By GREGORY ZELLER //
Reports of the demise of the Game On Retro Arcade were somewhat exaggerated – and legions of fans are thankful for that.
A fairly routine April Fool’s Day joke went slightly awry last week, when owner Tristan Whitworth told his social media followers that the arcade – lighting it up since January in Lake Grove’s Smith Haven Mall – would be closing its doors.
“It was fun while it lasted,” Whitworth lamented.
The innovator – whose modern spin on yesteryear’s videogames has grown into a three-store retail chain and Long Island’s first classic mall arcade in decades – was completely blindsided by the reaction.
“I thought nobody would even see the joke,” he told Innovate Long Island. “Or maybe two buddies might call and be like, ‘funny, funny.’”
Instead: a hundred-plus responses posted within hours, with teary-eyed adults crushed by the sudden “game over.”
Such is the power of the Game On Retro Arcade – at once, a senses-boggling play place for younger generations and a bona fide time machine for their parents, who can be instantly transported to an age when videogames were new, mall arcades were the rage and Space Invaders ruled the roost.
Of course, the Retro Arcade isn’t going anywhere. As evidenced on a recent Sunday afternoon – when hundreds of customers circled through the dynamic, 3,500-square-foot space off the Smith Haven Mall food court once occupied (comparatively dully) by Abercrombie Kids – Game On is a huge hit.
Player one: Whitworth (right), in game shape at his original Miller Place shop.
“You really see it on the weekends, when the families come out,” Whitworth noted. “It’s really become a place to go.”
Unlike the arcades of yesteryear, the Game On Retro Arcade requires no quarters – all of the games are set to unlimited free play, with gamers paying a cover charge that gives them day-long, come-and-go access.
But the dissimilarities to old-time arcades end there. This is every bit the classic game room of the 1980s, when arcades sprouted up in Green Acres Mall and on the Long Beach boardwalk and everywhere in between.
Here you’ll find Space Invaders (the 1978 Taito classic) and dozens of other games you remember: Asteroids, Frogger, Centipede, Missile Command, Tapper, Tempest, various Pac-Men (and women) and Donkey Kongs and many more, all in their original (or beautifully refurbished) arcade cabinets.
A backbeat of 1980s pop-music hits – “Like a drifter, I was born to walk alone…” – mixes well with the sounds you also remember: the ominous chords as Donkey Kong first snatches Pauline from Mario, the “Jaws”-like beat ratcheting up the pressure of Asteroids, a thousand other blippity bleeps and laser blasts, all careening through the neon light.
Pinball plays big, including a modern machine based on the popular Netflix series “Stranger Things,” which classic-arcade purists will defend as being set in the 1980s. Other selections explore the gaming industry’s early evolution; if you’re looking for a fight, you can throw hands with Piston Hurricane and Bald Bull in Nintendo’s 1984 classic Punch-Out!!, or take your chances against Scorpion and Johnny Cage in now-defunct Midway Games’ 1992 hit Mortal Combat (“FINISH HIM!”).
In all, there are more than 100 cabinets populating the retro arcade, with another 20 games in a rear storage room, waiting to be rotated in.
The old ball game: Flippering out in Lake Grove.
Assembling the classic collection was no mean feat. Whitworth spent years pulling it all together, growing the idea out of his retro-videogame retail operation, which now boasts stores in Miller Place, Smithtown and Patchogue.
While the stores deal mostly in old-school home videogames (classic Atari consoles, rare PlayStation 1 games, etc.), each boasts a neat little lineup of decades-old arcade cabinets.
Whitworth – who leveraged a deeply personal backstory to launch his first Game On shop, and has made autism awareness a cornerstone of the operation – quickly recognized the popularity of the arcade machines. Soon, he was scouring the nation for quality finds.
He struck gold in 2021, when the California-based Museum of Pinball announced it was auctioning off its impressive collection. Whitworth highlighted six games he “wanted to make sure [he] got” through the auction, including two sit-down Nintendo “Red Tent” cabinets, a “super-rare” Neo Geo “candy” cabinet, a sit-down version of Crazy Taxi and an original Ladybug, “my mom’s favorite game of all time.”
Other machines have been acquired from various places, in various ways. Whitworth spent months talking Rocky Point-based Anthony’s Star Wars Barber Shop into parting with a vintage Cruisin’ USA driving game; an original Lunar Lander cabinet – a grandaddy-level, black-and-white vector graphics masterpiece released by Atari in 1979 – was donated by a Connecticut collector.
“He told me, ‘It should be in an arcade,’” Whitworth noted. “We’ve gotten a lot of that.”
Also paying homage to eras gone by is the arcade’s décor. Classic posters hang everywhere. Forty-year-old home-videogame consoles fill odd corners, plugged into boxy televisions that are even older.
And a fantastic assortment of neon signs shines brightly, custom-made for the Game On Retro Arcade by Newby Neon of Mount Sinai.
Puck of the draw: Hockey classics and other sports games abound.
Even with the perfect look and the world-class cabinet collection, Whitworth was careful to ease into the unfamiliar shopping-mall setting.
“We weren’t really ready,” he noted. “We had everything we wanted, but this is so new for me – I know about running the retail stores and everything, but this is more entertainment.”
Among other things, the Game On team wanted to make sure the cabinets – most decades past their manufacturing date – could handle the rigors of constant use.
“We weren’t 100 percent confident in the product, and we wanted to test it,” Whitworth added. “And we wanted to give a big ‘thank you’ to everyone who has supported Game On.”
The clever entrepreneur checked all those boxes by opening the arcade’s doors for free over its first week, with no cover charges. And the worry, of course, proved unwarranted.
“Out of control from the start,” Whitworth said. “Every single day was packed, with lines down the mall.”
Things have since settled into a brisk pace. Triangulated between Whitworth’s three retail shops, the arcade is busy most days and positively buzzing on weekends.
There are still a few hard-to-find games on the collector’s radar – he’s looking for a well-preserved cabinet of the Midway classic Joust, if you’re selling – but it already seems like a sure bet that Game On Retro Arcade will extend its year-to-year Smith Haven Mall lease into 2023.
You didn’t hear that from Player One, though – Whitworth likes to keep his future plans, including the possibility of expanding the retro arcade to other regional malls, under wraps.
“I was working on this (arcade) for three years, and I didn’t tell anyone about it,” Whitworth said. “Work in the shadows and don’t say anything.
“I try to do everything in secret.”
