Your Ideal Game Room

[bikingjahuty]

This was inspired by MarvelvsCapcom2's lighting thread, but it made me think what I wish I could do with my game room versus how it is right now. I thought it would be fun to hear how other people plan or wish they could improve their game rooms as well. Here is what I could have if I could right now.


More Space: For probably the last 5-years, this has been an ongoing issue that has forced me to get very creative on how to display as much of my stuff in my game room as I can. Unfortunately all the creativity in the world will not allow me to have my entire collection on display mostly given the lack of space I'm currently working with. My game room is in a roughly 100-square foot bedroom. There is literally no more wall space for me to add shelves to house games, and I am currently close to running out of room on most of my shelves. In probably a year or two I will likely have no more shelf space on several of my shelves, requiring that I figure somethings else out given the ever expanding nature of my room. Ideally I'd like to have around 200-250 square feet to work with as this would allow me to have enough space for everything I'd need and like to have in my game room, and allow me plenty of room to show off all the consoles collections I have.


More Shelves: Going along with more space, I've always tried to organize my collection by having specific consoles on shelves that adequately hold a specific or a few specific consoles that are related in some way (having Sega Saturn and Sega CD games on the same shelf, or one shelf for all my PS2 games). Sadly, because of lack of space I've had to purchase several large shelved and throw many different console collections on them, many completely unrelated. I've still done pretty good in terms of keeping things organized the way I would want, but I do have one shelf in particular where my NES, SNES, Genesis, 3DS, GB, GBA, XBOX, XBOX 360, Switch, Wii, Wii U, and Gamecube games are housed....yeah. I would someday like to have this broken up in 3 or 4 smaller shelves where I could place these collections in a much more organized fashion on individual shelves. That's not to say I don't have any need for larger shelves too; many of my Playstation collection are massive and continue to grow. I have a very large shelf that has worked great for my PS2 collection, and would like another one just as big someday for my PS3, PS4, PSP, and Vita games to go on. And finally, having more shelves gives you more space on top of them to display cool swag related to that console such as console boxes, collectors editions, action figures, statues and all kinds of other awesomeness.


More Sega Swag: As much as I adore Sega I have a startling lack of Sega related merchandise on my game room. Meanwhile I have a ton of Nintendo related stuff. Again, needing more room and shelf space someday, it is my goal to amass a lot of Sega related swag for my room. This included figures, plushes, statues, promotional items, and other cool items to display.


Better TV and console management: What I mean by this is having a better system for how my consoles connect to my TVs and also having better TV stands to place all my consoles in so they can all be easily accessed and used at the push of a few buttons. I'd like to purchase a receiver someday, most likely two that connect to all my consoles and connect them to two or three TVs. Currently my consoles are all on two TV stands, both which I've had for years, and they don't allow me to have all my consoles out at the same time. Likewise, I am required to manually unplug one console so I can hook another one up due to lack of inputs. Someday I'd like a large media cabinet where all these consoles are housed along with the receivers so they are all accessed easy from there.

[kashell]

At this point, I just want a better TV. The one for gaming is fine and looks nice, but it's pretty old. It's clunky and difficult to move. Something lighter but with the same length and width would be perfect.

[hoshichiri]

In a magical world where money & space aren't a concern, I would not have a gaming room... I would practically have a gaming house!

Ok, so- you walk in the main door, and it starts you off in the arcade/snack bar. There's a few lockers by the front for visitors to store their things. The walls are done up in a blacklight space landscape. If my fiance was down, we would add glass display towers of his Star Wars memoribilia in between machines & we'd call it the Mos Eisley Arcade. There's a dividing rope between the arcade and the self service snack bar with professional popcorn machine, soda dispenser, hot dog roller & bulk candy bins becuase you can't take food into the arcade. But there might be a couple cocktail bads amongst the tables.

Off to the side of this is one of those 60s style converation couches, like a big one, at the top of a staircase, along with a couple beanbag chairs. Above this is a skylight window, & possibly a chandelier made of rupees. The wall going towards it is lined with imbedded shelving of various gameboys & what-nots. This Handheld Hall is both a transitional area and a calmer place to hang out.

Going down the stairs brings you to the Main Stage- it is quite literally a small stage. secret panels in the back walls provide storage for Guitar Hero/Rock Band equpiment, as well as VR gear. There's a couple of screens along the stage for players to look at, as well as a big one along the back for spectators. I can't find the pictures now, but the couch in front of the stage would look like a segment from the lobby at the Atari Sunnvale office back in the day.

Around this space would be doors. Each door would go to a seperate era's system room. One room for pre-NES, one room for 8 & 16-bit, then pre-HDMI CD consoles & post-HDMI consoles. Each room would have era appropriate decor and technology... for example, the first two rooms would use CRTs, the third a mix, the last all flatscreen. There would also be a secret door near the base of the stairs, that led to a dungeon-esque room for boards games or D&D. There would also be one or two 'guest rooms', to allow people I trusted to sleep in the space (and for conversion to console rooms for newer machines.)

....

Of course, this is never going to happen, I'd have to win one hell of a lottery to afford it. So- I'd just like a dedicated room instead of cramming everything into my bedroom. I've gotten really good at space management over the years, I think if I could have a dedicated room I could make most anything work.

[syljoly]

That's my kind of topic at the moment, because I'm moving from Europe to the US in a few days. I have a collection of 600+ games but I don't plan on bringing everything there, at least not yet (don't know how many years I'll stay in the US). Moving is actually a convenient way of curating my collection. I'm only bringing an AV Famicom (fav console), a Switch and a Super NT, for now. I've dumped all my SFC and SNES games to the Super NT so I don't need to bring them with me yet (I could also have downloaded them I know ). On the next trip I'll bring my Saturn for sure.

