There's just something about low-rent places that cater to parents who can't afford (or are just too cheap) to take their kids to a place like Chuck-E-Cheese or Peter Piper Pizza or other "family pizza restaurants"
I recall a place like this in a small city where I used to live for a bit. It was in a slightly rundown neighborhood and housed in a long, low cinderblock building where the owners had had murals painted on, featuring pizzas, rocketships, basketballs and other random crap. It looked really half-assed and slapdash.

I should add I actually went inside this place on one occasion, invited to a younger cousin's birthday and it was pretty much what I expected. The games area covered with paper-thin drab gray carpet and the rest of floor was skanky yellow linoleum. A bank of beat-up looking arcade games, some ball games and a ballpit crammed into one corner almost as an afterthought. School cafeteria quality pizza, a staff mostly made up of surly teens and adults almost zombielike in their movements. It was not a good place to be.

Sometimes low-rent can be fun. I remember a place called Treasure Forest, it was a mom n pop restaurant/arcade. I enjoyed it very much. They had skee ball, and batting cages, and sold Orange Whips, and Reuben Dogs. They also had a delivery service, but no car, so mom would make deliveries on a bicycle. They were located in a little valley, so every time she had to make a run she would have to hump it up a 45 degree incline on what looked like a Huffy they bought at Wal-mart. If you stayed and watched her going back and forth long enough she started to look like a zombie decaying in the sun. Beat that floor show Chuck E Cheese.

Wait, wait. There are families that are too poor to go to Chuck-E-Cheese?

Well now this place is strip mall suburbia. In the 80's I don't think that it was more local in character as were most area's of Buffalo. I would prefer the Pizza Planet any over the TGIFriday's that is at 6860 Main St now.

* I mean I think it was more local in character in the 80s

Stars for you

:-(

Mostly Pi, are you secretly J.D. Salinger?

I could be, if that's what you want *wink wink*

I grew up near Rochester during when Western New Yorks economy was destroyed and I remember going to places like this, but me and others didn't mind, because we didn't know anything better. And yeah everything was cheap and the food wasn't as good but for the people there that was all that they could afford.
I still remember it as a place where the adults always looked saddened and drained of will, but the kids who didn't know any better grew up happy albeit with a soul devouring panda bear...

You made me sad. I hate you.

RAAHR! I'MA GONNA KILL YOU THEN EAT SOME BAMBOO! CAUSE I'M A VEGAN! OOGA BOOGA!

That panda is the fucking UNDEAD. The way it emerges from the curtain, fixing you with its eyeless, undead gaze... that is my every childhood nightmare, compressed into one primal image. Jesus jesus jesus.