Pengo redux

As luck would have it, my re-acquaintance with Pengo after so many years was the result of pursuing another gaming experience – minecraft.

The Powerhouse Museum is one of Sydney’s biggest. Its focus is science, technology and design. It gets its name from its location within a cavernous converted power station about a 10 minute walk from Haymarket, at the southern boundary of Sydney’s rectangular CBD. For those who’ve not been here, the harbour, the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Sydney Opera House are at the northern end of the CBD.

 

In early March 2013, the Museum advertised a weekend of seminars and activities for kids. Among these were some two hour minecraft sessions for those aged 8-12. Two of my three boys were minecraft aficionados and in that age group. So we booked in and along we went.

 

It had been a few years since I’d been to the Powerhouse, and then only to see a special exhibition on Star Wars paraphernalia. It was one of those places I’d made a mental note to spend some time exploring one day, but that opportunity never really came up. So I was glad for an excuse to get along.

 

We arrived quite early and wandered around some of the exhibits in the rest of the museum until we came across four table top / cocktail-style video gaming machines. A couple of them were being played. I noticed that one of the games was Galaga. It soon became apparent that the machines were multi-game and carried a menu of what seemed to be around 10-15 different games – all from the early to mid-1980’s.

 

Just as quickly, I spotted that one of the games in the menu was Pengo.

 

As I sat down to play (no coins were necessary – the games were free), that familiar Popcorn music score rang out and away we went. It was obvious I was very, very rusty. But it was also obvious that those months of continuous play back in 1983 had worked to hard-wire the game into my brain, and I managed to clock up a score of over 100,000 on my first attempt.

 

The game was the standard three penguins to start, with one bonus at 30,000. The difficulty level felt like the conventional ‘medium’.
 

In the few weeks since, I’ve managed to play about once a week and when I soon started scoring quite consistently in the 300’s and 400’s, I decided to record all my scores over 500,000.

 

On Sunday 7 April, I passed that mark for the first time in 30 years.

 

It was a score of 684,970.

 

The interesting thing about this one was that it reminded me that the game score recorder ‘clocks’ at a number substantially less than 1,000,000. That is, the score recorder doesn’t reach 999,990 or whatever, and then go back to zero when the next sno-bee is killed, or the next block is crunched. The ones I played all those years ago consistently clocked at a very strange score of around 650,000+. This one ‘clocked’ at 654,990. So to calculate the total score, I needed to add that to the score that appeared at the end of the game. This means that it’s only the 654,990 score that appears as the high score on the machine - not the actual high score of 684,970.

 

In the small number of times I’ve played since, I’ve fallen a little short of that sort of number. But having been there once, I can feel that it’s only a matter of time before I get there again, and again and again.

 

One week later, on Sunday 14 April, I scored 534,410.

 

And last weekend, on Saturday 20 April, the best I managed was 539,460.

 

On the current Twin Galaxies league table of the all-time best Pengo scores, these three scores alone would rank sixth, seventh and eighth. Of course, there are rules about official high scores that I will go into a bit later on.

 

But for the moment, after only about six or seven weeks of sporadic play, I really feel as if I’m still just warming up.