Once upon a time, two cities in Minnesota were very close to each other. These cities were known as “The Twin Cities.” The area west of the Mississippi River was “Minneapolis,” while the area to the east was “St. Anthony.” At some point, the two settled their differences, and St. Anthony merged into Minneapolis to create a single, thriving city. But this presented a new problem: Their nickname didn’t make sense anymore. Luckily, the former Twin Cities was next to the state capital. St. Paul realized what it had to do and became the new “other twin city.”
It’s rare for me to come around these parts, but my bus transfer happened to be in this area. I had far more exciting places to be, but I took the opportunity to look around a bit.
I, myself, happen to live right in the middle of downtown Minneapolis, but I’ve never really posted about it. This blog is for posting about arcades, and there were no arcades there unless you count the slummy nightclub that’s only open 8 hours a week, and you need a reservation to get into. They have (had?) Joust. Recently, a reason to post about that area has come up, so you’ll be seeing it soon-ish. In the meantime, you’ll have to take my word for it: It’s very modern, for lack of a better term.
I bring this up because downtown St. Paul is the exact opposite of downtown Minneapolis. Outside of a bunch of clean-looking bank offices in the city’s center, St. Paul feels very lived in. There are cigarette butts and graffiti everywhere, most buildings look like they haven’t been renovated in a while, and every street pole is covered with whatever people feel like sticking on. There’s little room for small venues in downtown Minneapolis, but St. Paul is crawling with them. The image above is one of many, many like it.
While I was passing through St. Paul, waiting for my bus, I noticed something on Google Maps. This place was still marked on my map from a search I did a few months ago. “Oh yeah, I vaguely remember something like that,” I thought. It was two blocks away, so I decided to take a look inside. It was easy to miss since there was no sign on the building.
This is Eclipse Records, a store selling nothing but vinyl albums. This place has a history of having misfortune with their choices of location. Their first one ran into some ordinance issues, while their second had complications when the light rail was put in. Looking to the right, you can see a bunch of old posters of their logo that they sell. I guess this place stays afloat by marketing itself as a brand.
See, they have T-shirts and everything.
Really though, I’m not even pretending to be interested in music. This isn’t the place I’d ever step foot inside usually. However, I do empathize with them on some level. While I don’t understand why anyone would dedicate an entire store to dead audio format, I do see the reasoning behind it. Whenever people tell me they have an ITG machine or converted Stepmania cab, it’s like. Sure, most people would see those as a straight upgrade from DDR since you can load any song you want onto them. You can’t explain why it’s not the same to someone who doesn’t understand. I feel like this place’s dedication to vinyl is something similar.
I have no idea what any of these are, but I’m sure someone will find them interesting. They had a bunch of rare-looking stuff that I obviously couldn’t identify. Maybe I’m looking at something sought-after and don’t know it? I have some subtle kinship with this place, even though I don’t care for their product. There are probably record nerds out there who would be as excited in this place as I get when I find an authentic arcade in the middle of nowhere. Godspeed, Eclipse Records.
With that out of the way, I mentioned that I was researching this place. The reason being that this place’s last location was much, much bigger. This poor place once thrived but now seems barely hanging in there. The old area even had a built-in music venue where local bands could play and get their music out there. It was quite an ambitious labor of love by the owner, but you’d never know that now.
The old location wanted to be great so badly that they even had an arcade. Six arcade cabs and six pinball machines, from what I heard. At some point, they even let you go back and play them for free with any purchase. I was curious if that old arcade managed to survive in any meaningful form.
This is all that remains. I have no interest in the multi-cade machine, but that 1942 is the only one I’ve seen in town, although Up-Down has the sequel. It’s a standard curtain shooter for those who don’t know.
Back in Sioux Falls, this small anime shop was called Dark Matter Anime. Aside from being an anime store, it also served as the local hangout for every nerd in town. There were tables for TCGs, couches around a TV for anime and video games, and a few rooms in the back for tabletop gaming. I have loads and loads of stories about that place, but now is only the time for one of them. The old man running the store was a massive fan of 1942. Once in a while, someone would boot up an emulated version on the Xbox 360, and he’d go to town on it. (which was my Xbox360, come to think of it… Whatever happened to it?)
One day, everyone was gathered around some Genesis game compilation for the Xbox, where you could earn trophies of some sort by clearing specific challenges in each game. One of the games on it was the Genesis port of the arcade game Flicky, where you play as a bird and run around collecting little birds. After failing once at the game and getting a feel for what it was, everyone’s first reaction was to call the old guy over because he was known for being skilled at arcade games. He fought long and hard while sharing wisdom about how the key to the game is to take it slow and not get hit. After a long battle, he ultimately failed to reach the target score. Finally, I asked for the controller. Having never played the game before, it was apparent just by looking at the first level’s layout that it was about finding the fastest route and getting a score bonus. I got the needed score within a few minutes on my first try. I’ll never forget the look of shame on the shop owner’s face after that.
Don’t worry, Old Man. You’re still awesome at 1942.
Depressed at the state of Eclipse Record’s former arcade, it was time to start heading toward my actual destination. It’s a place I’ve known about since moving to Minnesota, but I’ve never really gotten around to going there. It’s a pain in the butt to get to. I knew I was getting close when I passed 40-year-old Asian people on the sidewalk.
This unassuming building is easy to mistake for a school or some office building, isn’t it? You’d be surprised what it looks like inside.
