Journalist Tool

Kineticist

  • HDashboard
  • IItems
  • ↓Ingest
  • SSources
  • KBeats
  • BBriefs
  • RIntel
  • QSearch
  • NName Review
  • +Health

v0.1.0

← Back to items

BDYETP 83: Jaws Revealed, Princess Bride Teaser, American Pinball Rumor Mill, Pinburgh Returns

Bro, Do you Even Talk Pinball·podcast_episode·1h 59m·held·Feb 11, 2024
View original

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.032

TL;DR

Jaws revealed, JJP sponsorship ends, Scott Kuthais tribute, difficulty debate

Summary

Buffalo Pinball hosts Kevin Manning and Nick Lane discuss recent pinball industry news including the official reveal of Stern's Jaws (Keith Elwin design), a The The Princess Bride teaser, American Pinball rumors, and Pinburgh's return. They also cover their decision to end Jersey Jack Pinball sponsorship, pay tribute to deceased community member Scott Kuthais, and debate modern pinball design philosophy around difficulty and accessibility.

Key Claims

  • Stern announced Jaws at CES in early January, designed by Keith Elwin with mechanics by Harrison Drake

    high confidence · Kevin Manning, BDYETP podcast, discussing official Stern announcement

  • Jaws pricing: $7,000 Pro, $9,700 Premium, $13,000 LE

    high confidence · Kevin Manning citing official Stern pricing tiers

  • Buffalo Pinball ended Jersey Jack sponsorship after ~8 years because they outgrew the relationship and want editorial independence for game reviews

    high confidence · Kevin Manning explaining sponsorship decision on air

  • Scott Kuthais, competitive pinball player and community member, passed away unexpectedly last Friday

    high confidence · Kevin Manning citing information from Dalton Eli's post about Scott's death

  • Kevin Manning and Nick Lane had 15,000 concurrent Twitch viewers for the Wonka reveal stream, with 250,000 total views over the night

    high confidence · Kevin recounting their streaming history with Jersey Jack

  • Jaws features a moving shark fin, upper playfield, and a mini flipper above the inlanes similar to Roadshow

    high confidence · Kevin and Nick discussing Jaws mechanical features based on revealed gameplay

  • The shark in Jaws does not eat the ball, but Stern includes a ball-captive mod for locations

    high confidence · Kevin and Nick discussing shark mechanics and mod availability

  • The Godfather code update shortened ball save time and reduced multiball frequency, making the game harder

    high confidence · Kevin Manning discussing The Godfather code changes and their effect on gameplay

  • Neither Kevin nor Nick have immediate plans to purchase Jaws

    high confidence · Direct statement by Kevin and Nick about their purchasing intentions

Notable Quotes

  • “I think we've outgrown the sponsorship or it doesn't make sense anymore. And I want to, first of all, start off by thanking Jersey Jack for just being an incredible sponsor for many years.”

    Kevin Manning @ ~10:30 — Explains the amicable end of an 8-year sponsorship relationship and sets a collaborative tone for ending the partnership

  • “Don't dumb down and make this a baby game simply because people don't want to take the time to get better at pinball like the rest of us. Your reward for fighting through a tough game is to make you better over time.”

    Nick Lane @ ~1:05:00 — Core philosophy statement about game difficulty and player skill development; reflects broader hobby tension between accessibility and depth

  • “If you're going to be sold on this game, it's going to be because it's an outstanding game that I'll play and love. Never seen the movie, the theme does nothing for me but it's also, the theme's not a hindrance either, right?”

    Nick Lane @ ~32:00 — Reveals Nick's approach to evaluating games on mechanics rather than theme appeal

  • “The shark does not eat the ball, Nick. What's your take on the shark eating the ball or not?”

    Kevin Manning @ ~48:00 — Highlights community fixation on mechanical details and the immediate mod culture around newly announced games

  • “Scott was one of the first pinball friends I made in pinball. I went down to Pinburg in 2011... very friendly guy, great guy for the community.”

    Kevin Manning @ ~21:00 — Personal tribute to a deceased community member, emphasizing the social cohesion value of the competitive pinball scene

  • “Let me give you guys some history and an explanation because I don't want to just remove a sponsor and think the worst.”

    Kevin Manning @ ~10:00 — Shows transparency in sponsorship decisions and desire to maintain community goodwill

  • “We had, like, 250,000 views. It was insane... That's concurrent. Right. That's, like, the total viewers.”

    Nick Lane — Demonstrates the scale of viewership pinball streaming achieved during Jersey Jack partnership era

Entities

Kevin ManningpersonNick LanepersonKeith ElwinpersonScott KuthaispersonStern PinballcompanyJersey Jack PinballcompanyJawsgameGodfather

Signals

  • ?

    product_launch: Stern officially announced Jaws at CES in early January 2025, featuring Keith Elwin design with $7k-$13k pricing across three cabinet tiers

    high · Kevin: 'CERN announced Jaws in the beginning of January. This was the game they took to CES this year.'

  • ?

    community_signal: Buffalo Pinball podcast ended 8-year Jersey Jack Pinball sponsorship relationship to maintain editorial independence and review credibility

    high · Kevin explains decision was mutual and allows them to review JJP games without conflict-of-interest appearance

  • ?

    community_signal: Death of Scott Kuthais, respected competitive player and community builder, acknowledged as significant loss to IFPA circuit and tournament culture

    high · Kevin: 'Scott was way, way too young. Maybe at most he was 10 years older than me, so maybe early 50s... very friendly guy, great guy for the community'

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Recent Godfather code update reduced ball save duration and multiball frequency, making game harder and extending play length; positive reception from experienced players

    high · Kevin: 'they toned down the ball save time and the multi-balls in Godfather' and 'Kevin is enjoying the game even more after they toned down'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Debate within community about game difficulty: experienced players resist 'babification' of pinball toward accessibility while newer players request easier settings

    high · Nick's post: 'Don't dumb down and make this a baby game simply because people don't want to take the time to get better at pinball like the rest of us'

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.357

0:00
Coming up on this episode of Bro, Do You Even Talk Pinball, we're a little behind guys, so we're going to talk about the reveal of Jaws, we've got a Princess Bride teaser, the American Pinball rumor mill, Pimberg returns, all that and more coming right up.
0:30
I need a room. I want party time today. I need a room. I just want my life. That's right.
0:51
And now, the Hall & Oates of Pinball Podcasting, Nick Lane and Kevin Manning of Buffalo Pinball. boom shakalaka hi everybody welcome to it's february uh i'm kevin that's nick how's it going everybody we missed uh we missed the january podcast somehow um but here we are we actually have some decent things to talk about so i think it works out in the end yeah i was uh i was in texas one of the weekends we had league one of the weekends you were out of town one of the weekends so that's uh that's pretty much the whole month and that you know it was the holiday at the beginning of the month so lots to catch up on lots to talk about, so let's go ahead and jump into it. Let's start by thanking some of our partners. Nick, would you like to do the honors? Yeah, let's see. All right, so we've got, for 2024, two Premier partners.
1:41
Joining the Premier partner ranks, happy to welcome Flippin' Out Pinball. Flippin' Out Pinball is the only place I consider buying a new pinball machine from, and that's because of just the excellent pricing and, even more importantly, customer service from Zach Menne. Zach Menne, he's one of us guys. Loves pinball. Will absolutely take care of you if there's any issues, and Lord knows in pinball there is. Very easy to deal with. Highly recommend flipping out pinball. And then the other Premier partner is Pinstadium. Pinstadium coming in back, coming in hot for many, many a year now as a Premier partner. They're lighting kits for your pinball machines. Many options to choose from. The new Pinstadium Neo Adams are the preferred one because of the low profile. So highly recommend. You know, typically wins mod of the year often. Just a great company overall.

Buffalo Pinball and Pinstadium are 2024 Premier partners, with Flip N Out Pinball also joining the Premier tier

high confidence · Nick Lane announcing 2024 partnership lineup at show start

@ ~14:00

  • “The hobby used to never be like this, by the way... It's like some of the things that are going on with the cheater ramps and really modifying toys so drastically. Like it was never this way, ever.”

    Nick Lane @ ~55:00 — Observation of shifting mod culture and hobby evolution toward premature modification of newly released games

    • game
    Godzillagame
    Red & Ted's Road Showgame
    Wonkagame
    Pirates of the Caribbeangame
    Flip N Out Pinballcompany
    Pin Stadium Lightscompany
    Pinburghevent
    Zach Menneperson
    Michael Barnardperson
    Harrison Drakeperson
    Rick Naegeleperson
    Jerry Thompsonperson
    daltonpinballperson
    Brian Broylesperson
    Bro, Do You Even Talk Pinballpodcast
    CESevent
  • ?

    design_innovation: Jaws features moving shark fin toy, upper playfield, and mini-flipper mechanic (similar to Roadshow); reduces to single pop-up vs. typical three-bumper layouts

    high · Kevin: 'The shark fin that pops up and goes side to side looks pretty cool. The upper play field is... one of the big differentiating features'

  • ?

    product_concern: Community obsession with whether Jaws shark eats the ball; players pre-ordering mods before playing the game; Stern includes ball-captive mod for locations

    high · Kevin: 'The big elephant in the room is the shark does not eat the ball' and 'people were prematurely making mods for before they even played the game'

  • $

    market_signal: Jaws maintains pricing tier structure consistent with recent Stern releases (Foo Fighters, Venom): $7k Pro, $9.7k Premium, $13k LE

    high · Kevin: 'The pros are level with the last two releases. So Foo Fighters and Venom, it's $7,000 for a pro, $9,700 for a premium, and $13,000 for the LE'

  • ?

    content_signal: Buffalo Pinball achieved major Twitch viewership during Jersey Jack partnership era (15k concurrent for Wonka reveal, 250k total views)

    high · Kevin: 'Wonka, that was definitely our biggest stream. We had, like, 15,000 concurrent viewers for the Wonka stream... 250,000 views'

  • ?

    event_signal: Pinburgh competitive pinball tournament is returning in 2025; significant community event for tournament players and networking

    high · Episode title: 'BDYETP 83: Jaws Revealed, Princess Bride Teaser, American Pinball Rumor Mill, Pinburgh Returns'

  • ?

    rumor_hype: Princess Bride pinball teased but not yet formally announced; generates speculation and anticipation in community

    medium · Episode title mentions 'Princess Bride Teaser' but full discussion not included in transcript excerpt

  • ?

    rumor_hype: American Pinball 'rumor mill' suggests upcoming announcements or industry activity from the manufacturer; content not detailed in excerpt

    medium · Episode title mentions 'American Pinball Rumor Mill' but details not included in transcript provided

