A, B, C, D, E, forget it! You and your mom and your sister and your job and your broke down car and the things you call art. Sit up, sit up, sit up, sit up, sit up, sit up, sit up, sit up! Wait a minute! Back to back episodes of Kaneda's Pinball Podcast. One day, then another day, and $5 a month is too much for these pinball people spending $10,000 on Stern Pro machines these days? $3,000 on toppers. This is the cheapest, most entertaining pinball thing happening in the galaxy. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to talk about some of the dream theme responses you gave me yesterday, and then I want to talk about spooky pinball. I'm going to give spooky pinball the most important question they need to ask themselves moving forward. But before we get to that, let's talk about haggis pinball real quick. So an email went out. Out to the buyers of Fathom Pinball who gave Damien their money seven or eight months ago. An email has gone out that said production is going to begin in January and look for the remainder of the payment due and then your game will go on the line within four weeks. Okay. Now what we still haven't seen, we still haven't seen pictures of all the parts and And here's the part that also gets a little bit fuzzy. Not everyone who ordered the game got that email. So I'm not sure if they're going to be building all these games at once. I'm not sure if 250 parts have been ordered. They also have not shown people the latest on the game. And by that I mean there's going to be code update in Fathom Pinball. So here we have another scenario in which people have Pre-ordered a game and the company won't show you the game itself, the gameplay and the code and what's going to be in the game. Now, it is a beautiful version of Fathom. I'm not going to lie. If you wanted a Fathom and this is a game that speaks to you, I wholeheartedly expect you to chase after this game. Now, why can't we see the parts? Are they hiding something? Is everything okay over at Haggis Pinball? The other thing you should look out for is how much is it going to be to get this game door to door because they are sending these games DHL door to door. But as people on Pinside have said, there is additional taxes you will be hit with if they ship a game from Australia to your door in the United States, you will have to pay an additional tax when that game arrives. And so that could be another couple thousand dollars. Game of Thrones And the reason why I don't believe a word they say is they've said stuff month after month after month that has not come true. So do you believe now that production is starting in January because it's real easy to send an email that says that, but let's see it. Let's see games on the line in the next two weeks, man. It always comes down to two weeks, right? It's January 18th and I don't believe games are on the line right now. It's easy to send out an email saying look out for the final payment and then your game's going to go into production in four weeks. Well that's February. So that means they did not hit their January promise date of production beginning. And again you could define production beginning in so many different ways. For me, my definition of production beginning means you have all the parts in house, means you have all your line workers going and there's actually games rolling down the line and into boxes by the end of the week. That is production. Everything else is just preassembly. So I asked on my last show when I was talking about He-Man and these 80s cartoons and how I think this is an untapped area in terms of giving people dream themes, themes people have nostalgia and I asked for some of you to hit me up and tell me, well, what would your dream themes be? And let me read some of your responses. So Steve Skye said, Hey, Chris spelled my name wrong. K R I S it's C H R I S. He said, Chris, you are so right about curmudgeon titles. How can anyone look at the Godfather and think it's a good theme? I'm not going to name the obvious eighties film titles. So here are some of mine. And then he names the following, the Lost Boys, Evil Dead, The Warriors, Scooby-Doo, Caddyshack, Blues Brothers, Mad Max, Mars Attacks, and Time Bandits. The best and then maybe followed by I don't know maybe Evil Dead but that's also very niche I mean some people like Evil Dead but it's not as big as GI Joe Transformers and He-man so this is an interesting list but I consider most of these Steve to be pretty B titles these aren't the A titles from the 80s that I would look at so Steve I want you to email me back the obvious ones that you I got an email from Drew Sloan and Drew said number one big trouble in little China And he said spooky if they hire the right programmers Okay Well you know that one of my favorite themes of all time It is very niche but it would be perfect for pinball Indiana Jones by Jersey Jack Pinball Yes that would be amazing Back to the future He said I think it in the works over at Stern or JJP No Stern has it not JJP Beetlejuice Okay Beetlejuice would make for a Tim Burton Films Tim Burton Pinball Machine needs to happen whether it's Beetlejuice or PeeWee's Big Adventure. The fact that we don't have a Tim Burton Pinball Machine is criminal. And then Terminator again already done spooky. Why Drew I have a question for you. Why do you want spooky to make any of these? If you have a dream theme how are you not handing it to CGC to How many Suitstä likes my videos?