Recap…
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I led an exciting double life: lanky teenager by day, arcade commando by Thursday afternoon and Saturday morning! Those were exciting times.
Like the times themselves the venues and the towns where I honed my arts were constantly changing.
In Part 1 of this series, we explored how an early arcade scene evolved in the sleepy Scottish town of Kilsyth. If you were to rely on the witness of the now defunct local newspaper, The Kilsyth Chronicle, you’d imagine that not much had happened there at all – apart from the mass evasion of television licenses. But I was there, and I know. Those of us young enough to embrace the joy of that brave new world were surfing the crest of the video-games revolution!!!
In Part 2, we followed my journey eastward, using archive photos from back-in-the-day to revisit the neighbouring towns of Falkirk and Stirling and the sites of their Golden-Age arcades. The arcades may be long gone, but the buildings are still there, oozing memories and melancholy.
Fair warning for this final part of the series! You’d better grab the handrail and hold on tight. ‘Coz in a moment, I’ll be pulling a reckless handrake turn and screeching off to the west. The ‘wild West’. Armed with no more than some ancient phone-books, a selection of old photos from the internet and my own trusty digital camera, we’ll revisit the arcade scene – as I knew it – in Scotland’s largest city, Glasgow.
But first, some context…
Glasgow / Glesga (pron. Glez-ga)
When I was growing up, Glasgow was the looming metropolis. From our house on the hill, you could see its tower blocks gleaming on the horizon, like a distant island on the other side of a sea of fields. In reality it wasn’t that far away – only about 12 miles. But the feeling among the grown-ups was that it was just too big, too busy and too expensive to bother with outside special occassions.
Sometimes that meant a trip to the pictures – a rare treat.
Sadly, the old cinemas were repurposed many years ago, with the city centre now served by a giant, vertical kinemathek. I’ve yet to go there. Nossir, it was the Irish Cinema on Renfield Street where I was taken to see heavy-hitters like Star Wars (woot!), Ghostbusters (yay!), The Philedelphia Experiment (err…) and Disney’s Snow White (aw). The other big one was the ABC at the top of Sauchiehall Street, where I saw Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khaaaaaaaan, as well as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and a bunch of others.
I loved the movies, but they weren’t something you could just rock on up to and enjoy. Oh no. The powers that be made you wait. I’ll never forget the tedium of the endless, and pointless, queues for blockbuster movies (yes, that’s how we spell it kids, not ‘cues’ and never ‘lines’). In the Age before online booking-systems, the queues were kindof inevitable. But they were also at least partly engineered for the hype – although it could be argued with some justification that this approach backfired. And then there was the smoking. As my attention span broke, and my tiny mind started to wander, I’d look upwards and stare at the rays of lights that danced and flickered through the rising smoke to the silver screen. Then cough.
More often than not, our trips to Glasgow were triggered by the need for particular household goods or fancy clothes. That usually meant trailing round one department store or another. Of course, whenever possible, us kids would do the best we could to sit by the door and wait – usually with the goal of working up enough ecourage to run the wrong way down an escalator. I’m sorry to report that this goal was seldom achieved. Folks in those days were generally less tolerant of mild-mannered japes, and the suspiscous glowering of passers-by usually kept us in check.
As we got bigger, the reigns were gradually loosened. By the mid-80s, I took every opportunity to dash off and browse the computer magazines in one of the two enormous John Menzies, or peruse the selection of video games in the two branches of Boots the Chemist – just like I’d been doing in the market towns of the East. From 1985, my searches were broadened to include 2000 AD comics, Citadel miniatures, and other role-playing kit. The problem with this was that Glasgow was a wonderland of retail opportunities. So, it wasn’t often that I felt I’d had enough time!
Yipp, if you wanted to peruse, inspect or buy something, some shop, somewhere in Glasgow had it. One of the big advantages of the city was the availability of multiple branches of multiple shops. What we tend to forget these days is that no one outlet carried the full range of stock. Sometimes there might have been exclusives to certain companies or certain branches. More likely, however, indiviudal items might be sold out. Being able to check for something across a range of shops drastically reduced the chances of disappointment.
