Sometime in the late ‘90s or early ‘00s, I would beg my father to drive me to Good Time Emporium in Somerville every weekend. He would always oblige, and while I’m sure he did it out of the kindness of his heart, being able to watch the Patriots on a gigantic TV while ordering a beer probably didn’t hurt. The magic of Good Time was in its size; teenagers like myself could play arcade games, adults like my father could sit at a bar and watch sporting events, and little kids could have birthday pizza parties. It was a dream come true, and an especially impressive bar-arcade-amusement park establishment in a pre-Dave and Busters world.

But there was also a little extra something about Good Time that made it special. A little personal touch, I would say. I remember one Sunday afternoon rushing over to the Mortal Kombat 4 machine. I didn’t even know the game had come out yet, and there it was for me to play, right after the other 12 kids in front of me in line. After much anticipation, I walk up to the joystick, lay my fingers on the buttons, and notice that someone had taken the time and effort to print out both special moves and Fatalities for most of the characters. This slip of paper was taped to the machine for all playing to see.

Amazing. What guardian angel did this for us? A fellow kombatant? Or was this person under the employ of Good Time Emporium?

As it turns out, his name is Paul Fitch, and not only did he work there, but he was apparently a manager at the time.

“When I was managing there, I got way more interested with the game side of things over the sports bar side of the place,” Paul tells me. “I’ve worked in sports pubs and nightclubs all over  but this was like a whole different world to me; the big machines, the technology, it was amazing.”

Paul and I had about a 45 minute conversation over the phone last month. I was given his contact info from a friend who has worked with Paul a few times. Paul is currently the LCMS (liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry) Manager at Charles River Labs in Worcester.  I was using a free, low-quality call recording app and jotting down disjointed notes to conduct this interview. It’s a shame the recording was so hard to hear, because talking to Paul is a treat. I have done my best to transcribe our conversation as accurately as possible. Paul always talks with enthusiasm, especially when it’s something he likes, such as video games. 

“Tekken was my favorite series. I was horrible at playing it but I loved it. That’s the one that got me into looking on message boards for move lists and codes. I’d have them taped on the machines and kids would be asking me where I was getting this stuff on. I’d tell them it was all on the internet!” Remember the time frame here. Good Time closed in 2008. I didn’t have completely reliable internet until 2001 or 2002. I wouldn’t know how to find a non-AOL message board for years. Good Times was cutting edge. In fact, you would see games at Good Time you couldn’t find in many other places across the United States.

“The guy who handled the games there was really really smart. I wish I could remember his name right now…he would go to trade shows and he would pick up, and I mean buy, not rent, he’d buy these machines from Korea and other parts of Asia. So we would end up with games years before they ended up in the States. None of the menus would even be in English. These were things kids had never seen before, and stuff they wouldn’t be able to play at home for awhile.”

Paul started doing bouncer and doorman jobs around the nightclub scene before he ended up managing them. He has worked at a variety of venues including the Worcester Palladium and the Hippodrome in Springfield. He wound up working for Good Time after looking for “the next big thing.” Paul tells me he was taken back at just how large Good Time was. It was indeed something quite different. A full bar and billiards hall with an entire arcade, a small laser tag arena, a couple bowling lanes, some go-karts, and a live music venue. I asked Paul if he thinks it’s something like Good Times could exist today:

“Well Good Time was a whole different beast, really. Plus, clubs and bars are completely different now. The big nightclubs as we once knew them aren’t around anymore. I feel like that whole idea is dead. And like you said, Somerville was different at the time, and we had the right audience back then. We had a lot of kids, mostly high school kids, and they would all show up looking for something to do because there was nothing to do at the time. And we really didn’t crack down on kids just hanging out, either. As long as you weren’t being a jerk of anything, you were pretty much always welcome inside. It was mostly just kids putting on cool clothes, trying to impress the ladies the best they could…as well as these gamer kids could [laughs].”

Good Time Prize Wall

Good Time was also a music venue. I did some Googling of the bands that played a Good Time music gig and the two I recognized were Powerman 5000 and Six Feet Under. So I had to ask Paul about how the music scene worked there:

“We usually ended up with a bunch of hardcore bands from the East Boston area. It was a tough time to be booking bands, we really couldn’t get a lot of variety. Even at the Palladium it was just metal, metal, metal. I don’t know if you remember, back in the late ‘90s, early ‘00s, there was a big consolidation going on in the music promotion industry. You had more and more of the smaller venues getting bought out by big conglomerates like Live Nation…why would any band just about to make it big book with a small place like the Hippodrome when they could go play bigger venues and stay at better hotel? A better hotel not in the middle of downtown Springfield? If you have someone controlling every aspect of the tour for you, that makes booking with a big company like that really appealing for a band. The casinos, too…the Palladium was about an hour or so away from Mohegan Sun. This is around 1999, so say you’re…Limp Bizkit or something. You’re gonna have someone handling your tour, getting you in a bigger arena, and staying at a casino for the night. Why live out of your tour van in the parking lot of the Hippodrome at that point?”

The Hippodome in Springfield, MA

Paul makes a good point. Having heard about his work at the Palladium, I wanted to ask him about any more unusual things he may have worked on, such as pro wrestling.

