Pinball Wizard

This week, we’ve got another single from the British band Pulp, from their new album, More. It’s called Got to Have Love, and it’s quite the fun disco romp (the music video, appropriately, effectively uses old footage from a 1970s disco dance party). I had a few different songs picked out this week (and I might feature them later), but I kept coming back to this track while planning this edition of the newsletter, and usually that’s a sign that the song is worth sharing with you.

Coincidentally, the full album was officially released today, so it’s truly meant to be!

This is the third song we’ve featured here from Pulp and that might make you think I’m a Pulp super-fan (I’m not) but damn, old rock bands are not supposed to come back after a 24-year hiatus and release such pointed, culturally relevant material as Pulp has with their first two singles this year. Talk about meeting the moment.

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The biggest pinball news of the week is undoubtedly the launch of Jersey Jack’s Harry Potter machine. We’ve got all the details in our regular launch article, updated today with fresh gameplay video from the JJP team, plus a lot of meta contextual coverage that you won’t find anywhere else.

After seeing the gameplay video, I think the game looks great, and I’m looking forward to getting a chance to shoot it sometime soon.

Despite rabid discussion among pinball enthusiast crowds, I’m frankly a little surprised that, at least as of writing, I haven’t seen any media coverage that’s “broken containment” like we saw earlier this year with the Portal launch and like we tend to see with most Stern launches. Given the size of the IP, it should be a coverage layup for most outlets, but maybe they just don’t know about it yet.

This could be troublesome for Jersey Jack as to reach the volume of sales that I think they’d want with this title, they could really use the additional top-of-funnel reach that would come alongside coverage in more mainstream media and fan communities. The best I’ve seen so far (outside of Pinball Media) is a piece on JoBlo.com (whose founder is a noted pinball enthusiast) and an announcement on HarryPotter.com.

I harp on the marketing a bit because it’s a world I know well and because, based on our analysis, it sure looks like Jersey Jack could use a hit with this release, which we break down in detail in this subscribers-only post.

As I’ve said previously, I want the team to succeed here. A successful game with the IP scale that Harry Potter has brings more people into pinball, and that’s good for the whole ecosystem. But some of the observed decision-making so far has been super questionable in a few different areas.

Maybe some of this has to do with the recent departure of marketing lead Ken Cromwell?

Possibly getting a bit lost in all the Harry Potter chatter are some official teasers from Pinball Brothers for their next game, Predator, including a new picture of the playfield. I thought the teaser trailer was pretty clever, honestly. From what I can see, people in pinball seem excited for the theme, but we’ll see if Pinball Brothers can deliver the goods when it’s fully revealed and people can play it for themselves. I kinda thought we’d have more to share on this title by now, but maybe that reveal will happen next week.

Row Mainia, an indie game created by developer Neil Wilson, was released at the end of May for Multimorphic’s P3 platform. It utilizes the Drained playfield module, and like Drained, it’s another EM inspired game. Portal developer Ian Harrower told us that the game is “simple to understand, difficult to master” and that the “most interesting twist is that the game presents you with 5 difficulty levels to choose from at the beginning of the game that change how the end of ball bonus and the Gobble Hole work”. Sounds fun!

It’s only $125, and proceeds from the sale are going to a new pinball project in Austin, Texas, called the Austin Pinball Collective, so that’s cool.

No gameplay videos yet, but it’s possible we’ll see it streamed soon, either from Ian Harrower or Buffalo Pinball.

Ryan and Scott from Pinball Map run a regular series that highlights one new or interesting pinball location each week. This week, Ryan writes about Winthrop Congregational Church.

Like many of you, I haven’t attended a church service since I was a teenager. That last session for me was in the mid-90s at All Saints-by-the-Sea, and there were a few of us left in the youth group, none responding to any prompt the teacher tried to fire up a discussion about The Bible. All of us, in our ways, were just kind of over it. The teacher, then, gave up, too. There was nothing more to say. I had stopped believing, and I couldn’t pretend otherwise, but I wasn’t going to argue with the teacher about the existence of God or anything. Another youth grouper, with fingernails painted black and a love for theater class, and whose parents had recently shunned a niece (and friend of ours) for having a child she loved out of wedlock, was about to head off to college and immediately flourish because he could finally be himself. We all just watched the clock until the service let out and we could have a bagel.

Church attendance, praying, and so on, have been on the decline in the U.S. for many years, especially among the younger gens. But a desire for community and friendship, and a system of beliefs to help guide us in life, is not necessarily on the decline. Those desires can be fulfilled outside of churches (or mosques, temples, etc.) - for example, at your local pinball league - but with a bit of tweaking I submit that churches could once again entice more folks to attend. I think this would entail doing what Kelvin Gemstone and Keefe Chambers did in The Righteous Gemstones season 4 with their PRISM program, by having a fun, accepting, and not oppressively holy venue. Community and giving might be the most important aspects of a church, so the Bible scripture parts can likely be toned down in place of a Unitarian Universalist approach of developing your own set of beliefs and being “good.” The Sunday morning part could probably be scrapped, too, right?

There’s one church on Pinball Map that seems to be heading down this path. Winthrop Congregational Church, in Holbrook, MA, has - get this - a gameroom filled with pool, arcades, darts, and even pinball. One machine, to be precise. And to be more precise, a Big Top made by Wico in 1977. One of two Big Tops on the entire worldwide Pinball Map! I don’t know about you - aside from you last attending church in high school - but to me Winthrop Congregational Church, and perhaps God, is kind of starting to sound… cool.

Winthrop Congregational Church
16 N Franklin St, Holbrook, MA 02343
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