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Bon Jovi Pinball Reveal | Barrels of Fun

LoserKid Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·46m 46s·analyzed·Jul 28, 2026
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 (batch) · $0.022

TL;DR

Barrels of Fun reveals Bon Jovi pinball: concert-themed, beginner-friendly design with innovative heart mech and premium audio.

Summary

Barrels of Fun announces Bon Jovi pinball with Phil Grimaldi discussing design philosophy emphasizing beginner accessibility, a concert-themed ruleset with song selection mechanics, and innovative features including a multi-position heart magnet toy and enhanced audio design by Jeff Dodson. The game uses a familiar concert structure (5-song setlist plus encore) with scaffold learning, 3D tutorial animations, and risk-reward mechanics inspired by deck-building games.

Key Claims

  • John Bon Jovi is a huge pinball fan and has five pinball machines in his VIP room; the band approached David Van Ness about creating a machine

    medium confidence · Phil Grimaldi citing research and understanding from conversations with David Van Ness; notes he wasn't in the room where the deal happened

  • The game features four flippers total: two main flippers plus an upper flipper and an outlane save flipper called the Crowdsurf Flipper

    high confidence · Phil Grimaldi describing the evolution from initial two-flipper design to final four-flipper layout

  • The game contains 11 playable songs across multiple modes: 8 main modes, 1 mid-wizard, 3 encore songs, and 1 final wizard mode

    high confidence · Phil Grimaldi detailing song selection (Runaway, You Give Love a Bad Name, It's My Life, Have a Nice Day, Wanted Dead or Alive, Bad Medicine, Born to Be My Baby, Keep the Faith, plus Living on a Prayer, Raise Your Hands, Lay Your Hands on Me, Let It Rock, and Legendary)

  • Players choose from 4 available songs at a time to limit decision overwhelm and scaffold the experience for novices

    high confidence · Phil Grimaldi explaining design philosophy: 'Four already is kind of pushing it. So we're limiting it down to just four.'

  • The heart mechanic has three levels and operates as a diverter with an elevator, plus an interacting lift ramp that creates multiple shot combinations

    high confidence · Phil Grimaldi detailed explanation of the heart toy mechanics and state combinations

  • Jeff Dodson personally hand-tuned audio settings for every game leaving the factory and insisted on tuning with physical cabinets, not remote settings

    high confidence · Phil Grimaldi describing Dodson's audio engineering approach and commitment to physical cabinet testing

  • The game uses 3D rendered shot-by-shot tutorial animations by Joshua Clay to guide beginner players on each mode's objectives

    high confidence · Phil Grimaldi: 'These are beautiful 3D rendered animations...shot-by-shot tutorial for each of those modes'

Notable Quotes

  • “If you've ever seen a casual player step up to a game with three flippers, you'll see very often the ball will come around past the upper flipper and they don't do anything...But it's not a natural thing for new players who are just stepping up.”

    Phil Grimaldi — Explains core design philosophy of two-flipper accessibility for beginners, a foundational principle of the game

  • “You are, first of all, at a Bon Jovi show. This is like your dream come true...You're in the crowd and you kind of get to pick your dream set list.”

    Phil Grimaldi — Core narrative framing of the game as a concert experience, using familiar concert structure to ground player understanding

  • “There's nothing worse than you step up to the game and there's like 30 options of what to do. And you already don't know...I very much like to scaffold things for the player.”

    Phil Grimaldi — Articulates design philosophy of avoiding decision overwhelm through scaffolding, key to accessibility

  • “What's really interesting is when you give the player an ability or something new, like this unlocked some other thing. And that is when things start to get addictive, right?”

    Phil Grimaldi — Design philosophy on reward structure influenced by Bowen at Barrels of Fun; prioritizes ability unlocks over pure points

  • “This is one of the best sounding games I've ever heard...You can turn this thing up as loud as you want, and there's no glass rattle, and there's no cabinet shake.”

    [name withheld pending review] — Highlights unprecedented audio engineering achievement in pinball, differentiating factor for the game

  • “This mech, we carried over the learnings from [Labyrinth] into there...It's very much like an evolution of design and a melding of minds that produced that work of art.”

    Phil Grimaldi — Shows iterative design approach across Barrels of Fun games, building institutional knowledge

  • “If you want to know what Runaway does, you can see a rendering of the inserts that are lit. You're supposed to shoot these shots...So when you do step up, if you are confused, it's your fault because you didn't look at what was given to you.”

Entities

Bon JovigameBarrels of FuncompanyPhil GrimaldipersonJosh RooppersonScott Larsonperson[name withheld pending review]person

Signals

  • ?

    announcement: Barrels of Fun officially reveals Bon Jovi pinball machine with comprehensive design walkthrough from code designer Phil Grimaldi on Loser Kid Pinball Podcast

    high · Full episode dedicated to Bon Jovi reveal with detailed discussion of mechanics, ruleset, themes, and production

  • ?

    design_innovation: Game emphasizes beginner accessibility through two-flipper origin design philosophy, scaffold learning with 3D tutorial animations, and limiting choice options to four songs at a time

    high · Phil Grimaldi: 'one of the main design kind of principles was that it's going to be friendly to the beginner' and detailed description of scaffolding approach

  • ?

    design_innovation: Heart toy features three-level elevator mechanism with magnet, interactive lift ramp, and multiple shot combinations; Newton Ball loop-de-loop by Luke Underwood

    high · Detailed mechanical explanations by Phil Grimaldi of heart functionality and crew credits for Newton Ball design

