In 2023, Stern Pinball moved to a new location in Illinois, worked on tables based on Godzilla, Foo Fighters, and Venom, and launched its Insider Connected app to bring players together. To learn more about the company and its plans, Siliconera spoke with CEO Seth Davis about the company and its latest moves.
Jenni Lada: When did you first start here with Stern?
Seth Davis: I’ve been here for a little over two years. So, couple years ago I I joined and it’s been a lot of fun.
What made you decide you wanted to join?
Davis: Stern makes the best pinball machines in the world. I’ve always been a big gamer. I came from Disney most recently, where I had worked on video games and all that. I’d grown up in an 80s arcade, like a lot of people my age, and, went between video games and pinball machines and all of that. So, having the opportunity to join a company that makes the best products in the world at what they do is just a really unique opportunity. So I moved out to Chicago and joined up.
About how many tables have you made this year, and which one do you think has been the most successful so far?
Davis: So, we’ve released a couple of new tables this year and we have our cornerstones. So those are our big new releases. We released our Venom table most recently this year. And then earlier this year, we did Foo Fighters as well.
So both have been really well received. Appealed to a bit of different audiences. I would say at this point, in terms of what went better selling, Foo Fighters has had longer to sell, so it’s the better seller of the two right at the moment. But you know, both of them, we expect to have long lives ahead of them.
And then we’ve done some special editions of other titles as well. We’ve released a new version of Jurassic Park, a new version of Elvira. We’ve had a lot of fun with those.
So with the Godzilla pinball table that we saw out there today, what did the process of getting the arrangements to create it look like? About how long did it take to put together and what kind of inspirations were used to determine which Kaiju would appear on it and determine how it would look like when it would come to market?
Davis: We spend a lot of time listening to the community and talking amongst ourselves about what would make great pinball machines. In order to have licensed pinball machines, there’s also a relationship with the company that owns the license and owns those properties. So it’s a little bit of a dance around all of that. We come up with what we would like, we work with licensers to see who’s interested. Who wants a pinball machine. Who’s really excited, Sometimes licensers will approach us as well.
In this case, a lot of our, our folks were really excited about the opportunity to work with Godzilla, a really well-known character works great for pinball. It was something we were really excited about, and the folks at Toho, who owns the license to that, were excited as well to put that together.
Typically we’ll secure our licenses two to three years before we make a product, it takes about a year and a half, a little bit longer to make a game. So you wanna have your relationship in place before you start spending the time making the game. So it takes about a year and a half to develop most of our games and get them to the point where we can finally produce them at the end of that. So that’s usually two or three years from sort of initial concept to ok, now it’s come to life.
Now with this Godzilla pinball table, since this is a cabinet that I imagine be very popular overseas as well as in the United States and Europe, does that affect the distribution and licensing and the creative process? And how does that change compared to a more domestic table like say the Stranger Things table?
Davis: All of our products at Stern are global. We actually send a lot of our volume internationally. We have a big market in Europe, Australia, and in other markets as well. You know, Latin America and places like that. A meaningful portion of our volume goes internationally, so we are actually looking always for licenses that can carry internationally.
Luckily, even with Stranger Things, Netflix is sort of everywhere. That IP is carried even internationally. Some always do better internationally than others, but we’re always looking for titles that do well, internationally, because otherwise it doesn’t make as much sense for us to do a title that only works in one market or another. We’re really looking for the, the best global opportunities for those titles.
Would you say that your background with Disney and other companies has made it a little bit easier to understand how to approach certain tables or work out certain IPs like, say, with the Guardians of the Galaxy table?
Davis: So Stern is, as I said before, a very unique company, and one of the reasons why I came here was because they needed someone who was comfortable with large entertainment licenses, gaming, as well as manufacturing.
And you know, you can find manufacturing people, you can find entertainment and gaming people. It’s hard to find people that have experience in manufacturing, entertainment, and gaming. And those are all things that I like to do. So that was a big opportunity to be here.
It’s definitely been really helpful that I have experience with the entertainment companies and what they’re looking for, in order to be able to secure the deals to get these IP and to be able to do what we need to do here, it’s definitely part of part of doing the job and getting the job done.
When you’re doing a virtual adaptation of your pinball tables, say with other companies when they’re developing their pinball titles, what does the process look like for you and how involved is Stern with that?
Davis: So we’ve historically done, mostly before I was here, some amount of having our, our tables adapted for digital. We found the experience in most of those to not be to the standards that the company aspires to and hopes for. So we paused a little bit on that. It doesn’t mean we won’t ever get back to it or wouldn’t be interested in doing it, but we wanna make sure when we do it, it’s what people are looking for.
But as you allude to the rights in the digital space are a little bit different than the rights in the physical space. Once you get into the licensing world, there’s a lot of dos and don’ts about what you are allowed to do and what you’re not allowed to do with all that.
This is a new building for Stern that just moved into in September 2023. What do you plan to do in terms of like outreach and allowing the community to come in and take a look around? Like I had heard mention about having tours and the game room.
Davis: We’re, we’re working on our game room and arcade space and putting that together so that people can have a fun time when they’re here and get to play a number of the games. We’re still sort of building that out.
We’re also doing some work on the outside of the building. The outside will look a little bit more fun as well.
It’s our intention to start having real tours and really put that together. We’ve historically always done some amount of tours for people, when they call and ask. A lot of that obviously subsided during the pandemic era, but we’re eager to bring that all back and welcome people in. Pinball Expo, where we welcomed 600 people in, was the first example of doing that.
I think probably going into next year, we’ll probably have something put together where people can come visit us and see how pinball’s made, because no matter how many times you give the tour or go on the tour, it’s just a lot of fun.
What kind of things would you like to expand on and do in the future with Stern and its pinball tables?
Davis: So the big things with Stern that we’re focused on right now is Insider Connected. So Insider Connected is our digital offering. It’s kind of our opportunity to offer some continuity between gameplay and help wrap some community around all of that.
People naturally wrap community around pinball. They go to tournaments. They play together in groups. They talk about it and all that. We now have the opportunity to offer them ways to expand and extend that experience with Insider Connected. See how their friends are doing. Compete on leader boards. Track their scores. Find where new pinball machines are located near them so they can go check them out and play them. We expect to continue to extend that.
Stern Pinball’s latest and upcoming tables include Godzilla, Foo Fighters and Venom.
