Arcade Heroes

If you live near Winchendon, MA and are looking for a Japanese style arcade gaming center, then here’s the place for. Known as Tokyo Game Action, they have a strong focus on Japanese arcade games, along with bowling and a Japanese café. In their own words:

Since our inception five years ago, we have done our best to recreate an authentic
Japanese game center in the United States. We have been the first
to premiere several Japanese games in the US and hosted two events
called “Bowlmani Festival” Where Japanese game music artist performed and we
held national Bemani tournaments.

We have welcomed visitors from all over the United States, Canada, Japan and Europe.

We’ve also held Tougeki Super Battle opera qualifications two years
and have been contributing columnists for Arcadia magazine’s
Tougeki Damashi.

That is a pretty good track record and on top of that Tokyo Game Action is coming up on its fifth year in business (which is a milestone for any small business to achieve) and on top of that it’s a non-profit arcade, which is unusual in the industry. As they describe it:

Our game center is community based and works on a non profit
basis. All proceeds go right back into the center, and the center as a whole
is used to benefit the community and show that video games can be used for the
good of society.

But enough talking about, let’s take a look! Here are quite a few pictures provided to us by TGA themselves, just click on each to enlarge it when you find something that you’d like to get a better look at.

First off, the café and its food. If you want to call yourself a Japanese game center then what better way to bring some authenticity to it than by having some Japanese food on hand.?

Meet the staff

Time for some games!I would just like to point out again that they are coming up on their 5th year, which means that they are running their arcade right. That seems to get lost when discussions come up about arcade closures, the ones that stay open do because they do their business right and take care of their customers, those that don’t go out of business.

In addition to this they will be getting Street Fighter IV in September.

For a more detailed rundown of TGA, check out their website, www.tokyogameaction.com, where you can also get hours and the latest news on what’s going on there.