Funhouse remake shipping now ABBA shipping soon The Princess Bride also shipping soon Hi, my name is Jonathan Houston I'm the editor of Pinball Magazine and I'm joined by Hi, I'm Martin A. Eban I'm the editor of Pinball News and Jonathan and I are here with our regular monthly Pinball Industry News Pincast to look back at all the exciting events from the previous month, which in this particular case is June 2024. Yeah, and, well, let's be honest, it was a rather slow month. It was. It was. We should be able to rattle through this fairly quickly in comparison to last month's mega three-and-a-half-hour pincast and interview with David Fix from American Pinball, which, even though it was the longest one we'd done for a long, long time, did get some very good reactions, and we got some good listener numbers, I think. Okay. Well, good to know that people are actually listening to us rambling about this stuff. Yes, absolutely. I know. It's amazing. It's a bit daunting, actually. But anyway, so we said we can rattle through this fairly quickly, so let's get started then. Yeah. And when are we going to start? Well, with the biggest company of them all, Stern Pinball, who would have thought that 20 years ago? But, okay. 20 years ago, wouldn't have thought they'd still be here. But, yes, they have been busy with promoting their games. Current game, of course, being John Wick. And in June, they launched their John Wick contracts. That's not easy to say quickly. which is a feature they've added to the Insider Connected program which really sort of encourages you to complete certain tasks within the John Wick game in order to achieve achievement badges if you care about such things. Now some of these contracts are open contracts which means they're open to everybody and you can keep doing them until you've completed them within the time limit while others are a much more limited number where there are only so many people who can actually claim them. And once they've all been claimed, the contract's completed and you can't run that one anymore. So this required an update to their Insider Connected app on, I think, both on Android and iOS. And unfortunately, when they upgraded the iOS version, they seemed to manage to accidentally remove it entirely from Apple's App Store, which left a lot of people wondering what on earth was going on and why they couldn't download it. And they got an error message saying this app is no longer available. Huh. Yeah, but it didn't last very long, and they got it all back in short order. And they lost all their reviews. Yes, that's right. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, it probably did. So if you're into the Insider Connected achievements and you have access to a John Wick game somewhere, you might want to try some of these contracts. Right, okay. So, in other news from Stern, because obviously Stern being the biggest multiple games in their recent catalogue, the previous one, Jaws, had its range of accessories released, released which include the speaker light kits a custom shooter rod art blades in our blades that is a a topper and a side armor and i believe in a certain webshop you can also order uh the pro and premium translates uh translate sorry um if you're not happy with the one on your game and that That happens to be another one. Oh, right. Yeah. I think $99 there or something. Anyway, the topper for Jaws is priced at merely $999, which is rather cheap. Okay. Yes. Yeah, compared to other toppers that sold for double of that. And it includes a 3D lenticular MTI-led billboard with RGB lighting effects, but nothing is moving on there. So it's a static topper with some light show animations, basically. Yes, that's right. Which I guess makes a change. They're not putting needless movement on there. They haven't got a shark animating or even swallowing the ball, dare I say. Yeah, but then again, whitewater didn't need that either, and that became a classic. That did indeed. It's been such a success that they've been entirely unable to reproduce it, I think, so far, given that foil effect they've got on whitewater. In addition to all that, you can also watch a Making of Jaws video as well on Stern's website and also on their YouTube channel and probably some other social media too, if you go to YouTube. Yeah, I actually watched that video this afternoon. I had some time to kill. And for everybody wondering, like, well, the shark doesn't eat the ball. In early iterations of the game, the shark did eat the ball. Yes. But the shark wasn't very visible because it was eating the ball. needs to be prominent, but the rest of it is underneath the play field. Right. Yeah. So, yeah. So that's an interesting watch, I would say. Highly recommend it. And carrying on with Jaws, we're recording this on the 1st of July, and it's the start of a week-long series of Jaws quests, which are available on Insider Connected, which we mentioned before about the John Wick stuff. So there are some unique badges to be won tying in with the 4th of July celebrations right in the middle of this week. So if you go and check out Stern's website and the Insider Connect app, you'll see that there are, I think, five or six unique Jaws quests which you can complete this week. They all seem to be fairly simple ones, but they are unique to this particular celebration, this Independence Day. Woo-hoo! Yeah. And so that's games which have been in production. Last month we mentioned about a potential black and white version of Godzilla to mark the 70th anniversary of the license. Right. And we said we didn't have any more details about when it might be appearing, but I hear it could be premiered at the San Diego Comic-Con event. Which is an annual event for Stern to attend in the first place. Yes, that's right. Yeah, yeah. I say normally they tie up with one of the other exhibitors there, but I think last year they might have actually had their own exhibition in a neighboring hotel. Right, yeah. So that could be where it's sort of previewed, sort of off the show floor for invited guests. Yeah. Didn't they debut Venom last year at Comic-Con? Oh, that's a good point. I wouldn't be able to confirm that, but you probably have. Anyway, Stern, Pimble, Comic-Con, Juvie, they'll be there, and they'll try to bring you something special. And rumor has it this year it might be the 70th anniversary Godzilla in black and white edition. So, oh, well. And speaking of rerunning older games, although not in a different packaging this time. But we already mentioned that Black Knight was going to be rerun, and we can add one more title to that list, well, if you want to call it a list, which is Iron Maiden. Yes. Which is actually currently on the production line at Stern Pinball, and we're talking about Iron Maiden designed by Keith Elwin, not the one from 1980 or what is it? No, not Stern Electronics. Yeah, exactly. So those are back on the line, and if you're interested