# Steve Ritchie – The Mullet Years **Source:** Silverball Chronicles **Type:** podcast_episode **Published:** 2020-08-01 **Duration:** 130m 0s **Beat:** Pinball **URL:** http://thepinballnetwork555350716.wordpress.com/?p=276 --- ## Analysis Silverball Chronicles hosts David Dennis and Ron Hallett discuss Steve Ritchie 11 era (mid-1980s), focusing on High Speed (1986), his comeback game after a three-year break from pinball. The episode covers Ritchie's innovative contributions including the first complete song in a pinball game, alphanumeric displays, and crucially, auto-percentaging—a system that dynamically adjusts replay scores based on player skill level. The hosts emphasize Ritchie's creative collaboration with programmer Larry DeMar, whose engineering brilliance was essential to realizing Ritchie's design vision, though their working relationship was famously tumultuous. ### Key Claims - [HIGH] High Speed (1986) was the first System 11 game and first Williams pinball to use alphanumeric displays, play a complete song, implement auto-percentaging, and feature a jackpot only available during multiball. — _David Dennis and Ron Hallett detailing High Speed technical firsts during game breakdown segment_ - [HIGH] Auto-percentaging was the single biggest innovation from an operator's perspective, dynamically adjusting replay score thresholds based on player skill level to maintain engagement across different venues. — _Ron Hallett citing Tim Arnold (Las Vegas Pinball Museum/Pinball Pete's operator) as identifying this as the biggest innovation_ - [HIGH] High Speed sold 17,080 units and kicked off a major resurgence in pinball after the mid-1980s slump. — _Dennis providing production and sales figures during game specifications_ - [HIGH] Steve Ritchie and Larry DeMar had a famously contentious creative relationship but produced High Speed and Black Knight together—Ritchie acknowledges DeMar's exceptional contribution and describes their conflicts as 'knock down drag-out fights' that ultimately improved the games. — _Dennis quoting Steve Ritchie 2005 interview about the collaboration dynamic_ - [MEDIUM] Larry DeMar invented the jackpot feature and was responsible for much of the rules programming, alphanumeric display implementation, and system innovations attributed to System 11. — _Dennis citing a 2005 Steve Ritchie interview attributing multiple innovations to Larry DeMar_ - [HIGH] High Speed was internally nicknamed 'High Speed' at Williams due to budget and development concerns, including a complete restart after three months of whitewood development. — _Dennis discussing High Speed development challenges and Steve Ritchie quote about throwing out three months of work_ - [MEDIUM] Steve Ritchie was a 'Williams purist' who refused to design any games under the Bally name after Williams acquired Bally in 1988. — _Dennis noting Ritchie's brand loyalty during the Bally/Williams discussion_ - [HIGH] System 11 represented a shift from System 7/9's separate MPU and driver boards (connected via problematic 40-pin interconnect) to an integrated single-board architecture. — _Ron Hallett explaining technical board set differences between system generations_ - [HIGH] Steve Ritchie took a three-year break from pinball (roughly 1982–1985), during which he ran his own video game company called King Video Designs and worked on a 3D game called Devastator. — _Dennis summarizing Ritchie's career gap and return to Williams in late 1985_ - [HIGH] High Speed was based on Steve Ritchie real-life 1979 police chase incident in a Porsche 928 on Interstate 5 near Lodi, California, where he was clocked at 146 mph (234 km/h). — _Dennis recounting Ritchie's famous origin story for High Speed theme and mechanics_ ### Notable Quotes > "He did much more than the normal output and imaginative contribution than any others I've worked with. We had knocked down drag-out fights, and the game always won. At the end of the project, we weren't speaking to each other. We patched up and forgot about it and remained good friends today." > — **Steve Ritchie (quoted by David Dennis)**, ~mid-episode during High Speed discussion > _Characterizes the legendary creative tension between Ritchie and Larry DeMar and how conflict drove innovation_ > "I think he lost touch with the average player. And I had to beg him, can we please win an extra ball on my own play field?" > — **Steve Ritchie (quoted by David Dennis)**, ~late in High Speed segment > _Illustrates how DeMar's expert-level design instincts sometimes conflicted with accessibility for casual players, and Ritchie's role in balancing the design_ > "Steve Ritchie rode the wave from the bottom of the industry in the mid-1980s all the way to the top again like a Honda dirt bike made of quarters and fueled by pinball players' tears." > — **David Dennis**, ~early episode during scene-setting > _Poetic summary of Ritchie's comeback arc and impact on the industry during this era_ > "I think we put in a lot of new things as the Whitewoods progressed. At one point, Larry and I were so disgusted after three months of work that we decided to throw everything out and start over. It was one of the smartest moves we made." > — **Steve Ritchie (quoted by David Dennis)**, ~mid-episode during High Speed development discussion > _Reveals the iterative, sometimes painful design process and the willingness to abandon significant work for a better result_ > "The most significant System 11 memory would be the first System 11 game, which would be High Speed. It pretty much started all of this. Started the uptick in pinball. Space Shuttle kept the lights on, but High Speed brought it to the next level." > — **Ron Hallett**, ~early episode during personal memories segment > _Frames High Speed's industry impact and its role in ending the mid-1980s pinball downturn_ > "Auto-percentaging is the single biggest first. As far as an operator. Because that's who's buying these machines, right?" > — **Ron Hallett**, ~mid-episode during High Speed innovations breakdown > _Highlights the operator-centric perspective on innovation and the gap between player and business priorities_ > "They would get out just at the right time...His timing was always good." > — **David Dennis (about Larry DeMar)**, ~late in High Speed segment > _Summarizes DeMar's career moves—leaving video games, returning to Williams, developing WPC, exiting before the industry collapse, pivoting to slot machine software_ > "If you got a pinball machine, you would set what the score needed for a replay...If you put this game on a location with a bunch of good players, they'd just be getting replays all over the place." > — **Ron Hallett**, ~mid-episode explaining auto-percentaging mechanics > _Illustrates the operator pain point that auto-percentaging solved and why it was revolutionary_ ### Entities | Name | Type | Context | |------|------|---------| | Steve Ritchie | person | Legendary pinball designer, 'King of Flow,' returning to Williams in late 1985 after three-year break; designed High Speed (1986) and collaborated with Larry DeMar on System 11 era innovations | | Larry DeMar | person | Programmer and engineer at Williams Electronic Games; invented jackpot feature, implemented alphanumeric displays and auto-percentaging; had tumultuous creative partnership with Steve Ritchie on High Speed and Black Knight; later developed WPC system and slot machine software | | David Dennis | person | Co-host of Silverball Chronicles podcast; leads research and historical narrative; primarily discusses pinball history and game design rather than gameplay experience | | Ron Hallett | person | Co-host of Silverball Chronicles podcast; collector and relatively new to pinball hobby; provides operator and practical gameplay perspectives; attended Slam Tilt streaming event with his father | | High Speed | game | First System 11 game (January 1986), Williams; 17,080 units sold; theme based on Steve Ritchie's real police chase incident; introduced complete song, alphanumeric displays, auto-percentaging, and multiball-only jackpot features | | Williams Electronic Games | company | Major pinball manufacturer where Steve Ritchie returned to design in late 1985; developed System 11 board set; acquired Bally in 1988 but continued producing games under Williams name | | Bally | company | Pinball manufacturer acquired by Williams in 1988; Steve Ritchie refused to design games under the Bally name after the acquisition | | King Video Designs | company | Steve Ritchie's video game company during his three-year break from pinball (circa 1982–1985); Ritchie worked on a 3D game called Devastator there | | Mark Sprenger | person | Artwork designer on High Speed (1986) | | Eugene Jarvis | person | Sound designer on High Speed; legendary Williams engineer known for Space Shuttle, Firepower, and Gorgar; worked with Larry DeMar on video game development | | Bill Parod | person | Sound designer on High Speed; prominent in System 11 era sound design at Williams | | System 11 | product | Williams board set/platform from mid-1980s; featured integrated single-board MPU/driver architecture, alphanumeric displays, enhanced flasher support; replaced problematic System 7/9 multi-board design | | Python Anghelo | person | Artwork contributor on High Speed (1986); subject of Silverball Chronicles episode (mentioned) | | Tim Arnold | person | Operator and collector; ran Pinball Pete's arcade in Michigan for years; runs Las Vegas Pinball Museum; cited by Ron Hallett as identifying auto-percentaging as the biggest System 11 innovation | | George Gomez | person | Modern Stern Pinball designer; David Dennis and Ron Hallett hypothetically contrast his work style with Steve Ritchie's willingness to scrap three months of development | | John Borg | person | Modern Stern Pinball designer; hypothetically contrasted with Steve Ritchie regarding design iteration and restart practices (in Ninja Turtles discussion) | | Pat Lawlor | person | Legendary pinball designer; System 11 era contemporary of Steve Ritchie; subject of upcoming Silverball Chronicles multi-part episode | | Barry Oursler | person | System 11 era designer; Ron Hallett mentions as significant figure alongside Ritchie and Lawlor | | Black Knight | game | Williams System 11 game co-designed by Steve Ritchie and Larry DeMar; represents their creative collaboration alongside High Speed | | Space Shuttle | game | Williams pinball predecessor to High Speed; characterized as 'keeping the lights on' at Williams before High Speed's industry impact | | Silverball Chronicles | organization | | | VidKids | company | Video game company started by Larry DeMar and Eugene Jarvis after leaving Williams; they later returned to Williams to develop video games for the company | | Zynga | company | Mobile gaming company founded by Joe Kamenkao; acquired Spooky Cool Designs (Larry DeMar's social gaming company) | | IPDB (Internet Pinball Database) | organization | Online database containing photos and documentation of pinball machines, including High Speed's discarded whitewood prototype | | Slam Tilt | organization | Twitch streaming channel where Ron Hallett and his father (Ron Hallett Sr.) streamed pinball gameplay during Ron's week off | ### Signals - **[design_innovation]** Auto-percentaging was a groundbreaking operator-centric innovation that dynamically adjusts replay score thresholds based on player skill level. Instead of static replay thresholds that either generate too many replays in high-skill venues or too few in casual venues, the system continuously recalibrates, improving venue profitability and player retention across different skill demographics. (confidence: high) — Ron Hallett and David Dennis both emphasize auto-percentaging as the single biggest innovation; Tim Arnold (operator/collector) cited as confirming this perspective; mechanism explained in detail as setting percentages for replay frequency rather than fixed score amounts - **[design_innovation]** System 11 consolidated the separate MPU and driver boards used in System 7/9 (connected via problematic 40-pin interconnects) into a single integrated board, reducing complexity and improving reliability, though this created maintenance challenges later via multiplexing complications. (confidence: high) — Ron Hallett explains the technical architecture shift; notes that System 11 became 'a pain in the ass to work with' due to multiplexing of flashers and coils; evolution from mini-boards with resistors to eventually a single interconnect board leading to WPC replacement - **[design_innovation]** High Speed was the first Williams pinball to implement alphanumeric displays, enabling initial entry and real-time scoring displays rather than static mechanical scoreboards. This was a significant UX improvement that enhanced operator appeal by enabling personalized high-score tracking. (confidence: high) — Identified as first Williams alphanumeric implementation; Larry DeMar credited with implementing the technology; characterized as enabling real high scores and player initials entry - **[design_innovation]** High Speed was the first pinball game to play a complete musical piece/song rather than discrete sound effects or beeps, establishing audio as a narrative and gameplay tool. (confidence: high) — Listed as one of High Speed's primary firsts; David Dennis and Ron Hallett both reference complete song capability - **[personnel_signal]** Steve Ritchie and Larry DeMar engaged in a highly contentious creative partnership characterized by 'knock down drag-out fights,' yet their conflict-driven process produced exceptional results (High Speed, Black Knight). This signals a design philosophy valuing passionate disagreement over consensus, with Ritchie pushing for player accessibility while DeMar favored expert-level depth. (confidence: high) — Direct Steve Ritchie quotes describing tumultuous relationship; Dennis noting DeMar 'lost touch with the average player' and Ritchie having to 'beg' for accessible features; characterization that 'the game always won' through conflict resolution - **[product_strategy]** High Speed represented a high-stakes comeback title for Steve Ritchie after a three-year absence from pinball. Internal nickname 'High Cost' and the decision to scrap three months of whitewood development signals significant R&D investment and risk tolerance in the game's design, contrasting with modern design efficiency practices. (confidence: high) — Dennis notes High Speed was nicknamed 'High Cost' internally; Ritchie quote about discarding three months of work and restarting; characterization of long development cycle; IPDB photo of rejected whitewood prototype - **[historical_signal]** High Speed's release in January 1986 and strong sales (17,080 units) reversed the mid-1980s pinball industry downturn. Ron Hallett characterizes it as the game that 'brought it to the next level' after Space Shuttle merely 'kept the lights on,' signaling a critical inflection point in pinball's survival and resurgence. (confidence: high) — Ron Hallett directly compares Space Shuttle (sustenance) to High Speed (resurgence); 17,080 units described as 'smash'; framing of mid-80s as period of struggle that High Speed reversed - **[industry_signal]** Steve Ritchie refused to design games under the Bally brand after Williams' 1988 acquisition of Bally, maintaining a 'Williams purist' identity. This signals designer autonomy concerns and brand reputation dynamics within the corporate restructuring. (confidence: medium) — Dennis states Ritchie was a 'Williams purist' who would not do Bally games; note about possible Williams tattoo as symbol of loyalty (characterized as 'may or may not be true') - **[design_philosophy]** Steve Ritchie and Larry DeMar's willingness to discard three months of whitewood development and restart from scratch reflects a design philosophy prioritizing final quality over sunk-cost adherence. This contrasts implicitly with modern Stern practices (hypothetical about Ninja Turtles suggesting such restarts would not occur). (confidence: medium) — Ritchie quote: 'At one point, Larry and I were so disgusted after three months of work that we decided to throw everything out and start over. It was one of the smartest moves we made.'; Dennis and Hallett noting modern designers (Gomez, Borg) would not do this; reference to IPDB photo of rejected whitewood - **[content_signal]** Silverball Chronicles employs a multi-part episode strategy for deep designer retrospectives (Steve Ritchie = 3 parts, Pat Lawlor = 3 parts, Barry Ousler = 2 parts), with typical 3-hour recording sessions edited into shorter segments. This reflects audience demand for comprehensive historical coverage despite editorial complexity. (confidence: high) — Dennis and Hallett discuss multi-episode planning; notes about listener requests for next Steve Ritchie episode; explanation of three-hour recording sessions; acknowledgment of research rabbit holes leading to long content requiring splitting - **[community_signal]** High engagement on Silverball Chronicles social media (Facebook comments, suggestions) and listener mailbag reviews indicate strong demand for in-depth pinball history content. The podcast's multi-platform strategy (Facebook, Twitch, TWIP database, custom merchandise) suggests a growing community infrastructure for long-form historical analysis. (confidence: medium) — Dennis and Hallett noting 'tons of engagement' on social media; multiple positive mailbag reviews; merchandise sales (shirts, mugs, stickers); presence on Twitch (Slam Tilt), Facebook, TWIP database; listener requests for specific episodes - **[personnel_signal]** Larry DeMar's career trajectory exemplifies opportunistic exit timing and skill redeployment: left Williams during video game boom (started VidKids