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!
What news is there in the city? Have the proud woo-ers by this time come home from their ambush, or are they still watching for me where they were, to take me on my homeward way?
Homer (The Odyssey, Book 16)
Greetings fellow arcade enthusiasts, and welcome back to my humble blog. Prepare to go ‘Woo’, for I bring news…
According to WordPress.com, Arcade Odysseus has been troubling the blogosphere for 520,960 minutes. That’s a whole lot of minutes. But what it means #IRL is that this site has now been up and running for a whole year!!!
‘Woo!’ and dare I say, ‘Hoo!’
So, many happy returns to Arcade Odysseus, but – more importantly – many thanks to all you lovely, lovely, wonderful readers for keeping me company on my journey.
We’ve covered quite a distance, haven’t we?
I’m not just talking about the 8,000 miles from the Glens of Pictavia to Funspot, NH, and back. There are also the strange aeons of time we’ve crossed in our joint quest to return to the Golden Age of video arcade games.
To celebrate, I thought I should introduce you to my twins. OK, so they’re not human, and they entered my world two years apart. But there are two of them!
I’ve already covered their protracted gestation, here, in a tale that’s bound to strike a chord with more than a few of you VACers. To cut a long story short, my attempts to get hold of a real-life, old-school, video-arcade cabinet for my own home began in 2007. For various reasons, it was late 2010 before I could put any serious effort into the project, and 2012 before it came to fruition.
Rob & Donnie, March 2024.
Twin number one arrived in April of that year. As you can see, his name is Rob O’Tron. And what a fine, strapping example of an Electrocoin Goliath Mark 3 he is. Twin number two joined us almost 2 years later, in May 2014. His name is Donnie K. Conn.
Compared to many collectors, my shrine to the gods of arcades past is meagre.
In an ideal world, and an ideal games room, I’d want hunners (= ‘a lot’) of the things. I reckon I’d ‘need’ a few of my favourite dedicated cabs, some pinball tables, and enough generic JAMMA cabs to cover all the control variations, from joystick, steering wheel and spinner to flight yoke, flight stick, and light gun.
What I have is a compromise. It fills the space available – in terms of room, and spousal tolerance (!). From my perspective, it also serves as a striking and emotive art installation that recalls an important moment in time, culture, and my own life journey. Goliaths FTW!
Beyond that, it lets me play horizontal and vertical games without any hassle whatsoever 😉
The Beauty Parlour
I may only have two cabs, but as I’m sure you’ll all appreciate, the scope to tinker, tweak, and tamper is not only limitless but very difficult to resist.
First up is the ‘ritual cleansing’.
Something that never ceases to amaze me, is the number of folk selling L@@K!!R@RE!!!! arcade kit, who don’t seem to know about cloths or soapy water. You see, I like to look after my stuff. And I don’t want huge hulking great objects d’art in my housecovered in grime. But that’s fine, I find the cleaning aspect of the hobby therapeutic. For me, the process was similar to those guys cleaning carpets on YouTube. Don’t get me wrong, the machines were clean to the touch when they came in. But decades of accumulated dust, dirt and cigarette smoke were laminated onto the surface – especially on the inside. That had to go.
After several gallons of warm soapy water, and a thorough airing, the scrapes, gouges and bumps on the outside were filled and touched-in.
BeforeAfter
I used acryllic model paint. While easy to blend and apply, it has faded over the years. I’ll need to redo the dings at some point, and maybe, when I do, I’ll spray over the top-coat with some UV-resistant anti-fade spray. It seems to work well enough on ink-jet photos, so it should do the job on the cabs. While I was doing this, I also used a black sharpie to touch in the cracks and creases on the black monitor shrouds. Hidden behind the glass bezel, the now look as good as new.
Next up, the metalwork was in need of a refresh. While there isn’t very much of it, getting the top coat dry without an effing insect landing on it, leading to a rub-down and respray was… challenging.
The coin doors, while OK, weren’t set up to let me use the big 10 pence pieces I enjoyed in my youth. So out they came, to be replaced with twin-slot doors, cut to accommodate low-maintenance S10 coin mechanisms.
While doing this, I sanded the black paint-work back to the metal, which reminded me of the doors on old Williams’ cabs like Defender. So I polished them up and left ’em like that. After fitting some new bulbs to the coin return buttons, I replaced all the barrel locks with new, keyed-alike mechs – which are far more convenient for a ome setup.
In those days, when it was easier and often cheaper getting spare parts from the States, I sourced a some replacement coin slot bezels from a stateside seller. A bit of scanning and photoshop later, and Y100 became 10p. At the same time, I bagged me a pile of old 10 pees off eBay – enough to generate the familiar ‘chink’ that followed the dropping of a coin through the slot.
Buttons were removed, cleaned, bleached, and then polished! Leaf-switches were refurbished and fine-tuned, and the monitors recapped, with burnt-in tubes eventually switched out for shinier, cleaner versions. Getting hold of those tubes, however, was nowhere near as easy or as quick as I would have liked. In fact, one of them still isn’t perfect (if anyone has a burn and scratch free 19″ screen compatible with Hantarex boards, that they no longer need, please drop me a line!).
Of course, the maquees had to be swapped out too. This presented me with a quandry. Which artwork should I use? Tonnes of the acade games I like have eye-catching marquees. Loads of them are reproduced in glorious, touched-up technicolour by Tim Nicholls in his excellent 2015 compendium, Artcade: The Book of Classic Arcade Art. However, to my mind, not all of these were suitable for their designated space, or the curatorial dimension of my ‘installation’. So I went for marquees with recognisably classic vibes. My thinking was tha they should have clean lines and bright colours, and come from games that I liked. My initial choices were Robotron and Defender.
At the time, the easiest – and cheapest – way to do this was to source high resolution scans off the internet, tidy them up in an art package, and print them out on heavy duty photo paper on the A0 plotter at work. Years later, when forum celebrity Muddy Music had set up his Arcade Art Shop, I grabbed myself some perspex replacements. This time round, however, I swapped Defender for Donkey Kong on my vertical cab. Classic game! Shame I’m still no good at it…
Like the marquees themselves, marquee lights don’t last forever. These days, a lot of collectors are swapping them out for LEDs. I’ve stayed with CFL for now, but have had to replace tubes and starters – which are all still available online.
That brings us on to the joysticks – which are a crucial part of the arcade experience. None of this ‘gamepad’ nonsense for me. Not even on my 1980s consoles! That’s right. I’ll always rock an arcade stick in preference to a gamepad. Pah!!!
My first cab came with ‘asymmetic’ sticks – as captured by my kids in an early piece of visual art! That would never do. They had to be replaced asap.
Daddy’s Arcade Mk I
First up were a pair of Happ ‘bat-top’ sticks from the States. At the time, that was cheaper than buying them in the UK. They were fine for most things, but not what I needed for Robotron. Luckily, not long afterwards, I was able to bag 3 leaf-switched Wico sticks on the now defunct JAMMA+ forum.
Sticks the firstSticks the second
The shafts were pretty rusty, but nothing a quick whizz in a drill couldn’t cure, when Brasso and wire wool were applied. A similar process sorted out the dings and scratches on the plastic knobs, with the help of Novus 123, and some fine-grade wet’n’dry sandpaper. To complete the revitalised look, I visited ArcadeShop.de for some NOS grommets and dust washers.
Later, when cab number two was having it’s beauty treatment, I was able to find a Cyprus-based seller on eBay with a pile of NOS Wico sticks. The price delivered was $112. In those days, that was about £75 in total, for two sticks and postage!!!
A quick note on Wicos. Many keyboards have been hammered to dust by ‘forumites’ evangelising the importance of a 4″ shaft when playing Robotron (oo err missus!). As a result, they’ve been rare and difficult to get hold of for a decade. I reckon at least part of that stick schtick was to shill the market.
