# Pinball Innovators & Makers Podcast Ep 18: Gerry Stellenberg **Source:** The Pinball Network **Type:** video **Published:** 2023-12-22 **Duration:** 74m 38s **Beat:** Pinball **URL:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmuAcnyO1mM --- ## Analysis Gerry Stellenberg, founder of Multimorphic and creator of the P-Rock controller, recounts his journey from first playing pinball in college (Theater of Magic/Attack from Mars) at Virginia Tech in the mid-1990s to becoming a driving force in the homebrew and custom pinball movement. He describes his engineering background, early experiments controlling a TriZone machine with National Instruments hardware and LabView software, his pinball machine collection building in the early 2000s, and the organic evolution of P-Rock from a personal project to a community-driven platform that became foundational to modern custom pinball development. ### Key Claims - [HIGH] Gerry Stellenberg first played pinball at Virginia Tech around 1995-1997, specifically Theater of Magic or Attack from Mars, after friends at a pool hall introduced him to the game. — _Gerry directly describes his college experience and the specific machines he remembers playing_ - [HIGH] Stellenberg's senior project in computer engineering class was to build a labyrinth-style game with optical sensor gates and custom control electronics, predating his pinball work. — _Gerry describes the project in detail, including his partner's woodworking and his electronics/programming role_ - [HIGH] Stellenberg's first custom pinball machine was a TriZone he obtained cheaply ($25-50) from a local collector who had no control boards, which he retrofitted with National Instruments digital I/O boards and LabView software. — _Gerry provides specific details about the acquisition, his father helping transport it, and the LabView implementation_ - [HIGH] Stellenberg worked at National Instruments in Austin, Texas, where he gained access to tools and knowledge that helped him develop his initial pinball control system. — _Gerry explicitly states he was hired by National Instruments out of college and used company resources to solve control problems_ - [HIGH] Les Pitt, a coworker Stellenberg met at Tipping Point Technologies in 2001, became a long-term collaborator and helped with mechanical aspects of pinball projects. — _Gerry names Les Pitt explicitly and describes their collaborative relationship over many years_ - [HIGH] P-Rock was initially developed not as a commercial product but as a sidetracked evolution of an earlier P3 (modular pinball platform) concept that Stellenberg and Les Pitt were working on. — _Gerry describes the P3 concept being blocked by lack of available controllers, leading him to design P-Rock as a solution_ - [HIGH] Stellenberg quit a demanding job at Tipping Point Technologies around 2006-2007 where he was burning out working 16+ hour days on network intrusion detection systems, which motivated his shift toward pinball entrepreneurship. — _Gerry describes in detail the burnout experience and the decision to leave that role_ - [HIGH] The P-Rock board was designed in 2008 with the goal of enabling diverse software applications on pinball machines, similar to how smartphones and smart devices were emerging at the time. — _Gerry explicitly states 2008 as the design year and references the smartphone/app metaphor that motivated the vision_ ### Notable Quotes > "And I just floundered around and lost the ball instantly. So I was like, wait, you're good at this and I'm not. So clearly there's something I need to learn." > — **Gerry Stellenberg**, early in episode > _Illustrates the competitive skill-based appeal that hooked Stellenberg on pinball—the desire for self-improvement through mastery_ > "I can't tell you why I wanted to do that. I don't remember. but that was my first thought and so I spent the second half of my senior year in college looking for a machine to basically rip apart take out the boards and stuff" > — **Gerry Stellenberg**, early-mid episode > _Shows Stellenberg's instinctive drive to tinker and rebuild systems, a core trait that led to P-Rock_ > "I have 12 huge expensive things in my home that every time I turn the switch on they're the exact same thing but now I have a I think I had a mobile phone at the time we certainly had nintendos and things that you turn them on and they have a lot of content... Why isn't the pinball machine a device that we can run different software applications on and do different things?" > — **Gerry Stellenberg**, mid-late episode > _Key insight that motivated the P3 and P-Rock vision: applying modern computing paradigms (apps, software switching) to pinball hardware_ > "I think I had a mobile phone at the time we certainly had nintendos and things that you turn them on and they have a lot of content I think the dreams of smart refrigerators were even coming out then with apps and things that you would run in your refrigerator" > — **Gerry Stellenberg**, mid-late episode > _Contextualizes the early 2000s tech landscape and the gap Stellenberg identified in pinball hardware_ > "Everyone who's helping should be taken care of. So I started looking around at what I wanted to do." > — **Gerry Stellenberg**, mid episode > _Reflects Stellenberg's philosophy on employee/collaborator treatment that has influenced Multimorphic's culture_ > "It was simply that eventually the people reaching out to me because I think at some point I said, yeah, I'm going to build a few extras." > — **Gerry Stellenberg**, late episode > _Shows the organic, community-driven transition from hobby to commercial product_ > "stop trying to fix pinball machines. You have no idea what you're doing. Don't ever touch one again." > — **Unknown RGP forum responder**, mid episode > _Early criticism from rec.games.pinball that Stellenberg ignored, foreshadowing his success despite skepticism_ ### Entities | Name | Type | Context | |------|------|---------| | Gerry Stellenberg | person | Founder and president of Multimorphic, creator of P-Rock controller, pioneering figure in homebrew/custom pinball movement | | Multimorphic | company | Boutique pinball manufacturer founded by Gerry Stellenberg; develops P-Rock and P3 modular pinball platform | | P-Rock | product | Open-source control board designed by Stellenberg in 2008 for controlling custom and homebrew pinball machines; grew organically from personal project to widely adopted platform | | P3 | product | Modular pinball platform concept Stellenberg and Les Pitt were developing; P-Rock was initially intended as a sidetrack to solve control problems for P3 development | | Les Pitt | person | Long-term collaborator with Stellenberg; met him at Tipping Point Technologies in 2001; skilled in mechanical/woodworking aspects of pinball projects | | Virginia Tech | organization | University where Stellenberg studied computer engineering in mid-1990s; where he first played pinball and developed foundational skills | | National Instruments | company | Electronics/software company in Austin, Texas where Stellenberg worked after college; provided tools and resources for his early pinball control experiments | | Tipping Point Technologies | company | Networking security company where Stellenberg worked 2001 onwards, developing intrusion detection systems before burnout led to pinball entrepreneurship | | Theater of Magic | game | One of the first pinball machines Stellenberg played in college, likely his initial exposure to pinball | | Attack from Mars | game | Early pinball machine Stellenberg played in college; he later bought one for his apartment collection | | TriZone | game | Pinball machine Stellenberg obtained cheaply from a local collector and retrofitted as his first major custom control project | | rec.games.pinball (RGP) | organization | Early internet forum where Stellenberg posted questions about pinball control and received feedback from the community | | Dan Rosenstein | person | Host of Pinball Innovators & Makers Podcast; interviewing Gerry Stellenberg for episode 18 | | The Pinball Network | organization | Podcast network hosting Pinball Innovators & Makers Podcast | | Whitewater | game | Pinball machine Stellenberg still owns as part of his original collection from the 2000s | | Spider-Man Black | game | Late-era pinball machine Stellenberg purchased, believed to be one of the last units made | | Medieval Menace | game | Pinball machine in Stellenberg's collection | | Shadow | game | Pinball machine in Stellenberg's collection | | Pirates of the Caribbean | game | Pinball machine in Stellenberg's collection | | Judge Dredd | game | Pinball machine in Stellenberg's collection | ### Topics - **Primary:** P-Rock development and evolution, Gerry Stellenberg biography and early life, Homebrew and custom pinball pioneer history, Community-driven product development - **Secondary:** Multimorphic founding and vision, Engineering approach to pinball control systems, Early internet pinball community (RGP) - **Mentioned:** Career burnout and entrepreneurship motivation ### Sentiment **Positive** (0.82) — Stellenberg presents a reflective, enthusiastic narrative about his journey into pinball and the creation of P-Rock. He speaks fondly of friends, mentors, and collaborators, and expresses satisfaction with how his side project evolved into a community-driven platform. Mild frustration evident regarding corporate work burnout and early online criticism from RGP, but these are presented as motivational obstacles overcome rather than lingering resentments. Overall tone is gratified and proud of contributions to homebrew/custom pinball movement. ### Signals - **[business_signal]** Stellenberg's burnout from corporate work (16+ hour days at Tipping Point Technologies) directly precipitated his pivot toward pinball entrepreneurship and the decision to build P-Rock commercially (confidence: high) — Gerry explicitly connects his exhaustion in the corporate environment ('I kind of burned out on helping other people be successful') to his decision to pursue personal projects and eventually P-Rock - **[community_signal]** Early online criticism from rec.games.pinball (a responder telling him 'stop trying to fix pinball machines. You have no idea what you're doing') was encountered but not heeded by Stellenberg (confidence: medium) — Stellenberg recounts: 'I remember posting on RGP... And the