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Bomb Jack. Solomon’s Key. Ninja Gaiden. Rygar. Tecmo Bowl. Dead or Alive. These titles are familiar to many gamers and among them are some commonalities. One, they were made by Tecmo. Two, they were all released as arcade titles originally. It also has been quite a while since Tecmo did anything in arcades. Since their last arcade release in 2001 with Monster Farm Jump, they merged with a company called Koei (known for series like Dynasty Warriors and the many, many variations on that concept) and after becoming Tecmo Koei, they have stuck to producing content for home gaming platforms.
It seems that someone at Tecmo remembers their glory days in arcades as news has hit that they are looking to get back into it. Most of the story is behind a paywall at Nikkei but the little blurb gives us enough to go on for now (also, Japanese game news sites like AM-NET are also reporting it as a re-entry to the arcade market). From what has been unveiled so far, they plan on offering a “flagship fighting game arcade for 800 stores in Japan from the end of the year in collaboration with Sega.” That flagship game will apparently be an arcade version of Dead or Alive 5, which was released for home consoles last year. This game featured some Sega characters as well as some over-the-top physics the series has become known for. How they might plan on changing it for arcades is unknown at this time but one thing is certain – if it does really well they will likely work on other games for the market too. It’s also too early to guess at whether DOA5AC or any other projects they will bring to arcades will come overseas but Sega has the overseas operations on the arcade side to make it happen, if the right project for the market comes along. It is not entirely clear yet what Sega’s involvement will be here but chances are they will handle the hardware side of things – or perhaps DOA5AC will become a headliner for their ALL.NET+ Multi game network. This will be the first time DOA has been in arcades since 1999; here is a trailer showing DOA5 Ultimate which will be released to home consoles in September.
UPDATE: With more information coming out here is some extra data to fill in the holes. Looks like some of our assumptions were correct. Tecmo Koei has announced that they will be bringing DOA5 Ultimate: Arcade to game centers digitally via Sega’s ALL.NET+ Multi Ver. 2 network. It will run on the Ringedge 2 hardware and will be released this Winter. [Source @ Dengeki]
For now I think its safe to assume that they will work with the safe stuff that exists for home consoles and porting it over but we can always hope for some original content too. Being that Koei is a part of them now, it’s well overdue to see something Dynasty Warriors-like that is designed specifically for arcades (Capcom had a game called War of The Grail in the works back in 2006 which would have offered that but it was never released). Of course Koei themselves never really paid much attention to arcade development. For the time being we will just have to wait it out and see where this venture goes.
Oh the exaggeration of boobs all over the place in arcades finally. Mai finally found some competition.
I honestly thinking it might be a different game from 5. It’s been 12 years since the last release and they’re kinda late jumping back in the arcade game. I think that’s where they lost some of their audience when the DOA series (3 and 4) was a X-Box and X-Box 360 exclusive.
The game would have picked up in the arcade if they kept releasing them and focus a little more on the game play and less on lonely sad nerds losing their mind over Kasumi boob all over the screen.
Where DOA5 Ultimate is coming in September, it seems likely that the AC version will be a variation of that. Doing DOA6 when DOA5U is so soon seems unlikely. But not impossible. As mentioned, with Sega being involved, I think that there is a good chance they could bring this to ALL.NET+. With Guilt Gear Xrd on board, they probably are looking to beef up their line-up to get more game centers on board with the hardware. DOA5 could certainly help in that regard.
Sega need to quit the bullshit and release an arcade version of Fighter Mega Mix, or Fighting Vipers (a new version of Sonic Fighters would not be bad)
But I see what they’re doing. Hopefully all the content that was in 5 as was as some additional characters exclusive characters (for a time period) can be featured on there.
It perplexes me a little how all of the arcade companies behave in regards to fighting games. It should not be so hard to do successful release of an arcade fighter – just don’t shoot it in the foot with the home release and at a ridiculous price point. Yet they consistently do that every single time.
I really can’t see any reason for an operator to invest in this if a home version comes out at the same time. Better for them to invest in a redemption machine or another racer.
If we’re looking at how Japan handles dealing with home versions, it’ll likely stay exclusive to arcades in their territory while we in other countries get the console release. Extras will be DLC as well so nobody misses out (as it should be).
There have been some Japanese operators that have complained about how home/arcade ports are handled there too. Sometimes they get lucky and the software is out long enough for them to at least make their money back but so often the companies have it ready to go in just a month or two. Persona 4 was a good recent example – I think they got a buffer of 3 months. The game was only about $2k-$3k at least but it also hasn’t made waves with earnings AFAIK. There are some players who practice in both and there are certain advantages that Japan has over other territories to weaken the blow. This also might not be such an issue if there was anything that fighters did much differently hardware-wise but it’s been a while since I’ve seen any take that risk since the goal is always to make it easy to port home.