Original article hand written on 26th January 2000.
For me, Casino is one of the truly great London arcades. It’s small stature belies the importance of this location in the old arcade landscape in central London. It hosted many gaming firsts whether in large deluxe cabinets or on printed circuit boards, Casino was the place to be, particularity in the 1980s and 1990s. It was there with its classic arcade vibe and feel when crazes such Street Fighter 2 and the onset of 3D entertainment were in full swing and it was there as consoles and home computers became all powerful, finally bowing out in 2014 sometime around Easter of that year.
I first ventured through its doors in the mid-1980s and am not quite sure how exactly I found out about the arcade. It could have been because of the allure of the immediate surroundings, the shops in Tottenham Court Road specialised in consumer electronics of all kinds ranging from cameras and mobile phones to laptops and large screen televisions. It’s more likely though that the discovery was through a gaming minded friend when one Saturday afternoon in 1986 or 1987 we entered this gaming zone where he was supposed to meet someone. That person happened to be an oriental asian guy who owned the new NEC PC Engine console, something of a luxury in the exciting world of import video gaming back then.
Now, what I do clearly remember is the location of Casino Leisure in the 1980s was different from that of the 1990s. There is an excellent article and arcade map here, originally published inside Computer and Video Games magazine in December 1988. Amongst other arcades locations the map shows where Casino used to be back then with a mention of the games available near the beginning of the article. It was a short walk from Goodge Street tube station in the direction of the Euston Road and Warren Street tube station. The floor space was ‘L’ shaped and it occupied just one modest sized floor but this did not stop it from housing some of the best and most memorable games of the time both in standard upright cabinet form and as dedicated arcade machines. These included titles such as Operation Wolf, Chase HQ and the highly innovative and technologically accomplished Hard Drivin (sic). In the upright cabinets you could find Gradius, R-Type, Bubble Bobble, Shinobi and Golden Axe. Best of all, games were just 20p to 30p a go.
In the 1990s, Casino Leisure moved to a spot almost next to Goodge Street tube station and was there until it finally closed in 2014, only for a new owner to take over and rebrand the centre as ‘Cashino’ and change it into a gambling and fruit machine parlour. Anyhow, Casino now occupied three reasonable sized floors. As was the case in previous years, it was a testing site for Electrocoin, one of the largest suppliers of arcade equipment in Europe, find out more here.
Hence, if you wanted to find some the latest arcade games in London, some still in an early stage of development, then there was no better place to sample them than at Casino. For example, Capcom’s very new Strider 2 appeared here in 1999 on test before a final release a short time later.
When you initially go through the entrance you’re greeted by the ground floor which is divided by the video games section, found at the front half of the floor, and the fruit machines in the back half. Here you will find mostly larger deluxe video gaming machines and the list has ranged from the likes of Sega’s all time great Daytona USA to its sequel in ‘Power Edition’ form, Crazy Taxi, Emergency Ambulance, House of the Dead and Le Mans 24 to Konami’s crazy Thrill Drive, excellent Silent Scope and Namco’s popular Time Crisis 2. Capcom games feature heavily with Street Fighter 2 and its many sequels ready to play, together with Dark Stalkers series and the multitude of ‘versus’ titles. In fact, Street Fighter 2 is one of the most memorable games that I found and played here when the craze was sweeping the arcade world in the early 1990s. Although most of the fighting games are in the basement, I do remember the appearance of Super Street Fighter 2 in late 1993 on four shiny new Capcom branded upright cabinets linked up for players to take each other, prominently placed near the ground floor main entrance to the right, parallel with the staircase. Check out this great little clip from the 1990s ‘Games World’ tv show where the presenter, one ‘Big Boy Barry’, goes into Casino arcade to show off Super Street Fighter 2 and talks about the four new characters. Additionally, this clip is on a YouTube channel belonging to someone going by the title ‘ted909’ and features an archive of vintage footage from various gaming locations and video games during the golden era of the 1990s.
To the basement then and reaching it is pretty easy thanks to a metal staircase to the right of the entrance. As you descend into this gaming nirvana it’s with a sense of anticipation and excitement. On a recent visit in January 2000 the gaming inventory consisted of King of Fighter 98 and 99, Street Fighter Alpha 3, Street Fighter 3 Third Strike, Virtua Striker 2 including version 2000, Street Fighter EX2 Plus Alpha, Puzzle Bobble, NBA Jam, Tekken Tag Tournament, Giga Wing, Strider 2, Final Fight Revenge, Last Bade 2, Pocket Gal 2, Raiden DX, Power Stone, Metal Slug and version ‘X’, Prehistoric Isle 2, Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 and a number of classics from the 80s including Gun Smoke and Mr Do. I’ve probably missed a few but my estimate is that there are somewhere in the region of thirty or so games here. Casino has most of the games running inside large ‘Electrocoin Duet’ cabinets set up in the first half of the basement with the back half running the games inside an array of upright cabinets. Games pricing is still excellent with 20p, 30p or 50p being normal and multiple plays given for £1.
