I miss the Arcades

[confettiinmyhair]

This morning I was pining to go down to the coast and play on some arcade machines. I reminisced about one of my all time favourites Operation Wolf https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wolf and remembered this other Simpsons arcade game, which I wasted a lot of money playing. Do you miss the arcades? My last time at the arcades was probably September 2019, when I was visiting family in Skegness. Spent several hours in Lucky Strike.

[The Culture Bunker]

We didn't have an arcade in my hometown, so such places were the main advantage of when we went to places like Butlins. Though as I had no cash, I was mainly limited to watching others playing.

My whole interest in video games, I think, started when we took a holiday to Folkestone in 1985, when I was four. The hotel had one of those table top Pac-Man machines in the lobby, and I was absolutely fascinated by it. I joke the appeal was the idea of a game you didn't need anybody else to play with, which worked for my solitary nature.

A couple of years ago, I went with a mate to Arcade Club in Bury, which was loads of fun, though I found out I was as crap at Chase HQ as ever.

[Sin Agog]

'ere you are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NrxMMxxUkI

[Consignia]

Build your own: https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,80679.0.html 🙂

[Dewt]

Out Run in the Gaiety Amusements in Clacton-on-Sea, which is near where I lived. If it's not there anymore then there is no Clacton, what's the point, just a racism place.

[Huxleys Babkins]

I live in Bournemouth, so we had great arcades here for the tourists, including Sega World which would have the latest machines straight out of Japan and the arcade on the pier approach which had all the classics and would occasionally trump Sega World in the flashy new machine stakes - I think they had OutRun 2 in there before it turned up in Sega World.

Both are still there (albeit with Sega World now called Fun Central), but there's very little worth playing in them any more. All fruities, coin pushers, shitty Fast & Furious driving games that look like they are running on a PS2 and massive Flappy Birds machines as is the case with most arcades now.

[Sin Agog]

Out Run in the Gaiety Amusements in Clacton-on-Sea. If it's not there anymore then there is no Clacton, what's the point, just a racism place.

Yakuza Zero made me think of just that grot-hole.  Also has those little planes on skewers on the pier nearby, including a kamikaze plane and one with an Iron Cross.  I remember one two-year-old baby yelling "For the emperor!" just as it reached its apogee.

[Dewt]

Haha, wow, I wasn't ever old enough to be aware of the Iron Cross plane. I mainly just played the Out Run.

[Cold Meat Platter]

I love the emulators that they have now but there is something about the cacophony of a load of machines just blasting out beeps and scratchy samples along with the smell of aggressive air freshener barely disguising sweat that makes it such a nostalgic experience. All the marquees lit up. The thunk of the coin followed by the credit sound.

Arcade games used to be technologically leaps and bounds ahead of home gaming when I was a kid so the wow factor was high.

[Dewt]

Yeah, it's strange to think that the gaming landscape had this huge home versus arcade divide because they didn't cut costs on the arcade hardware. Just huge-ass blitters and then the best 3D hardware in the 90s, completely inaccessible at home, even if you had a PC you wouldn't be able to get the same hardware or anything that runs on it (and the Neo Geo showed there would never be a dominant home market for stuff on that level)

[Neomod]

I grew up in Worthing on the South Coast in the 70's and 80's. The perfect time to witness the transition from the old games of the 50's and 60's to the first arcade cabinets. All of which would now be found in a museum.

Stuff like this was actually on our 'New Amusements' pier up until the mid 80's:

[Dewt]

There was another quite good racing game in a white cabinet that I can't identify. Any idea, Sin Agog? If you were sitting in the Out Run cabinet this machine would have been directly to the right, about ten metres away.

There was also a Golly! Ghost! nearby that spot too, for a while. So good.

[Sheffield Wednesday]

Arcade Club is just down the road from me, I've had some cracking times down there, really brought back my love for the arcades. I really hope they survive this.

[Dewt]

I've mentioned it before but my local arcade of note is Funspot from King of Kong. Lots of really good machines but it's a sad place. Downstairs is a bunch of activity, modern games where you win prizes etc., and upstairs just has all the class games sitting unplayed and unloved in a huge tatty room.

