For some good old arcade fun, a stop at the Game Preserve at Webster, Texas is a must. Come on in. Let’s take a look. Join Joe as he chronicles his road trips through the cities, towns, highways, back roads, and various regions of the Lone Star State. This is Texas Chronicles with Joe Perez. Today we’re at the Game Preserve. NASA. We’re in Webster, Texas, on the south side of Houston. And this is your best playground. It’s a classic arcade full of video games and pinball machines. What more could you ask for? The first thing everyone does when they walk in is they just jaw drop and like, I haven’t seen that since 1985 or whatever. When I was in. When I was in high school, I played this all the time. And they just. You can just walk around and watch them and they’re. They. They’re telling each other, do you remember that? Remember that? And it’s. It’s so fun to see, you know, kind of our age group, they come in and then they bring their kids and they get to teach them, you know, what. What was the arcades like? And it. It also gives us dads the chance to. To take on the little kids, um, and show them how to really play games. So it’s always fun. The game preserve is always our. One of our slogans has been, the 80s are back, because, yeah, you can play these games on your Computer, or sometimes on an Xbox. But there’s nothing like walking in the arcade, hearing the sounds, the attract mode music, um, seeing the cabinets, walking up to it and just that feel, you know, you walk up to the game, you got your hand on the side, the joystick, the one or two buttons. And then to also being able to play with your buddies and just head to head, the socializing, um, as opposed to sitting at home on the couch. It’s just not the same. You can’t recreate that. And then you come in the arcade like this, where there’s games as far as you can see. You’ve got the jukebox going, people talking. And a lot of the times, people will come in and we play games. But it’s also about the atmosphere, you know, because we’ve recreated what you can’t really find anywhere else. Um, with all the games, the pinball machines, the music, the old. We got the videos on the big screen, so it’s. It’s all here. So at the Game Preserve, all the games are always on free play. You don’t ever have to use quarters. You play as much as you want, which is always our dream as kids. Right. We. We don’t want to run out of quarters. So we’re making your dreams come true here. But you come in. Normal daily entrance fee is $15. You can play all day, unlimited play. So we have everything from the mid Sixties. The electric mechanical pinball machines. You know, the pinballs that bells and chimes. So we’ve got those. We’ve got a few over here and we’ve got a few up in the Woodlands. And we got all the way right up to the. The brand new games. We’ve got some brand new pinball machines right here like Deadpool and Iron Maiden. So most of our games are almost 40 years old, between 30 and 40 years old. That’s probably 90% of the machines that we have out to play. And we take pride in that. They’re all original games. So one of the wonderful opportunities that we had here at this location was that we had a very long hallway to get guests from the entrance back to the main arcade room. And we felt like this was a great chance to kind of do some very beautifully visual, uh, scenes that would make guests feel like they’re actually standing in some classic games, as well as kind of educate them on a little bit of gaming history. We. We featured games that we thought would be very recognizable and iconic. To guess things that. That they would want to, you know, take a photo op standing in front of scenes from these games. And so we chose to do Super Mario Brothers as one of the most popular 80s era console games. And then you walk your way into Dragons Lair, which was a beautifully done blue animated arcade. Game. And. And then into Tron, which another really fantastic, iconic game of the 80s. From there, you. You then step into the 1970, into asteroids, um, eventually into Space Invaders, and then into one of the most iconic but yet simplistic games that kind of kicked the whole arcade scene off, and that was pawn. So we. We just really thought that this was a neat opportunity to let people see how the graphics evolved over the years as you went sort of backwards in the time. And then into the main game room, we have the opportunity to play games from all of these different eras. Two of the most beautiful scenes that we feature in the hallway are from two incredibly iconic 80s games, Dragons Lair and Tron, both of which were painted by an incredibly talented local artist, Sean Swanner, who we just feel like did a tremendous job, and we look forward to collaborating with him more as we continue working on the hallway. All right, so come see us at the Game Preserve. We got locations in Webster and the Woodlands. The games are always on free play, so come see us. It’s a great time. Bring your friend, and we’ll see you at the Game Preserve.