That was fast! As we patiently awaited an update of another playfield drawing from JJP's upcoming, "The Hobbit" pinball machine which was finally shown last week JJP has been quick to release yet another picture in record time. This time detailing the center section of the playfield and what looks to be an action-packed design with cues from the #1 rated Williams game, Medieval Madness which incorporate pop-up trolls into the design. What will be included in this game is yet to be known. 

Along with classic design, auto kickback feature, a cross playfield ball launch and at least 4 flippers, this game looks like it will satisfy those looking for the "classic" look and feel of the Williams / Bally design along with the outstanding build quality that JJP is known for in their games.

See the press release below.

Greetings Pinball Fans,  

Today we are happy to release another section of The Hobbit Limited Edition Pinball Machine playfield.    

Click here to view the middle and lower portion of  

The Hobbit Pinball Playfield  

This will be a 4 flipper game with multiple shots from all 4 flippers. The upper flippers are very active with the game rules.  

As a reminder, as of September 1st the price of The Hobbit LE will increase $500 to $8000.00. We ask that you are current on the payment schedule for The Hobbit by 8/31/13. Those who are not current will see a $500 increase in the price of their game after 9/1/13, making their game $8000.

We will proudly show the full playfield before the end of August. This is going along better than WOZ as much of the basis of the platform is already created.

If you missed this in the previous update, click here to view the top right portion of the Playfield 

JJP Distributor, PinballSTAR Amusements is happy to announce that in conjunction with the fine folks at the PAPA 16 event this week in Pittsburgh, he will be running a WPPR points side tournament on a Wizard of OZ on Friday 10-5.     

     

WPPR points awarded and over $3,100 in prizes and giveaways. All proceeds to go to the PinballSTAR Amusements charity fund towards donation of WOZ machines to Children's Hospitals. For questions regarding this please click here for more info or email Joe atSales@PinballSTAR.com  

By Finn J.D. John
If you were a fan of the classic ABC television sitcom “Happy Days,” you know The Fonz had a special relationship with two particular machines: his trusty ’49 Triumph motorcycle, and the pinball machine in Al’s diner.
But it may surprise you to know that when Fonzie was playing that pinball machine, in 1950s Milwaukee, Wisc, he was breaking the law — and so was Al.
It’s a bit hard for younger Oregonians to believe, but just a few dozen years ago pinball was illegal in most large American cities — including Portland.
When coin-op pinball was first developed, it was mostly a game of chance, not skill — at least until flippers were added in the late 1940s. But even then, authorities still looked at a pinball machine as a straight-up slot machine with some extra gewgaws attached to it to fool players into thinking it was innocuous.
And they may have been right about that — at least, in some cases. But after 1949, the illegal status of pinball was going to have some profound effects on Oregon’s underworld, especially in and around Portland. It would set the stage for a semi-comical battle between two of the Beaver State’s scuzziest racketeers.
Where Pinball
Came From
Games like pinball had been around since at least the 1700s, but the coin-operated game was developed in the early 1930s, and by the end of the Great Depression they were a familiar sight in bars and malt shops pretty much everywhere.
But slot machines of the “one-armed bandit” type were getting to be a familiar sight, too. And as city authorities started cracking down on these in the 1940s, they also took a look at the pinball games.
To be fair, pinball was mostly luck-based at first. That made it great for gambling operators, since it provided protection against some wizardly player coming to the table and using his or her mad skills to take them to the cleaners. So a number of bars had started letting patrons place bets and cash in extra games that they might win.
They’d quit doing that by the late 1940s, as improvements to the games had dramatically increased the amount of skill that was involved in the game and decreased the role of luck. But by then it was too late. The public-relations war had already been lost.
So in ’49, when the city of Portland outlawed the silver balls, pinball’s reputation was dark and sordid — and alluring. Authorities considered them “gateway machines” used by wicked, scheming men to lure innocent youths into the underworld of one-armed bandits, covert blackjack tables and other underworld wickedness. Rebellious youths, attracted by the forbidden-fruit effect, considered them great fun.
All of which meant that by the mid-1950s — the beginning of pinball’s glory days — pinball in the Portland area was strictly an outlaw enterprise. Games were supplied by criminal syndicates, sometimes in collaboration with corrupt local officials. And when those syndicates started fighting for market share, things could get pretty exciting.

