It started with a layoff and a friend who picked up the phone…
Fifteen years, thirty games, and one obsession with a sport no one can pronounce later — here’s how we got here.
Our StoryAstro Crow started in 2010 with a space cat, a farting blue hog, and one guy's determination to build games entirely on his own terms.
Founder Brian Stabile had just been laid off from a game-development job and decided the only move was to build something himself. Walking away from his former office, he called his friend Shaun Wightman. Together they made The Last Ace of Space, the first of roughly 18 mobile titles they'd go on to release over the next five years.
But one idea kept coming back to him: jai alai, the sport he grew up around thanks to his grandfather, who worked at a South Florida fronton. An early mobile version never quite worked. Years later, while teaching game design at Full Sail University, Brian revived it as a joystick-driven game with his students — and that's where he met Caris Baker, an artist and lab assistant who joined as co-owner and art director in 2016.
What followed was years of nights and weekends: hand-building the very first cabinet out of a gutted, water-damaged Frogger machine just to get accurate measurements, learning CAD from scratch, and slowly turning a shared obsession into Throwback! Jai-Alai Heroes — the world's first arcade game built around the sport.
Since then, the game has picked up Best in Show honors at Free Play Florida and Playthrough GC, a spot in the Walter Day Collection, and a place in the PAX Rising Showcase — one of just 12 games selected out of hundreds of applicants in 2026, where it took home three awards and a feature in Kotaku.
Our mission is simple: build communities through competitive play.
Throwback! Jai-Alai Heroes is our first arcade cabinet — it won't be our last.
Our Approach
We build things ourselves, by hand, and learn whatever skill that takes along the way — CAD, cabinet fabrication, hand-drawn animation, all of it. We test early, in front of real players at real conventions, and we keep refining until something's right, even if that means spending two weeks perfecting a single detail most people will never notice. It's a small team doing the whole thing — design, code, art, and craftsmanship — start to finish. Slower than farming pieces out, but it's how everything we ship stays “actually good.”
We don't do one thing — and that's on purpose.
From arcade cabinets you can buy today, to custom builds we design and fabricate by hand, to games we help bring to life — we’re a dedicated studio of experience engineers. Our team consists of university professors and Hall of Fame inductees that win game jams for fun and have a demonstrated career history in gaming and spatial computing.
Our Products and Services
Buy a Cabinet — Throwback! Jai-Alai Heroes, ready to ship today.
Custom Fabrication — Have an idea? We'll design and hand-build it, start to finish.
Game Development — Bring us in to help build your next title, arcade or otherwise.
Events & Venue Partnerships — Activations, residencies, tournaments, and ongoing support to help your venue build a real community around the game.
We ran “Hyper-Micro Tournaments” every hour, on the hour to give attendees a taste of the arcade energy at PAX East.
Bring the heat with Throwback: Jai-Alai Heroes, the only arcade cabinet that fuses vintage sports flair with blistering, high-speed gameplay. With sleek retro visuals, tight competitive mechanics, and that irresistible "just one more match" energy, this cabinet draws players in and keeps them coming back. Easy to learn, fun to master, impossible to ignore.
For Players:
all-ages/8+
play vs. friend or robot
“Pro Mode,” great for tournaments
four Florida city frontons
team play vs the robots
For Operators:
“Amigo Mode” allows two to play on one credit
flexible pricing (quarter/token/free/swipe)
Coin Audit by day/month/year/match
custom attract-mode and in-game branding
multilingual support (Spanish, Portuguese, French, Basque, and English)
For Your Floor:
HDMI out
Industrias Lorenzo components
easy-access service panels
~5 sq ft footprint
Dimensions: D 28.5” x W 25.75” x H 70”
Weight: ~186 lbs
Returns: All sales final, no returns or cancellations.
Shipping not included in the purchase price. Cabinets are shipped from our manufacturer in Wisconsin.
Taxes not included in the purchase price. Product is sold from Florida and any taxes taken will be at the Florida sales tax rate if the buyer also resides in Florida.
Astro Crow will guarantee 6 months of service after the delivery date. Reach out to contact@astrocrow.com for more details.
Not ready to commit? Host a one-day activation or 30-day residency first.
More Information
We see your vision to the end when crafting bespoke arcade machines and games on contract.
Meet the Team
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Brian Stabile
CO-OWNER / PROJECT LEAD / PROGRAMMER / GAME DESIGNER
Brian founded Astro Crow in 2010, the day he got laid off from his job and called up an artist friend with an idea. Since then he's shipped roughly 30 mobile games, taught game design to the next generation of developers, and spent years turning a childhood memory — watching his grandfather work at a South Florida jai-alai fronton — into Throwback! Jai-Alai Heroes. When he's not writing code, he's usually behind a drum kit or a guitar in one of two local bands, or translating between English and Japanese for fun. -
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Caris Baker
CO-OWNER / CREATIVE DIRECTOR / ARTIST / SALES / MARKETING / LOGISTICS / CUSTOMER SERVICE
If you see it, it was her. Caris joined Astro Crow in 2016 and has worn nearly every hat since — art director, hand-drawn animator, CAD modeler, and the person keeping sales, shipping, and customer relationships running smoothly. A Full Sail Hall of Fame inductee, she's built her career as a technical artist for companies working in VR and AI, and still finds time to win game jams for fun — three first-place finishes and counting. -
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Aaron Asher Randall
MUSICIAN
Aaron built the sound of Throwback! Jai-Alai Heroes from the ground up — the soundtrack, the sound effects, and the audio identity that makes a match feel as fast as the sport it's based on. If you've ever turned up the attract-mode volume in a bar and just listened for a second, that's his work. -
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Neil Hernandez
COOL GUY
Neil is the reason Throwback! exists as an actual, physical machine and not just an idea. An arcade technician by trade, he stepped in to help build the first real cabinet. It was his vision of Don Johnson from Miami Vice in the white suit and pink shirt that gave Throwback its iconic white and pink motif. -
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Greg Pardo
A1 SINCE DAY ONE
Greg takes care of the Linux backend of our product and is responsible for keeping Brian sane, mostly.
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Shaun Wightman
CO-FOUNDER
Shaun co-founded Astro Crow with Brian and is credited as Art Director and artist in its game catalog from 2010-2015. Nowadays he takes less of an active role in design and development.
