Arcades, pinball & oddball play in Los Angeles
7 arcades and oddball play spots in Los Angeles, Good Times at Davey Wayne's, Revenge Of and Walt's Bar among them. Pinball basements, vintage cabinets, mini golf with a grudge — competitive, cheap and better than dinner for a first date. They spread across Hollywood, Glassell Park, Eagle Rock, Koreatown and 3 more areas, so two or three can make a whole afternoon. Every entry is hand-vetted against real sources — not scraped off a top-ten list or averaged out of crowd ratings.
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Good Times at Davey Wayne's
The entrance is a run-down refrigerator standing inside a garage staged like a permanent yard sale of vintage junk; you pull the fridge door open and step into a 1970s house party. Inside there's shag carpet, a pinball machine (placed because the owners' parents met playing pinball), occasional cover bands in the "living room," and a backyard with a snow-cone-style frozen-drink window run out of a repurposed trailer. It's a tribute by twin brothers Jonnie and Mark Houston to their late father, a blue-collar pool shark named Davey.
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Revenge Of
A comic-book and trading-card shop with a tucked-away back room styled like the interior of a spaceship - industrial sci-fi panels and grated floors modeled on the Nostromo from Alien - packed with newer, heavily themed pinball machines featuring sculpted plungers, 3-D toy art, and loud sound effects. It runs as a genuine community hub for casual players and collectors, with a small food bar, so the focus stays on the games and the comics. The pinball lives in that hidden room behind the retail floor.
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Walt's Bar
A tiny rockabilly-leaning dive in a former auto-parts shop, run by brothers Jeff and Brad Johnsen, who along with a friend draw from a combined collection of roughly 200 pinball machines to keep about ten on the floor at a time. The lineup mixes vintage electromechanical games with 1990s classics like Funhouse and Fish Tales, rotating every month or two; the EMs cost a quarter and the rest run about fifty cents. A 1976 Gottlieb Surf Champ, the machine that started the family obsession, is the sentimental fixture. Food is deliberately simple, mostly hot dogs and German pretzels, and Wednesday nights bring a pinball tournament.
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Blipsy Bar
An easy-to-miss Western Avenue dive that opened in 2010 as one of LA's first barcades, with original 1980s cabinets and pinball wedged in among a chaotic collection of oversized carnival animals and vintage toys. Live DJs spin most nights and the crowd is unpretentious and local. Pinball titles have included Twilight Zone, Terminator 2, and Stellar Wars alongside the video cabinets.
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AYCE Gogi / On Tilt Pinball
An all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ restaurant with a dedicated 21+ pinball bar, branded On Tilt, tucked into a back room running a rotating collection of a dozen-plus premium late-model machines at fifty cents a play. The operation is serious enough to host one of Southern California's largest pinball leagues plus tournaments and manufacturer launch parties for new titles. Recent machines have included Jaws, John Wick, Godfather, and Stranger Things.
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EightyTwo
A 21+ arcade-bar and listening lounge in the Arts District showing 55-plus restored vintage pinball and video cabinets pulled from a private 200-game stash, each maintained on-site by full-time technicians. Entry is free and first-come, no reservations, with a full bar, ten draft lines, and a large green outdoor patio. It hosts competitive arcade events and is home to the Los Angeles Pinball League.
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Highland Park Bowl
LA's oldest bowling alley, opened in 1927, when its upstairs doctor's offices wrote Prohibition-era prescriptions for medicinal whiskey that patrons filled and drank in the lanes below. A 2016 restoration by the 1933 Group uncovered the original Jazz Age decor, rebuilding chandeliers from salvaged bowling-pin and mechanical parts above eight vintage lanes. There's a full bar and a kitchen turning out wood-fired Neapolitan pizzas.
Arcades, pinball & oddball play in Los Angeles — FAQ
Where can I play pinball in Los Angeles?
Good Times at Davey Wayne's (Hollywood), Revenge Of (Glassell Park), Walt's Bar (Eagle Rock) and Blipsy Bar (Koreatown). Plus 2 more in the list below. Each listing has the address and what it costs to play.
Which arcades, pinball & oddball play in Los Angeles are the strangest?
Ranked by how strange they actually are: Good Times at Davey Wayne's, EightyTwo and Highland Park Bowl. Good Times at Davey Wayne's — The entrance is a run-down refrigerator standing inside a garage staged like a permanent yard sale of vintage junk; you pull the fridge door open and step into a 1970s house party.
Where in Los Angeles are they?
Across Hollywood, Glassell Park, Eagle Rock, Koreatown and Van Nuys and 2 more. Each listing gives the neighborhood and address so you can cluster a couple into one outing.
Is this a good weird date in Los Angeles?
That's what the list is built for. Every entry has a specific move rather than a vague recommendation — at Good Times at Davey Wayne's, for instance: Find the garage, open the refrigerator door, and split frozen cocktails from the backyard window under the string lights.
How were these arcades, pinball & oddball play chosen?
An agentic research system digs for the genuinely obscure — the spots even locals miss — and every one is verified against real sources before it makes the list. We deliberately skip the landmarks already on every Los Angeles guide.