Why GameWorks almost reconsidered its return to Seattle

Even if you’ve played pinball in Seattle, you may never have noticed a small label on the corner of each machine. The sticker reads: “City of Seattle Amusement Device.”

Under city code, “amusement devices” include pinball machines, arcade games, billiards tables, and jukeboxes.

For decades, owners have been required to register these machines and pay a fee. For example, a pinball machine that costs 50 cents per play costs the owner of that machine $50 per year. The city brought in $64,000 this year from amusement device fees, which isn't a huge amount in a budget of more than $7 billion.

In recent years, most of that money has been paid by one company. According to Greg Stevens, one of the owners of downtown Seattle's arcade GameWorks, their licensing fees this year would have totaled $45,000. That is, until the Seattle City Council voted to lift its amusement device fees earlier in August. Understandably, GameWorks was the major advocate for that.

RELATED: Seattle strikes down its fee on arcade games, pinball, pool, and more fun

The “fun tax,” as Councilmember Andrew Lewis dubbed it, was a surprise to Greg Stevens. Stevens bought GameWorks in 2022, after the business went bankrupt during the pandemic.

Stevens is the former CEO of the nationwide GameWorks chain, back when it was a franchise in the 2010s. He was enthusiastic about the original concept, which was a collaboration between Sega, Universal Studios, and Steven Spielberg.

After he purchased the Seattle location, Stevens was lining up his state licenses when he received a message from the city about the amusement device licensing fees.

"We hadn't budgeted for that, we hadn't considered that," Stevens said. "We found it to be, for us, outrageous in light of the challenges of opening businesses in downtown Seattle."

Stevens acknowledges that, for most businesses with a couple of game machines, this fee probably didn’t break the bank. For GameWorks, it was different — it almost drove them out of town.

"Our thought processes was, you know, maybe go to Bellevue, where we don't have to worry about it," Stevens said, though, he added the decision would have been difficult.

"I didn't want to walk away from the location that was the number one GameWorks, the first GameWorks," he said.

Seattle's "tolerance policy" history

Seattle is part of a recent wave of cities repealing their “fun taxes”; fees for things like video games and pinball machines. But why did these fees exist in the first place? It turns out, their history takes us back to the early 20th century and the nationwide war on vice associated with prohibition and morality laws.

As local historian Brad Holden explained, the licensing fee came out of a system established by Seattle in the mid-20th century called "Tolerance Policy." That system created licensing fees to replace the previous system (bribing police and city officials to look the other way).

"Tolerance policy directly led to this licensing system for amusement devices," said Brad Holden, a local historian and the author of "Seattle Prohibition: Bootleggers, Rumrunners, and Graft in the Queen City."

"They were a blatant violation of state gambling laws. So there was that, but Seattle allowed them to operate as long as they were paying their licensing fees and as long as they kind of policed themselves," he said.

Pinball operators didn't always police themselves and throughout the '50s and '60s. Pinball-related violence flared up sporadically, including bombings by rival pinball syndicates.

Brad Holden spoke with Soundside about the violent past of pinball in Seattle. You can listen to that conversation by clicking the play button above.