Warning, the following episode contains adult language and screaming goats. Listener discretion is advised. Thanks again for the ongoing support as a Pinball Show Club member. Enjoy this exclusive TPS content and make sure to visit the Pinball Show Club Discord to chat about the bonus material. Alright Dennis, let's get hot and heavy on video games and pinball. When a video game and a pinball love each other so, so much. They make lots of money. They sure do. I've recently been telling people, and I feel strongly about this, people not as familiar with pinball. You know, you go to these family events and stuff. Oh, you've still got the pinball machine. I've been trying to explain people what pinball is in 2025. So I tell them, essentially, in my opinion, what a pinball machine is, is now it is no longer wipe away what you once thought it was. It's essentially a physical video game. and then they scratch their heads and then they elaborate and they said basically it is just like a video game that has levels it's got bosses it's got objectives it's got tasks it's got achievements that you can gain it's got all that stuff it's really a lot to do but it is a physical form in which you are doing it and they're like oh okay that's a lot different than what i thought it was would you agree or disagree with that yeah that's a good description I like that description. It's a physical video game. And so much so that that's what we've been talking about in weeks past, I think exclusively here on the membership content, is the whole location thing is fine and dandy. But the primary focus of where pinball is going and has been going is the homeowner. It's more akin to a video game than it is a skee-ball machine. So, with that being said, Nap Arcade saying, hey, he's hearing some rumors out there. Possible studio titles from Stern Pinball upcoming include video game licenses of Activision's Call of Duty and Bethesda's Fallout. First off, are you hearing any of this? This was the first that I'd heard about it in this context. I have heard Call of Duty in particular suggested a lot as an obvious video game property to convert over into the space of pinball. Okay. I will add something, though. Well, this was a new thing to me in terms of the nap rumor where this could even make a little more sense. Microsoft now owns both of those studios. Oh, that's good. No, I didn't know that. Yeah. They bought Bethesda a few years ago, and they just in 2024 finally got all the approvals out of the way to own Activision. Wow. Well, you know what? Speaking of Microsoft and this being, I think this is interesting as well. I had heard rumblings that, remember Raw Thrills Play Mechanics? They brought the Halo franchise to video games, a very successful arcade unit that they built. So much so that they have different models, four-player, two-player, tethered player, fire team, Ravencroft, whatever it is, the Halo series. And I heard rumblings that they were thinking about bringing Halo into pinball as they did Pulp Fiction. Interesting. Another Microsoft-owned property. So if we're talking Stern here with potentially rumored Call of Duty and Fallout, potentially Halo. Are any of these three licenses, educators, are they popular today? Yes, to varying degrees. So the Call of Duty is the most popular of the video games. Especially right now. That's a new release, right? There's a new release. They put out a release every year. This is the way, hopefully, if I'm remembering it correctly. I actually do not play Call of Duty. However, I used to. However, two billion people do. It's right there with FIFA and Madden. There are some people that it is the game that they get every year. Like we're talking like a teenager that only buys a game. For some people, it's the only thing they play, yeah. Yes, yes, because it's got a very advanced multiplayer. It's just a very active community in that regard. And the way, the last I recall looking into it, that Activision achieves this, there is a Call of Duty every year. They have three different studios doing Call of Duties. So they're able to give them a three-year development cycle and always put out a game every year. Okay, so they rotate through three. Don't they have like Modern Warfare, Black Ops? Right, right. So it's like they have Infinity Ward and they have Treyarch, and I think there's a third one, and they each have their own flavor. So those are the programmers, and then Activision's the publisher, and they have them on a cycle because Infinity Ward was the first Call of Duty maker. And then they brought in Treyarch around, I think, Call of Duty 3, and then they were alternating, and then they added a third studio to keep this behemoth going. So they put out the game. They have different styles. Like Black Ops is with one particular studio. Modern Warfare is with another particular studio. And this way, they're able to get that game out. And then when it lives on with the multiplayer, those multiplayer games have very long tails. So a lot of people will continue to play. There are some that prefer to play the Black Ops games. And so they will just keep playing that Black Ops game for three years until the new version comes for that multiplayer. Wow. So it the most popular first shooter franchise in the world Oh Shit Okay