# Creating Dune Pinball - Meet The Barrels Of Fun Pinball Team

**Source:** Cooltoy  
**Type:** video  
**Published:** 2025-04-17  
**Duration:** 38m 26s  
**Beat:** Pinball

**URL:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnBDo89CyoA

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## Analysis

Barrels of Fun presents Dune pinball at public debut, showcasing innovative mechanics including a motorized sandworm that rises from the playfield, a dual day/night cycle with corresponding lighting and screen transitions, and a pain box recovery system. The team discusses design philosophy, the integration of film assets, programming complexity, and physical manufacturing challenges including 18 different injection molds.

### Key Claims

- [HIGH] Dune has 6 prophecy modes and 6 harvester battles, totaling 12 alternating objectives, plus 4 progressive wizard modes requiring spelling D-U-N-E — _Bowen Kerins, rules designer at Barrels of Fun_
- [HIGH] The sandworm mechanism can rise from the playfield, grab the ball with a center magnet, drop onto wireform, eat the ball at various stages, and function as a bash toy — _Phil Grimaldi, rules designer at Barrels of Fun_
- [HIGH] Production required 18 different injection molds with multiple cavities to create all playfield items, necessitating extensive testing and iteration — _Brian Savage, chief business officer at Barrels of Fun_
- [HIGH] The game includes a pain box mechanic where players must physically place their hand on a button to save a draining ball, playing with only their other hand — _Bowen Kerins, rules designer at Barrels of Fun_
- [HIGH] Legendary Pictures approved Barrels of Fun to develop Dune before the company had manufactured any pinball machine — _Brian Savage, chief business officer at Barrels of Fun_
- [HIGH] The playfield includes a light rail system with fully controllable RGB LEDs, including effects like laser beam animations during harvester defeats — _Eric Priestly, programmer for Dune_
- [HIGH] The saucer mountain has multiple entry and exit points including direct shoots, a lift ramp orbit, and a magnet that feeds the ball into underground passages — _Brian Savage, chief business officer at Barrels of Fun_
- [HIGH] Animated topper accessory will respond to day/night cycle transitions, changing colors to match gameplay states — _Brian Savage, chief business officer at Barrels of Fun_
- [HIGH] Players can get DUNE letters through winning modes, beating harvesters, performance in multiball, random awards, and surviving the pain box — _Bowen Kerins, rules designer at Barrels of Fun_
- [HIGH] The game's lighting includes cabinet side and apron lights as standard features, with no add-ons required to experience the full game — _Bowen Kerins, rules designer at Barrels of Fun_

### Notable Quotes

> "We want us and Legendary Pictures, we want to make sure that everyone who gets to play this game gets the full experience of enjoying this entire game."
> — **Bowen Kerins**, Early in presentation
> _Reflects commitment to standard-feature parity across all game tiers_

> "The further over the worm moves to the right, the more it's worth. And if it comes all the way back without hitting anything, then too bad I gotta do it again."
> — **Bowen Kerins**, During sandworm mech explanation
> _Demonstrates risk/reward gameplay loop for sandworm interaction_

> "I think we've done an excellent job of doing that. We've translated that vision, put it into the game, and made it a really compelling gameplay experience."
> — **Phil Grimaldi**, Rules philosophy discussion
> _Expresses confidence in translating complex film narrative to pinball rules_

> "That's how we can take a very complicated story and structure, but we can build pinball rules around it where you have this repeatable objective. It's fun to do. You want to do it again."
> — **Phil Grimaldi**, Harvester mechanism discussion
> _Articulates design philosophy of distilling complex IP into repeatable pinball objectives_

> "pinball is hard because it is hard because you have a plan and oftentimes you have vendors and governments and other people that have a different plan"
> — **Brian Savage**, Business/lessons section
> _Reflects manufacturing realities and external constraints in pinball production_

> "When we laid out our vision for Labyrinth and showed them what we're doing with that, they said, thumbs up, man. We're going to go with you guys, even though you haven't even made a single product yet."
> — **Brian Savage**, Legendary Pictures partnership discussion
> _Highlights Legendary's confidence in Barrels of Fun despite lack of manufacturing history_

> "The only flat plastic facing the player is the bezel on the monitor in the back"
> — **Brian Savage**, Playfield design discussion
> _Emphasizes three-dimensional sculpting approach contrasting with traditional flat plastics_

> "It's a lot of opportunity to do a lot of really cool things."
> — **Eric Priestly**, Programming complexity discussion
> _Reflects programmer's perspective on challenge and creative possibility in complex toy integration_

