Original article hand written December 1999.
This is probably one of the better smaller local arcades I can remember from back in the glory days. Sadly, even before I had a chance to sample it on a more regular basis the place was a burnt out wreck either due to natural or suspicious circumstances.
The discovery of this little gem is again thanks to an old friend, the very same that led me to Joker’s Amusements a few years earlier. We were both doing our best to avoid a sports lesson one Tuesday afternoon in 1987 and were supposed to be making our way to the sports hall on the ‘other side of town’ during the lunch hour. This meant a pretty long walk through the town centre and heading east to a place called Frenford sports centre. It must have been one spring or summer afternoon when my pal Adrian mentioned this ‘den of inequity’, the temptation proved too much, especially since Ade, as Adrian liked to be known, had a spare ‘fiver’.
BJ’s Arcade was located on the High Road, Ilford, just as you left the town centre heading towards Seven Kings. There were a row of shops and outlets on the left and amongst these was the arcade. Entering the location proved trouble free, despite many such places at the time have age limits so that anyone under 16 could be told to go away. I think this might have had something to do with a lack of gambling machines but years later when reminiscing about old arcades another friend, Phil, who frequented the establishment and reliably informed me that there were fruit machines on site.
Anyhow, I recall BJ’s Arcade was a small but reasonable size location split between a pool room and video games area. The pool area was to the left of the entrance and the games were directly in front. We were most definitely here for the games and the majority of the afternoon passed by with us spending the eponymous 'fiver' playing the classic Double Dragon.
Other great games included, Sega’s Super Hang On, Bubble Bobble from Taito, the legendary Asteroids courtesy of Atari and the super rare and equally enticing Tron produced by Bally Midway.
There were other games here but I simply can not recall any names but I think there were between 10 and 14 in total. As I said the location was a burnt out wreck a year or so later and I only ever visited a few times. However, some of my friends that also knew of BJ’s existence told me about some of the games they remembered playing here which included Sega’s all time classics Outrun and Afterburner, and Konami’s dynamic duo of Super Contra and Gradius, the latter also known as Nemesis.
And really that’s all I can remember. I will say this in closing however, it was great back in the day when £5 would get you a load of credits and most games cost just 20p a go. We spent the whole afternoon completing Double Dragon and still had change left to try some of the other games. Amazingly, here we are in 1999, just 12 years later and you’d be lucky to get more than 20 minutes of entertainment out of a fiver. But, that’s the price of progress, no pun intended. As the games become more sophisticated and cost more to develop it's the players who foot the bill. However, if you look around some of the costal arcades, they are a great throwback to the glory days with plenty of classic titles to be found and usually at a low price of play, just like it used to be!
