Glowing screens, flashing lights and the synthesized tones of chiptune music blending together.
That's the dream Steve Smith is keeping alive, one circuit board, one coin mechanism, one CRT monitor at a time at Retro Oasis, his Okotoks arcade.
“I loved arcades as a kid,” Smith says as he sits over a workbench where he’s testing the circuit board for an arcade game called Cyberball, made by Atari in 1988.
“I’ve been in Calgary for 27, 28 years, and they just started disappearing not long after that.”
As the arcades closed, the games made their way into the hands of hobbyists and collectors, often in various states of disrepair.
“I had a bonus from oil and gas sitting in the bank one year, the last arcade in Calgary had closed and their cabinets were up for sale, so we did a paper bid on The Simpsons for $500 and we won it,” Smith recalls.
“There were several other games I would have really liked to have had, but it’s like, ‘No, we can’t afford all of them.’”
Even before Smith opened the Stockton Avenue arcade with his wife Gina in early 2023, he began to acquire more cabinets.
“It was just that sort of thing; you get one and then you might be looking on Kijiji and somebody’s selling another one, so you go look at it,” he says, adding condition and cost aren’t always proportionate.
“Wrestlefest I paid $300 for a long time ago, then Miss Pac Man I paid way, way too much money for from a professional company versus somebody’s basement, and then it had issues a few years down the road.”
As the arcade cabinets piled up, the projects and debugging multiplied and Smith began his quest to unravel the arcane secrets of arcade restoration.
“So at that point I started learning. Wrestlefest was always two-player, and I wanted it to be four-player, because it’s a four-player game,” Smith says. “I made a new control panel and put it on and put in the buttons, because I knew I could buy those.
“Then left the ground wire loose while I was doing some work, so it dropped and landed on the coin tray guard box and it was enough to blow a fuse, so everything died immediately. I was just freaking out, like I have no idea how to fix this, and so the first thing you do is go on Google and you ask some questions here or there and they’re like, ‘No, it could just be that, check your fuses.’
“My first lesson I learned when these things go down abruptly is to check the fuses, because a lot of time those fuses are there to protect the hardware.”
After learning various skills, such as how to use a multimeter on YouTube, Smith isolated the fuse and swapped it out.
“Everything came back to life, and that was it,” he says. “Thanks to the Internet resources you have available these days, nowadays when I have an issue, the first thing I will do is do some Googling."
Hunched over the test chassis made out of wood 2x4s with a monitor, speaker, joystick and buttons, Smith tests out the circuit board for Cyberball.
“When I first plugged it in, I wasn’t getting any audio, and I wasn’t getting any audio on ThunderJaws either, so I thought that was strange,” he says.
“So I pulled up the game manual and it told me these three bulbs (he points at diodes on the board), each of them represents if you have plus five volts, plus 12 and minus five (respectively), so the first two were lit up and the last wasn’t, so it’s not getting minus five volts, so I hook up minus five volts and I had audio.”
The tinkerer’s quest has been one of constant learning, and a mixture of computer science and amateur electronics.
“There’s so much I don’t know, I probably know 40 per cent of what I would like to know," he says.
Often, Smith will get to the end of one challenge, and it turns out the princess is in another castle.
“Sometimes you fix one problem, and it exposes another problem you wouldn’t have noticed without solving – it's like debugging software, right?” he says. “You have to solve the first error that comes up on the screen before it can run the script to pass that and discover the next one.
“There’s a high that comes with solving a puzzle, because you feel smart, you feel like you can come up with something, and it’s probably one of the other reasons we like escape rooms so much.”
The renewed interest in the arcade has been satisfying for the analogue entrepreneur.
“What we were hoping for when we set up the business has occurred: kids come in and they’re immediately, pleasantly surprised by what they see and excited about the stuff,” Smith says.
“So this will be an eight- or 10-year-old's first experience in an arcade ever, and it’s very exciting that they come in and they experience something similar to what we experienced as kids.”
The games have also been a bonding experience for parents who grew up on them to share with their kids.
“This past weekend we had a dad and his three daughters playing Ninja Turtles, and that was just awesome,” Smith says, beaming.
“I’m excited that there’s interest in it. The granddad and his granddaughter that come in and they play Gauntlet once a week, or the other granddad and his granddaughter that come in to play Frogger, you know, that’s just awesome stuff.”
While vintage arcade cabinets often fall within the realm of a hobbyist collector, operating a working arcade brings Smith’s ideals down to Earth.
“Obviously I have a dream world where all the machines look pristine, and all the artwork is on the sides and they look close to what they look like coming off the factory floor, but at the same time, I know you have to wear your hat a little differently,” he says.
“The money isn’t bottomless, you know, we have to think about where it’s being spent and think about things a bit differently.
“When you’re a collector, they’re in your basement, you can work on them and get them looking just fantastic, but you’re spending $500 on the artwork. At the same time, most collectors don’t let 6,000 random strangers come in and try their stuff or have to deal with the ones that are playing a little rough.”
The circuit board for one of his arcade staples is currently undergoing repairs, but the standardized architecture of arcade cabinets means he can swap out another game board in the meantime.
“So right now Mortal Kombat is Thunder Jaws, and it’s probably going to be for another month, but at least somebody can go in, they can put in a token and they can enjoy it for what it is.
“Thunder Jaws in particular is really rare; in 1989 they made 811 boards, and who knows how many exist now.”
As Generation X and Millennials age and acquire the skills and funds, more are fulfilling their passion for the glory days of the ’80s and ’90s.
Smith sees a resurgence in the old games as those generations see what they almost lost as arcades closed.
“There’s so much market enthusiasm for pinball and arcade,” he says. “If anything this will just create enthusiasm for another generation of collectors 15 years from now, and that’s cool, that’ll keep it going.”
