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#40 Free Play Bar Arcade - The Classic Pinball Podcast

The Classic Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 18m·analyzed·Oct 27, 2020
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.031

TL;DR

Freeplay Arcade owner Jay Leone shares his evolution from collector to operator and venue challenges.

Summary

Jay Leone, owner of Freeplay Arcade (Providence and Worcester locations), discusses his journey from video game collector to arcade operator. He describes the origin of his collections, the Arcade Revival pop-up events that validated the barcade concept, the business model of unlimited play for a flat fee, and the challenges of maintaining a large pinball collection in a high-traffic, free-play environment.

Key Claims

  • Freeplay Providence opened August 11, 2017, over three years ago from the time of this recording

    high confidence · Jay Leone states this as a specific date for the official business leap

  • The first Arcade Revival pop-up event drew approximately 400 people over a three-day weekend

    medium confidence · Jay Leone estimates attendance: 'I don't know, 400 people through the doors that whole weekend'

  • Freeplay Providence has 20 pinball machines; Worcester location has 17-18

    high confidence · Jay Leone directly states these numbers during the conversation

  • Providence location has 150 total games available

    high confidence · Jay Leone states: 'you get to play all 150 games in Providence for free'

  • Pinball maintenance is the single most expensive maintenance category at Freeplay

    high confidence · Jay Leone: 'pinball maintenance in free play is single-handedly one of my most expensive... maintenance and repair... on the top of the list'

  • The first pinball machine Jay Leone purchased was a Valley 'Whodunit'

    high confidence · Jay Leone confirms: 'It was a Whodunit by Valley, right? Oh, yeah. Yep. Very first pinball machine.'

  • Second Arcade Revival event brought approximately 90 games and double the attendance of the first

    medium confidence · Jay Leone: 'we brought, I think, 90 games... bigger undertaking... had more people. I think we did double the people'

  • Pricing is $5 weekday admission and $10 weekend admission for unlimited play

    high confidence · Jay Leone explicitly states: '$5 admission charge during the week or $10 admission charge on the weekends'

  • Freeplay is 21+ only due to the bar component

    high confidence · Jay Leone confirms: 'it is a 21 plus uh venue uh because of the bar'

Notable Quotes

  • “One game turned into two, turned into ten, turned into hundreds. I have no idea how that goes. Nobody does.”

    Jay Leone @ early in conversation — Describes the organic nature of collector growth; relatable to many hobbyists

  • “I want the game to work, I want it to work well, and I want other people to enjoy it just the way I would want to enjoy it is the number one principle”

    Jay Leone @ mid-conversation — Core philosophy: passion-driven operations vs. coin-extraction approach

  • “If you build it, they will come. They will come.”

    Dave (co-host) @ during Arcade Revival discussion — Reference to the pop-up event validation strategy

  • “I remember the Saturday night during the second arcade revival, I looked around, and every game in the entire place was being played.”

    Jay Leone @ describing second event success — Demonstrates market demand validation and full capacity utilization

  • “To have a collection of 20 pins that are just getting hammered, you know, because there's no charge, you don't have to put a dollar in or whatever it may be... they probably get more abuse in a free play environment like this than in just a regular standalone pay-as-you-go arcade.”

    Jay Leone @ discussing maintenance challenges — Key operational insight: free-play model increases wear on machines

  • “These pinballs are commanding that kind of cash now? That's crazy.”

    George (co-host) @ during pinball collection discussion — Acknowledges rising secondary market prices for pinballs

  • “I didn't really grow up playing pinball too much growing up, but I played mostly video games.”

    Jay Leone @ early background section — Clarifies his origin as primarily a video game collector, secondarily a pinball enthusiast

  • “We would actually do, you know, our normal hours are we open at 5 p.m., so we would do an 11 to 4 [family day]. And that would give us an hour to kind of like get folks, you know, out and clean.”

Entities

Jay LeonepersonGeorgepersonDavepersonFreeplay Arcade - ProvidencevenueFreeplay Arcade - WorcestervenueArcade RevivaleventFun and Games ArcadevenueWhodunit (Valley pinball)game

Signals

  • ?

    venue_signal: Freeplay Arcade expanded from Providence (opened Aug 2017) to second location in Worcester; both locations feature large pinball collections and free-play business model

    high · Jay Leone confirms opening Providence 3+ years ago, mentions Worcester as second location with similar game counts

  • ?

    community_signal: Arcade Revival pop-up events successfully validated market demand for retro arcade/pinball venues in Providence area; model evolved from test events to permanent operation

    high · First event ~400 attendees, second event double that; second event showed 100% machine utilization; led directly to Freeplay launch

  • ?

    operational_signal: Pinball maintenance is the highest-cost maintenance category at Freeplay despite being only portion of overall game collection; free-play model increases wear vs. traditional pay-per-play venues

    high · Jay Leone: 'pinball maintenance in free play is single-handedly one of my most expensive... on the top of the list'; discusses increased abuse in free-play environments

  • $

    market_signal: Secondary market prices for B-tier and C-tier pinball machines rising significantly; makes acquisition of 20+ machine collection increasingly difficult and expensive

    medium · George: 'even the titles that you consider B and C list are like, wow, those pins are commanding that kind of cash now? That's crazy'

  • ?

    venue_signal: Customer demand led to introduction of family-only hours (separate from 21+ bar venue); biweekly events became popular; shows market segment beyond core adult demographic

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.234

0:00
🎵 Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Classic Pinball Podcast. My name is George and today I'm joined by my co-host Dave. Hello Dave. Hello George. Today we're here in Worcester with Jay Leone at Freeplay Arcade.
1:02
So, Jay, I've been to your place in Providence, and what an awesome arcade that is. I remember when I first went there, invited down, I was like, wow, this is like the arcade of my youth, Fun and Games Arcade. It's like closest thing to any arcade I've been to, just like that. the ambiance, the retro feel to it, the music, the lighting, just freaking captured it just right. And tell me a little bit about the history of it all, how you started this whole madness, and how you got into the whole gig. Sure. Well, first of all, thank you very much, George and Dave, for having me on this podcast. It's a pleasure.
1:42
So what we did in Providence and what you've experienced in the past, we tried to recreate here in Worcester. So, you know, the lighting, the game selection, the sounds, everything that you look and see and hear is a duplicate of what we did in Providence, right? Try to recreate that period of time that maybe you grew up in, you know, the golden age of arcades and pinball, right?
2:04
So how did it all start? I would say it's about 12 years ago now. a friend of mine asked me if I knew where to find a Street Fighter 2 arcade machine, arcade game. And I said, no, why would I, you know, why would I have one of those? Or I don't know how to find those things. I said, why don't you try eBay? And sure enough, he did. And he found one. He found one on eBay. Now, fast forward a few years later, he got married. He called me. He said, my wife says the arcade game's got to go. Are you interested in it? You know, do you want a Street Fighter arcade machine? And I said, no, I didn't really grow up playing Street Fighter. I played Mortal Kombat. You know, Mortal Kombat was my game. And I said, I'd love to have a Mortal Kombat. And he's like, well, you know, do you want the game or not? I said, no, I don't. So, but that got me thinking, you know, I wound up looking for a Mortal Kombat, you know, on eBay, just like what I told him to do. And I found one. And it was this giant warehouse that this guy had full of arcade games. And I went there to pick up the Mortal Kombat and my eyes, you know, lit up. I was like, wow, I want every game in this place.

  • Family days were introduced about 6 months after opening Providence and became biweekly events

    medium confidence · Jay Leone: 'we did our first family day maybe... six months after we opened... we were doing them twice a month'

    • Jay Leone @ family day logistics — Operational detail showing careful scheduling between demographics

    Creature from the Black Lagoon (pinball)
    game
    Theater of Magic (pinball)game
    Rewindvenue
    Donkey Konggame
    Mortal Kombatgame
    R-Typegame
    Street Fighter 2game
    The Classic Pinball Podcastorganization
    Adams Family (pinball)game
    Attack from Mars (pinball)game
    Dr. Dude (pinball)game
    Terminator 2 (pinball)game
    Pirates of the Caribbean (pinball)game

    high · Jay Leone: initial resistance to family play, but 'so many requests from customers'; first family day 'was a huge hit'; expanded to biweekly alternating Saturday/Sunday

  • ?

    collector_signal: Acquiring 20+ pinball machines for Providence and 17-18 for Worcester described as 'not an easy feat'; scarcity and rising prices cited as major challenge

    high · Jay Leone: 'to acquire, you know, 20 pins for Providence and then to try to acquire another 20 pins here for Worcester, it's not an easy feat'; 'these things are just getting more expensive with time'

  • ?

    venue_signal: Freeplay operates as integrated bar/arcade venue; separate fee structures for bar (Rewind) and arcade portions; 21+ age restriction due to alcohol service

    high · Jay Leone explains nightclub origin; $5/$10 admission for arcade; 21+ policy due to bar; mentions Rewind as separate entity within same space

