Do you remember visiting the gaming arcade? Meeting up with friends on a Saturday and spending all day tapping the machines, seeing who could get the best high score? It’s a time gone by these days. Very few arcades still exist, and if they do, they’re mostly coin machines and claw grabbers – or slot machines, which aren’t the greatest games you could spend your time on!
That’s why you should think about bringing the arcade experience into your home. If you’re a big gamer, and you spend time reminiscing about the good old days, why not turn a corner of your bedroom or living room into a mini arcade? It’s a lot easier to do than you might think! Plus, there’s still a lot of fun to be had in these older games, especially thanks to that nostalgia element. So, here are some tips that could help you put a retro design together.
Curate Your Lighting
All arcades have some kind of lighting theme to them. Whether it’s dark and stormy and made to feel like a gamer den – or light and pastel colored to make the space seem more like a cartoon – make sure you recreate the feeling in your own home. And this is going to be a lot easier to do than you might think.
After all, you can do this via RGB lighting strips. Buy them on Amazon, stick them up wherever you want the light to reflect from, and make sure you keep hold of the remote! This will allow you to change the lighting color at your whim, and can even allow you to match the lighting to the mood you get while gaming. What could be more interactive than that?
Invest in Vintage Equipment
Vintage equipment will really complete the feel of your classic arcade corner. If you can get your hands on a bona fide arcade cabinet, you’ll be golden! However, you can also invest in novelty versions of old arcade games, many of which have been released in the past couple of years. You can find them at most video game adjacent stores, such as tech companies on main street.
If you don’t have the money for buying a $1000+ arcade cabinet, don’t worry. You can just complete the look of the arcade with vintage posters, many of which can just be printed out from Google. You can also lay down rubber floor mats, put up shaped OLED lighting models or neon signs, and display any classic figurines you already own in a prominent way.
Download Classic Games
If you’re not interested in buying old arcade cabinets, simply download some classic games to play on an older laptop – especially if those games only work on these old operating systems. Make sure the games you choose have that arcade feel about them. The old Microsoft pinball game is a great contender here, but you can pick up various other kinds of pinball that all champion that same well beloved format of gaming.
Plus, the more you use older equipment to play these games, the better they’re going to work. Very few copies of them might be left these days, so install them on the system they were made for for a smooth experience! If you’ve got tech skills, you could also try using an emulator.
Make Gaming Social
The arcade experience is completed by bringing your friends round and competing to win a game together, or against each other (more on that a bit later!). If you really want your homemade arcade to be as nostalgic as possible, invite people round to use it with you.
Gaming can be an excellent social activity, even when it feels isolationist. Even just having someone round to take turns on one controller is fun; you can make fun of the game’s silly parts, hand the gamepad back and forth when you can’t complete a section, and cheer each other on when it’s the other person’s turn. Or boo and tear them down, it’s up to you!
Arcade cabinets are much easier to gather round. Plus, once your friends hear you’ve got Time Crisis II in your living room, they’re going to be right over to check it out again after all these years.
Run Your Own Tournaments
We said we’d talk about challenges and here we go! If you want to compete against friends, why not turn your arcade corner into a genuine competition floor, and run an event that pits people against each other to get the top score.
Arcades were always about trying to beat your friends, or getting the best prize, or uncovering the most secrets to impress each other. Recreate that feeling and you’ll really be able to indulge in your nostalgia. And if this goes well, you could even turn this event into a regular thing and invite more and more interested people. If you run out of space, all you need to do is rent out a small commercial space to use instead.
Keep Up with Nostalgia Gaming
Nostalgia gaming is very popular at the moment. Remakes and remasters are common, few new IPs are getting the same kind of attention, and that’s good news for people who want to bring back that classic arcade feeling.
While it’s good to bring more new games into the fray, if you want to play more of the older games you loved as a kid, now is the best time to do it. You could also just pick up old versions of the games you used to love!
If you used to love playing down the arcade, bring that feeling back into your home using the ideas above. Designing your own little arcade corner is a great way to make gaming a more fun hobby, and to indulge in your sense of childhood nostalgia that’s becoming more and more popular. If you never want to leave your house again, this is the thing to incorporate into your home!
