The Lost Arcade

Kurt Vincent and Irene Chen memorialize the community and history of their favorite Chinatown Fair incarnation in the documentary "The Lost Arcade."

In New York City, Chinatown Fair was one of the last cabinet dominated East Coast videogame arcades before it closed and reopened in 2012 as a more family friendly establishment, Chinatown Fair Family Fun Center. Instead of the jamming of quarters into slots, swipe cards are used to operate the arcade games. Where mainly face-to-face game cabinets once lit up with quarters to signify how long the line was, there is now a more even distribution with carnival style games, fancy driving games and crane machines.

They excavate back into Chinatown and New York City's history, including interviews with the original owner who opened the arcade back in 1944, Sam Palmer. A young Indian man who fell in love with the dream of an arcade, through the years Sam ran the Fair. Through the early years, it was a combination of casual games and then eventually videogames that only existed in cabinets. As personal consoles took off and became viable replacements to cabinets and arcade-style setups, the financial edge of these establishments diminished in America. Chinatown Fair was one of the last arcades left as videogame manufacturers began to pull out of making games to cater to the videogame arcade.

Poetry, interviews, and historic footage pepper the interviews and boops and beeps of adults and kids facing off in the arcade. Gil Talmi's score for the documentary consists of lots of fun chiptunes and focuses on various sounds: Old-fashioned 8-bit sound and newer well-rounded music of today's videogames that also skews towards the electronic. Racers, shooters, fighters and rhythm gamers frantically make their last pilgrimages and bemoan the loss of one of their favorite spots: Mostly tweens and teenagers, although adults are also interviewed.

As the closing looms, there is hope when Next Level, more based around competitive fighting games with livestreaming of matches via Twitch as well as card gaming, opens. Next Level becomes a training ground with both consoles on loan, traditional cabinets and viewing parties for larger tournaments. Underneath much of the nostalgia and very palpable passion is the knowledge that financially, both Next Level and Chinatown Fair Family Fun Center are both risky propositions. However they both evolve, they will never fully be able to recapture the original magic of arcades past.