It’s amazing to think, as I sit here surrounded by shelves full of games for decades worth of systems, all still vying for attention under every TV in the house, that there was a time they all used to fit in a tiny little plastic basket my Mum didn’t have any use for anymore! A photo from the time, which I guess was probably taken in my bedroom in early 1985, shows that little plastic basket, nestled on my home-made desk between the black and white portable TV I’d inherited and the enormous “An Introduction to BASIC: Part 1” book that came with the VIC-20, itself in its box under a pile of magazines, mail order catalogues and what I’m pretty sure is a big paper bag full of Lemonade Crystals, which would be sugary evidence of a recent trip to the exotic delights of Central Milton Keynes Shopping Centre… It even had a McDonalds!

I’m not as sure about everything that’s in the basket though! What’s very clear is Crazy Kong’s oversized plastic cassette case at the front, a decent (relatively speaking) clone by Interceptor Software. It’s kind of a mix of all the screens on the arcade game in one, with a brutal lift section you need to navigate to even get started, then some cakes on a conveyer belt to leap over before you get to the ladders and ramps, avoiding the barrels rolling down their flat surfaces! Behind that there’s a copy of Pinball Wizard, the very first game I ever covered at Retro Arcadia back in 2017, when I had an idea for what’s here now but it was still really to form. Which is probably still the case! At that back there’s a C15 cassette tape, like the one on the desk running the game on the TV I’ll come back to in a sec, but there are two other cassettes in there are were a total mystery. If only I hadn’t had to sell the lot a couple of years later to go towards a ZX Spectrum I could just compare the spines for something similar, but without dragging up my biggest gaming regret again (albeit for the greater good), in the ongoing absence of most of those games, and by process of elimination followed by some internet confirmation, one of them is definitely Tornado, which I have no recollection of even playing, let alone owning, so it’s possible it was a library hire or a borrow from a friend. Either way, it’s a simplified take on Scramble from 1982 by Quicksilva that doesn’t have a lot going for it but it plays fast and smooth all the same.

There’s also a white case visible that I’ve no clue about but – as I can’t see them anywhere else in the photo – it’s possible it’s one of the pack-in cassettes that came with the system. In which case, by further process of elimination, it can’t be the tapes that came with that Intro to BASIC book from earlier because they were unboxed and secured in special moulds in the same box, meaning it could be the single cassette containing the legendary Blitz, top-down racer, er, Race, the musical Type-a-Tune and a fantastic take on Frogger called Hoppit. I’m really clutching at straws there, although at the very least I think that did have a box! What is certain, however, is that if we’re not counting handhelds like Demon Driver, Grandstand’s Invader From Space or the Snoopy Tennis Game & Watch, then the contents of this plastic basket were the very first video games I ever owned! Which leads us nicely to the very first video game I ever bought, and the final cassette we can see in there… Well, at least I’m now pretty sure that Arcadia was the first game I ever bought! I’ve often pondered whether it actually was that or Crazy Kong instead, but by yet another process of elimination, the friend who may or may not have loaned me Tornado definitely got a copy of Arcadia right after he got his VIC-20, the same Christmas as me, and I definitely loved it when I played it at his house right after that, so it makes sense I’d buy that for myself when the opportunity arose rather than gamble my sole game purchase on something I’d never played, even if it did have cool box art, so I’m taking that as confirmation! I also have a very distinct memory of buying it, from a local electrical goods shop in Bedford called Carlows that had a selection of games behind the cash desk, which always made browsing a but uncomfortable on return visits because there was always someone in the way!

Before we get any further into Arcadia though, it would be remiss of me to not tell you about the game you can see me playing with my eyes half shut on the old TV screen in the photo above! It’s called Grand Prix, and it’s a race around five laps of the single-screen circuit in the fastest time possible, watching out for oil spills and wet patches as you go. It was a type-in from Clifford Ramshaw’s VIC Innovative Computing, published by Melbourne House in 1982, which was probably also the first of many BASIC games listings books I’d get, but one I don’t think was ever surpassed for the variety and sheer quality of games inside! There were some surprisingly decent and takes on familiar arcade games like Frogger, sports games like Squash and Golf (which might get its own deep-dive here soon), and some really ambitious stuff like the dungeon-crawler Adventure and space strategy game Ganymede (which already got its own deep-dive here, where you’ll also find a load of pics and more from the book). I also have to mention that by total coincidence, the author came across my piece on Ganymede just a couple of days ago as I write and got in touch, which was such an honour after I’ve got so much enjoyment and knowledge from his book for so long! Right, I’ll quickly close on that picture with the brand new notice board you can see on the wall, with just a couple of Adam Ant and Roland Rat comic strips pinned to it, most likely cut out of Look-In or TV Tops magazine. Like the Innovative Computing book, which still lives on a shelf next to my desk as I write, that notice board is still in use just above it, and although those cut-outs are now buried under forty years of other cut-outs, photos, badges, key-rings and all sorts of other junk, they’re still under there somewhere!

