Welcome to Token-Crow 2.0! No longer am I confined by the limitations of WordPress hosting! I’ve got a proper domain, a new layout, and I’ve taken the time to clean up a lot of my older posts. And the few that were terrible beyond repair now have disclaimers at the top warning people how terrible they are! This is a new start for Token-Crow.
And to make the new start even better, 2022 was the first year in a long time I’ve been able to take a real arcade trip. I’ve got lots and lots of exciting arcades to write about. Relaunching the blog with the start of that trip would be the obvious thing to do, but another arcade caught my attention. Somehow, I felt this one was a bit more deserving of that honor…
Lurking around near downtown St Paul, it’s the Two Bit Game Room.
Two Bit’s building looks absolutely nothing like an arcade. At a glance, you might mistake it for some kind of local art gallery. However, the arcade makes the most of its unorthodox building, turning the endless row of windows into an art display for the games housed inside. It doesn’t exactly help the whole “art gallery” vibe, but this is a building that doesn’t even have a proper sign yet. They’re doing what they can.
By the way, this is the Two Bit Game Room. The one in New York was Two Bit’s Retro Arcade. The difference being that one is in St Paul, and the other one shut down years ago. Completely different!
Before we enter, I need to explain something about this arcade. Two Bit Game Room is an arcade open by reservation only. For 10 dollars per person, you and a group get up to three hours of play. I’m always reluctant to cover reservation-only arcades since most of them tend to be “house arcades” in people’s basements, but that’s not a concern with Two Bit.
However, there was one other reason I waited so long to write about it. You see, arcade showrooms are something I don’t cover on this blog. I’m not talking about arcades that call themselves showrooms. I mean places that sell arcade machines and have a few of them set up to demo. Those are one of the few places with arcade machines that I absolutely don’t consider to be arcades (which is saying a lot coming from someone who’s written about laundromats multiple times). As for Two Bit Game Room…
There’s a local business here in town called Rent My Arcade. It’s a business that rents out personal-use arcade machines for a monthly fee. It’s been operating since well before I started this blog, so I’ve been seeing it pop up in searches for six or seven years now. I’ve just never had much reason to cross paths with it beyond skimming their game lineup a few times.
Two Bit Game Room is technically Rent My Arcade’s new showroom. Nearly all of the machines in the “arcade” can be rented for a monthly fee. I spent a long time debating whether to count it as an arcade or an arcade machine business. Finally, I decided that it counted as an arcade entirely because there are so many games on the floor that the owner doesn’t rent out. By my logic, those games alone are enough to constitute an arcade regardless of the rental machines.
When you first walk in, you’re greeted by a pristine display of old-school nostalgia items, alongside a shelf of items available to purchase. I’ll be the first to admit that I have mixed feelings about newer arcades already selling branded merchandise… As long as people are buying it, I guess…
By the way, that Virtual Boy is fully playable. I can’t recommend playing it for long periods, but it might be worth a shot if you’ve never experienced one before.
Two Bit Game Room’s building is divided into two sections: A carpeted storefront up front and a warehouse in the back. The “arcade” itself is kept in the warehouse, while the front is a dedicated hangout area for any groups of customers who come in.
For the past few months, I’ve wondered what this building could have been used for before this arcade. Finally, I had to look it up for the sake of this blog post. The answer? Nothing. It’s been unoccupied since at least 2007, with only a pawn shop and furniture store making a brief attempt to get off the ground before closing.
I love the front area. It’s got an entire dual-sofa setup for large groups, a smaller TV for Nintendo 64 games, a table specifically for bringing out the large selection of board games, and a meeting table (not photoed) for any other needs. As the former leader of the Twin Cities arcade group, I appreciate that it accounts for any type of group that might enter. I can still recall many awful experiences trying to get the group organized when crammed into a loud, tiny arcade.
Speaking of board games, they have the most extensive collection of arcade-themed board games I’ve ever seen. From Centipede to Berserk to Dragon’s Lair, they have some even I didn’t know existed.
With the main room out of the way, let’s get on to the main event: The arcade.
