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Why Haggis Pinball Failed
Detailed Haggis Timeline | 8 Reasons Why Haggis Failed | Song of the Week | Links | More!
Colin Alsheimer
July 26, 2024 • Time to Read: 18 minutes
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This Week in Pinball we’re learning some hard lessons.
This Week’s Pinball Agenda:
Song of the Week
Sponsor of the Week
Pinball News of the Week
A Detailed Timeline of the Haggis Pinball Collapse
8 Reasons Why Haggis Pinball Failed
Links of the Week
Poll of the Week
Song of the Week
How do you know something is over? That’s the core question posed by singer Elizabeth Stokes of New Zealand’s The Beths. In the 2022 title track off the album Expert in a Dying Field, her song is about a relationship, but I think the idea has a much broader scope and can apply to all sorts of common experiences—careers, entrepreneurial endeavors, friendships.
The story in the music video is told from the perspective of an older electronics repair person and his home filled with relics of the past that only he can fix. In the arc of that character’s life story it’s easy to see how he must have recognized the changes around him, but kept pushing forward.
But if you’re an “expert in a dying field” and that dying field happens to be a thing you love and have invested time and energy into, how do you begin to move on from that? “Can’t stop, can’t rewind / Love is learned over time”. It’s like the sunk cost fallacy of life.
We’re getting deep here for a pinball newsletter, but I for one can draw lines between this song, the pinball industry and recent developments with Haggis Pinball.
Maybe you can too.
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Pinball News of the Week
A Detailed Timeline of the Haggis Pinball Collapse
Since publishing this piece early Thursday, we’ve learned new information and have updated the article accordingly. The new information received fleshes out our initial timeline with an account from a former employee and some additional business records that bring into question weather or not owner Damian Hartin is still in possession of assets that could otherwise be used to begin paying back creditors.
This next piece assumes you’ve read the one above, so keep that in mind!
8 Reasons Why Haggis Pinball Failed
I want to be clear that there’s a lot I still don’t know and likely a lot more that will come out of this in the coming weeks/months/years—however long it takes for the process to play out. In fact, things have already changed between drafts of this update.
However, after my research this past week and after seeing it all laid out in a sequential timeline, I think there are obvious failure points that we can highlight. If nothing else, maybe future pinball startups can review these and learn from them so they aren’t repeated again.
Lack of experience
This could be the biggest issue in the whole operation. Damian went from being re-exposed to pinball to going full-bore on producing a 200 unit run of a commercial game in less than 18 months. He didn’t have a background in manufacturing. He didn’t even have a background in pinball. He caught the pinball bug and decided to jump off the cliff.
“So, you then take into consideration that there's a lot of things that we do that I think the other manufacturers don't insofar as that we make all our own cabinets, we make all our own play fields, we make all our own mechs, you know, we do all our own vinyl printing, we do all, you know, all of these sort of additional things that I don't think are necessarily done by all of the other manufacturers.
And that, again, that's born a little bit out of the fact that, you know, I didn't necessarily know better.
You know, I didn't come into this from a heavy pinball background.
I didn't come from a pinball manufacturing company or as an operator or anything like that that said, well, this is how games are made.
I sort of looked at it on the surface and went, well, I just do the absolute best I can do in everything that I do.”
In fact, I’m not even sure he bothered to do the requisite industry research to even know that there had been several failed pinball startups before his time.
“I wasn't even really cognizant of the fact that there had been this litany of failed pinball companies prior to me.”
Misjudged the market for CELTS
It may have appeared differently at the time, but Haggis Pinball dug itself into a hole with CELTS that it could never climb out of.
Damian took a prototype and a whitewood game to two industry conferences, received positive feedback, and, for some reason, assumed he could scale up manufacturing from scratch and sell 200-250 units of his first game, an unlicensed title with niche appeal. He sold ~50 units.
Everything else in his plan depended on being able to sell through those games to establish his foothold. How he was going to do that from a tiny industrial unit with no team and no manufacturing capabilities is anyone’s guess.
Then COVID-19 hit.
COVID-19
A lot of people attribute Haggis’ core failures to challenges encountered during COVID-19. I think there’s some truth to that, as the timing could not have been worse for where they were in their product release cycle. I think they were counting on generating significant sales and word-of-mouth from successful trips to Texas Pinball Festival and the MidWest Gaming Classic.
