Chances are less than zero. Think the hobby/industry has learned their lesson on this model. Down with FOMO!

The Dragon's Lair pinball team should get together with the Ballarama team. They could pool their resources, and have (checks math) 0+0=0 chance of producing pinball games financed by Kickstarter.

I will not be backing this project. But kickstarter is not a bad sign in my opinion.

It might be for pinball but it is certainly not bad overall. I have several excellent things I have gotten from them.

I do books, another friend backs board games there. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/256680/return-dark-tower

This one was a smash. Now bigger ticket like pinball? Seems like a high bar and cost, but we shall see.

Does Kickstarter even allow this shit? They've cracked down on people stealing money and never delivering. Seems like this project would need 100K minimum. And that only builds 10 games.

Oof.

well there is the answer , predator part 2

take it to AP and let them build it .... nicely done homebrew that I'm sure it will sell if ever built !

With the above now brought to light:

If anyone, ANYONE here, still gives money to this - especially with the history of Predator WELL documented here - you're as dense as a bag of rocks and deserve to lose your money.

YOU RUINED IT!!!

(insert the biggest sarcasm emoji possible here )

Haha, I can't believe people actually took that stance in the Predator fiasco.

Hey now, they can still get the license...

Just need a kick starter for getting the license before a kick starter for building (lol)

Idk if it's still his intentions, but years ago he wondered if people would be interested in buying a DIY assembly kit. All the parts to build the game, and then best of luck following his instructions.

Seems like he is taking a goofy approach… Why not complete the prototype he is building, take some high quality pics, good game play videos and then shop it around to see if a current pinball manufacturer is willing to invest in it, secure the license, and produce the game. This would generate some buzz, get people excited and he’d have a more realistic idea of how many people are actually interested. Feels like the cart is before the horse on this project. If he honestly thinks he’ll be able to secure the license, update the design for production and then produce them himself he is in for a nasty surprise.

Oh boy.
Good on ya'll for email the licensor.

Kickstarter is a joke. I did recently get a project I backed sent to me... but it was $100 project... not a 10000 project.

All of these "wanna be" pinball manufacturers need to get a clue.
Kickstarter doesn't work for you business model.
The community has learned from the mistakes of the past... Hopefully; in the future - the individual will learn.

License? Piffle. Insignificant minor detail, let's Kickstarter this bitch and collect some free money!

Go for it. I value my hard earned dollar.

I would love to see him team up with AP for this. Trying to start up from scratch would be a nightmare.

If they linked with American pinball I would be all over it… kickstarter… no chance

Well, that didn't take long.

https://www.knapparcade.org/post/dragon-s-lair-pinball-project-has-been-paused-due-to-lack-of-license

Y’all got me thinking about kickstarter now…. In a different but related way.

The target for a kickstarter project has got to be about one to three hundred.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/406644983572534/posts/1003503720553321/

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Playtime is over.

Good move on y'all. Impressive what this community can do when effort is put forth

Big mistake trying to get people's money before you had the rights. Probably wanted the Kickstarter to pay for the rights he couldn't afford. It's not like licensing works on consignment.

Flip side of the coin: I feel bad for the guy. Obviously put a lot of time into it, probably his big life dream...... now crushed and for nothing.

Most likely a dreamer...... and got too excited as his dream took form: wanted to show it to everyone for validation. Another big mistake.
Life is brutal, and it's lessons are savage.

I hope he bounces back and can do something constructive with it. It's a beautiful dream.

Even with $58M of insurance fraud backing I wouldn’t preorder this one.

I put a lot of work into my StarTrek Mirror universe project... but I knew from day one that I wouldn't be trying to go into production.
That said; I wouldn't feel bad for him. He should have known that doing a kickstarter without a license was just asking for trouble.

Star Trek Mirror Universe!!! Oh Yeah!!! Sick!!!

You should start a kickstarter!!

(Really though, what a great idea...... mirror universe is maybe the best part of Trek)

Seriously, if they have a working, flipping homebrew pinball machine that they designed, built, and coded, (whether it’s 100% finished or not), that’s a remarkable achievement! Out of 1000 pinheads, how many would you guess have managed that? One or two? Hats all the way off to everyone who has done that!

Trying to Kickstarter that achievement into a career was an enormous mistake. At this point in pinball history it would be reasonable for anyone to assume it was a fully malicious swindle attempt… So whoever this was may have poisoned the well beyond repair. But if instead they had taken their game around to conventions to let people play it, it could have been a whole different story.

