Congratulations on getting what you've deserved for many many years now He is now officially hired by Stern pinball like when I heard the news I was like wait a minute He's been like making games for them for like six years and now it's official now he gets to get on the benefit train I'm so happy for Jeremy. He is the most talented artist in all of pinball and he's the one man who you can give a blank piece of paper to and he could create a freaking masterpiece. You can never replace this guy with AI artwork. Can't say that about everybody else in the pinball art space. Oh, Kaneda, you can't say it. You gotta whisper that stuff on Saturday morning spectacular. Jeremy Packer, congratulations. What else is happening in the world of pinball? I heard a crazy rumor about Jersey Jack. This one is weird, but let's step back a little bit. Jersey Jack Pinball, October 5th of 2021 is when they officially announced that they were hiring Mark Sadan to be a game designer at Jersey Jack Pinball. So what do you think Mark Sadan's been doing for the last two years at Jersey Jack Pinball? What do you think? Any guesses? Do you think he's actually been doing what his title is? Do you think he's been designing a game for two freaking years? Okay, so here's the rumor. Remember those dates. Steve Ritchie's Elton John is coming out next. I am hearing that Jersey Jack is planning to release two games, not one, but two games or reveal two games by the end of this year. That Steve Ritchie's game will be unveiled at Expo. I don't even know why you bother revealing a game at Expo. All you need is the internet. And then we're going to see Mark Sadan's game at the end of the year. Now when I heard this rumor, and this comes from a good source, I was like, come on, really? jerseyjack has never even revealed two games in one year, let alone three. Cuz remember, Godfather was revealed this year and then we're gonna get Elton John and then another game from Mark Sadan. Do you think Steve Ritchie would even let that happen? I don't think so. He needs to come out with a bang and he's not gonna want to share the line with another designer. He's not gonna want to share the limelight with another designer. But let's just for a moment consider this rumor. Let's just consider where something like this would come from. And the only guess I can make is this, that Jersey Jack deep down inside, deep down in the soul of Jersey Jack Pinball, I feel like they might know and they might be reading the writing on the wall that they missed with Toy Story 4. They missed with the Godfather and Elton John is clearly another theme that Jack Guarneri put on the table. I think they might realize that we can't have three strikes in a row. And maybe we just reveal both of these games because maybe they're radically different in theme. Maybe they have radically different audiences. And maybe even if they're proud of both games, they might release both of them. My guess is Mark Sadan's game is going to be Avatar. It's not going to be The Matrix. I hope it's Top Gun. We have rumors it might be Top Gun. But that's it. I can't see Tom Cruise signing off on this stuff because, you know, I tried to work with Tom Cruise through Budweiser because Budweiser appears in the Top Gun movie and he didn't want anything to do with it, but I think that's because it was alcohol. But still, it's probably really expensive to license a Tom Cruise movie. So do we think this is going to happen? The only thing for certain is this, that Jersey Jack Pinball's The Godfather is not selling well. It will go down as a sales flop and they're going to have to pivot to something else. If I were Jersey Jack and it is Elton John and I know Ken Cromwell people are probably like Kaneda talked about you If it is Elton John just rip the bandaid off now I don even care if the games aren ready to be revealed If they try to like hold it back the way they did with Godfather the way they did with Toy Story 4 you have to give people time to warm up to a theme that you know people are not over the moon about And I know that you're drinking the Kool-Aid inside JJP and you think, oh, this is it. It's going to win people over. It's got the same rainbow lighting system that every Jersey Jack game has right now. No, trust me Jersey Jack. Tell people right now our next game is going to be Elton John and give people a chance to listen to the Rocket Man's music, get excited about it. Here's why that would work. All the people moaning and groaning could just get it out of their systems well before you're ready to create a launch moment. Just trust me on this. As a marketer, when you know you don't have a home run theme, let Let the people warm up to it, it will give much enthusiasm. Okay let's go to Jersey jack and komlick pinball classical pinball Story Track American pinball and david fix, they ordered 500 TANK turrets!! I think it's the nozzle, something like that. But they ordered 500 of them. Apparently Mukesh will not let them move on to another game until all of those freaking things are sold. Remember the rumors that like David Fix was saying they sold 2,000 units of Galactic Tank Force? They did not. And now it's looking like Galactic Tank Force is selling less than