EVERCADE:
A LARA TO LOOK FORWARD TO
Blaze Entertainment’s Andrew Byatt and Dominic Wheatley talk to MCV about the success of the Evercade retro gaming platform, their ambitious retail plans and the latter’s timely reunion with Lara Croft nearly 30 years on from launching Tomb Raider
T
he Evercade platform, joined by the Game Boy- inspired Super Pocket last year, is about to enjoy a refresh to its console and handheld hardware ahead of
an arcade-style system, the Evercade Alpha, joins the line-up at the end of the year. The revised systems, the EXP-R and VS-R, will be bundled
with the Tomb Raider Collection, a sign that the retro platform is moving into a new era of retro gaming. It’s not just the hardware that’s changing. Dominic
Wheatley, who launched the original Tomb Raider back in 1996, is just getting settled into his new role as Blaze’s
16 | MCV/DEVELOP August/September 2024
chairman, alongside CEO Andrew Byatt, both of whom were kind enough to speak to us about how they joined forces and the plans being enacted that will take the Evercade brand into the future.
MCV: Dominic, how did you come to join Blaze ? Dominic Wheatley: A couple of advisors had been talking to Andrew and Dave Pain, who’s one the shareholders, and sort of said ‘Maybe you should talk to Dominic because he’s also done this kind of thing.’ So they basically reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, let’s have lunch’. Of course, I looked into
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