On a hot weekend in July, not all the fun is outside at Winnipeg Beach. Inside Playland, players of all ages are at the arcade’s air hockey table. A generational tilt is on full display. “I beat him 7-3,” Kyler Johnson said with a big smile. “(I lost) to my eight-year-old grandson,” Scott Pawluk said as he laughed. “It’s great, I’ve been coming here since I was a teenager myself.” Johnson and his grandpa enjoy the nostalgia of Playland while visiting Winnipeg Beach. He walked over to try a number of pinball machines on display. More than 10 vintage arcade games are available, but patrons will need to bring their quarters and loonies to play. Playland’s owners say a nearly 70-year-old coin-operated relic is a favourite. “I think the biggest surprise has been the mechanical horse from 1957,” said Tyler Bennie, co-owner of Playland. “Their faces light up when they are on it. It’s really nice and all we had to do on that one was dust it off and plug it in.” Bennie and Melanie McFarlane took possession in June 2025 and spent more than a year renovating the historic space. The couple reopened Playland on Canada Day. The Manitoba Historical Society said the original building built in 1939 started as a business to provide fast food and entertainment. “We wanted to change a whole bunch of things in our life,” McFarlane said. “Move out of the city. Live by the water, and then this place was for sale and we thought well, let’s inquire and before we knew it, we owned the building. Here we are a year later, it’s been really wild.” There’s no shortage of players fishing for a fight on the joysticks of Street Fighter II as the sounds of the arcade reverberate off the walls. “The fighting one is pretty cool because I watch my brothers play all the time,” said Blair Cain visiting with her friend Scarlett Scully. “I just really like beating Blair,” Scully said as she laughed. A new pinball machine donated to the arcade from the Beachside Vinyl in town will be installed this week. The couple says they are overwhelmed with support from the beachside community. They point to a friendly business owner operating a mobile lemonade stand who drove by recently. “I was working on a machine here and he comes and hands Mel a lemonade and just says ‘thank you for opening playland again, this one’s on me,’” Bennie said.