Before the grand reveal, I want to set the stage a bit. As soon as you walk into the game area, it’s evident that this used to be a storage area. The floor is cement, everything is solid white, obtrusive pillars block run through the entire room, and there’s even a garage door for truck drop-offs. Making a room like this feel inviting would be nothing short of a herculean feat…
The moment I set foot in here, I knew this had to be the very first post on my new site.
I’ve been to over 200 arcades at this point, but I can honestly say I’ve never seen any arcade dominate a losing battle quite like this one. Two Bit Game Room is a master class when it comes to understanding what they have and working with it. Every inch of the space is strategically utilized to offset the gloomy atmosphere of a storage facility.
The entire room is an ugly white? Colored lights can fix that! Strange rafters? Poster space! Mysterious portal to hell? A perfect spot for Billy Bob Brockali’s disembodied head and a TV that plays nothing but static!
There’s even a tiny room in the back that rarely seems to get used, so they made use of the empty doorway to install this projector screen. Random images float by like a 90s screensaver, giving the arcade a bit of extra life. I visited in November, so the theme was “floating turkeys”.
But overall, what really gets me is how masterfully they use lighting to give the arcade its identity. Not just painting the walls with strategically placed colored lights but also the arcade’s centerpiece: A 30-foot ceiling display that hovers over the back of the arcade. If you watch it long enough, you can see everything from Batman emblems to the Space Invaders fly by.
Atmosphere is always the big thing that will make or break an arcade. It doesn’t matter how great an arcade’s collection of games is: If the atmosphere is terrible, every other aspect will be dragged down with it.
But more importantly, it has chairs.
Do you know how many arcades I’ve been to that don’t have chairs? Or have all the chairs stuck in a party room that may or may not be occupied? Two Bit Game Room didn’t even need chairs in the back since it has plenty of sitting room up front, but still, it went through the effort of putting plenty of seating in the arcade itself. This is the kind of thoughtfulness I love to see in arcades.
I also met Two Bit Game Room’s social media manager, Jonesy. He followed me around the arcade briefly, then got bored and left. It’s not even the first time I’ve had an animal follow me around in an arcade. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve been doing this too long for my own good…
I intentionally asked them to leave Jonesy out during my visit because I’m highly allergic to cats. I wanted to test whether Two Bit Game Room was friendly toward people with severe allergies. I can happily confirm that I had no issues for the two hours I was here, even with the cat running around the building. They do a good job keeping the place clean.
This is an excellent chance to mention Jonesy does a great job managing the arcade’s Facebook page. Even when there’s nothing of note happening, he’ll occasionally post images of himself messing around in the arcade just to remind people the place exists.
I guess we should finally get around to talking about the games. As always, I’m going to focus on the games I see less often. After all, there’s nothing I can say about Joust that hasn’t been said a hundred times already. There’s a complete game list on their website, if you’d like to see their complete lineup.
No, my photo isn’t at a weird angle for once. The first game that caught my attention was Wacko, a 1983 Bally Midway game known for its tilted control panel and marquee.
The gameplay in this one is pretty worthy of the name “Wacko”. You control an alien with the trackball who shoots with the joystick. But one can’t simply kill enemies by shooting them. Instead, you have to shoot enemies of the same color, one after another. In later levels, aliens that are strange mish-mashes of two creatures will start spawning. To kill those, you must first shoot the mixed-up pair to un-mix them, THEN deal with them like regular enemies.
The best way I can think of to describe this game is, “what if Smash TV was Dr Mario?”
Speaking of Dr Mario, Two Bit Game Room had quite a selection of Nintendo VS System hardware. On display at the moment were VS The Goonies and VS Ice Climber in solo cabs, VS Dr Mario and VS Something (Gradius? Tennis?) on opposite sides of the Red Tent, and VS Duck Hunt or VS Excitebike running in the two-player setup. According to their website, they have around 20 different games running on this hardware that can be swapped out for potential renters. Duck Hunt even has the original cardboard advert above the marquee.
One disadvantage of this business is that it’s a rental service, so sometimes games are unavailable due to being rented out. For example, I’m told they also had a VS Super Mario Bros that wasn’t around during my visit. Luckily, most of their more unusual games, like Wacko, are exclusive to the arcade, so you never have to worry about them not being there.