But here’s the thing: if you have a dedicated Williams’ Robotron cab, where the control panel is packed with 1/2 inch ply (into which a shallow rebate for the joysticks is routed), the shafts protrude around 3 1/2 ” from the outer surface. If, however, you have an Electrocoin JAMMA cab, where the joysticks are bolted directly under the 2 mm mild-steel control panel, the far more common 3 1/2″ shafts also stick about 3 1/2″ above the outer surface. You heard it here first kids. For authentic Robotron gameplay, you don’t necessarily need 4″ sticks. Check your control panel before dropping a fortune on eBay treasures!
The more I started getting back into my arcade favourites, the more I realised that when it came to vertical games, Golden Age titles just can’t be enjoyed the way they were intended without a 4-way restrictor gate. Technically, Wicos can be switched between 4-way and 8-way, but TBH, it’s a bit of a bollâche, as the French (don’t) say. The solution for easy 4-8-way switching? A pair of Ultimarc Mag Stick Plus joysticks – with ball-top handles. If you have a Goliath, you’ll need an adaptor plate to mount them (the interweb is your friend here). But once they’re in, it’s just lift, twist, and away you go. It makes quite a difference.
My final tweak – so far (!) – was to refurbish the control panels. I’d already picked up a pair of Wico LS-30 rotary sticks, so I could enjoy Rambo-inspired shooters like Ikari Warriors. Rather than mucking about with swapping joysticks in and out, I decided to find a spare control panel and keep them permenantly fitted. While I was at it, I also took the opportunity to replace the CPO (control panel overlay). Like the marquees, this came from the Arcade Art Shop.
When I have a spare day (or two!), the other two control panels will be getting the same treatment. I know a lot of you arcadists are keen on showcasing your cabs’ battle scars. I’m coming round to the idea that a storied appearance can look good on a dedicated cab. For Electrocoins, however, I want mine to look the way I remember them from bitd – minty fresh and polished to within an inch of their electronic lives! In the meantime, I’ve swapped out the rusty old coach bolts securing the joysticks for some shiney, shiney stainless-steel replacements. NB: when fitting these, you need to press down had on the top of the bolt with something rubbery when tightening the nut, otherwise, it’ll rotate and ruck up your CPO. That’s not a good look!
Stainless steel coach bolts.
To finish up, here are some shots of the cabs just after they came in:
Here they are again after their refurbs, almost 10 years ago:
And here they are again yesterday!
Games
‘[G]od soon gave us game to satisfy our hearts’
Homer (The Odyssey, Book 9)
Compared to most collectors, I don’t have a lot of PCBs. Just a few favourites, including the best game of all time… Rygar. Obviously. I also have a few multi boards, including the outstanding JROK Williams FPGA board, for authentic Robotron action. Other boards have come and gone over the years, because, basically, I don’t have any sensible places to keep them. What I have done is invest in a couple of inline Volt-meters, to be sure that my PCBs can be tuned to run under optimum conditions.
For reasons of convenience, most of my gaming has been done on MAME via PCs and Ultimarc J-PAC adaptors. For the first few years, I used (really!) old office PCs running Windows XP, MAME and the MALA frontend. That was fine… to an extent. MALA is uncluttered, simple, and easy to use. To shut down safely, however, you needed an extra, dedicated button, which is a bit of a pain. But I was able to fit one – discretely – to the top of the cab.
Frustratingly, the first few PCs failed after a year or so. Good job they were free! That could be because they were ancient and at the end of their natural lives anyway. But I was suspiscious that steam from the kitchen may have been intefering with their innards. As a precaution, I started keeping a couple of disposable moisture traps in the electronics section of the cabs. It could be a coincidence, but since then – maybe 8 or 9 years ago – nothing has failed.
Not long after that, I invested in one of 2Huwman’s Linux-based Mini Kab systems. It was great while it lasted. Fast-booting, reliable, and straightforward. Once I’d ugraded my switching PSU to 4A on the 12V line, it could run without a separate PSU. Sadly, in early 2020, it perished in a freak cat-tralated accident and had to be replaced. These days I run older, USFF PCs running Groovymame, on builds compiled by the initimitable Mr JonnyG. That guy is a hero!
Epilogue
I hope you’ve enjoyed the story of my little home arcade. I’ve certainly enjoyed the machines. They’ve been a regular fixture at gatherings and parties, and especially popular with the kids. My own kids have grown up with them. They may have moved on to more modern things, but at least they know their gaming history. And they’re under strict instructions. When their old dad finally pops his clogs, they can keep one of the machine if they like. But the other one is to have the gubbins removed, and used as a vessel for my final journey – to the great Amusement Arcade in the sky…
What else should I do to my Goliaths? How else could I tweak them for the ultimate arcade experience? Please leave you thoughts, recommendations and tips in the comments section below!
You go here to get high. It’s an airfield.Irn Bru Factory. They make it from grrrdrrrs, you know.
Where?
Well, it’s a town slap, bang in the middle of Scotland’s Central Belt: a town that boasts an airfield, an Irn Bru Factory and one of the country’s first recognised megastructures.
What’s it called….?
If you’re Ronnnie Corbet, voicing the long-running TV advert for the place in the ’80s and ’90s, it’s ‘Cumbrrrrnawled’.
To anyone who’s actually lived near it, however, it will always be ‘Cummer nudd’. Tricky? To get it right, you need to say it forcefully, bordering on aggressively, with a heavy emphasis on the ‘nudd’ bit at the end. Try it again… There you go! ‘Cummernudd’!
Kilsyth Main Street – aka ‘Down the Town’ – c. 1980. A few short years later, the place was bristling with arcade machines!
I’m not from Cumbernauld. As we established a few posts back, I grew up in the neighbouring town of Kilsyth – a smaller, sleepier, and hillier place, about 5 miles to the Northwest. But Cumbernauld, and its various retail outlets played an important part in my digital evolution. It offered the promise of arcade experiences, and a gateway to the world of home computing so pivotal to my own journey, that am gunna havta talk about it here, and in the first few posts of my forthcoming ‘Fizzy Pixels’ series of blogposts.
In preparation for today’s Odyssey I’ve only gone and been to Cumbernauld. Not just in my memory, or the internet, but #IRL!!!
Don’t worry! I escaped more or less unscathed. And the best bit is that I now have an SD card full of nostalgia-drenched photos to share with you. I’m not just talking about ‘now’ shots either – but a bunch of ‘then’ shots from back-in-the-day too! This is exciting stuff, people!
Fair warning: This is a nostalgia trip with video-game related colour. While there is arcade content here, we’re going to focus on the venues that weren’t. To find out what I mean by that, you’ll have to read on. But I’m hoping the journey will inspire you cling on tightly to my time-traveling surf board as I ride that wave of nostalgia to the before times, and the world of 8-bit micro computers.
To do it all the justice it deserves, we’re gunna need to start with some proper context.
Cumbernauld
Cumbernauld Village in 1898, 1950, & c. 2015.
There’s been a small village at Cumbernauld since at least the 13th century, when it started appearing in maps and charters. That’s not why it’s called Cumbernauld. The name doesn’t signal that the place is ‘auld’ (Note to Englanders, that’s how we say ‘old’). It’s from the Gaelic, *Comar nan allt, meaning ‘Place where the streams meet’. Bet that’s some #education you weren’t expecting, eh?
Cumbernauld Town Centre, straddling the A8011, January 2024
After the War, the green fields to the west of the Village were earmarked as the site for one of Scotland’s five ‘new towns’. Three decades of frenzied building later, they had disappeared under a sprawling complex of dormitory suburbs, orbiting an enormous brutalist ‘megastructure’. Seriously, that’s how it’s described by the architects’ association, RIBA.
