Planned Release Date: Q1 2027

About This Game

Six arcade machines. Seven skill trees. Seven currencies. 400+ upgrades.

Remember feeding your last coin into a glowing cabinet? Cathode Arcade takes those childhood memories and turns them up to 11. Play short runs, cash out in each machine's own currency and pour it into upgrades that never reset. Every run pays more than the last, until the whole arcade is running at full blast.

Six machines, all turned up to 11

• Prism Break – The brick breaker you grew up with, now with relics and special brick types that set each other off.
  
• Plasma Swarm – The alien waves are back, and this time they bring champions and bomb carriers.
  
• Skyfall Protocol – Defend your cities against endless missile waves, bosses and special weapons.
  
• Vector Abyss – Glowing vector tubes in five shapes, three bosses and one claw-shaped ship.
  
• Neon Maze – A maze that shifts under your feet, phantoms to hunt and bounties to cash in.
  
• Asteroid – Smash giant rocks with five unlockable weapons, photon bombs and shockwaves.

An incremental that keeps escalating

• 7 skill trees, 400+ upgrades – one tree per machine, plus a global tree that ties them all together.
  
• 7 currencies – every machine pays in its own, and the exchange turns it into cash.
  
• Afterburn – machines keep paying out long after your run is over.
  
• Jetons – put jetons on machines and take a cut of every run you play somewhere else.
  
• Bounty – the machine you neglect puts a price on its own head.
  
• Shopping list – pin what you are saving for and see what is missing at a glance.

36 Steam achievements light the way.

Good to know

• Mouse and keyboard. Controls are taught inside the run, in slow motion, the first time you need them.
  
• Available in English and German.
  
• The game contains flashing lights and bright neon effects.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Some in-game texts were drafted with the help of an AI language model and then read, corrected and edited by the developer. The program code was written with the support of an AI coding assistant. All graphics are drawn entirely in code; there are no AI-generated images. Sound effects come from licensed, freely available libraries or were made with a synthesizer, not with AI. No AI is used during gameplay.