with Eugene Jarvis), returned to Williams for WPC system development, exited before industry collapse (1999), pivoted to slot machine software, and now operates as gaming consultant. This signals an elite engineer's ability to recognize industry inflection points. (confidence: high) — Dennis detailing DeMar's career moves: video games, VidKids, WPC, slot machine software, casino consulting; characterization of 'always good timing' and 'getting out just at the right time'; notes on Spooky Cool Designs and Zynga acquisition --- ## Transcript Northern Michigan has a way of surprising people. You come for a golf weekend and you stay for the wine. Plan a beach trip and discover a James Beard recognized food scene. With non-stop flights from Boston to Traverse City, Michigan on JetBlue, Delta and American Airlines, getting there is easier than ever. About two hours in the air and suddenly you're golfing, sailing, sipping and soaking it all in. Fly non-stop to TBC Cherry Capital Airport and start your Northern Michigan getaway. Book now and start planning at tbcairport.com. That's tbcairport.com. Today, we'll attempt to defeat one thought impossible, overcoming high-interest credit card debt. It requires merely one thing, a SoFi personal loan. With it, you could save big on interest charges by consolidating into one low fixed-rate monthly payment. Defy high-interest debt with a SoFi personal loan. Visit SoFi.com slash DUT to learn more. Loans originated by SoFi Bank N.A., member FGIC. Terms and conditions apply. NMLS 696891. The Pinball Network is online. Launching Silverball Chronicles. Okay, so there's like a... Ah! I just hit myself in the face with the mic. Hello, everybody. I'm David Dennis, and this is Silver Ball Chronicles. With me this month is my co-host, who can't stop being awesome, Ron Hallett. What's up, fella? Yep, still awesome. That's me. Can't wait to talk about some Steve Ritchie. This is you. We are in your wheelhouse. My favorite designer. Beauty. Yeah, it looks like our listeners really want to talk about Steve Ritchie. Steve Ritchie has had a rabid response for us to make sure that we squeeze this in. In our first episode, our pilot episode, we went through Steve Ritchie's early career. You know, that was sort of a feeling out the podcasting world. We changed our email address, and as pilots usually are, it's a bit rough. We're into episode six now. We're moving right along. And I think we're going to settle into a better groove for the second episode for Steve Ritchie. That's for sure. Well, everyone I've talked to about this podcast asks me, when are you doing the next Steve Ritchie episode? Yeah, I had people mention that a couple of times as well online or through message or things like that. Like, when is it coming up? And what we do is we take this philosophy is that we want them to want it. We want them to crave it. The other thing that we've run into is as I'm writing out a lot of these episodes, doing a lot of the research, is they become really long and bloated because I'll end up going on rabbit holes and research holes when I'll do some of the research in my spare time. And because of that, we've had to break a few of these out. So, for example, our Pat Lawler will probably be three episodes, just like our Steve Ritchie episode. I'm pretty sure our Barry Ousler episode, that's going to be two episodes. So there's a lot of that happening. There's a lot of rabbit holes and a lot of interesting facts that we can go into. As well as there's a lot of folks, Ron, that don't have enough content or enough interviews for their own individual show. So I'll stick them in with somebody else to sort of stretch it out a bit. What people don't know is our typical recording sessions are right around three hours. Not a lot of fun to edit, which is a very big cliche. It's very true. It's not fun to edit. So what have you been doing since last month? What's going on in the LeBron world? Well, picked up another game. This is exciting, folks. What game is this? Well, what was our last episode? Gottliebs, right? So I got a Gottlieb. I didn't get a System 1, though. So you didn't get one of the big three from our previous episode? No, I did not get the Sinbad, Countdown, and Joker Poker. I did not get any of those three. I got my, one of my, probably my main Grail Gottlieb pin I was able to acquire. Pink Panther. No, and it's not Force 2. It's not Rocky. It is a System 80 game. Actually, it's a System 80A game. Ooh. Which I'm doing the flippers right now and can't believe I have to try to knock this stupid roll pin out to just do a flipper rebuild. So I'm already annoyed. It's perfect. But the game in question is a Papa favorite, Alien Star. Yeah, very cool. System ADA. Very cool art. Kind of neat rule set. It's the ultimate do the thing. Yep, it is do the thing. Mmm, very good. Well, I've switched out the LEDs in my Simpsons pinball party, which I picked up. I have pinball OCD, so I can't have mixed match bulbs. Oh, so by switching out, you mean you put the LEDs in a better game. Oh. Very pleased with the Simpsons. It's a fun game. It's a different kind of game. It's not very flow-oriented. It has some of the best call-outs I have ever had. Oh, I see. For me, I love the theme. I just hate that play feel. I don't know what it is with Joe Balcer, but he can't make a left ramp to save his life. Joe Balcer. I'll never have him on the Krusty show. So, I mean, nobody's released any new games in the last little while. Ninja Turtles is still sort of the new kid on the block. J.J.P.'s gearing up their factories. So there's not really much exciting on that round. But if you really want to talk exciting, Ron Hallett Sr. joined you on the Slam Tilt streaming channel. Oh, yeah, we did a father and son stream because I had the week off. So it's like, come on down. We did it during the day. So you were one of the two people watching, I think. Yeah, so it was Ron Hallett Sr. He was wearing his sombrero playing. He schooled you a few times, particularly on The Getaway, which will be one of our topics today. I don't quite remember that, but okay. So go back and watch that. It's Slam Tilt from Twitch.tv, and you can see Ron get trounced. He spoke a lot more trash than I expected. Oh yeah, we do that all the time. He's a better player than me. He's the first pinhead, not me. Yeah, he's very good. I didn't start playing pinball until I was in my 30s. He was playing way before that. It's shocking. Shocking that he played pinball before then? You know, pinball did exist years ago. That's right. In the 1800s when he started. The trash talk that he gave you was pretty funny, especially when you couldn't, like, quite hear, because he was on the other side of the room. It was wonderful. But go spend some time on the Slam Tilt streaming channel over on Twitch. It was well worth your time. At least you could say he never remembers a time where they didn't have flippers. Because Humpty Dumpty was the year before he was born, so he could say, hey, they always had flippers. We've had a lot of engagement on our social media. It's been tons of fun. We're seeing lots of the same characters popping up. But if you haven't joined us over on Facebook, join us, have a good time, make a few comments, make some suggestions. Facebook.com slash Silverball Chronicles. Also, over on This Week in Pinball.com, they have their TWIP Pinball Promoters database. That's where you can leave a comment and find a bunch of new Twitch streams, YouTube channels, and podcasts. We would love for you to swing over there, give us a five-star review if you enjoy the show. That just helps others find us, so when they're searching, they're Googling around for new podcasts, that they're able to sort of see Silverball Chronicles, which is a little bit different in the podcasting world. All right, so we'll go into our mailbag. This is from Brian T. He says, each episode so far has been a home run. Thank you. I always wanted to dig more into the history of modern pinball and thankfully these guys are saving me the trouble of doing it myself. Do it yourself, Brian. Don't be so lazy. I love how much research and work these guys put into each show. That's all, David. Ron and Dave make a great team and play well off of each other. Dave makes me laugh at least a couple of times an episode and Ron is such an engaging historian. This is a podcast that has been missing in my life. Keep up the great work. That's great. Billy Why, he says, the show is great. I listened to it on a road trip and it kept me interested. The whole time. There isn't a lot of fluff, just a bunch of interesting takes on older pinball companies and personalities. T-shirts were on. I finally got my Silver Ball swag order. Yes, I've got, I'm actually wearing the shirt right now. All my old T-shirts, everything's gone. It's all Silver Ball swag, Silver Ball Chronicle shirts from here on out. I also got a mug and a few stickers. I have to say, if I was going to suggest that everybody else go and buy one, I figured I would buy kind of one of everything and see what the quality was. Pretty pleased, actually. Good quality shirts, great printing. Keeps me warm up here in these cold Canadian winters. Very good. And we don't make much off the swag, but if you enjoy the show and you need a new shirt and you want to support us, drop over there and pick up a shirt. Yeah, silverballswag.com. Just go ahead and click over and grab one. We've got corrections from our previous episode, Ron, and we didn't get a whole lot of corrections to our mailbag, which is silverballchronicles at gmail.com, but there is one person who had a lot of corrections who spoke to you, is that right? Yeah, Bruce said our System 1 episode had all kinds of errors. So I told him, like, well, send them in, we'd love to correct ourselves. But, of course, he's missed the deadline. He said he had a whole letter's worth of corrections. Of course he did. He's formally typing that up on his typewriter. Yep. And by the time he sends them in, we'll be two episodes ahead and everyone will forget about the System 1 episode. Exactly. So we're looking forward to all those corrections from him, and we'll bring those into another episode if there actually was any corrections, which I don't think there was. It was absolutely seamless and perfect with not an error in sight. So today's episode, this is a big deal. This is a big one. This is Steve Ritchie, the System 11 and Bally Williams era. Wow, there are some classics in this lineup, just like our last episode with Steve Ritchie, a major list of first ever innovations in pinball. And it's funny you say Bally Williams, because this is the, around 1988, Williams bought out Bally, so they started producing games with the Bally name. But you'll notice there were no Steve Ritchie Gaines under the Bally name. He was a Williams purist. He would not do any Bally games. He would not do anything with Bally on it. He would only do Williams. He had that tattoo on his arm, which may or may not be true. The mid-80s saw a world of social and economic unrest, which was reflected in pop culture and, of course, pinball. The baby boomers were entering their 40s, and a new generation was coming to age, Generation X. Music was changing, technology was changing, home computers had arrived, the Cold War was still a thing, pinball was back in a big way. Suddenly, in the mid-90s, home video games became the norm. The internet, or the information superhighway, arrived en masse. Gen X rolled out, went corporate, and extreme was spelled with an X instead of an E. Yeah, I remember the 90s, everything was extreme. Steve Ritchie rode the wave from the bottom of the industry in the mid-1980s all the way to the top again like a Honda dirt bike made of quarters and fueled by pinball players' tears. Through this awesome time in pinball, the best-selling designer ever continued to build his legacy, and you'll see in this episode once again redefine the industry as it struggled to survive. Steve Ritchie, the mullet years. First place to start, what is your favorite Steve Ritchie System 11 memory? Memory or game? Well, I mean, the game is stored in... Okay, well, if you want to be picky... You want to be picky? What's your favorite game? Favorite thing? Well, I mean, the most significant System 11 memory would be the first System 11 game, which would be High Speed. It pretty much started all of this. Started the uptick in pinball. So, Space Shuttle kept the lights on, but High Speed brought it to the next level. Yeah, I have a lot of fond memories of High Speed, but those are in sort of the rearview mirror, right? I wasn't around in the arcades around the mid-80s. I was hardly around in the mid-80s. All of that era is sort of me looking at it through the lens of the last couple of years where I've been in the hobby. When I think System 11, you know, I'm thinking, you know, Pat Lawler, I'm thinking Steve Ritchie, I'm thinking Barry Ousler, you know, those were really big things, but something about high speed is pretty cool. I really, really, really like that, and it would probably be one of the top three System 11s that I would want to buy, and that's probably because I don't have a lot of experience with them. But do you think Steve prefers his System 11 work to his WPC work? I don't know. I've never asked him that. Yeah, I'd love to find out because we had one person messages, Ahmed, and he said that Steve Ritchie's WPC work is his most fun, but his System 11 work is his most creative, which I thought was a very cool comment. So when we left the King of Flow in 1982, he had taken a step back from pinball and began running his own video game company called King Video Designs. And he continued to innovate in the video game space for a few years. Pinball has this way of sucking you back in. Yeah, he was working on a game called Devastator, which I believe was supposed to have some 3D elements to it. Yeah, Steve Ritchie's so neat. He must have a pretty cool mind. I've never met the man that would love to meet him. You've never really taken any major breaks from pinball, did you? Not really, but I didn't start until much later. I mean, I was in my 30s before I even played pinball. Yeah, I think somebody like Steve Ritchie taking a break from pinball, he's got all these ideas, the technology has changed again. I bet you he missed it. I bet you he wanted to get back. And really those mid-80s, there wasn't much going on in pinball, to be honest, and we'll get into that maybe in a couple of other episodes. But he was, I bet you he missed it and he wanted to get back, but he had this time off to sort of stew and develop and think and create, which I think is kind of cool. And for the next really decade, decade and a little bit, he really brought a lot of those ideas ahead to the forefront. Can you imagine, though, that the pressure that Steve Ritchie probably had to continue to design and innovate the way he had done when we speak about his earlier time at Williams? I don't think he felt pressure. Really? I think he put a lot of pressure on himself because he's made some amazing games. I don't think so. I don't think there was corporate pressure. I think he might have put pressure on himself. Nobody wants to come back and make a bunch of games that suck. In late 1985, Steve Ritchie was back at Williams after a three-year leave from pinball. So what do you do when you get back? You're like, ah, it's time to get back. It's time to get back. Let's get back and play some pinball. You continue. You just play the hits, right? You just pull out a similar layout or you pull out kind of an old theme that he's done before or something like that. Just to settle back in, right? No, that'll be the part three of the Steve Ritchie. Oh, okay. So there's some foreshadowing on that. Sorry, Steve. He's not going Brianetti. He's not laying it out like he's done before. Something familiar, just to get back in the groove because, I don't know, the paper is different they draw on now or something. He hasn't even invented the patented Picard Maneuver shot yet that he would use a lot. The greatest shot in pinball. Steve Ritchie, hell no, you make high speed. So first on the high speed stats, it's a driving police chase car theme. January 1986, it's a solid state System 11, the first System 11 which you mentioned before. Standard body machine, sells 17,080 units, Smash. Software by Larry Dammar, Black Knight, Adam's Family, those are some of his. Artwork by Mark Sprenger and of course a little bit by Python Anghelo, which you can hear about in our Python Anghelo episode. Sound by Larry Dammar, Eugene Jarvis and Bill Proud. So Jarvis, you'll remember him from things like Space Shuttle, Firepower, Gorgar. Proud, he was very, very big in the System 11 era with some of the games on the forward. One of his most famous ones being Pinball. Once again, Steve Ritchie creates a bunch of firsts. How does he keep doing that, Ron? How does he keep developing these ideas? Just stuff. He's innovative. Mind-boggling. So here's a list of the firsts. I'm just going to go down through the firsts, and you let me know what you think about each one, okay? First pinball game to play a complete song. Okay. First Williams pin to use alphanumeric displays. Which let them do a lot more. Specifically, you could put your initials in now. Yeah, you could have real high scores. Real high scores. First use of auto-percentaging in the solid-state game, which is for replay scores. That is the single biggest first. Oh. As far as an operator. Because that's who's buying these machines, right? Today, you and I are buying machines. Years ago, people with buyers did. I'd say Tim Arnold of the Las Vegas Pinball Museum. I mean, he operated his own place, Pinball