Heading north out of Boston, Massachusetts towards New Hampshire, there’s not much along the highway capable of taking you by surprise. This is rural America, and there seems to be little here more than the occasional charming tourist town. But around the shoreline of the glacial Lake Winnipesaukee, the small village of Weirs Beach hides a secret: the world’s largest arcade, Funspot.

You’d be forgiven for driving past it, if not for a flamboyant sign next to the road that leads to the beach. Even then you might think you’d taken a wrong turn somewhere: there’s a large warehouse-like building with a roomy parking lot which, apart from the quiet hills that frame it, you could find anywhere. But then you enter the place, and all of that is forgotten as the inner child takes over.

The rows of flashing lights and bleeps stretch into the distance, from every coin-op from your youth to Skee-Ball machines and a bowling centre. There are three floors crammed with every colour, shape and size of arcade machine and entertainment device you can imagine. It’s easy to forget how ubiquitous lightgun ranges and physical entertainment machines were in early arcades, but then you pass a nine-hole indoor miniature golf course that looks and feels as well-maintained and polished as when it was first installed in the early ’50s.

To be more specific, it was 1952 when the 22-year-old Bob Lawton decided to abandon chemistry and found Funspot. A small loan from his grandmother, some craftsman skills and an idea about making lanes for miniature golf indoors probably didn’t make him seem like the next Howard Hughes. But Funspot was of its time, and not least as a part of the rise of popular culture in the US.

That’s something of that in Lawton’s ‘One Big Rule’ for running Funspot: “Keep looking for something new.” There’s a willingness to explore anything that might attract customers to an arcade, whether it’s as simple as the latest coin-op or, as was the case recently, a set of bowling lanes. That mixture of curiosity and business sense has been the backbone of Funspot, and the reason it has survived the bumpy times that have claimed others: the videogame boom of the early ’80s and the recession that followed broke the back of the arcade business worldwide, and certainly gave Lawton a bloody nose. But after the closure of five locations that had been acquired during the good years, Funspot’s operation returned to a focus on base camp and survived without ever coming close to financial trouble. The only mistake it made? It didn’t keep hold of all of the old cabinets.



In the late ’90s, a long-serving employee named Gary Vincent had an idea. Funspot still had classic machines scattered around its premises: why not collect them together and try to give visiting audiences a new perspective? Retro chic wasn’t that big a part of the videogame landscape in 1998 – and neither was a dedication to preserving physical videogame history. This idea became the Classic Arcade Museum – a non-profit organization and collection of over 250 working video arcade machines from the early ’70s through to 1987, including the likes of Computer Space and Pong – which has become an international focal point for retrogaming and its followers.

This revival of old gaming hardware had a significant local impact: just a year after the Classic Arcade Museum was launched, the vintage videogame lovers appeared on the scene. Weirs Beach became the new Mecca of self-styled ‘old-school skill gamers’, the vast majority of whom were males in their late 30s who have known each other since the arcade’s heyday. Still breaking records today, gaming’s most notorious bad boy Billy Mitchell established himself as hero and villain of the newly emerging niche scene after his magnificent achievement of the ‘perfect game’ on Pac-Man in 1999. Of course, he did it on an original cabinet at the Classic Arcade Museum.

What seemed to have vanished with the arcades in the ’80s was now visible again: the first wave of professional retrogamers had finally found a home. One player even retired from his banking career to move to Weirs Beach and pursue high-scores fulltime. Funspot and its Classic Arcade Museum continue to push the old gaming cabinets beyond nostalgia with their yearly tournaments, and have recently been attracting wider attention. Some of the finer moments in the recent, brilliant gaming documentary The King of Kong bore fascinating witness to the level of obsession and compulsion that can be found here – and in the wake of that film’s success, several other filmmakers have made a similar pilgrimage. Funspot’s future and its place in the videogaming community seem secure, and we recently talked to Lawton and Vincent about how it’s got here – and where it’s going.