My ideal game room is always to be able to pick up any game and being able to play it immediately. Also, I want to buy a TV with the lowest input lag possible, as well as a CRT.

[aliensstudios]

I think for me, the top priority is accessibility. I want every system, game and controller ready to go with very little effort. Right now, all of my systems are hooked up through a single hub (my Framemeister) and output through a single HDMI cable. Games are on shelves and fairly accessible, though not quite what I'd prefer and most controllers are ready to go as well. Pretty much any system I want to play takes less than 30 seconds of setup.

I've been looking for a house with a basement so that the basement can be an all-in-one entertainment hub with movies, games, music and maybe a pool or fooshockey table. That's the dream.

[wartoy]

I have a huge game room that takes up 80% of the basement but I would like to access the other 20% eventually I would like to add a couch and take my arcades out of storage and have a small lounge area.

[emporerdragon]

I pretty much need 2 things: Custom shelves and a gaming table.

While I have many media and other shelving units, I really want something truly designed to store all my books and games (both video and board). Even dedicated shelves for multimedia storage have problems with spacing, leaving that one row that's too short for a DVD sized case to fit in. Similarly, for my board games, I want something similar to the upcoming Box Throne, but more wood than metal.

As for the table, I host many board game nights, but the current furniture is showing it's age, and I want to go to the next level. A nice, long table that comfortably sits 6, with a recessed interior for the playing field, but a cover to easily convert back to a regular table. Then add cup holders and fold down drawers around the edges and put a groove in the top all around that functions as a card holder.

[ferraroso]

I can't complain about my current game room... I have a 32" LED that is perfect for the mini consoles such as the Nintendo ones and one huge Trinitron CRT TV with enough RGB and S-Video jacks to support all the 16 consoles that are currently connected to it and I can easily swap between them just by clicking a button.
In the living room, I have all my current/last gen consoles connected in a 52" 4K TV. And I there is still space to grow.
If I could ask for anything, it would be to have more space to store/display the boxes of the consoles and accessories and that my wife enjoyed games as much as I do, haha. Apart from that, no complains ^_^

(I'd love having space for an arcade cabinet though...)

[bikingjahuty]

Regarding a home arcade, I always envisioned this being separate from my gameroom. I thought it would be cool to transform my basement or part of it into an arcade, but the only problem is that I need a basement first. It would also be nice if it were a walk out basement since it would make the task of getting cabinets in and out of it a lot easier than lugging the machine inside and down some narrow stairs into the basement.

[marvelvscapcom2]

Better lighting   

As you referred to, I really want to do the awesome lighting set up that will bascially make almost every section of my game room glow with glorious LED and i'll have different sets that can all go off with voice command with Alexa .   




Game Room #2 DLC Edition GOTY Edition

Outside of that I also am getting cluttered in my main game room, so I need to expand into making my attic climate controlled and carpeted with all new flooring and insulating and the sorts.  Which will be brutally expensive but essentially transform my attic into yet another apartment which can be dedicated to soley the collection and making it bigger.  Thus making my final game cave.  It will be all my games and then some up there.  It'll basically be the dream game cave.  But that's in the works in a few years and with a lot of money 





A couch


I could really use a bed or couch but of course need to free up the space first.  But right now my sole furniture in my game room is a computer chair and I lay down on a pillow and look up at the games and stuff   





I hope everyone has a great day and succeeds in their game room goals.

[pzeke]

I'm pretty happy with my current set up. I've been playing with the idea of re-organizing everything for a better look and accessibility, but that means taking everything out of the shelves and that's something I definitely am not prepared to do...at least not now. I just recently got a curio cabinet/shelf from IKEA to complement my glass stand, so I think I'm set as far as everything I want in my room goes.

[kypherion]

Basically more space, a nice TV with HDMI and analog, and all my consoles hooked up with really good cable management.

[ignition365]

My collection is pretty huge and we don't have basements here, so my collection is fractured and spread throughout the house.  I've only put a little thought into it.

I'd want a huge room, probably the size of a basement.  Here, it'd probably have to be an add-on or a guest house type thing.  It would definitely have to have some sort of air conditioning because it gets HOT here.  No windows.  That's about as far as I've thought it through.

I'd love to hang posters and wall scrolls, but I think I'd hate the idea of displaying my games like a game store or library, but maybe if it was like a 50/50 thing where one end is the games all library style and the other end is setups to play and such.

[oldgamerz]

My game room is  quite different the way I setup things is (for the most part) I try to sort my games out with it's genre. For example I have most of my sports NES cartridges kept away in a cabinet, with other NES sports games. As for shooting games my 1 NES shooting game is located in a loose drawer with N64 Xbox Xbox360 PS3 PS2 and PS1 shooting video games.

RPG's and miscellaneous games inside a box mixed up. I have too much furniture in my game room to have a large spacious shelving unit. But I manage to keep all my Video Game Compilations on one shelf, all my golf games on every console I have on another shelf, than some other games on a shelf that I currenty don't rememebr what is on there, and some PS2 games are in a wooden CD/DVD holder

[kamikazekeeg]

If I had the space and money, my ideal game room would look basically like a Blockbuster with rack shelving to better display stuff so that everything isn't just the spine of the game shown.  Basically like what "The Last Gamer" on Youtube did for his crazy game house for the main room he teased in his latest video.

A little more realistic in scale and scope, would be to make it more like my old local video store, with wood paneling, but similar sorta racks for displaying games for better browsing, complete with a counter/checkout area.  Essentially what James Rolfe/Cinemassacre did that you see in their video reviews.  I would just more basically like to display my games with covers shown than only seeing spines.