Arcade is a low-budget independent American film of the science fiction and horror genres. It is an early attempt to incorporate heavy amounts of computer rendered images into a sci-fi film. The movie was directed by Albert Pyun with a script written by David S. Goyer based on a story treatment by Charles Band. It was produced by Full Moon Entertainment and was released direct-to-video in Europe on July 20th, 1993. It premiered in the United States on March 30th, 1994. The film stars Megan Ward as Alex Manning, a troubled teenager who accompanies her friends to a video arcade called Dante's Inferno, where they are cajoled into testing a new video game called Arcade, only to discover that the game's computer A.I. has been spliced with brain cells from a boy who had been beaten to death by his mother. Arcade also stars Peter Billingsley as Nick, John de Lancie as Difford, Sharon Farrell as Mrs. Manning, Seth Green as Stilts, A.J. Langer as Laurie, and Bryan Dattilo as Greg.
The tagline for this film is, "The game wants to play with you... real bad".
Production on Arcade began on February 19th, 1991. Principal photography concluded in March, 1991. Post-production on the movie was conducted in 1992. [1]
A script was written for a sequel to Arcade, but never materialized.
This is an early attempt to employ heavy use of computer graphic imaging at the dawn of the CGI era to pull off many of the virtual reality effects, which is something of an accomplishment for an independent film studio that releases strictly to the direct-to-video market. Producer Charles Band was dissatisfied with many of the original CGI effects and had the film almost completely redone. Scenes of the original Arcade can be found on the Full Moon Entertainment VideoZone video library documentary that accompanies many of the company's home video releases during the early 1990s.
