My love of Akira’s Tetris the Grandmaster series has prompted me to build an arcade stick which allows me to play the game the way it was meant to be played. Here is how I built it.

Electronics

The electronics in this build were very simple, low cost arcade stick kits are available from many online retailers. The kits usually include a 4 direction joystick, 10 buttons, and a controller board. Off the shelf controllers are a great option as they are designed to minimize latency, which is extremely important in both fighting games and Tetris.

Button Layout

There is a surprising variety in the positioning of the buttons/joystick on these arcade sticks. The main variables are the distance between the button set and the joystick, the angle of the button set and the actual layout of the button set. I spent quite a bit of time picking a template to use and settled on one which seemed pretty “normal.” Since I only use 3 buttons and the joystick for Tetris, the layout did not matter all that much. I imagine if I were playing fighting games which require all 8 buttons, I would have probably put more thought into this.

The Enclosure

I knew from the beginning that I wanted my arcade stick to have a very large footprint. This is so I would not need anything to hold the arcade stick down, like suction cups which some commercially available units must use. I had a large piece of cedar wood laying around in my garage that would allow me to make the large footprint I desired.

The Build

The general idea I had was to cut this cedar plank into 3 smaller pieces and stack them on top of each other to make one thick piece of wood. This would then be held in place using 4 counter bored bolts, allowing for disassembly.

The first step was to cut the plank into three pieces, drill holes in the corners and bolt the boards together:

Next I counter bored the bolt holes:

Now I taped down the template:

And drilled the holes:

Next I routed out the center panel of my arcade stick sandwich, I also needed to route a little bit of the bottom panel to allow the joystick to fit:

After this, I test fit all the buttons and electronics, and gave the whole thing a quick test run:

Everything worked well! Now I routed the edges of the board and sanded everything smooth:

Now that everything was working, and the board was smooth, I coated all three pieces in polyurethane:

Finally, I decided to add a USB hub to the inside of the arcade stick, this is so I could plug a flash drive containing Tetris into the arcade stick, allowing me to plug the stick into any computer and play with only one cable:

And here’s the final product, after several years of use: