When my fiancé and I started turning our finished basement into my office, the goal wasn’t just to create a place to work. She wanted it to feel like a space that was totally mine.
At first, it was just a sofa and a small desk. Functional and quiet. Not particularly personal. I put out some of my treasures that I had collected over the years, but that only went so far. So we started spending weekends browsing flea markets and antique stores, looking for things that might help the room reflect my interests.
One afternoon, we came across a print that made both of us laugh.
It was simple, almost too simple. A plain white canvas with neat stacks of Atari 2600 cartridges arranged across it. Seven stacks, fourteen games each. Ninety-eight total. It wasn’t rare or valuable. It looked like something that might have origianlly come from a craft store or maybe TJ Maxx. But it had a kind of strange charm.
It was ten dollars.
So I bought it and hung it on the wall without thinking much about it.
At the time, it was just decoration.
Then one day she casually said, “You should try to collect all of those games and recreate the print in real life.”
It sounded like a joke. Or at best, a mildly ridiculous long-term project. But the more we talked about it, the more it started to feel like something worth trying.
Now, whenever we go to flea markets, antique stores, or anywhere that might have old games, we automatically start scanning shelves for those specific titles. We keep a shared note on our phones so we always know what we’re still missing. There’s a retro game vendor at the flea market we visit at least once a month now. The guy behind the counter has started to recognize us, which I’m choosing to interpret as encouragement rather than concern.
So far, I’ve tracked down 50 of the 98 games.
Directly below the print, a floating shelf now holds the cartridges we’ve collected, arranged in stacks that mirror the image above it. The order isn’t perfect yet, but that’s part of the process. The goal is to eventually recreate the print exactly — to turn something that started as wall art into something more physical.
What began as a ten-dollar purchase has slowly revealed itself to be a significantly more expensive idea. So far the Atari cartridge has cost around five dollars, this “simple” project will eventually total at least five hundred. Realistically, probably more. Some of the titles on the print go for twenty, thirty, even forty dollars on their own.
But the cost isn’t the point.
When I think about Atari, I don’t think about graphics or gameplay mechanics. I think about sitting on the floor in front of a huge console television with a woodgrain exterior, holding that chunky joystick, surrounded by wood-paneled walls. The console was wood. The TV was wood. The walls were wood. I’m pretty sure if we’d had a woodgrain joystick, no one would have questioned it. The games were abstract enough that imagination had to do most of the work. Every cartridge felt like a doorway into something special.
What I didn’t expect was how peaceful the whole process would be. This has become something my fiancé and I do together… a kind of ongoing, low-stakes treasure hunt that gives us an excuse to wander through flea markets and antique stores looking for tiny plastic relics.
The print is still hanging on the wall.
The shelf beneath it is slowly catching up.
It started as decoration.
Now it feels like the beginning of a project I didn’t plan, can’t fully explain, and probably shouldn’t think about the cost.
But I’m really glad we started it.
Leave a Reply