some of their previous games. You know, I don't know the truth about the sales numbers of this game. I can tell you it's not good. You go into the Galactic Tank Force owners thread and what do you see? It's eight or nine pages long on a game that was revealed in March. Eight or nine pages. If you started a thread tomorrow that's like, I hate Kaneda, who else does? It would be at like 30 pages in like two days. Okay, that's how infamous I am. Okay, but they got like nine pages. Nobody cares. Nobody's buying this game. There's no way to like get people reignited into this game. They overpriced it. They pissed people off with that signature edition of the game. It's like they're just living in their own world. They've had so many swings at the plate, American Pinball, and they've made every mistake you possibly can. And the other thing I'm hearing is this. Remember when David Fix was going around and saying, hey, we're also going to make Barry O's game like his last game. Well, here's what I'm hearing. That they They are thinking of making Berrio's last game and it's some version of Food Truck but they can't call it FoodTruck because of licensing reasons and it's a single level game. I really hope this rumor is not true that they would even consider making a single level game based on a Berrio design that is based on a FoodTruck game he designed at Deep Root Pinball. If this is even remotely true, everyone over there needs to have their head examined, okay? Because gang, what are you doing? You know what people want in pinball. And then the other rumor I'm hearing is like Dennis Nordman is done with it. It's called like the son of Bigfoot or son of Yeti. It's one of those. It's probably son of Yeti. And it has all these ramps and it's got all this stuff and it would be so expensive to make that American Pinball is not going to make it. And that is why, if you think about it people, think about why is Dennis Nordman not hyping Galactic Tank Force? Why is he nowhere to be found in helping American Pinball sell this game? Now it makes total sense. He's gone MIA because he's pissed off because they're not going to make his better game which is the following game. Well, lesson learned for everybody. You never should have made Galactic Tankforce. You never should have gone down this road. Clearly it's not working. and they've got to be smart like a whitewater sequel would always be a better option than just a game about tanks in space with ice cream like what were they thinking and then you want to charge people 17 5 for a freaking lunchbox in thermos and I'm so happy that the pinball community has slammed the door faster on this game than they slammed it on Kaneda people all right so that's it American pinball and then so what so then they're gonna have to get to Ryan McQuaid's game you know You know this arcade video game comic book from the late 80s early 90s whatever that is because it's licensed it sounds a lot better to me than Galactic Tank Force and it sounds a lot better to me than the son of Bigfoot or Yeti. But the problem is this now I'm hearing Mukesh is not happy and unless they get these Galactic Tankforces sold are we even going to get to Ryan McQuaid's game? And look, the reason why we're speculating like this around American Pinball and it's not very positive is because where are they? Like where is the team over at American Pinball hyping this game, trying to sell this game? Like what are they doing? Like they've gone absolutely radio silent in the moment in which they need to get these games sold and that is a huge red flag. Alright speaking of red flags, uh-oh, Kaneda's gonna talk about haggis for a little bit people. So this is not a rumor, this is just a fact. So their marketing strategy to release Centaur for like $19,000 and the Beast edition for like $11,000 or $10,000, they did not sell out of either of those. And it's been a while now. I think people have learned their lesson. And this is what I'm hearing over at Haggis that there are basically four main employees that are putting these games together. And look, this is what I'm hearing. This is what I'm hearing from people over in Australia that have a little bit of a bone to pick. And here's the good news. If Damien wants to prove me wrong that there are more than four people inside Haggis Pinball on a weekly basis making these games, can you guess what he could do to prove me wrong that there are more than four people working at Haggis putting these machines together? He could maybe go live and walk around and introduce us to all those employees he said he had. He said he had like 20 employees. I don believe it I don buy it Look how much he talked a few weeks ago when he wanted to take your money and look what happened since and I don buy it And if this thing goes south people you going to come to me first and then like I should have listened to Kaneda and I not rooting for it to go south but they still have yet to open up the door and show us what going on Why is that You know what he says like oh people are going to take it No we not going to take it How are we going to take showing us what really going on the wrong When we got a tour of Dutch Pinball did we take it wrong When we got a