For a guy who has spent six months and more than $32,000 turning the bedroom of his Manhattan apartment into an old-school video arcade, Chris Kooluris is very put together. He greets me at his Murray Hill flat dressed head to toe in designer casual wear—Ralph Lauren jeans, pristine white Y-3 Yohji Yamamoto sneakers, and a crisp Captain America T-shirt. He's trim and athletic-looking, his shaven face boyish for a 37-year-old. This is not the obsessed nerd I was expecting. Then again, looks can be deceiving. He invites me in. The living room is bright and accented with brass everything—brass sconces, brass lamps, ornate brass mirrors. But I'm not here to see the living room. I came to see what Kooluris is hiding in the 180-square-foot bedroom. I look down the hallway: The door is closed, but from the other side I can hear a faint ting-ting-ting.

We make our way down the hall and he ceremoniously opens the door. It is a portal into the past. The first thing I see is a Donkey Kong cabinet, but then my eyes are drawn to a row of pristine gumball machines that look just like the ones at the Yellow Balloon where I got my first haircut on Ventura Boulevard in 1984.

Everyone who enters this room, Kooluris tells me, has the same reaction: They tell him about the part of their childhood it reminds them of.