The Pinball Wars
The pinball wars in the north Willamette Valley mostly centered around two racketeers, who supplied the machines that restaurants and bars used. There was Stan Terry, an old bootlegger whose pinball-and-slots syndicate covered mostly establishments south of Portland, in the Milwaukie area; and “Big Jim” Elkins, the self-styled vice boss of Portland itself.
The two of them, in a nutshell, coveted one another’s rackets. They started out in the early 1950s with surprise raids. Elkins, with five or six heavily armed goons, would barge into a bar with Terry’s machines in it, take all the money and as many of the machines as they could haul and disappear into the night. Then Terry would respond in kind. Apparently nobody got hurt in any of these tit-for-tat raids, but then again, they weren’t getting anywhere either.
So around 1955, Elkins escalated the battle by traveling to Seattle and asking the Teamsters Union for help. The Teamsters Union at that time was essentially an organized-crime syndicate, and was already running some machines in Portland under the direction of a short, stocky crook named Tom “Blubber” Maloney.

The Teamster Scheme
Elkins couldn’t get an appointment with the head of the Teamsters in Seattle, so he reached out to Maloney instead. Holed up in the Roosevelt Hotel on Park Street, the two of them hatched a scheme: They’d set up a Teamsters-affiliated pinball operators union, lock Terry out of it and shut him down by denying him access to union trucking services and by throwing picket lines around his customers’ joints.
This was soon done, and a few weeks later, the Coin Machine Men of Oregon was formed. Almost immediately, it moved on the enemy: It summoned a picket line of Teamsters around the Mt. Hood Café, a place with a bunch of Stan Terry’s machines in it.

The Vegas Mafia
Gets Involved
It was looking like the end for Stan Terry. Once the Teamsters started shutting down his customers, his remaining clients would leave in a hurry. In desperation, he went and talked to an old underworld buddy who’d worked for legendary former head Portland racketeer Al Winter before he’d left to open the Sahara Casino in Las Vegas. Terry’s friend had another friend who knew Hy Goldbaum, the pit boss at the Flamingo Casino — the mobbed-up joint in Vegas that had been started by the late Bugsy Siegel. Goldbaum personally escorted Terry to Seattle and introduced him to the head of the Teamsters — the guy Elkins hadn’t been able to get an appointment with.
Some cash changed hands, and then a telephone rang and the pickets were pulled from around the Mount Hood. Just like that, Elkins had lost, and now the Coin Machine Men of Oregon was the group on the outside, facing the prospect of pickets and “hot cargo” restrictions on its slots and pinball machines. At that point, it was checkmate: Elkins had no choice but to sell his machines and routes to Terry for whatever he could get. Terry, with the Teamsters, had run him out of the business.
But Elkins wasn’t done yet. He had another scheme up his sleeve to get the business back. All the business. And it was very simple.

Elkins’
Desperate Scheme
Elkins had made the acquaintance of a square-jawed goon named Herman “Bugsy” Burns. Now, he called up Burns and told him he had a job for him: He and some associates would pose as pinball-machine repairmen and start making the rounds to every joint with one or more of Stan Terry’s machines in it. Elkins already had the trucks and fake IDs that they’d need, and had lined up a big warehouse in North Portland where the machines could be hidden afterward. Everything was ready to go.
When the crew got to each joint, they’d tell the owner pretty much what The Grinch told Cindy Lou Who in Dr. Seuss’s classic “How The Grinch Stole Christmas”: The machines were being updated, so they were collecting the old ones, and another truck would be along in an hour or so with the new replacements.
Elkins figured if they were efficient, they could collect every single Stan Terry pinball machine before anybody figured out the scam, and then Terry would be out of business.
And it probably would have worked, too. But they’d never find out. Because Bugsy and his friends got bored while waiting for the signal to start the collection run, and decided to while away the time by knocking over a Safeway. Of course, they got caught.
Stan Terry kept his machines, and kept paying the Teamsters for the privilege. Big Jim Elkins was stuck on the outside looking in, perhaps thinking — as historian Phil Stanford wryly comments in his book — that, “as ever, good help is so hard to find.”

(Sources: Stanford, Phil. Portland Confidential: Sex, Crime and Corruption in the Rose City. Portland: ptown books, 2004; Donnelly, Robert C. Dark Rose: Organized Crime and Corruption in Portland. Seattle: UW Press, 2011)

Finn J.D. John is an instructor at Oregon State University and the author of “Wicked Portland,” a book about the dark side of Oregon’s metropolis in the 1890s. He produces a daily podcast, reading archives from this column, at ofor.us/p . To contact him or suggest a topic: finn@offbeatoregon.com, @OffbeatOregon (on Twitter), or 541-357-2222.

