When Christopher LaPorte and two investors sank $1.5 million into a 7,000-square-foot bar built for sociable video gamers at 512 Fremont St. in Las Vegas, they were betting that the stereotype of the isolated teenage gamer was already outdated. Insert Coin(s) opened its doors on April 15, 2011, packed with more than 40 nostalgic arcade cabinets — Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man among them — alongside 43 flat-panel televisions ranging from 32 to 60 inches and a video wall that turned the space into equal parts arcade and nightclub.
LaPorte, who had arrived in Las Vegas seven years before the bar's opening, tested the concept first through a Facebook page before recruiting two spine surgeons as investors, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He said gamers had become mainstream, and he deliberately steered the venue away from being pigeonholed as a niche hangout. Local artists painted murals of classic game characters on the walls, and the space was outfitted with couches shaped like vertically standing tufted mattresses alongside padded benches and a bar stretching more than 70 feet.
A Deliberate Break From the Typical Nerd Bar
LaPorte modeled Insert Coin(s) after early video game bars like New York's Barcade and Portland's Ground Kontrol, but he deliberately layered in high-end nightlife features — bottle service and live DJs — specifically to avoid the venue being labeled solely as a nerd bar, according to Las Vegas Weekly. He also chose to skip food service entirely, saying he did not want grease from a kitchen fouling up the consoles. Customers had to be at least 21 years old to get in, and electronic design, hardware, and integration for the arcade setup alone cost about $1 million.
Under the city's tavern-limited liquor license, patrons at Insert Coin(s) could not legally walk out the door onto the Fremont Street Experience with a drink in hand — a restriction that set independent taverns apart from the open-container privileges enjoyed by the big Fremont Street casino-resorts, according to the Las Vegas Defense Group. LaPorte had bigger ambitions than a single bar, though; he set out to prove Insert Coin(s) could grow into a multi-city brand, and by late 2012 he had opened a second, 10,000-square-foot location in Minneapolis's Warehouse District, per Twin Cities Business. That Minneapolis venue was later converted into a private events facility.
Rent, Rivals, and a Shuttered Door
The Fremont Street original didn't survive. Insert Coin(s) closed on July 8, 2015, after four years in business, following landlord eviction filings over back rent and mounting monthly losses, the Las Vegas Sun reported. When the bar opened in 2011, it predated Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh's $350 million Downtown Project, a redevelopment campaign that eventually flooded the Fremont East district with competing bars and restaurants and splintered the customer traffic Insert Coin(s) once had largely to itself.
The bar's closure came amid a broader reshaping of downtown Las Vegas nightlife, but LaPorte's underlying wager on adult gamers as a viable market didn't disappear with the venue. He went on to co-found RESET, a Las Vegas-based consulting agency that advises businesses on integrating video gaming, esports, and nightlife experiences, and he later served as a panelist on UNLV esports economy forums. In July 2023, he moved into an entirely different regulated space, consulting for Thrive Cannabis Marketplace on Smoke and Mirrors, one of Nevada's first state-regulated cannabis consumption lounges in Clark County, according to The Nevada Independent.
The Concept Outlived the Original Bar
The video game bar model LaPorte pioneered on Fremont Street didn't vanish from Las Vegas after Insert Coin(s) shut its doors. Florida-based Player 1 Video Game Bar opened a 9,500-square-foot location on Maryland Parkway in August 2019, charging a flat cover for unlimited retro game play alongside craft beers, as Las Vegas Weekly detailed at the time. On the Strip itself, the ambitions grew far larger: Allied Esports opened the 30,000-square-foot HyperX Arena at the Luxor Hotel and Casino in March 2018, equipped with 120 gaming stations and seating for up to 900 guests for major international tournaments and daily walk-up play, according to Unique Venues.
Newer data suggests LaPorte's original thesis about the gaming demographic has only strengthened since Insert Coin(s) opened in 2011. A June 2026 report from the Entertainment Software Association found that 212.3 million Americans — about 67 percent of the population — now play video games weekly, with the average player's age climbing to 37 years old, GamesIndustry.biz reported. That figure stands in contrast to the Entertainment Software Association's 2010 survey, cited around the time Insert Coin(s) opened, which found gamers then averaged 34 years old and that 64 percent played with someone else in person, up from 59 percent in 2008.
Insert Coin(s) never made it past four years at its original Fremont Street address, undone by rent arrears and a downtown bar scene that grew far more crowded than LaPorte anticipated when he opened in 2011. But the underlying bet — that grown adults with disposable income wanted a place to drink and play games together — has since been validated many times over, from Player 1's Maryland Parkway location to the tournament stages inside HyperX Arena.
