It's a "dive bar."
I'm sure they loved reading that this morning in a feature they had to have known was coming.
I think you just lost a few readers, Globe.
"After 32 years, video games return to Marshfield" by Billy Baker | Globe staff May 25, 2014
Now you know the name of the insulting elitist wannabe.
MARSHFIELD — The 1980s finally ended in Marshfield on Thursday afternoon, with two boys standing in front of a Centipede game yelling for quarters.
Kristin Croft was happy to give her two sons a big handful from the register at the Roadhouse, the dive bar she owns a few blocks from the beach in this South Shore town, because it was a historic moment, the first time anyone had legally put quarters into an arcade game in Marshfield since Croft was a teenager in high school in 1982.
Did the Globe reporter pass himself off as an arrogant jerk when he came down for the report and interview?
That year, the town elders made national news by standing up to what they saw as a menace that was corrupting America’s youth — video games.
They do seem to contribute to violence in youth. It's all kill, kill, kill, and promoted very much in my war paper's bu$ine$$ section.
A group led by Tom Jackson, the head of the town’s vandalism committee, persuaded voters to pass a bylaw that banned coin-operated arcade games. “I’m a former narcotics officer, I’ve seen what these machines do to kids,” Jackson told the Globe at the time.
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
I'm not seeing that connection, sorry!
And for 32 years that ban held, surviving several legal challenges from local business owners that finally ended when the US Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal. It has since weathered two town meeting votes — one as recently as 2011 — and a million cries from children who think it’s lame.
*****************
As the ’80s became the ’90s and the rise of Nintendo moved video games into the living room, the loss of arcade games in town was not as big a deal, said Michelle Poirier, a 27-year-old bartender at the Roadhouse.... You work in a dive
Indeed, with the advent of smartphones and pocket gaming – Croft’s kids are big into the game Minecraft, though they can only play for an hour a day “because it rots our brains,” Sean said, quoting his mother — targeting arcade games feels very 1980s-quaint. More than a few people have compared the ban to “Footloose,” the 1984 Kevin Bacon movie about a town that bans dancing.
As Croft’s children played the new arcade games, which join Keno and pool as ways for the Roadhouse to separate customers from their money, they got coaching from their mother. “That’s a bomb right there,” Kristin Croft shouted excitedly. “You have to shoot that!” Jack eventually got the hang of Centipede to the point where he ran into something unfamiliar: a high score screen....
Game over!
--more--"
(There will be no more blog posts tonight as blog editor passed out drunk at the Roadhouse. Sorry)
