Running through the maze of video game history, this article considers the relationship between geographies of game play, routine images of game play in popular culture, and the frequently obscured diversity of video game culture. Geographies of game play foreground the materiality of video games--that is, as an object in specific historical locations that have changed over time. This includes the often overlooked and transitory spaces occupied by threshold games. Displacing the centrality or arcades, the home, and the content of video games, enables a corrective scrutiny of the ephemera of video game culture and its potential to expand the cultural memory of minoritarian subjectivity's relation to digital media; it accounts for who played, and how playing in different spaces bears on an understanding of games' place in televisual space.