Murray Hill Man Turns Apartment Into Video Game Arcade

Chris Kooluris spent $26,000 turning his one-bedroom Murray Hill apartment into an old-school video arcade and himself into a guy without a fiancée. He seems inordinately proud of both those things, although the arcade is, admittedly, kind of amazing.

Kooluris's journey began when he moved into his fiancée's apartment in Brooklyn last summer. He put his place in 136 East 36th Street on the market for $599,000but failed to find a buyer, at which point he may or may not have freaked out slightly.

Since selling didn't seem to be in the cards, he decided to do the next best thing and buy thousands of dollars worth of action figures and arcade machines and renovate the apartment to accommodate them all. At some point during all this his engagement ended — though Kooluris clarified to us that, "my fiancée didn't dump me over the room…our split was amicable, but the room definitely didn't help" — and moved back into the now-arcade apartment and slept on a pullout futon with matching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sheets and comforter. A friend of his called the place "like a 'Field of Dreams' for geeks."