Licensing replica arcades: Co-Founder Matt Precious on the passion and authenticity of Quarter Arcades

You are; it’s on my list! But it’s Quarter Arcades I’m looking to speak about today… What’s the elevator pitch for those?
Quarter Arcades are real collectors’ pieces… Real nostalgia for real fans of arcade machines. We often say we’re on a mission to revive the magic of the arcade era, one scale replica at a time… So my business partner and I started Quarter Arcades looking to make classic arcade games available as faithful, fully functioning recreations of original cabinets – shrunk to one quarter size… With no sacrifice to the gameplay or design.

Perfect. How did that idea come about?
Basically, I wanted one. Ha! I grew up in the 80s, misspending my youth in arcades rather than schools. I loved it! Later, the arcades started dying out… These incredible machines were being replaced with soulless ticket-machine places. You’d go in but there’d be no great games – just Whack-a-Mole, or pull a lever and you get loads of tickets… Such a shame, because all the video games that people see now – PlayStation or whatever – came from those arcades. And it’s not just about the game itself – it was the artwork and the atmosphere! The arcade was a very sociable place, and the sound when you heard 20 or 30 of those machines going was incredible.

So before the exact size, scale or anything else about Quarter Arcades came to be, I just wanted to be able to make a fully playable arcade that was small enough to fit on a table… So we got loads of cardboard boxes and started playing around; literally cutting up and sticking down boxes and pretending to play the games until the size felt about right… Because the thing about Quarter Arcades is that they had to be exact replicas of the originals – as exact as we could possibly get – without oversizing anything.

So everything really is quarter scale? The buttons? The joysticks?
Everything! Originally, I said we should make them one-sixth scale – but the question was: can you really play them? And the answer was no… For example, the joysticks would snap; we’d have had to oversize them. We’d also have had to oversize the buttons and then there wouldn’t have been a big enough gap between them for your fingers. So keeping the scale authentic was really important to me.

Anyway, we played with the size until we roughly got this size. When we measured it, it turned out to be around quarter scale! And that was great because – A – we could just measure a real one and divide everything by four… Really simple maths! And B, in the US, you put quarters in arcades: that was the coin you put in the slot. In fact, a lot of people think we came up with the name and then sized them to match! Ha!

Ha! I love this. You keep saying ‘we’ though?
Yes! As well as my business partner, Ben Grant, I’ve got a very clever creative director, Karl Mizen… He’s one of those guys that routinely says, “I could make one of those!“ Ha! He knows all about electronics and he’s so good at making things. I’m just an ideas man. Karl did let me draw buttons on a cardboard box one time – but that was about as much as I was allowed to do! Meanwhile, Karl got bits of wood, a screen and a Raspberry Pi to whip up a Street Fighter.

I will just say this: we have interviewed Karl; people can read that here. Then one quick question: what’s a Raspberry Pi?
Ah! A Raspberry Pi is a very cheap, commercial Printed Circuit Board that consumers can buy and load games onto. Our machines don’t have Raspberry Pis in them – we make our own boards… But for the prototype, the Raspberry Pi gave us what we needed.

Got it! So even at that stage, the prototype was fully functioning?
Yes, we made fully functioning Street Fighter and Asteroid prototypes… I say we! Karl made them; I made Karl cups of tea while he was sawing and drilling and sweating. We’ve still got those prototypes somewhere. They look terrible now – the wood was probably thicker than it should have been, but it was more about the scale… We put buttons in there, a screen, the Raspberry Pi – all that gave the idea. Then we stuck them in a suitcase, headed off to New York and went and showed Atari. They really liked it! Then we went to see Capcom with Street Fighter.

Is this a cold call? Or did you know these folk?
We had contacts through our previous work – so no, we weren’t new to these people. And they thought the arcades were really cool. We were all set to go ahead and make Street Fighter… And then we got a phone call saying we couldn’t do it because someone else was making a tiny replica Street Fighter.

Through independent creation? Someone else came up with the idea?
Exactly. It’s like what they say about buses… In 30 years, no one made a miniature arcade – and suddenly two of us came along at the same time. They were doing them smaller; one-sixth scale. So they went ahead and made their Street Fighter at the same time we were making one… It happens. It’s a bit like in movies where they have two similar-themed movies. Antz and Bug’s Life come to mind… K9, Turner and Hooch; Deep Impact, Armageddon.

Yes. Two Robin Hoods. Two Truman Capote movies… I think Russell Crowe played two exorcists in different movies released within a year!
Yes, yes! So it was one of those moments. Anyway, when that happened, we decided to make Pac-Man! Beautiful machine; bright yellow, probably the most iconic machine I’ve done. So that’s what we did… We signed a license with Namco to do Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga and Galaxian. Pac-Man and Galaxian share the same cab, and Ms. Pac-Man was the same as Galaga. So we could use the same files which is great because we make everything out of wood. The wood is an important part of it, by the way… We could’ve bought six-millimetre wood off the shelf, but it had to be five millimetres to be authentic. So we had to get it done in five millimetres!