in one of those, then contact your local distributor. Yeah, there are suggestions that they are being rerun because the sales of the John Wick game are a little on the slow side, shall we say. I thought it was a killer game. Hey! How long have you been saving that one up for? so but maybe it's uh killing killing the production uh yeah kill the market maybe yeah that that might be the case so uh but apparently and uh we haven't addressed it um in the past but apparently it are tough times for pinball manufacturers as it's not as easy to sell games as during COVID, for example. No, before all the prices shot up, yes. Yeah. Yes. I'm not sure if there's a relationship between that, but also, yeah, I'm sure prices are having a big influence on sales, and also because there's a large number of manufacturers and a large number of titles in the market at the moment, so the buyers have a lot of choice. Yeah, that's why we need to rush to... Ooh, ooh, rush? There's so many... Good one, good one. No, well, we'll finish up with the Stern code updates, and then it's off to the other manufacturers that are also in the lead producing pinball machines. So what can you tell us about all the code updates that we're dying to hear? Well, we're saying it's a quiet month, and it is a quiet month, even for code. There are only two updates to report from Stern this month. Thank heaven for that. Yeah, one for John Wick, version 0.83, the current game. So that's a way to go before it's version 1. That came out on the 18th of June. But it's a big update, as you'd expect, for a game that's still coming together. They added more than 100 new call-outs from the movie. Movies, I should say, rather than just the one. There's all four movies represented in there. they added in the much hyped synchronized lighting and shaker motor effects with the movie clips. So when the shots are going off on the screen or explosions are taking place, then you have synchronized lighting effects and shaker motor effects to go with that. And they also changed quite a few of the ways that some of the in-game features work and the scoring and some of the rules for the multiples. Jaws is the other game that we mentioned. That's also on its way to version 1, but it's at version 0.91 at the moment. That had its update just a week ago, or under a week ago actually, 27th of June. But it was another big update. They added in the Search multiball Mini Wizard mode. They had the 4th of July mode before. Now they've added a 4th of July Challenge mode, which is one of those mini game modes that you can start from the game mode selection panel at the start. But to do that, you have to be logged into Insider Connected, which is interesting. I can't remember seeing that mentioned anywhere, so that will help you to push that particular app. There's some new topper functionality for the new topper we mentioned earlier, and quite a lot of rule and scoring changes. and, of course, all the usual bug fixes and improvements in general gameplay. And that's the code from Sturton Pinball for this month. So I think we'll wake up. Yeah, well, thank you. Moving on, let's head to Italy. Pedretti Gaming, or Pedretti Pinball, which I'm not sure which name is now the official one, but either way they are building and shipping Funhouse remake games in both the classic and the limited edition forgot what the limited is called, Midnight something oh no now you put me on the spot now yeah, whatever so anyway the limited and the classic are both shipping and already appearing in the US on shows and locations. So, kudos to Pedretti for shipping out these games. And that's basically all the news we have from Pedretti. Although, we might get back to Pedretti when we discuss Pinball Brothers. Yes. Of course, we worked together on the Euro Pinball Corporation project. Yeah. Yeah, well, Pedretti have been sharing images of, well, a number of Rudy heads stamped on the table. A large number of them. Yeah, yeah. So, which gives you an indication of how many games they are currently building, I suppose. So, yeah, well, good for them. Yeah, it's nice to see a game announced and actually start shipping fairly quickly. rather than being almost a year or more until they start turning up at distributors and buyers. How is this? Yeah, yeah. Are the companies listening? Yeah, I hope so. Well, we do say it's the pin cast that the industry listens to. That's true, yeah. Let's hope so. Yeah, yeah. Right. So let's get back to America then and go to the next one on our list of companies to cover. and American Pinball, I think, because last month, or we mentioned earlier about the long extended interview we did with American Pinball's Executive Vice President, David Fix. We got a lot of comments, a lot of positive comments about that. It cleared up a lot of rumours and speculation. And, as I say, it ended up being one of our most listened to pincasts this year, despite the whole thing being over three and a half hours long. So thank you for everybody who listened to that. And I do hope you found it as interesting as we did, because there were a lot of rumors and speculation about what the IPO for the company might mean and upcoming titles. And, well, there's a lot covered in that. Yeah, it's also interesting to see that some people couldn't recall how they got to jump to certain conclusions, but they jumped to conclusions which were literally not said at all in our interview with David Fix. But some people figured that they got confirmation for certain rumors that are going around regarding upcoming titles, titles, even though they were not mentioned. Anyway, we mentioned before that American Pinball had done a promotion I think it was around Memorial Day, where they did a $500 discount off all their current titles except Barry O's BBQ Challenge, which is already a cheaper game than most of the others. Well, good news if you're looking to buy an American Pinball game, because they are repeating that offer for Independence Day. So they have a promotion that's running from the 27th of June to the 12th of July, where if you buy any of their other games, you'll get a $500 discount off the price of them, available through their distributors. I don't think they sell directly, so contact your distributor to find out what the current pricing is. Right, okay. That's all the news we have from American Pinball, but I think last month we covered them more than enough. Yeah, okay. So moving on, but staying in America, and let's go, I was going to say south, but on the other side of the country, to Multimorphic down in Texas. Round Rock, to be precise. Round Rock, to be precise, yes. They have put out a newsletter this month, this month being the month of June where they cover some information about their upcoming production plans in which they said they expect to start production of the first the Princess Bride full machines, those are the ones with the kit installed