Shortly before midnight near the edge of the Inland Empire, a woman hoisted a bulbous Labubu mascot atop her head, took a stranger’s hand, and led a conga line to the pulse-quickening tune of a Vengaboys “We Like to Party” remix. Twentysomethings clad in Deftones and Pikachu tees, Dodgers caps, and beaded bracelets joined the procession, snaking from the dance floor through the bar area and back down again. Some strayed from the miniparade for sustenance—hazmat-blue Jell-O shots in syringes, $5 a prick—while others wiggled their glow sticks against the flickering pink and yellow lights.

We were not at a text-for-location warehouse rave on the outskirts of downtown L.A., nor were we at a club. In fact, this rager was Hello Kitty–themed—with trippy visuals of the fluffy cat blaring behind the DJs—and was hosted by the Dave & Buster’s in Ontario, California, just over 35 miles outside Los Angeles. Weirder still: The Hello Kitty party is far from the only rave that Dave & Buster’s has held.

The long-running chain, known mostly for its gargantuan arcade, bar fare, and ample screens for showing sports, has begun to let some of its locations book ad hoc late-night events with local promoters and artists. For these raves—dance parties set to thrumming electronic music, often with a bacchanalian edge—organizers (known sometimes in rave parlance as “party crews” and “collectives”) have built stages, brought in sound systems, and switched the channels from ESPN to psychedelic images to welcome in revelers.

After sold-out ventures at the Hollywood and Highland location in 2023, housed in the same indoor-outdoor mall where the Oscars happen every year, the chain has gradually rolled out raves in markets outside California: the suburbs (Auburn, Washington, and Euless, Texas), college towns (Tempe, Arizona), East Coast metropolises (Brooklyn), and southern beach destinations (Miami). And in many places, they appear to be thriving.

In some ways, it makes sense. You don’t go to Dave & Buster’s on a whim. You usually go there for something—a birthday, a bar mitzvah, a special family Saturday-afternoon outing. “We are a planned-occasion visit,” said Robert Jenkins, the company’s vice president of sales and local strategy. “It’s rare that someone drives by a Dave & Buster’s and says, ‘Oh, I’m going to stop in.’ And in a tougher hospitality environment, these planned occasions are really valuable.”

Enter the raves. The chain’s executives are hoping that those planned visits will include paying $20 to $40 a ticket to join the conga line and throwing down at the bar.

Dave & Buster’s ambitious swing arrives at an inflection point for the company, which has had a rough few years. Former CEO Chris Morris suddenly stepped down in late 2024, after just two years in the role, around the same time the brand earnings report revealed a 7.7 percent decline in same-store sales compared to the previous year. The company’s recently installed CEO, Tarun Lal, said on an earnings call in late 2025 that Dave & Buster’s had to address various thorny issues that had compounded ongoing sales and profit-growth issues: buy newer games that could keep people coming back, do a better job of training staff, and pour more energy into fresh marketing initiatives.

Raves have become entwined with D&B’s push to boost its numbers, a way the company is trying to distinguish itself in the ubercompetitive “eatertainment” landscape that it helped create. The field is more crowded now, with Bowlero, Top Golf, and other eat-and-play concepts springing up in many of the same areas. “The market is almost saturated,” said Brian McCleary, who served as D&B’s vice president of operations for nearly a decade and is now interim COO. “We’re still probably the biggest as far as overall units and volume, but there’s a lot more competition for that spend.” Despite opening several new stores, the company had a lackluster fourth quarter in 2025 and missed its revenue projection. Its stock dipped. In the face of a financial quagmire, why not throw up a few glow sticks?

This past spring, Dave & Buster’s doubled down on hosting events. It launched a sub-brand called D&B Unlocked, a ticketed event discovery platform in which guests can sift through upcoming nightlife offerings at their local arcade. These might include karaoke nights, themed bingo happy hours, and raves, often thrown with well-respected collectives. As Jenkins put it, the brand aims to “drive traffic during less popular days of the week, trying to stay relevant, trying to borrow culture sometimes if we need to,” through the raves.

