Retronauts East journeys into Namco's past in episode 148
Begin a comprehensive, ongoing journey into the history of an arcade giant this week!
Over the course of 2017, Retronauts East took a pretty well comprehensive look back at SEGA's expansive history of making arcade games. That hard work has come to fruition! The company has announced it's bringing some little-seen arcade titles to Switch courtesy of developer M2, including the innovative Gain Ground. Which I gushed about at length but forgot to mention by name. Well, you're welcome anyway.
I suppose we still owe you guys a late ’90s SEGA history episode, but in the meantime we decided to switch gears to a topic dear to our collective heart: Namco.
Yes, throughout the remainder of 2018, we'll be giving Namco's arcade legacy the same treatment we did for SEGA: Breaking down the company's coin-op line-up one game at a time. Of course, some of these we've already touched on; we glanced over the Namco Museum series back in 2013, and we've done deep-dive episodes on Pac-Man and Dig Dug. But our goal is to pay tribute to Namco's library in its totality here! Beginning with this episode, which tackles Namco's relatively late start (1978!) and meteoric rise (Galaxian! Pac-Man!). This episode basically takes us through the company's earliest experiments through the masterful Xevious. Next time, the games will get weirder and more experimental… but that's a few months away.
For now, though, just sit back and soak in two hours of Namco nostalgia… and some wonderment at new discoveries we'd never seen or played before, like Navalone and S.O.S.
Retronauts Episode 148
Namco arcade history: 1978-1982
MP3, 57.6 MB | 1:59:04
Direct download | Retronauts on iTunes | Retronauts on Libsyn
Episode description: Jeremy, Chris, and Benj take a comprehensive journey through the catalog of an arcade legend: Namco. From their humble beginnings through mega-hits like Pac-Man, Dig Dug, and Galaga, it's wall-to-wall coin-op classics up in this episode.
This week's interstitial music comes from a whole wide world of Namco compilations, including Namco Museum for PS1 and Namco Museum Megamix. I also sprinkled some of Yuzo Koshiro's X68000 Bosconian compositions in there, because, you know… Yuzo Koshiro.