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Jay Leone emphasizes passion for game functionality and player experience over pure profit maximization; contrasts with 'good enough' operator approach

    high · Jay Leone: 'I want the game to work, I want it to work well, and I want other people to enjoy it... is the number one principle'; contrasts with operators who just 'throw a game on location and charge whatever'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Freeplay's business model uses flat admission fee ($5 weekday/$10 weekend) for unlimited play across 150 games rather than traditional per-play coin collection

    high · Multiple confirmations; Jay Leone: 'all the games are set to free. It's a, you know, $5 admission charge during the week or $10 admission charge on the weekends'

  • ?

    content_signal: The Classic Pinball Podcast Episode #40 features on-location interview at Freeplay Worcester; episode includes venue tour and detailed business/operational discussion

    high · Podcast hosts George and Dave conduct live interview; discuss pinball collection inventory; tour venue

    • 3:10
    So instead of buying just the Mortal Kombat, I bought two games. I bought Mortal Kombat and a space game called R-Type that I remember playing as a kid. And that's pretty much where it all started.
    3:21
    One game turned into two, turned into ten, turned into hundreds. I have no idea how that goes. Nobody does. So were you primarily a video collector or buyer at first? Absolutely, yeah. When did the pins enter the game?
    3:41
    Yeah, the pins, you know, I was still just a hobbyist, just collecting video games. You know, I hadn't turned into free play or had a commercial, you know, arcade or anything like that. And I thought it'd be cool to have a pin after maybe having 20 or 30 video games. I said, you know what? Everybody's in this hobby that I know has a few pinball machines. I know they're expensive compared to the video games, and there's a lot of maintenance. I really don't know anything about pins. I didn't really play pinball too much growing up, but I played mostly video games. I said, all right, let me see if I can find a pin, and I knew nothing about pinballs.
    4:18
    There was a guy on Craigslist who had three or four pinballs for sale at the time. I went and looked at them, and I said, eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Okay, I'll take that one. I had no idea. Okay. And I played them all, and I was like, oh. So what was the first game? What was that game? It was a Whodunit by Valley, right? Oh, yeah. Yep. Very first pinball machine. Now, mind you, on the side of the Whodunit, he had like a Creature from the Black Lagoon. Oh, that would have been better. And like a few other like A-list titles, Theater of Magic or something. And I was just, I didn't know what I was buying. But the Whodunit was the cheapest out of all of them. Sure. And I said, okay, I have a budget. I can afford this one. Yep. And it seemed to play great, and that's where I started. and then again one pinball turned into two and three that's probably about it so you were a child of what arcade era would you say where were you like the 90s yeah I miss the golden age you know people call the arcade golden age the 80s you know when everything was coming out in the early 80s right at least for the video game side yeah and I was too young I was like five years old when that was happening so I totally miss that but my brother who's a little bit older than me you know got to really enjoy that period of time and i came more into the 90s you know arcade scene so the fighters you know the moral combat the street fighters and laser disc games and you know all that stuff was kind of like what i grew into in in the early to mid 90s um and but i always appreciated the classics from the 80s because that's what i played on atari and calico right as a child you know i played the donkey kongs and the centipedes and all that stuff but on the home console um so it was an easy kind of jumped for me to get into the classic arcade games that I played on the video game console and start collecting those too. So it sounds like Donkey Kong is one of your pride and joys, because that's what you have as your logo, seems a Donkey Kong thing. Yeah, that's right. So certainly I remember playing Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. on the Coleco when I was a kid, six, seven, eight years old or whatever. And so that is just an iconic, right? I mean, like, if you have to look at the top five video games, you know, Donkey Kong is one of them, you know, of all time. And so when we picked our logo, we went through a whole bunch of iterations of, you know, what game we wanted to try to, like, you know, maybe emulate. What says it all. What was, you know, most recognizable. What captures that time frame. Correct. Yeah. But without, obviously, infringing on any type of copyright or anything like that. And so, you know, we looked at a number of different options. And, you know, just taking that, you know, kind of ladder barrel scene, you know, the girders and everything from Donkey Kong was just, you know, a surefire win. We were like, yeah, everybody knows that. You know, it's just you look at it and you're like, oh, Donkey Kong. Even getting here today, I wasn't sure I was in the right spot. And I looked, I was like, oh, I'm in the right spot. I see the girders and the barrels. I know. Yeah. I know where I am. The sign is awesome. Two of them outside. Awesome. Very recognizable. people all the time you know comment they'll see me wearing the logo on my shirt or something they're like oh wait i recognize that is that you know like they may not they may not pick up donkey kong right away but they'll be like i remember that and they're like is that an arcade and so it is synonymous right with with the logo and with an arcade so it brings you right back to that time frame but that's again that's the heyday right video games that's when they're really coming in actually we're starting to push pinball machines out a little bit first place because you know with a video game all you really need to do is you know The old adage goes, clean glass, empty coin box, repeat. Right.
    7:46
    It's interesting to listen to you, Jay, because I'm a little older, and I don't remember that heyday of 80s. I was newly married. I bought a business. I kind of forgot about the whole arcade experience. And most of my arcade experience is in pinball. the classic Pac-Man, Q-Bert, Chapper, that's about it. I'm not much of a video guy, so it's great to listen. And looking at the number of games here, and then looking at your website,
    8:24
    you have a huge arsenal of games. Thanks, George. Yes. I know I'm not reminding you. Just look around the room, and people listening to this will post pictures. This is an awesome space. He's got, if you're a video fanatic, he's got one of everything here, and if not two or three. And they're games that are very recognizable. We'll get to the pinballs in a second, but I want to make sure people get the whole idea of what this place is about.
    9:00
    Yeah, it's an awesome feel. the classic video game vibe is here, and also that mid-'80s, 90s William Valley thing. You've got that pretty well captured, too, on the pinball side of things. It's very nice. Yeah. Certainly, you know, a video game collector first and a pinball collector as a must, you know, owning a classic arcade, you kind of have to have both. And we try to appeal to, you know, so many different, you know, customers or patrons. it's like, well, what did they grow up playing as a kid? Right. Or as a young adult, were they pinball players? Were they classic arcade game players? Were they Dance Dance Revolution players, which was well after my time?
    9:46
    Were they air hockey, skee-ball, whatever it is? I try to capture a whole bunch of different types of players, even casual folks who maybe weren't really video game players in the arcades, but we'll walk up to Pac-Man and be like, oh yeah, I played this when I was a kid on Atari or something, but I never went to the arcades. And then they can come here and they're like, oh, so this is really how it all started? These games used to be in these big clunky cabinets before they made it to the consoles that we played as kids.
    10:16
    And so it's a learning experience to try to create something like this in this space and appeal to so many different folks. When I first opened Freepoint Providence, It was a bunch of 80s games. You know, it was all the Atari classics and the Bally Midway classics. Sure. Very few pinball machines. No skee-ball, no DDR, no 90s, you know, games. And I quickly realized, like, I'm kind of just pigeonholing myself into a period of time just for the folks that used to go to the arcades in maybe the early 80s. Right. But what about all the people that went to arcades in the 90s and beyond? You know, they didn't play, you know, maybe they played Pac-Man and Donkey Kong because that was the only thing that was left. in the classic era, but they were playing Ninja Turtles, they were playing Simpsons, they were playing X-Men, stuff that I never collected and never thought I would need to collect, but I quickly realized there's a generation after me that went to arcades that played games that I never played, and I want to try to capture that period of time in this arcade as well. So what's your audience that comes in here? Would you say age 20 to 60 maybe? It's a wide range, yeah. It certainly is, I would say, early 20s all the way to, yeah, 50s, 60s. I would say our target demographic is more like late 20s to early 40s. So, again, still a very wide range in terms of age. That's the demographic. But that's what's coming here. That's the demographic. Here's the big question. When did you make the leap from collector to business owner? Yeah. And how did that come about and when did it come about? Yeah. Yeah, great question.
    11:56
    So the leap happened officially just over three years ago when we opened Freeplay in Providence. That was August 11, 2017.
    12:08
    So that really, I think, is when I went from being a hobbyist with a whole bunch of games to being an operator, if they call it that still, of an arcade. and even though I made the leap and I was involved in a commercial you know type of environment you know I'm still a hobbyist at heart right and I'm still collecting this stuff and I don't I'm still not really thinking of it as much of as a commercial operation as I just like to fix games and repair games well you know what it shows you get a love of the game versus more like just it takes a quarter in I don't care if it's a busted whatever it takes a quarter in you're more like you get a passion for it and it shows. Yeah, thanks, Dave. It really is, like, I think without that and without that passion to be able to just, like, I want the game to work, I want it to work well, and I want other people to enjoy it just the way I would want to enjoy it is the number one principle, right? I mean, anybody can just, you know, throw a game on location and charge whatever, and if it works, great. If it doesn't work or some buttons don't work, whatever, they'll figure it out. Good enough, yeah. Yeah, good enough, right? I mean, there's so many operators, I'm sure, that did that throughout the years, And I can tell you a lot of the games that I've purchased didn't work or didn't work 100%. Like a bubble gum and tape and black tape inside them, electrical tape. You know exactly. You've seen it a million times, I'm sure. You open it up and you're like, oh, look at this hack. Another operator hack. But, I mean, not to defend them, but sometimes I get it. Some of these games might have been out in the middle of nowhere. Sure. And you've got to work with what you have. And it's like, well, whatever you can do to keep it working.
