Welcome to Kaneda's Pinball Podcast. You know, this doesn't happen very often. I recorded a show and then I need to do a new show because we finally got an update The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Tim Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. I'm probably going to get to 500 before Fathom's shipped to customers, but I don't know. I'm seeing a Fathom go into a box. But I want to welcome Mario Party, Brian, Dave Peck, Eric, Shannon, Trey, Jeff, David, and Joseph to the Kaneda Club. All right, so here's the thing. I mean, this is big news. We all have been wondering what is happening over at Hagga Spinball, where are the games, where are the updates? I've been saying it that Damien has promised people that they should see their games on We are live on the line in testing in April and guess what? It's still April and this is a video of games on the line being tested by Marty and Damian and team over there. So first I wanted to say this, congratulations guys, you did it. I know it's a year late, but these games, I will say it, these games look sexy AF. I mean the amount of chrome, the amount of bling, the amount of attention to detail in these products. If you're in on a fathom, I think today is the day you've been waiting for for a really long time because these final versions of the mermaid edition that I'm seeing right now, they look better than the prototype of the game. And when they lift the playfield, the attention to detail inside these games and on the cabinet and on the build is very, very, and I mean this, very impressive. I am not seeing this level of attention to detail in any other machines out there in the world. So I think you guys are in for a treat. I did find the video kind of funny when Marty is sort of looking over the games and then dramatically puts his little approved by Marty Robbins sticker onto the game. Then the lights go out and you see this like box of blinking lights and it is very, very dramatic. But look, the proof is in the pudding. But I also want to play a little bit, just a little bit of devil's advocate here because you know it's Kaneda's Pinball Podcast and we have five twippies for a reason. I do still want to know one thing, like looking at this video and seeing these eight sexy games lined up, it gives me and it should give you some confidence absolutely that people are going to get their fathom machines. Now the major question I have is this, how many people did it take to build these games? When I look at the video, you can see like three people in the video, maybe four. Is that the skeleton crew that's putting these games together or are there more people over at Haggis Pinball that are making these games? That's the one question mark I have right now is how long did it take to get these games on the line? How many fathoms can they build on a monthly and weekly basis? So that is still a question to be answered, but for those of you out there who thought No fathoms were going out in May and I was one of them. I mean, can you blame any of us who were skeptical of this whole thing? We hadn't seen any progress. We hadn't seen any games on the line and clearly they had been working hard to get this game to this point. Now this is a good day. This is something we should celebrate and this is a very sexy AF product. It just is. Now the real challenge begins and that's making all of these games on a consistent basis in a way that's going to appease the customers of these machines. But here's what will happen now. Now that people are seeing this, this is the thing that makes people actually be more patient. This is the kind of stuff that will make you not mind waiting longer than you probably thought you ever had to wait to get your game. But as long as some games go out, and this is the key with boutique pinball, as long as some games are going out the door and making their way to customers, it will make your wait less painful because you're not wondering whether or not the company's going to collapse next week or next month. You're just wondering when it's going to be your turn to get your game. Now that being said, I still think we need to know what is the cadence, what is the cadence by which they can make these games. I do think customers want to know, all right, I'm in on a game. I might be fathom number 75. When can I realistically expect my game? But I want to say, look, congrats to Marty. Congrats to Damien. Congrats to Duck Pinball, whoever you are. You've put these games together. That's a good thing. So I hope this is a new beginning for Haggis. I really do. I hope they can start to get these games out the door and I hope they're finally turning the corner. I hope they've got a lot of parts in house to keep making these games and to making these games on a weekly basis. And that's what we're going to cover now. I mean, now we can put to bed the speculation that games aren't on the line, like games are on the line. Like those games look like they're ready to go in a box. And in fact, in the video, they put one in a box. So this is all we really want to see. Now, it's funny, right, because it's April of 2022. I feel like this was the day they should have revealed the game and taken people's money. But