The Last Arcades

‘[A]nd now they must roam about in search of game[s]’

Homer (The Odyssey, Book 12)

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Odysseus, and I am an arcade-o-holic.

Yes, there it is. I confess! I am hopelessly addicted to video arcade games, and have been for 45 years. Don’t worry, ‘though, I’m fine with it. In fact, it’s something I’ve come to embrace and cherish. It’s part of who I am. But when, and how did my predilection for the fizzy pixel begin?

My first encounter with an arcade cabinet was way back in the summer of 1976 on a family holiday to Great Yarmouth. There were six of us, staying in a chalet, a short walk from the sea – my younger brother, our mum and dad, our granny and grampa, and me. Our journey to get there had spanned two days and a night, with four adults, two kids and all their luggage crammed into a pretty average family car and its roofrack. At any given time, there were four peope on the back-seat in various configurations. No seatbelts, of course, or anything approaching peace and quite for the driver. But that’s another story.

The weather that summer was glorious – warm and dry with clear blue skies – and set the benchmark for years to come. The Scotland we had left behind was prone to being dreich (look it up), dull, and – let’s face it – rainy. This seemed like a different universe! We spent many sunny days on the beach, digging holes, building sandcastles and splashing about in the water. Everything was new. Everything was fun. Even the sweaty cheese sandwiches that were brought out for lunchtime picnics tasted great. Bizzarely, even as I sit here nomming my extra-mature-cheddar-on-sourdough-olive-bread, the thought of those wilting white-bread sandtraps brings back happy memories.

The holiday raced away, like holidays do. Then, one day, to give my parents a break, my grandparents took my brother and me to an arcade. There were all sorts of machines there to enjoy. At the entrance to the building were the penny pushers, and one-armed bandits. My granny showed me how to play those. Then there were machines with guns where you could shoot beams of light at circular targets, or little steel plates in the form of assorted wildlife. (Symbolic) animal-cruelty issues aside, the guns themselves were made from steel and wood, and a bit too heavy to be successfully wielded by a very small child. There were also machines with steering wheels, which let you move a rolling track round a static car, giving the illusion of driving. I now know these were electro-mechanical contraptions, some of which had been around since the 1960s. There’s no doubt that the sights and sounds of the arcade were exciting. But up to that point, they were already familiar from ‘The Shows’ – the traveling fair – that came to our town in the spring.

Lurking in the middle of the room, however, was something else, something new. Something large, looming, glowing and grumbling. Something which turned out to be a video game! The first I’d ever seen, and the experience was, well, religious. While my memories of that day are fuzzy, time spent trawling through the Romsets on MAME suggests it was the submarine ‘simulator’, Sea Wolf. My grampa asked me if I wanted a go, and the answer, ‘yes’, had left my lips, even before I’d had time to think it through. Frustratingly, for my four-year old self, I could hardly reach the periscope, let alone see through it. It seemed impossibly high – a distraction for giants and other supernatural creatures, not wee boys like me. But that only made me more determined to try it out. And with my grampa’s help, who held me up for the ninety seconds or so the game lasted, I set my first foot on the fosfor trail. When he put me down again, my eyes had been opened, like saucers!

Sea Wolf (Midway, 1976)

Funspot, NH (Feb 2023)

There wasn’t much scope to explore this new calling in the first few years that followed. I was only just starting school, with little say in where I went or what I did, beyond mucking about in friends gardens or tearing through the neighbourood on pedal bikes. With no arcade machines nearby to fan the flames, those pixels could easily have fizzled out. But I was lucky enough to enjoy regular family holiday in the 70s and 80s. Looking back, they were the highlight of my year. Growing up in central Scotland, they involved long journeys to the seaside resorts of southern England, to a series of guesthouses, chalets and latterly with our caravan in tow.

