Taking family vacations to Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, TN has become a sort of tradition for my family. Though many of the arcades are full of modern redemption, I did find some interesting things.
First off, if you go up to Ober Gatlinburg they have an arcade in the mall there. They have a Spiderman pin and several arcade machines both redemption and not. You can play ski-ball for a
a play and rack up some decent tickets if you're good at that. The pin is in decent shape, I'd say it doesn't get a hell of a lot of play there. They did have several machines down, I think they had half of their two player Daytona working and half of the two player Cruisin setup wasn't working (Crusin World or Exotica, can't recall which). Crazy Taxi was down as well. Still lots of interesting machines, I can't recall them all. 75 cent air hockey, two tables. Reasonably priced arcade. Plus, I don't know about Saturday but we drove up there instead of riding the tramway on Sunday and didn't have to pay to park. We went back during the week and parking was $5. While you're there, there's several stores and such. Currently, they're having their Octoberfest and have a beer garden going.
Next, there's the big new attraction in Pigeon Forge called The Island. There's a modern redemption arcade within it, of course, but it's entirely coinless/tokenless and ticketless. You get a plastic card like a credit/debit card that you load with cash. You swipe to play and it removes the appropriate credit money. When your game is over, the tickets load onto the associated card automatically (just don't be confused and swipe again when the machine says "take your tickets!"...that just credits the machine for another play...don't ask me how I know). Best part is, the cards never expire. You can keep going back and racking up tickets until you can actually buy something better than candy and plastic jumping frogs. Heh. They had a pretty awesome looking Namco Pac-Man themed air hockey table, but it was $2 credit. We actually only played this one game that was like beer pong. You get a bunch of ping pong
and have to bounce them into cups. Was great fun. We'll probably go back and load more than a few dollars on our cards. We take trips like this a few times a year.
Side note about the Island, they have a lot of interesting stores and a Smokey Mountain Moonshine Distillery store. The wife and I decided to take a shot at it, because free liquor.
You go through something like 13 different flavors. They give it to you in what looks like church "communion cups", probably 1oz or so and the guy serving us was brimming them. You have a range of different ones that go from something like 40 to about 80 proof, then they drop their highest one on you. Blue Flame, 128 proof. The wife had to take a break from a few of the flavors after that, heh. I tried the whole lot. We're not normally heavy drinkers, so it was actually enough to get us somewhat buzzed. I do recommend it to anyone to try, it's an interesting assortment of different flavors they have. I'm not sure if I'd want to try "real" hills moonshine, though. Some of that stuff was more like pure alcohol. 150-200 proof.
