Turn your home into a 2000s bowling alley with The Fast & The Furious Deluxe Arcade Cabinet, out in May.
Purveyors of officially-licenced replica coin-ops, Arcade1Up, has announced The Fast & The Furious Deluxe Arcade Cabinet. The hefty unit contains two arcade racers from the 2000s – The Fast and the Furious, released in 2004, and its 2007 sequel, The Fast and the Furious: Drift. Both are, of course, based on the long-running, tyre-squealing movie franchise in which Vin Diesel often appears.
Timed to coincide with the release of Fast X, the latest entry in said long-running, tyre-squealing movie franchise, Arcade1Up’s cabinet has a quite nifty trick up its sleeve – you can connect up to four of these coin-ops together for multiplayer races. Given that each cabinet will cost you $599.99, and you’ll need a pretty large area to set them up in, it’s not an option many are likely to take up. But it sounds enticing, doesn’t it? Imagine your living room, festooned with a row of cabinets, all revving and rumbling in vague unison, like a 2000s bowling alley writ small.
Returning to reality for a minute, it’s worth pointing out that the games housed in the bulky cabinet are rather good. The Fast and the Furious and its sequel were both designed by the legendary Eugene Jarvis, whose career takes in the similarly exhilarating Cruis’n games and stretches right back to Defender and Robotron: 2084. Both Fast games are marked out by their likeably outlandish physics, which commonly sees cars careening high into the air, and hazard-filled, street-based courses often based on those in the movies.
Arcade1Up’s cabinets scoop those racers up and place them in one upright, 64-inch-tall venue, complete with 17-inch LCD screen, light-up marquee, a rumbly steering wheel, pedals and gear stick.
The Fast & The Furious Deluxe Arcade Cabinet is out on 5 May, where it’ll be available in the US and Canada at Best Buy. Arcade1Up’s other retro offerings, such as Dragon’s Lair and Star Wars, have been available from UK places like Game and Amazon in the past, so it’s possible that we’ll see these Fast coin-ops appear on this side of the pond eventually. We’ll start clearing out the living room now.
