A desolate parking lot. A stormy sky. The remnants of a K-mart. This is how the first day of our journey begins.
If you missed the prologue, I decided to go on a two-week trip to visit as many arcades as possible. Fifty arcades was my target, so quantity’s the name of the game. If it had arcade machines, it was on my list. I just needed to get out to as many as humanly possible.
The first town on my journey was Dayton, Ohio. It was a medium-sized town about twenty miles north of Cincinatti. As random as it may sound to start an arcade journey here, I just couldn’t take my mind off this place. There were a couple of targets I absolutely had to hit.
Before we get into this arcade, I need to share my thoughts going in:
Normally, I don’t go into arcades blind. I do a lot of research to make sure they’re worth going out of my way to see. My trips are carefully planned to make sure I hit all of the best arcades in the area before my short trip ends.
This trip was an exception. If it had arcade games, I put it on my map. There were a few arcades that I only took a brief glimpse at before deciding they didn’t need any further research. Our first arcade would be one of those. I vaguely remembered a photo of about five retro arcade machines in a row but had absolutely no idea what to expect otherwise.
This is Gaming Adventures, a small hobby shop with an arcade in the side room. Before we get into the arcade, let me take a moment to really paint a picture of what sort of place this was.
Also, I apologize if my photos on this trip are a bit worse than usual. I was using a cheaper phone since I was doing a lot of camping. Carrying around expensive pieces of technology on the road generally isn’t the best idea.
Gaming Adventures’ storefront is a typical “used video game store that’s also a hobby shop.” Lots of used video games, DVDs, and general “nerd merchandise”. If memory serves, they also had a large shelf of tabletop miniatures and paints that I could have sworn I got a photo of.
Way in the back is the standard tabletop gaming area. It’s pretty big for a strip mall hobby shop. But if you look way in the back there…
You can see a couple of arcade machines in mid-repair. I think this is the third time I’ve been to an arcade with the original Lethal Enforcers, and all three times it’s been down.
But, of course, if this were the “arcade”, I’d have considered this stop a waste of time.
Let’s take a quick look at this image of the storefront I pulled off Google Maps. Do you notice anything unusual? No, you probably don’t. I didn’t either, which is why I missed photographing it.
Right next door to Gaming Adventures is the remnants of… a Chinese restaurant, I think? Maybe a pizza place? It’s not something you’d think twice about, since this whole parking lot was full of closed businesses like the K-mart from before.
While waiting for Gaming Adventures to open, I took a peek inside. I could make out a few old arcade games being stored inside. At the time, I still didn’t make the connection exactly what I was looking at.
It turns out there was no wall between these two stores. The seemingly dead, black-roofed building was now Gaming Adventures’ arcade! My research tells me they picked this venue for exactly that reason, and it wasn’t a case like Starcade or Boss Stage where there happened to be an empty store next door that they could expand into.
For fifteen dollars a day, you get all day access to this arcade (a bit on the pricer side of these sorts of places, but nothing too exorbitant). Once I started taking photos of the arcade, I immediately understood why the initial photos I saw made me think it was so small: The way the machines are laid out makes it VERY hard to capture how big this arcade is. Every picture I took made it look about a third of the size it actually is. I assure you, it’s MUCH larger than these images suggest.
In the corner of the arcade is a leftover from this building’s restaurant days: A full-blown snack bar. I wish it had been open during my visit, but it looks like I showed up a bit too early in the day. Either way, I’m a huge fan of these sorts of things. My arcade growing up was a minigolf place with a small pizza counter. You have no idea how nice it was, as a kid, to sit down and order pizza after a three hour DDR session, then get right back to the arcade. It’s much better than having to venture out and find a restaurant within walking distance.
Next to the snack bar is the console gaming area. I know this can be a contentious point for some, who believe that console games don’t belong in an arcade, but I don’t have a problem with it. I think it’s a fine way for these sorts of arcades to pad out their game lineup a bit. Naturally, they can’t constantly rotate their game lineup, so the kids who come week after week might get bored of playing the same games over and over. The console area adds some extra longevity. Plus, since the store also sells used games, it doubles as advertisment.
The big projector screen is for Switch games like Mario Kart and Smash Bros, as far as I can tell.
So now, let’s get to what you’ve all been waiting for: The games.
Gaming Adventures has over 60 machines, despite how tiny it looks. From the stardard 80s games like Dig Dug and Frogger, to common 90s Midway games (they have both Area 51 games AND Maximum Force, all in seperate machines), to a couple of strange oddities, this arcade has no particular rhyme or reason to its games. It even had a few that I’ve never encountered before.
