This weekend at the Texas Pinball Festival, Jersey Jack Pinball held a seminar to introduce its latest pinball machine, The Godfather. A lot of the information that was presented during the presentation has already been mentioned in the great Straight Down the Middle video on the game.
I did grab a couple of new pieces of new information from the TPF event though. According to the game's designer, Eric Meunier, a brand new code update for The Godfather was released this past weekend. The new code, Version 1.04, contains over 100 new voice callouts from the Godfather movies, new movie clips as well as choreography improvement, rule balancing and audio balancing.
JJP launched The Godfather nine months after its Toy Story 4 pinball machine was released. This is the first time that the company has brought out two games within one year, 12 calendar months. Interestingly, Jersey Jack has actually been working on securing the license to make a Godfather pinball machine for four and a half years.
Jersey Jack has been manufacturing Godfather LE machines for several weeks now. Games were available in box at launch. The Company is building several hundred LEs before starting production of the Collector's addition early this summer.
Last, but certainly not least, the Company talked a little bit about the recent removal of Scorebit from Jersey Jack pinball machines. When asked about it during the S&A session, Eric Meunier said "As far as Scorbit, we are going on our own path and more to come on that."
Later on during the Q&A the company's founder Jack Guarnieri told a person who asked the question on the subject to "search pinball redemption patent." Well, that just so happens to be my specialty LOL. So I searched it right up. Whew, it has a lot of words and diagrams, so let's start with the summary:
This is actually a patent that JJP has had for a number of years. It essentially talks about a card dispensing system in pinball machines, where players can win cards that can be redeemed for prizes. From that description, it reminds me a little of the Raw Thrills Injustice games that you see in every Dave & Busters that dispenses collectable cards to players. This summary doesn't sound exactly like Scorebit, but maybe JJP is just using this patent as more of a blanket to cover an in-house Scorebit / Insider Connected-like system.
There a rumor when Stern's Insider Connected came out that they had to put scanners in games for players to log in instead of just QR codes on machines' screens because Jersey Jack already owned a patent on that, but I have no idea whether that is actually true. So is JJP going to start putting card-dispensing pinball machines in big redemption arcades? My guess is no, this is just a patent that they've had for a while that they're using to create their own in-house player-tracking system, but time will tell.
Here is a link to the aforementioned patent document:
Below is a link a replay of the JJP TPF presentation:
