No one's leaving Tokyo, all night crossing the line. No one with the radio, Tokyo is on fire. Sit up, sit up, sit up, sit up, sit up, sit up, sit up. Welcome everybody to Kaneda's Pinball Podcast, the only pinball podcaster that gets along with everybody. Kaneda has closed on his house. We are so excited. We are moving to Connecticut next week. And I can't wait to put no pinball machines in front of windows. A lot more to come on Casa de Caneda, people. But thank you so much for all the people who said congratulations. Good luck, Chris. The right move for your family. I've done everything in my life in reverse order. Most people have kids young and then the kids grow up and they grow out of the house and then they put the arcade machines into the homes. I did that first and now I'm doing things in reverse order. So here's what we're going to do on this episode of Canada's Pinball Podcast. At the end, I'm going to share something I've never heard before. So we're going to call this podcast Canada's What If Pinball Podcast. And I want to just ask the question, what if, right? What if this happens and what do we think is going to happen in pinball if this happens with these manufacturers? And we're going to go around the horn. There's some news to talk about. We're going to cover off on that stuff. And it's just going to be an interesting month of June because I just woke up this morning and I saw that Stern Pinball is going to rerun Iron Maiden in July. Does that mean that they're not going to make Metallica Anniversary Edition in July? Does that mean that John Wick's sales are so bad that Stern is already going back to another Keith Elwin game like Iron Maiden? I mean, you're just going to sandwich this game between Jaws and Iron Maiden? And I think it speaks to a larger issue. If Stern needs to make like 600 to 800 games a week, and the response to John Wick is so soft, you know, John Nunchucks ain't moving units, then what does Stern do? You know, how often can they do this before they completely oversaturate their own market and their own category? So we'll see what happens there. I saw it on an Australian distributor site, so not sure if that person is leaking the information prematurely or if this is definitely going to happen. Now look, we know that Stern has the capabilities to do these reruns anytime they want. Now, do people want more Iron Maidens? I don't know. You know, I think people really want more Ghostbuster toppers. Now, speaking of toppers, I was on Naps Arcade yesterday and Jason was talking about the fact that within Stern's code, it's kind of leaking what the toppers are going to be on Stern pinball machines. So if you go into the Jaws code, there is like a line item in there for two different toppers coming out for Jaws. One is the billboard with the girl swimming on it that gets like graffitied from the movie. And the other is labeled Shark Attack. All right, that's cool. Two topper options. Which one's going to be $1,000 and which one's going to be $2,000? Then there's a topper for a game that everyone's already forgotten about in Venom. The Venom topper is supposed to be Ghost Rider, like some venomized version of Ghost Rider. Who's going to pay money for a Venom topper after this game is just torpedoed in value. Crazy that Stern waits so long to get the toppers out. And then the final one is the John Wick topper. In that code, there's something called like photo shoot. And everyone thought that meant that this topper was going to take a picture of you a la the way Jersey Jack pinball does. Now, what we've learned from Jason Knapp is what photo shoot means is just a moment in the game in which all the lights get turned on. and it's for promotional reasons to make the game look really good. So that's what photo shoot means with that topper. It doesn't mean that it's going to snap a picture of you or do anything really interesting like that. So we shall see. All I know is this, is that every single one of us, all of us collectively, don't understand why the world's number one pinball company cannot align its topper production with the game launch. It is much harder to make a game than to make an accessory. And the Stern delay is like a year. Sometimes it's two years. Sometimes I think it was like three years for like Star Wars. And it's like Stern. Here's the first what if. What if Stern Pinball actually just released the toppers when the games came out? Wouldn't everybody want that? They would make way more money because like a game has its most hype and most excitement on day one. And for people, when you buy a game and you spend this much money, you want to have it look the best it's ever going to look on day one. And here's the other thing. It's like, what if for $13,000, Stern Pinball actually gave you a topper, right? It is crazy to me that for $13,000, this company doesn't even put a topper on top of John Wick LEs or Foo Fighter LEs. Jersey Jack gives you toppers for both models. Heck, Spooky Pinball gives you toppers. Why is it you get a topper on the LE of Pulp Fiction? It's a $9,000 game. For $9,000, you get Pulp Fiction and that incredible topper. If Stern Pinball made that Pulp Fiction topper, they would have charged you $2,000 extra. And I know Stern Pinball is never going to do it, but it would be amazing if Stern Pinball could just sync up these toppers with the game launches. And I think the LEs should come with a topper included for this much money. All right. There we go. All right. What if? Here's the next one. What if Chicago Gaming Company's quality is starting to fall off? And I'm seeing this, right? This is not normal because CGC over the years, as delayed as they