So now, well after a year, we’re finally in the final stretch of arcades I saw in Denver. Due to various issues in 2020, I wasn’t able to make much of a trip, so it worked out fine (I DID go to at least one arcade, but I’ll get to that some day).
On my walk between the last location and here, I passed by a field of… gophers? I couldn’t really tell what they were, but they’d taken up residence on a barren plot of soil dividing the road.
So this is Nickel-A-Play, hidden away in one of the bigger shopping plazas I’ve seen. This arcade is the reason my sights were set on Denver to begin with. Once upon a time, Nickel-a-Play was a small chain of arcades that also expanded to Omaha, but it’s long since died down to this single location.
When I went to Denver many years ago for an anime convention, I remember finding out about this place a week later and regretting that I didn’t take the time to check it out. Well, now I’m finally correcting that mistake. What could possibly be inside?
As soon as you walk in, you’re struck with the air of a cheap local 90s arcade with gaudy floor tiles, and homemade signs hung up everywhere, some that look like they’ve been hanging from the ceiling for at least a decade or two. They don’t make them like this anymore. In fact, instead of just gushing about how great this arcade is for 5000 words, how about we use this article as an educational lecture where I teach you how to learn an arcade’s history by looking at it? I’m sure you already know I’m completely in love with this place.
Just look at that redemption counter. It’s packed to the brim. Given the location’s size, they can’t really afford to keep anything “behind the counter”, so their entire stock of prizes is on full display. Everything from Pete the Repeat Parrot to tacky souvenir mugs.
My favorite detail is that, instead of having packages of candy on display like you’d expect, they just have opened pieces of candy on the shelves with tickets acting as dividers. Even the beef stick on the bottom shelf. This place is really something else.
It’s impossible to capture in a single image, but this place uses every square inch to cram all these games into such a tiny space. The power outlets have to hang from the ceiling awkwardly instead of trying to route the power to the walls like most arcades. Right away, this whole place gave me the same vibes as the other nickel arcade I visited in Chicago. Looking at the selection of games, it’s obvious this arcade stopped keeping up with the latest games around 2000-ish, with only a small handful predating that.
Here we have the birthday area. They have 50 chairs stacked up, but I doubt you could seat that many people in this tiny area.
The bathrooms are way in the back. The women’s restroom sign has long since disappeared, forcing them to tape a cheap sign to the door. One thing I gotta say, between the brightly painted doors and colorful floor tiles, this arcade must have been quite the event when it first opened. It wasn’t just a place that awkwardly moved in after a shoe store shut down or something. They went out of their way to completely remodel the place with new doors and tiles. The walls look like they’ve seen better days, though.
It was the last area I walked through, but it feels like the best place to start. Here’s the ticket area. Immediately to the left of the entrance is an entire area dedicated to these games. As we’ve seen at other space-conscious arcades, they store boxes of parts on top of the Skeeball machines. Dunk N Alien’s plexiglass has gotten so scuffed over the years you can barely see the alien anymore.
Oh god, this is the most faded marquee I’ve ever seen on an arcade machine.
I recognize Rock N Bowl as a late 90s machine, but Bell Ringer looks to be from near the start of the decade, just going from the colors (EDIT: I looked it up., 1990). I always say you can generally tell how long an arcade’s been open from how old the ticket machines are, and I believe this is the oldest one. I don’t think this arcade was open in the 80s because of it. Perhaps it was capitalizing on the popularity of places like Discovery Zone in the early 90s.
There aren’t any ball-rolling games or other blatantly ancient ticket games, so I doubt whether this arcade was opened before 1994. But the Austin Powers machine is proof that it has been around since the late 90s. This machine was EVERYWHERE when it came out, but the movies were such a fad that no place would go out of their way to get one of these machines after 2000-ish. Every time I see an arcade that still has it, I know it’s got at least two decades under its belt.
Of course, these are just personal musings. For all I know, it opened in 2010 and bought this machine cheap somewhere.
The same story goes for this Titanic ticket machine. Released in 2000, this machine was EVERYWHERE. This may very well be one of the last new games they ordered before they started severely cutting back on how many new machines they bought yearly.
When I was scouting this arcade out by looking at pictures on Google images, I kept seeing glimpses of the light guns and wondering what it could possibly be. Well, now I know. It’s a very bad Lasertron game where you ride a minecart and shoot ghosts as they pop up.
The only really notable thing about it is that it’s a ticket game. And I got a LOT of tickets from it. Now’s a good time to mention that you have to pay 3 dollars to enter the arcade, and all of the games are set to free play, except the ticket games. Those cost a nickel a play, with one exception.
Dance Dance Revolution Supernova costs something like 45 cents a round. From what I gather, they still have an active community who come on weekends to play this. Since talking about the age of the arcade is a theme, I have to point out that this is an older machine, probably originally a 3rd mix from 1999. The version it’s running is Supernova from 2006, meaning this game was popular enough to keep it updated until then.
