The Rise and Fall of My Dream Video Game Arcade

Now you'll notice that the title of this story includes "My" in it. That is because this isn't a story of any random video game arcade that has fallen out of fashion over the years. There are a million stories like that out there and thankfully this isn't one of them. No, this is a story about "my" arcade which never was, yet one day could be.

About four months ago I had a dream where I owned a video game arcade here in Madison. It wasn't a huge arcade and it didn't have the newest games but it was mine and it was awesome. A ton of people I know would come and hang out and we would drink beer and play video games into the late hours of the night. When I woke up I realized that owning a video game arcade would be pretty awesome. The rest of the day I kept running the idea through my head thinking about how to open an arcade in Madison but every time I thought of something it ended up being too expensive to go through with.

Fast forward one week and I'm walking to class when it occurs to me how to open a video game arcade and make it affordable. The key is not to open an arcade at all but a game club instead. You see if you open an arcade to the public with three cabinets in a crappy location you don't make any money. To open an arcade properly you need a ton of games and a good location. Even then your probably doomed to failure due to the high operating costs and the fact that arcades started to die out 20 years ago. Sure you'll do good for a bit but once the novelty wears off you'll most likely end up closing your doors. When you frame it as a game club you don't have to worry about most of that stuff.

The game club idea was so simple it had to work. Weekdays members of the club can come and go at the arcade as they see fit. Weekends the arcade would be open to the public and club members. The money to keep the arcade operational would come from two places. Primarily funds would come from club members in the form of a monthly membership fee. Additional money would come from the public admission fee we charge on the weekends.

But where do the games come from?

Here is where I would have to spend my own money in order to get this arcade up and operational. In order to open an arcade of any kind you need games, lots of games. The big problem is that arcade games can be expensive. So my solution was to buy a bunch of cheap arcade cabinets and open with what I could afford. It wouldn't be much at first, three or four cabinets, but as we got more and more club members we would take that money and put it into new games. Over time we would end up with a bigger and bigger collection of games in our arcade. The more games you have in the arcade the more the gaming public would be interested in spending money to be in said arcade. Simple, no?

Now the success or failure of this arcade would depend heavily on the involvement of the game club members. If you get enough of them you can stay open for a long time and even make a little profit. If you don't have enough it becomes a money sink and you'll have to close your doors. Obviously you wouldn't see much public interested in an arcade with only a few arcade games at first so the whole arcade would be built by club members who simply love video game arcades.

My next question was what happens if it fails and we have to close the doors?

My thinking was that worst case scenario, I would own a few arcade cabinets and rent storage space for a year. Really at the end of it all I would have had a kick ass place to hang out with friends for a year. Once the lease was up on the space I was renting I could have a killer yard sale and sell off the arcade games.

How could I go wrong? To me it sounded like a fun experiment in entrepreneurship with possible benefits that far out weighed the chance of failure. I was set to find a cheap place to rent out and even went so far as to start calling around Madison to various business parks and warehouses. Everything was coming together perfectly.

If I had all the angles covered then why am I writing about the fall of my dream video game arcade?

The sad reality is that with the political upheaval going on in the state at the moment opening an arcade is not in my best interests. The budget reform bill currently on the Senate floor could adversely effect my income to the point that opening an arcade would be financial suicide. Instead of writing up a business plan, I'm sitting here writing an absurdly long blog post about all the ideas I had for my dream video game arcade. You never know, someday I might end up opening an arcade for a few hundred bucks and it will be a huge hit. Until then I'm going to just keep dreaming.