Kickstarter Spotlight: The Polycade

I’ve got an exciting Kickstarter campaign to share with retro-gaming fans today. If you’ve been itching for a retro arcade console that plays over 12+ generations of games, than you should check out the “Polycade.” The arcade was once the ultimate experience for gaming — gamers of old would flock to their local arcades in hopes to spend all their change on the newest arcade cabinet such as: Street Fighter, Donkey Kong, Pong, Pac-Man, etc. Gaming was a social affair, and smack talk was up close and personal rather than getting lost over a spotty internet connection.

Polycade looks to bring this social experience to the home and become the “modern arcade cabinet.” It also hopes to rectify many of the problems that old arcades suffered from, like only having the ability to play a single game per cabinet, a lack of portability due to weight, and looking out of place in the home (unless it’s in a man cave).

The Polycade claims to be “an elegant, minimalistic arcade that plays multiple games”, and the project is being spearheaded by original gamers — specifically, Tyler and Dylan Bushnell (the children of Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari) and Charles Carden form the Polycade team.

According to the Kickstarter page, the Polycade boasts these features and parks:

• One 4-directional joystick for classic titles
• Two 8-directional joysticks for multiplayer
• At 1/3 the size of a standard arcade machine, the Polycade fits nicely in any home or office.
• The Polycade ships with over 90 games, and is capable of playing thousands more.

Cabinets will be cut by machines and assembled by professionals. The cabinets consist of plywood. There will be an option to vinyl wrap your cabinet or have a solid color paint. The screen of the cabinet will be a 28″ Insignia LED TV running at a 60HZ refresh rate. The internals will run on a Raspberry Pi and Open Source emulation software. All cabinets should mount easily on walls, similar to TV mounting.

So far, the following systems have been tested to work on the system:

• Atari 800
• Atari 2600
• Game Boy Advance
• Gameboy Color
• Game Gear
• MAME
• Sega Master System
• Sega Genesis
• NES
• Turbo Grafx 16
• PlayStation One
• SNES 

Make sure to check out the Kickstarter page for a full list of games that will launch with the Arcade. At the time of writing the Polycade is at $19,494 out of its $20,000 goal. There are still 28 days to go, so it is safe to assume that the Polycade will be funded.

What do you guys think of the Polycade? Would consider buying one for your home or office? Sound off in the comments below.