response... basically said, stop trying to fix pinball machines. You have no idea what you're doing. Don't ever touch one again. Well, many people are full of bad advice, Jerry. I didn't listen.' - **[community_signal]** Stellenberg actively reached out to rec.games.pinball community to gather requirements for P-Rock functionality before even deciding to commercialize the product (confidence: high) — Gerry states he reached out on RGP 'asking people about functionality for existing machines' and received organic interest: 'some of the emails I got that were, this is really cool. If you ever make this board, it'd be cool if you could make a couple extras' - **[design_philosophy]** Stellenberg's vision for P3 and P-Rock was explicitly modeled on smartphone/app ecosystems—treating pinball machines as hardware platforms that could run different software applications rather than fixed single-game devices (confidence: high) — Stellenberg articulates: 'Why isn't the pinball machine a device that we can run different software applications on and do different things?' comparing to phones, Nintendos, and emerging smart appliances - **[market_signal]** P-Rock emerged organically from community demand rather than top-down business planning; initial requests from RGP forum users for 'a few extras' evolved into a formal product offering (confidence: high) — Stellenberg states: 'It was simply that eventually the people reaching out to me... at some point I said, yeah, I'm going to build a few extras' and emphasizes this was not originally intended as a commercial product - **[community_signal]** Gerry Stellenberg's engineering background and hands-on tinkering approach directly shaped P-Rock's design philosophy—treating pinball control as a systems engineering problem rather than a pure software or mechanical problem (confidence: high) — Stellenberg explicitly connects his computer engineering degree, early labyrinth project, and work at National Instruments to his pinball control system design methodology - **[personnel_signal]** Les Pitt's role as a long-term collaborator with strong mechanical/fabrication skills complemented Stellenberg's electronics and software expertise, establishing a foundational partnership dynamic for Multimorphic's later work (confidence: medium) — Stellenberg describes meeting Les in 2001 and their ongoing collaboration over 'so many years' where Les would handle mechanical challenges like welding and fabrication - **[technology_signal]** P-Rock represented a fundamental shift in homebrew pinball by providing an open, standardized control platform at a time when no commercial off-the-shelf solutions existed for custom machines (confidence: high) — Stellenberg notes that in 2008 there was 'no pinball controller... no off the shelf thing with open software' except pin MAME schematics, making P-Rock a critical enabling technology --- ## Transcript The Pinball Network is online. Launching Pinball Innovators and Makers Podcast. Hi, and welcome to the Pinball Podcast focused on the innovators and makers who are crafting homebrew, custom, and rethemed pinball machines, the technology that makes these personal projects possible, and the companies helping with these journeys. Custom pinballs are a deeply personal and technically challenging undertaking, requiring time, money, knowledge, and most importantly, the desire to make it happen. I'm Dan Rosenstein, your host. Join me and let's go under the playfield and see what's needed to make a custom pinball possible. Hello, pinball innovators and makers. Welcome to episode 18. Today's guest has been instrumental in kicking off the growth we have seen in the custom and homebrew hobby, which has become a true catalyst for many of the pinball companies that have emerged over the last decade and leading to the renaissance moment we have now. A pinball maker and innovator to the core, please welcome the creator of the P-Rock Controller and the president and founder of Multimorphic, Gerry Stellenberg. Welcome, Jerry. Thank you, Dan. Super happy to be here. So, Jerry, let's start off with your, you know, how did you get into pinball? What is your intro into it? your origin story if you will uh let's see i hadn't really touched a pinball game until college uh college at virginia tech 1996 97 95 somewhere around there i was big into to pool and playing in the pool hall my friends were into pinball and they they sucked me in they they they got me hooked do you remember what that first machine was it was either theater magic or attack from Mars. I forget which one. I think it was Theater of Magic. Somebody left a credit on there and said, Jerry, go play it. And I played it and it took about 30 seconds and I wanted to play it again. What was it about that first experience other than being with your friends? We'll talk about community a bunch throughout this episode. What was it about playing it that drew you in while you were in college? I think I didn't recognize or realize before I played it that it was skill based, that you could actually control the ball. And watching my friends play, they were good at aiming and hitting shots and controlling the ball. And I just floundered around and lost the ball instantly. So I was like, wait, you're good at this and I'm not. So clearly there's something I need to learn. And it just made me, just like playing pool. You play pool against people that are better than you. And you're like, man, they can do things that I can't do. I want to learn how to do that. So I guess self-improvement. So this was, was this truly the very first time you had been exposed to a pinball machine or you had never seen one growing up or never played on one or don't remember playing on one? I can't remember playing one. I'm sure I saw them somewhere, but no, I don't remember playing. We used to go to the arcade and play video games, but I don't remember ever playing pinball before that. Gary, you mentioned you went to Virginia Tech. Are you from the East Coast originally, just regionally? You don't have to give away where you're from if you want to. Yeah, no worries. I grew up in Delaware, school in Virginia Tech, and then after that, made my way down to Texas. And pinball was legal at that time. So it's not like you weren't exposed to it because it was illegal to play. So that's interesting that college was your first foray. So how did you go from, you know, in the pool halls, in between playing games, playing with your friends on Theater of Magic and Attack from Mars, to getting into the homebrew and custom scene? This is like before you started anything with P-Rock. Like how did you foray or make your way to the custom and homebrew scene? So basically when I wasn't eating, playing pool or pinball or doing anything else related to living my life, I was studying to be a computer engineer, which is kind of a combination between electrical engineering and computer software, which are the main facets of developing computer hardware like a P-Rock board. But I'm someone who was fascinated by how things work, by creating new things, by taking ideas and twisting them around and trying to do cool new things with them. My senior project in our computer engineering class was to develop a game. We were allowed to do anything, but my partner and I chose to develop a game similar to that table labyrinth game where you – the X and Y table and you'd roll a ball around and try through gates. So we developed basically that. We took opto pairs and mounted them various places around a table, moved it around, and we wrote the code for that. I think it was an assembler. It was a little microcontroller class, and that basically is Pinball. And I guess I did that because of the Pinball experiences and wanting to recreate that fun environment. But the ball rolling around through gates is basically the beginnings of every other project I've done for the rest of my life. So let's talk about that labyrinth just for a sec. Did you use an existing labyrinth or did you build up like the whole thing from scratch? Was it made out of wood, out of metal? How close to the actual game of labyrinth was it and how far was it? What was mechanically controlled and electrically controlled? We developed it from scratch. My project partner, just another guy from the class, he was interested in woodworking and building stuff. And he kind of took on the fabrication side of things. And I handled most of the electronics and almost all of the programming. I don't know how he got me to do all that because the class was about electronics and programming, but clearly I was a sucker. But no, it was a lot of fun. It was basically from scratch completely. We cut holes. We added the – I think it was more manually controlled than Labyrinth was. We would just use levers to move it around. But it would guide you through a sequence of gates. Instead of trying to avoid holes and get to the end, this was just a bunch of opto-gates that you were told via LEDs which one was next. which one you had to go to. Oh, that's super cool. So you're still mechanically, if I'm understanding it correctly, you're still mechanically controlling the level and position of the board so the ball can move. It's moving through gates and you're basically like a slalom course saying you've got to go through these gates. So instead of labyrinth, maybe it's slalom. Oh, that's super cool. So then let's rewind a little bit. You went to school for computer engineering. You found this love, you sparked this love for pinball in college. If you don't mind, let's talk about the earlier years. Like, what was Jerry like as a kid? Like, did you have the knack? Like, did you, you know, at the age of six, did your parents know you're going to be going off to engineering school? Like, tell the listeners about that. I don't think it was that early. No, I knew I, my dad brought computers home when I was 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. I remember starting on an NX-86 something or other that could barely do anything. I think we like everyone used them for word processing and that was about it I got into the bulletin board stuff connecting to bulletin boards through the modem in early high school I think, 13, 14 started downloading programs and learning how to do very basic things I took some programming classes in high school because computers were really neat and interesting and