A British Classic Arcade Photo Tour

Searching the web for photos of classic arcades from back in the day, tends to bring up a plethora of American locations. Which is all well and good and pretty informative, but sets of genuine photographs taken in the 80s and 90s that documented the British arcade videogame landscape are pretty thin on the ground.

Whilst arcades were of course popular over here, especially in seaside resort locations, we tend not to find many images online. Given that most visitors to British arcades would have been on holiday, it’s not a huge stretch to imagine that cameras would have been on hand at the time. We then have to hope that people many years later, might have taken the time to upload these pictures to the web for the rest of us to enjoy and study.

Well this week on the blog, we can go down that rabbit hole, thanks to a someone I was able to reach out to who had the wherewithal to snap some great shots of several classic videogames on location in British arcades over 30 years ago. Liz K is a prolific photographer who shares her work on Flickr. One of the albums she has uploaded to the platform are some great images of classic arcades taken back in the day. Liz has been kind enough to allow me to share some of these photos here on the blog this week. I’ve added some commentary under each.

These first two were taken in Skegness. Located on the East Coast of the UK, Skegness is a family-friendly seaside resort with golden sands, traditional seaside attractions and activities:

The following were captured at various seaside resorts in North Wales, UK:

Another coastal resort on the East of England, Cleethorpes hosted many an arcade on its seafront. As you can see, some great classics were located here:

Blackpool Pleasure Beach in the North West of England is probably the best-known coastal town for arcade classics – they were everywhere here:

Morecambe Bay was North West of England, right on the Scottish border. Damned cold most of the time, so the arcades would have provided some relief from the weather!

And back over to the East Coast, Ingoldmells is just up the coast from Skegness – a popular seaside town and a favourite for family vacations here in the UK:

Looking at these pictures, what I find surprising is that they were all taken in 1992, and as you can see, these cabinets were all released in the early to mid 80s – its interesting that they all survived for as long as they did. Perhaps testament to their coastal locations, visitors to the arcades were transient, and probably didn’t see many of these titles at their local towns and cities – thus making them appealing and giving the games a longer shelf out on the arcade floors life than usual.

But more than that, they do provide solid documentation of what games we actually had over here. That Streets/Williams Roller Aces is the trump card of all of these snaps – no one I know recalled that even being a thing! What a shame it likely ended up being scrapped.

I wonder how many other pictures are lying unshared in family photo albums across the UK?

I must thanks Liz again for allowing me to share these pictures on the blog. I’ve only shared a small sample of the total, so do check out the full gallery of incredible images here. There are many other cabinets, including pinball tables, one armed bandits and other amusement machines. Please do not share the images without permission.

If you want to read about the history of arcade gaming here in the UK, I can highly recommend Alan Meade’s incredibly detailed book, Arcade Britannia, available on Amazon here.

And if you want to read about my Missile Command exploits in British arcades in the early 80s, consider checking out my own book, Missile Commander which you can order directly from my website here.

Hope you enjoyed this trip down memory lane. Thanks as always for reading this week.

Tony