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Pinball Magazine & Pinball News PINcast October 2025 recap

Pinball News & Pinball Magazine Pincast·podcast_episode·2h 15m·held·Nov 3, 2025
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.033

TL;DR

Pinball Expo recap: Barrels of Fun steals show with Winchester Mystery House; Stern announces European expansion.

Summary

Jonathan Euston (Pinball Magazine) and Martin Evan (Pinball News) recap October 2025 Pinball Expo in Schaumburg, Illinois, covering major manufacturer announcements including Barrels of Fun's surprise Winchester Mystery House reveal (525 units, sold out day one), Walking Dead Remastered (Premium/LE) launching November 4th, new Stern Insider Connected All Access Perks subscription ($99/year), and Stern's planned European office opening in Amsterdam led by John Buscaglia. Code updates from Stern include improvements to Uncanny X-Men, Deadpool, Godzilla, King Kong, and Star Wars: Fall of the Empire.

Key Claims

  • Winchester Mystery House sold out 525 units on the first day at Pinball Expo

    high confidence · Jonathan and Martin discussing Barrels of Fun game launch at Pinball Expo, October 2025

  • Carl Python Anghelo designed Winchester Mystery House and runs IE Pinball streaming channel

    high confidence · Martin and Jonathan identifying designer and streaming connection

  • Stern is opening a European office in Amsterdam to be headed by John Buscaglia

    high confidence · Martin reporting direct conversation with John Buscaglia about European expansion

  • Walking Dead Remastered (Premium/LE) from Stern is launching November 4th, 2025

    high confidence · Jonathan confirming launch date in discussion with Martin

  • Stern Insider Connected All Access Perks subscription increased from $79/year to $99/year

    high confidence · Jonathan describing new subscription pricing and features

  • Kevin Mann of Buffalo Pinball has joined Multimorphic for corporate communication and community engagement

    high confidence · Martin announcing Multimorphic team expansion

  • Winchester Mystery House layout is limited to 525 units matching the house's street number

    high confidence · Jonathan noting the intentional number connection to the Winchester Mystery House property

  • Dune Pinball underperformed in sales, leading Barrels of Fun to move Winchester Mystery House forward in production schedule

    medium confidence · Jonathan and Martin speculating on business strategy based on observed Dune sales weakness

  • Portal version 1.0 feature-complete and currently shipping with full code implementation

    high confidence · Martin noting Kevin Mann streaming Portal 1.0 release during recording

Notable Quotes

  • “Winchester Mystery House was limited to 525 units...they could probably have sold, you know, close to, I don't know, 800, 900 easily, I think.”

    Jonathan Euston @ ~15:30 — Indicates strong market demand exceeded supply, supporting Barrels of Fun's FOMO strategy but suggesting potential left revenue on table

  • “this layout is way too good for just 525 units...maybe you should consider re-theming it into something else...Simpsons 3 House of Horror”

    Jonathan Euston @ ~18:00 — Speculates about potential retheme of Winchester game, suggesting exceptional playfield design merits wider release

  • “The European market is quite different than the US market...it's not like you have 50 states and everybody speaks the same language”

    Martin Evan @ ~35:00 — Highlights challenges for Stern's European expansion including language barriers and pricing complexity

  • “It wasn't quite tested properly...there were quite a few errors, app crashes...it would only show a maximum of two machines on the leaderboard”

    Jonathan Euston @ ~45:00 — Documents quality issues with Stern's new Insider Connected All Access Perks launch, atypical for Stern's usual polish

  • “It reminds me of how Keith Elwin used himself into the scene...Keith's archer game was already well known by the time he joined Stern”

    Martin Evan @ ~20:00 — Compares Carl D'Ython Anghelo's dramatic entry to industry with Keith Elwin's career trajectory

  • “Metallica Remastered sitting there and nobody playing it...last year there were huge lines to play it”

    Martin Evan @ ~32:00 — Indicates declining interest in Metallica Remaster at Expo, contrasting sharply with year-prior reception

  • “Star Wars (LE) of the Empire has a new 'not a Jedi yet' mini wizard mode...lots and lots of rule and scoring changes”

    Jonathan Euston @ ~65:00 — Documents significant ongoing code development for Star Wars, suggesting game still in active balance tuning

Entities

Jonathan EustonpersonMartin EvanpersonBarrels of FuncompanyWinchester Mystery HousegamePython AnghelopersonStern PinballcompanyJohn BuscagliapersonThe Walking Dead Remastered (Premium/LE)

Signals

  • ?

    announcement: Barrels of Fun announced Winchester Mystery House at Pinball Expo on October 13, 2025, with full promotional materials and 525-unit production run

    high · Jonathan and Martin confirm Winchester Mystery House revealed at Expo with banners, flyers, and game playable on floor; sold out first day

  • ?

    product_launch: Stern Walking Dead Remaster launching November 4, 2025, using Spike 3 system similar to Metallica Remaster

    high · Jonathan confirms November 4th launch date; Martin notes contrast to Metallica announcement timing last year

  • ?

    product_concern: Stern Insider Connected All Access Perks subscription launched with buggy implementation including app crashes, error states, and incomplete leaderboard display (max 2 machines only)

    high · Jonathan details specific bugs: 'quite a few errors, app crashes...it would only show a maximum of two machines on the leaderboard no matter how many you put in'

  • ?

    business_signal: Stern Pinball opening European regional office in Amsterdam headed by John Buscaglia to serve continental market with language and pricing localization

    high · Martin reports direct conversation with John Buscaglia about European office opening; expected January 2026 timeframe; discusses European market complexity

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Kevin Mann of Buffalo Pinball hired by Multimorphic for corporate communication and community engagement roles

    high · Martin announces Kevin Mann's official joining of Multimorphic; notes his prior exclusive streaming relationship with company

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.405

0:00
Winchester Mystery House Revealed Beetlejuice, The Three Musketeers and rather, also announced another edition of What's Cooking With?
0:20
Hi, my name is Jonathan Euston I'm the editor of Pinball Magazine and I'm joined by Hi, I'm Martin Evan I'm the editor of Pinball News and Jonathan and I are here to look back at all the exciting events in the pinball world throughout the month of October 2025. And what an exciting month it was! Well, indeed, yes. Sorry for my interruption, but it was, of course, Pinball Expo Month. Oh yeah, you're right, it was. I kind of missed that, but yeah, quite right. Right, so that means Martin and I were fortunate enough to attend the 41st edition of Pinball Expo in Schoenberg, Illinois.
1:04
Thanks to our main organizer, well basically the whole Bird family I would have to say, Richard Bird and all their kids chiming in. absolutely great event and you can read everything you want to know about it and how it went on a certain website called pinballnews.com have you ever heard of that news?
1:32
kind of rings a bit of a bell but yes that's right I've been keeping that as up to date as possibly can but as you and I both know and everybody who goes to Pinball X1 knows, there is so much going on at that show, it's hard, if not impossible, to attend to everything. So we've only got reports, or I've only got reports on what we went to. Of course, you were kind enough to contribute quite a lot to that as well, including the Stern Pinball Factory Tour, which I wasn't able to go to.
2:06

Pinball Expo 2025 was the 41st edition held in Schaumburg, Illinois organized by the Bird family

high confidence · Jonathan introducing the show context at beginning of podcast

  • “I expect him to come over around January or something like that”

    Martin Evan @ ~38:00 — Indicates John Buscaglia's timeline for relocating to Amsterdam for European office launch

  • “It sold out very quickly and people are saying, oh, why didn't you make more?”

    Jonathan Euston @ ~16:00 — Reflects community frustration with limited production creating artificial scarcity and FOMO

  • “There won't be an impact on the sales of those [Winchester units]...they could have sold easily twice that amount and possibly more”

    Martin Evan @ ~22:00 — Assesses Barrels of Fun's ability to announce new game given Winchester sold out, while acknowledging potential under-production

    • game
    Multimorphiccompany
    [name withheld pending review]person
    Portalgame
    Pinball Expoevent
    Brad Albrightperson
    [name withheld pending review]person
    Dune Pinballgame
    King Konggame
    Star Wars: Fall of the Empiregame
    Uncanny X-Mengame
    Deadpoolgame
    Godzillagame
  • ?

    product_strategy: Barrels of Fun employs aggressive FOMO strategy with Winchester Mystery House: 525-unit limit matches property street number, single-tier pricing at $11,600, first-day sellout despite likely demand for 800-900+ units

    high · Jonathan and Martin discuss 525-unit limit and note community perception that game could have sold 'close to 800, 900 easily'; both describe strategy as intentional artificial scarcity

  • $

    market_signal: Dune Pinball underperformed in sales, prompting Barrels of Fun to advance Winchester Mystery House production to fill gap in release schedule

    medium · Jonathan and Martin speculate that Dune underperformance and Winchester advancement are connected; Martin notes Dune production may have been cut to 500 units

  • ?

    code_update: Multiple Stern games received significant code updates in October 2025: Uncanny X-Men v0.94 (new Danger Room rules), King Kong v0.89 (new mini wizard mode), Star Wars Fall of the Empire v0.86 (multiple new features and modes)

    high · Jonathan catalogs specific version numbers, dates, and feature additions for each game update

  • ?

    design_innovation: Portal features innovative ball teleportation mechanics where ball moves between playfield locations via floor/wall connections, creating unpredictable but rule-logical gameplay

    high · Martin describes Portal mechanics: 'ball is being transported teleported...from one place to another when you use that the floor or the wall...comes out somewhere else'; compares to Harry Potter complexity

  • ?

    event_signal: Pinball Expo 41st edition in Schaumburg, Illinois (October 2025) served as major venue for new game reveals and announcements; Winchester Mystery House became unexpected star with heavy crowds and long play lines

    high · Jonathan and Martin note Expo as venue for Barrels of Fun announcement; long lines to play Winchester despite being unreleased game; contrast to Metallica Remaster's low traffic

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Metallica Remaster experienced significant decline in community interest year-over-year; went from hour-long lines at prior Expo to empty play position at 2025 Expo

    high · Martin directly observes Metallica unplayed on Stern booth floor while recalling 'huge lines...waiting in line for like an hour or hour and a half' prior year

  • ?

    product_launch: Stern Insider Connected All Access Perks subscription added home leaderboard features promised for 'couple of weeks after Pinball Expo' but delayed and launched with bugs

    high · Jonathan notes feature was 'promoted as being available in a couple of weeks after Pinball Expo...ended up being a little bit longer and then wasn't quite working right'

