I bought Asteroids and Star Raiders. All sorts of stuff in the landfill.

Managed to get Asteroids cartridge to work again! It did smell however...

MG folks got calls from AP before Expo , any MG people get updates after Expo - progress, timing, anything?

Did anyone go into the private room that American Pinball had set up at Expo...care to share any details?

Some MG owners did apparently, I never got a call, others have said the same thing.

Now that it's all over but the screaming...

This last month has been quite exciting for me. I'm not a journalist (as many nice, wonderful human beings have already commented), just a guy who loves pinball and wanted to deliver a good scoop to the pinball community. I never thought the people at American Pinball would take me seriously, so when they responded to my inquiry about the machine I used every last dime I had to go to Vegas and check it out.

It was a strange trip, too! Unlike any of my other Vegas excursions. I hardly drank, didn't gamble (okay $20 on a spin poker machine)... I tried my best to stay focused and do what I came to do, and no
matter what anyone says, I did what I set out to do.

Now that it's all over with... I wonder if I did get punk'd a little bit. Maybe Thunderbolt Levi is correct; maybe they didn't get a "real" journalist to come in and check it out because I'm a nothing nobody who would be dazzled by the proverbial, non-flipping box of lights.

But as dazzled as I was (and I was yawl, good god I was), I was actually more excited by Joe Balcer's presence! That dude has been involved with so many incredible pins, I was really having a hard time holding my fanboy-ness to myself.

Do you know how HARD it was for me to keep my mouth shut about that? They weren't sure of what Joe's involvement was going to be, so they didn't want me to mention him. Even though I was dying inside to do so! I think that would have legitimized things so much.

But, alas. And of course I had to go and get a month ban the day before the reveal. Probably for the best though, as I would have gone apeshit on the naysayers.

And speaking of: I really, really, really don't get the naysayers. I understand people being pissed about JPOP. But it almost seems to me that people would rather be on some "I told you so! JPOP sucks!" shit than to actually see people get their Magic Girls, or see Houdini come to light. And that makes me sad. I really, really wanted this to be a happy ending, a cinderella story, not to be all negative and solemnly swear that no good will come of this.

And then Expo happened.

I don't know or even remotely understand why it went from being shown in a cabinet to just the playfield on a table. I don't know what happened to the Magic Girl promise. I feel like a sucker. And that sucks because it ended up validating the naysayers.

So here we are. I still hope with all my evil might that people will get their Magic Girls. I hope that Houdini will be made. But that hope is fading fast.

Big ups to Minus World and Mr68. You were both very helpful in my time of need.

I finally heard back from the court clerk in Cook County, IL.

The complaint, JPOP's answer, and JPOP's motion to dismiss (which may be based on the whole "American Pinball is building them" premise) run a total of 496 pages.

The cost for a copy of all three of those documents is $130.50.

I'm curious about the details, but not that curious.

Imagine how much further along AP would be had they just hired Joe in the first place.

They'd be right where they are now, but a year ago

Ben, did you talk to the American Pinball camp at all at Expo?

Please take no offense when I say,

What the hell are you babbling about?

I'm the guy who wrote this: http://www.pinballnews.com/news/americanpinball2.html

Hope my babbling has context now.

O.k. Just read all that. Didn't know you were involved in pinball News. I listened to their talk at Expo and asked a few questions. Also saw the playfield. I wasn't at all impressed with them as a company or Houdini. Sure it looked pretty, but it didn't seem like it was gonna work. A little surprised you bought into their hype.

In reading through your article, it is glaring that the perception you portrayed for AP is that if they somehow cover all the "Magic Girl" loss, then all of the JPop concerns will go away and it's Happy Days Are Here Again. It's clear that the problem is a good bit deeper than that.
There are more stakeholders in the Zidware collapse than just the few Magic Girl customers. Making Magic Girl buyers "whole" is certainly a nice offer, but it leaves a good bit more of us High and Dry.

I'm a little surprised myself, frankly. But again, I tried to give the people a scoop, and I think I did. Really wish I could have said or shown more, but ah well.

This is true, this is very true. The way I imagined the scenario was:

-MGs get made for the MG buyers.
-Houdini goes on sale.
-AIW / the zombie game owners get credit towards Houdini or the next pin
-JPOP gets out of the shithole he dug for himself, makes more games
-Joe Balcer keeps JPOP in line

That doesn't explain how Zombie Yeti gets paid. Or Wolfmarsh. I don't like that, but I was hoping that the above things would happen and then behind the scenes, other people would get their due. Am I naive? I probably am. But I like I said, I love a good Cinderella story. I think a person with your avatar could appreciate that.

