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.

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.

In the 1970s there were 10 of these buildings in a row. In an earthquake in which no one was harmed or inconvenienced, they all began to collapse in unison, at a steady tempo, by one storey at a time.

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.

80s arcades: the heyday of videogame showbusiness.

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

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.

Did the suffering artist who drew the space invaders have in mind some slithering, slavering tentacled monster?

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

Easy to think that this space invader is just a generic symbol of an arcade, but of course Space Invaders is Taito's game, released in 1978.

What are all those card readers for on Japanese arcade cabinets? Here’s a quick guide.

2017’s Densha De GO!! updated the 1996 classic with some neat features like sounding your horn in salute to trackside workers. But the basics are the same: Drive the train when told, stop the train when told. Don’t go too fast; don’t go too slow. Don’t stop at the wrong place on the platform – you’re measured to the centimetre.

Densha De GO! was a 1996 train driving simulator that let you experience all the grind and tedium of menial work for the low, low price of ¥100 a credit.

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

Arcade racing cabinets seem pretty universal: very accessible, easy to export around the world. But here’s a series that’s very particular in its appeal, and hasn’t (properly) made it outside Japan.

Sit in the dark and match threes on your own. Screen so bright you’re blinded to everything else.

Taito Hey: the blue-lit legend arcade on Akiba‘s tower strip.

The legendary Taito Hey is portrayed as some sort of utopian wonderland, but it's actually a locked-down regime of authoritarian imperatives. Here are their inflexible demands:

This train driving simulator perfectly captures the simmering resentment of the menial worker…