# BDYETP 52: A Punny, Deep-Rooted Avenging **Source:** Bro, Do you Even Talk Pinball **Type:** podcast_episode **Published:** 2020-09-29 **Duration:** 104m 8s **Beat:** Pinball **URL:** https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/buffalo-pinball/episodes/BDYETP-52-A-Punny--Deep-Rooted-Avenging-ekangk --- ## Analysis Nick Lane and Kevin Manning of Buffalo Pinball discuss recent pinball industry news, focusing heavily on Deep Root Pinball's failed game reveal of Raza (Retro Atomic Zombie Adventure Land) and the leaked photos showing controversial design choices including sharp lock bar edges, a split backbox, speakers near the coin door, and a touchscreen 'pin bar' apron display. They also briefly cover the new Avengers Infinity Quest by Stern with Keith Elwin design and Zombie Yeti art, praising its visual appeal despite mixed feelings on theme repetition. ### Key Claims - [HIGH] Deep Root Pinball has delayed Raza at least 2-3 times, with the concept originating roughly 7+ years ago — _Hosts discuss multiple delays: planned for Texas Pinball Festival, then another time, now cancelled reveal_ - [HIGH] Deep Root invited 6 pinball media personalities to a reveal event on Saturday (day before Monday 21st reveal) that turned into a 'beta event' due to technical issues and negative feedback — _Deep Root's official statement mentioned 6 guests (Lauren, Carrie, Colin, Jeff, Chris, Crystal) provided feedback indicating machine wasn't ready_ - [HIGH] The Raza cabinet has dangerously sharp edges on the lock bar corners that could cause injury — _Multiple photo observations and host commentary about sharp flipper/lock bar design vs. standard rounded edges on existing machines_ - [MEDIUM] Keith Elwin designed the rule set for Avengers Infinity Quest with Rick Nagel implementing the rules, continuing their collaboration pattern — _Hosts discuss this being Keith's third game with Rick Nagel after previous two games_ - [HIGH] Avengers Infinity Quest Premium/LE includes an Infinity Gauntlet toy in the back area that Pro version lacks — _Hosts describe visual differences between Pro and Premium/LE versions, noting gauntlet appears 'cartoony' but fits theme_ - [MEDIUM] Deep Root's organizational culture has problems where internal staff either don't raise concerns or are not heard when they do — _Hosts speculate that Steve Bowden and internal pinball experts should have caught issues before external media guests had to identify them_ - [MEDIUM] Deep Root spent millions in capital for 3-4 years without bringing in revenue, creating unsustainable cash burn — _Hosts discuss hemorrhaging money, paying designers/rules people, building factory infrastructure with zero games shipped_ - [MEDIUM] The Raza 'pin bar' apron display can integrate game controls like ball save and redemption ticket displays — _Photos show 'ball save' and '200 tickets' displayed on touchscreen apron; described as heads-up display with game integration_ ### Notable Quotes > "They're hemorrhaging money because they're behind schedule by like what is it a year and a half two years dude at least just putting games out" > — **Kevin Manning**, ~24:00 > _Captures core criticism of Deep Root's financial unsustainability and chronic production delays_ > "There's a culture problem right because there's pinball people who work in there yeah and you know steve bowden's not blind he knows what's going on right so i don't get it" > — **Host**, ~25:00 > _Suggests internal dysfunction where problems should have been caught by experienced staff before external revelation_ > "Please tell me I'm wrong. I'm just assuming based on the picture, so maybe this is wrong. Look at the sharp edges where you put your hand." > — **Nick Lane**, ~30:00 > _First major critique of ergonomic hazard in Raza design; sets tone for safety concerns_ > "Due to technical issues and lots of feedback from our guests, it ended up being more of a beta event." > — **Deep Root official statement (quoted)**, ~22:00 > _Official acknowledgment that machine was not ready for public reveal; admission of technical failures_ > "Why would you change it? Nobody has been complaining about the lockdown bar, like the edges on it. That's not a thing, right?" > — **Nick Lane**, ~31:00 > _Questions why Deep Root deviated from proven, industry-standard lock bar design to create problematic version_ > "Jurassic Park, his last game was a redo too, but at least that was like 20 years before this one and not less than a decade ago." > — **Nick Lane**, ~16:00 > _Notes trend of theme repetition; Keith Elwin doing Avengers redo less than 10 years after original_ > "I would love to see a documentary on this like because it would be fascinating just to hear like this is the stuff that we're seeing as the public right oh my god like all the missteps what the hell's happening behind the scenes right" > — **Kevin Manning**, ~27:00 > _Expresses fascination with internal dysfunction at Deep Root; suggests public perception is only tip of iceberg_ > "The bombastic nature of this guy that really painted him in a negative light to start with and then to say we're gonna have the five days of deep root there's gonna be all these machines" > — **Kevin Manning**, ~28:00 > _References Robert Mueller's early hype cycle and ambitious promises that failed to materialize_ > "Everything around the pinball machine is being innovated, but nothing new under the play field. That was the other thing." > — **Host**, ~45:00 > _Core criticism that Deep Root's innovations (pin bar, speakers, backbox design) miss core pinball gameplay innovation_ > "I'm having trouble moving past it's okay i have another photo of it here somewhere uh right there so this is uh you can do like stuff you would normally do inside the coin door" > — **Nick Lane**, ~43:00 > _Indicates sharp edges criticism so dominant it overshadows other design features; safety concerns eclipse feature discussion_ ### Entities | Name | Type | Context | |------|------|---------| | Deep Root Pinball | company | Boutique pinball manufacturer that announced Raza (Retro Atomic Zombie Adventure Land) game reveal, experienced multiple delays, hosted media preview event that failed, and has now postponed public release due to technical issues and external feedback | | Robert Mueller | person | Founder/owner of Deep Root Pinball; known for bombastic early messaging and 'five days of deep root' announcement; credited in official statement calling out Jody Dankberg as inspiration | | Raza (Retro Atomic Zombie Adventure Land) | game | Deep Root's first game; concept originated 7+ years ago; features sharp lock bar edges, split backbox, 'pin bar' touchscreen apron display, and speaker placement near coin door; failed media reveal on Saturday with planned Monday 21st public announcement postponed | | Keith Elwin | person | Pinball designer credited with designing rule set for new Avengers Infinity Quest game; has released two previous games (Jurassic Park and another); collaborates with Rick Nagel on rules implementation | | Avengers Infinity Quest | game | New Stern Pinball game designed by Keith Elwin with art by Zombie Yeti; redo of original Avengers game; features colorful presentation, novel toys (pop-up center toy similar to Circus Voltaire), wire-form ramp on Premium/LE, Infinity Gauntlet toy, varies by tier (Pro/Premium/LE) | | Zombie Yeti | person | Artist who created art direction for Avengers Infinity Quest; serves as head of Stern Pinball art department | | Stern Pinball | company | Major pinball manufacturer releasing Avengers Infinity Quest with Keith Elwin design and Zombie Yeti art; using three-tier pricing model (Pro/Premium/LE) | | Rick Nagel | person | Rules implementation person who collaborates with Keith Elwin; worked on Elwin's previous two games including Avengers Infinity Quest | | Steve Bowden | person | Referenced as experienced pinball professional at Deep Root; hosts question why internal staff didn't catch technical issues before external media reveal | | Nick Lane | person | Co-host of Bro, Do you Even Talk Pinball podcast; from Buffalo Pinball; provides design critiques of Raza and Avengers Infinity Quest | | Kevin Manning | person | Co-host of Bro, Do you Even Talk Pinball podcast; from Buffalo Pinball; provides commentary on Deep Root's business problems and design issues | | Cal McAlpine | person | Former Pinburgh champion; one of six media personalities invited to Deep Root's preview event; provided critical feedback | | This Week in Pinball (TWIP) | media | Pinball news outlet run by Colin; announced planned Deep Root interview/reveal on day of postponement; published detailed technical specs and photos of Raza the day after reveal was cancelled | | Ban Bag | venue | Location that hosted Avengers Infinity Quest launch party tournament with streaming coverage | | Bro, Do you Even Talk Pinball | media | Podcast featuring Nick Lane and Kevin Manning of Buffalo Pinball discussing industry news, game design, and community topics | | Texas Pinball Festival (TPF) | event | Major pinball event where Deep Root was originally supposed to reveal Raza before delays; also referenced as potential venue for TPF spring event | | Jody Dankberg | person | Person Robert Mueller publicly thanked on Facebook as inspiration for Deep Root; context unclear | | Ben Heck | person | Original designer of 'Zombie Adventureland' homebrew concept that evolved into Raza | | Lauren, Carrie, Colin, Jeff, Chris, Crystal | person | Six pinball media personalities invited to Deep Root's Saturday preview event; provided critical feedback on technical issues that led to postponement | | Circus Voltaire | game | Classic pinball game referenced as design inspiration for center pop-up toy feature on Avengers Infinity Quest | | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles | game | Recent pinball game whose playfield layout was referenced as visually similar to Avengers Infinity Quest upon first glance | | Black Knight | game | Classic pinball game referenced for ball save mechanic comparison to Raza's touchscreen pin bar approach | | Dialed In | game | Modern pinball game referenced for orbit-to-ramp shot design similarity to Avengers Infinity Quest right orbit feature | ### Topics - **Primary:** Deep Root Pinball's Raza reveal failure and postponement, Raza design flaws (sharp edges, pin bar, backbox, speaker placement), Deep Root's business sustainability and cash burn, Stern's Avengers Infinity Quest design and features - **Secondary:** Theme repetition in pinball (Avengers redo), Pinball machine ergonomics and safety, Innovation vs. core gameplay focus in pinball design - **Mentioned:** Organizational culture and internal communication at pinball manufacturers ### Sentiment **Negative** (-0.75) — Hosts are highly critical of Deep Root's Raza design choices (sharp edges, poor ergonomics, unnecessary innovations), frustrated by repeated delays and failed promises, and skeptical of business viability. However, sentiment is more neutral-to-positive regarding Avengers Infinity Quest, with appreciation for visual design and creative team. Overall tone is exasperated cynicism about industry dysfunction. ### Signals - **[business_signal]** Deep Root Pinball's 3-4 year operation with zero shipped games while maintaining staff payroll, factory infrastructure, and designer team creates unsustainable cash burn; hosts question how company remains solvent (confidence: high) — Discussion of 'hemorrhaging money,' maintaining infrastructure without revenue, paying multiple designers/rules people for years; rhetorical questioning of business model viability - **[community_signal]** Deep Root's official reveal postponement and leaked Raza photos sparked massive negative Facebook commentary; community perception of company credibility severely damaged (confidence: high) — Hosts describe Facebook comments as 'avalanche of shitting on them'; previous criticism of founder's 'bombastic' early messaging and unfulfilled promises - **[competitive_signal]** Avengers Infinity Quest positioned as superior redo of original Avengers game from less than decade ago; Keith Elwin's consistent designer tag and Zombie Yeti art create market differentiation (confidence: medium) — Hosts acknowledge Avengers is 'much, much better than original'; Keith Elwin's track record ('two for two as far as I'm concerned'); combination of designer + art team generates interest - **[design_philosophy]** Raza cabinet features split/elevated backbox similar to Mrs. Pac-Man and Centaur 2, which hosts note are 'universally hated' by pinball community despite J-Pop aesthetic justification (confidence: medium) — Direct comparison to historically disliked design patterns; hosts acknowledge aesthetic appeal but note community precedent of negative reception to split backboxes - **[design_philosophy]** Deep Root appears to prioritize cosmetic/peripheral innovations ('pin bar' touchscreen, split backbox, crotch speakers) over core playfield design and gameplay innovation (confidence: high) — Host observation: 'Everything around the pinball machine is being innovated, but nothing new under the play field'; extensive coverage of non-gameplay features in official specs; flipper alignment issues visible in photos - **[community_signal]** Deep Root's organizational culture appears dysfunctional; internal pinball experts (Steve Bowden) apparently did not or could not raise concerns before external media guests identified critical technical issues (confidence: medium) — Hosts speculate about 'culture problem' where staff are either 'not heard when they raise concerns or afraid to speak up'; questioning why experienced professionals didn't catch issues internally - **[market_signal]** Deep Root's continuous spending on design, staffing, factory build-out without revenue generation raises questions about three-tier pricing model viability and games-needed-to-break-even calculation (confidence: medium) — Hosts discuss how many games Deep Root must sell to recover costs; speculation about unsustainable financial model; no clarity on pre-order deposits or investor structure - **[product_strategy]** Raza has experienced at least 2-3 delays (Texas Pinball Festival, unspecified secondary date, now postponed indefinitely); original concept is 7+ years old with no release in sight (confidence: high) — Hosts reference multiple delay cycles; Deep Root's own statement admits technical issues and insufficient readiness; media preview event converted to 'beta event' - **[product_concern]** Raza cabinet features dangerously sharp lock