From what I understand Stern shorted Jack on LOTR LEs when he was a distributor, so he decided to compete with Stern.

He was a distro, then he started his own company, cartwheels, leading to the never ending price increase in the hobby, investor came and introduced tiered pricing.

He started as a Stern distributor, yadda yadda yadda, playfield pooling is your fault.

Jack is the reason there are LOTR LE's. Stern only made one model of every game at that time. After the production run was over, Jack's customers kept clamoring for more, but he had none to sell them. Jack convinced Stern to produce a limited run of special editions, a few years after the production had ended.

He decided to compete with stern for 2 reasons.. As a ditributor, he and his customers were unhappy with the products being offered, as well as his allotments. And secondly, to make himself tons of money.

If I may please.

Stern had to seek revenue to keep doors open. The investment came with over site from investor group concerned with ROI . Strictly interested in security of that investment.

Sterns offerings had been continuously stripped of toys. Every step in the manufacturing had been thru cost reductions to point games produced had limited consideration as to actually being fun to play.

I do not know Jack or his company personally.

What appears to transpired my observations from Pinside discussion threads. Jack provided some seed money towards LOTR LE. He secured order for X# of games. Games manufactured. He was shorted somehow in the transaction. Discontent with Stern over this is what started JJP.

I will hijack thread for notable quote.

Launch JJP forced Stern to improve. Nature of competition is to morph into something sustainable for the times. Game play improvement resulted. From my standpoint a very good thing.

Enjoy your day Shane

Yep it was a dark time of hated games like Iron man, Tron, ACDC, Star Trek, & Metallica

Luckily WOZ brought all "the fun game play" back!

Dialed In and Wonka are AMAZING IMO.

I think JJP makes some great stuff and I am glad they exist.

Excited for High Speed III to come out in a couple years! (After Billy Joel of course)

You could watch this:

The main chronology starts at 4:11 and goes about 15 minutes.
.................David Marston

I'll give you Tron and Iron Man, even tho IM was not a successful game at the time, but AC/DC, Star Trek and Metallica? Those were after JJP was formed and, imo, were a direct result of the emerging competition. Stern had some other special games before that like LotR, TSPP and SM, but most of their games were pretty simple mechanically and had very similar rules and animations. The 'artwork' was also just clip art photos and the printing quality was like newspaper. Metallica was the first game in a very long time with hand drawn artwork.

Probably fair. I was wondering how much we knewm back then & how much it affected Stern.

Well WOZ is basically clip art so I don't think we can give JJP credit for that. But jesus no doubt aboot that dot matrix printing job; shockingly bad.

I'm happy and thankful that Jack started JJP. They really raised the bar with their first 5 games and pushed the industry forward

Then came the age of finance control, a move I think Jack didn't want to get into. Hopefully the sales of GnR and TS4 will show investors that JJP clients are in to buy loaded games and get back to that trend of making every game an above and beyond everything we've seen.

I honestly worry about JJP after Toy Story 4. I don't like the game, but for their sake, I hope it sells well. It just seems like a machine that has a confused identity:

Toy Story... but no toys
Easy shooting layout... but convoluted code
Family oriented theme... but damn expensive
Toy Story.... but only the 4th movie
Jersey Jack... but located in Illinois

They were done for me with GNR tier system; Strayed too far from the original point of JJP.