With Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice fading from view, all eyes are on the impending release of Captain America: Civil War, set to hit theaters in the U.S. on May 6. There’s another player in the comic book movie mix who hopes not to be forgotten, though, and that is 20th Century Fox with its upcoming release of X-Men: Apocalypse.
X-Men: Apocalypse is the third in a trilogy of movies started with X-Men: First Class back in 2011. First Class was not so much a reboot as it was a prequel serving as a backdoor to a rebooted timeline facilitated by the events of X-Men: Days of Future Past. That movie connected the timeline of all the movies together, while using time travel as a method to completely rewrite them into a new timeline. That has meant slowly working forward from the 1960s-era setting of First Class to the present day, but not before X-Men: Apocalypse takes a pit stop in the ’80s, complete with a marketing campaign that now includes ’80s-style, retro arcade games.
20th Century Fox has dropped a trio of retro games on the web via SpacePortArcade.com, promoting the newest X-Men movie, with accompanying retro box art as well. The first game, Mutant Conquest is an ancient Egyptian-themed take on Pac-Man, with the more traditional Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse chasing an Indiana Jones-like adventurer around the screen. The second game, Revenge of Hero X, features the titular Hero X facing off against wave after wave of killer robots to save humanity. Mutant All-Stars Track & Field is, as one might expect, a mutant-themed take on the classic Track & Field video games, where the player can choose to play as either one of the mutants or a hilariously mismatched human.
The three games add up to a few minutes worth of entertainment for those with a fondness for old-school video games, but they also work as fairly clever marketing for the movie itself. Besides their sly take on some of the themes of the X-Men universe, the games also reference an actual in-movie location: the Space Port Arcade located inside an ’80s mall, which is exactly where one would expect to find students of a school such as Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters during that decade.
The artwork accompanying the games is also worth the price of admission (i.e., free), as it is a convincing simulacrum of classic Atari 2600 box art sure to inspire nostalgia in those who are old enough to remember the real thing. Enjoy the box art, and then go play the games for yourself.
X-Men: Apocalypse will hit U.S. theaters on May 27th, 2016, followed by Wolverine 3 on March 3rd, 2017, and unannounced X-Men films on October 6th, 2017 (possibly Gambit), January 12th, 2018 (possibly Deadpool 2), and July 13th, 2018. The New Mutants is also in development.
Source: 20th Century Fox