[El Unicornio, mang]

There was a kid at my school who was kind of a tool but on the plus side his Dad owned one of the local arcades. He took me there one Saturday afternoon and got the keys, opened up Double Dragon and some others and flicked the coin mechanism thing to get us tons of credits. I remember being initially delighted but then got a bit bored, it was missing the excitement that comes with having limited coins. The other local arcade burned down under mysterious circumstances around the time that those kinds of places were becoming less popular (insurance claim most likely).

Went to quite a few arcade bars in Chicago when I lived there to relive those old memories + alcohol.

[BeardFaceMan]

The arcade at Trecco Bay at Porthcawl was my Twitch when I was 8. I basically spent 2 weeks in an arcade as my holiday, pocket money ran out pretty quickly unless my nan had a win on the bingo so most of the time was spent wandering around watching other people play games all night. If I was lucky I might find a free credit on a machine that someone had left, most of the time though it was pretending to play the attract mode on Dragons Lair. Lovely fucking grub.

[Pink Gregory]

There's a hidden Ms. Pac Man machine in one of the amusement house thingies on Cleethorpes seafront and it's one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had.

[Bazooka]

Growing up in the East Midlands, there was nothing unless you went bowling (at least not in Leicester), all my arcade memories were primarily from going to various places on the coast.

[Non Stop Dancer]

Absolutely fucking terrible palaces of minor villainy and curruption of young minds. Very fond memories.

[SavageHedgehog]

If I could own one arcade machine it would be:



Even if the game is probably not as good as his/her parents' games.

[Sheffield Wednesday]

Playing OutRun 2 on a massive fuckin cab at Arcains in Liverpool over Christmas was immense.

[The Crumb]

I live in Bournemouth, so we had great arcades here for the tourists, including Sega World which would have the latest machines straight out of Japan and the arcade on the pier approach which had all the classics and would occasionally trump Sega World in the flashy new machine stakes - I think they had OutRun 2 in there before it turned up in Sega World.

Both are still there (albeit with Sega World now called Fun Central), but there's very little worth playing in them any more. All fruities, coin pushers, shitty Fast & Furious driving games that look like they are running on a PS2 and massive Flappy Birds machines as is the case with most arcades now.

I grew up in Bournemouth too, our poor dad must have spent a fortune in those arcades. I remember when the Lost World cabinet came in at Sega World, it seemed like something from another planet. Very fond memories of another little arcade near Boscombe pier, there was a fun co op shooting/driving hybrid I loved playing with my dad.

All time favourite games are Time Crisis 2, Crisis Zone and House of the Dead.

Was reading about this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cho_Chabudai_Gaeshi today, sounds amazing.

[ImmaculateClump]

Oh, wow! I never knew there was a baby pac man, why wasn't that huge? They must have given up on it quite quickly.

I remember when pac man was all the rage and me and my sister used to buy packets of the pac man stickers at the corner shop at my nana's with that brittle "chewing gum" that smelt like the dentist and it would shatter between your teeth and skewer your cheeks and you had to pick it out with your brass hand. There was never a baby in there.

They were pretty lousy, thinking back, not very inventive, just a picture of pac man or a picture of one of the ghosts.
Garbage Pail Kids were amazing though, we got them a few years later.

Oh look, there they are



I remember now they had little speech bubbles you could peel off and stick separately.

[SavageHedgehog]

There were a lot of follow up games after Pac-Man\Mrs. Pac-Man in the early 80s, none of which were huge hits or took much attention away from the first two, a slight exception for Pac Land, an early platformer. In the case of Baby Pac-Man it was a combination of pinball machine and arcade game, which made it expensive to produce and hard to maintain.

[fflip]

I grew up in Worthing on the South Coast in the 70's and 80's. The perfect time to witness the transition from the old games of the 50's and 60's to the first arcade cabinets. All of which would now be found in a museum.

Are there any places one can go to play machines of this vintage now, or notable communities that collect/preserve them? I feel like videogames are well covered with private collectors openly chatting online, the likes of Arcade Club, and the marvellous MAME. But even the celebrated companies like Atari and Sega have a raft of pre-microprocessor productions where it seems hard to really find much on the Internet other than a couple of low rez photos of.

