8/20/24: Nickel City

As a kid, my dad always took me to this arcade in Northbrook called Nickel City -- a staple of family entertainment in suburban Chicago. Nickel City's whole thing is that all the games only accept nickels. Not quarters, not game cards, not tokens. Nickel City was your standard arcade. Play games, get tickets. In the back, there was a "free play" section of older games like Pac-Man and Mortal Kombat. When I was a kid I'd always pick out all the nickels from the change I'd saved up. I'd try to win as many tickets as possible to get the best prizes. I'd daydream about the Wii they had as the most valuable prize. Even though I already had a Wii at home, I thought it was so cool that it was something I could win at an arcade. Once I'd run out of nickels, I'd play the old-school games at the free-play section. I remember they had a Ms. Pac-Man cabinet with a Speed Up Chip that made the game run way faster than its intended speed. I have such fond memories of Nickel City. I remember having a birthday party or two there.

Yesterday, I got the itch to play Dance Dance Revolution. I guess one of the perks of being an unemployed college student home for the summer is that you can go to arcades alone at 1PM on a Monday while everyone's at their first week of school. I grabbed my jar of change I'd accumulated over the past few months and drove to Nickel City. The first thing I noticed was that they changed the logo. The flat bubble text was replaced by a sharp, futuristic acronym. "NCX: Nickel City Xtreme". I don't think there's anything particularly "Xtreme" about the rebrand. In fact, the place feels much smaller than I remember. The party room in the back, where I celebrated my seventh birthday, was gone. I made a beeline for the In the Groove 3 cabinet in the very back of the arcade. (In the Groove is a clone of DDR with pretty much identical gameplay. I'm not picky.) I remember feeling so stupid with my little mason jar looking for a place to insert my nickels. Silly me! This is Nickel City XTREME! We as a society have progressed past the need for coins in arcades! Begrudgingly, I coughed up 10 dollars for 200 credits on a "Reloadable Fun Card" and walked my jar of outdated primitive currency back to my car.


I sweated it out on ITG3 for about an hour, completely uninterrupted. The arcade was pretty well-attended though, there were about 15 other people. None of them seemed interested in ITG3. I guess the average arcade goer wouldn't be interested in a cabinet from 2000-something when its flashier and more modern spiritual successor, StepManiaX, released in 2017 by the same developers, is right next to it?

I'm not sure where to end this post. I just wanted to write about arcades. I love arcades and I love Dance Dance Revolution and its clones.