| “ | You can't win me, I can't be beat I won't hurt you, unless you cheat You can't see me behind the screen I'm half human, and half machine! |
„ |
| ~ The chorus of "Cabinet Man". |
The Cabinet Man is the villainous main protagonist of the song of the same name, the third song of Lemon Demon's album Spirit Phone.
He is a man who, through some unknown methods, became one with an arcade cabinet by storing all his organs inside of it. After being let out into the arcade, the Cabinet Man would turn the place into his own domain after his fame grew and grew, letting him wreak havoc on whoever was unlucky enough in the building, cheaters and innocents alike. After the arcade industry was rendered obsolete, everything from his favorite pastimes to sense of validation was uprooted, and with an intruder in his vicinity, his time seems to have cut even shorter.
He is voiced by Niel "Lemon Demon" Cicierega.
Personality[]
| “ | Such dedication, they came from miles away With eyes so piercing, they'd wait their turn to play Perfect patient lines, because I was in their minds I could do whatever I felt like. (Whatever I felt like.) |
„ |
| ~ The second verse of "Cabinet Man", showing the start of the titular character's descent into madness. |
While a lot of the song is kept vague, the Cabinet Man seems to be obsessed with arcades and games, letting his "electric desires" turn him into a living arcade machine. The Cabinet Man is a vain individual, prideful over his game's difficulty and how he's unstoppable. This attention quickly gets to his head, unlocking the ability to do incredibly reckless, if not actively malicious things to his players.
While most of the song paints the Cabinet Man in a neutral light, the bridge reveals that he has done quite horrid things, such as eating maintenance men and driving kids to madness, with the latter being quickly corrected to the kids being "predisposed to madness" as a way to seemingly cover his tracks. In any case, the Cabinet Man is uncaring of the suffering he causes, even seemingly trying to rationalize it as he sees the number of victims as low. While the song's chorus states that he only goes people who "cheat", what labels a person as a "cheater" to him is unexplained, and it does not justify the bodily harm suggested in said chorus as punishment.
The Cabinet Man seems to have lived a lonely life, never experiencing proper love in the time he was human. Instead, he seems to equate love with popularity, trying to fill in that gap with people coming back for more.
Biography[]
Prior to the song's start, the man that would become the Cabinet Man had reportedly gone missing, and presumed to have died. Unbeknownst to the public, the man had his organs and consciousness infused with an arcade cabinet, left inside a workshop behind an old arcade.
The arcade workers, having found the cabinet, decided to put it on display for the masses to see and play. The Cabinet Man's game quickly became popular among the arcade-goers, with people going from miles around just to play this fabled game. This newfound attention, consistently being given for years on end, led to the Cabinet Man feeling unstoppable, able to do whatever he pleases.
During this time, unbeknownst to anyone, the arcade cabinet was alive and actively tormenting people playing his game. From driving players insane to straight up eating maintenance workers, the Cabinet Man was on a roll, making the arcade his own personal stomping ground. Unfortunately for him, however, the business in arcades was quickly dwindling down. As companies like Nintendo were making their home video-game consoles, and especially with the release of the handheld Game Boy, it was becoming far more convenient to simply buy a console and a pack of games than to keep coming back to an arcade. New technology has made him obsolete, and that problem will only grow worse and worse as the passage of time goes on.
An unspecified amount of time later, on a lonely night, assumed to be a Christmas Eve where everyone was busy eagerly anticipating their gifts this year, the arcade was completely abandoned. No one, not even the staff, was left in the building. It was on this night that a stranger broke into the structure, ready to vandalize the place. From repainting the abandoned arcade machine to trying to bash in its screen, they messed with the cabinet in various ways, not knowing that something was living inside, finding out too late as blood poured from the machine and onto the vandal's shoes.
What happened to the Cabinet Man after the song ends is ambiguous, though given how the song ramps in intensity, it's possible that he tried retaliating against the vandal in some way. Afterwards, it's unclear if he bleeds out and dies or he recovers in some way, as well as just how long the arcade he's stationed has left to last, if it hadn't already been closed by now. In any case, with the steady decline of arcades and the like, the Cabinet Man's days of being the greatest game on the block have long since passed, and it's only a matter of time before the mechanical hybrid goes out as well.
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
- Neil Cicierega has stated on his Twitter that the song was loosely inspired by the urban legend "Polybius", an arcade cabinet that allegedly caused a range of mental and even physical side-effects in its players.
- Around two weeks before Spirit Phone was published, Niel Cicieriga had uploaded a short film titled Computer Fighters, with the short film ending with the main antagonist, Mitch Dollarson, being trapped inside a pinball machine. This had led to the idea that Mitch and the Cabinet Man are one in the same, although the types of machines the two are trapped in are seemingly different.
- It's implied that the Cabinet Man needs currency to breathe. Early in the song, the Cabinet Man states that his lungs are "collecting change", and when players stop appearing near the end, he laments that "it's getting hard to breathe".