    • Eventually you did. Well, kind of, yes. I did go to the Stern After Expo on the Tuesday and had a little private tour around thank you very much to Zach Sharp for that and it was actually, believe it or not in all these years, my first time going to the new new, in inverted commas Stern Pinball Factory because I've never been able to go to any of the tours because I'm always at the convention centre there covering the seminars which was the case this year as well but you went and you were able to go around and took some nice pictures of the factory so thank you for that and also for all your help quickest tour of the Stern Pimple Factory ever was it really? so the interesting thing is outside I ran into my dear friend John Buscellia and he's like great to see you Jonathan you go inside, you do whatever you want and that's exactly what I did.
    3:10
    Really? Okay, you helped yourself to the parts store then? No, I didn't. No, no, I think I was out in 10 minutes again. Oh, right, okay. Well, I was surprised you were back so quickly, I have to say. Yeah.
    3:27
    No, I was like, okay, I've seen this before. You can't take any pictures inside anyway. At least I took some and then someone said, well I checked with Dwight Sullivan and Dwight was like hey you got permission from John you do whatever yeah quite and then someone else was like but there's still no photography policy so I was like okay I'll respect that and so I quickly moved I think I surpassed every group that had that was at that time having that tour and I ended up in one of the first buses going back.
    4:07
    Okay. Well, that was very welcome from my point of view that you were able to come back and help cover the seminars. Well, I have some responsibility, I feel. Try to relieve you in some way of all the massive amounts of work that you do recording all these seminars. Oh, thank you very much for your consideration. I have to say, it went surprisingly well from our point of view, I think, covering the seminars. Yes. Yeah, we had a different room. We didn't know quite how it was going to be laid out, where all the PowerPoints were going to be, where we were going to put the microphones. And we had two screens and two projectors this time, which was new. So we had to feed those two as well. We had different cameras.
    4:52
    What else did we have? We had quite a few other things set up, and it was really very, very successful, I'd say. A huge thanks to Ron Coon as well for all his work in sorting out the audio stuff, because he comes in and does all the microphones, gives us our mixer, and we plug the audio mixer into the laptop. I bring the laptop, a whole bunch of cameras, tripods, cables, power supplies, you know, you name it, and set it all up. And the one thing that was really worrying me about it, not on the technical side of it, it was the fact we wouldn't be able to get into this room in time, because the first seminar starts 8am Thursday morning, and we didn't know whether we could actually get into the room before Thursday.
    5:42
    And if we couldn't, then we'd have to be in there like 6 o'clock in the morning, 5 o'clock in the morning, trying to set things up, and assuming we can get into the room, then the security will let us in. and in order to get everything wired, tested, all the cables taped to the floor, everything tidied up, the projectors lined up, all that kind of stuff, in time for the first seminar at 8 o'clock and that would have been an absolute nightmare. But fortunately, and thanks to the facility and thanks to the Burke family and particularly Bridget, we were able to get in there on Wednesday and sort that all out, mostly before the bumper blast party on Wednesday night, but then we came back early from that and finished setting up. So all we had to do really was come in on Thursday morning, plug in the laptop, plug in the cameras, and we were good to go. So we didn't really have to be in there until about 7 o'clock. You keep forgetting that you actually wanted to test everything. after you tested it first in the hotel room it seemed to work fine, then you plugged everything in on location in the room itself why is it not working? nothing works, it's always the way well I plugged it in and tested it all in my house in London unpack it all or pack it all up so I make sure I've got all the cables I need and everything and take them with me, take it to the hotel room got in there on Monday set it all up on Tuesday as you say and it was all working there. Take it down to the room on Wednesday, plug it together, and it doesn't work. And you're like, well... And those are the words that I really become stressed out like, what?
    7:28
    Well, the thing is... And then it was just a matter of unplugging everything, re-plugging it, and it didn't work. That's right. I had to disconnect everything and reconnect everything. I guess it's like, you know, when you test it in the hotel room and you press the power button, Everybody goes into standby. People are actually listening to our podcast to hear what you have to do with your cameras. Well, all right. Okay, you're quite right. Yes, I'm just venting. But anyway, it was a great show. We had 35 hours of seminar recordings.
    7:58
    I recorded over an hour of walking around the show floor. I don't know why. Maybe this year the show just... People are saying there weren't as many vendors this year. But to me, walking around the show took a lot longer. probably because of all the homebrew games I suppose in that Marco area at the back but there was an awful lot to cover and it took me far longer to walk around it this year than it did last year didn't have to do with anything of the alcohol you had there evening before no I don't think so I don't think there were any camera shakes or anything like that going on room 1632 was pretty famous I have to say yeah unfortunately every time I got up there they were just closing they were kicking everybody out every night Which brings me to the point. I do have to thank two people personally.
    8:48
    And that's JJ from CoinExchange. And Kevin Ryan, who took care of delivering the books that I had. Well, Antar, of course, yeah. But he also brought 100 books that were stored for me, and the plan was to sell them at Expo. I won't get too much into the details, but I wasn't counting on them to actually be brought to Expo because it was too difficult. They couldn't get a hold of people and a trucking company and what have you. And much to my surprise, I got a tap on my shoulder, They're like, I got a hundred books for you. And I'm like, okay.
    9:42
    There we go. And then I had to figure out how am I going to sell these and what am I going to do with the ones I don't sell.
    9:49
    So a really big thank you to Kevin Ryan for bringing those and JJ from Colorado Game Exchange for making it possible. And also to... To Nicholas. Nicholas of Pinball Sound Pin Sound who was kind enough to sell them on the vendor floor and Deborah who sold them for me in the tournament area big thanks and thanks to those people well at least the pile was a lot smaller and then I have to thank David Farness as well who took him to Houston and the plan is to sell the remaining stock at the upcoming Texas Pinball Festival Excellent, ok well we've talked quite a lot about Bill Expo but we should really be talking about the various companies who are represented there and elsewhere in the industry so what we'll do is we'll go through each company in turn, look at their news, talk about their presence at Expo and if they were revealing anything or showing anything unusual.
    11:05
    And then we'll have a little bit more Pinball Expo experience a bit later, because Jonathan has got a special interview with this non-special guest for our What's Cooking With section, but we'll come back to that a little bit later.
    11:20
    So we're teasing with that one for now, because teasing is what it's all about at the moment, it seems. But not from Stern. Not from Stern, the biggest company. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I want to start with the big surprise. Oh, go on then.
    11:35
    Right. So, no, seriously, much to the surprise of, well, everybody, Girls of Fun out of the blue showed up with a new game,
    11:48
    Winchester Mystery House. and they announced that there would be a new team member revealed on the 13th day of the 13th, or at the 13th hour, something like that. On the 13th, yeah. It sounds quite mysterious already there. And it turned out to be Carl D'Angelo from California, who's running, how do you say that? IE Pinball. which we know from streaming of many games but Carl turns out to be quite the pimple designer I have to say as he designed Winchester Mystery House and that game was on the floor promotional materials ready, banners flyers, you name it, everything was there the game was limited to 525 units and it sold out the first day. Yes, 525 units, which matches the house number of the Winsor & Newton mystery house property itself, the street number. As you say, it sold out on the first day. Only one model available, and that was priced at $11,600.
    13:07
    And it seemed to be the case these days that companies limit their production runs to a number they know is going to sell out very quickly. So it's just as it did with Evil Dead. Now, that sold out very quickly, and people are saying, oh, why didn't you make more? You could have sold many, many more. Well, I think the same is probably true of Winter's Mystery House, 525 units, and they could probably have sold, you know, close to, I don't know, 800, 900 easily, I think. Yeah, probably at least twice the number easily. But, so the interesting part is, well, for me, so the game was revealed on the Monday, the 13th. Yes. Well, we were actually up in the air, literally flying to Chicago. We land in Chicago, new game revealed. Yeah, that was slightly annoying. It would have been nice to have a bit of a heads up on that. so he kind of got something prepared so we were playing catch up from that point really so then so we go to the hotel I think build up starts when did build up of the show start? well Monday actually, it was already underway by the time I got there doing the basic stuff, but most of the stuff came in on Tuesday so I remember playing the game before Expo started I'm not even sure whether it was Tuesday or Wednesday. Probably Wednesday. They were unboxing them on Tuesday, I think. I've got pictures of that. So, I played the game on, let's say, Wednesday, Wednesday afternoon. And Marcel, the organizer of the Dutch Pinball Open Expo, was with us. He played it as well.
    15:02
    By that time, while nobody had played the game except for a few, was already sold out to distributors. Oh, yeah. And it was just a matter of finding a distributor who still has one. And Marcel was lucky enough to find one, so he immediately put a down payment down and managed to get him one. And he was one of the very few who actually got to play the game. This was distributed in Europe or in the US? In the UK. In the UK? Oh, right, yeah. So retro arcade specialist. Right, yes. Yes. And, but the funny thing is, then Expo opened,
    15:44
    people got to play the game, and then everybody was like, this is way too good of a game for just 525 units. Yeah, I want to buy one, and you can't, they're all sold. Yes. So, that's the story of the launch of Winchester Mystery House. Now, the interesting thing is, I mentioned to David and Es, the head mischief maker and barrels of fun. I'm like, this layout is way too good for just 525 units. I think I said, maybe you should consider re-theming it into something else, which is still appropriate.
    16:29
    And believe it or not, Jack Ranieri came up with what I think is probably the perfect scene for doing a makeover for that game, that layout.
    16:43
    Right, which is? Simpsons 3 House of Horror. Mm-hmm. I can see that totally happening, but, well, you never know, and maybe they're not going to rerun or re-theme the game after all. It's like, this is it, and we're moving on to the next. It would be a pity But Oh well Congratulations to all those who got in And got one of the 525 units I think a special congratulations To Carl D'Angelo for Kicking it off With such a killer game It reminds me of how Keith Elwin Used himself into the scene so to speak Yeah although to be fair Keith was kind of Keith's archer game was already well known by the time he joined Stern and turned it into Iron Maiden. But Carl's game kind of came out, well, for us at least, came out of nowhere, really. Right. And as you say, he's, I haven't used the phrase knocked it out of the park, but it certainly seems to have come to spooky, not spooky, barrels of fun with an amazing layout and design. And it seems to work really, really well. and when added to the artwork from Brad Albright, who is the artist on the game, who we know from doing the Portal artwork for Multimorphic, and also is a well-known artist who exhibits at Pinball Expo and Texas Pinball Festival, and has done for many years. It's great to see him, first of all, doing the Multimorphic game, and now moving to the Bowers of Fun game. He's really into the business now. And, of course, he did the homebrew game Motorhead for Dave Peck from Australia as well, which was shown at the Texas Pinball Festival a couple of years ago. So, yeah, a busy guy. Right. So, now, seriously, congratulations to Barrels of Fun and everybody working there for this game. Yeah, kind of stole the show a bit, didn't they, with that one? Yeah, absolutely. however this game being such a success sort of comes on I'm not sure how to put this mildly but it seems that while June is a great game it didn't do that well in terms of numbers and I sort of got the feeling and I'm not saying this is true this is purely the feeling I got that Winchester Mystery House was basically moved forward to fill a gap on the line because they expected to sell more jewels and didn't. Yeah, that was the impression I got as well. I don't want to say it's a filler game, but that's a kind of phrase which is unworthy of a great game, but it's, as you say, probably brought forward from where it was originally intended to be launched.
    19:55
    And of course it gives some time to develop the game after because they've got 525 units and you should get that get those built within six months, eight months I figured that they had basically 2025 scheduled for the production of June and then we went to the next title so I'm not I don't know the exact numbers but I heard that June was being cut to only 500 units, something like that.
    20:32
