Anything involving >1 entity rapidly becomes a licensing nightmare. Companies that generate as much sales as TH have way more resources they can spend do deal with all of that.
I think the frustration behind many of the complaints is that, ostensibly, people should consume culture regardless of whether it’s made by someone who looks like them, but for some reason white men are considered the only “thing we can all agree on” and everything else is niche content.
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Yes, licensing would be harder, but how about a Motown machine? A CMA Hall Of Fame game? See if The Roots would do something? Pair up Lady Gaga and Weird Al for something really odd (I won’t guarantee I’d buy it, but I’d definitely check it out). It’d just be nice if we have to go the music route at all to have something I hadn’t bought close to 50 years ago (like Alice Cooper, Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles; hmm, where’d I put that Billion Dollar Bill that came with the Billion Dollar Babies LP…?).
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It may be the way of the world today. But isn’t it funny that theme-splash (slash) hype and pre-sales are what makes pinball. Pardon me.
I give any pinball designer and manifacturer the liberty to do exactly what they feel works best to generate sales and coin drop. I’d rather have rock band games than no games.
The best designed pinball machine has to be a game that players absolutely wants more of after the first couple of plays. Ultimately that they want to buy one for themselves. Regardless if immediate interest in theme was hot or not.
One would think that pre-purchase sight unseen is bound to dissapoint on arrival. Though satisfaction might boost from outside of the game design perspectives like LEs that goes up in the market, I-am-the-first-to-broadcast-gameplay, I-am-the-first-to-own, I-am-the-first-to-put-it-in-public-play, check-my-mods,…
Don’t forget Disco Maiden 
This isn’t a what bands discussion really. It’s about, what Dave said, what is the market? And the market overwhelmingly is white older males. In any industry driven by disposable income taking big bets isn’t really advisable giving the fact we have a cyclical boom/bust global economy where the fixed costs of being a manufacturer mean you have to sell well when times are good to get you through when times are bad.
Linked to what bands are all the social/political issues of diversity and inclusion which in my view is probably another thousand years of human evolution before we start getting that right (and we should continue to drive this of course).
on Keith’s question I’d have put a grand down on Beatles, it was just the other 9 that I had a problem with.
There are plenty of bands/Musicans that one or two people would put a grand down, me; NWA, Simple Minds, James Taylor Quartet, Daft Punk, U2, Abba, Blues Brothers, David Hasslehoff (just kidding!) Beastie Boys the list goes on and on.
If you want to solve the what bands get made, then you need to solve the diversity of the marketplace; and that’s a non-trivial issue. However, compared to some of my other white old git interests,(Motor Racing and Drones) I think pinball has done a decent job of getting more women into it (more to do for sure) and has definitely changed the market, we won’t have a Playboy or Soprano’s machine in our club because it offends some of our members and I seriously doubt that Stern will do another big juicy melons, Yes we have kids coming in but the diversity of kids isn’t wide enough and for the majority these are introduced to pinball by the existing marketplace demographic.
Neil.
You got Hoops 
I must be in the minority, as to me theme is pretty much irrelevant when it comes to owning a machine.
I would never consider buying a machine completely sight-unseen (although I did buy AIQ Pro having only previously played the Prem - but having bought IMdn and JP2 I had faith in KME and his team).
I don’t think I could have named more than 1 or 2 IMdn, Kiss or AcDc songs before playing them, but enjoyed playing them all, in various degrees.
I would buy a My Little Pony themed machine if it played well and the rules made sense.
I would say that the reason the ‘old white rock bands’ suit pinball so well is the tempo of the songs more so than the demographic of those people buying them. A prime example being why Led Zep’s most iconic song isn’t in the latest game.
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I’ve been wanting to, but struggling to, respond to this thread for a few days now because there are so many layers to it.
I am staunchly in the “give me a non-white rock pin” camp. I want a Wu-Tang machine so badly. Or Prince. Or Blondie. And I get it. It is perceived that they won’t sell right out of the gate. There’s a long-standing difficulty of incorporating themes which will appeal to non-white and/or non-males within pinball, which needs to be acknowledged without getting defensive. No one is saying Led Zeppelin sucks. I’m not mad at the Led Zeppelin machine for being yet another dadrock machine or whatever because I get it, this is what was researched and tested for selling purposes. It’s the expensive and also safe bet, which is what you worry about when launching any product.
I’m annoyed that the design, both art-wise and game-wise, look thrown together. And whether this is because of constraints of the licensing or rushing to get the game out or what have you, what’s the point of putting this game out if there are going to be constraints that affect it’s market performance or tournament/pinball enjoyment/relevance? And after all of that pre-planning and research and demographics sowing?
(yes, money. I get it. Rhetorical question.)
I know licensing for various properties is hellof expensive. And I know that likely LZ had their terms regarding what can and can’t be in or on the game. But (HOT TAKE ALERT) we’re getting a mishmash of Star Trek, AC/DC, Ironman, and Walking Dead, from the looks of it. Which, cool if you like, wanted all of those games squished into one. Yeah, sorry, I’m slightly derailing here. I haven’t played the game yet, but it doesn’t look like a game I’d want to sink money into either for our collection, or on location. I know games are inspired by elements of other games but…meh. EDIT: so while I may want a Wu-Tang, Blondie, or Prince machine, I don’t want a poorly done one.
I couldn’t name an Iron Maiden song before that game came out, but I freakin’ love that machine. There’s something about the design that, you could slap any theme on it and I wouldn’t care. I’d just post up at it all day and night if I could.
