The Arcade Anniversaries of 2026

It’s a new year, which means new anniversaries for many of your favorite arcade games from the past. So as a stop-gap for when our EAG 2026 review comes out (the show has now concluded, but there are plenty of photos from it that still need sorting through), we’re going to look at the titles that were released 50, 40, and 25 years ago, all guaranteed to make you feel old! Check out last year’s anniversaries here.

1976

This was well before my time, although that ominous number of 50 is slowly catching up to me. Last year saw some cool but obscure titles reach the half-century milestone, and now you are more likely to recognize a lot of these. Depending on who you ask, 1976 is when the “Golden Age” of arcade video games truly began, and I would agree with that, given the quality of releases that started coming along from many of the market players. Some of them really pushed boundaries too, as we’ll get onto…

Notable games turning 50:

• Amazing Maze (Midway) – While it wasn’t technically the first digital maze game ever, it was the first proper one, as previous efforts like Gotcha lacked certain elements that this introduced (fixed walls, laying down dots, randomized maze generator, music). Designed by Dave Nutting.
• Bazooka (Project Support Engineering) – An early gun game that featured a semi-realistic shoulder-mounted missile launcher as a controller.
• Breakout (Atari) – Perhaps the most famous game to launch this year, this also has some fascinating history behind it involving none other than Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, who would form Apple soon afterwards. It should be noted that this was Nolan Bushnell’s idea in the first place as to a PONG variation, but it’s unquestionable the influence that the “block breaker” style of game would have down the road – especially in Japan… but more on that later.
• Cobra Gunship (Meadows Games) – An early first-person shooter where you are piloting a gunship, lining up your shots to take down enemy fighters. It came with an impressive cabinet for the time, with a light-up control panel, slightly enclosed display and a yoke controller. Ted Dabney was credited on this, but has since stated in an interview he doesn’t actually remember working on it.
• Death Race (Exidy) – The game that really put Exidy on the map is also the first truly controversial game as the public was exposed to the violence of driving over “gremlins” with cars. Exidy leaned into the national media attention however, and it ended up selling and earning pretty well.
• Flyball (Atari) – This one is on the list more for the story behind it than anything innovative – the two engineers assigned to the game surprisingly knew nothing about baseball, and apparently didn’t study up on the rules. This resulted in a “bug” that broke baseball’s normal rules.
• Heavyweight Champ (Sega) – Long thought to be a myth, this game did see production, although it is unknown in what kind of numbers. It stands as the first 1v1 hand-to-hand fighting game, although it was based on boxing instead of martial arts. Players would use the sort of boxing glove shaped sliders to control their punching position, then would pull to throw a punch. It had really good graphics for the time, given the huge character representations.
• Knights In Armor (Project Support Engineering) – I had to use the “hand-to-hand” caveat on HC above, as this game could be argued to be the first 1v1 fighting game, and it came out months before HC did. It involved jousting knights however, where you aim your lance and that was it, as opposed to throwing punches and such while moving around. Still, both of these games planted seeds that would grow into a full genre & community.
• Night Driver (Atari) / Datsun 280 Zzzap (Midway) – I’m putting these together as they have similar gameplay, and were released at the same time (Nov. 1976). Both of them were inspired by an obscure German racing simulator. Atari’s stands as the most famous of them all, where you must avoid hitting the pylons – and oncoming traffic – as you drive a winding road at night.  Night Driver is also notable for coming in one of the first sit-down cabinets for a video racer (not the first though, as they’d done this with Hi-Way a year prior)
