Here's an interesting rumor to start the week off.
Flash back to March of 2023, that month saw an absolute avalanche of new pinball machine reveals. The Texas Pinball Festival featured the first public appearances of Chicago Gaming Company's Pulp Fiction, Stern Pinball's Foo Fighters, Jersey Jack Pinball's The Godfather, American Pinball's Galactic Tank Force and very early appearances by the recently revealed Pinball Brothers Queen and Spooky Pinball Scooby-Doo. Whoa, that was an epic time for the hobby.
In interviews since then, American Pinball has indicated that they felt as though revealing Galactic Tank Force so close to all of those other new machines hurt sales. According to sources who I have spoken with, AP will not make the same mistake twice. The Company is rumored to have decided to push back the reveal of its next pinball machine, which initially it has said it would reveal at the upcoming Chicago Pinball Expo.
American's next game is reportedly very close to being ready, but rather than reveal it at the show with likely competition from Stern Pinball's new Metallica, Jersey Jack's next game and Dutch Pinball Exclusive's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, AP will instead push back the reveal and begin production of the game behind closed doors. Once it has 150 or so of the new machine in boxes and ready to go it will lift the curtain and reveal the game, which many believe will be based upon the video game franchise Cuphead.
Waiting until after only means people are more likely to have spent money with the competition already. If you're confident in the product you're making, you release when it's ready and damn the competition.
Will gladly wait longer for a perfected Cuphead!
Bro this is America....survival of the fittest... we can't just hold your hands American and give you a nice release window out there on your own. You think Godzilla was worried about other games coming out around the same time? HELL NO. If you're worried about your products' competition, than the problem is your product. No amount of hand-holding can make a great pinball man, step back, ask yourselves AP "What makes a great pinball machine?" ....as if you folks ever knew the answer to that in the first place. I still think AP is done and they're just delaying the inevitable. Bowden and McQuaid got potential the rest of em don't even care it's just insulting to us in…