Raider of the Last Arcades – Arcade Odysseus

Arcade Overload!

Published on 6th May 20247th May 2024 by ArcadeOdysseus2 Comments

Welcome back fellow arcade enthusiasts.

It’s been a while since my last post, but April – for me – was a very busy month. I knew it was gunna be, which is why I booked a weekend away with Mrs O to book-end the month – a trip that saw us ascend to the northerly latitudes of Aiberdeen, and paved the way for an officially-sanctioned visit to the Arcade Bar and Games centre on Union Street!!!

That was something to look forward to.

But as the month dragged on, I had an epiphany. I could also take an extra day off the weekend before our trip to the Silver City, and use it to beam directly down to the mother-ship, the nirvana, the epicentre of classic-arcade-gaming in Albion. You known what I’m talking about, right? The holiest of holies that is Arcade Club, Bury!!!!

I hadn’t been there for more than a year, and was eager to get back.

Not needing any extra hassles, I originally thought I’d take the train and use the trip to catch up on my retro-gaming mags and snoozing. On checking through the usual booking sites, however, it soon became clear that things weren’t going to be quite as straightforward as I had hoped. With engineering works planned on the railway to the south of Carlisle, I’d have to rely on bus transfers, with extended waits between stops. While that would have saved a few pound on the – quite frankly – fu-lippin’ expensive rail fares (or rail ‘un-fairs’ as I like to call them), it was going to pretty much double the time taken for the return journey.

So I decided to drive.

Yes, I would drive 500 miles, but maybe not 500 more!

As you can see, the drive was a long one, but it actually worked out cheaper than the cheapest train tickets I could find – even using split-ticketing. How that’s supposed to encourage us to be environmentally-friendly, I’m not entirely sure.

It also opened up a whole suite of possibilities that rail travel closes off. I could start when I liked, stop off for a break whenever I wanted, and – more importantly – choose a route that suited me best, and didn’t necessarily meaning come back the same way I went down. And that got me thinking…

…what if I were to combine being sensible (!) – by breaking up my journey into more manageable chunks – with branching out a bit in terms of the arcades I visited? What if – instead of driving straight down to Bury and back – I went on a bit of a tour? Half-an-hour on Google Maps later, and I had the mother of all arcade road-trips sketched out.

I’d leave Pictavia just after the school rush on Friday the 26th of April. First stop would be Forton Services on the M6, just south of Lancaster – a familiar location from summer holidays drives back-in-the-day. After that, the tour was timed with military-levels of precision.

Location	Day	Arrive	Depart
Eclipse Home Entertainment, Blackpool	Fri 26/04	13:30	13:50
Blackpool Seafront	Fri 26/04	14:00	16:30
St Anne’s Seafront	Fri 26/04	16:45	17:30
Arcade Club, Blackpool	Fri 26/04	18:00	20:15
Arcade Club, Bury	Fri 26/04	22:00	00:00
Arcade Club, Bury	Sat 27/04	11:30	23:00
Arcade Club, Leeds	Sun 28/04	11:00	14:30
Four Quarters, Newcastle	Sun 28/04	17:15	18:10

Blackpool was ‘interesting’. St Annes was nice. The weather at both was lovely. I checked out the arcades, the retro gaming establishments, and the ice-cream stands, and chip-shops while I was at it.

What happened next was a blur of classic-arcadey-goodness.

In fact, with my visit to the Arcadia Bar in Aiberdeen added in, there’s waaaaay too much material to squeeze into a single blogpost. So, I’m posting this as a memo.

Just when you need it most (or not!), I’ll be back with photos, opinions, and profound philosophical insights into the last redoubts of the classic-arcade scene in Blighty.

Watch this space for my new series of ‘Arcade Overload’ blogposts!

Arcade time, sir? Capital idea! Edinburgh: Konbo Vs NQ64

Published on 21st October 202322nd October 2023 by ArcadeOdysseus3 Comments

Edinburgh!

Seat of learning, law and government. Scotland’s capital city. Home to Hume, Smith and the Enlightenment in Northern Europe. The Athens of the North! A place so bursting at the seams with history and high culture, that we’re obviously gonna give those things a swerve – and talk about its video arcades instead!

I’ve been stotin’ aboot Embra for a long time. Back in the 90s, I even lived there. But the arcades of that era are something we’ll come back to in Part 4 of my Arcade Eco-System series. (Clickee linkeez for: Kilsyth; Kilsyth Extra – The Archives; Falkirk & Stirling; Glasgow)

These days I visit the place for work, which means I tread a very sorry furrow between the station and my office. In fact, that furrow is now so well-worn that I can barely see over the sides! I’m sure those of you who’ve spent any time commuting will be able to relate 😦

I do occasionally go off-piste. And every now and again, my expeditions through the wilds of Auld Reekie offer up rare glimpses of the city’s dwindling arcade culture. Sadly, that doesn’t happen very often.

An illicit snap from the 2014 Game Masters Exhibition, which very nearly got me ejected!

Back in 2014, there was the ‘Game Masters‘ exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland on Chambers Street. OK, so it was an ‘exhibition’, with a heavy emphasis on education (!), but it was an exhibition which foregrounded a hands-on display of video-games technology, from Pong to Fruit Ninja.

The centre-piece of that collection, for me, was the group of 10 or so Golden-Age arcade cabinets at the entrance. There was Tempest, Asteroids, Donkey Kong, Centipede and a few others. I can’t remember the whole list, ‘coz my archives are bare. For some unfathomable reason, photography was strictly forbidden – as I found out when I pulled out my phone and started to take some pictures. It wasn’t entirely clear how capturing an image or two of some of the most mass-produced consumer games cabinets on the planet might have infringed the organisers’ IP. But there you go.

A few years later, in 2018, I bumped into a random 60-in-1 cabinet while taking a short-cut through the Waverley Shopping Centre. Sadly, I was racing for a train, and didn’t have time for a game. With my ‘madskillz’ it would have taken way too long 😉 Unfortunately, when I eventually did have the time to return for a more leisurely visit, the cabinet was gone. Carpe diem, folks!

In recent years, pinball machines have been more common than arcade cabinets. They sometimes pop up in pubs, cafes and shops. Just before Lockdown, there was a pin-table in the BrewDog Bar on the Cowgate – Judge Dredd if my memory serves me correctly, which it might not, as I was rather refreshed at the time. Whatever it was, whether it’s still there or not is something I’ll have to go back and find out.

At the time of writing (Oct 2023), there are two pins just inside the shopfront of the new HMV on Princes Street. As far as I can work out, this seems to be part of the chain’s business plan. I’ve also seen pins in the new shops in Livingston and Dunfermline.

Konbo Arcade Cafe – 123 Gilmore Place, Edinburgh, EH2 9PP

When it comes to proper arcades, the situation in Edinburgh is even more hit and miss. Back in late 2016 / early 2017 there was a bit of a buzz on the old JAMMA+ forum about a new venue opening at 123 Gilmore place – the Konbo Arcade Cafe. The blurb was tantalising:

‘Edinburgh’s arcade gaming café. We bring Japanese arcade culture to Edinburgh in a comfortable café setting. Enjoy vintage 80s/90s arcade games, combined with quality coffee and fresh food. We also stock Japanese snacks & sodas, plus retro games & gaming merchandise. We run regular gaming tournaments & evening events, and you can even hire our venue with a game selection of your choice! See our website for more details and a full list of our games’.

May 2017: Whoever wrote that sign made a massive mistake. It should have read, ‘Diversion BEGINS here’!

The location – for me personally – was not great. Getting there involved an extended schlepp to the venue, then on to Haymarket afterwards instead of Waverley, which took my station race from less than 20 minutes to about an hour all-in. Being a busy chap at the best of times, I wasn’t able to visit until May 2017.

But it was worth the wait. Konbo was brilliant. The venue was clean, light, and welcoming. The decor was fresh and relaxing, with plenty of blonde wood and white, and comfortable stools. The refurbished (ie. clean) school-desk tables were a particularly nice touch. Better still, the coffee was not only excellent, but reasonably priced – and there was a varied selection of alluring cakes and other treats. Had it been closer to my place of work, I’d have gone there more often for that reason alone.

The venue was also used for Japanese cultural meetings, and could be hired out for private functions. It even sold Japanese knick-nacks and the odd PC Engine card. But the real ace up Konbo’s sleeve – its USP – was it’s collection of 6 pristine ‘candy’ cabs. There were 3 in the front, and 3 more in the room at the back. The machines were all set up for pay-per-play using tokens bought from the counter. IIrc (!) the exchange rate was four to the pound.

Given the cafe’s Japanese theme, it’ll come as no surprise to learn that Konbo’s cabs were usually fitted with puzzle games and ‘bullet hell’-type shmups of the Cave variety. I have to admit, that the selection didn’t always align with my personal tastes. But they were rotated on a regular basis. And here’s the weird thing – I actually liked going there and finding a whole new suite of gamage on offer, whether I actually wanted to play them all or not! That dynamism was attractive in its own right. Besides, if it wasn’t busy, the owner was happy to swap out the pcbs – and he had a good range of classic titles tucked away in his stash: Raiden, Makaimura – or Ghosts’n’Goblins as we Westerners know it – TMNT and more besides.

I didn’t get the chance to visit very often, but always regarded it as a rare treat. In the end, I probably made it 6 or 7 times before that start of 2020, when the good ship Konbo finally went down.

It’s now nearly 4 years since the business was wound up, and with the cabs themselves sold on via the forums. So, there’s no going back. That’s a real loss, and I can’t help but feel a touch guilty that I didn’t visit more often. Perhaps if I – and a few more arcade enthusiasts – had made the effort a bt more often, it might still be open? But life, as you know, gets in the way, and location is crucial for these things. And therein lies a paradox. Perhaps Konbo was such a nice place to visit precisely because it was slightly off the beaten-track, and never usually that busy. Had it been more central, the footfall may have been higher, but would the atmosphere have been the same? We’ll never know. What I can say, however, is that while it lasted, Konbo was definitely ‘a good thing’, and it will certainly be missed.

What about now, then? What about the present day?

‘Arcade’ on Cockburn Street, Edinburgh. It may bear the monniker ‘arcade’, but there’s nary a game in sight…

The fair city of Edinburgh has loads to recommend it. There are literally hunners of things to see and do and spend you hard earned pennies on. The best of them, in my opinion, is the National Museum on Chambers Street. There’s enough in there to keep anyone busy for days. They’ve even got a Roman tent. And the best thing is, it’s free! But there are almost innumerable other museums, galleries, theatres and architecture, as well as restaurants, pubs and shops.

If you’re loaded, and have trouble thinking of ways to spend your money, you could even come round for the Fringe festival in August, where they’ll gleefully bleed you dry while you float slowly from venue to venue on the treacly sea of tourists that flood the city, just as the locals have to get back to work.

NQ64 – 25, Lothian Road, Edinburgh, EH1 2DJ

Arcades, though? What about them? There are places which claim to be arcades, but they don’t have any games in them – unless you count drinking games?

Fast-forward to February 2023. I’d left work late, and was powering through the winter darkness to an evening function at the West-end of Princes Street. To shave a bit off the journey, I took a spur-of-the-moment detour down Lothian Road, where I spotted this – NQ64. Being in a hurry, I barely had time to stop for a photo.

It was a few months before I had the chance to go back and investigate properly.

Having overstayed at an important apres-work ‘business meeting’, I was left with an hour to spare until my next train home. That was enough time to re-route via NQ64 on the way down to Haymarket, and, who knows, if it turned out to be worthwhile, maybe even miss the next train too…

Perhaps I walked too quickly, perhaps I was too refreshed, but that first visit didn’t exactly impress. Although it was still early evening on a weekday, and broad daylight, there were two bouncers on the door – which, until I went in – was the same as the number of customers. That didn’t strike me as particularly welcoming.

Once inside, I could see srtaight away that the place had plenty of cabs, but it was also cavernous, cold and almost entirely modelled out of concrete. Had it not been for the paintwork, the vibe would have been most generously described as ‘underground carpark’. With the concrete daubed in black-lit graffiti, however, a better comparison might be ‘futuristic injection-room’. That kindof turned my stomach. Nevertheless, I had a quick look round. The games seemed to be pay-per-play using tokens of some sort, so I went to the bar to get some. But after waiting more than ten minutes while the other two customers perused the cocktails menu, and ordered some bizarrely complicated concoctions, I gave up and sped off to the station.

A few months later, I’d been thinking that I should probably give the place another chance. First impressions can sometimes be misleading, and with so little to choose from on the local arcade menu, we probably shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss things out of hand. So when an event I’d been attending finished earlier than expected, I trailed back down to Lothian Road, with the gritty determination to be as open-minded as possible. Here are my thoughts.

NQ64 is in the middle of what might be described as Edinburgh’s entertainment sector. It’s here that you find most of the theatres and clubs, and a fair few pubs and restaurants. Its exact location taps very deeply into that heritage, being cheek-by-jowl with the Caley Picture House, site of the once infamous Century 2000 night club on Lothian Road.

With its neon-lit frontage framing an actual arcade cabinet, the venue itself is hard to miss.

While the entrance is small, it opens up, TARDIS-like, into a cavernous interior. Now, I’m not gonna lie. My first impressions of the decor haven’t changed. The place is cold, hard and uncompromising in its dystopian, brutalist vibe. There’s concrete, neon and black-lit graffiti everywhere. I just don’t get that. It’s neither inviting nor comfortable. It’s not really conducive to playing arcade games. But that doesn’t mean you’ll be having a drink and chat with friends. There’s plenty to drink, with a heavy emphasis on cocktails, but you won’t be doing any chatting. The music – grinding modern rap or some such – was cranked up to deafening levels. I literally couldn’t hear the sounds from any of the games, and could only confirm the sound was actually switched on in the couple of seconds between the tracks. That’s probably why the Guitar Hero cab was in a separate room with a close-able door. But we’ll come back to the cabs in a moment.

NQ64: Guitar Hero Booth – Best seats in the house.

Having come to enjoy the cabs, I went to the bar to grab a diet coke and some tokens. As previously, I seemed to arrive at the worst possible moment – ending up behind another protracted cocktail queue. Don’t get me wrong, the bar staff (singular) was perfectly amiable. But there was only one of him, making drinks that took ten minutes to order and make. That can’t be a great for takings.

Tokens were 15 for £8, or 30 for £12. I went for 15. Which is just as well.

There were around 30 cabs all told, mostly woodies (albeit no Electrocoins), but a also a row of candies, a couple of recent pintables, a dance game, and a separate room housing Guitar Hero. Oh yes, and there was also a row of modern games consoles and monitors for those who prefer to game sitting down. Most of the games on offer were racers, shooters and fighters.

There was a Daytona USA upright, a Time Crisis 2 – IMHO the best of the crises series, and a dedicated Pac Man cabinet – all with CRT screens.

They also had a Q-Bert and a Puzzle Bobble. I was a bit disappointed that there were no shmups or classic platform games, which I tend to gravitate towards. But I think it’s fair to suggest that most classic gamers would find something they like in the selection. Whether they would actually enjoy playing it, however, is a different story.

Apart from the atmosphere, and the lack of audible game sounds – which really kills the arcade experience, most of the older games are fitted with LCD displays. And come on. Double Dragon on an LCD? No thanks. Some of the classic games did have CRT screens, but most were either very dim, or had bad screen burn. And I’m sorry, but that just doesn’t do it for me.

I did my best to ‘invest’ in a few goes of Daytona and Pac Man, but on the other video games I played, the controls were all damaged in one way or another, the joystick on Tetris was bridging connections, and didn’t always go the way you pushed it. The cross hairs on Terminator 2 didn’t track the movement of the gun across the screen, and the start buttons, and coin slots on the others didn’t always register. Sigh.

I enjoy the occasional game of Guitar Hero, but so – it seems – does everyone else. Although with hindsight, I suspect it may have been partly because of the door to that wee room, and the ability to shut out the dreadful racket.

Conclusions?

I liked Konbo Arcade Cafe, and was sad to see it go.

NQ64 on the other hand is something of an enigma. And that surprises me. Because it seems to be part of a UK-wide chain, which must have a fair amount of funding and business accumen behind it.

NQ64’s stylishly decorated tables. Watch that tippex doesn’t rub off on your elbows.

You see, to be honest, it’s not really that clear what it is trying to be? Most of the floor space is given over to arcade cabinets. But as I’ve already mentioned, it’s impossible to enjoy them properly even if you are a fan of the titles on offer. And while decor is – obviously – a matter of taste, if your motivations for visiting an 80s or 90s-themed arcade are even slightly driven by nostaligia, you’re not going to be bowled over by the torture-bunker stylings. What’s needed here are carpets, not concrete.

Of course, it could be that the cabs are only really there as ornaments – to provide an ironic backdrop to the usual bar-room shenanigans. And why not? But with so few seats, and such offensively loud, and, well, just offensive ‘music’, you’re not going to be enjoying a laugh or a chat with your pals. Is the agenda here to encourage the punters to focus on their drinking, rather than their talking? That would be the preserve of the night club. But with so few seats and no dance area, what’s the point of that? Something has to give, surely – something has to change – if this place is going to have any kind of future. Unless and until it does, I can’t see myself going back.

NQ64’s fancy tokens. I bought 15, and ended up taking 7 of them home with me.

But what do you think? Am I missing something here? Please do share your thoughts in the comments below. And if you do know about any other decent arcade venues in or around Edinburgh, for goodness’ sake, give them a shout out!

Thanks for reading everyone. See you next time when I revisit my whistlestop tour of Valletta.

In the mean time, why not explore some other capital ideas:

Dublin

Copenhagen

Reykjavik

Arcade time, sir? Capital idea! Copenhagen: Bip Bip Bar

Published on 18th September 202318th September 2023 by ArcadeOdysseus2 Comments

This ossum fan design got more than 10,000 likes on the Lego Ideas forum. Sadly, Lego chose not to go with it.

