Stern Pinball making an appearance at CES seems to be a tradition, so I wasn’t necessarily surprised to see the Chicago based pinball company setting up a booth here.
What I didn’t expect was a re-release of Steve Ritchie‘s Spider-Man.
Stern Pinball is calling this machine Spider-Man Vault Edition, and features hand drawn artwork from Marvel comics and new dot matrix display animations. The game is available for purchase from distributors for $7,600, although the rest of us can wait for someone to put it in a bar or movie theater, where we can play it for considerably less.
After a quick play session, the physical design of the playfield appears to be a shot-for-shot remake of the original game. Stern representatives swore that Steve Ritchie had not altered a single post on the game. With that said, there appears to be some hardware and mechanical improvements, such as a larger Doctor Octopus magnet with protector. The original magnet was known to mushroom on the older game (the ball would wear the metal of the magnet, creating a mushroom effect). Also an all-metal vertical up kicker, which was originally made of plastic and prone to breaking.
The original Spider-Man pinball machine was released in 2007 around the Sam Raimi and Tobey McGuire trilogy of the time. It was also legendary pinball designer Steve Ritchie’s last game before reaching a falling-out period with the company (he’s back with the company designing games, his latest being Game of Thrones). It is considered one of three titles that kept pinball alive during an extremely dire time for its industry, and is considered one of the more valuable games in pinball.