Retro Games Club

Greetings fellow travellers!

If you’re reading this blog, you probably like old video games. I know I do! Especially those of the arcade variety. They’ve been an important part of my life for nigh on half-a-century (Yeah, I’m that old!). I’ve enjoyed them at the shows, at the seaside, in town-centres, in take-aways, at motorway service stations, up mountains, on boats, and more recently, at home. If you saw my previous post you’ll know all about my (very) modest home arcade. If you’ve yet to meet ‘The Twins’, why not grab yourself a butchers via this link.

Let’s face it, ‘though, a mere two JAMMA cabs was never going to cover all my gaming bases. They were never going to scratch that pixellated itch.

You know the score.

To reconnect with the ‘Golden Age’ of arcade or home gaming, you really need the ‘equitment’.

Inevitably, my stash of vintage gaming equipment has grown to include a selection of old computers, consoles, and TVs. Not so many that I’m in danger of getting showcased – in Retro Gamer magazine – or one of those ‘hoarding’ documentaries! But I do seem to have acquired a modest collection of stuff.

As a naturally tidy person, I kept most of it stored away in the loft, rotating things out every now and again as time permitted. Starting about 2016, however, I was also bitten by the console-revival-bug that started with the NES, C64, and SNES minis. Being living-room-friendly, it was a lot easier to leave them out, under the TV, and left on for the kids to play at parties and gatherings. Perhaps not surprisingly, they proved to be rather popular.

Fast-forward to the Christmas holidays in 2018, and a dinner with friends – and the topic of video-games events came up.

Why?

Our local library had been dumped by the coonsil, only to be saved at the last minute by a community group. Events were needed to encourage folks, especially kids, to keep coming into the building on a regular basis – hopefully to borrow and read some books! But keeping the venue open wasn’t cheap, so fundraising was important too.

Various suggestions were on the table, mostly on the kind of book-related themes you might expect. But as the bleeps and bloops in the background began to escalate, it seemed that we had another potential solution staring us right in the ears. What about a Retro Games Club? The idea appeared to have wings. A few weeks of discussion, photoshopping and printing later and I had a plan.

In today’s post, I want to share my experience of running a Retro Games Club. I’ll cover what we did, how we did it, and how long it all took. That way, if you ever take the notion of running a club of your own, you can side-step the logistical problems, and start with the dial wanged all the way round to 11!

Gathering the troops

If you’ve got enough stuff, enough time and enough energy, it’s perfectly possible to set up and run a retro games club on your own. If you can remember back to the glory days of the JAMMA+ forum, you’ll probably know about the legendary efforts of Mr RGP (Retro Games Party), which have since blossomed into a bona fide business model.

For my humble project, however, the idea was to get the local community involved – to spread the joy, but also the load. Being of a certain age (old) was pretty useful here. With a few of my friends also harbouring retro-gaming urges, there would be a range of hands on deck. As we were all dads, we also had a ready made constituency of mini-gamers to help get the party started.

So far, so good.

Between us, we had a pile of retro kit – but that didn’t mean we could just plug it all in and get started. The venue was now run as a charity, and the terms of its insurance meant that electronics equipment had to be P.A.T. tested. With some of this stuff being 40 years old, and some of it accumulating 1000s of Volts, it was important that we didn’t expose the public, or the building, to any unnecessary risks. Even more so when kids would be involved. For an extra layer of saftey – and convenience – we also decided to run most of the stuff via fused extension cables. That meant absolutely tonnes of stuff had to get tested. If we’d had it done privately, it would have cost a bomb. Fortunately, a member of the Committee was a registered electrician, who gave up an evening to do it for free. If you need to get this done yourself, it’s worth checking if any local sparkies will do a special rate for charities. I’ve heard of some that will do it for a pound a test – although even at that rate you could be looking at £50 or more for a half-decent selection of gear!

Planning the event

With the equitment gathered, tested, and ready to go, the next big step was to advertise the first event. Before we could do that, however, we had to figure out what the format would be.

The main thing – obviously – was being able to offer a wide range of systems and games. But we also wanted to avoid the ‘tyranny of choice’, where the limitless selections of multi-carts can isolate gamers from each other, and quickly lead to boredom. The more sessions we ran, the more obvious it became that optimum levels of fun were generated by paring back the selection of games as much as possible – essentially running every system as a dedicated arcade cabinet.

Rather than simply turning on the machines and leaving the visitors to it, we decided to have a couple of systems fitted with multi-carts, but for most to be running a single competition game – with high scores getting listed on a white board, and prizes awarded to the winners.

In terms of competition games, we had to think pretty carefully about the selection on offer.

Lots of folks have very fond memories of obscure old games – and while we were keen to accommodate those nostalgia trips where possible, we were also conscious that they wouldn’t always make the best games for quick plays or competitions.

The winning formula turned out to be pretty straightforward. Games should be simple, easy to learn, have a clear scoring mechanism, and not last very long – allowing the maximum number of people to have a go, and to encourage a bit of competition. Games like Frogger, Galaxian, and Chuckie Egg fit the bill rather nicely.

Nowadays, there are also a bunch of amazing home-brew games for the C64, including the awesome Canabalt, and the 4K phenomena Winky Blinky and Dog that make for really great competitions. If you haven’t seen them, be sure to check ’em out!

