How to Have a Gaming Tour of New York City March 22, 2026

Posted by Maniac in Editorials.
Tags: Apple, Meta, Nintendo
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As a gamer who grew up on the East Coast, I was FREQUENTLY reminded of the fact that NO major gaming events or technology companies existed on my side of the country. That’s partially due to the fact that most major gaming companies had set up shop early in states such as Texas and California, and a side effect of their regional focus was most major gaming news came out of the West Coast. In fact, there weren’t any major gaming conventions held on the East Coast until Penny-Arcade offered to host a PAX in Massachusetts around the early to mid 2010s. Before that time, I would have to hop a six-hour plane ride any time I needed to report on major gaming news. However, the East Coast of the country could not be ignored forever.

New York City has been frequently cited as the heartbeat of the entire country, and this is a fact that tech companies have been ignoring to their loss for the past thirty years. Nintendo opened the very first Pokemon Center in the United States back in 2001 in NYC, and since rebranding it as a full-fledged Nintendo Store, the site has been a bedrock of Rockefeller Plaza for over twenty years. Since then, other companies such as Microsoft and Meta, have opened up boutique stores throughout the city. My wife and I recently spent the day in Manhattan as I sought to find the new technology hotspots throughout the island. We ended up having a wonderful day, and I left the city with a great appreciation for what was currently offered….as well as a huge haul of tech-goodies I could not get anywhere else.

First off, I want to highlight the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue.

Located just south of Central Park, this Apple Store operates 24-hours night and day and offers a full range of Mac, iPad, Vision Pro and iPhones for sale. This is typically the first place that the mainstream media will broadcast from whenever Apple releases a new product, and Apple will always dress up the store to highlight whatever the newest product they’re offering currently is. Today, that happens to be the new MacBook Neo.

My intention was to take my wife there for a live demonstration of the new M5-powered Apple Vision Pro, but she wasn’t feeling well from the train ride into the city. Instead, we sat in on a live demonstration, completely free of charge, focused on Apple Intelligence. I use an iPhone 16 Pro, but haven’t made much use of the AI features since they were implemented in an iOS update several months ago. My wife uses an iPhone 14, which does not support AI, but I was hopeful the lecture would provide incentives for her to finally upgrade to a newer phone.

My wife and I greatly enjoyed the presentation on Apple Intelligence, and we both could find our own favorite feature offered by the current AI models we agreed would be useful. She appreciates the image creation tool, and I found a lot of useful functionality in the new camera search/translate/transcribe feature. We didn’t end up buying anything (neither of us needed any accessories at this time), but the lecture alone made the visit worthwhile.

Next we wanted to check out Meta Lab. Also located on Fifth Avenue, they focus on offering public access to current Meta technology, including the Quest 3, the Gen2 Meta Ray-Ban sunglasses, and the new Meta glasses.

I’m actually a big fan of the original Meta Ray-Bans. I’ve had the first generation Wayfarer since Thanksgiving 2023, and they still work just fine. The thing I appreciated the most about their Ray-Ban smart glasses were that they were priced just as high as traditional Ray-Ban sunglasses, and yet offered integrated Bluetooth audio, hands-free camera, and voice controlled access to the new Meta AI. They’re also a really good pair of sunglasses, and the Wayfarer design has never gone out of style. I’ve shot a lot of recent unboxing and review videos with those glasses. In short, they’re both practical and convenient. As you know, I’m also a Quest 3 owner/enthusiast, so I wasn’t in need of a Q3 or Q3S demonstration either. No, I went to Meta Labs because wanted to get a first hand experience with their new screen-enhanced Meta Glasses.

Meta was nice enough to provide me a live demonstration on the second floor of the lab. It was actually a really cool space, with a lounge area surrounded by urban art and artifacts. I had to take off my Apple Watch to affix their neural band to the wrist of my dominant hand. The band would serve as the controller for the demonstration.

As I’m sure many have already reported in the media, the Meta display is only visible in one eye, but this is not a major detriment to using the product. What was a detriment was the neural band’s gesture interpretation, and the current limitations of the hardware. The demonstration was happy to walk me through all the gestures my hand needed to perform in order to control the menus on the glasses. The problem was that coming from someone who uses an Apple Vision Pro, the screen-powered glasses felt like a step backwards. Only a handful of applications were offered by the glasses, ranging from internal camera, streaming music media player, and of course Meta AI prompt. These are features I was already familiar with from the screen-free Meta Ray-Bans I’ve already owned, and I honestly do not feel the internal screen offered that much of an improvement, certainly not enough to justify the several hundred dollar price bump. The control system itself was not as responsive as a Vision Pro, which, combined with the learning curve on the control gestures, made basic navigation feel unintuitive. While this may sound like I had an unpleasant experience, it was actually a great learning experience I’m happy I received. I’m still a fan of the existing smart glasses, and I would still recommend getting the Meta Ray-Ban or Oakley Gen2 screen-free glasses to anyone interested in them.

Our next stop was to a location that wasn’t even on our initial list when we came into the city that day, the Microsoft Store.

Located on Fifth Avenue, this two-floor shop offered live demonstrations of recent MS Surface tablets on the first floor, and a gaming-focused museum on the second, with a one-person at a time Virtual Reality simulator ride.

I absolutely had to check out the second floor to give the World of Warcraft simulator a ride.

The VR simulator can handle one person at a time, and lets you ride on the back of a flying dragon through a real-time World of Warcraft powered simulation. As someone who hasn’t played the game since its initial release twenty-two years earlier, I felt like I was literally inside the World again for a brief few moments.

Once the simulation was done, I decided to take a closer look at some of the store’s exclusive merchandise. The store had a smattering of World of Warcraft, Xbox, Fallout, and Halo 2 clothing for sale, alongside their Xbox and Surface hardware. While i had no intention of buying an Xbox or Surface while I was there, the great experience I had in the simulator alone made me eager to pick up a Halo 2 shirt while I was onsite.

Finally, we headed back to Rockefeller Plaza to visit the last location on our tour for the day Nintendo NYC. Located at 10 Rockefeller Plaza (next to the NBC building), Nintendo NYC (formerly Nintendo World, and even more formerly Pokemon Center NY), was a combination Nintendo merchandise store and museum.

I’ve visited Nintendo NYC off and on every few months since the first time I ever visited in 2013, and I always try to make it a must-do activity whenever I’m in Manhattan. Sadly, most of the museum pieces in the store had been consolidated to just one two-sided display on the store’s second floor, as the former museum portion of the site was now being taken up by demonstration units.

The upside of the extra space was that there is always rare Nintendo merchandise for sale here that you cannot get anywhere else or even online, and I had three specific items in mind for this trip. During the recent 30th anniversary Pokemon Presents presentation, The Pokemon Company announced they would be selling a mini Game Boy player capable of playing songs from the original Pokemon titles. The item, as well as Pokemon Pokopia, and the new Mario Talking Flower, have been sold out online and in most retail stores since they were at launch. However, I was lucky enough to find all three of those products for sale at Nintendo NYC, and I did not hesitate for even one second to purchase them. I cannot think of a better way to cap off any day in NYC without at least one trip to Nintendo NY. It’s always busy, but there’s no denying it offers the best possible access to products you can’t get anywhere else, and long-term Nintendo fans will always find something new on display there in their museum that nobody had seen before.

If you liked this article, and want us to continue with more just like it, feel free to post a comment below with your thoughts. Have you been to any of these spots yourselves? Do you wish you could go? Do you wish more places like it would open? I know I sure do!