This gaming den was discovered in part from a magazine piece and partly by just visiting nearby arcades in the immediate vicinity of Leicester Square during the early 1990s.
The magazine article, which was from Computer and Video Games and can be found at this link, had a special arcade report where they had pinpointed a number of arcades in and around the area fenced by Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square and Tottenham Court Road. Amongst those locations to be labelled on the map was Crystal Rooms but the article did not mention any of the games there but rather the fact that there were hardly any newer titles showing up.
So, off I went some time in 1990 to seek out this mysterious location ‘just off Leicester Square’, as the magazine article had put it. Crystal Rooms was actually located just behind one of the entrances to Leicester Square tube station which was on Charing Cross Road, its exact address being 7 – 9 Cranbourn Street. The very large building where it was located was actually part of the ‘Hippodrome’ nightclub and casino. The arcade was in the corner of the building that was opposite Leicester Square itself and could be clearly seen thanks to its large signage and glass panels.
I recall the arcade was split between a ground and basement floor. On entering the street level floor it was immediately apparent that the focus was gambling and fruit machines and almost the entire space was taken up by these. There were some games to be found here, usually those of the larger cabinet variety. Sega’s Virtua Racing showed up here in 1992, two twin cabinets which let four players take each other on. I think Daytona USA then took up the baton a few years later. The real arcade action was revealed when taking the stairs to the basement.
Crystal Rooms had a very large basement that was partitioned into roughly three equally sized sections. Each section held about a dozen or more games on a variety of mostly upright cabinets. There may or may not have been some fruit machines here too. One of my first and most memorable visits here involved an encounter with a very new SNK Neo Geo multi-game cabinet which I believe was a four slot machine. SNK had pioneered a new way of delivering games faster and in bigger volumes to arcade owners. Their multi-game cabinets could hold four or six games at a time and the player was free to choose whichever title they wished to play at the start of their session, although I think it was also possible to stop a game mid-way and choose another one as long as you had enough credits in the machine.
Multi-game cabinets were not a new concept however because Nintendo had produced something called the ‘Play Choice 10’ cabinet a few years earlier in 1986. This was a novel concept where the main printed circuit board allowed up to ten interchangeable games cartridges to be fitted. It was left up to the arcade owner to decide which games to keep or swap out with regard to the revenue being generated. I remember playing on one of these in a fast food shop at the end of Ilford High Road, practically opposite Centreway where I used to frequent Joker’s Amusements during the Street Fighter 2 era. Play Choice 10 used a timer system, once depleted, no matter how far you were in to a game, more money needed to be shovelled into the coin slot in order to continue. This was unlike a conventional arcade machine where it was possible to play for as long as you could until all lives were gone or you completed the game.
The Neo Geo MVS or multi video system was different however. The games were graphically superior to those found on Nintendo’s system together with better quality multi channel stereo sound. SNK were ushering in 16-Bit gaming in a big way and it didn’t stop at the arcade because they had simultaneously developed a home console, called the Advanced Entertainment System or AES, using the exact same technology as that found inside their MVS multi-game arcade cabinets. The crux though was its exorbitant cost which also extended to the games. I remember the console system with one joystick costing about £400 in 1991 and the first generation games cartridge started at around £120 each. In today’s money, taking inflation into account, that’s around £940 for the console with games starting at £282!
The cabinet in the basement of Crystal Rooms then showed off some of the early Neo Geo games and I can recall titles such as Baseball Stars, Top Players Golf, Magician Lord and Nam 1975 being available. I think, just like the Play Choice 10, the MVS cabinet also used a timer system allowing players a set number of minutes to play before stopping the game and asking you to continue by inserting more credits into the machine. I had mixed feelings about this because as mentioned above, MVS was challenging the traditional model of earning income from an arcade machine. What was amazing though was that the cabinet housed a memory card slot. If you had one of these memory cards, then you could save your progress in the game and continue later. Alternatively, the card could be used on the home AES console as long as you had the same game cartridge.
It was a special moment finding this SNK cabinet as I had been reading about it for months in gaming magazines and now one had finally shown up in the heart of London. It was still very new and the condition of the controls and the monitor were excellent. I spent about a half an hour or thereabouts trying out all the available games. The graphics were definitely better than what was being output on home consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System or Sega Mega Drive let alone computers including the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga. The games fit in nicely with offering on the other cabinets and had a high definition arcade look and feel with large colourful sprites for characters or objects and several layers of parallax scrolling.
Now there were many upright cabinets in the basement in the early 1990s but I can only recall a few of the games. Chief amongst these were Carrier Airwing, Forgotten Worlds and Final Fight, all great Capcom titles. There was a funny incident concerning Final Fight once when I was so engrossed in completing the game no matter how many credit it took that in the latter stages of the game I began to panic as my change was running out and I need to swap a £5 note for 10 and 20 pence pieces. Back in the day arcades would have members of staff meandering about and Crystal Rooms was no different. I desperately called out to one of them as they were walking past asking them to please sort out some change. The response was both curt and direct as the young man said he would do no such thing and I could go and get it myself. He walked away looking hurt by the request, needless to say I didn’t manage to finish Final Fight on that occasion!
Strangely, Carrier Airwing had similar playing events surrounding it although under more amiable circumstances. A good friend at the time was very much into getting the thing finished or ‘clocked’ and asked me to get him some change which I had no problem doing so. He went on to see the end screens and credits! The Capcom titles were showing the company in their prime just before Street Fighter 2 fever took hold and almost all its efforts became concentrated on the fighting game genre. It started a snowball effect with every arcade video game producer wanting a slice of the action, some succeeded, other didn’t. The biggest success and therefore challenger in the 2D arena came from none other than SNK who would go on to get their Fatal Fury, Samurai Showdown and King of Fighters franchises off the ground with the latter proving to be a worthy contender for Capcom’s fighting game crown.
Crystal Rooms was one of those places that was more of a fringe location than one of the key locations, such as Funland or Casino Leisure, that my friends or I would visit. Due to this I can remember little else about what games showed up here through the 1990s. As mentioned near the top of this article, a 4 player Virtua Racing was here in the early 1990s and the Daytona USA which succeeded it was later moved into the basement where I recall three twin cabinets allowing six players to race. On the very few occasion I visited in the 2000s it seemed as if all the games had disappeared and Crystal Rooms was primarily focusing of gambling activities.
In closing I will say that it was a pretty good place to play games in the early 1990s. There was a large range of games on a variety of upright cabinets and the pricing wasn’t too bad either, averaging around 30p a go. Yet, I feel Crystal Rooms was always a gambling spot first and the games were a secondary revenue stream and as the 1990s wore on this became more apparent.
