Tag Archives: Gaming

This Retro Arcade Machine Folds Into A Furniture Cabinet Right Out Of Pottery Barn

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You bring home a new piece of furniture. It’s a handsome, mid-century modern style cabinet in a rich walnut finish, and your partner is frankly stunned. They thought your design sensibilities peaked at a framed movie poster, yet here is this sophisticated, adult-looking object that actually complements the living room. They nod, impressed. The next evening, they go to open one of the doors, planning to store some coasters or maybe a few new wine glasses. Except the handle is just for show, and the doors don’t open. The look of confusion on their face is priceless, because they’re about to learn your secret.

That’s because this beautiful cabinet is a beautifully crafted lie. The front panel doesn’t swing open; it unlocks and folds down to reveal a two-player control deck. The entire top half then pivots upward, extending into a full-height marquee that glows with the promise of 8-bit glory. In seconds, the quiet, respectable piece of furniture has undergone a transformation worthy of a Saturday morning cartoon, revealing itself to be the Swap Arcade. It’s the ultimate stealth entertainment system, hiding in plain sight and waiting for your friends to come over.

Designers: Les Cookson & Ken Higginson

The brainchild of Les Cookson and Ken Higginson out of Lincoln, California, the Swap Arcade tackles a very real problem for gaming enthusiasts who happen to live in actual homes with actual partners who have actual opinions about décor. Closed, it sits at a compact 36 inches tall with a footprint slim enough to tuck against any wall. Open, it rises to a full 70 inches with a 27-inch HDMI display, built-in speakers, and a two-player control panel loaded with SANWA joysticks.

The transformation is handled by a counterbalanced mechanism that manages the weight as the hideaway arcade moves up and down, keeping the movement smooth and controlled rather than the kind of chaotic reveal that ends with someone’s fingers in the wrong place. Once fully open, front corner locking pins secure the arcade immediately after transformation, with a second redundant set at the rear corners for added stability, keeping everything firmly locked in place before anyone even thinks about touching a joystick.

Running on a Raspberry Pi 4 with Batocera preinstalled and a starter library of 100 games, the machine is ready to play straight out of the box, a self-contained gaming system from day one. From there, thousands of additional retro titles can be loaded, giving access to a huge library of arcade, console, and retro favorites through one clean multicade interface. The controls run through a Brook Zero-Pi Fighting Board encoder, adding compatibility with Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, PS3, PS2, the original PlayStation, and PC via X-Input. Hook up a Nintendo Switch Online subscription and suddenly you have access to classic Nintendo libraries on a proper stand-up cabinet. Connect a PC and play arcade-style games through Steam. The machine evolves with what you already own.

Cookson clearly had no intention of letting the furniture half of the equation slide. The cabinet shell is actual wood, and the unfinished bare wood option means it can be stained or painted to suit any interior. Three finished options are also available, Natural, Walnut, or Dark Tobacco, each looking convincingly like something sourced from a design-forward furniture store. For anyone wanting something completely custom, a graphic designer and printer can create custom vinyl decals using almost any artwork, making the Swap Arcade truly personal. The nostalgia you’re chasing here is entirely your own to define.

The lower section includes built-in storage for game systems, controllers, cables, and accessories, accessible when the Swap Arcade is opened into arcade mode… or maybe some of those wine glasses your partner wanted to originally store. It’s a detail that keeps the illusion perfectly intact. When closed, nothing gives the game away.

The post This Retro Arcade Machine Folds Into A Furniture Cabinet Right Out Of Pottery Barn first appeared on Yanko Design.

This $249 Phone Becomes a Game Console With One $29 Snap-On Tile

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Feature phones have been having something of a quiet comeback, driven largely by people who are tired of the attention-capturing machinery baked into modern smartphones. Most of what’s on the market offers a stripped-back feature set with very little room to grow. Calls, texts, maybe a basic camera, and that’s about where the conversation ends, which hasn’t exactly made the category feel like an exciting place to be.

The Sidephone SP-01 has been quietly building a different kind of case for itself since its debut in 2025, not by piling features onto a simple phone but by letting users choose what kind of phone they want through a swappable modular keypad system. The Mini Controller Keypad is the fourth tile to join that family, and it’s the most unexpected one yet.

Designer: Sidephone

Unlike the T9 pad used for texting or the Sundial’s iPod-wheel-style controls for music, the Mini Controller brings a game controller layout to the front of the phone. It carries a D-pad, A, X, Y, and B action buttons, plus Start and Select, all of which will feel immediately familiar to anyone who has ever held a handheld gaming device. The keypad sells separately for $29, the same price as the other add-on tiles.

To go with the hardware, Sidephone has developed two mini games that ship alongside the keypad: Mini Asteroids and Mini Blocks. They’re clearly starter content rather than the main event, but they establish that this isn’t just a novelty tile. The company has plans to open a community development environment so that third-party developers can build their own games and apps for the platform, which is when things will likely get more interesting.

What Sidephone has been sketching out goes considerably further. GBA and arcade emulator support has been floated as a longer-term possibility, alongside universal smart remote functionality. If even a portion of that lands, the Mini Controller starts looking like less of a playful add-on and more of a meaningful expansion of what a deliberately simple phone can do on an idle evening.

The whole system rests on the premise that a feature phone doesn’t have to be a featureless object. The SP-01 runs a custom Android-based OS, carries a 2.8-inch touchscreen and a 12 MP camera, and supports essential apps without dragging in the full weight of a smartphone’s notification ecosystem. The swappable keypad system, which uses pogo-pin connectors and magnets to click tiles into place, is what allows the device to shift personalities without requiring a hardware upgrade.

The Mini Controller sits alongside a growing family of tiles that now spans T9 dialing, compact QWERTY typing, scroll-wheel media control, and controller-style gaming. What started as a phone built around the premise of doing less has turned into a modular platform that keeps finding new things to do, each one contained in a $29 tile that snaps onto the same core hardware.

The post This $249 Phone Becomes a Game Console With One $29 Snap-On Tile first appeared on Yanko Design.