Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is getting a 16-bit co-op arcade game

Australian developer Art of Play Interactive and Roditeli Productions have announced Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure: Arcade, a 16-bit cooperative action game for PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch. Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter are both returning to voice their characters from the 1989 comedy film, ahead of a BackerKit crowdfunding campaign scheduled for February 2027.

The project is a co-production with Infâme MKT and license holder Creative Licensing Corporation. It's the first official video game adaptation for the time-traveling slacker duo in 35 years, and getting both original leads in the recording booth for an indie pixel-art brawler is a genuine surprise.

15 stages and a phone booth

Following the plot of the original movie, players control Bill S. Preston, Esq. And Ted "Theodore" Logan as they pilot a time-traveling phone booth given to them by Rufus (originally played by George Carlin) to pass their high school history class and save their band, Wyld Stallyns, from breaking up. The campaign spans 15 stages that blend two-player side-scrolling beat-'em-up combat with minigames, tasking players with rounding up historical figures like Napoleon Bonaparte, Billy the Kid, Genghis Khan, and Ludwig van Beethoven.

Art of Play cites last year's Terminator 2D: No Fate as a touchstone for how the game adapts a late-80s movie into a retro arcade format. While Reeves has already spent plenty of time in recent video games playing Johnny Silverhand in Cyberpunk 2077 and voicing Shadow in Sonic the Hedgehog 3, hearing him and Winter return to their 1989 characters over 16-bit sprite work is a much stranger, more welcome pull. The development team also confirmed that zero generative AI was used in the project's creation.

Melbourne-based Art of Play Interactive, led by Ash Nicholls, spent over 15 years building licensed titles for brands like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers, SpongeBob, and Spider-Man before pivoting to self-published console games. That run started with a side-scrolling adaptation of comic strip hero The Phantom in 2025, followed by Lady Death, which launches later this month on the same modern console and PC lineup. Co-producer Kevin Roditeli brings similar experience reviving 90s properties, having previously handled comic book revivals for POSTAL and SWAT Kats, while producer Isaac Tremblay of Infâme MKT rounds out the production team.

Dialing past the 1991 NES cart

Saying this is the first Bill & Ted game in over three decades isn't just a fun piece of trivia; it's a long-overdue chance at redemption. Back in 1990 and 1991, the franchise received a scattered wave of tie-ins across PC, Game Boy, and the Atari Lynx, culminating in Rocket Science Productions and LJN's infamous Bill & Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure on the Nintendo Entertainment System in August 1991.

That NES cartridge ignored the obvious arcade action route in favor of an isometric scavenger hunt where you wandered around tossing historical bait into bushes and dialing phone numbers from a physical manual. I'm still not sure why nobody in 1991 thought to just make a side-scrolling brawler in the first place, considering the arcades were drowning in them at the time, though at least someone is finally correcting that oversight 35 years later.

The February 2027 BackerKit campaign will fund the final stretch of development through digital copies, exclusive merchandise, and physical console editions, including a collector's box modeled after classic Super Nintendo packaging. Art of Play says additional announcements are planned throughout the rest of fall 2026, with more gameplay footage, musical guests, and other movie stars set to join the cast.