The Old School Boardwalk Arcades of Ocean City, Maryland
It's been a while since I did an Arcade Road Trip article, so here we go. I recently went on vacation with my family. We rented a house in Ocean City, Maryland. Ocean City is not known for its pinball scene, but as I always do on family vacations I managed to find arcades. We found three old school Boardwalk arcades down there, with typical arcade names like Playland, Sportland and Fun City.
The arcades went well beyond the typical beach coin pushers and Skee-Ball. Surprisingly, I found some of the newest arcade games on the market there, not to mention my favorite...pinball. All three of the aforementioned locations had a minimum of three pinball machines. And every single one had a version of Stern Pinball's longest-running pin Star Wars. People in the pinball hobby are often critical of Star Wars and wonder why it's still being made. I'll tell you why...amongst random non-pinball arcade goers it was probably the most popular pin at these places. Kids and adults always gravitated towards it.
All of the pins that I came across at these three locations were Sterns. I was very pleasantly surprised to find a James Bond Premium with functional Insider Connected that worked perfectly. I picked up a couple of new achievements on that one. And I managed to put up a new Grand Champion score on a Star Wars Premium. The condition of the pins varied by location. The three at Fun City were fairly clean. Some of the others had the typical super dirty playfields.
The pins that I saw included:
2003 Stern Simpson's Pinball Party
2006 Stern Pirates of the Caribbean
2008 Stern Indiana Jones
2010 Stern Iron Man
2013 Stern Star Trek Premium
2017 Stern Star Wars Pro
2019 Stern Stranger Things Pro
2019 Stern Star Wars Comic Premium
2019 Stern Munsters Pro
2022 Stern James Bond Premium
On the arcade machine side of things, there was several really new games including:
Triotech QUBE
JET Games Quick Shot
TouchMagix Space Warp 66
The massive new THRILL-D Motion Raw Thrills Fast & Furious
And More...
Hopefully I conveyed the feeling of being at a good old beach arcade with these pictures. I sure do like taking them. I need to get more active with the arcade photography thing again in the second half of 2023. Enjoy and thanks for reading!
