All the IP games I saw at Dave and Busters in July 2025

19 Jan, 2026

In July of last year, I went to a Dave and Busters to wander around and eat an extra hour of my schedule. I decided to spend no money and just take photos of anything I could recognizably ID as an "IP game."

Historically, most arcade games do seem to license an IP. It's the norm. However, it's definitely weird to go to a relatively "up-to-date" arcade in the US and see that so many of the games are adaptations of mobile IPs, or that they basically look and play like big mobile games.

And for me, as someone who grew up in a place with extremely old, neglected arcades - most of the ones I knew about as a kid were just 2-3 machines in the back of a bowling alley - it's also very strange for me to see modern intellectual property in an arcade. To me, an arcade means Street Fighter games, maybe a copy of Super Off Road, and - at best - the Simpsons brawler game where you could hit guys with a vacuum. When I think "arcade," a vision of those machines in the back of a candlepin bowling place is still the image that flashes in front of my eyes, and I still feel a sense of shock when I go into a Dave and Busters and see Halo or Walking Dead machines there.

Anyway, here's what I found in the Howard Hughes Center Dave and Busters in July, 2025. I struggled to decide whether I should include the games which are licensing IPs that were originally arcade games themselves, but in the end I decided to include them anyway, because it's interesting to see what companies are doing with their old arcade IPs today...

• The Walking Dead
  • The Walking Dead AMC
• Subway Surfers
  • Subway Surfers "standard"
• Halo
  • Halo: Fireteam Raven
• Hungry Hungry Hippos
  • Hungry Hungry Hippos
• Guitar Hero
  • Guitar Hero Arcade
• Crossy Road
  • Arcade Crossy Road
  • Disney Crossy Road
• Top Gun
  • Top Gun Maverick
• Temple Run
  • Temple Run
• Cyberpunk 2077
  • Cyberpunk Turf Wars
• Despicable Me
  • Despicable Me Jelly Lab
• Jurassic Park
  • Jurassic World
• Angry Birds
  • Angry Birds Arcade
  • Angry Birds Coin Crash
• Godzilla
  • Godzilla Kaiju Wars VR
• Star Trek
  • Card coin pusher (NOTE: I could not find a sale or manufacturer website for this coin pusher game and most online resources refer to it as the "Dave and Busters" card-collection coin pusher, so it's possible that this is something that was made for D+B specifically?? You can see a video of it here.
• Spongebob Squarepants
  • Spongebob's Pineapple Arcade Coin Pusher
• Super Mario / Sonic the Hedgehog
  • Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo Arcade Edition
• Minecraft
  • Minecraft Dungeons Arcade
• Centipede
  • Centipede Chaos
• Space Invaders
  • Space Invaders Frenzy

Here's some pictures of my favorites on-site. The Hungry Hungry Hippo game was really tremendous in-person:

And the Cyberpunk game had a crazy setup with multiple screens in staggered rows, which was really odd-looking:

Special credit given to "Flappy Tickets Special Edition," a version of this Flappy Bird IP rip-off game that seems to have been licensed specifically by Dave and Busters:

#arcades #games