  • ?

    product_strategy: Only 700 units of Bon Jovi pinball planned, creating scarcity-driven demand. Josh Roop predicts it will 'sell out' immediately.

    high · Josh Roop: 'I guarantee this is going to sell out' and '700 of them' production limit mentioned

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Ruleset inspired by deck-building card games where song selections provide perks/buffs that carry into subsequent modes, creating emergent complexity from simple elements

    high · Phil Grimaldi: 'As you're choosing these songs, they're giving you a perk or a buff that continues on to the next' with detailed analogy to card game deck-building

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.031

0:00
Thanks for tuning in to the Loser Kid Pinball Podcast. I am Josh Roop. With me, my co-captain, Scott Larson. And Scott, I can't believe it. It's another pinball reveal. If you're going to get Bon Jovi, who are you going to get it from? Reach out to Zach and Nicole Minnie at Flippin' Out Pinball. Definitely get on this. This is going to sell out. I guarantee this is going to sell out. So Bon Jovi, Barrels of Fun. And we also found out that we did talk about the other two reveals with P3. And so you can also get them through Flippin' Out Pinball. So if you want Dungeon Crawler Carl, if you want Ender's Game, if you want Bon Jovi, please reach out to Flippin' Out Pinball. They will take care of you. Awesome. We have a special guest on with us today to talk all things Bon Jovi from Barrels of Fun. This is Phil Grimaldi. He's done wonderful code and rule structure for several games. Now, you said you've been here before Labyrinth was even shown. It's great to have you on, Phil. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm super stoked to be here and super stoked to talk about Bon Jovi. I know that you said you came on a little later in this project, but I heard from David Van Ness, owner slash layout extraordinaire apparently, this was a two-flipper game, but it's kind of evolved since then. From the start, this game was kind of like one of the main design kind of principles was that it's going to be friendly to the beginner. And that's kind of built into the rule set, and we'll get to that soon. But even with early on in the design, I wanted to stick to a two-flipper design because, you know, if you've ever seen a casual player step up to a game with three flippers, you'll see very often the ball will come around past the upper flipper and they don't do anything. And you just kind of watch in horror as it goes straight down the middle or something and you go flip, flip and you want to tell them what to do. But it's not a natural thing for new players who are just stepping up. They're kind of focused right down by the drain. They're just looking at those bottom flippers. And so by having only two flippers, it kind of makes it a little bit more accessible to new players. Just as it turned out, though, the geometry of the game early on really lended itself to an upper flipper. There's two shots up there that hitting them from the upper flip, you can only hit them from the upper flipper. There wasn't a way to massage the geometry to make it hittable from the lower flipper. So they said, you know what, we're going with an upper flipper. I'm so glad they did because both of the shots, and we'll get into, I don't know if we're going to get into the layout at all, both the shots I'm talking about, though, super satisfying to hit. And, you know, I personally like having at least three flippers on a game, but this game actually has four flippers because David, once he kind of broke that seal and he put in that third one, he said, well, what the hell, let's do another one. And that's when he decided to put in the outlane save. It's called the Crowdsurf Flipper. It's located in the left outlane. So rather than a traditional kickback or something like that, you actually have a skillful attempt at saving your ball via a small little mini flipper. And you can hit it up a little launch ramp and launch it back into play, save your ball. So we started with two, we ended with four, and it's a sweet end result. Josh, you're ready to lead, okay? Bon Jovi. We've been talking about dream themes forever, and how long have I been saying Bon Jovi is low-lying fruit? We need to have a Bon Jovi pin. So talk about why Bon Jovi and how did Barrels of Fun get this? A good question. And I'm probably not the best person to answer because I wasn't in the room where it happened when it all. But my understanding is that and I learned just through doing research with Bon Jovi, John Bon Jovi himself is a huge pinball fan. If you actually go back and watch, there's a documentary, Bon Jovi. He talks about, you know, as in their writer for shows, they must have five pinball machines in their in their VIP room. And there's even a set in one of their early concerts during the 90s where they've got a giant pinball machine as part of their set. So they were huge pinball fans. My understanding is they wanted a pinball machine made, approached David early on to have the machine made. And, you know, David, you know, did the math on it and was like, yeah, I think Bon Jovi is actually a good good fit for pinball. Early on, you know, he approached me with it. He's like, what do you think of this? And I was like, huh, Bon Jovi. And then the more I kind of like researched it, it's like, yeah, I think this is going to sell. And wow, I actually didn't realize how many of these songs are Bon Jovi that I've been hearing on classic rock radio stations forever. And it's like, I think this works. I think actually the selling point for me too was when I realized Raise Your Hands, like the intro, one of the first songs that introduces Barf and Lone Star and Spaceballs was that Bon Jovi song. I probably heard that a million times growing up watching Spaceballs over and over and over again. I had no idea that was Bon Jovi and I was like, all right, Bon Jovi's cool. I think we can do something with this for sure. That is amazing. I know. Now I'm thinking Spaceballs. Yeah, I do know Bon Jovi. Come on. That is one of the best. OK, that is the the lead in song for Slippery Slippery When Wet, which, by the way, has a hilarious story that they had a let's just say a more suggestive cover that would not be carried in stores. So that's why they ended up with the one they had. But yeah, no, it's that is one of the best intros of any CD, album, tape, whatever. I'm from that era and you put that in and you knew this this album was going to rock. One thing I really want to talk about, I don't think this has ever been done in pinball. If you look at the play field right underneath the Bon Jovi guitar, it says Bon Jovi, New Jersey. There is a Newton ball that then hits