IIRC from one of the many podcasts I listen to, Gary shares the rights to those old games with his ex wife?

I'd love to see this, but imagine some of the R&D required might be more difficult than it sounds. That said, I think they'd make a killing.

That’s true. Classic Stern rights are owned by Gary and the Ex. That’s why they did Beatles/Seawitch and yet made ZERO mentions to Seawitch in the credits.

This idea was tried around a decade ago, King of Diamonds.
Look it up, everyone was begging for it and then no one bought it.
Now the market may be different... but why risk it? They’re gonna stick with what’s popular and what’s guaranteed to sell. There are still Beatles sitting NIB with distros.

Yeah I’m sure Stern is dying to remake a bunch of old ass pins at minimal profit.
Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see that happen but………….not gonna happen.

In an interview Gomez said it would cost just as much as a new licence to remake them and not worth it . Despite not having to pay for a licence .

As always, why would they sell 5k machines when they can't even produce enough 9k+ machines to sell?
This isn't an issue of Sterns making monies, it's a pipe dream of us to get cheaper machines. Makes no sense.

Was hoping with PF and Bond 60th we would start to see a resurgence in classic pin remakes.

Not at 5k

It's a fantasy.

They can't just "throw these together" and design and build them quickly and sell them cheap.

For Beatles, every single post was moved in pre-production. It's not a "re-skin" of Seawitch, it's a brand new playfield design inspired by Seawitch.

Every other remake/reskin would be the same way. They can't just scan in some 45 year old playfield blueprints (if they even have them) and go straight into production.

And they can't produce them to sell at a profit for $5K either. You know this. $5K pinball machines have plastic lockdown bars and one tiny display.

Cause those games are boring in 2023.

Gottlieb tried that with Orbit/Super Orbit, Royal Flush/Royal Flush Deluxe, Jacks Open/Jacks to Open, Target Alpha/Eldorado.

Not with great success, even if they did not have to pay for license.

Whoa Nellie is based on Continental cafe, with all new (and great) artwork and updated rules, but how many have you seen on location?

Not possible. Hell scratch builds of these games are almost twice that. Even with sterns added abilities, you ain’t getting anything out of them for less than 7k.

Wrong.

Right.

Casting aside the "under $5k!" fantasy, I think it's clear many of us would like and buy games like this for $7K, standard pro pricing.

I've wondered why Stern has no interest it, and will only do these games at inflated boutique prices.

My best conclusion is they just don't think they'd sell enough of them, and they believe that the audience is limited, so if they are gonna do it, better do it on a premium pricing model to milk the most profit out of each game. Maybe they don't think they can sell massive numbers of a thowback game like that, but they think they can sell 500 bonds or 1964 Beatles games.

Who knows? If that's it, maybe the clear success of Pulp Fiction will change that line of thinking. Right now, they are ceding the "pro" throwback market to CGC, in a big way. Very unlike Stern to just hand over a large market segment to a competitor like that.

For me, having learned to play pinball in the 1970's and maybe for you also, the 1980's games are not boring. But for todays generation, single level playfield with almost no toys, no flashy LEDs and no display animations is a snoozefest.

Going back to classic for Stern would be simple for them to just throw in on one of their lines like a vault and pump up price what market has been paying.
We are all suckers and would pay. PF, I think will start a new movement going forward.

Simply not true in my experience. I am regularly playing with younger players that while they may start out thinking that way, within a year or two prefer having era-diversity game selection.

20k games ...

I would be interested in seeing Stern make a brand new solid state style game that was priced like a regular cornerstone. Maybe just a Pro and and LE, no need for the Premium, same playfield on both, LE for the bling and a topper or whatever. $7k for the Pro, because let's just be realistic.

I'm not interested in paying $7k for a re-release of an old game that still plays like the original. I'll find a used one for that. Remakes at high prices only work if the originals are going for those prices already. MM and AFM made sense because you could get a brand new one for cheaper than a used one. Nobody is buying used $10k Stargazers.

Old solid states are great, they're fun, they're not worth that much money, even shiny and new. For that kind of price I want modern rule applications, I want RGB inserts, I want proper sound, and I want shots that take into account how we play pinball now, even with the old school feel.

Pulp Fiction got this right. Bond 60th got it right. Beatles is good, but imo there's only so many times you can go back to the old game design well. Seawitch worked because it has an open orbit shot that provides flow people are used to.

tl;dr - Let Keith Elwin design a single level that's not stupidly priced and stupidly limited with unnecessary score reels.

Any serious pinball player will enjoy these games.

Anybody who likes playing multiplayer games will enjoy these games.

What is the percentage of 4-player games on new machines that get finished before someone loses interest and leaves, or plays something else? In my experience it's well under 50 percent.

Old-school games much more fun in this kind of environment.

An unknown company halfway around the world, with no real guarantee they could get it done, offered a classic Bally and everyone rushed to pay over 7K for it day 1.

Good example but they did struggle to sell them , even with the upgrades , like-new code , LCD screens ,thousand watt sound system , under cabinet lighting .
People want NEW games .

The Stern and Bally games from that era were based on the same basic board set and very similar in most ways. If Stern had considered remakes in the past, I would imagine observation of the current Haggis remake of Bally pins might help them decide not to. Haggis is remaking old Bally's and adding modern bling and new rule sets to them. Sales are in the low hundreds (not thousands) and there is ZERO buzz for these games. No FOMO, very little if any meat on the bone for flippers even with only a few shipped at this point. Not to mention that Haggis started with Fathom which is the most desirable of the Bally games of that era, so it is all down hill from here.

