What's up out there in pinball land? It's Don's Pinball Podcast. How you doing? Let's drop a little episode here, and we're going to let the gutter mouth music infuse our ears. So join me, shall you? Today, folks, I was going to go ahead and record a pinball podcast, as I do, as I'm well known to do, And then got hit by some sudden terrible, terrible saddening news from the world of media and content generation in general. My guy that really inspired me to get out there and record some stuff, put some things down, a guy whose videos I watched endlessly over the last six, seven years or so, Adam the Woo. I just heard that he has passed away somewhere down near his home in Florida. Now, I want to take a moment because this was a bit shocking to me. I know we have these relationships with these people that we have, but we follow their content and things online. We feel like we know them because we watch them so much. This was a guy, if you haven't got to check him out or see him, he was essentially like a solo videocaster, a vlogger. He liked theme parks. He loved Disney. He loved Halloween stuff. He loved movies, like all the same movies that we like. national lampoon's uh vacation uh back to the future ghostbusters all those and he did films on youtube that he would film himself and he would go into you know explore abandoned places he would go see movie filming locations he would go like to to where like peewee's big adventure was shot and and do like videos showing off the areas there he then went on the road and for five years he did a video every single day and put it up on his YouTube channel, starting off just with like van life kind of stuff, just little 30 second snippets or something. And for five years, this guy generated a video every single day and put it up online. And he went out and explored the country, eventually getting a camper van and like a Winnebago and just driving around off the beaten track, seeing America, getting out, exploring towns and taking us along for the ride. And when I was suffering in the doldrums of medical education where I was kind of trapped and locked in where I just had to do nothing but study, had no money, had no time for adventure, I could sit and watch his video every day. And he would take me somewhere different, some back road of Alabama, some abandoned factory somewhere, some piece of Disney lore or something. And, you know, he got he got in trouble for exploring the the closed water park that was in Disney World, ended up getting banned from the property and then subsequently let back in. And it was like such a triumphant moment. And I got to meet the guy at Knott's Berry Farm in 2018 or so. Monica and I were there and we were there for the first night of Knott's Berry Farm's Halloween Haunt, which is like one of my favorite Halloween events in the country. and you know he was there too covering it and so like i totally fangirled had a moment but he was gracious talked to me for a bit while we're waiting for the rope drop i got a selfie and it was cool man like i saw this guy that i shared so many adventures with on my own at home and then like here he was you know and then over the last a couple of years i've been frequenting walt disney world a lot he had moved down there i see him in the parks you know and stuff and yeah i want to i don't want to bother the guy was you know filming and doing his content or hanging out but It was just cool knowing he was around, you know, and because he made such compelling content, you know, really pushed me to go out and kind of do what I'm doing now. And I still pull in some of his mannerisms, you know, because I like I watched a daily video from him for five years of like all the stuff he did. It was amazing. He was also one of the touring bass players for the punk band Guttermouth, too. So I played that little intro music in his honor. And so I just want to take a moment here. I was going to talk about pinball stuff and then like this hit me and it's like, damn it. Like we're all kind of commiserating, you know, and, uh, you know, there's a lot of people that are in like the theme park world. And also in the, you know, urban exploration, abandoned features world. And just like the kooky roadside attractions world. And like, we all like watch this guy. Cause you know, he represented a lot of different things that we're all into, you know, it was like the Venn diagram had him in the middle. So it kind of sucks, man. The guy was 51. Um, I don't know any details really about what happened. of speculation online but i want to take a moment and just give him a silent moment here pinball super fun i think he would i was going to reach out and try to get him on the show too as soon as i like built up enough notoriety and stuff so don't wait man you know if you want to do something just go for it i guess is where we'll go with that speaking of going for it i want to do a special show because uh you know we all know about the three stern cornerstones that are coming rumored to be Pokemon up in about two weeks, followed by Elliot Elliot Eismin's septennial, septigenial, sophomoric event, his follow-up to John Wick, of course, talking about Transformers, whether it's Generation 1 or movies, or what is it? And then Fallout, I guess, from Keith Owen. And then we're going to get a remastered ACDC, apparently. I think there's one more. I think there's one more coming next year. And it's not entirely new, but I think it will be absolutely devastating. and I haven't heard anybody really talk about it directly. I don't have any personal confirmation of this other than just the general idea is happening. I'm just going to give it to you straight. I think that Godzilla is going to get another version and this version is going to be on the Spike 3 platform. So when we were all down there for the really the last media day Stern had, it was for Fall of the Empire. And that was kind of