“Always Connected, Always Building”
Private Equity Partner Pushes Amusement Connect into the Future
Not every tech company starts in a garage. Amusement Connect started at a dartboard.
A few times a week in Kansas City, neighbors and longtime friends Frank Licausi and John Tarpley met over a round of soft-tip darts, and the games always turned into shop talk.
Licausi was a second-generation route operator whose family’s Lee Vending ran a full line of vending and amusements. Tarpley was an automotive executive and a self-described child of the ’80s who never got the arcade out of his system.
The trash talk turned into strategy sessions on everything that frustrated them about amusement locations. Two complaints came up repeatedly – guests were walking in with a phone and no cash, and a coin-fed floor was quietly turning them away. And every dollar those games did take had to be collected, counted and reconciled by hand, with a truck rolling out for every jammed bill validator and every coin mech that stopped reading.
They concluded that the industry needed an affordable cashless card system built for street route operators, not just the biggest FECs.
Nine years later, following an investment from the Chicago-based private equity firm Periscope Equity in May, that system serves more than 800 customers across 3,000-plus locations in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia – from a small pizza arcade to FECs running well over 250 games.
One of the things they say got them where they are is “continuous improvement,” which is one of the company’s 10 values printed in its product catalog. In practice, it means the readers, kiosks and software that operators bought three years ago don’t look much like what’s shipping today – and today’s won’t look like next year’s.
Building for Rooms of All Sizes
The clearest example rolling out now is their SE product line. Wally SE is a self-service, wall-mounted kiosk, and CardMech SE is a game card reader. Together, they are a “compact, value-first system built for the operator running an unattended floor, adding a card system to a growing arcade, or finally cracking a location where the economics never worked before.”
CardMech SE and the company’s flagship SmartMech readers mix and match on the same floor, using the same platform and dashboard. Operators can put essential readers on their crane line and full SmartMechs on their premium pieces – or start a room on SE hardware and upgrade in place as it earns.
Wally SE releases this month, with CardMech SE following this fall; both will be available for demonstrations at IAAPA Expo in November.
The Reader Keeps Getting Smarter
The SmartMech remains the heart of the system, Amusement Connect said. The current generation brought twice the display resolution of previous readers, a wider-angle IPS display, improved wifi, and an “industry-first serial ticket interface that pays electronic tickets instantly.”
The company added: “None of it requires a truck roll, either. The whole system updates over the air, so improvements reach readers already on the floor, no tech visit needed. It’s a quiet advantage, and a hard one to copy.”
A couple other features include Installer Mode, which lets a tech scan a QR code and configure a room from a phone, and Offline Mode, which answers the question every operator asks before going cashless: What happens when the internet goes down? The answer: Tap a reader with a master card, and the room switches to free play with a cool-down feature, keeping guests in the building until the connection returns.
Both modes are patent-pending and were submitted for IAAPA’s Brass Ring Award. Both also shipped to existing customers at no additional cost, the company’s standing answer to what “continuous improvement” actually buys an operator.
Mobile Payment, Three Ways
With fewer guests arriving with cash each year, Amusement Connect’s mobile lineup covers three ways to meet them on their phone – MobileMech’s cloud-connected acceptors, the AMI Play app, and Player Connect, a white-labeled guest experience with nothing to download.
MobileMech, the company’s most awarded product (right), brings mobile payment and cloud-based tracking to games that keep their existing cash, coin and credit acceptors. That makes it the fit for bars, pool halls and street locations where a full card system isn’t feasible.
A partnership with AMI Entertainment lets guests spend AMI Play app funds (more than seven million downloads and counting) on games and music, while giving operators remote monitoring and automated collection reports.
Player Connect, the newest addition, is Amusement Connect’s consumer-facing solution. There’s no app to download either. All they need is their phone. Player Connect runs in the browser and white labels to the venue, using the operator’s arcade name and branding. Guests browse a filterable game list, choose single-play or multi-play pricing, and tap or scan to start. It also allows operators to use dynamic pricing.
Kiosks, Redemption and POS
The Paystation Steely XT is the full-size workhorse of the kiosk lineup, the company says. It’s a slim, all-metal, 69” tower with optional dual dispensers for up to 800 cards, a dual bill acceptor and custom wraps and screens.
Behind the hardware is a software suite the company has quietly broadened. Redemption Connect lets one employee with a wireless scanner serve up to four guests at once, with automatic low-stock alerts. Customer Connect is a cloud POS that sells attractions, party packages and game cards, handles tabs and gratuity, and manages employee timecards. Together they cover the two counters an operator has to staff, and both are built to run with fewer people behind them on a Saturday.
The Data Play
Amusement Connect said their most consequential improvements lately haven’t been physical at all.
AC Business Analytics, now in version 2.0 inside the AC Operator Dashboard, answers a question operators have always had to gauge on instinct: How will this game actually earn? The Break-Even Timing Report projects performance by business type and region and lets operators benchmark revenue against industry averages.
Because the platform is cloud-based, an operator can pull real-time numbers from every location on one screen or let the system email reports automatically. Alerts flag low cards, full cash boxes and machines needing service before a tech even leaves the shop.
That same dataset feeds the company’s annual Arcade Performance Report, now drawing on more than 100,000 machines. The 2026 edition found credit card payments outpacing cash 3 to 1, and 23% of the games in a typical room generating half its revenue.
The platform plays well with everything else in the building, too, with a growing list of integrations that includes Square, ROLLER, Qubica, GoTab, ClubSpeed and Bay Tek, plus open APIs.
New Backing, Same Leadership
The company boasts 24/7 U.S.-based support, which runs out of company headquarters in Kansas City with an extended team in Southeast Asia covering the U.K. and Australia in their own time zones.
That support model is what the company was most careful to protect this spring, they said, when they announced a “recapitalization with a strategic investment from Periscope Equity.” The private-equity firm focuses on founder-owned, technology-enabled service businesses.
New titles came with the deal: John Tarpley is now CEO and Frank Licausi has moved into a new role as chief customer and brand officer. Tom Jayroe, promoted to president in early 2025, continues running day-to-day operations, and the rest of the leadership team stayed put.
The founders said taking on a partner “was about building faster – not changing course.” “This partnership is about accelerating what we build for our customers,” Tarpley explained. “Periscope gives us the resources to push innovation even further and faster.”
Added Steve Jarmel, a partner at Periscope Equity: “Amusement Connect represents exactly the kind of company we look to partner with – a founder-led business with a reputation for service that customers genuinely rave about.”
Between now and the end of the year, Wally SE and CardMech SE will reach arcade floors and there will be a run of Player Connect expansions. AI-enabled features are taking flight across the lineup, too, built on nine years and more than 100,000 machines worth of data.
“This is the most exciting stretch of innovation we’ve had in front of us,” Tarpley said. “Every bit of it comes back to the same two things – more value for the operator, and a better experience for the guest standing in front of the game.”
“John and I had an idea at a dartboard nine years ago,” Licausi said. “Our team is the reason it turned into a company – the people who put every product through our own game rooms before an operator ever sees it, and the people who answer the phone at eight o’clock on a Saturday because they know what a dark game room costs an operator.”
Visit www.amusementconnect.com or call 833-727-2233 for more on the full lineup.