DISCLAIMER: These early Las Vegas entries were the first blog posts I ever did. They’re VERY antiquated compared to the rest of the blog.
Las Vegas gets gallon bottles of Chocolate Milk, so why don’t the Twin Cities?
My destination this time is a casino I’m very fond of. It’s in the middle of nowhere, so I wasn’t sure I’d have time to get over to it. I had extra time today, so I decided to make the journey.
Sam’s Town is the obligatory Wild West-themed casino. I tried to get a better picture of the front, but there’s a giant TGIFridays built off the side that covers up a lot of the cowboy ascetic. You can’t even tell it’s cowboy themed from most angles.
The Sam’s Town RV park is still here. When I was a kid, we’d take the motor home to Vegas every year and stay here. It’s nostalgic seeing this place again. Everything about this area is exactly as I remember it.
I have many fond memories of this place. For example, one year, I met some kid at the pool who thought he was awesome because he had Pokemon cards cut out from the back of a Lunchables box. He was quickly humbled when he saw my binder full of REAL Pokemon cards. I gave him a lot of my extras because anyone who loves Pokemon is a good person. Have I ever told the story about the runaway kid who…? You know what, ask me directly if you want to know. It’s not important right now.
Out front is a long walkway into the casino that you can get a better view of in the first photo. On the left of the walkway is this old caboose. The part of the building that looks like a bunch of old houses once contained a tacky souvenir shop full of wild west-themed stuff. It’s long gone, leaving the entire front of the casino vacant. Cutting through it used to be the quickest way into the building, but they’ve improved the layout many times over the years.
I’ve always wondered about these door handles. Are they the same ones that have been here for the last thirty years? Do they swap them onto replacement doors? Do they have a big store bin of backup handles? Do they custom-order replacements when one is damaged? Either way, I can say with 100% certainty that these handles are the same type that has always been here. Pulling on them is a unique, unforgettable feeling.
This may seem like an odd place to start, but why not? Sams Town’s entire basement is a full-sized bowling alley. Although it was revamped at some point in the mid-90s, it’s been here as long as I can remember. This bowling alley once had a small arcade directly behind where I took this picture from.
I clearly remember many things from that arcade: 5-year-old me getting together with three bigger kids and playing through the Simpsons arcade game. Some racing game with a wheel that I was too weak to keep steady. The three-player Off-Road game. I even have many fond memories from later years, like blowing loads of tokens trying to win a Pokemon keychain, me and my brother getting addicted to Gauntlet Legends, and that one skateboarding game that my older sister would occasionally make a half-assed attempt at playing. After the newer arcade was added, it slowly became more and more irrelevant until it was finally removed. RIP
Up there in the corner, above the restrooms, is a small empty room not being used for anything. When I was young, it was a child care center where you could leave your kids while you went gambling. It was pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a daycare. They had board games, Little People, a TV area that usually had something like Mary Kate and Ashley playing, coloring sheets they would hang on the wall, and a big carpeted climbing thing. In retrospect, it was a cheap and crappy place, but I spent time here every year until I was too old. According to my younger brother, it was full of Pokemon toys and posters in its final days.
Come to think of it, where was he during these trips? I only remember him coming once or twice. Did we drop him off somewhere?
Let’s get the other arcade out of the way before anything else. This one and the downstairs one co-existed for a while in the late 90s and early 00s before this one won out. This arcade has always been crappy, with more focus on ticket games than the other one. One year I talked my brother into wasting all his tickets on nine blacklight bulbs.
As you can see, it’s a pretty standard arcade without many notable games.
Thinking back to this arcade, my memories of it are mostly blank. Only two games stick out in my memory, one of which is no longer here. This is the first arcade I ever played DDR at. It was a third mix machine, and I failed horribly at Mr. Wonderful. This isn’t where I started playing, mind you. That was in an arcade in the Soaring Eagle Casino back in Michigan. I only ever played it here once. Mr. Wonderful managed to stick in my for years after that. 90s Eurodance was some of the worst when it comes to getting stuck in your head. I wish I knew where that machine was these days.
Or do I already know? We’ll see.
This is the other machine I played here all the time. It’s another game I discovered in the early 00s. At the time, it was a v2 machine instead of a v3, so I am strongly biased toward v2’s soundtrack. I was getting into anime and manga at the time, so this machine was responsible for buying my first manga volume a month later. I had to go all over town looking for the English printing of Initial D at the time because manga hadn’t spread to bookstores yet. The first volume had a surprisingly graphic sex scene, so I had to keep it away from my brother.
If you’ve never played it, Initial D is a serious contender for the most accurate adaption of an anime into a video game of all time. Nearly every car, racer, and course featured in the series appear. On top of that, they do their damnedest to make the vehicles work precisely as the manga says. When I returned the following year, I used the manga’s exposition as a guide on how to drift correctly in the game. That’s how accurate this game is.
It goes as far as allowing you to pull off all of the situational asspulls they do in the series. Catching your tire in the curb while drifting? Yep. Using the leaves on the side of the road to decrease traction? Uh-huh. The ridiculous “Machine Gun Shifting”? That’s a technique needed to play at high levels. The stages even have little details, like being able to cut corners on some parts of Akina because Takumi did it that one time he went berserk.
I wanted to get a save card for this game, but every machine in Vegas seems to be out of them. You can’t blame them since the game went out of production over a decade ago.
Let’s look around a bit with the arcades out of the way. Mystic Falls Park is an indoor park that was added around the same time as the upstairs arcade. I have no idea what it had to do with the cowboy theme, but it’s a nice place.
The park is full of animatronic animals. The beaver used to have a habit of being broken most of the time, so I’m surprised to see it here. The woodpecker’s pecking noise was finally turned down since it used to be loud enough to hear from the other side of the park.
The Mystic Falls. A few times a day, a wolf comes out of the cave on the top, a laser light show starts, then it returns to the shelter.
Man, those rocks are getting discolored.
The food eatery is next to the shuttles. My brother and I would often come here to eat during those last few years when we stayed in the hotel instead of the RV park. Before Mystic Falls Park was added, all that was here was an ice cream shop and some fast food place I don’t remember.
Calamity Jane’s Ice Cream Parlor survived! It just moved up to the front of the casino!
Last pic of Sam’s Town. This is an old Mexican Restaurant. I’ve never actually eaten here, but I remember it because it was right by the escalator to the arcade. They used to have tacky statues of Mexicans near the doors, which is the only reason I remember this place. This and Smokey Joe’s were Sam’s Town’s main eating places. There was also a 50s-style diner upstairs that isn’t there anymore.
The next one’s gonna be short. This day’s already gone on for too long.