> "You defeat the harvester and you get this big explosion. And you want to do it again. And that's how we can take a very complicated story and structure."
> — **Phil Grimaldi**, Harvester/Medieval Madness comparison
> _Describes satisfying feedback loop inspired by classic Medieval Madness_

> "What can we give to the collector that they don't have to worry about? A lot of things people add to their games including Labyrinth people said that the lighting was too too dim."
> — **Brian Savage**, Standard features discussion
> _Indicates design response to previous Labyrinth feedback regarding lighting adequacy_

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| Bowen Kerins | person | Rules designer at Barrels of Fun, works on Jim Henson's Labyrinth and Dune projects |
| Jonathan Bergeron | person | Playfield artist (known as Johnny Pinball), French-Canadian artist who created Dune artwork over approximately two years |
| Phil Grimaldi | person | Rules designer at Barrels of Fun, responsible for Dune rules design and gameplay philosophy |
| Eric Priestly | person | Programmer for Dune, manages complex toy logic and LED control systems |
| Brian Savage | person | Chief business officer for Barrels of Fun, oversees manufacturing, product design, and Legendary Pictures partnership |
| David Van Ness | person | Partner to Brian Savage at Barrels of Fun, created deck showing IP analysis process for pitching to studios |
| Barrels of Fun | company | Pinball manufacturer releasing Dune as their second game after Jim Henson's Labyrinth |
| Legendary Pictures | company | Rights holder for Dune IP, approved Barrels of Fun for machine development before company had manufacturing history |
| Dune | game | Pinball machine by Barrels of Fun based on Denis Villeneuve's Dune films, featuring sandworm mech, day/night cycle, pain box, and harvester battles |
| Jim Henson's Labyrinth | game | Previous Barrels of Fun pinball release; design inspirations for Dune include super modes and multi-ball mechanics |
| Denis Villeneuve | person | Director of Dune films, referenced by Jonathan Bergeron as fellow French-Canadian filmmaker |
| Medieval Madness | game | Classic pinball game referenced as design inspiration for Dune's harvester defeat mechanic and explosion feedback |
| Circus Voltaire | game | Pinball machine referenced for totem inspiration in Dune design |
| Radical | game | Pinball machine referenced for sand trap multi-ball mechanic inspiration in Dune |
| Barnyard | game | Pinball machine referenced in context of thumper bumper triggering mechanic |

### Topics

- **Primary:** Sandworm mechanism design and engineering, Day/night cycle gameplay integration, Pain box recovery mechanic, Playfield sculpting and three-dimensional design, Rules design philosophy and IP translation
- **Secondary:** Manufacturing complexity and injection molding, LED and lighting system implementation, Legendary Pictures partnership and IP approval

### Sentiment

**Positive** (0.92) — Team expresses strong enthusiasm for the project, pride in execution, and confidence in community reception. No significant criticisms or concerns raised by team members. Celebratory tone throughout public debut presentation.

### Signals

- **[business_signal]** Legendary Pictures granted manufacturing license to unproven startup (Barrels of Fun) based solely on pitch deck and design vision, prior to any manufacturing history (confidence: high) — Brian Savage: 'We weren't even a pinball company...they said, thumbs up, man. We're going to go with you guys, even though you haven't even made a single product yet.'
- **[community_signal]** Barrels of Fun incorporating feedback from Labyrinth community (lighting complaints) into Dune standard features, demonstrating commitment to learning curve (confidence: high) — Brian Savage: 'A lot of things people add to their games including Labyrinth people said that the lighting was too too dim so we wanted to figure out how we could incorporate a lighting system'
- **[design_philosophy]** Dune draws mechanical inspiration from classic games: Labyrinth super modes, Medieval Madness harvester defeat explosions, Radical sand trap, Circus Voltaire totem (confidence: high) — Brian Savage references multiple games in playfield discussion, acknowledging design pillars from pinball history
- **[design_philosophy]** Design approach emphasizes IP fidelity within pinball constraints, distilling complex narrative into repeatable objectives and surprising moments (confidence: high) — Phil Grimaldi: 'You can't do nuance in a pinball machine. So what you need to do is distill it down to what are the things that are tractable, what are short objectives'
- **[gameplay_signal]** Dune game structure includes 12 alternating day/night objectives (6 prophecy modes + 6 harvester battles) plus 4 progressive wizard modes, with 16+ methods to spell DUNE (confidence: high) — Bowen Kerins outlines mode structure and reveals plan for post-launch wizard mode additions similar to Labyrinth progression
- **[licensing_signal]** Barrels of Fun had access to complete Legendary Pictures asset library and detailed reference materials for both Dune films during design process (confidence: high) — Brian Savage: 'Legendary has such detailed reference, you know, for us to go look at. And so it wasn't that hard. It just takes a while to get it right.'
- **[announcement]** Barrels of Fun officially reveals Dune pinball with complete feature set including motorized sandworm, day/night cycle, pain box mechanic, and RGB light rail system (confidence: high) — Full public presentation with gameplay demonstration, multiple team member interviews, and technical specifications discussed
- **[product_strategy]** Barrels of Fun emphasizes three-dimensional sculpted plastics and multi-functional toys (18 injection molds) as differentiation from flat acrylic playfields of past (confidence: high) — Brian Savage: 'Jon, hey the 90s called and they want their flat plastics back...the only flat plastic facing the player is the bezel on the monitor'
- **[product_strategy]** Accessories roadmap includes animated topper with day/night synchronization, alternate back glass options, molded accessory pack, custom shooter rod, and secret drink holder (confidence: high) — Brian Savage: 'we will have an animated topper...it will change. The topper will change color, too...we're going to have some other molded accessories'
- **[technology_signal]** Dune implements custom light rail system with full RGB control as standard feature, representing advancement in playfield lighting technology (confidence: high) — Eric Priestly: 'we have your light rail system now, so you have a fully interactive lighting system...we can entirely control every single LED'

