Twin Cities Log: Minneapolis’ Phantom Arcades (ft. Alpacas)

The Twin Cities have many, many arcades. We have mall arcades, bar arcades, fun center arcades, laundry mat arcades, theater arcades, more mall arcades, and a few oddities I haven’t even touched yet. Among those, there are two that are special for a unique reason. According to legend, if you visit the state fairgrounds as summer turns into fall, you might catch a glimpse of them. Just like the changing seasons, these arcades are fickle and only appear for two weeks every year.

Welcome to the Minnesota State Fair. This event runs annually during the two weeks leading up to Labor Day. I’ve never bothered to go in my three or so years living here. Of course, I’ve known about it since there’s no way you can live anywhere near this place without hearing about it. It’s a big event.

When I say it’s a really big event, I mean it’s a REALLY big event. The fairgrounds are 320 acres of wall-to-wall people. In fact, it’s one of the 30 largest annual events in the world, depending on how you count. It draws around 200,000 visitors per day over its 14-day course, with a total of 1.8 million tickets sold over the two weeks. Since most people don’t go for more than one day, those are mostly unique visitors. To put that into perspective, it has roughly the same average attendance per day as Summer Comiket (almost 600,000 people over three days), except it manages to maintain that for four times as long.

Of course, it’s no Oktoberfest, but it’s still debatably the largest state fair in the country by quite a large margin. Texas draws fewer people per day but lasts twice as long, so it has a higher overall attendance.

In my infinite wisdom, I attended without realizing what a big event it was and quickly found myself lost in the 320-acre fairgrounds. My first instinct was to head toward the midway. Does this seem like a place they’d put an arcade?

As it turned out, there were no arcades in sight—just 50 or so different carnival games. I have to give the woman running this one props since she was doing the race announcer thing for the plastic horses. I was going to come back and play some of these games after I found the arcades, but I couldn’t find the midway again. I swear, this fair is one David Bowie short of being the movie Labyrinth.

You know how you’re supposed to win Porygon by doing well at the slot machines in Pokemon games, but everyone buys the 9999 coins outright? That’s kind of what I feel this booth here is. If you want the inflatable tabasco sauce, you can buy it here instead of trying to win it from a rigged carnival game.

The midway turned out to be arcade-free, so I wandered around until I ran into it. Near the middle of the fair was a “parade” of horse-drawn buggies. “It’s not every day you see horses,” I thought. Then I remembered that I live in downtown Minneapolis.

See, I took this in the city two days later just because nobody would understand what I was talking about otherwise.

Here’s the real highlight of the day. At some point, I wandered into the livestock district, only to find a pair of fuzzy alpacas on display. Minnesota has many alpaca farms peppered around the state for some reason, so it’s not all that surprising to see them here. They were still standing in the same positions when I passed them two hours later. I don’t know whether you were supposed to pet them, but everyone did anyway.

Since I was lost anyway, I decided to wander into some of the animal display rooms. I’m not certain, but this showroom was for 4H students to enter their livestock for a best-of-show competition. There were over 100 rabbits up for judging, which is strange because there weren’t even half as many of any other type of animal. Maybe they use rabbits to teach beginner farming students how to care for animals.

A chicken that some kid raised from an egg. It doesn’t come up much, but I also used to raise baby birds. While baby chickens are fluffy, baby cockatiels look like uncooked turkeys with yellow fuzz. To this day, I still can’t touch any piece of poultry that still looks like a chicken’s body part. Nuggets are fine, though.

Speaking of turkeys, there was an entire back wall of them. It’s a little-known fact that Minnesota is the country’s leading turkeys producer. It’s little known because nobody stops to wonder which state is crazy enough to specialize in turkeys.

This duck couldn’t be contained. When only death awaits, you might dedicate the remainder of your life to biting as many people as possible.

The arcade turned out to be in the most discreet place possible. If I weren’t specifically looking for it, there’s no way I’d have noticed it from this side of the street.

The official name of this arcade is “Mini Pinball on a Stick.” A banner above the doorway usually gives the name, but they must have forgotten to put it up. It was hard to get a good establishing shot of the place since the machines were laid out so that they all blocked each other from view. It’s bigger than this picture makes it look, but not very much.

I might have my facts wrong here, but I believe this arcade has been around since 2014. Every year, whoever gets the highest score on pinball gets their initials added to the Wall of Fame. BFG was the 2014 champion, JTJ in 2015, and MTS in 2016. Except it looks like they completely forgot to add last year’s winner. Whoops.

If it’s not obvious, this arcade is run by pinball fanatics. I got most of their pinball lineup in the above shot, but they’re the same machines you see everywhere. These pinball machines are borrowed from a small arcade on the east side of town that I haven’t gotten around to writing about yet. Maybe this arcade is run by the same guy. I don’t know.

Remember when I mentioned they had The World’s Largest Pinball Machine at the State Fair? Well, now you can finally have some closure on that plot point. Here it is again, now with a big sign telling you it’s the World’s Largest Pinball Machine. I think it’s the same machine, but they move it here for the fair.

