He-man / Masters of the Universe could absolutely be done amazingly. Castle Grayskull and Snake Mountain need to be on the playfield. Snake Mountain as a big bash toy in the middle. Grayskull in the top left, positioned so that a full plunge will cross the playfield and enter its mouth; you start modes and lock balls here, and can pick one of those at ball start like STTNG. There's also a ramp at the far left leading up to Grayskull's parapet, representing the Sorceress in her throne room. Between Grayskull and Snake Mountain is a saucer or scoop, to transform Adam into He-man for 2x scoring; an Adam figure rotates out of view to be replaced by He-man. Other shots can be the other heroes, collect them for wizard modes like Avengers. It could have character selection like Star Wars and TMNT - play as Adam, Teela, Man-at-Arms, or Orko. Dear god somebody make this and take my money!

The world where Hollywood continually screws up beloved franchises with wokeness and other garbage. It's completely possible that that would have happened to Top Gun.

That leaves out the ability to react to market conditions. What if, say, GOTG 3 is a great movie and bumps demand for that franchise again? Or another Deadpool, or a TMNT reboot, or say a Led Zep biopic documentary or some such. Stern would be doing disservice to all of themselves and the distributors and the customers if they said "nope, sorry, archived, can't make more" when the demand is there.

Stern isn't trying to be cryptic or misleading. They're trying to do the best by everyone, and that requires flexibility and keeping everyone's options open.

I thought that was Gary Stern in that pic for several seconds...

Does everything have to be so polarizing? Rush is pretty good, neither terrible nor outstandingly exceptional.

That "Escape from the Megaverse" thing surprised everyone, though it wasn't a cornerstone.

Even citing the designers can lead to less sales too. "Eddy's layouts are boring, I know I won't want that one, maybe I will buy that Legends of Valhalla instead."

Stranger Things prices went up from limited supply, not from demand. It's certainly not demanded as much as stuff like Jurassic, Deadpool, Godzilla.

And yes, it's only superficially like AFM; the flow doesn't play anything like it.

Anime won't happen because there's no singular focus for it. Everybody wants some anime but everybody wants a different one. DBZ, Naruto, One Piece, Sailor Moon, however many others, there's a million of them all splintering the market.

Pokemon is the only one with anywhere near enough recognition, and that's for the whole franchise not just the cartoon.

Mega Man also writes itself into a pin super easily. Beat modes to take the powers of each boss. And then everybody will complain because they don't understand how the powers work, just like AIQ. Right?

We'd expect Stern to do the announcement when the production line is ready to go for it. According to the latest schedule in the "what's on the line" thread, it's Godzilla currently, then Star Wars, then the new cornerstone. The announcement should come in mid August after Star Wars is through the line.

Hell, we could have Stern folks *spreading* speculation to dilute and distract from anything we might have gotten right!

Well, they certainly had some time to fill, with skipping a cornerstone this year.

Stern's idea of a cornerstone is best defined by what it isn't... it really means "not specialty". EHOH, Beatles, Batman 66, Heavy Metal, Supreme, Primus, and that Escape from the Multiverse thing all had some degree of remakeness or limited production that wouldn't qualify.

It's not exactly that the pro/premium/LE model determines a cornerstone; it's more like the causation goes the other way, a game broad enough to be a cornerstone is going to get the pro/premium/LE manufacturing.

Stern's Heavy Metal, though it was a retheme and a very limited release.

Rush already hadn't been produced in almost a year, it hasn't been blocking the Godzillas and Elviras and Jurassics since last summer.

Eh, we already have one great Simpsons pin. If we're going to get another cartoon pin, give us Futurama already!

Some of these were first-run Pros where the buyer then decided to upgrade to a Premium instead. That signifies more demand for the title, not less. Not sure how many, but I've seen at least several offers saying that.

Yeah, Foo (both models) is on the easy side, but deservedly so. A big part of it is that all the shot angles are so perfect. The spinner is dead center and easy to rip with any flowing feed, the upper ramp is exactly in the sweet spot from that flipper, the overlord shot is easy too, and the left ramp is close up and also easy to hit. This is the opposite of both Bond and Rush, where every shot feels like it's just out of the sweet spot.

