It is far better to have loved and lost than never to have gotten to play your video games again.
Just ask Chris Kooluris, who transformed the bedroom of his Murray Hill apartment into an old-school arcade — then watched as his fiancée walked out of his life.
The only scoring he’s doing now is on his Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Tron machines.
But Kooluris is reminded of a valuable lesson every time he fiddles with that joystick: “If you are going through relationship issues, you need to invest time in the relationship and work on it. Do not work on your arcade more than your relationship.”
True, but there are complicated emotions at work when a 37-year-old man sells his bed and furniture and spends $26,000 to build an arcade.
It started, as many complicated emotions do, with love.
Kooluris had moved in his with fiancée to her place in Brooklyn and put his own apartment on the market.
But three things happened that would change Kooluris’ life forever: The apartment didn’t sell, he began feeling claustrophobic living in his girlfriend’s apartment with all her stuff, and he happened upon a sci-fi novel called “Ready Player One” about 1980s video game culture.
“The book just blew me away,” he remembers. “It awakened something in me and I started thinking that I can’t believe I’m not surrounded by all these things that I grew up loving.”
So he decided to transform his old living quarters into his personal fantasy.
“This is the extreme reaction of someone who isn’t surrounded by his own stuff,” he explains.
Kooluris became a Pac-Man himself, gobbling up everything he could about arcade culture. He spent hours online with other obsessive gamers. He custom-built a four-player panel board that houses thousands of games, from Street Fighter II to Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker. He invested thousands of dollars in first-edition Transformers action figures. He installed a high-score board.
And somewhere along the line, the fiancée finally said, “Game over.”
Now this is the point in the story where it must be pointed out that Chris Kooluris is not a loser. Objectively speaking, he is not a shlubby, unemployed dude devoid of social skills or hygiene. He’s fit and outgoing. He’s a senior vice president at a global public relations firm. He helped engineer the release of Guns N’ Roses album “Chinese Democracy” in 2008 through a Dr Pepper promotion.
He just happens to love video games.
Moving back into an apartment without a bed was not ideal, but Kooluris bought a foam topper for his pullout futon, along with a set of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sheets and a matching blanket.
He now invites friends over for weekly game nights. Needless to say, they think his home arcade is the greatest thing ever.
“It’s like a ‘Field of Dreams’ for geeks,” says Josh Shabtai, 35. “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 him, and how it provides a place for his friends to come together, it turns out to something really cool.”
Kooluris’ fiancée may be out of the picture — and, indeed, declined to be interviewed for this story — but he can’t forget the woman who inspired (for better or worse) his apartmentcade.
“Now that my fiancée and I are no longer together, it’s hard to enjoy the room as much as I want to,” he says. “I always end up thinking about her.”
Want to play in Chris Kooluris’ arcade? Email him at bedroomarcadenyc@gmail.com.
