Jason Miller

If you ever fed quarters into a Pac-Man cabinet, you have probably wondered why old arcade machines cost 25 cents to play. The answer comes down to a balance between player affordability and operator profitability. A single quarter was the largest coin most kids and teens could carry in their pockets, and at the same … Read more

If you need to store an arcade machine in a garage, you are probably wondering whether your cabinet will survive the experience. The short answer is yes, garage storage can work, but only if you control temperature, manage humidity, and follow the right power-on procedure when you bring it back out. I have talked to … Read more

If you have ever powered up a classic arcade cabinet and noticed ugly purple or green splotches on the screen, you are dealing with a magnetized tube. Learning how to degauss an arcade monitor is one of the most useful skills for any arcade collector, restoration hobbyist, or retro gaming enthusiast. The good news is … Read more

There is nothing worse than walking up to your favorite arcade cabinet, hitting the power button, and staring at a blank or flickering arcade screen. I have been there, and the first instinct is panic, thinking the monitor is dead. In most cases, it is not. Arcade screen flickering and blank screens come from a … Read more

Wiring a JAMMA harness is the single most important skill for anyone restoring or building an arcade cabinet. The JAMMA standard lets you connect any compatible game board to your cabinet’s controls, power, video, and audio using one standardized wiring system. Once you understand the pinout and follow a logical sequence, the process becomes straightforward. … Read more

Toru Iwatani, a 24-year-old self-taught game designer working at Namco in Tokyo, invented Pac-Man in 1980. He led a nine-person development team through roughly nine months of design and programming, creating what would become the highest-grossing arcade game of all time. At the time, arcades were dominated by violent shooters like Space Invaders. Iwatani wanted … Read more

If you have ever played the original Pac-Man arcade cabinet long enough, you might have run into one of the most famous bugs in video game history. The Pac-Man kill screen is a glitch that corrupts the game at level 256, making it impossible to continue. For over four decades, this screen has fascinated arcade … Read more

The highest possible score in Pac-Man is 3,333,360 points. That number is the ceiling of the game. No human or machine has ever exceeded it because reaching it requires completing all 255 levels without losing a single life while eating every dot, every energizer, every fruit, and every blue ghost along the way. I’ve spent … Read more

Space Invaders is widely considered the first blockbuster video game, and some have called it “the Beatles of the arcade industry.” Released by Taito in 1978, it arrived at a time when the video game industry was reeling from the crash that followed the initial Pong craze. What started as one developer’s passion project became … Read more

Back in the summer of 1981, a young artist at Nintendo named Shigeru Miyamoto sat down to turn a pile of unsold arcade parts into a game. What came out of that session reshaped the video game industry forever. This is the complete history of Donkey Kong, told from the perspective of someone who grew … Read more