UK Pinball Party, the premier pinball event in the country, will be coming to the hotel from Friday August 9 to Sunday August 11.

The festival will have more than 110 pinball machines on offer, set on freeplay, with the biggest variety ever seen – from 1950s’ electromechanicals up to the latest, and most modern, solid state pinball machines.

Members of the UK Pinball Group bring along pinball machines from their own collections to allow people to play games they would not otherwise get to play.

The UK Pinball Party is a unique pinball event with everything under the one roof from accomodation to food and drink. There will be pinball machines for sale, new and used pinball parts to buy, raffles, arcade video games to play and much more.

A special guest George Gomez – designer of games including Lord Of The Rings and The Avengers – will be there on the Saturday. He will be talking about his career while guests enjoy a three-course dinner.

Andrew Heighway, UK Pinball Party organiser said: “The UK Pinball Party is now one of the biggest pinball shows in Europe. We have more than 110 pinball machines on free play, from old electro mechanicals to the very latest solid state machines. There are machines to buy, parts suppliers, merchandise and lots more. We even have pinball design legend, George Gomez, flying in from Chicago to be our special guest for the weekend.

“We invite people to join us for a weekend of pinballing fun!”

The show opens from 5.30pm to 11pm on Friday, 9am to 7.30pm on Saturday and 10am to 5pm on Sunday.

Tickets for the event cost £25 for all three days, or £7 for Friday and £12 each for Saturday and Sunday. For further details about the event or to book tickets in advance, visit www.ukpinballparty.com


Via daventryexpress

Ed Boon, Founder of NeverRealm Studios, shared via Twitter today that the next DLC for Injustice: Gods Among Us will be announced later this week.

In his recent twitter post, a clue was given out where he showed a video playing the “FunHouse Pinball Music”. Who could be this next DLC character? We’ll find out later this week.

Check back with us this week as we update you on this latest character that will be joining Injustice.

Last year Pro Pinball creator Adrian Barritt attempted to reboot his critically-acclaimed PC series with a host of crowdsourced Pro Pinball remakes. Unfortunately for Barritt, theKickstarter campaign was unsuccessful. Now, almost a year later, the virtual pinball wizard is at it again with a more modest Kickstarter campaign to only remake one of his games, 1997's Pro Pinball: Timeshock.

This time around he's been vastly more successful. Within only a few days Pro Pinball: Timeshock: Ultimate Edition has achieved more than half of its £40k goal with 39 days still to go.

So why was Barritt so successful this time after his previously less than stellar campaign? "In my opinion, last time around we tried to do too much all at once; Completely remaster the 4 original tables, whilst creating a totally brand new one," Barritt told me in an e-mail correspondence. "This meant we had to ask for quite a lot of money, an amount that many thought was unreachable. Understandably some people don't want to risk backing a project that they don't think will succeed, this can then turn into a self fulfilling prophecy."

"This time we boiled down the Kickstarter to absolutely minimum, one table on the simplest platforms to write for. This enabled us to ask for a lot less and hit to 50 per cent point in just a few days."
He also noted that the downloadable lighting demo helped the Pro Pinball series get a lot of likes on it Facebook page, which he hopes are being converted into pledges.

Aside from Pro Pinball in the 90s, Barritt has remained a developer in the virtual pinball industry, having worked on such titles as Mario Pinball Land, Metroid Prime Pinball, and Pinball Pulse: The Ancients Beckon at his previous company Silverball Studios.

£5 pledges will receive the Timeshock remake for iOS or Android upon its estimated December release, while those who donate £10 will reserve it on a platform of their choice.

So far Timeshock is in development for PC, Mac, iOS and Android, but Barritt said he'd like to add stretch goals for OUYA, Linux, XBLA, PS3, Vita, 3DS and Wii U releases.

Ultimately, Barritt would still like to make remakes of other Pro Pinball titles such as: The Web, Big Race USA and Fantastic Journey.

The current tally comes to £22,493. Additionally, Pro Pinball: Timeshock is looking for support on Steam Greenlight.





By Jeffrey Matulef Published Monday, 5 August 2013

Last year Pro Pinball creator Adrian Barritt attempted to reboot his critically-acclaimed PC series with a host of crowdsourced Pro Pinball remakes. Unfortunately for Barritt, theKickstarter campaign was unsuccessful. Now, almost a year later, the virtual pinball wizard is at it again with a more modest Kickstarter campaign to only remake one of his games, 1997's Pro Pinball: Timeshock.

