It’s been a busy weekend for me as I’ve been handling 5th anniversary dealings with my arcade, The Game Grid Arcade. According to the conventional wisdom, the business should not even exist, much less be busy enough to stay open and keep adding more games. I like to think that reaching such a milestone with a video arcade in today’s age is good sign although it is only one of many locations out there. There are many places that have been around much longer however, which are even better testaments in the industry.
(Thanks to Adam Coate for the tips on the Polygon stories)
Among the accumulating stories in the Arcade Heroes inbox are a couple of stories by game site Polygon. Their interest is increasing in arcade related stories as they have a few of them on their plate. First is a story about an XCOM Arcade cabinet, the other is a look at some of the prototype sketches for the original Gauntlet arcade cabinet.
On the XCOM story, a pair of cabinets were made for an even in the UK and they now reside with the developer, Firaxis. The artwork on them is nice although once the cabinet reaches the monitor it leaves something to be desired (could use a marquee and something to hide the bezel of the monitor). The story at Polygon also interviews the developer who goes over some of the challenges in long game development, particularly when a developer has a family to take care of. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of untold stories out there behind each video game. In the arcade industry I have spoke with a few where I have learned that we are no exception.
On the Gauntlet cabinet, the story at Polygon gets into some of the post-mortem on the development of that game at Atari and the issues found with creating a 4 player cabinet for a co-operative type game. As a compliment to that, recall this video that features Ed Logg giving his excellent and detailed post-mortem about the game.
There are two games, one is a new cabinet for an already released videmption title by UNIS called Fruit Mania Extreme Single, a standard version of their virtual coin pusher type game. Also, Andamiro has come up with some new titles, aside from pure redempition they also have a new music game for kids called Hit The Beat. Without a video it’s difficult to say how this one will work exactly but it is being setup to replace their Pump It Up Jump game.
On the Eastern side of the Pacific, it was unveiled today that Namco’s Sonic Storm is being tested out there as well. This game was first seen here in the USA on location test somewhere in Illinois not long ago. After the US test ended we have not heard anything else about the game, hopefully it will see a release sooner than later as it looks pretty awesome given the little we have seen.
I hope sonic storm performed well on testing in the US. Wonder if it will be multiplayer link up cabinets despite how much it could cost and also the space to fit more. Well for a start it’s certainly an experience that can’t be done at home anyway 🙂