Evercade Makes Retro Gaming Sexy and Portable
With a 40+ year history, there’s plenty of money in the nostalgia market for video games alongside blockbuster hits on the latest consoles. Evercade launches this month, trying to do it right with affordable collections of classic games on one piece of hardware.
Anyone still banging the “games are for kids” drum is missing a lot of key information. Like Sony passing 110 million sales for its PlayStation 4 console this week, with most of the top games; Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto, God of War and Death Stranding all 15 or 18-rated across PS4, Xbox and PC.
Then there’s the huge number of adults (and celebrities) playing Nintendo’s Animal Crossing during the lockdown, creating a media phenomenon not far behind that of Zoom’s video chat app. Some families are on their third-generation of gamers and during lockdown there are potentially millions of old games or consoles been dug out of cupboards or attics.
Beyond the big-hitting games, there’s also a large mature audience looking to play the games they grew up with across the 70s, 80s and 90s. Adults with disposable incoming flocked to buy the Nintendo SNES mini, the Mega Drive (or Genesis) mini — all sold out, and even niche products like the PC Engine CoreGrafx Mini, which was a rare sight in the west back in its hey-day.
But they all plug into a HDTV and these old games do look a little worse for wear on massive-screen displays. For a fan to buy them all, that’s a lot of little, undeniably cute, boxes, more leads to the collection and a finite number of games per box with no legal way to expand it beyond what came in the collection, usually 20-odd games.
There are also collections of classic games available on the modern consoles, but with varying quality results and the same screen issues, unless you get something like Namco Museum for the portable Switch. But, when the Switch is retired in a few year's time, that collection along with previous versions for the varying generations of PlayStation, Xboxes, and other consoles go a similar way, collecting dust or sold off.
Other portable devices, often Android-powered are popular for emulated gaming, but they use cheap parts and rely on illegal ROM files for the original games, with users scouring dodgy websites for firmware and other files needed to run them.
Enter the Evercade
So, here comes the Evercade, launching very soon (listed as 22nd May by Blaze the producer, 8th June by Amazon UK and as “not yet available” on Amazon US, but should be around the same time frame depending on COVID and shipping times ).
A Kickstarted project from 2016, the creators have spent their time and money to build a neat, retro-charming bit of hardware, powered by a quad-core CPU that can play most 8- and 16-bit classics. Game packs come on low-cost cartridges, with printed manuals, just like back in the day, making them quite the collectors’ item.
The hardware is low-cost, just £60–£80 ($80-$99) depending on the bundle you want, available from Amazon UK or Amazon US. And early reviews are largely positive with a few gremlins being fixed by a day one firmware patch.
The cartridges typically offer six to 20 games, mostly the NES, SNES and Genesis versions of the classics, and are mid-priced at around £15/$20, rather than some of the insane prices you pay for PS4/Xbox collections of retro titles. And, if you want to play them on a big-screen there’s a HD-out port too!
New carts are being announced on a regular basis and there are already 120+ games (here’s a handy visual guide rather than listing them all) across the unveiled carts, with plenty more in the pipeline. Upcoming releases include two Atari Lynx carts, and the first in a series of retro-modern indie carts with the likes of XenoCrisis and Tumbleweed, demonstrating that developers can still find success developing for decades-old consoles. There’s plenty more to come once Evercade has got past the launch window.
Evercade might not be for everyone, but being able to play the classics like Pac Man, Dig Dug, Earthworm Jim, Double Dragon Xevious and many others wherever you are in seconds, rather than digging out the disc and booting the console, finding the remote etc, it seems like a good bet.
For those who want to see the arcade originals on the hardware, not the home console sports, Blaze is looking into it, and with quite a powerful chip inside the box, it could soon be home to more modern titles too.
Do comment on you currently enjoy your retro games, and if you think you’ll pick up an Evercade, or what you’d really like to see on it.