and all the artwork on the cabinet sides and the back glass and the aprons and everywhere else they expect to start production of both kits and full machines in August, so next month. They will be producing the games and the kits in batches with each batch taking around a month. And so they think that will take up the rest of this year. There will be five batches each around a month long, so that's August, September, October, November and December. Which means that any new orders now coming in will not be built until early 2025. Okay, so that basically means that if you already put in your order, basically they can tell you, like, okay, you're scheduled to be built in this batch, so that's going to be in November. Yes, and if you've already got your order in, it'll definitely be built, well, not definitely, it's certainly planned to be built this year. If you haven put money in yet it be built early next year Right Yeah However if you want to buy any of the other game kits or need the P3 machine with a different game kit pre those are available right now. They're in stock and ready for immediate shipping. Good. So there's no lead time on kits for other games. So good news that Multimorphic got to the point where they wanted to be with that and have all their kits in stock. Right. And the newsletter also had some interesting statistics. The most important one, according to the company's P3 machine registrations, 94% of those games registered remain with the original buyers, which is rather odd in this day and age, I would say, in the sense that a lot of people buy a game and then sell it after X amount of time. But with P3, that's rather different. Yes, understandable in a way in that if you want to change the game, you buy a kit for it and that gives you the new game rather than having to sell the original P3 machine. Of course, it can be taken two ways. or three ways, I suppose, there's that way. There's also that the people are so satisfied with the machine that they don't want to get rid of it. Right. And the alternative is that even if they wanted to sell it, there's not a big market for P3 machines. That's the negative approach, yes. Yes, I say there are other ways of taking that figure. But I prefer to take it on the positive side and say that people are happy with their purchase and wanted to buy more kits for it rather than move the whole thing on. Right. There's also a fourth possibility, but I'm not sure whether that will work in the sense that maybe some people do sell their game and the new owner doesn't bother changing or registering the game as being sold and a new owner. But then again, that would be difficult with code updates, I suppose. I suppose it probably would be, yeah. That's a good point. I hadn't thought about that. But I was wondering whether people didn't register their machines at all in the first place when they bought them. Right. Also then, code updates. Yeah, I don't know whether code updates, registrations required for them or not. Okay. Anyway, but the final bit of information I think we got from Multimorphic's newsletter was that they said they had zero reports of any issues with the upgrade kits they shipped out for free to buyers of earlier-billed P3s. Remember, we mentioned about that a few months ago. Great customer service, by the way. Yeah, anybody who bought an earlier machine that wasn't included or didn't include the upgraded parts got those sent out for free. And they've apparently been very reliable, and they're still sending those kits out for those who requested them. And I reckon it'll take another four to six weeks to get them all shipped out to everyone. So if you haven't got yours yet, Shouldn't be long, and hopefully it will make your P3 experience even better. Right. Okay. So moving up a little bit north, well, a little bit. I wouldn't want to walk it. Spooky Pinball in Benton, Wisconsin. Yeah. They now have a topper available for Scooby-Doo. Apparently they've been making these since January. but they were pointing that to me earlier last month, so I figured it was news. Yeah, Mo, it's a new batch that they've been able to produce, but yeah, the ones with the siding cupboard or wardrobe, or whatever it is, bookcase, I think it probably is, with a video screen behind it, which is a very innovative topper. So I think it's a nice product and goes well with the game. Yeah. So they also launched a quarterly newsletter, or at least have the intention of sending out a newsletter out each quarter. And you can register on spookypinball.com if you want to stay informed because not everybody is on Facebook and Instagram and all those other social media. Yeah, it was an email. Yes, yes. And they also did what apparently also will be a quarterly update, but then in the form of a video for the second quarter of 2024. And some of the highlights from that video, They are currently building three games at the same time, being Scooby-Doo, Looney Tunes, and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Yeah. It's probably better to say three titles, I suppose. Yes. Presumably building lots of games at the same time. I stand corrected. Thank you very much. Yes. The company currently has built all the Scooby-Doo games that have been ordered when the game launched or after that. And they're currently building additional collector's editions, which are available to order on the Spooky Pinball webshop. And they will ship immediately. Oh, okay. Very nice. Yeah. Yeah. And, well, they're sort of keeping up with the tradition, I would almost say, that they are moving into a new facility almost every two years. Well, here we go again. They are moving into a new facility across the street, but they will keep the current one as well. And more interestingly, the equipment will also stay there. So they will actually have two working facilities equipped with machinery to manufacture pinball machines. Right. So they've got different lines then running in the two buildings. Yes. Okay. That's probably the idea. they also announced a Halloween slash Ultraman code update which will hopefully be available by October of course with Halloween coming up no surprise there and they now also have manuals for Halloween, Ultraman and Scooby Doo oh how traditional yes and well then there's also well several code updates, which I'll let you take care of. Okay. I actually have, Spooky had more code updates this month than Stern, which is surprising. But for Scooby-Doo, which we were just talking about with the topper, they have, actually have, strangely, they have two versions of the code. They have the regular, I suppose it could be described It could be described as the fully tested version, which has a few bug fixes and feature changes over previous versions, but isn't a huge update. And they also have a beta version, which adds the Gangs All Here wizard mode and also includes a few bug fixes and game changes. So if you want to add the