Centipede Counter Series Arcade MachineRetro arcade machine for the home

The trackball retro arcade machine for the home

Centipede without a trackball is a different and worse game, so we did not build it that way. A heavy ball sits flush in the panel of this 16-inch cabinet, read in two axes with no centre position to fight, and it is what lets you reverse a sweep in a single flick. This is the authentic control the 1980 board was written for, and fitting it into a counter machine is the hardest piece of engineering in our collection.

Five Atari titles on one board

Centipede brings Millipede, Liberator, Avalanche and Super Breakout along with it. Five licensed arcade games in a 16-inch box is a strange amount of arcade for the space, and the spread is well chosen: two trackball shooters, a defence game, a drop game and a breakout. Liberator and Avalanche are the two most people have never played, and they are usually the reason this cabinet is still on in the kitchen an hour later.

Weighted base, surface and care

A trackball pushes sideways, so a light cabinet walks across a counter. We weighted the base for exactly that, which is why this machine feels heavier than its size suggests. Give it a hard level top and keep it clear of a tap. The ball lifts out for cleaning with the bezel screws, which is the one bit of maintenance a trackball machine actually needs after a year of use. Everything else is the plug and the volume wheel.

Who this countertop arcade machine is for

This is the trackball machine in the collection, and that is the whole reason to pick it. Centipede was designed around a spinning ball rather than a stick, and on a joystick the game is a different, worse game. At 16 inches this is a tabletop arcade machine for a bar, a desk or a game room counter, with five licensed Atari titles on an official board and the same durable premium build we use on the full size cabinets. Check the surface first: a counter at waist height gives you the same standing posture as a floor machine, and a low coffee table does not. The nostalgia here is specific — the players who want this one usually remember the original cabinet in a chip shop or a bowling alley in the 80s, and they reach for the trackball before they look at the screen. For everyone else it is simply the most physical arcade game we sell.

How it fits across our collection

Four heights, one business, no custom work and no pinball: the Ultra Series is a 61-inch floor cabinet, the Junior Series is a 37.5-inch free standing build, the counter row is 16 inches, and the Handheld Series is six. The counter row also carries Asteroids and Tempest, which are the spinner and vector editions of the same idea, plus a WWE machine for two-player competition. None of them are coin operated, so the fun is endless and nobody is counting turns. If you are combining machines in one room, the thing to vary is the control rather than the cabinet: a trackball, a spinner and a stick give three different kinds of action, and that variety is what makes a game room feel like an arcade instead of a shelf of the same thing four times over.