Where We're Going

Back in May, I saw Telehealth at Deep Cuts, and Perennial, a local band, opened the show and really impressed me. I've been listening to them a lot since, so I was happy to see their new album, Modernism, make Paste's best albums of September. The title track is short, high energy and a lot of fun, and the national attention they're getting this year (Stereogum, BrooklynVegan) is well deserved.

Dutch Pinball finally confirmed Back to the Future on Wednesday. The teaser was 16 seconds of the clock tower, a storm and "Q2 2027," with no machine, no price and no official team (our piece has the rumored names, and why I'd wait). It also doesn't lean on any of the big licensed assets. There are no actors, no DeLorean, no film footage, and not even the Back to the Future logo (just Dutch's own, done up in the film's style). Even the piano music may not be from the soundtrack.

CoinTaker, Dutch's longtime US distributor, had a $3,000 deposit page up within minutes, and Pinball Traders opened its own. According to CoinTaker, it's only taking deposits against the first year of production, which is about 600 games for the US. Alice owners are guaranteed a first-year game. There's one model for now (the Super LE is still just a rumor), the 10% tariff will be built into the price, and CoinTaker's deposits are refundable until seven days after the reveal. Its page says games begin shipping in Q2 2027.

Then the layout leaked. An image that's supposedly an older whitewood-stage render showed up in creator chats and spread across social media and the forums from there. Honestly, when I first saw it, I thought it was a homebrew. It has the DeLorean up top, a flux capacitor in the middle of the playfield, a hoverboard on the left, and a set of displays under the flippers that look like the DeLorean's time circuits. There's another version going around too with art and toys, but it's very clearly AI-generated on top of the whitewood layout. Nothing from Dutch on either.

I'm glad this is finally making concrete progress, and that we might actually see it go live. But I'm still skeptical. Dutch's track record is what it is, and I think this theme is a bit overrated in pinball enthusiast circles. And if that really is the whitewood, it's funny that it's already leaked. So, wait and see.

Dutch also seems to be planning a multi-year rollout with a slow ramp, and I'm not sure that works. Even Harry Potter, a much bigger theme, has slowed down a lot since its launch year, according to our Moving Units tracker. I think it's getting harder to keep a single title selling for years in pinball, so that's a risky strategy for Dutch unless it's ready to launch a new game in 2028 and build on whatever momentum Back to the Future has.

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Matt Owen's Score Card 19 covers September's two IFPA Majors and a Stern Pro Circuit stop. PAPA was at The Pinball Capital in Stone Park, and then the action moved to London for the UK Pinball Open and the European Pinball Championship that ran alongside it. Two players won their first Major, and one of them did it on an Attack from Mars ball that went past 10 billion.

The IFPA announced on Monday that the Replay Foundation and PAPA have no plans to hold a PAPA 24, so it's starting a championship of its own in the same format. The Memorial runs September 9–12, 2027, at The Pinball Capital, where PAPA was held this year. Over its three revived years, the championship helped raise more than $150,000 for the 988 Foundation in memory of Lyman Sheats. The Memorial will keep supporting it, and part of the proceeds will also go to PADS of Elgin, a homeless shelter in the Chicago area.

Pinburgh and Barrels of Fun announced the Barrels of Fun Pinburgh Tour (BoFPT) on Tuesday, a season of up to 20 events in at least four countries that ends in a Tour Final before Pinburgh. The first round of marketing was light on specifics, so I asked around.

It's modeled on the old PAPA Circuit, where every event was worth the same points and the top players met in a ladder final. That circuit eventually became today's Stern Pro Circuit (SPC), which weights events by WPPR, so the Majors count for much more. The BoFPT is for good, fun events of any format that don't draw big WPPR numbers, and every stop is worth the same. PGH Pinball, the team behind Pinburgh, built it with David van Es of Barrels of Fun, and they don't see it as competing with the SPC (two of the committee members run SPC events themselves).

Each stop's winner gets a championship ring, and every player gets an entry in a drawing for a new-in-box Barrels of Fun machine. The top 20 get a free invite to the Final, with more than $20,000 in cash and prizes and another Barrels of Fun machine for the winner. A stop "can be a new event, or added to an existing one," PAPA told me, and event organizers can apply through October 30 ($700 to host).

It'll be interesting to see if it gains traction, and whether it can carve out its own new (old) niche among the rest of the competitive circuit.

The long-rumored Stern Mountain Dew machine finally surfaced at the end of September, and photos have been making the rounds on social since. Right now it's set up at Barstool Sports HQ in Chicago, and the speaker panel reads "The Mountain Dude's Journey." It's a re-theme of Stern's 2023 James Bond 60th Anniversary LE (similar to other branded games Stern has done in the past), with a Mountain Dude figure riding an inner tube in the middle of the playfield. Only a few have been made, and they aren't for sale to the public.

My guess is we'll see them at next week's Pro Circuit Championship, which Mountain Dew is sponsoring with $25,000 in added prize money (we covered that last issue), and maybe one gets given away there.

Pinball Expo is next week in Schaumburg. The hall opens Thursday, October 15, and runs through Saturday, with the Stern Pro Circuit Championship the Wednesday before at The Pinball Capital.

Will we see any new games? (We asked you about Expo surprises last issue, and the results are below.) With nothing announced yet, it's looking slim, but there's always a chance of a surprise. Stern is due for a remastered game, and Barrels of Fun is known for its Expo drops. We've seen it before, but we'll also get the official commercial debut of Jake Danzig's Monster League Hockey from Killdozer Studios. CGC is due for something, even if it's just confirming a new run of Attack from Mars. And homebrew will likely shine again, with PinDevCon's homebrew exhibit back for another year.

Other things to watch for:

Looking at the seminar schedule, all the manufacturer panels are worth your time, but these are some other highlights:

If you can't make it, the Flip Out tournament (a Pro Circuit stop) streams on Fox Cities Pinball's Twitch, and the seminar videos always end up on Pinball News's YouTube channel.

Pinball: Beyond the Bumpers, a 75-minute documentary from Mark Helms, comes out October 20 to rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and the other usual VOD platforms in the US, Canada and the UK. Helms made The History of Pinball back in 1995, and this one builds on that film's interviews and footage, with Roger Sharpe, Gary Stern, Steve Ritchie and Jack Guarnieri among the people on camera. Film Threat called it "a thorough, info-packed trip through the history of the silver ball."

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