Summer lacrosse season has begun. My high school son’s club team practices are far enough away from my house that I just sit here in my car and wait. That means lots of extra time to write articles lol.
As I sit here in my Jeep, I got to thinking about pinball toppers. Stern Pinball has a backlog of three toppers for its recent pinball releases now, Venom, JAWS and John Wick. During my recent visit to Stern, George Gomez stated that they are actively working on reducing the release time for toppers to have them go on sale closer to the launch of games. In my opinion, doing so would provide a big lift to accessory sales.
Word on the street is that JAWS may have two different official toppers from Stern.
As far as the Venom topper goes, back in October, I wrote here on this site that based upon analysis of the game’s code the topper would likely be based upon a Venomized version of the Marvel character Ghost Rider.
Stern Pinball’s Upcoming Venom Topper Appears to be Based on Venomized Ghost Rider
Thanks to more code analysis, we now have some clues about what the upcoming John Wick topper may be like.
The current code for the game contains a reference to a small LCD screen. The code also contains the phrase “photo shoot”. At first I thought that this meant that the game might take the player’s picture, but apparently all new Stern games have this in the code and it is used to turn on all of the lights in the game for promotional photo shoots at launch and it is eventually removed. Huh, I learned something new today.
Thanks to Julien Hamel for reaching out to me with this information.
Very interesting. Some thoughts.
320x240 is 4:3, and very low res. So maybe the screen is very small.
Venom photoshoot. Show player in Venom mask. That could be fun!