• Outlaw (Atari) – Most people when they think of a game named Outlaw from the 1970s likely recall the Atari 2600 game, but few realize that was a port that was very loosely based on the arcade version, and was akin to Taito/Midway’s Gun Fight than what Atari had done in coin-op. Said version was a light-gun game based on the quick draw Old West shootout. Players used a Colt .45 replica and had to keep the gun holstered in the cabinet then time and aim their shot just right.
• PT-109 (Mirco Games) – An obscure naval combat game that was essentially like Atari’s Tank, but applied to boats for up to four players. This one is significant in that it was thought to be the first video game to use a CPU as it debuted at the same show as Midway’s Gun Fight (which also used a CPU). It’s unknown which game was mass produced first, however, it is more likely that Midway managed it since they were Midway and Mirco was a tiny company without those resources; PT-109 also only sold 150 vs Gun Fight’s 8,000.
• Quiz Show (Kee Games/Atari) – A genre that never caught on strong in the West, but did so in the East was the trivia arcade game. Quiz Show was among the first video versions, as there had been games like it in the EM realm. This was supposed to have tapes that could be swapped to change the questions, although it seems Atari never made more than what they originally provided.
• Race (Fun Games) – This one is only notable for another odd story – this company was made up of a few ex-Atari employees, who mainly pirated and modded Pong style games. They somehow managed to get the code to a prototype of Atari’s Super Bug and got to market before that did, thus technically being the first game to feature 8-way scrolling. A lawsuit from Atari shut them down though and Exidy ended up buying their stock, where most Race’s were converted over to Robot Bowl units.
• Sea Wolf (Midway) – one of the more famous games on the list, Sea Wolf took a concept that had been tried to a degree with EM games previously and turned it into a video experience – to great success. There was nothing else quite like it on the video market. The use of the periscope controller gave it a simulator kind of edge, while also leaving some mystery (who wouldn’t want to look and see what was going on?). Blasting crossing submarines for points was a lot of fun.
• Sprint 2 (Atari) – While this one isn’t well remembered now, it became one of the biggest hits of the 1970s, still appearing on earnings charts into the early 80s. It’s also the best selling entry in the Sprint series. Atari had done racers like it before, with Gran Trak 10/20, but this was their first game to really take advantage of a CPU, which allowed smoother gameplay than their previous racing efforts. Two players on one cabinet didn’t hurt either.
• Tank 8 (Atari) – Not the first 8-player video arcade game, which Atari had done before, but this took their popular Tank game, added more players and gave it a color monitor. Both the number of players and the color monitor makes this one unique for the list, but the price on it of $6495 (the equivalent of $36,997.76 right now) meant that very few locations could afford one. Still if you came across one, it was pretty groovy.
• Tic Tac Quiz (Sega) – Taking a slightly different approach to the quiz game, this added the tic tac toe element to it. The trivia side came with 2,500 questions, and it controlled using a 3×3 button grid for places your Xs or Os. The then-editor of RePlay Magazine, Ralph Lally II, really thought that this was going to be a game that stood the test of time, but I’d be surprised if more than a handful of Sega fans have even heard of it, much less played one.
• Tornado Baseball (Midway) – Worth mentioning to balance out Flyball mentioned above, this was designed by Dave Nutting, used proper baseball rules (to the degree the game could handle the sport), and it used the “pepper’s ghost” effect where the game appeared to have a holographic effect with the players on the green baseball field.

