Winter here in Minnesota is notoriously harsh. We had a huge blizzard in the massivele of April just a few weeks ago. I’m always searching the internet for new arcades that I may have missed, but visiting them in that kind of weather is another story. Now that it’s spring, I can finally start adventuring again. Investigating arcades that may or may not exist, swearing up and down that two machines in a laundromat counts as an “arcade,” and just going anywhere, I feel like. There’s no better way to spend an afternoon.
A few days before this trip, I was going to the store when suddenly I thought, “Hey, why don’t I just keep going and see where I end up?” I made it a few miles before turning back and deciding I’d gone far enough. Today I was better prepared to make this seven-mile walk. After all, I read about a couple of arcades around this area, and I wouldn’t be content until I knew whether they were still around.
Our story begins here at the Mississippi River. I’ve often dreamed of buying a kayak and spending a month just floating down the river. There are some fascinating barcades in some river shore towns, you know. I’m the only person who would know that.
If I had thought about it, there are some cool ruins on the riverbed that I could have talked about, but I didn’t visit them today. Another time perhaps.
When you cross the river, you reach the area once known as St Anthony. I’ve talked about the history of the Twin Cities once before, but the term originally referred to the river-separated cities of St Anthony and Minneapolis. In the late 1800s, the two merged into modern Minneapolis, and St Paul somehow ended up as the second Twin City.
As you can see, this area shows its age. A bunch of factories on the river look like they were pulled out of the 1920s. I’m not sure how many of these are still operating, but it creates a cool atmosphere.
During my first year in Minnesota, I read a visual novel called Fate/Hollow Ataraxia. There’s this scene where the Japanese characters talk about how foreigners hate something called “Umeboshi.” I got curious about what it was, only to find that it isn’t sold around here (I’m sure the Dragon Supermarket carries it, though). After some digging, I found out that there was a lone liquor store that carried Umeboshi Sake. I had to see what it tasted like. This is that liquor store. They have a large section devoted entirely to Japanese alcohol, so this is the place to go if you want to try any of Japan’s specialties.
Btw, Umeboshi sake is gross. I was expecting it to be sour, but it was so sweet that I couldn’t stomach it. I did finally get around to finishing F/HA late last year.
Continuing north, we come across this part of town.
Look at all the abandoned buildings. Considering that there’s an upscale riverside condo just a few blocks away, you’d think this area would have been gentrified to hell and back. I like run-down neighborhoods like this. You can feel the history oozing out of every crack in these brick walls. It’s very thought-provoking stuff.
At some point, I got lost and had to cut through a train yard to get back on track. Those big stacks in the open are replacement parts for when the railroad breaks down. If you travel a bit further, there’s a yard where they sell used train cars. The Twin Cities used to do a lot of shipping down the river, so there are more transport railroads here than anyone needs. Nobody uses the river anymore, so many of them have fallen out of use.
A slow-moving train decided to accompany me on my walk, but I resisted the urge to grab on and see where it was going. Train hopping was my first plan to get from Omaha to Minneapolis, but I ultimately realized hitchhiking was more reliable. Still, it was moving so slowly. I could have grabbed on.
I’m also curious about what became of Kelsey and Noah. And how they got their names up there, to begin with.
It turns out that you’re not supposed to be in the train yard. There was no way out without climbing a wall—no big deal.
It looks like a hobo used to camp down in this corner. This would be an excellent place to do it since nobody can get in, and those trees provide decent cover during the warmer months. I found the remains of a bed, shopping cart, safe, and various Tupperware. This was a pretty successful hobo.
Here’s Minneapolis’ Art District. You know it’s the Art District because the signs sticking off the street lights say so. Every area from here out has a name like that, but I don’t think anyone uses them. I’m not sure what this district has to do with art, though. There’s an ice skating building and some museum, but not all that artsy. I’d have called it the Auto Parts District, myself.
Moving right along, this is the “Central Ave Business District.” I guess nobody wanted to be the one to put “The Mexican and Taiwanese District” on those banners.
My bus transfer point on the way to work used to be right across from this community garden. I’d buy a plot at my local community garden if I weren’t so sure that the local homeless population would steal my tomatoes. I was a bum once, so I know how it goes.
This is about as far as I got on my last trip. When you see a run-down laundromat, you have to look inside to see if they have any equally run-down arcade machines. That’s one of the many rules I live by.
I wasn’t disappointed. It looks like someone took it upon themselves to scratch out every face on the cab, except for the Mario up top. Look at that expression. Whoever did it decided to leave Mario alive, so he’d spend the rest of his life wondering when it was his turn.
Fun fact about this machine: If you ever see it in blue or orange, it used to be Donkey Kong. The dedicated machine for Mario Bros is a much rarer one known as a widebody. It’s a game two people play simultaneously, so Nintendo understood that the machine needed to be much wider to accommodate both players. Of course, nobody seemed to mind squishing together on the converted Donkey Kong machines.