They very well might have kept upgrading it beyond that, but the upgrade kits after Supernova were a complete mess. Look, they even keep a trash can next to it. I’m sure this has consistently been one of their most popular games for the last 20 years.
But enough about the ticket games. Around the corner, we get into the real stuff. The games seemed loosely arranged by theme, with this wall being the stock 80s arcade games. Of course, all of these were available well into the 90s.
Blasteroids is super, super underrated.
Whatever other 80s arcade machines they had were mixed into this wall of machines they had, which also seems to include everything they didn’t have a better place for. Look at the screen on poor Gauntlet Legends.
The sign says Ninja Masters, but it’s Samurai Shodown II. This arcade had well over 100 games, but this is the one I ended up getting hooked on the most. It’s not even rare. We’ve already seen it two or three other times in Denver alone. But I can’t get enough of its slow, combo-free gameplay style. Later entries in this series cranked up the speed pretty significantly, to the point where it feels like you’re playing on fast forward if you’re used to II.
One thing that makes me second-guess my estimate of a 1993-ish opening date on this arcade is the existence of these very late 80s games. I’m not entirely sure if these were still available new by that point.
Maybe I got the date wrong? No, there are just way too many early 90s machines sitting around. If they opened in the late 80s, their entire initial stock would be games from that era! That would mean almost their entire first lineup of games got rotated out for 90s games just a few years after opening! That doesn’t make sense! This is absolutely an early 90s arcade! Given how cobbled together a lot of machines in this place are, they probably got quite a few of them from resellers. That would explain where the 1987 games like these came from.
The original pre-Calibur Soul Edge! Complete with a generic marquee! I joke, but there’s a reason for that marquee that we’ll see later. For now, I took the opportunity to acquaint myself with this series since I don’t see many Soul Calibur machines in the wild anymore. It’s okay. Probably better in multiplayer, like most fighting games.
Like I said, they did have a FEW post-2000 games. If you’ve been keeping a sharp eye, you’ve already seen a couple like Deal or No Deal and Guitar Hero. I mostly took a photo of it because it’s rare to run into, and I didn’t get a better shot of the War Gods machine next to it. I really want to capture as much of this arcade as possible in this post, just in case it dies. I already regret not getting a very good overview shot of the ticket area, you know…
This machine here is Super High-Impact. Think of it like NBA Jam before NBA Jam, but with football. No rhyme or reason to the games against this wall at all!
Moving on to the other side of the aisle, this is where they kept most of their fighting games like Street Fighter and Primal Rage.
Speculating about this arcade’s history a bit, here’s something interesting. They have both Darkstalkers and Vampire Savior. That tells me that Darkstalkers must have been popular enough to have the sequel alongside the original. This arcade was probably a fighting game hotspot for the local kids in the latter half of the 90s.
So when it came time to get Vampire Savior, they had to choose between upgrading the original or swapping out the game in the old Marvel Super Heroes machine. Guess which didn’t make the cut. (this is Vampire Savior’s control panel if you can’t tell)
I want to talk about that Soul Calibur machine for a moment. Just looking at it,t here are two things immediately obvious about it: It used to be a Soul Edge machine and it used to be a Mortal Kombat II machine. Mortal Kombat II was released in 1993, while Soul Edge was released just two years later. One thing that really strikes me about this arcade is that, despite all of the other games from that era and all of the other fighting games, there’s no trace of Mortal Kombat. Isn’t it strange that a game as recent as Mortal Kombat II would be retooled into a Soul Edge machine? Perhaps Mortal Kombat was too controversial at the time and they opted to remove it? That would also explain why the words are scratched off the front of the machine.
Or, more likely, they bought a new Mortal Kombat III machine and didn’t need II anymore.
Next is the light gun aisle, featuring games they couldn’t fit elsewhere.
Here’s the original Lethal Enforcers! I remember seeing it EVERYWHERE as a kid, but I haven’t seen it in the past 20 or so years (I have seen both sequels!). I wanted to play it to see if it holds up, but both guns were very broken. Oh well.
Many years ago I went to an arcade called Fun World. It was one of the few arcades to ever get an S-class rating from me. The middle floor of that place had all sorts of weird, crappy-looking games that I hadn’t seen before, but I was so pressed for time I didn’t get to play all of them. Finally, I’ve once again run into Crossfire, a paintball light gun game.
And it was… pretty bad. I missed nothing. Nickel-a-Play did have two other games from Fun World we’ll get to later.
I never even knew Maximum Force/Area 51 had a dedicated showcase cab. The standard size game was so common…
Mixed in with the light gun games was Raiden III, one of the very, very few shoot-em-ups in the arcade. Strange, the genre was pretty popular in the 90s.
And if you were wondering why they didn’t have any Capcom VS games, they did. It was just in the light gun area for whatever reason.
