Welcome to Newsbytes, a regular series of posts here on Arcade Heroes that runs through recent “bytes” of news around the wonderful world of arcade and pinball games. We usually try and launch these on a Saturday, but given the Memorial Day weekend and day that it was in the US, we held it over. This weekend each May is usually a good time for going out and visiting an arcade, and I tend to be busy (but both last year and this one were very underwhelming :/).

For anyone interested in the business side of things, I’ve been trying to increase the amount of “free” marketing that I do, as in creating organic ads that are uploaded to various social media sites. I’ve also been getting on top of my website so that it is more up-to-date and reporting on any changes. It’s still difficult for me to attract people who aren’t already headed to the mall for some other reason though, so I’ve been talking with the mall marketing manager to see if there is anything that they will be doing to bring foot traffic into the mall. It used to be that I could rely on movies to do that for me, but it is increasingly obvious that habits have changed, as even when the box office is bringing people in, we’re seeing fewer of them wander around and spend at other businesses. I am beginning to feel like this is an effect of the FEC at the mall where I am, in that they are soaking up a lot of the business that I used to see. I never bought the line my mall management claimed about how their presence would improve my business – and after 4 1/2 years, that has borne out. The decisions before me now are: keep going, drastically change things, or move out to a different spot. There are risks with each of those.

On that note, I have done a video discussing business more here if it’s something you’d like to hear more about. Also I still need to get round to completing an AAA 2025 upload too, but until then, here are your Newsbytes (with a big thank you to Ted for his help on this post as well):

To start things off, an event that surprisingly hasn’t been mentioned before on the site is South Korea’s PlayX4. There isn’t anything quite like this elsewhere in the world – it effectively brings Korea’s entire games industry together, and by entire, that very much includes arcades. In that respect it’s like an interesting hybrid of Amusement Expo and a consumer show, like the dearly departed E3.

Anyways, the latest edition of this recently wrapped up, and there was a few arcade things of interest there. The biggest arcade company who usually attends is Uniana, a name which some of you may recognize for manufacturing official overseas releases of the Japanese rhythm games, e.g. Konami’s (the upcoming US Maimai DX cabinets are also likely from them). They have done a bit of original stuff too but the focus for them here was mostly on Konami’s works, including this odd little spot the difference touchscreen game based on the Korean YouTube animation series Panpan-kun. This went on location test in Japan and Korea last year, but given the property, it looks like only the latter will be getting it (Konami recently tested a different version of the game in Japan, with the Sazae-san anime cartoon license attached).

As well as this stream from their own competitive events they also held at the show, the below wider shot shows some of the other Konami games they had, including the new Gitadora Arena Model and DanceRush Stardom (which is still just about going). But also not from Konami, Sega Amusements and 3MindWave’s Apex Rebels can be seen here too. Nice to see that this is also getting some representation out in Asia:

Additionally in attendance at PlayX4 were fellow South Korean arcade factories Komuse and Andamiro, although the former didn’t seem to have anything new, and the latter was more focused on the new upcoming Steam edition of Pump It Up, which is sporting a stylish new logo. They did have a few arcade PIU cabinets alongside it at least, plus a collaboration with Bandai Namco Korea on Taiko.

We were originally going to focus on Godzilla Kaiju Wars for this post, but we need to hold off on that for a little while longer. So aside from a couple of clips of that game below, I’ll also take this opportunity to mention that Top Gun: Maverick is slated to start shipping out to the wider US industry this next month in June. I don’t know if that means next week, or at what point in the month it will be, but if you placed an order with your distributor for it, I believe you’ll have it in time for the summer.

On Godzilla, we can at least confirm there will be some news on the final update very soon. For a little refresher on it in the meantime though, that update’s final chapters are supposed to be super challenging, to the extent that RT’s QA testers had a tough time completing them. I wonder if they’ve decided to ease up on that or not since we saw the game at Amusement Expo.

