What news is there in the city? Have the proud woo-ers by this time come home from their ambush, or are they still watching for me where they were, to take me on my homeward way?
Homer (The Odyssey, Book 16)
Greetings fellow arcade enthusiasts, and welcome back to my humble blog. Prepare to go ‘Woo’, for I bring news…
According to WordPress.com, Arcade Odysseus has been troubling the blogosphere for 520,960 minutes. That’s a whole lot of minutes. But what it means #IRL is that this site has now been up and running for a whole year!!!
‘Woo!’ and dare I say, ‘Hoo!’
So, many happy returns to Arcade Odysseus, but – more importantly – many thanks to all you lovely, lovely, wonderful readers for keeping me company on my journey.
We’ve covered quite a distance, haven’t we?
I’m not just talking about the 8,000 miles from the Glens of Pictavia to Funspot, NH, and back. There are also the strange aeons of time we’ve crossed in our joint quest to return to the Golden Age of video arcade games.
To celebrate, I thought I should introduce you to my twins. OK, so they’re not human, and they entered my world two years apart. But there are two of them!
I’ve already covered their protracted gestation, here, in a tale that’s bound to strike a chord with more than a few of you VACers. To cut a long story short, my attempts to get hold of a real-life, old-school, video-arcade cabinet for my own home began in 2007. For various reasons, it was late 2010 before I could put any serious effort into the project, and 2012 before it came to fruition.
Rob & Donnie, March 2024.
Twin number one arrived in April of that year. As you can see, his name is Rob O’Tron. And what a fine, strapping example of an Electrocoin Goliath Mark 3 he is. Twin number two joined us almost 2 years later, in May 2014. His name is Donnie K. Conn.
Compared to many collectors, my shrine to the gods of arcades past is meagre.
In an ideal world, and an ideal games room, I’d want hunners (= ‘a lot’) of the things. I reckon I’d ‘need’ a few of my favourite dedicated cabs, some pinball tables, and enough generic JAMMA cabs to cover all the control variations, from joystick, steering wheel and spinner to flight yoke, flight stick, and light gun.
What I have is a compromise. It fills the space available – in terms of room, and spousal tolerance (!). From my perspective, it also serves as a striking and emotive art installation that recalls an important moment in time, culture, and my own life journey. Goliaths FTW!
Beyond that, it lets me play horizontal and vertical games without any hassle whatsoever 😉
The Beauty Parlour
I may only have two cabs, but as I’m sure you’ll all appreciate, the scope to tinker, tweak, and tamper is not only limitless but very difficult to resist.
First up is the ‘ritual cleansing’.
Something that never ceases to amaze me, is the number of folk selling L@@K!!R@RE!!!! arcade kit, who don’t seem to know about cloths or soapy water. You see, I like to look after my stuff. And I don’t want huge hulking great objects d’art in my housecovered in grime. But that’s fine, I find the cleaning aspect of the hobby therapeutic. For me, the process was similar to those guys cleaning carpets on YouTube. Don’t get me wrong, the machines were clean to the touch when they came in. But decades of accumulated dust, dirt and cigarette smoke were laminated onto the surface – especially on the inside. That had to go.
After several gallons of warm soapy water, and a thorough airing, the scrapes, gouges and bumps on the outside were filled and touched-in.
BeforeAfter
I used acryllic model paint. While easy to blend and apply, it has faded over the years. I’ll need to redo the dings at some point, and maybe, when I do, I’ll spray over the top-coat with some UV-resistant anti-fade spray. It seems to work well enough on ink-jet photos, so it should do the job on the cabs. While I was doing this, I also used a black sharpie to touch in the cracks and creases on the black monitor shrouds. Hidden behind the glass bezel, the now look as good as new.
Next up, the metalwork was in need of a refresh. While there isn’t very much of it, getting the top coat dry without an effing insect landing on it, leading to a rub-down and respray was… challenging.
The coin doors, while OK, weren’t set up to let me use the big 10 pence pieces I enjoyed in my youth. So out they came, to be replaced with twin-slot doors, cut to accommodate low-maintenance S10 coin mechanisms.
While doing this, I sanded the black paint-work back to the metal, which reminded me of the doors on old Williams’ cabs like Defender. So I polished them up and left ’em like that. After fitting some new bulbs to the coin return buttons, I replaced all the barrel locks with new, keyed-alike mechs – which are far more convenient for a ome setup.
In those days, when it was easier and often cheaper getting spare parts from the States, I sourced a some replacement coin slot bezels from a stateside seller. A bit of scanning and photoshop later, and Y100 became 10p. At the same time, I bagged me a pile of old 10 pees off eBay – enough to generate the familiar ‘chink’ that followed the dropping of a coin through the slot.
