Fantastic that you are doing this
If you can get the colours right, I would consider focusing on mini sets. Or at least running full sets and mini sets in parallel to see what sells and then refining your model accordingly.
This could enable you to cover more games and get more of a "copy, paste" production line going with the associated lower production costs.
eg making 6 piece easy break kits (7) times will require a lot less design time, production time, stock holding and money than making one full set of 42. And I think you could make more money and satisfy more customers this way
My fish tales only needed 2 of the usually broken 3 boat plastics for example. The only other damaged plastic was hidden at the back of the game so I bought a mini kit rather than a full one.
Some plastics rarely or never break on games. So logically - does it make sense to go to the trouble of making these ? We have all got plastics sets lying around where most will never get used, even when we refurbed really shagged out games.
My funhouse was a really tired example but only needed a few plastics out of the full kit I bought.
A few plastics are particularly vulnerable and are usually broken on pre refurb examples. I am sure that guys on here would happily share the data with you. You could ask something like ..."of all the games you have owned, which plastics were damaged"
I think that patterns will emerge very quickly as we all know that games have their well known and unique vulnerable points in addition to obvious ones like slings, saucers and captive balls
Fish Tales - the 3 boat plastics
Whirlwind - Skillshot
Shadow - vertical at the front of the mini pf and the brick plastics near the mini of upkicker
Etc etc
Good luck with it. We all want you to succeed.
Pretty much nail on head. Doing single pieces isn't going to be viable, except maybe just slings, but even that I would define as mini-mini kit. Having the full sets archived would be nice but as you say it's a lot of work for a bunch of stuff very few people would ever need. The really obscure plastics can be obtained by robbing parts from a junked game beyond repair.
Any chance you would consider making plastics that are better than the originals? The low res crappy images on Spider-Man and LOTR would look so much better if they could be redone (Same images but better resolutions).
That's an interesting one. I would seriously consider a whole new plastic set for Spider-Man if it were higher quality.
For Stern I will make them in their original crappy quality. We've done this already for LOTR and Sopranos which are being printed and cut today.
However, alternative plastics are a very real possibilty and I've discussed this with a couple of my designers. It's fairly straightforward to apply new art to the pieces once we have the cutting outlines for each shape.
I think that the biggest problem is going to be the need for you to keep the plastics, even if bought.
I'd be happy to send specific plastics off any of my games, if they were to be returned within a reasonable timescale - 1 or 2 weeks. That could give you enough time to manufacture replacements and save the file, so you could always keep one set of complete plastics as reference for future work.
The most sought after plastics are sought after because they are rare and pricey, not as much chance of anyone wanting to give those up permanently.
If you could return them, people could even send a complete set from any machine that they are doing a refurb on, and basically receive their original set back as well as a replacement set (which would be their "payment" for sending the set in the first place)
I also think that the majority of people, unless doing a full refurb, would usually just require a single plastic at a time. I've bought full sets in the past for my machines but only ever used 1 particular plastic - I don't have any of these left as I always give them to whoever has bought my machine.
The plastic over the upper left flipper on DM seems to be a common requirement
Yeah that's just not going to work for us. The amount of work involved requires far more time than 1-2 weeks. For starters just redrawing the artwork on a 6 piece mini kit is around 40-50 hours of work and then production of the actual plastics takes around 10-15 days.
The reason I can't do single one-off pieces for people is because we get charged for a full sheet, so it needs to be filled up with as many pieces as possible. Unless you want to pay £150+ for that single DM plastic then it will need to be part of a mini kit.
Also what I don't want is people bombarding me with odd parts that they need returned ASAP. This is not like photocopying a bank statement. It must be done with care and accuracy if you want high quality stuff. That's not to say I would refuse a complete full set of plastics if we were given say 2-3 months. But odd parts here and there, defnitely not.
So, what I will take is junk people no longer want, which is what i'm offering to buy here. The other way is by keeping my collection on rotation. Right now I have around 8 games in my possesion, so once I've acquired their parts, reproduce them, I can move them on and buy other games.
Pete,
They're not full sets, but have sent you the scans ive dug which include:
Fish Tales
Johnny Mnemonic
Junk Yard
Lethal Weapon 3
Pinbot
Spirit of 76
The Shadow
Whirlwind
World Cup Soccer
I've just ordered a Robocop set from your site - they look great and just what I need!
Cheers,
Tim
Got this, thank you very much Tim.
