Hi, I’m Carl and thanks for visiting Arcade Report. I started playing video games in 1978 from memory, around the time I was 8 years old. I started off by playing small handheld games like Merlin and Simon and then moved to handheld sports games from Mattel and Coleco. I specifically loved their hockey, football and baseball games.
I can’t even estimate how much time I spent in video game arcades over the years. But given that arcades have gone the way of the dodo bird and no longer exist, how’s a person supposed to get their fill of retro games and nostalgia? Especially in these COVID times when we’re safer being at home than out among other people, right?
So on this website, I’ll discuss many ideas for a home arcade or game room. It doesn’t matter how much space you have or your budget because there are plenty of options to consider. Classic and new video game consoles, full-sized arcade games, pool & billiards tables and jukeboxes, stuff for your bar, handheld video games and other unique items.
We’ll even go around the world and discuss things you might not have even considered that none of your friends have like an authentic German cuckoo clock (why not???!!!) or a shuffleboard table. We’ll also discuss outdoor items for around the house since we can’t spend all of our time in the basement when the weather is nice.
In that regard, your home arcade might extend outdoors and we’ll discuss options for that, too.
Early Memories
My earliest memory of playing arcade video games was the Space Invaders machine near the checkout of our local K-Mart store. So while my mum was shopping or getting ready to pay, I’d hit the Space Invaders machine and play for as long as I could or until I ran out of quarters.
I then started visiting the local arcade called Fun and Games in the same mall near the grocery store we shopped at, only after convincing my mum I could be trusted to not leave the arcade until she finished shopping and would come to pick me up. The games were horrible and outdated but I didn’t care. I played them anyways until I ran out of money or until my mum came to pick me up. It was the early onset of arcades and this was what was available to me at the time.
Arcade Fun
Then one day at school in grade 7 in 1983, a friend of mine asked me if I’d visited the new arcade at the mall. I assumed he meant Fun and Games but it turned out it was another arcade, a brand new one that had opened on the other side of the mall. He’d visited the day before and said it was full of brand new video games and pinball machines he’d never seen before. We agreed to visit together that Saturday.
I can still remember entering the side part of the mall closest to the new arcade. We opened the doors to the mall and walked in past the restaurant on the right hand side and as we passed the entrance to the bar, I heard the sound of video games for the first time. It got louder as we approached the entrance and as we turned the rounded corner of the mall leading into the main part of the mall, I saw the new arcade on the right hand side.
FUTUREWORLD
It was called FUTUREWORLD and was written in large gray, futuristic (for 1983) capital letters. It was packed. There must have been several hundred kids in there, no exaggeration. The video games were end to end around the perimeter of the arcade touching each other. Then there were 2 rows of machines down the center of the arcade back to back, tightly pushed together. You couldn’t walk between the machines as they were all touching, clearly to maximize the number of machines they could fit in there.
I thought I was in heaven. I think it was the greatest moment of my life at that moment in time. This was what an arcade was supposed to look like and I couldn’t wait to check it out. But before we could go inside, I had to take care of business. FUTUREWORLD required you to buy a $5 membership card which enabled you to get through the gate at the front of the arcade. In exchange for your $5 you got a credit card that unlocked the gate in and out of the arcade. It also got you $5 in tokens so you were even in that regard as each machine took 1 token and each token cost 25 cents.
I paid my $5, got my tokens and card, and used it for the first time to get inside the arcade. It was like a packed nightclub, boys and girls our age all playing or waiting to play all the latest games of that time.
More Memories
I can still remember much of the layout of the arcade. Every machine was brand new. Down the middle of the arcade on one side was a group of Donkey Kong machines. On the other side pushed up against them back to back was Ms Pac Man. Galaga and Galaxian machines were back to back in the other row of machines running down the middle of the arcade. Along the wall was Dig Dug, Centipede, Robotron and then several pinball machines. On the other side of the pinball machines was Q*Bert, Joust, Zaxxon, Time Pilot, Pole Position and Defender. There was even a single Asteroids game which at the time was pretty much a classic since it came out in 1979. There were other games that I can’t remember and didn’t end up ever playing but it was such an awesome place I couldn’t believe the choices.
