.

Hell, people won't even buy a game when shown a flipping machine - WOOLY.

"Tell me when I can pick it up" is the line now.

Yea, but all of those people were competent. JPop is clearly incompetent. JPop pretty clearly has some sort of personality disorder that is pretty serious. Not sure if he could even get and hold a job at Wal Mart.

As it SHOULD BE!

And, btw, that goes for the future jpops of the world, but also DO and JJP and even Stern.

You think Stern might do a little better on code at release if they weren't preselling the entire allotment of Le models in MINUTES? If buyers wanted to SEE and TOUCH working machines?

Yeah, I know, pie-in-the-sky that pinheads can exhibit that kind of self control...

I feel bad that some of the owners think the *noise* in the thread isn't helpful. Sure, lots of repetition and stupid comments, but this is the internet not a board room.

Here, everyone has the privilege of expressing their opinion.

Ease up a bit with attacking each other. Don't take out the anger and hurt on your buddies. We ALL love pinball here. We ALL think JPop is a bag of shit. We ALL appreciate what wcbrandes and the volunteers tried to do.

There will always be assholes on the internet that take a little joy in rubbing someone's face in a mistake, but if you can't handle that and let it roll off your back, I might suggest that you aren't mature enough for an open communication forum.

I don't think that's actually true. WOOLY had two main problems:

1) It was just too expensive. It's harder to sell people on a game that costs that much, especially with no pedigree. No theme people were dying for, no famous artist or designer.

2) They didn't travel with it. I think it might have been at one show besides Expo? It's tough, takes time and money to do that. But I think people were thinking more "I'm not buying it without trying it first".

And I think that's fine. Look, pre-orders are a risk. With anyone. But you have to evaluate the reasonableness of the risk. WOOLY has Spooky as builders, that's a known quantity. There's a flipping game, not something on a piece of paper. They had a "we're only doing this if we get enough support" model that was reasonable. There's real code, and a lot of it. The music is an unknown, but that's a solvable problem.

I think decided to "risk it" on something like that is fine. It's still a risk! But you're not dumb for doing it, you're seeing what's there and real, and deciding to take a shot.

I'm not going to say I told you so or finger point, but I think that with something like Zidware there's no way anyone will pre-order a game that they can't at least SEE first. Playing it yourself is great too, but you should at least see a photo and video of the game. Flipping, with art, shots, etc. Buying into a dream that's nothing more than an idea is what's crazy. Even if it gets built, what if you hate the art and style of play?

I recall exactly how I got hooked up with the Zidware train.

John had seen the episode of my show where Jeri Ellsworth and I were building pinballs and he emails something to the effect of "hey we should hang out sometime and I'll show you how it's really done!" (typical John-as-teacher BS)

An eye-roller now, but at the time OMG IT'S THEATER OF MAGIC GUY!

His idea with BHZA was to make the zombie theme everyone was clamoring for, and get younger / videogame crowd interested. As ICEMAN mentions, there are plenty of more photogenic people than myself who could have served this purpose ("Olivia Munn Let's Kill Zombies" maybe?) but whatever.

There weren't any "smoking guns" back then so can't help you there. John and I worked together, in either his or my shop, maybe a total of 10 times. Never saw a flipping MG, only early whitewoods. All built "flat" on a bench, I wondered why he didn't at least try things at 6.5 degrees. Never saw RAZA past flat pencil sketches.

He had a lot of crazy BAD ideas. Like a giant BEN head on the PF with arms sticking out. I thought he was kidding until, sure enough, MG has a stupid wizard head with arms sticking out.

--------------------------

I may have said a homebrew can be slapped together for a few grand, but nobody manufacturing a game has a BOM that low, not even Stern. Remember homebrewers will always have used parts, old cabinets, etc.

I still contend the best way forward with all of this is to let it die.

I agree, it's not usual for people to institute radio silence so early in a project. Normally they do that after they get your preorder money! I am still waiting to hear where all 3 prototypes are, that's what I'm most curious about.

Where is the Kiss proto now?

Kim is right. Same thing happened in the Predator thread. Everybody started targeting the cheerleaders, and it's easy to see why. Kevin Kulek, and now John, are nowhere to be found, and people are upset and want their pound of flesh, so they settle for the "next best thing".

