Pinball Magazine & Pinball News PINcast September 2024 recap
Can you believe it’s already the start of another new month? The good news is that a new month means a new Pinball Industry News PINcast with Jonathan Joosten from Pinball Magazine and Martin Ayub...
Highlights
- Avatar was in development for approximately 2.5 years starting January 2022
- Jersey Jack pre-built games for 2 weeks before reveal to ensure machines would be on location shortly after launch
- Avatar uses UV reactive security inks (same type used on currency and passports) that are highly regulated and expensive
- Collector's Edition uses three-color UV ink (red, green, blue) while Limited Edition uses blue only
- Avatar features six flippers and six balls installed
- Code is approximately 90% complete with Pandora wizard mode targeting Expo release
- Lightstorm Entertainment was heavily involved in asset provision, audio approval, and actor licensing throughout development
- Mark Seiden spent ~10 hours/week over 5 years on homebrew Metroid before joining Jersey Jack
Notable quotes
“Avatar is just a beautiful movie, excellent CGI work, probably the best of any film out there. And I knew then I just needed, the game just needed to be gorgeous.”
“They were working closely with us... they were involved during the entire process and extremely great partners. the game would not be as good as it is now if they didn't help us every step of the way.”
“I wanted to be more traditional hand-drawn art versus borrowing images from a style guide... I really wanted like a really nice comic book cover style art for it.”
“I settled on red, green, and blue sort of as an homage to the fact that Jersey Jack had started the red, green, and blue lighting system in it.”
“We knew that bioluminescence is a big part of the world of Pandora. Yeah. So we knew we had to represent that somehow.”
“As long as it was fun and it worked, they weren't going to cut it. So basically anything that they had any concerns about, we worked to make it fun.”
Entities
- Jersey Jack Pinball· company
- Lightstorm Entertainment· company
- Stern Pinball· company
- Pinball Expo· event
- Avatar: The Battle for Pandora· game
- Elton John· game
- Metroid (homebrew)· game
- Uncanny X-Men· game
- Eric· person
- Grant Stemmage· person
- Jean-Paul DeWin· person
- Jonathan Houston· person
- Keith Johnson· person
- Leah Foskey· person
- Mark Seiden· person
- Martin A.· person
- Olaf Gremi· person
- Stephen Lang· person
- Steve Ritchie· person
- Todd Holm· person
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