- Knapp, The King Kong, Klu, Rocky, and the Warriors. Now, out of this list, I think King Kong is one that is an amazing theme that needs to be made, that wouldn't be too expensive, and I also think Rocky is another one that comes up over and over and over again, and I think everyone out there wants a full-featured Rocky machine that pays homage to this incredible franchise. The only challenge being there are so many Rocky movies and you know me, I think the one you make because of the soundtrack and because of the storyline and because of like the visual world of like Ivan Drago and the CCP Russia and all the stuff happening in Rocky IV, I think Rocky IV would be the most epic pinball machine. But thank you Drew for those suggestions. Alright, I got an email from Josh Hunley and he gave me a few themes that he said I did not mention on my show. Power Rangers, DuckTales, Batman the animated series, Pokemon and Speed Racer. Well Josh, these are all very popular themes but again I'm thinking about the pinball demographic and I think for the pinball demographic, most likely I think stuff like Pokemon is obviously the biggest one on this list. This Week in Pinball, Franchi), I see people on Pinside making fun of Pokemon being like nobody would buy Pokemon pinball. They're so wrong. The issue with Pokemon is simply this. It is one of the most expensive properties in the world. I don't think any pinball company could afford it, but if I were to make one on this list, it definitely would be Pokemon. He then listed some movies, Francis Bride, Top Gun, a remake of Michael Keaton Batman, Rambo, Rocky, Beverly HillsCop, and the Fifth Element. I love all of these. I love all of these. I think a remake. Can you imagine Jersey Jack Pinball making Michael Keaton Batman in pinball form with the soundtrack from Prince, all the clips from the movie, Jack Nicholson, Way Do You Get a Load of Me Pinball Machine, right? You start to get really excited. And I know they made a pinball machine You can find a pinball machine back in the day based on this movie, but again, if you're going to go after a license with modern pin technology and a new approach to a game, who cares if it's been made before? Make it better. Can you imagine if Jersey Jack Pinball made Lord of the Rings and not the Hobbit? How amazing it would have been if they reimagined that movie as a pinball machine. And you know, I love the fifth element. I think this is one of the greatest movies that has one of the greatest storylines and is the most fun campy Sci-Fi movie maybe of all time and I think Fifth Element in pinball format would be amazing. Alright one more Pat P said on the Patreon page he said Rocky, Sonic, Mario, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Forrest Gump, Sandlot or any Pixar theme. I think those are all really good ones if I were to pick one there I think Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. Forrest Gump not so much. The reason why Pee-Wee would be so amazing in pinball format, again you want to think about the movie and all the visual elements in the movie and the storyline of the movie. Pee-Wee trying to get his bike back. You take a movie like Forrest Gump, not really so much, right? You don't want this three hour, it's a love story. That's not really the world under glass that we want to see. I also got a comment from Andrew F and he said, I would rather have all of those themes you listed that you don't Edward So until we're done with this week's topic for this week, I'm going to be talking about some things that we don't want over He-man masters of the universe. He said, I have no clue who masters of the universe is, so I'd rather than save money and put it towards cool mix for an unlicensed game. Wow, Andrew, do you work at American Pinball? No, but Andrew, not everyone grew up with He-man. I understand what you're saying, but Andrew, you can't deny the fact I'm going to be talking about the unlicensed game, which is a game with cool mechs. I have one major question for you, Andrew. Look at Legends of Valhalla. It's unlicensed, and there's no cool mechs in it. If you're going to come out with an unlicensed game, like Dialed In, it better be loaded with stuff. Look at Dialed In, Andrew. Look at the amount of mechs and stuff in that game. It was a sales failure. Even when you load up an unlicensed game, it doesn't have a chance in hell of selling as well as a Ghostbusters. Even if the Ghostbusters is one of the worst shooting games ever. And a Ghostbusters Pro just sold for 9,500 bucks and it dialed in fully loaded machine, you can't even get $8,000 for it. And that's the reality of the marketplace. Alright so let talk about Spooky response to what been going on around these two titles And I want to look at this from a macro level a little bit of a bird eye view and I want to start out by saying this spooky didn make anybody buy these games they didn they didn put a gun to anybody head they didn say you know you better buy these games now or you never going to get them in the future all they did was announced two games on the same day and they sold through seventeen hundred and fifty games before anybody in the world could buy them The pinball community saw the games before anyone saw the code before anyone saw anything about these games and they got 1750 people. Some of them were distributors. Some of them were customers, but they got that many people to lock in their money in a nonrefundable