I’m sure some of you are reading this and thinking I should quit my whining and just be thankful that I still have a local arcade at all. In many places, the local arcade is the lone Ms. Pac still in the neighborhood pizza parlor and not an entire location designated to gaming. My local arcade is a Namco-operated Time Out in Colonial Mall Lakeshore – Gainesville, GA:

When I first moved to town three years ago, the mall arcade seemed to be doing ok. Nothing like the arcades back in the eighties, but still busy on a Friday night. There was always one or two employees working there to dole out prizes for tickets (since about half of the arcade was filled with redemption games). About a year and a half ago, the dollar movie theater across from the arcade closes. Sure, I’m sad because I liked the place for cheap entertainment, but I don’t think much of the loss because the mall had just been renovated and still has traffic. Well, it looks like that must have been the first nail in the coffin.

A few months after the theater closes, I notice Time Out looks a little spacey and realize that there aren’t as many games in the facility. I just assume that they have sold a few of the ones they had available to purchase and would get new ones in. Not so. the games never returned. The empty space in the arcade was so noticeable that they actually shifted all equipment forward about fifteen feet and built a feaux wall to make the space seem smaller (you can see the yellow wall in the photo below – notice it doesn’t go all the way to the ceiling).

A few months later I come back, and notice the prize booth is gone and there is nobody present to accept your tickets. it takes me a couple visits to realize that the employess are permanently gone, never to return. In place of the glass cases with all the goodies for kids is a big vending machine that will let you feed your tickets into it to be counted and let you redeem a prize that is hanging on a hook by pressing the button.

If I wasn’t disappointed already, I can continue to lose heart when I realize that the games in this place aren’t very good either. Sure, they have the newest Tekken – they’re Namco; but aside from that, nothing “new” and absolutely NO classics (Nope, not even the Ms. Pac/Galaga Reunion). They have several sit-down drivers, a Silent Scope, a couple gun games, a DDR, and several button-punching fighters. Aside from that, everything else is a ticket dispensing machine.

In the last couple months things have been in a steady decline. The basketball game broke and just sits in the corner. The intermittently-broken voyager is gone, as is the constantly broken Dance Dance Revolution game, and the ticket redemption machine that distributes the prizes in exchange for your tickets has been broken for weeks with only a few sad prizes dangling to taunt any children who still believe there’s magic in the world.

As if all that wasn’t enough, my last visit may, in fact, be my LAST. The gun game had the Happ gun just hanging from it’s exposed wiring connecting it to the cirucuit board – the bolts to secure the cable base were gone. I went to my usual driving game, and it was turned off. I looked around and noticed the Manx TT and another driver were BOTH flashing boot errors. Cruisin’ USA needed a cap kit so badly, it was practically unplayable. However, the coup de gras had to be the fact that when I finally settled on one of the few games to play, I still couldn’t play it. Namco requires tokens, but BOTH token machines were broken which means no way to play any games since there were no employess present to offer assistance.

While I have my own basement arcade and never spent too much time playing in the local arcade, it was nice to know it was there. I know I’ll never relive my experiences growing up playing Smash TV in the late 80′s or even the tournaments we used to hold at the Diamond Jim’s arcade playing Mortal Kombat back in the early 90′s, but seeing the state of my local arcade makes me sad. I hate to say it, but I almost wish it were gone completely. At least that way, it would be out of its misery.

Tags: Arcade, Gainesville, namco