# Pinball Magazine & Pinball News PINcast March 2024 recap

**Source:** Pinball News & Pinball Magazine Pincast  
**Type:** podcast_episode  
**Published:** 2024-04-02  
**Duration:** 119m 20s  
**Beat:** Pinball

**URL:** https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pinball-industry-news/episodes/Pinball-Magazine--Pinball-News-PINcast-March-2024-recap-e2hs4m6

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## Analysis

March 2024 pinball industry recap covering three major announcements: American Pinball's Barry O's Barbecue Challenge release with mixed reception, Pinball Brothers' ABBA game announcement featuring Voyage holographic performance content, and Dutch Pinball's final early achiever shipment clearing the way for Dutch Pinball Exclusive (DPX), a new short-run production subsidiary partnering with Melvin Williams to develop John Popadulis' Alice in Wonderland prototype.

### Key Claims

- [MEDIUM] Barry O's Barbecue Challenge was based on Barry Oursler's final design, either a napkin drawing or more developed base design, completed by American Pinball team over 18 months — _Jonathan Houston and Martin Nair discuss conflicting accounts of design origin; Jonathan saw a playable version 18 months prior at Pinball Expo_
- [HIGH] Barry O's Barbecue Challenge Classic Edition priced at just below $7,000 and Limited Edition at $8,500 — _Martin Nair provides specific pricing details announced in March 2024_
- [MEDIUM] Pinball Brothers lost approximately £500,000 (roughly $600k USD or €500k) annually in 2022 and 2023 according to summary accounts — _Martin Nair reviewed UK Companies House filings; caveats that figures may not reflect full picture due to Euro Pinball Corp collaboration_
- [HIGH] Roger and Kato officially left Pinball Brothers in December 2023 (though their involvement ended January 2022) and withdrew all investments and support — _Direct quote from Roger and Kato's public statement; Martin Nair confirmed conversation with Cato at Texas Pinball Festival_
- [HIGH] ABBA game will include 20 full ABBA tracks, more than any other pinball game featuring a single artist — _Martin Nair cites official Pinball Brothers announcement; notes Elton John had 12-16 tracks by comparison_
- [HIGH] Dutch Pinball shipped the final early achiever Big Lebowski machine in early March 2024, ending a multi-year fulfillment commitment — _Jonathan Houston and Martin Nair confirm official announcement; celebrates Barry's achievement overcoming significant production challenges_
- [MEDIUM] Dutch Pinball Exclusive (DPX) first title will likely be Alice in Wonderland based on John Popadulis' Zidware prototype design — _Martin Nair cites social media post from Barry and Melvin Williams standing next to machine with matching Alice artwork; notes official announcement unlikely before July 2024_
- [HIGH] Melvin Williams purchased Zidware storage unit assets (including Alice in Wonderland design files) in auction settlement with John Popadulis — _Martin Nair references prior Pinball News article about Zidware asset auction; confirms Melvin as buyer_

### Notable Quotes

> "I'm not sure whether the game needed that. I'm also not sure whether the game needed Barry O to be attached to it so heavily."
> — **Martin Nair**, Early in Barry O's discussion
> _Critique of American Pinball's heavy Barry Oursler branding and Easter egg focus, questioning whether it serves casual players unfamiliar with Barry O_

> "You don't want to get charged or sued by the BBC, of course."
> — **Jonathan Houston**, During Barry O's title discussion
> _Humorous explanation for why American Pinball avoided 'BBC' abbreviation for Barry O's Barbecue Challenge_

> "Since January 22 we have not been involved in any decision making processes at the company, a factor that significantly contributed to our decisions to withdraw our support."
> — **Roger and Kato (public statement)**, Referenced during Pinball Brothers discussion
> _Direct statement from departing Pinball Brothers founders explaining lack of involvement in decision-making as reason for withdrawal_

> "It's a very impressive show and definitely worth going to see but I haven't been yet."
> — **Martin Nair**, During ABBA Voyage discussion
> _Acknowledges personal experience gap while confirming ABBA Voyage's cultural significance and technical achievement_

> "Big celebrations at the factory and I think we all have to celebrate that and Barry in particular is fortitude in overcoming what seem to be impossible odds."
> — **Jonathan Houston**, During Dutch Pinball early achiever discussion
> _Recognizes Barry Driessen's achievement in fulfilling early achiever commitments against difficult odds_

> "Just because John came up with a playfield design, doesn't necessarily mean that it works, or is it even feasible."
> — **Martin Nair**, During DPX/Alice discussion
> _Expresses caution about John Popadulis' design viability based on past examples like Magic Girl requiring significant revision_

> "It will probably be another year, let's say Texas 2025"
> — **Martin Nair**, During American Pinball game pipeline discussion
> _Prediction that Dennis Nordman's next game will launch around Texas Pinball Festival 2025 rather than 2024, due to licensed title being moved ahead_

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| American Pinball | company | Boutique pinball manufacturer that developed and released Barry O's Barbecue Challenge, licensing/completing Barry Oursler's final game design; experiencing personnel transitions with Dennis Nordman's reduced involvement |
| Barry Oursler | person | Legendary pinball designer (deceased); created final design that became Barry O's Barbecue Challenge; his work is heavily referenced with Easter eggs throughout the game |
| Pinball Brothers | company | Swedish boutique manufacturer announcing ABBA pinball game featuring Voyage holographic performance content; experiencing significant personnel changes with Roger, Kato, and Rudiger Beckmann departing; facing financial losses per UK Companies House filings |
| Daniel Jensen | person | Sole remaining director of Pinball Brothers after Roger and Kato departure; leading ABBA game development and design direction |
| Roger and Kato | person | Co-founders of Pinball Brothers who officially departed December 2023 (involvement ended January 2022); withdrew all investments and support citing lack of decision-making involvement and disagreement with game direction |
| Dutch Pinball | company | European boutique manufacturer completing final Big Lebowski early achiever shipment in March 2024; launching Dutch Pinball Exclusive (DPX) subsidiary for short-run production with Melvin Williams |
| Barry Driessen | person | Owner/founder of Dutch Pinball who successfully navigated multi-year early achiever fulfillment commitment and is establishing Dutch Pinball Exclusive partnership with Melvin Williams |
| Melvin Williams | person | Pinball restoration/customization expert collaborating with Dutch Pinball to establish DPX; purchased Zidware storage unit assets including John Popadulis' Alice in Wonderland design files |
| John Popadulis | person | Former Zidware designer who created Alice in Wonderland prototype design (unfinished); subject of settlement with Zidware game buyers; design assets now in Melvin Williams' possession for DPX revival |
| Dennis Nordman | person | Veteran pinball designer at American Pinball; next game has been in design/waiting for mechanical engineer; reportedly returning on consultancy basis; game now scheduled for Texas 2025 release due to licensed title moved ahead |
| Jeremy Packer (Zombie Yeti) | person | Artist who created black-line artwork for Alice in Wonderland design during Zidware era; currently employed at Stern Pinball; original artwork being used for DPX revival |
| Steve Bowden | person | American Pinball team member who led design development on Barry O's Barbecue Challenge alongside Brian and with Dennis' input |
| Ryan McQuaid | person | American Pinball designer whose next game is scheduled for production after licensed title; expected to launch around Pinball Expo 2024 |
| David Fix | person | American Pinball team member who conducted Texas Pinball Festival seminar discussing Barry O's Barbecue Challenge development and Barry Oursler's legacy |
| Texas Pinball Festival | event | Major March 2024 industry event where multiple games were playable for first time; venue for American Pinball seminar and Pinball Brothers stand presence |
| ABBA (game) | game | Pinball Brothers' announced title featuring Voyage holographic performance content; includes 20 full ABBA tracks; launch event April 6, 2024 in Örebro, Sweden coinciding with ABBA's 50th Eurovision anniversary |
| Barry O's Barbecue Challenge | game | American Pinball title released March 2024; based on Barry Oursler's final design; Classic Edition $7,000, Limited Edition $8,500; features Aura lighting system, shaker motor, barbecue red coating (LE); mixed reception noted as 'OK' but not widely praised |
| Alice in Wonderland | game | Planned DPX/Dutch Pinball Exclusive first title based on John Popadulis' unfinished Zidware prototype; design revival using recovered assets; announcement expected no earlier than July 2024 |
| Dutch Pinball Exclusive (DPX) | company | New sister company of Dutch Pinball established March 2024 as collaboration with Melvin Williams; focused on short-run production of 500 or fewer machines per title; Alice in Wonderland rumored as first release |
| Pedretti | company | Italian contract manufacturer for Pinball Brothers; cited by Roger/Kato as potential source of assembly quality issues on Queen game; also collaborates with Pinball Brothers via Euro Pinball Corp |
| Stern Pinball | company | Large manufacturer employing Jeremy Packer (Zombie Yeti) as artist; context suggests ongoing involvement in industry conversation regarding talent and design approach |
| ABBA Voyage | event | Holographic performance show running in London-based theatre since 2022; has sold 1.5 million tickets, generated ~$500 million; scheduled to run until at least November 2024, likely extended to April 2026; provides video/motion capture content for Pinball Brothers ABBA game |
| Pinball News | organization | Independent pinball media outlet represented by Martin Nair in this podcast; covered Zidware asset auction and maintains historical records of industry developments |
| Pinball Magazine | organization | Pinball media publication represented by Jonathan Houston in this podcast; collaborating on monthly industry recap coverage |

### Topics

- **Primary:** Barry O's Barbecue Challenge release and reception, Pinball Brothers ABBA game announcement, Dutch Pinball early achiever fulfillment milestone, Dutch Pinball Exclusive (DPX) subsidiary launch, Roger and Kato departure from Pinball Brothers
- **Secondary:** Pinball Brothers financial performance and company structure, Zidware asset acquisition and Alice in Wonderland revival, American Pinball game pipeline and personnel changes

### Sentiment

**Mixed** (0.55) — Generally positive toward industry activity and specific achievements (Dutch Pinball milestone, ABBA announcement, Barry O's release), but tempered by criticism (Barry O branding overkill, Pinball Brothers leadership turmoil and financial losses, caution about DPX Alice viability). Hosts maintain professional skepticism while celebrating milestone accomplishments.

