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THEIR graphics were lousy, their soundtracks infuriating, and they invariably
involved oversized fruit—usually as a power source, occasionally as a
deadly weapon. Yet when these primitive ancestors of today’s computer games
first invaded the games arcades in the late 1970s, their simple, addictive
powers hooked a generation.

Sadly, just a few years later, arcade classics such as Asteroids, Pong and Go
Go Mr Yamaguchi—together with similar games developed for early home
computers—had been consigned to the loft or simply dumped in the rubbish,
outcompeted by the next generation of computer games. When you can fly a
realistic jet simulator or blast gangsters with a bazooka, who’d want to chase
giant grapes or lob exploding bananas at a bored gorilla? “The early arcade
games died out because they were outclassed,” says Gary Whitta, former
editor-in-chief at PC Gamer magazine. “As the technology improved the
games got more sophisticated and so did our tastes.”

Mr Yamaguchi and his pals may have vanished from the scene, but they haven’t
been completely forgotten. A few diehard fans are desperately attempting to keep
the dubious thrills of early arcade action alive. Their lifeline is a small
number of carefully crafted programs such as MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine
Emulator, first created in 1997 by a software designer called Nicola Salmoria
and made available for free via the Internet. MAME and others like it have now
been developed to the point where, if so inclined, you can use them to enjoy the
fruity thrills of almost two thousand arcade classics from the comfort of your
home PC.

These aren’t just the games most of us remember, such as Space Invaders,
Donkey Kong and Frogger. The list also includes many almost (and perhaps should
have been) forgotten games, like Atomic Robokid, Chiki Chiki Boys and Beastie
Feastie.

At first glance, the appeal of old games isn’t obvious. But players say they
gain a sense of satisfaction from these games that new ones just don’t give.
“One of the real attractions about the old games is their purity,” says Michael
Dixon, news editor for the Internet magazine ClassicGaming. “Look at Pong. It’s
tennis that has been cooked down to the kernel. It’s one grey bar against
another grey bar hitting a grey square. These games were pretty good.”

Dixon was 4 years old when his parents bought an Atari VCS 2600 game console
for him and his brother. “We were actually a bit too young to appreciate it. We
sort of grew into it,” he says. He played the Atari games throughout much of his
childhood, but then drifted away from them. His interest was revived in 1997,
while he was in college at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. A friend
had an old Atari and hooked it up to a television in the dorm’s common room.
Dixon remembers: “He said, ‘It doesn’t matter if we leave it out and it gets
stolen. It’s not worth anything.'” So he began playing the old games again, and
later discovered MAME and the wide range of games available on the Internet.

The interesting thing about MAME, says Dixon, is that it doesn’t just
recreate these old video games. It lets you play them on your powerful home
computer using the same programs that powered the original arcade machines and
home consoles.

To make this possible, games enthusiasts had to bring the games back from the
dead. They needed two separate components: the original game program itself,
plus a program called a driver that simulates the particular arcade or home
video machine that the game was designed to run on.

Finding the original game program is simply a question of getting hold of one
of the old arcade machines, locating the chip in which the game program is
stored and saving it onto a modern hard disc. Today these programs are referred
to as “ROMs” because they come from the read-only memory inside the arcade
machine, or plug-in cartridge in the case of games consoles.

Writing the driver is tougher. It means reverse engineering the electronics
of an actual machine and writing a program that allows a normal home computer to
act like it. This is where MAME comes in. MAME is a collection of these drivers,
designed to allow your computer to act in exactly the same way as an old Atari,
for example, or like a particular 1970s arcade machine.

Want to play the 1984 gem Beastie Feastie? Just install MAME on your PC, and
select the Beastie Feastie ROM. The relevant driver reads the ROM, the game
starts and your fruit munching thrills can begin. Many of the games even ask you
to “Insert Coin”.

MAME enthusiasts certainly enjoy playing the games, and love nothing better
than discussing the finer points of Pong tactics with fellow gamers. But they
say MAME’s most important goal is to preserve the old games before they
disappear completely. Many different versions of each title were produced, says
Bryan McPhail, a programmer who helps update MAME. For example, many games have
Japanese, US and also European versions, each with slightly different content or
graphics. “To the casual observer each version is exactly the same, but MAME
tries to catalogue all of the small details.”

Despite the profusion of ROMs that are available, there are still at least
1500 other games that haven’t yet been emulated. That’s either because no one
has found the machines, or because the technical difficulty of reverse
engineering them is too great.

For an enthusiast, collecting and playing the old games is a way of
recapturing their youth, says Martin “Retro Rogue” Goldberg, content coordinator
at ClassicGaming. “Part of it has to do with the remembrance of childhood. It
has nostalgic value. It’s like someone who grew up in the 1950s and listens to
old 45s and restores old cars. It brings back their childhood,” he says.

Goldberg himself got hooked on video games in 1982, when his family bought a
ColecoVision home video system. Like Dixon, he rediscovered them at college and
now he’s hooked. “I’ve immersed myself in the whole scene,” he says.

But some people see fans who trade ROMS as little better than criminals. Most
game programs are copyright, and some companies have threatened to sue websites
and individuals if they distribute their ROMs—even for free. A number of
big websites were shut down when individual companies and the Interactive
Digital Software Association, a body which represents computer games
manufacturers, threatened legal action. However, most of the ROMs remain freely
available from websites outside of the US.

The legal aspects of game emulation are a grey area, Dixon admits. “There’s
definitely a copyright issue. But a lot of these companies aren’t even in
business right now.” McPhail agrees: “Many went bust and no one bothered to buy
the rights for the games. So why not make them available?”

However, according to Whitta, game nostalgia can be a dangerous thing: “Many
of the games that you marvelled at in your youth come back and bite you in the
ass when you play them 20 years later and realise that they’re crap.”

If you have great memories of those early games, let those memories rest in
peace, he says. “Going back and playing them again can be a very risky
business—your fond recollections could be shattered in the cold light of
day. The games haven’t changed, but you sure as hell have.”