    13:44
    They have a bow enough and a marshmallow. Make it happen. Yeah, total MacGyver trick, right? Jay, how many games did you bring into your first venture from your personal collection?
    13:58
    And then how did you come to acquire all the machines here? Because it appears that it's double the pleasure, double the fun, double the machines, double everything. Double the rent. That's for sure. Yes. Great question. And so I should back up a little bit and explain a little bit how FreePlay started before we actually became FreePlay. So a friend of mine who is actually my business partner now in FreePlay in Providence and also here in Worcester, he owned a nightclub and he had a space on the first floor of the nightclub that was basically empty. It wasn't being utilized. And for years, when I was a hobbyist just collecting games, I mentioned to him several times, I said, look, we should really talk about doing a classic retro arcade in that space you have on the first floor of your nightclub. I said, it's not being utilized, and these things called barcades that are kind of popping up all around the country, more so on the West Coast at the time, and I said, I think they're going to head here, and we could really open something really cool and new in Providence that nobody else has, and I think it'd be a hit. And so at the time, my business partner wasn't really convinced that, you know, these, you know, classic arcades were something that people would be interested in. It was a thing. Yeah, it was a thing. It was a fad, you know. Could you really turn it into a business, you know? Are people really going to come out for this, you know, more than just once? You know, play the game and be like, oh, that was cool, and then leave and never come back, you know. So did it have any staying power, you know?
    15:33
    And, you know, what's the demographic, you know? How many people are going to come to this thing? And, you know, so I had to really prove to him that this was a thing and that we should try it. And so we did these pop-up events. We had these pop-up arcade events at his nightclub, which was called, the pop-up event was called the Arcade Revival. And so the first time we did one, we started with 60 games, I think, 50 or 60 games. And it was a three-day. That's more than a pop-up. That's a lot of games. It reminds me of a movie. if you build it, they will come. They will come, yeah. Well, we wanted to go big. I mean, you know, I had a pretty large collection at the time. I think maybe I had 80 or 100 games in my arsenal of, you know, video games. No pinball, by the way. Maybe I had that one that I had purchased, but it was mostly all vids. And we were doing this for a three-day weekend. It was Thursday, Friday, Saturday. I said, okay, I enlisted some of my friends, the arcade, you know, hobbyists to help me. I said, we're going to move all these games out of my garage into this nightclub in Providence for three days, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. We've got to make sure everything works. This is a big, I know, risk that we're taking. It's a big undertaking to kind of bring everything there and set it all up for three days, but just trust me. Let's do this. So we did it. We spent months kind of working, preparing, making sure everything was, all the games were not bubble gum. And on top of that, how did you advertise to make sure Barney's going to get in that place and see everything? How did you do that? Good question. So we did a mixture of social media ad campaign and an old-fashioned kind of like fire around the coffee shops, all downtown Providence, any other place that we could get into to put a fire up. We would do that. So it was a mix of old and new. So we really did a good job, and we assigned some people within our community to kind of go up and help promote this thing. And I mostly focused on getting the video games to work and getting them to the venue. And a lot of my friends were really on the trail there, kind of like the campaign trail, putting up the signs and the flyers and everything. But in the end, it worked. I mean, we started with that 60 games in a small area of the nightclub. We didn't even have the whole nightclub. We had about half of it. And Thursday, Friday, Saturday, that whole three-day weekend, maybe we did, I don't know, 400 people through the doors that whole weekend, which was a good number, more than what we were expecting. We didn't know what it was going to turn out to be. And that's when the floors were uneven. There was some weird stuff going on. Yeah. I think I was there for that. I think Mike and Chris told me about it way back when. I think I remember I was going for that original opening thing. I thought it was really super cool. Yeah. But I just remember saying, you know, this, like, uneven floor thing, this has to go eventually. It was still a nightclub. I mean, we literally just moved our games into a nightclub to, you know, check it out and there were uneven floors there were there were vip you know kind of tables for the nightclub and so definitely had a look and feel of a nightclub still more than an arcade but it's very different though i like the feel of it anyway because they had you never really saw anything like this before the way it was laid out so it had this cool factor to it you know you kind of threw it together you know as quickly as we could we got in maybe on a tuesday or a wednesday to move the games in and we had to have everything done and ready by thursday night when we opened the doors. So it was a huge undertaking. Not only just move all the games in, but we didn't have, you know, electrical, you know, hookups for all the games. And it was a nightclub. It wasn't designed to be an arcade, right? Yeah. So you had to get more power. You had to get more power. And we had to do some slight electrical work, you know, temporary just to make everything, you know, work and power up. Okay. But we did it. We pulled it off. And my, you know, soon to be business partner, you know, at the time, my friend that owned the nightclub was happy. And he said, okay, when do you want to do a second one? This one really seemed to do well. Let's see if there's some staying power here and if people actually come back. We were going into the fall winter time and I said, you know what, why don't we wait until the spring? The last thing I want to do is lug all these games back here again in January It going to snowstorm It going to snowstorm Yeah it going to be the weekend that we pick Obviously there going to be a huge blizzard There you go And it just going to be a disaster Why don't we wait until, like, March? So six months later, we did another one. This time, we upped our game. We brought, I think, 90 games. So we really went from 60 to 90. So it was a lot more games. We brought some pinball. I think we had five pinballs.
    19:51
    And I think we even had one skeeball machine, if I'm not mistaken. So now this time we had the front and the back of the nightclubs. We had more space.
    19:59
    And that time, same Thursday, Friday, Saturday, bigger undertaking. We had more people. I think we did double the people than we did the first time. We advertised it harder, but some people had already been to the first one six months ago. They told their friends. So it just turned out to this huge event. I remember the Saturday night during the second arcade revival, I looked around, and every game in the entire place was being played. Awesome. There was not one empty game available for someone to play. So these were your marketing events to prove your theory that there is a market for an arcade. Yeah, these were our trial test runs for both myself and my business partner now. And he looked at me at the end of that third night on a Saturday and he's like, we don't need a third one because we were supposed to do three test runs. He's like, when do you want to start? Awesome. So with that, was that part of the fee to get into the nightclub? You got the arcade, or was it two different? Yeah, so it was two different. So the nightclub upstairs was still kind of a separate entity. And even today, that part of the nightclub is a separate entity still, and there's a separate fee. We'll get into Rewind and the other nightclub portion of it that's tied to Freeplay a little later on if you want. Sure. But that's how it all started and how the pop-up events turned into free play. Well, I think one thing that we need to tell the audience is, if you haven't guessed by now, free play, it's one price per entrance and you can play unlimited games, correct? That's right, yeah. And you'd be amazed at how many people, you know, I think... Ask you for quarters? Yeah, they come in, they say, where are the change machines? Are there tokens? You know, where is everything? You know, we get that question so many times, even three years later. Wow. And so, like, a lot of people, maybe they don't get the free play kind of term and why we're called free play. You're correct. All the games are set to free. It's a, you know, $5 admission charge during the week or $10 admission charge on the weekends. And you get to play all 150 games in Providence for free, including pinball, skeeball, air hockey, all the video games. Folks, did you hear that? five bucks during the week to play unlimited pinball and video and if you want ten bucks on weekends and you have a bar right so it raises the question is there an age minimum to come in there is so it is a 21 plus uh venue uh because of the bar um so no children so no children uh however you know early on um we didn't even really think about this you know we always just said this is going to be a 21 plus only kind of venue we had so many requests from from customers that would come to us and say, I really wish you guys would have a kids' day or something. My kids would love this. I want to show them what I grew up with, what our kids were like when I was a kid, and I'd love to experience this with them. Would you guys ever consider doing kind of a family event or something? A family day. So we took that question very seriously, and we said, you know what? Let's give it a try. Let's try it and see what happens. And so we did our first family day maybe, I don't know, six months after we opened, and it was a huge hit to the point where people were asking us repeatedly when the next one is. When's the next family day? So we were doing them twice a month and it became a thing. It was like a Saturday day kind of thing? Yeah, we alternate Saturdays and Sundays because we know we've got a lot of parents that would tell us, look, I'd love to come but I have commitments