You do realize that CGC is the same company as Churchill Cabinet, right? They've been making cabinets and playfields for many decades, so they already have the experience and tooling necessary to make widebody cabinets/playfields.

I don't know if you've seen this, but it's a fascinating look into the factory:

https://www.pinballnews.com/learn/churchill/index.html

There are certainly CNC machines and presses, but for the most part everything is hand assembled. The playfield inserts/sanding/screening/clearing are all manual processes.

Edit - I found the pic I was thinking about. Here is an original TZ playfield stamped "CCC" (Churchill Cabinet Company). So there you have it - CGC actually made some of the original TZ playfields long ago! So yes, they have all the tooling needed and perhaps even the original silkscreens.

TZ_CCC (resized).png

I think Stern does their playfields entirely in house now. The cabinets might still be CGC, Idk

I'm curious as to what is/was the deciding factor for CGC? I would think the obvious "top 10" but Cactus Canyon certainly wasn't there (nor is BBB) so it negates my theory. I remember shortly after I joined the hobby about a decade ago I'd see the "cool kids" start bragging up certain titles and it was like clock work. Prices jumped on these titles over night and the Top 10 list reflected the forum hype. Medievil Madness was one. *Hard to find* and yet the ratings jumped? Nothing odd there move along. (for the record I would love to own one)
Then there was the Circus Voltaire hype explosion. That's a rare game and that sat on the top 10 list for a good long while, now where's that on the list? Why didn't that make CGC's list? JPOP pollution syndrome? Acronym JPOPPS lol (Obviously TOTAN WAS JPOP so that's not it either)

Probably an unpopular opinion but I personally never saw the allure of TOM, TOTAN or CV. Pretty to look at? No doubt they are but having spinny/hangy toys that slow down gameplay and/or the rulesets weren't exactly deep either .... I never understood the hype. Rarity doesn't always equate to fun

And as for TZ, THAT is an interesting choice simply because of the history tied to the game. That title failed hard in the field back in the day. Vendors were practically giving them away and now look at it. #1 top 10 lister. (would love to have one)
I kind of giggle in a teeth grinding manner at the pinball business model. Slap a fat arse price tag on a pin in the name of rarity (keyword rare) and then turn around and make another run (decreasing rarity) at the same price of first release to ensure prior owners investment remains intact and no guarantee additional future runs won't happen? (which decreases rarity). Rarity drives price yes? Makes one wonder exactly what does the definition "LE" mean anymore? Is it truly LE when they make more or is there a need to dump this label all together and use something more accurate like "UE" upgraded edition or "EE" enhanced edition. There's nothing limited about unlimited runs.

I think you have some items backwards there...

It was CV that the distributors were "giving away". I don't know why you thought that was TZ. I've never heard of TZ failing. If it had, Williams would not have followed it up with a bunch more "Super Pins".

It did poor on location. At a time when the economy was harder and people were working harder for less. TZ isn't an easy pin to play on location. So it usually didn't earn good.

It was Pat's next game after Addams. So everybody, operators, distributors, manufacturer, thought it would do great. Williams made them for like 9 months.

Never heard of them closing them out, because sales were good.

CV, if you bought 3, you could get them for $1200 each.

LTG : )

TZ sold great based upon TAF. It is a high production game; ops wanted more of that "TAF Magic" at the cashbox.

But it broke like it was its job. Broken games don't earn money and TZ didn't earn. And even when working, I don't think the game had anywhere near the player appeal of TAF.

It was a bit of a disaster after TAF, especially for the 10,000 or so ops who bought one. In some ways it helped hasten the decline of pinball in the 90s...why should ops buy a new potential disaster game like TZ when Addams Family games are still earning big all over town?

Latter-day pinheads only look at production numbers and figure that 15,000 sold means it was a huge unqualified success but there's much more to the story. It was the beginning of the end in many ways. That's why you don't see Stern trying to replicate TZ, despite what the experts here think would be in their best interests. Stern knows broken games don't make anybody happy.

Talking sense on Pinside will not go over well! People who have no idea what they are talking about can make up plenty of justification for their theories.

It is exactly as you say, quite easy to change over, especially when they have all the tooling already.

?

She’s on the apron and near the bottom left

IMG_3679 (resized).jpeg

Looks more like Tim Curry.

Story boards have to be figured out for each step in production and mounted above each assembly station for what goes on or in, in that station. All parts need to be in house. Then parts sorted and placed in appropriate stations.

Then train assembly people for each station.

Run a couple games through to train assemblers and look for errors.

Then start production slowly and ramp up as everything comes together and looks good.

Change any machinery needed for things like drilling holes in the playfield.

Set up an area for sub assemblies, get parts in cue, train assemblers, get racks of those on the assembly line.

Plus a lot of stuff I'm forgetting or don't know.

Yup, pretty easy. They should be able to change over during a coffee break.

