The Las Vegas Monster Mash - How I Discovered Darkstalkers in the City of Sin
Has there ever been a wholesome story about Las Vegas told? Has anybody ever gone to the proverbial "City of Sin" and returned with a tale of enriching discovery, or are they all debaucherous yarns of over indulgence, excess, that led to surprise awakenings in mysterious, ravaged hotel rooms, surrounded by unconscious, debased strangers strung about the wreckage of left over drug residue, tools of the sex worker's trade, and a pounding headache keeping the foggy memories of the previous night at bay, and the sinking suspicion that your wallet is missing? Has anybody discovered a truly moving piece of art in Las Vegas? Can art even exist amongst the hyper real, and gaudy facades of that town, or are all those stories trapped behind the unofficial agreement of "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" you make as soon as you step foot into the neon light filled city?
For me, as a child of the nineteen hundred eighties and nineties, Las Vegas became the perfect vacationing spot for my family as it combined both a destination vacation, having sights and attractions for us as a family to do, with a visit to see the the relatives, mainly my mother's side of the family, Vegas being home to my Grandmother (Granny, as we called her), my three uncles, aunts, and myriad of cousins. Kill two birds with one stone, as some jerk once said.
In the nineteen hundred and eighties Vegas wasn't all that exciting for younger children. The destination part wasn't yet there, leaving us to spend all of our time with my relatives, "catching up" or occasionally taking trips out to Henderson, Nevada, and cruising around Lake Mead on my uncle's boat, before, eventually, my parents would bugger off down to the casino ladened strip to contribute to the growing pile of money they've left in that town, leaving me and my younger brother with said relatives, which was usually a snooze fest. Luckily our cousins were also kids, and liked kid things, so there was always a Nintendo Entertainment System around to wile away the time.
By the time the nineteen hundred and nineties were underway, we'd been to Las Vegas as a family a handful of times. Now, being on the cusp of teenage-hood, I was not exactly thrilled about another trip to Vegas to sit around with various familial adults gossiping while I twiddled my thumbs. This was a forced extraction from what I would rather be spending my time doing: playing video games, watching horror movies, reading comic books, and watching cartoons. However this was the go, go nineteen hundred and nineties and Las Vegas decided to try and shed it's tawdry, adults only, den of iniquity image (or at least try and hide it some) in order to appeal to the wallets in family's pockets. Now, instead of staying in various family member's guest rooms, we were lodging in one of the new "family friendly" hotels that began popping up all over the Strip: the MGM, a hotel tribute to the movie studio of the same name, replete with a life-sized replica of Dorothy Gale and friends traveling along the yellow brick road on their way through the wonderful world of Oz, located across the street from from the New York, New York, a shrunken down facsimile of the Big Apple featuring a twisty-turny, loop-dee-loop, rollercoaster which overlooked the Excalibur hotel across the other side of the street, a gaudy, Vegas style recreation of a mythical Knights of the Round Table, dragon slaying castle. Further down the Strip was Treasure Island, the pirate themed hotel featuring a live action pirate ship stunt show out front that one of my cousins acted in, multiple times a day, being blown into the artificial drink by the opposing pirate ship's cannonball fire. Long standing, and the previously sole "family friendly" hotel Circus Circus, even added an amusement park. Family friendly shows began springing up, water parks, family restaurants. The works.
All this screamed "see, we don't just have hookers, booze, and gambling! Bring your kids, here! Why go to a Disney World when you could stay in a sweltering desert, surrounded by equally fake surroundings, and lose yourself, family, and money to the hyper reality of our electric sex. Wait, not sex, I mean wholesome family camaraderie."
Now that Vegas was family friendly, and their children were older, my parents felt no qualms about stuffing me and my brother's pockets with money and releasing us, unsupervised into the now no longer sinful city, while they set up shop at the hotel's most alluring video poker machines, my father's one and only preferred form of giving money to the house, but under the caveat that we meet up later for a family activity, like going for dinner at the Excalibur's "authentic" medieval jousting tournament theater show, where we dined on, with our hands only (as was the style in medieval Europe) Cornish game hens, and a substance that was eerily similar to flat Pepsi, which sent my father into hysterics, unable to cope with the anachronism, feeling swindled by their promises of authenticity. A small price to pay for freedom to roam parentless through the streets of Las Vegas.
So, there we were, a recent teenager, and his preteen brother, left to our own devices, pockets full of money. The world, or more accurately, the Vegas Strip was our oyster. What would we do with all this new found, unsupervised freedom, let loose in the untamed wilds of a supposedly family safe and friendly city of excess and vice? We did what any young boys in the nineteen nineties would do with money to burn: went to the arcades. Arcades were now being installed in all of the casinos, and along the strip. This was Vegas, baby! No rinky-dink, back room, bowling alley arcades here. These were big, loud, brightly lit, cacophonous, cavernous affairs, full to the brim with all the latest and greatest in arcade technology, buzzing with action and electricity, underage gambling at its finest, but instead of winning hard, cold cash, it was high scores, or prize tickets exchanged for cheap plastic crap.
We'd wander from casino to casino, comparing and contrasting arcades, judging what each had to offer our discerning, young video game obsessed palettes. Like the casinos, the arcades put their biggest, flashiest, show-stopping machines out front to lure big eyed kids into their digitized clutches, which works on easy prey like me and my brother, as we soon were following a giant sign advertising large, all encompassing pod-like, spaceship shooting, virtual reality games, pointing down into the bowels of the strip, which we lilted to whimsically like a cartoon character entranced by the smell of a cooling pie on a windowsill, trapped in its pull.