    • 2:30
    And they're also, Pinstadium and Flippin' Out are doing giveaways. We're going to talk about that in a second. Let's look at some of the other partners. So other partners returning, it's Comet Pinball. Comet Pinball for LED lights. Titan Pinball for silicone rings and bands. And to replace your pinballs, I would recommend going there as well, as long as tools. Pinside.com and Multimorphic.com with makers of the P3. There we go. All right. Let's talk about some of these giveaways. Let's talk about these giveaways. So first we've got the Pinsidium Neo X Atom. I think it's just the Neo Atom. I don't know if the X. But regardless, we've got Pinsidium Neo and his deal, guys. $3.99 value that Pinsidium is giving away. I should probably do the math. It's a lot of work. But at this point, of all the giveaways that Penn Stadium has done, they've given away over $5,000 worth of giveaways on this channel. So just an excellent, excellent partner. I can't stress that enough. Definitely support the people that support us if you like the show.
    3:39
    So you've got that to give away. And then the other giveaway, Kevin, if we go to Flippin' Out. Flippin' Out's got the Stern Jurassic Park player mat. Again, a baffling $90 value that comes from Stern. This is not flipping out, but that's what it is. $90, get a player mat, anti-fatigue mat. And then Avengers Affinity Quest Pinball Art Blades, valued at $99. So nearly $200 of value from flipping out.
    4:06
    God damn it, we were giving away a lot of valuable things this podcast, thanks to our awesome partners who love supporting us. So you can enter in chat the way you do this, Kevin. How do they have a chance to win this? Yeah, so everybody on Twitch chat, so we are broadcasting live on YouTube as well, but you've got to jump over into our Twitch chat. That's where our little robot is running. You type hashtag win in the chat, and that will enter you into the raffle that we will pull later this show. So towards the end of the show, we'll pick a winner, and hopefully you'll be in. And for those of you who subscribe to the Twitch channel, as an extra way of saying thank you for being a supporter of the channel. You're two times more likely to be chosen for our raffles than those who do not. Everybody can enter, but if you're a Twitch subscriber, you get a 2X opportunity to win. So thank you to everybody who supports us. All right, now on with the show. So one thing that we want to do a little housekeeping here. If you're really observant, you might have noticed that Drizzy Jack is not on that sponsor page, and that's because they're no longer a sponsor, and it's not because of anything bad.
    5:15
    I think it's – how do I want to say this? I think that we've outgrown the sponsorship or it doesn't make sense anymore. And I want to, first of all, start off by thanking Jersey Jack for just being an incredible sponsor for many years and has been super supportive in bringing a lot of content to Buffalo Pinball.
    5:37
    One thing – sorry, Martha's listening to something in there. Hold on one second. I've got to yell. I can hear Martha doing the something.
    5:51
    All right. We're leaving that in. Absolutely. This is the amateur hour. I'm trying to honor Jersey Jack and show my love. Let me give you guys some history and an explanation because I don't want to just remove a sponsor and think the worst.
    6:08
    We reached out to Jersey Jack, I think it was like 2015 or 2016, Kevin. And we just started streaming in 2015. At the time, we didn't have a podcast even, I think, when we reached out to him. And he said, hey, listen, we would love to see if we can partner with you. If you want to send us some games, we're one of the few streamers. We can highlight the game. We can show gameplay.
    6:32
    What do you think? And Jack was super nice to us, and he agreed. So I think at that time, he said, why don't you guys come down to the factory? So we went down and we streamed The Hobbit.
    6:43
    Really fun time, really thing. We took a Hobbit back. Kevin had The Hobbit for a while. I had it for a while. Streamed the hell out of it. Even took it to a Syracuse show.
    6:54
    And then some other fun things that we did with Jersey Jack is that we would do gameplay reveals. So we revealed, dialed in. We went down to the Jersey Jack factory again and had the honor and privilege of doing that. That went very well. And then my personal, one of my biggest highlights in pinball was being asked to do the reveal of Jersey Jack Pirates, which is one of my favorite games. I think the game's a masterpiece. Kevin and I went to Pinball Expo, and we did the reveal for Jersey Jack's Pirates of the Caribbean. And one unique thing that we had streaming on Twitch is that it was harder to be a Twitch partner at the time, and it meant a lot more. So we got front-page Twitch time for some of these. And, like, the Jersey Jack Pirates reveal, we were on the front page, right, Kevin? We had, like, roughly how many people off the top of your head was watching that? So I can't remember if we got front page for Pirates, but we definitely had it for Wonka. And Wonka, that was definitely our biggest stream. We had, like, 15,000 concurrent viewers for the Wonka stream. It was insane. That's concurrent. Right. That's, like, the total viewers. Over the course of the night, we had, like, 250,000 views. It was insane. Yeah. So, I mean, at that point, we had the podcast, but we were going heavy on streaming pinball, and that relationship made a lot of sense. As time went on, more people got into streaming. Jersey Jack started doing their own reveals and streaming. It made sense for them in many ways to do their own and have a little more control. It was just easier.
    8:25
    I think we started focusing more on the podcast aspect of this. Kevin has stopped streaming on Mondays. We're doing the brochure sporadically. So I kind of looked at that and said, you know, obviously we love Jersey Jack. We had kind of an informal sponsorship at the time and said, I think it makes sense to not partner with one of the biggest pinball manufacturers as a sponsor.
    8:47
    I think it's good for both of us in many ways. Number one, now we're free to do Jersey Jack reviews. We were never, by the way, we were never told not to do Jersey Jack. This is the most loose sponsorship ever. We always, Kevin and I always chose not to review a game because it made no sense. If we come out and we do a review of a Jersey Jack game when they're a sponsor and we give it like a 10 out of 10, we're going to be accused like, of course you guys gave it a 10 out of 10, you're shills, they're a sponsor. And it puts us in a weird position where if we went and said, hey, look, I don't like this game, it's a 6 out of 10 here, then we could potentially upset that relationship. So now they're on an even playing field with Stern.
    9:29
    We could talk more about what's going on going forward. And I think that, ironically, I think sometimes not reviewing their games hurt them because when we would review a game, we would create like a thumbnail, I don't know what you call it, like its own review video on YouTube, and we would spotlight it, and they didn't get that, right? And so many of Jersey Jack games I think are fantastic games that it would have benefited them in that way as well. So long story short, that's where we're at. I think we're all in a better place. I love Jersey Jack. One of my favorite manufacturers, them and Stern, are the ones I buy. That doesn't mean that that won't change and I'll buy other manufacturers, but I think that both companies are producing great products that are always competing for my dollars. Both companies have their issues. There's no perfect company. And, yeah, we can strive for what we try to do is just to bring you guys great content, to speak honestly and openly, all driving towards more and better pinball. I'm looking forward to doing some JJP reviews, too. I think that one of the benefits we have of that partnership over the past, like, seven, eight years is that we've gotten extensive time on all these Jersey Jack games that maybe not everybody has. And I know one of the kind of running jokes when I would stream is like, oh, rank all the JJP games. Like, no, I'm not doing that. So, you know, it's all subjective, and we know that. But, you know, we have a lot of time. I've owned a lot of these games. So we can kind of give a real in-depth analysis of these games once we get around to doing some of these reviews. And, you know, maybe we'll reach out to, you know, we have a special channel in Discord for our Twitch subscribers. You know, maybe we'll reach out to them and say, hey, which one of these JJPs do you want us to review first? And we can kind of go from there. Maybe, do you think we start, I like the idea of ranking it. Yeah. You know the J.J.P. game is better than I do because you've owned them all. Except for Woz. Woz, which, spoiler, I don't like. You played a lot. Yeah. That's why I never owned it. Maybe we start off, I think a ranking would be interesting. Yeah. Maybe next show. So we'll keep that in our back pocket. Okay. All right. Okay. So another matter. I just wanted to highlight something. saw some very unfortunate news last Friday that Scott Kuthais had passed away. And many people listening might not know Scott, but certainly many people who are in the competitive scene might.
    12:09
    So Dalton Eli, who is a younger, he's a very good player, he's a streamer down in Georgia, had posted that Scott passed away unexpectedly last Friday, and I was just very bummed to see that.
    12:25
    The reason being that Scott was one of the first, you know, what do we say, pinball friends I made in pinball.
    12:34
    I went down to Pinburg in 2011. That was after I got my first pinball machine in, like, January 2011. So I went down alone. I didn't know anybody in competitive pinball at that time, very few people in pinball. And that was Scott's first tournament. And I just really connected with Scott. I think personality-wise we're somewhat similar. Scott was a very passionate and intense player, but also very friendly.
    13:02
    And, you know, hit it off with him, made fast friends, ended up even rooming with him at the next, I think it was the PAPA event in the summertime. I stayed in touch with him for a number of years with CM at all the Pimberg and Poplas. He introduced me to Brian Broyles, which a lot of people know from maybe Portal, Pinball, Arcade, and also Brian did a lot of streaming.
    13:26
    So just wanted to highlight that because it's definitely a loss to the community. Scott was way, way too young. Maybe at most he was 10 years older than me, so maybe early 50s. I don't even know.
    13:37
    I haven't talked to Scott in a number of years just because I haven't been traveling and competing as much. but again, very friendly guy, great guy for the community I was touched to see that he meant so much to Dalton who was a younger player obviously he took Dalton under his wings because that's the kind of person Scott is I went down to I was down for a Georgia Tech game like 10 years ago, I reached out to Scott, he had me over we got to play his collection very bummed but part of the moral of that story and just highlighting that is that Pemberg was when I traveled out and really met the pinball community for the first time, at least the competitive pinball community. And had I had a terrible experience there, I don't know if I would have continued down that road in pinball. You know, who knows. But, like, when I was down there, I was struck how nice everybody was, and Scott was at the forefront of that. So condolences, just letting anybody else know who hasn't heard the news. And no, Scott, IFPA, Somebody did a very nice write-up a few days ago, so if you go to the IFPA page, you can read that. I think maybe it was Chris Compton who did that. I know he provided the photo.
    14:49
    Sorry to stop on a bummer, but just wanted to highlight somebody who's just really good in the community.
    14:56
    Yeah. Okay, let's go on the news. Yeah, well said, and thanks for taking the moment to acknowledge a great person in the pinball community because that's one of the things that really stands out about pinball, and we'll get into Pinnberg and stuff later, but it's like one of the things that really drew me into this community and this hobby is just the number of great people you run into. So, yeah, thanks for acknowledging that. All right, lots to cover. It's been over a month, so let's do some news. Here's the tip. It's the latest pinball news. Show hunt. It's on fire. All right, let's start off with the big guy. Jaws, the latest Keith Elwin game.
    15:36
    Let's go. So CERN announced Jaws in the beginning of January. This was the game they took to CES this year. They typically go to the Consumer Electronics Show and show off a brand-new pinball machine there. They had a really cool exhibit there like they normally do. And Jaws was the game. It's a great one to show off. It's, like I said, new design by Keith Elwin. The pros are level with the last two releases. So Foo Fighters and Venom, it's $7,000 for a pro, $9,700 for a premium, and $13,000 for the LE. Game design is by Keith Elwin. Mechanics by Harrison Drake. Software by Rick Nagel. Artwork by Michael Bernard. And sound by Jerry Thompson. So it's a cool-looking game. I kind of like that typically it's been Keith Elwin and Zombie Yeti. So that's been like a combo package. but I like the mix-up of the artist with the designer on this one, and I think Michael's art style really fits this because, you know, you look at the pro and you've got that classic Jaws back glass that reflects the movie poster, the movie box art. I really like that.
    16:48
    And then if you get into, like, the premium in the alley, it's got a little bit more of a, you know, more of a classic kind of pinball design where Jaws is diving through and a little more action there. But I think for the pro, the one you're going to see on location, that's what you want. You want that iconic Jaws artwork right on the back glass because that's what everybody recognizes. And then we'll give it back to Ellie. Ellie has the kind of movie poster style back glass too, but some different side art.
    17:19
    Nick, what do you think of Jaws, what you've seen of it so far? Yeah, that's a good question, Kevin I don't have strong feelings I didn't look at that and say, oh my god, I need to get a Jaws, right? If I'm going to be sold on this game, it's going to be because it's an outstanding game that I'll play and love Never seen the movie, the theme does nothing for me but it's also, the theme's not a hindrance either, right? It's going to come to it as a blank slate So, a couple of cool things about the game, I don't know I don't have a strong emotional reaction It looks wonderful. I like the fin that moves around. I'm a fan of those kind of moving targets, as I said about Big Buck Hunter before or the crane on the Batman games. That's cool. Upper play field looks cool. Little turnaround. So it looks like, you know, I'm sure Keith delivered. I have no doubt about that. And then visually the game looks good. Yeah, I like the kind of like it feels like you're looking out into the ocean when you're looking over the play field. Again, a little less busy on the artwork than a Zombie Yeti game. I think it works. It's got some interesting mechanical tricks. The shark fin that pops up and goes side to side looks pretty cool.
    18:31
    The upper play field is – so that's one of the big differentiating features between the premium and the pro is the upper play field. But it's like you shoot it to the upper play field, you take a shot, and then you're back off. It's a real quick kind of get up there and get out kind of situation. So we'll see. I don't know if that will make it less of a draw for upgrading from a pro or if it keeps it from becoming kind of, you know, I think of when I think of terrible upper play fields, I think of stuff like Transformers where it's like, just get me out of here. It's so boring. And this is like, all right, let me shoot it up there, make a cool shot and then get back to the lower play field.
    19:11
