If you’ve got $US75 a month to burn and live in California, you can get a 250-pound arcade cabinet running a 30-year-old game delivered to your door. This is the service offered by All You Can Arcade, a San Francisco business that opened shop last month. If all goes well, it’ll expand to the east coast.
Brothers Seth and Timothy Peterson had been acquiring and fixing up the cabinets, valued between $US150 and $US200, for several years, and decided it was time do something with the stock. San Francisco would seem to be a good place to do it, as vintage game cabinets are quite the hip accessory. An AP profile of the business this weekend noted an advertising firm’s employees “clapped and hooted with excitement” when All You Can Arcade rolled up with a Galaga machine.
Obviously, anything a customer rents doesn’t need quarters to play.
Rummaging through a listing on All You Can Arcade‘s site, one sees machines ranging from 1980’s Berzerk to 1991’s The Simpsons and, of course, 1988’s immortal Bad Dudes. The Petersons hope to set up shop in the eastern U.S. later this year.
Rent an Arcade [AP via Polygon]
Image by Sam Howzit [Flickr]
Comments
5 responses to “Live In California? You Can Rent Arcade Cabinets For $US75 A Month”
Well considering that this is Kotaku AU i think you can assume that nobody on here lives in CA..
American arcade cabinet prices always bring to light how overpriced Australia’s market is
To be fair in the 80’s at least they were a lot more common over there, bars,7-11’s,bowling alleys,subway stations,pool halls,college rec rooms,every shopping center had an Allidins castle and I even remember department stores having little arcades in them.
In Australia if you wanted more than a few machines you useally needed council permission which were somtimes hard to get, according to the small bussiness owner friend of the family who had a large spare space at the back of his Pizza bar but was limited to 4 machines.
I’d be happy to pay something similar to have access to Addams Family Pinball for a week or two 🙁
It’s genius. If they had an immaculate Point Blank machine I’d hire it then skip the country.