An arcade conversion is a home version of a coin-op game. It is a provenance, not a genre: the original could be a racing game, a shoot-’em-up or a beat-’em-up. What set conversions apart was how they were judged. A magazine reviewing a conversion asked two questions at once: how close is it to the arcade machine, and is it any good? The answers often disagreed, and in February 1988 one issue of CRASH showed both on the same page.
Two verdicts on one page
That issue reviewed two of the biggest arcade licences of Christmas 1987, U.S. Gold’s Out Run and Ocean’s Gryzor, the European name for Konami’s Contra. Nick, reviewing Out Run, began with a warning: “all those of you that are expecting this to be just like the arcade version had better leave the room right now, because you’re going to be so disappointed.” Then he gave it 93%. The graphics were “as well drawn as is possible on the Spectrum”, the 128K sound “absolutely fantastic”, and the game “an essential purchase”. His two colleagues gave 63% and 59%, and the magazine summed up the split: views ranged between “the best you could have expected” and “a poor translation of a great arcade game”.
Gryzor, opposite, got 49% overall, with the verdict “not living up to the arcade original’s high standards”. “It’s not really the month of good conversions, is it?” one reviewer asked. A month earlier Sinclair User had found a way to say what CRASH’s reviewers were arguing about. It gave Out Run 8 out of 10 and remarked that if the game had been called Sunday Driver, “everyone would have been bowled over”. Measured against the cabinet, the Spectrum game disappointed; measured as a Spectrum racing game, it was good.
How the press judged them
The fidelity question could go either way. When Mean Machines previewed the NES Gauntlet II in February 1991, faithfulness was the whole recommendation: “Here’s a show-stopping arcade conversion! Gauntlet II is one of the most faithful recreations of a coin-op yet seen on the Nintendo… This Nintendo conversion has every feature of the coin-op, and, amazingly, has all the speech.” When CRASH made Ocean’s Spectrum Chase H.Q. a Smash at 95% in December 1989, its reviewer put the two tests together: “This is an accurate conversion that is as playable as the real thing — and that sure is a big recommendation!”
Some reviewers told readers to set the arcade aside. In December 1982 the American magazine JoyStik opened its guide to Atari’s VCS Pac-Man by asking readers to “forget you’ve ever seen or played the original arcade version”, and concluded that it was “a very good home-video game”. Video Games had done the opposite in August 1982, warning that “anyone who buys Pac-Man because they love the arcade game with the same name may wind up disappointed”. The Pac-Man entry tells that story.
By the late 1980s readers voted on conversions as a category. CU Amiga‘s ballot for its 1989 readers’ poll, printed in February 1990, listed “Best Coin Op Conversion” and “Best Arcade Conversion” alongside “Best Coin-Op (Arcade)” for the cabinets themselves and “Best Original Game”.
What the scores looked like
Read the CRASH scores for a handful of Spectrum arcade licences and the range is wide:
| Game | Publisher | CRASH | Issue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chase H.Q. | Ocean | 95% | December 1989 |
| R-Type | Electric Dreams (Activision) | 92% | Christmas 1988 |
| Thunder Blade | U.S. Gold (by Tiertex) | 91% | Christmas 1988 |
| Out Run | U.S. Gold | 72% | February 1988 |
| Gryzor | Ocean | 49% | February 1988 |
| Rolling Thunder | U.S. Gold (by Tiertex) | 47% | March 1988 |
The same game could also score very differently on different machines. Amstrad Action gave the Amstrad Out Run 37% and called it “probably one of the worst” arcade conversions, while ACE rated the Atari ST version 873 out of 1,000. Tiertex’s Strider scored 96% on the Amiga and 42% on the Commodore 64 in Zzap!64.
What the machines gave up
Each conversion cut something, and reviewers noticed what. The Spectrum Out Run loaded each stage from tape as the player reached it; a 128K machine kept the stages it had loaded. The Commodore 64 version dropped the forks in the road and made you choose one of five fixed routes before starting, and ACE wrote that without the junctions “it’s hard to call this Out Run at all”. The Amstrad version kept the routes but had no engine noise.
Colour was the Spectrum’s problem. CRASH noted that the Spectrum R-Type used colour “very liberally, but even the resulting clashes don’t spoil the detailed, fast-moving sprites”; the attribute-aware design entry explains why clashes happened at all. On the Atari VCS, which could not show five characters on the same lines of the screen, Pac-Man’s four ghosts took turns to appear, one per frame, and flickered.
The 16-bit machines narrowed the gap but did not close it. For U.S. Gold’s Amiga Street Fighter II in 1992, the sprites were about 20 per cent smaller than the arcade’s and the Amiga showed 32 colours. U.S. Gold told Amiga Power that it had not tried “to create a perfect conversion”, only “a home computer version of Street Fighter II which feels as close to the real thing as possible”.
Working from the cabinet
Fidelity depended on what the programmers had to work from, and it was rarely the arcade game’s code. At Tiertex, U.S. Gold’s regular conversion house in Manchester, “the programmers had no access to the original arcade source code – the game had to be played over and over again in order to make the conversion accurate”, Anthony Ball recalled of converting Mercs. The cabinet lived in the company’s attic, where the artists worked, and Ball’s team grabbed graphics from its RGB signal with a digitiser. “Virtually every one from Tiertex was coded and published within six months,” he added. For Strider, according to The One, Capcom was “understandably wary about revealing its coin-op secrets”, so the programmer built the game from long sessions on the machine and a video of it being played through.
