Don’t you love a good arcade? It’s hard to beat the lights, the sounds, and that adrenaline rush you get when notching a high score. Not all arcades are created equal, though—some are best experienced on a hot summer’s night. Here in Userlandia, we’re taking a vacation to the beachside arcade.

Along the east coast of the United States are numerous towns that live and die by the tidal wave of tourists that crash upon their beaches. Hundreds of hamlets from Rehoboth to Bar Harbor boast beaches and boardwalks guaranteeing a glamorous getaway from the complications of the city. Each one has its own claim to fame, but after visiting enough of them you’ll notice some recurring themes. Candy shops that craft delicious chocolate fudge and sticky saltwater taffy. Amusement parks that feature rides of indeterminable reliability. Gift stores that sell humorous T-shirts of questionable legality. But there’s one place that literally outshines them all: the town arcade.

One particular arcade lies on the rocky coast of southern Maine. In the village of York Beach is a nondescript white building emblazoned with the name Fun-O-Rama. Walk by in the morning when it’s closed and you might mistake it for a warehouse. But there’s no mistaking its purpose when the doors roll up and the light and sound burst forth from its confines and crash over Short Sands beach. It’s hard to imagine a time without Fun-O-Rama’s presence on the beach, but its history dates back to post-World War 2 America. When a bath house on Short Sands Beach was demolished in 1946 the land didn’t stay empty for long. Elmer Laughton, a York local who ran a jukebox and vending machine business, built Skateland on the site in 1946. Beachgoers spent their days rollerskating and enjoying penny arcade amusements. But by the time I first visited in the 1980s Skateland had long given way to Fun-O-Rama.

Your first impression when walking through the doors is that they don’t make arcades like this anymore. Its wooden floors host over a hundred machines of varying vintages. Everything is powered by good old-fashioned quarters dispensed by machines or—gasp—a human being! After collecting your cup of quarters, the next question is where to spend them. The plentiful players and conglomeration of cabinets might be overwhelming for the first-time visitor. But what appears to be a random arrangement of games is actually organized into a rather reasonable layout.

One corner is dedicated to sit-down driving games. Whether it’s cars, motorcycles, semi-trucks, or white-water rafting, there’s enough multiplayer options to satisfy everyone with a need for speed. Next to that is pinball row, featuring some classic tables like South Park, The Addams Family, Star Wars, and Theater of Magic. Walk past the ticket counter and into the back half and you’ll find rows of classic video game cabinets. Dig Dug, Asteroids, Ms. Pac-Man, oh my! Opposite those cabinets are games of chance, which let you risk your quarters for tickets or prizes. Oh, and there’s Skee-Ball too, because of course there’s Skee-Ball.

One credit for a 1980s video game costs a very 1980s price of one quarter. If you’re a Scrooge McDuck type looking for maximum play time for minimum money, you’ll want to check out the pinball tables. While a single game costs fifty cents, you can get three games for a dollar. That’s probably the best bang-for-buck in the building. The more modern video games ask for a dollar or more.

If you’ve never been to a beach arcade before, it’s easy to get sucked in by all the blinking, bleeping, and blooping. Games are packed together tightly to amplify their audiovisual assault on the senses. Nostalgic millennials team up to fight Mr. Burns in Konami’s Simpsons Arcade. Grizzled pinball gladiators bust bumpers and pull plungers for the glory of netting the next high score. Kids race from machine to machine, eager to try something new or win a bunch of tickets. And when they’re all done, they can step right up to the prize counter to trade in their tickets for the toy of their dreams. Or—let’s be honest—a few pieces of candy and some fake teeth.

Something Fun-O-Rama shares with its beach town brethren is a sense of history. Peppered throughout are connections to the penny arcades of old: the fortune tellers, the love testers, the finicky games that ask you to hit a moving target with a quarter to win tickets. Attractions like the clown face shooting gallery add a carnival vibe to the experience. Too many video arcades leaned into the space age whiz kids aesthetic during the video game boom years. Beach arcades might have adopted the new technology of the eighties, but their aesthetics are firmly rooted in the bustling boardwalks of the twentieth century.

Kids don’t care about ambiance and aesthetics, though. Kid me certainly didn’t; I was caught up in the excitement of winning tickets, or playing the newest game, or scoring a hundred-point shot in Skee-Ball. I eventually realized the cold, hard economics of tickets—there was no way I could rack up the thousands necessary for a big Lego set or portable TV. So I turned my attention to video games, and my family’s annual pilgrimage to York was a chance to experience the newest slate of arcade arrivals. I may have wised up to the ticket trap, but I had another harsh economic lesson to learn: what goes up must come down.

Despite Fun-O-Rama’s guaranteed beachfront crowd it wasn’t immune to the economic realities facing arcades. The purchase price of arcade video games in the 1990s rose in lockstep with their increasing graphical fidelity and mechanical complexity. These more expensive machines demanded more quarters, which meant less repeat plays. Rapid advancements in home video game consoles and PC gaming made them competitive with arcade graphics and sound. Rising capital costs and faltering revenues spelled game over for many arcades after the turn of the millennium. Northeast beach arcades had the same capital cost conundrum, but faced different customer challenges. Yes, they had a guaranteed stream of summer tourists, but their doors were only open for five, maybe six months of the year. And trips to the beach are some of the first things to get cut from family budgets when a recession rolls in.

