Today is finally my last stop on the Jersey Shore. While there were still a couple more small boardwalk towns up North, including a couple with lovely arcades, none of them were big enough to merit stopping at. I decided that the legendary Atlantic City Boardwalk would be the final boardwalk town I’d be visiting. It’s a place I’ve wanted to see for over a decade, but I’ll get into the reasons for that later.
For now, I had stopped into a random diner near Ocean City. I’d been living off boardwalk pizza until this point, so having something resembling real food was nice.
According to their website, Find D Zine is an entire business that does nothing but makes variations of this placemat for different diners. I’m not sure which is more surprising, that this business exists or that there are enough diners in New Jersey to make it profitable.
They had an old Ms. Pac-man machine in the front. Since it’s an arcade blog, I felt the need to take note of it. I tried looking up Bill’s Vending Service to see if I could learn anything interesting about the local distributor, but they don’t seem to have any real internet presence.
Here it is, Atlantic City. In the 80s, it was the East Coast’s answer to Las Vegas. A large city full of casinos, looming hotels, and a beachfront paradise.
However, it’s a wasteland of empty casinos like this one. There were three or four casinos that I tried to check for arcades, only to find that they had closed their door permanently. Granted, this particular one had been completed so recently that it may just have been changing hands.
Outside the door was a food and water bowl that seemed to have been left out for a dog but was since co-opted by some pigeons.
Since the bulk of this town is nothing, I think I’ll tell you about one of my favorite websites ever. It was a well-known blog I followed back in high school. I’m sure you came across it at some point or another if you were on the internet at all during the mid-00s. I’m speaking, of course, of the unfortunately-named x-entertainment. Despite sounding like a porn site, it was written by a man who could make any random situation interesting. He’d turn random tales of visiting flea markets into epic stories of finding things nobody else saw the value in. He had a vast collection of random packaged food from two decades ago that he’d sometimes open to see how fermented the food had become. He even tracked down a kid who won a create-your-own He-man character contest in the 80s.
His ability to attach meaning to things anyone else would find trivial makes him among the most interesting people in the world.
Among his writings, there are two that stand out to me the most. The articles themselves are down at the time of writing, but I’ll link them anyway if they pop back up before then. The first was the legendary “The Worst Game Room Ever” article. It was a mysterious look inside a really awful motel game room. None of the machines worked, the ice cream machine dispensed ice cream that looked months old, and there was a potato chip that looked like Pac-man. It was beautiful.
The second was the annual Atlantic City articles, particularly when he finds a ten-year-old can of Pokemon pasta still being sold at a random souvenir shop on the beach. Reading those articles all those years ago made me imagine Atlantic City as some bizarre, run-down wonderland full of junk. I can’t help but feel that I came a few years too late to see anything that interesting. I’ll still do my best!
Here’s the first arcade I ran into. It was an oddity that it was only open during particular hours every day so I couldn’t get in there. Peeking through the windows, there didn’t seem to be anything inside worth talking about.
Here’s the casino it was attached to. With the giant neon signs and blaring club music, this casino does remind me of a Vegas casino that got bored of Nevada and decided to live on the beach. That could be because there’s also a Tropicana Casino on The Strip. Or because The Las Vegas Strip’s proper name is “Tropicana Avenue.” One of the two.
Oh, I finally found one that I can get into. This is Playcade, Atlantic City’s Longest Established Arcade!
Arcades visited: 31
If I had to describe this one, it’s like a bizarre hybrid of Wildwood’s hyper-modern arcades and Ocean City’s ancient ones. Maybe it’s better to describe it as a mid-00s casino arcade that hasn’t updated its ticket games in over a decade.
This was the most mind-blowing thing on my entire trip. There were two different sizes of these damn fish games all along. They’re so similar that you wouldn’t even notice the difference unless you put them side by side, exactly like this.
The entire back wall had been closed off to create the redemption counter. Spanning from one wall to the next, it grabs your attention.
Yes! For five dollars, you can play until you win your very own Pokedoll! For those of you who have never owned one, Pokedolls are a line of Japanese Pokemon plush toys known for their cute proportions and high quality. The line’s been going on for so long in Japan that there are many extremely rare ones. Of course, you’re not going to find anything like that here, but five bucks is an excellent price for them.
Alternatively, you could get them for a few thousand tickets. Can you guess which Pokemon I got? The answer is to come in the final Exciting East Coast Arcade Adventure post.
I just realized that X-E also calls its random expeditions “Adventures.” I must have picked up the habit there without realizing it.
Among other things, you’ve also got this fantastic trash can. I have no idea if it’s been here since the days when the turtles loved showing their teeth or if this is meant to be a retro thing, but it’s cool either way.
Onward to the next arcade, passing by all of these deserted buildings. Is Atlantic City going to be alright?
This strange structure is a long, narrow mall that stretches onto the beach like a pier. Playground is the name of it. It’s not a playground; it just has a hip-sounding name, like Fashion Show in Vegas.
See, it’s attached directly to the Caesars Casino, so I think it’s an extension of it.
I ran through it looking for an arcade but had no luck. Atlantic City has been coming up short for me so far.
We’ll probably have better luck here. This, Caesars, and Tropicana seem to be the main three casinos in Atlantic City that are still operating. And, you see…
The sign says there are arcade games, so there must be arcade games!
I’m unsure what the relationship between The Wild Wild West and Bally’s is. They’re attached, and it’s hard to tell where one ends, and the other begins. I spent half an hour wandering around trying to figure out whether or not there was a second casino in here somewhere. I think Wild Wild West is just what Bally’s calls its lounge building.
Well, there’s a Bally’s sign on this rodeo mural, so that’s probably the case.