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## Transcript

 Thank you for watching. Hi, I'm Bowen Kerins. I'm one of the rules designers at Barrels of Fun. I work on Jim Henson's Labyrinth, and now I'm involved with the project of Dune. And we've got this incredible game that we're rolling out for the very first time today in public. I'm happy. I'm just excited for it and eager to take you through it. All right, Brian here is attempting to play Dune while I talk you through it. The obvious biggest feature of Dune is the sandworm, which sits in the back left corner of the game. And we'll get a couple of chances to see the sandworm in action. It does move around. It has a magnet in the center that can be used to grab the ball. One of the other key features of this game is that we have an entire day-night cycle like the planet Arrakis. So everything is bright and orange in the daytime. It'll be darker and blue at night. And the screen will show you the progress of the day-night cycle. And if we're night as we are here, then blue prophecy modes will be lit. If we're in the daytime, we'll see harvester bells. I've noticed it also corresponds with the apron lights as well. Yep, the apron lights and the lighting on the side of the cabinet, that's standard with this game. everything you see is standard. There are no add-ons you have to buy to get the experience you have here. We want us and Legendary Pictures, we want to make sure that everyone who gets to play this game gets the full experience of enjoying this entire game. And now, Brian has gone into the paint box. You want to test yourself? Here we go. Can Brian survive the paint box test? Remove your hand from the box. Remove your hand from the box. You did it! You survived! Congratulations. You're proving yourself worthy. I'm worthy. Don't drain immediately after, though. Oh, okay. So what did he just achieve there? Was that it? So we have on the left out lane a pain box event that happens. If you drain down the out lane, it will go into the box and give you a chance to save your life. In the Dune movie, Paul puts his hand in the box and has to keep his hand there while enduring pain. So we thought, okay, we can have the player forcibly put their hand on the button here and they can only play with their other hand while that's all happening. And the game obviously becomes incredibly difficult at that point and you escape that pain by enduring it and making the shots that the game asked you to make. So let's look at Desert Power. And for Desert Power, you're going to light the locks by shooting the thumper, then lock on the orbits. It gets more difficult as the game goes on, but at least at the base, you can shoot either orbit to get locks. Once you've got two locks, some green shots will light up, And those green shots make the, set the game to set the multiple. So I went in there. Now, all I have left to do is to shoot the worm. And if I hit the ball there, I can increase the value for the jackbox. But also, when the time runs out on the worm, And now I'm in danger of potentially losing the entire multiball. And I've got to shoot the world. Here we go. Oh man, what a good neck that is. In this case what you do is you're riding the worm and you are directing the worm left and right. Whenever the worm comes back to the center shot the yellow lights will come on and that will allow me to choose which direction the worm is going to go when I hit the yellow shots. So I chose to hit it to the right and now you can see the worm is going to move to the right now. And the further over the worm moves to the right, the more it's worth. And if it comes all the way back without hitting anything, then too bad I gotta do it again. Try to the right again, maybe I can get it this time. Got it! So then, there's a second phase of this where you go for a super, which was there, but I not get the super and I'm out. Woo! And like any good pinball machine there's plenty to do like that. Like that stuff. And the super similar to labyrinth where you're bashing the Yeah, actually the super for that is inspired by the rule in labyrinth. You lock a ball behind the forks here and then you bash it with another ball through the spinner and how well you bash it determines the value. So then the day-night cycle occurs and I'm in night right now, so I have a prophecy mode lit. And then I can start by shooting the scoop. If you don't want to play a prophecy mode, you can shoot spinners and then you can transition to day instead. So this is a day transition. And these transitions can just happen as much as you want them to. Every time you transition, you get a little more value into the game. you get a bonus multiplier, and you can see the transition occurring in the screen in the back. And then eventually the color will change until you're in nighttime again. The further you go, the more resources you can collect, the more valuable things are. and when you're in nighttime you can play these modes the prophecy modes and you're in daytime then you can battle harvesters so here in the nighttime it's asking me to try to learn how to ride a worm for the first time I'll get up there let's see what I'll do let's shoot this shot there we go get around There's plenty of combo action and different shots. I like how many shots the game has and that the game has a lot of ball pass. Most of the shots have more than one way that the ball can return to the player. The blue and the yellow that you see on the screen, that's you collecting resources. anytime you pick up resources, and resources typically come from shooting spinners. The other one that's here is that I have a thopter that moves back and forth from the