All right So that super popular video games What about Fallout So Fallout is interesting in the sense that it's not seen in the same light as a first-person shooter. It started as a 3D isometric game with Fallout 1 and 2. But its really popular incarnation started with Fallout 3 when it became a first-person slash third-person. and you can cycle to however you want. Shooter-style game. It's got interesting mechanics in terms of, like, you level your character, so it's got RPG-lite elements, so you, like, enhance your strength, enhance your ability with laser weapons, enhance your ability with melee weapons, enhance your sneak to suit your play style. And it also has a combat feature called VATS, which allows you to, like, precision target enemies, like you want to shoot their limbs, You want to shoot them in the head or the tail or whatever mutant thing you're fighting. So it lets you have a sort of degree of control in terms of how you engage with particular monsters. It's got its own universe. And, of course, one of the things that we have to remember is it now has an extremely successful streaming show. There it is. Yeah. The Fallout, to me, from an outsider perspective, because I'm not into video games, is like Fallout is kind of a darling IP right now because it's multifaceted. Yes, and the big thing about the world, obviously, the Call of Duty games, they take place in different eras. They started as a World War II game, and then it became modern combat, and then they'll do Vietnam, or they'll do the future, all that. Fallout is post-apocalyptic with a very 1950s aesthetic to it. Yes, the aesthetics and the nostalgia make it a collectible thing, too. I've went into many pinball collectors' homes, and they have sculptures of Fallout World kind of stuff. The logo, they have a mascot. They have a main mascot, and just the style and stuff lend itself to more collectability. So John Youssi people collect Fallout merchandise and stuff. So that's a big pull, too. And it's a huge multi-platform. It's on all sorts of systems. Halo is an interesting one that you mentioned. So Halo historically was confined only to Xbox devices. So Microsoft's always owned Halo. It was developed by Bungie, and now that Bungie is not with Microsoft, it's actually maintained by 343 Industries. But it struggled more than these other two. Man, it did so well initially. Yes. Halo was awesome. It was – the big thing about Halo is when the first Xbox came out, which I've played the original Halo, but not on the original Xbox. I didn't own one of those. But it pioneered the first-person shooter for console. That was a PC space. And a lot of people favor playing shooters because of the precision of a mouse on PC. But Halo was able to come in and give it a reasonable controller mechanic. And so then people were like, hey, it can be fun to play shooters with sticks on a control pad. And that launched a whole thing. Like, Call of Duty goes gangbusters on console. But Halo was the console shooter. It's what pioneered that space. And it has a very future-forward sci-fi theme. You've got advanced AI. You've got alien races. And so here you've got these three different games with three different approaches. Call of Duty being the most grounded in reality. Fallout being that very post-apocalyptic loss of technology in some ways, sort of steampunk vibe in others. And then you've got Halo, which is like humanity's future, sci-fi, laser weapons and needlers and all sorts of weird technology. For what it's worth, Halo is the only one of the three that I've played. It was like the last – it was my last stint with video games was Halo, I guess, with the first Xbox there. Cortana, is that a thing? Yeah, that was the AI. Was it Hertzhog or what was the car thing that you drove around? Warthog. Warthog, yeah. Shit. And like Call of Duty, Halo, very, very deep multiplayer community. Oh, yeah. So there are people that even if the story is crap and they're mad. They like, yeah. Like campaign. Yeah, and that's what I mostly played with Halo. I've played more multiplayer Halo than I have Call of Duty. Campaigns. And even if the campaign's deeply criticized, a lot of times, I think even the current iteration, the Halo Online is seen as in a good spot. So a lot of people just like the game modes, you know, capture the flags. Is it still popular at all as a game? Yeah, but, I mean, that one's longer in the tooth than the other. Well, Fallout's a little weird because it's been a little while since there's been a new Fallout game, a mainline Fallout game as well. But Halo's getting kind of long in the tooth in terms of needing a new title to come out. They had a TV series, wasn't as successful, right? No, the TV series was canceled. after two seasons. It was a case in point of studio interference would be how I'd describe it. It's exceedingly dumbed down. Thanks Paramount. Or whatever it came from. I don't even know. Peacock? Probably. I don't remember. I don't remember. But he needs to go back to the mountain and die. Or Yellowstone. So let's look at these as a video game. Do any of these work? Work in what way I guess the easy way is like It a studio title it under a thousand You can almost make anything work from Stern Pinball under a thousand But let just say in general would would