The quarter is the king of spare change in American currency, but it takes a whole court of kings to pay for our favorite commodities. Root through your couch cushions, and you might find enough coins to snag a candy bar from a vending machine. If you’re really lucky, you’ll dig up a fistful of mislaid mintage that covers the cost of coffee from your local cafe. Quarters have their legal, tender merits, but in 2016 they’re worth zip on their own. Back in the 1980s, though, you could walk into an arcade, those hallowed halls of glowing, pixelated entertainment where the faithful worshiped with joysticks, sling down a single quarter, and buy a day’s amusement with a sense of belonging and community at no extra charge. Bang for your buck, so to speak.
Kurt Vincent’s “The Lost Arcade” means to look back to those bygone days, and the public gaming culture they helped birth, through the lens of now. But the film doesn’t examine gaming history as much as it makes a loving homage to the arcade — literally the arcade, Chinatown Fair, one of New York City’s most revered video game palaces, and so by extension one of the world’s most revered video game palaces. Chinatown Fair opened in 1944 after its owner, Pakistani immigrant Sam Palmer, experienced a religious vision in a dream; it stayed open for sixty seven years, keeping itself afloat first as a penny arcade where visitors could come and gawp at dancing chickens (really), then as a hotspot for retro game junkies looking to play a few rounds of “Pac Man” or “Space Invaders,” and finally as a mecca for fighting game devotees and a proving ground for some of the best players in the field. If you could compete with the Chinatown Fair crowd, then you could compete anywhere.
Then, in 2011, Chinatown Fair shuttered, New York City lost a gaming institution, and so did, of course, the world. Or maybe Chinatown Fair was truly lost in 2012, when arcade entrepreneur Lonnie Sobel bought the place, slapped a fresh coat of paint on its walls, and turned it into a family friendly joint that even to uninitiated eyes was nigh-unrecognizable from the raucous, ocher-colored gaming bubble it used to be. Vincent deems this a kind of tragedy for gaming as a meaningful social pursuit while also suggesting that the death of the arcade as we once knew it is simply a marker of evolution, though that isn’t the throughline that strings “The Lost Arcade” along as a story. In point of fact, nailing down the film’s central thesis is as easy as snagging a stuffed unicorn with a claw crane.
Maybe it’s a perspective challenge. Is “The Lost Arcade” about what is lost by the closure of an establishment like Chinatown Fair? Is it about what Chinatown Fair means not to the gaming collective, but to individual gamers, like Henry Cen and Akuma Hokura, once upon a time Palmer’s employees, today staff members at other gaming outlets? Is it about the necessity of public play, the intangible magic that manifests when you jam a room past capacity with people who all share common interest in the adrenalizing effect of seeing two skilled people slug it out in a safe, digital battleground? (No joke: Watching talented gamers perform in a top level tournament setting can be exciting as all get out, though “The Lost Arcade” doesn’t linger long enough on any gaming action for that excitement to translate.) Or is it just about how improved home entertainment inevitably led to the obsolescence of the arcade as a gaming convention?
Instead of settling on one of these, or even two, Vincent settles on all of them and makes “The Lost Arcade” into a really brief — just over seventy minutes brief — chronicle of Chinatown Fair, which becomes an umbrella for sheltering the rest of the film’s ideas. That’s the trouble of the film in a nutshell: it isn’t bad, per se, but it is diluted. It’s easy to spot beat after beat where “The Lost Arcade” could have picked a focal reference and run with it, or where Vincent could have elaborated on the film’s minor themes and found overarching social critiques within them. Henry and Akuma both have compelling personal narratives that might make up a documentary feature of their own; meanwhile, concerns over the decline in public gaming alongside the rise of online gaming match up nicely with similar concerns about, say, the decline in moviegoing alongside the rise of VOD content.
“The Lost Arcade” suffers not because it lacks an egalitarian heart, but because Vincent makes his arguments through a myopic lens. (They’re also self-defeating. Vincent, in voiceover, claims that “the scene” at Chinatown Fair isn’t about nostalgia, but the film undermines his position repeatedly over its duration through interviews with gamers blatantly waxing nostalgic about bygone days.) You may find much of his material engaging, but you’ll find just as much wanting for perspective, for a center of our attention. “The Lost Arcade” is made well enough to pique our fascination, but too scattershot to be meaningful. [C]