We all know that arcades in the UK, but also in other European countries and in the USA, are not what they used to be. It's quite difficult these days, find a proper video arcade, not plagued by all sort of slot machines and other gambling games, but trust us, there are!

Arcades are not dead, and the community is still strong and driven by passion for gaming. We didn't use the expression"driven" by chance, in fact, UK Arcade Racers is born as a community for all the arcade goers, focused on racing games.

Said so, you're probably thinking that there's no big deal with racing games in the arcades, that there are plenty of them to play. You're kinda right, you got a point there, you'll probably always find at least one racing cabinet in your local arcade. Problem is we're in 2014 and we're forced to keep playing games from the early 2000s, if not older than that.

Our petition has one purpose: to convince Namco Bandai UK to bring Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 4 to the UK.

Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune (WMMT for short) is a long-running and much loved arcade racing series based on a Japanese manga from the 90s. All the installment of the game series featured a special card system that allows player to save their cars, records and ghosts data. Pretty much the entire world received the first three installment of the series, including the UK.

Problem is, we're stuck there. UK, but also all other European countries and USA, have received Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 3 as latest cabinets for arcades in 2007, and since then nothing else.

Meanwhile Namco Bandai has published other two updated versions of WMMT3, the brand new WMMT4 and it's ready to deliver the fifth installment of the series.

But, where are all those games? Simple answer: in Asia. In fact, Asian countries such as Japan, Philippines, Hong Kong and Australia, are the only ones to get all the new game in the series.

Now, we can understand why is that. WMMT4 cabinets have quite a lot of online features, that require the machines to be always connected to the internet and Namco Bandai to mantain dedicated servers for every country. Furthemore, WMMT4 features a brand new card system, called Banapassport, which is quickly becoming the arcade-save standard for all Namco Bandai game cabinets.

The problem is not internet features themselves (because you know, we got internet access in the UK), but the costs of keeping those servers online. Sure, Asian countries feature a high density of people playing arcade games, and in those countries arcade locations are far more widespread than in UK or in other European countries.

So in the end, the only way to convince Namco Bandai UK to bring Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 4 to the UK is to show them that we got a pretty big community in our country willing to play the game, in order to legitimise the costs for importing the cabinets (mind, they don't need to localise them, since the international version is already in English) and opening and maintaining the online servers, as well as opening the Banapassport system in the UK.

We think that 1000 signs would be enough to at least let Namco Bandai UK consider doing some location testings in major cities, such as London.

Please sign this petition if you care about the arcade racing games community in the UK and share it!