Capcom Has Tested Luigi’s Mansion Arcade In Japan

(Thanks to ECM for the tip)

Back on October 30th, a new location test began in Japan that interestingly enough seems to have avoided most of the Japanese arcade newswires. That is a fairly rare thing to occur, especially when you have a license/name like Luigi attached to it. Here is the loctest promo poster for Luigi’s Mansion Arcade as seen on Gamestalk.net:

And thanks to that license, there are plenty of Nintendo fans out there who are paying attention to this to hopefully provide more pictures. As you can see above, the cabinet design is a Theater cabinet, which has been popular to find in modern arcades since Sega’s Let’s Go Jungle. Likely this is a light-gun game with vacuums as the “gun”. Also given the design, this likely has a 55″ screen. Unfortunately we have no idea how the game plays at this point but it is safe to assume that it will play differently than the home versions.

The sad thing is however is that this is seemingly being handled by Capcom alone (although there could always be someone else involved here that we don’t yet know about). I don’t say that as a negative to the game quality but as a negative to the chances of finding this outside of Japan. In Japan the company has not kept up very well with their arcade competitors in recent years. Aside from Street Fighter (now done through Taito), releases have been rare, like the odd Monster Hunter themed pig racing game. They also did a New Super Mario Bros Wii themed redemption game which I have not seen imported to the West in any form so far.

As Capcom has no official arcade presence out West, the only way we will see this here is an operator spending the cash to import it or a US-based manufacturer deciding to give it a go (or the possibility that someone else is involved with this game behind the scenes – which is still open). Both of which could indeed happen when you have chains like Dave & Busters or Round1USA wanting to get their hands on some unique games that no one else has.

For now though, here is a picture of someone looking at the cabinet from Twitter user PO121KARMA:

Gamestalk now also has an update about the game too, which through translation shows that the game is indeed a light-gun type game as I had guessed and it is aiming for a Japanese release in Summer 2015. The game is creatively based upon Luigi’s Mansion 2 that came out for the Nintendo 3DS, although it will certainly use upgraded hardware and different play mechanics. Here is a tweet showing another cabinet shot, no one seems to have been able to get one from the inside at this point:

That same Twitter user linked to this additional picture:

I’ll keep my eyes and ears open for more info on this one, especially at IAAPA 2014 to see if there is any interest in someone bringing this over. What do you think of Luigi’s Mansion Arcade?