Some time ago I ran a story about a new pinball machine project by John Popadiuk and Ben Heckendorn – two men who have made quite a name for themselves in their respective fields, teaming up to produce a unique pinball game. In case you are curious as to what is going on with the project, well an updated website has the juicy details, which is summarized by this graphic (taken from the website for the game):
A trailer can also be viewed here
Some thoughts based upon the above:
That seems to be a fine place to put the LCD – while the first thought is for it to go into the backbox, I don’t think that is the only useful place for one. I imagine you could even place something the size of a Kindle Fire on the playfield itself above the flipper area.
Zombies were expected but I am curious to see exactly what they do with them – I imagine some of the variations have to be done with video. The zombie bowling mode sounds like it could be multiball.
Items like swirling ramps, hand drawn artwork, magnets and go-go girls, all sound like fun, interesting features but there are a couple of others things that really intrigue me here – the mystery mechs which sounds like there will be secrets to search out, 2 shooters (I wonder how that will work exactly as the drawing shows) and most interestingly, custom parts you can design for the game, including your own Retro Robots. It was sold as a fully assembled or DIY kit for almost $10k but it seems that me finding out about the latest on this was too late as they are no longer taking pre-orders. With that said, perhaps it will gain enough popularity for them to open up orders again, although the number of people that can spend $10k on a game are limited either way. Still, it’s great to see projects like this between it and the upcoming Wizard of Oz pinball. Here’s hoping it just keeps getting better!
Of course I would love to see how one of these would do on location compared to some other recent pinball machines. Seems to me that this kind of game would be capable of drawing plenty of attention to it without needing the crutch of a license.