I had dug into them a little bit but So, yeah, it was high school. I started programming a little bit and I just knew that I wanted to build stuff. I wanted to create stuff. I wanted to design things. I can't tell you what connected me to that. But probably dad bringing home those computers was the start of it. So on those early computers, so my you and I, if I did my math correctly, are roughly the exact same age based on what we both went to college. And based on just some of the things that you just said was it was very similar. My dad also brought home x86 computers when I was very, very young. And I remember playing Friendlyware, which was kind of like the first, like, here's everything a computer can do type piece of software. Other than word processing, do you remember any other software on those early computers that might have been interesting to you? The only ones I remember were Sierra's King's Quest. And was it Zork? Zork, yeah. Yeah. Look left, walk right. Was that Zork? Yeah. Okay. I don't remember if Look Left, Look Right was Zork, but Zork was definitely in that time frame. That's awesome. So then fast forward, let's take you, you know, you've studied computer engineering at Virginia Tech. You've been playing pinball with your buddies at the pool hall. So how did the bridge from playing pinball to being interested in custom and homebrew happen? So it actually happened very quickly, and yeah, it happened before I left college. So I went to a job fair at school and talked to a bunch of companies, one of which was National Instruments, which is a company in Austin, Texas, known for test and measurement stuff. They offered me a job. I accepted it. And I started wondering, you know, this company makes a lot of digital I.O. boards and industrial control type stuff. It might be cool if I took a board from them, a digital I.O. board, connected it to a pinball play field and wrote new software for a game. I can't tell you why I wanted to do that. I don't remember. but that was my first thought and so I spent the second half of my senior year in college looking for a machine to basically rip apart take out the boards and stuff and it turned out that there was a local collector who had a tri-zone machine that didn't have boards he I don't know what happened to his original boards maybe he got the machine without him or whatever but it didn't have boards so it was basically just a play field in a cabinet and it was perfect because he he gave it to me for super cheap i think it was 25 or 50 he gave me oh my god i'm just a bunch of features on a piece of wood that um i had my dad who picked me up from college we had to shove this pinball cabinet into the back of the car he's like what are we doing with this thing it takes it takes more room than all my stuff at the time but um took that machine with me to austin when i moved down here and literally spent the first few months of my free time wiring up mosfets and creating this digital digital based control system for a pinball playfield i got it completely working used the labview software which if you're unfamiliar is a graphical programming environment that it was targeted at engineers. You didn't have to learn line-based, text-based programming. It was all graphical. You'd drag and drop even for loops. You'd drag a circle in, and you'd put code inside of it, or code being icons and things that did stuff inside of it. Yeah, it's basically control systems programming software for engineers who are great engineers, but not necessarily great software developers. Which is weird to me, because in retrospect, you still had to think the exact same way through a design. You still need variables and for loops and statements. But anyway, you do it all graphically, which was a different experience. But I had all the resources I needed because I worked at the company making the boards and making the programming environment and got a little bit of help. But in a few months, we had a fully working TriZone pinball machine in my apartment. Now, you said we. I'm going to key in on that. And you also mentioned your dad a little bit earlier. Did your dad help you with this or did you have other people, other folks, friends that we're working or is the we kind of the royal we but you were talking about the we the we in that case was the help i was getting from people at at ni and national instruments who were helping answer the the stupid questions i had because i was this brand new out of school guy who didn't know anything um how do i how do i connect this board to a mosfet gate um and why do my mosfets keep blowing up i basically i have no idea what i'm doing please help me in other words do it for me, but I'm going to actually be the monkey who uses his arms and hands and ties it together. And then I got some advice. In fact, I remember posting online sometimes saying, why do my MOSFETs keep dying? And they're like, it's because you have a separate ground between your digital ground and your analog ground. And if they're not connected together, bad things happen. You can go back and teach that to Gottlieb if you want. That would be good information. What's funny is that specific fact has been the driving force of a lot of conversations I've had in the last 30 years. So other than keeping your grounds connected, what were some of the other early lessons learned? Basically, it's a convoluted, weird way to do things, to take a pinball machine and rip apart all of its guts and rewire it and connect it to a whole new control system and tie that control system to a programming language that no one else was using to do pinball machines. and do all this before the internet was super popular. So there were avenues for help, but not real easy ways to get help. It was kind of just an exercise to, I mean, I didn't have any long-term goals from this exercise. It was just something I thought would find. I did it so that I would have a pinball machine in my house that had code that I developed and could share it with my friends. And probably one or two friends played it and then it wound up in the dumpster when I moved to the next apartment. Oh, really? So you don't have it anymore. No. So in terms of gameplay code, did you have, you know, there's the portion that actually does the basics of the electrical play. So switches work and actuators work, you know, the basics of the control system. And then on top of that, there's games, you know, there's game rules and rule set. Did you make your way into game rules and rule set and scoring, or were you basically super happy at the point that you got the foundations of the control system working. Yeah, I wasn't really knowledgeable on pinball rule sets and why things were fun or what was fun and what wasn't fun. I was mostly attacking this as an engineer or a project to learn how to control this analog play field with digital control circuitry. I can't tell you when I really started to understand pinball rules, but it wasn't yet. But what was next was I started to get really into play field design and shot layouts like probably most pinball people. I started to go to – when I'd go out and eat, I'd take a notebook with me and start drawing layouts and different toy ideas and mechanisms. Something about just creating a fun layout or an interesting layout with fun toys was appealing to me, and that's kind of what I did in my free time. You know, Jerry, on this podcast, you know, this is going to be this is episode 18. And I've interviewed, you know, so many people through it. And everybody approaches it from a completely different position. And you now have added the 18th position, which is starting it as an engineer as an engineering project to see if to see if you can do it. It's totally, totally interesting. thing. You mentioned that you had reached out on the early days of the internet. Would that be to rec.games.pinball or was it to a different forum at the time? Who were you reaching out to at that point? At that point, it was simply electronic forums because I was trying to figure out why my control circuits weren't working or what I needed to learn. I do remember talking on RGP in college actually. I think you'd see a couple of posts from me being called an idiot by some of the... I remember we had a... My friend had a beat the clock. He got a beat the clock during our senior year, put it in his apartment, and one of the flippers stopped working. So I had tried to do something to fix it that makes no sense. And I remember posting on RGP, hey, the flipper doesn't work on this machine. I've tried this. And the response when I forget the guy who responded, if someone said his name, it would ring the bell because he's someone who's probably still posting today. But he basically said, stop trying to fix pinball machines. You have no idea what you're doing. Don't ever touch one again. Well, many people are full of bad advice, Jerry. I didn't listen. Which is great. And the other great thing is that the archive still have all the communication so it should be pretty easy to find who who was it that that said it um so when like do you remember when you first started to meet other folks who were also interested in it probably wasn't even called homebrew and custom at that point but in into these types of endeavors that you were you were looking at now now that you were in austin I did not meet other homebrew pinball folks until we started shipping P-Rock and those kind of things. What happened was shortly after I moved to a new apartment, got rid of that tri-zone because I didn't want to move it because it was basically just a functional but not fun to play box of pinball stuff. I bought the first two games that I'd ever played. I bought a Theater of Magic and Attack from Mars. Put him in my apartment, and my friends started to come over. We'd play him at lunch every day or whatever. Went to a new job in 2001, I think. Went over to Tipping Point Technologies and met a guy who spent every weekend at his friend's house playing pinball. I was like, oh, that's cool. They had a Tales of the Arabian Nights and I think an old Star Wars game. and I went over there a couple times played with them at one point the ship bracket on my attack from Mars broke and this friend of mine this guy I'd met at work he was good with his hands, his name was Les Les Pitt anyone familiar with my long term story knows