    It's got that one of the other notable features is the little flipper on the kind of like just above the in lanes on the right, where you can trap a ball and take your side shots. What's funny is, and I'll talk more about this a little bit later, is that I just picked up a roadshow, and roadshow you can do the exact same thing. So it's pretty funny that this came out. Everybody's like, oh, look how cool that is, how innovative it is. And it's like, you know, Keith is a well-versed player, so he's played all these games, and he knows where to, like, pull out these neat little tricks that we haven't seen in a long time. and I think that was one of these little tricks where he's like, oh, I remember doing that on Roadshow. Let's try to kind of bring that back and see what we can do with it.
    19:59
    I also like that it's only got the one pop-up around it, like Godzilla does in some of the other more recent games.
    20:08
    You don't need a nest of three pop-uppers on every game, and I like that they're kind of doing some different things with pop-uppers lately.
    20:16
    Sorry, where is the pop-upper there? It's right above the little mini upper flipper here. It's kind of, there's this lane. So on the right side. Oh, okay, it's like mid, it's like mid-right. Yeah, it's at the very right of where that shark fin goes. Yeah, I mean, it's way more, like the three pop bumpers just seems like copy-paste, that's what you do. And I agree with you, man. I think, I mean, the pop bumper is a thing to, it's not being used as something to avoid. where it's like sometimes you've got to get the ball in pops because most games are hit a number of pops, but it's not dangerous, right? It's not a threat because it's really tucked away in the back right, back left, no big deal, it hits it. Like what is the point of that at that point? Now they're bringing it down and putting it in play where it's a threat or danger. I think older games did that even in more so, like classic games, would have the pop-up be more of a threat or something, not just tucked away in the back. Yeah, I think for a while they're starting to throw them in as a way to make newbie players feel good. Like, oh, shoot it in here, and it moves around, and I get a bunch of points, and I feel good. But it's really just way too safe and boring just to kind of, like, wait for the ball to bounce around in there. So I like the different stuff that's going on. But, you know, the big elephant in the room is the shark does not eat the ball, Nick. What's your take on the shark eating the ball or not? We need to know. I don't care. I trust Keith and team. you know like they thought the game was better if it eats the ball then we would have gotten that and it's either just as good if better that it doesn't eat the ball who cares like I just I understand that the inclination like there is a surprise oh it doesn't eat the ball because it's like oh they're making jaws of course the toy is going to eat the ball right and when it doesn't people lose their minds but just to like people were prematurely like making mods for before they even played the game that's how important it was that the fucking toy eat the ball. How many things do we have that has to eat the ball? Come on, guys.
    22:16
    Let's trust Keith. Let's trust Keith, okay? Let's trust him a little bit. If you're on a game that eats the ball, get a road show. It'll eat the ball two different ways.
    22:25
    There's your eat the ball game, everybody. There he is. And the irony is that they include a ball captive or a ball in shark mouth mod for location so it doesn't accidentally get stuck in the shark's mouth because it can't... Yeah, exactly. So it could technically get stuck in there. So you've got to hit the... On the premium LE, you've got to hit the shark. Like, you interact with the shark. You've got to hit it. He pops up out of the play field, and then he's a bash. Yeah. Yeah, that's... Whatever. Like, it's just... But I think what's weird is that people, like, without even playing the game or having it, they just start, like, making mods. I mean, sure, I don't fault the mod makers because they know, like, these people are going to buy it. But, like, maybe just chill. Like maybe just give it a chance, see if you really need it to do that, and then, again, do what you want with your games. But I don't know, man.
    23:18
    It's insane how – The hobby used to never be like this, by the way. Yeah, never. It was never like this. It's like the hobby is just like some of the things that are going on with the cheater ramps and really modifying toys so drastically. Like it was never this way, ever. That's why we have the Mods You Don't Need segment coming up later in the show. Stay tuned for all the more Mods You Don't Need. So we have not had an opportunity to play Jaws yet. It looks really fun. I know there will be some locations around here getting it, and some of our friends will also be getting it. Nick and I do not have plans. I'll speak on behalf of Nick. I don't think he plans on buying one of these. I don't have immediate plans to buy one either. No. Well, again, it doesn't draw any kind of immediate emotional pull. So if the game is amazing after playing it, it's going to stand totally on its own merits. Some games I look at and they do have an emotional pull, but this doesn't have. Like Godfather had an emotional pull even though I never saw the movie. So it just looked like an amazing game after watching it. You know, I saw some of the Jaws gameplay and kind of watched it for five, ten minutes and turned it off and moved on about my day. Yeah, it feels like a game you're going to have to play to kind of really get into I've been playing the heck out of Godzilla lately and the more I play it I'm like this game is really good and there's a reason why this game is ranked so high because it's amazing and Jaws could end up being very similar but you know you have to put the time in and really figure it out yeah and speaking of Godzilla, Godzilla is also a game that never did anything emotionally for me either it's really interesting like Keith Games like I look at him and I'm like well I'm going to have to play it and that's where it's going to win me over but just looking at it or watching gameplay or the presentation never just makes me think, oh, my God, let me get my wallet out. I need to have this game. I know it's going to be good, right? Like, I don't doubt it. I know it's going to be good, but it's a different kind of burn for me. Yeah. Godzilla was a slower burn for me, too. Like, I could tell it was going to be good, but just there's something I clicked over the past, you know, month or so where I've been playing it, and I'm just like, man, man, this is really fun. It is a long playing game, though. So it's like you can really see stuff. You have to be at it for a while. And obviously I don't want all of my games to be like that, but Godzilla really nails it. Long playing games are killing me right now, Kev.
    25:38
    I'm not going to take out the rails too much. But I think, again, sorry, guys, I'm going to bring it back to Godfather. Godfather is like a mixed bag where, like, it could be brutally short. It could be medium, and it can be long. I think it tends to be more, like, medium and short. and then there is a long game there, but I think they kind of nailed it perfectly for my taste at this point. Whereas, like, man, if I play Zeppelin or if I play Foo or if I play Godzilla, like, there's no short games on these. They're all, like, medium long for me, for me. Yeah, I should qualify that in that it's after the most recent code update to Godfather where they really scaled back the ball savers on the multiballs. that's got me playing it even more than I used to because yes you used to be able to just kind of like string together a bunch of multi balls and plow through the modes and then when your multi ball is over there's probably another one ready to go and you can jump into that and you know the modes almost became secondary where now it's like you really have to focus on being careful with your shots um using the multi ball strategically um and you can't just use them of the crush. I've been hitting the start button on that game a lot lately. It's really fun. So good. Do you see my post in the Godfather thing? Where I got pissed off.
    27:02
    So people were like, of course, I'm sick and tired. I'm getting sick and tired, guys, about this babyfication of baby games of pinball.
    27:14
    Pinball creators, you don't have to listen to these people. I'm just going to, you can hear them, but don't have to just listen to it. Like, so they toned down, as Kevin said, Kevin is enjoying the game even more after they toned down the ball save time and the multi-balls in Godfather, which was a complaint, right, like, by people. And I think it is for the better. And people are like, oh, I want you to make the ball save time longer, or I wish you didn't do this. And it's just like, fucking stop. You know, I'm just going to read what I wrote, because I think this is something to reflect on, and I think this is important, about the baby games. And I say, I see complaints about how the game is harder with the new code and balls save shorter. Please, to those at JJP reading this, don't dumb down and make this a baby game simply because people don't want to take the time to get better at pinball like the rest of us. Your reward for fighting through a tough game is to make you better over time. And I'm going to add to that. What I really mean, too, is it will make you better over time, but also you get the reward of seeing more in the game over time, right? I missed that part of it, but that's what I was going for. All right, back to what I wrote. This adds to the longevity of the game. This game is, quote, just right in terms of difficulty, in my humble opinion. Do yourself a favor. Buy an Iron Man. Let it kick you in the teeth repeatedly. Toughen up and get better. Then any other game you play won't seem so hard, including Godfather. I speak from experience. So stop with the fucking, like, it's everyone's like, hey, I'm new here. I'm new. Can you make the game easier for me because I'm new? It's like, no. Like, at what cost? Right. Like, come on, guys. Just get better. And I promise you, you're new now. You're getting kicked in the teeth. You're struggling. Push through that because do you think you're going to be in the pinball hobby for 10 years, 20 years, maybe 30 years? I don't know, 40 years from now? Right? Like, you've got a long time to get better. Your skills will develop and get better. Stop asking for the instant gratification. If you think you're going to see everything in the pinball machine and you've been playing pinball for a year or two, you're out of your fucking mind. Like, you don't want that. You're going to get bored. Just throw it. Get some help, like Jordan would say. Yeah, it's 100%. And it all comes down to, like, there are ways to modify your games. If it is too hard, you know, you can close up the outlanes a little bit. You can adjust the pitch of the game. You can adjust the tilt bob settings. there are ways that you can kind of ease into it right Like it doesn have to be a software or layout thing that makes it a baby game out of the box right so you can kind of put the training wheels on a little bit get a feel for how the rules are because it can be hard to figure out what you need to do especially on these modern games with tons of rules when uh you're just getting your butt kicked because you don't have the ball control skills or whatever and you're still learning but you know so kind of make it a little bit easier and then over time you can can make it tougher and uh you'll have that satisfaction of getting to the end because it is, if it gets too easy, it's not as fun, right? It's just like you're getting all the reward without any of the risk, right? You're just kind of like, show me all the stuff. What the hell happened to his sense of accomplishment? Does anybody know what that feeling is like? It feels fucking great, but you've got to lose, lose, lose, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, and then when you achieve it, it feels amazing. So stop being a baby. Stop cheating, okay? and I know JGP and Stern and people are smart enough, and these guys create games where, yes, they're definitely listening and making baby game decisions in the games they're getting longer, which is unfortunate. But I think they overall do a good job, and they're cognizant of trying to balance a game where they're showing enough cool stuff where anybody can achieve something cool or have a cool moment while putting depth and adding layers there for competitive players. So I'm not terribly worried about that happening, but it's worth publicly bringing this up and trying to put things in perspective. I like the DOS review. It says bring back buy-in. Speaking of my roadshow, that's a game that has buy-in, and it was turned on when I brought it home. And Logan's like, what is this, my son? And he's like, what is that? I was like, oh, yeah, in the 90s they were trying to be like video games where you could credit feed the game and just get a high score. So one of the first things I did was turn that off. I was like, you don't need that. Just turn it off. Scores are invalid. Don't set your game to five balls. You know, that's also cheating. We've been over this before. Play on three balls, and then we can all compare scores. You know, don't buy in and then post your score. It's just, you know, it's not a thing. Yeah. RLM said it, I think, said it well in chat. You know, depth versus brutality is the hardest thing to get right in a modern game, in my humble opinion. I would agree. It is definitely striking a balance. and at the risk of being a broken record. You know, like some of my favorite era Stern was the Iron Man era and Avatar and Big Buck Hunter and Tron. They purposely looked at games like Spider-Man, which were like our playing games, and, you know, you can never play like a multiplayer game on that if you're good, and they were like, no, we need to stop doing that, and they made these brutal games.
    32:25
    I almost wish, like, you know, Stern makes three games a year. one game is of that design philosophy, it would be nice to balance out the universe, but at least in the short term, we're not going to get that. Well, I feel like last year, Venom seems to be that game and nobody's buying it, so probably part of the reason. Venom is what? It's one of the harder playing games. That was a baby game when I played it. Was it? Yeah. I had a hard time with it. Out of the gate, I instantly was just lasting forever. Yeah, I don't know.
    32:59
    Maybe I just suck. No, I don't think you suck. There was something about where the shots were on that game. But I promise you, though, Kevin, here's the thing, though. If you bought that game, okay, there's nothing in that game that's really going to come back at you or pop up in the middle of the play field, right? You're going to get the muscle memory and you're going to be able to hit those shots in your sleep. Yeah, yeah. Guarantee it. Fix some practice, yeah. Yeah.
    33:22
    Word. All right. Story number two. Let's talk about the four-hour podcast. I mean, we got to make up for last month, so it's been good. Good discussion.
    33:33
    So the big teaser going around right now is of a Princess Bride pinball machine. So this popped up a couple months ago. They had a website where you could sign up for this. Are you interested in a Princess Bride pinball machine based on the movie from the 80s?
    33:49
    And so at the end of the year, they leaked a photo, the first photo. from Nap Arcade, which doesn't show you much. It shows you a captive ball with a little bit of a reflection on there, you know, the top of a house or a building. A little bit of peek at the artwork, some stand-up targets. And if you go to theprincessbridepinball.com, you can get a glimpse at what you would have to assume is going to be kind of the art style of the machine, like a hand-drawn art version of the movie. This is like at the beginning where, you know, I forget the names of the kids. It's been years since I watched this movie, but, you know, the kids are getting the book read to them.
    34:30
    And then there's a – you can sign up to get more information. They also have been putting little teaser postcards. These go out with the orders from Pinball Life. I think you get these.
    34:44
    And there's some – the speculation, the overwhelming speculation, is that this is going to be a module for the P3, but not by Multimorphic. It's going to be by a third party. So this would end up being the first licensed third party module for the P3. I think the silhouette of the game here kind of reinforces that a little bit because if you look at it, it has more of a flat bottom.
