After months of rumors and teases, Alan-1 has officially announced that they have created a variation to their Soda Slam! arcade game that was released earlier this year, called Dr PepperTM SODA SLAM! Let’s take a look.
Soda Slam’s Journey
We’ve been covering the journey of this game idea since DSM Arcade first unveiled Perfect Pour a little over a year ago. The game itself started shipping earlier this year, but around IAAPA 2024, it had been picked up by Alan-1 and turned into an FEC version called Soda Slam! That was released this Summer, but Alan-1 had more plans behind it – as we’re seeing now. Here’s when I installed a Soda Slam! at my location:
What’s Different About Dr PepperTM SODA SLAM!?
The gameplay isn’t what is different here – you’re still pouring drinks as quickly and as accurately as possible by pulling back the tap handles, competing against the CPU or another player. The default mode of play is also for tickets, although you can play just for fun/points. It also has Alan-1’s MLES app for score tracking and tournaments.
What has changed are some of the graphics, where they’ve incorporated the Dr Pepper “Fansville” campaign into it, with some of the customers wearing football jerseys. They also are rolling out a new cabinet design, which in addition to new artwork, comes with nice new joystick tap handles that have images of each Dr Pepper drink incorporated into it. As you can see above, there are four flavors that it uses; also, there is no ‘.’ after Dr in the DP branding (something I hadn’t noticed before).
There are still two cabinet designs, Deluxe & Super Deluxe, where the only difference between those are the giant cans that mount to the sides of the monitor. These have also changed from what the SDX version of Soda Slam! had used. Those were big fiberglass props, whereas these new ones are more like giant back-lit marquees (they aren’t full 3D props).
These are available to order now and two of them will be at IAAPA 2025 (along with another new Soda Slam model using a different beverage license).
It’ll be interesting to see the market reaction to this one – I think that having a brand like this will certainly make a difference in the US, I’m not sure how big DP is outside of America though. What do you think about it?
