Once upon a time, in 2004 New York, a small bar-slash-retro arcade hybrid called Barcade set up shop in Brooklyn. Little did they realize that this little arcade would eventually go on to spawn countless copies in every major city in the country. Hell, Chicago alone has like 15 of them. I don’t think anyone would argue that this arcade single-handedly deserves the title of the most crucial arcade of the new millennium.
Arcades visited: 40
EDIT: I want to preface this with two things. First, this is the blog post that made me stop taking vertical photos. It isn’t very pleasant to scroll through when there are a lot of them. Second, please remember that this was my first major trip after I started this blog. I wasn’t very knowledgeable about arcade games at the time, especially 80s ones. Reading this post again five years later, I realize there are a LOT of games I could have said something much more interesting about and a few facts I consider dubious nowadays.
Plus, this is the 20th post I made about this trip. You could tell I just wanted to get it over with. It doesn’t help that it’s tough to write about arcades that are small and dedicate the entire floor space to games.
Well, not THIS specific location. The original was so popular that two more ended up opening in NYC. This is one of the Manhattan Island Barcades. We’ll be hitting up all three before the day ends.
As you can tell, this place is small, cramped, and full of nerds. The game selection is fascinating, though.
Basically, there are two types of retro arcade bars. One of them is targeted at an older audience and generally sticks to things like Pac-man, Centipede, Donkey Kong, and the like. (pictured is Millipede, the far less popular sequel to Centipede)
The other kind skews a bit more toward the 90s, generally including things like Konami beat-em-ups and NBA Jam. These arcades are, by far, the ones I prefer because of how damn unpredictable the game selection can be. They’re full of random shit like Golden Axe 2 and Moonwalker that you won’t find anywhere else. Walking into one is a complete crapshoot, and I love every minute of it.
Here’s the Play Choice 10, an old arcade machine into which operators could stuff ten different NES carts (assuming the games had a Playchoice-10 release). Every single Barcade had one of these, so we’ll see a lot more of these.
What I love about this one is how bizarre the game choice is. It’s got standard stuff like Punch-out, Zelda, and Bubble Bobble alongside Mappy-Land, Mega Man 5, and Jaws. Jaws? Really?
Another mainstay that every location had was a Neo-Geo machine. Similar to the Playchoice 10, these arcade machines could hold multiple games. Except these games were all arcade exclusive and far more powerful than any home console of the time. Except for the Neo-Geo AVS, but that doesn’t count.
I tried to get a shot of what the machines were running, but this place was so dark that most photos turned out awful. I can make out Bust a Move and one of the Metal Slug games, which are two of the most standard games to load into one of these, but I can’t tell what the other two are. I think the one on the right is one of the Samurai Shodown games?
They even had a handful of games like Slither, a mediocre Centipede clone, that aren’t known to exist at any other arcade in the country.
This one is Ghouls and Ghosts, the prequel to Ghosts and Goblins. As a kid, I had its successor on the NES and always remembered it as the one game I’d never play. If memory serves, Grandma came home from a swap meet one day with a bunch of NES games she got for 50 cents each. I played the hell out of Zelda, but Ghost and Goblins mainly collected dust.
In the 80s, arcades were so popular that new games were being churned out constantly. People still remember Pac-man and Donkey Kong, but far more games have fallen into complete obscurity. Anteater, for example, is another game you probably won’t find at any other arcade in the country. It’s not because the machine is particularly rare but because there are so many other machines that most owners would rather use floor space on.
This Barcade did have its share of standard stuff alongside the oddities. I’ve said once before that most of my knowledge of games from this era come from their Atari 2600 ports. Joust was one I really wanted to like when I was young, but the controls are so horrible. The arcade version is way more playable.
Barcade’s lineup is mainly centered on the late 80s and early 90s games, but they have a few that go all the way into the 00s. I hate trying to play games like American 18 Wheeler on the stand-up cabs, but I appreciate that they’re here. If I had been here a year later, I’d have put my name on Crazy Taxi’s high-score list for fun.
