On Location: Inside Tycoon Arcade with Founder Dan Yarrington

Tycoon Arcade started as a staff room at a board game company

Arcade Hunters: Where did the idea for Tycoon Arcade originate?

Dan: During COVID, we had very few people in the office as we were making board games. We had a bunch of different things [in the office]. We had video games; we had the [Nintendo] Switch, Legos, board games, ping pong, and a pool table; all the kinds of usual fun stuff that you do. As we started coming back into the office, we took one of the rooms on the side, and we got three Skee-Ball machines and a couple of shooters; Tomb Raider and House of the Dead 4. Then [we got] three pinball machines and a couple other classic games like Simpsons and [Teenage Mutant Ninja] Turtles. The pinball machines we got [were] Indiana Jones, Star Trek Next Gen, and Guardians of the Galaxy which was new at the time. So that was just one little room in kind of the selection, which was just for the staff.

Flash forward over a couple years [and] we were kind of hosting private events here. We didn’t want to go out in public spaces at that juncture, it's like 2021-22, but we can host that here. So we were having a lot of events here for our staff, for our friends and family. We kept building; we kept collecting pinball machines and arcade games over the course of that timeframe. And so eventually we got to a point where we said, “oh man, I guess we can probably open this up to the public?” Obviously, we're operating in the office during the day, but we weren’t operating during the evenings or weekends. The idea was we'll be an office during the day and turn into an arcade at night. We never actually ended up operating that way. Time wise, we ended up expanding the business; we upgraded to a new warehouse facility. And so we moved the offices to that location. We still had this location that we kind of filled up with arcade and pinball machines at that point. We said “well hey, we might as well try this out and open it to the public.” I think originally it was like three or four days a week; Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We had a lot of great machines. And so slowly over two and a half years we built that up to a point where we opened officially in May [2024], and we've been operating since.

AH: How did you acquire the collection of pinball machines that you have?

Dan: We bought from everywhere. We bought [from] dealers, distributors, private parties; we bought collections of games from arcades that were going out of business. Mostly onesie, twosie, here and there. We bought a couple decent size collections that were like twelve to twenty games. Then we kept buying more, but that got into the world of dealership era, which was later on. So I think over the course of 2021 to 2024, we ended up purchasing maybe one hundred fifty machines, of which probably one hundred-ish were pinball machines, and the rest were classic arcade games or modern arcade games.

He wants every visitor to find three to five things they love

AH: How do you decide what games to bring in and put on the floor?

Dan: We're very much trying to curate an experience where we want to have something where kids and parents and grandparents can all come in and play something together versus a barcade where we have some old school arcade games, but the kids don’t really care about them. So we're trying for everybody to have something they're going to enjoy.

We intentionally pick based on theme, based on license and based on quality of play. Are these actually good game experiences? That's where you can kind of filter out a lot of the games. There’s a lot of redemption games and a lot of newer arcade games [where] some of them might just be repetitive [and] some are like Jurassic Park Arcade. Jurassic Park Arcade is a combination of a great game and it's also the best earning video game in arcades. So that's odd. That's not typical.

So there's actually more games, it's easier to say, that you don't want. You don't want games that don't feel fun to play. Our [main] business is we make board games, we make play experiences. So, we're very much thinking about what is the play experience, and how do you play it? And then you want different things for different people. So my goal is I want you to find three to five things here that you really love. As long as everybody finds three to five things they really enjoy, we're in good business. Now when you come here for a birthday party or a corporate event you're not like “this place only has pinball machines.” “They only have these old video games,” or “they only have racers,” or “they only have shooters.” So we had very intentionally curated over a long period of time a selection. And that is partially games I like, but not entirely. I'm not sitting there playing Duo Drive like “this game’s awesome, it's amazing,” but we want to have that for the five year old who comes in and wants to play a game, you know? So that's kind of how we intentionally curated it.