Call of Duty lend itself to a pinball machine I don't even know how you would do that. Well, with the power of insider connected, that might be the lean there you go at. Put in some objectives that might be inspired by various video games, like destroying this base, freeing these POWs, that sort of aspect. And then can you progress things? Can you make your shots easier if you upgrade from the pistol to a machine gun? Like that angle. So I'm kind of thinking maybe some elements of gathering resources off on the side with Walking Dead, for example. Remember, you have the medicine, the food, and the ammo. Maybe you do stuff like that. You have certain shots that will give you certain abilities or maybe allow you to add more people to your squad. What's visibly iconic with that IP from an aesthetic point of view? A tank? Like what? Yeah, I mean, it's so broad. It depends if you want to narrow it or are we just talking – World War II, if you focus on that. Right. If you were to model it on a particular game, you could pull in more campaign elements like certain characters have, I think, have recurred. Again, I'm not as deeply familiar with these games. I think World War II might work in a pinball machine. Yeah, I mean, you could go that route, and those were some of the really popular ones. Call of Duty Modern Warfare 1 is one of the most. Of the Call of Duties I've played, it's my favorite. That one could be a solid one that you would do. So you could theme it around one particular game if you wanted to, and then you have a cast of characters that you could rely on, because some of the fans of these games know that sort of stuff. They could do the Evil Dead thing where at the beginning you just pick your game you want to play. Yeah. Again, though, I'm thinking with the play field art and stuff, like, obviously, if we're bouncing around between, like, modernity and World War II, there's going to be a problem. So you kind of have to pick a lane. I just think Call of Duty is just – it would be so sad to come out with a game like that before Pinball has come out with what everybody's waiting for for the last decade, which is true multiplayer. We're getting so much closer to that, but that makes sense to me, especially with Call of Duty, coming out with it whenever I can play you in Kansas at the same time. That makes sense to me. Otherwise, I just don't get it, really. I think it's probably, of the three, I think it's actually the weakest theme for pinball. I would have guessed number two there. Well, I think, you know, I think I think Fallout and Halo, it will be an easier ability to tell a story. But Call of Duty is the most popular of these three video games. So just on theme alone. Possibly. This is where I was a little surprised. I'm not surprised. Not the right word. But when NAP had reported that the rumor is that these are studio titles, I was like, really? Because the one thing all three of these have going for them is it would be great for operators to have pros with any of these. because that's where this value is. To this day, even shitty little Super Mario World is a great earner on location. It's not about the gameplay. It's just about being in that world and hearing those call-outs and hearing those sound effects. And same with Street Fighter probably could make okay money, but the difference is Mario is better known. Call of Duty is like that. just having Call of Duty, it making the same, like the tanks sound like the tanks, the guns sound like the proper guns. It's like if you were to do a Forza or a Gran Turismo pinball game, you need the cars to sound like the actual cars. And then people will come and they'll put quarters in. But that's not obviously, if it's a studio title, that's not the target. The target is clearly going to be the home audience, in which case Call of Duty is just the hardest one to tell a story with. With Fallout, you could either take a specific game and tell a story, or do like what the TV show did. The way the games have always worked is you are a vault dweller coming out of the vault, and each game is a different vault. So you come out of a different vault, and you're in a different state. Like Fallout 3 was set in Washington, D.C. Oh, okay. Fallout New Vegas was set in Las Vegas, and Fallout 4 was – I forget where. And Fallout 76 was set in West Virginia. So they give you a little location and you explore that world so you can have that. And in the case of Fallout, you've got all these creatures that are the same. You've got the Death Claws and you've got the Super Mutants. And you can have it be really goofy and quirky and you can go about it. So you could either invent your own story and do that or you could crib straight from one of these games like Fallout 3 and say, hey, let's go on the journey of trying to find the dad. Is Liam Neeson available to do the voice work for the pinball like he was for the game and be the dad? Who's Baby Billy with his nose missing? What's that guy? Oh, yeah, that's Walter Groggins. Yes. Sure. Is there a character in there? Do a pinball. That would probably be the smartest is do a pinball kind of set in the world of the TV show version. I was going to say that my worry is if starting to get their hands on it, they would lean more towards video game and get