Max Headroom! I'd love to see a game where you assist him in taking down the modern (or retro-modern) capitalistic advertising monopoly, only to have it go gleefully too far and become a nightmare, and the only person who can stop him from utterly devastating the world is you. Sort of like WarGames, but via pinball and with more satirical stabs at Coca-Cola.

Welcome to Chipped, everyone's favorite cooking game show! Each cooking round is a timed ball, and the better you do, the more rounds you get. At the start of a round, you're given three ingredients, which start out normal and progress to comically bizarre (round 15: all spiders), and you have to hit certain shots to make your dish correctly. As you progress, you watch your dish be cooked and assembled in the in-playfield screen via Cooking Mama-esque animations, but watch out! If you hit the wrong shots, you'll goof up. At the end of the round, your dish is presented to the judges (parodies of people like Alex Guernaschelli), and you have to stay above a certain cumulative judging score to stay in the game. For an easter egg, hit only the shots you're not supposed to and create a lethal dish! Kill all three judges to start dead judge frenzy, which scores negative points and puts you on a separate high score roster.

edit: and how about Willy Wonka? Since the musical is transferring to Broadway, that would open up a lot of options for music and freshly-recorded dialogue. It could be a progressive game - first you have to qualify and collect all five golden tickets. Each golden tickets starts a bonus scoring, e.g. every time you hit a bumper, Augustus eats another chocolate bar and his weight increases (accompanied by an appropriate DMD animation), or every time you flip the spinner Violet gets another brand deal, or every time you circle the mixing funnel Veruca's dad buys her another (increasingly ludicrous) thing, or every time you hit the side standups with the upper flipper Charlie collects another piece of garbage, etc. While doing this, you count down the clock to open the factory, build towards Wonkamania frenzy (which awards more points the closer you are to opening the factory, and becomes a post-drain bonus if you don't collect it before doing so), and collect random awards from the wheel, which is themed as a professor's high-tech gold-finding machine (if unlucky, it strikes out and grabs a gold filling from a passerby, awarding you nothing).

Once the factory gates are open, you enter and play through a chocolate room multiball before moving on to dispatching the kids. Examples: Augustus goes first, naturally, and in this hurry-up mode you build the pressure on the tube to send him up the pipe. Violet's mode is a looping shot, in which you must roll her to the juicing room before she explodes, and functions as an inverse hurry-up - the longer you take to get her there, the higher the payout, unless she explodes, in which case you only get a little bit (for what can be "scooped up"). Mike is a video mode (duh).

Also in the factory are glass elevator modes, which take you to non-kid rooms and award you bonuses and mini-modes and whatnot. This and the gold-finding random awards wheel both give you a mini wizard mode upon completion. You can ride the boat (a lightshow hurryup), light the lickable wallpaper standups (snozzberries!), and so on. When you've done away with all the kids, you enter the final wizard mode, which is where all the bonuses built up before entering the factory come into play, as well as everything else accomplished. Like LITZ, this is a timed all-ball multiball frenzy, the aim of which is to build the speed of the glass elevator, and as the balls drain you watch the animation to see how far the elevator goes ("Gee, Mr Wonka, we've gone straight to the moon!" "Never underestimate the power of chocolate, Charlie"). A high score nets you a free everlasting gobstopper (gumball), if the operator has it enabled.

Alternately, Tom of Finland.

My prediction for Dialed In was a little off - I was guessing it'd be a little more cyberpunky, with an in-game Siri-esque voice either assisting you or battling you (from the "Killer App" license). But the stuff I was thinking about would fit super nicely with Max Headroom. The art could be a throw-back to the 80s, and feature a holographic talking-head Max in a two-way screen at the back of the playfield. Maybe he enlists you to help bring down the fascistic consumerist overlords ("ca-ca-ca-catch the wave!") that have essentially taken him hostage, so the modes are based around blowing up Coca Cola's headquarters and stuff like that.

Eventually, you discover that Max's ultimate plan is to convert all technologically linked-in humans to digital form and set off all the nuclear bombs in the world, and then lord it up over them like the computer in Ellison's "I Have No Mouth", so naturally you have to work against him while he turns the tables on you, activating magnets and raising ramps by detecting where the ball is while mocking you. If you defeat him, you see a little animation of an idyllic society full of people drinking Coke or something, and one of them is Max Headroom. He winks at you, or says a quip or something, and the game glitches and re-sets, this time with a slightly different, tougher ruleset.

If you lose, maybe the game takes a picture of you and shows you trapped in cyberspace or something like that, idk. The match game could be a guy watching a blipvert and exploding, and his splattered guts form a number.

Though I think the movie itself was hobbled by not having Tim Burton at the helm like planned, it's still wicked, creative, and funny, and I wouldn't be surprised if it had been kicked around as a theme concept at some point when it was new. It'd be even cooler now that we have LCDs, and the game basically creates itself - "survive" a series of satirical TV shows to battle Spike while receiving help from your kids, who are watching, and Spike's rebellious underlings. Imagine it - a Sado-Masochistic Theater 3000 mode with little devil-horned Mike/Bots on the bottom of the screen, heckling the player.

Also, less likely but still fun - "Amadeus Superstar", in which you play a pop-star Mozart on his rebellious, outrageous exploits, rising in the Viennese music scene, featuring his music revamped with a pop edge. There could be a little toy piano in the lockbar where you have to mash the lit chords with one hand to light multipliers, or something. Receive mystery awards from the hooded stranger, build your popularity, and eventually battle Salieri to claim the music throne.

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Since I'm a huge dork (lol I wish I could make this for real...I'd play it!):

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