About
A Modern Arcade started because the games on the market sucked.
We couldn't find anything worth playing. A group of friends, controllers ready, and nothing on the market felt good. Not broken, not unfinished — just not fun. The kind of fun that used to be a given. So we started asking where it went.
The answer was sitting in the IP graveyard. Legendary franchises, styles of gameplay that defined entire generations, genres that used to have millions of players — abandoned. Not because people stopped wanting them, but because the studios that owned them stopped caring about making great games and started caring about making safe ones. The market that used to exist for this kind of game has essentially one real option left, and even that barely counts as competition. The space is wide open.
So we built the studio that should have always existed. We acquire legacy IP and rebuild it from the ground up — not remasters, not nostalgia bait, but genuinely reimagined games that capture what made the originals great and push them further than they've ever gone. Modern technology. Modern polish. The same design obsession that made those games worth remembering, with none of the corporate compromise that killed them. Our acquisition strategy is large, ambitious, and spans many genres.
We are fully owner-operated, and that is not a small thing. The developers who build these games own what they make. The best partners earn real ownership in the studio. Nobody here is collecting a check while someone else decides what's fun.
People
Founder, A Modern Arcade
John Duck founded A Modern Arcade with a straightforward premise: the games worth playing weren't being made anymore, and the studios capable of making them had stopped trying. His background spans design, communication, and engineering — disciplines that don't usually sit in the same room, and that's exactly the point.
The studio reflects his belief that the best creative work happens when technical rigor and design thinking operate without a wall between them. That philosophy shapes how the team is built, how decisions get made, and what kind of games get shipped.
Brown University & Rhode Island School of Design
Joint Master of Arts in Design Engineering
University of San Francisco
Bachelor of Arts in Advertising — Concentration in Design
Bio
John studied advertising and graduating into COVID forced him to adapt quickly. He spent two years at a biotech startup handling everything from investor deck pitching to supply chain to product design and development. That experience led him to pursue a joint master's in Design Engineering from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. He is based in Austin, and has spent most of his life at the intersection of sports, games, and building things that are hard to get right.