By the aughts the era of multiple new games every summer at Fun-O-Rama were long gone. Now you’re lucky to get one new headline game every other year. For a while these were of the flashy ticket-dispensing or prize-withholding variety, but real games are making a comeback. The newest machines are Jurassic Park Arcade and Minecraft Dungeons, which are state of the art. But they’re also very expensive. How about showing the pinball fans some love by adding a table made, in, oh, the last decade or two?

I’d wager that about half of the machines in this fine establishment have been here since I was a kid. The Skee-Ball and Killer Klowns From Outer Space might even date back to the Skateland era. All the classic video game cabinets are survivors from the days when they were front and center. Most of the vehicle games have been parked in their corner since the 1990s. Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is probably the newest fighting game in the whole joint, with nary a peep from modern entrants like Street Fighter V. I rarely see anyone playing the old-fashioned games of chance, and honestly that was true twenty or thirty years ago.

Another hangover of the arcade malaise era are the large and complex full-motion machines. The Afterburners and sit-down Spy Hunters are long gone, of course, but the husks of Star Trek: Voyager and Super Alpine Racer are forsaken in the boneyard. I’m pretty sure the Cedar Point rollercoaster simulator hasn’t worked in over a decade. No one in the northeast even knows what Cedar Point is, so it’s no surprise that it hasn’t been fixed. But to leave it non-functional in the middle of prime floor real estate has always struck me as strange. Maybe it’s simply too heavy to evict.

Now, I’m not asking for Fun-O-Rama to turn over its inventory over every year or ditch perfectly functional classic machines. The rows of vintage pinball and video games are what separates places like this from Dave and Buster’s. Without the “Hey, I remember that” factor, these establishments lose a lot of their character. But the reality of classic games is that their risk of failure is higher. To Fun-O-Rama’s credit, the number of machines on the floor that are completely out of order are pretty low. Machines that are D-E-D dead are relegated to the boneyard in the back. They have a repair room and a technician to service machines in-house. But one can’t help from noticing the staffers frequently helping people with machines that eat their quarters. Sticky bumpers or misfiring mechanical features drain the fun out of pinball. Dead monitors put the brakes on multiplayer racing games. Maybe one of the Time Crisis guns doesn’t work, or the sniper sight in Silent Scope is on the fritz. There’s nothing more frustrating than trying an apparently working machine only to find it broken in some way.

Now, I’m aware that no arcade bats a thousand when it comes to functioning machines. This is especially true of classic games, where dwindling part supplies are a real concern. And I’ve seen machines that were out of order in June be restored to a working state in July. But the fact that most of these mechanically and electrically complex machines are generally working in spite of abuse from kids and tourists is a feat on its own. Fun-O-Rama isn’t an arcade museum, and your expectations must be set accordingly.

Truthfully, it’s not Fun-O-Rama that’s changed—I’ve changed. I know way more about the business of arcades now than I did thirty years ago. I eventually visited other beach arcades in Wells, Ogunquit, Hampton Beach, and Bar Harbor. They all shared a certain level of dankness; a kind of funhouse energy that inland arcades lacked. So even though they shared common elements like video games, pinball, and ticket counters, they also had unique reasons to visit one instead of another. The arcade is just another expression of the similar but different nature of the beach towns that host them. York Beach has Nubble Light, the Goldenrod, and Long Sands Beach but Old Orchard Beach has the Portland Headlight, Dickinsons, and… Old Orchard Beach. So it’s no surprise that there’s Fun-O-Rama to face off against Palace Playland.

Knowing about the business of arcades also means I can appreciate Fun-O-Rama on its own terms. Let’s be real: the sun and surf are the primary reason to go to a beach town. Arcade games are just a bonus. If I want to visit a destination arcade, I’d go out of my way to places like the American Classic Arcade Museum in Laconia, New Hampshire or Pastime Pinball in Manchester, Vermont. While kids are allowed inside, they’re not for children. They’ve got more games, a nicer presentation, and they don’t operate like an all-ages casino. If what you’re after is a hardcore arcade experience, those places are more your style.

Fun-O-Rama isn’t here to be the ultra-serious arcade experience for the discerning gamer, and that’s OK. I’ve caught myself griping about how “it’s not how it used to be,” but that’s only from one perspective. In the eighties, the video games and amusements took my money in exchange for fleeting entertainment. Thirty-odd years later, is it really any different? The beach arcade is a cultural signifier; a signpost for fun. It’s all part of a beach town’s charming illusion that this is the way life should be. So mash those buttons, get that high score, and forget about your troubles for a while. What you’re buying with a Dixie cup of quarters isn’t a few rounds of Galaga; you’re buying memories. Whether you’re a kid making them or an adult reliving them, you’ll cherish every one.