Keanu Reeves Is Officially Ready to Party for New Bill and Ted Spin-Off

Hannah covers horror, sci-fi, and games at Collider, where she writes news and features, reviews new releases, and interviews the people who make them. She’s helping build out Collider‘s gaming coverage, with Pokémon as one of her specialties. If she isn’t writing about a monster, she’s probably watching one on a tape from her VHS collection.

Before Keanu Reeves started taking apart criminal organizations over the death of a puppy, his biggest concern was passing history with his best friend. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure made a potentially disastrous school presentation into an excuse to kidnap historical figures, introduce Napoleon to a water park, and put the future of civilization in the hands of two teenagers who desperately needed tutoring. Somehow, they were the right men for the job.

That friendship carried the pair through the afterlife and a long-awaited third movie, with Reeves and Alex Winter making their relentless enthusiasm difficult to resist. Bill and Ted might misunderstand almost everything happening around them, but they approach each new disaster with the confidence of people who have absolutely no idea how much trouble they are in.

Now, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure: Arcade is bringing the duo back in a new video game for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC. Developed by Art of Play Interactive, the 16-bit-inspired adventure features the voices of Reeves and Winter and lets players tackle its time-traveling chaos alone or alongside a friend in couch co-op. A crowdfunding campaign is scheduled to launch on BackerKit in February 2027, meaning the game itself does not yet have a release date.

Four decades, four completely different ideas of what music was even
for. Here is the one you were built for, what it would have asked of you, and what it would have
given you back.

You belong in the only decade that genuinely believed a song
could change something, and then kept finding evidence for it. The Sixties is where pop
music stopped being entertainment and started being an argument.

• You are an idealist who would rather be involved in something unfinished than
  comfortable in something settled.
• Motown, the British Invasion and the whole folk revival happened inside about ten years,
  which is a rate of change nobody has matched since.
• Sam Mendes is releasing four Beatles films in April 2028, one for each member, which is
  the biggest bet anybody has ever placed on this decade.
• The catch is that the decade promised more than it delivered, and the people who lived
  it have been arguing about that ever since.

You belong in the decade with no interest whatsoever in
restraint. The Seventies gave you glam, disco, punk and stadium rock at the same time, and
the only thing they agreed on was that more was better.

• You want the night to be worth talking about, and you have never once left a good time
  early.
• This is the decade of the great transformation act, where Bowie changed persona every
  eighteen months and everybody else tried to keep up.
• Disco and punk arrived within a year of each other as two completely opposite answers to
  the same boredom.
• You would have loved it and it would have cost you something, which is roughly the deal
  this decade offered everybody.

You belong in the decade where how it looked became as important
as how it sounded, and the people who understood that immediately became enormous. MTV
rewrote the job description overnight and you would have read the memo first.

• You are ambitious and you see no reason to be shy about it, which this decade regarded
  as an excellent quality.
• A three minute video could break an artist globally, and the ones who treated it as a
  film rather than an advert are the ones still remembered.
• The synthesiser turned the bedroom into a studio and let people with ideas beat people
  with training.
• The risk is that a decade built on image is unkind to anybody who stops keeping up with
  it.

You belong in the decade that reacted against everything the
previous one stood for. The Nineties decided that polish was suspicious and that the only
thing worth being was real, whatever that turned out to cost.

• You can smell a sales pitch from a long way off, and you have never trusted anything
  that tries too hard to be liked.
• Grunge and hip-hop had almost nothing in common musically and exactly the same instinct,
  which was to say the true thing plainly.
• This is the last decade before the internet flattened everything, so a scene could still
  belong to one city.
• The cost was that a decade obsessed with authenticity put unbearable pressure on the
  people who best embodied it.

What Is ‘Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure: Arcade’ About?

The game returns to the original movie’s history-report predicament, sending Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan through 15 side-scrolling levels. Players will encounter Billy the Kid, Socrates, Napoleon, Beethoven, and Genghis Khan, challenging the historical guests in individual minigames to secure their help. Recruiting the people who actually lived through your homework remains an impressively excessive response to the threat of a failing grade.

Brawling accompanies those encounters, with hand-crafted pixel art and an ’80s rock soundtrack setting the tone. Completing story mode unlocks arcade mode, minigames, and additional content. Couch co-op also feels like an appropriate choice for a franchise whose heroes would struggle to make it through an afternoon without checking in with each other. There is something reassuring about knowing a friend can join you when your academic future depends on impressing Genghis Khan.

The developers are also planning digital and limited physical editions, with merchandise and apparel included in the crowdfunding plans. Art of Play’s previous projects include The Phantom, giving the studio experience translating another established property into retro-styled action. Fans can already follow the BackerKit campaign for updates ahead of its launch. After the elaborate journey to get Face the Music made, another trip through the phone booth is welcome, especially one that lets fans bring their own equally unqualified partner.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure