Evercade’s ‘Renovation Collection 1’ Will Bring A Dozen Rare Games To The System

© Evercade

The Evercade is a rather intriguing physical-only handheld that we quite liked in our review last year, while a home console iteration that supports multiplayer, Evercade VS, is coming soon. In a little over a year the system has built up a unique collection of physical cart releases and bundles that has certainly attracted an eager audience of retro enthusiasts and collectors.

System creator Blaze Entertainment has now confirmed the 23rd cartridge joining the collection – ‘Renovation Collection 1’. This one is quite interesting as the very deliberate goal is to release officially licensed versions of games that are rare and – in these cases – have never previously been released in Europe.

The cart will have 12 games that were originally published by Telenet Japan and also Renovation in the US. They never made it to Europe via either publisher, but Blaze Entertainment has teamed up with Edia Co Ltd for the official rights to bring the collection together.

The full list of games is below:

• Arcus Odyssey
• Beast Wrestler
• Dino Land
• El Viento
• Exile
• Final Zone
• Gaiares
• Granada
• Sol-Deace
• Traysia
• Valis: The Fantasm Soldier
• Valis 3

They’re all from the 16-bit era, with only Arcus Odyssey seemingly making it to Super NES. Most – but not quite all – of the other releases were on SEGA Genesis along with lesser known Japanese home computers like the Sharp X68000. Sol-Deace did get a release in Europe as Sol-Feace, but only on CD-based add-on hardware rather than the original 16-bit cartridges.

Evercade cites Pricecharting.com to state the originals all boxed would cost just over $1400, or a little over $450 loose. Value aside it’s a collection with some intrigue, with a mix of sidescrollers, shoot ’em ups, RPGs and more besides on the list.

Pre-orders won’t open until November ahead of a release in early 2022; the pricing for the Evercade collections is typically £14.99 / €19,99, but that’s not confirmed yet for Renovation Collection 1.

So, are any of you Evercade fans planning to pick this up?