I found the town of Beacon, NY before the pandemic. I took my visiting parents and family up to the Industrial Arts Brewery located there. At the time they had an awesome tasting room open with routed pinball machines from Rockland Pinball.
Alas, the tasting room is still closed but Beacon is still a cool town. So I was happy to discover that someone opened up a new arcade bar in Beacon. It’s called Happy Valley. How did I hear about this you ask (ok you’re probably not asking that but I’ll telling you anyhow)? A couple of years ago I sold my original Centipede machine to a friend. He in turn eventually sold it to the guy who opened this arcade. As you’ll see in the pictures my old machine was indeed there. Small world.
Anyhow onto the location. Happy Valley is a bar arcade that leans much more heavily towards arcade games than pinball. The place has a lot of machines. All of the classics are there from Pac-Man to the aforementioned Centipede, Donkey Kong, Missile Command, etc… which was great to see. Beyond that there was a nice mix of fighting games, 4-player games and shooters.
By far the highlight of the trip for us was playing the relatively new arcade game called Kung Fu Kickball. You don’t see that game very often and none of us had ever played it before. Essentially it’s sort of like one on one or two on two full-contact soccer with funny characters. Sort of like the real life Soccer that my little brother and I played in the backyard as kids lol. What a fun game! We fed quarter after quarter into it. And at literally only a quarter per play it was a bargain. If you find this game in the wild you absolutely need to check it out.
All of the vids that I personally played worked great. The monitors were decent and all of the joysticks and buttons worked fine. My experience with the pinball machines though was mixed. First of all, Happy Valley’s website says that they have an “Avengers Infinity Quest” pin there. I was excited to finally try that one. They don’t. It’s the OG Stern Avengers from ten years ago. A fine game, but not what I was hoping for. The Avengers pin worked fine, other than the fact that the Tesseract didn’t really spin.
Pinball Machine number two was a Theatre of Magic. I’ve always loved that pin. Fortunately other than the flippers being a little spongey it worked great. Even the oft broken trunk worked perfectly. I was able to put up several free games in a row on it so you know that it was working fine.
Pin number three was the always fun Getaway. I would have liked to have played that one. Unfortunately, it was experiencing a resetting problem and had to be turned off.
Onto the bar itself. Happy Valley had a great selection of tap beers. Lots of them that I’d never had before. It’s always fun to try something new. I had a couple of Ball Lightning Pilsners from Catskill Brewery. My wife had a couple of mixed drinks that she said were good. They serve snack-like food. Essentially things that can be heated up. We had a big pretzel 🥨. The food is good to munch on while you play and drank but if you want a meal definitely head to one of the dozens of good restaurants on the main strip near in Beacon.
There was plenty of tables inside and even better a beer garden outside that people can hang out in. Very festive. The early crowd there consisted of some families. As time progressed it became mostly 20-something year-olds. It seemed to be a pretty happening place.
So there you have it. We had a great time visiting the Happy Valley Arcade Bar. If you ever find yourself near Beacon, NY and are looking to play some arcade games and have a few drinks you definitely should check it out. www.happyvalleybeacon.com