I already had a whiteboard and pens we could use for high scores. A few shifts on GIMP later, and we had some information boards for the machines, some labels highlighting the prize games, and some certificates for the winners. Kids love that kind of thing!

Given that the club was going to involve a long stretch on Saturday afternoons, we reckoned that there should also be snacks. First thoughts were the kind of comfort snacks we remembered from our own youth – donuts, crisps, and coca cola. All the good stuff! But as responsible, community-minded adults, we also had to be sensible. Healthy snacks (apples!) would also be available, as would gluten and sugar-free alternatives. There would also be some water, coffee and – of course – biscuits for the grown-ups. All of this would come at a cost, which would have to be covered by the ticket price. While the ultimate goal was to raise some money for the library on top of this, we didn’t want to price anyone out.

Compromises had to be reached.

Luckily, the best donuts on the market (street), could be had for 11p each in packs of 5. Crisps weren’t much more. And at the time, cans of coke (full-fat and sugar free) were south of 30p a tin (if bought in mahoosive boxes). Figure in some packets of gummi-type sweets for prizes, the fruit, and the gluten and sugar-free snack alternatives, and we found that we could cater for about 80p a head. That was assuming that this wouldn’t be a one-off event, and that the remainder of any bulk-buys could be held over to the next event. Setting the ticket price at £2 including snacks seemed like good value, and would still generate some cash for the library. I imagine you’d have to raise that to £3 or more nowadays to achieve the same kind of results.

Letting the world know

The plan was to let people pay on the door. But to encourage folks to buy into the event in advance, I also rustled up some souvenir tickets. If you’re going to do this kind of thing yourself, you’re going to need a paper guillotine. Cutting them out with scissors is a pain in the proverbials.

The final hurdle was letting the world know. To do that, we needed some posters.

The design of the posters was deliberately cluttered (honest!) – partly for ironic reasons, but mostly to give the intended audience something to explore, and hopefully to find something specific to identify with. Something to hook them in. We posted them on relevant and specifically-targetted web-platforms and ‘socials’. For extra-added old-skool charm, they were also printed out, laminated, and pinned up on notice boards around the village!

After the first few, I decided to beef up the retro-chic-quotient by adding some 80s icons.

Eventually, the temptation to riff off (rip off?!) the kids’ favourite TV show was just too hard to resist.

And once you go down that road, the challenge of matching branding, fonts and styling sets you sliding down the slippery road towards addiction.

In the end, things started getting a bit out of hand!

Let battle commence!

As you can see from the posters, the Club had its premier on the 20th of April 2019. That’s five whole years ago! Happy Birthday ‘Retro Games Club’!

Getting everything ready that first Saturday morning took ages.

Moving my own stuff from its various hidee-holes at home into the boot of the car took about an hour. This was on top of the hour it had already taken to go to the shops to buy the scran, and make up some flasks of coffee for the grown ups.

From parking the car outside the venue to being fully green-lit and ready to go took another 45 minutes – and that was with several other people helping to get the boxes in, unpack the stuff, and set it all up. Getting everything dimantled, back into the boot, and finally stowed away at the end of the day took another 90 minutes. So, basically, with a 1 pm start in mind, the shenanigans had to get underway by about 10 am. The 5 pm finish meant that tea could not be eaten, nor hostelries visited before about 6.30 pm. That’s quite a shift for the old day off!

After a few sessions, it was clear that a later start time would be needed to let us get things ready at a less frantic pace. It also meant we had time for some lunch before the guests arrived. Noice.

Retro-games clubbing!

Running the Club was definitely not a one-man job.

In fact, you’ll want a sensible number of adults for the size of the intended audience. A ratio of about 1 to 10 is usually a good idea. But you’ll need to make sure that at any given time, the whole area can be looked over by adults who’ve gone through the appropriate background checks. In Scotland, that means a DBS (Disclosure Scotland) check. The easiest thing to do here is to get someone involved who already works with kids (eg. as a school teacher, teaching assistant, nursery teacher etc.), or who is involved with a childrens’ group, like the Scouts or the Boys’ Brigade. Teachers will already have one, paid for by their employer – as will most folks who are regular contributors to kids’ groups. Depending on the size of the venue, one might be enough. The best thing to do is check the rules and requirements with the venue itself. They may well have a list of certified volunteers who can come along for the day and help out. Fortunately, we had all those bases covered between us.

We needed someone at the front desk to meet, greet, explain what was happening, and make sure that high scores were recorded accurately. We also needed bods in circulation to keep an eye on the kids, and the machines (!), and to check that everything stayed on and working. It’s amazing how easily kids can crash RPi set-ups – even when they’ve been certified bomb-proof by adults.

With the snacks, rather than leaving everything out on a table and having folks help themselves, we decided to have a dedicated snack-time about half-way through. Two adults minimum were needed to hand out the goods, and make sure that the inevitable debris was quickly and suitably recycled. Those kids went at the donuts and crisps like a shoal of piranhas! Cloths, kitchen roll, disinfectant spray, and binbags were on hand in case of catastrophe. We also decided to give guests a time-warning at 4.30, and to use the last 10 minutes for anouncing the competition-winners and awarding the prizes.

