This 42-year-old Japanese man is reliving the ’90s every day thanks to his enormous home arcade.

If the age of arcades wasn’t already dead, COVID-19 definitely killed it. In reality, it probably just stamped it further into the ground, what with Chuck E. Cheese’s recent declaration of bankruptcy being the final nail in the coffin.

But things are different in Japan. For starters, they don’t have an out of control pandemic or a government that seems to try to make it worse at every opportunity. But they also seemed to really hold on to the golden age of arcades when other countries had long since let it go.

Kōichi Toya, a 42-year-old from Gunma Prefecture, Japan, might be holding on to the golden age of arcades tighter than anyone else in Japan. He’s got so many authentic retro arcade cabinets that he’s had to convert his entire garage and part of his house into his home arcade. Games include Street Fighter II Turbo, Daytona USA, After Burner and After Burner II, Pop’n Music, Out Run, R-Type, and Thunder Blade.

Mr. Toya got his first arcade cabinet back in 2010, but it took another six years for the arcade cabinet bug to really sink its teeth in. From 2016 onwards, it was just one retro cabinet after another, spending sometimes upwards of a million yen (roughly $10,000) for a pristine cabinet that was built over three decades ago.

To be clear, this hobby is not cheap. Replica cabinets can be had for a few hundred bucks, but real arcade cabinets that were built in the ’80s and ’90s are hard to find. It’s a combination of middle-aged men recapturing their youth and the fact that these cabinets just aren’t built anymore. As such, online auctions are often the only way to find these cabinets, and bidding wards are increasingly common for working cabinets.

Toya even paid 1.5 million yen (or about $14,000 USD) to ship a working model of Sega’s 1987 classic After Burner. It even still tilts when you fire it up.

“I’m too afraid to tally up the total amount I’ve spent,” Toya told SUUMO Journal.

You can take a tour of Toya’s home arcade on his Twitter page, where he’s @myhomearcade. He’s not taking visitors thanks to COVID, but here’s hoping he can open his home up to the public someday.

Source: Anime News Network, SUUMO Journal, Twitter