Wilcox Arcade is NOT a Retro Business

Because this message is so gravely important to me, I will repeat my headline verbatim, without paraphrasing even a single word: Wilcox Arcade is NOT a retro business.

Now, I certainly don’t want to come off as abrasive: I purely wish to make my position clear, once and for all, because it’s unfortunately been misconstrued in the past. My mission is not to recreate the arcade of the 1980s but instead to provide to greater access to modern releases.

In all fairness, I can see several reasons why this misconception arose — more specifically, the erroneous notion that I’m in any way interested in nostalgia or bygone days. For one thing, when I launched the Wilcox Arcade route, both in 2019 and in 2024, I genuinely could only afford older games. I got my grubby hands on whatever was posted to Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace simply so I could start at all — not because it was what I actually desired.

Well, I’ll temper that last point: Truthfully, I used to admire the anachronistic nature of the arcade environment — the chance that a cabinet from 1972 could be placed next to one from 2022 — and I even yearned to foster something like that myself.

That was until, to my dismay, I learned two lessons: Firstly, people didn’t particularly want to spend money on classic games in public, and more crucially to me, if they noticed even one classic game in an arcade, they’d assume the whole danged game room was operated from some kind of retro slant, regardless of how many modern options may have been present.

That second lesson was a crushing one to learn, a tough pill to swallow — knowing that a top-of-the-line indie game like Switch ’N’ Shoot could be hastily dismissed as old-school just because it utilized pixel art or because I also happened to operate a Centipede in the same shopping plaza. I couldn’t bear the unfavorable optics I had accidentally constructed around Wilcox Arcade.

Even the indie games, to a lesser extent, facilitated this false sense of “retro” surrounding my business. Since they were such niche, little-known releases — and admittedly, most would intentionally evoke old-school associations — some patrons literally could not discern the difference between a game from 1988 and one from 2018, despite the latter game boasting, say, an LCD monitor or, most blatantly of all, just plain not existing all those years ago.

Although I adore indie arcade games, if I could afford bigger, flashier titles from companies like Raw Thrills, Sega, or Namco…well, by golly, I’d already have bought them, too. I ache for the day I can acquire something obviously modern like NBA Superstars. In the meantime, I can only hope these indie games will resonate with the residents of my region.

Let me clarify that this blog post doesn’t come from a place of hostility. I appreciate everyone who has ever engaged with the Wilcox Arcade route in any fashion, even if it was motivated by feelings of nostalgia. What really drove me to write this article was no more than the need to reclaim my own brand identity before it had become skewed beyond recognition.

At the end of the day, my guiding mission is to provide fun to the people of western Kentucky; and with that in mind, I’m aiming to do so in a way that aligns with my core values of modernity, accessibility, and quality. Somehow, I thought my up-to-date advertising techniques would be enough to convey that.

Beyond the arcade sector, my perspective on this subject remains consistent: I’m not fond of what I deem “stuck culture.” There are far too many remakes, reboots, and sequels as it is — and the media landscape is already too reliant on legacy IP — so why on Earth would I want to exacerbate that harrowing reality through my own route operations?

I suppose that’s all I had to say on the matter today. At least with this article down the proverbial hatch, there should remain no lingering ambiguity regarding my intentions, albeit I definitely didn’t mean to offend anyone with my somewhat intense wording along the way.

Thank you so much — as customers, as supporters — for making Wilcox Arcade possible. I literally couldn’t do it without you. Just know I’m moving forward, not backward.

Keep it real, ya sweaty nerds.