right side of the screen to the left side, and I have to shoot a shot where the thopter is to get get it, exploded. When you're battling the harvester as it was in the movies you want to take out all the defenses and then once you can take out all the defenses of the of the harvester you go right in and try to kill it. Also we're talking about the thing on the right another little mech this one is a sling set of a... So there, as I shoot that shot, it kicks the other ball. And by kicking the other ball, it knocks that ball into my ball and then out. And when you do that enough times, you get multi Dune compares to Labyrinth Like Labyrinth had six modes your mini modes and your final boss Yeah I think this has more things because there are six modes but there are also six battles So in that regard, you could say that there are 12, because you have to alternate between them. You have to do the harvesters during the day and the modes at night, and then come back and forth between them. And then there are four wizard modes. Now, Labyrinth, over the course of many months, we got the two main wizard modes, the Bell Jareth and the Goblin City, and then we added a third halfway wizard mode called Poison Peach. And then you can say, well, there are other multi-balls, but those are the three wizards. The plan here is to have four progressive wizards that occur whenever you finish spelling Dune. and you only need 16 Dune Letters, you can get them more than the regular ways. You can get one for winning a mode, you can get one for beating a harvester, you can get them from other things like performance in multiball or random award or surviving the pain box. So there's going to be at least 16 ways, like there were 13 ways to get orbs in Labyrinth. But I don't expect very many players to get all the way through Dune four times. I want players to get all the way through Dune, at least once, some of the time. But even that's hard. That's winning four things. Hey, my name is Jonathan Bergeron, like Jonathan Bergeron. I'm French-Canadian, so I'm known as Johnny Crap. I did the artwork on that Dune project. And yeah, it's been a lot of fun to work on for the last, say, almost two years. on and off so when you heard first that hey you know you got an opportunity to do some artwork on dune obviously sand plays an integral role in that uh do you find that you know to be a challenge you're like okay how do i make sand interesting yeah for sure uh like i was actually working on labyrinth at the time when you told me like you know like we're probably gonna have the dune license uh would you be interested in working on that and like being like i said like i'm french canadian Denis Villeneuve is from my little piece of land up there in Canada. And I was super excited because I kind of love the movies. Sand, yeah, the first thing you think about is brown and yellows and beige, tan. That's the color palette you're working with. But in the movie, he uses a lot of the oranges and the turquoise, blues. He plays a lot with that. So basically I started with a lot of sand and then I pulled it back and I tried to make it like, you know, move like in the movie they say like sand gets everywhere, you know. So like I was trying to place it in places where like it was coming in over the play field. Like basically there's a play field under it and then the sand is starting to, you know, take more and more space. and it's evident in the inserts you've got spots where yeah artwork that actually covers your insert yeah it was like because it was thumpers like so i'm like let's take those thumpers and like put them in the sand you know so uh so that was fun for that like you know you see sand like like coming down in front of certain inserts to uh drop enough you know with gravity so um yeah like I tried to play with it like it's a I wanted to make sure too that we saw the ball path and use them you know bringing sound over it but also using like the ball path like the ball just passed by and it's dragging the sand like in lines yeah yeah yeah to give the player you know visual cues where to aim and shoot yeah kind of the direction and I used to like a pattern like like at the bottom of the path, there's like a dune terrain kind of topography, I think you call that. It's a lot of fun. I tried to break it out to like in the middle, like put some characters to like bring some life into it. And it's like a different like view too, to the rest of the play field. it's nice it draws the person's eyes upwards because we got this kind of like downward perspective yeah for sure yeah that's great and i brought like when i was working on the plastics and the stuff that goes around it like i wanted to make sure that like i had some graphic elements too in there um stuff that they used to like you know we had style guides so like i based myself off what they had. So bringing some line work. The apron is basically based on the mural that's in the movie. At some point, Paul walks in front of it. Yeah, it was a lot of fun to work on. And in the back glass, this is where you really get to see our stars. Yeah, I really had to push myself on this one. I don't do characters like that as much. I really had to push the definition of the finish of it. The rendering, there's a lot more rendering than I usually do. I left it a bit looser on the clothing, just because it's a bit less important to make it really... I wanted it to be as close as possible to all the likeness. I had like some photo material to work from but then just a matter of like working the brushes over it and then you've got a lot of light and dark visual imagery that's represented by not only the back glass but you know yeah