I want an arcade. In my house.

It’s every kid’s dream, isn’t it? Get a whole bunch of arcade machines, set them on freeplay, and put them in a dedicated room in your house? You know, alongside the vending machine that dispenses limitless candy and pop? You know you’ve had this fantasy.

I love arcade machines. I love how the way they look and how there’s art all over them. I love that they build a big fancy cabinet specific not just to playing games but to playing ONE GAME. These days it’s all the rage to make game consoles that double as Blu-ray players or internet browsers or whatever, but back in the day you had machines that played ONE GAME and there’s something great about that.

When I go to work, I pass a Chuck-E-Cheese’s that has these huge windows and you can see what’s inside. They have a ton of arcade games in there. None of the kids ever play them because they’re too busy climbing all over the slide/ball pit contraption they’ve got set up in there. Good for them, because ball pits are pretty great, but I feel kind of bad for the games. I’d give all the arcades a good home.

I know some people have actually made this dream come true and have a bunch of arcade games in their basement or whatever. I’m jealous. Have any of you guys actually done this?

Written by: Pike on August 23, 2011.

6 thoughts on “I want an arcade. In my house.”

I had an arcade machine at one point. It was multi-purpose though– I built it to play Gauntlet, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, D&D Tower of Doom/Shadow Over Mystara (Yay emulators) and One Must Fall 2097 (YAY OLD GAMES). I had to pull it apart, though, I ran out of room. I did keep the hardware, so I may rebuild it one day.

I almost bought good-quality DDR pads to build a PC into a ghetto DDR machine, does that count?

Add a Slurpie Machine and a cotton candy maker and you have our dream game room.

No arcade games but I do have a Pong table game. Bought it from a pub in England many years ago in pristine condition. It lives at my brother’s house right now until I move.

This has been my dream for years, my own personal arcade, or if the demand was there, actually open my own old-fashioned Coin-Op arcade. I’d have it broken off into sections: Retro gaming which would include classics such as Pac-Man (Ms. included), Frogger, Galaga, Centipede, etc., a pinball section and it would have pinball machines from every decade (or as many as I could realistically obtain), fighting games, racing games, flight sims, and oh so many platformers. I guess I could throw a bone to the people who like DDR-type games, but to be quite honest, I do not enjoy them at all. /sigh That’s all a dream now, though. Arcade gaming has been on a major downward spiral ever since gaming rigs went from 2D to 3D. Still, one can dream, right?

It would be awesome though to find a couple of kits for some of my favorite games like The Simpsons, TMNT, Golden Axe, and X-Men though.