New for 2025, Beat The Bomb is pushing the boundaries of social gaming with the launch of the Arcade Battle Experience—a first-of-its-kind competitive tournament format that blends the thrill of video games with the energy of live, in-person play.
The Arcade Battle Experience is a 90-minute, 8-round tournament designed for groups of 6–18 players. Participants split into three teams and compete inside a high-tech 150 square foot Arcade Game Bay, outfitted with six large touchscreens, eight RFID readers, an overhead motion sensing camera, and a front projector.
Every round, the group selects from two available titles drawn from a library of more than 15 proprietary Unity-based games developed by Beat The Bomb’s in-house team. Titles like Avoidance, Supply Chain, Ejection Seat, Sequencer, and RoboFight ensure variety and replayability, so no two visits are ever the same.
Arcade Battle ExperienceScoring is cumulative over the first six rounds, with the second- and third-place teams battling in a semi-final to determine who faces the first-place team in the championship match. The winning team earns the title of Arcade Battle Champion, with the option to celebrate in Beat The Bomb’s iconic bomb room. The entire experience is powered by a custom user interface that integrates Roller, the company’s ticketing system, with SiteOps, its proprietary facility-wide operating software. Each player wears an RFID wristband tied to their identity, enabling personalised interactions such as “owning” specific screens in games like Colour Clash or Zone Control.
While bowling, billiards, darts, ping pong, shuffleboard, and mini golf have defined the competitive socializing category for centuries—many with origins stretching back hundreds or even thousands of years—today’s technologies such as Unity software, multi-touch screens, motion tracking cameras, RFID readers, and peer-to-peer networking are unlocking an entirely new genre of immersive social video gaming designed for physical group play.
Beat The Bomb is pioneering this space with the first truly new competitive social format in over a century, and in 2025 alone has already hosted more than 1,000 Arcade Battle Experiences across its seven locations, engaging over 10,000 players (relatively small for now out of our total of 350,000 players on the year).
Looking ahead, we project participation to grow tenfold in 2026, with more than 100,000 players expected to compete in the Arcade Battle Experience, as Beat The Bomb expands the game library to dozens more unique titles. With the Arcade Battle Experience, we are building not just a product, but a scalable platform for the future of multiplayer, software-driven competitive social gaming.