are, they've always made some of the best quality games in the world. Bar none. When you walk up to a CGC Attack from Mars or Medieval Madness or Monster Bash, the games look amazing. But for some reason, these Pulp Fictions are having a lot of quality control issues to the point where the playfields are flaking apart, which is absolutely mind boggling when you think about it. Because Chicago Gaming Company like makes the playfields like Churchill Cabinets, like this company is like bread and butter, was making the best products out of wood and clear coat. And they knew what they were doing all of these years. And so that is why it is so frustrating as owners of Pulp Fiction are showing their playfields fall apart. And so will they fix this before they get to the LE runs of the game? I don't think so, because I bet they just already made all of these playfields because it's the same exact play field in the LE as in the standard edition So what if right What if I was just thinking about this What if Chicago Gaming Company what if their quality starts to like crumble Are people going to move away from supporting CGC? Because there's no other element about this company. I mean this. There's no other element about supporting Chicago Gaming Company that is rewarding for a customer. They take your money and then they disappear for so long. And we were fine with that because we knew eventually at the end of that wait was going to be one of the most high quality games ever. And if that's not the case, how good do you feel having your money locked up for almost like a year and a half now? And when I think about CGC, it's like, who is the face of this company? I just want to know that. Who is the face of this company? It's like seemingly this entire organization is run in the shadows. Nobody, like I don't even know who to go to. I don't have anybody on Facebook who's a contact for these guys, I never hear from them. They never hear from me. We never hear from them. They're just like operating without any person or personalities giving us any information ever. And I'm just here to say, I think it's getting old. I think people are getting tired of it. You know what? We'll never get tiring. What if, here's the next one. what if haggis pinball isn't done what if haggis pinball hasn't reached all of its nine lives because i saw earlier this week or last week or the end of last week that listener of the show kelly daniel was waiting on a fully populated fathom playfield and damien got it to him like he got it to him he got it in a box he mailed it when he said he was gonna mail it and that's a good sign. So there is still something happening at Haggis. There are still screwdrivers. There are still people there building these things. Now, I still have way more questions than I have answers for this company. How many people are working over there? We've seen some photos recently of boxes. I think Cointaker got a game. But when you look at the manufacturing date of those games, this is the big question mark. What if none of these games have been made over the last few months? And I'm still starting to see build dates in like December and maybe January, but I'm just not sure after they sent out that recapitalization note, if anything has been made since then. We don't know. There hasn't been a factory tour. There hasn't been much communication. And I still think Haggis pinball, you know, I would say there's still like a 70 to 80% chance that this company is never going to get around to making these centaurs because still trickling out these fathoms isn't enough, right? They need to find a way to get this company turned around. And here's my other what if with Haggis that I'm hearing, and this is a rumor, but this rumor makes some sense. What if Haggis pinball and Damien, what if he brings the company to America to set up manufacturing here? Not because of our love of guns, but because it would be much more cost effective for Damien to make his products here. And I think he's learned a really terribly hard lesson how much more expensive it is to make these games over there. I think he's hit with more taxes. I think shipping is a nightmare. and I think he's probably losing money on every single fathom he makes. And so would he be able to move his operation here? The reason why I'm not sure that will work or anything at this point will really save Haggis is because the one thing Damien does not have, he doesn't have any demand or goodwill left with his company. Like there's just not demand for these centaurs. And I don't know how he's going to get people to feel confident to invest and pre-order these games ever again. It doesn't matter what the game is. I just don't think people want this. I think these games are old. Even though he's putting lipstick on older games, it's still these games like Centaur and Fathom. They're nowhere near as good as all the other great modern pinball in the world. And people don't want this stuff as much as they want new stuff. Like even as bad as John Wick is selling, it's still going to way outsell anything from Haggis, anything from Barrels of Fun, anything from maybe even Spooky maybe, right? And that's just the way it goes because Stern knows how to execute. They've got a lot of themes that have big audiences, and there's just confidence in them. And if you don't have that confidence, you're not going to get consumers. And I don't even know how Damien would walk into a conference room and try to get someone to invest in this operation. Because the moment they look at the spreadsheet and the moment they look at the books, everything has to be in the red. There's no way he's making money like this. So