    And that's just a rumor, not a fact. Right, okay. Okay, well, we should be seeing the fourth title then, from Barrel of Fun, being announced sometime in the summer then, of next year. Right, or maybe around TPF, something like that. Yeah, that might be better. I suppose they can announce it early, because they already sold out all the Winchester Mystery House games. There won't be an impact on the sales of those. No. In fact, they could have sold easily twice that amount and possibly more. But you never know what's going to happen. I mean, if they did, then they would have played a different strategy with games and titles and licenses and what have you. yeah and also there's always the risk that people will play and not with this title but there is the risk that they'll play or see videos of it and decide that it's not the game they thought it was going to be and then want to back out of their sale so it's very unlikely to happen with Winchester I agree yes I agree but it's something we've seen happen to a degree with other titles which have been pre-sold anyway congratulations to Barrel to Plunk Here's Carl and Brad and the whole team working there on, as I say, colour-stealing the show at Expo with a last-minute announcement. And having four models of the game at the show, three on the browser fun stand itself, and one on the flipping out pinball stand, who are distributors, of course, for browser fun. And there were long, long lines to play those games, of course, as you would expect when nobody has played them. and they generated an awful lot of excitement. Right. Now, you wanted to start off with Stern Pinball, but I figured now would be a good time to insert Stern Pinball in the mix.
    22:37
    As they made a new game announcement as well, although it's not exactly a new game, and then again, it is.
    22:45
    Well, they already announced very, fairly recently, the fact that they're doing the Star Wars Fall of the Empire. That was only announced shortly before Pinball Expo, but since then they announced that they will be doing a remaster of AMC's The Walking Dead, which has been kind of expected for some time, but in pretty much the same kind of way that they did Metallica, and do a remastered version of that. So it's going to have the LCD screen is going to have the, I guess it's going to be the Spike 3 system for this game.
    23:27
    I'm not sure, Metallica wasn't, it was Spike 2, wasn't it? Which is interesting for a music thing. Yeah, surprising or at least to my surprise, I was expecting The Walking Dead to be announced at the end of the factory tour like Metallica was last year.
    23:43
    And that wasn't the case. No, it was actually quite a contrast to me walking around the show as little as I did, but going around the CERN booth and walking around and seeing Metallica Remastered sitting there and nobody playing it. And I remember last year, there were huge, huge lines to play it. People were waiting in line for like an hour or hour and a half just to get their chance to play one game. And this year, here it sitting there, no one's touching it. I mean, it wasn't long before somebody did jump on it, but the fact that, you know, if I had wanted to, I could have done it. One moment that nobody was playing the game, you happened to walk by. Yes, with a video camera to prove it, so there you go. But yes, as we were saying, yeah, The Walking Dead remastered is coming up.
    24:40
    Yeah. November 4th, that's this Tuesday. Yes, that's right. Tomorrow, I would say, considering that we're releasing this on the 3rd. That's right. Yes. But that's not all that's been launched.
    24:58
    Besides actual games, Stern have finally got around and launched their new Insider Connected All Access Perks. and now this is a subscription service for people who were previously paying $79 a year in order to get access to it and it's now gone up to $99 a year but probably the key thing that it gives people is the new Insider Connect home leaderboards which allows you to set up your own leaderboards for your own Stern Insider Connected games in your own home which makes it very much like what you might see on location where they have the high score tables and the leaderboards and they can run tournaments and things like that. Now you can do that in your own home. Now they launched that initially in a, I don't know, it seemed like it was a kind of rushed way, if you avoid, pardon the pun, of the game, but it wasn't quite tested properly. When they launched it, there were quite a few errors, app crashes. it would only show a maximum of two machines on the leaderboard no matter how many you put in or how many you had connected to it but I think they're gradually getting it back together again now but it's not really like Stern to be something quite so buggy at launch it might be missing features and the home leaderboard feature was something which was promoted as being available in a couple of weeks after Pinball Expo when they announced it, but it ended up being a little bit longer and then wasn't quite working right. But it's something which, besides the Home Leader Board, also gives you some other perks. For your $99 per year, US dollars of course, you get free shipping in the continental, in the US, I should say, for stuff you buy from the Spam Pinball Shop. and discounted shipping for overseas orders. You also get things like tech alerts and machine stats, I should say, in your app if you subscribe to the service. And hurrah, you get your name in gold on any location leaderboards showing the people that you are an all-access elite subscriber. Okay, can't say I'm very tempted It is what it is Yeah, I guess you have a lot of sort of parties or you have, even if you've got a family and you want to have your own leaderboards at home, it's not a not an unreasonable amount of money, I guess 99, but it is kind of like Stern making, finally getting to the stage where they want to make some money out of Insider Connected They got it from operators in the past, now they're offering a subscription service to home owners, home game owners, to get money out of them too so they've put a lot of investment into Insider Connect and there was only a question of how long before they tried to get some return on that, well here's the next stage of getting some money back from those people they're not still, everything you had before, as far as a player goes, scan your QR code, log in and see your scores and that kind of stuff. That's still there, but this is another level, which was available before, but now they've added, they've upgraded the features and increased the price slightly by 20 bucks.
    28:40
    Right. So there we are. Okay. So, and then there's some other news. Yeah, you've got some. Well, I think we have a scoop here. go on then Stern Pimple is to open a European office in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and that office is to be headed by John Buscaglia who will be indeed moving that was the news that I got from John himself, he was like I'm coming to you and I'm well he's basically relying on me he called me last week we had an hour long phone call conversation about the European market. And I tried to explain to him that the European market is quite different than the US market.
    29:36
    For instance, all the languages and their barriers, so to speak. Italians speak Italian, and the Spanish speak Spanish, and the Germans speak German.
    29:50
    That's true. I can't believe that. So it's not like you have 50 states and everybody speaks the same language, maybe a different dialect, but everybody understands English. We do understand English, but it's not like you can set up a big campaign and that will cover the entire European continent. No, it needs to be translated into each market. Yes, quite right. Yes. Anyway. And pricing, of course. Not everywhere uses the euro, of course, in Europe either. So that's some of the stuff that I discussed with John And I'm looking forward to welcoming him to Amsterdam Oh, exciting times Okay, any idea when that's actually going to open? I haven't been given a time frame yet What I understand is John is still working the third quarter The fourth quarter for Stern In the US So I expect him to come over around January or something like that And I asked Whether John would be In attendance of the Upcoming Dutch Pinball Open Which is in two weeks, two, three weeks Unfortunately He's not because he's attending The IAPA show In Florida and the week after being Thanksgiving and he's having people coming over already on the Sunday before, which basically makes it impossible for him to fly from Florida to Amsterdam and then back in a day. So it's not worthwhile, I'd say.
    31:34
    Okay, well, interesting developments there. We'll look forward to seeing what John and his team in Amsterdam actually produce and how that helps within Europe. Right. But that doesn't mean that Scurrin Pinball will not have a presence at the Dutch Pinball Open Expo. But more on that later. Yeah. Yes. And also a question there about what Lloyd's position is, European Sales Director. Right. Yes. How that fits in with the European office. But anyway, we can answer that later once we get a chance to talk to the parties concerned, which we will do at the DPO Expo later this month, as you said. However, in the meantime, you've got your favourite part of every company's update, the new code. Oh, wow. And, yeah, it's been a busy month for some. I'm going to sleep on my jet lag. Okay, well,
    32:37
    Uncanny X-Men got a big update to 0.94 at the start of October, on the 2nd. whole new Danger Room rules based around building up your training progress bar to boost the value of the next mode, quite a few rule changes and quite a few scoring values changed as well and of course the usual bug fixes. Deadpool also had a big update, well actually it didn't have a big update, it had a small update, it was the exact opposite of what I just said. Deadpool had a small update as did Godzilla and they were both updated purely so they can support the new Expression Lighting Topper, which has been made available from Stern. We brought on that last month. So Deadpool and Godzilla have dedicated toppers and this update just basically adds the lighting support into the code for that. King Kong, the myth of Terror Island, had an update, had a new Crash the Gate mini wizard mode that locked until you play all five island scenes and had a new 2 million bananas rule well i sure you all know about that Changed some of the rules to the island scene selection and King Kong multiball, and many other aspects of the game, of course. That came out on the 27th of October, so just a few days ago. That was 0.89. And Star Wars, just a couple of days ago, Fall of the Empire had a version 0.86. current game from Stern 0.86 let's say it has a new not a Jedi yet mini wizard mode new dark side multi-ball, new super modes added extra balls have been added into the game which were missing before, the three ways of earning them and lots and lots of rule and scoring changes too, so that's quite a fluid game at the moment, Star Wars for the Empire but that's the code update for this month for October from Stern Pinball.
    34:39
    Time to wake up. Yeah. Right, where should we go next? What was our second, what was our, yes, one of our other headlines, but maybe we'll come to those as we get to them, I suppose. We're already making one of them. Well, we've got a barrel of fun. Yes. I'd say we go in the order that we have, well, our notes lined up in front of us. Okay. Multimorphic from Round Rock in Texas also announced a new team member. Yes, indeed. Yes. Well, go ahead. Well, Kevin Mann of Buffalo Pinball, who has been working with the team at Multimorphic a lot to stream their new reveals and their new features and the code updates, has officially joined Multimorphic to help them with their corporate communication and community engagement. What did you say? Yeah, corporate. They're a corporation. Multimorphic, apparently. Multimorphic Inc. Although they have changed their Facebook name, I noticed, from Multimorphic Inc. to Multimorphic Pinball Evolved, which is a P3 tagline, I would say. So, anyway, congratulations to Kevin on joining the Multimorphic team officially. He's already... He didn't design the game yet. Well, as far as we know, yeah.
    36:07
    He's already exclusively streamed the latest multi-morphic releases, as we said, under his Buffalo Pinball name. But he's also, today, in fact, as we are probably, probably as we're talking, as we're recording this, he is streaming the final, or the feature-complete version, version 1.0 of the Portal game, which is currently shipping. and it's fully code complete. And so if you go to the Buffalo Pinball website or Twitch channel, you should be able to see exactly how that new code looks. So congratulations to the Portal team on getting version 1.0 with all the features built into it. Right, and do check it out because Portal really is a game where that ball is doing... It's such insane things that you're like, huh? What just happened here?
    37:08
    Yeah. It kind of reminded me of when I first played Harry Potter. You can never work out where the ball was going to suddenly appear from. Yeah. But in that case and in Portland's case, it all makes sense once you actually understand the rules. the ball is being transported teleported if you like from one place to another when you use that the floor or the wall or whatever and everything passes through and comes out somewhere else so a fun game, I look forward to playing it I didn't get a chance to play it at all at Expo in fact I didn't get a chance to play anything very much at Expo but there you go I was about to ask go on then, ask so what games did you play at Expo good question I played Star Wars yes unfortunately I was like 40 minutes into my video walk around the show and I wasn't going to stop just to go and actually jump on a game so no I think Star Wars is about the only new game I played believe it or not speaking of which The first time I played it Not that everybody cares But I played it at the Atrium It was the evening before the bumper blast I think I was very Underwhelmed with the game And then I played it In the Stern booth at Expo Before the show opened And I actually Marcel and I were able to I think play probably 10 games on it. Wow.
    38:56
    And that changed my first impression of the game into a rather positive one. Yes. I can sympathize or empathize with that. And I haven't even seen the Star Wars movies. Really? Oh, you're the one.
    39:15