### Signals

- **[business_signal]** Pinball Brothers reported financial losses of approximately £500,000 (~$600k USD/€500k) annually in 2022 and 2023 per UK Companies House summary accounts (confidence: medium) — Martin Nair reviewed Companies House filings; caveated that figures may not reflect full business picture due to Euro Pinball Corp collaboration structure
- **[sentiment_shift]** Barry O's Barbecue Challenge reception described as 'OK' but not enthusiastically praised; simple gameplay with standard ramps and mushroom bumpers; community consensus suggests game is suitable for casual players but lacks depth (confidence: medium) — Jonathan Houston and Martin Nair based commentary on Texas Pinball Festival play-testing and social media feedback; no reports of 'blown away' reactions
- **[design_philosophy]** American Pinball emphasized Barry Oursler branding and Easter egg tributes extensively in Barry O's Barbecue Challenge, with seminar at Texas Pinball Festival explaining hidden references; Martin Nair expresses concern this approach may not resonate with players unfamiliar with Barry O (confidence: high) — Official seminar conducted by Dave Fix, Steve Bowden, Ryan McQuaid at Texas Pinball Festival; Martin Nair's direct critique of branding strategy
- **[licensing_signal]** ABBA game partnership with Voyage holographic performance; game will feature holographic video content of band members using motion-capture accuracy to within 1mm of movement; 1.5 million tickets sold, ~$500M revenue from Voyage shows (confidence: high) — Official Pinball Brothers announcement; Martin Nair cites radio program on Voyage technology; confirmation of 20 ABBA tracks (more than Elton John's 12-16)
- **[market_signal]** Pricing pattern emerging at ~$7,000 for classic editions and $8,500 for limited editions (Barry O's Barbecue Challenge); suggests industry consolidation around three-tier model with affordable entry point (confidence: medium) — Martin Nair identifies $7,000 as 'key price point'; notes Limited Edition premium of $1,500; observation of pricing consistency across manufacturers
- **[personnel_signal]** Dennis Nordman no longer regularly working at American Pinball; reportedly will return on consultancy basis when his next game approaches production; his game design completed but has been waiting for mechanical engineer (confidence: medium) — Martin Nair cites confidential sourcing; notes Dennis' absence from Texas Pinball Festival seminar; predicts return to consultancy role
- **[personnel_signal]** Roger and Kato officially departed Pinball Brothers (December 2023, publicly announced after Texas Pinball Festival); withdrew all investments; cited lack of decision-making involvement and game direction disagreements (confidence: high) — Direct public statement from Roger and Kato; confirmed conversation with Cato; UK Companies House records still showing them as active directors (not yet updated)
- **[announcement]** Dutch Pinball Exclusive (DPX) established as new short-run production subsidiary (max 500 machines per title) in collaboration with Melvin Williams; Alice in Wonderland rumored as first title (confidence: medium) — Social media announcement from Barry Driessen and Melvin Williams; Alice confirmation via post showing playfield underside and backbox artwork; Martin Nair estimates announcement timeline as July 2024 minimum due to ongoing factory setup
- **[announcement]** Pinball Brothers officially confirmed ABBA as their next title (April 1, 2024); game features Voyage holographic performance video content and 20 full ABBA tracks; launch event April 6, 2024 in Örebro, Sweden (confidence: high) — Direct announcement after month-long helicopter/stage imagery teasing campaign; confirmed by Jonathan Houston and Martin Nair
- **[announcement]** American Pinball officially announced Barry O's Barbecue Challenge with Classic ($6,995) and Limited Edition ($8,500) tiers; game released with Aura lighting system, shaker motor, red powder coat (LE), magic glass, barbecue apron (confidence: high) — March 6, 2024 announcement with multi-tier release structure and rapid location deployment to ~dozen US venues
- **[product_strategy]** Dutch Pinball completed fulfillment of all Big Lebowski early achiever machines (189 orders placed in 2014) in March 2024; achieved through 4:1 ratio of new Lebowski sales to early achiever production (confidence: high) — Jonathan Houston and Martin Nair confirm official announcement with celebration at factory; Martin Nair emphasizes achievement against 'impossible odds'
- **[technology_signal]** Barry O's Barbecue Challenge is first American Pinball game to use new Aura lighting system (proprietary LED display technology); indicates manufacturer investment in lighting innovation for differentiation (confidence: high) — Martin Nair confirms Aura lighting is new system; Jonathan Houston and Martin Nair note this as feature distinction for Limited Edition