that was a year ago. But you know what? A lot has happened in the world. And as you know, as a community, we are always willing to cut these companies a lot of slack when it comes to how long we will wait and how many deadlines we will miss. But my gosh, if there is one way to sort of overcome people's skepticism and if there's one way to turn people's perception of your company around, it's by making a game that is that damn sexy. I mean, it's that sexy. I mean, I would absolutely be lying to you if I didn't say I haven't seen a game that blingy and that sexy in a long, long time. So if you're in on a fathom now, here's the interesting part. If you in on a fathom mermaid right now what happens to your pre spot Does it go up in value Absolute freaking lootly it does because now the thing seems real But I would caution everybody and I mean this when I say we seen this before We've seen boutique companies do this before, you know, put together like a production video that looks like everything is going well. And we just don't know yet. I just want to have a little bit of caution that we don't know how long it took them to make these games. We don't know how many parts they have in house and we don't know what their staff is like to make these games consistently. And that is the next question I would ask. What is no longer a question is whether or not these games are beautiful works of art because they're absolutely that. And my hat's off to the people who made this game because it is gorgeous. I won't lie. It is gorgeous. And I hope Damian and Marty realize that all people wanted, all we wanted all month was to see these eight games being built. It's a little weird that they didn't do that. Like they didn't bring us on the journey. We saw Celts being built. We saw how they were going through the process of building Celts. I'm sort of perplexed why they didn't do that. I think it would have put a lot of the cynicism to rest. I think it would have put a lot of the skepticism to rest. But here we are and this is always the most important part. Like people would have forgiven deeproot if they made the Razzas and they put Razzas out in the world. All we want, the only thing we want is for companies to deliver the products, right? Deliver them in a timely manner, deliver them with quality. That is what this hobby has always been about. And these games look like they're built to the highest quality standards imaginable. And the other good thing about these games, don't forget, they're going to be bulletproof. Like those playfields will never dimple, they'll never dent, they'll never pool. So if you buy a Fathom, I think the only thing you have to do is get out your chrome polish The game is going to remain perfect like forever. So congrats again. Seeing this video really makes me happy. Gets me excited. Like I've been down on Haggis for like a year. But this gets me excited about what they have going. But also, you know, I want to make sure we ask those questions to make sure we know what manufacturing looks like. All right. Let me go on to this like Dragon's Lair debacle, right? Because this whole thing is weird. So the guy basically went on to Pinside, who's making the Dragon's Lair game. He said he's in tears. Like he's crying as he's typing this message about how he's been told he has to shut down his Dragon's Lair project. He has to reskin it. And then here's the weird part. Jason Knapp on Knapp's Arcade did a story about how the Kickstarter was coming for this game. Now, Jason had the screenshot where the Dragon's Lair Facebook page that was set up for this game says that, right? It says this is going to be the beginning of a Kickstarter we're going to do to get this game made. Now it turns out that the admin of that Facebook page isn't even the guy who's making the game. It's some guy that's trolling the guy making the game who's out to sabotage his efforts. Are you confused by this? I am. And so by doing that, by saying he was going to make this a Kickstarter, it forced the legal hand of the people who own the IP to tell this guy to stop making the game. But I just want to say this to the guy in Italy, there is nothing illegal about making A one of one, dragon's lair pinball machine for yourself. It's only the moment in which you start to take money and parade it around as if you're potentially going to make it for other people in which you need permission to do that. IP law is pretty easy to understand. Like I don't think it's legal when Franchi goes around and sells like Beetlejuice and Jaws artwork to everybody. Does he have permission to do it? I don't know. I would highly doubt that he does because we know that Roy Schneider does not give approval to use his likeness on Jaws stuff, but yet we see him there on that translate. So you can't go around to a show and raise money to build Dragon's Lair Pinball without permission, right? And I love how fast the community shut this thing down. It was like one day or two days. This community let Kevin Kulik run around for like six months and nobody even checked The best game to play and throw is the best game to win or lose. The best game to win is to win or lose. The best game to win or lose is The Valley Company is wider