Blaze walks a fine line with its new handhelds
Blaze has been one of the most consistently interesting players in the retro-gaming market in recent years, and it has recently announced plenty of new products. Most interesting are the two Super Pocket handheld consoles, to be released under the new Hyper Mega Tech! brand. The Capcom edition features 12 games including Strider, Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting and Final Fight, while the Taito edition contains 17 games such as Bubble Bobble, Space Invaders and The NewZealand Story. Both are due for release in October, for £49 each.
Andrew Byatt, CEO of Blaze Entertainment, says that the new systems were born from the company’s experience of working on the Evercade. “We have found that along this journey there is a large group of casual players that might want to experience retro in a simpler format. We wanted to give these people actual arcade games, rather than console conversions and a price point that wasn’t a huge purchase for many people,” he explains. “The Super Pockets came from this idea – arcade in your pocket.” Notably, this is the first time the company has managed to license games from Taito – adeal that Andrew says took “several years” of talks. The devices are numbered suggesting that more Super Pockets may come down the line, but we’re told that there are no further deals on the table at present.
What sets the Super Pocket consoles apart from similar devices is the inclusion of cartridge slots, allowing owners to expand beyond their built-in games with Evercade games. However, the budget-priced systems aren’t comparable to the Evercade EXP. “The Super Pockets use a similar chipset that was in the original Evercade. They can play all the games we have released and should do for years to come,” says Andrew. “They do not have some of the features the Evercade has (HDMI, Wi-Fi, Game Of The Month etc), it is very much a simpler experience that we know many people will enjoy at this price point.”
The reveal of the Super Pockets attracted some backlash from the Evercade community. In issue 239 of Retro Gamer, Blaze’s Sean Cleaver said that, “For the next certainly 14 to 18 months, we don’t have any real plans to make another Evercade device.” In the same issue, Andrew said, “For future products and other projects where content might be preloaded, I think it wouldn’t be an Evercade product.” Though Super Pockets
