At long last the story of John Popadiuk, Zidware and Deeproot Pinball may have come to a conclusion.
Last month, the case against John Popadiuk aka J Pop and his defunct pinball company, Zidware, brought by a group of pinball collectors who lost money in his failed attempt to produce pinball machines like Magic Girl, Retro Atomic Zombie Adventureland (RAZA) and Alice in Wonderland was dismissed in the Northern District of Illinois Bankruptcy Court (see below). The original Zidware customers definitely will not be made whole, but there may be some relief for them with more announcements on this subject later this week.
The majority of the remaining Zidware and Popaduik-related assets were in the possession of Robert Mueller's now defunct company Deeproot Pinball. They were put up for auction by a Texas Bankruptcy Court last week and sold to Turner Pinball for $50,000. Turner Pinball is owned by the same individual, Chris Turner, as Turner Logic, the company that did programming for Deeproot while it was still in business. Along with the Deeproot Pinball intellectual property, Chris Turner also purchased several life insurance policies that the Deeproot companies had possession of.
Despite expressing interest in potentially manufacturing the pinball machines that were designed by Deeproot during its short life numerous times on various podcasts, David Fix and American Pinball did not place a bid for Deeproot's assets during the bankruptcy auction.
Many had assumed that the prototype RAZA pinball machine that had been given to a company called Intertek for UL testing and certification was part of the bankruptcy assets, but it was not. It is now believed that that specific machine was left at Intertek for longer than the contractually allowed period of time and destroyed.
Lots of loose ends in the J Pop / Zidware saga have been tied up. Is this the end of the story or will games like Magic Girl, RAZA and Food Truck pop back up at some point in the future? Time will tell. The ball is now in Chris Turner and Turner Pinball's court.
Below are the documents related to the Deeproot bankruptcy auction:
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