    Yes, because I actually went back to uh enterium uh on uh monday uh no sorry tuesday tuesday afternoon before i flew back i went there and i thought i want to play some of the games and they had moved them all into the room that we had the bumper blasting which is where they normally live i believe not not by the bowling uh lanes where we we saw them on uh wednesday night um went in there and played some of the games and I wasn't well I seem to have a few issues with some of those games and they had issues with me and I managed to crash Dune to the point where I actually did a software restart in the middle of a game How many points did you get for that?
    40:00
    Zero apparently in total and also had problems with another game which was launching two balls I think it might have been yeah it might have been Star Wars actually it was launching two balls into it and I wasn't having any fun at all playing Elton John, which is quite an achievement because I really loved playing Elton John, but it wasn't a happy experience until my last game. Of course, just as I was about to leave, typically you play one game and that game, when you know you haven't got much time, that's when you have the game of your life. So I had to actually leave it with an extra ball or whatever to play. But yeah, it can be very, very different playing games there on that location through how they were at the show, so I absolutely feel what you're saying about playing Star Wars. And I enjoy playing Star Wars. It's not revelationary, or revelatory. I didn't... We've played enough Star Wars games in the past to know roughly what the rules are going to be. Treat the Death Star and all that kind of stuff. But it was fun. Yeah, and I think John and the team did a good job on that. And of course you can watch the video of them talking about that on the Pinball News Bimbo Expo report. Right. So, getting back to Multimorphic. Yes. Oh, yeah, that's right, yeah, Multimorphic, yeah. Yes.
    41:22
    Because Birdwatcher got new code. It did. Version 2.0. Yeah. Yeah, a third-party game, which I think is playable on all modules, if I'm not mistaken. Well, and if I am mistaken, and then you'll probably correct me. Well, the latest version, version 2.0, also adds support for the portal module, whether it's the standard one or the extended version with the extra ramps at the side, or ramp at the side, I should say. So that, and it also adds 11 whole new birds to the birdwatcher thing, and a new special class of module-exclusive birds to discover. So depending on which module you have plugged into it, you get different sets of birds. So that's a nice feature as well. There's also some other extra features in a new rare Easter egg bird that you have to be able to discover in a particular way. So, yeah, Birdwatcher 2.0, Ian Harrawer has updated that, and of course he was working for Multimorphic as well on Portal. Right, and speaking of Easter eggs, I also understood that for the Drain module has a special Halloween Easter egg. And this movie appears on the 31st of October. Ah, so only people can set the clock on their P3 to go back to that if they've missed it. Or do you have to wait a whole year in order to have another go?
    42:53
    I am not able to answer that question, but if you have a P3, it might be worth trying. Hmm. If you missed it. Okay Oh, we quickly jumped back to Stern The only I hate to point it out But if you're coming out with The Walking Dead Why the week after Halloween?
    43:22
    I think they've got a new season Have they? Of The Walking Dead coming out I have no idea I figure with The Walking Dead You want to be on top of Halloween Yeah I realize I'm talking rubbish, and I was actually thinking about Stranger Things, which is coming out. Yes. Too many licenses. Yeah. Right. Okay. Anyway, so that rounds it up for Multimorphic. It does. And for skipping to CERN and forth.
    43:51
    Dutch Pinball. Yes. So they were at, well, they weren't actually at Pinball Expo in person. Barry wasn't there, I don't think. No, Barry was not Melvin was there, of course from Dutch Pinball Exclusive Yeah, he was basically heading Dutch Pinball Exclusive indeed as well as many other alliances, companies corporations, whatever you want to call it Which we'll get to more of in a moment Right, yes So, um Melvin had a seminar at Pinball Expo where he was talking about the Alice game and giving an update on the progress of that and also telling us what the next game from Dutch Pinball Exclusive is going to be. And also giving a timeline on Dutch Pinball's next release as well. I'll not reveal any details of it. But anyway, back to Alice. And dropping hints. Yes. Yes, okay. But Alice, his update says they've got about another five to six months to finish their run of Alice in Wonderland games. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, I'll give it right.
    45:08
    They said they're building about 40 to 45 per month, and they should be finished with the entire run by the end of March. Right. Yes.
    45:20
    Yes, that's a good point. So there have been delays due to supplier issues with the topper. they were shipping out games that didn't have toppers and sending the toppers separately but now they're sending out games now they've basically solved that problem and they're sending out games with toppers and they're going back and sending out toppers to people who didn't get them with their games who had ordered them although they have a bit of an issue yes finding the right packaging for those toppers yes because they were never designed to be shipped separately they were designed to be shipped with the game So having suitable packaging that would protect the topper When it shipped on its own Is a bit of a challenge So that's something they didn't expect to have to look into But they are, as you said And there you have it again Making pinball is horror Yeah, due to issues beyond your control in most cases But as we were talking about Alice and the finishing in March So the question was, well what's the next Dutch pinball exclusive game going to be, and during his seminar, Melvin was able to reveal exactly what that is. There have been rumours swirling around that it would be this, but he confirmed it would be the Retro Atomic Zombie Adventureland game, another John Popaduke design. Yeah, Popaduke Were Days, that was further developed as Deep Root, which we'll talk about later on as well. and now Melvin has sort of redesigned that further developed game by Deep Root but taking out the whatever it Pinbar? Exactly that was the word I was looking for. Yeah that's going to be sort of like in the apron area. Yeah it's going to be a full width display down there so it won't be touch sensitive but it will be information down there so you will control it with the flipper buttons in the fairly traditional way he also said that only 333 of these retro-zombie adventureland games are going to be built so talking about how Bowser's Final Limited is 525 and they could have sold far more than that and now DuckTree more exclusive and only going to build 333 retro-zombie adventureland games and they will include an interactive and animatonic topper but it's going to be sold separately and not be included with the game. But Melvin did say that they're only going to build toppers that are ordered with the game. So, you know, if there's 333 and 250 people want a topper, they'll build 250 toppers and that's it. You won't be able to buy one after that. Yes. So you have to order it at the time. trying to create a little bit of fear of Mr. FOMO yeah that's right now the full reveal of this is going to be in February sometime, February or March he reckons with production of the game starting in June with only 333 if you get it done next year you'd think they're going to start producing them in June if they're building 40 to 45, they need to ramp up on this but 40 to 45 a month it's going to be what, six months? Seven months? Yeah, seven months.
    48:47
    Maybe eight. So, yeah, June. Towards the end of the year, probably into early 2027, I suppose, when they actually finished making those on those numbers.
    49:00
    And there was a little goodie to people who bought the Alice game. Not in relation to Raza, the retro-atomic zombie of Ventureland, but Melbourne did say that all Alice buyers will be eligible to be the first to get the next Dutch pinball title, the full Dutch pinball title, which is expected to be shown in around a year's time at Expo next year. and I guess it will be revealed slightly before that time but we believe it's going to be back to the future but we don't know that yet it hasn't been announced officially but all those Alice buyers will be eligible to be the very first to get that game whatever it is if they choose to buy so that's a nice little sweetener for Alice buyers which is interesting because it kind of, to me at least, it muddies the water between what is Dutch Pinball and what is Dutch Pinball Exclusive. Because you think Dutch Pinball Exclusive is separate, but then Alice's buyers from Dutch Pinball Exclusive are able to get a deal on the Dutch Pinball title.
    50:27
    Well, probably because there's more Alice's than the 333 Razzack games that will be built, so it couldn't give the health buyers a perk on the Raza game.
    50:41
    No, although what's the 333 limit on that? It seems awfully low, shall we say, if you're going to invest all that time and effort into developing the game and programming it and producing this special apron display. And why limit it to that? But anyway, that's a marketing decision. If I recall correctly, Melvin also said that the Raza game will be more expensive, or at least similar or more expensive than Alice.
    51:15
    Yeah, we imagine it would be, if they only could produce that many. But certainly keeping the exclusive aspect of their name intact with those kind of numbers. But if you are able to get one of those, well done, congratulations. We look forward to seeing it and playing it early next year, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, it will reveal February, March, so maybe a bit Texas show.
    51:41
    If United was. Right. Now, you slightly touched on this. Melvin, of course, has multiple hats to wear, to put it nicely, as he's involved with Dutch Primal Exclusive, but he's also involved with, well, he got an alliance going or collaboration, whatever you want to call it, with Lior, the art of pinball, as well with Planetary Pinball Supply. And the fruits of that collaboration have been revealed right before Expo in the form of series 1 and 2 of the Pinball Legends sculpts which are available in two sizes the largest being coming in at $229 and the smaller sculpts for $89 these sculpts are created by Lee or the Art of Pimble in collaboration with Melvin and Planetary Pimble Supplies So what are these scopes? Please tell us. Oh yeah, well of course so there's apparently four series coming the first series was revealed in full before Expo and that includes sculpts of Salim Bagazzar, also known as the genie from Tales of the Arabian Nights, the Martian from Attack from Mars, Dr. Dude, Captain Bizarre from Party Zone, one of the trolls from Medieval Madness, and Ringmaster Jack from Circus Voltaire. So these are figurines, actual character sculpts then, are they? Full body sculpts in two sizes, as you said. Yes. So the shape of the figurine is the same, it's just two different sizes. For some of those,
    54:04
    particularly the genie, and the, not the Martian, no, the genie certainly, we've never seen the full body of those particular characters. Oh, I don't know.
    54:20
    Well, we know. Having seen the gene, it's more like he sort of turns into a clown. But the ringmaster from Circus Voltaire, who, incidentally, I was surprised to find, has a name Jack. It wasn't a name I was aware of before.
    54:38
    There's a full-height model of him. You'd think, considering the name Circus Voltaire, it would be Jacques instead of Jack. Yeah, exactly. But, oh well, continue. Yeah, well, two things there. Firstly, interesting to see that some names given to some of these characters that we're aware of. Salim Bagazar, as the genie. Didn't know that was his name before. Didn't know Jack was the name of the ringmaster from Circus Voltaire. And there's some more names we didn't know of from Series 2 as well, which you'll tell us about in a minute. But also, as I said, interesting to see the ringmaster in his full height. You saw his head rising out of the playfield in Circus Voltaire, and now we're seeing a full body sculpt of him. So, more information. Well, yeah, quite. Yeah, interesting design.
    55:34
    But, yeah, so that was Series 1, which is available now, I believe. Yes, and then Series 2 was already teased, just the outlines of the figurines.
    55:49
    But they have been revealed in the meantime as they were present at, or presented, I should say, at Pinball Expo. And series two includes The Bride from Bride of Pinball, Bud from No Good Govers, Linda, the magician from Theatre of Magic, so here's another new name. Yeah, Linda D. Or the Devil, Rudy from Funhouse and Officer Roar which is a lion from Police Force yeah ok and then there's two more series to come if I'm not mistaken so yeah I do have to say the sculpts do look nice not always in the position I would prefer myself.
    56:46
    And in some cases, like with the gopher or the troll from Medieval Madness, it's quite out of proportion in the sense compared to the full body scopes of, for example,
    57:03
    Dr. Dude or well, the bride or Linda the Magician, as on the medieval Madness backlog, it's quite clear that the troll is a very small character.
    57:22
    A short character, so to speak. But the scroll is, again, the same size as a... the same height as for example, Linda or Rudy from Funhouse. So it almost, to me, makes sense that if you get some of the larger skulls and you would want the troll as well, you get the smaller figurine of the troll, so you have them at least in proportion if you decide to put them together. If you put them on top of a game, then of course it doesn't matter if it's just sticking to that one game. And the same goes for the gopher from No Good Gophers. That's not a full body, a full human size, so to speak, so that's a little out of proportion then again they look very very nice yeah very nicely painted as well I think and that brings me sort of to the following subject by the way to Planetary Melvin and Lior on continuing this series but I sat down with somebody who had sort of a finger in the hand. Yeah, has connection with this, doesn't he? Yes. Some skin in the game, as they sometimes say. We get, so, and I was curious what he would thought about someone else taking on one of his creations.
    58:58
    So I went and sat down to find out what's cooking with Doug Watson. So we're here at Pimble Expo 2025, and this is a great time to run into all sorts of pimble celebrities. And right now, it's time to find out what's cooking with pimble artist, Doug Watson.
    59:23