for sure like yeah the whole machine basically like on one side it's kind of like the the night time and on the other side it's a bit more of the daytime so I kept that through all through the game like even the art blades are like you know different on each side to represent the night and day same thing because whenever you have the spinners to like you see the lighting it plays with the artwork that's in there too and like really like helps the the player like realizing that they're going through like cycles like that hi I'm Phil Grimaldi rules designer at Barrels of fun coming up with uh the rules for a game as or for ip as deep as dune has a lot of challenges i mean there's a reason why just adapting this to film is a big challenge so trying to be true to the vision of the the dune films and making sure that we're able to capture the essence of everything put it into the game it took a lot of mental energy to make it work but i think we've done an excellent job of doing that. We've translated that vision, put it into the game, and made it a really compelling gameplay experience. There's a lot of just amazing moments in here that are kind of like pinball first. It really captures a lot of these moments where, oh my gosh, did that just happen? And that kind of magic that only pinball can provide. And it only happens when a lot of things come together and really gel. And we're really proud how it turned out and uh yeah i mean it's there's so much packed into here there's so much depth and richness to the ip in general i think you know we did our best to uh honor everything that's in here we're all like huge dune fans i'm a huge dune nerd so this is such a dream come true for me to be able to do this and uh and gosh just the end results as you're seeing is just stunning i'm So proud to be part of this team. So let's talk about the pinball moments that you alluded to. So you got a couple of firsts in here for sure. Obviously, you can't have Dune without a sandworm. What's special about this sandworm in the gameplay? So this sandworm, like the mechanism itself is just an engineering feat. It can do so many different things. So there's basically, it can do, it has a magnet in center. It can grab the ball. That's, you know, one common in pinball. But it can grab the ball. It can rise up out of the play field. that can drop it onto the wire form. Wow, that's wild. It can eat the ball. It can eat it in various different stages. So it can eat it when it's down low. So it can just grab the ball, eat it. It can rise up and eat it, like kind of envelop the ball as it's going. It can rise up, then eat it. So there's all sorts of different kind of ways that we can capture certain moments in the rules or film that we're trying to emphasize. And it can also turn into a bash toy as well. So we can capture a ball, hold it on there, rise it up, and then you can hit the worm as it's written up out of the playfield. So it is a, you know, a deceptively simple and hidden mechanism that comes out of the playfield and does all sorts of different cool things. Yeah because your top view we just looking at it it like okay it a magnet with a core Yes and then yeah I can imagine a lot of new people who may be not familiar with this game play this for the first time and will be extremely shocked and surprised when some of this stuff happens And that's exactly the kind of thing you want to see in a pinball machine, because that's the thing that only pinball can provide, that kind of surprise and those moments where you're just like, holy crap, that ball just did that thing, the game just did that. So we've got all the assets from both movies. How do you roadmap that when it comes to coming up with rules, coming up with modes, what to leave out, what to cut in? How do we do this without overloading a player's senses? Right. And if you're familiar with the films, it's very political. And there's a lot of strategy and politics and abstract things that are in this, which makes Dune such a great story and compelling movie. You can't do all that in a game. and it's pinball, you can't do nuance in a pinball machine. So what you need to do is distill it down to what are the things that are tractable, what are short objectives that a player can do in the game, and what's going to be a repeatable thing. So if you put a mech in a game, you put all this stuff into, or all this engineering into a particular mechanism, you don't want it to be a one-trick pony that does one thing. It can't just be one scene. What's something that you can do over and over again? And in this game, you're playing from the perspective of the Fremen. So you are fighting against the Harkonnen, you know, and Lisan al-Gaib comes, the Messiah comes at this point. But you're fighting against the Harkonnen, and one of the main objectives in the game is defeating all of their harvesters, disrupting their spice production. So we have another amazing mechanism in the rear left corner of the game representing the Harkonnen Harvester. So you'll be defeating these harvesters as you go to try and disrupt spice production. This is going to get more and more difficult as you go on. Obviously, the first harvester is going to be a little bit easier. And we have this awesome interaction with the ball as you destroy these. not only does the mechanism have this kind of like collapsing, intercollapsing action to it when you hit it, but we're making use of the LCD back glass behind it and having explosions come out. And this gives you way more kind of immersion into what's actually happening. And so this is like Medieval Madness 2.0, kind of that moment when you defeat the castle. This is like that. You defeat