Today, we’ll be looking at the third arcade in a row that shut down shortly after my visit. If nothing else, I’m lucky I went when I did.
This is (was) one of the last surviving Tilt mall arcades. At the time, only around 11 of them were left, but now it’s down to just five (two of which are in Hawaii). Unfortunately, the one in the Twin Cities was another victim of the Great Purge. You can still read about it and remember what was taken from us, but it will never scratch the itch to play Sega Super GT.
Where do I even begin with this place? The moment you step in, you can immediately tell that this arcade has seen better days. The carpet is worn. Most of the lights don’t work. The machines look like they’re being held together with figurative duct tape. It’s a relic of another time.
In fact, it’s fallen so far by the wayside that I very nearly missed it. I only stumbled upon it a few days before my trip while doing a last-minute scan of Denver’s malls. The moment I saw that they had three Cyclone Stoppers lined up together, I knew I had to go out of my way to see it.
I thought long and hard about what to talk about first, but this machine probably made the best prelude to the rest of the arcade. At a glance, it looks like a pretty normal DDR machine. The pads on the bars are missing, but that’s pretty normal. Let’s take a closer look.
The marquee says DDRMAX2, but the sticker says, “NOW!! 8th Mix EXTREME”. For those who don’t know, DDR Extreme came out in 2003. That sloppy sticker’s just been sitting there for 18 years. It’s this kind of personality that makes me love visiting arcades. You can look, but you’re never going to find something quite like this anywhere else.
But wait, there’s more. Aside from being in serious need of cleaning, a couple of the arrow decals have been replaced with these out-of-place yellow abominations. If you live in the Twin Cities, Korea, or South America, you may recognize this is an old-school Pump It Up arrow. Specifically the middle one. They must have been significantly cheaper than DDR arrows.
It’s not the worst screen I’ve ever seen on a DDR machine (that was in a small mall Arcade in Norfolk, NE, before I started photographing arcades), but you can tell there are some serious issues with it. On the bright side, Link Play is enabled!
Nearly all of the arcade’s ticket games were crammed into this awkward corner up front.
On a side note, I’ve never seen that version of Big Wheel before.
Coin pushers are usually one of the big money-makers, but it looks like this one went out of commission some time ago, and they couldn’t be bothered to get rid of it. It doesn’t seem to have been plugged in for quite a while.
Generally, you can carbon-date poorer arcades by their ticket games. They’re almost always the last to get rotated out for newer ones. In this case, we have one of the early-mid 90s Lazer-Tron games here, which tells me that some of these games have probably been sitting here for almost 30 years.
Here’s the other example that stuck out to me. It’s hard to find the exact date of most redemption games, but you can tell from the color scheme that this one’s from around the same era as the Kangaroo game. Possibly a bit earlier. This particular one has a broken gun, torn up seat, and 3/4 of the lights have stopped working.
Next, let’s take a look at the racing games. As I said in that short-lived racing game history series, the timeline of racing games represents the timeline of arcades. Since this seems to be the remains of a 90s arcade, you can be sure there will be a LOT of racing games sitting around. The advent of 3D made them very popular around this time.
…wasn’t the guy in this photo sitting in the other seat earlier? One of them must have been broken.
Here was have Sega Super GT and California Speed, two particularly common ones from that era that our local Tilt also had. I assume Tilt has an entire warehouse stuffed with these two and Cruis’n games somewhere.
While most Tilt mall arcades are dead, the chain does live on in the form of Tilt Studio, a line of bigger, more entertainment center-y venues. I’ve never been to one (I was planning on visiting the one in Chicago, but Tom drove past it). From the pictures I’ve seen, they’re most newer games with a few older games dug out of their warehouse filling space. For some reason, most of them have an Indy 500 machine. I feel like this is another of those games that they ended up with way too many of when they had to start closing their smaller arcades.
I’m… not sure why I felt the need to photograph this. It’s not particularly rare. Maybe it’s because it’s one of the few machines from the flatscreen era they had.
And everyone’s favorite racing game, Tekken!
I’m pretty sure this was a Wing War cab and not a racing game, but let’s ignore that. For some reason, they converted a sit-down cab into a Tekken machine. Bizarre as this is, it’s not even the wackiest thing in the arcade. But we’ll get to that when we get to it.
But first, check out this beauty. It may be falling apart now, but this is the swanky deluxe Cruis’n machine. Despite how common the Cruis’n games were, not many of these have survived into modern times.
