On a Tuesday in May 2025, nearly 120 families walked into the Manitou Springs Penny Arcade within 45 minutes of opening. Locals stood next to visitors from out of town, feeding coins into anything from antique penny machines to Pac-Man.
If arcades are a kid thing, why do so many adults keep coming back with a pocket full of quarters? Some of the reasons go back to the 1890s, and others have more to do with memory than with the games.
Where Arcades Started
Herman Casler finished the Mutoscope in 1894, and it soon became a hit in the first penny arcades. Viewers dropped in a penny and turned a crank, flipping through photo cards fast enough to make the pictures move. Each reel ran for about a minute before the viewer needed another coin. A 1967 Museum of Modern Art press release says the Mutoscope had taken over the arcade parlors by 1897, with more than 4,000 titles out by 1907.
Other machines filled the space around it, from mechanical fortune tellers to punching bags and strength testers. The first coin strength tester goes back even further, to an 1885 patent. That mix lasted long enough to reach Disneyland, where Billboard counted 100 machines in the park’s Penny Arcade in 1956. Most dated back to early in the century and still ran on pennies, with Esmeralda, a fortune teller machine, at the head of the center row.
Jack Kerns opened the Manitou Springs arcade in 1933 as Bingo Jacks, a bingo parlor he ran for profit. When new laws kept restricting bingo, his family switched to pinball and other coin games instead. Merriam-Webster dates “slot machine” to 1891, when it meant any coin machine, though only gambling machines kept the name. Their reels now spin in casinos and in social casino apps like Caesars Slots, which runs on the Fortunes Ultimate Slots casino site with virtual coins for free.
The Penny Arcade on Manitou Avenue
Arcade Amusements, which most people call the Penny Arcade, bills itself as the largest historic arcade west of the Mississippi. A Gazette report from May 2025 counted more than 450 games and rides there, from every decade since the 1910s, including Skee-Ball lanes and pool tables. They sit inside several buildings on Manitou Avenue, the town’s main street, all of them more than 100 years old.
For 92 years, the Kerns family ran the arcade, with Alan Kerns working there since he was a young child. When he was ready to retire, an earlier sale fell through, and some buyers wanted the space for retail. John Weiss, a longtime resident who once lived about three blocks away, stepped in and bought it in May 2025. He has described himself as more of a caretaker for the arcade than its owner, and he planned to keep all 31 members of the staff.
The oldest games have wooden and metal cases, and some of them still cost just a penny to play. Many other machines cost a quarter, according to Visit Manitou Springs, which lists horse derby, racing games, and 1980s favorites like Galaga among the draws. Tickets from those games go to the prize counter, where visitors trade them for retro candy and other prizes.
Fortune tellers are part of the mix too, the same kind of machine at the center of Big (1988). In the film, Josh, a boy of 13, drops a coin into Zoltar and wishes to be big, then notices that nobody had plugged the machine in. He still wakes up the next morning as a grown man. Real Zoltar machines followed, after a Nevada company received the trademark for Zoltar Speaks in 2007 and started selling them.
What Keeps Adults Coming Back
Nostalgia explains a big part of that pull, and University of Southampton psychologist Constantine Sedikides has studied it for years. A 2006 study from his team linked nostalgia to closer social bonds, higher self-esteem, and a better mood. When the team asked people what brings nostalgia on, 38% pointed to a bad mood. Loneliness came up often too, which may be why a familiar place feels so good on a rough day.
Sedikides later led a paper showing that nostalgia makes people feel more connected to who they used to be. That effect came from feeling closer to other people, since sentimental memories so often include loved ones, as Scientific American reported. Tim Wildschut, one of the researchers, called nostalgia “a psychological immune response” that people naturally feel several times a week. He also named photos, certain meals, shared stories, and music as common triggers.
The Manitou arcade is full of that kind of shared memory, with families coming back year after year. John Weiss got to know it as a single dad raising three boys, whose friends always wanted to go there. “This was sort of a playground for us,” he told The Gazette. On that same Tuesday in May, a grandmother played a shooting game there with her granddaughter to celebrate the end of fifth grade.
The Rise of Arcade Bars
Arcade bars brought classic games back for adults after arcades slumped in the middle of the 1990s, CNBC reported. Barcade helped start the trend in 2004, when four friends opened it in a former metal shop in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. Its founders were “kids of the 1980s arcades,” as Paul Kermizian, one of them, later put it. They wanted that feeling back, this time with a full bar.
The Brooklyn bar also became a home for serious players like Hank Chien, who set a Donkey Kong world record of 1,061,700 points in March 2010. George Leutz practiced on its Q*bert machine for years before setting a world record of 37,163,080 points in February 2013.
Barcade started calling itself “The Original Arcade Bar” in 2015 to stand out from other arcade bars. Many of those bars name Barcade as their inspiration, according to the company. Gamers have grown up, too, and the Entertainment Software Association now puts the average U.S. video game player at 37 years old.
Colorado Springs has its own arcade bars, starting with Supernova, which calls itself the city’s first and runs two locations, downtown and on the Westside. Visit Colorado Springs also lists The Control Room, a retro arcade bar that hosts trivia and karaoke nights. Rail Yard Gaming and Gastropub goes bigger, with bowling and virtual reality next to its arcade games.
The Short Answer
The short answer is that arcades let adults share old memories with family and friends, on machines that still work the way they did decades ago. John Weiss built his plans for the Manitou arcade around that idea. After buying it in May 2025, he told The Gazette that 75% of it would stay exactly the same. The other 25% would get improvements, though only the kind that keep its old flavor.
That way, a grandparent can still bring a grandchild to the same penny games and fortune tellers from years ago. For a lot of adults, that is the real draw, since the people playing alongside them matter more than any score.