Conversely, our collection is mostly older games with unlicensed themes because there is some element of the game design which strikes us as unique, fun, and collection-worthy. We’ve purchased one NIB game, ever, out of a 30+ game collection, which makes me curious about what research is done on people who are NOT buying NIB games…an untapped demographic for the manufacturers. And how much of our money they could be getting if more research or appeal was focused there.
Anyhow, lots of thoughts muddled together, but all of this to say, games like TNA and Dialed-In stood on their own merit as much as I love jamming out to Beatles or Metallica, it’s the design/source material (Seawitch) or rules and software (Metallica) that are more enticing to me, obviously personal opinion, when considering which games to add to our collection.
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I would love to see a good game available with multiple rock/pop band themes. Work out five different skins and let people choose when they order.
This might not be something Stern could do because of the way they bulk manufacture components, but maybe that makes it even better if it lets a boutique company find a niche.
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Village People
Weird Al Yankovic (Made some video’s as other races)
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Donna Summer. I’m quite sure I’m the only one.
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I’m not much for actually owning pins but if I saw a Donna Summer pin on location I’d be all over that!
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Black Panther at some point would work well as a back door hip-hop pin. Daft Punk helping produce a pinball machine would be most excellent as well imo.
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I would probably buy a Mighty Mighty Bosstones or Less than Jake pinball sight unseen take my $1000 deposit please. Old white guys but the old white guys that were younger white guys when I was a younger white guy. And I think there’s the rub; we will see nostalgia pins for what teens listened to in the 70s/80s/90s until such time as the people buying games are as undiverse as they are now. Just based on the last few years I think pinball is reaching more people; I have seen lots more interest and collecting/playing from women and that I think is due to the efforts of orgs and individuals to specifically invite them via leagues and events. I’m not sure how we would get pinball more diverse wrt backgrounds; it might be socioeconomic as well which I have no idea how to solve.
If Stern were playing worldwide interest they’d create a BTS pinball. Which would make me really sad because they don’t have a horn section.
LTJ! Miss them. They actually just released a new LP. Crazy they are only like early 40s.
In a heartbeat
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Something I’ve observed is the rather narrow range of bands as far as their time period goes. Most seem to be from the 70s and 80s (which, as mentioned, are in turn predominantly the “angry rock” type) with very few from after that.
I get that licensing for newer artists are prohibitively expensive and are a big risk because no one’s tried it before, but perhaps it’s because I’m thinking in terms of on-location play, as in places like shopping malls, pizza restaurants, laundromats, nightclubs, etc., where there is a lot of foot traffic of people from younger demographics. (Admittedly, I would be part of said demographic–I had to groan a bit inside when I saw friggin’ Led Zeppelin be the most recent Stern release. There has been no pinball release of a band that isn’t from before my time.) But even just once, I’d like to see someone TRY for something like Imagine Dragons, BTS, Lizzo, Twenty-One Pilots, Taylor Swift, Khalid, Alicia Keys, Bump of Chicken, or any other musician or musical group that has actually charted recently. If it doesn’t work out, it doens’t work out, but the lack of any 2010s/2020s-era musical themes suggests to me a sort of risk aversion.
(That being said, I don’t think the fanbase for Twenty-One Pilots in particular would take well to there being a pinball machine of the band. They have a reputation for falling thoroughly into the mindset of “It’s Popular, Now It Sucks!,” and a pinball machine is enough to push them over the edge.)
One thing that could be done regarding that is to go for less well-known acts and build a soundtrack based on that. This is what many indie video games have been doing recently, such as Castle Crashers and Lethal League Blaze, both of which were done on the budget of a few people working with each other remotely from their bedrooms and garages.
That being said, this can’t be done to draw in people to play, but rather, it would be done in lieu of having an in-house composer. It CAN, however, create a vehicle for some people to take off from.
Just wanted to point out that while the boat has passed, Bronies were willing to sink HUGE amounts of money into merchandise that spoke to them, regardless of what it was. This was a fandom that kept its ears very close to the ground for any new projects themed on My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and regularly had people sinking thousands of dollars into fanmade things much smaller and less interactive than pinball machines (such as figures and plush toys).
The final episode had aired October 2019 though, and with that, as they themselves say, “the spark has been lost.” But throughout the 2010s, I felt like this was a very good theme to pick to get into an otherwise untapped market. I don’t think we’ll see something like this again, though it did get pretty close with Steven Universe, with fan-run conventions where fanmade merchandise would run considerable price tags, albeit with smaller numbers of people (but this, too, is waning as the TV show has ended).
A tabletop game had just been released based on Friendship Is Magic though, so it’s not completely dead yet. There may also be a kind of cultural nostalgia lingering for decades to come. That being said, Friendship Is Magic is kind of a demographic/psychographic dead end, since there was a lot of monomania within that fandom. That is, fans of the show tended not to be fans of anything else, so it’s difficult to impossible to actually keep their attention for long if you weren’t directly involved with the show or the fandom.
(NOTE: I may have some bias regarding this issue, which might be evident based on my username. I had also considered making a Friendship Is Magic pinball machine as a fan-project myself, though it never got off the ground.)
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I feel like Michael Jackson, Prince, Beyonce, BTS and Wu Tang Clan could all definitely carry a title and deserve one at least as much as many of the other bands who have one. There are at least two people on the above list of mixed racial backgrounds though. Slash of Guns And Roses’ mother is black and a famous costume designer in her own right. Kirk Hammett of Metallica’s mother is filipino. That’s obviously not enough representation, but we should at least be aware of the representation we do have.
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