She's More Than Pac-Man With A Bow

Ms. Pac Man Promotion
Roy Rogers (1982)

It's difficult to pin down an exact release date for video games in the 80's.  This is especially true for arcade machines.  Case in point, the Bally Midway coin-op classic, Ms Pac-Man.  The US Copyright Office has the official publication of the game listed as January 13th, 1982 - forty years ago today.  However, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times that was published a few weeks later, Ms. Pac Man debuted on February 3rd at a press conference in Sherman Oaks and the game was still a few weeks away from being available to play in arcades.  Complicating the issue further is the fact that more than a few respected sources, including Game Informer and the Official Pac-Man Website (run by Namco, who have owned the licensing rights to Ms. Pac Man since 1984) list the game as having debuted toward the end of 1981.

Even with a time machine, it would be extremely difficult to pinpoint the exact date that a paying customer first put a quarter into a Ms. Pac-Man machine, but for the lack of a more accurate date, I'm going to go ahead and wish the First Lady of Video Games a happy 40th birthday today.

One thing I can give the exact dates on (thanks to the contest's official rules) is this Ms. Pac Man promotion from Roy Rogers, which ran from June 14th to September 30th, 1982.  Customers of the restaurant chain were given a game ticket.  It worked a bit like the McDonald's Monopoly promotion in that customers had to collect multiple tickets in a single category for a prize.  For example, a complete set of three Salad Bar tickets could be exchanged for a Ms. Pac-Man t-shirt.  A set of Crispy Fried Chicken game pieces could be redeemed for a cash prize.  There were also instant win game pieces that awarded prizes, including free food items, a coupon booklet, and up to $2,500 in cash.

The grand prize was a bit more difficult to win.  If you collected all four Large Roast Beef Sandwich tickets, you could mail them in for an entry in a sweepstakes to win an authentic Ms. Pac-Man arcade machine.  The restaurant gave out 25 of them, and I could only imagine how awesome Christmas 1982 would have been for those families that had won their very own cabinet of the hottest video game of the year straight from the arcade.

This contest was a little before my time.  I was only two years old for most of its run, but even if I was older, we didn't have a Roy Rogers in town.  To this day, the closest one that I'm aware of is at the Allentown Rest Stop off of the turnpike, so their sandwiches have become my go-to snack for the drive home from Philadelphia.  Despite this, my childhood memories of Ms. Pac Man are closely tied to a restaurant.

Blue Comet Diner (2007) - Photo by Christian Montone

When I was growing up, I spent a lot of weekends at my grandparents house.  On Saturday, Grandma, Nana and I went to services at Our Lady Of Mount Carmel in Hazleton.  It was the first and only Tyrolean Roman Catholic Church in the United States, and is probably the reason why my Nana's side of the family settled in Hazleton when they emigrated from Tyrol to the New World.  My grandfather was Lutheran, so he didn't go to church with us.  He would go visit his mother and then come back to pick us up when services were over, and then the four of us stopped at the Blue Comet for dinner.

You can't see it in this photo, but there were stairs on the right side of the building that led to the front door of the restaurant.  There was a small vestibule when you walked into the building, and once you were inside, there was a second set of doors on the right that led to the dining room.  That vestibule had a small coat rack, a pay phone, a couple of video poker machines, and a Ms. Pac-Man arcade machine.  The game was in the center of the back wall facing out, so that it was the first thing I saw when we walked in and the last thing I saw before we left.  After I was finished eating, my grandfather gave me a couple of quarters and I'd go out and play Ms. Pac-Man.  When they finished their coffee after dinner, they'd usually join me and play poker for a little while.  Like most of the video poker machines in town, the ones at the Blue Comet "paid out" the same as they would at a casino (very illegal, but it's a Hazleton thing).

This is how I spent literally hundreds of Saturdays through the 80's and early 90's until I moved to South Florida.  I know it probably seems a bit silly or even stupid to reminisce about something as ordinary as playing a video game at a diner that's been sitting abandoned for over ten years, but these are memories that I treasure.  The closest I can get to experiencing them today is a game of Ms. Pac-Man.  When I play it on an arcade unit, I can almost smell the mixture of cigarette smoke, coffee and diner food that permeated this place and I usually don't get very far on my first quarter.  Seems like something always gets stuck in my eyes.

The other spot in Hazleton where I played Ms. Pac-Man was the Laurel Drive-In.  Coincidentally, this was also on Route 309, but a few miles down the road from the church in the opposite direction of the Blue Comet.  It closed a few years ago when studios went all digital and stopped producing movies on 35mm.  This is the theater where I saw my first movie on the big screen, and I became a frequent customer from my late teens straight through until they closed.

Before it closed, the snack bar had a row of arcade games on the wall opposite to the counter.  Most of them were crane machines with candy or stuffed animals, but they did have a Ms. Pac-Man machine.  My family used to sneak in their own snacks so I don't ever remember going into the snack bar when I was a child, but I became very familiar with it as a teenager.  Cheap pizza, movies and Ms. Pac-Man... it was heaven for a 17 year old nerd!

There are still retro themed arcades across the country, and I'll bet that each of them have a Ms. Pac-Man.  Additionally, Arcade 1Up has made the dream of winning the 1982 Roy Rogers grand prize a reality for a fraction of the cost of the original.  However, the world has changed a lot in the 40 years since Ms. Pac-Man debuted.

In the 80's and early 90's, arcade machines were everywhere.  Grocery stores, convenience stores, gas stations, restaurants, bars, malls, airports, laundromats, bus stops... pretty much every public space you can think of had at least one video game coin-op, and Ms. Pac-Man was among the most successful of them.  There were 125,000 machines sold in the first six years since it was released and they grossed a total of $1.2 billion dollars by 1987... one quarter at a time.  These days, you're not as likely to stumble across an arcade machine out in the wild, but if you do, there's a very good chance that the one you find will be a Ms. Pac-Man.  If that happens, give it a spin.  The true classics never get old.

