Attempting to break out of the the malaise of a difficult summer, my family and I drove out to Brookfield, Illinois to visit the Galloping Ghost Arcade, a sprawling, ramshackle collection of buildings that take up one entire side of a city block and house the largest video game arcade in the world. Walking in is overwhelming, it's dark and warm and humid; the beeps and boops of the vintage arcade game collection drowned out slightly by the hum of industrial fans placed in corners. The windows to the outside world are either tinted or obscured and most of the lighting comes from the games themselves.

The games. Room after room of games pressed right up against each other in aisles barely wide enough to squeeze past someone as they try their best against Donkey Kong or Pac Man. It's a labyrinth of games that seems to continue forever. We were discovering new rooms filled with games up until our last moments at the arcade. There's a box on the counter asking for donations to expand even further. At this point there are well over 800 games, according to their website, with machines regularly swapped in and out. You pay a flat $25 to play all day, every game rigged to play for free at the push of a button.

Don't expect high-tech Dave & Busters-style games at the Galloping Ghost. The vast majority are from the golden age of arcades, the 1980s. As it should be, extra attention is given to the games born in Chicago from Bally, Midway, and Williams, as well as smaller outfits like Rock-Ola. The city used to be the center of the arcade universe, and it was fun to be able to walk past (and play) dozens of Chicago's forgotten classics.

After a while though, I became captivated not by the games themselves but by the incredible art on the cabinets and specifically the marquee, the sign set above the screen, tempting a kid from 1983 to spend their hard-earned quarters. The marquee back then had to do a lot of work, because the games themselves were all low resolution and blocky affairs. The marquee had to sell the idea of the game, the excitement around the concept and the story because the on-screen graphics alone weren't going to do it. So you made sure that your marquees did the job, filling it with exquisite hand-lettered logos, art borrowed from the pages of fantasy novels, sci-fi, and comics, and vivid color palettes that would shine out into the dark arcade.

These vintage marquees, to me, are such a beautiful vernacular artform that perfectly capture the moment where our lives were transitioning from the physical to the digital. So, during this long, hot summer, enjoy a gallery of video game marquees I took while walking around the Galloping Ghost.