Here I am again, back up in Blaine. Like last time, we find ourselves walking down a long road in the middle of nowhere. That’s just how Blaine is.
It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog post. The next Chicago post is one I’m excited about, so I’ve been waiting until I was in the right mood to do it justice. I needed to visit an arcade that would ignite the fire in my heart first. I was planning on doing that next week (trust me, I think I found a good one), but inspiration struck in the form of a muse driving by my apartment yesterday. You can’t see something like that and not seek it out. It just so happened it was going to be right near a couple of arcades I’ve been meaning to write about.
Well, I’m not sure what it is, but the thing I was looking for was supposed to be here. Some kind of local Blaine Fair? The pictures I took of it didn’t do its size justice, but it’s pretty big.
I recognised a lot of this stuff from the State Fair. It makes sense that the people who run these stands and carnival games would want to make some extra money during the off-season. However, the truck I was looking for was nowhere to be seen. I wonder if I came all this way for nothing. I searched every square inch, but it just wasn’t there.
They did have Deep Fried Oreo Cookies though, so that was something.
With that disappointing detour out of the way, it’s back on the open road we go. It was 90-degree weather, humid as hell, and my route for the day was 6.2 miles long. But it’s not an adventure if you don’t feel like you’re going to die by the end of it.
…god damn it. Looks like I’m going to have to go back to the fair now.
We can deal with that later. There’s a small arcade in this Best Western I’ve wanted to check out for a while. By the way, for those curious, this place is two blocks away from the bowling alleys I showcased in my last post about Blaine.
Hmm… Yes, this is a hotel arcade. I made it a point to check this one out because Google images shows that this arcade was quite a bit more exciting a few years ago. That picture I linked is ancient, but there were some more recent ones that I can no longer find that showed Crazy Taxi and a game called Rhythm Freaks that I had never heard of. Either way, this is all that’s around now.
This looks like a relatively old version of Super Chexx. It’s probably a relic from when this place was packed with games. I’ve recently learned that they finally stopped making Super Chexx a couple of years ago. RIP.
Even though the lineup of games here isn’t very interesting (not pictured: Ghost Squad and Ms Pac-man), it’s still the kind of charm you can only find in run-down hotel game rooms. Just look at how both token machines are crammed up against Crisis Zone for some reason. Still, I can’t help but shake the feeling that this small game room isn’t going to be around for another decade.
After finishing my very short sweep of the Best Western game room, I finally had to get back to the Blaine Fair to get a picture of this damn thing. This is the legendary Oscar Mayer Hot Dog Truck. When something like this drives by your window, you can’t help but take notice of it. It was also two hours late getting to the fair.
The road is long and endless, but I had one last destination I had to visit. It’s one I’d been putting off going to for well over a year. You see, there are a LOT of local places with arcades I still haven’t gotten around to visiting. Someday I’ll get to them for all. But for now, I was caked in sweat and unsure whether my legs could handle the last few miles of this walk. I’ve let myself go over that last year…
But I will always endure!
Finally, I made it to a small roadside building in a part of town I’d never been to before. If I didn’t know what I was looking for, I’d probably assume this was a hot tub dealership or something. Upon closer inspection, the entire front of the building is painted with an elaborate mural and two guard figurines surrounding the door. I’d have gotten a better picture of it, but dammit, I just wanted to get inside where the air conditioning was.
This is the Blue Sun Soda Shop, the self-proclaimed largest soda store in the country. Or, this is the diner half of it, anyway. I failed to get an establishing shot of the store part. I assure you, though, the store half is something else.
Let’s start our exploration here at the very front. This is Whistler brand soda, a “local brew” of soda found only in Minnesota. I’ve asked an expert on the subject and was told that the proper term is “handcrafted bubbly water“, but I find this information dubious at best.
Out of Blue Sun’s 1300 varieties of soda, about 60 were various flavors of Whistler. There are the standard flavors like grape and cherry, less standard flavors like mango and ginger ale, and “why did you make this?” flavors like caramelised banana and huckleberry.
A giant poster on the wall explained that Whistler is Minnesota’s most iconic soft drink. Having grown up in Michigan, I can confirm they’re right about Faygo being a big deal. However, Kool-aid isn’t a soft drink, so this poster is about as reliable as “handcrafted bubbly water”. It doesn’t help that “Whistler” is pasted over some other drink…
I want to put the size of this place’s selection into perspective for you. This section is called “Nothing but Root Beer”. Like the sign says, every soda in this picture is root beer. I bought a couple of bottles of Ramblin’ since they were two for a dollar. I’ll pop them open and see how they taste at the end of the post.
Here we can get a better look at the store as a whole. It’s about the size of a large 7-11, except everything on the shelves is soda. I didn’t even know there were this many types of orange soda. How would anyone even know which flavors are good without drinking most of them?
This is the selection of generic cola, except for that yellow one there. I’m pretty sure that isn’t Cola-flavored.
Here’s where the local handcrafted bubbly water is put on display. Since the biggest soda store in the country is in Minnesota, it was only a matter of time before they made the most obvious pun possible. I applaud their restraint in only making it once.
Here’s where they house the imports! The only label I can make out here is Country Club, which is from the Dominican Republic. There are also some Japanese brands in the middle, but I’ve had Japanese soda before. It’s flat and tasteless like Ramune or so hyper-carbonated that it burns to drink. I vaguely recall some Korean Sprite that made my mouth burn, too…
I don’t know the story behind this, but that Billy the Soda Jerk character appeared in a few other places around the store. I’d guess that this was the store’s in-house brand, but I know that’s not the case for reasons we’ll get into later.
