Raw Thrills, Inc. is an arcade video game entertainment company based in Skokie, Illinois. It is best known for developing arcade games based on films.
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| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Video games |
| Founded | 2001 |
| Headquarters | Skokie, Illinois, United States |
| Website | rawthrills |
History
Raw Thrills was founded in 2001 by Eugene Jarvis, Deepak Deo, and Andrew Eloff. Early on, the staff also consisted largely of other former Midway Games employees.
At the beginning, the company made game designs for IGT including Super Times Pay Poker, Multi-Play Blackjack, and Turbo Reelette.
Raw Thrills' first independent coin-op game was Target: Terror, a light-gun shooter game[1] which was later upgraded to Target: Terror Gold (also known as Target: Force) featuring bonus levels, end-of-round awards, and other performance enhancements. Target: Terror was the first gun game designed under the direction of Eugene Jarvis.
The company's second game was The Fast and the Furious,[1] a racing game based on the Universal Studios movie of the same name. Tsunami Visual Technologies later made a motion version of the game for large family entertainment centers.
In 2006, Raw Thrills published two titles:[1] Big Buck Hunter PRO, developed by Play Mechanix; and The Fast and the Furious: Super Bikes. Raw Thrills released in 2007 a sequel to The Fast and the Furious titled The Fast and the Furious: Drift.[2] They also released a continuation of the successful Big Buck series, Big Buck Safari[3] in three different configurations which included a standard 27" cabinet, a 42" LCD version[4] and an 8'x6' projected screen Theater version. They would also release a new update to Big Buck Hunter Pro with Big Buck Hunter Pro: Open Season[5] in 2009.
After the success of their Fast and Furious DRIFT racing title, the company set their sights on kart-style racing with Nicktoons Nitro.[6] The game featured licensed characters from various Nickelodeon Nicktoons including SpongeBob SquarePants, Timmy Turner from The Fairly OddParents, Aang from Avatar: The Last Airbender, Invader Zim, Jimmy Neutron, and Danny Phantom.
Also in 2009, Raw Thrills teamed up with Konami and Activision to produce Guitar Hero Arcade.[7] Raw Thrills engineered the game while Konami and Activision were involved to cover patenting and licensing issues respectively.[8] The game was a solid success selling over 2000 units in just three months.[9]
In January 2009, it was revealed that Raw Thrills and Specular Interactive came together to produce a spiritual successor to the Midway arcade racer Hydro Thunder with a game entitled H2Overdrive.[10] Specular Interactive was made up of several ex-Midway employees who had worked on Hydro Thunder and this led to H2Overdrive maintaining many of the ideas that Hydro Thunder had in place while adding in some new elements such as achievements, a leveling up system and improved physics. It also received high praise from critics.[11][12][13][14][15] The original version of H2Overdrive came in a cabinet sporting a 42" LCD HD monitor and in March 2010 they produced a 32" version for smaller venues.[16] A motion-based version was also produced in November 2009 that was being handled by Namco Bandai Games and UNIS.[17] UNIS also holds the rights to distribute the game in China.[18]
In March 2010, Raw Thrills and Play Mechanix released Terminator Salvation, a deluxe light-gun shooter based upon the film of the same name that was released to theaters in May 2009.[19] The game received early praise from arcade operators as it exceeded earnings expectations during testing.[20]
On June 16, 2021, Raw Thrills announced a port for its arcade game Cruis'n Blast, the latest installment in the Cruis'n video game series for the Nintendo Switch system. It marks the company's first console game, and its first port to a home system.[21]