If I remember I’ll take a photo of it now and stick it at the end here but in the meantime, it’s probably time we talked Arcadia, “…the name of the game especially created to be the fastest, meanest, most addictive shoot ’em up game you’ve ever desired. Wave after wave of the most loathsome and deadly aliens billow hypnotically towards your space fighter with deadly intent. But then you have dual Plasma Disruptors and a lon Thrust Drive haven’t you?” Familiar words to any readers of Computer & Video Games magazine in the early eighties, as they were written on one of the few full-colour, double-page adverts in there at the time, and it seemed to around for quite a long time too! That iconic space ship firing into the logo from the box art by Steve Blower didn’t hurt either. It had been around for a couple of years by the time I got to it though, having been first published on the VIC-20 and ZX Spectrum by Imagine Software in 1982, and later on the Dragon 32 and Commodore 64, which was a decidedly average version! No idea about the Dragon 32 version, but according to the original adverts for the other two, both were “100% machine code,” with the Spectrum offering twelve different enemy types, “incredible animation and explosive effects, sound and the fastest, smoothest hi-res graphics ever,” while the VIC had eight enemy aliens, “smooth, hi-res multicolour graphics and animation, narrow playfield and sensational sound effects!” I love that the Spectrum version has “sound” – all games on there should have used that as a feature! Us VIC owners couldn’t really gloat though – the sound might have been “sensational” but I’m not sure “narrow playfield” was such a great selling point!

The advert pictured previously (from the May 1983 issue of C&VG, where it was part of a triple, double-page set of ads from Imagine, on top of another on the back cover!) also tells us the game was designed and programmed by D.H. Lawson, but what it doesn’t say is that it cost £5.50, and I think I’m right in saying it was also Imagine’s very first game. Before we jump into the box to find out a bit more though, I said earlier I’d got rid of pretty much all my VIC-20 games for the greater good in the mid-eighties, so I should explain how I’ve got the box for this one! Well, while clicking “Seller’s Other Items” on eBay isn’t always the smartest move, in this case it wasn’t too financially damaging! I was buying a couple of Atari ST games when I spotted Arcadia, bundled together with Mastertronic’s Frogger-meets-Pac-Man budget classic Psycho Shopper, for less than the £1.99 the latter originally cost me, so knowing I was going to be writing what you’re reading not long after, I took a punt. And now I just need a new machine to play them on… A bog standard 3.5K RAM one will do fine though because this runs on the unexpanded VIC-20, hence the smaller number of aliens to shoot, I guess, compared to the 16K or 48K Spectrum version. Regardless, we’ve got one hell of a game to get through before we worry about how quickly it’s looping back to the first wave though. And yes, literally hell!

The game involves you taking on the role of the pilot of the good ship Arcadia, equipped with dual Plasma Disruptor drives, meaning you can shoot off two bullets at once, and an ion thrust drive, meaning you can go up and down the screen as well as the traditional left and right, although gravity will also bring you down when its not in use. It works fine! You’re up against the subtly-named Atarian Empire, who are going to attack you in waves made up of different alien races, none of which are averse to a bit of suicide! To move on to the next race, you’ll either need to clear the screen of the whole wave or survive their attack for a certain time, although honestly until I just re-read the instructions for the purpose of writing this paragraph, in all my time playing this I don’t think I ever noticed that coming into play! It all begins frantic but ultimately manageable as masses of multicoloured arrow-like aliens fly from level to right, gradually dropping further and further down the screen, and all the while dropping bullets down on you, so one way or another they’ve got their bases covered as far as taking you out is concerned! The second level redefines “frantic” though, as a swarm of alien butterflies dart left and right but take a more direct approach downwards towards you, so after not having to worry about thrusting to optimise your vertical position too much last time, on this level you’ll be alternating between retreat to the bottom of the screen then moving back upwards as they move back up. By the way, worth pointing out that your fire has a limited rate, so no choice but to go aggressive in this way or you’ll just get inundated very quickly!

