It’s been an entire year since Token-Crow left its previous free-hosting wordpress site and moved on up to a dedicated domain. Back then, I decided that the new domain would be a new start for the website. I now had a “decent layout”, “cleaned up older posts”, and “a huge backlog of arcades to write about”.
But in the past year, I’ve written a grand total of three new posts.
So what went wrong? If I have to pass the blame off onto something, it would be the arcade we’ll be looking at today. I’ve sat down to write about it many times over the past months, but every time I’ve found myself dreading having to highlight it all. You could shave it down and only focus on the most interesting parts, which I did end up doing to some extent, but there were limits to how comfortable I was doing that.
Once upon a time I visited an arcade north of New York City called FunFuzion. To this day, it’s still one of the only four arcades I’ve been blown away by enough to deem it an S-class arcade. But the blog post… It’s not one I’m proud of. I was super burnt out at the time and forced myself to write it. I didn’t do that arcade the justice it deserved at all. FunFuzion shut down a few years back, so that terrible page is one of the few remaining archives of the place.
What I’m saying is that I don’t want to ever repeat that.
So, without further adieu, let me introduce you to Clarkade.
Inconspicuously tucked away in a random strip mall in Huber Heights, OH, Clarkade is a used video game store that proudly boasts its own arcade. It’s named after the owner, Mike Clark, according to the website. I’m not a local, so its website is one of the few sources I have for information about it. Sadly, it doesn’t really say much.
As you approach the store, you’re immediately greeted by theee dioramas of official video game figurines. Even before you get into the store, you can tell that there’s a lot of personalized love and care put into this arcade. They could have simply put a poster or some merchandise in the window, but they wanted to go above and beyond. A passion project of a store.
However, the window decorations alone don’t really tell you what you’re in for. If you were to drive by without knowing what was inside, you’d probably imagine a pretty standard used game store: Shelves of used games along the walls, a few bins of plushies and other merchandise, and maybe a few cheap tables for a trading card community they foster as a secondary (primary?) source of income. Even with the arcade sign on the front, you’d expect the “arcade” to consist of three or four random 80s arcade games. Maybe even Arcade1up machines if you were particularly unlucky…
But inside, Clarkade is something else entirely. A single photo alone can never do Clarkade justice, so allow me to paint you a picture with my below-standard quality photos. We’ll get to the arcade shortly.
When you first walk in, the cramped aisles, dim lighting, and random video game nick-knacks in the glass cases give off the impression of an underground electronics store. Instantly, I was reminded of the hole-in-the-wall game stores you see in tours of Akihabara. I’ve been to over 200 arcades now, but I’ve never seen anything quite like this in person.
There’s a certain chaos to the entire store that made it a memorable experience. If not for the fact that I was traveling on-foot with a heavy backpack, I’d have absolutely spent hours combing through their merchandise. I couldn’t count on anything I bought during this trip to actually survive the trip. One bad rainstorm would have been the end of most things. Anything else would have been destroyed by falling backward onto my gear.
If you make your way down the aisle, you’ll find their repair corner. This is, presumably, where they run maintenance on various consoles that get brought in. I had a brief stint working in “store support” for a local used game chain about a decade ago, so this all looks pretty familiar to me. We didn’t work in the stores themselves, but we processed all of the overstock stuff people traded in, ran minor repairs, then either sent it back to the stores or flipped it online.
Here in the back is… something. I’m not entirely sure what this is, but it looks under construction. Mind you, these photos were taken a year ago, so this area probably no longer exists. Their website says they now do TCG tournaments, so maybe that’s what this area was turned into? During my visit, it really added to the “garage” vibe that Clarkade had.
And if you look to the right of the photo, you can see various Commodore computer accessories. The range of stuff they sell here goes way beyond the normal fare you’d find at a standard used game store.
