I have some great information from Pintastic to share with everyone, from both the excellent presentations at the show and from speaking with people. A lot of it has to do with Jersey Jack Pinball. JJP's current game has been so successful that we haven't had much new to say about them over the past couple of months. Well, that's about to change. At the show, Jack Guarnieri, designer Steve Ritchie and designer Mark Seiden gave a great presentation that had a ton of new information.
First off, in my own words from having spoken with lots of people at Pintastic, Jersey Jack's next game is without a doubt based on Sonic the Hedgehog. During his presentation, Steve Ritchie said that the game is "maybe the fastest game I've ever made" — which is a huge statement coming from the designer of High Speed and F-14 Tomcat. He went on to add that the game has over 6,000 recorded speech calls, though they may not use them all. The licensor required all recording to be done at once with no retakes, so they used a "shotgun approach" of multiple takes. The game is a standard body, not a widebody. It "might" have more than two flippers and it has "satisfying spinners." During the presentation they said that the game is not ready yet — Steve gave a non-answer on timing. However, after speaking with pinball at Pintastic, I personally believe that Sonic will be out sometime in June, which will be here before we know it.
Mark Seiden was more guarded in terms of talking about his next game, but he did confirm that he is working on one. Jack said that he has played Mark's layout and "thought it was really great." Mark revealed that he scrapped his first whitewood entirely and started over, and is glad he did because "the new one shoots amazing." When asked about timing, he said "this year sometime" — which Jack noted is encouraging since it's still early in the year. I personally heard rumblings at the show that Mark's game will be a music theme.
During the presentation we also received an update on Harry Potter. New Arcade Edition and Wizard Edition builds are scheduled for September.
Some Collector Editions are still available but not many. Eric Meunier did a separate deep-dive seminar earlier at the show on "The Making of Harry Potter."
Jack confirmed he filed a patent covering AI for pinball and gaming more broadly. He acknowledged that people (including me :) ) monitor trademark and patent filings and that the patent is written broadly, covering pinball, video games, and other game types. He also confirmed JJP is working on connectivity — "it's not a dead issue with us" — but is taking an Apple-like approach of letting others figure out the technology first rather than being an early adopter.
On the subject of licensing, Jack said he visits the Nintendo booth at License Expo every year and gets turned away — "pinball is not a category they license." He noted Gottlieb got two Nintendo licenses in the 1980s (Super Mario Bros. and presumably another) and speculated Nintendo may have had a bad experience. I'm not sure who Stern Pinball got the license for Pokémon from. Maybe it wasn't from Nintendo. If what Jack said about Nintendo is accurate, don't expect to see a Super Mario Brothers pinball machine any time soon as many people are hoping for.
In Eric Meunier's earlier presentation about the making of Harry Potter, he told an interesting story about how Jersey Jack secured the license. Jack Guarnieri had been pursuing the Harry Potter license for about ten years before it finally opened up. The franchise wasn't available for pinball as a category until a new head of franchise licensing came aboard who happened to like pinball. The Warner Brothers franchise team visited Burbank and saw three pinball machines lined up — a Jersey Jack game (The Hobbit) and two from other manufacturers — and said they wanted "this kind of appreciation" turned into a Harry Potter pinball. Eric got a call from Jack one week before TPF 2023 (right after The Godfather launched) saying his flight was being rerouted to Burbank to pitch the game. He had one caffeine-fueled week to prepare a full concept — playfield layout, characters, assets, mechanisms, and required audio/video clips. His genuine lifelong passion for the franchise (he'd been a fan since picking up the first book at a Scholastic Book Fair in third grade and taught himself Hedwig's Theme on saxophone in high school) sold the licensing team. The game took just over two years from that pitch to release.
Harry Potter the pin has 938 unique parts and over 3,200 total parts, all of which had to be drawn, sampled, inspected, and inventoried. Eric emphasized designing with manufacturability and serviceability in mind — the staircase top comes off with three accessible screws, and the only service issues have been occasional bad motors or loose set screws (five-minute repairs).
So there you have it. We ended up getting a ton of new Jersey Jack info out of the show. Good stuff. I'm super excited to see Sonic. We won't have to wait much longer.
I have embedded the Jersey Jack seminars as well as a great presentation by my friend Brady Hearn on the music of Spooky Pinball's Beetlejuice and a gameplay stream of Turner Pinball's Yukon Yeti from the show below.
