People have been saying forever that He-Man Masters of the Universe is coming from Stern Pinball. Earlier today, a Pinside member named "mnpinball" who is legendary on the message boards for correctly predicting future titles from Stern Pinball posted the following message:
"By the power of Grayskull, Stern has the power !"
I don't think that there was any doubt previously that Stern had the Masters of the Universe license, but now we almost certainly can put it in the books, write it in pen or whatever colloquialism one wants to use. Interestingly, I had been planning on writing my next article here on He-Man, probably tomorrow or Wednesday, but this prediction by the Nostradamus of Pinside moved my timeline up a little bit.
With the What? part of the questions surrounding this upcoming Stern Cornerstone pinball machine answered, the next questions are Who? and When? Let's look at the Who? first.
For a long time now, the new Stern designer Jack Danger has almost exclusively been linked to a potential Masters of the Universe game. However, I recently heard that he actually is NOT this game's designer. I've been hearing that John Borg is designing it because Jack wanted to work on some other theme. Is this change actually true? It certainly goes against conventional wisdom. Time will tell. It's most likely one of those two gentlemen.
One of those two is the likely designer, so who is on the art? Back in mid-2022 I wrote an article here speculating that Randy Martinez may be doing the art for a Stern He-Man pinball machine:
Taking Stuff and Running...Stern Pinball Masters of the Universe Coming in 2023?
At the time I wrote the following:
"From the quote that I shared at the top of this post, you can see that he obviously knows that us pinball people grab ahold of every single nugget of information that we can find and completely over-analyze it LOL. That's exactly what I'm going to do here. Early on in the interview, Randy said the following:
"Hopefully by next year's Comic Con I will have some Masters of the Universe artwork. I'm really excited about that because besides Star Wars and basketball, Masters of the Universe is my thing."
There has been a rumor floating around out there that Stern Pinball is working on a Masters of the Universe pinball machine. So, let's add this smoke to the Stern He-Man Pinball fire :)."
Besides the two Star Wars-related Stern pinball machines that Randy has done the art on in the past, he also has been rumored to be the artist for a possible upcoming Stern Pinball Jaws pinball machine. Could he be doing both Jaws AND He-Man for Stern? I suppose that it's possible.
So the last question here is When? If Masters of the Universe is really coming, when might we see it? Above Randy Martinez actually associated his Masters of the Universe art with San Diego Comic Con 2023. Could He-Man be the Stern's big reveal at this month's convention instead of Venom? I personally think that the smart money is probably still on a Venom release now with Masters of the Universe in 2024, but between the Random Redditor rumor and this He-Man stuff there's enough uncertainty about what Stern is going to show off at Comic-Con to keep us guessing and make things interesting. I like it!