To be absolutely clear, that doesn’t make it a ‘good thing’!
Objectively speaking, however, it’s fair to say that by the 1970s, Cumbernauld had been transformed. The charming village that was had been stripped of its name in the maelstrom of gleaming white harling and concrete. When the dust finally settled, the place now known as Cummernudd was exponentially bigger, and the longstanding dynamic between the village and the neighbouring town definitively turned on its head. Kilsyth with it’s 10,000 souls had once been a market town and a burghal centre – a hub for trade, commerce and administration, now it was very much the junior partner.
Cumbernauld New Town had muscled up to 50,000 men, women and weans (sounds like ‘waynes’: from ‘wee anes’, ‘bairns’, kids). With the local government reorganisation of 1976, when Scotland’s counties were abolished, it also came to house the lion share of Council offices and amenities (NB: online retailers, did you read that? Scotland doesn’t have counties, and hasn’t had any for 50 years. Stop making us fill in that box on your stupid forms!).
Kilsyth folk didn’t like that.
There was a general feeling that Cumbernauld got unfair advantages and special treatment, that poor old Kilsyth badly needed but never enjoyed.
You don’t need to take my word for that. Kilsyth’s local newspaper, The Kilsyth Chronicle, had been amalgamated with The Cumbernauld News. So, the locals got to read about what was happening in both places, and complain about it all in one convenient forum!
Having read through these materials, it’s clear to me that Cumbernauld did benefit from disproportionately large investment, supported by tax breaks, and some fairly ambitious and innovative planning. But that wasn’t because of corruption in the local authority – regardless of what the gossips were saying. It reflected something the gossips didn’t understand – the practical realities of running a ‘New Town’ as legislated by Westminster, and managed by the Cumbernauld Development Corporation, which had been set up to oversee the project.
Cumbernauld had a small cinema, where I went for an occasional helping of ’70’s shovel-ware, of the Herbie or Cat from Outer Space variety. There was also a theatre, which hosted a never-ending stream of national, local, and youth-group-type performances. Check out the promo for this 1982 show, ‘B’roo-ing’. ‘B’roo’ was what the previous generation had called the (Unemployment) Bureau – ie. the place you went to get your dole cheque. So, clearly, the issues covered were right up-to-date!
Sounds like the kids had fun. As you can see, details on the play itself are scant, but I’m guessing it was an uplifting tale of empowerment, where the disadvantaged and forgotten yoof of Cummernudd, somehow found the strength to succeed in life by turning their backs on poisonous distractions - like puggies and video arcade games. AAARRRRGH! What were they playing at!? It was the ’80s kids! You were supposed to be dissing Thatcher, not the aracde machines! Oh well, at least they were able to get hold of some actual video-games cabinets for props. And let’s face it, that’s probably the best UFO is fit for.
Of even greater interest was the swimming pool and sports complex called the Tryst. For a while, in the early 1980s, Kilsyth Primary School would bus its older pupils there and back of a Friday afternoon for the obligatory swimming lessons – presumably to minimise our chances of drowning when we went for a paddle in the King’s Lynn, up the Glen, or one of the abandoned quarries.
The tryst was great. Not only was it a venue for swimming, basketball and karate competitions, it was also a source of cheeky portions of chips. Sadly, and unlike many similar venues bitd, what it made up for in sportiness, it lacked in ‘spacies’. To the best of my memory, it had none. Not even a Frogger.
But I digress…
The jewel in Cumbernauld’s crown was it’s ever-expanding shopping centre, the Town Centre. Straddling the A8011 dual-carriageway, like an overfed Frenchman squatting over a traditional porcelain toilette, ‘The Centre’ has long attracted a very bad press. In fact, it’s the main reason that Cumbernauld has assembled such an enormous haul of Carbuncle-type awards over the years.
#NGL it ain’t exactly pretty.
It has to be stressed here that the problem is not the people, but the world-leading architects who preferred to make career-enhancing statements rather than places which are nice to live and work, or even, dare I say, functional. Flat roofs and concrete are never a particularly good look imho, but when you combine them with the relentless cold and damp of the Scottish climate, and the inevitable build up of slime and grime, you can kindof understand why the locals feel so resentful. To their general relief, and despite a cack-handed attempt by Historic Environment Scotland to get the place listed, the Council has now acquired the entirety of the megastructure, with the aim of demolishing it, and replacing it with a modern community hub. Thank goodness I got in there with my camera first!
As you can see from this montage of photos from the 60s to the present, not a lot has changed. Having said that, I always found the Town Centre to be a strangely optimistic place. But that could well be because I stopped going there in the early 1990s, a few years before things really started going downhill. In any case, I have fond memories of driving up there with my parents in the 1970s. Usually on wet Saturdays. Our destination was the now-demolished Woolco superstore – an out-of-town Woolworths on steroids.
Woolco! The grassy area in the foreground disappeared under Phase IV of the Town Centre, which opened in 1981.
Originally opening in 1975, Woolco was a giant department store that sold clothes, household goods, sports equipment, toys, and groceries – virtually everything and anything at which you could shake the proverbial stick. While my parents rounded up the week’s messages (‘food shopping’), my brother and I were released into the aisles to keep ourselves a) occupied and b) out of their way.
The checkouts at Woolco in Cumbernauld not long after it first opened, c. 1976.
We automatically gravitated towards the toy and book department. In the early days, we’d check out the toy cars, the Lego, and the Airfix kits. If I could work up the courage, I’d sometimes leaf through the Ladybird edition of Dracula or Frankenstein – fascinated and frightened in equal measure by the scary illustrations. Years later, in 1984, on one of the last visits I remember, I bought myself a paperback copy of the Return of the King for the princely sum of £1.95. Check out the picture below – it’s the actual book!
Of course, the toys would only hold our attention for so long, before the wanderlust set in. It was then that we first noticed the Death Star-style security cameras – those black hemispheres where you could never tell which way the camera was pointing? Mission Impossible-type spy shenanigans ensued.
Come the early 80s, the home entertainment landscape began to change. In response, Woolco introduced a counter of electronic games and consoles. Look at those prices! The top two are from The Kilsyth Chronicle, Thursday, 4th of November, 1982 (pp. 3 & 11), the bottom image from Thursday, 10th May, 1984 (p. 3)
It was here that I first encountered the mighty Vectrex.
Best 80s action movie ever? Check out my investigation into Commando, Rambo and the origins of Operation Wolf.
For those of you who don’t know, the Vectrex was a cartridge-based video-games console originally released in 1982. It’s USP was a built-in 10″ CRT screen, which displayed vector rather than raster graphics. That means the lines were completely smooth rather than blocky, but with no curves. While the graphics were monochrome, colour effects – of sorts – were achieved with the help of coloured acetate overlays. Cutting edge stuff! Or maybe not.
I bought myself a Vectrex a few years ago, mainly off the back of recent homebrew releases, some of which are absolutely stunning. For my money, Kristof Tuts’ Vector Pilot and Vector Patrol are amongst the best – taking the arcade versions of Time Pilot and Moon Patrol, and making them even better! But that’s partly because they cheat, by using memory management techniques and other tricks not available to the first generation of programmers. The most extreme example of this is the mind-boggling VecFever cartridge, which by-passes the Vectrex’s circuitry completely, using it as monitor to output spookily faithful renditions of early ’80s arcade games like Asteroids and Star Wars.