How did it all work out?

In short, it was BRILLIANT!

That first day – which we ran as a test – had about 20 paying guests. More would have been better. But in retrospect the limited nmbers were a good thing. It gave us the space we needed to iron out the creases and nail down the routine. After that, word spread, with the number of paying guests doubling to around 40 for the next event, and passing 50 by the end of November.

The growing numbers inspired an adults-only event between Christmas and New Year, with beer and cake, as well as coke and donuts. I have to say, it looked pretty good fun, even if I was lumped with responsible person status!

Game Over?

By late February 2020, we’d got into a bit of a rhythm. The Retro-Games Club was taking off as a local event. The vibe was good, the kids had fun, and we’d raised several hundred pounds for the library.

Plans for a follow-up event at the end of March were well underway when…

Well, we all know what happened in March 2020.

It was late 2022 before we were in a position to think about a revival.

By that point, the pooled retro-collections, Rpi-creations, and TV stock-pile had grown. I’d managed to bag a few extra CRTs through a local advertising campaign (!), and was keen to get them fired up and running clasic video games.

Unfortunately, in the years that had passed since our last event, the library’s buildings insurance had been changed to one that seemed to require full PAT-testing for every single piece of electrical equipment being used. While that seems sensible for high-voltage kit, like CRT TVs, I’m not so sure it’s necessary for very low-power gear like RPis. I also ‘hae ma doots’ that blasting aging PC Engines or Vectrexes (Vectrices?) with a test jolt is the best thing for their electronic health. To my mind, the regulations would allow for (partial) exceptions for this kind of equipment, especially if other layers of saftey precaution were put in place. But that doesn’t mean the insurance company needs to agree!

Epilogue

If I can find a way to spare my geriatric electronics the indignity of shock-testing, I’d be up for reviving the Retro Games Club. An alternative might be to restrict the event to less valuable and less-cherished relics, like RPi-based systems and LCD screens. Would that cut the mustard? Maybe some of the dads would still come along. But in the life of the kids who used to visit the Club, 5 years is a very long time. The ones who still play video games have moved on to more modern things. Some of them have left home and moved away. Would an even younger crowd be interested in our Stone Age appliances? Watch this space. We’ll have to wait and see…

Have you organised a Retro Games Club? Do you have any tips to share? Do you plan to, and have questions to ask? If so, please join the conversation in the comments section below.

John Rambo Vs John Matrix (aka ‘How many k!llings?’, aka Operation W-hat now?!)

Today’s post is more about action movies than video games. There is a connection, which I’ll get to in a wee while. But first, we need to set the scene.

Back in the early 1980s, life was slow. Things hadn’t changed much since the 1970s. There were some perks to being a kid back then. We still had our Lego, our toy soldiers and our Raleigh bikes. Star Wars was already a thing. And those were all great. But there was still a lingering, lurking boredom. The days were long, and our tiny minds were racing at eighteen to the dozen. The truth is, there wasn’t always enough going on to occupy them. Remember that? Remember being bored?

But there were signs and portents on the horizon. Who can forget the arrival of the Golden Age of video arcade games? Or the appearance of The A-Team on the telly? Things were looking up.

Then we reached the event horizon. The advent of reasonably-priced home computer systems dropped like a Tsar bomba, vapourising the lurking vesitges of 1970s boredom. And that was only the opening salvo! We barely had enough time to catch our breaths before the next explosion – the RPG revolution. And no – I’m not talking about turn-based, anime-flavoured home console games. I’m talking about dice, baby.

But as it turned out, that one was a cluster bomb.

You see, just after the first flash, there was a series of others, which gave us Citadel miniatures, hair-metal metal music, leather jackets and mullets.

And it didn’t stop there.

Of course, not everyone was happy about these developments. As previously discussed, some grown-ups were a bit suspicious of arcades and arcade games. Others were downright miserable. Some of them did their damnest to rain tears of malcious disdain all over the stuff that was suddenly making life so exciting.

Some of the busiest of these busy-bodies had already organised into the ‘National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association’ (later known as Mediawatch-UK). Their po-faced spokeswoman Mary Whitehouse whinged on and on and on (and on) about the ‘moral collapse’ of British society. Their self-righteous, and self-appointed representatives bullied their way onto television, and badgered their targets through the courts with the help of tame MPs.

Thankfully, however, they were never able to generate quite the same level of noise as their bible-thumping counterparts in the USA. The holier-than-thou brigade on that side of ‘The Pond’ were so convinced that Dungeons and Dragons was the gateway to Satanism and eternal damnation, that they managed to foment the so-called ‘Satanic Panic’. Witness the slightly less-venemous version of their speil brought to life in the Tom-Hanks-vehicle Mazes and Monsters (see what they did there?). If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s worth a watch. Not because it rivals the levels of zeitgeist-magnification seen in Stranger Things. More because it’s so bad its good!

In Blighty, the do-gooders’ greatest outrage was yet to be piqued.

While I remember the 1980s with fondness, I realise that not everyone had it quite so good. In fact, for lots of grown-ups, and their families, times were pretty tough. And when times are tough, folks do what they can to escape. One of the less damaging ways of doing this is through the portal offered by the silver screen – which goes some way towards expaining the raft of exciting and escapist adventure-movies which flooded the market in those days.