a captive ball that goes through a loop-de-loop through a spinner. What mad genius decided to put this on here? The mad genius is sort of like a team mad genius effect. In fact, my understanding is that Luke Underwood, one of our new engineers, new young engineer, and he's just awesome. He's done a bunch of homebrew games. He did a homebrew Pokemon machine, if you've seen that. He's the one who came up with the idea for the Newton Ball loop-de-loop. And then David was, you know, shooting around at early prototypes and was like, we should totally put a spinner in this thing. And it was just sort of like stacking layer upon layer of kinetically satisfying things. It's like Newton Ball kinetically satisfying, loop-de-loop kinetically satisfying, spinner. It's like, oh my gosh. So you put these things together. It's pretty great. We had a similar moment like that in Labyrinth where we had kind of this fork captive all mechanism. And when we put a spinner behind it, it like turned it into, it turned a fun shot into like an immensely satisfying one. And so we kind of this this mech, we carried over the learnings from from that into there. And that's how you get it. So it's very much like an evolution of design and a melding of minds that produced that work of art. Tell me in 20 seconds, what do I do when I step up to this game and what is the goal of this game? I will say there is a structure to this game that should be familiar to anybody. You are, first of all, at a Bon Jovi show. This is like your dream come true. You're at a Bon Jovi show. You're in the crowd and you kind of get to pick your dream set list. So pick your five songs for the set list and then there's an encore. So how you play the game, your goal is to get to the encore, play five songs, you get and then you play your encore. So we put in a familiar structure that should be understandable to anybody who's just stepping up. If you've ever been to a show, you understand the concept of what happened. This band is going to play some music. They're going to play some songs. They're going to be done. They're going to play an encore at the end. That's the structure. But on top of that, too, we have one of the things I'm very excited about for the newbies is when they do step up and they're about to pick their song or which mode they want to play. We have 3D rendered animations of the playfield. These are beautiful 3D rendered animations by Josh Clay, our lead animator, and he's just a phenomenal animator. It's a shot-by-shot tutorial for each of those modes. So if you want to know what Runaway does, you can see a rendering of the inserts that are lit. You're supposed to shoot these shots. It makes it like very kind of boiled down to the most simple elements. So when you do step up, if you are confused, it's your fault because you didn't look at what was given to you. We're trying to make it as user friendly as possible and not overwhelm the player with a bunch of blinking lights and kind of no cues as to what to do. We might as well ask this because you were kind of alluding to it before, but, you know, there's many ways to approach music pins. They were like Foo Fighters. It was more of a narrative driven pinball machine that just happened to have Foo Fighters music and then something like a concert. So what did make you decide to go with the concert vibe over a narrative driven? Well, there wasn't a clear narrative to be had, first of all. So like we didn't want to go around and like invent a story like Foo Fighters. I love what they did with Foo Fighters, by the way. I think that was excellent. But it is very important to have some sort of structure. It doesn't have to be a narrative per se, but having some sort of understandable structure to ground the player in, I do think is very important. If it's just a collage of random stuff, like there's nothing to organize it in your mind to understand what you're supposed to do. So if we have a concert experience, a set list that you're building, making your way to the encore, you at least know what's happening next. You at least know what your path is in this game and you can remember everything else in that context. Along with that, too, we wanted to take a page out of a Creature from the Black Lagoon playbook where it's creature is not necessarily like a creature pin. And like it's a drive-in movie theater pin, right? It's a kind of a love letter to drive-in movie theaters. And we try to do a similar thing here with the Bon Jovi pin. What happens is that, you know, you're going to a concert. And so we build in a lot of concert elements into it. When you're picking your song, Jeff Dotson, the audio engineer, has some amazing sound effects. And if you've played Dune and you've gotten to Fade Routhis Arena Battle where the crowd is going wild when you're hitting shots and doing things like that, he's kind of captured part of that element in here and like amped it up to 11. So like you get this feeling, he creates this very rich experience for the player where it gives you this feeling that you're in a 3D space, that you're in a concert hall. The sound that it makes when you are outside a concert venue and you can hear the muffled sound of songs being played inside He able to capture this experience in a way that is very unexplored I would say in pinball audio design And this game is very much as much a showcase of the audio engineering as anything else. It serves the whole theme very well and it serves the band very well. It very much gives you this concert at the concert vibe. Part of a music pin, the biggest determinator of people's interest in it, tends to be the set list. How did you go about finding which songs to select? This guy's been doing it since the 80s, and so we're talking at least 40 years. Now, exactly which ones are you going to select and then prioritize? The easiest way to approach this is what are the most popular songs? Go on Spotify and see what are people listening to? What's popular? That works some of the time for Bon Jovi because a lot of the songs are popular, but maybe not the thing you want to be playing 90% of the time. Right. It's maybe not. It's a love ballad versus like a driving rock anthem. So we went through what are the popular songs? What are songs that we like? What are songs that we think it would be cool to play pinball to and then go from there? And then then there's an iteration with the band, too, because the band very much wanted this to be a telling of their legacy. So they didn't want to just focus on the early hits. They wanted to throw in some of the newer stuff. They wanted to span the eras. So they had suggestions of what they wanted to see in the game, what they didn't want to see in the game, or for whatever various reasons are complicated for putting it in.