Somehow I doubt this machine still has anything to do with Mario Bros on the inside. It looks more like someone got it cheap and made a half-assed conversion to a multi-cade machine. If it were working, I’d love to see what was loaded up on this.
Another thing that caught my eye in this crappy laundromat was the drink machine. This is one of the most bizarre soda lineups I’ve ever seen. Why are all of these from different brands? Why grape Faygo but three orange drinks that aren’t Faygo? Why are half of them orange-flavored to begin with??
Continuing further north, we get to this hill. Nobody bothered to give it a cute district name, so I’ll call it The Hill.
On the Hill was a repo shop where they resell stuff taken from people who failed to pay their debts. It was full of fantastic stuff, but they’re only open on Saturdays. I want that Pepsi fridge.
They had even more stuff in the back. There’s a grill, some old doors, and a plastic bench that looks like it came from a tour bus. I want to see what other kinds of weird stuff they have so badly…
Next is a gas station called Bobby & Steve’s Auto World. Don’t let the unassuming name and appearance fool you. This place is rocking.
So you walk in, and the first thing you see is a rotating car above your head. There used to be an exclusive lounge on the second floor, but they had to get rid of it because of the loitering. What’s most interesting to me is that a completely different car used to be up there. How did they manage to swap the vehicles?
The gas station goes the extra mile to embrace the vintage road stop look. Every inch of the place is covered in 1960s signs and memorabilia. If you’ve read any of my other blog posts, you probably know at this point that I’m a sucker for places, going the extra mile without any real reason to do so. Nobody will come to this gas station just to soak up the atmosphere.
Nobody besides me, anyway.
As cool as the gas station half of the building is, it’s the Godfather’s that really got my attention. Just look at this place. It’s impossible to top the Godfathers up in Brooklyn Park, but this one takes a confident second.
Check out those Cadillac seats and that gas pump gumball machine. It reminds me of a place back in Omaha called Hollywood Candy. Someday I swear to God, I will take a trip to Omaha to do a blog post about that place. Imagine everything I love crammed into an old fire station. That’s Hollywood Candy.
Over in the corner are a Betty Boop gas station mannequin and an authentic record-playing jukebox. This is the point where I decided that this Godfather’s deserves my business. I will make the walk whenever I’m hungry for cheese bread and don’t feel like making my own.
This Ms. Pac-man/Galaga cocktail cab seems a bit out of place. Not that I’ll complain. I usually don’t even mention the upright version of this machine when I run into it, but the cocktail is a whole ‘nother story. I am a man sold entirely on novelty.
Speaking of novelty, check out the 1960s pinball machines. I’ve been randomly running into ancient pinball machines a lot lately, haven’t I? wait until I get around to doing a blog post about a specific 21+ miniature golf course. If the prospect of a 21+ miniature golf course full of vintage pinball machines doesn’t strike your interest, then I think you’ve come to the wrong blog.
Cars’ heavy route 66 motif makes this feel at home here. Did you even know that a Cars arcade game exists? Well, it does. It’s just really, really rare outside of Chuck E Cheese for some reason. I took a trip to one of our local Chuck E Cheese for my first anniversary blog post. It was such a disappointing, underwhelming trip that I never got around to making the post. Cars arcade was one of the few things of interest I found there, which means the post will be even more tedious if I ever get around to writing it.
This game is much more fun than you’d expect from Raw Thrills and their Cruis’n USA rehashes. It’s like what would happen if you took that game and added Mario Kart items. The game’s most exciting feature is a bizarre mechanic where getting spun out doesn’t stop you as it does in most racing games. Instead, you just get flipped around and start driving trunk-first. You can quickly flip your car back around with the push of a button at the cost of some speed or keep driving like that with slightly wonky controls.
Just when you thought this place had everything: Godfather’s Pizza, arcade games, old crap, and a spinning car, it somehow finds a way to top itself. That’s right, my beloved Kemps’! Here! It’s like someone built this gas station just for me. I don’t care what we find from this point on. Bobby & Steve’s Auto World is the highlight of this adventure. Sorry, train yard.
With the adventure peaked early, we continue down into yet another district of some sort. None of my photos have a clear enough image of the banner to see what they called this one. Probably a “shopping district” or something.
Hey hey, look what I found. I didn’t even know this was here. This is gonna be good.
First up is a pretty recent Lego set going for eight bucks. Shaking the box tells me that either a big chunk of the pieces are in there, or there’s some completely unrelated crap inside. Unrelated crap isn’t necessarily bad. Some guy last year found a bunch of original 1930s Disney animation cells in a puzzle he got from a thrift store. That’s a big deal since Disney is pretty protective of their animation cells, so very few of them are circulating in public hands. Those things were worth thousands of bucks each.