the debut for a lot of the Spike 3 systematology that we have from Stern. They talked about the big screen, the better built-in amplification, the better audio, the speakers, expression lights and all that business. And what they said was going forward, eventually certain titles would be remade onto the Spike 3 platform. Now we're looking backwards. Now that we've seen The Walking Dead come out, we know what that new cabinet looks like with the interior expression lights, the exterior ones, the much bigger screen with the deeper blacks and everything, the better sound quality. So I think we may be getting a Godzilla with expression lights here in the next new year. OK, now it takes a lot of work to transition a game from Spike 2 to Spike 3. It's not simply just putting it in the new cabinet and dropping the SD card in. The architecture is a little bit different. And so they actually did address this. Either Seth Davis or George Gomez, when we were all in the conference room, he did go into the fact that it's not just a simple plug and play. There's a lot of work that's involved. So a lot of games that are kind of like, you know farther in their developmental life You know probably wouldn't get this done, you know, it's not gonna happen to rush It's not gonna happen to Iron Maiden, you know Munsters is not gonna get a spike 3 upgrade But any games that were still in active production at the time that spike 3 comes out going forward Would likely get that so i think we would see jaws eventually get a spike three treatment and i think for sure godzilla will get a spike three treatment uh kong probably well as well i mean the elwins you know going forward i don't know that they're going to make a whole another run of john wicks or uh if it would be worthwhile doing like a james bond you know i mean how many more years do they have to actively make new ones of those but with godzilla in particular poised to be potentially the greatest selling pinball machine of all time i think that would be the one to do at least a premium uh so i don't know if they would do another le run can you imagine the pitchforks um but i i think we could see spike three pros and premiums of godzilla get out there absolutely so does this mean that we We would then have Godzilla with expression lights, interior, exterior, better sound, bigger screen, probably not a new topper or anything like like Stern would never do that to us. You know, sell us Ellie's sell us toppers, then come out with new new stuff and then have to dress it all up. And then we feel bad about it. Of course, I'm alluding to the jaws topper that just dropped today. But what do you think? Right. If Godzilla did get which I think it absolutely will get made into Spike three. would that you know cause people to try to sell their godzillas they have an upgrade to the one with the fancy lights on it uh and the you know the the butt cabinet so spooky pinball has butter cabinets and now stern has the butt cabinets because of the butt joints i don't think anybody's made that joke or reference yet so i'm gonna go ahead and put that out there as a dawn exclusive so the jaws topper came out for the 50th and we had heard that because it was shown off to some people that had toured through the factory recently uh that it was essentially just the jaws topper but instead of a yellow border around the billboard it was red right and like minimum effort okay well there's also like a little acrylic plaque or something as well it says 50th anniversary and i have to admit it does look kind of cool i mean if i had a jaws 50th and i had the regular topper on there and i saw this one for 1099 a part of me would definitely be like oh man like i really kind of wish i had that and i think that's happening to a lot of people somebody took to facebook today it was just completely upset taking stern to task like how dare you allow me to purchase a jaws 50th anniversary edition and then buy the jaws topper only to see this released and now we look foolish and so he was like i don't know if he wanted you know like a refund or something i made a snarky comment i'm like maybe like you know how some places they have those gun buyback programs maybe stern pinball would have a a topper um you know sadness buyback program where you could sell back your topper and then purchase the updated one or something now look it's just a red frame around the topper unscrew it spray paint bolt it back on done right or you know i i would say i would say it would be reasonable and i don't know stern could do this because licensing restrictions but if they could just you know offer an update kit to people that did have the the 70th you could write in and they would just kind of send you the plastic parts and you can bolt them on and just you know don't make a big deal about it i think that would be kind of cool um if they would do that i could see why they wouldn't broadcast something like this i would say it probably won't hurt to ask if you do it in a somewhat respectable manner um but i have to say seeing it now it does look kind of sharp and if you did have a jaws 50th and you didn't have one of the two jaws toppers that i made uh i think that would be the way to go that'd be kind of cool so there you go there you go it's it's it's 1099 it's not 1700 so at least we have that i think it looks fine i think it looks fine staying on toppers uh we got a code update for the 2017 star wars stern edition um star wars Steve Ritchie game uh the one that i have in the premium format Now, it looks like an LE because I am crafty, but we got a code update for that that incorporates this new topper, the spiritual successor to the Black Knight Sword of Rage with the Golden Child himself. Not talking about Eddie Murphy here, but we're talking about C-3PO up on the topper. So it looks like they added custom speech animation specific to the 2017 Star Wars game, which is super cool