we shall see what happens there. All right. What else is going on in pinball? I was thinking about this recently because, you know, as I see Stern Pinball go back to the well and remake maybe Iron Maiden, Metallica in July. The big titles, though, there's like two really big titles that I think are hanging over everything in pinball. Actually, there's three. I think the three big titles that are hanging over everything in pinball. And I think the reason these three titles are hanging over everything in pinball and are probably pausing a lot of our purchasing decisions is that we know there's a really, really good chance almost all of these, if not all of them, are going to happen. I think two out of the three of these is 100% happening. And the third one is like I'm like 90% sure it's happening. And those three titles that have probably most people waiting and wondering how they're going to be made is Harry Potter, is Pokemon, and is Back to the Future, right? Those three titles are coming. And all three of those titles might actually come out sometime in 2024, even early 2025. So they're not that far away, right? This isn't like, oh, these games are never coming out. No, they're coming. And that is huge, right? And so that is another reason why I think even though Elton John shoots great, the response is never really going to catch on because we know bigger stuff is coming. John Wick, easy pass, because you know, like, well, I'm going to go in on John Wick when they're going to do this. They're going to make a black and white Godzilla. There's Pokemon. There's Harry Potter. There's back to the freaking future. And so what I was thinking about is this. When we talk about pinball, when we talk about all these companies, and there's 14 companies out there. And what's interesting about this hobby, I've been covering this hobby for 10 freaking years. And I haven't seen any pinball companies really ever do anything interesting in the world of mergers and acquisitions. And I was saying to myself, and this is crazy, just let me say this. I was like, what if, what if, what if Stern Pinball or Jersey Jack Pinball, I know this sounds crazy, what's coming next? What if they bought Dutch Pinball? I mean just think about it for a minute What would be the reason for acquiring another smaller boutique company if you were someone like JJP or Stern They might have an innovation that you don have that you want to acquire That could be one reason. They might have a footprint in a territory you don't. That could be another reason. Or they might have an IP that they've secured that you want to get your hands on. Normally when you do mergers and acquisitions, there's a reason why it would happen, because it would be a mutually beneficial thing for both parties involved. Now, look, we both know Stern doesn't have a problem getting games to Europe. We know Stern does not have a problem manufacturing. We know Dutch Pinball does not have an innovation that Stern does not have. They've only got one thing, but the one thing they do have is worth so much money. What if Sterner Jersey Jack just acquired Dutch Pinball to get access to this IP that is probably the most valuable pinball IP that is going to come out over the next few years? It's interesting because what will sell better? Will Back to the Future outsell Harry Potter? Will it outsell Pokemon? And I don't know, right? It's really, really interesting because Elton John has sold way more albums than Foo Fighters. and Foo Fighters will sell way more pinball machines. So we've always like endlessly debated this is like where's the crossover between a fan base and the number of people in that fan base and will they buy an expensive pinball machine? Now, the reason why I think Back to the Future is better than Harry Potter, I think Back to the Future is better than Pokemon is simply this, is that Back to the Future is the greatest sweet spot. It is one of those 80s movies that has held up tremendously well. Everyone who's seen that movie and the second movie, we love it, we love it. Like we grew up with this stuff. So when you think about pinball, 40 to 60 year old demographic, it's perfect. Back to the Future's never had a great pinball machine. There's one from years ago, not good, not good. It's from the 90s, not good. And here's the other thing too. It's like, I think what makes a pinball machine great is source material that lends itself perfectly to amazing pinball moments. and I think that's what Back to the Future has better than almost anything because think about it. If you're going to try to tackle Harry Potter and there's like eight or nine movies, how are you going to jam that all into one pinball machine? The same thing is true with like Pokemon. I mean, even as I say Pokemon, there's so much happening in Pokemon and for most of you listening right now and just be honest, you're like, what? You don't even know anything about Pokemon. Like you know it exists but you didn't grow up watching Pokemon. It's the generation below us. We're like 10 years all too old to get into Pokemon if you're around my age. Like I was born in 76 and you know what? I just wasn't into Pokemon. I was probably into Tupac Shakur when Pokemon was blowing up with kids that were 10 years younger than me. And I'm not saying it's not popular. And I'm also not saying it's not going to do well on location because that's the most annoying fallback now. It's like, well, you don't understand how well it's going to do on location, man. Like, yeah, old pinball. Get ready, people. All pinball is supposed to do well on location because all pinball was only meant for location. It was never meant to be in your