Token Taverns

The bar arcade has always kind of been a thing.

At the very beginning when video games began

to first hit the beaches they would go into bars.

And now, 30 to 40 years later,

these machines are right back where they started in an arcade bar.

Oh, they got all your old favorite games.

Come on in, play the games and have a beer, a whiskey,

my preference whiskey.

We've grown up with multiple generations

of console video game players who are used

to playing either online or they're playing by themselves,

but people are sort of thirsty for this interaction

in person where you can see the cabinet,

you can feel it, you can hear all these sounds.

There are a huge number of arcade bars popping up all over the country.

They're doing gangbuster business.

We're building memories and we're building nostalgia.

But what happens now, because of the arcade bar,

because of the experience we had back in the '80s,

it is now revived with this.

It's brought a resurgence.

It's the big kids' man cave and you go,

hey, you wanna play some "NFL Blitz", some "NBA Jam"?

Dude, this place is off the hook.

Craft beer and games, come on, it just goes together.

"Token Taverns", boom shakalaka.

My name's Michael Burke. I own Vector Bar & Arcade in Clearwater, Florida.

Going into this, my wife and I, we wanted a nice,

cool place that people could hang out with

and feel like you're in my basement or my garage arcade.

Making this whole endeavor possible

was really my wife more or less forced me into it.

We just had games on the side.

I was fixing them and reselling them and just as a hobby.

So when we moved to Clearwater, we thought,

what an opportunity for us to do it on our own.

So the game selection's pretty amazing.

It's not always the games that are sought after by high-end collectors,

but games that people that like to play.

There are some must-have classics

that everyone says you should have.

Like, you gotta have the "Pac-Man", the "Donkey Kong".

And I want to represent games that you don't see in every place.

We got games like "Double Dragon" and "Street Fighter III",

not "Street Fighter II".

They want people to see there was a huge amount of other great games.

This is another one of those like weird, obscure Japanese games.

It's called "Muchi Muchi Pork!".

It's super weird, man.

For us, the most popular games are "Last Action Hero".

"'Jurassic Park' Pinball",

people love just based on the theme.

And then, "Area 51",

people just love blasting the aliens.

It's like the favorite around here.

Just get that power-up.

So, the vibe here at Vector is really cool.

There is definitely like "Pinball" nerds,

there's also a lot of beer nerds,

and then you have a lot of people in between.

Our core audience,

we have two.

We have the younger 20,

30-year-olds who like the retro games.

And then we have the people who grew up like the older guys

who like coming in here and playing "Pinball".

Vector is both very unusual

and very comfortable at the same time.

It's unusual 'cause it's dark.

There's not a whole lot of decoration or atmosphere.

You kind of have the machines

and you have the people that are there.

If you're the kind of person that's looking

for "Pinball" machines or arcade games,

you're gonna be right at home.

If you're the kind of person looking for a football game

and the regular kind of bar atmosphere,

you're gonna be way put off.

We're not a sports bar.

You don't have TVs on the walls.

It's lined with games.

The games lend to their own aesthetic.

They're the energy of the space.

And the lights are dim.

You got the glow of the screens.

Now you have a beer in your hand

and just the fact that you're standing there

in the glow of the game,

it really has a nostalgia factor, for sure.

It felt, genuinely like an arcade.

What's really odd that it's so uncommon now.

Just every place I go to,

it's a bar.

It really just feels like they threw money at it.

There's no soul to it and this place has soul.

You can't have a business like this

and not be passionate about it.

You can have a bar and expect people to come

'cause you're slinging beers.

But there's a difference when you care

about all the different beers you order

and you care about the customer experience

and giving them something new and something that they enjoy.

I really like this one though.

What? -It's a really good beer.

It's a small operation here.

It's like one person's manning the place.

They're handling the arcade.

They're handling the bar.

You've been.

Yeah. -Good, I'm glad to see you.

Jesse's our bartender here.

He's been with us for over a year and a half.

He's amazing, he's one of our best hires,

so wanted to make sure we hired the right people

who had our same vision.

Mike and Lauren,

they threw like a base or a birthday party for me.

They wanna throw a going-away party for me.

They're super cool.

So other than just having the bar

and the arcade experience,

we also wanted to bring some of our personal life into it.

So we did Monday Night Fight Nights

that was where me and all my friends would meet up

and we'd play fighting games.

When I play the game with the owner of this place

and he fucking destroyed me.

That's very disrespectful.

I might leave that in a Yelp review.

There's always the person who comes in

and they wanna challenge the owner.

So it's like they own the place

if they could beat the owner in a game,

but I don't get beaten too often.

I'll take that.

Finest

Cheers.

And then we would do semi-quarterly wrestling events.

It's was called Bar Wars. -I was like,

oh my god,

this guy's got wrestling too in this place.

And he had "Bar Wars I",

"Bar Wars II",

"Bar Wars III" all right here.

I've seen 250,

300 people total.

All this epicness is just happening right

on the other side of this building.

The main event,

someone jumped off the roof of the back

of the building into the ring for their finishing move,

which was epic.

We're sitting on the picnic table and next thing you know,

the wrestling guys are like,

"Get off the table",

and they're like DDTing and power bombing each other

on the picnic table we were just sitting on.

And ridiculous, epic each time,

and it just grew and grew and got bigger and bigger.

Put a wrestling ring out behind your business

and throwing a huge wrestling event

with a hundred-plus people is a pretty big endeavor.

Luckily for us,

the back of our building butts up to government buildings

that are closed on the weekends.

We were able to keep the ring in our space,

but we could have the spillover people all in the back

and be as loud and obnoxious as we wanna be.

Fuck off.

Thanks everyone for coming out.

This is excellent.

I couldn't ask for a better turnout.

We gotta get a trilogy in before the landlord shut us down

from having too many people out back.

Thank you guys for coming out to Vector's open mic.

My name is P Funk.

We're over here every Wednesday.

I'm gonna do all these funky jams for you.

If you'd like to hear anything in particular,

let me know.

I'll try to do my best to accommodate you guys.

Just no Jimmy fucking Buffet.

Wednesday night was open mics,

so everyone from the local area would come

and do music and poetry and a spoken word.

Crack a beer,

sip that drink,

pour another glass of wine.

There is a war going on for your mind.

The revolution will now be televised.

The fact that I could find like-minded people

and be at like a Cheers-like environment

where everybody knows your name,

everybody is easy to talk to.

They're weird sometimes, right.

I'm weird sometimes.

We're all a little bit crazy,

but it's like we're all the right kind

of weird for each other.