A trip to the seaside isn’t complete without a jangling cup of 2p coins or an overconfident uncle nursing a sore hand. Here’s a rundown of the top nostalgia-inducing games
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he seaside day trip remains an almost essential component of the school summer holidays, and although the big beachfront arcades have changed a lot over the last decade, they are still a magnet for small kids with handfuls of change, as well as adults hoping to spy an old Space Invaders cabinet in the back. As a child of the 1980s, coin-op video games were an obsession, but what really fascinated me were the older machines, the electro-mechanical oddities that hung on into the digital age. Here are 10 of the best – please add your own in the comments.
Long before the arrival of computer chips and CRT monitors, arcade driving games featured projected images of landscapes or even scrolling paintings to give the impression of hurtling along a road. The first examples arrived in the 1930s and a few later models, such as Chicago Coin’s Speedway and Sega’s Grand Prix stuck around in seaside arcades well into the 1980s. I remember playing a later example, Kasco’s astonishing 1979 arcade game The Driver, on the pier at Blackpool. It used 16mm footage of a real race to put you right in the action.