the harvester and you get this big explosion. and you want to do it again. And that's how we can take a very complicated story and structure, but we can build pinball rules around it where you have this repeatable objective. It's fun to do. You want to do it again. It gets harder and harder as you go. And it's compelling. I'm Eric Preepty. I'm the programmer for Doom. A lot of complicated stuff to have to juggle in this game with the various sections that can do more than one thing. The lift ramp and diverter and the radical kickback with the drop target on it. The worm mech, of course, is a rather complicated piece of machinery. So there's a lot to juggle, but it's also a lot of opportunity to do a lot of really cool things. Exactly. And with those opportunities, we have certain things. We've got your light rail system now, so you've got a fully interactive lighting system. Yeah, some of the add-on lights you can get that give you more light on the play field, but the ability to do full RGB shows throughout is a lot more. Some of those add-on ones can just flash a color. We can entirely control every single LED so that we can do a lot of really cool effects. like when the harvester gets shot at the end of the battle this whole rail lights up blue like the laser beam from the the movie and then there's a little bit of glow along the rail when it blows up to go along with all the other screen and other leds inside the toy and like you said it's the little details like a small section of the lights is yeah it's not just a blinking right rail yeah in the in the survive mode when you're in the thopter there's a constant forward motion like because you're in the helicopter and you're flying through the whole mode, there's a constant forward motion on the lights to give you that we're going somewhere sort of vibe, I guess. So when you learn about add-on features like a shaker motor, a light rail system, four magnets, multiple diverters, does that personally excite you for a new challenge? Or are you like, oh my God, what are we doing here? Oh yeah, more to do is always good. It makes it more interesting. The challenge with programming is always getting the logic to do the thing you need to do. So all the little extra toys you get to wave around and little extra effects and atmosphere you can add, that stuff's like icing on the cake. The hard part is always the how do things layer together and does this interrupt that? What happens when this happens if that's already happening? So being able to take a break and make an explosion happen on the back screen or some kind of cool lighting effect with the rails that like that's the fun part hi i'm brian savage i am the chief business officer for barrels of fun what are the lessons learned from starting a company from scratch going to labyrinth and then now coming out with well it's um there's a lot and as people always say pinball is hard because it is hard because you have a plan and oftentimes you have vendors and governments and other people that have a different plan and so you just have to shuck and jive and change and modify what you're doing to fit whatever the situations are to make it come out to be not only the best machine that it possibly can to represent you the legendary brand but to make sure that pinball people like it everywhere you know that it fits what they want that it truly has moments in the game so what was it like working with legendary for the first time because this being game number two obviously you don't have an established relationship with them well the interesting thing about legendary is when we started development of this machine or started after the license, let me put it that way, we weren't even a pinball company. We had established ourselves, but we hadn't even made a machine. So basically because of the deck that David, my partner, made, showing the process of how we look at an IP and say, what does an IP need? So like in Dune, you have the siege. So it's like, well, that has to be in here. The pain box has to be in here. The worms have to be in here. The harvester has to be in here. What does it need to represent that universe? And so when we laid out our vision for Labyrinth and showed them what we're doing with that, they said, thumbs up, man. We're going to go with you guys, even though you haven't even made a single product yet. So that's probably the most amazing thing out of all of this is you're talking about over a billion-dollar franchise that put their trust in us before we had anything to really show them to represent their brand. And you can see what a fantastic product that has come out. So looking here, we've got the Fremen Mountains. we've got sculpts on top of sculpts we're not dealing with just flat acrylic plastic anymore you guys have really you know set yourself apart with the sculpting details absolutely and what i like to say is you know hey the 90s called and they want their flat plastics back you know this doesn't the only flat plastic facing the player is the bezel on the monitor in the back but there are it takes so when you mold stuff it's called a tool okay there are 18 different tools that some of them have multiple cavities in them just to produce all the items are on this play field. So it's a lot of testing and changing. You know, just looking at the mountain, we had to work very hard to not make that a ball trap and still look like a mountain. So the ball can't get up there and sit somewhere. It's going to roll off anywhere it is. And then, of course, you have to be accurate to the property's color palette. You know, you've got the worms are different colors, the harvester, the thumpers, you know, the sand, you