In 1982, there wasn’t even a hint of a suggestion that this would be possible. In fact, to be absolutely honest, it’s prospects didn’t look particularly good. Now, don’t get me wrong, If I had been given a Vectrex back then, I’m sure I would have played it for a bit. But truth be told, it was fairly obvious – even then – that if was little more than a glorified toy – a slightly fancier version of the single-screen VFD games we were all familiar with. It was also extremely expensive for what it was – with games costing way more than most parents would have been happy replacing at the rate their kids got bored of them. That was the view of ten-year-old me. But I clearly wasn’t alone. It wasn’t long before the system bombed.
After months of gathering dust on the shelf, Woolco’s hoard were slashed to £50. But even at that price, no one would touch them. By that point, the ZX Spectrum had taken off, and – as we’ll see in Fizzy Pixels, £50 would have bought you a heck of lot of blank tapes.
But that was then. And things have changed. These days Vectrexes – Vectrices? Vectri? – sell for a pretty penny on eBay. A tidy, boxed specimen could set you back £400 or more.
Looking back, it’s one of those ‘tardis’ scenarios. You know the kind? If you had a tardis, and a bag of period bank-notes, you could nip back and grab yourself a pallet’s worth of the remaindered consoles for cheaps. Better still, you could wait until they didn’t sell and were being driven to the tip, then offered the skip driver a case of Tenents larger for the lot of them, and retired off the eBay profits. Mind you, if you knew where the tip was, you could probably still excavate a few today. Sand-damaged E.T. cartridge anyone? No thanks, I’ll take a composted Vectrex instead, please!
Things started to go wrong for Woolco in the mid-1980s. Too much competition you see. Although we didn’t realise it at the time, the signs were there from 1984. Increasingly heavy advertising in The Chronicle, was probably one of them. By 1986, it had closed.
Asda, Cumbernauld, 1991.
The building itself was used for a few more years – first by Gateway, then ASDA – who kept the popular Red Grill cafe going, pretty much until the end. By the mid-1990s, however, not even ASDA could make the site work. When it finally closed it doors, the building was demolished, ultimately being replaced by the eastern end of the ‘new’ Antonine Centre.
Now you see it…
Now you don’t 😦The old Woolco site from the opposite side – 27th January, 2024.
One of the reasons for the demise of Woolco, and the unit it occupied, was the continued growth of of Cumbernauld Town Centre. Of course, when it opened in 1975, Woolco had benefitted from integration into the existing mall. At the point where the two joined, customers could enjoy the spectacle of the giant clock from the old St Enoch station in Glasgow, which once linked the area to the metropolis.
On my recent visit, I was excited to learn that the clock was still on display. Unfortunately, thanks to the damage caused by January’s high winds, quite a lot of the Centre was locked down or otherwise inaccessible. While my legs are long enough, and my neck brassy enough to ignore out-of-bounds signs, that didn’t help to unlock the doors to the installation. So, the closest I got this time round was the mural in the corridor outside.
By 1981 the Mega-Structure had expanded into Phase 4. And that was a game changer. I remember those buildings going up, and the sense of anticipation about all the new shops that would be moving in. But we’ll return to those, and the promised photos in the next blogpost. Right now, it’s time to focus on…
The arcade that wasn’t!
If the retro games press had their way, 1983 and 1984 would forever be associated with the ‘Great Video Games Crash’. Apparently that’s when the ground gave way under the over-heated home and arcade scene in the USA, forcing manufacturers like Atari to bury huge amounts of unsellable stock in the desert.
That didn’t happen in the part of Scotland were I grew up.
On the contrary, 1983 is precisely when we experienced an almost magical boom in both arcade and home video-gaming. Sales of old-fashioned cartridge-based had certainly stalled, but hardly anyone was buying them anyway. This was when sales of the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 really started to soar. As for the arcades, while the US market may well have become over-saturated with dedicated cabinets designed to play single games, venues in Scotland operated a more ‘homely’ business model, based on generic cabinets, and illegally imported bootleg PCBs. Between 1982 and 1984, the number of video-arcades in my own small town, increased from a disappointing zero to three! That’s not to say, however, that we weren’t eager for more.
As mentioned earlier, the good citizens of Kilsyth kept abreast of developments in Cumbernauld, through their shared newspaper, The Kilsyth Chronicle (and Cumbernauld News). In early 1984, there were murmerings of something big in the arcade world – rumours which I’ve since been able to flesh out with a bit of digging in the archived minutes of Cumbernauld & Kilsyth District Council.
In their meeting of 10th of February 1984, the Coonsil’s agenda included an item titled ‘Amusement Arcade Town Centre’. They were to seek opinion on the Cumbernauld Development Corporation’s plan for an amusement arcade in the town centre, housing up to 60 machines, with ‘video machines’ at the front adjacent to a ‘soda fountain’, whatever that was supposed to be. There were concern that this might damage a market already served by the County Bingo venue, which was licenced to carry 40 ‘amusement with prizes’ machines.
While further detail is lacking, the plans became a lot clearer, and a lot more exciting in the Coonsil meeting of 12th March. The agenda this time included an item on the ‘Proposed conversion of former Templeton Unit in Phase II for use as a ‘Leisureplex”. Yes, you read that right, ‘Leisureplex’. Lol!
The Development Corporation went on to explain that 2/3 of the arcade would be set aside for ‘videos’, and 1/3 for gaming machines. This gaming machine area would moreover be separated, manned and supervised at all times. What that means, dear readers, is that Cummernudd was looking at a venue with 40 video arcade games! In 1984! Can you imagine that?!!! That’s Blackpool or Scarborough levels of excitment!!!
The planning went from strength to strength.
On the 13th of June, the project was granted a Public Entertainment Licence for a ‘Soft drinks parlour and amusement arcade at Tweed / Tay Walks in Cumbernauld Town Centre’. Then, on the 3rd of September, a licence was issued under the Gaming Act 1968, ensuring that machines with prizes could be legally sited provided that: 1) No child under 16 years of age was to be admitted unless accompanied by an adult, and 2) No child wearing a school uniform was admitted during school hours.
The minutes noted there were ‘no objections’, but that didn’t stop the miserable hack from the Chronicle putting a negative spin on it.
On the 13th of September, he reported that the Leisure Centre was only given a ‘reluctant go-ahead’. Note the emphasis given to McElroy’s strangely contradictory ramble about the ‘great deal of support throughout the community for a facility of this nature’, but the development being somehow ‘worrying’. Sigh. What an old Elmer.
Kilsyth Chronicle, Thursday 13th September 1984, p. 6.
Without the benefit of some photos it’s difficult to imagine where this ‘Leisureplex’ might have been. But look what I’ve found!
Templeton’s supermarket, Phase II, Some time in the late 1970s / early 1980s.
As a supermarket, Templeton’s covered a fair amount of floor space. It also straddled one of the entrances to the Town Centre, which meant that it could theoretically stay open after the shopping mall itself had closed for the evening. If you take a look at the view looking inside, and the view from the outside, below, you’ll see the area linked together by the pub, Bar Yellow.
Bar Yellow on the inside.Bar Yellow on the outside.
With a build-up like this, the arcade was bound to be absolutely, world-turningly awesome. And you’ll no doubt be keen to know how it worked out – which games from 1984 and 1985 made the cut, where they could be found in the venue, and what, exactly the mysterious ‘soda fountain’ arrangement involved. Well, so would I. Because, you see, as far as I know, it never happened 😦
In the end, the owners seem to have pivoted into a simple, common or garden bar, sinking the bulk of their efforts into the re-developing the loading bay underneath into a nightclub – the late, lamented Papa Docs.
A year later, in September 1985, The Chronicle celebrated the opening of Papa Docs with a full-page spread. As you can see in the adverts surrounding the blurb, half the contractors in Cumbernauld were involved in the project. Whether they were paid in cash, or free drinks at the bar is anyone’s guess!