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## Transcript

 Barry O's Barbecue Challenge Revealed ABBA Pinball Announced Dutch Pinball Launched DPX Hi, my name is Jonathan Houston. I'm the editor of Pinball Magazine and I'm joined by... Hi, I'm Martin Nair, and I'm here for Pinball News, and we're here, as usual, to look back on the past month, which in this case is March 2024, in the wonderful world of pinball, and bring you all the highlights. And it's been, well, it has been a very busy month, really, hasn't it? Particularly because of the Texas Pinball Festival, which we'll be covering multiple times during this pincast. But anyway, we hope you enjoy this month's Pinball Industry News pincast, and it's a great month for pinball companies. There's a lot of news from the industry. A lot of news, yes. Well, if you remember Texas Pinball Festival last year, there was an avalanche of new pinball machine titles from various companies. This year, a little less, in the sense that we got the Berrio Barbecue Challenge game, which got revealed. There were quite a few games that were already out there on the market which for a lot of people were the first chance to play them. We got updates from games that already had been revealed earlier on. So not as many new games as last year but still a lot of news to cover. There is, let's get straight on with it. Yeah, so American Pinball. Yeah, so... Very old barbecue challenge, which is quite the mouthful. Not quite intended for a barbecue. Sorry. We'll get on to your cough a little bit later. Right. Yeah, no, the game... Well, I think it's been in development for the past 18 months. It's based on, from what I understood, Barry Orso's final design, which he was... I have different stories here. My source tells me that he finished the base design of this game, which is more than just a David Hankin drawing. But other sources say, no, it was just David Hankin drawing. And the team at American Pinball completed the design. Either way, they completed the design. But I'm not sure what you heard. Well, I saw the game, it would have been about 18 months ago. It would have been not the last Expo, but the Expo before that. At which point it was, I don't think anybody else worked on it much at that point. and it was certainly a playable game then, so that would have been about 18 months ago. And as I understood it, that was what Barry had got to, or that's what the team had built based on his design at that point. That was obviously shortly after he had passed away. Right. But the finished product is significantly different from that, as you might expect. but it didn't have any artwork back then, but it did have several of the features and the ramps and things which made it into the final game. So, yes, I think it was, as far as my take on it is, and I don't know anything more about it than that, is that it was at a certain stage of development which was suitable, but it still required quite a lot of work to bring it to the production-ready stage, and that's what's been going on in the past 18 months I suppose with, as you say, the whole team at American were working on it. In particular Brian and Steven Bowden I think and with Dennis' input. Right, yeah. And they did a seminar at the Texas Football Festival in which they explained a lot of the Easter eggs or hidden references to other games from Barry Osborne. Yes, there were a lot. Quite a few. Personally, I think I'm not sure whether the game needed that. I'm also not sure whether the game needed Barry O to be attached to it so heavily. It could have been just a generic barbecue theme, and that would have been fine if you put Vario on a plastic or something as a tribute and not get so carried away with it, it seems to me. And I get that it's an emotional game for people involved in it at American Pinball, but for the players, they have no clue who Vario is. They did go all in, shall we say, with the Barry O branding, or Barry Elsa branding on it. I wondered at the time when it came out whether they had Barry O rather than just Barry. I thought Barry's Barbecue Challenge would have been fine, and then wondered whether that name or that brand was registered to somebody else or there was already a Barry's Barbecue Challenge somewhere. So I did a bit of research, and I couldn't find anything about it. They didn't like the abbreviation that would be BBC. Well, there are worse ones to have. But it certainly tripped off the tongue a lot more recently as Barry's Barbecue Challenge. You don't want to get charged or sued by the BBC, of course. I don't think there are plenty of other companies. There was the Boston Bank Incorporation. They used to own the BBC.com domain, incidentally. from the British Broadcasting Corporation bought it from them. We are, absolutely. But yes, I would have thought Barry's BBQ Challenge would have been an easier title to work with. Everybody in the know would know that it's Barry Alster and those who don't know who Barry Alster is it's a Barry. It's a generic Barry, yes. Anyway, so they announced the game, anyway, at the beginning of March, before the Texas Pinball Festival Yeah, the best campaign towards the press I would say, if I may make a comment on that. Especially if you consider lack of decent playfield photos where you have a good overview of what the playfield looks like. You have to do it basically with the back of a flyer which had all sorts of writing on top of it. Stop making it very clear to see what's happening. Yeah, there's some nice playfield detail shots, but not an overview, as you say, which obviously existed because they used it for the flyer. Right. But it wasn't made available at the time. Anyway, it came out, I think, about the 6th of March. That's when the announcement was made. A limited edition version and a classic edition version as well. The Classic Edition priced just below $7,000, which, as we'll see later, seems to be a bit of a key price point at the moment. The Limited Edition, $1,500 more, at basically $8,500, or a few dollars short of that. Limited Edition's got red powder coating, side armor. It's got a new Aura lighting system. Okay, an all-new Boris. This is the first game with the new Boris. Absolutely right, yeah. which I guess were probably needed for this lighting system. Magic glass, anti-reflective, a shaker motor, knocker, and a limited edition barbecue red cooking apron. Don't forget that. And, of course, a limited edition numbered brass plate. And, interestingly, the game was available to play around a dozen locations across the United States from the following day, I think that was. That is impressive. I have to give them that. Yeah, very good to get those shipped out. And there's quite a lot of publicity about people unboxing them as well on social media at the locations where they were being set up. So those places are a nice boost as well. So a bit of help for the location pinball there. Right. Do we know how the game has been received? Only from what we saw at Texas, I think, and a few comments on social media which were that it's OK. I think people have been blown away by it yet. But it doesn't really have much in the way of next on the game, does it? It's fairly simple, play for now. Mostly standard bars, except for the ramps, I would say. And the, what do they call them, the posts. Yeah. The school posts. Yeah. Which is basically sort of a... Mushroom. Mushroom bumper. Yeah, that's right. Basically, it's a post with a disc on the top, which scores when it's hit from any direction. So that's, I think, one for the mild source and one for the hot sauce on the other side, not spicy sauce. Anyway, as you said, they had a seminar at Texas Pimple Festival with David Fix, Steven Bowden and Ryan McQuaid. They talked about the development of the game. Dave Fix talked at length about what it meant to them as Barry's final design. Of course, one person not there and notably absent was Dennis Nordman. Right. who we hear is no longer working at American Pinball, or at least not working there on a regular basis. Right. As I understand it, his next game is designed, but has been waiting for a mechanical engineer to progress it further for a long time. I think Barry's game kind of got in front of that. But I hear that Dennis is due to be returning to America on a consultancy basis when his game gets closer to going into production or being ready for launch. Right, yeah. And what I've been hearing, and we don't cover rumours, but this is worth mentioning. Originally, I believe that Dennis' game was scheduled to be the game after BBQ, which means probably around the Pinball Expo this year that it would come out. and what I have been hearing, but I can't say that I have it confirmed, is that a license title has been moved in between, meaning that Dennis' game would probably be out probably another year, let's say Texas 2025. Right. And that other game would need, which I suppose is Ryan McQuaid's game, that needs to be finished as soon as possible to get it ready for production around Expo. So that's what I hear. And of course we hope, or at least I do, that we will see Dennis again and that Dennis will be heavily involved in finishing up his games, or his game. Yes. Because I think by now Dennis has a tradition of working on games that get finished by other people. Yeah, or the company closes down before we actually get... And that goes back to Elvira and the Party Monsters. Yes, well that's right, yeah. That was self-inflicted though in that case, wasn't it? Yeah. But yeah, and then Fosca is if he was laid off as well from Williams, I think, before that game was finished. Yeah, and then we have Bonelli at Stern and a couple of other games that Dems were working on that got finished without him actually working on the game. Yeah, yes, absolutely. I won't go through the list but it has worked for everyone at some point pretty much but yes it will be interesting to see it would be great to see Ryan get his game out but also from what we know about Dennis' next game I think we're both keen to see it go into production as well it has a lot of potential I think that could be the hit game that American people need Yeah, well, say that without knowing what Ryan's game is going to be. So Ryan's game could be that as well. But anyway, I think that's pretty much all the news from Roken Pinball. I don't think there's anything else we've missed out there. So let's move on to our second headline, which was almost hot off the press because it was news that was announced just today. And that's from Pinball Brothers in Sweden. Yeah, all day to announce news on April 1st, because people, you never know whether they're going to believe you. Yes, we've had this before. Companies have announced games or made major announcements on April 1st, which turned out to be true, but people, as you say, think it's an April Fool. Right. Or at least suspect it might be. So, anyway, to clarify, the past month, Pimple Brothers, started teasing their upcoming title. They did so with the image of a helicopter, a specific type which was immediately recognized as the same helicopter used on the cover of the Arrival album by ABBA. Yes. And with Pimble Brothers being a Swedish company, ABBA coming from Sweden, that link was made very clearly, although people also figured it could have been a hint towards Predator. And since this was confirmed on April 1st as being ABBA, it might still be Predator, but we never know. Yes, but they've been teasing it, as you say, over the past past the weeks and even I think just a few days ago there was a picture of a stage with a drum kit and tall thigh-length boots of the kind that the the women in ABBA wore so I think that kind of pretty much filled the deal if there's any any doubt about it but today it was there was an announcement from them. Confirm it. The game is AVA. Yep. And it will use video content used in the Voyager performance, which is a holographic performance in a London theater, London-based theater. have you been there yet? I haven't as I understand it the whole place was built specifically for the Voyage holographic stage show and it's been running since 2022 I think and so far has sold 1.5 million tickets which is pretty impressive and has generated a huge I can't remember exactly how much money it was, like $500 million or something like that from ticket sales so far. It's currently scheduled to run until at least November of this year, and it's probably going to be extended until April 2026 as well. So it's been that popular. I think they've got something like 99% occupancy in the theatre every night. so it's still pulling in people and from what I've heard from people who have been it's a very impressive show and definitely worth going to see but I haven't been yet so anyway video footage from that show will be in the game these are holograms digital images of the members of ABBA personally I found them a bit still unrealistic as in you couldn't tell the difference from whether the hair is a part of the face or a mustache it looks like is basically it's difficult to explain but it doesn't look that realistic to me so I hope that's not an issue with the game although they do use motion capture or did use motion capture to capture the performances of the four band members. So they are singing and in time with the music, the mouth movements are accurate. I was actually listening to a radio program just the other day about the technology they use on that, which is accurate to within one millimeter of movement. So it's very impressive what they can do with it these days. and yeah so they are doing full performance even though it's as you say it is a hologram or holographic projection but you know people seem to really like it and this is the material the video material they're going to be using but they're also using 20 full ABBA tracks within the game which I think I couldn't remember any other game which ever uses that many songs from an artist in any pinball game that uses that many. I think maybe 12 or 16 maybe in Elton John, I think, is the number there. 