Flynn's Arcade

It seems that Disney took my advice and built Flynn's Arcade. Unfortunately I wasn't specific enough about it and they stuck it over in California Adventure instead of Disneyland. I went down there to check it out in December. They only had it open on Saturdays and Sundays during ElecTRONica. So I got there on Sunday, and a nice surprise, I met some of my long lost family there, but they didn't have passes to California Adventure and were only gonna be around on Sunday...I'm sure you can see where this is going. I wasn't about to leave them just to go see an arcade, because I miss them too much. We had a really good time at Disneyland.

Disney said that as they get closer to the premier of TRON Legacy that they would have ElecTRONica every night. Well I was there premier week and it wasn't happening. I was informed Monday by a cast member that the arcade was open only on the weekends. I went back to the arcade area anyways and I could walk right up and look in the windows, but it was closed. The outside facade looked half cool and half half-assed.

Arms raised in defeat.

Looking in the window, it was all old school American style cabs, no deluxe games, and I could see the arcade version of Space Paranoids right near the front doors. They had some neat neon Galaga bugs on the wall, unlit, and I read somewhere that when it's open it has nothing but 80's music playing on the stereo.
There are nice pictures of every game Here.
Some people, myself included, were complaining that there is no list of the games at Flynn's Arcade online. So I'm putting one together. They appear to have:

Space Paranoids
Tron
Donkey Kong Junior
Centipede
Punch-Out!!!
Super Cobra
Targ
Wizard of Wor
Pac-Man
Galaxian
Galaga
Donkey Kong
Dig Dug
Gauntlet
Zaxxon
Solar Fox
Pole Position
R-Type
Robotron: 2084
Joust
Ms. Pac-Man
Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off Road
Red Baron
Track & Field
Scramble
Buck Rogers - Planet of Zoom
Battlezone
Space Duel
Qix
Subroc-3D
Missile Command
Mr. Do!
Space Invaders
Defender - Stargate
APB
Asteroids
Arkanoid
Berzerk 
Roadblasters
Yie Ar Kung-Fu
Whirlwind (pinball)

That's quite a selection! I must say that from the outside the arcade doesn't look big enough to hold all of those games. I was going to get myself a $10 stack of tokens for my token collection, but since I didn't get to go inside, I didn't get any tokens. I was able to get some off of Ebay for about $1 a piece though. They are oversized, the same size as a Chuck E. Cheese's token.

Here's a scanned image, they are a lot shinier IRL.

We droped by the Starcade in Disneyland and they had the usual god-awful deluxe games everywhere. But they did have the Neo-Geo cabaret machine still. One of the deluxe games was an arcade version of Mario Kart, which looked kind of interesting. Also, I have to stand corrected, they do have pinball in the Starcade. One game. Pirates of the Caribbean.

A family enjoying a game of Spinmaster on the Neo-Geo Mini.

We stayed in the Grand Californian Hotel, which was just massive and completely awesome. I wouldn't mind living there :)
The Grizzly Game Arcade at the Grand Californian was a small-ish room stuffed with oversized deluxe games. It ran on tokens. I got some and they were just some generic tokens, I spent all of them, as they weren't anything special.
I spent my tokens on fifty cent games of Ms. Pac-Man on a Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga Class of '81 machine.
The arcade was empty first thing in the morning. The funny thing was, the Ms. Pac-Man game had a ridiculously high High Score on it. It made me wonder if one of the hotel employees was playing it a lot or something. I vowed to come back later and try to beat the High Score, but I ended up not bothering.

I love Disneyland, it was a really fun trip even though I missed out on Flynn's arcade.
I would speculate on why they only have the arcade open during ElecTRONica, but it'd be hard to say having not been there while it was open.



Disney, I know you read this site. You did a good job on the arcade, even though you screwed up by putting it in California Adventure. How's about keeping it open everyday?

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