#Odyssey foosball and air hockey table movie#
#Odyssey foosball and air hockey table full#
#Odyssey foosball and air hockey table plus#

#Odyssey foosball and air hockey table movie#

It gave young me visions of the original Ninja Turtles movie when you saw the Foot Clan lair set up to lure young delinquents. As a little kid, it felt just dangerous enough that you felt like you were getting away with something just being there.

#Odyssey foosball and air hockey table plus#

It was large, dark, loud, smokey, and absolutely stacked with arcade games, plus a rear section with pinball, skeeball, pool tables and a jukebox blasting the whatever current rock and metal of the time. It even had a lit up spaceship on rails attached to the ceiling, which would just glide along overhead. The entrance was built to look like the hallway of a spaceship with custom automatic sliding doors. I went there for the first time in the late 80s. The local arcade in my hometown in suburban Massachusetts was called Fun and Games. I still would have rather have had a game console, but this was at least a decent substitute. That being said my mom thought nothing about giving me $10 roller quarters on a whim and telling me to go knock myself out of any of the local arcades. My folks are very frugal about big price items, so I was never able to get a console and had to really work some magic to get a computer later on. They had some pretty cool games in there that the other places did not have, but I was always afraid to go in without at least a friend for support. That's where all the scary teenagers hung out and we give you a hard time. You choke on the amount of smoke coming in. It was located in the dark side room that probably never had been cleaned. Now that, was a hive of scum and villainy. They were the only ones that used tokens of the three, which made it slightly less convenient.īut then, there was the bowling alley. They also had pretty decent games and some ski ball redemption ticket machines. The next place was a Chuck-E-Cheese type clone (I can't rent the name of it) that was half pizza restaurant half arcade. It was a little sketch, but there were hardly any people down there usually, so it was a good place to go. One was in the basement of a restaurant where they had kind of a party bar for private parties and stuff, but when it wasn't used for that it was an arcade with pool tables and such. I had three arcades within walking distance of my home. You'd go and always meet a dozen people you knew there. It's quite understandable why arcades don't work today (barcades do seem to be the way to go now) but I do miss the social aspect of them. The place was dark but it wasn't sketchy, you'd get booted if you were being obnoxious. The owner wasn't a player but always kept things maintained, especially the pinball, always in great condition. Probably had about 60 games and a dozen pinballs, and they were always the latest and greatest. There was also a locally owned amusement park at Salisbury and I just spent lots of weekend nights there.Īs a teenager I ended up working at what I considered to be the best arcade in the area, which just happened to be in the town I lived in. One or two of them still exist, but of course it's not the same. A dozen arcades all next to each other, with so many different games (for example I've never seen a Darius II machine anywhere else). There's a strip of beaches on the MA/NH border that were heaven if you were an arcade rat like I was. I tried to explain to him that malls in nice areas would include such arcades that were better, but he wouldn’t budge…it was an exhausting conversation.Īnyway, I personally think they were probably nicer earlier in the decade before they started losing market share to home systems and took a nose dive, but I don’t know. This co-worker of mine refuses to believe any of this because he saw Terminator 2 and “the arcade doesn’t look bad in it.” Usually you couldn’t hear yourself think because the music was being blasted so loud, gum was stuck to literally everything, the bathroom looked like a set from the latest Nightmare on Elm Street sequel, there was graffiti all over the place, and half the machines didn’t work right most of the time although they never seemed to have any issues taking your quarters.

#Odyssey foosball and air hockey table full#

I was trying to explain this to a coworker from a different country who has this really idealistic vision of America in the 80’sĪrcades-at least by the late 80’s-early 90’s when I started going-had degenerated into smoke-filled rat holes full of people gambling, selling drugs, fighting, and doing who knows what else in the dark corners.