The dog days of summer and arcade news don’t seem to go together too well, although the desire to come across anything arcade-news related today had me on a hunt across a bunch of manufacturer websites. Most haven’t given me anything to talk about, then I checked out Incredible Technologies’ site and was happy to find a couple of updates.
First, they now have a page for their newest release, Retro Raccoons, something that we’ve been hoping that they would post for some time now. In case you’ve missed coverage of that, it’s been on the blog for the past four years and I also got to play it at the AEI 2021 tradeshow a few weeks ago.
The other addition to their site was a little surprise, as I don’t recall hearing anything about this at AEI. That is a game that they are calling Arcade Collection. At first I thought that this might entail a bunch of IT’s early 90’s releases like Rim Rockin’ Basketball, Slick Shot or Ninja Clowns, but it is looking at more recent releases. This will take three of IT’s popular games: Target Toss (both Lawn Darts & Bags), Silver Strike Bowling, & PowerPutt Golf – and offer them either as a kit or in their standard showpiece cabinet.
(Sorry for the white lines in the image – there’s no cabinet image yet and the above couldn’t be saved as it’s own image, so I had to use the screen snip tool straight from the webpage).
Each game comes complete, offering all of the content that you would find with this titles separately, and some enhancements are mentioned. One of those is PowerPutt is receiving a new side game called Poker Putt. The “Raw Talk” thing that is mentioned is for profanity-laced audio – something that was made for the bar scene (since those are all over 21 anyways). Target Toss Pro is no longer available by itself, so this will be the only way to get one outside of a used machine when this collection launches [presumably] later this year.
There’s no indication yet as to when this will be available, and it will also be interesting to see where the price goes, but if you operate or have owned these games and want to save some space, this looks like a great way to do it – especially with a kit available. This also allows us to throw out the question – What multi-game options like this would you love to see from your favorite gaming company?
If only there are light gun or driving game collections that utilize the same control scheme for a cabinet, that would be an awesome killer for kits.
Joystick arcade video game collections exist mostly out of unlicensed stuff. Very rare for coin-op multi-game to actually exist with official license such as Namco collection and Ultracade.
If collections are going to sell good enough, exclusive content should be the big draw.