A blast from the past Gaming museum brings back 1980s arcade favorites
A youngster plays a game at the Pennsylvania Coin Operated Gaming Hall of Fame in Beaver County.
Pinball games at the Pennsylvania Coin Operated Gaming Hall of Fame
A sign at the Pennsylvania Coin Operated Gaming Hall of Fame and Museum in Beaver County
Chris Akin, one of the founders of the Pennsylvania Coin Operated Gaming Hall of Fame in Beaver County, is shown with a Space Invaders game.
ALIQUIPPA – Faster than Michael J. Fox’s DeLorean propelled him to 2015 in “Back to the Future, Part II,” walking into the Pennsylvania Coin Operated Gaming Hall of Fame in Aliquippa catapults you straight back to the 1980s.
There are the posters of Cheap Trick, Heart and the Ramones on the wall, which would not have been out of place in a rec room or a strip-mall record store back in those days. But what really bounces you back to the heart of the Reagan era are the rows of rattling and ringing video games that once found pride of place in arcades in that epoch, but have since been supplanted by PlayStations, the Xbox and all the games that can be played anywhere and everywhere on smartphones, tablets and television screens.
There’s a multitude of Pac-Man consoles in the Coin Operated Gaming Hall of Fame, with different variations of that pioneering game, along with games that will stoke the nostalgic longings of many a graying Generation X-er: Donkey Kong, Defender, Mortal Kombat and Space Invaders, movie tie-in pinball machines for “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” and “Robocop,” and machines immortalizing those rampaging deities of heavy metal, AC/DC and Kiss.
It’s enough to make a middle-aged man feel like he could slide into his Members Only jacket once again and the thinning hair on his head could grow once more into a flowing mullet.
“It’s my childhood,” said Ed Beeler, a 44-year-old from Imperial who oversees the Pennsylvania Coin Operated Gaming Hall of Fame along with Chris Akin, a 46-year-old from Twinsburg, Ohio. The 413 machines within the Coin Operated Gaming Hall of Fame are owned by Beeler, and he has an additional 800 to 1,000 more stashed in a warehouse. Both Akin and Beeler were arcade-game enthusiasts in the 1980s, when they were in their teens and in thrall to video games and heavy metal.
“We would lift up the couch cushions looking for as many quarters as we could find,” Akin said. Compared to the games you can now play wherever you want, heading down to the arcade 30 years ago “was more of a social thing,” he added. Unlike many of their counterparts, however, their fascination with video games followed them into adulthood. Beeler started collecting the games about 25 years ago, following in the footsteps of his pinball-loving father.
The twosome came up with the idea for opening the Coin Operated Gaming Hall of Fame in, appropriately, a strip mall on the southern edge of Beaver County, after a trip to Atlantic City in September 2012.
“When we got back, we ended up in his warehouse where we had all his games,” Akin recalled. “At some point, he said to me, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life,’ as he had sold his other businesses at that point. I looked around said, ‘This is what we should do.'”
They then launched a Kickstarter campaign to gauge interest and, after close to three years of preparation, they opened the doors of the Coin Operated Gaming Hall of Fame May 30.
And, despite its name, you don’t need to have a fistful of currency to while away the day at the Coin Operated Gaming Hall of Fame, located in the Hopewell Shopping Center on Brodhead Road, near a tanning salon and grocery store. Two-hour admission costs $19.99, while all-day admission goes for $39.99. Two-hour family admission, which includes four people and at least one parent, is $39.99, and all-day family admission is $59.99.
Although there are not many places in Western Pennsylvania where you can settle in for round upon round of Asteroids, there are a handful of other places around the country that operate on a similar principle: For instance, in suburban Chicago, the Galloping Ghost has in excess of 400 arcade games. But Beeler and Akin see their mission as being not just business proprietors, but curators of, and educators about, a bygone era of popular culture. The Coin Operated Gaming Hall of Fame bills itself as an interactive, hands-on museum, and it offers an abbreviated history of video games near its entrance in the form of games torn apart so visitors can see their guts, and some game cartridges from the late 1970s that now seem as primitive as rabbit ears on television sets and 8-track tapes. You can also shake your head at newspaper clippings from the early 1980s that ponder the possible ill effects of video games, including a 1982 clip from The New York Times on efforts to ban them in some suburban Long Island communities. A bar code has also been attached to each game, and when visitors step back into the 21st century and swipe it with their phones, they can learn about the history of each one.
“We wanted to build a museum and not just a game room,” Akin said. “We wanted to provide education to people visiting, and not just a place to try the games. Since we are a museum, we consider each game an interactive exhibit that you can try.”
In a broader sense, the Coin Operated Gaming Hall of Fame can be seen as another way in which Generation X, its older members now aged 50 or getting uncomfortably close to it, are reclaiming chunks of their vanished youth. Vinyl records, of course, have staged something of a comeback, small knots of aficionados still cling vociferously to VHS tapes (with one group of Chicago collectors piling up almost 5,000 copies of “Jerry Maguire” as of 2012) and there are even a few true believers in the audio cassettes that were briefly the best-selling of all music formats. And one look at this summer’s movie line-up underscores just how deeply nostalgia for the 1980s and early 1990s has taken hold: sequels and reboots of the “Mad Max,” “Poltergeist,” and “Jurassic Park” franchises have already been released, and one for “The Terminator” is on the way.
The feedback Akin and Beeler have heard so far has been positive.
“The adults love being able to revisit their youth, as well as playing games that are not as overly complex as the modern-day stuff on XBoxOne or PlayStation4,” Akin said. “The kids are fascinated with the old games, and love to run around and learn about all the pieces. They really do seem to have a great time.”
Akin’s sentiments are echoed by Marty Boggess, who is a devoted patron of the Coin Operated Gaming Hall of Fame. While playing on a recent afternoon – he drops by, on average, every couple of days – the 51-year-old who lives in Beaver County’s Independence Township explained that he is drawn by the variety of games and the variety of experiences to be had with them.
“It’s different all the time, the same thing never happens twice,” Boggess said, adding, “It takes me back.”