Jack Danger Accepts New Role at Stern Pinball; 8 Quick Thoughts on the Move
Yesterday, Stern Pinball officially announced that fan-favorite game designer and pinball personality, Jack Danger, will be taking on the new role of Head of Community for Stern Pinball.
Jack is currently best known for his work as lead designer on the Stern cornerstone games The Uncanny X-Men and Foo Fighters, plus the home edition of Jurassic Park pinball, his first release for the company. Before joining Stern full-time as a game designer, Jack had risen to prominence as a popular Twitch streamer and pinball personality under the moniker DeadFlip.
In his role as Head of Community, Jack will serve "as an ambassador for the company, elevating pinball’s visibility through community engagement, strategic content creation, and relationship-building," and will "continue to stream broader pinball and other content on the official DeadFlip Twitch channel."
Notably, in the press release Stern states that Jack, "will be returning to balancing his time between completing the delivery of his current game with the support of the broader Stern team and spending time on his new responsibilities."
There's a lot I think we still don't know about the full scope of Jack's responsibilities moving forward and what the day-to-day of the change will look like to Stern's customers. I asked a few clarifying questions through his DeadFlip Facebook page (one of the places where the announcement was shared).
For example, if the DeadFlip persona is making a return to regular content creation, should we consider those to be the same as official Stern communications? "Deadflip will continue to be independent. Stupid stuff said there is its own thing. 😅".
Will he be running Stern's social media accounts in a more traditional community management capacity? "I will be playing more of a role in official socials, but marketing has an awesome team behind it."
Is this an acknowledgment that full-time game design was not aligning with your interests or Stern's needs? "I fricken love game design. (More info on that soon)".
I was curious if it means we'd be seeing more of him in existing community groups and media platforms, to which he replied, "Absolutely!".
Finally, I wanted to better understand what new initiatives he was excited to bring to the table in this role that he couldn't do previously. "Right out of the gate, I want feedback and an open line of communication with the community. The rest we’re keeping close to the vest for now."
With this context in mind and knowing that there's more information coming, I wanted to share a few quick hit thoughts on the move, as it's a change we'll likely be reflecting on more in the coming months as Stern continues to evolve and adapt its business coming out of the booming Covid-19 market.
Quick Hit Thoughts on Jack Danger's Move to Stern's Head of Community
Pinball's favorite streamer makes a return
The DeadFlip account had been more or less dormant (for regular streaming content, anyway) following Jack's move to full-time pinball design. When he made the announcement that he'd be stepping back from that side of his pinball work in 2023, he cited the need to spend more time with his family. Completely understandable, but what's interesting to me is in the 2+ years since, I don't think anyone in pinball has really been able to step into that void and completely fill the DeadFlip streaming shoes.
There was a reason for the vaguebooking
In recent months, Jack had been doing a bit of vaguebooking on his DeadFlip accounts before pivoting into more outright teases that his streaming antics would be making a return soon. This led to speculation in some corners of the hobby that there was trouble in Sternland and perhaps Jack was unhappy following the reception of Uncanny X-Men and looking for an exit. I figured it was just an elder millennial doing elder millennial things on the internet, but I guess the truth is somewhere in between.
Is this what Jack has always wanted to do at Stern?
In some ways, this full-circle move resembles a college student choosing a path of self-directed study over a defined major field. Maybe full-time game design seemed more interesting or achievable at the outset, and after a few years, the reality of the work and how it aligned with his skills and interests were out of alignment. This new role might allow Jack the freedom to do more of the things he's really good at (growing pinball, engaging with pinball fans) and fewer of the things he's less good at.
Was Jack working out as a game designer?
This is the question I might catch some flak for, but it has to be asked. Evaluating Jack Danger as a game designer is complicated, as I think there are a lot of dynamics at play.
On one side, Jack is an extremely popular, beloved figure in the pinball community. People want to see him succeed and they want to be in his corner no matter what he does in the hobby. He is also wildly creative and with his first two releases, he explored some ideas and challenged some long-standing thinking at Stern that a lot of people in pinball were extremely excited to see. Foo Fighters sold well from the get-go, and Uncanny X-Men was released to great fanfare.