The game structure is also fairly easy, since the modes are simple and you can retry and resume until you finish them, unlike say AIQ. Not every game has to be a punishing titanic battle, some can be a fun upbeat romp. I agree that Foo is the next Deadpool, and that's a positive assessment. I don't think there are a lot of owners dumping Foo because it's easy, although there may be a few.

Anyone here remember that Stern's Heavy Metal exists? That's a generic theme, even with existing music, and it's been completely forgotten.

Yeah, the only reason to do unlicensed is if you're a small manufacturer where paying for one is risky. There's some success in this space - TNA most obviously - but most of the American and P3 titles are also pretty much overlooked.

One other angle is public domain properties, like Houdini. Surprised we've never seen Sherlock Holmes or the Cthulhu mythos - those are probably the most recognizable public domain "franchises" that anyone could do.

Which means prices will continue to decline. You already can't sell most any Pro for more than about 6200 or premium for 9200 and that's only going to drop with more supply. Good news for buyers, bad for sellers.

Namecheap is a domain registrar that's been around for 20ish years and is decently well regarded in the tech community, so don't judge by just that.

It was not. The pinball came out a year before the movie. It was just coincidence that two industries did the same homage/spoof of the same thing around the same time.

Yeah, it seemed like almost nothing was selling at York. Hardly anything left the floor or had a sold tag on Friday.

I think the Multimorphic P3 and maybe its modules still have a wait list, and maybe Lebowski if that's still in production too, but yeah those are minor compared to everything else.

Stern has Addams-ed themselves and the whole industry. The last few years of machines have been so successful and so reliable with Spike 2 that they just stay in operation forever and saturate the market.

BTW, I'm calling it here: The carry-over progress in Venom is a pilot for doing it in Pokemon. It's an obvious fit to have persistent progress for collecting your Pokemon. Maybe you even have to find and play both Red and Blue pinball machines to get them all.

Whyever not? Simpsons Pinball Party is an all-time classic.

Wow, there's a lot of haughtiness dumping on Pokemon in this thread. You (and everyone else in this thread) realize that the "millennial kids" who were 15 and playing Pokemon when it came out, are now 40? That's plenty of time to have a career and solid income. I own five machines at 45 and could have at 40.

Then you haven't seen how obsessive Pokemon fans can get. Pokemon Go players would drive to another city just to conquer a gym that would get conquered right back the next day. Not all of them, of course, but there will indeed be a fanatical base of some extent seeking out the pinball machines on location.

Does this mean Stern is lowering prices to the distributors, or does it mean the distros are having their profit squeezed out?

(My guess would be some of both, and the former is really not exactly lowering the wholesale price, but more like package and volume deals and discounts.)

I would guess Venom will end up about where Rush and BKSOR are - low supply, low demand. They won't overproduce Venom like LZ and TMNT so the prices won't sag as badly, but there's not going to be any demand keeping Venom close to NIB prices like for say JP and Godzilla.

I didn't literally mean that Rush sales are equal to Venom and/or BKSOR. I meant that they're in similar market positions, demand mostly matches supply so that prices won't either sag greatly or spike highly. They're all themes with limited appeal and unexceptional layouts.

Vespula, you also started a fight with me in the Rush owners thread when I expressed criticism of it. I don't know what makes you so compelled to be combative and defensive about this game.

Yeah. Rush does make sense for its market position. Like Beatles. Rush fans tend to be fanatically obsessed about that one band in particular, and so they're going for casual pinballers who may never have had a machine at home but will have to have this one. I sold my own Rush to such a buyer.

...but I still have to say it's not a great game. Solid, yes, but not great. The concert footage, music, vibe, and energy are great, sure. The pinballing is ordinary. It's got a sequence of song modes and stackable multiballs... just like Led Zeppelin and every other band pin. The layout is mostly recycled aside from the time machine.

