Dwayne Houghton says the new retro-style shop brings fun for all ages. Photo: Bay Arcade 2536/Facebook.
When it’s a rainy day and the kids are climbing the walls, what do you do? Dwayne Houghton and his partner, Bianca Caldwell, have been there and have recently opened Bay Arcade 2536 to help parents in the same position.
“We were looking at buying a house, and then we’re like, ‘Let’s hang on a second’,” Dwayne told Region.
“Our kids love fishing – but when the weather is not the best, they can’t go fishing and then there’s nothing else to do.
“If you wanted to have any arcade-type entertainment, you needed to travel.”
The pair decided to create something close to home – an arcade in coastal NSW, packed with vintage games and machines (think pinball or Daytona USA).
He said for a lot of parents, finding something for their kids that was convenient was key.
“We would go to Canberra [for] any activities for kids, basically, because our kids are ranging from eight to 14.
“We’ve got busy schedules; it’s hard to take four hours of a day to drive to Canberra and back, just to spend two hours with entertainment. That’s a whole day event.”
The process began in March, when Dwayne and Bianca started collecting machines for their store.
They travelled to Orange, in the NSW Central Tablelands region, after an arcade in that town started selling their machines.
Dwayne said their hunt also took them online and overseas as they searched for the missing machines in their collection.
“The hard part was getting them all into Batemans Bay, storing them all till we actually got the keys [to the storefront]. Then I started the process of bringing in the machines myself to save as much money as we could.
“We had a house full of machines, a garage full of machines … we had to hire a couple of storage units to hold more machines.”
Dwayne said the arcade ended up going “old-school”.
“I’m 42, so when I was younger, arcades used to take tokens and physical tickets would come out of the machines,” he said.
“Nowadays, it’s all on a little ATM card where the kids just tap the machine … they have no way to tell how much a game cost or how much money they have left,” he said.
“We wanted that experience of ‘this is how much you put in’ and then, you get physical stuff [in return].”
He said even big kids had been visiting the arcade and trying their hands at the games (that is, showing the kids how it’s done).
Dwayne said the arcade was meant to become a space where kids and teens could sit down and spend some time relaxing.
It is also able to host birthday parties, work functions and other events.
“We’ve got free wi-fi. There’s no obligation [to play] … instead of them roaming the streets and causing trouble, they can come in.”
“We have lounges – [kids can] sit down, chill, charge their phones.”
Dwayne said locals were always welcome to test their skills against the visitors from the big smoke.
“We are hoping for all the tourists to come down and check it out, because if they bring their kids down and its either too hot or raining, they’ve got somewhere to come and do something,” he said.
“The kids are used to Canberra, where there’s a lot of stuff. When they come down here, they get bored pretty easily when it’s not swimming weather, or there’s no movie to watch or they don’t want to fish.”
Bay Arcade 2536 is located Shop G22, 1 Perry Street, in Batemans Bay. People can find its opening hours on its Facebook page.