he's been a big part of it but he took it home and welded it and put it back in the machine my attack from Mars now works again over the course of the next so many years we'd talk a lot, play a lot of pinball And eventually kind of because of all of this I started to grow my collection and then get antsy about wanting to do my own thing So, as you grew out your collection, was there a specific time, you had talked about going to bars and restaurants, restaurants or restaurants, I should say, even say bars, to write down what you liked in shot layout and what you liked in various different games. Like, what did you gravitate to? Is there a specific type of game, a specific type of shot layout, a specific designer perhaps? And when you built out your collection, what were you looking for? I don't know that I was looking for anything in particular. I was on the ever-growing forums reading about other people's opinions. This game's great. That game's great. I didn't have a lot of opportunity to play a lot of the recommendations. I just couldn't find the games, so I bought a lot sight unseen. I wound up with 12 machines, and I can name a few, some that I remember. Attack from Mars Theater of Magic were the first. I bought a Medieval Menace. I bought a Shadow, Pirates of the Caribbean, Judge Red. You're not dealing with a bad collection at this point. It ends up they're all AAA titles. Well, that's the thing. I was a single hardware engineer making reasonable money at the time. I didn't really have any expenses, so I started to buy pinball machines. And I bought fairly good ones. I tried to buy home use only ones because I didn't want to have to restore them. I wasn't into the woodworking side of things. I didn't want to do any of that. I eventually bought a Spider-Man Black, I think the last one or two, or supposedly the last one or two. Who knows what the dealer was actually telling me. I bought and sold a junkyard pretty quickly. Whitewater, I still have. Yeah, it's interesting because I came in to pinball through the technical track as well. But for me, it was about finding ones and going through the process of repairing them. Because at this point in my career, although I was an engineer, I wasn't hands-on. I was managing teams. And so to kind of get that hands-on knack, it was an outlet for me on weekends while we were having our kids and building out our family or making our family. And so the fact that you came in and you started with home use only machines, even though you came in from an engineering track, is quite interesting. So in just about, I think if I have my facts right, and if I don't, I'm sorry, in about 2008, you started pinballcontrollers.com. And it looks like, I was looking at LinkedIn, and it looks like it was as a side business. You were still, at least on LinkedIn, working full time at that. How did that come to be? Why don't you tell the story of from, you know, you start building out your collection, you talking with your friends and then how how Pinball Controller starts? Yeah, so. It was 2006, 2007, I'd been working for Tipping Point Technologies for a while, basically in a role that they claimed was really important in the sense that the features I was working on for the board we were designing. It's an intrusion prevention system, which was new at the time. Firewalls versus IPSs. IPSs were just kind of being introduced. And I was developing the chip that would scan the data as it went through the network and try to look for signatures of the bad things that they needed to filter out. So there was a lot of heat on me to work hard, design these features, get them working. We were a small group, but I had the core function. The CEO was in my office one day saying, what's it going to take to get this finished? And it just kind of told me how important any individual role can be in the company. And I was in one of the more important ones at that point. And I worked my butt off summers, nights, and weekends. 16 hours a day I'd go home and work, or I'd go home thinking about the problem I was trying to solve and solving it while showering or whatever, coming up with ideas. And I don't know how many times I would wake up in the morning having dreamt a solution to a problem that I couldn't solve or was having trouble solving. Anyway, the point was that I kind of burned out on helping other people be successful. Because at that time, at least from my perspective, other people didn't care how much work you were doing. They didn't care how much they were asking so long as you were helping them be successful. And I don't think that most of the companies I was working throughout the years, I don't think that the individuals were taken care of nearly as well as they should have been given the magnitude of success for the people at the top. It's kind of a philosophy I kind of hold to this day. Everyone who's helping should be taken care of. So I started looking around at what I wanted to do. I came up with some ideas. I actually quit my job. But after coming up with an idea to do something non-pinball related and while working on the business plan and researching that and working through the investment raise stuff, that's kind of when I built up the collection of pinball machines. Okay. I didn't pursue the company. There were some big challenges that I didn't have the skills or the connections to solve. but at the time I've now got 12 pinball machines in my house and I'm like this is kind of stupid I have 12 huge expensive things in my home that every time I turn the switch on they're the exact same thing but now I have a I think I had a mobile phone at the time we certainly had nintendos and things that you turn them on and they have a lot of content I think the dreams of smart refrigerators were even coming out then with apps and things that you would run in your refrigerator I'm like This doesn't make any sense. Why isn't the pinball machine a device that we can run different software applications on and do different things? And so the entrepreneur thing kind of going on while I was building this pinball game or this pinball collection and kind of thinking that it didn't make sense, kind of merging those two things is what led to the P-Rock board, which I developed in 2008, as you said. And so why don't you talk about back in 2008? What were some of the goals of the P-Rock board that you had put in place? What were some of the things you wanted to accomplish? Yeah, so actually, it's not quite the whole story. The whole story was, why am I buying individual machines? Why don't I buy or make because there isn't? Why don't I make, get with my friend Les, who's good at using tools and building things? Why don't we make a machine that can be themed, that can do new stuff, that can, I don't know, what if we put an LCD in the lower play field? track the ball and then we can have a physical ball interacting with stuff just like our finger does on these mobile phones why don't we try to do something that that uses technology today's technology back then in a in a cool way and integrate that with pinball so we started down the path of of p3 concepts way back when and it was kind of a roadblock right at the beginning like there's no way to control this today there's nothing out there that i can just go by there is no pinball controller stern had their own williams had their own everyone had their own there wasn't an off the cell thing with open software there was nothing i could use i think the only thing available at the time if i remember correctly was a schematic for it was called pin meme hardware okay so a schematic and a list of parts you could use to build I don't even remember what it was really used for. And in 2008, just to refresh for the audience, Arduinos weren't commercially available in 2008. Raspberry Pis were not commercially available. It would be another three to five years, depending on how you want to look at the timeline, that they would become commercially available. There were, you know, even computers start, you know, as small as the form factors were getting, they were just starting to hit the size that they could be put into a pinball machine. And even if you did that, the ability to control digital I.O. and analog I.O. was still a large chunk. Things started to show up at this point, especially for the, like you said, pin MAME as well as the MAME community. But it was still very, very, very nascent. So even if you could control switches and solenoids, being able to do something that had real-time control or close to real-time control that a pinball machine just didn't exist. so i didn't initially jump into the controlling coils and lamps and stuff like that um what i did was i said okay let me let me build a controller this is what i do for a living i design i design um digital electronics to control stuff so i can do this you can do this so so i started designing the circuitry around um controlling what eventually became our ir grid which is the set of emitters and transmitters we put over the LCD screen to track the ball. And then I was thinking, well, how am I going to test this? How am I going to develop early software? In order to do that, I have to build the machine first or all the features of the machine. However, I have 12 machines in my house. So why don't I build in the additional circuitry, which really is just a bunch of comparators for the switches and an output bus to talk to like a Williams or a Stern power driver board. Why don't I design this into my board so that I can use any of my 12 machines as a test bed, as a physical tool set to allow me to develop the software and make the thing more mature. so so that's what i did and that sidetracked the p3 for a good three or four or five years because as you know the p-rock is what that was and it kind of grew a life of its own so um you you bring the the you know you design the p-rock you bring it to market like you you put it on on a web page you start to to sell it how did like how did the community grow from there Talk about what happened from when the website for pinballcontrollers.com went up and you started to get not just people buying them, but people reaching out to you being like, hey, I want to do this thing. Yeah, I think it actually started before we put the website up. That was entirely me. I designed the board. I put the website up. But while I