I would love a new Meteor and a few other games of that era and would be willing to pay, but I am in the very small minority...

I'm always amused at this "real players need ramps!" mantra you get, mostly from people who only own new Sterns made in the last 5 years that were all purchased NIB.

Meanwhile, the high ranked IFPA players they'll never be as good as love single level games.

I also get that it's hard to give up some modern conveniences like varied soundtracks and callouts and ball saves and modern lighting. Which is why I'm in favor of new game designs with retro flavor over strict remakes. There's a market for the former, I think a pretty limited one for the latter.

Sure, and if Stern were to find itself in the position of not being able to sell their stuff, maybe they would try it.

But right now, they have a huge backlog of $8-10K games that they can't build fast enough. They have no incentive (or additional capacity) to build cheaper games that they'll make less money on.

If operators stopped buying Pros because the economics of location play aren't working, Stern might try to start stripping down the Pros even more than they currently do. At that point, a single level old-school game might make some sense. But it would probably be easier to just build something new than try to recover some old design (for which the operators would have no special attachment to anyway).

I think this gets at why Pulp Fiction is an early hit - it's not *just* a retro game. It's a retro game with modern lighting, parts, code, etc., plus a desirable license. I can see Stern going this direction to a degree. Let's see more modern/retro applications instead of remakes, please.

Tons of people come to my tournaments not because I have some hard to find in the wild games, but primarily to play Hot Rod, my EM retheme with ball save, two multiballs and light shows but with real score reels and incandescent lights. It’s literally played continuously while the others are played but more sporadically. The top players love it.

I think once you’ve played for awhile, the variety and novelty of older games starts having some serious appeal. Also not everyone wants to slog through the wood chopping on some games - you can play two complete games on Hot Rod while someone is still on ball 1 on AFM.

I think there’s a market for these types of games even at 7K+. The hobby is a lot different than it was in the King of Diamonds era. Also that game was a shit remake.

This man knows that's up. Stern isn't a bunch of bros with a 3D printer in a storage unit slapping together homebrew quality games like spooky.

They're a legit manufacturer and with that comes a ton of overhead which would not make producing low cost products for a limited market profitable beyond what they're already doing.

One additional thing comes to mind: TGP

I think as long as Stern continues making movie, comic book, and music themed pinball machines, there won't be any re-makes or re-imagined classic Sterns.

I would love to play the Haggis Fathom machine one day.

Stern Beatles and Spooky Total Nuclear Annihilation are on my short list of pins I hope to be able to purchase eventually.

Beatles is awesome, and at this point, you can get a Gold for less than the price they were new, especially considering inflation etc.

Aww. Am I the only person that likes playing that solid state King of Diamonds remake? I've played it a bunch at Flippers in Grandy, NC.

Funny how it was ludacris when released and now it's looking like a good deal

I'm waiting for Stern to remake Rawhide...

Stern has a massive backlog to keep them very busy for a long time. But it does seem like a good rainy day policy to have a modern Star Gazer that could quickly be rolled out onto the line in a pinch. It's all standard parts that they keep anyway, 3 banks of drops, pops, spinners, etc... Just a few custom ball guides, the playfield itself, and a plastic set. Toss in an autolauncher, a few simple multiball modes, and expand the ruleset a bit like The Beatles did. Alphanumeric displays to keep the game simple/retro and costs down. They could sell a thousand of them for 7500.

Sorry, this isn't the first time we've discussed this

Sure, before I downsized my collection it was half early 80s Ballys, I get the appeal. We could play a 4 player game on Flash Gordon while someone was on ball 1 of Metallica, totally relate to your experience. But I also paid like $1500 on average for them.

Discussing prices is boring, but you can't avoid the fact that at $7k people are looking for some value.

The fun of a fast, brutal, single level game is timeless. But people will gravitate to TNA over Stargazer given the choice I suspect. And it's clear that TNA struggled to sell in this new run when prices went up compared to what it went for originally. I paid $6k or something for mine, I wouldn't pay $9k.

Well good for you!

It’s funny. Nobody who starts these threads ever can imagine this, so they just keep repeating their “it can be done!” fantasy until we all give up and move on to the next thread.

But hey I’ll try again.

So take a Stern home pin, which is sold for $5,000 currently. Add a metal lockdown bar, rails, a real coin door, and 5 individual LED displays. Oh, and a playfield made out of real trees, not “MDF.” And, keep in mind they are in business not to fulfill your fantasy or make friends, but to turn a worthwhile profit.

Now can you imagine it?

Again, this is we we're not pinball manufacturers.

Right now $5K is too low, but at least a full year before COVID, I asked Jody live during a Deadflip stream where Jack was walking around Vegas the possibility of recreating classic era games (remakes or original titles) at that price point.

His response was basically exactly what is in the paragraph above "limited audience, juice not worth the squeeze"...etc. and that was me asking about them being $5K NIB back then, nevermind today! I'd certainly be interested in some cool classic style games at $7K, but I'm sure they have their reasons not to do that right now.

Pinball is hard.

Can we talk about producing the vault edition of Tron first? Thanks.

I have multiple friends and family that refuse to play anything multiplayer made in the past 30 years.

Can't do this because then they'd be wasting too much manpower, and too many resources that they need for the newer licensed games. Stern would fall behind on their competitors with the licenses, and they know those make the money.