The staff of ST Format didn't waste their youth in arcades playing coin-op games. They couldn't get in because of all the other people who write this kind of factually suspect article!

Tempest 2000 has it. (In fact, most of Minter's games have it.) The Chaos Engine has it as well, by Jimmy White's Snooker doesn't. (Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.) What are we edging around unnecessarily mysteriously? That Arcade Feeling, of course. The elusive fast-pased, panicky feeling all action games so desperately want to capture in an effort to be just like their coin-op idols.

From the beginning, coin-ops have endeavoured to perfect the instant, short-term hit of speeding graphics and nerves aflame. Even Pong, that Atari cornerstone, succeeds in frightening players with its white-hot reaction demands. (When our sister magazine, Amiga Power featured a PD version on their Cover Disk, work ground to a halt as friendly games exploded into 51-round grudge matches.) But how to get from Pong to T2K in a series of easy steps? Sit back, acolyte, and bask in our collective and only marginally smug wisdom as we drag the muddy rivers of coin-op history to make Atari look really good and try to persuade you Battlezone 2000 won't be as unbearably dull as the original...

Your basic arcade game has but one function: to take your money. The ideal game, experts say, hooks you instantly, mesmerises you for two minutes and then kills you off. So how do they explain the appeal of Defender? Staggeringly complicated controls fronting a game you couldn't hope to become proficient at in less than seven goes. Fools.

Early coin-ops used the Wrist Splinter principle: each level of the game was structurally identical to the previous, with monsters getting harder and faster, until, inevitably, you lost, or your legs cramped, or your wrists splintered at the hinge. The aforementioned Defender and Atari's Asteroids were the twin peaks of this type of game and probably claimed the sporting careers of over 7,000 youngsters. But then Phoenix introduced variety with attack waves and a huge final guardian, and before you knew it you could complete a game without sustaining any debilitating limb injuries.

Most of the games (home or coin-op) around today are either beat-'em-ups, shoot-'em-ups or driving games. For these timeless and not at all effigy-rending genres, we have to thank Kung Fu Master (a boring horizontal scroller with half-hearted opponents and magnificently terrible music), Space Invaders (oh, come on) and Atari's token submission, Pole Position. It wasn't the first driving game, but it was the first to play well and the first to feature sampled speech ("Brebare to qualify", hilariously mid-Atlantic twang fans). So good you can almost forgive it for inspiring so many awful clones, for, sadly predictably, any of the groundbreaking original coin-ops were followed by hopelessly similar rivals. But bobbing in the morass of banality were machines by truly legendary manufacturers Williams (not Atari. Sorry). Williams specialised in hugely challenging games like the control-awash Defender. Joust, for example, featured inertia and gravity as you pounded a fly button to keep your ostrich aloft, and Robotron boasted two joysticks, the second used to control the direction of your gun. Absolute madness, really.

Our heroes were left rather out in the cold at this point, due to the amazingly gruesome crash of the entire company (as detailed in the surprisingly entertaining Game Over by David Sheff). But one large sale later, and Atari Games were ready to bounce back with coin-op fun aplenty, including Gauntlet, obscure but well worth the chase Gauntlet-in-3D Xybots, Gauntlet-with-smaller-graphics Crackdown, and Gauntlet II. Atari had also discovered licensing, and a cascade of Tengen-labelled coin-op conversions rained down upon the likes of the Atari ST, largely disappointing but occasionally getting it right. The problem was so glaringly obvious that no one spotted it: namely, how do you squeeze a dedicated and enormously expensive arcade game into a home computer? Answer: you don't, but make failure a spectator sport.

Things bobbled along comfortably poorly, with coin-op conversions announced, delayed, released, panned and sold off to budget labels, and then the Jaguar appeared. Suddenly there was a machine that could do justice to the coin-op ideals of showoffily impressive presentation and disposably exciting gameplay. Enter Minter with his love of old arcade games, and Tempest 2000 was more or less to be expected, which brings us back to the beginning in a neatly circular sort of way. We can only hope that Atari commissions a whole batch of coin-op conversions for their lumpy 64-bit - Asteroids 2000, perhaps, or Robotron 2084 2000. Or something.

Before adopting the Tengen label, Atari tried to capture that Arcade Feeling for the home computer market with their very own imaginatively-titled coin-op conversion label, Atarisoft. Oh what great excitement it caused: at last, correct conversions of everyone's favourite arcade games.

But, cruelly, it was not to be. Although there were a few that did manage to get it dead right - among them the ugly but supremely playable Asteroids Deluxe, the ugly but supremely playable Millipede, and the supremely playable and mould-breakingly pretty Joust - the majority were horribly inept hatchet jobs. Pacman, for example, managed by dint of great effort to be worse than nearly all the PD versions, while sequel Pacland appeared more interested in loading things from disk than letting you play the game.

But the star of the collection had to be Tempest. Audaciously redesigning the game by having the Flipper monsters spiral out of the web straight at you rather than, for example, flip, it was astonishingly difficult in an entertaining unplayable sort of way. Sadly, the Atarisoft titles are no longer aailable, and there are no plans on Atari's part to restock them. Even worse, an attempt to put them out in the Public Domain was scuppered when the original coin-op manufacturers demanded heavy royalties. Such a great shame.