    Hello, Doug, how are you? Hello, Jonathan. How are you doing? I'm good, thank you very much. So, what's cooking with Doug Watson? Well, today I decided that the recipe I'm going to go with is salmon with asparagus, perhaps a little mashed potatoes on the side, but what's going to make it is the sauce that's going to go on the fish and on the asparagus at the same time. This is an opportunity to go either very spicy or very mild. It's very herbal of what you want to do. It should be a thick, creamy sauce as opposed to something watery. and a fine Chardonnay is probably your best bet to go with this in terms of keeping your palate interested in the flavors you're dealing with. That sounds delicious. I hope so. Yeah. Oh, I've got to try it for sure. Thank you very much. And what's happening with Doc Watson otherwise, if you're not in the kitchen? If I'm not in the kitchen, I would say this summer my highlight was a chance to get to Pinball Universe in Germany. Yes. And for a week there, I was hosted by the exit group of people who operate that operation, and I had a chance to do a presentation along with JP from...
    60:37
    Jack Pinball? Yeah. I went first, he went second, and we got our entire histories worked out in front of an audience there that was extremely warm and receptive and friendly to us. It was absolutely delightful. I had a wonderful time in Germany, is I also had a wonderful time in Amsterdam because we fly into Schiphol. Okay, Schiphol Airport. Schiphol. And my host decided that for the first three days of that trip, it's time to check out Amsterdam. I'd never been to the Rijksmuseum before. I thoroughly enjoyed that, at least the Rembrandt Room anyway. And I got to visit cathedrals and walk on cobblestones, and I got to take tours on the canals. I managed not to get run over by a bicycle. In spite of how easy that is? That is very easy in Amsterdam, yes. Just not pay attention to where you're going and be sure to find... Either a bicycle or a tram.
    61:33
    If you have to choose, choose the bicycle because you won't survive the tram. Well, it's a city built for bicycles and it's very effective and it's one of the reasons why the air is as fresh as it is. This is not L.A. style exhaust. Probably not, but with all those pot smokers over there, I wouldn't say the air is very clean.
    61:55
    Depends on how you feel about pot. True. Well, it can be part of the flavor enhancer for the salmon and the asparagus. You know, if you decide to do a little pot, maybe an hour beforehand, so it has a chance to reach a high and be on the way down, and then the hunger arrives at the end of that trip so much, so to speak, then it's time for a really excellent meal. You could do something cheap in crackers and sugar or cookies, or you could actually cook something you want to share with a lady in your life, perhaps, or whatever your companion might be that you have a nice meal with, with a nice glass of wine, and that's a nice evening for me. Right. Okay. So, you enjoyed Amsterdam, you enjoyed the University of Germany.
    62:49
    Are you still tutoring? Tutoring? Well, I understood your lecture at universities. Oh, well, I am retired from being a university professor at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. That's what I was referring to. It was at the tip of my tongue. Okay, yes, I taught for a number of years there for three of the colleges at the university. I enjoyed it very, very much. I did not want to stop teaching. I was forced to because our President Trump, during his first term, decided to enact a trade war with China.
    63:30
    Fifty percent of our student population at the school were Chinese. Once the embargoes and the tariffs came out, wealthy Chinese decided to send their children to other countries to study art instead of to the U.S. That meant that about 800 of us professors at that school, over a course of about a year, said goodbye to our teaching careers there.
    63:59
    Okay. Have you landed on your feet in the meantime? Yes, I have. I'm glad to hear that. My most precious news for this summer is, in addition to getting to visit Germany and make new friends there, I also bought a home in a nice neighborhood called Walnut Creek in the San Francisco Bay Area. It's the first home I've owned since 1998.
    64:26
    Happy to have a place to get a wife. Okay. Good for you. Thank you. So, any chance we might see you do some pinball art at some point again? Probably not. I can explain why. The world of pinball and pinball art has changed dramatically since my era. I was an 80s and 90s artist. In the 80s and 90s, the purpose behind our work for a pinball game was to help the game make money. In the coin box. I had a very particular play field design style that was designed to be very easy to read and understand for a non-player. So you can walk up to the game, take one look at my play field artwork, and you know exactly what to do. Right, right. You were involved with the layout of the inserts and all that kind of stuff. I laid out all the inserts on the games I did in the 90s. Yes. To my specifications, and that's what made that possible. Earlier in my career, I had to contend with wherever they put those damn inserts. and it was not easy to create a unified graphic package around that, nor was it easy to make it comprehensible to a non-expert player. I wanted my artwork to appeal to players who weren't already experts in pinball because I wanted to bring new players into the world of pinball. And the way to do that, in my mind, as an artist, was to make sure that my playfield artwork was as easily comprehensible, moment to moment, as you played it, as I could possibly make it. so I had a very strong philosophy about how to achieve that with the graphic design of my play fields. They were not busy. They were clean. They were unifying. Their color organizations were very clean.
    66:06
    A typical example would be Terminator 2. Very limited color palette. Strong graphic design throughout. And when you look at a play field for T2, you don't need instruction. You can tell how to play the game right away as soon as you put that money in and you get going. Sounds like some pinball companies might actually need that. Well, pinball has changed in terms of who the games are manufactured for and who buys them. There is still coin-op out there, but a lot of people who are private individuals want to buy the games and own them at home. they've got $14,000 to spend on some pinball game to put into their home, which means artwork now serves a different purpose. So you need to understand that when you own a game of your own, complex, busy artwork is not a problem. Because you own it, you've got forever to figure out how to play the game, and being able to study and admire the detail of executed artwork on these busy play fields is part of the appeal to the people who want to spend money and buy them. That wasn't a part of my era as an artist. So the demands of what makes for good pinball art are still in the process of changing.
    67:25
    Now what made my career doable is because the games themselves were made at Williams by teams of people not by individuals working in literally different countries at the same time trying to get a game made and put together. There's no sense of coordination between the creatives. I worked at Williams and had the tremendously good fortune to have the designer, the engineer,
    67:51
    the dot matrix animators. everybody on that team was in close physical proximity. I would spend a lot of time with the designers. My favorite being Brian Eddy because we thought so much alike we practically finished each other's sentences when we got together. So our sensibilities about what made for more fun and what made for less fun were very closely aligned because of Brian's personality. He was kind of quiet and shy back in the 90s. He overcame that. so I got to be kind of like a voice and a mouthpiece to promote the kind of stuff that we did like Attack from Mars but we did other games together like Shadow I mean Brian and I have a track record of making some pretty good games together the same way that Steve Ritchie and I have a track record of making pretty good games so that's been my take on where pinball art is right now I'm not sure that my talent is best suited for it I was a top talent, so people tell me anyway, during my era, especially the 90s.
    68:56
    So it was me and John Yowsey making very, very good games and making very, very good artwork. John was a tremendously talented illustrator. I couldn't touch him. But I had a different sensibility about unity and packaging and how the whole design came together and full rules. I did a lot of rule design in the games that I created because I laid out those inserts so I had a huge input into what you're trying to do thematically and rule wise as you played the game I relished that responsibility I wanted to keep going by the time my career ended in 96 actually it's that far back I was already designing my own play fields I laid them out on my desk I had my shots, it was kind of a Steve Ritchie flowing playfield ball guide type of feel to my games as opposed to, let's say, the Pat Lawler approach, which is completely different. I liked the flow of the classic well-made Steve Ritchie games from that era, and I wanted to bring that into my own style. I had my very first game and title ready to go at the time when I was asked to please depart because Williams was closing down. Yeah.
    70:15
    Too bad. If I'm not mistaken, you were also responsible for the Martians on Attack from Mars, and, well, later on, what they looked upon. Would you like the story behind that? Yes, please. Okay. I thought I was here to talk about food.
    70:33
    Well, we got some time. Brian? himself came to me, who wanted to work with me once again. He says, Doug, I want to do a game that's based on science fiction movies coming out of Hollywood in the 1950s. We had Creature from the Black Lagoon. We had This Island Earth. We had the Metaluna Mutants. A lot of giant robots and things like that. We wanted to do a game to celebrate that era of Hollywood.
    70:59
    And I went, how about an alien invasion? He's like, yeah, let's do that. Well, what's the planet that everybody wanted to be invaded by in the 1950s? It was always Mars. Occasionally Venus, but Mars was the popular place to be invaded from. I needed to invent some Martians. So I went into my office and got sculpting material, and without even a sketch, I made up the Martians with the forearms and the buff bodies, and no, those aren't corn cobs inside his skin. they're trying to be steel cables, like he's half metal, like a cyborg. So my Martians were sort of cybernetic. They were nine feet tall, buff-like bodybuilders, and they were here to capture our women and our cows with the big old beam. That was not my idea. That was Brian's. So I sculpted it so I have something to model and pose and light. So when you look at the backgrounds for Attack from Mars, it isn't cartoon style. It's actually three-dimensionally lit to try to bring that drama to it. I couldn't do that without creating something to use as visual reference, photographic and light. That's what I did. I invented the Martians. Then, Brian and I decided, well, they could either be giant nine-foot scary monsters, or we could do a humor twist on it and make them ridiculously stupid aliens, utterly incompetent at invading anything, much less an entire planet. So, I created the personalities of all the Martians with my voice. I wrote the script along with Brian for what the Martians would say in the game, and then I went into the recording studio that we had at Williams, and I spent an afternoon yelling my brains out, being those Martian personalities.
    72:51
    I had no voice for the next two games after that, because I was completely hoarse from that acting performance.
    72:59
    The little rubber marshals in the playfield that we got to jump up and down, that took several versions, or at least a couple, to try to get the arms to bounce entertainingly on the posts. We got there. They're fun. They're ridiculous.
    73:14
    Total achievement of an original game, not based on a license, Attack from Mars. I was also the one handed the responsibility, because at the time we were making our game, Hollywood decided to take a collectible card game from the early 1960s called Mars Attacks, and they made a movie out of it. They found out what we were doing, and they were prepared to sue us for compromising the copyright of what their process was. So I had to write up exactly how my Martians were different from their Martians,
    73:46
    why, how the entire approach we were taking was utterly original and not theirs. The only thing that was similar was the word attack and Mars in the title. we won that. So I didn't have to compromise anything, and Brian and I got to make the game that we wanted to make, and it's my swan song in my career. I'm more proud of Attack from Mars than almost anything else I did in terms of how great and how fun that game is. All right.
    74:13
    Sorry. Now, speaking of Martians originating by a scope, Have you seen the new Martian scope? Whose new Martian scope?
    74:30
    By Planetary Pimple, who owned the rights to Williams, started a series of scopes of characters from Pimple machines. I have not seen them. I would love to. I was asked several years ago to do a topper for a custom version of Attack from Mars, and I created one of those toppers and I did a whole brand new Martian sculpt that they cast and painted in a completely different pose to be the centerpiece of that. Then I had a cityscape behind it and I had flying saucers with beams coming down and I can't remember, I might have even had a flying cow.
    75:08
    Right. I remember that. It's on the floor, so I can show it to you. Is it? It is, yes. After this, let's go take a look. Show me. Okay, let's... For now, thank you, Doug Watson, for your time and your delicious recipe, as it sounds like. So we're going to try it out, and we're going to take a look at the new Art of Pinball Martian sculpture. Jonathan, it's an honor and a pleasure to speak with you today. Well, it's certainly interesting there that Doug didn't know anything about this, and one other thing to come out of that, and we would maybe come back to this next month. is, although Doug did give us a very nice recipe there, he didn't go into too many details about exactly how to make the sauce to go over his salmon and asparagus.
    76:03
    So I went after Doug. Again, he didn't reveal very much, but he did say the following. The sauce I mentioned is Hollandaise sauce. You make it from egg yolks, melted butter, lemon juice, seasoned with salt and a pinch of cayenne pepper.
