Today I present to you the amazing Penn Skate arcade in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Unless you were specifically looking for it, you might never know that behind this nondescript door to a skate park lies one of the most diverse collections of pinball machines out there. Owner Chris Budinetz has put together an absolutely awesome, eclectic collection of games. There’s no cookie-cutter lineup here. From Banzai Run, to every skate and bike-themed 🛹 🚴 game imaginable to American Pinball and on and on. Check out this lineup:
BMX (Bally, 1982)
Bad Cats (Williams, 1989)
Banzai Run (Williams, 1988)
Beat the Clock (Bally, 1985)
Black Knight (Williams, 1980)
Cybernaut (Bally, 1985)
Dirty Harry (Williams, 1995)
Earthshaker (Williams, 1989)
Elvira and the Party Monsters (Bally, 1989)
Elvis (Stern, 2004)
F-14 Tomcat (Williams, 1987)
Ghostbusters (Premium) (Stern, 2016)
High Speed (Williams, 1986)
Houdini: Master of Mystery (American, 2017)
Junk Yard (Williams, 1996)
Last Action Hero (Data East, 1993)
Magic (Stern, 1979)
Metallica (Premium) (Stern, 2013)
Motordome (Bally, 1986)
Mousin' Around! (Bally, 1989)
Oktoberfest (American, 2018)
Pirates of the Caribbean (Stern, 2006)
Pool Sharks (Bally, 1990)
Radical! (Bally, 1990)
Rollergames (Williams, 1990)
Skateball (Bally, 1980)
The Sopranos (Stern, 2005)
Special Force (Bally, 1986)
Spy Hunter (Bally, 1984)
Transporter the Rescue (Bally, 1989)
How much does it cost to play? Ready for this? Ten bucks. That’s it! All of the games are set to Free Play and you can play for hours. Crazy.
The vibe of Penn Skate is super cool. The shop that you walk through to get to the pins contains all sorts of bikes, scooters and skateboards. The skate park is full of ramps, jumps and neat graffiti art.
Penn Skate hosts a regular pinball league and tournaments that are well attended. If competitive pinball is your thing, you should definitely check it out.
As good as the Penn State Arcade is now, an expansion that will add at least another 20 games to the lineup is nearly complete and there’s a large collection of games beyond what’s on the floor to draw from. I can’t wait to go back in a few months to check the expansion out.
So there you have it, the amazing Penn State Arcade. I have another arcade report in the queue that I’ll get up on the site later this week, so stay tuned. Thanks for reading! If you haven’t yet, make sure to stop by the Knapp Arcade store: https://www.knapparcade.org/shop . The new pint glasses are now available. There’s also all sorts of other merch, cool games, etc… Pick up a few things to help support all of the content that you see here. I’d rather sell something of value than run shady raffles or grovel for pennies :) . Enjoy the Super Bowl tonight!
