The thing was a turd. It's right up there with virtual shuffleboard tables... NO ONE PLAYS THEM. Certainly not in a FEC.

Walk around AMOA and look at the types of cabinet and games on display.. and then look at this thing. It looks like a middle school science fair project compared to the competition.

Would they pay to play, how much and how often are the questions every manufacturer is looking to get answered. I disagree that keeping track of people playing for free is useless info. I bet every manufacturer of coin operated equipment feels the same.

I unfortunately wasn’t there, but I saw in a walk-thru video that it looked like there were some guys there to answer questions and entice people to try it, and to fix balljams and whatnot

If someone from A.P. pulled down their pants and took a dump in the middle of the floor and told you it was decoration, you would praise it.

Isn't that the whole point of skee ball?

After listening to Zach and Dennis discuss Whirl a Ball on TPS and seeing this thread, I was intrigued and searched out videos.

A.P. has to be joking. I got bored watching a 30 second video. This is the debut from A.P. 2.0?

If those guys (claimed to) like it, that's all the proof you need not to listen to distro shill podcasts.

But just wait... they have 2 more pinball games coming.... eventually....

it is a shame, as I liked their pinball games (with the exception of WTFBBQ)

I've played one or more AP pins at an event. It was enjoyable, I just can't get past the strange backbox design, which I know is nitpicky.

Nope. They were as baffled as all of us. Zach is an AP distro and has received zero info on price, release date or anything else having to do with this thing.

What is important to observe is how they are playing the game. How long are the playing? Are they enjoying it? Are they coming back to play? Is there a line of people waiting to play? Etc. Just looking at the number of plays at an expo is pretty useless without any context.

We are saying the same thing.

"how much and how often are the questions every manufacturer is looking to get answered."

Obviously the more detailed the info the better. Total plays calculate into the manufacturing of every machine.

As I posted previously, I played it and wasn't overly-impressed. However, if they add some more games, do some animations on-screen, and add some colorful graphics to the "runway," it will definitely be more interesting. I'm not sure they did themselves a favor in showing it off this early, but I guess they were desperate for product. Ice Cold Beer is a classic, so at least they have that.

They are just the builder of those games.. and now maybe a distributor too. The game was built by another team, and they switched their production to contracted manufacturing by (then) Aimtron/AP.

Considering the significant discount they were selling those games at.. I hope they were demos.. or not a great sign for sales of that unit. It's MSRP is $5500.. so to be selling it for like $4300 is a STEEP discount.

Those machines must have had their audits malfunction, or they both came to the show with already 1000+ plays on them. If you look at the show expo hours, there were 39 hours the expo floor was open. So you’re saying each machine had over 2000+ players. That means each machine was averaging over 50 plays an hour. I was right next to the booth playing Harry Potter for a good 30 minutes and I didn’t see one person play one game.

I don’t think the math is working here, unless one person came up, enrolled one ball and walked away and that’s counting as a game

The only way those machines would have gotten that many plays, would have been if barrels of fun would have required one game to play Winchester

I was about to post pretty much this same thing. There's no way they got anywhere near 50 plays per hour. I was walking all around Expo from open to close both Friday and Saturday. I passed by the AP area every couple hours and only saw a few people total ever playing it at all. Most times I walked past there was nobody playing them, let alone never seeing any line formed to play it. And if it was getting 50 plays per hour there would have to have been constant play and a constant line.

are they reporting the numbers an lot higher then they really are?
did someone code balls played = games played?

It doesn't matter... these things will be scrap soon enough.

People were gonna play Whirl-o-Ball, but then they got high.
They were gonna whirl a ball, but then they got high.....

Sorry, just trying to see if I can shoehorn that song into every thread on PS.

hahaha, AP is either lying to you, or something is fishy with the numbers you're reporting. David Van Es was on the latest WAP show. He reported that Winchester had a total of 2,995 plays between the 4 machines so just under 750 plays for each machine. Now granted, pinball is a bit longer of a player than this Gem but they also had 2 hour lines (so no down time between games). Also, they had people playing outside of show hours for vendors (they also stated there were 30 minute wait times during these times).

The math just ain't mathing here for you!!!!

I believe it. Every time my son and I went over there we saw a handful of people playing it. Games were usually finished pretty quickly, unless someone was able to hit all seven targets. Then they got to essentially play again with another nine rolls.

Really fun game and I'm happy for Orbit!

I thought the 4k number sounded sus too. Maybe they counted each ball thrown as a play?

Bro this is embarrassing.

Total sales for whirl-a-bore:

2025 - 0
2026 - 0
2027 - discontinued.

If I'am feeling well, I always come back to this thread and feel a bit worse after reading the new posts.
Just wanna say thank you, otherwise I would be flying high all day long.

RMS will buy at least 1.

This is an embarrassing product.

It's like someone brought a skee ball into the lab and said "ok, how can we remove everything about skee ball that people like, and rush this into a prototype?"

AP is a weird zombie company at this point. Like, we know they are dead, they know they are dead, yet...it's still lumbering around clumsily.

If it's priced right and it will fit in my basement, you bet I'll purchase one.

My son enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. We enjoyed playing it together. If quality time between a father and son is wrong, then I don't want to be right.

Not sure if it’s right but I’ve read that MSRP is US$ 8,999.

I told them at Expo that that would be a deal breaker for me

<spits coffee all over keyboard>

As others have said the math does not work. In my experience you can expect 500 or so plays per day on a new release machine that has a never ending line at a show, obviously depends on show hours, ball times, etc. There is no way those whirly ball games got 2000 plays each, those are either lifetime number, counting issues in code, or as someone suggested balls played, which would then be about 250 games each over the show, which seems possible. While they got plenty of play on the busy Saturday, for long periods of time it was a ghost town, especially in the evening hours. I played the game a couple of times on Thursday or Friday, and chatted with Ron for quite a while at that time and no one else came up to play. So that was a 15 minute window where only 2 games were played, across both machines, again, math does not work, so for anyone who is believing this 4000 number, I have some ocean front property for sale here in Chicago, with both Atlantic and Pacific views, but hurry I only have a couple of lots left

It’s AP 4.0 now, no joke…

Popadiuk was AP 1.0, Balcer 2.0, Fix 3.0, and now whatever this Orbit thing Rob is doing. You can maybe mix the JPOP Balcer thing into one, but you get what I’m saying.

You can only reboot a company so many times before things just aren’t viable anymore.

The post Fix era doesn’t seem to be off to a good start….

It works out to a little over 1 game per minute, continuously, show open to show close daily, with no breaks. The simple fact that they were down at various points in the show alone makes that not possible.

Don't know how many of you grabbed some parts during the Halloween sale, but I'm shocked. Ordered parts on Oct 28th and received them today.

We are getting dangerously close to Panzerfreak "you are insulting my family!!!" territory. But it's so heartwarming, I'll allow it!

This is the one area AP does really well at - if it's in the store you're getting it fast. If you have to talk to someone to get something not in the store - good luck.