Benjamin Franklin once said that “nothing can be certain except for death, taxes, and collections of old Midway arcade games.”* Today, Warner Bros. has proven him right by announcing Midway Arcade Origins, yet another rerelease of a bunch of classics originally published by the now-defunct Midway Games, for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
The upcoming collection contains Joust, Rampage, Gauntlet, Defender, Marble Madness, Spy Hunter, and more that haven’t been announced yet but that you probably remember playing once or twice before. Warner Bros. has also announced that while Origins doesn’t have online multiplayer, it does feature online leaderboards and Trophies/Achievements.
This is a relatively new idea for Warner Bros., but before Midway declared bankruptcy in 2009 (and had most of its assets bought up by WB), it was a big fan of putting some version of all its classic arcade games on every possible platform. Going as far back as 1995, Midway was selling console-based ports of the same games you could just as easily find at any arcade … assuming you could still find an arcade.
Now, counting Origins, Midway and Warner Bros. have done this over a dozen times. That’s enough for us to make a collection of the collections, so with the help of MobyGames’ exhaustive database, we’ve done just that. Check out the gallery below for a trip back through time and explore the rich and exciting history of Midway’s classic game compilations. Of course, you won’t find very much information about the classic games themselves, so just think of this as more of a museum of museums. It has a fraction of the educational value and a fraction of the fun!
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*OK, Franklin never actually said that … but we’re pretty sure that if he were still around, old tech-lovin’ Ben would play video games all the time. Well, at least when he wasn’t using the Internet to meet women.