Vorias: Modern Technology Helped To Achieve Our Vintage Dream

MANCHESTER, NH — I am a child of the 1980s. I grew up on Saturday morning cartoons, Star Wars, Larry Bird, and Celtics basketball, armed with a Walkman, Cabbage Patch (or Garbage Pail) Kids, a Trapper Keeper and other invaluable mementos of an unforgettable decade.

That means I also grew up during the video game revolution, from the evolution of home video consoles Atari to Nintendo to Sega, to the vintage arcade classics such as Donkey Kong, Frogger, Pac-Man, and Space Invaders. There was something about an arcade that I fell in love with, surrounded by flashing electronic lights and sounds of asteroids exploding, race cars roaring or alien UFOs soaring.

Even as I grew up and left the 1980s behind, that love of an arcade and being able to lose yourself in a game stuck with me.

As fate would have it, when I met my husband, I quickly learned that he shared my experience with, and love of, 1980s nostalgia. Importantly, that included the unique thrill of a vintage arcade. Unlike some who might indulge that shared nostalgia by visiting an arcade every once in a while, we began searching for and purchasing our favorite vintage video games we knew from our childhood. At first, those efforts reflected the shared joy of memories we had known that we wished to share with our children. As time went on, however, a little dream began to build between us — of opening our own vintage arcade in Manchester.

In 2018, we made that little dream into a reality by opening Electric Avenue — a vintage arcade — in downtown Manchester. As we both had day jobs and a family to raise, the arcade was a much —loved small business side project. We took it on with a limited budget but big ideas on how to capture the glory of everything 1980s for not only adults our age who yearned for happy reminders of their childhood but also for Millennials and Gen Z who grew up with smartphones and games at their fingertips 24/7.

Did I mention a small budget? We had some great ideas but not much money to work with. So, as we thought about how to virally market the arcade, communicate and network our friends, we turned to online platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which quickly and efficiently became our all-in-one online headquarters. From there, we were easily able to connect with old friends, make new friends, post schedules of our hours, book corporate outings and promote our special holiday events, Skee-Ball League nights, or even a visit from Senator and former presidential candidate Cory Booker!

These easy and fun online technologies were our lifelines, contributing enormously to our being able to grow our business while creating stronger ties with our community and countless dear customers who have become friends.

When the pandemic hit in March 2020, it gave us a long time to re-evaluate our lives, priorities, hopes, and dreams, loves, losses, and what’s most important, prompting us to sell our arcade last year. We thoroughly loved our journey as small business owners, and we couldn’t have enjoyed the great successes we had without the remarkable technology platforms that allowed us to share our passion with the world.

In New Hampshire and nationally, we are blessed to have such a strong and innovative high-tech ecosystem, with a regulatory framework designed to support America’s competitive advantages. I hope Congress will keep entrepreneurs like us in mind and avoid overregulating or limiting the countless tech innovations we dreamed about as kids and rely upon as adults. I will always be nostalgic for the 1980s, but I know that our future is technology and greater integration, whether to support e-commerce, provide telehealth services or simply stay connected. I’m excited for that future, just like Doc Brown was as he said to Marty McFly in 1985’s “Back To The Future,” “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!”

Sara Vorias is the former co-owner of Electric Avenue Arcade. She lives in Manchester.

This press release was produced by Sara Vorias. The views expressed here are the author's own.