However, on the other side, Foo Fighters was vaulted by Stern comparatively early for other successful titles in their catalog (or maybe it was kneecapped by licensing issues, or Dave Grohl's antics), regardless, it didn't have legs in the market that I'd expect for a title that sold so well initially.
Uncanny X-Men, while praised for its innovative layout and design ideas, has been plagued by technical and code problems, so much so that it's required a lengthy overhaul of the game's code in an attempt to revive dormant sales. Given the hype and excitement for this game at launch, I'm comfortable saying it hasn't lived up to expectations, and this could be another title that gets an early vault hook for Stern.
Could we see an Elwin/Danger team-up on Pokémon?
All that said, Stern's press release made it clear that Jack would continue fulfilling his obligations for his next game, though with support from the larger Stern team. Rumors of a Pokémon game have circled Stern for years, often with Jack's name attached. However, recently, those rumors have shifted, with some prognosticating that it would be Keith Elwin behind this game, instead of Jack.
This never really made sense to me, as it was my understanding that Pokémon was one of Jack's top theme choices around when he first joined Stern. So, if they were able to secure the IP, how could it not be a Jack Danger designed title? With this new knowledge, maybe the rumors of Elwin being on Pokémon aren't so far off, and what we'll wind up with is some sort of team-up with Elwin stepping in to mostly finish the work that Danger started so that he could move into this new role.
Attention Turns to Elliot Eisman (and perhaps Elizabeth Gieske)
Stern's game design leads are, on the whole, not young. Over the last few years, it's been clear that Stern has been making an effort to inject more youthful talent into their pool at all levels of the organization. From the outside, it had appeared that people like Jack Danger, Elliot Eisman, Tim Sexton, Raymond Davidson, and others were leading that charge. If Jack Danger is moving out of the game design rotation, that more or less leaves Elliot Eisman as the sole design lead under the age of 50. So I would expect to see another release from him, and maybe more after that.
The wild card might be Elizabeth Gieske. While she's primarily a programmer, and (at least as far as I know) not experienced with game design, she is held in high regard at the company, has been rotating through different design teams (Elwin and Eddy), and I believe Gary Stern has been on record about his desire for more diverse voices in pinball design. If Stern thinks she has design aptitude, I could see them trying to work her into the rotation in order to build more of that youthful design bench.
Is Jack Danger the new face of Stern Pinball? What guardrails will he have?
Alongside the previous point, Gary Stern isn't getting any younger. Neither is George Gomez. Keith Elwin, while revered, isn't an on-camera talent.
At some point, sooner or later, the people we think of as being the faces of Stern Pinball will no longer be at Stern Pinball. That means that Stern either has to lean into being corporate and brand-led (as countless other organizations do) or they find a new face. Jack Danger as the face of Stern Pinball seems like a path of least resistance for now.
That said, the complicating factor here is how Jack balances the needs of Stern Pinball with the needs of DeadFlip. As much as everyone involved will say it's not an issue, those two entities will always be in conflict at some level. DeadFlip cannot be an independent entity as long as its creator remains a salaried employee of Stern Pinball.
We've seen this dynamic play out once this year already, where the DeadFlip account shared an update on Uncanny X-Men that had the appearances of official Stern communications but was later taken down.
This means that for this to work, Jack will need to have some guardrails in place, and I question the effect these guardrails will have on everyone involved.
As a media person, is it on me to know when a DeadFlip post is or isn't also a Stern post? Are Stern customers expected to make this distinction? Seems easier (and more logical) to assume that most everyone will not separate the two as much as they'd need to for both to fully co-exist.
In my opinion, at least, the move by Stern from day one should have been to buy the DeadFlip brand from Jack Danger and fully integrate it and the accrued audience as a Stern-owned and controlled media entity, but maybe that's a direction Jack wasn't open to exploring.
A good move overall
As the length of this piece speaks to, I'm a bit fascinated with this move by Stern. Ultimately, I think it's a good one. As much as I question some of the behind-the-scenes dynamics at play and the motivations of all involved, Jack always did feel a little too sidelined in his game design role at Stern, and I think the community (and growth of pinball broadly) is better served by having him in a more visible, public-facing capacity.
