Pinball is the bomb, baby. Come and get it on. Living like a flipper with a tight end on. Looking like a pimp, like a literal pimp. Demolition Man cannot be your sim Razzle and a dazzle and a flash a little light We shake your motor lover baby go all night Sometime anytime shaking me sweet Little miss doesn't chomp sugar me Yeah Now come on Take that pin bot Nudge it up Break the rubber Break it up And pour your novice on me In the name of love Pour some novice on me Come on, fire me up Put your money in me I can't get enough My cash box is sticky sweet From the head to the pinball feet, yeah! Oh my goodness. Yeah, so we've got an incredible show now that we can get started. Number 189 from Don's Pinball Podcast. I'm going to cover everything from the Jaws 50th to what is game of the show currently at the Golden State Pinball Festival going on in Lodi. As we get started, be sure and give me feedback. Rate this show on Spotify or wherever you're listening. Totally helps out. Email Don's Pinball Podcast at gmail.com. Ticket at me and hang out over on the Patreon where you can win stuff every month and we have a great discussion always going. And new and bonus and rare tidbits seem to make their way on over there. All right, so let's start with a King Kong production update. These are what people like to hear. What's going on over there at the Stern Factory? Don, do you have any idea when I'm getting my premium? I'm not even a distributor and I'm getting asked these questions. So I reached out and I found out that premiums have been leaving the factory with the first ones left as of Friday. Just a God, what was that yesterday? I don't even know what day I'm recording this. It's sometime going into the weekend. Regardless, Friday, the first premiums went out to the point that late this afternoon, I got a call saying that my game's ready to pick up at the warehouse. So I'll be heading in there Sunday, which might be today, might be tomorrow. I'm still time delayed. I'm in some kind of time loop for my trip to Singapore. But we're back now. So I'll be picking that up soon. LEs should be in the homes of consumers. I believe they've sold through now. Some may still be available from distributors. We'll see what the holding power for the great big ape is. See if people will hang on to those. Or if they're going to chuck them as soon as we get Harry Potter released. Pros are going to start coming out this next week. And then I think they're just going to alternate. Now, I think the reason they did this was because they just finished the run of the LEs. And so they got all these damn green spiders around. and with the playfield layout being not dissimilar, they probably just ran a ton of populated playfields and just started throwing them in LE cabinets and throwing them in premium cabinets. And now that they're caught up, they can make the spiderless edition. Because when you compare the pro premium and LE, like the only difference between the pro and the bigger cousins is essentially the green spider. Is that it? I mean, you get a gesticulating ape in the back and a physical ball lock. But man, I love that Stern is going on with these loaded pros and I want them to continue that so nobody say nothing. We'll keep complaining there's not enough value in there, and maybe they'll just go ahead and just keep adding it in. All right, can you work with me? I think we can all work with that. What else is going on? Literally down the street from Stern Pinball at the house of currently Harry Potter, have you seen some of the controversy about Harry Potter? Go over to the Kineticist if you haven't. I won't weigh into it too much here. I'm trying to stick with just the pinball, but I can see very valid arguments on every side. Well, more so one than the other. Regardless, my own controversy with Harry Potter is am I even going to get this game? Now, hear me out. Don, you buy everything. Come on. Listen, I'm pretty much full right now. I do have a Kong coming in. It's a project. It'll be going back out again. I'm still holding tight to that no purchasing new in box in 2025. I did some trades, and D&D LE is so far the only trade that's staying here. Everything else has gone out. Harry Potter was going to be the one that was going to break me. And three weeks ago, that money was absolutely allocated. And then, you know, economic reasons happen. Uncertainty happens. I don't even know which way we're heading now in the United States economy. I know what it's wreaking havoc overseas. I know tariffs are still in the mix. All of that business. Uncertainty. I don't know if, like, I should go in on this game. Plus, look at the last five or the last ever pinball machines that Harry Potter has put out. And there is only one shining example of one that is still retaining massive value, and that's Pirates of the Caribbean. And that's only because nobody wanted the dang thing, right? So everybody, it seems, wants this Harry Potter machine. Anybody that is tolerant of Harry Potter in general wants this machine, right? So this is not the same situation with Pirates of the Caribbean, where there was low demand and so not that many were made. And then when the game became desirable later on, it was like, well, there's not that many to pick from. So it's more of a, not Cosmic Carnival, what's that damn Big Bang Bar situation, where the game is absolutely not great, although