In the nearly four (4!!) decades I’ve been visiting Kennywood, I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve gone to the arcade. Just not my thAng, you know?
But Chooch dragged me in there twice yesterday and turns out, it’s not so bad and they have a ton of old school arcade games that I used to play with my bro Ryan at the mall when we were wee lads & lasses.
Anyway, here are some pictures that I took while I was bored when Chooch was doing stuff for tickets under the guise of “winning mum a birthday present” like ok boy.
I used to be really good at Skee Ball! But now I suck and get super aggravated at even the thought of inserting a token. It made me kind of sad to think about how undesirable amusement park and arcades games are to me, even though my wallet is happy, because it’s probably one of the only childhood things that I’ve outgrown. I still love amusement parks, I still get obsessed to the point of traveling to other states and countries for bands, and I still love piling on accessories that make me look like a toy store window display.
But I just don’t care for games anymore! Of any kind! Video, arcade, card, board…however if you were to invite me over for some night tag or hide n seek, I’d be there.
Especially if there was a night cap of prank calls.
I won 15 tickets on this thing by accident. Ok bro.
In the back, some old shit is on display so that was cool and Chooch and I had some laughs imagining Henry riding on one of the old carousel horses or playing whatever that Peppy thing is.
Fun fact: the movie Adventureland was filmed at Kennywood and the arcade was in some of the scenes. I only saw that movie once when it first came out like 10 years ago so don’t ask me any questions about it.
We had to return to the arcade once Henry joined us later in the afternoon because I’m one of those mean moms who won’t give their son money for games LOL. Yeah that’s right, the first time we were in there, he just stared wistfully at all the games because he had no money haha.
Meanwhile some lady frantically chased down Chooch and panted, “WERE YOU JUST PLAYING THAT MACHINE OVER THERE? WELL HERE, BOY, YOU LEFT YOUR TICKETS!” and she dumped a long string of tickets into Chooch’s open palms, what a fucking ARCADE SAINT.
Henry was threw some quarters at me like I was working in a Texas strip club and I did super lucrative things like get fortunes and lottery numbers.
Anyway, those bastards didn’t even win me anything because Henry was all WHY DONT YOU SAVE THE TICKETS FOR THE NEXT TIME YOURE HERE AND THEN GET A BIGGER PRIZE and I already know how this will pan out but here, choose your own adventure:
A. Henry loses the ticket receipt
B. Chooch loses the ticket receipt
C. Chooch chooses a prize for himself
D. We don’t make it back to Kennywood this year to see which way this will go
E. Trump bans amusement parks
You know what I’m truly bad at now as an adult? I mean, aside from being an adult? Pinball. It makes me so anxious!
And this concludes the arcade interlude. I’ll be coming ’round the mountain with another Kennywood post later this week and maybe some songs that we can sing together as a round.