DISCLAIMER: This was one of my earliest blog posts. Forgive the fact that I had no idea what I was doing.
I always said I would write about local places but never got around to it. I can do it whenever, so there’s no rush like when I travel. Today I found myself bored enough actually to head out and do it. So many places on my list to write about, so where to start? Well, I decided this was as good a place as any:
This average-looking mall in South Minneapolis is appropriately known as “Southdale Center.” From the outside, it looks like any other mall in the country. From the inside, however…
No, it still looks like every other mall in the country. I’d probably have written it off as a useless mall like Rosedale Mall or Fashion Show in Las Vegas. Before we get to the good stuff, let’s get some of the boring shit out of the way first.
Also, I apologize in advance for these photos. If mall security gets bored enough, they’ll yell at you for taking pictures, so I had to use my phone camera to not draw attention to myself. Some of them came out blurry because of how slowly my phone focuses.
For starters, this mall has a confusing layout. What you see in the above photo are floors 1, 2, and “L.” The L floor only has about four stores and isn’t very big. However, another L level on the other side of the mall is not much bigger. As far as I can tell, the two don’t connect for some reason. There’s also a floor 3 in some parts of the mall but not others. It’s easy to forget whether you’re on floor 1 or 2.
Here’s a timeline of the mall’s history. It’s a pretty historically significant place. Here, I’ll just copy/paste from Wikipedia:
Southdale Center, colloquially known as Southdale, is a shopping mall located in Edina, Minnesota, a suburb of the Twin Cities. It opened in 1956 and is one of the oldest fully enclosed malls, and the first climate-controlled one, in the United States. Southdale Center comprises 1,300,000 sq ft (120,000 m2) of leasable retail space, and contains approximately 123 retail tenants
In other words, this place is the first modern mall as we know them. Don’t worry; I wouldn’t be writing about this place if the only exciting thing about it was that it’s old.
Here are two of the first things you see when you walk in. On the left is a dark hallway illuminated by the eerie red glow of Jimmy John’s Sandwich Shop. The right is the DMV that they added this year. It has nothing but glass walls, so you can witness the misery of everyone waiting for their number to be called. This place makes an awful first impression.
Plowing through some uninteresting photos, we have Smashburger, a local burger chain easily mistaken for Gamestop from a distance. The other two are a board game shop and the Twin Cities Monopoly variant they sell. I don’t think it comes up much, but I sometimes go to the monthly board game marathons in Minneapolis. It’s a “marathon” because you need an entire day to play Titan or Civilization.
Now we’re getting to the good shit. This store hangs off the edge of the third floor, and every wall is made of glass. It can be seen from most of the second floor, and the decorations lining the windows make it hard to miss. The escalator to the third floor runs parallel to what you see in the photo, so you get a nice long view of it going up.
This is Gamerheadz. If nothing else, you have to give it credit for knowing how to grab your attention. I’m not sure what the palm trees have to do with video games (Donkey Kong Country?), but you can tell whoever owns this place loves their job. The walls and windows are all lined with old video game memorabilia.
This is my favorite piece. It’s a classic early 90s store display Mario statue (in poor shape). I’d love to give some history on this thing, but it’s a bit of an enigma. Google turns up a bunch of people asking where these things originated from, and the only answer anyone can come up with is, “it’s probably a store display of some sort from the early 90s”. Mysterious!
I’m repeating myself, but what I love most about this place is the sheer amount of love they put into the atmosphere. The window displays are so chaotic and full of life. Take the right-hand side, for example. Most places would be content to have all of the consoles on display. This place isn’t happy unless they go all-out and go the extra mile of covering it with Pokemon toys.
By the way, the Pikachu slippers are amazing.
This one came out blurry. It says, “TEAM MYSTIC HEADQUARTERS – All members representing Team Mystic get a 10% discount on used games!” Well, I guess even this store isn’t without its flaws.
Oh, look at that Wreck-It Ralph theatrical poster! As a surprise to absolutely nobody, it’s far and away my favorite modern-era Disney movie. Did you know that-
…
Next Time.
