Step Right Up

This week I'm going with the latest release from Edinburgh's Barry Can't Swim, called "Dance Dance Dance!" Very Daft Punk / Justice coded if you're into that kind of thing. It's even got its own genre, French Touch, as I understand it. Perfect end-of-summer earworm for your final poolside or beach days.

But for this pick, the video is what I love. A sentient robot tasked with menial work discovers itself through the power of dance and goes on a self-discovery journey, and I wonder if there will be a day in the future where my AI robot gives me the metaphorical finger and blossoms into a dancing machine.

Speaking of robots, have you seen the latest release from Hugging Face's robotics arm? They just opened pre-orders for this open-source programmable AI robot duck. $399 (plus shipping and tariffs, boo). I'm gonna get one and teach it to dance dance dance.

American Pinball announced Cirqus Voltaire on Tuesday in two trims: a Classic at $9,989, built to demand with no cap, and a Ringmaster at $12,589, limited to 772 numbered units (a nod to the 1772 founding of "Troupe Le Voltaire"). Both run the same code and the same ruleset options, both get AP's new QuickFlip flipper board, and shipping starts in October.

It's the first of the seven Williams and Bally remakes AP licensed from Planetary Pinball back in January.

Paul Melio went through the release for us: Melvin Williams on creative direction and all six sculpts, Brian Allen on the Ringmaster art package, an optional two-year extended warranty, and the first AP title to ship with Wi-Fi updates.

Two details I keep coming back to. The first is the code. Both editions will have the 2.0 rules Cameron Silver, the game's programmer, created anonymously and posted through a proxy to rec.games.pinball back in 2002.

The second is a monkey. In the new playfield art it's sitting at a lever box marked LUDICROUS SPEED / HIGH / LOW / OFF (it's the Spaceballs line), which is a very specific phrase to pick by accident. Nobody has said anything official of course, but it makes you go hmmmm.

Part three of Paul Melio's licensing series for us, after George Gomez and J Bryan Vincent. Weird Al, Portal, Princess Bride, Ender's Game, Dungeon Crawler Carl. Multimorphic is good at keeping things quiet. Many of these landed with more surprise than most releases, or at least with little connection to Multimorphic at the rumor stage.

Stellenberg's answer is that predicting the community is a losing game. Huge titles fall flat, surprising ones succeed, so they build around IP they love and hope it resonates. He's also direct about walking away from a license when a rights holder's restrictions would make a worse game. On the P³'s playfield screen, he calls it "a canvas just as any undecorated pinball playfield is a canvas": traditional pinball asks you to shoot the flashing shot, and the P³ can ask you to shoot the staircase that just appeared.

Chris Turner has relaunched PinAccess, the connected-play platform that has been in private beta since May, and the relaunch includes a distribution arm that feels unique in pinball.

PinAccess FrontLine takes an exclusive allocation of early-production machines from manufacturers that integrate with the platform and sells them directly to PinAccess account holders ahead of standard production orders. The first FrontLine title is the Cirqus Voltaire Ringmaster Edition. FrontLine's page explains the process.

The corporate structure is an interesting note. In an email to us, Chris Turner said: "PinAccess and Turner Pinball are separate companies. I own both, but they should be represented as distinct businesses—particularly now that PinAccess will distribute games from multiple participating manufacturers." Fair enough. Turner Logic, LLC appears to be the corporate entity that houses both the Turner Pinball and PinAccess brands. Legally, they might be separate, but they're owned by the same person, and since both are rather small companies, the legal technicality feels less important.

It's interesting positioning. Game data has real value. Stern has been building Insider Connected for years on exactly that premise, and PinAccess is asking manufacturers to plug into a platform that also distributes their games and shares an owner with one of their competitors. American Pinball is comfortable with it. I'd be curious who else is. I've asked.

There's been some chatter in various social media groups about slow response times from Pinball Brothers' support teams, leading some to speculate about the company's long-term health. I reached out to CEO Daniel Jansson this week to check in, and he told me, "Shawn [US Customer Support] moved the warehouse in the US during the summer, so there has been some disruptions, but things should run fine now." Hopefully they get caught up on the support work soon.

Stern's media day for their next cornerstone release is scheduled for Wednesday, September 2 at their Elk Grove Village factory HQ. The last few major releases have been pretty consistent: dealers/distributors get an in-person look the day before media day, and the game is typically more or less revealed by the time media sees it.

Which puts us in line with rumored designer Keith Elwin's teasing. On August 18, Elwin changed his Facebook profile photo to the "two weeks" scene from Total Recall, which puts us at a Tuesday release. Interestingly, on August 4, Stern filed a trademark application for MAGNA-FLIP. Not exactly a subtle name, so it could point to an upcoming feature in the next release (rumors say that it’s for a flipperless lower playfield). All rumor mill signals point towards Fallout as the IP, but as of publishing, nothing has been officially confirmed by Stern. This close to a release, though, the rumor mill is usually right.

We'll have a couple of our regular contributors at media day next week to bring you more coverage of the release.

Once again, we've had more activity on the mainline site than this newsletter, but if you missed a post or two, here's what we've been covering since the last newsletter.

From an 1871 bagatelle patent to the largest homebrew ever built, every entry is a first of some kind, so the list doubles as a compressed history of the medium. The biggest, most heavily researched thing we've published this year.

Neyens was heavily represented in that list, and we went a bit deeper on his career. The first multiplayer flipper game, the disc roto-target, the wedge head, add-a-ball — all out of one Gottlieb designer. solar_espeon walks through them one at a time, from his first production game in 1949 to the head-to-head oddity he patented in 1970 that sold 110 copies. Neyens died in 2022, a day after his 104th birthday.

Ben Plotkin and I asked Conor Wilson, Ed Giardina and Will Oetting what's driving the boom. The piece ties into broader trends of AI adoption this year, particularly on the coding front.

Arcade Hunters went to see Don Berrios in Somersworth: his Sterns, how he handles maintenance, and how he got into any of this in the first place.

It just turned up on sales floors in mid-August, and it's the closest one of these has come to an actual Pro. We went through what's on it. There's still been no formal word from Stern about the release, and rumors of tech issues have cropped up online.

300 numbered units, billed as the last edition before their next release. We have the details.

Matt Owen is back with Score Card 17, which also has Stacey Moritz sweeping the Women's International Pinball Tournament and Jack Slovacek taking his first Stern Pro Circuit win at The BEAST.

Andrew Quemere filed from the room at the Center for the Arts in Natick, which kicked off Tasker's multi-state book tour.

All three passed away this week, and each had various ties to pinball machines.

Canada's counter-tariff list takes effect on September 8, and tariff item 9504.50.00, the line that names "pintables," carries a 50% surtax on US-origin goods.

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