A video post this week.

Space Port was a chain of arcades across America usually located within shopping malls. Along the lines of Time-Out, it was a staple of any eighties kid’s world. As the name suggests, the branding was very space age!

I came across a couple of interesting videos on YouTube, that I thought were worth sharing here this week. These are the original corporate employee training videos, presumably shown to new incumbents to the business:

As well as dwelling on the overall 80s vibe, it’s worth checking out the cool shots of cabinets in-situ within the arcade.

The video proudly proclaims:

The pleasant, beautiful surroundings of each Space Port is carefully planned by the leading architects and space planners in the industry, and its your job to keep the atmosphere pleasant, so that our customers can enjoy themselves in safety.

Some of the instructions are fantastic – particularly on how to give customers change. “No Checks, no borrowing!”. Here the first part:

What is interesting in that first video is the use of painted tokens. Employees were told to never manually activate the coin switch of any game. Employees were given a number of painted tokens which could be used to not only test games when required, but also to provide family members and the emplaoyee, free games. So what these painted coins did was to hold the employees accountable. If the manager pulled 100 coins from a machine, but the coin counter had 200 meter advances, then clearly, an employee was giving games away. That’s harder to do with painted coins, especially if there was a limited inventory on each shift.

More here in Part 2:

Brilliant stuff.

I would imagine for you American readers, this is a great trip down memory lane. Of course Space Port is now long gone, but we are left with a few photos of this particular chain of arcades in their heyday:

Hope you enjoyed these great videos and pictures. Thanks go to YouTube user Craig Schaible for sharing these the vids for us to enjoy.

If you remember visiting Space Port for your arcade kicks, let us know in the comments. You can share this article using the social media buttons below.

See you next week.

Tony