Perhaps surprisingly for such a big city, that’s no longer the case. What was once a bustling centre of commerce, with umpteen shopping centres, department stores and marketplaces, has been reduced to swathe of pound-shops, vape stores, and mobile-phone-repair centres. To an extent, that’s symptomatic of the modern age everywhere. If the rise of the out-of-town retail park was the death knell for many cities and larger towns, the convenience of internet shopping has hammered the nails into their respective coffins.
Notable losses to Glasgow include BHS, C&A, The House of Frazer, and the Goldbergs department store on Candleriggs – now closed and demolished, but still famous in my mind as a landmark for finding the Dragon and George hobby shop across the street. Then there was John Lewis, later Debenhams, where a huge chunk of the top floor was once sequestered by the mighty Silica Computers. Remember them?
Silica was a relatively late addition to the home computer scene in Glasgow, and was still there when I left the area in 1995. It was here, after one particularly long summer of flipping burgers, that I went to buy a 2-meg RAM expansion board for my Amiga 1200, bringing the total memory up to an eye-watering 4096K!!!! Only a decade earlier, I’d been chuffed to bits (see what I did there?), to get a 32K RAM-pack for my 16K ZX Spectrum, rocketing the total up to the queasy heights of 48K! Sigh. It’s a shame it wobbled out the back 30 months later in a machine-bricking kamikaze manoeuver. Or maybe not. But that’s a story for another blogpost.
The shells of other once-familiar haunts are still there, but their spirits have well and truly departed. The buildings might still house shops that still sell ‘things’, but they’re just not the same. Gone is Boots on Union Street, HMV and Burger King on Sauchiehall Street, and Woolworths on Argyll Street.
In many places, the process of urban renewal and regeneration has stalled, leaving a growing number of prominent scars. For me, the saddest of these is probably Tower Records – a site that was once so buzzing, it allured best-selling artists like John Bon Jobbie to perform ‘impomptu’ sessions out its first floor windows. As you can see from the photos below, it’s now derelict.
The one saving grace is CEX, which squats in part of the old Virgin Mega Store building on Union Street. At least you can still try to look for proper games there. Back in the second half of the 1980s, the Megastore was a cornucopia of good stuff. Whether it was music, new or old, home-computer software, role-playing kit (skull-dice anyone?), graphic novels, or t-shirts, Virgin was packed to the gunwhales with just about everything you thought you wanted, and plenty of other stuff you hadn’t realised how much you needed! I got some excellent 2000 AD t-shirts there, now long-perished, and a double-sided Hysteria t-shirt, which has somehow survived to this very day – probably because I’m scared that squeazing into that holy relic will destroy it!
Branson hung around Glasgow longer than I did, with a bit of premisis shuffle seeing them move round the city centre. But none of the subsequent branches offered the same range of stuff, or the same sense of excitement as the Union Street Megastore.
As I’ve mentioned in a previous blogpost, one of the biggest losses from my childhood high-street is John Menzies – pronouncied ‘Ming-ease’ (!) – purveyor of newspapers, magazines, stationary, music and home-computer equipment. Old Mr M must have had his nose pretty close to the trend horizon – pulling the company out of the retail market completely in the 1990s, just as demand began to stall. Many of their outlets were taken over and rebranded by WHSmith – (not) pronounced ‘Whis-mth’.
As elsewhere, Menzies in Glasgow was my goto source for magazines, comics, books and software. When I say software, I have to admit that I very rarely bought any there. Unlike Boots, they almost never had any discounted tapes. But they did usually have a selection of home computers, set up on portable TVs, where you could sample their wares. That’s wares with an /s/ btw. We’ll come back to warez with a /z/ a bit later on. One particularly vivid memory is playing Jet Set Willy on the ZX Spectrum upstairs in the Sauchiehall Street branch and encountering the creepy ‘Chapel’ screen for the first time. It was also here that I nobly avoided buying a guidebook for Melbourne House’s classic adventure, The Hobbit. After a sneaky peek at its hints and tips, I decided to put it back on the shelf, go home and complete the game on my own without cheating (any more).
