It's kind of hard to believe now, but Laser Tag (or, the more extreme cousin, Lazer Tag) was pretty popular for about fifteen minutes back in the early 2000's. When a laser tag arena opened here in town, it was a pretty big deal.
I heard about it a couple of weeks after it opened and decided to see what all the hubbub was about. I had no real interest in Laser Tag itself, but I was given to understand that the arena also had a pretty decent arcade set up for you to keep yourself busy while you waited your turn. I wasn't expecting a whole lot, but when I got there, I was pleasantly surprised.
When you walked in to the lobby, the first thing I noticed was that all of the lint and fuzz and mustard stains on my shirt were suddenly glowing like neon because the entire place was lit up with black lights. It made the place look kind of futuristic, in a 'we don't want to pay a lot of money for glowing accents on all the walls, so use paint that glows under a black light' kind of way, but it was simple and effective.
The rumors, also, were true. There was a sizeable arcade that had a line snaking through it leading up to the semicircle of the main counter. There, someone would take your money, give you a code (alpha, beta, delta, gamma, etc), and you would mill around the arcade until they called your code over the P.A.
There were lots of then-popular games around, too, including some Virtual Reality thing that I never saw anyone play, and it disappeared after a couple of months (it also cost something like $5 to play, and to College Freshman Me, that was too much money). One end of the room had some tables and chairs so you could drink sodas from the machine and just kind of hang out. Next to that was a bubble window that you couldn't see much through. If you stuck your head into it to get a better look at whatever was on the other side (spolier alert: it was the arena itself), then some motion sensor would be triggered and a rubber facehugger would be lowered on the top of the window with a 'whump', lights would start to flash, you'd get startled and jump a little bit, everyone (but you) would laugh, and then you'd hang out in the vicinity of the window trying to get a glimpse of someone else falling for it.
But there were also arcade games to play, which is what I spent most of my time there doing. I ended up getting to the level of 'not terrible' at games like Fast Draw Showdown, X-Men: Children of the Atom, T-Mek, and some shmup featuring submarines that I can't remember the name of (but the joystick and the buttons were reversed, which forced me to utilize the famed 'reverse grip' to make any kind of progress with it).
I also played a lot of Police Trainer, and I got to be what I considered to be pretty good at it. Until the one night where the actual police officer who was there to make sure that nobody got too rowdy was playing Police Trainer. He was in the stance that I've seen police officers assume when they're on the news or whatever doing target practice, and he did very well.
Eventually, though, my code was called, and I went up the stairs in the corner of the room to the briefing area. It was a room with a couple of benches built into the wall. They were about two feet high, and ran the length of the wall, and they kind of looked like giant steps. The briefing consisted of some worker telling us the rules. It seemed like we got one that called himself 'Special K' just about every time. He would always tell us the three main rules:
- No running
- No swinging your gun around
- I forget rule 3
After the briefing we would go to the room where we would suit up (i.e. put a vest on that had a number stuck on it and a gun attached to it) and head out into the arena. After a ten second period, the game would start.
The arena was also in blacklight, and was split into two levels. Each level had a 'base' at either end, which was basically a closet with one wall missing. The rest of the arena was stuff you might see in a late-90's military movie. There were barrels, painted black. There was cargo netting all over the place. There were fog machines going full blast so you couldn't see anything except the lasers you were shooting, and the targets that were lit up on the other participants' vests (one on each shoulder, one in the middle of the chest, one on the back, and one on the gun). The goal, of course, was to wander around the arena shooting targets and scoring more points than everyone else.
People really got into it, too. One guy in particular showed up wearing camouflage and facepaint who would skulk around low and slow trying to not be seen. I only saw him there once, and either his camouflage got a lot better after that, or he went back to the paintball arena.
After the time expired, your vest would make a sound like a heavy sigh run through a vocoder and you'd have to return to the loadout room, return your vest, and head down to the lobby counter. There you would get a printout that matched your number and it would show you how many points you got, how many times you shot each of the other people in the arena, and probably some other stuff. I no longer have any to check. The winner got absolutely nothing.
But, I still played Laser Tag a lot. I went there with a regular group of people and we played games and hung out at the arcade just about every Saturday night for a year.
We got to know the regulars, including a guy who showed me his killer sound system in his car, literally. He had removed all of the seats and replaced them with plywood boxes that he mounted speakers in. It was definitely loud, but without seatbelts or any place to mount them, if he was ever in a crash, he'd definitely have a killer sound system.
We stayed until closing time (midnight) just about every week, and we all got pretty good a lot of the games. We even got to be respectably good at Laser Tag itself, frequently coming in at the top of the leaderboard every time we'd play.
But, after a year or so, things changed somewhat. The crowds were dwindling, there were fewer people playing Laser Tag, the vests frequently lost their charge in the middle of the matches, the printer that was supposed to print off scorecards at the end of the matches frequently printed garbage, the arcade didn't swap out its games as often, the facehugger that scared people only worked about half the time (and its appendages had been either torn off or fell off) and so on. I don't even remember the last time I went there, and it's one of those things where I probably didn't even intend to quit going there, but that was the time where I had to start concentrating on going to college and try to hold down a part-time job, and blowing six hours in an arcade every Saturday night just started taking its toll on me.
Some time later, I saw through the local newspaper that it had closed. Kind of unceremoniously, just a blurb in the local news section. I lost touch with all of the workers there, and all of the friends I made when I was a regular, except for the ones I went in with.
The space where the arcade and arena used to be has been subdivided now and is several unrented offices. For a brief time, one of the offices was a church, and I went in to check out some fundraiser church sale / bake sale, and there's not a scrap of the Laser Tag Station left. Nothing on the walls, the floors, the ceiling, to even indicate that it was ever anything but a simple office in a strip mall.
They could have at least kept the black lights.