way. So the moment that happened, nothing could go wrong for spooky pinball. All of their sales were confirmed and the money is in the bank and nobody can back out, right? That was the smartest move this company ever made. Now, when you do that and you lock in 1750 buyers without ever showing them anything, you kind of need to deliver. Now, you don't need to deliver to make money, which is great because most boutique pinball companies making money is really hard and manufacturing is really hard. But now the real challenge for them began. It's not about the finances. They had to make these games fun and they had to deliver on people's expectations because that's why they sold through all of these games because there was a lot of excitement coming out of Rick and Morty. There was a lot of people that were seeing a lot of improvement with Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle. And so these two games people assumed would be better than what came before it. Now, what has happened? How have things transpired? Are people looking at these games as being And you can see that these games are improving and improvement over Rick and Morty. And I think unanimously speaking, the answer is no. People aren't seeing as much in these games. While these games might shoot a little bit better than Rick and Morty, they definitely do not have the code. They definitely do not have the music. They definitely don't have the polish that Scott Denisi's game brought to Spooky Pinball. And then you look at Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle, and that's another game that was The game was coded much better than these games had better animations and just felt like a much more cohesive package. So then the question has been raised where did the talent go that gave people faith in spooky pinball? Talent like Scott Denisi, Bowen Cairns, David Van Es and the truth is this nobody got fired and I know that there's been a lot of people going back and forth on this. Nobody got fired from spooky pinball. In fact some of these people were never spooky employees. The work on these games like Scott Denise we know he as the day job at pinball life there are a lot of rumblings behind the scenes that these individuals willingly left spooky pinball for reasons that only a few people know and I'm not going to speculate on what those reasons are and I think the team we're seeing now over at spooky is trying to replace those people and show us they can do it just as good if not better as As those people who are no longer on this project. Now let me read for you what Charlie just said. Okay, I want to read for you what Charlie just said and I want to give you my thoughts on this and then I want to tell you what the one question Spooky Pinball needs to ask in the future. All right, he writes in the last year we have doubled the production staff including adding key talent, added an entire new building to house production, have a second full-time engineer programmer in house for the first time in company history and so much more behind the scenes. Reminder, this is after we bought a bigger facility what 1.5 to 2 years ago time flies. We corrected and improved mountains of electronics assemblies, ditched IDCs in favor of pneumatic molex equipment, higher level no noise power supplies and brought even more equipment in house for better controlled parts manufacturing in our own shops to avoid supply chain issues that are hitting literally everyone. Okay, this is all good stuff. We are pouring buckets of money, time, people, and talent into this company every week and intend to do more. We feel we have one of the best young companies out there and yep, we know the code is not where you want it to be. Thank goodness it's the one thing we can keep working on until we're all happy. Going forward, the goal is to have the game code much farther along at launch. This wasn't the norm for This Week in Pinball, Franchi), Franchi, Tanyo Klyce, tilt pendulum or tilt mechanism any pinball company just a few years ago but we know that's not the case today all of this takes time money and people we just had our biggest year that means you all expect more from us and so do we it doesn't happen overnight folks peace and pinball y'all spooky is only going up enjoy the ride with us all right so i appreciate charlie's statement here i agree with a lot of it but here's my big issue with what he just said It doesn't happen overnight. Okay, you've been in the industry now Chuck for like eight years. This isn't an overnight thing. And I don't think he can keep playing this card anymore. Not when you're putting $3 million in the bank on one day. Not when these games are going to make you $15 million in revenue. At what point are they going to stop playing this card? And here is the one question that they should have asked themselves, Penis expanded paragraph starting Mats allowing absolutelyfree, 05x !! PLEASURE I'm very happy with where this game is at to let people have it in their homes. And if you've played Ultraman and if you've played Halloween, especially when they ship these games to customers because first impressions are everlasting. They just are. And they know over the last eight years that these games were nowhere near good enough to ship to operators They were nowhere near good enough to ship to consumers and yet they ship them to consumers incomplete like very incomplete accentsogether 19 measurements for Cause soon as the