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 was proving 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 place sat the time have age limits in place 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 that frequented the establishment reliably informed that there were fruit machines on site.
The great ‘Double Dragon’, arcade marquee, image credits: ‘Game Hoard’
Anyhow, I recall BJ’s Arcade was a small but reasonable size location split between a pool room and video games area. The pool are 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 using the eponymous fiver for the playing classics Double Dragon.
The super rare ‘Tron’ in an original upright cabinet, image credits: ‘Land of Oz Arcades’
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 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 that about some of the games they remembered playing here and these 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 its 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 and plenty of classic titles can be found and usually at a low price of play, just like it used to be!
Konami’s classic horizontal shoot em up Gradius, arcade poster, image credits: ‘Adam Rackoff – Twitter’
UPDATE from May 2022
As mentioned right at the beginning of the article BJ’s Arcade closed down very soon after I discovered it. The place was a burnt out shell but adjacent buildings seemed to have survived. The row of shops where it was situated were demolished some time in the 1990s and then redeveloped into a number of warehouses which incorporated a ‘Fitness First’ gym with a ‘Farm Foods’ store behind it.
