Which of these two arcades is the “world largest”—and does it matter? is currently attracting attention in the technology world.
Experts believe this development may influence how digital platforms evolve
over the coming years.
The topic has already sparked discussions among developers, analysts,
and industry observers who are closely monitoring how the situation unfolds.
In New Hampshire, just off the western shore of the vacation destination Lake Winnipesaukee, there’s a town called Laconia. With a population somewhere south of 17,000, it’s barely a blip on a map—except on Bike Week, when around 300,000 motorcyclists swarm the place. On the other, quieter weeks of the year, Laconia is best known as the unlikely home of Funspot, the world’s largest arcade.
Meanwhile, in Brookfield, Illinois, about 45 minutes west of Chicago and the shores of Lake Michigan, you’ll find Galloping Ghost Arcade, a sprawling suburban palace with a nondescript exterior hiding a mind-blowing collection. With over 1,000 arcade cabinets (plus a further 46 pinball machines), Galloping Ghost is the world’s largest arcade.
Yes, there are two arcades in the US labeled as the world’s largest, and while that may seem a bit paradoxical, a visit to both proves that while only one can be the biggest, both are the greatest.
We’ll start with the eldest of the two. Funspot’s origin story dates back to 1952, when Robert M. Lawton founded it as an indoor mini-golf and penny-arcade pavilion. Over the years, its location has changed and expanded, a fact evident in its architecture: a series of loosely connected buildings spread across a gentle slope.
It can be a bit hard to know which of those buildings to enter, but so long as you steer clear of the Funspot Bingo Hall, you’ll eventually arrive in video game paradise.
Funspot is spread across multiple floors of a discordant series of structures, housing everything from a throwback mini-golf course to a small go-kart track for the little ones. There’s even a 20-lane bowling alley. It’s all inside and protected from the harsh northeastern weather, making Funspot a four-season source of entertainment.
I wasn’t interested in any of that, though. The primary attraction for me was the American Classic Arcade Museum, or ACAM. This nonprofit organization houses and preserves vintage arcade machines put into play through the late 1980s. The project was the idea of Gary Vincent, a long-time Funspot employee who proposed organizing the arcade’s disparate collection of vintage machines into a sort of on-site interactive museum.
“I was always, even as a young kid, fascinated by museums. There was just something about them,” Vincent said. He saw the same fascination in the eyes of many Funspot attendees when they stumbled across classic machines like Defender or Ms. Pac-Man. “And in September of ’98, I said, ‘You know, what? Can I take what’s left of the old games here and put them in one area up on the third floor and kind of make a museum out of it?’”
Today, ACAM is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit entity housing roughly 270 vintage arcade machines. The best part? They’re all up for play.
Well, almost all of them. You’ll find a few particularly rare titles hermetically sealed in giant acrylic boxes to protect them from the elements—and from little fingers. One is a game called Mystic Marathon. “We have one of the five original prototypes that was made to test the game,” Vincent said. “This is the one that actually belonged to Kristina Donofrio, the woman who programmed the game.”
That’s just one of the arcade[s many rarities, all beautifully laid out in an expansive, red-carpeted room with just barely enough lighting to keep you from tripping over your friends as you wander around, mouth agape.
The constant trilling tones of all those vintage machines make for a discordant symphony better than any orchestra could produce. You also get a whiff of the pizza and french fries from the cafeteria down the hall. Like Proust with his madeleines, it’s enough to warp any child of the ’80s back to simpler times.
But this place will seem familiar for another reason: Large portions of the hit 2007 documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters were filmed here, where Steve Wiebe set a then-record high score of 985,600 on Donkey Kong. Wiebe hit the kill screen that day, but of course, the controversy would linger for much longer.
Plenty of other records have been set here over the years, many in collaboration with Guinness World Records, which officially certified Funspot as the “World’s Largest Videogame Arcade” in 2008.