This move also has the potential to transform the company and who it’s for. Not everyone is so sure it’ll work. Though Dave & Buster’s raves are more wholesome affairs than the debauched culture of parties transpiring long after bars shutter at 2 a.m., the image of ribald partying among Skee-Ball machines chafes against the company’s family-friendly reputation. “It has an identity issue,” said a Dave & Buster’s bartender I spoke to. “I’ve been saying that for years. Not that it’s a bad place to work. It’s not a bad company. It’s just, what are you trying to be today?”

Then again, as D&B’s interim Head of Marketing Melissa Powers told me, anytime the chain surveys its customers, “adults-only” nights are one of the most highly requested events. Grown-ups want to party in the arcade too. And from what I saw, at least on the right night, Dave & Buster’s may be on to something.

***

Dave & Buster’s owes its existence to the pursuit of pleasure. The company’s origin story holds that two enterprising men—Dave Corriveau and James “Buster” Corley—first dreamed up the idea in the late 1970s, after they noticed their customers ping-ponging back and forth between their respective joints, located side by side in the shadow of the Arkansas State Capitol: Corriveau’s sprawling pool hall–turned–arcade Slick Willy’s World of Entertainment and Corley’s eponymous bar and restaurant Buster’s. Proof of concept in hand, they joined forces, opening an arcade and a watering hole with solid food under the same roof, with Corriveau’s name placed first in the title because he won a coin toss. The Dave & Buster’s empire now spans more than 180 locations across the world.

The late Corley once told this story with considerably more color in an episode of the sports podcast Pardon My Take. Corley, who died in 2023, said on the show that Corriveau had initially opened a “big-ass, really fine pool hall” in a former Little Rock train station depot. Corriveau then approached Corley about opening a bar next door to his place as “success insurance.” After it opened in 1978, Buster’s became one of the city’s preeminent fern bars, where singles swilled breezy drinks under the libidinous glow of Tiffany lamps; it was also “a favored haunt of politicians, bond daddies, and coke whores,” wagged the Arkansas Business Journal. The reason for the separation between the businesses, Corley added, had to do with a defunct local law that forbade the two establishments existing under one umbrella. “In those days, you couldn’t have a liquor license with pool tables,” he said in the podcast interview. “So Slick Willy’s and Buster’s had to be separate, no common door. But there was a walkway between the two.”

The united Dave & Buster’s first swung open its doors in a Dallas industrial hub in 1982. The location began amassing customers drawn in by its scratch kitchen, overseen by Corley, and arcade games of chance helmed by Corriveau, who styled Dave & Buster’s to resemble a windowless casino where visitors could lose their sense of time. “You would not believe what it was back then,” said Popeye Vasquez, the company’s regional marketing director for the Western U.S. He described the early iteration of Dave & Buster’s as if “Cheesecake Factory had an arcade.” In that original location’s first year, the duo raked in $3.5 million in sales.

Corriveau and Corley had gone into business with the intention of scaling up. While expanding first throughout Texas, they picked locations that weren’t obvious real-estate boomtowns. At every new site, Corriveau and Corley installed a massive flagpole and flew the largest U.S. flag they could find, betting that people’s curiosity would lead them to Dave & Buster’s, McCleary said. The company surged early on because of its “adult focus,” he added. “It wasn’t meant to be focused on smaller children; it was adults that just wanted to come out, have a good time.” As the company spread across the U.S., it maintained rules for decades: Kids were allowed only with a chaperone age 25 or older, and adults could tote along just three total kids.

Around the time Corriveau and Corley were seeing traction with the early iteration of their dual restaurant-and-arcade concept, a cultural phenomenon rose in nascent techno and house scenes of cities from Detroit to Ibiza: raves. Sometimes called “massives,” these embryonic raves bubbled underground, often in former industrial districts with available, frequently forgotten spaces. A rave is, in its ideal form, a temporary ecosystem of revelers, characterized by euphoric acceptance of that time and place. But it didn’t take long for some promoters to see dollar signs. By the early 1990s, some crews in the U.K. began throwing megaraves more spiritually akin to experiential carnivals than to more lowkey dance-floor-and-DJ setups. “As raves became big business, it transformed itself from a lawless zone into a highly organized space programmed for pleasure, and rave culture itself became highly ritualized,” author Simon Reynolds wrote in his book Generation Ecstasy. “There was a uniform—floppy chapeaux, hoods, white gloves, gas masks, wooly hats, loose-fitting or stretchy clothes (baggy jeans and T-shirts for boys, Lycra for girls), along with accessories like whistles, air horns, and fluorescent glow-sticks.”

