The Trocadero is a well-known retail business center in London and one highlight of the location would certainly be the Funland facility there, home to many great arcade games as well as serving as a prime spot for many location tests of various upcoming coin-op game products. It’s one of the few locations we had a specific tag for since news of these tests often made their way to us. It’s one place that I had always hoped to visit if I ever made it over to England but it looks like I am going to miss out on that now. One of our readers, Rjay63 tipped us off to this a few days ago and now news has broke as to what is going on. You can read the full statement about why the Funland is 
closing here at Intergame Online but to break it down to a nutshell – the management and the landlord have had some sort of dispute and after the landlord disconnected the power to the facility on July 3rd, the negotiations broke down completely from there. At present, that leaves 95 people unemployed now and who knows what will become of the awesome games the Funland had on hand. There is a sign there currently however telling people to head over to the Las Vegas arcade at 89/91 Wardour Street, perhaps they will help pick up the slack here. Also suggested to me as an alternative location is Namco Land at County Hall by the London Eye.
Our friend and contributor Kevin Williams has an online album showing some recent before and after shots of Funland, it was the kind of location that leaves a very noticeable mark on the entire mall there with it closed.
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Shapey Fiend
I pop in their every year or so when I’m visiting London and the place has been on the slide for a decade or more. The building is well located but seems totally dead for some reason. The layout isn’t the best for some reason and things are just placed at random without any sort of flow, it’s hard to put a finger on it. That said the range of games is pretty interesting although you have to trawl through a million boring racing and lightgun games to get to the good stuff. The place just didn’t have the atmosphere of other smaller locations like Casino on Goodge Street (the best arcade in the UK in my opinion). It just lacked that certain spark since it changed from being associated with Sega.