was designing the board, I reached out on – it still might have been RGP at the time. I think it was still RGP. and I was asking people about functionality for existing machines. How does this work? Does anyone have a WPC machine? Can you explain how it handles such and such? So I could build in support for as many of the current, at the time, modern machines, support for them. I honestly don't remember how many people responded or some of the emails I got that were, this is really cool. If you ever make this board, it'd be cool if you could make a couple extras because I would love to have one and do this myself. Okay, so at this point when you were reaching out, you hadn't thought – okay, I didn't catch that. You were just doing this as kind of like your own thing. You hadn't thought about actually building a commercial product. Absolutely correct, yes. This was not intended to be. This was just a hobby thing for me to control my machine. And so – sorry, that didn't click. And so, OK, but when people started to say like, hey, you know, if you build one of these, if you build a second, like you start to get customer signal at that point, which is a pretty strong. So how did it go from you building it for yourself to actually going, OK, I am going to make this thing to to offer it to other people? It was simply that eventually the people reaching out to me because I think at some point I said, yeah, I'm going to build a few extras. I'm sure the history is on RGP if we actually wanted to go back and see how wrong I am in my memories. But I think a bunch more people started reaching out and saying, yep, if you do this, I want one too, or that's really cool. I would love to control my Brida Pinbot or whatever it happened to be. I know right around – so we launched the website. I know I keep saying we, and at the time it was just me. I launched the website in 2009 yeah, set up the LLC and it was either before or very soon after that I got an email from a guy named Adam Preble who was a software programmer in Atlanta who apparently was searching for exactly the type of thing that the P-Rock was. He was looking for a way to control a pinball machine I think he wanted to customize, I don't know if it was an Addams Family or another game, but he was looking for something, which is funny, Adam Preble and Addams Family, that makes sense. He reached out, said he's a software programmer. He really likes what I'm doing and would love to help with the software side of things. So between he and me putting this together, the board and the early software, it just kind of organically grew into this thing. We started posting it online and getting more and more emails from people who wanted it. So when the board became available, tell me and the listener a little bit about the software that you and Adam put together. What was made available at that time? So I had first started with a very basic set of drivers, which are just features built. built, I think I was using C at the time, just to make sure I could control the physical features on a pinball machine. I remember connecting it to both a Stern machine, which was Pirates, and a Williams machine, which was probably Judge Dredd, making sure that the very low-level drivers could control functions. So basically, I built a diagnostic tool set. The test menu that you have in your machines. You can activate coils. You can read switches. You can control the DMD. I did all that in C. And Adam basically asked, can I look at your code? And he did. And he's like, this isn't going to fly. So he's like, let me help take that code, turn it into a real C driver that we can compile into a driver, and then we can link that against applications. And he basically helped refactor all of the driver code. He came in and he sent me one week he sent me, hey, I took your driver code, I made it, and also here's an example of what I just did on my Judge Dredd machine. So he had his own Judge Dredd machine, and he's like, check this out, and he's like playing a basic game. I'm like, wait a second. All I did was give you some driver code, and he's like, yeah, I went and implemented a control loop and allowed you to write some very basic rules, and here's it controlling a sequence of drop targets and things. And what he had created was the core, the main logic inside of what became PyProcGame, the software framework PyProcGame. That's absolutely amazing. So, Jerry, it must have been pretty satisfying to see your creation bring new life to both WPC and Stern Machines, as well as see Adam build up the driver code and his Judge Dredd. Now, I realize you had gotten your own stuff flipping before, but seeing something that actually started to show some scale, started to show some adaptability to other people, it must have been personally rewarding. Well, it was personally rewarding to see Adam take it and develop that stuff. The connection with the community and people obviously being successful didn't happen until a little later because that was all based on this work. But what happened was Adam showed me that demo and I was like, cool, how did you do that? And he sent me the code and it wasn't a week later that I had built. I had written all of the supporting elements of the software framework to basically turn Judge Dredd into a fully working, customized code base. So I called it JD because it's not Judge Dredd, it's something else. But I mean, I had to build in the setting support and the high score tables and the ball trough management and all the features you would need outside of just the main control system the main the main runtime loop in in event handling um so it wasn't a week later but that a full a full running jd was there in pipe rock game was really a thing and and jd is not the easiest of all games it's got that um i forget what that that area is that holds the balls and turns the night so and i forget it's got a cool dead world that's that's what it is um did you get that activated as well as part of this? The one on my machine was actually the modified one that would hold onto the balls and it would rotate them around. And it was pretty cool. Yes, that was fully working. The crane would go pick up the balls and drop them. It was all, I mean, truth be told, I wrote all of this code while at my day job, writing code in a VI window and then going home and testing it at night. But it took about a week of full-time work and it was a fully running game. So fast forward a little bit. That's super awesome. Fast forward a little bit to let's start talking about how that starts to change the community and how folks start more than Adam start to come out of the woodwork and what happens next from a community perspective. I don't really recall who was the first person to take it and do something cool with it, but this is the time where Dutch Pinball bought one. I don't know if it was Barry or Kuhn bought one to put in their Brida Pinbot, and that was the beginning of Brida Pinbot 2. Scott Danesi bought one for his Earthshaker to customize Earthshaker. Eric Prypke bought one for Cactus Canyon, and that grew into Cactus Canyon Continued. There were a number of projects people like Michael Ocean and Josh Kugler and I probably missing some names of some of the early folks David Nelson for the Buffy Project These are all people who reached out. This would have been 2010, 11, 12. I remember 2013 was the expo where we had a big booth full of all these projects because basically all of us kind of came together and we're building these cool things and we're all answering each other's questions and everyone's building on top of Pipe Rock Game and it just became this really exciting thing to show off new game code written for existing machines. And so how, in this time frame, let's go, let's rewind just a little bit before the 2013 show. How were you all communicating? Was there a forum? Were you all getting together every so often? Was everybody co-located? Talk a little bit about that, about the logistics of community building, if you will. I'm trying to remember. We were definitely not local. Everyone lived in their own place, their own state, their own whatever. At one point when I launched the website, pinballcontrollers.com, I put a forum on there, pinballcontrollers.com forums. It was a simple machine forum implementation. And I'm guessing that's where we were all talking way back then. I knew that kind of grew into a bigger thing for a few years. but forum posts on that forum the forum isn't dead we kind of all moved to Slack five or six or ten years later but I think it was all through online forums after the initial emails when was the first time that you met any of these folks in person? do you remember? roughly 2012, 2013 okay so it was really almost either before the show or in prep, before and in prep of the show. Absolutely. I'd only ever talk to all these people online. Yeah. It's 2012. I took a Judge Dredd to Expo. Was it 2012? It might have been 2011. I took, I don't remember. Jerry, we don't remember what happened a few days ago. Like, I mean, roughly it's 2011, 2012. This is a decade ago. No, I know, but it's so important in my timeline because 2012 was the introduction of the P3. So I would have brought Judge Dredd to Expo in 2011 before that happened, and I was sitting in Rob Anthony's booth with this custom implementation. And I remember three or four people bought P-Rocks at the show because they thought it would be super cool to customize their own games. So it would have been 2012 and 2013 where we started meeting everyone in person, seeing all their games. I mean, these two guys from the Netherlands literally flew over with their bride at Pinbot to participate in this custom pinball exhibit at Pinball Expo in probably 2013. That's awesome. It's so cool to hear about the early days where you folks came together and had the first, you know, more than just one custom machine at Expo together. So how did this all become the start of Multimorphic and the P3? so remember that i developed the p-rock in order to control this custom concept i had 2012 early 2012 actually would have been late 2011 lesson i built the first version of the p3 in my garage so straight up garage garage start to this whole p3 journey and we put this machine Jerry, if you're not going to do a startup in your garage, it's not worth doing the startup. And I don't even