Hello all, never bought a spooky NIB before or at all I guess haha. I was wondering if I can get things like the shaker motor, art blades, knocker after the fact with the standard or do I need to get the BSE to get those things. Those are always must haves for me.

Just unboxed mine ,a little smaller then expected but plays like a dream

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is that the butter?..

There's no way that's us, it has pop bumpers.

If you ever do pop bumpers again please make them all fire at the same time so there can be epic melt downs.

So this game has three outlanes, but no outlane spinners? Scoff

Good job Spooky on standing up and presenting gameplay. I totally understand the lack of sound, assets- I get it. Showing the gameplay though - that was my ask and the team stepped up. Thanks for that.

I like what I'm hearing about the code - seems to be continuing the spooky approach of doing more than just shoot a light like so many games do these days (stern looking at you).

That said, my major hesitation is the layout itself. Upon first glance, I was worried around how fun this would be to shoot since everything seems to be straight (up and down) with the ball getting hidden a lot as it makes those transitions back to the player. Not a lot of side to side action or things to shoot for that's not straight ahead (minus those drop targets which again, 3 in front of another 3 seems to be a very odd choice that could lead to frustration with control especially if the code makes you hit all of them). The gameplay video released has only contributed to this concern as I was bored 2 min in seeing the straight forward action.

Waaaaaay too early to judge and I'm not saying it will be a borefest by any means but continuing to provide first impressions as the content is provided to spooky. Excited to see the full reveal. I also get the layout needs to be less odd/complex b/c for many, that was a turn off (and I'm def in the camp of appreciating spooky's unique take - love halloween) so this will come down to preference prob but man, that's a lot of up and down action. Adding a pop would have been nice, especially with the extra room- would fit the theme well too. Love what I see with the use of magnets btw.

Those in on this game and not getting the CE are absolutely crazy btw but that's a whole other thread. Art difference alone is a big one. And that topper is SO good.

Spooky, in the past, has considered knockers and shakers to be EXCLUSIVE to the upper models, and made them very difficult to add to lower models (missing harnesses and connectors, etc…). Owners have added them after the fact, but I recall reading that it was much more involved than a Stern, for instance. I would recommend the BSE if those are mandatory options for you.

My son's sense of humor folks... and I thought I was proud of his co-design on this game!

Should get an e-mail:

Subject: Zoinks, Scooby-Doo Pinball Is Here!

The wait is finally over! Scooby-Doo Pinball is here! See below for game reveal! Good info to know listed below!
1. Sales open Friday December 9th 10 AM CST!
2. CE-$9769, BSE-$8769, SE-$7769
3. Initial Payments-CE-$2000, BSE-$1500, SE-$1000 (non-refundable, non-transferable to other games)
4. Limited to 1969 total units!
5. Orders only placed online, we will not be taking phone orders!

The Scooby-Doo official reveal trailer is here!

Tips for Sales Day
1. Check your Fang Club Membership status! If you need to me double check for you, just reach out at [email protected]!
2. If there's anything you need to change, like your shipping or billing address, now is the time to do it!
2. Make sure your credit card info is up to date.

Thank you to every single one of you for your continued love and support. Stay Spooky!
-------------------------------------------------

Or go through a Distributor and avoid the potential of website issues tomorrow.....

Awesome! Thanks for the info. BSE it is for me then.

I don’t want any LotR ‘30 minute games’, I’m too old for that.

Not to derail from scooby but would be cool with all they have learned to do a tweak/upgrade of Americas Most Haunted. They prob learned alot on their first game and with how far they have come they could add a few more cool objects, like the stone cave on SD, and give it a facelift. SD and AMD would be a nice campy scary combo side by side.

Where you been?

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I was just about to mention the Medisinyl Mod Set for AMH. It is SPECTACULAR!
But, good luck finding one.

I think he made 50 sets.

The before/after is impressive!

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I tried to reverse engineer the preorder URL. Seems spooky was wise enough to not just hide a staged URL and made it so it wasn’t live yet. Sorry for letting all the early adopters down

LOL

They mention on the podcast it’s a new proprietary board…i don’t have the technical know how to understand the implications of that or if it matters much.

So if the order for production is CE then BSE then standard, but they don't know how many of each they are making first... what happens if I order a BSE on day 1 but someone else orders CEs in 30 days. I wonder whose gets built first.

If all sell out day 1, much easier to forecast. But if they don't, i'd imagine that a first-day order BSE still gets built after the (let's guess) 1000 CEs?

If you had opportunity to get either a Bond LE or Scooby Doo CE for general home use which would it be?

They are my favorite 2 pin themes (were even before releases). Really hoping not to have to do a lot of repairs - so expected build quality matters more to me then code. Don’t plan on selling.

This approach can work for sure.
I brought a NIB Wonka standard edition when I really wanted an LE.
But I’ve enjoyed my Wonka immensely and it was two grand cheaper.

They build ALL CEs first. Then BSEs and Standards.

Only exceptions seem to be the overseas orders and those are timed to shipping from what I can tell.

Having played Bond, I'd roll the dice on Scooby! Bond was -ok-. But it won't be bolted to the floor unless you are a die-hard bond fan.

Right. But how do they know if they have all the CEs in the queue if they haven't hit the total cap of number of machines to build.

Basically hold on all BSEs until all CEs they have orders for are built and then build BSEs? could be!

