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NFL Blitz, the beloved over-the-top football game that was a staple in the late ’90s, is returning this fall as a home arcade cabinet from Arcade1Up. The new cabinet is dubbed NFL Blitz Legends and includes remastered versions of the first three games in the series: NFL Blitz, NFL Blitz ’99, and NFL Blitz 2000: Gold Edition. NFL Blitz Legends is available to preorder now for $600 ahead of its early October release.
NFL Blitz Legends was made in partnership with the NFL, and Arcade1Up also worked with the Field Greats Association (FGA) to get real NFL legends in the games like they were originally. While it’s unclear at this time if all of the players who appeared in the original games will be present in the cabinet versions, Arcade1Up provided a list of some of the stars who are on board:
Jerry RiceDan MarinoDeion SandersCris CarterJerome BettisTerrell Davis
The cabinet artwork and design are based on the original cabinets that you may have seen in arcades more than 20 years ago. Like a lot of other Arcade1Up cabinets, it has a 17-inch LCD display, a light-up marquee, and is five feet tall. You can pair your NFL Blitz Legends cabinet with an $80 team-branded stool featuring the logo and color scheme of any of the 32 current NFL teams.
NFL Blitz Legends supports local and online multiplayer. Along with a set of buttons for each player in local multiplayer, the cabinet has two 49-way joysticks, which means they will operate in a similar manner to modern analog sticks on controllers when it comes to precision. Online multiplayer can be played over Wi-Fi against other players with the cabinet, and there will even be a leaderboard feature to see how you stack up against other players on the gridiron.
Games featured in Arcade1Up cabinets typically aren’t remastered versions; they are ports of the original games. At this time, the extent of the remastered features isn’t entirely clear, but the cabinet has been in the works for years. One thing we do know is late hits will not be supported.
“Our team spent the better part of the last two years making sure we both honored the games’ past while bringing it up to today’s modern standards with AAA development efforts in partnership with the NFL and FGA, and I think we’ve achieved that in an unbelievable feat of fun, exciting, action-packed gameplay while reengineering the original game,” Arcade1Up CEO Scott Bachrach said.
Out of all of the many Arcade1Up cabinets, NFL Blitz Legends might very well be the most exciting to date. Arcade1Up already brought back the NBA equivalent of over-the-top arcade action in NBA Jam (and the recently released NBA Jam: Shaq Edition ), but the return of NFL Blitz is considerably more surprising.
We’ll make sure to update this article as more details are revealed about NFL Blitz Legends. Arcade1Up is giving away a limited-edition NFL Blitz Legends hat to the first 1,000 customers who preorder the cabinet directly from Arcade1Up. You can also expect the cabinet to be available at other retailers that carry Arcade1Up cabinets, including Best Buy and GameStop.
The NFL Blitz Legends reveal comes on the heels of Arcade1Up announcing a Marvel vs. Capcom 2 cabinet featuring eight games. So, this fall will see the release of cabinets focused on two of the greatest games of all time in their respective genres. That’s pretty exciting and potentially bad for the bank accounts of nostalgic gamers.
