Top Gun: Maverick Arcade Game

Raw Thrills and Play Mechanix built Top Gun: Maverick under licence from Paramount Pictures as a rotomold cockpit rather than an upright, and that decision sets every number on the spec sheet. The cabinet pairs a flight stick and throttle control system with two 65-inch displays and mounts the whole cockpit on a flight-simulating motion platform. Installed, it stands 121 inches tall, 58 inches wide and 120 inches deep, and weighs 1,315 pounds. Ten feet one inch of height and a full ten feet of depth are the two figures that decide whether a location can take this cabinet, and they should be checked before anything else on this page.

The game runs six levels through volcanoes, hurricanes and avalanches, with three licensed real-world airframes to fly: the F-14 Tomcat, the F-15E Strike Eagle and the F/A-18 Super Hornet. Players race Rooster, Hangman and Phoenix to the mission objective while shooting down enemy aircraft, vehicles and boats to earn Destruction Boosts, with Afterburner, Heat-Seeking Missiles and Multi-Missiles available as power-ups, and licensed franchise music behind it. Up to four cabinets link for squadron play, which turns a single cockpit into a four-way race. Each cabinet feeds through two power inlets, 10 amps per inlet at 120V/60Hz for 20 amps total.

Start with vertical clearance, because it disqualifies more rooms than any other figure here. Installed height is 121 inches, or 10 feet 1 inch. A room with a standard 8-foot ceiling is short by more than two feet, and a 9-foot ceiling still does not clear it. Basements, dropped ceilings and anything with ductwork or a sprinkler head over the intended spot need measuring at the exact position, not at the highest point in the room. Delivery has its own vertical problem: the main cabinet pallet ships 86 inches tall, which is taller than a standard interior door frame, so the route in has to accept the crate or the crate has to come apart before it reaches the door.

Then measure the route against the crate, not against the finished cabinet. The cabinet is 58 inches wide once installed, but it arrives as two pallets measuring 47 inches and 42 inches across, and both are wider than a 36-inch residential doorway. Total shipping weight is 1,315 pounds split 800 pounds on the main cabinet pallet and 515 pounds on the pedestal pallet, so receiving handles two pallet loads rather than one, and neither is a two-person carry. The installed footprint of 58 by 120 inches works out to just over 48 square feet in a deep, narrow shape, which suits a wall run or an alcove better than an open island position.

Electrical planning turns on the phrase "each inlet". This cabinet has two power inlets, and the published draw is 10 amps per inlet at 120V/60Hz for 20 amps total, or 5 amps per inlet at 230V/50Hz for 10 amps total. A single 20-amp branch circuit is fully committed by one cabinet with nothing left over, so plan two feeds and treat the 20-amp figure as the cabinet's number rather than the receptacle's. The 230V/50Hz rating is published alongside the 120V rating, which is what makes the cabinet placeable outside North America without a conversion question.

Linking is where the arithmetic is worth doing in advance. Up to four cabinets link for squadron play, and four units mean 232 inches of frontage, 19 feet 4 inches, at the same 120-inch depth. That is 5,260 pounds of installed weight, eight power inlets and 80 amps of 120V draw for the bank. Operators who intend to grow to a bank of two or four should confirm the wall run and the panel capacity at the first purchase, since a single cabinet running standalone gives no warning about what the fourth one will need.