Here’s a game called Cadash that I was particularly fond of. It’s a sidescrolling RPG, something you REALLY don’t see often in arcades. I could go into detail about what kind of game it is, but there’s a much simpler way to explain it: Imagine a more arcade-y version of Zelda II.
And here’s ANOTHER sidescrolling RPG-inspired game I haven’t run into before, Capcom’s Magic Sword. Unlike Cadash, this one is much more akin to something like Castlevania or Ghosts and Goblins. The most interesting thing about it is a mechanic where you can recruit party members who follow you around and help attack enemies after you save them (or evacuating them, since they yell “evacuate me!” instead of “save me!”).
Oh yes, PuzzLoop. I HAVE seen this once before, but it was stuffed into another cab with the wrong marquee. I’m only calling attention to it because this specific machine was basically unplayable. You see, the screen was worn out pretty badly, so it had trouble displaying the color red. At first it’s not an issue, but as you get further into the game and more colored balls are added, it becomes impossible to distinguish some of them. Like, there were two different balls that were both displaying as grey for me. Imagine trying to play Magical Drop if the blue and green gems looked identical, so you had no idea whether you were matching 4 green gems or 2 blue and 2 green. That’s what it was like.
The Nintendo Super System! Like I said in my last post, this was the very first time I’ve ever seen one in person. The Super System was the sort-lived successor to the Nintendo Play Choice-10, playing Super Nintendo games instead of NES games. But unlike that machine, this one can only hold a mere three games. This particular one was running F-zero, Super Mario World, and Super Tennis.
The thing I found most surprising about the machine were the controllers. They look like they hang off the machine like a store display demo, but they’re actually just protuding control panels. They don’t move at all.
You’ve probably seen lots of Neo Geo machines in your day, but here’s one you may not have seen before: This is what’s known as the Neo-Geo Cabaret cabinet. Much shorter than a standard Neo-Geo machine, although not as short as the Neo-Geo Mini, this version is known for its striking wooden color scheme and yellow control panel. The less gaudy style was aimed at establishments like taverns and airports who wanted something a bit more subtle than the standard arcade machine look. Of course, this model never really took off like the more iconic red version did.
Here’s a trend I’ve been noticing lately: An arcade will have a bunch of classic machines, plus one or two games from the past decade. This Alpine Racer reboot from 2015 is a great example. I don’t have a problem with newer games being in the lineup, but this machine looks so modern compared to everything else that it definitely stands out.
This isn’t a pinball blog, but I felt the need to include these for completion’s sake.
Speaking of “completion’s sake”, I told myself on this trip I WASN’T going to photograph every inch of every arcade I came across. It lasted about four arcades before I started doing it anyway. But that’s the reason why things like the Skeeball and Cyberball machine you see in the background there don’t have dedicated photos.
Before we look at the last few machines, here are a couple that were in weird spots. Completion’s sake and whatnot.
The DDR machine! I wanted to play it. I really wanted to play it. But I had over a hundred miles of walking to do before my arcade walkabout ended, so I had to restrain myself. It would have been a completely disaster if I blew my legs out in the very first arcade. But still, I really wanted to play.
Last but not least, it’s Jurassiac Park: The Lost World. Because of course it is. You can’t go more than three arcades without running into SOME Jurassiac Park game.
Overall, Gaming Adventures surprised me. I went in expecting absolutely nothing, but it turned out to be an excellent way to begin my journey of (hopefully) fifth arcades. It was an arcade that absolutely had a unique flavor all its own. I’ve been to over a hundred (two hundred, as of writing this) arcades, but I really can’t think of any that give off a vibe quite like this one. The game lineup was unorthodox without deviating too far from the norm. The floors and walls gave off a cold, unfinished impression, but the loud green walls somehow still made it feel fun and exciting. The console area and snack bar give it a friendly, social climate.
I honestly can’t think of a single thing I’d change. Except Puzz Loop’s screen.
And so, after the guy at the counter put the very first signature in my arcade book, I continued on my endless journey. My next destination was down the road, tucked behind a…
Actually, we’re going to be skipping that arcade for now. You see, this was a journey of quantity over quality, so I ended up visiting a LOT of arcades I don’t have much to say about. I’m going to focus on the meatier arcades, then do a quick roundup of the less interesting ones before I head to the next town on my journey.
So next time, I’ll show you the arcade that made me go “I absolutely need to go to Dayton, Ohio, no matter what”.