it's kind of interesting. It's not incredible. However, because there's only like seven of them in the wild, it's going to go for a lot of money. Kind of like that other Data East Kong, man. Try to get one of those, what are there, three of them? So I think we're in a different situation here. Harry Potter is going to be mad popular. and they're going to sell a ton of these things. And then this might be, well, I don't know if it'll be the second coming of GNR. I know GNR suffers not because it doesn't have an incredible light show, not because it's not absolutely packed with content and music. I mean, of all the music pins, there's so many good songs in Guns N' Roses. It's just that there's thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of them out there. So, like, they're selling for, like, five grand now. If you want to move a GNRL-E, man, you've got to be sub-6 to get that thing out of there. I sold at 6, and I thought that was an incredible low-level amount. But now I think if I had one for sale for 6, it would just be sitting there. So my point is this. I kind of think I can get Harry Potter at any point. Now, last week, I was like, you know what? I've got Avatar CE. Let me get this sold. 12.5 is what I was going to ask for it. And I put it out on my Discord. I put it out to my friends. And the thing is, this is the other thing, man. I just got this game, finally. Like, I'm not ready to get rid of it yet. It's still fun for me to play. It's the CE. It's the good version. I loaded it with glow balls. And multi on Pandora with the UV lights when an eclipse hits It as much fun as the first time I played it in the factory So like I not really ready to get rid of the game And when I look back two months ago I was dressed just down the hall as Blue Monkey Man taking this thing out of the box and everything. I still have some trans lights left to give away. So, like, it's just too soon. Now, when I was originally told about this game and originally put my order in, the word was November. November dawn, the CEs are getting made. That's when you're going to get yours. I would say November, maybe a little end of the way, maybe December, fine. That would have been okay because here we are sitting at the end of May, and I would have had it for January, February, March, April, May, and then also December and part of November. So I would have had it for like six months. It would have been reasonable to then say, you know what? I'll take a couple thousand off of it. I've been playing the game this whole time. We'll gift it to somebody else and roll that money into Harry Potter. However, I didn't even get this game until March. I've only had it two months now, man. I'm not six months down the road with this thing. So, like, it's too soon to try to get rid of it. But then what am I supposed to do? Open the door for the Harry Wizard to come on in? I just think that's too much too quick, right? I don't think I would appreciate it that much. And I don't think that the Harry Potter CE is going to be hard to get because it's not limited at all. And if they sell thousands and thousands and thousands of them, you know, by the time I'm, like, caught up playing all my other games, it might be time for Harry Potter. That's the argument I'm making to myself. I could keep some money in the pocket, build up the funds, especially in the light of economic uncertainty. What do you guys think? Does this seem reasonable? Of course I want the dang game. It's going to be a Jersey Jack. It's going to be at least as good as, you know, one of the other games that Eric's done. Godfather, the way it plays, isn't terrible. The theme just doesn't do anything for me. I really wish the game had some more in it. But, man, it is a beautiful game. So if this is going to be all sizzle and no steak with the hairy wizard, I just don't know. I guess ultimately it's going to take the reveal to let me know what's going on. And I've heard all kinds of reasons for the delays. I've heard that they were waiting for the marketing approval from the licensor. Even though the licensor has approved everything else in the game, a separate team does the marketing and release. Could be that. Could be filming the video. Now there was some wild accusation floating around that there was a last-minute change of the play field, so they all had to be stripped out of the cabinets, and the cabinets are sitting there with no play fields. Who knows at this point? I don't know. but until I know more, I'm not making a decision. So right now, there's a very good possibility that I'm not buying this thing at launch, and I think that's just fine because I don't think I will have any problem getting one when I need to, and it is fun to have games at a location. Guys, let me know what you think. Let me know what you think. When it comes to, like, certainty in pinball for where we're at, I kind of think the only sure thing, and I'm going to put my spooky shill shirt on right now, but Spooky Pinball's next game may be the only one that really is kind of like a sure bet everybody go into look at the 888 of Evil Dead as soon as people played it literally as soon as people played it as soon as the TPF doors opened up that game was rapidly on its way to selling completely out and now that it's out you can get $2000 more for this game we're almost like Golden Age back when people were holding on to the Pulp Fiction