The first thing Zach Gage did, when I walked into his apartment, was apologize for the mess. He had just finished building, in a corner of his living room, an old-fashioned arcade cabinet — the kind of wooden, vending-machine-size techno-altar you would have seen teenagers huddled around in skating rinks in the early 1980s, except this one had a giant Mac monitor for its screen and a Mac mini for its guts and could play more than 3,000 games: everything from the paradigm-shifting superclassics (Space Invaders, Pac-Man) to experimental metagames that Gage and his indie-designer friends invented — with no budget, sometimes in just a few hours — over the last year or two.
Gage referred to his arcade as “a little shrine to games.” Building it, he said, had been his summer project; it cost him around six weeks and $1,000. He ordered parts from Hong Kong, then stripped and cut something like 100 wires, then figured out software to map them all to the various buttons. He had to learn the differences between Japanes