Spaceport | Bangor Mall

Bangor Daily News

You're living on Bangor's east side and it's 1978. Ten years past the closure of Dow AFB, one of the town's farms had been transformed into a modern mall. Star Wars had just shown everyone that you could do action movies in space and reap in cash hand over fist. Texas Instruments had just released the first microchip, and the first Bulletin Board System was allowing people from all over the globe to dial in to argue about Star Trek and write creepy Redwall fan fiction from basements of pastel split level ranches everywhere.

While in a time of relative tumult, technology was making the world a lot smaller. The consumer computer revolution was just beginning, and computing power six times faster than what was used to track supersonic aircraft and control nuclear countermeasures only sixteen years prior had been dedicated to play Pac-Man.

Video games had gone from being a fledgling industry in 1971  to a loud and colorful "public health threat" by the late 1970s that would surely still make Brewer's city council blush even today. A hubbub grew surrounding these magic boxes into which kids could deposit coins and become transfixed. Even the Bangor Daily News had run a series of  essays from children running from themes like "Pac Man eats the brain" to "video games are no worse than sports." 

There's not a whole lot available on the Internet regarding Spaceport other than the ad above and various news stories related to various incidents, achievements and accidents there. Fortunately for us, Space Port appears to have been a chain which means that it's more or less guaranteed that a lot of what had gone on inside had been standardized to some degree.

In addition to the training video above, there exist several stories collected in the Bangor Daily News over the years that help paint an affectionate picture of a chain that provided a couple generations of us with memories in exchange for quarters. 

• An ad run on October 4th, 1978 gives us an image of the inside of a futuristic wonderland full of top of the line machines that would deliver us to places elsewhere. It touted Space Wars and Middle Earth.
• February 17th, 1983 saw a collection of children's essays about whether or not video games were a social problem on par with rock music and...rock music.
• A touching story from ten years later tells us of a gentleman with muscular dystrophy who received a pioneering piece of adaptive technology; a custom remote control unit that allowed him to play video games. The piece indicates it was one of the first devices of its kind in the country. 
• In 2005 Emily Burnham wrote about Dance Dance Revolution.
• In 2007, it caught fire.

Nowadays it's a head shop. If you want to play arcade games you've got to go to a sports bar so you can get your daily dose of other people's jukebox preferences while you do it. Personally, I preferred the cacophony of tens of arcade machines as they wildly vied for our collective attention.