Level three takes a similar but more direct approach downwards with some little robot things grouped in a tighter formation that will also go off one side of the screen and reappear on the other, as if it wasn’t chaotic enough already! Nasty little buggers these, with a lot of bullets coming out of the pack making it very difficult to line yourself up and get many shots away at once. And then the birds in level four come along and attack from the bottom of the screen as well as the top… Unbelievable! Level five pits a bunch of multicoloured shapes up against you, lined up in four lots of two columns of four, and this is where having to restart the level again every time you die becomes particularly heartbreaking because if you somehow survived to this point, these things are simply going to batter you over and over! If you should somehow be able to take out one column then go up the gap they leave before the rest starts coming from the top of the screen again then you might just see the relative reprieve that is level six! This one involves a snake-like row of slightly off-square aliens travelling from left to right then right to left down the screen in a more traditional Space Invaders style, and while they are also spewing out bullets, you shouldn’t have too many problems taking them all out before they get too close – at least until the last few, which are going to make a bee-line for you Galaxian-style, which is the case on every level but seems more apparent here after that relative lull! Business as usual on level seven, as a load of pulsing circles dance chaotically all over the screen, coming at you fast from the top and the bottom, so it’s a case of mashing fire while focussing on maintaining your position with thrust, then fall into the occasional gap in the middle of the screen.

Thank goodness there’s only eight different aliens on the VIC-20 version because the advert wasn’t wrong when it said this game was mean! That said, I think meanest of all is when the remaining aliens on any level go into a kind of smug, upwards victory formation as the condensed but colourful little explosion animation is happening to mark your latest death! Anyway, mean it certainly is throughout, although while the final set of barely moving, heavy-set, bird-like aliens in level eight might look the most sinister, they’re not quite as mean if you can get a few shots away while they’re all still above you, rather than when they’re either side if you let them move down the screen. Not that I’ve legitimately ever seen them! I got as far as level seven this time around, which is as far as I’ve ever got. Should you beat them though, it’s on to level nine and onward, looping from the start again. Mean it might be, but it was also way ahead of its time, and unsurpassed in its unique gameplay style for many years that followed! Okay, there’s no doubt it’s borrowing from the likes of Gorf (or Phoenix) and Galaxian, but playing now there were times I got a much later bullet-hell vibe, albeit more from the chaos of the number of enemy sprites on all sides all over the screen than from their bullets themselves. And at the time it was just utter madness, taking what was already a familiar but crazy-high difficulty bar to a whole new level, and sometimes an unfair one too, but still just about giving you a chance. If you were lucky! And for us mere mortals, the thrill of seeing how far you could get into those first few levels was more than addictive enough to not worry about what you were missing out on beyond.

I’ve not really gone into the presentation too much so far because for all the reasons I’ve just described, it was more than that, as was also often the case back in the very early eighties wherever you were playing. However, it was no slouch there either! The eight alien types might just be a bunch of simple shapes but it was trying something different with them, and their unique movements, combined with more colours than you’d normally get in an arcade shooter of this vintage on the VIC-20, gave them their own personality. There’s always loads of them at once too! Likewise, the simple thruster animation on your ship gave that just enough life, although it was of a decent size and there were also several colours in its very distinctive design. It sounds simple but things like dual-shooting bullets and death animations, rather than just disappearing enemies, also added more than the sum of their parts to the whole, and speaking of sound, that’s equally chaotic, with non-stop beeps and blips and explosive white noises!

I’m not sure I’d have lent the name of the first game I ever bought to my retro-gaming website four decades later had it been anything else, but that also goes for had it been anything less either. Like many of its classic arcade inspirations, and brethren from this pioneering era, its gameplay has a timeless quality that goes way beyond the presentation I just described… Even if it does pull a few less punches than some of those do! But it had to do that to distinguish itself from what was already a mass of clones on the shelves of obscure local electrical retailers and everyone else trying to get in on this new act, not to mention justifying its own price tag. And I think it did that very successfully too, given it was still riding high at number two in the VIC-20 charts two years after its release. Behind Crazy Kong no less (incorrectly but understandably, given the clone situation I just mentioned, listed as Krazy Kong in the picture above), so I guess there was some method to my early game selection madness at the time as well!

Almost forgot, here’s that notice board from the photo at the start, as it is now! As always, I’ll never expect anything for what I do here but if you’d like to buy me a Ko-fi and help towards increasingly expensive hosting and storage costs then it will always be really appreciated! And be sure to follow me on Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) or Threads for my latest retro-gaming nonsense!