The story so far…

Somehow, through a combination of blind luck, persistence and cold hard cash, I had come into the possession of the machine of my dreams. A real life cocktail arcade cabinet and a pile of random PCB’s which, I was assured, were actually Commando, Pleiades, Green Beret and Jungler. At this point in time, I had never owned a dedicated gaming machine (not even a Gameboy) so I was going in at the deep-end somewhat – I set the cabinet up in pride of place in the living room and settled down for an evening of pure, non-emulated, gaming.

And, if everything had gone according to plan, I might very well have played for a few nights, decided that emulation was better after all and sold the machine. And I wouldn’t be here typing this today.

My dream of arcade ownership was a simple one. I was hoping for the ‘arcade experience’ at home – choose a game, insert 10p and play the game of your choice for half an hour.

Who needs beds at home?

It wasn’t to be that simple. Nothing ever is, is it?

The Scramble didn’t have any sound, Green Beret worked perfectly but had to be played on it’s side, Commando and Pleiades didn’t plug in to the connector inside the cabinet and Jungler had wonky graphics. The coin mechanism wasn’t wired up, and needed old style 10p coins anyway, the player one joystick was loose and the fire buttons had obviously seen previous life in a fruit machine. The monitor was held in place by a piece of old shoebox and the power cable was held in place with a piece of gaffer tape. It was, in all respects, exactly the sort of machine that I would now recommend that a newcomer to arcade collecting should avoid. The only game that was properly playable was Jungler, which is an interesting enough little game but is, well, a bit shit.

More research ensued.

I am, at heart, a software man. I still, to this day, don’t understand, at a gutteral instinctive level, what happens inside a machine to make a character move when I move a joystick. There’s a wire going from the joystick to a connector on the PCB – fine, I can get that far – and I have no qualms about the programming logic which drives the internal workings, but as to the ‘how’ of computers? How those little black boxes with legs turn input signals into dots and lines on a TV display? Simply no idea at all.

Pass me the screwdriver boy.

“But,” I said to myself, “it’s got to be fairly simple hasn’t it? It’s just wires and stuff.” – and with that little mantra I set to it. I drew up a plan (you can still find it on the internet if you look hard enough) which basically came down to finding a way to mounting the boards in the cabinet, finding some way of converting the boards from one format to another, fixing the coin mechanism and hoping that the whole thing didn’t burst into flames or electrocute me.

Some eight years later and the shoebox is still there, I have had multiple electric shocks and, on one memorable occasion, I have sat in horror and watched a PCB burst into flames in front of me. And I never did find a way to satisfactorily mount my arcade boards in the cabinet. The power supply has also been known to give off a funny smell and, in fact, is becoming increasingly unreliable. I have blown up at least two monitors and the player one joystick is still too floppy to reliably get through the fourth level of Scramble and at least half of my forty or more games have faults of one kind or another.

I am obviously, according to all the available evidence, an abject failure.

But it is precisely my constant battle, and inevitable failure, to adequately maintain my small corner of arcade nirvana which makes it worthwhile. Arcade machines are cheaply made and clearly not designed to run for more than a handful of months. They’re made using the cheapest possible components (Defender cabs were famously largely made from banana crates), have often been badly stored for over 20 years and frequently have dead things inside them. They were, and still are, essentially ephemeral devices – made to run for a season or two and then to be thrown away, discarded for the next big thing. Space Invaders was phenomenally successful for, at most, two years before it gave way to Asteroids, Asteroids had a few brief months before Defender hit, which had even less time before being replaced by, in all probability, Cabal.

And collecting arcade machines means having to deal with the fall out of 20 years of this behaviour. When I first bought my Robotron cabinet there were so many holes in the control panel from successive poorly executed conversions (including, at the very least, Street Fighter II, Neo Geo and a football game of some form) that you could easily put your hand through it. If you didn’t mind it being cut to ribbons by all the exposed pointy shards that is…

So I’m a failure then? I’m sure that some members of the arcade collecting community would brand me so. I don’t obsess over my machines, I don’t polish out every scratch, or restore them to factory condition - I do the bare minimum of maintenance and not a jot more. I revel in the imperfections, in the cigarette burns above the start buttons, in the hastily scratched initials on the monitor glass attempting to permanently record some long lost hooligan’s right to the top score in Mr Do! Because in the broken doors, the coin scratches, in the extra holes drilled in a Defender cabinet to cater for a second joystick, in the badly soldered patch wires across that Phoenix PCB, there is the history of arcades. Every scratch was put there by someone fiddling wth their coin while they were waiting for their turn, every slightly floppy joystick is a result of countless players struggling to make that last, impossible, climb in Scramble. Every new hole represents the change from two way joystick to eight, from one fire button to two, from Pac-Man’s control simplicity to the Neo-Geo’s surfeit of buttons. Every cigarette burn is a high score attack that was more important than smoking. Every damp patch is the final result of a poorly balanced pint.

That is why I collect arcade machines, not for the games – any old PC and an X-Arcade is undeniably better for playing them – but for the history. For the feeling that you only get when you sit down at a battered, long past its prime, videogame machine. For the spirit.

There’s no excuse for the dead mice though.

February 2006

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