Behind the Scenes at Barrels of Fun Pinball: How Many Dunes Will Be Made?; How Many Labyrinths Are Left?; & More
By knapparcade
Earlier this week I mentioned the super cool factory tour of its pinball factory that Barrels of Fun gave attendees of the recent Houston Arcade Expo. I was thrilled to find out yesterday that two attendees posted videos of the tour up on YouTube. A huge thank you to TNT Amusements' Todd Tucky and Grownup Adjacent Pinball for sharing footage of the tour with everyone. Last night I watched the nearly two hours of footage and came away with all sorts of interesting information about Barrels of Fun. Barrels is current building both Dune on its main production line and Winchester Mystery House on a new second line. This is the first time that the Company has built two games at the same time. According to Barrels's David van Es, they have built approximately 350 Dune games so far. He also stated that they will likely wrap up Dune production in January. Currently, 60% to 70% of the factory's production line is dedicated to building Dunes and the rest to building Winchester. In January that will shift to 100% Winchester production. With these two facts and some other figures that were stated during the tour we can come up with what I think is a very good production estimate for Dune. Barrels' said that its factory produces games 4 days per week and that it can ship 7 to 10 games per day. There's around 9 weeks left until mid-January and we probably should subtract one of those for the Holidays, so 8 weeks or so left in Dune production. 8 weeks x 4 days per week x 8.5 games per day = 272 Dunes left to be built. Add 272 to the 350 already made and we're looking at 622 total Dunes. This is an exercise in false precision, so it's probably safe to say that Barrels of Fun will ultimately end up building 500 to 600 Dunes. That's right around the 525 Winchester Mystery Houses that Barrels has sold and is committed to build. Regarding Winchester, I learned during the tour that originally Barrels considered building 666 of them, but they were concerned that people would be spooked by that traditionally evil number, so they shifted the figure to 525 which is the street number of the house. Another really interesting thing from the tour was the mystery wall of New In Box games that can be seen in one of the rooms in the factory. Those are NIB Labyrinth games that have yet to be sold. It was hard to count them, but I'd say that Barrels has 60 or so of the 904 Labyrinth games that they built in stock at the factory. That's in addition to games that are at distributors. They will not build any more once those machines are gone. Here's some other interesting facts that I learned: - Barrels' internal Code Name for Winchester was Springfield - Barrels' rejection rate for playfields that aren't up to her standards is around 30% - Barrels can build around one game per hour under ideal circumstances - 40% of the Barrels of Fun games are sold directly by the Company - Labyrinth is the last title in Phase 1 of Barrels' Business Plan. The licenses for all of the games that produced so far were secured before they revealed the company. Going forward the themes will be from Phase 2 - Barrels wants to build 2 to 3 games per year - They currently have around 40 employees, 22 or 23 of them are in-house at their factory - The Winchester rifle cannot appear in the game because that's a different license - While giving his tour, David van Es was pointing things out using a fancy staff, which is actually The Emperor's staff from the 1982 Jim Henson film The Dark Crystal. A clue about a future theme perhaps? - Barrels of Fun kept one Winchester Mystery House game back to give away in a contest to an existing customer - The Company is 100% confident that they have another new game coming in 2026 Whew, that's a lot of awesome information. Below are the tour videos for anyone who wants to check them out:
