Game accessory maker Performance Designed Products wants to bring back good memories of arcade action with a new version of the light gun. The company is unveiling Mars, a light gun that you can play on the couch with a couple of new games.
You could say it’s part of a retro craze in gaming that has entrepreneurs bringing back console hardware like Intellivision and Atari.
Burbank, California-based PDP is showing off the new product at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the big game trade show in Los Angeles next week. Set to debut in early 2019, the Mars product will have a light gun, camera, and one of two downloadable games: Voyage of the Dead and Qubit’s Quest.
More titles are in development. With newly developed technology, PDP has enabled modern HD/4K TVs and projectors to detect a low power laser for pinpoint accuracy while tracking gameplay for up to four players.
Above: Mars lightgun
“As the No. 1 video game accessory company in North America, PDP draws from superior engineering capability and years of experience developing advanced technology,” said John Moore, senior vice president of marketing at PDP, in a statement. “We’ve been working with top game developers to bring two new co-op arcade-style experiences to life and we’ll show them for the first time at E3.”
For Mars’ lightgun to have the required accuracy for the new games, PDP developed a new camera that can track the actions of up to four players. It uses low-power infrared detection.
The team working on Mars previously did product development work for the Disney Infinity and Lego Dimensions toy-game hybrid products. The team wanted to bring back the old light gun genre from the arcades, but with a modern twist.
Above: Mars gun’s Voyage of the Dead.
Old light guns were available on devices like the Magnavox Odyssey, the Sega Master System, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and the Atari XEGS. Popular arcade titles include Time Crisis 4, Virtua Cop 3, and The House of the Dead: Overkill.
Qubit’s Quest is an action platformer and third-person game where up to four players work to protect your loyal robotic canine, Qubit. The game takes you on a mission to defeat the Singularity and his minions. Qubit’s Quest is currently in development with Two Okes.
Voyage of the Dead is a couch co-op game with a quirky art style and campy sense of humor, set on a cruise ship overrun by a zombie outbreak. Voyage of the Dead is being developed with Gaming Corps.
Privately held PDP is profitable and it has been around for 15 years as a maker of game controllers, headsets, chargers, remotes, and other peripherals. The company has 175 employees.