From the perspective of a spotty teenager shakily finding his way in the world, the heavy emphasis on childish empowerment fantasy was a sure-fire winner. OK, so you might be getting a b0ll0cking at school for not doing your homework, or at home for ruining shoes / tousers / random items in pursuit of assorted hi-jinks. But after joining messers Stallone or Schwarzenegger for a ride in their latest action adventure, all of that had been forgotten. You came away feeling pumped up – even if the reality staring you in the mirror was a pile of bean poles tied together with hairy string.

Of course, those movies weren’t made for kids. In fact, in terms of licensing laws, kids weren’t even allowed into the pictures to see them. But we all did see them. How, I hear you ask? Why, home-video of course! These were the ‘video nasties’ that Whitehouse et al. railed on about and wanted banned. But then as now, they were more than welcome to get to Falkirk. Actually, no – I liked Falkirk. They could get to Fenchurch.

Kilsyth Mainstreet, 1980s.

My family didn’t get our first VCR until Christmas 1984. But following a trip down the Mainstreet to the Pegasus video-rental shop, and the procurement of a membership card by my dad, we wasted no time in working our way through its collections. By 1986, my friends and I would take turns renting movies, and decamping to the house of whoever’s parents were feeling most tolerant that weekend.

By the late 80s, we’d developed the prehistoric version of Netflix syndrome. Basically we’d seen all the good stuff, sometimes multiple times, and were suspscious of new releases in case they were simply more of the same, or – confusingly – not enough of the same. While our choices were partly based on reviews, or even just pictures we’d seen in magazines or on the telly, we also gravitated towards films that had been condemned by our self-proclaimed moral guardians. When The League of Gentlemen skits about two gormless youths basing their video-rental choices on the number of ‘killings’, they’re pretty close to the bone!

Two of my favourite films from that era and that genre are Rambo: First Blood Part II, with Sly-vester Stallone (deal with it); and Commando, with Arnie ‘get to de chappa’ Schwarzenegger. They capture the essence of that hyperbolic, over-stimulating, escapist nonsense that prevailed in those days. And as we’ll discuss later, they also inspired a slew of video games.

Rewatching The League of Gentlemen recently got me thinking. Has anyone done a properly scientific, double-blind survey of the actual number of killings in either of those films? Well, as it was my birthday last month, I got myself a couple of hand tally counters, conscripted the services of one of the kids, and set about doing just that.

We started with Commando.

If you’re unfamiliar with the plot… what the heck is wrong with you?!!!!!!

Essentially, it’s about huge, muscle-bound special ops commander John Matrix (Arnie) who uses his martial prowess, and preter-natural ability to dodge bullets, to kill an army of bad guys and rescue his kidnapped daughter.

After a fairly slow – but steady – start, Arnie tracks the bad guys to a South American island, where he quickly racks up an impressive tally of killings. Based on what could be seen, we reckoned on 88 or 89. However, things weren’t always clear cut. At one point, Arnie blows up two fairly large barracks-buildings. Whether anyone was in them at the time is impossible to say. Then there’s the issue of how many additional baddies might have fallen off-screen, when Arnie was pulling the trigger on his machine gun like a dog pulling on a string of sausages. Sadly, the baddies were not entirely unsusccesful, with three of Arnie’s buddies, a couple of squaddies, a mall-cop, a regular cop and a forger also biting the dust.

That makes a total of at least 96 killings by our reckoning!

Contrary to what Whitehouse and others may have argued, this was no nauseating gore-fest. The violence, while extreme, is cartoon-like. The only damage done is highlighted with paint-like stage-blood. In one sequence, where Arne is about to detonate the explosives he’s rigged round a barracks-block, it is obvious that the guards outside are not people but scarecrows, which wobble about on their poles as the building explodes. That’s funny. There are actual jokes in there too – although the best we could do, if we were feeling generous, would be to file them in the ‘dad-joke’ drawer for dodgy puns.

Next up is Rambo: First Blood Part II.

While the original First Blood is a comparatively sedate action-adventure with no actual killings, Rambo goes all out for the high score. The plot is, naturally, extremely similar to that of Commando: ie. muscle-bound special ops veteran John Rambo (Sly) uses his martial prowess, and preter-natural ability to dodge bullets, to kill an army of bad guys and rescue some kidnapped American soldiers. For some extra added Cold-War edge, the action not only plays out in foreign lands, but includes a squad of evil Soviet antagonists.

When it comes to killing, old Johnny Rambo sure knows his onions. He gets ’em with throwing knives, his big old ‘Rambo’ knife, ordinary arrows, explosive arrows, a garotting wire, explosives, machine guns – including an M60 – a helicopter, and – of course – his bare hands.

In the end, we reckoned he maxed out with either 62 or 64 on-screen killings, including a ridiculous 30 Soviet Black Berets. But that was just the visible total. After immolating a whole hillside of paddy-fields while being chased by baddie-soldiers, and blowing up around 15 buildings in the enemy compound, the actual total of unseen and off-screen killings could have been far higher.