Through the years some great titles have appeared at Casino including really hard to find games such as Irem’s horizontal scrolling shooters, X-Multiply and R-Type Leo, the latter being the third instalment in the arcade series. As mentioned above, this was also a memorable place to play and compete on Street Fighter 2 in the early 1990s. I remember being here with an a group of friends on one occasion when they were trying to master the special moves on one of the many cabinets in the basement. Suddenly, along came a spectator speaking English with an accent telling my friend he was doing the moves all wrong and that he could show him how to pull them off. This spectator then took over the controls my friend vacated and proceeded to show off his skills with a running commentary of how he was managing to pull of the specials. All was well until we realised the spectator was being just a bit cheeky by not letting us back on the machine as he continued to the next computer controlled opponent and then the next. My friends and I just decided to leave the plonker to it and found another cabinet on which to carry on learning the art of Street Fighting. The moral of this story is don’t be too kind to another player because it’s your credit in the machine and you should be the one playing and learning.
It’s worth mentioning that one of the floors was also used exclusively for pool tables. I think you could access it from a staircase at the end of the ground floor. Sadly, I never ventured there so can only speculate about what it was like. I do remember that there was a CCTV camera covering the room because the video feed was visible on a monitor next to the ground floor change booth. It seemed as if there were three pool tables in total but that is all I know. From their size, it also appeared as if they were smaller English pool tables rather than the bigger American variety as found in the pool hall at Namco Station, County Hall.
The following recollections are from 2023 and intended as an update/extension to the original article.
In the 2000s Casino became the unofficial home of many gamers that used to frequent the great Namco Wonderpark until its closure in July 1999. Early on the scene was concentrated around Tekken Tag Tournament with a regular slew of players making their way to the very back of the basement where a deluxe large screen cabinet let them battle it out with a crowd of onlookers almost always present.
Then, in the summer of 2001 the rumour mill was going wild with news of the imminent arrival of Sega’s Virtua Fighter 4. Some of the players at Casino had got wind of this and a contributor on a forum thread of a gaming website of the day revealed the location for a beta test version as none other than Sega Park in Bayswater, next to Queensway tube station. Well, Casino did acquire it too when the game was released a few months later and it proved very successful by getting all sorts of players involved, both new to the scene and old timers. Here’s a forum thread from back in the day on the excellent ‘Virtua Fighter dot com’ website when Virtua Fighter 4 got a player by the nickname of ‘the Prince’ to produce an amazing 91 consecutive wins against an array of human opponents.
Virtua Fighter 4 began a trend for a few years where a lot of new games began to appear with regularity. Big release in the early 2000s included the much anticipated Capcom vs SNK, Street Fighter 3 Third Strike and King of Fighter 2001. Now, Capcom vs SNK was a fun and playable entry into the world of fighting games but in a short space of the time many players at Casino were of the opinion that the overall balance of the game was not quite right and needed tweaking. Some characters were just too strong or weak thereby affecting gameplay and win streaks in favour of teams of specific Capcom and SNK characters whilst leaving other firm favourites at the wayside. The gameplay equilibrium was adjusted for the sequel in 2001 resulting in a more level playing field but ultimately both games were being enjoyed more and more at home on the Dreamcast and Playstation 2 consoles as they were released almost simultaneously with the arcade versions.
And then there was Tekken 4, a game that the large Tekken community at Casino had been looking forward to after the popularity of the just released Virtua Fighter 4. Sadly, it did not live up to the hype. The games mechanics were radically different to its predecessors, with uneven surfaces to negotiate as well as walled arenas. Funnily enough, these gameplay innovations had already been introduced in 1996 with a mildly polarising effect on the highly creative and playable third iteration in the Virtua Fighter series. It took getting used to after the flat surfaced fighting arenas in Virtua Fighter 1 and 2 but participants had persevered and Virtua Fighter 3 had taken on a great amount of respect from long time players as well as from the Street Fighter and Tekken crowd.
However, Tekken 4 had no such luck. Sure some of the hardcore players stuck it out, perhaps thinking in some odd way it was their duty to carry the baton for the community and show how it’s done. Yet, in essence, the approach taken by Namco, the game’s developed, was so far departed and radical, unlike Virtua Fighter 3, Tekken 4 felt more like a completely different fighting game in the series and once the players had tried it, many did not return. Strangely, some of them even went over to the Virtua fighter 4 machine to start learning that rather than stick it out on the new Tekken or if they needed their Tekken fix then the tried and tested Tekken Tag Tournament cabinet was still there at the back of the basement. Interestingly, while researching for this article I came across a Reddit thread, here, where some of the people now think the game is arguably the best in the series and was ahead of its time.