We go to a lot of other arcades, like pretty much whenever I'm traveling, any arcade, I'll go there. We go to Dave and Buster's, we go to Chuck E. Cheese, we check out all the new stuff. We go to [the] International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions [trade show], we go to other amusement expo shows and just see what's in. But the principle is effectively the latest and greatest in terms of pinball. So the greatest could be from whenever, but the latest is pretty obvious. That kind of led us to the dealership model where we said, if we're gonna already have this stuff, we're buying a lot of it, we could probably sell it as well. There weren’t really, at the time in 2023 any local dealer(s) in New Hampshire. You had to go to Connecticut or Massachusetts to get it. So we said we could be a local dealer in New Hampshire. And that took two years to get set up because of supply constraints and stuff during COVID. So now we sell pre-play machines and we sell new machines, specifically pinball.

AH: How did you initially get into pinball?

Dan: We didn't have any pinball when I was growing up. We didn't have any big arcades nearby. I played arcade games at the county fair and stuff like that. I grew up dirt poor so we didn't have any of that stuff and there was really nothing around us. We were out in the middle of nowhere. So I really got into it more when I was playing at some friend's place. I had a couple of friends out in Columbus that had collections, and they would have ten or twelve machines. And so then I basically just went to them when I first started.

[When] I was building my little mini arcade I was like, “okay, if I want to buy, like, three pinball machines, because I'm only going to buy three, I promise. And then it's like what should I get? And so then, of course, that leads you down all the recommendations. Here's the top 100, here's my top 10, here’s my top 50, you know. So I selected from themes that I like. I like Star Trek and Indiana Jones. I like Guardians of the Galaxy as a theme. And then we just got to delve into that.

I'm more of a sampler for pinball. I'm always chasing that new experience. I really like Medieval Madness. It's just a game I really like, [it’s] approachable. Because I'm sampling I'm not really going deep. I’m not a very good player. I don't get that deep into the code. A lot of the complaints of hardcore players “the code was not very deep. I played the whole game in two days,” I'm still playing on level one and it's been out for ten years. So I think for me it's about the theme, it's about the experience, about the moments of pinball.

He keeps the credit system simple on purpose

AH: How did you land on using a point system for credits?

Dan: So we've done a couple of versions, we’ve done a token base system. There you kind of have some numbers, how many tokens were in the machine. But very manual, very expensive to maintain. It was like, half a day, take all the tokens out, count them. We'd want to tally those up and see what's being played. Then we tested over a couple of months of winter what people call free plays, which is really one price to play what you want. And that didn't work. Pinball machines, especially versus video games, are very maintenance intensive. So the more plays like mileage the more it actually wears on the machine. So you have all these expenses of repair and maintenance in addition to the cost of the machines which are not cheap. It always cracks me up when people come in, they’re like “oh my God I spent fifty bucks in the arcade the other day and I just played Sonic the Hedgehog.” I'm like, okay I am a dealer. I have another option for you. You could spend twelve thousand dollars to buy this to play this. So, which is cheaper? I always feel like you want to spend fifty, a hundred bucks on playing a game if you’re going to buy a pinball machine for ten or fifteen grand or something. You should probably spend fifty to hundred bucks, right? It's like a test drive. For the people that can’t afford that, or they don't have room, that's what we're trying to provide. We’re trying to provide that environment. You just come down here, enjoy some games. And what I found early on, whether it was the card system or the token system, people were like, I’ll buy twenty bucks worth, forty bucks worth. Then they think oh, it's not gonna be that long. It won’t last me that long. Because they're used to that experience from traditional arcades. If you ever see a kid, walk in any Chuck E. Cheese, they go immediately to the crane machine, and go tap tap tap, and they use all their credits. But if you're actually coming to play old school games, play pinball, or even play modern games you can actually be there for quite a while. You'll be there for two, three hours. “Wow, that compares to the experience of going to a movie!” It's a very different experience and it’s a good experience.

