Over the August Bank Holiday weekend, I travelled to London with my brother - a massive wrestling fan - to see AEW/NJPW Forbidden Door at the O2 Arena. It was a great night of wrestling, for sure, but for me the highlight of the trip was the following afternoon, when to pass some time before our flight back to Belfast, we checked out the Heart of Gaming arcade in Croydon.
My brother told me how on a previous trip to London he visited the now-closed Namco Funscape on the South Bank and was left rather underwhelmed - the main thing he remembered was seeing that weird Injustice card game. He asked me if I knew of any good arcades in London, and I remembered reading about HoG on the old Neo Empire forum, but wasn’t sure it was still in business. Some quick research indicated it was, although in a different location (it moved from its original location in west London to the Whitgift Centre in Croydon in 2017, and then to its current location next to the Whitgift Centre in 2019).
We had a bit of a gap in our Monday plans, between checking out of our apartment at 11am and a tour of the McLaren Technology Centre at 4pm (our sister works for the McLaren F1 team - who are doing reasonably well at the minute - and arranged for us to go on the tour), so we decided to take the train to Croydon and check this place out.
We arrived there and paid £10 each for a wristband that granted us entry all day (the games are all on free play, and it’s normally £20 to get in, but they were giving half-price entry as it was a Bank Holiday). I looked at the far corner of the arcade, saw this, and knew immediately that I had come to the right place:
Since we didn’t have that much time to kill, this report is based on around an hour and a half of time in the arcade, and is therefore unlikely to be fully accurate or complete; also, I’m sorry that the pictures aren’t exactly the best quality - the lens on my phone camera must have been a bit smudged.
Fighting games#
The arcade had the following fighting games in stand-alone two-player cabinets:
- Capcom vs SNK 2
- Killer Instinct 2
- Street Fighter Alpha 2
- Street Fighter Alpha 3
- Street Fighter EX2
- Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting
- Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3
There was a group of six head-to-head cabinets with:
- Marvel vs Capcom 2
- Super Street Fighter II Turbo
- Two of the cabinets were switched off, so I don’t know which game they were supposed to be running
There was also a six-slot Neo-Geo with:
- Breakers Revenge
- Fatal Fury Special
- Garou: Mark of the Wolves
- Last Blade 2
- King of Fighters ‘98
- (and also Money Puzzle Exchanger, but those kinds of games are only a few steps removed from being fighting games when you think about it)
Finally, they had an Arcade1Up Marvel vs Capcom cabinet, accounting for (in addition to the aforementioned MVC2):
- X-Men: Children of the Atom
- Marvel Super Heroes
- X-Men vs Street Fighter
- Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter
- Marvel vs Capcom
All told, that’s 19 games, and they were (at least, the ones I had time to play) in excellent condition. The joysticks were a bit loose on a couple of them, but otherwise I had no complaints. In particular, those Naomi DX cabinets with their massive CRTs were an absolute joy to play on.
You could say that the game selection is a little Capcom-centric (and SNK, to a lesser extent), and the closest thing you’ll get to a 3D fighter is SFEX2, but I’d be surprised if even the gargantuan Arcade Club in Bury, the largest arcade in Europe - over five times the size of HoG, in terms of number of cabinets - had a better line-up of fighters.
Other highlights#
- There was a decent selection of rhythm games, such as In the Groove, Maimai, Pop’n Music, Hatsune Miku: Project Diva, Rhythm Heaven, and - I apologise to D4RK ONION for not getting a better picture of it - Taiko no Tatsujin.
- There was a four-player projection screen Daytona USA setup, but it didn’t seem to be as well-maintained - the projectors were noticeably misaligned with the screen.
- In better racing game news, I cleared the arcade version of Sega Rally for the first time.
- Back-to-back with the aforementioned six-slot Neo-Geo was a four-slot Neo-Geo with Metal Slug 1-3 and X.
General information#
HoG is located at 44-46 North End Road in Croydon, about a five-minute walk from West Croydon station and a ten-minute walk from East Croydon station. It’s open from midday to 7pm every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and seven days a week in July and August. As mentioned previously, it’s usually £20 for an all-day pass, but various concessionary rates are available. For more information, visit their website at https://www.heartofgaming.co.uk/.
In the end, it turns out we could have stayed later, as just as we got on the train back into central London, we got a message - it turned out something had come up at McLaren and they weren’t able to accomodate any tours that day. On top of that, our flight - which we’d switched to from an earlier flight so we could go on the tour - was delayed by over an hour. Oops!
In any case, though, I had a great time at HoG and I’ll be sure to visit for longer the next time I’m in London. So I say: check it out if you can.