20 seems pretty impressive. Yes. So that was announced, and they also announced, well, they had already teased that they're doing a launch party, which will be held on the 6th of April in Sweden. In Sweden, Örebro, in the city of Örebro. It's easy for you to say. But that's something we are hoping to get to. Yes, we have been invited and we're looking if we can make it. Yes, we're planning it, but no guarantees at this stage because it's not the easiest place to get to. We are definitely planning to interview Daniel Jensen and other involved in the design of the game, I suppose. Yes, that may be a good point. We might have a bonus pin cat coming up later this month. Yes, we were planning to have more interviews this month, but we'll get on to why we haven't got those later. but we're talking about people who are involved in the production of this game and People Brothers have been trading some of those on social media as well including the sound designer obviously not the musical composer the band and also the animator the video animator who's doing the work on this game but it's probably worth mentioning that there's been an announcement by a couple of the people we associate with Pinball Brothers or have associated with Pinball Brothers in the past which is Roger and Kato who were at the Texas Pinball Festival probably enough although Daniel was not and a lot of people there were asking them what's going on with the Pimple Brothers when their next game is going to be announced and what their plans are and they had to basically tell everybody that they're not involved with the company and haven't been since December last year. Well actually since January of 2022 but officially they left the company in December of 2023 and And since Pimple Brothers made no announcements of their involvement no longer being accurate, they decided to put out a message themselves, indicating that they are no longer affiliated with Pimple Brothers. This decision includes pulling all our investments and support from the company, making a new direction for both of us. Since January 22 we have not been involved in any decision making processes at the company, a factor that significantly contributed to our decisions to withdraw our support." End of quote. I did talk to Cato at the bar at the Texas Film Festival. The thing is, I'm not sure what was off the record and what was on the record. But I think it's safe to say that one of the reasons that may have resulted in them stepping down was that they were not too happy with the way Pedrecci in Italy, who is their contract manufacturer, assembled certain assembly or assemblies in the Queen game, which according to them were not assembled correctly causing the game to be less fun. But that might have been the case on the production model that they got, that doesn't mean that every production model was not assembled correctly. Yes, and they might have been caught since then anyway and corrected. But yes, I'd heard that they were unhappy with the themes and the direction that the company was going, had been for some time. And I don't know whether ABBA was part of that unhappiness, but they wanted to have a different type of game compared to Daniel. And I guess they couldn't come to an agreement or a compromise. like that. So they decided to walk away from that. So that leaves Daniel, as I understand it, as the sole director of the company. Right. Because, interestingly, and I guess this dates back to their involvement with Highway Pinball, they are listed or registered in London as a company's house. So on the company's house website, you can access certain details about the company, including who are registered as directors. And Roger and Kato are still listed there as active directors of Pinball Brothers, along with Daniel. But it sounds like they are not any longer involved in the company, so that needs to be updated at some point. but also you can also look at the company's accounts or at least summary accounts as well and who the companies that own it are. Well, I'm no accountant but it did look strictly from the summary accounts that Bimble Brothers as a company appeared to be losing around about half a million pounds which is I guess about 600 thousand dollars, about half a million euros roughly, each year in 2022 and 2023. This is the latest the accounts go up to. Right, but it doesn't have to be accurate in the sense that Pinball Brothers is also involved with Euro Pinball Corp. Absolutely. collaboration with Pedretti and they might be making a profit there which doesn't show in the books of Pimple Brothers for some reason. I can't either but it doesn't have to be, it's not alarming to me let's put it like that. No and Pimple Brothers is actually owned by other companies anyway one called White Walker in Sweden and one called Umbrella Corporation in Norway. Well, that would kind of suggest that one of them is Daniel's company and one of them belongs to Roger and or Kato in Norway. But, those details haven't been updated yet with the change in director status. So, all of this could be out of date or inaccurate. But, anyway, interesting to browse and look at all that. You can download all that stuff if you want on the company's house website for the UK. Right. And there's another person who left the company, Pimor Roders, that is. In this case, we're talking about Rudiger Beckmann, who was in charge of PR and marketing. Now this has nothing to do, as far as I know, with Rudy not being happy with his job or anything. I think what I understood is Rudy is also a very talented photographer and he got an opportunity in that area of his expertise. pleased and he decided to take the opportunity and had to leave his job in PR and marketing at Thimble Bros for that. So nothing shocking and I wish him the best in his photography the endeavours. So, best of luck. Absolutely. Yeah, and, well, good luck to Daniel and the rest of the team at Fibble Brothers on the launch of their new ABBA game, and we look forward to seeing it in the flesh, as it were, in Sweden on the 6th of April, if we can make it. If we can make it, yes. Yeah. Else we still will have interviews with Daniel and hopefully others involved as well. I'm just in case you're wondering why 6th of April is an important date. It just happens to be exactly 50 years to the day from when ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest that was being held in Brighton in the United Kingdom with the song Waterloo. So a big ceremony or a big commemoration of 50 years of ABBA being on the world stage, I guess. And a good day to go once again. Just as a heads up, the pinball machine will be revealed on the 6th of April, but at the same date there's also a big celebration on Swedish national television I believe for ABBA Don count on the members or any of the members of ABBA being present at the Pimple reveal event. As they already indicated they would not be at the TV event memory for the 50th anniversary of the victory of winning the Eurovision Song Contest. No, we are expecting a tribute band though at the Pimple Brothers launch. I think that's already been announced the name of them. Punch. Punch, indeed. So we look forward to hearing them. Yes. so and we hope to report like you said from the event and bring you all the latest news on the ABBA game personally I do look forward to to this game I think I after playing Elton John I was like if Elton John goes like this and it's such a good game ABBA should be next funny enough Emma was already in development at the time. Yeah. I'm a little more cautious in my optimism there, but I'm not sure how many people will, pinball buyers will buy into it. Maybe the breakthrough game, which will get people who wouldn't have bought a pinball, or wouldn't have bought a pinball brothers game in the past, to consider it. In which case, fantastic news. now a couple of other items of news from Pimple Brothers one of which is that their website has been completely redesigned although it's a bit strange because they've seen the whole thing like Stranger Things the TV series so all the artwork and design is just like that of course Stranger Things is a Stern Pinball title so why they've done that I don't know but it looks nice but a bit of a cross there in themes and we mentioned we were at the Texas Pinball Festival and well, so were Pinball Brothers and so was Roger and Kato even though they're not part of Pinball Brothers anymore but on the Pinball Brothers stand they had two of the Alien Ripley Edition games and one of the Queen games as well on the stand which I understand was organised by Pinball Brothers USA Yes Pinball Brothers USA A company they set up recently To supply games and parts To the US market So what went on to them? Yes Moving on to A company A lot closer to me And to you as well Although still in Europe Dutch Pinball had two interesting news items to report on and the first one being that they finally shipped the last early achiever game to its distributor in the US I think it is and for those who have no idea what I'm talking about when Dutch Pinball announced the Big Lebowski back in 2014 I think there were about 189 people who signed up and deposited money to buy the game at the price that was set at the time. And these people were called the early achievers a reference to the Big Lebowski movie of course. After that, Dutch Spring Bowl got in very heavy Carl Weathers, so to speak, eventually managed to turn everything around and start basically over again, not using a contract manufacturer, but take production in their own hands. And the way they managed to climb out of the hole that they were in, so to speak, was by selling new Witt Lebowski machines and basically at a ratio of 4 to 1, build new machines versus one early achiever machine. So at a very slow pace, all these early achievers who had been waiting for their game for years, one by one received their game and the last one finally shipped earlier this month. Yes, and big celebrations at the factory and I think we all have to celebrate that and Barry in particular is fortitude in overcoming what seem to be impossible odds there was a time when I think hardly anybody thought he'd actually be able to pull this off it seemed impossible but all credit to him and the rest of the team they have done it and everyone eventually at least got their game and that's a big bonus going forward and a big vote of confidence that if you put a deposit down on a Dutch pinball game now or in the future it probably will be delivered right so now and why is this so important basically because it clears the way for other news. Yes. Because Dutch Pinball was very or very was very I wouldn't say public about it but it was clear that he was not going to announce any new projects until all early achievers were made whole which is now the case and that's why he could now announce a new brand called Dutch Pinball Exclusive which is a basically a new company, a sister company of Dutch Pinball, a collaboration with Melvin Williams, and the company is basically formed to build short-run titles of 500 or less pinball machines of a specific title. Now the first title being rumored to be taken into production is the Alice in Wonderland design from John Popaduic, which he made during his Zidware days. At that point it got no further than a prototype phone core stage, I would say, not even a flipping version as far as I know and you might wonder why this specific title and that has to do with Melvin Brower-Williams to buy the storage unit assets that belong to SIDWARE that were auctioned off I think a year and a half Yes, you may remember there was a People News article about all the former Zidware assets which were held in a couple of storage units in Illinois. Took some pictures of them, well, went to visit them, took some pictures of them. They were sold as part of a settlement between a bunch of buyers of Zidware games who never got their games, and John Popadiuk himself, in order to clear the debt or to satisfy the claim that they had against him. So they took possession of all those assets, which included a lot of drawings, some models, artwork, various parts, various ideas, concepts, and they were all put up for auction or put up for sale. and Melvin was one, if not the only, buyer of those. And so all those assets were then shipped over to Europe. Right. And so that's why now people are saying Alice in Wonderland will be the first title. And indeed, Barry and Melvin did put a post out on social media of them standing next to a machine, the underside of which appeared to be the design, which John Popperduke had come up with, or at least a variation of that. And you could just see a little bit of the backbox artwork as well behind it, which matched the artwork of Alice in Wonderland that we'd seen before. So that does lend credence to that being the title. although Alice in Wonderland is of course based on the Lewis Carroll book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland which was published I think in 1865 so it's long out of copyright so it's a copyright free licensed theme the Disney movie of course is not copyright free but it's not based on that it's based on the original book and seems to also be based on the drawings, the black line artwork that Jeremy Packer (Zombie Yeti), aka Zombie Yeti, did for John. So it looks like that's still being used, which is perfectly understandable. It's great artwork, incredibly detailed and evocative. But as far as I've seen, anyway, there was only play field and back glass. art for that crease. And it was in black and white. Yes, absolutely, just outline. So, given the fact that Jeremy's working for Stern Pinball now, it probably involved another artist being brought in to colour it in and maybe complete the cabinet artwork as well. So still a lot of work to do on that and of course just because, as we've seen in the past, just because John came up with a playfield design, doesn't necessarily mean that it works, or is it even feasible. Have you seen that in the past with Magic Girl, for instance, where there's a big design but lots of things don't actually work and don't lead to other places in the playfield. So plenty of work still to do to bring that into production. What I was going to say, just because we are talking about this right now, doesn't mean that the game is going into production this month or next month. As far as I can estimate, I would not be surprised if it takes at least until July before the game gets officially announced. And that basically has to do with Dutch Pinball still having to set up the second factory. Yes, you may remember that we actually mentioned probably a couple of times in the past that the Dutch had taken or were going to rent out the factories across the street from their existing one in