Pete's, like, in Michigan for years and years. And he said this was the biggest innovation. So how does auto-percentaging work? Basically, the issue they always had is if you got a pinball machine, you would set what the score needed for a replay. And usually there would be a couple of different tiers, maybe 1 million and the next one might be 2 million. The problem is it was a set number. Like you set it and that was it. So if you put this game on a location with a bunch of good players, they'd just be getting replays all over the place. So then if you upped it, then your lesser players would never get a replay. So they wouldn't be happy. So, just like it says, it auto percentages. You put it in a location. If it's in it'll keep raising the score required for a replay. If it's crappier players, it'll lower it. So every time you sort of smash a high score, it just sort of raises that bar a little bit higher. And then if a bunch of people come in and it starts lowering again all at the same time. Yep. And you just set the percentage you want. How often do you want people to get replays? Very commonplace now, but that was a big deal. Oh, every game has it now, but until that game, that didn't exist. It's the first jackpot available only during multiball. The first use of broken switch compensation programming. Fancy. And the first solid state game with an operator report. Yeah, a lot of those, like the operator report, switch compensation, playing a full song, that all has to do with the new platform, the System 11 platform. Although maybe Steve Ritchie didn't come up with all of these, some of this is probably Larry Dammar. It's interesting to point out that it was sort of the working relationship between the two that actually got it into the System 11 system, and Steve Ritchie being the first one there. It was the first one in the next of the changing board set. What's the major differences between the board sets of the previous system, which is really System 9, right, was the previous one? Well, System 9 was only for three games, and that was kind of a transition. That was, I think, Comet, Space Shuttle, and Sorcerer were the three System 9 games. System 7, you had a separate MPU and driver board that were connected with a 40-pin interconnect, which was problematic. So System 9 and then later System 11, they just put everything on one board. Now I hear System 11 is a super pain in the ass to work with. They used multiplexing for the flashers and coils. It got more and more complicated. As the games got more and more complicated, they kept having to put more. Firstly, they added different boards. Originally, they had a lot of mini boards underneath the playfield with resistors on them, and then they eventually just did an interconnect board at the bottom of the backbox that had all the resistors on it. It kept getting more and more complicated until they just did away with it and started WPC. Yeah, which is on the second half. Yeah, which they used the longest period of time. I haven't played a lot of System 11s. I've played a few kind of in passing. The most machines, for some reason, that I've played are the earlier System 7s. I don't know why. System 6, System 7, I've played a lot of those. And, of course, the Bally Williams era. When I think System 11, I think Flashers, because, man, they love Flashers. They used so many flashers in System 11. I love it. So much, so much light. So much light. And I mean, I think we can agree when it comes to pinball history and System 11 specifically, High Speed has the greatest story. Talking about the background story of it, yeah, it's tough to beat that. Steve Ritchie tells the story a billion times, but we're going to go through it in summary. High Speed is, in my opinion, pretty epic, and it's based on Steve Ritchie's real-life police chase in a 1979 Porsche 928. He's finally caught in Lodi, California on Interstate 5 and accused of speeding at 146 miles an hour, and in the correct format for everybody else to understand, that's 234 kilometers an hour, which is insane. Which I believe is Lodi, I think. Lodi? That's a Creedence Clearwater Revival song. He says Lodi. Okay, well, here we go. Dave, mispronouncing all the names. Unless John Fogarty is wrong. John Fogarty is wrong about a lot of things. His pronunciation of Lodi is probably correct. Basically, he goes, he gets in trouble, he has to go and go to court and things like that. Basically, he wanted to see how fast this new Porsche will go, and he's speeding along the highway. Hey, eventually the police catch up to him and give him an arrest. It's pretty funny when you hear Steve talk about it, but everybody's heard it a billion times. He literally tells it every time he can because it's the greatest story in pinball history. And basically he got off for the most part. He couldn't drive anywhere but to work for a period, and that was about it. Yeah, nowadays people give us millennials crap for the world that we live in, but if I got caught right now driving my Nissan Murano down the highway here, The Trans-Canada Highway at 200, they will take my car, I'll never get car insurance ever again, oh, I have to take my kids to school on a bicycle, like it would just be the worst. Back in the 1980s, they're like, you shouldn't do that, your punishment is you can only drive to work, which I'm sure Steve totally ignored. Eh, he might have. High Speed also had some budget and cost concerns at Williams, right? So his first game back, he's got all these great ideas. What did they actually call High Speed? Well, that's another funny thing. At Williams, they would have non-flattering names for almost every game they did, and High Speed's non-flattering name was High Cost. Steve Ritchie would say the nickname around Williams for High Speed was High Cost. It wasn't really that much more expensive than all the other games that were being developed at the time. I don't get it. Which I assume means it was actually probably very expensive and he just didn't want to admit it. It could just be a long development cycle they had for it. Yes, Steve says, I think we put in a lot of new things as the Whitewoods progressed. At one point, Larry and I were so disgusted after three months of work that we decided to throw everything out and start over. It was one of the smartest moves we made. The game became much more refined and progressed further than other designs that I worked on in the time allotted. The funny thing is, if you want to see that Whitewood, the one that they threw away after three months, there is a picture of it on the Internet Pinball database, IPDB.org. They brought it to Pinball Expo one year, and they put a very unflattering sign on it that I cannot read. It was somewhat familiar, right? It has a figure eight on it, which we will see later on another game. Very good. God, the foreshadowing. You're on the foreshadowing today. You're just, you are, you are roping in the audience right now. See on the top, it says, hello. My name is fing something. Which is interesting. It's still interesting. It's got the drop targets on the sides to the stand-ups. That would have been more fun. It's got all drops. It's got tons of drop targets. Yeah, Steve Ritchie loves his drop targets. Can you imagine today that George Gomez or John Borg, just after three months, was like, ah, throw it all out? That's not happening. No, that did happen. That happened, Stern. They had a certain designer who got arrested for a certain thing, and they kind of had to restart the entire game. Yeah, but I mean, if you thought of just one designer, one person, you're working on Ninja Turtles. John Borg's working on Ninja Turtles. And then he's just like, a quarter of the way through, he's like, this is crap. We're throwing it all at you. Yeah, they wouldn't do that. That would not happen. So I guess this is a good spot to maybe chat about Larry Dever, since I don't think I'm going to get the opportunity to do it. Larry Dever is awesome. Yeah. He's had the greatest timing ever. However, he came to Williams, worked on their board set. When video games got hot, him and Eugene Jarvis realized there were only a few people there and knew how to do video games because they had done, I believe, Defender. So they both quit, left, started their own company called VidKids, then came back to Williams and said, hey, we'll make video games for you. So they did that. Then when everything crashed, I think Jarvis went back to college. I think Larry D'Amar was away for a while. Then he came back, developed their WPC system, worked on a ton of awesome Pat Lawlor games, became like head of whatever. He was higher level executive there. And then when Pinball 2000, he was working on the development of that. Then when the writing was on the wall, he actually left before the Star Wars one came out and started his own company working on slot machine software. Wow. So his timing was always good. He would get out just at the right time. Yeah, pretty brilliant. Chris Granner would say that Larry Dever and Eugene Jarvis were literally geniuses. They really got on the simplest level what coin-op was. I would agree. Things like auto-percentaging, right? Well, according to Steve, he said he came up with that. But he didn't implement it. No, he said he came up with it, but Larry Dever coded it. That kind of stuff is pretty nuts. So Larry Demar, he went to MIT in the 1970s. From 1980 to 1999, he was director of engineering at Williams Electronic Games, did slot machines for Williams in the 1990s, founded a company called Spooky Cool Designs, which you had mentioned, which did social mobile gaming, which was a very big thing sort of at that beginning of those Facebook games, for God's sakes, that would pop up all the time. That company actually became part of Joe Kamenkao's Zynga company, which also does a lot of those sort of mobile gaming apps. He also had his own company. It's called LED Leading Edge Design, which was also kind of a play on his initials. I think it's like Larry Eugene DeMar, which was always, if you played any Williams games of the era, you'll usually see an LED in the default high score table. That's him. And now he's working as a consultant for gaming and the casino industry. So now he just charges me to tell them what to do, which is pretty cool. So you come to me, pay me some money, I tell you what to do, and then if it works, it works. It doesn't, it doesn't, and I'm out of here. It's great. This guy, this guy's awesome. Would you say that that marriage of Larry D'Amar and Steve Ritchie was one of the best creative collaborations around? Well, they did two games, Black Knight and High Speed. Pretty much says it all right there. They had a very tumultuous relationship, though. Yes, the word in the industry was that Steve has a lot of passion, and this often results in a lot of arguments. Steve says, he, meaning Larry, did much more than the normal output and imaginative contribution than any others I've worked with. We had knocked down drag-out fights, and the game always won. At the end of the project, we weren't speaking to each other. We patched up and forgot about it and remained good friends today. There's some funny stories that you hear about Steve Ritchie getting in arguments with Dwight Sullivan through the WPC era, him getting into arguments with Liva Cheats. Good times, good times. Now, there's some interesting items about Larry. This comes from a Steve Ritchie interview in 2005. Larry actually invented the jackpot feature, which is crazy. Those fantastic alphanumeric displays, which you mentioned before, which do numbers and letters. And a hell of a lot of rules over the years. Those were all Larry's. Larry himself is actually an excellent player. And at one point, Steve Ritchie would say, I think he lost touch with the average player. And I had to beg him, can we please win an extra ball on my own play field? Yeah, and when I heard that story, there might have been an F-bomb somewhere in that sentence. That's one thing about this. Steve has toned down a lot of the stories throughout the years. Yeah, it's funny because he's tamed them down as opposed to most people that bring them up. He's tamed them down, but I heard the original versions, which were probably the true versions. The artwork, we've, you know, for some reason, I always get pulled back to artwork. It's probably because I'm not a very good player. It's also probably because I'm new to the industry and I have no idea what I'm doing, so we usually default to artwork. Some pretty cool stuff on here by Mark Sprenger. And he told IPDB that if you look at those cars on the playfield, so it's like a, oh God, cliche time, world under glass, right? There's a car chase going on with highways and streets, and there's some squad cars down there. They have written on top of them A8, W11, and S81, which are the initials for the birth date of his son. He told IPDB that Steve did not want the color green used anywhere on the playfield, calling it bad luck. Mark used green anyway and included a good luck small four-leaf clover near the top of the traffic light. Because you know, that last green game that we talked about was a sales success. Quicksilver. Ugh, hideous. With the success of this game, he believes the Clover was responsible for finally breaking the dreaded green curse. The other interesting thing about the game is the fact that you as the player are running from the cops and the cops are actually the bad guys and you're trying to get away. What kind of message is that sending? That is not what children growing up in a good household should be doing. That's probably another reason why it was so popular. Like, I get to run from the cops and get away? Yeah! So if we, you know, if we tie this back, our Python Anghelo episode, we spoke a little bit about the Steve Ritchie Python Anghelo collaboration here. Python Anghelo did the backlass, which I think is probably one of the best backlasses ever in pinball. Which, as we said, I think in the Python episode, it was known as the zombie cops from hell, is what it was called within Williams. It's all about bringing everybody down a peg when they're working. It's pretty funny. You know, a lot of arguments there between Steve and Python about should we be running from the police, should we be chasing the car, etc., etc. But I think really when you look at it, it comes together very, very well. A good marrying of code, art, and sound, and playfield like no other. This is really where Steve starts to develop that upper right flipper into a side ramp. This is really where he starts that. This is the first game with the, I would call it the Picard Maneuver, but basically it is a left orbit from the lower right flipper, comes around to the upper right flipper, and you hit it up a ramp. Or another loop or something else, but he has used this. This is the first game he used it, and he has used it a lot. His first game at Williams, back in the Flash days, kind of had the beginning of this as well, a somewhat repeatable. It had a somewhat repeatable loop, yeah. Back then I guess he learning to sort of the geometry but he really starting to dial that in now And this is a heck of a fun shot When you shoot that from that flipper it goes up that ramp into kind of these two metal ramps and it either divert left or right They're actually plastic. Well, it's plastic to a metal ramp. Very, very cool. Very satisfying shot. And something completely unusual, because this is the time where sort of ramps are becoming kind of, They've moved from that bi-level Black Knight style kind of design around 83. Now we're a couple of years out from that, and now we're moving into what we would notice is the ramps of today. Very cool. Yeah, more molded ramps that actually curve into things like that. You can actually rev the engine of the car, which is pretty cool, with the flipper button. One thing that you brought up in our Python episode is that you are not so much a fan of the play field and the back glass and the side of the cabinet all sort of being different designers. Yeah, and more along, we'll get more into that with Getaway. That's why I really have an issue with it. Once again, Ritchie comes out of the gate and just smashes some sales right out of there. 