Whether it be Pac-Man or Street Fighter, everyone has played an arcade game at some point. One gaming enthusiast is working to introduce independent arcade games to western Kentucky with a launch event this weekend.
During his adolescence, Dustin Wilcox, a Murray State alumnus and owner of Wilcox Arcade, discovered his love for games at a pizza parlor in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. He fed this love through two quarters per game.
“I was drip-fed my passion for arcade games, 50 cents at a time is how much my parents would spare me when we would go to Godfathers,” he said. “I would try to stretch it. In third grade, I had my ninth birthday party there. My parents had gotten (my friends and me) rolls of quarters, we went hog wild and that was a fun experience.”
Wilcox later combined his love for writing and gaming at 15 years old when he started the Wilcox Arcade blog. Later in 2018, he submitted his first article for RePlay Magazine, a monthly publication featuring stories about the amusement gaming industry.
After writing a handful of articles for RePlay, he was invited to cover an event in Las Vegas, Nevada. The COVID-19 pandemic arrived and stripped Wilcox of his opportunity to cover the event.
“I started the journalism pathway thinking I would eventually write for the magazine full time if the opportunity arose,” he said. “Sadly in my first year, the COVID-19 pandemic had struck and RePlay had invited me to cover an amusement expo in Vegas that year. The editor strongly advised me not to come, it was February at that point, but she had an intuition it would get worse. Well, in retrospect, (the pandemic) did get worse.”
Despite the pandemic dampening everyone’s opportunities, Wilcox turned his attention to collecting his own gaming machines. Many popular arcades, such as Dave ‘n’ Busters and Chuck E Cheese, host what seems to be endless amounts of gaming options. Although Murray has a few locations, Wilcox finding arcade games along one’s route is more common than most think.
“A lot of people, when they lament,‘Oh there are no arcades anymore,’ they’re, maybe not intentionally, obtusely overlooking route locations,” he said. “Which is exactly what I do. Nine times out of 10, if a location that is not specifically specializing in arcade games has a game room, they don’t own and operate that outright.”
Wilcox currently owns six arcade games, a candy machine and a mini crane machine sprinkled throughout west Kentucky. One of the first independent arcade games he bought was SkyCurser, a game set in the 90s where a plague descends on Earth and the player has to save the world by fighting with the pilot weapon called SkyCurser.
“I put it in Hopkinsville at WK Cinemas, and I was so proud to say that this is the only instance of (SkyCurser) in the Commonwealth,” he said. “I’d be surprised if there are more than 200 of these in the world.”
Wilcox’s goal is to introduce more indie games to western Kentucky and he isn’t just a one-man band in this endeavor. Jordan Harrell, his fiancee, is by his side to make their dreams come true.
“Wilcox Arcade is the hopes and dreams of the person I love,” Harrell said. “I will always put my whole heart and soul into it, because I see how hard he works every day to make it not only everything he dreams of but everything we dream of.”
Wilcox and Harrell will host a launch event Saturday, March 22 to introduce their next indie game. Switch ‘n’ Shoot tests a player’s reflexes by providing just one button to pilot a starship. The event will take place at 1 p.m. at Know A Guy, located on Five Points in Murray.