  • Only 700 Bon Jovi machines will be produced, limiting location placement opportunities

    high confidence · Josh Roop discussing production limits: 'I know that there's only 700 of them'

  • The ruleset incorporates card-game/deck-building mechanics where song selections provide perks that carry over to subsequent songs

    high confidence · Phil Grimaldi: 'As you're choosing these songs, they're giving you a perk or a buff that continues on to the next'

  • The Newton Ball loop-de-loop mechanism was designed by Luke Underwood, a new engineer who previously built homebrew games

    high confidence · Phil Grimaldi crediting Luke Underwood as the originator of the Newton Ball loop-de-loop feature

    • Phil Grimaldi — Describes aggressive onboarding philosophy using visual tutorials to ensure player comprehension

  • “I guarantee this is going to sell out.”

    Josh Roop — Host confidence in demand; reflects anticipation about Bon Jovi IP appeal and limited production (700 units)

  • “The Bon Jovi pin...we build in a lot of concert elements into it. When you're picking your song, Jeff Dodson, the audio engineer, has some amazing sound effects...he's kind of captured part of that element in here and like amped it up to 11.”

    Phil Grimaldi — Details how audio design reinforces thematic immersion in concert experience, integral to game's identity

  • “So there's plenty of strategy to be made, strategic decisions to be made, but it's still accessible to the novice, right? We want it to be simple on the surface, and the complexity comes from taking a bunch of simple things, combining them together.”

    Phil Grimaldi — Core design ethos: depth for competitive play without alienating casual players; balance of accessibility and complexity

    • Jeff Dodson
    person
    Luke Underwoodperson
    Joshua Clayperson
    Johnny Crapperson
    Zach Sharpeperson
    [name withheld pending review]person
    Flip N Out Pinballcompany
    Loser Kid Pinball Podcastorganization
    Labyrinthgame
    Dune Pinballgame
    Winchester Mystery Housegame
    Creature from the Black Lagoongame
    Lord of the Ringsgame
    Foo Fightersgame
    Dungeon Crawler Carlgame
    Ender's Gamegame
    P3company
    Brian Savageperson
  • ?

    technology_signal: Enhanced audio system with premium hardware components, hand-tuned by Jeff Dodson for each shipped game. System reportedly eliminates cabinet rattle/shake at maximum volume while maintaining pure music quality.

    high · Phil Grimaldi and Josh Roop discussing Jeff Dodson's insistence on physical cabinet tuning and Josh noting 'no glass rattle, and there's no cabinet shake'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Prioritizes ability/mechanic unlocks over point rewards as primary reward mechanism, influenced by Bowen at Barrels of Fun. Aims to create addictive gameplay through new affordances rather than score targets.

    high · Phil Grimaldi: 'What's really interesting is when you give the player an ability or something new...That is when things start to get addictive'

  • ?

    business_signal: Flip N Out Pinball (Zach Sharpe and Nicole) distributing Bon Jovi alongside P3 titles (Dungeon Crawler Carl, Ender's Game), consolidating new game availability through established distributor

    high · Josh Roop directing customers to 'reach out to Zach and Nicole Minnie at Flip N Out Pinball' for Bon Jovi, Dungeon Crawler Carl, and Ender's Game

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Luke Underwood joining Barrels of Fun as new young engineer with homebrew game development background; contributing innovative mechanical design (Newton Ball loop-de-loop)

    high · Phil Grimaldi: 'Luke Underwood, one of our new engineers, new young engineer...He's done a bunch of homebrew games...He did a homebrew Pokemon machine'

  • ?

    design_innovation: Game uses concert/setlist structure (5 songs + encore model) as organizing principle for ruleset, creating familiar framework for players. Contrasts with Foo Fighters' narrative-driven approach.

    high · Phil Grimaldi: 'You're at a Bon Jovi show...you kind of get to pick your dream set list' and explanation of concert structure as design anchor

  • $

    market_signal: Bon Jovi band actively involved in game design, influencing song selection and insisting on legacy representation across band eras rather than only early hits

    medium · Phil Grimaldi: 'the band very much wanted this to be a telling of their legacy' and 'They wanted to throw in some of the newer stuff. They wanted to span the eras.'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Game deliberately avoids venue/environment creation in favor of exploring diverse Bon Jovi imagery; similar to Creature from the Black Lagoon thematic approach (drive-in focus rather than creature focus)

    medium · Phil Grimaldi: 'We didn't go overwhelmingly into creating a venue or anything like that because we wanted to explore a lot of the Bon Jovi imagery'