bar edges that create ergonomic hazard compared to industry-standard rounded design; hosts question why proven design was altered (confidence: high) — Multiple photo observations showing sharp edges where hands rest; hosts walked to other machines to compare; concern about injury potential ('poke your eye out') - **[product_strategy]** Deep Root originally announced 'five days of deep root' with multiple games launching concurrently; now barely has one working game after years of development (confidence: high) — Hosts reference original ambitious pipeline ('five days'); hosts question 'how many games were they supposed to release like concurrently'; current state: one partially-functional game - **[sentiment_shift]** Community perception of Deep Root shifted from initial intrigue/skepticism to near-universal cynicism and criticism after failed reveal; hosts describe need for 'documentary' to understand internal dysfunction (confidence: high) — Description of early 'bombastic' marketing promises; contrast with current 'all their fault' and 'joke at this point' sentiment; hosts' fascination with potential internal chaos - **[technology_signal]** Raza's 'pin bar' touchscreen apron display is unproven technology; hosts question whether touchscreen controls (ball save) will be accidentally triggered during intense play vs. tactile buttons on established games like Black Knight (confidence: medium) — Hosts discuss uncertainty of tactile feedback for controls; comparison to proven mechanical button design; acknowledgment that effectiveness requires hands-on play testing --- ## Transcript DOUBLE SUPER JACKPOT! The Hall and Oats of Pinball Podcasting, Nick Lane and Kevin Manning of Buffalo Pinball. Woo-boom-shakalaka! Oh, Nick, they didn't hear you. Well, you know, it's too late. I said some fucking great stuff. You missed it. You had to be here. And even if you were here, you didn't hear it. You had me on mute? Yeah. He should be good now, though. Fuck. Well, you know what? Now we got a good start, as usual. So I said, after Kevin said his line, I said, well, I don't even, I'm not feeling it. I'm not feeling it. Do it again. Here's the deal. We've got a showdown with Deep Root versus Pinball Adventures theme off. Yeah. So there you go. So this is a. In other words, a lot of Deep Root because it's our favorite topic and Punny Factory too. That man. We've got some good news in the last couple of weeks. It's Punny Factory and Deep Root, our favorite show topics. I was thinking about it. But it's been, well, you know, all the drought of pinball news started in, like, March. So we filled in with interviews, and we had guests on and things like that. And then just, like, everything came at us all at once here. And it was Deep Root coming at us. It was a new Avengers Infinity Quest. And then, to top it all off, new Puny Factory news. It's like, we've got to do a show. Let's get to it. So before we get into that, why don't we thank our partners? And we have a new one. so I'll get started pinstadium.com save 10% with coupon code buffalo on awesome LED lighting for your pinball machines app controlled lighting that you can apply to any machine, looks great you can color match the colors on your play field if you want, you can get cool add-ons like the Orion's Belt or all that fun stuff, check them out, pinstadium.com DoubleDanger, ddpinball.com. I'm decked out at Double Danger tonight. They got some of our stuff in stock still. I think they still got a couple hoodies if you want to grab one and start and get cold. 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We'll talk about that later. pinball edu pinball raffle.org to get in on the latest raffle for uh the 501c3 charity pinball edu goes to benefit them and spinners pinball arcade you can win a new stern pinball machine uh for the raffle ticket cost of just 40 bucks a month so there you go uh community beerworks communitybeerworks.com for all your uh micro brewery nano brewery needs and they're not a nano brewery are they anymore nick no no they're they're they're a macro brewery they're all grown up brewery they're a big big boy brewery uh but they make good beer i hear if you drink beer you probably like theirs uh coming back with a vengeance holy crap it's tilt cycle tilt cycle.com dan burfield said i need to get back in on that hot bro action let's uh let's let's do it up i mean we've always loved dan and if you've watched my streams i have my my play field in the back and Everybody always asks about it. So we couldn't be more excited to have Dan back on as one of our partners. Check them out. TiltCycle.com. Upcycled pinball art. So he takes old, unusable pinball pieces and parts and playfields and pop bumpers and all sorts of stuff, turns them into awesome pieces of art. So if you want to spice up your bathroom, your arcade, your bedroom, your living room, go to TiltCycle.com, buy something, and throw it up on your wall. Comet Pinball, makers of awesome LED Lighting for your pinball machines This is all the lighting that goes under the playfield The pin stadiums go on top Comet Pinball goes underneath All your inserts, all your GI Make them look great, bright With Comet Pinball LEDs Pinball Mix, if you want to make your Machine sound great Maybe you have a Mustang and you don't like the music And you want to change it Go to pinballmix.com, use coupon code BUFFALO To save 10% and get a free Easter egg on your remix soundtrack for your pinball machine. And finally, Titan Pinball, titanpinball.com. Save 10% with coupon code BUFFALO on silicone competition rings for your pinball machine. They hold up better, they look better, they clean better, and they just, you know, they'll make you feel good. So there you go. That's our thanks to our partners. Could not do it without you guys, and I really appreciate everybody who shows them support. So there you go. Nick Lane, what do you think? Thank you for you. What do you think about Avengers Infinity Quest? We should probably talk about that, right? I saw it a little bit. Theme-wise, I was surprised to see another Avengers pin. I did one the last 10 years, so I didn't see it coming. We wanted to talk about theme. But then again, the original Avengers was kind of a dud. It was just an undesirable game. It wasn't that great. Avengers being a hot property in terms of movie license, I guess it made sense to kind of redo it again and do it justice. Yeah, it did seem very, like, I know, like, pinball companies, for whatever reason, they just keep redoing these themes, you know, between Stern and Jersey Jack. And, you know, you see themes that have been done get done again, but hopefully better the second time. I don't think anybody would argue that Pirates is worse the second time around. This looks much, much better than the original Avengers. And like you said, the theme continues to be hot. So I'm excited to play it. It's Keith Elwin's latest game. You know, he's two for two as far as I'm concerned with pinball machines. And, yeah, it looks great. It's got Zombie Yeti art. So the combo of Zombie Yeti plus Keith Elwin, you got my interest, right? So what do you think of, like, the whole entire package art-wise, presentation-wise? Have you seen any of the gameplay yet or anything like that? Like a couple minutes. It's hard for me to watch gameplay because I can't form an accurate opinion on it. So I try not to have too many strong opinions. I'm just watching it and just looking at the art. But it's really colorful. I'm looking at it right now. It's cool how they brought back the thing that pops up right from the center, like on Circus Voltaire, right? And you can block the ball underneath the game. That's a cool little toy. um when i first saw it the layout struck me as being similar to ninja mutant ninja turtles like just having back-to-back games that that just on a quick like five second look resembled each other but i'm sure you know i'm sure when you play it it's nothing like it and it looks different in person so yeah so i've seen um i was watching bang bag had a launch party tournament and they streaming it yesterday so i watched a bit of that and the um yeah that was the pro and it looks cool like the shots are cool like the right orbit reminds me of dialed in how it goes from an orbit into a ramp it's got a lot of interesting shots which it this is the first game i've watched in a long time on a stream and i was like man i just want to shoot that it looks really fun to shoot um it didn't so it didn't have this this big uh wire form ramp on the right hand side the pro let me pop over to that picture so the pro has a spinner here on the right for captain marvel and the premium le has this crazy wire form uh which looks impossible to hit it goes uh you shoot it in it goes straight up and over but somehow it works i don't know um the other big thing is the you can see it in the background of that photo is the uh gauntlet infinity gauntlet is in the premium le it's not in the pro uh it looks a little i mean it looks cartoony but that's the theme of the machine so that was one of the critiques when the pictures were first revealed they're like oh that looks pretty chintzy and i won't disagree that it does doesn't but uh you know it's i think either people are gonna replace it with a mod of some sort or you're just gonna get used to looking at it because it kind of blends in with the whole package uh when you look at it. What part does? The Infinity Gauntlet in the back there. Yeah, it doesn't look good. Yeah. Yeah. Not great. Yeah, but theme-wise, like you said, it's still relevant, looks fun, Keith Elwin game. I mean, Jurassic Park, his last game was a redo too, but at least that was like 20 years before this one and not less than a decade ago. But we'll see. I mean, who knows when I'll get to play one, but hopefully soon. But it could be a while yeah how's my mic chat is that better than hear me before yeah i boosted you up a little bit and give me a little boost yeah give yourself a little boost too turbo boost uh we had some questions about your let's go back to the uh before we proceed uh questions about the room you're in tonight can you tell us a little bit about that my vr room yeah it's very blue i told him it was a very twitch streamer of him to be in a blue room like that oh shit it does look legit I should turn my LEDs on too you're one upping me over there I'm at my stand up desk oh there you go you're doing the healthy thing you can't even see all the LEDs here I just put in more fans in my computer of LEDs I've got LEDs backlighting on my monitor I've got LEDs mouse pad LED keyboard LED headset holder because you need that you need it so that's been your pandemic project so far trying to keep sane yeah you get to have projects yeah projects keep me out of trouble so that's right all right so anything else on avengers what do you think gotta play it man i i don't know it's hard yeah i like the theme does nothing for me like i don't care about these marvel themes so um i don't care about avengers so if it's a fun game then and great fun game good rules who do the rules for this uh i think it was rick nagel again who's been on keith's other two games so i think keith designs the rule set and then rick implements them right i think that's the relationship yeah so they're really asking questions about the um that's all right he's got a monster pc now he's there's a lot of blue that's all i could say i I mean, I have control, so... Blue. Yeah, he's... Like the song. All right. Let's get back to it. Yeah. All right. Next up, it's Deep Root, ladies and gentlemen. Retro Atomic Zombie Adventure Land. So let me set the table here. We rewind like... You set the table, and then I'll clear it off. All right, sounds good. So rewind it about a year. Or not a year. Well, you could rewind it like three or four years. But rewind it about a month. Deep Root starts teasing that they're finally ready to reveal. They're ready to go. So they post a little teaser graphic on their website, and it's got an alien on there, and it's got some letters. And over the course of the next few weeks, they fill in the letters to be the date where everything's going to drop. Lives are going to change. Robert Mueller called out Jody Dankberg, saying thanks for inspiring us. all this stuff on their facebook page so they fly down or bring in i think they were mostly local folks um six folks six like quote-unquote pinball media people to come and see their big reveal can i just can i hit pause for a second oh yeah why why why fucking do that like they're just hemorrhaging money they have to be hemorrhaging money because they're they're behind behind schedule by like what is it a year and a half two years dude at least just putting games out yeah so they're hemorrhaging money and for the reveal they're like let's fly down six people yeah well i think maybe a local most i think uh most of them are local i think you know there's well i don't know they ended up being like it was like a column Colin MacAlpine was one of them he was local i'm not sure so i don't think they ended up spending as much bringing people in as they would they were planning on it like rudy was was going to be our in if the thing was at tpf in the spring he got he had approval he was going to go because he's planning on going to tpf he's going to get the scoop on deep root for us but covid waylaid all of that so um fast forward to you know a week or so ago they they're like okay everybody come in we're gonna we're gonna show you the game show you everything and then monday which was the 21st i think that was the day um here it is we're going to drop it all everybody's going to see it it's going to be the deep root you've been waiting for and we were so this week in pinball the morning of they said later in the day there's going to be an interview with deep root or it's going to be the big reveal and all that and then about midday that day they just put the brakes on they said we're not doing it so god how bad was it i I mean, how is there such a disconnect between they're announced that they're ready to go, and this is after they've had delays, right, on games. So they've delayed it at least. They were going to have it at, like, Texas Pinball, and then we're going to have another time. So they're at, like, delay two or three right now. Yeah. How bad are – like, the first time you mess up, okay. The second time you mess up, all right. The third time is the charm. Like, I just don't get it, man. Yeah. I don't get how they're just that bad. how the people