I'm going back someday, come what may, to Blue Bowl. Welcome everybody, happy Friday. It is Kaneda's Pinball Podcast, the only pinball podcast, or probably not at Texas Pinball Festival right now. The show begins today, and I'm curious about two things at this show. The two things I want to see the most from people, I want to get pinhead reviews of Portal and Merlin's Arcade. There's really nothing else at the show that's totally intriguing me. We know about D&D. We can look at the Medieval Madness armor. We're going to talk about the blue Merlin edition. But honestly, the two major things are going to be Portal and Merlin's Arcade, right? the biggest show. This used to be the biggest show and nothing else is really dropping there. So what will those two games play like? What else is happening in the pinball world? Well, where should we start? Let's talk about this Merlin edition of CGC's Medieval Madness, a game that they could ostensibly run for an unlimited amount of years. And I think the demand for this game. It's going to be interesting now that they're bringing back 1000 units. We don't know how many units are going to be Merlin additions. Cointaker has sort of like the standard edition. I think it's called like the arcade or classic edition is up for sale on the Cointaker site. So are they going to be half Merlins? Are there going to be 500? Are there going to be $7.50? Are they going to do a spooky? And as many people that order Merlins, we will make and the rest will be standard editions. I know everybody is wondering what will the price be? A lot has changed in the pinball world since the Royal Edition came out. You got to remember the Royal Edition, I want to say came out in what, like 2022. It was right before COVID. It was before the spike in prices and it was $10,000. And I remember when the Royal hit, it wasn't impossible to get. I had one, right? I had one. I ordered one and it wasn't like I need to know right now. And foolishly, it was one of the games I regret not buying for $10,000 and just keeping it in a box because at the height of COVID, these things were going for 20 grand and they've been going consistently for $16,000 to $18,000 easily over the last three years. And I don't know how many there are, like, what is it, like 200, 250 Royal Editions. And now that the game is coming back again with all the bells and whistles and the topper again with the big display and we've got the Merlin Edition, that is obviously going to chip away at the value of the Royal editions. You know what? I don't see people being upset. You know what? I don't see an uproar around. They're making another limited edition of a game that already had a limited edition game. I just don't like this practice in general. If you bought a Royal edition, you kind of thought you were getting the last LE of the game. It felt like a final sort of build of the game. And you know, if you bought one, you want your game to be the last edition. You want your game to hold its value at $16,000 to $18,000. And they are ostensibly, and they are once again doing what is the modern trend in pinball, screw over the people that thought they were getting a limited edition version of a game. And I still believe this. To this day, if you're making an LE or a CE of a game, you should only make that run once. You should not make another LE or CE of the game at a later date. You are burning your buyer base and your collector base. There's no if, ands, or buts about it. I don't like it, but here we are. if you had a royal and you bought it to speculate on you should have sold it because now i think all these games are going to go down in price so what will the price of the merlin edition be it's been a while right games have gone through the roof the cost of making games has gone up this game gives you everything in a world in which two thousand dollar toppers have a lot less in them than this topper what will the price be i believe the price of the royal was right at 10 grand. I don't think this Merlin edition, when they announced the price today, I don't think it's going to be that much more money than what it was years ago. I could see a little bit of a price increase. And if I were to guess what they're going to ask for this game, I would say 11.5 no more. I expected to come in underneath that, but I don't expect them to ask for anything more than 11.5 and knowing that there's a thousand of them it is going to be a real test of the market will the market absorb a lot more medieval madnesses on top of portal merlin's arcade the fact that there's two merlin games coming out right now my poor friend who's listening to this is working on his version of merlin there's going to be three merlin games in the zeitgeist but at least he's going to have a lot of time before you see his Merlin. If it were up to me, I would wait for the last installment of Merlin because I think it's going to be pretty epic. You know, so you got more medieval madnesses in a world of all these other games. Potter's about to come out, King Kong, Predator, Dune, all these titles about to hit. Pokemon's coming out. I just talked to Barry over at Dutch Pinball and yes I can confirm for you they are making Back to the Future at Dutch Pinball He is really excited about the game And he really wants to show the other pinball manufacturers how it done So that game is coming out at the end of the year. So you got to think, do I want to be locking in all this money right now? Or can I wait eight months and get Pokemon and back to the future? You know how we are. the moment this like barrage of games hits we're not going to be satiated we're going to be like