Denmark: Land of bacon, butter and interlocking building blocks (I’m talking about LEGO people!). Let’s face it, even if that’s all they had, Denmark would still be brilliant. The Danes think so too. That’s partly because they know how to look after themselves. But also because they know how to look after each other. Compared to other countries, they’re big on the ideas of collective responsibility and trust – even when it comes to politicians, which is probably why Denmark consistently ranks near the very top of the happiest nations in the world.

In terms of its lanscapes, Denmark is relatively flat. Its gently rolling hills and famland average a mere 30 m above sea level. Don’t worry, though, it does have its points of high excitment!

Copenhagen

One of the high(light)s is the capital city, Copenhagen. The Danes know it as København, but you might be more familiar with its Yorkshire pronunciation: ‘Cope-en-hey-gu-un’. As in, ‘Hey! Hey! Cope-en-hey-gu-un! Bright lights, such a wonderful sight‘. Sigh. Gotta love that Black Lace.

Copenhagen is a big city, with all the facilities and amenities you would expect. As a tourist, you’ll find loads to do. I’d recommed a visit to the National Museum of Denmark. It’s huge, and packed full of amazing (and surprising) artefacts – way too many to peruse comfortably in one day. But if you have kids in tow, you can get ’em to dress up like this, and keep the photos safe to embarras them when they’re older.

Before lockdown, I was lucky enough to visit Denmark several times in relatively quick succession, with work, and on holiday with the family. Jutland is worth a visit if you get the chance, especially the old towns like Ribe on the west coast. They’re very attractive indeed, like real life lego villages. So is the original Legoland amusement park, and the more recent Lego House – aka ‘The ultimate LEGO experience‘! Top tip if you plan to visit either of those, check with the local McDonalds if they’re offering discount vouchers with their Happy Meals – it makes a big difference (you can often find them in northern Germany too if you’re taking a road trip).

Back in August 2017, I found myself ‘between gigs’ in Copenhagen with some time on my hands. Being a hopeless arcade addict, my feet started pulling me west of the ‘Indre by’ part of the city centre, to its Blågård quarter.

The Bip Bip Bar: Wesselgade 4, Copenhagen 2200 (2017)

While it’s only a kilometre or two off the beaten tourist track, this is no scary suburb. There are still bistros and bars aplenty along the main road and side streets alike. It’s just that they’re more heavily frequented by Danes than visitors – the real deal, so to speak. Crossing Dronning Louise’s Bridge, turning left onto Peblinge Dossering, and then shoogling up and left onto Wesselgade, you’ll find yourself stood face-to-face with the unassuming brick-built facade of a regular Danish tenement block. There, happily ensconsed in the basement of Wesselgade 4, was the Bip Bip Bar.

The first room was where you’d check in, buy your drinks and get settled, or occasionally return for a chillax in front of the big screen showing tastefully-curated retro-snippets on heavy rotation. When I was there, they also had an old pong console hooked up to a portable black and white TV – retro-chic (or is that kitsch) at its best! The staff were welcoming and helpful – as were the regulars. Over the course of the evening I enjoyed quite a few chats and games of doubles with the Danish enthusiasts!

That all happened through to the right, in a much larger space of knocked-through basement rooms, where the arcade action was at.

There were 7 or 8 classic pins, and maybe 4 or 5 candy cabs, stacked with more than just the usual range of shooters. For me, though, the highlight of the evening was the selection of woodies, of which there must have been about two dozen – or more – all told.

Back in the heyday of the arcade scene, the misspent youth of Denmark (?!) enjoyed a not dissimilar mixture of arcade cabinetry to that of their spotty cousins across the North Sea. While they did get their hands on the occasional dedicated cabinet – as you’ll find in the Bip Bip Bar, with its Atari Centipede and Star Wars cabs, Sega Outrun upright and others, the bulk were generic woodies. While we Ukanians might have expected a row of gleaming Electorcoin Goliaths, the Danes had their own manufacturers. And there were several neat little rows of their angular woodies here, fully-loaded with an impressive range of Golden Age standards.

When I was there, I played: Rainbow Islands, Bubble Bobble, Ghosts’n’Goblins, Kung Fu Master, Wonder Boy, Moon Patrol, Robotron 2084, Galaga, Centipede, Star Wars, Outrun, Snow Bros, and 1943. Phew! I was there for ages!!! I also saw Donkey Kong, Blaster, Gyruss, Go for Broke, Lethal Enforcers, as well as a bunch of Fighters I didn’t touch (we’ve covered that already). But there were so many, I can’t remember them all.

In terms of condition, almost all the machines were top notch. Maybe a stuck button or two on one of them, but that was all. By the end of the night, there had inevitably been a few casualties. GnG was flaking out, and a screen on one of the others was failing. But come on – that’s only to be expected with aging arcade technology. In fact, like the squished animals you sometimes see at the side of the road, it’s actually a sign of a healthy ecosystem (maybe)! Squeezing my synapses even more tightly together, I seem to recall there was only the one LCD screen – in 1943 – albeit with the original bezel still in place, so it didn’t look quite as awful as it might have done. And as far as I’m concerned that’s not just a good thing, it’s essential for the proper arcade experience.

The new Bip Bip Bar at Fælledvej 7, Copenhagen (Google Maps).

Now, the more observant among you may be wondering at the laboured use of the past tense in my ramblings so far. Yeah, well, it’s deliberate. But not beacause of any stylistic pretensions. The thing is, when I was checking the address for this place, to find a better picture of the outside, I discovered that it’s moved!

A few years after my visit, it seems that Bip Bip relocated to a larger and airer venue just up the road at Fælledvej 7. They’ve kept most of the old games, but expanded and improved their collection, especially on the pinball front, and the selection of old computer systems on display and available for play. They’re no longer stuck with the same old Pong (Tee hee hee!). You can now get down and dirty with a C64 while your pint of Tuborg watches!

When I went to the old venue, I’m pretty sure it was pay-per-play. Now you have a choice. You can still choose to pay-per-play, for the reasonable price of DKK 5 a game (about 60p). Or you can opt to pay by the hour for freeplay. Details of their current gameslist, bar menu, and session charges can be found on their fancy new website, here.

The Verdict?

I really enjoyed my visit to the old Bip Bip Bar on Wesselgade. It was clean, friendly, and packed with well-maintained video games from the Golden Age of arcade gaming – and beyond. From what I can see, the new venue takes things to the next level. Literally. The games are now upstairs instead of in the basement! Would I go back to the reboot if I’m ever back in Copenhagen? Having seen the selection of games on offer, and the very resonable prices they’re charing, abso-flippin-tively.

Thanks for reading!

Next up: ‘Auld Reekie’ – that’s Edinburgh, folks!

Arcade time, sir? Capital idea! Reykjavík: Freddi

Published on 17th September 202318th September 2023 by ArcadeOdysseus3 Comments

You know how sometimes you wait hours and hours for a bus to come, and none do. Then, all of a sudden, and without warning, three turn up at once? Well, sometimes that’s the way with arcades.

Due to a happy conflation of circumstances, I recently found myself en route to Reykjavík in Iceland. My point of departure was Glasgow airport. While Glasgow has a lot to recommend it, I’m not convinced that the airport is one of those things. For some reason, the queue for security is funnelled through a long and narrow channel that always seems to slow things down to a standstill. Forewarned is nevertheless forearmed (not back-handed). In anticipation of the inevitable delay, I arrived with what I though was time to spare. But when I finally got through the x-ray machine, there were only minutes to wait until the gate opened.

And it was only then that I noticed this – Glarcade, a shiney new video arcade!

OK, so it’s small, it only has modern games, and the actual video games are all racers. But given my discovery at Belfast airport (as reported in my previous blogpost), it’ seems to be following’s mere existence seems to point to a trend. Could it be, that in arcade terms, the airports of the 2020s are channelling the spirit of the motorway service stations of the 1980s?

I thought the Zoltar machine was a particularly nice touch. Yes, it’s a figment of nostalgic imagination, recreating something we never actually had over here back in the day. But thanks to its appearance in the Tom Hank’s vehicle, Big, it’s something that’s become umbilically linked to that era in our time-addled collective memory. Did I get my fortune told? You bet I did!

My visit to Iceland was brief, and (once again) work-related. But I had some spare time in the evenings. As a city, Reykjavík is growing at a rate of knots – as are most of the towns along the airport corridor. Where once were open meadows and lichen-covered hraun (solidified lava) are now swathes of glass and steel. But that’s not all bad. More and more of the old industrial zones are being swept out to the east, and replaced with rows of swanky new apartment blocks, shops, and eye-popping monuments to statement architecture. One especially stunning example of this phenomenon is Harpa, a space-age concert hall of impeccable design credentials. Going in for a look is like walking onto the set of a sci-fi movie. If you get the chance to visit, you really need to check it out.

Hoi car nerds! Get away from my ride!!!

Then there’s the prospect of seeing the Northern Lights. The aurora borealis is usually a winter thing, most commonly encountered on the cold, clear nights after Christmas. This year, however, they appeared in the middle of September. I almost missed them myself. Had it not been for the bunch of random people standing outside the door of my hotel and looking up at the sky as I was about to go back in, I wouldn’t have known they were out.

Who ya gonna call?

For us video-game enthusiasts, the sight of those shimmering bands of lights in the night sky can be likened to a tech demo on a cosmic CRT. It’s breath-taking in more ways than one (see hear (sic)!). Could we be so bold as to describe them as ‘GOD’S ARCADE MACHINE’ ?!?!?! And if so, is the Almighty playing Raiden 2 ?!?!?!

But what about the kind of arcade games that we mere mortals are permitted to enjoy?

One for the video-game nerds (I mean, ‘enthusiasts’!). If you know, you know. Baldursgata, Rekjavík, Iceland, 2023.

Freddi, Austurstræti 20

The last time I was up this way was in February 2016. One of the distractions I enjoyed back then was a small city-centre joint called Freddi.

From what I understand, Freddi was the name of an Icelandic arcade Mecca back in the 1980s and 90s. At its peak, it is said to have had around 40 cabs! That’s not small. Although the rise of home consoles forced the owners out of business in the mid 90s, the flame was never completely extinguished. Some 20 years later, the concept was revived in the much smaller unit at Ingólfsstræti 2. It was this 2-storey re-incarnation that I stumbled into in 2016.

Inside of Freddi at Ingólfsstræti 2, taken from in front of the desk. Not my photo (c. late 2010s).

Downstairs at Ingólfsstræti were four pins and about twice as many video-games – some (kindof) dedicated, and at least one fitted with a Pandoras-box-type multi-game PCB. In those days, the machines were pay-to-play. There seemed to be quite a good mix of genres for the space, with most of the machines being in reasonably good condition. Barring the expected, and noticeable screen-tearing on the Pandoras-box-powered machine, they were all fully functional too. From memory, I don’t think that more than a couple of them were fitted with LCDs.

Upstairs, was a seating area with some 14″ CRT TVs hooked up to various consoles. You paid to hang out there, but could bring your takeaway in with you if you were that way inclined. The main attraction was an N64. While it certainly seemed to appeal to the regulars, I’m sorry to say that it’s not a system I can get particularly excited about.

Fast-forward to 2023, and that version of Freddi has disappeared. But the business itself has survived like an alien larva, re-seeding itself into a series of new hosts. This thing is resiliant!

First it moved to the converted public ‘convenience’ known as Núllið, ‘The Zero’, at Bankastræti 0. Then, by the time I returned, it had relocated to the back rooms of the rowdy rock-bar at Austurstræti 20. The bar itself is called Lemmy. That’s right – it’s named in homage to the hard-drinking, heavy-smoking, mustachioed frontman of speed-metal (!) pioneers Mötorhead, Mr Ian Fraser Kilmister, otherwise known as ‘Lemmy’ .

As a bar, Lemmy is great. In many ways, it’s like a throwback to student pubs of old. Occupying one of the city centre’s oldest buildings, it offers burgers, hotdogs and strong lagers to a backing track of classic rock music – except in the evenings, when the music is often live. Be warned, however. Later on in the week, the bands tend to be of the growly/shouty-variety favoured by the young people of today. If, like me, you’re more into the kind of anthems you can sing along to when ‘refreshed’ (you know, stuff by Bon Jobby, Guns’n’Roses, or even good old-fashioned 80s pop standards), you’re probably better off at the Old Bookshop bar up on Laugurvegur.

Now that’s a chunky burger, and the stack of waffle fries that came with it was a challenge-and-a-half. But look at that beer. Even Iceland hasn’t escaped the annoyance of ‘shrinkflation’. The locals I spoke to were more than a wee bit irked by this. Apparently, while many pubs have cut their measures from 500 ml to 400 ml, they haven’t changed the price, or the size of the glasses they use!

But what about the promised arcade and toy museum? What about Freddi? When I checked things out on the web, it suggested you payed by the hour to enjoy the games. The reasons for that seem to be a matter of practicality as opposed to the usual economic argument we hear elsewhere. In Iceland, while they do still have banknotes and coins, hardly anyone uses them for anything. Ever. And this isn’t a recent development. When I lived there 20 years ago, most folks paid for their apres pub hotdog with a credit card!

Anyway, back to the present. When I finally made it down to Austurstræti, the toy museum part of Lemmy’s Freddi dimension seemed to be shut. The arcade part of the arrangement, on the other hand, was mostly located in a room off the tented-garden area out the back. Apart from two or three casualties, it was all switched on and operational.

As you can see from the pictures, the selection of games looks pretty similar to those on offer seven-and-a-half years ago. For sure, they look promising enough from a distance. But get a bit closer and you’ll see that the intervening years haven’t been all that kind. The ‘Spacies’ have mostly had their CRTs replaced with LCDs. Realistically, I imagine that getting hold of spare tubes in Iceland is a pain in the pungur (!), so I can see why they’ve done it. The casual, or younger gamer – ie. everyone under 30 – probably wouldn’t notice or care. But when you play arcade games on CRTs at home, it does kind of take the shine off. Also, regardless of what the livery on each cab suggests, they’ve mostly been fitted with fighter games. Once again, I appreciate that’s a relatively minor issue, and that loads of folks out there love their arcade fighters. As a genre, it’s not really one that calls out to me. But that’s obviously a matter of personal taste.

Like an organism expanding out from the point of infection, the machines spill out into the rest of the building, which I think is a nice effect. There’s even an authentic Ms Pac Man cabaret in the bar itself – the shiney lure to guide you onto the hook and reel you in to the arcade proper. Now as you may, or may not know, I’m a big fan of platformers, action games and shmups. I think we can all agree that Rygar, Raiden and Robotron 2084 are three of main contenders for the title of ‘best arcade game ever’. From that perspective, and from what I could see on display, I didn’t feel there was enough there to keep me interested for the evening. So, with a certain amount of melancholy, I finished my burger, and headed over to Harpa. Back in August, I’d enjoyed my games on Timber as part of 10 Pence Arcade’s hi-score challenge. So what better way to end the evening, than listening to a bit of Freddy Choppin’ and his pal, Bobby Shoe, on the old pianoforte.

The verdict?

I enjoyed the ambience in Lemmy itself, and would probably have sunk an hour into a few of the games – most likely the pins – if I’d been in town for longer. I have to say, though, that if you only have limited time available, there are plenty of more attractive ways to spend it. Is that unkind? Perhaps I’m being too hasty here? Maybe I missed some of the machines? Could it be that the cream of the crop was being kept safe in the toy museum? If it hadn’t been for the lure of the concert hall, I’d probably have investigated further…

Have you been to Freddi? Can you add to the picture. If so, please share in the comments below.

Thanks for reading.

Next up – Copenhagen.

Arcade time, sir? Capital idea! Dublin: Token Barcade

Published on 16th September 202316th September 2023 by ArcadeOdysseus1 Comment

I’ve usually got enough going on at home to keep me busy. And that’s just with the family, and household maintenance. If you’ve been following my spam on Twitter recently, you’ll know I’ve spent more of this summer nostrils-deep in gloss paint than I care to admit. But when I get the chance, I do like to go on a bit of an adventure.

Custom-mix Palantir Gloss (R). As you stare into its endless beauty, the whisp of swirling clouds drags your mind into the horrific abyss of its embedded specs of dust.

Belfast: Base Arcade

When opportunity came knocking to fly me over to Belfast in August, I jumped at the chance. I’d been to Norn Irn before, and wiled away the minutes seeking out the dying embers of the arcade scene in Portstewart and Portrush. But this was different. Things are still happening in Belfast.

Soaring into the late-summer sunshine in central Scotland.

The only place in NW Europe more rainy than Scotland, Northern Ireland.

*The Irish have always been good at weaving baskets. This one looks like a chair. In olden times, they used the same skills to make boats!*

OK, so it was a work thing, but if the stars aligned, I figured I could also squeeze-in a trip to Base Arcade, the new pop-up venue on Donegall Quay. Having followed its inception and early development on the interwebz, I could see it was a place that I really needed to visit.

Base Arcade, Belfast (from their FaceBook page, September 2023)

What I hadn’t realised was that the pop-up dimension to Base Arcade is currently balanced out by an even longer pop-down dimension. Basically, they’re only open to the public on random Saturdays every month or so. And while that would – serendipitously – include the Saturday I was actually going to be in Belfast, my schedule for that day was fully-booked. So, I couldn’t go. Sad times indeed.

