VideoGameEsoterica has done it again! Less than a year after they successfully managed to preserve Castlevania: The Arcade Game and a month after they rescued Konami's Gashaaaan!, the YouTuber is back with another set of videos focusing on their efforts to save another rare piece of arcade history.
Akuma Mortis Immortal is a little-known title from the developer Gamewax — a London-based studio that also worked on arcade racing games like Wacky Races and Chase H.Q. 2. It is a horror lightgun shooter similar to Sega's House of the Dead and Konami's Evil Night. However, it's currently unknown whether it was actually given a full release like both of those titles or whether it was simply made available in certain beta locations for testing.
Before VideoGameEsoterica got involved, the game was previously added to the playable list for the software package Teknoparrot which allows players to run PC-based arcade games on modern hardware, but no actual download to the game was provided meaning players still had to source their own copies.
As a result, VideoGameEsoterica posted a new video to their channel on the morning of Sunday, February 4th announcing that, with the help of Andy Geezer and their Discord community, they had managed to successfully obtain a copy of the board and had archived the game publicly (on Archive.org), with the intention of offering an alternative way to play the title in the future.
Much like with the release of Castlevania: The Arcade, this initial release of the game wasn't playable with mouse controls. Luckily, though, it didn't take long for that to change, with VideoGameEsoterica later posting a second video that same day, announcing that Andy Geezer and others on their Discord had sent them the files to make the game playable.
If you want to learn more about the game and this preservation effort, we recommend checking out both of VideoGameEsoterica's videos on the topic.