know, not all sand is created equal. And so you've got different colors of items, you know, all across the play field. You've got the paint box. So you've got, but the good thing about Legendary, because they have such detailed reference, you know, for us to go look at. And so it wasn't that hard. It just takes a while to get it right. So we also have some accessories coming. The machine will ship with a, just a flat plastic topper. That's just kind of a placeholder. But we will have an animated topper, which I'm not going to tell you any more than that. But you've seen our other animated toppers, what they do, so you can expect what's going to happen on that. But it will also represent the day and night cycle. It will work with the machine on that. So when we're seeing gameplay color elements, when it changes? It will change. The topper will change color, too. Nice. Yeah, so that will be a really fun addition to it. Plus, we're going to have some other molded accessories in an accessory pack. I'm not going to tell you what they are right now, but they'll come with the Chris Knife shooter rod. So those will be available later in the spring. We also are working on alternate back glass, so you'll have a different choice. If you don't want the characters, if you want more of the scenery type of thing, there'll be something different from that. And then we'll have the topper down the road. And then, of course, we're working on, we showed everybody the secret drink holder. So just use your imagination, and I won't say anything like popcorn bucket. Nothing like that at all. So just think about that. It something that will be absolutely unique to this machine so I you know you say pinball first and yes there is a lot of new stuff in here but you remember i a pinball collector i a pinball fan so a lot of this stuff i pulling back to things that i love in games you know swirly ramps um circus voltaire totem there are inspiration from a lot of these games i mean for example the space over here where we have the uh the multiball, the sand trap multiball over here. It is one of those situations of like we had a spare space there and what could we do? And a lot of times you'd be looking at other games. We'd go out and we'll play games somewhere and you go, radical. That is an amazing trick on radical. And we have a space that we could literally fit it. But, you know, you can take a mech like that, but how does it integrate into the game itself? Yeah, it's got to make sense for the theme, the game. It's got to make sense. The whole point is you hide your soldiers. They hide under the sand. the whole point and you put a ball in there and now they're waiting to be called to the uh to the cause um so one of the ideas is we want to use it as an edible you put a soldier away in there and then when you need to call him you can shoot it back in there and get him out there to help you on the mode and into the uh into the war when it comes to the toy side of it it's like how do we capture what the fremen are doing and how they uh walk in this world so we have the the mountain over here so you know this is the siege and the siege is like they don't just go into the she's one direction there's multiple entry points so for example you can shoot an orbit where right now the ramp is down so you'd go up a ramp and it'll feed the wire form here but there's another exit there's a diverter bind here dot behind here and if you shoot that it can actually come out from the back side of the mountain and then on the other side of it is you have a lift up ramp that can lift up and that just becomes a traditional orbit that goes all the way around But it doesn't just go all the way around. There's actually a magnet that you can actually see through the wire form That it will grab the ball and feed that into the mountain and out to the subway So there's always multiple entry points as into the siege Also, you can go into the siege from the upper upper ramp on the inside ramp here You also can go underneath it because there's a pathway that feeds down into the battle The battle zone in here and there's a magnet in there so when you trap up in there you can collect spice you can fight in there you can once you have the fork up you can bash the ball and it'll do its own little crazy stuff in here plus you know there's nothing more satisfying that we learned on labyrinth with a drop target with a spinner behind it so we took it to the next level and put a magnet in between it so and there's nothing more satisfying when you hit that and it rips the ball it is really really satisfying we also do have a stand up post in the back of it so we can actually stop the ball from leaving or we also can allow the ball to come out and come up to the upper flipper and vice versa we can stop the ball from going in it has optos in front of it so we can actually tell if the ball goes in or goes out so we can stop it in multiple positions and you got a scoop here that's accessible from multiple directions yeah so you can obviously shoot it directly on you can shoot it from the back side from under the flipper and you also can do it through this spinner under here that goes under the sand dune and feeds it from the left side of it the thumper bumper yeah this is probably the first thing is like we have to turn the thumper the thumper bumper you know pop bumper into how we can call it so obviously you can trigger by hitting it and there are modes that you know you have to hit it to activate it but there are times during the mode during a game when you're playing a game and you want to get some additional bonus and if you've actually uh selected thumper on your three drop bank target