Buttons were removed, cleaned, bleached, and then polished! Leaf-switches were refurbished and fine-tuned, and the monitors recapped, with burnt-in tubes eventually switched out for shinier, cleaner versions. Getting hold of those tubes, however, was nowhere near as easy or as quick as I would have liked. In fact, one of them still isn’t perfect (if anyone has a burn and scratch free 19″ screen compatible with Hantarex boards, that they no longer need, please drop me a line!).
Of course, the maquees had to be swapped out too. This presented me with a quandry. Which artwork should I use? Tonnes of the acade games I like have eye-catching marquees. Loads of them are reproduced in glorious, touched-up technicolour by Tim Nicholls in his excellent 2015 compendium, Artcade: The Book of Classic Arcade Art. However, to my mind, not all of these were suitable for their designated space, or the curatorial dimension of my ‘installation’. So I went for marquees with recognisably classic vibes. My thinking was tha they should have clean lines and bright colours, and come from games that I liked. My initial choices were Robotron and Defender.
At the time, the easiest – and cheapest – way to do this was to source high resolution scans off the internet, tidy them up in an art package, and print them out on heavy duty photo paper on the A0 plotter at work. Years later, when forum celebrity Muddy Music had set up his Arcade Art Shop, I grabbed myself some perspex replacements. This time round, however, I swapped Defender for Donkey Kong on my vertical cab. Classic game! Shame I’m still no good at it…
Like the marquees themselves, marquee lights don’t last forever. These days, a lot of collectors are swapping them out for LEDs. I’ve stayed with CFL for now, but have had to replace tubes and starters – which are all still available online.
That brings us on to the joysticks – which are a crucial part of the arcade experience. None of this ‘gamepad’ nonsense for me. Not even on my 1980s consoles! That’s right. I’ll always rock an arcade stick in preference to a gamepad. Pah!!!
My first cab came with ‘asymmetic’ sticks – as captured by my kids in an early piece of visual art! That would never do. They had to be replaced asap.
Daddy’s Arcade Mk I
First up were a pair of Happ ‘bat-top’ sticks from the States. At the time, that was cheaper than buying them in the UK. They were fine for most things, but not what I needed for Robotron. Luckily, not long afterwards, I was able to bag 3 leaf-switched Wico sticks on the now defunct JAMMA+ forum.
Sticks the firstSticks the second
The shafts were pretty rusty, but nothing a quick whizz in a drill couldn’t cure, when Brasso and wire wool were applied. A similar process sorted out the dings and scratches on the plastic knobs, with the help of Novus 123, and some fine-grade wet’n’dry sandpaper. To complete the revitalised look, I visited ArcadeShop.de for some NOS grommets and dust washers.
Later, when cab number two was having it’s beauty treatment, I was able to find a Cyprus-based seller on eBay with a pile of NOS Wico sticks. The price delivered was $112. In those days, that was about £75 in total, for two sticks and postage!!!
A quick note on Wicos. Many keyboards have been hammered to dust by ‘forumites’ evangelising the importance of a 4″ shaft when playing Robotron (oo err missus!). As a result, they’ve been rare and difficult to get hold of for a decade. I reckon at least part of that stick schtick was to shill the market.
But here’s the thing: if you have a dedicated Williams’ Robotron cab, where the control panel is packed with 1/2 inch ply (into which a shallow rebate for the joysticks is routed), the shafts protrude around 3 1/2 ” from the outer surface. If, however, you have an Electrocoin JAMMA cab, where the joysticks are bolted directly under the 2 mm mild-steel control panel, the far more common 3 1/2″ shafts also stick about 3 1/2″ above the outer surface. You heard it here first kids. For authentic Robotron gameplay, you don’t necessarily need 4″ sticks. Check your control panel before dropping a fortune on eBay treasures!
The more I started getting back into my arcade favourites, the more I realised that when it came to vertical games, Golden Age titles just can’t be enjoyed the way they were intended without a 4-way restrictor gate. Technically, Wicos can be switched between 4-way and 8-way, but TBH, it’s a bit of a bollâche, as the French (don’t) say. The solution for easy 4-8-way switching? A pair of Ultimarc Mag Stick Plus joysticks – with ball-top handles. If you have a Goliath, you’ll need an adaptor plate to mount them (the interweb is your friend here). But once they’re in, it’s just lift, twist, and away you go. It makes quite a difference.
My final tweak – so far (!) – was to refurbish the control panels. I’d already picked up a pair of Wico LS-30 rotary sticks, so I could enjoy Rambo-inspired shooters like Ikari Warriors. Rather than mucking about with swapping joysticks in and out, I decided to find a spare control panel and keep them permenantly fitted. While I was at it, I also took the opportunity to replace the CPO (control panel overlay). Like the marquees, this came from the Arcade Art Shop.
