From ATE to Arcade Royalty: Inside Play Mechanix’s 20-year partnership with Bandai Namco

It has been a while since we’ve had a guest post here, and today I’m happy to share an interview that writer Dan Snook recently did with George Petro & Dave Snipes of Play Mechanix. PM still handles some products on their own, and a part of their many relationships have been with Bandai Namco Amusements Europe. Dan gives us a walk through some of that history, and the role that Big Buck Hunter has played on the market since.

Play Mechanix has built some of the arcade industry’s most enduring titles, from Big Buck Hunter to Minecraft Dungeons, establishing itself as the more experimental half of the Raw Thrills group. Ahead of a year that marks two decades of working with Bandai Namco, founder and President George Petro and Marketing Director Dave Snipes sat down to talk through the studio’s philosophy, what keeps a 25-year-old game relevant, and why the Bandai Namco relationship has stayed central to that story.

It was a January morning in London, at a small café tucked away from the show floor at the industry stalwart UK event ATE (which, of course, later evolved to become the behemoth that is ICE), when George Petro and Raw Thrills President Eugene Jarvis had the conversation that would change the direction of two companies. Petro had brought Big Buck Hunter to the UK for the first time to pitch manufacturing to Raw Thrills, who Bandai Namco distributed. Over lunch, Jarvis turned to him and said: “We should merge the companies.”

That conversation happened twenty years ago. The merger that followed in June 2006 brought together two studios with very different creative instincts under one roof and cemented a relationship with Bandai Namco that has shaped Play Mechanix’s path in the European and global markets ever since.

Two studios, one philosophy

Play Mechanix actually predates Raw Thrills by five years. Petro had already left Midway to start the studio as a pure game-creation outfit, licensing titles to manufacturers rather than building hardware itself. One of those early partners, Incredible Technologies, built the original Big Buck Hunter, though Play Mechanix retained the IP throughout.

When Raw Thrills launched, Petro and Jarvis realised the fit was obvious: Raw Thrills had the manufacturing capability, Play Mechanix had the appetite to develop. The day after the companies merged, Petro asked Jarvis what he wanted to change. The answer: “Nothing. Keep doing what you’re doing.”

That arrangement has held for two decades. Petro describes Play Mechanix as the more experimental of the two studios, willing to chase ideas that haven’t been tried in arcades before, accepting that the approach will produce misses as well as hits. Raw Thrills, by contrast, carries what he calls Jarvis’s own DNA, built on decades of arcade pedigree dating back to Defender. Petro is unambiguous about being a fan rather than an imitator of that style. The result, he argues, is a combined catalogue that gives operators more reasons to choose Raw Thrills equipment, and gives the wider company, as Dave Snipes put it during the conversation, a far wider footprint with which to serve different tastes on the same arcade floor.

The secret behind 25 years of Big Buck Hunter

No title illustrates that experimental instinct better than Big Buck Hunter, now in its 25th year and still evolving. Petro is candid that there’s no formula for that kind of longevity: the game simply had a powerful enough core to build on, as only a handful of genuinely iconic titles do.

What has kept it alive, he says, is a willingness to keep investing in it long after launch. Play Mechanix was an early believer in connected, live-ops gaming, well before the wider industry caught up, and for years that connectivity cost more than it earned. The turning point came with downloadable content, piloted through a licensing deal with the A&E series Duck Dynasty: content delivered free to operators, with Play Mechanix recouping costs through a per-play model instead. It was a contested idea at the time, but it reframed the studio’s relationship with location owners as a genuine partnership rather than a one-off sale.

That approach has continued with crossovers like The Walking Dead, and with the most recent addition to the Big Buck Hunter universe: a new mountain goat, voted in directly by the player base through in-game play. It’s the first time the studio has handed that decision to its community outright, and according to Snipes, it had the side effect of driving engagement on its own: players had to play the game to cast their vote.

Earning its place on the arcade floor

Asked what makes a game succeed on a modern arcade floor, Petro returns to a simple but unglamorous truth that visibility comes first. No amount of gameplay depth matters if nobody walks up to the cabinet. Today’s arcades and FECs, he notes, increasingly resemble casinos, all LED lighting and scale, and standing out within that environment, before a single credit is registered, has become as important as the game itself.

On the question of global appeal, Petro is candid about the limits of his own perspective. Play Mechanix understands the American market intimately, but acknowledges it can’t fully read the cultural nuances that make certain titles resonate in markets like the UK or China. The studio’s answer has been to anchor its bets in globally recognised brands (Minecraft, Top Gun, Godzilla) rather than second-guess local tastes. It’s also, he says, part of why Play Mechanix has never tried to compete head-on with Bandai Namco’s own output, which draws on a distinctly Japanese design sensibility. As Petro puts it, a healthy, creative field of competitors is good for everyone, since it keeps players engaged with the category as a whole.

Snipes adds a point that cuts across markets: the appeal of location-based games, wherever they’re played, comes from delivering something a console or phone simply can’t: physical movement, scale, shared presence. That, more than any specific title, is what travels.

What’s next

Play Mechanix delivered a heavy slate of new equipment through 2024 and 2025. With Raw Thrills’ Stranger Things title and another announced release queued ahead of it, Petro is pointing to 2027 as the next big year for Play Mechanix releases. However, he’s not ready to confirm specifics yet, including whether anything will be shown at IAAPA Expo in Orlando in November. That call, he says, will likely come in October.

What hasn’t changed, two decades on, is Petro’s enthusiasm for the wider location-based entertainment category. He points to venues like Topgolf and UK-style competitive socialising concepts as proof that people still want to be out, together, having fun, something he found reassuring even in the uncertain months after COVID lockdowns lifted, when he wasn’t sure players would want to stand shoulder to shoulder at a cabinet again. They did.

Twenty years after that lunch in London, Petro still counts Bandai Namco among the closest relationships Play Mechanix has built. “I just am super fortunate to be able to work in an industry where we have great friends and partners all over the world,” he says. “And Bandai Namco is certainly at the top of that list.”