Many of the machines had bar stools to sit on but most people were standing waiting to play a machine. They were basically lined up behind the person playing the game, waiting for their turn. At the front of the arcade were about 10 cocktail style games like Frogger and Ms Pac-Man where you sat in a chair and played the game by looking down at the screen rather than standing in front of it like the more popular upright video games.
And it was so loud. All you could hear were the machines making their sounds as people played and all the kids in the arcade talking over top of it all. There wasn’t a single person in the arcade over the age of 20 I don’t think including the staff at the front of the arcade selling the tokens and most of us there were younger than that.
Over time, I visited FUTUREWORLD pretty much on a weekly basis certainly in Saturdays and Sundays. At the time we didn’t even have Sunday shopping and the entire mall was closed except for the 2 arcades and the restaurant. #Priorities.
Video Game Growth
Video games were so hot that Fun and Games moved to the other side of the mall into a brand new store with entirely new games. Unlike FUTUREWORLD which had anywhere from 1-5 machines for the same game, Fun and Games was smaller and only had 1 of each game maximum. But they had some video games that FUTUREWORLD didn’t have like the new Popeye game which I quickly loved to play. So my friends and I would go to the mall and start at FUTUREWORLD and end up at Fun and Games to finish spending our quarters.
When I look back, I’d have to say that my favorite arcade video games of all time in no particular order are:
- Robotron 2084
- Smash TV
- Donkey Kong
- Donkey Kong Jr
- Ms Pac-Man
- Elevator Action
- Popeye
- Double Dragon
- Arkanoid
- Galaga
- Galaxian
Home Video Game Systems
And what about home video games? I was into those too, even before going to the arcade actually. I remember my first home video game was a Space Invaders rip off that I had to plug into the wall with an AC adapter to play. And as mentioned I also had Merlin and Simon, too if you remember those. Merlin was a red game that resembled large old style phone that had number of word and number games on it. Simon was a memory game involving different color patterns and was super popular back in the game. Then I started collecting the small Mattel and Coleco sports games like I mentioned above and I still own all of them to this day.
Atari 2600
Suddenly, Atari was the name everyone was talking about and we were onto the advent of video game systems that could play multiple games with cartridges. The Atari 2600 as it later became known as was the home video game system that took the world by storm. Even though it wasn’t the first home system, it’s the one everyone remembers.
You could now play video games from home using cartridges that you purchased for about $20 each that you inserted into the system. Even as a kid I knew the Atari graphics were horrible and didn’t have a huge interest in it even though I was obsessed with video games. The idea of getting a home system that I could play anytime was exciting though.
Intellivision
So it was around 1979 that two of my friends from school got a new home video game system that really caught by eye that I couldn’t get enough of. Intellivision by Mattel. To me it was like the Rolls Royce of home video games. The hand controllers were so much more sophisticated than Atari. The game play and graphics were so much better than Atari’s, for the time period anyways. It was the best thing I’d ever seen. And retailing for $299 US or $399 CDN (I’m Canadian) it wasn’t cheap. And new cartridges cost about $30 US or $40 CDN too.
To put this in perspective, in current terms you’d be paying about $1,000 for the game console and $100 for each cartridge. Not cheap especially for a 9 year old kid. But I could dream, right?
So every weekend, my friends and I would get together on Saturday and Sunday morning and play road hockey for a few hours out on the street. Then when we were done, we’d go inside the house and play Intellivision for a few hours on the only tv they had in the house. This was 1979-80. One tv per household was normal back then.
Poker and Blackjack. NHL Hockey. Baseball. NFL Football. Space Battle. Sea Battle. Auto Racing. We played every game that my friend had. He was spoiled so he was always getting new cartridges. It was awesome.
Later on as they added new games, we’d play Astrosmash, Night Stalker and Utopia among others.
Cable TV For Video Games
Then he got the PlayCable which for the time was an unbelievable invention: It was basically cable for video games. Rather than buying cartridges, you rented a box from your cable company that matched the brown Intellivision console and plugged it into the cartridge slot. It gave you access to 20 games each month that rotated every 30 days. So you’d turn the Intellivision system on and it would hum away for a few seconds while it loaded and then one of three theme songs would play as it loaded the available games. You scrolled up or down to pick your game, selected it and waited a few seconds for it to load and then you played it.
