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Major Magic’s closes its doors (toledoonthenove.com)
Popular kids pizza party place out of business (13abc.com)
Although my video gaming days seem to be firmly behind me at this point, I can’t help but be saddened by this news. Toledo never got a Chuck E. Cheese until well into the nineties, so we had to make do with Major Magic’s, a knockoff chain that originated in the Detroit area, although ironically the Toledo location wound up staying alive for far, far longer than any of the Michigan franchises. Major Magic’s was only a couple of miles from my house, less than a mile from the hospital where I was born, so it’s definitely been a fixture of my neighbourhood for a long, long time.
Strangely enough, though, I didn’t go there on a regular basis until I was well past the target demographic of a place like that. Dad and I went there shortly after it opened, when I was eager to play every arcade game I could get my hands on. I wasn’t that impressed, though, and Dad was more interested in the animatronic puppets there. As a little kid I had no interest in animatronic puppets, or people in mascot/character suits, or dressed up as Santa Claus or anything like that, and most of the time they made me uncomfortable. Franklin Park Mall, a few miles down the road, had a much better arcade (which closed about eight years ago), plus they had toy stores and bookstores and record stores, so I only went there once before I turned eighteen.
I went there for the second time when I was eighteen years old, in 1994, for an informal get-together of the regulars of several local computer bulletin boards. (I had Internet access at this point, but the local bulletin boards were still a lot better for some activities.) By this point I had lots of home video games, of course, and Major Magic’s didn’t have any Street Fighter games, the only arcade game series I had any real interest in playing. It wasn’t a bad experience, but it didn’t make me feel like going back there. A friend of mine took me to a laser tag place that opened next door to it a few times, but Major Magic’s was still one of those places that I just felt no real need to go to.
Ten years later, in 2004, I visited Major Magic’s again, and at the age of twenty-eight I had my first birthday party there. This was a few months after I got into Dance Dance Revolution, and despite the fact that Major Magic’s didn’t update their video games that much, they had a couple of pretty good machines there. I was mostly playing DDR at home, of course, but this was before there were dozens of games out, and the arcade machines offered a lot more songs, not to mention a social dynamic I couldn’t get from playing at home. The friends I made through dance games became my main social circle after I graduated from college, and I still keep in touch with several of them.
Eventually, though, I stopped going to Major Magic’s. Dance game machines are notoriously difficult to maintain, particularly in an environment where lots of little kids are stomping their mud-encrusted shoes on the dance pads, mud and dirt slipping into the pad’s sensors and mechanisms and causing the pads to stop tracking steps accurately. From the time I started going there on a regular basis in 2004 to my last visit there, Major Magic’s got all of onenew game in, and even that was a shooter that I believe came out in 1997. (I can’t remember its name.) The people there just didn’t seem to care about keeping things up-to-date, or even that clean (rumours were that the kitchen had been cited for numerous health code violations), and it got to the point where I just couldn’t give them my business any longer. Besides, I built my own dance game setup last year that lets me add any song I want, so I have almost no incentive to pay money to play dance games now.
It’s no secret that the arcade game industry is facing all kinds of problems because home systems and computers can replicate anything an arcade machine can do at this point. Particularly in the age of a million accessories for every video game system, even specialty games like dance games and skateboarding games and the like can easily be replicated at home. Still, I was a kid in the early 1980s, in the golden age of arcade games, and there’s something about the tactile experience of playing an old Pac-Man cabinet or the feel of a wooden Skee-Ball in your hand that you can never really replicate at home, to say nothing of the communal aspect of people coming together any playing games with, or against, one another.
The worst part is that it didn’t have to be this way. Chuck E. Cheese still has two locations in Toledo, and last I heard there’s no real risk of either of them shutting down, even in this economy. If the employees and owners of Major Magic’s had done more to keep the place up-to-date and clean, make it a place where people had a strong urge to go, I don’t think they would have had to close. Particularly for people my age, who went to Major Magic’s as kids, and now have kids of their own old enough to appreciate a place like that, there was a huge potential for business there that I felt Major Magic’s squandered away. Even though I hadn’t been there in a very long time, even though I had no plans to go there, I’m still really saddened by the fact that they’re closed now and I won’t ever go back.
On top of that, I had hundreds of redemption tickets saved up that I never had a chance to spend. Now I have to buy my Tootsie Rolls with cash. Oh well.