wizard mode, it's still in beta, or beta, depending on where you're listening to this, but it isn't fully tested yet so you have to take it as it is and accept there might still be some bugs in there they haven't ironed out yet but two versions for Scooby-Doo anyway Texas Chainsaw Massacre and also got an update version 0.92 that apparently we're having some stability issues for some of the video assets and also for the hook multiball mode. Those should now be much more stable and reliable, and there are a few minor rule changes in there, which we needn't go into the details of. And Looney Tunes as well, also the current title, along with Texas Chainsaw Massacre, that also got an update which added some new display graphics, some new sound effects, changed some of the rules, and fixed a few known bugs. and so those are the updates for the software for Spooky Pinball this month, June 2024. Right, and I think that rounds it up for Spooky Pinball as well. I think it does, yeah. Yeah, okay. Back to Illinois, I would say. Jersey Jack Pinball, well, this is interesting news. with code updates, there's often a file accompanying with all the info. Yeah, the readme text file. Right. And there's people that dive into the code to see, like, Yeah, me, normally, for once. Yeah, like, oh, what happened? And apparently there's a line in the recent code update for, I believe, Elton John, where it said that there is a certain, sorry, English, not my native language. Yeah, there's a variable or a flag or something in there that was requested, it said, by the Pinball Connect team. Now, we don't know. Thank you for helping me out there. That's all right. We don't know what the Pinball Connect team is. There's a lot of speculation that it is a system which Jersey Jack Pinball are working on, which will replace, replicate, enhance the features that were available in the Scorebit system, which Jersey Jack Pinball did offer for quite some time on their games, but then fairly recently removed it. I don't know whether there was a falling out, but I think Scorebit wanted some extra functionality in the games, which Jersey Jack Pimwall weren't happy with. So that disappeared, and since then there's been no replacement for that. That was all about score tracking, some of the more basic features which Insider Connect also offers. But Scorebit allowed you to collect scores and made them available to outside systems such that they could automatically get the scores into a tournament system, for instance, rather than having somebody have to write them down or type them into a system, into a tablet or a phone or whatever, in order to register your score. It would also actually be recorded. It could generate leaderboards. It could generate very much more information and get stats and that kind of stuff and audits. But anyway, that all disappeared when they took Scorebit out of Jersey Jack Pinball's games. This little line said Pinball Connect. Quick search on Google. It's indicated that there isn't anything, any system out there called Pinball Connect that is already in development, or at least it hasn't been made public. So there's a suggestion it's an in-house project by Jersey Jack Pinball to provide that functionality. But it's only speculation at this stage. Right. Is that fair? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So, and, well, if you keep an eye on Jersey Jack's social media, you might have noticed that the company is hyping the Elton John Collector's Edition production to be ending soon. But apparently the Collector's Edition isn't sold out yet, so you can still get one. and this is sort of becoming a trend I would say in the sense that we see quite a lot of posts more than usual I would say for games being a little bit hyped get one while you can and which production is ending and you might still get one blah blah blah blah, blah, blah, and not with Jersey Jack alone, but, well, we've seen it with Stern running all the titles. We've seen Spooky just made an announcement that they have Scooby-Doo ready to ship if you order one now. Multimorphic indicated that we have all game kits available and ready to ship. So it seems to be, we already said, the market seems to be rather slow right now, And these are all confirmations, I would almost say, that it's indeed the case. Yeah, everything is not selling out immediately, which is a situation that we kind of got used to for many years. Right. But it's probably a healthier market, I'd say, because it means that maybe that fear of missing out when the game is first released can gradually sort of subside, and people won't rush out and buy a game that they don't know anything about. So it gives people the chance to actually experience the game before they decide whether they want to get it. I think too many people have been too disappointed too many times in the past by buying something that they haven't played yet, yes. Yeah, okay. So I think that's all the information and news we have this month from Jersey Jack Pinball. and you can think of anything else? Well, we mentioned before, we're expecting another Jersey Jack game to be ready or revealed later this year. Yes. Maybe before Pinball Expo, but definitely before IEPA, which is three weeks later, I think. So October, November, we might see a new Jersey Jack game. Yeah. And there's lots of speculation about what that will be, but it is only that at the moment, so we won't add to that. And we move on instead to things that we do know about, which is from Barrels of Fun, who are taking us back down to Texas again. and this time they also sent out a sort of newsletter, in this case a press release, saying that they have orders now for more than 750 of their Labyrinth games out of the maximum 1,100 that they said they were going to build and that they've already built 270 of those and they are committed, they said, to build another 500, so up to 770 by the end of this year 2024 and what that means is that basically covers all the orders that they have in right now plus a few extras so it means that any new orders that come in now will be built in early 2025 this is sounding like something we were talking about earlier it also means that they have 350 potential to be built machines available to be bought. Yeah. Which is in line with what we've seen with other companies what we were just discussing. Yeah, they're not all sold out yet. But, it's, I don't know whether it's a bad thing or whether it's an indication that they set their maximum number of units at just about the right level. So, they've got, they can easily fulfill all the orders that they've taken in the first rush. And then, over the next six months or so they'll get some additional orders in and can satisfy those in early 2025 while still remaining within their maximum number of 1100 units right and what we don't know is for how long they can run the game if they want to I mean it could very well be that in 