Of all the games they had here, this was the one that I wanted to see the most. Tron was popular enough in the 80s to have a second arcade game called Discs of Tron. The full environmental version of this machine had a very limited release, making it quite the collector’s item. Unlike some of the games in this arcade, this is far from the only remaining, if only because its notoriety has led to these machines being taken care of. Especially since a big chunk of the original machines released in 1983 had the back sawed off so, they’d take up less floor space.
This machine lives up to the hype. It’s got voice acting, lights both in front and behind the player that flash in sync with the game, mirrors to make the inside look bigger, and a cool glowing pink bar. It’s one of the most elaborate machines released during that decade. Unfortunately, the game itself isn’t amazing. You just run back and forth, throwing discs at an enemy while running back and forth to avoid his discs. You play this one for the spectacle.
I hate to have my only input for these machines be “it’s rare,” but this is an old black-and-white game called Fire Truck from the late 70s. This is the kind of machine you’d only find at arcade museum-type places that pride themselves on their weird games. It’s not something you’d typically see in a place like this. I’m telling you, this location has bizarre taste in machines.
Here’s one I’m amazed isn’t more common, The Real Ghostbusters. This game’s actually a Doki Doki Panic-Esque rebranding of an unrelated Japanese game called Meikyu Hunter G, about guys in jumpsuits running around shooting ghosts with beam guns. I can see why they took one look at this game and thought, “let’s just reskin this into Ghostbusters.” The Ghostbusters version also adds a couple of extra stages that weren’t in Meikyu Hunter G.
I’m sure everyone’s heard of Dragon’s Lair, yeah? Taking advantage of laser-disc technology, it was one of the first FMV games. Modern lexicon has made this game extremely easy to explain: It’s an entire game of quicktime events. Throughout the cartoon, the main character is constantly falling into danger, and you must quickly hit the correct button prompt to progress or be treated to a custom death animation for each part of the game. What makes this one frustrating is how hard it is to tell WHICH button the game wants you to press. For example, the first prompt of the game is falling through a hole in the bridge while a tentacle monster rises from the moat below. Most players instinctively try to hit “up” to climb back onto the bridge, but the correct choice is just to hit the attack button. There’s no on-screen prompt, so it’s pure trial and error.
The animation is all done by Don Bluth, best known for making most notable cartoons of that era that weren’t Disney. Land Before Time, An American Tale, Secret of NIMH, etc. Dragon’s Lair was one of his earlier works.
Speaking of FMV quicktime event games, this is Time Traveler. It’s very much the same thing as Dragon’s Lair, except it’s done with live-action actors and doesn’t have much in the way of a narrative. Instead, it’s just a bunch of short sketches where the titular time-traveling cowboy is standing around minding his own business when some random period-appropriate warrior pops out of nowhere and starts attacking him. Also, like Dragon’s Lair, you just have to guess which button saves the cowboy from the attack.
This game stands out because it uses a carefully positioned mirror to make the cowboy and his enemies appear as tiny holograms attacking each other. It’s pure style over substance but look at this machine. You’ve got to admit it looks cool as hell.
Pigskin 621AD is a game where medieval warriors face off against each other in Ye Olde Football. This game bothers me, because it’s dark ages Europe with a bunch of Viking imagery thrown in.
Being an arcade with a heavy 90s focus, it would be weirder if they didn’t have a Street Fighter machine. Some arcades have Street Fighter 2, while some prefer 3 or Alpha. If an arcade wants to be particularly cheeky, they’ll have something like Puzzle Fighter or the original on the floor. This arcade goes the extra mile with one of the most esoteric entries in the series. This is Street Fighter (The Movie (The Game)). If you’ve had the fortune of never playing this game before, imagine if Mortal Kombat had the cast of the live-action Street Fighter movie instead of Sub-Zero and his friends. It’s got the same awkwardly digitized characters, clunky gameplay, and even a bit of blood spraying around.
