Remember back in the mid-90's when we had such great arcade hits such as Ridge Racer, Point Blank, Daytona USA, SEGA Rally, Virtua Cop and House of the Dead? Well it's all thanks to these awesome companies from the likes of SEGA and Namco (AKA: Bandai Namco to be exact).
These companies produced and developed some timeless arcade classics. So awesome they were also ported to video game consoles. Even though SEGA had alot of arcade games for their own hardware which is the SEGA Saturn. Namco however made an exclusive tie-in deal with Sony Interactive Entertainment to bring their titles such as Tekken, Point Blank, Time Crisis and Ridge Racer exclusively to PlayStation, thus competing against SEGA and their lineup of home versions of their arcade hits on the Saturn. Namco however also developed many peripherals for the PlayStation system which includes a arcade stick, the NeGcon controller that twists and even the G-Con 45, a light gun used for Time Crisis and other shooting games.
With Namco and SEGA competing in amusement gaming.
- SEGA had Daytona USA and SEGA Rally, Namco had Ridge Racer.
- SEGA had Virtua Fighter, Namco had Tekken.
- SEGA had House of the Dead and Virtua Cop, Namco had Time Crisis and Point Blank.
- SEGA had pinball machines, Namco had NamCam technology.
- SEGA had AM2, Namco had System 22 hardware.
You know, back in the 90's it was filled with games both created by SEGA and Namco. While many are very underrated such Namco's Prop Cycle and Gunmen Wars which had kick-ass soundtrack by the way. But more commonly, some amusement places still has SEGA's Outrun 2 game. If you're really lucky and if your local amusement place took great care of these two machines, you might still happen to find SEGA Rally and Daytona USA which are both released in 1994. I'm so glad that these machines still exist today. You know if I had to pick either SEGA or Namco. Well I don't know. Namco makes great shooting games while SEGA makes great racing games so for me I'd pick both.
Yes Namco did have their timeless classic arcade games such as Pac-Man, Galaxian, Dig-Dug and others but however. I'm only focusing in the 90's. I kinda miss the 32-bit days of arcade gaming. It was good.
Before I head off, here's a little fun fact. Today, Namco stills makes amusement games today such as Time Crisis 5 as well as other 4D games. They even have their own entertainment centres across the UK as Namco Funscape which has allsorts of fun and games. Oh and didn't you know that Namco and Nintendo joined forces by developing a Mario Kart arcade game which had Namco's characters in it?
