A reader describes how his love for 80s arcade coin-ops led to him becoming a collector and getting ever more deeply involved in the UK fan scene.
It all started at the seaside. Either Llandudno or Weymouth, it was a long time ago. My dad took me to the arcades, probably more for his benefit than for mine, as I later found out he was a compulsive gambler! There were lots of mechanical games at that time, mainly shooting and driving. The first two video games I can remember playing were Seawolf and Boot Hill. In Seawolf, you looked through a submarine periscope and attempted to shoot torpedoes at ships moving along the top of the screen. It was a timed game; you probably got about a minute for your 10p.
Boot Hill was two-player only I believe. You and a friend controlled a cowboy on each side of the screen and you tried to shoot each other. I think it was also on a timer. Fun games, but certainly not addictive. In 1978, Taito’s Space Invaders was released. I’m not sure where I first played it, might have been a seaside arcade, travelling fairground, or the local Kwik Save supermarket.
I was blown away. It was just you against the machine. You had to stop the aliens before they landed on Earth. What made this game better than any video game before it, and a huge worldwide hit, were the amazing graphics and sounds. The better you got the longer you could play. It remembered the highest score of the day (until it was unplugged) and it had a sci-fi theme. Everyone was sci-fi crazy as Star Wars had been released the previous year.
I was obsessed with it and all my school dinner money went into it and the various other games that began to appear in chip shops, pubs, taxi ranks, cafes, etc. I would spend Saturdays seeking out the latest games at nearby towns on my bicycle or on the bus or train. Our yearly family holiday in Great Yarmouth became my favourite week of the year. As soon as we arrived there, and checked in at the guest house, i’d be off trawling the 10 or so huge seafront arcades to find the newest games with cutting edge technology that improved by the year.
Pac-Man, Missile Command, and Battlezone in 1980. Gorf, Tempest, and Defender in 1981. Robotron: 2084, Buck Rogers: Planet Of Zoom, Donkey Kong, Pole Position, and Mr. Do! in 1982. Atari Star Wars in 1983, etc. I left school in 1984 and after working in a computer games shop for six months I got a job at a video rental store. Hiring out the latest blockbuster films on video was hugely popular at that time and my bosses were making a fortune, one of them bought a (second-hand) Rolls Royce!
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They started to expand their business and bought a hotel on Blackpool seafront. One of my bosses, Geoff, told me that there was a sit-down (known as a cocktail) arcade machine in the bar of the hotel and they didn’t want it. Did I want to buy it? I asked what the machine was and Geoff said he thought it was Space Invaders. People that weren’t interested in arcade games called all video games Space Invaders back then. Anyway, I bought it for £30.
It turned out to be a pretty poor Galaxian clone with the catchy name of Defend The Terra Attack On The Red UFO. Yes, really. It was cool to own my own arcade game for a while and I had my fun with it, then sold it for £40! Over the next couple of decades I owned many home computers and consoles and still do, but I was becoming increasingly nostalgic for the golden age of arcades.
Around 15 years ago I began looking on eBay to see what arcade classics might be available. I found and bought a cocktail Phoenix machine for £154. A mate took me to pick it up. To my surprise, it was still being used in a Chinese takeaway near Burton. Amazingly, kids loved it and enjoyed playing it at 20p a go. I got it home and it’s worked perfectly ever since.
The thing is, one machine is not enough! I continued to check eBay daily. Quite a few machines would come up for sale, but most were not cheap. Then one day an Alca Bomber was advertised for £400 or best offer. Back in the day, there were probably as many bootleg machines as officially released ones. Companies would clone a PCB [printed circuit board] of a popular game, remove the name of the manufacturer and add their own, change the name of the game, and build their own cabinet to house it.
Alca was a British company and Bomber was a bootleg of the arcade hit Scramble, made by the Japanese company Konami. The seller said in the eBay listing that he could deliver and charged a pound a mile. He was 20 miles away, so I could certainly afford that. I made a cheeky offer of £250, and it was accepted! I had my first upright arcade machine. £250 was pretty cheap and one reason was that it didn’t include an original PCB, it was running Scramble from a 60-in-1 multi game PCB.
You can pick these up from eBay for about £30. There are 60 emulated arcade games on it, including Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, and of course Scramble. Problem is some of the games aren’t emulated very well. Donkey Kong and Pac-Man are pretty much perfect, but the sound effects on games such as Moon Cresta and Galaxian aren’t quite right and some games lag and glitch a bit.
The gameplay and graphics on Scramble are perfect but the shooting sound isn’t right. I was happy enough with it but intended to buy an original Bomber PCB at some point to replace the 60-in-1, but still haven’t got round to it! Around this time, I joined the UKVAC (UK Video Arcade Collectors) website. I thought it would be useful to get to know other collectors as they organise meet-ups at places such as Arcade Club in Bury. Members tend to use the site to sell machines to each other, you avoid paying eBay fees and are less likely to get scammed.
