Friday, May 30, 2014

How Much Does The Perfect Arcade Cost? Everything You Love

Arcadia, a Love Story

Chris Kooluris transformed his bedroom into a 1980s arcadeâ€"and altered the course of his life.

By Emily Dreyfuss

Caption caption caption caption Benjamin Rasmussen

Video: Andrew White / WIRED

THE GAME COLLECTOR

For a guy who has spent six months and more than $32,000 turning the bedroom of his Manhattan apartment into an old-school video arcade, Chris Kooluris is very put together. He greets me at his Murray Hill flat dressed head to toe in designer casual wearâ€"Ralph Lauren jeans, pristine white Y-3 Yohji Yamamoto sneakers, and a crisp Captain America T-shirt. He’s trim and athletic-looking, his shaven face boyish for a 37-year-old. This is not the obsessed nerd I was expecting. Then again, looks can be deceiving. He invites me in. The living room is bright and accented with brass everythingâ€"brass sconces, brass lamps, ornate brass mirrors. But I’m not here to see the living room. I came to see what Kooluris is hiding in the 180-square-foot bedroom. I look down the hallway: The door is closed, but from the other side I can hear a faint ting-ting-ting.

Chris Kooluris walks Oakley through his Murray Hill neighborhood. Amy Lombard

We make our way down the hall and he ceremoniously opens the door. It is a portal into the past. The first thing I see is a Donkey Kong cabinet, but then my eyes are drawn to a row of pristine gumball machines that look just like the ones at the Yellow Balloon where I got my first haircut on Ventura Boulevard in 1984.

Everyone who enters this room, Kooluris tells me, has the same reaction: They tell him about the part of their childhood it reminds them of.

Even the floor is funâ€"his girlfriend helped design it: multihued FLOR carpet tiles that bring out the colors of each machine. In the center of the room is a massive pedestal; inside is a PC running the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator software that’s mostly used to play Street Fighter II. It’s piped through a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall surrounded by 20 replica game marquees that Kooluris painted himself.

He walks me through each game, explaining what makes it special. A refurbished Tron, one of the all-time greats. A brand new Ms. Pac-Manâ€"‘really, just for the ladies,” he says. This Donkey Kong, he says, is the very one that former champion Steve Wiebe played in the first Kong Off competition in 2011

But perhaps the pièce de resistance is the Fix-It Felix Jr., a custom-built arcade machine that plays a faux-retro game that was the centerpiece of the 2012 Disney animated movie Wreck-It Ralph. It’s an ’80s arcade game that didn’t even exist in the ’80s. Kooluris says it’s one of about 10 in private hands.

Over the sound of the clanging games, Kooluris tells me how awesome the Fix-It Felix is, how Disney distressed the cabinet so it would look like it really was 30 years old. All I can think is: Why is an adult man obsessed with a game made for a kids’ movie that came out only a few years ago?

The answer eventually reveals itself: The game is brilliant marketing, and Kooluris is a brilliant marketer. A vice president at Weber Shandwick, one of the world’s leading PR firms, Kooluris has been in the marketing and promotion business for 12 years. One of the highlights of his career involved his second love after gaming: Guns N’ Roses. He is an unabashed GNR fanatic, and he credits himself with getting Axl Rose to finally release the album Chinese Democracy. In early 2008, he persuaded his then-client Dr. Pepper to offer everyone in the US a coupon for a free soda if Rose released the long-delayed record. “Total guerrilla marketing,” he says.

Chinese Democracy was indeed released later that year, Dr. Pepper gave out lots of coupons for free sodas, and Kooluris got to meet his idol. “When I met Axl,” Kooluris says, “the first thing he said to me was, ‘Are you Kaneda?’” Kaneda is the handle Kooluris uses on message boards.

A Way of life

Video: Andrew White / WIRED

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 in 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.

Living The Dream