Classic games

At The Retro Lounge, we want you to choose the games you remember playing, however, with thousands to choose from, we know this can be a daunting task. So, when you are buying one of our machines we tend to ask you to give this some thought whilst we get on and make your machine. To get you started, we generally supply a list of what we call 'classic games', these are the games that were the most popular in the arcades, back in the day.

Our classic list is around 100 games that includes all the classic platform games, fighting games, sporting games, etc. However, if you are only interested in fighting games, we can start you off with our fighting list. There are many websites dedicated to preserving arcade games and we recommend using emuparadise as a one stop shop to jogging your memory for games. Browse the site and let us know if you find any games that you desperately want including and we'll do our best to source it and load it up for you.

Emuparadise retro arcade website

It's very important to remember that a specific arcade game may have had very specific controller units (roller ball, analogue joystick, steering wheel, paddle, etc), so with a cabinet containing lots of games, some may not work well, be difficult to control with the standard joystick, or indeed, not work at all with our software. For example, many customers ask us for Star Wars and whilst we can supply the game, it is very difficult to control without a unique joystick. So, unless you want a machine that will only be good for a few games, we advise against putting some games on the list.

Most games however, do work and with a little bit of time and effort, we can generally get any games that have problems, to work in a fashion. Space Harrier is a classic example, this used an analogue joystick when first released in the arcade, but with some additional work, it can play pretty well with our standard digital joystick.

We feel that the 3 button set up not only looks better, it suits the needs of nearly every game. You may often see arcade cabinets with 6 buttons, but there are very few games that require this. The very few games that require more than 3 buttons, tend to only need the extra buttons for things such as choosing something before play commences, we can replicate this in other ways than filling your control area with buttons that are not needed, often confuse novice players and generally make the look and feel of your machine a little poorer. All our machines are supplied with a USB port for connecting a standard USB keyboard, which will allow you to perform many more operations, including the unique button press a specific game may require.

Less is more

Download our classic list of games

We allow you to customise this list by not only adding up to 20 more games of your choice, but deleting any games you really don't want on there. Less is definitely more when it comes to choosing games, remember, the original arcade machines will have just come with only 1 game on. Our easy to navigate menu system does allow you to quickly scroll through the list using the joystick, but when you have too many games to choose from.....well, you know what happens!

So you want more?

That's really not a problem, talk to our team about putting more games on. If you are confident enough, you can do this yourself and we can point you in the right direction for self help videos. Don't think for one minute that you've made a mistake and suddenly realised there is a game you forgot to tell us about. We try to do all the hard work for you, but our machines are fully customisable, even when they've left our workshop.