GameWorks Opens Its Revamped Arcade

The Irvine Spectrum Center just got a bit louder. GameWorks LLC opened its revamped multimedia arcade Friday, hoping that shoppers will want to eat and drink while they shoot and kill.

For the past nine months, the company has been revamping its Sega City arcade, which opened in the Spectrum in 1996. Nearly double in size, the new GameWorks site is 28,000 square feet of video-game craziness. Players slide into mini go-carts and zoom around an enormous racetrack that loops throughout the center.

With a full restaurant and bar, officials say the GameWorks arcade will attract twentysomething game lovers and novices alike.

“We’re really focusing on this being a destination for people, so we’re offering theme-park scale entertainment,” said Michael Auger, vice president of operations. The hope is that these high-tech playgrounds will serve as a natural hangout for suburban teens and young adults, who will spend hours--and dollars--inside the arcades.

But analysts have long wondered whether such location-based entertainment--the catch-phrase for such multimedia playgrounds aimed at an adult audience--will ever grow beyond its youthful niche.

While the GameWorks arcade has a new look, it is vying with two other high-tech playgrounds in the Spectrum. Dave & Buster’s, a 55,000-square-foot attraction, is known for its billiards room, laser battleground, video arcade and the motion-simulator rides in its iWERKS Turbo-Ride Theater. And NASCAR Silicon Motor Speedway entices racing fans to stop by the virtual reality arcade, slap down their cash and slip into the driver’s seat.

A core crowd of high school and twentysomething high-tech workers regularly pop by during lunch and on the weekends to play games at all three arcades. But recent visits to the Spectrum have found only short lines and small crowds.

GameWorks officials insist their Irvine location, as well as their arcades in Ontario and the Block at Orange, are doing well, but declined to release financial details. Officials from Dave & Buster’s and the NASCAR Speedway could not be reached for comment late last week. Dave & Buster’s said in August that its three Southland locations--in Irvine, Orange and Ontario--were having operational problems, causing its stock to plunge 45% in one day. The company fired or transferred the regional manager and the managers of the three stores.