come in from the reveal and they're like, dude, you can't release it. Is that what happened? That's pretty much it. So here's the message that they put on their website. They said, Deeper Pinball has spent years redesigning the pinball machine from the ground up with countless novel approaches. On this past Saturday, we had hoped to host a launch event with six well-known pinball personalities. Due to technical issues and lots of feedback from our guests, it ended up being more of a beta event. Whatever that means. um he got fucked yep uh we are grateful and thankful to lauren carrie colin jeff chris and crystal for their invaluable feedback and involvement in refining our platform to be the best it could be so they had to have outsiders come in and tell them that these games are not ready to show off is what it sounds like if you're a company and you're at that point where you're like all right we're ready to show our product and then it takes people coming in from the outside to tell you that this isn't ready for prime time there's there's some there's some problems there right there's a there's a culture problem right because there's pinball people who work in there yeah and you know Steven Bowden's not blind he knows what's going on right so i don't get it i mean this can't be the first time that they've heard there's problems there's all those problems that people from the outside had to come in and tell them right so it tells me there's a terrible culture there yeah but people are either not heard when they raise concerns or they're afraid to speak up and say anything. But that's what that tells me. That's what that tells me. If you have to have people from the outside come in and say something. All right. So the letter continues, the result is the realization that we are not as ready for launch as we had hoped. We are already working hard to fix the technical issues and implement our guests feedback. So they came in, the guests said there's technical issues. We have all this other feedback and now they're working to implement the things that the guests gave them. I guess. So the only right decision today is to postpone the public release of our platform. Our first game Raza retro atomic zombie adventure land. We hope that you agree that releasing a well-engineered and fun to play Raza is in everyone's best interest. So is that applying that it's currently not well-engineered or fun to play? It's kind of how I read that, but yeah. And this is Raza is a game that was, you know, J-POP swindled people out of their money on, or had the concept of like what almost 10 years ago now. Yep. Right. This is at least a seven-year-old concept game. So still not seeing the light of day. Yep. Jesus, dude. Started off as Ben Heck's Zombie Adventureland, right? I think so. Way back when. So the final paragraph, we hope to update you during this process. They hope to update us. They're not going to. They're hopeful that they can do it. We remain deeply committed to delivering the highest quality of gameplay and innovation to our players. We thank you for your continued trust and patience. The team at D-Room and all. So there you go. so the uh facebook comments was just like an avalanche of just shitting on them and you know this is all this is all their fault this is all their fault for coming out and being cocky we've we talked about this on the podcast from day one you know the guy's attitude of just shitting on all the other manufacturers saying you know things are easy blah blah blah and then still but three four years later still no game still delays still just complications it's a joke at this point like even if a year from now they release a game and the game's great that's great i mean i want to see a great game it still doesn't negate all of like these horrific missteps that he's made along the way because again you're hemorrhaging money you're when you're this far behind schedule a year year and a half you're just bleeding money i don't even understand how they're still paying people they're still in business it just makes no sense i don't know how many games they have to sell at this point just to dig themselves out of this hole yeah because they've been you know two or three years now they've been running this company and employing folks uh they have a whole arsenal of designers and rules people they have to build up a factory to just keep spending money spending money spending money without bringing in anything at all what is going on over there dude what is going on this is uh i would love to i think i said this to you in our chat like i would love to see a documentary on this like because it would be fascinating just to hear like this is the stuff that we're seeing as the public right oh my god like all the missteps what the hell's happening behind the scenes right like just what craziness is happening it's true he his he hasn't taken any money yet though but he did come out of the gate punching he was he was firing it on all cylinders pinball is easy for nobody can do it like the way we can we're gonna bring 200 innovations it was it's the bombastic nature of this guy that really painted him in a negative light to start with and then to say we're gonna have the five days of deep root there's gonna be all these machines we've got all these themes we're gonna launch with this big bang last year didn't happen came to this year covid happened okay yes that's out of everybody's control but clearly six months after covid they're still not ready to go so they wouldn't have been ready to go at tpf um so you can't blame that on covid and then here we are and they they do the and then like the four-week countdown to the reveal that wasn't ready to go and how many games were they supposed to release like concurrently i i want to say it was five like there was like five days of deeper last year was supposed to be all of these games at once and Now they barely have one working. So next step was, so later that day, a couple photos leaked, which was this photo of Raza, the cabinet. So they had pulled back and said, we're not going to show anything. And then a couple of pictures leaked, this one and that one. Are you showing it? Yeah, so you'll see it in a sec. Let's talk about this. So what's your first take on this? This is like one of those things where you see on the Sunday comics or the funny pages or whatever, you're like, what's wrong with this picture? Jesus, where do we begin? All right, the first thing that struck me was, please tell me I'm wrong. I'm just assuming based on the picture, so maybe this is wrong. Look at the sharp edges where you put your hand. Oh, yeah. This guy said to our friend with Thunderbirds, and he saw the little flipper, the sharp flippers. He's like, fucking hold my beer, bro. I got this. You know? Yeah. Look at the sharp edges. How do you rest your hand on it comfortably? After I saw these pictures, I walked up to any one of my other pinball machines, and I just put my hands on it. I was like, these are expertly designed lock bars. They fit my hand perfectly. Why would you change that? Why would you? Yeah, exactly. Why would you change it? Nobody has been complaining about the lockdown bar, like the edges on it. That's not a thing, right? There are things that might be able to address or fix or improve. Well, that's not one of them, and he took a step back. So, okay, great. Yeah, and the chat room's with you. Everybody said, you know, it looks sharp. You can get the stigma out of playing this. God, you fall down or something on that, you're done. Like, it's not in a bar. You know what you need? Poke an eye out. Those things for toddlers that you put on the edges of your coffee tables and stuff, the little bumpers. You need those for your pinball machine here. Dude, you can poke your eye out with that pinball machine, and that should be impossible. Put your eye out. All right, so beyond the pointy lock bar corners, anything else stand out here for you? I'm trying to make heads or tails of the backbox. Mm-hmm. I mean, it's hard to tell what's going on from this picture. I don't know. Maybe it looks better in person. I don't know if the backbox is horrible. Again, it's one of those things that's like you don't need to mess with it. You're just taking a big risk because the backbox is accepted. It's not something that pinball players are saying, you know, I'm not buying a pinball machine because I don't like back boxes as they are. So why mess with it? the only thing that you can do by messing with it is just risk somebody not like you okay so so there's that let me let me comment on the backbox so i like the backbox i think it's cool looking and if this machine was on location it would make it stand out from everything else but not in a negative way like i think of the highway backbox and how janky that looks compared to this this is like wow that's cool looking and it fits this theme like it's got this cool retro modern uh theme or style to it and i think that's like like that's all j-pop he's all design he's all like make everything look awesome so it fits this game would it fit other themes which we'll get into later like say a game maybe like called food truck or something why is uh why is it on stilts though you see why is it like separated it's a it's a style thing it's a design thing which in it's funny somebody brought up uh mr mrs pac-man or um uh centaur 2 you know those those have like the two-part back boxes like that and everybody like universally hates them so bring it back stuff people don't like yeah i mean it doesn't i don't think that i think it just looks far where you can kind of see through the back right it's not like one solid thing but that's really yeah it's really weird yeah i like it but you know different strokes for different folks right and the display is just that kind of thin dmd yeah it's like a super wide screen yeah with speakers on the sides and also speakers by your crotch down at the bottom did you notice those that's not that's not just art no so down on either side of the coin door uh there are speakers and my favorite what you want them there well here's why but so going back there's there's so many layers to this so the um after those pictures leaked the next day there's this massive dump of information on this week in pinball including descriptions of the machine more photos which i'll show you here in a second and those those speakers are designed to put you in the oral a-u-r-a-l envelope the oral envelope they call it it's you're just supposed to be wrapped up in sound that's not how it works there's a man who's got like nine speakers in his living room for like that's not how it works okay it's don't put it in your fucking crotch it's the oral emblem that is so dude it's also a good place for your kids to stuff their uh their cheesy crackers or something i don't know yeah you don't want to put that location yeah it's terrible idea okay so let's move on to some of the pictures that came out the next day so this is the pin bar so this they like to their all their innovations are pin something pretty much so this is the pin bar uh that's the apron screen pointy finger wrist uh palm thing that yeah let's see that so this is this shows a little bit more about what it is so it's a it's a heads up display it can also have um game integrated features so you can see on the right there by steve thumb it says ball save So you can integrate controls on it as well as on the left it says like 200 tickets. So it looks like it's got some pinball redemption kind of stuff going to maybe. So it's cool, but it's hard to say without playing it, how effective it would be. Cause you think about, think about something like the ball save on black night where you have to move your hand over to the middle and whack the bar. At least that's a tactile button, right? You kind of feel where you're going. When you're playing pinball and you're slap-saving and stuff, are you going to accidentally hit the ball-save button there, or are you going to hit something else by accident because you can't feel it while you're trying to watch the ball? I don't know. What do you think about the pin bar? I'm neutral on it, right? It's like, okay, well, here's the innovation. i didn't think i needed it but maybe once you have it and play with it you're like everything should be like this right like it's cool so i have i have honestly no idea i'd have to play it i can't get over the sharp edges though yeah like look at where like look at where steve's hands are it's like it's going right into that i i'm not sorry i'm having trouble moving past it's okay i have another photo of it here somewhere uh right there so this is uh you can do like stuff you would normally do inside the coin door on this little screen which is kind of cool i mean second hang on i can't not look at the flipper alignment on this game look at the flipper alignment can you see the flippers yeah so i imagine that's just you know it's messed up it's broken games aren't even functioning they spend more time on all this other garbage and they can even do the basic shit right right so you this is your big reveal you're gonna have people come out and play it you got cal mc alpine there who's a you know the former pinberg champion and the like what does that tell you you know as as pinball nerd podcast said in it like the pinbar could be the most interesting innovation but must add more cost than it's worth right like that's the other thing too like you're gonna do that just adding more cost is it worth it yeah anyways innovation for innovation's sake you know i mean it could sure like i like the idea of adding more control options into pinball it like we've seen with the uh with the the screen in the backbox you know now that we have this real estate on the screen we can do more complicated games because there's better ways to communicate with the player so this could be that in a different kind of kind of format uh a more interactive part portion you know maybe there's ways we can interact with the pinball machine that you weren't able to before so i'm definitely interested in that um yeah that's But, again, without playing it, without seeing it fully executed, it's hard to say. All right, so let's go back to the pictures. They're just nowhere near releasing this thing. The only thing that took me back was that all the innovations they talked about, everything in this big, huge article on this week in Pinball, it was all about everything except the actual game. It's like, we got this