In the U.S., the emergence of corporate-sponsored electronic music festivals like Electric Daisy Carnival—which began, much like Dave & Buster’s offering would, in Southern California—and Ultra brought rave culture to the apex of commerce. The hush-hush raves that require knowing someone and slinking into condemned warehouses have always happened alongside parties thrown by big-name promoters.

But in the 2010s, raving began to go back underground following several drug overdoses at rave-specific events, which led the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to cease hosting EDC and other rave events, and for Los Angeles County to consider banning raves from festivals altogether. (EDC then moved to Las Vegas, where it’s still held annually.) Those throwing parties back then in the region “did not want to say rave at that time,” said Chad Kenney, the creative director of the L.A. rave crew Brownies & Lemonade. “It was basically a dog whistle for the city or vice to shut down what you’re doing.” It’s a history, in other words, that one wouldn’t expect an international chain to have hanging over it.

***

Early in 2023, Vasquez, the D&B regional director, received a phone call from Ronda Aycock, one of the general managers he oversees. “Hey, do you want to get fired together?” she asked.

She was joking, probably. Aycock had been talking to her former manager at Dave & Buster’s, CaseyJones Alam, who happened to be a DJ and involved in the local L.A. rave scene. He had hatched an idea with Brownies & Lemonade, which was known for hosting famous DJs in anomalous places: inside the elevator at United Talent Agency, in a USS aircraft carrier. When Alam floated the possibility of having Brownies & Lemonade take over the Hollywood Dave & Buster’s, Aycock, that store’s general manager, was game to make it happen. “I knew if we gambled on it, people would show up, and honestly, I just wanted people in the door,” said Aycock, who had been trying out different events in the store to boost attendance and sales on weeknights. When he heard the plans for the Hollywood rave, Vasquez assumed there was “no way” it could work.

On one hand, Vasquez thought that a Dave & Buster’s rave would get shut down swiftly by the police. On the other, he knew that the company had dabbled in off-kilter programming offerings for the past 50 years. After Corriveau and Corley opened their second location, also in Dallas, the founders in 1989 sold off an 80 percent stake in the company to expand it. The business pushed to become a sports-viewing destination by adding in 40-foot screens called WOW Walls, which can be split into subscreens tuned to different channels. It’s also built out more immersive games in recent years: A notable recent entry, called the “human crane,” clips customers into a harness; a crane then lowers them into a massive pit rife with blow-up toys and other trinkets. Amid the cultural rise of betting platforms and prediction markets, the company announced in 2024 that its customers could wager on games among themselves via the D&B app. At least one Dave & Buster’s location within the past year has hired a string quartet to play live versions of iconic video game soundtracks. Some DJs had even spun tracks on Dave & Buster’s rooftops before, or in the dedicated venue spaces the company rents out for parties and corporate events. The Hawaii location had previously hosted club-night ragers. Yet even for a place that’s constantly reinventing itself, raves were mostly uncharted terrain.

Vasquez’s fears stemmed less from corporate backlash and more from his past life as a raver traversing Orange County and L.A.’s late-night scenes. In the early ’90s, he had attended Long Beach’s mythic Spruce Goose rave, which took over the hulking geodesic dome that once housed eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes’ failed wooden plane. He’d been to raves where things got dark. The vibe of Dave & Buster’s might be quirkier than you’d expect, but it was still a corporation. “I thought, legitimately, people were going to mosh and do the hard drugs,” Vasquez said. “Somebody is going to fall off of a balcony. All of the things that sound the alarm on: liability, liability, liability.”

But he had also been surprised by the success of past D&B events, helmed by careful managers with a keen sense of what would work for their hyperlocal customers, or at least a willingness to experiment. Plus, corporate was aware that they were hosting the event. So he swallowed his worries. Brownies & Lemonade put together a secret lineup of musical guests and launched ticket sales in an Instagram announcement calling it the group’s “wildest location yet.” Kenney said they sold more than 1,000 tickets for the party, slated for a Wednesday in mid-February, within an hour of listing the event.