Sticking with the visible total, however, we can also add the 4 baddies killed by Johnny’s girlfriend, and at least another 4 killed by the gunners in various goodies’ helicopters, bringing the on-screen total to 70/72. But there is a sad addendum here. The one character who could have saved Rambo from his demons, and helped him find peace and fulfillment – his Vietnamese girlfriend – is also killed. NooooOOOOOO! Guess that makes 71/73.

So there you have it, Commando beats Rambo by a minimum of 96 to 71.

But is that the only measure of success?

OF COURSE IT ISN’T!

We can also look at the respective influence of those movies on the video-games phenomenon.

Now, in the Wild West of copyright violation that was the 1980s-video-games-scene, both Arnie and Sly, and their images were frequently and blatantly infringed. The look and colouring of Lance and Bill from Gryzor (Contra), for example, was no coincidence.

Rambo itself was the inspiration for a home video game released by Ocean software in late 1985. I dunno why I’m telling you. Its so weel-kennt, it even features on the cover of Jerry Ellis’ superb Book of the Game of the Film.

I first played it in Boots the Chemist in Falkirk in the run up to Christmas that year. I may have had a ZX Spectrum at the time, but when I graduated to a C64 the following year, one of the first games I ‘backed-up’ was Rambo. I still remember the time I took to savour it.

Boots the Chemist, Falkirk Hight Street, 7th Fenruary 1987. The video games were on the 1st floor.

Waiting with growing anticipation through the excellent Ocean loader music, and then letting the amazing Rob Hubbard attract screen tune play all the way through before starting. It was a surprisingly short game when you knew the secrets, and there was a cheat for the helicopter phase at the end, but I loved it.

Commando a la Arnie, never got its own game. Or at least – not directly. Capcom had released an arcade game by the same name in 1985, but it bore little similarity to the Holywood blockbuster.

Where both films came together, however, was Taito’s 1987 classic, Opertation Wolf

As with most arcade games in the late 1980s, I first encountered Operation Wolf in the summer holidays the year after its release – so, 1988. I’m pretty sure it was in a motorway service station on the M6, no doubt of the Trusthouse Forte variety, and it was certainly in a specially converted Electrocoin Goliath cabinet.

As I may have mentioned previously, this initial encounter was not love at first sight. Strange as it might sound, I suffered a fleeting ‘moral panic’ of my own. The graphics on that game were something of a quantum leap in video-games design. Prior to that we’d be shooting triangles, or space-insects, or cute arcade monsters. The baddies in Op Wolf looked realistic. Too realistic. Who were those poor souls I was gunning down? Is this right? Do they really deserve to die? It was an Austin Powers moment. Twenty pee later, however, I was over it. And I still enjoy a blast today.

On my first few plays, I assumed the game was a rip-off of Rambo. After all, it is set in a tropical jungle. And look at the attract mode. It’s very close to the scene in the movie, just before John J. takes off from his Vietnam base camp, where we see a ‘getting-ready-montage’ involving bootlaces being tied, a gun being checked, and a knife being slid into a sheath. It also involves rescuing POWs, and a cut scene, where the hero has his wounds dressed by an East Asian lady, just like Rambo’s girlfriend.

The ‘inspirations’ (!) seem fairly clear.

But on revisiting Commando, it struck me that the similarities between the Op Wolf attract mode and Arnie’s getting-ready-montage before heading to South America are maybe even greater.

It seems that’s what the big boys thought too. The way the game was packaged for the home computer market by Bob Wakelin, foregrounded a muscular blonde soldier. I’d say there were also shades of Predator in the game, especially the bit at the start where Arne and chums raid a contra base in Latin America. And finally, while the hero of the cut scenes in Operation Wolf has black hair – just like Sly, the game does feature a muscle-bound M-60-wielding baddie with blonde hair, who is so tough he can only be killed if you shoot him ‘right int’ face’…

But what do you think? Is it possible to unpack the single inspiration behind Operation Wolf or is it just a steaming broth of violent action-movie tropes? And who was Top Trumps, anyway – Arnie or Sly? Let me know in the comments below (oo, ah done a rhyme!).

Thanks for reading, folks. And stay tuned. I’ll be back before you know it with a report on the arcade-scene in Glasgow in the late 1980s and early 1990s…

This is the ongoing voyage…

My first encounter with MAME – the Multi-Arcade-Machine-Emulator – was waaaaaay back in 1998 – more than 25 years ago! #NGL (as the yoof might have said five years ago!) that discovery re-ignited my fading addiction to arcade video games. For the first time in decades, I had access to the whole range of games I had loved and left behind all those years ago. And boy did I gorge myself on those things.

While the reunion was a joyous one, it also – inevitably – completely re-shaped the nature of ‘our’ relationship! I imagine you went through a similar process yourself? Back-in-the-day, game-playing was only a small part of the arcade experience. Strapped for cash, and eager to spin out the enjoyment as much as possible, I’d spend far longer watching attract sequences, and scrutinising side-art than actually playing the games. I don’t know about you, but I never got the chance to play my fill of any particular game. On the contrary, plays – when they did happen – were few and far between, and by the time I was getting reasonably good at any of them, the games would be rotated out of existence, never to be seen again. What this meant was that – by and large – I never got to fully unlock the potential of any given game for enjoyment.