crate you can put it in, we got this screen, But, you know, tell me about what's on the play field. What are you going to do under the glass where I play the game of pinball that's going to be different? Where are you innovating there? It seems kind of like everything around the pinball machine is being innovated, but nothing new under the play field. That was the other thing. Ball search made me think of this. I think somebody in Discord mentioned, like, how many times have you seen tournament players punch the lock bar out of anger when they drain the ball? Like, goodbye, pin bar. see ya not you should not that you should be doing that but it happens all right so there there's the i'll show you here i'll give you a second to catch up the uh the screen the dmd display area underneath the the backbox it's cool looking um it looks like nice and high resolution and i kind of like how they've segmented out the different portions of it um i wonder if it's because like sometimes on the stern screens things can be a little small and hard to see. I wonder if that would play out here. But I think you've got more real estate. I don't know. It's hard to tell without standing in front of a machine and seeing it. Yeah, one of those things. It does seem like the text. You would see Player 1. It just seems really small. And this is like, consider where this picture is taken from. You're right up in front of it. So, I don't know, man. Looks like a good resolution. but uh i think i think stern has it like the minimum size now for what they're trying to do and then you know jersey jack is ideal yeah the other side of it um so let's see here so oh i don't have the i must have deleted that picture i had to take some pictures out of here so uh one of the pictures they showed off was the uh um the fold up glass and everybody was like oh my god that's an amazing innovation so i went and i found the earliest game i could find which is Bally's Wiggler from 1967 that also has this feature. So there you go. Innovation from 1967. They're bringing it back. Boom. Boom. Again, something no one's asked for. Yeah. Like for that one guy who asked for this. There you go, dude. You got it. Nick, you made a good point that no way would the way theirs props up, it goes almost perfectly vertical. So that would never work in your basement. Yeah. I mean, from what I can tell, right, just looking at the picture, I couldn't have that game in my house because I can't raise the glass fully up. Assuming I need to raise it fully up, but that's how it works. Yeah, I wouldn't be able to go up like it's supposed to. So, again, this is not something that anybody's asked for. It's not an issue I've ever had with the glass and the way the glass works. People are saying it's heavier doing it this way. I don't know how you replace the glass. Like if the glass breaks or something I don't know, it just doesn't seem like This needed to happen, I don't know I just don't understand Why they're making these decisions Alright, so this brings us to the hammer test This is another thing They bragged about before The reveal, the quote unquote reveal They put out that you could get your Hammer tested shirt And they've boasted that every play field That they're going to release is going to be tested with a hammer To make sure you're not going to get any dimples so I wanted to go to the article on This Week in Pinball about this because they had some insight on this so here we go let's see the tour group observed the demonstrations with the 16 ounce hammer test and the huge 750 gram pinball drop and those along with the regular pinball definitely left craters or dents on the normal clear coat and did not leave dents or craters on the pin armor So their innovation is called pin armor. However, the VIP group had concerns regarding the quality and look of the pin armor coating, as it is currently not smooth, but more like an orange peel. Robert mentioned that this was an early version of the pin armor. When you run your hand over the playfield, it does not feel smooth like glass. During brief gameplay later in the evening on a playfield with pin armor, the ball did seem to roll normally and act as if it would on a normal playfield. there was no noticeable unusual changes in ball activity on pin armor so i don't know man they came up with some really strong clear coat that makes it look like an orange peel i just what it sounds like but it's not still not ready to go apparently yeah i mean i this is a thing that i want companies to address um dimples don't bother me believe it or not like which is amazing, I'm going to say. Yeah, I know. Maybe I've just always accepted it since day one because my first game I ever had had dimples, and like, okay, that's pinball. But yeah, it's cool. I mean, listen, if you can make a thing that doesn't dimple and doesn't increase the cost by any significant amount, then great, great, I'm all for that. I'm all for something that's going to protect the play field and have it looking as good as pretty much the day you got it, if you can pull that off. Absolutely. Yeah, pre-hammered play field. Isn't an orange field already dimpled? Pretty much, pretty much. They're just taking that step out of the process for the owner. But, again, it's like in this thing they put out the next day, they're saying, well, it's not ready yet. But over the weekend they were going to have everybody in for the big reveal when it was apparently they thought it was ready. They're not even close. They're not even close to having these games done. I don't even understand how a year and a half ago they thought they were going to have something. It just makes no sense. yeah not even close we talked about haggis they they've already done this they did the hat they did the big video with the hammer test we talked about it on the stream um but they did it with a different solution they did like a clear plastic um sheet over top of the the play field um something like that is i think bally or somebody did that before i don't know it's something that had been done before they brought it back probably improved on it i assume but i haven't played it or seen it person but yeah everybody's kind of working on this well there's a few folks working on this um this problem trying to bring a solution to it all right back to the back to the pictures that was so here's another one and i was like oh that's cool uh so on the bottom of the play field they actually have it drawn out where the parts go and they have things numbered and labeled so that's cool like if you if you're fixing stuff or you're doing a play field swap you can easily see where everything goes um easily line things up but again here this is the bottom of a stargate gottlieb was already doing this so again it's another innovation that's they're just kind of bringing it back they're not they're not bringing something new to the table with some of this stuff um stuff like the pin bar totally new totally interesting um yeah but you know new folks who might not be as familiar with the history of pinball you know would see that and go oh that's cool, it's not my Stern or my JGP or whatever, but yeah, not necessarily an innovation for, and again, it's like, everything doesn't have to be an innovation, but this company was touting they're going to have 200 innovations and we're going to sell this platform and all this stuff over the past three years. So they're like set themselves up, set themselves up for this unrealistic level of expectation. Exactly. Here's an innovation. I'll give them that. It's the Deep Root Pin Pod. Did you see this when you were – did you look through the article and see this? Yeah, Gottlieb used to do that shit, I thought. The big crate? Oh, I haven't seen that. You were on the other thing. Yeah, no, no, no. So this is a giant wooden crate, reusable crate to ship pinball machines. So the idea is you would buy a pinball machine, keep this somewhere, and then when you're ready to sell your machine, you could use it to ship it out again. You don't need to do that. You just wrap it. But I guess if you're shipping it, like, God, how heavy does that make the thing to ship it now? It's got to increase the shipping cost considerably. I know. Well, yeah. No kidding. How much heavier does it make it? But also. That thing itself has to be like 100 pounds. Where the hell do you put it? Yeah. Where the hell do you put it? Yeah, exactly. Oh, my God. This is amazing, dude. This is really. I don't know. Nick, you're going to have to move the Miata out of the garage because you have a pin pod now. It's got to go in the garage. It folds up. Maybe you can park the Miata in the pin pod. The fucking over-engineered shipping box. It folds up. Okay, yeah, it folds up, but how big is it when it folds up? It's still huge. Dude, I'm confused. I'm just really confused. And heavy. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Going good, going good. I'm solving a problem. How many people would actually use this? I think Kyle Bossa in Discord mentioned this. He's like a packaging engineer. This is his job. So I was like, I need your impressions of this. And he goes, it's solving a problem for like 2% of the pinball market. This is the weirdest thing that this company is doing. They're solving problems that aren't real problems. Right. And I think you're seeing that over and over. Yeah. Yeah, it's this weird, I don't know, it's this weird personality in play that is laughable at this point. It's just, sorry. Like, we're making these decisions. This needs to stop. Here's the deal. Here's my philosophy. Get a base hit. Fucking make a pinball machine, ship it, and then over time you can start playing around with some of these changes. Like, don't put 200 new inventions in your first pinball machine ever. What that means is, like, these innovations are things that are untested, right? So you might fail. There might be a good reason why other companies aren't doing this, right? So just make a pinball machine, get it working, then start tweaking it. Then start maybe getting a little better or experimenting. But this is a recipe for disaster, what they're doing. And, again, things that people haven't asked for. Yeah, and it just seems like they can't focus. They're just going on, we're going to add this in. We want to do this. They have the big, like, moonshot vision, but nobody there to kind of rein it in and say, these are going to be the specs for our first pinball machine, and we're going to ship it by this date. and then in the next one we're going to introduce this we're going to add this on you know they need to kind of roll these things out along the way um and the other thing that was weird was and you know they just did this massive dump of information including like their next like eight titles or more why would you reveal all of this this is like the the lifeblood of pinball right when a new game comes out we start speculating about what's next what's the next game from sir what's from jersey jag when are they going to announce it we think it's this but we don't know for sure uh but here it's like okay we know everything that's going coming there goes your opportunity to kind of get everybody excited for the next game because we all know what's coming if it ever comes yeah i'll be honest i don't know how they're just bankrolling this fucking bastard i i don't understand it i don't know there's enough kevin there you go that's all you gotta say yeah i don't know there's more to deep root than pinball that i know there's more there's another company there i don't know the ins and outs of it um so i don't know maybe they're selling drugs maybe there's drugs i don't know probably not all right so that company shell company um so that's um all i have for photos but i do want to talk about so let's talk about the titles they announced the future planned titles all right are you ready for listening Probably not. All right, so the first one is Fire and Brimstone. Let me read you the concept. Relive the Old Testament alongside the prophets of ancient times. Build up faith or suffer the fire and brimstone of the wrath of God. A key feature, first multi-denominational religious pinball game designed by... That's a feature. Something no one's asked for. Again, put it in the column. We have to have a column. Things that nobody's asked for. Deeper's got Monopoly on it. This guy's like, maybe this guy's like just the fucking, like, he's just got all the money in the world. He's like, I'm going to troll these pinball people because he's nailing it. And what kind of struck me on this is that Robert Mueller is the primary designer on this machine. So not only is he running this company, apparently he's designing pinball machines. you think that's the motivation behind this is like i'm gonna start a promote company so i can make my own games i mean i can't wait to see this game be honest this is what i'm hype about can we get the reveal stream of that please yeah please all right not to be outdone by fire and brimstone it's food truck food truck primary designer do you have any pictures over this or i did i had to i had to pull them out because i the slide only lets you put so many pictures in there so oh man kevin um i'll put the link in chat and then you can you can see it if you can pull it up online though right oh yeah i can actually let me um let me go to the website yeah it's it's oh it's been all adventures um let me see uh if i go over here and then bear with us folks you guys need to see this uh here we go bam okay here's food truck so um primary designer Barry Oursler uh get your orders filled quickly and accurately to keep your social media reviews up for maximum scores watch out your competitor the roach coach will try to steal your customers and look for any opportunity to post bad reviews and sabotage your business features some cool toys and max along with a fast-paced visual ordering Thank you. Features are cool toys. Some cool toys. Some cool toys. Fuck. Come on. He's trolling. He's trolling, dude. Some cool toys. He's got some cool toys. Look at the artwork. They did this in like an afternoon. Well, wait until you see more. We can go back up and shoot Fire and Burnstone. Oh, yeah, yeah. Don't deprive me of that. It's looking good, right? When did he drop these bombs? This was all on that day after those two pictures leaked in this massive... I thought he was getting awesome licensed games. Well, there's one licensed hint in here. Food truck, stay tuned for it. Next up, Merlin's Arcade. Primary