On an unrelated note, does anyone remember the 2009 Chun Li movie?
Keep this in mind for now. It’ll be important later.
It’s no secret that I don’t have time or money to play every machine in every arcade I find. But with a title like “Escape From The Planet Of The Robot Monsters,” this was one of the first I put my coins in. This game reminds me a LOT of Zombies Ate My Neighbors, both in tone and gameplay. Basically, you run through the levels shooting Robot Monsters while rescuing hostages. At the same time, a computerized voice yells at you (strangely, the voice is your human general and not one of the Robot Monsters, unless this game has a major plot twist near the end). It doesn’t have Zombies At My Neighbors’ vast array of weapons and enemy types, but what can you expect from a 1989 game?
This here is a machine I’ve been searching for forever. When Wreck-It Ralph first came out in theaters, Disney promoted it by producing a relatively limited number of Fix-It Felix arcade machines. Most of them littered around Disney World, but a small handful made it to the outside world. Only a very small handful of these exist.
Contrary to popular belief, this isn’t just a port of the Flash version offered on Disney’s website, even though they’re very similar looking. The arcade version is significantly harder to control since you have to manually walk between the windows instead of just teleporting between them. I think the Flash version is a bit more accurate to the movie in that regard.
Speaking of which, let’s all hope the sequel doesn’t suck. It’s not gonna top the Pac-Man Fever parody, but maybe it’ll turn out okay? UPDATE: It’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.
Here’s a slideshow of all of the other stuff they had. I tried to keep the commentary to games I had something to say about because we’ve still got two more Barcades to visit. Some of these are still pretty interesting, though. Others, not so much.
The location of my second Barcade was littered with sushi places and oriental bars. I assume this is the Japanese part of town or something.
And so we come to the second Barcade of the three.
Arcades visited: 41
I expected all three of them to have similar layouts but thatwasn’t the case. This location was very, very narrow. You can’t see it from the photo, but nearly all the machines are lined up in a straight line along that left wall. There isn’t space for them anywhere else.
Before getting into the other machines, I’d like to point out that their Play Choice-10 had a much more standard lineup of games than the last one. I played Super Mario Bros 2 for the first time on Play Choice-10 at Gold Dust Casino in Reno, Nevada. I’ve mentioned that game room a few times in the past. It was tiny and across the hall from the gift shop. The four things I remember being there were the Play Choice-10, Centipede, Title Fight, and one of the kiddie rides where you put a coin in and get to ride the seal. This one, I believe. I have no idea if the ball on its nose was supposed to spin or if it was just loose and starting to unscrew. That seal was there every year, though.
That’s one arcade that will stick in my memory forever. We never stayed there for more than a few hours while passing through each year, but my oldest arcade memories came from that place. I think it’s because most of the other casinos we stopped at had other things for a four-year-old to do, so that was the only one where I spent the entire stop in the arcade. That Mario 2 in Play Choice-10, in particular, is what I still consider to be the first video game I played instead of just hitting buttons at random. Never could make it over the waterfall, though.
Where was I? Oh yeah, Barcade.
At this Barcade they had not one, but TWO NeoGeo cabs. One is a pretty normal 4 slot, while the behemoth on the right is the far rarer 6 slot version. There’s an arcade on the outskirts of St Paul that actively brags about their 6 slot NeoGeo. I’ll visit it if I can ever find a ride out there.
These are the ten games they had. My camera is not equipped for dark arcades. Either way, in 20 years, if someone wanted to know which games this particular Barcade had, they could use these photos to try to piece it together. Or use the better-lit Google images.
In the cartoon Avatar the Last Airbender, all of the animals are hybrids of two animals, like spider-wasps or turtle ducks. At one point, there’s a bear. When the characters hear about it, they stand around for like 30 seconds, trying to wrap their head around the bear. “Are you sure it’s not a platypus bear?”, “No, it just says ‘bear’.”
