Between watching old episodes of The Game Chasers and this recent episode of Penny Arcade: The Series where Mike shows off his home arcade, it’s kind of gotten the old nostalgia gears turning in my own head of some similar projects that I’d like to undertake myself…
…eventually, anyways!
I’ve always thought that it would be pretty sweet to have my own personal arcade. I didn’t necessarily spend a ton of time in them growing up, as most of my gaming was done in the comfort of my own on my NES and SNES and we only had just the one small arcade/pizza place anyways, but there were still a few classics that I remember fondly today – The Simpsons Arcade Game, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Street Fighter 2 … not to mention all of the different varieties of pinball machines, even though I always feel so horribly helpless at it.
More recently, Sara and I occasionally find ourselves in need of something to do over at Disney that’s not under the sweltering sun, and we’ve had a lot of fun killing time on all of the classic arcade machines found around DisneyQuest. How sweet would it be to pick up maybe half a dozen or so machines of our all-time favorites … boy, that would be really hard to whittle it down to only six, though, now that I think about it, and that’s only looking at my list and not even my wife’s at this point! 😯
Maybe they would be mostly the same??? Boy, wouldn’t that be convenient!
Anyways, on top of that general awesomeness, why stop at just a few arcade machines when this fantasy game room of mine might as well also serve as a loving tribute to that 8-bit game console that started it all for yours truly. Apparently it’s a big thing right now for people to collect the full catalog of their favorite console’s games – most notably the NES, and even though there’s something like 700-800 games that were made for the system (not counting imports or whatever), I’d like to think that if I get to the point in my life where I’ve got enough room in my house for a mini-arcade, also scoring a metric ton of Nintendo games at a few bucks each (for most of them) shouldn’t be too much of a problem, either. 😉
Of course, that’s really the catch there because in our current house unless I were to gut the Lego shelves that I painstakingly constructed over the course of last summer, there’s just really no room to do this kind of project justice where we stand today. In a way, I kind of love seeing how Mike of Penny Arcade transformed his garage into his arcade, but let’s be realistic – he lives in Seattle, I live in Florida! I just about break a sweat walking out into the garage to dump the trash, so without some crazy overhaul to air condition my garage (and basically denounce all hope of ever parking my car in it again), it just isn’t in the cards here today.
But that’s not to say that it’s not going to be a serious selling point if/when we find ourselves looking to upgrade our humble abode as our bustling family continues to grow! 