Newsbytes: BuckFest 2025; Trade Show Updates; PRGE & Pinball Expo 2025; More

Welcome to another edition of Newsbytes, the series of posts here at Arcade Heroes that rounds up bytes of news from across the arcade and pinball worlds. What started off relatively quiet has now become an eventful month in terms of arcade happenings, and that is only going to pick up even more with IAAPA now exactly one month away, so let’s get into the here and now before the news cycle turns again.

BuckFest 2025

First up, one of the biggest events around for just one arcade game got even bigger recently, as the first ever BuckFest featuring the Big Buck Hunter World Championships was held a week ago. This went down in Nashville, TX at Marathon Music Works, and had live music, Raw Thrills/Play Mechanix arcade games aplenty (first, second and third generation Big Buck cabinets were all on hand to play, with the others being Top Gun, NBA Superstars, Angry Birds Boom, Minecraft and Halo), and the eighteenth World Championships as the main event. Here’s the Day 1 stream of those championships:

Day 2’s stream can also be found below; for those who don’t want to sit through all of it, Jordan Classen was this year’s Big Buck Champion (winning the top prize of $25k – AH reader Federico Read came second and got $12.5k) whilst Kattey Pass took home the win in the ladies division.

Unfortunately, those hoping for any new Premium content in Big Buck Hunter Reloaded will have been disappointed, as the only update announced at the show was for the addition of the Mountain Goat in Spring 2026 (as voted on by the BBH community), plus a few bonuses. It’s a little surprising they didn’t have anything bigger to commemorate the game’s 25th anniversary, especially since Reloaded now has a port. That said, their platform operates a lot like Golden Tee at this point(annual content updates), so it may still be a few years before they decide to wholly change that up.

Trade Show Updates

October is usually the ‘breather’ month between the peaks of September and November in trade show season, but there are still smaller amusement expos happening this month to take note of. Out in Bangkok, Thailand, there has been the TAAPE (Thailand Amusement & Attraction Parks Expo) show, which had numerous companies (mostly Chinese ones) show up. Among the notable examples, there was UNIS, who were there with some of their new games like Spin City and Jump Master, and Joint Fun, who had the products we’ve previously seen from them at other Asian shows, such as Saga of Knight, Buggy Empire, and Running Ostrich DX. None of these have had much serious representation out West yet, excepting some of the smaller European distributors, but perhaps that may change come IAAPA:

Then for trade shows still to come, more and more preview announcements have been coming out for Japan’s Amusement Expo in November, chief among those being Bandai Namco Experience’s booth contents. One game that already seemed destined to appear was Wangan Midnight Speed Ignition, which will be taking center stage, alongside their recently revealed One Piece Dawn Strike puncher and the first pusher medal game based on that franchise. It will be a little interesting to see whether that releases outside of Japan given Konami’s above mentioned similar moves, though the puncher doesn’t sound likely.

Their new original rhythm game Penlalive and a children’s cooking title called Tekipaki Kitchen that quietly showed up on test last year will also be on show, but seemingly absent are Biohazard RE:2/Resident Evil 2 Arcade (not a surprise given its current early status) and Bike Dash Delivery, their bike-based food delivery game which has sporadically been tested in the East and West (and at Japan’s previous couple Amusement Expos) as far back as 2023. However, with the game’s absence here, it looks like it may well be cancelled after all… unless BN have a surprise West-only release of it hidden up their sleeves. There’s no sign of Magi Blast either, which is a slight shame as that game looked pretty unique.

Sega Japan have also made the first announcements of what they will bring to JAE, largely being just StarHorse Party (which recently went back on test) and UFO Catcher exhibits for now, although it does sound like there will be a little more to come from them than just this.

Portland Retro Game & Pinball Expo 2025

Still staying on the events tack but less on the industry-focused side of things, this year’s annual Pinball Expo got underway this week out in Schaumburg, IL, whilst over in Oregon, the Portland Retro Game Expo has also been happening. Unfortunately nobody at Arcade Heroes could make the former on this occasion (we did have coverage last year), owing to the overlap with PRGE, but there was still plenty happening there regardless, as this tour makes clear. Two event debuts for new games actually happened simultaneously at both PE and PRGE – for pinball, it was Stern’s Star Wars: Fall of the Empire. This had a nice game flow to it, and seemed easier for newcomers than their 2018 SW pin:

Whirl-O-Ball by Orbit Games sounds like it was a hit at Pinball Expo, with our friend Joe at Indie Arcade Wave taking the top spot in the competition they held for the game. They also posted some video of it to the American Pinball Instagram where it looks like kids really enjoyed it.

