Shannan Park, operator of the Fun Zone Arcade & Game Room on Balboa Peninsula, said she always made sure the prizes for winning tickets from its old-school classics like Skeeball, pinball, Pac-Man and the famous Big Mouth toss were exactly the ones kids would covet.
“I’d talk to the kids about the prizes they wanted to win,” she said, adding that she and others were blown away when a giant, plushy black stuffed dog was recently claimed by someone who had saved 40,000 tickets. “This is an old-school place where people save tickets and use quarters and win a lot of prizes.”
But the rush and excited screams of a win won’t be reverberating through the arcade much longer. The arcade that has been part of the Fun Zone since the mid-1980s is closing at the end of the month.
Park, who purchased the arcade in 2018 with her husband, Max Moore, has been paying month-to-month for her lease and learned recently it would be terminated after December.
She’s planning a big farewell party to celebrate the arcade’s last day on Dec. 28 and then the games and memorabilia will go to an auction house in Anaheim.
The Pyle family of Newport Beach purchased the block-long Fun Zone in 2021 from the Discovery Cube. Henry Pyle said the family, which has been in Newport Beach since the 1960s and has its own nostalgic ties to the Fun Zone, bought the aging property with plans to refresh it. He said they plan more restaurants, but the fun will remain in the Fun Zone with its Ferris wheel and a new concept arcade.
For Park, shutting the doors on her arcade strikes a deeply personal note. She grieves for the nostalgia that it represented and the simple, pure fun locals and tourists have enjoyed there for decades. But, it’s also what her husband, who spent much of his life working at the Fun Zone, was devoted to.
When the arcade was going up for sale in 2018, Moore and Park stepped in to buy it to ensure its tradition would continue. But that same year, Moore died and Park…
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