freaking home. There's a reason why there's a coin slot on the door. So stop saying it's going to crush on location. Yeah, I hope every pinball machine crushes on location. You shouldn't buy a pinball machine if you're an operator, if you don't think people are going to put freaking money inside the game. So this is like what's crazy to me is like, what if they bought Dutch pinball? They can then help Dutch Pinball make all these back to the futures. Both of them could, right? Once the game is designed, it could be made anywhere. You're just talking about parts going from A to B. Like you could manufacture these somewhere in a corner at JJP. Stern Pinball could not make enough back to the futures on a weekly basis. They would be able to fulfill the demand for back to the future. And they would probably make it over six months. They'd probably put like 6,000 units into the world. Dutch Pinball can't do that. They can't even come close to that. And if I'm Dutch, I'm like, man, like, what do we do now? Like, what do we do now? We're going to be like the only ones in the world who know how to make a hamburger. And we've only got one hamburger joint. And we can only make like 10 hamburgers an hour. Like, that's not enough. That's not enough. Like, Back to the Future is going to be like Big Macs, man. Everyone's going to want one. So that was a crazy what if I had. Like, what if Stern or JJP bought Dutch pinball? It's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. but a man can dream, a man can dream. All right, what else is going on in pinball? All right, so I have a crazy one here. So what if, right? So we all think that Mark Seiden's Jersey Jack game is gonna be like either the Muppets or maybe it's Harry Potter. I know Matrix gets floated around and I just wanna throw out a crazy what if. Again, there's nothing backing this other than we do know that a pinball company has this license and we keep attributing it to spooky. We keep saying Spooky's got this. We know that this license was acquired or parts of it were acquired by Deep Root Pinball and it's no other than the Goonies. And so, you know, I'm thinking to myself, well, what if Spooky Pinball doesn't have the Goonies? What if when Deep Root was failing, another pinball company simply inquired from the license holder? Hey, like they're going under. What would it take to acquire this license? And what if it wasn't spooky? What if Mark Seidens' game is the Goonies, right? I haven't heard anyone say this. I guess I could just input any movie and say, I haven't heard anyone say Shawshank Redemption. I haven't heard anyone say Raging Bull. But maybe, because I know that someone does have this license, maybe it is Jersey Jack. Even as I say it, it almost doesn't feel right. I just can't see Jack, like, being into the Goonies, really. Like, Jack's really into stuff from, like, the 70s. He's really not into stuff. He really has missed the mark, I think, on the greatest decade to be going back to. And it's not the 70s. It's not Elton John. It's not the Godfather. And he goes back even further with Wizard of Oz. Where Jack needs to find something is something from the 80s. And I'm telling you right now, maybe it's not the Goonies, but just imagine this. What if Jersey Jack Pinball made Karate Kid? Jersey Jack Pinball would sell three to one more karate kids than Elton John. And I really hope Jersey Jack Pinball gets its themes better. And I know they have some big ones coming. And Harry Potter is huge. And everyone's hoping they have Top Gun. And everyone's hoping for The Matrix. That's from the 90s. But just the first Matrix movie. Because if you do Matrix 4 like Toy Story 4, you screwed us all again. But man, that's it. I really, if I'm Ken Cromwell and I'm Brett Abbas over there, I'm really starting to think like how do we get some 80s nostalgia into the mix and here's what's crazy with the billionaire father and all the money and all the resources in the world like you're a billionaire you can hire the greatest licensing and merchandising guy on the planet a billionaire company Didn get the rights to freakin back to the future but a little company in the Netherlands did I don even understand how this happened All right, a few more what ifs, then I'm going to end on the crazy what if. Okay, so here's another one. What if American Pinball actually has the license to Masters of the Universe He-Man? Right? What if they actually have it? I keep hearing they have it. Joe Balcer was working on it. So why, if they have the license for this property, would they? even waste a second of resources making Barry O's barbecue challenge? You know, what if they actually diverted all the resources to making the one good theme they've got in their portfolio? And here's the other thing that I was thinking about that's funny, because I saw like Lloyd, like defending this barbecue game, you know, because he's an operator and he goes, you know, it earns just as good on location as everything else. And George Gomez also said something like that were like, Venom is the most played game out there on location. And I want to tell them, both Lloyd and George are right. Because what if, ladies and gentlemen, the games that get the most amount of plays on location are the games that we all know we're never going to buy. I'm never buying Barbecue Challenge. I'm never buying Venom. So when I go to a bar, am I going to play the games that I own or my friends own? Or am I going to throw money into the novelty game that I hear so many bad things about and I just want to see for myself how bad it really is? Like it's got our curiosity. And so you'll dump 30 bucks into barbecue challenge just to