Spooky has been doing it all within a week. It was what, a month from announcement did we get anything out of Stern?

Its going to take 18 months to produce all these, they got lot of time to finalize these numbers

4. Limited to 1969 total units!

What's the deal with the limited production? Is their production floor not capable of supporting demand, trying hard to be exclusive, or do they not like money?

Wow...That looks great!

It’s their model that they’ve decided works best for their company. Controlled growth. I respect it.

I think you overestimate the size of Spooky. At max capacity, they get up to 40 games in a week. That is the amount Stern makes in a day, or less. If they tried to make something like 4000 Scooby Doos, it would be 4 years of making it. That gets into ROI for something around 4 years on the line.

Stern has the capacity for 115 a day.

I'm almost 100% on board. My last concern: freezing & resetting

I've had many Spooky pins on location, but all had to be removed because the software was unreliable.

If I buy this new game and the game freezes or resets on day 1, I'm gonna be furious-ish (I don't get mad, so whatever that is, lol).

I wish there was a way to alleviate that concern somehow, if it's truly fixed.

Yea, but even stern does a Xth run to fill gaps. Unless I'm mistaken they don't do that? I get the fact that there trying to limit their overhead exposure but this is like when WMS/BLY ignored the sales of AFM and didn't bother upping production. It's clear there was extra demand and they left it on the table.

They are small. You can’t take all these orders if you don’t have the capacity to make them.

It’s easy to say scale up. Much harder to actually do it.

SD > Bond imo.

Bond might be great, who knows but it might well be on production for 5 years so it’s not a race to buy it. You can most likely wait a few years and decide once its code is done. I bought DP, SW, BM66 and JP all years after they were launched, BM66 was 5 years after launch and still was in production.

SD while not a small run, will be less common.

I don’t know about the code yet but Lonnie on Bond is a strike against it.

America's Most Haunted is a great game and underappreciated. Always play it when we find it. It was that game that turned us on to Spooky! Just diferent enough back in 2014.

Capping production at release day isn't controlling growth, it's sidestepping it. It's forgoing future sales because production capacity is at 100%. Yes upping production capacity isn't a walk in the park, but that's not the reason to only produce X. That feels more like a marketing decision. I.e. trying to create a concept of exclusivity, or covering for concern that they will not sell out.

Then you definitely can't own GZ!

Have watched the gameplay video a couple times, and share the concern about little to no side to side. There are no outlane drains in that video, maybe because of editing, or maybe they have the outlanes as closed as possible for the video, but if it ends up being too easy it will get boring fast. Maybe it will be discussed in the Q&A tonight.

Wow impressive. I wonder who helped with that or did they do that from within? Guess they are using their own framework too?

And once you scale up you have to stay scaled up, unless you want to lay off a bunch of people after you build a popular game and you're not quite ready with the next one for that level of build out.

This is why Stern has to constantly "feed the line", they have capacity that can't just sit idle. Spooky has chosen to grow within their means.

It's not nearly as simple as you're making it out to be, see above. But clearly some of it is marketing. The number being made is the year SD debuted. So what? It's smart marketing for this crowd.

JB Premium = the cost of a SDCE.

And I would argue that the comparison of what's in these games is a night and day difference. The code for Bond isn't even done yet. Tons of circles in the screen... I have no idea what's happening.

SD > Bond, no doubt. Not even close either.

Now... back to the resetting / freezing concerns...

Limited run licenses for a product are much cheaper than buying a long term license contract. To do like Stern with an open production number for X amount of years is going to cost a ton more than a one and done limited release. This is why so many smaller companies stick to limited production runs of products.

Also doing long term licenses are HUGE risks, cause if sales don't remind consistent you are SOL and bought an expensive license that is not gonna pay back. Limited helps ensure you are gonna get your turn around

As for being limited to push sales, yes that's a tactic, it's a business, they are in the business to make money and doing such things are part of the strategy even if we don't like it

These will always be there until they are not. I would wait to buy until you have confidence it’s fixed.

It's been their model for a long time now - slow controlled growth, limiting title production to ~18 month periods. They have increased the number of games each time during that 18 month window:

RZ - 250
ACNC - 500
R&M - 750
HWN/UM - 1750
Scooby - 1969

I don't think they are going for exclusivity (if they were, they would have a capped CE # - Charlie said he would never do that again after RZ). They are simply making as many as they can in that 18 month window and then moving onto the next title.

They haven't released any specs, so who knows, but even if they did and it looks great on paper that's not going to tell you anything about long term reliability etc. In terms of gameplay you're mostly only going to notice things like the graphics capability of the computer powering the game if that changes in a real way, at the end of the day any board is going to drive coils and RGB LEDs etc now.

Just in general speculative terms you would hope that any company would settle on a single hardware set for their games. You don't want to develop a new board every time, that's a lot of development time and expense, and means stocking parts to repair each game gets harder each time etc. Game X needs this board and parts, game Y needs this board and parts, etc.

This is why Stern invested in Spike and has stuck with it (well Spike 2 now, but that was more iterative) since. Same with SAM before, Whitestar etc. These are generational decisions, not individual game decisions.

But that's mostly a headache for the company, not the end consumer, so long as they continue to support your game regardless of board why would you really care?

That said it's another unknown. I don't think it's really a worry, more something to be aware of? Curious to see what they say about it myself though.

It is a widebody?

Yes