What questions are really left at this point? We're in the middle of a blizzard up here, so answering a couple questions might be fun.

Working closely with some pretty awesome people and properties to bring you another game that is very likely to blow you all away

http://style.org/unladenswallow/

The body placement and movement will be showcased in the video. Matt strongly recommended against having the ball hit it directly, so we had to change it up a little bit. The upside is that it moves much more naturally this way.

In our tests this has only been observed after using select Old Spice care products.

I hope I don't regret saying this, but April 7th is our target release date.

There is now

252, on average.

I'm not a moderator by any means, but let's not let this thread involve any rule 34 :-/

I think it would sound great with another subwoofer. The game uses all high-sampled cd-quality music and our amplifier has a built-in crossover to send just the right stuff to a sub. Also, the crossover frequency is adjustable so you can only isolate the really low tones, if you wanted to.

Thanks The skull/spine turned out to be a pretty simple issue of playfield mounting, so that was pretty easy to take care of. I like to think we've run into just about every problem that could have happened already, so aside from any manufacturing mishaps along the way, we should be pretty smooth sailing from here.

You and I both, buddy

It would be a best-seller if we could get that orange chick from Jersey Shore to sign off on it.

This post deserved its own reply, so here goes. By the end of this post, it should be fairly obvious to see why it is so difficult to nail down a solid release date, and why the date I've given is a little further out than the arithmetic would imply.

The development cycle is virtually complete, save for testing and minute observation, which is fantastic because without any further hiccups on certain part designs, that makes the remaining times much more predictable. Just to over-state, whenever something doesn't work or doesn't fit exactly right or needs to be redesigned for whatever reason, that adds at least 3~4 weeks of dev-time for the new designs to come back to us in a physical form. That's not aggregate, so having 2 parts or 200 parts that need to be redesigned would still take 3~4 weeks. That was fine when I was having 10~15 parts tweaked at a time, but now we're down to only TWO that we can't be 100% sure of at this point (due to low amounts of testing, but so far, so good). Now it seems like everything hangs in the balance of these two parts, which cost literally thousands to prototype and still have that 3~4 week overhead. That being said, we've brought in some pretty talented veterans to make sure those waits and costs won't happen again.

All of the contractors we have lined up have given production schedule estimates ranging between 6 and 12 weeks from the time we order parts to when we receive them, save for cabinets and toys (cabinets take almost as long as the rest of the game to assemble, and the toys are essentially ready when we are). So that's anywhere from a month and a half to three solid months just for all of the parts to arrive.

Once all the parts are in, we start assembling. Personally, I can ALMOST do two playfields a day, at my last checked speed (yes, we keep track of stuff like that), and after doing a bunch of them over time, two a day might not be a pace to be measured against, but it's certainly a possibility. We have a handful of very skilled builders, so it should only be a few weeks before we have our whole shop doing 20~25 machines per week without any trouble, making it another 10~12 weeks for production time. Once we get to the point of actual game production, there shouldn't be a significant time difference between machine #25 and machine #250 to go out the door. I don't think anyone will be looking at 2015 at all. With our release date set in April, and our build schedule continuing at a good pace, the entire build process should be well over with by October.

Rai, you always seem to ask the big questions, so I hope this is a complete enough answer for you I also hope this will help the rest of you insiders understand the scheduling a little better.

You and about 40 other people We have deals with a couple shipping companies, but we see a recurrence of R&L being the best balance of price and reliability. After dealing with a few distributors in Europe and Australia, we have been toying with the idea of hooking up with a distributor in Ontario to help with all of these Canadian games.

Nah, we got this

It was all smooth sailing for the good Captain Smith after he said that. I haven't heard a complaint from him since!

Working out all of the little bugs right now. Whenever that is finished, there will be a big video update.

I get this question a lot, but it's surprising how rarely it actually happens. When someone asks me if the center targets are a death shot, I usually say "the center targets are to be respected, not feared." What I mean is this: If you just shoot at them like they're "just targets" and you aren't sure of how the ball will react after hitting them, you are definitely going to have to deal with that and risk a drain situation. That being said, if you "respect" them as a real shot and aim for specific placement of your shot, you can predict how the ball will come off of them and keep playing just fine. They are designed at a pretty stiff angle to toss the ball more to the side than straight back down at you, so SDTM drains are extremely rare from the center targets. Even if I only need to hit one of them, I always shoot for dead center to hit both targets to give double the dampening effect of the targets themselves and to use as much of that angle as I can. The movement of the ball is still damned fast, but it almost never throws it STDM or out the side, making it easily reactable.

PM Sent. I didn't re-include that information in the latest email to go out, so if anyone else needs it please email me or PM or whatever.

Haha, no. Not counting Predator, obviously, or some weird and specific scenarios, I've never paid more than $1750 for a pin. Even if someone made my favorite license and it was the best game ever made, $8500 still equals at least four other pins for me. The market is a lot different now, not to mention the economy and general inflation over the years, but we used to get NIB games all the time back in the day for around $1500, including FunHouse and other big names. Despite the fact that I am notoriously cheap when buying games, I could picture paying $5k for a Predator, and that's kind of where the thought ended. I doubt it will change much, if at all, with the next machine.

Questions? No, not really. Comments? Sometimes...

Still honestly considering it, actually. The Skit-B Pinball Canadian Tour might be a damned fun time, and those MAACA guys know how to party

You know, at first I laughed, but if I think back to when I was first thinking of how long this would take...
April 2012 I figured it would only take "like a month" to get the unit we had to "complete" status and start getting some rolling out. (Naive, for sure, but oh well)
So we double it to two months and change the unit to years, that would put us exactly where we are right now: Looking at an April 2014 official release.

You, sir, are a genius.

Still trying to think of a classy way to do this without seeming like a sales push, but yes, everyone who gets a game from us will have a shot at it and their previous production number before anyone else.

At this point, Iceman, this is almost a philosophical question We get compared to Jack quite a bit, and Jack has also fallen under a lot of criticism in the last year or so, but at the end of the day we are very different not only in what we do but how we do it. Let's also not forget that there are some WoZ games out there now and they seem to be doing pretty well, and, while I've only played it a couple of times, the game is a marvel to look at (admittedly, I still know very little about how to play it).
Do I feel confident that we'll be able to knock out 250 units? Absolutely. Comparing our resources to Jack's is apples to oranges, but our big difference isn't in our resources, it's in our resource management. We only keep one working prototype at a time for lots of reasons, but one of the big reasons is simply cost. At one point in development, Jack had dozens of machines going to certain shows and expos around the country, when it wasn't even complete and I'll never totally understand that. We also have a workshop that is only a few thousand square feet, compared to Jack's multi-million dollar factory. Much of it has to do with the scale and scope of what we do, but anything more than what we need is just too much.
The biggest difference between what Jack and I do comes from the fact that all of their hardware is proprietary as far as their boards go, and that has been where most of the problems he's been having have come from. We use the tried-and-true P-ROC and its driver boards, and I work pretty closely with Gerry whenever I try to do something off-the-wall to make sure everything always works as it should. If JJP used P-ROC, it wouldn't have had the issues it had, bottom line.