on Saturdays or Sundays. So we just decided we'd alternate and we'd do some Saturdays and some Sundays. Gotcha. Yeah. So you kind of maybe did like a 12 to 6, and then after that you want to get the Saturday night crowd in, the regular crowd, I'm sure, the drinking crowd. Yeah, that's right. We would actually do, you know, our normal hours are we open at 5 p.m., so we would do an 11 to 4. Okay. And that would give us an hour to kind of like get folks, you know, out and clean and do a quick cleanup and turn before the 5 o'clock crew, you know, 21 plus. Yeah. Nice. So I'll add one more question to the pile. Is there food at your location in Rhode Island? There is. It's minimal. Right now it's just flatbread pizza. And we do that for many reasons. One is we want to have some food to keep customers there, and we had so many requests from people saying, look, I want to eat something just quick so I can go back to playing the games. I'm starving. I don't want to leave. So we have flatbread pizzas. They're $9. They're enough for two people. but we always told our customers look, if you want a gourmet meal or if you want to go out somewhere in Providence there's so many fine restaurants around town really within walking distance go there first, have your nice dinner come to us afterwards and then plan on spending the night this is your entertainment and they do that we even offered some customers free re-entry so even if they come to us early when we first opened and they say, I want to go grab a bite to eat but I really want to come back because I want to play more games, we'd give them a stamp and let them come back in after they have dinner. Nice. Very nice. That's great. I'm going to put in a commercial plug here for a second.
    25:05
    Audience, these are the games that he has available in Rhode Island. We'll get to the Worcester location in a second. But these are all the pins. We are a pinball show. Adam's Family, Attack from Mars, Dr. Dude, Dr. Who, F-14, Firepower, Fishtails, Funhaus, Monster Bash, NBA Fastbreak, Phantom of the Opera, Pinbot, not done, Pirates of the Caribbean, Scared Stiff, Star Trek Next Generation, Taxi, Terminator 2, Theater of Magic and World, and I've seen some of those games at this location as well. That's an arsenal, and that's a lot of games. Well, thank you. Yeah, it took a long time to collect all those pins. As I mentioned earlier, by the way, the last one was Whirlwind, I think. Whirlwind. What did I call it? Whirlwind.
    25:57
    That's what's on your website. Yeah, I caught that and I updated that. And I wrote Whirlwind next to it. Yeah, it was Whirlwind. Oops. Yeah, no worries. Thanks for the plug, by the way.
    26:07
    Yes, I think we have 20 pinball machines in Providence, and we have about 17 or 18 here in Worcester.
    26:14
    Look, you guys know this. Pinballs are a lot of work. Oh, yes, they are. In terms of not just acquiring them, especially in the pinball craze that we're in right now, I would say. So acquiring them can be difficult and expensive. But then maintaining them and not just keeping them running, but to maintain them to a level that we have some very serious pinball players in the area. And the last thing I want to do is get a complaint that my pins are not up to par with some other location. It comes with the territory. It does, it does. And I can tell you that pinball maintenance in free play is single-handedly one of my most expensive, I'll call it maintenance and repair, of all the video games and everything I have on location. Pinball repair is on the top of the list. You know everybody is nodding their head in agreement out in the audience right now. Well, you've got to steal a ball, roll around, and hit and things. Yeah, yeah, that's easy, right? Yes, so to keep the pinballs running at a very high level of quality is expensive and time-consuming. But I understand the value it offers. So starting out, I had, like I said early on, just a handful of pins. When we first did the revival event, we had five pins, and I think three of them were on loan from a friend of mine. So I had like two. And then when we first opened Freeplay in Providence months later, I think I had five. And it took me so long. I mean, to acquire, you know, 20 pins for Providence and then to try to acquire another 20 pins here for Worcester, it's not an easy feat. I mean, you guys know and everybody listening probably knows that these things are just getting more expensive with time. Yes, they sure are. You know, even the titles that you consider B and C list are like, wow, those pins are commanding that kind of cash now? That's crazy. You know, so to get in this hobby and to buy a pinball and maintain it, it's not for the faint of heart, right? So to have an army or a fleet of 20 pins and some A-list, some B-list, and some C-list, yes, it's costly and expensive. Especially if you're beating on them all day long for hours at a time, they're taking some punishment. Yeah, and it's something I think very hard about is because this is a free play kind of venue where all the games are free and limited, there's a lot of people that come in and play pinball, and they're not pinball players, and they just beat the hell out of those games. Yeah, flap-flap of the flippers over and over and over. They just do it all down the lineup. They'll just play every one of them that way. And these aren't children? No, these are adults. They may have had a few beers or drinks.
    28:48
    You can be forgiving if you're five, but if you're 35, you kind of look and say, you realize this is a sophisticated piece of machinery. There's some finesse going on, not just fricking whack the flippers 25 times. Correct. We've kind of seen it all. Yeah, I'm sure you guys have. And so, you know, to have a collection of 20 pins that are just getting hammered, you know, because there's no charge, you know, you don't have to put a dollar in or whatever it may be. You know, people will just sit there and play them for hours. And so I would say they probably get more abuse in a free play environment like this than in just a regular standalone pay-as-you-go arcade. Would you ever consider, to that point, is like having free play, but again, people that want to throw their quarters in, maybe throw quarters into the pinball machines? Yeah, so I've seen that before. I looked at a lot of other barcades before we started FreePlay, and I looked at the business models, and I tried to understand how other places were doing it, and I saw a lot of barcades.
    29:47
    The pins were free. I'm sorry, the bids were free, but the pins you had to pay for. And so maybe the pins were $0.50 or $1. If there were any new stern pin, it was absolutely $1 to play. At a minimum. At a minimum, right. So I've thought about it. I haven't gotten there yet, but I have thought about in the future maybe expanding because they're cranking out so many new pins now. Not just Stern, but there's all the boutique manufacturers, whether it's Jersey Jack or Spooky or whoever it is. It's becoming more crowded in the pinball market, right? And there's so many new pins coming on the market now so more, I think, than ever, maybe in the 80s. But I'm thinking about maybe adding what I'll call a VIP pinball area. So if you want the newest, latest and greatest Stern or Jersey Jack, whatever it may be, sure, I'll put that there. But you've got to pay for it. Yeah, it makes sense. And I don't know if I'm going to do it yet, but I'd love to hear. Like anything, you start with one, see how it goes.
    30:43
    Yeah, I'll consider it. And I think that'll help, too. Well, I'll call it the abuse factor. So the second you start charging a dollar or whatever, I don't think those pins are going to get abused as much as maybe the free play pins would. Right. That's true, because now they're going to pay your way kind of thing, so they're not going to get, like you said, something like a governor or a filter. Exactly. So the regular patron who knows nothing about pinball or video games, for that matter, just comes in and starts hammering the flippers. You kind of now filter that out, so to speak. Pins require a lot of maintenance. You guys know that for sure. Parts aren't cheap. Parts and labor are not cheap. Parts and labor are not cheap on pinball maintenance. But vids, for the most part, are very reliable.
    31:31
    With the exception of maybe the monitor, these CRTs are getting old now from the 80s, 90s, and they're not being made anymore, right? So you keep the original CRTs running.
    31:42
    Can be expensive and hard to find parts for, but they run for 10, 20, 30 years. So once you maintain them and you do whatever you need to do to keep them going, they're fine. Power supplies, they're cheap and reliable, and you can replace them if needed. So other than that, you're talking about buttons, joystick, and a game board. Again, the game boards are very reliable, and the buttons and the joysticks are the only things you have to maintain. And even those are very reliable and cheap if you need to replace them. Pinball is a whole other story. So how hard was it to acquire all the games for this location? So, again, collecting 10-plus years, it took some time. It's not for somebody that is maybe not a collector or a hobbyist. It didn't start that way, right? Because, one, trying to find all these games today and procure them is not an easy task. So over time, this is a long-time thing. Little by little, like a bank account, slowly scroll things away, and then boom, here you are. Absolutely. it's not something you just walk into and say yeah I'm going to pay X number of dollars and buy everything and I'm going to start a bar cave you didn't decide 6 months ago and say ok quest to buy 80 vids and 20 pins correct no which brings me to another question about your first location and now your second is there a cache of games that are not used and do you rotate things in and out so your sites stay fresh yeah great question George So I learned a lot from Providence in the first three years in terms of before I built Worcester here, in terms of what gets played and what doesn't get played, what are the must-haves and what are the nice-to-haves or what's the stuff you're going to rotate out to keep it fresh. And there's a whole lot of that going on behind the scenes here in both locations. So you do like an audit? You do a game audit on how many plays and stuff? Yeah. So right now, or Providence, there's counters on the games, and those are mostly activated with the quarters. but because there's no quarters, there's really no counters. There are on some of the more advanced games, you can go in and get some statistics. I really don't pay attention to any of that stuff. In Providence, I'm there almost every night, and I watch what gets played. I walk by every game all the time, and I know what gets played, and I know what doesn't get played. And when games aren't getting played, it's as easy as, okay, it's time to rotate it out. There's lots of video games that I thought were so cool and so fun, and whether they were rare games that a collector must have or another game that you thought, oh, yeah, everybody played that. You'd be amazed at how many people don't play that. It's like you and one other guy. Yeah. That's about it. Yeah, and I'd be like, oh, that game has to leave. I'm like, I love it. My buddy over here loves it, but nobody's playing it. Maybe it's too challenging or people don't remember it. It's time for it to go. So the audience probably wants to know what's the number one played video and what's the number one played pinball, according to Jay. Yeah. And these would be the games that if you removed them, your head would probably be on a stick out front.