    35:08
    And the P3 does have more of a flat bottom because there's a lot of mechanical stuff in it that kind of goes lower It's lower if you look at it than the rest of your pinball machines. So, you know, assuming this is actually a silhouette of the actual game, then that would lend credence to that theory. I don't have any inside information on this or anything, but I don't know. What do you think of Princess Bride as a theme in a possible pinball machine? So you're saying this is P3? That's the rumor, yeah. All right. Well, that's bad news for Jay because I don't see him getting a P3. But, yeah, I mean, I don't know. This is like there should be a company called Gen X Pinball who are just pumping out 80s. We got Labyrinth and then – Yeah.
    35:52
    Sorry, I had a call. Labyrinth P3 – sorry, not P3, but Princess Bride. Yeah, I mean, these things do nothing for me, but that's cool.
    36:01
    It's a theme. It's going to do well. Yeah. It's a hilarious movie, and I think it would make for a fun pinball machine. and as a P3 owner, I hope it is a multi-morphic add-on so I can just grab one and slap it in my machine and play. Stay tuned. I'm sure there's going to be more to come on that. But yeah, so that is the Princess Bride.
    36:25
    Alright, let's talk about the next item which is, this is kind of interesting. Pedretti Gaming, you may know them from their remakes of 2.0 kits such as the Funhaus Rudy's Nightmare, and I forget what the other one was. Oh, World Wind Total Chaos. They did that one, too.
    36:44
    They have signed up to kind of expand their agreement with Planetary Pinball. So Planetary Pinball is the current owner of all the Bally Williams rights, so the 90s Bally Williams games. So previously, Chicago Gaming and Haggis had been in agreement with Pedretti to remake full pinball machines like Medieval Madness, Attack from Mars, Fathom and Centaur.
    37:09
    Those agreements have not been changed. They're just adding Pedretti on as a third manufacturer to remake 90s Bailey Williams games. So I don't know. I haven't been overly impressed with the quality of Pedretti's stuff so far of what I've seen and played. I also wonder how much demand there is for these remakes. I feel like it made sense when it was a game like Medieval Madness and, you know, 10 years ago it was approaching $10,000 worth on the resale market for these 90s games. Attack from Mars was kind of in that same ballpark. But they're running out. Unless they're going to just keep cranking out these Medieval Madnesses and eventually the bottom will fall out on those too. I guess there's games like Theater of Magic is probably one that would do okay I would love a Whitewater remake but Whitewaters don't sell for that much I don't think and the only thing is these games never play like the originals so that's kind of my biggest hold up with some of these anytime I play an original Attack from Mars like we were at Matt's house the other day I played the original Attack from Mars and I'm like this game plays great. And then you play one of the Chicago Gaming remakes and they look great, but there's just something about how they play that is not the same. So that holds me back on buying games like those. I agree. It's too bad. You've got to get the feel right.
    38:43
    You've got to put a blindfold on somebody and say, does this feel like the other game? Blindfold a test and say, which one is the remake? And when you get everybody being able to not be able to discern what the remake is, then you win. But if they tend to do that, then you've lost. You've got to do the Pepsi challenge with the remakes.
    39:07
    Another Gen X comic. I'm leaning in. I have my birthday the other day, so I'm leaning into the old age.
    39:14
    All right, so stay tuned for that. It makes me think about Haggis 2 and, like, what the hell is going on over there. I haven't really been keeping tabs on it, but I jump in the pin side thread every once in a while. And, man, they promised Fathom, and then they jumped in and they announced Centaur. And it just feels like they're not cranking out, like, any games. So not knowing all the details of what's going on right now, I won't speculate further than that. But there definitely seems to be some questionable things going on over there. Maybe they smoked this player. Yeah, exactly. It's like they keep taking money, and games don't seem to be coming out. What's going on? So I would be cautious if you were planning on buying a game would be my advice right now. And you say this because we've seen this before. We've seen how it ends, right? So this is based on past experience. Yeah. Yeah, we've seen this movie before. We've seen it, yeah. Many, many times. Mm-hmm. All right, on the opposite end of things, let's talk about Multimorphics. We talked about this a little bit in our chat that we have going on Facebook. But if you remember back in like late 2023, Multimorphic decided they were getting ready to announce their second module for the year. They did Final Resistance earlier in the year. They were scheduled to do two in 2023. and they kind of took a step back and decided to re-evaluate, reassess some of the quality of some of their production based on feedback they've received from owners, based on some of the support that they had been doing for current owners of the P3. They said, let's step back, let's do a full quality review, and then we'll launch the game after that. So as a result of this quality interview, They put out an email earlier this week that contained a bunch of updates. So I'm going to NAP Arcade for this. They kind of did a good summary of the email. Very detailed. If you go to Pinside, there's a full reposting of Jerry's email. But let me read through some of this for you. So after reaching a production capacity of 10 P3 machines per week, so 520 machines a year, that's pretty good,
    41:35
    Multimorphic has expanded its production facility by 5,000 square feet. The new space will enable it to increase its machine and playfield production in 2024. So good to see the growth there. Multimorphic continues to work through its build queue for Final Resistance. It is currently on batch six. They recently completed the full quality review and have implemented the following improvements. So the ATX power supply in the back box is being upgraded to a gold certified ATX power supply. All P3 owners are going to receive that power supply for free. They're just going to ship this out to all current registered owners of the P3.
    42:10
    Welded flipper and slingshot pivot brackets had inconsistent quality. That's one of the things they found.
    42:16
    Design specs have been updated. Issue has been discussed and corrected by your supplier, and all P3 owners will receive free replacements for all lower playfield flippers and both slingshots.
    42:26
    Some of the coils had premature failures. Those will be replaced under warranty. And if stroke switches can fail, so they're sending all owners replacements free of charge.
    42:40
    High-stress 3D printed parts are being replaced by aluminum or injection molded parts. So that's a huge upgrade in my eyes.
    42:49
    So others are being updated to being more resistant to overtightening and vibrational stress. All P3 owners will receive a number of updated parts for free, including aluminum flipper bats for the side target assemblies. So those are the traditional, like, standard upper flippers. Most of our remaining 3D-printed files will be made available for download on our support site, so you can just print out replacement parts as you want. If you have a 3D printer of your own, you can just print your own parts.
    43:17
    They updated some of their assembly guidelines and QC processes in an attempt to discover more assembly mistakes, such as missing thread locker on installed screws early in the production process. So that's on their end before you even see any of this stuff. They've made improvements in their assembly processes. And they're switching to palletized freight shipping for the heavier playfield module. So Heist and Weird Al are going to ship on pallets versus just shipping in boxes by themselves through UPS because they were seeing damage coming through on some of those. So, again, they're going to ship those replacement parts free to existing owners, and they're moving forward with their next game. So here's a photo of their expanded space. Currently they just kind of have it staged with a bunch of parts and stuff, but they're going to use that to improve their production.
    44:08
    There it is with nothing in it. And then one of the other pieces of feedback they received was for modules that use the upper flippers, their side target artwork is now going to be cut out, so folks who are having trouble seeing where the upper flippers were. I never really had a problem with that, maybe because of my height or whatever. I was always kind of able to see the edges of the flippers. I also had put red flipper rubber on my other flippers, which probably helps with that. But now you'll be able to buy side target artwork with cutouts so you can see the full flipper. So that's a nice, like, oh, we heard feedback from our customers. Here's an easy way to kind of remedy that situation. So I feel like this is an example of a company doing it right. it wasn't all talk they're taking action to improve their production, their quality overall I think it kind of lends to the overall business model of multi-mobility like they sell a machine and they want you to be able to keep playing on that machine so you can buy more modules that's their whole business module so it's in their best interest to make sure their customers are happy and that their machines are playing well so you'll buy more products in the future happy to see them making these moves in my mind as a PR person the best PR is backed by action so you don't just say you're going to make things better you actually do make them better and then you build that trust and the goodwill with your customers through situations like that so kudos to them they've also been doing this before I move on Nick any thoughts on that any feedback on that no love to see them humming along you know every new release from the P3 makes the P3 more of a good value proposition, makes it more attractive to buyers like myself maybe who have held out on the P3. These develops watching the company mature and get better over time which they should be doing makes it more of an attractive purchase. I'm still not there with the P3. The thing is heavy as fuck.
    46:14
    I'm still like I want to get traditional pinball machines, but I could see myself owning one one day when I maybe have an easier solution and more space. I don't have to contend with stairs. And at that time, I'm excited to see them humming along because maybe they're on the P3V2 of a model. So I want to see them being successful. I want to see them being profitable. I want to see them continuing to improve on what they have. So I continue to watch these developments, and I'm glad that I have now. Like, you own it, Matt owns it, Dave owns it. I'm the only one kind of in the group that chats a lot that doesn't have a P3, so I'm glad I get access to it. Yeah, you get to play it a lot, and we get to, you know, share modules with each other at League Night. We kind of all trade and swap. It's pretty awesome, actually. I kind of love it. It's like the vision of the P3 come to life, so really fun. Happy to see them doing well and expanding. Another thing they've been doing is they've been counting down, so they have on other social media channels they've been running Meet the Games. So recently they hit 20 games on the platform between digital software add-on games and physical modules. So that was a huge milestone, and they're doing every business day, I think. I don't think they're doing it on the weekends. They're doing a Meet the Games thing starting all the way back with, with Lexi Lightspeed, and they've currently, I think they announced, they kind of, like, checked off Final Resistance. So they're getting close to the end, and the rumor and speculation is when they get to the end of all the Meet the Games, they're going to announce their next game. So look forward to that. Can't wait to see what's next. Makes sense because they were kind of slotted to do this game in the fall when they decided to take that step back and do the quality review. So stay tuned for more. Cool stuff coming. Looking forward to it. Can't wait to slap a new game in the P3. Maybe two if Princess Bride ends up being a P3 game too. There could be two new games coming here pretty quick for P3 owners. So looking forward to that. All right. Other recent pinball manufacturing news is Chicago Gaming. Nick Lane, this is one of Nick's current games that he's got on order. The Pulp Fiction is on the line at the factory and says games are now shipping. So they kind of hit a huge milestone here. I don't technically have it on order, but I'm 100% planning on getting it. Oh, I thought you had a deposit in on one of these. No, no, no, no, no. All right. I will hold on to my money. That's because you're a smart guy. You're a smart man. Dude, if you want a game, wait until it comes out. Put that money earmarked into a money market fund at the minimum. Get 5% or more back. And, yeah, don't give your money to someone to hold on to. This is crazy. But do what you want. But you have to, you know, that's all the people who have to have it immediately. You've got to have it now. What's going to happen is people are going to buy this. The early adopters are going to have them. And they're going to hit the market. Like, they're going to get bored of them and sell them. And, you know, you could probably get a used one before you'd even be in the line to, even if you're in that first batch of buyers, if you really wanted one that fast, So you could probably use one even faster than buying a brand new one.
    49:37
    I agree. But, you know, they're cranking them out. It has not been quick. That's been the thing with Chicago Gaming is it seems like they take a long time to kind of crank their games out. But they build a quality product, and when they do, so – and they have – obviously, they're – you know,
    49:54
    Raw Thrills is a huge company, so they have the resources to put into making a good game and making sure it comes to market. And everybody hopefully has had a chance to play this game at shows and things like that because it has kind of made the rounds over the past year. So you had the opportunity to try it out. And if you like it, go grab it.
    50:15
    Another kind of interesting development has been this, in the JJP world, has been this enhanced IO board. So it's kind of over the past, I don't know, ever since Toy Story came out, there was the feel that the flippers had been improved. But nobody could really justify and improve it. Excuse me.
    50:44
    Oh, and I see these are out of stock on Pinball Life now. And somebody spotted that on Pinball Life there were these JGP fully populated IO boards. and the description is updated direct replacement driver board for Jersey Jackpin Machines starting with Toy Story. Suitable replacement for Guns N' Roses and prior machines with the exception of Wizard of Oz. This IO board is the latest revision and may improve flipper performance in older machines. We recommend reducing coil strength and entangling in Guns N' Roses and machines prior. So what they're saying is this is the board that's been in all of the machines since Toy Story and you can use it. You can take it and put it in your older machines and it may improve the flipper performance. So the folks on Pinside were like, well, it says it may improve it. Does it actually improve it? So I've been following this since, you know, it's been 31 days ago over the past month. And kind of the overwhelming consensus is that it does. It makes a significant improvement in not only flipper strength, responsiveness, but flipper fade over time. It keeps the flippers feeling strong for longer periods of time. and a lot of folks have instead of buying the whole board they are just upgrading capacitors so if that's something you want to do if you follow through this thread people have identified the capacitors that are on the new boards and they're going through it and people have put together instructions on how to do it let me see, here's some of the they have these little risers, the like 3D printed risers, because on the older boards, these bigger capacitors don't fit directly on the boards. So you have to desolder, add this little spacer, and then solder on the capacitor. So if you want to do it for $20, $30, you can just do that, or you can go and grab the full board. Apparently, just replacing the capacitors is not the only improvement on the board. I won't reveal names, but in the Buffalo Pinball Discord, We had some inside info in that if replacing the capacitors will get you about 70% there as to the performance improvements you get from just replacing the whole board. But if you want the full, I don't know, all the changes, you want all the improvements, the full experience with this board, it's worth grabbing the board. So I decided I was watching this. I was like, is it actually going to make much of a difference? And apparently it does. So I've taken a – and Nick went to the bathroom.