than the Grand Canyon. And I'm just so over, and I think everyone else is, of everyone just thinking because they made a one of one prototype that they can turn that into a pinball company. It takes decades of institutional knowledge to learn how to successfully become a pinball manufacturing company. Without that institutional knowledge, if you go down that road, it's going to be very expensive, Very hard and you're going to run into so many hurdles you never expected. I mean, just ask Marty and Damien how much fun the last year has been over at Haggis Pinball trying to figure this out, right? I still don't want to see the balance sheet because I still have a hard time thinking they're going to make money on these fathoms with the increase in all the material costs and shipping costs and gas prices. But it is what it is. But this is what happens is like when you go from fanboy to manufacturer and you have a dream of becoming a manufacturer and you're just a fanboy, it's really, really hard. It is next to impossible to actually do it and make a profit and keep your company afloat. And I think a lot of people get like stars in their eyes about, well, if I love it this much, I'm going to figure it out. I don't know. It's just not a road I would go down. So that's it with Dragon's Lair. Apparently this guy's dreams have been crushed and I don't really feel that bad. He can still make the game. He can still go to Chicago Expo with the game. He doesn't have to shut it all down. They don't have the right to do that. I think he needs to get a better understanding of what he's allowed to do versus what the law is. He's also in Italy. Good luck trying to sue a guy with international courts to shut down a one-of-one All right, nothing is going on over at Stern Pinball. We are waiting, right? We are waiting for them to catch up on their backlog. Now, what title do I think is coming out in August? Now, I first thought it would be like Keith Elwin's next title. It would be Jaws. But then I was saying to myself, wait, if they're trying to catch up on a backlog and they don't want to overload their manufacturing wing of the company, isn't Keith Elwin the The last designer game you would put on the line next Because once you put a Keith Elwin game out there you going to get inundated with orders If you want to sort of just get stuff going again and get your schedule back online I think it would make more sense to put Brian Eddy Venom on the line next and save Keith Elwin for like maybe the end of the year early 2023 just to give your manufacturing more time to catch up I think if Keith is next, I mean, right away, you're going to be backlogged again. I know people who still ordered Godzilla that won't even get it by the time Keith Elwin shows his next pin. I mean, that's how long the backlog is over at Stern Pinball. It's either going to be Jaws, James Bond or Venom. That is my guess. We know Jack Danger's working on a cornerstone title. Stern's got a lot in development, so it's going to be exciting. But we have like a four month wait before we see Stern's next game, which is going to be hard. But the one company that can take advantage of this weight is Jersey Jack Pinball, right? This is the moment. This is Jersey Jack's greatest scenario. No new Stern games. No CGC games flying out the door. Nothing for Multimorphic to truly worry about. You know, nothing happening anywhere else in the pinball world that has any competition for you. You now have a door to walk through in which you could put out a game called Toy Story in which all of the pinball money is going to flow towards you. If they can get Toy Story out in June to coincide with the Buzz Lightyear movie, this will be, and I mean it when I say it, this will be the greatest sales month that any pinball company has had in like 10 years. They're going to get more orders for this one game and every single family that's got pinball in their homes is going to want this game. And all of the Toy Story and Disney fanatics out there, when they see Toy Story pinball, I think you're also going to get people outside of the typical pinball buyer to be attracted to this on a level like we haven't seen before because it's Toy Story. And I think people truly underestimate the popularity of Disney and Toy Story and this iconic property that has had four incredible movies. Now look, it's going to come down a little bit too to how good is the game. Did Pat Lawler load it with toys? Is it going to be something that we look at and we say, I have to have that? I mean, for some of us like me, Killian grabs Buzz Lightyear every morning. It is no brainer for me. Like I'm all in on a collector's edition. I don't care what it costs. I don't care how many they're going to make. I am getting a Toy Story collector's edition. And Brenda and I have budgeted that out in our budget for 2022. I put it down as $16,000. That's what I expect it to cost. I know friends and family who are going to want one. I mean this is that kind of property that is so beloved. I mean Todd Tucky said it. Just wait. Just you wait and see what happens when this game gets revealed. It's going to be bonkers for them. Now there's a supply chain issue again. Are they retooling the