Even on it's own "merits" without the stink of the designer this game looks pretty poor to me. They took a "magic" theme and slapped Houdini's name on it. Houdini was a skeptic and did not believe in seances; yet it's a clear feature of this game. Houdini was primarily an escape artist, not really a magician. "Believe" in the middle is very silly. Much of the other imagery on the game, such as the gargoyles and gryphon, are not associated with HH and just lazy decoration. Even the title of the machine doesn't make any sense. "The Master Mystery" is a series of films with HH as an actor, but I don't see any link between that and this machine. It's lazy.

On top of that there are a couple distractingly bad spots in the current art. In a vacuum, with no history of jpop, this does not look like a good game to me.

I don't know a lot about Houdini; but a lot of this feels like putting Chewbacca on Star Trek and shrugging it off as "space stuff" or putting "Dream On" in Metallica and dismissing it as fitting the 'rock' theme.

I also can't un-see the 'twig and berries' in his right hand in the backglass art.

FWIW, if you purchase officially licensed stuff and use it to create something new, you're generally OK to re-sell. Think about buying a jersey, framing it and re-selling it - that's fine. So, if that's a playing card from the deck it's fine. If it's a reproduction, no bueno.

Pics are on their web site: http://american-pinball.com/

The artist looks talented; therefore my hunch is that much of these images are mockups to help people understand what the final game and layout will look like to understand the shots instead of showing a whitewood. I suspect that the artist will be refining these concepts into original art before the final game is shipping. It could even be Balcer's quick and dirty photoshop to give the artist an idea of how the game will play to help the artist work a little faster.

Based on the portfolio alone, I would be very surprised if this is final art.