This place, whose name I can't even recall (and Google has failed me) was a multi-level underground arcade bunker, decked out in a nineteen nineties industrial warehouse aesthetic: exposed metal pipes and air ducks, concrete walls and floors cover in bright graffito art, chain link fences cordoning off different sections. Have you ever seen the original "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" movie? It was oddly similar to the warehouse hangout the Foot employed to snare their next recruits with arcade machines festooning multiple floors of the dimly lit enclosure, kids of all ages, eyes affixed to the digital display of any given cabinet, locked in on the task of beating that level, blasting those space aliens, or dominating that high score list, no adults any where in sight, but with less organized criminal activity then the Foot's forever Peter Pan Lost Boys enclave. Well, maybe, this was Vegas after all.
However, I was more interested in where they kept the fighting games, the player versus player genre of video games recently catapulted to fame via Street Fighter 2's explosive action, spawning a legion of punching and kicking clones like Mortal Kombat's blood-soaked brawling, King of Fighters' team based matches, or Killer Instinct's flashy, combo heavy assault. See, pre information superhighway there was no easy way of knowing what new games would be coming out. Home video game consoles hadn't yet overtaken arcade's graphical and gameplay supremacy, so the only way to know, and play the latest and great games was to just go to a fucking arcade, one of the appeals to our touring the Vegas arcades, the video game Mecca, our hometown of Aurora, Colorado virtually bereft of any arcades of that caliber by comparison. Street Fighter 2 was nearing the end of its reign and I was enthusiastically wondering what the game's developers, Capcom, would release to follow it up, hoping it wouldn't be yet another updated version of the seminal fighting game, of which they'd iterated on multiple times already. I found out in the back of this Las Vegas arcade warehouse.
Perhaps appropriately stashed in the darkest corner, one cabinet beckoned me come closer. I could tell from a distance it was a fighting game, the familiar gameplay of opposing pixelated characters on each side of the screen jumping into and kicking each other. When the screen flashed with the now seared into my brain Capcom logo, I quickly made haste, hands already fumbling through my pockets for the first loose twenty five cent piece I could get my eager mitts on. Before I knew what was even happening I'd deposited the quarter into the arcade machine and hit start.
The familiar fighting game character select screen burst onto the display, instantly alerting me to the fact that this was not Street Fighter. In place of the then well known world warriors was something entirely unexpected: a selection of ten, count 'em, ten snarling, gnashing, monsters. I jimmied the joystick, moving through each selectable character: a vampire, a Sasquatch, a werewolf, a zombie, a mummy. The classics were all represented, but these were not the typical Hollywood takes. These were bright, bold, twisted, yet comical, imbued with cartoonish, animated character, and Capcom's distinctly Japanese design prowess. I landed on the fish man, my inherent love of the Gillman monster in "Creature From the Black Lagoon" seemingly guiding my hand, and veritably mashed the button to select him.
The first match started almost instantaneously, my computerized opponent, a feisty half cat, half lady named "Felicia," according to the screen (I had picked Rikou) began wildly flaying her limbs at me while I put all my previous learned fighting games skills through the ringer: back to block her attacks, rolling the joystick a half circle forward or backwards with an attack button to do a special move, and watching out for jumping attacks. A mental stack of options compounded through countless hours of sweaty Street Fighter combat, though, this was definitely not Street Fighter. The game moved at lightning speed, as the two monsters clawed and thrashed at each other, their animated bodies reacting with over exaggerated twists and rolls, akin to the Loony Tunes classic style of animation. It was grotesque, yet comical. Creepy, yet whimsical. Gory, but with an over abundant sense of humor. I was, to put lightly, enthralled. Had the gods of teenage fantasy plucked the materials for the perfect video game straight from the storage bin of my brain? An animated, violent, monster mashing fighting game? It was too good to be true. Here, in front of me, was perhaps the first time I was moved by a piece of art in the way people describe seeing a classical masterpiece. This was the Renoir of video games, deserving of holding court in the Louvre, the pixelated monster mayhem the replacement for impressionistic brush strokes, the blood and viscera the substitute for beauty and feminine sensuality.
I managed to best Felicia and while waiting for the next match to start I looked up to the top of the cabinet to find out what this marvelous new game was called. There, in blood red, fanged vampire font it read "Darkstalkers," setting the hook for what would become my favorite fighting game series of all time, my appreciation only growing more intense as time passed, eventually becoming a college student of animation, being able to identify all the staples of traditional animation and how masterfully Capcom used them in Darkstalkers to push affective storytelling and gameplay. Later, as an artist, enamored with the design and color choices used throughout the series. All thanks to that money sucking desert oasis and two kids being granted minimal freedom by parents eager for some much needed time alone to indulge. Perhaps there is art to found in Vegas. I found some, and it's been with me ever since.
I spent the remainder of my quarters in that darkened, cigarette smoke filled arcade's corner, playing through each character, trying to take in all the dazzling art and animation while simultaneously doing my best to not get my ass kicked, eventually being subdued by the dread of all arcades: the older kid who's better than you at every single video game ever created. Watching the continue game screen count down to zero, I desperately reached deeper into my pockets, hoping I'd missed an errant quarter. Alas, I had not, leaving me with no other recourse than to slink back to our hotel room, trading all my new found independence for family time, which would, undoubtedly, be sorely lacking hyper-colored fighting monsters.