LEs before they knew it was going to be 6 years until they got a machine for Spooky. So people are awake now to the quality and what's in this game. I just played the Cheryl multiball. Fantastic. More to come for this game, too. So yeah, a solid release from Spooky, a true return to form, and given that their next title is going to be another one of these big licenses that people are really going to connect with, and the fact that they're still going to keep it under 1,000 games that they're going to build, they could probably have sold 2,000 Evil Deads or at least 1,500. No problem. The thing is, the guys don't want to build that many. They want to move on to the next game. They've got a backlog of all kinds of stuff they want to get out. You've heard it before. So the next under 1,000 release from Spooky will probably be in a Halloween situation where everybody missed out on Rick and Morty and then they rushed in on Halloween. The difference is it's probably going to be a much better game than Halloween is. So I've got some cash earmarked for that just so I'm not FOMOing. Plus, if you go in early, you get one of the early builds. You're not waiting like the other 600 people right now still waiting for Evil Dead. Game's awesome, man. I was just playing it. I got the update in it. I'm going to go dive back into it as soon as this recording session has elapsed. What else do we got? Dune. So let me talk about Dune for a little bit. David Van Ness, how you doing, my homie? Your game has a worm in it, and I do like shooting it. So I went to IO Arcade, did a little live on Facebook over there. Happened to be in Madison, Wisconsin. One of the first Dunes on location is out there. Hilton's routing it. just had a launch party for Evil Dead as it turns out so I was in the area so I bopped on in there as soon as doors opened I was the only one in IO Arcade and it was just me and Dune and like 5 or 6 bucks and I was like let's go get some damn sandworms I played this game on Houston incredibly jet lagged from coming from Pentastic needing to go up to Stern came through there played the game you know with everybody around and everything this was like me alone in an arcade quiet so I could like just play this game and listen to it. So that was super fun. Very thankful I have this game in my neighborhood. More operators, go get a Dune so people can play it. Longest lines of Golden State, apparently. So Dune was still running like the same code, the pre-release code that was at the factory. It had not yet been updated. I talked to David Van Ness, and he did say that there was an update that wasn't applied yet, and so he called the operator, and it's going to get that in there. But playing this code, god, there's nothing in it, man. There's music and just barely a call-out, and the game was just, like, dull. It was as dull as the Arrakis planes playing it with this early code. The shots were interesting, and after playing a couple of games, I started to get in the rhythm of where the shots were on the flippers, so I feel that this game does shoot much better than Labyrinth. I wasn't bricking any shots anywhere, at least not to the extent that I was in Labyrinth. What an incredible game, but you really have to be precise with those shots. This was more, let's throw balls around Arrakis. An insert would light up. I could hit it. Now, I had no idea what that insert was doing. The game wasn't telling me what the insert was doing. The spinners still don't have the decals on them yet. Those are coming. So all in all, it was, while a lackluster play experience, I did have fun playing the layout. It was like playing a Whitewood, is what it was. Some moody music. Every now and then, like a call-out that seemed out of context. I was able to play that pain box, ball saver mode. I mean, I played it a couple of times, but I was able to successfully complete it, which was fun. I wasn't able to do that at the factory. This is where you go down that left out lane when it's active. Your ball will get locked over there. That pain box will come out of the little fiery hole that was on Labyrinth, and you have to keep your hand on the action button and play one-handed. It's simulating your hand in that dune pain box or whatever, where you have to, like, endure. And so you have to play the game one-handed and just try to hit the left orbit shot. And so I was able to successfully do it, so that was fun. I think it's something that I could learn and get better at as well. So I feel a little bit better about that. When I played the game initially in Houston, I wasn't able to complete it, and it seemed like that whole mode effect was just wasted on me because there's no way I was going to get it. But I did. I used my nudging skills, my dead flippers, and bounced over, my cradle tactics, and I was able to line up the shot and get it. So that was fun. So the main thing I was enjoying with the game were the shots, although the shots weren't really connecting with me on a code basis yet. Still too early to judge. I'd like to see what the reception is from Golden State Pinball Festival going on in Lodi, California this weekend. There was something like 10 or 12 King Kongs there so no hour long lines like we saw at what was that recent of Allentown had like one King Kong and it was like an hour plus to wait to play it Inexcusable for a game that just came out that is in abundance