On a strangely warm morning back in January, the normal opening routine at Town Center at Cobb is interrupted by a note taped to the entrance doors:
“DUE TO UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCES, THE MALL IS CLOSED AT THIS TIME. NO ENTRY UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.”
Starrcade’s staff is supposed to be flipping on the lights, turning on game cabinets, and pumping hardcore EDM from the speakers to attract gamers.
The closure of the mall only lasted one day, but the writing was more than just on the door sign. Town Center anchor store Belk confirmed it would close the following month. Starrcade just happens to be in the same wing as the department store.
“Belk closed, and they were our main anchor,” Starrcade owner and namesake Shane Starr said in April. “And so if you look around, we used to get foot traffic, and people would see us for the first time ever. Now, there’s no reason to come down here.”
Belk’s closing wasn’t the start or the end of the closures in Starrcade’s wing of the mall. Many neighboring stores have permanently locked their doors and blown out lights along the concourse that haven’t been replaced, giving the wing a feel of gloom.
“Express closed,” Starr said, motioning around the hallway. “Forever 21 closed. The S&S Menswear is leaving. And then the rug store, they do all their sales online, so nobody comes here except for us.”
Despite the closures, Starrcade still aims to stay afloat and keep its clientele happy.
Inside Starrcade
Starrcade’s floorspace is illuminated by choruses of flashing lights and filled to the brim with games from yesteryear, as well as those that can’t be found anywhere else.
The public arcade space is only a branch in the company’s tree of business.
“The arcade itself has only been around for a year and a half,” Starr said. “The way we made our money before that is we repaired everybody else’s stuff – and that still makes up probably two-thirds of our business, is doing other people’s arcades.”
The Starrcade website states that the company services over 30 different locations around the Southeastern U.S. According to Starr, many of those arcades are independent mom-and-pop operations.
Starr started Starrcade after holding a slew of other arcade jobs, notably for the Japanese arcade chain Round1’s now-defunct Stonecrest Mall location. While working for Round1, Starr would travel around the country to help open other locations and repair the company’s game cabinets.
Starr said he realized his work was worth more than he was making from the arcade chain, and decided to do his own thing. He eventually started a small, fully independent arcade repair business, all run out of a garage.
One of those team members is Mike Chrysler, the arcade’s general manager.
“I love this job,” Chrysler said. “I love coming here every day. Being surrounded by my childhood every day, I could do way, way worse.
Bringing Old Games Back to Life
Starrcade’s arcade repair business often requires employees to travel across state lines to reach clients. They will leave a little room in their trucks as they travel, and while out of town, check local marketplace listings and sellers for the odd arcade cabinet. On occasion, they’ll strike metaphorical gold, finding something unique to bring back to Starrcade’s floor.
“Our Pop’n Music and our Chabudai, like some of our other weird, obscure Japanese games, literally came out of the dump here in the United States,” Starr said, describing the origin of two notably rare games on the arcade floor. “It would be in a landfill if we didn’t have it.”
Since the closure of Round1’s location at Stonecrest Mall, Starrcade is the only location in Georgia where Pop’n Music can be played, according to a community-run map commonly used for logging the locations of arcade games.
“Our Pinpoint Shot right there is the only one in the world in operation,” Starr said, pointing at a lone blue staircase in the center of the entrance with safety fencing and toy rifles at the top. “That came out of some operator from the 90s who had it in his garage.”
Pinpoint Shot tasks the player with picking up a toy rifle and shooting a laser at a target on the back wall. Being such an old piece of hardware, its targets use a unique method of sensing shots from the player, similar to how an old TV remote works.
Many of these games don’t have manuals available, Pinpoint Shot especially. The game was broken when Starrcade got it, so the team had to tinker with it until they figured out just how it worked.
Like Pinpoint Shot, many of these games also require constant upkeep.