The original Fisher Price Little People barn. Back in my day, I had LOADS of these Little People houses. The barn. The ranch. The house. The city block. The airport. You name it. I had a lot of cousins who where 5-6 years older than me, so I had all the hand-me-down toys I could ask for. These were pretty much my go-to toys just because I had so many. Every once in a while, I still find things like this at Savers, but you’re never going to find the little people that went with it.
Skip ahead if you don’t want to hear me rambling about Nerf guns.
Back in the early 10s, there was a fad where college kids would have these gigantic nerf gun gatherings. A big part was these Nerf N-force series guns and their tacticool motif (or as close to tacticool as you can get when the firearms are bright yellow). They came in every variety imaginable, had interchangeable gun magazines and accessories, and were just really fun to shoot. At Dark Matter anime, the hangout for all of the anime nerds in South Dakota, we’d sometimes bring these out and shoot them in the store.
Right around the time the fad was passing, these atrocities were released. Instead of foam darts, they shoot stupid discs. “But they’re so much better than darts,” those fools would tell me. Look at that ugly-ass piece of garbage. If I’m playing with toy guns, I want the one that looks like an assault rifle, not this stupid sci-fi nonsense.
You’ve learned something new about me today. I’m triggered by nerf guns that shoot anything besides darts unless it’s the Nerf Cluster****. EDIT: That’s my name for the Nerf N-Strike Unity. I had a link to it, but it broke. Just Google it. You’ll understand why I gave it that name.
These two are the Nerf Strongarm and Nerf Barricade. The lower gun, the Barricade, is my all-time favorite. Unlike most Nerf guns, it’s battery-powered and doesn’t need to be reloaded. That sounds nice on its own, but what makes me love it is all of the crazy mods you can do to it. You can swap out the batteries with higher voltage ones to raise the firing rate. You can cut out the barrel and replace it with a magazine slot to increase the reloading speed. I’ve even seen one guy who added a digital display counter to show how many bullets he had left before he needed to reload.
I’ve talked about the anime club I was in charge of a few times before on this blog. It was an actual anime club at one point that I went to once or twice just to check out, but ended up in charge of because a couple of dorky 14 year old girls kept showing up for it even after the leader quit because I’m too dutiful for my own good. While I wouldn’t go as far as calling them friends, I ended up growing pretty fond of them over the course of the year we spent together. Sometimes on warm days, I’d grab my Nerf guns and the five of us would go to park behind the anime shop and shoot each other. Come Christmas, I got each of them their own Nerf gun, mostly used, that I had tricked out with a global organized crime theme (the Shadow Counsel was an inside joke that I’m not even going to try to explain), since I was moving away in a few months. For one of them, it was a pair of Barricades I had painted purple called “Honor” and “Humanity”. The anime shop had moved to a different building in November, which didn’t have the back room we used for the anime club. We tried to keep it alive, but it just wasn’t working without a room. In the end, it fell apart before I could give them their presents. While disappointing, I’m glad that they kept hanging out with each other after that. Half of the reason I kept it alive was because one of them in particular didn’t have any friends and I got depressed watching her show up and sit alone for two hours every week.
Moving on, the Strongarm is from the N-Strike Elite series, a series of souped-up N-Strike guns released later. The Strongarm is the upgraded form of the legendary Nerf Maverick. The Maverick was so popular that many people cite it as the reason that the N-Strike series took off like it did. The main reason was that it looked baller with almost any sort of custom paint job.
When I left home, I posted on a toy forum that I was giving away my Transformers and giant Pokemon plushies to anyone who happened to live on my route west. My third and final dropoff was to an awkward chap residing in Indiana. When I was taking my stuff out of my trunk, he caught sight of my copper-painted Maverick and couldn’t shut up about how much he loved it. I wasn’t planning on parting with it that day, but I hope he took care of it.
Man, that Nerf gun rambling went on far longer than expected. For two bucks, you can get not one but THREE different versions of DDR for the PS2. That’s almost as cheap as I got mine for during Gamestop’s PS2 clearance. If that’s not your thing, you can get Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, DDR Konamix, and some other PS1 games for the same price. Either way, it’s a steal.
If you don’t have a Playstation of your own, you can get one with two controllers for only 9.99. If you can’t find it in the picture, it’s because it’s under the 10-dollar Xbox 360. People tell me, “it’s only ten bucks; it’s not gonna work.” I’ve never bought a system from Savers that didn’t work. My PS2, Wii, and all of the PS2s I’ve bought for friends have functioned just fine, and most of those were half the price.
And if you get the Wii, Mario Galaxy is only 4 bucks.
I’ve seen Maus on top comic books of all time lists before but never got around to reading it. Most people I’ve talked to consider it one of the best examples of a well-written non-cape comic with some sense of maturity. When I saw it on the shelf, I knew I had to move it up front so everyone could see it.