“Do you remember ECW?,” Paul asks me. I inform him I remember Extreme Championship Wrestling extremely well. The “garbage” wrestling promotion that made people think wrestling was real again had stopped at the Palladium more than once.

“They got big really quick. The thing about dealing with ECW was that it was sort of like booking a band with a big cult fan following. ECW lived and died through its merch, just like bands, and so we would actually not get a merch deal out of them. So if I’m booking ICP or ECW, we’re getting that huge crowd, but they’re keeping that merch money. They had people buying ECW hockey jerseys for $100 a piece. The more “carnival” the act is, the harder it is to get a deal with them.

ECW and Insane Clown Posse were the two hardest acts to get a merch deal out of.”

We both take a moment to laugh because really, what else can you do after that statement? Paul tells me about his favorite ECW moment:

“ECW is blowing up at the time and they pay a big advance for a show at the Palladium. It was supposed to be a really big deal, they were gonna fill the place up. It was going to be televised so they were bringing in the big guns, bringing back some of the older big name guys and stuff like that. They had all the classics: Sandman, New Jack, The Dudley Boys, I think they got Bam Bam Bigelow and Hacksaw Jim Duggan…And working with them, I got a behind the scenes look at how wrestling works. Especially when it came to dealing with the fans. ECW had a lot of fan interaction and I saw how the wrestlers would work with the referees and security and staff to keep a certain level of control with the audience. It looked like complete chaos. There was a legitimate issue with fans getting drunk and really trying to fight the wrestlers when they would go into the crowd.”

“It was crazy. I had security out front taking away household items from fans. They bring in stuff for the wrestlers to use as weapons, like VCRs or chairs. I saw a stop sign once. I watched all the wrestlers and ECW crew break out 20 to 30 tables and remove all the metal from them, so they break right down the middle and no one gets hurt.”

“So the main event is tag team ladder match. I think it’s New Jack and Sandman on one team and the Dudley Boys on the other. The wrestlers are climbing up and falling down the ladders, New Jack has a plan to jump off a balcony, and of course he does it and for a minute there I thought he was legitimately knocked out. So he takes time to recover and Sandman has to fight the Dudley Boys by himself. They start throwing everything at each other. Every piece of equipment they paid for was inside the ring by the end of the match.”

That’s right. ECW would purchase every table and every ladder and every chair before their employees went flying through them. No wonder it was hard to get a large merch deal out of them.

“So Sandman and one of the Dudleys go through the crowd up to the main bar, where I am. They start trading blows, Sandman hits Dudley with a pizza tray, then Dudley hits him with a drink tray. Sandman starts looking at the cash register, the actual cash register I’m behind, actually tries to grab it and lift it up, and I’m behind there, my hands up in the air, yelling “No! No! We need that, you can’t use that!”

“They finally somehow make it back to the ring, a stagehand comes up to me and says he needs a tallboy of Budweiser for the Sandman, because that’s Sandman’s big thing: he smashes a beer can on his head and chugs it. We’re in the Palladium, for God’s sake, I don’t have any Budweiser tallboys. So I give him one of those Guinness pub cans they had at the time. I see Sandman up there just smashing the thing against his head over and over, trying to break it open, he’s all bloody. I tried to tell the stagehand it was sheet metal, not aluminum. Then Sandman takes one sip of it, turns around, and says “what the fuck is this shit?” It’s a Guinness, that’s the closest thing I had!”

ECW’s Sandman

I inquire about any other acts that were a big clean-up process.

“ICP would do some things like that. You know ICP likes that soda, they apparently spray it on the crowd? Well we actually had GWAR there one time, and it fell on the same week as an ICP show. I had people working there with permanently stained skin. Between all the Faygo and the fake blood and…whatever else, they just couldn’t get it off.”

Paul had left Good Time before its unfortunate closure in 2008. While there was always a lot of talk about crime in the area back then, and I asked Paul if he thought that was the reason behind the closure.

“I can’t say for sure, but honestly in my time there I never saw anything too too bad. For the most part we could keep things under control. Even back when the Sox won the World Series in 04, we had a packed house, probably at full capacity. I did not see one bad thing go down. We had the cops there to escort everyone out obviously, but there were no incidents at all. Every once in awhile you’d have a parent sneak away from their kids’ birthday party and have a few beers and act like an ass, but it wasn’t too hard keeping kids out of the bar area. Really, the kids who were hanging out there were mostly in high school and they really had no interest in the bar side of things. They were there to hang out and play arcade games. They see some old people drinking and playing Keno…that’s not really all that exciting when you have a new arcade machine in front of you.”

So why did Paul leave? In his words, he got bored of it, and he wanted try something new. Paul originally went to school to study science and decided he wanted to go back. The narrative of a man leaving a bar scene full of fake blood and Faygo for the world of chemistry is fascinating, but even more fascinating is how this man paid for it. Paul got by paying for school by selling copy machines. This was a job that paid on commision, and Paul was in the right place at the right time when an entire chain of banks contacted him telling him they were switching from Xerox to the brand Paul was selling. With this 32 thousand dollar check, Paul paid for his college education. He now works with machines I couldn’t even begin to understand and also holds a teacher’s license.

Paul is the epitome of the modern renaissance man, and I thank him for both his time and the impact his work had on so many of our teen years.