Change can begin anywhere.
Change can begin anywhere.
Wake up early, work hard, sleep late - every day a tumble and turn in the sea.
His life was predictable.
But inside he was unfulfilled, and deeper down, a more unsettled part yearned for something else.
Lestary came home one day to find his roommate on their sofa playing a game.
He didn’t, however, recognise what was being played.
So he asked: “What are you playing, dude?”
To which his friend simply replied: “I’m farming.”
So he asked again: “You’re what?”
To which his friend again replied: “Farming.”
And when Lestary said nothing in response, finally a little explanation came.
“It’s a simulator.”
“Well can I look?”
he asked - and his friend agreed.
And Lestary never looked back again.
Where there’s clearly interest, there’s clearly money to be made.
There’s evenFarming Simulator esports.
But the simulators we know are often only a door to something deeper beyond.
The world of simulators is bottomless: they go as far as you’re prepared to.
Simulators have inspired real-life fairy tales before, too.
He currently manages top-flight French team Lens.
Craig Wilmott stood at the crossroads of change after 20 years working in supermarket chain Morrisons.
He had different ambitions when he was younger but family illnesses hardened a teenage trolley job into a career.
What could he do?
He found the answer in games.
One that could occupy his brain without overloading it.
“You don’t want a big, chewy story and triple-A production.
You just want a stupid, mindless task.”
He’s Scottish, Wilmott, 37 years old and mildly mannered.
Euro Truck Simulator 2 was by no means his first gaming experience.
Would it be possible to get out and actually see what it’s like in real life?"
That day, then, he chose a road - Craig Wilmott decided to become a trucker.
The appeal of Farming Simulator instantly grabbed Hades Lestary as his roommate demonstrated it that fateful day.
“Whenever I played the game, it was like a sense-state,” he adds.
“My mind is blank, I’m just playing the game, my worries are gone.”
Lestary is half Puerto Rican and half Colombian, with warm tanned skin.
He’s laidback, friendly, and radiates good energy.
He’s 36 years old.
And as with Wilmott, Lestary began to feel a secondary thought surfacing the more he played Farming Simulator.
The thought: what if farming was it?
The next question was, could it work in real life?
For Mcgehee and Brown,Arcade Paradisearrived like manna from heaven.
She has a loud and catching laugh, and does the majority of the talking.
She’s 38 years old.
Brown, by contrast, is more reserved, though he is recovering from an illness when we speak.
He’s 40 years old.
It re-focused them, re-energised them.
“It lit a fire under our ass to actually do it,” says Brown.
We can’t chicken out this time.'"
Most businesses don’t get that far.
“I’ll be honest,” Mcgehee says.
“I never actually expected us to get here.”
With that she laughs again.
“That sounds really terrible.
I probably shouldn’t say that out loud.”
But crammed into that space are 65 delicious, bleeping, arcade machines.
There are all sorts.
It turns heads with the right people.
“Is this real?!”
“I’m very proud of it.”
And Arcade Paradise helped them get there.
But there are some realities about owning an arcade that the game could not prepare them for.
You have to move them.
“It’s backbreaking work,” Brown says.
“You don’t realise how heavy some of these games are to move.”
“We have one game that weighs 1800 pounds,” Brown says.
“It lives in the same spot it was put.”
Reality number two: your home is now taken over by unused machines.
Repairs they have to carry out themselves.
Reality number three: not everyone cares for your machines like you do.
You become attached to them, they’re like your children.
You’re like, ‘Don’t hurt my babies!
Don’t slap it!'"
However, there are some things Arcade Paradisedidprepare them for, such as unclogging the toilet, for one.
How many plays will a $3000 machine need so that pay itself off, for example?
“I’m one of these people who’ll quite often start things and not finish them.
My whole life I’ve done that,” he says.
And he did: Wilmott received his licence in 2022.
Overwhelmingly, the biggest is the responsibility of driving a vehicle that large on the road.
“You feel more responsibility, like a weight on your shoulders,” he says.
“If you damage it in a game: no consequences,” he says.
You don’t get that from the simulator: you turn the computer off and go."
Craig, for what it’s worth, takes his Switch.
People pay relatively low amounts for veg boxes that tend to overdeliver, basically.
And he loves it.
“It’s like there’s silence,” he tells me.
“There’s just this peace that you cannot find anywhere else.
From the game to real life, it’s the same feeling.”
“I still play!”
says Lestary, beaming.
“Like a schedule kind of deal,” he says.
There are many things the game doesn’t do, though, even with mods.
Plus there are the endless repairs and maintenance he has to perform, similar to Legends Arcade.
In reality, the list of chores is long.
Simulators show the good parts, not the bad.
That’s what initially appealed to each of them, after all.
And if it hadn’t, where would they be now?
“It really did provide some solace in a really hard point.”
Three sets of people whose lives were irrevocably changed by video games, in a good way.
To which Brown says Firnigl unexpectedly replied, “You’re not supposed to get that far!”
They made themselves a plaque and shipped one to Firnigl, too.
“Of course I obliged,” Firnigl tells me over email.
Like some weird symbiosis!"
Giants, the creator of Farming Simulator, says it hears stories like Lestary’s all of the time.
“It’s amazing how virtual farming can spark a genuine passion for agriculture and ultimately shape careers.
SCS Software, the creator of Euro Truck Simulator 2, I didn’t hear back from.
And so I leave these people inspired by video game simulators to their new-look lives.