AH: With Tycoon Arcade’s point system it is easy to figure out the value of the points when compared to Dave and Buster's or other family entertainment centers.

Dan: Yeah, I intentionally kept that pretty simple. The general principle is the more you buy up to maybe a hundred bucks, the better value per credit you're getting. And then those credits obviously stay on your card so you can use them for whenever. We have the kiosk, so you can refill it. We thought about doing subscriptions and stuff; bonuses, but [it's] a little too complicated. But also [if] you just wanna come in off the street and spend twenty bucks in the place, you can. So, obviously, your cost is going to vary there, but I think the credits per play, the lowest is twenty one for the classic oldschool games and then it goes to thirty three and forty two. Some of these are chosen because I like repetitive numbers like forty two, the meaning of everything. But if you put that into a spreadsheet it translates into some kind of value. So your expensive ones would be seventy seven or ninety nine. You may have one that's one hundred eleven, especially as you start getting into bigger modern arcade games, like a [King] Kong VR, those will be expensive. Because we have a simple system, we're not doing thirty three point six points. I was at an arcade and it was like eighteen point six [points] and if you're a pro member, you get a ten percent discount. I just want to walk in, I don't want to buy something. I want to use my real currency to buy some imaginary currency and I want to spend that currency to have fun. That's my goal. I want to keep the system simple.

What I don't like is when you go to an arcade and it says like five bucks. It just says the dollar amount. I'm like no, I don't want to think about that. I want to spend a hundred bucks and then spend an indeterminate amount of money to have some amount of fun. So that's an intentional thing for us. The gist is spend what you want to spend. You're here to have fun, right? It's about what you can afford. And if you spend more, you're gonna get a better deal. But at the end of the day, you're playing for fun. So do whatever you think is appropriate.

AH: What about redemption games and other types of arcade games?

Dan: They literally call them filler machines and I was like, what do you mean, filler? If your principle is, you want to make money, why would you bother having any of the filler? They're like, “well, they’re attractions.” Some of the newer ones like the newer Ninja Turtles, from Raw Thrills from like 2012 actually does have the option to do credits. But I'm like, ah, you know, you're not really playing that because you want credits. So we can turn that on or off, and that impacts the cost per playing because there's some residual costs for the rewards and stuff. So generally we can think of those categories as video games. You know, like actual arcade games. And then I think like midway games. So I'm thinking like basketball, cornhole, Skee-Ball. So those are actually going to expand that space, like, Down the Clown, stuff like that. It's like, you're at Canobie Lake. You're playing these games, right? You play one of the hit the hammer, you know, that thing, you know. And then there's, “I want to play classic arcade games.” And then there's “okay, I want to play pinball.” And then there's racers, drivers, different experiences. The [coin] pushers are a little, you know, kiddie casino kind of feel. So that's what we try to get, a little physical interaction. You get things like air hockey, that sort of stuff, you get stacking games like Crazy Tower.

So again, all these things are different play experiences. I think of them as like neighborhoods. Like, you're around Disneyland. It's like, oh, we're in the classic video game section. So that's where we're like, oh, it feels like we walked into an 80s or 90s arcade. Oh, we're in the pinball place. And then, even within the main area, this is the shooter section. So if I like shooters, I'm gonna go there and do that. So we're very much not necessarily making a SpongeBob land or something, but we're making categories (at the new location). So if you like that type of thing, you can go there. And if you don't, you just wander through and play something and see what you like.

Like, every arcade when you go to the prize counter at the end [some] people would be like, “oh, I could have bought this.” I'm like yeah, but that wasn't the point. We have some longer redemption games and stuff, but that's not really what we're here for. We want those things because people like them, and it's nice to get that, but I think of our store as less of a redemption store, and more of a geek Cracker Barrel. We have candy you can buy and books and toys and games and all this stuff. But, you can go to the redemption counter and get your bouncy balls or whatever. But even there we kind of filter out the literal garbage. I've been to too many arcades and I'm like it’s a happy meal toy. I'm literally gonna take this home and throw it in the trash. I'd rather you just save your points on your card and get something cool later. Or if you just want to buy it, you can just buy it. So I think in the new location it'll be more clear, like here's redemption, here's the store, and we will probably still have a conversion option where you can convert those points in.

