Go to Tommy’s Arcade Right Now
By Will Dryden
First things first: if you haven’t been to Tommy’s Arcade in Lexington yet, get a friend with a car and head over as ASAP as possible. For $10 an hour, or $20 for the whole day, it’s one of the best hangout spots you can find. The glue that’s holding it all together is the man himself, Tommy Stuart.
While he’s not an overpowering presence, it’s hard to go to Tommy’s arcade without remembering Tommy himself. If you have any questions about any games he has, odds are he can answer them. When I asked for some tips on Street Fighter 3, he was in action from round 1. Not only did he teach me the mechanics unique to that version, he recommended characters to learn as a beginner, and showing me which ones were considered the best and why.
This passion started at a young age, when little Tommy first picked up a Mattel Intellivision and played his first round of Burger Time. “Ever since I was a toddler, I’ve been playing video games,” says Stuart. “There were always screen time limits, though, so I couldn’t play too much until I started earning an allowance… I spent quite a bit of money on the Sega Dreamcast.”
Soon after, Tommy caught the fighting game fever when he played Soul Calibur for the first time on his Dreamcast. He described it as “the game that made me want to learn how to really play fighting games.” Luckily, around that time, his family had moved to New Jersey, close to an arcade called 8 on The Break, a well-known spot among fighting game enthusiasts (a semi-frequent stop of Street Fighter legend Justin Wong.
Though he has competed in tournaments before, Tommy is quick to point out that he’s not a competitive type. “Most of my enjoyment of fighting games comes from playing with friends.” Whenever he’s in tournaments, he says he’s “focused more on improving and playing than on winning.”
Though they may not have led to fame and glory, these tournaments proved valuable learning experiences. There, Tommy learned how to work with arcade hardware. In the competitive fighting game space, typical controllers like you see on Xbox and Playstation are rarely used. Instead, players use “arcade sticks” or “fight sticks;” small boxes with six buttons and a joystick that are meant to emulate the feel of fighting in a traditional arcade. Over the years, Tommy has built, or bought, a few dozen of these (a number he told me his wife describes as “too many”).
After his wife’s job brought their family to Lexington, Tommy put together a five-year plan to open an arcade downtown; that was 2020. Shortly after, a pandemic hit, closing shops left and right. Tommy said he “didn’t want to see our downtown go away”, so he decided to jump start his five year plan by four years. He put together a list of 75 cabinets he thought would be a good fit and commenced scouring Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, eBay, and local antique malls. The first one he bought was a Neo Geo cabinet, one he had wanted to own since he was a kid. Once he felt like he had enough, it was game on. Tommy sums the story up as “I wanted an arcade in town, nobody had one, so I said fine, I’ll do it myself.”
So, what’s next for Tommy’s Arcade? Well, for starters, more games. Specifically, more multiplayer options for groups to come in and play together like “Pac-Man Battle Royale”, a 4-player competitive Pac-Man game where players all race in one maze for the high score. Another one on the list is Gauntlet Legends, a fantasy hack-and-slash (basically imagine Dungeons & Dragons but as a video game), with a password system for you to save your progress across multiple visits to the arcade. As far as single-player games go, Tommy’s also eyeing Godzilla pinball, which Tommy praised, saying “if you don’t like pinball, this could be the one that gets you to change your mind.” Outside of this, the future is fairly open to whatever the people want. “If there’s a game you want to play and I don’t have, just let me know,” he says, “If I can find it for a good price, I’ll buy it.”
As far as fighting games go, he wants to keep the tradition alive. Tommy mentioned plans he has for a Shenandoah Valley league, where people from Southern Virginia, Washington & Lee, Virginia Military Institute, James Madison University, and more, could possibly compete here. “We have about a dozen or so people who have come out to play,” he says, “It’s a small community, and I would like to grow it.”
Want to help grow the community yourself? Come to Saturday Night Smash or the Doyo Dojo. These are monthly fighting game events held at the Arcade, featuring everything from Smash Bros, to Street Fighter, to Guilty Gear.
For more information, you can follow Tommy on Facebook, or find him on Instagram at @tommysarcade.