On the first of each month, a few games would be taken out and a few new ones would be added in to replace them. And my friend would typically call in sick that day at school so he could play the new games at home.
As time went on, I continued buying cheaper Mattel and Coleco handheld home games and got my fill from arcade games rather than buying Atari or Intellivision. I was kind of torn as I loved the superior graphics of the arcade games but would have loved to play the same games at home.
ColecoVision
Then in 1982, Coleco entered the home video game console market with their product ColecoVision. The interesting thing was ColecoVision did something that Intellivision and Atari didn’t: They focused at least initially on producing mostly arcade games ports for their machine. So you could buy games for ColecoVision that you also played in the arcade. When you bought ColecoVision, it came bundled with Donkey Kong. You could also buy Donkey Kong Jr, Time Pilot, Zaxxon, Q*bert, Burger Time. Many of the games you’d pay 25 cents for in the arcade you could get for ColecoVision.
And the graphics were really good. Better than Intellivision in fact. They weren’t 100% the arcade game, but for 1982 it was pretty close for my 12 year old eyes. Donkey Kong was pretty close to the arcade version certainly for that time period. Q*bert was also good and I quite liked Zaxxon since I typically played all of these in the arcade anyways at 25 cents a pop.
The funny thing about some games was noticing little quirks or glitches in the system. There’s one part in Colecovisions’s Donkey Kong where every time Mario walks to a specific part of the board, he slows down running for about one second, before picking up speed again. Happens every time. And on the first level if he walks off part of the girder and falls to the platform below, he won’t die even though it kills him in the arcade version.
Anyways, I bought ColecoVision and I was happy to get it. And at $199 USD (about $299 CDN for me from memory) it was much cheaper than Intellivision. I also purchased the Smurf game called Rescue From Gargamel’s Castle (I have no idea either but it was a pretty good game actually) when I bought ColecoVision, for an additional $40. That was the money I had available to me at the time. Just enough for the console and one game.
The controllers were even a bit better than Intellivision as they had a joystick at the top which made for easy use. They also had some add ons that I eventually bought like large handgrip controllers to play their baseball game and a steering wheel for auto racing.
I had convinced my parents and myself that if I bought ColecoVision with its arcade-style games, I would no longer go to the arcade and would only play games at home. That never happened of course but that was my plan. I think this lasted for a week or three and then I was playing ColecoVision at home and going back to FUTUREWORLD and Fun and Games on Saturdays and Sundays with whatever quarters I had lying around.
Even More Great Memories
When I look back, the time I spent in the arcades and playing Intellivision, Atari, ColecoVision and other games at home were ones I remember both vividly and with fondness. So much so, that years later as an adult, I suddenly decided to go on eBay and buy Intellivision, Intellivision II, Atari 2600 and have those in my possession. I still have my original ColecoVision and also got the Nintendo NES, PlayStation and Nintendo Wii along the way too. I’ll be talking about all of them on this site, too.
And at other times, I’ve also played foosball, air hockey, bubble hockey, billiards and other games, too. There are so many such games to play in the comfort of your own home – especially in this COVID-centric environment – and we’ll look at each of them on here at Arcade Report.
Home Arcades
Speaking of COVID, for the foreseeable future, many people will probably feel more comfortable spending time at home away from crowds. Some of us prefer that anyways even without the threat of a pandemic or lockdowns.
Having your own home arcade is a great way to spend time with your immediate family, with a small group of friends and even alone with whatever game(s) you like. Modern video games, classic video games, foosball, bubble hockey, air hockey, billiards. There are so many choices and that’s just a start. Depending on your budget and the space you have the sky is the limit. I prefer to focus on the old school stuff but we’ll talk on this website about everything I can find to let you know what’s out there.
I’ll also make you aware of some fun, interesting and unique choices that are outside the “normal” arcade or game room type options. In the current world we live in with COVID, it’s nice to get outside when we can so I’ll include outdoor activities like bocce, petanque, powerbocking and more. Sure, they’re not arcade-related but they are fun activities that can be done around the house or in your neighborhood anyways.
Thanks for visiting, thanks for reading and do check in often as the site is updated regularly!
Carl
P.S. Have you ever wondered why arcades no longer exist? Check out my article called Why Did Arcades Die? to learn more.