When I have a spare day (or two!), the other two control panels will be getting the same treatment. I know a lot of you arcadists are keen on showcasing your cabs’ battle scars. I’m coming round to the idea that a storied appearance can look good on a dedicated cab. For Electrocoins, however, I want mine to look the way I remember them from bitd – minty fresh and polished to within an inch of their electronic lives! In the meantime, I’ve swapped out the rusty old coach bolts securing the joysticks for some shiney, shiney stainless-steel replacements. NB: when fitting these, you need to press down had on the top of the bolt with something rubbery when tightening the nut, otherwise, it’ll rotate and ruck up your CPO. That’s not a good look!
Stainless steel coach bolts.
To finish up, here are some shots of the cabs just after they came in:
Here they are again after their refurbs, almost 10 years ago:
And here they are again yesterday!
Games
‘[G]od soon gave us game to satisfy our hearts’
Homer (The Odyssey, Book 9)
Compared to most collectors, I don’t have a lot of PCBs. Just a few favourites, including the best game of all time… Rygar. Obviously. I also have a few multi boards, including the outstanding JROK Williams FPGA board, for authentic Robotron action. Other boards have come and gone over the years, because, basically, I don’t have any sensible places to keep them. What I have done is invest in a couple of inline Volt-meters, to be sure that my PCBs can be tuned to run under optimum conditions.
For reasons of convenience, most of my gaming has been done on MAME via PCs and Ultimarc J-PAC adaptors. For the first few years, I used (really!) old office PCs running Windows XP, MAME and the MALA frontend. That was fine… to an extent. MALA is uncluttered, simple, and easy to use. To shut down safely, however, you needed an extra, dedicated button, which is a bit of a pain. But I was able to fit one – discretely – to the top of the cab.
Frustratingly, the first few PCs failed after a year or so. Good job they were free! That could be because they were ancient and at the end of their natural lives anyway. But I was suspiscious that steam from the kitchen may have been intefering with their innards. As a precaution, I started keeping a couple of disposable moisture traps in the electronics section of the cabs. It could be a coincidence, but since then – maybe 8 or 9 years ago – nothing has failed.
Not long after that, I invested in one of 2Huwman’s Linux-based Mini Kab systems. It was great while it lasted. Fast-booting, reliable, and straightforward. Once I’d ugraded my switching PSU to 4A on the 12V line, it could run without a separate PSU. Sadly, in early 2020, it perished in a freak cat-tralated accident and had to be replaced. These days I run older, USFF PCs running Groovymame, on builds compiled by the initimitable Mr JonnyG. That guy is a hero!
Epilogue
I hope you’ve enjoyed the story of my little home arcade. I’ve certainly enjoyed the machines. They’ve been a regular fixture at gatherings and parties, and especially popular with the kids. My own kids have grown up with them. They may have moved on to more modern things, but at least they know their gaming history. And they’re under strict instructions. When their old dad finally pops his clogs, they can keep one of the machine if they like. But the other one is to have the gubbins removed, and used as a vessel for my final journey – to the great Amusement Arcade in the sky…
What else should I do to my Goliaths? How else could I tweak them for the ultimate arcade experience? Please leave you thoughts, recommendations and tips in the comments section below!
I mean, they weren’t just games. They were a full-on sensory workout! You got retina-searing colours, synapse-tingling jingles, and the chance to spray your digital territory with crudely miss-spelt memos in instalments of 3 letters: XYZ IZA D*K anyone? Remember that? Amazing!
Now, remember when we discovered we could play video games at home, in our own house?
I’m not talking about table-top games or handhelds here. Sure, those things filled a niche – as we’ll see in Matt Precious’ hotly anticipated retrospective, From Coin-Ops to Table-Tops: The Essential Electronic Games. And yeah, the kids who were lucky enough to have one of them VFD-endowed beauties – and were allowed to take it in for the bring-a toy-to-school-day – could dine-out on their shot-giving largesse for-pretty-much-ever (OK, the rest of the week). But let’s face it, those things were never more than also-rans.
We can also skip over the old, Pong-type TV games here. Can anyone honestly say that those things held their attention for more than a couple of weeks – even in the bleakest winter evenings of the early 1980s?
Where I want to go with this is home computers, people. Because they….. were GLORIOUS!
My original plan for this post was to begin chronicling my journey through the world of personal computers, starting with the ZX Spectrum. But there’s already so much copy out there – so many websites, blogposts, Youtube videos, and podcasts that do such a brilliant job of showcasing the systems and the games, that it all seemed a bit redundant.