17,080 units. I guess a big driver for those sales would be some things like those auto-precentaging, the bookkeeping features and stuff in the system. I think that would be a huge driver for sales, more so maybe than kind of the playfield design or art, which I'm sure helped. But as an operator, you'd be like, wow, look at all of these great innovations which are going to help me. And you forgot one of them. What's that? The beacon, the rotating beacon. Oh, yes, the flashing light on the top. Which does, says, look at me, look at me. And they fire it off during attract mode. I mean, how can you miss that? Steve Ritchie loves to flash people. Oh, my. Well, after another smash hit, another pinball theme just out of nowhere, Steve Ritchie is just ready to play the hits, right? He's like, okay, that's enough. I've shown everybody that I can reinvent, reinvest. Let's just go back. Let's flack off a little bit and do the same sort of theme I've done before. Incorrect. You can't have any more original ideas. Incorrect. We're going to have a vertical upkicker. We're going to have tons of habit trails. No, let's go back to the well. No. Let's just improve and invase. We're going to make it even more expensive. We're going to have F-14 Tomcat. Woo! This is a good one. Which Steve Ritchie has said, this was purposely overdone. It's a Cold War theme, classic USA versus Russia. Yagov is the bad guy, the Russian dude. But where High Speed had three flippers, this has four. Where High Speed had one beacon, this has three. This has like an obscene number of flashers. And it is loud and in your face. I think the tagline was like, it's fast, it's furious, and it fights back. I think that's what the flyer said. Man, that's cool. And it has a kicker, basically the same that they would use for a kickback, except it's pointed at you. So if you hit this thing, it just fires it right at you. This is a Jets Aviation Cold War theme, March 1987. This is a System 11A, standard body, 14,502 units. Software by Eugene Jarvis and Ed Boone, who's a new name. Artwork by Doug Watson, who we're going to see a lot of. And he's done a bunch of stuff in the 80s and 90s at Bally and Williams. And sound by Chris Granner and Bill Pratt. Have you seen Top Gun? I have never seen Top Gun. It's released 1986 with Tom Antonio Cruz, Val Kilmer. Goose, Maverick. Directed by Tony Scott, produced by Jerry Brockheimer. Pretty decent movie. It's 55% Rotten Tomatoes. Take me to the Danger Zone. Yeah, I just remember Kenny Loggins, Danger Zone, and there's a volleyball scene. That's literally all I know about the movie. Yeah, greatest volleyball scene in movie history. Okay. Anyway, that movie, totally unaffiliated with it 14 times. No, this is a Cold War. Not anything like it at all. This is a Cold War theme. Of course, Steve Ritchie is the Russian in this game. He is Yagov. He's pretty much a Russian in almost every Williams game. Steve Ritchie's always the bad guy. He's always the bad guy. The Yagov kicker, as it's called, that fires the ball back at you. I mean, for years after that, whenever I see a game with that feature, I just instinctively call it a Yagov kicker, no matter what it is. Now, I mean, I could see how people could see the similarities between F-14 Tomcat and Top Gun. I mean, Jet Fighters, Russians, Murka, you know, music. There's Russians in Top Gun? I think so. Isn't Top Gun at the end? Is there some Russians or something? There's a lot of Russians in your American movies. Not to be outdone, this was another pinball machine with a bunch of firsts. You mentioned it, the kickback that fired the ball right back at the flippers. Yagov kicker. Yep, because Steve Ritchie's a sadist. And it's also the first machine with an autosave, which in this game they call it flight insurance. Yeah, because they, I guess, realized that it was almost impossible and they should give you your ball back a little bit. Yeah, that was made specifically because of the outgown kicker, just so if it threw the ball down the center like the first time, you're like, okay, you get that back. Yeah, I mean, Steve Ritchie obviously would feel bad if he punched some child in the face, so he'd give them their quarterback. Unless he was the Black Knight, then he would ask for their money. That's right. So, listener of the show, Mikhail Gorbachev says, America weak, Russian MiG-25 Foxbat, faster pinball machine, much better, less slasher, two player facing kickbacks, Russia strong. So thank you, Mikkel, for that feedback. That may or may not have been legitimate. Steve Ritchie has said in the past that there were actually ten prototypes for this game. Can you imagine? That's crazy to be moving stuff around that much. And to have the amount of time available to just do that? Those poor guys at Gottlieb at this time are banging stuff out in like three weeks, and he's making ten prototypes over at Williams. I think the quality of the games are all you need to know about, which was the better option. Yeah, some of the items that were changed on his designs were the cabinet art design was deemed too plain, so they changed that for production. There was actually a second pop bumper up at the top. So there's only one pop bumper kind of in the middle of some stand-up targets where the two upper flippers are. There was two pop bumpers. That didn't play well, so they took one out. I can tell you the next two were not just on prototypes. They were on production games. Ah, so clear flashing lamp domes along with a back wall of playfield were too blinding. So they changed them to red. And the beacon on the top of the backbox was deemed too bright, so they had the domes changed. Yeah, they changed a lot of stuff. F-14 had a really long production run, and they changed a lot of stuff throughout the run. Earlier F-14s, they used the same flipper coils for the two upper flippers than they used for the two bottom flippers, which is insane, because they were way too strong. They just like break things. But what they also did is if you played AF14 Tomcat, you may notice that there are flasher domes on the top to target banks. Like just a flasher dome sitting over the target bank, but with no flasher in it, which seems kind of odd. Well, if you had one of the first couple hundred, or however many the number, maybe 500, you would have had flashers in there. And what would happen is the flashers, because the flippers were way too strong, they would pound the targets and the target would get thrown back into the flasher, which would short the flasher voltage into the lamp matrix and just blow off the game. So they removed those flashers and they put weaker coils for those upper flippers and then they had a service bulletin that went out to tell people this is how to remove the flashers and how to change the wiring and all that. I know this because I reversed the bulletin on my game to put the flashers back in. Only Steve Ritchie would design a game that tears itself apart from playing. Tears itself apart. But it's, in the back panel, it had all clear flasher domes originally, they changed them to red. And then the beacons on top, it was red, clear, and blue. So they changed it to red, white, and blue. Now this is a big game for tournament players and stuff, right? Like this is a very popular sort of tournament game. It doesn't play very long, it's got a very difficult strategy. It doesn't have any real bad, like, mystery awards, like a Gottlieb, you know, get your opponent score type stuff that has to be removed. Yeah, they used it, I think one of the pop-off finals, the final game was decided on 14 Tomcat. Now, it's strategy, right? Right, it's you start, try to start multiball and then lock in your jackpots by shooting back up into, so the ball comes down, you gotta shoot around the orbit which goes into a vertical upkicker which kicks it up into a ramp, right? Yeah, like a plastic ramp diverter thingy that diverts the balls various ways. There's a ton of habit trails in this game. It has the upkicker in the back. And most of the game is just hitting the right orbit because it will spot your Tomcat letters. So you can kind of get away with doing that. But it also has mini orbits. You can use the – and it will always – when the ball is locked into position and it ejects it, it will always eject it to the flipper you need it to go to, which I appreciate, you know, to get a Tomcat target. It also has – the other cool thing you can try to do in it, which no one ever does, is try to match the bonus out. Because it has 8x. You can go up to 8x bonus. The left mini orbit, when it's lit, it gives you a multiplier, 2x up to 8x. And if you max the bonus, which is on the right orbit again, you can get over like a million just in bonus and it counts up forever. It's awesome. And it's extremely obnoxiously loud, flashy. There's so many flashers in this game. They paired them up too. They'll have like one transistor run like four flashers, and just you're everywhere. And when you start multiball, you know you start multipall. Plus, if you have the track mode music and stuff on, the game will just come on every few minutes, but the beacons will just go and start playing music. Like, play me, play me. Steve Ritchie, he did the voice of, what is his name? Yagov, the bad guy. Yagov, right, and his brother Mark did the voice talent of the protagonist. Yep. Yep, and Mark Ritchie, of course, will go on to do other designs and have somewhat of a career in pinball. Completing the high score gets the Navy's anthem, Anchors Away, which I guess you Americans all know more than us Canadians. Well, the funny thing is I believe you get one version of Anchors Away if you were, like, second, third, fourth place. You get a slower version of it, a special version of it, if you get first place. A little bit of special, a little something something for you there. Or I might have been totally wrong on that. It might just play the slower version if you get your name up. That's what I think it is. Because it plays that at the end of every game. If you know, please send us an email at silverballchronicles at gmail.com. So I think it's time to slack. Slack in black. It was 1989 when Ritchie decided to slack off and take it easy on his next title. He didn't have to spend all that effort on a new story, on a new character. Of course, I'm talking about Black Knight 2000. Now, because it's 2020, we realize that 2000 back in the 1980s meant the future. If you had 2000 after your name, that was a big deal. Do you have any memories of Black Knight 2000? Greatest multiball intro sequence ever made. Wow, that's a hot take. Tell me one better. I dare someone. Please, send it to silverballchronicles at gmail.com if you can name me a game that has a better multiball intro. Maybe Ghostbusters? No. Nope. Sorry. And I didn't even count the, there's also the Ransom intro, which is also incredible. Yeah. Here's a funny Black Knight 2000 story. When they were debuting this game for one of the European distributors, so this was in Europe. I don't remember which country. Maybe Germany. I don't know. But the distributor was going to do this huge presentation for Black Knight 2000, and he had this idea. He was going to have an actual knight on a horse come out on the stage as they introduce the game. So they did that. Except the horse kind of, um, um, how do I say this? Let loose, if you know what I mean? All over the stage. And they had to get everyone out of the room because of the smell and clean up the mess the horse made. And then everyone came back in and they were able to debut the game. Yeah, so give me your stats. At Black Knight 2000, it's fantasy, it's like a castle battle theme. That's from April of 89. It is a System 11B. It's a standard body, only sells 5,703 units. Sound by Dan Forden, Brian Schmidt. Software by Ed Boone. And artwork, once again, by Doug Watson. So our friend Kerry Hardy from Kerry Hardy YouTube channel, he's a restorer, an enthusiast, a pinball commentator. He recently sold a machine to buy a Black Knight 2000 and he said this, oh man, I wish I could do his charming Texan accent, but I can't. One of the best soundtracks of the era. Heavy on the right flipper, although it is overall a simple game code-wise, the speed and flow keeps me entertained. Why revisit Black Knight? Well, because as Steve puts it, people are always asking me, when are you going to make another Black Knight? I had a vision for a two-level game, and Black Knight just fit. Speech and music have come so far. And they did. So it's the same thing, right? You look at Sword of Rage now, which we'll cover in our next Steve Ritchie episode. People will just ask you, when are you going to do Black Knight? When are you going to do Black Knight? And just, great idea. Okay, why not? So Kerry, he alluded to this. The music of Black Knight 2000. Music has always been, and apparently always will be, a big deal for Steve Ritchie and his games. Steve says, I want a music that made me feel energized and excited, laced with urgency and drive. I wrote most of the music as chord progressions first, then added some leads and riffs to the main songs of the game. I wanted the music to be fast and furious to inspire players. I also wanted the sound and music package to stand out in a loud arcade, and that sure did. Ryan Schmidt added great bass lines that transformed the music. So they do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Dan Forden wrote a bunch of lead lines and sampled my 72 Les Paul Custom through a Marshall 100-watt lead amp in a Marshall cabinet with a 412 Celestion speakers. I'm probably saying that wrong. Some musician will make fun of me now. Dan laid out my guitar scale electronically for playing throughout the game. Dan created and engineered the entire sound pack, including the sound effects and enhancing and coaching my voice as the Black Knight. Dan Vorden deserves a lot of credit for his spectacular work on this game. You can read this. This originally came from an old IRC chat conversation interview that Steve had way back in the 90s. And it's funny because you can see the passion and the detail and the memory that he has around specifically Black Knight 2000. He knows the guitar. He knows the amp. He knows who did what. He has such passion for the music in his games, particularly Black Knight 2000, that he can remember exactly what was going into that game. That is pretty, pretty cool. The other shout out I'll give to Black Knight 2000, Joe Jost, who we talked about in our Stern episode, our classic Stern. By this point, he was at Williams, and it was his engineering that designed the upper playfield and how it pivots, so it's easily serviceable. The upper playfield is insanely packed on Black Knight 2000. Yeah, which is sad when you look at Sword of Rage. Sword of Rage has a loop and a lock shot. The Black Knight 2000 has three lanes on the top, three lanes on the bottom, three pop-uppers, one flipper, a loopable orbit shot, a motorized three-bank that goes up a ramp to another lock area. That's pretty packed. Now you can see that it's a bit of a niche title, right? It only sells far less than the other Steve Ritchie games at the time. It's only selling about a third of those games at 5,000 units. You can see it's more of a passion project. And it went through some changes too with the plastics. The original Black Knight 2000s had more futuristic looking plastics and then they changed it to a more medieval looking plastic set. So depending on when you got yours, you'll have one plastic set or the other. Very cool. I think if you took out the sound package, if you took out that sort of iconic Black Knight 2000 song, I think it would be a turd. No, it's got a great upper playfield. The biggest issue is when it comes off the upper playfield, it's just so easy to trap. Way too much control. If it was a better exit and it lasts right flipper only, it would have been a better game. Well, Kerry mentions that, right? It's right flipper all day. Oh, right flipper all day. So it comes down off of the top playfield, kind of into almost like a drain, if you will, down into a ramp into the inside lane down by the flippers. And then you just sort of trap it and then shoot it back up. It doesn't go in the inlay. It actually goes past the front of the slingshot and just right to you. So you can move it around a little bit, but the most you're going to do is you'll have to hit it on the fly back up top, which if you get the timing down, you can just keep doing that over and over. It's one of those games that I owned, really loved it, and then when I got better at pinball, the games got longer and longer and longer, and then I had to sell it. But I still miss that multiball intro sequence. It's the greatest of all time. And it has that really cool sort of insert wheel at the bottom. They're sort of like lightning bolts. Lightning wheel. The lightning wheel. And it's so cool. It just looks so cool. Which you'll learn about in episode three of Steve Ritchie because he's going to use it again. So after all these hits, you've got to lay an egg, right? Oh. That was Roller Games. Steve Ritchie says, I used to hate it. Well, I used to hate it a lot more. I played it more lately, and it's a good game. It's fun. He's lying. He hates it. I can tell you for a fact he hates this game. He says, I can certainly point out that my least favorite game is Roller Games. I'm sighing because I have one downstairs, so it pains me. Roller Games, he says, was depressing. The show went off the air before even producing the game. The show was that bad. Maybe it isn't apparent to play the game, but all the wind went out of the sails towards the end of the project. It was the only project that didn't get us progressively higher as the project moved forward. Yeah, what happened is the production company that actually made the show went bankrupt. Ratings for the show were actually, they were about what American Gladiators was doing. So roller games is like a, it's like a roller skating thing, right? It's pro wrestling on roller skates. So there's like a course, like a circular course. It's not a circular, it's a figure eight. Oh, it's a figure eight, okay. So the figure eight course, you rollerblade around it, you knock people off of it. There's the wall, there's the, they had all these crazy things on the show. Then they had bands that would play during intermission. Oh yeah. I actually did a few episodes back in the day. Which made you want to get a pinball machine, so that's why you got roller games. Actually, I didn't even realize it was the same show. Wow. You can tell that Steve was disappointed, though, right? Yes. He was disappointed, and, oh, you have Roller Games? It isn't that bad, is it? No. But what they did with Roller Games, unfortunately, is they kind of stopped working on the software. It isn't overly polished. Yeah, so you can see that, like you said, the wind came out of the sails. Yeah, they kind of just like, meh, and they cut the hell out of it. And what I mean by that is Rolard Games probably has some of the most different versions of a game for the run it had. How many did it have? We have the stats up on the screen here. They have 5,000 units. Yeah. I like how it's an even number. It's