The Des Moines arcade Up-Down is set to replace Hamburger Mary’s

The bright-purple building at 101 Southwest Boulevard that has long been home to soon-to-relocate Hamburger Mary’s will next be Up-Down, a bar and arcade featuring vintage video games from the 1980s and ’90s.

As soon as Hamburger Mary’s owners Erik Christensen and Jeff Edmondson complete their move from the Crossroads to the Uptown Theater (3700 Broadway), targeted tentatively for the end of this month, Up-Down’s owners — Sam Summers and Josh Ivey — will start their renovation. Atop their to-do list: repainting. That delectable shade of lavender will be one of the first things to go.

“We love the building,” Ivey says, “but it’s going to require a lot of work retrofitting it for our concept. And we’re coming up on the cusp of winter, so we’re not making any promises for an opening date, other than to say that we hope to be open by early spring 2015.”

Ivey and Summers are based in Des Moines, where they opened their first Up-Down bar and arcade a year ago in that city’s East Village neighborhood.

“We love that neighborhood so much that once we decided on Kansas City for our second location, we wanted to find a comparable area, and the Crossroads has a comparable quality,” Ivey says. “It’s a mixed-use neighborhood, with arts, shopping and restaurants. We didn’t want a nonstop bar location.”

Ivey describes the Up-Down model as “an over-21 arcade featuring electronic and nonelectronic games from the 1980s and ’90s, and serving craft beers from local and regional breweries and 1980s- and ’90s-inspired cocktails. It will not be a live-music venue.” And he has plenty of hands-on arcade experience, though it dates from before he was old enough to enjoy craft beer. As a teenager, he worked at a Chuck E. Cheese and learned the intricacies of arcade maintenance. Ivey now owns, with his business partners, hundreds of vintage machines in an Iowa warehouse. The relative proximity of that storage space means that machines can be regularly rotated onto the game floor.

“We learned, opening the Des Moines Up-Down, that there are classics that you simply have to have: Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, and the core fighter games like Mortal Combat, Street Fighter and Killer Instincts. But there’s a demand for the niche stuff, too. We had to go out and look for a game we knew would be popular, Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker, which gets played quite a bit. It’s really goofy — Michael’s fighting the bad guys with his pet monkey. It’s off-the-wall, but customers love it.”

And, of course, there will be a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game.

“Our concept is all about connecting with nostalgia of a generation that grew up in arcades and want to play those games again — but in an adult setting with cocktails and beer,” Ivey says. “We’re not a family arcade. We’re a bar with arcade games.”

Their bar in the arcade will have limited seating. (Expect table seating on the patio.) Ivey says he wants customers up and moving to and from the games rather than sitting and talking — or eating, though that’s its own wrinkle. Kansas City’s liquor laws require saloons open on Sunday to serve food, all but demanding that Up-Down build a menu, unlike its original Des Moines location.

“That’s still a way out,” Ivey says of the Up-Down food solution. “We haven’t even started construction yet.”

Video-game historians cite the introduction of Nintendo’s home console to the U.S. market, in 1985, as the beginning of the decline of the video arcade. Up-Down spokesman David Hayden explains: “Arcades were closing. The video sections of bowling alleys and skating rinks were no longer making money. Kids were playing the same kind of games at home on their Nintendo. The market was flooded with unwanted game machines. There was no demand for them. So people began buying them and warehousing them.”

Ah, opportunity. “When there was a resurgence of these vintage games about 10 years ago, people began buying them and restoring them,” Hayden says. “What sets Up-Down apart is that we have the original machines, and it costs a quarter to play them.”

That’s right: Recalling their original Reagan era, the games will cost just 25 cents to play.

Ivey says the combination of quarter plays, cocktails and the chance to revisit the childhood glories of Krull makes him confident that what works up Interstate 35 a ways is going to score here, too.

“People responded to our Des Moines location very quickly,” Ivey says. “Judging from the feedback we’re getting on social media, I think we’ll be in the right place in Kansas City for the same reaction.”