Street Fighter II
“Are you man enough to fight with me?” - Street Fighter II
To begin with one pound was enough. For that I could have ten goes of just about any game in the arcade, and I’d have to have been a pretty pathetic sort of character not to have made that last for the Saturday afternoon hour or so that my mum was in the bingo hall around the corner, even without factoring in all the other time-dwindling pleasures of just being there; the cashier’s conversion of that chunky little brass pellet into a handful of the silvery fish which, every now and again, came cascading down from the one-armed bandits in the front parlour; the proprietary, preliminary stroll between the glimmering 
rows, the satisfyingly sticky carpet holding your feet a moment in front of each individual cabinet; the occasional jostle for position when some Grand Master was in attendance, nibbling for a good view of even just the tidy piles of 10p’s which established his rights in perpetuity; the unspeakable joy of finding one last coin in the corner of one’s pocket! And we hadn’t even got round to playing anything yet, that last of most joystick-wrenching, button-pummelling delights! How to describe it? To me, relatives visiting from abroad meant getting to play the Bubble Bobble machine at Glasgow Airport. I wish it still did.
Still, nothing lasts forever, and it was Street Fighter II that ended it all, really. So overwhelmingly popular that the owners quickly realised they could easily charge 20p a game to play it and any other new games, suddenly prices had doubled all across the board whilst my meagre hourly stipend remained the same. The contemplative walks between games grew longer and longer still, the mournfully quiet jingle in my pockets lighter and lighter as I considered all the angles. To continue or not to continue became a serious moral dilemma; to admit to my pauperish position by continuing to play the now antique 10p games seemed inconceivable. Add to this the continual concern that even my occasional games of Street Fighter were likely to be curtailed by the jarring chord of “HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER!” and my subsequent beating and elimination at the hands of someone who was better than me because he had more money to play more often, because games were becoming increasingly sophisticated, because it was no longer enough to be good at them generally but to need to be good at each one individually. Times were bleak, my friends; many was the day I thought about getting out whilst I still had money for a Beano and a Refresher Bar. So what changed things? Well, what pretty much always changes things.
There really were no girls in the place, never ever ever, because girls did not tend to play 
games and boys who played games did not tend to have girlfriends and the arcade itself was fairly dark and dismal and not really a cool place to hang out in any case. So when, one day, whilst playing Street Fighter II, a girl came up to drop her challenger’s money into the metal slot, I was as surprised by the gender of the opponent as I was gratified by the prospect of extending my playing time by a couple of minutes at someone ELSE’S expense, for a change.
Properly, I should lose. It should be like one of those movies where the big, boorish brute is reduced to tears by the heroine’s astutely applied armlock, only with her reaching into his pocket and chucking his last 20p down the drain whilst so doing. It is what people expect, and I am loath to disappoint. In the event, however, I beat her with such consumate ease that I was almost sorry I hadn’t made it last longer, tried to eke another half-minute or so out of the rare occasion of my ascendency over another. Much to my surprise, given the demonstrably massive disparity between our abilities, the girl drew out another 20p. And lost. And again. And lost. And once more! And lost. And so it went on for the remainder of the hour: and, as it happened, every Saturday afternoon thereafter for the rest of the summer.
She never got any better. Despite my precautions always to have another 20p in reserve, and my constant fear that she would grow good enough to beat me, she never did. But nor did she ever get fed up with it, no matter what, whether enduring the oppressive humiliation of death by a thousand kicks at the feet of Chun Li or the borderline cheating of being pinioned by E. Honda’s hundred-hand slap: every time the next twenty pence was as inevitable as the next defeat, every time my own twenty pence spun out over thirty, forty minutes of successive beatings. And you know, in all that time we never even spoke to each other, nay, scarcely even looked at one another. I remember looking once to find that she was pretty enough for me not to be able to bring myself to look again. It was like that.
I was never guilty about the money - she seemed to have plenty of it - nor really about winning all the time, but in my more lucid and introspective moments I felt something like sorry for her, every Saturday giving up hours of her time and pounds of her money and possibly even whole measuring-sticks of self-esteem (not that I’d have understood that then) without a word or even a look of acknowledgement both of us were too bashful to give. And for what? Love, or whatever you call it when a face leaves such an imprint on your soul that it feels like an unfillable hole that’s just been there for ever and you know that there’s a tremble in their loveliness that you’re the one to fix.
And Street Fighter II? It was good. But you already knew that.