Herkenbosch and were moving some of their office and design stuff out of the factory into the new building. That's still ongoing, as we understand it. so that they've only just announced that they've got this new building. So I think it will be, as you say, it will be a while before they're in any position to start building. Although they're only building short runs of 500 or fewer machines, that still requires a lot of set-up, and they're not just going to set it up for this one game. It needs to be an ongoing operation, and they can build more and more short-run titles. so it'll be months before they'll be in a position to announce anything I think right, but at least we have the announcement of Dutch Pinball Exclusive or DPX and well, we look forward to hearing more from DPX I think you'll be hearing a lot of DPX over the next few months so it's good to remember who they are and what it relates to Yeah. Right. Okay. Moving on. Yes. Okay. Well, we've been talking about various things that have been going on at Texas Pimple Festival, so let's move on to one of the other companies. Let's talk about Multimorphic, because they had a big display at the Texas Pimple Festival. They announced The Prince's Bride last month. That's right. Yep. And so they had three of those machines there as part of their 13-machine display of P3 games. They were showing, effectively, all the different titles that they had, or at least all the different playfield layouts that they had, and they could change the titles on the fly, of course. Thirteen machines, two rows of five, and they had three separate, the Princess Bride machines, which were set up, and kept busy the entire duration of the show. There were lines to play them at all times. So very, very popular. And they did a seminar as well at the show about the making of The Princess Bride, hosted by Jerry Sellenberg, of course, who heads up Multimorphic, with a panel of Stephen Silver, who was creative director of the game, Josh Kugler, lead software designer, Steve Scheuer, who also did the software, and Colin MacAlpine, the rules designer. so they were able to tell everybody all about their passion for the theme, all the Easter eggs and features they put into it, and their love of the movie and how the game relates to that. I'd like to say you'd be able to watch that back, but I'm not entirely sure whether any of the seminars are actually online at the moment. Yeah, I'm not sure either. They were streamed live. Yes. Yeah, because I know that, because I found out where the stream was. It was on Twitch. And a couple of the times I had to go back to the hotel room to process some of the pictures, and I was watching the seminars, making sure I didn't miss anything, on my laptop while I was doing it. But they didn't publicize that at all, which seems very strange. and then it was available on an entire day at a time on their Twitch channel and then it all disappeared. Whether it's going to be back or not, I don't know. I understand that some shows don't like making all their seminars available free of charge and it means people end up not going to them in person and just watch them when they get back home, which is not great for those who are actually doing the presentations to be talking to, of course, especially in an empty room. But on the other hand, you kind of wonder why go through all the trouble with streaming stuff and they're not telling anybody about it and then deleting it when you've done it. Yeah. Oh, well. Anyway. Mainly because you're off. Yeah, hopefully, because it was a good seminar. Well, they all were, in fact, so it was nice to see them. The People News report has pictures of them and a brief summary of the sort of thing they were talking about because I thought it was all going to be available online, so I didn't record any of it. and wouldn't be able to do such a good job as his team who were doing the streaming. So, anyway, yeah, as you say, let's hope it all ends up... If you did your report, I did not, because I was ill. You were, yes. You were quite ill, actually. You spent a lot of time in the room, in bed, asleep. And you seemed to arrive with, I don't know what it was, it was a bad cold or flu or a bug or whatever it was. Whatever it was, but it kept me down. Yeah, and you were kind enough. I was happy that I was able to at least assist with our So You Think You Know Pinball quiz on Saturday afternoon, but I could barely speak a sentence, a complete sentence. Yes, um, kind enough to share whatever it was you had with me, so I ended up catching it as well. Oh, you're very welcome. Oh, you're just generously personified. And, um, but it did mean that I did all the talking during the two hours of quiz. Which resulted in Martin having no voice in that whole subject. Yeah, I was croaking across the breakfast table at Dwight's home and trying to hold a conversation and not really being able to express myself very well. But fortunately, it improved a bit during the day. But yeah, I had all the same symptoms that you had, but delayed by about five or six days. Anyway, that is one of the reasons why we didn't actually do any face-to-face interviews with anyone. either because Jonathan was so down with whatever it was that he had that he couldn't speak to anybody over the table, could he give it to them, or later that I hadn't got any voice to speak either. So we were not in the best of health to do that. So apologies. We did expect to be able to interview lots of people, but for their sake and for ours, we didn't. But we'll try and make amends on that in future months. Right. Back to Multimorphic, who announced they will be attending the Midwest Gaming Classic. Indeed, yeah. Taking some of the P3 machines along, including the Princess Bride as well, to be able to play it there if you didn't get to play it in Frisco. And as with the show at Frisco, the Texas Film Festival that is, they have offers on if you want to buy the machines that they're using on their stand after the show is over so you'll be able to show pricing but also you'll be able to jump the line a bit I think in the case of Texas they weren't selling any of the Princess Bride casual modules but I think at the Midwest Gaming Classic they're saying that they will but they are pre-production versions they're not actually in production yet they're not going into production until the summer and so if you do buy those they will be swapped out later with a full production version but you know if you want to get a game there and then that's a good opportunity to pick one up straight after the show's over and of course it means there's time to ship them back so it's good news for Multimorphic 2 right now Multimorphic talking about one last item there some new code. Not actually from them, but from Nicholas Baldridge. His game, Drained, he's released a code update on the 22nd of March which adds a whole bunch of new features to the Drained walls and fixes a couple of bugs. And adds some new light shows as well to improve the performance of the game. So that's version 2.5.0.0. So if you have that drained game and the drained playfield module for your P3 machine, check to see whether it's been updated to version 2.5. Right, okay. Now, the biggest company, usually we start with Stern Pins, but so far we haven't mentioned them yet. But they were represented, I would say, by market specialties and fund amusements at the Texas Pinball Festival with a big stand focusing on mostly Jaws, but they also had Venom and Foo Fighters Kings and Jane Bond, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, that's right, yeah. Yeah. As well as quite a heavy delegation, I would say, from the Stern office, including George Gomez and Tanya Clive was there, Ryan Eddy, Dwight Sullivan. John Borg was there, although not speaking, not as part of the delegation, he was not speaking. He was there in personal capacity, I believe. Right, right. Michael Grant was there. Yeah. So, plenty of Stern Pinball staff, I would say, represented at the Texas Pinball Festival. Yeah. Yeah. George Gomez did of course a seminar on what's happening at Stern Pinball over the past year. I assume that's largely focusing on Insider Connected. And the move to the new factory as well. Right, yeah, okay. Tanya Clive did a seminar on Foo Fighters. Jack Danger was unfortunately not at the event because of the passing of his mother. Our sincere condolences. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, that news came through, which has put a downer on things, but Tanya did a very good job of representing Foo Fighters. Right. And Brian Eddy and Dwight Sullivan did a seminar on the making of Venom. Yep, another very interesting one with this sort of development and behind-the-scenes pictures of how the game came together and the ideas they came up with, some of which made it into the game, some of which didn't. So, again, I really hope that seminar makes it online somewhere. Right. Now, we mentioned the Ten York Slice seminar on Foo Fighters. There is some Foo Fighter news. We get to the 1.0 code update later on. But the official Foo Fighters accessories have become available, which include expression lighting, which is an upgrade for the premium model only, which costs you $500. There's a custom amp tube shooter knob for $225, lit by two RGB LEDs in the shooter rod housing. There are art weights for the pro only, which will cost you $100. And there's a topper priced at $2,000 with a rotating head that lights up. And that's about all it does. That's a bunch of RGB lighting effects. And there was laser cut side rails also available for $250. dollars. So that's all the Foo Fighters accessories that are currently available in the Stern shop. Yes. With various Stern pinball distributors of course. Yes, I checked it earlier, everything seemed to still be in stock, so there wasn't a shortage of them at the moment. But yeah, the expression lighting particularly, that's something which tends to disappear very quickly once it's available, and then is unavailable for long periods of time for most games, resulting in a lot of people saying, when are you going to get it back in stock? And, well, so if you want your expression lighting, $500 upgrade if you've got the premium. It doesn't fit into the Pro, and the LE's got it already. Then be advised to grab that while you can. Yes, absolutely. Other stuff from Stern. Well, there's lots of new code, of course. Jonathan just mentioned about Foo Fighters reaching version 1.0 that version was released on the 12th of March added a couple of new multiball modes ComboTron and Toytime Multiball won't go into details of all of those Toytime Multiball particularly works with the Topper which has illumination for each of the six key band members it also works if you haven't got the topper but it works differently if you've got the topper by default it carries across players and the completion of the six band members carries across players and across games so if you start a new game it picks up from where the previous game left it and the previous player so getting all six then allows you to start Toy Time Multi-Wall. Combotron Multi-Wall, as you can imagine, is based on combos, but won't go into the details of that. There's also a Multilater Frenzy mode as well. That's been added, along with lots of new speech, which is a very nice benefit for owners. New lighting effects and some tweaks to the rules for the game. So that's Foo Fighters. Jaws had a couple of updates this month. one of which was a rather urgent fix, which was version 0.86, which has since disappeared off the Stern website. You may remember Stern started this thing this month, March Madness Rankings, which kind of pitched every state in the US against each other, so the players, whenever you played or logged into an Inside the Connect game and played in a particular state, those scores counted towards that US state's ranking. Unfortunately, that kind of fell apart very early on when top tournament player Eric Stone posted a video showing his Jaws score, which was in the range of almost 4 trillion points, due to the fact he'd discovered and exploited a particular feature in the version 0.85 code of Jaws, which allowed you to complete all the bounty hunts and then shoot the spinner, and the spinner was adding billions of points per spin, which completely messed up everything. And that caused a bit of a ruckus online because Stern decided to delete it and called it sneaky foul play, which of course it's not, because Eric had actually posted a video of the entire game showing exactly how he did it, and there was no sneaky foul play at all, but it was just a failure of the scoring within the software. Anyway, lots of people got angry, as it was a legitimate score, but turned to Lisa anyway, and issued a quick fix, which was 0.86 on the 7th of March. They later, on the 20th of March, added 0.87, which of course included that fix, and a whole bunch of other things, including the Super Catch, Super Cast and Catch Mini Wizard Mode, which again, I won't go into the details for, but it's a multi-stage feature, and also includes lots of rule and lighting effect changes. finally Venom which has also reached version 1.0 that added a new hero ranking which tracks how many times you defeated Null and you can see your progress in the progress area of the Venom game on Insider Connected if you're into all that stuff and there's an extra mode called Million Plus Pops which is only for the Premium and Limited Edition and that's pretty much it for the code. I won't go into any of the more esoteric and minor details. So Venom and Fee Fighters now feature complete officially on version 1.0. JAWS not but adding lots and lots of new features and rules with every update Right okay So I understand you got some rumor news Yeah, I'm not sure what it is. Do we do rumors or should we ignore them? Or should we... Well, one isn't a rumor. ...going around is a fact, so we're factual about a rumor going around, right? Well, one's from the horse's mouth, I understand it, so not necessarily a rumor. Right. I can't confirm that it's from the horse's mouth, but according to Pineda, Open Gate Capital, who you might remember when we discussed that company a couple of months ago, when they bought Player One Amusement in Canada, a large distributor for coin-op amusement games over there. According to Canada, they are looking to buy Stern Pinball, and apparently made an offer. I'm