Kilsyth Chronicle, Thursday 11th September 1985, p.12.
While this came as a bitter disappointment to my 13-year-old self, it wasn’t that long before I was visiting Papa Doc’s myself. I preferred the Sax rock bar at the other end of the building, in the top floor of what is now ‘Spoon’s Carrick Stone pub. While Sax closed at 1 am. PD’s kept going to at least 3, and you know, ‘needs must’ etc. But that’s another story…
Former Sax venue on the roof of Phase IV, now the top floor of the local ‘Spoons.Alluring entrance to the once notorious Papa Docs nightclub.
Epilogue
So there you have it. While I know there were arcade machines in Cumbernauld back in the early 1980s, I only saw them used as props in an advert for a youth theatre production in 1982. And despite advanced plans for a 40-cab amusement arcade, with ‘soda fountain’, in the old Templeton’s supermarket, that particular bottle of pop went flat before it was even opened. Sad times indeed. Somebody pass a tiss-shoe.
Did you grow up in Cumbernauld? Did you visit it in the 1980s? Do you remember any actual arcade machines out in the wild? If so, please leave a note in the comments below and help add a happy ending to this tale of woe.
Coming Next…
This Arcade Eco-System series has already covered the most important (!) parts of central Scotland from 1982 to 1995. If you haven’t seen them already, feel free to explore the links below. But even if you have, please do go back and add the conversation. I’m really keen to fill the gaps in my memory before it finally starts to wear out:
The next part in the series will see us head back east to Auld Reekie, where I relocated in 1995. For the time being, however, we’ll be sticking with Cummernudd!
Stay tuned for Fizzy Pixels – Part 1: The ZX Spectrum.
This post will be a short one, but I’m gonna share it anyway because of what it represents…
As an arcade experience, it’s the equivalent of biting into a KitKat and discovering it’s chocolate all the way through. Or maybe that should be biting into a Malteaser, and finding there’s no honeycomb centre?
Why?
‘Coz this latest ramble is all about Malta.
Where is Malta?
Right. Now that we’re all here, can everyone who’s been to Malta please sit down…
Now, those of you still standing, can you point to Malta on this map?
What, no one?
Lol!
Don’t worry, until the beginning of this year, I would have been the last man standing. I’d heard of Malta, of course. Mainly due to it being mentioned in the Eurovision Song Contest. And I was aware that it was an island somewhere in the Med.
Malta is here!
Turns out that the island of Malta is between Sicily and Tunisia.
If, like me, you live under a flat stone in the rain-soaked glens of Pictavia, Malta is the perfect destination for a blast of light, heat and culture in the early spring – just when you’re starting to think that the sun is never coming back.
When we departed Edinburgh airport at the end of March, the temperature was way down in single digits. Typically for that (or any) time of year, there was also standing water in the sky. On arriving at Valletta airport later that evening, however, it was dry and – despite being well after sunset – still a good 19°C. The next few days were mostly sunny, with the mercury nudging 23°C in the afternoon. For me, that’s Goldilock’s territory. Not so hot you’re going to be melting into your Sketchers, and not too cold to walk about comfortably without a jacket. Just right!
Although it’s a small island, Malta doesn’t have many beaches. Instead, it’s famous for its sheltered bays and harbours. Over the centuries, the millennia even, they’ve helped to establish the island as a nodal point in international trade and commerce. Its ports were expanded and fortified by a series of powerful incomers, including the Romans, the Moors, the Knights of St John, and the British. It’s all very Game-of-Thronesy, or Napoleony – if you’ve been to see that yet?
During the Second World War, protecting Malta from the Germans, and keeping it supplied through a fierce Nazi blockade were key to securing the Allied advance into Sicily, and then the Italian Mainland.
In short, Malta has a lot of history. It’s also very built up, and possibly the mostly densely populated country on the planet. To be honest, you wouldn’t want to be driving a car down there. But thankfully, you don’t have to.
The bus network is phenomenal, linking every part of the island with frequent services. For locals it’s also totally free. But even visitors only pay EUR 2 for all but the fastest express buses. That means it’s easy and cheap to get about. So, there’s no excuse for not seeing the sights.
I had really wanted to visit the Hypogeum at Ħal Saflieni – a multi-level, underground ritual complex dating back to 4000 BC. Sadly, even although I checked for tickets a month before going, it was already fully-booked until the autumn! Never mind though. I was able to take in Hagar Qim and Mnajdra instead, after a nifty little boat tour round the Blue Grotto.
It was also super easy to nip down to the Sunday market at Marsaskala on the SE coast, and in to the ancient citadel of Mdina in the middle of the island.
But there’s also tonnes to do in Valletta itself. There are museums, galleries, cafes, bistros and bars aplenty. There were plenty of places to eat, with the standard price for a good quality meal being about EUR 20 a head. Burgers and chips were cheaper, but the local specialities seemed to be rabbit, and octopus. Given the island’s location, it wasn’t too surprising to find out that there’s also a lot of Italian influence. If octopus isn’t your thing, there’s pizza and pasta on tap! Just as well, really. It’s easy to work up an appetite in Valleta. The gorgeous old streets are a pleasure to explore. There are also city walls to conquer, and gardens and parks aplenty where you can kick back and catch your breath.
If you get tired of walking there’s a massive lift down from the citadel to the water line, and a series of speedy boats to take you across to Sliema, and the other parts of the Three-Cities area.
Arkadia: Merchants St, Valletta VLT 1175, Malta.
One thing that there doesn’t seem to be in the ancient heart of Valletta, is a cheap supermarket. Yes, the city has several Lidls etc. but they’re all a boat ride or bus trip away. According to GoogleMaps, there was meant to be one very near where I was staying. The alluringly-named ‘Arkadia’ foodstore. I went looking for it on my first night, but couldn’t find it.
Was that just me being daft? Probably. In my defence, however, the main part of the building that you enter from the street is filled with a food court selling all kinds of yummy street foods. So it was easy to get distracted. It turned out that out the supermarket was actually hidden from sight downstairs in the basement. It wasn’t the most economical, but it did have a wide range of ‘interesting’ seafood!
I bought a few bits, mainly for the bag, and sauntered back to the appartment for a snack and a snooze.
On passing by again the next day, something at the back of my head told me to look up. It must have been the ultra-sonic, siren song of the CRT. Because on straining my ageing eyes at the first-floor windows, that’s exactly what I saw!!!
Making my excuses, I zoomed in, bounded up the escalator, accelerated through the swanky bar area, and careered round the corner into a… deserted amusement arcade! What a real blast from holidays past. There was the ubiquitous air hockey and pool table, the usual weird gambling game, and several old-school CRT-based video-arcade cabinets!!! OK, so the racers were (imho) a bit ‘meh’. But there, at the heart of it all, was a testament to the high art of the fizzy pixel. Perhaps the very last-flush of the Golden Age of video-game entertainment. Not just a Time Crisis, but the best of all the time crises, Time Crisis II! Joy!
Epilogue
I really enjoyed my trip to Malta. It may only have been for a few days, but the weather, and the ambience were terrific. Finding an old-school arcade in a public place was the cherry on top of the icing on the cake. It may not have been Rygar or Raiden, but in this day and age, I’m happy to enjoy a bit of a crisis out in the wild. If I get the chance, I’ll certainly go back.
Next up? Well, we’ll have to wait and see what the New Year brings. In the meantime, have a very,
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!
Fancy some ‘Wang Casserole’ from this Edinburgh massage parlour? No? What about some ‘Golden Tea’? Ew.The story of Dun Edin is told by the names of its streets. There’s ‘Cowgate’, and ‘Haymarket’ which recall its farmers’ markets. Then there’s this… Wonder what used to happen here?These are not the t-shirts you seek.Edinburgh has more than its fair share of tourist tat shops. But some of their wears (sic) are rather appealing.
