When you spend a lot of time online you tend to find some interesting things there, but you probably knew that already, right?! Well, let me tell you about the latest thing I found online, that kind of fascinated me. Someone asked a pretty cool question and gave an even cooler answer for it. What would Dwayne Johnson’s movie Jumanji would look like if it was a good old Beat ‘Em Up game?
To make things more interesting, this isn’t the kind of post where we will try to explain to you with words how the entire thing would look like, no! We actually managed to find some art that depicts the movie as an old style 90’s arcade game, and all of that thanks to the artist called Castpixel. But we must not take all the credit for this because Destructoid spotted these images and provided us with a keen observation that we would all miss. It’s the fact that if this game was actually real and existing, there would be a whole bunch of people out there burning their quarters in order to take the role of Dwayne Johnson (Dr. Smolder Bravestone) and kick some mercenaries faces off.
If you recall the one game (different genre) that was similar to this was Alien vs. Predator released in 1994, and it allowed you to play with up to three players. Needless to say that this was basically one of the era’s best arcade brawlers. It was developed by Capcom (who doesn’t remember their logo popping up as soon as you inserted a coin) and it was based on a film adaptation of the comic book series that were in the works and supposed to be released around the same time as the game. The movie connoisseurs out there will point out that the actual movie came out nearly a decade ago, but despite that fact Capcom made one of the best 16-bit beat ’em up games we all loved to dump our spare change onto.
The only thing that ruins everything here is that thanks to the economics of licensing movies and games, and arcade machines being what they are, the Castpixel’s art you saw here will remain just that, art and nothing more. Something is better than nothing right!? It was nice to remember all those happy times we spent in an arcade with games like these. Yanking that joystick and nervously pressing those two buttons in order to annihilate your enemy was something none of us (from that era) will forget.
