Welcome to Newbytes, a curated compilation of arcade news from around the world, generally covering items that didn’t necessarily need their own full-blown post but are still worth mentioning. This week has seen arcade news slow to a crawl again, but in some positive location news, one of my locations is almost back-to-normal as far as earnings go. Seems like the light is at the end of the tunnel, but I won’t take anything for granted given how things have worked over the past year.
One other note before we get started – the Maximum Tune 5 Championship Main Draw ends after tomorrow. Hopefully, there is some more Bandai Namco arcade news after that… I also made a mistake on something I said in last week’s Newsbytes, I erroneously thought that there would be a news release regarding exA-Arcadia. WE’ll just have to hang tight for a while longer in that regard.
Team 17 Launches A New Save The Arcades Campaign
Long-time readers of the site should recall that back in 2009, Stride Gum launched a really cool effort called Save The Arcades. That campaign worked out well enough that they did a 2nd round the following year. I’m not sure why they stopped after that, but arcades did pretty well during the past decade.
Thanks to the pandemic stopping that progress in its tracks, arcades are in serious trouble again. Many locations have already closed, never to reopen, while some other icons of the location landscape are barely holding on. To help address that, game publisher Team 17 has taken the reigns of raising funds to help. From this great article on GamesIndustry.biz:
We’re talking to some of the biggest museums on the back of Team 17’s Saving The Arcade World campaign, which it’s launching to coincide with its 1980s-themed side-scroller Narita Boy. The campaign is designed to raise money for the three museums that are hoping to preserve the arcade business as more of it disappears, with funds being raised through the game, a music track from the game, and other activities yet to be announced.
“Arcades are a crucial part of the history of video games, but [they] also offer players a unique social experience that can’t be replicated purely online,” Dyson adds.
You can read up on that campaign on the game page for Narita Boy.
Bandai Namco Amusements Europe Begins Smiles For Miles
Speaking of fundraisers, this one by BNAE isn’t for arcades, but kids in need.
Sega To Launch InitialD: The Arcade On Feb. 25th
I don’t know if Round1USA will be grabbing this or not, but at least for Japan, the latest iteration of the popular driving series will be available for arcades to pick up.
Hologate Rolls Out Slugterra VR; Announces Hologate World
Now available at over 400 Hologate locations around the world, you can experience Slugterra in an out-of-home VR setting. I’d never heard of Slugterra before, but from the trailer it looks like it fits with what the Hologate setting offers:
On the other item, it looks like Hologate has decided to go into operations for themselves with HOLOGATE WORLD. Per Kevin Williams, this will launch in Europe (didn’t say where) this September. Once more details are known, it’ll work for a Location Watch post.
New Indie Arcade Page
After my discussion with Indie Arcade Wave, I realized that it would be good to list out all indie arcade games on a page of their own. Hence, we have this new page for tracking all indie arcade releases. I hope it can help raise the profile for indies a little more; Any post about an indie game gets barely any views, but it’s still important to cover them anyways. I still need to figure out where to put this on the site…the menu at the top is already full. Maybe it’s time for a new site theme that could solve that…
A Glimpse Into The Audio Production of Mortal Kombat
Thanks to Insert Coin Doc for sharing this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gv0RardhWc
The Namco Museum of Art Presents: Splatterhouse
The latest from NMA, this time covering the iconic oddball Splatterhouse. This is one of those games that started in arcades but gained more notoriety via the console ports & sequels. As with the other NMA videos, it is in Japanese but you can still appreciate the art:
Another Williams Alum Joins American Pinball
It sure looks like American Pinball is set on becoming a major player in pinball, as they’ve added Zofia Ryan to their team, shortly after adding Dennis Nordman. She is best known for creating the multi-level, multi-target mechanism in Doctor Who…should be really interesting to see what this growing team comes up with down the road.
Steve Aoki, Arcade1up & Capcom Team Up For Street Fighter II
This will include a tabletop cabinet and an apparel line designed in conjunction with the DJ. More info and pics here.
San Francisco Rush History
Shared on this tweet, a more complete version is found on the AH MeWe page.
Per Mike Jang, designer of the seats for the original San Francisco Rush, the seat used a new plastic molding process at the time and the seat supplier created neon green parts for Kawasaki. Mike knew this, so he had the seats use the same color to guarantee sufficient supply. pic.twitter.com/6eduSR7NTN
— Arcade Heroes – The Saviors of Coin-op Newsblog (@arcadeheroes) February 13, 2021
Arcade Trivia Game Update
Well, I wish I had better news, but things have stalled again as features stop working, and trying to implement new ones just seems to make it worse. The creator of the kit I’m using had re-emerged back in January, but he disappeared again, so is no help, and his walkthroughs for problems I’m dealing with are apparently using old versions of his kit and the assets, so a lot of things aren’t jiving together. I will keep trying to figure something out, but no idea when this will be ready in a truly playable state that I’m comfortable in selling.
That’s all for this week – I’ll leave you with a fun shmup-related meme:
https://twitter.com/shmups/status/1359296643070218244
Have a great weekend everyone!
Yeah we’re not getting the new Initial D. Let me run you through the obstacles:
Since the previous installment Initial D Zero, i-D is now tied to the ALL.NET service and are on revshare. You can’t run them offline anymore.
iD-10 will mark the return of the series’s iconic eurobeat soundtrack. Which means they are entirely licensed, probably through Universal Music Group Japan, who under the brand SUPER EUROBEAT was responsible for the italo disco/eurobeat craze in Japan back in the 90’s.
Music in Japan is licensed through either the JASRAC or NEXTONE rights societies and their licenses for arcade games involve royalties per-credit. How are you gonna make sure that happens? Through revshare.
Finally, UMJ often only retains the distribution rights to these eurobeat songs in the Japanese and Greater Asia region. The most famous and revered eurobeat artists, as you could probably surmise, Italian and they’ve retained their rights outside of Asia. So how is SEGA gonna be able to ensure they’re allowed to use this music outside of Asia? They can’t, not unless they individually deal with each artist.
The only way Round1USA got away with operating iD before is because you could run them completely offline and not pay revshare dues to SEGA. And due to the difficulties associated with obtaining the worldwide rights to the soundtrack these games aren’t coming stateside in any legitimate fashion anytime soon.
Thanks @Enoch, for your observations. I would however propose a counter view.
– Yes Initial D The Arcade is connected to ALL.Net – but so was Maximum Tune 5, and that has been ported to the West (see Arcade Hero announcement on new tournament)
– Yes the licensed music (and also vehicles that you missed) would have to have Western licensed support, as was done with previous properties. Not trivial I grant you, but if the commitment was there…
On the Round1USA machine operation – this operator gets round (as does D&B) with running their own ALL.Net system in many cases. A unique position, and one that obviously is not going to be copied by most operators. There is also the small issue that Round1 ships straight from Japan via their parent company, and they have carte blanche authority to get round territorial restrictions. And with that both have fed off the revenue generated by these titles, while others are angry at being excluded.
I think finally we need to admit the reality – the real block to the appearance of Initial D The Arcade (a very profitable and popular IP in the Western arcades as seen above) is sales pushback. With warehouses loaded with nominally priced racers, why should the effort be placed in selling this version – I leave the question to the conscious of the sales teams at the respective distributors to answer that question.