News Round-Up: SpaceWar Turns 50, Namco changes, Capcom Restaurant

arcadehero February 15, 2012 0
News Round-Up: SpaceWar Turns 50, Namco changes, Capcom Restaurant

Time for yet another round-up of those sort of related news items that I just haven’t felt really needed a post all to themselves. All links brought to us by The Stinger Report.

SpaceWar Turns 50 – The 1962 creation of SpaceWar was not a coin-op game but it was an important milestone in the development of games and would heavily influence arcade games that would come a little later. In particular Computer Space (1971) and Space War (Vectorbeam/Cinematronics, 1976) and later Asteroids (1979). Space War and Asteroids were big hits and proved to fuel the arcade craze, the Vectorbean/Conematronics version introduced the vector monitor to the arcade scene (the original SW likewise used a vector as seen above) which also launched a whole subset of classic arcade titles.

Namco Bandai creates Namco Bandai Game Studio – I checked into this with someone at Namco America and they said it won’t really affect them. It sounds like the typical consolidation that could have the effect of helping prices come down a little on their arcade games. Sort of like what happened with Sega’s arcade side last year.

Capcom is starting a restaurant – I make no bones about my disdain for Capcom after their lousy handling of SSFIV in arcades overseas where there is still no 2012 upgrade freely available as far as I have heard so I won’t shed a tear if this goes nowhere. Serving something that looks more like a pile of bloody dog crap than brains seems like they are off on a good start on that path.

UPDATE: EAG 2012 Report by Arcade Belgium. Nomax from Arcade Belgium sent me a link to his thoughts and pictures from his visit to EAG 2012 in London this year.

Speaking of EAG, some videos of the event were uploaded by Peter Riley to Youtube

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