While I might come back to some of my favourite games in the future, what I thought I’d do instead is focus on the times and places that were central to my own 8-bit era. I thought it would be nice to take you back with me on a journey through the sights, the scenery, and the shenanigans of a typical 1980s shopping mall – to help you reconnect with the Golden Age in all its beige, brown and orange splendour. Yes, what I’m offering is some essential therapy to help you better remember what made it all so great. Coincidentally, that’s also a lot easier for me to structure. You see, for me, the 8-bit era started, and ended in the same place – Cumbernauld…
The 8-Bit Era
As a child of the the 1970s, I was prepped and ready for the home computer revolution. Yessir, I knew all about computers. I’d seen them on Star Trek, Blake’s Seven, and Tomorrow’s World. I’d even read about them in comics and newspapers. I felt like I really understood computers – you know what I mean? I’d never actually had my hands on one, of course, but all of that changed at the tail end of 1982.
It turned out that a friend of mine’s dad was a home computer enthusiast. He’d dropped a fortune on a BBC model B, a Microvitec Cub monitor, a double disk-drive, and some other shizz. I’m assuming it was somehow work-related. Grossed up for inflation, we’d be looking at north of 4 grand nowadays. Maybe even 5! That clearly made it ‘precious’, and not something destined for ‘open access’.
But here’s the thing. With us finishing school at half past three, and the parents in question not getting home from work until about half past five, there was a window of opportunity to explore its digital delights and clear out before anyone knew – which is exactly what we proceeded to do.
Somewhat suspiciously, the software collection wasn’t limited to spreadsheets – not that I’d even heard that word back then. Over the next year or so, I was introduced to a cornucopia of ‘black-label’ 5 and 1/4″ floppies, filled with titles like Rocket Raid, Hopper, and the mighty Planetoid.
Yes, this was very naughty – an early example of what came to be known as ‘Piracy’! In terms of morality, however, I’d suggest there was an element of karma at work here. I could be wrong, but I doubt Acornsoft had negotiated a distribution license with the creators of Scramble, Frogger, or Defender. Arrrrrr!
Those games were great. Arguably, amongst the best of the early arcade conversions on any system, and unsurpassed until Richard Broadhurst’s retro re-imaginings of the twenty tens. But truth be told, I was also captivated by the prospect of programming in Basic. Yes, that’s right. Writing computer programmes was called ‘programming‘ in those days. None of this new-fangled ‘coding’ malarky. So, I started borrowing books about computer programming from the library.
While I didn’t have a computer to practice on, I used to rehearse the routines on the back of my jotters in the clock-watching slots at school. My teacher thought I was doing sums (teeheehee!). The irony! If she’d clocked on to what I was up to, I’d have copped one for sure – even although my subversive scribblings had far more career value than the tedious sums I’d already finished.
Before long, I was totally hooked. There was never any chance of me getting a BBC micro. But it was so out of reach, that it never really bothered me. What did get me excited was an old copy of Computer & Videos Games I’d been given in the spring. A BBC was never going to happen, but there was this new computer that everyone was talking about – it was even in the magazine, for flip’s sake! You could get it for less than £200, and you didn’t even need a monitor or a disc-drive to use it. You could just plug it into the TV and play games off ordinary cassettes!!! Its name? The Zed Ex Spectrum.
A relative noticed what I was up to and passed on a pile of pre-loved computer mags. Some of them were pretty recent. In amongst the articles and adverts, was some encouraging news. Basic-ally (!), with early production-line issues under control, Sinclair Research Ltd. had taken the decision to slash the price of the Spectrum. The £175 originally asked for the 48K model had been cut to less than £130. Even better news, the 16K model had been pushed down below the psychologically-important £100 barrier. It may not have had the same (games-playing) potential, but you could solve that problem later by saving up for a 32K RAM expansion! I could hardly believe it!
Now, these days, £100 is not a lot of money. It doesn’t touch the sides of our weekly food shop – and that’s at Lidls. But in 1983, the pounds and pennies in your pocket went a lot further. Bearing in mind that a Spectrum – on its own – was no good, and needed a £20-30 cassette recorder to load and save the software, we’re talking about a likely minimum spend of £130. Plug that into the Bank of England inflation calculator and we’re pretty firmly in PS5 territory. In fact, at the time I’m writing this, it’s almost exactly what it’d cost you to buy yourself a PS5 ‘Slim’ from Argos. Whodathunkit?! A 16K ZX Spectrum set-up had the equivalent value of an all-singing, all-dancing, ultra-modern Playstation 5 ?!?!
With a birthday coming up soon, I started dropping hints at home, asking everyone for cash instead of presents. My pitch was for the 16K model, with my marketing strategy foregrounding the ‘educational’ potential of the machine. I mostly wanted it for the games, of course, but the potential sponsors needed to know there were some traditionally acceptable outcomes too!
When the dust cleared after the big day, it turned out that I’d been a very lucky boy. With the help of my granny, there was enough for a ZX spectrum, a basic tape recorder, and a game! To say I was excited would be an understatement. There was only one minor setback. My birthday was on a Saturday, and I wasn’t going to see everyone until Sunday or maybe Monday. Ultimately, that meant that the purchase would have to wait.
