This weekend, I spent a few hours wandering around the convention center of the Marriott in Brookhaven for the second annual Southern-Fried Gameroom Exposition, a three-day convention focused solely on classic arcades, pinball machines, and home gamerooms. The whole experience harkens back to the arcade days of yore, and you’ll see not only folks who used to play these games when they were young, but also brand-new generations grabbing the controls.

There was more than 200 different pinball machines and arcade cabinets spanning over 30 years of history and damn it was fun. The best part? All on free play. There were also rooms where you could play brand-new, yet-to-be released games, as well as rooms where folks could bring in their old home gaming consoles like Atari, old Nintendo machines, and Sega Genesis. I even got to take a peek into the headset of a vintage 1995 Virtual Boy, Gameboy’s answer to the 90s fad of virtual reality gaming that never really took off. 12-year-old Haley beamed.

One of the best parts of the entire experience was just taking in all of the art and design on some of these classic games. Brilliantly lit and colored, they truly bring some of the games to life—even today, in our world of computer-rended 3D design and shading— and add an extra dimension to the gameplay.

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