Teekee, I see you just listed your BBB for sale on Mr. Pinball. Are you selling to make room for the re-fake

I would love to see PPS make original titles as well but can't see that happening for a number of reasons. The biggest reason would be that it would require PPS to assemble a full team of designers, programmers, engineers, sound and video people, etc. which would be a huge conflict of interest to Stern who does the assembly of PPS branded games. Stern wouldn't take too kindly to PPS if it sniped away any current or former employees from them and let's face it, the pool for talented pinball programmers/designers is pretty small.

What I could totally see happening would be for PPS to re-make the 5-6 titles that make financial sense to remake over the next 3-4 years. At that point I could see Rick making attempt to buy Stern Pinball and merging the two companies together. This happens all the time in other industries, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if this happened to pinball. This would give PPS full control of running both re-makes and original licensed or unlicensed titles. That's just how I see it in my crystal ball though. Things could fold out much differently in real life...

I have a feeling they will. If they remake BBB I have a feeling it will use the same board system/led lighting as MMR. I would also guess that we'll see things like ColorDMD and Shaker support added to software and wouldn't be surprised if they added additional modes or playfield features like they are planning to do with WPC 2.0. I would also imagine that they would use WPC parts vs. re-making Capcom parts which is good news for the owners of IPB BBB games as the gameplay would be slightly different.-I like the feel of WPC flippers so it wouldn't be an issue for me. It would be a different game that's for sure but it would still be really cool to see as the theme/artwork on BBB is tough to beat. If they can improve on the gameplay/software and maybe do some cool/unique stuff with the lighting it would be a very tempting purchase for many of us!

They'd still need a small team of mostly engineers and computer programmers, but it's not nearly as much work as coming up with an entirely new original pinball machine from scratch. On MMR they get the benefit of having a kick-ass Lyman Sheets rule-set without having to pay Lyman's salary and benefits. On BBB they can use Stan Fukuoka's awesome artwork without having to pay him for coming up with a whole new art package, etc.. The skill subset of the engineers/programmers that work for PPS is quite different than those employed by Stern. PPS is mostly about getting existing stuff to work in a new eco-system whereas Stern is mostly new content creation.

There's no doubt in my mind that PPS will at least look into the feasibility of producing BBBR and KingpinR. Whether they deem the project worthy of pursuing has likely yet to be determined. Keep in mind though that the Capcom Rights are essentially worthless if they don't remake the games'. It simply isn't profitable to produce parts for a game that less than 200 are in existence. If you own an existing BBB and want new parts produced for your machine, you are likely SOL unless PPS remakes BBB. I don't know what PPS paid for Capcom Rights but if they want to see any kind of return on that investment they will have to remake Capcom games.