tour of Spooky Pinball did we take it wrong Heck, even Andrew McBain over at Freakin' Pinball Adventures did a walk around. So if you want to ask people for $19,000, yeah, you got to walk around your joint and prove to us that what you said is true. Because I don't believe Marty and I don't believeDamien. I think they're spinning it all. I think it's only a matter of time before they're going to have to be real about it. And look, we know what the deadline is. They got to finish all the fathoms by the end of the year. And I'm telling you right now, it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen, people. All right, what else is going on? We got Haggis, we got Stern, Spooky Pinball! Bug was streaming the Daphne mode of the game yesterday. Spooky Pinball in the house! The game has had a lot of bugs. They're always working on the bug. It's kind of ironic, right? They got a guy, kind of ironic, that like Charlie's son is named Bug and there's a lot of bugs in the game. I mean, I don't know, maybe they've been telegraphing to us how it's gonna be owning a machine all these years. Look, you know this by now. When you buy a spooky machine, it's like buying a Jaguar. It's gonna have problems. It's gonna have issues. The quality is not gonna be the same as everybody else's machines. There's one thing I wanna ask Spooky Pinball to do. Because I was watching the Daphne mode and there was one thing that's just annoying. It's a really fun mode. They've got a lot of fun clips from the show and they freaking put what you need to do in the mode in text across all the clips. It says like shoot the purple shots. Okay, just tell the player that once but it stays up there during the entire mode and every time there's a new clip of like Frankenstein chasing Daphne the entire v fronte The New Clip Go look at Lyman's Batman 66. Let the clips play. Don't ruin the clips by having this font on an angle in front of all those assets you have. Alright so speaking of spooky pinball, another rumor for you guys. I hear they have the Evil Dead license. I know they have three licenses and I hear Evil Dead is one of them. And so, Looney Tunes is also another one I heard they have. The game that is going to be released is Looney Tunes, The Princess Bride and Evil Dead. Look, it's not a bad trilogy for a company that just needs to make like a thousand to fifteen hundred games. Out of those three themes, they will be able to sell that many games. What everyone's looking for from Spooky moving forward is just better quality. They need better software engineers so when they release these games, you don't feel like you're a guinea pig the whole first year of owning it and they really need to get some mechanical engineers in house and actually make a toy. I mean that's just that simple. Like you need to be able to make a toy in a modern pinball machine when you're gonna charge this much money. It's just table stakes now. I mean that's the other thing too about Venom people. It's like you look down at that game, there's no real toy in it. It's like come on. For $10,000 to $13,000, you're not going to fool us with this. I mean they made freaking Lord of the Rings like 17 years ago and the toys are so much better in Lord of the Rings than in Venom and Lord of the Rings was like $4,000. I mean we're not that stupid. Oh, did I miss anybody? Any rumors over at Chicago Gaming? No. So here's what's going to happen at Chicago Gaming. They're no longer making remakes. The next game after Pulp Fiction is going to be a licensed themed game by Mark Ritchie. I heard it is sci-fi themed in nature. Is it Gremlins? Is it Beetlejuice? What is it? It's got to be something really cool, but it's going to be a fully featured Mark Ritchie game. Seeing what they've done with a single level Pulp Fiction, I think that makes everybody excited. I'm just looking for CGC to like get stuff out. I mean that's where everybody else is. Just get it out. Everybody, thank you so much for being a member of the Kaneda Club. I hope you enjoyed this episode. It's a great time to be in pinball. It's a great time to be observing everything that's going on. I don't know about you, but I'm keeping my money in my wallet. A lot's gonna happen. We're gonna end this episode with a moment of silence for Don over at Don's Pinball Podcast. I was ribbing him today. By the way, we're friends. Like this is all like in jest. So don't be like, oh, Kaneda, it's his game. It's his money. How dare you? No, this is not like Genghis taking his ball and going home. Like this is two grown men just having fun on a pinball topic. So Don took his Elvira. I think it was like an Elvira premium because there were no pros. He had it transformed into a makeshift Elvira 40th edition game. Only problem is it's not the imiz vs. and put them on a premium. It's like being a pinball poser. It just, you don't do it. It's just something about it. It's like kids who used to put the V8 emblems on their Mustangs when it was a V6. It's like, who are you fooling? You're just making yourself look silly. So we're gonna do this. We're gonna have a little, let's do a 10 second moment of silence for Don's Pinball Podcast and his Elvira 40th that is not an Elvira 40th starting now.