Stern's home edition of Pokémon started appearing in Costco warehouses today at $4,999, with nothing officially announced by Stern Pinball or Costco. The first photos went up on social media this morning. As of publication there's no listing on stern.com and none on costco.com.
A Pokémon home edition has been rumored most of the year. What nobody had until this morning was a price, a date, or a look at the playfield.
It lands two thousand dollars under a Pokémon Pro, which is $6,999. A Premium is $9,699, and the 750-unit LE went out at $12,999 and sold out quickly.
The buyer isn't the enthusiast. Stern already reaches that person through its distributor network, and nobody who reads Pinside is getting converted by a warehouse display. The person walking past this one and considering it is likely net new to pinball.
So far there's one hands-on account. CoolToy played the machine at his local Costco this morning, and by his telling the game inside is a close approximation of the cornerstone version that released earlier this year. "Essentially it's the same game inside the machine," he says. The display is a 10-inch LCD instead of the 18.5-inch on the full-size games, running the same assets.
The home model build has improved over the last few release cycles. CoolToy notes that the playfield is now commercial grade wood rather than the MDF of old, and that two speakers are standard where prior models shipped with one. Stern's retail box, visible in one of this morning's photos, advertises a "commercial grade wood playfield" in those words.
The savings come from elsewhere. There's no Town Scoop on the right. Wireforms are gone in favor of all-plastic ramps, banks of individual targets have become paddle targets, and the molded Poké Ball on the left is a flat plastic piece. Pikachu is a static sculpt, same as the Pro, but the up post beside him is gone. The Squirtle shot on the left has been reworked into a target that trickles the ball into a ramp underneath, where an up post holds it for the catch.
Meowth still moves. On the full-size games he's motorized; here he sits on a spring mechanism that raises and lowers him to block the middle shot. A simpler mech, but more than the previous home editions attempted.
Pokémon is now the third entry in the latest Stern and Costco partnership, and each has been a better machine than the one before it. Star Wars and Jurassic Park were reworked heavily enough to read as different machines, and cheaper ones. This one looks like (and appears to play like) a trimmed Pro.
What's great about these releases is that the games are typically playable on the floor, which puts pinball in front of a new mass-market audience. Presumably some of them go on to buy full-featured machines. CoolToy watched it happen while he played. "As I was playing this game there was a line of children huddled around watching me play," he said.
For now, all we have to go on are social media photos and CoolToy's video. Hopefully we'll get more official details soon.
Colin is the chief pixel pusher at Kineticist. He's a lifetime gamer who became enamored with pinball after taking in a family copy of the 1979 classic Joker Poker (the EM version). Since then he's bought, sold and repaired many machines, competed in all kinds of tournaments, and contributes to This Week in Pinball, the New England Pinball League, and Pin-Masters of New England. Previously, Colin spent over a decade working in marketing for agencies and tech startups. He also started and ran a music blog, happy hour website, and wrote a regular craft beer review column for Central Track in Dallas. Once aspired to be an artsy film director.
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