Arcade Project 03: Roomifications

With this set up, I want to accurately estimate how much it would cost to outfit a room as an arcade.  So first I have to settle on the room size.  There are several room standards around today, and I did a little research to try and get an idea for them.  In most rented apartments, condos and town homes, the average size of a bedroom is 10'x10'.  I am not a big fan of living around a lot of people like that, high density living I guess you'd call it.  Well in the suburbs, you get a little bit more space with 10'x12' rooms.  Now this stays the size for quite a wide range of homes.  When the house gets larger, you simply get extra spaces in the home for gathering together, and the emphasis on a "room" holding all the entertainment kind of goes away.

I have decided that a 10'x12' room will be what I choose to base this project on.

The Dark Room

Now that we have a room, I need to come up with a color scheme to match everything with.  The classic is to go with blacks, dark blues, purples and some neon.  Some people really like that, and that's the way that the Penny Arcade artist, Mike Krahulik, went for his game room.  This is what the arcades looked like in the 1990's.  Presumably it saved on the cost of lighting to be able to have everything dark, and it made the older arcades with the fading televisions look decent enough.  As I've said before, I actually do not have a big picture of "this is what an arcade should LOOK like" I more know how I want it to feel and the memories for it to bring back.  The cool thing is that they make glow in the dark and UV reactive carpets for this style.  What I do not like is that it is very dark, even when the lights are on.  The arcade room I'm designing is not something for someone's basement, or for a room in a detached garage, it is part of the home.

The Light

Looking at home theaters, there is another set of colors that I like; the red and gold scheme.  This scheme looks good in light as well as when its dark.  The gold is a little gaudy though, and I've never big a fan of lots of red in a room, it causes me to be agitated.  If we darken the red to be closer to maroon, and tone down the gold, maybe use a light wood instead, and we start getting into something that looks decent among other rooms.  Another thing to take into consideration is all the accessories for the room.  Gumball machines, sticker dispensers, popcorn machines, all of these come in red, and so matching that would be easy as well.

So I found a pretty easy to edit empty room that somewhat looked like the right size and I paintshopped it up to try these out.

I have to admit that even though I've decided not to go this way... this is tempting.  I would love to make a star filled ceiling and some galaxy artwork around the wall instead of gaming artwork.  Still, you can see it is REALLY dark there.

This one has the addition of the accessories listed at the bottom in the colors you can get them.  The carpet is just... an approximation.  I have some ideas on the carpet I'd like to have and I'm not happy with the carpet i used here, but still, its there for visual estimation.  The room was still a little too red for me and the room itself looked a little too normal.  So I tried again.

This is looking much better IMO.  The wood trim breaks up the room, and the addition of white means I do not have to have an "accent" white wall to break up all the red.  I like this, and as far as things go, I think this may end up how the room looks.  I have an "over the top" concept I want to do based on  a home theater picture I found.... when I do that, I"ll add it into this post, but I think this room is the way I'm going to go.