Years ago when I was starting to get much more into the hobby and had just really begun to listen to podcasts, Dennis and Tony's Eclectic Gamers Podcast (EGP) was the first podcast about pinball that I ever listened to. I was listening to the newest episode of the show this morning and heard an interesting rumor about Stern Pinball's upcoming release.
As In wrote here last week (Link: https://www.knapparcade.org/post/george-gomez-replaced-steve-ritchie-as-designer-on-upcoming-stern-pinball-machine ) George Gomez took over the license for the game that Steve Ritchie was working on when he left Stern Pinball for Jersey Jack and is he developing a completely new, three-flipper layout for it from scratch. According to EGP, the license that George Gomez is working on is...James Bond. Taking the rumor one step further, in the episode, Dennis stated that a Gomez-007 pinball machine "may very well be" Stern's final cornerstone game of 2022.
There's been rumblings that a Bond pin is in Stern's queue for some time, so this rumor certainly isn't completely out of left field. However, to use another baseball analogy, Dennis' batting average for the beloved Rumor Corner segment is the equivalent of a light-hitting, defense-first shortstop. So will a Gomez-Bond pin really be Stern's next game? I guess that we'll all see this summer.
If a Stern James Bond pin is coming, I wonder how they would do it? Would it just be based on the newest Daniel Craig Bond movie? Or would it be based upon older films? When I was young, I used to LOVE the Roger Moore and Sean Connery Bond films. It would be cool if Stern somehow incorporated all of the bonds (or at least the good ones LOL) into the machine. The licensing to do that might be tricky though depending upon what intellectual property the studio does and doesn't own.
Here's a link to the Eclectic Gamers episode that I referenced in this post:
P.S. The new "Rumor Corner" theme song is fantastic LOL