what's next what's next at stern what's next at spooky what's next at jjp it's just the way we're wired in this industry the best game is always the game that's not out yet so we'll see what they price it at we're going to learn it today okay as far as which edition i like better i still think the black royal looks so much better than this merlin edition and i know what's happening. A lot of people out there that don't want to spend the money on the Royal Edition are trying to justify that the Merlin looks just as good, if not better. I'm here to tell you people, no, it doesn't. There's nothing sexier than glossy black on top of glossy black. And when you look at the medieval cabinet and you look at the artwork, the glossy sparkle black looks so much nicer than the blue. The blue interrupts. It interrupts the black of the art package. I get what they're going for, but it just doesn't work as well. Armor shouldn't be the focus. Armor should complement the art package in a more subtle way. And the best art packages do that. Now, that doesn't mean your armor can't be bright and colorful, but the artwork around it needs to be bright and colorful for it to work. But overall, the sexier, more beautiful looking pins, in my honest opinion, don't have too much of a jarring armor pop to them. Like Batman SLE, Guns N' Roses CE, Wizard of Oz with that beautiful green. You know, I like that way more than the Yellow Brick Road Edition. And yes, it is subjective, but when you put a picture of black and blue versus black on top of sexy black, the Royals look better. Will that make those worth more? I don't think so. It's still a great game in any of these new trims. They all look so much better than the original LEs that had that ugly WWE like mustard colored armor. Those were hideous. All right, so we got Medieval Madness Merlin Edition. We will see what the price is. We will see how the market responds to it. Speaking of new things to the market, have you seen this new topper for Pulp Fiction from the gang over at the Electric Playground? Now, I think the Electric Playground are the guys that made that big Godzilla topper. I think they made that big topper for the big Lebowski. And so they've got this topper. It's called the Double Tap Edition Pulp Fiction Topper. And it's interesting because they launched a video of it in which you see the two main characters. You see Samuel L. Jackson's character and John Travolta's character. And they're pointing their guns. And the guns are really big. And they're firing pinballs out that go across a wire form into the other gun's barrel. It just made me wonder what's happening here. Why would a gun fire a bullet into another gun? But I guess that's the double tap action that's happening. There's also a speaker on the side of it that makes the sound of a gun being fired. And then there's all these palm trees. That was the first thing I thought when I saw this. When I think of Pulp Fiction, the last thing I think about are palm trees. And there's like one, two, three, four, five palm trees on this topper. But that's not the thing that grabbed everybody's attention. The thing everyone's talking about is when you look at the characters on the topper, their faces are blurred out. They're blurred out on the image. They're blurred out on the video. But are they in real life? Are they blurry? And the reason why they're blurred out is that this company, Electric Playground, does not have a license with the studio to show the actual likeness of Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta. So if they release this topper with those people's faces on it, they are committing IP infringement. And there's a reason why Chicago Gaming Company and Play Mechanics spends a lot of money to license the theme so that they have sole exclusivity to sell the products. Also, the license holder doesn't want just anybody profiting off of their IP. And I know this is a gray area. I know everyone's like, Kadeida, you're a hypocrite. You use the image from Akira. And let me tell you right now, Kadeshiro Otomo, who runs Akira, has gone on the record that he enjoys seeing people take his artistic creation and using it for stuff. OK, so there's that. Also, I am not selling you anymore any of that IP for profit. OK, I don't sell you merchandise with the Akira image on it or Kaneda's face on it. nothing. And I don't use that to sell this podcast. And I'm allowed to call my podcast Canadian Spinball Podcast. It's just a Japanese name. All right. So but these guys, they want to sell 300 of these at 1500 a pop. That was the other big thing. 1500 a pop. That's $450,000 in potential revenue if they sell all 300. But I think the overall consensus, regardless if the faces are blurry. We're going to get an answer on that at TPF. I want someone who is at TPF to take a picture of this topper and settle this debate once and for all because we still don know My guess is that they manipulated the video and the image to try to skate around the letter of the law And I think they're going to get caught and called out on it. But here's the real truth, regardless of whether or not they're stealing IP doesn't matter. Why would anybody order a $1,500 topper for Pulp Pulp Fiction Essie because nobody who owns an Ellie is ever going to buy this topper because they have already got an amazing topper on top of the game. And why would anybody spend an additional $1,500 you would have just bought an Ellie? If you buy this and put it on top of your Essie, that's the same amount of money that it would have cost you to just get an Ellie. And guess what? You can go get LEs today for sticker price. Like the LEs on Pulp