Big Success for Electric Bat Arcade’s Pinball Leagues, Tournaments
Pop-A-Shot Elite Now Part of the Magic at Tempe Game Room
by Matt Harding
Electric Bat Arcade opened in Tempe, Arizona, more than seven years ago as part of the historic Yucca Tap Room. The bar has been around for more than 50 years, and the owners approached pinball aficionado Rachel Bess with the idea for a small arcade. Yucca Tap Room and Electric Bat Arcade have been attached ever since.
As her husband and Electric Bat’s marketing manager Cale Hernandez explained: “The guys at Yucca Tap Room had the vision that the bar really needed an arcade. At that point, they had a restaurant, alcohol and live music. It felt like more entertainment would bring them into the future. Now the arcade’s almost bigger than the original bar it was attached to.”
Hernandez and Bess initially met through their shared work at Marco Specialties, the South Carolina-based pinball parts supplier. Hernandez admits, when he stumbled into a graphic design job at the company, “I didn’t even know pinball was still a thing.”
Bess, meanwhile, had been involved in the pinball scene for a while and was part of a league. Opening Electric Bat Arcade meant “there was a new place to play.” They launched with 13 pinball machines, a bubble hockey game, and 10 standup arcade games and shooters.
“We started hosting pinball tournaments pretty much immediately,” she said. “The tournament players – we were already friends. It was an easy transition.”
Hernandez added: “We got a lot of help from the bar we were attached to.” People would initially come for drinks or live shows and then pop over into the arcade. Also being open from 6 a.m.-2 a.m. every day, “It really allows a different crowd to be introduced to pinball.”
Yucca Tap Room held those hours for decades, so it only made sense to operate the arcade that way, too. The state liquor board requires the closure. Otherwise, they’d be open 24/7.
“Part of the magic sauce is our hours,” he said. “It’s almost easier to advertise when we’re closed. Not everybody’s here at one time, so you can really feel like you have the arcade to yourself.”
Of course, every Tuesday night, the place packs right up. That’s league night and there are 130 people in the league, which runs various tournaments year-round. “Our league is the largest single-location pinball league in the world,” Bess touted. “We are busy at all different times but having the leagues and tournaments creates that rabid player base.”
Three years ago, they expanded into their current space (they’d previously expanded into additional units in the strip mall they’re in). “Rachel just used the office of the Tap Room,” said Hernandez. “The catalyst for the expansion was the pinball tournaments. More and more people started coming and it was getting hard to move around.”
Now, they have 65 pinball machines, 12 Japanese rhythm games, some standup arcade games and the latest addition, a Pop-A-Shot Elite (more on that shortly). Yucca Tap Room does the food and beverage but there is a tiki bar located inside the arcade itself.
Guests enter the arcade through the taproom. Make your way past the stage and there’s a double doorway into the arcade, which features three progressively larger rooms that you go through – thanks to those expansions over the years.
Bess said new Stern games always do well in the arcade. Star Wars and Godzilla are a couple of the top ones at the moment (though you may get more up-to-date numbers via an earnings report segment on their Electric Bat Cast podcast).
They also have vintage games, starting from 1978, that are priced at 50 cents a play. Games are mixed up so none get ignored. A couple classics include Joker Poker and Sinbad.
Electric Bat Arcade is also 100% coin-op – running on tokens and quarters. “We love the feel of the arcade like when we were kids,” Hernandez explained.
Back to that Pop-A-Shot Elite basketball game, Bess said, “We met Ryan (Cravens) when he was working at Stern and have been friends since.” Cravens, now the VP of arcade products at Pop-A-Shot, got in touch with Electric Bat Arcade and convinced them to get a machine and take part in their Virtual League.
“At first, we turned him down, thinking about size considerations, but Rachel brought out the tape measure, and we thought we could make it work. It’s not really much wider than a pinball machine,” Hernandez said. “This machine is really beautiful. It has a leaderboard integrated into the LCD screen where the backboard would typically be. It’s been our highest-earning machine in the entire arcade.” (By the way, Season 2 of Pop-A-Shot’s Virtual League, which runs for eight weeks, began Jan. 12. Learn more about it at www. popashot.net.)
In addition to Rachel and Cale, staff at the Electric Bat Arcade includes mainly bartenders and a couple of arcade employees – seven in total. Bess and Hernandez handle most of the technical fixes, though one of the bartenders is a junior tech and training to do more.
“She’s much more qualified than I am but I learned how to work on machines when I worked at Marco Specialties and was doing customer service,” Hernandez said. “I learned about the parts and how to troubleshoot with operators over the phone. Until I married Rachel and started working in the arcade, I had never actually opened a machine.”
Bess, meanwhile, has been playing pinball since her early teenage years, sneaking into bars just to play the games.
Bringing that kind of passion to more generations of pinball players is at the core of what they do at the almost-open-24/7 Electric Bat Arcade.
A developer has plans to spruce up the strip mall they’re a part of, which has been untouched since the late 1960s. A courtyard for live entertainment and more shops are expected. It’ll be a large project, and will take some time to come to fruition, but the arcade bar is excited to be at the center of it.
You can learn more about them online at www.electricbatarcade.com.