Blazing Star, KOF 2002, and Thirteen Kaboom Clones. Evercade Just Announced Its Most Stacked Double-Cart Drop of 2026 — and the Price-Per-Game Math Is Actually Embarrassing.
Blaze Entertainment just announced two new Evercade cartridges — Neo Geo Arcade Collection 4 and Activision Collection 3 — shipping simultaneously. One cart carries Blazing Star and King of Fighters 2002. The other carries Kaboom! and twelve more Atari 2600-era Activision titles. At $19.99 per cart, you're looking at roughly $1.50 per game on the Neo Geo side and about $1.54 on the Activision side. That math is the whole argument for physical curation in 2026.
What Just Dropped
Blaze Entertainment announced two new Evercade cartridges this week: Neo Geo Arcade Collection 4 and Activision Collection 3. Both are physical releases — real plastic, real labels, real shelf presence — and both are compatible across the full Evercade hardware family: the EXP handheld, the VS home console, and the VS Mini. Per Time Extension's report, these are fully licensed releases, not gray-market compilations.
Why This Week
The timing matters because the Evercade release calendar has been quietly accelerating. Blaze has been shipping licensed cart collections at a pace that outstrips most digital storefronts' retro catalogs, and the double-drop format — two thematically distinct carts announced simultaneously — is a deliberate shelf strategy. One cart targets the arcade-fighting and shmup audience. The other targets the Atari 2600 nostalgia crowd. Per Games Asylum, this is the fourth Neo Geo volume and the third Activision volume on the platform — a pace that suggests the licensing pipeline between Blaze and both SNK and Atari (current Activision 2600-era rights holder) is stable enough to sustain quarterly drops.
That pipeline is doing something digital storefronts structurally cannot: bundling games from different publishers onto the same hardware ecosystem, under physical media, at a unit price that undercuts every à la carte digital listing on the eShop, PSN, or Steam. The comparison isn't subtle. A single Neo Geo title on the Arcade Archives lineup runs $7.99 on Switch. Neo Geo Arcade Collection 4 ships thirteen games for $19.99. You can do the division yourself.
The Neo Geo Cart
Neo Geo Arcade Collection 4 leads with Blazing Star — Yumekobo's 1998 horizontal shmup, the spiritual successor to Pulstar, and one of the most visually extravagant games the MVS hardware ever produced. The pre-rendered sprite work on that game still holds because it was designed for a fixed resolution on a fixed color palette; there is no "remaster" that improves on what the original artists drew. It belongs on a cart.
King of Fighters 2002 is the other headliner — the "Dream Match" entry that stripped KOF down to a pure versus framework with no story progression, no team-order gimmicks, just the roster and the matchup. Per Time Extension, the full thirteen-game tracklist also includes titles like Sengoku 3, Shock Troopers: 2nd Squad, and Twinkle Star Sprites — a competitive puzzle-shmup hybrid that remains one of the most underappreciated games on the platform. The collection spans fighting, shooting, action, and puzzle genres, which is the kind of curation that makes a cart feel like a sampler rather than a genre dump.
SNK's involvement here continues a licensing relationship that has made the Evercade one of the densest legal Neo Geo libraries outside of the AES+ announcement. The distinction matters: the AES+ is a dedicated ASIC console playing original cartridges at premium price. The Evercade is a multi-platform handheld playing licensed compilations at budget price. Different shelf, different buyer, same preservation outcome — the games stay commercially available in physical form.
The Activision Cart
Activision Collection 3 goes the other direction entirely. Per Games Asylum, the headliner is Kaboom! — Larry Kaplan's 1981 paddle game, the one where you catch bombs in buckets as a mad bomber drops them faster and faster. It is a pure reflex loop. It was designed for the Atari 2600 paddle controller, which means every version that isn't played on a paddle is a compromise, and every version that keeps the game commercially available is still doing the work.
The remaining twelve titles fill out the Activision 2600-era catalog: games like Stampede, Megamania, Crackpots, and Pressure Cooker. These are games designed by individual programmers whose names were printed on the box because Activision — the company founded specifically because Atari wouldn't credit its developers — made that a founding principle. David Crane, Bob Whitehead, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller. The names are the lineage. The Evercade cart keeps those names attached to the work in a way that a ROM dump on an anonymous download site does not.
Thirteen 2600-era games for $19.99 means you're paying roughly what a single loose Kaboom! cartridge costs on the secondary market, and you're getting twelve more games with it. The secondary market is not the competition here. The digital void is. These games are not on Switch. They are not on Steam in any useful form. The Evercade cart is, for many of these titles, the only currently-shipping licensed physical product that contains them.
Twenty-six licensed games across two carts, forty dollars total. The Evercade isn't winning on hardware specs. It's winning on the math.
Who to Credit, Where to Find It
Blaze Entertainment — the UK-based team behind the Evercade hardware and its licensed cart library — handles the curation, licensing negotiation, and cart manufacturing. They are the reason these collections exist as physical objects. SNK licenses the Neo Geo catalog. The Activision 2600-era rights sit with Atari (via the Activision IP acquisition chain), and Blaze has clearly maintained a working relationship through three volumes now.
Both carts are available for preorder at CastleMania Games in the U.S. The Neo Geo Arcade Collection 4 and Activision Collection 3 are listed at $19.99 each. CastleMania has been a reliable Evercade stockist; if you've ordered from them before, the process is the same.
Where This Sits
The Evercade's play has always been quiet and structural: license the back catalog that rights holders aren't actively exploiting, package it on physical media at a price point that makes piracy feel like more work than buying, and ship it on hardware that doesn't pretend to be anything other than a delivery mechanism for curated collections. It is not a MiSTer. It is not an Analogue Pocket. It is not trying to win the accuracy argument. It is trying to win the access argument — and with twenty-six new licensed games at forty dollars total, the access argument is getting harder to rebut.
Blazing Star shipped on the MVS in 1998. Kaboom! shipped on the 2600 in 1981. That's a seventeen-year span of arcade and console history compressed onto two small cartridges that fit in a shirt pocket. The games are not remastered, not remade, not "reimagined." They are the original ROMs, licensed, on physical media, with the original developers' names in the credits where they belong. That is the whole pitch. It is enough.