More often than not, classic and retro titles were about facing the challenge of the game or your peers and trying to beat the challenge. The tech-driven entertainment medium has diversified greatly over the decades, as we discuss at DigitalConnectMag.com, allowing for much more exploration, customization, and styles of play. Yet, with these games becoming more complicated, being tied to online competition, or often launching in an incomplete state, many yearn for the classics. This is where two bold developers have decided to step in, offering a very different approach to retro gaming.
Streaming a retro collection
Streaming is all the rage, with millions of people deciding that paying monthly subscriptions for multiple movie and TV show platforms is better than a satellite or cable TV package for roughly the same combined price. So, it makes sense that a studio looking to reintroduce a whole host of retro games would lean into this fad. Antstream Arcade, found at Antstream.com, boasts over 1400 games from across the retro consoles and devices, including the Amiga, arcade machines, Ataris, Game Boy, SNES, PlayStation, and more.
Chief games in the collection include Mortal Kombat, Bubble Bobble, Space Invader, Worms, multiple Star Wars titles, Pac-Man, Pac-Mania, and Indiana Jones’ Greatest Adventures. The most classic among these is, of course, Pac-Man. It’s still a big seller even in modern formats, such as on Apple’s App Store, while Star Wars boasts a superb retro history in gaming, and Mortal Kombat will get a new game this year. Best of all, and unlike most movie and TV streaming platforms, there’s a free tier to the subscription.
Having received over $90,000 in Kickstarter backing, Antstream Arcade launched with an ad-supported free tier. Through the website, you can also subscribe to the premium tier of $8 per month or $40 for the year. On platforms, however, as ads aren’t available, premium subscriptions are needed. It costs $30 for the year on Xbox or $80 for the Lifetime Pass Edition. This would probably be fine for those who just want a quick or infrequent hit of nostalgia, but for those retro gamers who are also collectors, the chance of losing these games after paying may not appeal to them.
Physical copies of the classics and hit digital releases
Limited Run operates in what is essentially the opposite way to Antsteam. Perhaps less accessible due to the $35 pricing per physical copy, but retro gamers and fans of hit digital releases will see that as a relatively low price – especially when new triple-A games on those same consoles hit $70 or more. Recently, at LRG3, some true big hitters were announced, including Arzette, The House in Fata Morgana, Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution, the mighty Gex Trilogy, and Jurassic Park Classic Games Collection.
Jurassic Park is, essentially, the premium brand of dinosaurs. Across media, where the skeletal tyrannosaurus rex goes, people follow. You can see this from the most recent video games like Jurassic World Evolution 2 to more far-flung forms of entertainment. In the iGaming sector, there are countless Jurassic Park online slots – this is the kind of franchise that draws players in, together with welcome offers. So sites like CasinoReviews.com list the top bonuses, but they also place a strong focus on the quality and quantity of games available. For instance, one of the top casinos, Casumo Casino, offers three Jurassic-themed slots: Jurassic Park Gold, Jurassic World, and Jurassic World: Raptor Riches.
You could even pull further with Jurassic Park into the world of theme parks, with the VelociCoaster being a huge attraction at the Universal Orland Resort. For all of these reasons and more, Limited Run bringing out a Jurassic Park Classic Games Collection will prove to be huge for the developers, with the additional appeal of it coming as a hard-copy game.
Antstream Arcade has gone with the mass library through a streaming approach, while Limited Run offers more of a collectors’ selection, giving additional value and physical ownership to classics and digital games. Both approaches are a superb sign for classic game enthusiasts, proving that there’s a demand to bring back the lost hits.
