When I was a child in the late 1980s, my brother and I would watch every Saturday morning as a crescent of teenagers gathered around an arcade machine in our local sports club. Even if we had been allowed to spend our pocket money on something as transient as an arcade game, there was no barging in here. All we could do was watch as the older boys jeered and cheered each other on, making it a little further each week as their skills improved and muscle memory set in.

Diversion became ritual and, soon enough, a crowd stopped by to watch their weekly quest. I remember wishing that today – perhaps today! – would be the day they conquered the dragon and made it to the final credits. I remember the elation in the room when it finally happened, the backslaps and lingering grins. Within a pastime outsiders considered to be almost debauchedly flippant, we had witnessed something quietly meaningful, perhaps something like our parents felt the first time they saw Dylan play live, or similar to that our own children would experience years later when they first saw the music video to Single Ladies.

198X is a game that seeks to encapsulate and accentuate the experience of those who found their people not in the football stands, or on the dancefloor, but in the smoke and truant dinginess of the amusement arcade. It’s a coming-of-age story about Kid, an androgynous teenager who lives in the town of Suburbia, “stuck between the limitations of innocent youth and the obligations of inevitable adulthood”. Everything changes, Kid says, when they discover the local arcade and find “worlds and new meaning in video games”.

The game has a unique structure. It is, essentially, a collection of five arcade games that never were, across a range of genres. There’s a Final Fight-style brawler, a racing game in the mode of Out Run, a R-Type-esque shoot ’em up, and so on. Each game is an exquisite period piece and provides the anchor points around which Kid’s story is told, via sumptuous pixel-art scenes – all pink neon signs reflected in shimmering puddles, Reebok hi-tops and canary-yellow BMXs – and Kid’s melancholy voiceover. To progress the story you must first complete the arcade game, a savvy design trick that strengthens the psychological link between player and protagonist, as you share each other’s victories.

During the past few years, there have been numerous books that explore growing up through the lens of video games, from Michael Clune’s Gamelife to Cara Ellison’s Embed With Games. The urge to understand the role video games play in forming our sense of self, even in the way that we parse the world, is strong. When any media has such a major effect, there’s usually an urge to discover why. 198X fits squarely within this tradition. It is a game about a fictional teenager who is an obvious surrogate for the experiences of the game’s Stockholm-based creators. It’s a game that seeks to contextualise its celebration of a bygone era from the vantage point of adulthood: what did that mean? Why do I still care?

198X also offers a window into a vanished scene. London’s Trocadero, for years one of the only places where you could play arcade games old and new, evicted its cabinets years ago to make way for apartments. Brooklyn’s Barcade may have reignited interest in the medium with the lure of craft beers, but you’ll have to reach Tokyo if you want to experience the kinds of arcade to which 198X truly pays tribute – Akihabara’s Try Amusement Tower, or Takadanobaba’s Mikado, probably the greatest living arcade left in the world. For everyone else, the game offers a more affordable way to visit a past that, for those of us who were there, has lost none of its captivating allure and psychic mystery.

Also recommended

Cadence of Hyrule

(Nintendo; Switch)

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Collection of Mana

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