Everybody's working for the weekend Everybody wants a new romance Everybody's going off the deep end Everybody needs a second chance Oh, sit-a-sit-a-sit-a-sit-a-sit-a Oh, welcome everybody to Canada's Pinball Podcast, the only pinball podcaster working on Labor Day. We got a great show for each and every one of you. But before we do that, I want to thank some new members to the Canada Club and some of you out there that have been upping your memberships. Rodney C. went from $30 a month to a $50 a month membership. Rodney, thank you so much. will be went from five to ten dollars a month let's welcome some new members we got what we also got a rod went from five to ten dollars a month welcome to the show shane welcome to the show let's see we got a new members matthew andy palmer craig young steve haskell edwin robert f Mike, Manaj Mohan, welcome to Canada's Pinball Podcast everybody. It is Labor Day week and we're all waiting on Star Wars. I'm here to tell you right now it's gonna be next Monday or Tuesday. The media day is on the Wednesday. I would have liked to have seen it this week. Everybody's off, everybody's drinking. It is the perfect time to reveal the game. They should have revealed it today. They should have said on Labor Day, get ready. And here's the part I don't like. And again, I don't understand modern pinball marketing. We still don't know the exact date and time by which this game will be revealed. Why? You've been working on it for over a year or two. You've got the licensing deal in place. And so your marketing team hasn't even set the release date or the reveal time. Everybody should have it on their calendar. And we're a week away and nobody knows. It's maybe the 8th or the 9th. That's what I got from people over at Stern Pinball. Really? It's a rolling release. It's in flux. I don't understand it. I don't get it. It would have been perfect to reveal it this week. There's no hype right now. The hype thread, because everybody already knows that Star Wars is dead. It's only 10 pages long and nobody cares anymore. You teased it with Star Wars and then you hit with nothing. John Borg's out there playing old games. We know it's John Borg. We know it's Star Wars. You could have at least done like a new element of the game every few days just to get us excited, just to keep it going. That being said, it is Star Wars. I still think they're going to sell all 770 LEs, but I also think Stern needs to make the LEs special. You go back, you look at the Ghostbusters LE. Go look at that pamphlet. Go look at the Batman 66 LE. I don't think there's been a really wow, take my money now LE since, when was the last one? Think about it. I think actually Ghostbusters was really the last LE that just blew us away. It wasn't Jaws. We had debates around the white armor. It wasn't Godzilla. It wasn't anything James Bond. It wasn't Foo Fighters. Stern has made the biggest mistake on its LEs recently. The last four to five years, they have not made their LEs truly stand out. I mean, go look at Foo Fighter. It's the same damn art package. They just changed like the red to the green, same art package. All these games are looking the same. James Bond, LE looks exactly like the premium. Even the trim is like the same. They just haven't gone above and beyond. Metallica remastered LE. That LE looked a lot different than the premium. And that's why people gobbled it up. So it's a golden opportunity here for Stern Pinball to bring back and restore What makes an LE an LE? Are they going to do it? Here's my bet. Nope, I don't think they're going to do it. I think Star Wars Pro is going to look almost as good as Star Wars LE, even though it's half the price. Okay, so here's what I want to do for you on this episode. I want to give you some exclusive confirmation news. Nobody else is saying this. It's coming at you directly from Canada, and it is about Big Bang Bar. I'm here to confirm for each and every one of you that Big Bang Bar is coming back. It will most likely be revealed to the world this year, maybe as early as Pinball Expo in October. The company making Big Bang Bar remake is Pedretti Gaming. They have the license. They are working with Rick at Planetary on this game. Not that surprising they made the Funhaus remakes that nobody really wanted And the reason this is happening let me give you some backstory Because you know it an interesting history this Big Bang Bar It always been like a game out there in the world that like was super rare They only made like one prototype. And then Gene Cunningham went and like basically it killed him. He spent his whole life like remaking this game and getting it to the price. I think he sold the remakes. I think he made like 214 remakes of Big Bang Bar for something like $5,500 or $4,500. It was basically like over like a decade long journey for him to remake this game. But the story is very interesting. So back in the day, I want to say it's like 1998. Let's go back then. There were two companies making pinball. Bally Williams and Capcom was also making pinball machines. Now, something interesting happened. I might be like paraphrasing a little bit, but employees from Williams went over to Capcom. And at the same time, these companies both came out with similar games. Williams came out with Theater of Magic and Capcom people who had worked at Williams who knew that they came out to compete with that with pinball magic. So Williams comes out with Theater of Magic and Capcom comes out with pinball magic. Now they get in a lawsuit over this and then there's a settlement. So these two companies are like connected. Now, Big Bang Bar was originally designed by Bally Williams. How many of you knew that? I didn't really know this. And so when they made Cactus Canyon and then Bally Williams sort of like went out of business and stopped making pinball, then Capcom got the license to make Big Bang Bar. And we all know the story there. They just made a handful. I forget how many, like eight prototypes. It wasn't that many. Maybe it was one prototype and the company went out of business. Well, the company didn't go out of business. They just stopped making pinball machines. Capcom is still alive and well today. Obviously, Street Fighter, the big franchise for Capcom. So Gene goes and makes these games, makes 214 Big Bang Bar remakes. They are made to the specifications of the prototype. They take forever. He gets them out. They are beautiful pins and they become instant collector's items. In a world in which there's so much of everything, there's only 214 Big Bang Bars in the world. On the secondhand market, I've seen these things go anywhere from $18,000 all the way up to $30,000. To have a mint Big Bang Bar is to have a unique game in your collection, especially nowadays where nothing feels collectible, this is a very sort of coveted game by Pinball Collectors. It's not the greatest game ever, but it is a fun game. And the adult theme and the adult nature of this game makes it really cool. And it's stunning. If you've ever stood over a Big Bang Bar, it really does stand out in a lineup. Okay, now fast forward to today. What's happened with Rick and Planetary makes sense. So Rick has all of these licenses. He has all of these properties that he can remake back from the Bally Williams days. And he's worked with CGC to remake games like Monster Bash, Cactus Canyon, Medieval Madness, and Attack from Mars. Now, he's got a lot more licenses than that. The thing is, CGC is really slow. I don't have to tell you that. So if you're Rick and you want to remake all of these games, Toten, Theater of Magic, Funhouse, all these games, Twilight Zone, you can't give them all to CGC because CGC is so slow. So he's dividing and he's giving some themes to CGC. The next will be Twilight Zone. Toten and Big Bang Bar are going to be remade by Pedretti Gaming. Now, I know what you're thinking. And here's the issue, though, right? Is CGC took those Bally Williams classic games and made them better. Everything about the CGC remake is better than the original. Pedretti Gaming doesn't make games as good as CGC. They might not make you wait as long. But in the end, all you really want is an improvement upon the original. You want the quality to be better. The screen is better. the sound is better, the lights are better, the play feel quality is better. Everything about the CGC remakes of Bally Williams games makes those games the ones people want. If you're going to go get a Medieval Madness, you don't want the original. You want one of the CGC remakes. Same with Attack from Mars. Same with Monster Bash. The toppers are awesome. They're beautiful. They're stunning games. You know, when Pedretti Gaming came out with Funhaus, nobody really wanted it. They redid the artwork with Brian Allen. Nobody wanted it so much that like damn content creators are giving discount promo codes to move the games out of distro inventory. That's how bad the sales were. I heard they didn't even sell like 200 of them. But Funhouse was never this like highly sought after collectible So now that Pedretti Gaming is going to make this game and bring it back the story gets even more interesting So do you know who had permission to make Big Bang Bar Pedretti Gaming didn't really engineer this remake of Big Bang Bar. This remake was re-engineered off the original Williams files, with the original mold from Williams to make the new dancer in the game. all of it was re-engineered by Mr. Melvin Williams who we know from Dutch Pinball X. Now Melvin fully made the