    53:18
    Spoiler, Nick's gone. I ended up grabbing one of these boards. So the only game I have left in my collection that doesn't have this board is Pirates. I sold my dialed in earlier this month. So I decided for, with a game like pirates, I wasn't going to take any chances. I'm going to go ahead and just grab the board. And so it's stripping. It's on its way right now. I'm glad I grabbed it. Cause it's out of stock at pinball life now.
    53:51
    And I'm, I will report back on the, on what I feel like the improvements are. So stay tuned. Nick, I want, I want Nick to like play as pirates at home and then come play mine with the new hundred percent. flipper board on it and see if we can tell the difference. I've never thought that Pirates had, like, oh, it needs to be snappier. And one fear that, like, so I'm not searching to fix my Pirates. And I also am like, well, will Pirates stand up to stronger flippers, like bashing things around? Because that game didn't have, like, major issues with the playfields chipping, but they can chip a little bit. So I don't know. I mean, I'm cool with where I'm at, but I'm glad you're experimenting. I hope I don't like it, Kevin. I hope I'm insane. Because, you know, it makes life easier and I save some money. That's what I'm saying. So I will probably just, like, get the board and then reduce the flipper power, right, and get it where it's, like, playing a little bit stronger than normal. Apparently it also, like, increases the responsiveness of the pop-uppers and the slingshots. Hopefully not as much on the slingshots because the slingshots on pirates are fucking insane. They're like crazy powerful.
    55:03
    But yeah, if it improves like flipper fade, that would be good for the longer playing games and stuff like that. So we'll see. If I don't like it, I'm going to swap the other one back in and sell it. So all good. Let's give it a go.
    55:19
    So that's something to look out for. In the Spooky Camp, they put out a new topper for Scooby-Doo. we will have a new Topper Talk at the end of this episode it is not about this one, spoiler alert so we're going to talk about it so it's a new custom artwork by artist Brad Duke, interactive sliding bookcase mechanism, sculpted by Back Alley Creation, a secret LCD video screen, RGB LED light show, with brand new villain footage, there's like a Topper mode, like man all the hot Topper action you could possibly want so there it is, man that is a tall You've got to have some huge ceilings for this topper in your game room. That is a tall topper. And there it is opened up with the screen revealed. It looks pretty small. It looks like, okay, these pictures are pretty close. That's like take your iPhone Plus and put it on your back box. Can you actually see what's on that screen? It's not very big. So if you're trying to play a mode on there, I don't know. It's like that Houdini mode where you're, like, throwing stuff. Or, like, what's the one on Junkyard with the toast and the dogs? It's kind of like that where you're just trying to hit stuff. So I'm sure it's playable, but it is a pretty small screen for being – it's got to be really far away from the player. So it's a $1,000 topper if you're looking to add a $1,000 topper to your Scooby-Doo. There you go.
    56:50
    I will not because I am not a Scooby-Doo owner. Up next, Pinberg is back, baby. So we talked about this a little bit last time where the Papa channel had put up a teaser, and they didn't exactly say what it was. And we were like, is it going to be Pinberg or Papa or what's going on? So they did announce over the past month that Pinberg is coming back. It's July 25th through 27th. It's at an eSports facility in Pennsylvania, so it's not going to be the full replay effects situation with, you know, a whole show and a tournament. It's obviously not at the pop-up facility anymore because that doesn't exist, but it's brought to you by some of the folks who used to run it. So Doug and Elizabeth and a bunch of the other crew from Pinberg are back. They're running the tournament.
    57:40
    Only 144 players. They're super limited. They did eventually add additional super supporter tickets, where if you paid $1,000, you could get your ticket earlier, and you also got some other perks like having the opportunity to buy future Pembroke tickets before everybody else. So it's kind of a cool thing you could do if you really want to play in Pembroke every year.
    58:05
    I decided kind of at the last minute, I was like, all right, I'll give this a shot, and I'll see if I can get in if I can. Cool, if not, whatever.
    58:14
    And lo and behold, I was one of the lucky ones who was able to get in. and there I am on the list. So very, very excited, even though it's not going to be the same. This is, like, my favorite tournament of all time, even if it's just going to be a fraction of what it had grown to before COVID and all that kind of, like, took it back. You know, it's been five years since this tournament took place. Very stoked. That's why I decided to give it a go. And, you know, I'll report back on how it goes and what we think how it compares to past events. It definitely will not be the same because part of the Pemberty experience was just everybody was there, like all of your pinball friends, people you would only see once or twice a year, especially with Buffalo Pinball. We had streamers from all over the country who we would get together and all hang out there, and people who know us from the show would say hi, and other tournament players that you only see once or twice a year, and having the experience of being in the city. and it always felt like pinball summer camp to me. So very excited to be back. Hopefully this will help them grow back to what it used to be and looking forward to it. I can't wait. I'm very excited.
    59:28
    Nick any Pemberg thoughts No looking forward to hearing how it is To me it Pimberg in Pimberg name only because Pimberg means a very different thing to me versus what this is, but hopefully this leads back on the track to its glory days. Yeah, I just love the whole format. So it's like getting to play a bunch of pinball over the few days, playing in these groups, getting put in your skill division, So even though it's not going to have that other aspect of it, it still will have that format structure that I really love. How many people? It's 140, you said? 144, I think. Okay. So the first one I played in 2011, I don't think it had a player cap. I think there was like 183 players. Okay. So, yeah, a little fun. Just a lot of fun at that. Yeah.
    60:16
    Amazing. So there you go. All right. I think that's it for the – oh, let me give – I want to just give one shout-out. shout out to the pinball party podcast Jason over at pinball party was kind enough to reach out to me and ask if I wanted to be part of his he did a 12 days of Christmas run of shows and I got to be episode 7 so go check out pinball party it's from the end of 2023 it was fun to be on there and I kind of prompted one of the questions he asked was what are you most looking forward to in 2024 in pinball And I said, I thought about it for a minute, and I was like, you know, I'm really looking forward to what Mark Seiden is doing. So Mark was the younger designer that JJP hired. And he's been there for a couple years now, so I'm like, it's got to be getting pretty close to his time to be up to present his game. And I said, and he's like, well, I'm going to have Ken on from JJP coming up next. I was like, ask Ken if Mark's game is going to be next. And sure enough, he asked them, and he said, yes, Mark's game is coming out in 2024. So looking forward to that. Can't wait to see what it is. And go check out that episode of Pinball Party. It does a great job. So thanks, Jason.
    61:33
    Speaking of Jason, one of the things he broke that kind of blew up the pinball world was during his podcast, he – oh, I'm on the wrong story here. So he dropped a news bomb. He said his guest received a text during the show that Amtron, the parent company of American Pinball, was, quote, looking for a buyer for the pinball division.
    62:01
    This blew up and everybody started talking about American Pinball is going out of business, blah, blah, blah, which to Jason's credit and to Kaylee Hernandez's credit, that's not what they said. They said Amtron is looking for a buyer, which would indicate that they're trying to stay in business. They're just trying to find an investor, right?
    62:21
    Maybe. Maybe that's what that means. Or maybe it looks like they're just trying to get out of it. You never know. But they didn't report that they were going out of business. People just kind of, like, took that and ran with it to the next level.
    62:33
    And Nick, stop me at any point if you want to jump in on any of this. But in response, American Pinball planned a live stream on Twitch. They launched their own new Twitch channel where they said they had huge news. They were going to drop all this amazing new news.
    62:51
    So basically they ended up coming down to two announcements. One, apparently their service tech had lost at the end of the year, and one of their big announcements was that they were hiring Lloyd from LTG. actually, Lloyd the Great, you know him from Pinzide he's been around forever, he runs SS Billiards, former tech of JJP and I don't know if he's tech for other companies too, but I hired him and a guy named Maurice, will also be doing tech for AP, the second announcement is that they are doing their own pinball board system, so they've spent the past year or so developing their own board system. Currently, their games use the multimorphic P3 ROG board system.
    63:39
    And for some reason, they decided they didn't want to do that anymore. I guess it makes sense because Ametron, their parent company, manufactures printed circuit boards. So in some ways, it does make sense. On the other hand, does it make sense to put all this research and development into developing your own board set when you've already got a solution that works? In the long run, maybe it pays off because your cost per unit goes down. You don't have to buy from another developer, another supplier.
    64:09
    So I don't know. Those don't strike me as huge announcements either. So they built up all this excitement to be like, we put a new board set in, and we also hired some service techs. I was like, I'm discord. I was like, only in pinball would a hiring of a service technician be considered big news. Like, oh, Samsung, my refrigerator manufacturer, oh, they got new service technicians. Great. They're not going to do a whole announcement about it. They're just going to do it and provide a level of support that you come to expect. And people wonder why we only do a once-a-month podcast, you know? These are the big news. This is the fucking news. Yes.
    64:53
    So, Nick, I'll kind of let you take it from there. I know you got some thoughts on all this. Yeah, you know, I mean, we've talked a lot more about American pinball than we have in the past, and I think our response to Galactic Tank Force, you know, was interesting, right? It caught a lot of attention because they certainly wanted a lot of attention with that and made a splash with it, for better or for worse. And I'm always interested in, like, pinball from, like, a business perspective. So I saw that rumor, and I was like, yeah, whatever. it's a rumor. I didn't think much of it. You know, I think last year around the time that GTF was announced, I said, look, I could see American Pinball going out of business in two years. So I was like, okay, I could see why somebody might buy into that rumor or think about it just because I think from the outside looking in, some of the things that they're doing doesn't make sense but then you have to also take into account that from the outside looking in, you don't have all the information, right? You can try to make sense of it and that's what we try to do, right? We try to predict things, make sense, try to acknowledge what we think is working, what's not, and have a discussion around it, because I think that's interesting. And then I saw that Dave was on, Dave Fix was on the Pinball Profile, Jeff Teal's podcast, and it's kind of like the Streisand effect, where I was like, well, okay, now you're continuing to talking about the rumor, you're going to address it, let's see what Dave has to say. And for, I think I've got to give this context, Kevin, like, you know, earlier I mentioned that Scott was one of the first people I met in pinball or maybe the first competitive person I met. Well, Dave Fix was the first person I ever met in this pinball hobby. When I got my Ironman in January 2011, I got referred to Dave because I needed help repairing my pinball machines. I didn't know what I was doing, so I got referred to Dave. I gave him a call, and within one minute of the conversation, I just want my game repaired. He's telling me about his mustache. and uh you know i i have like a lot of dave fix stories that we don't have possibly a mountain time for that but uh you know i became i ended up becoming friends with dave and dave was very nice he came over and fixed my pinball machine dave was very passionate about pinball uh he's kind of really interested in the historical and the history of pinball um didn't charge me for it was just it was really cool and i think i asked him i was like hey i'm really eager to learn more about this. Can I come along with you on repairs or whatever? And is there anything I can do to help? I think a month later, he called me and went to help pick up a pinball machine somewhere. And then again, I developed a friendship with Dave. Dave started storing pinball machines at the house I was living at the time. And I would work with him to help repair these machines. Usually I'm just holding a flashlight or handing Dave tools. But, you know, There was a point in time where Dave was probably coming to my house once or twice a week. We would go on trips to pick up machines together. So I'm sorry, I probably spent like five years where I was interacting with Dave Fix a lot, so I know him quite well. So it's interesting to talk about what's going on in American pinball because I know Dave from that perspective. I really haven't talked to him in like five years much. We only maybe hopped on the phone one time, so I've kind of lost track and touch with him. I remember the first time I met you, Dave Fix was there. You had that brand-new ACDC machine. I came to your house. You were kind enough to invite folks over to play it, and Dave Fix was there. I was like, what am I getting myself into? A hundred percent. Love Dave. He's a character. Oh, yeah. Dave would always like to bust balls. He'd bust my balls. I'd bust his.
    68:30
    Again, I haven't talked to him for a long time. I mention that because when I hear about what's going on in American Pinball and I hear in an interview, I kind of know Dave's personality. And it's also harder to talk about American Pinball because if we're saying negative things about it and Dave's making decisions, then it's like, well, you know, there's that aspect of it. But here we are. So I listened to that interview. I was really interested to try to understand what's going on with them. And I'll kind of break it down and give my thoughts, and then I'm interested to hear what you think about it because you haven't listened to it, right, Kev? So I listened to the pinball magazine, pinball news podcast. I had a long road trip to go pick up my Rojo, conveniently enough. So I listened to that. It was pretty long, so I have some thoughts on that.