just like, we had to do 5,000. We weren't going to do a single one more. So Rolard Games, early in the run, like the first hundred, couple hundred, they're actually diamond plate, which is a clear coat that Williams was experimenting with, Which would go into production later on a Steve Ritchie game. But this was actually, I think, the first Steve Ritchie game where they used it at all. So, like, the first couple hundred had this clear code on it. They started cost-cutting. I know we mentioned, like, System 11s have tons of flashers. Well, they decided they'd save money if they removed all the flashers from the backbox. So there's actually three different insert panels for roller games, depending on where it is in the run. The insert panel being where all the lights are mounted behind the backbox, the thing that swings open. There's the original one that has all the flashers in it. Then there's the second one that has all the holes for the flashers, but there are no flashers. And then there's the third one that doesn't even have the hole for the flashers anymore. And they removed a bunch of flashers from the play field also. Again, all cost cutting. They removed the speaker panel. They removed the W's, the Williams logo, from the speakers, because I guess that was an extra cost. It just has regular speaker grills. I did a lot of research on roller games, and I actually have a really early one, probably one of the first couple hundred. So mine has all the flashers in it from the factory. It's like a hack and slash. It's just like, whatever I can pull out of it. Well, basically, whatever they can pull out of it, they just stop developing the software, just get it the hell out, and move on, which is what they did. And that's a shame. It's from June of 1990, so we're into the 90s. We're in the 90s, but it's very 80s. It's trash 80s all the way. It's awesome. It's a System 11C standard body software by Mark Penico. If you want to tell us how to say the name right, to SilverballChronicles at gmail.com and tell us how to say his name right. And he will come up again. Sound and Music, Dan Forden. And Pat McMahon did the artwork who did Tale of the Arabian Nights, Dirty Harry, Popeye, and Junkyard, sort of that, the WPC games. The biggest disappointment in Roller Games is the multiball start. Because you came off of Black Knight 2000, the greatest multiball start ever. And on Roller Games, when you lock a ball, it does super cool, like it dims the lights and does a bunch of cool flasher effects, so you're like, oh, this is going to be freaking awesome when multiball starts. And then you start multiball and it just cuts all the lights on the game and just flashes on the alphanumeric. Roller Games, Roller Games, Roller Games, and then you just get all the balls. That's it? Lame! Yeah, that's where you could tell that they were like, nope, that's it, that was one of the last things. If you finish Sudden Death, though, you get a crazy awesome light show, but that's like the only time you get one. So, you know, they're in this time, licenses. Licensing, for some reason, is such a strange thing in pinball. I don't get it. Yeah, they could have had American Gladiators, but they picked Roller Games. Stata East, Gary Stern new company with Joe Cam and Cow, around this time, they really see licensing as the go-forward. And everybody else in the industry, Gottlieb, Bally, or Bally Midway at the time, Williams, they're all kind of trying to figure out licensing. But one of the dangers of licensing is you could go American Gladiators or you go Roller Games. Both of them weird. Both of them, you know, not lasting very long in pop culture. But yet one of them sort of lasted a few months and did fairly well. The other one was just a train wreck. American Gladiators lasted way longer than a couple months. It was not for years. Years. Still horrible. Yeah, but didn't they like that in Canada? Yeah, no, I mean, I guess. I remember seeing it, but I remember being like, oh, this is kind of fun. Data East was smart, and they knew that their games were not as good as Williams, so they got licenses. So they had to figure out a way to make them better. Yep, and that's how you make them better. You slap something like Star Wars on it, boom, it's better. Yeah, I mean, I kind of like Roller Games, the game, because it is so obnoxiously 80s, right? It's almost like those System 80B era games. They're just, they just ooze 80s like you would not believe. But it's Steve Ritchie and has a third flipper and a magnet that will catch it and feed it to that third flipper. And it has the Pekar maneuver. It has that side ramp. This is his second game that he did the left orbit to the upper right flipper up the ramp. So we should count. We should keep a count between episodes two and three. So that's two if you're writing them down at home. That's right. If I could get a Roller Games, I would be pretty pleased, I think. I would be pretty happy because it's not an outrageously priced game. It's still a System 11 game. It screams 80s pinball. It's kind of fun. It's got that stereotypical 80s guy in a jean jacket, muscle-up fighter guy on the play field. Not even muscle. They're on roids. They're ridiculously over large. Yeah, it's got the lady roller games people and they're in there like really bright. Yeah, I guess the twins were actually on the show. Some of them were supposed to be people who were actually on the show. Oh, well there you go. That's something. Well, Steve once asked what he would have liked to have made roller games theme-wise. And he said, the beige knight. You know, he's a good guy. He doesn't want to start trouble. He's happy. He's baking cookies tonight. But showing once again how much he hates that game. I know he hates it. I bet you his high standards really, I think they really hurt him, right? Like, he seems like the kind of guy, I don't think he's a perfectionist, but I think he likes to win, I think he likes awesome things, I think he likes excitement. One thing is that roller game song in there, right? Like, you can tell that's a Steve Ritchie game, especially after Black Knight, right? Yeah, well, that song is actually from the show. Oh, my God. Rock, rock and roll, oh, yeah. That game, that game is just a train wreck. And the roller games, like when you get into multiball, that's from the show. Roller games, roller games, roller games. Okay, I think people are sick of roller games at this point. One other thing, just in closing, the Playfield has, like, Thermos and Pepsi. Yeah, probably one of the last times, yeah. The speaker panel has all these advertisements, all just different products on it. Slice, I think, is on there. It's like that would be the worst part is if a repro company wanted to reproduce that playfield to save a bunch of machines. It's never going to happen. I'm trying to remember. Is a lot on the playfield? I thought it was just on the speaker panel. I'd have to go downstairs. Some of it's on the playfield because it's got those inserts, right? It's got those inserts in the middle of the playfield. I thought they were all for the different teams, like Team Thrash, the Violators. They had great names like, oh, it's so trash. Are you telling me that this machine didn't sell? I love it. I'm sorry. So if you're following at home on your IPDB database, you're probably thinking we're going to talk about Terminator 2 next. However, to do a correct timeline, we must say the actual next game that Steve Ritchie was going to do after Roller Games was going to be another sequel. Yes, he decided to slack off again. It was going to be Getaway, High Speed 2. And an opportunity just falls from the sky. Could not turn down, which was basically Williams got the Terminator 2 license, and Steve was completely on board. But here's where it gets interesting. For Roller Games, his programmer was Mark, who we can't say his last name right, Penicheau. They had a major falling out, and they were not on speaking terms. Not on speaking terms. Can you imagine it was bad enough that I wouldn't talk to the man? Enter Dwight Sullivan, who would end up being Steve's main programmer for probably most of the rest of his Williams run. And a good portion of his Stern run. Yeah, the only person that can separate angry argument Steve with regular Steve and reconcile those at the end of the day. Yeah, and so they got the Terminator 2 license, which that was a big deal. This machine, this is the machine that I want. And it drives me crazy that they made so many and the price has continued to rise and rise and rise for this machine. Really? How much do they know? In Canada, these things are selling for 5,000 loonies. Mine was like 1,400, 1,500. That's it. Originally when I got it. I don't have it anymore. I saw one in Canada, I want to say last year, for about 3,000 U.S. dollars. And I was like, ooh, man, that's way too much. Now they're like 3,600, 3,700 U.S., which is like, and it just keeps escalating. And it's driving me crazy because, man, I want one of these machines, but I'm not paying that much. Not doing it. This is the machine run from my childhood. So I used to travel multiple times every summer. From my province of New Brunswick, there was the island of Prince Edward Island, which is just one of the most beautiful places in the world. It's a vacation just mecca. It is amazing. Now you can take a bridge. You just drive on a bridge and you pay a toll. It is the longest bridge over frozen water in the world. At the time, you used to take a ferry. You get on a ferry and you go. And of course on a ferry you'd have a cafeteria and an arcade to keep the kids away. And there was a Terminator 2 on that boat. And man, oh man, I love that game. Just love it. This just bubbles with nostalgia for me. This is the game that I remember. I would drop quarters into it. I'd pull the gun handle trigger. I double-flip that machine, just smash those buttons until the ball drained out. You can still hear the match screen sequence, the crushing noise that the thing would do to come up with the number. Do you have a memory like that for T2, Ron? Yes, it was in the bowling alley. It's probably one of the first times I played pinball, but I was just playing it to kind of appease my dad because he wasn't going to play me in any of the video games because that would have been painful for him. So they had a Terminator 2, and that's the first time I ever saw it. That machine was everywhere. Oh yeah. Everywhere. And they also had the arcade Terminator 2 with the stand-up, with the guns. Yeah. Williams got both licenses. They're Midway, they're video game division. They did the video, the gun game, and then the pinball division did the pinball machine. Everything associated with that movie made just tons of money. That was so huge. There was nothing but... I remember seeing the coming attraction for that. It was one of the coming attractions. I went to see a movie. I don't remember what the movie was, but that was one of the coming attractions. And it was the trailer where they just show him building Arnold. You know, they show the endoskeleton, and they put the skin on him, and he looks at the camera, and it just, you know, goes to black and says, Terminator, this summer. And he says, I'll be back. And I'm like, oh, my God. This is going to be huge. Even the Terminator, the original one, was awesome. I actually like the original Terminator more. I'm in the minority. Ooh, you're a weird fella. Terminator 2, we'll get into that in a minute. One of the reasons I love YouTube is that you can find some really cool stuff And we getting into this 1990s era of pinball and there some really cool stuff I going to throw this up in our show notes You can see the original distributor sizzle reel or sales pitch from the VHS tapes that they would send out Williams started doing these, I think, in 91, somewhere around. I think Party Zone might have been one of the first ones they did. They got more and more heavily produced as they went along. Yeah, they realized these VHS cassette tapes of pitching the game would actually sell the game just as much as going to a show and sort of schmoozing folk. But the crazy thing about it is the game came out at the same time the movie came out. Yeah. That never happens anymore. Like, they had access to everything. As the movie was being made, as we're going to talk about when they get Arnold to do the voice, the call-outs, he was in his trailer on set doing the call-outs. There is a lot of risk to that if you ask me. Like nowadays Stern particularly is very risk adverse, right? They are not taken any of it. Yeah, they will only do a movie if it's already been successful, like the second one's coming out. Like Guardians of the Galaxy, it's based on the first movie, but they waited until the second movie to play it safe, etc. But I mean, this is an exception. This was James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Terminator. This couldn't possibly suck. Look, there's no way. There's no way. The YouTube pitch video for this I've included in the show notes. Steve Ritchie has one proper mullet in this thing, man. It is business in the front. It is party in the back. And he's wearing a suit and he's describing all of the innovations and features within Terminator 2. And it is awesome. It is so funny and so cool to sort of see this. And it's like peak prime Steve Ritchie, right? Like this, he is loving showing that machine off. It is cool. Let's bring it into the movie here. So we'll give some people some context. Man, this Terminator franchise has been a train wreck since, you know, after T2. It's just been a bit of a mess. The movies don't exist in my world. Right. It's a whole thing. And I think that's a shame because there's a lot of people coming into the hobby, into their, you know, maybe early 30s, mid 30s, you know, the 20s, sort of the newer generations coming into maybe tournament play. They don't know the phenomenon that was the Terminator 2 world. So it was written, directed, and produced by James Cameron in 1991. And this is well before Titanic, well before the Avatar series. But it's like everything. Yeah, when he made good movies. Everything that James Cameron touches like turns to gold. And this is really the first one where when he touched it, it turned to like triple platinum. It was it was amazing. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, the biggest action film star at the time. He's doing Predator. He's doing he's he's just he's the biggest star ever at the time. Like it is it is him and Sylvester Stallone are the biggest stars in action. And who's the other guy? Bruce Willis. He's in Die Hard. Bruce Willis. It's like the three of them, man. If you're making an action movie, those are your three guys. So this is a follow-up to the 1984 film The Terminator, which is an awesome movie. You should definitely see that one. It has a $102 million budget, the most expensive film ever made at the time. It did $520 million at the box office. Now, if we put that into today's dollars, so if you use inflation, that's a billion dollars. So that's basically a Marvel or Star Wars movie kind of box office. But like 30 years ago, right? Like it's a, this is huge. It was for the longest time one of the top three movies of all time and adjusted for inflation is still amongst the top earners. And it has a 93% Rotten Tomatoes score, so it is actually a good movie based on the critics. So 7% of the people are dumb. Okay. This movie, I used to pretend I was a Terminator. I used to play Terminator with my friends. We used to play the video game. I had this... Probably a Canadian knockoff Terminator movie somewhere. Yeah, where he's just like a lumberjack, and he's just walking around looking for a Molson. So come with me if you want the stats. It's space, time travel, sci-fi war theme, July of 1991, so 12-ish months after Roller Games. It's a WPC, which the big difference here, we're talking totally new board set, but it has a dot matrix or DMD display. Totally new board set developed primarily by Larry Dammar, so we'll bring him up again. Yep, Standard Body sold 15,202 units. Music by Chris Granner, some of the best music he's ever done. Software, Dwight Sullivan. Nobody's ever heard of that guy. And art by Doug Watson again. Killer back glass. Oh my goodness, iconic back glass. Wish, you have to thank Arnold Schwarzenegger for that. He just wanted his face. Because the original back glass, they had like his face, he had to be in sunglasses on the back glass. So he had to re-jigger the thing around. If you remember, there's a Terminator endoskeleton, then he's half Terminator, you know, half human looking, and then he's human looking with the sunglasses. Yeah, got to keep it on brand. Let's go through, again, a bunch of firsts. This guy, he just comes up with stuff. It's amazing. The first machine with an auto plunger, and it also had like a gun handle, which was pretty cool, right? So instead of a plunger... A high quality gun handle. You could kill someone with that thing. It is so hot. That thing is like a tank. Chrome. Oh yeah. You could grab that thing and pick the whole game off and it'll be like, no problem. Oh man. Awesome. Because I remember that. That was one thing when I was a kid. I would grab that thing, pull that trigger. I didn't have to pull a thing. I didn't have to... Oh man, it was so cool. It's the first machine with a fan, quote-unquote, air quotes. I don't want to say Steve Ritchie invented the fan layout. No, he perfected the fan layout. But this, the reason I have sort of the air quotes and the question mark here in our show notes is because it is perfected here. Everything is pushed way back. It's left to right. It's combos. It's repeats. It's an orbit. Like, it is perfected. He might not have been, you know, if you know who had the quote-unquote first fan layout, you know, I'd love to know over at silverballchronicles.gmail.com, and I'll put that in our next episode. But, I mean, I think this is the first fan layout. And this is the first, he's starting to repeat at this point. It's the three bank in the center, just like Flash, and the five bank on the left, just like Flash. And also just like roller games, five bank on the left, three bank in the center. Yeah, he's kind of falling into kind of a... He's going to start getting into a certain groove. He's going to start using, reusing his elements. Yeah, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But that causes some issues when you've been in the industry so long. It's the first machine to feature a cannon or an on-playfield ball-launching mechanism. That's a cannon, I guess, because technically you have things like taxi, Big guns. They use catapults to fly the ball through the air. