Three-time Skee-Ball champ Joey Mucha opens Mission arcade, launches SF's first league

Joey “the Cat” Mucha, a three-time national Skee‑Ball champion, opened Joey the Cat’s Mission Arcade in San Francisco’s Mission District and staged a Thursday-night public kick-off for what local outlets are calling the city’s first organized Skee‑Ball league. The venue grew out of a years-long project Mucha began in 2018 and reflects a business that already supplies arcade machines to dozens of bars across the city.

Mucha built his reputation in competitive Skee‑Ball and kept practicing at home after buying a personal machine, a habit that turned into a larger enterprise. “My passion for Skee‑Ball and then putting it into bars and other venues basically blossom to business that was very organic,” Mucha said in an interview with CBS News, explaining how a single home machine multiplied into “hundreds of arcade games” in his inventory.

The Mission space occupies what used to be Mucha’s warehouse for arcade games and, according to social posts, features a packed collection of vintage machines and a full bar. “World champion Joey ‘The Cat’ Mucha just opened Joey the Cat's Mission Arcade, a warehouse space packed with vintage games, a full bar and” reads an Instagram caption excerpt promoting the venue. CBS News noted the space is “open mostly for private parties” but that Mucha opened it to the public for the Thursday-night league kickoff.

Mucha described the conversion from warehouse to public arcade as hard-won. “It was a lot of work. A mixture of red tape, construction woes, the pandemic was in the middle of all that. Then just really seeing this vision through took a lot of tenacity,” he told CBS News. He added that the opening felt like vindication: “This is a dream come true. Building this venue has been a lot of work but just feeling the fervor that we feel right now has really just washed over me with joy. I'm so glad to be past the construction woes and now what's happening behind me is in the future.”

Photographic evidence shows Mucha playing at the venue prior to the March coverage; a SFGate photo caption documents him launching a ball up a Skee‑Ball ramp at Joey the Cat’s Mission Arcade on Feb. 27, 2026. Local reporting published March 5–6, 2026 describes the public Thursday-night kickoff that launched league play while also noting the space’s roots as Mucha’s warehouse and his wider machine-rental business.

Organizers describe the new competition as San Francisco’s first organized Skee‑Ball league, with regular competitions planned at Mucha’s arcade and the first full season of play expected to begin in the coming months, according to published coverage. Specifics about league format, registration, fees and prizes were not disclosed in initial reports.

Mucha’s presence in the city’s nightlife economy is already concrete: he owns hundreds of games and rents them to dozens of local bars, a footprint that gives the new Mission venue both an existing client base and a potential pipeline of players. For now, the arcade will continue to host private events while staging public competitions as the league organizes its first season.