Even as technology advances, and continues to produce visually stunning video games such as 2022’sHorizon: Forbidden Westand the more recent action-RPGBlack Myth: Wukong, the demand for retro gaming is constant. Whether it’s down to nostalgia, a need for simpler gameplay and mechanics, or something else entirely,many gamers love nothing more than to play a game that in some cases may be much olderthan they are.Antstream Arcade, a streaming platform with a library of over 1300 games, aims to fuse this love of retro with modern consoles, granting players the best of both worlds.
In an interview with Game Rant, studio head Mike Rouse discussed his personal love of retro gaming. He talked about why he feels there is still such a demand for it, and alsowhat the future holds for Antstream Arcade.This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Antstream Arcade is Continuously Growing its Library
Q: What was the main motivation behind Antstream Arcade?
Rouse:So the vision, initially for answering came from our CEO, and what he envisioned was a place where you could go and play the first game ever made, to the latest games being released. He was seeingservices like Netflixand Spotify pop up for people who love music, and people who love TV and film, but there’s nothing for games. It’s impossible to play the first game ever made, but not to read the first book ever made. So we really wanted to kind of make a platform that allowed gamers to come back and engage with this medium, just like we do with film and music and books.
We created and looked at the technology and said, if you’re going to scale from these small little games to games that are gigabytes and hundreds of gigabytes, you need to kind of start off with a platform and a technology that can do that and so that’s why we initially started there with streaming. As you go up through the generations, the games get bigger and more complex, andthe emulators get complex. You’ve got to have a technology that scales with that. So you start off with streaming, and this ambitious vision for every single game that was made to be on the platform.
Q: What factors influence which games are in the collection?
Rouse:So a lot of it comes down to who licensed with us first. We take the mantra of every single game possible. Now that’s going to be a near impossible task, because some are lost completely to time. Others are locked down. Nintendo, for example, I doubt they’ll ever let anyone license their IPs, but we go out there looking for anyone who wants to license again. We’ve spent, in some cases, four or five years trying to track down who owns a game, where the ROM is etc. It’s a real kind of likeIndiana Jonesinvestigation processto figure out where these games live and who owns them, because some are owned by a studio that went bankrupt, that got bought by a power company, and that power company got dissolved, which was purchased by a banking company.
We’re following these trails to find out where they went, we’re sort of like detectives. So we don’t necessarily choose particular games. Of course, we go for the big games. You know, we talk to Namco, Square, Sega. We’re constantly talking to those teams. But it really comes down to what comes in first, and the bigger players, who are still big publishers and have big IPs. Those conversations, some of them have been going on for six years, and the licensing process is complex and time-consuming, so it really depends on what comes in.
But we go broad. We go for everything, and we definitely look out for the big hitters that everyone will enjoy, but we go for the obscure stuff as well. Because, again, you know, not every game is for everyone, but there is a game that everyone loves. And so, by going for a broad selection of games, our hope is that we can find a game that you either love or you learn to love.
Q: Why is now the right time to bring the collection to PS5?
Rouse:So we always wanted to come to all of the consoles as soon as possible. We’re a small team, though. We’re about 30 people, and about 17 of those are active developers who look after the live service, customer service, QA artists, those kind of people. So it just came down to a question of timing and what we could do at the time. So we went with Xbox first, just because the architecture was close to what we had. And as soon as we finished Xbox in July,we started on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.A lot of it came down to how long it took us to bring the technology and build the engine so that it would work on PlayStation architecture.
It was more a factor of a small team wanting to be everywhere, but we’re just limited by the number of people we’ve got. For me, as an ex Sony guy, I did 12 years at Sony, it was a real passion to bring it to PlayStation. Also, I’m an ex-Xbox guy, so there is a conflict there! But yeah, I think the timing is more about development and how development naturally falls. If I could, and I had the team, I would bring it to every single device at exactly the same time.
Antstream Arcade on What Classifies as Retro
Q: What do you classify as retro, in terms of time period?
