The Top Ten Most Wanted Electro-Mechanical Tables, as voted by the pinball community, will be revealed on Friday September 6, 2013.
Presumably because after the poll Farsight will start looking for those tables and seeing if they can get some in good condition. It doesn't matter if a table wins by a flat out landslide, if they can't physically get that table then they can't take apart the pinball machine to put it into the game.
This will also happen with licenses, just because we want it and have made it known to them that we want it doesn't mean we're going to get it.
I wonder if TPA would do Spirit of 76 because Microsoft did a recreation of the table in their Microsoft Pinball Arcade. They also reproduced Haunted House in that series.
I seriously doubt that Microsoft ever renewed their license to distribute Gottlieb tables on a pinball game that is now 15 years old and not making them any money, so this should be a non-issue.
Well, I was thinking, which I shouldn't do
All right. Enough of this EM stuff. Where's the Williams poll?
Humpty Dumpty would be neat to look at, but for the sake of a video game I think most people would rather have the EM's that are the most fun to play.
I stayed away from "Stardust". It might as well have been titled "Jive Time 2".
Sorry, I choose based on play mechanics, rule sets, and fun factor. Not on artwork. Jive Time is just not fun.
Understandable. I love pinball artwork because it's a kind of gauge of the zeitgeist of each era. The trends, fads, popular fictional characters, and anxieties of each age are reflected in what they chose to make into pinball table themes. I find the current trend for huge licensed multi-medium franchises kind of disturbing. It's indicative, however, of a larger corporate entertainment power structure in stark contrast to the days when the imagination of the pinball table designer was actually used to come up with ideas rather than implement ideas handed down from on high. It's all fascinating.
Although the use of licenses has indeed taken away from the creativeness of unique art, it is still indicative of the era in which the industry finds itself in. We may look back upon this decade of games and say "whoa, remember when pinball was on life support and the only way they thought would keep our interest was licensing? Good times, good times."
If Jersey Jack's next pinball machine after The Hobbit is an unliscenced theme then we could maybe see how well a table does without a license, up until then it's just too risky to make a game with no secondary market because if it bombs it damages the company big time.
We'll see it even sooner actually, if Stern does indeed put out Whoa Nellie: Big Juicy Melons. Double whammy too with that, as it's essentially an EM in terms of play.