That’s a bit too harsh. It’s usually well intentioned people who get in way over their head because they massively underestimate the work to take a single prototype into a mass production item and then actually making multiple units.

I feel a little bad about tipping off the rights holder, but this needed to be nipped in the bud.

He’s free to keep working on his own personal homebrew project. Maybe one day he’ll reach a point where he can work out a deal between the licensor and an established manufacturer.

If anything, this thread has shown there is interest, even from an audience that has been burned many times by other parties.

If the motivation is there, and the game is good enough, with the right backing it's very possible Dragons Lair could still see production. It just needs to get on the right radar with a group that has the funding, experience, and manpower to make it happen.

-Hans

I’m in!

But only if it runs on Laserdisc!

The vibration dampening/mounting system is an additional $500

I think I worded my thoughts poorly there. I didn’t mean it to sound like an accusation. It seems far more likely that the person is naive than malicious.

and how much for an GOOD working LD player?

Stern should snag the license for it.

Oh hell no!!! It would be another home pin mess like the Heavy Metal.

My experience with Dragon’s Lair was playing it 10 times and I could rarely time my move correctly and was resolved to watch others. But a dozen years ago a guy I knew collected arcades and he was into disk playing systems. He loved Dragon’s Lair and he had 2 at home. Each arcade came 1 disk. IIRC there were multiple disks produced. DL might have had 20’ish of them and he’d acquired 3 others.
Anybody have access to one who can check or with history that remembers and could fact check?

Yeah, Dragon's Lair was a horrible "game". It basically existed to deceive gamers into putting in 50 cents cuz it looked so cool. Kids didn't know what a laserdisc was - they just saw real feature animation in an arcade game and HAD to play it. We soon realized you couldn't actually play it, and went back to Rampage, Joust, and Donkey Kong.

I thought it was so funny & out of touch when Don Bluth said something like "Players can finally control Dirk the Daring in real time" when Dragon's Lair 3D for Xbox came out...I was like - bro, we've been controlling video game characters in real time since BEFORE Dragon's Lair...you haven't given us some amazing new gaming gift we haven't had for decades already.

Y’all just hoping for some Daphne nips

And?

I used to collect and restore arcade games many years ago. People would come over with their kids, and kids NEVER understood Dragon's Lair. They didn't have that disconnect we did as kids between the visual presentation and the technological capability. To them it was just broken and they'd move on to games that "worked."

It was weird to see. Never saw a single kid take to Dragon's Lair or Cliff Hanger.

It had attract mode magic that pulled people in but it was crap. It got a couple quarters out of me back in the day but that was it.

I never took to a single other laser disc game, but I played a shit ton of Dragon’s Lair II (at Copper Cue in Wichita, KS, 5 blocks from my house!) It forever altered the first movement of Beethoven’s 5th symphony. To this day I hear the breaking glass and the yowling cat.

Cool concept, but not great games. They were borderline redemption games where the reward was a clip instead of tickets or a rubber duck. Still, it was fun as a 12yo to have a bunch of the game memorized and have people gather around to watch me play it.

When I was a kid, it was the same exact thing. You could control Pac-Man. You could control Mario. Dirk just takes your 50 cents, looks pretty, and dies.

I did arcade games before pinball…never wanted a laser game. If I wanna watch Dragons Lair or Space Ace animation, the DVD or Blu-Rays are fine.

In hind sight nearly forty years into the future, we realize now that it may not have been the greatest video game and its a limited. Its easy to look at anything this way though but remember... Back then it was awesome and ground breaking to control a cartoon character in a video game. Laser disc technology was new and it allowed the team to use it to their advantage of. It was significantly different that took the arcades by storm and they had to put monitors on top so crowds could watch. It got people in the arcade and generated $$$ which is what ops wanted. It was featured on "That's Incredible" and there's one on display in the Smithsonian in DC. I know its no Pac Man or Robotron but I still love to play again now and then.

I was a kid when it came out, so I remember exactly how it was perceived from a 6 or 7 year old’s point of view. It looked & sounded amazing…and then we realized you COULDN’T control the cartoon character. We all thought it was broken & never touched it again. We’d watch the teenagers or adults play it & just enjoyed the animation.

I think it's safe to say that wasn't everyone's reaction. The game is still beloved by people even if it was more a novelty than a game. I remember playing it as a kid and being amazed by the technology, even though it was probably 8-10 years old before I ever saw it. It used to sit next to mortal kombat 2 at my local video store and I'd play them both until I was out of quarters.