Retro Recall: Returning to Arcade Games

Last Updated on February 28, 2023

Quite out of nowhere, on a recent visit to the very Victorian heart of the Midlands, one of my brothers and I ended up going to a retro arcade. My first time. His too. It was also a pub, but we have been acquainted with those before. In fact, pretty much everything that you could touch at the arcade I had been acquainted with before.

That’s the point though, isn’t it?

Allow me to do my best and get to it; we busted our behinds to get down there and I checked to make sure that I didn’t have any knives on me. It’s not like that, but my other general employ as a gardener means that I do carry old detritus like blunt knives, sharps knives… pig iron, around in various pockets. I know that stuff goes down like an allergic reaction in cities, so we checked me out before going in. Just one; a murderous sharp little thing I keep for deadheading. Not regular heads though, so it was fine and not even worth telling my brother about.

In we went.

Insert coins

My eyes were not quite sure what to land on first. To our right was a bank of consoles running stuff like Mario Kart 64, and my eyes didn’t want to settle there. No thank you. Far ahead down the galley layout, I could see some bigger machines so we took a wander down, past the bar to our left and towards the attract sequences. Tekken 2, X-Men vs Street Fighter, Gunblade N.Y. Some quality mid-nineties fare, with classic-era stuff mixed in between. Around another corner was a four-player Outrun 2 machine.

We knew where we were going to start.

For a trip down retro road, Outrun 2 counts as a late entry, but how could we resist? Everyone loved the first game and this one felt like a real upgrade. The best arcade racer Sega would make (long) following Sega Rally and a game in a micro-climate entirely of its own. We went to the bar to buy some tokens and beer and then we settled in for a race. Handily, between each linked machine was a spot to rest your beer and hang your coat. Very civilised. Points there.

We were stamping on the pedals here with full abandon and under a time limit that we both felt had been set to liberal.

Off the bat, we both went for Ferrari Enzos and both focused on the job at hand; getting a slide going. Winning was good but sliding was paramount. My brother was on it first and then I followed, and then in an unabashed moment of pure Outrun mood, we were both sliding away together, casually wrenching the wheel around long ribbon corners designed for feel over precision. We weren’t racing each other or the game itself, we were just racing together like a pair of power-sliding peacocks. And oh my, the joy of proper arcade-made controls. The few racing rigs that I have seen at people’s homes look fragile to the touch, but we were stamping on the pedals here with full abandon and under a time limit that we both felt had been set to liberal.

It was great to play arcade games again.

Then we both started to fancy a go for the win. Inevitable, when it came down to it. The high afternoon light along the road turned to sunset and we settled in whatever position we settled and threw some more tokens in the slot to go through it all again. Superb stuff, like vitamin C for the soul. It got me in the mood for Konami’s GTI Club but with no amount of leering looks into the corners of the arcade could I see one. I could see another big name sequel though; Namco’s two-up, two (duck) down shooter, Time Crisis 2.

Guns’n’Ice

Everyone had a soft spot for Time Crisis. Pop up, pop a few rounds off, then pop down again. It had a terrific if staccato rhythm and Namco delivered an absolute pearl of a conversion to the PlayStation. I didn’t like Time Crisis 2 though, then or now. The general upscaling of it over the first should work and two players is a good move, but there was a charisma to the setting of the first game that didn’t carry over and playing it again only reminded me about that.

Not to worry, there was plenty else going on amongst the Laser Quest-inspired lighting. Dry ice would have been appropriate but had not been provided as of the day that I went. It didn’t matter to our round on Tekken 2 and I wouldn’t have wanted dry ice around the Virtua Fighter 2 machine. This was a serious moment.

‘I knew you were going to have to have a go on that,’ my brother said as I homed in on the standing cabinet and nodded with a look back at him.

‘I loved this on the Saturn’ I said. ‘Couldn’t really play it two player much though.’

‘Well no one else had a Saturn within about a fifty-mile radius.’

‘We could have.’

‘We were all playing Tekken instead. You really loved this though.’

‘Let’s see what I remembered.’

It turned out that I had remembered not a whole lot, at least with Lion Rafale, but I suspect him to be a symptom of a broad misconduct of controlling all of them after all this time.

I am only a mewling consumer looking for the next machine to go hammer time on.

It still looked great though, those smooth characters exhibiting a relatively minor chunkiness that was amazing at the time and now comes across as the signature aesthetic of the late arcade boom of the nineties. Tekken never looked this good or played as fast, a point I was keen to make and one that my brother agreed with.

‘Yeah, this is better,’ he said as I was knocked out of the ring.

‘I was always trying to tell you so.’

‘But we had Tekken’ he reminded me and shrugged. I hated Sony then but prepared for a go on Crazy Taxi to make me feel better. You can always play that game and believe that Sega must surely still be big players, and making crazy money.

Continue?

So the games themselves were great. A reminder of the power of proper game design, that immediacy need not come at the expense of depth, which modern, story-focused games could learn a lot from. I personally think that you shouldn’t be allowed to programme a single polygon until you have mastered Virtua Fighter’s Akira Yuki. It would count me out for certain, but then I am only a mewling consumer looking for the next machine to go hammer time on.

But what of the retro arcade itself? Well it was my first go, and certainly was an experience, but I do have a spider graph of ideas and thoughts on what the consumer is after, that I am quite prepared to go into next time. If you are a frequenter of retro arcades yourself, I bet you do too. We’ll hook up next time and see where we converge.