One recent Saturday evening on the Lower East Side, loud cheers issued from a converted art gallery called Waka Waka on Clinton Street. It sounded as if people were watching an impossibly high-scoring football game, with joyous eruptions every five minutes. Then the crowd began to chant: “Snail! Snail! Snail!”

The crowd at Waka Waka was not gathered to watch ESPN; it was cheering for an arcade game called Killer Queen, which looks like an enormous Pac-Man cabinet. Pac-Man, of course, was a solitary affair; Killer Queen has 10 joysticks and allows for two teams of five to gather around its oversize console.

The clean white walls of Waka Waka hint at its origins as an art space, but the crowd on this night seemed more like the sort you might encounter at a midnight movie. Finding anyone over 35 would be a challenge, though a couple in their 50s had wandered in off the street to see what the commotion was about. Discovering it was a video-game tournament, they left quickly.

Thirty-four years after Space Invaders arrived in America’s malls, the arcade game has exploded in popularity and faded away, replaced by games on increasingly small personal devices. Simple iPhone games like Candy Crush rake in millions of dollars every day from addicted players; the latest sports games on PlayStation are almost indistinguishable from the real thing. It has been a long time since a humble arcade game inspired such fervor.