Bu there was a flipside to that coin. At the same time, it was rare that I’d have the chance to look behind the smoke and mirrors deployed by game designers to make an otherwise mediocre effort seem palatable. What I realised with the help of MAME was that I’d been harbouring some deep and positive nostalgia for various games based solely on a melody, a sound effect, or an animation sequence, when many of the games themselves didn’t bear up to mutiple replays. That was a bit sad 😦

On the other hand, it also got me thinking about what I had actually expected from arcade video games back-in-the-day – what I valued about them. This conjured up some fractured memories of the comically limited conversations I’d had about those things with contemporaries. From what I remember, the discussions all boiled down to variations on the theme, ‘Have you seen the graphics on X [game], it’s gallus (a term which originally had the nuance of ‘preposterous swagger’, but had been reduced in our parlance to simply ‘good’). In other words, the flashier and more detailed the graphics and animations, the better the game.

However, being able to go back and take my time with those games has helped me ‘decouple’ (!) the spectacle from the long-term playability. In so doing, I’ve come to fall for games I wouldn’t have spent too much time on first time round. One of these is Robotron2084. Superficially, it’s a difficult game. And that puts a lot of people off. But once you start to tune in to its implicit risk/reward strategies, it’s a gift that just keeps on giving.

Something that shouldn’t be forgotten or under-appreciated is the ‘vitalism’ of the early arcades. The excitiment that characterised the phenomenon went beyond the everyday. The bright, primary colours, and unearthly analogue tones of those games triggered the primodial centres of our brains in ways that the clipped and cleaned experience of modern digital media simply can’t. The mark it left on our synapses was indelible. And, of course, all of this was amplified by the rush of frantic motion, with life moving relentlessly onwards and upwards at break-neck speed. In this kind of environment, there was very little value in nostalgia. Last year’s games were quickly discarded as rubbish, or just forgotten in pursuit of the next big thing.

Bob’s Burgers, ‘Burger Boss’: DRL – ‘I’m not a nerd, I’m a video games enthusiast’.

That sense of vitalism is now gone. In fact, we ‘retro-games enthusiasts’ are stuck in a kind of stasis. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s given us the space we need to really get to grips with the games and enjoy them in a way that was never realistically possible (for most of us) back-in-the-day. Nowadays, we can afford to sink enough time and energy into them to rack up telephone-number scores. We can learn to appreciate their quirks, and exploit the flaws in their gameplay in a way that makes them more accessible and enjoyable all-round. And that’s just as well. This new, laid-back reality has panned out to fill a horizon many times broader than the initial mad rush of the arcade scene.

MAME was a revelation. I bought myself a bundle of 3.5 inch disks and a new disk caddy to store my collection of ill-gotten digital gains. Finding the ROMs was a breeze. But getting hold of them took ages. Some of the bigger files took an hour or two to download using dial-up modems. Remember them? And the penny-a-minute minimum they cost to use?

Back in those days, I was just stoked to be able to enjoy the games again. After a few years, however, I started to pine for more. I got sick of using the PC keyboard, and those inauthentic console ‘gamepads’, which I’d never really liked. What I wanted was a proper arcade joystick. Nowadays, I would have made one myself, as I have done. But at the time, I had neither the chops, nor the knowledge of where to look for help. So, I saved up for an X-Arcade tank-stick, which was great while it worked, but seemed to have adaptor-issues, which sadly took the shine off.

Moving to Morecambe in early 2007, with a young family to support, and a house to renovate, I had an arcade-related brainwave. What if I carved out a space in our new home for an actual arcade cabinet, and somehow got it fitted with one of those new-fangled j-pac arrangements I’d been reading about? At the time, Morecambe was not just a faded seaside resort, it had hit rock bottom. But that’s not as bad as it sounds. There was an optimism in the air, not only that things couldn’t possibly get much worse, but that they were actually, gradually getting better. The crumbling holiday infrastructure would still take a while to ‘level off’. The guest houses were mostly gone, either demolished or converted into HMOs (look if up!). Sadly, the arcades would be next.

By the time I arrived, the bigger arcades had only a handful of video games left. Big Buck Hunt springs to mind, along with a couple of the ubiquitous racers. But they were also looking to clear out their last remaining JAMMAs, and close down. I got excited when I saw a hand-written advert in one of their front windows. It was short and to the point, ‘2 arcade machines with game, £60 each’. It turned out these were both ma-hoosive fighters with 25-inch screens. One was a Tekken game, and the other, one of the Virtua Fighters. They were too big for the space I had in mind. To be honest, I also thought they were fugly. So I turned my nose up at ’em and left.

After that, a period of frantic busy-ness, round-the-clock renovations, a house move, and a change of jobs left me little time to pursue my arcade-cabinet dream. By late 2010, however, when things had settled down a bit, I came to the conclusion that it was now or never. It was then that I discovered and signed up for a couple of arcade collecting forums. First of all, the now defunct JAMMA+, then the recently-refurbished UKVAC. After 16 months of getting sniped on e-Bay, and missing out on forum-advertised cabs by the proverbial ‘baw-hair’, I finally managed to bag myself an Electrocoin Goliath. That was when I was finally able to begin bringing the arcade back home. But more about that in a future post.

