About
Zidware Pinball was a one-person venture founded by designer John A. "Jpop" Popadiuk Jr. in July 2011, working out of his own studio in Streamwood, Illinois. Popadiuk had designed a run of Williams titles in the 1990s, including World Cup Soccer, Theatre of Magic, Tales of the Arabian Nights, and Cirqus Voltaire, finishing with Star Wars Episode I, the last pinball machine Williams built before closing its pinball division in 1999. After a licensed-game partnership with the toy company Zizzle wound down, he set out to build high-end collector pinballs under his own name, taking non-refundable pre-order deposits to fund development on three titles: Magic Girl, Retro Atomic Zombie Adventureland, and an Alice in Wonderland machine.
None of the three ever reached a finished, sellable state. By 2015 Popadiuk's pre-order funds had run out, and a rescue deal with an outside financier collapsed after inspection showed Magic Girl still lacked working mechanisms and code. Nineteen buyers sued Popadiuk and Zidware in Illinois that year; a 2018 judgment held Popadiuk and the company liable for $139,280. In the meantime, Popadiuk struck a deal in 2016 with the newly formed American Pinball: he supplied the playfield design for their planned Houdini machine in exchange for the company contract-building a run of Magic Girl cabinets. Roughly 22 were completed and 18 shipped to buyers in 2016 and 2017, most still missing switches, mechanisms, or finished code. American Pinball later scrapped Popadiuk's Houdini design and released its own version, designed by Joe Balcer, in 2017.
Popadiuk joined the newly launched Deeproot Pinball in San Antonio in early 2017, bringing the rights to Magic Girl, Retro Atomic Zombie Adventureland, and the Alice in Wonderland concept with him. Deeproot went on to fold without shipping any of them. Following Popadiuk and Zidware's bankruptcy, a 2022 settlement split what remained: Zidware's surviving prototypes, playfields, and artwork went to the plaintiffs to sell off, while the game rights passed through Deeproot's own bankruptcy sale to Turner Pinball. Those physical Zidware parts later surfaced in the Netherlands, where Dutch Pinball Exclusive used them to build Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, released in 2024. That same year, DPX co-founder Melvin Brouwer-Williams separately acquired the Turner-held Retro Atomic Zombie Adventureland and Magic Girl rights; RAZA was in development as a planned second DPX title before the venture ended in February 2026, while Magic Girl was never put back into production.
