Quoted from nicoy3k:0% chance that a major movie studio would risk information leaking around a blockbuster movie to make a few hundred grand on a pinball machine...
I agreed with this when I first read it but the first matrix trailer dropped today and I love baseless speculation.
I could totally believe they planned to release that last Christmas and would start to release more details under nda on a need-to-know basis. By now, they expected to have the second trailer out and the third not far off. The promotional/licensing blitz would be redlining giving away most/all of the major plot points of the movie other than the ending/final battle. The perfect time to slot in the pinball machine which will almost entirely be based on information already available in the trailers. The ending? A wizard mode that won't even be implemented until a code update after the movie has released.
Then normal movie production issues along with covid delays throw everything into flux and the licensing/promotional people are in triage mode 24/7. They have to release a few details they'd prefer not to so the art/toys/callouts can be planned, but Stern doesn't need much as the general design of a matrix pinball game writes itself.
Sunday night the trailer is finalized and scheduled for youtube premier on Thursday. Monday morning their social media intern uses their only day off this year to browse twitter and sees the buzz about Stern's Big Announcement(TM), realizes this stupid pinball company is going to ruin everything and starts burning down phones until they find someone to call Gary and tell him in no uncertain terms they have to reschedule the reveal for next week.
So is Godzilla Godzilla or is Godziilla a codename for "We're finally making a Matrix Pin. A cultural phenom that anyone more than casually interested in pinball between 98 and the mid 2000s thought about how it would play whether they liked the movies or not, and every professional and aspiring designer likely has a pitch for just in case it ever comes up, let alone Elwin who won his first PAPA world championship the same year the original released."