Sneak Peek at Upcoming Official Dune Pinball Mods; Will We See a TRON Remake from Stern?; The Making of King Kong & More
- Jason
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
This past weekend the Northwest Pinball and Arcade Show was held in Tacoma, Washington. In addition to the tons of games on Free Play, one of the best things about pinball shows is the presentations, particularly the ones by the manufacturers. I was not in the Pacific Northwest this weekend, but I almost felt like I was there thanks to Chase at Geek Gamer TV. He did an amazing job streaming all of the great presentations at the show on his Twitch channel.
After getting up at 4 AM to take my youngest son to a lacrosse tournament in Long Island on Saturday morning (he won all three games), I took it easy yesterday and relaxed on my deck watching the recordings of the Northwest presentations.
Two stuck out in my mind as being "newsworthy" for what I write about here on the Knapp Arcade site, the Barrels of Fun presentation by Butch Peel and the Stern Pinball presentation on King Kong by Keith Elwin and his team.
I have included my notes on the presentations and a bunch of really cool pictures of prototypes of the games below. Enjoy!
Dune Presentation
Butch showed off an upcoming official mod for Dune that will be available for sale soon, a sculpted shooter rod based on the Crysknife carried by Paul Atreides.
A RGBW lit flat plastic topper comes standard on Dune. The early machines shipped out without it but they will get it.
Barrels of Fun plans to make an optional enhanced 3-Dimensional, moving interactive topper for the game available later this year
In a couple of the pictures below we got a look at prototype sling plastics that BoF decided not to use in the game
Butch talked a lot about the making of the upcoming manual for Dune
King Kong Presentation
During the Q&A session, someone asked if we will ever see Stern's popular 2011 pinball machine TRON Legacy remade. Elwin seemed to hint that if we do get a new TRON machine it may be based on the newest movie because that’s the part of the franchise that companies like to push.
Specifically, he said “I will tell you that dealing with licensors, if they have a
license with many different movies, they’re always going to push the latest
movie. I would love to do a TRON 1 myself, but they’re going to be like ‘No,
TRON 3 is coming out, you gotta do this one. Not that this is happening, but
that’s usually how the licensing world works.”
If Stern does remake its 2011 game it sounds to me as though it would be
rebranded as Disney's new upcoming TRON: Ares film. Though that could be an
issue given the recent negative publicity that the movie's star Jared Leto has
received.
Someone asked Keith if he has started on his next game yet. His response was “Kind of. I’m a little behind…the answer is It’s in my head.”
King Kong was one of George Gomez’s dream themes. He really wanted to make games for both Godzilla and Kong. He “willed it into fruition.”
Keith Elwin loves the show Archer but he thinks that it’s a little dead now as a pinball theme. “I don’t picture that ever happening, but I would still love to do it.”
Below are a number of pictures from the presentation, including a robotic ball-throwing Kong arm that never made it into the game, a cool Kong mech testing rig, earlier versions of the game's art, a look at a ramp that never made it into the game and much more.
