From a retrogaming perspective I’m pretty lucky to live in Southend-on-Sea, as we have several retro associated venues in town. One fantastic one is Astro City which is located right on Southend High Street. It’s an arcade, with lots of games and machines, retro and modern, and is now available to hire for parties. It has been an incredibly popular venue for children’s parties on weekends. Everyone I know who has hosted a party there has said the children and parents have all absolutely loved it. I’m certainly going to be nudging my son to hold his 7th birthday party there next year :-).

The venue is also available for adult parties or stag parties, etc, where it must be great to have the whole run of the venue to yourself.

Plus, they also do free play nights on Thursdays and Fridays, where you pay £5 entry fee and you can stay as long as you want, with the machines all on free play (except for the fruit machines and coin pushers of course).

They’ve got some cool machines, such as the original Gauntlet, Gauntlet Legends, Crazy Taxi, Street Fighter 2 (and 3 & 4), Daytona USA, Need for Speed, 18 Wheeler, Radikal Bikers, several candy cabs (Astro City models of course), multiple big screen sit down two player Electrocion/Unigame arcades that have multi-boards or games in them like Hyper Sports, Donkey Kong, Pac-Land, The Simpsons and more. They’ve got several light gun games including Time Crisis 2, Panic Museum, House of the Dead 3 and Time Crisis 2, at least one dance game and also several cool punching or kicking machines. They also have a very cool Street Fighter II pinball. And to top it all off several pool tables, table football and an air hockey machine.

I’ve gotten to know Paul, the owner bit, and he’s a great guy who will sort you out with anything that you need. To find out more you can visit their website at http://www.astrocityamusements.co.uk/.

Now, here are the pictures!