Comments (0) Best Place to Re-Create Your Entire Video-Game Setup, Circa ’93 - 2008
We may now admit the following images into an entire generation’s collective memory: a dusty basement somewhere, eight-bit music blaring, controllers sticky with soda, and a Nintendo Entertainment System (or Sega, or Super Nintendo) on an altar, throwing off a red LED halo. Young professionals in this city are the first crop of people to be caught in a peculiar bind: We ushered video games into the world, yet find video games circa ’08 nearly impossible to understand, let alone master. The NES is our eight-track—our walk to school in the snow—and Video Games New York may well be our cathedral. Enter, walk past a life-size Mario statue, and emerge into a cramped museum of the past—every system, every game you ever owned, every obscurity you ever longed for laid out on cramped shelves and retailed by gentle, kind, Hobbit-like clerks who will happily recount the differences between Madden ’93 and Madden ’94. Even the prices are eerily the same (comparative rarities like Super Mario 3 sell for $30 or $40; Bart vs. the Space Mutants and outmoded sports games go three to four for $10). They’ve got new stuff, too, but you get the distinct, reassuring sense that no one in there is very interested in playing games that have buttons beyond A and B.
