That’s a lot of news! We were fortunate to have TEP’s Rob Rath available to answer a few questions for us about all the new endeavors.
Interview with Rob Rath of The Electric Playground
Colin: Congrats on all the awesome news today! Let’s start with the hire of Nick Neitzel, who rose to community fame with his work on Tony Hawk’s Pro Pinball. How long has this been in the works, and how did you come to meet Nick?
Rob Rath: In late 2023 I noticed a guy in St. Louis posting a “thank you” for a playfield and an empty cabinet he had donated to him by some local pinball folks. I started digging into his profile and noticed he was working on a homebrew game. I sent him a message and we ended up meeting up.
We kept in touch and he started sharing some specifics on his project along the way, and that led to a discussion on how he’d reveal it. I ended up asking him to show it in our Expo booth and he was down!
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Through that experience, it became clear that Nick’s skill set could work really well at TEP and take us to a new level in some key areas. We discussed him coming on board after Expo and he joined officially in mid-January of this year.
What I’m most excited about is not only having a second person to prototype new topper ideas at TEP, but also his vast knowledge of leveraging electrical systems in other even more complex industries. He probably can’t talk about it, but Nick has worked on some amazing stuff. He also used to drive race cars, so we basically had to hire him on cool factor alone after learning that.
Colin: Does this mean we can expect to see an official TEP topper for Radical or Skateball anytime soon?
Rob Rath: Interestingly enough, I got asked to pick up a Radical about 3.5 hours away by a friend up north, Dan with the 🤠; you probably know him! It was a big ask but if we can get some Radical time soon, who knows?!?
Colin: You also announced your next topper project, the “Double Tap” Pinball Topper for Pulp Fiction. How long has that been in the works?
Rob Rath: Probably 6 months, growing in intensity. When we learned Nick was coming on we paused the engineering side for a bit and we’ve been full steam on it since he joined in January. The artwork by Brad Albright is done, we’re just making color tweaks at this stage.
He’s already helped us to expand on the light show of the topper beyond what we had initially planned, including simplifying the install on the customer side. We’re also tweaking the mechanical side to make it a more integrated experience with the game. The “Double Tap” name will make a lot more sense once the topper is fully revealed.
Colin: How do you go about trying to top an OEM topper that has already been heavily praised by the pinball community?
Rob Rath: Hopefully very successfully! Deciding to do a topper starts with loving the game followed by some theories around the potential demand for a topper. Then we need to fall in love with a specific topper idea and test its feasibility through prototyping. Finally, a deeper analysis of whether we believe the market will bear the volume we need to make it profitable is done before we green-light it.
In the case of Pulp, we believe there is a lot of passion for the standard model and no obvious topper options since the official topper was only sold with the LE. From there, we hope the execution will result in a lot of people wanting to take the SE to the next level.
Colin: The “Double Tap” topper won’t debut until TPF (March 21-23), but do you have any expectations for when it will ship out to customers?
Rob Rath: I expect we’ll start shipping a small volume in April and then a TBD amount to our first large batch of customers sometime in the following months. I’d fully expect we will have another batch or two out by the end of the year, but it will depend on volume.
We’ll most likely “batch limit” this topper, meaning we’ll offer deposit slots on a set number of units in one or more batches and then take waitlist emails for future batches. Then we’ll decide if and when we’ll do more batches based on the size of the waitlist. This is how we’ve done our Twilight Zone topper and it’s worked well.
The waitlist emails (sign up at teppinball.com/pulp) we are collecting right now will be contacted in order for the first batch to place a deposit sometime around the launch in March.
Colin: You have a new partnership with DPX (Dutch Pinball Exclusive) to offer a Licensed Topper Extension for their upcoming Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland release. Can you tell us about how this partnership came to be?
Rob Rath: Yeah, so Davey (with Stumblor Pinball) and I have a mod livestream called In Before the Lock, and of course, we’re often discussing what to talk about in the show next.
We saw a pre-reveal announcement post about Alice and I asked Davey….who is this Melvin guy with Dutch? He totally knew him from collaborating on the Bride of Pinbot 2.0 kit; they were beta testers on it.
Davey got a hold of Melvin and soon enough Melvin was on our show talking about Alice. This was still during the pre-reveal phase, where they had just shared a bit of artwork and the official name. Melvin gave us 2 hours live and we got to do a really deep dive into all the baggage around the game, his decision to bring it to market and the back story on acquiring the IP. It was a lot of fun talking to him for many hours of show prep, during the show, and even more after. Melvin loves talking pinball and I don’t think he sleeps ;)
Anyway, we interviewed him again for the show at Expo when they did the first game reveal. I was already in on Alice at that point through Cointaker, so was thinking of ideas since I knew I’d have it on-site at some point.
I kind of sheepishly floated the idea to Rens (Dutch’s support lead) at the show. We already had a relationship, due to how fantastically supportive Dutch has been with our aftermarket TBL topper. He kindly nudged me to share my idea with Melvin.
From there things picked up between Melvin and I over a few conversions in December, and pretty quickly the vision started to come together.
The reality that Davey’s mod platform (already built into the machine at the factory level) made the decision to move forward a lot easier, because the topper expansion will be powered and controlled through his platform; a direct integration with the game.
The timing of the Alice Topper Expansion is TBD. We’ll have a production topper from Melvin very soon and we look forward to having the game in-house to take the next steps in fine-tuning the current design.
Colin: “Topper Expansion” is a new term to me. Is this a first in pinball? What exactly is a Topper Expansion?
Rob Rath: Melvin and I kind of debated the term. Upgrade, expansion, extension, mod, etc. The nuances of those words probably differ by region and culture.
It’s an optional add-on to the existing topper offering by DPX. I think the closest example of this in recent memory is Diddy’s mod for the Jaws Topper.
Due to the extent of what we are working on for Alice (it will be a pretty full package), we think it is less of a mod and more of an expansion of the current topper, so there ya go!
Colin: Since the Topper Expansion leverages the Stumblor Pinball mod board, is there any chance we’ll see something from TEP that might interact with any upcoming Stumblor Pinball mods?
Rob Rath: Davey and I have a few ideas in the works, but Davey is (rightfully) getting hit up for tons of collaborations, so I’m hoping we keep it to just this in 2025. Maybe another one in 2026, we’ll have to come back then and tell you about it!
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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