Rain spitting on the roof. It's humid out, but it's stuffier inside, where nonprofit Arcade Commons is calling on every god of DIY to help them finish making the Nightmare Kart cabinet, a tangible "port" of developer Lilith Walther's Bloodborne parody racer, which is making me feel weepy as I worry about the future of indie gaming.
Video games are an increasingly expensive hobby, layoffs and studio closures are rampant, and even former havens like e-store Itch have chosen to place, in some cases, strict restrictions on what games are for sale. But the Nightmare Kart cabinet – now snug in its home at Wonderville in Bushwick – and the people who created it make me feel like none of my anxieties matter. We can all keep making weird, personal art for as long as we want to.
Designer baby
For the last year, Arcade Commons has operated from a small, windowless room in East Williamsburg. The space is soaked completely in a chemical smell, which the Arcade Commons team apologetically tells me they don't notice anymore. During my visit, the Nightmare Kart cabinet takes up its only foot or two of empty space.
Developer Lilith Walther tells me she's added a new cutscene to the Nightmare Kart cabinet's original leaderboards – each track has its own – but, otherwise, it's "all of the content of Nightmare Kart, specifically the races, [...] kind of wrapped up and remixed in an arcade wrapper." She's especially eager for people to experience the cabinet's leather-wrapped steering wheel, which "fights back against you."
Some people have already had the privilege of facing off against the all-black Nightmare Kart in battle – lone rider versus stallion. It officially debuted at MAGFest 2025 in April; to prepare, the Arcade Commons team members say they treated the cab like a "second job," spending almost 50 hours a week huddled around duct tape and plywood in their East Williamsburg room.
While they seem to agree that Nightmare Kart, their decidedly "coolest" project, isn't quite like the cabinets they've made in the past, Arcade Commons has been around for so long, I imagine some of its volunteers are used to the work. Some of them have been with the organization since 2013, when it was originally known as Death by Audio Arcade, after the now defunct music venue started by A Place to Bury Strangers noise rock star Oliver Ackermann.
Do it yourself
Though its association with guitars and beer-sticky floors is technically behind it, Arcade Commons still operates with the black t-shirt cool I connect with DIY music in the 2010s. So much of it has vacated the city now, but my best days in high school were spent sweating somewhere in Williamsburg, waiting for some hardcore drummer to do the thing where he spits what's in his water bottle out into the crowd.
In this case, we have Walther, sitting in front of the Nightmare Kart cabinet wearing a witch's hat, studying something on its screen.
This is technically her first physical game release. Today, she's working on its leaderboards, which are broken. But "the whole legally distinct-ifying it has been really fun," Walter says about her ongoing mission to cleanse Nightmare Kart of its past life as Bloodborne Kart, which Sony wasn't fond of.
"It was a lot of work," Walther reflects, "but it was a lot of fun, scrambling to rewrite [and] come up with new proper nouns really quick." At this point, though she knows she's put in "thousands of hours" into Bloodborne while working on the PS1 demake she released in 2022, Walther figures her time spent with Nightmare Kart "probably outpaces that."
Real rock stars
Anyway, I don't think Walther has any need for the Bloodborne association at this point. She's been able to form her own identity as an indie developer through Nightmare Kart and its nutty The Old Karts expansion, and so Nightmare Kart has its own life – I see it being forged from plastic and metal in front of me.
And this is enough. The Arcade Commons team likes that the indie game scene accepts that some "people [are] like, 'I just want to make art games that 10 people will play.'" They've seen the power of a passionate group of people firsthand, feeling that the "physicality of the arcade cab is a very community-focused aspect of this, just trying to strengthen the developer scene in the different ways that we can."
"When people in the community find out things in the games," they say, "it's like you're in school, and people are talking about what they saw in Nintendo Power magazine or something." Proof: Arcade Commons hosted a tournament for their cabinet Hoverburger at this year's Magfest and had to separate new players from the game's following in New York, where people tend to "compare notes and play it at the same place every week," reaching what Arcade Commons happily calls "New York high [scores]."
Later, I'm not surprised that, when I show up at the Nightmare Kart cabinet launch party at the Hex House warehouse, there's a line in front of the cabinet – which looks glorious in its completed state. Its faux stained glass marquee is fully lit, revealing a sword motif among tangerine orange and festering red. The inside of the cabinet is lined in plush upholstery, like the inside of Dracula's carriage, and brassy ornaments evoke similar Gothic sensibilities, and stories to read in the dark.
When it's my turn to play, I use the Nightmare Kart cabinet's wheel to select the ashen French maid as my rider and notice how it resists my hands. I hold my breath as I run my race – I've been waiting weeks for this – and immediately plummet to the bottom of the leaderboard. Well, you know. It's about the journey.
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