D&B recently posted these direct capture clips of the game to their website too:

This news originally came through over a week back now, so has been pored over by most of the major arcade-adjacent sites, but is still worth a mention here. Every once in a while we see organizational changes at the big companies in Japan (Bandai Namco Amusement came under the new Bandai Namco Experience name there a few months back, whilst last year Sega Japan’s arcade division got together with their toys wing to become Sega Fave), and this time it’s Konami reshuffling. Whilst their arcade game division has long been under Konami Amusement (which also encompasses pachinko and pachislot), it has now been split off into its own subsidiary, given the straightforward name of Konami Arcade Games.

Despite what some have reported, the split itself doesn’t sound 100%, as under it, Konami Amusement will still handle manufacturing of their games and retain some arcade development too (speculated to be more for the medal game/redemption side of things, given their closer relation to pachinko, although wording is vague). But the biggest part of this news that a lot of rhythm gamers seem to have been excited by is the announcement alongside it that will be the president. For those who may not know him by his full name, he is better known as DJ Yoshitaka, composer of such prolific Bemani game tunes as Flower. He has worked more as a game producer at Konami though, so this isn’t that much of a surprise.

And again, it has to be asked: could this move be part of or connected to the wider rumors that Konami is looking to make a comeback on the global arcade stage, following their personnel’s apparent approaches on the floor at IAAPA 2024 and Western-friendly games like Contra Burst? Time will only tell…

We’ve had plenty of screenshots sneaked out of Wangan Midnight Speed Ignition‘s Japanese location tests already (some of them even made it into a previous Newsbytes post), but the ban on video filming must have been rested in its latest ones, as the first full clips of it in action have been starting to appear of late. This channel has three, including the one below (the other two are here and here).

Also, a different video without the F-Zero musical overlay was posted to Twitter/X; H/T to Nsm for it. Overall this is looking really nice, and interestingly my tweet about wanting to test this in the US even got some attention from the WMMT staff (not that this attention means “it’s happening!” or anything of the sort).

One thing I should find out more about soon is testing a Soda Slam! though, so there’s that….

At last year’s GTI Asia China Expo, UNIS had a few new titles with photo sharing bans, which got trailers fully unveiling them a few weeks afterward. That seemed odd as it kind of defeated the point of the ban, but this has happened again with the two new games they brought to AAA earlier this month. These also have the official localized English titles, which are a bit different from the straight translations we got. One is Monster Jet Riders, where the assessment that it’s a follow-up to their existing Monster Kart seems correct:

Then the other is Dino Dash. From the information we were given this was supposed to have dragons, but to us they looked more like dinos, so maybe someone at UNIS agreed…

One of the more popular series of videos that we’ve done for the AH YouTube channel has been those of Minecraft. It makes sense, given the huge viewership numbers that game garners across the internet, and it’s something different that most Minecraft-Tubers can’t record. Here’s the latest round from the Series 4 update, Pumpkin Pastures, which would’ve come sooner if not for the release delay:

Finally, in what has been the oddest pinball game reveal I’ve ever witnessed, Jersey Jack Pinball has finally decided that they will unveil their Harry Potter pinball on June 5th – the same day as the Nintendo Switch 2 launch. If you want to be informed of the details, you can sign up via email here.

I call this odd, as how this has come along hasn’t followed the same pattern as any other pin that I can recall – confirmed on a podcast and expo (after many months of slight hints on social media), then pre-orders opened at distributors, but then nothing until today with this announcement of an announcement. Perhaps there have been little details unveiled on Pinside; I was starting to wonder if they were waiting to ride out all the attention for the new TV series, or for something like Harry Potter’s birthday, but apparently June 5th is Malfroy’s birthday… I dunno if that was planned by JJP or not. But, better late than never on all of this I suppose. We’ll be sure to summarize what pops up about it on Thursday.