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. It's a thing that moves that shoots the ball as opposed to catapult. And we're not including Hyperball, another game he did, which literally had a cannon that fired balls. Right, which is probably the same mech. First game with a video mode. Thank you, Dwight Sullivan. Yeah, no, because it's Dwight Sullivan and he loves video modes. He's got a series of firsts. Very, very cool. But I would say one of the greatest, if not, maybe it's the second greatest story in pinball history. The high speed story is pretty great. I think the comedy in the branding and licensing adventure that was Terminator 2 and getting Ernie's voice in here is probably one of the greatest ever. They went all in here with this one, right? They had noticed what was going on with the data east of the world. The branding meant a lot. Chris Granner says, what Roger and our people offered, and Roger, I would assume he means Roger Sharp, who was the head of licensing for Williams, what Roger Sharp and our people offered Carolco Pictures and Arnold, I don't even remember. It wasn't about money. It was more about let's teach Hollywood about another version of the product placement. That's all we were offering. A pinball shop didn't have more to offer than some sort of cachet. Yeah, it's all about let's build some relationships, right? Let's get your face on a pinball machine. Let's get you in every pizza shop. Let's get that branding out there in another way. Now the branding is very different, right? The branding now is how do I sell the machine? I need to have branding on it. Where back then it was like, how can we sort of marry the two and get your product, Mr. Movie Maker, out in the field? I'm sure the guys at Guardians of the Galaxy and Marvel don't care about having a pinball machine as much as I, David Dennis, care about having a branding of Guardians of the Galaxy in my house. There's also a DMD, but it's the first DMD with an asterisk. It's the first Williams DMD. Checkpoint actually had the first DMD. Data East beat him. It had the little tiny dot matrix. But it was so not even cool, it was so small. It was so small, it was like half the height. Totally, it was basically alphanumerics really, if you ask me. Terminator 2 was the first Williams game they designed with the dot matrix display, but had such a long development time, Gilligan's Island beat it out. That's the first one actually released with a DMD. So, you know, we're all about sort of asterisks because we would say, this is the first one with a DMD, and somebody would be like, well, technically. Like, the, um, Killing's Island came out three months before that, but I get it. It was in production earlier than this, but this was actually developed before that, so asterisk is all around. And since they were developing the game while the movie was being made, if you've watched Terminator 2, it's based around the T-1000, the new Terminator, made out of liquid metal. So the T-1000 was not included in the artwork of the game except for a small image of Robert Patrick, the guy who played him, because of the pre-release secrecy of the movie. The character was only included in the display animation because when the DMD programming was finalized, the liquid metal character was already public knowledge. There was nothing cooler than the T-1000. No. Man, it was so good. The T-1000 still holds up to this day, and that movie was made 30 years ago. And it was so good, and the character was played so perfect that they, even to today, 30 years later, are struggling to try to come up with a cooler Terminator. Look, it's brutal. I think we're fanboying a little. Oh, I love it. We're going a little on this Terminator. This weekend? We're going to watch it. Hold on, we've got to watch it again, yes. Oh, so good. So let's talk about that cannon. So the first, you know, oscillating, moving cannon. Yeah, Steve Ritchie says, the cannon ID I had in Atari. Sorry, that's a long time. I just didn't have the vehicle to make it happen. It's a simple thing. It's a kickback mounted to a motor that pivoted back and forth. And that literally all it is. It's literally the kickback mechanism just moving. So people talk about Scott Denisi and his Denisi lock in TNA about taking stand up targets and stacking balls on those targets and just how like you're taking something and changing it and converting it into something totally different. So Steve Ritchie uses a kickback on the outlaying of firepower. And then he takes that kickback in F-14 and says, well, what if I turn it and face it towards the flippers? And now he's like, well, what if I just put it on a mount and rotate it and shoot? Like, he's taking something that's been done before and just changing it into something new. So about the gun handle, Steve Ritchie said one time, I'm going to try this, that gun handle? Yeah, I don't know. I own a .45 and I like shooting. We just put it on. People like to shoot guns. Yes, they do. Being a Canadian, I mean, I kind of get it, but you guys love your guns. Arnold Schwarzenegger versus Williams. Arnold was really tough to get on board to do the call-outs. And if you go back to the Head to Head Pinball podcast, episode 71, Chris Granner, the legend of sound, tells an amazing story. This was really James Cameron's big breakout movie. Like he did some awesome, awesome movies. He did Aliens and now T2 will just launch him into space where he is now. This was a juggernaut project. Arnold, who was at that point making successful movies over and over again, he was making a lot of money for his movies. He was really a celebrity at this point, but this was really sort of on the upswing of his celebrity. So he was in a totally different category at the time. And Chris Griner would say, We send the tape off to them and a couple days later we hear back and Arnold's like, not only am I not going to do this, you're not using a sound alike, we're not doing this, you're not putting my voice in this game. Steve Ritchie looks at Roger Sharp and says, if we don't get his voice, then what are we buying exactly? And Roger Sharp says, let me do something, let me pull a rabbit out of my hat. The producer talks to Arnold and says, we'll come to your trailer, we'll do it on a break, it'll take you 15 minutes, it'll be easy, just do this. There's good PR on the film and it's good for us. So Arnold says, okay. So they did it and they did the recording in Arnold's trailer. He did every line twice. Everything sounds like the Terminator because he was the Terminator. So the back and forth between sort of Chris Granner and his engineering team in L.A. doing the shooting is epic, right? Like the summary that we just did here does not do that story justice. Go back to that head-to-head pinball podcast. It's in our show notes. The way Chris Granner tells it is a riot. He is so excited and funny. And in fact, this story is where the so-called profanity ROM set for T2 comes from. Yeah, there is a profanity ROM set where if you hit it in the one scoop, one of the awards that comes up is a certain quote. So Chris Granner says the capter to the whole thing was. When they're done recording it, all their call-outs, he asks Arnold Schwarzenegger, Okay, that's it. Anything else? Arnold says, Yeah, then gets completely out of character and leans down to the mic, and his voice drops a perfect fourth and says, F you, asshole. We're all sitting in the studio listening to this tape, and they come back to us, and we're like, Yes, it was epic. Arnold said, F*** you, asshole, directly to me. Directly to me, Chris Granner. Garner, my everlasting gift to pinball. So he was so excited to tell that, to tell that part of the story that you could tell that it was such a pain in the ass and they persisted and were really annoying to the point where Arnold had to do this recording and he probably didn't want to do it. But what's funny is Mr. Schwarzenegger would end up in a lot of other machines and he did all the call outs for those machines. Yeah, when he did Terminator 3, he was very accommodating. Like, do you want me to do any more? Do you want me to do any more? And he was also in Last Action Hero at Daddy East. His career wasn't in the same spot, though. How true is that? So the invention of the video mode. The video mode is basically a mini video game in the pinball machine on the Dot Matrix display, which is controlled with the flipper buttons. And in some cases, the trigger, or in some games, it was a reward or a mystery award, Which breaks up the playfield gameplay. Some people would say that it's actually in the machine to counter the attack that video games had on pinball. Pinball have been trying for years to sort of meld playfield and video game together, which has been horrible, very, very bad. But they've sort of at least discovered now where it's a bit of a hybrid, and it seems to have worked. Although, some people, not a big fan of video mode. How do you feel about video mode? I tolerate them. There are good ones. There are bad ones. What's the best video mode? I always loved Fishtails, just hitting the jet skier, hearing him scream. Ah! Or the shooting the wolves in Dracula. Yeah, the Dracula one's pretty cool. You know what? I don't really mind the one in T2, actually. It's pretty simple. It's move the cursor left, move the cursor right. Let's see, worst video modes, I mean, the one in Game of Thrones, I played that once, that was not good. I really hate the one in Star Wars, Flying the Millennium Falcon. Oh, that's okay. I don't find that at all. You gotta know when to thrust and when not to thrust. That's what she said. This playfield design, is it really the beginning of sort of the high flow era? Like, he's had flow before, but he hasn't had high. First time he used the payback time feature, which is hitting the alternating ramps, because each ramp would feed back to the flipper and then you could hit the opposite ramp. You crisscrossed back and forth. Crisscrossed back and forth and payback time, and it was used in that game, and he would use it again in T3. He would use it for no apparent reason and no fear, which we'll talk about it's in there, payback time. But that's major flaw. And to the point where if I play any game where I can do that with the ramps, I think of payback time. I'm like, oh, you can do a payback time thing. Because other games had the same feature, but they would call something else. Like Johnny Mnemonic, it's called Yakuza Strike, but it's literally, it's payback time. It's the same. There's games that have that. I like Fishtails, it's kind of the same sort of stuff. Yeah, they have the mod. Yeah, doesn't Metallica do that too, I think? Yes. If you go back and forth. It's a lot tighter shot on that line. Yeah, it's a lot tighter shot, but it's the same concept. T2 was like the first game I can think of that did that. And did it so well. Anywho, if you want to sell me a very, very nice T2 and you want to sell it really, really cheap because you feel bad that I don't have one, shoot me an email, silverballchronicles.gmail.com. So 1992, it's time to get back behind the wheel. Very quickly, the turnaround here is into the next game, which is the Getaway High Speed 2. Which he had begun working on before Terminator 2, but now we're back to it. Yes, solid state WPC, standard body, sells 13,259 units, which is huge. Another hit. Sound, once again, Dan Forden, software Dwight Sullivan, and Doug Watson did the Translight. Mark Sprenger does the Playfield. Yep, duplicating his Playfield artwork style from the original, High Speed. Listener to the show Rockford Replay from Pinside. That's a weird name, Rockford Replay. So his last name is Replay? Maybe it's Replay. Okay. In 1996, we traveled to West Bend, Wisconsin for a wedding. After the wedding at the hotel, I was combing the hallways in search of ice and vending machines. Walking past an open doorway, I peeked in and caught a glimpse of the getaway. As a car guy, I stopped, backed up, and walked into the room for a closer look. Oh, police chase, streetlight, and a supercharger. I only played two credits. Back home, that game was on my mind. Something about the gameplay, shifting gears, supercharger, and running from the cops. Over two decades later, a getaway pops up for sale and it's located three blocks from where I'm employed. I'm bringing this one home. I actually felt like a loose end in my life had been resolved. I'm very thankful Steve created this game and even luckier to have one. And you have one of these? Ah, yes. And you love it. My dad loves it even more. He loves it. And it plays Easy Top. Yes. Lagrange. Which is awesome. Yeah. So Steve invents another toy. One of the coolest toys of all time. One of the coolest toys, Supercharger, which the funny thing is if you watch any of those promotional videos we were talking about earlier for the distributors, they say how great a toy it is because it has no moving parts, which is not true. Lies. It has a diverter. If it had no moving parts, it would go around the Supercharger forever. Which, by the way, is super fun. It is. And it is cool because it really just has the one moving part, and all the rest is just magnets. And it's integrated into the game very well. I had a friend of mine, Sean, he had one of these. And you just, you know, you shoot it up for a jackpot. It goes up into a ramp, which then kind of closes. And then it gets shot around in a circle really quick. And it's got this, like, weird grinding noise, the way the ball sort of shoots around because of this magnet. So the magnet pushes it around this thing and it goes shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo. Yep, there's three magnets that are positioned so you can't see them. They're covered up by that plastic piece with the three flashers on it. It's like an engine. Yeah, and then they have just one little diverter that either makes it go around or makes it come out of the supercharger. Sometimes on mine it'll go too fast and the diverter will be too slow and it'll just hit the diverter and then come down the ramp and drain. It's such a cool toy and it's used so perfectly. It's used well and it will move the entire machine. The entire machine will move with the supercharger. It's coded so well and this is I think Dwight, one of the best things Dwight has ever done is this. Very quickly a player that kind of doesn't know much can toss it into the supercharger. It goes around like three times and then it comes out of the supercharger like the ramp pops up again and then it kind of zips around. Anybody can do that so easily, just kind of quickly. So awesome. Because immediately you're like, oh my god, this is the coolest toy I've ever seen. And you don't have to have a lot of skill. It's not a bash toy. It's so unique. It's so cool. And like my first reaction to that supercharger was just like, this is awesome. Like right out of the gate. I'm pretty sure that's exactly what I said. So how about Steve Ritchie on the back last year? Yeah. Yep. Doug Watson put him on the backless. So he is driving the car. So you said there's some issues to the art on this. You have Doug Watson doing the Translight. So you have Steve Ritchie is driving the car. Then on the play field, it's a blonde guy and the cops are like, he's back or I'm back or whatever, whatever it says. And then on the DMD display, when you see the driver, which is supposed to be you, is like a crew cut. Yeah, so it's not quite. Yeah, the cop is there. He's back. And the driver is there. Deja vu. So cool. There's some really, I think, unique bits to this. You can see that it is high speed, too. It's the getaway, but it is high speed, too. It has a lot of the same unique, interesting pieces to it. It has the lightning-fast orbit loop. It's got the third flipper into a repeatable shot. It's a top-down look of a car chase on a highway. It has stoplights, so the stand-up targets are red, yellow, green. It is a stoplight. You run the stoplight. You start a multiball. It has the RPMs, but one thing that is so cool about this game is he's gone and one-upped the gun handle launcher, and it is now a gear shift that you flick up and down, like the gear shift of a car. Which actually uses two switches. There's up and down. So you'll see a lot of getaways. They'll have like a test report and it'll say that one of the switches isn't working because everyone always shifts up. Yeah, that's the one that gets up. When you walk up, you shift up. No one ever shifts down. So every once in a while you'll get like, shift down hasn't been hit in so many games. It may be broken. The original High Speed, in our Python Anghelo episode, we spoke about how Python, you know, drew him driving a Maserati, a very