There is a good reason why Stern doesn't publish any production numbers. If they would they would lose all credibility they somehow still seem to have (ironically often with pinball enthusiasts. I can't think of any pinball industry insider praising Stern for what they have been doing for the past 12 years.) I also doubt they would have found an investor to step in if those numbers were publicly known.
They ran out of left over McDonalds toys for Shrek.. so no more to be made
out of all the pinball company's to have survived Why did it have to be Stern? toys toys and more toys.
the least inventive pinball company, they are no bally williams as far as inventiveness of titles goes. how they survived is beyond me.
24? or CSI? come on, there is only 5 titles in that entire list that makes sense making, and yes acdc is one of them that makes sense.
i know allot of pressure rides on sterns shoulders as far as keeping pinball alive, but does it look to you that they arent even trying to be inventive???
I will say to cavey, it is great loyalty you hold towards Stern, and i can fully understand why you like them, and its for all the right reasons you support them as you understand, its the last real operational pinball company making pinballs. so i know my comments about stern seem a little personal. i dont mean them to be. my beef is purely with strens lack of innovation, i am glad that a company still operates but the more i look at sterns pinballs, or to be fair late stern pinballs, you can see how lazy they are. with out any real competing company against stern they seem to have no invovation to feed off.
what stern needs to do is look at what the best and over all most popular pinballs that have ever been made, sit down and study them, play them and figure out what it is people like about those machines, once they understand that, maybe they can start building not just good pinballs but awesome pinballs.
It's not so much running out of toys. FG didn't sell at all. Gary has admitted "that game came too soon". That's still a stubborn vision as nobody internally thought it would be a good theme. At the time nobody in Europe knew the theme. Shrek came to being to find a use for the parts for 500 games that already had been laying around. As that was announced as a limited edition, they couldn't make more.
While amongst pinball enthusiasts there seem to be Stern lovers and Stern haters, isn't it odd that there aren't that many Sega lovers? Stern simply continued what they were doing as Sega. Ops considered Sega a B-brand at the time and even with B/W as A-brand gone, Stern didn't even try to become an A-brand. Yet it seems we have to be thankful for all the poorly themed games with lack of innovation that have been put out of the past 12 years. I don't hear anyone saying we should be happy for Sega pinball games like Lost in Space, Independence Day, X-files, or Starship Troopers. You could make a second list including all the Data East and Sega games. Could be a fun listing, but it also would raise even more questionmarks with me.
