How Stern Pinball and Stranger Things are thriving on nostalgia

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
January 11, 2020
Updated June 20, 2025
4 min

Stern Pinball has built its business on nostalgia, so it’s no surprise that its next table is based on Stranger Things, the hit Netflix show that itself is built around nostalgia for the past.

Stern Pinball showed off three different versions of the machine, dubbed Pro, Premium, and Limited Edition models, at CES 2020, the big tech trade fair in Las Vegas this week.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.