    76:24
    And I guess you have to Google how to make colander sauce to go with your salmon and asparagus. Okay. Well, thank you very much, Doug, for giving us your recipe and telling us what's cooking with you. And yeah, we have to work out our next one.
    76:45
    Well, that too. So, well, when I finished recording this interview I walked Doug actually to the planetary Pimble booth where I showed him the Martian sculpt and if you don't know the story, the Martian on Attack from Mars and later Revenge from Mars was actually originally sculpted by Doug Watson who is the illustrator of the Attack from Mars playfield and back glass. He made a sculpt of that Martian first as a reference for what he would be drawing on the back glass and the miniature Martians that are actually on the playfield of Attack from Mars. Yes, as he talks about. Yes. And let's just put it mildly. His first response was that's not something I made and he was not very impressed.
    77:49
    Oh dear. Okay. And let's just leave it at that. Right, okay. Well, thank you, Doug. And let's hope the asparagus and salmon and holiday sauce is more tasty than the sculpt is. Well, it tastes like a sculpt, yeah. Yeah.
    78:14
    Well, it goes down better. shall we say. Yeah. Right. Okay. Right. So, let's move on then from that and move to our next company. And we're talking about teases for upcoming games. We've already looked at a couple of those. So, we have another one from our next company, Spooky Pinball. Yes, and this runs down rather odd, I have to say. Yeah. Because what happens, at least from my point of view, being basically watching certain threads on social media develop, so to speak. I believe at some point Spooky Pinball responded in a different topic by posting a meme of Beetlejuice, which was a response to a discussion going on nothing about them building Beetlejuice or whatever and once that once they posted that meme if you wish I believe it was Pimblestar the distributor for Spooky who immediately sent out a mailing Beetlejuice has been announced and you can place a pre-order right now and it's going to cost you this much and what have you.
    79:44
    Sorry. No images of the game whatsoever. But in my opinion also, no announcements. From what I could see, this was just a response with a meme to something in a to a different topic, but apparently people were dumped on it.
    80:03
    And eventually that resulted in spooking. Indeed, announcing fetal juice. Well, yes. Announcing but not revealing. So they have been teasing it like crazy since, with details leaked all over the place in various outlets.
    80:23
    They did come out and say a full reveal will happen the week of the 14th of November, so a couple of weeks' time.
    80:32
    They did release a teaser video, a very short teaser video, of somebody walking up to the game saying, Beetlejuice three times, and the game starting. there's also a suggestion in there that it will have some kind of voice activation feature built into the game where how that will work and what the data protection issues are we don't want to get into at the moment I'm sure they've considered it all in there you can can't see any of the play field, you can see a little bit of the back glass artwork which is different to the earlier Beetlejuice back glass that Christopher Franchi produced, Christopher was doing the artwork on the production of Beetlejuice, but a while ago he produced one as a pitch to try and persuade the company to make Beetlejuice, which they ultimately decided not to go ahead with. But now he's working with Spooky, who are making it, and they have a different back glass, which, to my mind, isn't as good as the one that he produced the first time round. But we haven't seen it in real life, and as we can tell from Evil Dead, once you see the game in real life that's when you get to really appreciate the artwork in the game and so hopefully it's every bit as good as his pitch that he drew up before because that looked fantastic Right, yeah so that's all we know for now about Beetlejuice obviously we'll get back to the full reveal of the game in our next episode, which is at the beginning of December. Oh my goodness. All the exciting events that are taking place this month in the industry of pinball.
    82:18
    Right. More news from Spooky. Yeah, more news from Spooky. They hired a new full-time in-house programmer named Casey Butler.
    82:29
    And I'm sure Casey is very qualified, but it didn't write all his credentials down, but at least it's good to know that they found a new programmer who is actually in-house, so living in Benton, Wisconsin, or nearby. Right. Congratulations to Casey, congratulations to Spooky on finding him. Yes. And, of course, well, it was October, and Spooky Pimple calls it Shocktober, where they do a code update every Friday, and a live stream of every new code the day before it gets released. So you could have been watching a lot of spooky games getting played.
    83:16
    I do recall we touched on this in our previous episode. We did, yeah. And I didn't even bother to write down which games got updated. But if you have spooky games, just check their website and we'll save you the all the code update details for now. Yeah, okay. Yes, there's quite a few because there were five Fridays in October so five games or five pairs of games in some cases where they did two versions of it. Got updates throughout the month so as you say we won't go through them all now.
    83:56
    I'm sure if you've got the game you will be aware of it. That too, yes. So then, Pinball Brothers in Sweden worked with their Predator game as their most recent game.
    84:11
    Well, they had two Predator games set up at Pinball Expo, as well as Richard Chase, who plays the role of Poncho in the movie, making several guest appearances at Pinball Expo, at the Pinball Brothers booth. and believe it or not Predator actually seemed to win quite a few people over I think that's the case I think when it was first launched there were quite a few downers about the game, people were feeling a little bit negative, it didn't have this, it didn't have that once they actually played the game people seemed to be turned around on it and really appreciated just how intense the gameplay is so I know Pinball Brothers have been pushing that a lot but it's not something you can really appreciate until you get your hands on the game I didn't get my hands on the game so I didn't get a chance to play neither did I wanted to but well you know what it's like shows like this I certainly do seminar programs and what have you but I look forward to playing Predator at the Dutch Pinball Open Expo which is in two three weeks time yeah Yeah. And we're still trying to get Daniel Jensen, the CEO of Pinball Brothers, to come over for the Dutch Pinball Open. Still working on that. So hopefully that will work out. Yes. I don't think anybody from Sweden was over there at Expo for it. It seemed to be handled by Pinball Brothers USA. Yes. So, but they did a very good job of it. So I don't think they needed any assistance anyway from Daniel or anybody. Decent presence at the show, and they left quite a good impression with the Predator game. So congrats to the Pembroke brothers for that. It's again a shame that they're only making a small number of them before they end production at the end of the year. Yes. Because from a show like X-Men, they actually could have got quite a few more orders. Right, yeah. So if you're in the market for a Predator game or like turning around based on feedback from others, if you weren't able to play the game yourself, then you better hurry, because it might be difficult to find one after, well, in a few months' time. Let's put it like that. Yep. Okay. Well, moving on to one of the other big companies who was there at Pinball Expo, Josie Jack Pinball. Of course, fairly local, down in Elk Grove Village. And we got a chance to go and visit the factory briefly to go and have some lunch with one of their employees. Yes, we had lunch with Steve Ritchie. And Steve didn't come along. No. We were actually joined by Mark Seiden. Mark Seiden, yeah. And Olaf, which is his art director or graphic artist for Mark's upcoming game. Olaf is, of course, from the Netherlands, from Amsterdam. It was very nice to see him. It's always good fun hanging out with him. And He was happy to Be in the position to work a couple of days Alongside with Mark On their upcoming game Of course they're all very busy At the moment producing Harry Potter games People are keen To get their Arcade editions out At the show they had all three versions there of course and it was nice to see the Wizard Edition the intermediate version and the lovely paint treatment that they put on the body armour of that game which looked very nice but even the Arcade Edition still looks great as well even though it's got standard body armour but the playfield and features in the game are the same and yeah it looks absolutely wonderful and I did get to play a few games of Harry Potter and it's just as good as I remembered it from when I played it at Pinball Heaven in the UK. Well, I hadn't played Harry Potter yet. I was able to play a couple of games before Expo started.
    88:57
    I was very impressed with the game, yes. And again, it seems to be a tradition, but I don't think I've ever watched a full Harry Potter movie from start to finish. I have seen tidbits or segments, but never cared that much for the whole series. But I was very impressed with the game. I would even say, go as far as saying, I think Harry Potter would be game of the year.
    89:34
    But it's Thunder got stolen by Winchester at Expo. Well, yeah, but I don't know. I mean, you played it. I didn't get to play Winchester. So you have a better comparison between those two games. Well, I didn't even get very far. but the way Winchester was playing I'd say not as packed as Harry Potter but hard to be yes yeah but certainly a very good runner up so but that's just my personal opinion okay well one of the few people who played them both well relatively small number but we're talking about Harry Potter now but there is some new code which has just been released for Harry Potter version 1.0 so it's fully feature complete and that means they've added two mini wizard modes called the Battle of Hogwarts and the Deathly Hallows and also the main wizard mode called the Boy Who Lived so those are now all in the game and from now on I don't think there will be any major additions to it just bug fixes and maybe a bit of scoring rebalance and feature changes. So congratulations on Jersey Jack Pym on getting version 1.0 for the feature complete out on the 29th of October. It's in time for those people who are still to get their game. They'll get it with everything in it, which will be nice. Right.
    91:17
    Now then. Well, moving on to Projectic Gaming. Hang on, hang on, hang on. we've got a little issue to address, where there was a rumour, a rumour. I know we don't cover rumours, but we should cover this one, seeing as you are probably to blame for it. To blame? Well, responsible, then, shall we say. God.
    91:46
    Do you want to tell us a little bit about what I'm talking about? Not really. Well, you have to now.
    92:00
    I'll say there was a rumor going around that Jersey Jack Pinball was going to be making a Ghostbusters game. Right. I bet you. Yeah, I bet you did, yes.
    92:14
    Now, that was a suggestion for a ruse, shall we say, a joke. Okay, so here's what happens. And we're having dinner, or sorry, we're having lunch with Steve Ritchie at this Chinese place that we always go to.
    92:34
    We're sitting at a round table and I'm sitting, to my right side is Mark Seiden. And, well, obviously knowing that Mark Seiden can't reveal what he's working on. So, I'm trying to talk about him and his next game without asking for what theme it is, because I know he can't reveal it anyway.
    93:03
    And I'm also not trying to get it out of him in a sneaky way or whatsoever. So, he's talking about working on the game, and he says, well, it's actually interesting that so far nobody has guessed what theme I'm working on.
    93:22
    So I'm like, jokingly, like, so how about we start a rumor? And he's like, what do you mean? And I'm like, well, why don't we start a rumor that you're working on Ghostbusters? Just first name that pops into my head, Ghostbusters. And he goes like, oh, I wouldn't mind doing a Ghostbusters game. So for me, that's like he's not working on Ghostbusters, and he wouldn't mind working on one. But, you know, okay, well. So I'm like, well, let's just see what happens if we mention it briefly, like what you could be working on. And I don't think I even phrased it that way, because later I figured, like, well, there's a reason why, Stern Krimble isn't doing a false edition of Ghostbusters. Because if you want to do a Ghostbusters remastered or whatever, you need the license first. Yeah.
    94:28
    And by no means do I know whether Stern has that license. By no means do I know whether Jersey Jack has that license. It was just intended as a joke, like, let's see if we can start a rumor. I mentioned to two people exactly what I just said people ask me at some point I mentioned we were having dinner with Steve and Mark Seidman and I get the question do you know what Mark Seidman is working on and I'm like well I guess there's a reason why Stern isn't doing Ghostbusters that's all I said and then It took about a week, and it's official. Apparently, JJP has the license for Ghostbusters.
    95:17
    The interesting thing is here, in the meantime, at Expo, I did talk to Jack Ranieri. And I said, Jack, I came up with this little joke with Mark Seiden. and I just figured like, okay, what if we tease that you have that Mark is working on Ghostbusters indirectly.
    95:46
    And Jack didn't seem to have a problem with it. And, well, so basically the rumor got started, but now here's the catch.
    95:56
    Since I mentioned it to Jack, it could be that Jack might have thought, that's actually a good idea.
    96:04
    So, I'm not saying that the rumor isn't true about Jersey Jack Pinball having Ghostbusters. All I'm saying is, it started as a joke, and you never know where it went after that. Yeah. It's simply been picked up in a few social media places since then. Yes. Which I had nothing to do with. No, right. Okay. Well, let's just leave it there then, because we don't want to get into trouble in case they have got a license or somebody else has got a license. Maybe they got the license in the meantime. Yeah. They might have had it all along. You never know. Yeah, well, it would be a very good first step. It would, yeah. Anyway, let's move on, as you were about to. If you're hoping for Jason Jack to do a Ghostbusters game,