This branch was once one of the main anchors in the Sauchiehall Centre shopping mall. Like many other bigger businesses, the centre ran a catchy advert on STV in the 1980s. Other interesting outlets included a traditional Wimpy restaurant, where you could enjoy your miniature burger and chips on a proper china plate, and sip your undersized soft drink from a bona fide glass. But they’re all gone now, as is the Centre itself, with most of the floor space taken up by a TK Maxxxx.
As Menzies’ lights went out, those of WH Smith began to flare alarmingly. In Glasgow, the crossover period was accompanied by a weird example of retail-musical-chairs. By the late 1980s the flagship branches of Menzies and Whismth faced off against each other across Argyll Street. This was total market saturation. And something clearly had to give. From what I remember Smiths blinked first, cut their losses and ran. But this seems to have tempted Menzies to relocate across the road to Smith’s now vacant premesis – presumably to downsize and pay less rent – only for that same store to then get rebranded as WHSmith when Menzies itself shut up shop! Melon-twisting, no?
The Video Arcades
But what about the video arcades, I hear you ask?
Don’t worry, we’re coming to that bit #rn.
In the autumn of 1987, I was 15. As you can read here, I was already striking out to the East on the Midland-Bluebird bus services. Number 27 took you from Kilsyth to Falkirk, and Number 14 from Kilsyth to Stirling, or all the way to Dunfermline if you were styoopit enough to fall asleep on it (not me!) But here’s the thing – both buses also linked Kilsyth with Buchanan Street Bus Station in Glasgow!!!! Before this point, there had never been a lack of means of getting to Glasgow, the problem had been getting permission to go. My parents were understandably reluctant let me loose in the big smoke until they were confident I wouldn’t get lost, or murdered. But that hadn’t been such a huge frustration. It wasn’t really until about then that I was old enough and ugly enough to sidle over some of the seemingly arbitrary age hurdles that most arcades put on entry. In some of them it would be 12, others 14. But if the venue was mainly fruit machines it might be 16, or even 18.
Let’s have another look at that map:
As you can see from the numbered blobs, my teenage shopping experience in Glasgow ploughed an extended z-shaped furrow, with Sauchiehall Street (pron. ‘Sucky-hall’) at the top, and Argyle Street at the bottom. The main connecting route was down Buchanan Street (pron. ‘Buh-canan’, not ‘bew-canon’), which is and was considered the city’s main commercial thoroughfare. While Buchanan Street was lined with shops, including the tedious House of Fraser department Store, there wasn’t much there to hold my attention… until one day, on heading back up to the bus station, I passed the old George Hotel.
Enterprise (Mk 1) – 243 Buchanan Street
Until the early 1990s, the layout of the top end of Buchanan Street was very different to how it is now. There was no Royal Concert Hall, or Buchanan Galleries shopping centre to contend with.
Near the point where Buchanan Street crossed Sauchiehall Street was the old George Hotel, which stretched from 235-245 Buchanan Street. Originally opened in 1892, the George had been famous for its high quality rooms, fare and facilities – all of which were on offer for ‘moderate’ prices. I think it’s fair to say that in the late 1980s, its glory days were well behind it. To the left of the main entrance was a pub, The Dragon Bar, more or less where the giant ‘B’ is in the recent photo below. You can see it boarded up in some of the other images taken not long before its final demise.
Between these two doors was another entrance, which you can see in a couple of the images above. As I recall (maybe incorrectly!) this led down some stairs to a short corridor. Down to the left from here was a small snooker hall – a legacy, no doubt, of the hotel’s halycon era. Up a small flight of stairs to the right, was the Enterprise arcade. Without better photos, it would be hard to verify. But sadly we can’t go back and check. The George burnt down under mysterious circumstances in the late 1990s, with the ground floor of the facade then re-modelled out of existence.
