Before the aliens arrived, the arcade had rules.
One-Armed Bandits rattled and rang. Penny Falls sat there looking smug, waiting for someone to believe that one more coin would somehow release an avalanche of copper. Hook-a-Prize held teddy bears hostage behind glass with all the moral integrity of a Victorian loan shark.
Then, sometime in the late 1970s, everything changed.
The future arrived inside the Spanish City Dome.
It flashed.
It bleeped.
It demanded ten pence.
And I was completely mesmerised.
Arcade Fire, the fifth poem in Spanish City Slickers, is about that moment when a generation of children suddenly encountered machines that did something entirely new.
They did not simply take your money.
They transported you somewhere.
When the Arcade Changed
Before video games, amusement arcades were wonderfully mechanical places.
Springs.
Levers.
Lights.
Coins dropping.
Things going round.
Things going up.
Things stubbornly refusing to give you the prize you had clearly earned.
There was something satisfyingly physical about them.
Then the screens arrived.
Space Invaders descended from the stars.
Asteroids hurtled across black space.
Galaxians swooped towards you.
Pac-Man tore around a maze eating everything in sight with the determination of a man who had missed breakfast.
And then there was Defender.
Defender was not so much a game as a nervous breakdown with a joystick.
You seemed to be responsible for approximately seventeen things at once while aliens attacked from every direction and the machine cheerfully invited you to insert another ten pence when you inevitably failed.
To a child, it was magnificent.
The poem imagines the old arcade machines watching this invasion with growing alarm, their springs and levers suddenly looking rather elderly beside these glowing newcomers.
The arcade had become a battlefield.
And we were delighted.
Saving the World Before Tea
There was something extraordinary about that first generation of video games.
For ten pence, you could save the planet.
Not metaphorically.
Properly.
Aliens were coming.
Civilisation was at stake.
And apparently the only person capable of preventing total planetary destruction was a twelve-year-old from the North East who needed to be home before his tea went cold.
That seemed perfectly reasonable at the time.
The old amusements had always been about chance.
Would the penny fall?
Would the claw grab the teddy?
Would the One-Armed Bandit finally stop on the right symbols?
Video games were different.
Suddenly, there was skill.
Reaction.
Memory.
Pattern recognition.
You could get better.
And once I realised that, I was hooked.
When the Machines Climbed Inside My Head
There is a line in Arcade Fire where the poem changes direction.
Amid the pings, zaps, joysticks and flashing screens, “the machines climbed inside my head.”
That is really what the poem is about.
Not video games themselves.
Influence.
Inspiration.
The moment something you encounter as entertainment begins quietly reshaping the way you think.
Those arcade machines made me wonder how they worked.
How did the alien know where to move?
How did pressing a button make something happen on the screen?
How did a machine remember a score?
Could you make one yourself?
Those questions turned out to matter rather more than I realised.
Then the Future Followed Me Home
A year or so later, the arcade followed me home.
Not literally.
There would have been questions.
Instead, a small white computer appeared beside the television.
A Sinclair ZX80.
By modern standards, it was astonishingly primitive.
Black and white.
Almost no sound.
Tiny amounts of memory.
And, as the poem puts it, roughly as powerful as an enthusiastic potato.
But none of that mattered.
Because when that cursor blinked on the screen, it was asking a question.
What do you want me to do?
And for the first time, instead of simply playing a machine designed by somebody else, I could begin telling the machine what to do.
I taught myself to programme.
Simple things at first.
Then slightly less simple things.
The important part was not what I created.
It was the discovery that I could create at all.
The games in Spanish City had opened the door.
The ZX80 showed me how to walk through it.
Stories and Technology
Looking back, I can see two great pillars running through my life and career.
And technology.
One came from books.
The other came from machines.
Both began, in their own way, during those childhood summers around Tynemouth and Whitley Bay.
The books showed me that someone could build an entire world from words.
The computers showed me that someone could build a world from logic.
For forty years, technology became my career.
But somewhere behind every system, every project, every new piece of technology, there was still that boy standing in the Spanish City arcade, gripping a joystick and wondering how on earth somebody had managed to make those little glowing aliens move.
A Door Kicked Open into Tomorrow
That is why I called the poem Arcade Fire.
It is about disruption.
A sudden arrival.
Something new burning through something old.
The traditional arcade did not disappear overnight, of course.
The One-Armed Bandits still rattled.
The Penny Falls still mugged the optimistic.
But something fundamental had changed.
The future had kicked the doors clean in.
There were screens now.
Buttons.
Joysticks.
Code.
Possibility.
And children like me were standing in front of those machines without realising that what looked like a game was also a glimpse of the world we were about to inherit.
The Boy Who Started Building It
The final lines of Arcade Fire are perhaps the most personal in the poem.
Somewhere between the flashing screens of Spanish City and the blinking monochrome cursor of that first home computer, something changed.
A boy stopped merely playing with the future.
And started building it.
That journey would eventually take me through a forty-year career in technology.
But it began somewhere much smaller.
Under the Dome.
Ten pence in my hand.
Aliens on the screen.
And absolutely no idea that I was looking at the rest of my life.
Stephen Watson is the co-founder of Shades4Seasons and manages the day to day operations of the store. As a professional copywriter Stephen manages the store's social media marketing and content creation. Stephen has published long-form articles and blogs extensively on LinkedIn on topics ranging from technology to self-improvement and commercial matters. He is also a published author with his collections of poetry "The Milling Street Tales" and "Spanish City Slickers". You can find out more about Shades4Seasons founders here.