Thankfully, despite the name, they have a large selection of non-pinball games, including a few that I haven’t run into since starting this blog. Here, for example, is OutRun2. What do you mean I’ve run into it before? That was OutRun2SP! They’re completely different!

Well, maybe not “completely,” but there is a sect of OutRun2 fans who will swear by this original version. This game was deemed too difficult, so the SP update made crashes far less punishing and added a new slipstream technique to make the game easier for more casual players. If you’re not one of the few players offended by the slipstream’s existence, there’s no real reason to play this over the updated version. Maybe that’s why most arcades have that version instead of this one.

This is the third or fourth time I’ve seen this game, but I don’t think I’ve ever talked about it. The final boss is a giant butterfly that attacks by making normal-looking butterflies fly into your face. It’s that sort of game.

Somebody decided that the best way to promote Fox Family’s The New Addams Family was with an arcade machine that causes you pain. Ironically, more people probably remember this “game” than the show it was promoting.

Here’s a machine I’ve wanted to run into for ages. This was the last place I expected to find it. This is Konami’s Fighting Mania, an arcade adaption of the beloved 80s multimedia franchise The Fist of the North Star. The only time I’ve seen this machine was in Omaha, right before they got rid of it. That point already broke it down, so I never got a chance to play it. The idea is that those six pads on the sides fold forward, and you punch them in rapid succession like Kenshiro to make your enemy’s head explode. The idea is very similar to that Kung Fu Panda game you see at every Dave and Busters, except with more implied violence.

As you can see, this is the Korean version of the game, but it’s identical to the English version outside of some of the menus. I’m not certain if the English version was formally released in the US or if it was made for some South-East Asian country. This game has a cult following because of its unique playstyle. There have even been attempts to create a PC controller for this game so it could be played at home, but none ended up getting off the ground.

When I was going through some pictures of my trip, I realized I didn’t take a good picture of those old digger machines they had on the East Coast. They had a few here, so I made it a point to get a shot of the inside. These particular diggers are much newer than before but still old enough to run on the primitive crank system. Since electronic arcade machines didn’t exist back then, these were controlled entirely by turning a crank to rotate the digger. After half a minute, the claw would automatically drop and grab whatever it landed on. They’re similar to modern crane machines in most regard, except without the computer chip that makes it impossible to win until 30 people have lost.

There were also some classic photo booths lining the side of the arcade. If I remember the arcade’s website correctly, these are the same photo booths that have been at the state fair for the last 50-60 years. Granted, I could be thinking of an arcade in Ocean City that also had an old photo booth…

Last and maybe least, they had some rooms on the side with VR goggles that you could pay to play. VR technology is still a novelty that arcades are the only practical use anyone has come up with. They even have entire arcades dedicated to nothing but oculus rift goggles (or whatever the modern equivalent is). We have one around here, but I’m still unsure if I will bother writing about it. Those places feel more like LAN centers than arcades, you know?

Before leaving, there was one last machine I wanted to mention. It was out of order, but that’s fine. I wasn’t going to play it; I just wanted to point something out.

See, I told you. It’s totally the same bottle of soda as Intermission.

They also had this hanging on the wall. At first, I scuffed at it, but then I remembered that I’d taken quite a few girls to the arcade on dates. It just comes with the territory when you meet most of them playing DDR at conventions…

I’m still not sure if this was some kind of gimmicky Sega Super GT promotional thing or if whoever made this just really liked the game.

Before hitting the other arcade, let’s take a look another quick look around the fair.

The long-running comic strip Peanuts was set in Minneapolis, so there are statues like this scattered all over town. You see, Minneapolis was Charles Shultz’s hometown. At some point, Shultz moved out to California, and the setting began to take on more and more aspects of California, but everyone here quietly ignores that. The only things we have going for us are turkeys, Better Crocker, Target, and the Mary Tyler Moore show. It’s understandable why we cling so hard to Peanuts.

Here at the state fair, like every other carnival, there are two genres of food: Deep Fried and On a Stick. The food groups are diverse; you can fit literally anything into one. It’s turned into something of a competition to see who can come up with the most extreme thing to deep fry or put on a stick. This year they had deep-fried avocado, Australian potatoes, and s’mores. Sadly, none of those could compete with the sheer absurdity of the deep-fried Twinkies. I’d have bought one, but they were five dollars each, and I believe everyone who’s ever eaten one has died.

The second category had nothing quite as ridiculous, mostly the mundane likes of cheese on a stick and olives on a stick. The one that stuck out most to me was “BIG FAT BACON on a stick!” where the only food being sold were gigantic slabs of bacon stuck on a stick. The name tells you everything you need to know about this place.

However, neither could compete with Bayou Bob’s Gator Shack, best known for its signature Deep Fried Alligator on a Stick. I nearly bought one to see what it tasted like, but I promised I wouldn’t get any food while I was here. Once you start eating, your reserve money dips down fast.