Since we’re doing Nintendo Games, let’s get this one out of the way: This is the Nintendo Super System. It’s the short-lived SNES successor to the Play Choice-10 (which Two Bit Game Room has two of, but they’re both almost always rented out). Only twelve games were produced for this, of which Two Bit Game Room has seven (plus a homebrew port of Super Mario Kart). I’d have been a lot more excited about seeing one of these for the first time, but I’d just run into one during my trip a few weeks earlier. I’ll talk about it a bit more in the next post.
I’ll forget these two if I don’t mention them now. They have an original Computer Space and Pong machine from 1971 and 1972! Unlike the other games, they’re housed in the front, right behind the counter.
Computer Space was the first video arcade machine ever made! And Pong wasn’t far behind! I’ve always wanted to play Computer Space in person, but it didn’t look like either was turned on during my visit. I’m honestly not sure if they even work or if they’re just kept here as display pieces. I’ll have to remember to amend this blog post if I ever manage to come when they’re turned on.
Similarly, Space Wars is a loose arcade port of Spacewar!, considered by many to be the very first video game. By the time the arcade game came out in 1978, video games were already a regular thing, so it lacked any of the prestige of its DCE PDP-1 ancestor.
However, it has a notable mechanic that is pretty rare, especially on later arcade machines: It has a full options menu controlled by a number pad. Manual setting buttons were common on older video games, especially home console games like the Atari 2600, but seeing it in person on an arcade game is still pretty novel.
But this one was also turned off during my visit, so I can’t say much else about it. Thank God this is a local arcade that I can revisit.
This is all the same machine. All the photos I took of it were terrible, so I decided to post all three.
This is The Act, a rare arcade game that was supposed to go into production in 2007 but was ultimately unreleased. Only 10 of these arcade boards were sold to the public, with another 40 owned by the production staff. I only know of two other arcades in the country that have this machine (both of which are on my list to visit someday). For an arcade that only has around 60 games, I’m surprised at how much stuff they have that I’ve never seen before.
As for the game itself, I wasn’t a fan. It’s like a modern version of Dragon Lair with a raunchy sense of humor. The mobile version got a wide release, if you want to check it out.
Time Traveller and its hologram arcade cabinet!
Alright, real talk: I’ve seen this cabinet enough times that I’m not excited by it anymore. I can’t help that this is the fourth or fifth time I’ve run into one, so the novelty has worn off. But just because I’ve seen it more than enough times doesn’t mean it’s not interesting enough to showcase, just in case someone reading hasn’t heard me talk about it before.
Time Traveller was a laserdisc game created by Rick Dyer, the father of Dragon’s Lair. The game’s main gimmick was its creative use of mirrors and transparent surfaces to create a pseudo hologram.
The game was a pretty big when it first released, even getting coverage on a few local news stations. But from all accounts, the game had a relatively short lifespan. Maybe because Street Fighter II happened shortly after and drew attention away from it? Maybe because cost three to eight quarters per life? Or maybe just because it’s kind of slow and clunky compared to games like Dragon’s Lair? Nobody can say for sure. Either way, it’s worth playing at least once.
Over here, we’ve got Konami’s Police 911. I’ve run into this and MoCap Boxing on the blog a few times, but this is my first time getting to photograph one in working condition! These things are super prone to breaking, especially when two decades old.
The gimmick in this game is that instead of using a pedal to dodge, like in Time Crisis, the game has a ring of motion sensors above the machine. To dodge bullets, you need to completely shift your body away from them. This same setup was used for its sister game, MoCap Boxing, and a very similar configuration would eventually be used for Konami’s ParaPara Paradise.
Oh Karnov. I wanted to like you so much.
The game is a standard side-scrolling arcade platformer. The central gimmick is that you have an inventory of optional items you can use to do things like spawn ladders to climb or temporarily fly around. It reminded me a lot of the rope mechanics you see in modern games.
The only issue is that it’s one of those games where you die in one hit and the checkpoints are usually way back near the start of the level, so you often find yourself forced to start over because you encountered a new enemy for the first time and wasn’t expecting their attack pattern. Supposedly the console port added a life mechanic to make it less frustrating.
