After a couple of false starts, Stern Pinball officially announced their next release today, the ‘studio’ game Elvira’s House of Horrors.
Stern have opted to make this a ‘studio’ title rather than one of their own in-house ‘cornerstone’ games for a couple of reasons. First, the design of the game was by Dennis Nordman who was contracted to Stern for this project and then joined Deeproot Pinball to design games for them.
Stern Pinball’s press release describes the title as a joint production between Stern and Dennis’s & Greg Freres’s Whizbang Pinball, who worked with Stern to produce the Whoa Nellie! Big Juicy Melons game which was subsequently re-themed as The Pabst Can Crusher and Primus.
Secondly, Stern see this as a premium title appealing to the collector market in particular, and so have adopted the Batman 66 model of variants where the playfield is the same in all three versions but they step-up the range by dropping the Pro at the bottom end and adding a Signature Edition at the top.
The game was revealed as being in development back at the Texas Pinball Festival in March 2017, where Elvira (Cassandra Peterson) appeared alongside Dennis and Greg at the Spooky Pinball seminar.
Dennis, Cassandra, Greg and Charlie from Spooky Pinball
Since then, there have been regular questions asked about why it was taking so long to bring the game to market. Releasing it around Halloween seemed like a sensible time, so maybe it took until 2019 for that late-September production slot to become available?
So, what of the game itself? Let’s begin with the Premium model which is the bottom of the range. Remember, all three models feature the same playfield design and features, as well as the same translite/backglass artwork.
The left side of the Premium model
The front view of the Premium Model
The right side of the Premium model
So, the Premium model features the familiar black ‘wrinkle’ lock bar, side rails and legs with the game title used for the cabinet artwork. Elvira appears on the backbox sides in a design which is common across all three models, although the colour scheme changes for the
