It was the year 2020, people had to stay at home and find things to do with all the extra time on their hands. My husband and I were no different. We brainstormed and browsed creative posts to find something we could do together that would put all that time to proper use. After a lot of consideration and inspiration from the web, we finally found a project we were motivated to tackle.
🌟 - Building our very own Arcade - 🌟
To start this project, we had to find building instructions and buy lots and lots of materials.
Finding instructions was the easy part. Big Thank You to Rasmus Kønig Sørensen, he made it very easy for us to realize this project. If you want to get instructions, just follow the link: https://estherkoenig.dk/mame/eng/index.htm
Equipped with a nice guide and some rough calculations of what we will need, we went to our local hardware store.
Our first steps had to be cutting the wooden panels and preparing them to get a proper paint job, before assembling the build. Since we started to build the arcade in 2019/2020 we had the luxury of cutting and preparing everything during the summer and using my parents garden for extra space.
After getting the basics done, it was time to finish the individual parts of the project. My husband was responsible for everything that had to do with software, hardware and basically everything electronic. Since the electronics is the actual important part and I have absolutely no understanding of how any of that works, it was my responsibility to paint everything and make it look good.
While my husband was very efficient and was done with his part rather quickly, it took me 4 years to finish my part. Just after a few weeks, we had a running system we could play on. If you are interested in the technology behind all of it visit my husband’s website and ask him, because I honestly have no idea https://dominik.suess.wtf
Since I like perfection and have very specific ideas of how things should be, it took me forever to paint everything. In the beginning, I decided on the games I wanted to be represented on the panels and the style I wanted to paint them in. Then I took a brush and did something completely different, and never looked at any of my sketches again.
During painting the sides I learned new techniques and discovered different ways to create looks, perspectives and shading. For me, it was a learning process and a creative challenge. Since it took me a very long time and I took breaks for months in a row, it was hard to keep a continuous style, but I think in the end it turned out quite nice. During the process I never used a pencil or stencil or anything, I didn’t even use a ruler to get straight lines. I only used acrylic paint and different kinds of brushes. If I didn’t like how a brush stroke turned out, I had to find a way to make it work or paint over it.
What I want to say is: it was challenging, I learned a lot, I had times when I didn’t want to look at it and I had times when I enjoyed the process. Obviously, I could have used a pencil to make it easier or to create a layout, but I liked the process of creating errors and learning how to incorporate them with the overall idea. This way I created paintings more accurate to myself with more character.
Here are some pictures of the progress:
Finished paintings:
As soon as everything was painted and prepared, we wanted to finally finish the project as fast as possible. So after finishing the paint job, my husband and I set a date to assemble everything.
Just a week before assembling we tried to wrap our head around everything we planed 4 years ago and ´oh boy´ we made a lot of mistakes those 4 years ago. So with a week to go we realized we had to buy more components, different screws and hinges, new polyacrylic glass and some new materials. Luckily, we noticed the mistakes of our younger selves before trying to assemble the whole thing.
We bought everything we needed and stuck to our plan to build it in one day. We obviously didn’t finish the build in one day, but we almost did.
Here are some pictures of the building process:
The next day we got up pretty early to finish building our project before starting our Sunday routine of lots and lots of sports.
Here are pictures of the finished Arcade Suess TM:
After assembling, we knew we had to get some people to play and introduce our build to our friends. So we invited a bunch of people and had a great time playing some retro video games.
I loved this project even though it took me many many many hours to get the paint job done. But now I can spend just as many hours playing some retro games 😊
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