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Ep 14: The Larry Bird of Pinball, Bowen Kerins

PodcastAnalysis updated 2d ago1 hr 2 min listen
From the creator

Sitting down with a pinball legend, Bowen talks about Pinburgh, Jurassic Park leaks, and Star Wars home edition among other things!

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Highlights

  • Sales in the current era are 'much lower' than the 1990s despite industry growth; Popeye sold ~4,000 units, modern successful games sell 2,000-3,000 units.
  • Spooky's full production run of Alice Cooper is 500 units, which is 'wonderful' for keeping staff employed but still 'nowhere near' 1990s or 1970s production (10,000+ unit runs).
  • Game development at Spooky relies primarily on internal playtesting and team instinct rather than extensive location testing, because leaks to PinSight would occur within hours.
  • Stern is responsible for keeping the pinball industry alive after Williams' collapse in 1999, though sometimes maligned for cost-cutting and repetitive designs.
  • Just two significant hardware innovations in pinball history: dot matrix display (1990) and LCD display (1999/2013); virtually all possible gameplay mechanics have already been implemented.
  • Pinball's second renaissance is comparable to the 1990s growth, but current production volumes remain drastically lower.
  • Bowen has received legitimate questions about unreleased Scott Danesi game specs (bumpers, ramps) but cannot answer without breaking NDA.
  • Alice Cooper was an exceptionally easy licensor, granting creative freedom, and has subsequently built his tour around the pinball machine design.

Notable quotes

“I've definitely been called the Larry Bird to keep up with Michael Jordan, which means I'm almost as good.”
Bowen Kerins
“Stern gets maligned for releasing a game that looks the same as another game or doing things that are cost-cutting. but they're the ones responsible for the fact that there even is an industry right now.”
Bowen Kerins
“It's pretty much all internal thoughts and my own playtesting and a few other people. And then we kind of go like, we agree this is fun. Let's roll it out.”
Bowen Kerins
“I think that the size of Spooky can work to its advantage in that sense where a larger team at Stern, they have to crank out games so much faster than anyone else does that it makes it difficult to make the game as cohesive.”
Bowen Kerins
“Just about everything I could think of has been done in some game. And so it's a matter of then hooking all those things together.”
Bowen Kerins
“I spent eight hours playing X-Men trying desperately to get to Danger Room and I finally got there and it was over within 20 seconds I was like screw it I don't care that's the game that's the one we're going with I'm not spending another eight hours trying to get back there”
Bowen Kerins
“I miss the days when I would open it up and when I wasn't as involved as I am now, when I would look at it and say, I wasn't even following the rumor mill, and I'd say, oh, well, they released that. Let's check it out.”
Bowen Kerins

Entities

  • American Pinball· company
  • Jersey Jack Pinball· company
  • Spooky Pinball· company
  • Stern Pinball· company
  • Williams· company
  • IFPA Championship· event
  • Four Seasons· game
  • Iron Maiden· game
  • Jurassic Park· game
  • The Shadow· game
  • Alice Cooper· game|person
  • Papa (Pinball at Papa) / Replay Foundation· organization
  • Pittsburgh public schools· organization
  • Pop It (venue)· organization
  • Bowen Kerins· person
  • Josh Roop & Scott Larson· person
  • Keith Elwin· person
  • Scott Dinesi· person
  • Patreon (Bowen's tutorial series)· product
  • Pinside· product

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