Defender becomes King of the Arcades on February 19, 1981


Bethesda, Maryland - February 19, 1981

A new arcade machine appeared at the Farrell's Ice Cream Parlour at the Westwood Shopping Center today. The air was heavy with the scent of hot Old Time Franks, Holland Dutch Chocolate sauce, and butterscotch candy. A player piano's automated keys frantically rippled up and down like John Wesley Hardin was expected through the doors any second. And at the center of this electric storm, standing like some gleaming, alien monolith, was the Defender cabinet. Its marquee, a jagged burst of purple and blue, practically vibrated with the promise of high-tech violence.

You have to picture the scene, the sheer, unadulterated chaos of it. Until this glorious, terrifying Thursday, video games were...polite. Simple, even. Pac-Man was a cheerful, yellow glutton, blithely navigating a maze. Space Invaders was a slow, methodical march of descending marching bands. Defender? Defender was an assault. It was the digital equivalent of being shoved into a dryer with a handful of firecrackers and told to pilot a supersonic jet.

Defender was a cruel mistress. Unlike its predecessors, it demanded everything. Five buttons! A two-way joystick! This wasn't gaming; this was an exercise in multi-limbed, polyrhythmic coordination that would have made Neil Peart sweat. There was the joystick for vertical movement, the "Reverse" button, the "Hyperspace" button (a desperate, last-resort gamble), the "Fire" button, and the "Smart Bomb" (the "I-Give-Up-And-Want-Everything-Dead-Now" button).

Eugene Jarvis, the long-haired ex-pinball coder from the wilds of California, had built the thing in a fever. First video game for the guy, and he didn't mess around with "easy to learn, difficult to master." He went straight for the jugular: difficult to learn, impossible to master, and addictive as hell.

You piloted your sleek starfighter across the screen at speeds illegal at that time. Vicious aliens, each with their own unique attack-tics, would train their fire on you, turn kamikaze, or simply beam up your hapless fellow Earthlings from the mountainous surface below. When one of these body snatchers got ahold of a human, the victim would let out a digital scream, as you desperately scanned your planetwide radar to locate the abduction before it was too late. If you failed, the aliens mutated the abductee into, well, a mutant. A mutant considerably less attractive than the X-Men of the comics, and now turned against you as an additional on-screen opponent. 

Graphics like this had never been seen on a video screen before. Realistic laser beams, long and fluid and rapidly-fired, streaking straight across the sky. How better to crystalize the Cold War zeitgeist of the 80s than being able to detonate your very own planetary atmosphere-incinerating Smart Bomb with one mere tap of a button, generating an appropriately "Don't look at it, men!" 1940s atomic bomb test flashbulb? "Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds," indeed! When your ship exploded, the pixels burst apart so convincingly, you half thought the debris would fly out of the screen and tear you to shreds. 

And the sound! My god, the sound. The Defender chip was an electronic demon, screeching and wailing with every death and every laser blast. It wasn’t a soundtrack; it was a noise assault, a digital shriek that cut through the low-level hum of the arcade like a buzzsaw through balsa wood. Finally, a sensory experience that could rival the deafening cacophony of the servers' parade to the table of that lucky boy or girl celebrating a birthday at Farrell's! Never before had an arcade machine delivered weapon sounds that made the player feel like a starfighter-piloting god wielding the force of a thousand Death Stars.

Defender's arrival at Farrell's was the moment video games graduated from toys to adrenaline delivery systems. Another giant leap from boyhood toward manhood. It was fast, it was loud, it was impossibly difficult, and it was glorious. It was the digital scream of the 1980s, and it started right here, on this day, with a quarter, a hamburger, a $1 banana split, an obscene amount of Coca-Cola, and a whole lot of nerve.

Location: 5400 Westbard Ave, Bethesda, MD 20816, USA

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