For years the people of Maryland were treated to one of pinball's best secrets, a huge arcade that was essentially hidden behind the frozen food section of MOM's Organic grocery store in College Park. A few months ago we received the sad news that the famous MOM's pinball location was closing.
Never fear! Today the folks behind that location announced that they have found a new home for the games. A "couple dozen" of MOM's most popular machines are currently being set up in a new Maryland location. They shared a couple of pictures of the new spot with a note that said additional details are coming soon.
Ooh, a Stern Batman 66 that has Insider Connected! You don't see that very often. I'm going to have to head on down there and chase some achievements when it opens :).
Yesterday afternoon, Planetary Pinball, the rightsholder to Bally Williams, shared some details of its current arrangement with Pedretti Gaming to remake classic titles from the brands.
For its newest game, a remake of the popular 1990 Williams title Funhouse, Planetary provided Pedretti with original Williams blueprints, artwork, parts and assemblies. They worked hand-in-hand with Pedretti to assure the new version of Funhouse matched the original as closely as possible. Planetary is "pre-staging" key unique parts for Funhouse for Pedretti to use during the manufacturing process. Most of these major mechanisms from the game were recreated exactly to Williams' specs except for when improvements to the original design were needed to improve reliability, like Rudy's new improved jaw motor/gear assembly
Planetary has been shipping parts to Pedretti in 50 to 100 game batches since February 2024. Replacement parts for Pedretti remakes (notice how they used the plural of that word, meaning that more are coming) will be available to purchase through Planetary Pinball's website.
Below are pictures of some of the parts batches that Planetary has shipped to Pedretti.
Time to hop from pinball over to the arcade space.
UNICO recently showed off its upcoming Nova Blast Candy Cab to potential customers at the IAAPA Thailand show. The company is in the process of ironing out a few last wrinkles before it begins shipping cabinets to customers.
I'm very curious to see what the early reviews of production units are like. I'm actually tempted to buy one to put a few of my favorite arcade boards in, such as SEGA's Golden Axe: The Revenge of Death Adder and In the Hunt.
This afternoon, Evercade, the maker of a handheld, cartridge-based retro gaming system revealed its new Evercade Alpha mini-arcade cabinet product. Modeled after the Dynamo Big Blue cabinets, the single-player machines come in two variants, each pre-loaded with six classic Capcom games. They allow owners to use the fifty existing Evercade retro gaming cartridges to play a over 500 classic games on the cabinet. Two player games can be played by using external controllers.
Priced at $229.99, pre-orders for Evercade Alpha begin on June 4th with deliveries expected to begin in November of this year.