    • 13:42
    So let's see, what did we end up with? So I would say the eight main mode songs, Runaway is on there, You Give Love a Bad Name, It's My Life, Have a Nice Day. That's our first four songs. Then there's Wanted Dead or Alive, Bad Medicine, Born to Be My Baby, and Keep the Faith. So those are our eight main mode songs. And then kind of a little mini wizard halfway in there is Living on a Prayer because when you're halfway, you get it. You got to be living on a prayer. And then our, I guess, mini wizard modes, wizard modes, whatever you want to call our encore songs. These are after you play your five songs in each set list, you can play an encore song and that's Raise Your Hands, Lay Your Hands on Me, Let It Rock. Those are kind of nice like stadium rock anthem songs. So that seemed appropriate to have like a rock out moment as a you've built the set list. This is your, you know, climactic song for the set list. That's kind of how we approached it. And then Legendary is our final Wizard Mode song, which is more or less kind of putting a bookend on the career of Bon Jovi and, you know, reaching legendary status, essentially. So what made you decide to, because that's a ton of songs, and going through the code, you have to kind of whittle it down to five songs. How do you select those five, and what made you decide to make it a five-song set list? First of all, you can choose your songs in a couple of different ways. So like when you step up to your ball and the ball is just sitting in the shooter lane, you have a, you know, a menu of songs to choose from. We whittle it down to four because I don't want to overwhelm the player with too many things. Like there's nothing worse than you step up to the game and there's like 30 options of what to do. And you already don't know. I very much like to scaffold things for the player. So let's start off with like at least a manageable chunk of information, chunk of decisions to make. Four already is kind of pushing it. So we're limiting it down to just four. Of these four, which song do you want to play? While you're playing that song, you'll have the ability to kind of choose the next song before.
    16:03
    As soon as it's qualified to move on to another song, you'll be able to choose it just via spinner hits. So it'll move the song to the next one. And on that case, it's only cycling it through the next four songs, next four available songs. And so you'll be able to land on one of those if you'd like. And then when you go into the scoop, you can choose to play that song or stay in your current song. In that case, you're only making a two option choice, right? Am I going to keep playing this song or do I want to move on to the next song that is currently selected, which, you know, is sort of a pseudo random type approach. We did that, too, to be a little bit user-friendly for the novices who, again, don't want to be over one with too many choices. If they don't care, they can just flip through and it's going to start the next song for them. Yeah, and that's sort of a balancing act because you want the objective in the game to feel reachable, right? If you've got your wizard mode that you're trying to reach for this next thing so far away, you want to capture that feeling of like, I just did a little bit better. I would have got to that thing. I was so close. Like one more song, I would have got to that next thing. And so if it's seven songs or eight songs before you get to your encore or wizard mode, it's just too much. And so we wanted kind of like a nice in-between where it feels like it's close, but it's not too close. And that's just sort of a, you know, find the right balance. And that's something that has, it's an inarticulatable skill or even thing that it just comes from as you're playing the game more and more, You're going to get a sense for how hard the shots are, how hard each of these modes are, what feels like a reachable goal and what feels like a stretch and what feels like a bridge too far for some players. But we add in this layer of leveling up these songs. So if you want to kind of speed run to that final encore, you could or you could go deeper in each of these songs and try and get them leveled up as much as possible. And that it gives you additional perks. There's reasons why you might want to do that strategically and point wise. And then even when you do get to that final wizard mode, you might wish you had gone deeper on some of those songs because it is going to make make your life a little bit more difficult when you do get there and maybe not make it as lucrative as it could have been otherwise. So there's plenty of strategy to be made, strategic decisions to be made, but it's still accessible to the novice, right? We want it to be simple on the surface, and the complexity comes from taking a bunch of simple things, combining them together, and then you have a little bit more interesting of a game. And there's reasons for why you might want to choose some of these things that the novice may not care about. And hopefully they're not annoyed by the fact that it's happening. Right. It's and you're not overwhelming them with choices and flashing lights. We try and scaffold that make it and walk them through it as they go and make sure they know what they're making a decision for. And if they don't care, that's fine. But if you do care and you're in a pinball and you want to try and maximize things, You can if you want to. So it seems like you're leaning very heavily on this risk reward type thing, which which is really good, especially because for elite players, there is a deeper level that they can go into in each mode that they can actually gain more experience, more more points when a basic player just wants to do the bare minimum to get through. So talk about that philosophy of being able to reach that and why go in with the risk reward? And do you have it on every mode? Do you have easier modes or are they all kind of like similar in that you start off with a with an easier shot? But if you want to get more and you just keep pushing into it until you end the mode. As more of the rule set becomes developed, it'll become apparent that, well, what even is the risk reward in it? And before I even get into the risk-reward element of it, there's another mechanic or set of mechanics that I was really playing around with in this game that I'm really excited to see it unfold and see how players react to it. I don't know if you guys are board gamers or anything like that, but I'm very interested in the idea of card games where you're building a deck where you're kind of building an engine. You have each card in your game, whatever you're playing, it does one thing and it might do something pretty simple. But then as you build out your deck, you start to interact with one another and it starts to culminate in something a little bit more than just the sum of its parts. And so as you're choosing these songs, they're giving you a perk or a buff that continues on to the next into the future songs. And so when you choose Runaway and you're choosing a combo-based mode, that combo mechanic is going to carry over to the next song. But what's like in the next song might be based on these drop targets over here or shooting the ramp and that starts a hurry up over here. Does this pair well with that? And if I was to start these combos and then it triggers a hurry up, can I pair these things together in a way that's going to maximize my point potential and maximize my progress in that mode?
