Unfortunately, it appears as though Josh Kugler, the American Pinball programmer for Houdini, Oktoberfest and most recently Hot Wheels, is no longer with the company. This news was recently reported on The Pinball Show podcast and I verified its accuracy on LinkedIn. It remains to be seen who the programmer for the next American Pinball release will be. Riot pinball's Frank Gigliotti was the programmer for American's last release, Legends of Valhalla. The new AP employee Steve Bowden will likely be involved in rules design for future games. At this point I'm hearing that the next AP game will be a Dennis Nordmann design that will be revealed this fall, but these things are always subject to change. I wish Josh well in his future endeavors.
While we're on the subject of American Pinball, as far as I can tell, the company has no immediate plans to manufacture the amazing homebrew machine, Sonic Spinball that was created by its newest employee Ryan McQuaid. This doesn't mean that it won't get made at some point much further down the road, but if it does happen it won't be for a long time.
