Panama City Beach arcade tour: "What were ye expectin', ya wise-acre?"

[alfonzotan]

DISCLAIMER:  Long-ish post, and without a happy ending.  No prizes for anybody who gets the reference in the subject line, but I will be impressed.

Panama City Beach, aka "the Redneck Riviera" was a legitimate arcade mecca for decades.  Front Beach Road, the man tourist drag, was loaded with arcades of all sizes, the crown jewel being the massive arcade at Miracle Strip Amusement Park.  There, in the 80's, you could find everything from Starship 1 to Paperboy, and almost literally everything in between, under one roof.  Another high point was Fun Land, a mom-and-pop arcade that stocked classic games well into the 21st Century.

I spent last weekend in PCB, but thanks to Tropical Storm Debbie, I didn't get in a lot of beach time.  So instead of sitting around the condo, I decided to head out and see what was left of the arcade scene.  

The sad answer:  not much.

I started out on Thomas Drive at the (relatively) large arcades attached to various mini-amusement parks (mostly go-cart joints), then worked my way west.  All three arcades that I checked out on the west side (Emerald Falls, Race City, and one other that I've already forgotten the name of) had a good selection of modern arcade and kiddy games, but none went beyond the standard Ms. Pac/Galaga combo cab for classics.  Same story at the "Rock It Lanes" near the Holiday Inn:  a well-kept-up modern arcade, but in that case not even the token Reunion game (the oldest machine in the building was a Lord Of The Rings pinball).  

There's literally nothing left of Miracle Strip.  The park was sold off at the peak of the beach real estate bubble, and closed on Labor Day of 2004.  The development deal eventually fell through, and most of the place sat vacant and rotting for years before being razed to the ground in 2009.  But across the street, Alvin's Island still remains.

For those of you who aren't familiar with north Florida, Alvin's Island is a chain of beach shops specializing in... crap.  They sell the detritus of the the Florida tourist machine: t-shirts, beach towels, airbrushed junk, hermit crabs, etc.  The store across from the old Miracle Strip site literally looks like a giant piece of crap:



... but as you can see, the Alvin's Mother Turd also has a big "ARCADE" sign tied up on the front, so I braved the crowd of soaked hicks (hey, I can say that, I'm from about as far back in the sticks as you can get) to check it out.  And there is a beat-up Ms. Pac cocktail.  But besides a knock-off Zoltar (the dummy inside is a pirate instead of a genie), that's it.  Everything else (such as it is, there's not much) is kiddie and/or modern games.

The last stop:  Fun Land.  When I lived in PCB back in the late 90's and early 00's (yes, I'm still kicking myself for not pestering every then-open arcade owner to paw through his stash of retired games), this place was absolutely packed with classic games.  Add in the $0.99 draft and you had adult nerdvana.



Today at Fun Land, there's a Galaga, a Reunion, a Pac-Man (speed hack) and an Arkanoid.  And that's it.  Plenty of modern stuff, and it was full of kids playing them, but the day of the classic arcade in PCB is sadly over.  

Skee-ball, I'm happy to say, is still pretty much ubiquitous in PCB, so there's that at least.  And if you're looking for somewhere to stow your kids for a while, any of these arcades (besides Alvin's Island) would be fine.  Just don't expect to re-live the 80's yourself, no matter how many times you dial up the Van Halen on your iPod...

[lilshawn]

Thanks for sharing this.

We all know the arcade is a near extinct animal. Hell even the arcade we have here in West Ed Mall that USED to be mainly coin-op computers for retarded on-line gamers to play WoW and about 20 photobooths (but still had some pretty decent games) is now full of token pushers and ticket redemption games. there is barely a handful of video games, and even of those, NONE are classics and MANY are duplicate machines (why the hell would you want 8 of the same game?!) or ridiculously large deluxe cabinets to fill space.

As I see it arcade is almost as done as is pinball. People can game at home on their ps3's and 360's for next to free all they want. The Game companies aren't putting any effort into making games anymore. the way i see it people are going to get sick of the current run of crummy arcade machines and stop buying/playing and that will be it. take a look at the players choice in replay magazine...games that have been out for 55/74/173 months?? and still making money?? and the new crap is barely a blip on the radar!

that said, i guess it's up to us to preserve the endangered dodo and keep it for prosperity's sake.