Stern took what, 6 weeks to set up a line for MMR. Just got up to speed when the factory moved. And they were back at square one and had to start over. And in that case pretty much had to hire and train a new staff of assemblers, which took another month or so.

Might be easy. For those with the experience. I'll bet it time consuming.

LTG : )

My point is CGC already have the experience and ability to change over if they wanted to. Once you have done something enough times the most difficult process becomes easy. I am sure they would not take something on unless they could do it. I am in manufacturing, I understand the internal issues.

CGC have already said many times... No widebody games.

I'm aware of it but due to quirk of licensing a different "character" no voice calls outs or normal characters.

I think Andrew was just cheap and didn’t know what he was doing…

Weaver is notoriously expensive.

David Thiel covered this in some detail on one of his podcasts when they were working on the Alien game.

I remember Twilight zone being successful when I was an arcade rat. It didn't get Addams play, but nothing did. TZ did way better than STTNG and just as good as Indy in the arcades I frequented. Every kid I knew plugged a fortune into tz. The power Ball and battling the power were way too cool to resist.

The breathy alluring female voice is about 75% of it for all of them. Been true in pinball ever since Xenon.

Because thats what Andrew was telling everyone when really he was just not wanting to spend money.

I still have a hard time believing TZ was a "failure". Maybe compared to TAF it did not earn great but that's true of pretty much every other game. I don't see how you could sell so many units if it was that bad. TZ was the first game to really capture my interest in pinball. It's been one of the most desirable games since I have been in the hobby.

Just to show up for event she requests $300,000 to $500,000 bucks. Minimum.

This is a matter of record outside pinball, she is expensive.

It didn't earn super well, it broke all the time, and it was a pain in the ass to fix. It was not popular with OPs at all. As stated, it was the hype that it was the same team as Addams. Don't forget that Addams was hyped as the same team as Funhouse too. Back then, if it wasn't popular with operators, it was a failure. Thats why when pinball was dying out in the early to mid 2000's Pat Lawlor himself said making that game like that was a mistake and hopefully they never do something like that again. In fact, I'm convinced he still felt that way even after it was proven companies could still make pretty jam packed games (like WoZ and Pirates) and thats why he pulled a lot of mechs out of JJP games and his 3 JJP games were relatively simple

"Here's a detailed and logical explanation of why TZ wasn't a huge success, despite selling 15K units."

"BUT IT SOLD 15K UNITS!"

Never change Pinside.

I think what happened then is largely irrelevant today. People focusing on that is baffling to me at the moment.

How much is it to license the title and projected demand is important right here and now.

Sure I'd agree with that.

But I just hate when people butcher and misinterpret pinball history!

I don't think it's relevant to this particular potential remake project, but it certainly still is for modern new release production games. When designers start getting carried away with BOM and "mechs," you can be sure the lessons of TZ from 30 years ago still reverberate with management. Companies want to make money. It's way more important than impressing a bunch of pinball nerds by packing in as much expensive, fragile shit as possible into a machine just to get some pop during the reveal.

Flip the argument on it's head; how many titles were utter duds back in the day but in demand now?

Frankly the fact Catus Canyon got remade is astounding.

quite a few. Thats a big reason many games command big prices now. They weren't popular so they didn't make a lot and now people have realized they are good. Its not just pinball either, this happens all the time in other hobbies. Not really worth commenting about, its just how things work sometimes. It doesn't change the fact they were failures in their heyday, even if now they are sought after rare gems.

She's super rich, even before becoming an actress (her dad used to run CBS), so she just doesn't GAF lol

My point was that in my real world experience, TZ did well in the many arcades I frequented. But maybe my zone was an anomaly.

Peter is, over in Germany, for sure.

In all the locations I operated/tech'd in, we had a TZ. And it outplayed almost all other games. Dunno where the other poster is coming from.

The problem is we have different criteria for "success".

Some consider selling a lot of machines, and those machines seeing lots of play, and see "success".
Others see the high BOM cost and the low reliability of the mechs, and see "failure".

I always saw it as a success, but I was a player back then, not an operator or a tech...

It earned, it just wasnt a stellar earner for how many problems it gave. I just checked playmeters from 1993 and it was out earned by Addams every month. By 1994 it had slipped way down while addams was still making big money.

Not aiming to argue... in the arcade where I worked and the few others I frequented, operators were able to keep TZ running- but it was right beside Addams. Over and over and over, players would come in and try the new game, then go feed Addams for the next hour. At that time, the hunger for Addams was far from satisfied.

In my opinion, if TZ was released first, we might have a Twilight Zone Gold (gold Powerball!). But again, I don't doubt the maintenance issues, so perhaps not.

And just to confirm that operators in the 1990s were heavily influenced by the pedigree of the design team, Williams marketing leaned heavily on it. After seeing profits rise with each successive pin from Lawlor et al; it was probably easy to view TZ as a let down. This is from the TZ flyer itself:

IMG_0933 (resized).jpeg

Looking at today’s data, TZ is one of the most widely owned games on Pinside. It’s *much* more widely held than the other games CGC remade. In some instances, more widely owned than those games even considering the remade machines.

