I may not be a follower of extreme sports by any means but when they do something arcade related, then it grabs my attention. If you live in the Nashville, TN area near an arcade which we have covered in the past known as the Game Galaxy Arcade, then you might want to pass by that location on May 1st. On that day, the extreme sport known as the World’s Fastest Drummer will be making it’s coin-op arcade debut. From what I can tell, they have taken the Flash-based game of WFD and put it into a cabinet where you can get a more realistic experience thanks to the drum controls as opposed to a keyboard. The cabinet pictured above is a conversion made out of some other game so no idea if this is just being made for Game Galaxy or if they have future plans on mass distribution. It’s always great to see an independent effort coming along in the industry, so we certainly would like to welcome them to the fold of coin-op arcade games!
UPDATE: On the KLOV Forums one of the people behind the game has answered some questions about their plans for the game:
Me:”So do you have plans for mass manufacturing the game for other locations to pick up in the future?”
wfdgame: “Well in the perfect world and in our dreams the short answer is ‘YES’ and the long answer is ‘we hope so’……:)”
WFD has been a 35 year investment, it took 24 years just to build the Drumometer which detects the speed of drummers hands and feet and the X-Sport WFD is now in it’s 10th year!
We did our first market test by building 8 very raw/simple machines with just pad and Drumometer for Guinness World Record Attractions. Guinness locations were international including Japan, Canada etc….It has been and still is one of their most successful interactive games. Here is an un-staged video from WFD early testing @ Guinness in Texas see http://www.extremesportdrumming.com/…ade%20Game.wmv
Then MTV’s Addicting Games asked us to do an online game version of WFD for their ‘Classic Arcade’ division and it produced well over 1.5 Million plays in it’s first 90 days as seen at http://www.addictinggames.com/worlds…erthegame.html
Having said all that above this test is the first coin-op version (pay to play) where the player has to put $1.00 in
The Arcade is more elaborate but just to get a slight feel of some the game play you can check the basic WFD Game for your keyboard at http://www.worldsfastestgamer.com/“
More info:
[World’s Fastest Drummer News @ ExtremeSportDrumming.com] [Via KLOV] [Game Galaxy Arcade]
