Feature By

Brad Gallaway

As someone growing up in the heyday of arcades, it's always been a dream of mine to have at least one actual arcade machine in my home. It has nothing to do with saving quarters of course, it's about the pride of having a great showpiece and a larger-than-life display of my love for gaming. Beginning my quest to make this little dream a reality, I started poking around into different options, originally planning to build my own cabinet from scratch. I admit that I ended up taking the easy way out and writing a check when I saw a pre-made unit at a price I couldn't ignore, but during my searches I came across Chuck McGee, a man with a similarly obvious love of the great big boxes, and who actually went the distance and built his own units—twice. Envious of his beautiful creations, I took the opportunity to get to know Chuck a bit and pick his brain for knowledge and tips. You can view his efforts at his website, www.leafstation.com

Please tell us about yourself, Chuck.

My name is Chuck McGee. I am a 32-year old technical professional. Over the past 10 years, I have held high-level positions at both large and small organizations, but regardless of the job's importance and my need to be a polished professional, my hobby and recreational was still gaming. Like many other thirty-somethings, I grew up in the 80s watching every episode of Tom and Jerry there was, and finding my way to the local arcade after school with every quarter I could bum off of friends and family.

Obviously, you're a big arcade fan. Tell us about your gaming background.

Arcades are where my interest in gaming first began. Gaming at home wasn't really popular yet and people were lining up to play the local Pac-Man machines. An arcade opened up near to where I went to Middle School and I was finding my way there with every free moment I had (and sometimes not-so-free moments).

Eventually, the Atari 2600 hit the scene and all of my friends who had more money than me got one. It was one summer when my parents finally broke down and purchased the Magnavox Odyssey2 to help my constant ramblings about home and arcade games. It might have also been the steady audio stream from my cassette player of "Pac-Man Fever" by Garcia and Buckner that told them I needed to channel that energy somehow.

Through to my graduation in high-school, and as a three-sport athlete during that time, I never had money of my own and had no time for a job, so my purchases would always stagger the official releases of some of these consoles and games by months, which was a painful process and a primary motivator to what I am today—a gamer in a professional's body with enough recreational income necessary to stay on the edge of my gaming interests and to express myself creatively.

Today, I own a PlayStation 2, an Xbox, and a high-end PC for gaming. I spend an equal amount of time among all three playing games, mostly in sports, racing, first-person shooters, and strategy titles. But it feels like I try and play them all, regardless of genre, simply because I am fascinated by where the gaming industry is headed.

Where did you get the idea to make your own cabinet?

It was early on in my professional career, around 1998, that I was able to discover the wonderful world of MAME. For many years, I was satisfied to try out different MAME games that would take me back to that time as a middle-schooler [when] I would be dumping quarters into arcade machines.

(Editor's note: MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, a means of allowing people to enjoy arcade games at home, although the main stated purpose of the project is to document the hardware (and software) of the games themselves. GameCritics.com does not endorse emulation, and provides this information for the purpose of this interview. More info can be found at http://www.mame.net/)

I eventually lost interest in MAME the more I realized that these games I was once in love with, were not the technical marvels I once remembered them to be. So I turned my attention to other PC and console games for the next couple years, until one day, cleaning up my home office, I found a CD of all the MAME games I used to play. I started to search the Internet to see what was new with the organization and found a site that demonstrated many examples of people building their own arcade cabinets.

The more I looked into this possibility, the more I realized that I had the motivation and skills to do something like this on my own, with one twist. I was also very interested in art—which drove me even further to create very elaborate artwork to cover the control-panel surface, side panels, and marquee—completely satisfying the right-side of my brain.

How did you gather the general knowledge on how to do it?

From that one site with all of the examples, I read page upon page of people's step-by-step instructions, and asked a lot of questions by email of those people, until eventually I knew enough to make me dangerous. I collected people's Word documents, JPEG images, AutoCad drawings, you name it.