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I just reached out over on Bsky. I'll report back if I hear anything!

Yea, we want to get in touch. No reason to think they are anything but someone like us - just with more firsthand experience (something I think most of us would love to have tbh).

Discovered  by Hounskull HERE. From the original DVD version of American Pickers, Season 1 Episode 8 (during a minute of footage later removed from the show's published versions):

This is tremendously helpful! I was just catching up on the forum and wishing we had this exact kind of post.

whoa 🌀

Wow, this is a GREAT find. This is easily the best image we've seen yet - the full back glass screen is really interesting.  Looks like just a single button on each side too (so it's a different machine than SUPER-R-U but that full LCD screen could have told me that, I guess). I am dying to know why it got cut from the broadcast? Some collector didn't want it getting spotted (why not just buy it up from this guy and then not worry about it though?).

Are the balls you are finding all standard pinball size? Do they all match?

I find normal pinballs pretty mesmerizing with the spherical chrome but what you are describing is definitely something different. I'm wondering if this might match with the report of a machine having different sized balls.

True, who knows when Ito could have had the idea. Maybe it was initially pitched for the machime and only jumped to manga once the project died.

Whoa! I just did the same thing!

My friend send me some more of the Arcaiders archive from that time and I'm gonna try to dig through them tonight to see if Caleb wrote any more about the machine.

Watching the Olympics....

I know it's not all that rare of a shape and I'm sure I'm just thinking about it more than I was, but I feel like I can't go more than a few minutes all day today at work without seeing a weird amount of spirals, just the last day or two.

Anyone else?

I'll be so pissed if it turns out I lived most of my life this close to the Ito machine.

Check this out - a brief interview excerpt from 2019 where Ito expresses VR as really his only interest in video games (cus controllers remove you too much from the experience). He has an idea about a VR game that strangles you as you fail: https://bloody-disgusting.com/the-further/3566298/horror-manga-master-junji-ito-...

The blacklight reactive paint isn't something I'd even considered before but that could REALLY open up the visual possibilities (and trippiness) of the machine. Wow.

Very possible! I think it's worth us keeping an open mind collectively in terms of whether or not this machine was licensed (and maybe broaden our mind to a bit of a flexible time frame too) since so much is still up in the air.

This is a bit off-topic, but interestingly despite folks here talking about there not being any anime/anime-adjacent pinball machines (even tho we know Ito's machine did exist in some form), Stern announced an upcoming Pokemon machine today: https://pokemon.sternpinball.com/landing-page/pokemon

So something I can't quite get out of my head is the idea that SUPER-R-U predates Uzumaki (Ito's spiral story). 

What if Ito got the original germ of the idea for Uzumaki from this machine (or another like it), rather than the machine itself being base on the works of Ito?

What if we're running into so many dead ends when we're looking to connect the pinball machine to Ito because it isn't actually an Ito machine - just a huge influence for a lot of his work?

Wow, this is HUGE!!!

Yea, don't tease us. If you're legit, drop the details here!

Now this is interesting! That model of node board (based on my extremely-not-an-expert analysis) seems to be a fairly common one, but I can't find other references to the "ITO-A" bit here. That, along with the date and company all matching up, definitely could be some evidence of the machine.

Anyone here know anything more specific about this stuff? I wonder if they'd have tried to work in any easter eggs and design jokes in the boards itself - like spirals in the circuits and such.

Great find - it's good to know Ito was open to works like this at this time (and lends a bit more credence to the idea of a prototype machine). The Bandai connection here is interesting. Again, we've got a surprising amount of connections between the various people and companies at play.

Joe Blackwell, one of the lead developers of the machine (if the manual pic is to be believed), is now at Bandai Namco as their Customer Service Director. He's been there for years now and these games would have happened prior to his run, but its the same time frame as the machine, like you said.

Feels like there could be something going on with the Sega > Stern > Bandai Namco and some of their employees over the years. 

Boosted!

They've retired cards before due to them being in super bad taste, even by their standards, but this seems super early on for that. I didn't hear about them doing that until like a decade after the first release really.

