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When it comes to arcade games, every city has a heart. This is the spiritual and physical epicentre, towards which a metropolis' video game players are drawn from miles around. It's here that friendships are won, rivalries settled and pallid tans worked up in front of the cathode glow of the machines. In Tokyo there's Club Sega, its cavernous belly rumbling conspicuously opposite Akihabara's subway station. In New York it's Chinatown Fair, a grimy, well-loved nucleus that spills its outcast teen-agers and old timers into the flanking takeaway restaurants at closing time. In London, it's the Trocadero, a towering entertainment complex situated in Piccadilly Circus. For decades now, virtual fighters, drivers, dancers and gawping tourists have travelled the spinal escalator to the building's summit, where the brightest and best arcade machines await.
However, in the past two years both Trocadero and its nearby cousin Casino - the final bastions of the capital city's video game arcade - closed. The rise of online video games and the fall from popularity of so-called 'destination gaming' has made running this kind of business on some of England's most valuable real estate unviable. But every arcade has its community, those for whom the physical act of coming together to play video games remains more enticing than the remote, displaced tussle of online competition. So rather than find itself homeless and game-less, London's arcade community has performed something of a heart transplant.
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