Coverage of the First Public Appearance of Stern Pinball's Pokémon - The 2026 NY Toy Fair
By knapparcade
Let's kick things off today with a report from the first public appearance of Stern Pinball's brand new cornerstone pinball machine, Pokémon. Stern brought the game to the New York Toy Fair at the Jacob Javits convention center in Manhattan this past weekend. As a grizzled veteran of the auto industry, I personally have been going to the NY Auto Show industry days at the Javits for years, so I somewhat knew what to expect at my first Toy Show. My wife and I took the ferry over from Weehawken, New Jersey on Saturday morning. If you're ever going to the Convention Center, that's a super easy way to get there. The boat drops you off right across the street. We picked up our press badges and wandered around the show floor until we found the Stern Pinball booth where we met up with Stern's Senior Director of Marketing Zach Sharpe and CEO Seth Davis. They gave us the lowdown on Pokémon. Stern had two machines at the event, Limited Edition Game #3 and a Pro. My wife and I spent time on both getting our butts kicked by Zach. His father, the Man Who Saved Pinball - the legendary Roger Sharpe who was at the show for unrelated licensing purposes even stopped by the booth while I was there and proceeded to casually GC aka Grand Champion aka get the top score on the game the first time he played it. The Limited Edition version of the game looked fantastic in person. There's no doubt that the art on the LE is better than it is on the Pro and Premium. Having said that, I'm a Pro or Premium guy all day. The LE just isn't worth the additional cost to me personally. It's a moot point anyhow because all 750 Limited Editions sold out nearly instantly. So how did it play? Fantastic. I've been describing it as playing Attack From Mars if it had a UFO that came down and hovered over the playfield that you can bash and 200 monsters to catch. This game is going to be a big hit, not only with pinball collectors, but on location as well. It's approachable with an important shot right up the middle and ramps that won't insta-drain if you don't make it all the way up, but deep in that there's a zillion different monsters to catch. I wasn't allowed to take a picture of it because it was still pending licensor approval, but I did get to see what the Insider Connected Pokédex looks like. For those of you who aren't familiar with Pokémon, a Pokédex is a sort of list or book in which players store the various monsters that they catch in the game. The Insider Connected one contained spots for a whopping 182 characters at launch, with more coming. Clicking on the monster's image in the Pokédex brings up a sort of trading card on your phone. It's pretty neat and I can totally see myself getting addicted and trying to as the tagline says "Catch 'Em All." After we checked out the Stern Pinball booth, Megan and I walked the huge floor and checked out the rest of the show. We did manage to find a few other arcade-related booths. Quarter Arcades, which sells 1/4 scale playable arcade game replicas had a ton of mini-machines there. That was really neat. We also got a behind-the-scenes tour of the Basic Fun booth. I can confirm that Arcade1Up is indeed alive and well as a brand of that company now. They didn't have a whole lot new to show off. Their big Toy Fair reveal was a Sonic the Hedgehog home arcade cabinet, which plays what I believe are console Sonic games. They also had a larger Ms. Pac-Man cab. I was there before the official reveal of both games, so again I couldn't take pictures of them. Having said that, pics are out there now so if you're curious about them you can Google them. They weren't really for me. If I'm going to buy a 1Up, they have to be something with unique controls or some other feature that I can't just replicate in MAME, like the yoke on the Star Wars cabinet or the 4-player Pong / Warlords pub table. My wife, Megan, was a really good sport for going to a Toy Fair on Valentine's Day with me. I have to say that we ended up having a fantastic time, between checking out all the cool stuff at the show, getting to see Pokémon pinball and then going out to dinner by the water in Weehawken after. Thanks to Zach Sharpe and Seth Davis for showing me around the new game! Below are several videos and tons of pictures from this year's NY Toy Fair.