No one other than John took your money. Whatever anyone said "seven months ago" was still well past the promised date of these games and after years of nothing but teaser photos. Hell, the first WTF-I'm-out in all this was when my friend told me had to sign a NDA to get in. Let me get this straight: I pay some guy 10k and I can't talk about it? What kind of goofball baloney is that?

Then he raised the number of MGs (a major screw job for the original 13). Then Ben Heck left the project. Then he announced another game. And then another, even after not delivering game 1. And then he tried to a fourth. Red flags everywhere. Then not returning phone calls and emails. None of the chearleaders had anything to do with that.

Some Predator people are now even saying PINSIDE is partly to blame for everything because they somehow legitimized Kevin's operation by giving him a sub-forum.

At the end of the day, you made the choice to send John money and it sucks, but you got duped by John.

I am currently on page 224, two weeks ago in Pinside's equivalent to War and Peace (the length, TYVM)

I just wanted to jump ahead and say I have been thinking about some day in the future, when perhaps one of our children does something really stupid to the community, we will refer back go the MG, RAZA, AIW fiasco from 2015 and look back at this time in history and realize we were part of it.

Not necessarily a fond memory at all, but a huge part of pinball history nonetheless.

Sheesh, I will be 70 in 2035. In case I am reading this again in 2035...hi

I disagree in a big way. Was anyone else at expo to see Johns presentation before he started collecting money (2008 or 9 I can't recall) Thats when it was obvious to me, that Jpop is an "artist" of sorts, and not a competent business man. There is nothing wrong with that as long as a man knows his limitations. To me, it seems there was and is a lot more wishfull thinking coming from pinheads. Master illusionist? Not so much.

Cues slideshow of squirrel.

I doubt if Bill will post any more info here. He must feel every time he opens his mouth he gets the equivalent of an extended
prostate exam.

He'll probably just talk in the private "owners" group and avoid us rubberneckers and armchair QB's... those guys in the group have actually lost real money so it seems fair to me.

...

or else he's got no clue as to what qualifies as a nearly complete game....

Well, you certainly won't get a thread eject with an attitude like that.

I agree, even if somebody picks it up to run with it, how much trouble will John be in the future? Will he start trying to sue if you make it successful?

I think it would be reasonable for the cabs and playfields to be auctioned off to people who want to build a custom game themselves (same with Raza). Even the code could be provided as open source to finish and customize. Efforts are better spent elsewhere than trying to resuscitate this project. I think this could come out of the bankruptcy proceedings anyway.

That's perfectly fine. Let's just be sure he doesn't use pinside to sell standard mg's that his plan relies on to give mg/raza/aiw their zidware credits.

That is a strange way to try to sell 199 machines. It is only uncomfortable for him to post here because he has no answers or evasive ones about the important questions.

The point I was trying to make, which I did poorly, was that it was doable. Those who say 'this was doomed from the start' are wrong, the p-roc guys, spooky and DP have shown it can be done (at least getting to a functioning prototype in a year or so) and spooky has shown you can get them built without building out a massive factory.

John had far more knowledge and experience on what it takes to design and engineer a game, so there is no excuse that four years and a million dollars spent, that things are where they are. It really gets back to in his inability to manage complexity, to have deadlines that drive things to completion and force the tough decisions. John never made tough decisions, he wanted his cake and to eat it too, and now he has neither.

This was possible, John was just not the guy who could drive it, and that was something folks did not realize or do the due diligence on. The wanted to believe, and you know, that is not necessarily a bad thing, even if it has turned out poorly.

I think in the beginning most people had a sense that some boutiques would sink and some would swim, it was inevitable. Through all the pain of lost money, at least we gave Spooky the ability to show they could swim. It was just a painful process to find out. John's project is tougher than the others because he managed to make it encompass 3 expensive projects and hit the same people multiple times in some cases.

We definitely need to keep on top of the other new guys and make sure they are on target. TBL should be watched closely, given the warnings we were given by Phil. I haven't kept up with TBL and where it stands, but we should be clamoring for gameplay videos etc. at this point and a specific status report including the exact items holding up the project.

I am pretty confident with Heighway, partly because Aurich is on the inside and he is a straight shooter.

Here's the problem: in the "old world model" a new business venture would have their business plan "pressure tested" when they went to the bank or investors to borrow money. They'd certainly get a "financial prostate exam" before they ever got a penny. Many bad ideas died right there.... And some good ideas, but not fully thought out....

In today's "crowd-funding world" - that pressure testing doesn't happen in any formal sense. A sexy idea has oftentimes been enough to raise millions of dollars by people without the first idea of how to execute. No sense boring people here with some obvious examples.

