Bay Area Video Arcades
Photographs by Ira Nowinski
1st Street Arcade San Francisco
c. 1981 - 1982
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Ira Nowinski
Ira Nowinski was never a “gamer.” He was an established documentary photographer in his own right when he became aware of video arcades as a kind of cultural scene in 1980 or 1981. The fact that this recognition came from an observer outside the scene testifies both to the allure of what was going on in video arcades and to Ira’s intuition.
1st Street Arcade San Francisco
c. 1981 - 1982
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Ira Nowinski
The Nowinski photographs document a perhaps surprising diversity of the people who visited these arcades and played the videogames there. The participants do not seem to be limited to male teenagers, as one might expect. The photographs show participation by males and females, children and businessmen in suits, and players, spectators, and bystanders who appear to populate a spectrum of ethnicities and races.
1st Street Arcade San Francisco
c. 1981 - 1982
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Ira Nowinski
In an interview about these photographs, Nowinski said that in the early 1980s most people “didn’t see the diversity. I did. Right away, that was such a shocking thing that people from different walks of life would interact that way. And it’s—in an enclosed space. But then other places were different [from San Francisco]. Like in Santa Cruz, there were more young people and in Berkeley too. But in San Francisco, there was a real mix of the different kinds of people racially.”
Broadway Arcade
c. 1981 - 1982
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Ira Nowinski
“You can’t just go in. You have to step back so you can get an idea. And when I stepped back, I could see people’s postures and … what interested me was that there were people playing these games next to each other who were completely different.” –interview with Ira Nowinski.
Atari Competition
c. 1981 - 1982
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Ira Nowinski
A boy participates at the Atari International Asteroids Tournament, held at the Exploratorium’s old San Francisco location in 1981, as a judge watches his screen. The writer Cat DeSpira has remarked that “Not much information remains on this nationwide event save for a tee shirt here, a small headline there. In fact, a lot of particulars have been lost over the decades or, perhaps, were never written down … If it weren’t for a few tee shirts and the caches of photos archived by award-winning California photographer, Ira Nowinski, the whole affair may have been forgotten.”
Atari International Asteriods Tournament
c. 1981 - 1982
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Ira Nowinski
Viewing these images in 2021, it is easy to see them in relation to the growth of competitive videogaming, now called “e-sports,” over the last twenty-five years. At the same time, we are struck by differences in technologies, participants, supervision, and layout between this competition held in the San Francisco Exploratorium and the professionally organized and sponsored competitive events held in sports arenas around the world today.
Atari International Asteriods Tournament
c. 1981 - 1982
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Ira Nowinski
Another difference, of course, is the specific games that were played in 1981. Here, a group of competitors play Asteroids .
Atari International Asteriods Tournament
c. 1981 - 1982
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Ira Nowinski
“Even the Exploratorium is gone from where I photographed it. You know, when you think about it, it looked like one of those things that was a fad that was going to move through society and if I could capture it during that time, it was pretty cool thing.”
Berkeley
c. 1981 - 1982
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Ira Nowinski
Nowinski was the photographer of the San Francisco Opera through the early 1980s. This work produced many experiences with working in interior spaces and stage lighting. He decided to work “against the traditions” of photographers such as Ansel Adams by “looking at the light and … understanding it. And it was a real challenge at the opera.” In other projects, he had worked in apartments and residences. Taking photographs in residential and performative spaces with lighting constraints and his spontaneous approach to establishing shots served him well in arcades; he embraced the challenge of working in dark rooms broken up visually by artificial lighting and console screens.
Berkeley
c. 1981 - 1982
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Ira Nowinski
Before beginning his career as a photographer, Nowinski had worked at the California Academy of Sciences in the ichthyology department. Later in life, he would return to natural history with projects such as photographs of fauna and landscapes of the Galapagos taken in 2002 and 2003. While this set of interests might seem remotely connected to videogame arcades, Nowinski pointed out that, “It’s like when you are involved in Natural History, it sort of fits into photography. It fits cabinets, you know, and things that are similar but not in the natural order somehow. And so a lot of my photographs of arcades are the cabinets.” Here, we see the photographer reflected in the display from Donkey Kong.
