Where Talent, Need & Passion Meet 

Game Tech Starts Service Route, Opens Arcade in Georgia Mall

by Matt Harding

Shane Starr, the owner of Starrcade Amusements, started out his decade-plus career in the industry as a hobbyist.

As a college kid, he had a Qix cabinet from the early ’80s that he converted into a multicade. “I used a broken Xbox controller as the USB interface and soldered all the joystick controls and buttons to the board,” he explained. “It was a chop-shop, mad-science little project.”

His soldering experience and tinkering with electronics eventually got him hired at Chuck E. Cheese, where he went on to become a facilities manager.

More recently, he worked with Round1. During Covid, he said that the company was using the time to open new stores and flying all of the local-level store technicians around the country to set up the new venues.

“I felt like every two weeks – I was basically living in hotels opening store after store after store in 2020,” Starr recalled. “Going into 2021, I realized there must be a labor shortage in our industry if it was more cost effective to fly techs out instead of finding local technicians.”

He was also furloughed at one point during the pandemic and started doing repairs on the side for individuals. And he began to refurbish games and sell them, too. It wasn’t long before he was making more money doing that than as a senior tech for Round1.

“I started establishing contracts with the local mom and pop arcades,” Starr said. “There was this big hole in the market. It just started as me and some of my colleagues that left Round1.”

The repair service route began to take shape in metro Atlanta in September 2021. At that point, he had 5-6 contracts and hired a small office team and grew enough to stop operating out of his garage, instead opting for a warehouse in Woodstock, Georgia.

Starrcade Amusements built a partnership with Betson as a parts supplier and now works extensively with Amusement Connect as third-party installers for their cashless systems. They also count clients in Costley Entertainment for their Cici’s Pizza locations, Sky Zone, Fun City and Bob’s Space Racers. They also do warranty work for ICE and Bandai Namco.

Now up to a team of 15 – 10 of them traveling technicians – Starr’s company has expanded to service the entire Southeast and also has partners in Southern California. He also has some in-office people who handle advanced placements and organize everything for the techs. “We’re kind of like a one-stop-shop for our customers,” he said, noting they handle parts orders, tracking and a whole lot more.

“Every week, we build out our route for the following week,” Starr further detailed. Service agreements are for six months up to a year, and the biz is jam-packed until well into 2027. While there are a lot of arcades to be serviced along the route, there are also a lot of profit-share operators who contract Starrcade Amusements to service machines from time to time.

As he spoke to RePlay, Starr was in the middle of one of his circular repair routes. He started in Atlanta, headed to Memphis, back down to Mississippi and Louisiana before working his way through the Florida Panhandle back into Atlanta.

Of course, techs roll around in a service van, and two or three arcade machines can fit if they happen to come across something interesting on the road (and they have trailer hitches, too, if absolutely necessary.

Spark for An Arcade No, a Starrcade!

About two years into service, the route was mostly contracting with mom and pop arcades without their own dedicated technicians. Many of them would have 15-20-year-old equipment that was “still state-of-the-art in small towns,” like an original Ice Ball.

“We know how to work on all those – those are our bread and butter,” Starr said. These venues might not be able to afford a full-time tech, but they can contract Starrcade for five hours a month.

He kept on coming across unused classics. “I grew up in the ’90s with Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam. They would have those games squirreled away, covered in a tarp, and tell me, ‘That game was here when I bought the the building. It’s a piece of junk.’”
Well, one man’s trash is another’s arcade. “Either they would ask us to haul it away for free or we would give them a break on our labor,” Starr said.

The original plan was to rehab the games and sell them. But their warehouse slowly became a retro game storage unit. From there, it served as a way to train new technicians on those games.

“At some point, I had friends and family telling me we should open up the warehouse to the public,” he mentioned.

So, after finding a former department store space in a local mall with “dirt-cheap rent,” he ended up turning that into his warehouse – part arcade (aptly named Starrcade), part offices for the service route (which brings in some 80% of the business; he called his new arcade a “passion project”).

Right across the street from Kennesaw State University at the Town Center at Cobb mall, Starrcade packs about 90 games into a 3,400-sq.-ft. space, double the space of their original warehouse. It’s a range of classic games dating from the 1980s into the early aughts, including one-of-a-kind games imported from Japan.

“We service arcades all over the country, and a lot of the high-budget arcades tend to have the same games over and over again,” Starr reported. “Everybody says we have hidden gems.” Many of their machines are rare and harder to keep running because they don’t make parts for a lot of them anymore.

Since the arcade is bursting at the seams, with such a huge inventory of retro cabinets, Starr has decided to open an arcade bar concept in Marietta. Called Satellite, the venue is set for a late March opening.

“Every game we have is a banger,” Starr boasted. “There’s no filler in our arcade.” It’s a mix of pinball and video games.

He cited Pinpoint Shot, a rifle shooting attraction from the late ’90s as the rarest. “To my knowledge, there’s not another one in operation in the country, if not the world,” he said. Arcade aficionados regularly leave reviews like one that stuck out in Starr’s memory: “Games you would expect to find at a museum.”

But this is no museum. It’s a living, breathing arcade. “I like that people can come play our games like they’re supposed to be played. I know I’m not running a museum. Kids beat the crap out of some of these games. We just try to keep the games original and operating.”

With no nearby anchor in their wing of the mall, Starrcade is the attraction and they get a “whole lot of regulars,” many of whom Starr described as “alternative kids” who come in to play the music games and other Japanese favorites. Wednesdays are popular because they offer half-price on the music games. Old Sega UFO Catcher cranes are also a big draw, filled to the brim with Japanese plush.

Sure, it’s not a museum, but Starrcade pays homage to the industry’s history through his games and some vintage issues of RePlay, too, which he keeps on the front counter for guests to look through.

“It’s fun to be able to flip through and see an ad for a game that’s still operating in our arcade – like NBA Jam,” he said.

Starr found them in a dilapidated warehouse that was owned by an operator who used to have a beach arcade called Power Play in Meridian, Mississippi. “We go into this warehouse. The ceiling has collapsed. Everything’s covered in cobwebs and dirt. That’s actually where I found my Cosmo Gang.

“And being that I’m a big industry nerd … I went up into their old office and found torn-open boxes and a bookshelf that was full of RePlay magazines from the ’90s. I took as many as I could fit in a box.”

Maybe we’re partial, but that’s pretty cool! Thanks, Starrcade, for helping preserve a bit of our history as well as the industry’s. Learn more about the service route and arcade at www.starrcade.com.