mean my basement or my dining table. I mean my garage. We were building this machine in my garage. So we put in this very small display in the center of the play field. We built some ramps and loops around it. 2012 was the introduction of that concept homebrew machine. We took it to Texas Pinball Festival. simply to show people a cool project we were working on. And that's it. It had very early software. It did have implementations of what are now Rocks and Barnyard and some of the little mini games we had. And that was all it had. It was just you can choose when you hit the start button, Rocks, Barnyard, or some other game. And we took it to TPF 2012. It won best something. I won $100 at that show. Took it home. I was like, sweet, let's do this. at the same time I had an aunt and uncle who were visiting and saw this thing and they thought it was super cool and they were like are you going to make this a company like no why would I do that that would take literally to build a company to build pinball machines I remember I was from the technology world and I had been through a couple startups that had grown to I told them explicitly it would take two million dollars to get us off the ground to start to build out a staff to start this was back in 2012 two million dollars It would be a lot more now. But they said, we don't have $2 million, but this is super cool and we think you should do this. So they wrote me a very small check for way less than any sane person would take to go to a company and I started Multimorphic and regret it ever since because it was enough enough money to basically pay me in less for a year and not buy anything, just to pay our salaries for a year. Now it's been more than 10 years of building something from essentially nothing. Not only did you incubate and build the control board, but then you also built and incubated the machine itself and its core ideas. Then you built and incubated the business. You truly went the maker to market journey, which is and, you know, you've been doing it for for 10 years. It's absolutely amazing. What do you do? Might saying what your aunt and uncle's name are so we can we can thank them on the air. Diane and Gary. Well, let's let's thank Diane and Gary for for their initial investment, because it sounds like it would not have been a company without without without them. Look, I will say for the listeners, I'm a P3 owner just for full disclosure. I've had mine for over a year. I absolutely love it. You know, my virtual machine, my virtual pinball machine happens to get the gets the most play from me during the week. The second thing that gets play after that, and I've got a pretty extensive collection, is my P3. And I, you know, I absolutely love it. You know, and it's interesting because I work in technology. You work, I mean, you still work in technology. It's a different form. And we're talking about technology that's now, you know, five years, 10 years old. And the thing about it, I want to talk about this here rather than as we go further as the company took off. You know, in the world of technology, that can seem like multiple generations. But I will tell you, like as a technologist, I work on cutting edge, like bleeding edge stuff. I look at the P3 as this like revolution in innovation and pinball. Every, you know, every everything about it to me is is the forefront of where I want pinball to go, where, you know, I see pinball going. I believe my final resistance is in manufacturing right now. I might have actually just shipped out and I'm super excited to get that. And I'm a technologist. I truly work on robotics. I work on bleeding edge stuff. And I view, even though the core technology used here might have 10 years under it, it's still truly, it's magic in certain cases. When I show people the ball movement tracking as an example, they're blown away by it. And so walk us through how you took the prototype and that initial seed and built out the P3 that we know now. And then we'll talk about some of the games and when you took the plunge into full-time work with Multimorphic. Well, number one, thank you for your support and for your enthusiasm for what we're doing, because we are just happy to be making something that people are really enjoying. And seeing people like you react so positively to the technology in the games is kind of the validation we need to do this. It's why we do it. Keep them coming. I joke that you guys have built out a great business model and that you basically get $2,500, give or take, from me every quarter, every two quarters. Thank you. We're obviously super happy to know that people out there are enjoying what we're doing. remind me of the question sorry yeah no um so so so uh the the plunge into into multi-morphic full-time you took the seed money um how did you over the night you'll talk about the next five to ten years as you brought the multi-morphic out of out of out of uh incubation as as a product market okay so we took about five years to iterate on the idea we started but we got the first and only check from from diane and gary in 2012 we incorporated in may and less than i finished building the first prototype we built a secondary prototype with a larger monitor the first prototype, by the way, was a display, a 17-inch display with traditional flippers below it. We did float. We came up with a new slingshot concept, so there were floating slingshots above it, but the first prototype was 17 inches. The second prototype was a 24-inch monitor, so a bigger monitor that we had to invent new flippers to float over top of it because, As we all know, monitors don't like holes drilled through them. So Les was an avid mountain biker. He came up with this concept where he would use brake lines to control flippers and tug the flippers back. It didn't work. It did work. It flipped the flippers, but they didn't want to return. They didn't have a good spring action to pull them down. So he then changed it to bicycle spokes, so hard rods that are connecting the flippers basically to the plungers. And those worked functionally. They were much better, but they would break very quickly. And we slowly iterated that design to be more structurally solid and more reliable. And at the same time, we switched from a static upper playfield design to a modular upper playfield design because we're like, oh, I had some early parties. I had some parties, people coming over the house and we're playing this thing. Like this is super cool. You can do so many things on the screen, but the top stuff is always the same. So I think I'm going to get bored of this lower stuff if the top stuff is always the same. And that little seed of an idea kind of got us thinking about modular upper playfields. So 2013, 2014, we had our third prototype. 2015 or I think it was before that we brought TJ on board. TJ was a friend of Les's wife. I think they played on the same billiards league team or something. She's like, I know a mechanical engineer. He's into pinball. He works at a pinball place, and we talked to him. TJ came on board. He started design. This might have been 2013. I forget when he came on board. But anyway, we had a mechanical engineer drawing the mechanical stuff in SolidWorks for all these things and iterated over the course of five years. 2015, 2016, we had what we called a production prototype. Oh, by the way, in 2013, we thought we would be like everyone else who in the industry was coming out of the woodwork, and we announced a preorder. We're going to have this really cool machine. It's going to be awesome. It's going to be a multi-game thing. Let's get some preorders. And we sold, right out of the chute, 10 or 15 machines that we didn't deliver for like four years because we were still iterating the design. But we gave them all a good deal. We said – we had the whole concept. We said for – I think it was $10,000 at the time. If you pay up front, you're going to get two playfields and three mini games. You're basically going to get a lot of stuff. So those people, because they eventually got their machines, got great deals on the early P3s because it cost way more to do that than we had time to do. to them. So, you know, for those of us in product development, the timescales you're talking about aren't actually that long, like one year, two years, five years, like it can take that long to bring product to market. Why don't you talk for the listener who doesn't know product development as well? What were some of the challenges you were having and what was it that, like if somebody was to say that was a long period of time, talk about what were the things that needed to happen in order to get the business off the ground and the product off the ground. I think this is probably a good comparison. It might not be. You can tell me your opinion. If you took two guys, stuck them in a garage, and said, design a car from scratch, how long would it take? You could design the basics of it, the frame or the very basics of steering and wheel movement and braking and stuff, make it a mechanically controlled car probably in six months, a year maybe, and then you'd iterate on it for another year or so and improve stuff, get better quality components and put it together. But we're talking something as complex as an automobile, but also with technology that had never been done before in pinball. So I think we could probably build any custom homebrew game in two years, maybe just two guys in a garage, probably two years fully start to start to finish, fully printed, clear-coded playfields and full rules and graphics and artwork and all that stuff. But we were doing stuff that had never been done before, still hasn't been done again. And we had to iterate on that repeatedly. In product development, usually you either have a very well-defined set of requirements and you can design directly to those requirements, which usually change while you're doing it anyway. But we didn't start with requirements. We kind of started with an idea and that idea evolved as we were going. So we got far enough and then we're like, OK, let's add let's add the modular playfields. OK, let's add an infinity ball trough, a ball trough that can kick up balls from any position underneath the play field. OK, let's add. And you name the feature that the P3 has. We just kept adding them and it was a long process. You've got the built