1983-era John Menzies Flyer (skooldays.com). Note the cost of the ZX Spectrum in the lefthand column, and then compare it with Menzies’ pricing – as if they had a unique special offer 😦
On Saturday afternoon, my Dad took me up to Cumbernauld to get a few bits we needed for my birthday tea. We got some strawberries for the victoria sponge my mum was making. I even got a ‘big’ bar of Dairy Milk (by 1983 standards) – an unexpected bonus, ticking off a longstanding ambition of mine! Even better than that, we nipped into John Menzies to check that they actually sold ZX Spectrums at the price we expected them to be, and that they had some in stock. The plan was to come back the following Friday after school and buy it then.
The 6 days that followed were the longest of my life so far. But the time passed, as it always does, and come Friday evening, I was the proud owner of a Spectrum, a tape recorder, andthe Planet of Death text adventure. Sadly, the game didn’t work, and we were eventually able to swap it for Psion’s Hungry Horace. But that evening, there was more than enough to keep me busy in the introductory Horizons tape. Who can forget the keyboard trainer, the evolution of foxes and rabbits, or the Breakout clone, Thro’ the Wall?
The next day was a Saturday, and a sunny one at that. Naturally, I spent the morning inside with the curtains drawn, glued to the screen. I remember hearing my wee brother and pals out in the garden. Eventually, and inevitably, I gave up on keyboard trainer and went out to join them.
Not my Spectrum, sadly. The only bit of my set-up that survives is a random flap from the box it came in. This holy relic was preserved like a fly in amber, or rather a bookmark jammed between the pages of a Fighting Fantasy volume.
Over the next few years, I put together a small collection of original tapes. Like most folks, however, the bulk of my gamage revolved around, ahem, ‘back-up’ copies on C15, C45 or even C90 tapes. With the originals being few and far between, and the local ‘back-up’ scene taking a year or two to fully develop, I had to get my gaming fix in other ways. Like loads of other kids in those days, I turned to the type-in programmes published in magazines. Sometimes, those programmes promised an approximation of a popular arcade game, or at least part of it.
One rainy Saturday morning in November 1983 (yes, that’s before the date on the magazine below, that’s how those things worked!), a trip to John Menzies in Glasgow revealed what promised to be a decent version of the arcade classic Hunchback. It was showcased on the contents page of the classy, Your Computer magazine. With a cover price of 80p instead of the more usual 75p, it was bound to be good.
I bought the mag in the hope – and expectation – of great things. In the end, I must have spent more than 3 hours typing that fecker in, only for it to not work and for my tape recording to fail. I don’t know if that was down to me (likely), typsetting issues with the print out in the magazine (also likely), or if the programme never actually worked in the first place (something I’ve since read was not unkown!). Whatever. That was the last time I typed anything in from a magazine longer than a POKE.
Come Christmas, Santa was kind enough to bring me a 32K Rampack, swelling the machine’s memory to 48K, and opening up the entire spectrum of gaming possibilities. At the same time, a couple of the neighbouring families had bought Spectrums for Christmas, helping to kickstart the local home computer scene.
What’s it Called?
I got my Spectrum from the John Menzies in Cumbernauld Town Centre. Did you ever go there? I appreciate that you probably didn’t. But if you grew up just about anywhere in the ‘UK’ in the 1970s or ’80s, aspects of it would have been very familiar – especially the names and types of shops. We’re not just talking John Menzies here, but Currys, Tandy, Klicks, Granada, Rumbelows, Thomas Cook, Mothercare, Barretts, Saxone and more besides – brands that we haven’t seen on the streets for years, and in some cases decades.
When you look at the ‘then and ‘now’ shots in the photos below, you’ll no doubt also associate with the washed out, soporific, and sterile experience of the modern era. While that’s a bit sad, I think it also helps to emphasise how full of life and colour those places were back in the day. And yes, I realise how odd that sounds when most of the photos are artfully rendered in black-and-white. But I’d argue that it actually gives them a dream-like quality. Or something.
Cumbernauld Town Centre, as I remember it, went One Step Beyond the other malls of the era. OK, so the exterior was a horrific, brutalist mess. But by the time Phase IV of the shopping complex had been completed in 1981, the designers had clearly made some real efforts to up their game. The decor and branding embraced the full, extended colour palette of the late 1970s, with its interlocking triangles of brown, beige and orange. They even commissioned the artist – Michael Snowden, RSA – to elevate the place with sculptures and other cultural experiments.
Michael Snowden sculpure.
The outside, may have looked like a nightmare, but the inside was a dream – filled with optimism and choice retail outlets!
John Menzies
John Menzies, Teviot Square (below), and Ettrick Square (above), Cumbernauld Town Centre, c. 1987.