Welcome to Hmong Village. It’s some kind of… There’s no good way to describe this place without walking you through it. They have a full 360-degree tour of the place if you want to see first-hand what a strange place this is. I highly recommend it because it’s way bigger than single images can convey. Also, I was the only white guy in the entire building, so I was getting weird looks. I was drawing enough attention to myself without taking pictures, so I will go ahead and pull the next few from the google tour.
St. Paul has the largest community of Hmong people in the country, totaling around 30,000 without counting the 9,000 in Minneapolis. Most of them immigrated from Vietnam and Laos a few generations back. Minnesota is the state most of them ended up in for some reason.
Anyway, this is the food district. It’s pretty standard compared to everything else in here. I was expecting it to be more of an Asian specialty marketplace, but I guess it was just a typical farmer’s market for people in the area.
Right next to it is this office-like area. It’s surreal that this is attached to the rest of the building. This is where they put the clinics, paperwork offices of some kind, and other such things. I’ve got to give credit to the Hmong people: When they say “one-stop shop,” they aren’t kidding. This place has everything you’d ever need condensed into one building. The guys on the walls are government officials from Laos.
This is the meat of the place. It’s a giant warehouse-like area with somewhere between thirty and fifty stalls. I got lost in this area over and over again. This is where you can buy toys of dubious origin, clothes tailored by a woman at her sewing machine, over-the-counter drugs, Taiwanese snack food, foreign DVDs, those weird beauty supplies that only work on Asian girls, and anything else you can think of. I nearly said, “why can’t we have this in America?” before remembering that it is in America and I was just here two days ago.
Oh hey, we’re back to my photos. This is the food court, where they set up between ten and twenty stalls. I can’t help but wonder how so many of these places can co-exist simultaneously when they all have such similar menus, and there are so few chairs. There was also a food stall set up in one of the store-area rooms with a bunch of benches around a counter. It reminded me of a Japanese ramen shop.
Okay, those are the main parts of it. I’m not just here to soak up the local culture. I’m here with a purpose. Four years ago, this place had an arcade hidden in its corridors. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a single image of it online, and only a few passing mentions. I wasn’t even sure if it still existed. After lots of wandering around, I found…
…what the heck is this??
Look, I’ve been to a lot of arcades in my time. This blog should be proof of that. This is the only arcade I’ve ever been to that’s completely blindsided me. I was expecting many things, but this isn’t one of them. It was just stuffed in some awkward corner of the building where you’d never find it if you weren’t looking for it. Hell, even if you were looking for it, you might not find it.
The room they were given for this business is tiny, but they use every inch of space they have. There’s just enough room to get to the arcade machines and the owner to get to his tiny workspace in the back, but everything else is piled high with computer parts, boxes, and things that I think they didn’t have room for at home. After greeting me and seeing that I was set up in the “arcade” part of the place, the owner became consumed in a game of League of Legends while his daughter played Shopkins on another computer they had set up on a folding table. After about 5 minutes of waiting to ask if I could take photos of this place, I did it.
If you don’t frequent the arcade, it might be hard to tell what’s off about this machine. Look closely at the monitor. It’s a standard Pump It Up cab that’s been upgraded to HD by attaching a bigger flatscreen monitor to the front. It’s a pretty recent version of Pump too, so they seem to take care of the machine. That makes sense since the thing takes up so much space that they wouldn’t keep it around otherwise. This place has a table of computer cases that they keep almost blocking the entrance because there’s no space for it anywhere else in the room. They must love this Pump machine.
Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve confirmed it. The Twin Cities have thirty or more arcades and game rooms, but this is the only known Initial D machine in town. Well, it’s the only normal one, at least. Why is it in a computer repair place? Because much like Eclipse Records, this is the remains of an actual arcade. Evolution Arcade, as this place was once known, was once much more than just these three machines. According to the only mention of this place I could find on the internet, there were once two Pump It Up machines, a couple of fighters like Street Fighter Alpha and Killer Instinct, and a few other random games. A lot has changed here in just four years. Nearly every arcade game has been sold off, outside of the one Pump and Initial D. These poor machines have endured to the very end.
This was the real surprise here. When I heard this place had both Initial D 3rd and 4th versions, I assumed that either someone got confused about which version it was, or one version got upgraded into the other at some point. I can’t believe there’s a 3rd and 4th machine right next to each other. If I’m being sincere, I’ve never actually played v4 before. It was all over Vegas for one year. I went there, but it was gone the next time I went. My save card didn’t work with it, so I had no reason to play it at the time.
And now that I’ve played it, I completely understand why this version was so unpopular. The second and third game in the series were minor upgrades to the core game that added new content and made some tweaks to the gameplay. This is an entirely different game. Outside of visuals like the CG characters and your car taking up half the screen, the physics are far less technical overall. In ver 3, you had to either shift gears or break at the right time to trigger a drift, so the entire game revolved around how well you could do it. In this game, your car does it automatically when you take a sharp enough turn. Touching a wall even slightly in ver 3 will completely screw you over, but here I accidentally nudged the wall several times without dropping off in speed. I wonder if they decided the game was too unforgiving to learn. I only played it once, so there may be more to the game, but it doesn’t make a good first impression.
That was all that was left of this “arcade.” Just the three machines. Thankfully, the Initial D managed to survive, so it still has merit, even though it’s a bit of a stretch to call it an arcade anymore. I’m not sure how long this place can hold out before being converted to a pure repair shop, so I’m glad I saw it.
There you have it. The remains of two different arcades. It feels like St. Paul is kind of a dead zone for these places. But where there’s death, there’s also life. This was supposed to be a short one-part blog post, but I ran into a surprise later in the day. I guess we’re going into overtime…
