As kids my cousin and I first discovered arcade games in a fish & chip shop in Hill Top West Bromwich (when it was safe to send young kids around to the shop to fetch tea) and this is where we first saw our first arcade game which pretty much started our interest,of course later trips to the 'sea side' on the coast to places such as Blackpool,Morecambe and Rhyl helped fuel this interest along with Stourport. It was not long before my cousin came up with the idea of writing our scores down on bits of paper and then writing them down in exercise books back home which sounded like something to do,so when on holiday we carried a biro and sheet of paper and noted our scores as we went along. On returning home these scores were writen down and recorded in numeral order with the highest scoring game at the top and so a leader board or division system came about where we started re-writing and splitting the ever increasing list of scores into divisions like soccer league tables,as we were growing up these `Invader Charts` as we called them got bigger and bigger up until around millennium time where the arcades in our opinion simply died (and filled up with Street Fighter cabs). Emulation sort of took over as an option but it simply became a chore to update the charts because back then we did not own computers and would still be having to re-write everything out by hand to insert/edit the new scores!,at first we updated every week then it became every month and then six months or more due to the sheer amount of writing.
This is a visual record of my bits of paper,the Invader charts themselves and other material that I still have in as folder which has accumulated over a period of time from the early eighties to the millennium.
I am not sure exactly to the month or even year when we started playing these games but my first full invader chart of scores is 1984,my cousin tells me his first is 1981! so we must of started playing them at least around 1980? and clearly I have seen what my cousin had been doing and finally decided to also record my scores the same way some time later. In 1984 I would of been 9 years old so this is a record of information from then to around the year 2000 when I pretty much stopped doing the charts aged 29 years. I hope they are interesting to someone.
