Not much of a topper either.

Yeah, there's nothing new about the concept of the mode. BK2K had RANSOM. Rollergames had WILLIAMS. Surfin' Safari had DOUBLE. The list goes on and on. Progressive modes have been around for ages, just like progressive jackpots.

The 'innovative' feature here is selling it as a $600 add-on.

The more I think about this, the more I wonder who it's intended for.

In a home environment, a progressive mode/jackpot is generally less interesting than a non-progressive one. Skill can accelerate it, but skill isn't required; you'll activate the mode every few games by pure chance. It can actually become an annoyance, because it means that you're in a major scoring disadvantage during the games when the mode is out of reach.

In an on-location environment, a twelve-letter mode seems like too many letters. You want that progressive mode to feel within reach, to draw players in. If I understand what the mode is and does, and if I just see JUR lit up when I walk into the location, I'm going to feel less interested in playing. (And for the players who don't understand what the mode is and does, it's pointless.)

Stern's shopping site is extremely weird. You can add whatever items you want to your cart. That means nothing until you click Check Out. At that moment you get taken to what looks like a standard Shopify sales site -- and at that moment it tells you which of the things in your cart are actually in stock.

I've only been active in the hobby for a few weeks, and I've already given up on shopping at Stern, because I have yet to find any part I was interested in that was actually in stock. Including toppers, art blades, shooters, etc. -- all of which you can merrily add to your cart but can't actually buy.

I've been thinking about this more, and setting the $600 price tag and the personal attacks aside, here's what puzzles me about this.

Suppose that you've never seen this machine before, and you walk up to it at a location. You notice the topper, and you notice that JURASSI is lit up and that C PARK is not. What does this communicate to you?

It doesn't communicate "There's a progressive feature". Most likely it doesn't communicate anything. If it does communicate anything, it's probably "Hmm, looks like the topper is broken."

The only way the game has to communicate "This is a special thing that leads to a special reward that you should be trying for" is the relatively-old-fashioned way, on the display. Likewise, the only way it can communicate "Here's how you add letters during play" is on the display

A number of folks in the thread have pointed out that they could just as well put the letters themselves on the display. If anything, I'd say that putting the progressive mode counter on the topper is at least slightly worse than putting it on the display, because it's requiring you to look in two different places to understand the information, and it's putting half the information in a place that's awkward to look at during play.

If you look back at how progressive features are shown over the years, they tend to fall into three categories:

• Purely on the score display.
• On the backglass or the back wall of the playfield, very near the score display -- RANSOM in BK2K, DOUBLE in Surf'n'Safari, etc.
• On the playfield or the apron near the flippers.

Notice that these are all places that the player is likely to look anyway.

There are also a lot of machines that show progressive jackpots on the backglass, often pretty far from the score display. But a progressive jackpot display is a lot easier to understand in isolation -- when you see "JACKPOT" and a thermometer-type column of lights from "1/2 MILLION" to "4 MILLION", and some of those lights are lit, it's pretty clear what it's telling you. And you probably don't have to pay attention to how it's changing during the game, so it doesn't matter that it's in a place where you don't normally look.

I'm really curious about how this will be implemented and how well this will work on location.

I'm fishing for a scenario where this makes sense. It doesn't make sense in a home scenario, because progressive features are more annoying than interesting if you're the only one playing the game. Progressive features are normally there to attract players on location, like progressive jackpots on a slot machine.

Also, to me, the Spartan design of the topper seems more suited for locations, where you don't want something that can be easily damaged. For the home it seems like you'd want something more elaborate.

So setting the price tag aside, what's the scenario where this makes sense?

Do Stern toppers actually contain code at all? I'd have thought that the code would be part of the normal game software, and the topper would effectively act as a dongle enabling the feature.