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Airbnb. Love it or hate it, it is responsible for some of the most interesting places to stay when dropping in for a city break. In the uber cool neighborhood of Koukaki in Athens sits one such a place, a heaven for retro gamers. We take a look at a Retro Gaming Airbnb in central Athens and chat to the owner, Thanos Meim.

Introduce yourself!

My name is Thanos….

Whoa! Like the purple bloke with the…

Nah. It’s a pretty common name here in Greece, given to me in the 80’s, way before the Avengers movie. For the last ten years I have been working in the tourism business.







So why a retro gaming Airbnb?

My ultimate goal is themed apartments with different distinct themes. The easiest theme to start with was the retro gaming one because of the huge field of options and because it’s so much fun!

So what consoles do you actually have in there?

In the apartment we have 7 consoles. Some of them are the new mini edition consoles with HD cables and built-in games (NES, Sega Megadrive and Atari Flashback) and some are the classic old consoles from the 90’s (SNES, N64 and Playstation 1) with the classic cartridges and CD games. Plus a Gameboy colour and an old arcade cabinet with the Pandora Box 5s system with 1299 games.









Did you find it hard releasing your consoles to the public?

There are many valuable things in the apartment, including the games and the decoration. I gave it a lot of thought and I consciously decided not to stress too much, if anything gets broken I will replace it. After all my target group is people that love and respect the consoles and I’m optimistic!

What kind of people rent the apartment?

Since the apartment is pretty new, it hasn’t been discovered yet from the gamers. The guests I’ve had already are a mix of fun loving families with teen kids and groups of young people. All of them were great









What kind of consoles did you play growing up?

When I was a boy, my dad brought home a none official console with hundreds of games built in and it had all the classics (Super Mario, Duck hunt, Galaxian, Bomberman etc) He used to play as much as me and my brother, if not more. But then growing up we saved and bought our first PS1 and we never stopped playing.

So where do we book?