Write, you fool! [Arcade Games] [Bagman]

A couple years ago, I gave myself this challenge to post something new to my blog every day in the month of December. I liked the alliteration of Daily December and I needed to practice the discipline of creating and posting something new every day.

At the time, I hoped it would sort of revitalize my blog, which had taken a back seat (in a vehicle that was parked in a garage across town) to social media and the like. I hoped I would be inspired to keep writing in the new year, maybe get that vehicle out of storage and drive it around town.

But I felt like all the effort was for nothing. I wasn’t creating to satisfy myself; I was posting to create content. Eww. Gross. And the numbers on my blog didn’t move at all. Hardly anyone commented, I didn’t see an influx of returning or new readers, and when January rolled around, I remember thinking, “well, thank god that humiliating waste of time is over.”

Until just recently, I didn’t see any value in the exercise. Like I said, the goal was to generate interest by posting new content every day. And I didn’t hit that goal, because generic content isn’t what people came to my blog to read (and it isn’t what I like to write). I wasn’t all that interested in what I posted (though I love the post I did, and still laugh when I think of calling my team “The Los Angeles Los Angeleses” as they played the “Vancouver Vancouvers”) and the old adage “When you are interested, you are interesting,” has an equal and opposite adage “When you aren’t interested, you’re labored, or trying too hard.”

You can see — I can see, rather — the very meaningful difference between the two. And with the benefit of hindsight and experience, I get why I didn’t achieve what I wanted. I went about it in a way that was unlikely to deliver what I was looking for. Lesson learned.

Yesterday, I saw that my friend John gave himself a Daily December last month, where he wrote about a different comfort movie every day. He said it was to get that daily writing muscle stretched out and warmed up, because he has two novels due this year.

I don’t have anything due, at least not right now, but I do have some things I want to finish and release this year, and the muscles and discipline I need to use them have been neglected while I’ve been focused on mental health therapy and complex trauma recovery for much of the last year.

I’m not ready to commit to daily posts. I’m going to do daily writing (I’ve written this over the last six days), but I don’t know for sure that I’ll have something to publish every day. I’m not going to pressure myself with expectations. I’m going to start out with weekly posts from a list of topics that interest me, in the hopes that I will be interesting when I write about them, as well as looking forward to the creative process involved.

Inspired by a lifetime of RPGs, I made a table featuring all the different topics that are interesting to me. I’m going to roll on the table, and use the result as my prompt.

Today, my rolls landed on Classic Arcade Games: Bagman.

Okay, here we go.

Bagman was released in America by Stern in 1982, when I was ten years old.

I first saw and played Bagman at Shakey’s Pizza on Foothill Blvd. in La Crescenta, when we went there for one of those school fundraiser things that I weirdly remember were always on Wednesdays for some reason. This place had a dedicated arcade room, large enough to hold maybe five machines along one wall, with two pinball machines perpendicular to them. A change machine and candy machines were against the other two.

The routine was familiar: order dinner, drink as much soda as I could before my parents caught on, cram some mojos into my face and then go play video games while we waited for the pizza to come out. We sat a long, banquet tables on padded benches. Lamps hung low above the table, dressed up with fancy stained glass shades. The glasses were red, pebbled plastic. Mine had a chip out of the lip.

In 1982, video games were a huge part of my life, but my exposure to them was relatively limited. I didn’t get to go to arcades often, and never alone. I didn’t get to go to the mall where they had everything. I got to go to the 7-11 where they had two games and a pinball machine, and if they weren’t fun for me, tough shit, kid. Maybe they’ll be replaced next month, which may as well be a year.

Shakey’s was a place we only went to every couple of months, so there were always new games there, and they were always ones I never saw anywhere else. They had Pac-Man and Galaga, Space Invaders, of course, but they also had Star Castle and Vanguard … and Bagman.

In those days, everything you needed to know about the game was on the cabinet. Some games, like Karate Champ, had all kinds of combinations to refer to betwen levels or turns. Some games told you who the bad guys were and how to defeat them. Some games had vital parts of the instructions burned out by a player who carelessly let a cigarette burn down across it. (This happened way more often than you’d expect).

All games had gorgeous artwork on the sides of the cabinets, that hardly anyone ever saw, because most games were stacked right next to each other to maximize space. In 1982, I was starting to notice games with an attract mode, where it would play music and walk you through how the game was played.

Bagman’s bright, yellow, cabinet stood out in the dark arcade room. Other kids were clustered around Pac-Man and whatever was just past it, but Bagman was wide open. Nobody was playing it, and there wasn’t a single quarter on the “I got next” rail at the front of the marquee. I noticed that there was a comic strip on the marquee, and I took a closer look.

The marquee was so bright in the dim light, I had to squint to read it. Okay, so the Bagman breaks out of prison and goes into an old timey gold mine to collect bags of money he stashed there, with the prison guards hot on his heels. Okay, that makes sense, and it’s kind of promising an experience that is closer to Choose Your Own Adventure than Galaxian.

See, all the games I played up to that point were essentially about being a space ship, or whatever Pac-Man was. Occasionally, I was a car. Those games were about getting points and putting in my initials (or ASS if nobody was looking). This looked like a story, where I was a GUY. The only other game I played where I was a GUY with a story was Donkey Kong, and I loved that sense of being a person instead of a thing. (You know, something I was desperate for in my real life.)

