The story behind the ARCADEsrFUN

Est. 2003

We Were Building These Before “Custom Arcade” Was a Category

Twenty-plus years ago, we were just a family collecting real arcade games in our garage. Somewhere along the way, we figured out how to build them ourselves — and never really stopped.

Why It’s Still a Family Business

We’re not a company that started during a slow year and scaled up on ad spend. We started because we genuinely liked building these things, and two decades later that hasn’t changed — we still test-play every cabinet ourselves before it leaves the shop. If you’ve ever called a big company and gotten a different person every time, that’s not us. You’re talking to the people who actually build the machines.

It Started With a Question: Why Play One Game When You Could Play Thousands?

In 2003, most people were still buying single-game arcade cabinets or holding onto originals from the ’80s. We built our first PC-based home arcade from scratch instead — one machine, thousands of games — and it sold before we’d even finished explaining the idea to friends.
That first build was a part-time project. It didn’t stay that way for long.

2005 — Going All In

Two years in, we bought our own 5′ x 10′ CNC router and started cutting every cabinet ourselves instead of relying on outside shops. That single purchase is the reason our cabinets have looked and fit the same way for the past two decades — same tolerances, same joins, same build quality whether it’s cabinet #12 or #1,200.

2009 — Adding Virtual Pinball

We brought virtual pinball into the lineup, because half our customers wanted arcade classics and the other half wanted to relive their pinball league days, and we didn’t see a reason to make them pick.

Where That Leaves Us Today

Two decades later, we’re still doing the same basic thing: building real cabinets, from raw wood to game time, for people who want something better than a box that showed up flat-packed. We’ve just gotten better at it — and the games list has grown from a few hundred to 50,000+.

The Warranty That You’ll Never Get Elsewhere

The Best Warranty in the Business — Because We’re Not Going Anywhere
Most companies bury their warranty in a PDF nobody reads. Here’s ours, in plain language:
Control panel, for life. Every button, joystick, trackball, and spinner is covered for as long as you own the machine — no cost to you, no time limit. Normal wear and tear only; this doesn’t cover someone putting a fist through the trackball.
PC failure under vendor warranty? Ship it back to us and we’ll reload your entire game system at no charge.
PC failure outside of warranty? You only pay actual parts cost. We handle the labor and the reload. You’re responsible for shipping both ways.
Software support for the life of the machine. Email support and remote log-in help whenever something needs troubleshooting — not just in year one.
Nothing on the control panel is something a customer can’t eventually replace themselves if they want to. We just don’t make you.

What This Means for Your Build

Two Decades of Getting This Right, Built Into Every Machine
Every Mean Machine we build gets the same CNC-cut precision, the same in-house build process, and the same lifetime control panel warranty we’ve offered since we bought that first router in 2005. We haven’t changed the fundamentals because we haven’t needed to.

See the Mean/Extreme Machine →