After about an hour of trying to figure out where the other arcade was, I finally realized that I was on the wrong side of the fair. Playland Arcade at the Fair was harder to miss than Pinball on a Stick, as long as you’re in the right area.

Since entrances surrounded the entire building, this arcade didn’t seem to care whether its machines were organized so that you could get a good photo. It did have an awesome lighting arrangement, though.

Playland arcade is the much older of the two fair arcades. I don’t know how far it goes back, but it’s been here for at least a decade.

This little corner I’ve been showing pictures of is only about a quarter of the entire arcade. This is where they put nearly all of these non-ticket games. As you can see, it’s mostly the standard Raw Thrills stuff and a few other common games like Razing Storm and the roller coaster simulator they have at most theaters.

They had a working copy of H2Overdrive, though. That’s something?

The rest of the arcade was taken up almost entirely by the most standard lineup of ticket games I’ve ever seen.  There were a couple worth mentioning, though.

First up is Pac-man Ticket Mania, a game I’m amazed I don’t see more often. More importantly, if you look at the background, you can get a better idea of the arcade’s layout. The corner with the non-ticket games is lower than the rest of the floor, so it’s inherently divided from the rest of the arcade.

Oh, Quik Drop. I see this all the time, but there’s usually not much you can say about it. However, this is a great opportunity to point out something. Once upon a time, this machine was easy to win at. It was the go-to game if you wanted to farm tickets at Dave and Busters. It got so bad that the company had to release an update that increased the difficulty so much that players could no longer consistently hit the 46+ prize. That’s all well and good, but it brings up an interesting point:

How much do you want to bet that this arcade never bothered to apply the update?

I didn’t bother to check since this game was so overpriced that it wouldn’t matter. It’s still a good example of how easy it can be to farm tickets at hole-in-the-wall arcades that have never had anyone come in who knows how to exploit the ticket games. Then again, if they cared that much, Colorama wouldn’t still be as common as it is.

Crossy Road is another example of a game that used to be exploited to hell and back before it got an update patch. I’ve never actually done it, but I spend so much time researching arcades that I pick up on this stuff. I took this picture because I haven’t seen Timber Man before, but it happened to tie into what I was talking about, which is great since I honestly don’t know what I would say about Timber Man.

I normally make it a point not to take photos with people in them if I can avoid it, but I had to get a shot of these two. It’s been so many years since I’ve seen two kids huddled around Big Rig Trucking with a huge pile of tickets, dumping more and more coins into the machine. You have no idea how addicting this game is until you’ve played it. It warms my heart to know that even with all of the newer games available, this one still manages to rob kids of their money.

It does exist! I thought it was just an urban myth, but here it is A Super Cars machine produced after Raw Thrills lost the F&F license! See, every trace of Fast and the Furious has been removed from the machine, so the game is called “Super Cars” now. You have no idea how good it feels to get closure on this issue finally. I never thought I’d be this excited to find a Fast and the Furious machine, but I’m technically not since it has nothing to do with Fast and the Furious.

And finally, we have this old Pump It Up machine that’s been here for as long as anyone can remember. It’s easily the oldest one I’ve ever seen. Notice how much it looks like an old-style DDR machine? That’s how early PIU machines looked. Newer machines have managed to distance themselves from their roots, but it’s obvious that the game was a shameless DDR ripoff back then.

This particular version is The Prex 3, an awkward shortening of “The Premier 3 Extra”. The Pump It Up Premier games were the Pump equivalent of the DDRMAX series, with three entries coming out during the same timeframe. While the DDRMAX games would hide a handful of new songs and release codes to unlock them over the course of a year, PIU Premier instead opted to release a 1.5 “Extra” version of the base games that added a handful of new songs (which, in all fairness, DDR also used to do early on). DDR went on a several-year hiatus after Extreme, giving Pump time to build its own identity. That same hiatus is a major reason ITG took off like it did. If Konami had opted to keep releasing new versions of DDR around that time, they’d probably still be uncontested in the arcade dance game market. In retrospect, it was a stupid decision.

On my way home from the fair, I passed by this. I promised I wasn’t going to eat anything, but damn it, I have a weakness for cheese.

They were so greasy that I couldn’t tell if they were mozzarella or white cheddar, but these were the best things I’ve eaten in weeks. I didn’t feel well afterward, but I regret nothing.

I took the wrong exit out of the fair and had to walk around the fairgrounds to get to the buses. Then I found out you can’t enter the bus area on foot unless you’re coming out of the fairgrounds, so I had to walk several blocks and catch the bus elsewhere. As I made the trek, I saw several high school students walking their cows back to their pens. I pondered the scene for the next half hour because I had nothing better to think about while roaming around trying to find the bus.

I don’t know if I’ll be going to the state fair again, but I’m glad I got to experience it once. I wish I had been able to find the carnival games again, though. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I still have two weeks’ worth of exciting East Coast adventures to write about.