Insert Coin is director Joshua Tsui’s playful retro-chic documentary about the golden era of coin-operated video arcade games and the electronic exploits of the game-designing Chicagoan nerds at Williams Electronics and Bally Midway: the two pillars of the nascent 1980s video game universe who would eventually suffer an uneasy business merger. The coin-op era effectively lasted from the early 1980s, when post-Pong space-war games like Defender were all the rage, through the 1990s, when the blood-soaked martial arts carnage of Mortal Kombat revolutionized graphic video game violence. Tsui interviews the major players in the Williams/Midway rivalry, Eugene Jarvis, being the creative wizard behind early runaway successes like Defender to the pivotal realist cops vs. drug dealers game NARC, which set the pace for Williams/Bally/Midway’s future graphic realism in combat games (or “body part” games as Jarvis jokingly calls them).
Anticipating the public’s increasing bloodlust in the video game market, Jarvis and his game developer began to geysers of blood gush from dying characters and severed limbs routinely explode across the screen, the many iterations of Mortal Kombat being the coin-op apotheosis of said “body part” games. One of the most unexpected pleasures of Insert Coin is its behind-the-scenes insights into the production process, especially how the designers managed to digitally capture human movements and then adapt them for use in gaming contexts, not only in Mortal Kombat but in sports games like NBA Jam, where the graphic representation of onscreen images was becoming increasingly cinematic: we see, for instance, old footage of video game actors performing moves and poses that would eventually serve as the foundations for their digitized doppelgängers’ onscreen arsenal of physical abilities. In the end, though, Tsui’s documentary follows the rise-and-fall narrative arc of most human success stories. Eventually the company’s dog-eat-dog competitive ethos would burn itself out in market oversaturation—in this case, the failed attempts to create a coin operated gaming experience that could transcend the Mortal Kombat legacy. Then of course comes the death knell: Y2K and its onslaught of direct-to-consumer gaming experiences characterized by internet-driven X-boxes and Playstations. For Gen Xers, this is sure to be a nostalgic trip down the comforting memory hole of technological obsolescence. Recommended. Aud: C, P.