The first video game I ever played was in a Dairy Queen restaurant in rural Canton Texas, sometime in the early 1980s. It was a cabaret arcade cabinet of Atari's top-down space shooter Asteroids.
This was a time when people didn’t have computers in their homes (or in their pockets). Consoles were scarce or non-existent. Finding this thing in the wild tucked into the piney woods of East Texas was like finding a monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. You engaged with it and magic happened. It responded to your input, it had artificial intelligence, the Vectrex screen glowed these sharp bright lines like something from another world. I was in awe.
As my brother took his turn I studied every inch of this machine. I found screws that held it together, a power cord sandwiched between it and the wall. I found vents with warm air emanating from them. I peeked in to see twinkling lights illuminating mysterious circuit boards, wires, and glass enclosures. Someone very smart, somewhere, designed and built this thing. There must be more of them.
Pretty soon after that, video game arcades were in full swing. Tall cabinets, short cabinets, multiplayer cabinets. Cabinets with steering wheels and foot pedals, chairs, glowing controls, spinning knobs and track balls. Every new clever cabinet made me love this medium even more.
I have this weird quirk. I'm always a little anxious if I don't know how the things around me are built. I tend to run my hand under desks to understand how the legs are attached. I was the kid that took his toys apart even if I couldn't always get them reassembled. And hanging out in arcades made me endlessly curious about what was inside of them. It was a special day when you would catch one being repaired on the arcade floor. The generous repairman would give you a tour of the inside and explain the components, which happened to me on many occasions. Eventually the video arcade came and went, and most of these cabinets fell into disrepair. With Atari 2600s and NESs, then Xboxes and Playstations, offering videogames right in your living room, these huge clunky things became obsolete.
By 2014, when I began co-organizing my local indie game dev collective, the Dallas Society of Play, we were always looking for new events and projects to bring together developers. We decided that we would build our own full-size, 4-player arcade cabinet and fill it with locally-made video games. I’d finally found my impetus to build an arcade cabinet of my own. A dream I’d had since I was ten years old. I’d build a cabinet from scratch.
This wasn't an original idea by any means. People have been building MAME cabinets for years to emulate original arcade games. Torontrons and Winnitrons, repurposed DIY arcade cabinets containing indie games, have been popping up all over the world, most connected to the Winnitron network that fed them a curated collection of indie games.
But I wanted to build one just for us, the North Texas indie scene. I knew I wanted a few requirements to help it stand out. It had to be a four-player cabinet to maximize the social power of arcade cabinets (the first four-player indie cabinet), and it had to be expandable so we could change out the controls in the future for a different configuration.
Research led me to a particular 4-player Konami cabinet design from 1991. It was used for The Simpsons, G.I. Joe, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Most people I know have played on this cabinet at some point in their lives.
I got the specs on this cabinet and it was enormous. Using a flat screen LED instead of a CRT meant that I didn't need as much space as the old ones, so I modified the design to have a significantly smaller footprint.
I also knew that I wanted a modular control panel that could be replaced if we wanted to use different inputs. Someday we may want steering wheels, or whack-a-moles, or something even more experimental. Also the thing would need to be able to fit through a standard doorway. I designed a sturdy cradle in the front that a removable control panel would bolt into. The planning was done, and the build could begin.
I had two deadlines throughout this project. The first was a game jam that the Society of Play was hosting specifically to build games for the cabinet. The cabinet was built and functioning at that point, but the paint job and marquee were still not complete (picture above). The jam was a huge success and resulted in 10 working debut games. The second milestone was a Microsoft booth at the very first PAX South in San Antonio. The cabinet was fully completed in time to make its first official convention:
We built a custom launcher to help people navigate between games, rearranged the controls a bit, and added some art to the sides. For the most part it came out exactly like I expected. Watching people gravitate to it at conventions is very satisfying, especially the kids. I'll keep perfecting it before it starts taking temporary residencies at local comic book shops and movie theaters. What interests me most right now is the potential for new and weird control schemes, but first it needs to get out into the world for awhile.
So it's been a long journey since Asteroids lit up my face and I felt the heat coming out of those vents. I became a maker and a designer in many capacities. The feeling of completing a build is a hugely satisfying feeling that has become very important to me. I thought a lot about that old Asteroids cabinet as I was building the Society of Play Arcade. I wondered where it went after it left that Dairy Queen, and how many other people had lost themselves in its magnetic charm. I only hope the Society of Play Arcade can offer a fraction of the excitement and enjoyment that its ancestor did.