Here’s the inside. Despite the chaotic decorations on the outside, it’s pretty tame inside. (also, that’s a Pokemon pinata hanging on the left)
Time for a game. I took this photo to comment on one specific item. Can you guess which one?
…
Have you made your guess?
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“I really don’t like K-on!”
Photo dump, because honestly, I can only say, “look at that!” so many times before people get bored. This kind of thing isn’t my specialty, anyway.
Now, this. This I can talk about. Around the time Guitar Hero revived interest in the music game genre, Konami made a SECOND attempt at bringing Beatmania stateside. Unfortunately, it got released around the same time DJ Hero flopped, killing any chance of it taking off. This game shelf warmed at Big Lots for YEARS. You could get this game and the packaged controller for dirt cheap. Given how expensive “real” Beatmania controllers are and how bad the Japanese PS2 controllers were, the US controller was generally the best option for new players getting into the game. It was such a good option that they shot way up in price once the shelf warming supply dried up.
Funny how those things work, isn’t it?
This takes me back to when Funcoland had consoles set up for you to play in-store before Gamestop bought them out and gutted them. As a kid, I could spend hours in there playing Super Nintendo games. Used video game stores aren’t the same without video games to play, you know?
…and here it is. The highlight of the store, in all its blurry glory (mostly blurry because I was trying to get a shot before this Asian guy jumped back on the machine). This is the legendary “free DDR machine of Minneapolis.” You can come here to practice as long as you want without paying a thing. The tradeoff is that this is the same machine that goes to every convention, so it disappears during con season. This is the first time it’s been here in months. It’s not the best machine, not by a long shot, but it’s more than playable. It’s impossible not to draw a crowd playing in that place. The only downside is…
…it’s right next to the free PIU machine that’s been the bane of my existence at every convention in Minneapolis. Whenever you start playing DDR, someone will inevitably jump on this machine and steal your audience with an easy song. No exceptions.
I think Anime Fusion 2014 had the right idea, putting it in its own room where nobody could see it except the people playing it.
EDIT: I’m mostly joking, for those who can’t tell.
There’s also a Mortal Kombat II machine sitting around in the back. It used to be joined by Pop’n Music and some multi-game system, but now it’s just dance games and a lone Mortal Kombat. This place isn’t much of an “arcade” anymore, but it has a killer view of the entire mall.
On my way out, I grabbed a picture of this, too. It’s a plush Lakitu with a Spiny hanging off the bottom. It’s somehow frustrating because I was huge into Mario when I was a kid, but there was so little merchandise during the Super Nintendo era for some reason. I’d have killed for one of these things. Nowadays, you can go to ToysRus and find an entire wall of Nintendo shit. Kids don’t know how good they have it.
I will use this picture as a transition because there’s not much to say about it other than, “I mistake this cardboard cutout for a human every time.”
If I had to name one flaw with Southdale mall, the food court sucks. There’s a Subway, Panda Express, and other things, none of which I’m particularly fond of. Today, I came to Southdale without eating breakfast, so I looked on their website to see if there were any eateries I’d somehow missed before (even though I come here all the time, I still manage to find new stuff regularly). There was a pizza place I’d never noticed before called “DeLeo Bros.”
And their logo looked like the original Super Mario Bros logo. “What a cute gimmick for a sign,” I thought, not overthinking it beyond that. Other than that, I ended up going to this place completely blind. On my way down the hallway, I see this:
I learned two things from this:
- The reason I’d never heard of it is that it just opened last week.
- They had a video game gimmick beyond the sign.
At best, I expected a regular pizza place with a few video game posters half-heartedly hung on the walls. Then, as I continued closer, I saw THIS in front of the store.
That’s a mall support pillar wholly repainted with a Mario brick pattern if that much wasn’t apparent by looking at it. At this point, it became evident that this place was going all-out with its gimmick. Again, I didn’t want to get my hopes up going in.
Well, it looks pretty standard from this angle. But if you turn immediately to the right, it becomes apparent what this place’s real gimmick is.