2025 at some point they move on to their next game but not having build all 1100 Labyrinth games, they might still get back to that game at a later stage, if the contract allows that. Yes, that's right. But Labyrinth is the game at the moment, and that game had a code update this month, on the 14th of June, which added a new poisoned peach mode to it, which was demonstrated in a video. Yes, by I.E. Pinball. Yes, that's right. Easy to look up on the socials of Barrels of Fun, where the modus demonstrated as well. Yes. Great gameplay, Carl. Yes. Okay. Well, I think that's about it for Barrels of Fun. Yes. Anything else for them? So let's move back across the Atlantic and to the North Atlantic and to Pinball Brothers, who we were discussing a little bit earlier when talking about Pedretti. But, of course, Pinball Brothers are based in Sweden, Pedretti is based in Italy, and their joint venture, Euro Pinball Corp., is also based in Italy. And it's there that Pinball Brothers are building their upcoming title. I'll say upcoming, but not that much upcoming. It's almost a current title, which is, of course, ABBA, which we have covered the launch of and the launch party of in previous BINcasts. Yeah. And as we discussed at the time, the game was far from complete software-wise, although it also had some recommendations for the hardware. where I really curious whether they took any of my suggestions and well changed some bits of the design what could easily be changed Anyway, we'll see about that. But software-wise, they currently added, or they, well, last month added a Disco Frenzy multiball, a Waterloo multiball, a Super Trooper multiball, and at this point I was like, oh, God, is going to be one of those multiball heavy games that really gets boring. Oh, another multiball, but okay. So far, only those. Three new challenge modes. Two new songs being Jose Fernandez and the name of the game. I thought it was ABBA, but apparently they don't remember. And much more. And much more. and on top of that Joel Engelberth of Flip N Out Pinball I believe that is did interview Pinball Brothers CEO Daniel Jensen in his Flip N Out Pinball podcast which is actually video so you can find that on YouTube and of course you can listen to our interview with Daniel as well on all our outlets so if you're looking for where we got this from Yeah, wherever you got this from, you can listen to our interview with Daniel, too. Just thought I'd throw that in there. Yeah. And then, of course, you wonder, like, okay, it's great that they add all this stuff to ABBA, but when can I play the game? Or even die. Yeah, exactly. So the first games are expected to leave the factory the second half of June, which has already happened. and they should be arriving in the US by July. So hopefully soon in the US you will find ABBA games on location near you if that location bought a game or at a pinball show where a distributor is bringing the games, then you might have a chance to play some ABBA yourself. Yeah, well, lucky you. The first game to go into the US then. which is nice, but I suppose it doesn't mean that in the intervening time between them shipping them and them arriving in the U.S., they aren't still making games that are coming to Europe or, indeed, other markets. Yeah, exactly. So no updates on that yet. Well, as soon as we hear anything, we'll bring that to you in next month's Fincast. Right. So, okay. Then all the way across the world, I would say, on the other end of the world, Taiwan, to be precise, where we find the factory of Homepin, which technically is still an Australian pinball company just building their games in Taiwan. their most recent announcement was that they are building a Blues Brothers pinball machine which Pinball Magazine actually had the scoop for thank you Mike for that and not much news other than that the company shared a couple of images of the cutouts for the plastics the shapes of the plastics were basically on a sheet of plastic where you could see them but the artist for the game doing the graphics still had to decorate them so to speak so but well that's basically the only news that they shared at the beginning of the month so there are plastics on the game and we know what the shapes of them are but other than that Yes, and we still don't know how long it will take before we actually get a fully finished Blues Brothers machine, I would say. Well, yes, indeed, if it will ever be fully finished, because remember, it's open source code in it as well. Well, the plastics will be finished at some point. The plastics will be finished, and hopefully the play field will be too. but it's intended to be a game in development, I suppose, for a long time until a fully featured version of the software comes out, or at least one of them. Right. Because there could be several. Yep. Okay, so that's all we have from HomePin. So going back to the US, Turn the Pinball, their current launch title is Ninja Eclipse, which we haven't really seen it go into mass production at the moment but if you want to play one then you can go to the Freeplay Arcade in Arlington in Texas which is actually somewhere that you and I visited when we were over in Texas Yeah, I remember, it was a fun place by the way Yeah, absolutely, and we recommend you going there because if you do go there you'll be able to play Ninja Eclipse at least for the next short time. It was there for a tournament, which was held there last weekend, in fact. And how much longer it's going to be there, we don't quite know. But if you're interested in experiencing the game, get over to Arlington and the Freeplay Arcade. Right. And that's all the news we get from Turnip. It is at the moment, yeah. so um um we still have uh chicago gaming as one of the companies uh left to discuss um interesting news that um butch pew who recently did a seminar at the northwest uh pimble in arcade show about the uh the manual that he wrote for pulp fiction which is available on youtube by the way left the company a few days after the Northwest Convention. It was like a week later or so. And I think he worked for Chicago Gaming for four years. And apparently the reason he left had to do with different priorities within the company that he apparently didn't agree with. or maybe he had just nothing to do because now that the manual for Pulp Fiction is done, what else could he do? Yeah, they haven't announced any other titles. Then again, if there's a new title in development, you can start writing a manual for that. But then again, if it's not finished, you might end up trashing half the manual. Exactly. And given how much and how in-depth Butch's manuals have always been for the game, it would be an awful lot of work. They end up doing it at least twice, I suspect, if he's working on an unfinished development game. Because a lot changes from the development process until it goes into production. And even then, afterwards sometimes, as