I's been a while since I've written about a pinball rumor that came from a podcast. Well, today I have a whopping four of them! Two of them are brand new to me and two have been around for years.
Let me begin by saying that if you haven't heard Retro Ralph's pinball podcast yet, the Flipside, you definitely should check it out. Ralph has been a big YouTuber on the retro gaming scene for years, but he recently branched out to talking about pinball. I believe that this is the 20th-something episode of his pinball show.
Let's start by talking about one of the rumors that I hadn't heard yet. The first one is about Barrels of Fun, maker of the Labyrinth pinball machine. Ralph heard from an anonymous source that Barrels has the license for the 1980s cartoon, toy line and comic GI Joe.
GI Joe is definitely from my generation. I'm sure that I watched just about if not every episode of the cartoon as a kid. I had a few of the toys, but the cheaper little green army men were definitely more in my budget. I remember my Mom finding a huge box of little green army men, tanks, planes and stuff at a garage sale back in the day and bringing it home for me. It was glorious.
A friend of mine in grade school had the huge GI Joe aircraft carrier toy. Man that thing was sick. GI Joe is actually somewhat relevant again as an IP. Not only is it in the nostalgia wheelhouse of probably the biggest pinball buying demographic, 40 to 50 year-olds, a big new compendium of the GI Joe Comics just went on sale in October.
I'm more into comics today than I was as a kid. I started buying them again when George Gomez gave me the comic for The Uncanny X-Men when the game launched. I read it on the airplane back from Stern and was hooked. Of course, now I own a zillion comics both in physical form and on Amazon Kindle. The new GI Joe comic may be the thickest book I've ever seen, coming in at a massive 1,168 pages. I'm not sure how the binding even holds all of that lol.
Do I think that GI Joe would be a great pinball IP? Sure. Barrels of Fun made Labyrinth work so I can see them doing well with this IP too. The rumor is that if Barrels has GI Joe (and I don't know that they actually do) that it's not the next game. The hottest rumor for the next title has been the recent film remake of Dune. Barrels runs a pretty tight ship without many leaks though, so who knows. Hopefully we'll see Game #2 from them this spring.
Ralph also had rumors about potential future games from Jersey Jack Pinball. Two of those rumors have been floating around out there for years, the Beastie Boys and Sonic the Hedgehog. I've written about both in the past.
Some company out there definitely has the license to produce a pinball machine based on Sonic the Hedgehog. We know this because American Pinball hired its former designer Ryan McQuaid in part to produce his beloved homebrew pinball machine Sonic Spinball. When AP went to try to secure the license for the game, they were told that another company already had it. We never found out who does, but I know for a fact that it's not Spooky Pinball. I don't think that it's Stern Pinball. I personally kind of thought that it might be Multimorphic, based on nothing more than pure speculation. Having said that, people - including Kaneda, have been saying that Jersey Jack has the license to make a Sonic pinball machine. I have not heard anything specific about this personally.
The third JJP license that Ralph mentioned in his episode something that I personally have been banging the gong for for a while. DC Comics. Stern Pinball's George Gomez even said in an interview last year that he heard a pinball company had secured the a license with DC, so there's plenty of smoke here.
Traditionally, one of the problems with DC Comics is that I have heard its licenses, outside of Batman, for some reason are very expensive. I even wrote an article here on the subject back in 2023:
Why We Don't See More DC Comics Licensed Pinball Machines?
Well, you know who doesn't shy away from expensive licenses? Jersey Jack Pinball. JJP just paid a rumored $5 Million dollars for the Harry Potter license, so I'm pretty sure that they could afford to make a game based on DC.
I would go wild for a game based on the Super Friends Saturday morning cartoon (one of my favorites as a kid) or the Justice League series of comics. Think of all of the iconic characters that would be in the game...Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Aquaman, Flash. Come on. Those are some heavy hitters. A Jersey Jack DC Comics pin has the potential to be awesome.
If the DC - JJP rumor is true, like with the GI Joe rumor it would not be next from the Company. It's pretty well know that Jersey Jack is releasing a Harry Potter pinball machine, designed by Eric Meunier this Spring. Veteran designer Steve Ritchie is likely up for Jersey Jack after that.
So those are the four rumors from the Ralph's latest podcast. As soon as I saw the words Pinball and Rumor in the title, I instantly tuned in lol. I have embedded the episode below for anyone who wants to check it out.
