"Every game we have is a banger. There's no filler in our arcade." That's Shane Starr, talking about the collection of machines he's spent five years hunting down, restoring, and now serving cocktails next to on Canton Road.
Satellite Restaurant and Arcade Bar opened its doors for good on September 18, with a soft opening the weekend before it. It sits at 3372 Canton Road, Suite 120, next door to Dr. No's Comics and 2nd Chance Toys, and it's built for adults: the restaurant runs as a normal dining room during the day, then becomes an 18-and-older venue after 4 p.m. There's no cover charge to play. The place passed its first Cobb and Douglas Public Health inspection on September 2 with a perfect 100 and an A grade, which matters less for the food than for what it tells you about how far along construction already was two weeks before the ribbon-cutting.
None of that is the interesting part. The interesting part is that Satellite isn't a new business. It's a new storefront for one.
Shane Starr didn't start as a bar owner. He started as an arcade technician, first at Chuck E. Cheese, then traveling the country for Round1 installing and repairing machines. During the pandemic he saw an opening for independent techs who could keep other people's cabinets running, and by September 2021 that side hustle had turned into a repair route with several contracts across metro Atlanta. The business, Starrcade Amusements, outgrew his garage and moved into a warehouse in Woodstock. It now runs a team of 15, ten of them traveling technicians, servicing arcades across the Southeast with partners as far as Southern California.
The repair work is how Starr ended up with a collection most operators never see. Technicians on service calls kept finding machines headed for the dumpster: rare Japanese imports, rhythm games, cabinets nobody local could fix. Some of that inventory became the public-facing arcade Starr opened at Town Center at Cobb in Kennesaw in late 2023, about 90 machines packed into roughly 3,400 square feet. One of them, a late-1990s rifle game called Pinpoint Shot, is one Starr believes is the only operating example left anywhere. Since Round1's Stonecrest location closed, his arcade is also the only spot in Georgia where you can still play Pop'n Music.
Satellite is the next chapter of that same operation, not a new one. The technicians who kept those machines alive are the same people who stocked the arcade bar on Canton Road. That's a different story than "new bar opens," and it's the one that actually explains why the place looks the way it does.
The kitchen side, developed by chef Adam Smawley, leans hard into the same theme instead of treating it as decor. Starters include Shredder's Cheddars fried cheese curds, TMNTreats stuffed egg rolls, and Galaxy Eggs, a soy-marinated take on deviled eggs. The handheld section gets more specific: Obi Wan Bulgogi pairs tortilla chips with Korean barbecue shaved ribeye, and Seoul Calibur is Korean fried chicken in gochujang sauce with citrus agave slaw and quick-pickled cucumber. It's the kind of menu that only makes sense if the people running the kitchen actually play the games the dishes are named after, which tracks with an owner who restores rare cabinets himself rather than buying a turnkey arcade-bar franchise package.
That distinction is worth sitting with for anyone trying to figure out what kind of night this actually is. A chain testing a new market usually opens with a proven format and works backward from a spreadsheet. Satellite opened with a specific inventory of machines its owner already had, a repair reputation already built with other arcade operators, and a menu written by someone who bothered to get the anime references right. It's a local operator finally putting a storefront on work he was already doing.
Marietta's other grown-up game option didn't need a debut. Dave & Buster's has been at 2215 D&B Drive since 1992, when it was the company's fourth location in the country. At roughly 53,560 square feet, it's a different order of scale entirely, and it's had two real overhauls in its history. The first came in 2012, a $3 million project that added a sports viewing setup with three 180-inch screens alongside a bank of smaller HDTVs. The second, and the bigger one, reopened on February 21, 2025, as what the company called an entirely reimagined location.
That renovation touched the whole building. The Arena added a 360-degree interactive gaming floor with digital walls and floor projections. Private Game Suites now let groups book their own space with High-Tech Darts or a digital shuffleboard game called Social Shuffle, food and drinks delivered right to the room. The old sports section became the Watch Experience, anchored by a 40-foot screen the company nicknamed the WOW Wall, ringed by more than 30 oversized HDTVs. General manager Christopher Kersh called it a transformation at the time, and the first 100 people in line at the reopening got free games for a year to prove it.
Here's how the two venues actually compare on paper:
| Satellite | Dave & Buster's | |
|---|---|---|
| Opened/reopened | September 18, 2026 | 1992, rebuilt February 21, 2025 |
| Footprint | Suite 120 on Canton Road | Roughly 53,560 square feet |
| Age policy | 18-and-older after 4 p.m. | All ages, family-anchored |
| Signature feature | Owner-restored rare cabinets, including a one-of-a-kind rifle game | The Arena's 360-degree gaming floor and the 40-foot WOW Wall |
The gap between those two footprints is the whole story in miniature. One is a corner suite next to a comic shop, stocked with machines its owner personally hauled out of warehouses and landfills. The other is a 33-year-old anchor tenant that just spent millions proving it can still compete with newer, flashier concepts on its own turf.
What makes this worth paying attention to isn't that Marietta got a new place to play games. Cities get new bars constantly. It's that the city's two most recent moves in this space point in opposite directions on purpose. Dave & Buster's answer to staying relevant was to go bigger: more screens, a bigger showpiece room, a menu built for groups who want a private suite and a shuffleboard match with dinner. Satellite's answer was to go narrower: a single specialist with a repair background, a curated set of machines nobody else in the state has, and a room small enough that the owner can still tell you the story behind each cabinet.
Those two bets landed about a year and a half apart, which is a short enough window that Marietta's after-dark game options effectively doubled in kind, not just in count. A resident weighing a Friday night now has an actual choice between two different experiences built by two different kinds of operators, not two versions of the same idea with different paint.
Satellite is still new enough that its longer-term hours and weekly programming hadn't fully settled by its opening weekend. Anyone curious about the rare cabinets Starr has been collecting since his repair-route days can still see the earlier version of that collection at Starrcade in Kennesaw, a short drive up I-75 from the Canton Road location.
Marietta keeps adding rooms like this, and knowing which block they're on is part of knowing the city. If you're weighing a move to a street where a night like this is a short walk instead of a long drive, The Carlson Orange Team can tell you which Marietta blocks put you closest to it.
