Allow me to introduce you to Candy Kitchen and Sunsations. Candy Kitchen is exactly what you’d expect, while Sunsations is a souvenir shop that deals primarily in cheap T-shirts. I bring up these two places in particular because you can’t go three blocks without running into one. They’re EVERYWHERE. While Sunsations is mostly restricted to the Delmarva Peninsula, Candy Kitchen is a prominent sight on every single East Coast boardwalk.
Fidget spinners were also a big deal this year. I don’t think there was a single souvenir shop on the beach that wasn’t prominently advertising them. I’m just an old man who doesn’t understand this fad. Then again, we had pogs back in my day. I can’t imagine anyone other than kids of the time understanding the appeal of those things, either.
Hermit crabs were also a hot commodity in beach souvenir shops. These are pretty big compared to the tiny ones most places were selling. Sunsations, in particular, advertised them as one of their main draws. I believe they gave out free ones with a 20-dollar purchase.
I couldn’t tell you what this place was called, but it was somewhere near-ish the next arcade. I couldn’t wait to find out what kind of pizza they sold out on the boardwalk.
You’ve heard of New York and Chicago-style pizza, but this is the far more obscure “Delaware-style” pizza. As far as I can tell, the defining trait seems to be separating the sauce and cheese instead of layering them. It’s kind of strange, but at least it’s unique.
And I finally got my damn penny. I’d have much rather gotten it from an arcade than a random penny presser in the middle of the street, but I was hellbent on getting one after being denied. It was my last penny, too.
Enough acting like a tourist, let’s find another arcade.
Here’s an arcade that proudly advertises itself as being an Ocean City tradition since the 60s. Arcades didn’t catch on outside of places like this until the advent of video games, so it’s pretty rare to find an arcade this old anywhere outside of coastal towns.
Arcades visited: 4
The outside is adorned with kiddie rides that look like they’re from the front of a grocery store. It gives the place a much lighter and friendlier feel than most of the other arcades on the beach.
I’ve always been fascinated by the Flintstones. It hasn’t really had a new cartoon series since the 90s, but it somehow manages to continue existing as an independent brand. While I was on vacation, I’d often see this Fruity Pebbles commercial and think to myself, “in 10 years, there are going to be a bunch of teenagers who hear the Flinstones theme song for the first time and suddenly understand the point of the commercial.”
Funcade was noticeably smaller than the other arcades on the beach. Although the games aren’t as old as you’d expect from an arcade that’s been operating for half a century, the older machines peppered around the venue make it clear that this place has been in business for a while.
This game here is a great example. If you’ve never seen one of these before, they’re a type of ticket game that was extremely common in the mid-90s. That pink surface is an incline rather than a flat surface, so the objective was to simply place a rubber ball at the front and hope it rolled into the slot you were aiming for. There were a lot of variations of it back then, to the point where you’d usually see several types of them lined up next to each other. Before seeing this, I had completely forgotten that these games were a thing. I wonder why these fell out of use. Maybe they take up too much space?
They don’t have a large section of ancient arcade games like Marty’s, but they did keep their original 1960s Skeeball machines. The reason for that big sign in the back is that early Skeeball machines didn’t dispense their tickets. The arcade would have to have someone running the machines like a carnival attraction and hand out tickets manually. I believe these particular machines came out right after automatic ticket systems were added in the late 60s, but the signs were still a standard thing at the time.
Oh, here’s one I’ve had my eye out for. This is Wacky Gator, a variation of Whack a Mole that, like the rollerball game above, was EXTREMELY common in the 90s. Finding a ticket arcade without one of these was like trying to find one that doesn’t have a coin pusher today. This machine is Wacky Gator Too!, a much more colorful “sequel” to the game. I put sequel in quotations because the game is identical beyond the pink and purple gators on the front.
“FEATURING HOPPING HARRY AND JUMPING JAAAAAACK!”
The local casino that my grandparents liked to go to on weekends had a large play area called Kid’s Quest. It had a gigantic multi-level play area, all the latest game consoles, a karaoke stage, a snack area, and pretty much everything else needed to keep kids occupied for six or seven hours while their parents gambled. It was pretty common for places like those to have a couple of random arcade machines sitting around, often ticket games that didn’t dispense any tickets.
My local Kids Quest had six machines. Any sound byte from those six machines is forever ingrained into my memory. Ribbit Racin was among those six. This is the first time I’ve run into this machine since then. I ran into five of those six games throughout my trip. I’ll leave the other four as a surprise.
