Brushing up on details — So right now the possible futures of the hostages are:

Lawsuit goes in favor of jap&co and games are released and delivered to EA’s (I’m assuming shipping would have to be arranged individually or something? Or were these headed to cointaker?)

OR

Ara wins and can do whatever they want? Auction them, release to buyers with additional money collected, burn them..?

Is that the just of where it’s at right now? Lawsuit is still going on, yeah? Or no? Or no one knows?

Trying to understand the stakes of that $1000 gamble a bit better, sounds interesting. It’s a killer game, esp if you love the movie.

Thanks for clarifying guys. There’s gotta be another deep root investor out there to save this mess!! Right now sure doesn’t sound like a good gamble to go in for a grand on a hostage game. Sure hope they don’t get destroyed in the end, that would be a shame.

Give it a fricken rest, get off your high horse holier than thou pulpit.

You aren’t stealing jack shit if you buy one of these games — ARA won the lawsuit, so essentially they can do whatever they want with the games. DP can’t afford to pay them — what exactly do you want to happen? The people that prepaid for these games don’t really own them because DP fucked up, ARA owns them. And soon other people (I mean scumbags) will. Would you prefer they sit locked in a warehouse forever or something?? There’s no other options, get over it. EAs are screwed again. It doesn’t make anyone a scumbag.

Unless u wanna bail DP out so EAs can get their games?? Then you can get back on your pulpit

Not outta the woods just yet — how many deposits does Nitro have? They can’t be getting too many of those 40..

The question is.. if no EAs had sent in preorder $$, would there even be ANY TBLs in existence? 1.5 mill for the 185 fully paid games (not sure if that includes the 40 that shipped and the forty shipping at 12.5k?) .. but either way I wonder what Dutch would look like today if they hadn’t taken any preorder money. Some was blown but seems like a bunch was needed for making the games upfront. W/out that model I think we’d have 2 or 3 protos and that’s it.

‘Amusing’ probably isn’t the right word for many in this thread and it may be in a 3 way tie with the magic girl BS and Predator— maybe a 4way with Alien?

Yeah — not sure how you get condescending out of that comment..?? pretty obvious who any downvotes are meant for..

Look a jpop- still has a job, still people that want to work with him despite the whole fiasco and peeing money/games all over town. Crazy but true.

With the EA games though — they’d be making them for free if it happened — cause they are all paid for right? So you start out way way in the hole.. I guess you could get back to break even if you were able to renew the license and sell enough games after getting EAs taken care of. If a company like deeproot comes along and wants to take up that kind of liability from the get go.. it could happen.

Lol Scroll back about 50 or 60 pages... maybe a bit more?? They never released the games, this is the result of a lawsuit settlement

Omg give it a fucking rest, didn’t you already get a moderation spanking for this broken record rant? You’ll never realize it but you’re crucifying the wrong people. DP (and possibly ARA) are the people to be mad at. Not people getting machines delivered right now.

Serious question though — IF (big if) EAs get machines somehow next year, or in 3 years — are you still going to keep those people who bought the EA machines on ignore cause they are scumbags? Or can they be given a pass at that point? If No one bought one of those games from cointaker — what would have happened? They just would continue to rot in a factory. Not exactly ideal either.. there was no way they were going to EAs. Period. But carry on with your judgements.

Yes — wolffmaaaan certainly appears to enjoy pushing people’s buttons more than contributing positive content to the threads. Unfortunate.

Have you ever stripped an entire Playfield top and bottom And disassembled all the mechs for cleaning / restore? There’s a TON of parts, and given there’s no manual for TBLthat I’m aware of, there’s currently no help to assemble all this so that’s quite a lot of work to put together enough documentation for someone to get it out together correctly. It’s unlikely all the little needed screws, nuts, washers, etc ( maybe even a few critical parts) would make it into every cabinet. Some of the pf divets could be off, all kinds of assembly crap could go wrong. They’d HAVE to have full harnesses supplied but that leaves a ton of soldering. If you e ever restored a game fully you know how critical all the tear down pics are. W/out those,and without any memory in the harness to lay it out, and with (likely) missing parts and similar but different hardware pieces.... yeah that sounds like a friggn nightmare. The instructions would have to be damn good with full color pics.. talking something like a DILE manual quality here.

Yeah, I mean that’s a point (were they to put this together and offer the option) but I don’t know that a pile of parts in a cab is a huge improvement over nothing if it’s near impossible to assemble.

There’s at least 1 in Seattle

This seems to be a strange order they are going by .. perhaps #187 isn’t too far off either, who knows..

What was the ratio quoted - 5/1 roughly new order to EA? But looking at the numbers this year, well below that I think? At 5/1 they’d need over 600 new orders at 12.5k$ yeah? Seems possible they could land short? Hope not but that’s a fair amount of orders at jjp CE pricing

Since they are getting 0$ every time they ship an EA game, doubt they want to make them forever ha!

I meant making more than the 190 for the oroginal EAs, in response to the post above mine suggesting they could just keep making EAs forever beyond the 190 or so.

The EAs also have the rug - I think that’s still just EAs - and the EAs going out now (vs old production ones during ARA days) have the fancy apron and apron lighting /code. Not sure how you would get your hands on an EA though, short of buying an older one for sale

Yeah I wasn’t sure on that - you’re probably right, everyone wants a way to tie the room together

Curious to confirm a couple things—

1) any new orders are now 13,500$ plus tax for a game - including shipping?

2) any confirmation on if they were done taking orders around year end ?

3) is it known how many EAs have rcvd games this year? Has it been 1/month or more? Less?

Ah sweet— thanks for the info! I must have missed that renewal info. I thought last I saw they ‘wanted to move on’ or something .. taking into account they’re a year out on builds of course. I feel like we were around #53 EA or so early this year.

I’d love to own this and sometimes $14k+ after tax seems ok, esp since the secondhand market isn’t too likely to go down much on a limited title .. but I’d have to sell another pin I am loving. Tough to pull that tigger.. 1st world problems . If I remove myself from the pin collector mentality- $14k for a pinball is clearly nuts. Unfortunately I’m into pinballs and Lebowski is a great game!