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New Location News: GAMA Ride Open in Belmont, CA; Summer Street Arcade in Denver, CO

Arcadian 8

(Thanks to Jon Cox for this first tip)

A new FEC venue has opened their doors in Belmont, CA by the name of GAMA Ride (corrected from San Francisco, thanks for the point Sean). The ride portion of their name is to bring attention to their motion theater ride setups which include the Mini Rider 3D two seater and the X-Rider 4 seater (both are developed by South Korean company called Simuline). These certainly are the main attractions at the venue as there as motion theaters aren’t terribly common due to their high cost. GAMA Ride does have an arcade area that goes beyond those attractions which includes a couple of air hockey tables, basketball, some bounce house type setups and some video arcade games which include: Dark Escape 4D, Project X-Pher 4D, Aliens Armageddon 42″, Dead Heat Riders, Fast and Furious Super Cars, and a Pac-Man Chomp Mania. Visit their website here and if you are local, pay them a visit!

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If you are in Denver there are arcade locations like The 1Up Bar there but is a new “immersive street arcade” setup in downtown Denver at the moment by a project called “OhHeckYeah”. It is just a temporary thing through July 2014, being an outdoors attraction. Most of the games are just Microsoft Kinect type setups but Phil Arrington who sent the tip in stated that “they have classics like Space Invaders and X-Men out there”. Here is a promo video from last year and you can find out more at their official website.

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Arcadian

Website: https://arcadeheroes.com

I'm a lifelong fan of video games and I have been operating my own arcade, Arcade Galactic in West Valley City, Utah since 2008. Soft spots in my heart for Atari, Sega, and Nintendo.

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8 comments
jon

nice, spacious ,clean, looking, machines, 🙂 goodo

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Sean

The GAMA place is in Belmont, CA; calling it San Francisco is a bit generous. I’ll be curious to find out how much it costs, their website is a bit barren on pricing.

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Eric Weigand

Is GAMA running machines from multiple operators? Looks like some of the pieces have a card system, but things like the Boxer and Air Hockey quite clearly do not.

It bugs me to see mutually exclusive payment systems on games in the same location. Hurt my earnings at Gunthers Games years ago, and I think it just makes a location look bad to not be consistent.

Once people load up the cards they will be much less likely to bother paying cash to play the other pieces.

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Jon Cox

@Eric – Yeah, when I went there they had some things on cards and some things on tokens/quarters. Basically all of the simulation style games are on cards and anything that is more standard arcade + air hockey and others use tokens/quarters. Wasn’t very ideal and was also hard since at the time I went they didn’t really say how many credits on your card the simulation games took. Hopefully can add more signage to make things clear. Think it has only been open for a couple of weeks.

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Arcades4ever

I’ve just got back from cyprus yesterday and a brand new shopping mall had just opened up back in November last year and it’s quite impressive lineup. I’ll email you the info and pictures and video link soon arcadehero when I’m better as I’m ill right now

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Arcades4ever

Sorry what I meant to say was a brand new shopping mall has open last yea and has an impressive arcade inside

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chaos

Stopped by GAMA game yesterday and as another person mentioned all sit down enclosed simulation games run off a card, other video games used tokens ($1.00 per play for pretty much all of their token games) and the boxer punching bag had a dollar bill vendor. Mini Rider 3D and X-Ride simulator need an attendant to operate so it makes some sense to use a card system on these. Dark Escape and Project X-Pher (InJoy Motion) don’t require an attendant so its strange as to why they have these hooked up to a card system. All of these games cost more than $1 each to play/ride. Dark Escape was $3 and Project X-Pher was $2 so I’m guessing the logic is that one swipe is much easier than trying to feed the machine 8 or 12 tokens. Plus I’m sure it is easier for the operator to keep track of the book keeping by not having to count as many tokens.

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    chaos

    What I mean by easier book keeping and earnings is that with tokens, it is a very manual process of collecting and counting the tokens. A friend worked at a 5 cent nickel arcade about 10 years ago and he said it was more work and required more staff than using quarters. A couple of the driving games were set at 30 and 40 cents to play. They were dual 2-player machines so that can be as many as 16 nickels per game. A roll of nickels has 40 coins and most of you know how big that is. You can imagine after one day the coin boxes would be completely filled with all those nickels so many machines had to be emptied daily versus a few days/weekly.

    Reply