I seriously doubt they will be producing anything else after all the negativity around their version of KOD...

There is 1 at the Pinball Hall of Fame. It is not in the with the EM pins.

Was that that Herb guy? I seem to remember him coming on RGP and making political statements, which was a real turnoff for me. Promised I'd never do business with his company.

I've heard a lot of bad things is all... I have no firsthand experience with them at ALL.

Have heard just general bitching about silly things like the cabinet is the wrong size/shape all the way to more serious stuff like the overlay they used to put the art on the playfield tends to wrinkle up. Either way, they failed to reach the hardcore community due to design choices, they failed to reach the collector community because of price and durability issues, and it's taken them FOREVER to sell all the games they produced....if in fact they even did. Not a good first go that would lead me to believe they would be doing much else.

Flippers in Grandy NC has a KOD, cant imagine paying over 300 for that game...

Herb made a game no one wanted....he lives in a bubble of EM guys who grumble about how EMs are great and modern games suck...they believe their own bullshit and tried to make a business based around their collector rants. He truly believed this game would "save pinball"....that Stern games were too confusing and everyone would gravitate toward a game with simpler play and rules...(and no toys, music, voices, ramps, light shows, or excitement). People who buy/play new pinball want DMD-style new games...they weren't interested in this. People who are already into EMs want real EMs, they didn't want this. People who might even casually buy an EM can get them fully restored and working 100% for waaay cheaper than Retro KOD - so they didn't want this! There was literally zero market for this type of game.

On 'IPDB' it states that 55 Retro King of Diamond pins were made. There are some out there. The cabinet is larger than an EM. The 1 I have played, played quite well. It stands out as different, a hybrid game. It does not sound like an EM, sure it has bells, just not that click-click-click of the motor. I can certainly appreciate the efforts in building this game, guys with more computer skills than me. If its selling price was to much at release, then that also limited its interest.

The anti-EM ramblings of a >=1989 A-list collector aside... it is like saying modern cars are too complicated with too many things to break, so we need to go back to model T's with no features. Or computers became too powerful with too many ports, so we need to take all that away and make them nearly useless (oh, wait, Android tablets...)

It will be interesting to see how Whoah Nellie does, eh?

Yes, it will be interesting to see how Stern decides to price Whoah Nellie. If they will price it based on cost to build plus %, or rather, what the sometimes crazy collector market will bear. Either way, I think it will come in at a price point where it won't be sold in large quantities. I can only hope I am wrong.

Whoa Nellie will sell better for multiple reasons:

-While oldschooly, it's "new". You can get an old KOD, but you can't get an old Whoa Nellie.
-Art package...card themes just don't do well today (see WPT) - humor and cute girls - that'll do fine.
-Stern awareness, marketing, and distributors. Retro didn't have that going for them.

Aside from the relatively good points from rarehero, the other biggest failing of Herb was the price. He kept promising on rgp that it'd be like half the cost of a Stern back in the day, and when all was said and done (5? 6? 7? years? I don't remember when it came out but he announced it a long LONG time ago), I remember it being BARELY cheaper... so he had that going against him as well.