Wow! Just wow. A perfectly run pinball company would be lucky to be profitable within a few game titles. The idea that one could start up and be so profitable that they could literally give away machines to people is ridiculous. What is it about Jpop that makes people completely lose their minds???

I did.

Scott worked with JPOP at Zizzle.
Scott knows JPOP's potential.
Finds someone with a lot of money and access to cheap hardware

I guess it's because JPOP makes great games is that people lose their minds. And what I saw in Vegas sure looked purty. I drank the Kool-aid too, right? But at least I got off my ass and did something.

Did you register your concerns that you've mentioned on Pinside with them? I know you claimed to be physically hurt by the Houdini playfield.

I said HI and shook hands with the owners that's about it.

Joe and I talked about the state of the game, he clearly knew what was up.

He clearly knew what was up when I met him as well, but it seems like something changed between when I talked to him and when you did.

(He also spoke very highly of Spooky)

I also spoke with Joe. He for sure knows there were a lot of issues with the playfield layout.

And so maybe this is where I got the cards-close-to-the-vest treatment versus what you got.

Welcome back! Must have been hell of a rollercoaster.

As they say in poker, "If you’ve been in the game 30 minutes, and you don’t know who the patsy is, you’re the patsy." -- Warren Buffett.

patsy (resized).jpg

Boy between this and the neg bombing, I'm feeling the love.

I'll give ya some....You did your best and gave an effort. A good thing!

First, thanks for making the effort of getting us the first info on the game.

Second, it's wild to see how effective a box of lights can be. This carried John for years. We've concluded in this thread it also fooled the new people at AP.

It will be interesting to see what Joe can do with it, but in the end, he was involved with another pinball startup that took many years to get a new game design of his out the door.

The idea that they can just bang these things out is comical.

At every stage we've been ready to believe that things are different, but the proof is in the pudding and with no playable games of any kind, nothing else that's been said can be believed.

Hey, Jpop is the master of this type of grift. He did to you what he did to all the rest. Make you feel important, by bringing you into the inner circle. Asking you to just hold off the reveal for a little while on all the great new secret innovations that they will unleash onto the world. And you fell for it like so many here have before you. lesson learned, hopefully.

Real journalist have editors to help them seperate emotions from content and keep an objective perspective. No one can create quality commentary in a vacuum. People in the main are optimistic, they want to belive the world is a magical place where anything is possible. (Blame Disney if you must). An editor would of helped bring a sense of balance to the story and probably grounded your enthusiasm. That being said you don't owe anyone an apology. it's just a shitty situation for all concerned American Pinball included. Everyone wants to get excited by a new machine with a real wow factor, the reality is that these things don't come easy. Could you have taken a more cynical approach? Definitaly considering the history of the project, but at the end of the day you didn't travel all the way to Vegas, hoping to tell everyone, sorry it's all BS.

By embarking on this trip and committing your own resource, you already had a vested interest in seeing a positive result. We can all fall victim to idolised fancy, it a lot harder to be our own voice of reason sometimes. In the end AP had a box of shining lights, maybe they thought it was more then that at the time, due to ingnorance or wishful thinking.

Regardless of what cab it was in, Houdini didn't flip at Vegas or at expo because it couldn't. AP lied when they said they had a flipping machine in Houdini or at least a machine the community would consider flipping. Maybe they where duped, maybe it was sales tactics, either way, it is easy to get caught in the hype. You should still be commended as the only person in our whole hobby that at least made the effort and took on the personal expense to pursue the story. To bad the truth is a lot less interesting then the promise in this scenario.

Zizzle?

Another success story. They tried selling that cardboard box of garbage for $400 and nobody bit. I remember at the end they were getting blown out at Best Buy for $50.

I can't imagine anybody made any money with that Zizzle project. John hasn't made anybody but himself any money in about 20 years now. But man can he sell a dream. And after all this time there's clearly still a healthy market of buyers.

Give it a rest already, Lightning Levi. You're a broken record. Everybody knows you know everything, give the other people a chance to talk.

LOL

You've made 45 posts in 8 hours and I'm not allowed to chime in? And you are gonna pretend that you haven't been absolutely DYING for me to respond to you? Cute.

I'm not picking a fight with you, just adding my two cents like everybody else. When I heard about Goldberg and the "Zizzle connection" I was puzzled, since wouldn't Scott know better?

