Not long before Space Invaders dominated the gaming scene, “Snake” games did. Now, there wasn’t any game actually called Snake that was in arcades – instead it was games like Comotion or Dominos. But the concept would stick around through a number of variations over the years, including the Snake on graphical calculators that most people think of when the game pops-up.
Fast-forward to today and you might be familiar with a game called Slither, better known as Slither.io due to it being a browser game. The game has enjoyed a bit of popularity among the younger crowd, in part due to being covered by popular YouTube gaming channels. As an app, the game has dominated the download leaderboards on places like the Google Play store, enjoying over 65 million downloads over it’s lifetime so far.
Slither.io Arcade
As you can gather from the headline, Slither.io is finally making the jump to the arcade market. Over the weekend, I was alerted to the game being seen on test at a location in Illinois and checked with Raw Thrills about it. Fortunately, they sent us this high resolution image showing the game cabinet in all of it’s glory:
The cabinet is a re-design of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cabinet (which itself was a re-design of the Injustice cab). This means a 55″ screen but a relatively small footprint, and plenty of bright LED lighting. It has been designed primarily as a redemption title, where you can see the ticket doors on the front. Each player is controlled using a knob controller (likely the same design as Raw Thrills created for their Wheel of Fortune videmption game) and features a Boost button. The software has been modified to not only work for arcade needs, but also to accommodate three players. The playfield does not scroll around, the camera is zoomed out. It also has other features that are supposed to allow it to stand out from the app version, but those have not been unveiled yet.
While Raw Thrills didn’t specify how long the game has been on test (it’s been there for a few weeks at least – the picture I initially saw was dated September 24th), but they stated that it’s been performing extremely well, outearning the popular Ice Man game that has been topping the videmption charts this year.
With this reveal coming now, I also confirmed that this game will be playable at IAAPA 2018 next month in Orlando, FL. I also found out about another brand new game that will be there (something mentioned in my Arcade Almanac in the coming soon section 😉 ), but we’ll have to wait on that one for the moment. Stay tuned for more information as we get it!
What do you think about this game from what we know so far?
I like how the game is using knobs rather than joysticks. I’ve seen the app but never played it but does look fun as I used to enjoy snake on my old phone. The knobs will give more precision and the multiplayer will be popular.