I loved the arcades (they’re gone now – replaced by souless grabbing machines and regiments of racing games) and decided to tell The Escapist all about the seedy, back alley shit hole coin-op dens of English town centres. It’s followed by a couple of lesser known arcade game reviews of some personal faves.
NOTE: I just checked on The Escapist, and the second page of the article seems to be bust, so I’ve included the full thing below. You should still visit The Escapist though – it rules.
BACK ‘O THE ARCADE
Traditionally, in England, an arcade was the kind of place where delinquents could get out of their council flats for a few hours a day (well, 16 to 20 hours) without leaving their beloved TV drug too far behind.
There were two types of arcade, with a third being a hybrid of the two distinct flavours. The first of these were large, well funded, noisy, neon soaked temples to the Japanese God of Joysticks and Buttons, with all the latest titles in tight regiment and brand spanking new uniforms (or cabinets, anyway). These magnificent establishments generated their light and thunder at the epitome of the British working class holiday locations; sea front resorts, such as Blackpool and Scarborough. Families were welcomed, the staff in the change booths were only mildly belligerent and a five pound note would buy you a ten minute digital fix.
Regrettably, the average English joystick junkie only saw these sea front retreats once or twice a year; nowhere near enough for a dedicated, addicted player. The mid-week alternative to Blackpool’s Central Pier was the seedy, dank, back alley shit hole of a crime den that could be found in any town centre in England that boasted an unemployment figure in excess of 75,000 (which, since the late 70s, is a good 85% of the country). Here you could find last years machines; beaten and abused, retired from the glory of the Golden Mile to live out their lives in a smoke filled lair of iniquity.
When school kids bunked off for the afternoon, this is where they would go. And quite right, too, because despite the sticky floors and weeping walls, England’s back alley arcades were a thing of horrid beauty. Here you could find the games that were made by the smaller, less successful publishers – who were nothing but a lonely arrow head frog in Nintendo’s vast coin-operated jungle – but they made games that were meant to be played.
These were also the machines that Uncle Ronnie in the downtown Yorkshire ghettos could afford to buy, and we could afford to play; the lowly, devoted, arcade creepers. We had very little money, but what we had, we shared with the iniquitous operator.
Every so often, a new machine would be brought to this digital knacker’s yard and placed in the doorway to entice young urchins and their 10p pieces. At the back of the room, however, would be the old faithful campaigners – that constantly and reliably took money, so were never replaced – where only local yokels and the bravest of the stupid would venture. Their cabinets were crumbling, the coin return buttons didn’t work and the joysticks were, quite literally, sticky, but these were the machines we visited more often than our own grandparents, spending not only pocket money with them, but heart felt, quality time.
There was no competition in the home market that could compare to a dedicated arcade game. What did we have at home? Most of us who would frequent Alassio’s Café and Arcade (the most dangerous, sordid hole in a brick wall before it ‘burnt down’) at best worked on a kind of hand-me-down system. When the Spectrum was released, we could afford the Atari 2600; when the Amiga was released, we could afford the Spectrum. But it was only in recent years that an ‘arcade perfect’ home edition of Double Dragon appeared, so what else could we do? We had to go to these places.
There were kids in these arcade whose socks were a substantial part of their shoe leather and had their hair cut by their sister with a knife and fork, but give them the price of a single credit and they became rich men and kings alike; revered among their people for their prowess at making that single coin last longer than their lengthy walk home in the rain.
When I see a video game show on the TV, populated by affluent, sharply dressed twenty something’s talking their insipid talk while walking a 30 second walk on some photo realistic 3D football simulator, I remember those down and out ten year olds stood on a milk crate to see the screen as they thwarted the final boss on R-Type with cramping knuckles and aching fingers. These were real video gamers, who played because of a need to take their minds out of a bleak reality, where the hostile space of the Bado Empire or the back streets of Metro City was more of a home than their own bedroom. And harsh as these arcades were, it was a place where they could go to be with their own kind, be it Shinobi or little Tim Green from Collier Street, banding together for the single most important reason that arcades existed across the world (the same reason that has been forgotten by today’s video game industry) – to have fun.
Sadly, as the scene changed there was no longer any place for these video game graveyards and they are now a long lost, but not forgotten, piece of a single generation’s childhood. A dim and murky light was extinguished, exchanged for a faint flicker of hope when the internet appeared, though it will never replace our beloved raster lit muck hole that was the back of the arcade.