For instance, there are 2992 TZ listed as owned on Pinside, but only 1251 of the original MM listed. The first batch of remakes (LE & Std) adds 749 more owners (2000 even). Even with the last set of remakes MM + MMr is only listed as owned by 2276 people.

For the record, only 2565 TAF are owned by pinsiders, and we know there are something like 6k more TAF out there than TZ.

If you compare any machine to Addams, it's a failure for sure.

Now compare tz to all other pins and you have a huge success. How did demolition man do? STTNG? How about keeping that thing running? It appears there is selective memory going on. I didn't operate, but arcades were my second home. I remember every new pin release since cyclone. TZ was a crazy, innovative, insanely fun pin that every pinhead at the time played like crazy. It was always the second to Addams and maybe an equal to Indy. I can't see other arcades being so different...

Injecting some factz

AVvXsEhyBYr2WQF1SRq_2cEZL_eXNUwTaJHge1L19HaOUnPDLHlzC9n6c7KujdzQX1lgeOjHzdFY5Bk0t6dQL6s1ITM4PVwfwo_wLvprcsKLnj4BuzMY7FHKYb1VA7I2

IMO …… most all pinball is a failure when on route. With maintenance , manpower and machine costs along with the split it’s a break even at best. You usually only have a pinball because the locations owner is requesting it.

What does the estimates sales revenue column refer to - revenue for WMS or for an operator over an average period of ownership?

It's Williams sales revenue (for those who are dying to know what WMS sold a game to distributors for, you can do the math and get a good idea - about $2350-2600 in the early 90s or $5,500 in modern dollars)

So TZ sold way more games than average, earned well according to that chart, and is a popular game. But yeah, crazy to think that is some kind of recipe for success.

All that said, Pat Lawlor has mentioned having regrets of making the game too complicated for location players. There was a lot of nervousness around player reactions during testing

Also, from what I gathered, I think this was still when Williams had decent leverage over distributors? IE you gotta buy X if you want Y. Then Popeye happened and distributors started to put their foot down about the practice or just got out of pinball...

Yeah, legends abound of ops being forced to buy garbage like Popeye if they wanted the latest Mortal Kombat, but that all came to an end as arcades were dying off wholesale, not just pinball.

Steve Ritchie on the topic

The real reason that Popeye is/was universally despised was that all of the Williams/Bally/Midway distributors were signed up to take minimum amounts of every run of machines we manufactured. They were not upset when they had to buy minimum quantities of ST:TNGs and other titles, but they were very angry that they had to take a minimum # of Popeye machines. To make matters worse, Willy raised the price of Popeye! The theme was ridiculous. Who cares about Popeye? Popeye was nothing in Europe (our second through fourth ranked markets) even when it was fresh. Not one distributor cared for the license [...]

The distributors were screaming and making threats of lawsuits and dumping Willy as a represented manufacturer. Eventually Williams canceled the minimums clause in their contracts with distribs. Popeye had a very bad stigma attached to it for a long time which, of course, was played up by our competitors. Some people say Popeye was "the beginning of the end" of pinball at Williams. It was hard to sell large runs of games after Popeye. The failure of pinball cannot be blamed on Popeye, but it sure didn't help our business.

https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.pinball/c/Brmc4Jdbn3s/m/-gE4nMsfJE4J

You had to buy 2 or 3 Bugs Bunny games if you wanted an Addams.

LTG : )

This is interesting. I dont ever remember seeing TZ much but saw lots of TAF and STTNG. I bet where you played knew how to keep them working.

EDIT I shouldn't say lots about any pinball in the 90s, but finding a TZ to play was a nice find.

worth it !!

Wild IJ shipped so many games (12k+) but you don't see it for sale often.

Also the 1st month revenue for MM showed how much of a hit it was despite only selling ~4k units.

Afm and MM were both big hits and Williams could have sold many more.

But they were already on to the next game.

Stern was the first company to figure out how to regularly rerun games when there was a demand.

Cactus Canyon wasn't a dud. It got cancelled, as did all regular form-factor pinball at Williams, in favor of the Pinball 2000 format games. Code was largely unfinished on those 903 games that got made. That's why CCC was such a huge deal. It really fleshed out how great a game CC could have been if Williams didn't shut it down midstream. It being remade allowed for those that had always wanted the game to finally own one, and a brand new one that was complete, at that.

Not all reviewers agree and I'm just using it as an example of a title that got redone when you think other more popular titles would have been done first. A reasonable assumption is low licensing cost compared to a major franchise like IJ or TZ.

How about Dragonfist? Only 302 made and it has a higher rating than CC. Again, just a random example.

BBB or TZ remakes would sell respectable numbers, Indiana Jones would sell well but I see the license on that one being difficult.

Not impossible but difficult.