May 5, 20223 min read

Spring Arcade Road Trip Stop 2: Up-Down Milwaukee

After spending all day hanging out at The Garcade, Rob and I decided to grab a couple of beers at stop two of the 2022 Spring Arcade Road Trip, the arcade-bar Up-Down Milwaukee. Up-Down is a small chain of arcade bars, very similar to Barcade, with seven locations throughout the Midwest.

If you're looking for a beer, Up-Down certainly hits the spot. They have tons of beers on tap. The bar has a much younger vibe than a lot of old-school arcades, with most of its patrons seemingly in their 20s. The vibe was very friendly though, so either I look like I'm in my 20s (fingers crossed lol), or people were just very chill. The games were extremely well maintained for an arcade bar with this many machines. I don't recall seeing one game completely down and for the most part all of the ones that I played seemed to work properly other than a few sticky buttons here and there, which isn't surprising in a place where everyone is drinking beer.

The highlight of the night for me was when Rob and I were able to hop in on a bunch of epic 10-player games of Killer Queen. I've seen Killer Queen around a number of times before, but I had never had the opportunity to play it with a full roster of people. It was amazing. Complete strangers were cheering and high fiving each other during epic matches. I definitely need to play that again sometime.

Up-Down had a number of cool games that you don't see very often, from the aforementioned Killer Queen to the HUGE four-player Mario Cart screen that people were constantly playing, 6-player X-Men, a custom The Goonies Nintendo cabinet and giant Connect 4 to name a few.

Every night of the week, Up-Down has a different special. The Thursday night that we were there they were selling discounted tokens. The tokens were so cheap that Rob and I were playing pinball for literally ten cents per player. You can play a loooong time for less than twenty bucks. Of course, you'll probably buy a bunch of beers along the way, which I'm sure is the idea lol. The only food that Up-Down offered was pizza and it wasn't great, so if you're hungry, grab something to eat elsewhere before you go.

This was my first visit to one of the Up-Down locations and it was a very positive one. I absolutely would go back or hopefully visit on of the Company's other spots at some point in the future.

Here's the games list for Up-Down Milwaukee according to its website:

https://www.updownarcadebar.com/

Arcade Games

Aliens Extermination

Area 51

Arkanoid

Bad Dudes

Balloon Fight

Battletoads

Blitz 99

Bust A Move

Centipede