“With the Super Pocket, we didn’t want to make products that ended on day three. That you’d play for a bit and then stick in the drawer. We wanted to make something


that had real value as a console” Andrew Byatt, CEO Blaze Entertainment


people of a certain generation remember these early games and love to be able to play them again. Then you’ve got a newer audience who just want to be able to play retro games in a way that is quick and easy. A lot of people find it enormously complicated to get into big games today. They just don’t have the time, which is why mobile has been so successful. Don’t forget that in the


vintage era of video games your game had to be really fun. It wasn’t played because it was beautiful. It wasn’t played because it had amazing music. If it wasn’t interesting and fun, the game would fail.


g


Andrew: Evercade was born in 2020 when we released the original handheld and the first ten cartridges. We signed all the licences, we’d invested in it as a business and then we held our breaths to some extent to see whether it worked. Over time, we’ve found that actually people do love collecting for this product and playing this product. We have regular releases that people can follow and they can really engage with the community, so building that community site has been really important for us. Dominic is sort of a leg up, to help us get to the next level.


18 | MCV/DEVELOP August/September 2024


MCV: What does the next level look like? Dominic: One of my roles is to help us get distribution - particularly in North America, where I lived for many years - and also, in due course, to help raise the funds to get to the next step. Those are my main missions. Licensing too to some extent, if I can be helpful, but really I have to say that Andrew and his team have been brilliant there. There are 500 games that he’s licensed so far and every quarter we come up with another couple of cartridges. Most have ten or more games on them and in the case of Tomb Raider it’s just the three, and at the moment we’re looking at Playstation 1, PC, and that sort of thing. There will be a time, in three or four years, when the hardware will be upgraded, the chips will be a bit cheaper, and they will be able to do PlayStation 3 games and Xbox games and so you’ll march in step with with the industry as it gets older.


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