“Same thing with our Cosmo Gang over there. It’s probably my favorite game here,” Starr said. “It’s a nightmare to keep running. It’s kind of like an electromechanical Space Invaders, but it’s the same thing. It’s one of two in operation in the world, as far as I know.”
Cosmo Gang was further described in an Instagram Reel Starrcade posted as part of a series detailing the history of certain games on the floor, as well as how those games were acquired.
Another post in Starrcade’s Instagram series describes a 90s arcade game called Armadillo Racing. The reel claims the arcade cabinet was abandoned in Louisiana and found by one of Starracade’s technicians behind a children’s party rental business while he was on a service call.
“Almost everything here, it really is like stuff we saved,” Starr said. “It’s stuff we refurbished. Which, because we started as a repair company, that’s kind of what we do for fun, and the back of the shop is always full of projects that we’re working on”
Now that same Armadillo Racing cabinet – only one of four English cabinets brought to the U.S., according to Starrcade – is cleaned up, brightly colored, functional, and on the floor for the public to play.
The Arcade of Misfit Games
“I once described Starrcade … as, ‘a retirement home for arcade games,’” Kevin Turner said. “But in the positive sense that we’d like our retirement communities to aspire to, rather than what they typically are.”
Turner is an Atlanta resident and part of the developer team for the arcade rhythm game StepManiaX. While Turner is impressed enough by Starrcade having games as rare as Armadillo Racing, connections that directly relate to him are what truly make the place special.
“I work on StepManiaX, a game that builds on dance and music games that have come before and tries to update things for a more modern audience,” Turner said. “I’m relatively new to working on this team; the rest of the team are veterans who have worked on so many other projects. Somehow, Shane has acquired some of those older projects in the form of Pump It Up Pro 2 and ReRave.”
StepManiaX is spearheaded by an American team with multiple industry veterans. Some of their past arcade game work includes the 2010 release Pump It Up Pro 2 and 2012’s ReRave, both of which currently sit on the floor of Starrcade.
“It’s one thing for older developers to tell me how cool they thought a last-minute idea in Pump It Pro 2 was, but it’s another to see how it was executed myself,” Turner said. “These are not easy games to find and neither sold particularly well, so having them all so immediately available in their original contexts is something I could never have dreamed of.”
Starrcade has become the arcade of misfit games. The team has saved one-of-a-kind games on the floor from rotting in landfills, allowing them to do what they were made for: entertaining people.
“I think the games they have are really neat!” Ezra Morrison, a regular at Starrcade, said. “Shane really has curated an awesome collection of rare games that need love.”
“It’s always been pleasant. The owner and everyone who works there really strive to make it a good environment,” Morrison said. “I personally go to play rhythm games. I like being able to practice and watch myself improve.”
Morrison and Turner are both part of a semi-local community based around rhythm games like the popular Dance Dance Revolution.
“I’ve made so many friends via meeting at the arcade. I’m going over to one’s house tonight, even,” Morrison said. “The arcade has opened my world to people I wouldn’t have had anything else in common with.”
Staying Alive
Spaces like Starrcade help these communities thrive by providing games that would be otherwise inaccessible. These games are typically exclusive to foreign countries like Japan, expensive to bring over, and often exceedingly rare.
“Come check us out if you want to see games you won’t see anywhere else,” Starr said as a Taiko no Tatsujin cabinet sang a Japanese song from behind him. “If you want a really unique experience, even more unique than just a retro bar arcade, we have such a crazy mix of stuff. If somebody hasn’t already been here, it’s worth checking out, because they might find some game that they never knew existed.”
For the local community, Starrcade offers something that can’t be found anywhere else. The scares that come from the mall’s instability serve as reminders for the need to appreciate such spaces while they are around.
“We’ve had many arcades, both big and small, close over the years,” Vincent Kim, a leader in Georgia’s rhythm game and arcade community, said. “I think many of us take these places for granted without realizing until it’s too late and they aren’t around anymore.”
