You can buy yourself an arcade machine with 1200 games for PS1 for your birthday, but without L2 and R2 buttons

Nostalgia sells better than anything new, and the pricier it gets, the less buyers seem to care about details. Sometimes those details get ignored entirely. Take, for example, dropping $1,200 on a PlayStation arcade machine that physically can't press half the buttons on the original gamepad.

That's exactly the birthday gift one PlayStation fan got for himself, and he shared photos on Reddit. The shot shows a cabinet in classic PlayStation colors, a joystick, a row of buttons, and 1,200 pre-loaded PS1 games, all sitting in a room where even the curtains carry the Sony logo.

After taxes, the purchase came out to exactly $1,200 – a dollar per game. He found the machine on eBay, and whoever builds these things appears to be a hobbyist based in Ohio, hand-assembling them from Chinese parts with genuine care for the details.

An official PlayStation arcade cabinet never existed. The closest anyone got was Namco System 11 and Sony ZN-1, arcade boards from the mid-90s built on PS1 hardware that ran Tekken, Tekken 2, and Soul Edge.

Inside this particular cabinet sits a regular PC running an emulator like DuckStation, paired with a frontend, most likely built on the Linux-based Batocera distribution.

The controls make things even funnier. Four shoulder buttons existed on the PS1 controller since launch in 1994, and analog sticks arrived in 1997 with DualShock – neither one made it onto this cabinet.

Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, and Metal Gear Solid turn into torture on a setup like this, but Metal Slug, Tekken, and Mega Man 8 feel right at home, though even the owner admitted that Capcom's 2D platformer plays rougher on a stick than with a controller.

Legality is a separate question entirely. Selling a cabinet pre-loaded with game images stays firmly in piracy territory no matter what preservation arguments get made. Someone even joked that this kind of publicity might land the builder a cease-and-desist letter from Sony's lawyers.

There's some irony here – the official PlayStation Classic from 2018, loaded with twenty games, ran on the open-source PCSX ReARMed emulator itself and still flopped commercially.