You can tell a lot about a business from its bathroom. In one of the women’s rooms inside Somerville’s Good Time Emporium — the greatest gallimaufry of arcade games/pool tables/televised sports/batting cages/dartboards/bowling lanes/bumper cars/wrestling matches/pizza slices/scratch-ticket machines/Keno screens/Skee-Ball/mini-basketball/laser tag/ping-pong/virtual horseracing/kiddy rides/nightclub/people parade/teenage hangout/dive bar this side of the Mall of America — cigarette ashes sit in the sink, the counters slope downward, and one stall’s rickety door lifts into place. Over by the door, there’s a vending machine that dispenses, among other drugstore damage-control tools, glow sticks, tropical-fruit-flavored condoms, and MaxArouse Sexual Stimulant, herbal pills packaged in unmarked, palm-size yellow boxes.

Whether these pseudo-aphrodisiacs suggest that the men tend to be unsavory, or that the women lack libido, is arguable. What’s certain is that the john hints at the character of this 83,000-square-foot entertainment complex hunkered down in Assembly Square: smoky, worn, wobbly, glowing, amusing, tacky — not exactly broken, but not exactly fixed.

This isn’t a bad thing. For a region that’s become increasingly antiseptic over the past 10 years, rife with bland corporate chains and encroaching gentrification, the Good Time Emporium still has genuine character — not the commodified kind engineered by some marketing department. It’s the raw character of nicotine stains, whoopie cushions, and neon beer signs. It’s the character of bobbing-head Bledsoes, Def Leppard cover bands, and pay-per-view boxing matches. It’s the character of Dance Dance Revolution, play-until-you-win candy cranes, and public appearances by ESPN’s "World’s Strongest Man."

It’s not the character of, say, IKEA. But in case you haven’t heard, the City of Somerville has been trying to revamp Assembly Square, a difficult-to-navigate industrial no man’s land off Route 93, for about 20 years. And while the project has been sunk in a series of community disputes and consequent setbacks, one thing’s certain: a franchise of IKEA, the Swedish furniture chain, owns land beside the building that houses Good Time. And it hopes to break ground on a new store this year.

Of course, a lot of things have to happen before then: state-level permits must be approved, activist-filed intents to appeal must be dealt with, and meetings must be held. But an Assembly Square IKEA is a real possibility. And while no one is saying IKEA would come to town with insidious intent, it’s hard to imagine the rough-and-tumble Good Time Emporium co-existing in the same universe as IKEA, never mind sharing a square.

But this isn’t simply yet another tale about a multinational behemoth eating up the little local guy. The story of Good Time has its own plot lines. The mayor of Somerville, Dorothy Kelly Gay, isn’t a big fan of the place, what with its seamy reputation. And though Good Time holds a five-year lease with its landlord, Taurus New England Investments, there’s really no clear answer about the future of the "83,000 square feet of fun," should Assembly Square go under the knife for a real transformation. Which would be a shame; after all, where else in the Boston area can you chug a $3 Bud, play basketball in a cage, pay to unclog a toilet (it’s a game, silly), aim a rifle at a cowboy, and walk away with a new set of glow-in-the-dark fangs, all for less than 10 bucks?

IT’S EASY TO sneer at the Good Time Emporium. (The name is in the singular, even though most taxi drivers, customers, and employees call it "Good Times.") "I suddenly regretted wearing my pea coat and wool slacks," writes Eloise D. Austin in Fifteen Minutes, the Harvard Crimson’s weekend magazine, about her 1999 visit. "An appropriate ensemble for my earlier Lit and Arts section, but out of place among the Harley-Davidson insignia."

Though Austin’s take may be a bit exaggerated, the Good Time’s clientele is decidedly blue-collar, a panoply of faces from all races, shapes, towns, and sides of the track. "Good Time is like America," says the venue’s night manager, Suzanne Rinfret. "You come here, it’s a melting pot. We have every language. We have people who speak Spanish, Thai, Portuguese, Vietnamese."

Open 365 days a year, Good Time is only a decade old, yet its facilities seem straight out of the early-Reagan-administration era. Black puttied cracks squiggle along the hard slate floor, and gray gum spots blot the carpet. Even some of the video games seem transported from yesteryear: coin-op classics like Ms. Pac Man, Galaga, and Atari’s Centipede.

"The place is very old-fashioned," says 21-year-old Salem resident and North Shore Community College student Aaron Judge, who ended up at Good Time after realizing that the Liberty Tree Mall in Danvers closed at 10 p.m. "That’s what I like about it."