    96:56
    maybe you should express that to Jason. Yeah. might not be true but I really hope you would yep I mean we have seen a zillion Star Wars games so why not another Ghostbusters yes well there have been a lot of remakes of various games in recent years very very good with the women ok right I'll take your word for that or maybe I'm the only one appreciating that version I think you probably are actually Okay, we will move on because we have a lot to get through still. So as you were saying, we're going to Pedressi Gaming, aka Pedressi Pinball, aka Euro Pinball Corp, aka Pinball Remakes, whatever you want to call them.
    97:44
    Last time we mentioned about the suspicion or suggestion that Big Bang Bar might be coming up from them. there's been no announcement about that or indeed any other game we were kind of expecting there to be something around about now, if not now then, or by now then fairly soon but nothing Funhouse yep, that's true we've been pushing that a lot and there were some funhouses at Expo of course as you would expect, although not a big display of them there's no pinball company row of like four or six Funhouse games. At least not the one I saw, unless I missed that particular part. Right. So nothing from them, but you had some news, or you found some news. Well, actually Planetary Pimble, who we just talked about, announced on Facebook that they were offering new Big Bang Bar tube dancers. which have been produced in collaboration with, there he is again, Melvin Brow Williams,
    99:00
    using the original mold that was also used on Gene Cunningham's version of Big Bang Bar, Illinois Pinball, if you remember, which made the largest run of Big Bang Bars back in the day. but those tube dancers seem to have a well, a timely life form apparently at some point after well, what is it a decade or two 10 years or so the material that the tube dancer was made out of would start to melt out of the blue,
    99:49
    causing a lot of Big Bang Bar games ending up with no tube dancer in the tube. But if you own one of those games, now you can buy a replacement tube dancer made from the original same mold. Well, hopefully not from the original same material. Hopefully they've improved the material. No, actually the material is improved, and it also is glowing a lot more in the dark than the original material. So good news for Bitbank bar owners there.
    100:24
    I believe at Expo they were priced something around $185 or so. Right. Sounds like a worthwhile investment if you've got that game, even if yours hasn't started to degrade yet, to get a spare, because it's probably only a matter of time before it actually does start falling to pieces and melting and you need to replace it. So while they're still available, get in there. Yeah. So many thanks to Melvin and Planetary for making those. I got one. Ah, okay. Because my tube dancer melted indeed. Ah, okay. I need one. and I will be installing that very soon on my game.
    101:10
    Great. I ordered it directly with Melvin and he also sent me a video of how to install it properly Note that the current dancers do not come with the purple belt as they call it I'm not sure whether it's a belt or a sort of pants or what is it, but that's not included.
    101:39
    But that's okay, because that didn't melt. No, that's something you can transfer from the old model.
    101:47
    So, a morning from Planetary in collaboration with Melvin. Hmm. Yeah. It runs it up for Pedretti's flesh. I think it does. So let's move on quickly, as we've got a lot to get through, to American Pinball, who are also at PinballXO, of course. their building being not too far away but there's a sort of, I don't know, it's unclear well it's unclear to me, or it was unclear to me exactly how American Pinball fitted into this new Orbit Games brand and certainly it was Orbit Games who had the stand at Pinball Expo where they had not only a row of American Pinball games existing ones, no new games but they also had a whole bunch of polycade video games which they also sell and an arcade game called Whirlo Ball which is a skee-ball type game where you bowl a ball up a ramp it disappears up into the head of the device and lands in one of the five or six different lanes each of which has a different value to it, and which lights up to indicate which one you're meant to hit, and the various games that are played in going for ones which are lit in certain colours, ones which are roving lights, which you have to time properly, nothing to do with pinball directly, but they did seem to be very popular there, two of these machines, these World of Ball Games at Pinball Expo, and they were in use for the time, people seemed to like They were only prototype games,
    103:37
    because they didn't have proper artwork on them, they didn't have the proper final surface along the bowling lane, and probably not even the final ball, because they do seem to make quite a noise when you're playing the game, more than a skee-ball game would do, so it may not be ideal for all locations, but they could change some of those things, I'm sure, and make it a little quieter. Those games aren't made, incidentally, at the American Pinball Factory in Palatine, and made elsewhere and just sold by American, sold by Orbit Games I should say we were hoping that well we weren't hoping, there was an outside chance that there would be some mention of the Cuphead game which American Pinball were working on, but generally been thought to be dead now as a future game, but talking to American Pinball slash Orbit Games at the show, they were saying it's definitely not dead, and it won't be their next release, but they do think it will be a future game, and they reckon they can bring it back, work out a deal with the licensor, and get it released. So, very curious, because around Expo time, it looked like one or more images of what appeared to be a Cuphead game leaked, or share it online, whichever you prefer, that looks like a very interesting game to me. So I'm very curious to see whether American Pinball would actually be able to pick that game up and get it into production. Although you have to wonder who's going to be building it, because apparently there's not that many people left working there. No, no, although they do set up this Funzart manufacturing brand, where they would build games for other people so if they're going to do that then they should have the staff and the facilities to build their own games as well you'd think, I didn't see leak pictures I'm assuming it's not in any way related to the Cuphead game that was in the Homebrew area Well, it was a game indeed in the Homebrew area, but that was an entirely different game. Right, good, yes. I'll try to see if I can quickly find some image. If you do the... Yeah, I'll carry on.
    106:15
    Because although they had just like one row of American Pinball games set up on the stand, they did have promotions for their Halloween sale, which was mainly around parts and I think we mentioned this last time actually parts and merchandise, which was like 20% off, but also I think, now I'm kicking myself here because I'm sure I took a picture of the pricing for the games that were at the show, and I'm sure that Galactic Tank Force collector's edition was for sale at the lowest price I'd seen it, only by a couple of hundred bucks or something. Might have been 7,500 or less than that. Might even have been 7,300.
    107:07
    But typically I've gone through all my pictures trying to find the picture of it, because I remember walking up to it and taking a picture of the sign and thinking, oh, that's interesting. I'll need that later. I, of course, can't find the picture now amongst the hundreds and hundreds of pictures which I took at the whole extra. 325 of which you will find in the Pinball Expo report on Pinball News, incidentally so that was that's pretty much it for American Pinball I'm sure we'll come back to Cuphead if Jonathan can find the picture that he was looking for in the meantime we will move on to Turner Pinball of course from San Antonio they had four Merlin's Arcade games on their stand at Pinball Expo and Chris Turner was there and demonstrating how the game was put together, how to play it. I didn't see John Norris, the game's designer there. Not to say he wasn't there, but I didn't see him. And they also had a Ninja Eclipse there, but of course that game is sold out and not in production at the moment, and not going to be. I think they've done that run of, was it 100? 100 machines, I think. So Merlin's Arcade was the game that they were promoting at the moment. Seemed to get good response, and I think from everybody who's played it always seems to enjoy playing Merlin's Arcade very simple to understand game but difficult to master as they often say no news really from Turner Pinball no developments or reveals or even hints about what their next game might be at this stage so no more for me to say about Turner Pinball have you got anything else to say about them Johnson?
    108:47
    no from Turner or not I did make a suggestion and I have to work it out with Chris Turner myself. Oh, okay.
    108:57
    Anyways, I'm going to send you an image. Ah, are you? I'll look forward to it. See, we're so well prepared for this pin cast. Oh, yeah. This is pure live intros, if you wish. So, I know that you played, actually, the Cuphead prototype, so you can tell me whether what I'm looking at is actually the actual game, or whether it's something different.
    109:32
    Certainly, when I played it, there was less art on it. From the picture that you sent to me, yeah, it looks familiar from some of the aspects of the game, which I can see. certainly the dice in the top left hand corner which was a big feature of the game that you can roll the dice for you and read what the value on the dice is using a camera built in to the top but yeah that's that looks believable to me right ok so the image I did send to Martin was an image posted on the 23rd of October by Canada's Pinball Podcast on Facebook. So if you look that up, you get an idea of a small portion of what Cuphead probably looked like, although it's not the best image, I have to say.
    110:34
    No, but it's interesting, and hopefully we will get to see it going to production at some point. but American people were saying it won't be their next release. Assuming that they have a next release. Yeah. Well, one can hope.
    110:51
    Well, certainly, yeah. Okay, moving on to Chicago Gaming. Not much news from them. They are busy building Medieval Madness Merlin editions. Yes, and they're halfway through number 500 roll of the line and is shipping.
    111:07
    So that means another 500 to go. Okay. all the ones I've done so far are yeah I was going to say for the North American market and then there's going to be a run for the international markets right ok one other company that was at well one of the other companies I should say that was at Pimblewood Expo was Wonderland Amusements who you may remember are producing their Alice Goes to Wonderland game their slightly 80% sized game they were expecting to be there with a large number of machines but due to production issues they had two prototype Outer Coast of Wonderland games that weren't running the production code they were expecting to be able to show the latest version of code they were expecting to put it in their videos over the past couple of months but it's taken longer than they planned and it isn't ready so yeah, they were saying they were aware They're behind schedule, but they are hoping to get their first games shipped out in time for the holiday season.
    112:18
    So, fingers crossed they managed to do that. They said they were talking to some of the big box resellers in the US, like Costco and Sam's Club, and looking to be able to sell games through there as well. although they said that these resellers, they all want something slightly different to what can be bought elsewhere. So there might be different trim versions or different artwork on the games. So nothing confirmed there yet, but they were certainly investigating that, whether they can sell them through there as well at the full retail price rather than the discounted price that was available to Kickstarter backers. And they also suggested that they might be able to make a smaller tabletop version of the games that they could sell through other retailers. We're talking about places like Best Buy.
    113:11
    But Best Buy, apparently, a big US reseller, they are apparently getting out of selling large appliances, like cookers and fridges and washing machines and that kind of stuff, and getting more into a marketplace where they are like a shop front for other companies to sell their products through. And they were saying that they might be able to sell their smaller versions at a cheaper price through that particular outlet or others, similar ones.
    113:44
    And they're saying, I want to talk about what their next project is going to be after this, next pinball project.
    113:50
    Boot shell, boot shell. Yeah, they're not, I'm trying to remember it because I was talking to so many different people about so many different projects and I could be mixing it up with what we were talking about earlier but I thought there might have been says that we're talking about doing a Ghostbusters game as their second title that could just be a rumour what a good idea yes let's put that one out there Ghostbusters is a hot title I hope so, let's put it out there and see where it goes, see who ends up reporting it as news but yeah, no confirmation on that, but yeah, they are certainly looking at their second title, because I mean they've gone to all the trouble of setting up the manufacturing facilities and their design studio in order to produce their As Goes the Wonderland game, well, it makes sense to then carry on and do that with the second title so that's being worked on as we speak, alongside the first one Yeah, so I did hear from, well there's several Dutch attendees at Pimble Expo. One was trying to get to actually buy an Alice Goes to Wonderland game. But it's impossible to get it overseas.
    115:07
    Yes, it's just for North America. Yeah. So, he's basically on his own, but I'm not sure whether he managed to work something out. Yeah, of course, you know, if they end up sending it through Costco or Sam's Club, then you can just go there and buy one. and ship it. That is still in the US, yeah. Well, okay.
    115:27
