Raw Thrills, Inc. is an American arcade video game entertainment company based in Skokie, Illinois. It is best known for developing arcade games based on films.
Raw Thrills was founded in 2001 by Eugene Jarvis, Deepak Deo, and Andrew Eloff. Early on, the staff also consisted largely of other former Midway Games employees.
Raw Thrills' first independent coin-op game was ', a light-gun shooter game which was later upgraded to ' (also known as Target: Force) featuring bonus levels, end-of-round awards, and other performance enhancements. Target: Terror was the first gun game designed under the direction of Eugene Jarvis.
The company's second game was The Fast and the Furious, a racing game based on the Universal Studios movie of the same name. Tsunami Visual Technologies later made a motion version of the game for large family entertainment centers.
In 2006, Raw Thrills merged with Play Mechanix, the developer of the Big Buck franchise, and founded in 1995 by George Petro, a former designer for Midway Games. That year, it published two titles: Big Buck Hunter Pro, developed by Play Mechanix; and The Fast and the Furious: Super Bikes. In 2007 Raw Thrills released The Fast and the Furious: Drift. It also released a continuation of the successful Big Buck series, Big Buck Safari in three different configurations which included a standard 27" cabinet, a 42" LCD version and an 8'x6' projected screen Theater version. The company would also release a new update to Big Buck Hunter Pro with Big Buck Hunter Pro: Open Season in 2009.
After the success of their The Fast and the Furious: Drift racing title, the company set their sights on kart-style racing with Nicktoons Nitro. The game featured licensed characters from various Nickelodeon Nicktoons including SpongeBob SquarePants, Timmy Turner from The Fairly OddParents, Aang from ', Invader Zim, Jimmy Neutron, and Danny Phantom.
Also in 2009, Raw Thrills teamed up with Konami and Activision to produce Guitar Hero Arcade. Raw Thrills engineered the game while Konami and Activision were involved to cover patenting and licensing issues respectively. The game was a solid success selling over 2,000 units in just three months.
In January 2009, Raw Thrills and Specular Interactive co-produced a spiritual successor to the Midway arcade racer Hydro Thunder with a game entitled H2Overdrive. Specular Interactive was made up of several ex-Midway employees who had worked on Hydro Thunder. It also received high praise from critics. A motion-based version was also produced in November 2009 that was handled by Namco Bandai Games and UNIS. UNIS also holds the rights to distribute the game in China.
In March 2010, Raw Thrills and Play Mechanix released Terminator Salvation, a deluxe light-gun shooter based upon the film of the same name that was released to theaters in May 2009. The game received early praise from arcade operators as it exceeded earnings expectations during testing. By 2014, the company employed over 60 developers.
In 2016, Raw Thrills licensed a new video game in the Cruis'n franchise from Nintendo to develop Cruis'n Adventure. The game was later rebranded as Cruis'n Red Line. It was released as Cruis'n Blast in 2017. On June 16, 2021, Raw Thrills announced a port for its arcade game Cruis'n Blast for the Nintendo Switch system. It marks the company's first console game.
Unreleased: Dance Central 3, Q*bert