Now, obviously, having emotionally invested in the prospect of some arcade action (!), I wasn’t going to give up that easily. With only limited free time on my trip, it meant I’d have to be nimble. After some intensive Googling, and quantum-level logistics, I worked out that I could get down to Dublin and back on the train with change to spare. Not in the cash-money sense, unfortunately. Dublin is notoriously expensive! I’m talking about time, folks, which is – on occasion – even more precious…

Blackpool

Dublin is the Blackpool of Ireland. Not because it builds on the same kind of seaside recreation roots as Blackpool in Lancashire. Not even because it hosts a branch of Andy Palmer’s Arcade Club empire – such as we now find in Bury, Leeds and…. erm, Blackpool. Because it doesn’t! No, my friends. ‘Blackpool’ is what Dublin means in Irish!

This Blackpool is a big, busy and booming city. A city on the rise. As Ireland’s capital, it’s also the custodian of a rich and varied cultural heritage, which includes Viking settlements, epoch-defining authors, and, of course, the delectable self-levelling, boozaholic indulgence that is Guinness. While it’s a deceptively smooth tipple, I find it fills me up in a way that puts a handy brake on the old inlet valve.

While I’ve been to the island of Ireland before, I’d never been to the Republic, never mind Dublin’s fair city. So with the steely determination to eke as much out of my visit as I could, I made sure my day was packed to the gunwales.

On disembarking from the Enterprise, my first stop was the National Museum of Ireland, overflowing as it was with Ireland’s cultural (and actual) treasures – including heaps (I mean carefully curated and contextualised displays) of Bronze Age gold, Iron Age bog bodies, Viking Age tools and weapons, and more besides. It’s free to get in, and the kind of place I could probably spend the whole day – if I hadn’t had other stuff to do.

Staggering out again into the sunlight (by which I mean light drizzle), there was the Georgian architecture, the waterways, the parks, and the statues to enjoy – from Molly Malone, the fictional purveyor of cockles and mussels, to Oscar Wilde.

If you’ve yet to visit yourself, and you do get the chance, I’d recommend the Viking Splash Tour. OK, so it’s a glorified bus tour of the city centre. But you get to ride, over firmament and foam (sortof) in a genuine, second-world-war amphibious transport vehicle. Better still, the driver and tour-guide, Vinnie, was nuts. You could say he was a grade-A craic dealer!

Just around the corner from the bus-stop were the hallowed halls of Trinity College – with their magnificent wood-panelled library, and stunning Book of Kells exhibition, both of which I’ve wanted to see for a quite a while. Entrance to the latter wasn’t cheap, but I’d recommend it. As an aside, if you’re looking for a film to watch which ties in the Book of Kells with medieval Ireland and the Vikings, I’d also recommend Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey’s beautifully-stylised animation, The Secret of Kells. It’s well-worth a watch.

But, you know, as much as I enjoyed all of that, it was probably more than enough cultural tourism for one day! So, to let the experiences settle, I took some time out to enjoy a Guinness or two in Temple Bar, and Fishamble Street.

Then I had to eat. And where better to do that than the Token barcade. In fact, with Token sitting rather conveniently adjacent to the red tram line, a mere 15 minutes’ ride from Connolly Station and my train back north, I was more or less obliged to drop in.

Token Barcade, Smithfield, Dublin 7.

My first impressions were very positive.

The venue was spacious, well laid out, and clean. The staff were friendly and helpful. There’s a well stocked bar, some top end pub-grub, and then – of course – the arcade machines.

Unlike quite a few modern arcades, there’s no fee to get in. But that has its pros and its cons. While I was able to rock on up off the street and sit down to a meal, that was during off-peak hours. By the time I left, the place was absolutely packed. So, if you do plan to go there to eat, you should probably book in advance.

The games themselves are pay-per-play. Not with coins, but tokens. These are sold at the concierge desk by the door, with price-breaks and meal deals available for larger purchases. I only needed a few – partly, because I didn’t have much time, but also because of my ‘mad skillz’. I couldn’t afford to be over-scoring on the spacies and missing my train back. I may only have bought 7 tokens, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that even this paltry bounty came in a fetching commemorative pouch.

And the games?

Ireland played an important part in the history of the Eurpoean arcade scene. Atari’s Tipperary facility was responsible for producing a few of the Golden Age heavy-hitters we enjoyed bitd. Ireland itself was awash with cabinets, not just in the early days, but into the JAMMA period and beyond – as can be seen from the ma-hoo-sive haul of dedicated cabs and Electrocoin Goliath machines in the transmarine ‘Arcade Raid‘ reported by Tony Temple in 2020. Darren Doyle gives us a flavour of the arcade scene in 1980s-Dublin in his epic Coin-Op: The Arcde Guide. In a way that will be familiar to many of us, it seems to have been both alluring and edgy. But as with just about everywhere else, these legendary arcades of yesteryear are now long-gone.

As for Token, well, Token isn’t so much an arcade as a bar-cade. And there’s nothing wrong with that. To temper expectations, though, it’s clear from the average age of the clientelle that the target market isn’t middle-aged ‘video games enthusiasts’.

There were plenty of cabs. And most of them were in very good condition. As we’ve come to expect, however the selection of games was geared towards the casual pub-goer, with the majority being fighters, shooters or drivers – none of which are really my thing. There were a few classics, eg. Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Pac Man, and Bubble Bobble. But with the usual LCD ‘upgrades’ on most, I wasn’t that tempted to play.

By far the most interesting proposition from my perspective was down in the basement. Not so much in terms of video games, although there were one or two, but if pinball is your bag, man, this place is a goldmine (see what I did there?)!

Look at that lineup! Medieval Madness, The Simpsons: Hit and Run, The Adams Family, the list goes on! Ossum sos, indeed, boss. I didn’t get the chance to play them all, but the ones I did have a go on seemed to be very well maintained. The flippers were tight and responsive. The lights and toys were all present, correct and working. And the atmosphere was appropriate! If I had one minor critique – as an aging Arcadian – I’d suggest that this basement room was possibly just a touch too atmospheric. While it was dim enough to look great, it was also perhaps just a little bit too dim to see the playfields as well as I would have liked. A touch more ambient light, and it would have been near enough perfect.

The Verdict?

If you’re in Dublin, and you like burgers, and/or pinball, you should definitely give Token a whirl. If you’re not so keen on those things, but have certain tastes in antique video games, you might want to drop in for a go on them? Have a look at the photos and see what you think.

And finally…

This post was mostly about Dublin. But I flew back from Belfast International Airport. ‘And why is that in any way interesting’, I hear you ask? Well, because it’s got its own video arcade, that’s why!!! Granted, the machines are all modern, but it would have been a great way to kill the time if your flight was delayed – as many people seemed to be doing. In fact, it was so full of families, I was only able to take the one photo. It seems, moreover to be part of a trend – a topic to which we’ll return in the next post in this series…

Thanks for reading!

An Arcade Ecosystem – Part 3 (Glasgow)

Published on 15th August 202328th December 2023 by ArcadeOdysseus6 Comments

Amusement arade beside the old Cannon Grand cinema on Jamaica St., Glasgow: 1990s, 2023, 1980s.

Recap…

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I led an exciting double life: lanky teenager by day, arcade commando by Thursday afternoon and Saturday morning! Those were exciting times.

Like the times themselves the venues and the towns where I honed my arts were constantly changing.

In Part 1 of this series, we explored how an early arcade scene evolved in the sleepy Scottish town of Kilsyth. If you were to rely on the witness of the now defunct local newspaper, The Kilsyth Chronicle, you’d imagine that not much had happened there at all – apart from the mass evasion of television licenses. But I was there, and I know. Those of us young enough to embrace the joy of that brave new world were surfing the crest of the video-games revolution!!!

In Part 2, we followed my journey eastward, using archive photos from back-in-the-day to revisit the neighbouring towns of Falkirk and Stirling and the sites of their Golden-Age arcades. The arcades may be long gone, but the buildings are still there, oozing memories and melancholy.

Fair warning for this final part of the series! You’d better grab the handrail and hold on tight. ‘Coz in a moment, I’ll be pulling a reckless handrake turn and screeching off to the west. The ‘wild West’. Armed with no more than some ancient phone-books, a selection of old photos from the internet and my own trusty digital camera, we’ll revisit the arcade scene – as I knew it – in Scotland’s largest city, Glasgow.

But first, some context…

Glasgow / Glesga (pron. Glez-ga)

When I was growing up, Glasgow was the looming metropolis. From our house on the hill, you could see its tower blocks gleaming on the horizon, like a distant island on the other side of a sea of fields. In reality it wasn’t that far away – only about 12 miles. But the feeling among the grown-ups was that it was just too big, too busy and too expensive to bother with outside special occassions.

Sometimes that meant a trip to the pictures – a rare treat.

Sadly, the old cinemas were repurposed many years ago, with the city centre now served by a giant, vertical kinemathek. I’ve yet to go there. Nossir, it was the Irish Cinema on Renfield Street where I was taken to see heavy-hitters like Star Wars (woot!), Ghostbusters (yay!), The Philedelphia Experiment (err…) and Disney’s Snow White (aw). The other big one was the ABC at the top of Sauchiehall Street, where I saw Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khaaaaaaaan, as well as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and a bunch of others.

I loved the movies, but they weren’t something you could just rock on up to and enjoy. Oh no. The powers that be made you wait. I’ll never forget the tedium of the endless, and pointless, queues for blockbuster movies (yes, that’s how we spell it kids, not ‘cues’ and never ‘lines’). In the Age before online booking-systems, the queues were kindof inevitable. But they were also at least partly engineered for the hype – although it could be argued with some justification that this approach backfired. And then there was the smoking. As my attention span broke, and my tiny mind started to wander, I’d look upwards and stare at the rays of lights that danced and flickered through the rising smoke to the silver screen. Then cough.

More often than not, our trips to Glasgow were triggered by the need for particular household goods or fancy clothes. That usually meant trailing round one department store or another. Of course, whenever possible, us kids would do the best we could to sit by the door and wait – usually with the goal of working up enough ecourage to run the wrong way down an escalator. I’m sorry to report that this goal was seldom achieved. Folks in those days were generally less tolerant of mild-mannered japes, and the suspiscous glowering of passers-by usually kept us in check.

As we got bigger, the reigns were gradually loosened. By the mid-80s, I took every opportunity to dash off and browse the computer magazines in one of the two enormous John Menzies, or peruse the selection of video games in the two branches of Boots the Chemist – just like I’d been doing in the market towns of the East. From 1985, my searches were broadened to include 2000 AD comics, Citadel miniatures, and other role-playing kit. The problem with this was that Glasgow was a wonderland of retail opportunities. So, it wasn’t often that I felt I’d had enough time!

Yipp, if you wanted to peruse, inspect or buy something, some shop, somewhere in Glasgow had it. One of the big advantages of the city was the availability of multiple branches of multiple shops. What we tend to forget these days is that no one outlet carried the full range of stock. Sometimes there might have been exclusives to certain companies or certain branches. More likely, however, indiviudal items might be sold out. Being able to check for something across a range of shops drastically reduced the chances of disappointment.

Perhaps surprisingly for such a big city, that’s no longer the case. What was once a bustling centre of commerce, with umpteen shopping centres, department stores and marketplaces, has been reduced to swathe of pound-shops, vape stores, and mobile-phone-repair centres. To an extent, that’s symptomatic of the modern age everywhere. If the rise of the out-of-town retail park was the death knell for many cities and larger towns, the convenience of internet shopping has hammered the nails into their respective coffins.

Notable losses to Glasgow include BHS, C&A, The House of Frazer, and the Goldbergs department store on Candleriggs – now closed and demolished, but still famous in my mind as a landmark for finding the Dragon and George hobby shop across the street. Then there was John Lewis, later Debenhams, where a huge chunk of the top floor was once sequestered by the mighty Silica Computers. Remember them?

Silica was a relatively late addition to the home computer scene in Glasgow, and was still there when I left the area in 1995. It was here, after one particularly long summer of flipping burgers, that I went to buy a 2-meg RAM expansion board for my Amiga 1200, bringing the total memory up to an eye-watering 4096K!!!! Only a decade earlier, I’d been chuffed to bits (see what I did there?), to get a 32K RAM-pack for my 16K ZX Spectrum, rocketing the total up to the queasy heights of 48K! Sigh. It’s a shame it wobbled out the back 30 months later in a machine-bricking kamikaze manoeuver. Or maybe not. But that’s a story for another blogpost.

The shells of other once-familiar haunts are still there, but their spirits have well and truly departed. The buildings might still house shops that still sell ‘things’, but they’re just not the same. Gone is Boots on Union Street, HMV and Burger King on Sauchiehall Street, and Woolworths on Argyll Street.

The old Woolworths building on Argyle St. Above, former Boots (Union St / Argyle St), and HMV and Burger King (both Sauchiehall St).

In many places, the process of urban renewal and regeneration has stalled, leaving a growing number of prominent scars. For me, the saddest of these is probably Tower Records – a site that was once so buzzing, it allured best-selling artists like John Bon Jobbie to perform ‘impomptu’ sessions out its first floor windows. As you can see from the photos below, it’s now derelict.

Bon Jovi performs in Tower Records, Glasgow, 14th June, 1995. Look at him hingin oot that windae!

The one saving grace is CEX, which squats in part of the old Virgin Mega Store building on Union Street. At least you can still try to look for proper games there. Back in the second half of the 1980s, the Megastore was a cornucopia of good stuff. Whether it was music, new or old, home-computer software, role-playing kit (skull-dice anyone?), graphic novels, or t-shirts, Virgin was packed to the gunwhales with just about everything you thought you wanted, and plenty of other stuff you hadn’t realised how much you needed! I got some excellent 2000 AD t-shirts there, now long-perished, and a double-sided Hysteria t-shirt, which has somehow survived to this very day – probably because I’m scared that squeazing into that holy relic will destroy it!

Branson hung around Glasgow longer than I did, with a bit of premisis shuffle seeing them move round the city centre. But none of the subsequent branches offered the same range of stuff, or the same sense of excitement as the Union Street Megastore.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous blogpost, one of the biggest losses from my childhood high-street is John Menzies – pronouncied ‘Ming-ease’ (!) – purveyor of newspapers, magazines, stationary, music and home-computer equipment. Old Mr M must have had his nose pretty close to the trend horizon – pulling the company out of the retail market completely in the 1990s, just as demand began to stall. Many of their outlets were taken over and rebranded by WHSmith – (not) pronounced ‘Whis-mth’.

As elsewhere, Menzies in Glasgow was my goto source for magazines, comics, books and software. When I say software, I have to admit that I very rarely bought any there. Unlike Boots, they almost never had any discounted tapes. But they did usually have a selection of home computers, set up on portable TVs, where you could sample their wares. That’s wares with an /s/ btw. We’ll come back to warez with a /z/ a bit later on. One particularly vivid memory is playing Jet Set Willy on the ZX Spectrum upstairs in the Sauchiehall Street branch and encountering the creepy ‘Chapel’ screen for the first time. It was also here that I nobly avoided buying a guidebook for Melbourne House’s classic adventure, The Hobbit. After a sneaky peek at its hints and tips, I decided to put it back on the shelf, go home and complete the game on my own without cheating (any more).

This branch was once one of the main anchors in the Sauchiehall Centre shopping mall. Like many other bigger businesses, the centre ran a catchy advert on STV in the 1980s. Other interesting outlets included a traditional Wimpy restaurant, where you could enjoy your miniature burger and chips on a proper china plate, and sip your undersized soft drink from a bona fide glass. But they’re all gone now, as is the Centre itself, with most of the floor space taken up by a TK Maxxxx.

As Menzies’ lights went out, those of WH Smith began to flare alarmingly. In Glasgow, the crossover period was accompanied by a weird example of retail-musical-chairs. By the late 1980s the flagship branches of Menzies and Whismth faced off against each other across Argyll Street. This was total market saturation. And something clearly had to give. From what I remember Smiths blinked first, cut their losses and ran. But this seems to have tempted Menzies to relocate across the road to Smith’s now vacant premesis – presumably to downsize and pay less rent – only for that same store to then get rebranded as WHSmith when Menzies itself shut up shop! Melon-twisting, no?

The Video Arcades

But what about the video arcades, I hear you ask?

Don’t worry, we’re coming to that bit #rn.

Buchanan Street Bus Station main entrance, June 2023. NB: There was no Greggs or Whismth in the 1980s.

In the autumn of 1987, I was 15. As you can read here, I was already striking out to the East on the Midland-Bluebird bus services. Number 27 took you from Kilsyth to Falkirk, and Number 14 from Kilsyth to Stirling, or all the way to Dunfermline if you were styoopit enough to fall asleep on it (not me!) But here’s the thing – both buses also linked Kilsyth with Buchanan Street Bus Station in Glasgow!!!! Before this point, there had never been a lack of means of getting to Glasgow, the problem had been getting permission to go. My parents were understandably reluctant let me loose in the big smoke until they were confident I wouldn’t get lost, or murdered. But that hadn’t been such a huge frustration. It wasn’t really until about then that I was old enough and ugly enough to sidle over some of the seemingly arbitrary age hurdles that most arcades put on entry. In some of them it would be 12, others 14. But if the venue was mainly fruit machines it might be 16, or even 18.

Let’s have another look at that map:

As you can see from the numbered blobs, my teenage shopping experience in Glasgow ploughed an extended z-shaped furrow, with Sauchiehall Street (pron. ‘Sucky-hall’) at the top, and Argyle Street at the bottom. The main connecting route was down Buchanan Street (pron. ‘Buh-canan’, not ‘bew-canon’), which is and was considered the city’s main commercial thoroughfare. While Buchanan Street was lined with shops, including the tedious House of Fraser department Store, there wasn’t much there to hold my attention… until one day, on heading back up to the bus station, I passed the old George Hotel.

Enterprise (Mk 1) – 243 Buchanan Street

Until the early 1990s, the layout of the top end of Buchanan Street was very different to how it is now. There was no Royal Concert Hall, or Buchanan Galleries shopping centre to contend with.

