Game Not Over

Long before the arrival of video game consoles such as PlayStation, Xbox, Wii and Nintendo, playing games meant going to the arcade, where you would drop money into a box-like machine, hit some colourful buttons and manoeuvre a joystick.

Games designer KJ Poh, 40, remembers those days clearly. During his secondary school and junior college days, he would change out of his school uniform into a more comfortable T-shirt and head to the video arcade centres, spending hours playing games such as Street Fighter and World Warriors.

About two years ago, he started making his own arcade machines. He would draw the plans for the cabinet first, before finding a workshop that can turn those drawings into reality. "Sometimes the designs look great on paper, but after you've built it, they are too big, or you don't have enough space for your hands when playing," says Mr Poh. "Other times, it could be the internal components aren't easily accessible after it's assembled." It took a lot of trial and error to get the dimensions right. He later used the Retropie software to run the programs.