Mike's Blog

Because Pac-Man on your iPhone is just not the same game as Pac-Man at an arcade cabinet!

I have a real fondness for old arcade cabinets. I’m sure it is partly nostalgia, but there’s no doubt that the controller and environment in which you play a game change the experience. Playing the Winnitron at GDC and a Ms. Pac-Man cab last week already had me yearning to have one of my own, and then a couple days ago Anna’s really cool game was released on Adult Swim Thursday. I love it, but it really feels like it belongs in a cab.

Confession: I barely remember this movie. I was 2 when it first came out.

So I’ve definitely got arcade cabs on the brain right now, but it’s always been something I thought would be cool and I can’t think of a good reason to wait longer

So here are some of the things I’m looking at:

• These guys make various cabs that actually disassemble to be shippable. Pretty tempted to go with one of theirs instead of DIY-ing it.
• I found a couple good examples (link1 link2) for bartop/desktop cabs. I’m wondering if that’s a better format due to portability and cost, but I’m also worried that these smaller cabs could slide around as you bang the joystick around so that it wouldn’t have the arcade cab feel I’m after.
• Getting a used arcade cab on ebay seemed like the smart way to do it, but so far they all seem to be in CA and understandably want you to pick it up yourself. So that ain’t working out.
• The builders of the Winnitron(s) have a forum set up where they describe how they’ve been doing it.
• Behemoth has a time-lapse video of them building one for one of the PAXs (link). It’s one of those things that really does not feel like a misuse of the word “awesome”!

And then they made MORE OF THEM

If I had tools, garage space, and a friend interested in making a weekend(s?) project of it, it’d be fun to play carpenter and build a cab, but I don’t see that happening. Plus it looks like it could easily be easier, faster, and cheaper to buy a cab. So at the moment I am leaning heavily toward getting the X-Arcade Tankstick (which I’d still be drooling over even if I wasn’t getting the cab), the Xtension Arcade Cabinet to go with, and working with somebody who has better art skills to make custom graphics for it.

WANT

WANT

And of course if I had one of these set up I don’t just have to play other retro games or other people’s games, I can put stuff by me and my friends on it! That’s pretty exciting to me! Especially for 2-player games!

So with tax return money burning a whole in my pocket and me looking at all this stuff late at night, purchases are likely to be made