    34:47
    Why'd you get rid of that for? Yeah, exactly. It's a good question. And it varies with the demographic, I'll tell you, right? So certainly you have your classic, I'll call them table stakes, you know, Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Frogger. You have to have those. Those are going to get played no matter what, right? And if I didn't have those, people would yell at me and say, well, how do you call yourself a classic arcade and not have those games? You have to have those, right?
    35:14
    So those are games that will always be there. There's probably like 10, right? And I could list them all here, but I think you know what they are. The Donkey Kongs, the Pac-Mans, and Ms. Pac-Mans, and Froggers, and so forth, right? After that, oh, and then the pinball side of it, right? So what are the pins that get played the most? well I have I call like my A-list you know kind of classic title up front when you first walk in if you're familiar with Providence Dave I know you've been there yes you know I've got like seven or eight A-list games up front when you first walk in that's Attack from Mars and Adam's Family used to be Medieval Madness but you know I rotate those out every now and then so Theater of Magic you know Monster Bash like Elvira Scared Sniff those are like my you know Bally Williams A-list right up front as soon as you walk in and then you get into the back and you have like you know some of the B&C list, Terminator 2, and Funhaus, and NBA Fast Break, that kind of stuff, all the way down to like Sorcerer, Pinbot, stuff from the early 80s.
    36:11
    But in terms of what gets played the most for pins, Adam's Family, Attack from Mars, Theater of Magic, when it had Medieval Madness there, that was probably the number one. For some reason, everybody knows that game in the hobby, or even if you're not in the hobby, right? So those are the pins that it took me a while to acquire those because everybody knows those are expensive. of A-list titles, you know, classic, you know, from that era. And I didn't have those when I first started. I had, like, a pin bot, and I had, like, a sorcerer, you know. It was like, all right, I have some pins, but I don't have, like, the desirable pins, right? Right. And I still have those pins. They're just moved into the back, you know, area of free play in the corner, and they still get played because, you know, there's people that come in and they're older. You know, maybe they're in their 50s or 60s because that's what they had in the arcade when they grew up. And they want to play those games. And they don't care that, you know, Medieval Madness is, you know, the best pin ever in that era and the DMD and all that stuff. They didn't multi-ball. They're like, I want to play pin bot. You have that? Yeah, it's in the back. Way in the corner. Well, you're kind of describing the audience in front of you right now. Sorry. Well, no. And I'm not sure that you know this about Dave or me. Do you know what we collect? I'm guessing it's probably a lot of that, what I'll call earlier era, you know, 80s kind of classic. We go back even further. Even further, maybe 70s. We're Bali, Bali. Tell me you're not EM. I got a couple. Dave does. I don't. Early solid state is kind of where we're at. So Bali and Stern solid state games from mid-70s to early 80s. Okay. And that begs the question, and I always ask a hard one. Yeah. How come you don't have one of those in your collection?
    37:54
    Good question. He hasn't been to my place, that's why. No, I haven't seen your collection. And you need to come over. I definitely need to come check it out.
    38:05
    Look, I'm not opposed to adding something from that time frame or that era. You would have to tell me, look, if you're going to add something from that era, this is the one to get. Right. Because I'm going to limit it to one. You're not going to get a whole band. Exactly. You're going to get, right. I'm going to have one. Right. And I'll do it. I mean, because there's, look, like I said, our demographic is very wide. We go from the early 20s to 50s and 60s.
    38:27
    I have some Vids that are vintage like that that nobody else will play. There's only a few of them because there's customers that come in and say, yeah, I want to come here to play that game. I remember playing that game. You do have a Firepower, though. We do. We have a Firepower 2. Oh, a 2. Okay. Firepower 2, Saucer, Pinbot. I had a Gorgar in there. Those are probably my oldest pins. But if you tell me, hey Jay, there's one from this era that you must have. I'll think of that. You can find a home for it. Yeah, okay. I think of that for you Good we have to talk after this Okay cool Sounds good So compare and contrast Jay You stated earlier that you learned quite a bit from your first location in Providence What did you learn, and what differences did it make in opening your new location? Yeah, great question. So when I first opened Providence, I had, as I was talking about earlier, mostly early 80s classic arcade games. I had all the heavy hitters that we talked about earlier, but I had a lot of rare stuff that nobody else had. But I collected, because that was, as a hobbyist, what I enjoyed. I loved the Treasure Hunt, going after those crazy rare games. They only made 500 of Atari or Valley, whoever made it. And there was a lot of that in free play when we first opened. And I looked and I said, nobody's playing these games. Those are the hardcore video game guys that wanted that. Right. But your general audience is lost on them, right? Right. And our general audience is 99% not collectors or hobbyists. They are just everyday people that are coming in and like, well, I don't remember this game from when I went to the arcade. I never played it. I never even heard of this game. What is this game? Those games just weren't getting played. Right. And that's when I realized that. I looked around. I'm like, well, this person's from, you know, they're like 10 years younger than me. They grew up with Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Crazy Taxi, and whatever, Daytona USA. Stuff that I really didn't play because I was too old and I had moved on from the arcades at that point. And I realized, I'm like, I have to go get those. Those are games I must have. What were the popular games from that mid to late 90s that I'm missing? It was X-Men, it was Simpsons, it was Turtles. It was, looking around here, Arctic Thunder and Crazy Taxi. And then, if you can believe this, Golden Tee and Silver Strike Bowling, later 90s, early 2000s. There's people that maybe just went to bars and Golden Tee and Silver Strike Bowling. Oh, it's everywhere. All bars. Was it Buck Hunter? Not yet, but I've had a lot of requests for it. But again, and that came even later, right? I mean, so Golden Tee and bowling were like, you know, late 90s, early 2000s. Buck Hunter came a little bit later. But I get requests for that game, and it's like, look, you know, there's people that never went to arcades but went to a bar, and there was a Golden Tee in the corner, or there was a bowling in the corner. And they're like, hey, I'd play here all night if you had a Golden Tee set to free. And I put one in, and sure enough, that happened. I mean, I'm telling you, there would be a group of four guys. And they're not crazy money either. No. And Buck Hunter is the same thing. It's kind of come and gone, and a lot of those cabinets, it's not too apparent in this location, but some of these cabinets are gigantic. They're huge. And it's not for something you would put in a home. No. Unless you have a football field-sized basement or a big barn. And a whole bunch of heavy lifting things. You want some big guys. You need some big guys. These games are like 300, 400 pounds. I mean, they're some of the heaviest arcade games I've moved. But the second I put one in free play, those games would just get played all night. You'd get a group of guys that have a few beers, and they would just sit there, and they're like, this is great, I can play this all night, it's free, and they would just keep doing that. And I learned I could put that game anywhere. I could put it in the darkest corner where I didn't think anybody would find it, and they would find it.
    42:28
    And so you have to have the Golden Tee, the Silver Strike Bowling, And even like you said, the Big Buck Hunter is one that I get a lot of requests for that I recently acquired that I'm thinking about putting into free play, but I haven't done it yet. You ever think about getting a shuffle alley or one of those butcher block things that you shuffle puck thing with all the sand on it? Shuffle board. Yeah, it's funny you should mention that, Dave, because I think we were talking earlier about a bulk buy that was in New York, right? And part of that deal was a shuffle alley or shuffle board that, in the past, I've had no interest in. I've had so many people. That's a lot of fun. So many people have asked me for that. Especially if you have a bar, which you do, it becomes a competition. Exactly. So you're saying a shuffle alley electronic version or non-electronic? No, an electronic Williams shuffle alley. It's alley cats or whatever it's called. This one is called Tic Tac Strike. And it's very similar to the other one. Oh, you're talking a shuffle bowler. No, we're talking a shuffle alley, which is like your bar top here where you take a puck. That's a butcher block one. Right. Where you take a... Yeah, it's a metal puck. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Non-electrical. Oh, okay. I think you know what I'm talking about. The shuffle bowler is with the bowling ball. Well, they also made them with pucks. Yeah, yeah. So you could play, what's the one, Tic Tacs, not Tic Tacs, right? The turkey across. When it would go across the marquee and you tried to hit it in the middle because that was the odds. Well, the thing is, basically, you have an electronic version, like a 90s. I didn't know that existed. No, it's a 90s Williams one that you had. Yeah. They made a couple of iterations of it. Correct. The other one is the non-electronic butcher block, whatever, big thing. Yeah, yeah. But actually, people actually buy those for their homes, and those are awesome, too, and they don't take no electricity, which is nice. Yeah, yeah. I've seen some of the ones from the 50s that predate the Williams ones that are electronic, but they're all. Oh, the rolling numbers. Yeah, they're all EM. That's going to be a nightmare. No, that's a nightmare. Yeah, yeah. No, so I don't have that, but I do have the Williams one, which I really recently learned that it's the same hardware as the System 11. I opened it up, and I'm like, this is the System 11. Mike Pinball back there. So no worries there. Yeah, it was easy. And so now I added one of those into Providence, but just like Pinball, it's got all those leaf switches, and I have to go through and pretty much just clean them all and get them all 100% before I can turn it on. But it is there in Providence, and so one of the reasons why I didn't add it initially was those things take up space. They do. They're like 10 feet long. So, look, I don't have a ton of space, even though it may seem like it in here, right? But for something like that, you have to find a home for it. It's not something you just go put in the lineup with all the other games. That's like three or four game space, right? Yeah, and you need an area that people can crowd around and play it. Like you said, you usually get a group of people. Takes up a big space. And so I found a place in Providence for it next to our skee-ball machines, and that's where it's right now. It's sitting there. It's ready to go. and I had to do some modifications to get it to do free play and all that stuff. But it's working, and I just need to adjust those sensors, and we should be good to go. So we'll see how it goes. It's actually been off for a few weeks now as I get around to maintaining it and tuning it. People have tried playing it. Even with the power off, they went and plugged it in. Wow. Somebody found the power cord. I haven't seen one of these forever. Oh, yeah. I used to play this all the time, whatever. So, yeah, I'm going to get it working really soon. You have to come down and check it out. I'll give you a trick on it. You might know this already, but in case you don't, those leaf switches for all these games, they're basically gold contacts. Yeah. And it's very easy to clean them with this stuff called Brasso. Oh, okay. You get it from any grocery store, you know, to clean silverware or whatever. Sure. You put a little bit of that on there, and it gets the gold right back to shininess again without using a credit card or none of that stuff, and it works phenomenal. Oh, good to know. I've used the Brasso, believe it or not, on Tapper. Tapper has a lot of the brass on the foot rail there and also the side drink holders, and that stuff just makes it look like brand new again. Yep, it shines it up nice.
    46:22
    Now, when we started this, George said he wasn't going to do much talking. Do you remember that? I have my book. Just joking. I have my book. No, no, it's great. I'm happy to answer. I listen to quite a few different pinball podcasts, and there was one I listened to in the last day. It's called Off the Record, and they had this op-on. His name is Bob Burnham. He owns an operator business called Paradise Pinball, and then he owns an arcade in Cheyenne, Wyoming called Flippers Arcade. And the reason I bring this up is he made mention of what happened back in March and that Massachusetts and Colorado finally got around to opening arcades in this state. And his statement was they were getting sued by operators and people who own family entertainment centers because the casinos are open.
    47:30
    Their demographic is much higher, yet the arcades weren't allowed to open. Has that affected the opening of your business here? And what impact has it had? Yeah, great question, George. That is true, 100%. Massachusetts, up until recently, was not allowing arcades to open, but casinos were allowed to open. And there was kind of a bait and switch when it all happened. Arcades in Massachusetts were on the schedule to open up into Phase 3, along with casinos. And last minute, the announcement came out the day of, or maybe the day before, that arcades were moving to phase four, which is a vaccine, right? But casinos were still permitted to open in phase three. And arcade operators like myself were just up in arms. We could not believe it. How could casinos, which essentially are almost the same thing, older demographic typically, same buttons and things that you press just like an arcade, how is it that they can open? I think we all know the answer. I know why.
    48:38
    I know. Oh, me, me. Yeah, yeah. Go ahead. Would it be tax dollars? Maybe. Maybe tax dollars. That's something to do with that. Maybe campaign donations. It could be that, too. Definitely, yeah. So it took basically one of our competitors to free play in Massachusetts to file a lawsuit against the governor instead of Massachusetts. Oh, I did read about that. Yeah. Up in Salisbury? Is that the person? It was. Joe's Arcade? Well, Joe's Arcade was affected, but it was in Salem, a place called Bit Bar. Oh, Bit Bar, yeah, I heard of that place. Bit Bar Arcade is the one that filed the lawsuit. And I would say within five days, the governor came out and said arcades are allowed to open. Sweet. So it was a very swift kind of turn of events. But let's face it, I think the state knew that they were in a corner. You know, if you can allow casinos to open. And that was the argument that the lawsuit basically brought against the state was casinos are essentially the same thing as arcades. So you cannot allow them to open but not arcades. And arcades are more fun. Way more fun. And you lose less money. Oh, yeah. You lose less money. And I'll put my two cents in. They were a little late because we have lost some barcades and arcades in the state. So it's nice to see that you're on the beginning of a new venture here. Folks, this is a beautiful place.
    50:01
    It's a bargain. I look at what I see from other vendors. Come out and support this person as soon as the doors open.
    50:17
    Trust me, you're going to have a lot of fun here. There is more to do. I could spend hours here. But I'm not even a video guy. I could spend hours here.
    50:25
    It's awesome. For your entertainment dollar, if you even go to a movie, it's like $15 plus the $10 bucket of popcorn or whatever. in the $10 bag of M&M's versus coming here for like $5 or $10. And we have a bar, too. And you've got a bar. We have a bar. Yeah, and your bar. So craft brew stuff. Do you get any of that? Yeah, so we have a lot of... We try to go with the local craft beer scene as much as possible. So in Providence, we have a lot of the local Rhode Island kind of craft beer.
    50:56
    And we'll do the same here in Worcester, right? So we're going to go after the Wormtowns and the local... Ooh, Wormtown, my fave. Which is right down the street, by the way. I mean, it's literally like two miles from here. They could pipe it right here, put a fresh pipe in. I know, right? So we're going to try to stick with that. And obviously we have a full bar, lots of different cocktails and the craft beer specialty. So I think in Providence we offer over 50 beers. We'll try to do the same here. Great.
    51:22
    But, yeah, so the bar would come out. You have some pizza. And then we talked a lot about the vids and the pins. the pins, you know, if you think about it, if you come on a weeknight, it's $5. I mean, where can you go and spend $5 on pinball? It doesn't go far when you're putting money into it. Put money in, forget it. Especially if you play like me. Right. That's what I mean, right? So, I mean, most pins today are at least a dollar. Oh, you know my plans.
    51:45
    I mean, even if they were 50 cents, I mean, you can get 10 games, you know, out of it and you're done. Right. And you can spend hours. And I've seen it. You know, there are pinball players that come in and spend hours. You know, they'll play every pin in the place. and they're like, this is a bargain. You know, I can't believe it. You know, so I think it's, and we try to keep it that way. You know, my business partner and I look and we say, first and foremost, we want it to be a value, right? We want it to be a value to the customer. So they come in and they come back and they have a good time, you know, and enjoy themselves. For me, you know, on the video game and the arcade side of it, it's make sure the games are working to the highest standard. You know, make sure, you know, test those buttons, test those joysticks, test those flippers. Sure. You know, make sure the games are maintained to the highest level so the customers come and they feel like they enjoy themselves. So that's a good question. How do you go about, because it's hard for you, I'm sure, to play every single thing. So do you have like, do the customers ever leave like, hey, so-and-so is out, or do they leave you a little note, or how does that work, a feedback? You have a suggestion box or a hey, this game doesn't work box. We do, so we do get that. I've thought about putting a little suggestion box on the wall. I haven't done that yet. But we do have customers that will leave us notes or leave notes with the staff. But I have a dedicated person in Providence that their job twice a week is to go through every game, test every button, test every joystick, test every flipper, and then compile a list. And then on a weekly basis, we attack that list. And there's a group of us that go every Tuesday night in Providence, and we'll do the same here in Worcester once we open and attack everything that's on the list. And if there's a game that has some serious problems, whether it's vids or pins, we pull it. And with the pins, we have a shop cycle that we go through and we say, okay, it's time for this game to get shopped out. Pretty much one a month has to leave. And there's a small reserve inventory where another game gets moved in, that's been shopped, and we replace it. And when that game is shopped, it gets cycled back through. We try to keep it fresh. I think, George, you hinted on that earlier.
    53:46
    I have a large video game kind of overflow inventory that I'm able to swap out vids often enough. where they're not getting played or I want to have some variety and I'd bring the games back later if they were popular. With pins, I have a very small overflow, just a handful of games that I can swap pins in and rotate in and out. My goal is between Providence and Worcester is to rotate the inventory between the two locations. Yeah, great idea. You know, to keep it fresh in each location as much as possible. Any plans to get or do you have a rip-off? I have two rip-offs. Oh, I love that game. Yeah, Cinematronics Vector. Yep. Another hard game to keep running. We talked about vids earlier and how easy they are to keep running. There are certain vids, the vector games, that are not so easy to keep running. And Ripoff is one of those. Oh, boy. Not so easy to keep running. Okay.
    54:38
    Other games like Star Wars, Tempest, Black Widow, those are all classic Atari vector games. I limit how many of those I have here because they are hard to keep running. But I will try to get a Ripoff into the lineup for you. Cool. So you can come and enjoy it. Because St. Philly made Ripoff. They also made Star Castle. Star Castle, Armor Attack, Solar Quest.
    55:01
