They got different animators back in the summer, who are also redoing a bunch of Halloween's animations

Mystery Machine CE cabinet

Remember when we were told about Bond and then it took weeks for us to even find a picture of the cabinet via leaks?

People don't seem to realize that Scooby Doo still gets a ton of animated movies and tv shows still. It's been a very consistent IP for many years now

I think it would be ideal if Spooky shows off the game fully before taking orders, show us the layout, even demo some early gameplay if possible. Would go a long way.

And folks acting all uppity about incomplete code their games had at launch, get real, like this isn't what EVERYONE is friggin doing right now. Love the hype going for Bond when key features are not even in the game and its being sold and rolled out everywhere. So many feature incomplete Sterns and games from other companies. It's sadly just the way the business is now

Outside of Halloween, most of their pins have gone up in price so this is odd. Halloween had alot of blind early adoption and a much large production run so that didn't help. Things will likely calm down on that front. Heck it's amazing how Sterns that distros have been sitting on for long periods of time and weren't big hits with fans, when they went out of production, suddenly shot up in resale value.

But it's also silly how folks seem to be focused on "resale value" over the actual enjoyment of a game.

UM and Halloween improved immensely in the past two updates and the next update this week sounds like a big one too. Yea some of their early machines had issues and it was a rough start, but they have kept working at it and improved everything. Hopefully they learned things after them, but they have worked to deal with the issues and take care of their customers also. So can only hope and imagine Scooby is gonna be even better

Folks always say this, but expendable income collectibles and entertainment tend to be pretty economic proof. No matter how bad things get, high priced luxury items are still in demand and sell cause the market buying them can afford to do so. It's low end entertainment and luxury items that tend to get hurt.

It's just a known and common fact that high end luxury items tend to be highly resistant to recessions. The people buying these high end goods tend to have the means to have more purchasing power and are not as affected compared to the lower income brackets which have to buckle down on their spending. Pinball is not a common man's hobby, if your capable of owning a small arcade worth of pins and buying 10k+ machines here and there, you are typically not a person who is going to be as affected by these things, these are high end goods. It's not like someone who is cutting out his trips to the golf course or going scuba diving cause you got to spend 100-200 bucks for your session, these are huge money deals in comparison. Luxury car brands for example have always weathered recessions while the more consumer friendly budget car options see the complete opposite.

A stern like action button? Interesting.

This is gonna sell out quick

From their FB post, it sounds like only the CE comes with most of the sculpts

Cab comparison. Like Halloween, majority are going to get the CE

revea (resized).jpg

The guy said it looked the same, but it clearly isn't? How is that semantics?

Yea I was thinking that, Spooky loves their upper playfields

The post he was quoting was not you, and the post he was quoting claimed it was the same. Not sure who you are talking to cause he was not addressing you if you look at the quotes. So your getting mixed up on whose responding to you.

Half their machines have no pops, that's not exactly a pattern

Spooky Fang Club members get first shot at ordering it online at their website. Other way to get is to hope to snag one from a distributor that is picking up slots

That's what happened with their previous games outside of the TNA remake. But you could find dealers that had reserved slots that non members could buy, but those went fairly quick

Funny theirs a huge post on here of folks complaining about how Stern struggles to get them parts, with taking a year+ at times and more to get simple replacements from Stern.

Any issue I had with Spooky, they were shipping out new parts the same or next day to me so far and always answering emails. Something I've never had from any other company.

Save that for the eventual "A Christmas Story" Pinball. When you unlock "you'll shoot your eye out mode" and you get blasted in the face

The bare bones model is so stripped down, I wouldn't. Seeing those stripped down Halloweens, ugh. No decals on the targets, tons of bare areas with missing details. All those cool sculpts are pretty much CE exclusives so I think folks really are gonna want to stick with that model

Your order number and which version you get. CE's are made first so if your number like 10 with a CE, you are likely going to be getting yours real soon as it will be one of the first made.

The one caveat is if you are international, those units apparently get done last or near the end of the run

Looks really smooth

All aspects need to be approved, music, callouts, art, if it's WIP still, then that means they can't have full approval yet. So they either keep delaying announcing till everything if feature approved. So this means it's not complete at this point.

Why launch? Because they likely need the capital flow, speaking from a manufacturer's perspective, these big project do need to wind up and you need a cash flow ready to go to push the production, and with them depending on one machine sale to the next, they have to get orders going, unlike a bigger company like Stern which has multiple ongoing product launches and lines going at all time producing non stop cash flow.

Smaller companies with a single product focused line have this problem often as you are having to always get a product moving along to keep your factory running and paying everyone while also being able to upfront handle the development and production of your next product in your queue. Larger companies have a cushion to work with due to multiple revenue streams

What? They announced the game and didn't even show us the playfield for weeks. It required online leaks for folks to even see the machine for the first time even after they announced the game on their social media and via email

Also lack of colored plastics, and no decals on the targets is a big oof frankly. Have you seen what the playfield on the standard Halloween looks like compared to the CE? It's pretty huge difference visually. Gameplay is identical but it really loses alot of oomph

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

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

Folks were transferring their preorders for Halloween and UM left and right if gotten from a distro

Lot less cosmetics, like no target decals, none of the cool sculpts, none of the colored plastics or rails. It's a very bare bones looking machine if you seen what the SE's of the Halloween and Ultraman looked like. And you will be waiting till end of production run as they are made last.

