D10| Saturday/Sunday, October 19 - 20, 2019 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
friends, especially if you sweeten
the deal with beer and pizza.
For another, the machines are
mostly ¾-size, but even that is kind
of cute and certainly apartment-
friendly—especially if you want to
sit while playing or cram a few cabi-
nets into a room. If you play solo,
the shrunken size doesn’t seem to
affect the authenticity of the experi-
ence. It’s more problematic if you’re
bumping shoulder-to-shoulder with
three friends while taking a slice atShredder. Then again, a newly built,
full-size Pac-Man machine from
Sharper Image runs $2,995, so suck
it up and pop on the one-foot-tall
riser that Arcade1Up throws in.
The machines are shockingly
easy to build, I found, as long as
you have a Phillips-head screw-
driver and about 90 minutes.
Though I feared the cabinet would
be filled with a rat’s nest of wires
that I’d need an engineering degree
to fathom, it was mostly hollow.Once you slide the screen and
speakers into place, you just need
to plug a few things in and pull the
power cord through the back panel.
It can be built and even moved
alone, but it helps to have a willing
assistant hold pieces in place, in ex-
change for getting the first pick of
characters once you flip it on.
Arguably the greatest drawback
of Arcade1Up’s kits is that you only
get access to a themed limited se-
ries of two to 12 games per ma-Q
UARTERS WEREev-
erything to an ’80s kid
like me. They could get
you five pieces of jaw-
shattering candy or 45
seconds in a star
fighter’s seat hunting down aliens.
Most quarters I earned as a youth
were pumped into a Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles arcade at the local
cineplex in the minutes before the
feature rolled (though I always
saved one to call for a ride home).
A few years ago, in a late-night
fit of nostalgia, I scrolled eBay in
search of that same cabinet. The
sole result: one beaten to hell and
barely operational for nearly
$3,000. I tacked on $300 for ship-
ping and whatever it might cost to
get its mechanics running smoothly
and...my wallet loudly objected. It
seemed my days wielding pitchfork-
like Sai as the “cool but rude” Ra-
phael were definitively over.
Then I stumbled on the build-
your-own-replica-cabinet kits devel-
oped by Arcade1Up, a toy company
under the international brand Taste-
makers LLC, and discovered I could
get the equivalent of a fresh Ninja
Turtles machine for $399. I wouldn’t
even need a stash of quarters to en-
joy it—and shipping is free.
“Arcades are part of the culture
of the ’80s retro market, like vinyl,
like cassettes,” said Scott Bachrach,
the CEO and founder of Tastemak-
ers, whom I breathlessly inter-
viewed in his office while we bat-
tled each other in an intense game
of Street Fighter. Mr. Bachrach, 51,
grew up smoking in arcades while
spending every coin on Galaga. See-
ing the rise in “barcade” culture,
and sensing an appetite for an af-
fordable alternative to expensive
vintage cabinets, Mr. Bachrach
launched Arcade1Up in 2018. It has,
he reports, quickly ballooned into a
“significant nine figure business.”
With licensing from iconic com-
panies including Namco, Arcade1Up
offers a range of titles from my be-
loved TMNT to Mortal Kombat, Pac-
Man, Golden Tee, Galaga and Space
Invaders(starting from $249,
arcade1up.com), each cabinet
adorned with the original artwork.
The joysticks and buttons are all in
their original positions, and pop,
click and roll as satisfyingly as you
recall. One difference: The screens
have been updated from hefty CRT
monitors to slim 17-inch LCD panels.
There are, of course, trade-offs:
For one, you have to build the ma-
chine yourself, from a flat-pack,
Ikea-style kit. But even that’s a fun
weekend project, tempting enough
to attract your handiest, nerdiestBYMATTHEWKITCHENJERRY SEINFELDobserved decades back that
“Star Trek” was his generation’s “ultimate
male fantasy” not because of Captain Kirk’s
dalliances with green women, but because the
bridge of the USS Enterprise featured a big
chair and a bigger screen. “Just hurtling
through space in your living room, watching
TV,” the comedian quipped. With the new
Stellina telescope from Vaonis, all galactic be-
ings can approximate this sci-fi fantasy, star-
gazing while staring at their phones.
The Montpellier-based Vaonis bills its de-
vice(about $4,412, vaonis.com)as the world’s
first connected, all-in-one telescope revealing
mysteries of deep space on command via
phones and tablets. As you may imagine, your
first stop on this cosmic adventure is an app
store. From there, setup is simple, although
the machine, a white, roughly 25-pound
U-shaped body with a pivoting lens housed in
its center, takes a few minutes to orient itself.
