Retro Arcade Remakes & Atari Join Forces For PCB Reproductions [UPDATED]

[Thanks to GraffitiTavern for the tip]

[UPDATE 5/1/23] – Retro Arcades got back to me and stated: “Licensed Atari PCB boards Major Havoc, Black Widow, Gravitor, War Lords, Lunar Lander are now available food fight and millipede coming soon.”

They also added that work on the Warlords remake is coming along quite well, where they expect to begin full production around July/August. The cabinet has been heavily redesigned from what was shown at IAAPA in the video below; I’ll have more info as it comes along.

[Original Story]

Back at IAAPA 2022, Retro Arcade Remakes was the touting two major  items – their Ice Cold Beer Remake and a reproduction cabinet for Atari’s Warlords. But that wasn’t all. On a table at the center of the booth one could find a couple of reproduced PCBs: One for Taito’s Ice Cold Beer and the other for Atari’s Lunar Lander. You’ll see them at the beginning of this video, although since there is so much to discuss at IAAPA, I think they got overlooked.

As an important note, the repro of Warlords was seen at Midwest Gaming Classic, so hopefully that’s still on track; RAR also mentioned to me that they are working on a new arcade version of Atari’s semi-obscure classic Food Fight that supports up to 4 players, although it sounds like that’s still super early in the development process.

At the time of IAAPA, RAR had mentioned that there would be more PCBs and they would launch this year, fast forward to today and they are officially available, as shown on Atari’s website here or at select arcade parts distributors like Paradise Arcade.

For those curious, these are fully functional, albeit unpopulated,  PCBs based upon three classic Atari titles: Major Havoc,  Gravitar and Black Widow. Each PCB has text printed on it that explains how to play along with some history on each title. They are also serialized.

I did reach out to RAR about this but no response so far, so I’m not sure why these particularly games and where Lunar Lander is,but it’s worth noting that these are all vector games. Perhaps Asteroids & Space Duel will be next.

Retro Ralph is questioning why these aren’t populated, my guess is that reproducing some of those components or just sourcing the parts is proving difficult, if not impossible or prohibitively expensive to do. But I agree that it would be really nice to just buy one of these that is ready to go – I wouldn’t trust myself to transfer over such components as I always end up bending or breaking a pin.

Do you  have any interest in these, either as wall art or to replace an aged PCB in one of your games? Is there a game you’d love to see get a repro PCB?