By Don Steinberg

Ah, my little yellow friend, we grew up together, you and I, and now we are one.

I am Pac-Man.

Strapped into virtual reality goggles at "New York's premier, high-tech, multilevel, interactive virtual game arena," I am getting inside Pac-Man's head, all the way in, seeing the world through his black-dot eyes. I'm thumbing a handheld-controller-button to run for my life through a familiar maze that has sprung into a third dimension. As I look up I see, looming over the walls, the terrible ghost-blobs Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde. They're coming for me, I know; I can hear them blipping. I rush headlong down a corridor, eating rows of energy spheres, seeking the coveted power capsule that will turn predator to prey.

A $60,000 machine is making this possible. A machine that costs $5 to play, for five minutes. This is a level of technology that was not available to, say, Neil Armstrong or Dr. Christian Barnard. Here at XS New York in Times Square, there are four such machines dedicated to Pac-Man VR.

As I play, I am fully aware that the crowd watching me is seeing before them an incredible dork. Every fiber of my body --- my hunched posture, the spastic way I'm shuffling my feet feebly clockwise then counterclockwise, my dopey, out-of-it grin reminiscent of a sedated patient -- everything is shouting to the public, behold, it is I, Supergeek...never before have you witnessed such unbridled dweebiness. I know this because that's precisely what I thought about the guy I watched playing Pac-Man VR before I did.

Inside, though, I'm the man. I'm Pac-Man. Pac-Man who made the cover of Time. Pac-Man who inspired a top-ten pop record. Pac-Man who raked in more cash in 1981 than I will make in my lifetime. I turn left and sprint -- suddenly it's Blinky IN MY FACE. And then...it's just...that ...electronic...shriveling...dying noise.

I peel off the goggles and require human assistance to keep from falling onto the reality of a painted concrete floor as I disembark from the padded corral known as a virtual-reality pod. A deafening swell of Sheryl Crow, blasted over the club's nine or ten thousand loudspeakers, welcomes me back to 1997.

"How'd you do?," yells Eric Cohen, XS New York's cheery marketing man, who's leading me on a tour of the facility.

"That was great. Finally being in there after all these years," I offer.

"Yeah," Cohen says. " I mean, who hasn't wanted to be that little guy?"

Video games, this year, are 25 years old. This makes them, at least as an industry, mature. They've reached the point where two concurrent forces are now at work. On one hand, the technology being harnessed to woo your leisure time and disposable income is now stunning and obscenely expensive. Arcades are no longer mere arcades -- they're "location-based entertainment centers" with adults-only policies and microbreweries in the back. Computer games have production budgets that top $10 million. And video games you've never heard of routinely make millions of dollars in days, putting Hollywood box office receipts to shame.

Yet even as electronic gaming hurtles toward the 21st century, another unstoppable force has taken hold. Like every other pop-culture phenomenon that began in the early Seventies, video games are inspring a wave of nostalgia among late- and post- baby-boomers (about half the population has grown up during the video game era). Obsolete video games are now being re-released as "classics," discarded arcade machines and game cartridges feed a thriving collectors' market, and serious dissertation has begun to evaluate the actual importance of video games to society.

Now, if you and I ever think about video games as significant, it's likely because they had some bittersweet connection to a part of our lives. The video games we played as teenagers, sure, they were a massive waste of time -- but it was a waste of a PARTICULAR, SPECIAL TIME. On the other hand, there's Keith Feinstein, who has no doubt that video games have been quite objectively, from a global and societal standpoint, IMPORTANT.

"If it weren't for video games, we wouldn't have computers on our desktops. There's just no way around it," he says. Feinstein is curator of the world's most comprehensive private collection of vintage arcade machines. His collection forms the beeping, flashing, throbbing heart of "Videoptopia," an exhibition he has single-handedly assembled to document the history and societal contribution of video games such as Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Centipede and Asteroids. It opens June 21 the Franklin Institute and runs through summer.

Video games alone created the market for home-entertainment machines, and that means home computers, Feinstein asserts. "Seventy percent of home computers bought today are bought primarily to play games," he says. Without those seventy percent making a mass market, home computers would far be too expensive. Certainly the move to today's high-powered multimedia computers has been all about playing games; you don't need a Pentium chip, color monitor, sound synthesis, speakers and a CD-ROM player to calculate a spreadsheet. It's also a fact that the creators of some of the first personal computers began their careers in the video-game business.

