A One-Man '80s Arcade Revival

Peter Hirschberg of Linden, Va., never made the leap with the video game industry to violent, complicated games. He's accumulated dozens of early '80s arcade classics in his basement. (By Michel Du Cille -- The Washington Post)

These days, he buys the games. The average machine costs him about $500, he estimates, though he could pay a few times that figure if he weren't willing to do the restoration work himself.

To keep the collection safe, the arcade is rigged with a webcam, equipped with audio, so he can monitor it from afar. There's also an alarm, with moisture detectors concealed around the room in case there's a problem with the water heater.

There are a couple of things you may be wondering about Hirschberg by now.

First of all: Yes -- he has a sense of humor about all of this. "Psychotic" is his description for his hobby, which, he says, just went "exponentially out of control" at some point.

And second: Yes -- he is married, with kids, and his wife, Julie, is more than cool with his collecting.

Peter gave Julie a vintage Tempest machine for their first anniversary, and, she said in an e-mail this week, she still considers that to be the best present ever; her initials top the game's high-score list. She's even a fan of the idea that Peter build a separate building to house the collection, which has by now filled up their basement and taken over the kids' former playroom. The structure they have in mind could fit up to 100 games.

The Hirschberg children, meanwhile, will occasionally humor Dad by spending some time in the arcade, but they'd really just rather play Pokemon or Harry Potter on their Nintendo GameCube. Kids.

You could say Hirschberg misses the '80s, but that sort of misses the point. "People tell me I'm reliving my childhood," he said. "I never left; everybody else just moved on." Most new video games, he says, are too violent.

Hirschberg has never seen an episode of "American Idol" or "Survivor" and doesn't know what "The Sopranos" is about. Don't bring up the new "Battlestar Galactica" series with him; he doesn't want to hear about it. He didn't like the VH1 show "I Love the '80s" because it was too snarky; his affection for the era is, most emphatically, not ironic.

And, really, he loves only about half of the '80s, anyway. There is a stopping point in his collection that he is reluctant to cross. The golden age of the arcade came to an end, after all, and for him, the end was around 1984, when the arcades started to fill up with shooter and fighting games.

"After 1984, there was nothing that interested me," he said. "I kept going back, but the old ones were gone."

His next project is restoring a copy of I, Robot, a hard-to-find game designed by Dave Theurer -- the same guy who once upon a time wrote the programming for Missile Command and Tempest.

Theurer, in a phone interview yesterday, said he agrees with Hirschberg's take on when the golden era of games ended. "I enjoyed the puzzle and strategy games, not the beat-the-other-guy-down ones," he said. "When the kick-punch-type games came along, it sort of lost the thrill for me."

After the thrill was gone, Theurer eventually left the video game industry. He now works for Citrix Systems Inc., developing the user interface for the company's Web conferencing product.

The latest jewel in the Luna City Arcade is Tron, a tie-in with the 1982 Disney movie in which Jeff Bridges plays a programming and arcade-game-playing whiz who, basically, gets sucked into a computer game. And yes, it seems fitting that such a game would be in Hirschberg's collection.

Getting all the pieces for this job and putting them together was a six-year process; at some point, the Tron cabinet had been converted into another game, called Choplifter. Restoring the game to its original pizza-parlor glory involved buying pieces off eBay, replacing a joystick controller and even getting the game cabinet painted at an auto body shop.

My friend Luke and I ended up playing games at Hirschberg's place for about five hours. After a while, our wrists had to take a break. Over potato chips, Peter Hirschberg had a question for the world: If you know you like something, why move on? Why, for example, is disco everywhere one day and then universally ignored or even hated the next?

"I never understood that mentality," he said. "You love something -- then it's a pariah. For me, it's like: 'Wait, slow down. I still like that.' "