Littleloud’s latest Flash game project went live today on the Internet. It’s a scrolling arcade beat ‘em up in the Final Fight-style based within the Watchmen universe.

Just like Alan would have wanted.

The idea is that this is an arcade game that Veidt Industries made in the late 1970s to promote the Minutemen. Remember that there was a load of Veidt Minutemen product shown in the novel so, even if the technology for the era is a little out, it seems reasonable there might have been an arcade board as well as action figures etc.

The cab, now beaten up and graffitied, is stationed inside the Gunga Diner, in 1986, where you can play it and enter your high score onto a global leaderboard.

We made the game from scratch in 4 weeks which, now we’re on the other side of it, was stupidly ambitious. As a result the actual game mechanics are pretty darn basic (there are less moves than in Final Fight, for example) but for most players (i.e. non-gamers) it serves its purpose: to be a cute, period pixel-art distraction during your lunch break.

By the end of the project we were wishing we had just another day or two to squeeze in all of the features we had prepped but, movie marketing being what it is, there was no room for slippage so we had to ‘ship’ as is. That said, the pixel art and 8-bit soundtrack works well and I *think* it comes across as tasteful rather than OH.MY.GOD.What-Have-You-Done-To-My-Bible for fans of the graphic novel.

The game’s been getting some positive coverage from Kotaku and Ain’t It Cool News today so yay!

Play and register your high-score at minutemenarcade.com