Software gets most of the attention when people think about arcade games, but the truth is that the physical cabinet is just as critical to the experience. A great game inside a poorly built cabinet is still a poor product. The cabinet is what guests see first, what they touch, what they lean against while watching their friends play. It sets the tone before a single pixel appears on screen. This post is about how we designed and built our first cabinets — the decisions, the mistakes, and the lessons that shaped the hardware our games live inside.
Starting from Scratch
I did not come from the arcade cabinet manufacturing industry. My background is in software and design, with a stubbornness about building things myself. So the early days involved a lot of research, a lot of sawdust, and a lot of prototypes that ended up in the scrap pile.
Originally, the plan was straightforward: build cabinets in the workshop and rent them locally. Drive them to venues in Connecticut, set them up, pick them up the next day. It was a simple model, and it would have worked — for a very small radius. Then, over one of my regular lunches with friends, one of them said something that changed the entire trajectory of the business: "If you flat-pack it, you can ship anywhere — as long as it's easy to assemble."
That was the moment the idea really took root. Not just local rentals, but a product that could reach any wedding in the country. A full-height arcade cabinet that breaks down flat, ships in a box, and goes back together in thirty minutes with no special tools. It sounded simple. It was not.
The Flat-Pack Decision
Once the flat-pack concept clicked, everything else followed. A fully assembled arcade cabinet weighs well over a hundred pounds and does not fit through a standard doorway without maneuvering. Shipping one across the country would cost nearly as much as the game itself. But a cabinet that breaks down into panels? That packs flat into a shipping box sized for standard carrier services, ships at a fraction of the cost, and goes back together in roughly thirty minutes with basic hand tools.
I had a vision of what the flat-pack design needed to be, and I spent months iterating on it in my head. But I also knew that getting it right would mean building multiple physical versions and refining the real thing — and at the same time, I wanted to launch. So I purchased a flat-pack arcade cabinet from a company that specializes in them. It gave me a working starting point, but it was not a perfect fit. Their design was really made to be assembled once and left together — not assembled, disassembled, shipped, and reassembled over and over again, which is exactly what a rental business demands. So I took their design and modified it for my V1, reinforcing the joints and reworking the fastener system to handle repeated assembly cycles without losing rigidity.
Materials and Durability
Material selection was a balancing act between weight, durability, cost, and appearance. We tested everything from MDF to birch plywood to various composite panels. Each had trade-offs:
- ✓ Weight matters — Every pound added to the cabinet is a pound someone has to carry into a venue. We optimized for the lightest material that still met our strength requirements.
- ✓ Durability is non-negotiable — Cabinets get shipped, assembled, played hard, disassembled, and shipped again. Materials need to survive repeated handling without showing wear.
- ✓ Finish quality — The exterior surface needs to accept high-quality printed graphics and maintain a professional appearance under event lighting.
- ✓ Edge resilience — Corners and edges take the most abuse during transport. We reinforced high-impact areas and selected materials that resist chipping and denting.
The fundamental trade-off is this: an arcade cabinet needs to be a certain size, and it has to have a certain heft. Players expect a full-height cabinet to feel solid and substantial when they lean into it. But at the same time, I needed it to be easily assembled by one person, and it could not weigh so much that shipping became prohibitive. If I am sending 300 pounds of materials across the country, the shipping cost alone kills the business model — and even if it arrives, nobody wants to wrestle that kind of weight into a venue. So the material had to be light enough to move, heavy enough to feel substantial once built, and durable enough to survive the cycle of shipping, assembly, an evening of enthusiastic guests, disassembly, and shipping again.
Controls and Ergonomics
The control panel is where players physically connect with the game, so getting it right was a priority. Button layout, joystick position, panel height, and angle all affect comfort and playability. I went through numerous iterations, testing with players of different heights and experience levels.
The final control panel sits at a height comfortable for the average adult while remaining accessible to younger guests. Joysticks are spaced so two players can stand side by side without crowding. Buttons are sized for easy identification by feel — you should never have to look down at the controls while playing. I chose commercial-grade arcade buttons and joysticks rated for millions of actuations, because wedding events generate hundreds of plays in a single evening and the controls need to feel crisp from the first guest to the last.
Screen Selection
This is where things get more interesting than you might expect. The goal was never to reproduce a vintage arcade game — it was to replicate the feeling of one. Those are different things. Classic arcade games ran on CRTs: heavy, curved-glass, analog displays that are now 40 years old and completely impractical to ship across the country in a flat-pack box. So a modern LCD it had to be. The question was which one.
Dropping a 4K widescreen display into an arcade cabinet does not make it feel like an arcade. The aspect ratio is wrong, the pixel structure is wrong, and the whole thing looks like a video game on a TV — not a real arcade cabinet. Classic arcade games ran on 4:3 displays, the "square" ratio that defined the look of that era. Finding a 4:3 monitor in 2026 turns out to be genuinely difficult. They are not something you can walk into a store and buy.
We settled on a 1600x1200 display — a proper 4:3 panel. That resolution gives us roughly 30 times the pixel count of a classic arcade game like Pac-Man. That headroom matters, because we can use those extra pixels to simulate the look of a CRT: the subtle scanlines, the soft glow between pixels, the way colors bled slightly into each other on the original hardware. A modern LCD is fundamentally different from a CRT, but with the right resolution and the right rendering approach, you can get surprisingly close to the feeling — and that feeling is exactly what the cabinet is supposed to deliver.
Building these cabinets from scratch has been one of the most rewarding parts of starting this company. Every decision, from the flat-pack joints to the button spacing to the screen angle, was made with a single question in mind: will this make the experience better for the couple and their guests? The workshop is still where the best ideas happen, and I am far from finished refining. To see the games these cabinets were built to house, explore our full product lineup.