game made a few tweaks added some stuff that's cool but in the end like he just made it off of the original Bally Williams design. There was some stuff in it like there's a post hole that never got used he removed that from the game and a few tweaks here and there. And so, you know, you might be asking yourself, well, why didn't Dutch Pinball remake Big Bang Bar? Well, Barry was going down that road for a little bit and he was thinking about remaking some of those classic games. Remember, Barry's got like this bride of Pinball he was going to remake. But Dutch Pinball made a decision that they don't want to turn their company into a company that's making remakes. You could argue that, well, you're remaking Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and you're next going to remake Raza. I'm going to talk about that in a second, but I get what they're saying. Raza never made it into the world. Nobody owns one. Nobody was able to buy J-Pop's Alice. Now you can. That's different than remaking a game that's been out for a long time. So Melvin engineers this game, hands it off to Pedretti Gaming. I don't know what the rest is, but it's now a Pedretti Gaming planetary pinball release. It's going to happen sometime soon. I'll tell you one interesting change. If you look at the original Big Bang Bar, look at the trans light on it. You know, it's an interesting fact. Not sure everybody knows this. On the original game that came out that Gene remade, notice what it says on the trans light. All it says is Big Bang. What word is missing? Bar. You want to know the true story about why it doesn't have the bar? when they made the one prototype, they forgot when they were Marc Silk screening the Translight artwork, they forgot the final layer to put down to Marc Silk screen over onto the art. And the final layer said bar. So the original Williams files have it, but when they went to print it, they left it out. So when Gene did the remake, it still only says Big Bang on the Translight. Now on the new game, you're gonna see the bar it's finally gonna be the way it was always supposed to be so big bang bar coming back from prodreddy gaming and so then the question becomes this what will this game cost how many will they make what will the quality be like it's not gonna have like a 2.0 kit in it like it's not gonna be like the original and then a newer like coded game melvin originally wanted to do that, but it sounds like these guys want to keep it as original as possible. I also don't expect to see new art package. Stanley was working on some stuff, but what Stanley was working on, the artist, he was working on the 2.0 version with Melvin. What we're going to see here is a remake of a remake of the original prototype. That's what we're going to get. Now, the question is, How much do you think they're going to be able to charge for this game? What will this do to the value of the originals? And here's how I feel about this. If you're going to remake Big Bang Bar, you got to make it better the way CGC would do it. What I'm worried about here is Pedretti is going to make a version of the game that isn't as good as the first remake. The quality is not going to be there. They haven't really established a lot of credibility as building high quality machines. And the bar has been raised. Dutch quality is amazing. CGC quality is amazing. Pedretti, I don't think people look at them like they're going to enhance what's come out before. So that begs the question then, what happens, right? I think unfortunately, when you oversaturate a limited game like this, what's going to happen is all of them are going to lose some of their prestige. All of it is going to lose some of its rareness. And the original games are definitely going to go down a little bit. Now, I don't know how much I would say if a game is going for like 20, 25, I think it's going to slide down now because now they might make three to 500 of these. Now, I don't think they're going to sell that many. If they were smart, they would make no more than like 214. I would make 213. I would make one less of the new remake than there was of the original remake. I don't think it should ever be remade. I think sometimes there's a reason why this thing is special. And now you're messing with history. You're messing with the legacy of it. And you're messing with the collectability of it. It only ever existed to be a rare game that was really cool to have in a very prestigious collection. when you just remake it and flood the market with more. You could do it but should you do it And I wouldn have done it I think it different making Alice I think it different making Raza Now speaking of Raza I just going to say this save your pennies people. And I mean this, I'm just going to say, when