Vincent Diamante loves arcade games. Growing up after the golden era of early-‘80s arcades, Diamante hunted them down in 7-Elevens and pizza parlors, and he still remembers the pleasure of finding a game he’d never played before, that could show him something new when he threw in his quarter.

Nowadays, coin-ops still litter our bowling alleys, highway rest stops, and the occasional full-fledged arcade. But innovation is rare. Beyond the derivative racing and hunting games, retro cabinets dominate, like the ubiquitous Galaga/Ms. Pac-Man combo. But as a grad student at USC’s Interactive Media Division, Diamante took a chance on something new. He and his project partner, Shelby Wong, not only built an arcade game: they put a whole cabinet on wheels.

Here’s how it worked. They started with a Shinobi cabinet that Diamante picked up from proto-blogger Justin Hall. They replaced the Shinobi board with games that relied on paddles or rollerballs – first Pong, then Arkanoid – and they fitted the cabinet’s wheels with rotary encoders to turn them into controllers. The whole thing was powered by two daisy-chained UPS power sources, to make it mobile. Instead of playing the game by twisting a paddle, the player rolled the entire cabinet back and forth. And instead of stashing it in an arcade, Diamante and Wong wheeled it out onto the street.

Photo: Vincent Diamante
 

Says Diamante, “I love the idea of moving around in real space translating into game action. I also like the idea of really being seen with your gaming equipment. The cabinet is right there, it's huge, and it identifies you as playing a game.”

“I was definitely inspired by other projects that I saw at USC that involved moving around with computers in hand. While I was there, there was a project called MobZombies, and everyone held laptops and webcams and GPS units and were running around going crazy. It was quite fun.” Working with a cabinet was also a response to the subtlety of handheld and cell phone games. “The miniaturization of everything is neat, technologically it's a very cool thing, but I like the ceremony of it all, where you deal with something large like [a cabinet]. This is an action, this is an effort, and that effort is really clearly visible to everyone.”

And everyone on the street noticed. “While I was there, lots of people wanted to take pictures, just them and the arcade cabinet. Just in that split second, ‘There's an arcade cabinet,’ they felt the need to record that they were part of the event with that arcade game.”

Diamante and Wong named the project MG1, or Mobile Gamer 1, and you can see Diamante’s photos of the project on Flickr. As well as a gamemaker, Diamante’s an excellent photographer, although his main gig is composition: you’re probably most familiar with his work as the composer for Flower, where he gave the year’s leading zen game sweeping orchestration and synthesized pizzicato strings reminiscent of XTC’s Apple Venus Vol 1.

In fact, Diamante took on MG1 in part because it had nothing to do with his music studies. “One of my professors told me that grad school is a place where you can do anything … . You have the rest of your life to do things for your career, so why not have fun and experiment a bit.”

Wong ultimately left the program, and Diamante held onto the cabinet. It’s seen one other incarnation, as MG2. Instead of focusing on “mobile gaming,” the new version was a tool for playtesting: students in the program could load their Flash or Torque engine games, and the cabinet would be placed in a public place to encourage new players to give it a go. While one computer powered the game, another ran a microphone and webcam that captured the player’s reactions. “There’s something about seeing the game in that big monolithic structure. The arcade cabinet doesn't really look inviting, except it is inviting. People will go up to it and see the flashing lights and [want to] press the start button.”

It was a clever way to liven up the tedious process of playtesting – but several factors weighed against it. Fewer students than he expected signed up to use it, and with two computers to run, the cabinet’s batteries could only go for about half an hour. Not to mention that playing a Flash game in a cabinet felt odd. “The smoothness of everything - it doesn't feel quite right,” says Diamante. “I kept on thinking, ‘This isn't an arcade game. It doesn't feel like an arcade game when I look at it.’”
Today, Mobile Gamer is on hold. Diamante is busy as a composer, as well as a part-time teacher of game design and sound design. And he’s testing other mobile game ideas, such as experimenting with iPhone games that tap the device’s GPS.

But there’s nothing like a stand-up arcade cabinet. “Talking about this has made me more sad at the state of it,” said Diamante at the end of our interview. “I really would like to start up again. I still feel the same way I did about four years ago, that arcades in America could still live on if there was a type of game made for them. Maybe people would find that same energy and fun that I had in discovering a new game. I would love to give that people.”

Chris Dahlen writes about games, music, pop, and tech for a number of venues. You can find him online at @savetherobot.