This Arcade Cabinet Was Made for a Toddler

Arcades are largely a thing of the past, thanks to the quality of video games that you can play from the comfort of your sofa. But many people still enjoy the experience of playing games on arcade machines. There is a huge market for second-hand arcade cabinets, and many people put a lot of effort and money into building their own custom cabinets. Unfortunately, they’re usually far too tall for toddlers and young children to reach. That’s why Mark Stevenson made a tiny arcade cabinet for his toddler Grayson to play games on.

A few years back, Stevenson built a coffee table arcade machine. That kind of project is very popular among gamers in the maker community, and Stevenson's turned out quite well. But, when Grayson was born, the arcade coffee table was relegated to a lonely corner of Stevenson's office so that the baby would have room to crawl around the living room. Grayson eventually grew big enough to wander around and found the arcade table, and he was interested in playing it. Unfortunately, he was still too small to reach the controls and to see the screen. So, Stevenson took it upon himself to create a small toddler-size, fully-functional arcade cabinet for his son.

This was largely a cosmetic woodworking project, as all of the electronic hardware was already right there in the original coffee table arcade machine. That was built around a Raspberry Pi computer running RetroPie and the screen was a simple VGA LCD monitor (presumably connected via an HDMI adapter). The arcade buttons and joysticks are connected through a cheap USB controller. Stevenson removed all of those components and put them into a new cabinet constructed from MDF. That was designed to look just like a standard arcade cabinet, just on a smaller scale. The MDF was then coated in sealant and then covered in black plastic film. Stevenson didn’t love that look and ended up covering the sides of the cabinet in hundreds of sticks, which is a really cool aesthetic. The result is an awesome arcade cabinet that Grayson can use to play his favorite emulated games.