You can keep your bland Sega Worlds and your fourteen storeys of samey Trocadero. When I was in my teens, arcades were awe-inspiring places – rather than family fun centres. They existed on different levels too… For every local café with a handful of machines there was a city centre full-on wonderland packed with arcade machines. All of which could all be mastered to such an extent that a pounds worth of 10p coins could last you an afternoon. A visit to a “proper” arcade was a real event and one to be savoured.

I lived in Bristol, and whilst my regular haunt was Rita’s Café in Fishponds I also frequented the main arcade in the City Centre, “Mad Harry’s”.

Insert coin?

Mad Harry’s was THE place to go in Bristol to play arcade machines. Harry knew how to run an arcade - he had it absolutely right. 3 main rooms, one dedicated to the cash-generating fruit machines, the second dedicated to all the classic video games (the bread and butter stuff if you will), and the third was used to showcase the latest video releases like Dragon’s Lair, Outrun, Space Harrier and Donkey Kong. He would also have Pinballs scattered around– Haunted House (fuck me what a game), Gorgar and Pinbot stand out.

A visit to Mad Harry’s almost always followed the same pattern:

Dear god no.

Go in, hand over a pound note. Unceremoniously receive ten bits of arcade commodity from a leather-faced, butt smoking old bat behind the counter. Think Olive from “On the Buses” crossed with Thora Hird and you’re close to what I’m talking about. She’d slam the change on the wooden counter, which was at my head-height, without a word. The wood on the counter was raw and worn to such an extent that it had a depression in the spot where the coins met it. If RSI was recognised as a disease in those days, she could have sued for millions.

The main room held no attractions for me, so I would walk through to room two, find a spare tabletop videogame, sit on the stool and proudly stand my stack of 10p’s on the machine. This was very important. Like a dog pissing on a lamppost, or Clint Eastwood loading his Magnum one chamber at a time – it was a way of marking your territory, of showing your intent to everyone else in the room. Ten shots for glory, ready to take on whatever alien hordes you chose to blast away all afternoon.

Go ahead.

I’d give an hour to the cocktail tables, to get my eye in. Blow away the cobwebs and loosen up with a few games of Space Firebird, Space Invaders, Helifire, Frogger, and Galaga. During these sessions, it was common and accepted practice for doubles to be played with complete strangers. People of all ages would see you playing, come over and sit in the stool on the other side of the machine, place 10p alongside your stack, and sit and watch your game in silence and wait for you to finish. Nothing need be said – your next game was a game of doubles, and you got on with it. Brilliant. You’d learn so much from watching other people play – the co-op scene today for all its benefits is great, but you don’t learn much. Turn based doubles are a rare sight in today’s arcades and that’s a shame. And the fact that it would stretch your meagre stack of coins for that extra ten minutes was a welcome bonus.

Once the preliminaries were over, I’d grab the remains of my stash and go and find the game I could play for an hour or more from on one 10p. For me this was Missile Command. Mad Harry’s had a huge up and over cockpit cab with a vast viewing window behind the player’s shoulders. I’d easily play for an hour or two on one credit, clocking the machine three or four times with a crowd watching and then walk away leaving the machine running. This was the arcade equivalent of Eddie Van Halen’s 45 minute live guitar solos. Gaining respect like that was a good thing. Not only did it build my confidence in those formative years, but it also meant the arcade bullies who’d threaten a beating if 20p wasn’t handed over left me alone.

Gawd bless yer Ma’am

This would leave 50p in my pocket. A wander through to room three, for “research purposes” - playing the latest new games in this room gave me an education in videogaming. Every new experience, every nascent genre, gave me a wider field of vision, and kept my options open when visiting other arcades in the years to come. Machines would come and go during the 80’s, and having the ability to adapt to other genres and playing styles meant I never got bored whatever arcade I was in, because I wasn’t looking for the same machines and allowing myself to be disappointed if they weren’t there.

A particular memory was Dragon’s Lair. I was dumbstruck at what I was watching. A cartoon that I could actually “play” - albeit for only a handful of levels. But it came at a price – 30p a shot. This was the first of the mega-cost games, and it was a long time before I could play the game and walk away without feeling sick at having spunked a third of my kitty on a one minute thrill.

Ways to stay single. No. 1 in an occasional series…

Another new game to be showcased in this room was Donkey Kong – the only one in Bristol at the time. This was astonishing – this was something completely new. It announced the arrival of a fresh genre and still, to my mind, defines what makes a perfect platform game.

Space Harrier was another. Now this was special, as it was a sit-down hydraulic cab. A jet-fighter like joystick controlled your man up, down left and right in a 3d rez-like style, and the cab moved in the appropriate direction. Shit now, but absolutely cutting edge at the time. Awesome. A LOT of money went into that machine, not because I was fond of the game particularly, but because it was something new, and I had to experience it time and again.

There’s always someone who takes it too seriously…

And then there was the arrival of Track and Field. This was videogame as spectator sport. This the machine had the most intense interaction between player and machine that I had ever seen. I was fascinated watching how people dealt with it. Players actually grimaced as they thumped the run buttons. There was that distinctive wrist shaking after the 100meters while the machine intoned “The time…ten point zero three seconds!”. And, of course, the one guy who was banned from Mad Harry’s for using a Bic lighter, to rub over the buttons really fast, thus smashing all the high scores in one thrilling Ben Johnson inspired session.

I have tons of memories of this place – the distinctive “chink” of your 10p falling into a nearly-full bucket of other 10p’s inside the coin door, being able to get free credits by rubbing your shoes on the carpet and touching the metal part of the coin door of certain machines, being drawn in by a new machine’s “attract mode”. I could go on.

And it was all good. I can’t fault the arcades in those days. It was pure. You against the machine, not against someone else. It wasn’t so much about entertainment, and filling some time, it was about beating the challenge that these electronic things set you.

AEROFLOTT, July 2004.

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