CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Eric Williams of Cleveland and three other people frantically worked the controls of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game on a recent Friday. The 31-year-old Cleveland man and his friends sought a milestone that had long eluded them: beating the game.

They played the arcade as children every chance they got, but reaching its conclusion had two major obstacles. The first was the game's difficulty, and the second was the quarters they needed to keep playing when their characters died. Like most children, their funding was limited and they were never able to collect enough quarters to play to the end.

But at Lakewood's 16 Bit Bar they played the game for free -- provided they kept ordering drinks -- which, until a few years ago, was nothing more than a fantasy.

Customers don't come to 16 Bit Bar for a dance floor, or to watch sports, or to sample colorful cocktails. They come for the arcade games. The machines line the outer walls, sporting flamboyant characters, flashing multi-colored lights and emitting the bleep and bloop sounds the bar's patrons remember from their younger days.

The bar boasts dozens of games that some patrons wasted mountains of quarters as children and the Detroit Avenue tavern gives them the chance to play those games again -- this time for free. And it isn't the only bar that offers that opportunity.

16 Bit is an arcade bar and part of a trend that swept the Buckeye State in the past four years.

Ohio's first arcade bar -- 16 Bit's flagship location -- opened four years ago in Columbus. Since then, four more arcade bars have opened their doors in Columbus, and 16 Bit Bar brought its gaming-centered reminiscence to Greater Cleveland and Cincinnati.

Their success has inspired other businesses to give customers a chance to play the games of yesteryear. A pinball parlor, for example, opened on Cleveland's near West Side several years ago.

The bars deal in nostalgia, owners say, providing thirty and fortysomethings the chance to mix a thrilling part of their childhood experience with alcohol.

The bars

B-Side Liquor Lounge and Arcade brought the arcade-bar concept to Greater Cleveland. Prior to 2013, B-Side -- which sits directly underneath the Grog Shop in Cleveland Heights Coventry Village neighborhood -- was a conventional nightclub, but the ownership added several pinball machines and arcades when they renovated in 2013.

16 Bit Bar opened a year later to great fanfare, and today is one of the most popular bars in Greater Cleveland.

The Lakewood establishment has the hallmarks of a neighborhood watering hole, including incandescent lighting, high chairs at the bar, a patio and tables that patrons congregate around. But the arcade games are unquestionably the marquee attraction.

The most popular games have long wait times on Friday and Saturday evenings, and on the busiest nights the bar is so crowded it's difficult to walk around the inside.

With a drink menu that features cocktails named after actors and pop-culture personalities who were prominent in the '80s and '90s -- like the "Pam Anderson," the "Kevin Bacon" and the "Winona Ryder" -- the bar makes no secret that it targets Gen Xers.

Superelectric Pinball Parlor on the corner of Detroit Avenue and West 65th Street in Cleveland mostly features pinball machines. But it also includes a handful of classic arcade games like Space Invaders. Its interior captures the same vintage feel as the arcade bars that inspired it.

"Some of our oldest games are from the 1940s," Superelectric co-owner Ben Haehn said.

Haehn said his family owned a pinball machine when he was a child, and he started collecting them as an adult and long considered opening a pinball parlor.

"But I didn't think anything like that was possible," he said. "Then we started to notice the trend of pinball and arcades coming back, and we put our name in the hat for a spot on West 65th Street."

Central Ohio has the most arcade bars.

Old North Arcade in Columbus' historic Clintonville neighborhood opened just two years ago. Every afternoon when the bar opens, an employee flips a switch in the breaker box that activates around 50 arcade games spread throughout two rooms.

The main bar features a line of arcade games and a few tabletop games, along with a Playstation 4, an N-64 and a Dreamcast. Customers can play cornhole and giant-sized Jenga on an outdoor patio that opened last fall, and a backroom features several dozen more arcade games. As the bar's popularity rises, they plan to include even more.

"We're getting ready to renovate the back room," owner Benjamin Morgan said. "And add another 20 games to the lineup."

Cincinnati features two arcade bars, a 16 Bit Bar in the Over-The-Rhine neighborhood and Arcade Legacy: Bar Edition in the city's Northside neighborhood.

Conventional bars are also getting in on the act. Punch Bowl Social in the Flats has a vintage arcade room that features pinball machines and classic arcade games like Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam. And Game On, a Lakewood sports bar, boasts several arcade games on their patio.

Game On opened two years ago on Detroit Avenue and has steadily added more arcade games. They now have five, along with a pinball machine and table hockey to compliment the pair of pool tables on their patio. They also keep a bowling game and a claw machine inside.

Owner Kurt Delfavero said he acquired the arcade games from a company called Cadillac Music, a bar supplier who handles the maintenance in exchange for half the proceeds.

While they're all popular, not all of the games have proven equally successful, he said.

Delfavero said he's in the process of bringing in an NBA Jam arcade game to replace a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game that underperformed.

Of their current arcade games "Terminator 2 has been unbelievable," he said. "And (Mortal Kombat) has been the best by far."

But the pool tables, Delfavero said, remain the biggest draw of all their games.

"They've saved us on many a dead night," he said.

What is their appeal?

