He did a great sales job didn't he ? Business founders get rewarded by running confidence building rackets, intentional scams or not, where they purposely equate themselves with their business. If you believe in the person you also by extension believe in the company. His videos were designed to convince us he was a caring, swell guy, who just loved pinball and it worked. The problem is legally none of that was ever true if set up properly (and he for sure set it up properly). The business is the business and the founder is the founder with a large wall between them. You only get to see the wall when the business fails. He as CEO followed the law, his obligation is done, personal ethics for the mess left in its wake not warranted or legally applicable.

Painful as it is to say, they don't owe people their earnings, Haggis owes people their earnings. They are legally not Haggis.

I don't disagree with anything you have written, I would personally be devastated if my own business cost people their hard earned $s. But that's not how we define the matter legally. As they say the law doesn't care if you are a scoundrel, just that you don't break any of its rules of the game while being a scoundrel.

""Everything else in his plan depended on being able to sell through those games to establish his foothold. How he was going to do that from a tiny industrial unit with no team and no manufacturing capabilities is anyone’s guess."

It's a common strategy from the software contracting world. You sell the idea, then build it to order by assembling a team to make it happen after you sell it. Damien probably just didn't realize the significance of what it means to build complex integrated hardware project at scale vs what it meant to spin up a software project. The transition from one-off build to production ready assembly design and processes is what sinks most of these startups.

Not really called out.. but I think he grossly over estimated the interest in Celts. He kept pushing it long after it's moment for gaining interest was past. Maybe in hindsight he was hoping to-order Celts was cash flow in an otherwise non-existent sales forecast.

Moving on from Celts should have been the key... but obviously they bit on the remake model which I presume he under-estimated the scale of the design work at the time of the decision (hence the cabinet talk in the interview). I don't think the remakes were a bad idea, but no company survives inability to ship and escalating costs... especially in the face of a declining market. I'd probably pin competition more than COVID on crushing their potential. COVID you could spend your way out of... a new market place they couldn't.

It seems the crush of needing more work to design Fathom without really having a income stream and proper capitalization is what started the spiral. JJP suffered through this with their slow releases in their #2 and #3 titles.. but Jack was able to go back to the WoZ well a few times and still eventually had to find outside money and help before they could get their production capabilities smooth with a steady pipeline. Pinball factories can't run for 6 months, stop for 18mon, and expect to just wake up again like nothing happened.

So I'm pretty sure it's a given that there will be no more Fathoms built beyond this point. Do we have any hard #'s on how many were built and delivered? Is there a database with serials to show that number?

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/haggis-fathom-tracker-

.... also, Australia isn't really a manufacturing nation any more. The remoteness, lack of specialisation and cost of labour were all foreseeable risks, but contributed to the business failure in any event

If product #1 fails you had better have ALOT of money to give you the runway to get to product #2. They didn't. In fact it wasn't clear they had any money. Still not clear how they filled their parts bins (that they threw a lot out of per the kineticist article) to begin with..

Fixed monthly costs will eat you alive for making that mistake. You see this all the time, wrongly forecasting demand. Took down Peleton too.

It's quite shocking how small their production space was. Never saw those pictures before.

I see undercapitalized businesses go under all the time. Lack capital is death. It takes time to become profitable, usually more than you think..

So...considering one off prototypes are all that were made, and I urge you to go back and re-read all the posts pertaining to this, is there a Centuar Revisited in North America or not? I want you to study up, think real hard, and then come back with your answer.

More like - you need to expect product #1 to not pay the bills.. and plan for product #2 to maybe not get you there either.

With the initial investment needed to build these products, especially when starting from zero... your costs for the first generation are going to make profitability virtually impossible. Even when you have a 'hit' - your startup costs are still likely to bury you. And you must assume your product will be dodgy due to lack of experience... so support and post sales costs will be higher than normal too. So anyone who counts on product #1 to get you to positive cash flow is doomed. You need to weather those "investment" periods to get your capabilities up to the level to be able to produce product at the level your customers expect.

This is where the choice to pivot to a remake had a huge cost to Haggis.. having to basically start over a second time, losing ground gained with Celts with regards to prior work. But here, the opportunity to chase huge potentials with well known Bally titles is a decision worth considering.

Where the money is coming from is always a secret in these startups. Dutch is another example of where it seemed impossible given the $$ involved, yet somehow individually or through partners they kept pouring money in enough to keep it alive.

Externally we can estimate what the math looks like with big round numbers.. and know when things look irrational (IE like when deeproot was boasting about their burnrate). Sad thing is, the faithful in the community look at such analysis as 'haters' or whatever instead of acknowledging that a pinball startup still lives in the real world... and the challenges they face are in fact shared with other businesses too. You don't need to be a pinball company founder to know you can't count on selling 10x the size of the entire current market to break even..