Not every team started with a machine. Sinclair User reported that the programmers of the Spectrum R-Type travelled to London from Swansea to play the coin-op “until they could get the proper feel for the game”, until Activision sent them a machine “to save their rail expenses”. Ocean could do better for RoboCop, because it owned the licence: it had bought the film rights and sublet them to Data East, which made the arcade game. Peter Johnson, converting it to the Atari ST and Amiga from home, was sent “the Data East arcade game supplied by Ocean, built into a handy portable suitcase, alongside a finished build of the Spectrum version”.
The business
Conversions were licensed products, bought from Japanese and American arcade makers, and in Britain two publishers dominated. U.S. Gold and Ocean were partly owned by the same people, and a U.S. Gold executive later described an unwritten division of the arcade makers between them: “They went after Taito, we went after Sega, they went after Nintendo, we went after Capcom.” Elite Systems had its own run of Capcom games: in March 1986 CRASH announced that “after the massive success of Commando, Elite Systems are to continue their series of Capcom arcade conversions with Ghosts and Goblins”.
The licence fee and the arcade game’s fame set the schedule. U.S. Gold’s Out Run was in the shops for Christmas 1987 before review copies had gone out, The Games Machine noted, and U.S. Gold claimed more than 200,000 copies sold in the first two weeks. Having one developer write every format was cheaper. Geoff Brown of U.S. Gold explained that Tiertex’s work on all formats cost “a hundred thousand pounds for four formats whereas it might be fifty thousand for one”. Mick West, who worked there, put the cost in quality: “We were just to copy the game, and do it as quickly as possible.”
From loose copies to near-identical ports
The first famous licensed conversion was a loose one. Atari bought the home rights to Space Invaders in 1980, and its VCS cartridge had 36 invaders instead of the arcade’s 55, three shields instead of four, and 112 game variations. It still became, Creative Computing reported, “the fastest selling of Atari’s thirty-six games”.
In Britain the conversion became a major business on the 8-bit computers in the mid-1980s, and the Spectrum carried on getting arcade licences into the 1990s. When the 128K-only Spectrum Street Fighter II arrived in 1993, with each fighter loading separately from tape, Sinclair User guessed it was “likely to be the last big licence coin op conversion ever on the Speccy”. By then the comparison that mattered was with the consoles. Capcom’s own Street Fighter II had come out on Nintendo’s Super NES, and The One judged the Amiga version against it: “absolutely excellent”, but “not as good as the SNES version”.
Sources
- CRASH issue 49, February 1988, pp. 22–23: Gryzor (Ocean, £7.95; overall 49%; “not really the month of good conversions”) and Out Run (U.S. Gold, £7.99; Nick’s 93% and “leave the room”; 63% and 59%; the split general rating; overall 72%; 200,000 copies claimed).
- Sinclair User issue 70, January 1988, pp. 12–13: Out Run (8/10; Sunday Driver), as set out in the Out Run entry.
- Mean Machines issue 5, February 1991, p. 90: Gauntlet II preview (NES).
- CRASH issue 71, December 1989, pp. 56–57: Chase H.Q. (Ocean; 95%; “an accurate conversion that is as playable as the real thing”).
- JoyStik, vol. 1 no. 3, December 1982, pp. 36–37, and Video Games, vol. 1 no. 1, August 1982, pp. 74–75: VCS Pac-Man; Electronic Fun with Computers & Games, November 1982: the ghosts drawn one at a time, all as set out in the Pac-Man (Atari 2600) entry.
- CU Amiga, February 1990: 1989 readers’ poll ballot.
- CRASH issue 59, Christmas Special 1988, pp. 26–27: Spectrum R-Type (92%; colour “used very liberally”), as set out in the R-Type entry.
- CRASH issue 50, March 1988 (Rolling Thunder, 47%) and issue 59, Christmas 1988 (Thunder Blade, 91%); Zzap!64 issue 54, October 1989 (Amiga Strider, 96%) and issue 70 (the Commodore 64 Strider’s 42%); The One on Strider; Mick West’s and Geoff Brown’s recollections in The Story of US Gold, pp. 80 and 156–157: all as set out in the Tiertex entry.
- Amstrad Action issue 30, March 1988, pp. 46–47 (Amstrad Out Run, 37%); ACE issue 5, February 1988, pp. 38–39 (C64 Out Run) and issue 10, July 1988, p. 64 (Atari ST Out Run, 873): as set out in the Out Run entry.
- Amiga Power issue 20, December 1992, pp. 22–23: Street Fighter II preview (sprite size, colours, “a perfect conversion”); Sinclair User issue 133, March 1993, pp. 8–9: Spectrum Street Fighter II; The One on the Amiga version: all as set out in the Street Fighter II entry.
- Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The Story of US Gold (Fusion Retro Books, 2015), pp. 164–166: Anthony Ball’s recollection of converting Mercs at Tiertex (a recollection); p. 75: the division of arcade licences with Ocean, as set out in the U.S. Gold entry.
- Sinclair User issue 79, October 1988, pp. 86–87: the Spectrum R-Type programmers and the coin-op.
- Wireframe issue 39, May 2020, p. 30: Ocean’s RoboCop licence, Data East and Peter Johnson’s suitcase arcade machine.
- The Games Machine issue 3, February 1988, pp. 60–61: Out Run in the shops before the reviews, as set out in the Out Run entry.
- CRASH issue 26, March 1986, p. 105: Elite’s Ghosts ’n Goblins announced.
- Creative Computing, vol. 6 no. 9, September 1980, p. 18; Retro Gamer issue 41, 2007, pp. 22–26: the VCS Space Invaders, as set out in the Space Invaders entry.