Handmade arcade
Hand cut arcade machines for a pop-up in Toyko
I volunteered to design the arcade cabinets for Hack Club's Shiba Arcade event without knowing where it would lead me.
Shiba was an event where 30 students, all 18 or under, made a video game and flew to Tokyo to open a pop-up arcade. In October 2025, Thomas, the organiser of the event, made a callout for designs of arcade cabinets.
I had a lot of experience with CAD from my robotics team robotics I volunteered for this, but I had never designed anything at this scale before. Thomas wanted the design to be Sashimono style, meaning no nails, screws or bolts. I needed to consider how the structure would work, how the cabinet would stand up and be stable, what thickness the plywood should be, and how it would hold together.
Over the next couple days I did research on joinery techniques and standard arcade cabinet dimensions while developing the first draft of my design.
When finished, the design was full size (6ft tall) and used long wooden pegs to hold the machine together, meaning it could all be assembled by hand. I sent it to Thomas, and he was super excited with my design!
At this stage, we were expecting to laser cut the cabinets, but it was unknown what laser cutter would be utilised, the dimensions possible for a single cut, or the thickness of the wood. Also, I needed to learn the workflow for converting my design to 2D flat cut designs for plywood.
Thomas had sent the designs to a place with an industrial laser cutter in Tokyo a couple weeks before the event, but we hadn't received a quote. I followed up with a message to the manufacturer, but we still didn't get a final quote before we left for Japan.
Daniel (friend I was traveling with ) and I had arrived in Japan a week early when we got a call from Thomas. The laser cutter had quoted $27,000 USD for the wood and laser cutting. We needed to figure out a new solution immediately.
We emailed countless manufacturers but all of them either ghosted us or let us know that the deadline was too tight. Thomas ended up finding a small woodshop in the outskirts of Tokyo that was willing to let us use their tools to manufacture the arcade cabinets ourselves. After an extended late-night call, Daniel and I woke up at 5 the next morning.
By 6am we were on the bullet train from Osaka to Tokyo. On the bullet train, I opened a blank CAD file and started again from scratch.
The re-designed cabinet had to be smaller, hand-machinable, and tabletop instead of full size. I ended up with this design:
We arrived in Tokyo and headed to the woodshop. We all needed training on how to use the woodworking equipment. We spent all day working and finished with one machine built.
We had three days left before the event kickoff, so we needed to speed up. Over those next three days we fell into a rhythm of tracing the design onto our pieces of wood and cutting out those pieces. We were behind schedule; there was always an undertone of anxiety that we wouldn't make it in time and we had many conversations about that.
The process was deceptively simple and took us all day every day up to right before the event started. We had to book more time in the woodshop, but in the end we completed all 32 machines just in time.
Shiba arcade as an amazing event, with amazing people! It was so meaningful to me to see the participants interacting with something I contributed to.