There it is, John Menzies, c. 1987. The retail mother of my ZX Spectrum! The home computer section was upstairs to the rear and right of the shop. I don’t remember this branch lasting long into the 1990s, when at least part of the unit was taken over by Superdrug. The image below was taken in the Murraygate branch of Menzies in Dundee in 1986. As far as I can remember, the set-up of the ‘computer department’ in Cumbernauld was almost the same.
Computer Department (!), John Menzies, Murraygate, Dundee, November 1986. The guy fiddling with the equipment is shop assistant Stephen Marr, apparently.
In fact, it was fairly similar to the computer section of most other high-street chains at the time. The photo below is from Rumbelow’s on Teviot Walk in Cumbernauld Town Centre. What made Menzies different was the range of games, which was usually a lot better, and the selection of computer magazines on sale downstairs.
Kilsyth Chronicle, Wednesday 7 July 1983 (I think!)
Looking back, I didn’t go up to Cumbernauld that often. I much preferred the combined shopping and arcading opportunities of Falkirk, Stirling and Glasgow. By the time I was at secondary school in the mid-1980s, however, Cumbernauld Town Centre was a computer-games-buying destination for lots of local kids. In fact, when I did go there, I’d be surprised if I didn’t see some familiar faces, perusing, and sometimes even buying the wares.
I remember seeing a friend’s older brother testing and then buying Ocean’s Gift from the Gods for the Spectrum. It looked OK, but if I remember correctly, the reviews weren’t stellar – which was an absolute pre-requisite for spending long-saved pocket money on such a big-ticket item! A couple of weeks later, he approached me in the playground and asked if I wanted to buy it off him. I politely declined.
But let’s take another look at that photo of Menzies. Consider the ambience in the mall in the 1980s. And then look at it now. Sigh…
January 2024: What once was John Menzies is now ‘Pound Mania’. Noice 😦
Menzies was in the large atrium at the very end of the Phase IV strip, which seems to have become known as ‘The Escalator Hall’. Why? Because that’s where the escalators were, of course. Check this out:
This photo was taken around 1986. Look at the place! Look at the decor! Look at the people! There’s olde worlde streetlamps, hanging gardens – and not a shell suit in sight! Finding it on the internet was a bit of a shock. Believe it or not, I was actually there on the day it was taken. When I first saw it, I even thought I was in it! You see that wee guy standing at the edge of the balcony at the top-centre? That could well have been me. That’s exactly where I used to stand when I was waiting for my parents to emerge from the shops. It even looks a bit like I did. But if you zoom right in, it seems like he’s wearing glasses, which I didn’t have back then. Oh well.
On meditating, I distinctly remember walking past a camera on a tripod on my way upstairs that day – quite an unusual sight. And seeing my favourite spot gazzumped, shuffled off to the other shops behind. I suspect I might have been off to Toymaster to see if they still had any Citadel miniatures in stock. Spoiler, they very rarely did.
Here’s the same spot now. A sterile, soulless nothing. The Kopper Kettle cafe survived at least into the 2010s, but even that’s gone now. Sad times.
All of these photos were taken on Saturdays. But look at the difference. In 1986, it was packed. In 2024, not so much. The black-and-white image below is a bit later, c. 1991, but there’s still a throng.
As far as I know, Toymaster has been gone for decades. And truth be told, I can’t remember exactly where it was. But I do know it was somewhere upstairs – because, when you went in, there were stairs down to a lower level. That’s where they kept the good stuff: the models, the milliput, and – when they had them – the lead-based mini-figs! My memory is fuzzy, but I suspect it wasn’t too far away from here:
Which I believe is captured in the shot, below. The Gym at the end has partitioned off the old corridor.
Teviot Walk
If you were driving, the main way into ‘Phase IV’ of the Town Centre (no-one actually called it that #IRL) was from the carpark at the eastern end – to the left of the roundabout in the picture below. Nowadays, it’s been ‘augmented’ with a huge feature entrance.
To begin with, the area to the left of the entrance was a supermarket – initially, the Scottish retailer, William Low. My parents rarely went there. But I do remember one ocassion on a Friday evening after school in the autumn of 1983. As a reward for helping out (or was it as a bribe to stop me pestering them?), I was allowed one of the new 500 ml cans of Coca Cola!!! Remember them? If that wasn’t memorable enough, I enjoyed it in my brother and my bedroom a bit later on while watching the must-see new TV show on our tiny black-and-white TV – The A-Team!!! It wasn’t until 1984, that the show moved to its more familiar Saturday tea-time slot.
A few years later, when the shop was taken over by Tesco, there was a bit of a teenage gold rush. The new shopping trolleys were coin-operated, you see. You had to feed a 20 pence piece into the handlebars to release them from their trolley prison. Until the customers cottoned on to what was happening, there was a gang of helpful young men offering to take empty trolleys back to the cage, then trousering the 20p. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t last.