not saying it's an offer they can't refuse. I have no further details on whether that is true or not. And the question remains, A. Will Stern accept the offer and sell the company and what will happen? Chances are nothing will change, only ship of the company. But they still keep making games. So that's rumor number one. And it might still be false, so no reason to lose any sleep over it. And rumor number two is, we just mentioned John Bork was present at the Texas Pinball Festival. And apparently, John mentioned to several people that when asked like, when is your next game coming? that he has designed two games since his last one, which I think is Turtle. Yeah, Turtle. Yeah. So in the meantime, he designed two games, but one of them, the license expired, and Stern is not renewing it. So that's basically complete game design down the toilet. And you wonder whether they are going to reuse it. apparently some of the mechanisms could be reused in a different design, but still it seems very odd to me that an entire team of, well, a design team basically, We go down the path of designing a game, which usually takes about a year, coming up with a game, and then the license is expired, and it's either too expensive or no longer interesting to renew it. And all the work you've done is basically down the drain. Yeah, I wonder how much of the team had got involved in it before they decided to shelve it, whether they'd gone to all the trouble of designing the video assets and the audio assets and the music for it, or whether it was still at the design at the Whitewood stage where they hadn't actually got that far. Hopefully they hadn't wasted all that time and effort because it's a big team now who has to work on every new game, and that means a lot of money goes in, and it would have to be pretty severe for CERN to ditch all that effort simply because the cost of the license was too much. It must have been quite a wrench to actually abandon or bail on that project. We wonder what the license is, but I don't know. Yeah, well, if you've got two designs, then maybe they went for the best one. Yeah, and that other design, I would probably say we're likely to see that around Pinball Expo end of the year, whenever they do... Well, you'd think it would be the next game, wouldn't you? So that would probably be towards the summer, late summer, because normally they announce they have a new game at the start of the year, don't they? for Consumer Electronics, for CES, at first. Sure, this year. Yeah, and then at EAG International Expo in London a week later. That's normally where that game premieres. And obviously, the World Expo is in October. So, we'd expect it to be, John's game, to be out a month or so before that. So, but anyway, interesting talking about that. And we were talking about American as well earlier. Just a little diversion there. It looks like Pinball Expo are going to be having three factory tours this year. And was it four? Was it four? I can't remember who the fourth one was. They're certainly going to have three. They'll be doing American, Jersey Jack and Stern. And Chicago Gaming. Chicago Gaming. Right. Okay. But I sound corrected, or I sit corrected in this case. So, yes, it's going to be a really busy Pinball Expo. We'll come to that more closer to the time. But, yeah, you will expect to be seeing, hopefully, John's game and also Ryan's game at American on the line during those factory tours. Right, right. And speaking of Pinball Expo, there was just an announcement that they are doing a focus on new innovations in pinball, whatever that may mean. But if you're a vendor and you have a new product, an innovative product to showcase, there will be special opportunities for that, I suppose. Something like that. There's a page on it on the Pinball Expo website. Ah, well done. I hadn't spotted that. Yeah, very good. Okay, so moving on. I think that's all the swim pinball news we have for this month. So let's move to Spooky Pinball, who were also, of course, at the Texas Pinball Festival and had a big display of games. They had their Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Looney Tunes games there, their current titles, their manufacturing. As well as another one they're still making, Scooby-Doo. They had that and several of those there as well. Very, very popular, all those titles. and that whole area was crowded nearly all the time that I looked at it. I could hardly get on any of the games. I did get a brief go on a Texas Chainsaw Massacre game early on in the show before it got too crowded, before it was actually open to the public. But even before that, it was busy. They did a question and answer seminar, which was hosted by Kerry Hardy. the team from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Looney Tunes were there to answer questions both from Kerry and from the audience again hopefully that will be available online you can catch it, it was interesting that was one of the ones I was watching the second half of from the hotel room while processing the video walk around of the show but also interestingly Probably the most interesting feature, although all the games, of course, were interesting. It was the first chance for a lot of people to actually get to play Chainsaw Massacre and Nini Tunes. But they also had the Motorhead homebrew game from Dave Peck in New Zealand. It was on their stand because it had a lot of help from the Spooky team, and it uses the Spooky Pinball board set to actually run the operating system. Brad Brad Albright is the artist who did the art package for the game and he had a stand right next door as well where he was showing the playfield and cabinet art that he'd done for it and it was so popular that they were so well received that many people were now calling for Spooky to make this Motorhead game as their next title. No indication yet that that's going to go ahead, but it certainly would seem to be a very popular title if they did choose to make it. And it has some very nice sculpts and mechs on the game, and I'm trying to remember whether I actually played it. I don't think I did. I was always busy. Did you? What did you think of it? Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, very well implemented. I think the code still needs a little bit of work but the voice calls were rather funny I would say I would hope so yeah and if you're wondering what the game looks like think the black, white, red Sands Hour game, that comes a bit close, obviously the artwork is way different but black and white and red were the main colors, I would say, in the art palais. And I think it's a single-level game, no ramps, if I recall correctly. But it was really fun to shoot. Yes, absolutely. And it looked amazing. It had a really nice fist mechanism on the game as well, which I thought was very well sculpted. and it was funny when you saw it actually operate. So, yeah, amazing. And that game came all the way over from New Zealand. So I think Dave did an amazing job with that. And it would almost be a tragedy if it doesn't end up being taken into production by someone. Right. So, well, let's just hope that another company doesn't skip the Motorhead license because we've seen that happen before. Yes, that's true, yes. Yes, exactly. I always want to keep quiet about it. The word is out now. So, let's see. Yeah. Okay. So, Jersey Jack Pinball. Mm. Yes. Another big stand at Texas Pinball Festival. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, they had lots of Elton John games there, of course, and Godfather and a sprinkling of Toy Story 4 games as well. Right. Elton John designer and lead programmer Steve Ritchie and Bill Brutt did a seminar at the show about the making of the Elton John game, which is very interesting as well. But probably the biggest news... The biggest news actually had to do with the Elton John game, but it was not so much Jersey Jack pinball news as it was two collector edition games, I believe signed by Elton John himself, were auctioned off at the Elton John... The Academy Awards viewing party and fundraiser, wasn't it? Yes, in Hollywood of course, in Las Vegas, or Los Angeles, sorry. And I believe what happened was one game was put up for auction and there was a bid for $200,000 and there were two parties interested and neither didn't want to go higher than $200,000. This is just for one game? Right. Yes. So, and both wanted a bit of a standoff, and in the end, Jersey Jack said, we'll throw in a second game, and you can both buy them for 200,000, bringing in 400,000 American dollars for two collector edition games. Fantastic. That was part of a fundraising auction, which managed to raise over $10.8 million for the Elton John AIDS Foundation on that particular night. Remember last month we talked about a collector edition of the Elton John game going under the hammer at Christie's. Right, 55,000. Exactly, 55. We thought that was a huge amount of money. Well, this is what happens when you get a lot of very wealthy people turning up at an Elton John's Academy Awards party and fundraiser, and they push that bar higher, right up to $200,000 per gallon. Yeah, which will be the new price point of Jersey Jackets. No, it won't. I kid, I kid. April Fool's, people. Well, I can't afford them where they are now, so it doesn't really matter how much they go up to, as far as I'm concerned. But I hope they bring in the money. Right, as we don't do rumours, do you want to do some rumours? Well, I can only mention the fact that there's a rumour going around that the next Jersey Jack title is rumoured to be The Matrix, designed by Mark Seidman, Mr Keith P. Johnson as the lead programmer, artwork by Christopher Franchi and sound designed by David Keel. Well, that's a rumour. Or it's a rumour of a rumour, perhaps. No, it's a rumor. We're reporting the fact that this is the rumor that is going around. Right, there you are. It's a fact that it's a rumor. Right, good. Okay, well, we don't know anything about when it should become available. And it sounds to me like Elton John is really getting good reception at shows. People are really surprised by how much fun it is. So I think Elton John might actually have a longer production lifetime than expected. Yeah, we said it before, it's potentially a bit of a sleeper game. People tended to write it off a bit when it first came out because of the theme. But once they played it, they completely turned around on the game. And yeah, I think they'll be making that for a while. At least I hope they will. But maybe Mark is not so keen on continuing to make Elton John and keeping his game off the production line. But anyway, we will see what happens with that. No point second-guessing. And we move on. There's still one more thing I would like to make. Go on, then. Is it a rumor? No. Oh, good. No, this is a fact. We're still waiting, or we should schedule an interview with Steve Ritchie and possibly also Bill Grubb, lead programmer of the game. We were supposed to record it at the Texas Pinball Festival, which did, well, the Texas Pinball Festival did take place, but we just explained why we didn't do any interviews. We're still waiting for that to happen. We have talked to Steve in the past, and that was mostly off the record, so we could not use that, although a lot of the off the record stuff that we could not use was also used in the seminar at the Texas Primo Festival so I suppose at some point either we do a new interview or we see what we can publish from our previous interview but that seems to me like something that we might see if we can do the upcoming month Yeah, quite long overdue so yeah and as you say we were due to do it last month or this month I should say during the Texas Film Festival but circumstances got in the way indicating that we shouldn't do it and I don't think it would have been a good idea for us to interview Steve anyway at that point because he's just recovering from an operation so probably just happened to risk catching any infections of the type which which you were generously donating. Yay! Super spreader for once. Well, I don't think you were alone in that. Reading some of the comments online after the show, it seemed a lot of people came back from that show with some kind of bug or other. So I think it was just a bad time all round for infections. Something in the air, I see. Yes, we're playing the air conditioning. There we go. Right. Okay, so we'll move on now to Barrels of Fun, which is a very successful new company who, with their Labyrinth game, have been barnstorming it, really. They had three of their Labyrinth games at the Texas Pinball Festival. And all the time, big lines. Yeah, absolutely. I was about to say, we're occupied all the time. and although it wasn't that long away if you wanted to get on the game, but it's good to see it's so popular. They had a seminar at the show, of course, with Bo and Keren, Phil Grimaldi, Brian Savory, John Savage, Jessica Donado, David David Van Es, and Trent Armstrong. So the panel was there from the company. Excuse me, I'm not going to have a little cough, because that's what I have. Anyway, Bowen also did a how-to-play labyrinth demonstration in a separate seminar, a late-night seminar. I think it was probably one of the last ones of the show. It was actually the last one of the show, apart from the Go Gorillas band, Go Gorillas, who played in the hall a bit later. I couldn't stay for it all because I needed to go out and get something to eat at that point, but I did leave and I think Bones was having a bit of a tough time getting that far into the game. But I'm sure that the audience got to see quite a lot more of the game than I did and some of the deeper parts and learned some good strategy hints on how to play Labyrinth. Probably the other exciting news is that Barrels of Fun are now selling pinball armour. You may remember pinball armour was a thing a while ago. I did an article on it in Pitbull magazine. There you go. If you, either two or three. Right, so that long ago. Yes, it was, seemed to be very popular, but then disappeared. And I don't quite know why. Yes, actually it went out of business I believe. Oh, okay. Well, now it's back. Maybe it's back three times as long. But, yes, you can now buy... It's from the deck. It is, yeah. You can now protect your game with a pinball armour head cover, which costs $110, a body cover, $245, a leg bag to carry your legs around. So that'll be your pinball