What was retro gaming like in the UK in the 80s and 90s?

>>11813993 (OP)
>What was retro gaming like in the UK in the 80s and 90s?
Imagine playing games on a computer or a console in the 80s or 90s. That's what it was like. You can actually emulate the experience on modern computers.

speccy

>>11813993 (OP)
was alright

Didn't the UK get 8-bit emulation the moment that 16-bit computers came out? I recall hearing about Spectrum emulators on the Atari ST. That must have been a pretty big deal.

Pretty bad. You mostly played weird soviet tier games on janky home computers. If you had a console the third world power grid made it play strangely and everyone around you was some kind of drunk, bloated slug. At least you had brain dead dance music and pills to take your mind off it all.

Simple home computers like ZX Spectrums and Commodore 64s with cheap to buy (and eaay to pirate) cassette tape game carts dominated. Consoles were still around but these computers were still hotter. IIRC it took the Mega Drive and SNES to get game consoles more popular.

80s Ingerlund was grim, Dickensian even.

It was shite and still is.

Good ol' times were you pop on in to the corner shop and pick up a tape for your speccy and then copy it and trade it to one of the lads on the playground next day for one of their tapes.

>>11813993 (OP)
Early 1990s arcade culture was pretty awesome.

Night of the bot posts.

>>11814367
Gaming was centralized in arcades. Huge buildings created to hold machines. All the arcades used the Deluxe models with maximum players.

>>11814375
So much soul.

>>11814378
They don't make arcades like this anymore. What a pity.

>>11814386

>>11813993 (OP)
UKs didn't have video games, they had """interactive software"""

>>11814416
Computah gaymes.

>>11813993 (OP)
GameMasters & GameStation were fuckin kino, world has been shite since they both went bust desu

>>11814371
That's every night.

>>11813993 (OP)
This was 1992 in the UK

>>11814001
This.
>>11814110
No, not really.
>>11814367
No, it smelled real bad.
>>11814375
What? Take your meds.
>>11814386
Trocadero was always tacky

>>11815408
>Trocadero was always tacky
It was expensive but awesome.

But okay, what do you think was a better arcade?

>>11814389
I went on that ride, it was scary when you go up so high you're in amongst all the ceiling ductwork and they make you sit there for ages wondering when you're gonna suddenly fall

>>11817193
Did you go up once? Or did the ride take you up multiple times?

>>11817650
just once

I'm an American but went to Segaworld on a family vacation, it was pretty amazing that something like that was ever built in the first place. It was already kind of dying by the time I went, which would have been around 1998 I think. The drop ride was cool but short, I think there were windows up at the top that looked out? But I'm trying to remember stuff from it and no realize I went to a few places like this in the 90's and I'm getting them mixed up. Like I thought there was a ride at Segaworld where you rode on seat that rose up and dropped individually according to your playing a shooting game on screens across from you... but maybe that was at Disney Quest. Segaworld definitely had all the deluxe versions of the cabinets, and I remember attendants for the ride type games, the river rafting one and maybe Jambo Safari are ones I can remember playing with the whole setup. And everything was extremely overpriced, like, 4pounds a credit, whatever that is in real money.

>>11813993 (OP)
Unbearable

aw shit sega world at the trocadero, amazing place
i'm from brighton and got to watch all our seaside arcades either shut down or slowly shift from games to slot machines for junkies, shit was sad

>>11815978
I do think it was the best back in the day.
But still tacky.

>>11813993 (OP)
I have only read about it, but it is like another dimension/timeline where Sega was successful. Vastly different from the reality I know, defying the natural laws that govern the universe, Sega being loved was an imbalance that was only corrected with the passage of time. Peering into this alternate reality is mind-boggling, but truly fascinating.

>>11813993 (OP)
>>11814367
>>11814375
>>11814378
>>11814386
>>11814389
>>11817193
>>11818828

If I remember correctly, Sega World London was very expensive. They would charge you an ticket entrance fee just to go inside the building, and ontop of that they still charged you to use their video games. Crazy greedy. What's the point of a ticket if they still charged for games? The games were also more expensive than other arcades.

I miss the Sega brand but I do NOT miss their greed.

>>11813993 (OP)

Essentially - from what I understand from burgers who post here - we had a much bigger scene in terms of microcomputers (Atari, C64, ZX Spectrum) through the 80s particularly, with Nintendo and Sega becoming more a thing in the tail end of the 80s and into the 90s. My wife, who is a bit older than me, remembers playing Chucky Egg at her granddad's house years before her brother got a Master System II, but also the UK release date for the NES was two years after North America.

