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No Longer Available STTNG - £4,500

VeeMonroe said:
There aren’t any 18 year olds regularly posting here because of the price of pins - not nostalgia.

@MajesticPinball, you’re in your twenties, aren’t you? And got into pinball through EMs (which are cheap-er…)



Erm, I first played a full-sized pinball machine in 2021… The pinball machine I played in my youth, I already owned, and has - sadly - been broken by my sons (it was a little plastic thing, after all).

There are people coming into pinball. Mostly, I admit, in the States. People on the forum keep complaining about us, often because we’re blamed for not understanding value and driving up prices. I’ve just explained why. I have no nostalgia because I never played pinball in the 90s. I’m not in my 50s either (although, admittedly, I’m not as young as @David_Vi, @Lecari and @MajesticPinball). Some of us got into pinball through Zen Pinball, Pinball Arcade and so on. I had a slightly more circular route - I actually owned a bunch of dexterity games (like crokinole and Tumblin’ Dice) before I bought my Fish Tales.

If you imagine someone coming into pinball through a computer game, playing Twilight Zone, playing Fish Tales, looking up the prices and realising that there is a nearly 3x difference in the price of these two pins, can you imagine why the prices seem off to me? I must have played Fish Tales on iPad hundreds of times before I bought one with the topper missing. To me, Fish Tales is a mobile phone video game that happens to have a seriously fun physical version.

@Sgt GrizZ, I’ve had our Fish Tales for more than two years now. We’ve had a bunch of pins come in and out, in that time, and I’ve probably played 100+ pins on location. It’s not going anywhere and, in fact, it probably gets played more than our other pins put together. As I say, a dexterity-based mobile phone app that happened to have a seriously-fun physical version. And, no, never watched an episode of Twilight Zone. It‘s about as familiar as Tudor cooking or Roman bathing practices (in fact, probably less so).
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Yeah 28, my first handful of pins were EMs as that's literally all I could warrant pricewise at the time. Grew up playing all the classic 90s DMDs which got me into it initially though.
 
VeeMonroe said:
There aren’t any 18 year olds regularly posting here because of the price of pins - not nostalgia.

@MajesticPinball, you’re in your twenties, aren’t you? And got into pinball through EMs (which are cheap-er…)



Erm, I first played a full-sized pinball machine in 2021… The pinball machine I played in my youth, I already owned, and has - sadly - been broken by my sons (it was a little plastic thing, after all).

There are people coming into pinball. Mostly, I admit, in the States. People on the forum keep complaining about us, often because we’re blamed for not understanding value and driving up prices. I’ve just explained why. I have no nostalgia because I never played pinball in the 90s. I’m not in my 50s either (although, admittedly, I’m not as young as @David_Vi, @Lecari and @MajesticPinball). Some of us got into pinball through Zen Pinball, Pinball Arcade and so on. I had a slightly more circular route - I actually owned a bunch of dexterity games (like crokinole and Tumblin’ Dice) before I bought my Fish Tales.

If you imagine someone coming into pinball through a computer game, playing Twilight Zone, playing Fish Tales, looking up the prices and realising that there is a nearly 3x difference in the price of these two pins, can you imagine why the prices seem off to me? I must have played Fish Tales on iPad hundreds of times before I bought one with the topper missing. To me, Fish Tales is a mobile phone video game that happens to have a seriously fun physical version.

@Sgt GrizZ, I’ve had our Fish Tales for more than two years now. We’ve had a bunch of pins come in and out, in that time, and I’ve probably played 100+ pins on location. It’s not going anywhere and, in fact, it probably gets played more than our other pins put together. As I say, a dexterity-based mobile phone app that happened to have a seriously-fun physical version. And, no, never watched an episode of Twilight Zone. It‘s about as familiar as Tudor cooking or Roman bathing practices (in fact, probably less so).
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Do you know how old I am? Don't cheat 😄
Here's a hint, @MajesticPinball and I are not around the same age. But I feel complimented that you think so.😘

Most you are saying is irrelevant because pins are priced in desirability.
I don't understand the hype for TZ either, but it's definitely got more going on than Fishy in every way.
 
David_Vi said:
Do you know how old I am? Don't cheat 😄
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You know you should never ask a gentleman how old he is… 😎

I’m guessing early thirties.

I’m certainly not going to let anyone guess how old I am. Although if I’d had a teenage pregnancy scandalously young, I could just about have a son @MajesticPinball’s age…

I don’t think how much is going on is a good guide to the desirability of pinball machines either. Otherwise, The Shadow and Johnny Pneumonic would be ranked much higher (and I know that’s a fair bit about theme).
 
