Have you ever wanted to know what it feels like to have an actual arcade cabinet sitting in your living room, driving your wife insane?
Well, thanks to a new business called All You Can Arcade, you can do just that by renting arcades of your choice for $75 per month, and after your rental is over, you have the choice of keeping the game another month or changing it for a different game. The best part is pickup and deliveries are completely free.
“The very first cabinet we ever bought was actually a SEGA game called Turbo Outrun, and after experiencing what it was like to have an operator deliver the game to our house, it inspired us to try and recreate the experience on a bigger level,” said Seth Peterson, the company’s co-founder and CEO. “Currently, we have approximately a dozen SEGA cabinets in our inventory. A few of these games are After Burner, Golden Axe, Cyber Police ESWAT and some SEGA/Gremlin classics like Zaxxon and Frogger.
“We launched the site with 30 games yesterday, so not all of the SEGA titles are live just yet, but we plan on adding one game per day to the service for the next four months,” he said.
Currently, the service is only available in the San Francisco and Sacramento area, but Peterson is looking to expand it tremendously through a partner program. The way this works, is if you have an arcade sitting in your house that you want to rent you, you can apply for a partner account on the All You Can Arcade website. From there, you take a photo of your arcade, input the maximum number of miles you’re willing to drive and deliver your cabinet to renters and All You Can Arcade will match you up with customers.
“With many operators unable to even earn $25 a game anymore, there’s been a lot of interest in our service from professional operators like ourselves who own 100+ games,” Peterson said. “The cost to store the games is about $10 per game per month, so there’s an added incentive for the pros to get the games out of public storage and into customers living rooms.
“We launched the site at (California Extreme), the industry’s biggest arcade convention each year, and expect to announce new locations shortly from operators that we’ve been signing up at the event,” he added.
This sounds like a really interesting concept, and we’re really interested in seeing how it pans out. While some may feel the $75 rental fee is a bit steep, it could be a great idea for birthday parties. The benefit would be you get to keep it the rest of the month, even after all those bratty kids leave the house!
Check out All You Can Arcade here.
