Mountain Dew Pinball?!; Big Prize Pool for Upcoming Stern Pro Circuit Championship; The History of Riot Pinball; New & Improved E-Mail
By knapparcade
Back in April, I wrote here about a rumor that Stern Pinball might be making a pinball machine for the soda brand Mountain Dew. Over the subsequent months, we haven't heard a peep about that rumored game...until yesterday! The long-rumored, but never-before-seen Stern Pinball Mountain Dew pinball machine has been found! Well, at least one of them has. It lives in the studios of Barstool Sports in Chicago. The game appears to be a re-theme of Stern’s 2023 James Bond 007 60th Anniversary Limited Edition pin. This morning I reached out to Stern's Senior Director of Marketing Zach Sharpe asking about the game. He confirmed that Stern did make this machine and that it is an exclusive collaboration with Mountain Dew that is not planned for general sales at this time. He implied that we may be getting more information on the game in the future. The Mountain Dew brand has been a big supporter of Stern Pinball for the past several years. In fact, Mountain Dew has added whopping $25,000 to the prize pool for the upcoming Stern Pinball Pro Circuit Championship tournament. The event is scheduled to take place on October 14th at The Pinball Capital arcade in Stone Park, Illinois. Has anyone out there seen the Mountain Dew pin in person? I'd love to get some more pictures of it to share and I have so many questions about it...like does it have its own rules, does Insider Connected work, how many were made & more. A big thanks to Jacob Wolff who noticed the pin in one of Barstool’s streams and mentioned in the Pinball Enthusiasts group on Facebook and to Zach Crim who took a picture of it when he visited the studio and gave me permission to share it.
While we are talking about Stern, I figured that I'd mention that seconds ago it launched new code for its Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye pin. That code, Version 0.94, contains a new "OPTIMUS VS MEGATRON" stand-alone two player, split flipper challenge mode.
I also wrote here a couple of weeks ago that Turner Pinball's new spiritual successor to Dennis Nordman's iconic 1993 pinball machine White Water has begun to ship to customers. One customer who just received their machine, Retro Ralph, filmed a great gameplay livestream of it last weekend. If you haven't seen the game's amazing "Avalanche Multiball" yet, you have to at least flip on the stream to check that out.
In case you missed it, last week I shared pictures of a couple of super-rare pinball machines by Riot Pinball on social media. Riot's first game, built in 2015, was called Wrath of Olympus (WOOLY). WOOLY is an absolutely packed widebody game. When Riot looked into having a manufacturer mass produce the game for them, they were told that the pin, which had a Bill of Materials of $6,500 in 2015 dollars, was too expensive to build. I used the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' website to adjust that $6,500 for inflation and it told me that it is equivalent to over $9,300 in 2026 dollars. I honestly think that may understate the increase. We're talking a cost to build this game of around $10K today. Wow. As a result, only 6 units of this fantastic game were produced. It was Designed by and had art by Scott Gullicks with code, sound and animations by Frank Giglioti. The Riot folks decided that they did want to try to get a pinball machine made for commercial sale, so they went back to the drawing board and in 2020 came out with Legends of Valhalla (LOV) Riot built 7 prototype units of LOV. They eventually convinced the previous management of American Pinball to pick up the game for mass production in 2021. Below are pictures of Wrath of Olympus and a Legends of Valhalla prototype machine that are in the personal collection of Joe Newhart of PinballSTAR Amusements (sales@pinballstar.com). I had the honor of having the games' programmer and animator Frank Gigliotti explain all of the details of the project to me before we went to the recent Tales of the Arabian Nights Remake launch party a couple of weeks ago.
Last up I have an administrative note (is that what this should be called?). The Knapp Arcade website has a new e-mail address and new and improved article alert e-mails. When I first migrated over to the new website that my son, Austin, created for us a couple of years ago we lost the e-mail alerts for articles completely. I had him recreate that functionality and it has been working great, but the messages were purely text. Now with the new and improved system they include pictures from the articles as well. Also, the e-mail address for the site is now more professional lol. Instead of the old knapparcade@gmail.com (which does still work), the official e-mail address for the website is jason@knapparcade.com .