And the market agrees with me. Rush just isn't in high demand, it stopped production a year ago and prices haven't gone anywhere. It didn't transcend its niche theme to become a must-have machine, like Iron Maiden.

Anything from before Spike 2 is a technical challenge, they'd either have to port the software to Spike 2 or have it run in an emulation layer. Doable but takes significant effort.

Also not sure they'd want to be trying to sell any more DMD units now that the LCDs have existed for quite a few years, but making all-new LCD visuals for any game would be a full-sized effort.

(I know you're being facetious with those titles, but that's the real answer if there's something more serious like TSPP or LOTR or Star Trek on the table)

I'd be in line for a Journey, at least if the layout isn't so clunky like Rush.

Stern did something close to that with the Heavy Metal title, although that more or less went unnoticed.

Stern doesn't get the 10k per. That's the retail price but wholesale to distributors is less. We don't know by how much but rumors have been between $1k to $2.5k under. (Not that that invalidates your point, just lessens it slightly. Actually then Stern makes about that much on toppers anyway...)

AIQ varies a lot from machine to machine, based on flipper power and alignment and wear. Flipper alignment in particular matters; AIQ is best aligned a millimeter or two up higher, for the flow shots onto the Widow and Gauntlet ramps. Though the factory seems to align the flippers low on almost every machine for all titles recently.

This is a matter of opinion. Anyone can just as easily say that the Pro is the proper game - it's the one that will get the bulk of plays, being in public locations - and the Premiums are unnecessarily gussied up to bilk a few thousand extra out of the insecure FOMOers.

Of course, really the design goes both directions - sometimes it's obvious the premium was downgraded (Godzilla, Star Wars), sometimes it's obvious the premium features were tacked on (GOTG, Zeppelin, Bond, Deadpool.)

There's an adjustment on the Premium to turn the moving building off entirely and then it behaves like the Pro. In this case you actually can have it both ways.

Same for JP actually, you can turn off the T-rex head which just gets in the way of gameplay while keeping the other premium features.

I've been calling this: the online carryover progress in Venom is a pilot for doing the same thing for Pokemon.

I'd actually say either Gomez or Brian Eddy would be the best fit for a hypothetical Pokemon playfield layout. This is a title that calls for simplicity, for all the casuals and newbies and button-mashers it's going to attract. This doesn't want an upper flipper that the kids will never notice, or Borg's clunky shot paths, or the gadgetry that Elwin or Jack would want to put into it. Just put a big plastic Pokeball on the playfield with a nice wide opening to shoot (about like TSPP's garage but always open) and a bash toy for battling the monsters (even as simple as Star Wars's 3-bank with a screen above it showing the monster.)

THPS using AIQ's layout is the game I didn't know I needed until this moment

Gary implemented this as deliberate policy when he took over Stern from Sega. The directive was (and still is) licenses that are franchises rather than single movies. He didn't want stuff like Congo, Johnny Mnemonic, Demo Man, Shadow that became obsolete and forgotten after a year. The one exception where they did do a single movie was Avatar, and that was big enough to justify the break and also was supposed to become a recurring franchise way sooner than it did.

Stern just moved to a new factory with double the capacity, and they've got to put that to use somehow. The market is saturated, but maybe putting out as many different titles as they can, new or vault, is how to push their customers into cramming in just a few more machines...

Just use AIQ's layout, that's already got vert ramps.

For a grind rail, think like TSPP's monorail, use a narrow channel rather than a big wireform.

Skaters wouldn't be hard to license. They'd be happy for the money and publicity. They aren't exactly overwhelmed with demands. If any don't want to play ball, they can be left out in favor of those who will... and that itself is pretty good incentive for anyone to not want to be left out, it'll happen with or without them and they may as well be on board. Same for the songs, there's hundreds of possibilities and you only need maybe ten or so to agree.

The carryover progress in Venom is one plausible piece of evidence, since that's exactly what a Pokemon property would expect to have.

If it's Danger doing it, it wouldn't be this soon, it's been less than a year since his Foo.

