Time is a flat circle.
Melvin Williams — formerly of Dutch Pinball Exclusive and the designer behind Alice's Adventures in Wonderland — has been named Creative Director of American Pinball. The announcement came today from AP's new owner, J. Bryan Vincent, who said Melvin would be "leading the design team and creative vision of American Pinball going forward."
This comes just over a week after DPX ceased operations and Melvin split from Dutch Pinball following a dispute over the company's direction with new investors. At the time, he made it clear he was looking for a U.S.-based manufacturer to continue his projects. That didn't take long.
What This Means
Melvin owns the IP for the old John Popadiuk designs he purchased from the wreckage of deeproot Pinball — including RAZA (Retro Atomic Zombie Adventureland), Magic Girl, and Space Mission X (a lesser-known Zidware title that only reached prototype stage). RAZA was reportedly near completion when DPX folded, and it comes with him. There's been no official confirmation that the Popadiuk titles are part of AP's plan — but Melvin owns them, he's now their creative director, and the game was nearly done. It's not a huge leap. Whether RAZA ships under the American Pinball brand or as something separate remains to be seen, but AP's facility in Palatine, Illinois gives the project a manufacturing home, assuming the new ownership can rebuild the operational capacity that's atrophied over the past year. As Pinball News pointed out, building RAZA stateside also sidesteps the import tariff issues a Dutch-manufactured run would have faced.
Then there's the Planetary Pinball Supply deal. American Pinball announced in late January that they'd licensed seven classic Williams and Bally titles through a long-term partnership with PPS. The key word in that press release was "reimagined" — and that was intentional. I checked in with AP President Ron Lindeman at the time and he clarified that the plan is to offer both traditional remakes and reimagined versions with additional mechs, updated code, and enhanced sound and video. Melvin has relevant experience here — he served as project manager on Pedretti Gaming's Funhouse 2.0 conversion kit. Expect him to be overseeing at least some of these.
The Full Circle
But here's where it gets interesting.
American Pinball was incorporated in late 2015. Their very first project was a deal with John Popadiuk — he'd design a Houdini game for AP, and in exchange they'd manufacture his long-delayed Magic Girl machines. That arrangement fell apart (Popadiuk was fired, Joe Balcer redesigned Houdini from scratch), and Popadiuk exercised a buyback clause to license his work back to himself. Those designs ended up at deeproot Pinball, which burned through $58.8 million in investor funds, got hit with SEC fraud charges, and filed Chapter 7 — all without shipping a single finished machine.
After the collapse, the deeproot IP sold at bankruptcy auction to Chris Turner of Turner Pinball. He'd keep some of the IP for his own company, but sold most of the Zidware and Popadiuk IP — Magic Girl, RAZA, and Alice — to Melvin, who produced Alice through DPX.
Now Melvin arrives carrying the same Popadiuk-originated IP that brought American Pinball into existence a decade ago. By my count, these designs have passed through six entities: Zidware, American Pinball, deeproot, Turner Pinball, DPX/Dutch Pinball, and back to American Pinball. The people are different, the company has changed hands twice, and the industry has cycled through its own booms and busts in between — but these unfinished Popadiuk games keep finding their way back to the same orbit.
American Pinball has had a turbulent few years of its own — mass layoffs, the departure of designer Ryan McQuaid and EVP David Fix, Cuphead getting mothballed, and the eventual sale from the Vasani family's Aimtron to JB Vincent LP, a Texas-based family office with no prior pinball experience. The company has been essentially dormant for over a year. As I wrote at the time, Vincent's manufacturing credentials are real — but pinball requires licensed IP relationships, community trust, and design creativity that have no parallel in his previous work. Adding Melvin gives him a creative lead with actual pinball experience. Whether it all comes together remains an open question, but RAZA now has a plausible path to production, and the Planetary Pinball classics partnership has someone to run it.
Of course, there's another way to read all this. Every entity that has touched these Popadiuk designs — Zidware, American Pinball, deeproot, DPX — has either gone bankrupt, been sold, or imploded. Call it the curse of J-Pop. American Pinball is betting they can break it.
