Arcade @ the office (completed!)

[Felsir]

Last month my employer reorganised our office. Part of that was that we got a big say in how the things would look. So I promoted the arcade theme at our office in Eindhoven (we have 5 offices in the Netherlands, about 200 employees). Since our office consists mainly of ~30 year old IT people, the theme got the vote! I already posted about the meeting room plaques see this topic.

So now the next step, I explained my BYOAC hobby so I got a bit of budget to start our own build at the office! With some leftover stuff and spare computer parts, I hope to stay within a $300 budget. I already prepared the biggest parts of the cabinet (my coworkers voted for the pacman cabinet shape). In the office storage I found have a (heavy) 21" Sun CRT monitor covered in dust so that will most probably be used as the display.

It will probably be a slow build, since we have to do this in our spare time and lunch breaks. But so far my coworkers are very enthusiast in participating getting this done!

[matsadona]

Sounds like a great office! Do you need any additional employees?

[talkgeek]

Passed this thread link around my fellow team managers, now have universal agreement we should do the same thing in our office (but build it as a "largish" meeting table, so can turn it off if any of the directors appear on our floor - not that thats very likely ...they keep their distance from ICT, the geeks scare them  )

Also we'll implement it with head phone jacks (no speakers) - that way only the button thumping and woops of delight will be heard in the office (which is pretty normal anyway so won't really be any different  )

strong debate on whether it's going to be horizontal or vertical screen format though - so might be a week or 2 before we start building

Looking forward to seeing how your project progresses

[cmoses]

Very nice to work with such friendly bosses. I will be keeping an eye on this one.


Sent from my iPad Mini using Tapatalk HD

[Felsir]

Because we're an office, I had scheduled a little meeting with my coworkers yesterday. So I held a short powerpoint presentation about the construction and we made a list of stuff we need. The project is treated like a, well, project. So an Excel-list with parts, costs (my boss wants to know how much things cost) and coworkers got assigned to get parts from the DIY-store etc.

The fun-part of the project is how people come up with ideas of their own! Since we're all programmers, we plan to make our own frontend. We all carry a badge for access to server rooms etc, and the plan was to store a list of favorite games tied to the badge. And RFID reader in the cabinet to read the badge to interact with the frontend. It is really fun to see my coworkers getting enthusiast for the hobby!

[emphatic]

The fun-part of the project is how people come up with ideas of their own! Since we're all programmers, we plan to make our own frontend. We all carry a badge for access to server rooms etc, and the plan was to store a list of favorite games tied to the badge. And RFID reader in the cabinet to read the badge to interact with the frontend. It is really fun to see my coworkers getting enthusiast for the hobby!

  That's really awesome. It's really special how everyone's involved in this and it'll be a nice memory as well as an excellent conversation piece when you have customers over. 

[Felsir]

Today we made progress, the cabinet is taking shape. Quite a few coworkers helped out so it has become truly a group effort. The pictures are taken in our lunchbreak area.

[paulliadis]

This is awesome. I love everything about it. What a cool "team building" exercise in disguise

[darthpaul]

Proceed with caution, I had a similar idea http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,120050.msg1272606.html#msg1272606.

[Felsir]

Legally "workplace" and "public place"are two different things (note how laws on smoking are worded specifically for public places and workplaces). But I'll proceed with caution on the forum- I know the kind of heated debates this could stirr up and I don't want to go down that road.

We have lots of plans for running our own games on it. Most of us have sideprojects and games out on iOS or Androids that we would love to run as a big cabinet. A lot of programmers do like to code games outside their jobs :-)

[Felsir]

The build is complete! Now most of our lunchbreaks are spend playing Broforce, which is an excellent game for an arcade cabinet!

Co-workers are already starting building their own games so looking forward to see what else we will be playing on this thing :-)