designer Jon Norris. Jon Norris finally coming back to pinball. Concept, medieval arcade Olympics set in the 80s. Train with Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table. Battle Morgan Le Fay to regain the holy poppin' grail. Features based on 8-Ball Deluxe with flow and precision around new mechs. unique gameplay HUD. So this is, so it's like, uh, Jon Norris did bad girls, right? So he's going back to bad girls. Yeah. Cause there's not enough games around that design. Yeah. So, I mean, it's great. We like that layout, but here we go again. Here we go again with, with the medieval madness 2.0 theme, basically. So take a bad girls, medieval madness, smash them up. You got Merlin's arcade. All right. Next up, 200 innovations on a pinball machine and in glass, that's too high to raise. if you have a low basement, get fucked. And you can only play it for five minutes before your palms hurt. All right. That's right. The Who, the band that made the song that all the pinball people don't like. Let's do a game about them. Primary designer Barry Osler. Concept. Take the legendary band The Who on an amazing journey in search of the pinball wizard. Features. Some unique mechs. And special effects round out this musical spectacle. Some unique mechs. They need to hire a marketing writer. They need to hire marketing people And communications people Four years ago Dude remember when Deep Root This is like Two or three years ago When they were a sponsor of what was it Pinberg That was years ago They were spending marketing dollars to sponsor When they still didn't even have a game out I know Tell me how that makes sense Yeah they've been like year long sponsors of Papa for a few years now What's the point That's just money this is something to laugh at now okay i mean it's good for the replay foundation so i'm glad they're getting yeah well listen i'm not that's not the point i'm looking at from the marketing perspective like their marketing decisions just could not be any worse yep all right okay we got a long way to go here they announced a lot of titles here so we got to keep moving let's take a deep breath ready gladiator more by at least four or five more all right gladiator primary designer, Barry Osler. Concept, play as Septimus, a captured slave who must rise the ranks of the gladiators of Rome. Hone your skills, kill the senators, and overthrow the emperor who killed your family and enslaved you. Features, based on 3D Space Cadet layout. Oh my god. First virtual table converted to a physical layout. Subways galore. Have you ever gone back and looked at the layout of Space Cadet? So Space Cadet is the one that was on when it was 98 that everybody played when you were supposed to be doing your homework or working. You were flipping around on Space Cadet. That layout is weird. And to actually get that to work, it's got these mini pop bumpers and things like that. Man. Oops. Rudy Soup, what are you doing? I hit the wrong button and Rudy Soup came up. Yeah, so bringing 3D Space Cadet to a real pinball machine, it's going to be a challenge. It's got disaster written all over it, if you ask me. This reads like a child's homework assignment where they had to come up with and the missionary company. This is by Game Time Television. Nailed it, dude. You win. You win right now. We love you. The chat's having a field day, too. This is great. This is good for everybody. I said that following this couple days of Deep Root. If it did one thing, it brought the pinball community together. You know, we all kind of jumped in on this and really enjoyed this together. So hats off to you, Deep Root. You did it. Yeah, yeah. I don't know how – I hope you're holding up over there, Steven Bowden, because we love you, but my God. I don't know. Listen, Steve, here's a pro tip. Start writing a book now. Yes, seriously. Because when this place goes under, I'd pay to read the book. Hell yeah. All right, we're not done yet. Yukon Yeti TM, it's trademarked. Designers Robert Mueller and Dennis Nordman. So think Whitewater 2.0. That's what it makes me think about. A goofy and lighthearted game, exclamation point. They almost got the color into the art. They almost did. The mischievous and lovable teenage Yukon Yeti feuds with the gold miners against the backdrop of late 1890s Yukon Gold Rush. Features who doesn't want a sequel to Whitewater? Oh, it says it right there. New mechs and the great multi-level flow you expect from the original. Yeah, and so basically they have some concept art for this game and they're announcing it as one of their future themes. Okay. But sign me up. I mean, I love Whitewater. That'd be awesome. Yeah. Machine Age. you're gonna like this one Dennis Nordman the designer concept you are dropped into a battle spanning ages of beings and time itself help two diesel punk heroes take on the world's greatest threat in this dystopian thriller with the help of a mystery ally features open layout with three first ever max stunning video game quality animations are you ready to take the diesel punk heroes on the world's greatest threat help them take on the group this is like uh dude this is what they call shovelware they just fucking dump a bunch of garbage products out there shoveling it out yeah perfect so everybody who uh inevitably so every time a new uh pinball machine gets announced and it's something like avengers or pirates or whatever everybody's like oh god i'd wish they'd stop with these movie or tv show themes why are they doing stranger things they should do original themes like they did in the 90s well here you go that's that's that's what you got coming to you here's all your original themes line them up so in that sense he is listening to the pinball community or right so in that sense he is i guess yeah i mean right but people have asked for that i gave him shit for doing things that people didn't ask for people have asked for that so you're right kevin here you go so but people pinball people say they want original themes but when they come out they don't buy them because it's not the right original theme That's correct. Oh, here's dialed in. Oh, but it's about a phone. I don't want that game. Gary Stern known that for well over 20 years. Yeah. At least. He knows something. He knows something about it. It's like he's been in the pinball industry the whole life, and he might have an idea of what actually sells. Yep. All right. Maybe. Where's our website? Here we go. Title TBD. Why would you announce this? What's that about? Why would you announce this now? Primary designer, Ausler. Concepts. Space pirates keep order in the cosmos by causing nightmares for the villainous trade syndicates. Progress from the grunt to captain in this cosmic keep-what-you-steal epic. Features a revisioning of the classic black hole with a groundbreaking mech that redefines a multi-level playfield. It's weird that they keep saying, like, we're just updating this old game. You know what's weird, too, is, like, when I heard about Deep Root and what they're bragging about, how awesome they are i thought we were going to get like jersey jack level pinball machines but they're just making like pinball machines that would have come out during the 80s pretty much these basic kind of games right like not sophisticated these flat games but it's i don't know it's saying they're taking the basic layout of that but then like adding all these cool stuff okay it's gonna make it even better stuff yeah cool stuff but like if you when you cool stuff when you tell people like oh this is eight ball delight or eight yeah eight ball deluxe or Black Hole, that's what you think. You're like, oh, it's going to be an update of this. Yeah, exactly. I mean, like, so Sharky's Shootout was 8-Ball Deluxe. Stern did that 20 years ago. Right. So now somebody's going to do that again. Whatever. We'll see. We probably won't see because he's never going to see the fucking letter D. We probably won't see. That's true. But we can only speculate. All right. Website. All right. Going down. Magic Girl. We've seen this before. um so again this goes back to John Papadiuk and his zidware days when they actually made some of these that didn't really do anything but they exist but now they're going to finish it i guess so the primary designer John Papadiuk he says in this post-medieval age potions alchemy and new magics constantly shift the balance of power between good and evil against this backdrop of mystery and intrigue five heroes embark on a quest to search out the ultimate secret the elixir of immortality Features continuous play in an immersive C world I don't know what that means. With hundreds of plays to win. You don't know what C-Y-O-A means, Kevin? Who knows that? Oh, choose your own adventure. Okay, I knew chat room would be on it. Choose your own adventure world. Why would, again, when you have acronyms like those, here's a writing process. Kevin's getting upset. Spell it out on first reference. Nobody knows what the acronyms mean. If you use it again and you put it in parentheses after you spell it out, then you call it C-Y-O-A. That's getting upset. Otherwise, it stands for cover your own ass, I think is what it stands for. That's right. Floating balls, too. Okay, there you go. So that sounds like a cool concept. The art was awesome on the original one. Maybe someday it'll exist. This is fun. Here you go. This is fun. I knew you'd like the show tonight. How much more have we got to go? We're almost to the end of Deep Root. But we got Puny Factory ahead of us, everybody. We should have an intermission when you go to a movie theater. So here's the one people are excited about. Hey, you guys, 2021. It's got to be the Goonies, right? The Goonies. Were you a Goonies fan, Nick? No. No. I didn't have a childhood. That's not going to do it for you. I like the Goonies. It was fun. It's not my cup of tea. I would play a Goonies. I don't know that I would rush out and buy a new pinball machine from an unproven company based on an awesome theme. Lebowski. Well, I mean, at least, look, theme sells. Yeah. You know, like, that's the thing. That's the thing about pinball. You see a theme, people will just hit order. Right. So, no one's going to hit order on any of these, like, made-up themes until they – the game's got to be amazing. Yeah, I've seen that too. They're like, well, if they make Goonies, I'm buying it. So that's the power of a theme, right? So it's smart that they have one of these. It's weird that they would tease it already, especially with 19 other games or however many we just read through waiting ahead of it or in theory. Everybody know that this says 2021 on it, okay? So we're getting Goonies next year, guaranteed, because it says it right here on this slide. All right? So when 2022 comes and we have no Goonies or whatever Hey You Guys is, we'll all remember that. All right, so other titles in development. If that wasn't enough, they throw a couple more out at you. Alice, which is, I'm sure, Alice in Wonderland, because that was one of the J-pop games. A combative racing license. Multiplex. What the fuck is that? Exactly. A popular board game license. Maybe they're going to remake Monopoly. and 80s movie license which we assume is hey you guys which we assume is goonie so ladies and gentlemen that is deep root that is your big reveal more more talk more talk from deep root nothing but talk a bunch of chatter more more talk oh my god more talk uh they showed you the game they they already showed you back at the houston arcade expo six months ago except with more stuff on it. It has a pin bar and a different backbox. Yeah. Heard almost nothing about... It's still not working. Still not working. As far as I can tell, the game under the play field hasn't changed. This company still can't produce a game that can be sold and played. Yep. After three, four years. Still can't even get one game out the door. And they're talking about making like ten games. That's all you need to say. If somebody off the street was like, tell me about Deep Root. You can sum that up in ten seconds. There you go. Does it all. All right, kids, who's ready? Who's ready for Puny Factory? So as if that wasn't enough, coming up, what was this? This is September 25th, which was three days ago. We got a guest post on This Week in Pinball from Pinball Adventures, the makers of a machine we've been talking about since day one. It's Puny Factory, kids. Let's get to it. There it is. So we saw some pictures of this, I think, around December of last year. When they finally showed off the play field, it didn't have all of the colorful paint on the punny truck thing there and the barrels on the right. So let's go through this. So, Punny Factory updates. There's a lot here, so let's take this all in. It says, COVID-19 slowed down some of our contractors, but we are happy to report they are back to work in full swing. And so are we. Pinball Adventures has now finished the first, second, and third phase of our research, development, and build process. When available, the Punny Factory will be retailing for $5,500, which, okay, that's reasonable. It's actually lower than most of the other brand-new pinball machines. And will be limited to 112 units. 