On November 22, 2019, a small arcade opened just north of Downtown Minneapolis. It was located in the former Domo ramen shop. It was a small, humble building situated on a small side street. It was easy to overlook even if you knew which street it was on. On March 15th, 2020, just four months after opening, the doors were closed due to a local ordinance declaring all dining and entertainment venues shut down to “slow the spread of the coronavirus”. On April 22, 2020, they officially announced that the month of forced closing had made it impossible for such a new business to break even, and NE was officially closed for good.
The arcade exists as nothing but a fading memory now. In five years, few will remember this short-lived dream. However, without ever knowing it, they were visited by someone running a small blog, known by few and viewed by fewer, who can’t allow a place like this to be left forgotten. I couldn’t tell you anything about the owner, the staff, or even what went into opening NE Arcade. That’s not what I do. I’m a man who’s been to hundreds of arcades, something I take great pride in. When I look at an arcade like this, I might see it in a way that others might not. I can’t tell you everything about it, but I can tell you what I saw.
I caught wind of this place a few weeks before it opened. When I brought it up to the local arcade group, none had heard of it. After some discussion, we agreed that we’d hold our monthly meeting here in December (granted, they usually just agree to whatever I suggest since they haven’t even heard of most of the places I show them). That left me to do my job as acting leader and scope the building out to make sure it was suitable for a meeting of 8 or more people.
These photos were taken during that excursion, about a week after it opened. I know the game lineup changed a bit in the following months; even a few were swapped out when I brought the group here. I wasn’t able to come back after that, thanks mainly to the harsh Minnesota winters, so my frame of my entire frame of reference is from the first quarter of its life.
The inside is slightly bigger than it looks on the outside. Don’t let this photo fool you, there is an area off to the right and another small room in the back, so it’s not that small. It gives you a good idea of how cramped everything had to be to fit the bar and arcade into such a tiny venue. Random anime was always playing on the screen in the back. Both times I came in here, I had trouble getting the bartenders’ attention to buy tokens, so I got the feeling they were really, really short-staffed. Even on the weekend, they weren’t swamped, though. People would pop in, wander around for an hour, then head off to another bar. There were a lot of people coming in and out both times I came, but never too many at once.
You could tell that they were still setting up. Many of the decorations, and even the sign out front, were left over from the ramen shop. All they had were some minor, cheap-looking signs of their own. There weren’t even any video game-themed posters or decorations like you’d typically see at an arcade bar. The whole thing felt very minimal.
Their “console area” was an original Xbox and Gamecube placed with a CRT TV on a pair of small tables in the front. They were usually running Halo or Smash Bros, from what I could tell, but I believe there was a skateboarding game of some sort being played on my first visit. Seeing this, I could only think that the owner wanted to have console gaming but had to make do with what could be thrown together.
The Twin Cities have a very large pinball following. Given how often NE Arcade’s Facebook page talked about their pinball machines, they must have been a sizable chunk of the customer base. They were mostly machines from the mid-90s, around the same period as most other games here. I discovered that nobody in the arcade group had seen the Whirlwind machine before, so I made it a point to see to it that they call played it at least once. Most of them thought the fan gimmick was the restaurant’s air conditioner until I pointed out the fan on top.
These five games were about half of NE Arcade’s video game lineup. If you can’t make them out, they’re (from left to right) Soul Edge, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Street Fighter 2, Die Hard Arcade, and Raiden. You can almost pinpoint when the owner grew up just from this lineup alone. Here are some quick notes about these games:
- Soul Edge was working. It was just turned off most of the time for some reason.
- A chap from India came to the arcade group for the first time. I got excited when he said he was a fighting game player since I love talking to them because of how terrible I am at fighting games. At one point, he called me over to the MvC2 machine to show me his skills. I think he was a bit embarrassed when he got beaten without taking down a single one of my fighters. I’d have probably taken it easier on him if I’d realized he didn’t know the game.
- Only one person in the group knows how to do a Hadouken in Street Fighter 2. I tried showing them what a quarter-circle motion was, but I don’t think it stuck. The things I have to deal with…
- Raiden was replaced with an indie game called Death Ball. This is an excellent time to list the other games that were rotated in after this visit. There was a two-player cocktail indie game whose name I don’t remember, Pac-man Battle Royale, Super Puzzle Fighter, and a bunch of new pinball machines. I remember reading that they’d prepared 27 games for this location but had to opt for a smaller building than they first thought. I think they were rotating between those games.