legs. $125, or a full set of all three for $410. Alternatively, you can get a material wrap which wraps around the game and protects the head from damaging the side rails or getting damaged. And that's available for $90. It wraps around the body and the head. so if you're transporting a game and you tilt it upright it keeps it all together but also protects most of the visible part of the cabinet and bat box as well so that's a nice alternative to bubble wrap or shrink wrap around the game or a bit of rope or anything or ratchet straps yes as well while providing protection right I suppose that rounds it up for Barrels of Fun Yeah, if you want to buy that stuff You can go to the Barrels of Fun website Which is collectfunwithak.com Right, okay So, now, since we're already in Texas Let's move to Turner Pinball Who are also in Texas They are, yes, in San Antonio Yes, and I have to say I was very impressed with Turner Pimble's presence at the Texas Pimble Festival. They brought two games, two updated games, as you say, a Ninja Eclipse game in a new cabinet. They did not abandon all the new ideas that they showed off at Pimble Expo in 2023, but the cabinet got a larger coin door, was deeper, and had more of a traditional pinball shape to it. Yes. But they did still use the glass frame, which completely lifts off the game and also covers the apron area. And includes playfield lighting as well. Right. So, yeah. But they also updated playthrough art and the game, of course. As far as I could see, the game was very well received at the festival. Absolutely. They did take some of the sort of more attractive moulded parts out of the game. The mould for the temple at the back, in particular, has been replaced with flat plastics. which is a bit of a shame, but you have to do what you have to do to hit the price point because they are offering a price for the first 100 units, which they call limited release, of US$6,994, which is actually $1 cheaper than Barrio's BBQ Challenge, which is US$6,995. So I suppose they can claim to be maybe the cheapest game. cheapest game at the show, maybe. Right. Yeah, but definitely not the cheapest looking game. No, no. I think it's definitely a much more conventional looking backbox and playfield design. The backbox that they showed at the Pimble Expo in October was open at the back with just a single sheet of printed plastic for the trans light. That's been replaced now with with a full traditional backbox which looks a lot better and is a lot more secure as well and as you say the cabinet also looks more like you would expect around the cabinet to look but yes it certainly does incorporate some of the um some of the innovations uh which uh which they were showing off before including the means to lift the play field out as well because as you say when you take the glass off it takes the apron off and then you've got a you've got some grab handles there in order to lift the playfield out, which seems like a very good idea. Although I don't know what the cost of the glass cassette is, or what happens if you need to replace the glass for any reason, it gets scratched. But, you know, these are all minor issues, when the actual gameplay itself looked very good. I was watching a video of it earlier today, and, yeah, it looks like it's got some nice, easy-to-understand rules with some good depth as well, and you could do some lighting effects on the playfield and it seems to flow nicely too. Yes, yes and what the theme is, let's call it Asian influence, there's a complete backstory on that. Earlier on Chris Turner, the founder of the company, already announced that there will be a, I believe, 36 page comic book available for those who buy the game, the limited release. But there's now also a video available which explains the backstory of the game, which is on the Turner Pinball YouTube channel. on their website as well. I was watching it or I saw it there earlier. Right. So it's quite a complex story which I did not expect because actually the game is not that difficult or the objectives in their various modes are easy to understand I would say. But there are an awful lot of characters in the game as well so it's useful to know their roles in either helping you or trying to block your progress through the game. Right, so I did try to help out the company with some constructive criticism if I may call it that because I played the game and I really liked how it played but I think on my second or third game I was in a specific mode which I started on ball one I needed to finish one shot couldn't get that done and that mode kept going and going was not timed or didn't even stop when the ball drained yes you continued on your next ball so as long as you didn't make if you didn't make the finishing shot which might also it could be that you made the shot but a switch doesn't register then you're basically stuck in same mode for the rest of the game, I suggested to either make such mode timed, so it times out, or if you train, then it's end of that mode, whether you made it or not, or whether you completed the task at hand, but if you boldly train it, usually the mode ends. Yes, some modes do run on and on, others don't. There was a particular mode where you were limited to the number of flips that you have in order to complete it, and if you run out of flips, then that mode finishes. So they don't all run on forever, but I understand what you're saying here, some of them do. Yeah. Yeah. But other than that, seriously compliments and I've seen great reviews of what people thought of the game and some people even indicated that Turner Pimble was the company that made the biggest impact compared to their impact on Pimble Expo with the progress that they made on this game. Yeah, well it's good that they've listened to the feedback they received from that pinball expo reveal and made a significant number of changes to the game and all hopefully all for the better so uh we will see when uh that game is available to buy now um through the turnipinball.com website if you want to see that um as i said it there is a special pricing supposedly for the first 100 units but it's not quite clear what happens after those are sold, how much the pricing changes or in which direction, presumably more expensive. But that could be something which puts people off buying the game because you put the price up. Okay, but it does. Let's move on to Chicago Gaming. And they, of course, were also at the Texas Football Festival. They had six of their Pulp Fiction games on their own stand and another one was available on the Nitro Pinball stand. So, again, very, very popular. Everybody wanted to play the game. They hadn't already, or in fact, even if they had, wanted to replay it again and get a reminder of how good a game it is. It was also backed up by Butch Peel from the company who was doing a presentation in the seminar room where he was talking about how he created the manual for the Pulp Fiction game and I don't know we mentioned last month quite what a a veritable tome that particular manual is and it is available for download if you want you go to the Chicago Gaming website but having a printed version is a thing to do. Lovely. Yeah, it's great. It's a massive, great volume. But Butch talked about the creation of it and everything we went into that, and the electronic version as well, during the seminar. And again, he's always a good speaker, and this talk was as good as his previous ones. Right. So now here's a suggestion. if you're looking to buy a pulp fiction game, if you have the manual, basically, that's how to build your own pulp fiction game manual. Because literally everything is in there. So all the schematics, all the boards, everything. So if you can get your hands on a playfield and you put together a cabinet, you're basically there. Yeah, you need the boards, of course. Yes. Yeah? Yeah. Well, you can make those yourself. Descriptions in the manual. You need a couple of custom sculpts. That's it. To put on the playfield. But all the generic parts and so on, you know. You make it sound so easy. Oh, yeah. Well, good idea. Good luck to you if you're up to doing that. okay, move on over to France and what will they be doing? well of course they have their Space Hunt game which is in production albeit slowly if I may say so but they have been showing their Space Hunt game at various sorry French and a Belgian pinball show during the month of March. Also collecting feedback from players which indicates me that they're still working on code, trying to improve it and implement suggestions from people that played the game. From what I can see so far is they are bringing only one game to a show. It might help them if they are able to bring more than one because it basically makes a bigger impact. But that's just my opinion, I would say, or two cents, whatever you want to call it. That's all the news that I could find from Hexaping. Okay. While we're on companies beginning with H, let's go to Taiwan and Homepin and what they've been up to because there's a few new snippets from them, I'd say. Yes. If you're looking for this is final step news, Martin found something, but most of the news has actually to do with a new board that they are working on, The first being a new voltage regulator solenoid driver board, which is currently being tested. That's going to be part of their new board set. Right, so they're going to be using it on their own games. Sorry. Yeah. No, I did talk to Mike last month and he mentioned that their next game will have a complete new board set. So I assume this new voltage regulator solenoid driver board is intended for that new board set, not for this final time. Right, okay. Or not a replacement board for Williams or Bally or anything like that. No, no, that's the other one, which I'm going to talk about now, which is designed by a fellow Dutchman, Peter, also known as Incognito. He designed a bridge board, which is to prevent fires in early solid-state Williams and Data East pinball machines. And apparently, Peter licensed that board design to HomePin, or came to an agreement with them so that they would manufacture the board set and distribute it. So that will become available through home pin distributors. Right. Well, it certainly sounds like something you want to have. You can rent fires in early Williams Solid State and Daytree's games. Yes, sounds like a must-have to me. Yes, you mentioned about Spinal Tap. This is Spinal Tap. not really much to say this month there hasn't been much to say very much at all in recent months there is a short video on their Facebook page showing a flipper mechanism being screwed onto a This Is Final Tap playfield which is not very exciting it doesn't say much about what they're doing but I did notice that it says on the playfield this is a none more black edition I thought hang on is this a different name for the same game or a new version of the same game? Because it wasn't called None More Black when it was first released. So I had a little look around, and on the SpiralTapPinball.com website, it now has None More Black Edition as the only edition, to be fair. So it looks like it's been rebranded with that name, and it actually mentions that as part of the logo for the game. And it says it now includes the third flipper, which we had been mentioning for some time was going to be added, has updated firmware and hardware, new graphics on the play field, and includes the dynamic topper. I think we've seen the topper before. That was like the devil head type thing with the horns that talked. But that's included. It is interesting, there's confirmation now that it does include the third flipper. There are no pictures of that. I think it's still being worked on. But yes, so none more black is the edition that Home Pin will be selling from now on. Okay. And that rounds it up for Home Pin. I think it does, yes. I am curious to see how far the progress is on their upcoming game, because I believe the plan was to show it at a Taiwanese trade show, which was either, probably is this month in April, so I'm really curious whether we get to see what game that actually is. The upcoming game, not Swine All Tap. The one after. Which we did talk about last month. As potentially having open source software on it. Yes. Okay. Okay. Sticking in that area, Haggar's Spinball Australia, I couldn't find any news. I don't think you... No, I had a good look around. I couldn't see any comments. I did see on the inside there was a post from Wayne, who runs one of the big pinball companies down there, claiming that Haggis were being sued for non-delivery of games. But there's nothing to back that up. It's been sued by an overseas buyer who wanted their money back, but haven't seen any confirmation of that or verification of that, and certainly nothing from Haggis themselves. There have been no announcements beyond what we reported last month about having to restructure and slow down production further. Right. Now, speaking of the liberty of the Kings, there was a Centaur revisited model at the Nitro stand at the Texas Bingo Festival. There was indeed, and we both got to play it, I think. Yeah. So what I noticed was there is apparently the ability to choose between either the classical rules or the updated rules. And with the updated rules, there's a song playing in the background, which I actually was able to shazam and find out what it was. Let me look it up. What stuck with me, aside from the song, which was quite catchy indeed, the band is called Death Lab, and the song is called Devolition. And if you Google that song, it turns out to be a royalty-free song that you basically can include in anything. But what I notice mostly is that that song is basically the background playing. It doesn't really interact with the game, it's just playing that song. Right, all the way through. Continuously, right. So either that needs some software coding that it, of course it ends when the ball breaks and so on, but that's about it. And then it starts over again with the next ball. Yeah I suspect it's almost like a placeholder for what will eventually be in it. That's a very cool placeholder. Yeah, well, okay, it gives you an idea of what will be in it eventually. I played it, I think, with the original rules, so I don't know how the game played, compared to something I was reasonably familiar with. It seemed to play very nicely indeed. I did find that, well, the switches didn't