JQW

Here in the UK, it seemed that the only store selling Atari's games, at least in our part of the country, were the Greens concessions situated in Debenhams department stores, at least during then early days. This meant a journey out of town, as there was no Debenhams in our town centre. Once Activision and Imagic appeared, games could be picked up elsewhere, such as branches of Boots. Even a couple of small local independent electrical stores had a try at stocking Activision titles.

Here in the UK, I recall receiving a promotional leaflet from the Atari Owner's Club a few months prior to the release of Pac-Man, with a competition to design a promotional badge for the game. If I recall correctly, the leaflet didn't feature any screenshots, but did include the painting from the final box artwork. Does anyone still have this leaflet to double check?

Riddle was a very simple game with the easiest setting, you simply just had to reach the end of the map without gathering specific objects. The harder variants included quests for certain items. On the hardest level you needed to acquire a specific to pass the final barrier, and that item was somewhat difficult to locate. I recall finding it by accident on my first run through, though, and remembered that on subsequent plays.

Indeed it was.

Here in the UK, the Atari Owners Club sent out a special promotional letter just to announce that PacMan was coming soon. The leaflet included a competition to design a PacMan badge. If I remember correctly, there were no screenshots, and no details as to when it would launch.

You could only play Backgammon properly if both switches were in the A position. When set to B, one switch let you dial-in numbers on the dice, whilst the other let you position pieces to where-ever you wanted.

Version 1.2 of the app appeared in the store last night. It adds more choice of control options, amongst other things. One issue is that you need to download more content for every purchased game - presumably the extra graphics for the control option screen. It seems that the option to download content for all games at once isn't working, so at the moment you have to do it on a game by game basis.

14. Street Racer had some 3 and 4 player variants, but with players acting as members of a team.

Primrose Valley, Near Filey, North Yorkshire - 1970-something to 1983. This was (and still is) a caravan site/holiday camp on the Yorkshite coast, situated a mile or so south of the town of Filey. Some friends of my parents had a static caravan on the site, and we would borrow it for a holiday once a year from about 1974 onwards. There was a small amusement arcade on the site. My first memories are of visiting it when quite young to play some of the penny fruit machines and other amusements, plus the odd game on some of the mechanical machines, and maybe a bit of prize bingo. Then a few years later video games started to appear. I can remember games such as Starship 1, Boot Hill and Sprint appearing there at some point, and perhaps some others. In 1979 the family acquired their own caravan on the same site, which meant our visits were more frequent. 1979 was a big year for that arcade - they acquired a whole row of electronic pinball machines, but the biggest attraction was a single Space Invaders machine. 1980 was the arcade's big year. In came many more machines, such as several Space Invaders Deluxe/Part II, Galaxians and Asteroids, as well as more pinball tables, with some of the older machines being dumped. There were more acquisitions the next year with the likes of Pacman (albeit labelled as Munchman), Gorf, Phoenix, Scramble and Defender. At the same time the arcade also expanded into an abandoned social-club based on the floor above, converting it into a pool room whilst also adding a row of somewhat older machines. There were further acquisitions in 1982, such as Moon Cresta, but 1983 only brought in one machine of note - Robotron 2082 - and the arcade was starting to show it's age as many notable games were now missing. Some of the games they had were fairly rare, such as a Nintendo's Radarscope and Zaccaria's Quasar. Others were hastily made conversions, some obviously using bootleg components. Whilst visiting the site we would also regularly visit Filey, Scarborough and Bridlington. Filey only had one arcade with a few odd games. Scarborough had a whole row of arcades on the sea front, the most notable being Gilly's and Corrigan's. One year Corrigan's converted their top floor into a free-play arcade - you would pay a modest fee to get in, but once inside all games were free. Gilly's always had a selection of the latest games. Bridlington was a really tacky town back then, and many of the arcades were poor. One arcade was notably dreadful; the machines were a mixture of the really ancient early b&w ones, and some obvious bootlegs, with some machines in a really bad state - I can recall one having the casing partially open with the internal wiring exposed. The same arcade would also play taped recordings of Radio 1's Top 30 countdown show over the PA. The family sold the caravan sometime in mid 1983, and I've not been back to the area since. I did look at the site recently on Google Earth and noticed that the arcade has been demolished, but there seems to be another one situated not too far away.

I can remember playing on one of those around 1978/79. The machine was based in the amusement arcade of a caravan site near Filey, Yorkshire, England.

I do know that Paul McCartney was an early owner of a NES, as he brought it up in a BBC Radio interview.