you see what's going into Raza and when you see the changes that have been made and you see the stuff and the world under glass, it is a special game coming. And I think you're going to want one next to your Alice if you have an Alice. It's got more in it than Alice, obviously. It was a more fully developed game. But boy, oh boy, oh boy, I hope you like magnets. I hope you like magnets. I hope you like cool ways to ball save. I hope you like incredible sculpts. I hope you like ramps that have been fixed that are even steeper, that are even cooler. I hope you like UV lighting, lighting up a game in a crazy way. I hope you like a world under glass. This feels like the J-pop game everybody always wanted, but it's going to be made by an engineer who knows what he's doing. It's not going to be like that crap they rolled out in Texas and had the clipboard. This is Melvin knows what he's doing. I mean, seriously, I'm just going to say like it's going to be a very special 2026. And so what I also heard is Raza will be coming out next. And I also heard Back to the Future. The latest I heard, and you know me, I mean, I know people that know people. The latest I heard is Back to the Future is looking insane. Like, it is loaded. Like, if you think Harry Potter's loaded, guys, where do you see Raza? Where do you see Back to the Future? There's a lot in it. The world of Back to the Future is going to be coming to life at the end of 2026. And, you know, they know what they need to do. They know what the bar is. They know what they did with Lebowski. And I'm just hearing that Back to the Future is very, very special. And they were like, Chris, just can't wait till you see it. Yeah, where we're going, we don't need roads, baby. You just need a lot of money. So it's going to be really interesting to see what Dutch Pinball does to sort of deal with the demand of this thing. The demand is going to be insane. And, you know, I don't know. They don't make that many games a week. And so they're going to get like 8,000 orders for this thing. So Dutch Pinball Back to the Future. I love that they just kind of kept it there. I do. It's going to be a very special year. We're going to get Pokemon from Jack Danger and Keith Elwin. We're going to get Sonic the Hedgehog from Steve Ritchie. And Back to the Future from freaking Dutch Pinball. We're also going to get Beetlejuice soon from Spooky Pinball. 999 units. $9,999. $29 it's going to sell out in nine minutes and nine seconds that's what's going to happen people trust me and as I said Canada's Pinball Podcast is going to get a small number of games so if you get locked out of Beetlejuice I am going to get fully loaded games that I can offer up to some of you to buy I'm not getting them for free you're going to buy it you're not going to have to pay a scalper's price and you're not going to get shut out. And that's going to be a fun perk. I'm able to offer some of you because of Bug and Luke and their generosity. I think they just like the fact that I've been saying nice stuff about Spooky without having to exchange any dollars. They're going to fix the screen. No more washed out screens. It's going to be insane. The next three months are going to get a little bonkers, everybody. The bar's been raised. You know, look, Harry Potter, I get it, I get it, but how many of you out there might have been in on Harry Potter for 15 and you're still waiting and the more you look, you know it's not packed, baby, you know it's not packed. It's a great game, it's a great shooter, it's packed with assets, it's just not packed otherwise. Yeah, I get in these arguments with people, they're like, the game is loaded, Canadian. I'm like, where? It's got a lot of shots, it's got a lot of assets, But where's the loadedness in the game? Where's the magic? Where's the stuff happening? Where's the ball flying through the air? Where's the magnet grabbing it and disappearing? Where, where, where's any of the magic in the mechanical parts of the game? I love the staircase. But after that, are you really going to tell me the upper Quidditch play field is like blowing you away? And then what else? And then what else? And then they just stare at me. They just stare at me. I'm like, guys, go play a Star Trek The Next Generation and come back and tell me Harry Potter's packed. Go play a Dialed In. Go play Lord of the Rings and then tell me it's packed. I just can't. I can't with these, like, apologies. It's a really great game, but it's not packed. Everybody, thank you for being a member of the Kaneda Club. Happy September 1st. In, like, seven, eight days, we're going to see Star Wars. A lot is riding on this game. I can't wait. Now go enjoy your Labor Day. Kaneda out. You wanna be in the show? Come on, let's go! Thank you.