Jersey Jack Pinball Unveils The Pat Lawlor Game: Dialed In!

arcadehero October 13, 2016 4

We have long awaited for news and details on the joint efforts of Pat Lawlor and Jersey Jack Pinball. If you are unfamiliar with the name, he designed some of the best selling pinball machines in history including The Addams Family, Twilight Zone, FunHouse, EarthShaker and more.

Unlike Jersey Jack’s first two titles, the Pat Lawlor game has been shrouded in mystery. It was known that Pat would be designing it and that it would be an original theme but that was it. Today with the arrival of Pinball Expo 2016, the veil has dropped and we have details on Dialed In!

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Dialed In! – An Original Theme

Here on Arcade Heroes, we’ve longed to see original themes in pinball. A vast majority of new tables use a license of some kind but many memorable pins from the 80s and 90s didn’t need that to be great. Granted, original themes come with a lot of risk. There is no instant market you can appeal to from a TV Show/Movie/Rock Band. As Mr. Lawlor said in his presentation tonight, ‘if players don’t get what you are trying to convey, you’ve just wasted several years of your life.’

UPDATE: The theme is not about a smartphone but is like a “Sim City Disaster theme”. Reviews from those who have played it are raving, especially about the camera & selfie features which take your pic during the game.

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While this isn’t the first original license in recent memory, it does join a small club. Just by virtue of it being a Pat Lawlor game however, JJP’s website has crashed and the company has already experienced a flood of orders.

The Jersey Jack store website has been restored after temporarily crashing due to demand. where you can find Dialed In! for sale. The Collectors Edition is actually going to the more “packed” edition and retails for $12,500; the LE is $9000.

Dialed In Flyer

From the unveil today, there are two versions – a Limited and a Collector’s Edition. As the front of the flyer suggests, this game integrates various unique features including Bluetooth & smartphone connectivity and a camera. By laying your smartphone down on the glass, it can activate a special mode during multiball. The game also features 5 magnets, “3 flying drones”, a “3-D interactive projected image”, an animated robot, a hidden trap door and more. As it is with the other Jersey Jack games, it also has a 27″ HD monitor in the backbox, a headphone jack and RGD LEDs throughout the playfield. This does not appear to be a widebody like Hobbit and WOZ however.

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Here is the back of the LE flyer. I’m not reading much in the way of differences here but there can always be unannounced additions.

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Dialed In! – The Game

Shots of the game as seen at Expo. The theme appears to have a bit to do with physics & electricity meeting up with technology.

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A view from the playfield. They’ve really jammed packed this one with devices and toys.

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So far every JJP game has made use of a small LCD on the playfield, this one being a smartphone.

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Like other unique Lawlor designs, he created his own characters to make this game more interesting. I can’t recall seeing a sign like this on the left in a pinball machine for some time:

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Overall, this is pretty big news for the pinball world. While a final judgement will have to come from playing the game, judging by the pictures it really does appear that Lawlor didn’t hold his creativity back in coming up with a game that both operators and players can enjoy. Hopefully this will be showing up at IAAPA 2016 so we can get some hands on time with it.

What do you think about JJP’s 3rd game?

4 Comments »

  1. Nadav Salomon October 14, 2016 at 4:57 am - Reply

    FINALLY! FINALLY!
    I’ve been waiting for this for so long.

  2. IcePagoda October 14, 2016 at 10:43 am - Reply

    Someone took video already (it sounds very Safecracker-esqe, without the time limitations, which is a good thing):

  3. Neil Brimelow October 17, 2016 at 10:28 pm - Reply

    I find it hilarious that everyone has been complaining since 1998 that we needed an original themed pin, and when the pin-master Pat Lawlor delivers what is essentially the first “Bally-Midway” game since 1998, everyone complains about every aspect of the game!

    First off the price IS expensive. There’s no getting around that. However, it is 2016, going on 2017. The dollar (and money in general) ain’t worth what it used to be. My college Tuition in year 2000 was $1234 per semester. Now it is almost $4,000. We have gotten used to very cheap, very powerful electronics in the past eight years, and it’s sort of ruined us. A top-of-the-line laptop PC with the newest 1080 Nvidia GPU has close to NINE BILLION transistors in it (total); packed into the laptop, and the cost is under $2,000. So we balk at why a pinball machine must cost so much!

    But, we all know there’s very few shortcuts that can be done for a pinball to reduce the costs overall; there’s just simply too much labor!

    I saw a picture of the underside of “Dialed In” and whoa boy, it was totally jammed! Every inch was occupied. Pat Lawlor really went all out on this one. The game looks like a lot of fun, but I can’t figure out why so many people aren’t more supportive of JJP. There’s always room for competition, and competition always makes things better.

    Not to discount Stern’s accomplishments of keeping pinball alive and profitable since Bally-Midway withdrew from the industry, but it took a lot of balls building a brand new pinball company from scratch, and going from zero, to building three games, including an original pin, in less than four years.

    The game looks like a lot of fun, and it looks really, really deep.

    If the rumors that JJP is getting Toy Story pans out, I don’t think JJP has to worry about anything.

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