Spooky Pinball Update; Which Stern Pinball Game is the Hardest?; Is Another Star Trek Pin Coming?
By knapparcade
I am going to kick things off today with a ton of interesting news about Spooky Pinball. Spooky's Corwin "Bug" Emery was on not one, but two YouTube Streams over the past week and he shared lots of interesting information about the company. The first was a Golden State Pinball Festival interview with Bug conducted by the Spinner Is Lit podcast, courtesy of the Marco Pinball YouTube channel. The second was a livestream of an Evil Dead tournament at the private home arcade "Jay’s Silver Ballroom" on Bug's Scream N' Stream YouTube channel. Here's my notes: - Bug dropped strong hints about Spooky's next pinball machine. The interviewers were asking him about the next theme, dropping Goonies quotes like "the answer should be: it never say die" and Bug joked "Why are you asking stuff everybody already knows?" before backtracking and asking the host to edit it out. Not surprisingly, they basically confirmed what we already know, that the next Spooky title is The Goonies. - The upcoming Goonies layout has only one scoop (versus Beetlejuice's multiple) - It has extremely few similarities to Beetlejuice in layout - He references "the stuff we're doing in the next one" when talking about theme integration tricks like sandworms eating balls and meat hooks holding balls — implying the next game will have a similarly novel theme-integrated mech. - They discussed Beetlejuice's new "Spooky Speak" voice-activated functionality and the future plans for it. Spooky Speak is currently integrated into one mode in the game, Showtime Multiball — say "Beetlejuice" three times to start. Future plans for the feature include Call-your-shot mode...say "left orbit," "right ramp," etc. to light your next shot, operator service menu integration — Bug's most-wanted application, things like a "Fire right flipper" voice commands during tech support work so you don't have to balance a game with your hands full while diving into a coil test. Spooky is working on updating Spooky Speak to be able to interpret different European accents for games that ship overseas. - Production update. As of the Golden State Pinball Festival (May 15-17) Beetlejuice production was "into the 300s" out of 999. Spooky is now building at around 100 games per month. It took Spooky some time to ramp up to this rate due to internal training and new management at the factory. - Spooky's upcoming public appearances: Southern Fried Gameroom Expo in Atlanta (July 2026) and Pinball Expo (Chicago, October) — Spooky will be there walking the floor, but not running a booth this year. - A new Rob Zombie pin? "The licenser did just recently ask if we wanted to do another Rob Zombie pinball machine. The answer is yes. I would love to do another." Given the original Rob Zombie's Spookshow International is widely considered Spooky's weakest title (and by far my personal least favorite), a redo by the new and improved Spooky could be interesting. There's no guarantee that it will happen but the conversation is active. I personally think that a new Rob Zombie pin is unlikely, Spooky is getting so much bigger themes now. Having said that, they are likely doing a small run of Motörhead in the future, so you never know. - Evil Dead's lower playfield was almost not in the game. Bug said "For the first probably six months of this game's design, we did not have a lower playfield in this game. Ben kept telling us it doesn't matter if it's a good playfield or bad, but if you don't have one in there, people are going to kill you for it." Ben was right, and Spooky put extra effort into making sure it didn't suck because "we know lower playfields tend to suck." I personally love the lower playfield on Evil Dead. Even cooler is how you get to it, the huge scoop that opens up to take balls to the lower playfield also sometimes has a bank of stand-up targets that pop up. Such a cool mech.This weekend we also got a new live episode of the JBS Show, featuring Jamie, Cale, Jeff and Serge. They had a super long, fun discussion about everything currently happening in pinball. Cale reiterated that he strongly believes that an unlicensed Dracula-themed game from designer Brian Eddy is real and coming as the first Stern Pinball release of 2027. They went on to discuss that the licensor for The Walking Dead is different now than it was when the original games was released in 2014. They said that there is some things in the original game that the new licensor wouldn't have approved. This is why the code for The Walking Dead Remastered initially shipped less complete than it was in the original game. Stern had to rebuild it under new approval constraints. TWD Remastered's code still isn't fully updated yet. Stern is working on adding mini-wizard modes and walker-kill achievements. They also talked about how licensing may be the reason why Stern's Pokémon still does not have achievements or a Pokédex in the code. At one point later in the stream, Serge shared a really interesting analysis of what Stern games have the longest and shortest ball times, based on audits from the games at The Electric Bat arcade (see below). According to this set of data, the hardest Stern (shortest single-player game time) is Black Knight Sword of Rage Pro, followed by James Bond 60th and Stranger Things. The easiest games on the list were Godzilla, King Kong and JAWS.
Late last week, Jersey Jack pinball dropped another teaser for its upcoming pinball machine, promoting that it is being designed by legendary designer Steve Ritchie. Look for a reveal of that game in early June.
On Saturday morning during his weekly live broadcast, Kaneda's Pinball Podcast stated that he has heard that Keith Elwin's next game for Stern Pinball after a rumored Fallout game later this year will be based upon the original Star Trek series - the William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy era. No word on whether it would be based upon the original television show, which ran from 1966 through 1969 or the movies which came out in the late 70s and 80s. I am always skeptical of rumors that I have not personally heard from sources myself, but I figured that I would mention this here anyhow. If this game does get made, it would be the FIFTH Star Trek pin - following Bally's 1979 game, Data East's 1991 Star Trek 25th Anniversary, Williams' 1993 game Star Trek: The Next Generation and Stern's 2013 game based on the new movies (which I personally own and really like). A new Star Trek would however be the first game in the series to have a LCD screen so maybe there is room for another? We'll see...
Last up, I recently came across an interesting YouTube video in which someone attempts to recreate a real physical version of the classic digital pinball video game "Space Cadet," that came pre-installed on Microsoft Windows computers in the late 1990s and early 2000s