San Francisco Skee-Ball champion opens arcade and launches city's first league
It may have taken years, but a San Francisco man has been able to turn his dream into reality. Joey the Cat, as he's most commonly known, opened an arcade in the Mission District Thursday night and he got the ball rolling on the first official Skee-Ball league.
Skee-Ball is a game most people fondly remember playing as a kid, but for Joey the Cat, he turned fun and games into a profitable business.
"The cat came from a nickname that I got in college, just sort of a metaphor for being on the prowl on a Thursday night," Joey Mucha said. "Then, when I joined the competitive Skee-Ball league, that was my alter Skee-go that I gave."
Mucha is a 3-time national champion and originally bought a Skee-Ball machine to practice in his home. He now owns hundreds of arcade games and rents them to dozens of bars in the city.
"My passion for Skee-Ball and then putting it into bars and other venues basically blossom to business that was very organic," he said.
This space used to be his warehouse for the arcade games, but owning his own arcade was his ultimate dream. He started this project in 2018.
"It was a lot of work," he said. "A mixture of red tape, construction woes, the pandemic was in the middle of all that. Then just really seeing this vision through took a lot of tenacity."
While this space is open mostly for private parties, it opened to the public Thursday night for the first Skee-Ball league kick-off party.
"I did this as a kid," player Alisa Yee said. "We went to Chuck E. Cheese as a kid, and I'm like, oh my God, there's a Skee league. I think it's perfect."
Yee is the leader of the Pickle Rollers. She says it doesn't matter if her team finishes in last place, but she has been working on her Skee-Ball skills.
"I figured it out," she said. "You gotta use a netting to rebound it into the other ones. You can't just go for the concentric circles. That won't work."
Seeing the smiles is what Joey the Cat hoped for when he built this place.
"This is a dream come true," he said. "Building this venue has been a lot of work but just feeling the fervor that we feel right now has really just washed over me with joy. I'm so glad to be past the construction woes and now what's happening behind me is in the future."