    Yeah, you can easily ship it to, you know, it's designed to be shipped to Bayer, so it shouldn't be, it comes flat-packed, so it should be perfectly shippable. Anyway, moving on, we talk about Europe, and let's move to a European manufacturer, Hexapimble, who were over at Pimble Expo for the very first time with their own stand featuring four Space Hunt, machines. Space Hunt was there last year, but it was Rob Burke's personal machine, and it was he brought it along, and it was one lonely game there. But this time, they were there, and they also had a seminar. They talked about that and more. Yes, indeed. They did announce their next future title, which would be The Three Musketeers.
    116:21
    Yeah. on the famous Roman novel, I would say. And they had a fancy announcement video, which they showed and in the meantime shared on their social media as well.
    116:40
    Yeah, so that's the classic story of the three musketeers, the d'Artagnan and whatever they are called. Yes, Aramis. and yeah I can't remember the other one yeah I was surprised because I actually asked them in the seminar because they said it was a licensed title and I thought hang on this book came out in 1844 that was the first published the story can't still be in copyright it's 70 years and indeed it is now in the public domain but they were insistent that it is licensed so maybe they're using some movie assets basing it off a later adaptation of the original story. Certainly the teaser video has some video. I don't know whether that was produced in-house.
    117:32
    Yes, that's right, yeah. So there is some sort of animation series going on about the three musketeers that we are not aware of, but they use that. Yeah. Believe it or not, I actually did do some research and try and search for YouTube videos of... I know. I surprise myself sometimes.
    117:53
    Looking for the Three Musketeers animated version, and most of them seem to involve either kids or mice or dogs as the characters, and it didn't seem to be anything.
    118:08
    Or there was a very old version as well, which I don't think would have been of sufficient quality. So I'm not saying there isn't one. There might well have been another version that's out there that's not on YouTube. The trailer looked rather, I'm not sure whether it's the right word, but Japanese-like.
    118:28
    It certainly seemed a bit, I would say, like cutouts of things moving rather than, I suppose in a certain manner, a waving of hair and that kind of thing as they were riding horses and things like that. But it was a bit simple, but no direct indication that it wasn't produced in-house, or that it was. So we'll have to wait and see. But they said it, they were very insistent that it was a licensed title. But the book itself and the story isn't. It's like drawing, so. Yes, well, that's true. I'll go along with that. Yeah. Anyway, it's good to see them at Thinwall Expo. And I think it was a good success for them. and of course they will be at the Dutch Pinball Open Expo as well, won't they? Yes, and maybe they will bring a prototype of the Three Musketeers.
    119:21
    I'm not saying that they will, but I know that we are trying to persuade them to do so. Interesting. Okay, well, if you do manage to do it, you're going to read all about it in our respective reports on the Pinball Magazine website, and on Pinball News website, and of course we'll bring you the details of it next month in our look back at November,
    119:46
    at the start of December, as you said before. Right, so, speaking of respective reports, I was planning on writing one for Pinball Expo, and I think in the end I ended up with Please visit Pinball News because I was just too busy during the event hardly any spare time once the seminars were over and so on. And immediately, once I got back from Pinball Expo, I went straight into the Amsterdam Dance Event. So I figured, I'm just going to put this out right now and visit pinballnews.com for all the...
    120:31
    Well, it's far more interesting than what I was going to watch anyway. Well, thank you. but I think we do appreciate reading your personal take on your journey as well, because it's always a different angle from the show coverage. It's definitely a different angle, but in order to write it properly, I probably have to write it on the go during the event, because I run into so many people, I have so many different conversations, and in this case I also had to take care of selling these books that all of us forgot. So my apologies to everybody who was looking forward to my report. It's not what it used to be in the past couple of editions and I hope to make that up at some point maybe with the Dutch pinball open but no guarantees.
    121:25
    Okay, well no news from you then on that But let's have another couple of companies where there's also no news. Oh, really?
    121:33
    Yes. Homepin. Well, we haven't had any updates from them. There was a Blues Brothers game on the Nitro Pinball stand at Pinball Expo, but no information about any developments there or any future titles or anything, to be honest. So also no news from Pinball Adventures in Canada. we've been reporting no news from them for many many months now and we do keep checking to see if they're doing anything with their elements again but no, not seeing it seems like it would be a good time to start producing that given the tariff situation with the US but no, no news from Pinball Adventures but let's look at some companies who do have some news so one of which would be Ramps Pinball based in the US.
    122:28
    Well, I'd say there's no news. I'd say there's news. There's actually no news from them either. No, there's not.
    122:34
    All I can see is that. You checked. There was no news, though Elf, the Homebrew game that Bob Neese, the founder of Rems, built, was at Expo.
    122:51
    You also discovered that the Rems website says that the road trip is expected mid-April 2025. Well, maybe in another universe. I don't know.
    123:07
    Yes, maybe that'll just be ticked up to 2026 fairly soon. But no, that was the only news I had was that Bob's Elf Game was back in the homebrew section at Pinball Expo, which of course is the one which brought him to people's attention in the first place. So hopefully the road trip game will see some movement now. However, a company which does have some news is Vector Pinball in Australia. Remember them? They've been creating quite a few sort of, well, not conversions, but customised games. And we mentioned last time that they were showing some artwork designs for their upcoming Lost in Space.
    123:49
    Pardon me. by Lost in Space, the pinball adventure game, ProSite Cabinet artwork and backgrounds art, well, that game's now been renamed to Irwin Allen's Lost in Space, for one reason or another, I guess the licensing, and there's some Playfield pictures shown as well.
    124:10
    Yeah, the Playfield has two main flippers, plus two mini flippers on Perspex's upper Playfield, which shoots at a bank of seven stand-up targets and a couple of captive balls. Like some of the other Vector games, it has an alphanumeric single-line display, a bit like the 80s ballet games like Mousing Around, where they have a long line display, alphanumeric along the bottom of the back glass. But this game also has a TV screen embedded in the middle of the playfield, which seems to be showing Lost in Space clips, whether it contains more information than that I don't know but nice to see that built in and price has been announced for that game as well which is $13,545 Australian dollars plus 10% general sales tax which totals to $14,900 Australian dollars if you're buying it in Australia and that equates to $9,700 US dollars 8,500 euros and 7,500 pounds you can take 9% off those prices if you're not a resident of Australia and don't have to pay the sales tax on them there but interesting looking game at the moment still in the prototype stage but it certainly looks a professional looking package so as Vector Pinball has done with some of their other titles that they've produced, particularly the racing games the card-based games. Regular updates for this, if you want to find out more, go to LostInSpacePinball.com and you'll be able to see what I've been talking about and keep track of their progress in bringing it to production. So, nice work, Vector.
    126:03
    Now, moving on. Yes, Vectronic in Spain, they were represented at Pinball Expo by Nitro Pinball, although they also sent a representative of their own, manning the Knights of Pinball stand.
    126:19
    They had a Super Hoop and a Tokyo Perfect Drift game, as well as a few other of Bitronix's non-pinball arcade games, which they are producing, like a darts machine, a foosball-style game, which use mechanical flippers that you actually not use by pressing flipper buttons, but you have to pull a handle, if I'm not mistaken. Kind of like hand-shaped bats, aren't they? Yeah, something like that, yeah.
    126:54
    So, they were present at the Pinball Expo, but no news on any new titles from them. I'm also still not sure how they set up their distribution in the US, or even Europe. for Daphne.
    127:10
    I guess they'd be sending them through Nitro as they were on the Nitro stand, but will they have other distributors? We don't know. But all the pictures I see seem to show that they're making lots and lots of games in the Victronic factory, but we never get to see them anywhere much. So maybe they're just for the Spanish market or they haven't sold them. Yeah. And I think we're still trying to get them to go over to the Dutch people, Open Expo later this month, but I have no news on that, whether we actually succeeded in convincing them to come over. Okay. Well, we were talking about some no-news companies earlier. Let's have another three. We can say we have no news from Cardona Pinball, makers of conversion kits. We have no news from STR Pinball in Spain. And no news from Quetzal Pinball, also in Spain, although the Tokyo Perfect Drift game is designed by Antonia from Quetzalpinball. So it was kind of a little bit of news, but no news on future designs, because that's quite an old game now. It's been around for a long time. Right. And then we get to the other news section. Hey! Well, we've mentioned it a good few times already, but Dutch Pinball Open Expo coming up this month. Now there's some special guest announcements. Apart from us being there Apparently there's some Other guests Well they have some money left Well we obviously weren't doing it right Okay So Confirmed special guests at this point Are Steve Ritchie Which is a pinball designer you might have heard of He's working currently At Jersey Jack Pinball And a certain Jack Danger,
    129:05
    who is working at Stern Pinball. He used to be designing pinball machines, but now his main activity is streaming again. He's also the man who put pinball streaming on the map in the first place. Yes, Dead Flip Channel. Yeah, Steve and Jack both have been at the Dutch Pinball Open before, but never at the current venue, and I think it's been like 8 or 10 years for both of them to attend the event. and we're still talking to some more names to come over, we know that Hexa Pimble will be there and they will be doing a seminar and maybe Rob Burke is joining us and I'm really trying to get Tony Ramuni as well who is Tony Ramuni Tony Molyneux He did artwork for The original Black Knight by Steve In 1980 Whatever, something like that Yeah And a bunch of other titles At Williams, later at Belly, and then he went Or he moved to Italy Where he's still living to this day And he did Work for Italian pinball company called Mr. Game where he did artwork for a couple of quite odd looking pinball machines although probably the first with a mini TV screen in the back box a motor that comes to mind and a deck yeah very rare games that didn't get well probably didn't get far outside of Europe and inside Europe also not great production numbers but I'm sure he has great stories to tell and it's certainly I know Rob Burke has been trying for years to get to come over to Pinball Expo and so far he hasn't succeeded in doing that would be great if he is there and team up with Steve They could talk about the Black Knight game. Yes. Well, he referred to Steve as his first art director, which is interesting because Steve is actually the designer of the game, not the art director. But apparently Steve was in charge and he told them, I want this.
    131:39
    It doesn't sound like Steve at all. Not at all. I also have no idea why they only did one game together, but we hope to find out if we manage to get Tony to come over well fingers crossed we will obviously be reporting on exactly what did go down at Veldhoven for what it's worth I've been trying to get Tony to come over for a couple of years every year we talk and so far I haven't succeeded so don't keep your hopes up but if we succeed this time, then it would be really great.
    132:24
    Great. Okay, so one other bit of news then. Another news. Yeah, it's our good old friend Robert Mueller. Yes, always good for an update.
    132:38
    You may remember, if your memory stretches back that far, that the criminal trial was due to begin early December. Well, surprise, surprise, there is now an unopposed motion to push this back at least another 90 days which would take it into early March due to the large quantity of documents that have been produced by the prosecution. Apparently thousands upon thousands of pages and he's saying he needs more time to get the work through them and also produce his own documents. The motion hasn't been granted by the judge yet but it looks like it's likely to be approved as there's no opposition to it from the prosecution. So that's and we don't expect any more news on that. Of course, the civil case from the SEC, that was put on hold pending the criminal trial, or at least the penalties that were going to be imposed from that. So nothing's happening until at least early March next year. So we can cross that off the list of things to look at until spring. and that's the other news from the Deep Root criminal trial well I guess this runs it up for October 2025 then I think it does yes you and I will both be back at the start of December with our next Pincast looking back at all the events of the pinball industry throughout this exciting month of November which includes the reveal of The Walking Dead the remastered version and Beetlejuice as well yes yeah and of course all the excitement from the Dutch Pinball Open Expo as well where there'll be lots of developments as well so until the start of December that's it from me Martin Ebb of Pinball News and from me Jonathan Houston of Pinball Magazine we hope you have a naturally noteworthy November oh come on it's hard to get alliterative words from November And we look forward to joining you next month for the next edition of our Pinnable Industry News Pincast. So, until then, bye for now. Bye-bye.