    Speed Freak? Speed Freak was early on. I think that was Vector Beam. So Vector Beam became Cinematronics, and then that became Leland. So, yeah, there's kind of a line of heritage there. And I think Speed Freak was early on. Early on. Yeah. I remember playing that at Fun and Games years ago. I remember you'd go buy a cow and it would go moo. Moo, yeah. That was a classic Vector at the time, black and white. But I don't have a Speed Freak yet, but I'd love to own one of those because that's one of those rare classic games I was talking about earlier that maybe you remembered. I'd play it. But if I put that in an arcade, you and I would be the only two guys that would play it. Everybody else would look at it and say, oh, my God, that thing's ancient, black and white. How about the other old school one? I think it's from the early 70s. I think it has almost like a green mylar over it. It's a racing game, and the car goes up the screen kind of thing. Really old school back, almost like Spy Hunter. but figure early, very early Spy Hunter kind of game and I don't remember the name of the game. It was a funny game two years ago. Big steering wheel. Yeah, there's a few of those. And green kind of graphics on it, all green. I'm trying to remember what it was. It was like, one that was like a Datsun or something it was called. Oh, Datsun 280Z Zap. It was that one. There was another one that had, yeah, like a filter on it. Yeah, a green filter. A green filter. I can't remember the name right now but yeah, those are what, probably 70s? 70s, yeah. Early on. So probably really tough to keep running,
    56:21
    And the only games I have from the 70s, believe it or not, I have two of them. Asteroids, 1979, one of those must-haves. And then Space Invaders, also 1979 for bids. That's the oldest I go. Right. That's about right. Those two are iconic, and people love those games from way back when. Right, right. Yeah, makes sense. I have another business question. Sure. One of many.
    56:43
    Do you do corporate events? We do. In Providence, we've had a number of corporate events that we host, private events. A lot of times we'll do them before we open. A lot of times we'll do office parties or other corporate team-building events.
    57:00
    There's one night a week that we're closed during the week. A lot of times we'll use that night for a corporate event.
    57:07
    Here in Worcester, we have the luxury of having a separate area. So if somebody wanted to have a corporate event on a Friday or Saturday, We can actually give them that area. I kind of gave you guys a tour of that earlier down below. So you can have your corporate event in there, whether it's food or drinks or whatever you're going to do, and then you can come into the arcade as well and kind of go in and out. In Providence, we don't have that large of an area to dedicate to. That's why we have to do them on off nights or before we open. So this is a bigger footprint than Providence. Yeah, combined with the back area and the arcade area in the front, it is a bigger footprint. And it's all one level, which is nice. Yes. Yeah. So you're projected opening for this at this point. Do you have, like, a projected? Yeah, we're hoping to open in the next several weeks. We're just waiting for our final building permit to, you know, get issued. And then we're hoping we can open. We're still on the fence if we want to open with the holidays coming November. You know, we're getting into November and December. and we're still deciding if we're just going to wait until the new year to start fresh or if we should try to open during the holidays and the pandemic. So we're still on the fence as to exactly when, but it's going to be soon. Because I guess you could always use more time to get everything, T's and I's dotted and crossed, the more time the better, instead of rushing to a world where you not quite all Well we were ready to go We didn talk about this too much but we were ready to go back in March I mean we were supposed to open the end of March and the pandemic hit so we didn know how long that was going to take But the video games and everything, the bar, this has all been set up, if you can believe it, since March. I mean, I've been coming in and fine-tuning the games and double-checking everything, but it's like we could literally open next week if we had our permit in hand and we decided to open. And so, you know, it's just a matter of, you know, do we want to focus our energy on Providence right now, especially with everything that's going on? Or do we want to try to, you know, start Worcester during the pandemic and the holiday season or just, you know, wait? Well, because right now you're actually you're you're paying the rent and whatever for this place anyway at this point. So you may want to, you know, that's why you probably want to open to kind of offset that. Yeah, correct. And Providence is established and has been there for years and has a loyal customer base. Worcester is kind of a new. We've never opened this location. We're anxious to open it, but just the timing right now might be a little difficult. So how about you're going to do the same kind of thing, the flyers, and get the people to know about it's here yet? Or do you have to do a big marketing glitch? No, I think the word is out. I mean, so we've been here, believe it or not, last October is when we actually moved into this building and started doing renovations. The sign has been up since probably January. So everybody drives by. We see it. They come by. Do people knock, bang on the door, let me in kind of thing? We get so many e-mails and social media messages saying, hey, Worcester, when are you opening? When is Worcester opening? Even people in Providence say, I drove down to Worcester from Worcester to Providence to see what this place was all about because we can't wait for the Worcester location to open. When are you guys going to open Worcester?
    60:15
    So I would say the advertising is probably, we'll do a little bit of the fire stuff and boots on the ground kind of thing, go around all the local places and put it up. It's going to be a huge social media blitz. I learned a lot about social media. I want to ask you about that. Other than your website, give us the website, how else can people stay in touch with your business? I'm guessing you use some of the social media sites. Can you get on a list so when you do finally open, you're going to do a push and say, here's the grand opening, here's the day, time, here's what we plan on doing. Absolutely, yes. Thanks for bringing that up, George. So our website is FreePlayBar.com, and on that you'll find some information about both locations. You'll find the game list, directions, and all that. Our social media, we're on Facebook, we're on Instagram. Same thing, just FreePlayBar, and you'll find us. So, yes, you can go to our website, and we'll have the announcement there for when Worcester is going to be opening. We'll make sure we preannounce it so you won't miss it. We'll tell you this is going to be the date that we're opening. Same thing on the social media sites, Facebook, Instagram, Google. I mean, you can pretty much find us across the bar just about everywhere. But make sure that all that information for the Worcester location, when the grand opening is going to be, will be out there well in advance. So if you guys want to check out any of those sites, you'll find the information there. Cool. Well, we can certainly come back to you. This will be published sometime in the month of October. Okay. And if you decide that you're going to wait a little bit, we can always revisit and do a little tease to announce that you're coming on a certain date. Because we can do that by phone and hook you up real quick. Or we can come down and sneak a peek before you open the doors again. Maybe we can have a pre-opening. And given you guys are such avid pinball players. I'm sitting at this bar and I'm a little... Bartender, bartender. I'm a little dry. I figured you guys can maybe play test all the pins and tell me everything that's broke or how off and not level they are and all that fun stuff. And we can tune them before we have the true reveal. Cool, cool. That sounds great. Is there anything, Jay, that Dave or I didn't ask you that we should have asked you or anything else that you want to tell our audience before we go? I have another question. Yeah, sure. Of course you do. So have you ever thought or have you ever done tournaments? Our tournaments here, either video tournaments or pinball tournaments. Yes and no. So, and this is a great question I was going to ask you guys about the pinball tournament side of it, right? Because New England obviously has a large contingent of pinball players, a lot of competitive pinball players. There's the NEPL, right, all throughout New England.
    63:01
    So I have not done pinball tournaments yet in the Providence location. I have done some video game tournaments. Believe it or not, DDR, Dance Dance Revolution, very competitive.
    63:12
    So we've done a number of air hockey and Dance Dance Revolution tournaments. I've gotten requests to do skee-ball tournaments and certainly requests to do pinball tournaments. In Providence, there was already a few locations, I think, that already had any EPL and other various pinball leagues going on. And I didn't want to infringe on any of the other locations, and so we never really got into doing any type of tournaments in Providence. In Worcester, it's a different story, right? So I'd like to look at you guys and say, what's the best way to do it? I'll tell you, in Providence, they did have some requests, and basically they were looking for somebody to come down and be, whether it's a referee or whoever it is, the scorekeeper. Tournament director. And I said, look, guys, I don't have the bandwidth to do that. I'm like, I have to run the arcade and the business. Run, Jay, run.
    64:05
    And I really didn't want to do it. Your point is full. Exactly. That is a full-time job to begin with. That's what I figured. And honestly, I'm not ever going to say I know enough about pinball to obviously even be in that position. So it has to be somebody else. Sure. So, yeah, if it was to ever happen here in Worcester, you know, we'd have to have somebody like that to kind of manage everything, come down on a weekly basis, however often the tournament runs, to kind of manage all that without me being around. Sure. I have to bounce between Providence and Worcester. Right.
    64:38
    But, yeah, I'm not opposed to the idea. The one question I have for you guys is, you know, you guys know how this operates, right? It's a free play admission. You come in, you pay, and then you get to play all the games.
    64:51
    In a typical tournament, you know, how many games are, you know, in the tournament? You know, how many pinball games are being used at one time? How would that affect my other customers that, you know, may be coming into play and now those games are not off-limits, but they're being consumed by the tournament. Yeah, they probably would be off-limits. So if you're going to do a real bona fide tournament, it would be, you know, these games are roped off for these, you know, and let's say at least six games, six to ten games. Oh, really? That many? Something like that. And that's a weekly? I would say more like not a weekly thing. So that's more like a league play. I'd say more like a tournament thing. This is maybe like once a quarter, once a year. Do a one-timer and see how it goes. Limit it. Make it so that there's high demand. Don't make it an open as many people. 24 people, 16, whatever. Again, we can't predict what the future is, but just humor me for a minute. Keep it limited so that there's a want. I've got to get in this tournament because there are plenty of people in this area. But I'll take it one step further. What a lot of people do, it really depends when you open, Dave works with a show that is going to be nearby.
