The battle in the pinball world is heating up as today Stern Pinball posted a trailer for their upcoming Transformers Pinball game. This is actually a well done, high quality teaser, you can catch brief glimpses of the playfield, see a prototype toy in action and to top it off we learn that George Gomez (most recently worked on Batman, The Sopranos and Lord of the Rings Pinball) is apparently the chief designer of this game. The toys are going to be crucial here – if there wasn’t a transforming robot of some kind but just a static character, fans would certainly revolt and for good reason. Most likely this will be a Q4 2011 or Q1 2012 release, should be interesting to see what they do with it now that there is competition on the line. I’m quite pleased by that as it seems to me that everyone is upping their game for a change which is what pinball badly needs to stay a relevant force in public entertainment.
Also thanks to IcePagoda on the forums, a link to a press release from Stern showing that you can now find their top five games for sale at a Best Buy near you. These are not necessarily the downgraded models either but the Pros – like you would find in an arcade (well, except for the Ironman Classic). Interesting to see Stern go this angle which is certainly not the traditional way to go about it in the coin-op industry. They already sold some through Costco in the past so it appears that the program was a success.
Future anticipation is a wonderful thing. I look forward to Stern Transformers Pinball Machine.