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.

Four arcade game machines in a row with bright, colorful designs and empty screens. 
Our Story

Astro Crow started in 2010 with a space cat, a robot pig, 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.”

Three people standing next to an arcade game titled 'Treasure Ally' at the World IA/A/ M. The arcade game has colorful graphics and two joysticks, with a large screen displaying the game. The setting appears to be an indoor event with a green wall and overhead lighting.

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 a university teacher and a Hall of Fame inductee 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.

Three people taking a selfie at a gaming event for 'Throwback! Retro Arcade Heroes.' The woman on the left is making a peace sign and winking, the man in the middle is touching his chin, and the man on the right is also touching his chin with a serious expression. They are all wearing red shirts with game logos and event badges.

We ran “Hyper-Micro Tournaments” every hour, on the hour to give attendees a taste of the arcade energy at PAX East.

Community-Building Services
Throwback! Jai-Alai Heroes 1v1 Standard Mk.II Throwback! Jai-Alai Heroes 1v1 Standard Mk.II
Throwback! Jai-Alai Heroes 1v1 Standard Mk.II
$6,999.00

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

    • multi-payment system (quarter/token/free)

      • can be outfitted with card reader/bill acceptor

    • 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[at]astrocrow[dot]com for more details.

Volume discount available. Please message us at contact[at]astrocrow[dot]com to discuss.

Not ready to commit? Host a one-day activation or 30-day residency first.

Click for More Info

Cabinet Storefront
Nighttime scene of an outdoor installment with several large, blank, movable panels with blue borders. A woman wearing a mask and apron is cleaning or working near one of the panels, and a man is partially visible on the left side of the image. There are trees, parked cars, and apartment buildings in the background, and the ground has scattered objects including a can and paper.

We see your vision to the end when crafting bespoke arcade machines and games on contract.

Work With Us

Meet the Team

  • A man with dark hair and a beard smiling, wearing a black shirt with a logo, standing in front of a pixelated video game character background.

    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 bands, or translating between English and Japanese for fun.

  • A young woman with short brown hair and glasses smiling in front of pixel art of a pink panther and a white dog.

    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.

  • A man with dark hair, wearing a checkered suit and tie, posing in front of a blurred blue background.

    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.

  • A man with dark hair and a beard holding a bottle of lotion with a finger pointing towards it. In the background, there is a blue screen with names and text, and a black table with some equipment. The man is wearing a black shirt with orange text.

    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.