When you first read the headline here, you were probably thinking “is this dredging up an old article? Adrenaline already has a Hot Wheels game.” Well, not to worry as we’ll clear things up quick. Adrenaline Amusements is continuing to leverage the Hot Wheels license that they have, removing Hot Wheels: King of the Road from their active product roster as they are prepping to launch a more serious racer within the series. This will join Hot Wheels: Ultimate Race by Coastal Amusements, assuming that it hits production. Let’s take a look at what appears to just be called Hot Wheels.
H/T to Jdevy for the find! Also, for those interested, I’ve cut a video discussing the same topic, that you can watch here.
Hot Wheels – A New Arcade Driver
In case some of that first paragraph made no sense to you, Adrenaline Amusements released a videmption game back in 2020 called Hot Wheels: King of the Road. It was released in 4 & 6-player versions, and perhaps you’ve come across it out there in the FEC wilds.
The subject of this post is still using that popular Mattel license, but instead of putting all players on one screen with a simple set of driving controls, this is a standard sit-down arcade racer that reuses the Need For Speed Heat: Takedown DX cabinet. As far as we know, this is the first time that a pure (i.e. non-redemption, just amusement) Hot Wheels video game would land in the arcade scene. There was also the Hot Wheels pinball machine by American Pinball that launched in 2020.
Are There More Details?
As of this moment, there isn’t much else that we know about the game, as AA has not responded for comment. We also haven’t heard about it testing in the arcade wilds. Jdevy, who brought this to our attention, found it as a part of the Hot Wheels manual, although in looking through that, it seems to be an early version – they have a blank page at the moment for ‘Game Features’. That said, looking through the rest of it, it still has a player camera like NFS used, and can link four units together. Hopefully, it has a nice range of courses to choose from.
There is also a very high likelihood that this game is testing out there somewhere, as Adrenaline does tend to release a manual when a game is on test so that the location can refer to it if needed for any technical items.
Beyond that, it appears from the image above that you’ll be able to select from a number of licensed HW cars, then race on the orange/blue tracks that are placed in real-world settings. We can’t rule out that this is based on an existing game like Hot Wheels Unleashed 2, given that NFS Heat Takedown was based on NFSH. That said, that game was so heavily modified that it wasn’t the same game that was found at home. Unleashed 2 seems to be the most likely base for this new game.
What do you think about this one?