I’m talking about the arcade row by row, but let’s take a moment to talk about a few of the other games. Here is the one and only pinball machine in the arcade. And it’s Street Fighter II, no less. My gut tells me they used to have others, but they’re such a pain to maintain that they’ve probably given up on most of them. Even this machine was barely hanging on.
Here is another one of those games I mentioned seeing at Fun World. This is Tokyo Cop, a game made by Gaelco. If you don’t know, Gaelco is a company from Spain known for making such hits as Surf Planet, Radikal Bikers, and Smashing Drive. While I don’t dislike those games (I quite enjoy Smashing Drive, thank you), it’s obvious that they were made on a pretty low budget. This game is no exception. This game is a blatant rip-off of Taito’s Chase HQ series, just with an awkward open map. It wasn’t terrible, just not something I’d play again.
The third and final game I didn’t get to play at Fun World is another Galeco game called ATV Track. I swear that this, Smashing Drive, and Tokyo Cop were all built on the same engine with the same physics. Normally I wouldn’t be able to tell, but it’s really obvious in this case.
Unlike the other two, this is a normal racing game with an ATV. I guess I didn’t miss anything at Fun World.
Oh my god! After five years of blogging about arcades, I’ve finally found a Ridge Racer! It’s the most recent one, but I’ll take it! The Ridge Racer series is one of the most important racing game series ever. When the original was released, it was one of the most cutting-edge games on the market. Then Daytona USA happened shortly after, and the west forgot Ridge Racer existed. In Japan, it was a very influential game, with a LOT of later racing games borrowing from its atmosphere (although few dared to copy its extreme drift physics).
Here it is. The third and final Virtual On machine in Denver. Finding this game anywhere else is a nightmare, but these guys have THREE of them. Of course, two of the arcades that had them have died since I visited, so now this is the only one. Hmm…
We had LA Machineguns in the Twin Cities. Two of them. Now they’re gone, and I regret that I didn’t pay more attention to it. This game is amazing. If you ever see one, make sure to give it a shot. Especially if the vibrating platforms you stand on still work!
Suzuka 8 Hours, AKA “that one game you sometimes run into at hotels or theaters that’s still around because they don’t feel like getting rid of it, so the screen hardly works anymore”. Well, that was the case a decade ago. Nowadays, most of these have finally given out. We may still have one on the outskirts of the Twin Cities, but the buses don’t go that far, so I haven’t been able to check personally…
Back to going down the rows. This one seemed to have a sports theme, even though games like Battletoads were mixed in.
Here, for example, is NBA Jam, with one of the most awkward screen replacements in the arcade.
And what looks to be a custom piece of control artwork. I know there’s a proper term for this, but this is my second day in a row of writing this post, and I’m tired.
Around one corner was Merit Boardwalk, a collection of bar-style trackball games. I couldn’t play it because it was booting up. They also had a beanbag tossing game in the same vein called BAGS, but I didn’t take a photo of it. Cut me some slack. There were a lot of machines.
That marquee isn’t wrong, “Run and Gun” is the name of a basketball game. The setup where multiplayer games had screens facing away from each other was toyed around with a bit during this era. Title Fight and the double Nintendo VS machine are probably the two most well-known. Ultimately, they decided just having the screens side by side was a more effective use of space.
Along the opposite wall was a row of sit-down driving games. Crazy Taxi, Rush 2049, Cruis’n, and Hydro Thunder, if memory serves. My gut’s telling me they also either have Califonia Speed or Sega Super GT somewhere, but I could be wrong.
I like this particular photo because you can get a good look at how big the ticket area is in the background. It’s WAY bigger than I made it sound.
And finally, we have this small corner of older games that don’t really fit anywhere else.
There didn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to what they kept in this corner beyond not fitting anywhere else. Oh, look, it’s one of SNK’s pre-Neogeo games that isn’t Ikari Warriors. You don’t see many of those in the wild.
And Joe and Mac, or “Caveman Ninja” as it was called here. I’ve never seen this one in the wild before.
Unfortunately, there was also a shoot ’em up here, but it’s so dark I can’t determine what it was. I wanna say it was Strikers 1943.
And another blasted Xybots machine. This is the third one for those keeping count. What the hell is it with Denver and this game?
Well, there you have it. Since I decided to focus this post mainly on the age of the arcade, my overall impression may not have come through. This truly is an arcade you won’t find anywhere else. But I can’t bring myself to give it an S-class ranking.
Instead, this arcade has pushed me to finally break my own rating system and add a second one. This arcade hereby gets my first official A-class rating. Retroactively, so do several other arcades! This is a title I’m giving to arcades that don’t qualify for an S-class but still fill me with excitement when I think back to them. Feel free to use the A-class tag on the left if you want to see which other posts I’ve retroactively added it to.
Oh yeah, we have one other tradition to take care of. We got a Dunkin’ Donuts here in Mall of America recently, so there’s not much point in this anymore, but it’s still tradition!
Anyway, the next arcade on my journey was… Eh, just read the post and find out.
