While most VR-enabled options for arcades have been more in the realm of attendant-required, “medium scale”attractions, there have been a few options that have been looking to provide something that is closer to an arcade machine with VR as opposed to a full-blown attraction. Of those products, only one has emerged as a success, as highlighted by Kevin Williams yesterday, LAI Games’ Virtual Rabbids – The Big Ride.
We’ve covered this game a few times, from initial location test to the release, and since then, the VR virtual roller coaster has been slowly racking up the sales. This is a challenge as the game is well above the cost of something like House of the Dead Scarlet Dawn or Halo: Fireteam Raven Super Deluxe – about twice the cost of the main competitor on the market, the Typhoon. But with some persistence and good word-of-mouth on weekly earnings, the company just saw their 500th installation of the game, per this tweet below from our friend Kevin Williams:
Big Congratulations to the team at #LAIGames for the 500th installation of the #VirtualRabbids machine pic.twitter.com/1cAwbJ3jCg
— DigitalOutOfHomeEnt (@DNA_Conference) June 24, 2019
With that significant milestone reached, it’s time for an update to the game to further improve repeat play. LAI has been teasing this update for a while now, but with the arrival of the International Bowl Expo, they are ready to show it off to the industry. Here’s a preview posted to YouTube this morning, showing direct capture footage of the three new “rides” as they are called (might also be called films, depending on your salesperson). That said, one of them (Space Skirmish) states that it is interactive; judging by the video, I’m guessing that it uses an auto-fire function if you look directly at the targets. That’s a nice touch to elevate it above the typical ride:
The ability to add more film experiences (each film/ride tends to last about 3 minutes give or take some seconds) has always been one of the advantages of these kinds of machines, allowing them to rejuvenate interest from consumers.
I’ll be at the Bowl Expo tomorrow to check this and any other new items out. If you’ve already experiences Virtual Rabbids, what did you think about it and are you looking forward to this update?
Played it here in Newcastle Australia.. Great ride. Really effective. Gets a lot of plays at my local location.