Welcome to Newsbytes, a curated collection of quick news items from around the world of arcades and pinball. While we’ve had a lot of game releases in the past month, these smaller bits of news haven’t been plentiful so Newsbytes has been slightly infrequent and I don’t have a ton of stuff to share below, apart from headlines. That said, we do have:
Trade Shows Take Off
March is a month for arcade & amusement trade shows and this past week has seen the month start off with two of them – IAAPI (taking place in Mumbai, India) and GTI Asia China Expo (taking place in Guangzhou, China); another called the IAAPA Middle East Trade Summit starts on Tuesday; The NJAA East Coast Gift & Variety Show, which will have UNIS there at least, starts on Monday, then the Family Entertainment Expo takes place in Italy on March 10th-12th. OF course at the very end of the month we’ll have Amusement Expo along with the Bar & Restaurant Expo (a lot of arcade makers visit the latter, which used to be called the Nightclub & Bar Show).
IAAPI ended yesterday while GTI Asia China is still taking place, although I’m not seeing a ton of media coming out of either event so far. Let’s start with IAAPI, then do GTI.
IAAPI 2023
As you can see at the top of the site here (and below if it goes away), one of our advertisers was there, TouchMagix, with the latest versions of Carnival Cups, SpaceWarp 66 and Hop ‘N Stack:
Sega Amusements were there with a small booth showing Bop-It Arcade, although I’ve yet to see photos of their setup. LAI Games came along too with Slam N’ Jam Ultra and Let’s Bounce.
Finally, ASI, a distributor in the region (and I think covers other parts of Asia and the Middle East) was showing off a number of redemption games and Trio-Tech’s Storm VR.
GTI 2023
Now for GTI 2023 (whose website is not loading at the moment without a warning, so I’ll refrain from linking at the moment). UNIS emailed out this photo of their GTI setup as they also discussed a few other shows that they are attending this month:
Wahlap posted this preview to YouTube – there aren’t any new never-before-seen video games in the mix, but they do have some new redemption stuff that I imagine will go West at some point:
Jersey Jack Pinball To Reveal The Godfather On Tuesday
As recently mentioned on the blog, March is also a month for pinball gaming and not content to sit back and let Stern get all of the glory on Foo Fighters, Jersey Jack announced on Instagram that they will unveil their latest design, The Godfather, on Tuesday.
Running up to that, they also sent out some teases with the game’s designer, Eric, including a huge number of parts that it has (I have thoughts on this as an operator but I’ll hold my tongue for now) and that they already have them packed up and ready to ship. The latter is important as for the past few years, stock on pins has been something of a nightmare, with super long lead times in some cases…
American Teases Galactic Tank Force
Information is also slowly trickling out on American Pinball’s next game, Galactic Tank Force. Since these teasers were posted to YouTube they’ve been strangely made unavailable (maybe because one of them is using licensed music?). So I took the liberty of reuploading them, which you can see below. There are no cabinet or playfield shots yet, so we’ll just have to hang tight, maybe for the Texas Pinball Festival. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if AP will be at Amusement Expo at this point.
Galloping Ghost Does A Dark Presence Livestream
I haven’t had a chance to watch it so I’m not sure if this is going to be seeing production or not, but it’s been in development almost as long as this blog has been around, so that’s certainly a record among arcade games, if not gaming in general. I was able to catch a few minutes by jumping into the stream at random and saw some gameplay. I’m not sure if it still takes up a terabyte of space but it does appear to be keeping with the original vision in other elements (think of it as a modern take on Mortal Kombat, using digitized characters).
The embed isn’t working here, so you can check it out by following this link.
Headlines
Pinball – Effective Layoff Therapy?
The Arcade Scene From The Last Of Us TV Show
Sword Art Online Arcade No Longer Being Supported
New Trailer For Mutagen, A Zombie Shooter On Arkadia VR – The game itself launched back at IAAPA 2022, but this trailer popped up this week
Looking For One Of DSM Arcades’ Releases? Check Out Their Game/Location Finder
A Thread Worth Bookmarking: 3D Printable Arcade Parts
Sega’s Congo Bongo Turned 40 This Week
Visiting The Arcade In Jitsu Squad
The 7-11 x Pac-Man Collab Is Going On From Now Through May
Stay Tuned To This Space For More Info On Enter The Gungeon Arcade…
I Agree With Arcade Repair Tips Here – Kinda Weird For A Wealthy Guy Like Spielberg To Not Have An OG Star Wars Arcade Cab – Maybe he does in some other mansion somewhere…
That’s it for now – see you next time!