factory? Yes, I think they are. That is why there are no more factory tours at JJP, right? We saw that our friends over at RB Flip France, they toured the factory and then we heard no more tours. It's not because they saw something or they freaked out the people at JJP. No, that's not why I spoke to them. Now, nobody's told me the reason why over at Jersey Jack, but it's common sense people. They need to tool up for the next game and they want to keep it private. So you can't tool up and start making toy stories if you have people visiting the factory. It's just that simple. So I look for Toy Story to be on the line in May with a reveal in June. Very much like Guns N' Roses, we're going to have a lot of games built on day one. Very much like Guns N' Roses, we're going to get an amazing launch video. They're not just going to put this thing out at a pinball show and that's that. Jersey Jack Pinball launches their games better than anyone in the industry. And then hopefully we don't have any playfield issues because that's the big thing, right? Are there going to be Mirco Playfields in the game? Yes, I'm here to tell you right now, I know for a fact these playfields will be made by Mirco. That has everybody nervous. You can't find anyone who feels great about that other than Mirco himself. I really hope that this game comes out and it's amazing and it's a world under glass filled with toys and I really hope that the conversation around Toy Story does not become a quality issue conversation. I really hope that Jersey Jack finally gets a game out the door that doesn't have an Achilles heel issue and it's happened every single game. So hopefully they've learned their lesson. They've been around long enough. They know what they need to do and I hope they do it. Alright what else is going on in the pinball world? Cactus Canyon, people are waiting for their Cactus Canyons, SC's are going out, they look beautiful. I'm not really that excited about covering CGC. Again, I don't know why they revealed the game 8 months ago. I don't know why you have to wait almost a year to get your LE. I don't know why they did it. And it's taken this company 3 years just to get Cactus Canyon on the line. I'm so bored by CGC. Am I wrong in my boredom of CGC? I know they make great games, but everything surrounding this company always is like sluggish. It's like watching paint dry. They never exceed our expectations. They just make us wait forever. And I have to be honest, as a marketer, the problem with making people wait so long is that when you finally do deliver all of the enthusiasm, all of the energy, all of the excitement, it's It's gone because we've seen the game now for eight months. We're playing it at shows and nobody really has it in their home other than a handful of people. And then everyone who's got the LE, right, the most expensive version of the game, they don't have anything. And I'm seeing LEs at shows like why is it that you can make LEs for the show but you can't make them for consumers? And again, I don't know, like just something about like making people wait nine months. Can they get the excitement back? Will the Lyman Sheets code get people reignited with this game? I don't know. We'll see. But again, it's just like CGC gives us very little to get excited about on a weekly basis. And also there's absolutely like no communication from this company to the fans, right? There's no communication from them on Facebook. There's no communication on Pinsight. They don't even talk to us. And that's the other part is companies need to learn how to engage the community more, especially companies like CGC. Now you could argue, you could argue who cares? The game's are sold out, Chris. It doesn't matter. And you'd be right. But it's not just about selling games. It about building a brand It about building a community And I just don feel a community sense when I see the way CGC talks to the community I just don Alright so what else is happening in the pinball world So Multimorphic P3 I don know I feel like Damien and Marty just lapped Jerry Because what we haven't seen from Jerry is what we just saw from Marty and Damien. I would like to see Jerry match Haggis Pinball this month. I would like to see Jerry line up eight cabinets about to go out to customers. Jerry keeps posing in front of boxes and showing us parts, but what we never see at Multimorphic is an assembly line. We just don't see it. And I think now, Damien and Marty just threw the gauntlet down on Multimorphic because these are the two boutique companies that have customers lined up and it's all about efficiencies with manufacturing. I think Jerry showed us he sent out game number one, but I have not seen game number two, three, four, and five. Have you? He said something, he posted something. He said, we have shipped out a few Weird Al's. A few? Like what is a few? Three? Two? And I think the few he's shipped out are the prototypes he built for the show. I don't think this game is on the line and I don't think it's being made yet. Now, he told a lot of you that you have to wait at least like six months to get your game. He also gets six additional months to miss that deadline if you want to get your money back. It's just really