because your boy has one. I have a Fall of the Empire as well that will be going out to Bellingham, Washington here soon. So I have the topper on order. I'm probably going to put it on the Fall of the Empire, play with it for a little bit, and then scoot it over to the 2017 version, which would be to date the fourth topper I think I've had on that game. And then I have another one coming from the Electric Playground 2. We're going to figure out what to do here. But I like what they did here. There's a LED bar that's beneath the C-3PO head. And on Fall of the Empire, it functions as, I guess, a progress bar for the modes. It counts down or it counts up to completion or counts down based on time or maybe a little bit of both. Well, they're bringing some of that functionality over to the 2017 Star Wars. Now, this game, as you know, has the multiplier function where, as you're playing, you can build up this multiplier. It's a shot multiplier. and then you have to hit the action button, which turns the inserts red. And then you can use the flippers to move them around to the different shots and then activate them again, lock them on with the lockdown bar button, which will turn them green and then you can utilize it. And so now the thing to remember with Star Wars is every 10 seconds or so, you need to be hitting the standup targets to maintain that multiplier. Otherwise it resets to 2X. And so now there'll be a visual representation up on top of how much time you have left. i think that's helpful because if you glance up real quick you can see like okay i'm trapped up should i go ahead and try for this ramp or should i go ahead and keep my multiplier going like listen if you build that up to 40x and then put it on the video mode shot and hit that video mode and just Antonio Cruz and don't hit an asteroid you're at like 400 000 million points or something 400 million around there like i've gotten some huge scores like really score unbalanced by doing that and and it makes me giggle i kind of like it i love seeing a billion points on the screen on a stern um so that's kind of cool i hope they add extra call outs to it i'm not sure if they're just doing the ones that are already in the game or if they're adding more i really wish they had more i i think that would be awesome um but yeah a lot of topper news here has dropped uh so let me know let me know what you guys think in the comments uh sonic hype i'm getting kind of hyped for it you know i'm uh i'm looking at the the landscape of pinball machines and of course i can't help myself i want everything i still want a walking dead le i still want to walk into delhi i think i want to pay nine thousand dollars for it but i i still want one and now pokemon's coming out and i don't know anything about this game other than early words from canada is that it's lackluster um to make of that what you will uh i i like pokemon i like the stern games the two certain games I seen that actually save your progress and let you level up i really enjoy those man can we just talk about how the leveling on john wick is completely stupid i'm so mad about that um i love the the ability to level up on venom i love how it works in dnd and so when i heard john wick had a leveling system i was like i'm gonna get this game because i think that's super fun to grow your character the more you play only to find out when i asked tim sexton himself when are you going to get around to like having these code levels make a difference and he said oh no there was never any plan for that to actually do anything it just kind of levels up and and it's just kind of fun to see that happen and like my jaw almost hit the floor i'm like yeah are you serious obviously i don't think he's a serious person he was leaving stern anyway who creates a leveling system that is completely meaningless anyway if stern gets the right coders on this game and the layout is somewhat decent i think it could be uh you know a much bigger title than i think we're leading ourselves on to believe so i've got that staring at me in the face and then later on this year we're going to get another jjp game jjp's been cranking out hits elton john was fantastic i loved avatar you know haters you can dump all the haterade you want i really enjoyed the game and uh harry potter of course is it's just phenomenal so harry potter setting records it's uh probably going to be their biggest selling game maybe just short of gnr we'll have to see but it's maintaining its price man um if you want to get a ce for fifteen thousand dollars now they're starting to become available uh pinball star just openly posted that they had one ready to ship ready to go so maybe we're starting to see that that appetite satiated for the collector's edition but just try to get an arcade or a wizard edition right now the ten thousand and twelve thousand dollar versions you can't you can order them but you're gonna wait six months or so like they're months and months and months out so that game's doing amazing uh elton john if you want to get the top end version they're around 12.5 or so uh avatars can be had for around 12 or 12.5 as well So I think Avatar is a much better game than Godfather was. And I could say that objectively because the resale prices are maintaining reasonable. Like Avatar came out over a year ago. And so if you were to have it and you want to sell it now and you had to take a couple thousand dollar loss, it's not as terrible as losing 7000, say, on a Godfather CE, you know, despite how cool those gold lions look. So they're on a roll. They're on a tear. now what's going to happen with sonic now sonic is not the ip that harry potter is necessarily however my wife she didn't have nintendo growing up she was a sega girl and so one of her earliest video game memories that she's like is attached to was playing sonic the hedgehog that was like one of the only games that she had in the house you