This story originally appeared on Kotaku.
A Reddit user found something quite odd inside their dentist’s waiting room: An old McDonald’s N64 video game kiosk that had been converted into an Xbox 360 arcade complete with multiple controllers and games.
The dentist’s office waiting room can be a tense place as you wait to start whatever procedure brought you there. Even a simple cleaning or check-up can cause a lot of stress, especially for younger kids who might have had a few bad experiences with the teeth cleaners. So instead of them playing games on your phone and killing the battery or making them read five-month-old issues of a random fashion magazine, why not let them play some Xbox 360 to distract them from their upcoming root canal? At least one dentist seems to think that’s a pretty good idea.
On April 16, Reddit user Asleep-Tumbleweed-99 posted some images on the Xbox 360 subreddit of an Xbox 360 kiosk hanging out in his dentist’s waiting room.
“Pretty cool. [Doritos Crash Course] is what I see on one of them and the other just has the scoreboard up,” explained Asleep-Tumbleweed-99. “It was for little kids in the dentist so I didn’t want to actually play it as I’m almost 30 and don’t want to seem like a creep LOL.”
While they didn’t play it, the user “had to post” about the discovery, adding: “You don’t see these much anymore especially an old Xbox 360 one.”
Quickly others chimed in, pointing out that the kiosk in the office looked a lot like the N64 machines found inside some McDonald’s restaurants back in the late 90s and early 2000s. However, digging a bit deeper, this isn’t simply an old N64 kiosk that has had some Xbox 360 consoles shoved in it.
The real story behind this Xbox 360 dentist kiosk
At first, I thought someone took an old kiosk and cleaned it up, removed the McDonald’s logo from the tall pole sticking out the top, repainted the red dome silver, and pulled out the old screens and consoles. Those were then replaced with three devices from a company called KidzPace, which sells self-contained video game units designed for restaurants, businesses, hospitals, hotels, and basically anywhere else bored kids might be waiting around.
However, digging deeper, I discovered that this unit is not a refurbished ‘90s kiosk, but a product that KidzPace used to sell. A rep told me they no longer offer the Xbox 360 model. But I found a 2017 YouTube video posted by the company that shows it off.
Looking closely, it’s likely the company reused leftover shells from those old N64 kiosks because—after I did more research—I discovered that KidzPace made those old McDonald’s machines back in the day, too. In fact, they still make games for the fast-food giant to this day.
If you are curious, buying just one Xbox Series S standalone play unit from KidzPace in 2024 will cost you $3395 and that doesn’t include shipping, a rep told me. Yikes!
Anyway, so uh, what were we talking about again?
Oh right, yeah that weird old Xbox 360 kiosk in the dentist’s office someone posted on Reddit. Yeah, it’s real. It was a thing you could buy, and it’s probably not made from an actual old McDonald’s N64 kiosk. But it likely shares some DNA with those nostalgic devices and maybe some plastic, too.
I’m going to stop digging into this now before I find some new piece of info that leads me down another rabbit hole.
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