By late 2012, I had also decided to get a bit more pro-active in seeking out some more genuine arcade experiences, either in the wild or via Expos and Conventions. Truth be told, I haven’t been to a lot of these. They’ve usually happened at times that were difficult to reconcile with my work schedule or family-holidays. When it has been possible, however, unlike the first time round – when I was living in the moment – I’ve attended with my phone/camera in hand, and taken a few photos to share in nostalgia-tinged discussions afterwards. As a result of various mishaps, I’ve lost quite a few of these – especially for the years 2012 and 2013, when my then phone was killed by the rain. But here’s the thing, it turns out that I’m not the only one taking photos. Obviously, that’s something that every man and his dog is doing nowadays, usually with a much better camera, and an order of magnitutde more skill than me!

There are many other arcade bloggers out there, all documenting their arcade journeys with a slightly different slant. But as an aside to their main focus, they often post cameo shots from events and gatherings. ‘My Acade Diary‘ by Neil1637, is a particularly good example. Although the main thrust is his almost supernatural re-animation of long-deceased arcade cabinets to gleaming functionality, Neil has also published reports and reviews of a number of expos, including NERG 2016. On looking at his pictures from that particular event, I was amazed to see the back of two heads and shirts, that – if you know – clealy belong to me and one of the kids! In the hope that I can provide a similar service for some of you, I’ll finish off this post with some photos of my own. I’m pretty sure that at least a few of these appeared on JAMMA+ before it all got flushed down the pan. So now you get a second chance to see if you can spot yourself!

Coachman Hotel, Kilsyth (24 Nov 2012)

The New Frontier – Opening Party (30 Aug 2014)

NERG 2015

NERG 2016

Proper Games!

‘[And Zeus] soon gave us game[s] to satisfy our hearts’

Homer (The Odyssey, Book 12)

Proper games? What are they? What exactly are we talking about here?

In a bit, it’ll be computer and video games (obviously). But before we can start that conversation properly, we need a bit of context. Some gaming archaeology.

Back in the days of fresh air and exercise in the old school yard, there were games aplenty. Stalwarts included ‘Tig’, of various different kinds. When cries of ‘you’re “het”‘ rang out across the playground, we knew what was happening, even if we didn’t realise that was actually just the old word for ‘it’, living on in the bubble of primary school patois. Then there was ‘What’s the time Mr Wolf?’ – which we enjoyed long before anyone had heard of Squid Games. Hide-and-seek was perenially popular, but eclipsed, when the opportunity arose, by its edgier cousin, Two-man-hunt. We called it ‘two man’ hunt, but the actual number of hunters at the start varied depending on the size of the crowd. And who could forget the viscious but exhilarating grabby-dashes of Bulldog, or its rhyme-powered variant Red Rover. The energy invested in those last two games led to so many ripped coats and jumpers it was eventually outlawed by the school. No-one was bothered about the bruises, though!

Despite their apparant differences, all of these games had a few things in common. There was always a set of rules. More often than not, there was also the need to combine talents in several different areas – dexterity, speed, vision, hearing. Finally, as unpopular as it might be to dwell on the fact in 2023, they were competitive. There was always a winner. But the competitve element didn’t stop there. Thinking about it carefully, there was also a kind of leaderboard – albeit fleeting – with the names of the last five or ten players being called out, increasingly frantically, resonating in the air around the playground.

Yes, we all aspired to be up there – on the virtual leaderboard, ideally at the very top. But how would we do it? As cheeky London ska/pop outfit, Madness, reminisced in their 1980 single, ‘Baggy Trousers‘ – being at school was all about learning how to ‘bend, not break the rules’. This was a maxim that applied, more than anywhere else, in the world of games.

Those schoolyard games were always better with a crowd, and in bigger spaces. They didn’t work so well on home turf. Instead, we’d have to make do with more modest pursuits like kerbie, and keepie-uppie, where the emphasis was very much on the score, and the not-at-all-dangerous escalation of ramps and stunt tracks for bikes, sledges and other moving objects, where the concept of ‘risk-and-reward’, although not something we could have articulated, was slowly seared onto our brains. Of course there was always the ubiquitous football, but that got a bit boring after a while.

Imaginative games were all the rage too, with or without the ‘scaffolding’ of accessories like lego, toy soldiers, or wooden-stave ‘swords’ or longbows. They highlighted the natural tendency in kids towards creativity and escapism. Much later, they would all be completely swept away by the role-playing game phenomenon – but that’s a whole nother story

The cold and dark of the winter months didn’t really curtail these outdoor activities. In them days, parents weren’t so keen on having groups of kids hanging about their houses. A lot of homes seemed smaller then than they are now, or at least had more people crammed into them. So, space, and peace-and-quiet were prized commodities. Unless it was raining, we’d be ushered out. Who can forget the hours wiled away under the orange glow of the sodium street lights, competing to see who could execute the longest skid on the hard-packed winter ice?

For entertainment inside, there were board games. The baseline for things to play was usually some version of the aptly-named ‘Ludo’, which is Latin for ‘I play’ – but we soon graduated to the classics like Monopoly, Cluedo and eventually, Scrabble. Depending on the mood or the timing, boardgames didn’t always hold your attention. Yes, there were some slow-burners, like Colditz, but if you didn’t have enough time or enough players, they were pretty much non-starters. They became bored games.

And that is where video games came into the picture (do you see what I did there?).

