Arcadia, a Love Story

One day in late 2013, Kooluris was on the street in front of his apartment, supervising the delivery of his new Donkey Kong machine. A boy and his father walked by. ¶“Dad, what’s that?” the child asked, pointing at the Donkey Kong cabinet. ¶“It’s like a big iPad,” his father said.

Kooluris shakes his head mournfully at this memory. “That is just sacrilege,” he says. Arcade games were not just big personal game machines. They were about community. They were a way of life.

Kooluris talks about his early immersion into arcade culture with an almost spiritual reverence. He grew up near Yonkers, New York, taking taxis to play the arcades at Nathan’s Famous with his twin brother Alex when they were too young to drive. He remembers the sweet smell of the place, the sound of the screaming and laughter when a kid was on a roll. If you were good enough, you could play for hours on one quarter.

Steve Wiebe’s autograph on the Donkey Kong cabinet. Amy Lombard

In 1992, when he and his brother were teenagers, his love of gaming got serious. “When Street Fighter II hit, it wasn’t like we knew that there was this new Street Fighter game coming. It was the ultimate surprise,” he says. “You only learned about something when it was physically right in front of your face. I remember I walked into the arcade in Nathan’s, and there was just a row of Street Fighter II Champion Editions, and I’m like, oh my God. It changes your world.”

Street Fighter competitions at Nathan’s got so tense that actual fights would break out, Kooluris says. At least when it came to playing the game, he had a considerable advantage over other kids: He and Alex had convinced their parents to buy them their own Street Fighter II cabinet so they could practice at home. It is conspicuous by its absence here in Kooluris’ bedroom arcade. His brother ended up with it. “I’ve been trying to pry it from his hands, but to no avail,” Kooluris says.

A little over a year ago, Kooluris fell in love with a woman he met at work. Within six months, they got engaged, and he moved out of his Murray Hill apartment and into his fiancée’s bigger Brooklyn pad. ¶They began to adjust to living together: He tried her raw food diet, she started listening to GNR. In August 2013, they went on a vacation to the Grand Canyon. While on the trip, Kooluris read Ready Player One, a 2011 novel about a future world obsessed with the arcade game culture of the 1980s. “It awoke a monster in me,” he says. “I just had this revelation that, you know, why shouldn’t I—in this short time that we’re here—surround myself with the things I really enjoy?”

Kooluris had been an avid collector of games and action figures since he’d first had his own pocket money. Back in 1996 he bought the first Transformer figure for a collection that is now worth $15,000. All that stuff was stored in his bachelor pad uptown. “The Transformers collection, all the things I really loved, were just boxed away and off to the side,” he says. “My lifestyle was so devoid of all the things that I grew up with.”

Kooluris watches as friends play Street Fighter during a party at his apartment. Amy Lombard

Kooluris owned his old apartment, and he and his fiancée had decided months before that he should sell it. After all, they were getting married; it was time to let go of the trappings of bachelorhood and fully commit to this relationship. But the apartment had been on the market for months now, and Kooluris hadn’t gotten a single offer. His real estate agent begged him to lower the price, but now he had a better idea: Keep it and turn the bedroom into an arcade. That way, he reasoned, he could enjoy married life while still having a place to be surrounded by his prized possessions. He promised himself that he wouldn’t let the arcade spill outside the confines of the bedroom. The rest of the apartment would be reserved game-free for hanging out and entertaining.

“It wasn’t exactly like a joint decision,” he says. “It’s hard to sell that to the woman in your life, that this is a good financial decision.” But, to his surprise, his fiancée wasn’t totally against the idea. She loved him, and he loved arcade games, so she got involved. She convinced him to make the room colorful and bright, a happy place people would want to spend time in. (He had been planning a dark neon-dungeon motif.) Those authentic gumball dispensers? A Christmas present from her.

Whenever Kooluris had free time, he was uptown working on the arcade. Whenever he was at home, he was online browsing the Killer List of Videogames, the Internet’s foremost forum for collectors of arcade machines.

This went on for six months. His fiancée’s initial support began to wane. “There’s a fine line between a hobby and an obsession, and I think what happened is I just got so consumed by it all,” Kooluris says. “There probably should be therapists for hobbyists. It can take over.”