we've seen with various games, there are post-launch fixes to the games which need to be implemented. So the version that's launched may not be the version that goes into mass production. Right. So, yeah, getting all that documented is the reason why it takes so long to bring the manual out after the game is launched. Right. Anyway, so Butch was at Chicago Gaming for four years, and before that he worked at Jersey Jack Pinball. Yeah, ever since it's set up, I think. Yeah. and hopefully we'll see Butch return to the industry at some point and who knows with what company Yeah, he's a very good presenter when he does seminars has a lot of knowledge about the games and very thorough in everything that he does so yeah I think it's a big loss to the industry if he is still without a job at another company hopefully somebody will snap him up right so anyway enough about uh butch uh but uh whatever you go whatever you do butch uh we wish you all the best and we hope to see you uh at at one of the pimple shows in the future again it's always nice talking to you so um and then um apparently there was a um a distributor email sent out from Chicago Gaming which let's address this as rumor because I have no confirmation of it I haven't seen it myself but apparently the goal is to ship the limited edition Pulp Fiction games over the course of late September, October and early November these limited edition games are limited to 1,000 units and they are not accepting new orders because they're all sold out. Yes. And, of course, they will also be building standard edition games, which will be shipping during the fourth quarter of 2024. And there will be some international-testant standard edition machines available to ship already in July. So we might see some in Australia, some in Europe, I suppose. And God knows where else. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's as you say, that's something which we haven't seen the details of, but it's our understanding of it. Right, yes. A situation. Okay. Now, speaking of international, let's head back to Europe. Yay! Well, we have Hexa Pinball in France, who launched their first game last year, Space Hunt. And, well, I wouldn't say whether... I wouldn't call it production has started, but apparently they did ship two Space Hunt games, which to me seems... Well, it's not so much mass production as it is probably like hand-built games. Yeah, like boutique production, I think, is probably the best way of describing it at the moment. Thank you. Yes. And on top of that, they have been busy in a completely different field. They launched a new website, which is hexa-pinball.com. So if you're curious about the space hunt game, take a look there. Yes, I'm looking at it right now. And it's very nicely made. has French and English versions of most of the text there. So you don't have to speak French in order to understand all the details. And it lets you buy the game through there. Merci beaucoup. Oh, mon plaisir. So, well, speaking of international manufacturers, I just mentioned Australia. We have two manufacturers over there, not counting Homepin, Hacker Spinball, who are in, well, I wasn't looking for the location, the geographical location, but more like they're in sort of trouble in the sense that they needed more funds to continue production and they needed to source parts. Yes, they needed to restructure their finances and find a way of basically buying the parts they need to make the games, which they are still making games, apparently. Not dead yet. No, still there. Still churning out, I suppose, though. There are still fathoms at this stage. They haven't moved on to Centaurs. yet. However, they do have this sort of head down, just keep ploughing on attitude and don't respond to messages or any requests for refunds. So that's interesting. I did see today that I think it was Flipping Out Pinball have agreed to, now this is this is something which I'm literally reading the outline of just, just before we started recording. Uh, I think Flip N Out Pinball Ball have agreed to turn deposits for Haggis games into store credit. So you can then use that to purchase other things. So if you put a thousand dollars deposit down on a game, you could then use that to say buy a topper or, or accessories for your, for other games. If you don't want to hang in there and, uh, and see what happens with, uh, with Haggis, whether they actually ever do deliver on the games that you have a deposit on. So I think, well, I don't want to say the vultures are circling, but you certainly get that feeling that it's only a matter of time before the inevitable happens, because if you're only turning out games very, very slowly, your costs don't stop. You still have to keep paying the staff, you have to keep paying for the premises, and if you're only buying a few parts here and there, then the cost of those is very high compared to buying them in the thousands. So it's... Not to mention all the custom parts that you might need. Yeah, that's right. I'm not sure whether that's the case for Phantom, but, I mean, you don't go to a vendor ordering 10 sets of plastics for a game. No, you go there and order 100. You get put to the back of the line and say, well, we'll do them when we have time, when we're in downtime and we're not making tens of thousands of plastics for this other customer. Right. Which is not going to speed up production either. But anyway, we hope. We wish them well. Yeah, we wish them well. We hope Damien and his crew will manage to dig themselves out of the hole they're currently apparently in. but the second company though also in australia yeah vector pinball that is um who have um their april fury game which is a rather um simplistic single level uh type of game with a billiard theme you would say so um and um uh the game is available in two trims and they're building more games. We've seen I think several of these games well we've seen photos or videos where at least two of these games were on either location or at a pinball festival and in there they posted a photo on their Facebook with four machines with two different trims and two different Translight set up and being built right now. Good. It's still boutique production, as you just called it, but they're building more games, so that's good. Yeah, more pinball, good thing, I think, up to a certain level, unless you're flooding the market with them. I don't think they'll be doing that just yet. Now, let's go back to Europe for a moment, and to Dutch Pinball, your neighbors or relative neighbors. Right. And I'll let you give us the news from your home country. Okay. Well, as you know, Dutch Pinball have currently the Big Lebowski in production and they also set up DPX, which stands for Dutch Pinball Exclusive. And Dutch Pimble Exclusive announced last month that they will be building Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which is based on a foam core zitware