Part Three

Continued from Parts One (Issue 28) & Two (Issue 31)…

My association with Rita’s Café and its inhabitants died a slow death. The change-out of machines meant that my interest wasn’t held any more. A bastardised Track & Field and a couple of non-descript bootleg table-top machines were all that were left, in the space once occupied by my beloved Missile Command. I visited the café less frequently. I think my O levels must have been around that time, too, which didn’t help.

One of my final memories of the place included witnessing a fight between the owner of the café, Peter, and the Builder brothers over some comment about Peter’s wife. I recall being gobsmaked as I watched this sweaty lard-ass Greek bloke smack seven shades of crap out of the two lads, before physically throwing them out of the door. Everyone saw it happen, and by way of apology, Peter clocked up a load of free credits for everyone to play the machines all afternoon, and supplied endless cups of sweet tea. That was nice, in a strange way, but I saw Peter in a different light from that day, and decided that it was time to move on.

Ricky moved out from the café and went to live with his uncle in St Pauls (where the riots happened a few years earlier). Debbie also disappeared at the same time – no idea what happened to her. Keith No Teeth was still part of the furniture, and Roger Buckland showed his face every now and then to put his trademark ‘BUK’ on the Track & Field high-score table.

Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb…

Not long after this, the cafe closed when some dopey tart employed by Peter left a chip-pan on while gassing to a customer. I remember walking to the café, only to find it surrounded by fire engines. Peter was there, holding his head in his hands, along with the guilty woman – an ashen look of: “My worthless career in catering is over” on her face. Apparently there were no fire extinguishers, or alarms in the café, so when the fire broke out, someone ran to the petrol station over the road and came back with one of those powder extinguishers – and made a right fucking mess of the place with it. The cafe wasn’t gutted, but the smoke damage was impressive, I recall. I think Peter obviously thought it too expensive to redo the place, and with Health & Safety keeping a close eye on things to make sure they were done right this time, he just didn’t bother. It’s now an old people’s hairdressers, I think.

So, that was the end of any arcade action in Fishponds, Bristol.

But, what of Missile Command, the bug, and the chase for the perfect game? Well, perhaps I should come clean at this point, and say that to date, I have not achieved a truly perfect game, yet. The best I’ve done is 500,000-ish using a PC emulator. But, read on…

I managed to keep my eye in when I could, but remember, this was 1984/5 and the machines were getting more and more scarce. The only one I could find anywhere was in Weston-Super-Mare, as I described in my previous article. But that didn’t last very long. I arrived one Sunday in Weston, after the arduous bus trip from Bristol, only to find the machine was gone. Enquiries revealed that it had been taken to the skip just a week earlier, and if I had said, I could have had it for nothing. Aaaarggghhh!!!!!

And this is the thing: at that time, when a machine had had its day, it were just dumped in a landfill somewhere, or chopped out and repainted, with a new board put in. No-one ever dreamed that one day people might write about the cultural significance of these things.

Get in there, you slaaaaag!

And so, that was that. No more MC. During my twenties, it appeared on various formats – Gameboy, PS1, etc, and of course I played them all, hoping to get the same ‘feel’ as I did from the arcade game, but to no avail. They were either unlicensed versions, or just totally inauthentic, with too many ‘clever’ enhancements. The arcade gameplay was perfect (apart from the bug of course) – so why mess with it?

And then, a few years ago, MAME came along. I discovered it quite by accident after reading an early edition of PC Gamer. And fuck me, if I wasn’t soon playing a perfect version of the game that defined my teenage years. For fifteen years or so, I hadn’t seen an original Missile Command, let alone played the thing. And here it was, running on my P200 in my house! The drawback? Mouse control – no trackball. But it was a start.

In more recent times, I’ve made contact with one of the UK’s foremost arcade machine collectors. I was speaking to him about a part I needed for a Defender machine, when we got on to the subject of his games collection and arcade games, generally. He asked what my favourite game was, and I mentioned this old game called Missile Command that I used to play, and recently rediscovered on MAME. He said: “Follow me”…

Down in the basement, were two beat-up, shitty, old MC upright cabs, that he’d brought back from the States. We got talking…

“Well, I’m going to restore them. Are you after one?”

“Do bears shit in the woods?”

We spoke about price, and how much I wanted to spend – depending on how “extreme” a restoration job I wanted doing. After much thought and discussions with my partner who would have to agree to a bulky arcade machine becoming part of the furniture, we decided this was something that should be done properly. I wanted a ‘perfect’ one. That didn’t mean cheap, but hey, I don’t have many vices, and my other half thinks arcade games are kinda cool too, which is fortunate to say the least.

Nope… they pee just like the rest of us.

The project has taken over a year, already (not only is my restorer a very busy guy, he’s also a total perfectionist). The cab has been completely stripped and cleaned. Boards have been overhauled, a new monitor added, the trackball stripped, lubed, cleaned, and rebuilt. The control panel has been shotblasted and recovered. All that’s left is the side-art, which has to be seen to be believed, having been reproduced by hand with colours that exactly match the original work. It just needs to be printed on appropriate vinyl and be attached to the sides of the cab. Then, it needs to be put together.

I dread to think how much time has been put into this. The final result will be truly outstanding. I’ve paid a few visits to see how the job has been coming along. Take a look at the pic of the cab during the restoration process - you can see what has been done. I’m essentially getting a brand new Missile Command cab – as good as, if not better than the original Atari issue back in 1980. As of today (early June) I’m expecting the thing to be sat in my living room by the end of this month. Eighteen years in the waiting, and estimates are there are only about ten of these things left in the country. Nice.

Missile Command DIY Kit.

What of the actual bug? Well I asked the opinion of my restorer, recently, and this was his response:

“Hmm, don’t know. Its a 6502, and the game awards cities every 10,000 points, so I would understand the bug more if it was binary related, like it happened at multiples of 127/128 or 255. But The 6502 had a BCD mode, so the score/bonus multiple might have been stored as a hex BCD byte of $80 which would set a carry-over flag in any mistaken binary operations immediately after it, because its the 7th bit up from the 0th bit, and there may be a code bug which looks for carry-over on BCD additions as the bonus cities score when past $80/$81 in BCD mode. I'd like to see the code to prove it, though”.

Means nothing to me at all. But there it is. The Missile Command bug exposed for what it is. The bane of my teenage life, summed up in a chunk of techno-babble.

Revenge will be sweet – a perfect game of Missile Command will occur this year. One game: every missile, plane and smart bomb intercepted. No cities lost, right up to where the bug kicks in at 820,000 points.

I believe no-one has ever done it before. I’ll keep you posted.

AEROFLOTT, June 2004.

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