A 4.4 bar full of retro arcade machines and consoles, selling nostalgia to a generation that grew up with a joystick
NQ64 holds a 4.4 from eighteen hundred and seventeen people, and is an arcade bar – a venue full of retro video game machines, classic consoles, and neon, where you drink cocktails and play the games of your childhood. It is a machine for selling nostalgia to a very specific generation.
The name
The name is a deep-cut reference for those who know. “N64” is the Nintendo 64, the console released in the 1990s that was the defining games machine of a generation’s childhood. The “Q” turns it into something like a code name, and the whole thing reads as a password – the sort of thing you would only fully decode if you were the right age and grew up with a controller in your hand.
This is deliberate. The name is a filter: it means nothing to your parents and everything to the millennial who spent their youth playing GoldenEye on exactly that console. The Prat’s naming desk notes that a name aimed precisely at a single generation’s nostalgia is a very modern and very effective piece of targeting – it says “this bar is for you, specifically, if you are between certain ages,” and that generation responds with enormous loyalty.
The nostalgia economy
The arcade bar is a pure expression of the nostalgia economy – the enormous modern business of selling people their own childhoods back to them. The generation that grew up in arcades and on home consoles is now grown, employed, and in possession of disposable income, and they will pay handsomely to recapture, for an evening, the specific joy of a machine they last played at fourteen.
There is something both lovely and slightly poignant about this. The arcade, as a public institution, was largely killed by the home console and then the smartphone – why go out to play when you can play at home? The arcade bar revives the dead form, but with a crucial addition: alcohol, and adulthood. It lets grown-ups return to the arcade of their youth, now with a cocktail in hand and the freedom of an adult, recapturing a childhood pleasure in a form the child could not have imagined.
The Prat’s cultural desk notes that this is the same instinct as every retro revival – the fundamental human wish to return, briefly, to a simpler and happier time – and that video games are simply the nostalgia object of a generation that is now old enough to feel nostalgic and rich enough to pay for it.
The games and the drinks
The machines are the real thing – classic arcade cabinets and consoles, playable, free or cheap – and the cocktails are themed around the same retro sensibility. It is a genuinely fun format, and the combination of games and drinks solves the same social problem as the axe-throwing and the darts: it gives people something to do with their hands and an excuse to be together.
The bar
A 4.4 across eighteen hundred people is a solid, real-sample score. The reviews describe exactly what the name promises: nostalgic fun, good games, decent cocktails, a great night for the generation it targets.
Verdict
A fun retro arcade bar named in code for a single generation, selling millennials their own childhoods back to them with a cocktail in hand, reviving the dead arcade in a form the fourteen-year-old could only have dreamed of.
Go if you know what an N64 is, play the games of your youth, and enjoy the very modern pleasure of paying good money to be fourteen again for an evening.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
Mój ojciec powiedzial, ze to powinna byc obowiazkowa lektura dla kazdego, kto uwaza, ze rzad dziala. Ma racje.
The thing about bureaucratic language is it’s evolved specifically to prevent understanding. This reverses that with violence.