(The sixth was the Aaaah! Real Monsters ticket game, for those curious. I did run into a broken one in Kansas City a while back, but they’re still very rare nowadays)
As long as we’re on the subject of Nicktoons, this is Nicktoons Racing by Raw Thrills. For some reason, this game is almost always found in theater arcades. This might be the first time I’ve seen one anywhere else. Given the popularity of Spongebob and how common Raw Thrills games normally are, you’d think this one would be everywhere. Maybe it’s because kids in 2007 didn’t have any idea who the Angry Beavers were.
Yeah, there was a second one of these floating around the boardwalk. Can you believe it?
Tekken 3 from 1996. This is one of those very early 3D fighters, from the days when the technology was still new enough to be a novelty in itself. Tekken and Virtua Fighter were the two main competitors in this market at the time. While Tekken is still a common-ish sight in arcades, Virtua Fighter looks so outdated that most arcades didn’t bother to keep them around. It’s the same reason Ridge Racer is so rare, despite Daytona USA being released around the same time and still being extremely common.
I suck at trying to guess the year of these vintage novelties that Ocean City has so many of. The 1970s, maybe?
I’m posting this only because it’s the first time I’ve seen the smaller version. Unlike the full version, which has three different games, the compact version only has Plinko. Lame.
This is one of the most normal redemption counters I’ve seen in Ocean City. It’s very well organized. I love the stuffed seahorses bookending the plush shelf.
Nothing else to see in Funcade.
There’s a storm brewing on the beach. Thankfully, I enjoy this kind of weather. If I didn’t have my luggage with me, I’d take the opportunity to go for a walk on the beach.
“But I don’t want to cure cancer! I want to turn people into dinosaurs!”
Before going any further, I want to explain the layout of Ocean City a bit. The whole city is one, long peninsula. At the very bottom are theme parks, tacky souvenir shops, and other such tourist traps. The further up the island you get, the more they start to thin out. Right around Funcade is a spot where the boardwalk suddenly shifts from shops to a long row of hotels.
Ocean City as a whole is about 3 blocks wide. Once you cross into the hotel section of the boardwalk, you also cross into what I like to call the “miniature golf district”. From this point on, the non-beach parts of the island are littered with nonstop miniature golf courses. I think I counted around 20 of them, each with its unique gimmick.
Sunsations and their hermit crabs again.
If you take a peek at the area just beyond the dinosaur golf course, you’ll find the island’s residential area. A handful of rich old people do live in this area, but they seem to be the only ones. Everyone else just commutes here.
Before we go any further, we need to make one last stop on the beach. This is a part of that long line of beach hotels I mentioned earlier. The Grand is kind of intimidating from this angle, isn’t it?
This is the side of it you see from the beach. They look so different that I wouldn’t even know these were the same building if I hadn’t been here myself. It looks like a normal hotel on one side and a shitty beach hotel on the other. There’s supposed to be an arcade inside, so let’s take a look.
It’s been forever since I’ve been in a poolside hotel arcade. They’re usually the result of the hotel wanting to keep all of its entertainment areas together. They have a pretty unique flavor, don’t you think?
Here it is, slightly to the left of the giant chess set. Honestly, it’s quite a bit bigger than I was expecting. The claw machines make it look a lot bigger than it is, but it’s still a lot more effort than most hotels put in. Let’s see what they’ve got.
Arcades visited: 5
The main reason I made it a point to stop in this specific hotel is that I heard they had Crazy Taxi: High Roller. At first glance, I naturally assumed this was it. That only lasted a minute before I realized that I had no idea what the hell this game was. I guess Sega never really stopped making weird, experimental racing games. I’ll have to remember to research this game more someday.
Coincidentally, I was reading up on Sega’s Cycraft last week and found this game listed as one of the only three games compatible with it. Sega must have had a lot of faith in this game.
Here’s a better shot of the machines you can’t see from the overall photo. It’s just Ghost Squad, Fast and Furious Drift, and the Club Kart machine. The Ghost Squad games are some of the most common rail shooters that aren’t produced by Raw Thrills. These games deserve it since they’re REALLY good. I do wish we got the card-saving system in America, though.
Every once in a while, I’ll find an arcade game I’ve never seen before, then not bother to play it for one reason or another. In this case, it’s because I didn’t want to pay a dollar to play Rambo. Trying to look up information about this game makes me regret my life choices. Every article I can find about it either claims it’s either one of the best or worst games they’ve ever played. I swear to God, I WILL play this game next time I run into it.