VeeMonroe said:
You know you should never ask a gentleman how old he is… 😎

I’m guessing early thirties.

I’m certainly not going to let anyone guess how old I am. Although if I’d had a teenage pregnancy scandalously young, I could just about have a son @MajesticPinball’s age…

I don’t think how much is going on is a good guide to the desirability of pinball machines either. Otherwise, The Shadow and Johnny Pneumonic would be ranked much higher (and I know that’s a fair bit about theme).
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Mid/late 30s if I can remember...

It's not just about bling. The ruleset for TZ is miles ahead of those two and fishy. Fishy serves a purpose but is also a lot cheaper.
 
David_Vi said:
Mid/late 30s if I can remember...
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If I can remember... You jest, I'm sure...😜

David_Vi said:
It's not just about bling. The ruleset for TZ is miles ahead of those two and fishy. Fishy serves a purpose but is also a lot cheaper.
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Yes, but it's not just about rules, either.

Led Zeppelin Pro has a shedload of rules and I am pretty sure that no one is going to argue LZ Pro is a better pin than - I dunno - Flash Gordon? Centaur? Quicksilver? (not had the fortune to play Fathom yet)... Or maybe they are... Who knows...
 
TZ is a bit of an outlier, wasn't that the highest BOM ever in a pinball machine at the time?
Seems to command big money a game needs to rate highly in playability, artwork/theme and have limited supply.

Fishy and STTNG are both great games, but they sold well and made a ton of them, Shadows under rated (thankfully, otherwise I wouldn't have one)

In many ways coming into the hobby more recently without any baggage or memory of the pinball scene in the 90s is a benefit, I would imagine the top 10 games lists of us newbies would look very different than those who have been in the hobby many years.
 
I don't think you can compare LZ with Bally SS games. it's like comparing a brand new ford focus with a 1970's ford escort. The new model has all the modern bells and whistles and performance, but is incomparable to the nostalgic, simplicity of the older model.

I would absolutely say that some of those bally SS games are much better games than LZ.
 
AlanJ said:
I don't think you can compare LZ with Bally SS games. it's like comparing a brand new ford focus with a 1970's ford escort. The new model has all the modern bells and whistles and performance, but is incomparable to the nostalgic, simplicity of the older model.

I would absolutely say that some of those bally SS games are much better games than LZ.
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Yes, but @AlanJ I don't have the nostalgia angle. I'm coming into all this fresh, circa 2021. I never played any of these games in the 80s, 90s, 00s or 10s. I personally think Flash Gordon is a better pin than LZ (hope that was clear from what I wrote). It has better shots, better artwork and more gameplay tension. Pinball machines are physical objects, after all. They don't need amazing code to be fun to play.

That said, there are now modern pins that are as good artwork-wise as the 90s Bally/Williams, have as great shots as Flash Gordon, and have video-game-equivalent code too. Just not that many of them...

I think there are also a bunch of pins that were innovative in their day, which people have a lot of nostalgia about, but which compare extremely poorly to modern pins - often because they're trying to do the same things, but worse. The pricing is what the pricing is, as the nostalgia market is evidently a thing, but newer players don't necessarily see the appeal of that stuff.
 
Space now becomes the issue, rather than price. Loads of supply and better prices, but if you can’t sell a game and are at capacity, you can’t buy either.
 
AlanJ said:
Space now becomes the issue, rather than price. Loads of supply and better prices, but if you can’t sell a game and are at capacity, you can’t buy either.
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Well, it *is* price. It's *always* about price. Because you can *always* sell a game if you drop the price enough. I dropped the price on the El PinBotto by ~£450 because I was at capacity and needed to sell. I bet if Marcel dropped the price of this ST:TNG to £4,000, it would sell in days.

Prices would need to drop a lot before there were pins that weren't worth the cost and bother of picking up...
 
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I'm now thinking back to the freebies we couldn't be hassled with

The deluxe space harrier dumped outside aztec coin

The new in box pistol pokers £50 each we didn't go back for at the electrocoin super sale ( did squeeze in als garage band though)

The black knight 2000 in a cornish ditch .. ah them were the days
 
steve brum said:
I'm now thinking back to the freebies we couldn't be hassled with

The deluxe space harrier dumped outside aztec coin

The new in box pistol pokers £50 each we didn't go back for at the electrocoin super sale ( did squeeze in als garage band though)

The black knight 2000 in a cornish ditch .. ah them were the days
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Have you still got Als Garage - one the very few DMD games I’ve never played , and always fancied one 😁
 
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