GAMES OF MY YEARS: THE ARCADES - Part One by Mr Biffo

4/12/2015

I associate arcade gaming with being on holiday.

I'm sure I'm not the only person of my swollen years who first encountered gaming through the seaside arcades, nestled as they would be twixt the fish and chip shops, the family pubs, and tat shops with their paper plates of candy bacon and eggs, plastic buckets, and Magic Wiggly Worm displays.

Those manically flashing lights and frantic chimes, the well-trodden, Vegas-cosplaying carpets... there was a bit something desperate and tragic about them.

Even as an 8 year-old I found them wistful and forlorn, clinging to a sort of desperate, pseudo-glamour. But within that there was an intangible wizardry; a room full of portals into other worlds, where you could become anything. And yes: those were the exact words my 8 year-old brain formed, so fuck off.

Nevertheless, the arcades were bait for an 8 year-old boy with holiday money to spend. Virtually nauseous with indecision, I would ricochet between the air hockey tables, the bagatelle, that weird gambling game with the plastic horses... The 70s were a brown and melancholic decade, yet here was the glitter on the dog turd.

What's most bizarre to me now is how little seaside arcades have changed in the years since - they're a slice of the 70s trapped in aspic, down to the dead-eyed attendants in the change booth.

My family holiday this year took an accidental, one-night detour through Blackpool, and the arcades hadn't changed a single iota from the ones I visited as a kid.

Were it not for the Star Wars Battlepod and iPhones in the claw machines, I'd have sworn I'd slipped back to 1978.

Also, having only seen the notice on the guesthouse door - warning us not to drink the water - as we were leaving, Blackpool even succeeded in giving several of us the runs. Most of my childhood was spent with diarrhoea, one way or another, so it added to the sense of time travel.

In fact, Blackpool as a whole retains a sort of quintessential 1970s-ness. Everyone we saw looked as if they'd either popped out for a tattoo, or to pick up some candles in case there was another power cut. The only thing that's changed is that the seafront is now kept safe by patrols of 40-foot tall automatons designed to look like Paddy McGuinness.

"You have 20 seconds to let the sausage see the bun" they rasp through their electronic lips.

SPEND A PENNY
The first put-a-coin-in-a-machine game I can ever recall playing was the penny falls - you know: those retracting shelf games, where coins teeter on the edges, threatening to make you a millionaire at any second. My nan would hand me a tub of two pence pieces, and let me spend what felt like hours trying to encourage gravity to overcome the superglue.

Those peculiar animatronic light gun shooting galleries were also popular with the less-old me. Animatronic might be stretching it a little, mind - they were typically a few stiffly-animated redneck mannequins, posed in some sort of mocked-up, illicit moonshine distillery.

Shoot the correct target and you might see something as exciting as an owl raising its wings, or a weathercock spinning around. If you were really lucky, you might even cause the outhouse door spring open, revealing a debagged hillbilly in flagrant delicto.

One game I always inclined towards was Sega's Killer Shark (as featured in the movie Jaws, no less). Not a video game in the sense that we came to know them, Killer Shark was a mechanical device, which had players shooting harpoons at light-up sharks. There were a few others using the same technology, including a submarine game with periscope and depth charges - the name of which escapes me. Let's imagine it was called "Sub Time 4,000".

INTO SPACE
Somewhere in there, real video games started appearing.

Like so many others, Space Invaders - with the acetate overlay to give it an appearance of full colour graphics, and the inevitable fag-burns in the control panel - was my first proper video game.

Battlezone was another I couldn't walk past without having a go on - the sensory deprivation of its viewfinder and wireframe, 3D visuals, predates virtual reality by decades. As primitive as it looks now, back then I believed.

When I was six or seven, my best friend and his family moved to Scotland. Specifically, a small town called Golspie, on the East coast. You may have seen a viral image that was doing the rounds a few years ago, of a Scottish folk hero doing a poo down a chip shop chimney. My best friend's parents used to own that chip shop, and growing up I stayed there most school holidays. In fact, I slept in the room that's just below the man's bottom in the picture.

I'm not Scottish, and as far as I know I've not got any Scottish ancestry (if anything, it's Moroccan on my dad's side, bizarrely), but I used to tell people I was Scottish - such was the impact of Golspie.

They were the best holidays of my life, though so frequent were our visits - 12 hours or more by train and car - that they ceased to feel like holidays, more like it was somewhere else that I just happened to live occasionally. Up there, I had a freedom I could never have in London.