    21:48
    So that's where some of the risk reward comes into play, because as you're deciding, do I want to move on or do I want to stay? That decision isn't just points. It's also, do I want this perk? How long do I want this perk to last for? How valuable do I want this perk to be? And that's where that risk-reward comes in. It's not just points. And this is something that I was heavily influenced by Bowen when we were working on Labyrinth and Dune that he emphasized a lot. It's just like giving players points is kind of boring, right? Like what's really interesting is when you give the player an ability or something new, like this unlocked some other thing. And that is when things start to get addictive, right? Like, oh, now I can do this now. And I couldn't do that before. And it's not just, oh, you got 10 million points. It's like, you know, sometimes like when you do get that really big payoff, it's really rewarding, but you don't want to overuse that. You want to give them that ability or that new thing that they didn't have before or it unlocks some new mode or it unlocks some mini wizard mode or something they haven't seen before. That's where it's really interesting. So when we talking about the risk reward that the reward I want to give I don want to give points I want to give a reward of an ability or a new affordance that they didn quite have before It a music pin Obviously the sound going to mean a lot You guys have upgraded the sound system for this one Can you walk me through the changes you made to improve sound in this game Jeff Dodson, who did audio work on Winchester and Dune and who's just a phenomenal audio engineer and musician. He worked with the Barrels team to help design this new system. He personally hand-tuned all of the settings for these for every game that's going out of the factory. It's going to come sounding incredible. Just from what I'm hearing people playing this game, they're like, it just sounds amazing. They're hearing it from rooms over at headquarters as it's being blasted and people are just saying, this is one of the best sounding games I've ever heard.
    24:14
    I think they upgraded the cabinet design a little bit to help with how the audio even just sounds exiting the game. It was really important to Jeff, for example, as he was tuning it. He wants to actually have the game in front of him. He's not tweaking these things remotely or hearing what it sounds like playing through his computer on a dev work environment.
    24:43
    He's like, I need a cabinet and I need exactly the same specs as our shipped cabinet. And I need a playfield in it. All of these things matter when it comes to how the game sounds. And he's tuned everything to that physical reality. So it's heavily tuned to that. The hardware underneath the hood has been tuned to accommodate these things. I'm pretty sure there was like some new hardware that is being included in there. And it'll be announced in the spec sheets and everything what those actually are. Again, I'm not an engineer, so I can't tell you exactly what they are. But the end result, I can tell you, sounds phenomenal. It's really special. One thing I want to point out before we move on from the sound, I was listening to Jeff talk about, I don't know how they pulled this off, but you can turn this thing up as loud as you want, and there's no glass rattle, and there's no cabinet shake. It is like pure music without compromising the quality of the cabinet. It's just amazing.
    25:55
    You can feel it in your bones. And it really makes a difference. Audio is one of those things that you cannot under-invest in in a game, and having good audio is the difference between a banger and a snoozer. And it's like you can totally amp up a game just by investing in the audio. And Jeff is like, in my opinion, best in the business right now.
    26:21
    Well, okay, an audio PIN, it actually really thrives in a home location. And so that's why it's a big deal to be able to have that good sound. Now, one question that some games kind of lack on location is that sometimes it can be difficult to actually hear them. So what options are these? Is there a headphone option? Is there just a – are you just at the mercy of the operator for turning it up and down? How is the plan for this to be if it's on location? Now, I know that there's only 700 of them, and so that may not end up on location very often, but I'm just curious. Obviously, there's certain things you can't control. Like if you've got a room full of 20 pins and they're all cranked to 11 and you're in a noisy bar, It's just like, forget about it. It doesn't matter what you're doing.
    27:12
    But all of the Brails games in the past, like just the computer itself, there's eighth inch jack out. So you can install a headphone jack on the game if you'd like. They're not, you know, you can plug it into the back.
    27:29
    If you wanted to route one to the front, that is something you could do. It's not installed by default, but you can upgrade it to have a headphone jack if you'd like and you want to hear it. But honestly, if you had this in a home environment, the only reason I would say to put on a headphone is if you're trying to not wake your whole family because the sound out of the speakers is better than the experience of putting on headphones. You know, looking at this game, the mech that stands out to me the most is this massive heart mech with the sword through it. What made you guys decide to go with almost a Lord of the Rings-esque magnet ring and it has multi-positions? Just explain this thing to me. The mech itself is kind of a riff on the shot through the heart lyric that begins, you give love a bad name that probably everybody's familiar with. And so it's sort of like, oh, it would be cool if we had a shot that went through a heart, right? And so going from there, it's like, well, Bon Jovi is kind of iconic icon or image is this Bon Jovi heart and dagger, which is a heart with a dagger going through it. And, you know, wings on it. That's kind of the Bon Jovi logo. And so we use that as the starting point for making this mech. So inside the heart is an aperture that, you know, has a magnet, a magnet around it similar to Lord of the Rings. So when a ball is shot into it, you can shoot directly through it. Obviously, you just don't energize the magnet. You can catch the ball with the magnet and it kind of hovers there in the center just like Lord of the Rings if you're familiar. But it goes several steps beyond that because in addition to doing that magnet, we now have an elevator that can go up and down. So there's actually three levels that the heart can be on.
    29:31
    Street level, we'll call it, where it's at the playfield level. You can shoot through it kind of like a lane. It can go up to the second level where it empties onto a wire form ramp, and it can even go up to a third level where it empties onto another wire form ramp. So in many ways, it kind of serves as a diverter. You can do all sorts of tricks with this, too. So you can grab it, you can whip it back kind of like shadow once you do have it. You can grab it on the bottom level, take it up to the second level, whip it back there.
    29:59
