Coin-op alumni brought together to make new iPad games

arcadehero February 3, 2012 4
Coin-op alumni brought together to make new iPad games

Newsfeed 1165 via The Stinger Report

I can’t say I particularly care for this trend of news that deals with more with mobile devices lately than actual arcades, but the kind of news that we generally focus on will probably be slow until AOU so we take what we can get.

So let’s start off with a hypothetical idea – what would happen if you took several coin-op game designer alumni and brought them together to develop a new game? While I think of that in the sense of what if they came back to do a coin-op game, we won’t know that for a long time most likely but we will know the result of that on the iPad thanks to the formation of a new company called Innovative Leisure. If that name sounds familiar to a degree, that is most likely because it used to be a marketing line from Atari back in the 70s in regards to their arcade development. It’s what they used before “Have you played Atari today?”

Yep, this is their logo

The new company, headed by Seamus Blackley of Xbox development fame has brought together several individuals whose games you have likely played at some point and they all have experience making classic coin-op arcade games: Ed Logg, Owen Rubin, Tim Skelly, Ed Rotberg, Dennis Koble, Rich Adam, Lyle Rains, Bruce Merritt, Bob Smith and Rob Zydbel.

Of course there is always a possibility that one of the new games they develop still manage to end up in arcades, as has been seen with other iPad games like Fruit Ninja, Infinity Blade and Flight Control. It certainly would be neat if at some point they decide to tackle a specific coin-op project but I doubt that is anywhere near likely for now.

 More details are available through this Gamasutra article.

4 Comments »

  1. DarkTetsuya February 3, 2012 at 8:47 pm - Reply

    While I may not be that big into the iDevice games (played sonic on a demo iPhone once, didn’t care for it) I gotta say this definetly should be interesting to see what kinda game they come up with.

  2. editor February 3, 2012 at 9:17 pm - Reply

    @Dark, yes they will be under a lot of pressure to come up with something impressive – though like the inventor of Tetris’ second game – I wonder if the expectation will be too much?

  3. ECM February 3, 2012 at 9:46 pm - Reply

    I have zero expectations for this, which is probably the only sane way to approach it.

    (Plus that Seamus guy is a clown on an epic scale–I once had to listen to him go on about how awesome he is for about an hour once (I don’t think it’s possible for him to speak without telling you he’s brilliant, he’s an amazing pianist, etc., then you realize he was the ‘genius’ behind Trespasser on the PC and you just kinda tune him out.).)

    • 60Hz February 6, 2012 at 12:22 pm - Reply

      lol… i have low expectations as well…

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