I actually feel bad for you, Goatee Tim. I had NO idea you went to Vegas on your own dime, spending every last cent you had, to play the role of sucker in this dog and pony show. AP should be ashamed of themselves for taking advantage of you like that.

oh you're "allowed" to do whatever you want, Lightning Levi. I can imagine (painfully) what you must be like if you feel your right to be a trolling d!ckhead was impeded.

It's just amazing how you are so completely lacking in tact, shame, or decency. Jersey Jack himself already told you that you don't know Jack (sh!t), so i don't wanna be redundant.

also what the fark is with the "corny tim" and "goatee tim" stuff? LOL are you in third grade? Way to live up (or down) to your manchild-ness, Lightning Levi.

Never mind.

Too mean.

I'll let this (Edited Content) fight with someone else.

Too mean? Worse than calling me an unemployed nobody, amongst the rest of your catty comments?

I mean, make fun of my goatee, that's, uh, whatever? I could say that you look to be extremely follicly challenged on your head, and wouldn't that be ridiculous?

I give as good as I get, Lightning Levi. i'm just not in the protected class of Pinsiders.

boxing (resized).jpg
"FIGHT!"

I picture it more like this.
image (resized).jpeg

i didn't want to have this huge block of quoted text but I appreciate your comments, Simon.

Like I said, I'm NOT a journalist. Just a pinball fanatic. I wanted to give people the "real deal", whether it was absolutely nothing or very little something. If I just met with Scott and Dhaval, I would not have been as impressed with the box of lights. But Joe being there? Seemed very legit. Why would this dude with so many years of experience in the pinball industry under his belt want to throw his good name away on some shit show?

Something happened between the time I met with them, and the expo. I'm dying to know what. That, to me, is waaaaaaay more interesting than a bunch of know it alls going "I TOLD YOU SO! I TOLD YOU SO!" Nobody who lost money in this fiasco wants to hear that.

Come on guys, let's be serious here for a moment.

IMG_5090 (resized).JPG

Sooooooo I just got a warning about my behavior. I'm really tired of being overly moderated, so i'm just going to ignore a few people and move on. I'm tired of being Pinside's bad guy.

I firmly believe "the thing that happened" was they learned how bad the Zidware situation really was. Houdini provoked a reaction from the internet, and every move since has been about distancing themselves from Zidware.

Did you see the cabinet drawings at Expo? They're changing all the art, putting the LCD in the backglass, changing the cabs. They're not using Zidware driver boards either - that's a pretty serious red flag.

But how could two savvy businessmen and one pinball developer get hoodwinked so badly? J-Pop isn't Kaiser Soze, just a terrible businessman. Wouldn't these people do their due diligence? Let's say that Scott and Dhaval had the wool pulled over their eyes. I can't believe Joe would get involved as well!

And all the talk of Magic Girl getting made. The pics of cabinets! What the hell happened?

I knew that they were making a lot of changes. But taking it out of the cabinet?? There was nothing all "Zidware"-esque about the cabinet I saw in Vegas. The most Zidware things were the monitor on the playfield (which you said repeatedly was mounted incorrectly) and the lightning bolts on the metal crossover ramp.

Maybe J-POOP IS Kaiser Soze.

Apparently the American Pinball people never came here and did any reading. They should have known - "Making pinball machines is hard"

Sounds like what a party would do after receiving a C&D letter. Or maybe they just decided to back slowly away from the Zidware "tar baby"?

That's a very good way to describe it

The biggest "legal landmines" I can think of off the top of my non-lawyer head:

1) Houdini clearly developed with money intended for MG/RAZA/AIW
2) By patenting the be-jesus out of everything John tied all mechs and parts to a now-defunct company embroiled in a lawsuit (Zidware)
3) He may not have disclosed that Bill got the MG/RAZA/AIW IP in return for his hail-mary help last June.

And ethically, he lied (not even going to say "likely") about the production state of Houdini. It LOOKED like a game, especially to a pinball noob, but clearly needs a lot done.

10 strikes, you're out, bring in Joe to get things done.

Cornelius, since you went to Vegas, what was your assessment of "why" they were there? Did they actually pay to go there, and incur the related expenses, just to show an incomplete game? Were they there for any more reason than to lure you or did they hope to sell something or what?

It just seemed like such a hair brained activity, to pay all that money and effort to go show a non-functioning game, create flyers for it, and then junk most of it.

Seems likely it was caught in the "jpop reality distortion field" and they honestly thought, based on what John had been telling them, they had something "near complete" (we've all heard that before).

Their big post about the Magic Girls was 2 days before Vegas. Things all seemed to unravel after that.

They got (I assume) free booth space by putting it with a vendor whose single-board computer they intend to use.