I can remember going to see Men In Black in the theaters back when the film launched in the 1990s, and it became a movie that I think rewatched several times over the years. The hype around it was real at the time, and that certainly helped the sequel, although I never caught the reboot that came along a few years ago.
Arcades generally don’t need to launch in conjunction with a film to do well though, although I personally believe that it can help both the game and venues which are able to “ride the wave” that Hollywood creates around movie launch time. Problem is, they’re always so concerned with spoilers and game development schedules being what they are, it isn’t often we see the launches line up.
Anyways, I’ve been mentioning for a while now that one of Sega Amusements’ next big pieces was going to be a Men In Black videmption game – I think I first heard about it back at IAAPA 2019 – but thanks to the pandemic, it and a few other projects in development at the company got pushed back way beyond the intended launch date. Today, they finally unveiled the piece on their website and through a trailer.
This cabinet appears to be pretty close in style to the location test cabinet we saw months ago, although that was from a distance so it’s hard to tell if it’s really that close or if some changes have been made. As you can tell from the marquee, the principal purpose of this one is to work as a videmption game; There is no mention of an amusement (ticketless) mode on the game page, so we’ll assume it’s just focused on the tickets. It also has an infinity mirror built into the console, further given a highlight by animated LED lights. This operates on a 55″ HD monitor and uses a 2.1ch sound system with a 12″ subwoofer.
That product page also mentions “90-second gameplay,” which I suppose makes it about 9x longer than most redemption games out there 😛 The teaser here shows us the alien baddies that you’re chasing down, although I would guess from this that there’s more to come back to than just what you can get in 90 seconds; The game page also mentions various missions, so perhaps that means 90 seconds a mission on average.
This game is launching soon, and will be at IAAPA 2021 in a couple of weeks. I’ll be nabbing video of it there to share with you then. What do you think about it from what has been shown so far?
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