know a little poor growing up right um but she did have that and like just kind of latched on to it so she's got some nostalgia she's got some member berries for sonic it's Steve Ritchie's possibly last game i don't know how many more hopefully he's got a hundred in him but you know it's going to be definitely his latest his his magnum opus maybe everything he's learned across his trajectory of a pinball designer uh he will never be uh well i was gonna say never more talented than he is right now but of course he does another game then he would have add this to his resume he's never been as talented as he is and as experienced as he is as he is right now that that's what i mean uh so going into sonic so theme i i love this theme more than elton john probably more than avatar not quite as much as harry potter um but sonic is absolutely a pinball sonic spinball was a video game where sonic it was a pinball machine in sega genesis where you played as sonic and it was super fun i think i downloaded it on sega channel back in the day so like this theme is perfect for pinball perfect for nostalgia when you hear that music it's based on the video game not the movie i dig that aspect of it and then you marry that with the king of flow with a ton of ramps and like like like looping ramps that he's done before like star trek the next generation that launching wire form where it comes up in that big circle imagine those like all over the play field potentially uh this was the guy with the turbo charger this was the guy with the uh what we got a hyperspace ramp and star wars like one the coolest part of that game like i think it's got potential here uh to be super amazing now is it going to be worth fifteen thousand dollars probably as long as the topper brings it i can see that uh if the art is amazing on it it's going to have rad cows uh what i don't want gold ramps though i don't want gold ramps so maybe wizard would be the way to go on this but it's going to have the cool topper on the fifteen thousand dollar version but i can say this if if the concept i have in my head comes to fruition which i think is a reasonable uh not not quite certainty but it's reasonable to expect that i think we could see a game that comes out for 15 000 or maybe 14 5 if you've got a homie hookup and then holds on to some relative value and goes around that 13 5 range in six eight months or so that sounds reasonable to me i think that could be a win well can we say the same thing about pokemon about a 13 000 pokemon that's not going to have the fix that's going to come later um you don't know when the accessories are going to come out you're still going to have to buy the topper is it going to be good is it going to be not you don't know when you buy the game you're going to have to wait for the code to mature whereas jersey jack says you know what this game is going to come out in march but it needs more time to bake we're going to do october and so they pushed it on back so sonic is going to come out loaded with accessories for 15 000 you don't have to bolt anything onto it's going to have under cab lighting and back cabinet lighting something that stern still does not do and we're going to have some reasonably you know deep enough code we're not going to have to wait a year for like playable code to know where it's going to end up and we're not going to be sitting there wondering like is the top we're going to be cool is it not because you're going to see everything all at once so i'm wondering if the smart money for me is to go ahead and keep those ducats in the piggy bank let pokemon go ahead and come out and do whatever it's going to do i'll go play the kickback cafe I'll go play it at IO Arcade, and then I'll look at getting Sonic in the house to be the one to hold for a year, to play the hell out of it. And then by that time, we'll know how Pokemon was doing. If I want to get one, I can go pick up a depreciated one, or maybe I just could get a Walking Dead LE for $9,000 if those are available. Or heck, let's just go crazy and get a $7,000 Godfather CE at that point. What do you think? What do you guys think? Am I wrong? Am I right? This is why I follow the industry. This is what causes us a little bit of that anxiety, which causes us to then lash out emotionally when we see a topper or an accessory we don't like. Because once the money is sunk on something, you're kind of married to that. And something else may be coming out that you didn know about and then all of a sudden it like oh I got all this money tied up in this and now I couldn use it for this cool new thing But then you don want to let something cool go by Ask anybody that missed out on, I don't know, Beetlejuice, Evil Dead, Winchester Mystery House. That's a terrible feeling, and I was there. I remember when I had my Pulp Fiction collector's edition, limited edition, whatever, in the cart, and I was like, I don't really need it right now. Let me let that go. only to find out like, oh, I could have sold my spot for $3,000. It all came out in the end. It all worked out in the end. I got a Pulp Fiction. It's a standard edition. I've got the TEP topper. I couldn't be happier with it. I put mirror blades in it very easy. So I essentially have myself an LE basically. I was able to get a big Lebowski as well. I didn't have to wait for it, meaning I didn't have to put down a deposit and wait one year, two years, ten years. I took it in a trade deal for Rick and Morty, and then I had it, And then another trade deal that went on out. So any game is gettable. So I don't think we have to really necessarily worry about the FOMO, but there's still that aspect of, should I put this money down now and secure this game or let it go? Thinking there's going to be something better on the horizon. This is the whole box fallacy, right? Let's make a deal here. You have this, this washer dryer that you've won, but you can trade that