2025 Year In Review

As 2025 draws to a close we wanted to look back on this year and some of the arcade games, events, and other significant moments that made it special!

New Games and Installations

This year we brought in several new arcade cabinets and installations! Most noteably, the majestic Nightmare Kart arcade cabinet, built by Arcade Commons, debuted along with Wonderville’s 666th birthday in June. We also brought in Oshi Gokko by Team Wario this year. In October, we partnered with Checkpoint to launch a new free photobooth! Lastly, in November we were lucky to receive Quantum Jungle by Robin Baumgarten which we will be hosting for the forseeable future! We are eventually sending it back to Europe so make sure you come by and check it out while you can!

Museum of the Moving Image Residencies

In 2025 we continued our partnership with the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Beginning in July, they featured WeatherSys Admin in the Hearst Lobby. We’re looking forward to January where we’ll be bringing in a new game, so keep an eye on our social media channels for that announcement!

Other Partnerships (needs update)

Since Wonderville has limited space, we’ve been working with other venues to host arcade cabinets for short term residencies. Right now, Particle Mace and Super Sharp birds live at Nitehawk Cinema in Prospect Park in the Trees Lounge on the 2nd floor. Powerboat Italia ‘88 is at All Night Skate and Volleygon is residing at Windjammer in Ridgewood (in partnership with Footlight Presents). Lastly, Slam City Oracles is at LoFi, a new bar in Prospect Park! We hope to continue to partner with venues to feature our games and rotate them periodically so we can keep building new cabinets at Wonderville!

Residencies

We also continued our two seasonal residency programs. On the Wondercab we featured Scythe Machine, One Million Stars, Kick Kick Boom, and Jump & Puzzle. On the Pico-8 arcade we had Cosmo Mambo No 5, BLASTODROME, Lemon Shark, and My Lovely Wife vs 100 Draculas.

Community

Our monthly playtest nights hosted by Blake Andrews continue to be a huge success, with 20+ developers showing up each month to showcase games on the last Tuesday of the month. On the first Saturday of the month, Blake has also been facilitating the 2 Hour Game Jam Club where attendees learned how to make games using RenPy, Bitsy, M.U.G.E.N., ZZT, Môsi, Mario Builder 64, Google Sheets, Doom Level Builder, and more! We are grateful to all of the work Blake has put in and are excited to grow this community more in 2026!

Check out the 2 Hr Game Jam archive to play some of the games built during these workshops!

Events (needs update)

In addition to our work with games, Wonderville continues to host a wide variety of events like WordHack, the Donut Lounge hip-hop showcase, LiveCodeNYC, Disasterpiece movie night, Brooklyn Experimental Electronic Music Night, Open VCR Night, and Wonderville Karaoke! We also have recurring DJ Parties like Weeb Adjacent, Tackycardia, Smash Bash, and City Soul (playing New Year’s Eve tonight!)

This year we teamed up with Problem Child and Sour Somethings to host a series of Drag Shows with themes like Adventure Time, Over the Garden Wall, and Toonami. Our staff also played an incredible Halloween Show and covered Blink 182, Gorillaz, Death From Above 1979, Siouxie and the Banshees, and Misfits! We also teamed up with Death By Audio for a workshop to help people solder their synthesizer kit

Every Wednesday is our Killer Queen Open Hive Night, and it’s been wonderful to see the community around that game grow over the years. Bumblebash took place in Chattanooga Tennessee this year, which marked the 10 year birthday of the game! Mark and Steph traveled down to talk about Wonderville and building indie games. Thank you to Bumblebear for the invitation! We’ve also grown our virtual community on our Twitch channel (check out Fort90 TV every Monday!) and have archived over 400 livestreams since 2020 on YouTube

Randwiches

2025 was our fourth year working with Jenn de la Vega aka Randwiches! We featured 6 new signature hot dogs this year, bringing the grand total to 63 hot dog recipes since we started this partnership! We’re celebrating with Jenn by hosting our annual Hot Dog Appreciation Night on Sunday February 1st so come meet the chef and eat some dogs!

Wonderville Projects

With everything going on in the world, we are grateful that we can contribute a litte bit of positivity through our small arcade space. Last year we launched Wonderville Projects, a 501(c)-3 organization, that helps to fund much of the community endeavors. We look forward to continuing these programs in 2026 and starting new partnerships and events!

If you’d like to make a tax-deductible donation, just follow the link below:

We also offer monthly memberships to Wonderville, which include discounts on event tickets, drinks, and merch at the bar! If you’d like to check out our membership tiers, head over to our WithFriends page!

Wonderville Merch (needs update)

You can also support us by buying merch! We rolled out new hoodies, long-sleeve shirts, magnets, fanny packs, and tote bags - all designed by Maria Kleback - this past November. The quotes on the apparel are from actual Google Reviews!

Do you have another idea or want to collaborate in some zany way? Send us an email! We look forward to hearing from you!