1986

1986 saw the industry out through the light at the end of the 1982 crash’s tunnel, with all the big trends defining the rest of the decade now in full swing. The Japanese arcade game companies, particularly Sega and Taito, were churning out hit after hit by this point (with the exception of Nintendo, who were now getting out of the business besides using it as a platform to promote their console games), whilst out West the likes of Exidy and Cinematronics struggled, though there were still a few successful USA-made releases. This year did see huge gains on the console side of things too, with very notable releases on the NES such as The Legend of Zelda and Metroid, but as you’ll see here, Nintendo can’t claim all of the credit for bringing video games back, as arcades were making new classics on their own.

OutRun at AMOA 1986 (Source: Sega Retro)

This year’s games now into the big 40s are:

• Arkanoid (Taito) – If not for the aforementioned Breakout ten years earlier, this would be the original “block breaker”; it certainly is the one that spawned countless other titles of the same ilk in Japan. Taito still have much love for this game, to the point that when they included it on their Egret Mini, it received its own dedicated controller. Many also seem to enjoy this one’s “personality” over Breakout, which also came from how it established the idea of setting up fun patterns and designs with the blocks, as opposed to just placing several boring straight-across rows in place for each level.
• Athena (SNK) – One of their first ever major hits (though not released in arcades outside of Japan), SNK realized the power of character with Athena, as its titular princess would gain a cult following in Japan and go on to appear in their later fighting games long after the success of her original platformer.
• Bubble Bobble (Taito) – Bub and Bob turn 40 this year, as the original game they appeared in long before the days of Puzzle Bobble was released in 1986. Mere mention of the game should give anyone reading it an earworm of its music. Interestingly enough, Taito has leaned into B&B as mascot characters in recent times over the Space Invaders, since they would be more kid-friendly.
• Chiller (Exidy) – With the company’s fortunes on the wane (they filed for bankruptcy around this time and stopped making video games altogether two years later), Exidy turned the shock factor up with a game that RePlay are said to have regarded as making Death Race “look like a gumball machine”. Chiller was the most violent arcade game up to this point in time, and one of the most sadistic video games ever created as you essentially ran a medieval torture chamber with a gun, blowing off body parts of helpless prisoners in one sequence. It wasn’t all that for each screen, but hard to overlook that one.
• Danger Zone (Cinematronics) – Like Exidy, Cinematronics found life in the 1980s tough, as they failed to find a strong hit after Dragon’s Lair. They did do well with a baseball game in 1985, then in 1986 came along with this war game that had an innovative cabinet design. The game itself wasn’t particularly special, as you man a turret blasting planes, helicopters and other enemies, but what was really cool is that the monitor itself was mounted to a swivel base, as was your controller. So in essence, the mounted gun is also the monitor. It was a very early version of gyroscopic aiming and augmented reality.
• Darius (Taito) – Between this, Arkanoid and Bubble Bobble, Taito were truly on fire in 1986. Easily the most impressive of the three thanks to its gargantuan triple-screen cabinets, Darius built on inspiration from Konami’s Gradius and took shooters up a notch. You pilot a starfighter against an evil robotic fish species called the Belsar, weaving through a branching level selection feature and the iconic “WARNING! A HUGE BATTLESHIP (insert boss name here) IS APPROACHING FAST!” alarms. This was also the first Taito game to feature music from their in-house band, ZUNTATA, who would create dozens of iconic songs across multiple games from there on out. [Note: Arcade History claims this was released in 1987, but I’ve always seen Taito themselves maintain 1986.]
• Fantasy Zone (Sega) – Often retroactively called the first “cute ’em up”, Fantasy Zone was an early attempt by Sega to make a more visually appealing, easy shooter for casual players. It wasn’t as successful as hoped, but it still established a long-running series and gave us the little spaceship wonder known as Opa-Opa, one of Sega’s first mascots before the blue blur.
• Gauntlet II (Atari) – Primarily sold as a conversion kit, Gauntlet II took what made the first game a smash hit (Atari Games’ first hit since Star Wars in 1983) and made it better. This included letting you select your character, color-coding those characters, adding new speech, shots, invisible walls, stun tiles, the “Tag, you’re it” feature, and more.
• Hyper Dyne SIDE ARMS (Capcom) – Pretty much every company wanted to get in on side-scrolling shoot ’em up action after Gradius, and this was a great Capcom entry in that genre.