What I remember from a few years later was playing a NES in 1992 - and then at that same friends house playing TMNT on their (I think) Spectrum; this is when the SNES would have been out in the US, and then later about equal numbers of friends who had a Megadrive or a SNES, whereas it seems that Sega was more niche in the states.

Arcades also existed, but by my recollection were nowhere near as big a part of the culture as they seem to have been in the states. People have written elsewhere about the Trocadero and Sega World; notable because there weren't a lot of other places like it in London. Arcades tended to be more something you saw at the seaside, so something you would play during the school holidays - usually they were part of something else like a bowling alley or Laser Tag (Quasar for us). You'd be far more likely to play a Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter machine in a chip shop if you lived in a major city.

By the mid to late 90s, we'd caught up a lot more as to where consoles were with the states - and N64/PSX onwards were very similar stories.

>>11814153
>tape game carts

Contrary to some insane beliefs, the ZX Spectrum did not dominate, the Commodore 64 was a lot more popular because it was recognized as categorically better. The market was very 'value' focused in a way, which is why the ZX actually had some foothold, but the Commodore 64 was so much better that the higher cost was still worth it, you could still get cheap games and pirate them easily.

stop engaging with it

>>11814367
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tc7-Ot70JYM

>>11823746
Backing up/dumping computer memory to tape used to be a thing, either onto a cassette or DAT tape.

>>11827601
tapes are not cartridges

>>11813993 (OP)
retro games in the 8-s and 90s would have been like...pong. Just pong

Piles and piles of UK-yank
backgrounds with tons of objects in all the different colors they could grab which brits seemed especially fond and proud of
a hand full of good games and a lot of not so good ones

i have some german game magazines lying around from early nineties, so it is mainly amiga, atari st, c64 and some pc games.
Most of the amiga games seemd to habe been developed by uk based developers. these developers were presented like the absolute giga pros, wow, psygnosis, woah bitmap brothers. in hind sight, these companies didnt make a lot of good games, with one of the biggest hits, lemmings, had been more or less been good by coincident.
why did these companies not get some inspiration from the superior developers from japan? when i think of it, they probably thought they didnt need to because they were doing very good work, which they werent really. guess early nineties there was probably still a lot of pride for british culture, in case of game development mostly unwarranted, in my opinion.
core design was a good company though and made more than just one good game.

>>11815376
nintendo BTFO by Speccy in 1992 kek

>>11825737
can confirm. C64 won the war against the speccy. I was there, I was a speccy owner.
I stubbornly held out for a few years but then couldnt cope anymore with the C64s sound and graphics, I sold out. sorry Clive you needed a better machine

The small town near my village had an independent videogame shop which went under by 2001 at latest. I miss those.

Us bongs enjoyed games such as wibbled egg and spobbys spigs big pig adventure on the speccy we paid 50p for a game back then and it was lush. And I mean lush.

>>11828806
I talk like this and did these.

>>11814045
>>11814156
ESL

>>11814386
This does seem a bit excessive architecture just to play some vidya gaems

>>11828569
Distribution in the UK was a mess. You check wikipedia and it says we got the NES in 1987. I suppose, technically, that's true. But it really wasn't until Nintendo took the reigns back from Mattel that anyone actually got proper hands on with it. To me at the time it felt like the gameboy and NES arrived at the same time, and then the year after the japs were getting the SNES while we had to wait until the end of 1992. No wonder the stats in '92 said nintendo was way down the pecking order and companies that actually gave a shit dominated.
Nintendo learned their lesson. We weren't all dirt poor former coal miners livin' on the dole. We were a 1st world country that rediscovered capitalism and had disposable income. Unfortunately square still thought we smelled so no chrono trigger or proper final fantasy, but that's a different rant.

>>11828567
The japs invested heavily in their game companies. Those superior games you liked from there were made by small teams working for larger corporate entities. Game dev in the UK though was more often than not a programmer still wet behind the ears and some contract workers for art and music. Half the game was likely programmer art and sound effects because the contract guy was mostly doing cover art and marketing stuff. The publisher would pay bottom dollar and expect it to be out in 3 months. The better games you mentioned like lemmings were the tentative baby steps towards the UK learning how to go full development studio proper, but we weren't there yet really. Exceptions exist, but as much as the UK was home to some insanely good programmers the way the japanese really weren't, they were stuck doing shit port jobs under contract from Data East and their latest slurry of arcade licenses.

>>11828913
>This does seem a bit excessive architecture just to play some vidya gaems

Back during the peak of arcades (80s and 90s), the Japanese were much more hardcore with their arcades.