The chippy backed onto the beach, and we basically had free reign to climb the local mountain, or play in the water beneath the local waterfall, or clamber rather dangerously around the ruins of the local pier. There was a castle - an actual fairytale castle - just outside of town, a stone circle, and lobsters on the beach.

Days would be spent outside from dawn until after dusk, and when we were inside, we had all the fried food we could stomach (including - beautifully - deep-fried, battered haggis, pizzas and hamburgers... and this is why I love Scotland; they might as well just fry the Saltire and be done with it).

On one visit, I discovered our friends had bought an arcade game for the chip shop - Atari's Phoenix. Better still, outside of shop hours we could open up the front of the coin dispenser, and repeatedly flick the trip switch to give ourselves as many credits as we wanted.

That was the one trip to Golspie where I spent more time indoors than out...

CONTINUE READING...

FROM THE ARCHIVE:
THE GAMES OF MY YEARS: SEGA MASTER SYSTEM - PART ONE by Mr Biffo
THE GAMES OF MY YEARS: SEGA MASTER SYSTEM - PART TWO by Mr Biffo
THE GAMES OF MY YEARS: ATARI - PART ONE by Mr Biffo
THE GAMES OF MY YEARS: ATARI - PART TWO by Mr Biffo
THE GAMES OF MY YEARS: THE ZX SPECTRUM PART ONE by Mr Biffo
THE GAMES OF MY YEARS: THE ZX SPECTRUM PART TWO by Mr Biffo

13 Comments

Kelvin Green link

4/12/2015 06:40:51 pm

Porthcawl. <i>Golden Axe</i>. So many 10ps wasted on those damned skeletons!

Paul Morrison link

4/12/2015 08:41:40 pm

I have strong, very fond memories of playing a game called Dive Bomber at the arcades. It was another of those animatronic games... tanks rumbled along the bottom of the screen (diorama?), and you steered a plane on a wire toward them, hoping its strafing run would score a hit. It was great fun!

penyrolewen

4/12/2015 08:50:27 pm

Ha, Phoenix! Great game. Just so varied compared to Space Invaders. Loved it. And Killer Shark! I never knew what it was called but I remember it from pre (real)video games days, on the pier at Weston-Super-Mare, where my nan lived (Weston, not the pier). I'm from Birmingham so like you, Biffo, arcades were holiday phenomonomonomon (or phenomonomonomona). Yes, those horse racing games - I loved those. The big lights that showed who'd won, like mini-indicators from a mini (see what I did there?), one armed bandits that actually had arms. the coin falls, all so seductive. And like you, the chippy days. Mine wasn't in glamorous Scotland, it was Mick and Stella's (until Mick ran off with a serving girl. Then it was just Stella's) at the bottom of my road. They started with Space Invaders, then Space Invaders 2, then a sort of pac man maze game but you were a missile, chased by another missile. Anyone know what that was? Then Scramble, then Defender. Man, Defender. So beautiful, so fast, so slick, so HARD! And the chippy rules...You could go in if you were buying, playing or - crucially - watching. So we'd go in, spend our money in a pitifully small amount of time, then hang around outside. If anyone put money in the machine, we were in, crowding around to watch. Respectful distance for grown-ups, right in there, faces all around the screen for other kids. Happy days...Those games, all so deliberately hard, just sucked me in.

Stay

7/12/2015 09:43:28 pm

As your from Birmingham I bet you spent at least one holiday at Brean? I'm from Bristol and we did have a couple of arcades but Weston was arcade heaven with Mr B's and the Pier being the best.

I would have played my first arcade probably at either Unity Farm in Brean or a Littlesea (where lots of Bristolian's holidayed), near Weymouth.

Penyrolewen

8/12/2015 10:07:01 pm

My Nan lived (still does actually) in Weston and when I was a kid she owned, and rented out, 2 caravans at brean. One at unity farm. That was where all my holidays were spent until I was about 8. That's a long time ago and I was young so only vague, nostalgia-drenched snippets remain but I had many great times at brean and Weston.

Euphemia

4/12/2015 10:41:57 pm

Funny, it hadn't occurred to me that I associated arcade machines with being on holiday, but I do. No way that I'd pump that much real money into Final Fight at home, but I would shit about a trillion Spanish dubloons (or whatever the fuck they were) without hesitation into the slots of any cabinet-housed crapfest they had at the dingy resorts arcade.