Of course, the coastal towns of Cornwall, Devon and Dorset were packed full of attractions. The mainstay was the beach, with its infinite scope for civil-engineering projects. But there was also swimming, exploring rock-pools, playing tennis and frisby, and flying kites. On the edge of the beach were the promenades, with their ice-cream stalls and play-parks. Beyond that were the bustling touristy towns, filled with all kinds of magical outlets, catering to the holiday-maker’s every need, particularly if those needs centred around sweeties, comics and toys. There were even regular shops that stayed open well after our home town had packed up and gone to sleep.

In the space in between, the liminal zone between the beach and streets, were the amusement arcades.

My brother and I came to develop a sixth sense for these, anticipating where they might be, even before we’d seen them. Perhaps, in those days of analogue sound, our spongy young minds were capturing bleeps and bloops our ears couldn’t hear? Naturally, we also fell into the habit of pestering our parents to visit them on the way back from the beach, or on our return into town in the evening to see the sights, and maybe enjoy some chips. More often than not, they indulged us.

At the front of the bigger arcades, the machines would be spilling out onto the prom to entice the customers in – calling out to them with their futuristic siren-song. Once inside, the excitement was palpable, as was the cigarette smoke – something we tend to forget. And the sound wasn’t just emotive and immersive, it bordered on deafening. For many years, I’d emerge from those murky salloons with ears ringing, and hearing taking several minutes to return to normal. It was fantastic! Something I looked forward to enormously – something I enjoyed. But I suspect the impression it made on me was only as strong as it was because it was so fleeting. In my mind, I spent aeons of time in those places. In reality, it was never more than an hour or two, even as a teenager. I never really had my fill. And that kept me hungry for more.

As the years went by, the arcades spread. Like the interconnected-growth of some kind of fungal network, the machines moved out into all kinds of new locations and venues, including motorway service stations. By the early 1980s, they had become a major feature of our holiday journeys too. My parents would drive us hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles down the motorways of England and France in their pursuit of the summer sun and memorable holidays for us kids. This took a long time, with all the usual shenanigans you would expect with (by now) three over-heated children draped across the back seat for hours and hours on end. To beat the traffic and steal a head start on the holidays, we’d set off on a Friday after tea, and drive through the night. Now and again we’d stop to water the daisies, or to let my parents grab an hour’s sleep. And when we did, the arcade machines beckoned. Sites managed by Trusthouse Forte and Blue Boar were the best, but obviously not the only ones to feature arcades. And if there was gamage to be had, we would find it.

Like many kids of the 80s, I veered away from the arcades in the 90s, as other distractions and responsibilities came to the fore. While I didn’t really give it much thought at the time, I seem to remember feeling that the arcades would always be there, and that I could always come back to them again if I felt like it. That had been the story of my life for almost as long as I could remember, and it never crossed my mind that the situation could change. A bit like quite a few other things! But it was during those years that the video arcade as a phenomenon declined and disappeared, first from the service stations on the M6 and M1, and then from the seaside resorts themselves. The Universe wobbled. Life went on.

Southwaite Services, Cumbria, August 2023

Ultimately, the arcades had only really been a relatively small part of what, for me, had been a busy life. But smothered away somewhere deep-down in my synapses, my arcade radar has continued to tick over. It wasn’t something I was consciously aware of, or even something I was able to atriculate at first. It’s just that every time I stopped off on the road, or walked through a seaside town, I would feel a slight pang… of something. Then I worked it out. Part of my peripheral vision was wired to look out for a reassuring glance of my favoured childhood haunts. Not seeing them any more seemed odd, then sad. I suppose that – in a way – what I was experiencing was a sense of mourning for good times passed.

In more recent years, when the stability of encroaching middle age has given me the space to reminisce, and the means to explore those interests again, I resolved to seek out and capture the final drops of enjoyment from the last of the arcades, before they – or I – disappear forever. To do that, I have embarked on a journey back to my own spiritual Ithaca, the Golden Age of video arcade games.

In this part of the blog, I aim to document a selection of the adventures I’ve had on the way. Some of my earlier ‘retro gaming’ experiences seem pretty retro themselves now. So, here’s hoping I can get them down before I forget! I’ll begin, I think, with the most recent…

…to be continued in: An Arcade Ecosystem.