Now is probably a good time to mention that Atlantic City was crawling with anime cosplayers. The first ones I saw were a couple dressed as their Pokemon Go player characters wandering down the boardwalk, and I assumed they were just really, really hardcore Pokemon Go players. It wasn’t until I got into Bally’s that I realized just how many of them there were. It turns out that I wandered out here in the middle of AnimeNEXT. I was tempted to pop into the convention but walking up a boardwalk in 90-degree weather leaves you in no condition to endure an anime convention. This was the first day of a heat wave that would make my life hell for the next several.
This is the arcade; I say as the non-existent readers give me a funny look. Trust me; this is the arcade; it’s just a bit unusual.
Arcades visited: 32
I’m sure you recognize these two as the World’s Largest Pac-man and the arcade version of Connect 4 by now. Bally’s did something I had never even considered: They took those games’ giant displays and detached them from their control panels! The games’ big monitors are now hanging above the bar like neon displays. It gives these games a sense of grandiosity that you don’t get when the monitor is right in front of you.
Sure enough, they did have enough other games for me to qualify this as an arcade rather than a bar with a Pac-man machine. If they had even one less, I probably wouldn’t have counted it.
There was also a bull-riding machine set up among the arcade games. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in person. I guess they do exist.
Last but not least is an oversized Battleship (and a Big Buck Hunter in the background). I’ve seen oversized chess sets, checkers sets, and Jenga, but this is my first time seeing Battleship. If I had anyone to play with, I’d have loved to try this. That’s one of the disadvantages of always traveling alone. On the other hand, I don’t think anyone else would want to travel with someone compelled to visit any place that might have a Pac-man machine.
Moving on is the legendary Peanut World, Atlantic City’s largest souvenir shop! This is a place I knew well. Matt of X-Entertainment would always make it a point to stop here and find weird shit to talk about. Once upon a time, there were arcade games here. Those days seem to be long over, but I must find at least one thing to discuss here. When you visit those stairs from Rocky, you must climb them. When you visit Peanut World, you must show everyone what random junk you found!
This is a bit underwhelming, but the back shelves were covered in tarps that hid most of the good stuff. Maybe they were in the middle of inventory? Either way, if you’re ever in Atlantic City and want people to think you went to Wildwood, Peanut World has you covered.
Arcade and Go-Karts? Sign me up.
Arcades visited: 33
Oh dear god.
I’ve mentioned before that seeing who has the most claw machines is a dick-measuring contest among boardwalk arcades. This place makes them all look impotent by comparison. There are about 40 of them visible in the picture, with another section of this hall that you can’t see from this angle. I don’t think there’s another arcade in the world with more claw machines than this random Atlantic City go-kart place.
EDIT: In retrospect, this might be an exaggeration. I’ve heard of a few in Japan that supposedly have entire floors of the things.
The actual arcade is in a room off to the right. It was mostly ticket games, and I was suffering from heat exhaustion, so I didn’t get many pics of it. I loved this Pokemon display, though. The Go-Kart area had a Pokemon shooting gallery that I completely missed because I was too damn tired to look around.
EDIT: For anyone wondering if they kept the Pokemon shooting gallery once the Pokemon Go fad ended, I can update you: They kept most of it. Now there are also a bunch of characters like Stewie from Family Guy among the poorly-drawn Pokemon.
And here’s Monopoly, just because I haven’t seen it in a long time. As you can see, it’s mostly a reskin of the Titanic ticket game. In the early 00s, ticket games sometimes experiment with a “put more money in and win more tickets” system. They didn’t realize that most arcade goers would rather have more chances to win than bigger jackpots, so the idea was mostly abandoned.
Ripley’s Believe It Or Not always have the coolest buildings.
Well, you see, Atlantic City’s tourist season starts a few weeks later than most other boardwalks, so neither the pier nor its arcade was open. This is the second one today that I couldn’t get into. If it makes you feel any better, all the pictures of it, I can find remind me of those arcades in Cape May that I didn’t like.
But if you want to know more about Steel Pier, Matt from X-Entertainment, who I’ve been gushing about nonstop for this whole post, has gone through it over and over and over with more insight than I possibly counter. He’s still doing that thing over at his new site, Dinosaur Dracula, but it’s mostly podcasts nowadays. He still does classic articles from time to time, though.
As for me, I now realize that Atlantic City isn’t really my thing. Listening to the mad ramblings of someone who has an emotional connection to the place is far more interesting than seeing it for myself. From now on, I’ll keep my ramblings to places I have something to say about.
By the way, at the very end of the boardwalk is the remains of the infamous Trump Taj Mahal Casino. In the late 80s, President Trump saw Atlantic City as the next big thing and built several local casinos. He didn’t foresee Atlantic City quickly falling into irrelevance a few later. It was such a failure that he’s still suffering from it today. You can still walk through it since the hotel part is still operating.
Before we leave the Jersey Shore once and for all, I decided to try that AirBnB thing that’s all the rage these days. I ended up in a fancy house owned by a realtor who couldn’t sell the house and realized it would be more profitable just to rent it out.
This is, by far, one of the swankiest houses I’ve ever stayed in. Look at this sink. It’s a bowl!
You can even sit down in the shower. This was a godsend, since I was caked in sweat and my legs were burning after five days of exciting boardwalk adventures. 33 arcades is more than most people will visit in their entire life, you know.
Oh yeah, it also had a riverside balcony. I’m glad I tried this AirBnB thing. There was a second one I’d end up staying at later on my trip. It’s an experience I don’t like to remember, though.
Before we head to the big city, I’ve got one last detour to make—a detour I’d deeply regret.