    You can hold it, wait for a ball to hit it kind of thing. It has multiple states. On top of that, there's a lift ramp in front of the heart. So when the heart's at the second level, you can raise the lift ramp and turn it into a ramp shot. You can lower the ramp when the heart's in the up position and shoot underneath it into like a subway shot or like a hole shot. Or you can put the ramp down, lower the heart and shoot through it. So with the combination of the heart and the ramp, you've got a lot of different possibilities for how you can use this heart. And we make full use of it in the rule set, too. It does a lot of different things and creates a lot of different special moments for the player. And since it's so prominent, too, we try and make the player shoot as much as possible. It looks pretty amazing. Definitely it is the feature of the game, that one thing you're like, that is really cool looking. Now, talk about the whole presentation of the game because now Barrels has always had that approach where we want the best version for all the people out there. So there is an entire package here. So do you want to mention the presentation and how you're doing it? Yes, our artist, Johnny Crap, Jonathan Bergeron, also known as Johnny Crap, he did the art on Bon Jovi. He also did the art on both Dune and Labyrinth and also Jurassic Park in the past. So he's a pinball art veteran at this point. So we definitely trust Johnny to kind of like bring the vision to fruition. And he's kind of made like a really great, you know, just a really colorful, vibrant package for Bon Jovi. It spans the decades for the band. It does a nice job of kind of capturing several different eras of the Bon Jovi band history.
    32:01
    And, you know, as part of it, like I love like the apron art. He's got like a soundboard at the concert. So we're kind of, again, trying to lean into this concert vibe in the game. We didn't go overwhelmingly into creating a venue or anything like that because we wanted to explore a lot of the Bon Jovi imagery and music pin in general. But it does a good job of creating a nice collage of the Bon Jovi image and setting up a nice emotion for the game. You look at this game and it kind of just has a fun vibe to it. I'll bring up Creature from the Black Lagoon a lot. It kind of gives me this vibe of just like almost like a 90s pin vibe of it's just very inviting. You just want to play it. It looks fun. And of course, we've got all of the touches that you'd expect. So there's artwork everywhere. There's details everywhere. The more you zoom in on this, on the artwork, the more little details and Easter eggs are kind of hidden in there. We've got Art Blades standard on every Barrels of Fun game. You know, Mirrored Backglass standard on every Barrels of Fun game. It's a very beautiful, beautiful game to see in person. The artwork is very unique. We really leaned into Bon Jovi, right? We just we did the band true to what it is. We captured their vibe, I think. It's a party. It's a celebration of the different eras that they've been in. And it's just a fun pin. When you see it, you know what you're getting into when you look at the pin. So one thing I want to bring up is I don't think this has been done in a modern LCD game, maybe back old school, but you've put an outlane flipper in for a crowd surf shot. This is amazing. Like, I love the skill to this. Yeah, I mean, this is David Van Ness' wacky vision come to life. So he, I guess we mentioned early on, like, you know, started as a two-flipper game, added that upper third flipper, and he wanted to explore this idea of a flipper ball save. So you put it in the outlane and leading into the theme of being at a concert, having this crowd surf opportunity to save your ball.
    34:33
    So rules wise, you're able to qualify this via shooting that loop-de-loop cheer mechanism. You build up enough Bon Jovi letters via that and you can qualify that outlane. And then when it goes in there, you have a limited time. I mean, you can imagine if a ball is going into the out lane, you only have a limited amount of time to like get your bearings and start flipping, right? Like as soon as it hits that switch your flipper becomes active and you can start flipping away as much as you want I mean obviously you want to do this skillfully and try and time it right Try and hit it up that ramp and hit it back into play and save your ball And if you don't, you drain and that's on you. But it's more of a skillful opportunity to save your ball than like a traditional kickback or something like that, where you don't really have much control over it. It just happens or some kind of trick that hits the ball back into play, which is always fun. But it's fun. I really like it when it's a skillful opportunity to save your ball. It's not a gimme by any stretch. You know, you do get better at it over time. Once you kind of figure it out, you'll get better at it. Initially, it's kind of hard, especially if you get a screamer of an outlane. Outlane drain, you got to really be on your toes and flip fast. Most of the time, if it's going out there, it goes right by you. But if it's in there and you're ready for it and you know that it's active, you can save that ball. And it's a super satisfying thing when you do because, you know, who doesn't like saving their ball? So you get to stay alive and play more pinball. It seems like you should be able to do even a planned one, like maybe an extra level that this is just my idea. Go ahead and run with it. But kind of like Monster Bash, where it's like the phantom flip where you get it timed and it comes down. You're like, boom, you're right back in the action. It's okay. That's a free idea. Go ahead and take it. Go ahead, Dick. What I like about that, though, I mean, I don't know if we have enough, if the time variability between when that switch goes off and when it does get to the flipper is probably greater than it is on Monster Bash. But it would be cool to do that, especially as we were talking about early on, most novices, they may not even recognize that they've got that flipper there. So, you know, it might be useful to them to try and give them like a freebie flip if they don't get to it in time. It's like the opening act mode. You know, you're not quite into the concert yet. You're just barely getting your drink. You're sitting down and you're just trying to get into the vibe of the concert. You know, you got to make sure the newbies get into it. I will say, though, that phantom flip annoys me a lot when I'm, you know. It never works. I have Monster Bash behind me and I swear it never works. But I mean, if it did, it would be great.
    37:22
    We've got so much AI now. Surely we could make a Phantom Flip be more accurate in the year 2026, right? That's true. One thing that you guys were kind of known for with your other games is the backboard, how to display within itself on the playfield. This one, you guys didn't do that. What was the decision there to not put that in? My understanding is, you know, early on it was planned. And as the game started developing and the heart mech went in, it started just being, it's too much back here. It's going to be obscured and we don't really need it. And when we started thinking about what, you know, what assets we were going to be putting in the game, what the display was going to look like, It was sort of like we didn't want to pigeonhole ourselves into like always putting the display back there, especially if we don't need it. So in this case, it just didn't add anything to the game. In fact, it would have detracted from the things that were in there. And so no LCD screen. That's not to say it doesn't come back for future games or that it's not something that we want to use. It's just for this particular game. It just didn't make sense. Now let's transition up a little bit though because you still have the LCD display that has been emblematic of most modern games. So let's talk about what things you're going to be showing out there. Are you showing concert footage? Are you showing animations?
