Way back in February of last year, I ran a story about an interesting new game that had launched over in the UK/EU via a distributor called UDC; The name of the game was Sky Riders. What made it interesting was that it was a new age take on a unique Namco arcade game from the 1990s called Prop Cycle. If you are unfamiliar with that game, it required players to pedal using a mechanism similar to what is found on a bicycle. The harder you pedaled, the faster you would go. This made it a physically demanding game but as mentioned, rather unique. It’s certainly one of those things that you never got with a home console.
Sky Riders, developed by a Chinese company known as Ace Amusement, takes the Prop Cycle idea and gives it a modern setup. It maintains the pedaling and wind effect, but offers the package in a Twin cabinet model. The graphics per this off-screen video below also look nice, with the game moving along at a smooth 60fps all the time. It appears that in China they call it RetroTech Cycle, and the cabinet reflects that “Retro Tech” with the steampunk aesthetic. I guess I’m surprised the Western version wasn’t called Steampunk Cycle, although maybe they wanted to avoid using the “cycle” part in the title.
As a note, Ace Amusement also created the light-gun game Wild West Shootout that is currently available in the States via Coastal Amusements.
I’m not sure how many locations over in Europe have grabbed the game, but for those locations in North America who might be interested in it, now it’s available through Amusement Source International. They recently posted a photo of the Standard version of the game to their LinkedIn page, but it is not listed on their website as of this moment.
I checked with ASI and the game works as a videmption game or it can be amusement-only. It was supposed to be at IAAPA, but was trapped on one of the many ships that have been sitting outside of the Long Beach, CA sea port(there were two other games that were also held back because of that, a videmption game called Magic Rabbit that is similar to the new Monopoly Roll’N Go game by ICE, and a redemption piece called Pirate Legend) . That said, it sounds like they have more units available than just the one that would have gone to a tradeshow, but I still imagine that stock is very limited.
What do you think about this?