Top end of Buchanan Street c. 1971-5 (web). You can see the eastern corner of the George Hotel as it twists round from Sauchiehall St to Buchanan St. The Enterprise arcade would have been in the bit you can’t see 😦

Near the point where Buchanan Street crossed Sauchiehall Street was the old George Hotel, which stretched from 235-245 Buchanan Street. Originally opened in 1892, the George had been famous for its high quality rooms, fare and facilities – all of which were on offer for ‘moderate’ prices. I think it’s fair to say that in the late 1980s, its glory days were well behind it. To the left of the main entrance was a pub, The Dragon Bar, more or less where the giant ‘B’ is in the recent photo below. You can see it boarded up in some of the other images taken not long before its final demise.

Between these two doors was another entrance, which you can see in a couple of the images above. As I recall (maybe incorrectly!) this led down some stairs to a short corridor. Down to the left from here was a small snooker hall – a legacy, no doubt, of the hotel’s halycon era. Up a small flight of stairs to the right, was the Enterprise arcade. Without better photos, it would be hard to verify. But sadly we can’t go back and check. The George burnt down under mysterious circumstances in the late 1990s, with the ground floor of the facade then re-modelled out of existence.

The old Enterprise was a brilliant arcade. The main room always had the latest machines. It was here that I first saw R-Type, in June 1988. Even although it was brand new, I watched a guy play it who was clearly already an expert. He knew the ‘strategy’ for the end-of-level 2 baddie, where you hide in the bottom left-hand-side of the screen and shoot away, impervious to damage, until the level ends. Other interesting cabinets included Xenophobe, Super Punch Out, and the self-consciously over-the-top, 1950s-B-movies-inspired, Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters.

It was also here where I first played 1943, Shinobi, Golden Axe, Dragon Breed, Dragon Ninja, Combat School, Toobin‘ and so many others, I can’t remember them all.

At the back of the main room and to the left was a stair down to another level. Just as you came out of the stairwell, was a small alcove that always housed a couple of games. I played Mr Heli down there, the only time I saw it in the wild, as well as the 2-player rotary shooter, Time Soldiers. At one point, they also had an original Street Fighter cab, with the massive pressure-sensitive buttons for kick and punch. You had to whack them as hard as you could for maximum effect – meaning the machine was soon wrecked by over-enthusiastic teenagers and taken off the floor.

Through from this area was a small pool hall. From the back of that room, you could nip through to the the snooker room, and then back out the door. However, the smoke was so thick down there and the atmoshere so intimidating, I only went all the way round once or twice.

Enterprise (Mk 2)

Just how much longer this den of pixelated delights stayed in business has become a bit fuzzy in my memory. I think it was still there in the very early 1990s. But by then, I rarely got the chance to go. I was at university through the week and working at the weekend, with little scope to venture in to the city arcades. What I do remember is that with the completion of the Royal Concert Hall, the wheels of progress went into overdrive, and the top part of Buchanan Street was pretty much demolished and rebuilt. Among the victims was the old Enterprise arcade. But amazingly the business itself didn’t disappear. Instead, it relocated to a refurbished building about 50m down the hill. The new arcade was down a steep flight of stairs, accessed from the street by taking a sharp turn to the left. Although the venue was newer, and cleaner (!) it was notably smaller. It still had some up-to-date games. I seem to remember they had King of Dragons, and a bunch of vertical shooters. I’d go down there very occasionally to play Varth. Sadly, neither the selection of games nor the atmosphere matched up to the original venue, so I stopped going.

Having relocated myself in 1995, I can’t say for certain when the Enterpise Mk 2 finally disappeared. By 2013, however, this part of the street had been re-modelled yet again as part of the new ‘Buchanan Quarter’ shopping experience. All traces of the Enterprise Mk 2 were swept away.

Treasure Island (/Morris Amusements) – 20 Jamaica Street

For 30 or more years, the SW corner of Argyle Street and Jamaica Street has been home to a large McDonalds ‘hamburger restaurant’. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, McDonald’s neighbour to the west (on Argyle Street) was Tower Records. Its neighbour to the south, however, was the slightly less alluring Cannon Grand cinema.

While the venue and its name are enjoying something of a renaissance in local cultural circles, I find this reinvention of the past rather amusing. You see, back in the 1980s, the XXXs emblazoned across its advertising boards suggested it was almost exclusively used to screen soft-core porn movies! Hardly the pinnacle of refined entertainment! At the time, this was a wee bit inconvenient, because housed in the same building was a very promising-looking amusement arcade. Thanks to its seedy neighbour, and the potential embarrasment of getting spotted there, I don’t think I went in until 1990. It was the first place I saw Eugine Jarvis’ anti-drugs classic Narc. I must have spent a good hour on it with some friends, and at least a fiver on credits before the bus home beckoned.

Surpisingly, that arcade is still there today. While it’s been known for many years as Treasure Island, that wasn’t always the case. In the late 1990s, it seems to have been called Las Vegas. A decade earlier, the only legible part of the sign said ‘Amusements’ – which wasn’t uncommon, and what I seem to remember from the before times. I popped in for a quick look-see earlier this year (2023), and was surprised to see how much smaller it was than I remembered. Like most other arcades these days, the only ‘amusements’ on offer were the gambling machines.

(Argyle Street) Amusements

Beyond the old Tower Records building, Argyle Street continues under Central Station, through the tunnel known traditionally as ‘The Heilanman’s umbrella’. In years gone by, this is where poor migrants from the Highlands and Islands would congregate on their evenings off to shelter from the Glasgow rain, meet like-minded souls, and head off on their metropolitan adventures. By the 1980s, this part of the street had a bit of a grubby vibe. There was an amusement arcade on its north side for many years – I think where the green-fronted units were in the photograph above – but I never went in back-in-the-day. I can’t remember now if that’s because it looked too rough, if it was over-18s-only, or both.

Kent Street Arcade – 16 Stevenson Street

A similar story can be told about the Kent Street Arcade beside the (in-)famous Barras market. I discovered this by accident one day while visiting the Barras. My memory is that it was just way too busy to navigate. It was also rough enough that we didn’t fancy hanging around to claim our turn on the machines in case the other punters got bored waiting and decided to try their hands at a bit of live-action Street Fighter 2.

The Barras

We can’t talk about video-games in Glasgow in the 1980s and 1990s without mentioning The Barras. The Barras (Glaswegian for ‘barrows’) is famous for two things – the Barrowlands ballroom and concert hall, which has hosted and continues to host some pretty big bands. I’ve seen a few there myself, including Megadeth and Morrissey – but not Maiden, who’re obviously a bit too big. Then there’s the market beside it.

This ramshackle collection of indoor and outdoor stalls has occupied roughly the same place for a hundred years. And until about 20 years ago, nothing had been replaced or repaired. When I started going in the late 1980s, you could stand and watch the frantic theatrics at the butchers’ stalls, while enjoying the backing track of ‘three perr fir a pound’-sock-merchants and fag-sellers. Then you would disappear into one of the old ‘structures’, which put me in mind of Fagin’s lair in Carol Reed’s 1986 film adaptation of Oliver! In normal circumstances, that probably wouldn’t have been a very good idea. But that, my friends, is where you got your ‘warez’.

Yes, the Barras were a veritable hive of counterfeit activity. I remember hearing at the time that it was the biggest single source of copied computer software in Europe. But that revelation wasn’t exactly bad for business. At any one point there would be at least three stalls selling Amiga games. The tarrif seemed to start at £3 a disk and then gradually sink to £2 or sometimes less if you bought a load at once. Initially, stall-holders were super careful. The only things on display would be the lists, sometimes folders full of lists, of the available software – with runners used to fetch the warez when orders were placed. And once the transaction was complete, folks weren’t encouraged to hang about – not that you’d want to lest you be implicated in the event of a raid. But before long, things got pretty brazen. The stalls began sporting colour TVs and Amigas, which were set up to demonstrate the latest cracks, advise on the best games, and make copies on demand. Small crowds would gather to enjoy the show and spend their money. Those stall-holders must have made an absolute fortune.

Of course there were police raids on the Barras, when tonnes of gear was confiscated. And that must have stung. Imagine losing your telly and your Amiga? That’s a couple of grand down the pan when grossed up for inflation. But the rewards were such that business was usually back to normal within a week or two at most two.

My favourite stalls were in a building called the ‘Upstairs Market’. I’m pretty sure it was demolished about 20 years back, along with a fair few of the other ‘quainter’ structures. Probably just as well. It was only a matter of time before they collapsed or went up in a lethal inferno. Still, the atmosphere was electric. I doubt there’ll be anything like it again. Well, not until we move Beyond Thunderdome…

The Barras weren’t the only place in the city centre where you could get copied software. There was a smaller, and much more civilised indoor market down past Marks & Spencers on Argyle Street. I can’t remember what it was called now. If you can fill in the blanks, please let me know in the comments below.

Student Unions

In 1990, two things happened. I started working (a lot) in Glasgow ‘restaurants’ for the princely sum of £2.28 an hour! For the first year or two of that, it was common to get paid weekly on a Friday afternoon, with the cash – in the form of banknotes and small change – stuffed into a small brown-paper envelope. That was fine by me. It was fine for me. For some of the other kids I worked with, though, maybe not so much. A few would come in for their pay-packet, and then head straight back out to some non-video arcade, to sink the bulk of it into the ‘puggies’ as they called them – aka fruit machines. I imagine behaviours like this were one of the influencing factors behind the switch to direct payment into our bank accounts.

In October of that year, I also began my career as a student at Glasgow University – ostensibly to study, but also to enjoy the delights of the student unions. The first union I joined was Glasgow University Union, the old ‘Men’s Union’ – so-called because until 1979 (so, not that long beforehand) only male students were allowed to become members! Of course, it had a fantastic range of bars and other facilities, including a reasonably well-stocked arcade in the basement, in a large room beside the Beer Bar. There must have been about a dozen machines in there at any given time. The ones that stick out in my mind are a sit-down version of Hard Drivin’, which I’ve never seen since, Pang, and King of Dragons. But it was also here that I had my first encounter with the epic vertically scrolling shoot-em-up, Raiden. Now there’s a game. Solid graphics, fluid movement, convincing physics and reponsive controls. I loved it. I still do. While I didn’t realise it at the time, it gave off a bit of a retro vibe, being inspired, as it is, by Taito’s ground-breaking shooter Twin Cobra.

Way up in the attic was a proper snooker hall, with a bar and quite a few full-sized tables. You had to book though, and it tended to be busy, so I didn’t visit very often. On the first floor was a smaller pool hall and bar, which was a lot more accessible. It also housed a video game or two. But the only one that sticks out in my mind is Tetris.

From 1991, I alternated annual membership with the University’s other student union, the QM – The Queen Margaret University Union – aka the Women’s Union. This had a slightly more bohemain atmosphere, with better music, and a better disco, but only a handful of arcade machines. At any given time there were never more than 4 or 5, but it was the first place I saw Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker, and Thunderblade.

Over the following years I went on to frequent umpteen other student unions, and city centre nightclubs, but not to play video games. The only other one for me where video games were a factor was Strathclyde University Union. At one stage, I worked with a guy who was on the Committee there, who would tip me off when they were running a promo. I’ll never forget the night they did 50p pints! But SUU also had a fun, if compact, arcade room, with half a dozen or more new machines. There was a Tekken 2 at one point, a Great 1000 Mile Rally (or World Rally), and I think also a Virtua Fighter machine.

Although I left the West in 1995, I’d sometimes go back to Glasgow to catch up with friends, go to concerts, or revisit old haunts. Once, in early 1997, I took my then girlfriend, now lovely wife, for a wee tour of the Barras. As we left, I was talking about the warez that were (quite the romantic, eh?). At that precise moment, a guy who was walking past with a briefcase clearly overheard what I was saying and came over. Turns out his briefcase was full of copied Amiga games. When I wasn’t too fussed on buying any, the Guy sighed that no one else was either, and that he was thinking of getting out of the game. He offered to sell me the case and all the disks for £20 (or maybe even a tenner). But that was a lot of cash to me in those days, and I didn’t need them, so I declined.

Booths

On other occasions I’d come through for a refreshement or two. Those were the days when alcopops were all the rage, and various city centre bars would offer happy hour specials, like Bacardi Breezers for 50p a bottle!

There’s still an arcade called Booths on Renfield Street today. A ‘Booths Enterprise’ no less – suggesting a business arrangement with the one-time owners of Glasgow’s best arcade? The picture above was taken in in June 2023, but I think we may be looking at a Menzies/Whismth-type scenario here. Today, both of these arcades are fruit machines and over 18s-only. In other words, well-worth avoiding. In the late 90s, I’m pretty sure there was only one arcade at that junction. And that while it was where Noble Leisure is today, it was called ‘Booths’. In those days the arcade machines were down in the basement. Thanks to the refreshing effect of the Bacardi Breezers, however, I can’t remember what any of them were! But there must have been a few decent and recent releases, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone.

Comments?

Phew, that was a bigun, eh? Thanks for sticking with it all the way through. What do you reckon? Did I miss something out? Did I misremember? Can you add to the picture? Have you got any picures?!? If so, please feel free to share in the comments below.

An Arcade Ecosystem – Part 1 EXTRA: The Archives

Published on 16th July 202328th January 2024 by ArcadeOdysseus3 Comments

Hi Everyone,

And welcome back. Before the commercial break, we heard about the sudden appearance of a video-arcade scene in the small Scottish town of Kilsyth in the early 1980s. While the story told was based on what I could remember, I had some help from the nation’s archive materials, and a friend. This is how it all went down…

The Archives

Kilsyth’s relationship with amusement machines didn’t begin in the early 1980s.

About 10 years ago, some video-game enthusiasts mustered the support of the now defunct Jammaplus community to stage a retro-gaming event over a winter weekend in the Coachman hotel. This was very handy for me, as I could stay with my parents for the duration. On discussing it with my dad, he mentioned an earlier hostelry on the same site, which had been popular in his youth – at some point in the late 50s or early 60s. This seems to have been a ‘milk bar’. Hard as it now seems to believe, there was still a locally enforced prohibition in the town in those days. But the main reason for the ‘bar’s’ popularity was that it had pinball machines – the only place, locally, where that kind of entertainment could be found.

By the time I started frequenting the local pubs, there had been no pin-tables for years. What they did all have, however, was at least one ‘fruit machine’, something that seems to have been common since at least the 1970s. Known officially as ‘amusements with prizes’ these kinds of machines were and still are heavily regulated. To be able to operate them legally, businesses needed a licence. The general conditions had been laid out by the Gaming Act 1968, and tightened up by the Lotteries and Amusements Act 1976. However, the District Councils kept an even tighter reign on developments, through the application of strict planning conditions on the kinds of activities which could be undertaken by traders on a given premesis. This might limit the type or number of machines that could be sited, the opening hours of the venue, the minimum age of the customers and more besides.

As far as I can work out, from at least 1982, any buinesses hoping to site multiple video arcade games also needed to apply for (and be granted!) a ‘Public Entertainment License’ under the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982. While all of this sounds like tedious legalese (which it is!), the prospect of licences and applications, means the prospect of a paper trail, and with it – potentially – more information to help fill the gaps in my crumbling memory. Encouraged by this realisation, I headed off to the National Library of Scotland on George IV Bridge in Edinburgh.

To simplify the process of trawling through the records, I thought I should probably start by nailing down the names and addresses of the arcades themselves, and if possible, their owners. My first instinct was to go through the old phone directories. These were easy enough to get hold of, and what a blast from the past that was – massive chunks of printed paper that were once so familiar, that could be found in every single house in the land, that were torn in half for sport by celebrity strongmen, but which I hadn’t seen for decades. I’d also forgotten about the flimsy paper and cheap ink they used that came off all over your hands. Ten minutes in the phone book, and anyone looking at your hands would mistake you for a chimney sweep!

The best possible outcome was that I’d look up ‘Amusement arcades’ in one of the phone books, and find a ready-made list of all the locations I was interested in. In reality, of course, I knew the information they contained was never going to be complete.

The Yellow Pages, for example, had a classifications index over 20-pages long, including the promising-looking ‘Amusement parks and arcades’, and ‘Leisure centres’. But that doesn’t mean that every location that we might consider an arcade would be listed there. For one thing, securing an entry in the Yellow Pages was a business proposition with an expense, which many smaller concerns and start-ups might not have wanted to incurr. I suspect there may have been more than a few businesses for whom video-games were a side-hustle, which they didn’t want to advertise any more conspicuoulsy than through word-of-mouth, lest they fall foul of the District Council, or the taxman. In even more cases, however, the ‘spacies’ will have been a temporary or experimental aside to an established line of business, and probably not worth the bother.

I quickly found the details of several of the arcades I used to frequent in Falkirk, Stirling and Glasgow – which I’ll explore in my next post. Frustratingly, this particular angle revealed precisely none of the venues where I invested / sacrificed so many 10 pees in Kilsyth. I couldn’t even find the names of all of the business.

Central Kilsyth (OS, 2023), showing ‘points of interest’!

Based on what I’ve written above, I was expecting to find at least four:

Rennie’s the Bakers,
Shannon’s the Newsagents,
A proper, bona-fide arcade, with at least 10 video arcade games and a pool table, whose name and exact location I could not remember,
The tiny grocers known locally as ‘The Wee Shop’, run by a businesman called Harry Wilson.

Kilsyth’s three (count ’em!) Main Street Arcades in 1984…

Of these four establishments, Rennie’s was there under ‘Bakers & Confectioners – Retail’. It’s still there now, at 22 Main Street.

I also expected to find Shannon’s and Harry Wilson’s under ‘Newsagents & News Vendors’, or ‘Grocers, Supermarkets & General Stores’, but nothing, nada… although not entirely zilch. Being able to remember roughly where those locations were, I checked for the addresses. For some reason, what was Shannon’s was still listed as ‘Matear’s’!!! Big up all the grannies out there! While I found another of Harry Wilson’s groceries, he doesn’t seem to have put his name to ‘The Wee Shop’, which was apparently officially-known as ‘Highland Park Stores’.