And just so I understand how you went from cardboard boxes to working prototypes, Matt, what was the process there?
We purchased full-sized arcades: a Pac-Man, a Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga and Galaxian. Then we just measured them in every direction! And more than that: on Pac-Man, for example, the control panel’s got a rough texture to it. We replicated that texture… On the back of the machines, too, there are these handholds where you would get a grip to pull the machines backwards. You don’t need them on an arcade at quarter scale, but to me that detail was important. Even the positioning of the speakers makes a huge difference. It would be easy for us to make these and put the speaker at the back – but the sound doesn’t come down the same! It’s a project of passion.

Is there anything you couldn’t replicate to your satisfaction?
I don’t think so! We got these concave buttons a millimeter bigger; even the screws are in the same place. If there is a ‘wrong’ on some of them, it’s an original wrong! So I might have taken it too far with Galaga and Pac-Man for instance because I made them so that they don’t save your high scores… I regret that now; ours should save the high score even though the originals didn’t because the memory wasn’t there.

Oh, that’s an agonising choice! I think there’s a Matt Precious in a Sliding Doors universe that added the memory and now regrets it! It’s not as authentic…
Yes, maybe… Maybe. But this is partly why these arcades aren’t cheap. Quality and authenticity are everything. You know, just because of the imperfections that the factory finds when they cut the wood, I think about 50% of the material gets thrown away. But we pay for 100% of it! If we made them in plastic, I’d be a rich man. Ha!

Anyway, we did four prototypes – none of which, ironically, have come out. We’ve prototyped a few that didn’t work out for one reason or another. But we have license for Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, Galaxium, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dig Dug, Bubble Bobble, Elevator Action, Zoo Keeper, Burgertime, Lunar Lander, Space Invaders…

Space Invaders! Of course!
We seriously underestimated how difficult Space Invaders would be… The technology’s from 1978; we figured it’d be easy to replicate 40 years on. So we bought an original Space Invaders – from Australia; I had to get it shipped across because they’re so rare. Then it took us four years to do! Because Space Invaders is amazing inside. What no one realises is that those aliens aren’t actually on the screen. The machine has what’s called a Pepper’s Ghost effect inside it…

This is the magician’s illusion with angled glass? It creates a ghostlike effect; it makes things look translucent?
Right! The alien graphics are on a hidden screen that’s reflected towards you on an angled, partly transparent mirror. Behind that, there’s a plastic cutout of a moon on a starry background. So you can see the background through the mirror; it makes it look like it’s behind the ground, thus appears behind the aliens.

Wow!
Right? There’s also a black-light tube behind it all so that you can’t see how it all works. We had to recreate all that in quarter scale. And there’s no such thing as light tubes these days – everything’s LEDs! How they made those machines in 1978 is beyond me. After we saw inside it for the first time, I sat in the office with Karl nearly in tears. We just thought it couldn’t be done – it was the work of a genius. It’s by far the hardest thing we’ve ever done

Was there ever a time where you nearly gave up?
Oh, yes – several! It was an absolute nightmare. We were nearly at the point of scrapping not just Space Invaders but Quarter Arcades in general. We’d had enough; it nearly broke the brand! But Karl and I both live in South Shields… What we usually do after a terrible day is go to the pub, get some beer mats and scribble some stuff down. We just had to accept that this was a product of passion; that there wasn’t going to be any money in these replica machines. Seriously – developing them is a money pit! It makes no sense to carry on with something like that. That’s why I want to do it! Ha!

And looking back?
I look back at Space Invaders and feel very, very proud of it because I know what we went through to get there. And I must admit, we’ve got a great community on Facebook – our Quarter Arcades fan club. We were going to those guys and saying, “We know this is four years late… We’re struggling with it.” And they would tell us not to worry about it; it’ll be ready when it’s ready. They had our backs. It was lovely. And to this day – when we’re struggling with something – I would say 95% of the time that the community is the reason we carry on making stuff.

So Space Invaders – had to be done; Pac-Man – had to be done! Are there any licenses where you think, ‘No. It’s not for me.’?
That’s tricky – I’m biased because of my age! The more modern the game, the less interested I am personally. I think the most recent machine we have here, as in the date it came out, would be Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time. That’s from 1991. It’s 35 this month! And that’s about the limit for me personally – but that doesn’t mean we’d never make machines past there because Karl’s 10 years younger than me…

Ah! He’d know different games!
You’ve got it! He never saw Pac-Man in the arcades… He grew up with different stuff. Which doesn’t mean he doesn’t appreciate earlier stuff because he absolutely does. So many of the arcades are incredible. Take Lunar Lander for example… This came out in 1979. They only made a few thousand. Then Asteroids came out and went blockbuster! So they had people come to the site and convert Lunar Landers into Asteroids.

But Lunar Landers had a thruster handle on the front instead of buttons and a joystick! And it turns out that if you play this on a hard level, it’s nearly impossible to land. So believe it or not, NASA bought some of these arcades and trained their astronauts on it to practice thruster control. And I love the idea that astronauts had to play Lunar Lander to get into space! Ha! Also, there’s no music on Lunar Lander and it’s said that’s like being by yourself in space in a pod… All you can hear is the noise of the thruster. When I heard all this, I just fell in love with it. I knew we had to make a Lunar Lander.