Walking in past the supermarket on the way to Menzies took you along Teviot Walk, and past all manner of top-tier retail outlets. Jewellery, underwear, sausages, you name it. Between them, they had it all. Or at least, they had the limited selection of ‘all’ that their tiny footprints gave them space to keep in stock.
Here and below, some black-and-white images of Teviot Walk looking in away from the entrance, c. 1990.
A bit further in and you’d pass Michael Snowden’s beautiful sculptures. They brought a level of sophistication to Cumbernauld Town Centre in the 1980s and 1990s, which I haven’t seen in the years since. That makes it all the more depressing that in 2024, the self-same sculptures have been dumped in the smokers’ garden outside ‘Spoons – (dis)tastefully suqeezed between the carpark and the dual-carriageway. Michael’s still with us – and in his 90s. I hope nobody’s told him.
Shops from yesteryear. Remember when you could buy shoes, washing machines and artisan pies in your local shopping mall? This shot looks along Teviot Walk towards the front entrance of Cumbernauld Town Centre, ‘Phase IV’.
When I went to visit the Town Centre in late January 2024, there had just been two major storms. They’d caused some major damage to the roof – some of which had collapsed down in to the mall! With the affected area covering most of Teviot Walk, it was closed off with substantial barriers at both ends – making it difficult to get convincing modern-day photos from the same angles. I did my best, but I might have to go back at some point before they knock it all down and try again!
Look at the state of this place compared to 1990 & 1987. Where are you supposed to sit and have a chat? Squeezed into the pound-a-play kiddies’ rides apparently.A rare colour photo of Teviot Walk from 1987 looking in towards the escalator hall, aka Teviot Square.
By the summer of 1986, my Spectrum was getting a bit long in the tooth, but still going strong. I’d taken a bit of a risk getting a new game from my mum’s Freeman’s catalogue – Elite’s conversion of Capcom’s Ghosts’n’Goblins no less – when tragedy struck.
I’d borrowed a back-up copy of the dreadful Sai Combat, and was dutifully sai-ing my opponents to pieces. Apart from the sense of disappointment with the game itself, that probably wouldn’t have been a problem for most folks. But I was playing the spectrum on the technical drawing board perched atop my bed. And so grimly determined was I to enjoy the game, that I inadvertently shoogled the machine to the edge of the board, where the Rampack fell out, bricking the machine 😦
Sadly, that wasn’t quite the end of that. You see, I still had 10 instalments left to pay on Ghosts’n’Goblins. Ultimately, however, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. That Christmas, I was given a Commodore 64C, introducing me to the world of hardware sprites, graphics utilities, and the mesmerising tones of the three-channel SID sound chip.
Ettrick Square
Visits to Cumbernauld slowed down during my C64 days. But I would occasionally get the bus in to kick about the shops. Part of the attraction was the opportunity to explore the maze-like corridors of the Town Centre.
Ettrick Square / The Escalator Hall, looking down towards Teviot Square, 1990.Ettrick Square / The Escalator Hall, January 2024.
By far the best shops were in Phase IV, and most of those were downstairs. The floor-plans I’ve been able to find are a bit misleading in this respect. Upstairs and beyond Ettrick Square, the so-called Ettrick Walk was all outside – a row of takeaways and the like spread along the back wall of the rooftop carpark.
List of shops at some point around the mid 1990s. Note: John Menzies and Mothercare are both gone, replaced by Superdrug and Argos respectively. And what’s happened to Megabyte?
One such visit took place in August 1985. I was 13, and had just started S2, when it was announced that the school would be closing for a teachers’ strike! Not wanting to cross any picket lines, I arrnaged to bunk off to Cumbernauld with a pal to see what was happening, most likely on the actual bus shown in the photo below.
We went on the usual circuit of shops starting with the newsagents, RS McColl. Unusually, they had a copy of White Dwarf magazine. But only the one, which we both wanted. As a compromise, we decided to leave it on the shelf, and see if there were more in John Menzies. Surprisingly, there weren’t. Next was a new-ish computer shop, Megabyte, up on Ettrick Square.
Megabyte sold all kinds of computer equipment for home and business use. It usually has the latest software running on its display systems, and a reasonable selection of games, including the affordable Mastertronic titles. They had some pretty decent stock during my Commodore years. But on that day, the title being platformed was Epic’s weird Mattel-doll-simulator, Barbie. The sampled speech was pretty impressive for those days. But even if the game itself had been outstanding, and even if we’d had the money to buy it, there is NO WAY we’d have been caught dead buying a game about Barbie dolls!
