Quoted from SirMachismo:

Wise words, I squad up with my daughter and son playing Fortnite several times a week, and they “squad” up with me playing pins a couple times a week. It is delightful, I am lucky man. I am no longer a liability in Fortnite and the boy has started cracking the top ten on our two pins. We share music and memes daily and he’s is excited for us to get an insider connected pin, he loves getting achievements. What a wonderful time to be a dad and kid! I often tell them the hardships of having to wait till Saturdays to watch cartoons or worse…If you miss an episode of a tv show you never saw it again! I still don’t know how the 1985 Transfromers cartoon series ended!
I drifted a little of topic. Have a great day.

Quoted from Blackwolf:

This is a really interesting thread, coming as someone who was raised on computers, starting with an Intellivision (I'm the other kid that had one!) and a Commodore 64. I never left the video game space, though - I still play lots of them today and have been a video game podcaster for a super long time, which means I spend a lot of time around people who play video games or are involved with the video game industry, most of them elder Millennials or Gen X.
There are some REALLY good points made by people who have way more industry experience than I do. This thread was started as a "kids these days" type of thing, but it's really more of a "normies these days" type of issue.
TL;DR - It's an onboarding issue due to the overwhelming nature of modern pinball.
Most of the people I talk to are surprised Pinball "came back". They saw it as something popular in the 80's and 90's and then went away. Now, people here on Pinside know that Pinball NEVER went away, there were ALWAYS new machines coming out - but they weren't in the public consciousness. The reaction I got when I talked about the Mandalorian coming out was "wait, they started making pinball again????" - and yes, this was in 2021!
So, once you get past that, all most people remember of pinball was identical to the original Pong instructions: "Avoid Missing Ball For High Score".
Mandalorian Premium is my first ever home pin. I had some friends over for New Years and everyone ooh and aahd over the machine - but NOBODY would play it. I am also not the oldest person in my friend group! One of my friends who absolutely loves Star Wars won't touch my Mando - he is overwhelmed by the amount of lights and things on the playfield and is afraid he'd break it. Thankfully, for others, I can just say "hit under the ship three times for multiball" and that gives them what they are aiming for. (And my friends play complicated strategy board games as well as D&D all the time, so it's not that they aren't capable of understanding complicated rulesets.)
When I was talking about Mando online to a non pinball audience (but a video game audience) I would get asked what the "goal" was. When I started explaining about all of the different missions, how to unlock them, how to complete them, they usually clam up and say "well that's just too complicated" - and I don't even get to the part about earning Beskar to buy items in the Foundry which can then be used in specific situations. And these are gamers that play 100+ hour RPG's or even MMO's with complex battle mechanics and min-maxing of stats and gear. Once again, not incapable of comprehending complex rulesets, but it is just so foreign to them to apply that to pinball. (They did ask me if anyone "speedruns" pinball...)
And that's where the lack of tutorials come in. Mando does have SOME splash screens in attract mode that explain things at a very high level like encounters and hunter, but it doesn't say how to clear them. You have to watch YouTube videos of the designers spending 20 minutes explaining all of the modes and pointing to the targets to get your head around how things work. I have Rush on order and I watched that same stream everyone else did, and my head is dizzy from all of the different rules for different modes (get to midnight, no, 5PM, no, make the playfield dark, no, place the ball underneath this flipper unless you just hit that then you need to place the ball over here, be sure to have the diverter going the right direction) that it is SUPER EASY to get overwhelmed, especially if you DON'T have time to watch a two hour Twitch stream to hear bits and nuggets of information.
So, people just revert to "Avoid Missing Ball For High Score" and pretty soon the callouts and music repeat themselves and it's no longer novel or new.
This is actually where the commercial digital pinball games help a LOT. Pinball FX and I believe even Pinball Arcade (RIP) had visual rulesets for their tables. You had to dig in the menu for them, but they would tell you how to activate a mode, and then show you the target on the playfield. It was still overwhelming, but it was at least presented to you. I do know that there are rule sheets for modern tables, but nobody in my basement (or on location) is gonna thumb through a 10 page manual to understand what's going on in the game.
Video games, sadly, don't have manuals anymore. They've been replaced by in-game tutorials and help screens. Now that we're no longer limited to cartridge space, we can devote UI space to show you the controls, rather than expecting you to have read the manual at school when you thought the teacher wasn't looking.
And that's why my friends who saw my Mando have already said "so, when can you get the 1992 Doctor Who?" because they remember those rules to be "hit the rising building to make the Dalek say Exterminate" and that's pretty much it. I bet if I DID land a 92 Who (it's my grail classic pin) it would get a ton more use out of my friends than Mando or Rush would.
And once again, these aren't kids, these are adults that are old enough to remember popping quarters into pinball in the 80's when they were kids and still play complex games today. Kids mostly hit the start button a billion times, play a ball, and then walk away with 11 balls left on the machine. The kids who "get" pinball have super awesome parents or family members like y'all in this thread who are willing to patiently teach them - but kids left to their own devices today are used to the game itself teaching them how to play, and pinball hasn't matured to that point just yet.

Quoted from NC_Pin:

Intellision rocked. Even after we had a Nintendo my buddies and I would occasionally go back any play Intellision ( we loved “Utopia”) they also had the 1st person dungeon crawler “Dungeons and Dragons: Tower of Doom” which was like a decades ahead of its time for a console.

Quoted from Rarehero:

Never heard of this....looked it up. That's a hard NO for me...lol...maybe Ben Heck can incorporate it into his Bible Adventure game.
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Quoted from Rarehero:

Nah, I don't watch religious content. Maybe they're big with kids in evangelical circles...
In any case - pinball themes always comes back to "who's buying games?". The goal of pinball factories isn't making games "to get kids into it"...because kids aren't seeking out public spaces for gaming, and they don't buy pinball machines. Any manufacturer makes a game based on Jesus Boyz, they'll sell zero units.