/ Cory Doctorow / 6:08 am Wed Feb 16, 2011

NYC: Chinatown's last grungy arcade hangs on


New York City's Chinatown has one last, die-hard grungy video game arcade, a dungeon of a place with wheezing coin-ops and signs from its glory days, when it offered the dubious pleasure of watching a chicken perform on an electrified tic-tac-toe board. Scouting NY has a great collection of photos and observations from this place, which seems like the Platonic ideal of all those places I spent my adolescence smoking and giving myself RSI in.
This is the real thing. Not a Hollywood set, or a nostalgia-fueled attempt at creating a Tron-like arcade. The letters on the store's sign are missing not for aesthetic value but because they fell down with age or were stolen, and haven't been replaced because the owner doesn't feel it's worth the trouble...

Like a storybook magic store that's larger inside than appears possible from the street, the arcade seems to stretch farther back than it should - and then takes a left hand turn to go even deeper into the bowels of Chinatown. Here you'll find more modern fare like Dance Dance Revolution and others.

The Last Arcade in Chinatown (Thanks, Ricky!)
 

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  1. Last time I checked, last summer, it was closed. But maybe it’s back open again.
    The tic-tac-toe chicken retired around 2000.

  2. Sweet, I wandered in here with a friend a few years ago, sometime late at night after leaving Wo-Hop up the street and thought ‘this won’t be here long’ – glad to see it’s still going strong.

  5. Ha ha ha. Chinatown Fair. Nothing can prepare you for exactly how grimy that place is. It’s AMAZING.

    Also extremely competitive. There’s some damn good fighting game players there. Everytime I go to New York I make at least one stop.

  6. This place is dank, in the absolutely best possible way.

    And I totally agree with Blaine, I wouldn’t hop on a fighting game unless you’re ready to bring it.

  8. If nostalgic arcades is what you’re after then let me plug Geneva-On-The-Lake Ohio. The town flourished as a tourist hotspot in the 50’s. Most of the arcades still survived. Unfortunately a lot of the owners have attempted to keep up with the times, but there are still plenty of remnants from the days of yore. You can still easily find a good game of skee-ball or find objects hidden on the shelves of curiosity shops. The whole town is shrouded with a mix of mystery and creepiness- so much so that if you drove down the strip right now it would be a ghost town… it’s seasonal.

  9. Even back in its heyday (the early 1980s), that place was on the grungy side, a far cry from the (somewhat) more slick arcades of 42nd St. I can’t imagine what 30 years of low maintenance has done to it.

  10. There are literally professionals that train there, and if you’re lucky (or unlucky depending on how your POV) you might find yourself up against Justin Wong, who is considered one of the best in the world.

  12. As this was one of my hangout joints in HS, I feel compelled to make one tiny correction –

    The tic tac toe chicken was NOT electrified. He just hung out in the cage taunting potential players and reveling in our losses (btw, the prize was a 10lb bag of fortune cookies).

    Chickens and electricity were mixed in the back, where they had “Disco Chicken”. That was basically a chicken in a big circular cage, you’d put in $1 in quarters and then it would start playing disco inferno and the floor the chicken was standing on would start rotating and heating up, making the chicken look like it was dancing. In retrospect kinda horrible but, hilarious as shit at the moment…

  13. I still miss Pac-Man Arcade in Pasadena, cigarette-stink and all. They were open 24 hours and therefore hated by the city as it attracted shady elements in the wee hours. Of course, I only ever went during the day and it had a diverse collection of games from the classics to the latest. I even saw Billy Mitchell of King Of Kong fame there for some event.

  15. @hectorinwa

    The giant prize bag of stale cookies was hanging in the manager’s booth for all to see and salivate (?) over.

  17. Dang, I was in NYC C-Town in April, doing a lil’ karaoke singing. Had I known this place existed, I would have had to check it out. Reminds me of the Fun Center in SF on Broadway (alas, now closed): pool, plywood floors, occasional fatal stabbings and some marathon Street Fighter II battles. . .

    “Curse you gentrification!!!” -shakes fist-

  18. Does it have Bosconian? Because I’ve been longing to hear the heavily accented narrator shout “Aloyt! Aloyt!” as enemy ships approach.

  21. Until a couple of years ago, the “penny arcade” of my childhood and youth was still up and running.

    It was in a cinderblock building between a putt-putt golf course and “the amusement park,” a dusty field full of rickety-rackety carnival rides. The beginning of a strip of restaurants and bars across the street from a beach in Bayville, NY.

    I first went to the place in, like, 1966. No videogames back then; pinball machines, a driving simulator, and various target games. Many of these old-school machines survived well into the 1980s, when I last visited.

    Proof the complex still existed early last year (?) was had via Google Maps. Then, when I checked again, it was gone. Replaced by what my brother describes as a novelty hearse ride.

  22. For those visiting the New York area and prefer hipsters to Chinatown, Barcade out in Williamsburg is home to a great many classics as well as a bar. As a non-drinker I’m always thrilled to hang out there with friends and get my Dig Dug on.

    We also had a pinball museum up the river but it was closed by the local mayor due to “zoning.” Apparently they hadn’t realized that by “museum” they meant “playable machines that we encourage people to actually use” instead of “quiet place where people wander around looking at machines behind velvet ropes.”

  23. Also fondly remembered is the Hong Ying Rice Shoppe, a basement-level Chinese restaurant (formerly) located roughly across the street. Baked Stuffed Jumbo Shrimps – yum.

  24. There was an arcade in downtown Chicago, I want to say on State Street, back in the day that was similar to the ones described above. This was before State Street’s revival and it was a slightly scary place to go into. Kids who only know mall arcades don’t know what they’re missing.

  25. This place is great! But about 4 years ago I went in to kill some time and play some Ms. Pac Man and man, the screen on the machine was really “wavy” and out of phase. I tried to play but it was like trying to play while you are just about to faint!

    Oh, also, a tangent but connected there is only ONE real arcade left in Coney Island. The Eldorado. Old school machines and Skee-Ball as well. Everyone should patronize it because it’s great and connected to the Eldorado bumper cars which is a “disco” bumper car ride that hasn’t changed much since the 1970s. Dark, flashing, lights, thumping music and bumping cars.

  27. Wonderful!

    I love NYC’s Chinatown.

    Was friends with a wonderful Chinese woman for a summer. She took me all over the city, but Chinatown with her was exquisite. I always had the feeling she was dragging me to the most “un-touristy” places she could come up with. Helps so much that she was fluent in Mandarin and could get by in Cantonese (She came over from Hong Kong at age 10).

    NYC (and probably many other cities I have yet to have the pleasure of visiting) are so wonderful with their diverse neighborhoods. Makes me love how the US is such a country of immigrants. Even if so many it seems wish we were otherwise. I feel we, as a society, and nation are so much richer for having people from all over this vast world wishing to make their home within our shores. I personally think we are blessed by it.

  28. Ah, Playtown. 3 games for a quarter, five balls a game. Got a $20 buck a week from my $60 fulltime weekly salary. No regrets.

  29. Chinatown Fair officially closed it’s doors this week. Such a shame. And I still have all these tokens…

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