"Our (customer) demographic is all across the board," Haehn said. "We get people in their 60s and 70s playing some of the vintage machines they played when they were kids."

The classics are always the most popular, and customers say they revel in the chance to revisit the games they sacrificed so many quarters to as children.

Williams threw untold numbers of coins into the game as a kid, but finally had the chance to play it all the way through when 16 Bit opened.

"It's definitely the nostalgia aspect of it," he said of the bar's appeal after he and his friends beat the game. "It brings me back."

Some arcade bars allow parents to bring their children during certain afternoon hours on the weekends, and it's common to find parents playing the games with their kids at 16 Bit Bar on Sundays.

But 16 Bit is also popular with the under-30 crowd, and on any given night it features no shortage of bearded hipsters and tattooed millennials looking for an alternative to conventional bars.

"It's definitely something different," said Aaron Weber, a 24-year-old Cleveland man, on a recent Friday.

Superelectric tends to draw more families with small children. Nicole Murton was there with her elementary school-age children on a recent Thursday afternoon. The kids were on spring break and Murton said the visit to the pinball parlor was part of a "staycation."

"It was just something new to try," she said.

Her children seemed to enjoy themselves as they exchanged quarters for tokens and played a smattering of pinball games.

Getting an arcade bar off the ground

Opening an arcade bar can take years. The owners and managers need all of the amenities necessary to start a conventional bar, plus the main attraction -- the arcade games -- which are difficult to procure.

Unlike say, liquor or beer, no single market exists for vintage arcade games. Arcade bar owners find the relics from a mix of collectors, online ads, and people who just so happen to have a game and want to get rid of it.

16 Bit Bar owner Troy Allen said the idea to open an arcade bar came to him years ago, and a trip to Chicago convinced him to pull the trigger.

"I came across a place called Headquarters (Beercade)," an arcade bar in the Windy City's Near North Side community, Allen said. "And then I was like, 'oh my gosh, someone actually did this?'"

He admits to being skeptical at first, but found that the bars were wildly popular and there weren't many of them.

"There was a huge gap in the market," Allen said.

Having no idea where to find vintage arcade games, he spent untold hours scouring classified ads for any sign them.

"It was trial and error," he said. "Really just digging in, calling, researching, checking online."

He said he's amassed quite a collection since then, with hundreds of arcade games spread throughout his three bars and a warehouse. Some of the games he keeps in storage for their spare parts, but admitted that he sometimes buys games he doesn't need to keep them off the market and cut down on his competition. This may explain why there aren't more arcade bars despite their enormous popularity.

John Geiger, co-owner of Arcade Super Awesome in Columbus, was fortunate enough to already have most of what he needed. He's an arcade game collector and would sometimes host arcade parties in a clandestine Columbus warehouse before he and his partners opened their bar.

"We actually had all the equipment ready to go from day one," he said. "The only thing we had to do was build it."

Owners and managers cite maintenance as one of their biggest challenges. The games require constant repairs.

"There's a lot of minor problems like people spilling beer on them," Morgan said.

And when they do fail, "they tend to fail catastrophically, with parts you might not be able to track down," Geiger said.

Is there a future for arcade bars?

The vintage vibe of an arcade bar is it's most popular aspect. But it could also be it's downfall.

A dedicated group of handyman make spare parts for arcade games, including micro chips and joysticks. But the curved CRT screens that arcade games use are no longer manufactured.

Arcade games and older TVs project images using cathode rays, which are emitted from a projector a short distance behind the screen. This means that the screen must have a curve, otherwise the image appears distorted.

CRT screens can last if treated with care. Geiger said the CRT screen on one of his arcade games dates back to the 1970s. But they are fragile.

With a finite amount of replacement CRT screens, the days of the arcade bars appear to be numbered. Geiger said he gives the arcade bar industry about 15 years.

Are the arcade games always free?

Arcade games can be set for free play, but not every arcade bar owner agrees that they should be.

Morgan called his arcades a "loss-leader," an industry term that refers to a service or product that a bar loses money on, but encourages customers to buy the expensive drinks that bring in more revenue.

"You make (the cost of upkeep) back at the bar," he said.

Games with moving parts, like pinball, require quarters at virtually all arcade bars. Owners and managers say this is because those machines require more maintenance.

"They wouldn't be worth keeping around" if they didn't generate revenue, Old North Arcade manager Amber Buckley said.

Other games like Dance Dance Revolution are so popular that patrons would likely spend hours on them if they were free.

"If it didn't take quarters, people would never get off of it," Morgan said.

Geiger of Arcade Super Awesome said he charges quarters for his games because he wants to fully recreate the experience of a classic arcade. While a steady stream of quarters no doubt contributes to his bottom line, he insists it's part of the atmosphere he wants to convey.

"It isn't so much about making money as it is about the contract between the player and the game," he said. "When you can play all the way through a game for free, it loses some of it's value. Games like Gauntlet were a lot more fun when we were trying to go as far as we could on one quarter."

Besides, he said, if he didn't charge for the games, he would have to make up for it by marking up drink prices.

"You're paying for it either way" he said.

Even when the games are free customers still sometimes put quarters in them, Allen said.

"The amount we pull out is just obscene," he said.