February 5, 2026
The RCade is a custom arcade cabinet at the Recurse Center that runs games made by the community. It has a real CRT running at 320x240, a custom graphics card, custom input controllers with spinners, and a deployment system where any Recurser can ship a game to it just by pushing to GitHub. There’s also a web player and local simulator so remote Recursers can play and build for it from anywhere.
There are now 44+ games on it. This is the story of how it came together.
The RCade
At the Recurse Center, I met Greg Sadetsky and saw his Rapid Riter project. The Rapid Riter is an LED display from the 1980s, 96 pixels wide by 38 pixels high. Greg hung it on the wall in the hub and built a way for Recursers to contribute images and animations to it. The simplicity of the display and the fact that it lives in the physical space means both in-person and remote Recursers can leave their mark on the community.
The Rapid Riter hanging in the hub at the Recurse Center
I love the constraints. There’s something about retro hardware and limited resolution that gets people’s creative juices flowing in a way that a blank canvas doesn’t. People really want to build for it.
I loved my time at RC and really wanted to give back in the same way that Greg did. Eva Khoury, who runs Operations at RC and also coordinates Boshi’s Place, an indie games and arts space in Brooklyn, was super encouraging about the idea from the start. I wanted to build something similar to the Rapid Riter: the RCade, a custom arcade cabinet that runs games made by the community.
The project had three goals:
Build hardware that feels like a real arcade machine Make deployment so easy that someone who has never made a game can ship one in minutes Create something that connects remote and in-person Recursers
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