Yet when you read about the history of computers, video games are ignominiously ignored. "Video games to academics are this lowbrow technology...as if it's not even it's not even worth discussing with any real... conviction," Feinstein laments, as he transports me in his new Saturn (only coincidentally the name of a video-game system) to the New Jersey warehouse where he's keeping the world's largest private video arcade machine collection. "It's really revisionist history in a way," he says. "That's how this whole thing started. I said, all this stuff is gonna disappear, all these people and their stories will be lost, unless I do something."

The Big Bang of the video game revolution is generally traced to November of 1972, when the first Pong machine began accepting quarters at a Sunnyvale, California bar. Nolan Bushnell, whose Atari Corporation made the Pong machine, is widely considered the father of video games. It's a title he holds in the same way that George Washington, whose face is on the coins than made Bushnell rich, is the father of our country. Outside of biology, paternity is seldom a one-man job.

Computers from their start (it was 1946 when the geniuses at Penn unveiled ENIAC) were being programmed to play simple math- or word-games, like tic-tac-toe or Hangman. Programmers often wrote games to explore what these fascinating electronic brains were capable of. Once created, games were sometimes used as demonstrations to prove to visitors (usually reporters) that computers were good for something besides the destruction of humanity (always a popular suspicion) and to put a fun face on their otherwise threatening and inhuman image. Sort of like when Nixon went on Laugh-In.

ENIAC-era computers didn't have screens. What may have been the first prototype of a (sort of) video game is credited to Willy Higinbotham, a physicist with a past designing electronics for the Manhattan Project's atomic bomb. In 1958, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., he wired a computer to an oscilliscope and created a crude tennis-like game. The machine delighted Lab visitors and must have made them think, hey, the military-industrial complex really knows how to lighten up. Oddly, at the time no one saw a future in turning multimillion-dollar military-research equipment into interactive Etch-a-Sketches.

But that was before they started giving computers to students. In 1961 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, engineer Steve Russell started hacking on the school's new DEC PDP-1 mainframe, one of the first computers to have video monitors, to explore the machine's graphics capabilites. He ended up creating the first video game.

Just like the big bang, it started with a single dot. Russell took a program that guided a dot across the screen in sine and cosine waves, then modified it to let someone sitting at the terminal alter the trajectory and velocity of the dot.

It's understandable that a science-fiction loving MIT engineer at the dawn of the space age imagined that his moveable dot could become...a rocket ship! Russell made two controllable rockets that could fire missiles (dots) at each other (this was the Cold War era, too). If a rocket and missile ever moved to occupy the same screen-position -- KABLOOIE! -- the rocket would be erased from the screen and a little spew of dots would briefly appear in its place.

That was it. He called it Space War. Every video and computer game since has been elaboration.

The game spread to university computer labs around the country. One player at the University of Utah was Bushnell, himself a science-fiction fan and electronics tinkerer. He was also the world's first cyber-impresario waiting to happen. While working at an electronics company after graduation, Bushnell had a brainstorm, that moment of revelation often attributed to great scientific revolutions. Eureka! He'd put a version of Space War into a coin-operated machine and create the first computerized game people would pay to play.

Bushnell programmed a rocket battle contest onto circuit boards and hooked them to a black-and-white TV set he'd ripped from its case. He rigged up two (then unheard of) joysticks to control the ships and put it all inside a curvy kiosk whose bubble-head shape he'd designed with modeling clay on his kitchen table. Painted metal-flake green, his cleverly renamed Computer Space machine looked like a dollop of alien slime with a TV for a face. When the company where he worked wouldn't manufacture it, he went to a pinball-machine company, which made about 1,500 of the machines. And when Computer Space flopped miserably because its complexity and appearance terrified pinball players, Bushnell started his own company, Atari.

Legend has it Bushnell told his Atari programmers they needed to make a new game so simple, any idiot could figure out how to play with a beer in one hand. Rumors say Bushnell got his idea for such a simple game from a prototype of a play-on-your-TV computer-tennis game invented by Ralph Baer, who worked for a military electronics company in New Hampshire (Bushnell would deny ever having seen the prototype, but Atari quietly paid royalties to Baer's employer). In November of 1972, perhaps with American Pie or Brandy (You're a Fine Girl) or Popcorn (by Hot Butter) spinning in the jukebox, employees of Atari Corporation wheeled the first Pong machine, a homemade wooden cabinet with a TV and circuit boards inside, into a Sunnyvale, California, bar. A metal plaque on the Pong machine gave just two instructions: "Ball will serve automatically. Avoid missing ball for high score." It was plugged in next to a pinball machine.

To make a long story short: by 1982, America was spending $5 billion a year-- and 75,000 man years a year -- playing arcade machines. That $5 billion, reported Time in its 1982 Pac-Man cover story, was twice the intake of all Nevada's casinos, almost double the gross of the movie industry, more than all the TV network revenues combined and all the major sports' revenues combined.