• Ikari Warriors (SNK) – The 1980s could be called “The Decade of the Macho Man”, given the propensity of one-man-army action hero movies and masculine stuff like monster trucks and entertainment wrestling going big. Games like Ikari Warriors tapped into that, essentially letting you play as Rambo in this vertically scrolling shoot ’em up game. It wasn’t the first to do so (previously you had games like Taito’s Frontline and Capcom’s Commando), but it employed unique elements, such as the rotary joysticks and no stages – it was just one long, giant level and no standard continue feature (you could continue only if you held down FIRE then pressed start).
• Joust 2 – The Survival of the Fittest (Williams) – An attempt was made at a sequel to Joust, but it fell flat on its face. On paper it sounds like it should have worked – same basic kind of gameplay but now with more detailed levels, a vertically-oriented screen, and now the ability to change into different types of flying creatures with different strengths/weaknesses. But in practice, it just didn’t work.
• Mania Challenge (Technos/Taito) – I mentioned above that wrestling became a big thing in the 1980s, and games like this capitalized on that popularity by bringing the sport to the video market.
• OutRun (Sega) – After innovating with Hang-On and Space Harrier the previous year, Yu Suzuki was far from done with making Sega a true force to be reckoned with, as another iconic sprite scaler game came for them with OutRun, birthing those signature Sega blue skies and a much-beloved soundtrack by Hiroshi Kawaguchi. Also released this year was Enduro Racer, which though less significant was another eye-catching experience cabinet.
• Playchoice-10 / Vs. (Nintendo) – While not a game per se, this was Nintendo’s big contribution to arcades this year. A definite sign of their shifting priorities, the multigame Playchoice-10 cabinets served to promote their successful NES releases in arcades. On the Vs. releases, these were more challenging versions of their NES cousins, and thus were unique, although they still served the purpose of promoting the home stuff.
• Quartet (Sega) – The success of one game inevitably leads to others following suit, and such was the case with Quartet, a sci-fi answer from Sega to Atari Games’ Gauntlet. It was similar not in game style (this was a side scrolling run ‘n gun game), but in the up-to-four player co-operative play.
• Rampage (Bally Midway) – Also in the more-than-two-player genre, Rampage did three instead of two, and let players be the bad guy for a change. Pulling from the likes of Godzilla and King Kong, you become one of three beasts who go on a rampage across the US, destroying buildings and trying to survive the onslaught from the military. A fun game with a quirky sense of humor that gave it a memorable personality beyond the unique gameplay.
• Road Runner (Atari Games) – A game that was stuck in development hell for several years, first starting on LaserDisc, then eventually moving to their System I hardware. The game has you playing as the iconic Road Runner from the Looney Tunes cartoons, grabbing birdseed and avoiding Wile E. Coyote as best you could.
• Rolling Thunder (Namco) – Many great arcade games have been loosely based on or inspired by popular films, and in Rolling Thunder’s case, they pulled from James Bond. This is an early run ‘n gun game which had fantastic graphics for the time, and elements such as entering into doors to gain an ammo reload or a new weapon. It was released by Atari Games in the States, Namco elsewhere.
• Salamander (Konami) – The sequel to Nemesis (aka Gradius) came out pretty quickly thanks to how popular the first game was. It also had a name change, being known out West as Lifeforce. According to Ikeda Tsunemoto, eventual creator of Donpachi series, this is the game that influenced him to go in that direction of game development.
• Spelunker (Irem) – While it was first developed for 8-bit PCs in the early 1980s, this game made the jump to arcades and quickly became a hit in Japan (same thing with Lode Runner). You play as a cave explorer who can’t handle small falls without dying – that alone makes it rather challenging and oddly compelling to overcome.
• Super Sprint (Atari Games) – A decade after Sprint 2 had been all the rage in arcades, Atari Games gave the game a major update with Super Sprint (although technically, they released Championship Sprint first, then rolled out this upgrade which came with more tracks). Aside from the vastly improved graphics and sound, you could also upgrade your car in-between races by grabbing wrenches that would occasionally pop-up on the track. It also supported three players on one cabinet.
• Thunder Ceptor (Namco) – A Super Scaler style space shoot’em up that showed that arcades still had a distinct technological advantage over home consoles & PCs. The gameplay wasn’t all that stellar, but it had a rad soundtrack.
• Wec Le Mans 24 (Konami) – The big K joined the sprite scaler racer fray with the first game to depict the Le Mans World Endurance Championship. There’s some interesting history with this one that hasn’t been covered much – they in fact bought the game in from Coreland (who provided Sega with the basic concept for Hang-On) and Technostar (who were founded by Sega’s former R&D head)…
• Wonder Boy (Sega) – A cutesy platformer that became better known on consoles, but at the time with Super Mario Bros. mania, platformers could do great in arcades. This presented a different style of play than SMB had established, showing that the genre had a lot of places where it could innovate.

