Retro Gaming Cart (2021)

I collected vintage video games for years, mostly my buddy Dave and I hitting Value Villages around town looking for Atari games. We'd take the games home, try to figure them out for 10 minutes - most involved you being a square shape and trying to avoid other square shapes - and then adding them our collection. There were games I loved though, like River Raid. I also collected games for the NES and other consoles like Colecovision, Intellivision and Commodore 64.

My collection sat on custom-made shelves in my parents' basement for years. Eventually I sold all of the vintage PC's and only hung on to the video game related things. At one point I realized I actually wanted to enjoy the vintage video game systems, so I thought building them into a wheelie cart of some sort where my favourite consols were always connected and ready to play was the solution.

I was in a high rise apartment building downtown, pushing a white ikea desk down the carpeted hallway towards the service elevator. My plan was to repurpose this white melamine freecycled item into a retro gaming cart. I figured it would be easy, just cut the pieces down and screw them in place. I had no idea that at some point Ikea switched from making their furniture out of chipboard to completely hollow boards filled only with a thin honeycomb of cardboard. This meant that every time a portion of the desk was cut to dimension, strips of hardwood also needed to be made to fill and enforce the empty gap. Because of this, the project took way more work than I anticipated and I probably should have just built it out of plywood.

I kept my old Commodore 1702 CRT monitor and based the side of the cart around it. For the sound to escape out of the monitor's top-mounte speaker I drilled out the hole pattern from a Dieter Rams' designed transitor radio. I included 3 pull-out shelves, one for each of my favourite consoles. My heavy 6-switch Atari 2600 (if you know, you know), my original childhood NES and a japanese Super Famicom that Melissa and I picked up in Los Angeles. Each system's video output is connected to an A/V switch so no cords need changing going between the different consoles. The cart sits on wheels so it can easily be moved around. After building this, I kept the games I enjoyed and sold all of the ones I didn't. It's fun to play occasionally and I still do want to beat Startropics, but playing these games isn't nearly as fun as combing through resale stores and garage sales looking for them in the first place.