After a trip to Toymaster, and the realisation that there was nothing worthwhile buying that we could actually afford to buy, a steely decision was made. We’d have to run back to RS McColl so the winner could lay claim to its solitary copy of White Dwarf.
It was a close run thing, but in the end, the prize was mine. I still have it to this day!
The End of an Era
I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the C64. I may have been a bit late to the Commodore party, but that had its advantages. By the time I got there, there was a ready-made pool of classic games, with additions pouring in so thick and fast that it never ran dry. Come the summer of 1987, however, there were some serious rumblings in the force. The Amiga 500 had rang the doorbell, and was stood there on the doorstep, bold as brass, and waiting impatiently to be let in. In short, it was very hard to ignore.
Of course, we’d all known about the Amiga for a couple of years by that point. It made it’s debut on the BBC’s Micro Live TV show back in 1985. It was an order of magnitude better than the C64 in every possible way. The ‘launch’ title, Defender of the Crown looked absolutely phenomenal. But it was so incredibly expensive, that it was only ever going to be a fantasy computer. The A500 was different. Not only was it much cheaper, but if you believed the marketing hype coming from every conceivable angle, you could also benefit from a hefty discount – if you took out your wallet and acted NOW!
I had to sigh. Like everyone else, I desperately wanted one of these, but I was skint. And there was no way I’d be getting one mere months after I’d been lucky enough to receive a C64. Asking for one would have been neither reasonable nor diplomatically wise. So I resolved to enjoy the 64 for now, keep an eye on Amiga developments, and save up for a possible purchase at some point in the very distant future.
A year later, in the late summer of 1988, I was still waaay short of my target. I’d known I would be, but everything was in hand. I just had to sell my C64 stuff for a reasonable price and add the proceeds to the pot, and I’d at least be within sight. I put an advert in the local classifieds. But there were no takers. I did it a second time, and the same thing happened.
Then there was an ‘incident’.
By now it was October. One evening I was heading out with friends when my much younger sister asked if she could play on the computer. I said OK, but only if dad helped her, which he said he would. But that didn’t pan out quite the way I expected. You see, my poor old dad didn’t have a clue what he was doing. He plugged the power cable into the AV socket, powered-up and bricked the machine. Oh dear 😦
Megabyte, Cmbernauld Town Centre, 1991. This was towards the end of Megabyte’s stint on Ettrick Square. Not long after, it was gone 😦
The solution this time round was to get the machine repaired. The one place relatively locally that I knew that might be able to do it was Megabyte in Cumbernauld Town Centre. So we took the machine in and explained what had happened. The guy in the shop wasn’t too hopeful, and said he’d have to send it off to a specialist, who might or might not be able to revive it. He also said the soonest he could send it off would be the courier pick-up next Tuesday. All in – it would probably take a couple of weeks, but he’d give us a call after the preliminary diagnosis, so we knew what to expect price-wise. It all sounded very reaosnable and sensible. So we left it with him.
3 weeks later, there had still been no phone call. We checked, of course, and apparently, there had been a backlog, which was frustrating, but fair enough. Fast forward another couple of weeks – and still nothing, with the same reason given, which was even more frustrating. A week after that, my increasingly irked dad phoned up to ask for the machine back repaired or not, at which point the owner asked us to come into the shop.
Why?
There was no machine to hand back!!!!!!!
It turned out that 5 weeks previously, as promised, he’d packaged the machine, and left it out the back of the shop for the courier. Only the courier never took it. In the 20 minutes before pick-up it was STOLEN!!!!
In the circumstances, the only acceptable solution was to offer us the full, wholesale price of the machine in compensation. That wasn’t the same as the retail price, but it was a LOT more than I could ever have hoped to get by selling it second hand.
I stood there agog.
I was doing mental arithmetic so fast that the folks round about must have been able to hear the cog-wheels spinning! This meant I had almost the right amount of money for an A500 FA-18 Interceptor pack!!! After a quick discussion with my dad, he agreed to make up the last little bit as a Christmas present. The owner asked if I wouldn’t prefer an Atari ST with its bundle of 20 games. I felt insulted! A deal was done on the Amiga, and the machine taken home – on the condition that I wouldn’t get my hands on it until the 25th of December.
All’s well that end well, eh readers?
And, of course, I was able to ‘check’ the Amiga a couple of times before the big day, when my parents were out!
The Thistle Centre, Stirling, 1981 and 2024. Just through the Port-Street entrance was Stirling’s 2-floor branch of John Menzies – the source of my copy of Operation Wolf for the Commodore Amiga. For a tour through Stirling in the Golden Age of Video Arcade games, surf on over to this post, here.
Epilogue
Hope you enjoyed my travels through Cumbernauld Town Centre in the 8-Bit Era. As always, I’d be really interested to hear about your own experiences of this stuff. Maybe you’ve got some photos you could share?
Arcade Odysseus 