fancy sort of car. This one, he's very much in a Lamborghini. There's some really interesting features about this game as well because it did get costed. There were some things that were taken out of this machine, and one of them was a prototype mountain, which was mounted in the back of the game. Yep. So you can actually get these mountains now by the mod makers of Pinball. They've taken a 3D printer and they've created a mountain that kind of sits back in that right corner. I actually have a mountain in mine. Does it make it look cool? It's not from one of the newer modders. I actually don't like some of the newer ones that were out. The people who made mine are not around anymore, which I found out, because it came with instructions that, thank God, I printed. Because if you try to go to the website, the website's not there anymore. Oh, no. It was supposed to be a mountain there, and you can see it in the actual DMD. Like when you drive and when you hit the ball into the one saucer, the DMD shows you going into a tunnel. Yes. You're supposed to be going into a tunnel. So, yeah, that was costed out. There's also a plastic on the top of the supercharger on the far right, which keeps the ball from sort of popping out. And it has a mountain printed on it as well. Yep. So you can sort of see the idea was, but it was costed out. One of the great things in this hobby, especially now with 3D printing and all that stuff, are the mod makers are able to sort of complete the vision of the pinball machine or hide wires that were normally there. Another really, really cool mod is that you can get the Donut Heaven mod. You don't like that one? No, I don't like that one. There's like a ball lock on the right side, and it's, in my opinion, very ugly, the way that the ball comes up and locks into this thing, and it just sits there. Now, you can get a cover, or in some people, you can get a 3D printed house, or even just stickers for that thing, and it looks like a Dunkin' Donuts or a Tim Hortons, which I think is awesome. It's donut heaven, and they show all the cops hanging out there. Get it? Nope. You don't get it? No. Nope. That's an American thing, I guess? Cops love donuts? No, Canadian police up here, they're just, you know, playing soccer out there with the kids and always exercising. So you have the Mounties, we have donuts. There are two versions of this game. So the manufacturer flyer shows the first version. So if you look on IPDB, you can see the first version in the flyer. But there's two versions. So some of the notable differences. Yeah, the first, there's very few of the first version. There might be only 100. I think I've only seen one of them. Let's see. The first version is five. Five gear inserts do not have the curved text above them saying red line RPM to collect gear value. And the numbering below them is first, second, third, fourth, fifth without the word gear appearing on each one. The second version has the curb text and the original numbering includes the word gear such as first gear, second gear, etc. First version has the word supercharger in front of the supercharger ramp entrance. The second version does not. This one added ball deflector to rear glass channel on later versions to prevent air balls from falling into the cabinet. That's actually not on a lot of the second version. That was added during the run because the ball will fly off the supercharger, go over the back panel and end up in the cabinet. And see, barcode added to the left return lane under the diamond coat on later version. The first version used a standard, like, smaller coil, like the kind you would see in a kickback for the launch. Like, the kind that was probably in a Terminator 2. But it just wasn't powerful enough to get all the way around the loop. So they used a much larger, like, a flipper-sized coil. The first, yeah, the first version had a single playfield hinge. So it had the old hinging playfield. So you couldn't pull the playfield out. Imagine trying to work on a supercharger. That would have been a pain. The early version also had two extra GI lights on the right side of the playfield, but they were removed to accommodate the new hinge system, which then Williams started using for all the games. The interesting thing is, Adam's family that came out after Getaway has the pivoting playfield, not the new hinging system, because their development cycle was so long. Oh, interesting. The first version cabinet front decal shows headlights of the car from the back glass instead of saying the getaway. And really, you don't want a first-run one. You don't want the original. It's not the more fancy collectible one. Well, there's hardly any of them. And you don't want the hinging playfield. You want the new playfield mount, which was one of the best ever made. That's why everyone ripped it off or tried to rip it off. So basically you could just lift the play field up, actually pull it out, and then put it up. But it allowed you to get to all the stuff in the back of the game, which would be a big deal later on as Williams started putting more and more crap in the back of the games. Yeah, once things get a lot more complicated, being able to get under and out of them. And one thing that Stern did in a costing effort sort of around the financial crisis was they put those pegs in instead of service rails. Yeah, around, I think, Iron Man, NBA Iron Man. Iron Man might have been the first. I think Iron Man had the pegs, and then they did the deal where, like, the pros would have pegs, but the premiums would have rails, and then they finally, like, no, everything gets a rail again. Yeah, and that'll be the first to go if something else happens in the industry. But you can see that in this time of, you know, they're not so much costing things out of the game that make the operator's life easier. So if it's something that they can, like, for example, let's take the mountain out of the game and make sure that we change this hinge system, right? If it makes the operator's life easier, they're willing to sort of put that money in. Pinball's a business, and sometimes items get cut from the final thing to cost save, and that's just how it goes. We're going to do a whole Dwight Sullivan episode. I've got more stuff on Terminator 2. I've got more stuff on The Getaway from Dwight Sullivan's perspective. So I want to move on to the next thing here. 1993. Steve Ritchie, he's voiced many things in his career, tons of his games, tons of other things, but one of the most famous things he ever did were the call-outs for Mortal Kombat. As Shao Kahn. If you took Terminator 2 and the amount of nostalgia around that, Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, it's like 1A, 1B. Like, Mortal Kombat was so huge when I was a kid. It's such an awesome big deal. When I found out three years ago that Steve Ritchie was the voice of Mortal Kombat's Shao Kahn, I almost crapped my pants. Fight. Fatality. Flawless victory. And if you get a couple of drinks into Steve, he'll do that for you, just like he was sitting in the studio. It's amazing. So do you have any favorite Steve Ritchie call-outs throughout his career? Anything that Skull says. Shoot the rap for more time and bigger points. We'll get to that in just a minute. Anything as a bad guy, anything laughing at me. Oh, like if we want to go, one of my favorite early ones, I probably would have said this on the first episode, Black Knight. If you hit the MagnaSafe too late and it drains, he just literally laughs at you. The call-outs, I think, for Sword of Rage are pretty amazing. Ah, they are. Because he's had, like, 30 years of thinking about what the Black Knight would say or do in the next game, and it really came out well. Give me your money. Or stand up and fight. The intro, the multiple. Stand up and fight. Now allegedly Steve Ritchie came up with the name Mortal Kombat and it was originally just called Combat before his suggestion of Mortal Kombat Now I don know how true that is I heard that I thought I heard it the other way It was going to be called Mortal and he added the Combat So there you go. We've reconciled that Steve Ritchie was somehow involved in the naming of the game, but nobody's really sure how. Now we get to move on to something pretty unique and pretty cool, and we're going to go where no pin has gone before, Except those two other machines that did Star Trek as well. Heaviest complex machines ever devised. Yeah, it's time to call Steve Ritchie, I think at this time, you know, the king of the license, right? He's the king of flow, but man, he is the king of the license at the moment, and he's got some big-name licenses. And if you wanted to sell 10,000 units, you put Steve Ritchie on your license. And it might not have worked later on in his stern career, but I'll tell you what, Star Trek The Next Generation, man, Star Trek was huge in the 90s. Huge in the 90s, especially The Next Generation. It was, all of a sudden now you're getting conventions and they had their own thing at Las Vegas. They did movies, potato chip bags, had little trading cards in them. Star Trek was massive, and they put Steve Ritchie to make The Next Generation. Yeah, the Star Trek Next Gen license was difficult to get. In the first meeting they had, Roger Sharp set up the meeting. They sat down with this, I guess, woman who was in charge of the license, and they told him, you know, no phasers, no shooting, no fighting. You can't do anything like that. Yeah, you don't want anything that makes the show fun. And Steve Ritchie was like, you know, because he was a fan of the show, and he's like, I'm not going to make it space pirates from effing hell. That was his exact quote. Nice. So the meeting did not go well. Roger Sharp's seed, if he could salvage something, they ended up getting a hold of someone else in the licensing department instead of the initial person they talked to that were much more friendly. They were like, sure, sounds good. You can really tell that Steve Ritchie will have some sort of vision, and he is part of the licensing. Like, he really is in there. Now, he's not getting the license. He's not supporting license. But when somebody comes to him and says, Star Trek, the next generation, he kind of says, okay, I need these elements. And he's part of negotiating those elements. So you can see that he's bought in to the Star Trek name and his vision. And if you can't get, you know, phasers or aliens or, you know, fighting, you know, what else do you want for Star Trek? You didn't just play the game, you played the show. You ever watch Next Gen? Yeah, did I ever. I was all in. That was my Star Trek. I mean, I watched the original show as a little kid, but definitely Next Gen was my, that's my show. I would watch the original series when I would come home from school. It was like Star Trek, the original series, or Batman 66, kind of on TV when I would come home as reruns. I watched a lot of Next Generation. I enjoyed Deep Space Nine, but not to the level of Next Generation. But my jam was really Voyager because it fell within that sort of like 13, 14-year-old age, 12, 13, 14. But it was also sort of more action-y and more explosion-y stuff, which was pretty cool. And of course it had the Borg, like come on, like the post-first contact Borg. So yeah, I was all in on Star Trek, for sure. Steve Ritchie would say that Star Trek The Next Generation was the greatest collaboration of talent on any game I ever did. More spectacularly talented people were involved than any other game. Great stuff. So all hands prepare for Seth. Make it so number one. Space sci-fi Star Trek theme, November of 93, Solid State Williams WPC. Now this is a DCS WPC system. It's a wide body, which we haven't seen Steve Ritchie do in a long time. What was the last wide body game he did, listeners? Do you remember from episode one? Did you say Stellar Wars? Ding, ding, ding. Correct. If you answered that correctly, send us an email to silverballchronicles at gmail.com and we'll enter you into a secret draw for a prize which we will reveal next month. 11,728 units. Dan Forden on music. Dwight Sullivan on software. He's able to handle Steve Ritchie, so they probably just keep feeding him to the lion, poor Dwight. And Greg Ferreira's on art. First time Greg has worked with Steve. So this is part of Williams, Bally, Midway's Super Pin line of wide bodies. So what's the Super Pin? It's wider. They all of a sudden came up with this concept of retrying the wide body, right? The wide body became a big deal because Atari made them, and everybody freaked out that they need to make this wide body in case it was the next greatest invention and they don't want to miss out. And then they kind of disappeared. And now they're back. Yeah, I'm trying to remember how much wider. These were not Paragon wide. I always go by the playfield glass. I think the standard playfield glass is 43 by 21. It's 43 inches by 21. I think these were like 23 and three quarters or something. So as much wider, they were only like two and a half inches or so, maybe three at the most wider. Yeah, wide bodies, the ball tends to travel further. Like if you're shooting the far left, the far right, the very back of the play field, in the corners, the ball takes a little longer to get back there, and it's kind of noticeable. It's not off-putting, it's not like, ugh, I'm never going to play that ever again, but it takes a little longer, and you're kind of waiting for that ball to come back. A lot of people describe them as floaty, right? So the ball just kind of floats around. There's so much wide open space. Well, they haven't played any of those old Sterns from one of our first episodes. Those wide bodies are not floating. That's right. And if you're keeping count, that's the fourth time Ron has tried to pump Stern. They got it going on. They made the right choice. Stern made the right choice. They're a little bit wider. They're not huge. And they also made various play field positioning that made it a lot better. Super Pins are going to pop up in the Barry Ousler episode. They're going to pop up in our Pat Lawler episode. You know, the Mark Ritchie one whenever I, you know, start writing something about him. But those, they were really popular at this sort of 93 to like 95, right? Like all of a sudden it was like everything was a Super Pin. Yeah, it was Twilight Zone and the last one was, what was the last one? It was a Popeye. Yeah, Popeye. I don't have it in front of me, but yeah. I mean, the thing is, once again, we have the return of the Picar maneuver shot. Yeah, this is where it gets the name. The left orbit up to the upper right flipper up the ramp. He does it again. If you're keeping count, you can just check that off again. Yep. Almost a bingo. People say this is like the most complicated machine ever built. What is a subway? Subway is just what it says. It's the way to get the ball from one area of the play field to the other. But underneath the game, so you don't see it. Hence the subway. It's like a plastic habit trail. It goes in a hole, some coils kick it down, and then it pops up somewhere else. It's like magic. And on Star Trek, it is insane. It has three large ball popper units, each with a set of optos that can detect more than one ball. And it has a full subway system with two diverters and six balls, three in the ball trough and then one in each of the three ball poppers. So if you put six balls in the game and turn it on, it will fire three of the balls to the back and you will literally hear the diverters activate and you'll hear the balls load in each ball popper. Dwight Sullivan, he was on the Special When Lit podcast, which I'll include in our show notes, and he takes a lot, he's all about complexity. And he says that the complexity in this machine was more or less his fault. So I'm going to try to read this like Dwight Sullivan. I said to Steve, I said, wouldn't it be great if the ball went down here and then popped up over here and then it popped up over there or over there? Basically, it was all my fault. He just kept popping up around. Does that sound like Dwight Sullivan? Pretty much, yeah. Jerry Thompson is the main sound guy at Stern right now. He pretty much does just about every game's music at this point. And he's good. And at a convention, he says he got Steve to sign his Star Trek Next Gen Translight. And Steve said, you have one of those? And I said, yeah. He said, does it work? He replied. And he said, yes, it does. And Steve said, oh, that's rare. So that's like the joke. The joke? Yes, Steve pretty much said the same thing to me when I said I owned it. So he uses that one a lot. When I went to go buy my Simpsons pinball party, I was at a collector's home, And he had a next gen and it was just, it was beautiful. Just a beautiful next gen. It had been powder coated and it was in wonderful shape. And I told him this story because I was doing this research for this episode. And I said, hey, here's this story that I hear. And the joke that Steve Ritchie has is that it never works because it's too complicated. And Buddy told me, oh, no, it works fantastic. It's great. It's no problem. And then he went to play it and sure as shit, the ball got stuck. I couldn't believe it. And I felt so bad. I felt so bad that I told him this story. And then his Star Trek Next Gen just stopped working. Biggest issue with Next Gen is just the sheer amount of optos, the optic sensors the thing has. And if any of them are not working and it doesn't know where the balls are, you'll start getting the issue where it just keeps firing balls out. It gets confused. It ends up in permanent ball search. Producer of the show, Dennis Creasel, would say, Hey, this is the greatest sound package that