Interview: 'The Lost Arcade', The Brilliant Documentary About Chinatown's Last Videogame Arcade

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The Lost Arcade
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The Lost Arcade

Depending on your age, you might have fond memories of putting endless coins into Street Fighter or Time Crisis arcade machines, usually on some boring seaside family holiday. Or maybe you’re young enough that the idea of actually having to go to a physical location to play videogames against other people seems insane, instead of just logging into Xbox Live. 

Videogame arcades have all but disappeared from malls and high streets in the West these days, as modern games consoles can offer everything a high end coin-op cabinet can, and online play gives you and endless stream of new opponents without leaving your house. But something they can’t replicate is the experience of hanging out, in person with other humans. A new documentary called The Lost Arcade captures the undefinable magic of these dusty old meeting points. It tells the story of ‘Chinatown Fair’, one of the last remaining arcade in New York’s Chinatown, as it faces closure. Chinatown Fair had become a mythical location, a hangout and safe space for a diverse young crowd, attracting both god-level Street Fighter and Dance Dance Revolution players, and kids trying to escape the world. The film serves as both a social history of NY and a chronicle of the human stories of its owners and patrons, including runaway kids who ended sleeping and eventually working at the arcade, and its eccentric elderly owner who became a surrogate parent to some of them (and also knew nothing about videogames). It’s also a great looking documentary — old footage of New York always looks cool, but this captures the neon of the cabinets like a Michael Mann film, accompanied by an appropriate electro score. 

We spoke to director Kurt Vincent and producer Irene Chin chat about making the film, the growing acceptance of games in the mainstream, and how Chinatown Fair is holding out today. 

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So how did you come across Chinatown Fair?

Irene: We were actually out meeting friends our Chinatown, and I realised I didn’t have my ID, so we weren’t able to get into the bar we wanted to. But I’d just read about this arcade, ‘Chinatown Fair’ that’s been there forever, so we checked it out. It was January, a really cold night and it there was no one on the street apart from this wild place. All these teenagers were hanging out outside. It was like “What’s this all about? This is crazy.” So we step inside and it was like being transported into another dimension. It was something special.

It had a pretty diverse crowd, right?

Kurt: Yeah, there was a lot of different types of people there. Black kids from Harlem, Hispanic kids from the Lower East Side, Chinese kids from Chinatown. It also meant a lot of LGBT kids came to Chinatown Fair because it was like [safe] space, it was like a refuge or shelter.They didn’t come for the games originally, they went maybe because their friends knew the place, and they could hang out and not get bothered. And then from seeing people playing games there, they became gamers. 

The film doesn’t consciously explain what Street Fighter or DDR are — you just see people playing them and it makes sense — did you ever have primers on the games in there?

K: We definitely went down that route, and we had a Street Fighter section because I was outsider being educated about this subculture. And then when we’d watch it didn’t feel right, and that the movie was really about people and their stories. And Street Fighter is pretty easy to understand. 

There seems to be a new wave of great documentaries about games, with films like The King of Kong, Indie Game and Atari: Game Over. Have you experienced any older critics or film festival programmers being snooty about games, or not understanding why people should care about arcades?

I: I would say no, actually. The film community actually relates to in the way that cinemas are going. They related to this underground community trying to keep film alive, showing actual film prints and things like that. And we had a film programmer talk about that, how it relates to what he’s doing, trying to keep film alive. And we though that was a really interesting parallel.

K: I think I was expecting a lot more people to be wary of the movie but videogame culture is so much larger than people realise, and it dates back to the early 70s. So the people that are programming festivals and theatres, and writers, grew up in the age of videogames. It’s hard to find one who doesn’t have some relation to videogames. I don’t consider myself a ‘gamer’, but I love videogames. 

I think some people expect it to be a real niche videogame film that will connect to people who only play games. And that’s strange to me. And I think that’s because videogames still have this stigma that’s slowly being shaken off. If you told somebody you made a documentary about boxing, I don’t think people would say you have to like boxing to appreciate the movie. But with videogames it’s weird. When people hear that I’m not a gamer [they’re shocked], but you don’t have to be a gamer to appreciate games and the stories around them. Maybe we’re slightly ahead. You listed a string of videogame movies, and that’s just the beginning. 

The Lost Arcade
The Lost Arcade
The Lost Arcade

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