– No link on this first one, that’s just the word straight from SAI that I received via email. , but BNAA are targeting sooner (likely mid-June) at the moment on that one. We also might have an update on Alan-1’s Missile Command here pretty soon, as I have been able to play a new build of that, which implements a number of changes that greatly improve on what was seen with consoles. Hang tight for more.

Ok, now for the linked headlines:

Sega Amusements Holds 2025 Kick-Off Event – SAI additionally had their kick-off meeting (an awards ceremony, business summary and game planning proposal event) recently in the UK, which explains why Marty and Oga-Shi have been in the country of late…

Konami Announces Bemani Pro League Season 5

Bandai Namco Starts Up First Animal Kaiser Plus UK Tournaments

Round1USA Puts Space Invaders Gigamax R On Freeplay For A Month

Sonic Wings Reunion Launches For APM3 (And Console/PC) In Japan

Stern Holds Launch Parties For King Kong: Myth Of Terror Island

Pinball Brothers Teases Predator Pinball – In case you’re too young to remember the fiasco of Skit-B’s Predator Pinball, I can point you to the long tale of that disaster. But given Pinball Brothers’ record, they will finally make things right.

Galloping Ghost Set Up Quite The Booth At The C2E2 Expo In Chicago

SEA Expo 2025 Happened, With Much The Same As DEAL 2025

Superwing Trails Lunar Warlord 4-Player Shooter

LAI Games Promotes NASCAR Pit Stop Ticket Game

LAI Also Testing Dragon Knight + Blade Pushers?

Attractions & More’s Boxer Combo Is Doing Well

IREM’s In The Hunt Is Being Worked On For The Neo Geo (unofficially, as a homebrew)

Footage Of The Development Of Namco’s Metro-Cross [Japanese] – Great clip, even if likely staged

Pac-Man Gets Otamatone Instrument + Krispy Kreme Donuts + Exhibit For His 45th – I did try the donuts – they’re fine, just Krispy Kreme donuts with frosting. Didn’t get the box though, since those were out.

Also, If You Want A Book & Media Kit About Pac-Man, This Is Only $30 At The Moment

The AOU (All Japan Amusement Operators Union) Newsletter Archive Has Been Opened

Hang-On Was Actually Brought To Sega By Coreland + Ex-Developers Joined Konami For Wec Le Mans

Former Bandai Namco Producer Junichiro Koyama Joins Japan XR Center For Development Of Arcade VR

Bob Cooney Launches LEXRA To Promote VR/AR/MR Technologies In The Commercial Amusement Space

All Of The Reports On The Opening Of Universal’s Epic Universe (Including Super Nintendo World) From Attractions Magazine

(3 separate links): Games with start-up issues / Games that start, but have some in-game problems / Games with issues that should be resolved by or close to launch – I have a few of these games, but I am surprised by how many Arcade Archives titles have problems. Must have something to do with them being emulated, then Switch 2 having to emulate the Switch as opposed to natively providing backwards compatibility. Given how many games exist on Switch though, the number of games with issues is relatively small.

Clair Obscure Reaches 3.3 Million Sales – I also saw that the new Elden Ring release sold something crazy like 2 million in a day or less.

Valve Expands SteamOS Support To Rival Handheld Platforms – Wouldn’t it be something if the Switch 2 were added to that list in the future (don’t get your hopes up… )

Virtua Fighter 5 REVO Is Headed To All Modern Consoles

Sega Not-So-Forever, As Their Mobile Ports End Service

Killer Instinct 1 & 2 See Improvements From New Emulator Development

Cool Stills From The Never Released (Or Announced, AFAIK) Quake 5 Pop-Up Online

The Dreamcast Port Of  AM2’s Outrigger Is Back Online – Now to figure out how to connect my old DC to the internet 😛 This is still one I want to try in arcades someday…

Sony Is Closing Their Digital Loyalty Program

Fortnite Returns To The Apple App Store

That’s it for this Newsbytes; which of the above stories (e.g. PlayX4) interested you most?