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!A random 60-in-1 cab that popped up in the Waverley Mall back in 2018.
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.
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.
Konbo Arcade Cafe, May 2018.
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.
May 2017May 2018
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.
May 2017Nov 2018Nov 2018
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:
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.
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…
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.
Yellow Pages, Glasgow North, 1987.
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.
O’Deans, Renfield Street, Glasgow.
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.
WH Smiths, Sauchiehall St., June 2023.WH Smiths, Argyle St., June 2023.
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
Yellow Pages, Glasgow North, 1987.
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 yetagain 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.
These are the ongoing voyages of Arcade Odysseus – on my 50-year mission to seek out old worlds and boldly go where many of us have gone before. If you’re not familiar with the back story, you can catch up via this link.
As I sit here writing this blogpost, most of Europe is blistering in the heat. Of course, that’s not the case in Perfidious Albion, where we seem to be stuck in an eternal monsoon season. But that’s not a bad thing…
You see, the endless rain persuaded me to escape on a pilgrimage to the Retro Collective in Chalford near Stroud in Glou-cider-shire. For the three of you who might not know what that is, it’s the converted mill on the river Frome, which houses retro-museum siblings The cave and Arcade Archive.
This has been no mean undertaking. I first began plotting the adventure in the Christmas holidays. But for reasons discussed here, I decided to postpone my trip in favour of an expedition to Funspot, NH. On Thursday morning, however, I bundled the clan into the car, and set off for an AirBnB in Chalford Hill. Don’t worry, I wasn’t taking them on an 800 mile round trip to drool over retro-computer equipment. We had family to visit too. The ‘Collective’ experience was to be mine alone!
The journey took us past Southwaite and Forton services. Once famous (in my mind!) for their 24-hour video arcades, the buildings themselves were now faded and crumbling. But seeing them did help to steel my resolve for the long road ahead. Which was just as well. Despite the ‘promises’ of Google Maps, what might in quiet times have been a six hour drive ended up taking more than ten…
A word of warning about Google Maps: While it had been my saviour in the States, that could not be said of our experiences in the southwest of Englandshire. Chalford has some frighteningly steep and narrow roads. And no street lights. Although Google was determined to send us up the aptly-named ‘Dark Lane’, it turned out to be unsuitable for motor vehicles.
Arcade Odysseus navigates the streets of Chalford.
We were spared disaster by local road signs, of which there were thankfully lots. Here’s my personal favourite:
On arriving in Hobbiton, and getting settled in the cottage, the wife and I headed out for a stroll.
Before too long, as the rain started to lift, and the light began to fail, we found ourselves here:
That, my friends, is Belvedere Mill – listed building, former cloth mill, then office complex, now home to The Cave and Arcade Archive. But I was 36 hours early. The nerding would have to wait until Saturday morning.
The next day was to be a busy one, but not with retro tech.
The first part was spent at the American Museum in Bath, which was certainly worth a visit – especially the exhibition of American landmarks and icons lovingly recreated in Lego.
Intriguingly, almost everyone else there was American. It was almost as if they’d presumed the name was a presidential decree to demonstrate their patriotism! In reality, of course, the label was simply there to describe the contents of the tin.
Getting to Bath and back was no easy matter. The Cotswolds are busy at the best of times, and the traffic fraught. Typically, however, the authorities were taking advantage of the school holidays (insert angry emoji!) to work on the roads – several of which were unexpectedly closed. Dodging the livestock on the winding detour through Minchinhampton Common was particularly ‘interesting’.
To balance out all this high culture, and cows, we nipped into Stroud that evening to watch a documentary about exploding fish. Think it was called Them Egtwo, or something like that. If you haven’t seen it, I’d give it a miss. I much preferred the Stranger Things‘ vibe emanating from the Kobold’s Armpit next door.
The next morning, it was time to don my snorkel and flippers, and slither down the hill to the Retro Collective.
What is was it like?
In a word?
Ossum!
As the guests arrived at the entrance, we were sheparded into the vestibule by the Maître d’, Holly. And then, at the anointed hour (10am), we experienced the Rapture.
The ascent through three floors of the Heber complex built anticipation to fever pitch. But almost before we knew it, we were there – face-to-face with the Cave’s auteur, Mr Neil Thomas.
Neil, aka Stroud Man, will no doubt be familiar for his contribution to the This Week in Retro podcast. But he is best-known for his long-running YouTube channel, where he revisits, revives and restores all manner of retro-computer equipment. The research and preparation that goes into this work is painstaking. By watching it, I’ve learned a lot about the history of home electronics, not to mention how to repair and conserve them. But I’ve also learned some surprising things about myself. If you’d asked me 5 years ago, I’d never have guessed the theraputic value in watching a middle-aged man in black rubber gloves clean a computer keyboard!
Anyhoo… here, in The Cave, you can enjoy the fruits of Neil’s labours.
As a venue, the Cave was bigger than I expected. It also had a lot more stuff in it. If, as I do, you have fond memories of early computer magazines like Personal Computer World, and their ever-changing menagerie of brands and systems, you’ll find them all here, from the Sword M5 and Mattel Aquarius to the ZX81. But there are also a wealth of others from the hardware Spectrum (see what I did there?), all the way on to the PCFX and Playstation 2.
That’s not to say it’s cluttered. On the contrary, the displays have been thoughtfully curated. The items have clearly been arranged with both themes and aesthetic appeal in mind. As you can see from the presentation of handheld games shown above, they are also enhanced by the considered use of cabintery and LED-lighting,and the provision of short and accessible interpretation boards – to better effect, in fact, than you’ll find in many established museums. Unlike most established museums, the Cave is also a hands-on experience with (almost) all of the exhibits available for touching, examining and playing.
Highlights for me included the recreated software shop, complete with era-specific plastic bags!
Then there was the new Japanese exhibition, foregrounding the so-called ‘God Computer’, otherwise known as the Sharp X68000. Oh to have had one of those back in the day!
You can also experience the Nintendo Virtual Boy. If like me, you’ve never seen one in the plastic before, and only have the generally negative reviews to go by, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Perhaps it was just the game I played (Mario Tennis), but I found the 3-D effect to be quite convincing, and the game, relatively playable! If I’d had more time, I’d have taken a deeper delve into the Cave’s library, with its unrivalled collections of antique computer magazines. That would really need a whole session in its own right to do it justice.
In the end, I spent most of my time fiddling with the old staples, like the Amiga, the ST, the C64 and the BBC Micro, where I was able to crack 100,000, to set a modest high-score on Chuckie Egg.
What is remarkable about all of these systems is how well maintained they all are. For starters, they’re all clean – a factor that doesn’t seem to get considered in a lot of other retro exhibitions. In many cases, they’re not just clean but gleaming – the arctic-white sheen of the Cave’s A600, for example, was a sight to behold. Equally importantly, the CRT monitors are all vibrant, with good, strong colours and nice geometry. Finally, but not something we can take for granted these days, the keyboards and controllers all work. Needless to say, there’s also an excellent selection of software to explore and enjoy, with multi-carts and SD-solutions there to supplement the physical media.
The downsides? I only had time for the morning session! Shame really, as I could easily have spent the whole day there.
At 1 pm, the morning session came to an end, and I scarpered up the road to the Lavender Bakehouse in Chalford to grab some lunch. It was lovely. Top tip, though, if you’re in a group of more than one, and you’re in a hurry to get back, you should ring up and book a table in advance. It seems to be a popular spot. I enjoyed a grilled bacon, chicken and brie sandwich on local sourdough toast, with a wonderfully fruity salad. Not only was this delightful, it also provided some much-needed sustenance for the afternoon session I had booked at Arcade Archive.