Permits held up the arcade for nine months

AH: What were some challenges you faced when first opening up, Tycoon Arcade?

Dan: Oh, so many challenges. There's the usual staffing and costs and all that stuff. We've intentionally not been really actively advertising because this is, in my view, a prototype location. It's just a prototype location we've been in for a long time. But when we get to the new location, we're dealing with all the construction concerns there. Here we had some permit issues that took us a long time to get approval. For a while [I thought] maybe they don’t want an arcade here. We're in this millyard district [and] one of the many uses, it actually says arcade. In this space prior to us, like 20-25 years ago, they had mini golf inside in this exact space. So I was like, man, did they just not want us here? All the people we were talking to in the city were like “oh no we really love that. It sounds great. It's a family friendly arcade? That's awesome!” It was just bureaucratic nonsense for like nine months. We gotta do this, we gotta do that, we gotta get this updated, we gotta wait for this meeting, do that meeting. So that was a bit of a challenge.

We're running into that in Bedford as well in the new location. I think we've probably run ten different retail locations over the years. So that's not new. It's just annoying and challenging. A huge amount of challenges other than the basic things like costs, staff, getting people that can provide a good experience, maintaining the machines that’s always a challenge. So we got a bunch of machines that we have to pull off the floor because we're waiting on a part or this bracket doesn't fit or this thing should work, but it doesn't work. That was probably more challenging during that kind of later COVID period, like 2022 to 2023. So lots of challenges, but like all usual kinds of businessy challenges. It's just the drip, drip, the continual dribble; like “oh that machine broke?” “Oh, this one's broken?” “Okay, now we're fixing that.” We scaled our staff for that. Then I think on the dealership side, it was just a real challenge; the supply chain was really limited. That took us three, four years to really get through. But now we carry full volume Stern, Jersey Jack, Barrels of Fun; we carried them from when they started, Spooky we just added recently. We carry Multimorphic. We even carry Dutch and Pinball Brothers and stuff like that. So we really intentionally try to [have] a wide variety, but as with most mercantile things, if we can't get it, we can't sell it. So we're constantly trying to buy and sell and trade and do all that. That works well. It's not really an unexpected challenge, if that makes sense.

The newest pinball machine is usually the best earner

AH: Do you happen to know what your best earning game is?

Dan: I don’t off the top of my head, but my guess is that it would be whatever the newest pinball machine is. That's pretty typical. It tends to be rarer machines, things you can’t get cost effectively. An extreme version of this would be like if you could buy a Winchester Mystery House for five hundred bucks, would you spend a lot of money to play it in the arcade? Probably not. But Winchester Mystery House runs like twenty grand or something stupid. So are you more likely to spend fifty bucks playing it at the arcade? Yeah, probably. So I would guess Harry Potter is still earning well, Pokémon I know is earning well. Winchester, Sonic now that that's here.

So that's kind of usually what tracks. I know Jurassic Park is one of the best arcade games. The cranes always do really well. We have good prizes in those. The pushers do really well. Mario Kart still earns pretty well even though we have the old GP ones, not the newer ones. The shooters are more ones that I like that don't earn super great. But I just like that, besides Jurassic Park. I think that's probably a good rule of thumb, it's gotta be the greatest things like Jurassic Park that's been out for forever and the newest things. But you find out pretty quick, actually, a lot of the games; we've kind of pre vetted them that way because if it's a new machine that's just coming out on the market, we actually check with our distributors and dealers first. So we're usually not the first place to have it. Whereas pinball machines we will be one of the first places to have it.

