Houston pinball machine maker readies new 'Dune'-themed machine

When Houston’s first pinball machine maker, Barrels of Fun, debuted its initial game in 2023, it was a surprise hit. Well, maybe it was a surprise to the pinball collecting community, who’d heard that a local startup was working on a secret new title.

But Barrels of Fun’s initial table, themed around the 1986 cult film “Labyrinth" starring David Bowie and Jim Henson’s Muppets, appeared with a swagger and buzz usually reserved for more established manufacturers. In pinball’s current renaissance, in which teched-out machines sell for five figures to collectors who are nostalgic and have disposable income to burn, the Labyrinth table checked both cultural and gameplay boxes.

The company is back with a second game, this time based on the pair of recent Oscar-winning movies drawn from Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel “Dune.” Having gotten a chance to play it at the company’s northwest Houston headquarters and factory, I think this sophomore effort is even more fun than the first. And that first one was pretty great.

The company and its games are part of a pinball resurgence that began almost a decade ago. After years of declines in which pinball makers shuttered their doors until only one major player, Stern Pinball,  was left standing, a growing number of companies have sprung up in the United States, including Jersey Jack Pinball, Spooky Pinball, Chicago Gaming and another Texas-based manufacturer, Round Rock’s Multimorphic.

If you haven’t played pinball in a while, it’s not the quarter-a-play game you remember from your misbegotten youth. Modern pinball still uses flippers to keep a metal ball from draining off a playing field, but it’s as much a computer game as it is a physical one.

There are video screens in multiple spots on some machines; different scenarios can be activated via shot combinations; some machines are internet-connected; and the tables are upgradable via software to offer new modes and capabilities.

Labyrinth has won raves since its release. It is No. 32 on the Top 100 machines ranking at Pinside.com, a website that tracks pinball machines, competitions and players. The game has not yet sold out – 90 of the $10,600 machines are available via the Barrels of Fun website. Dune, which is available for pre-order, is priced at a little more at $11,600.

As I noted in my column about the launch of Labyrinth in 2023, Barrels did a masterful job of keeping the game a secret until it was ready. The same was true of Dune – and the secrecy was even more impressive because there were plenty of pinball aficionados sniffing around about what the company’s next machine would be.

What’s even more impressive is that a startup like Barrels of Fun got a shot at rendering the “Dune” film franchise as a pinball game even before the first Labyrinth table had been assembled.

“We had storyboards and prototypes and stuff to show them,” van Es told me. “I think when they saw the passion and the detail level that we were doing for (Labyrinth), I think they truly believed that we had the passion in the right direction to tell their story.”

The Dune series started with “Dune” in 2021 and continued last year with “Dune: Part Two,” both directed by Denis Villeneuve and starring Timothée Chalamet. The first grossed nearly $430 million worldwide and received the most Oscars of any film in the 2022 Academy Awards ceremony. The second brought in almost $715 million globally and won two Oscars in this year’s presentations. A third film, “Dune: Messiah,” is expected to begin filming later this year.

(Sadly, there is no pinball game based on the 1984 version of “Dune” directed by the late David Lynch, who died earlier this year. That movie, which flopped upon release, has since developed a cult following.)

The Dune game is ambitious and technologically complex, echoing the epic scope of the films. Both the book and the movies focus on the Fremen, the desert-dwelling denizens of their home world, Arrakis, which is under assault by the vicious Harkonnen who want to control the planet for a substance found in its dry sands known as Spice. Paul Atreides, played in the two movies by Chalamet, is a messianic character who inspires and leads the Fremen to their destiny.

Anyone who has read Herbert’s novels or seen the films knows that summary barely scratches the surface. “Dune” is a rich story about love, politics, tradition survival and good versus evil. Barrels’ game brings playfield versions of the signature moments in the story, punctuated by clips from the movies on the screens on the backboard and below, at the level of the field – an innovation the company first unveiled in Labyrinth.

And Barrels of Fun went to great lengths to build this “world under glass,” as immersive types of tables are known. For example, “Dune’s” monstrous sandworms are represented by a mechanism that, when invoked, captures a player’s ball, rises above the playfield and then slowly swallows the ball. Later, it might spit it back out and onto an adjacent ramp.

Van Es, who oversaw the design and worked with a team of 14 on the game, said his engineers initially complained that this one component alone would cost $600 to build. They got the cost down and even added more features to the worm.

Another example: In a dramatic scene in the first film, Atreides is forced by the leader of an ancient order to place his hand in a box in which increasing levels of pain are administered as a test. If he removes his hand, he dies. In the game, triggering the pain box requires the player to hold down an action button with one hand and play with both flippers with the other. If the player takes their hand off the button they “die” – the game freezes and the ball drains from the playing field.

Barrels of Fun has its sights on more games. Van Es said he has acquired the intellectual property rights to six different titles, but won’t yet say what they are. In the meantime, he’s nervously eyeing the Trump administration’s ramping trade war with China. As with most tech-based products, many of the more than 1,800 components for the machines come from there. Many of the parts he needs are already in house, but there’s still more to acquire.

“It’s a really, really bad situation that we're in,” van Es said. “And there's nothing I can do about it. I'm just held hostage at this point. I see a lot of companies basically pausing or stopping. I can't do that because as soon as I do, I have to lay people off. And I'm not going to do that.”

dsilverman@outlook.com

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