Every year for most of my life I’ve made my way to the cabin in the summer. When I was younger we went to the laundry mat in town. The cabin has since been remodeled and I haven’t been to the laundry mat in years. One year they had a Ms. Pacman cocktail style arcade. The screen was flat under the glass of the table top. I’d never seen anything like it. I was kind of in awe of this new way to play games. It always stuck with me. Like something being flipped on it’s head and giving you a whole new way to see things.

Lightning Crashes

Then I was struck by lightning. Ok, not exactly, but pretty close. It was around 1999. I had just gone to bed. Maybe I was asleep or just about there when the loudest most terrifying boom shot me up out of bed. It was like the house had exploded. I was shaking. Everything seemed to be vibrating. I was awake. I circled the first floor of the house like the Flash running back in time to see what just happened. I didn’t even know if anything did happen. Then someone came up and checked on me, sitting up wide-eyed back in bed.

Turns out the peak of the roof near the foot of my bed had been struck by lightning. Maybe 14 feet from my pillows. Insurance gave me a replacement for the “fried” TV. Turns out it was OK once I messed with it, but now I had 2 identical TV’s.

Years later I started thinking about building a table for 2 players. I had 2 CRT’s. I found a glass coffee table in the alley one day and brought the glass home. I found some nice finished plywood in the alley a little later. Once things start coming together a thing starts to tell you what it wants to be. I started laying out the top and cut a template out of cardboard.

The table top was the key to everything. I knew I wanted wood around the glass and screens. I landed on two layers of MDF topped on the sides with the. I wanted it to have that yellow feel of sports bar. It took a lot of tests to find and oil based ARM-R-SEAL that was somewhere between a stain and shellac. The middle has back lit graphic made by shining LEDs down into a white box for an even, diffused light. Graphics under the glass. Eventually I made wood inlays around the screen and used EVA foam as a bezel. To hide the seam between the wood and foam I watered down silicon caulk and layered it over gap until it was seamless. Painted this black and it feels like one piece.

I had some wood I had saved from an old futon. It was a hard wood so I used it to build a frame to hold up the TVs at the right height and orientation. I designed and 3d printed braces that insured everything was square.

Once I had the height I could start making the sides. Starting with the ends because they had the joystick and buttons.