    66:09
    A lot of barcades attach themselves to the show the night or two before in order as a warm-up type of exercise before the main tournament starts at the show. you might find that that might be a great way to give exposure, not only to people in town, but people that are coming from out of town. Because they're staying the night ahead. They're staying for multiple days.
    66:36
    And I'll mention Jeff Teolis again. He's a broadcaster out of Toronto. He's a big pinhead. He's a top 50 tournament player. He did a world tour where he went to different bars and barcades around the country and internationally and a lot of times he was attaching himself like I said to a show and doing an event the day before or the night before yeah and he limited it he put it out on a website right you know ever bright or one of the sites and your end or your app right limited yeah that's what I would recommend okay dip your toe in the water yeah yeah weekly thing I'll turn to my counterpart over here he managed to leave no longer does yeah long story but he doesn't do it anymore I'm doing it was a great five-year run I did it it was a lot of fun but I learned a lot and but it's it ran its courses done and I moved on out of the things basically I got more into my business and you know so that kind of gig but it's a lot of fun I learned a lot but what I was actually talking to George about this too is is you know and approaching you you know down the road or whatever. But it'd be kind of cool to do like a one-off thing and do like a say, I don't know if you'd be opposed to this, say George and I brought a bank of classic pins. Pins you don't usually have here. And say that would be for a one day or a weekend turn, whatever it was. You have a bank of them here and it would be a draw because you don't really find a classic turn around. The only time you see a classic tournament like that is maybe at Pintastic.
    68:17
    The bigger shows. Yeah, the bigger shows. The guys down in Connecticut bring up their games. So something like that, but we even have older school stuff.
    68:25
    I'm just throwing an idea out there. I don't know exactly how it would run, but it's like an idea. I wouldn't mind exploring it someday. It would be a great venue to do it at. Absolutely, yeah. We have plenty of space that's not being utilized that we could, depending on how many games we wanted to bring in, either remove a few vids out temporarily I don't know what time you'll open on a Saturday. It could be off hours, too. If it's 5 o'clock, you could start a tournament at 10 o'clock in the morning with the idea that we're going to try to make it so that it ends at 5 o'clock and it doesn't impact the regular business. There's lots of ways to do it, but I certainly would stay away. Me, personally, I would not get into the weekly thing at first.
    69:07
    It's a lot of work. Dave knows as a tournament director, even doing a one-off. and Dave does a lot of stuff at his house for small groups of people, it still is work. Yeah. Oh, no, I know. I'm preaching to the choir. Yeah. I know it's a lot of work just getting up to it. You throw a tournament every day of the week. It just doesn't have trophies with it. No, no. I mean, once a year, once a quarter, something like that, I think it's totally doable. And then we can talk later about how we can do something with some of the old pins to go with some of my less old pins. Yeah, right. Sure.
    69:42
    There's lots of opportunities. And especially now with other arcades not being open any longer, it certainly limits the places where people can go play competitive pinball. Even here in Massachusetts, I know there's been a handful of places that have closed down. Well, Flop Top Johnny's down in Cambridge. You've got Mystic Arcade, which I thought was kind of interesting that they closed. That's closed too, huh? Yeah. Wow. You know him, right, or met him? Yeah. Doesn't he own the storefront? We own multiple storefronts in that building. Yeah. What town is that out in?
    70:18
    Greenfield? Yeah, Greenfield. Somewhere out that way? Yeah. Yeah, I think I've heard of that Mystic Pinball, but I've never been there because it is kind of Massachusetts. Well, they're few and far between. I mean, it's just. Yeah. And to go back, and I know I'm beating a dead horse here, guys, but it is very inexpensive to come here. If I look at some of the others, and I don't know if you track other businesses in other states, when I saw $5, I thought it was an hour.
    70:47
    That's unlimited. Because you're very competitively priced compared to other venues. There are places that charge $20 for an hour of pinball. Yeah. And that might be their only business because they don't have a bar or other things that support the business. I think you hit it right on the head there, George. So, like, it isn't expensive, and I do see a lot of other places that offer $5 for an hour or $10 for two hours or whatever it is, and then all the way up to $15 or $20 if you want to go in and out for the day, kind of like what we do. But, you know, we want to make sure that coming to free play isn't too expensive if you just want to come play a game and have a beer. Right. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, so you can leave if you want to. It's a quick, short money. Correct, yeah. So if you wanted to come here on a weeknight and it was $10 and you just wanted to grab a drink or two and maybe play a game, it's like, well, am I going to spend $10 just to walk in the place to drink a beer? But at $5, you can make that back in a half an hour. Yeah, exactly. Because for a nice beer, you've got to pay more than – And if you play like me, it's 15 minutes. You're going to pay more than $5 for a nice beer anyway. Yeah. You know? We did before we came here. And we talk about $10 on the weekends. So $10, we didn't talk about in Providence. you guys have been before the pandemic we had the Rewind Dance Club upstairs so that plays you know 80s and 90s kind of yeah great stuff too all those smoke machines and the light so the fog machines the laser lights great stuff so that $10 gets you not only admission into free play with all 150 video games and pins and everything else but it also gets you entrance into Rewind which is the dance club that plays the 80s and 90s music so the same thing will happen here in Worcester you know has that club been impacted by what's going on yeah so in Providence Since we cannot open, Rhode Island, you cannot open any dance clubs. Same thing in Massachusetts or, you know, bars even in Massachusetts. It's even worse. So, unfortunately, the dance club is not open yet.
    72:39
    Jay, I also want to talk about your vision for the future here. I know you have a great idea for an outdoor venue you're talking about. Tell us about that. Yeah, thanks, Dave. So, you know, you guys are sitting in what I'll call phase one of Free Play, right? So, you know, we have big plans for the expansion of Free Play, and this building that we're in allows us some great future opportunities. So phase two, which we hope to have ready sometime next year, will be our outdoor patio. So we have this great courtyard that's adjacent to Free Play that we have permission from our landlord to basically expand into and create an outdoor patio, which is huge for downtown Worcester. there's not too many places that you can go and sit outdoors um you know have some beers we'll have a bar out there uh and and hopefully we'll have some live live entertainment in the future as well so uh that's all hopefully ready for next summer if all this you know pandemic stuff is over sure um so that's uh phase two and then phase three which um may come uh end of next year or maybe into 2022 if you can believe that uh would be our expansion into our nightclub like we have in Providence, our Rewind Retro Dance Club. We hope to offer here in Providence. I'm sorry, it's the same in Providence here in Worcester. And I'd love to pick your brain later on about some future expansion possibilities. We talked about VIP pinball. So it doesn't make sense to have some of the newer pins at free play, but they're pay-for-play. You still get access to all the great pins that we have for the unbelievable $5 value or $10 on the weekends. But if you're somebody that really enjoys playing the new pins, loves the Stearns or the Jersey Jack stuff, maybe we have a group of five of those that you can pay to play. I love the idea of the VIP room. You can play some really exceptional stuff, like you say, and expensive stuff that you're going to pay a little more to play it, but now you kind of filter out just the regular people that might bang the flippers around. So you want some people to really appreciate the role. Yeah, I'm envisioning almost like a separate room.
    74:45
    Velvet ropes. Yeah, or maybe even some, you know, whatever, glass doors or something, right, so you can go in. And, yeah, so you'll have your own area, high-end pins, you know, the newer stuff that you could play. But, you know, again, a little bit more, you've got to pay for that, right? Right, makes sense. But, yeah, we'll talk about that, and I'm certainly open to the ideas or idea in the future. Sounds great. Let's give our audience the information one more time. Tell people how they can stay in touch with you or look at your information. and most importantly, I want to stress to everybody, even though this is a downtown city location, there is free off-street parking. And lots of it.
    75:25
    Unusual for Worcester, I've got to say, as one who doesn't come here often, but the times I do, it always seems to be parking garage and very little on-street parking. So that's huge in my eyes. Yeah, thanks, George. We got very lucky when we decided to use this building for free play. It came with, I think the number is 128 parking spaces that are allowed to free play. So we have great parking, very close to the venue. I mean, you guys parked and walked right in. Oh, yeah.
    75:57
    That's a huge bonus, especially in downtown Worcester. We don't have that luxury in Providence, so it's nice to be able to offer that here in Worcester. If folks are looking for more information, you can go to freeplaybar.com, our website. You can also search Freeplay Bar on Facebook. You'll find us there on Google. Also, we're on Instagram. So whatever your social media fancy is, we probably have a space there for you to visit. And the street address? The street address, downtown Worcester, 25 Union Street, right next to the DCU Center. It's just a block away from DCU. so right in downtown Worcester you can't miss us Jay I want to thank you my pleasure, thank you guys for coming down tonight taking the tour and spending time with me and I had a great time doing this stay tuned audience Free Play Bar coming soon to Worcester, Massachusetts
    77:01
    Thank you. Down at the arcade, down at the arcade Oh, I'm the great defender and I really think I got it made
    77:56
    A fistful of quarters, a $50 steak Life is a gamble on videotape.