OCEAN CITY – Jilly’s Arcade, at the end of 12th Street in Ocean City, is one of the last arcades of its kind on the Cape May peninsula. Arcades were hot stuff when Jilly’s opened in 1976, so hot that Ocean City and many shore towns like it heavily regulated their operations.
Most of these arcades closed, or are unrecognizable in their current forms. But thanks to clever management from the Levchuk family, Jilly’s Arcade remains a 364-day (except Christmas) operation that thrives well past the heyday of the video arcade.
Jody Levchuk, who currently sits on the City Council in Ocean City, picked up the Jilly’s torch from his father and his grandparents, who owned several arcades in Jersey shore towns. Levchuk said that when his grandfather bought the business, Coach’s Casino, in 1976, it was “a nasty old place with broken-down games and a dirty parking lot.”
It was an idea to grow into, he said.
But why buy a place so decrepit? For two reasons: the arcade license required to operate, limited in number according to Ocean City’s zoning code, and the prime boardwalk location. The Levchuk family made incremental improvements to the business in its first few years of operation, but they were saving up for a major overhaul that would add air conditioning, new wall paneling, a proper paved parking lot and an apartment upstairs for the family to live in.
“My Granddad lived in that apartment every summer,” Levchuk told the Herald on an especially rainy winter afternoon at the arcade. “People would knock on his door every time there was a problem. But he loved it, that was his home every summer,” he said, rain pounding the boardwalk outside.
Jilly’s year-round operation keeps the arcade fresh in the minds of locals and keeps his best employees working. Levchuk said that his staff is exceptional, and if he closed for the winter, they would rightfully find work elsewhere. “And we would have to rely on random teenagers every summer,” he said.
Each spring brings a full refreshening of the arcade, and every machine in the building is put under scrutiny. It’s like a puzzle: Levchuk evaluates the profitability of every arcade cabinet, what games appeal to which age demographics, which games are high-volume but low-yield, and which games are low-volume but high-yield.
Some of those low-yield games, like 25-cent SkeeBall and pinball, are extremely popular. SkeeBall was just 10 cents a play for many decades. Inflation and economic pressures forced Levchuk to raise the price to 25 cents. Since the machine can only take a single coin as payment, it was not possible to raise the price to 11 cents or 15 cents. The quarter was a necessary evil.
But a customer must play the game four times to bring in the same revenue as a single play of a newer game like Space Invaders Frenzy, a wall-sized version of the arcade classic with giant vibrating light guns and dramatic light effects.
Games like Space Invaders Frenzy help Jilly’s stand apart. Similar in its ambitious scope, Fast and Furious: Arcade is played on massive horizontal screens that tower above players as they sit in the cockpit of a sports car. And a King Kong game from Raw Thrills rocks players back and forth, similar to the feeling of a roller coaster, while they are immersed in the action with virtual reality goggles.
“If you take a look around the arcade, every piece of equipment is something you can’t do at home at the same scale,” Levchuk said. “It’s a totally different experience that can’t be imitated.”
Importantly, Jilly’s is always spotless. Levchuk said that maintenance takes place every single day so problems do not build up over time. A quick stroll on the Wildwood boardwalk shows that cleanliness in arcades, to the degree that Jilly’s maintains, is not always a primary virtue.
It is important to Levchuk that the arcade maintains a constant flow of new games. Even the pinball machines, which look retro at a glance, are state-of-the-art from contemporary pinball manufacturers like Stern Pinball, which makes machines based on popular properties like “Stranger Things.”
These pinball machines are very expensive. Godzilla, a Stern machine, costs anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000, depending on the version. But Jilly’s still charges 25 cents per play because Levchuk believes that every visitor deserves a good value during a time of significant price hikes across the arcade industry.
Jilly’s Arcade has a diverse revenue stream, so the low-cost games help bring in customers without hurting the business. In the off-season, local groups rent the arcade out for events like school dances and birthday parties. And during the summer, the machines are almost always slam-packed. An ice cream and snack stand connected to the arcade brings in extra revenue, too.
Many arcades across the country have converted to what Levchuk called “casino arcades,” which emphasize games of chance. At first glance, these “casino arcades” look like the video arcades of old. Bright characters, like Angry Birds or Spongebob, adorn the large cabinets, but the games found inside are slot machines, spin-the-wheel style games and coin pushers.
Arcades like the one Levchuk has curated are filled with games that have no objective outside of the games themselves. They are focused on the player. Players who put a dollar into Space Invaders Frenzy at Jilly’s, for example, know they can play the game until they run out of lives. There’s nothing to win at the end but a big smile.
Players who put a dollar into a machine at a “casino arcade” are hoping to win tickets, and the games are tuned differently as a result. If a game like Space Invaders Frenzy is at both a video arcade and a casino arcade, the version at the casino arcade will be more difficult. It gives players less playtime for their money because the goal has been reduced to ticket-earning.
Levchuk wants every game in his arcade to be one thing: fun. He said that the industry has moved away from this because games of chance have higher profit margins. And in Ocean City, “gambling casinos” are prohibited by law, which is not true in towns like Wildwood, where some of the largest and oldest video arcades have converted wholesale to glorified casinos.
“We can’t say screw video games, we’re just going to do casino games and redemption. You can’t do that here in Ocean City — it’s all video games or nothing,” Levchuk said.
And besides, where’s the fun in putting a coin in a machine just to see where it lands? That is not the spirit of entertainment that put Jilly’s on the map. Jilly’s boardwalk has not lost its spirit, and Levchuk said that he loves seeing the smiles on families’ faces when they see how cheap some of his games are.
“We really try to have something for everyone,” he said.
Have thoughts on arcades? Contact the author, Collin Hall, at chall@cmcherald.com or give him a call at 609-886-8600 ext. 156