in scoops and walls. You've got the ball tracking. You've got the play field screen, which has its own set of challenges. And like you said earlier, you had to design new flipper mechs because, like you said, monitors typically don't like holes drilled in them. So speaking of which, a little anecdote. We were at the 2012 Pinball Expo with our first prototype. The who's who of pinball came over and played it. Roger Sharp, Greg Kamek, Dennis Nordman, so many people came over and played it. And they're like, this is really cool, but I have one piece of advice for you. They all said the exact same thing. Use off-the-shelf components for everything. I mean, that sounds great, but I can't do what I want to do with off-the-shelf components. There simply aren't off-the-shelf components to do what I want to do. Well, I mean, Jerry, you have a choice. You can use off-the-shelf flippers and mechanisms and then get a completely custom monitor, or you can use an off-the-shelf monitor and build your own custom flippers. I mean, you got to do one or the other. So we went the route of redesigning a thing that had been reliable and working for 40, 50 years. And we we eventually came to an iteration point where things were solid and stable. But for the first few years of prototypes, the flippers were a major risk. So for the people I've interviewed on the podcast that had brought something to market, One of the things we talk about is the design for manufacturing, design for repair, service, etc. I will say, having had to do some work on the P3, because like in everything in pinball, things break, things need to get fixed. Your folks have been absolutely helpful in doing that, by the way, both TJ and Nick, as well as your direct help in a few cases. What I will say is it is most definitely now today built for serviceability. It is a very easy machine to service. it's you know the couple things you have to learn that are different than a more traditional machine but that's that that that's normal were you at this point as you were innovating over these five years also designing for manufacturability or was that something that happened after you had your let's call your your your your go-to-market working prototype no it was it was always part of the consideration we knew i mean it was 20 obviously we founded with money in 2012 expecting to build a product. So the reason TJ started, the reason we brought him on board was to help us take these concepts and these hand-built prototypes and turn them into a manufacturable product. Mind you, we didn't 100% understand the complexities of designing mechanical items for a pinball machine that would survive the types of things pinball machines need to survive. But iteratively, we improved the quality, but we always intended to make it manufacturable and reliable for manufacturing. The serviceability was kind of a byproduct of the modularity. The system itself, because it's got modular playfields and because we wanted to be able to change the flipper interface, we wanted to be able to pull out one set of flippers and put in a completely different set of flippers, which we haven't done yet. We don't do. But we made all those slide in and out. We started the whole design with the extruded aluminum side rails and kind of like an oven rack, the sides of an oven rack. So we can slide in the flippers. We can slide in the display. We can slide in the features underneath. That all kind of came out of our desire to want to change up the functionality over time. It turns out that's very serviceable. Yeah, it's extremely serviceable. I will say on my other machines that I have, when I've got to make a fix to lift up the play field and like work underneath the machine with the play field on, with the potential of it coming down to my head, like it's a scary thing. Here, you know, I pull the module, I'll put it on the little portable table I have, and I can just work on it there. I will also say as an aside, a number of the documents that you folks have online and that have been passed to me, it looks like TJ had actually made some of them as manufacturing and servicing documents So it definitely is helpful You know I looked on the Discord this morning As far as I can tell, there are seven modules and 15 downloadable add-on games, which are a total of 22 games. Talk to me about, you know, getting that first module out the door and then, you know, getting commercial shipments out and then building up to the seven modules, you know, including third-party modules as well as licensed modules. Yeah, so first of all, how cool is it? There's 20-plus games for this thing that we built, 20-plus experiences that people can have out of this single machine that they can buy. It's like the entire vision realized. And all of those experiences are physical and digital experiences, which is a really magical thing. If people have not played Michael Ocean's most recent game, they absolutely have to. Dungeon Door Defender, it truly to me at least, it put goosebumps on my back when I played it because it really showed the power of physical and digital. That's a $200 add-on. Every single game for the system, and I know I just put on the marketing hat for a second, the sales hat, you can buy Weird Al's Museum of Naturalities $3,500. It's not $10,000. You already have the system. It's just a small add-on expense for whole new experiences. But we started with the plan to launch Cannon Lagoon, Lexi Lightspeed, and Cosmic Heart Racing together, all with Barnyard and Rocks as two minigames at the same time. And again, we started pre-selling 2013. We didn't ship until 2017. So around the 2016 timeframe, we're like, oh, crap, we can't really do all these at the same time. It's going to take us forever. So then we serialized and we came up with Lexi Lightspeed first, which, oh, by the way, is a Dennis Nordman design. He loved the machine at Expo when he saw it, and we got him to help. So we launched with Lexi Lightspeed. I think we came out with Rocks and Barnyard and Cannon Lagoon shortly thereafter, and then it was about another year or two later when we came out with Cosmic Kart Racing. But the release of Cosmic Kart Racing was a second full physical, really cool pinball experience on the exact same platform that people at the time could buy it for. It might have been $2,100 or $2,500. I don't remember, but it was this incremental cost to add an entirely different game. We always had the idea to do a third party development kit. I don't actually know when we first started releasing that kit, when we first released that kit. But we came out with, well, I guess it would be Grand Slam Rally was the first third party game developed. It was developed for the Cannon Lagoon playfield. it must have been 2017, 2018 when that came out. So clearly we had the dev kit out right around then. Friend of the company, Jimmy Lippo from 86 Pixels wrote Grand Slam Rally. He helps us do a whole lot of things, but he also took an interest in the system itself and thought it'd be cool to write a game. Let's see. 2017, 2018 that came out. We build, was it Heist after that? I think so. Heist was 2020, right when COVID hit. So yeah, it took us two years after Cosmic Heart Racing to develop our next full game kit, which was Heist. We had Steven come on as the creative director. He drove in to, at the time we were down south in a manufacturing facility in South Austin. We talk about Heist, the concepts, the rules. And we took two years. We didn't have a schedule, right? We're not like, we need this out by X date. It was when this thing is ready, when it's polished, when it's ready to go. And it came out March 2020, right before COVID hit. And that kind of shut us down. The good news is people were still buying pinball games during COVID. The bad news is we didn't really have the opportunity to get into the manufacturing facility and build these games and ship them. So it was kind of a tough time. But regardless, throughout the early 2020s, it was a big growth period for us because we were coming out with Heist and other people were starting to develop minigames. We developed a couple more minigames of our own. We started adding features like Bluetooth support for headphones and things. We came out with the profile system where we started documenting the profile system, lots of new features that no pinball machine had ever really supported before. And then we came out after that with our first license title, which was Weird Al. And then, you know, in terms of innovation, you've also got the head-to-head play with Cosmic Heart Racing. Yes. You know, although NBA Fast Break did have it for a serial connection between two machines, the fact that you can play this over the Internet is super awesome. Yeah, and you still can. Anyone who got Cosmic Heart Racing can right now just load up a game, host a game, or join one that's hosted by someone. I mean, our community is small enough now where usually you got to get a few friends together and coordinate and get online and do it. But yeah, you can do that today. And there's a Discord channel specifically for Cosmic Heart Racing matchmaking, which works just great. So can you talk a little bit about how you got the Weird Al license and what that did for the growth of Multimorphic? Yeah, everyone knows the power of a license in the pinball market. We were coming out with games so far that had been licensed, and the reason they were unlicensed is because we didn't have any money. We had a bunch of people. Oh, by the way, I didn't say, but a lot of our developers, in fact, all of our developers were people who saw what we were doing early on and reached out and said, this is super cool. I want to help. Stephen Silver reached out. BJ Wilson from New Zealand, he said, this is super cool. I had similar ideas. I want to do something. I want to help. And he's written a lot of our framework software. He wrote the first version of Rocks. Rory Cernuto we met at Pacific Pinball Expo, and I think he just graduated his game design school and wanted to help. So anyway, all these people reached out and wanted to help. We had this team of people who weren't making any money with us. I wasn't making any money. I was still working for free. I'm still basically working for free. I'm trying to make this thing successful. We all kind of shared the risk, and we will all eventually