One of the things I’ve consistently heard on NeoGAF has been the recent dearth of content on Xbox Live Arcade, considering announcements made at GDC back in March and at E3 in May about what was in the pipeline. They were setting the stage for Xbox Live Arcade, and by association, Marketplace, to have a significant amount of content by the end of the year. Then people started to wait for when the Marketplace floodgates would open and they would unfortunately wait longer than they thought.

The good news is that after a bit of hard work, folks at Microsoft, along with some of my co-workers, put together the “Summer of Xbox Live Arcade” event in San Francisco that happened tonight. This event kicks off five straight weeks of Xbox Live Arcade releases, updated every Wednesday at 1:00 am PDT (0800 GMT), through August 2. Tonight, the updates start off with Frogger. After that, the schedule goes:

• July 19 – Cloning Clyde
• July 26 – Galaga
• August 2 – Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting
• August 9 – Pac-Man

I’m really looking forward to Galaga, that has been one of my favorite arcade games for a long time. Except this time I won’t have to put real quarters in it over and over again!