Stern Offers Their Factory To Build Medieval Madness Pinball Remakes

arcadehero May 15, 2014 5
Stern Offers Their Factory To Build Medieval Madness Pinball Remakes

It looks like the Medieval Madness Pinball remake is just around the corner. The announcement last October that Planetary Pinball Supply had acquired the rights to the game and would be remaking it was cause for a lot of excitement and they later announced a partnership with Chicago Gaming Company. Now Stern Pinball has announced a ” specialty manufacturing arrangement pursuant to which SPI will make its manufacturing facility available to PPS and CGC to assemble their remake of the Medieval Madness (“MMR”) pinball game.” Chicago Gaming Company will be involved in designing some of the new hardware, making the parts which follow WMS specifications and they will be building the units at the Stern factory. The press release Stern issued about the deal doesn’t say when the game will be ready but I imagine that with this news that production will begin soon.

Here is the press release:

Planetary Pinball, Chicago Gaming and Stern Pinball announce Specialty Manufacturing Arrangement

CHICAGO, IL – MAY 14, 2014 – Planetary Pinball Supply (“PPS”), Chicago Gaming Company (“CGC”) and Stern Pinball, Inc. (“SPI”), today announced a specialty manufacturing arrangement pursuant to which SPI will make its manufacturing facility available to PPS and CGC to assemble their remake of the Medieval Madness (“MMR”) pinball game.

CGC, which has a long-standing business relationship with SPI, will assemble the game for PPS in SPI’s factory using SPI’s factory labor and production line assets. The game will be assembled with parts supplied by CGC which consist of original WMS specification parts combined with the new electronics and lighting systems designed by CGC. Final prep, packaging and shipment will be from the CGC facility in Cicero, IL.

“We think this arrangement provides the best solution to insure the timely delivery of a high quality game for our customers who wish to own this legendary title” said Rick Bartlett, President of PPS.

“We have a long-standing relationship with SPI and its high capacity manufacturing operation will allow us to complete the MMR games in a timely fashion,” added Doug Duba, President of CGC.

“We’re looking forward to helping PPS and CGC exceed the expectations of Medieval Madness pinball enthusiasts,” said Gary Stern, President of SPI.

5 Comments »

  1. AE35 May 15, 2014 at 11:48 am - Reply

    Tell me, Adam, is these Stern news not bad news? Does this mean that they have stretched themselves too thin?

    Would a fitting analogy be that Ford has a factory that a larger than their cars require and then they decide to produce cars for another car company?

    I don’t know.

    /Nicholas

    • arcadehero May 15, 2014 at 1:13 pm - Reply

      On the contrary, I think this shows that Stern is doing pretty well so they can offer the factory floor to build other pins. While this doesn’t mean that the flood gates are open for everyone that is building their own pins to use Stern, it certainly does not mean that there is trouble for them. I think this also adds legitimacy to the remake – while Chicago Gaming has been around for a very long time I don’t know that they had the best resources to make the best game. But now they do so sales will certainly go up.

      • AE35 May 15, 2014 at 3:23 pm - Reply

        I’m not so sure…It seems odd. I thought the news would be that they were going to re-run an earlier game(of their own) like Tron – again.

        • arcadehero May 15, 2014 at 3:43 pm -

          It is unusual for them as I don’t think I’ve read of them doing this before but as the PR states, they know Chicago Gaming and they have a relationship with them of some kind. But PPS has to be elated at this news as I think it provides some legitimacy to the project that they wouldn’t have had otherwise.

    • Steffen May 30, 2014 at 11:37 am - Reply

      Stern is doing pretty well these days. They recently revealed that Ray Tanzer has returned from Namco and that one of his duties will be moving Stern to a larger factory.

      As for Tron their license to build them has probably expired by now.

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