FOR MANY COMPANIES, THE MANTRA FOR SUCCESS IS TO USUALLY GO BIG, BUT NUMSKULL DESIGNS WENT SMALL AND IN DOING SO IT CREATED A RANGE OF CLASSIC ARCADE MACHINES THAT CONTINUE TO GROW IN POPULARITY TODAY 

WORDS BY DARRAN JONES

It’s rather fitting that the latest game cabinet to feature in the Quarter Arcades range is dedicated to celebrating  Pac‐Man’s 40th anniversary, which took place earlier this year. It’s fitting because it was Namco’s iconic mascot which helped launch the concept of a miniature arcade machine back in December 2018, and since then the development team behind the idea hasn’t looked back.

For Matt Precious, Numskull Designs’ managing partner, this dream of creating miniaturised versions of his favourite arcade games harks back to his own childhood in the Eighties and a desire to recreate the nostalgia of visiting his local arcade. “I was very fortunate to go to school in a seaside town that had some fantastic videogame arcades,” he tells us. “I fell in love with the whole environment, I loved the games, but for me it was all these different cabinets crammed together in the same room, the symphony of noise, the flashing lights.”

Matt’s memories of those early arcade games, and their vivid artwork and interestingly shaped cabs, stayed with him in later years, and eventually he found himself in a position where he could make those dreams a reality. “I wanted to try and preserve these machines so they are not forgotten, both for people who remember those fantastic times and to also bring back arcades for a new generation.”

Thanks to the rising interest in retro gaming, there are plenty of ways to enjoy playing arcade games in your home, from full-size dedicated cabinets with Raspberry Pi computers in them, to single official releases on contemporary consoles, but if you want an official experience you don’t have as many options (see ‘Bringing The Arcade Home’). Another thing to keep in mind with arcade machines is the sheer amount of space they can take up, and it’s rather telling that most of the licensed cabs that currently exist on the market are rarely full-size replicas.

Dedicating a large amount of space to an arcade machine is a big ask, and this was certainly something that Matt and the rest of the team had in mind when they came up with the idea of these new mini cabinets. “It was imperative that we made these machines as close as possible to the originals in both gameplay and look,” he tells us. “I was very conscious that most people couldn’t recreate those arcades full-size in their homes, so making them quarter scale seemed the perfect size to make sure they would still be playable and enable fans to recreate their own arcade.”