(Topic ID: 13701)

Top Pinball Flops??

By Rick471

11 years ago


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  • 90 posts
  • 53 Pinsiders participating
  • Latest reply 11 years ago by goatdan
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    #43 11 years ago
    Quoted from MikeS:

    Instead you have RS, which sells for under $2K despite a production run that is only about 40% of what it's predecessor "TZ" sold.

    People might not know this, but a big reason that RS probably sold so poorly was that TZ was a total route dog. It broke down constantly, and people didn't understand what the heck they were doing on it. When I first started in pinball, you could regularly get nice ones all day for $1500 or so. It wasn't until repro parts made them totally repairable, and people figured out that it made a great home game (if you like that sorta thing) that it's price went up.

    So it depends on what you call a flop. TZ was a route flop at the time, but it sure doesn't seem like one now. And IJ4 which a bunch of people mentioned apparently does really well on route from what I've heard.

    If you're looking for games that didn't sell, the only recent one that seemed to be blown out has been WoF. Before that, there are lots of stories of games like CV and CC being blown out for like $1500-$2000 NIB because people didn't want them. Time changes the perspective of flops rather dramatically.

    #52 11 years ago
    Quoted from RobT:

    I don't understand the TZ being a flop on route in terms of earnings. How the hell did they sell so many of them if they weren't making money for ops?

    Games weren't built like they are today, for demand. They were built with some sort of general idea in mind. If you made too many, you either forced distributors to carry them, or blew them out cheap. If you made to few, well, you should've bought earlier, sorry -- we can't rerun them (see: MM).

    In TZ's case, it was the follow up to one of the most popular games of all time, which had been earning really solidly on route. So why wouldn't you expect the same thing? Gear up a ton, sell a ton based on the earlier reputation... and then low and behold, the clock broke, or something else went wrong, and you were constantly out there for a game no players really understood or were playing.

    A local op told me a year or so ago that they kept a TZ because it was the owners favorite game, but it always made about half of what anything else on location made. They finally retired it because of that. TZ was a total route dog, and you can pretty much lay the blame the failure of RS to be made as much as it was directly at it's feet.

    But again, my point isn't that TZ is a bad game -- I know a LOT of people that would vehemently deny that. It's just that the definition of "flop" really changes depending on your perspective.

    #90 11 years ago
    Quoted from davewtf:

    Very reliable sources tell me you could buy CV's for $1700 back in the day

    I've heard $1500. Just missed that era.

    Remember though, the world was a different place back then. People were buying pins because they made them money, not because they were fun to have at home. If a machine earned money on route, there would be more of them sold. If a machine was super fun, but didn't earn, it didn't matter. It's different now.

    Also, as to why a lot of people like to bash Stern, back in the day when they were playing in arcades, it was by FAR the most likely that they would come across Bally / Williams titles. All machines do feel different in some ways. That isn't a good thing or a bad thing, it's just true -- and so when those same people are going out looking for a pin to relive what they remember from the arcade, of course there is going to be nothing better than exactly what they remember.

    Add to that B/W titles were relatively unreliable when you took them out of the box. DE was worse, Gottliebs were built like tanks. But, by the time that most collectors get them, these games have been tweaked, and tweaked, and tweaked, so opening up your new Stern game and finding out that a switch is out of alignment suddenly seems horrible. Machines were way worse back when B/W ruled the roost, but collectors don't see that side of it.

    That's why people ultimately and unfairly bash Stern for what they have done over the past 12 or so years -- because they aren't exactly what they remember from 20 years ago, and they don't work as well right out of the box as a machine that a collector has spent hours and hours tweaking.

    I like everything for completely different reasons. I don't currently own any Stern machines, but if an Iron Man came up for anything near a reasonable price, I'd be all over it. Heck, I haven't even played Tron, but from everything I've seen and read, it would be the same sort of situation. But, if I was looking to play games that played like they did back when I was a kid, those aren't going to be the machines that do it for me. Mostly, B/W titles will be. And, admittedly, I do own a lot of those titles.

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