Ice Cold Beer (2023 remake)

Ice Cold Beer (2023 remake) is Retro Arcade's faithful modern recreation of Taito's beloved 1983 mechanical skill game. Rather than a traditional pinball machine, the game presents a vertical playfield dotted with holes; the player uses two joysticks to raise and tilt a horizontal metal bar, rolling a steel ball upward to drop it into the currently lit hole while avoiding all the unlit ones. Each success lights a new, harder-to-reach target.

The remake, which began shipping in February 2023 at a $5,499 MSRP, deliberately preserves the look and gameplay of the original while rebuilding the internals with modern technology: screw drives with stepper motors, FPGA control boards running the original ROM code, individually sensored holes, and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth connectivity that lets operators adjust pricing and diagnostics from a phone and even run competitions between machines.

A single-player game with no flippers, ramps or multiball, Ice Cold Beer is pure nerve-and-steady-hands gameplay, and the remake brought a long-unobtainable operator favorite back into production for a new generation of players.