Having also just returned from a holiday with family in Scotland, I can confirm that the food is as lethal as ever. When it was announced a few years ago that Glasgow was the heart disease capital of Europe the general feeling locally was "Yaaas! NUMBER ONE!" like it was a lottery win. We're a simple people. Who don't usually reach 60 without medical assistance.

5/12/2015 12:20:46 am

I've just remembered the hotel in Italy that had Wiz and Double Dragon in the lobby. That was amazing.

Alex Rogan

5/12/2015 07:49:11 am

Space Invaders was my first. In a pub in Ireland, which had both the standard cabinet and the one that was embedded in a glass top table, where the stick and buttons protruded, horizonatally, out the side. Being 3 or 4 I needed a stool to even see the screen, but it instantly made sense to me. I'm the thing at the bottom, shoot the aliens, and hide behind the bushes for safety.

Col. Asdasd

5/12/2015 10:36:10 am

For me the association was always ferries. They're pretty interesting places in themselves - a completely self-contained little environment, bordered on all sides by 'invisible walls', almost video-gamey in their confinement. Have their been any games set entirely on a ship? Except for, er, The Ship? It seems like you could do something interesting there with an adventure game, maybe.

There's a weird contrast on a ferry between the alienness of the ever-rocking, life-giving, life-taking sea without and the quietly frantic efforts made to maintain the appearance of civilisation and order inside. Step onto the deck and it's all weird spools of rope, the clamour of the engines, rusted paint and the smell of salt-flecked waves. Step back in again and you're met with the clink of teaspoons and the riotous colour clash of chrome railing and never-fashionable, British Home Stores-grade carpets. The carpets are everywhere. A weird, shoe-shaped shopping centre sitting dubiously atop a great untamed expanse of entropy, convulsing constantly from side to side in a way that no respectable shopping centre should.

Of course, being a kid the attention span doesn't take much of that in. Nor does it hold up for more than the briefest scrutiny of the car park, the cabin, the bitter-sweet spectacle of a receding coastline, the lifeboats, the cafe, the majestic wonder of the open sea, the duty free... an arcade, on the other hand, can captivate a childish mind well past the point of disembarkation. In my head I was still playing at Primal Rage a week into the holiday in Normandy, to what I can only imagine was the disgust of my dad.

Then, endless pound coins pumped into Crazy Taxi on a school trip to the Isle of White. Then, about a decade later, a deeply unsatisfying £2 go at Time Crisis 3, or 4, or 7 or something. It was obviously so patently inferior to what was already available on consoles by that point.

Sad in a strange way; it felt like one of the frontiers of the medium had been closed down for good. You can't deny that they played a huge roll in pushing the medium forward, even if they were garish and seedy and at all times smelt vaguely of sick.

memyselfandi

6/12/2015 10:36:11 pm

I live in Golspie and played on that pier, chippies still there although a little more upmarket (only a little) but no arcade machine anymore and people only defecate down chimneys on special occasions

Mr Biffo

7/12/2015 10:40:56 am

Aw, man. Yeah, I went back a couple of years ago and ate in the chippy restaurant bit for old time's sake. The weirdest thing was the fireplace in the back of the dining area - I remember that fireplace being in their living room, and it hasn't changed a bit. Is Orcadian Stone still there at the end of the high street?

8/12/2015 03:16:29 pm

Yep, orcadian stone is still there, spent a lot of my childhood longing for the rock polisher they had for sale but could never convince my parents to buy it, not entirely sure why I wanted it so badly now. The fairytale castle would be dunrobin, worked there as a car park attendant for a few summers - best job I've ever had

9/12/2015 09:31:02 pm

Outside of current games arcade machines are my favourite.

Once I was teenager it was the arcades that were the big draw for me. The first day of a holiday would involve visiting all the arcades and doing a walk around and getting excited at finding all the games I wanted to play. For me the best place was Somerwest World in Minehead - 4 arcades on site and 3 off all populated with a big variety of games. It was here I mastered Robocop and Midnight Resistance - completing them on a single credit. It was also the first place I played Golden Axe, Final Fight, Growl, Aliens plus it was the only place that had Heavy Barrel. There was nothing more shocking than turning around to see a big crowd of people watching you play - filling up the imaginary "Poseometer" above me and my mates heads.

If you want to relive those arcade games look on the Internet Archive for "MAME 0.151 ROMs" and download the gert massive 42GB zip file. Then search for the frontend MameUI64 or MameUI32 depending on your Windows version. Install and unpack the Zip into the sub-folder ROMS and you are good to go.

GAMES OF MY YEARS: THE ARCADES - Part One by Mr Biffo

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