I finally had a chance to listen to the full George Gomez interview that the folks at The Super Awesome Pinball Show podcast dropped earlier today. The show's hosts, Christian Line, Christopher Franchi and new co-host Jeff Parson did a great job.
I personally am a huge George Gomez fan. He's a really nice guy. I had a great phone conversation with him last year, after which he went out of his way to send my sons and I an autographed Deadpool translite, that I was able to put into my Gomez-designed Deadpool Pro that finally arrived at the Knapp Arcade last week.
The interview contained a ton of great information about Stern Pinball and its game development process. Here's my notes on what I found particularly interesting from Part 1 of the interview:
- Stern Pinball is developing another home game for "The Pin" line of machines.
- Private label machines taking a back seat at Stern despite being approached by companies all the time to make them.
- A big Insider Connected code drop with tons of new features is coming soon.
- An Insider Connected "Home Team" feature coming soon. The feature allows game owners to log in and play on their Connected account at home without having to pull out their phone.
- An Insider Connected Operator Dashboard is coming. It will allow locations to set up custom quests, see location trends, and many other things.
- In an ideal world, Stern would like to drop new Insider Connected features every month. That's what the programmers are saying they would like to do.
While I purchased an Insider Connected kit for my Stern Jurassic Park Premium a while ago, I admit that I haven't installed it yet. So, when my new Deadpool arrived, it was the first connected pin in my home arcade. Now that I have one, I'm absolutely addicted to getting achievements in games. It adds a whole new level of replayability. I'm definitely going to buy IC kits to install in my Guardians of the Galaxy and Jurassic in the near future.
Again, if you haven't listened to it already, make sure to check out the latest episode of the Super Awesome Pinball Show (link below). The next episode of the Super Awesome podcast will include Part 2 of the George Gomez interview.