Here’s the one I was most excited about. It was so nice to finally have a Die Hard Arcade machine here in the Twin Cities. I hyped the ever-loving hell out of this thing to the group when I first told them about NE Arcade. Two members ended up playing through the entire game while a few others watched. For once, they agreed with me that the game was amazing. If they can appreciate a good game like this, maybe it’s worth paying the damn 25 dollars a month to maintain the group?
Here’s the game I found myself most interested in. This is Maze of Kings, a mid-2000s Sega Hitmaker light gun game. For some reason, I’ve never seen this game before, even though I’m told it’s not that rare. I suppose it’s one of those games you mainly find in theater lobbies?
Maze of Kings is a fascinating take on the genre. You play as a pair of explorers traveling through an Egyptian tomb. You fight mummies, alligator men, birds, scarabs, and almost every enemy you’d expect to see in a game like this. The main gimmick here is that levels are all made out of three or four rooms. Which rooms you travel through are randomly generated from a rather large pool of rooms, making the game a bit different each time you play it. At the start of the game, you can choose the strength of your weapon (weaker weapons need to reload less often) and a piece of armor that will protect you from specific enemies. This makes it an extremely dynamic game with a lot of replayability. I was planning to have a lot of fun with this machine come spring, but I guess it was never meant to be.
You can also see the Skeeball machine in the background. It was free and didn’t give tickets, but it jammed constantly, so you had to have the staff come over and fix it. I wonder if they ever got it working right.
I’m surprised at how rarely I run into this game, given how common it was in the late 90s. I’ve talked about it before, so I’ll share a tidbit about this particular machine. Since the game would often be housed at theaters, there were censorship options to turn the blood green and turn the giant baby boss into a dinosaur thing (shooting a big baby was too violent?). The NE arcade machine had the red blood turned on but chose the censored version of the baby. I’m not sure if this was an intentional choice or if they just flipped the dinosaur on without realizing what the option did.
This is the back room. It’s every bit as cramped as it looks. These pictures were taken during a weekday, so it wasn’t very busy. I was really, really worried that the limited seating would be a massive issue for a group of eight on the weekends. Thankfully we were the only sizable group, so there was space for us all. That doesn’t change how cramped it was. They made due with what they had.
This is an indie game called Burrowing Owls. These kinds of games are usually some variation of “a popular 80s arcade game, except multiplayer”, so I guess this one was “borrowing inspiration” from Dig Dug. This game wasn’t working the first time I came and permanently unplugged it the second. Apparently, the game is half-finished, and the AI enemies stand around doing nothing, so the bar owner kept the machine on free play, saying he couldn’t charge people money for it. Then the developer installed some updates but forgot to show anyone how to turn the machine on after the update. I got the impression the bar owner was sick of this machine by that point and just wanted him to take it away.
The last three games in the back are: Gauntlet Dark Legacy, House of the Dead, and NFL Blitz cut off on the right. I hate to say it, but having three light gun games is a bit excessive. I’d have left out Carnevil, but that’s my opinion.
Note the power strip hanging from the wall.
As I mentioned, there was an undeniable theme with the period in which most of these games were released. Aside from Maze of Kings and the indie games, all of them were squarely from the late 90s (or at least something you’d see in a late 90s arcade). Even the pinball machines and choice of consoles were from around the same period. Although it’s not the first bar arcade I’ve been to with a bit of a 90s slant, it’s the only one I’ve seen that kept this close to the theme. They usually have a few 80s games filling space, but I guess space was a premium here.
Oh yeah, this is the only Gauntlet machine in the Twin Cities. There was another one in a bar on the other side of town, but it disappeared around when this one popped up. I suspect they may be the same machine. That other bar also got the Killer Queen machine that was meant to be housed here, which lends a lot of credit to the theory that they just traded.
Sadly, that’s all I have to say about NE Arcade. I wish it were an arcade that I could talk for hours about, but ultimately I’m nothing but an observer who only got to see it twice. Although they’re troublesome, I’m glad I came with a group this time, so I had some minor stories to tell instead of just telling you which games they had. I got to share some interesting games with that bunch, even if I get the feeling they didn’t appreciate the Maze of Kings as much as I did. It’s a shame Super Puzzle Fighter wasn’t set up yet.
I wish I could have watched this location grow. I think it had a bright future of it. It didn’t have many games, but its lineup was solid and unusual enough to set itself apart. Any arcade that has even one machine I haven’t seen before should wear it as a badge of honor. These past months have filled me with dread thinking about how many other arcades will meet a similar fate in the coming months. I hope this virus nonsense ends soon so I can archive some out-of-town arcades before they’re gone.
