Stern Pinball’s George Gomez Addresses Criticism of New Pinball Cabinets; Godzilla Poised to Become the Best-Selling Pin of All-Time; Next Stern Title?
By knapparcade
With its latest game, The Walking Dead Remastered, Stern Pinball launched a brand-new redesigned game cabinet without a whole lot of fanfare or explanation. As games began to ship, people - particularly those on the forums of the website Pinside, began to notice how significant the changes to Stern’s cabinets are. Over the past day or two, historically vocal critics of the Stern picked up on and shared pictures of the new cabinet on social media. Last night, Stern Pinball’s George Gomez - industry veteran, Executive Vice President and Chief Creative Officer of the Company, went on YouTuber Cary Hardy’s channel to address the recent criticism of Stern’s new SPIKE 3 cabinets. During the marathon two-hour broadcast, George explained that he personally has redesigned Stern’s cabinet over the course of the past several years. The project began in 2022 with the first prototype of the new cabs built in 2023. For those who may not realize how significant his involvement in its creation is, George has designed over 40 coin-operated game cabinets during his decades-long history in the amusement game industry. That is literally more cabinets than anyone in history other than one individual who works at the game manufacturer Raw Thrills. During its multi-year development process, Stern’s new SPIKE 3 cabinet has undergone rigorous Drop, Drag and Shipping testing. It is made of a similar 18 MM plywood core and HDF sandwich as Stern has been using on its game cabinets since 2018. The reason why Stern uses the HDF material on the outside of the cabinet is that its melamine decals can’t be applied directly to a rough plywood surface. The new HDF material is actually smoother than the material that Stern has been using over the past several years, which should allow for even smoother decal application. George feels as though the new cabinet design, which uses four steel 16 gauge steel brackets to add stability, is superior to the previous cabinet’s locked miter joint design which was held together by glue and staples. In the past, Stern had no way of knowing how much glue the cabinet-maker used on a machine’s joint. Furthermore, huge fully-assembled cabinets had to be shipped from the cabinet-builder’s factory over a long distance to Stern adding many variables to the quality equation. With its new design, Stern has brought all cabinet building in-house. It has complete control over the process. Employees can now visually inspect all cabinet joints to make sure that they are assembled correctly and tightly, which wasn’t possible in the past with the old design. Regarding the criticism of Stern using MDF in its new cabinet, George Gomez explained that Williams Pinball - which is known for having some of the best pinball cabinets ever made, used MDF extensively in its machines. As an example, he showed off Williams 1995 pin Congo. The Congo cabinet uses two pieces of plywood with the entire rest built from MDF. George Gomez seemed extremely proud of Stern’s new cabinet design. He believes that the new better materials and build process will address the inconsistent quality in builds of the previous cabinet. While I have collected pinball and arcade machines for years, I am not personally an engineer so it has been difficult for me to assess what these cabinet changes actually mean for Stern games. That’s why I didn’t jump the gun and held off on talking about the issue until I had more information. Now that we have an explanation for the changes, what does everyone think? Do you own or have played a machine that uses the new cabinet design? How does it feel? I’d love to hear some real-world feedback. In an “Oh By The Way” moment, in the middle of the video George Gomez dropped this HUGE news… “Godzilla is at some moment in time in the not too far distant future, Godzilla is going to break the record for how many pinball machines have been produced” Whoa. People have been wondering how many Godzillas Stern has sold. George just said that it is about to become the most sold pinball machine in history, passing Bally’s iconic 1992 game The Addams Family - which sold 20,260 units. Additional notes from the broadcast: - The new cabinet does not cost significantly less to produce than the old one. The efficiencies are in improved quality. - 70% of Stern’s games are sold to consumers and 30% to operators - Yesterday Stern released a Death Star ramp fix that owners can reach out to Stern to get - Stern is very aware that people want Limited Edition machines to be more valuable and it is considering ways to improve that - Jack Danger did a lot of the early work on the game that he is co-designing with George Gomez and George is finishing the game off (rumored to be Pokemon) - George confirmed that the next two games are Transformers and Pokemon. While he didn’t say so definitively, to me it sounded as though the next game in January will be Pokemon - Stern is working on another Remastered game. It is very early in the process. It may be ready by the end of 2026. The effort that Stern puts into remastered games is still 70% of the work of designing a new game from scratch. - Stern knows that people want remastered TRON and Lord of the Rings pins. George would love to do it. He said “Sit tight, maybe it will happen.” - Stern has gone from 9 people in product development and 35 people in the factory when George Gomez began working there to 55 people in product development plus 30 outside consultants, 500 people working in the factory and 150 people in the front office. - Costco just ordered more Star Wars Home Edition pinball machines. We will probably see a new Home Edition game with a different layout in time for the next holiday season. - JAWS 50th Anniversary is currently on the production line at Stern Whew, that's a lot of fantastic information. Kudos to Cary Hardy for the great interview, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. And Kudos to George Gomez for the transparency and his willingness to address questions head-on.
Images Courtesy of Retro Ralph
Images from Cary Hardy's stream