Guinness reached out to Funspot, offering the title. “So I said, ‘Oh, OK,’” Vincent said. “I didn’t know what any of the parameters were for it. Never submitted anything to them.”
The official Guinness record counts 581 machines. Vincent says the number is closer to 600 total at this point. Yes, that means there are many more here than the ACAM collection, including plenty of my favorites from the ’90s and beyond, like Sega’s Daytona USA, plus dozens of newer games, like Pac-Man Battle Royale.
You’ll find a healthy selection of pinball machines, too—it’s a good mix of classic and modern titles. Impressively, nearly all were operational when I visited, which is a major accomplishment given their fickle nature. Vincent says that sourcing parts and keeping the elder machines operational is becoming increasingly difficult because they’re so far beyond anything the original manufacturers envisioned. “They wanted you to buy a machine, and especially on the video game side, run it for six or nine months, and then get rid of it and buy the next greatest thing that’s coming out,” he said.
Keeping everything running is a huge challenge, and it’s funded by a steady stream of tokens. Twenty dollars at Funspot gets you 110 copper coins, and while most of the classic machines take only one or two, the bigger, more modern ones demand up to four. Regardless, your $20 will keep you busy here for a very long time, and a good one at that.
Galloping Ghost is situated about 20 minutes south of O’Hare International Airport on a busy street dotted with colorful Mexican restaurants, plus other, more menial fare. The arcade can be a bit hard to find, if only because it’s just one business out of a veritable sea of establishments bearing the logo of a cartoon ghost riding a hobby horse.
You don’t want the building housing Galloping Ghost Productions, as that’s a video game advancement company. You’ll find Galloping Ghost Reproductions next door, a distributor of arcade machine components, but that’s not right, either. You should also steer clear of Galloping Ghost Gym unless you’re looking for a little workout before an afternoon of button-mashing, and if you hit Galloping Ghost Garage, you’ve gone too far.
Amid that collection of co-branded businesses, you’re looking for a nondescript series of conjoined buildings on Ogden Avenue with a sign modestly proclaiming that you’re at “The Largest Arcade in the World.” From the outside, Galloping Ghost Arcade is a more compact facility than Funspot, which made me skeptical of that claim. But as soon as I walked in, I quickly changed my tune.
Galloping Ghost may lack Funspot’s expansive volume, but it certainly has density on its side. From your first steps inside the door, you’re hit with the sights and sounds of dozens and dozens of machines.
“It’s kind of just like you’re being slingshot right back into the ’80s,” said Tom Nieter, the manager and curator of the Galloping Ghost arcade. “Some legendary attract modes are instantly just hitting your ears. Altered Beast and Shinobi are right up front.”
But before you can rise from your grave or whip out the throwing stars, you need to visit the front desk and pay your dues: $25 for access all day, or another $5 if you want to add on access to the separate pinball facility down the street.
There, beneath a collection of toy ghosts hanging from the ceiling threatening to haunt you for life if you chew any gum, you’ll pay your fee, enter the facility, and immediately feel overwhelmed.
“I definitely suggest everyone take a lap around the whole place,” Nieter said. “It’s basically the size of a Home Depot. You’re going to be scoping out all the games. Make a list of what you want to play. To be honest, that alone probably takes about 45 minutes.”
Galloping Ghost grew out of a video game advancement company founded in the early ’90s. The arcade proper opened in 2010 with roughly 130 games, and it has been growing steadily ever since, taking over neighboring businesses and buildings along the way. Every Monday, the arcade adds yet another game to its collection.
That’s a wild pace of expansion. Nieter says the arcade currently houses 1,067 games, a ridiculous number but one I don’t doubt. That includes a fair few games that Nieter believes you can only play here, like Midway’s Power Up Baseball, an ill-fated attempt to bring the energy of NBA Jam to the diamond.
You’ll also find games from international markets, including dozens of shoot-’em-ups from Japan that never saw American release, and other oddities, like The Spectre Files: Deathstalker, a semi-interactive full-motion adventure.
