The Star Chamber Arcade

09/03/2026

Just announced by Stern today! Fallout Pinball looks FANTASTIC--designed by GOAT Keith Ellwin (the visionary behind the Godzilla, Jaws, and King Kong pinball machines)--this game appears to be absolutely loaded.

Featuring a mechanized sliding vault door, deathclaw bash toy, pinball-firing nuke launcher, interactive pip-boy 4-way diverter, inverted "mutated arm" flipper, a sunken playfield with magna-flippers--we are beyond stoked. We're going for the Premium edition so it features all the mechs and bells and whistles, and our distributor tells us it should arrive sometime early Rocktober.

08/31/2026

08/28/2026

SINISTAR IS IN THE HOUSE!!!!

This game is ICONIC. It's the first arcade game to use digitized speech, the first horror video game, and the first game to use a 49-way optical joystick.

It's kinda like if Asteroids was sped up, frantic, and featured a giant anthropomorphic spaceship-star that screamed taunts while pursuing you through the deadly vacuum of space. IT RULES.

You have to blast space rocks to collect "Sinibombs," which are the only weapon that can defeat the titular Sinistar, who is being assembled piece-by-piece through the unflagging efforts of worker drone ships. Once Sinistar is assembled, you WILL know, because he announces himself--"Beware, I live"--before chasing after you.

If Sinistar's scream sounds like something no man could muster, it's because it isn't--it was sampled from a recording of a gorilla's roar.

Despite being a legendary game, not that many were made during its initial production--estimates are, only about 3,800 upright cabinets were produced by Williams--and even fewer survived. It's fairly rare to find in an arcade today, so we're super stoked to be able to offer it to you guys!

08/24/2026

LET IT BEGIN!!!!!

Starting today, when we open our doors at 2:30, HIGH SCORE SEASON BEGINS!!!!

The game for this week is Frogger! Come on in, and try your best at this iconic road-and-river-crossing masterpiece!

If you beat the current high score posted on the placard above the game, tell our bartender, and we'll put you at the top of the leaderboard!

Whoever has the highest score on Frogger at the end of the week, Sunday at 11:00 p.m., wins a $50 gift card to the arcade!

GAME ON!!!!

08/18/2026

HIGH SCORE SEASON IS COMING!!!!

To celebrate the run-up to our one-year anniversary, we are super stoked to announce HIGH SCORE SEASON.

From day one, people have been asking whether the high scores they just posted on one of our machines would be there the next day--to which the answer is usually, "probably not!". That's because the games generally weren't built with the capacity to retain high scores after they were power cycled. WHICH IS A SHAME!

So we're going to start recording the house champion high score for each of our Mount Rushmore games on a little plaque above the marquee. POSTERITY WILL BE PRESERVED IN A VERY CUTE MANNER!!!

And in order to set the high score, we thought that having a full-on HIGH SCORE SEASON would be a fun way to celebrate the new recordkeeping process and whip up an ecstatic fervor of frenzied gamesmanship in anticipation of our one-year anniversary (which is October 2nd, can you freaking believe it?).

Get your practice in now, because the competitions will be starting soon, and THE STAKES ARE SO HIGH!!!!

08/15/2026

Don't ask us how we did it, but we squeezed an additional game into the arcade!! (Ok, we'll dish: we used eldritch alchemical incantations to bend localized space-time to allow for the introduction of a net-new game).

Which means Tekken Tag Tournament is now back on the floor for the first time since November 2025!! (And Mortal Kombat fans, fear not, Ultimate MK3 is still here, hiding out directly behind Tekken).

Come on in and get gamin'!

08/12/2026

LAST PINBALL TOURNAMENT OF THE SUMMER!!!!

[$10 cash buy-in]
[$10 arcade entry fee]
$20 total per participant
registration: 6pm
tournament starts: 6:30
all levels welcome
1st, 2nd, and 3rd place cash prizes

08/10/2026

ATHENS YOU HAVE WAITED LONG ENOUGH!!!

Since day one, people have been asking "where is your Donkey Kong?". To which the answer was sometimes "Donkey Kong 3 is right over there, good sir" or "Donkey Kong hisself is chilling in storage awaiting surgery."