I find with things that kind of underperform in the market from a sales perspective, like a John Wick, those actually have more use in person. And this is the biggest thing I know for people is that they’ll get all excited for this new machine and “aw man the code's not done!” I’m like you know that, you’ve played pinball forever. You know this. So things can start to kind of bloom like a year later and wow, that's really good now. James Bond [007] is a classic example of this. So if the rumors of “we're gonna do a gold edition” are true, that's great! You should do that, because if something got to a point where it's really good, you should celebrate that and sell more. Same thing for Godzilla or anything else.

I think Godzilla actually still does well too, but I don't check those day to day, our manager does. But when we get to a point where we have to filter out equipment, that's when we start doing that check. It’s less about earnings and more about use. This is not our primary business. We need to make money because it's what businesses need to do. Otherwise, I’d invest my capital somewhere else. So we're more concerned if something never gets played, that's an indicator to us that there was just not that much demand for it. So we will probably do a recalibration of that when we get to the new location, because then we’ll have a little more flexibility about physically what we can move in and out. Right now it's a little more of a hassle to move. I’ve moved a lot of things in the elevators in this building, and it's never easy.

AH: Even Jurassic Park and Halo and...

Dan: Yeah, you got to take them apart in four or five places. They have to get up here somehow; we’re on the second floor. So that's what I’m really looking forward to. In the new location we actually have them putting in a double door in the back that we had them expand to do bigger doors, so we can actually roll those things through all in one piece. But, when you bring it in here [original location] you have to disassemble Jurassic Park in like five pieces. And then you put it through the doors, and then you put it all back together. Ironically the hallway out of the freight elevator is more narrow than that front elevator. So the only things that can come up the freight elevator are long, skinny things like Skee-Ball lanes, or something like that. It's easier to move a pinball machine in the front elevator than the freight elevator. Now at the new location we’re ground level, so we can just go, “hey, pull around back and drop a lift gate and drive it right inside.” We're all one level so that would be much easier.

AH: Would you ever dip into older pinball games from the 60’s and 70’s?

Dan: So we probably will have a couple of those in the new location. I actually really like the old ones from the thirties. Have you ever seen Fleet and stuff? I love those. I almost want to do a reproduction of it so that it could be commercially viable versus an antique. They just look really gorgeous to hang on the wall, but then if you could get one, that was commercially viable as a free play machine. Just imagine a mini history of pinball wall, where this is a machine from the thirties, and the forties and the fifties, and here's Humpty Dumpty.

So I would say probably we will have something from the seventies, something from the sixties, a handful from the eighties, and then a lot from the nineties. So we have some stuff, but they're obviously not that much fun to have compared to the newer machines unless you have nostalgia for them. They're a different play experience. Actually, I have Everdell that's really a Flash from 1979 that has a very simplistic, enjoyable style of playing, and it looks gorgeous. But would I rather play that, or would I rather play Medieval Madness, or would I rather play Harry Potter? I'd probably rather play Harry Potter. I'll have to take votes for what's the best game for those eras.

Winchester Mystery House surprised him most

AH: Over the past two or three years, has there been a pinball game that really surprised you? A game you’re not expecting to be very good, and...

Dan: Oh, Winchester, definitely, that's the most recent one that stands out. I mean, Harry Potter, Pokémon, those are all obvious. Even Transformers [More Than Meets the Eye], it's like, yeah, that'll do okay. But Winchester, I even knew what Winchester Mystery House was; never been there, but I just knew what it was and I was like that's a really weird license. So Winchester… from a licensed theme standpoint it does seem weird. And I still think that would have done similar to what, if it was unlimited, it would have done similar to what they did with Dune. I don't think it would’ve sold like 3,000 units or something. It's obviously fantastically well received and I've actually only played a couple games of it myself, but so far it seems like it'll be a good fit. So that was the biggest surprise.

