Mini-Arcade Home Mini-Arcade Home


















Open since the year 2000!
miniorgan - musical electronics & toys website 
Tuesday, May 2, 2006, 08:42 PM - General Info
Here is an awesome site to visit if you like my MiniArcade.com site. This is MiniOrgan.com! A museum of vintage electronic toy organs and keyboards. Super dirty sounds. Lots of photos and history about the various models. Check it out. This is the project of Eric and Jaro in Germany, two very nice artists/designers/collectors. Jaro Gielens (of the Electronic Plastic website and book) designed much of the website, while the organ collection and website content is by Eric Schneider (aka musician Nothingface). Enjoy the electronic journey through dirty, cheesy sounds...

Click to visit the MiniOrgan.com Website




japanese game & watch commercial 
Monday, April 24, 2006, 04:02 PM - General Info
This was floating around the net about 5 years ago, I haven't heard about it in a while so I thought I would unearth it again. It is a short sound sample from an old (early 1980's) japanese advertisement for nintendo game & watch handhelds. I don't speak japanese, so I don't know what is being said, other than when he says 'micro computer'! This commercial sample has only sound, no visuals - its short but sweet.

Retro Game & Watch Advertisement (quicktime format)


build your own mini-arcade game...with paper! 
Wednesday, April 12, 2006, 04:50 PM - General Info
How cool is this? You can print off paper templates and then cut, fold, paste until you have miniature stand up video arcade game. Very nice! Gauntlet, Defender, Pac-Man, Tempest, Robotron, & Gravitar! This rocks. Someone on the forum here was talking about designing something like this with some mini-arcade tabletops, but in full scale instead of miniaturized like these. Were still waiting... :)

The Paper Arcade




game king 2 
Sunday, April 9, 2006, 02:59 AM - Video Games For Sale
For those who love the weird cartridge handhelds, here's one for you to get. The Game King 2! It only came out a year ago, but its totally old school. Very low budget piece of crap, greyscale, pixelated craziness. The case looks like a PSP (playstation portable) ripoff. The background on the screen, with mountain landscape, is fixed! So every single game has it in the background! If you buy one of these, you get 13 separate boxed games for it too! These are the same games that were made for the GameKing 1 (they work on either unit). The games aren't much better than the epoch game pocket computer from 1984, although some of them are pretty fun and inventive. The box art on the game boxes are worth every penny!!!! Some of them use stolen graphics from games like Unreal Tournament and Sega Moto GP. I got one from this website, and its a great weird game system to have for collecting - once they sell out I'm sure it will become an obscure rarity.

Click here to buy the Game King II




samorost 2 - online video art game 
Saturday, April 1, 2006, 11:29 PM - General Info
Have you played Samorost 2 yet? This online Art-Video-Game is a must see. Created by Jakub Dvorsky and Vaclav Blin. And you can play the whole game directly from your browser!

Visit and Play Samorost




homebrew cartridges on sale 
Friday, March 31, 2006, 12:53 PM - Video Games For Sale
Atari Age is running a spring sale on homebrew catridges for Atari 2600, Atari 5200, and Colecovision. Dozens to choose from - all recently programmed by game fans like you and me. Its great to support new video game releases on old hardware! These 'home brew' carts have become very collectible - most come with cool artwork on the labels and boxes and instructions and everything. And any purchase you make supports the indie game programmers!

- All in-stock homebrew games are 20% off! This includes Spectar, a brand new ColecoVision
homebrew game!
- Free shipping for purchases of $50 or more! (applies only to orders shipped in
the US)

Atari Age Store



new tabletop mini-arcade games 
Thursday, March 30, 2006, 01:36 PM - Video Games For Sale
A few months back some new mini-arcade style games were released. These were develeoped like the old style designs of coleco mini-arcades. You can find them at many places on the web for about $25 each. Spencer Gifts has them all. Frogger, Space Invaders, and The Family Guy Pinball. Very cool! These are color LCD instead of VFD (vacuum flourescent display) screens. All the repros now are LCD, and if someone makes a reproduction in VFD I'll be in tears...







new galaxy 2 tabletop simulator 
Wednesday, March 29, 2006, 06:49 PM - News and Events
Madrigal has released another simulator after a very long while. The one and only epoch galaxy 2 tabletop VFD!! Play it now!
http://madrigal.retrogames.com/




submit something... 
Wednesday, March 29, 2006, 01:29 AM - Submit to the Blog...
I encourage anyone here who wants an announcement made, to submit with all the details and url links to pages or graphics or whatever. I will try my best to post your announcements to this blog. Events, rare games for sale, new or weird items currently on the internet, and so forth. Surprise me! But please, don't ask me to post because you are selling a $20 Game & Watch or something normal like that - we are looking for rare, special, or strange news related to video game culture!


changes to site 
Wednesday, March 29, 2006, 01:22 AM - General Info
Hello! Today you may have noticed a few changes to miniarcade.com. The most obvious, is the creation of this blog and also the addition of google advertisements. Miniarcade.com has been completely ad-free since 1999, but now 7 years later here they are - oh no! Well....what can I say - I basically just need for this website to pay for itself. I once posted a donation campaign through paypal to help pay for hosting, domain, and bandwidth costs. Not one single person donated money! Not a dime! Ha Ha Ha rather funny actually.

So now I have added text only advertisements to help offset the yearly costs of maintaining the website. Sorry about that, but I tried to keep it to a reasonable level. When I was testing the ads, I actuall saw some pretty good, often funny sites come up. For instance a strange 'pac-boy' lcd handheld game from China came up for sale through a linked site. I purchased that straight away! If you happen to click an ad every now and then, this helps to support the miniarcade site and keep it alive. If you don't click and totally ignore them, that's OK too.

The other new addition to the site is this blog page. I figured this would help offset the ill-ness of the google ads. So in return I will post things here as often as possible. I will update you on things I see happening in the crazy world of video game culture - both retro and new. Events, news, expositions, new releases, strange finds and discoveries, ebay insanities, handheld games and retro items for sale, yada yada.

And even more will be coming to the website soon. Stay tuned all you game culture junkies... :)