The Wonders of the Deep: Arcades, Nostalgia, and the Mystery of Imagination
I remember a conversation I once had - with a therapist, actually - about just what it was about video games that I found so compelling as to make it not just a childhood fascination, but an adulthood obsession. It was during a conversation about learning styles and childhood, and all of the myriad of ways in which various artwork and hobbies and games can be indicative of the particular ways in which a person problem solves, understands narratives and storytelling, or even develops hand-eye coordination. I remember thinking for a moment about video games in particular and saying (to paraphrase, basically) that video games were ultimately artistic mediums that unfolded on screen, not unlike a film or other print medium. However, because of the interactive nature of video games, they are played as much within the bounds of our conceptual abilities as they are visually or otherwise. However literal or straightforward their representation, all video games require an inherent degree of imagination. We may “play” video games with controllers or keyboards, but the imaginative worlds of video games that draw us in so deeply are ultimately founded in the bedrock of our own minds and imaginations.
Thinking back on my life as a gamer thus far, and the many gaming experiences that stay with me as resonant and impactful, and for the purposes of this list overall, I am drawn to the memory of arcades in particular, for the ways in which they afforded me a chance to have a gaming experience not just conceptually but utterly technologically different from the 16-bit confines of the SNES console experience I had at home. Arcade gaming represented to me a massive, flashy, compelling, mature, ceremonial, and certainly financially daunting form of gaming that could only be accessed rarely within the confines of a uniquely sacred outing like a birthday party or some similar occasion. Beat-em-ups, racers, pinball, and of course, light-gun games existed not just in my memory and muscle memory as normal gaming experiences, but as boutique allowances that could only be indulged in on the most sacred and celebrated of circumstances, during which my jealously guarded supply of quarters or tokens would be meted out with such miserly scarcity that anything I did deign to play would be required to pull double duty as not just the game I would spend all my currency on that day, but also as the go-to conversation piece for all spoken anecdotes, both real and fictitious, for the next few months of my second- or third-grade life.
Of the many, many games that held this position for me, I feel like SEGA's The Ocean Hunter encapsulates not just a piece of beloved gaming lore, but represents an example of how games overall live and evolve in our imagination, particularly as kids. Furthermore, the ways in which memories of childhood in particular are often seen through the lens of stories (or in this case games), and how the “feelings” generated by those stories and experiences are often as much or more substantial than our actual experiences playing or consuming them.
As a child of the '90s, I was lucky to have a number of arcades in my life growing up. These typically followed along the lines of a few fairly broad but extremely comprehensive arcade archetypes. We’re talking “pizza place”, “movie theatre”, "kids arcade" (or "kidz zone") and “family fun center”.
For a quick rundown: the “pizza place”-style arcade encompasses everything from the literal pizza place with a dusty Street Fighter cabinet to the bagel shop with the combined Neo Geo cabinet with five available Metal Slug titles. It’s not about the size or composition of the “pizza place” arcade, it’s about the spirit. Like pornography, you know it when you see it.
A “movie theater”-style arcade is similar, its various iterations also appearing at video rental stores, malls and hotels. They’re often heavy in light-gun and skill-based games, like skee-ball, pinball or claw games. Any “kids arcade" is exactly what you’d imagine: your Chuck E. Cheese's, your Discovery Zones, or often your local community center or after-school program. These things always fucking sucked.
The arcade at the center of our story today falls into the final category. I first played The Ocean Hunter at an arcade called Sports Plus that was a proper “family fun center”. I’m talkin’ bowling, ice rink, arcade, go-karts, movie theater, etc. This place had absolutely everything. These kinds of arcades represented a premium gaming experience as a kid. Not only did their considerable size promise a field of new and unending gameplay experiences stretching all the way to the strip-mall horizons, they offered a variety of games in not just content but genre, difficulty and subject matter. Through the arcade I was given the potent taste of how exciting it could be to see 30 seconds to five minutes of a game that offered considerable depths, but hide it away behind a paywall of a few quarters. Sports Plus in Long Island, New York was a sprawling warehouse of an arcade and entertainment facilities with every imaginable game under the sun, the kind of place that nowadays has either closed up entirely or given itself over to a cheap contemporary. I think one of the reasons why these places aren't as around these days is because exactly what they trafficked in, exactly what kept me drawn to the place, and what kept me drawn to The Ocean Hunter was something that could only be captured in that moment at that time before being lost forever. It was writ loud in the garish geometrics of the 3D motion simulator movie theater carpet. Or in the clangorous outcry of the Daytona 500 arcade cabinet main theme song. What was so intoxicating and alluring about the arcade experience (and for me The Ocean Hunter) was the fact that it could only be accessed in that place and time. The fact that the game was so difficult and cost me upwards of 50 cents per game, each lasting an average of three minutes in total, only made the whole experience more alluring.