hopefully share some kind of reward. but all of us put this thing together. We came out with Heist and realized it sold okay. It sold okay for us for a new machine with a growing community of people that thought it was cool. It didn't sell like other licensed titles were selling in the industry and we knew we were putting so much time and effort and our savings into this company that we needed to do something bigger. So Stephen and I, well, the whole team kind of talks about, always throws out idea for licenses and talks through them but I don't know if it was Steven or or me who said hey what about weird Al and we both thought it'd be super cool and reached out to his agent who sent us to his manager and his manager was super friendly and helpful and we decided to do it that was just kind of pretty organic we reached out to him he thought it'd be cool we had some back and forth about concepts and early on items, but we came up with the museum concept. We picked the songs. He didn't veto. He vetoed one. Well, he didn't veto one. He said there was one song on our early list that he'd rather us pick something else, but if we really wanted to, he'd let us do it. And it just kind of super nice guy, super easy to deal with, super helpful. The problem with that one was the music licensing. The music licensing for that game required us to talk to a lot of different publishers because we yes yes he didn't technically have to get permission to make his music but we absolutely had to get permission to make a game with the music that was based on many other artists work so it was it was a learning process for us but the game is amazing the the music's amazing scott denisi helped with the audio package michael ocean who's a weird al super fan i reached out to him early on and said, hey, we have a Weird Al license. He's like, oh my god. I'm in. It's something very special. So Weird Al, like many of your customers, was the reason that I ended up buying P3. It had been on my radar for a while. I'm a huge Weird Al fan. That tipped the scales for me. But I will say, going back, I got the modules basically in reverse of the way that you guys designed and implemented them. And so I got Weird Al first, and then Heist showed up later. I personally actually like Heist a little bit better than than weird elf just because of the character development in it um i'm i and i like the fan layout of it it's it just it just resonates with me um but then going back like i'm a huge Dennis Nordman fan and the fact that lexi is designed by Dennis Nordman like i you know i i will rotate those three games pretty pretty regularly um and it's it's it's awesome that you got that license uh and and i will you know like i said the character development in both Lexi and Heist for that matter are really, really, really good. So, you know, you've, you know, you've built out the company over, over just over a decade. You know, you've, you've talked about some, some highs and, you know, what are, what are some lows? What are some things that, you know, you would take as, as, as lessons learned? And if you, if you have lessons for other people who want to go down the, the maker to market journey, or even the custom journey, what are some lessons you would give them? Oh, geez. The obvious one is what I said earlier. To build a company like this, you either better commit a decade of your life to it with no pay and no free time, because this literally still is a 16-hour day job for me, almost as much for my wife, Sarah, who helps on the business side of things. $2 million in 2012 would have been a good start. Today, maybe $5 million. I don't know. If you're going to go out and get investment to build a pinball company, I wouldn't do it for probably $2 million anymore. It would take a lot more. The amount of money you'll spend in prototyping and the licensing and building out a factory and doing all this stuff is significant. And if you don't have money, you're doing it with your time and effort. and hopefully you've got friends who are willing to help you because it's just too much for one or two people. So there's the business side of things. The challenges to build up a business with no resources is hard for me to describe how difficult that is. The obvious second one is pinball machines are extremely complicated things. 2,500 unique parts, 4,000 total parts in a machine or whatever. And if one part, if one single screw falls out or isn't put in or whatever, then the feature that that's holding together doesn't work and the experience for a customer is ruined. You as a new customer, you get a brand new machine. If it's missing one screw and whatever actuator doesn't move, it's like, I can't play this game. This is terrible. I hate this experience. so the the challenge to create a high quality product that works for customers when they receive it is enormous and you read all these threads about man i got machine from whatever manufacturer and it's terrible they have terrible qc because i got it and i don't know the coil stop broke or um something was wired incorrectly and and i relate that back to our own experiences we've got customers who receive their machines and if something doesn't work right the p3 is new It's different. It does things differently. So they can't even lean on their own experience with traditional pinball machines to say, oh, I can. No worries. I have 10 other machines. I can just fix this. Usually it's like, oh, my God, this is a black box to me. Let me call up Multimorphic Support and tell them I can't play the game that I bought. So customer experiences related to quality are incredibly challenging. And doing that on top of a machine with no money made it extra challenging. We're at the point now where we understand how to build a quality machine, but we have people working for us. And people are humans, and humans make mistakes, and things happen. And all you can do is deal with those and move forward and try to make sure they don't happen again. Yeah, I hear you. Your analogy earlier on it being like designing a car, I think is spot on. That many moving parts, they all have to work together. If one doesn't work, the whole thing doesn't work and the experience goes down the gutter. And the fact that you said what you said, which is the customer experience is job one, and that's your top job is job one. I've lived that. For the things that work great straight out of the box, that was awesome. For the things that I had to reach out to your folks, you guys have been nothing but awesome in getting back to me. I feel like you were standing right there beside me. And you and Nick and TJ, everybody who has helped, and the people on the forums as well. Ian, who's offered his free time to help, or Gamakot, I should say. The other thing is, you talked about all this band of folks that you brought together, and a lot of them have released their own games or experiences on the P3. And I think this goes back to one of the things you said very early on in the interview, which was when you realized you were working for, I'm paraphrasing here, when you were working for someone else and how they weren't necessarily taking care of you and didn't care how much time you were spending, I can see that you've changed, you've brought a different culture to the way that the multi-morphic core builds out games, builds out experiences, works together. And that's pretty awesome as well. Thank you. Thank you for recognizing. It's tough and we're still an immature company in the grand scheme of things. We still need to come out with bigger titles and build the community bigger and put out more educational material and help people do these things. So I still see us very much in the risk part of the risk-reward equation. So the people that are helping us are still helping us with the hopes that one day this is going to be largely successful. And I am as well. We're still putting in all these hours because we think we can make this thing what we originally thought, which is a machine, a system that has a place in this community for the long haul. Yeah, and with Final Resistance not coming out, you guys focusing on, as has been said in a few places, on looking at what you can do to double down even more so on some quality things, as was in your letter, delaying the release of a couple modules to go look at some of those fundamentals and what you can do even better is awesome. I'm like, I'm rooting for you. I know there's many other people who are rooting for you. I, you know, I know that there's been ups and downs. Let's take the ups and learn from the downs. And, you know, I want to see you be successful. Like I said, you've got a customer who's super happy. And everybody that I bring over and show the machine, it's like, it's the machine they want to gravitate to compared to everything else that I have in my lineup. Yeah. So the only thing that even can hold water is my virtual pinball. but that's like, yeah, well, no, but that, that, the, the ability to, the reason is because you can switch out titles very, very easily. But the one thing they say is it's not a mechanical pinball machine. And when they see the P3, that's when the magic light goes off. Um, Jerry, listen, I really appreciate your time. Um, I, I appreciate, you know, how, how, you know, honest and, and, and raw and, and, you know, uh, uh, uh, how, how you walked through the journey, um, how you spent the time on the journey. Thank you very much for taking the time for me and the listeners. You bet. I appreciate what you do for the community. I love hearing everyone's story who's been on your podcast. It's great from the homebrew perspective to see all these people getting involved and everyone's got a story. Everyone started somewhere. Everyone's doing homebrew pinball. All pinball is very difficult. And everyone who's successful at it is a successful one because they're a hardworking individual and two because a lot of people are helping them. Yeah, I think it's very well said. Well, listen, thank you very much. Dan, thank you. thanks for joining the podcast. Thanks for listening. And I can't wait to see what you make. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. _(Acquisition: youtube_groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_ --- *Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 15567bfb-fb84-45fa-ad10-1dd90450dfa9*