Arcade Collecting > Pinball

Stern layoffs

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shardian:
You forgot to critique Elvis - which is by far my favorite Stern Pin.

Unfortunately, the route one I play just keeps getting worse and worse. Hardly anything works on it anymore. The only bad thing I can say about Elvis is the cheesy hotel design. Slap an aftermarket molded hotel on there and you have an excellent all around game.

Cyberflexx:

--- Quote from: shardian on November 05, 2008, 09:49:31 am ---You forgot to critique Elvis - which is by far my favorite Stern Pin.

Unfortunately, the route one I play just keeps getting worse and worse. Hardly anything works on it anymore. The only bad thing I can say about Elvis is the cheesy hotel design. Slap an aftermarket molded hotel on there and you have an excellent all around game.

--- End quote ---


Elvis friggin rocks..If I had my choice right now, I would pick that or Austin Powers..

ChadTower:

IMO Elvis is a decent game but really suffers from not enough quality music clips.  Movie themes can get away with that but when your whole theme revolves around sound and the sound is poor...

RayB:
Lets see, pin #s declined due to vids (and let's face it, lack of innovation in pins). Highspeed was the machine that really reignited interest thanks to innovation. It was an exciting and different pin to play (I remember when I played it for the first time, it really wowed me) and they (Williams, Bally, etc) had the benefit of arcades still being popular.

So then arcades decline... so does pin interest... then BAM 92/93 it reignites? Let's see what coincides with this time period? Oh yes, Street Fighter II. The game that brought people BACK to arcades and coin-op entertainment back to mom & pop stores, etc.

And then it declines again. And through the 90's the pin companies bail out one by one as the market shrank (in step with arcade popularity!). Gottlieb, Bally, Sega, Capcom, then finally Williams. One by one.

My point: Pinball survived and had its ups and downs THANKS to video arcades. People went to play SF2, and put a few quarters in the pins while they were at it, not the other way around. I think Stern using mass market licenses has had a big role in helping keep them alive for as long as they have. A movie or television tie-in is going to fit into a general public setting like a bar much more than some geeky theme like dungeons and dragons. Hardcore pin fans might not like it, but hey, do you build a business catering to a market of 1,000 hardcore or do you try to cater to the millions of casual players? Even the video game industry right now is facing tough choices. They can spend $10 million on a AAA hardcore game that might not even break even, or spend $400,000 on a more casual mass market type of game that sells to everyone and their grandma.

It's over. The best pinball game design won't bring anyone back to playing pins enough to thrive. Maybe a niche collector market could work if costs are kept really low, but there won't be any profit. It would have to be purely for the love of it, like what The Pinball Factory has done and is trying to do.

ChadTower:

--- Quote from: RayB on November 05, 2008, 03:14:41 pm --- It would have to be purely for the love of it, like what The Pinball Company has done.

--- End quote ---

And Classic Playfield Reproductions.  What those guys have done is amazing.  Not a ton of profit in their setup - and it's actually pretty small when you consider how much product they put out.

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