Can Apple’s Retrocade turn 80s kid arcade dreams into a virtual reality?

Can you really replicate the feel of the arcade with mixed reality?

It’s every '80s kid's dream: What if you could have an arcade in your own home? Just imagine if your basement looked like something out of a mall, full of cabinets for all your favorite games. The bubble-bursting reality, of course, is that it would cost a lot of money to pull that off. Authentic arcade cabinets aren’t cheap, nor is remodeling a room in your house to match your nostalgic fantasies. But what if there was a way to simulate that experience?

That’s the mission for Demeo developer Resolution Games. Its latest game is Retrocade, an Apple Arcade-exclusive retro game collection. While it’s available to play on iPhone and iPad, the more enticing version lives on the Apple Vision Pro. There, you don’t just get access to classics like Pac-Man and Frogger in one app; you get a digital arcade beamed directly into your house. It’s not the most cost-effective alternative, considering the Vision Pro’s $3,500 price tag, but it’s a fascinating use of mixed reality that explores the fantasies the tech could fulfill. Even so, it’s an experiment that only gets halfway toward its goal, reminding us that there’s no true replacement for physical objects.

If you’re playing on a normal flat screen (as most Apple Arcade subscribers no doubt will), Retrocade is a fairly straightforward package. It’s an '80s game collection with some extra retro theming to ground the included games in their era. The compact list of 10 games includes reliable favorites like Breakout, Centipede, and Asteroids alongside welcome surprises like Haunted Castle and Track & Field. It’s by no means an exhaustive catalog of arcade history, and you can emulate just about any of these games with hardly more than one click, but the hope is that Resolution will support it over time with new additions.

The app does come with some unique perks. Being tied to iOS devices means that it can take advantage of the overarching social features housed within the Apple gaming ecosystem. The collection has its own online leaderboards for each game, as well as daily challenges for players to chase (e.g., clear a Pac-Man board without touching a ghost, break five blocks in one bounce in Breakout). It’s all brought together by a light progression system, where you level up and earn coins to unlock new games (and their corresponding cabinets) and even unlock cheats in the backend. Throw in a bit of historical context on each game, and you’ve got a perfectly novel way to replay some faithfully ported games on multiple devices.

The nostalgic twist is that the app is presented as if you’re inside an old arcade. That doesn’t mean too much on a flat phone screen; you’ll just see some retro art direction when you’re in menus. But the experience is clearly built as a Vision Pro experiment first. That’s not surprising given Resolution’s past support for the device; it has created more games for Vision Pro than any other developer, including Game Room and Gears & Goo.

When playing in Vision Pro, you are dropped into a reproduction of a real Los Angeles arcade. You can look at the crusty carpet, see natural light flooding in from the storefront windows, and even hear the sounds of cars passing by in the background. When you want to play an arcade game, you don’t just pull it up on a big screen; you physically walk up to the cabinet. You can crane your head around it to admire the art on the side and lean in closer to the display while playing, just as you would in real life. (If you’d rather just use your Vision Pro as a big display, you can open each game in a windowed mode that still simulates the cabinet art you’d see next to the screen in real life.)

That’s wish fulfillment enough, but Retrocade goes one step further. Using the Vision Pro’s mixed-reality tech, you can turn off the fictional arcade setting and instead place a cabinet in your real play area. It’s a fun magic trick that works surprisingly well; it really does look like there’s a Pac-Man machine sitting against your wall. There's no reason to drop thousands of dollars on a headset — it’s much cheaper to just buy a real multicade cabinet — but Retrocade does make creative use of the tech to show how XR can create unique experiences that feel futuristic.

All of this is done in the pursuit of immersion, but Resolution can only pull that off up to a point. For instance, you can’t actually press the buttons on the arcade cabinets to control the games on Vision Pro; you play by connecting a wireless controller. It’s the right call: While the Vision Pro does have hand-tracking tech, it’s far too finicky to rely on in the heat of a high score chase. Still, it doesn’t feel right. It’s a mental mismatch to stand in an arcade and physically move your head around to better see a cabinet’s display, but have your hands sagging down by your waist gripping a controller. It’s unnatural, to the point where I eventually opted to play games in windowed mode while sitting on my couch instead. (The mobile version almost feels more immersive since you’re actually tapping the buttons and dragging to move the stick there.)

Retrocade goes for feel-good nostalgia, but there’s something inadvertently melancholic about it too. The more realistic the cabinets look, the more disappointed I am that I can’t actually reach out and touch them. When Breakout starts getting tense, I feel a primal instinct to lean in hard, using my left hand to brace myself against the top of the cabinet. When I clear a Pac-Man board, my hand tries to let out the adrenaline rush by giving the side of the machine a few excited taps. Instead, I’m locked to a gamepad that regulates my energy. It’s the impossible problem of recreating the arcade experience: The physicality is inseparable from the aesthetic.

My arcade game of choice is Ms. Pac-Man. It’s a game I’m extremely particular about. Every time I stumble upon a cabinet in the wild, my first game is always a stick test. Am I able to fluidly swivel the joystick around, or am I constantly smacking the edges of the gate? If it’s the latter, I don’t even bother putting another quarter in; I’m not really playing the game I love if that feeling is off. For the kind of person who spent countless hours of their youth hogging their local arcade’s Asteroids machine, a cabinet isn’t just a vessel that contains a regular old game that plays the same on every screen. It’s a horse, and the player is the jockey.

Retrocade can’t capture that, in the same way that a collection of Atari 2600 games can’t capture that all-important battle with the original console’s stiff joystick. Even if Resolution adds support for hand-tracking down the line, it still wouldn’t be able to reproduce the experience of feeling a button spring up and down under your finger. It can only rely on iconography, and that kind of surface nostalgia can only go so far, even when it’s as earnestly represented as it is here.

Retrocade is best enjoyed as a museum exhibit rather than a retro game collection. The latter isn’t terribly exciting considering the Arcade 101 games included here — lord knows that no one is hurting for a way to play Space Invaders in 2026. Instead, it’s a virtual art exhibit that lets you look at cabinets up close, marvel at their intricate paint jobs, and appreciate each machine’s design quirks. But picture yourself going to a real museum that didn’t let you touch the machines on display, and you can see the limitations of a well-meaning experiment like this. In offering up such a sincere reflection on the arcade era, Retrocade accidentally shows that the real thing is irreplaceable. Maybe I should invest in a good Ms. Pac-Man cabinet.