for what's in the box. The box might be something cool. It might even be a washer dryer. You don't know. And it's like, do you take the certainty and walk with it? That's probably the smart thing to do. Or do you go for the big time? Maybe that's a trip to Singapore. Maybe it's a lifetime of turtle wax. Or maybe it's like a tub of cotton candy. You have no idea. And I think that's kind of where we feel. And once I can learn to make peace with that uncertainness, I think my anxiety will really come way down. because otherwise i think that's what pushes us to manifest in these weird ways and diatribes and like yelling at stern pinball because you bought the wrong jaws topper for your game or some such uh some such nonsense which brings us to dutch pinball because i've been thinking about back to the future as well so dutch pinball in the u.s has essentially one distributor coin taker i think automated maybe in cahoots these are big east coast distributors that I've met both of them. I don't even know. I think they know who I even am. But I don't have like a deep relationship with these guys. I've never bought anything from them, but I have met them at shows. And so if Back to the Future is going to have this special limited edition and there's only going to be 88 of them in the U.S., and what's it going to be, $25,000? And I'm already not going to get one because I don't know anybody at Cointaker, And I'm sure there's more than 88 people that are already on a list that are going in there, right? I think Kaneda's got to get like five of them or something just for himself. So it's like at this point, if I called Cointaker and said put me on a list for a potential special, special edition of Back to the Future, I probably wouldn't even be able to get one anyway. So like what do I do? But then I was thinking this is Dutch pinball we're talking about here. They still haven't cleared I think 350 of the Halas and Wonderlands. I guess the way to get in on the list for Back to the Future would be to go ahead and buy it, Alice. But that's a bridge too far for me. And then I don't like the idea of putting down my $2,500 and then waiting four months, six months, 12 months, 24 months, 36 months. I have no idea. Nobody can tell you how long you're going to have to wait for this game. But then the other thing is this game may not even come out this next year anyway. These people definitely don't seem to be in a hurry of any kind. um so i think i don't i think i'm not even gonna let that entertain my consciousness i think i'm gonna focus and we'll uh you know i've got my name down on pokemon just in case i'll see what the reveal shows and then we'll let fomo dictate but i don't think there really is a sense of this pokemon is a game that will be made for years and years and years at least i think they'll be easy to get um otherwise i think i would be able to make over one i'm still a little bit stumped now It used to be that I can buy a premium stern, make my own armor, get everything powder-coated, eventually buy expression lights if they were available for that game. But now if every Spike 3 is going to have the ability to put expression lights in there and speakers and speaker lights and armor lights, you know, I'm talking about – it's like $2,000 in upgrades to upgrade a premium to look like an LE when you could probably just wait six months and for the same money just buy an LE. So I'm losing like any impetus to really jump in and like get it first. Plus, something I've learned over the last three years of essentially buying every Stern pinball machine that says they come out. It kind of sucks to have the game, play it for six months, which is going to be the six months that you're playing it the most like of probably your entire life because it's brand new. It's in your house. You've never played it before. It's new pinball. It's super fun. but then you know you play your fire four to six hundred games on it and then it's like something news out let me sell this one and then you know it leaves and then all of a sudden over the next six to twelve months the code finally blossoms and it's like oh man i wish i would have owned the game now to put those 400 games on it now with the robust code i think would have had a lot more fun but at this point like it's not worth it to go buy it and bring it back just to play that new code in your house when you can go play in a location but it's not the same and anyway what I'm saying is it will probably be better to bank my experience time that I'm going to have on Pokemon and cast that off to the future when the game is more robust, when the code is finished, then I can get it in and play it. But then as life tells us, you know, unexpected things can happen. I mean, look what happened today. Man plans and God laughs is the old verbiage there. And, you know, so there is a little bit of a YOLO to it. We know about FOMO, but I prefer to think about YOLO as well. If I don't buy Pokemon, I'll have $10,000 I can give to my child. But, you know, maybe I missed the opportunity. You know, we never know what's going to happen to us in life. You know, every moment is a gift. And so let's just be here and enjoy it. So like there's the Zen battling with the FOMO, battling with the fiduciary responsibility to not squander the family's money. And then there's the pinball fun. Let me know how you're flipping, guys. I love hearing the feedback and everything drop me an email at donspinballpodcastgmail.com just comment your thoughts or comment on the Patreon here or let me know that we're all in here and I'm not just speaking out into the void but there's other people at the other end of this alright let's go out with some more gutter mouth guys be cool and we'll talk more as soon as I hear more fun stuff to talk about welcome everyone Adam is it Rue here I'm inviting you on a journey a quest. A quest for fun, if you will. Join me. Shall you?