The Arcade Archive side of the Retro Collective is the brainchild and baby of the artist formerly known as Nintendo Arcade – Mr Alex Crowley.
Before Lockdown, Alex hit the headlines with his Sky Skipper project. Having discovered a PCB for long-forgotten Nintendo title, Sky Skipper, he joined forces with American collector Whitney Roberts to recreate the original game from PCB to cabinet art.
Like Neil, however, Alex is probably best-known for his engaging YouTube channel, which has documented his journey as a collector.
Initially focused on Nintendo games and systems, Alex’ channel has grown to include his famous games room tours, which have given us mere mortals a window onto the world of other prolific collectors. More recently, he has used it to share his growing arcade hobby, through the refurbishment of his own home games room to the development of the Archive itself.
With the Arcade Archive, you get another well-curated electronics museum. Once again, the venue is full but not crowded. The two-dozen-or-so cabinets have been selected not just to cover a range of classics from the Silver and Golden Ages of the video arcade, but also to tell the story of how these eras played out in the UK.
I enjoyed Bubble Bobble, where I started with a visit to the first Treasure Room and a cheeky 1.3 Million, but also Shaolin’s Road, Flying Shark, Space Invaders, Operation Wolf, Super Hang On, Rescue, Sheriff and Sky Skipper, to name but a few. As you may have seen in some of Alex’ recent videos, the Archive also boasts a large number of additional JAMMA boards, which are rotated on a regular basis. In fact, if there’s a classic you’d like to play, and you message Alex in advance, he might be able to have it there for you on the day.
Crucial to the presentation here is the atmosphere. In the arcade section of the Archive, Alex has worked hard to recreate the atmosphere of a classic British arcade. The lighting is low, with atmospheric use of coloured LED-lighting. There’s no ‘authentic’ miasma of cigarette-smoke – which is a good thing!!! But murmuring behind the jingles and explosions of the arcade games there is a subtle backing-track of 80s pop and rock standards – loud enough to feed into the experience, but not so loud as to distract.
As with the Cave upstairs, something else that had to be stressed is the fantastic condition of the machines. Unlike a lot of other small arcades and public displays, everything is clean and fully-functioning. Some of the machines may have minor, storied ‘battle-scars’, but that all adds to the ambience. When it comes to the screens, eveything is CRT, and everything is working as it should be – no missing colours, or wonky geometry, or blurry displays. Is it obvious I was impressed? I hope so! These things need a lot of maintenance, so it was good to hear that the Archive will be benefitting from an on-site repair facility staffed by experts, including Holly.
RygarR (814K) Vs Alex C (536K) 😉
I was particularly impressed by the absolutely stunning Robotron cabinet. The monitor was pristine – just how good it was doesn’t really come over in the picture. I was also priveleged to enjoy a game of doubles with Mr C, even more so that he allowed me to win, and by such a big margin too! Alex, sir, you are a gentleman and a scholar! Maybe next time, when the new grommets have been worn in a bit more, I can return the favour.
***
Many thanks indeed to Neil and Alex for sharing their collections with the public. I thoroughly enjoyed my visit, and look forward to going back. If you’re prevaracating – don’t. Get down there quick! And which one to visit first? I’d start with the Cave, if for no other reason than you need to conserve some energy for the Archive. That Robotron cabinet isn’t going to play itself!
Today’s post is more about action movies than video games. There is a connection, which I’ll get to in a wee while. But first, we need to set the scene.
Back in the early 1980s, life was slow. Things hadn’t changed much since the 1970s. There were some perks to being a kid back then. We still had our Lego, our toy soldiers and our Raleigh bikes. Star Wars was already a thing. And those were all great. But there was still a lingering, lurking boredom. The days were long, and our tiny minds were racing at eighteen to the dozen. The truth is, there wasn’t always enough going on to occupy them. Remember that? Remember being bored?
But there were signs and portents on the horizon. Who can forget the arrival of the Golden Age of video arcade games? Or the appearance of The A-Team on the telly? Things were looking up.
Then we reached the event horizon. The advent of reasonably-priced home computer systems dropped like a Tsar bomba, vapourising the lurking vesitges of 1970s boredom. And that was only the opening salvo! We barely had enough time to catch our breaths before the next explosion – the RPG revolution. And no – I’m not talking about turn-based, anime-flavoured home console games. I’m talking about dice, baby.
But as it turned out, that one was a cluster bomb.
You see, just after the first flash, there was a series of others, which gave us Citadel miniatures, hair-metal metal music, leather jackets and mullets.
And it didn’t stop there.
Of course, not everyone was happy about these developments. As previously discussed, some grown-ups were a bit suspicious of arcades and arcade games. Others were downright miserable. Some of them did their damnest to rain tears of malcious disdain all over the stuff that was suddenly making life so exciting.
Some of the busiest of these busy-bodies had already organised into the ‘National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association’ (later known as Mediawatch-UK). Their po-faced spokeswoman Mary Whitehouse whinged on and on and on (and on) about the ‘moral collapse’ of British society. Their self-righteous, and self-appointed representatives bullied their way onto television, and badgered their targets through the courts with the help of tame MPs.
Thankfully, however, they were never able to generate quite the same level of noise as their bible-thumping counterparts in the USA. The holier-than-thou brigade on that side of ‘The Pond’ were so convinced that Dungeons and Dragonswas the gateway to Satanism and eternal damnation, that they managed to foment the so-called ‘Satanic Panic’. Witness the slightly less-venemous version of their speil brought to life in the Tom-Hanks-vehicle Mazes and Monsters (see what they did there?). If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s worth a watch. Not because it rivals the levels of zeitgeist-magnification seen in Stranger Things. More because it’s so bad its good!
In Blighty, the do-gooders’ greatest outrage was yet to be piqued.
While I remember the 1980s with fondness, I realise that not everyone had it quite so good. In fact, for lots of grown-ups, and their families, times were pretty tough. And when times are tough, folks do what they can to escape. One of the less damaging ways of doing this is through the portal offered by the silver screen – which goes some way towards expaining the raft of exciting and escapist adventure-movies which flooded the market in those days.
From the perspective of a spotty teenager shakily finding his way in the world, the heavy emphasis on childish empowerment fantasy was a sure-fire winner. OK, so you might be getting a b0ll0cking at school for not doing your homework, or at home for ruining shoes / tousers / random items in pursuit of assorted hi-jinks. But after joining messers Stallone or Schwarzenegger for a ride in their latest action adventure, all of that had been forgotten. You came away feeling pumped up – even if the reality staring you in the mirror was a pile of bean poles tied together with hairy string.
Of course, those movies weren’t made for kids. In fact, in terms of licensing laws, kids weren’t even allowed into the pictures to see them. But we all did see them. How, I hear you ask? Why, home-video of course! These were the ‘video nasties’ that Whitehouse et al. railed on about and wanted banned. But then as now, they were more than welcome to get to Falkirk. Actually, no – I liked Falkirk. They could get to Fenchurch.
Kilsyth Mainstreet, 1980s.
My family didn’t get our first VCR until Christmas 1984. But following a trip down the Mainstreet to the Pegasus video-rental shop, and the procurement of a membership card by my dad, we wasted no time in working our way through its collections. By 1986, my friends and I would take turns renting movies, and decamping to the house of whoever’s parents were feeling most tolerant that weekend.
By the late 80s, we’d developed the prehistoric version of Netflix syndrome. Basically we’d seen all the good stuff, sometimes multiple times, and were suspscious of new releases in case they were simply more of the same, or – confusingly – not enough of the same. While our choices were partly based on reviews, or even just pictures we’d seen in magazines or on the telly, we also gravitated towards films that had been condemned by our self-proclaimed moral guardians. When The League of Gentlemen skits about two gormless youths basing their video-rental choices on the number of ‘killings’, they’re pretty close to the bone!