You know there is a game. Don't appreciate your condescension.

Exactly. At least Dutch was able to make the same game with the same sunk costs for a long time. Yet to see if they can keep going, they will need another big hit IMO.

You guys are arguing over semantics. No retail Haggis Centaur made it to North America. Time to move on

Ya. I think that was established long ago.

Its almost as if I said that:

and it was answered with the nonsensical response of

so no, it wasn't established. I think its just important that we have the facts straight here.

There were no production Centaurs. Prototypes are the only Centaurs that exist. There is a prototype in North America. To suggest multiple times that there are none in NA is simply false. Again, only prototypes exist, so to say no production Centaurs exist in North America is technically true, but true in the same way that no flying unicorns exist in North America is also a factual statement.

And it's also ok to just say we have no idea how many prototypes were built - we know of at least 2 (or is it 3?).

Just like we have no idea how many actual Fathoms were left to build. Somewhere between 20 and 120. That's a huge range.

The lack of knowledge is no ones fault but Damian's - as he has been piss poor at communicating all along.

I don’t get you man. Are the Haggis production Centaurs supposed to be flying unicorns, because everyone knows unicorns don’t fly (that’s Pegasus), so are you implying no Centaurs exist at all? That’s counter to what you just said! So which is it?

He always had the best intentions at least!

I agree, but we do have a much better idea on how many Centaurs were built than the fathoms. Theres at least 2 confirmed as far as I'm aware of. There may have been another 2-3 in various stages of completion/prototyping that could count too but still a little in a dark there. I suspect we'll know eventually. Its a lot easier to keep track of a handful of engineering samples than dozens to 100+ games.

I’d be interested to hear more about whether Jeff Teolis got a Centaur as was alluded to earlier in the thread.

...With The Best Intentions.

Yawn. Wake me up when you schmucks get taken by the next start up pinball ponzi scheme. Noone to blame but yourselves if you lost money to this clown. Bonus points for those that signed up for the long term exclusive member club and put down money on multiple future planned titles. One look at Damian and I thought, “I didn’t know jpop had a brother”. I’ll just cut and paste this post when it inevitably happens again. Rinse and repeat.

America's Sweetheart, over here.

Sorry, but you people need some tough love.
[removed]

does tough involve using adjectives as nouns? if so, i don't know if it's for me.

Just kidding on the last part. You already got that from Damian, Jpop, Robert Mueller, skitb, etc etc etc.

It’s getting weird in here

Hey, anyone know where I can put a non refundable deposit down on a Back to the Future pin?

No chance

while generous, i hereby decline your offer.

No, but how do you feel about Japanese assassins and/or celestial events?

Not sure if his inch is classified as "generous"

as i'm sure he's heard before, it's the thought that counts.

Hey, it may not be very long but at least it lacks girth.

a deep rooting changes a person

IMG_4933 (resized).jpeg

Oh snap

Even some of our brightest bulbs were fooled by the spectacular Deep Root charm offensive!

(not me though. I was always pretty sure it was a bunch of bullshit)

Watching Cary unbox that Centaur and peeling all that plastic off, makes it look more like a production game than a prototype. Who boxes up a prototype like that?

IMG_3892 (resized).jpeg

You got Deeprooted bro

IMG_3891.gif

Same here. That post was out of context. I never thought anything but scam from the beginning with deeproot. I was trying to sucker a fan boy into betting with me that deep root wouldn’t ship by a certain date. I tried to instill false hope that they would ship by a slightly longer timeframe for him to bite. Not one of my proudest moments. I did think that with all that money being thrown around that Blobert would ship to a select few at some point. That has always been standard operating procedure for these scams. Send out a few one offs to the biggest cheerleaders and call them early production games to gain legitimacy to buy some time and keep the fish on the hook. I was also drinking pretty heavily then.

A con man.

I never made that bet. And I sure as heck never put a deposit down with any start up

c'mon, you're amongst friends. you can just fess up and remove your foot from your mouth, so we can carry on.

Like I said, I always assume these scams get a few games shipped to gain legitimacy and keep them going to maximize grift. I underestimated deep roots complete lack of competence to even do that much. But really, his grift was more on a bunch of old retirees than the pinball community.

I will also admit to, at one point, thinking deep root would “manage to get a few out the door” before collapsing completely.

Nobody was counting on the pinbar. Nothing could overcome that.

My guy, if you're trying to grift money from people, there's way better ways to do it than spending tens of thousands making pinball machines to trick people into thinking you'll be making more of them. So much assumption of malice when hanlon's razor says it all.

I'd start an MLM scheme or something instead.

Well then, i take back what i said, you didn't actually fall for their scam. And I applaud your premeditated and calculated deception of a fellow Pinsider in an effort to win $50

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Schroedinger's cop-out.