2001

Jumping forward 15 years (we already covered 1996’s anniversaries some time ago in this video), 2001 is considered to be one of the lowest lows of the second arcade crash. That arguably started in earnest during the late 1990s, but it was prolonged enough for this year to be another major dip. As a result, many of the releases around this time were sequels, content updates (lots of which being for rhythm games), or obscure attempts to do something different, to varying degrees of success (usually failure). We also saw the final arcade releases by Midway, Capcom dumping support for arcades out West, and the sad bankruptcy of SNK, marking the definite end of an era for some. As you’ll see in the list below, it shows that Japanese companies were carrying the market on their shoulders, as American and European outfits practically evaporated and left the impression with many in the West that “arcades are dead”.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom though – much more came out this year than might appear at first glance. Most notable of all are the births of a major manga-based Japanese racing game series and a drum-based rhythm game from Namco, both of which became immediate successes, and have gone on to be among the longest-running franchises found in many arcades (especially across Asia) to this very day.

Wangan Midnight at JAMMA 2001 (Source: Game Watch)

2001’s arcade anniversaries are as follows:

• Air Trix (Sega) – Following Top Skater, Sega returned to the skateboarding simulator well with this piece. It isn’t as well remembered, but did differentiate itself with half-pipe tricks, more complex combos, and improved graphics.
• Alien Front (Sega) – This tank game for the NAOMI platform put you up against invading aliens, but it also apparently had an online version that offered crossplay with the Sega Dreamcast version – and you could voice chat. I’m just not sure if that was a prototype that only got some testing or if it saw something of some reach in Japan.
• Arctic Thunder (Midway) – One of Midway’s final two arcade releases (orders opened in late 2000, but cabinets didn’t ship until January), Arctic Thunder brought the arcade wing of the Thunder series to a close with snowmobiling fun. It did stick around even after Midway exited arcades, when Play Mechanix issued an update in 2004.
• BEMANI Games (Konami) – Konami almost singlehandedly kept their arcade divisions afloat in this period off the success of their BEMANI rhythm games, of which there were many yearly (even bi-yearly at this time) iterations. 2001 saw both the 5th and 6th releases for Beatmania IIDX and Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania III Append 6th Mix, Pop’n Music 6 and 7, Dance Maniax 2nd Mix Append JParadise, Drummania 5th Mix, and Para Para Paradise.
• Capcom Vs. SNK 2 – Mark of the Millennium 2001 (Capcom) – Released at a time of transition for SNK, their second collaboration with Capcom was one of the last hurrahs for the original iteration of the company. This also was released on the Sega NAOMI GD instead of something like the Neo Geo MVS, although the latter platform would have a little life left in it yet.
• Club Kart (Sega) – After Namco moved into straight karting simulators with Kart Duel the previous year, Sega tried their hand at them too. Though they weren’t outright bombs, neither really made a lasting impact, though Club Kart does have the distinction of being one of only three titles that went on to be compatible with the Cycraft simulator by Sega and Simuline.
• Cosmic Smash (Sega) – Among those games that tried to do something different, we had Cosmic Smash. This is probably the most unique version of squash ever created, and it came with a cool soundtrack. The game even had a pretty neat indie VR remake for home platforms a few years back.
• Cyber Troopers Virtual-On Force (Sega) – The final arcade entry for the fast-paced battle mecha series that had started off five years previously, although like all the other sequels it remained locked to Japan. Still, it allowed for up to four players to go at it and had fantastic graphics, being the last title to run on Sega’s powerful but less-than-reliable Hikaru hardware.
• DoDonPachi II (IGS) – While Cave developed most DoDonPachi games, its sequel stands as the only one to be outsourced, with Taiwan’s IGS surprisingly taking charge on this one.
• Gunbarich (Psikyo) – Here is one of Psikyo’s few breaks from shooters, jumping into the block breaker genre and throwing a bunch of cuteness into the mix. Instead of controlling a typical paddle, you pick a character and they have a pair of pinball flippers in front of them for hitting the ball(s). It also used pre-rendered graphics which IMHO, have usually aged well.
• Gun Survivor 2: Code Veronica (Capcom/Namco) – The first appearance of Biohazard/Resident Evil to arcades landed with a thud, being an unusual repurposing of Namco’s Gunmen Wars cabinets and joystick/gun controls. We may very likely see Resident Evil come to arcades again this year, but so far the indications are it will erase any of the “bad taste” that this first attempt left on the market.
• Ikaruga (Treasure) – The spiritual sequel to the highly acclaimed Radiant Silvergun enjoyed widespread praise among fans of the genre. For another sign of diverging arcade tastes, it did not leave Japan, though in a weird twist of fate, Atari ended up releasing and publishing its console versions in the West.
• Jurassic Park III (Konami) – Whilst Sega had made the previous two Jurassic Park light-gun shooters, the license found its way into Konami’s hands for the third film in the series. Unfortunately it ended up being less successful than what came before on both fronts, and this release has been kind of forgotten about in the wake of Raw Thrills’ continually profitable take on the property. I had one of these for several years and it was solid though.
• The King of Fighters 2001 (Eolith/SNK) – SNK’s swansong had already came in 2000 with the previous King of Fighters release, with this one marking the first to be developed for them in their post-bankruptcy state by South Korean studio Eolith. The version that fans most prefer can vary though – requests tend to fall on 1998, 2000, or this one.