here and collected it these targets of the thumper bumpers the thumpers here if they're lit you can hit it and you can cause the thumper to go off to call the worm to get your get a bonus and as it's going you'll see the progression of the worm slowly going towards the william mac and once he gets up there obviously it represents when william is ready to eat the ball we learn a lot of things but as a collector myself I was like what can we give to the the collector that they don't have to worry about and a lot of things people add to their games including Labyrinth people said that the lighting was too too low so we wanted to figure out how we could incorporate a lighting system into this and that's where we came up with the horizons that they call it how for sure and this is actually built into the cabinet so where the playfield glass slides in underneath that we created a whole new cavity where we actually align in rgbw's so we can actually fully control the light down onto the playfield so that was one of the key features that we wanted to add the other thing that we wanted to add was the um the decals a lot of things with labyrinth that we did i mean we're happy with our decals on it but there would be times that people would scratch their decals so how can we fix that there are different things that i saw other companies do um and basically what we decided was the evergloss decals was the way to go because although they're not scratch resistant but it can take a really really good beating and it's not going to curl up under the legs we also did a mirroring printing on the backside of it, so it's actually a mirror ink on the inside of the Everglass decals. We also upgraded the audio system in this because this game is so cinematic. I wanted to make sure the audio was heard in its best possible format, so we included an independent amplifier that's actually in the backbox now. So now we can actually drive that sound a lot more cleaner. um infinity glass it's our version of invisiglass is basically again a lot of people pay a lot of money for that and it's something that you shouldn't have to add on to a game like we want to make the highest quality game we possibly can for the best value for your buck and at the end of the day it's one of those things with labyrinth a lot of our vendors kind of did doubt what we could be doing but when they saw what we did with Labyrinth they trusted us more which means we actually had better buying power and when we got better buying power we're able to include a lot more with that. Everyone wants a Shaker Motor. I'm not a I like Shaker Motors but if I had to pay for it I don't tend to do it but if it's concluded of course I love it but so many people asked for a Shaker Motor in Labyrinth so we had to make sure we had a Shaker Motor in this game. The good news is also the second mode that goes into this is retroactively able to work in labyrinth um we've got to get the boards in because it has to have a separate board for it and eric's got to put the code into it i'm Travis Moseman with barrels of fun and uh proud to introduce the dune pinball machine you know i was involved as a contributing to the mechanical layout and producing the overall model of the play field and doing all that that integration so i'm really proud of the layout and the overall gameplay that we've been able to put into the machine. It's got a lot of neat mechanisms and toys that are all, I think, come together in a really cohesive package. It's really packed edge to edge. You'll notice that there's shots that go all the way to the edge of the playfield wood on both sides of the playfield. It's got three opto spinners that are an upgrade from even what we did on Labyrinth with its renowned spinner through the forks. And the game's packed with magnets and custom mechs. There's one mechanism in particular that I think everybody's going to talk about. That's the worm mech. And it's a really multifaceted mech. So it's not only like the Tales of the Arabian Nights magnet that can catch the ball and eat it, but it also has a giant rotating cylinder that is the body of the sandworm. and it can raise up all the way to the height of the wire form and it can move in the mouth that eats the ball and the body in any way you want in relation to one another. So we could have some really neat choreography planned for that overall mix. So sometimes it goes up slowly or quickly and sometimes it eats the ball or swallows the harvester in a sort of different way. It also serves as a bash toy, so it has sensors in front of it that let us know if the player is bashing into it. So we use that creatively in some of the modes to indicate maybe you're throwing your maker hook and capturing the worm's scales to turn it left or right, or to ride the worm. So that's got a lot of neat aspects to it. We talked at one point, like, I guess you could have it just go up, but to have it go up and twist? I mean, that would be bonus points, you know, and so he really crushed it on the development of that mech. Especially being able to incorporate a custom sculpt on it with all the custom painting on, you know, just on top of the really, you know, you know, precise move and it's, you know, it's so precise that it's really easy to level against the playfield even because it's a software setting. So you go into the menu and you can bump it up a millimeter or down a millimeter and get a nice and flush with the playfield. Thank you.

_(Acquisition: youtube_groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_

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*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 7afc419f-c8e7-4364-a97f-899d6474ab0a*