Your glasses spike the screenlight at your face like a kid burning ants. HUD branded on your cheekbones.

Look at this coinslot flange, puckering up to take your hyakuen in an industrial-age kiss.

The lights in Hey are famously blue. First foot off the IN escalator is *that* row of a dozen or so Egrets on either side. They actually have a Kodak PhotoPoint(TM) standee there now, yellow greyed by the blue light, with a cutout for where experts say to point your camera. That’s actually true!

I’m hearing bad things about the independents. Even Sega is shutting shops. Akiba 2-kan – iconic! – is gone. Photos of staff bowing outside in thanks for years of patronage from also-bowing, clapping crowds.

Gun Bullet – also AKA’d as Point Blank. Not the usual conveyor-belt murder. Weird thing is you’re basically playing extremely simple kids’ games – picture pairs, snap, spot the difference – but looking like you’re playing The House of the Dead.

I feel like I should have an obituary prepared for this game. It’s on a hell of a run – since 2006!

Teeth bared; talons out. But look at the posture of their right hands. Claws, but relaxed claws, ready to swoop at the attack buttons with quite a travel. Wouldn’t your response be quicker if you started nearer the buttons? It’s not that kind of reflexes. You play with rhythm, where the travel helps. Reflexes are to quickly change rhythm. If fighters were music games they’d be jazz duo jam sessions.

Officially branded (with a felt-tip) Taito HEY headphones, which hang on a self-adhesive hook on the side of The Ninja Warriors. It's a robot-ninja-based beat-em-up, three screens wide in a Darius cab from 1987.

Good old rail shooters up for a one-coin-stand. Maybe these are for gaijin rolling off the escalator, spluttering into port from the alien seas of UFO catchers and Nesica Live.

Seemed harmless enough, in 95, shooting people so they die. Just a game, dad – god!

Mortal Kombat was supposed to be a Jean-Claude Van Damme game. No JC in the end, so they went for guys in pointy hats and balaclavas pulling each other’s spines out. And lo, born was a multimedia franchise up there with Care Bears and My Little Pony.

Bubble Bobble became an icon. Cutie dragons burping poppers at trippy edible baddies.

1985. Beds under desks for months. Ravaged eyes, forgotten families. Sega-AM1 are ready: World, meet Fantasy Zone.

FInal Lap R was the last in Namco’s legendary Final Lap arcade racer series, released in 1993.

Flying Power Disc (or, stupidly, Windjammers outside Japan) shows you a future of total sports perfection. This ultimate sport combines the pseudofunctional fetishwear of beach volleyball with the hardpolished maple of the NBA with the candyised plastic bodyarmour of the NFL with the circle going back and forth of Pong.

Virtual On Oratorio Tangram: so much more than just four pins in a dictionary.

You’re flying. You drive these paradise roads, wide open, five lanes all yours, a flawless plane of tarmacadam, whiteline paint in perfect rectangles. You stream through a pristine beach of white sand. Pristine – when you think about it – apart from the five-lane carriageway dragged through, weeks under construction by belching diggers. Don’t overthink it. You’re flying. Palm trees.

#SpaceHarrier at #TaitoHey. #Taito ashtray, #BubbleBobble strip and #100yen coin.

There are rules about how you can modernise a candy cab.

Imagine this: a 3rd-person arena-based team battle that you can play online with headset comms in an arcade.

As a child I played Space Harrier on my friend’s Atari ST. It was beyond me. There was always another stage I believed in with unseen colours. Some magic just out of sight.

Taito Hey’s been overtalked. Here are its four contradictions.

Wangan Midnight is a typically epic Japanese  comicbook streetracing story that ran from 1990 to 2015. Older gamers grew up with it like a sibling. To younger gamers it’s more like a parent – present since before your world existed. Just a fact of life, presumably eternal.