Rare Namco Breakout Flyer hits Arcadeflyers.com

Arcade Flyers is certainly a unique website, but extremely powerful. I use it as a research / reference tool all the time. Dan H. runs that site, and turns up a ton of flyers because he has an easy to use, search engine friendly website. Today Dan shared that he tracked down a Namco Breakout Flyer. Namco? Isn’t that an Atari game?

Namco Licensed Breakout from Atari

I won’t recant all the details of Dan’s story here, you can read it for yourself on his arcadeflyers homepage. But the jist is that Namco licensed Breakout from Atari, but not on the up and up. Good old Namco, they got some of their own medicine when Atari sued them. The flyer looks mostly like the Atari one, but missing the T.M. of course and Namco’s cabinet doesn’t have the sideart – huh, I wonder why? 😉 I doubt Scott E. has those films. Here are the Breakout flyers side by side;

This industry was a shooting star, certainly the market continued to be unmet for so long, companies expanded capacity producing hand over foot. This bootlegging, as we’ve seen, is not unusual. But then demand dropped off the face of the earth and the market was saturated and as a result, there are probably a ton of small runs of bootlegs and really rare (but not high in demand) items like this that have all but disappeared.

Dan’s story recounts the history. I know I’d like to hear how he got his hands on this flyer, probably from overseas, and if it was a ton of work to track it down – how that went, or if it just dropped into his hands because his site is ubiquitous. Do share Dan, do share.

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