Rouse:Do you know it’s such a hard question to ask, because I’m obviously part of a big retro community. I’m part of a Sega Mega Drive and Genesis community, and that is part of a broader retro community. At that age range, people tend to feel likeanything up to PS1 games is retro, and as soon as you get into the PS2 era, that kind of stuff is kind of where modern gaming began. So I think if you were a historian, and you had to put lines in the sand, you would probably say everything up until PS1 is considered classic, and then modern gaming was PS2 onward. But to be honest, my son and my nephew, you know, 9 and 15 years old, consider the PS3 a retro console. So, for that generation, they see retro and classic gaming through a very different lens.
Q: What are the oldest and the newest games in the collection?
Rouse:So there’s a really cool feature that we’ve got coming in a big update, where you can search by year released. It’s an awesome feature, because I went and looked at my birthday to see which games were released then, so that’s cool. One of the earliest releases we have isPom, which is 1972 believe it or not. The latest we have is a PICO-8 game coming out in 2024. We cover big games, but we also look at indie games, independently developed games that are being developed for the original consoles. There area lot of Sega Genesis gamescoming out. I think there have been 15 new games released this year already for the Genesis. So, of course, when we license those, they go in as released in 2024 for the Genesis.
We cover a wide range. One of the cool things we’ve been investigating is actually, how do we emulate mechanical machines? There’s a game calledSubmarineby Namco that came out in the early 70s, maybe 74 I think. It was mechanically driven, using lights and gears and springs and all of that. One of the things we’ve discussed is, wouldn’t it be cool to bring back emulated, recreated versions of these mechanical games so that people can experience them and see what it was like? Obviously, you’re not getting the authentic versions because they were mechanical, but if we could recreate them somehow, they would not be lost to time, they would survive.
Antstream Arcade Has More PlayStation Games on the Way
Q: The collection updates weekly. Are there any plans to get more PlayStation games in the collection now it’s on PS5?
Rouse:We actually have a ton of PlayStation games already licensed. What we do look at is what games release in what week, and we try to balance it across the different types of platforms we have, the different genres we have, and the needs that people have. If the community is calling out for more PlayStation games, we’ll look at doing more PlayStation stuff. We’ve probably got another 50 already licensed PlayStation games, and there are more being licensed all the time. But, for example, some of those are the sixActua Soccergames that came out on PlayStation. So we could release those one at a time in consecutive weeks if we wanted to, but I think the community would be like, ‘‘Okay, we’ve had our fill ofActua Soccerthanks.’’
We try to just mix up the catalog as and when we’re releasing stuff, but we actually have many PlayStation titles that we’ve licensed, and the timing thing is really about when they’re gonna drop. We’ve probably got about 2000 games that we’re still working through. Like I said before though, it’s a small team. We’re hoping with the PlayStation release, that we can grow the team, and we can start accelerating the number of games that we can get into the catalog. But yeah, there’s a vast number of games now. Of course, if a big AAA game lands in our lap, we’ll look to prioritize that. But yeah, we have experts that are looking at the genres and popularity of them and whether the community would like them, or if they’re a hidden gem, perhaps, like games that we know people will love but may not have experienced back in the day, and they prioritize the list that way.
Q: There are currently over 1300 games in your library, do you foresee that number growing?
Rouse:Yeah, I think ultimately, it’s going to grow. There are more than 1300 at the moment. I think we’re about 1400 at the moment, but because we have a licensing model, some games inevitably drop out, but then come back on the platform again. A publisher may sell their games to someone else, and the person that buys them doesn’t want to renew the license because they’re cataloging all the games that they’ve just purchased…or they may go to a publisher, and they’re releasing a new version of the game in that particular series, and they don’t want to license, so we’re kind of at the mercy of licenses.
We do license for long periods, but games do come off the platform now and again. We’ve got a massive number of games that then come back on the platform though, and we keep all our relationships with all of these publishers and owners of games so that maybe even if they’ve taken them off, in six months, or a year, the deal’s back on the table, and we can license them again.
Q: Could there be any changes to how regularly the collection is updated?
Rouse:At the moment, we update every single week. I don’t think we will go to multiple days a week. I think what we would probably do is just increase the volume of games that come out on release day. So we release at least one tournament every single week. We release new challenges every week, mini-game challenges, where we break down a game into a small fun bit of game play, and then we release new games every week. So we could increase that volume. We generally release two or three a week. If we grow the team, we could increase that to like 10, maybe 15 a week, just so that we can get that back catalog that we have out to the public.