seem to be working very well, which was the one that led up to the captive ball on the left-hand side that knocked down the drop target. Because if you shoot it the correct way, it's supposed to give you two values. And every time I made that shot, it went, oh, do you see the whole value? And I thought, oh, it shouldn't be. I made the shot. So that was a bit... Right, yeah. I found the drop target also a little bit unreliable, I would say. Yeah, I also found it quite hard with the flipper angle. It wasn't easy to shoot them with the 1, 2, 3, 4 targets across the middle. But hey, it's minor stuff. but the build quality of the game looked absolutely outstanding, I have to say. Yes, absolutely. The quality of the artwork and the finish on the cabinet was superb. The playfield looked wonderful. Even the colouring on it was a lot more subtle than I was able to believe from the publicity photos when it was first announced. So I really do hope they get to take that game into production and can overcome their financial issues because it looks amazing. Even the pattern on the floor that it generates just seemed a really nice touch. And looking at the back of the backbox as well and seeing how well that's put together, it just oozes quality. So fingers crossed for Haggis that they get that game and particularly all those people who've put their deposit down and they do actually get their game. Anyway, I think we can say an awful lot more about that yet, But we can stay in Australia with another company who are a new company, who are even newer than Haggis, who, as we reported before, Vector Pinball have their H-Pool Fury game. They put that up for sale now at a US dollar price, which equates to 7,000, sorry, an Australian dollar price, which equates to US dollars of 7,000, which, as I said before, seems to be the new benchmark for simpler playfield layouts. And this has a pretty simple playfield layout. Yeah, a single level, I'd say. Single level. I originally thought that the centre of the playfield was a LCD with a pool table design, but it's actually just artwork with LED inserts, which does the job perfectly well. It is a simple game to play. There are some videos available if you want to watch and see. Not sure whether it's going to be a big sell. It's up against some pretty stiff competition for the likes of American with their Barry O game and Turner now with their Ninja Eclipse, all at the same price point of $7,000. Yeah, by the time they get into Australia, they are a lot more expensive, I suppose. True. That US dollar price was minus the 10% general sales tax, which you have to pay in Australia. So I guess that would apply also to American and Turner games. But you do get a lot more for your money from the American, well, a lot more physically for your money from Ninja and Barry games. so it's getting to be a crowded market there and of course you're also competing with Stern at the pro level too so still 7000 seems to be the base these days anybody can come in significantly below that is probably likely to call themselves quite a good niche in the low end pinball market right, ok Well, if there's no other news from Vector Pinball, then I suggest we move to Podraci Pinball. Or Podraci Gaming, depending on which logo you want to read off their Facebook page. Yes, well, we know about their... Well, actually, do we? Because I'm just thinking, they announced a collaboration with Planetary Pinball Supplies to remake classic Dally Williams games. Was that in the past month? I think it probably was, wasn't it? Well, I think they earlier announced a new collaboration with Pedretti Pinball to remake specific Williams spare parts and so on. Yes, indeed. And this might have been an upgrade to that, that they are now also going to make games. Yeah, well, they were making the 2.0 kits, of course, which we knew about for Funhouse, Rudy's Nightmare and World in Total Chaos. But now they're going to be remaking entire games. And there's some questions as to exactly which games they're going to be working on, because obviously they are in competition now with Chicago Gaming. They're also remaking classic Buddy Williams games. So the suggestion is that... There's a rumor going around. Oh, do tell. That their first game will be Funhaus. Right, exactly, yes. So, of course, as I just mentioned, they do remake the 2.0 kit for Rudy's Nightmare for Funhaus. So that already exists. So they could make that as an entire game, of course. Now, part of their complete game plans, they have announced a couple of partnerships, one of which is with Classic Playfield Reproductions, based in Nova Scotia, Canada, indeed, who are going to be making their playfields for their reproductions. And the second collaboration is they've partnered up with Brian Allen of Flyland Design, who is renowned for his remaking or reimagining of classic Bally Williams artwork, in particular, Backglasses. And he is going to be doing artwork for Podresi Pinball reproductions. So that kind of suggests they're not going to be doing direct remakes, you know, like exact versions of games like Chicago Gaming does. No, like Attack on Mars, League of Madness, Monster Bash, Cat's Canyon, where all the artwork is exactly the same. If Brian's going to be doing new versions of the artwork. Now, I did wonder whether that meant, if they were doing like Funhouse, Woody's Nightmare, for their 2.0 kit, they came with a back glass and some decals I mean, cabinet art blades. But, of course, it doesn't include an entire cabinet or the backbox side art. So that would need to be recreated as well or need to be printed. So are they going to do a complete Rudy's Nightmare game rather than just being a straight funhouse or maybe be able to switch between the two of them? There's lots of options there. And would that then mean they do a whirlwind afterwards? But, yeah, so as you say, the rumor is that it could be Funhouse. Some of that art exists, some of it doesn't. It would need to be created. So maybe that's what Brian's going to be working on next. But as of now, we don't know exactly what their next title is going to be, or first title, I should say, is going to be as a complete game. And they haven't announced it. They've entered a few teases and shown some pictures of shooter housing, shooter-world housings, with the Pedretti logo on them, where a Williams logo would have been in the past. So we'll wait to see until they're ready to announce something. Right. So, and I suppose that rounds it up for Pedretti. I think so. In Italy. Now, there's a bunch of companies that we're briefly going to mention, but there was really no news from them. The first one being Pimble Adventures in Canada. Although I did get a text from Andrew McBain, that is, I believe, who saw a post of me on my Facebook that I was ill during the Texas Pimble Festival. He wished me well and he said that their Elements game is greatly improving and will be revealed soon. So that will be the second or the third reveal. Re-revealed. Right. Okay. Right. There was no news from Cardona Pinball, although you did publish your review of the Black Rose Skull and Bone kit. Yep, a long-awaited in-depth review of that is on the Pinball News site now. If you want to know what it involves to fit it and what the outcome is and whether we think it's worth the effort. Right. So, yeah, hop over to Pinball News for that and, of course, all the Texas Pinball Festival news that we've been talking about before. Right. So then, okay, from Spain, no news from Bitronic. of SPR Pinball or Quetzal Pinball. No, no updates there. Yeah, also no news from Circus Maximus. I don't think we'll be hearing much from them. No, sadly not. And then there's other news. Yeah, also at Texan Spinball Festival, although Hex Pinball weren't there, Romain who's part of that team was there as as part of the the Pinsound team was there with Timothy Timothy Timothy yes so and they were promoting apart from the regular Pinsound products they had two new products to demonstrate which were just announced days ahead of the Texas Pinball Festival that's right yep and they had them right there for people to see and see how easy they were to install. One of which is especially innovative, I think, is cool speaker LED lights. Now, you think, this is for Spike 2 games with the rectangular speaker grills. Well, you think, oh, yeah. The hexagon holes. Yes, right, yeah. You think, oh, yeah, we've seen light kits for that before, but this is somewhat different. It covers the entire area of the speaker without impacting on the sound. So it's actually got LEDs right across the floor, which allows you to do full area animations and put text and stuff. And I think they were demonstrating it on the one I saw was on the Godzilla, where they had, you could put right-scrolling writing on it, you could have flames, you could have all kinds of things that covered the entire speaker. look very impressive. Tied into the game through the sound. So basically it listens to what the sound is and uses intelligence to work out what animation it should be showing at that particular time, which is quite clever, but it doesn't mean that they have to be customised for each model because obviously the effects and the sounds that it's listening out for will vary across the game. again. I think there are about three different ones of all, three or four different models supported at the moment, and there'll be more available. Very simple to fit, really just a few seconds to unplug a couple of connectors, plug in the new board, replug everything. Everything's done within 30 to 40 seconds, and equally simple to take it all out again. So really designed very well. The second product is an improved audio amplifier board, which also plugs in very simply. Unplug where the speakers are plugged into the existing Spike 2 board. Plug this board in its place. It has cut out in it for the LEDs for the backbox, so it doesn't get in the way of that. And plug the speakers into the new board, and you get a much more powerful and higher quality audio amplifier than the one that's included by default on the Spike 2 boards. So, yeah, they looked and sounded very good. So, congratulations to Pinsound on the launch of those two new products. I'm sure you can find more details about them on the Pinsound website. Right. And then we, of course, it was Texas Pinball Festival, and we do our So You Think You Know pinball quiz. We used to open the show with that on Friday afternoon, but we have been moved to Saturday afternoon, which is a busier time slot, or more people are at the show. Again, we were hosting our quiz in the happy hour bar area. Great turnout, I have to say. And I think it's only appropriate to thank our sponsors, who generously donated all the prizes that we gave away during the quiz. I think it was an amazing selection, our best yet. In fact, we had so many great prizes. We had so many prizes. We had so many prizes. We ran an hour late. We did the quiz for two hours. Yes. And including prizes that we gave away included a play field for Legend of Valhalla, and back glasses for Legend of Valhalla and Hot Wheels from American Pinball, as well as a barbecue apron, or whatever you call it. Yes, from the Barrio game. And some posters as well. I forgot about the posters. Yes, sign posters from Crafty Tank Horse. Right, okay. And we got a signed playfield and a mirrored back glass for Labyrinth from Barrels of Fun. Very thank you. Beautiful, beautiful stuff. Thank you very much to David for that. We got Elton John and the Godfather banners from Jersey Jack Pinball, which were very popular. People were really into Windows. Yeah, it was devastating when they didn't win them, but hey, they always end up with a good price. Spooky Pinball was very generous with Translites from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Looney Tunes. We got t-shirts from Beck Alley Creations, Nitro Pinball, Turner Pinball and Cardona Pinball. And we got holographic Stern Pinball stickers from spin pinball. Careful. Don't choke. Yeah, yeah, sorry. I'm still not completely recovered. Yes, I know the feeling. Yes, I'm about a week behind you in recovering, so... Well, then you're as easy in it for another week. Yeah, thanks. That's reassuring to hear. Yeah. Right, okay. But that wraps it up for all the sponsors for our So You Think You Know Pinball quiz. Yes, thank you to all of them. They were very, very generous. There were so many great top prizes, we actually had to start rationing them, didn't we? Come up with a new rule that if you win a playfield or a back glass, then that was basically the end of your participation, and we let other people win some of the other prizes. But it was a nice situation to be in, to have so many wonderful prizes. So thank you for the generous, very generous sponsors. of the quiz and just shows just how how good the the pinball industry is at being generally supporting players and shows like Texas Chef. Right so and that wraps it up for March of 2024. I think it does yeah so we will be back at the start of May with our next thing. We will most most likely be back next week. Well, we might be. With an exclusive interview with Daniel Jensen about the Pinball Brothers ABBA pinball machine. Well, I was about to say we'll be back with our next pincast. Right. Looking back at all the events in the pinball world through the exciting month of April. But yes, as you say, we could well be back before that with all the exciting news from Sweden and the launch of the ABBA games. So, yeah. So until then, anyway, whether we see you mid-month or not until the end of April, we hope you have an amazing month, amazing April, and look forward to seeing you again for next month for our latest edition of the regular Pimble Industry News Pincast. The one that's the industry business. That's right, yes. Absolutely right. And we don't just say that. Everybody in the industry tells us that they do listen to it. so we always have to be careful what we say but hey, it won't affect anything so, until next time have a wonderful month or a wonderful couple of weeks and we'll speak to you again soon so from me, Martin Ev of Pinball News and from me, Jonathan Houston of Pinball Magazine we wish you a wonderful month and we'll see you next time thanks, bye bye

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*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: fe93f6e8-1add-4d77-8121-4149c3c3017b*