Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii revives another Sega arcade classic that's never been ported - a true Yakuza games tradition

News
By published

RGG Studios is reviving a 1998 arcade cabinet in-game

Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii screenshot showing Majima in drag
(Image credit: Sega)

Yakuza games have a knack for resurrecting oft-forgotten classics from Sega's arcade cabinet era, and the upcoming, delightfully-named Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is continuing the series tradition.

Developer RGG Studios just released a blog post diving deep into all the whacky side activities featured in the latest Yakuza kind-of-spin-off. Chief among them is a arcade game called The Ocean Hunter, which has never been ported off of its cabinet origins since it came out in 1998. It's almost the perfect choice for Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii because, as you can probably guess from its name, the game is all about hunting marine predators like sharks and other underwater monsters. 

"The arcade games that can be played in the Like A Dragon series require the 'reproduction of the cabinet,'" technical lead Yutaka Ito wrote in a recent tweet. "This is also a very difficult task, but with the help of many people, we were able to reproduce the Ocean Hunter cabinet in great detail." You can see the entire cabinet, recreated in painstaking detail, in the tweet above.

Yakuza and Like A Dragon have had a long history of excavating old Sega arcade games, recreating the cabinets, and making the entire things playable within the Yakuza series itself - everything from Daytona USA 2 to Virtua Fighter 2 were ported inside of Yakuza games. And, hey, maybe some of that effort is what led RGG to return to Virtua Fighter with the newly-revealed reboot.

Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is also bringing back some other returning favorite mini-games, too, like the burger delivery frenzy from Infinite Wealth, a dating mini-game, and, of course, karaoke, because it wouldn't be a Yakuza game without karaoke.

For now, don’t miss a single exciting launch with our new games of 2025 and beyond release calendar. 

Kaan Serin
Freelance contributor

Kaan freelances for various websites including Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, and this one, Gamesradar. He particularly enjoys writing about spooky indies, throwback RPGs, and anything that's vaguely silly. Also has an English Literature and Film Studies degree that he'll soon forget.