Tempest Counter Series Arcade MachineRetro arcade machine for the home

The spinner retro arcade machine for the home

Tempest on a joystick loses the whole game, because the spin is the game. This 16-inch cabinet carries a free-running spinner dial: one finger, no limit, no centre to fight. It is the reason Tempest plays so well while you are standing up waiting for a kettle, and it is the control the 1981 board was designed around. A spinner is the cheapest-looking and most particular part on any arcade machine we build.

Five licensed Atari titles, including Major Havoc

Tempest arrives with Gravitar, Lunar Lander, Warlords and Major Havoc. Major Havoc is the one to point at: a vector platformer and shooter that almost nobody got to play in an arcade, and it is on this board as an original licensed edition. Warlords is the two-player title, Lunar Lander is the slow one that ruins your evening, and Gravitar is the one that rewards the spinner most after Tempest itself.

Counter height, light and sound

Elbow height, hard top, an inch at the back for the lead. Vector games want a dim room, so keep the overhead lighting off the panel and let the marquee do the work. The speakers were tuned for a noisy arcade, so drop the volume a notch in a tiled kitchen. Assembly is a screwdriver, the marquee head bolts on, and the adapter goes in the wall with no coin-operation in between.

Who this countertop arcade machine is for

Tempest runs on a spinner, and a spinner is the one arcade control that cannot be faked with a stick. That is the single reason this edition is in the collection. Sixteen inches of tabletop cabinet, official licensed board, five Atari titles, authentic arcade controls, the same durable premium build as our floor machines. Put it on a counter at waist height — a bar, a desk, a game room table — and the posture is the same as standing at a full size arcade machine. The vector graphics and the colour-cycling tube are the look people remember from the early 80s, and the game is still one of the hardest things we sell: the difficulty is high from the third level and it does not apologise. With no coin-operation in the way, you get as many turns as your patience allows, which is how most people discover that they were never actually good at it.

How it fits across our collection

Our counter row is four machines with the same body and four different control panels: a spinner here, a trackball on Centipede, buttons on Asteroids and two sticks on the WWE cabinet. Above them is the 61-inch Ultra Series for a dedicated game room, and below them the 37.5-inch Junior Series and the 6-inch Handheld Series. One small family business, four heights, a fixed collection of licensed arcade games, no custom orders and no pinball. Nothing is coin operated, so play is free and endless for everyone who walks past it. If you are building a room rather than buying one machine, vary the control rather than the cabinet — the variety of action across a trackball, a spinner and a stick is what makes three machines feel like an arcade instead of three copies of the same idea.