Museum of the Game® & International Arcade Museum® Forums

I had a chance to visit for the first time last week — it's on our route from IN to PA, and conveniently at the half way point for us. Very easy to get there from 80/90. Girard is near Youngstown. I already gave this place a shout out on the Top 5 Destination Arcades in the World? thread but wanted to elaborate on my experience. Hoping others will chime in on their experiences there!

First things first, their website with all the basic info...
https://pasttimesarcade.com/

A recent YT walk through video that's very thorough. Should give you a great intro to what's in store. Even though this was in April, some of the games have been swapped out since then.


After you pass the vintage grocery store sign, you pay for your $20 day pass at the entry counter, put on your wrist band, and then you're all set.

I headed straight for the EDOT. It was OOO. :cry: I asked an employee about it. He was kind enough to turn it on just to double check. A few moments of EDOT glory. I saw it all lit up. The floor bulbs worked, the big disc lit up, it looked like all the inner and background pieces were working. But the audio was a disaster. Very loud constant hum, along with static, garbled Sark speech and sound effects, all making it unplayable.

Nitpicking on the cosmetics, but there's no carpet on the back piece and the start button should be white. Harumph!

edot1.jpg edot2.jpg edot3.jpg

Important detail: this was a Sunday, and the place is open Thursday - Sunday. Best chance for working games is on Thursday, after the staff has repaired games from M-W (and before the games start to go down over the weekend).

Such a shame. After crying for an hour, I moved on. Kidding. No tears were shed. There's so much that this arcade offers. It's overwhelming. I've never in my life seen so many pinball machines in one place. I've also never seen so many bronze age and early machines in one place. There's an entire row of early gun games. I spent lots of time with these b/c of my obsession with mirrored games with blacklight effects. Wow!

Two others that really caught my interest were Dune Buggy and Spooksville.

The player car is visible behind the mirror, but the playfield is reflected from below (second and third pics). This was a ton of fun. It's a game where you keep trying to stay on course and hit the lit up elements around the track, which keep changing.

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Here's Spooksville, a very early mirrored pinball game. What a beast of a machine. Just so cool to see an early version of this idea...it reminded me of Video Pinball and Varkon (more on that later!).

Spooks1.jpg Spooks2.jpg Spooks3.jpg Spooks4.jpg

To be continued...
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