Nearby to one of the places I lived when I was growing up is a parking lot.
Not very exciting, I know, but before it was a parking lot it was an abandoned church, and before it was an abandoned church it was a place called Star Video, which was, as you might have been able to guess, a video rental store.
And, like most video rental stores in the late 80's/early 90's this place started stocking NES games to rent. $2.10 would get you a lousy game to play for the night (the good ones were usually gone before I got there), due back by some time the next afternoon. It was in your best interest to get there as early as possible since if you got there, say, at noon on Saturday, you had until about noon on Sunday to play, whereas if you got there at 8:30 PM, you still had until about noon on Sunday to get the game back, which chops about eight hours off of your precious playtime.
But the video/game rental business only took up about a third of the building, and the other 2/3 of the building was a mystery for a while (okay, it was only really a mystery to me and probably most of the other customers, I'm pretty sure that the owners knew what was going on in there).
One day, though, an arcade game showed up in the lobby, Final Fight. I played it a little bit, but never really got very good at it. That's mostly because most of the time I didn't have any money, and what money I did get I'd rather save up until I got a couple of bucks together to rent a game, which I could play for a whole night and part of the next day, which seemed to be a better use of my dollars.
After a while, though, a strange thing happened. The Final Fight machine disappeared and the door to the mysterious other end of the building opened up. Going through the door revealed something game-changing (to pre-teen me, at least): an arcade. An arcade within walking distance of my house.
When you walked in the door, you were greeted with two (two!) pool tables, then a step up to the two rows of games in a narrow corridor that included: Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off Road , Willow, WWF Wrestlefest, Final Fight, and some more games that I forget because I didn't play them much, again, because I didn't have much money or a job to get more.
But I did hang out there a lot anyway over the summer and I even played a few rounds of something on the occasions that I would scrape up a couple of bucks doing chores or odd jobs (or just finding money on the ground, which, to a kid, was like finding treasure), but I would mostly hang out while my friends would spend their money on whatever they wanted to play. When that ended (which was usually pretty quickly) we would end up watching the attract mode of the various machines or trying (and failing) to do trick shots with the cue balls on the pool table.
However, one afternoon, I was there with a friend who was a few years younger than me (he would have been about 9, but he was big for his age) and the owners came over with a proposition: He needed help moving a couch from the upstairs (this place had an upstairs?!) to the downstairs (in the very end of the building). If we agreed to help, we could have our pick of anything in the candy display case.
"Free Candy" were the two magic words I needed to agree to do whatever the guy asked me to do (in fact, free candy will get me to do just about anything today, too). And we set to work.
It turns out that when you have a 9-year-old and a 12-year-old moving a couch, things don't go well. The couch is heavy, it gets stuck, and, I'm not completely sure, but I'm going to say that we scuffed up the walls pretty badly, too. But, in the end, nobody from the Department of Labor or Child Protective Services or OSHA showed up, and we got our free candy. Those might have been the best Reese's Cups I've ever had.
After a while, though, the summer ended (as summers tend to do), school started back up, and I got a job delivering newspapers. I wasn't able to burn days hanging around an arcade waiting for another couch-moving job to show up, and, slowly but surely, the arcade closed down, and the video store closed down. But at least I'll always have the memory of how my love of video games led me to do something kind of stupid and a little dangerous. And, as much as I'd like to say that that was the last time that video games had that effect on me, I'd be lying. But that's another story for another time.