Amazing! You tell a similar story about Battlezone, do you not?
Battlezone’s amazing! It has a periscope on the screen. A couple of people said we’d never be able to make that quarter size… Well, that – to me – is a bit like calling Marty McFly a chicken…

Ha!
Now I HAVE to do it! But to answer your question: yes! Battlezone is a tank simulator that that came up in 1980; it’s from Atari. Is the first first-person shooter game of all time. And because it came with this periscope, the military took one and made it into a tank simulator to train soldiers with. I guess it’s just a lot cheaper to get soldiers started on a tank simulator than on a real tank. Formula One is another example! They still use Formula One video games to train the drivers.

Apparently, they train London Underground drivers by making them play video games at home… Gets them ready for all the strikes. Ha! You mentioned earlier that you already had contacts when you pitched your first arcades. How come? What’s your background?
I worked for the retailer Game for over 20 years. I started out working in the stores and ended my time as the Commercial Director of Game in Australia. In the first place, I went to work for them because I loved video games and everything that went with them. I thought that was better than getting a grown-up job… I couldn’t get excited about selling beans or shoes or something.

But I’ve worked in retail… You must have grafted to work your way out from the shop floor to that level.
Oh, very much so. But I think if you’re passionate about a product, then it’s easier; it doesn’t feel like work – which sounds a bit corny! But I can’t imagine going and do something that I’m not passionate about. If I didn’t do this for a living, I’d still be doing it because I love it.

So working for Game obviously meant I was doing a lot of video games. And they’d always do big hype for a new Call of Duty launch… We’d get in all the games and dress the stores – proper buzz… But I was always really disappointed with the merch. 99% of the time, it was logo slapping. Here’s a hoodie… It’s got Call of Duty on it. There’d be key rings, waterbottles, patches – nothing clever, nothing truly inspired. So when I we got out first licenses, I knew we’d never just slap a logo on stuff.

What was your first licensed product?
An early one was for Spyro. We made an incense burner – smoke came out of his nose and it made your room smell nice. It was something we thought a fan would want. We also did the go-kart from Crash Bandicoot Racing and smoke came out the back of that. That’s what our company Numskull is about… Asking what fans would really want.

What other licensed products have you created with that more unusual approach in mind?
We did some scented candles for Star Wars… One smelled like the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon. The others were everything from Blue Milk and wompas through to the trash compactor

My days! And what does a wompa smell like?
Not as bad as a trash compactor! Ha!

Ha! You know, this isn’t a conversation I imagined us having!
Ha! No! But all that was stuff and fun where we just put a bit of thought into it. It seemed like a good idea until we had to pick the smells. For the wompa, I think we went for wet goat or something. But they’re the sort of development meetings where someone seriously says, “What does the Millennium Falcon cockpit smell like?” You know? And you’re thinking: leather from the seats? A bit sweaty?

The faint hint of tauntaun guts…
…all that sort of thing. Anyway, that’s how we got into it. Just making cool stuff for fans. And that’s who we’re still catering for with Tubbz, CosCups – anything we produce! Its all about what you want as a fan.

I was going to ask one last question, but I want to make it two! I know you’re a big fan of The Beatles…
Massive fan!

Which Beatle are you most like, Matt?
Oh! What a question! Which Beatle I’m most like changes depending on what mood I’m in. Even my Favourite Beatle changes… I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but I just watched Man on the Run on Amazon Prime…

The Paul McCartney documentary?
Yes. It’s brilliant. Love it! Paul was the glue that kept everyone together. John was the clever one… In terms of what he wrote, he was the best. But then, some of the greatest songs ever came from George! So I can’t pick, really. Did you know our company is called Rubber Road because of the Beatles?

I did not! How so?
My business partner Ben is also a huge Beatles fan. My favourite album is Abbey Road and Ben’s is Rubber Soul. Ha! Rubber Road still confuses people. They think we’re a tarmacking company! But almost everything we do has a bit of the Beatles in it. If you actually look at our Rubber Road sign, it’s inspired by the Abbey Road sign… Things like that. We’ve even got a video game company that’s called Appey Studios – things like that.

I’m glad I asked! Finally, then, what’s the one question I could’ve asked you today but didn’t? Don’t say, ‘How did Rubber Road get its name?’!
Ha! I don’t know… The question I get asked a lot is, “What’s the ultimate arcade?” But the answer is, of course, it depends on the person… Because its not like a film. If you ask someone my age what the ten greatest movies are, at some point you’re going to have someone say The Godfather, Shawshank Redemption, Goodfellas, Star Wars – that sort of thing – because everyone’s seen them. The themes are familiar. They’re objectively good films. Your favourite arcade, though? That could just be the only one that was in your local chip shop when you went there for a treat! It’s much more driven by nostalgia than by objective quality.

Fantastic! Matt, I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed chatting to you about this. Thanks so much for making time.