Sega City: Where Men Are Men and Reality Is Virtual
Lunchtime at Sega City in the Irvine Entertainment Center.
High Noon. No place for the faint of heart. It’s a shirt-and-tie-and-beeper crowd, but, please, don’t get in their way.
“Gentlemen, start your engines.”
With that, the most popular game in this video arcade revs to action. I’m watching five grown men sitting in a row, about to steer their virtual reality racing cars on the computer screen in front of them. The five work together--their firm, Advantage Memory Corp., is right around the corner on Technology Drive--and they drop in two or three times a week at lunch to take each other on in the game known as “Daytona.”
Colleagues they may be, but once the racing starts. . . .
“It’s a special gene that only men have for video games,” says Brian Patton, the company’s development director. “I know very few women who enjoy them. I think guys crave the adrenaline rush more than women.”
These are young guys, of the generation that grew up during the mushrooming video game industry. Patton, 23, describes his colleagues as “a bunch of techie-kind of people who love games.” His dad worked for IBM, the family bought a Pong game when he was a boy and he had his first computer at age 9. Now, the company he works for manufactures computer memory and components.
Where else should he spend his lunches than behind the wheel in a virtual reality racer?
Tom Tandle is 32 and a sales executive for Advantage. He saw his boyhood friends get hooked on pinball and “Space Invaders,” but he never found anything to satisfy his video urge until he met “Daytona.”
“Nothing has excited me to the extent this place has,” he says. “The thrill of being behind the wheel, the thought of it, the dream of it.”
One of the company’s owners also sponsors a NASCAR team, so the Advantage employees are somewhat partial to auto racing. “I tell you what,” Tandle says, “for me it’s the No. 1 growing spectator sport in America. If you watch any of the NASCAR races on Sundays, they fill more seats than any football or baseball game. It’s a sport I’ve watched all my life, but it’s never been big on the West Coast.”
The “Daytona” game simulates being behind the wheel to an incredible extent, Tandle says. So much so, he says, that you can feel the other guy’s car pressuring you. Indeed, part of the game’s appeal is that you can force another driver’s car off the road and into the wall.
“I’m probably a little over-competitive,” Tandle says, after the five have completed a six-race tournament. “I’m over-aggressive on the whole thing. I get so competitive, I get to the point where I say, ‘I’m going to win this thing.’ I really get caught up in it.”
Fueling the on-screen competition is a Sega employee who patrols the aisle behind the racers and calls the race much like the announcer at a racetrack.
“The best time in the first lap is 17.92 seconds.”
“Oh, Car No. 3 smashed up against the wall!”
“Second gear, Car 1, second gear!”
“Car No. 1 has run off the road. He’s now in fifth place!”
Sega employee Dale Broadbent confirms the male domination of the arcade. “It’s a guy thing,” he says. “Guys have always gotten into video games more than women. They tend to get addicted quicker and take to it on a deeper level.”
Broadbent says there are about 200 games in the arcade and that it is common for office brigades to show up around lunchtime and have multirace competitions. Customers are scattered throughout the arcade, but “Daytona” seems the biggest lure. “They love to race,” Broadbent says of the men who try the game. “It’s very competitive. They like the exhilaration, but more than that, it’s the competition.”
I once was a junkie. I spent the summer of 1983 out here in California with a buddy and we were hooked on Ms. Pac-Man. Wherever we saw a machine--restaurant lobbies, liquor stores, arcades--we stopped and played. I remember one especially grueling seven-game series after an Angels game, in which we cajoled the owners to delay closing so we could play the deciding game.
So I understand these young men’s mania. I understand how it can be more fun than going to work and more important than eating on your lunch hour.
At one point, after they’d finished two races, the five were heading back to work.
“What time is it?” one said.
“Twenty after,” came the reply.
“Twenty after what?”
“One.”
Almost as a unit, the five began calculating. “Oh, we’ve got time,” one said. “Want to go another lap? C’mon.”
And like five little boys playing hooky, they headed back to “Daytona.”
As he did, Brian Patton let me in on a little scoop.
“This is very addictive,” he said with a smile.
Dana Parsons’ columns appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.
