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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pupdog

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.
Jack

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 â€œwavyâ€Â 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 itâ€™s great and connected to the Eldorado bumper cars which is a â€œdiscoâ€ bumper car ride that hasnâ€™t changed much since the 1970s. Dark, flashing, lights, thumping music and bumping cars.
WaylonWillie

Wow, that looks like a great place to play Defender. I’m glad they are getting business.
Anonymous

There was an article about this place in the new york times last summer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/fashion/05Chinatown.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=chinatown%20video%20game&st=cse
Blaine

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.
Xul Solo

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.
michaelannb

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.
Anonymouse

CTF is hands down the best place to find worthy opponents in MVC2.
Anonymous

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/nyregion/13critic.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion

It’s gone…
Skidds

If nostalgic arcades is what youâ€™re after then let me plug Geneva-On-The-Lake Ohio. The town flourished as a tourist hotspot in the 50â€™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 townâ€¦ itâ€™s seasonal.
kmoser

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.
Bamalama

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

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.
Anonymous

You can see a brief 1990′s glimpse of the arcade (and chicken) in the Natalie Merchant video for Carnival. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwNMXdtcBa0 (2:50 mark).
eyeone

The arcade at the Redondo Beach Pier (Redondo Fun Factory) here in Southern California has an amazing collection of original arcade classics. (They have an upright cabinet Pong from 1972! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pong )I went there for the first time in 1979 and it hasn’t changed much.

http://www.redondo.com/rff/
eyeone

Ground Kontrol Classic Arcade in Portland also rocks. They are currently remodeling this week (and I’m not sure how nostalgia-fueled or Tron-like it will end up) but their collection of games surely keeps it real. I posted a bunch of literal screen shots as proof http://eyelost.com/eyeoneblog/index.php?itemid=562

http://groundkontrol.com/
Stefan Jones

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.
mccrum

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.”
Anonymous

I think they have Polybius there.
Anonymous

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.
Halloween Jack

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.
Anonymous

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

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…
Rick.

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.
hectorinwa

Supreme, how do you know that? Did you beat that damn chicken? I didn’t think it was possible…
Supreme

@hectorinwa

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

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.
Stefan Jones

My account of visiting the place in 1976 is on the linked-to site.
Anonymous

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

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-