ACAB (High Speed, Hogan's Alley)

My mother was a woman liked overly big, showy Christmas presents, and one year she decided to outdo herself and buy me a pinball machine. She did her homework on slightly older machines she could get a good price on, and settled on the classic Williams table High Speed. Needless to say, I was gobsmacked. She hid the pinball machine in plain sight with a blanket over it and insisted it was the surprisingly oversized toy kitchen my sister was getting and I bought it because "there's a pinball machine hidden in your playroom" is simply not an outcome I was equipped to imagine.

High Speed was a 1980s machine with a pleasantly frenetic pace and soundtrack. Its plot, such as it was, involved hitting a series of targets around the table to steadily illuminate a traffic light, then made a ramp shot to "run the light" setting off a high speed chase; successful completion of a few more targets constituted getting away and launched multiball.

It's probably too much to ask for moral lessons from a pinball table, and I'm pretty unconvinced by "run red lights" as a lesson in the first place. And yet there is something about the impish anti-authority leaning here that is easy to respect. "Fleeing from the cops is fun and should be rewarded" has an easy charm to it, fitting into the long tradition of the noble outlaw. 

Interestingly, the game's sound effects are from the perspective of the frustrated cops—"Dispatch this is 504. Suspect ran a red light. Over," and the like. Which means that the player is positioned not with the driver whose actions they are nominally controlling via the ball (although the question of avatars in pinball machines is to say the least vexed) but with the cops who exist in a state of endless frustration, always missing the perp. In a pleasant detail, there's literally no victory dialogue: when you lose a ball the cops don't say "we got him" or anything. And so the game is simply an endless recitation of defeated authority that can only ever be revealed as impotent and useless, with the player's pleasure always allied with that revelation. 

The NES port is reasonably faithful as a table—I was able to pick it up quickly and was broadly speaking almost as good at it as I was on the actual table the last time I played it, which was admittedly some eight years ago. It makes the irritating and non-optional decision to add a bunch of gimmicks—little threats that show up on the table and disrupt play, along with random collectable bonuses that tricker extra rounds. From a design perspective, a "Normal" and "Enhanced" mode would be nice touches. But as a pinball port it's reasonable, an entertaining bit of nostalgia that I legitimately didn't expect to find on the NES. (Honestly, if I'd realized I had this coming in just two posts I probably wouldn't have quit the project when I did.)

I remember one evening when my father came to get me. I don't remember what I was doing—statistically speaking it was probably playing video games. He walked me down the front lawn to where a traffic stop was taking place; some teenage girl had been speeding or run a red light or something. And we stood and watched. Eventually the cop decided he didn't like this, and asked my father to go back inside. And my father replied, very calmly, "I believe citizens should watch their police." 

There are no shortage of bad games on the NES. Still, it is hard to think of a more straightforwardly evil one than Hogan's Alley. Another light gun game, this one functions as a shooting gallery in which a mixture of criminals and innocents pop up and you must quickly identify and shoot the criminals. The name dates back to 1920, when the NRA and the Army collaborated to create a training range in Ohio after determining that an insufficient number of cities had dedicated firing ranges. This was presumably named after Richard Outcault's Hogan's Alley, widely credited as the first newspaper comic strip, although as usual the word "first" turns out to be extremely vexed here. The Hogan's Alley range was notable for being a broad simulation of a city, with targets popping out in unexpected places as the officer walked through. This eventually became a generic name for that type of shooting range; two years after the NES game came out the FBI established a range of the same name in Quantico in which actors were hired to portray a mixture of civilians and terrorists for the purposes of training. 

There are multiple levels to this sort of training. On one level the presence of "civilians" constitutes training in threat assessment. But these ranges are also known as surprise ranges, with the idea being that threats might jump out of any corner. The end result is to keep police on edge, paranoid, always afraid that something bad could happen to them. This is the logic that would eventually evolve into Dave Grossman's horrifying notion of "killology," a set of police training seminars that can be boiled down to convincing cops that they need to learn to kill without hesitation or moral qualm. The lethal consequences of this are, I imagine, self-evident. 

Hogan's Alley avoids the worst baggage of this with an entirely white cast of criminals, who are generally in the mafioso style. But its basic logic is still the same. All runs at the game ultimately end the same way, with a failure to clear the room of criminals leading to the player's defeat. Perhaps they're defeated by hitting a civilian, but more likely they miss a criminal. The lesson is still that cops are under constant siege, always threatened, and thus that violence is inevitable and necessary. Ultimately, the goal of the game is still to shoot all suspects on sight.

My father's lesson was one that I was not entirely prepared to absorb at the time. Grounded in realities and systems too abstract to grasp, an insufficient counterweight to the copaganda of D.A.R.E. All the same, it is the lesson that has held; an understanding both of citizen and police that steadily grew to a worldview. The real secret history in all of this,