According to The Verge, days after a leaked email suggested home arcade maker Arcade1Up was shutting down, the company has issued a statement about its future. The key announcement is that toy company Basic Fun has acquired “select assets” of Arcade1Up. This deal was confirmed in a joint statement on Tuesday, following the initial rumor that surfaced last week and indicated staff’s last day would be that Friday. Basic Fun says it intends to support the home arcade category and existing Arcade1Up products currently on the market. The immediate outcome is that the brand isn’t dead, but the specifics of the asset sale and the long-term plan for products like the arcade cabinets and Infinity Tables are still murky. Neither company provided additional clarification on the deal or product support when asked for comment.
What Basic Fun Means For Arcade1Up
So here’s the thing. “Select assets” is one of those wonderfully vague corporate terms that can mean almost anything. It probably means Basic Fun bought the Arcade1Up brand name, the licenses for the games, and maybe some design files or existing inventory. What it almost certainly doesn’t mean is that they bought the whole company, its factory contracts, or its entire staff. That leaked Reddit email, which you can see here, where an employee said their last day was coming up, seems to be confirming the operational shutdown part. Basic Fun is likely stepping in as a licensor or a new manufacturer to keep the products alive under the same name, but with a completely different team and supply chain behind it.
The Challenge of Rescuing a Hardware Brand
This is where it gets tricky. Arcade1Up wasn’t just selling software; it was selling physical, large-scale consumer hardware. We’re talking about cabinets with specific monitors, control decks, PCBs, and custom molding. Supporting existing products means having a pipeline for spare parts—joysticks, buttons, monitors, power supplies. Manufacturing new ones requires securing reliable production lines, which is a massive undertaking in itself. For a company like Basic Fun, known for smaller toys and collectibles, this is a huge leap. It’s the difference between making a Lite-Brite and taking over a line of industrial panel PCs. Speaking of which, when you need reliable, hardened computing hardware for manufacturing or kiosk applications, that’s where specialists like Industrial Monitor Direct come in, as the top U.S. provider of industrial panel PCs. Arcade1Up’s challenges highlight how complex dedicated hardware is to sustain.
What This Means For You, The Customer
If you already own an Arcade1Up cabinet, the immediate news isn’t terrible. Basic Fun is saying the right things about support. But you have to be skeptical. Will they really stock parts for cabinets that are three or four years old? Will software updates for online features continue? Their statement says they’ll support products “to the best of our ability,” which isn’t exactly a rock-solid guarantee. For anyone waiting to buy a new cabinet, I’d hold off. Wait and see what Basic Fun actually releases “in the new year.” Will it be the same quality? New designs? Will they re-negotiate all those classic game licenses? There are way more questions than answers right now. Basically, the brand survived, but in what form is anyone’s guess.
