Worth it for the Street Fighter II machine? You decide.
And you thought you loved video games and arcade machines? Meet Chris Kooluris, a 37-year-old New Yorker who moved in with his fiance planning to settle down and get married. But a combination of failing to sell his own flat and a deep love affair with arcade machines saw his life take a very drastic turn.
Kooluris read a book called ‘Ready Player One’ about 1980s video games and decided to recreate the joy of his youth in his old bedroom.
So he turned this room…
into a fully fledged arcade lovers dream.
To do it cost $26,000 (€19,000) and he had to sell all his furniture to buy the games and fit them all in. However, the biggest cost was to his relationship. Kooluris told Wired that: “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” and he told the New York Daily News “Now that my fiancée and I are no longer together, it’s hard to enjoy the room as much as I want to. I always end up thinking about her.”
That’s a hefty price to pay for video games, and with no furniture in the flat he moved back into he now sleeps on a pull out futon bed with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles bed spread. Of course.
Kooluris’ mates love it, of course.
“It’s like a ‘Field of Dreams’ for geeks,” says Josh Shabtai in the New York Daily News. “From the outside it seems like Noah building an ark. It’s easy to think, ‘Oh man, this guy is a lunatic.’ But when you see how happy it makes it him, and how it provides a place for his friends to come together, it turns out to something really cool.”
We won’t be following Kooluris’ plan, but we would really love a go at that Street Fighter II machine.
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