12 of those units. That's smart. It didn't work for Mafia, but they could try. Limit the supply, try to drive up demand. maybe it'll work this time um so 12 of the 112 will have an engraved punny factory logo complemented with black wood stain finish on the cabinet and backbox and an extra added cost of 500 us dollars so those will be six thousand dollars all the playfields will be identical as an extra bonus this this was like you're gonna love this um we'll be drawing one owner's name for every 25 punny factory pinball machine sold for the entire run the lucky winner will receive cash back of $2,500. Oh, yeah. Just a way for pinball adventures to have fun and say thanks. The draw will be recorded on our YouTube channel with a picture of the winner beside their pinball machine. So, I'm just like, how can you afford to give back half of what you're making on Yeah, why even do that? Like, four pinball machines? Yeah. You don't need to do that. Yeah. That's all I gotta say. You don't, there's no no point okay it's not 25 credit to apply to their next spin it says $2,500 cash back US dollars um yeah so phase one the Hyattwood cabinets full let's let's talk about this um let's go back here so there's the cabinet um only one model of the playfield a limited amount 12 will have the different cabinets this is what we're looking at is the full color cabinet not the 12 special cabinets. The, I like this. It said, they talk about the type of wood that they use for the cabinets. Remaining 100 units will offer direct art that will be sealed onto a hard, thick Russian Baltic birch and then clear coated twice with sanding in between and then sealed. Think butter cabinet. So I'm sure it'll look great. If you want Russian Baltic birch in your cabinet, here you go. You're finally getting it on Punny Factory. not only that are you're getting full interior graphics for some reason so again again this is the theme things things that nobody's asked for in pinball here it comes so guys are solving problems that don't exist yeah i get art blades right you see those when you play it makes the play field look cooler and more immersive um do you need crates in the inside sides of your cabinet or a punny factory manhole or whatever that is on the bottom of the cabinet. You don't. You're never going to see it. You're going to look in your cabinet once every year or so when you need to go in there. It's dark in there too. Yeah, fucking put LEDs in there so you can see that shit. Like, oh cool, they put art down here. Neat, okay. Alright. Again, all clear-coated twice with standing in between and then sealed. Again, you do not don't spend your time doing this. It's extra added cost and time and effort and something that is of minimal return. Sorry. Well, you want to preserve the Puny Factory for eternity. Right, exactly. You want to pass it down to your great, great, great, great, great grandkids. They have custom metal trim with unique powder coating. Yes, some pinball like to get their custom side rails powder coated or painted by their local shop at Pinball Adventures. We do this for you. Our first machine, we have chosen a vibrant silver vein powder coating color to accent the new Puny Factory's metal and gears. Add in the Pinball Adventure's own newly designed apron, hinges, side rails, lockdown bar, and legs. You get one color-coordinated game. Let's not forget the matching coin door, shooter rod, and bolts. So the coin door doesn't match the armor. That's a little deceptive, misleading. um that so the armor is actually like a silver color and then the legs and the coin door are black unless they're saying it's not gonna look like this but right now that's what it looks like in the pictures they're posting so um and the the silver powder coating just looks like stainless steel armor to me it doesn't look fancy at all when people get powder coating they want colors that pop stuff to make it stand out this looks like standard belly williams um side armor with the side they have some cool cutouts like it's got a little cool design it says 252 on the side which i assume is a integrated theme number for some reason so and the the gear on the shooter rod is kind of cool so there's that oh and then that's it we for the uh phase three unique playfield and wood coatings they have a chart of all right let's i gotta show this off Sorry. Let's analyze the strength of the wood that is in the playfields. Living in Canada, we are blessed with an abundance of natural resources. One of the resources is Canadian hard maple, also known as rock maple or sugar maple. Yes, this is the same tree that is tapped to get our maple syrup. I mean, just look at this thing. You can see the janky hardness of maple species. Pinball Adventures has decided after months of... No one gives a shit. No one gives a shit. Months of testing that the best wood playfield we can manufacture would be from our very own hard Canadian maple, known for its combination of strength and durability. If that's what you're talking about on your pinball machine, you've got nothing. Like, if that's like, we're like, ugh, what's the high points? Talk about the wood. Puny Factory, you're really doing it. You really did it. All right, so that's Puny Factory. Is there anything else here we need to cover? Let's see. Final phases. Here's the play field with the stuff and the things. Written by Andrew McBean, Pinball Adventures. So you can follow him on Instagram if you want to see the progress. Tio Bennett with the Canada Ace in chat. Thank you, sir. All right. That brings us to the end of our Pinball Adventures adventure. But we're far from over. There's more news. Lots more news. So let's switch back to our photos. and we're going to go into ranger in the ruins i've been doing some stuff maybe sort of newsworthy stuff so um i actually worked with Nicholas Baldridge the creator of ranger in the ruins um he needed a play tester and i said i can play test because i have a p3 and uh the cosmic art racing play field i can help you do that and nick man he's a madman so let me let me rewind a little bit ranger in the ruins new game for the p3 platform p3 platform we've talked about it uh it's a pinball machine real pinball with cool you want to talk innovations here's a pinball machine with a lot of innovations in it it's got a screen under the main part of the play field walls and scoops that pop up interchangeable uh ramps and shots on the back cool stuff so it exists kevin it exists you could buy it you've got in your house imagine that they brought it to market they innovated they brought a product to market and you can purchase it and then they talked about all the innovations that they've been doing and they've been adding new products so um this game so you would buy the cosmic kart racing play field which is a game uh where you can you know it's it's like think mario kart but in pinball form uh so once you have that play field you can go to the multimorphic store and buy this game you can get a whole add-on game for your your pinball machine turn your pinball machine into a whole different rule set everything graphics sounds lights shows everything 150 bucks which in the world of pinball is a freaking steal because you pay a thousand dollars for a stern topper uh you pay however much for the pinball you feel like the pinball pinballs you buy every year probably cost 150 bucks um this game's cool so it's a roguelike experience in pinball form where um so we start up the game it's a one ball game by default you get one shot to get as far as you can um you're along the way you're collecting items that do things to gameplay they either boost scoring work towards multi balls uh one of the one of the options shows you the effects of the other uh items that you pick up along the way because otherwise you're kind of figuring it out as you go um uh the scoring is pretty straightforward it's got the arrows all over the play field that show you what the shots are worth um so it's a it's a score rush game you're trying to score as much as you can on one ball collect items along the way it's kind of the ultimate mashup of old school pinball with the next level of technology and i i really like it i really like what nick has done here it goes to show that's the that's the thing about p3 that excites me the most is it's just like new content new cool stuff it It allows people like Nick to say, I don't have to go full deep root and create a whole company to build pinball machines. I can just go and build off of this platform. I can program on it using their software development kit and bring a game to life. It took him like 76 days or something like that to go from start to finish on this game, which I could barely, as a tester, I could barely keep up. he would have updates for me after, uh, about, uh, after like the next day he would have a whole nother build. Um, Oh, Stephen Silver says, talk about the ghosts. I am going to talk about the ghosts. There's a question in the, um, in the Q and a that I will get to that, but, um, to touch on it quickly. Um, so the items you collect are left behind by ghosts of other players. So, um, you talk about connectivity and pinball. A lot of people think high scoreboards. They think head-to-head play. Here's a really creative way to implement internet connectivity in pinball. So the items that you collect are left behind by the ghosts of other players. When you die, the items you have go out to the server, and they get fed into other people's games. So the way you play will impact somebody else down the line. Really, really neat stuff. Really creative things. Interesting ways to bring internet connectivity to pinball. I have no doubt that we're going to see more of that coming from Nick and the P3 folks. Along those lines, I don't think I was able to get this photo in there. I was not. So talking about connectivity and multimorphic games, another cool thing that we did was we debuted Twitch Connect, which again on the cosmic kart racing play field that's a game that they recently added the uh online play to so you can play head to head but now uh there's twitch integration so players in the chat can play along with the people actually playing the game so the things you do in chat will impact the gameplay so for example i'm playing and somebody drops 100 bits and they say blackout it blacks out the entire game so i don't know what the shots i'm supposed to hit or anything i can't see anything on the screen all the lights go out really cool um effect on the game and i say really cool because it was my idea so um that was one of the things another thing was reverse flippers so that was another bit uh related one they're also a series of non-bit related um effects you could have on the game so you just by entering commands and chat you could play power up so part of cosmic heart racing is there's power-ups in the game like mario kart where you can get a speed boost you can get a shield you can uh you can put up blocks in the game which is kind of cool so the the walls i can pop back to this so you can see where that purple line is across the play field that's a wall that'll come up there's scoops and then walls in front of those so uh in cosmic heart racing one of the one of the items you can collect is a um is a well actually one of the items you can collect is a block you can play on the other players. So the chat room can play those on you. So they can mess with you. They can play blocks on you. They can help you by doing the shields or the boosts, things like that. So it was really cool, a fun way. We had a three-way stream going. It was me, Jerry, and GammaGoat, Ian Ian Harrower. And the different chat rooms were all playing for us and against us. I was in there rooting people on. I was cursing them out when they were playing blocks on me and blacking me out. So it was really cool. Another interesting way to bring Internet connectivity into Pinball, but also be a benefit for streamers, too, because this boosted chat interaction. It gave our viewers something interesting and unique to do. So if you're looking to kind of differentiate a little bit as a streamer, this is a cool way to do it, too. This is the only place you're going to be able to do this. So that is Twitch Connect. So cool. Looking forward to doing more of that. We'll have more of that coming up on the channel as well. So follow us on Twitch if you haven't. Twitch.tv slash Buffalo Pinball for all that hot action. All right. So I don't think I got any pictures of this in either. We can jump over to here. And we can talk about Jersey Jack has teased some big stuff coming in October. Their first update said their next chart-topping hit is coming this October. and then just last week there was a big group photo of everybody. They're all masked up, but they said they're working hard to make our October a memorable one. So there's some cool stuff coming from Jersey Jack. Stay on the lookout for that, and we can't wait to see what's coming from those guys. We always look forward to their games. Unabashedly, they're my favorite games. We're the Jersey Eye Shills. You can look at our podcast comments and see that. another thing that happened was the stern hdmi adapter which is an interesting thing and i couldn't get this picture right side up so i apologize so it's sideways but turn your head if you're watching and uh i put a penny there so you can see how small it is so this is a capture card that allows you to grab the signal off of the spike to board and feed it out to an external source so if you're streaming you can get a direct feed of the display instead of pointing a camera at it you can uh put it on an external monitor if you wanted to show it in a bar or whatever throw it up on your tv you wanted to make the display bigger um and so this is uh this had gone up on the flipping out pinball website zach manning posted about it and he put a little video up and i was like i grabbed two of them they were 39 each i think plus shipping and i was like because i was like hell for the price of that so the i had already had a capture solution to to grab these things um to grab the signal off of my jurassic park using a series of parts the order from china through aliexpress and i wrote up a guide on how to do it because it's kind of convoluted and the the pieces and parts you had to get were very specific in particular so i put a step-by-step guide how to do it um and that was a great great uh kind of workaround to grab this signal so the the problem if you're not familiar with it and this is kind of some some behind the scenes in-depth twitch streamer stuff but if you want to grab the signal off of a screen in a in a stern game you have to have the an adapter so it's not a straight hdmi or dvi or standard connection it's this lvds signal which i guess is pretty common in laptop computers but um so you need something to convert that lvds signal into something you can get into your capture card and this is a quick little solution to get that done so it's it all ended up being like in the ballpark of of ordering all this stuff from aliexpress and piecing together it from from china and so i was like hey for the convenience of just being able to plug this in plug in a an hdmi uh card let me grab a couple and i'll i'll have them around if i end up getting another stern game with a lcd screen we can do it so this got quickly pulled from the flipping out store so unfortunately they're not available anymore I did do a write up on it I didn't do a write up I did a video on it on our YouTube channel if you want to see it how it installs and also how it looks once you get it set up I will recommend it it's a great card for the price $39 hopefully there's been talk that the price is going to go up hopefully that's not the case but if you're looking for a capture solution this is a great way to go if