Listen, I know that I have scarcely talked about the actual gaming experience of playing The Ocean Hunter. Take my word for it, it’s fucking amazing. It’s a light-gun game from 1998 that would eventually get ported to the Dreamcast where you play as a blue-haired anime guy who travels the world's seas on-rails to shoot the fuck out of all manner of sea creatures, from the benign hammerhead shark to the mythological kraken. The environments were incredible. The enemies, from the regular mobs of sea snakes and sharks to the monstrous bosses, were some of the most memorable designs I’d seen in my entire life up until that point. The music was absolutely super hot fire.
My overall point in emphasizing what this game did well is to highlight the kind of impact that something I never even got past the first few minutes of could have on a person. As a youngster, video games still largely represented a world that was mysterious, unknowable, and strange, and arcade games were still the ultimate example of that. It’s for these reasons both material and abstract that The Ocean Hunter existed not just in my growing lexicon of games as a competent and beautiful on-rails first-person arcade shooter, but as an experience that lived for a few moments at a time in episodes that I would regale to my schoolyard friends in excruciating detail at every available opportunity. These were not like the typical feeble attempts I made at Donkey Kong Country or Super Mario World on my SNES at home. These excursions existed in the wholly novel world of arcade gaming, and represented a singular experience that was still undoubtedly “gaming” but was something also wholly unique, that truly couldn't be had anywhere else.
I've done my best up until this point to describe my relationship to arcades and video games and The Ocean Hunter as specifically as possible, but I haven’t been totally revealing about what it is exactly about this random arcade light-gun shooter that sticks out so significantly in my mind when I consider my identity as someone who loves video games, and why this game occupies a unique place in my heart and mind.
The Ocean Hunter is the first time I can remember a game being different in "real life" than it was in my imagination.
I remember a time during which I was at my height of fascination with The Ocean Hunter. I had recently reached the all-but-impenetrable third level and it was quite literally all I could talk about. As an overly wordy third grader, all I wanted to talk about to my peers, friends, teachers and passersby was the kraken, the hammerhead sharks, the sea snakes, the divers and their weapons, and their desperate but thrilling war against the monsters of the deep.
“If this game is as boring as this story, it must be really boring.”
I can remember the words as clearly today as when I heard them back in third grade. I wasn’t even talking to the older girl in front of my friend and I in the line to get on the bus. I didn’t even know her or who she was, and I remember a feeling of embarrassment to go along with my shame of being outed by an older member of the opposite sex for not just my obvious nerdom, but my utter ineffectuality in even presenting as anything other than a boring nerd. I remember to this day not so much the feeling of hurt or sadness, but the feeling of genuine confusion. I remember thinking to myself, “I must not have explained something properly. I mean, we’re talking about fighting a giant squid here”. In my mind, I couldn’t possibly imagine anything I had said being anything other than the most compelling narrative ever spun by anyone. The fact that this older girl who I did not know would be so bored by me talking about this game that she would feel the need to turn around and deliver this killer line was a moment that shook me so deeply I felt as if my relationship to reality itself had been compromised. If I could be forced, for one terrifying moment, to consider that not everyone was experiencing every piece of extremely nerdy content at the exact same kind of amplitude as myself, I might feel like all the time I’ve spent putting so much emotional and mental investment in these silly games and their imaginative worlds would be for nought.
Until now.
It’s not been until now that I look back on the experiences with video games overall that made me the consumer of them I am today. And the fact is, the words of that older girl when I was talking about a weird arcade game I could barely afford and did not understand but loved dearly probably made an impression on me for a reason. That reason is not necessarily entirely bound within The Ocean Hunter, and though it remains somewhat of an underrated arcade classic, the game for me represents an overall sense of nostalgia and my relationship to the physical spaces of arcades and the personal application of imagination and fandom (especially relative to socializing and childhood) that always springs to mind when I think of the most formative gaming experiences of my life. It is for these reasons, among many others, that I regard The Ocean Hunter as one of...