    69:24
    Okay. So the point of the interview, I think, was kind of to address the rumors. and I think Jeff asked some good questions, but I think some things were on the table and sort of begged the question. So we'll kind of go through some of the highlights of that that I picked up and took some notes.
    69:43
    When asked about the rumor of American Pinball, Dave said they're not for sale, quote, doing fine, doing very well.
    69:52
    And then Dave speculated on where the rumor might have come from, and he acknowledged that they've been talking to investors.
    69:59
    So here's the thing. Here's the thing. To me, this begs the question, right, that wasn't asked. Okay, why are you talking to investors?
    70:08
    You know, Dave didn't say that. The question wasn't asked. Like, there's two reasons you would talk to investors, right? You told me, like, earlier in the story we talked about P3 sounds like they're doing well. They're expanding their facility, right? Like, you might be doing well and you can't handle the orders, so you need to generate some capital so you can grow and get to that next level. That's one reason. or the other reason is you're running out of money and things aren't going well and you need to talk to investors to save it. So I would imagine if things were going great, you know, potentially he said, no, no, things are going so good, we're growing, we need to expand. We're actually talking to investors so we can grow our facility. That wasn't said. So, you know, to me that doesn't – I think maybe they thought that interview was great and well, But to me, it just sheds more light on the rumor that things aren't exactly well. But you can draw your own conclusion from that, which is, again, that was my first takeaway.
    71:07
    You know, Dave says multiple times that he's a collector first. He mentioned that, I think, on the podcast. You mentioned, Kevin, and he mentioned it on this. He's very adamant, likes to support what's going on in pinball. And that's true. Dave is a 100% collector. I think Dave said somewhere that he has like 150 pinball machines. I know Dave has a lot. Maybe about 10% of those are working that he's got.
    71:30
    I kid. It's probably 25%. I kid again. Dave, this is the kind of jokes that I would bust Dave's balls with. But, yeah, he totally is a pinball fan, totally is a collector. I just, again, from that I take away, it's like that's all fine and well, but I don't know if the decisions being made are from a prudent business standpoint, right? So that's kind of the clout that I look at this.
    71:58
    You know, so here's the question, Kevin, that I don't know, and I would invite anybody in the pinball industry to kind of illuminate this for us. If you want to reach out, you can reach us at talkpinballgmail.com. This can be totally anonymous. I would verify that you know what you're talking about, and I'm happy to share with viewers because we don't have this information. And I'm not just talking about American pinball in general. I am curious to know, generally, how many pinball machines does a company have to sell to be profitable? Now, there's going to be a difference between doing an original license and a license game, and even what the license is. Some licenses are more expensive, but I really want to know. You know, he talked about, Jeff and I talked about, like, they sold out of Valhalla, and I think the original run of Valhalla was 250. So if they're setting a goal of selling 250 Legends of Valhalla machines, I guess that, like, okay, that's a win, right? They can sell 250. They're making money at that point.
    72:56
    And that's not a licensed game, so they don't have to sell as many as Stern would have to sell if they get Jaws, right? Stern has to sell a lot more. Stern also has a lot more overhead because they've got a lot more employees. So that's something interesting. That's something that this is like, you know, outside looking in, we don't know. We can only speculate.
    73:13
    And also a good deal of the interview was talked about the new boards, which Kevin mentioned. Dave, again, kind of circles back to as a collector, he wants to make these boards compatible. That's important for him, which is true, but was also said in there, and again, reading between the lines, he said, like, they started the venture in May, but it, quote, ate up a lot of bandwidth. So they invested a lot of time on this. And then from my perspective, it's like, did you need to do that when there's other things you could be doing, right? I don't know. This takes time.
    73:47
    He mentioned that, you know, his team is small many times. There's only a few engineers. Quote, there's a lot more to do on GTF, and they also got to still do work on a new board. So, right, like it's just a question of priorities, which, again, you know, you listen to it and it all sounds good, but then you're left to ask yourself questions like, does this make sense?
    74:11
    Yeah, you have to wonder if that's the best use of their time and energy and resources when that's not something that's going to generate revenue right away. In the long run, you may end up saying, you know, generating extra margin on your machines because you're not spending as much on your board sets. But to me, you're better off investing in the next game. If this ended up, you know, taking staff time and energy away from your nice game, you know, is that the right decision to make? I don't know. I'm not running the company. But to me, it doesn't seem like a super smart decision. But, again, there are things that, you know, I don't know in this situation. Right. And you can only look and speculate, and that's what we do. And certainly invite people in the chat to give their thoughts. And, again, I would love for somebody in the industry somehow to reach out, and I would love to have kind of a private conversation and share under the cloak of anonymity, if I can verify that the person's legit, just to talk in general about the business and how that works and get their thoughts. Okay, so the really interesting thing to me, and this kind of gives insight to how they think or how Dave's thinking as he's steering the company, is the question about original themes. Now, we've talked about original themes through the years for many times, right? I think the industry is in a place where if you're going to do an original theme, you're operating on hard mode. This is my take. You're operating on hard mode.
    75:39
    You know, you look at a company like Spooky. Spooky started off with, like, you know, an original theme, but they progressed to license, right? They got a base hit, and they built up to getting there.
    75:51
    Jersey Jack tried an original theme because everybody was clamoring for an original theme and dialed in. I think Dialed In is a great game, but the theme is divisive, and people didn't buy Dialed In because the theme was Dialed In. I mean, very small percentage of people did that, so that put them behind the eight ball. If that was a themed license, that game would have been a much bigger hit and success. I have no doubt. Stern did an original theme with Black Knight, right? And it's like, yes, it was the third in the series, but it's an original pinball theme that they're building off of, And that didn't do well. So you've got to look at that in saying that all these companies, they could do an original theme or choosing not to. Why are they not doing it? Because it's a huge risk.
    76:37
    Even though you hear people say, oh, here's my meme and my joke. Somebody needs to make this meme for me who's more creative.
    76:44
    You know, somebody inevitably on Facebook or on Pinside will say, I want more original themes, right? They're saying that. And then the next thing is you show a picture of an original theme like GTF. And then they'd be like, but not that original theme. Right, right. Because you substitute GTF for any other thing. That's always how it is. People say they want it. But an original theme is, like, limitless. You can make an original theme. They've done that, like, on a cell phone, as people joke about, with dialed in. They've done it on GTF. There might be, like, this food truck game that's coming out for American Pinball that's rumored to come out. You do original theme on Hacky Sack, right? It's just, like, how are you going to get it right? This original theme is going to resonate with a lot of people.
    77:26
    So, all right, that's the kind of context to thoughts on original theme. Now, in the interview, Dave points out why they're doing original themes, and it comes down to two things. He says, using the IPDB, so the Internet Pinball Database, Dave looked at the top ten rated solid-state games, and he said, look, Out of the top ten solid state games, five of them are original IPs. Now, first of all, Kevin, these are all 90s games. I know what's wrong with this logic. What do you think is wrong with this logic? I'm going to pause for Kevin's participation here. Well, yeah, it's – actually, I do remember hearing this segment, and I have a point that – we'll see if you make it or not. But, yeah, these are 90s games. They're built on nostalgia. So, like, you remember going to the arcade and playing these games, so there is a built-in audience for these games for the folks who were going to the arcades then, right? So it's not an original theme to somebody who already has a connection with a specific game. They're just remaking these games that are proven hits by some of the best designers out there, and they have, you know, some of the nostalgia pull for the folks who remember these games already. yeah totally but I mean what was there's two things that the first thing that was glaring to me is that you're trying to apply 1990s rules and I think I'm going to tie my point in with yours right to today right you're not looking at what is the market today where are we today in the pinball market and you're not looking at the failures of these other companies trying to do an original theme I think the most successful original theme in the last 10 years was TNA Right. And they sold, what, 1,000 maybe of those? Yeah, that's probably a huge hit because they didn't have to pay licensing. So that was like, but that's like one out of a number of them that didn't work out. Right. The other thing is like going to Internet Pinball Database. Again, this is something that you went to in maybe the late 2000s or early 2010s. Right. It was just like, when I first heard that, I didn't hear the IPD. It's like, where is he pulling those numbers from? If you go to Pinside, which is what everybody's using, sponsor of the show, and you look at the top ten, it's Godzilla, number one, license. Jurassic Park, number two, license. Three is Medieval Madness, which is, to your point, nostalgia. Has that baked in nostalgia? Number four is Attack from Mars, baked in nostalgia from the 90s. Then we get to five, Deadpool. pool. Then we get to Iron Maiden, six. Then we get to Elvira, seven. Then we get to Foo Fighters, eight. That's crazy. Lord of the Rings, nine. And then Monster Bash 10. So I think that's way more. If you're going to try to justify it, that's way more that more of the market is on pin side, using pin side and rating things. That's what you've got to look at. So how many of those out of 10 are actually original themes? One, two, three. There's three and they're all from the 90s. One of the things Dave did too was that he counted medieval, or attack from, what's wrong with me? Monster Bash as an original theme. That's a licensed game. Correct. It is 100%. It's a licensed game. Universal Monsters licensed game. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I went off and made the error, so there's only two. There's only two out of ten. So, right then and there, that's like where it's like You got to throw that out the door.
    81:07
    So the interesting part of that discussion as well was Dave cited the cost of a license, right? And this is an interesting discussion. I don't know much about this at all. He said hypothetical cost of, put in quotes, a big IP, he didn't define what that is, is a million dollars.
    81:28
    He calls it, it needs to be paid up front before you even make the game, Dave says. they call it internally, or he calls it, quote-unquote, dead money, because they have to pay that before they even start making the game. Then they're giving a time frame to bring it to market. Then there's the royalties you've got to pay per game sold, and then there's the back-and-forth of licenses. So that's why we're seeing – that's the justification for why we're seeing these original themes. Lastly, he brought it back. He keeps on saying that we're a small company. American Temple is a small company. It's like, well, yeah, but so spooky. Spooky's smaller.
    82:05
    Spooky was able to do licensed games, and they only do licensed games now. So, again, that rationality makes more sense. My takeaway, combined with everything I said, is that I think you said this before. It's like they just want to do – I think it's like this feeling like, oh, I like original themes.
    82:24
    I know some other people that like original themes. I'm going to do original themes for this company. and the question is how many games do they have to sell on original theme to make it sustainable in the long run that we don't know right that's where the question comes into play yeah so address some of the feedback in chat it is fronting a million dollars is not an easy task right but you should be building your company on these original themes to the point where you can afford that like that should be your goal right let's get to that if that's what it costs then we'll use that to kind of take our business to the next level. And it's also building an original theme is not free. The benefit you get with a license is that you get this whole world to work with and all of these assets that you don't have to create. When you do an original theme, you have to create absolutely everything by yourself. The idea, what's going on, the art, the look and feel, the sounds, absolutely everything. So you're kind of trading one thing for the other. In the end, it may end up being cheaper, but you have to spend so much more time building all of these extra assets that go into an original theme. That doesn't have this built-in audience of, yes, I take my money, I love this theme.
    83:39
    Kevin is 100% correct. I think when I look at American Pinball, their first game is Houdini, which is, I guess, the original theme. It is and it isn't, right? Like Houdini, I don't know if they paid licensing for that or not, given the, I don't know how that works. I think it was public domain. Right.
    83:57
    But that's a smart thing to do, right? When you're growing, like here's something people recognize. Like, oh, Houdini magic? Cool. I kind of get the idea. Let's run with that. Yeah. So it's like, okay, this is smart. Like do that. Get something that people know, Houdini, everybody knows Houdini, right? But, like, build off that. Get the base hits so then you can get the doubles, triples, and then the home run, right, leading up to a license. Houdini came out when? 2015, 14, 16, right? Yeah. They've not done that the way that I look at Spooky. And, like, you know, for all the Spooky people who get mad at me, I praise Spooky all the time. Like, what Charlie did is fantastic, right? Like, Charlie got the base hits. Charlie built up to that point where he's getting licenses. So, again, Dave uses the example of a million dollars for a quote-unquote big IP. Don't get a big IP. Or, you know, do smaller ones that are recognizable and work up to that so that you can get there, you can grow, you can ensure that as soon as you announce the game, like what this new pinball company did, Barrels of Fun, right, came out of nowhere, somehow had money, okay, never produced a game. They had money to get the license for Labyrinth. And David Bowie's smack on there, okay, right in the front. So they're able to do it. Barrels of Fun is a small company. Spooky's able to do it.
    85:21
    Why can't AP do it? Because they're choosing not to. Or they're stuck in a thought process of that, right? So that's the context. That's the reaction to that. Again, I've seen some interesting discussion in chat. But, Kevin, anything more to add?
    85:38
