Power Up Arcade Bar — Restaurant in Kennewick

Nostalgia overload! I remember seeing this place 2 years ago when I was in town so this time we made it a staple to go and visit it. I expected it to be a regular bar with a few games but holy moly the amount of original classic arcade machines were amazing.

First thing I got a beer and went to the ATM and got 20$ for the token machine. Off the bat I saw the tokens are custom made for that place with their logo on it. Neat detail.

Galaga. First game I played was galaga. One of my favorites. Got to stage 10 and got the high score on the machine. Next my coworkers and I went around got to play tons of other classic games such as pac-man, rampage, digdug, mortal combat 3,.Skiball. having a few drinks here and there in between. And then we found it. The game we played and beat 7 times that evening.....and original cabot of House of the Dead.

We dumped our tokens in and played the first playthrough of it and we noticed that we can keep hitting continue and always playing. At first I thought I put in an absurd amount of tokens but by playthrough 5 we determined it was on freeplay and could play without tokens! This made me so happy as it's my favorite arcade game. So heads up you might still be able to play this game for minimal tokens as the publishing of this review.

It was an amazing experience and brought the inner child out for about 6hrs I was there. Beer games what's else to love?!? I was also surprised how packed this place got! It got to the point where it was elbows to elbows in here come 11pm that night. Honestly it was a good vibe being around so many people in a barcade ever since COVID. For once since then everything...

Second time here. Went over a year ago and it was ok. Today they had just opened. The bartender told me I needed to use the machine to get change for the games. The machine had a slot for a credit card but it was broken, cash only. So I rode home and got cash and came back. The place was much busier when I returned. I stuck $5 in the machine. It gave me nothing. I looked for an employee, but there was only the bartender. Now he had a line of people 12 deep waiting for service. I saw another customer using the change machine. I told him not to. Too late. My time is too valuable to stand in line wait for a bartender to service a lot of people, and then hope he will refund my money. A sign says no refunds abovethe machine. I decide to leave and I tell the other customer who got robbed to go ahead and add my money to his request to get a refund since he was going to wait. The atmosphere and service would be rated higher if they had more than one employee to help people and I don't believe they serve food. It's very disappointing, because the world needs more places like this, it is the closest arcade to my home, it just seems poorly run, and it kills me to hate on a local place. On a side note the place is pretty small, also. I travel often and go to a lot of arcades, this is the worst one I've been to. I will visit in the future to see if it gets better and change my review at that time if it does. ...

Great concept, but not the best execution. For a place that is going to make the selling point retro gaming, I expected a little more maintenance on that front. A couple of the machines wouldn't allow certain coin slots to be used, even if those slots were required to use certain characters. Some machines wouldn't work at all, which is a shame considering how crowded the place was and almost no machines were available. Due to the crowd, it didn't feel much different than a regular bar. Building is way too small for what they are trying to do. They had a Nintendo 64 available for use, but I was told I couldn't use it because of the crowd, which was disappointing. The drinks were expensive even by bar standards, and they served 10 dollar drinks in paper cups. I also lost quite a few tokens from machines eating them and not giving credit. I would have said something, but they clearly lacked the available staff to do anything about it.

I didn't have a bad time per se, but I don't feel like I got my money's worth overall and would not return unless changes are made. It did what was advertised at the very...