There was no information, however, about the other arcade.

A friend suggested I try to fill the gaps by looking through back-issues of the local newspaper, The Kilsyth Chronicle. Initially, I was reluctant to do so. The last time I’d done that kind of thing, which was – admittedly – decades ago, the materials came on microfiche or microfilm, which is an absolute chore to use, and difficult to photograph. But luck, it seems, was on my side. On going back to the Library to collect my order, it turned out that they only had physical copies of the paper in stock. Woot!

Looking back through those old papers brought back so many memories. The Chronicle was another one of those things that was always there in the past. Everyone who lived in the town read it, mainly because it chased down every local crime, scandal and happening to fill its column inches. It’s also where you could buy and sell your unwanted shizz for free through it’s ‘Fifteen Pound Flyer’ section. No Facebook Marketplace in them days. It was also amusing to rediscover the immediately transparent and dare-I-say unprofessional levels of bias in how some of the issues-of-the-day were reported. But that’s a tangent for another time.

Figuring that the new arcade opened in 1984, I started with the box of newspapers from that year. Disappointingly, there was a gap from the 19th of January to the 5th of April. Miraculously, however, the next available issue, for Thursday the 12th of April, had a massive clue on the front page!!!

The arcade had been at 46-48 Main Street, and the proprietor, a Mr Francis Harvey! As you can see, Frances had gone out of his way to make his planned business acceptable to the local Community Council (basically a residents’ associastion), as well as the District Council, which presided over licencing and planning decisions. To the detriment of his own business, he was going to stay closed during the lucrative lunchtime slot. And I’m wondering now, if that’s because the Rennie’s was already doing that? In any case, the Rennies weren’t overly pleased at the prospect of further competition, and had employed local lawyer and sharp-actor, Alastair Mathie, to raise objections on their behalf. What’s really interesting about all of this, are the comments offered by Mathie on their behalf. You’ll note that he plays the ‘social and moral danger’ card – which had been very prominent in the media back then. It is also very interesting how he suggests that ‘space invader machines […] could lead youngsters on to gaming machines which in turn could lead to an addiction to gambling’. Why is this interesting? Later that year another gaming-related application was considered by the council. It has been submitted by the Rennies.

Kilsyth Chronicle, 19th December 1984, p.1. Note the typo. For Bennie, read Rennie!

You see, those sneaky bar-stools were already planning to refocus their own games room on just the kind of activity their lawyer had suggested was socially and morally dangerous. Even worse, on looking through the surviving records of Cumbernauld and Kilsyth District Council, I discovered that the Rennies had submitted their application before the meeting about Francis’ application had been held!

Someone who was justifiable irked by this was Mr Francis Harvey. While it’s not mentioned in the newspaper, the records of Cumbernauld and Kilsyth District Council show that he had submitted a formal letter of objection to the licensing committee, opposing the Rennie’s development. It seems that the Community Council had also been extremely concerned. In the end, however, the upstanding local businessman got his way! But this was to be a pyrrhic victory. By the looks of things, there weren’t enough hardcore gamblers in the town to feed his new morality vacuum. After a few months, it seems to have died a death, after which the building was sold, refurbished, and repurposed. That’ll teach him, eh?

I made several visits to the library, where I went through all the available copies of The Chronicle from 1982 to 1986. While this was tough going, it didn’t take quite as long as you might think. For a start, it was a weekly paper. There were also gaps in the collection. Significantly, however, there were rarely more than 10 or 12 pages of news in those things, only 4 or 5 of which were relevant to Kilsyth. The rest covered the outlying villages. While I didn’t find any substantive information on Kilsyth’s arcades, I was able to trace the beginning of the Rennies refurbishment of 22 Main Street to 1981 and the planning permission they were granted to undertake ‘erections, alterations and part-demolition’. What was even more interesting were the adverts.

In the world of ‘retro-gaming’, there is a persistant myth that the video-games industry, and with it the whole video-games phenomenon, suffered a devastating crash in 1983. If we focus on sales of massively expensive cartidge-based home-gaming systems – like the Atari VCS 2600 – or the high-volume sales of dedicated arcade cabinets – such as Pac Man – in the USA, that’s probably accurate. Here in the UK, however, this is precisley when gaming at home, and certainly in my local arcades really began to take off. Throughout 1983 and 1984, The Chronicle is full of stories on local computer initiatives, computer-themed events, and the sale of computer systems. These are also the only years where there is a wave of applications and approvals for the opening of new arcades.

Check out those prices! And check out these!

Kilsyth Chronicle, 10th May 1984, p.3. Phwoar!

The next step in my investigation (!) was to have a look through the minutes of the Council’s Committee Meetings. While some of the bigger councils kept discrete sets of minutes for Planning, Licensing, and other committees, the surviving material from Cumbernauld and Kilsyth District Council was all lumped together in one bundle. I imagined this would have been stuffed into a single, large storage box. But the reality was rather more civillised. Nobly assisted by fellow arcadist, TartanGP, we set out on an expedition for the North Lanarkshire Heritage Archives in Motherwell.

Council Records, North Lanarkshire Heritage Centre, Motherwell

After steeling our nerves at a nearby fastfood restaurant, we arrived to find the documents we’d requested neatly bound into a series of fetching hardback volumes. On leafing through them, however, it was clear that large swathes of information had been consigned to the dustbin of history. Not only were there major gaps in the records, but loads of examples of overlap and repetition, and no indexing to speak of. We did manage to find the minutes of the meetings that fed into The Chronicle’s reportage, but this was – surprisingly – revealled to be more or less verbatim. I suppose that simply copying down what was said in the Council Chambers was easier for the journos than creating any actual stories!

Sadly, I wasn’t able to confirm when Francis Harvey’s arcade came to an end, or to find the short newspaper articles that reported the troubles that forced it to close. What I was able to do was trace how my own local arcade ecosystem sprung into life, fourished, then fizzled out. Don’t worry, though, readers, ‘cos in the end, I wasn’t too sad. In fact, it may surprise you to learn that I wasn’t particularly bothered. That wasn’t because I’d gone off arcade machines. It was because suddenly, my horizons had been significantly widened.

An Arcade Ecosystem – Part 2 (Falkirk & Stirling)

Published on 14th June 20233rd February 2024 by ArcadeOdysseus7 Comments

Looking back at the era before mobile phones and digital cameras makes you realise how precious memories are. Most often, we have no way of revisiting or even checking our internalised view of the past, beyond reminiscing with fellow travellers. The only way to ‘see’ those golden moments is through the foggy lens of our mind’s eye. Of course, when photos of the dim and distant past do turn up, those which are objectively mundane are often the most exciting – precisely because they open a window onto scenes that are so unlikely to have been preserved.

In the previous ‘episode’ in this series, we took a long-distance view of the early arcade scene in Kilsyth. In this second episode, we’ll have a look at how that ecosystem grew (for me!) to encompass Falkrik and Stirling.

I’ve been guided in this journey by the archived Yellow Pages in the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. But many hours of trawling through internet search engines has revealed another invaluable resource – Falkirk Council’s Heritage Collections. These include thousands of photos, kept in hard-copy in the Museums at Callendar House and Kinneil. Better still, quite a few of them have also been digitised and are now freely available online. As we shall see, two of them got me quite excited. OK, so they’re not quite ‘Elvis sightings’. But for me at least, they’re close enough!

Artist’s Impression of Kilsyth Academy (web, unknown date). The landscaping at the front is a recent development. Similarly, the fencing you can just about make out was put up as part of a nation-wide ‘response’ to the Dunblane Massacre in 1996. It wasn’t there in the 1980s.

In June 1984, at the grand old age of 12, I said goodbye to P7, and with it Kilsyth Primary School. Some of the other kids phrased it rather differently, screaming ‘freedom’ in the style of the Bash Street Kids, as they ran out the door for the last time. How little they knew.

6 and 1/2 weeks, and one glorious summer later, I started S1 – first year – at the local secondary school, Kilsyth Academy. From then on, my daily wanderings were restricted to the north side of the town. If I wanted to go down to the Main Street, it would have to happen after school or at the weekend. By then, however, my interests were developing in other directions. Why go down the town, when I could bomb off up the glen, and practice with my home-made composite bow? Besides, with the new arcade shot down its prime, the chance to invade ‘spacies’ in the evenings had been relegated, once again, to the realm of fantasy.

OK, so the Main Street still had other delights to offer, but those had begun to dry-up too. From my perspective, the range and availability of ‘good stuff’ (cream-cakes excepted!) began to shrink. Obviously, like most of my peers, I spent an increasing amount time playing ‘back-up’ copies of slightly out-of-date home computer games. That’s not to say we didn’t hanker after the new releases. Shannon’s the Newsagents may have stocked a limited range of Mastertronic games. But the ones they had were no match for the Ocean and US Gold titles stocked by the larger branches of Boots (the Chemist!), and John Menzies in the neighbouring towns.

Boots the Chemist, Falkirk High Street, 7th February 1987.

Boots had some surprisingly good offers on from time to time. The Falkirk branch was known for marking down video games. I remember picking up the twin-cassette-case-version of Gauntlet II for £2.99 in early 1988. The Stirling branch had a habit of doing the same with LPs. I was very pleased to pick up Duran Duran’s Decade on vinyl for the same price – before the decade itself was out. On looking back, that all seems a bit strange. Had the company been sold a batch of faulty label guns? Had the staff made a mistake? Who knows. Perhaps we shouldn’t look that particular gift horse too closely in the mouth…

I still liked comics. But from 1985, the only comics I needed were 2000 AD, and its Judge Dredd spin-offs. Anyone else read those? Remember the bizarre systems they had for working out the cover-date? 2000AD claimed to appear in orbit every Monday. But they hit the shelves on a Thursday, a couple of weeks before the date printed on the cover. What was that all about?

At the same time, I remained an avid consumer of computer-game magazines. In Kilsyth, the shops were small, and the choice, limited. The process of buying a mag was almost a shot-in-the-dark experience. It played out like this: Go in, have a quick look at the covers, pick up the most attractive mag, buy it, leave shop. If you spent too long looking, ie. more than 2 minutes, the folks behind the counter would start glowering. In the relative anonymity and busy-ness of the bigger shops elsewhere, however, I could spend pretty-much as long as I liked ‘checking’ the content of any given month’s crop of computer-game magazines, before deciding which one was deserving of my pocket money. You may well scoff, but that was a serious matter. All of a sudden, the mighty Computer and Video Games had become a lot more colourful, and before long faced stiff competition from the likes of Your Sinclair, and Zzap64! Frustratingly, the increasingly out-of-touch retailers in Kilsyth never seemed to stock those things – even when they were sure-fire investments selling 100,000 or more copies a month. They would have taken a subscription, of course. But making that kind of committment in a such a fast-moving world was impossible.

Behold! A holy relic! My actual, very first copy of White Dwarf magazine. The cover date is April 1985, which means I must’ve bought it in March 1985. The pusher for this evil gateway drug? John Menzies in the Thistle Centre in Stirling.

Not long after that, I was totally swept away by the role-playing games phenomenon, and the whole scene that went along with it. In the beginning, I just couldn’t get enough of White Dwarf magazine. In the early years this was a wonderfully broad-based resource for the RPG-community. I remained captivated until about 1988, when it had been transformed into a corporate rag for Games Workshop products. But even that made no dent on my love for the ever-growing range of Citadel Miniatures. I’d first encountered lead-based fantasy miniatures on holiday with my family in Dumfries in September 1984. Back in those days, they were more amateurish than not, and had molded bases. Still, as a massive Tolkien fan, I found myself hovering over the cusp of a purchase. I can’t remember now why I didn’t close the deal. I imagine there was an arcade round the corner or somesuch.

A few months later, in the run-up to Christmas, I was dragged into the Goldbergs’ department store in Candleriggs, Glasgow by my Mum. On the way in (and out), I was dazzled by the array of painted figures in the window of the Dragon and George role-playing-games shop across the road. After discovering White Dwarf, I was champing at the bit to go back. But Glasgow was a big city, and a relatively long and expensive bus ride away from my home town. For the time being, as a 12-year-old, I wouldn’t be going in on my own, and had to bide my time for a few weeks until the Easter holidays in 1985. My first ‘blister’ was a packet of ME44 Uruk Hai orcs – of the far-superior (in my opinion!) slotta-base variety. Sadly, 2 of the 3 in that pack later succumbed to lead-rot (yes, it’s a thing). The blister in the picture is an early e-Bay acquisition. I should probably get it back on there and use the proceeds to pay down the mortgage!

Those were things that never graced the shelves of any retail outlets in Kilsyth. But they were available in the neighbouring towns of Falkirk, Stirling, and Cumbernauld – not to mention the big smoke itself, Glesga – as we called Glasgow – to which we will return in the next episode.

Falkirk

The town of Falkirk lies about 12 miles to the east of Kilsyth. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was a popular destination for shopping and recreation.

Falkrik had a fairly limited an erratic supply of fantasy miniatures, but it was way better than the big fat nothing on offer in Kilsyth. There was one shop, away down Grahams Road, which sometimes had some blisters of Citadel’s Middle Earth range of ‘slotta-base’ figures. That was a bit of a pilgrimmage, reserved for the rare occasions when more time was available. At one point, I seem to remember it was joined by long-time retailer of objects d’art, The Gilded Cage. There was also a wee shop tucked away behind the steeple on the High Street, whose name escapes me, which kept a stock of Citadel stuff for a while around 1985.

The Gilded Cage, Newmarket Street, Falkirk, 1970s?

Fortunately for me, this change in perspective co-incided rather nicely with a switch in my parents’ food-shopping habits. In the early 80s, they alternated their bigger weekly shop between Fine Fare in Bishopbriggs, Woolco in Cumbernauld, and a few other places, usually on a Saturday. But by 1984/5 they had settled down to a regular Thursday-afternoon trip to Tesco on Callendar Road in Falkirk. They usually went straight after school.

Tesco, Callendar Road, Falkirk, 26th July 1984.

One day, in late spring 1986, I went along for the ride, but instead of dragging round behind them, or waiting outside the shop – as I usually did – I asked if I could go out for a look at the other shops while they were getting the food. Being only too glad to get me out of the way, they said yes, and I zoomed off to John Menzies.

Falkirk Leisure Centre

Falkirk, in those days was great. They had shops to cater for all your computer-games, magazines, and records needs. The main attraction was the Aladin’s Cave of cool stuff, known as John Menzies – part of a once familiar, but now deceased chain of high-street stores.

Falkirk High Street, 27th February 1987. If you strain your eyes and look really, really hard, you can just about make out the blue, white and orange livery of John Menzies at the extreme centre-left of the image.

Oh the humanity! The insufferable insult. Blasphemy. John Menzies rightful home is now occupied by ‘Pounstretcher’. 30th May 2023.

The big Menzies on the High Street had a great range of shizz, including all the latest home computer software. For a while, ‘though, there was a secondary branch just round the corner at the top of Vicar Street. Nowadays, that shop is home to a Usave grocers. Back-in-the-day, however, it specialised in newspapers, sweeties, cigarettes, and – obviously – a shelf of Ultimate: Play the Game cassette-software for the ZX Spectrum!

Please note, other newsagents were available!

Lint Riggs, Falkirk, 20th April 1988. Down at the bottom of the hill, on Newmarket Street, was another great newsagents. It’s out of shot to the left.

There was also a fantastic old-school shop between Menzies and the Falkirk Leisure Centre – the High Street Newsagents – that always seemed to have a pile of 2000 AD back-issues. There was another newsagents down beside ASDA on Newmarket Street, whose name escapes me, but which always kept a fantastic selection of specialist computer mags, that even the all-powerful John Menzies didn’t stock. This came in very handy when the time came to investigate what the burgeoning 16-bit era had to offer. I also remember a wee grocers shop on one of the back roads skirting round to the south of the High Street, where the old newsprint comics were pegged up on a washing line, strung up across the inside of the shop! But what was it called?

Photo montage of Falkirk town centre in the 1980s. See if you can spot the C5! Talking of which, check this out from the Kilsyth Chronicle in March 1985:

Kilsyth Chronicle, Wednesday, 27th March 1985.

Port Street, Stirling, late 1970s / early 1980s?

Anyway, back to late spring, 1986.

As I headed back down the High Street towards Callendar Road and Tesco, a familiar sight came into view. Have a look at the picture below. Look down the pavement on the left-hand-side of the road. That’s the way I would doubtless have walked to avoid being injured by the old dears with their reinforced shopping bags. I’m not sure what they kept in those things. But judging by the bruises I acquired on my legs, it was more likely to have been breeze blocks than messages (general shopping). In the middle of the picture, you can see a lorry. To the left of that is a lampost. And just to the left of that, a bit further in the distance, is something special… which we can see more clearly in the next image.

It’s Falkirk Leisure Centre, fresh from the before times!!!!

It’s wishful thinking, I know, but the two, blurry guys in the centre of that photo look an awful lot like brother and me. That’s the kind of clobber we wore in those days: Short shorts, sleeveless t-shirts, and white towelling sports-socks. Gotsta lurve those white toob-socks (I still swear by ’em). On the other hand, we were hardly unique in that respect. But now take another look at that old photo of Tesco taken on the very same day.

Look to the right of centre along the railing. It looks like the taller of the two guys we saw in front of the Falkirk Leisure Centre is hanging about outside the shop. That could be me, with my brother crouching down beside me, waiting for our parents!

Wow!

Even if that isn’t us, the scene would have been pretty much identical.