I say it every time, but I’m not really much of a pinball guy. Usually, I just skim over the pinball selection. However, I need to make special mention of these five.
This is such a thematically strong choice of pinball machines. Of course, anyone who comes into a place like this is going to be interested in these machines, even if they don’t normally like pinball. Even I had to make it a point to play Pac-man and Space Invaders pinball. Someone was playing Spy Hunter for most of my visit, so I couldn’t get near it.
Pac-man’s got a cool gimmick where there’s a “maze” of 5×5 lights in the center of the board. When you meet certain conditions, you switch to moving “Pac-man” around the maze using the flipper buttons to steer him. It’s an extremely clever way to translate Pac-man into a pinball machine.
Space Invaders has a more standard gimmick, where the “invaders” are represented by lit up targets around the board that you have to hit. But, if nothing else, you’ve got to admit that the backboard art is spectacular.
This is a trend I’ve noticed a lot at neo-retro acades lately. The entire arcade will be games from before the turn of millennium, plus two or three much more recent games. I’m not sure why this has become so common, but it does add a bit of extra personality to these places.
The one and only racing game in the entire arcade. Unless you count Batman, but that’s more of a Spy Hunter-type deal.
Speaking of which, there was one thing that struck me as a bit unusual about the Two Bit Game Room. It’s the kind of thing that I’m sure is a natural consequence of it being a rental service first and foremost: Despite the atmosphere so obviously being catered toward groups, the bulk of the games were single-player or had Pac-man style “multiplayer”.
That’s not to say that all of the machines were single-player, of course. They did have a few: Both 2D and 3D Gauntlet, the various Nintendo console ports, Rampage, X-men: Children of the Atom, and a pair of Mortal Kombat machines. So the options for group games are there, there just aren’t as many as you might expect. More so considering that some of these games might be rented out during any given visit (they supposedly had a few others like Street Fighter and NBA Jam that were rented out during my visit, for example).
But, to its credit, Two Bit Game Room does make good use of console games to try to offset this problem. The Nintendo 64 and Gamecube both have four controllers available, and there’s even a full Rock Band setup, so groups who come in do have a bit more of a selection in activities to do together. This tells me that they’re aware of the shortcoming, so there’s no point in ragging on them for it. I’m sure now that the arcade is established, future acquisitions will aim more toward hammering out that problem a bit. I’ve heard there’s an Area 41, Double Dragon, and Archrivals on the way, so I think they’ve got it under control.
Anyway, as usual, please enjoy a collection of other random photos I took that didn’t make it into the post. The most notable thing here is the Donkey Kong Pauline Edition machine, which is a hack of Donkey Kong that switches Mario and Pauline’s roles. There’s a whole backstory attached about a father making it for his daughter, so the hack was popular enough that someone actually started making decals for the thing. It makes sense for a rental service to have (it’s a pretty popular rental, from what I gather), but there’s really not much to say about it since it’s just a minor graphical hack. The machine can be switched to run the Donkey Kong II hack instead.
Speaking of which, I’ve run into Donkey Kong Remix a few times, too. I don’t think I’ve seen a hacked version of any other 80s game at an arcade before. What is it about Donkey Kong specifically that makes people want to hack it?
Hopefully, you’ll understand why I felt like this should be the first arcade I showcase on my revamped blog. Although still a bit rough around the edges, it’s got the makings of one of the best 80s-focused arcades I’ve ever been to. The atmosphere is great, the game lineup hits the sweet balance of standard and more usual games, and even their pinball lineup was interesting. But more importantly, I get the impression whoever runs this arcade has a clear vision for it. The few issues I had with the arcade are things I’m sure will get resolved once it’s had a bit more time to cook.
Oh, and before I forget, the owner of the arcade gave me permission to take photos under the condition that I post them on social media. If the fact that I’m still writing a blog in 2023 doesn’t give it away, my internet sensibilities are a bit outdated. I’ve never really had much need for social media…
So, with great reluctance, Token-Crow 2.0 is now on Facebook and Twitter.
