For more than a year, a new small-scale pinball manufacturer has been secretly beavering away in their office in the city of Cardiff in South Wales, designing and building their first game.
The office in Cardiff
With little-to-no outside knowledge of their efforts they have been spared the distractions of having to produce constant updates and respond to social media comments, and now have their first game ready to show the world.  And guess what?  They have already built ten of them and you can buy one right now.
Team Pinball is the collaboration of Janos Kiss, Otília Pasaréti and Romain Fontaine.
Romain, Janos and Otília
The three formed JOR Games Limited to design, build and distribute amusement games and accessories, with the Team Pinball brand used for their home-grown pinball products.
The first product is a modern take on an EM-style single-level game, entitled The Mafia.
The playfield from The Mafia
The two-flippered game features a central spinner, a captive ball, two orbit lanes, three pop bumpers, three top rollover lanes, four bottom rollovers, five standup targets, LED lighting throughout and a 10.1″ LCD display in the backbox.
The Mafia from Team Pinball
To find out more about both the game and the people behind it, Pinball News visited the JOR Games office in Cardiff and interviewed Janos, Otília and Romain.
We began by asking how the three of them joined together.
Janos explained, “Naturally it was pinball that brought us together. It is not just simply that we love playing pinball, but we always wanted to design and make our own games.  It is so exciting to see our sketches come to life and then join people’s collections or arcades!”
That might seem premature, but the three all have experience of pinball manufacturing and their names might be familiar to anyone following the fortunes of another south Wales pinball maker.  They all worked together at Heighway Pinball for several years until leaving to form their new venture.
Otília told us how they came up with a name for the business. “When we established the company in 2016 we considered many alternative names.  Then, one day Romain came up with this idea to

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