Arcade Club Teams Up with Chilli Shop

There are probably easier ways to introduce yourself to Leeds than inviting people over and feeding them ten increasingly vicious chicken wings, but where’s the fun in that?

Arcade Club Leeds teams up with Chilli Shop Leeds for our own Hot Ones Experience. Ten wings that get progressively hotter while you attempt to answer questions and maintain some semblance of dignity. It should be brilliant, or, if nothing else, quite funny for everyone watching.

It also gives us a good excuse to talk about something that continues to genuinely surprise us.
Loads of people in Leeds still don’t know we’re here!

We’ve been sitting in Kirkstall for years now, in a massive building full of hundreds of arcade machines, and we still regularly get people walking through the doors for the first time who had absolutely no idea what was here.

Even people who have heard of Arcade Club often don’t realise how it actually works. So here goes: You pay to get in and that’s it. Once you’re inside, everything is free to play and you can stay all day.
There are no coins or credits involved, so you can spend three hours repeatedly losing to your mate on Daytona if that’s how you want to use your Saturday (No judgement here!).

And this place is BIG.
You’ll find the obvious classics, of course, and plenty of games that’ll immediately transport you back to whatever arcade you wasted your childhood in. But then you wander a little deeper inside and suddenly find yourself standing in front of some enormous Japanese machine trying to work out what on earth you’re supposed to do with it… This happens often and is far less intimidating than it might sound. And honestly, that’s probably our favourite bit. There are games here that we struggle to explain to people and machines that you’d have a hard time finding anywhere else in the country, never mind Leeds. Arcade Club has always been built by people who are slightly obsessive about this stuff, which means somebody will inevitably discover an obscure Japanese rhythm game and decide that, yes, obviously we need one of those.
Then we need another one…and so it goes.

Arcade Club originally started over in Bury and has since grown to Leeds and Blackpool, with thousands of games between the three venues. The funny thing is that people sometimes assume somewhere with this many old machines must be a museum. It really isn’t. Play them. That’s why they’re here.

And that tends to be how a visit goes. Parents showing their kids the games they played when they were their age, only to suffer the crushing experience of watching them become better at them within about four minutes. Mates having a beer and getting far too competitive over something they haven’t played since 1997 (We’re looking at you Time Crisis). Someone disappearing onto a pinball machine for an hour while somebody else becomes completely obsessed with a bizarre Japanese game none of them had heard of ten minutes earlier.

It’s a place where slightly daft things tend to happen, which probably explains how we’ve ended up inviting The Chilli Shop Leeds over to feed people ten increasingly hot chicken wings. They’re taking over a little corner of Arcade Club for our Hot Ones Experience, with the sauces getting progressively more serious and questions thrown in between each wing. There’s a vegan option as well, and we’re not entirely sure how well anyone is going to play arcade games immediately afterwards, but presumably that’s part of the experiment.  It’s also the sort of thing we want to do more of in Leeds. Arcade Club is already a pretty unusual place, so bringing in interesting people from around the city and finding new ways to make a day here even more fun just feels like a good idea.

If at some point over the next few months, you find yourself wondering what to do with a Saturday, maybe come and see what’s been sitting in Kirkstall this whole time. We’re obviously biased, but we reckon it’s one of the best gaming venues in the country.
And, just in case you missed the important bit earlier, once you’re inside, every single game is free to play.