Nanoarcade is a mini-arcade cabinet that lets you play classic games on your tabletop

With game developers sliding resources towards smartphones and tablets, many hardcore gamers feel nostalgic for the pre-mobile era, when consoles were king and levels weren’t locked behind 99-cent paywalls. A four-man team from the US and Taiwan is riding this wave with Nanoarcade, a mini-arcade cabinet that just passed its funding goal on Kickstarter.

Weighing 320 grams, Nanoarcade lets users play Java-based games using physical push-buttons and a joystick. Users who purchase the device will have access to Nanoarcade’s library of almost 100 games.  They can also port titles they have downloaded independently from online sources, via Nanoarcade’s USB 2.0 slot.

Nanoarcade sells for US$49 for ordinary backers of its Kickstarter campaign, but the team hasn’t yet decided on an official price. It also offers a set of customizable skins that it sells for extra money. Chien Lee, who runs business development and marketing for Nanoarcade, says that the team hopes to recreate the visual thrill of browsing through an actual arcade.

“We’ve built our package so users can customize it. When you go to an arcade gallery, you’re not just looking at the games, you’re look at the exteriors. So this also becomes a collectible,” says Lee.

According to Lee, Nanoarcade is a hobbyist project that’s leveraging Kickstarter in order to gage long-term business prospects. Eric Lin, who conceived of the project, and his three co-founders have pooled personal money to finance prototyping and first-round manufacturing. But each of them has other sources of income at present.

Nanoarcade isn’t just a revival of the arcade, it’s a call back to feature phone gaming as well. Eric Lin’s brother was a co-founder of Gemmy Planet, a mobile game publisher that developed, licensed, and published Java games in the pre-smartphone era. At one point, it had offices in Taipei and Beijing, along with partnerships with telecoms like Taiwan Mobile and Far East Zone. Gemmy Planet is no longer operational, but its in-house and licensed games will make up Nanoarcade’s initial library of titles.

Lin and his partners have spent 18 months taking Nanoarcade from concept to first-round production. According to Lee, the team drew from its network in Shenzhen to connect with a manufacturer with a background in toymaking. This turned out to be crucial, as Nanoarcade devices will likely take a button-mashed beating from their owners. At one point, during the prototyping phase, the team hung an 21-pound weight on the joystick to ensure it still wouldn’t break

“We told [our manufacturers] we wanted to test the buttons to see how many times you could press them before they break. A lot of our backers are asking about these issues. They’ll say ‘I’m a very aggressive player, can Nanoarcade withstand this?'”

Nanoarcade is the sort of product that will elicit oohs and aahs, but not necessarily purchases. While Lee and the team appreciate the device’s novelty appeal, they’re directing their focus squarely towards their most valuable customers – game developers who love and miss the classic Arcade experience. Nanoarcade will make a great stocking stuffer for a retro-obsessed collector. But in the long term, Lee and the team hope to build a community around Nanoarcade, in which Java hobbyists create and share games with one another.

“We have about 500 backers of our campaign, and maybe 60 or 70 percent of them are developers,” says Lee. “If I were to sell this today, it would basically be a novelty accessory that sits on your desk. But when we engage with these developers, we want to see not only how they can help us, and also how maybe using this platform and this form factor can help these developers realize their dreams.”