Pull up The Goonies on the Hype Index right now and you'll see more than a ranking. There's the rank itself — #1, currently, up two spots — and a user hype score of 80 from community voting. But keep scrolling. There's a Nostalgia Score of 52, rated "Peak." A Cultural Pulse of 72, with nearly 20,000 Wikipedia pageviews in the past week and a flat trendline.
None of that existed six months ago.
When the Hype Index launched, it was one of the first features on the Kineticist site. The concept was straightforward: people in the pinball community are constantly talking about what themes they want to see made into machines, and nobody was tracking those conversations in any structured way. So we started. The first version was a manual operation — read through community threads, tag mentions to specific intellectual properties, aggregate them into a ranking based on mention frequency with some recency weighting. There was a user voting widget where visitors could rate themes on a scale of 1 to 100, but it was essentially decorative. Didn't affect the rankings. A standalone popularity poll sitting next to the actual data.
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We also had some basic context on each page. Franchise age. A rough nostalgia number based on how old you'd be now if you were between 5 and 15 when the property came out. Some market signal data from YouTube search volume and Amazon search volume. That data was mostly static — snapshot-in-time numbers that went stale and didn't tell you much about whether a franchise was having a moment right now or coasting on something we pulled eight months ago.
That version proved the concept. People used it, voted on it, and it was a fun if imperfect market signal. But the limitations were obvious. Rankings skewed toward two extremes: whoever got mentioned most recently, and whatever had been talked about the longest. A franchise could spike to the top because one thread blew up, then crater when the conversation moved on. And properties with years of accumulated mentions just sat near the top by default, crowding out newer themes that people were genuinely excited about. The whole system also depended on how many conversations we could manually read through, which meant we were always behind.
What Changed
Over the past few months, we've rebuilt the scoring from the ground up. The Hype Index now monitors community conversation continuously across a bunch of sources — and I do mean continuously, not "whenever I get around to reading threads." Mentions get processed automatically when the pattern is consistently proven, and there's still a manual review phase for the rest. Each mention gets tagged to a specific IP and fed into a composite ranking that weighs several signals together rather than just counting mentions.
I'm not going to detail the exact formula — partially because it's proprietary and partially because it's still being tuned — but I can describe what the signals accomplish. One measures raw discussion volume over time, scaled so that a franchise with a thousand mentions ranks meaningfully higher than one with ten, but a single mega-popular property can't drown out everything else. Another looks at recent activity in a way that's reliable even with small sample sizes — a theme with two mentions this month isn't penalized for being new, but it's not treated with the same confidence as one with two hundred. A third detects momentum: is conversation about this IP spiking relative to its own historical baseline? That spike detection is dampened by volume, too, so a franchise going from zero to two mentions doesn't register the same as one going from fifty to a hundred.
Then there's the user vote. Your hype score is a real weighted component of the rankings now. Not the only signal, not the dominant one, but a meaningful one — and it scales with participation. One person rating something 95 out of 100 doesn't move the needle. A hundred people consistently rating it highly does.
Nostalgia, Rebuilt
The old nostalgia number was a rough cut: this franchise came out in this year, here's how old you'd be now if you grew up with it. Useful but flat.
What we have now models franchise eras, and that's the difference that matters. The Goonies has one primary era — 1985 — so its nostalgia footprint hits a specific band of the buying demographic hard. Score of 52, labeled "Peak." Star Wars, by contrast, has multiple eras: the original trilogy, the prequels, the sequels, the animated series. Each era creates its own nostalgia window across different age groups, which is why Star Wars rates "Multi-gen" — it hits several slices of the market, not just one. The model accounts for peak imprinting ages (roughly 10 to 15), childhood exposure, and identity-formation years, then maps all of that against the people who actually buy pinball machines today.
On the public page, you see the score and the label. Behind the scenes, there's a demographic breakdown bar showing exactly what percentage of the buying demo falls into each nostalgia tier. I might surface that publicly at some point — it's one of the cooler things in the system.
Cultural Pulse
The old market signal data — YouTube volumes, Amazon searches — was pulled once and displayed until it went stale. Cultural Pulse replaced that with something dynamic: Wikipedia pageview data, updated daily, normalized into a 0-to-100 metric that tells you how much mainstream attention a franchise is getting right now. (We'd like to fold in additional search signals over time, but Wikipedia turns out to be a surprisingly good proxy for cultural attention on its own.)
The Goonies at 72 with a flat trendline means consistent cultural presence — people are reading about it, searching for it, but there's no spike from a new trailer or anniversary event. When something does spike — a reboot announcement, a viral moment — you'll see it move.
Frankly, the trendline indicator (rising, flat, or falling) is almost more useful than the score itself. It tells you whether a franchise is gaining or losing cultural momentum, which is a different question than how popular it is in absolute terms.
What's Next
The system now tracks over 2,300 intellectual properties with more than 90,000 community mentions processed, some from conversations going back nearly a decade. When a theme actually gets made into a pinball machine, it "graduates" from the rankings — peak rank preserved for posterity — and the system keeps tracking conversation around it separately.
I should be upfront: this is still a work in progress. There are visualizations, mention timelines, and scoring breakdowns behind the internal dashboard that I'm still validating — and frankly, some of that may end up being a paid subscriber perk rather than fully public. Some signals are still being tuned. The data pipeline occasionally hiccups. I'm building this in public, which means you're seeing it at various stages of done.
But the rankings on kineticist.com/hype-index today are meaningfully smarter than what we started with. They reflect sustained community interest, weighted by multiple signals, rather than just whoever got mentioned last Tuesday.
Go poke around. Vote on some themes. See if you can get that random dream theme of yours to the top 10.
Colin is the chief pixel pusher at Kineticist. He's a lifetime gamer who became enamored with pinball after taking in a family copy of the 1979 classic Joker Poker (the EM version). Since then he's bought, sold and repaired many machines, competed in all kinds of tournaments, and contributes to This Week in Pinball, the New England Pinball League, and Pin-Masters of New England. Previously, Colin spent over a decade working in marketing for agencies and tech startups. He also started and ran a music blog, happy hour website, and wrote a regular craft beer review column for Central Track in Dallas. Once aspired to be an artsy film director.
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