The 1UP
Audio By Carbonatix
There are a lot of sound effects for losing a life in video games. The “Pac-Man” “weeroweeroweero-wop-wop,” Q-Bert’s garbled grawlix swearing, or the sweeping downward siren-spiral of Mario spinning to his death in “Donkey Kong.” But the closure of the original 1UP in LoDo borrows audio from 1991’s Midway classic arcade shooter “Terminator 2: Judgment Day”: a Schwarzeneggerian “I’ll be back.”
But alas, not on Blake Street. The 1UP’s original location, which opened in 2011, just dropped its last quarter on June 22. “It was time,” says founder and owner Jourdan Adler, who adds that he wants to focus on what he and his team can keep providing, including concrete plans to open a new 1UP in the old Lucky Strike location in Belmar this fall. “I’ve taken a lot of swings, and sometimes hit the ball, but the 1UP was the first time I got one over the fence.”
The baseball metaphor makes sense — and adds a little melancholy to this 1UP’s closure, given the arcade bar’s proximity to Coors Field. “We’ve always been just half a block away,” Adler says. “That’s been a really special thing.”
Adler recalls opening with just 28 arcade games and a dozen pinball, plus life-size Jenga, booths along the walls, and “two original Skee-Ball machines we could barely keep running,” Adler says, and grins. Much of that has changed over the years to fit in more and more games — the larger venues on Colfax, Greenwood Village and in Westminster now boast games measured well into triple digits — and the one opening this fall will be the largest yet.
To be sure, the 1UP hasn’t been an easy thing to keep going. “Making it through the pandemic was a huge feat,” says Adler. “And after things reopened, people wanted to be out and about. Maybe too much. Things got a little crazy on Blake. It got a little nuts.” The city’s mitigation efforts to fight crime in the area didn’t help local businesses, he adds: “I think when Blake officially changed to no-stop for traffic, and the designated rideshare on Wazee, it changed the dynamic of the block. That’s just one of the ways it became increasingly cumbersome to run our business down here.”
Adler admits that changes in the clientele could also explain a move out of downtown. “Our concept might be growing up,” he says. “If you think about it, that 21-year-old who came to hang out at the 1UP when we first opened in LoDo is now in their mid-30s. Careers, kids. Maybe our target audience has moved to the suburbs, so it makes sense that we’d be out there too.”
One of the best things about the 1UP has always been its arcade-loving-ambiance. There was a certain romance to the LoDo 1UP being below grade — something that luckily will be preserved at the new digs in Belmar. “It was part of the initial concept,” Adler laughs. “We wanted a place that felt like you were raiding your parents’ liquor cabinet and then going down to the basement to play video games.”
But with each new iteration of the 1UP concept, things have gotten bigger and better. And the opportunities to salvage, restore and put back into use all those arcade games of yesteryear is a gratifying thing, says Adler. He ticks off a number of games that he loved growing up, and still plays: the 1985 wrestling game “Mat Mania “(“the OG wrestling game”) and the classics “Centipede” and “Millipede” (“you put 20 or 30 minutes into a game like ‘Centipede,’ and your brain is in a whole other place”). Adler says he was never a “Donkey Kong” player, but loved “Donkey Kong Jr.” He didn’t play much “Galaga,” but did play “Gyruss.” He played “Ms. Pac-Man” so long as there was a speed chip, because “people don’t remember how slow those games moved at first.” And he was always inclined toward 1984’s “Hypersports” rather than the game to which it was a Konami sequel, 1983’s “Track & Field.” “I just liked the events better in ‘Hypersports.’ Swimming, weightlifting, pole vault, skeet shooting.” The two games now sit side by side at the Westminster location, so fans can decide which is their favorite.
“The 1UP has always been a ‘we-thing,’ not a ‘me-thing’,” Adler says. “It takes our whole crew to make sure everything is working. And despite the challenges, despite this move, every step of it has been magical. We expect all that to keep going. The Blake Street location really became a community over the years. Lots of history, one game at a time.”
And those games aren’t over. That’s the whole idea of the 1UP: The games keep coming. Put your quarter up on the ledge of the screen to mark that you’ve got next.
The 1UP is still open at three locations: 1UP Colfax (717 E. Colfax Ave.), 1UP Greenwood Village (6864 S. Clinton Court) and Westminster (4750 W. 120th Ave. #900). The new location in Belmar (415 S. Teller St. in Lakewood) will open this fall. For more information, visit the 1UP website.
