14. Insert Coin (Redux)

I wake up, feeling vaguely hungover, and reach for a memory of the night before…

Something swims into recollection. Not that bit with Eileen from accounts – that won’t surface until we meet in the canteen in two days. No, definitely not Eileen. What then? Ah, yes… something about arcade machines…

Dear god, no.

I snap, instantly, to full alertness. This is my new mission in life, to find out where all of those arcade machines, those glorious harbingers of our videogaming present, have gone. What happened to them? Once they were legion but slowly, almost imperceptibly, they faded away. One by one they disappeared from the seaside arcades, from the pubs, the chip shops, from the taxi ranks. I didn’t even see them leave – seduced, as we all were, by newer machines, by racing games and light guns, by the inevitable onslaught of the £10 jackpot ‘Give Us A Break’ machines. I didn’t even have time to say goodbye.

The email/internet thing

But where do I start? It’s not as if I can just ring up the landlord of the Rec, Nick Hornby style, and ask where Space Invaders got to. Fortunately, this is the eve of the 21 st century – August 1998 – and I have the phenomenal power of a fledgling internet at my disposal…

I spend some time clicking on things at random.

Yes, this is my first attempt at trying to buy an arcade machine on-line. Check it in Google…

I stumble, rather naively, into the mostly US based, rec.games.video.arcade.collecting and start asking stupid questions. And I am, for the most part, ignored totally. Perhaps my over-use of the ‘L’ word (I blame my occasionally hippy mother) scares off the testosterone hordes of RGVAC. More probably it’s that I come across as a bit of a tourist who isn’t exactly serious about arcade collecting…

Undeterred, I stumble on, posting messages on pinball message boards, sending off emails to the few UK suppliers I can find (Arcade Heaven, Swallow Amusements in Hayling Island…) and generally having no luck at all. In desperation I post an advert on a amusement machines site based somewhere in the continent.

Incredibly, this turns something up. A few days later, I receive an email from a mobile phone engineer called John Mason (if he Googles his way in here, then, hi John - look what you started…) – not, unfortunately, offering me the machine of my dreams but wishing me luck in my quest and passing on the details of a chap down in Bradford-on-Avon who might be able to help…

Well, where else would you find vintage arcade machines?

Somewhat nervously, I reached for the phone… Incredibly, not only did Simon (the chap on the other end of the line) know what I was talking about, but he also had “one or two” machines which I might like.

I’d done some research by this time and I had a very definite idea of the machine I was after. I now know this to be a Taito Space Invaders cocktail but, at the time, I just referred to it as a “black tabletop arcade machine with wood sides”. Simon confirmed that one of his machines (with, oh yes, Scramble installed) matched this description, so I arranged to sling the family into the car and go down and have a look.

I don’t know what I expected to find when I arrived at the address I was given. I guess I was half expecting to find the machines in the back room of a pub, or to be confronted by twenty-odd stone of halitosis-driven arcade operator, or possibly a ‘Flash Harry’ ‘50s style spiv.

What I wasn’t expecting to find was what appeared to a gamekeeper’s lodge on a country estate in rural Somerset – which turned out to be Simon’s parents place, rather than our final destination. Urged on by the rather affable Simon, we followed him into the centre of town…

Now, this was more like it.

Now we’re talking…

A small lock-up, behind a pub, crammed from floor to ceiling and wall to wall with arcade machines and bits of arcade machines. Next to the door was an Asteroids upright, the left wall was full (and I mean full) of Space Invader PCBs, at the back was a Nintendo Space Firebirds cocktail cabinet and there, underneath all of those, as it turned out, dud Space Invaders, was my machine. One quick flick of the power switch later and I was back playing Scramble on a cocktail arcade machine as though the last 20 years had never happened.

There was no real question about whether I was going to buy this machine. Truth be told, it was a bit tatty – bits of it were held together with cardboard and hope - and an older, more stupid, me would probably advise against it. But this machine, appearing from the mists of my memory like Excalibur from the lake, was going home with me. It was the beginning of a beautiful obsession…

From tiny acorns...

ahchay, July 2004

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