design by John Popatiewicz, for which Melvin Brower-Williams bought some lockers with those prototypes and laptops and what have you in it. So the game is announced, and kudos to In Before the Lock, which is a podcast, and they recorded an episode where they talked to Melvin for about two hours about his history, where he's coming from, how he got into pinball, but also what he found in the lockers of... Zitwer. Zitwer Staffel, for one. and what his plans are with the game and so on. It's a two-hour podcast, but it's highly recommended. He takes plenty of time to kill any rumors that may have been floating around. He also describes his relationship with John Popaduik because he reached out to John at some point because he found personal items of John, photos of his kids and stuff like that, which he wanted to return. So he reached out and I believe John offered his services and Melvin kindly declined. Yes. So yeah but highly recommended interview with Melvin Brower about the upcoming Alice Adventures in Wonderland game And of course I also tried to reach out to Barry Driessen the CEO of Dutch Pinball asking whether there was any news. I didn't get a hold of him. and he called me back at a time that I was away and not had my phone with me. So two hours later I see I missed a call from Barry. I tried calling again. He didn't answer. So you probably had the biggest scoop in the history of pinball. Yeah. But you didn't have your phone with you. Yeah. Sorry. so but in other news let me pour a little drink over here by the way it's not really yeah I'll have one yeah pass one over sure don't drink it this is heavy stuff so oh it is careful nice yes other news yes yeah other news Dutch Pinball added Pinball Traders in Northern Nevada and Great American Pinball in Illinois. Mike Nogel. Yeah, exactly. To its distributor network for both the Dutch Pinball and DPX brand of games, I would say. So if you're looking to buy a Big Lebowski or Alice's Adventure in Wonderland when that eventually comes out, you now can go to Pinball Traders or Great American Pinball as well as the existing distributors for those titles if you're in the US of course if you're not in the US but you are in Canada then you may have heard of Pinball Adventures even if you're not in Canada you might have heard of them you may well have heard of them and we've certainly covered them for a long time here on this Pincast well we've been reporting out there upcoming titles, including Polyfactory Before and Elements, which is their next one. They've been very, very quiet, which is unusual for them. Until now. Well, they showed a sign of life, I would call it. By posting an image of a sort of knight helmet I would say that's right yeah knight's helmet yeah with I think a piece of artwork which probably is the part of the translight with the name of the game elements yeah featured and a sort of well circular cutout which is forged forged by Pinball Adventures with a little dragon in there. Hmm. Predominantly related to the Elements title. It's all like gold. Yes, it's interesting that that was all that has been shown so far. Yeah, and the accompanying words with the Instagram post where this was posted was starting to forge. Yes, which was kind of funny given how they were, oh, Andrew, who runs the company, was heavily criticized for using fake celebrity sound-alikes in some of his advertising for previous games and trailers. So it's funny that they had a logo that said forged by Pinball Adventures or maybe they're just taking it in good humor and turning it into a positive for the company. So, anyway, it made me laugh when I saw it. And so that was intentional. Nice one. By the way, nice-looking assets and looking forward to seeing Elements when it eventually is released. Right. So I'm currently checking whether they have any other updates, but no. No, I checked just before. There was nothing else there. No. Yeah. So what other news do we have then? Yeah, go on. Okay. Well, we do have news from Tiltbob. I'm not even sure where they are in the U.S., but they are in the U.S., who sent a translate of their earlier announced road trip game to NAP Arcade. And they were the first to do that, so kudos to NAP Arcade for that scoop. It's a sort of collage type of trench light with a lot of, I don't know, well, you see a little bit of fabulous Las Vegas sign is in there. Yeah, it has all the elements. Carnival, a carnival ride, a plane flying in the air, Volkswagen Beetle with a trailer. Could have been a cartoon style. Yes. A raccoon going through someone's luggage in there. And apparently the game is now called Ramps Road Trip. So I don't know who this ramp would be, but oh well. Hopefully it makes sense. Yeah, so hopefully it will be a fun game. No news on when we can expect the game to be revealed at some point, but we're curious. And like I said, kudos to NAP Arcade for getting this coupon on this one. Indeed. So we have a bunch of companies where we have no news from them. Yeah. And they include... The usual bunch, I would say. Yeah, pretty much. So we've got Cardona pinball, nothing new there. Biktronic in Spain, also in Spain, SGR pinball and Quetzal pinball, no news from any of those companies. Neither from Circus Maximus. No big surprise there. No, that's about it. Yeah. Okay, so we move on to that's all the companies that we cover. But we're not done yet. Oh, no. No, it's a quiet month, but there's still news. For instance, Color DMD, remember them? Yep, still producing color displays, color replacement displays for your monochromatic dot matrix. They have added support for the NFL range of games. They just said that. I assume that means that those are the rethemed Striker Extreme games that Stern put out back in the early 2000s. yeah it was the first game or technically the second yes that's right now something you mentioned before about Butch Peel's appearance at the Northwest Pinball and Arcade show his seminar and all the other seminars from that are now available on the Geek Gamer TV channel on YouTube so if you want to catch up on what was said at in Tacoma there at the center. Always have a good range of seminars there and always very well produced as well for the video presentation. So catch those on Geek Gamer TV channel on YouTube. Let me just say that the seminar of Butch, which is highly interesting, but also the Brian Eddy seminars are very interesting, especially the one where he talks about all the stuff that didn't make it into games from the Bradley Williams days including like the three stage drop target that was supposed to be in Indiana Jones Ah right I could say yeah because the animations are on the screen Right So he talks about all that stuff things that were cut for budget reasons and stuff like that. Very interesting, so I highly recommend to check out the Geek Gamer TV channel on YouTube and look those seminars up if you have some time to kill. Well, I think that's a