The Evercade EXP Is Hoping For Vertical Take-Off

If there’s one thing gamers are used to, it’s generational churn. The NES gave way to the SNES, the PS4 to the PS5, and even dedicated PC players race to pick up improved graphics cards and beefier CPUs every few years. 

That rush for the new, for more powerful devices to drive ever more impressive games, presents a problem for Blaze Entertainment, the UK-based manufacturer of the Evercade family of consoles. With a library consisting entirely of retro games, how do you iterate and improve on hardware, when the software players running on it is from decades ago to begin with?

The answer, it seems, is to lean into “authenticity,” making playing those classics as close to stepping into a 1980s arcade as possible—just without any discarded gum stuck on the casing. The result is the new Evercade EXP, an upgrade on 2020’s original Evercade handheld, where the main selling point might be … the ability to hold the console vertically.

That might sound like a minimal overhaul, but for fans of classic vertically scrolling shoot-’em-ups—or “shmups,” in more contemporary parlance—the EXP’s new TATE mode (a term popular in the shmup fan scene, derived from the Japanese verb “tateru,” meaning “to stand”) is a literal game changer. Generally, it means rotating the display 90 degrees to make use of a screen’s full real estate. On consoles connected to a TV, that generally means having to trade off getting a full-screen view with having to play in a horizontal orientation. On PC, it typically means the same, although some monitors can now be rotated.