Namco Ltd.

Midway had already struck gold with the Mortal Kombat series, but the industry was changing rapidly.

Sega's Virtua Fighter and Namco's Tekken had proven that the future of the genre wasn't just hand-drawn sprites, but fully 3D polygonal fighters.

Like many developers of the era, Midway faced a choice, continue refining the 2D formula that had made them successful, or embrace the industry's next technological leap.

In true midway form, they chose to do both.

It was insanely popular, in case you didn't know.

Namco and their license distributor, Bally Midway, were not interested in licensing it out yet.

That character, as far as they were concerned in 1980, was barely off the showroom floor.

Nobody... had proven that a video game could carry a television show.

Every one of those shows deserves its own telling somewhere down the line, but for today, it's just enough to know they all exist because Pac-Man went first.

Pac-Man's own legacy inside the games followed the cartoon, you know, to be fair, almost as closely as the cartoon followed the games.

Because as the, you know, the first game comes out, Ms. Pac-Man comes out, the cartoon comes out, the merchandising comes out, then everything just kind of comes full circle, right? Because 1984, Namco releases Pac-Land, right? the side-scrolling platformer that sends Pac-Man through a candy-colored world that's clearly inspired by the television show rather than the Maze-based original.

Peppers in Pac-Lan.

We're talking about Prop Cycle.

[upbeat music] So Prop Cycle is a Namco-made game.

It came out in June of 1996 in Japan, and the following month in North America.

And yeah, this is literally a arcade game hooked up to a bicycle, and that is how you power this game.

Yeah.

So a little bit of history about this game.

This game was designed by Shigeki Toyama, and he was a Namco engineer.

He already had some good credits in the industry, uh, including Xevious in 1983.

We're talking about Prop Cycle.

Prop Cycle So Prop Cycle is a Namco-made game.

It came out in June of 1996 in Japan and the following month in North America.

And yeah, this is literally an

I mean, it would work well.

So a little bit of history about this game.

This game was designed by Shigeki Toyama, and he was a Namco engineer.

He already had some good credits in the industry, including Xevious in 1983.

Like I remember people being like, oh, it's too violent.

Yeah, I mean, it's a Namco game.

I don't even know what system it was on.

It was TurboGrafx-16.

Yeah, I hate Galaga.

really we could cover it so I just it's just we could do like an old arcade we could do like old yeah I'm just bad at it that's what it is Dig Dug is more my style Dig Dug is just dumb and enjoyable

classic arcade games we could do like a few of them in one of the weeks like they're not they're not hard to play they're pretty quick It also says, I remember having a Game Boy Advance game with a handful of Namco games and my dad played it more than my brother and me for Galaga.

And then it hit me when I went to college and saw an arcade with the Galaga cabinet.

I know.

I'm like, we're like, we're just like, it's sort of how much will Namco let the license go for?

[laughs]

Contact Serious Sim and be like, "Do you know what you should do?" [laughs]