AH: Is there a theme or intellectual property that you wish would get turned into a pinball?

Dan: So I feel like most of the ones that I'd be like “come on you have to make this theme” are already announced. From a personal perspective I love Firefly. I think Firefly would make a great pinball machine. You know, very limited content, but there's enough there to make a good machine. Lord of the Rings is our favorite machine so I have a bunch of those, but I would say a remastered version of that would be good to get it back out to more people would be a cool thing. I guess I'll go with Disney animation. So like a Lion King or something like that. That would be great. I'm a nineties Disney kid so that would be like, oh, man, that would be great. Can you imagine walking up to the machine, pressing the start button and “Nants ingonyama”? I wouldn't say do a Bluey pinball machine, but I think something like Lion King or Beauty and the Beast, those would be really cool things. And then I think more music pins of the level of Metallica Remastered or Guns N’ Roses, that kind of level of quality content. So lots of dream things. I'll just say Firefly is at the top of the list.

AH: What's your desert island pinball game?

Dan: Since that has to be something that exists because otherwise it's theoretical. So I have power on this island as well?

AH: Yes.

Dan: Okay. Otherwise, I'd be thinking like maybe Hercules, cause I need to build a raft. So I have one game that I can play and it's only getting played on this desert island. Huh. Do I have Internet connectivity?

AH: Yes.

Dan: Okay. So, I go between D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) and Harry Potter. D&D has the “more online connectivity” piece, but probably Harry Potter, I think. Nah, it’d be Lord of the Rings. Give me Lord of the Rings, then Harry Potter and D&D. I have a fantasy preference.

He hopes to open in Bedford in January 2027

AH: What lies ahead for Tycoon Arcade and the new location?

Dan: So we've been working on this space for a while; we’ve been nonstop. It's been going more slowly than we’d like, due to all the aforementioned usual challenges of business, supply chains, permitting, and all that stuff. But I think it'll be a really cool space. Right now it kind of exists on plans in my head. I have a lot of 3-D renders, but I think you're just gonna have to walk in and see what it feels like.

So I think you know my best estimate is, essentially, we're gonna be open here at this location, Thursdays to Sundays until the other location's done. And that means permitted; we have to get our liquor license and all that. So we're gonna stay open here for as long as we can. Until that point, and then we’ll close for about a month. We'll tell people in advance. We'll say, hey, we're gonna be closed for a month because we have to move all this stuff that’s in here, to the new location. So once that's set up, then we'll do a soft opening, and then we'll just for, you know, staff and friends and stuff. And then we'll probably do a soft opening for a couple months actually because I like to do grand openings once things have been really ironed out. Since we're doing food and beverage and stuff, we want to make sure all that's smooth. I think that's gonna be a big upgrade, it's a really cool space. It's 18,000 square feet. It's gonna have a whole raised area for food and beverage. I'm intentionally kind of building it to be that approachable nexus space with some really cool kinds of features. But primarily the attraction is you come and you play the games. I think of it as like, it's an amusement park that you walk in. I think the biggest impact you're going to get there is, walking in and being able to see the whole space. The visual of walking in, kind of seeing everything as it's laid out, walking in through the gift shop, walking to the end of the hallway basically and when you get to the end of the hallway you're like “WOW, look at all this stuff!” That's the approach I'm trying to get.

So I think hopefully early next year [2027], January. We might be closed for December. We're going as fast as we can, and until then people can play here, and then we'll have a grand opening 4 or 5 months after we actually open at the new location. So my hope is, knock on wood [knock knock] our downtime will only be about a month that we’ll be totally offline. So, at that point we’ll start to say “hey go play at Funspot.” Get your fix up there, and then we'll be back open.

Thank you to Dan for the interview. For more information about Tycoon Arcade you can check out their website or their Facebook page.

Editor's note: Kineticist covered Tycoon Arcade's soft opening in February 2024. Read that piece here.