An Empty Swedish Fish Candy Bag (Or: Space Invaders, The Candy Store, and Other Pieces of a 1970s and 1980s Great Neck Childhood)

I was chaperoning a field trip, and on the bus, a kid held up a Swedish fish candy wrapper, and asked to whom it belonged. Another kid asked if there was anything in the bag, and the first kid said yes. The second kid now really wanted the Swedish fish bag, and of course when he got it, there was nothing inside. That first kid was smart, I tell you; the bag was no longer her problem.

Anyway, the second kid went on about how he now had an empty bag, and I said that actually the bag had a lot of things inside it. The first thing the bag had inside of it was the memory of the Swedish fish. It also still had the smell of that Swedish fish candy, which, for an old person like me, is a lot.

The smell of Swedish fish candy reminds me of The Candy Store, a key place for any child of 1970s and early 1980s Great Neck, New York. The Candy Store was one of the places in town that had coin-operated video games, which were really big back then. The others places that had coin operated video games were Jay’s Candy Store, Roma Pizza, Great Neck Bowl, The Shirting Gallery (a place that sold iron-on t-shirt decals, which were really big in the 70s and early 80s), and, further up Middle Neck Road, Colony Stationary Store, Barry’s (a coffee shop) and Scotto’s Pizza.

None of these places exist anymore, and that makes me feel old. Still, if I want to feel really old, all I need to do is talk about technology with my students. I talk about things ten years ago, and it feels like I'm talking about the days before humans walked upright; when I talk about the technology of my childhood, I feel like I’m talking about the Pre-Cambrian Era.

When they ask about technology my childhood, I tell them the following:

You have to remember that back then, computers weren’t all that powerful. I got my first computer in 1983. It was a used Apple II Plus, and I paid a thousand dollars for it, which was actually a good deal back then. There were no internal hard drives, and you stored everything on a five-and-one-quarter-inch square piece of plastic called a floppy disk; a floppy disk held something in the neighborhood of one-ten thousandth the information you can fit on a 1GB thumb drive.

(Stop snickering. Most kids today have no idea what a floppy disk is. Trust me.)

Apple was one of the three or four computers you had your choice of when you were growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s. Some of the others were the Commodore Pet (which sort of looked like a 1960s science fiction computer terminal, with the screen built into the machine) and the TRS 80, which most of the brainy nerds bought. Forget about IBM; they didn’t start putting out personal computers until much later.

Of course, come to think about it, we pretty much have forgotten about IBM in general. Any kid reading this would have difficulty conceiving of a world in which Dell was not the computer you had on your desk. Not too long ago, it was IBM; now those days are gone.

The computer games they had for personal computers back in the day were nothing like the computer games you have now. They were often simplified versions of arcade games that were themselves, by today’s standards, incredibly primitive games. If you go to a website such as Addicting Games and play a simple arcade game, you get some idea of the sort of games I actually paid money to play.

That’s because as primitive as those arcade games from Addicting Games are, they are miles beyond the types of games you could play on a home computer in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And don’t even get me started on the Atari Home Arcade System which was the gold standard for home entertainment consoles back then. Yes, some of the games were good, but it was all blocky graphics, blips and bleeps.

Computers didn’t talk to each other easily back then. If you owned an old school modem, you actually placed the part of the phone you hold up to your head on a cradle that was hooked up to the computer. Then your computer would send a series of beeps over the line, which the computer on the other end would hear.

At this point, if I needed to elaborate on this, I would say: if you want to see an old school modem in action, check out the 1982 film called Wargames. That’s still one of my favorites.

(To people my age who can’t conceive of a world in which no one knows the significance of the name “Joshua,” I say: you’re old. Deal with it. And it’s a strange game, Professor Falken; the only winning move is not to play. Anyway, I digress. Onward.)

This is pretty much the way computers talk to each other today, but the computers back then were hundreds—perhaps thousands—of times slower. When you used a modem back then, about the most you could send to another person was a message, and you sent it one letter at a time. Each letter took about a second or two to send. It was excruciating.

But let’s get back to playing games on the computers. If you wanted to play something like Space Invaders—a monumentally popular game from my childhood, along with, take a deep breath now, Asteroids, Missile Command, Dig Dug, Mr. Do, Mr. Do’s Castle, Star Castle, Sinestar, Defender, Stargate, Galaxian, Galaga, Breakout, Lunar Lander, Pengo, Pac-Man, Tempest, Tron, Discs of Tron, Gyrus, Q*Bert, Major Havoc, Spy Hunter, Moon Cresta, Gorf, Zaxxon, Crazy Climber, Donkey Kong, Frogger, Atari Football, Spinout, Battlezone, Xevious, Qix, Ms. Pac Man, Gauntlet, Targ, Robotron 2084, and God knows how many others I left out—you needed to play on a coin operated video game.

I’m sorry. I need a moment. You’ve no idea the flood of memories I get from just listing those games.

Okay. I can go back to writing now.

Each game cost 25 cents and some even cost 50. I vividly remember emptying several dollars worth or quarters into those machines. So did a lot of other people; when Space Invaders was first released in Japan, there was a shortage of 100 yen coins (the Japanese quarter), so great was the demand to play the game.

After I wasted my allowance on video games, I would usually have a couple of cents left over to buy Swedish fish. The Swedish fish that The Candy Store sold were bigger than the tiny Swedish fish that were in the empty bag that I took off the hands of the kid who was disappointed when he saw that it was empty.

You could buy the fish by the pound, or you could by them for 12 cents apiece. I would usually buy one, because if I had a quarter, I would spend the money on video games.

The thing that I’m just thinking about now is how even though so much has changed—The Candy Store and all those other places don’t exist anymore, kids play videogames on their personal computers, we send incredible amounts of information over Ethernet lines, and all those personal computers I mentioned are considered antiques of a bygone era—the Swedish fish haven’t changed. They still smell exactly the way they did when I was a kid, and they still taste exactly the same.

And I wouldn’t have thought about any of this if it hadn’t been for that empty bag, the one my students were all convinced contained absolutely nothing.

One more thing: if you want to check out some those old school games, go to the Classic Video Games website here.