You can play old school arcade games and buy old school video cartridges at an increasing number of places in New York. Check out these old and new parlors.
This out-of-the-way museum is really three things: a fantastic movie theater showing retrospectives by master auteurs like Park Chan-Wook and Sidney Lumet; a secret arcade game funhouse; and a museum documenting both of the above. With exhibits on Spacewar! and the first 50 years of video games, awesome secret DVD drop art installations in the exterior wall of the museum, and an ongoing exhibit on the history of film, MoMI is a Queens nerdcore trove.
Despite the bro-y downfall of this once-pleasant, dark, divey neighborhood bar, you can still get your Saturday afternoon kicks on playing Big Buck Hunter in relative peace at this bar, pint and pizza in hand.
With Sly Fox, Victory, Dogfish and Captain Lawrence on tap, vintage video games like Rampage, Donkey Kong, Ms. Pacman, and Asteroids, and a low-key atmosphere, Barcade is a good place for a quiet date on a weekday or a raucous time with friends on a Saturday night.
At this comic fanatic burger joint, villain food is fatty red meat or fried items, while hero food is healthy turkey or veggie burgers. Who wants to be a hero, you ask? Not your villain writer, who customized her burger with "power-ups" like kimchi, pineapple, and bacon. Dogs come with crazy toppings too, like the Dark Energy Queen, two spicy chili pups with red onions and mozzarella sticks. After you're filled with dark energy, take it out on the arcade games like Street Fighter II.
In a land before Xbox, dinosaurs like Atari and Sega roamed a sparsely-populated video game land. This second-floor hideaway on St. Marks is a treasure trove of those 70s, 80s and 90s games and consoles. With its giant pile of vintage controllers, arcade games including Double Dragon and Street Fighter II, one-off game cartridges, board games, and more, 8-bit is pure childlike pleasure for adults.