The steady flow of new release now gets me thinking that they were taken so much for granted that when the trend slowed to an almost halt in the mid to late 2000s, the murmurings of discontent from Casino stalwarts became more vocal and louder with little to no action by the people in charge. Tekken 6 began the downward spiral. It was eagerly awaited by the Casino players but one of the first places to actually get it together with its rather attractive new cabinet, inspired no less than by Sega a year earlier with a fetching design for Virtua Fighter 5, was the giant Funland arcade near Piccadilly Circus.
Even bigger news was to come in the fighting game space when Street Fighter 4 was confirmed for arcade release in the summer of 2008. Most players thought Casino would surely be one of the first places to get hold of it. No. The game was released in Japan as planned and went on to be hugely successful. However, it was no secret that the technology running the game together with the fantastic cabinets cost a prohibitive amount. The issue was compounded by the fact that each player needed their own setup, that is, a cabinet and PCB to play. So, a full four player configuration, cost a pretty penny and not many arcades in the West were willing to pay extortionate amounts to have the game imported. Of the few that did import the game, they wisely did so early on in its release cycle. This proved invaluable for the return on their investment because the game was due to be converted and released for play on popular home consoles including the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 early in 2009.
Unfortunately for Casino they bought the game late, just after the ATEI show in January 2009, there is a clip on YouTube here, just forward it to 2:18 to see the game running inside the actual cabinets Casino got hold of. In February 2009 the game was released on home consoles and although it did not effect the arcade crowd quite as drastically as expected, the fact it was now available to play at home meant that a sizeable chunk of income for Casino must have been missed due to getting the arcade version so late.
The later arcade updates seemed to get more attention though and I myself spent a fair bit of time on one of a number of deluxe large screen cabinets housing Super Street Fighter 2 Arcade Edition, hereafter SSF2AE, during 2013 and 2014. There were always a healthy number of players around the cabinets and human competition was never too far away. I managed to hold my own against some of them but I was nowhere near the top tier players that pulled of intricate combo attacks and strategies to win, sometimes by the slimmest of margins. By this stage the large screen cabinet at the end of the basement that was home to Tekken Tag Tournament in previous years now earned its keep by having a SSF2AE circuit board attached to it and a range of players taking to the control deck. It was almost like the old Tekken days as some excellent matchups took place between players of all abilities and backgrounds. The atmosphere, the pressure, the onlookers, it’s something that I do not think you can replicate in an online match. No trash talking or online insults here boys and girls because your opponent is sat next to you! You can literally feel the tension in the heat of battle against a human adversary with a dozen or more spectators and no matter what the argument is by Gen Z and their console-computer tournaments, arcades are really where it’s at. It’s both a proving ground to show who the best is as well as a learning arena where those still new to a game or its scene are initiated by a baptism of fire where only the strong and resilient survive and prosper.
However, by 2014 all was not well and around Easter time Casino finally shut it doors. Here’s the thing, the location is still open, minus the video games in the basement. It was first taken over by new management and renamed ‘Cashino’, with the location now championing operating fruit machines only. The basement was shut and then possibly leased out and used as a martial arts classroom! Wonders will never cease! Oh the irony. What was once an area full of fighting games now used for the real deal.
As for all the arcade games, cabinets and related equipment, an enterprising chap by the name of Mark Starkey, with help from like minded individuals in the community, managed to save a sizeable portion together with some of the gaming inventory from Funland when that closed in 2011. He went on to open the ‘Heart of Gaming’ arcade, situated in Croydon, south London, take a look at their website here and be sure to visit and keep the spirit of arcade gaming alive and well. It was a commendable effort by Mark and the community to save the games and put as many as them back into the Heart of Gaming for the public to continue to enjoy.
Casino was the last bastion of the old school spirit of arcade gaming in London. It retained a classic charm and appeal that transcended the decades it operated over and somehow kept going through the upheavals of the video gaming world as 3D and then powerful home consoles began to steal the limelight.
The thinking is that once it closed, that this would signal the end of arcades in London. Well, it’s yes and no. Yes, because it represented the old distinct image of an arcade that is long gone from the electronic entertainment map in London. And no simply due to arcades such as Las Vegas and Heart of Gaming still able to offer some of the old school characteristics and atmosphere that makes arcades feel like a great public arena in which to sample classic and contemporary gaming delights.