I consider myself something of a gaming expert, and I was humbled when I saw dozens of games I had never heard of before. Galloping Ghost even has a Sega R360 machine, a giant arcade contraption capable of swinging players upside-down in a nausea-inducing demonstration of ’90s arcade excess. It’s sadly broken at the moment, needing a new monitor, but I’m confident the Galloping Ghost gurus will have it spinning soon.
Keeping all these machines operational is indeed a full-time job. “We have guys working around the clock, six to seven days a week,” Nieter said. Those technicians are passionate about maintaining the accuracy of the original experience, meaning no LCD replacements where glowing CRTs should be found.
Despite having over 1,000 arcade machines on the floor, I spotted only a dozen or so that were inoperable. The vast majority were up and screaming for attention, even the ultra-rare ones.
Sadly, the same can’t be said of Galloping Ghost’s pinball facility down the street. There were 46 machines on display, including some rare gems like Revenge from Mars and a two-player Joust. But nearly a third were powered down. $5 is still a bargain, but I wish more had been operable.
That didn’t dampen my spirits much, though. The overall collection at Galloping Ghost is dizzying in its breadth and density. I was there for two consecutive days, and I spent more time wandering around in amazement than actually playing.
I feel like I barely scratched the surface of what’s available to play, yet I know that the next time I visit, that portfolio of playable machines will be only greater.
Spend an hour wandering around Funspot, and you’ll be left with the confident belief that you have toured the world’s largest arcade. It’s big and confusing enough to get lost in, which is part of the fun.
Galloping Ghost is likewise a bit maze-like, thanks to the collection of adjacent buildings all subsumed into one. Its symmetric exterior makes it much easier to get your head around, but trying to consider the wondrous collection inside is a little like gazing into a Lovecraftian abyss without losing your sanity.
Which place, though, is the world’s largest? I contacted the Guinness Book of World Records, which confirmed that the 2016 update to the record for Funspot is indeed based on the number of games, not square footage.
Interestingly, though, Guinness also recognizes another arcade, Grand Prix Race-O-Rama in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as being the World’s Largest, with somewhere around 1,000 games. That arcade sadly went out of business, though, meaning it’s given a posthumous “World’s Largest Ever.”
Funspot is still listed as the official Largest Videogame Arcade (current), then.
“There’s a bit of semantics that comes into play. I think in terms of unique games, we’ve had them beat since around the 600 mark,” Galloping Ghost’s Tom Nieter said.
“I know Galloping Ghost has over 1,000,” Funspot’s Gary Vincent said. “I’m not sure why they haven’t reached out to Guinness,” he said.
To officially get that title, Galloping Ghost would likely need to pay a Guinness adjudicator to certify its collection. It doesn’t seem like the crew there is in any hurry to do so, and in the interim, neither arcade seems concerned about sharing the honors.
“There’s definitely respect among all arcade owners,” Nieter said. “They’re totally cool. We’re kind of just doing our own thing. And, yeah, Funspot is very, very famous, though, a great spot.” Vincent was equally complimentary about Galloping Ghost.
While I’m certainly not a Guinness adjudicator, if we’re talking number of games, there’s no question: Galloping Ghost takes the title.
However, Funspot is far more expansive. That extra space also gives room to showcase the games with reverence. It really does feel like a museum in there, not despite the cacophonous soundtrack blaring from each machine but thanks to it.
So counterintuitive though it may be, I am in full support of both of these arcades continuing to call themselves World’s Largest. They’re both well worth a visit, and we’re lucky to live in a world where both are open for business.
Why This Matters
This development highlights the rapid pace of innovation in the technology sector.
Companies are constantly pushing boundaries in order to stay competitive.
Analysts suggest that such changes could influence future product design,
user expectations, and industry standards.
Looking Ahead
As technology continues to evolve, developments like this may shape the next
generation of digital services and consumer experiences.
Industry watchers will continue to monitor how this story develops and what
impact it may have on the broader technology landscape.