REDWOOD CITY — Marty Edelson stood in the middle of Malibu Castle, clutching 500 tickets he’d won playing arcade games Tuesday afternoon.

In his pocket were vouchers for about 2,000 more he’d dug out of his San Francisco home after learning the beloved amusement park near the Port of Redwood City was shutting down. He and his 12-year-old daughter, Sarah, who was toting 250 tickets of her own, were poised to exchange their loot for prizes.

“I saw online, Facebook, I think, ‘We’re closing soon,’ ” recalled Edelson, 50. “I said, ‘Oh, no! You can’t do that. I have tickets to cash in!’ “

Malibu Grand Prix and the game-filled castle next door will close for good Sunday, leaving the Peninsula a slightly more serious place. Palace Entertainment, the owner of the complex, whose go-kart track and miniature golf course have long served as landmarks along Highway 101 at Woodside Road decided not to renew its lease with the landowner, Granite Rock.

Zany combination

For 35 years Malibu has been providing a unique form of family entertainment — that increasingly rare place where young children, teenagers and adults can all gather to goof off. Craig Stieglitz, who has managed the park for 18 years, is headed to Florida to run one of Malibu’s sister franchises, Boomers.

“Unfortunately, these kind of things are slowly but surely disappearing,” said Stieglitz, 42, who played video games at Malibu as a kid back when countless games weren’t so easily available on home consoles or smartphones. “As we all know, land is just so valuable here.”

Business at Malibu has always been steady, Stieglitz said, but costs have been rising. Granite Rock, a regional supplier of stone and other building materials, wanted an increase in rent, he said. Granite Rock did not respond to a call seeking comment.

Fans have paid their respects this week, rushing in for one last jaunt on the Grand Prix racecourse in Malibu’s signature Indy-style cars. They also took turns splashing in bumper boats, smacking air hockey pucks, and wrestling with controls in the arcade.

Ten-year-old Ryan Harvey got his first taste of real horsepower Tuesday, taking a go-kart around one of the Grand Prix’s winding half-mile tracks. He was ready for more.

“I liked it a lot,” he said. “When I first started driving, it felt cool.”

Unique amusements

Other businesses in the region are ready to pick up Malibu’s customers. There are indoor go-kart tracks in South San Francisco and Burlingame, and there’s miniature golf in Sunnyvale. There’s even a Boomers in Livermore.

But no place from San Francisco to San Jose has Malibu’s patented blend of frivolity, said Ismael Gonzalez, who stopped by Tuesday evening with a group of co-workers from Redwood Shores. They’d divided into teams for a friendly competition in the batting cage. The men and women cheered and teased one another as they took their hacks.

“It’s sad to see it go, because there’s really no other place like it,” said Gonzalez, 30. “There’s a bunch of places where it’s either go-karts or mini-golf, but you can’t really find it in one location.”

Contact Aaron Kinney at 650-348-4357. Follow him at Twitter.com/kinneytimes.