As uncomfortable as it may seem to some, working at a standing desk is better for your health than sprawling out on a couch all day long. But how do you convince millions of people responsibly working from home to stand all day? You build a standing desk with a built-in retro arcade that even includes a rare four-player version of Pong.
Arcade1Up, known for its scaled recreations of classic arcade cabinets, has been slowly expanding its repertoire to include other iconic arcade designs, and the company’s latest creation is the Pong 4 Player Pub Table. Decades ago, tabletop arcade machines like these could be found in restaurants and bars and featured a screen (and controls) safely mounted under the surface of the table allowing players to eat and drink while still pumping quarters in to play their favourite video games.
The Pong 4 Player Pub Table is a recreation of those classic designs. Using it as a standing desk is the easiest way to justify it as an essential work purchase, but at the end of the day, you can switch to gorging on retro gaming. The lineup includes games like Pong, Warlords, Circus Atari, Tempest, and Super Breakout, as well as games that can take advantage of the four sets of buttons and spinning paddles located around the table like the four-player Quadra Pong and Pong Doubles, and Pong Sports.
Pricing and availability are still to be announced as we move into 2021, but hopefully, the table will be available before we’re all forced to abandon our home offices.
For many years arcade machines offered cutting edge gameplay and graphics that was simply impossible to recreate on the home consoles of the ‘80s and ‘90s. That’s no longer the case, but in 1983 a new arcade game was introduced that absolutely blew gamers’ minds because it looked like you were playing a Saturday morning cartoon: Dragon’s Lair.
Decades before technologies like real-time cel-shading on 3D models existed, Dragon’s Lair achieved its ground-breaking graphics through the use hundreds of hand-animated clips (created by animation legend Don Bluth) that were played back on a laserdisc triggered by a player’s in-game choices. It was a beautiful game, and an extremely challenging one, that was ported to countless platforms over the years, but Arcade1Up has also announced a recreation of the original Dragon’s Lair arcade cabinet matching the same size and scale of the original.
The arcade machine features a 4:3 ratio high-def transfer of the original game’s animations and also includes its sequel, Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp, as well as Space Ace. All three feature the same hand-animated style. There are no details yet on when the arcade machine will be available but given it’s a full-scale replica you can expect pricing to be a little higher than Arcade1Up’s other smaller-scale cabinets.