In many ways the early to mid 1980s were the golden years of arcade games. There seemed to be such a great variety of machines to play on. Everywhere you went there were new additions to the ranks of the video machine. ‘Spy Hunter’, ‘Kung-Fu Master’, ‘Bubble Bobble’ and ‘Pac Land’. Programmers had learnt all the basics and now they were starting to push the boundaries…

These were imaginative times for video games and there were some very strange things on offer. You could jump on a BMX to deliver the news on ‘Paperboy’, become a ball on ‘Marble Madness’ or earn yourself an ASBO by being a yob on ‘720 Degrees’.

Game manufacturers even began to mess around with totally different ideas. They combined video gaming and motion pictures with ‘Firefox’ along with animation and gameplay with ‘Dragon’s Lair’. ‘Mortal Kombat’ employed digitised fighters whilst masochists designed a game to make people get painful blisters called, ‘Track and Field’.

There was an awful lot of experimentation going on in the world of video games and kids like me were the willing guinea pigs! Multiplayer games reached a whole new plateau with the introduction of co-operative gameplay. ‘Gauntlet’ was the first time that people had to work together if they wanted to reach the next level.

All those games from that period went a long way to shaping the ones of today. So next time you see an abandoned and half knackered ‘Mr Do!’ in the grotty corner of an arcade, give it some respect and have a go.

I have just changed some text on the email marketing page, what do you all think about it? And before you say anything Jayne, yes we all know that you could have done it better…