Fiction have not gone up in price. In fact, they've gone down a few hundred dollars. So why, right? Why? I mean, again, I just think we're moving past this sort of period where people are gonna throw these super expensive toppers on top of games. And in the end, it doesn't matter, right? I really don't care. If you wanna go buy this, knock yourself out. If these guys want to commit IP infringement and make all this money stealing IP, I don't care. Go knock yourself out. It doesn't matter. But it's interesting to talk about. And it's an interesting debate on whether or not this should be a practice that we endorse in pinball. It's like the guys that are selling all of those banners illegally. There are people out there selling banners illegally. They're selling mods that have illegal IP on them. And George Gomez always says to me, he's like, Chris, it's just whack-a-mole. Like, yeah, we could try to go after all these people, but it's whack-a-mole. You shut one down and 10 more pop up. And I get it. I get it. And it's such a small hobby. It's like nobody's getting super wealthy on any of this stuff. All right. So we've got that. I'm curious to see how that sells. Only going to make 300. They're not going to sell 300 of that topper. It's just not going to happen. All right. So what else is going on in pinball? We finally got a teaser from Barrels of Fun. Guess who they're listening to? Canadian Pinball Podcast. I've been telling David David Van Es, you got to get some conversation going. You got to let people know. Don't get forgotten in this sort of crowded period in the pinball marketplace. And so yesterday, they uploaded a photo of David and three of his barrel co-workers standing over a playfield that has been turned upside down. And when you zoom in on this playfield, it looks like a mech for a three drop bank target area. So there's that. There's a bunch of other coils. Not everything is wired yet. There's no subway yet. There's a little bit of an insert area that people think is one of the family crests from Dune. I posted that. Oh, yeah, this is confirmation that it's Dune. There are playfields in the background of this image. Those are labyrinth playfields. They are not the playfields for the new game. David has a big smile on his face. And look, David, I hope we're all smiling as big as you are when we see your new game. And hopefully it comes out sometime soon. And as I said, I think they're going to be last. I think they're going to wait for everything else to drop. I think a lot of us are just going to wait for everything to drop. Really? Do you really think it's going to be hard to get a King Kong, Ellie? I mean, I know they're going to sell quickly, but you really think? Like two months from now, Stern makes a thousand King Kong LEs. They're going to be hard to get. I don't know. I think Harry Potter is going to be the big winner. Just on theme alone, I think that's going to be the big winner. Here we are, TPF. I think we're going to get a lot of feedback on Evil Dead, on games like D&D, on games like Portal, on games like Merlin's Arcade. How will they do? We shall see. Never a dull moment in pinball, everybody. Happy Friday morning. I might even do another show later today, depending if any surprises happen at TPF. That's what I'm wondering. Are there going to be any surprises? There used to be surprises at big shows like these. Is someone going to walk in that nobody expects and pull the curtain off a game? Predator, is it ready? Is someone going to release a teaser to become the talk of the show? Think about that for a minute. You don't even have to go to the show to own the conversation of the show. if I was someone like David David Van Es if I was someone like the Pinball Brothers I would be doing stuff like that right now if I had Predator and I knew that these games were coming out in front of mine and I had the most badass theme like Predator I would be making fun of all these new games in a Predator speak you know why don't you buy these new releases they're all coming out right now because some damn fool accused our game of being the best Just have some swagger. Have some confidence in what you're about to release. And poke some fun at the rest of the industry. We're all grown men. I've noticed this lately. I get a lot of people that get upset with me lately. They're like, I'm not going to give you this because you're just going to make fun of it. You're just going to say something negative. And gang, I think there's a big difference between negativity, toxicity, and sarcasm. and taking the piss out of the fact that all of us are spending this much money on these things. The rest of the world is suffering. The rest of the world can barely pay rent or put food on the table. And we're not allowed to make fun of a pinball topper company that's stealing IP. We're not allowed to make fun of Pinside users that post 40,000 times on Pinside and they don't even show up to their own local shows. We're not allowed to poke fun at the biggest keyboard commandos out there. We're not allowed to poke fun at Kaneda who has a minor meltdown or a major meltdown because he loses a $5 trophy that means nothing. You guys all made fun of me. I didn't care. I thought it was funny. Was I bullied? Am I going to cry about you making fun of me? No. It's just funny to me. The modern world modern world there no bro code anymore You can just be a bro that just talking smack anymore Like oh you bullying people Say nice stuff When did everybody turn into thumper on this planet? And again, let's just have some fun. Who cares? Life is so damn short. You know what thing I've been thinking about lately? It kind of level sets all the ridiculousness of all this. Like, oh yeah, the pinball market's collapsing. Oh yeah, these prices. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. It's such a small market. If you only have to sell a thousand of one item, all right, a thousand of one item across the globe to a bunch of rich guys, and if you can't do that, then what you made is crap. Let's be honest. If you can't sell 1,000 of a $10,000 product that appeals to 40 to 60 year old geek men who should have money in the world, and they do. if you can't sell a thousand of them what you've made is crap and I mean that I mean that and you can't say that oh that's not being nice you're not supporting I don't care anymore like I don't care make something good people want right don't waste everybody's time don't waste your time don't drive your wives and your families down a damn journey so you can have some pinball fame and then release some crappy game and if you release a crappy game I'm allowed to call it a crappy game the same way I'm allowed to call it a masterpiece because if I call everything that's crappy, okay, I have fun. You know, it was okay. I had fun. I mean, I saw people jump on road trip and they'll, yeah, yeah, come on guys. They're not going to sell 50 of those things, but they don't want to say that. I don't want to hurt the feelings of the man who made the game. Well, if you don't want me to hurt your feelings, if you're the man who made the game, then maybe make something that more than 50 people in the world want. I made a podcast, more than 50 people want it. This pinball podcast, over 600, over 600 people, right? It used to be over 700, over 600 people. I don't know. I feel like it's more fun when we can have actually like dialogue and discourse, but you gotta be nice. You gotta be nice. You gotta be positive. You gotta be nice. Let me tell you what nice doesn't get you. It doesn't get you to the chopper. It doesn't get you to kill the predator. I ain't got time to bleed. We all need to have a little bit more thick skin. It's a lot of money, people. a lot of games coming out, they cost a lot of money. A lot of you work really hard for that money. It's not cheap, right? Three pinball machines at the top trim, $45,000. So you have to make $90,000 before taxes to buy three pinball machines a year at the top trim level. What's the average median salary in America? What's the average median salary in the world? So if you're going to go down that journey and you're going to get a team of people together and you're going to screw together a pinball machine and you need to sell a thousand of them and you need to sell a hundred of them or 500 of them. I don't care what it is. Make it work. Come with a good idea. A hard no is better than a soft maybe. There's too many pinball machines that came out in the world recently. You know who they are. Barbecue challenge. There's too many machines that came out galactic tank force too many machines that came out that should have been killed in the boardroom when the idea was to make that game toy story 4 should have been killed they should have killed the godfather these games should have been killed john wick venom these games never should have been made with all things considered because stir needs to sell not like a thousand stir needs to sell three to five thousand and if we need to sell five thousand it's not going to be john wick It's got to be Pokemon. And if we make games like Star Wars and we charge this much for Star Wars, we can't then charge this much for Venom. Hello, everybody. Stern's waking up. Why is the Mandalorian topper $700 more than the same exact topper that's on Venom? It's the same materials. It's the same layout. It's the same design. You know what I'm saying? Now you could say, well, it's the licensing cost. It doesn't matter. You know they would have sold that Venom topper for $2,000 if Venom was a hit. So yeah, I don't know, man. I'm kind of in this place now where I just want someone to blow me away. That's where I'm at. And none of these games that are coming out at TPF blow me away. It's the calm before the storm. I still do think all these games are the JV games. These are the minor league games. Where's the major league game that's going to make me want to buy this stuff? Where's a game that's going to make me not want to put $15,000 away for my children's investment fund? Where's the game that's going to be, you know what? They can work hard on their own and they can make their own money. I will educate them, but it's my time. This is my money. It's not my dad. It's my money. I work for this money, not Killian, not Cassian. I'm just joking, people. Yesterday was a good day. We knocked down our mortgage by a lot of money. and now we have like paid 70% of this house off in just nine months. Super excited. Still got my investments. Still got my pinball money. Still gonna scalp Harry Potter, people. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna get $20,000 for Harry Potter. Mark my words right now. I guarantee you, Kaneda is gonna flip a Harry Potter for $20,000 and I'm telling you this right now. So don't quit and don't cry like babies. It's my money. I'm going to get an allocation fair and square I'm not going to get a deal from a distro you all have an opportunity to get one at the same time as me I'm not going to get special treatment so when I buy my $15,000 Harry Potter don't you come crying to me if I want to go sell it for freaking a $5,000 profit because damn American Pinball cost me twice that twice that in money out of this family's pocket So take that to the bank, mofos. Kaneda out.