Anyway, on the way back down to Tesco that day, I walked past the so-called Falkirk ‘Leisure’ Centre’, as I had done quite a few times before. This was no centre of sportiness, or physical activity. I think I’d known it had spacies in it for quite some time by that point. But I’m pretty sure it also had an ‘over-somethings-only’ policy (14?), which I was – until then at least – obviously under. On this ocassion, however, the front door was propped open, and as I passed by, it was as my ears had been physically grabbed by the other-worldly tones of arcade-game music. One screeching u-turn and stealthy entrance later, I was in, and completely agog!

I only had time for a brief explore – but that first visit brought me face-to-face, for the first time, with the magical Ghosts’n’Goblins. Being obsessed with role-playing games at the time, it ticked so many of the boxes in my gaming itinery, I could hardly contain myself. After that, I made sure I went with my parents to Tesco every chance I got!

This was a proper arcade. Almost as good as the ones you got at the seaside. It had at least a dozen, maybe more video games confined to the right-hand-side as you went in. The other half had a small cafeteria, several pool tables and some fruit machine. The change desk was right at the back. The ambience was completed with the proper arcade carpet underfoot, and the obligatory, thick blanket of cigarette-smoke descending from above.

The selection of games was amazing. The first time I went back in, I was captivated by Sinistar, with its creepy soundbites – ‘I hunger!’ I’m sure it was the cockpit version too. They also had Shaolin’s Road – the only place I saw it in the wild. The martial-arts theme continued with Karate Champ. Over the next year or two, I was also introduced to perhaps the greatest video game of all time – RYGAR – better even than the ossum Robotron2084. The chunky, harmonised thwacks it made when your powered-up fantasy-warrior took out three baddies at once was divine! There was also a fantastic vertical shooter called Tokio, which let out a peal of meaty bass-thumps when you dropped a coin in the slot. Once again, that was the only time I saw that game in an arcade. This place had some pretty exclusive gets.

There was also Tiger Heli, then Flying Shark, and I’m pretty sure they also has Wonderboy, and later-on Wonderboy 3. Something I wonder about, though, is what kind of cabs they were in. From the mid- to late-80s, loads of UK arcades were stocked with beautiful (or ‘generic’, depending on your perspective) Goliath cabinets made by a company called Electrocoin. While I’m sure at least some of the cabs in the FLC were Electrocoin models, I don’t think they were all Goliaths.

The reason? I’m 6’4″, which sometimes complicates the playing of arcade games. By 1986, I was already getting quite tall. But in the FLC there was no need for me to adopt a preposterous ‘arcade stance’ to avoid getting blinded by the marquee, and – even more importantly – to actually see the screen. On straining my grey material, I seem to remember a low plinth running along the wall from the front window. Maybe the machines on top were jacked-up Electocoin Midis?

After a hiatus of a couple of years (more on that in a future episode), I started going back to Falkirk about ’93-4. By then, the number of video games seemed to have been reduced… to allow for an even tighter concentration of heavy-hitters! It was here that I first saw Daytona USA, in a two-player configuration no less – the beginners’ track on which is well-balanced, ‘drifty’ racing-perfection. I also enjoyed Virtua Cop, and latterly, before I left the area, the now mythical holographic cabinet, Holosseum: Time Traveller. While the holographic effect was pretty convincing, the game itself was pretty ‘meh’.

The Falkirk Leisure centre is now long gone. It’s been at least a decade since that row of buildings was remodelled. If you look carefully at the two images above, you can see that the windows of the ‘Fireaway’ takeaway correspond to the front door of the FLC. The Tandoori restaurant to its right has been renovated out of existence. However, there’s still a wee takeaway to the right of that. Back-in-the-day, this was the Golden Fryer chippie, which became a regular part of my Saturday visits to the FLC. It was there that I was introduced to the east-of-Scotland-phenomenon of ‘so’n’sos’ (salt and sauce). That’s when you get your chips drenched in a vinegary brown sauce. Very nice, it is too! Funny how Falkirk bears to the east like that. The same is true of the local accent. There was a lilt in the voices of the Falkirk bairns back then (Stirling too), that we didn’t have 12 miles to the west.

Park Avenue

Later in 1986, it must’ve been late July, I’d been at the Canon cinema in Falkirk with friends. Someone’s dad had given us a lift in to go and see The Karate Kid Part II. I seem to remember there was a special ticket-price for the summer holidays – 50p a pop for kids! That’s less than £1.50 in 2023 money! Can you imagine!

I didn’t go to the pictures very often growing up, but the big screen experience made a big impression on me. I absolutely loved it! My darling wife is reluctant to go to the cinema unless there’s something on she wants to see – which I suppose is fair enough. But I’d happily take a chance on a duffer just for the cinematic ambience. The seats in the Canon may not have been quite as comfy as the ones we’ve become used to in more recent years. There were no leather sofas, or even reclining chairs. To balance that out, we did get pre-film adverts ushered in by the Pearl & Dean promoters’ anthem, featuring some Indian restaurant we’d never go to. But I digress…

10th April 1986. One of the fire exits / back doors from the ABC cinema is down the alley on the left of the photo. Park Avenue was more or less opposite.

On leaving the cinema, still buzzing from the triumphant climax of the movie, we had a few minutes left before we were supposed to meet our lift back. Leaving through the fire exit on Vicar Street, we spied an interesting venue across the road called Park Avenue. This was clearly an arcade – of sorts. Why had we never noticed it before? Imagine – just imagine – it had… Karate Champ??!?!?!?! After a build up like that, there was no way we couldn’t go and explore. It was obvious from the blacked out windows, and the ‘No under 16s’ sign in the doorway, that we’d hit upon a den of ‘amusements with prizes’. Which was disappointing. In the days when most folks took authority a bit more seriously, that also threw further investigation into doubt. At 14, I was the oldest. But to me, the electronic noises ringing out above the din didn’t sound like they came from gambling machines. Emboldeded by the siren song of video-game-entertainment, we waited until the cashier was distracted talking to friends, and dashed in and around the corner… into an alcove of video games. Paradise!

Vicar Street, Falkirk. Unkown date: Possibly early 2000s? Look at the far right of the row of shops. You can see the ‘PARK AV’ of ‘PARK AVENUE’!!!

30th May 2023, again. That old Park Avenue building will still get plenty of kids going in. It sells school uniforms.

I was lucky enough to come back a few weeks later, I think with my brother. That time, however, the cashier spotted us playing the spacies and kicked us out. No under-16s, you see, ‘Kin ye no read? Oot!’ was the extent of our welcome. Blimmin jobsworth! I did go back a few times later in the 80s and in the early 90s. Park Avenue didn’t have a lot of video games, about 10 perhaps? But there were a few decent shooters. Latterly, there was definitely one of the R-Type offerings, Leo, I think, as well as a Raiden, or a Varth. But I just can’t bring them into focus.

Did they have Karate Champ in 1986? I’d like to say yes, but sadly, my memory fails me. I suspect not. In any case, just as we were preparing to feed the slots with coinage, my friend’s dad came in and gathered us up. He was in a hurry to get home, and we didn’t have enough cash for the bus back, so off we went. Bah! This guy liked his music. I had expected some Jimmy Hendrix in the car on the way back, but instead, we listened to the radio. In writing this, I had a strange flashback. One of the tunes we’d heard was this (I’ve just looked it up). At the time, I thought it was a throwback to the 50s. According to Wikipedia, however, it was actually released in 1986!

There were other video games in Falkirk. One day in the run up to Christmas, I went in on the bus with my Granny to do my Christmas shopping. She noticed, just before we arrived at the town centre that the Park hotel had a lunchtime special on, so we went there later for something to eat. They only had 10-Yard Fight, but I indulged in a game or two while my gran had a cup of tea.

As the years went on I started making regular trips to Falkirk on the bus myself. Usually to browse in the shops, and hang-out like yoofs still do. We’d get the Midland Bluebird, no. 27 bus, either to Newmarket Street or the Bus Station. The former was handy for the pictures or the newsagents (and some reading material for the trip home!). The latter was a lot close to the Falkirk Leisure Centre. Sadly, bus services these days seem to have dwindled away to almost nothing. With the substantial drop in footfall, it’s little wonder that the shops in and around the station have largely gone out of business and been boarded up. The bus station itself is pretty much derelict. Walking round it again was more than a wee bit depressing.

Midland Bluebird bus, Newmarket Street, 20th April 1988

Falkirk Bus Station, 1980s. My stop was in the middle of this row of shops.

Stirling

Until 1975, when Scotland’s counties were dismantled (that’s right readers in England, there have been no counties in Scotland for half a century), Kilsyth was a part of Stirlingshire. I was born in Stirling maternity hospital. With the old ‘county town’, Stirling a mere 14 miles to the northeast, connections remained strong. Towards the end of the 1980s, my field of vision drifted westwards, and I temporarily lost touch with Falkirk. In addition to their weekly shop, however, my parents would ocassionally head up to Stirling. When I got the chance, which wan’t often, I’d tag along with them.

In those days, Stirling had a thriving town centre. One of the main attraction was its two-storey John Menzies – where I’d bought my first copy of White Dwarf magazine, there was also a Boots, a slew of the usual clothes and knick-knack shops, and a bona fide shopping mall – the Thistle Centre. In the picture above, you can see the entrance leading to Menzies to the left of Marks and Spencers. On the left-hand-side of that entrance going in, was a bakers called Oliver’s. Sadly, what once was Oliver’s is now Greggs.

While it lasted, Oliver’s (nothing to do with Jamie) was part of a chain. They ran a catchy TV-advertising campaign featuring an animation and music riffing off (/ripping off!) Lionel Bart’s musical, Oliver! It sold the most delicious crusty bread, which you could smell before you saw the shop itself. Gorgeous!

Now, I may already have mentioned, I like my bread. These past few years, despite my best efforts, I’ve found myself slipping into some rather effete bread-eating habits. Where I live now (which isn’t Kilsyth – I’ve been gone for 30 years!), we have an artisan baker that sells the most delicious olive sourdough bread. It’s so good I could eat an entire loaf. But it’s not crusty the way bread used to be. The closest approximation these days would be some supermarkets take on ‘tiger bread’. But even that isn’t the same. Whatever happened to proper crusty bread?!

On the hill up towards the castle, the streets change name as they climb higher. On Baker Street, or was it Bow Street (?), there was a popular childcare shop called Cradle Care. This shop was in a row of ancient, tall buildings, with units much taller than they were wide. Above two (or possibly three!) floors of prams and shawls, was a final floor rammed full of toys and games. They had a great stock of Airfix soldiers and model-kits, and plenty of Star Wars figures. By 1986, however, as the Star Wars craze began to head the way of all things, the owners decided to cut their losses with a fire-sale of NOS figures. I’m sure they were selling them for 50p each in the end. In retrospect, I’d like to have invested a tenner or two, and kept them to sell on eBay. But untroubled as I was by the knowledge of this dystopian future, I didn’t bother. I had no need for that old tat! By this point, you see, they also had a well-stocked, spinning-rack brimming with the latest Citadel Miniatures.

Sadly, one could only spend so long salivating over the miniatures, before it started to look impolite. So, I had to bulk-out my visits to Stirling with other activities. Reading the magines in Menzies was one. Checking out Boots for reduced-proce home-computer games or LPs was another. But there was also the old standby of going off the beaten track to find amusement arcades to haunt. I found two.

Truth be told, I had trouble remembering exactly where those two places were. It’s been a veeeery long time since I was last at either, and they have, in any case, long since been wiped from the face of the High Street. This is where the Yellow Pages collections in the National Library came in handy. One of them had to be Lothian Amusements at 14 Friar Street, and the other, the strangely-named Castle ‘Leisure’ Centre at 101 Barnton Street. Frustratingly, I forgot to look up Cradle Care. Doh! Maybe I’ll go back and find it for a future update.

You can see roughly where they all were on the map below.

Yellow Pages Street Map of Stirling, 1987. Where things were at.

Lothian Amusements

Exactly when Lothian Amusements finally vanished, I cannot say. My best guess as far as video games are concerned would be the late 1980s.

As you can see from the image below, from the ‘street view’ feature on Google Maps’, it’s now a restaurant – Jimmy Zheng’s. I’ve never been there, but I’m sure it’s very nice. It’d have to be to fit in with the other more genteel outlets on Friar Street. In the late 1980s, however, I seem to remember that things were a wee bit more ‘exciting’ round that way. Possibly because of the arcade…

14 Friar Street, Stirling, Google Maps, 13th June 2023.

From memory, Lothian Amusements was quite a big venue, with a mixture of video arcade games and fruit machines. The fruit machines were upstairs, and the videos down an open staircase from the centre of the ground floor in a large basement area. There may also have been pool tables down there. This smokey cavern also had a bit of a menacing edge. But with at least a dozen games, that kindof offset the risk in my tiny mind!

My memories of that place are vague. But then again, I only went in a few times. That was partly because I was rarely in stirling after I’d discovered it. But I suspect there may also have been a more strictly enforced minimum-age policy, which I had less success dodging. I’m sure they had a reasonably up-to-date selection of games. What that included, I’m sorry to say, largely escapes me. The one thing that does stick out in my mind, however, is Sega’s S.D.I., with it’s topical Cold War theme, and weird controls featuring a joystick with a button on top.

Castle Leisure Centre

Around the time that Lothian Amusements lost its appeal, closed it doors, or both, I followed my nose down Barnton Street to the Castle Leisure Centre – another one of those sketchy appropriations, which had little to do with sports or ‘healthy’ recreation. The Yellow Pages had it at 101 Barnton Street, where Betfred’s is today, which is roughly the right place in my mind, and the site of what you would imagine was a suitably large building.

Perhaps I’m getting old, perhaps my synapes are discombobulating, but I was sure that the venue where I used to enjoy video games was in one of the old shop units, on the same side of the street but a wee bit closer to the Thistle Centre? None of those units are particularly big. But in my memory, it wasn’t a big arcade. I’m sure it only had half-a-dozen or so video games. They may not have had a lot of machines, but it’s where I discovered Rampage, and where I had a lot of fun with Shadow Dancer until at least the early 1990s. Perhaps it wasn’t the Castle Leisure Centre after all, but aonther one of those ephemeral arcades that never appeared in the records, for reasons we explored in the last episode?

Barnton Street, Stirling, Google Maps,13th June 2023.

As much as I enjoyed the delights of Falkirk and Stirling, the wares (and warez) on offer were relatively limited. As time went by it also became clear that the supply was unreliable. By 1987, as a strapping (alright, gangly) 15-year old, I knew the future lay in the bright lights of the big city. For me, that meant Glasgow. In a flash, I’d moved on from John Menzies and Boots to the Virgin Megastore, Tower Records, and – eventually – the infamous Barras market…

Next up – Glasgow…

In the meatime, if you grew up in or near Falkrik or Stirling, or – like me – used to haunt their video arcades, please share your memories below. Perhaps you can help fill-in some of the gaps, or correct some of the gaffes in my version of the story?

An Arcade Ecosystem – Part 1 (Kilsyth)

Published on 9th June 202329th October 2023 by ArcadeOdysseus9 Comments

My arcade journey began in the seaside resorts and motorway service stations of the 1970s. I’ve already written about it here.

But it didn’t end there.

Kilsyth (2016 – Wikipedia). Loads of new houses have appeared since the 1980s, especially along the western and eastern approaches (bottom-left and top-centre, respectively).

As I got bigger, and more independent, I started to look for arcade experiences closer to home. My memories of those days are patchy. That’s unfortunate, but given that we’re talking about stuff from 40-odd years ago, it’s probably not surprising. None of my fellow travellers can remember much about that era either, so at least I’m not alone. When it comes to filling in the gaps, however, it turns out that I have a secret weapon at my disposal…

My commute to work takes me past the National Library of Scotland. And while there is no convenient archive of ‘Local Arcades: 1980-1990’, it does have collections of national and local newspapers, Yellow Pages, and telephone catalogues, stretching all the way back to the year dot. While far from complete, these sources have helped jog my memory, and revealed some interesting if small-scale local drama along the way (take a peek behind the curtain, here). This, in turn, has prompted me to revisit some of those old sites, and see how they’ve changed. Over the past couple of months, I’ve begun to build a fledging record of my childhood ‘Arcade Ecosystem’, covering when it first appeared and how it evolved. Of course, I’d like to grow this project even more. As always, the holy grail would be some old photographs.

Considering how ubiquitous phone-cameras have been for the past decade and more, I think we lose sight of just how much we used to live in the moment – and how rare and precious decent photos from those days actually are. There are all kinds of reasons why folk wouldn’t have taken photos of shops or amusement arcades back in the day, mainly the cost involved in buying and developing a film. But as we’ll see a bit later on (in the next episode), these things did happen.

In the first part of this journey, we’ll explore the mean streets of Kilsyth, the town where the sport of curling first had its rules codified, where the potato was first grown as a regular crop, and where I gew up.

Better buckle up, buttercups. It’s gonna be a long and bumpy ride.

The Concrete Jungle

Back in 1978, my family settled into the house where my mum still lives today. It nestles on a quiet street, high up on a hillside, overlooking the small town of Kilsyth, right on the edge of the Stirlingshire countryside. It was a great place to grow up.

Ten months earlier, I had started school at Balmalloch Primary, the recently built infant-school a bit further along the road from our house. Everything was new, fresh and shiny.

Like everyone else, I walked to school with my pals. The walking thing was neither here nor there. Everyone did it. The important part of that equation was the scope it gave for shennigans on the way to and from school. By the age of 8, I was well-versed in the art of sneaking off-piste in search of adventures – most often involving climbing trees, jumping burns, or building dens, but sometimes just visiting sweetie shops. Quarter of cola cubes, anyone? Yes please!

In June 1980, I bid a fond farewell to that first school, and headed off to Kilsyth Primary School – the town’s main seat of primary education. This was an altogether different proposition. The school itself was a sprawling complex of Victorian buildings, sheds and concrete playgrounds, much of which had been earmarked for demolition or replacement before I left. One year, my classmates and I were pulled out of lessons to serve as pack-mules, carrying books and chairs from the doomed primary 4 /5 building, which we were warned was on the brink of collapse! That must have been at some point in late 1982 or early 1983.

