Anyone running a MAME cabinet or working with dumped arcade boards eventually runs into the same headache: keeping ROM files organized, correctly matched to your emulator version, and verified against known-good data. Here’s how the hobbyist and preservation community actually…

Pinball’s history is stranger and more contentious than most people realize — a game that was once literally illegal in major American cities, saved by a single mechanical invention, and kept alive for decades by essentially one surviving manufacturer before…

Lighting is one of the most overlooked parts of an arcade cabinet, right up until it’s the reason a machine looks either dead on the floor or absolutely commands attention from across the room. A few distinct lighting systems are…

When Capcom released Street Fighter II in February 1991, it single-handedly revived a flagging arcade industry — and more than three decades later, original hardware and memorabilia tied to the game have become a genuine, if niche, collectibles market with…

Ms. Pac-Man has a stranger origin story than almost any other arcade classic: it wasn’t originally supposed to exist as an official product at all. It began life as an unauthorized modification, built by outside engineers, before the publisher decided…

Before barcades and dedicated arcade venues were common, there was a clever design solution for getting arcade games into spaces that were never built to host them: the cocktail cabinet, a table-height machine with the screen mounted flat under glass,…

If you want to see arcade and video game history properly preserved and interpreted rather than just collected in someone’s garage, a handful of dedicated museums around the country have made that their entire mission — and a couple of…

It’s not glamorous, but the power supply is the single point of failure that takes down everything else in an arcade cabinet. A flickering screen, corrupted graphics, or a board that resets randomly is, more often than not, actually a…

Anyone who’s visited a Japanese game center quickly realizes it’s a fundamentally different experience from a Western arcade, both historically and today. The games themselves, the culture around them, and the business models built to support them all developed along…

The two decades between 1980 and 2000 took the arcade industry from its most explosive growth ever, through a near-death collapse, back to a second golden age, and finally into a slow transformation that reshaped what “going to the arcade”…