Because I’m ten and think the idea of people overreacting to the cover is hilarious.
This desk once belonged to my grandpa. Not this particular desk, but one identical to it. It’s one of the things I associate most with him. I can tell you exactly what he kept in most of the drawers. Five year old me wasn’t supposed to open the drawers, but I usually did anyway. I’ll never forget the sound they made.
If the pull-down front wasn’t missing, I’d have probably bought this.
Last up is this sign. If my apartment allowed you to hang stuff on the wall, I’d be the proud owner of this sign right now. But it doesn’t, and I’m not. Isn’t this one of the same signs they were giving away as prizes at the Namco Time-Out arcade?
I was nearing my destination. Here is the final stretch of businesses before the end of the line. When I was crossing the street, some kid in a stroller threw a temper tantrum. He threw his toy train into the middle of the road, and his mom told him it was his fault and he couldn’t have it back. I grabbed it out of the street, not to save the train, but to save whoever was driving the next car from wondering what the hell they just ran over. The mom still refused to take it back. Free train, I guess?
This is Total Health Square, a strip mall full of every health-related business you can think of: A family physician, chiropractor, acupuncture, Great Health and Nutrition, massage place, a beauty supply place, and Domino’s Pizza.
I said there were a couple of arcades around here; I wanted to confirm. The first was at a laundromat a few districts back. A listing from early 2010 said they had Virtua Fighter 2, Contra, and Out Run. Dammit, I wanted a local Virtua Fighter 2, but it turns out the laundromat had changed owners a while back, and the arcade was removed. The other is that hotel you can kind of see in the middle of the photo. It had an arcade once upon a time, but according to the guy at the desk had been gone since he’d been working there—no big loss, since it was just Hydro Thunder and Area 51. Wait, do we even have a local Hydro Thunder machine anymore?
I got lost somewhere near the highway again and had to follow a fence until I found a point where I could safely scale it without having to wade through a pond.
At this point, I realized I had made a horrible miscalculation. My last stop was a theater on the other side of the Mississippi river with no way to cross on foot. I began skimming by phone to see if a bus could take me across, but for some reason, I couldn’t find the theater on Google. After a bit of searching, I figured out why: The theater closed last summer. How disappointing. They had a DDR Extreme machine that very few people knew about. And one of the only Crazy Taxi cabs in Minnesota.
Sadly, I began to look for a bus stop to return home. While clearing my mind, something occurred to me: DDR Extreme? Crazy Taxi? Late last summer? Finally, it clicked in my head:
Remember that trip to Chuck E Cheese last November? It was right next to Southdale Mall, so I did the rounds to see if anything had changed. Southdale Mall’s theater had a couple of new games. I thought it was bizarre that a neglected game room like this would be getting any new games, much less one as old as Crazy Taxi. Crazy Taxi is crazy rare here in the Twin Cities for some reason, with only one other location I know of possibly still having it. To have one pop out of nowhere like this caught me off-guard, but now I under that they must have picked it up cheap when the other theater shut down.
And as for that DDR Extreme machine? A certain arcade I’ve covered before had quite a drastic expansion last fall. Maybe it’s time we took another trip there…
Before we go, how about one last peek through a Goodwill I found on my way home? Look at the sheer amount of DDR they’ll never sell for that price. I don’t think you can still play The Matrix Online, either. If you can, it’s probably freeware.
Pokemon The First Movie. While the VHS isn’t rare, the DVD is quite the collector’s item because few people had DVD players in 1999. What gets me is the Hollywood Video wrapping. If they’re selling a used VHS for that price, that sticker must be from 2002 at the very latest. It isn’t even marked down.
There’s even a dead spider trapped inside. So to recap: In 2000-ish, someone sold a used copy of Mewtwo Strikes Back to Hollywood Video. That video had a spider living in it that nobody noticed when they repackaged it. Someone bought the video shortly after and never took it out of the package. Around 18 years later, they donated it to Goodwill, never having removed it from the plastic.
That gas station may be the best place I found today, but this VHS tape is by far the most fascinating find.
Yet another object that was very close to me as a child. The Take-A-Long tape player was the first electronic device I ever operated. It taught me how tapes work, let me record my own, and even forced me to learn how to change batteries. It was mostly because the damn thing ran out so often that I got tired of asking my grandparents to change them for me.
And so ends today’s pointless walk north. While we only found one thing that would qualify as an “arcade,” Today, we also confirmed three arcades were gone. Yeah, you’re saying that doesn’t matter, but I keep a map of every arcade in the Twin Cities that I catch wind of, even ones I don’t think are still around. Deleting some of the more dubious entries is finally a win in my book.
Plus, I got a free High-Speed Bullet Train. The 7-mile walk was worth it.