So, expect to get your "pressure testing" right here from now on. And, let's be honest, if a business venture can't answer questions HERE- on a pinball forum!!- how the f+€€+ are they going to make it in the real world. Too much heat in this kitchen? Need to fall back to a secret Facebook page or something? Get ready for failure.

After the mixed (to put it politely) reception to the machine at the show... I think that ship has sailed.

My thoughts: boutique shops like these should be able to get pre-orders so they know where they stand when they are going to make big investsments. It makes their efforts viable. But we should all stop pre payments on those orders.

If the plan is good, and there are a lot of pre-orders, just let the pinball manufacturers to be go to a bank. They will provide the money, but they have also some leverage and can demand more info. Also, when something like this happens the only one that is responsible for the money is the owner of the shop, not the customers that have no say or do in the business at all.

As for TBL: I am Dutch so I really would like to see them succeed, but what worries me is - and it is said on this page already about Spooky - the only thing I really see them do is go to shows with their prototypes. That costs a LOT of money. Seeing that it was proven that they (DP) said they were going to ship the BoP 2.0 stuff (pictures of the boxes were shown) and later it was proven that there were invoices for the mainboards that had to be in those packages with a date on it that was months later, I really do not see how they are going to have enough money left to go to production of TBL. I think that is why they go to the shows: to get more money to proceed.

As I said: I really really want it to become a reality, but I also know how much money everything costs and if you get a lot of pre-payments at first the Sky is the Limit. Until it is all gone...

No pre-payments anymore from me. They can get a pre-order but thats it.

Annnd notice Ben doesn't own TOM anymore

On an upcoming ben heck show, you should wear your BHZA tshirt and "accidentally" spill paint all over it "ooooh shucks, that's going to have to get thrown away"

I keep thinking the same thing thing, and I believe it is still very possible for someone to complete this game. People may not see it, but there is quite a bit to work with here. Granted it's nowhere near where it should be after 4 years, but most of the hard work is done. I wonder what would happen if 3-4 guys from the P-ROC forums were to take it over? Hmmm. Hell, I'd be interested, just to see if it could be done.

I think everyone will feel better when Full Throttle ships. I know Andrew will! I can tell you that I'm definitely seeing the insanity up close. There are just so many moving parts, and so many things that can go wrong. Things totally outside of your control.

Andrew brought up the ball guide example. The samples he got were fine. Then the whole batch came in and looked like crap. And he couldn't assemble playfields without ball guides. The vendor basically put him in a tough place, and he had to find a new one. Luckily they came through, and fast, but at any moment you're at the mercy of things like that.

And there's only so much you can do. You pick people who seem good, they show you the right stuff, but the proof is in the final delivery. Manufacturing really is a difficult business. I heard another crazy factory story yesterday, I'll let Andrew share it when he's ready. Luckily it wasn't a show stopper, but still, I was just shaking my head. Crazy stress.

Meanwhile as Andrew has said, Alien is slow right now because we're working through the process with Fox. A license adds a whole new layer of complexity, approvals mean you often have to wait for one part to run through the channels before you can go to the next one. There was that silly thread about having Jeremy do the art for Alien instead of me. I took no offense, really, but I also knew that it didn't matter, it wasn't even possible. Hand drawn art couldn't run through the license process.

License work. Factory work. Two things John never had to contend with. He has the "easy" parts!

Yeah, Phil knew that they weren't taking working with the licensors seriously, warned us the guys were just living the rock star lifestyle without giving 2 shits about their responsibilities. They seemed to get their act together after that bombshell, but who has been watching them lately? Roger Sharpe? Anyway this is kinda derailing so should probably stick to JPop games here, but you know... concerns about this sort of thing permeate all boutique projects.

You don't know Gene very well. I worked very closely with him as did a number of other people here. Gene was not a great businessman and had zero experience manufacturing anything let alone a pinball machine. You're looking at the result and making a lot of bad assumptions about how it got there. Ask some of the people close to the project. Even with all the parts BBB would not have been completed without some hard working, smart pinheads that jumped in and got it on track. One of which Kerry, Gene screwed in the end. So yeah, for some reason there are too many shady characters in pinball.

