This is where the story starts. Not at the arcade — the arcade came later. This starts in my brother-in-law Tony's garage in 1981. I was still working at his auto shop, changing oil and rotating tires, coming home every night smelling like brake fluid. But I'd seen this ad in the back of a magazine — a kit you could order to build your own TV tennis game. Forty-nine dollars plus shipping. I sent a money order that same week.
The kit arrived in a flat brown box, no bigger than a shoebox. Circuit board, a bag of components, a photocopied instruction manual that was already on its third generation of copies. I set up on Tony's workbench after hours — soldering iron, a little black-and-white TV I'd pulled from the junk pile, and a RadioShack bag full of capacitors because I kept burning them out. Took me three weekends. Two trips to RadioShack. One argument with Tony about whether I was wasting his electricity.
The moment I connected that last wire and flipped the switch, a little white dot appeared on the screen. It bounced off the top edge. It bounced off the bottom edge. It moved from left to right and back again. That was it. That was the whole thing. A dot, two paddles, a score. And I sat there on a metal stool in a cold garage and I knew — I just knew — what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Not fix cars. Not change oil. This.
I opened Galaxy Zone Arcade the next year. But every machine in that building, every quarter in every coin box, every kid who walked through that door — it all traces back to this one. A kit from a catalog, a borrowed garage, and a white dot on a black screen. Everything else came after.
___________________________
| _______ |
| | | * * |
| | . o | TOOLS |
| | PONG | wrench |
| | . | pliers |
| |_______| solder iron |
| |
| [====WORKBENCH=====] |
| | kit parts | manual | |
| | capacitors| coffee | |
| [======================] |
| |
| RadioShack bag |
| (3rd trip) |
| |
| Tony's oil cans [DOOR] |
|___________________________|
"You're using my electricity
for THIS?" — Tony, 1981
"That little white dot bouncing across a black screen. That was the moment. Everything else — the arcade, the cabinets, the kids, the quarters — it all started with that dot." — Sal "Pixel" Martinez
_____ | _ | | |_| | - Sal "Pixel" Martinez | _ / Galaxy Zone Arcade |_| \_\ Est. 1982