Fun with Air Hockey Tables

The air hockey table is a classic—returning those of us who were teenagers in the seventies. How much time we would spend in the arcade! We’d check out the pinball machine to check the high score and who held it, and then make our way to the air hockey table to get our daily stress-reducing therapy.

The air hockey table was one of the first novelties in my home town along with the pinball machine When did you discover the air hockey table? When you left home, or went on vacation, or even after you had kids of your own? Was your first air hockey table experience one that involved a low-hanging light that got dinged every once in awhile when one player got especially rambunctious with the paddle and sent the typically close-hovering puck flying midair?

Was the air hockey table top surface blue or white, and did the sound of the hydraulic sheet of air get louder the closer you leaned in for the kill? Did you ever jam your playing hand—between the puck and air hockey table goal box—or get your knuckles rapped by an incoming hard plastic disk…and keep playing anyway? When it was time to switch sides of the air hockey table, did the find your game favored one particular side: did you think that one side of the table was more favorable (as you were sure it slanted in your opponent’s favor on the other side)? When you and your buddy got bored with the game, did you sneak out a second puck and go spastic playing an extreme version of the air hockey table game?

One web master has crafted (or lifted) the slogan that air hockey is “not a game—it’s the world’s fastest table sport.” An air hockey enthusiast, among the thousands, speaks to the upgrades done on the air hockey table over the years, including discussing some new “photon” table Dynamo sends for the nationals. Another writes in a forum to denounce the discrimination of titles such as “best woman air hockey player” and to determine who is—regardless of gender, race, et. al.—the best air hockey player in the WORLD.

Wow, the air hockey table has come a long way from my days, when it was often occupied but certainly not for any championships more involved than the best player in the arcade, where, at the most, on any given night ten or twelve kids gathered to hip-slam pinball and slide-slam air hockey pucks.