November 3: "The Place" Retro Arcade

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4069 East Galbraith Road, Cincinnati OH
Walking into The Place. the twin corridors of coin-op machines recall one of the arcade sets from The Wizard. I believe this feeling attests to an inherently more relaxed atmosphere. This is not the kind of thing you would say to one of the employees at D&B. That arcade was staffed by minimum wage employees in blue shirts and part-time student workers bussing tables; The Place is overseen by a husband walking the aisles and his wife watching the counter. The first thing I saw walking in was a toddler, leaning over a babygate installed where the counter would open up into the arcade proper. There's no company protocol in this space.

It's not quite like the glory days that The Place is trying to recreate. The previous arcades used a card reader model to drive profits, this one relies on an entry fee system. You buy time here instead of games, and while the quarter slots exist, all of the machines are locked in perpetual free play mode. The Place is a nine-year-old's dream, or it would be if the nine-year-olds of today still went to arcades. Most of the machines present are still in their original cabinets. The back of The Place is dominated by paired Daytona USA racing machines from the 90s, linked together for multiplayer and encapsulated by racecar-shaped plastic hulls. They're dwarfed by the huge numbers of the same game stocked at D&B, but somehow I don't see enough people anxiously fighting for a turn at Daytona for those huge numbers to be necessary. Nearby is an original Gauntlet cabinet from 1985, its controls sprawled out like a diorama unfolding around the screen. Not everything is so fortunate--Tekken II is crammed into a generic, unpainted Atari cabinet--but for the most part The Place reads like an interactive museum of arcade history.

The soundtrack of an arcade is very different from the home video games of today. In modern times we have sweeping orchestral soundtracks written by world famous, classically-trained composers and progressive rockstars, which dominate the atmosphere and the sensory experience of the game. But arcades have always been a much more plural experience. Tekken 2 is one of The Place's most popular games, and standing at the cabinet it's not just Tekken 2 that you're getting. A whole world of different games, each singing its own tune and string of sound effects bombards you. The Punch-Out!! machine near the very back of The Place is audible all the way from the front door. Galaga's level music will slip into your ears while you're playing The King of Fighters. It's like a pixel jungle of different beeps and murmurs mingling together on the arcade floor. You wander between machines trying to figure out where that one sound is coming from, and it gets you playing that game when you find it. Try opening three YouTube tabs with a different game being played in each and a fighting stream of your choice, and you'll begin to approximate the experience. This form of audio marketing once drove the success of small game companies, but stripped of its original context it's akin to having library books narrate themselves to you from their shelves.

While it's exciting to find an arcade recreating this kind of ancient history, not everything is sunshine and rainbows for The Place. The arcade is plagued by advertising issues. A small pool of regulars with very few new faces makes up the majority of the business that The Place does, and while the doors stay open it's only from Friday through Sunday. This isn't to say that new people don't show up. Arcade manager Cary had seen people come three and four hours away to visit The Place, staying in hotels so that they can come to the arcade and play all day long. Some people bring their whole families. More locations like it are springing up, but there's a subtle distinction in the minds of the players as to which arcades have earned their authenticity. "Real" arcades hold classic games from the 1980s up through the early 2000s, focus on cultivating a community and host tournament play when the opportunity arises. The family-oriented environment is a far cry from the sanitized pachinko experience D&B provides. Authenticity is important, but it's also appealing to a withering community. Despite being located close by to a local high school, The Place's demographics stretch mainly to older individuals in their 30s and 40s, and the young children that they bring in with them. In the age of the PlayStation 4 and Wii U, teenagers and college youth are the exception where they once ruled the arcade life. And like the barcades that are now drawing a significant portion of The Place's potential costumers, its owners have recognized that steps have to be taken to not only endure as businesses but to draw a larger audience.

"I don't think you can really have just arcade games anymore." Cary gestured to the home consoles near the front of the arcade, "That's why I got the Wii U, the Xbox." Bringing in these more expensive consoles that customers might not be able to afford for themselves but are more than willing to put a $10 fee down to play is one way of keeping his business afloat. Cary's efforts at being a progressive arcade have kept the doors open, but barely. Small businesses like this are becoming increasingly fragile over time as large chains take over, and in an industry widely agreed to be dead as an independent genre preserving this history is difficult. The Place doesn't bring in enough revenue for him to quit his day job, but money is far from his primary concern.

"Success for me is about seeing people like you come in here and have fun." Cary's intentions are to get players in the door, playing video games as a group again. For him The Place is about opening up a collection of electronic artworks to players, bringing the memories of the 80's golden age back to life for older players and introducing new ones to the classics. The TRON cabinet is his pride and joy; while it still has the original hardware, joystick and controls, when it was first acquired the game had sustained significant water damage and the cheap wooden cabinet had to be repaired by a specialist. Cary went and bought the original poster for the game online and used it to rebuild the cabinet in its original form. By his own reckoning, TRON isn't a fun game, but the cabinet is an art piece.

It's is a sentimental location. The arcade's name was derived from a previous arcade that used to be close by, near a local smokeshop. The Gauntlet II machine was acquired because of Cary's attachment to the game as a kid, and his 1982 Joust machine previously held the highest possible score of ten million, set by one of the game's world record holders as part of a campaign to max out 100 Joust machines to reach a total score of one billion. The entire establishment is fueled by memories and the recreation of a dead space in the postmillennial world. Perhaps the most vexing part of playing games in The Place is the realization that unlike the large and well-supported chains, this business may not last forever. There's a certain inevitability that comes with the understanding that each of these machines once called a different building home, and could someday find yet another establishment to take them in. Summers are the busy season for the retro arcade, but once school starts up again attendance decreases. Youth interest in these older games is low, so The Place's primary audience is families trying to expose their kids to a different generation's games. The lack of teens and 20-somethings is a serious problem. Teen culture was heavily intertwined with arcades in the 80s, and the absence of younger customers threatens The Place's survival. Without them, it becomes like one of the failing churches in America's depopulated countryside; older community members stay in place while young people are drawn into more virile communities. Younger age groups become alienated by a lack of peers. Even if young people can be stimulated into attending arcades regularly and better advertising could keep them informed, there's no guarantee that they would visit a small business instead of one of the larger chain. The Place has a product that the barcades can't offer, but in the age of easy emulation and Virtual Console, less people are looking for that product. The introduction of home console systems is intended to stimulate attendance, but the arcade is still in need of a strong injection of younger members to help it thrive.
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