Articles
Arcade. Eyesore. It’s Conquered.
arcade that I could still believe
there were some still alive,
preserved in a time bubble that
people of my generation kept
living both in style of venue
(dark rooms, sticky floors,
odours of flat fizzy drinks and
chips in the air), and the games
themselves (Street Fighter II,
Point Blank, and Final Fight to
name but several hundred).
That time bubble burst the
moment I laid eyes on infinite
10p pushers, crane grabbers,
fruit machines and horse race
betting simulators. Has the
fair come to town? Wading
Issue 57 • July 2014
through these eyesores, taking
up a lot of floor space in this
fairly sizeable area, passing the
Namco ticket-prize redemption
counter (pretending that didn’t
exist!) I find myself face-toface with the first of the few
‘actual’ arcade machines in
the building... Doodle Jump.
But, to digress briefly, I note at
this point that Namco Funscape
is a dedicated arcade. Tenpin is
a dedicated bowling company.
The gaming venues I’ve been
visiting over the past 15 years,
living in places without such
amenities as an arcade, I’ve
had to make do with the flashy
arcades tacked on to bowling
alleys like Tenpin, Super Bowl, et
al. Moving to Manchester I had
the chance to see what passes
for a real arcade these days,
and then it hit me – the ones
in the bowling alleys I’d grown
accustomed to are the real
arcades these days. The games
are the same, and dedicated
arcades now have bowling
alleys tacked on to the side
of them! The only difference
between a bowling alley-arcade
and an arcade-bowling alley
is the Namco brand and ticket
issuing allowing the potential to
11 • GameOn Magazine