    38:48
    And getting into that, who's doing the call-outs? Because that's usually a big part of the game. Yeah, so on the main display, like the main kind of the vibe that we got is a concert footage vibe, but it's painstakingly stitched together from decades of archival concert footage that the band had given us access to. So we got hundreds of gigabytes of concert footage dating back from the 80s. And Trent Armstrong, one of the animators on the team and, you know, digital asset designer, he, you know, stitched these together in a way in addition to and I'll say in addition to concert footage, too. We also have many of the music videos that go along with them. So he had stitched them together in a way that kind of seamlessly, you know, as you're playing these songs, everything is lining up. So it's like it's not just one concert footage constantly being played. It's kind of switching back and forth across the eras in a really neat and creative way that Trent did it. It's stitching in footage from from the music videos as well. And it really gives, you know, this kind of almost like nostalgic, like it's like when you go to a music concert, it's not just seeing the band, like you're getting all these emotions that go along with it. What Bon Jovi means, like what happened over the eras through this, you know, being told through this lens of this concert footage, the videos that go along with them. It creates a very nice vibe. So that's kind of the main thing that's being shown on the screen in addition to the wonderful user interface design by Josh Clay that's conveying what's actually going on in the game and giving you a heads-up display of what songs you have active, what perks you have active, what's next, what the value is of these shots, etc., etc. So we've got call-outs from a number of different perspectives in this game. Um, we've got from this archival footage, we were able to get the most authentic call outs you could get from Jon Bon Jovi from these. So he's got so many moments where he's talking to the crowd and he's amping up the crowd. And, uh, Jeff, again, I'm going to praise Jeff has gone through, pulled out these moments, you know, uh, digitally enhanced them to make them sound like really good and clear, even though they were like soundboard recordings or from concert recordings. Pulls them out, makes them sound excellent, like they're recorded in a booth. And you've got Jon Bon Jovi doing the call-outs there. We also have two characters that are frequently referred to in Bon Jovi songs, if you're familiar with the lore.
    41:42
    Tommy and Gina, who make an appearance in Living on a Prayer and also It's My Life. Actually, they're featured in the video for It's My Life as well. So we decided to kind of as a perspective of you're at this concert, it's like you're at the concert with Tommy and Gina and they are yelling from the crowd. They're interacting with one another, kind of reacting to them kind of maybe subtly realizing that maybe these songs are about them, that sort of thing, Adding like a little bit of depth and character to the experience to kind of enhance this idea that you are at the Bon Jovi concert as being told by Tommy and Gina. Barrels does focus on a limited amount. So how many are there going to be and when can we start seeing them out? 700 is the number. And we also now have this Barrels Reserve program, of course. So if you're not familiar with the Barrels Reserve program, this is sort of like an insurance policy. It's a subscription-based club, essentially. It's like $75 a year, like a low barrier of entry. But it serves as sort of an insurance policy against getting boxed out of purchasing a game that sells out immediately. So if this game were to sell out immediately upon release, I hope it does, then all of the members, all those 700 games are accounted for. And then everybody who is a Barrels Reserve member who didn't already buy one of those games has up to a week to claim an additional game. So it could be 700 plus, I can't remember how many reserve members are there, 700 plus, like it's going to probably get in the bar park of like a hundred, a couple hundred people somewhere around there that could purchase if they choose to. So that chooses, that determines the cap. So it's a little bit tricky in that it's like non-deterministic what the final number is actually going to be. We can't just advertise. It's going to be one of 700. It's like one of 700 plus some. That makes sense because what happened with Winchester is it kind of sold out way faster than we anticipated.
    44:06
    And this is a great option for people. And actually, I'm totally joining this club because I want to be on the list because I don't want to be frozen out of future barrels releases. So this is great. If someone wants to join that club, do they just go to the website? How do they get on it? Yeah, just go to the website, BarrelsOfFun.com. You should be able to navigate there. I will say, though, we closed. So we have to close entry to the reserve program before we announce the game. So we actually closed. You can no longer become a member right now. So unless you signed up before Friday, you cannot become a Barrels Reserve member until this cycle passes for the sale. So like once the cycle passes, then you can become a Barrels Reserve member for the next game. So unfortunately, if you're not on it now, you cannot get on it for this release, but you can for all future ones. Go to the website.
    45:09
    Again, we want as many people to get the games that want them. We love selling out games, of course, but if there's people who still want the game, we want to see it out there too. It sucks that there are people that want Winchester so bad that they now are having to pay a lot of extra money if they want to get it pried from somebody else's hands. So we want to make it fair to everybody and still limited in a way. And this is like the best compromise that we were able to come up with. Well, Phil, I want to thank you for coming on to talk Bon Jovi with us. If someone wants to get a hold of you, what's the best way to get a hold of you? Oh my gosh, I'm not on social media, I'm not one of these social media people. I am on Pinside under the name Spray Nerd. It used to be on Tilt Forums, but Tilt Forums doesn't exist anymore. So yeah, Pinside, Spray Nerd, that's me. And if you want to get a hold of us, we are LoserkidPinballPodcast at gmail.com. All the socials are at LoserkidPinball. Or if you want some sweet swag like I am wearing right now, our baseball jersey, it is SilverBallSwag.com slash Loserkid. Scott, why don't you give us our final words? All right. You want this pin, dead or alive.
    46:37
    Thank you.