The Arcade Is Back, Now With Beer

It’s midafternoon on a Saturday, and most bars in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward sit empty. But the Joystick Gamebar on Edgewood Avenue is hopping. About two dozen adults, mostly in their 40s and 50s, crowd the retro arcade games lining the wall, dropping quarters with a satisfying clink into Centipede and Space Invaders. Everyone is sipping pints of craft beer. “Well, it’s confirmed, I suck as bad at Defender as I did in the ’80s,” one man shouts to no one in particular.

Arcades are dead. They perished in the early 1990s along with shoulder pads, fax machines, and dignified nightly news anchors. The primary culprits were home-video consoles such as PlayStation and Xbox, helped by the Internet and the fact that hanging out at malls became uncool. Now a new breed of arcade bars is suddenly everywhere; pick an American city, and it’s likely that one opened in the last few years. There’s the Coin-Op Game Room in San Diego, Supernova in Colorado Springs, and Zanzabar in Louisville. New Orleans has a Barcadia; Des Moines, Barcadium; and New York, Barcade. Last March a bar called Eighty Two, named for an epochal year of the arcade boom—Ms. Pac-Man, Pole Position, and Donkey Kong Junior all bowed then—opened in downtown Los Angeles. On weekend nights, lines to get in wind around the block. “A lot of people appreciate having another stimulus at a bar besides drinking as much as they can,” says Scott David, 34, one of Eighty Two’s owners.