Californian arcade biz hopes to start new rental trend

Fancy an old-school arcade cabinet in your home or office? Californian startup All You Can Arcade reckons monthly rentals can revive the arcade business.

Fancy an old-school arcade cabinet in your home or office? Californian startup All You Can Arcade reckons monthly rentals can revive the arcade business.

The cabinets cost $75 a month to rent and customers aren't lumbered with repairs or stuck with a retro machine once they're done.

The startup's roster includes flagship titles like 'Donkey Kong,' 'Ms. Pac-Man,' 'Pole Position,' 'Street Fighter II' and even a 'Tetris' cab, as well as a good selection of more obscure picks.

Operating out of San Fran and Sacramento but with franchise expansion plans for Florida, Texas, and Southern California in short order, AYCA offers a fun experience for players, and a way out for an arcade industry squished by the smartphone.

Once the iPhone launched in 2007, people could have been right next to an arcade machine with time to kill, but instead 'they started buying apps and they started calling their friends and they started playing games on their phone,' stockbroker and AYCA co-founder Seth Peterson told Ars Technica.

So what was a multi-billion-dollar industry is now dealing with fractional revenues and storage fees, forcing many operators to liquidate their stock, and making it easy for AYCA to build its rental catalog and fix up all those battered old machines.

'By offering a price that's both fair to customers and to the hard working men and women who restore and care for these games, we hope to inject new energy into the industry and to create a restoration movement for the games,' reads the AYCA website.