• MoCap Boxing / Police 911 2 / Tsurugi (Konami) – Bunched together here are three Konami games that made use of a technology they were certainly going all in on at this time, motion capture controls. Whilst a novelty back then and fun enough games, they didn’t have that much staying power. Still, the Wii would come along five years later and show how controls could be done in a way that appealed to a broad range of people, so without the arcade experiments first, the Wii might not have come to fruition the way it did.
• Mr. Driller G (Namco) – Here’s one series that got its start in arcades, but this entry marked the last time that Mr. Driller graced coin-op. Cutesy & competitive, this one didn’t get a lot of attention out West, but it did fine in the East.
• Planet Harriers (Sega) – Another of the select few games made for the ill-fated Hikaru, the only arcade sequel to Space Harrier has a place in the hearts of many hardcore fans of Sega’s arcade games, despite it doing poorly at the time. This did release in Japan at the end of 2000, but didn’t come elsewhere until 2001 (though not many places got it).
• Pump It Up – The Premiere (Andamiro) – The first edition of Pump It Up to receive an official international release came this year, though some had already made their way out West as imports. It would become the strongest contender against DDR in Latin America, and it has seen many iterations since.
• Silent Scope EX (Konami) – Chances are that if you visited any arcade location in the late 1990s/early 2000s, you could easily come across a Silent Scope 2. It seemed like the game was everywhere. Perhaps that saturation is why fewer jumped on the 3rd title, despite this offering better graphics and sound than before.
• Spikers Battle (Sega) – The beat ’em up genre ended up getting thrashed by the fighter genre in the 1990s, but that didn’t stop an occasional game from popping up to do something other than 1v1 fighting. Spikers Battle was a game that attempted to blend both genres together, taking a “1 vs. many” approach as you worked through the stages, although this kept the stage sizes limited to rooms, as opposed to a more open world approach like Spikeout had done.
• Stunt Typhoon (Taito) – Taito had a quiet one this year, as their output was already starting to diminish before the Square Enix buyout, however among the few titles they gave us in 2001 is this curiosity. Not many driving games have you control a stunt driver following orders from a film director, but this one did.
• Taiko No Tatsujin (Namco) – Whilst most companies struggled to go toe-to-toe with Konami’s rhythm games in the initial arcade boom of the genre (partly due to them being very protective with patents), Namco’s taiko drumming sensation was the one breakout hit that had legs besides Pump It Up. It remains a staple of arcades across Asia, and is at long last being primed for a bigger release in the West as of this writing.
• Tekken 4 (Namco) – An established Namco series was on its fourth release this year, though this was where their priorities became clear, as against the backdrop of fighting games becoming a bigger concern on consoles, the PS2 port of this came out under a year after the arcade release (in part thanks to Namco’s System 246 being based on the hardware).
• Turret Tower (Dell Electronics/Namco) – Namco did not actually create this distinctive motion seat shooter, only manufacturing and publishing it on behalf of Dell Electronics (not the computer company) who also created Flamin’ Finger for them. It would be quite a sight to see in action though, almost as interesting as a Sega R360 as your seat spun around with the screen inside the enclosure. The gameplay itself isn’t too far off of Danger Zone that was mentioned above, but with more action and of course that motion.
• Virtua Fighter 4 (Sega) – Whilst Namco ported Tekken to console quicker, Sega sought to revolutionize things a little more with the fourth release of their flagship 3D fighter, particularly through it being used as the launchpad for the earliest version of their online connectivity system ALL.Net (known as VF.Net at this time). Though it took hold in Japan, it didn’t quite so much out West. This also introduced an extensive training mode and is the first video game to use the “normal mapping” graphics technique for more realistic textures.
• Virtua Striker 3 / Virtua Tennis 2 / Virtua Golf / Virtua Athletics (Sega) – As you can see, Sega really leaned hard into the Virtua brand in 2001, although out of these titles, only Striker and Tennis would continue to get a little more love, with Tennis receiving a 3rd & 4th release some years later. The latter was a bit of a surprise back in 2011, and one version came in a cabinet that looked like a giant smartphone.
• Wangan Midnight (Namco) – The long evolution of Namco’s arcade racing games, from the likes of Pole Position to Ridge Racer eventually led up to this, which fused the Wangan Midnight manga series with an arcade racer to great effect. It would later most famously beget the Maximum Tune line of games, which turned it into a little bit of a racing RPG. Will 2026 and the 25th anniversary finally see the release of Speed Ignition, its latest evolution? Only time will tell…
• Wild Riders (Sega) – Some good old Sega quirkiness to end things on, as this cel-shaded motorbike racer was one of the main releases for the NAOMI 2 this year. It didn’t kickstart a big series or anything, but has undeniable style and is often called a hidden gem by those who stumble across it now.

Whew – that’s a wrap! 2006 did have plenty of major arcade game releases too, but we will be saving those for a special anniversary post to celebrate the site itself turning 20 towards the end of the year, and if you are curious about games from 10 years ago, check out the arcade releases page for 2016. Hard to believe we’re already this far removed from then. Which of the games mentioned here are your favorites?