The old Enterprise was a brilliant arcade. The main room always had the latest machines. It was here that I first saw R-Type, in June 1988. Even although it was brand new, I watched a guy play it who was clearly already an expert. He knew the ‘strategy’ for the end-of-level 2 baddie, where you hide in the bottom left-hand-side of the screen and shoot away, impervious to damage, until the level ends. Other interesting cabinets included Xenophobe, Super Punch Out, and the self-consciously over-the-top, 1950s-B-movies-inspired, Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters.
It was also here where I first played 1943, Shinobi, Golden Axe, Dragon Breed, Dragon Ninja, Combat School, Toobin‘ and so many others, I can’t remember them all.
At the back of the main room and to the left was a stair down to another level. Just as you came out of the stairwell, was a small alcove that always housed a couple of games. I played Mr Heli down there, the only time I saw it in the wild, as well as the 2-player rotary shooter, Time Soldiers. At one point, they also had an original Street Fighter cab, with the massive pressure-sensitive buttons for kick and punch. You had to whack them as hard as you could for maximum effect – meaning the machine was soon wrecked by over-enthusiastic teenagers and taken off the floor.
Through from this area was a small pool hall. From the back of that room, you could nip through to the the snooker room, and then back out the door. However, the smoke was so thick down there and the atmoshere so intimidating, I only went all the way round once or twice.
Enterprise (Mk 2)
Just how much longer this den of pixelated delights stayed in business has become a bit fuzzy in my memory. I think it was still there in the very early 1990s. But by then, I rarely got the chance to go. I was at university through the week and working at the weekend, with little scope to venture in to the city arcades. What I do remember is that with the completion of the Royal Concert Hall, the wheels of progress went into overdrive, and the top part of Buchanan Street was pretty much demolished and rebuilt. Among the victims was the old Enterprise arcade. But amazingly the business itself didn’t disappear. Instead, it relocated to a refurbished building about 50m down the hill. The new arcade was down a steep flight of stairs, accessed from the street by taking a sharp turn to the left. Although the venue was newer, and cleaner (!) it was notably smaller. It still had some up-to-date games. I seem to remember they had King of Dragons, and a bunch of vertical shooters. I’d go down there very occasionally to play Varth. Sadly, neither the selection of games nor the atmosphere matched up to the original venue, so I stopped going.
Having relocated myself in 1995, I can’t say for certain when the Enterpise Mk 2 finally disappeared. By 2013, however, this part of the street had been re-modelled yet again as part of the new ‘Buchanan Quarter’ shopping experience. All traces of the Enterprise Mk 2 were swept away.
Treasure Island (/Morris Amusements) – 20 Jamaica Street
For 30 or more years, the SW corner of Argyle Street and Jamaica Street has been home to a large McDonalds ‘hamburger restaurant’. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, McDonald’s neighbour to the west (on Argyle Street) was Tower Records. Its neighbour to the south, however, was the slightly less alluring Cannon Grand cinema.
While the venue and its name are enjoying something of a renaissance in local cultural circles, I find this reinvention of the past rather amusing. You see, back in the 1980s, the XXXs emblazoned across its advertising boards suggested it was almost exclusively used to screen soft-core porn movies! Hardly the pinnacle of refined entertainment! At the time, this was a wee bit inconvenient, because housed in the same building was a very promising-looking amusement arcade. Thanks to its seedy neighbour, and the potential embarrasment of getting spotted there, I don’t think I went in until 1990. It was the first place I saw Eugine Jarvis’ anti-drugs classic Narc. I must have spent a good hour on it with some friends, and at least a fiver on credits before the bus home beckoned.
Surpisingly, that arcade is still there today. While it’s been known for many years as Treasure Island, that wasn’t always the case. In the late 1990s, it seems to have been called Las Vegas. A decade earlier, the only legible part of the sign said ‘Amusements’ – which wasn’t uncommon, and what I seem to remember from the before times. I popped in for a quick look-see earlier this year (2023), and was surprised to see how much smaller it was than I remembered. Like most other arcades these days, the only ‘amusements’ on offer were the gambling machines.