On a recent visit to Hull, I found the Streetlife Museum to contain a small room with an old target shooting game and a "What The Butler Saw" peepshow, but it was mostly boring old cars. :)

A friend of mine had a static caravan and our stay there was memorable for the on-site arcade having a Sega Monaco GP. Thrillingly unsubtle, white knuckle vehicle dodging with booming analogue sound effects. Upon returning another year it turned out the machine had developed a fault and the philistines had scrapped it. I partly mention it because there's a brilliant free remake of it for PCs, slightly hidden away on a forum here. Better than any of the official conversions and well worth grabbing.

[petercussing]

Baby Pacman was in the Pacman cartoon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_(TV_series) which seemed to be on the telly for about a day then fucked off. I enjoyed.

My first arcade experience was in a dodgy cafe and was a centipede table top game i played after putting 10p in a fruity only for it to spunk out lots of cash. That was a weird/good period where arcades were just in cafes, pubs and cornershops, not just fruities, real arcades.

Our local-ish corner shop Raj's had Cabal, Robocop and later streetfighter 2. My and chum spent so much one day and very nearly completed both Cabal and Robocop.

One of my conceptions of heaven would involve me being between 10 and 12 again with my mates and having infinite money at the Rotunda in Folkestone which somehow has all the arcades up to about 1993.

[Norton Canes]

Growing up in the East Midlands, there was nothing unless you went bowling (at least not in Leicester)

Wan't there an arcade (ironically) on the ground floor of the Silver Arcade?

[Neomod]

Are there any places one can go to play machines of this vintage now, or notable communities that collect/preserve them? I feel like videogames are well covered with private collectors openly chatting online, the likes of Arcade Club, and the marvellous MAME. But even the celebrated companies like Atari and Sega have a raft of pre-microprocessor productions where it seems hard to really find much on the Internet other than a couple of low rez photos of.

On a recent visit to Hull, I found the Streetlife Museum to contain a small room with an old target shooting game and a "What The Butler Saw" peepshow, but it was mostly boring old cars. :)

A friend of mine had a static caravan and our stay there was memorable for the on-site arcade having a Sega Monaco GP. Thrillingly unsubtle, white knuckle vehicle dodging with booming analogue sound effects. Upon returning another year it turned out the machine had developed a fault and the philistines had scrapped it. I partly mention it because there's a brilliant free remake of it for PCs, slightly hidden away on a forum here. Better than any of the official conversions and well worth grabbing.

Brighton still has the Mechanical Memories/Penny Arcade museum I think.

[fflip]

Ah cool. I'm on the Youtube recommendation loop for 'penny arcade' now, looks like there are a few dotted around the country.

[the]

There's a retro arcade in Bridgwater called the Timewarp Arcade, it's well worth spending an afternoon there. They also buy up and repair old machines.

pac man stickers

I stuck a few of those to my bedroom door as a nipper. But yes, seeing them again, they're a lot more cursory than I remember.

Didn't each pack of stickers also come with a scratchcard game of Pac Man? A printed maze where you had to scratch the silver dots off and hope you didn't reveal a ghost.

I think there used to be Pac Man sweets as well (those hard chalky candy shapes), which came in a little blister pack with a maze printed on the backing.

Pac Man was a big deal for a while there.

There were a lot of follow up games after Pac-Man\Mrs. Pac-Man in the early 80s, none of which were huge hits or took much attention away from the first two, a slight exception for Pac Land, an early platformer.

Pac Land was a trailblazing game, it set the blueprint for scrolling platform games (of the walk/run-about-and-jump variety). Was a direct influence on Super Mario Bros. Amazing game, still play it. It's got a satisfyingly bonkers plotline too.

A friend of mine had a static caravan and our stay there was memorable for the on-site arcade having a Sega Monaco GP. Thrillingly unsubtle, white knuckle vehicle dodging with booming analogue sound effects.

They used to have Monaco GP on the (old) pier at Weston-super-Mare. By the late 80s it was showing its age so it was only 10p a credit.