Reboot Arcade Bar — Restaurant in Winston-Salem

Great fun when it started out. Games were fresh and bright!

Fast forward and I visited for the first time in a couple years.

The place: Now it seems dull and dingy. The bright is gone replaced by chain smoking hipsters out front holding the door open so you can't escape the stench anywhere inside!

The floor is sticky and bits of whatever have been swept under the games. There is a bar smell (stale spilled beer) that a really strong in places. I know it's a bar, but the focus is the games, right?

The Restrooms: My GF who is pretty tough, refused to use them and held out till we got back to CC BBQ.

The Games: 6 out of 10 we wanted to play wouldn't even take a quarter. 2 other swallowed them happily but wouldn't register. We stuck to the pinball at 4x the cost, but at least they worked.

Many of the old school games were in pretty rough shape. The sticks/knobs were loose and the buttons stuck or barely registered. Makes for a laugh at times when you are playing 2P, but it's not why I visited. Like many others the bartender marginalized us (we weren't drinking like her friends were.. yes, there was an obvious friendliness between them because she wouldn't ask them to move so we could play!) and blamed service that obviously didn't happen as several other reviews state.

The Crowd: Several people seemed very annoyed that I was making them move so that I could play a favorite game that had been poorly placed so that we both were in each others way. Their loud, drunken attitude and the stink in the corner made us feel that this wasn't the place to stay long.

Overall: I miss my video games and the fun they provide. I was looking forward to an evening playing them again. I was disappointed and will have to look for a really good reason to loose quarters and clean the sticky off my shoes.

Sadly, I will stop recommending this place to friends and visitors to WS that love retro video games as...

I Sadly cannot remember the bartender's name, though she was amazing. It was sunday, Sept 7th and we were there around 4 pm. She was extremely helpful and upbeat. HOWEVER. It very quickly became apparent that the owner does not give two dimes about this establishment or its customers. Half the machines say there is a cash option, which there is not (not a huge problem for us, but consistency is key). When we wanted to reload our card, it would not scan on the machine and kept telling me there was an error, I wanted to use this card as we had leftover credits. I resorted to purchasing a new card with 20 credits. When I applied the card to the next machine we wanted to use, it said I only had 18 credits, as annoyed as I was from trying to operate the machine previously, I admitted perhaps I did not use it correctly. In an attempt to add enough credits to use the machine I wanted to use, the reloading machine kept giving me the same error. I asked the bartender for help, and she helped me as much as she could, kept my spirits up just as much. Finally, we figured out that we could combine the points online to the previous card and we were able to execute the original goal. Further frustration was with the fact that drinks advertised online were not offered at this establishment. To go further, the drinks they DID offer were not developed with taste buds in mind. We ordered the Pop-a smurf and princess peach, and they were not drinkable. We choked them down simply because we paid for them. I would NOT recommend this bar to anyone, as someone who prefers to support local businesses, and instead recommend checking out the nearby tikki bar and oddities store. The only appeal is if you are a very patient teenager looking for a spot...

This is more of a "response" than a review, since for some reason google won't allow users to Reply to an obviously fake review. This is, in fact, a response to "Katy Borum", the user that just left a 1 star review approximately an hour ago below me.

Dear Katy, I happen to be the Arcade Technician for Reboot and am calling you out for your 100% false review. In your review that you posted (53 minutes) ago you stated "Literally, every game I played was either broke or took my coins.".

Well Katy, it just so happens that I was just at Reboot at 8:30 a.m. THIS MORNING for one of my routine services. As part of this routine, I physically insert coins into each and every machine on the premises to insure functionality.

After my visit this morning, I found 1 single machine that was not coining up properly and this was caused by a coin jam (a common problem with these machines), which I corrected and that coin slot is working. At this time there are 3 machines currently offline due to some major technical problems that require some hard to find parts. ALL off the other machines in this establishment are working correctly as of 8:30 a.m. this morning so clearly your little review is 100% false. I'm not sure who you are mad at or what prompted you to write this review, but it clearly was not that games because I visit there at minimum every two weeks to insure proper functionality.

The next time you have a problem, feel free to talk to the bartenders, who go above and beyond to keep everyone happy, and they will certainly address any problems you have, but to come onto google and post a deliberately false review tells me that this is more a "personal" issue for you because it's definitely not a problem with...