This time around he's been vastly more successful. Within only a few days Pro Pinball: Timeshock: Ultimate Edition has achieved more than half of its £40k goal with 39 days still to go.

So why was Barritt so successful this time after his previously less than stellar campaign? "In my opinion, last time around we tried to do too much all at once; Completely remaster the 4 original tables, whilst creating a totally brand new one," Barritt told me in an e-mail correspondence. "This meant we had to ask for quite a lot of money, an amount that many thought was unreachable. Understandably some people don't want to risk backing a project that they don't think will succeed, this can then turn into a self fulfilling prophecy."

"This time we boiled down the Kickstarter to absolutely minimum, one table on the simplest platforms to write for. This enabled us to ask for a lot less and hit to 50 per cent point in just a few days."

He also noted that the downloadable lighting demo helped the Pro Pinball series get a lot of likes on it Facebook page, which he hopes are being converted into pledges.

Aside from Pro Pinball in the 90s, Barritt has remained a developer in the virtual pinball industry, having worked on such titles as Mario Pinball Land, Metroid Prime Pinball, and Pinball Pulse: The Ancients Beckon at his previous company Silverball Studios.

£5 pledges will receive the Timeshock remake for iOS or Android upon its estimated December release, while those who donate £10 will reserve it on a platform of their choice.

So far Timeshock is in development for PC, Mac, iOS and Android, but Barritt said he'd like to add stretch goals for OUYA, Linux, XBLA, PS3, Vita, 3DS and Wii U releases.

Ultimately, Barritt would still like to make remakes of other Pro Pinball titles such as: The Web, Big Race USA and Fantastic Journey.

The current tally comes to £22,493. Additionally, Pro Pinball: Timeshock is looking for support on Steam Greenlight.


[Editor's Note: While writing this story I nearly let slip a typo where I called it "Timesock," which sounds like the raddest 80s movie that never was. Just imagine: Corey Feldman gets a pair of ugly holiday socks for Christmas that his mom picked up from a gypsy on a street corner. Then, begrudgingly, to make his parents happy, he wears them to Christmas dinner only to discover that they WARP HIM THROUGH TIME!! Of course, his bully will naturally encounter a pair of Timesocks too and they'll compete in King Arthur's court to win the hand of a maiden played by Molly Ringwald. Timesock: coming to theaters this Christmas!]


Via eurogamer.net

It's a tricky question, one that's likely been debated for decades, with no satisfactory answer: Is it better to be the person playing pinball or the people leaning against the machine, along the sides, instructing and cajoling and rooting the pinballer on?

Most people would probably opt to play, though "backseat driving" is an age-old attribute of pinball, a venerable game that saw its pop culture-y glory days in the 1970s.

It's due for a major resurgence. Perhaps Pinball Forever in Santa Ana can lead the way. The machine-laden hangout -- there are over 50 games, so, yeah, we'll call that "laden" -- is hosting Obscura Society LA during a pinball-informative field trip on Saturday, Aug. 17.

You can hop on this trip for twenty bucks. Yep, that's a bit more than the roll of quarters you used to show at the local arcade with, but you'll get lots and lots of pinball play, not to mention a bit of schooling on the history of pinball.

Collector Dave Miner -- let's just call him a Professor of Pinball -- will lead a talk on how pinball began, the game's ups and downs (it was illegal in several places back in the day), and some funtastic factoids. Mr. Miner will also be Q&A-ing, too, so be sure to arrive with questions. Like this one: Why does the flipper always seem to stick on the most important play? And is there anything more satisfying on this planet than that first pull of the knob that sends the silver ball into the game?

Pinball Forever has newer machines, yep, but you'll see pieces dating back to the 1930s. See and play. That's a seriously out-of-sight Saturday, right? Hours of pinball play with a little history mixed in.

If you can't make the Obscura Society LA field trip, which is expected to sell out, Pinball Forever does keep hours during the later part of the week. This is beyond date-night cool; this is just flat-out cool. But if you want some deep history about kickout holes and poppers and pinball wizards, you'll want to join the Aug. 17 outing.

Yep, we've decided: It's way more fun to play pinball than to comment from the sides, elbows leaning heavily on the glasstop. Which always got you in trouble with the arcade owner, anyway.

But who hasn't leaned on a pinball glasstop and told his pal to aim for the 1000-point hole? 


Via nbclosangeles