(Argyle Street) Amusements
Beyond the old Tower Records building, Argyle Street continues under Central Station, through the tunnel known traditionally as ‘The Heilanman’s umbrella’. In years gone by, this is where poor migrants from the Highlands and Islands would congregate on their evenings off to shelter from the Glasgow rain, meet like-minded souls, and head off on their metropolitan adventures. By the 1980s, this part of the street had a bit of a grubby vibe. There was an amusement arcade on its north side for many years – I think where the green-fronted units were in the photograph above – but I never went in back-in-the-day. I can’t remember now if that’s because it looked too rough, if it was over-18s-only, or both.
Kent Street Arcade – 16 Stevenson Street
A similar story can be told about the Kent Street Arcade beside the (in-)famous Barras market. I discovered this by accident one day while visiting the Barras. My memory is that it was just way too busy to navigate. It was also rough enough that we didn’t fancy hanging around to claim our turn on the machines in case the other punters got bored waiting and decided to try their hands at a bit of live-action Street Fighter 2.
The Barras
We can’t talk about video-games in Glasgow in the 1980s and 1990s without mentioning The Barras. The Barras (Glaswegian for ‘barrows’) is famous for two things – the Barrowlands ballroom and concert hall, which has hosted and continues to host some pretty big bands. I’ve seen a few there myself, including Megadeth and Morrissey – but not Maiden, who’re obviously a bit too big. Then there’s the market beside it.
This ramshackle collection of indoor and outdoor stalls has occupied roughly the same place for a hundred years. And until about 20 years ago, nothing had been replaced or repaired. When I started going in the late 1980s, you could stand and watch the frantic theatrics at the butchers’ stalls, while enjoying the backing track of ‘three perr fir a pound’-sock-merchants and fag-sellers. Then you would disappear into one of the old ‘structures’, which put me in mind of Fagin’s lair in Carol Reed’s 1986 film adaptation of Oliver! In normal circumstances, that probably wouldn’t have been a very good idea. But that, my friends, is where you got your ‘warez’.
Yes, the Barras were a veritable hive of counterfeit activity. I remember hearing at the time that it was the biggest single source of copied computer software in Europe. But that revelation wasn’t exactly bad for business. At any one point there would be at least three stalls selling Amiga games. The tarrif seemed to start at £3 a disk and then gradually sink to £2 or sometimes less if you bought a load at once. Initially, stall-holders were super careful. The only things on display would be the lists, sometimes folders full of lists, of the available software – with runners used to fetch the warez when orders were placed. And once the transaction was complete, folks weren’t encouraged to hang about – not that you’d want to lest you be implicated in the event of a raid. But before long, things got pretty brazen. The stalls began sporting colour TVs and Amigas, which were set up to demonstrate the latest cracks, advise on the best games, and make copies on demand. Small crowds would gather to enjoy the show and spend their money. Those stall-holders must have made an absolute fortune.
Of course there were police raids on the Barras, when tonnes of gear was confiscated. And that must have stung. Imagine losing your telly and your Amiga? That’s a couple of grand down the pan when grossed up for inflation. But the rewards were such that business was usually back to normal within a week or two at most two.
My favourite stalls were in a building called the ‘Upstairs Market’. I’m pretty sure it was demolished about 20 years back, along with a fair few of the other ‘quainter’ structures. Probably just as well. It was only a matter of time before they collapsed or went up in a lethal inferno. Still, the atmosphere was electric. I doubt there’ll be anything like it again. Well, not until we move Beyond Thunderdome…
The Barras weren’t the only place in the city centre where you could get copied software. There was a smaller, and much more civilised indoor market down past Marks & Spencers on Argyle Street. I can’t remember what it was called now. If you can fill in the blanks, please let me know in the comments below.
Student Unions
In 1990, two things happened. I started working (a lot) in Glasgow ‘restaurants’ for the princely sum of £2.28 an hour! For the first year or two of that, it was common to get paid weekly on a Friday afternoon, with the cash – in the form of banknotes and small change – stuffed into a small brown-paper envelope. That was fine by me. It was fine for me. For some of the other kids I worked with, though, maybe not so much. A few would come in for their pay-packet, and then head straight back out to some non-video arcade, to sink the bulk of it into the ‘puggies’ as they called them – aka fruit machines. I imagine behaviours like this were one of the influencing factors behind the switch to direct payment into our bank accounts.