Here in the back is seemingly where they hold console game tournaments, like Super Smash Bros. Skimming through their Facebook page, it doesn’t look like they’ve held any recently, so I’m not sure if this area is still there. Since my visit, they’ve pivoted to trading card games, so this whole back area might have just been converted to a card area. Again, my information is pretty out of date.
By the way, Clarkade is an arcade. I feel it’s been a while since I mentioned that. Just give me a bit. We’ll get there.
One of the most striking parts of Clarkade is their massive collection of store display units spread throughout the store. They had everything from Pokemon Snap stations to the old double-screen World of Nintendo demo units. They weren’t turned on during my visit, so I’m not sure if they’re actually playable or just display pieces.
It makes me wonder if this is the type of store that was founded by a hardcore collector who decided to actually do something with the collection he’d accumulated over the decades. I’ve run into quite a few arcades over the years that came about like that, but never one quite like this. Clarkade’s story is a fascinating one, I’m sure.
Unfortunately, their website doesn’t have any sort of history of the store, so I’ll assume they want to keep it close to their chest and won’t pry. I’m just a humble arcade-goer who takes pride in observing these kinds of places and sharing them with other people. As interesting as arcade history can be, my job is archiving from the perspective of a visitor. That’s also why I don’t do basement arcades.
Before we get to the main event, have a collection of miscellaneous photos. I’d love to go through and talk about each one individually, but I’d be here all day just talking about the store half. This is an arcade blog after all, so I must remember why I’m here.
If you pass through any of the endless aisles of used video games and accessories, and pay the entrance fee, you’ll find yourself magically transported to the other half of Clarkade…
Yes, crammed into the other half of Clarkade is nearly 100 arcade machines, many of which are way more esoteric than I’d expected. There are some in here that even I’ve never seen before.
Now is a good time to mention that they completely revamped the lighting a few months after this photo was taken. Now the arcade is completely illuminated with blacklights and the store half isn’t nearly as dim. The arcade wasn’t nearly as dark as this photo makes it look, but it was pretty dim near the back.
Lately, it’s been a trend for people to take out their camera phones and do a walkthrough of arcades going “look at this” and “look at this” on Youtube. Personally, I prefer the outdated blog format, just because it allows me to be a lot more thorough highlighting specific parts of an arcade.
But one thing I will admit is that video does a much better job capturing the scale of an arcade. The most consistent problem I run into with my format is that arcades are laid out in a way where it’s basically impossible to capture their size in a single photo. Arcades will either be divided into sections or laid out in a way where machines will block the view of other machines. It does a huge disservice to some of these places.
So here are the only other photos I have with a good view of the aisles. Maybe together, they can give an impression of how simultaneously big and small Clarkade is.
And, before I forget to mention it (which I know I will), Clarkade has a section of prize and ticket games up front. Unlike the others, you have to pay individually to play these, because otherwise you could farm them for infinite prizes. I’m told Garcade has added something similar since my visit in 2018, so maybe this model is becoming more common?
I want to call attention to Sky Hero, since I’ve never seen it before. It’s a game by our old Taiwanese friends IGS. I couldn’t actually play it since it was turned off, but it’s there.
Now, let’s finally get to talking about some of these games. As always, I’m going to be focusing on the ones I don’t see often. Otherwise, this blog would quickly devolve into talking about Ms Pac-man for all eternity.
Here’s the original Sega After Burner Taikan cabinet. These were a series of full-motion moving arcade machines that Sega made in the 80s and early 90s. Although I’m pretty sure they weren’t the very first of their kind, they were definitely the most well known.
Today, these things are pretty rare to run into. The only other place I’ve run into this one was at Galloping Ghost, where it was broken down. This is my first time getting to play it (at least in this century). Sadly, I don’t think the hydraulics were working properly, since the machine didn’t move when I played it. I could have simply been doing something wrong, though. Again, first time.
Here we have two Konami late 90s classics, Silent Scope and Mocap Boxing. I was especially interested in the latter since it’s VERY rare to run into one of these in working condition, but alas, it wasn’t running during my visit. These machines are a real pain to maintain.