Once calibrated, Stellina can automati-
cally point itself toward any of a hundred-
plus preset nebulae, star clusters, galaxies
and other points of astronomical interest.
We recommend skipping neighboring plan-
ets, though—with the len’s fixed focal length
of 400 mm, even Jupiter appears tiny.
Calling Stellina a telescope is a bit of a mis-
nomer. Vaonis describes it as an “observation
station,” but it’s really an astrophotography
lab you can haul around in a large knapsack.
While conventional telescopes require you to
look through an eye piece, Stellina repeatedlycaptures images of an incomprehensibly dis-
tant object—often for up to an hour—then
overlays those images to turn a mere smudge
of light into a crisply rendered view accessed
on your hand-held device via the app.
On-screen, you can fiddle with various fil-
ters (including one for light pollution) and
processors to easily amplify image quality—
the sort of tweaks that normally require
painstaking work by professional astrono-
mers or obsessive amateurs. That said, the
radius of Stellina’s onboard Wi-Fi system is
frustratingly small—our screen lost its link
when we were even a few paces away.
We invited some Vassar College astron-
omy students to take Stellina for a spin out-
side their massive campus observatory in
Poughkeepsie, N.Y. They were impressed by
how the Stellina, essentially a hobbyist’s tool,
in some ways outperformed their apparatus,
but bemoaned the loss of romance. For soph-
omore Patricia “Pipa” Fernandez, the experi-
ence was “only slightly more satisfying than
looking at the objects on Google Images.”
Those seeking a more direct cosmic con-
nection might cool their rockets until Febru-
ary, when the crowdfunded Unistellar eV-
scope ships for a slightly less astronomical
$2,999. The startup, which has a “citizen
science” partnership with the SETI Institute,
boasts that its smart scope is 100 times
more powerful than a classic at-home tele-
scope, while retaining the all-important-to-
some, familiar eyepiece.—Erik BaardGaze Sagaciously
This app-connected smart telescope captures wonders of our
galaxy. But does it count if you’re staring at stars on a screen?F. MARTIN RAMIN/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
EYES ON THE PRIZE
Stellina smartly captures
hundreds of HD photos,
layering them to form a
dramatic celestial image.AN ODE TO
FEWER
BUTTONS
A standard
Xbox One
controller has
10 buttons,
two triggers,
two joysticks
and an omni-
directional
pad. The 1989 Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles cabinet (which my
kit, pictured, more-or-less recre-
ated) had only a joystick and
two buttons: Attack and Jump.
“Early coin-op games were pris-
tine because we didn’t have
great graphics,” said Atari
founder Nolan Bushnell. “We
had 10 seconds to teach people
how to play or the game didn’t
earn.” So he and his peers cre-
ated what he calls “elegant
games” for the masses in what
I now call the good ol’ days.DAVID URBANchine; one offers the range of ’90s
X-Men beat-em-ups, for instance,
while another is restricted to the
trilogy of Star Wars’s classic vec-
tor-graphics titles. It’s fun to have
an authentic arcade experience at
home, but I beat TMNT in my sec-
ond attempt (unlimited lives helps)and can imagine the novelty wear-
ing off quickly, at which point I’d
be stuck with a bulky, neon-green
coat rack in the corner.
If you want an infinitely updat-
able list of new and retro titles and
are willing to pay a much steeper
price, you might be better off buying
a Polycade(from $3,900, poly-
cade.com). The chic machine—de-
signed by Tyler Bushnell, son of
Atari founder and arcade godfather
Nolan Bushnell—is wrapped in pow-
der coated steel, runs off Steam, a
popular online gaming platform, and
features an HD monitor. It mounts
to your wall rather than taking up
precious floor space, but still “nods
to the retro gamer,” said Mr. Bush-
nell. “Classic arcade machines have
a beautiful art to them, but they
tend to belong in certain spaces.”
Still, 15,600 quarters, before tax,
shipping and warranty, is a lot to
fork over unless you plan to become
an arcade master. And who’s got
time for that? My movie’s starting.‘Arcades are part of the
’80s retro culture, like
vinyl, like cassettes.’GEAR & GADGETS
One More Turn at Kombat
Want to recapture the thrills of a youth misspent in arcades? Build an authentic, old-school cabinet at home
from a kit for a few hundred dollars—as we did one satisfying Saturday