A tour of my game room

[Emperor Megas]

My game room is upstairs in the attic. The upstairs area has two connected rooms with sloped walls which don't offer much usable storage space. The stairwell is also narrow and treacherous, so you're limited in the furnishings you can get up there (I currently just use ottomans). It's sort of a strange layout up there, but I tried to make the best of it.

I don't have swag, or standees, or collectibles laid out all around, so it's probably bland by most collector's standards. I'm more about tidiness and organization, and try to minimize the clutter as much as possible.



This is an older image, but it shows the layout of the area. My game room is in the second room. There's a small closet behind the wall that my television is on. The closet door use to be where the TV is, but I sealed it up and relocated it to the side since that was the only usable wall in the room.

Like a lot of you, I've accumulated quite a few games over the years and have lots of game memorabilia, too, so I built a media cabinet and custom shelving to house and organize most of it. The attic has sloped walls which limits the amount of usable space I have, so I made low horizontal shelves all along the parameter of the room.

The television is a 46" Samsung Series 6 LCD (it's not mounted crooked, BTW, the picture is). The speaker layout looks funky, but the output has been adjusted to compensate for their odd placement, which was necessary because of the limited wall space. I also ran all of my speaker wire behind the walls and under the carpet because I hate seeing wires.

I still have a lot more games left to shelve though, so I'll probably extend things into the first room eventually, but for now it's mainly storage space.



I had an awkward panel in the ceiling that you could access the wiring from but it was ugly, so I replaced it with this custom SMB item box panel that I painted which my girl got a kick out of. I'm thinking about rigging a switch so that it plays the coin chime sound through my speakers when you hit/open it...I haven't decided if it's that serious yet though.



I made this media cabinet to house the consoles I use the most. Every system in it is hooked up and ready to play, either directly, through HDMI, or routed through two A/V selectors which are tucked away behind the unit.

Again, I really hate seeing wires and cords (and yes, I see that Wii power supply peeking out -- it was put away after I took the picture), so custom labels and wire ties keep everything neat and organized, and all of the wires and cords are fed through holes in the back of the unit, and through the wall behind the unit, which lead into the closet. The holes are all finished with black 3" plastic grommets.



The cabinet is made out of ¾" plywood, and the shelves out of ¾" MDF. I painted it 'khaki' and 'almond', which isn't the most exciting colour combination, but then I'm not the most exciting guy. Besides, it matched the carpet. The shelves are made to slide out about a third the way so it's easier to dust and to remove the larger consoles and components. Pull out shelves also help for systems like the 360 that need to vent.

That black and white plastic strip on top of the cabinet is a wireless Wii sensor bar. The cord on my original one snapped or was chewed through by a mouse or something.



This is one of the two A/V selectors that I use to switch between consoles. They're tucked out of sight behind the cabinet (but easily accessible), and attached to the back of the unit with Velcro tape.



I have a few more hand-held systems, but these are the ones I use the most.



Here you can see the start of the shelves I made to store the majority of my games. This corner area is dedicated to PSX games, and unboxed 3DO games (I have all of the boxes, they're just stored away). All of my media is alphabetized; I'd probably never play anything if I had to fish for something.



Here you can get a better idea of how the shelves look. There are two additional shelves like this one attached to each other, end to end, to form a solid unit the spans the length of the room. Each unit has removable/adjustable shelves which are held in place by wooden pegs. Each shelf has channels cut into the bottom with a router which the pegs rest in.



Here we have more PS2 games, a handful of PlayStation3 titles, and the start of my Gamecube collection.

The seams where the shelf units merge are concealed by the face molding pieces I made. Upon close inspection the design and overall construction are somewhat crude, but I know nothing about wood work, and this is quite literally the first practical thing I've ever built, so I'm just glad it turned out as well as it did.



Here are the rest of my PS2 games, my Gamecube and XBOX titles, and the start of my XBOX360 and Wii collection.

The 10 or so games in front of the non-rumbling Sux Asses controller are my PS3 games. There really aren't many exclusives on the system that I'm interested in, and most cross platform titles I get for the XBOX360, because I prefer the 360 controller. Honestly, I only got a PS3 because I got a good deal on a new backward compatible 60GB unit thanks to bing cash back. I mainly use it to upscale my PS2 games. There's the whole Blu-Ray thing too, I guess, but I still just purchase DVDs.