My goal here isn’t to rate or review arcades.
Around a decade ago, I went on a three hour drive to a small town in northern Nebraska. I’d heard rumors of a small arcade in a local mall that was home to a rare older version of Dance Dance Revolution. Even back then, I couldn’t resist the call of an interesting arcade.
It was a small arcade tucked away in a dark, untraveled corner of that mall. There were no ticket machines, so it was completely unstaffed. The DDR machine’s screen was broken to the point where the top half of the picture was squished into the lower half. The other machines were mostly fighting games with buttons that had long since stopped worked. It even had one of the last public Derby Owner’s Club machines. The very act of entering the arcade made you feel like you’d stumbled upon a hidden treasure.
That arcade closed a year later and not a single image of it still exists anywhere on the internet.
That’s one of many beautiful arcades I’ve seen disappear suddenly, leaving nothing behind. That’s the real reason this blog exists. It started as a way for me to show a handful of friends some of the interesting arcades I’ve seen, but slowly turned into a series of preemptive memorials as the arcades I’d written about slowly started disappeared. I wanted to make sure those arcades left something behind.
So that’s what this blog is today: An archive of various arcades I’ve seen. Not just how they looked or what games they had, but the experiences they gave me. I’m not here to review arcades or give them ratings. If I liked an arcade, I’ll probably gush about it. If I didn’t, then I’ll usually vent about it. But overall, my primary goal is to share them. To share those arcades and how they personally made me feel what I encountered them.
In other words, I’m just here to tell you what I saw.