I’ve seen many attempts at officially selling licensed retro games come and go over the years.
As piracy remains a ‘popular’ way of playing classic games – how those companies who sell 10,000-in-one devices are getting away with it is beyond me – there are those who are trying to do it legit, and often struggle to turn that into a success.
While the officially licensed ‘mini’ console craze that saw pint-sized replicas of the NES, SNES, Mega Drive, PS1, TurboGrafx and the like did well at the time, it seems to have fizzled out these days with only Retro Games and its home computer recreations continuing to regularly release new devices.
Others, like the old ‘Flashback’ series of plug-and-play devices, or the Retro-Bit Generations console, bundled together a bunch of officially licensed retro games, but only saw modest success (if any at all).
When UK company Blaze introduced the Evercade back in 2020, then, you can perhaps appreciate that I wasn’t quite convinced it would last too long. The concept was a noble one – do licensing deals with IP owners to sell compilations of retro games, released on physical cartridges with full colour manuals – but I wondered how big the market was.
On top of that, the original Evercade handheld was decent, but was a little light and plasticky, and didn’t really feel like a premium product. If I’m being completely honest, I foresaw it getting five or six cartridges then quietly disappearing. I didn’t want it to – I loved the mission and wanted to support it – but with piracy rife among emulation fans I thought it was doomed to fail.
Six years later, I’m happy to admit I was wrong, and that the opposite has happened. By the end of the year there will be 90 Evercade cartridges, offering a total of more than 750 games to play. Just last week it was announced that System 3’s James Pond and The Last Ninja series will be coming to the device, two series that I personally loved back in the day.
What’s more, Blaze has improved its hardware since that original Evercade handheld too. It’s since been replaced by the Evercade EXP (and then the redesigned EXP-R), which feels more solid and can also be turned vertically to play some arcade games in TATE mode.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.videogameschronicle.com/features/after-playing-the-evercade-nexus-its-clear-that-blazes-retro-line-up-is-preparing-to-step-up-a-level/