Then in video games, Alan-1’s arcade edition of Gravitar Recharged made its first appearance at both shows. The game has been getting some good coverage from Jon at GenXGrownUp, as can be viewed below. Elsewhere in arcades, PRGE also had a slew of more recent games like Halo Fireteam Raven and DanceRush, indie developer Eftsith Software’s dungeon crawler Unfathom, and a huge multiplayer San Francisco Rush 2049 setup (right next to one for Maximum Tune 3DX+), which can be seen here.

Pinball News has been posted a plethora of videos from Pinball Expo to their YouTube channel, it’s all too much to share in one post, so check out their channel if interested. There’s an awful lot of interviews and panels, so it’s content to watch for days if you’re into pinball.

Konami Location Test Mania

One company that is continually making waves this year is none other than Konami, who besides their reopening of US amusement sales and restructuring of their arcade division have been doing numerous location tests of new games in recent months. That has came to a head recently with multiple games popping up all at once – last month saw them try out the new Super Punch Mania in Japan and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pusher in the US, and now the former is testing Stateside too. As can be seen from the below photo posted by Konami’s US arcade product manager Kwang Jae Lee, there is unsurprisingly a definite emphasis more on the ticket redemption aspect in this version, and more vibrant lighting:

But that’s not all, as also receiving R1US location tests over at the flagship Puente Hills Mall location are their ball toss piece Gashaaaan! (also seen on test in Japan recently), and yet another new pusher based on the anime Bleach, with a heavy card vending focus and clips from the original series playing. The latter game taps into a little bit of a trend we’re seeing now for pushers, as we’ll get into shortly… though again, whether any of these will turn up at IAAPA via someone associated with Konami remains to be seen.

RIP Paul Williams

Finally, this sad news was only mentioned briefly at the top of another story, so will be covered here. Weeks after stepping down from the company, Sega Amusements International confirmed that their former CEO and longtime director Paul Williams passed away on Wednesday. From what’s been shared with us, he had fallen ill at least one year ago, but kept working until his illness became more aggressive just recently. Paul passed peacefully on Tuesday morning with his family; we at Arcade Heroes extend our condolences to them and everyone who has known him both at and through his time with Sega. For our part, Paul kindly assisted us with our reportage on numerous occasions (including most recently the US release of Maimai DX), and though we did not know him personally beyond some email exchanges and brief conversations at shows, we too will miss him deeply. [Photo: InterGame]

Headlines

Tomonobu Itagaki, Creator Of Dead Or Alive And Ninja Gaiden’s Revival, Dies – Another sad passing…

Elderly People In Japan Play Taiko No Tatsujin For Care Prevention, Socializing – On the lighter side

Vanguard Princess R Begins Shipping

Photo Gallery From American Pinball At Pinball Expo 2025

Taito Shares New Darius-Inspired Reception Room Wall Mural Artwork

Bandai Namco’s Penlalive Tests Again, This Time Unannounced

An Odd Compact “SP” Monster Eye 3 Cabinet Tests In Japan

Konami Releases New Mahjong Fight Club Version

Konami Also Updates Their Quiz Magic Academy

Pump It Up Phoenix 2024 Updates To Ver. 2.11

Team Play Reveals Ghostbusters Wheel For IAAPA

We’re Only A Month Away From IAAPA 2025

[Home Headlines]

Atari Announces The Intellivision Sprint Game Console – It’s a clever commercial to announce this. I got to use this hands on at PRGE and it’s cool, although I don’t hold any nostalgia for the console as no one on my street had one when I was a kid. Still, if you’re into retro games, it has some fun games (Thunder Castle in particular for me was nice).

Psikyo Ends Sales Of Their Titles On Steam

That’s it for this Newsbytes; which of the above stories (e.g. BuckFest 2025) interested you most?

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