The 90s was a good time to be a kid. Video games were catching on more and more as a household necessity, Saturday-morning cartoons were awesome, and we were just on the cusp of Japanese animation becoming a highly sought-after commodity. Pokemon was still a new concept to most, toy franchises were spiralling out in bizarre and wonderful directions, and video arcades were still a wonderful thing you could do to kill an afternoon.

Now, I want to tell you a bit about one such place. It was called Cosmic Adventures, and it was smack in the middle of Bayer's Lake, a business park near Bedford. See, up in Canada we don't have Chuck E. Cheese's, least of all in the nowhere-cum-metropolis that is Halifax. So places like this were a rare treat. It was basically the same idea as C.E.C, a junk food restaurant supplemented with an arcade and a big ol' playground. But that wasn't why you went to Cosmic Adventures. No sir, Cosmic Adventures had something better. Something they kept in a big room off to the side, something every kid lusted after, granted only on the most celebratory of occasions. And when those doors opened and the kids ran inside, what was waiting for us was unlike anything else, a sci-fi battlefield of our own invention, a skirmish in a great interstellar war, the kind of game we'd all play in our backyards suddenly made real, brought to vivid and tangible life by blacklight and plastic.

Cosmic Adventures, you see, had laser tag.

Now, I was a bit of an awkward kid, so I didn't get invited to a lot of parties. I think in the end, I wound up playing laser tag there only a handful of times. Cosmic Adventures closed up a while back, since the rising tide of ever more entertaining video games drove the value of both its laser tag and its arcade down. Once they dropped shop, other, smaller establishments took the hint and closed their doors as well.

I didn't grieve too much when this happened, I was at that age where you're old enough to think you're an adult and done with childish things like laser tag (and, y'know, fun, n' shit). Of course, now that I'm actually an adult, I yearn for anything that can give me back that sense of childlike wonder and unashamed glee (thanks, SF0!)

Flash to a few months ago. My older brother and his girlfriend were over to enjoy a meal. They live on their own, so sometimes they swing over to our place to have a bite to eat and visit and whatnot. I'm usually the one who winds up driving them home, but it's no big deal because I like them both and they're lots of fun. Good people.

It was nighttime on a Saturday. I was pecking away at the keys on my laptop, working on a novel and not really getting anywhere. It was a warm night, not muggy, and with a nice breeze that danced through my window, tripped, and collided with my forehead. The book wasn't going as planned, and I was sitting on the wrong side of a big writer's block. With a sigh and a gentle rub of my forehead, I leaned back in my seat and idly twirled a pen through my fingers. It was about then that I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, and I recognized the gait as being my brother's girlfriend's. Good, thought I, a drive will give me the chance to collect my thoughts.

Sure enough, she opened the door and excitedly thrust her head in.
"Hey Bruce!", she said breathlessly, "You want to come play laser tag with us?"
"YES!", I blurted, without even thinking.

It turns out that way out in Burnside, another local business park, there's a laser tag joint called Alpha Strike. I have no idea when it showed up, but there it was- a shining testament to those forgotten Halcyon days of the 90s. I still remember the first time I stepped across the threshold. To my right was a modest selection of arcade games. To the left, big, industrial-sized rooms for children's parties. And straight ahead was the cashier, standing next to- of all things- a slushie machine.

It was as though someone had done their best to recreate a little slice of my childhood. While they hadn't made it perfect, they had done pretty well, and I felt like a kid again as I stepped through the doors. In all honesty, I was expecting the experience to be enjoyable, but not especially memorable- a kind of fun, nostalgic trip, a good way to kill a few hours.

But no, it turns out that holy shit, you guys, laser tag is still as awesome as it was in the 90s.

I honestly had some of the most genuine fun I've had in months playing laser tag. The place was nearly empty, so we got the run of the institution for the entire 3 rounds we played. We immediately resolved to do it again, with more people.

We each decided to bring three friends- this would bring a total of 12 people to the show. In the end, the 3 people I invited couldn't, or didn't, come- meaning that apart from my brother, his girlfriend, and the handful of their friends that I knew, the entire place would have plenty of strangers in it.



The final count was 8- the five I knew were myself, my brother, his girlfriend, and two of his friends from a sketch group he used to run. The remaining three were all friends of my brother, none of whom I knew with any degree of familiarity.



We waited for a while to go in, since we had to make two trips to get everyone. We ate some ice cream, chatted, played some of the arcade games, and bought our passes. The entire place was full of people I didn't know, and it was inevitable that we would be paired off with them.



Once the entire group was assembled, I turned to them and said loud enough that everyone in the admittedly small room could hear, "I formally challenge all of you suckers to laser tag!"

So, there it was, my challenge was issued- and by their refusal to leave once I made it, everyone in the room had implicitly accepted. The rest of them bought their passes, we headed into the suit-up room, and the little hand said it was time to rock and roll.

Now, a technical note, laser tag is predominantly a game of speed. In a field as small as this, waiting to pop your shot isn't really worth it, and it more or less comes down to fast-twitch reflexes in terms of getting your gun raised and squeezing the trigger. You also have to run the hell away if you're outmatched. Ultimately, the person who's fastest on their feet and quickest on the draw comes out on top.



For all three games, I pulled the vest with the name "AZTEC" sewn onto it. So look for that name on the charts!