    Yeah, it's just like, oh, we've got a super chat in chat. Thanks, James. He says, original themes can work if done right, if done high end. Some themes are in public domain and can be had for nothing, such as Night of the Living Dead. Think pirates would sell because of the toys no matter the theme. Yeah. Yeah, so it's picking ideas that people can connect to, even if it's not a specific license, right? Dude, Lovecraftian Horror. Mm-hmm. Cthulhu, right? Like, there's so many board games on it because it's public domain, but it's recognizable, right? Like, you can do things like that. Again, I think American Pinball, when they did Houdini, was a smart move out of the gate. Not only pay license fees, they still have, as Kevin brings up very importantly, you still got to create all that content from scratch. You got to have a story kind of concept. They had to have those actors. They had to write lines, dialogue. Not that that probably took a lot of brain power, but there's the costumes. That diverts from, if you're a small company, now you're a production company. You got to generate music for it. There's a lot of work. At least when you license, you have some music you can work with. So it's not a black and white thing. You've got to balance it out. Some things are easier. Some things are harder. But there's a benefit to just paying cash for the license and then getting to focus on everything else, just the rules, the production, the game, and getting it out and shipping and going to the next one. Right. And not to mention being able to hire the creative people you need to develop a – these are art pieces. Like there's so much creativity that goes into a pinball machine. on so many different levels in so many different areas of expertise that you would need to hire to pull something off when you're climbing over this roadblock of an original theme to begin with. So I feel like when it's an original theme, everything you execute has to be exponentially better than if it's built on a license that people already love. It has to knock everything absolutely out of the park to really kind of get over that, Well, it's an original theme, but, oh, this is really good, right?
    87:42
    So you have to kind of go back, get the creative people. You're competing with all of these other companies. There's so many people making pinball right now that probably have higher budgets for salaries. You know, CERN and JJP, I'm sure, can afford to pay their designers more than an American pinball can, right? but just because they have bigger productions and they've built their organizations up to a bigger level at this point. So you're competing with them in the same market for the same level of talent when you're trying to build these products that you're kind of like, all right, I like Nick's sports analogy. Kudos to Nick for the sports analogy of getting your base hits and your doubles before you get your home runs. I think that's stated it well. Yeah, so I have some numbers to put some, you know, quantitative of what we can, and I pulled these from Pinside. We can try to compare. I'm going to compare American Pinball Games versus Spooky Games, right, because we'll put them in the smaller company category, even though I think American Pinball is a better manufacturer of games in terms of quality and should be able to really crush Spooky. They should be able to. All right? They've got a parent company. There's got to be more money there. There's no reason that they can't, in my mind. And then also, what I didn't bring up is, like, just the competition out there these days is fierce. I mean, 2023, there's a lot of games. Now you've got Barrels of Fun has entered the chat, you know, proverbially speaking. So now you've got to compete against another one. So you got to like you can fuck around at this point You just can Just because you want to do it and like doing it like you got to like think about longevity So here the last few games from both companies So Legends of Valhalla according to Pinside and here the asterisk This doesn't mean how many games are actually sold by the company. These are self-reported. I didn't even look at location. I just put collectors because that's typically much higher than location games. but my thinking here too is that especially with American Pinball games most of the people who own it are probably on pin side versus like people who buy Elton John are just like they're the casual people a lot of things are just not going to be reported on that so I think the accuracy is more in line with like original themed games on pin side than a game like Elton John or Star Wars where you've got just Johnny Cumberland buying it right Okay, so Legends of Valhalla was $128 sold. They're claiming that they actually sold out of their original limited 250 run. They lied about it being original limited because you can still buy it today.
    90:19
    So $128. So that's, I mean, that's actually like almost half the people are on Pinside or self-reporting on Pinside who bought it. Right. And maybe that's even just maybe those haven't already are in the hands of people that they might just sold to distributors, and distributors are spitting on Legends of Valhalla. So keep that in mind as well. They can count that as sold. Distributors have to buy the game and then actually sell it. And if these games don't sell, do you think the distributor is going to buy the next unlicensed game from American Pinball? They've got limited space and limited money as well. These things factor into everything.
    90:55
    So that's Legends of Valhalla, 128. Maybe that's good. I don't know. So, GTF, though, 35 of the deluxe edition and then 43 of the limited edition. It's been out almost a year now. That cannot be good. They had to have lost money on that. So, this goes back to the rumor and why might they be talking to investors. They spent time on this board. I cannot imagine they had a good year. I didn't listen to this podcast. I guess Dave was on one where he was asked to rate the company in 2023. He gave them a C. I don't know why. I've listened to enough of them all podcasts this week alone. Good. So, okay, so that's that. Now, you look at Spooky the last couple games, Scooby-Doo, 534 of the collector's edition. Wow. Okay, now, how does that balance out between the license fees and sold? I've got to imagine they're good. Right. I've got to imagine. I'm not even counting. There's 21 Bloodsuckers and 7 Standard.
    91:52
    Then I look at Halloween. There were 467 CEs, 55 Bloodsuckers, 27. Again, this smaller company that, you know, Charlie didn't have the backing of another company, has been able to do this on license alone. Okay, they're strapped with resources. And then T&A, T&A is self-reported 393, and then the CE is 109.
    92:16
    The more interesting thing in here is, like, look at J.J.P. with Godfather. Now, this is concerning because J.J.P. with Godfather is 112 for the LE and 240 for the CE. So those are not good numbers, given they're a larger company than American Pinball, probably not by a ton, but certainly they had to pay for the Godfather license, so they've got to sell a lot more. Now, again, I'm going to come back to my earlier point where they might have sold a lot more Godfathers to just the general public who will never be on Pinside, right? And that might be the only game they have because they love Godfather, they're super rich, whatever.
    92:53
    Most people, that doesn't apply to people buying Legends of Baja. oh, they're pinball nerds who are just super plugged into the industry. That's mostly their customers. Does that make sense, everybody? I hope I did my best to explain the thought process and analysis behind that. Yeah, it definitely felt like I was telling Nick about listening to the Pinball News, Pinball Magazine interview with Dave, and they just kind of let him go. and the more they let him go, the more kind of sketchy his responses got. I don't know. It just felt like, why are you saying all of this? Get on, say what you got to say, and then move on.
    93:37
    I don't know. On the podcast you heard, what was it? The Pinball News podcast, yeah. It was the longer interview. I don't know if he did himself many favors by going on the podcast, but what did you hear on that one that was concerning? Well, there was a lot of the same thing. I think just the thing about his kind of rationale for developing this board set was that he's a collector and that in 30 years he wants his American Pinball owners to know that they'll be able to replace their board sets now that they're manufacturing their own board sets, which was kind of like how is there any more guarantee that AP will be around in 30 years making board sets than Multimorphic that doesn't make any sense if anything you would think there's probably in 30 years from now there will probably likely be more Multimorphic board sets because there's more manufacturers using them Multimorphic uses them, Spooky has used them American Pinball used them up until now I think there's one or two other ones and the resources will be out there that people will know how to fix these. If past, you know, hobbyists have been an indication, like they've been able to keep machines running from highway and stuff, like the original aliens, because people in the community figured it out.
    95:00
    So I don't know that that was a good rationale for spending a year of your company's time developing a new board set. One of the comments in chat earlier, that made a lot more sense from what I saw from Dave, he said, you know, Ameshawn wants a product to put their boards in on a consistent basis. That makes sense. Like, your parent company, they want to be able to sell these boards and put them in a product and produce them and make money off of these boards doing what they do. That makes sense. Providing boards to a collector in 30 years, that makes no sense to me. Especially when a traditional pinball company's business, like, it's their job to sell new pinball machines. it doesn't do that many, aside from like the margin they would make on selling a board set, they do much better selling you a brand new pinball machine than keeping your existing pinball machine running.
    95:52
    So, like, that was one of the things that stood out to me. Like, that doesn't really make any sense. I mean, Dave did point out in the pinball pro, I mean, he said that too, but he did point out that, you know, Antron does manufacture boards. So, it doesn't make sense for them to be doing their own boards. I do get that. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I don't know. I just don't know how that helps in the short term, right? And it just goes back to the rumor that they might be in trouble, and then going back to the interview, there's nothing that was said there that dispels that rumor for me, right? He didn't land the jump of dispelling that. Exactly. I don't know that he necessarily solved that PR issue of they may or may not be looking for it. buyer when he goes on the show and then he says, yeah, we're looking for investors. Yeah, exactly. Why are you looking for investors? If it's all good, you would just say, hey, yeah, here's why. To the point of, we were talking about multimodern earlier, walk the walk, don't just talk the talk. Show us that you're good. Show us how you're going to make improvements. I think that's what they were trying to do with the hiring announcement and the board announcement. Like, oh yeah, we're improving, we're good, we're investing all this into the product still, but I don't know that he convinced everybody. I think he may have done the, he may have stemmed the tide a little bit in the short term, but in the long term, I don't think he's squashed those concerns. It doesn't matter what the concerns are. It's like, you just got to sell games. Is your next game going to sell? I think that I would have liked, if I'm an American pinball fan, and listen, I want this company to succeed. I want, they're more pinball. I want to see them succeed and grow and mature, right? So I have more options as a consumer. There's no doubt about that. I would have been, like, I would have been well more reassured. Yeah, you know, we really went for it. We wanted to, everybody else is doing license memes, so sometimes in the marketplace to differentiate yourself, you need to try something different, right? And we're able to save money on license and we really went for it with GTF and it looks like the marketplace didn't respond like we hoped they would, so therefore our next game will be a licensed one We're going to try to find a balance. We want to reach those in the market that want an original theme because no one's really doing it. But we do recognize that the market demand is for less than themes, and they're the ones that typically make the most money. And I would be like, okay, great. Great strategy. Makes sense. But now I think, what's the rumor? We're going to get Food Truck, another unlicensed game? I mean, I'm here for it. Food Truck and Cuphead has been another one that's been batted around, which that could be one of your smaller licenses, right? I don't know how much crossover there is with indie video game fans and pinball buyers, but at least it's something they can work with. And another rumor that somebody told me on the down low is that apparently Power Rangers might be one that they have, which would be, to me, that's a bigger license.
    98:59
    It doesn't kind of hit the nostalgia button for me because Power Rangers, I feel like I was too old for that by the time it kind of became a thing, but I can see it being popular with a certain segment of the pinball buying audience for sure. That's something. I mean, yeah, I agree with that, Kev. Yeah. It's something. Yeah. So hopefully they can move to that and keep things going. But, yeah, developing a board set and hiring a service tech, not exactly huge groundbreaking news. Sorry. So I will say this. This is not a radical statement. This is almost like a throwaway statement, but it's if I had fucking money and a limited money in space, I would buy a GTF for the lulz.
    99:41
    I would support you with that. But I wouldn't, but just so you know, I'm serious. I think there's something there. It's not the itch I really want to scratch, but, like, I wouldn't buy a Pony Factory. I wouldn't buy a Thunderbirds. You know, I wouldn't buy whatever that Turner pinball thing that's monstrosity. So, like, yeah, I would. But also, like, the truth of the matter is I don't have unlimited money. I don't have unlimited space. Neither do you, Kevin. And so you're competing against all these other games that are just eating its lunch, right? So that's the challenge. That's the issue. That's the point of having this conversation.
    100:17
    Yeah. I also don't have a full-time service tech to keep Galactic Tank Force running. That's why you need unlimited money. So I just have to hire Matt to just live at my house and keep the game running.
    100:30
    All right. I think we've said enough on American Pinball. More to come on that, I'm sure. Let's talk about some mods you don't need. This is one of my new favorite segments on the show. So let me switch over to mod you don't need number one. I feel like this is second only to Luma Legs. This came up 22 days ago on Pinzide. It's the Pin Signal mod. Nick, have you seen the pin signal mod?
    100:58
    I have not, Kevin. Well, now you have. And what do you think of this one? Describe to the listeners at home what we're seeing. I mean, the name is pretty accurate. So it projects like an image of the game, like the icon of the game on the floor.
    101:18
    So, like, let's say you have a medieval madness in the basement and the giant back glass that's illuminated and everything else on it and the side and the cabinet are, let's think, you're like, how will people ever know what this game is? Well, you can also project the Medieval Madness logo on the floor. Oh, my God. You can do that.
    101:37
    You can do that. The best part is, like, you don't really see the product itself. So I don't know what this looks like on the bottom of your cabinet. and how easy is it to remove when you sell the game because you don't want to be shoving a game into your car to move it with a projector on the bottom of it. And do I have to drill holes in the bottom of my cabinet to attach this? When you're standing there, is it projecting on your feet? It's going to project on your feet. Yep, yep. It's definitely going to do that.
    102:09
