Debbie Gardner of New Haven brought her 4- and 7-year-old grandchildren to Middlebury’s Retro Realm arcade on a recent Thursday so that they could play alongside other kids. But when she spotted familiar games from the arcades of her teen years — including an original 1981 Ms. Pac-Man — she joined right in.
As the grandkids, Ander and Evelyn Demers, fiddled with foosball and manipulated joysticks to grab at stuffed animals jailed in the prize-dispensing games, Gardner gripped the plastic gun tethered to the cabinet of Big Buck Hunter. Watching eerily realistic deer prance across woodsy terrain on the monitor, she zeroed in on her objective: to shoot as many bucks as possible, without shooting a doe.
“They’re too fast. I can’t get them,” she said as her fiery sequence of shots missed the bucks but annihilated another unsuspecting doe. “It’s terrible, hunting. Terrible, I tell you.”
Gardner and her grandchildren are among the area residents discovering Retro Realm, which opened in April on Washington Street. Owner Christian Bloom, 48, of Bridport — an aficionado of 20th-century arcade games — hopes the business will fill what he sees as a void of indoor entertainment in Addison County.
Retro Realm’s single-room layout and natural lighting set it apart from the typical dark, disorienting arcade. But with about 45 games, ’80s music sounding from its speakers, reverberating digital bleeps and bloops, and the low roll of Skee-Balls shooting up a ramp, the place is as old-school as it gets.
While larger arcades usually charge per game, customers at Retro Realm pay based on time — $10 for one hour and $15 for two hours allow them to play any game as many times as desired. Parents don’t have to worry if their kids’ attention wanes in front of a game they’ve already fed coins to. There are also family deals: $30 for one hour or $50 for two hours for four people.
The 11 self-dispensing prize games are an exception. They charge per round, but Bloom keeps small consolation prizes, such as rubber ducks, behind the counter to comfort kids frustrated by a continually empty claw or merciless spinner.
Matt Larkins of Bridport comes to Retro Realm regularly with his two young children. He said he appreciates the flat-rate pricing.
“You can kind of just go around, and you don’t have to panic about money,” he said.
Bloom’s fascination with arcade games began in the 1990s, when he was a teenager on Long Island, N.Y. He and his friends hung out at small arcades after school, playing pinball and raging over the first-ever multilevel game, Rolling Thunder. He scored his first job, at age 16, at the nearby arcade and restaurant chain Chuck E. Cheese, later going on to manage arcades for large companies in Maryland, Nevada, California, Alabama and, finally, at Spare Time Entertainment in Colchester. That’s the job that brought him to Vermont three years ago.
Now, he’s back in the little leagues — Retro Realm is the smallest arcade he has ever run. Its proximity to pizza (Green Peppers Restaurant is right next door) and residential neighborhoods reminds him of the arcades of his youth.
“I absolutely love it because there can be a much more personal approach,” Bloom said. “I get a chance to talk to every dad who comes in, every mom who comes in, every kid that comes in.”
Two of Bloom’s own teenagers, Candace, 18, and CJ, 15, are his sole employees. CJ helps out with game maintenance and repairs, while Candace works in customer service, bustling around to assist visitors who may get overwhelmed by the maze of games before them.
“People have the most technical difficulties with the multicade,” Candace said, tapping on Legends Ultimate, a cabinet that lets players switch between 14 different games. These include Asteroids, a spaceship shooter game, and Crystal Castles, a game in which the player collects gems and must dodge enemies.
Initially armed with his personal collection of 12 machines, Bloom then purchased another chunk of the arcade’s current selection from a Pennsylvania company that sold off most of its games after the pandemic. He and CJ lugged 60 machines, some of which were not yet in playable condition, back to Vermont from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in a moving truck. It took three separate 13-hour round trips.
“It was at least a good bonding experience,” Bloom said.
Their haul brought them close to what they needed to press “play” and open Retro Realm’s doors. Bloom found the rest on Facebook Marketplace, eBay and Museum of the Game, an online community dedicated to arcade games. All told, his efforts have scored him the likes of air hockey, Star Wars Trilogy Arcade, Cruis’n, Spider-Man: The Video Game, Point Blank 2 and Tekken 3.
While rarer games in pristine condition can cost thousands of dollars apiece, Bloom snags games that are dysfunctional — but restorable — for only a couple hundred. From there, he purchases the necessary parts and either makes repairs himself or calls in experts to solve problems outside his wheelhouse.
“For us here, it’s more diamonds in the rough than anything,” Bloom said. “We’re looking for something that you know is underappreciated, underused, or something that we can definitely refurbish and fix up.”
He continually expands his collection based on requests from regulars, scouring the internet for hidden treasures. He knew he was missing the classic carnivalesque game Whac-A-Mole, so when he spotted online its functionally identical cousin, Frog Frenzy, for sale in New York, he drove there the next morning to retrieve it. A pinball machine and a basketball hoop are recent finds, but Bloom is still on the lookout for a Q*bert machine and classic fighting games such as Double Dragon and Street Fighter. He just bought a Meta Quest 2 virtual reality set. Currently, it only comes out at a customer’s special request.
For Bloom, arcades, especially small ones, continue the social aspect of gaming he knew as a kid. Much of that experience has been lost to at-home, online video games in which kids can play “with” someone hundreds of miles away, he noted. But in an arcade, sharing the triumphs and defeats in person with fellow gamers is part of the fun.
“Come on, claw machine, work with me,” 7-year-old Evelyn begged, fishing with the claw for a stuffed panda, leopard or koala. Her friend had won one of the big prizes from the block-stacking game Pile Up just the week before, she said, but her own luck, it seemed, had run out.
A consolation rubber ducky would have to do.
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Seven Days and is the result of the writer's MiddWorks internship with the local media company. Inquire about a Seven Days internship at interns@sevendaysvt.com.
Madeleine Kaptein '25.5 (she/her) is the Editor in Chief.
Madeleine previously served as a managing editor, local editor, staff writer and copy editor. She is a Comparative Literature major with a focus on German and English literatures and was a culture journalism intern at Seven Days for the summer of 2025.
