Timezone back with new parlour
Timezone is bringing video gaming back to Palmerston North in a new arcade.
The parlour will open in the Downtown on Broadway shopping centre on Saturday, with a grand opening party the following weekend.
It will be Timezone’s 11th New Zealand arcade, featuring more than 100 game machines, such as Dance Dance Revolution and air hockey, as well as newer virtual reality games.
Downtown centre manager Greg Key said talks over the arcade franchise returning to the mall began a year ago and if it wasn’t for delays due to Covid19 Timezone may have opened as early as April.
Timezone has secured the second largest retail space in the mall, after Event Cinemas.
It is not the first time the brand has featured at the mall. It previously provided a gaming area at the cinema in the 1990s and inside the old Broadway Burger King.
Downtown Nails and Beauty, Vautier Pharmacy and Downtown Souvenirs all had to shuffle around in the mall to make room for Timezone, which had taken over all three spaces, Key said.
‘‘But all the retailers support the mall getting something a bit different to bring people in.’’
Dedicated arcades are not as common as they once were, but Timezone has continuously run at least a few since it opened its first Kiwi arcade in 1978. Video game arcades arrived in New Zealand in the 1970s and Timezone was one of the earliest franchises to set up shop.
‘‘Spacies’’, coined for the classic early game Space Invaders, quickly became popular.
At their peak in the 1980s, video arcades were in almost every town in New Zealand, and games were stationed at sports clubs, dairies and fish’n’chip shops.
But their numbers dwindled drastically through the 1990s as household computers and video game consoles became cheaper and more powerful.
By 2020, more than 90 per cent of households had at least one device used for playing video games, according to The Interactive Games and Entertainment Association.
Timezone chief operations officer Belinda Falzon said arcades were still a centre for family entertainment and birthday parties. They provided access to larger game machines along with games less common in homes. Virtual reality games such as Halo: Fireteam Raven were a big attraction.