Found this exhaustive doc of all the CAH cards and editions - it's in here under main editions and it marked as being included in the KS and 1.0 versions, but nothing else (US only too). https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jUquemJ0QCQdTuLQAcmB9wXPruPuA7VCY8PV52ZU...

I'm starting to wonder if some rights holder or something doesn't want us to find more about this machine, between the video getting swapped (could have come from a message to the OP or a copyright claim even), the American Pickers episode edit, and more, it seems like someone with the power to get other folks to pull stuff down is going around... 

Maybe we try to dig into trademarks and stuff - could find a rights holder that way?

That's so weird. She's got that skeleton mouth face going on in the original but the colors and spiral are definitely different. Can Alfred even edit our posts? I didn't think it works that way.

Also, one of the posts in this thread is deleted now. Weird stuff going on in here today.

WTF! There's a lot of comments from folks who said they've encountered it too (though I guess it could be some sort of dumb trick where they want us to think this fake creepy thing is real).

Looks like she's sucking it up with the controller - or letting it out. I know that imagine is probably just for promo's sake, but it's probably eluding to some actual gameplay.

That's wild about Golden Tee. I love stuff like that.

I'm supposed Caleb could have ended up almost anywhere - someone else mentioned a pinball tourney judge they knew by that name in the 2000s. It's interesting cus in the zine he doesn't seem to care much for pinball, but maybe this machine was the thing that got him into it in a bigger way. Worth persuing. I'll do some digging.

Wow, Twister coming so close to this from Sega seems like too many similarities to be a coincidence - I'll have to check the layout of that machine more.

I'm not quite sure what I'm looking at it - but I don't know much about the components of pinball machines really (as much as I love playing them). Like it this the back of the backglass?

Kinda reminds me of the Operation Ivy guy (they should make an Op Ivy machine now that I think about it):

Were you able to watch the video linked in that Reddit post? It's showing private for me.

If you can do this and it ends up being THE machine, you'll be a legend here.

I've seen a bit of chatter around here and Reddit that it seems to sense tilting a bit more advanced than most machines. Not sure what that means exactly but I'm imagining that rather than displaying TILT and stopping play, it instead interacts with play somehow. Hoping to find more on that but works been keeping me too busy...

I posted this in reference to what was called "SUPER-R-U" at the time, a test machine from 1996 with tons of similarities to the Junji Ito machine. Don't know much more than that yet.

This is great - there's so much here I didn't know about and I (foolishly) considered myself mostly on top of it.

I gotta look into the Zen Pinball 2 DLC. If something like this made the jump totally to digital that much later than the reports about the machines, that's really interesting (and there's got to be a backup out there somewhere).

I think I still have a set of these cards from back when (college for me too, apparently that's the time period where CAH is funniest). Need to get it out and see if I have this card. Most folks would have probably just thought it was more of their random humor and not a real thing anyway.

Wow, great find. CAH is based out for Chicago so there's another Chicago/Midwest connection here. I'm really starting to think if there is a machine out there somewhere still, it's probably in that neck of the woods. 

Whoa! My friend wasn't the one who digitized it. They just searched for it!

I've been spending way too much time on this since I first hit this forum earlier today. I was searching stuff like the Video Game History Foundation's digital library to see if I could find any mention of this. Game mag's used to love running rumors and alphas, but I didn't find much - outside of some extra info for other folk's finds here today.

I asked my friend who's a librarian at the Indianapolis Central Library to search anything he's got access to for all the key stuff (junji ito, pinball, sega, stern, mr. gray, spiral, etc.). He spends a few hours of his on-the-clock time being my research assistant and doesn't find much until he runs across this Midwest Ephemera Database and gets this hit off of a mid-1996 Illinois arcade fanzine called Arcaiders that ran for a few years and had recently scanned and OCRed a few copies someone had turned in (the upload on the database was last week, which is... weird timing). Check this out:

Anyway, SUPER-R-U has got to be the machine right? It's way earlier though - and no mention of Ito at all (this actually predates Uzumaki in any form as far as I know, by a few years). But there's a lot of similarities and I can't track down any info on this one either. What do you all make of it?