(Thanks to Mark Robbins for the info)
About a year ago at the AAMA Gala, among the new products shown was a picture of a company that used to be known as Shelti. They changed their name to Gold Standard Games last year and they launched some new products at the Gala but all we had to go on was the single picture so info was sparse.
We’ve been given some details about the equipment, specifically the air hockey table shown and with another AAMA Gala around the corner (first part of August; I have heard of a few new things we can expect to see there) its fitting to follow-up on this development. The air hockey table in question is called The Table Of Champions and right off the bat you will notice one big difference about it from others – an LCD monitor attached to the score bar on the side. According to GSG, this displays “tournament info, player info, web addresses, promotional info, etc., during attract mode, and shows the scores to spectators during game play”. A nice touch to this is that the operator can customize some of what is shown on this screen too. Another unique touch to this table that I have not seen previously is that of the player switchable lighting. There are two buttons on the side of the LCD where one can change between white or black lighting.
There are four versions of this table, two of which don’t use the LCD screen, two of which do, the Premium and FEC models. You can see three of them along with more details by pulling up the brochure here (PDF). Here is a pic of the FEC model which has different art and LED lighting:
Mark also let me know about a documentary about air hockey called Way of the Puck. I’m not sure how we missed this one as it was released in 2010, although it does sound familiar. Here is the official website for the movie and here is a trailer below to give you a good idea of what it’s about; checking Amazon they have the DVD for sale but if you have Amazon Prime then you can watch it via streaming. I haven’t had a chance to check the full thing out yet but I certainly will have to this weekend.
