The Walking Dead Arcade Officially Unveiled; Coming January 2017

We’ve known that Play Mechanix and Raw Thrills have been testing out The Walking Dead in arcades for a little while now. We knew that the cabinet shown was a prototype and today, Betson has unveiled the final design for us to check out.

The Walking Dead Flyer & Cabinet

First, let’s start with the cabinet. The original test cabinet was a reskinned Jurassic Park Arcade cab.  Play Mechanix stated that this was not going to be the final and as we see from the flyer, here is the new design as shown on the flyer (which notes that some changes may still occur):

It still uses an environmental cabinet but the changes fit better with the theme of the show. The “rear door attraction feature” is interesting as a play on the zombies breaking through the doors; there is a bench seat and there appears to be a new lighting feature that “follows the action on screen.” From the trailer below, this appears to be RGB LED lighting in the ceiling of the cabinet that changes according to the action (ala light feedback). This also will use the “Thrill-D” sound system that was introduced with Jurassic Park Arcade in 2015; that same system is present in Cruis’n Blast.

They also have kept the crossbow controllers that we saw a short time ago. These remind me of the controller in Exidy’s Crossbow but they use a unique lever reload mechanism for reload and player interactivity. When the arrows are being used, players have 8 shots per reload.

The game will be at IAAPA 2016 which begins a week from now so we will be able to see how this works in person.

The Walking Dead Trailer

This Betson page has a trailer and link to the flyer itself but for those that would like to see it in a larger format, here is the trailer embedded (NOTE: The video has been updated so if you saw it earlier, we were sent a slightly modified version, now embedded below):

From watching this a couple of times, it appears that the hordes of enemies are much larger than what was seen in Terminator Salvation and Aliens Armageddon. From the looks of it, TWD seems to be a blending of the two. The use of other weapons (such as hammer or axes) seems to show that there are more scripted events to break the monotony of “sprayin’ n’ prayin'” style shooting.

Graphically this looks to have higher detail than Jurassic Park, almost like an upgraded Big Buck Wild/Doe of the Dead engine. The colors seem to stand out thanks to the enemy/item highlights (which are often muted in zombie games).

As a violent game (which the industry used to call red label), some locations will not pick it up but I think there are enough locations out there that cater to a mature audience as it is that can get around that.

The Walking Dead arcade will be released in January 2017. The last zombie game to find itself in the arcade was Doe of the Dead: In Case of Zombies, which was released as a part of an update to Big Buck Wild; prior to that, the only major name that comes to mind is Sega’s House of the Dead 4 (not forgetting EX but that was a limited release).

So what are your thoughts on this upcoming arcade game?