That’s exactly how the original Street Fighter makes me feel.
That seems to be a strange preference of this particular Barcade since they also have the original Marvel vs. Capcom over the more famous sequel. That’s not nearly as strange as just having Street Fighter, though.
Really? Just ‘Street Fighter’?
Here’s a strange game called Toobin’ where you ride down a river in an innertube, collecting points and avoiding an enemy who’s also in an innertube. This game is way more fun than it sounds, but it reeks of “okay, the boss says we’ve gotta come up with a new game within the next five minutes, or we’re all fired.”
All three Barcades had Pac-man Battle Royale (which most people tend to call “Pac-man VS”). One of the three had an imported version, which I believe to be this one. Barcade’s insistence on carrying these machines despite not fitting with the retro games is a big reason that nearly every bar arcade out there has this game. Every one of them is just trying to copy Barcade’s success. That goes for Up-down, the hundreds of them in Chicago, and every other Barcade knock-off out there. Then again, you’d have to be creative to come up with any way to spin a bar arcade that wouldn’t feel like a rip-off…
…Next year I’m taking a trip to Denver. It will be glorious.
This is a game that I very nearly ignored, assuming it was just another Galaga clone. This one is Gyruss. It’s like if you had to play Galaga while flying through a 3D tunnel. I was surprised by how much fun I had with it. Check this one out if you ever encounter it.
This is Strider2 and Rygar. Despite seeing it mentioned in various game magazines as a kid, I had never played either Strider. I assumed it had something to do with the Beverly Cleary book from the name alone. One of my Elementary school teachers was named Mrs. Henshaw, so every teacher in the building thought it was hilarious to make their students read Dear Mr. Henshaw (“Strider” was the title of the sequel, for those of you in the iGeneration). If I ever find a local Strider machine, I’ve got to remember to give the game more attention.
Here’s one that I don’t see at retro arcades as often as I’d expect. This is Killer Instinct, Rareware’s attempt to cash in on the popularity of Mortal Kombat. Killer Instinct was pretty popular for a time, featuring a cast of memorable characters like Saberwulf, Spinal, Riptor, and those other six guys nobody used. However, the Mortal Kombat hype was dying down by then, so it didn’t last very long as a franchise. I think Saberwulf got a spin-off at some point, and there was a failed reboot attempt, but that’s about it.
Oh, Batman Forever had an arcade game. I honestly didn’t know that. This game is a standard side-scrolling beat-em-up, but it doesn’t feel very good to play. There’s too much going on on-screen, the controls don’t feel right, and the graphics are some of the worst digitized sprites I’ve seen. The random mooks themselves look okay, but Batman himself has a wildly exaggerated comic book-ish coloring style to him. When you have the two interacting with each other on-screen, it just looks weird.
Oh, hey! It’s X-men, Children of the Atom! This game is considered by many to be the very first game in Capcom’s VS series. Although the X-men don’t battle anyone from Capcom’s side of the field in this installment, this game was the base on which X-men vs Street Fighter was built. That game would then be followed by Marvel vs. Street Fighter and later Marvel vs. Capcom itself. Nearly every Marvel sprite from the rest of the series is recycled from this game or the later Marvel Superheroes.
Oh, it’s the North American version of Splatterhouse! Because the game was so relentlessly violent, not many of these were made. Although this series did get its start at the arcade, the game feels more like it was meant for consoles, which probably explains why the series became console-exclusive after the first entry. I love the graphics in this game, but the gameplay leaves a lot to be desired. You can cheese most bosses by standing in the right place and mashing the attack button…
Speaking of gore, he’s Chiller. Just like Splatterhouse, this game was violent to the point where most arcades at the time refused to touch it. Supposedly, the developers realized that no arcade in the US would touch this game, so it was primarily marketed toward Mexico, from what I hear. This is a game you’ll never find outside of places that pride themselves on novelty, at least in America. Gameplay-wise, a bunch of prisoners are chained up in a torture chamber, and your job is to use the rifle to execute them. That doesn’t mean giving them a swift death but shooting their skin off until they’re nothing but a meaty puppet. You can also shoot other things like the torture devices they’re chained to in order to do something like rip them in half. There’s no gameplay to speak of beyond gore. Plus, the game doesn’t have a blast marker when you miss a shot, so it’s impossible to zero your shots. When you’re aiming at random things in the background, it’s hard to tell whether the item does nothing or if you missed your shot. (although most videos I can find of it online DO have an impact mark when you shoot. Why didn’t I see it in this one? Maybe it was the lighting)
Of course, I didn’t get past the first level.