weird. I just hope that all of these companies stop with these shenanigans. Don't reveal your game unless it's on the line. Don't ask customers to finance the creation of your company. Don't ask your customers to keep the lights on and pay the rent. You should be selling a product. If you need money to build up and scale up your operations, that should not be crowdsourced by your game order money because it's just weird, right? And if you do it that way and you spend an entire year and no games are on the line, then where does that money come from? Like, how do you make up that money? Now Jerry's got other money coming in from P-Rock. My bigger concern is with Haggis. I still don't know how they make up the money they've lost having this year delay on Fathom without raising the price of the machine. You know, looking at the machine, they're leaving money on the table because they couldlarcy ye Dáns, Bet F complimentary. And how the gold flake armor on Halloween turns black from the oil from your hands. It's a real quagmire for them. Once again, I think it shows that Spooky is just rushing it. They need to slow down and really properly test these games. They need to not ship games out to customers with such barren code. It's been a really rough year for Spooky Pinball. I think the confidence in them is really eroding away. And I think this is just another case where what do they do now? How do they fix the armor issue with this game? How do they make customers happy now in a way that's not gonna cost them a fortune? They've also got like 700 more Halloween's to make. So are they going back to the vendor that clear-coated this armor and having them redo them and start over again? They need to but I don't think they're going to. Unless there's enough of an outcry, they're not gonna change this. They're actually gonna pass on to the customer something they now know is defective. And I just feel bad for them because I think a lot of this is them trying to make more games than they should right now. I don't think they properly quality control tested these games because the game that Jack Barr got, he got one of the first Halloweens ever and it had this issue with the armor and John told me that he told Spooky, look at what's happening to the armor on this game and that was like in the first week or two these games were shipping and And here we are almost a year later and games are still going out with this problem. And I think this is going to be just another reason why if you need to spend eight to ten thousand dollars on a pinball machine, you're going to be much more selective on who you support. And the companies that build quality products, the companies that give you games with complete code, the companies that have the themes you want and have animations that are great, And the pinball experience that justifies these crazy high prices, those are the companies that are going to win out. If Spooky Pinball offered refunds, this company could possibly go under. That's how many people I think would ask for a refund on both of these titles. Now, they probably would pivot and put TNA back on the line to sort of make up for the refunds. You know, you don't want your company to get to this point where if you actually allowed a customer a way out, they would take it. And I think that's where we're at with Spooky. I hope they're learning I know they're good people and I think they are going to learn a lesson. But these two games in the marketplace, them seeing the different issues, I really feel like, I feel like it must be a really unsatisfying year for Spooky because even though you've made all this money, you know that you're not making people super happy, especially when there's these quality issues. So I hope they figure this out. It's not going to go away and I think consumers are going to demand some sort of fix for the problem with the armor on these two games. Alright everybody, thank you again for supporting Kaneda's Pinball Podcast. I love you so much, I just re-recorded a show. This doesn't happen often, but I want to make sure that I gave props to Haggis for getting us what we've been asking for, because I would be a hypocrite if I was like beating my chest that I want to see production of Fathoms, and then they shared production of Fathoms. And I have to say, the game looks great, I hope they can consistently turn on that factory, Because that's going to be the most important part of Haggis Pinball's survival into the future is they need to make money, not just make a beautiful pinball machine. They need to make money. But this is how you do make money. You create something of value and you take it up a notch and the money will come. I hope they can figure out the manufacturing side of it. But this product is sexy AF and people are going to hand over their hard earned money if this is the quality of product they're going to send customers. So well done. I love the attention to detail on these games. I really do. Everybody, have a great day. I'll talk to you soon. I know I've got to find some kind of peace of mind. I'll be searching everywhere just to find someone to care. I'll be looking every day. I know I won't be found. There's nothing going on now. I'll find a way.