When you first enter the Game Room, you’re met with a cacophony of eight-bit video game soundtracks. A free download for the Xbox 360 and PC (through the Games for Windows Live client), Game Room is a virtual arcade in the spirit of the dark, smoke-filled spaces so many of us lost our youth. Games are organized by publisher—Activision, Atari, Intellivision, and Konami are there now, and others are coming—and there are also themed rooms: adventure, ’80s, outer space. Titles available include Asteroids Deluxe, River Raid, Time Pilot, and Sub Hunt, and five new titles are being released weekly for the foreseeable future.

Frank Pape, a senior director at Microsoft, leads the Game Room project. On the phone from his office in Redmond, Washington, he told the Straight he’d like to get 1,000 games in the arcade. So far, the easiest to license was the catalogue of Intellivision titles created for Mattel’s console that came out in 1980. The rights to all the games are owned by a company formed by Keith Robinson, part of the original creative team at Mattel. Pape said Robinson had “code, documentation, art assets, and everything else” required.

Titles being considered for the Game Room were all released between the late ’70s and early ’90s. While publishers have regularly released compilations of their retro games for the modern consoles, Game Room consolidates them all in one place. You can trial any game for free, and if you decide to buy a game for your own arcade, you can purchase it for your Xbox 360, your PC, or both. But the real appeal, Pape believes, is the social aspect of Game Room. “The dynamic leaderboards and cross-platform challenges are what really set it apart,” he said. So when Pape scores the highest on Pitfall, he can brag about it to all his friends. Which is what those old, dingy arcades were all about.