In 2016 my husband and I planned an epic video game themed wedding. We wanted a way to incorporate our mutual love of gaming without shoving it down people’s throats who may not understand complicated gaming references. With the help of the internet, we found subtle ways to put a gamer’s touch on our wedding.
1. Printed materials
Save the dates, invitations, thank you cards...These were a no brainer that we could make them gaming themed.
The save-the-dates and invites we purchased from Origami Prints off Zazzle and we LOVED THEM. They were clean, classy but also just enough gaming to get the point across. Origami Prints had a great video game wedding collection so we also got Save the Dates and mailing address labels that matched the invites. (We went with postcards to save money on postage.)
Table numbers at the reception are where I went a little silly. We decided to call each table a “game” instead of a table. We made a list of all of the games we like to play or have played together over the previous 10 years and put table numbers together in the style of old Nintendo game cartridges.
Our wedding favors were thick cardboard coasters with a cute tagline my husband wrote. We designed them and had them printed through Vistaprint.
At the reception, the seating cards had small pokéballs on them.
When it came to thank you cards after the wedding, I purchased a controller image from a stock website and printed cards from Vistaprint that said “thank you for playing.”
2. Rings
My husband was really the one who got the ball rolling on this video game themed wedding. He worked with a local jeweler to create a custom Zelda ring using diamonds from his late grandmother’s ring. We kept the Zelda theme going with my wedding bands and had the same jeweler work on those.
My husband wasn’t big into paying a ton of money for his wedding ring - the process our jeweler needed to complete his ring idea would have been pretty expensive. So we ended up buying his wedding ring from C9TTUNGSTEN from Etsy for $50! The seller was able to include our “play your heart out” message on the inside along with our wedding date. The ring is so cool looking and my husband gets compliments all the time on it. (And because it was so cheap, we were able to get two wedding bands around my ring instead of one.)
3. Hair piece
I ended up buying a white wedding dress that reminded me of something that could be Star Wars-like. But I wanted to include something gaming in my outfit without looking tacky. Etsy to the rescue again! DancingParticiple sells adorable 16-bit gaming headbands, so I got this super cute pixelated heart in white to match my dress.
4. Video games at the reception
I looked into renting arcade machines for our wedding reception, but the quotes I got were way out of our price range. Our friends came together and helped us out to lend some TVs. We had a few TVs set up with systems for guests to play games. It was a hit with kids as well as adults! Near the end of the night, my husband and I had a Mario Kart 64 challenge.
5. Set the mood with music!
I spent all summer on this and the music was one of the things I was most proud about. During our wedding ceremony, we had a pianist playing piano versions of songs from games (Mario, Sonic, Final Fantasy, Zelda, etc.). NinSheetMusic was a great resource for me to choose from.
At our wedding reception, we wanted video game music playing during cocktail hour and dinner (we went with regular dance music for after dinner). But I wanted classier, more jazz-like versions of gaming music. And boy did iTunes deliver! I bought SO MANY SONGS that summer. A few nights a week I would sit on my phone looking through options and would write down songs I liked. Then I narrowed it down to the ones I thought were the most classical sounding while still being able to tell it was from a specific game. I ended up buying more than 2 hours worth of music to have the DJ play.
Some of my favorite artists I bought multiple songs from:
6. The cake.
We went wild on this. When we ordered our cake from a local baker who makes them out of her house, she asked what we wanted on it. “Oh nothing. Just white. Super plain.” We had projectors set up around our cake and projected arcade games onto it! It was SO cool and guests loved it!
We were kind of the guinea pigs because our venue had never done that before. Warm lights from the projector had been pointed at this cake for hours, so by the time we finished our first dance that cake had melted and fell right onto the floor! (This is why you have to be okay with knowing not everything will go well at your wedding.) We didn’t get any cake that day, because some of the guests grabbed what they could, but our baker made us a cake free of charge to eat at home which I found so nice.
So if you plan to do a projection cake, which is awesome and looks so cool, make sure you have some supports built into the tiers of cake so it doesn’t melt and fall over!
7. Engagement photos
We had fun with our engagement photos and threw as much gaming as we could into them in one photo session. Click here to see more photos from the session.
If you're thinking of having a video game themed wedding, it'll be so unique and a BLAST (even for non-gamers). Good luck and reach out if you have questions!