November 7th 2002

Arcade on a card


Aahh! The glory days of the arcades... Don't you miss them? All you'll find in today's arcades are fighting games, race games, and gun games. Back in the eighties, there was a lot more variety, and you didn't need a detailed strategy guide to play them.

So anyway, arcade games on e-Cards. Sounds like an awesome idea, doesn't it? Many of the early games could be sold as packs, just like the NES-e series, although some of these games might require more than 5 cards. Just for fun, I made mockups of two of these proposed cards, as I imagine them:


(Front of card)

(Back of card)

(Front of card)

(Back of card)

There are dozens of arcade games that could be adapted for the e-Card format, and to demonstrate, I made the screenshots below. You will notice that some of these screenshots (namely Arkanoid, Pac-Man and Popeye) are actually from the NES versions of these games. I did this on purpose, to demonstrate that the NES emulator could be used to run these games, even if the cards were to be advertized as being arcade adaptations. If those three pictures seem a little blurred, it's because I tried to approximate the special "interlaced" display mode used by the NES emulator. The real games would probably look a lot cleaner on an actual GBA screen.


Arkanoid

Berzerk

Carnival

Discs of Tron

Missile Command

Pac-Man

Pepper II

Popeye

Q*bert

Star Trek

Vanguard

Venture

The pictures above are only the tip of the iceberg, of course. If you drop by http://www.klov.com, you will see many more classic arcade games just begging to be released on e-Cards. There are a few, however, that have already been released in compilation GBA games, such as Asteroids, BattleZone, Centipede, Missile Command, Super Breakout and Tempest (in Atari Anniversary Advance by Infogrames). These few games will probably never be released on e-Cards because this would hinder sales of the GBA cartridge versions. But it's not really a big problem, because there are plenty more to choose from, like Galaxian, Galaga, Space Panic, Mr Do, etc. etc. etc. I think all of them would sell like hotcakes. Don't you agree? ;-)