I know a lot of times people come out of the woodwork for negativity around here but I think its important for us to acknowledge when companies exceed your expectations. At a time when every other pinball manufacturer seems to be making missteps (both big and small), it feels like Spooky never disappoints. Bought a dominoes around October. Kayte told me my game would be ready around June or July (obviously a ballpark at the time). I was told today that my game was ready 2-3 months ahead of schedule! In this new era of multi-year waits for machines, it was very refreshing to find out one was coming ahead of schedule for a change. Here are a couple compliments/observations from a customer dealing with Spooky since AMH #20: I find them to be easily accessible to me through a wide variety of communication tools. Rarely does it take longer than 24 hours for an email or phone call to be returned, during business hours calls or emails are returned within minutes. Also, for pinball or any other luxury item customer service combined with transparency is key, if you make a mistake as a company its fine, but please admit to the mistake, dont treat us like were too stupid to realize. Here's an example of the kind of transparency I'm talking about, this is a quote from Ben Heck about the jump ramps in AMH (which I love btw)
"In retrospect, I would have either not done the jump ramp OR make it a "sure fire" thing. The fail condition isn't the ball falling through the gap, it's not having enough juice to make it up the ramp.
We tuned it to be about 50/50, you've gotta hit that shot dead nuts to make it. Issue becomes fine-tuning on each new build, dialing it in as it were.
Problem with the Allentown game was were we literally, no joke, finishing it as it was being palleted for the show. Chuck and Paul were wrenching off the legs as I was making last-minute flashes to code. So it didn't have any fine-tuning. It was a miracle it got on the truck, to be honest.
I'm heading down to Chuck's next weekend to check on things, help with his Fathom PF swap, drink beer, and hopefully shoot a promo video on a production game. More as it comes!"
Now you think to yourself, "no big deal he was just trying to deal with a bunch of customers complaining about their jump ramp not being tuned right." Except this quote was made before a single game had ever been shipped or a single customer had complained, to my knowledge, everyone loves the jump ramp. He [Ben] thought it was a mistake and he was honest with the customer base about what those perceived mistakes were. It didn't take people catching in him a lie or forcing the issue for him to be honest and transparent about where he thought the state of the game was at. Only misstep i can think of recently is picking Alice Cooper over God. RIP Bible Adventures, Never Forget.
