Taipei Arcade Games (Photo credit: Michael Kwan (Freelancer))
Have you heard — surely, yes, by now if you live in the U.S. — about Caine’s Arcade?
In one of those unlikely fairy tales, a nine-year-old boy named Caine Monroy decided to build an entire amusement arcade out of cardboard boxes and packing tape. He created “fun passes” and used calculators to make sure each pass was legit. His arcade had every variety of game but the place, at the back of his father’s east Los Angeles auto body shop, lacked the crucial element — customers. Most people now buy auto parts on the Internet.
Until Nirvan Mullick, a film-maker, needed one for his old car.
He found Caine, played in his arcade, made a film — and asked everyone he knew to come and play there. They did. The event made NBC Nightly News and a college scholarship (and college prep tutoring) fund has topped $145,000 for Caine, a sweet-faced kid in a bright blue T-shirt.
Although — as someone not wild about traditional college education — I wonder where his amazing imagination would flourish best. Cal Arts?
It’s an astonishing video and I hope you’ll make the time, 10 minutes, to watch it.
It embodies everything I love:
Having a dream
Being persistent enough to make it into something real, even when no one is looking
Finding the tools to build your imagined world
Making stuff up from scratch
Finding someone who believes in you
Having that someone believe in you so much they want to do whatever they can to help you succeed.
I suspect for some people Caine’s win is that he’s now “famous”. It’s not.
The grin on his face when he saw how many people had finally shown up to play in his world was one of the sweetest sights you can imagine.
Related articles
- Awesome 9-year-old’s cardboard arcade gets flashmobbed (news.cnet.com)
- Caine’s Arcade (everwas.com)
- Get outside. Be creative. Dream. Create something. The story of 9-year-old Caine Monroy and Caine’s Arcade. (eugenecho.com)
