The first video games machine I ever saw was a car racing game in Newcastle Bowling Alley on Westgate Road in about 1977. It was fairly rudimentary, but it looked pretty exciting and it was a foretaste of what was to come. The prospect of being able to play against someone across the world in real-time in a game with motion almost lifelike, or to be able to stand on an exercise board and Wii myself fit would probably have seemed less likely then than a flying car would have.
After that I didn’t really run into video games again until the ‘tennis’/bat and ball games on Grandstand video game machines a couple of years later. We had a couple of those and I did spend a lot of hours mastering the paddle and imagining it was a real game of football between Newcastle and oh just about anyone really. A couple of years after that I had an Atari Games Console with ‘Space Invaders’ of course and many others such as ‘Berserk’, which I broke the world record score on!
When the ‘real’ video games first hit arcades here in the early 1980s, it was ‘Space Invaders’ that was the pioneer of the genre. Still a classic game and only fully appreciated when played with an original machine with ’stiff’ controls and all, ‘Space Invaders’ was hugely addictive for a competive boy of my age.
It would cost 10p per game and that was prety costly for most boys of my age around then, particularly when it would cost you many pounds just to get the hang of the joystick and avoid being killed within a minute or two.
Those first machines had a score readout that would only go as high as 9999 I believe at which point the machine would be ‘clocked’ and return to 0. To prove you were a top player you would have to say how many times you had ‘clocked’ it in one session. The machines were in arcades of course, but also worked their way into cafes, pubs and various corner shops wold convert a back room into a makeshift mini-arcade. I remember a shop at the top of Wingrove Avenue did just that, as did Jock Ali’s little shop on Fenham Road and Stanton Street in Arthur’s Hill.
We used to play it in the arcades down at Tynemouth and also in a taxi office in North Shields, where me, Keith Bain (Bainsy) and Paul Van Zandvliet would sometimes go and sneak a few games.
Everyone loved Space Invaders or ‘Spaceys’ as we called them and the name became a generic term for all arcade video games machines. Most boys at school would discuss the games and various strategies for beating them and I recall I bought a book with guides to playing Pacman, complete with maps for how you coudl play without even looking at the screen and a ‘hiding place’ where the ghosts could not get you – impressive when showing friends.
The next machine I saw was ‘Asteroids’, where you shot asteroids into smaller and smaller bits and then one of my all-time favourites, ‘Galaxian’, which was kind of a souped up version of Space Invaders, but with more colour and more active bastard aliens.
Each month seemed to bring a plethora of wonderfully exciting new titles and by 1981, Bainsy and me would be spending all day in Whitley Bay on Sundays playing ‘Moon Cresta’, ‘Defender’, ‘Cosmic Guerilla’, ‘Gorf’ and many many others. ‘Moon Cresta’ was our favouite and involved the novel task of having to ‘make rockets dock’. It was a completely mental game with lots of really weird aliens to shoot. Once you got a high score it became hugely difficult and some of the aliens would randomly disappear. I was great at ‘Moon Cresta’, but my expertise really shone in ‘Scramble’, which I would play for hours.
I would take £10-£15 from my stupidly generous pocket money (it was shitloads in those days) and blow it all in the arcades and on chips with the odd game of pool thrown in. Bainsy and me had a whale of a time and if nothing else, it stopped him leading me any more astray than he probably would have if we’d been out on the streets, but that’s another post.
Mostly we would walk from North Shields to Whitley Bay on a Sunday morning from about 10 and get home around 6. The money would all be spent, but we would have enjoyed every moment of thumping the controls of any and every machine we could lay our hands on.
Surprisingly the arcades in Whitley Bay never really attracted any nutters back then, but when I went to Eldon Square Recreation Centre in Newcastle to play them, I ran into trouble several times, including a young boy shoving a knife at my throat and pressing it to my skin while demanding money. I just backed off and walked away from him and kept on walking! Never any shortage of lunatics in the Toon.
Luckily a couple of years later we all had computers and/or video games machines at home, where nobody would ever threaten us with knives and we didn’t have to spend £15 a week on our addiction. I bet all the boys I went to arcades with sit and fiddle with XBoxes and Playstations now.