Another thing its patrons like: when it comes to interactive entertainment, Good Time is nearly alone in its class. The only other venue around that’s even remotely similar is Jillian’s, a national chain with an outpost across from Fenway Park. It too boasts billiards, big screens, video games, and multiple bars, but unlike Good Time, there’s no live wrestling, martial arts, magic shows, or boxing. And at Jillian’s, everything glistens like a new-car show room. At Good Time, nothing shines.

Their target patron pool is different, too. Jillian’s bills itself as a playground for adults, while Good Time gears itself to both grown-ups and children, hosting approximately 25 birthday parties every Saturday afternoon. "Good Time Emporium is a huge hit with my 10-year-old son," posts an unidentified mother on MommaZone.com, a Cambridge-based online mothers’ resource. "He loves the laser tag and the arcade games.... There is a large full-service bar which tends to get very smoky and quite a few Keno games being played. It’s like a little slice of vice-heaven."

Clearly, one of Good Time’s main attractions is its massive arcade. With rows and rows of 200-plus games, it offers everything from an old-school Shootout Saloon to Austin Powers pinball and Brave FireFighters, a competition of "real life heroes" controlled by a hose nozzle. Although technicians regularly maintain these attractions, the games themselves behave grumpily, indiscriminately eating tokens and spitting out strings of purple tickets redeemable for prizes like containers of disappearing ink (100 tickets each) and Powerpuff Girls CD holders (800 tickets each). A few Saturdays ago, the CoasteRider X-Press, a simulated roller coaster with a two-seat passenger car that vibrates like a drunk with the DTs, spit out four free zigzagging rides before its monitor inexplicably froze. Four tokens were pumped into the coin slot as retroactive payment. Nothing happened. Eventually, with a poke at the coin return, two coins dropped down.

And that’s one of the reasons patrons love the Good Time Emporium. You never know what you’ll get.

IT’S 10 MINUTES to nine on a Thursday night in the dusky haze of a pool hall. Jay, John, and Chris, three college-age kids who say they’ve "been here a lot, but don’t come here often," slouch over a small table strewn with plastic cups, beer bottles, pizza crust, losing scratch tickets, and cigarettes. Above, beams of light transmit athletic events onto a horizontal row of 14-foot projection screens: the Atlanta Thrashers clash with the Tampa Bay Lightning, the Maple Leafs blow past the Penguins, the Sacramento Kings struggle with the New Jersey Nets.

"This place is dead," mutters 21-year-old Jay, a dark-haired Malden resident with a baby-blue visor on his head, a tiny scar on the bridge of his nose, and the perpetual squint of a stoner. Although Good Time may look "dead," there are about 200 people puttering around the premises: dapper Asian boys with yellow-streaked bangs shoot pool; clumps of middle-aged men and women wearily swill beer at the rectangular bar; ’do-rag- and baseball-hat-wearing fellas sit at Sega’s Derby Owners Club, a multiple-player stallion-siring simulation game. But since the enormity of the 3500-person-capacity venue tends to engulf a few hundred folks, the complex seems sparsely populated. "Dead, dead, dead," sighs Jay.

"Y’all have wristbands?" interrupts a bald bouncer, who’s marched over to the table from a perch on a nearby counter. Equal parts George Foreman and Ving Rhames, the bouncer looks familiar; turns out, he appears in two enlarged, color snapshots stapled to a nearby wall. In the pictures, he’s dressed like a drill sergeant and cradling the taut, naked midriffs of two costumed women. Unfortunately, he’s not so playful now: he demands IDs, blusters about how everyone should get wristbands, then barks suspiciously at slit-eyed Jay, "You okay?"

"Me?"

"Your eyes look —" he stops short of an allegation.

Jay blinks, lifts up the curved lip of his visor, and opens his eyes wide. (When told later that he does, in fact, look stoned, Jay protests, "My eyes are always like this, I swear.") The bouncer glowers, then lumbers away.

By the time Jay’s friend Phil, also 21, joins the table five minutes later, the tale of the bouncer’s intrusion has already evolved. "Were you just here when the guy came over to me?" Jay asks, motioning to Phil. "He’s like, ‘Your eyes look all fucked up!’ And I looked at him. And he’s like, ‘You all right? You look high.’ I was like, ‘What?’"

All too perfectly, the opening buzz-saw riff of the Cars’ "Good Times Roll" plays from the speakers: Let the good times roll/Let them knock you around.

"Damn, I hope he doesn’t try to take away my keys," grumbles Jay. "I met this girl here, Amanda. One night — this wasn’t the same night I met her — she was all messed up on Valium, so they took her keys away. I had to come and pick her up. She turned out to be a total psycho, though."

Let the stories be told/Let them say what they want.

"Remember," winks John, leaning across the table so his words drown out the voices of Jay and Ric Ocasek. "There’re two sides to every story."