🕹️ The 50-Paisa Trick: Token Slips and Arcade Days in Peshawar

Video games weren’t an entirely new concept for me, but for Peshawar, they certainly were. Up until then, I had only ever played them when visiting my mamus/maternal grandparents in Lahore. When the flashing screens and synth sounds finally appeared in Peshawar, I was absolutely ecstatic.

The machines required a specific game token that cost one rupee. For us as students, a rupee per game was a significant amount of money. However, it didn’t take us very long to figure out a brilliant loophole: the arcade cabinets would accept a standard 50-paisa coin—the one featuring Quaid-e-Azam’s picture—instead of the official token. This cut our costs exactly in half, meaning we could suddenly play twice as many games.

I became obsessed with collecting those specific 50-paisa coins. There were two shops located right underneath our apartment building. I used to visit a shopkeeper named Khawaja Jee and ask him to trade my one-rupee paper bills for “Quaid-e-Azam coins,” as we called them.

With our pockets literally weighing us down with loose change, Mehboob and I would head out. We commuted to school together, and on our way back home, we would have the rickshaw driver pull over by a shop on Mall Road—right in the same strip mall where the old Chinese restaurant used to be. We would buy just a couple of official tokens to keep up appearances, and then spend the rest of the afternoon burning through our 50-paisa coins. Some of the games I loved during that arcade era included classics like Donkey Kong and Galaxian, alongside defining fighting games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat that I would play as the years rolled on.