Darren and Mikki Spohn opened this arcade on Research Boulevard in November 2010, at a point when American arcades had been closing for twenty years and they were told repeatedly that the business could not work. The stock came from Darren's own pinball collection, which had outgrown the house. It worked. The original room holds more than a hundred pinball machines and around two hundred other games in about thirteen thousand square feet, and the company claims the largest pinball collection in Texas, which across its several Austin locations runs to well over two hundred working machines. The point of difference is that the games are genuinely maintained rather than left to decay, and the range runs from electromechanical tables of the 1960s through to machines built in the last few years. The appeal is not only nostalgia. Pinball has had a real competitive revival, and rooms like this are where it happens, with league nights and tournaments alongside the family trade. For a road trip it is a reliable indoor stop in the north of the city, off a frontage road, at a scale that takes a couple of hours rather than twenty minutes, and it is one of the larger collections of working arcade machines anywhere in the country.
Getting there
30.3699, -97.7215
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
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