Nostalgia Trip - Songs From the 80s (Arcade)

When I started this blog a year ago I talked a lot about the games I used to play, the places I used to play them and the nostalgia I have for them. The one thing that kick starts my nostalgia more than anything else is music. Because most of my time playing coin-op games was on a camp site that had a bar and nightclub as well as an arcade, there are a lot of songs from the 1980s that I associate as much with gaming as I do the games themselves.

With that in mind, here (in no particular order) is my top 10 songs from the 80s arcade, starting with the song that somehow conjures up more memories of those happy days better than any other, not because I particularly liked it, but because it was played everywhere! It's the Material Girl, Madonna, and "Get into the groove".

The Old Hall arcade always had a juke box in it and when I could stop myself shovelling 10ps into one of their many games, this is one of the songs I would play. It's the band with the beards,  ZZ Top and "Legs". See if you can spot Space Invaders and Berzerk machines in the video:

I am a big Van Halen fan, but for me it started with Sammy Hagar and "Why can't this be love" from their 1986 album "5150". This was another juke box favourite of mine back in the day, even if it's not a David Lee Roth track:

Here's another track that I played on the juke box from time to time. As you can probably tell by now, in the mid-80s I was into my hair metal. The passion and drama of "Still of the night" by Whitesnake made me want to be a rock star. Instead I got into IT. Oh well:

The Old Hall's night club was quite relaxed and since you had to be a member to use the camp site's facilities  they allowed kids on the dance floor.  Their DJ was open to requests and one song I remember asking for on several occasions was Sly Fox's epic "Let's go all the way".

The Old Hall night club may have let kids one the dance floor, but my folks still wanted me home before it got to late. Back in our caravan we could often hear the music and the opening drums from this track were unmistakable. This is 80s electronica at its best. This is the '88 remix of New Order's "Blue Monday":

When the Beastie Boys emerged in 1986 I was just 11 years old and I didn't really know what they were singing about. What I did know is that "(You gotta) fight for your right (to party)" was a great song to shout along to:

If movies like Last Star Fighter and games like Star Rider felt like the future to my adolescent self, then Sigue Sigue Sputnik and "Love Missile" felt like music of the future. Shoot it up, comrade:

There were some great films with great pop sound tracks in the mid-80s, but for my 10 year-old self, the best one was  "Power of Love" by Huey Lewis and the News, taken from the 1985 smash hit Back to the Future. I wanted to be Marty McFly so bad I even took to wearing a (grey) body warmer over my denim jacket that year. Classic stuff.

And I'll end with one of the biggest bands of the decade, Duran Duran. There's tonnes of their songs I remember playing in those days, but I'm going with the one that hooks into another piece of 80s nostalgia, Roger Moore as James Bond. What a combo:

MTW