must see. So we have some other news in the long-running saga of Robert Mueller of Deep Root Investments and Deep Root Pinball, amongst other things. we won't go back over the history of how that all fell apart but in last month's pin cast we mentioned that there was a court case scheduled to begin on the 10th of June so obviously we're going to be keeping an eye on that and bringing you the updates on what happened there well the news is it never went to court because a settlement was agreed between Robert and the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC Now, it's not fully revealed yet exactly what the penalties are going to be, but basically Robert didn't admit to anything, but also doesn't contest many of the claims from the SEC. So if I give a brief summary of what they are, they say he's restrained from directly or indirectly owning any entity participating in the sale of investment securities. He should also, won't act as an officer or any company that does that. He won't breach any of the things that the SEC claim he has breached in the past. And he shall pay disgorgement of ill-gotten gains. That's a lovely phrase, isn't it? So basically they have to repay some money. he will not he's precluded from arguing that he didn't violate securities laws as alleged by the SEC and he can't claim or can't challenge the validity of the court's agreement. So basically he can't sell securities of any kind, be a director of a company which does promises not to be a naughty boy again and will have to pay back both his ill-gotten gains and a financial penalty. The size of both will be determined by the court in a separate hearing. It may have taken place, but we haven't seen any publication saying what those ill-gotten gains or financial penalty are going to be. Also, although he doesn't admit to misappropriating the investment funds, the SEC detailed, He isn't allowed to deny those claims for the purpose of working out the fine or repayments. So that's where that whole SEC case has ended up. We're still waiting to see the financial penalties and repayments. But once that's done, that will basically be the end of that. Now, will there be a criminal case from the Department of Justice? The SEC is only a civil case, so can't send him to prison or anything like that, even if he doesn't deny the claims. But the Department of Justice have that power, of course. And the settlement doesn't prevent any criminal charges taking place, although of course he didn't actually admit to anything so he hasn't incriminated himself in any way but he can't deny or reject anything that the SEC said should it ever come up in court so that's kind of the it could be the entire end of the deep root saga barring the financial side of it the fines and the repayments or it might end up going further and becoming a criminal issue but for now That kind of wraps up most of the SEC's side of it, and we'll see where it goes from there and let you know whether it goes any further. So basically, the lessons we learned here, it pays off to be a lawyer. Well, it pays off not to be poor. Yeah, if you're dealing with small amounts, it probably would be a criminal case, and if you're found guilty of that, you'll probably go to prison for it. But if he's talking about millions, then you probably won't come to that. Okay, so if you're planning on anything in that area, go big. Yeah, go big. Go big or go to jail. Yes. oh well yep so we'll keep you updated on whether that goes anywhere else and what the numbers are when it is announced right so there's one final household yeah a bit of housekeeping stuff which I can mention these monthly pinball industry news pincasts were previously also available through Google Podcasts. I know that some of you listened to it through that. Well, Google Podcasts is no more. People have shut it down. But it's been replaced by YouTube Podcasts in the way that they want to steer everybody towards YouTube. So that means that, yes, our Pincast is now available in video format on YouTube. well not really i mean it's it's it's audio but with uh the video being our promo image which you see on youtube and on on the spotify page and anywhere else that you might download it from to a podcast player um that's all the video is but it does mean you can now play or embed our pin casts and all our previous pin casts through your favorite youtube player no matter what you use to do that. It means it'll be on YouTube Music as well. It's a really minor point, but what it means is that YouTube actually make a copy, make their own copy of our Pincast rather than getting it from Spotify, like everyone else does. So if for some reason Spotify is down or you can't get it from there, you can't remember how to get it from there, just remember it'll always be on YouTube as long as YouTube's not down. Just search for Pinball Industry News or head over to the Pinball News Videos channel, and there's a podcasts tab there where you can get this and all our previous pincasts, going back to the start of the very first one over five years ago. Exactly. Now, this does raise the question, should we do video? Should we add video? where basically we have two hands talking do people want to watch us talking into a camera I think one quick look would be give them the answer to that it's an option other people do we could but if you have any thoughts about whether you'd like to see us I think the editing will be much more difficult and I'm not even sure what I want to take that for. Hang on. We do editing? Well, occasionally. Okay. Yes, I have to admit, it might mean doing the headlines a little more differently because by the end of the third one I'm always laughing. So I have to try and stifle my laughs before we pick up. But yeah, it could be interesting. But if you have any thoughts about whether looking at our ugly mugs for the entire duration of the podcast. Thank God, pardon. I'll talk about the ones we're drinking from, drinking our ugly mugs. Yes. Then please get in touch and let us know. Either way, I'm sure you'd rather just listen to the audio version of it. But anyway, I think we're kind of there for this month, aren't we? Yeah, we are. Yeah. This is all the news we have for you right now. Fantastic. Okay. Well, thank you very much for listening to this somewhat shorter PINcast. We'll be back at the start of August with our next PINcast, looking back at all the events in the pinball world throughout this exciting month of July, which hopefully will be a little more exciting than June was. so until then Jonathan and I both wish you a fantastic rest of this month and we look forward to joining you again next month for the very latest edition of the regular Pinball Industry News Pincast so from me Martin Hebb of Pinball News and from me Jonathan Jewson of Pinball Magazine we wish you a fantastic rest of the month and we'll see you at the beginning of next month ok thanks, bye bye you