Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted "Theodore" Logan are heading back into the phone booth. Art of Play Interactive has announced Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure: Arcade, a side-scrolling action game with a 16-bit pixel-art look, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch and PC. The game already has a Steam page, though there is no release date or price yet, and the studio is lining up a crowdfunding campaign to help get it over the finish line.
A history report, the arcade way
The premise follows the 1989 film closely. Bill and Ted are about to flunk history, and the only way to pass their oral report is to round up famous figures from the past and bring them back to San Dimas. The game turns that errand into a 15-level side-scroller, with the duo travelling through time to track down Billy the Kid, Socrates, Napoleon, Beethoven and Genghis Khan. The developer's own pitch adds the obvious stakes: pass the report, and save the world while you're at it.
You can play as either Bill or Ted, or bring in a second player for local couch co-op, which is exactly how a game built around a two-person double act ought to work. Beat-'em-up stages carry most of the journey, with brawls in a Wild West saloon, a medieval castle courtyard and a smoke-filled Napoleonic battlefield all visible in the screenshots released so far.
Win history over, one minigame at a time
The more interesting wrinkle is how you recruit each historical figure. Rather than simply beating them, Bill and Ted challenge each one to a dedicated head-to-head minigame, and winning brings that figure on side for the trip home. Each challenge appears to be themed around its guest: Beethoven gets a rhythm game played out on a concert stage, complete with a grand piano and on-screen button prompts for both players.
Other screenshots show a one-on-one sword duel between two armoured knights, labelled with Star Wars-flavoured player names, and an ice-cream eating contest at a fairground diner that will be very familiar to anyone who remembers Napoleon's afternoon at Waterloo. Those smaller set pieces look designed to give each era its own flavour, rather than just reskinning the same brawling stage over and over.
Story mode first, then the extras
Art of Play describes a structure built for replay. Story mode is the main campaign, and finishing it unlocks an arcade mode, standalone access to the minigames and further extras. That is a sensible fit for a game that wears its coin-op influences on its sleeve: the HUD shows scores, a lives counter for each player and a timer stuck, inevitably, on 69.
The presentation leans hard into the source material. The developer promises hand-crafted pixel art and a soundtrack of 80s rock, and the screenshots are full of nods to the film, from the phone booth parked beside a convenience store to the 'Dudes!' speech bubbles that pop up during co-op. Bill and Ted even get an expressive close-up portrait for dialogue scenes, greeting the Old West with exactly the kind of line you would expect.
Platforms, timing and crowdfunding
The game is confirmed for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch and PC. On Steam it is listed for Windows, with full controller support, and Art of Play Interactive is named as developer alongside Roditeli Productions as co-publisher. The store page currently reads 'Coming soon', and no launch window has been given.
Funding is part of the plan. Art of Play intends to run a crowdfunding campaign for the game, and a BackerKit pre-launch page is already up for anyone who wants to be notified when it goes live. That means the scope and timing could still shift depending on how the campaign does, so treat the feature list as the studio's current target rather than a locked-in spec.
Why it matters
Bill & Ted have had a handful of games before, but most of them date back to the late 80s and early 90s, and the franchise has spent decades without a proper modern one. A co-op brawler with a minigame for every historical guest is a smart match for a story that was always about two friends bumbling through history together. If the crowdfunding lands and the finished game matches these screenshots, it could be a most excellent addition to the current wave of retro-styled licensed beat-'em-ups. For now, the Steam page is the place to wishlist it.
