Visual History of Time Out Found in Trash

In January I was researching for my video What 80's Arcades Really Looked Like in order to not only dispel the myth that your average 1985 arcade looked like it puked a 1995 skating rink, but to just gush about 80s arcades in general. There's a lot to talk about regarding arcades at the time, from the sociological aspects to the design aspects (the design was what I was really interested in.) It's not a very well documented area of video game history. Finding the story of certain arcade chains can be impossible or whenever it is documented it's usually sitting within a newspaper archive or some random dude with the same interest took the time to do the research and made a blog post about it 15 years ago.

My "conspiracy board" for my arcade research. Figuring out how it all fit together was a pain!

Anyway, early in my research I was especially interested in Time Out, the 1970 arcade chain that's iconic for its warm color stripes, ultra-70s logo and the "time out tunnel". Time Outs were in arcades across the nation starting in the 70s and ending in the mid 90s. It's one of the coolest looking chains from the period, but photos of Time Out (and arcades at the time in general) are slim. Often when looking for this kind of thing you're bombarded with photos of home arcades, models, or low quality polaroids someone posted on Facebook or Flickr reminicing about the good old days. So when I ran across Peter Hirschberg's fan website for Time Out, I was really excited to see a whole page dedicated to photos of the arcade, seemingly professionally taken when they had just opened. The problem, however, is that the images were rather old (mirrors from Flickr uploads from 2008) and were obviously photos of slides being projected onto a wall. I had also noticed that in other places there were photos of Station Break, Time Out's sister chain, being used in people's "arcades in movies" websites and compilations of arcade photos. I couldn't find out where these came from for the longest time. Peter had credited someone named Jim Miller for letting him use them on the website, who, as I read Peter's short biography of the arcade chain and did a little more digging, I managed to track down. Peter had originally uploaded a chunk of photos onto Flickr during the late 2000s, this included the photos of Station Break. Later on, however, he closed the account, which is why I couldn't find the source anymore.

During a phone call, Jim told me that he worked for Namco during the early 90s doing inventory, for their arcade chain called Cyberstation. In 1995, Namco had bought Time Out and was in the process of converting all remaining Time Out locations into Cyberstations. During this time, Time Out employees were either being laid off or being re-trained to run Cyberstation locations. So, as Time Out was being phased out, all of the paperwork, photos, and documentation for the company was being thrown out. Jim said on Peter's website that "all [he] ever knew of the Time Outs were the boxes of stuff that ended up in the warehouse. Eventually they pulled in a couple dumpsters from the street and filled them up. [He] grabbed what [he] could. Probably a lot of history ended up in a landfill but it was just receipts and accounting stuff."

Jim saved a plethora of photos from being destroyed.

Jim had managed to save a few boxes of photos, over a thousand of them, along with a stack of paperwork. After telling him about my project, I had asked if it'd be possible to be sent scans of the things, which, thankfully, he had apparently had done a few years ago. So, after a few days of waiting, Jim was kind enough to upload 25 gigabytes of lossless scans from the various negatives, slides, polaroids, and prints.

It really was something.

Station Break was Time Out's strange, television-themed arcade.

Finally, in 2K, I had photos of arcades that had been shut down for decades. Photos taken by the company for their own reference and promotion were now available, and Jim had given me permission to share it all publicly and use it in my project. There's a wide range here, professional photos taken of empty arcades from the early 80s to the early 90s, random Polaroids taken for unknown reasons, even photos of their competitors.

Included was also this concept model for one of Time Out's early locations.

After my video was completed, I decided to upload the set to the Internet Archive. Unfortunately, however, the photos were taken down a few days later due to a request by the "copyright owner," which happened to be Peter Hirschberg. When reaching out to Peter, who I had talked to previously, I wasn't met with an answer. Jason Scott, curator of the Internet Archive, tried to facilitate a conversation between us but it simply ended in Jason stating "I'm simply not going to allow those items to be uploaded to the archive. They have a background of permissions and legal situations that prevent them from doing so." I was not given any more clarification on what this meant, but, in reality Peter never worked for Time Out and neither does he own these (neither physically or in terms of intellectual property.) My best guess is that these are technically still owned by Namco, who I'm sure won't care at all that these are out there.

Anyway, many months later, I finally splurged for a Dropbox account and just threw it up there. I'm working on curating these properly for an online gallery, but, I'm not sure when that's gonna happen and I'm tired of keeping these to myself.

So, here it is, the entire thing.