laugh your whole way through it. You know, ladies and gentlemen, David Fix is like the Ed Wood of pinball. He is. He's like he sincerely doesn't realize how bad he is at what he's doing in the pinball industry. And he sincerely brought this product to market thinking it would be successful. I mean, that's the Ed Wood of pinball. Ed Wood did not go off trying to make horrible movies. He simply made the movies to the best of his ability, but he didn't have any ability. And that's the same thing happening in American pinball. And so when we go spend money on barbecue challenge, it is like watching an Ed Wood movie. We're doing it for the giggles. We're not doing it because we actually sincerely think there's a good game there. All right. Let's end this with the weirdest what if, right, everybody? So I heard something that I've never heard before. You know, I reached out to Jason Knapp. I'm like, did you ever hear this? And I get rumors that come my way all the time. And I don't break every rumor, people. I saw there's like all this back and forth on Pinside. Who breaks more rumors, Kaneda or Knapp's Arcade? I will say over the last 10 years, nobody has broken more pinball rumors than me, right? And it's been accurate. Am I right all the time? Absolutely not. Nobody has gone after companies and kept them honest quite like me. Nobody, right? Nobody. All right. So, but here's something that I've never heard before. And normally I get like one liner rumors like, oh, the next game is Harry Potter or the next game is Matrix. But I got a statement here that was actually kind of detailed. And you could tell sometimes, you know, the more detailed, the more descriptive, the more those rumors tend to have some sort of validity because if someone's going to go to all this trouble, there might be some truth to it or it might be wrong. So I want to tell you the final thing that I heard, which is crazy. And this is Canada's final what if on today's episode. What if Foo Fighters actually wasn't designed to be Foo Fighters? And this is what I heard. What if Foo Fighters started its life being designed as another property you know as Pokemon. And I want to read for you. I'm not going to give the source what I heard and just take it for what it is. And it goes as follows. Pokemon doesn't make much sense to me. From what I remember, Foo Fighters was designed to be Pokemon, but nobody wants to talk about it. The upper play field was supposed to be the Poke Hospital. The Overlord was supposed to be a Pokeball with a ramp in front of it that lifted up kind of like Toy Story 4 and No Good Gophers. And there was supposed to be a lower playfield to be the Poke Stadium right where the Overlord graphic holding the Toy Foobot is on the playfield. Jack's second game was designed to be Board Game Night during designing. But I'm not sure it's actually going to be a Board Game Night pin. But what I do know is this, is that Stern is designing games without even a license in mind. Congrats on the newborn and the new house. All right. So look, ladies and gentlemen, take that with a grain of salt. Doesn't really matter, right? It doesn't really matter, right? Because Foo Fighters is great. And when you make a music pin like Foo Fighters and you do it the way they did it, it doesn't really matter. You can kind of reskin almost anything into a music pin. And unless the actual mechs in the game look like musical things or instruments the way Guns N' Roses did, you could re-skim these games into anything. Like, look, Steve Ritchie just re-skinned Star Trek into freaking Elton John. I mean, that's all he did. He turned Star Trek into Elton John, right? It is really easy to just, at the 11th hour, to pull a different theme over a design. So, but it is interesting that if this is true, does that mean that Stern still has Pokemon? Did they originally have it? We know they lost the license to Indiana Jones. Maybe they lost the license too to Pokemon. And the reason why Stern sometimes I think designs a game and then the licensing deals might change because if a game takes two to three years to design, sometimes these companies, you know, they change the way they want to be paid for the license. And that's why they lost Indiana Jones because Disney changed the way their payment works and they wanted money for each game sold and Stern was not going to do that. So lots of interesting stuff happening always in the world of pinball. Everybody, I'm so excited that I closed on my house. I'm so thankful to have each and every one of you here. And the reason I love this show too is you see there's no drama. You know, every once in a while, man, people might poke me and I might poke back, but you're never gonna get it here. Here, we're just talking about everything we love about pinball. I think there's so much interesting stuff happening. I think between Harry Potter, Pokemon, Matrix, Back to the Future. Man, the future is looking good. And every time Stern has to go to the past, it's just showing us that the decisions they're making today are not working out. And Stern, you need to think about the pricing. It's too expensive. You need to make sure the themes are what people want and do market research. And you got to start doing that now because you're not going to be able when John Wick flops to just run more old stuff forever. You're going to oversaturate the market. The pressure is building and it's all going to collapse if you keep just making too many games. I can't be the only one that like is observing this. Like it's kind of funny. I've never seen Stern have such a hard time moving units. Everybody be good. We'll talk to you soon. Some people call me Maurice