In October of that year, I also began my career as a student at Glasgow University – ostensibly to study, but also to enjoy the delights of the student unions. The first union I joined was Glasgow University Union, the old ‘Men’s Union’ – so-called because until 1979 (so, not that long beforehand) only male students were allowed to become members! Of course, it had a fantastic range of bars and other facilities, including a reasonably well-stocked arcade in the basement, in a large room beside the Beer Bar. There must have been about a dozen machines in there at any given time. The ones that stick out in my mind are a sit-down version of Hard Drivin’, which I’ve never seen since, Pang, and King of Dragons. But it was also here that I had my first encounter with the epic vertically scrolling shoot-em-up, Raiden. Now there’s a game. Solid graphics, fluid movement, convincing physics and reponsive controls. I loved it. I still do. While I didn’t realise it at the time, it gave off a bit of a retro vibe, being inspired, as it is, by Taito’s ground-breaking shooter Twin Cobra.
Way up in the attic was a proper snooker hall, with a bar and quite a few full-sized tables. You had to book though, and it tended to be busy, so I didn’t visit very often. On the first floor was a smaller pool hall and bar, which was a lot more accessible. It also housed a video game or two. But the only one that sticks out in my mind is Tetris.
From 1991, I alternated annual membership with the University’s other student union, the QM – The Queen Margaret University Union – aka the Women’s Union. This had a slightly more bohemain atmosphere, with better music, and a better disco, but only a handful of arcade machines. At any given time there were never more than 4 or 5, but it was the first place I saw Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker, and Thunderblade.
Over the following years I went on to frequent umpteen other student unions, and city centre nightclubs, but not to play video games. The only other one for me where video games were a factor was Strathclyde University Union. At one stage, I worked with a guy who was on the Committee there, who would tip me off when they were running a promo. I’ll never forget the night they did 50p pints! But SUU also had a fun, if compact, arcade room, with half a dozen or more new machines. There was a Tekken 2 at one point, a Great 1000 Mile Rally (or World Rally), and I think also a Virtua Fighter machine.
Although I left the West in 1995, I’d sometimes go back to Glasgow to catch up with friends, go to concerts, or revisit old haunts. Once, in early 1997, I took my then girlfriend, now lovely wife, for a wee tour of the Barras. As we left, I was talking about the warez that were (quite the romantic, eh?). At that precise moment, a guy who was walking past with a briefcase clearly overheard what I was saying and came over. Turns out his briefcase was full of copied Amiga games. When I wasn’t too fussed on buying any, the Guy sighed that no one else was either, and that he was thinking of getting out of the game. He offered to sell me the case and all the disks for £20 (or maybe even a tenner). But that was a lot of cash to me in those days, and I didn’t need them, so I declined.
Booths
On other occasions I’d come through for a refreshement or two. Those were the days when alcopops were all the rage, and various city centre bars would offer happy hour specials, like Bacardi Breezers for 50p a bottle!
There’s still an arcade called Booths on Renfield Street today. A ‘Booths Enterprise’ no less – suggesting a business arrangement with the one-time owners of Glasgow’s best arcade? The picture above was taken in in June 2023, but I think we may be looking at a Menzies/Whismth-type scenario here. Today, both of these arcades are fruit machines and over 18s-only. In other words, well-worth avoiding. In the late 90s, I’m pretty sure there was only one arcade at that junction. And that while it was where Noble Leisure is today, it was called ‘Booths’. In those days the arcade machines were down in the basement. Thanks to the refreshing effect of the Bacardi Breezers, however, I can’t remember what any of them were! But there must have been a few decent and recent releases, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone.
Comments?
Phew, that was a bigun, eh? Thanks for sticking with it all the way through. What do you reckon? Did I miss something out? Did I misremember? Can you add to the picture? Have you got any picures?!? If so, please feel free to share in the comments below.
Arcade Odysseus 