RonPaulFanInGA
05-01-2014, 11:53 AM
http://www.patriotledger.com/article/20140429/NEWS/140426585
Get your quarters ready, kids, because Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Tron could soon be coming back to town.
Residents at town meeting voted to overturn a 1982 bylaw banning coin-operated video and arcade games from Marshfield, Massachusetts businesses. The vote was 203-175. The measure required a majority vote.
Believing that coin-operated video games robbed children’s piggy banks and brought an undesirable element to town, residents passed the ban in 1982. The prohibition split residents and threw Marshfield into the national spotlight as the law made its way through the state’s legal system.
The debate ended in 1983, when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from the business owners who were forced to pull the plug on Pac-Man.
Voters upheld the ban in 1994 and again in 2011, when an appeal was placed by petition on the town meeting agenda by lifelong resident George Mallett.
Opposed to the proposal, resident Sue Walker said she likes to go out to dinner with her children so she can sit down and eat with them without the distraction of video games.
“There is gaming all over the place, and there’s nothing fun about it,” she said, adding that children running around restaurants is disturbing.
Get your quarters ready, kids, because Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Tron could soon be coming back to town.
Residents at town meeting voted to overturn a 1982 bylaw banning coin-operated video and arcade games from Marshfield, Massachusetts businesses. The vote was 203-175. The measure required a majority vote.
Believing that coin-operated video games robbed children’s piggy banks and brought an undesirable element to town, residents passed the ban in 1982. The prohibition split residents and threw Marshfield into the national spotlight as the law made its way through the state’s legal system.
The debate ended in 1983, when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from the business owners who were forced to pull the plug on Pac-Man.
Voters upheld the ban in 1994 and again in 2011, when an appeal was placed by petition on the town meeting agenda by lifelong resident George Mallett.
Opposed to the proposal, resident Sue Walker said she likes to go out to dinner with her children so she can sit down and eat with them without the distraction of video games.
“There is gaming all over the place, and there’s nothing fun about it,” she said, adding that children running around restaurants is disturbing.