Last up’s the novelty soda section, where flavors that sell themselves entirely on being weird are stored. Atomic Fizz is the one that I’m most curious about. Sure, the cucumber and blue cheese flavors are funny, but at least you know what you’re getting into when you buy them. What could Atomic Fizz possibly taste like to be lumped in with them? Luckily, their official site has the answer! Sort of. (EDIT: Site is dead. I think the page said something like “it tastes like freedom in your mouth”)
Now I really wish I had grabbed a bottle.
They were also giving away free popcorn. I’m not sure the front drawer is supposed to hang out like that all the time, though.
Blue Sun isn’t just a soda shop and bills itself as a sweets shop. The sweets selection is tiny compared to the 1300 soda flavors, but they went with some interesting choices. Here we have 72 different flavors of taffy. I’ve never been much of a taffy person, but Mackinac Island, near where I grew up, is pretty famous for the stuff, so it was sold all over the state. I visited Mackinac once as a kid, but I don’t remember a damn thing about it besides the taffy and fudge.
Sorry, Blue Sun, I love you and all, but your Wall of Pez is lame. There’s a place I’ve mentioned on this blog a few times called Hollywood Candy in Omaha that also has the 1950s theme going on. Once you’ve seen their Wall of Pez, nothing else really compares.
Novelty Jelly Belly flavors. The one that gets me is pear. I kinda get the others, but why is pear significant or novel enough to merit being its own thing? Did it win some poll? Does someone at the factory really like pear? I have no idea.
Speaking of Hollywood Candy, they had one of these things there, too. You usually find this at higher-end candy shops where you fill a tube full of sour sugar powder…
Hold on. I just noticed that the sign in the background says “craft soda”. I’ve been lied to.
As always, this is an arcade blog, first and foremost. For talking about and archiving arcades. I wouldn’t be writing such a long blog post about a soda shop if they didn’t have an arcade of some sort. Let’s take a quick look inside.
…and I failed to get a shot of the room. Well, the short version is that there’s nothing in here but a lot of pinball. There’s also a small seating area. You can probably piece together what it looks like from the pictures I did take.
For a 1950s-themed place, they had a strange emphasis on 90s pinball machines. On the bright side, I’m a bit more knowledgeable about those than the older ones. Of note is Junk Yard, my all-time favorite pinball machine. Yeah, even a guy like me who isn’t big on pinball has a favorite machine. It’s one of those heavily mission-based pinball games where you play at a junkyard-themed table, fulfilling objectives to collect specific pieces of junk. The junk can then be put together into tools to help you. For example, you can assemble a makeshift gun and use it to shoot the guard dog that blocks your way to a part of the table. Throughout the game, you have an angel and devil giving you advice about which piece of junk to aim for next. They tend to have very priorities in which objective you should complete next, so they’re constantly arguing with each other in the voice samples. It’s a really fun machine, but not a particularly popular one.
They did have a handful of older machines over here, though.
We saw this one at Up-Down forever ago, didn’t we? This is Ice Cold Beer, an “arcade game” that you’d rarely find outside of bars. If you want to know more about it, go check out that post.
This doesn’t seem like the kind of place that would house an Out Run machine, but it’s possible they did during the early days of the establishment. If not, I hate when they hang marquees on walls that aren’t meant to honor fallen machines.
Before I forget, this is the bathroom. Every inch of Blue Sun is filled with personality.
Anyway, let’s pop back over to the dining area and take a better look at it. I’m unsure if the girls working the counter have to wear those outfits or if they enjoy dressing the part. Given that the one on the right was rambling about cosplay, I guess it’s the latter. I was on the verge of passing out when I arrived, so I ordered a root beer. All the soda here is made fresh by adding syrup to the old-school carbonated water. It was the best damn root beer I had ever had. That could have just been because I was dehydrated, though.
What’s going on back here? When I said Whistler was a local brew, I wasn’t kidding. It’s made and bottled right here in the back room with a vintage bottling machine. They even keep the window open so you can watch the process. That’s also why they have a 50-cent deposit on all Whistler glass bottles since they clean and reuse them.
They had a couple of other arcade machines in this area. The arcade on the top floor of Mall of America was called Sky Deck until very recently when they rebranded. It seems this is where their skeeball machines ended up. You can still see the Sky Deck logo on the front of the machines.
This game is Shuffle Alley. Or, at least, a game that works the same. I talked about a modern version of this machine once a long time ago, but it’s much easier to see here. Those pins are held above the lane, and you slide a puck under them. The puck has a magnet inside that the pins respond to and get “knocked down” as the puck passes under. Note the purely mechanical scoreboard.
One last thing of note is that they have a random year-round fireworks shop in the back. I don’t understand this either.
Blue Sun boasts having the biggest soda selection in the country. It’s not hard to see why. It’s wall-to-wall soda, having more brands than I even knew existed. You need to see this place at least once if you’re in Minneapolis. Even if you’re not interested in soda, it’s a place that sells itself entirely on charm. And it’s got even more charm than soda. But there is one last thing I need to do before finishing this post…
Let’s taste this 50-cent root beer! (the carrying case is for some licensed tie-in soda to the Dead World comic book and has nothing to do with what I bought)
…it’s okay. The flavor is much stronger than the big-name brands, but the carbonation is weak. It reminds me of a richer MUG. Nowhere near as good as the Whistler brand.