    That's the innovation you need. So there you go. Don't waste your money. I mean, if you want to, go ahead, but the file is under mods you don't need.
    102:20
    How much is it? Let's see. It's $100 plus shipping. It's his target. It's not extravagant pricing, I'll give it that much, compared to half the nonsense out there. What's interesting, though, Kevin, is that we've got a lot of OCD in the pinball hobby.
    102:35
    Unofficially not diagnosed. But, like, the problem is, if you have a large collection, you put it on just a couple games, it's going to look weird. Some have it. Why does some not? Are the other ones broken that don't have it? It's weird. I need a pin signal for my P3 that changes with every game that I swap to it. So I'm flipping through my P3 home screen, swapping games. I need my pin signal to match. Otherwise, why bother? You know what I mean? Shout out to the chat for Glen0570 writes, I like the idea of Alviver's face frightened for when I play naked. Right under your feet. There we go. Yeah. The view directly below. Oh, Jesus. Gosh. All right. I got one more for this month. So let's do Majidoni number two. And this comes back to what we were talking about earlier. It's the Jaws the Pinball Eater mod. Here you go. Oh, you can put a – oh, that's hideous.
    103:38
    That is – are you serious? That's how it looks? I think this is a mock-up. Okay, all right. That's how it's going to look. Fair enough. Yeah. Oh, God. Come on. Just play the game and move on.
    103:52
    If you need a game that eats the ball, there are plenty of games that eat the ball. Except the fact that Joss does not eat the ball and move on. Okay, can we do that, please? Don't put holes in your machine. Right in the dumpster. It doesn't eat the ball. Garbage game. Move on. Zero out of ten. I like this graphic. That's how it's going to work.
    104:10
    Ball goes in the shark's mouth. Well, goes out the shark. You laugh, Kevin, but this mod maker is going to make a fucking mint. Well, that's the thing, too. He's wrapping all the way to the bank. Yeah, you look at the responses, they're like, sign me up. I need it. Oh, my God. I just emailed you for a quantity of two for LE. Make this. I'm interested in premium LE. Put me down for a premium. Oh, my God. Dude, next we're going to see Stern. It's purposely not going to have, like, the most obvious, like, toy feature, but you can buy it from them. Exactly. Yeah. Oh, God, what a time to be alive.
    104:44
    Amazing. So there you go. That's the mods you don't need for this month. Nick Lane, let's check in as part of our game room updates. What have you been playing the most? All right, I'm going to tell you what I've been playing, and then I'm going to run the bathroom. You're telling me what you've been playing. Two bathroom breaks for Nick this podcast, man. All right. I know.
    105:06
    It's like a Larry David, like keeping track how many times I've gone to the bathroom. Well, I switched back to the camera and you were gone. Yeah. Like I said, next time. It's a safe bet where I am.
    105:18
    Yeah, so I've not been playing a lot of pinball lately. I have been playing a little Godzilla a little bit. The few games I played, I played a couple of Godfather, but not a lot of pinball. I've been, like, super into VR. I rebuilt my computer just put a 14th gen Intel in and put all kinds of fancy lighting in my case, I was a big boy shout out to Dave Sousa and Matt Taylor for being my moral guidance as I did that, but I was a big boy and I did it and I've just been playing a ton of VR, I played a game called Racket Club in VR, I actually joined a league for it and I'm in last place with my brother as a doubles partner, but I'm having a blast. That game's amazing. Definitely recommend it.
    106:05
    But yeah, that's what I've been doing. Nice, yeah. I've been playing like I said, I've been playing a lot of Godfather with this latest code update. It's been, here I gotta bye Nick, Nick's leaving.
    106:21
    I've been playing a lot of Godfather with the new code update. It keeps me hitting the start button. My scores are like way in the dumpster because it's super hard now with all these crazy ball savers, but I love it. It's got me playing the game more.
    106:35
    It's a better game now that they've tweaked the code, so I've been playing that a lot. Godzilla also, that game, no surprise, is amazing. The more I play it, the more I love it, so I don't see that game going anywhere for a long time. Super fun game. And Roadshow is the newest game. It's one of the big changes in my game room. is that I've kind of had the urge to mix things up in the game room. So I decided, I kind of looked at the lineup, and I'm like, hmm, what's it going to be? It dialed in kind of. It was staring at me going, you've had me for seven years. You beat me from start to finish without baby mode on. I think it's time to move on. As much as I do love me some dialed in, it was time to move it on. Because, you know, keeping it in game is fun, but, like, I love it. But if I'm not playing it, why keep it, right? So I decided to, I was going to list it. I got a bunch of interest in it, and I traded, dialed in for a very nice Roadshow plus cash.
    107:40
    Roadshow is one of those games that I've always kind of wanted, but there aren't very many around here. So I don't have much time on it. I've enjoyed the time I've played it, and now that I have it at home, it's super fun. The one I got is really nice. It has a color DMZ on it. It's got pin sound in it because I know that's one of the big, you know, when people talk about Roadshow, they're like, oh, my God, the music. It's got country music in it. Oh, my God. So you can turn it into jukebox mode if you want to have it play like Queen and Michael Jackson and all sorts of crazy crap.
    108:12
    It's terrible, but at least it's in there. The nice thing about the pin sound is it improves the sound quality overall, so that's kind of nice.
    108:21
    And it also has, like, it's fully LED'd out. LED OCD. The previous owner was somebody who takes really good care of his games, so he'd gone through it all. It all works really well. I'm super happy with it, and it's a really fun game. It's also got the ROM in it that allows you to mix up the rules, so it doesn't always have to be like the East Coast to West Coast thing. You can kind of play modes at random, so you get to see more of the game and not always have that same experience when you boot it up. So, very happy with that game. We'll see. It could end up being one that I keep around for a while, and then it goes. Could end up being a long-term keeper. We'll see. But I'm enjoying it for now.
    108:59
    So that's what I've been playing. Also, the P3's always in the rotation. I had Final Resistance in there for the longest time because I had convinced myself this is absolutely the best P3 game. I love this game. It's amazing. And then they put a Weird Al update out and I was like, alright, let me put Weird Al back in and I'll check it out. And I'm like, wait a minute, this game's amazing too. I love this game. So that's kind of the thing about the P3 is you take a game out and you can fall in love with whatever's in there and you're having a good time. And then you put one of the other games back in and it kind of reignites that love for the game that you had before you swapped it out. So it keeps things fresh, which is cool.
    109:34
    Some other things I've been working on. So last month I listed my Big Buck for sale because I want to bring my console game collection down here and I decided to sell Big Buck to make room for it. And I had somebody coming over to pick it up. So I fired it up when he was on the way over, and it wouldn't boot. And I'm like, God damn it. So I turned it off and back on a couple times. I'm like, what's going on? Did some troubleshooting, and it ends up being there's an issue with the motherboard. So I ordered a replacement motherboard off eBay, and I put it in, and everything worked except for the sound. The sound didn't work. So I contacted the eBay seller and saying, did you test the sound on this before you shipped it to me? And he sends me these pictures, and he's like, oh, yeah, look, it powers on. It's fine. I was like, but did you test the sound? Like, how did you test the sound? And then he never wrote me back, and he just gave me a refund. He didn't test the sound, but he was trying to get me to kind of fall for it that it was a tested and working board. But he was like, nope, give me my money back. So now I have a third one on the way that hopefully will be here early next week that I can swap in, and I do have somebody else who's interested in it. The original buyer still might be interested, so hopefully that will move its way out, and I have my new shelving unit to put together to house all my console games, so that will be cool. So that's going on. And the other thing I did was the Neo Geo that is behind my head right now, I recapped the monitor on that. I made a list of some of the winter projects I wanted to tackle that was on there. I wanted to keep the monitor looking good. And after 30-ish years of that being in operation, it was time to take it to that one. So I kept it on the K7000 monitors, and there it was easy enough to do. So I did that, and it's looking and working good. I didn't blow it up. So mission accomplished, recapped the monitor, didn't electrocute myself, didn't blow up my game. So win-win all around.
    111:26
    That's about it for the game room updates. Vic, anything else before we pull our raffle winners? I don't think so. As always, I appreciate it. I mean, we had a lot of listeners on Twitch and on YouTube, so really grateful for the active. You guys are awesome in the chat. I love seeing everybody in there having a conversation, as always. So just consider me grateful. Yeah, between the two channels, we have 112 viewers right now. So that's pretty solid. So I appreciate everybody tuning in. If you're on Twitch, Twitch only gets to enter our chat, our giveaways, because my robot doesn't like YouTube. So if you're on YouTube and you want to enter to win, jump on in and type hashtag win in chat. This is your last chance. Now we're up to 50 entries. Thanks, everybody. So, Nick, run again through what we're giving away while we give folks a last-minute chance to win. Okay. So we got a Penn Stadium Neo from Penn Stadium, valued at $399. Boom. And then we also got from Flippin' Out Pinball, we've got Stern Jurassic Park player mat, valued at $90. And then also an Avengers Affinity Quest pinball art side blades accessory. very grateful for our sponsors we're going to be doing giveaways every podcast that's the plan so tune in tune in live you get rewarded and again if you're a twitch subscriber you get double the chance to win our giveaway so as a thank you for being a subscriber to the channel you get extra entry into the to the raffles every month during the podcast so here we go we're going to give this away now we're going to draw an entry the first one will be for the set of pin stadium lights here we go it's Arcade Hunters, Arcade Hunters. I just saw him in chat.
    113:19
    Do you accept? I think that's a yes. He gave a surprise. So congratulations to Arcade Hunters. We will go ahead and say we accept that. Okay.
    113:36
    Drawing up next. Lounge. Lounge, you are the winner of the, this is the player mat, the Jurassic Park player mat from Flippin' Out Pinball.
    113:51
    Congratulations, Lounge. And then our third one will be for the Avengers. He's here. He or she is here, Lounge. We'll put that as an accept. And then our final giveaway for the set of Avengers Infinity Quest side blades, courtesy of Flippin' Out Pinball. Let's go ahead. TurboGrafx7 holy crap I know he's a former owner of Avengers I don't know if he's still got it but we're going to go ahead and say that he is going to go ahead and accept that too so thanks and congratulations everybody for participating thanks so much for all of our Twitch subscribers thanks to our partners who give us these awesome prizes to give away and I think that's it if you haven't yet don't go anywhere though don't go anywhere we have Top or Tock, the moment you've been waiting for Top or Tock coming up but before that, thanks to everybody who subscribes to us on Twitch as a way to support the channel you can use your Prime Gaming account to give us a free sub every month with your paid Twitch Prime sub, or your Amazon Prime sub you can follow us on all our social media channels, you can email us at talkfanbell.gmail.com another way you can support the channel is by giving a check out to our merch,
    115:08
    buffalopinball.com. Click the merch button. You can see all the shirts and swag we have available there. You can just give a, make sure you give a thumbs up, right? On YouTube, right? Help the algorithm. That's what you got to say this. You got to do this. And when people say that, I tend to do it because I forget otherwise. But if you enjoy the content, help other people find it. Help us reach an audience. Like, comment, and subscribe. Do all the things. Let the robots know that you like this. That's right. And like it too. But you can also review us on your podcast platform of choice. All right. So in the meantime, enjoy this episode of Tiger First Dog, and we'll see you next month. Bye, y'all.
    115:50
    It's Topper Talk with Goran right now. Let's all have some fun. This is about plastic on top of your pin. Go and buy one now. There's a topper here and a topper there. Here a topper, there a topper, everywhere a topper. It's critical to the gameplay experience. You must buy one now. It's your monthly fill of toppers right now. Topper Talk with Gorin.
    116:18
    Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of Topper Talk with Gorin. The part of the podcast where Kevin and Nick give me about three to five minutes to talk about everything happening in the very active and profitable topper community. Today we'll be talking about the two different toppers for the two different editions of Jersey Jack Pinball's brand new pinball machine, Elton John. So let's head into the office and talk about that now. So here we are in the office, so let's jump into reviewing the Elton John toppers from Jersey Jack Pinball. We're first going to look at the topper for the Platinum Edition of the game, which the Platinum Edition is a new type of edition from Jersey Jack Pinball that replaces the Limited Edition line of games. and it retails for $12,000, but for Elton John, it does come with the topper, which is great. I love toppers that come with the game that you don't have to pay extra for. So this is dual-layered acrylic with LEDs. It's nothing too interactive, but it flows very nice with the art package. It overall enhances that art experience that you get with the game. It's not repeated art from down below. It's something different and new, and overall, I think it looks great. Now, where the topper really shines is on the collector's edition, which this topper comes with the $15,000 edition of the game, but it's really great looking. You have the superstar letters at the bottom that light up and interact with the game, dual LCD screens that have different footage from what's on the back box being played that interacts with the game, as well as there's a laser that projects up on the ceiling different lights.
    117:48
    And I've seen it in person at IAAPA, and it just looks great. I love it. I think it's a great topper, especially for it to come with the edition, is awesome. My biggest concern is that people have ceiling heights that are different. Some can't fit a topper. Some are way too high, and that laser light may not shine well on a super high ceiling, although I will say, from what I've seen, it looks pretty powerful, and we have this video here from Loser Kid Pinball that shows it in action.
    118:17
    It just looks really great. I love it. I think they did a great job. we can see the, you know, projecting on the ceiling as well as different imagery on the LCD, as well as the superstar letters lighting up. It really looks great. So way to go, Jersey Jack Pinball. Congratulations. I love that both models of the game have a topper, which is awesome.
    118:39
    And I can't wait to see what you come up with next. Thank you for tuning into this episode of Topper Talk with Goran. Tune into the next podcast for another episode. And as always, get out there and buy a topper. Thank you for coming to my Topper Talk.