I want a Brian Eddy designed Disney's Jungle Cruise machine. It could be a great spiritual successor to MM with tons of puns and dad jokes. You could probably get a bunch of former skippers to help write jokes.

Rush is a good game that doesn't have mainstream appeal. LZ feels like an empty box. People are buying IM for the great game, not the theme.

Stern needs the hobby to grow because most people only have space for a couple machines. Most current enthusiasts are already at their limit in terms of space, so they have to sell a machine to buy a new one. Stern needs more people and operators who want to buy machines. Insider Connected is squarely targeted at a younger audience - people who love the achievement system that Xbox pioneered. I wouldn't expect many more geriatric themes. That market is saturated. The growth segment has to be people in their 30s and 40s.

FWIW my teenagers like pinball. When we go to places with a lot of machines they always play fun themes. TS4, STH, BM66, GB, TAF, etc. They will play something like TOTAN if I suggest it to them but they always go back to themes that they like over "good" games.

Mario/Pokemon/Zelda would be the best theme Stern could produce. Gomez was talking about Spike 3 and a new lower cabinet design. Any of those titles would be an ideal theme for that new system/cabinet combination. They could increase price $2000 and sell out day one.

All the conversation about music pins made me curious about the data versus opinions. I started looking at album sales of Foo Fighters versus Black Sabbath but it's apples and oranges considering that people don't buy albums anymore, so I looked at Spotify data. Obviously, that would skew towards a younger band, so that's not fair either. But I went ahead and highlighted the artists that have machines in red, artists that have been rumored in green, and artists that have come up in the last week or so in this thread in purple.

Personally I would buy either Foo Fighters or Black Sabbath if they were as well done as Rush. I still don't really understand why Stern would choose to make a Venom machine but if it's Brian Eddy with Ozzy music then I will definitely put my order in.

Spotify Pinball (resized).jpg

Or the Multiball mode is the Dee Gees.

Seems pretty obvious what they will do with Pokemon. Pro will be themed to a color, premium will be themed to a color, LE will be themed to at least one color. Red/Blue/Yellow/Green seem most likely. Probably make Red and Yellow LEs for Pikachu and Charizard. I could also see something like diamond and pearl SLEs that would have two of those sets of pokemon in them, like red and blue or yellow and green.

Each machine will have about 80 pokemon to collect with 20 being unique to that trim level. So if you want them all you are going to have to either find a location with every trim level or drive around to multiple locations. You will have to catch them by winning battles. The more you play the higher your XP, the easier they are to catch. They will probably allow you to choose your own Pokemon to fight like the venom team-ups and each pokemon will effect the battles pretty significantly. You will be able to manage your pokemon collection via the new Stern App. There will probably be some that you can only encounter by doing difficult combos and then having some RNG luck. You will get a badge for collecting all the pokemon of each type. I could see a location specific leaderboard for who has collected the most pokemon today/this week/this month/this year.

This satisfies a lot of Stern's goals. 1) Get more younger people playing, 2) Entice operators to buy more than one machine per location, 3) enter new types of locations (card shops, record stores, hipster places), 4) Increase replayability - some of these pokemon will have a 1% drop rate and be very difficult to capture. People will just keep pumping money into the machines and eventually consider buying one for their house.

I came up with all of that in about 15 minutes of thinking about it. I would assume Stern would think about it a lot more.

I am assuming that Venom is the proof of concept for all of this. Go play Venom with this in mind and it all makes sense.

The licensing is different. Google it.

If you can't hear Jaws you are missing a lot of the game. The music and callouts are used with hurry-ups to build tension in a very unique way.

Easy Buy:
Pokemon
Metallica

Very interested:
John Wick
X-Men '97 (only if it's Elwin)
Muppets
Harry Potter
MMR
Williams Indy Remake

Only if it looks like a great layout:
Stern Indy
Whitewater 2
Gremlins

Everything else looks like a pass to me.