Iowa State: Paul and Cyberball

Well, since everything at Iowa State revolved around Paul (hah!), why not another story?

When we lived in Westgate, there was an arcade called ‘ZAP’. It wasn’t like today with XBOX and Playstation and high-end graphics–unless you went to an arcade to feed machines quarters.

At Zap, they had an awesome video machine called ‘Cyberball’. Basically, it was machines playing 7-on-7 football. You had six periods, a halftime, and as you scored, you made money which allowed you to either repair damaged robots or upgrade their speed and toughness. It remains my favorite arcade game of all time…

Paul and I would walk down there a few times each week. We’d stop at KwikShop and grab a drink then play a couple games of Cyberball before heading back to Foster House (all hail Foster) in Westgate. We got pretty good at the game–individually and playing as a team (you could play two-on-two)

Along the way, we had a couple of unique experiences because we weren’t alone in our appreciation of Cyberball.

The first was a guy named Joe Henderson. Joe was the starting halfback for the Iowa State football team. He spent most of his sophomore and junior year spending evenings playing Cyberball. We got to know him and play him a bunch. Friendly guy. Really built, too. The weird story with Joe was one night when a woman came in and started scolding him. He went outside for a bit–came back in and she didn’t come back in with him. The woman was his girlfriend (was…used in multiple contexts here)–because when he came back in, he mentioned he was tired of being nagged about his obsession with football (and Cyberball). She told him he had to choose. So he did. We kept playing Cyberball with him until Zap moved locations to Welch Avenue.

The other was the arcade owner–he was the son of someone with quite a bit of money. He ran it with his wife. He liked Cyberball along with his brother (brother in law maybe??). If the place wasn’t busy, they’d come over to the machine if we were playing, wait for us to finish, then he’d open up the machine and pump in free credits for the two of them to take on me and Paul. They were sore losers when they lost–but I mostly recall it being 50-50 who won. I’m weird though for remembering one game where we were all so good that no one could do anything on offense, players had all been blown up so they were slow (making defense even easier)…so that we wound up having a 0-0 tie that went for something like 6-7 overtimes until we won 6-0 because the owner’s brother/brother in law decided a smoke break was more important than victory.

It’s sad there aren’t really arcades today. I get that home video games are amazing–no doubt, but there’s something about the bigger machines, the carnival-ish atmosphere of sound. I wish they’d make big cabinet-style games chock-full of technology…I bet those would be amazing…pity they wouldn’t be profitable.