Wood: Knox bars quench thirst for videogames

By Greg Wood
Thursday, July 2, 2009

Greg Wood

Brandon Blevins tries his hand at a videogame in the Fort Sanders Yacht Club barcade.

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Mars Massengale, left, and Ian Lawrence spend a little time at the bar at Fort Sanders Yacht Club.

Sharing a moment at Fort Sanders Yacht Club are Brooke Lindsey, left, and Jay Ramirez.

Videogames serve as a good place to rest a favorite beverage (as well as a kitschy lamp), as Matthew Miller, left, and Matt Burkhart demonstrate at Fort Sanders Yacht Club.

My generation is never going to grow up.

As we reach our 20s and 30s, we're still obsessed with videogames. And it isn't necessarily new videogames, nor is it the mindless entertainment thereof. We enjoy Nintendo and Super Nintendo games as we did the first time we played. Only with 20 years of practice under our belts, we know all the secret moves and levels and can beat the games in under 10 minutes.

Shirts bearing the logo "Know Your Roots" and a photo of the original NES controller abound in the year 2009. As do bumper stickers reading "my boss is an Italian plumber," a reference to the protagonist of the Super Mario Bros series (and the less-succesful Mario Bros arcade game), Mario.

We have a deep-seeded nostalgia for the '80s.

We shamelessly attend various "'80s night" parties wearing thrift-store acquired jean jackets and dance the night away to the B-52's, INXS and Tears for Fears even though the only things about the decade most of us can remember are the Energizer Bunny and people smoking cigarettes in every single public place imaginable, including the mall.

I recently turned 25. Our legendary friend, Mario, turned 26 this year. I feel as if I've been raised by the guy.

Seriously.

When I was 6 years old and had the chickenpox, keeping my hands glued to the Nintendo controller and attempting to save the Princess, the first Super Mario Bros game kept me from scratching away and permanently scarring myself.

Coinciding with my generation reaching bar-hopping age, there's a nationwide craze for videogames in bars.

True, in the '80s and '90s maybe it wasn't quite as practical to put game systems in bars, but the transition to high-def television sets made way for the current generation of gaming systems (Wii, Xbox 360, Playstation 3) as a sort of 21st century pool table in bars.

The nationwide trend is catching on in Knoxville. Ray's ESG, popular with 30-somethings, has a Wii tournament on Monday nights. New Amsterdam, a college student hangout, offers the same occasionally. The Pearl, an all-ages cereal bar in the Old City, offers Guitar Hero for its patrons.

It seems like every day another venue in town is catching on to videogames.

On a recent episode of "The Tonight Show" with Conan O'Brien, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog traveled to the Bonnaroo festival and mocked those who paid $300-plus to get in only to spend their time at the Xbox 360 tent playing the same games they play at home.

Triumph asks a question many wonder: "Why leave the house to play videogames?"

There are two answers to that.

First, we're not really leaving the house for the sake of playing videogames. But if they happen to be at the bar, you'd better believe we're getting in line for a Wii Tennis match or a Guitar Hero showdown. The only thing more entertaining than simplistic videogames is simplistic videogames mixed with alcohol.

Secondly, it's the perplexing '80s nostalgia we all have.

We want to go to the arcade, but we don't want the arcade feel. We don't want to hear kids yelling and 100-plus systems going off at once.

This has resulted in "barcades" popping up across the country, and Knoxville has one called the Fort Sanders Yacht Club.

There are roughly 15 arcade systems in the barcade, dating from 1979 to roughly 1993. There are classics like Street Fighter II, Dig Dug, Galaga and Ms. Pac-Man. It even has hard-to-find game Tapper, where you are (appropriately) a bartender serving beverages.

What's most interesting about the Yacht Club is it hones in on that '80s nostalgia with contemporary pop culture. Blaring over the PA you'll hear bands like Modest Mouse, which sounds kind of like a cracked-out version of '80s band Echo and the Bunnymen, and they're known to play Nine Inch Nails, whose music very well may be sampling Nintendo's 8-bit sounds.

The Yacht Club is a place where we can go to appreciate classic icons from our childhood yet still act the age we actually are. And it most certainly does not get old, even if we do.

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