That night Vasquez rolled up to the Hollywood Dave & Buster’s, decked out in a suit. Stepping into the arcade, he winced as he accidentally bumped into someone. He steeled himself for the worst: “When I was going to raves and going to these types of things, when you bumped into somebody, you were looking to fight,” he said. To Vasquez’s shock, attendees were instead convivial, even friendly. “At this thing, they would literally look up at you and be like, ‘Oh my God, I love your hair. Can I give you a hug?’ ” he recalled. (To his mind, this person had not indulged in party favors.) “Everyone was there to just compliment each other, dance with each other, have a good time. I could not have been more wrong about what I thought was going to happen there.”

Video of these rattling sets, juxtaposed against Pop-A-Shot games, swiftly made the rounds on social media. Powers, the Dave & Buster’s marketing executive, told me that she had first gotten wind of the rave after the company kept getting tagged in videos from that night. Vasquez said that the bosses had one question for him after the event: “When’s the next one?”

If the D&B C-suite had any initial misgivings about putting their chips on raves, no one I spoke to blinked. “It’s giving us new eyeballs … which is what all of our industry is fighting for: traffic. It’s the frequency of visits,” said Jenkins, who delighted in telling me that at a recent Dave & Buster’s rave in Euless, Texas, he ran into his former Sunday school teacher. When I asked McCleary about what those internal conversations were like, he reiterated that the company lets general managers take the reins on events at its many official national outposts. “As long as they’re protecting the brand,” he said. “That’s where the ideas come from, right?”

A year later, Brownies & Lemonade returned to the same Dave & Buster’s for another rave. JP Orchison, one of the artists who performed that night in Hollywood, initially thought he would be DJing outside the arcade and not within it. “How is this legal?” he remembered thinking. The power went out twice. “The venue wasn’t set up for the amount of production and special effects we brought,” Kenney said. Later, a minor earthquake throttled the arcade. The requests for Dave & Buster’s parties kept coming.

***

Two weeks after I attended the inaugural Hello Kitty rave in Ontario, I drove out to Orange County late one Friday night to see how the party would play out at the Irvine Dave & Buster’s. When I walked into the arcade, I experienced a feeling I’d stuffed down into my subconscious for decades: the stultifying awkwardness of a middle school dance. Not 20 people shuffled around near the bar, lingering on opposite walls. Partygoers seemed more enthused about the vendor selling beaded plushie necklaces than about heading to the dance floor.

Judging from the satellite bar lodged near the decks, Dave & Buster’s management expected far more people to show up for the event, given the number of RSVPs. The bartenders and servers, some dressed in light-up rave gear, were trying to ratchet up excitement by passing around stickers. As I stood against the bar top and watched people shyly trickle in, Vasquez came up to me. “Irvine is a tough market,” he said with a small smile. But the low attendance came as a surprise to Dave & Buster’s—a rave the summer prior had sold out, with a 2,000-person-strong waitlist. Dave & Buster’s quietly nixed the remaining dates on the Hello Kitty tour shortly after the Irvine party.

The shuttered Hello Kitty experiment animated yet another challenge in scaling raves across Dave & Buster’s many outposts: the sense that these parties are once-in-a-lifetime events that can’t be missed. A rave likely loses its FOMO-inducing potency when it feels as if you can go to one all the time at your local mall. Still, the company remains bullish on raves, and management is hoping that partnering with crews like Brownies & Lemonade—which is gearing up to host various raves via the company’s new ticketed D&B Unlocked platform—will help drive interest in coming to the chain for something other than games.

Orchison, the Australian-born, Denver-based DJ who has played several Dave & Buster’s raves under the name ÆON:MODE, sees a through line between the arcade chain parties and the freewheeling spirit of the OG rave scene. To him, the Dave & Buster’s raves tend to be “less polished” than others he’s played, despite the room’s corporate-seeming trappings. “I think the juxtaposition is the point,” Orchison said. “They’re obviously letting us do it, but it’s kind of a middle finger to the corporation, the man, whatever. The fact that they have to … clear space, to move arcades out of the way to make this makeshift dance floor, that’s what makes it more raw and warehousey.”

For Orchison, playing at a Dave & Buster’s “is reminiscent of when I used to play house parties,” he added. “That experience is very nostalgic and very, like, ‘This is not as serious.’ We’re in a very random and hilarious place. What this actually makes us do is take our top hats off, and we can then actually just have fun as DJs. And I think that’s what everyone else feels as well.”

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