Last year, the Taiwan-based arcade developer IGS unveiled a new snowmobile racing title called Hyper Cross. It was promoted on a Chinese manufacturer website and YouTube channel, but other than that we didn’t have much else to go off of since no Western arcade house had mentioned it. I also was hoping to see it at IAAPA 2022, but it was absent.
Give it some time and it seems like most IGS games find their way to Western shores, we’re just never 100% sure who might be involved until a said game pops up. Thanks to this photo shared on the AH Discord by Ted, we now know that Sega Amusements is looking into bringing it over here:
And thanks again to Ted, here’s a better look at the game than the above. I hadn’t noticed the skis & shocks on the cabinet seat before, that’s a nice touch. It appears in this video at 2:25 but the aspect ratio is garbage since the video was uploaded for 9:16 but the part where the guy is using the game it’s in sort of a 16:9 – cropped into the 9:16. Hurray for phones as video cameras :/
This is currently on test at the Airport Bowl in West London, a popular spot for Sega to test new games. Other titles that have recently been tested there include Crazy Rafting and Storm Rider 2, both of which have been released to the Western market at large. Of course, it can still fail the test or not reach production for some reason, so this is not a guarantee that it’ll see a full launch here (one reason that could also delay it are the number of racing games Sega has on the market right now – if it performs well, they could delay it a little to not “stomp” on one of their other games like Drone Racing Genesis or Storm Rider 2). But it also could mean that we’ll see it sometime later this year if everything works out.
What do you think about this game from what little we have seen so far?
