American Pinball's First Game Will Be A "Reimagined" Bally Williams Title; Riot! Pinball Programmer joins Pedretti Gaming; The History of Super Chexx
By knapparcade
OK, I've dug out from under somewhere between 20 and 30 inches of snow and a power outage here in the Northeastern U.S. Whew :) . Time for more news. First up, we have more information about the new regime at American Pinball. The Company's new owner Bryan Vincent and its President Ron Lindeman recently sat down for an interview with YouTuber Cary Hardy. Below are a couple of new things that I learned from the interesting interview: - American Pinball's first game, which is at this point is forecast to be revealed sometime in Q3 2026 will be a "Reimagined" Bally / Williams title, under its new licensing agreement with Planetary Pinball. No specific titles were mentioned in the interview, but I have heard rumblings about a possible remake of the 1994 Bally game The Shadow at some point. Is that true? I have absolutely no idea and I wouldn't put money on it, but it is out there. Still, take a grain of salt though. - AP's second game will also be a Reimagined Bally Williams machine. - AP Game 3 will be its first original licensed pinball machine. - The Company is currently working on a surprise code update for its 2018 pinball machine Oktoberfest. - American is aiming to release two new machines per year, one Remake and one Original licensed game. - Two specific types of themes that Bryan mentioned the Company not currently being interested in obtaining licenses for are the Horror and Superhero genres.Next up we have more news on Bally / Williams remakes, which has been the bread and butter lately for Pedretti Gaming. Pedretti, which is rumored to be working on remakes of the 1996 Williams game Tales of the Arabian Nights and the 1995 Bally Game Theatre of Magic, recently hired an industry-veteran coder. Pedretti brought Riot Pinball's Frank Gigliotti on board. Frank programmed two pinball titles while with Riot. The first was the 2015 game Wrath of Olympus, which Riot made 6 prototype units of. The second - Legends of Valhalla, which American Pinball built in 2021. He also worked on DMD colorization for several titles, including Avatar, Transformers and Tommy. Between this and Pedretti's recent announcement that it has signed a deal with Athryio Games, the programmer for Chicago Gaming Company's remakes, Pedretti is throwing some serious programming power at its future Remakes, which is great so see. Below are several pictures that I took of Riot Pinball's Wrath of Olympus. Only 6 prototype units of this game were produced. As seen in the private collection of Joe Newhart of the distributor PinballSTAR Amusements.
The arcade game manufacturer ICE Games aka Innovative Concepts in Entertainment, recently shared a cool video about the history of its iconic bubble hockey game Super Chexx. As a former and hopefully again some day future Super Chexx owner I personally found it fascinating. In the early 1980s, Ralph Coppola and ICE introduced Chexx, a game that would permanently change the arcade landscape. Rather than simulating hockey on a screen, Super Chexx brought the sport to life mechanically allowing players to physically control skaters beneath a clear poly-carbonate dome, pass, shoot, and score in real time.
A few housekeeping notes for those of you who have made it this far lol.
First up, the third time is the charm for the Knapp Arcade new article e-mail alerts. They are now back, working as intended.
The next step is to repair the "Unsubscribe" feature for e-mail alerts. Rest assured, we are working on it.
After that we have a couple of other cool new features for the website in the works. Stay Tuned :)
Oh, also I accidentally included an exclamation point "!" next to the word Riot in the title of this post because one of my sons used to play for a club lacrosse team called "Riot!" and I'm used to writing it that way. I can't change it at this point though because changing the title also changes the link and the link was already sent out, so I'm going to have to live with it lol.