But as the newspaper clipping above shows, the Coonsil didn’t get round to demolishing it until the summer holidays in 1984. So much for health and safety! The article also serves to remind us that poor journalism is not a recent development. The building, we are told, was ‘the old Higher Grade’ building, and ‘in later years, science was taught there’. Maybe that had been true in the 1950s or 1960s. When I was there, it was only known as the Primary 4/5 building, because those were the classes based there. And I should know, because it’s where I spent P4 & P5! It also housed the dinner hall, which I remember from the two occasions I took a pack-lunch to eat there. Seems like some people have always been stuck in the past, eh?

Kilsyth Primary was about a mile away from my house – a mile’s walk down the steep hill, across the busy road, then up the other side of the valley to the school. There were lots of different ways to get there. Some were direct, some less so, and usually involving inaccurately-named ‘short cuts’ of one variety or another – round the back streets, or through the woods. Sometimes we ran, sometimes we walked, and sometimes, when the weather allowed, we might ‘skite’ (or skate) to school in record time along frozen weirs and waterways. The path of least resistance, however, was also the path of maximum attraction – the concrete (OK, sandstone) jungle of Kilsyth Main Street.

Weirdly, this ‘main’ street is not the main thoroughfare through the town. That would be the Glasgow or Stirling Road, as it’s called, depending on whether you’re on it to the west or east of its intersection with the Main Street. The proximity of those, and other big towns is one of the reasons why Kilsyth town centre has gradually been reduced to a selection of nail bars, hair dressers and pound shops. Back in the day, however, it thrived.

Navigating its bakers, newsagents and toy shops, without falling for their cakes, football stickers or toy soldiers was nigh on impossible. It was complimented nicely by the neatly-manicured shrubbery of the adjacent, Burngreen park, which provided rich hunting grounds for discarded, glass ‘ginger’ (Irn Bru) bottles, which could be returned to a local newsagent or grocer to reclaim the 10p deposit – something that was to come in very handy later…

Kilsyth Chronicle, 11 Dec 1985, p.9. Downstairs, Millar’s had cycles, fishing tackle, and – yes – guns, albeit of the air-rifle variety. Upstairs, however, was a cornucopia of plastic tat. There were Airfix and Matchbox models and soldiers aplenty, those spider things that crawl down your windows, and Star Wars figures by the row! Paradise!

In my first few years at Kilsyth Primary, the shape of the school day was glorious. We had play time in the morning and in the afternoon – giving us lots of scope for games of the rough-and-tumble variety. Even better, the lunchbreak in those early years lasted a whopping hour and twenty minutes – enough time to let the kids from the far flung corners of the town (like me!) go home for lunch. For that reason, I never had school dinners. But I never spent much of my lunchtimes at home either. It took ten minutes to rush home, another ten to eat lunch, and less than that to zoom back down the town and hang out until the warning bell was imminent.

Midland Bluebird Buses 1981. MB operated the main bus services in Kilsyth. In those days, there was a bus depot in town, now long gone and redeveloped with flats.

Sometimes, we’d go to my granny’s house for lunch. She lived about the same distance away from the school as us, but along one of the bigger roads, and en route to a housing scheme, which was even further away. This meant there was a school bus-service. If we were going to gran’s house, we’d get some money for the bus. There were different stops along the way that cost different amounts. But the main figure that sticks in my mind is 14p – another convenient sum… The buses couldn’t leave immediately when the lunchtime bell rang. They had to wait a set time – I think it was 5 or 10 minutes – to give all the kids a chance to get on. Naturally, it wasn’t long before my brother and I figured out that if we ran down the road as soon as we got out of school, we’d usually get to gran’s before the bus. I have to confess, there were occasions when the bus fares were then trousered to invest in other activities.

Rennie’s the Bakers

Fast-forward to the winter of 1982. The bright lights and heady times of Christmas had come and gone. The weather had settled down into its usual pattern of cold, wet and dark. And kids and adults alike had hunkered down to begin the long wait for spring.

And that’s when the proverbial bomb went off.

The Spacies landed!

We’d had a few arcade games in town before – as part of ‘The Shows’ – our name for the travelling fair that turfed up for a week or two around Easter – usually accompanied by unrelenting and torrential rain! But now we had them in the warm and dry!

On trudging back to school one particularly bleak lunchtime, I clocked a van parked outside Rennie’s the bakers. Moments later a man came out of the shop, and proceeded to unload a huge, coffin-like cabinet onto his sack-truck. There was another one in the back. These, I explained breathlessly to my less-observant friends, were ‘spacies’! Anyone else remember that? ‘Spacies’? The term was short for ‘Space Invaders’. In theory, it couldn’t be any older than the release of the Golden Age classic of that name in 1978. But a word of warning on the release-dates listed in MAME… Unless you were in London, or one of the major seaside resorts in the English school holidays – which started and ended 3-4 weeks after the summer holidays in Scotland – you probably wouldn’t have seen the games on these shores until the following year. In any case, I can’t remember where or when I learned that expression myself, but by 1982, it was as if I’d always known it.

Rennie’s bakers at 22 Main street (2023). Pacitti Jones unit at No. 20 was also once part of Rennie’s shop. NB: the Main Street wasn’t pedestrianised until the 1990s.

The arrival of an arcade at Rennie’s came completely out of the blue. The business has operated from 22 Main Street for as long as I had lived in Kilsyth – and apparently for quite some time before that! It’s still there today, albeit managed by a generation three-or-more times removed from the one that started it. Rennie’s is and was a successful family business. Until about 1982, school finished early on a Friday, and I sometimes popped in on the way home to buy some clootie dumpling in a poke (small paper bag) and a can of coke. The cost of this Friday-afternoon feast? The princely sum of 20p.

In 1981 there was growing concern about the dilapidated state of the shop next to Rennie’s, which I now know is number 20. I have vague memories of hearing the grown-ups tut about how dangerous it was. Eventually, building work commenced, on both the ground floor shop and the flat above it. This seemed to go on forever. With hindsight, I doubt it lasted more than two or three months.

When it was finished, the ground floor of the property was knocked through into the bakers, and divided off with a stud partition wall. This last part of the project seems to have been done as quickly and cheaply as possible. There was no door in the new wall, just a doorway. And the bottom strip of CLS timber hadn’t even been cut. This left a threshold you had to step over as you went in. The new space was relatively big – at least 3 metres by 6. Even so, when the bakers shop was busy, the queue at the counter served to cut it off from the view of the staff, and create what seemed like the command room on the Starship Enterprise.

Despite the size of the space, I don’t remember there being more than 3 machines in it at any given time. I’m also pretty sure they were all placed along the back wall, furthest away from the baker’s counter. The price of a ticket to 2-minutes of space-themed escapism was 10p. Although the currency had been decimalised a decade earlier, the ‘new’ ten-pence coin was the same size as the old two-shilling or ‘florin’ coin, known colloquially as the two-bob-bit. These older coins remained in circulation, albeit in dwindling numbers, until 10 pence pieces were re-sized in the 90s.

One one of the first games that Rennie’s had was the classic vertical-shooter Phoenix. Who can forget that end of round mothership, and the frantic rush to get the maximum bonus score? As much as we enjoyed it, none of us were particularly good at it. Yes we had the advantage of youth, and the vitalism that stretched seconds into what we would now perceive as minutes. But our coordination hadn’t yet fully-developed. So games were soon over, and what scant money we had was soon spent.

Out of cash, but still thirsty for arcade action, my friends and I set to work exploring the cabinet for secrets. Before long, it was discovered that if you rocked the on/off switch on the top, it would restart the machine with 3 credits on the clock! Miraculously, we were never caught doing this. But I suspect somebody else was. A week or two later, the machine was replaced.

Some aspects of the set-up stick out more clearly in my mind than others. Phoenix was definitely in cabinet no. 1 – as, I believe, was Tempest. Defender and Pleiades, on the other hand, were probably in cab no. 2 – as was MARS. There was a Centipede at one point, and there were certainly others, but what they were, and where they were placed escapes me.

Sadly, the restricted opening hours of the shop meant that gaming sessions rarely amounted to more than a few stolen moments. From what I remember, Rennie’s closed before tea-time on weekdays, which usually meant no arcading after school. Realistically, the only time to enjoy the machines was lunchtime. Of course, you could always pop in on Saturday morning, which would mean missing Tiswas. Invariably, this also involved jostling for space with the much bigger kids who had been otherwise engaged through the week at the Academy, the local secondary school at the other end of town.

Despite the hassle, that did have its benefits. If you were lucky, you might witness an aspiring space cadet flex some killer moves on Tempest or the like, which you could then try out for yourself and claim as your own. I didn’t have a lot of cash in those days, and was determined to make it last. Having said that, I remember trotting ‘down the town’ one sunny Saturday morning, clutching an artfully crumpled pound note. If memory serves me correctly, I bought a can of pop, a mars bar, a comic (probably Whizzer and Chips, or Scream), nipped into Rennie’s for 3 goes on Defender, and still went home with change in my pocket! Imagine that?! All from a single pound. How times have changed.

After a while, however, Rennies lost its allure as an arcade. I can’t remember why, exactly. Perhaps it was a combination of the limited hours and selection of games. There was also competition, more about which in a moment. One thing is certain – for the last big chunk of its existence, we hardly went in there. Perhaps they’d banned schoolkids during lunchtime? Crazy as that sounds from a business perspective, there were hints in the archives that may have been what happened. In any case, by late 1984, the space had been transformed into a small hive of fruit machines and restricted to over-16s. Sadly for Mr Rennie, or perhaps as divine retribution for his crimes against video arcade machines, that doesn’t seem to have worked out too well. Barely a year later, the unit at no. 20 had been sold to a lawyer / building society and refitted as an office. In the early days, however, it was great. Fresh-cream chocolate eclaire and Defender anyone? Classic combo!

Shannon’s the Newsagents

Not long after Rennie’s got themselves all arcaded up, the same thing happened in the shop directly across the road – Shannon’s the Newsagent at no. 23. Perhaps they’d been talking to auld man Rennie, and heard how much spare change could be siphoned out the weans’ pockets with the help of these newfangled Space Invader machines? Shannon’s had refurbished a small room which opened off a short corridor at the end of the counter. From that point, they used it to house 3 arcade machines, rotating the games fairly regularly for maybe 3 or 4 years.

Needless to say, I was a frequent visitor through to the summer holidays in 1984, and from then on of an occasional Saturday until at least early 1985. By some point in 1985 or 86, they’d got rid of everything. While it lasted, however, Shannon’s kept a better selection of games than Rennie’s.

The town’s gossip mill went into overdrive when the machines first appeared. I remember coming home late from school one day, and explaining to my granny that I’d nipped in for a game of Moon Cresta or somesuch. She didn’t mind, but it took a while for her to put my story together with the others she’d been hearing. She was at pains to establish that we’d been playing video games in Matear’s. But I’d never heard that name before. As far as I was concerned, the shop I’d been to was called Shannon’s. It even said so in big metallic letters on the wall above the front door. The shop has long-since changed hands, but as you can see from the photo, above, the current owner, Mr Hassan, seems to have recycled most of the lettering! Anyway, it turns out that the shop had been owned by a Mrs Matear in years gone by, who ran it as the grocers where my granny liked to do most of her shopping…

Back to the games.

Funny how some random things stick in your memory. I’ll never forget that Track’n’Field was in cab no.1. There was one, much older kid whose initials dominated the high score table. But in my mind’s eye, they’re just too blurry to make out. Cabinet no. 1 was also home to New Rally X. Cabinet no. 2 had MACH 9, and possibly Burnin’ Rubber.. Cabinet no. 3 had Qix, Moon Patrol, Kung-Fu Master, Mr Do’s Wild Ride, 10-Yard Fight, and – I think – Traverse USA, although not necessarily in that order. I’m sure I can’t remember all of the games that passed through that back room, and possibly, a couple of them were actually based across the road in Rennie’s. The vaguest of my recollections is of Tron and Mr Do’s Castle. They were certainly somewhere in Kilsyth, but was it in Shannon’s?

There was one drawback with Shannon’s. The position of the games room relative to the counter meant that the staff couldn’t see anything that was going on in there. On the one hand, that served to create a dedicated, private space – which was nice. On the other hand, however, there were occasions when it encourged the local neddery to take liberties. Having spent their own ten pee, they might then harass someone else by ‘pressing their player 1 button for them’. Once or twice this led to minor altercations. Sadly, it went unmarked. But the truth is that no-one was going to clype (tell tales) on the miscreants to the shop-keepers, in case they got barred themeselves. And you certainly wouldn’t want to tell your parents, in case they banned you from going. Thankfully, however, this was a very rare occurance.

Another good thing about Shannon’s was that it kept better hours than Rennie’s. As a newsagents it was already open when we were on the way to school in the morning, and it stayed open until tea-time in the evenings, which meant you could sneak in for a quick fix on the way to school in the morning, going back to school at lunchtime, or on the way home from school in the afternoon – not to mention through the day on Saturdays.

A New Frontier – Harvey’s Arcade

Early in 1984, our dad told my brother and me that one of those arcades that we liked was going to be opening up in town. We were ecstatic. Where? When? Obviously, we wanted it to happen in the next 5 minutes, so the screens had time to warm up while we put our shoes on and ran down there. Frustratingly, the details turned out to be less than clear. My dad said he’d read about it in the local newspaper, The Chronicle, but that was now in the bin. Yes, that’s right, the landfill bin. The only thing that got recycled in 1984 was ginger bottles.

Now, that wasn’t always as bad for the environment as you might expect. Municipal tips in those days were very lightly-regulated. Nowadays, the majority of rubbish has been sold to various recycling concerns before it’s even been collected. Combine that with ‘health-and-saftey gone mad’, and you can start to understand why your average ‘community recycling centre’ is locked down tighter than Fort Knox. In 1984, however, the dumps had a resident population of ‘tip rats’. Men and women who’d spend hours picking through the detritus to find stuff worth saving and re-using or even selling on.

Help ma Boab, it’s the polis! Back in 1984, 46-48 Main Street was a bona fide amusement arcade run by a Mr Patrick Harvey.

Months and months went by, and we heard nothing more about the promised land. Eventually, we forgot about it. Then, without warning, it appeared – a few seconds down the Main Street from Rennie’s and Shannon’s!!!!!

But there was a snag. The owner, apparently, was trying to keep everyone happy with his new venture, and so had announced that his arcade would not be open during the school lunch break! Aaargh!!!!

Fortunately, he was also going to stay open in the evenings! I sneaked in with my friend Stuart for a quick preview on the way home from school, and could see we needed to come back. But here’s the thing. While parents in those days were fine with us running riot round the neighbourhood ’til it got dark in the summer (which is very late in that part of the world), and while it was dark in the winter (which happens very early), they were a bit cagey about us going down the town in the evenings. I was only 11 or 12. But that meant there would have been a couple of younger brothers in our group who were only about 8 or 9. We had to wait for an evening when everyone was free before permission was granted. It seemed to take ages for the stars to align. But eventually, it happened.

This new arcade was much bigger than the other two games rooms. But my memories of it are also the vaguest. I think it had a tuck shop near the entrance, and at least 10 video arcade machines, mostly in one longer and one shorter row down the left-hand-side of the shop as you went in. There was also at least one pool table in there.

As I recall, few of the games could be considered cutting-edge. In fact, most were at least a couple of years old by then – probably older stock that had been bought or rented on more favourable terms? Quite a few of them had already been in Shannon’s. But this was where I first saw Robotron 2084 (somewhere down the LHS) – and the last place I saw it until coming back to arcades through MAME in the late 1990s. It was brilliant!

Near Robotron was Scramble. There was also a Hunchback in Cabinet no. 1, facing the front of the shop. In addition to that, there was at least one driver in there. I’m pretty sure there was Turbo, but was there also a Pole Position II? And I have a feeling there was also a Hunchback at the Olympics. I’m fairly certain there was a newer game on the same side as Robotron 2084, but closer to the front of the shop, that we were all keen to play. Frustratingly, however, I can’t remember what it was. Perhaps I need to get me some hypnotic regression therapy?

After that first proper visit, our little group of neighbourhood pals was desperate to go back. But the permission thing was a bind. It was a few weeks before we got the go ahead, which then had to be postponned for a few more weeks – Adam had to go out with his parents, then someone else was away. But then as the annointed day finally approached, something happened.

There was a report in the local newspaper about an incident outside the arcade, and very abruptly, it shut down. We never got to go again. While I remember reading the article, I can’t remember what it was that actually happened, or when. But then again, I couldn’t remember the name of the arcade either, or even when it finally closed. My best guess is later in 1984 or early in 1985.

Around the same time, and not so long after this new arcade opened, Rennie’s closed their games room for good. Although it transitioned briefly into a centre for ‘amusements with prizes’, it was soon repurposed as a separate retail until.

Shannon’s continued to have games into at least 1985, and possibly later. They also branched out into selling Mastertronic cassettes over the counter, to feed the growing home-computer habits of the local school-kids. By then, however, I’d moved through P7, and up to the ‘Big School’, just along the road from Balmalloch Primary. If I wanted to go down the town from then, I’d need to make a special trip – and that rarely happened. That wasn’t the final full-stop on Kilsyth’s Space invasion. Towards the end of the 1980s, Harry Wilson’s grocers, known locally as ‘The Wee Shop’, seems to have hosted a single jamma cab. While it was just up the road from the Academy, I never went that way. In fact, I only discovered it by accident. Sadly, the shop was shabby, and the machine battered. I never went back.