The big challenge is that the effort and expense to take a game to production is massive. If you have any custom parts, you have to make/buy these all up front, only way to do it. So a boutique firms needs to validate demand, and currently pre-order is the way to do that. Just having a list of 'yes I will buy' is not the same as 'yes I will buy and here is my deposit' (which is still not 100% sticky). If we had some history, in the boutique world, of what percentage of those who say "yes, I will buy it" actually follow through and are not just full of crap and/or wanting to reserve a place in line 'just in case' they decide, then future boutiques could use a 'list' to get a sense of demand and determine viability without requiring large deposits or total pre-pay.

This does mean the boutique needs to come up with money to buy all of the custom parts, and enough of the standard parts to get a dozen or so machines done, and then using that money from those sales to get the next dozen done. The boutique maker though has to feel that the 'demand' based on that list is reasonable enough (given assumptions about how many will drop out) to justify mortgaging their house or taking out a business loan etc.

Post development of the game, you are likely looking at a 150 to 200 thousand dollars, to fund the first 25 machines or so, depending on how many custom parts you have (as well has having the necessarily facilities and tools to assemble, etc. -- not included in that number). Again, this is after development of the game. So, bottom line, with the 'death of pre-order payments', if you can't come up with a couple of hundred thousand, then you should probably not be dipping your toe in the boutique pond.

I agree completely about watching TBL like a hawk. I told my friend who is in he should hang on to the refund and buy it when it's actually released. Gambling 10k for a rug isn't worth it.

I would pass on this and start over If I planned on making it work. I suspect the "value" of whats done is not as valuable as people think. First lets scrap the cab.... the wheel was already invented, and the new wheel is barely different, let alone better. How many other parts fit this example?

The best idea I can think of, is to try and get some money back (slim chance) and go buy from Spooky.

It kills to birds with one stone, you get a new boutique game, and annoy Jpop by supporting Spooky

I'm going to start saving now, for a future Spooky game.

And maybe use standard cab, glass, parts, etc?

Nah, I was thinking....maybe, unicorn bones for that super rare boutique feel.

While I agree there are things on the game that need to be scrapped, it's hardly worth scrapping the entire game and starting over. Some things would be easy to cut costs on, others not so much. Sure you could ditch the custom cabinet, but how are you going to fit that huge LCD on the PF then? To keep the integrity of the game some things need to be changed. In this case the custom cabinet was a necessity. That being said even the custom cabinet could be changed to be less "innovative" and more cost effective. I wouldn't be interested in continuing the original vision of the "16K game", but rather refine and finish off what could potentially be an 8k game. It would be very possible if the rights could be picked up for decent price at the bankruptcy auction.

First and foremost, I would like to express my deep gratitude to everyone who dedicated their time and effort to help bring Magic Girl to light. Without everyone's effort this would not have been possible.

I would also like to personally thank everyone who believed and supported me in this endeavor.

After working and speaking with a lot of you, who know pinball development inside and out, and finally getting an opportunity to see how far along Magic Girl really is, I have decided that it is not worth my effort or finances to move this to completion.

Despite the fact that I'm not going to continue with MG, I do not regret the investment I have made as I hold the friendships cultivated at a much higher value.

Thanks again for all your support and patience.

Best regards,
Bill

Maximum respect, Bill.

Sad, really. Thanks for trying.

Frolic to you too. Helped more than you know

Can't say I'm shocked. Another well intended hopeful soul chewed up and spit out by the zidware machine.

does this mean it is finally dead and peoepl can focus all efforts on going after Jpop?

Please tell me the answer is a resounding YES!

Have at it.

It's the right call Bill. You know I never wished you anything but luck, but it was simply an insane thing to attempt, and was stacked against you from the very beginning. You tried, I applaud you for it, but walking away is a decision you won't regret.

So, since we all want to know, what happens to the MG proto? Back to John?

No its still on west coast getting analyzed. Its probably best to either keep it here till everything is worked out or if everyone wants it back in Johns possession then fine with this too.

Sorry to hear that but obviously it's the right decision.

So what happens to the game now? Does it go back to Willy Wonka at the Dream Factory?

Fat lady sings!!!!
So where's the nw pinball show game now?
Did bill give Jpop enough cash to keep the lights on a little longer or pay his lawyer he will need a retainer?

Bill, since you love the hobby and would like to produce some machines, why not invest some with the people over at Spooky?
They seem to be on a winning track.
Just an idea.

Good call bro.

So it's all over then, right? Unless there's someone out there who is crazy enough to adopt this thing at this point.