Bushnell became the first Bill Gates and the first Steve Jobs (metaphysically, he actually employed Steve Jobs at Atari before Apple Computer existed). He had Learjets and yachts, a mansion in California and homes in Aspen, Georgetown, Paris. He made and lost multiple fortunes. He sold Atari to Warner for $28 million. He invented Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theater, a nice place if you like to be entertained by animatronic rodents, and sold that company as well. This being America, we trace the 25th anniversary of the video game to the 25th anniversary of Pong, the first video game to make a profit.

My new buddy Keith Feinstein and I move briskly through a quarter-million-square-foot warehouse in Edison, New Jersey. A couple football fields in, I see it, several rows of dark green monoliths, 50 or 60 six-foot-tall boxes, individually shrink-wrapped for shipping, Christo-style, in opaque plastic. Each box has a slightly different contour. Feinstein can identify each of the arcade machines inside by its silhouette.

Dust flies as we poke a hole in the plastic that shrouds the first machine we begin to uncloak, the ancient-yet-futuristic Computer Space. Feinstein owns five of them; nobody owns more. Tearing open the wrap, I feel like an archaeological digger whose shovel has just struck bone.

There it is. Computer Space. He plugs it in and its fan whirs to life. The screen stays blank. Repair will be needed (the only place to get spare parts for an old arcade machine is from an identical old arcade machine).

One of the warehouse forklift drivers, who has been lurking behind us at a distance, suddenly approaches us on foot.

"That must be ancient!" says the worker, who looks to be in his early Forties.

"Yeah it's as old as they get," Feinstein says.

"I think I remember Pong was older, wasn't --"

"Nope! This one. Pong was second," Feinstein asserts.

Suddenly the warehouse man has left us. He's traveling back in time. He's remembering.

"I went to college up in Montreal, and they didn't have anything like that," he recalls. "We drove a Pong machine across the border and put it down in our laundry room. It paid for our tuition. That and one otherthing -- we had a soda machine we turned into a beer machine."

I didn't ask if he graduated.

We proceed to tear open more machines. Pong. Tank. Star Wars. Pole Position. Asteroids...the Computer Space concept finally made good, in 1979. You're a floating rocket-ship, shaped like a capital A, blasting dangerous rocks to bits. Our planet poured another few man-millenia into playing that.

Atari Football let two players guide Xs and Os across a gridiron using huge trackballs. Centipede was the first arcade game co-designed by a woman (but strong enough for a man). Frogger was the first game to let you guide a frog across a busy street. Space Invaders, in 1978, made video games respectable, moving them beyond just arcades into ice cream parlors and movie-theater lobbies. Missile Command was the timely 1980 game based on the high concept of defending U.S. cities from an onslaught of Soviet bombs. Atari programmer Dave Theurer intentionally programmed it so you'd always eventually lose and see an explosive graphic that flashed the words "THE END " ("That was the point," he'd explained, "to show if there was a nuclear war, you would never win.")

Defender was another hard-to-master rocket-shooter game.

"You'd always see the tough guys playing Defender," Feinstein says, recalling his arcade days. "It's hard to find a Defender machine without cigarette burns."

Video games changed the arcade scene irrevocably. Pinball manufacturers feared for their lives. When they realized that video games digested quarters more rapidly than pinball machines, they cut the number of balls per pinball game from five to three (now you know why this travesty occurred). Ultimately pinball machines incorporated the electronic sounds and lights pioneered in video games (Further trivia: the first pinball machine to incorporate electronics was Dyn-0-Myte, a Jimmy "J.J" Walker-themed unit.)

Between 1980 and 1982 video-game fever crested. Bally made several hundred million dollars as Pac-Man, released in 1980, swept the nation. Both Time and MAD magazine made Pac-Man a cover boy. Pac-Man Fever, a horrendously bad song that Buckner & Garcia must have written and recorded in 11 minutes, reached the Billboard Top Ten. After such an awful song, the backlash was inevitable. Video games, it turns out, were taking our kids' lunch money. Time's article examining this new societal plague contains a telling interview with a 12-year-old boy in a

New Hampshire pizzeria who's pumping quarter upon quarter in to a machine called Scramble.

"'I usually bring $20,' says the boy, when asked how much he spends," the story reads. And you don't have to be on the Pulitzer Prize committee to see what's coming next: "'But today I brought $40.'"

