With it being less than a week before Christmas, things are getting as busy as they can get in the year – for me anyways. Here’s a round-up of your arcade news for the weekend:
Step Revolution & Konami Collaborating? – For a little while now, Step Revolution founder and In The Groove (ITG) creator Kyle Ward has been teasing that something big might be happening at Konami and yesterday on Facebook he posted this video showing some odd looking dance pads – something like a cross between DDR and Pump It Up. There is a chance that the video below might not work due to the sharing restrictions so in case it does not, it shows the shiny new pads. I took a screencap just in case. This has not been confirmed as an arcade thing yet but since there’s a good chance, we’ll be keeping an eye on it!
Ghostbusters Pinball Backglass Leaked? – Earlier today an image leaked out into the wide internet (apparently some people had seen it a few weeks ago but now its all over the place) that purports to be a version of the backglass art for the rumored-to-be-upcoming Ghostbusters pinball machine by Stern Pinball. This seems to grant some credence to the rumor, but until Stern unveils it we’ll keep it in the rumor mill. It’s important to note that changes can be made at any time and generally Stern produces 3 or 4 different machines (Pro, Premium, Limited edition, maybe a special variation of the LE once in a while) so if this is legit, we won’t know which version it would go to. If I had to guess, I’d say it is the LE backglass since the recent KISS Pinball LE got such a thing…and the artwork seen below does have a similar style to the KISS LE backglass. You be the judge! [Source – Nifty LED]:
Tokyo Joypolis Fixes and Reopens ‘Veil of the Dark’ – Interactive roller coasters are gaining steam on the market and Sega’s Joypolis theme park in Japan has just re-opened their Veil of the Dark ride that pre-empted them a few years back. From the webpage promoting it, it looks a little like House of the Dead – The Roller Coaster, minus the House of the Dead license.
Carrie Fisher Star Wars interview in front of some giant arcade cabinets – It isn’t Star Wars 7 related but still Star Wars. The cabinets in question were specially built Atari cabinets, Anti-Aircraft II can be seen as one of the games getting play.
Computer Space Gets FPGA’ed – (Click here for reading up on what an FPGA is). For the first mass produced video arcade machine, Computer Space didn’t sell very well but that does not remove its important spot from history. Now a user has recreated the hardware in FPGA which could lead to the production of modern replacement boards for the game… or just serve as an interesting engineering project.
