GOAT Gamers Lounge was built for Pittsburgh video game fans. Will they come?

Years ago, Kevin Piedra grieved the loss of his parents at the same time he was missing his older brother, Roberto Piedra, who was in the military.  “I didn’t have anybody,” Kevin says. “So I dove really deep into video games. Really, really deep. That was my escape. And if I had other people that I could share that with, I probably would have gotten out of my funk a lot quicker.”  For his part, Roberto maintained his lifelong love of video games while in the United States Navy but without others, he couldn’t pass around controllers. While playing a particular game, he called his little brother to learn if he got to the same part yet.  “And that’s when I realized that throughout my entire life playing games, not very many times did I play alone,” Roberto tells Pittsburgh City Paper . “It was always my brother, my mother, my father, my friend, my neighbor, my babysitter. Somebody, somewhere, at some point, played. And that is the connection I was seeking when I called him. It wasn’t the game at all. It was the story that I was sharing with somebody else about these experiences and these challenges that I’m having.”  Each of them forged their own career paths but came together earlier this year, along with Roberto’s wife Alyize Piedra, a co-owner , to form the local business GOAT Gamers Lounge, a large and high-tech communal gathering space for hanging out and playing video games. In their attempts to attract enough customers to keep business afloat, they say the same isolation they’ve felt makes their space a challenging — but also potentially socially beneficial — pitch to gamers.  Rob and Kevin Piedra of Goat Gamers Lounge Credit: CP Photo by Mars Johnson GOAT Gamers Lounge takes up multiple rooms in a shared building in Garfield, located at 4805 Penn Ave. There are both dark and bright environments, along with a mix of individual monitors, projector screens for spectating, and big TVs for traditiona