Vault wouldn't make sense on this title, to me, at least. Stern would have to charge the "premium" price point for the game, however, you can get one well under that cost on the secondary market. If they were able to vault it at a pro price, that would make sense, but I doubt they would.

Would have to be at the new bm66 and ehoh pricing imo for stern to be interested. Be an expensive game to make, no chance it would be at pro price level.

They are so busy making all their current games hard to imagine they have time to vault an old game for a limited run of 500 or even 1000.

It would be amazing of course but there’s no real need for stern to bother.

Everybody always thinks a game is "for sale more than normal!" and everybody always thinks this means a vault is coming.

The game you have zeroed in on is not actually popping up for sale more often than usual, and it's not going to be vaulted.

No way they would vault it. Too many out there for reasonable prices.

If that was the case Munsters would be on the line every month lol.

I’d buy one LotR and one Tron

Why would I sell my decently nice lotr for say 5500 to turn around and dump 8k on their vault? This is what they did with Spidey. They are gonna deal with all the nib issues like warped playfields and bad clear. Ef that! Idk seems nuts

My LOTR’s birthday is tomorrow. It’s never leaving, Vault or not.

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the vault rumor has come and passed multiple times over the last 5+ years and still nothing....

How else can you explain the unprecedented avalanche of LOTRs for sale!?!?!

Even so it came to pass

Hahah because even I was about to sell mine, to fund something new. Lotr is great but feels the same after a ton of games :shrug:

LOTR is an epic journey of a game, long ball times and many objectives, Love it and mine will not go anywhere until my daughter gets married, she wants it as a wedding gift lol.. I play it the least out of all my games because I have to be in the mood for it, but I digress, Now that's an army! Run Frodo run! Epic game!!

Ancient Aliens?

they couldn't even find enough figures for the LE they released. how the hell would they find them for a vault? They had 6 runs of the original LOTR + that LED run. There are more than enough to go around.

Just have flat plastics printed of the figures

A vault edition would sell “well enough”, I expect.
Many of us would jump on the chance to get a NIB LoTR.
You may argue b.o.m. but keep in mind with vaults, they don’t pay a team of people to design and code this game.
Everything’s done already.
Fingers are crossed. Would love to see this happen.

-Someone does have to program it...they have to either emulate Whitestar in SPIKE, or re-write it in Spike. What if they put it on a modern display with new footage/animation/graphics/audio? That's $$$

-The license is expensive, even more so when spread over a small Vault run.

-Even if we ignore the costs of Vaulting, if they released a LOTR Vault and priced it like a Pro, that makes their current Pros look like Zizzles at the same price point. They're not going to make their own catalogue of current product look bad. Pricing would be at Prem at the lowest....knowing Stern, they'd call it an "Ultimate Anniversary Edition" and price it at $12,500...cuz, why not? lol

Kaneda heard a rumor that Stern figured out how to port over the Whitestar system to SPIKE. Sometimes people like to feed him false info so who knows. Mine is not going anywhere and is one of the only Stern's I hung onto after all these years.

sounds like it would justify the 8k price tag. Especially when I paid $3400 (full) in 2009 for my LOTR Delivered from the stern factory to my doorstep. Triple the price in 11 years, with cardboard cutout figures. :/

Wow. My first NIB is close to yours and also never leaving. Happy belated birthday!

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I would say that LotR, Tron and KISS would be easy sells for lots of money. Yes KISS. Recently the prices have soared on them. License might be a little tricky but KISS is always down for that lol.

KISS has been surprising to me. I remember when it came out and it got dogged.

I am not a KISS fan at all, but I REALLY LIKED the Premium, and ended up not minding all but a couple of the songs. It's one of a very small number of pins I'd have again.

The BOM argument is absurd, do you realize how much money they save not having to develop a new game?

Plus the cabinet and electronics stern is scaled down to have gotten MUCH cheaper since the early 2000s. And not just development money saved, but a proven, guaranteed hit product. That's very uncommon. Nice that Kaneda finally got the 411.

Agreed, people discount how much overhead cost Stern has to account for these days from animators, coders, engineers, and designers. A product that is closer to ready made is much easier to deal with and actually costs stern less to produce. That of course discounts the efforts of the coders to port the software to a new system, but rumors would say that has been done slowly over time.