“We were all massively geared up to get to TPF in 2020 [when they’d be pushing CELTS], which would have been sort of the back end of an 18-month to 20-month solid, solid hard push from starting from the point of zero knowledge to get to the point where we actually had a game that we were ready to sell and, you know, release to the wild.
And when COVID hit, literally a day or two before we were set to jump on an airplane, it just took the wind out of everything. And the plans that we had based off the back of getting to Texas and to MGC basically all just dissolved overnight.
So, as part of, I guess, almost the reboot of Haggis Pinball off the back of the world sort of turning back on, or certainly Australia turning back on, we needed to once again set our sights back on future titles and, you know, where we were heading. Celts was always game number one, and the timing just worked out well with regards to the idea of doing a remake of this classic era, and that's sort of how we landed on Fathom.”
That didn’t happen, forcing Damian to switch gears. Instead of pushing forward on War of the Worlds as their second title as planned, he chased easier money in the form of Bally classic remakes.
Scaled at the wrong time
While COVID-19 was a significant roadblock for the business, it’s interesting that they didn’t sign a lease for their new larger facility until May of 2021. At this point, Fathom had not been announced, and it must have been clear that CELTS wasn’t selling as much as anticipated.
I think these are revealing comments from Damian, from Episode 304 of Pinball Profile in April, when discussing the Fathom reveal:
“But yeah look I mean the simple reality is as a micro business you could almost have called us, I can continue to churn through building CELTS and pushing them out the door like I have with game number one recently but the reality is it would be such a slow burn.
I don't feel like that is particularly fair to the people that have supported us and have bought a game and are patiently, pinball people are just the most amazing understanding patient people I've ever come across and it's fantastic and I love it and I'm so grateful for it.
But I have some pretty high personal standards of my own and part of that is wanting to deliver on these promises that I'm making people which is support us and back us and I'll make you a quality game and I'll stand behind it and I will get it to you in a timely manner so you can enjoy it.
And hence I need to grow to do that otherwise it will continue to be a slow process and it's just difficult.
I could support probably full time four or five people in this space.
It wouldn't be the most efficient use of the space and there's a lot of overlap and there's a lot of dancing that almost has to be done to make use of the facility.
So by upscaling and by in-housing some functionality as well and getting our sort of assembly line and our work process a lot more fluent, it will mean that we can get through the games quicker and start getting to the point that I want to be which is a larger, serious manufacturer of pinball machines.”
At this time he’s still in his small industrial space (150m2) pushing on a planned 200 unit run of CELTS. Had he received the interest he was expecting in his first game, how would he have scaled to support the demand in a space that could only support 4-5 full time employees?
Tried to boil the ocean
If the knock on Haggis Pinball was their delays and poor communication, they were almost as frequently praised for their build quality, and that seemed to keep people interested in their product early on.
Looking back on their efforts, though, it’s clear they tried to do way too much in-house for the staff and resources they had. And I suspect their games were overengineered to boot. Instead of using more off-the-shelf components or proven pinball manufacturing techniques, they forged a unique (and extremely wasteful) path that would see them doing everything in-house from producing proprietary playfield tech to die-cut stickers and promotional merch.
“He [Damian] kept telling everyone we just need to get one out and wasn't interested in making it sustainable (i.e. doing things in batches). He was also micro managing everyone. The amount of parts we had to bin was staggering as he wouldn't check any of my drawings or allow us to get a single item made to verify its dimensions or how it functioned. Every order minimum was probably about 50x on the off chance that it worked and then we saved some time by not having to go back and order more (little did that help when we had to iterate on a design and throw those 50 out).”
I suspect it’s this overengineering that pinball enthusiasts perceived as high build quality and while it made them stand out at times, it was never a sustainable way to run their business.
Poor strategic planning
From the get-go, Damian seemed to focus on building the business around best case scenarios. It’d work if he could sell 200 CELTS. It’d work if he could sell-out of Fathom pre-orders. It’d work if he could drum up interest in Centaur.
With CELTS, regardless of its sales success, he had invested time and money in building a basic, differentiated game platform for his company. Instead of taking that progress and building from it in his next game (War of the Worlds), he had to do it all over again for the Bally remakes, which required a different manufacturing approach for just about everything he’d need to build.
