What is Fight Arcade?? It's a custom arcade cabinet built entirely from scratch by my friend Enrico. This guy has been pouring his blood, sweat, and tears (quite literally) into building his dream cabinet in his spare time over the past six months or so.
I was lucky enough to get sneak peeks at his "secret project" over time and have been photographing the process for posterity. It was just finished a week or so ago, and it came out FREAKING AWESOME. It was built primarily for fighters, a genre of choice among many in our neck of the woods. As such it features classic six button controls and traditional bat-style arcade sticks-- with the clicky! You gotta have the clicky.
Inside this beast are a modded PS2, Saturn, Dreamcast, and a PC loaded with MAME. Enrico is some kind of wiring wiz-- or at least he became one-- so he's got an elaborate switchbox-dial setup to move between each of the systems. Additional details include full stereo sound, headphone jacks for each player, and LED backlit(!) buttons and faceplate.
The Fight Arcade logo, joystick base, and side panel artwork were done by yours truly, with a little help from Capcom of course (Enrico wanted his fave characters on the side). And I have to say as an art project it was one of the coolest things I've been involved in and am downright psyched to be a part of it.
To top off how cool a guy Enrico is, when the cabinet was done, he brought it into our office. We're co-workers at a small game developer, and the arrival of Fight Arcade immediately lit the fires of almost everyone there. Getting the most play has been Guilty Gear XX and SF3 Third Strike, with the occasional bout of Waku Waku 7. Tournament trees came forth almost immediately, and everyone is having a blast with no signs of slowing.
There have been some cool custom arcade posts here at Destructoid and I wanted to share this with you guys. Mainly to give mad props to my man Enrico, who gets to finally enjoy the fruits of his labor. He deserves it!
See the full gallery of pictures here.
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On an unrelated note, does anyone remember that Half-Life 2 arcade game?
OH GOD!
But where do people buy those buttons? I can't find them anywhere. :(
@KamikazeTutor:
The only place I know of is Happ. Look for Sanwa parts.
Two years ago I bought the parts to build an arcade control panel but the parts are still sitting in a box. I need to finish it someday.
I got all my arcade hardware from groovygamegear.com they're amazing.
@the-excel: that's the intro from Guardian Heroes.
THX everyone for comments and drooling :-)