Five Years Without The Comet

Blue Comet
Route 309 - Hazleton, PA
This iconic diner has now sat vacant for five years after closing their doors for the last time in April 2011.  The images above show what it looked like in the 80's and 90's, with the stone front, red brick, and the plants on the right hand side of the building, and in the 2000's after the remodel, with the box-like chrome storefront and the flagpole.

source: Blue Comet postcard  (year and photographer unknown)

source: Donna Esposito (October 12, 2008)

I'm still hopeful that this place will reopen someday.  It's a local landmark that dates back to 1939 and I have a lot of happy memories here.  One of these days, I'm going to do a write up on its history.

Memories Of The Blue Comet

Blue Comet Diner menu
Hazleton, PA
I have a lot of happy memories at the Blue Comet Diner.  When I was growing up, my grandparents and I had dinner here every Saturday evening after church.  My clearest memory of the place was the smell.  I would bet that there was enough second hand smoke that breathing the air at your table during dinner would be equivalent to smoking at least one cigarette.  It may sound like I'm talking bad about the place, but not at all.  The 80's were a very different time.  Almost every adult I knew when I was a kid smoked, so it wasn't an uncommon smell anywhere in town.  For some reason though, I associate it strongly with the diner.  When I think of it, I can call up a memory of the way that it smelled without even trying.

The food there was always good.  My favorite things to order were chicken fingers and breaded shrimp.  They used to have one of those pie and cake glass cases that had stacks of desserts that rotated.  Everything looked delicious, but I don't remember ever trying anything other than rice pudding and a big piece of coconut cream pie.  It was delicious!

They used to have video poker machines and a Ms. Pac-Man cabinet in the entrance way.  I played at least one game of Ms. Pac-Man every time we ate there while Grandma, Grandpa and Nana took turns playing video poker.  Even though they were labeled "for entertainment only", the machines paid off.  I'm not sure exactly how many points you had to score to get a payoff, but I remember that when one of my family members won, they'd go into the restaurant to get the cashier to come out and verify the score.  They'd go back to the counter and pay cash out of the register.  When I was a kid, I had no idea that this was illegal gambling.  No one made any attempt at all to hide it.  That was Hazleton in the 20th century.

When I was a teenager, the 24 hour diner became a late night hang out where friends and I would drink coffee and talk about music, or where I'd grab a burger and fries with my girlfriend after a movie.  This menu is from those days - either the late 90's or early 2000's.

I have more happy memories over the years here than any other restaurant.  I've been here hundreds of times with family and friends, and I'm sure I'm not the only person who has so many fond memories of the place.  It's been there since 1932 and has been an iconic part of Hazleton for generations.  Sadly, that came to an end as the Blue Comet closed its doors for the last time today.  It will be missed.

The Tale Of The Comet

Blue Comet
Route 309 - Hazleton, PA
A restaurant that my family and I used to have dinner at every weekend in the late 80's after my grandmother and great-grandmother got out of church, and the place that my friends and I would hang out when I was a teenager in the late 90's, is closing this Sunday.

Standard Speaker - Hazleton, PA  (March 28, 2011)

Even though I live pretty close to the place, I work and go to school in Wilkes-Barre so I haven't had a lot of opportunity to stop by the Blue Comet for lunch or dinner recently.  The last time I was here was a couple of years ago when my girlfriend and I stopped for a later dinner on the way home from a Phillies game.  Hopefully someone will buy and reopen it soon, but for the time being, it's the end of an era in Hazleton.

The Blue Comet Diner

Blue Comet Diner
Route 309 - Hazleton, PA

We stopped at Blue Comet for something to eat when we got back to Hazleton after the ballgame and fireworks on the 4th.  This is a place I used to go all the time in the 80's and 90's.  Grandma, Grandpa, Nana and I used to stop here after Grandma and Nana got out of church on Saturday when I was little.

Back in the 80's, you could get pretty much any dinner off of the menu for $5 or less including scallops, which was one of my favorites.  My grandfather usually ordered liver and onions.  One of the random memories always think of when I come here is my Nana rooting through her purse to find her bottle of saccharin tablets to use in her coffee.  She didn't like Sweet N' Low or Equal, which is what every restaurant had back then, so she carried her own supply with her.  They also had a great selection of cakes and pies for dessert.  To this day, I haven't found a coconut cream pie that's as good as the one I used to have here when I was a kid.

Before they remodeled, when you went in the front door, you were in a small lobby area that had a pay phone, a coat rack (I think), a Ms. Pac Man machine, and three video poker machines.  My grandfather always gave me a quarter or two to play Ms. Pac Man after dinner while he and my grandmother played the poker machines.  They were labeled "for entertainment only", but like pretty much every other video poker machine in town, they "paid off", so if my grandparents got to a certain score, they'd go get the cashier who would come out to verify, then give them money right out of the register.  That was Hazleton in the last days of Mob City.  I never thought it was unusual until I got older and left the area and realized that most places don't have mini casinos in their local restaurants.

These days, the Blue Comet is barely recognizable from the 80's.  It's gone through many different owners; one of whom had an addition built onto the building.  The outside and inside have been remodeled several times, so at this point, the only part of the restaurant that even looks vaguely similar is the neon sign out front.

The most recent change is that every booth now has a MegaTouch machine.  It's fun, and I understand that time marches on, but I really miss the way this place used to feel back in the days when they still had ash trays on every table.