Alien’s had a lot of arcade games over the years. When most people think of Alien video games, they usually think of the original run-and-gun arcade game or the modern incarnations in every arcade. This is Alien 3: The Gun, the first Alien-themed light gun game. I don’t have anything to say about it, but it’s worth pointing out that the recent Alien arcade games seem to have taken notes from this one.
This one is Sega Ninja, Ninja, or Ninja Princess, depending on what you feel like calling it. Released in 1985, this is one of the first top-down Run and Gun games, predating both Commando and Ikari Warriors. In this game, you play as a feudal Japanese princess who’s also secretly a ninja to save your country from the evil ninja. Strangely, there’s a home port of this game that replaces the main character with a male ninja.
Speed Racer was one of the earliest arcade racing games with a Mario Kart-esque item system. To this day, I don’t know why items never caught on in arcade racers. In this game, each racer has three car-specific items that have a limited number of uses. Passing a checkpoint refills all your items, meaning you can spam them nonstop.
Honestly, I thought this game was a localization of a Japanese game when I first saw it because I couldn’t imagine Speed Racer being relevant enough in the west to get an arcade game. It turns out that Namco of America made this and never saw a Japanese release at all. Huh. I seriously can’t get over how many bizarre game choices they have here. I, for one, love seeing so many machines that nobody else would be crazy enough to carry.
Alright, here’s the real highlight of the day! Dynamite Cop! I love this game so much. It’s a fairly early 3D beat-em-up that’s trying way too hard to have a badass, testosterone-filled 80s action movie feel (in fact, this series started as a licensed Die Hard game, and this is the sequel to it). The further into the game you get, the more it begins to dawn on you that this game is only pretending to take itself seriously for shits and giggles. Suddenly, you’re attacked by a giant chef with a bunch of minions wearing Master Roshi turtle shells on their backs and chuckle because you once thought you were laughing at this game instead of with it.
This series is honestly one of my favorite Beat-em-ups ever. It was the first to use texture-mapped graphics, has a ridiculous amount of moves for a Beat-em-up, and was even an early pioneer of quicktime events in 3D games. I hope I can find the original Die Hard arcade someday. UPDATE: Ironically, it’s much, much more common than Dynamite Cop.
I wanted to stay and play more Dynamite Cop, but I had the feeling some unexpected guests were going to be showing up soon and quickly left for the following location. Sure enough, my instincts were right on the money. Maybe you should have scoped out that Ridge Racer machine like I had asked. I posted a pic of the third Barcade on social media a few minutes later. I figure if they wanted to find me badly enough to try to hurry there to try to catch me, I’d acknowledge their presence. As I expected, they gave up after the first one. I have a policy against meeting people I know online in person, but I make exceptions for people who can prove they want it. This was not one of those times.
I was getting hungry around this time and decided to try “New York Pizza.” This looked like an extremely average pizza place.
…and the pizza tasted pretty much like every small “New York-style pizza” across the country. I very much predicted that most New Yorkers would go, “but you didn’t get the RIGHT pizza” if you’re unimpressed with their offerings. I need to take countermeasures to that tomorrow.
DEAD DOG
There is no death. Follow the dogs, they will show you.
I think this was a hint to the location of some bonus dungeon, but I wasn’t in the city long enough to solve it.
