ARCADE WATCH
Keeping an eye on the coin-op gaming scene
First announced all the way back in 2008, the smart money was on this unnecessarily ambitious 2D fighting game having long since gone the way of the dodo. Yet Dark Presence, which is being made by a development studio set up by Galloping Ghost, an arcade in Brookfield, Illinois (which, with over 400 games, is one of the biggest in the US), is somehow very much alive.
OK, it doesn’t look like much. Indeed, its digitised sprites do not exactly scream 2017, instead calling back to the likes of Pit Fighter and Mortal Kombat (understandably, Galloping Ghost prefers the latter comparison). Yet beneath the mid-’90s aesthetic is a fighting game of baffling, staggering complexity. Actors have been fully performance captured in remarkable detail, with every character fighting every other character to ensure each battle feels distinct. Oh, and they’ve done it with each fighter on the player one and player two sides, with none of the sprite flipping found in other games. Oh, and there’s a stance system, tied both to screen sides and health bars (when a bar is almost empty, the character enters a ‘Not Well’ state).
The result? Seventeen thousand frames of animation per character, five years on a capture set, and a game whose final filesize may run to an entire terabyte. A console port doesn’t seem especially likely; then again, neither does the game itself, but nearly ten years later Galloping Ghost’s enthusiasm appears undimmed. Risky, ludicrously expensive and mad as a brush, it’s the kind of thing we thought was long gone from the arcade scene – and not just because it reminds us of Pit Fighter. Commendably bonkers stuff.