We followed that up on Wednesday with the rumor that Jersey Jack Pinball is trying to woo Keith Elwin and his entire design team away from Stern since his contract expires after his next game (Reason for the Cactus Canyon Upgrade Kit Delay? Keith Elwin to JJP? FunHouse Update; Videos Galore.
And yesterday we talked about the dramatic price cut and new production limits that Pinball Brothers put on its latest game Predator, before even a single game has shipped (Pinball Brothers Offers No Tariffs and Free Shipping on Predator Pinball; Limits Production)
There was a bunch of other smaller news items in there as well. Fun stuff.
Today I'm going to kick things off with an Evil Dead production update from Spooky Pinball. Last night, on Spooky's weekly Bug's Scream N' Stream YouTube broadcast, Spooky interviewed my good friend Brady Hearn. Brady, who is working on composing the music and sound effects for the next two Spooky pinball machines, showed a behind-the-scenes look at how music is made for games. It's a great watch.
At the beginning of the stream, Bug gave a production update on Spooky's Evil Dead. So far the Company has boxed up 450 out of the 888 games. Several containers of games have gone abroad, including to Europe and Australia. Spooky is producing 24 to 25 games per week, or around 100 per month. They are mixing some Looney Tunes, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Scooby-Doo machines in that. Spooky currently has around the same number of employees they had when they were building Halloween, but Evil Dead is so much more loaded and complex that the build rate has dropped from around 40 games per week for Halloween to around 25 for Evil Dead.
With 438 games left to go at 100 games per month and Spooky appears to be right on track to reveal its next pinball machine, rumored to be based on the 1988 Tim Burton film Beetlejuice, likely sometime in November.
We got an avalanche of new code for games this week too, including one for my current favorite game Stern's Dungeons & Dragons. The latest D&D code, Version 0.93, contains a new feature called "Trinkets." Trinkets are small objects that players can buy from the store in the game that give the player a "buff" aka perks while playing, like extra damage on monsters or extra points on jackpots. The game contains 21 different buffs. Players can have up to 12 of them active at one time. Buffs of the same type are additive. They come from a whopping 100 possible Trinkets. Sounds like a cool addition. I downloaded the new code last night and hope to check it out this weekend. Below is a short video by Stern Pinball's Jack Danger and Dwight Sullivan explaining this new feature.
Stern also released new code for Kong Code, Version 0.85. This code contains a two new modes called "Manhattan Rampage" and "Window Shopping" and a ton of other stuff.
Barrels of Fun also released new code for its newest game Dune. It contains a new Mini-Wizard Mode "Fall of Seitch Tabr," additional callouts from two new voice actors and a bunch of other things.
Speaking of Barrels of Fun, they also gave us one of our first looks at Dune on the production line at their Houston, Texas factory this week. You know how I love factory pictures, so I've included those below.
On Saturday, my family and I paid a visit to the awesome Eight on the Break arcade in Dunellen, New Jersey. The Break claims to be America's oldest continually operated arcade. I took video for everyone. Check it out below:
A couple of days ago, a really cool new pinball documentary launched on YouTube. Titled "Always Another Game - A Pinball Journey," the short film shows the journey of Nate Smith - who opened The L.A.B arcade in Ogden, Utah.
I always love being able to play official versions of real arcade games from the comfort of my own couch. We're getting another port soon from Raw Thrills. Much like it released its arcade game Cruis'n Blast to the Nintendo Switch back in 2021, it is now porting its 2022 arcade game Fast & Furious to consoles, Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox, on October 24th. Pretty cool. Below are the trailer and a story from Polygon on the game:
Are we finally getting a great Fast & Furious racing game?
