Asteroids Counter Series Arcade MachineRetro arcade machine for the home

A retro arcade machine for the home with the deep space board

Asteroids is the vector game that taught a generation about inertia, and it is the title this 16-inch cabinet is named for. Five licensed Atari boards sit behind the marquee, the screen is an 8-inch colour panel, and the control is the trackball and button set the original machines carried. On a counter at elbow height it plays exactly as it did standing up, which is the whole point of building the format at all.

What the five titles give you

Asteroids and Asteroids Deluxe cover the vector end. Missile Command is the trackball classic where you defend six cities and lose anyway. Crystal Castles puts Bentley Bear in an isometric maze, one of the first games to do it. Liberator rounds the board out. That is a real variety of arcade games on one machine, and Missile Command is the one that turns a quiet room into a competition fastest.

Fit, finish and the first ten minutes

The body is wood with laminated custom artwork and a moulded bezel, built to be carried to a garden table in summer and back to a desk in October. Leave it on and walk away for the first ten minutes: the attract screens cycle every title on the board, which is how people in the room find out what is in there without reading a line of the manual. Power is an AC adapter and there is no coin-operation.

Who this countertop arcade machine is for

Asteroids is a five-button game, and this cabinet is built around that fact: the panel is laid out for thrust, rotate and fire rather than for a stick you push. Sixteen inches of tabletop arcade machine, authentic arcade controls, an official licensed board with five Atari titles, and the same durable premium construction as our floor cabinets. It belongs on a counter at roughly waist height — a home bar, a desk, a kitchen island — so check the surface before you order rather than after. The appeal is the vector era: white lines on black, no colour, no music, and a difficulty curve that was tuned to take quarters off people in 1979. Since nothing here involves coin-operation, the curve is the only thing standing between a player and a high score, which is the way the game was supposed to feel before the coin box got in the way.

How it fits across our collection

The counter row runs four machines on the same chassis: Asteroids on buttons, Centipede on a trackball, Tempest on a spinner and WWE on two sticks. Above them the Ultra Series is a 61-inch full size floor cabinet for a dedicated game room; the Junior Series is a 37.5-inch free standing build; the Handheld Series is a mini arcade for a pocket. We keep a small fixed collection of licensed titles rather than taking custom orders, and we do not build pinball, because that is how the quality of the panel stays the same across every size. Free play is standard on all of them, so the entertainment is endless and the only thing you are upgrading is the surface it stands on. If you are explaining the collection to someone else, the short version is: pick the height, then pick the control.