HE grandparents of Michael Gabriele's five children seem to visit more often lately at his house in Stormville, N.Y. "They say hi to the kids," he said, "and then head straight for our recreation room."
Everyone else follows, said Mr. Gabriele, 39, a mortgage banker, who has spent more than $30,000 over the last two years on seven arcade-style games, each in its own cabinet, to furnish his 650-square-foot game room. "We burn so much juice in there I had to have an electrician rewire the whole room."
Mr. Gabriele says his game room is well worth the expense because it brings together different generations of his family. "It's a dream come true," he said. "I could live in there."
Well-equipped recreation rooms are becoming a more popular destination for both relatives and friends. Updating a recreation room can be a major project. Debbie Baxter, an interior designer in San Antonio, says she has noticed an increase in clients willing to pay her fees of up to $200 an hour for advice on selecting the best mix of games and fitting them into the available space. "You've got to leave some elbow room, and there are other considerations," she said. "You don't want the path to a pinball machine to take people right in front of the dart board."
But with enough space, that kind of danger disappears. Ms. Baxter said a medium-size recreation room would cover about 350 square feet. "That gives you enough room for a pool table, a bank of three or four pinball machines or arcade video games and maybe foosball," she said.
But not enough for Mr. Gabriele. His buying binge embodies a trend among grown-ups who fed coins into Pac-Man and Missile Command machines in mall arcades in the 1980's. For them, home video-game systems like Sony's PlayStation 2, which connect to a regular television and are played with hand-held controls, just don't provide the right feel or enough thrills.
"Playing an actual arcade game, where you stand there over a control panel that has a joystick and flashing lights, is the ultimate way to play," said Ryan Delaney, the principal of Taft Elementary School in Ashland, Ohio, who has two children. His home recreation room is filled with a half-dozen arcade games. His current favorite is the new Elvis pinball machine; it is priced at $4,275 from Stern Pinball Inc. "It's packed with action like hidden bumpers and very fast - plus it plays eight Presley songs from the King's comeback tour in 1968," Mr. Delaney said.
All of this reflects a new type of the "cocooning" tendencies that market researchers said they spotted after Sept. 11, 2001. In an earlier time, a stay-at-home consumer was often a couch potato watching TV, but the new version is more active, and enjoys playing games. Ms. Baxter points out that her clients shun easy chairs and sofas in their recreation rooms in favor of bar stools and benches - if they want places to sit at all. And their plasma televisions are less the focus of the room than a form of prestige art to be watched between turns at a game.
Arcade games bought for home use are a relatively small market compared with the $10 billion market for video games in the United States. After all, the price of the new Elvis arcade game is roughly equivalent to that of 85 copies of the popular video game "Grand Theft Auto." Yet sales of arcade games are growing. David Young, president of BMI Gaming in Boca Raton, Fla., who sells new and refurbished arcade games generally priced from $1,000 to $10,000, said his 2004 sales would total $4 million, more than double the level of the previous year.
One of his customers, Germaine Harmon of Wellington, Fla., has converted her three-car garage into a game room decorated like a 1950's diner, with a jukebox and game selection that includes a tabletop shuffleboard court. "It's something my grandkids, kids and friends can enjoy," she said.
