Build Your Own (Wo)Man Cave

With home video game rooms and other home entertainment theatres pretty much a given these days, it isn’t too hard to stumble upon sites that sell you anything from game furniture to posters and other accessories. Office upholstery in video game themes--same story. That’s a great thing, in the sense that home design trends increasingly allow for inclusion of dedicated video game spaces.

However, most of what the internet yields is geared towards teens’ and dorm rooms, with sites offering budget solutions to everything, ranging from cheap posters and lumpy gamer furniture to overly dramatic neon backlighting that help you decorate mancaves big and small.

That’s fine, of course, but this type of setup doesn’t appeal to all. People whose love of video games doesn’t necessarily correlate to buying overpriced office chairs with rally striping, or lining up their wallspace with surround-sound speakers at shoulder height.

These people might like our following listing of game room design ideas.

Buy quality wall art

Cook and Becker was born out of frustration with the lack of high-end game art pieces on the market. Sure, you could download a high-res marketing image and turn it into a print, or buy a cheap poster from somewhere, but that didn’t get you anywhere near the quality of non-gaming giclee prints or other ‘genuine’ works of art. “This probably means we should do it ourselves”, said Cook and Becker’s founders, and the result is what you’ll find on this website: high-end giclee prints of fully licensed games imagery, available in limited editions, framed or unframed, and shipped with a certificate of authenticity - the real deal in terms of gallery art. Why not take a peek at some of the more classy prints, and be inspired?

Find that statue that looks the part

In-house statues have always been great props to inform guests of your standing in life - just look at all the piano’s adorned with Beethoven busts. For video games it’s the same thing: a great Link or Vault Boy statue immediately puts you in league with other connaisseurs.

Problem is, really great looking statues are hard to find. Sometimes great statue manufacturers lack the licenses to portray your favorite game character, while others just lack the skills to truly bring life to polystone figures. Our favorite manufacturer by far is Prime1 Studio, who are miracle workers when it comes to video games busts or life-size statues.

Quality collectibles

Not everyone has a room big enough to hold life-size figures, we get that. So let’s look at quality collectibles of video game properties. Some of our favorite statuettes are from two online shops that both show consistent quality and range. First up is Sideshow.com, an online powerhouse that offers quality products from various manufacturers, who all benefit from the traffic. The one complaint you could hold against Sideshow is their reliance on comic book characters, a problem our second favorite shop doesn’t have. The Blizzard Gear Store has superb statues and replicas of characters from Blizzard games, with some of the most dynamic figurines we could find at reasonable prices.

Get it right with an upright

They’re the cherry on the cave, err cake: vintage arcade machines. But how to get your hands on a vintage Pac-Man cocktail table model or Bally pin? One that - preferably - is in working condition, with ancient high scores to sink your teeth into, and with telling smudge marks on the buttons and joysticks?
Of course you could just head for Craigslist or Ebay and try your luck, but often it pays off to visit dedicated online shops - staffed by people who know a Pong from a Paddle Battle. There’s a few of them around, but why not start at Vintage Arcade or Williams Amusements - shops that offer repairs and spare parts are often places that are in it for the love of old machines.

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