Small towns moved to shut down arcades. Mesquite, Texas, banned anyone under 17 from playing video games in public without an adult guardian. It took the Supreme Court to uphold guardian-free play. Ironically, Mesquite today is known worldwide as the headquarters of id

Software, creator of Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein 3-D, some of the most popular and violent computer and video games in history.

But arcade games were facing a growing threat from the inside: home systems. The first home video game system, 1972's Magnavox Odyssey, pre-dated Pong. It played tennis and other games using changeable circuit boards, though it didn't have enough memory to store the actual playing fields -- you had to place mylar overlays onto the TV screen, and you had to keep score on paper. Neverthlesss, everyone was so awed by the ability to control something on their TV screens, the system and its follow-up sold well. Pong home-units debuted in 1975 and were initially sold exclusively at Sears. After Pong came systems that supported interchangeable cartridges. George Plimpton went on TV to sell Amerrica the Atari 2600. William Shatner hawked Mattel's

Intellivision. Coleco released ColecoVision. At one point, in an early example of the triumph of marketing over creative brilliance, about sixty different variations of ball-and-paddle games for home users were available on different systems: ping pong, tennis, squash, handball, raquetball. But the long-awaited home version of Pac-Man was terrible, and by 1983 it seemed like home video games systems were a fad gone stale. Atari had fallen to pieces under new corporate owners. New games were, simply, bad. Some gamers started checking out the new IBM and Apple home computers instead.

"People didn't get tired of video games," Feinstein assures me, as we check out his display case of early home video-game consoles. "They got tired of crap."

The home video game was really only dead for a year or two. Then came Mario, a Japanese caricature of a pudgy Italian plumber who became an America icon.

Nintendo had been founded in Japan in 1889 as a maker of hand-painted playing cards. Through the years the company had sold a variety of games, toys and electronics. In 1981 the company released Donkey Kong to U.S. arcades, featuring an odd little character named "Jumpman" (he later got the name Mario in Donkey Kong Jr., where he was cast against type as the "bad guy," imprisoning the father ape Donkey Kong Sr. in a cage). Donkey Kong was successful enough that Universal Studios sued Nintendo for infringing upon the "King Kong" trademark. The infringement seems obvious. But Universal lost the case, not so much because, as Nintendo argued, the phrase "kong" was generic slang in Japanese for a stubborn ape, but because it turned out that Universal no longer owned the rights to King Kong.

In 1985, Nintendo introduced the home Nintendo Entertainment System and revived -- actually, became --the home market. By 1989, one in four American homes had the NES system, according to David Sheff in his Nintendo history, Game Over. In 1990 a survey showed more American kids recognized Mario than Mickey Mouse. By 1991, Nintendo, with about

5,000 employees, earned $400 million more than Sony, which had 50,000 employees. Nintendo was profiting more than all the American movie studios combined and the three TV networks combined.

Once you do the math, it's easy to figure out where the profit comes from. Parents who grew up craving the latest $6 record albums suddenly had kids who craved the latest $60 video games. And in 1991, it was time to make them spend their money all over again. The new 16-bit Super

Nintendo system was super-incompatible with all the 8-bit games everyone had already bought.

Arcade-machine manufacturer Sega grabbed a piece of the action as technology shifted to 16-bit. After a false start trying to market its new Genesis system on the strength of lame tie-in games like Michael Jackson's "Moonwalker," Sega introduced Sonic the Hedgehog, who would eventually become more popular than Mickey Mouse too (sorry, Mickey, but face it, you're just a big head with ears; you haven't had a personality since Steamboat Willie.)

On the strength of its fighting games and deals with sports stars like Joe Montana, Sega drew even with Nintendo in the 16-bit world and came to be perceived as the cooler company.

Meanwhile, computer games quietly played second fiddle. There were always plenty of computer games, but only a small percentage of homes ever owned computers. Flight Simulator was created in 1981 by a small company at the behest of Microsoft, which was developing the operating system for a sceret new home computer (the IBM PC) and wanted a game to show off the machine's graphics. It's been a best-seller for about 15 years. Tetris, which really was written in Russia, came over and sapped capitalist office-worker productivity for years.

Myst and Doom broke sales records and inspired hundreds of knockoffs. The Doom-clone genre of "first-person 3-D shooters" in which you flee through a maze of corridors slaughtering monsters or fascists with huge weapons, was invented by kids who grew up navigating the original maze-game, Pac-Man. In Halcyon Days, a huge oral history of video game design available only on the World Wide Web (www.dadgum.com), John Romero, the designer of Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake, recounts how he played Pac-Man so much as a kid he could get through the first level with his eyes closed. (More trivia: in Romero's Wolfenstein 3-D, right before you get to gun down Hitler, the Pac-Man ghost blobs emerge to attacjk you. Who knew they were Nazis?!)