>>11830254

>>11830259

>>11830262

>>11830265

>>11830268

>>11830274

>>11830281

>>11830282

>>11830285

>>11830289

>>11830290

>>11830293

>>11830294

>>11830296

>>11830301

>>11825886
stop engaging with what

>>11821579
>Chucky Egg
based. chuckie egg was one of my favourite games on amstrad.

1992 was just a magical year to have lived through, i first played sonic 1 on the master system at my cousins, they also had a c64 and a nes, i got my megadrive 1 not long after this and an amstrad 6128, the amstrad being 8yrs old was still enjoyed as we were still in the 8bit-16bit transition here in the uk,
the snes hadnt yet released in early 92, mario bros 3 was the newest entry, i remember watching a rolling demo in dixons as a 6yo and being amazed by the colours. when the snes released not long after the only 2 games i remember was mario paint that i played on a kiosk and later mario allstars, it seems the snes didnt really take off until DKC and starwing, even then the megadrive and master system were still more popular here in the UK.

as for arcades we has sega park at the local shopping centre/mall, apparently it opened in 96 but im sure i remember it being there a couple of years before, i once saw an R360 there that was roped off, i got my mum to ask a staff member if i could have a go, they said it only ran certain times as it needed an attendant, now more than 30 years on i will probably never encounter another. :( last time i went to sega park was around the time it closed in 2013, it was usually pretty dead inside, id usually play racers with my frens or air hockey, wasnt into arcade games like i am now so kind of regret missing out.

also for anyone who remembers the 90's and the evolution of games/consoles/tech, check out the anime high score girl, even though its set in japan its relate-able even for me being in the UK as well as being fucking nostalgic.

>>11814129
Americans calling people from better countries third-worlders will never not be funny. Keep it up. Let's see what he says next!

>>11821579
>Quasar
Holy f that brings back memories. Yeah, I remember most arcades were in places like that to distract kids while they waited for their turn in the arena. They usually had good games, sometimes more engaging than the laser tag was.
>By the mid to late 90s, we'd caught up a lot more as to where consoles were with the states - and N64/PSX onwards were very similar stories.
Yes, early 90s in the UK felt like the 80s, and almost nobody I knew had a console; tech proliferated down to us regular people slowly. But by 1995, it seemed like everyone had a pc or at least one console and was on par with whatever was coming out of the US, especially if you were a pc gamer (Macs excluded, of course). I always thought the UK gaming mags were better than their US counterparts—certainly, the print designs looked much more exciting on shelves at the newsagent, and the writing was better.

>>11832298
>UK
>better countries
lol come on bud

>>11833991
i didnt know anyone with a pc until my grandparents got one in 1995 with the release of windows 95, the majority of people here in the uk didnt have a need for a pc unless they used it for work, those that did have a computer would have maybe had an 8bit or an amiga, my grandparents were still using an amstrad pcw with greenscreen from 1985 for word processing up until they got win95.

but yeah i agree uk mags were more appealing, especially the ones that were more aimed at adults with games that are not so child friendly.
the only ones i remember by name were sega mean machines and gamesmaster with patrick fucking moore! legend.

also uk sonic the comic used to show a lot of new games, cheat sections, and comic strips based on different games,absolute kino artists, definitely better than the us sonic archie comics

>>11831972
IT

>>11834197
the bottom line for me is gaming in the UK was mostly on par with other western countries, especially for pc gaming; consoles were always somewhat behind America until the mid-90s. N64 was the earliest one I remember where the release dates were much closer than previously, but I could be wrong. I think pc gaming was niche for a time because up until ‘96-97, you had to at least be able to follow dos directions to boot many games. That was intimidating for a lot of people. Internet definitely sold a lot of PCs; we got our first pc in 1995 and had compuserve internet service. It took off quickly from there.

UK gaming mags were also willing to cover consoles and games the Americans just ignored in favor of Nintendo/Sega.

>>11830254
>>11830259
this is SOUL.

coolest arcade i ever been to in SEA monkery world, was 1 where the owner decided to turn the whole place into a setpiece from Aliens. all dark and gloomy with a few Alien heads sticking out. sadly that died out fast when LAN shops and online gaming became a thing.

>>11836041
>aliens arcade
Awesome concept

>>11830254
>>11830259
>>11830268
>>11830290

>’Ello old chap
>Wot we goin’ to load in e’ ol’ Speccy t’day?
>Oi! Ow’ bout a’ won wif’ the egg?
>Jolly Good old boy!
>Cheerio! Perhaps we can suck on a fag after!

>>11830254
>>11830259
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>>11830294
It really sucks that such decorations were only built when arcades were at their peak. Nowadays, at best, we get some random soulless warehouse filled with Carnival ticket games like Dave and Busters. Zero effort in decorating or making it look cool.