all the assets rather than the Amazon series. Sure. and again we talking about it in a video game context so that would be the I mean it what they do with comics now Let not theme it around the movie Let theme it around a comic It gives them more flexibility Which one do you think works better? I think with adults, with spending money, I think doing the show is the strongest choice. I think so. If they can get it out soon enough, because we don't know what's going to happen in development time of a pinball machine. I bet the series goes no less than three seasons with popularity. It might squeeze a Walking Dead four and five season that nobody watches. Walking Dead squeezed like ten. It's hot right now. It's honestly a series that I was not as strong of. I've watched it. It wasn't as strong to me as it was everybody else. You didn't have the touchstone of the games. Yeah. So I just. Yeah. The thing about the show that works so well for people is it actually captures the spirit of the games. The new Yakuza show I've heard does not capture like Yakuza is a silly game. And the Yakuza TV show is serious. Halo took all of the lore of Halo and like upended it. And case in point being Master Chief going around without his helmet on for entire episodes. And in the game, you almost never see him without his helmet. there's just stuff like that that pissed fans off but fallout was like what will not piss fans off and then let's drop in a bunch of video game easter eggs and they're going to love this stuff and then we just have to have a competent story and everyone else will come along for the ride no that's not so fallout i think potentially could work i think fallout might be the one i want the most i yeah i agree i want sit precious because there's so many modalities that they've created within that ip that's what helps that's what helps it out now halo would be the easiest one I think to do because in that context, you have just pick one of the games straight up. There's not any good TV show or they've done some animated things. None of those are worth farming. You take Halo Reach and do the Fall of Reach or you want to emphasize Master Chief, you're going to do something like Halo 3. You're going to take that and you're going to have those missions. You're going to play through those story elements. The story is already written for you. Get the voice actor who does Master Chief in the video game. Get the Cortana voice actress to do the guidance of where shots you're supposed to shoot, they're done. Done and dusted. Super easy. Halo would be the easiest. I already dozed off. I just don't think that's a good idea. Halo's just... No. It's no. People love... Again, we're trying to sell this to people who know the games. And there are millions of people that know Halo 3. It was like the game to get on the Xbox 360. It is beloved. And it is seen as one of the strongest games, if not the strongest game that they ever made? It's I don't know. For me, it's like, you know, I like Elton John music, but do I need it as a pinball machine? No, you don't. And you don't need Halo, but you know who does need Halo? Little Billy. Little Billy needs Halo. Or Little Billy will never own pinball. I like to sell games that have really big licenses, and Halo just... So you don't... Okay, so your issue with Halo is you don't think it's big enough. I don't think it's, well, big enough is one thing, relevant enough right now. I think dipping back into it 20 years from now, maybe, but I don't think it has legs anymore. Five years ago, maybe, but I don't see it. Halo, I had to do a quick search. Halo 3, fastest selling video game ever, held the record for biggest entertainment launch in history, $170 million in sales within the first 24 hours. $300 million in one week. Well, answer me this then, to rebuttal that. 14.5 million copies sold as of 2012. Do you think that Destiny would do well as a pinball machine? No. Why not? Because, boy, that was big. No, because I don't play it. My point being... No, Destiny could do okay. I mean, that's Bungie's sequel title when they went off away. And it was hot, and then it was not. And there's Destiny 2. Yeah, you know what? With a multiplayer base, it probably could do pretty well. Again, it's a game that I think you want to have on location, but I think that's true for all of these. Yeah, I think... I don't know how strong the story is. I played the demo of Destiny, and I couldn't get into it, but they made a lot of improvements after I demoed it. I think you can make Fallout work here, because, especially if you're Stern, if Stern could make Foo Fighters work, if Stern could make John Wick work, if Stern could make Venom work, then sure, Fallout, to me, is right in there. But Call of Duty, I think it could work on name alone, but I don't see Halo. Don't see it. Okay. Are we going to see it, though? Are we going to see any of those? I'm still skeptical. I think 2026 would be the earliest we've seen any of them. Yeah. Doing something like Pokemon makes more sense than this. Yes. There's so many nostalgic video game stuff. Yes. Gosh. What? And honestly, if they have it, they should be trying to have talks, Stern should, with Nintendo about something like Mario. One billion percent. Mario or Zelda. Jeez. You can turn it off now.