Here it is. The first and original Barcade. The place that began the revolution. From the outside, it looks more like a construction zone.
Arcades visited: 42
I’m not sure if this Barcade is smaller than the last one, but it definitely feels that way.
The first Barcade was balanced between the 80s and 90s games, the second had a very 90s lean to it, and this one had a higher concentration of 80s fun. All three people who read these posts have probably gathered that I prefer 90s stuff, so this was perhaps my least favorite of the three. It did have a few games that caught my attention.
Oh, I completely forgot they had Ghosts n Goblins. Now I feel foolish for wasting everything I had to say about it earlier in this post.
Robotron 2084 is a very common retro game at random bars and such. I just don’t think I’ve run into since starting this blog. They also had Q-bert here, which I swear I took a photo of…
Look, another 6-slot! And it’s well-lit enough to see!
The game I opted to play is the one you see on the screen now: King of the Monsters, a kaijuu game that plays like a pro wrestling game. Good fun, but rounds feel like they take far too long.
And you can read this, too! King of the Monsters, Wind Jammers (imagine playing air hockey with a Frisbee), Metal Slug X (actually just Metal Slug 2 with some extra content), Aero Fighters 2 (SNK’s take on 1941), Bust-a-move, and Nightmare in the Dark (ever feel like Bubble Bobble doesn’t have enough zombies? This game is for you).
I was excited to play Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom finally. Then I found out that this game isn’t great. It’s one of those “run around and free all the hostages, then get to the exit” games, except the controls are awful.
Ladybug is one of the many Pac-man clones of the 80s. Arguably one of the better ones at that. It’s got a gate mechanic that adds a lot of complexity to a simple “run around the maze and get the stuff” game.
I hate turning on my flash in arcades, but I made an exception. I love the artwork on this machine. 80s machine artists must have had it hard. Imagine trying to make “a ladybug walks around a maze” look exciting.
Hey, hey. Bubble Bobble! I remember a thread on a retro game board a while back asking why Pac-man and Donkey Kong had millions of clones, but the original Mario Bros didn’t. I think the reason is that all of the “kill all of the enemies on the screen to progress” games are already clones of each other. Mario Bros, Joust, Bubble Bobble, Nightmare in the Dark. All variations of the same thing. I suppose Joust is debatable because it wasn’t really a platformer. Balloon Fight is a total Joust clone, though.
Yes! This is a game I’ve been searching for since starting the blog. Virtua Fighter 2 isn’t the original, but I’ll take it. Virtua Fighter is one of the most important fighting games ever made. It single-handedly defined what a 3D fighting game was. Hell, the fourth installment was the game that introduced networked arcade machines to Japan. It’s just a shame that Tekken completely overshadows it in the west.
Also, check out that cardboard standee. Quite a few games used to have those, but they were almost always damaged and destroyed eventually. DDR used to have them, too. In fact, an arcade in Omaha proudly keeps them attached to their machine to prove they still have them.
Golly Ghost is a neat machine. It has a small wooden dollhouse-esque room built into the back and uses the “hologram” trick from Time Traveler to make animated ghosts fly around in front of it. It’s the kind of machine you have to see in person at least once. I’m glad this Barcade was well-lit enough to get some good pictures.
INTRUDER ALERT! INTRUDER ALERT!
This is Berserk, the game everyone remembers for being one of the first machines to use those awkward synthesized voice clips.
THE HUMANOID MUST NOT ESCAPE!
Here’s yet another Alien arcade game, except this one is Alien vs. Predator. It’s a beat-em-up where they play as the predators or humans and kill the aliens. There’s no option to play as the aliens. I’ve never seen the movies, but I assumed it was something like Freddie vs. Jason, where an alien and predator fought for an hour and a half. Maybe the film is about humans and predators shooting the aliens or something?
