"RMC - The Cave"

Posted: 22 December, 2024

I’m not entirely sure when I first stumbled upon Neil Thomas’ YouTube channel, but I do remember it becoming essential watching during Covid, as he and the team slowly started building out Cave 4.0

If you’ve not watched the RMC channel, it’s a curious mix of restorations, developer interviews, and tech nostalgia, but unlike most others that I’ve flicked through, Neil’s attention to detail, and research, is borderline OCD. In a good way. Well worth a like and subscribe.

His book, Retro Tea Breaks, is one of the best collections of game developer interviews that I’ve ever read, for a couple of reasons: He’s not interviewing the same old faces from the speaking circuit, and the amount of research he’s done is clearly evident from the questions he asks. None of that surface-level, Retro Gamer Magazine guff that you’ve read a million times before… far closer to the sort of questions I’d ask those people, if I happened to be sat around a table with them. And given the games industry is basically shit at talking about itself, that’s important work.

So yeah, I’ve wanted to visit the cave for several years, but spookily, I ended up with a personal reason to make the visit. Ian Ford, who ported Cecconoid to the Amiga, has not only featured in one of the RMC legends interviews, but also worked with Neil to put out a vinyl of some of his music. They’re friends, so when Neil came across an Arcadia Arcade cabinet – Mastertronic’s folly to make an arcade machine out of an Amiga 500 – Ian jumped at the chance to port Cecconoid across to it. And I wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity to play that, was I?

And I’m so glad I went. One thing the videos don’t do justice to is the size of the Cave. It’s a lot bigger than I expected. It’s also immaculate. Every machine you can think of is powered on, with a lovely CRT, or age appropriate monitor, and has been modded with SD cards so you can flick through an entire library of games. Andrew’s Immortal Joysticks are everywhere, begging to be played. The staff are lovely. There’s cups of tea and choccie biccies. Plenty of seats. Good acoustics. Clean loos.

It’s impressive.

There’s so much stuff in there that it’s difficult to get across in words, and pictures barely do it justice. It’s just so much better than I expected, and far better than any other “museum" that I’ve been to. Don’t get me wrong, the National Videogame Museum, in Sheffield, is alright. There’s plenty of stuff in there, but it’s sterile in that “big museum” kinda way. There’re a lot of tatty machines behind glass. Too much of the hands-on stuff requires a service. But that’s still better than the National Museum of Computing, which is, in my opinion, a fucking disgrace (at least when I went there). Sure, it’s got the Bombe. It’s close to Bletchley Park. But really, the best they could do was the fucking classroom? (Which, when I went there, wasn’t even powered on…)

The Cave embarrasses both of them.

So I’m starting a position. The Cave should have national museum status. It’s an absolute treasure, run by a team that are doing the Lord’s work, containing an encyclopedic collection of magazines, games, and machines in perfect working order, begging to be played. And it’s got the world’s only Cecconoid arcade machine. A very rare thing, indeed.

(I put 1.2 million on it, in case you’re wondering.)

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