it ends up being more expensive and you need a bunch of them for a bunch of your games and you want to do it on the cheap, you can do the other way, the AliExpress China way. But the other downside of doing the AliExpress orders is that it takes a long time for the parts to get here. It took like a month or two almost for me to get my parts the one time. So it takes a while. So, yeah, there you go. That was that. So if you want to check out more of that, check it out on our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Buffalo Pinball, and you can see how it all works and how it fits there. All right. uh here's the thing i was not involved in it's the scorebit launch um nick have you heard anything about scorebit i have not okay so scorebit has been kind of lingering out there in the tournament scene for a while um i think at indisc it never drains in southern california it made its debut as a way to get a direct feed of scores off of games so not necessarily capturing the whole display just grabbing the number data and pull it in into a stream um so scorbit officially launched uh it's pricing is a little hard to to kind of wrap your mind around it but it it it makes sense so if you buy one it's three hundred dollars for the scorbitron which is the board that you put in your pinball machine but then on top of that there's a monthly fee of four dollars a month so not only do you have to buy the board you have to pay a monthly fee to kind of get this keep the service going if you have multiple machines there's discounts i think starting at four units and then up 26 plus units you can get them for 199 each and it's a 20 total fee monthly to keep them going so for me it kind of remains to be seen the benefit of doing this um beyond tournament streaming like i can't figure out why i would want to have this in my machine at home Maybe I just haven't been exposed to the right things. The light bulb moment hasn't gone off, but I think internet connecting machines is cool. What can you do beyond scores that will make it cool for a home buyer? Or is it worth, you know, pinball streaming tournaments? There's like, there's no money to be made there to begin with, right? so you're going to add additional cost onto machines that you're trying to stream for a better end product yes but is the return on your investment going to be there it's going to be that's going to be a tough sell to me it's also a tough time to put this out with locations closed there's no literally no tournaments happening um so it just seems like uh a heart i mean you had to you had to launch eventually maybe maybe it'll come out and like a year from now it'll really take off and um the benefits will be there and more obvious to everybody but if you want to check it out uh check out scorebit uh and you can maybe um tell me why it's awesome and why i should have it okay let's go to the next item which is fun with bonus i don't know if you heard about this so they're actually um pivoting Steven Bowden is pivoting fun with bonus uh after 300 3,005 consecutive days of posting pinball content. So from July 1st, 2012 to September 21st, 2020, a total of 3,005 consecutive days I've been posting about the pinball scene. That has ended for now. However, the site is not closing. It's undergoing a transition. Since I am rules designer for Deep Root Pinball, I am biased in certain aspects. I'll be rightly called that by others as I continue my career in pinball development for this company. To address this, I've decided to make fun of bonus.com, mainly a DeepRoot-focused online presence while adding my perspective as rules designer. Although the site will be more focused on DeepRoot, it will not be DeepRoot only. I will continue to bring attention to other happenings in the pinball scene as I have done before. However, my posts will no longer happen every day. My goal is to produce better content moving forward. Some of the sections will be brought over to the new style. For example, I plan for the new pinball dictionary to remain and devote more time to expand it with more entries. Other sections may be retained as well. the site is now in a maintenance mode as i transition thank you for the motivation over these past eight plus years i hope you continue to check out fun with bonus.com when it changes over to that new format and he encourages folks to check out this weekend pinball in the meantime for their pinball news which so i just wanted to give a a literal and figurative tip of the cap to Steven Bowden for eight years of of pinball content that no small feat and i remember when we really kind of were coming into the scene he was already in it making these posts and uh it was a go-to place for me for sure when i when i was going for pinball news so good job steve we look forward to seeing what's next from from fun with bonus.com and thank you for the uh the years of your uh your service, your content service. Nick, you want to talk about operating pinball in 2020? How's it been? Yeah. So non-existent. I mean, we're just not doing it. You know, places are closed. You know, places have asked us to get machines out. A few places that we have machines at, it's just aren't really playing pinball or we're just even saying we're not going to do it. It's just not worth it. So, yeah. This is a total lost year. It's crazy. In terms of operating pinball. It makes you wonder how... I mean, the story has to be similar for a lot of folks, and we're seeing a lot of it on Facebook and social media and stuff. Bars and arcades are trying to reopen even though laws are against it right now or guidance from governors in your area. Certain parts are opening. Other parts aren't. If they're opening, They're opening at limited capacity, which, you know, I've been reading about certain bars and things like that. I'm not a bar owner. I don't know the ins and outs of the business. But from what I've read, they make their money on the big days. So, like, Friday, Saturday is when the rush of the crowds come in. That's when they make their money, and everything else is just kind of filler. Now they're not getting that. They're just getting the slow, limited income on those restricted capacities. and it's really not sustainable. So I just think it was interesting from an operator perspective. You know, you route machines. You don't own a business. But even from that standpoint, it's not been an effective year for you guys. No, we're not making any money off pinball. You know, and that makes me wonder what's happening to, like, the new games that are coming out, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Avengers. You know, we're not, we would always buy new Sterns. Every time a new Stern came out, we'd buy it. Sometimes two copies of it. And, you know, we're not doing it. I can't imagine a lot of places are doing it. It just doesn't seem to make sense. So, you know, the home market is only so much, and location pinball has really exploded over the last 10 years. So these companies have to be hurting. You know, you just can't go out. Maybe some place they're still buying games, but it just doesn't seem to make sense. Pinball is just one of the things that, like, I don't know, man. I don't know why you want to go out in the pandemic and play it, to be honest. Yeah, I mean, I get it. I love pinball. If you don't have it at home, you get the itch. You want to go play, but the risk. The risk. Why risk? You know, I think back to the beginning of the pandemic, and this week in pinball did a special where they interviewed a bunch of folks in the industry, and then I was in there for some reason. But, you know, and I said it's even at that point. So a lot of the manufacturers, rightly so, it's in their best interest. We're like, it's going to be great. We got good things coming. Stay tuned. They had a very positive outlook. But, you know, I kind of looked, I sat back, and I was like, there's going to be a ripple effect here because if business is closed down, they're not going to be buying new pinball machines. There's going to be fewer people going to play pinball if they can't even at all. So they're not going to be making money to buy the new games. If they do reopen, who's going to want to go out and play in a pandemic? This was way at the start when we really had no idea what was going on, but still, even now that we're understanding it more, I wouldn't go out. And then, you know, so that's going to eventually, So not only is it going to start with the owners, the bar owners, the operators, and it's going to work its way back to the pinball manufacturers. Their sales are going to go down. And then eventually I think we're going to end up losing some of the smaller manufacturers if this keeps up. If we don't turn this thing around, there's only so many people at home that can afford to buy pinball machines. Zach Menny from Flip N Out Pinball said that Avengers Premiums are selling 5 to 1 over Pros, which tells you that the premiums are going to home buyers. Yeah. Mostly. I'm sure like folks see that the cool ramps and stuff and like, like, well, if I'm going to have this on my location, the premium locations would buy all these and premiums anyways. But those are your home buyers by and large, the street operators. Like you guys always bought pros, right? Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's because they're, they're cheaper. You get your return back and there's less to maintain on them. Right. A hundred percent. Yeah. Yep. Um, so, you know, it's, it's a negative outlook, but I think it's realistic. And, you know, just hearing from, from folks like you who actually do this is just like, you know, hopefully, hopefully we get past it all soon. I don't know what else to say. And we can, we can get back to, to getting hanging out and playing pinball together. No, it's a bummer. Cause I mean, I, I spent the last three years, like putting a lot of energy into getting pinball machines all around Buffalo, right? And definitely accomplish that goal, all to have it kind of wiped out. Like, I feel like we're going to go back several years, like in just the hit that it's going to take. Yeah. You know, we came out of the 2000s, which were terrible because of the recession and everything. Pinball barely made it through. And now it's getting set back again. You know, like you said, for Buffalo, we had built up this big tournament and league scene, and then you started the operating business and everything like that, it's just, yeah, definitely, it's a gut check for sure. Yeah. All right, well, on that downer note, let's talk about some folks who could use your support. Let me pull these up, and then I can show them off. All right, so bear with me here for one sec. All right, let's pop over here. and we can take you to there's a couple pinball documentaries coming out which are they have either kickstarters or gofundmes this is one I've been following for a while it's called arcade dreams looks pretty cool you can back them on kickstarter if you want to see this come to life I always like a good pinball or arcade documentary so you can check that out the other one is skillshot it's a a documentary about competitive pinball and they're actually running a rally up raffle similar to, uh, pinball EDU, but they're using the proceeds to fund this. Uh, it's going to the pinball asylum, but it's going to fund, I don't, I don't know the ins and outs of this, but pinball asylums of five one C three. So that's why they're able to run the, the raffle. Um, and so he, the, uh, the folks behind this, uh, asked for a shout out. So here you go. There's, uh, two, Two documentaries, pinball and arcade documentaries you can support if you so choose. And there you go. Let's go back here. And the other thing is Cabin Fever. They have a GoFundMe going. This is in our viewer-listener Q&A. But I'll bring it up now since we're talking fundraisers. So, Nick, tell the folks about Cabin Fever. Kevin Fever is my favorite pinball bar, period It's in Toronto And I don't know, the vibe of it is it's pretty an intimate space The bar is basically built around pinball, right? I mean, it's not a bar that has pinball It's a pinball place that has a bar It's got a cool vibe, too It's got records along the walls because I think you can actually buy some music there as well. I'm doing a terrible job selling it and hyping it up. I don't know, Kev. Sorry. Yeah. So the way you guys might know it is it's been the home base for our international pinball battle, the North American pinball battle with City Pinball versus Buffalo Pinball for the past four years now. So every other year we go to Canada and that's where we play. So Jeremy Wilson, the organizer of the fundraiser on GoFundMe, just searched for Safe Cabin Fever on GoFundMe. He says, I was wondering what it takes to get a shout out about my fundraiser for Cabin Fever. It's getting hit hard by the pandemic. Let me know. Thanks. So in the write up, it says 20 years ago, there's barely a couple of pinball machines on location around Toronto. Pinball is effectively a dead pastime for most relegated to the dustbin of history. Then came a resurgence, pinball started showing up again, and dedicated places to drink a pint and play some pinball came around like Cabin Fever. Cabin has been the premier spot for pinball in Toronto, providing a dedicated space for both the general public to enjoy pinball as well as IFPA-sanctioned tournaments for internationally-ranked players. Don't let the pandemic kill pinball location again. Location pinball again helped Cabin Fever survive to play another day. So if you're so inclined and you have the ability to, this is a pinball spot that Nick and I love. highly recommend showing them some support. We threw a little support their way as Buffalo Pinball because we want to go back and hopefully we'll be able to soon. So good luck to them. They've already raised $7,500 out of $1,000 over the past few days. That shows you how loved this place is and how well supported it is. So help push them over the top. Get them to that $10,000 goal and save Cabin Fever. We love you, Cabin Fever. all right uh let's go moving on the showdown i think we're almost to the showdown let me see i gotta jump back to my my rundown here uh yep i think it's time ladies and gentlemen it is time for the showdown uh i just got to bring it up here and where's my showdown window here we go pop this in over here i go to the i probably should go to this link uh yeah you can and i'm going to uh i'll run you through it on the screen too