Have you ever seen a secret, hidden apartment?

It's as strange, beautiful, and creepy as you might imagine.

I bought my first arcade game in 1994 when I was in my early 20s. Arcades were huge in the 1980s and then the bottom dropped out of them. By the early 90s, most of the dedicated arcades that had popped up in my town had already closed. Arcade games are only valuable to operators if they’re making them money. When they stop making money they become big, wooden things that are heavy to move and take up a ton of space to store. The same machines that were selling for thousands of dollars in the 1980s and were brining in thousands of quarters were suddenly being sold for pennies on the dollar in the 1990s. The first machine I ever bought was Elevator Action, a classic game that would have cost thousands of dollars in the 1980s. I paid $200 for it and put it in the corner of my kitchen.

By the time I was 23 I owned five or six machines. They were inexpensive to buy and it was a fun, quirky hobby. Then I took a job halfway across the country and sold them. Financially, it just made sense.

Years later, around the time I turned 30, I decided to revisit the hobby. By then I had a bit more disposable income and a bit more space. It was around that time that I discovered arcade auctions. The first machine I ever bought at an auction was Mat Mania. Mat Mania was based on 80s professional wrestling. Growing up, the closest convenience store to my house had the same machine. I used to ride my bike or skateboard up to the store every day during the summer and I played that machine every day. As a kid, the thought of owning that same machine was beyond my wildest dreams. I paid $35 for it at an auction.

Buy and sell enough arcade machines and eventually you’ll meet all the other people in your area that are buying and selling arcade machines. One of them, a guy I’ll call “D”, became my arcade dealer. Any time I was looking for a specific machine, I would call D and, sooner or later, he would find one for me. Some people have drug dealers or weapons dealers. Me? I had an arcade dealer on speed dial.

That’s how I ended up buying and selling more than a hundred arcade machines. The most I ever owned at a single time was right around 30, which I kept in my own personal backyard arcade.

Wait long enough and everything will come full circle. All the games that were super popular in the 1980s and 90s and worth nothing for two decades once again became popular. Arcades began to flourish once again, adopting one of two new business models. Some arcades began selling alcohol (which is way more profitable than arcade games) while others adopted a “pay one price entry fee” with all the games being set on free play. Each model has its benefits and downsides.

In 2017, D (my arcade dealer) decided to open his own arcade using that second model. The location he ended up in was not great. It was located in a small town far outside the city. Its only saving grace was that it was connected to a skating rink. The guy who owned the skating rink was also the landlord.

D’s arcade was super rad. There were maybe 40 games available to play — again, all free with the cost of admission ($10). There was a party room in the back that I rented once for my kid’s birthday. Every minute I spent in that arcade I felt like I was a teenager again.

As much as I loved the place there was no way it was ever going to survive. There was no way to lure people that far out of the city. Plus, arcade machines are old and break all the time. (Trust me.) The arcade was open for a couple of years before it closed.

I’ll never forget the last time I went to the arcade. The skating rink had already permanently closed by then and the landlord had decided to sell the entire building. I was hanging out in the arcade after close, which is and of itself an odd enough. Seeing rows of arcade machines turned off is a weird feeling. It’s like seeing a dead body; just these big, giant things that used to light up and make noise and do stuff that are suddenly lifeless.

So my buddy D and I were hanging out in the arcade with all the machines off when he said to me, “you want to see something weird?” I’ve made it my life’s mission, whenever asked that question, to say yes. More often than not, I haven’t regretted it.

Near the rear of the arcade was a locked door that I had never noticed before. D told me he’d been given a master set of keys for the entire building and proceeded to unlock the door.

I stepped through the door and into a dark room. While my eyes were adjusting D flipped on the lights and I found myself standing in the living room of an apartment.

A very narrow apartment.

If I had to guess I’d say the width of the room was roughly 6’ across.

Imagine for a moment you were standing in the parking lot, looking at the front of this building. From the outside — and I’m making up the numbers here, but you get the idea — from the outside it appeared that the skating rink was 150’ wide and the arcade was 50 feet wide. From the inside it became clear that the skating rink was only 147’ wide and the arcade was only 47’ wide, which left just enough room in between the two for a 6’ wide apartment. An apartment that was 6’ wide and ran from the front of the building to the back, so say… 80’ long.

I was so shocked to find myself standing in the middle of an abandoned apartment that it’s tough for me to remember exactly how things were laid out. There was a narrow bedroom, a narrow kitchen, a narrow dining room, and a narrow living room.

“You wanna see something even more weird?” D asked. How could I say no?

At the front of the apartment was another door, this one on the opposite wall. D opened the door and the three of us (he, me, and my wife) walked into the skating rink. The skating rink had officially closed but everything was still inside. Bags of potato chips hung in the snack bar. Just feet away from the door, coin-operated rides sat motionless.

Perhaps the strangest thing in the skating rink were all the roller skates themselves, all lines up and ready to be exchanged for a pair of shoes as collateral. Whether or not D, my wife, and I laced up a pair and took a victory lap around the rink is our secret.

Before long it was time for our sneaky tour to end. D turned off the lights in the skating rink and then we backtracked our way through the apartment until we were back in the arcade.

D told me that almost every night when he locked up the arcade and left, the landlord’s truck had been parked out back. He said he had always assumed the guy had been cleaning the skating rink, but now it seems it was just the landlord, sleeping mere inches away on the side of a thin sheet of sheetrock.

And you know to this day, I cannot for the life of me recall whether or not that skinny apartment had a rear exxternal entrance. I’ve tried to reimagine the space in my mind and I just don’t remember seeing a door. Is it possible the only two ways in or out of that space was through the skating rink and the arcade?

That’s creepy, right?