A practice of taking older games (in the case, best of class older games but in most cases any will do) that have devalued over time, compiling them into a single release and selling them as a combined bundle. Often the games are licensed from the original company but in the case of shareware and freeware compilations, they didn't have to do either. In Microsoft's case here, they worked out a deal with Namco to sell their arcade classics on CD for Windows 95 and up.
Microsoft Arcade is a series of classic arcade game compilations.
The first compilation was released in 1993 on a single 1.44MB floppy for both Microsoft Windows 3.1 and the Apple Macintosh. It contained versions of classic Atari arcade games.
Two follow up versions were released (which is what this trailer is for), including the arcade games from Namco. The first was Microsoft Return of Arcade, released in 1996. This compilation contains:
Pac-Man
Dig Dug
Galaxian
Pole Position
The second follow-up, released in 1998, was called Microsoft Revenge of Arcade and contained:
Ms. Pac-Man
Mappy
Rally-X
Xevious
Motos
Officially, both of these follow-ups required Windows 95 or later, though the demo for Return of Arcade is a 16-bit program that requires only WinG to run in Windows 3.1.
Additionally, in 2000 to celebrate Pac-Man's 20th anniversary, Microsoft re-released Return of Arcade and added Ms. Pac-Man (as presented in Revenge of Arcade) to the roster of games. None of the other games from Revenge of Arcade were included. This updated package was called Microsoft Return of Arcade: Anniversary Edition.
Namco themselves released a compilation known as Namco Museum. Originally for Playstation but branching out to all other consoles.
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