The Big Bang Bar Remake Rumors Were True...Sort Of

Good morning everyone. News is a tricky thing. There's always a silent battle to be the first to report or talk about something. However, doing so often comes at the expense of not hearing both sides of a situation. That's exactly what we are running into today — or last night, to be more specific.

Late yesterday afternoon, the UK pinball company Team Pinball, creator of the 2018 pinball machine "Mafia" and coder for Pedretti Gaming's first remakes, issued a statement on its Facebook page. To me, the most interesting part of that statement was the following:

"In 2022, three parties began working together on the Big Bang Bar remake project:

Pedretti Gaming / Manufacturing – manufacturing
Team Pinball – software and electronics
Melvin Williams – all prototyping and redesign work for the game

The original collaboration eventually stopped after disagreements between Melvin Williams and Pedretti.

At that point, Melvin Williams had completed the prototypes and held all related paperwork."

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/18Wh5TFkSc/

The Big Bang Bar remake rumors that we've heard for years were indeed true! I knew that they were, but now we have proof. Unfortunately, it certainly sounds as though the project has fallen apart.

That sort of stuff is right up my alley. For me, the rest of the post falls into the category of two sides — Pedretti and Team Pinball — having different opinions about why the project fell apart and what happened afterward. I have no special insight as to who to believe.

I spoke with Pedretti last night and they strongly deny any wrongdoing to the point that lawyers are getting involved. Their short take on it is that they are continually trying to improve the quality of the games that they produce and that switching from Team Pinball to FAST boards and Athyrio Games (the company that programmed the Chicago Gaming Company remakes) for programming is a significant upgrade. I actually completely agree with that.

Team Pinball is understandably disappointed that the Big Bang Bar project that they had invested time and money in fell apart. I can't blame them. I would be too. However, I don't have any way of knowing the veracity of their accusations. I personally think that a media entity just instantly sharing one side of the story on their Facebook page or in an article without context is somewhat irresponsible. I'm not the journalism police — that's just not the way I want to do things. So I wasn't first. I waited until after speaking with Pedretti Gaming to mention this situation. We'll see how this plays out.

In the meantime, the most likely next new game announcement in the pinball hobby is from Pedretti Gaming, which is expected to show off its new Bally Williams remake at some point in the next two weeks.

For now, the hobby is left without a remake of an extremely rare pinball machine, Big Bang Bar. Below are pictures that I took of the Illinois Pinball Big Bang Bar remake when I visited the personal collection of Joe Newhart of the distributor PinballSTAR Amusements.