Zach Sharpe is really good at pinball.
I’m standing with Sharpe, director of marketing at Stern Pinball, in the company’s top-secret, badge-accessed Pinball Alley, located inside its headquarters in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, (a suburb 20 miles northwest of Chicago, the pinball capital of the world). And the game we’re playing is none other than Stern’s newest title, King Kong: Myth of Terror Island. The games are available in Pro, Premium, and 932 Limited Edition (LE) models, with prices starting at $6,999.
This title has been guessed at by Reddit sleuths and arcade bloggers with a penchant for monitoring trademark filings, teased by Stern on social media, and after getting exclusive hands-on early access, I’m happy to report that the new machine is my favorite Stern release since 2021.
I first got into pinball at CES in 2020. I was playing the newly launched Stranger Things, and while I flipped frantically and hoped for the best, this nice gentleman with long white hair kept telling me to “be patient” and “slow it down.” (I found out later that man was quite literally Gary Stern, the founder of Stern Pinball, whom I also spoke with during my tour for this piece but was too panicked to greet properly. Sorry, Gary, I’m a huge fan.) After that, my friends and I attended the Midwest Gaming Classic, and I was hooked. I googled “how to stop a pinball from draining.” I learned about slap saves. I joined a league and played tournaments. I broke a billion points (on Star Wars, if you’re wondering). I didn’t know it for a long time, but I freaking love pinball.
Photograph: Louryn Strampe
Going Ape
When I first arrived at the factory, I asked Sharpe what his favorite pinball game ever made was. He mentioned two: Cyclopes, a rare machine his father, pinball historian Roger Sharpe, designed, and Godzilla, which just so happens to be my favorite machine as well. It’s also the favorite game to play of Keith Elwin and Jeremy Packer (also known as Zombie Yeti), respectively the lead game designer and lead art director of King Kong: Myth of Terror Island. (Rick Naegele, lead software engineer, was an outlier, citing Iron Maiden as his favorite to play. But I won’t fault him for that—I’m just bad at Iron Maiden.)
If you’ve played a Stern Pinball machine before (and you probably have, given the fact that Stern is one of the oldest and most storied pinball manufacturers in history), you’ll recognize the mark of the team’s work immediately. King Kong feels just as fun to play as Godzilla, Iron Maiden, Jurassic Park, and Avengers: Infinity Quest. I love all of those machines, and I fell immediately in love with King Kong as well. The candy-colored playfield makes it hard to decide where to look first, especially on the Premium edition, which has all sorts of toys and gizmos. There are four flippers, a secret path, a diverter, a creepy tarantula magnet (I affectionately nicknamed the spider “Jeff”), and a network of rails that go up, down, and loop around (including a helix-shaped ramp complete with a biplane). There’s also a gong bash target near the middle right of the playfield. I lamented the fact that I would no doubt drain a few balls while trying to get my pinballs behind it, to which Elwin helpfully pointed out that I could just avoid hitting it.
Photograph: Stern
