You know how we have the mainstream consoles / portables (EX: Playstation 5, Xbox Series S / X, Nintendo Switch and I guess now the Steam Deck)? There is a group of consoles / portables known as "New Retro" which is right now Evercade and the new Atari VCS (the Intellivision Amico is suppose to be the third console in the "New Retro" group, but I'm 95% certain at this point it's going to be cancelled, so it's just going to be Evercade and the new Atari VCS in the "New Retro" category of consoles).
The Evercade portable came out during 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic. Despite the horrendous timing, they made a nice profit and during 2022, just last week or so, they released the Evercade VS. It's the same exact hardware as the portable, but it hooks up to a TV and has local multi-player due to the controllers (see pics in the opening post).
Evercade is cheap as hell. The portable is only about $100 and comes with three game collections and the console (Evercade VS) is only about $130 and comes with two game collections and two controllers. ALL game collections are only $20 each and come with a shit load of games on each cartridge (some more than others).
There are THREE types of Evercade cartridges:
1) MODERN indie games which look like classic 8-bit and 16-bit games, but they are brand new. While some of these games are available digitally on the mainstream consoles, the appeal here is that they throw several modern indie games on a physical cartridge for a low price of only $20. It's all licensed and the publishers get a percentage of the sales. EXAMPLE of this is the Indie Heroes Collection:
2) CLASSIC 8-bit / 16-bit games from the 80's and 90's. Several publishers have made officially licensed compilation cartridges for the Evercade where they throw several classic games on to a cartridge. Each collection comes with instruction manuals and a nice case. For $20 each, it's pretty nice. Especially when they throw in rare and lesser known games I never knew about from the SNES and Sega Genesis. The best is the few times when they TRANSLATED Asian 1990's Sega Genesis RPGS in English for one of the collections (Piko volume 1 has them, there are about two or three). Very nice. I hope they translate more Asian RPGs into English. Anyway, lots of good stuff like the Interplay collection, the upcoming Renovation collection, etc.
And finally... Category three... 3) ARCADE game collections. They just started this last week or so. Only four have been released, but so far so good. These contain arcade games from the 80's and 90's on cartridge collections. This is the first time many of these arcade games are being released on a home physical format. Some of the arcade collections contain well known games, but some of them contain very rare arcade games I have never heard of and never even got releases in the U.S. All the arcade collections (only four so far) come in the purple cases. An example of rare arcade games that never had a U.S release below that most people in the U.S have never heard of... the Gaelco arcade collection (even though Evercade does have well known arcade stuff like Data East, Technos, etc).