And this one is no exception. It looks like they gutted this thing aeons ago and have kept it around as a decoration. Shame, too. It’s even got the Exotica decals…
And they had a Wing War machine that didn’t work. This was one of the ones I wanted to play most, too. Oh well.
With the racing games (and Wing War) out of the way, let’s see what they had lined up against the wall. This shooting gallery is the first and most obvious thing when you first walk in. Originally set up for eight players, the number of working guns has long since been reduced to just two. This feels more like something you’d see in a boardwalk arcade, but I guess I have been to a couple of normal arcades that had them.
If the Wing War-Tekken conversion wasn’t silly enough for you, here’s a Golden Tee awkwardly converted into a retro multicade with a vertical screen. I know some people buy up old Golden Tee machines on the cheap and convert them into these, but they’re mainly meant for the living rooms of people who don’t know any better. I’m honestly not sure if someone sold them this cheap enough for them to snatch it up or if this was another of Tilt’s hack jobs.
We’ve seen a few already, but now’s a good time to mention something. A LOT of their screens had been replaced with monitors that didn’t fit in the cab. This is one of the more hilarious examples of it. I can’t blame them in this case, though. Rear projection monitors are kind of a pain to find replacements for these days.
A pair of Silent Scope machines that obviously weren’t going to work. The guns require parts way too specialized for a place like this to keep on top of.
I love generic showcase cabinets so much. It’s a shame they’re mostly extinct these days. The last couple in the Twin Cities died when we lost our Tilt. If I ever got a generic arcade machine, I’d take one of these over a candy cab any day. Not that I’d be able to get it upstairs.
There at the end, between Soul Calibur and Paradise Lost, was an old Trophy Hunter machine. I normally don’t bother to bring up hunting games when I run into them, but this one’s special. Because…
Right there. On the right. They had two Trophy Hunter machines for some reason. (also, the Alpine Racer worked, much to my surprise)
And Turkey Hunting, in case you were tired of hunting trophies.
Before I forget, it wouldn’t be a Tilt arcade without too many Time Crisis machines sitting around. In addition to the Time Crisis 3 next to Alpine Racer, they also had back-to-back Time Crisis 2 machines. And a broken Time Crisis 3 we’ll be seeing in a moment.
I used to jokingly say, “life finds a way”, and leave it at that whenever I saw either of the Jurassic Park sit-down machines because they were so common, but I got so sick of seeing them that I eventually had to stop. I’m feeling a bit nostalgic, though.
Life finds a way.
Here’s one of my favorite things in the arcade: A Street Fighter IV machine! And not just any Street Fighter IV machine…
A Ghetto Street Fighter IV machine running the Xbox version of the game on a timer. Look, it even has an “Xbox LIVE Marketplace” option on the menu! Yeah, running console games pretending they were arcade games was a thing poorer arcades would do in the mid-00s, but still. Look up older videos of Family Fun Center in Omaha if you want to see an arcade running an “arcade version” of Super Smash Bros Brawl.
Here, where the lighting problems are most severe, lies the forbidden corner of Skee Ball. And next to the Forbidden Corner of Skee Ball…
…lies the graveyard of machines too big to get rid of.
This machine was once a Final Furlong. If you’ve never seen that machine, and I wouldn’t blame you if you haven’t, it’s a game with big mechanical horses you ride on. They seem to have disposed of the horses already, but they’re keeping the rest of the machine around. Probably in case they need to harvest any more parts from it. One of monitors is still there…
Here in the graveyard was also Lethal Enforcers 3, the third and final entry in the series. And also a game that’s pretty damn rare to find at arcades these days. I only know one place in the country that has a working one, and it’s the Japanese version!
Just like that, I’ve finished my postmortem archival of this once-beautiful arcade. When I took the arcade group to the Tilt in the Twin Cities, they didn’t seem nearly as impressed by it as I was. I admit I wish more games were in working order, but an arcade like this is special. It’s a time capsule of an era when mall arcades flourished. An arcade that proudly tells its story through a series of broken machines. This is an arcade I’m truly happy to have been able to see before it closed its doors for the last time. Like I’ve said over and over since starting the Denver blog posts, not a single arcade managed to disappoint me. They were all great for completely different reasons. Even the run-down ones like this and Gameworks.
Life finds a way
After over a year, I’m in the final stretch of these Denver blog posts. Just three left to go. What kind of arcades will the final three be? Another ancient arcade clinging onto its legacy? Maybe something a bit more modern? We haven’t seen any traditional barcades either yet, have we?