Tron should be remade first.

If Stern were to vault this it would be an insta buy for me. I've wanted one since they first came out.

I heard that a DMD game was ported to a LCD version and is definitely being released this year. NO game was specified.

LOTR makes sense because they can charge an arm and a leg for it because it's so packed. I could care less about the screen and wouldn't want to own one again... my hope is it's Tron so I can add that back to the arsenal... but I'm sure they'll charge an arm and a leg for that as well

Who am I kidding it will probably be Ghostbusters

Bingo. NIBNEWBS can't get enough of that pile of trash.

It’s hard to believe LOTR Fellowship was released 20 years ago this year. So who knows with a vault on this one. Wasn’t the Spidey vault priced at premium level? I can easily see this at $8k to pocket what they can. Tron too.

STOP

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I agree and always enjoyed playing KISS out in the wild.

He is right sometimes. Not often and most of the times he is wrong. But he knows people feed him false info and admits it. I give him credit cause it takes some testicular fortitude to say all these rumors on a podcast knowing most will be false and other podcasters will call you out on it.

Tron seems like it would cost a lot less to make compared to LOTR. Basically 2 plastic ramps, motorized 3 bank target, and a spinning disk. I would think the licensing for Tron would cost less then LOTR as well. I am not a pinball manufacture so these are just my opinions but it seems like Tron would be no brainer.

I would buy a vault KISS for sure.

and it's looks as bad the service menus on spike 2 that still look like the mid 90's and not scaled to full screen size.

Ah, another LOTR Vault thread. Yes, we’ve all speculated about the possibility since the first Vault title was released, and no they still haven’t made it. Most of the “they’ll never do it because ...” explanations are total bullshit, of course. Anyone that’s been paying any attention to the pinball market the past few years knows this would sell very well at a Premium price point. The fact that you personally already own one that you bought for $3k, or are sick of playing LOTR, or would rather see them remake a rarer title, just doesn’t matter.

The right question to ask is can they still get the license (including likeness rights) at a tolerable cost? And then as a secondary matter how much of a pain would it be to run more Whitestar games or upgrade LOTR to run on Spike? So far no one on Pinside seems to have good intel on either of these points.

According to Gary Stern and Zombie Yeti they are 'Done with doing any vaults". They might do a special edition like Catwoman to get rid of parts but never a vault especially an old system like SAM

A GB vault okay, but don't forget to redesign the lower part from the Playfield.
Higer inlane with rubber post, smaller flipper gap, maybe Gomez do a remake so that that child abuser that design the original can be forgotten.

Where was this statement made? If true, it is incredible to me that Tron, TSPP, and LOTR didn’t get another run.

Got a link? Would love to read more about this.

I would love to see LOTR vaulted and I would buy, as well. With the new Amazon series coming out and being filmed as we speak, the rerelease of the LOTR and Hobbit Trilogy on 4K and the 6 movie combo 4k coming out this summer, could boost interest of the movies and other properties. I agree the there are many LOTR to buy on the market, but so is the Ironman pin. That has not only been vaulted, but re-vaulted and NOBODY asked for a re-vault. Marvel/Disney license is expensive, so I think the Tolkien estate would be possible, too! Nothing is impossible but who knows. Just my 2 cents (converted to Canadian currency, 1 cent)

Steve

Original LotR was Whitestar.

And since when does Gary Stern not like waterfalls made of money? Maybe this was said in a COVID brain fog. I find the statement suspect or intentionally misleading (perhaps he doesn't consider the LotR Spike a vault because it's essentially a partial remake with the new dots). The statement also goes against what Gomez has said, which is if the market is demanding a release, Stern will try to meet that demand (paraphrasing).

Stern is 3 generations past Whitestar hardware (SAM, Spike1, Spike2), and has a bunch of licenses locked up.
Little chance of this.

LOTR gets sold a bunch because the better skilled players can beat up on this pin, and then it get's boring, and it's valuable so they think:
I can sell this and make money, or sell and get whatever Stern pro I want.

Nobody at Stern would ever confirm if they had future plans of doing vaults because they want you to buy what is available now. Any time Gary is asked what his favorite machine is and he always responds whatever is on the line right now. They want people spending their hard earned money right now, not hanging onto it hoping for a future VE release.