This reminds me of that Louis C.K. bit on SNL. There are plenty of consenting, adult women willing to do WTF ever. Why get your jollies from kids? I do not understand it.

Yikes, I'm floored.

Hopefully it's not true, but unfortunately, more often than not, it is.

I have heard of some home computers being infected and being used as zombie file servers to host pirated media and pr0n files without the owner's knowledge. Maybe that could be the case here? Or maybe someone else had access to the computer?

There could be a number of alternative possibilities, but usually when things get to the stage where an arrest is made, it doesn't look good.

Moderator's comment: Please try to keep this civil. I have a feeling this can get out of hand really quickly since emotions will probably run pretty high on this one.

The statement says 2 cases.. I'm guessing that's either 2 computers, or a computer plus a backup storage of some sort. Yes, innocent until proven guilty, but this does not look good.

This was included in the press release from the police department:

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So, let's try not to lose our heads quite yet until there's more information.

Nooo! I was just debating with other pinball guys that ROBOWAR has one of the best music soundtracks for a pin!!! Now I lose by default Sad day for pinball

Ok, who brought the dog?

I think it's fair to say we can close the book already on the 2017 "Most Restrained Thread Title" award contest.

I always thought grown men who play pinball were a bit odd...

I'm taking no sides on this thread but.... This is a totally ignorant statement. how many people exonerated with DNA evidence so far that the police did 'careful investigation' on?

I had a friend of my brothers, arrested on 8 counts.
Turned out it was a Teen Powerpoint, Basic stuff, that someone forwarded and 8 girls were 16 or 17.
Case was dismissed.

I hope we wont jump to conclusions quite yet.

It's like the opposite to click bait.

Some of these jokes are hilarious. I laugh. And then 2 seconds later I am back to being very very sad.
This is a dark day for pinball. His life is over, innocent or not.
Stern will have to close the flipper gap and pretend his next pin wasn't designed by him.

Man, this is really something. Met him and hung out a bit with him at Pintastic last year, and he signed a bunch of stuff for our tournament crew, myself included, with pictures even. Seemed like the nicest guy, so personable.

I think if people had been waiting for a bubble to burst, this would be a start to it with some of his designed games... really curious how that will go among players and collectors.

As a parent of three young kids, It's hard to stomach. I just had a conversation last week with my wife about how anybody on you or my friends list, or people we know COULD be one of these people. You just never know and always have to have your guard up.
It's disturbing to think about, and then it hits sort of close like this for many people within the hobby. Dark day for pinball.

Iron Maiden was already finished....

Who knows, IFPA may have to make rules about... nah, not going there. Yeah, lots of easy jokes on the table right now.

I'm sad. I just told my wife and she said she can't see playing his games anymore and I'm with her. Fucking sucks.

They had to get a search warrant.

In order to do that, they needed to present evidence to a judge.

Trudeau is still sitting in jail.

If the "Genesis" of this story is "Rock" solid, he'll need a "Deadly Weapon" shank the size of "Excalibur" to protect himself from cell mates intent on "Tag Team Pinball"

Yep, no one blames you there. If you didn't do it, someone definitely would have.

I don't blame you. I'm glad the mods are staying on top of the prison rape posts.

Chastity belt LE?

And all those points are very valid. It just sucks....

damn... love my tx sector... wonder how i will feel about this over time. I am glad i forgot to bring the apron to TPF to get it signed tho

Wow. It just goes to show it could be anyone you know.

This makes me so incredibly sad.

I hope this is some kind of terrible mistake.

I need more information before I tar and feather him... Two counts seems like a really small number if he's really some secret kiddie porn lover. I mean... his HD's could have 17k images and another 15k pornographic videos on them, and out of that huge number there's only TWO things that warrant him being charged over? I know, I know, 'Merica. Just seems ridiculous that someone's life is potentially going to be ruined and it could boil down to him downloading two images that he thought were legal.

This is really horseshit if true. Next pinball for him is "Dirty Old Man" .

All kidding aside, I really liked John and his unique pinball ideas.

read the Facebook link.

Judge Dredd is a $1400 game folks.

This is a sad and disturbing day for our hobby. Will be interesting to see how Stern handles this for his existing (GB) and unreleased games (Iron Maiden) in the future. Can they really promote and sell his games? Not the easiest situation for a guy like Zach to walk into.

Jesus..... wtf

That's really sad. Very disappointed.

Did he do Big House for premier? Holly shit crazy man.

Terrible

They kept selling (well, trying to sell) WWE's after Hulk had his whole thing go down.

Sad and shocked.

If he gets convicted thats the end of any of his games being made as for existing stock I don't see anyone buying his games after this, all his other pins through the years will take a dive big time.

too early to judge anything but can't you still watch films by Roman Polanski yet be opposed to his crimes?

Not even close to being the same thing.

I dunno, look at the prices of all of Jpops games. still a lot of them demand a pretty penny... People will separate the game from the designer.

Did. If there was "numerous" images, then why only two charges? Surely they wouldn't hesitate charging him on each of those 'numerous' images? And what is 'numerous', exactly? All it would take is for him to download one image with a trackable FBI hash. I think what I'm pointing out here is really the definition of 'innocent until proven guilty'.

The only thing that I've learned is that he likes porn. BFD. He's human.

Wow just stunned.

*allegedly

I doubt they stop making GB if people are buying them. The average home buyer doesn't even know the designer of a game, let alone look up their arrest record. And people playing on route have no clue either so ops {(probably) won't care if the $$ is coming in.

I used to keep an open ftp on one of my home servers just so people would upload stuff I could harvest. I'd periodically delete it all and let them start over with new stuff. I never had any of that stuff show up but I suppose it could happen. Funny thing it was nearly impossible to delete the stuff. You had to kill the volume and rebuild it. Was easy so I never investigated how they were doing it.

Those 2 situations are night and day, have to the give the man the benefit of the doubt for now, if he is charged then the shit storm begins.

Exactly.

All Stern has to do is remove his name from the machines and credits

Im not going to get rid of mustang overnight because of this. Nor would i have with gb. The guy designed it but alot of the engineering is not him

I don't think his old games will take a dive. He has some great games and that does not change. People are still going to buy cftbl and GB no matter what.

Unbelievable and just downright awful. Another sad day for pinball.