The Apple Vision Pro is making some pretty immersive experiences come to life in mixed reality.
The latest to prove that point is Resolution Games’ new Apple Arcade title, Retrocade. The title is one of four new games coming to Apple Arcade
This game lets you step into the neon glow of the ’80s and relive the thrill of the classic video arcade. Retrocade brings acclaimed games from old-school arcades together in one place — no quarters needed.
Players can immerse themselves in an actual arcade with their Apple Vision Pro and experience games like Asteroids, Bubble Bobble, Centipede, Galaga, and more, just like how they were played when they were originally released.
Retrocade games are also playable on iPhone and iPad. Apple sent me an Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset to try it out. And I got a demo of the experience from Tommy Palm, CEO of Resolution Games, while inside the Vision Pro.
“We’ve been working with Retrocade, which is really dear to my heart. It’s a love letter to the golden age of gaming, back when games were very simple, very much about really great gameplay, being very experimental with the controllers, and very clear business model,” Palm said in our press group interview.
We did a Facetime call inside a virtual room where we were all sitting with each other, using our Personas, or dynamic representations of your face and hand movements used during video calls and other applications.
Palm shared 3D immersive images of the arcade machines during the Facetime call. The cabinets were higly realistic, and the machines were just as tall as they would look in real life, only their were in a virtual room. The art looked beautiful.
A seasoned developer
Resolution Games was founded in 2015 to focus on virtual reality games and spatial computing. The company has now made four titles for the Apple Vision Pro, including Gears & Goo, which had two nominations for the Apple Design Awards. The company also made Game Room, Demeo and Racket Club on the Apple Vision Pro.
“We really love the platform. We focus a lot on social-first gameplay. I’m very passionate about that. Personally, I think games are such an excellent way of hanging out together with friends and getting to know people, colleagues,” Palm said.
Retrocade is about the social chasing of high scores on classic arcade games. Palm showed us a scene of a real arcade, reproduced in the Vision Pro, in Los Angeles.
“We see it as like a chance to revisit the 80s, this arcade recreation that we have from like an arcade in LA, and this is actually me from the 80s in an arcade in LA so we all have some geek cred there,” Palm said. “This is a chance to kind of relive those really classic titles that matter. They are the foundations of gaming today. They had a high score list, soundtracks, music. It’s a lot of the really iconic titles from the era.”
The game has 10 machines. The list includes Asteroids, Bubble Bobble, Breakout, Centipede, Frogger, Galaga, Haunted Castle, Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Track & Field. It’s like getting an all-acces pass to the Golden Age of arcades, Apple said.
You can climb global leaderboards, unlock achievements for every game and go on daily missions. Each game has Dip Switches that can alter the gameplay. The challenges change each day, and you can go back and play past challenges.
You can check the Leaderboard to see your global high score standing. In the Apple Vision Pro version only, you can toggle the environments. All the games are in solo mode. You can toggle to the Immersive cabinet mode or use window mode in the menu.
You can use a PlayStation 5 controller, or a PSVR2 controller. You might be tempted to see if you can grab the virtual joysticks and push buttons with your virtual fingers.
“It works with single-push buttons, like starting a single-player game,” Palm said. But for hitting fire or hyperspace, you have to be very precise with handtracking. It’s good at pressing a button down, but then you don’t know how far you need to press it, because you don’t feel it, and then it’s very hard to let it go. So it wasn’t good enough an experience to use your hands.”
The game is an exclusive for Apple and it isn’t going to other platforms like Meta Quest.
Hands-on gameplay
I fired up the Apple Vision Pro after getting used to its finger-based controls. Then I added a PlayStation 5 controller to the Bluetooth connection. It worked fine and then I started Retrocade. It was cute to see a shiny quarter appear in the middle of my living room, floating in the air. I could see things in the background while I played in mixed reality.
The game started out with Breakout, the classic Atari brick-smashing game. I was a little slow on the controller movement in my first game. Then I moved on to Taito’s Space Invaders. That turned out to be a a lot of fun. I loaded a quarter into the machine by pressing the left social button on the controller and then I started the game by pressing the menu button.
I pressed the X button and the game started. The familiar sound of the invading aliens came on in my ears — the Apple Vision Pro has environmental sound, allowing you to hear sounds without plugging in headsets. And I started firing with the X button on the PS5 controller. I cleared out the low-flying ships first and then they started moving faster. I played more but failed to clear the screen. I was trying to fire the shots too fast, and so my timing was off. I needed to slow it down a notch and then became better at hitting the moving targets. I was a completely immersive experience, and I enjoyed it.
I suspect I’ll get a kick out of showing this off to people for fun. I played it on the Apple Vision Pro with the M5 processor. It’s a $3,500 machine, and so you aren’t going to buy one of these just to play an arcade game that you could play for a quarter. But it’s a very nice experience that brings home the experience of immesion.
Disclosure: Apple provided me with a Vision Pro for the purpose of this review.