RePete: Remembering WOW

Back in the late 1990s– 1997 rings out to my memories the loudest– there was an arcade in Holyoke, Massachusetts that I visited every once in a while. It was noticeably smaller than the larger arcade at the nearby Holyoke Mall at Ingleside that I went to most of the time, but it had a hook that the bigger arcade did not: It was a nickel-and-dime venue– after paying a flat cover/admission charge.

The venue’s name? WOW.

I cannot find anything on it now, and that sucks– because it was an interesting place.

Admittedly, the prospect of paying only a nickel or a dime to play arcade games was a cool hook. The arcade had games I didn’t see in other places locally, like RARE’s Battletoads coin-op and a NEO Turf Masters cabinet. I spent a ton of time playing the Dr. Dude pinball machine there… like, wayyy too much time. A two-player Virtua Racing cabinet was also present, and playing that for a dime was an easy decision. Granted, I was never really any good at Virtua Racing, but it was still fun to play.

The bigger hook, to me, was that certain arcade games were set to Free Play. Getting to play full games of NBA JAM for no money out of pocket was a dream come true. I mean, I had the console versions at home, but playing a legit coin-op? The original version? For FREE? Yeah, you couldn’t beat that. To be fair, Tournament Edition and NBA HangTime were both in arcades and were more relevant at that time– but again, this was the OG NBA JAM… the game I spent tons of tokens on and the game that really ignited my love of sports video games in general. The fact that it was considered “old” at the time simply meant less/no waiting for the cabinet to open up.

Another Free Play cabinet was High Impact Football. Yes, NFL Blitz‘s daddy. I played the console port of Super High Impact on the Super NES before then, so playing the arcade game was familiar and fun. The idea of over-the-top football hit hard with me at the time, after spending so much time with Madden and other sim games. I didn’t connect this with Blitz at the time; it was years later when I realized it.

One other Free Play game I remember clearly was Final Fight. Having the option to “brute force” my way through Capcom’s seminal beat-‘em-up was a welcome one, as I could focus more on having fun and checking out the whole game than worrying about having enough tokens or quarters to finish it (like many other games of that era). I wound up developing a deeper appreciation for Final Fight from this point on— and, thanks to various compilations that included the game in years that followed, I always went back and played it. Final Fight and WOW will always be inexorably linked in my brain.

As time passed and as my life was changing, my visits to WOW decreased. Then, before I knew it, an impromptu visit wound up being to a closed venue. It’s not surprising, given that arcades were in decline and the model of play WOW used likely wasn’t conducive to making lots of money. Still— it hurt when I realized it was gone, much as it did as other local arcades met similar fates.

WOW was a cool idea. It wasn’t a venue with the latest and greatest games, but it was a really fun place to spend an afternoon or evening. It’s significant that a place like this, which has no media that I can find nearly three decades later, left such vivid memories that are indelibly etched into my brain. I only wish that I hadn’t taken the place for granted, as if it would always be there.

It’s a lesson I’ve learned the hard way, time and again, as the years zoom by, much like the competition in Virtua Racing during those 10-cent races.