Good morning everyone. After a big flurry of news to end last week, things have been I've very quiet on the arcade front to start this week off. Plus I've been pretty busy with work and my son's high school soccer games. I figured that I'd offer proof of life that I'm still here lol with a few minor pinball odds and ends this morning.
First up, according to the distributor Flip N Out, Stern Pinball has added one last production run for its Guardians of the Galaxy Pro pinball machine to its calendar for December. This supposedly will be the final production run for the game. Is Stern slowly starting to fill in the mysterious late-year hole in its production schedule with random runs of existing games or are we actually going to see something new / vaulted from them. I sure hope that it's the latter. Time will tell.
Next up is an update on Circus Maximus' efforts to reproduce Pinball Circus and Kingpin. I was recently called out on Pinside asking for an update on this situation, so this is what I've heard. Pinball Circus is completely dead and there's no chance that they are remaking either game. In fact, all U.S. Trademarks for the sought-after Capcom game have been allowed to expire except for a newer one from a gentleman in the Netherlands who has accumulated a number of parts and documents about the game but as far as I know does not currently have any affiliation whatsoever with a manufacturer that could produce the game.
Someone is working on finishing and improving the Kingpin code and documenting it on Pinside and YouTube but again this individual is not currently affiliated with any manufacturer.
So Kingpin sits in limbo for the foreseeable future. It's very disappointing that Circus Maximus would take pre-order money for a remake by selling translites and not at least provide an update on the project for the past several years.
Speaking of trademarks, somehow American Pinball has let the trademark for "Galactic Tank Force" lapse. My guess is that this was some sort of administrative error on the company's part, but given the fact that the game is still in production and they want to sell other products using its Intellectual Property, they should probably seek to fix that ASAP, unless for some reason they don't care.
In pinball code news, we recently were given new updates for Multimorphic's Heist, Stern Pinball's James Bond and Pinball Brothers' Queen.
I personally am anxiously awaiting another code update for Stern Pinball's Jurassic park in the near future. The next update will launch an entirely new mode / challenge to the game:
"Stay tuned for details on the upcoming Insider Connected Quest which will keep players all over the world busy trying to collect Dinosaur DNA strands."