There are also members who can repair machines or just the monitor or PCB, or give you advice on repairing and restoring. You need to be careful though, as CRT monitors can hold a lethal charge, even if they haven’t been turned on in months. I decided that I wanted my next purchase to be an original Space Invaders. It was the first video game I fell in love with and the cabinet artwork is so iconic. I checked eBay daily until an original Taito cab[inet] was listed for sale. Bally Midway also released Space Invaders in the US, but the Taito cab is nicer in my opinion.
The machine was faulty but it was only eight miles away in Tamworth and I bid on it and won it for £260! I had no idea how I was going to get it home. I put a post on Facebook asking if there was a man with a van who I could hire. A guy with an estate car said he could surely fit it in, as he’d moved a few fruit machines in it. So we went to collect it and it wouldn’t fit in the back of his car! The bottom two thirds of the machine is wider than the top, so the top fitted in and the bottom stuck out of the back of the car! We tied it in and set off back. Luckily, we didn’t pass a police car.
As we got near home, I hadn’t thought about all of the sleeping policemen on the roads. As we went over each one the machine made a huge banging sound and I cringed! So, we got it back and he charged me £30. Amazingly, the monitor worked. The PCB had a fault though. I went on UKVAC and asked for advice. I was instructed to test the voltages first, which meant buying a multimeter and learning how to use it. I found that the voltages were correct, meaning it was either a PCB fault or a loose chip or faulty/dirty edge connector. It was a PCB fault.
I found someone on the VAC who repaired them. It turned out there was a lot wrong with it and it took him over a month to sort and it cost me £150. He sent it back and I now had a working Space Invaders machine. It’s worth around £1,200 now. A while later, a Cosmic Guerilla cocktail table came up for sale on the VAC site. There used to be a Cosmic Guerilla upright machine in a chip shop by my school, so I had nostalgia for the machine, plus it’s a good game. It was fully working and only £280, which was a good price. Only thing was, I needed to use a courier as the machine was on the other side of the country. There are a couple of trusted couriers which many collectors use. They know how to transport a machine correctly and charge about £100 to move a machine from anywhere in the UK to anywhere else in the UK.
I got my game and enjoyed it for a few years until it stopped working. I checked the fuses in the machine and they had blown. I hoped this was all that was wrong but blown fuses usually mean something else is not right. I replaced the fuses, but it still didn’t work so I was left with a very cool looking coffee table. My lovely gran passed away, she was 100. She left me some money. Around the same time an Atari Star Wars machine came up for sale on the VAC. This was one of my favourite machines ever and I decided to buy it even though it was very pricey. Gran probably wouldn’t have approved, but it was an investment!
I wrote about it in detail in a letter I had published on Metro GameCentral. I’ve now owned the machine for 10 years and it’s cost me a fortune to keep it running. It is working at the moment and I hope it keeps on doing so, I adore it. I also bought an Invaders Revenge from the same seller. A year or so after Space Invaders took the world by storm in 1978, people started to get a bit bored of it. Several companies released upgrade kits consisting of RAM chips or a new PCB, plus a new bezel and control panel. This would usually change the game into a Space Invaders variant with a different name. Some of these were hardly any different to the original Space Invaders, but others were quite good. Invaders Revenge was one of the good ones. It added new alien attack patterns, excellent sound effects, a firing UFO, and a docking stage.
The game was working when the courier picked it up. When it was delivered to me, it had stopped working. Unfortunately, this is something that happens quite regularly. These machines are nearly 50 years old and quite delicate. During the journey chips can come loose, as can connectors and various other problems. I was a complete novice and I attempted to find the problem, or problems, and ended up making things worse. I still have the game and have yet to decide whether to sell it or spend more money on getting it repaired.
During my frequent trips to Europe’s largest retro arcade in Bury, Manchester – Arcade Club – I fell in love with Asteroids! It was a game I wasn’t that bothered about in my youth but now really started to enjoy it and decided to buy my own. It was one of the most popular video games back in the day, so it wasn’t hard tracking down one for sale. It worked perfectly for months, then it developed a fault on the PCB. I found a guy on the VAC who specialised in repairing Asteroids PCBs and I posted it to him. He promptly repaired it and charged me something like £15, which is crazy cheap!
It worked for a few years, then the PCB went again. I got the same guy to repair it and it’s still working perfectly. A while later, a Pac-Man cabaret came up for sale. A cabaret is smaller than an upright machine and usually has no art on the sides, just woodgrain. They were designed to go into more classy locations, such as cocktail bars and nightclubs. They are quite popular with collectors, as you can fit more machines into your probably limited amount of space. I wasn’t a huge fan of Pac-Man but I liked it and figured it would be good to have some variation in the collection, as everything else is a shoot ‘em-up! It’s worked perfectly the whole time I’ve had it, apart from the joystick started to stick when you pushed it left. It was very easy to repair.
