Arcade Cabinets, Measured Floor to Ceiling

An upright home arcade cabinet occupies roughly 2 feet by 2 feet of floor. That is the easiest footprint in this entire site. The constraints are vertical and electrical instead, and they catch people out.

A full-height cabinet in the current home market stands about 5 feet tall before a riser, and 5 feet 9 inches to 6 feet with one. Add a marquee light and you are at the height of a tall door. In a basement with 7-foot ceilings and ductwork, that is a real measurement. Measure where the cabinet will actually stand, not the highest point of the room.

Then measure to the nearest outlet. A cabinet's cord is short - commonly 5 to 6 feet - and running an extension across a games room floor is how cabinets get knocked over. Plan the position around the socket, or plan to add one.

Full-height uprights are the ones that look like an arcade. They stand at playing height, two people can crowd around them, and the control panel is usually close to arcade width. This is what to buy if the point is the feeling of an arcade.

Countercades and bartops are the same electronics in a shortened cabinet that sits on a counter, table or shelf. They cost far less, they take almost no floor at all, and the controls on better ones are full size. The compromise is the screen, which is typically 7 to 12 inches instead of 17.

Cocktail cabinets put the screen into a tabletop with players sitting opposite each other. They double as furniture, which is the point: in a finished room that is not solely a games room, a cocktail cabinet is the format that does not look like a games machine when it is off.

Multi-game tables - the 3-in-1, 7-in-1 and 10-in-1 frames - are a different product that lands in the same searches. They are physical games, not arcade electronics: pool, air hockey, table tennis, sometimes basketball or bowling, in one frame with swappable or swivelling tops.

They are genuinely useful in one specific situation: a room that must serve several ages and has space for exactly one table. Outside that situation they disappoint, because every game inside the frame is a reduced version of itself. The honest version of the trade is laid out in what multi-game tables actually include, including the one that is usually worth buying on its own instead.

Cabinet listings quote a game count. Read it carefully: 14 licensed games on a brand cabinet and 412 titles on a generic multicade are not the same claim, and neither number tells you how many you will actually play. Licensed cabinets give you a handful of titles you recognize, properly emulated, with the right control layout. Large-library machines give you breadth and variable quality.