Two of my favourite films from that era and that genre are Rambo: First Blood Part II, with Sly-vester Stallone (deal with it); and Commando, with Arnie ‘get to de chappa’ Schwarzenegger. They capture the essence of that hyperbolic, over-stimulating, escapist nonsense that prevailed in those days. And as we’ll discuss later, they also inspired a slew of video games.
Rewatching The League of Gentlemen recently got me thinking. Has anyone done a properly scientific, double-blind survey of the actual number of killings in either of those films? Well, as it was my birthday last month, I got myself a couple of hand tally counters, conscripted the services of one of the kids, and set about doing just that.
We started with Commando.
If you’re unfamiliar with the plot… what the heck is wrong with you?!!!!!!
Essentially, it’s about huge, muscle-bound special ops commander John Matrix (Arnie) who uses his martial prowess, and preter-natural ability to dodge bullets, to kill an army of bad guys and rescue his kidnapped daughter.
After a fairly slow – but steady – start, Arnie tracks the bad guys to a South American island, where he quickly racks up an impressive tally of killings. Based on what could be seen, we reckoned on 88 or 89. However, things weren’t always clear cut. At one point, Arnie blows up two fairly large barracks-buildings. Whether anyone was in them at the time is impossible to say. Then there’s the issue of how many additional baddies might have fallen off-screen, when Arnie was pulling the trigger on his machine gun like a dog pulling on a string of sausages. Sadly, the baddies were not entirely unsusccesful, with three of Arnie’s buddies, a couple of squaddies, a mall-cop, a regular cop and a forger also biting the dust.
That makes a total of at least 96 killings by our reckoning!
Contrary to what Whitehouse and others may have argued, this was no nauseating gore-fest. The violence, while extreme, is cartoon-like. The only damage done is highlighted with paint-like stage-blood. In one sequence, where Arne is about to detonate the explosives he’s rigged round a barracks-block, it is obvious that the guards outside are not people but scarecrows, which wobble about on their poles as the building explodes. That’s funny. There are actual jokes in there too – although the best we could do, if we were feeling generous, would be to file them in the ‘dad-joke’ drawer for dodgy puns.
Next up is Rambo: First Blood Part II.
While the original First Blood is a comparatively sedate action-adventure with no actual killings, Rambo goes all out for the high score. The plot is, naturally, extremely similar to that of Commando: ie. muscle-bound special ops veteran John Rambo (Sly) uses his martial prowess, and preter-natural ability to dodge bullets, to kill an army of bad guys and rescue some kidnapped American soldiers. For some extra added Cold-War edge, the action not only plays out in foreign lands, but includes a squad of evil Soviet antagonists.
When it comes to killing, old Johnny Rambo sure knows his onions. He gets ’em with throwing knives, his big old ‘Rambo’ knife, ordinary arrows, explosive arrows, a garotting wire, explosives, machine guns – including an M60 – a helicopter, and – of course – his bare hands.
In the end, we reckoned he maxed out with either 62 or 64 on-screen killings, including a ridiculous 30 Soviet Black Berets. But that was just the visible total. After immolating a whole hillside of paddy-fields while being chased by baddie-soldiers, and blowing up around 15 buildings in the enemy compound, the actual total of unseen and off-screen killings could have been far higher.
Sticking with the visible total, however, we can also add the 4 baddies killed by Johnny’s girlfriend, and at least another 4 killed by the gunners in various goodies’ helicopters, bringing the on-screen total to 70/72. But there is a sad addendum here. The one character who could have saved Rambo from his demons, and helped him find peace and fulfillment – his Vietnamese girlfriend – is also killed. NooooOOOOOO! Guess that makes 71/73.
So there you have it, Commando beats Rambo by a minimum of 96 to 71.
But is that the only measure of success?
OF COURSE IT ISN’T!
We can also look at the respective influence of those movies on the video-games phenomenon.
Now, in the Wild West of copyright violation that was the 1980s-video-games-scene, both Arnie and Sly, and their images were frequently and blatantly infringed. The look and colouring of Lance and Bill from Gryzor (Contra), for example, was no coincidence.
Rambo itself was the inspiration for a home video game released by Ocean software in late 1985. I dunno why I’m telling you. Its so weel-kennt, it even features on the cover of Jerry Ellis’ superb Book of the Game of the Film.
I first played it in Boots the Chemist in Falkirk in the run up to Christmas that year. I may have had a ZX Spectrum at the time, but when I graduated to a C64 the following year, one of the first games I ‘backed-up’ was Rambo. I still remember the time I took to savour it.
Boots the Chemist, Falkirk Hight Street, 7th Fenruary 1987. The video games were on the 1st floor.
Waiting with growing anticipation through the excellent Ocean loader music, and then letting the amazing Rob Hubbard attract screen tune play all the way through before starting. It was a surprisingly short game when you knew the secrets, and there was a cheat for the helicopter phase at the end, but I loved it.
Commando a la Arnie, never got its own game. Or at least – not directly. Capcom had released an arcade game by the same name in 1985, but it bore little similarity to the Holywood blockbuster.
Where both films came together, however, was Taito’s 1987 classic, Opertation Wolf
As with most arcade games in the late 1980s, I first encountered Operation Wolf in the summer holidays the year after its release – so, 1988. I’m pretty sure it was in a motorway service station on the M6, no doubt of the Trusthouse Forte variety, and it was certainly in a specially converted Electrocoin Goliath cabinet.
As I may have mentioned previously, this initial encounter was not love at first sight. Strange as it might sound, I suffered a fleeting ‘moral panic’ of my own. The graphics on that game were something of a quantum leap in video-games design. Prior to that we’d be shooting triangles, or space-insects, or cute arcade monsters. The baddies in Op Wolf looked realistic. Too realistic. Who were those poor souls I was gunning down? Is this right? Do they really deserve to die? It was an Austin Powers moment. Twenty pee later, however, I was over it. And I still enjoy a blast today.
On my first few plays, I assumed the game was a rip-off of Rambo. After all, it is set in a tropical jungle. And look at the attract mode. It’s very close to the scene in the movie, just before John J. takes off from his Vietnam base camp, where we see a ‘getting-ready-montage’ involving bootlaces being tied, a gun being checked, and a knife being slid into a sheath. It also involves rescuing POWs, and a cut scene, where the hero has his wounds dressed by an East Asian lady, just like Rambo’s girlfriend.
The ‘inspirations’ (!) seem fairly clear.
But on revisiting Commando, it struck me that the similarities between the Op Wolf attract mode and Arnie’s getting-ready-montage before heading to South America are maybe even greater.
It seems that’s what the big boys thought too. The way the game was packaged for the home computer market by Bob Wakelin, foregrounded a muscular blonde soldier. I’d say there were also shades of Predator in the game, especially the bit at the start where Arne and chums raid a contra base in Latin America. And finally, while the hero of the cut scenes in Operation Wolf has black hair – just like Sly, the game does feature a muscle-bound M-60-wielding baddie with blonde hair, who is so tough he can only be killed if you shoot him ‘right int’ face’…
But what do you think? Is it possible to unpack the single inspiration behind Operation Wolf or is it just a steaming broth of violent action-movie tropes? And who was Top Trumps, anyway – Arnie or Sly? Let me know in the comments below (oo, ah done a rhyme!).
Thanks for reading, folks. And stay tuned. I’ll be back before you know it with a report on the arcade-scene in Glasgow in the late 1980s and early 1990s…
Arcade Odysseus 