The first game was... strange. It was myself and friends, coupled with a bunch of strangers, spread more or less evenly across the teams. But on the team opposite me was... I'm not sure the term "man" even applies. Oh, I don't mean he wasn't biologically male, but...

... Hm.

I have heard the word "relentless" spoken. I've read it in books. I've heard it sung by hundreds of voices. I have seen things that I've called "relentless". I've written it myself, many times.

I have never seen the word "relentless" so embodied in anything more than in the player going under the inauspicious moniker of "Mr. Gerber".

Now, understand, this is not a compliment. Mr. Gerber is a colossal dick. He's very good at laser tag, but he also happens to be a massive asshole about it.

Let me explain the rules of the game, here- each player has a gun and a vest with four sensors. When the sensors are hit, your shields deplete. When your shields reach zero, your gun deactivates until your shields recharge- usually about 8 to 10 seconds.

Now, here's how Mr. Gerber was programmed: when he saw you, he would immediately raise his gun to chest level, thus blocking the sensor on the front of his vest. He would then turn sideways, thereby reducing his profile and blocking his shoulder sensor. This meant the only shot you had was at the tiny shoulder sensor facing you. But not for long, because he would then raise the shoulder facing you, thereby giving you an impossibly small target.

When his battle mode was activated, he would charge at you, sidestepping while firing, spraying fire. This more or less always resulted in you going down.

Now, if that were the length and breadth of it, that'd be pretty bad. Taking cover and reducing your profile is one thing, but covering them up entirely is another beast altogether. But in the big scheme of things, that's bearable. You can't fault a guy for not wanting to get hit. But this wasn't his cardinal offense. No, if Mr. Gerber saw you wandering around with your vest deactivated, he would fall in step behind you and wait until you reactivated, sending another hail of fire right into your back.

There's bad sportsmanship, and then there's being an asshole. This was about when most of us realized that Gerber didn't have any actual skill. He was a cheating loser who claimed every victory dishonestly.

But he never gloated, and that was the strange part. I wholly expected him to lord his pro strats over us, but he went through the entire game with a dead-eyed intensity that was honestly a little worrying. The strangest thing happened when I finally realized he was following me while down for the fourth or fifth time. I whirled around, inches from his face.

"I'm down, you fuck!", I cried, frustrated by his dishonorable conduct. "I'm out! Stop following me!"

As far as pleas for sanity go, it wasn't much. But a strange thing happened. Gerber stopped, and, without a change in expression, turned on his heel and marched off in the exact opposite direction. I tried to think of where I'd seen that kind of motion before. For a while, I couldn't place my finger on it, but I ignored it and kept playing.

When all was said and done, I had 1064 points, the highest on my team.

Gerber had over 3000, which was well over half the points scored by his entire team.

We headed back to the waiting lounge, making no secret of our disdain for the man. He merely stalked by wordlessly, then walked through the door, out into the parking lot, and off into the sunset.

I realized then where I'd seen that kind of walk. Before we'd started playing, I'd headed off to the arcade for a few games. There was a Terminator Salvation lightgun game that I ran a few rounds on. That was where I'd seen Gerber's insouciant, emotionless stride. That was where I'd seen that dead-eyed intensity, the single-mindedness, the unwillingness to stop.



What an asshole.



The first game concluded with me coming first in my team, thereby exerting my dominance over them. I think I came second or third overall (that photo is a bit indistinct). All in all, I came out pretty well.

The second game turned out to be much better- with Gerber gone and everyone on more or less even footing, we wound up in a very large team match. The sizes of the teams, in comparison to the map, made the kind of aimless, disorganized wandering that characterized most other games impractical. Instead, a fairly defined line of engagement formed clean down the middle of the map, with each team holed up on one side, exchanging suppressing fire and occasionally trying to get teams of two or three infiltrated up into the opponent's back lines. We held our side admirably, driving off assaults on both fronts and keeping the others pinned down on their side. Of particular distinction was one of my brother's friends, someone I'd been told I should meet. He found himself a hole in one of the walls and began deploying suppressing fire all across the wide-open field of fire through which enemy players tried to advance. After I slid into cover beside him and saved his bacon from a couple of players trying to flank, we found ourselves covering the major entrances for enemy players. Together, we began racking and stacking the entire red team. He ended up dominating, and my role became one primarily of support.

As the game neared its end, the reds made a hail-mary play and charged the small gate through which we'd previously bottlenecked them. Their Zerg rush strategy overwhelmed us, and although we ended up winning the game, we finished broken, disorganized, and with our defensive line thoroughly shattered.



I came out with 1034, almost the same as my previous game. This time, however, I was squarely in the middle of the team- I'd made a significant contribution, but others had proved quicker on the trigger than I was.



The third game was nothing spectacular. We were all getting a little tired, and the teams were too small to facilitate the kind of tactical thinking that the second game had. It was a fun diversion, but we were pretty thoroughly exhausted.



I ended up pulling my lowest score yet, a measly 431 points. This still put me in the middle ranks of my team, but we were fairly badly routed by the others.

We were exhausted, so we headed back to my place to chill out and cool off (laser tag is good cardio). I maybe hadn't proven my superiority over the mass of strangers I'd matched wits with, but I'd shown that I could at least hold my own, contribute to the team, and conduct myself with dignity in failure. I wasn't the fastest on the draw, or the quickest on my feet, but I could hold the line when the chips were down. Sometimes, that's the kind of guy you want on the team.