It’s not a video game-themed pizza place at all. It’s an 80s-themed pizza place! Look at ET, Orko, and the Quik bunny standing on a shelf next to a can of Pepsi Free with a [okay, I honestly don’t know what that speak-and-say-like thing is] hanging up behind them. That is the core of this place. I wouldn’t care much if it were an 80s pop culture pizza place. But an 80s pop culture pizza place with random junk on the walls?
This is totally my jam.
Here are some better shots to see what I’m talking about. This entire place is littered with old stuff glued to the walls. There’s the official Mario Metal Lunch Tray, a TMNT anti-drug poster, VHS tapes lining the walls, and that last one is a lousy photo of a Garbage Pail Kids poster (and ? Blocks painted on the ceiling). Every single inch of this place’s walls is covered in something.
Not photoed: Framed Garfield books.
Look closely. On the condiment trays at the bar, alongside the salt, pepper, and other such things, there’s a Rubix cube on each of them for people to fiddle around while waiting. I’ll be blunt: I wouldn’t say I like places that play the nostalgia card so transparently. I can’t bring myself to hate this place, though. There’s having a gimmick; then there’s going all-out with a said gimmick.
Also, the sample trays that show you the size of a Medium and Large pizza are Pac-man and Ms. Pac-man.
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
By the way, remember how I was talking about going all-out with a gimmick two seconds ago? Well, you can’t have a proper 80s-themed anything without one of these:
Of course it has an arcade. Let’s see:
- Pizza
- old stuff
- arcade
I’ll take it.
First up is Arkanoid. This was one of my favorites as a kid. Granted, when I say “this,” I mean “Breakout for the Atari 2600”. They’re not very different. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this game at an arcade. The knob is familiar, though, since there’s a bowling alley in Omaha that has an Arkanoid 2 machine, of all things. Did you even know there was an Arkanoid 2?
Dead Galaga and Frogger. When I was a kid, I’m sure these machines were still around in some form, but I was probably too small to remember they existed. By the time I was old enough to have a clear memory of arcade games, I was already interested in newer stuff like Konami beat-em-ups. Most of my memories of these games were the Atari ports. I was very late in upgrading to an NES…
There is one exception. Centipede. I’m sure I mentioned the Gold Rush when I was talking about Vegas. It had a small game room with a Play Choice 10, a kiddy ride of a seal, Title Fight, and Centipede. The last one was there for years. My earliest memories of video games were Centipede.
Despite my attachment to the game, I suck hard at it.
Paperboy. I can’t remember the last time I saw a working Paperboy. The controls break quickly. The broken-down one in Omaha’s Godfather’s Pizza is a good example. My elementary school was in a bad neighborhood, so they had a community center attached to the back in hopes of giving kids something better to do than start trouble. I only saw it a couple of times when the class would have to go there for a guest speaker or something, but they had a Paperboy machine I always wanted to play. I also remember it was, as expected, broken down the last time I saw it.
These things again. I’m always happy to see the Simpsons arcade. This is a scaled-down reproduction cab with the controls awkwardly crammed into a space that isn’t big enough for them. I feel sorry for anyone who wants to play Homer or Lisa.
Rounding out Southdale’s second arcade is pinball. Simpsons, Ghostbusters, and some fish game (I think it’s called Fish Tank, but Googling “Fish Tank Pinball” only turns up a pinball machine converted into an aquarium). These days, pinball machines only make me think of when I took my sheltered ex-girlfriend from China to the arcade and had to explain the concept of pinball as she kept losing within seconds of the ball falling. Then Jurassic Park Pinball malfunctioned, and the ball got stuck. That relationship would never have worked out.
By the way, this was the greasiest pizza I’d ever eaten, and I say that as someone who lives off pizza. The garlic knots were covered in an inch of parmesan cheese. I need to remember that if I ever find myself in New York, I need to find a pizza place to determine if this is actually “real New York-style pizza.”
Did you think we were done in Southdale? Hell no. Even I wouldn’t have taken 170 photos of this place if that was all that was here.