But now the answer is "DONKEY KONG HAS PRIDE OF PLACE AT THE VERY FRONT OF OUR HUMBLE ARCADE."

Yes yes, there's all sorts of fun trivia facts and history about Donkey Kong (did you know that the game was designed by a serial killer who learned computer programming in a Japanese prison as part of a prisoner cultural enrichment process? Or that the barrels were originally fish carcasses until Nintendo brass figured it was "too upsetting" to force players to control a character jumping over fish entrails tossed at them by a blood-soaked primate?). And you know what? We don't want to steal Wikipedia's thunder!

Instead, we'll just suggest that you come in NOW and start getting some reps in on Donkey Kong, because High Score Season is coming soon (OOOHH, what's that? Sounds exciting! Yes, it is, with more details to be released shortly) and there will be big money, big prizes for top game-doers across a variety of classic titles, like DONKEY KONG!!!!

08/04/2026

In 1999, Crazy Taxi took the arcade world by storm, offering an innovative twist on traditional driving games (instead of a basic race format, you're tasked with picking up passengers and taking them to their destinations with as much flair and speed as you can muster), dazzling graphics, a *sick* soundtrack featuring The Offspring and Bad Religion, and a preposterously bad Wolfman Jack impersonator DJing the whole affair.

At the time, it seemed like a pure shot of "fun"-de-siecle adrenaline euphoria, a crazy blender of blue collar and extreme sports whipped up with that subversive edge that Sega had prided itself on throughout the 90s.

Today, while the gameplay experience is still an undeniable thrill ride and pure delight, the cultural politics of the game no longer read like euphoric jouissance, but, rather, as a dire forecast of the disintegration of Social security nets and the rise of the gig economy that would be the dominant narrative of the next quarter century of labor in the United States.

The four edgy, 20-something cab drivers--who once appeared as though they lived solely for thrills and Lollapalooza--are now clearly prefigurations of beleagued Uber and Lyft drivers, perpetual "independent contractors" who are forced to ceaselessly hustle and grind their ways throughout a callous and indifferent socioscape controlled solely by the strictures of a neoliberal capitalist orderthat has long left them for dead.

And so it is with a similarly nihilistic mindset that these drivers treat their fare, passengers who, much like the zombies in Dawn of the Dead, are cursed in an eternal pattern of infinite return to seek out only those corporate landmarks that have been inscribed deep within their consumer psyche, as they beg to be whisked from one nationally branded landmark (such as Kentucky Fried Chicken or Pizza Hut) to the tombs of now deceased consumer culture icons such as Tower Records.

This is the manic energy not of unbridled joy, but of the frantic and frenetic need to carve out the conditions of basic existence in an economy that hears only the whims and wishes of the 1% elite.

08/02/2026

Come join us Monday August 3rd at 6:30 pm for our Summer Slam PinGolf Tournament!

In PinGolf, each Pinball Machine is a hole on our course, and our goal is to complete the objective for that hole in as few balls as possible. If you get the objective on the first ball, that's a 1 for that hole, ball 2 is a score of 2, and ball 3 is a score of 3. If you don't meet the objective during the game then you'll score a 4 on the hole. As in golf, our goal is to have as low of a score as possible. The objectives for each hole could be points based (ex: score 1 million points), or based on a machine specific goal (ex: Start multi-ball). Scores for each hole will be totaled for your final score.

We'll play an 8 hole course in small groups for this tournament, with cash prizes for the top 3 players

Costs:
Tournament Fee: $10 per person. All of this goes to the cash prize pool. Please bring cash for the tournament fee (laws are weird)
Venue Entry Fee: $10 per person. Star Chamber arcade has a flat $10 entry fee for tournament participants from the start of registration (6:00 pm) until the end of the tournament (or 9 pm, whichever is later). All machines are set to free play, no quarters necessary.

Prizes:
The cash prize pool (from the tournament fee) will be split among the top three teams as follows:
- First place: 60% of prize pool
- Second place: 30% of prize pool
- Third place: 10% of prize pool
Total prize pool is number of participants * $10

Registration and reduced entry fee begin at 6:00 pm and registration closes at 6:30, with the tournament starting shortly after.