Game Room Still Attracts Some

Spinal is a 2,650-year-old skeleton, resurrected by cutting-edge scientific techniques. Glacius is an alien being from a distant planet, who crash-landed on earth and must now fight for his life. Combo is a boxer who wears a stars-and-stripes tank top over his colossal muscles.

What do these three creatures have in common? They are all characters in Killer Instinct, a one-on-one combat game in the Wilder game room, where students can go for a temporary suspension of disbelief.

If turning your hands into spears and throwing globs of silver-colored destruction at a single opponent isn't your style, don't worry. The game room has more down-to-earth games, such as Area 51: Maximum Force, where the goal is to kill a pack of terrorists and free hostages. Alongside newer offerings, the game room boasts the venerable arcade classics Tetris and Pac-man, along with two pinball machines.

Chris Baymiller, head of the Wilder Student Union, admits that while an occasional sports or fantasy game will appear in the room, "most of the games are based on death and destruction." Even Pac-man "does a little spin when he gets eaten by a ghost," he said.

Baymiller, who has been at Oberlin since 1982, said the early history of the game room predates his arrival. He said the room was probably set up by a panel of students at the beginning of the '80s, and was placed in its current location because it was the only available space. Baymiller recalled that the game room's early days were its finest. "We used to have the room staffed from 4 p.m. to 1 a.m. every day," Baymiller said. "The place was always packed, and we used to have tournaments all the time. Nowadays, we couldn't dream of doing that."

Besides the steady crowd around Area 51 (a top seller), the game room is relatively quiet these days. Baymiller pointed to the room's financial decline as the reason. While profits once ranged from as high as $40,000 a year, they are now down to about $10,000. Baymiller said the profits from the game room are put back into the Student Union so that more work-study jobs can be created. The less money the game room creates, the fewer jobs are available for students. Baymiller cited improvements in computer games as a major factor in the decline of the game room. "It used to be that people had to come to the game room in order to get their video fix," he said. "Nowadays, people can just hop on their computer and play for free, from the comfort of their own home. It's sort of sad - the game room used to be really hopping."

Baymiller parallelled the fate of the Wilder enterprise with similar decline on a wider scale. Arcades, he felt, are too expensive to maintain and upgrade in the face of improving home-entertainment technology, although interest in retro games has given them a boost. To keep interest up, arcades have to continue moving games in and out.

Wilder hopes to add the new South Park pinball game to its lineup in the near future. These moves, however, seem inefficient in comparison to home-entertainment systems, where accessing a game is as easy as popping in a small cartridge and switching the television to channel 3.

Baymiller pointed to the presence of Pac-man and Tetris in Wilder as an example of how nostalgia can sell. "Everyone was playing pinball as a cult thing a few years ago. We had four machines down there at one point." Besides these brief retro fads, however, sales figures indicate little interest in the arcade and especially in many new titles.

Does all this mean that, sometime in the future, one will no longer be able to slice opponents open with swords in Soul Caliber or defeat an evil demon in Gauntlet Legends? That there will be no enemy spaceships in Gunbird to pummel?

Arcade fans will be relieved to know that Oberlin's financial commitment to the venture is very small; the games are installed by various gaming companies that pay for all expenses and maintenance. These enterprises then divide the profit with the College on a 50-50 basis. "The only thing Oberlin pays for is the electricity," Baymiller said. Given this, it seems safe to say that students will be able to stop by the game room for a little dose of unreality for a long time to come.