While I considered what could happen should I take control of the story myself, and what (if any) animation I could expect to see when I picked up all the money bags, the game began its attract mode sequence. It played music, there was something that sounded like speech, and holy shit was there a lot to do! You could ride in a mine cart! You could break down walls with a pickaxe! There were multiple screens that were all connected! And though I would NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER admit it to anyone, the sprites were ADORABLE. The little Bagman in his prison suit, the guards with their giant mustaches and little shotguns? The money bags that could have come out of a Saturday Morning Cartoon? UGH! STAHP! happytearsemoji.png It got me the same way the Smurfs did, for the exact same reasons. I stole a quick, furtive glance around to ensure that nobody — especially my dad — had somehow heard my secret inner thoughts. Of course, nobody did. That was impossible.

And yet. Where my dad was concerned, I could never be too careful. I’d learned that the hard way, over and over and over and

Still. Even a single quarter represented a significant portion of my budget. My parents were so stingy with the quarters at these things, I’d get maybe a buck and a half to spend on six games (the 50 cent games didn’t exist, yet) and I had to make each one count. It’s funny, the parent in me is like, “Maybe it wasn’t as unreasonable as you think it was,” but I’m telling you this story from a specific point of view, and I’m just relating how ten year-old me felt, something he wasn’t ever allowed to do.

So. To recap: in Bagman, you walk around a mine, picking up bags of money that you carry up to a wheelbarrow, while you avoid the guards. Fun music plays while you do it, and the whole thing is adorable. Okay, very simple. I got it.

I reached into my pocket and fished out a quarter. I felt its ridges against my fingertips as I turned it around and held it flat against my thumb in a singular motion before pushing it into the slot.

Bagman’s start screen

The game skipped the “are you ready” formalities of Donkey Kong and, like someone who had just escaped from jail, threw me into the middle of the action, on the run, bottom of the left screen at the base of a ladder. The music played! The little guard guy came lumbering across the top of the screen toward the top of the ladder, and I realized that I didn’t know where I was supposed to go. All the way to the right, along the bottom? All the way to the top? I guess? To escape? Like Dig Dug? Wait. I have to get the money! First you get the money, then you get the mojos, then you get the pizza. The world is yours.

The guard guy was now coming down the ladder.

I didn’t even have to move to pick up the first bag of money. I just tapped the button and grabbed it. I started to go up the ladder, but the guard was coming down too fast. So I yanked the joystick as hard as I could to the right, running away from the guard whose singular focus on methodically, relentlessly chasing me down was rivaled only by Jason Vorhees. I was about halfway across the screen when he got off the ladder. The money bag was slowing me down so I dropped it, picked up speed near the edge of the screen, and got run over by one of those mine carts I was so excited to ride in.

A sad “you lost lol” tune played.

Shit. That was really fast.

The game reset, and this time I went straight up the ladder. AS the guard started coming down, I was off to the right, picking up a different money bag. I went back to my left and up a different ladder. The guard followed me and gained as I climbed to escape him. Desperate to stay alive, I dropped the bag of money, killing the guard guy, who fell all the way to the bottom of the screen. “Yes!” I hissed with quiet excitement, as I pulled the stick toward me to climb down and retrieve my loot.

I was picking up the bag when I discovered that the guard wasn’t dead. He was just resting, pining for the fjords. Beautiful plumage. The Bagman cried out a digital “aye yi yi!” and the game reset for a third and final time.

Up the ladder, to the left, up another ladder, back to the right, up the ladder to the top of the screen! Now off to the right to see what’s hidden one screen away! IT’S HAPPENING!

The guard, realizing he’d been fooled my my clever movement, ascended the ladder. I scoffed and tapped the button to push the wheelbarrow into the second screen, which revealed itself to me in all its glory. This screen had TWO mine carts, three pick axes, a silver bag of money behind a wall that had to be blown up with a bomb — A BOMB! — and an elevator you had to wait for if you wanted to cross the shaft in the center of the screen. An elevator that didn’t arrive before the guard from the first screen appeared and ended my game before he even touched me. There was nowhere to go. Game Over.

Well, that sucked, right?

Yes. And no.

There was SO MUCH to do, I just had to figure out how to do it. There was probably a pattern or something to get me started. I just had to find it in a book at B. Dalton’s in the mall. (more about those books another time).

It wasn’t fun. It was frustrating. Why give me all these things to do, and program it so that all I could do was run away from the guard? I wasn’t mad as much as I was confused. Crazy Climber would vex me in a similar fashion, as would Track and Field, before I finally figured out that I just wasn’t very good at these games.

I went back to the table a little dispirited and resolved to be more careful with my quarters. I didn’t like mushrooms on my pizza. Mom and dad knew that, and they always got them, anyway.

I saw Bagman again and again over the years. While researching a little bit for this post, I saw that it was actually quite popular. There’s something to be said about perception versus reality, but not by me, at least not right now.

I also watched someone play the first level on YouTube and … yeah, there is no way ten year-old me was EVER going to figure out the things this dude had to do to complete the level. Like, I honestly have no idea how he figured it all out. Trial and error would have cost me a fortune back then, so when I played Bagman — always as a second choice when the clock was ticking on getting picked up and I had quarters left in my pocket — I never got past the first level. I never even came close.

But I kept going back, trying to kick that particular football, and AUGHing onto my back each time.

I have Bagman in my gameroom. It’s why it’s on this list of possible topics. Of COURSE I played it before I wrote this, between drafts, and during the rewrite. It remains as compelling as it is unsatisfying, more of an oddity in my collection than a beloved source of memories like some of the games I will likely write about at some point.

But I have played it so much this week that I got to put my name in for the first time, ever, which was pretty great. Bagman allows for long entries, so WIL RULES is currently looking down upon FANCHOIS, GASTOUNET, PIERROT, and JOJO.

And that’s Write, You Fool, Volume 1, Number 1.