Like I said in one of my last articles, I’ve run into this thing so many times that I’ve run out of things to say about it. But it’s still novel enough that I feel obligated to point it out. Otherwise, if this is someone’s first time reading my blog, they’d question my integrity for ignoring it.
Not that I have any integrity. My only area of expertise is having been to a lot of arcades. Any time I try to bring technical facts into these posts, I inevitably end up making a fool out of myself.
I’ve wanted to get a photo of this on the blog forever. This is Mazan, Flash of the Blade. It’s a ninja game where you swing a plastic katana around and the game’s sensors pick up on its position. Believe it or not, my tiny hometown arcade had this one when I was growing up, so I’m very familiar with it. It’s pretty hard to find nowadays.
I really wanted to play it more, but the screen was garbled. The monitor was working just enough that you could vaguely see some 3D humanoids running around. I was able to make it a few minutes into the game, before reaching a point where I had to watch an enemy’s movements and block his sword strikes. Of course, that wasn’t happening.
Something I wasn’t expecting to see was a two-player setup for Gunslinger Stratos. I’ve raved about this game before on the blog several times, but the short version is that it’s a third person 3D “fighting game” controlled by dual-wielding light guns. I’d kill for a local arcade where I could actually spend enough time with it to learn the game, but imports from the last decade just don’t exist in the Twin Cities. The only really notable arcades we have out here are either super retro or modern ticket games, with nothing in between.
What I wouldn’t do to live near Clarkade.
This is ParaPara Paradise 2nd Mix. It’s there. You just have to squint a bit. The back of the arcade was pretty dim.
Back during DDR’s heyday, a bunch of arcade dealers saw the demand and started supplying imports of Konami’s other rhythm games from the late 90s. To this day, you can still occasionally find older arcades with an old Dance Freaks, Drum Mania, or Beatmania 5 Key laying around that they never bothered to get rid of.
Among those games was ParaPara Paradise, based on the short-lived Eurobeat ParaPara dance that was popular for a couple years in Japan. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s a dance where you step back and forth while waving your arms in a way that looks like you’re trying to help a plane land. You can probably imagine how the gameplay works.
By the way, this MIGHT be the only public one left in the country. It’s really hard to say with this game. It’s common enough that quite a few rhythm game collectors have one in storage. You occasionally see arcades attempt to run them, but they get rotated out pretty quick due to high maintenance and general unpopularity. Or the arcade just shuts down. Whichever happens first.
Every time I see a DDR machine at a freeplay arcade, it makes me want to move out of the Twin Cities.
DDR Extreme isn’t special enough to bother highlighting on its own, but I’ll never ignore a machine that still has memory card slots. By the way, Clarkade doesn’t have its own Zenius entry at the time of writing this blog. I would, but after Starcade, I swore I’d never do it again. If anyone reading it lives nearby, I’m sure people would love to know about this arcade.
Speaking of unusual rhythm games, here’s Crackin’ DJ. Back in the late 90s, Sega made a pretty half-hearted attempt to enter the arcade rhythm game scene with games like Samba de Amigo, Mambo a GoGo, and this thing (they’d find success with rhythm games a decade later, but that’s neither here nor there). I’ve run into a few people in the rhythm game community who love this game to death, so it must have done something right.
This is only the second time I’ve ever seen it (and that arcade has since gotten rid of it). The gameplay is… What was the gameplay like again? I honestly don’t remember. It’s been a long time. This one was broken, so I couldn’t re-familiarize myself with the game at all. I assume you spin the disc to the beat of the music? I think that volume lever in the middle was involved somehow? I’m drawing a blank.
