In December I went to the U.S of A with my boyfriend. We first went to New York for a week and then down to Miami Beach for another week. In New York I found two game stores which had a bunch of exciting retro games! However, it was in general extremely pricey..
The first store was awesome, however a bit disorganised. I didn’t wanna take any pics inside cause there was this bald rude looking man behind the counter, but they had like EVERYTHING. It didn’t look very Retro going up the stairs, however they had mainly Atari and NES stuff ^_^ My boyfriend got bored quickly though and wanted to leave =(
The second store we found was so awesome! They had everything so tidy and neatly displayed, but everything was behind glass and even more over prized =( They had a bunch of stuff I wanted to buy, like Donkey Kong Game & Watch! But it was too expensive.. I’ll just have to Ebay it instead…
While in Miami we decided to look up some vintage arcades where they might still have some of the old classics like Pacman and stuff. My nifty friend Gaston googled a bunch of places that might have the retro arcade machines close by, one of them had appeared in the documentary “Chasing ghosts beyond the arcade” (Youtube it, it’s an interesting documentary). So we rented a car to get to the places, a big-ass-mother-f*cking-jeep. I’ve never driven a bigger car, and it was scary as hell to drive on the american highways among all the other big-ass cars (and I HAD to drive since I was the only one with a licence).
The first place we went to had no vintage stuff at all, and not many games at all.. The guys stopped to shoot some Terminators for a while, and after that we left.
The second one was way out in nowhere, called Gameroom Superstore and was the one that I think was part of the documentary. It had been a place for restoring and selling old arcade machines. It was however closed, even though the signs were still outside, apparently for several years according to the neighbours that we asked… it was sad. The place still had their website online.. they should shut that thing down! It’s misleading >_<
People had even vandalised the text on the door to the Gameroom Superstore. “This is not a coin operation gameroom” was now “This is not in operation gay room” … So after having driven for hours back and forth we went back to Miami Beach.
It really felt like chasing ghosts.. there were no vintage arcade machines to be found anywhere. The closest thing we came to that was an old pinball machine in a bar in Miami, but it’s not the same =´(
Apart from the lack of vintage gaming experiences the trip to the US of A was a lot of fun with family and friends <3
Retro Video Gaming 
Indeed, video games new york is the place I mentioned. It used to be on st. mark’s place (and called Multimedia 1.0), but I reckon the rent became too high, although it’s not that far from its original home. since you said you went to a 2nd retro games store, where is it?
It wasn’t very far from the other one. I don’t really remember where exactly we went, we were just strolling around and accidentally found it. It had a big TV playing Super Mario World in the window and I was drawn to the video game music ^_^ The first picture here is from the entrance to that store, it was on the second floor and it was a bit messy but they had loads of games and it was pretty cheap! :D
/mE