Chuck E. Cheese Arcade, San Mateo
c. 1981 - 1982
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Ira Nowinski
In his book Atari Design , media historian Raiford Guins writes, “The utilitarian function of the cabinet was not ignored in the attempt to design an appealing product. Practical functionality was married with a form expressive and supportive of game play. Equally, the cabinet possesses packaging, is a package.” Here, three of Midway’s Pac-Man cabinets line the wall of a Chuck E. Cheese entertainment center and pizza restaurant.
Chuck E. Cheese Arcade, San Mateo
c. 1981 - 1982
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Ira Nowinski
Images that capture the essential labor of maintaining products such as videogame cabinets are relatively rare. In this image, A repair man at the Chuck E. Cheese arcade in San Mateo works on an arcade machine in need of maintenance or repair.
Chuck E. Cheese Arcade, San Mateo
c. 1981 - 1982
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Ira Nowinski
“You see, when I came up, there would always be eye contact … because I always introduced myself. It’s my technique and it takes a lot of pressure off. Some people don’t do that. I always felt that I was ripping someone off because I am a presence.” He tried to capture details about the subjects of his photographs that the eye could take in, such as clothing or items they were holding. In this photography, we establish eye contact with a Chuck E. Cheese employee whose likely task was cleaning the displays of these Pac-Man machines.
Pier 39
c. 1981 - 1982
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Ira Nowinski
In Pilgrim in the Microworld (1983), David Sudnow wrote that about arcades of the sort Nowinski visited that, “When you first enter one of these places, not the shopping plaza sort with carpets, old-fashioned lighting, a more polite volume, and parents holding little kids up to reach the controls, but inner-city versions where the heavies hang out, you know you’re in a new species of public place.” He might have been describing Nowinski as he described how while the players were “intensely engrossed” in their gameplay, “browsers come close up behind to watch.”
Pier 39
c. 1981 - 1982
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Ira Nowinski
The “theatrical sensibility” Nowinski self-consciously brought with him from his work as an opera photographer combined with a keen documentary eye to produce his distinctive visual take on the arcade as both location and subculture: “When I went there, I saw that there were people playing the games. So, I broke it down there—where I would photograph people playing the games and interacting. I would photograph the screens themselves as best I could since I wasn’t really setting up a tripod and using a large camera, I would just take grab shots.”
Pier 39
c. 1981 - 1982
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Ira Nowinski
The photographs in the “Bay Area Video Arcades” collection grab our attention in ways that transcend the camera’s focus on arcade cabinets, screens, and players. They remind us that video games played in arcades were not facing forward to what was new, but also were part of a historical past. These photographs open issues around urban disappearance, inclusivity, embodiment, and identity not just inside the arcade, but also outside these places of play, about Bay Area arcades in movement with the shifting cultures around them during the early 1980s.
Santa Cruz
c. 1981 - 1982
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Ira Nowinski
In 1983, Geoffrey and Elizabeth Loftus published "The Arcade Subculture," originally a chapter in their Mind at Play: The Psychology of Videogames . They wrote that the video arcades of the 1980s served a function like the drive-in theaters of an earlier generation. They are "not only ... novel but they are also a breeding ground for social interaction They’re places where social contact is made In a friendly atmosphere and where friendships are formed. They constitute the foundation of a subculture with its own norms, values and patterns of communications." They pointed out, for example, that the Arcade was a place where it was perfectly acceptable to stand behind someone and stare at what they were doing without speaking to them.
Santa Cruz
c. 1981 - 1982
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Ira Nowinski
Why did teenagers in particular hang out in videogame arcades in the early 1980s? According to Geoffery and Elizabeth Lotfus, the reasons they “hang out at video parlors may not be all that different from the reasons older folks hang out at bars and coffee houses and office water coolers. It’s done largely for social companionship and entertainment. But for the teenagers, there is an additional reason. An easy way for them to rebel … is to concentrate on the pursuit of activities that are different from those of their parents.”
Santa Cruz
c. 1981 - 1982
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Ira Nowinski
More than thirty years later, we know that in these photographs we are looking at places – and certainly, people – that have disappeared. Nowinski, as the photographer of these places, sensed the passing nature of what he photographed. “Well it’s like [Eugène] Atget, who photographed Paris because he knew it was going to [be redeveloped]. … And I thought, I looked around and I said, boy is this going to change. I better photograph it.”