And so, the boardwalk comes to an end. The sign on the right sounds like one of those signs you sometimes come across in JRPGs that have no real reason to exist. From here on, the boardwalk is replaced with a long beach consisting mostly of even more hotels. We’re not done yet, since the entire rest of the island is covered in mini golf.
The rain was beginning to come down hard, so I wasn’t going to take a picture of all 20-30 of mini-golf places I came across. This is an arcade blog and few of them had arcades. I’m making an exception for this one.
I’ve seen some crazy miniature golf course gimmicks over the years, but this one stands out for its brilliant simplicity. The theme here is serpents and dragons from various cultures around the world. You’ve got sculptures representing everything from the Greek hydra to the Chinese myth dragon. Had it not been raining, I’d have given this course a go out of sheer respect for whoever came up with it.
Relics from various cultures are also peppered around the course, implying that these dragons coming together was the result of several time periods merging. But the dragons aren’t the only ones who’ve arrived from beyond time and space! Knights in shining armor, Egyptian and Greek soldiers, primitive warriors in tiki masks, and other heroes from throughout history have come together to put an end to these cold-blooded demons once and for all!
If you’re brave enough to survive 18 holes of death, your golfing battle culminates in climbing the Serpent’s Temple to defeat that sickly-looking thing standing on top of it. He doesn’t look like much, but he’s the one responsible for reality colliding into itself! When he’s defeated, time will be restored and the many warriors who fought alongside you bid you one final farewell as you look down upon the battlefield. Although you’ll never see each other again, the legend of your golfing skills will be passed down to their children for generations. During your next trip to the library, if you happen to pick up a book of ancient myths, you might just find a record of your story.
I assume that’s what the plot of this golf course is. If not, it really should be.
After that last golf course, this one’s kind of underwhelming by comparison. This is either Lazertron Minigolf or Planet Maze, depending on who you ask. It does have an arcade, so I guess I have to stop here, don’t I?
Arcades visited: 6
I didn’t get a good establishing shot of this place, because this is one of the very few arcades that decided to ask me why I was taking pictures of all of the machines. He gave me the third degree like I was doing something wrong, so I had to pretend I was updating Aurcade to get him off my back. It made the rest of the stop awkward. I wanted to get my photos and get out.
UPDATE: This arcade closed its doors a year later. This is one of the last remaining records of this arcade. Thanks to its closing, I learned that it had been open since 1993. I really wish they had let me take more pictures so I could do it justice.
This facility had mini-golf, laser tag, and the huge indoor climbing thing you can see in the previous photo. The arcade games were stuffed into whatever room they had leftover. The games were pretty much exactly what you’d expect. They had the Fast and Furious, the Time Crisis, the House of the Dead, and everything else you’d normally find at a place like this.
This is the third time I’ve seen this same House of the Dead machine. When I saw the first one, I was surprised to see such an old machine still up and about. Only now do I remember that this game was everywhere in Las Vegas. This isn’t the last time I’ll see it, either.
Of the games here, this is the only one I hadn’t seen before. The name of the game is Landing High Japan, a flight simulator from 1999. As you can tell from the picture, someone was hogging this game, so I, unfortunately, didn’t get a chance to play it. From what I know of it, you fly a commercial airliner across the ocean and then try to land it. Pretty standard flight simulator stuff. This game series has been around since the late 80s, so there must be a market for arcade flight simulators.
And of course, there were plenty of ticket games here. Dunk the Alien looked hauntingly familiar. I knew it from somewhere but couldn’t remember where. It wasn’t until several weeks after my trip that I remembered: My local arcade growing up got this machine in the mid-00s. By then, I was mostly going for DDR, so I didn’t pay too much attention to these kinds of machines, but the bright color scheme still left quite the impression.
That old arcade is long gone. I do save every picture of it I can find; in case I ever decide to write up a tribute to it.
This is Zoofari, a child-friendly first-person shooter meant to look like a circus peanut cart. The two guns, which are currently knocked out of their holsters, are barrel guns that shoot peanuts into the hungry animals’ mouths. These graphics are so awful that I had to download a rom of this game just to check the release date. These are 2006 graphics.
I was on vacation for almost three weeks. I’m sorry if it feels like I’m rushing through some of these arcades. I visited so many that I just had to post the highlights. Don’t worry, in one more blog post we’ll finally be done with the first day.
(or so I thought at the time of writing this)