“I'd spent all this time and energy working out how to make, you know, what I thought was a modern pin, you know, which was CELTS.
It was sort of a modern size style cabinet, modern hinges, modern head box, even though we have a different twist on how we do our translights and our backglass and whatnot.
But it was all built around modern cabinetry design.
When we pivoted and went to class of ‘81 and all of a sudden I'm in this, well, you know, we've obviously got to, you know, we're remaking trying to make a faithful, you know, revisited version of the game.”
That’s an expensive mistake!
Over-promised and under-delivered
To many of the points above, Damian was a chronic over-promiser and under-deliverer. From CELTS onward, he shot himself in the foot at every corner by setting expectations (and taking money for) things he couldn’t actually deliver.
“At this point we were meant to be getting out 50 Celts a month but we were yet to make a single one from the new factory.”
Poor communication
It’s somewhat ironic to list poor communication as a major fault point for the company that gained traction in part from its seemingly transparent and consistent use of social media.
“The lack of vlogs was probably more centered around wanting to give the impression that things were further along than they actually were. Any videos would reveal the opposite of that.”
When things started going south (or perhaps when things were happening that Damian didn’t want the community to see), he went quiet, and set in motion a doom spiral of trust decay. Rather than addressing his problems head-on and being honest with his customers, he created a situation where slowly, no one in the community could trust anything that came from him or the rest of the company.
Damian also severely misled his customers by communicating specific production timelines he could never meet, asking for payment for products that didn’t yet exist, and financial safeguards (Escrow accounts, etc.) that may not have been in place.
Wrapping up (for now)
Is there criminal liability to be found here? There very well could be, but I’m not a lawyer. Mostly I think it just sucks for the pinball community to have to go through another one of these embarrassing and costly failures.
I think we’re going to learn more in the coming weeks and that additional knowledge will change my view on things. For example, while I didn’t list it as a specific sub-head, we’re also learning more about Damian’s management style and legal/financial maneuvering that may trump everything else listed in this piece.
At the end of the day, he couldn’t, or didn’t know how to, rise to the challenge.
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Links of the Week
Few quick links worth checking out this weekend.
Jeff Teolis interviews Eugene Jarvis (Raw Thrills) for the 400th episode of Pinball Profile
Wormhole Pinball interviewed Erika of Erika’s Pinball Journey
LoserKid Pinball Podcast interviewed Shane Told of Silverstein
Cary Hardy released a teaser trailer for an upcoming series on Haggis Pinball
Poll of the Week
If money were no object, would you start a pinball manufacturing company? |
Last Week’s Poll Results
Are you surprised by the news of Haggis going out of business?
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Yes (16)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 No (100)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ What is a Haggis? (13)
“Tightening the reins on production seemed like a smart move to regroup and restart. Instead it seemed like the death throes of a murder victim. Partly by Covid. Partly by costs from living so far from the majority of pinball lovers. No surprise the see the breathing cease. And it’s sad. Because they made beautiful machines. The end of anything good is a true sorrow. THEN you start wondering just how good management of the details and financial handling foundations actually were. If not, then yeah, that’s a paper airplane in a professionally aerodynamic space. It’s gonna crash quick no matter how pretty and sharp it seemed at during launch & flight.”
“No need to pile shit on them but honestly if you say x machines a week and deliver o then don't realize that consumers talk with each other? And to ask for a full final payment in January and say it's on the production line that week and it still didn't arrive. It's not rocket science.....”
“Disappointed, but unfortunately not surprised. The writing appeared to be on the wall, well before they announced Centaur (which I absolutely would've loved to see take off and do well). RIP dudez”
“Never heard of the company, or that it was Ausy! Did they advertise?”
“The prices they announced for Centaur were never going to work. It was to expensive for what that game was. They would have had minimal orders, so didn’t have enough deposit money that they seem to have needed to finish off Fathom. Essentially Centaur costs showed that they could not produce games at competitive prices, in what is a tight market with lots of competition.”
“Lack of Haggis communicating for months - no surprise Haggis is done. Sounds like some questionable practices toward the end concerning taking monies for games, not delivering etc etc. No surprise at all. Start ups with no, or sparse track record are a big risk for buyers of pinball. Proven track record with many games sold is prudent before you buy... But it seems this type of thing just keeps repeating itself over and over again. ”
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