Q: You host plenty of competitions. Are there any plans for ones that might have prizes and things like that?
Rouse:Yeah, we’ve got some massive updates on the roadmap.We have eSports in the planand leagues that you may be part of. They’re a little bit further down the road. In theory though, with those ones, you can join an eSports team and start playing these games in your own room, so that’s going to be very cool. We’ve got a massive update that’s due out at the end of the year. We’re redoing the whole tournament system. We’re giving you more ways to win. So at the moment, it’s global, but we’re also bringing in ranked so you can compete in the ranked divisions.
We’ve also got a friends division that you can compete in, and we’ve got another mode, which is called missions, where you can earn rewards for just doing certain things in the tournament, like for getting in the top 100 you’ll get a little reward, or play six times in a week in the tournament, and you’ll get a reward. And that’s really for people who like to do missions, but people who don’t like competing on a leaderboard.
Retro Gaming Never Loses its Appeal
Q: So retro games in general, there’s obviously still a huge draw for them. Why is this, in your opinion?
Rouse:I think it’s down to the fact that a great game is always a great game. It’s no different to music. People still listen to The Beatles, and that’s just great music that people enjoy. I think it’s the same with films too. My kids, at the beginning of the year,watchedBack to the Futurefor the first time, and their minds were blown. They loved the film despite it being, like, 30-odd years old now. I think that’s true for any kind of entertainment medium you have. People enjoy well-produced games, films, music, etc.
For me personally, when I look atthe 16-bit erain particular, that’s almost become an art style rather than a limitation of hardware. So we see today, people still make retro-style games with pixel artwork. I think it’s just great. Games stand the test of time. What we do with Antstream is we’re exposing people to those great experiences. Then what we do with the games that you may not have necessarily considered, is we turn these into little challenges and make them fun in themselves.
For example, I’m not a bigfan of ZX Spectrum games, but with some of these challenges, I find myself playing games I would never have considered playing because I don’t find them visually appealing, or I think they’re a little too old. You play the challenge, and suddenly you’re playing against other people, and it’s a competing thing, and you’re just playing this small loop of gameplay. What we’ve done is make a game relevant to you by creating this challenge. I think that’s a key thing for preservation. When you look at preserving games, you’ve got to make them easily accessible, but you have to make them relevant to audiences as well.
Q: what are the long-term plans for Antstream Arcade?
Rouse:We’ve got a lot on the horizon, obviously, more games, more games and more games. We are starting to look at emulation tech that allows us to do more modern games, so modern retro-style games, and also starting to look at the early GPU stuff (PS2-era). So we are looking atthe PS2 and the Nintendo Gamecube, that kind of stuff. There’s a big collection there to get through, and then we have a huge number of features. I touched on the new version of the tournament system. We’ve completely rebuilt Antstream from the ground up over the last year. We’re a bit behind because we did the PlayStation launch, but we have this massive update that completely redoes the entire interface, fixes all the navigation problems, and adds new features.
One of the things that I’ve been working on is a feature called Badges. I’m kind of making a system that rewards players with badges similar to trophies but for the retro gaming collection as well. There’s a massive amount of stuff that we’ve got on the horizon, and that’s just for the next 12 months, there’s plenty more beyond that like leagues, eSports, etc. More consoles are coming online, more modern arcade machines are coming online, and again, it just makes them more relevant for people and increases the audience. It becomes more appealing as people kind of remember the games that they used to love, but also get opportunities to interact with these games in new ways, with our kind of new challenge system and game modes.
There’s a lot on the horizon there. I think the best way to describe it is that we’re trying to create a PlayStation or Xbox in the cloud. It’s like a second-generation gaming platform where you don’t need hardware anymore. You’ve just got access to these games. And what this will mean for gamers is at the moment, when you’ve got hardware, when you leave your hardware behind, you leave your games catalog behind. When you sell your PS4, all those downloadable games have gone. What you’re able to do with Antstream is take your collection with you, for every generation of gaming platform. It’s always there.If there’s a PS6, the same login details just work with the PS6, and you’ve got the same stuff, high scores, save data, it’s all there. We see it as a second-generation gaming platform, and that’s exciting.
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