One of the worst-kept secrets in the pinball world has finally been confirmed: Stern Pinball has officially announced a Pokémon pinball machine. The game company revealed its existence through an incredibly short, incredibly detail-free teaser trailer that doesn’t offer a single glimpse at the game itself. Heck, it doesn’t even have a cool graphic of a pinball turning into a Poké ball. It does include a line delivered in a very Pokémon announcer-style voice, before ending with the Pokémon logo and theme music, so there’s absolutely no mistaking it: Stern’s doing a Pokémon pinball machine, and it’s coming soon, as the teaser declares.
This would be the first official Pokémon pinball machine, although a fan-made homebrew machine was on display at Pinball Expo last year, and has probably made the rounds at other pinball conventions. It’s not the first pin based on a Nintendo property, but it’s been decades since the previous two, which were a couple of Super Mario machines released by Gottlieb all the way back in 1992. Pokémon wasn’t even a thing yet.
Pokémon seems like a no-brainer choice for a pinball machine. You’ve got the whole ball synergy, obviously, but there are over 1000 individual Pokémons (and counting) out there in the world today, and collecting them all could easily be adapted into missions. And there are over 30 years of Pokémon cartoons and movies to use for video footage, a now-standard part of any new pin. Also Pokémon has been around long enough that its appeal now spans at least three generations; if you got hooked when it first came to America, you’re probably in your 40s today. It’s one of the biggest media properties out there, and will likely continue to grow in popularity.
Still, there’s more risk to this choice than you might expect. If you’ve ever wondered why pinball themes tend to stick to stuff middle-aged men like—old movies, classic rock bands, comic book characters that are at least 40 years old—it’s because they’re still the bulk of the pinball audience, and make up most of the home collector market. And the typical 55-year-old who can afford to drop $10,000 on a new pinball machine probably couldn’t tell a Pikachu from a Bulbasaur.
This is a play for a different audience, something that the handful of pinball manufacturers active today are hesitant to do. A Pokémon machine isn’t targeting the grizzled old collector market so much as arcade owners and operators, the people who’ll put a machine on location and charge $2 a game. A Pokémon machine will almost definitely draw more attention in an arcade or restaurant than something like (the very excellent) Iron Maiden machine Stern released in 2018, and, crucially, could also attract younger people who’ve never shown any interest in pinball before. If it’s well-designed and makes it out to enough public locations, the Pokémon pinball machine could help hook the next generation of players—and you better believe Stern is counting on that.
Here’s that teaser. Stern promises more information soon at its website and Instagram account. There’s no release date yet, but Stern typically releases a new game every quarter. Machines are usually announced very shortly before release, and based on the company’s schedule you can probably expect these machines out in the wild by April.