The KLOV community helped Kooluris restore his treasures accurately (should Tron’s black light be white or blue?), find obscure parts, and avoid getting ripped off as he built up his cabinet collection. “Online communities are awesome,” he says. “They become like another life for you.” As the weeks turned into months, one thing became clear: The members of KLOV shared Kooluris’ obsession in a way that his fiancée increasingly did not.

He thought he was sparing her, getting all his geeky thoughts off his chest online so she didn’t have to listen to him blabber on about it. “If you come home every night and want to talk to your girlfriend about arcade or pinball machines, that relationship is going to end really fast,” he says.

Instead, he realized too late, by not including her he was cutting her out of his life. “The arcade drove a wedge. It made clear everything that was wrong,” he says. “What happens in any relationship is that once you start to construct separate lives a little bit, it just becomes harder.”

His online friendships were souring, too. On KLOV, the haters outnumbered the supporters. They were certainly more vehement anyway. Some people hated his carpet. Some hated that he seemed to love Disney’s Fix-It Felix more than he loved actual ’80s arcade games. Some really hated that he paid $3,000 for an arcade-machine emulator pedestal. They made fun of him for overspending to restore his vintage Punch-Out!! cabinet. In fact, a lot of people just seemed to be ticked off that this stranger was essentially buying his way into their close-knit circle of longtime hobbyists.

When the room was ready to be revealed in February, Kooluris threw a launch party, but things were bad enough with his fiancée that she didn’t attend. “It was sad to not have her here,” he says, looking away.

In March, Kooluris’ fiancée gave him back the engagement ring. He hid it somewhere in the arcade; he won’t tell me exactly where. He moved out of her Brooklyn place and back to his old bachelor pad—only, of course, he’d sold the bed and turned the bedroom into an arcade. “This is not where I wanted to end up, just living in an arcade,” he says. One day when his ex came over to see the finished project, he showed her that he was sleeping on a convertible sofa bed with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles bedspread. “Well, at least I don’t need to worry that this room will ever get another woman wet,” is how he recalls her reaction. (Kooluris’ ex-fiancée declined to participate in this story.)

It’s hard to get ready for bed when you have to first individually unplug all your videogames. To make it easier, Kooluris rigged a single button that turns them all off. He tries not to play before bed. It gets him too hyped up. He bought a memory-foam topper for the fold-out couch to make it slightly less uncomfortable. ¶The games aren’t the only thing that keep him up at night. He’s been doing a lot of thinking about how to find true happiness. “A lot of times, once you get what you were chasing after, it’s not going to change your life,” he says. “It’s just sitting in your house, and then you sometimes can go through a depression,”

KLOV, he says, isn’t providing much support anymore. He posted pics of the finished arcade; they accused him of wanting attention. “I’ve seen your type before around here. So have a lot us who have been here for a while,” one wrote. “Your self-esteem is tied up in material possessions, your trophies.” Others were more succinct: “Poser.” But when I search through the forums I find plenty of people who came to his defense; in every thread he had a few allies. He just couldn’t see them anymore. “It got to the point where no matter what I said, I was vilified by the same bunch of people,” Kooluris says. “It’s a silly thing. No one owns this hobby. No one is more entitled to these games.”

Kooluris’ first pinball machine, Lord of the Rings, finds a home in his livingroom. Amy Lombard

Kooluris has had more social success in real life, inviting friends over to play in the arcade. Once a week he hosts arcade happy hours. He invites coworkers, friends, the guys he used to play Street Fighter II Champion Edition with at Nathan’s. He’s even invited some local KLOV guys but none have shown up so far. He thinks that if they ever met face to face, he’d get along with them.

He’s up for visits from strangers, too. “If there are any Street Fighter II players in the New York area,” he says, “they should come over and play here. I want this to be their hub.”

I ask: Do you still hope that you and your ex might work things out?

“I hope so,” he says. He’s still eating her raw food diet, to feel close to her.

A week later, on the phone, he’s not as hopeful. “It’s fucking perfect that the Lord of the Rings pinball is getting here the same night she’s going on her first date with someone else, which means I won.”

We ease off the subject and onto the unexpected news that he bought a pinball machine.

It won’t fit in the bedroom, so it’s going in the living room, over the boundary that he once promised would separate his hobby from the rest of his life. But there’s a silver lining: Now that the arbitrary limit has been crossed, Kooluris can start buying more pinball games and hanging out on pinball forums—Pinside, he tells me, is a really positive community.

“Arcades are a gateway drug for a pinball collection,” he says matter-of-factly, as if this had been the plan all along.