To begin with, the mere fact that we could control the picture on the TV screen was enough to keep us transfixed. Given the central importance of TV in our lives, it was almost like being able to move the hand of god (check out my observations on ‘In the Beginning’). That being said, there were only so many times you could play the million different variants of Pong on your Grandstand TV Games 3600 before you realised just how shallow and boring they actually were.

So how was it that the fad took root and didn’t fizzle out?

A lot of early video games had the same ‘Pong’ (tee-hee-hee). Even the arcades, those temples to pixelated hedonism, were packed with single-screen oddities that worked well as a brief distraction, but didn’t really warrant any return play. Or at least, that’s what we would have realised if we’d been able to plough enough time into them.

In practice, most games would be over in two minutes, and our finite supply of ten pees exhausted after a few rounds. For that reason more than anything else, the gaming component of the arcade experience was spun out as long as possible around a series of other activites. Every inch of the machine would be investigated – in the (usually) vain hope of finding a way to finagle an extra credit out of it, but also to appreciate the artwork and overall aesthetic (no, I didn’t know that word in 1982 either). Attract modes would be studied time after time in the hope of isolating tips and tactics to make the games last just a tiny bit longer. The efforts of other kids, but especially older and more experienced players ,would be scrutinised and copied to the same end.

Eventually, however, and inevitably, it became apparent that some games were better than others.

Those calls were obviously subjective, but often to a much lesser degree than the disinterested observer might imagine. The boxes they ticked had already been imprinted on our subconscious by the experience gleaned in the playground, on the streets, and in the boardgame battlefields of our bedrooms. By and large, for games to appeal, they had to:

• Be colourful, with appealing (ie. smooth) animation,
• Sing sweetly, with memorable sound effects and music,
• Offer a well-balanced mixture of risk and reward, with the pats on the head coming thick and fast,
• Demand an element of twitch-reaction and skill,
• Give some scope to bend the rules to gain an advantage – even if only very slightly,
• Offer a straightforward and comparative scoring mechanism – with the facility to archive and advertise your performance via a high-score table.

Time was also a factor.

As a kid playing arcade games, whether that was at the seaside or in the high-street backrooms, we may well have been lost in the moment. Time had effectively stood still, and we wanted – or thought we wanted – the games to go on forever. Without realising it, however, the reality was that this would never have worked. Eventually, we’d have to get back to school, or with a bit more urgency, get back to the carpark before our parents drove home. No-one wanted their game to be over after two minutes. But good games had to be short enough to fit in to the time we had available.

In the years since, and the evolution of home computer games, that time parameter was temporarily bent. Exciting new opportunities to pursue real-time strategy games, marshalling armies, building cities, or colonising the new world, grew to fill the aeons of time that went along with early teenage evenings and summer holidays. And that was all well and good, then. More recently still, however, with the rise of home-console gaming, this element seems to have risen to crowd out all others.

As far as I can see, most modern games seem to go on and on and on forever. They demand a huge and extended committment from players. They may be very pretty, with UHD, HDR, ray-traced graphics, and mind-blowing special effects, yet the competitive element has been diluted away to some pointless ‘trophies’ that everyone can find given enough time. Their worlds may be complex beyond anything we could ever have dreamed of, yet they are bound by strict, and inflexible rules. Even supposedly ‘open-world’ games seem to play on rails. There are always tables you can’t climb onto, windows you can’t smash, things that your eyes tell you should be possible but console says ‘no’. That won’t do! You’re not the bos of me, PS5!

Then there’s the matter of twitch reaction and skill. For many, many modern games, the interactive element of the experience has become almost secondary to the protacted cut-scenes. These may be visually and aurally stunning, but to my mind they work as neither movies nor games. To enjoy a movie to the fullest, you need to be able to clear your mind and concentrate on what you are seeing. But if you have to press the correct sequence of buttons every now and again simply to keep the reel rolling, that’s not really possible. And with games, well, I need the challenge and reward to follow in short order, not spun out around five-minute video clips. Surely I’m not alone in that?

Ultimately, there are always gonna be different strokes for different folks. Stick to whatever floats your boat and enjoy it. But in my world, with its roots in the ebb and flow of the Before Times, I think I can afford to make some pretty bold distinctions. Here are a few examples of what I consider to be ‘Proper Games’ – games that fit the bill:

1) Fast Twitch

• Robotron 2084
• Exerion
• Track’n’Field
• Rygar
• Twin Cobra
• Raiden
• Daytona USA
• Quake

2) Slow-Burners

• The Hobbit
• The Lords of Midnight
• Sim City
• Colonisation
• Age of Empires II
• Cossacks: Back to War

Nothing too controversial there, I imagine. They tick all the boxes. But here’s the stinger…

Mostly ‘Meh’ Games

• Tomb Raider franchise
• Resident Evil franchise
• Assassins Creed franchise
• Most Japanese RPGs

Sorry folks. These days, I need games I can play (and maybe complete!) in less than an hour. I’m a busy chap. And as much as I love the animations of Studio Ghibli, I also have a relatively low threshold for full-on anime. That’s why, for me, it’s Golden Age arcade classics all the way. Do you agree? If not, let me know why. Leave a comment below and try to change my mind.

Next up: How we enjoy games…