Every Summer about this time, I write up a post that feels the same, as it deals with a game that launches every year in September – the latest iteration of Incredible Technologies’ Golden Tee. The annual launch has kept this as the longest refreshed series found in the arcade business (not the oldest, but certainly the most revisited). It also remains the most popular golf video game on the planet, with over 10,000 units installed into bars and other amusement venues out there, and consistently strong sales on the home side. On the latter point, Golden Tee is often one of the best selling arcade games into homes, right next to the likes of whichever Pac-Man multigame that Namco is currently selling into that market.
So, what’s going on with Golden Tee 2020, you might ask? Plenty, as this fresh new trailer points out. I’ll let it do the talking for a couple of moments, then go from there:
Summing it up for you here:
- 5 new courses (Jamaica Bay; Oakwood Hills; Lake Powell; Grand Teton; Dodge City)
- 2 re-imagined classic courses (Coral Ridge & Castle Shire)
- Real Time Rivals are online now; defeat them to unlock in-game rewards
- Revamped events mode
- “Freaky courses” are now available in Casual Mode
- More wacky clubs, outfits and golf balls
IT has also been very active in promoting the game for the past while on their social media accounts, where you can get news of events and updates there.
The core gameplay hasn’t changed by any indication that I’ve seen, which is good, although I really think that it’s way past time for them to roll out some new graphics. I get that their core audience doesn’t really care (and they did roll out a hardware update a few years ago that bumped the game resolution up to 1080p at least), so that probably makes this point moot, but the game is just looking ancient by today’s graphics standards.
Granted, Golden Tee never was at the cutting edge of graphics in arcades. But I don’t think that anyone would complain if GT looked nicer. Write a raytracing shader and offer the cheapest nVidia RTX card on the market (still going to cost more than the gfx card that these come with, so that would increase the base cost of the games by a couple/few hundred dollars)…or at least a new HDR engine. Anything would be an improvement at this point, although in the case of GT, I imagine that the RTX On/Off thing would be rather noticeable in it’s case. 😉
Anyways, Golden Tee 2020 is set to launch to bars & arcades on September 24th, with the Home Edition always coming a month or two later. There are no shots of the cabinet for this yet, but I would assume that it will be the same as we’ve seen since IT released the “Showcase” cabinet back in 2007. Kits will be available, so that owners of existing GT units can update the software, swap out the art and they’ll be good to go.
What do you think about the next version of Golden Tee, from what has been shown so far?
Great to see arcade tournament support going strong in the west from at least ONE company!