Mojang announced yesterday that Minecraft Dungeons Arcade cabinets are on their way to arcades in North America for limited testing, with more cabinets coming later this year.
Released last year on Xbox One and PC, Minecraft Dungeons is a Diablo-like dungeon crawler set in the blocky world of Minecraft. Up to four players can jump in together and fight back waves of Minecraft enemies, like skeletons, zombies, and spiders. Now there’s a new, less convenient, and unsafe way to play Minecraft Dungeons. Just go to an arcade (during a pandemic) to play the new Minecraft Dungeons Arcade game, developed by Play Mechanix and Mojang.
As explained in a blog post announcing the new arcade machine, Minecraft Dungeons Arcade will take the action and gameplay of the original game and simplify things a bit to make it work better as a co-op arcade game. Players will even earn different physical trading cards they can collect and scan into the machine to get new powers, weapons, and pets.
The cabinet looks great too and the in-game screenshots shared by Mojang look great. It all sounds nice. But I can’t imagine venturing out into the world right now, during the covid-19 pandemic, just to play an arcade game that other folks might have just been touching and playing moments before. Especially when that game is available at home and is just fine there.
Mojang did emphasize that they are only sending cabinets to arcades that “follow local health guidelines” so as to help slow the spread of covid and mitigate risk. But maybe this could have waited until this summer, after more folks have been vaccinated?