If you’d like to take a peek behind the curtain, and see the research chops that helped put the story together, have a look at Part 1 EXTRA, where I dive into the archives of the National Library of Scotland, and the North Lanarkshire Heritage Collections.

But please do tune in to Part 2, in which Arcade Odysseus heads east to the badlands of Falkrik and Stirling…

A Fun Spot? Part 4 – ACAM

Published on 17th March 202316th August 2023 by ArcadeOdysseus3 Comments

As far as amusement arcades go, Funspot, in Laconia, NH, is big.

According to their website, they are ‘the largest arcade in the world‘. But how does that claim measure up against reality? And what, in any case, is the quality of the experience on offer?

Definitions are important here. For collectors and connoisseurs of classic video arcade games, the term ‘arcade’ has become synonymous with the larger of the rooms or buildings in which those kinds of machines were once housed – the smoky palaces of bleepy, bloopy thrills and escapism that dominated the seaside towns, and occasionally city-centres of yesteryear.

But this is where we need to stop for a minute and think. With the arcades of the Golden Age surviving only in our heads, we tend to fixate on the part of the arcade experience that appealed to us the most – the video games. Fuelled by YouTube tours of private collections, and photo galleries of arcade ‘holy grails’ on forums and blogs, there’s a tendency to dwell on the alternative reality of what Jonathan Meades calls the ‘Mythical Arcade’. I’ve been guilty of that myself. And why not? It’s a wonderful mind-spot to visit! Wouldn’t it be great if there had been dedicated, barn-like venues with an exclusive focus on the appreciation, and competitive enjoyment of video games ? It’s little wonder that our collective memory has coalesced around the false recall of that idea.

For those of us who spent out formative years in UK arcades, however, the truth is that these places never really existed, certainly not on a large scale. I’m not talking here about the high-street backrooms, or computer shops, or chippies that might have housed a few ‘spacies’. If you relax and let your genuine gaming-memories bubble up to the surface, you’ll remember that what we actually had in the bigger arcades was a mixed economy of penny-pushers, one-armed bandits, horse racing, bingo and other low-stakes gambling opportunities as well as video arcade games – but with the later only usually in the minority. Formally, the largest arcades were recognised as ‘family entertainment centres’, designed to attract the broadest possible demographic, and part them from the biggest possible chunk of disposable cash.

In that sense, Funspot isn’t really an ‘arcade’ at all. But neither can it be described as a mere family entertainment centre. No, it’s a venue which prides itself on the elevated status of ‘Family Entertainment Super Center’ – with quite some justification. You see, Funspot isn’t just a room, or a building. It’s not even a building with several floors. It is what can only be described as a compound – a sprawling complex of multi-storey-buildings strewn over a site covering several acres.

Perhaps I should qualify that observation. The word ‘compound’ has acquired some unfortunate connotations over the years. And for the casual reader, this image of the LED billboard on Endicott St. won’t help to allay those fears. Don’t worry, though – this particular compound is not home to a disturbing survivalist cult. Or at any rate, not a violent one! What you can read on the billboard is actually the state motto of New Hampshire, which harkens back to Revolutionary times, in which context it makes a lot more sense!

Most of the buildings at Funspot are inter-connected, with a few others set apart. All are enveloped within an enormous parking lot with space for several hundred cars and – potentially – thousands of visitors.

In the summer months, the activities spill out beyond the parking areas onto a crazy golf course, ice-cream pavilion, picnic area and more. This place is huge!

Inside, there’s plenty to keep the whole family busy. There are 20 bowling lanes – half 10-pin, and half candlepin. There’s a crazy golf course, there’s a cafe – the Braggin Dragon, and a bar – the D.A. Long Tavern. There are dodgems for the kids, and several floors of redemption machines, spewing out tickets that can be swapped for sweeties, toys and keepsakes.

There’s even a separate bingo hall. And that’s all well and good. I enjoy the odd punt on the redemption machines myself. Once you’ve figured out the most ‘rewarding’, and more importantly, how to maximise you chances of winning – you have the challenge of trying to get yourself a commemorative mug or t-shirt for less than it would cost to buy one outright in the shop!

But none of that is what we’re interested in! Coming back to our implicit understanding of the term ‘arcade’, the thing we really care about is its collection of ancient and historic video games! And this is where we have to make another distinction. If Funspot is the Family Entertainment Super Center, only a small part of it it would be considered an ‘arcade’ – and that is the American Classic Arcade Museum – or ACAM for short.

ACAM occupies only one part of one floor in one of the buildings at Funspot. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t large, or worthy of a visit…

Nosir, ACAM is not just #ossum, its #OssumSosBoss!

It is precisely how we would imagine a Meade-ian mythical arcade. The electronic glow from its rows and rows of carefully-curated video-games, draws you in to its half-lit sanctuary of retro-gaming history. Soft-rock classics from the 70s and 80s waft from the PA system to help ease you into your journey. I suspect that if you stood still for just a bit too long, you’d end up stuck there, not just mesmerised by the fosfor-induced nostalgia, but frozen solid for all time in pixelated carbonite!

While ACAM is packed full of video arcade machines, it doesn’t feel crowded. The aisles are wide enough to allow players on both sides to adopt even the most preposterous of arcade ‘stances’, and still allow free passage in between. More importantly, things have been arranged so that side art is always at least partially on display when warranted.

To get the full effect, I recommend making your first entrance through the bannered entry on the top-floor, opposite the indoor golfing centre. But once you’ve done that, and had an explore of the main buildings, you should try again using the steps that come up from the floor below. Perhaps on the way back from a sneaky refreshment in the D.A. Long Tavern, or from having a go on the touching, and not-at-all-gimmicky homage to Irish cultural heritage, Leprechaun.

It’s worth pointing out that while base-line snackage, such as ‘soda’ and ‘candy bars’, is available from vending machines, your options for more substantial vittles will be limited to the pizzas and other items on sale in the Tavern through the week, outside of peak season. At the weekend, however, you can also avail yourself of the culinary delights of the Braggin’ Dragon, whether that be Chilli-Cheese Dogs, Onion Rings, Fries, or all three!

NB: while the hotdog in the picture looks small, that’s an optical illusion caused by the relative size of the ketchup pots. These aren’t the inch-wide thimbles we get at McDonalds in the UK, what you’ve got there is a pair of two-and-a-half-inchers!

While there are some games from most years between Atari’s 1972 Pong and the late 1980s, there is a noticeable, and pressumably intentional emphasis on older models, many of which are not just unusual but downright rare. I saw plenty of games, which I only vaguely remembered from back in the day. Some of these, like Midway’s 1976 submarine classic, Sea Wolf, brought back particularly fond memories (read the first blog in this thread!). Shame it was out of action. Luckily, from what I remember, it was vaguely similar to Destroyer and Depth Charge, which they did have – in full working order – so I had a few goes on those instead.

I was also pleased to see a pristine example of the notorious Death Race, a two-player, top-down ‘racer’, with a single screen, where you compete to see who can run over the most ‘zombies’ in their sports car! It’s not a high-scoring game – if you can break into two figures, you’re doing well. Not something to emulate out on the roads either!

If you’ve enjoyed the arcade doc- (or should that be mock-)umentary, King of Kong, you can take your chances on the same Donkey Kong machine that’s inspired champions for decades. In fact, it sits in the middle of an impressive row of Nintendo cabinets, with all the Kongs, Popeye, R-Type, and more besides (NB: The R-Type pcb is by IREM, but was served up for the US audience in a Nintendo cabinet).

Other highlights included cockpit versions of Sega’s marvellous racers, Turbo and Monaco GP. Both use the same basic game mechanics, which – despite entering its fifth decade – remains surprisingly good fun. It’s smooth, responsive, fast – and, bascially, easy to pick up, but difficult to master.

Something else you’ll find out on the floor, which I’d heard about but never seen before was the vector-based space simulator, Star Tek. There is no doubting that the cabinet itself is a retro-futuristic work of art. And it certainly had the potential to offer an immersive experience in Captain Kirk’s chair. Sadly, IMHO, this is an opportunity missed. The game itself is shallow and repetitive, but not – it has to be stressed – in an entertaining way. I imagine that explains why I never saw one b.i.t.d.

I also found myself drawn to Exerion, a midly nauseating, but strangely compelling inertia-based shooter, that I don’t think I’ve seen in the wild since the summer of 1983. It was one of two cabinets in the takeaway on a campsite I was visiting with my parents in France! I also dallied on the crisp Krull cabinet with its twin-sticked trickery; marvelled at the photo-realistic topper (kindof) on the Alien Syndrome machine, and spent a pleasant half-hour re-acquainting myself with the spinner-induced joys of Arkanoid. And how could I not sink some serious time into the original Williams Sinistar cab, with its still-responsive 49-way joystick. The difference this makes to playing in MAME on an 8-way stick is really quite something.

While there was a general lack of shoot-em-ups, and other games from the mid-to-late 80s, the range of other genres on offer more than made up for it. Amongst them was a bewildering array of strange old distractions, which could only reasonably be described as ‘janky’. Regular listeners to the Ten Pence Arcade Podcast would have recognised a fair few of these, such as Satan’s Hollow, Circus Charlie, Kamikaze, and Radical Radial. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that they steer clear of RR‘s evil cabinet-twin, Frisky Tom. It clearly crosses the line between janky and junk. Why they have it in ACAM, and not smouldering in ashes at the bottom of a bonfire, I do not know.

New discoveries for me included Timber – a really engaging twin-sticked-lumberjack game, starring the main character from the perenially-popular Tapper; and the janky shooter, Space Dungeon, which I reckon could be a grower. I also enjoyed reconnecting with Warlords – a fantastic multi-player game which holds up well for the single gamer; and Canyon Bomber, with its cross-over bomb/coin-drop vibe.

Beyond this, there was a representative selection of heavy hitters, including Robotron, Track’n’Field, Rastan, Pac Man, Missile Command, 720 Degrees, Rolling Thunder, Gauntlet, and Black Tiger to name but a few. Sadly, there was no Time Pilot ’84 out on the floor, which was a bit of a blow, as I was hoping to get some practice in it at the time for Arcade Archive’s February high-score challenge.

If that wasn’t enough, the electronic bleeps and bloops of the arcade games was complimented by the mechanical thwacks and thumps of a row of classic pinball tables. Stand-outs for me included Xenon, Gorgar and Black Knight 2000, but there was also a selection of older machines. Downstairs, en route to the D.A. Long Tavern, was a secondary collection of DMD-based pins.

If there was one disappointment, it would have to be that there was no Rygar – unarguably (DON’T DARE!), one of the all-time masterworks of the video-arcade-game form, and I game where I am relentless pushing my personal best twoards the 5 Million point mark (yeah, #fr #srsly!)

With all of this sounding like a cut-and-paste description of a pretty exciting fantasy arcade, you might be wondering where the ‘Museum’ aspect of the title comes into play. Well, impressively, this descriptor is no mere confection or contrivance to lend the arcade a degree of gravitas. It is no symbolic blunt object, with which to bat away the painfully ignorant meddling of the Mary Whitehouses of this world. For reasons related to it’s funding model, ACAM is in fact configured as a bona fide museum, and is registered as such with the authorities. While you might feel that its collection of classic games would be enough in its own right to justify that status, ACAM goes above and beyond the call of duty in this respect.

At regular intervals throughout the arcade, you will find displays, installations, signage and interpretation boards that showcase pivotal moments, movers and material examples from the world of classic arcades. There are displays cases filled with early games consoles and cartridges, banners highlighting the impact of arcade culture on other aspects of popular entertainment, and boards telling the story of the machines that have been donated or lent by enthusiasts to be enjoyed by the wider public through ACAM. For those who’ve spent any time delving into the arcade scene on the internet over the past decade, there will be some familiar names here. There is also series of banners outlining the history of industry giants Bally-Sente, and their ‘multi-system’ cabinets, which form the backdrop to a row of the same cabinets, showcasing a selection of the weird and wonderful games that were sold for them. The example par excellence here is the bizarre ‘eat-em-up’ Snacks’n’Jackson – a game that needs to be seen rather than described!

Upping the ante in terms of scale are the apparently growing number of pivotal cabs encased in Perspex sarcophagi. But the largest artefact on display, by quite some way, is the Hercules pinball table. That thing is so big, players steer what looks like a baseball across its playfield.

An unexpected, but welcome addition to the museum displays was what can only be described as a shrine to Keith Apicary – YouTube phenomenon and comedy creation of Nathan Barnatt. Not only do we get to see Keith’s certified score of -400 on Donkey Kong, as witnessed at ACAM, but also the actual Neo-Geo multi-slot machine featuring in the video for his (in)famous, Neo-Geo Song. If you’re having a look at that, do check out Nathan’s ‘Skittels’ (Skittles) Song while you’re at it. Top notch nerdery!

Now onto the more sombre stuff.

ACAM was great, as was Funspot. Full-stop.

Something that worried me a bit about both, however, was the way you pay for the experience. The machines throughout are operated by tokens, you see, which you can buy with cash or card from dispensers in the main entrance. On one level, this is quite nice. I like dropping coins (or tokens) in the slots. It really twangs my nostalgia strings. I even have my JAMMA cabs at home set up to run on old 10 pence pieces.

The more you buy, the cheaper they get. So if you’re going to be there for a stretch, it makes sense to buy the maximum 120 tokens for $20. That works out at not much more than 10p a token. While some of the big-ticket redemption games cost 3 or 4 tokens a play, the more familiar pinballs cost 2, and most of the arcade games 1. If you’re an even half-decent player, that makes for a fairly cheap evening’s entertainment. But that’s also a problem. Businesses like Funspot were hit pretty hard by the pandemic, the lockdowns, and the slow rebound in custom afterwards. I get that they don’t want to put their regular customers off by hiking their prices, but doing so might help them to give the place a bit of refurbishment. I don’t think it’s unfair to suggest that fixtures and fittings, and especially the carpets are starting to look a bit ‘tired’. Maybe fershening things up would also encourage even more people in?

When I first went, on a cold and dark Thursday evening in February, the whole place was deserted. And things weren’t that different on the Friday. Come Saturday during the day, however, the carparks were full, and the redemption-machine areas were rammed with families, with loads of small kids tearing about enjoying themselves. And I have to say, that made for a really nice atmosphere. While ACAM was moderately lively during the day, come 6 o’clock, it emptied out almost as if someone had flicked a switch! Having passed the time on my flight out to Boston with a private screening (!) of The King of Kong, I’d been expecting a throng of middle aged nerds to descend as the families left, and for there to be some serious jostling for position on the classic cabs, and pestering of the ‘part-timers’ with announcements of ‘Kill screens’. But that was not to be. Maybe it was just the time of year, but I suppose the rag-tag collection of 30 and 40-something gamers holding the fort in the movie, would be in their 50s by now or perhaps even older. Maybe they had other things to do? Or perhaps they’ve just drifted away from the arcade scene?

From a purely personal, and selfish point of view, however, that actually worked out rather well for me as a man on a time-limited mission. It meant I had the pick of the machines, and plenty of opportunities to take (bad) photos of them to boot.* But it did make me wonder about the viability of the place going forward. Given what Funspot/ACAM has come to symbolise in the arcade community, it would be a real shame if more of you didn’t get to see it.

On the whole, the bulk of the machines were very well looked-after, and there was clearly maintenance underway on others, even while I was there. Nevertheless, I don’t know if it was reflective of the winter doldrums, or a general trend, but far from all of the games were in good working order. A few were completely out of action, but that’s something you’d expect in any busy arcade. All the same, beyond that, I’d say that perhaps a quarter of the total had issues ranging from screen problems, to broken controls or non-functioning coin-slots, which meant you either couldn’t play them at all, or couldn’t play them in a way that was enjoyable. It would have been good to have a go on Forgotten Worlds, or Buck Rogers, or Pin Bot, or Super Bug, or Bandido for example, not to mention Sea Wolf. But they were all broke in one way or another.

This, to me, points to problems. I’d suggest the easiest way to resolve them would be to replace the tokens with the kind of single entry fee used so successfully in the UK by Arcade Club, and others. Perhaps that would give ACAM the headroom it needs to help keep everything ship-shape, in Bristol fashion, and floating comfortably above the waterline? It would certainly save on the time and resources needed to fix dodgy coin mechanisms.

To conclude, you couldn’t argue that ACAM is the world’s biggest arcade. Depending on the specifics of the arcade experience you were after, it may not even have the ‘best’ collection of games in absolute terms. Based on what I’ve seen to date, that honour would have to go to the monumental, multi-level Arcade Club, Bury in England.

What ACAM does have to offer, however, is unique. It works well as a museum, but I think it’s real value is as a physical reinforcement of the idealised arcade of the early to mid-1980s. Although a mythical arcade in terms of its contents, ACAM has also achieved mythical status in its own right. But this is no fantasy arcade that you can only explore in your mind. You can actually go there, see it, and buy yourself a baseball cap to prove you’ve been!

What are you waiting for?!

* A note on the photos: I’m obviously no photographer. And I didn’t take a dedicated camera. Like most folks, I was stuck with the built-in camera on my less-than-flagship Android phone. While it seems to give reliably good results in daylight, the pre-sets struggle with multiple sources of bright light in an otherwise dark setting, eg. in a dimly lit video arcade! What this meant in practice was that I could only easily get a decent shot of the marquee, or the screen, or the cabinet, but never all three at the same time. The alternative, was to dial in the settings manually. While this worked for isolated locations, the non-uniform lighting in the arcade meant that settings that were perfect for one side of the room would have to be recalibrated for the other. This made it pretty difficult to capture consistently watchable video-footage. I realise the two obvious solutions are to invest in a better camera, and spend some time learning how to use it properly! But if anyone has any tips for apps or techniques to squeeze the most out of an Android camera in these kinds of condition, please leave them in the comments below.

Next up: Other things to do on the ACAM trail…

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