Tiny Arcade Puts Retro Cabinets In The Palm Of Your Hand, Literally

This might either be the best thing in the world or the most stupid. I can’t really decide. But it’s an awesome Kickstarter project that takes retro game cabinets and makes them small. Really small.

It’s called Tiny Arcade, and it does exactly what it says on the box: it takes a retro game cabinet and compresses it until it’s so small you can hold the entire thing in your hands while playing with two thumbs.

The entire unit is built on a 32-bit ARM processor, it recharges via a USB port and the entire thing has an analogue joystick and a couple of buttons. It’s built on the Arduino platform but the creators say “there is no need to download any special software or do any soldering with the Tiny Arcade”.

The creator of this madness is Ken Burns, who already raised over US$120,000 for the TinyScreen colour display. That same display is being used to help power this new project, and so far it looks like it’ll get off the ground without any trouble.

The project has already raised over $20,000 and it has 29 days to go to hit just over $35,000 for its goal. If all funding stopped today and only started again Tiny Arcade would still comfortably get over the line, but the rate at which things are going Burns and his colleagues should be good to hit six figures.

My only concern is the practicality of it all — does that actually look like a comfortable way to play Space Invaders? It’d be a beautiful adornment for your office desk that you could actually pick up and enjoy, but I can’t imagine I’d be able to appreciate it for long stretches of time.


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