The success of Doom, no doubt, was its no-learning-curve simplicity, an elegance that has marked most smash hits: Pong, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Tetris. The vast storage space of CD-ROMs, however, has encouraged game designers to pile on complexity and special-effects flourish. One recent trend saw Hollywood actors, often those with a lot of free time between TV and film roles, starring in CD-ROM computer games. Ever wonder what happened to Joe Piscopo? He's in a CD-ROM poker game with Morgan Fairchild.

Budgets for computer games have soared to an average of more than $1 million each. Wing Commander IV, a Star Wars space-battle game that acing sequences by Mark Hammill (THE Mark Hammill) and Malcolm McLaren, reportedly cost $12 million to make. To make increasingly realistic sports and karate games, sofware companies have built multimillion "motion capture studios," filming athletes and acrobats with sophisticated equipment to capture the mechanics of human movement for animated game characters.

Now they can put Hollywood actors in games without requiring them to act. The forthcoming Apocalypse, for the PC and Sony PlayStation, will let you control "an entirely digital Bruce Willis," says an executive at developer Activision. "We're cyberscanning him, motion-capturing him and texture-mapping him." The result will be a realistic looking Wills whose movements players at home will be able to control like a puppet. (Maybe this digital doppleganger could be put to work in Willis' mindless action films, leaving the real Bruce free for more critically acclaimed roles in films like Twelve Monkeys and Nobody's Fool.)

Not content to digitize the living, Los Angeles-based Cortina Entertainment is preparing a video game that stars an eerily alive-looking Humphrey Bogart. Bogey gets in fights and shoots people. There's everything but nude scenes.

In arcades, meanwhile, complexity runs rampant. Fighting games dominate, and if you don't know the proper twelve-button combination to pull off your character's secret spinning jump kick, you'd just as well hang it up.

"Today's game designers seem to be blowing off casual users in a misguided attempt to stay ahead of an increasingly rarefied group of experts," Nolan Bushnell wrote in a computer game magazine recently. He has confessed to great guilt about his creation. "Not quite the guilt that Robert Oppenheimer felt, but guilt nonetheless."

Bushnell's current project, rolling out this spring, is a line of trivia-game machines for grown-ups in hotel bars, linked together via the Internet. This follows the latest trend: "upscale", adult (not THAT kind of adult), amusement centers, where "coin-operated" is a misnomer because the machines cost about a dollar a minute and accept credit cards.

Stephen Spielberg's Dreamworks SGK has teamed with Sega and Universal Studios to launch Gameworks, a chain of amusement centers where the machines are half video game, half carnival ride. In one attraction, you're physically lifted 24 feet off the ground. There's also a cybercafe and microbrewery.

At Dave and Buster's, where they enforce a one-adult-for-every-three-kids ratio, you can eat and drink yourself full, then head over to the midway and ride a machine that lets you experience a 360-degree barrell roll in a fighter plane. Yum!

Back at XS New York, where no one under 18 is admitted after 9 p.m., I play a NASCAR racing game in which I sit inside a full-sized stock car. The entire windshield is filled with widescreen video, and the steering wheel physically jolts, when, say, I ram into the back of another car, or spin-out and die. Then I try Virtual Glider, a hang gliding simulation, in which I lie prone with my feet in the air, my hands holding a steering bar, and my face pushed down into goggles, allowing me to experience a horrifying face-first freefall into the cliffs of the Grand Canyon.

"How was it?!" asks Eric Cohen, XS New York's happy director of marketing, when I was done.

"Eric, it was my worst nightmare," I tell him.

"Yeah," he says, "But how often can you live your worst nightmare, and come out smiling?"

It probably makes sense that amidst all this high-tech excess, a return to simpler times, a "retro-gaming" movement, has begun. That old arcade machine in your basement - don't throw it away. While amassing his collection, Feinstein once purchased eight Star Wars arcade machines for $63 apiece.

"I've had people offer me as much as five grand for a Star Wars machine these days," he marvels. "You could sell a dead one for five, six, seven hundred dollars, without thinking."

Collectors haunt thrift stores and yard sales for obsolete games. And the "Classic" arcade games -- Asteroids, Centipede, Pac-Man, have been re-released, on popular discs that run on modern home equipment like PCs and PlayStations.

"Those games are enduring in the same way that Casablanca is enduring," observes John Lowenstein, president of the Interactive Digital Software Association, whose annual E3 exhibition of new entertainment software, this June in Atlanta, will be bigger than ever.

Casablanca? Hmm. When you think about it, Casablanca VR could be pretty cool.