The Offspring already had a video game soundtrack. Heck, Crazy Taxi might even make a decent pin.

Yeah, Magneto doesn't have his purple helmet.

I guess that's because the days of fuchsia passed

Yup, this obviously happened with Venom, it was planned when the franchise was a lot hotter, then got pushed back by Covid and the huge backlog for everything else, and finally came out into a brutally cold market.

Jaws Pro doesn't have verticality because the vertical space is used for the upper playfield on the Premium.

I agree that Jaws feels... ordinary... compared to the other Elwins. It's fine, but what it's missing is any sense of progressive building like the other Elwins (Eddie cards, dino perks, gem powers, GZ powerups and the destruction jackpot.) The only progression in it currently is the bounties, and to a small extent the beach closure values. I assume this will come with the activatable gear that currently doesn't do anything.

Halo makes no sense for a pinball title. Halo players are addicted to that genre of game, they wouldn't care about Halo's name pasted onto something else unrelated. It's not like Sonic or Mario or Pokemon where the assets and characters already cross over many genres. GTA would be similar, its players wouldn't care about pinball. (Although GTA's missions would port over fine, like shoot a "steal car" shot three times then shoot the paint shop.)

Redoing Metallica is fine. Stern already redid Avengers less than ten years apart, and Jurassic and Godzilla and Star Wars and Elvira and Black Knight are all also redos of the same licenses.

Matrix, though rumor is JJP has that license. Also Mission Impossible.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/31/the-13-highest-grossing-film-franchises-at-the-box-office.html

From that list, the only ones that haven't been done for pinball are Potter, Fast and Furious, and the DC universe other than Batman.

Everything in TSPP is pretty generic, there's not much of any references to particular episodes. There's the monorail and the list of Cletus kids, but that's about it for specific references, all the TV modes and pretty much everything else are just whatever the characters could be doing any time.

TSPP is great enough that we don't really need another Simpsons, though. If we're doing that, do Futurama instead or maybe Bob's Burgers.

Journey has at least as many fans as Rush. And at least some of them are women this time.

Well, LOTR and TSPP were pretty good 20 years ago. The real worst time was about 15 years ago, when the menu was the likes of CSI, 24, Wheel of Fortune, Nascar.

Exactly. Star Wars was exactly this, didn't matter that it came out at the time of the crappy new entries, the market power of the original was and is still there.

There was absolutely nothing substantive about Halo, just wild guessing, mostly from people who want some videogame theme but not Pokemon.

I think Halo makes no sense at all, Halo players don't care about another genre of game wearing Halo paint, and Halo non-players don't care about Halo at all. It's not like Pokemon or Mario where there are tons of ways to engage with the franchise.

Don't wait on Halo, get whatever else you want that actually exists. Jaws should be resellable enough if by some wild miracle Halo does happen.

The only thing necessary (besides licensing) is if Spike 3 can run older Spike software, which seems fully possible, and even adding Insider shouldn't be a big deal.

The bigger obstacle commercially is the display; a DMD probably wouldn't sell much now but remaking full video assets would take quite a lot of effort invested. Maybe a middle ground of enhanced color dots like the CGC remakes, on an underlying HD display to show the Insider stuff.

MTG themed games in other genres always flop, hard. MTG players are addicted to cards and deckbuilding, they don't care at all about other games wearing MTG paint. The Arena of the Planeswalkers board game was infamously getting blown out on clearance for $1 because nobody wanted it. And non-MTG players don't care either, even as a generic swords-and-sorcery theme, nobody dabbles in Magic without actually playing Magic. MTG players would only care if a pinball machine dispenses cards, but even then they're not going to play pinball for it, they'll just buy them on ebay when the pinball players sell them.

As for bands, why not Journey? They have just about the most radio play and recognition among bands that haven't been done except for maybe Pink Floyd, and the songs are iconic and timeless. Unless you go into modern singers like Taylor or Beyonce or Rihanna, but that audience doesn't overlap with pinball at all.