Moving out of the rhythm game corner and into the realm of games outside of my comfort zone, let’s start with this one. This is Six Gun Select, an early 2000s re-release of a game called Quick Draw Showdown. Between the dim lighting and the pinball machine right next to it, it was really hard to get a good photo of this one. Here’s what you’re looking at. (by the way, that machine being auctioned was from an arcade very near and dear to my heart)
The game itself plays out like a western quick draw showdown. (Formerly) Laserdisc footage of an actor dressed as an outlaw will stand on the screen and talk to you. You’re not allowed to touch the gun until the actor starts reaching for his weapon, at which point you have to whip it out and shoot him before he can put a bullet through your chest. I’m a sucker for video games set in the wild west, so I got pretty absorbed into this one. This game has no right being as fun as it is.
It’s had multiple home ports for some reason, if you’d like to try it.
No matter how many arcades I go to, I’ll always find things that surprise me.
This is Gladiator, an arcade game from the mid-80s that I can only describe as genre-defying. It’s a strange hybrid of a standard 80s “repetitive task” game, a shoot em up, a beat em up, and a fighting game, without really resembling any of those genres.
The gist of the game is that you’re a knight (he’s obviously not a gladiator) who first has to walk through a hallway full of bats to get where he’s going. You use your joystick to switch your shield between high-medium-low positions to intercept the fireballs. The game also has three attack buttons, each of which swings your sword at a different height.
After walking through fire-breathing bats (???) for a bit, you’ll encounter an actual human enemy. The human enemies have a shield and armor, just like you, so fights with them turn into battles of keeping your shield in a position that can block their sword, while also hitting around their shield and slowly tearing off their armor.
Admittedly, it can be a bit clunky to play, but it’s the game I remember most from this arcade. Aren’t arcades great? You can visit hundreds of them and still run into games you’ve never seen before.
This isn’t a pinball blog, but I have to at least mention their pinball lineup. They had a nice selection of them.
You see, when I started this journey, I resolved to keep my photos to a bare minimum and not photograph every inch an arcade like I usually do (it lasted about four arcades into the trip before I relapsed). That meant that I really didn’t get a good shot of their full pinball lineup. I’m bad at estimating, but I’m pretty sure it was at least ten?
There were a couple other games I could talk about. They had some other games I don’t think I’d talked about on the blog before, like Two Tigers (converted) or Kid Nikki. They had 30 different games that they rotate into their Neogeo MVS. They even had a couple of other very modern games that you wouldn’t expect to see in arcade like this (those with a sharp eye probably noticed Sonic and Mario at the Olympic Games and Dark Escape 4D making cameos in some of my photos).
But I’m not going to. After thinking about it, the arcade is the exact opposite of the store: In order to do the store justice, it takes a LOT of photographs. In order to explain what’s great about the arcade, it only takes a few.
Clarkade is an incredibly balanced arcade.
It doesn’t skew toward one particular genre, era, or type of machine. It isn’t all oddities or safe picks. It doesn’t restrict itself to specific games in order to stay “on theme”. It doesn’t even mind including ticket and prize games among its rank. It’s a perfect blend of the unusual and the mundane. I might even go as far as to say it’s the most balanced arcade I’ve ever been to.
As usual, I don’t give arcades ratings, but I do give particularly stand-out arcades a personal seal of approval. This arcade is very, very easily an A-class arcade. In fact, it’s so close to earning an S-class that I may very well go back and edit this post someday to give it the title, like I did with Akihabara Barcade. I don’t even have a “well, I don’t feel right calling it an S-class because…” reason like I do with some arcades. Sometimes the only difference between an A-class arcade and S-class arcade is personal whim.
It’s absolutely a great arcade either way. Go check it out if you’re ever even remotely close to it.
Well, did I do Clarkade justice? Probably not, but hopefully I came close.
With that out of the way, hopefully I can start getting these blog posts out at a decent rate. I’ve knock out two arcades out of… a lot that I saw on this trip. Thankfully, a lot of them are smaller ticket arcades that I have very little to say about, so we can skip those for the time being. I’ll compile them all later.
But next time, I’ve got another interesting arcade in this area to show you. Or rather, a very standard arcade with a handful of games that even I couldn’t believe. Join me as a write a elegy for some very special arcade machines…