An Atari Tempest upright came up for sale. I loved the game and I also think it’s one of the most stunning looking machines ever made. The game had been imported from the US at some point and converted to work on the UK power supply. Also, the coin slot takes quarters. The US is obviously huge compared to the UK, and so there are many more surviving golden age coin-ops over there. Over the past few years, collectors have joined together to buy machines in the US, filled large containers with them, and got them shipped over here.
As I waited for the courier to pick Tempest up for me, the seller told me that the sale of another game, Gorf, had fallen through and if I bought both games he would knock £200 off the total price. He was desperate for the money, as he wanted to buy an old Lotus Esprit, as seen in the 70s James Bond films! So I bought the two cabs. They both worked, but over the years Tempest has developed a fault. It’ll work perfectly sometimes, then other times it won’t switch on or it will turn off during a game.
The monitor in Gorf has stopped working. The game is still working though, you can hear it. It is best not to try to repair a monitor unless you know exactly what you’re doing. As I mentioned before, monitors can hold a lethal charge, even when they’ve been switched off for months. They need to be discharged before you mess with them, something I’d rather not attempt. Next, I decided to buy a Williams Defender, possibly my favourite game ever. It took me a year to find one. I got it home and it died within hours! I knew that the PCB set inside Defender was fairly unreliable, so I decided to buy a Jrok.
The Jrok is a multi-Williams FPGA board. It emulates the software and hardware of multiple Williams arcade games in an extremely accurate way. It is so accurate that world record holders on these games can tell no difference whatsoever between original arcade PCBs and the Jrok. I had to import one from the US, as they are not for sale in the UK, and had to pay import duty so it ended up being quite expensive, around £400. After reading the installation instructions I realised it wasn’t something I felt comfortable doing. I reached out to a few people who said they’d help, but it was a pretty big job and it took me about five years to get it done!
There was an Italian company called Zaccaria that released a number of games in the late 70s/early 80s. One of the games they released was a Space Invaders clone called The Invaders. I saw that a cocktail version of The Invaders was for sale on eBay and the seller was only about 15 miles away. I put in a couple of offers which were refused, but a couple of weeks later the seller messaged me and said if I wanted it he could deliver it, and maybeIi might have something he could buy!
It turned out that the guy was a collector who had around 20 machines. He was a qualified electrician and was able to repair the games himself, including the monitors. I asked if he would like to trade my non-working Cosmic Guerilla cocktail plus cash for his The Invaders cocktail and he said yes. Turned out he was a UKVAC member and we chatted on the site about his collection. He had an upright Defender! I asked him if he would be able to install the Jrok in my Defender and he said yep! What a great new contact!
So, we did the trade, and he got my Defender working at last! He spent three hours going through the whole machine, he installed the Jrok, rewired anything he thought might be a bit dodgy, and installed a new power supply I had also imported from the US. Some VAC members are very clever. Not only can they repair games, but they can also modify them. With a chip change, they can add a high score table to a game that didn’t save high scores or add a freeplay option, so you don’t need to put money in for credits.
One guy came up with a multi-game PCB for Space Invaders. I bought one for mine and installed it myself. It was very easy, you just pull out a certain chip, then plug a tiny PCB into the socket, then plug the chip into the PCB. My Space Invaders now plays about 10 variants, including Lunar Rescue, Invaders Revenge, Galaxy Wars, and Moon Base Zeta. To change the game you press the one player start and two player start buttons together and it brings up a menu.
So, I now had 11 arcade machines, and no space for any more. Late last year, a Sega Astro Blaster cabaret came up for sale at a decent price. As I said, a cabaret is smaller than an upright and I bought it! It fitted nicely into my hall next to my Pac-Man cabaret and my Phoenix cocktail. Is that it then, game over? I certainly can’t fit anymore cabs in, but if anything comes up that I want, I’ll sell my non-workers and buy something new.
I pretty much have all my favourite games, but there are still a few I would like: Ladybug, Bomb Jack, Moon Cresta, Mr. Do!, Zaxxon, etc. I would also love Tron and Paperboy, but they are both very expensive cabs, £3,000 – £4,000 each. It’s certainly been a fantastic journey. I’m friends with world record scorers on Defender and Star Wars, a guy who appeared in the film The King of Kong, retro arcade managers, etc. I’ve met Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar, who created the games Defender and Robotron.
Eugene owns a company called Raw Thrills, which makes all the huge racing and lightgun games you see in arcades these days. Larry was also co-designer on The Twilight Zone pinball and The Addams Family pinball, etc. I also had a chat with Jeff Minter at Arcade Club about the machines he has owned over the years.
If this feature has made you nostalgic for some retro action, then I suggest you find your nearest retro arcade. Arcade Club Bury is the best, you pay around £18 on the door and then all the machines, over 400 I think, are free to play. There’s also Arcade Club Leeds, and one in Blackpool also. There are several other retro arcades including the NQ64 chain and The Retro Realm in Walsall. There are also yearly events such as Play Blackpool. As the title screen on Moon Cresta says, You Can Get a Lot of Fun and Thrill!
By reader Tim Keeling
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