Irem sure did embrace the concept of digital distribution in the early 2000’s. On the original Wii they published a ton of their 16-bit titles through the Virtual Console marketplace and they released many of their retail PlayStation Portable titles through the PlayStation Store. Later they released more of their older titles as PSone Classics including a collection of even more old Irem games. Unfortunately, a lot of unexpected setbacks hit the company in 2011 and they delisted many of their home console releases to focus on their pachinko and pachislot business.
This is about where the story ended as far as our site was concerned; I had a placeholder page for each game with an overview of the timeline up to that point. There weren’t many details about each release though, and over the years many of them made their way to the Wii U Virtual Console… until they were delisted again. Hamster rolled out newer Arcade Archives releases throughout 2019 leading to their second delisting.
The Wii U titles were submitted to the site back in September and I finally carved out the time a week ago to clean them all up with release details and an updated history of events. Since the pages were already on the site they never hit the Twitter or Facebook feeds so consider this post one massive tweet:
