It is Friday night at the Chinatown Fair video arcade, one of the last of the traditional arcades left in the city. Inside, it’s hot and sweaty and the walls are blood-red. Amid the kids and the trash-talking and chaos, an older Chinese man stands quietly in the corner playing Jr. Pac-Man.
“Friday is the night, it’s packed,” says Travis (“Just Travis”), 30, a dreadlocked paralegal who lives in Harlem and said he has been a regular at Chinatown Fair for seven years.
“It’s an old arcade, more for the hard-core gamers,” he says above the sounds of punches, kicks and car crashes coming from the machines. “Everyone here kind of knows each other. Kids come here from all over the city.” When he was younger and lived in the Bronx with his parents, Travis says, he traveled an hour and half to get to Chinatown Fair “to train.”
In 2005, there were 44 licensed video game arcades in New York, according to the Department of Consumer Affairs; today, 23 survive. With the expansion of interactive online gaming, video game action has largely shifted to the home.
“Arcades are an anachronism now,” says Danny Frank, a spokesman for the Amusement and Music Owners Association of New York. “They exist only in shopping malls.”
- “A Place Where Ms. Pac-Man Still Has a Home”, an article on the famed Chinatown Fair by Kabir Chibber, August 5, 2010. Photo by Michael Nagle.
After more than thirty years in business, Chinatown Fair is rumored to be closing up shop soon.