yeah yeah yeah um so we want to go let me just swap it over here theme off so okay this was uh inspired by gamma goat Ian Harrower where he posted this in discord and i was like this is amazing so um i showed it to nick he's like you're not supposed to show me this stuff until the show but uh i went through it so over the course of a few days you know we we ran through and put the ridiculous themes from deep root and pinball adventures head to head and i won't spoil the the actual winner but here we're going to have nick lane do his picks of each category has one pinball adventures theme and one deeper theme you got to pick one over the other so let's let's start at the top fire and brimstone versus is punny factory all right well listen this is a hell of a matchup because i really want to see both of these go to round two i know this is kind of like should be the finals but i want to see fire brimstone i just want to see if i i want to you know how religious i am i just really want to see this happen all right um yeah but you know it's i think funny factory is going to move on by default simply because it's going to exist and fire brimstone won't you know i'm saying but this is just about the themes it doesn't matter beyond that which theme you gotta pick i know i know i'm just adding that little commentary there all right so all right alice alice and wonder man fruto maddox fruto maddox yeah love the name fruto maddox so i just realized like you have friends over you might go downstairs and play fruto maddox there you go so these are these are how much scene did you just buy fruto maddox It's Fruit-O-Matics. Yeah. Yeah, they had Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but I went to Fruit-O-Matics. The seeds are a little different, so the matchups are a little different than Ian's. Hopefully we'll end up with a different result. This is different? So the first two of each are the same, but where they end up in the second bracket are a little different. So it wouldn't have been Fire and Brimstone against Fruit-O-Matics in round two, for example. Oh, it won't really be that. So it won't be exactly the same as it, but the end result is the same. Okay. So Gladiator versus Ninja Mania. Ninja Mania. All right. Yeah, that's the right choice. Yep. Okay. Yukon Yeti. Yukon Yeti. Alliteration. Versus Canada A. Canada A. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You got to go with Canada A. Easy. Easy. I want to see all the Canada stereotypes. Oh, yeah. Awesome. Joe Cherovino, the pinball machine. Let's go. Uh-huh. Food Truck versus Sushi Mania. Sushi Mania because I think there's going to be offensive things in there, unintentionally offensive. And people can – I want to see people get bent out of shape about it and argue on Facebook and Pinside. Let us sit back and eat popcorn. Let me just say that's a huge upset in the results of the other poll because food truck went far. Food truck seems lame compared to Sushi Mania. And don't they have a backlash artwork for it? Yeah. That's great. Sushi Mania looks really bad, yeah. It has mania in it. Space Pirates. Versus First Class. I want a pinball machine about flying. Yeah, you do. That's the right choice. Yeah, about being in First Class flying, though. Not Coach, because you know how luxurious Covenant is to sit in First Class. Oh, my God. It's the best. It's the best. You've got to have that experience and put in a pinball machine. Merlin's Arcade against That's Whack. We remember That's Whack. That's Whack. Oh, dude, this guy's crushing it. Look at this. This guy's crushing it, man. That's whack. That's whack. Ken, you want to play Fruit-O-Matic or that's whack? I want to play that. That's whack. I play all machines. Yeah, so Machine Age versus Elements. I don't like either. Can we just get rid of that? You can pick neither. Okay, you got to pick one. Yeah, I don't. So Machine Age is Debrute, Elements is the other. I don't even know what Elements is. Do you remember what that is? I don't remember. some nonsense. Well, let's give Deep Root Machine Age so we can just knock it out. Okay. Move it forward. Machine Age, there you go. So two of the, two of the Deep Root games advance. Yeah. And the other are all Pimola Adventures. You're really doing it. All right. Fire and Brimstone against Fruit-O-Matics. Oh, God. This is, this is tough, Kevin. I know, it's hard. This is tough. I really want to see a religion themed pinball machine. I really want to see it. I really want it to happen. All right. I want to see how it's done. Fire and Brimstone. We might see, you know, Fire and Brimstone might be the racehorse to beat here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Ninja Mania versus Canada A. Canada A. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, easy. Easy. Going to get really tough next. All right. Sushi Mania against First Class. uh first class all right first class travel all the way baby all right that's whack against machine age uh that's whack oh yeah yeah yeah it is i don't even know that's not even a question all right we're getting this is like things getting fucking real here we're in the semi-finals now So we have... Let's just send first class to the finals. Okay. Because it's going to beat that SWAC. First class. Off you go. I love it. All right. Fire and Brimstone against Canada A. Oh, my God. I know. You know, I said it, though. Oh, my God. Let's go. Move them on. Move them on. Oh, my God. Fire and Brimstone. submit scores here we go all right in the grand finals it's fire and brimstone against first class i'm sorry uh attack jesus won't be in fire and brimstone okay this is old testament only this is like when god is really fucking pissed off right he's like angry he mad what's he gonna be the number one seed against the number 10 seed first uh First, air travel or the Bible? What's it going to be? Bible. The Bible. Ladies and gentlemen. Yeah. Yeah, there we go. I want to see this shit happen. Yeah. Come on, Robert. Come on, buddy. You had to know the philosophy major would pick fire and brimstone. Come on, kids. Oh, yeah. There you go. That is it. Your grand champion, fire and brimstone. against all those... All the rest were almost all pinball adventures. Shoot the ram five times to kill your only child or kill your firstborn. It's a feature. It's one of the major selling points of Fire and Brimstone is that it's about religion. So there you go. Outdoing all of the pinball adventures themes. Fire and Brimstone coming out on top. Do you have a burning bush toy? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Oh, man. Let's do some Q&A. Again, Attack, you're pissing me off. That's New Testament. Come on. He's trolling now. Yeah, he is. All right, let's move. Let's wrap this up. This is a... All right, we got a few Q&As. Let's bring this home. Thank you to GammaGo for coming up with that amazing idea. Yeah, there you go. That was great. Good stuff. You did it. You did it. All right, so Jeremy Wilson we talked about with the Cabin Fever GoFundMe. so we got a couple on uh twitter from procco question one said i saw carl has removed the ball guides for to the ramp on 24 for his wm challenge i thought that was supposed to be 20 oh oh his uh he's trying i was like what the heck is the wn challenge he's trying to get for the wizard mode that's what it is uh alongside other modifications to make his game play stupidly difficult what is the hardest a machine was set up that you had to play uh i don't know i got one while you while you think about it i'll give mine um it had to be the hobbit that was at pinberg i don't know if you got to play that but man was that game set up ridiculously hard i think like scores were like you would get 10 000 points on that if you were lucky it was just so hard no center post lightning flippers steep as hell um i'm trying to remember what else was but like if you got like a couple shots in on that game you were lucky it was death um so it had to be had to be uh had to be walk a hobbit at pinberg for me any any tournament games come to mind for you i mean what what popped my mind is just what they do to iron man which is already a hard game and how they set it up oh yeah pinberg it's just like it's it's it's just brutal man you're lucky if you get a couple shots off on that game that's it it's funny how they take a game that is like normally not a long playing game like i understand like taking a game like hobbit and you've got to like you got to make it hard so you can't have somebody up there for an hour, right? But like, Iron Man's not that type of game, and they still just still just make it like like, in a way nobody would ever set it up in their home, right? Yeah, and Mashmo in chat said, I didn't know Hobbit could be hard. That's the point, like and, you know, we talked to Kiefer about it too, it's like any people are like, oh Hobbit, it's a long playing game, it's slow, whatever. You can set any game up to be brutal and butt-kicking if you wanted to. But, you know, the point of Hobbit in a home, at least, is a long playing adventure where you're trying to play through the story. But in Printburg, you can't have that because you've got to keep the rounds moving to keep everything on time. And they do an excellent job of calculating all that by playtesting throughout the year with tournaments leading up to the event and things like that, making adjustments to keep the rounds moving. Inevitably, you end up with a World Poker Tour that takes forever, at least once per show. But that's when you end up with the top-level players on a game that's set up a little too easy and then they just go to town on it um so his other question was since deeproot plans to do a lot of network stuff and kevin has a p3 do you use the networking things on on that regularly and which parts online live versus co-op uh competing shop updates etc etc so we talked about this before cosmic kart racing um the online play is cool and multimorphic runs occasional tournaments. They'll coordinate online play night where we all get together and play. There's a Discord where we can get together and coordinate heads-up matchups. I forget the name of the location, but there's a place in Pennsylvania that just got two P3s, and they have them set up for online play with Cosmic Heart Racing, so you can get on and play with folks there, which is cool. So yeah, I've been doing that. They have the Twitch integration, which is great for me as a streamer. We did the first stream of that a week or so ago, two weeks ago. The network, the online updating is not there yet. The shop, you don't actually buy games on the machine. You buy them on multimorphic.com, and then you download them to USB and install them that way. I imagine down the line they'll probably add all that in to be able to do right from your pinball machine. and then also like in uh ranger in the ruins it just happens you don't have to actively go out and participate in an online thing it's just internet connected all the time as long as you're online doing the the drops from the other characters and bringing them in and you sending yours out to the other players and vice versa so um yeah so that's how i use it it's very cool to have at home and uh like i said part of the motivation for me to get the cosmic art racing was so I'd be able to play with other people during a pandemic, and it's given me the opportunity to do that. It's been really cool. So looking forward to what's coming online next. His other comment was, have you seriously used a phone for dialed in before? To that I will say yes, I tend to use it anytime I stream it. It's a fun way to kind of break up the stream. Like midstream, I'll usually be like, all right, let's do a phone game. And it's an interesting challenge to give you. So if you didn't know, you can pair your cell phone with dialed in using the Bluetooth adapter in it. I hadn't been doing it recently because over the course of the beta test program that I'm part of, they disabled the phone feature. But when it's active, I definitely do it. It's fun to do on stream. It's a fun challenge to use. It also gives you some benefits. In addition to flipping with the phone, you can push a button on the screen to cash out your Big Bang at any time, which is cool. So while it makes the game harder, you can't nudge unless I guess you're flipping on your phone and put it down a nudge, but it gives you a plus in that you can use the Big Bang whenever you like instead of having to hit the target. So some cool stuff, some innovative features there, and it definitely fits the theme. So that is dialed in. So that brings us to the end of our show. Thank you so much for watching, listening, however you consume the podcast, the thing we do live. Thanks for watching live. if you haven't yet you can follow us on social media they're all at the bottom of your screen down there buffalo pinball.com is our home base we're on twitter instagram youtube you're gonna want let me let me just throw this out there you're gonna want to subscribe to the youtube channel ring that bell ladies and gentlemen ring that bell for notifications we got some cool stuff coming uh youtube.com slash buffalo pinball uh facebook.com where we have a group slash group slash Buffalo Pinball there. And don't forget, we are on Discord, discord.gg slash Buffalo Pinball to follow us there. If you want to send us an email, you can do it at talkpinball at gmail.com. If you want to support the channel, you like what we do, you want to see more of it happen, you can sub us on Twitch, or you can use your Twitch Prime to sub us for free. Or now if you're a YouTube person, you can click the Join button to become a member and back us there. You'll get some nice perks in addition to some emotes that you'll get to use in live chats anywhere on YouTube. They allow us four right now. If we get two members, we'll be able to add some more. So go on there and check it out. I appreciate that. If you want to do PayPal, it's buffalopinball.gmail.com to send some PayPal donations. If you want to support us, you don't want to throw some cash, totally understand. A way you can do that is dropping a review on iTunes. you can go to this week in pinball in the pinball promoters database there you can review us there so there you go and with that Mick Lane what do you have to say to close it out love everybody see you next time bye bye _(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_ --- *Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: e409b6cc-d5b8-4c54-bcf8-0bf4b8c6fe04*