It's quite common distros and such hook people up, happens with every Stern LE too before they even go up for sale, folks get to brag about how they secured their order ahead of everyone cause someone does their pal a favor

wat

Showing you know nothing about web development and networking. Total units means nothing, it's about user load going on at one time.

Toppers are usually just screwed in some manner so probably not that difficult.

Operators don't get first dibs on Spooky pins, they are made in the order of the order placed.

The mine entrance sculpt is on the upper playfield as you can see here:

Believe the castle stone sculpt that separates the bottom and upper playfields is on all editions

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The feature matrix says no plastic protectors, so imagine that means that all those plastics that the sculpts are standing gone are simply removed so you got open lanes with just the playfield art. The upper play field for example has none of those sculpts that are standing on the plastic protector, so imagine that simply is taken out and you got open lanes

Theres probably lot of Scooby toys out there that a person can just buy and add. It's what many have done for Godzilla , especially pro models, just buying random toys and filling up the playfield

So for simplicity sake, it sounds like the only sculpts that the BSE and SE include are the Mystery Machine Van, Captain Cutler, and the castle center pieces, everything else appears CE exclusive for sculpts.

The playfield is essentially standard, but they have extra aspects on the right and left of the playfield that expands it to a widebody. If you look at the playfield layout for example you got the rails slings and others in the wide area. Wire forms, subways, locks, etc are out of bounds on the sides of the playfield instead of taking up playfield space. The actual open playfield is essentially a standard sized field. They put it in a wide body to fit in more stuff essentially

Because they have so much going on in the game. If they didn't use a wide body for it, the extra bits would have had to been placed on the playfield.

The open playfield is essentially a standard playfield in size, while they used a wide body to be able to spread things out and use extra real estate to add content and features to the game by sticking them on the sides. The entire left size for example is up kickers, wire frame trails, locks, etc that would have had to be placed on the actual playfield and making it smaller. Instead of crowding the playfield, they were able to move lot of things to the left and right sides

The top down really shows how packed the game is. They still have a big open playfield by putting it in a wide body while the wides as I kinda marked show how are being used by extras to not crowd the playfield or take up space on it. They might have had to leave stuff off otherwise to get it to fit and flow well.

trails (resized).png

Most of the left side is blocked off outside a couple lane entries, but it's mostly used for pathways for the wireframes and other features.

I like the taking out of context things and blowing it out of proportions. Yea the new code has a couple bugs. But "filled with bugs" is pretty huge exaggeration. They fixed and added a bunch of things, theres a couple little issues which are all visual presentation issues and they are already working on it.

Love the overreaction, saw another of this on Facebook where folks were saying how the new code is a "disaster". lol no it's not

The shipping company came early for me and left it at my front door, no signing for, it was nuts. The pallet the game was on clearly broke and the whole thing had tipped over, box was beat up, but since they just left it at the house I couldn't even dispute it. Thankfully it was packed well and there was no outer damage. There was some damage inside due to the terrible delivery job, but Spooky promptly sent me replacement parts to fix what came loose and broke due to the shipping companies terrible service.

If you were the original buyer, and had powder coat issues they would send you replacements. The ones who couldn't were the folks who bought a machine 2nd hand typically. The newer armor had clear coating applied, still not perfect but clearly better than the original powder coat.

Yep, product sold to a distributor is a sold machine. If a distro bought more than they needed, that's on them to sell em.

The 576 was a CE model #, so that's also not accounting for BSE and SE models that were sold, which some folks also got direct.

Then we know of a distro that supposedly had 300 units allocated apparently, so there is a good amount of pins spread around

If they can get gameplay stream going for this finally, that itself would probably push a bunch of sales or get this sold out. Lot of folks leery to go all in with no gameplay after Halloween/UM rough start

What a weird thing to say when no one else is doing this either.

It's not trying to be... that's kind of the point

Some people rush on limited pins to claim em just to hopefully flip them or see their value shoot up after. The game didn't sell out, theres probably a bunch of people who just freak out at that or never intended to keep the game.

They need to show the gameplay off before these ship. This is kind of crazy

They've worked together with Jack since after that whole thing already.

It looks so good

The code looks so much more solid than their previous games so far.

The constant use of the classic Hanna Barbera sound effects is pretty amazing

Be interesting to see if the reveal video pushes a bunch of sales

I only like games that I lose in less than 2 mins and require quantum engineering to figure out scoring

Hah, almost got me, but we all know Spooky hates pop bumpers

Whoa, never even knew this existed!

Guys also realize shipping is not always the same, it varies by route, distance, etc. What costs someone 300, can be totally different for another state. Freight is not flat rate. Kingpin was around 500 for freight to me in FL

Also freight companies are currently CONSTANTLY changing their rates on us shippers.

lol adult mode?