At the end of last year’s review when looking ahead to 2020 we predicted, “This is going to be quite a ride“, and by just about any measure 2020 has been an extraordinary twelve months.
What started out as a seemingly ordinary year soon turned into anything but. By mid-January the first tell-tale signs surfaced of what was soon to radically change many aspects of our lives and dominate media reports throughout 2020 and far into 2021.
Unsurprisingly, the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 impacted on the pinball world in many ways too. With Stern Pinball, Jersey Jack Pinball, Chicago Gaming and American Pinball all located in the greater Chicagoland area, the state-wide stay-at-home order on 21st March brought the vast majority of pinball manufacturing to a sudden halt.
Despite that interruption and the lack of collector or trade shows, the industry restarted, new pinball titles have been successfully launched and sales of games into the home have boomed.
We’ll have more on that later, along with your chance to vote for the Pinball News Game of the Year, but let’s begin our look back at the events of 2020 with the new titles unveiled during the year from a seemingly ever-increasing number of manufacturers.
The Pinball News Review of the Year 2020
NEW GAMES
Stern Pinball had revealed their much-awaited new game from designer Brian Eddy just before Christmas in 2019, but despite Pro models of Stranger Things being available in small numbers from selected distributors at the time of launch, it didn’t get out into the wild in larger quantities until the start of 2020.
The Limited Edition model of Stranger Things
That was also when we got to see the game’s innovative new feature – the projector screen. Only included with the Premium and Limited Edition models, a projector mounted under the bottom apron beamed animated images and clips onto a white screen, a spinner, two ramps and some standup targets further up the playfield. The screen could also fold down to become a ramp, allowing shots into the mouth of the games main model, the Demogorgon.
The screen, ramps and standup and drop targets are all lit by