This is one of the most unique light shooters I’ve ever sin. At first glance, The Cheyenne looks like a standard western “shoot the bad guys” deal. Well, it is. What makes this game neat is that the enemies aren’t shooting at you; they’re shooting at Billy Badshot, an NPC who wanders aimlessly through the map, seemingly oblivious to the fact that everything is trying to kill him. Instead of just shooting the bad guys, you also have to shoot down any projectile that might hit Billy. Neat!
By the way, here’s the Playchoice-10 lineup. After the first Barcade, I was hoping they’d all be full of random stuff. Oh well.
Final Fight is a game that’s very closely related to Street Fighter. Not only did a bunch of characters from this game end up in later Street Fighters, but the crappy American cartoon even did a crossover episode. Mike Haggar appeared in neither, but he’s still the most remembered character from these games. You can make him beat up Ryu in Marvel vs. Capcom 3, though.
When the recent Rampage movie came out, I assumed the title was a coincidence and joked that it was based on the arcade game. Then I found out it actually was based on the arcade game.
Have you ever played Super Off-road at the arcade? You know the one, it looks like this, except it has three wheels. It’s a blatant rip-off of this game, released three years earlier.
Look, a Street Fighter II Championship machine that’s been upgraded to Turbo, with the proper decals and everything! I wonder if this was an official upgrade kit or a reproduction using a similar look.
You probably have no idea what the hell I’m talking about.
Yet another one of those obscure 80s games that you’ll probably never see anywhere else. I played it, but I can’t remember anything about it. That’s probably why it’s so obscure.
Looking at this machine, you’d expect this game to be the goriest, most metal thing ever.
It’s a Space Invaders clone with demons instead of aliens.
Space Harrier was one of Sega AM2’s very first games. This one’s most notable for its deluxe edition, one of the first games where the seat would move along with the controller. It’s one of the games that put AM2 on the map. Sadly, the regular version isn’t exciting. This game got a sequel called Planet Harriers in the early 00s, which is super, super rare because it ran on expensive hardware for the time.
Missie Command was one of my grandpa’s favorite games, but the arcade version was before my time. I do remember running into it once in Vegas a long, long time ago. I remember it clearly because this machine is tough to miss.
They don’t make ’em like this any more. Just look at those nipple buttons.
Lol, Narc, the anti-drug game. This was made in response to all the drug dealing that used to go on in arcades in the 80s. Nowadays, it’s infamous for being a joke. Can you believe they made a gritty reboot of this game in the mid-00s?
Oh, there’s my Q*bert photo.
Despite this being one of the most important arcades in the country, the original location really underwhelmed me. There were some excellent titles, but overall it didn’t feel as gleefully spontaneous with its games as the other two. Lots of very safe game choices and not a lot of oddities. Oh well.
As long as I was here, there was one more quick arcade bar I wanted to check out. Don’t expect much. I didn’t save the best for last.
Arcades visited: 43
This is Two-bit’s Retrocade, a newer bar arcade, from what I understand. Cramped doesn’t even begin to describe this place. It looks like they had to struggle to fit any games in here at all.
Against the back wall was a projector playing movies. I’m not sure if they couldn’t fit an actual television on the back wall or if this is an atmospheric thing. Probably both. There’s next to no seating, so I doubt anyone ever watches it.
There was a random pachinko machine sitting on top of NBA Jam. No idea if it’s something that they bought to hook up or if it’s just a decoration. It’s an expensive decoration if that’s what it is.
I bet you’re expecting me to go through and talk about all of the games they had here. Too bad, I just wrote 5600 words about the three Barcades, and I’m tired. There are a few I haven’t talked about, but nothing too unusual. Why would you ever go here when the various local Barcades exist? The most notable thing here is After Burner, another of Sega AM2’s earliest games. Just like Space Harrier, it was notable for having a big moving cabinet. That was kind of AM2’s thing in the 80s before they started revolutionizing 3D gaming.
Well, there you have it. The original Barcade, two off-shoots, and a mediocre two-bit arcade. This was the end of my arcade adventure in New York. It wasn’t my last day here, though. Nor was New York my final destination…
