This Fully-Functional Quarter Scale Star Wars Arcade Accepts Tiny Quarters

When Star Wars (later renamed to Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, and then renamed again to Star Wars: A New Hope) was released in released in 1977, nobody knew how big of a hit it would become. But, of course, the movie — and the entire franchise — ended up taking the world by storm. The property’s vast profitability hasn’t just come from ticket and home video sales, but also the licensing rights and merchandise like Atari’s Star Wars arcade machine from 1983. Finding that machine in working order today is going to set you back a lot of money, but YouTuber Jamie McShan was able to build their own 1:4 scale version of the arcade classic.

There were actually two version of the 1983 Star Wars arcade machine: one was a typical upright cabinet and one was a special cockpit cabinet that players could sit inside of. This is a miniature replica of the upright cabinet, because it would have been really difficult to sit inside of a foot-tall cockpit cabinet. Both cabinet versions had the same game, which was a colorful rail shooter that put fans inside of an X-Wing Starfighter. Unlike most arcade machines from the era, this one featured a custom flight stick control setup that was built specifically for this game. McShan’s miniature replica has a tiny version of that control setup, too.

The replica 18” cabinet was designed with help from Alan Grier, who handled the 3D modeling so that the custom accents could be 3D-printed and the MDF components could be cut out on a CNC router. The game is running within an emulator on a Raspberry Pi. An Arduino Leonardo board is used to connect the controls to the Raspberry Pi, and was chosen because it can be configured to show up as a standard USB joystick. There is a LiPo battery inside so that the machine can be played without plugging it in, and the battery is charged through a SparkFun LiPo board. All of that is impressive, but the tiny coin-op mechanism is arguably the coolest part of the build. That actually works, and accepts itty bitty “quarters.”