14 Years Later, This Gaming Hotspot Is Still the Happiest Place on Earth

We live in a post-button era, and none of us mourn it. Among the many victims of smartphones — pregnant sea turtles, cobalt miners, distracted home movie watchers — the humble button sits low on the list. The touchscreens on our slick pocket supercomputers murdered touch tones and keypads and car dashboards. Buttons have all but vanished from our lives. After a joyful night full of well-timed clicks and haptic mashing, I think we are worse for it.

One night at Galloping Ghost, the world's largest arcade, was all it took to transport me to a time when technology wasn't so boring and sterile. This place takes you back to an era that embraced warm wood cabinets and bright Lucite joysticks. When all you needed in life was a pocketful of quarters. Doc Mack, owner of this longtime Chicago landmark, is content to spend his life keeping the dream alive.

“It's an unbelievable thing. It's never work for me. I can't get here early enough or stay late enough,” Mack told Inverse. “It's a pretty tremendous thing to go to the arcade and see so many people so happy and having fun. It makes every day really amazing.”

“Happy” and “having fun” certainly summed up my experience at Galloping Ghost. As you approach on Ogden Avenue, walking past the ancient Colony Motel and a handful of smoke shops, the arcade doesn’t have much sidewalk presence. Two modest signs let you know you’re there but don’t hint at the scale of what you’re about to experience.

The world’s largest arcade keeps it humble and lets the games do the talking. Once you open the door to Galloping Ghost a cacophony of beeps, boops and chiptune ballads hits your ears. Natural light surrenders to a wash of CRT monitors displaying title screens and teaser intros. Every arcade machine ever designed is focused on grabbing your attention in a crowded space, and with 1,000 of them going at once it’s an overwhelming, almost dream-like euphoria.

A $25 entry fee gets you all-you-can-play and in case you’re wondering, no, you can’t play it all in one visit. There are currently 1,005 machines available, and more being added every month, so your strategy will likely depend on your age and interests. Much to Mack’s dismay, older gamers like myself tend to gravitate to long-lost childhood favorites.

“It's odd that players tend to stay on the games they know, and it's really unfortunate as there are so many, way underrated games.” he says. “Outfoxies, Gamshara, Dragon Gun, Arena, Edward Randy … I could go on and on.”

I told myself I’d be on the lookout for rare gems, but the chance to bond with my inner child proved too strong. With free play enabled I had the opportunity to potentially conquer titles that had eluded me my whole life, and put to rest some unpleasant memories of throwing tantrums at the mall because my mom wasn’t going to shell out any more cash. First on the list: Paperboy.

This wasn’t some bootleg, third-party Paperboy cabinet like you might find in one of the many bar-cades cashing in on millennial nostalgia. This was the real deal, complete with handlebars. The knobby rubber handgrips brought back memories of my old Huffy bike as I twisted them in a revving motion to go faster or slower. The throw button on the left side was a little worn out, but the right side was springy and responsive. I’m not the paperboy I used to be, but that’s not the machine’s fault.

Maintenance is an ongoing challenge, and some games are more durable than others. Mack cites Star Wars Empire Strikes Back as the toughest to maintain, but overall Galloping Ghost has an almost perfect record when it comes to keeping games alive. Almost.

“Metal Gear Arcade is the only game we have had to pull off the floor because of not being able to fix it,” he says. “It will return one day though.”

Trust me, you won’t notice. I was enraptured by the dizzying amount of options lining row after row after row. I got lost more than once, always a happy accident because it would lead to a new discovery. It was how I found Off-Road, a legendary rally truck racer from 1989 that was my go-to at our local Pizza Hut. Again I was struck by how responsive the steering wheel and gas pedal were, and lost almost an hour running races as my favorite yellow truck.

Galloping Ghost is so much more than nostalgia, offering gamers of all ages a chance to experience firsthand some of the most innovative and creative game design ever seen. You don’t have to have grown up with Time Crisis to have a blast with its duck-and-cover light gun action. Anyone who looks at the Sega R360, a flight sim which Mack says cost as much as the first 400 games he bought, is going to want a turn.

Galloping Ghost became the world record holder 10 years ago, although Mack says it was never their intention to be the biggest, just the best. The record was 611 machines and they thought they’d hit just by “doing what we do.” In addition to the 1,000+ games available now there are 250 in storage, and the hunt is always on for more.

“There are games that have taken me 7 or 8 years to get, and yet I'm quite happy there are more to track down. As we have continued to grow, it's gotten a bit easier as the games tend to come to us now. Players often sell us crazy rare games knowing we are going to share them with everyone and won't resell them,” he says.

As I wound down my evening at Galloping Ghost, I stumbled upon one of my own white whales, 1996’s Police Trainer. A simple light gun game, Police Trainer is a virtual shooting range with increasingly difficult challenges. I couldn’t get enough as a kid, and scammed my parents into giving me money for “going to the movies” only to spend the entire haul on the Police Trainer machine in the lobby after they dropped me off. But at $1.00 a game I never had the budget, or reflexes, to finish it. Until now.

The old muscle memories came right back as I ripped through the first two ranks. Then I started to stumble, but in free play mode, that didn’t matter. Sure, it felt a little cheap until I earned my spot on the “Board of Commissioners” high score screen. I clapped and cheered and made a scene born of pure euphoria, pure relief from scratching an itch I’d had for nearly 30 years.

It’s moments like this that keep Galloping Ghost from feeling like a museum or, at times, a tomb for retro gaming. The whole place is alive with people winning their own hard-fought battles, or discovering new ones. You can put your hands on any game you’ve ever dreamed of and hundreds of games you haven’t. Nothing is “for display purposes only.” Thousands upon thousands of buttons are ready to be pushed. Just keep your phone in your pocket, where it belongs.