Golden Tee is one of the best selling arcade games in modern times, a staple of bars everywhere, even if they aren’t “bar/arcades.” While the company hasn’t needed the “gamer” segment of the market to find success, it’s still a video game and as you can tell from the GT2021 trailer, graphically the game is…terrible. I know graphics aren’t everything, but for a game wearing the the “2021” badge, it should look better than a budget-grade original Xbox game. IMHO 😛
Part of the reason for that is that since the game was rebooted back in 2007, most of the updates have been to the gameplay and not the game engine(there was one exception a few years back when IT offered a graphics card upgrade to bump the game up from 720p to 1080p). They’ve added 5-7 new courses every year, expanded online features and come up with new game modes. They also introduced the “Showcase” cabinet that has been standard for it ever since. This has all worked to keep the fanbase interested in the series, which is always difficult to do with annual releases of a franchise. GT is also one of the more affordable games on the market…game development, particularly when it comes to modern graphics is not a cheap endeavor, so reusing things there and on the cabinet side tends to help keep budgets low.
As we can see from this tease, it looks like the game will finally take a step closer to looking like a modern game, although final verdict will have to wait until we see active gameplay. That said, the video is in 4K, so perhaps that means it’ll support 4k out of the box.
The bigger news for fans though is that this is also the first time that the game will feature a PGA license. GlobalVR & EA Sports did team up about 15-20 years ago with the PGA Tour Golf series of games, but even that wasn’t enough to take out the Golden Tee juggernaut. That should mean official PGA golf courses and possibly some famous players (the past couple of releases have included the likes of John Daly).
We don’t know more than what’s seen below at the moment, but I’m sure that IT will provide much more bits of info throughout the year, as they like to do so in the run-up to the release. Chances are that this will launch in September, which is when every GT game is released. I am wondering if IT is prepping a new game cabinet for it; Since most cabs these days are flashy, perhaps that’s another thing that GT could use…
What do you hope to see out of the next iteration of Golden Tee?