has ever been made, ever, ever, ever. I don't know if sound package, it's the greatest speech package, just in fact that you have every cast member. Every single cast member. Every single one. And if you told the Next Gen fan, like, we have every regular cast member, they'd be like, well, did you get Q? Did you get him? They'd be, yes, we got Q also, which would be John DeLancey. It's like, holy crap, you did get everybody. Well, except Wesley, but, you know, he looked lefi that time, so who cares? Who cares about Wesley, the stupid turtleneck? Shut up, Wesley, as Captain Picard would say. One of the cool things, and very few people know this, each member of the cast that did the voiceovers, they each got a machine for doing the voiceovers. Yep, and most of them are owned by collectors now. Yeah, so what they did is they had special voice ROMs in them with all of the outtakes from their speech. So if they were warming up their voice or they flubbed a word or they said something funny. Most of them were like, we will never surrender unless you pay us enough. Yeah, exactly. Things like that. Those sound ROM chips are different in just those machines. They are outrageously collectible, in my opinion, if you can get one of those. Well, you can get the ROMs. They're freely available. Yeah, but if you can get the one, the machine that was actually from that individual. Yeah, I know two that were sold. Beverly Crusher, I don't remember their names. Beverly Crusher was sold to... It's McFadden. Yeah, Gage McFadden. I think his name is Greg Colton. He's one of the Family Guy directors. He's on Pinside. But he bought that one. I don't know if he still has it. And I know Worf still is. He was on one of the final episodes of Canada's Pinball Podcast talking about that pin, I think. And he was on, and Worf sold his. Sorry, Worf. What's Worf's name? I know all the character names. I know the actual names. It's all that matters. Yeah, so Worf sold his also. So that's at least two that are owned by collectors now and not by the cast members. Yeah, was it Michael Dorn? Michael Dorn, yeah. I don't think either of them ever, I know Gates McFadden's was just like in a box, he never like opened it. That's crazy talk. Like she would care though really like. Nah she wouldn't care. What's better than just one oscillating cannon from Terminator 2? Two! Now I personally think that Steve Ritchie's standards might be too high. He always, he will always find something with his machines that he wishes he could improve on. Well, I agree with him in this case, because Steve says the one thing I regret is the side arrangement, the swings. As soon as I made the decision to put the cannons on the slingshots, it changed the movement too much. Superman in Stellar Wars, he put those slings exactly where they would be on a standard body. This one, because he put those cannons on there to shoot the ball, he had to move them out a little bit. Well, it's the shape of the skis, too. They're just a bizarre shape. So it floats weird down there. And anything going near the in-lane-out lane is going for the out lane. Yeah, it just gets sucked in. It's like a black hole. Plus, by default, the kickback doesn't start lit on default settings, which I never could understand. Yeah, it's dumb. That's so weird because he has it lit on almost every other game at Game Start, but not Star Trek. If we move on to that, I got some really great stories around Star Trek The Next Generation, which I want to save for the Dwight Sullivan episode. But there's lots of really cool stuff because it's such an iconic machine. It's such a big deal in pinball that there's a lot of stories about Star Trek The Next Generation that I want to spread out. So we're moving into 1994. Let's face it, okay? Steve Ritchie is cooler than me. And I think he's cooler than most people. And on top of that, he actually is like a huge motocross fan. He's driven Porsches by getting caught by the police. He's met tons of celebrities. He had a mullet. Steve Ritchie is much cooler than I am or ever will be to make him even cooler. So if you watch the No Fear promo video, Steve goes into detail as to what was the inspiration between the inspiration for the extreme No Fear pinball machine. He says, oh yeah, there's the missing fingertip. On Labor Day 1994, I lost my fingertip, left ring finger, in a weird dirt bike accident. It went in the rear sprocket and snipped it off. Ow, ow, ah. I looped it on a cliff jump. It wasn't a flying W. I dropped straight down through the air and could not push the bike away from me. The bars were ripped from my hands when the bike and I landed. We slid down the face of the cliff together and I guess my hands were flailing around. Man, what a badass. Just that whole part, that whole quote. I'm like, man, he's so much cooler than me. I think they found the finger, but they couldn't reattach it. Yeah. My story is the one time I took off the treads on my deck stairs because the treads were sort of rotting a little bit. And I took it off, and then I realized the stringers, or the runners underneath, were all rotten and had to fall apart. And then I had to build deck stairs. That's about as exciting as my life gets here, man. Scintillating. Are you sitting on the edge of your seat? I'm sure I'm standing right now. Man, you're so lucky. I had to stand, yeah. So hunched over. When we move into 1995, it's been 18 months since Steve Ritchie's super cool Star Trek The Next Generation. 18 months is a long time to go for Steve Ritchie before making a pinball machine. His next longest stint was really 10 years. And one of the reasons for that was at the time, when you get around 1995, he actually had the George Gomes role that George Gomes currently has as fern pinball. He was basically head of manufacturing or head of whatever it's called. So he was not doing games. So what happened is Williams had a very small little window in their production schedule where they didn't have any games that were going to be made. So to keep the factory moving, Steve came up with No Fear in a very short period. It was No Fear, Dangerous Sports. It's sports, extreme sports, and it's kind of a license. And it was his last good art package until Sword of Rage. May 1995, it is a WPC-S, 4,540 units. Dan Forden on Music and Sound Software by Matt Coleri and Art by Greg Ferreris. Now, Edward Partridge from Facebook, you'll remember Edward because he's the one that hijacked our Steve Ritchie and Gottlieb System 1 poll. He says, No Fear? You lost me on this one, Steve. So, what's the deal with No Fear, Ron? It's actually a license which I didn't even know. No Fear's t-shirts were popular in the mid-90s to early 2000s. And I did not know this. Shirts typically featured existential slogans or quotes that touted the virtues of extreme sports. Extreme! Common themes included fear of death, lack of laziness, contempt for social norms, and the law. And the other thing is, when he debuted this game at one of the trade shows, he did so riding in on a motorcycle. Of course he did, because Steve Ritchie is cooler than me. There's a video. He rides in on a dirt bike, comes in, they got the blanket over the machine, and he just pulls it like, there it is, and then he rides off. You know, if I unveiled a pinball machine, I would do it probably in one of two ways. One of them would be... Canadian Mountie? I would be riding in on a golf cart with a hockey stick, some Tim Hortons donuts, and a six-pack of Molson, and enough poutine to feed the entire group there. Or I would do the next best thing that comes to mind, which would be to take my very expensive pinball machine, cover it in garbage bags and tape, and then unveil it to everybody. So I remember No Fear because I'm from rural Canada and No Fear was very much a cool brand because it was very extreme sports and hunting and it was really big in that community. It also had its knockoffs like No Surrender. People and their like Chevy Cavaliers would have the No Fear stickers on them. It was huge in the sort of mid-late 90s. It made no sense to me because I was not of that, wasn't their target demographic, I guess. You were not extreme. I was not extreme. Like I said, golf cart Tim Hortons and Poutine. Having a pinball machine after a clothing company, we're seeing a bit of a decline here in the quality of licenses, aren't we? Yeah, this particular one. So Greg Ferreres and Steve Ritchie once again do the voices. Greg Freres, he would be Wiseguy, one of the characters in the game. Steve Ritchie being Skull, who is in the middle of the playfield. Steve Ritchie and Greg actually wrote the scripts together. And you say this is your best call-out package. Well, he used so many quotes from this game on other games continually. You know, play better, which is just part of, he's used that in multiple games. That's in Spider-Man. It's in Spider-Man. It's in ACDC. Pinball's not a spectator sport. That's also in Spider-Man. He just reused the whole... Even the voice he does in ACDC, it's basically Skull. Yeah, it's the Steve Ritchie voice, isn't it? Play brother! I love it. I'm in a minority here, but whatever. Steve says, most of my games are pretty rowdy. With a name like No Fear, it had to be Quick and Somewhat Dangerous Game. At least it should feel like that. The game comes off like it's very violent mean, But I think most people found it pretty forgiving. Okay, I didn't. Mine's brutal. There are breaks in the game if you choose to take them. What is wrong with physical play? I think that's when you're physically involved in the game, you enjoy it more, and we'll remember it. The funny thing about No Fear, Steve also says, During No Fear, it was incredibly difficult to design the game and watch over others' designs. Hence the George Gomez role. No Fear became a rushed project and probably suffered a little for it. Yeah, I talked with Steve before. He wanted to do one more Whitewood. And he wanted to remove a shot. He felt it had too many shots. Which, if you've ever played it, and you start hitting posts galore, because all the shots are so tight and there's so many of them, you can see where he was coming from. Yeah, so he probably wanted to open up something and ramp or in orbit to make it a little... But then again, he took the shot under the skull. It's the same shot that's in Star Wars. Mm-hmm. Yep. So he reused that. Plus he sort of reused the supercharger, kind of. It uses the same mechanism. You go up the ramp, it has three magnets. Except now, you are the supercharger with your flipper trying to keep the jump going over and over and over. Is No Fear a bad game? Not to me it ain't. I mean, it doesn't take long to get to the wizard mode. It's not roller games, let's put it that way. It mode, but I almost never get there because it's just hard. I had a friend of mine who had a No Fear, and he enjoyed it. I never did get to play it. But it was just not right. I don't know, he couldn't get into it. The thing to remember is a lot of the modes are rip-offs of Star Trek Next Gen. Oh, interesting. Literally. Exactly. Okay, Skydive is the same as Asteroid. You know, Asteroid, you hit a shot and it locks in a value and then all the shots are lit and you hit them. The exact same thing in No Fear. The Next Gen has the one mode where you hit the side ramp once and it's over. I can't remember which one that was. And No Fear, it's the skiing one. You hit the right ramp and it's over. They just copied some of the modes. They're literally the same rules. What's really cool and unique about the game is the skull character. So there's the No Fear logo had a skull in it in some of their designs. Yep, and he comes to life. And they put this skull in the middle of a playfield and his jaw moves, he talks. And he's noisy, that jaw, so I had to put all kinds of dampening around mine so it's not as loud. You don't want to be playing it with the glass off because you'll hear more of the creaking of the jaw than you will him actually singing or talking. The other interesting thing about No Fear is, and I don't know if they did this on any other game. If you know, please email us at silverballchronicles at gmail.com. But No Fear has a different playfield mounting system than what Wills usually use. If you look at the cabinet, and you're at IPDB right now, you look at the side of the cabinet, you notice there's no bolts. The two bolts that are usually on each side where the mounting is. Oh, interesting. They're not there. They actually cut the inside of the cabinet and the playfield rides along the cut. It actually sucks, guys. It's way harder to pull the playfield out and push it back in. I don't know if they did this with any other games, but I know they did it with no fear. Yeah, and we're getting into that sort of period of decline, right? It's not right at the beginning. It's not right at the end. It's kind of right in the middle where... We're declining. We're declining by 95, 96. Yeah, things are... you know, 95 is really where it starts to fall. It doesn't fall off a cliff, but it really does. You've got those big major hits of like 91 to 94, and now it really starts to taper off. It really is not going to happen. Yeah, you don't have games selling 10,000 units anymore. Yeah, video games and video games really taking over. People aren't going out. Sort of the millennials, the younger generation at the time and Gen X, you know, you guys are graduating college, university. You're getting out into your real life. You know, you're too busy to go to an arcade or things like that. You're having your kids. My generation, I'm in my mid-30s, you know, at that time I'm in sort of middle school, high school. We're more at home now, right? We're playing video games at home. Television is really big now. Families in general aren't going out for entertainment, right? We're being entertained at home, but we're going out for food, where it was kind of the opposite before, where you would go out for entertainment and you would eat at home. So, you know, society has changed a little bit and pinball has sort of shown that, is that people aren't going out and playing. I mean, this is where we can kind of wrap up this episode. This was Steve Ritchie's last game at Williams after his second decade of almost non-stop hit pinball machines, brand new original themes, the biggest licensed themes pinball had ever seen. And he continued to build on the title of best-selling pinball designer of all time. So around this time, Williams, Midway, they basically buy Atari. So Atari is now under the Bally Midway Williams banner. So Steve Ritchie ends up going there. It also gives him the opportunity to move back to California. That's where Atari, if you remember from our first episode, that's where Atari is primarily based. Yeah, Steve has come full circle, right? He came in working on the line at Atari. Now he's coming back as a bigwig. As a senior staff producer. And he would design and produce the racing game California Speed, which sold very well. Sold over almost 8,000 units at sales of over $40 million on a budget of $2 million with a crew of 16 video programmers and artists. And I have played California Speed before. It's fun. It's crazy. He kills it at Atari, too. Like, he's just like, you know what? I can't, you know, Pinball's not doing it. I think it'll be better if I just serve Williams, Bally, Midway over in the Atari division, and he goes over there and he just kills it right under the gate. So he was never involved in any of the Pinball 2000 things or any of that chapter of Williams. He was already gone by that point. So 1996 was really the beginning of the decline in Pinball that would gradually diminish in sales, and three years later, Williams closed its Pinball division and Pinball was basically declared dead. When Atari was bought by Williams, it was over. They turned everything off. In 2000, it was over. They paid me and I went and did some other things, some slot machines. Yeah, and you could really, I remember in that, going through that, he just really just, the wind was really out of his sails when he said that, right? You could tell that he was really bummed out by the death of Pinball because it had given him so much. That's the end of our second Steve Ritchie episode. What did you think of that one, Ron? Um, I own a lot of the games we went through, or have owned. You have so many pinball machines in level zero. Well, most people will be like, okay, what ones did you keep? Like, are you high? So, let me get this straight. You kept F14 Tomcat. Okay, that's fine. I could see that. But you kept roller games, and you kept No Fear? Like, are you high? And you got rid of Black Knight 2000? But I do have Getaway. I don't have any Steve Ritchie games. I'd love to own something. Oh, that's such a fail. I know. Probably not the next generation just because I don't want to deal with the headaches. And I'm not a big Super Pin fan. And it's really heavy. Yeah, I'd like a getaway. I think a getaway would fit in. High Speed would fit in, I think, fairly well into my collection. Like I said, Terminator 2, man, if I could friggin' find a really good Terminator 2 but didn't pay a fortune for it. Terminator 2 is pretty easy to service. It's not very complicated. If you watch, we've been talking a lot in this episode about those promo videos that Williams did for distributors. They're hilarious in that if the game is very uncomplicated, they would say, and the play field is uncluttered for easy cleaning, and then they would show a game like Whitewater, and they would never use that comment. It's like, wait a minute, this game isn't exactly uncluttered. This game will drive you insane. This game will drive you insane trying to clean any of this. Yeah, but it doesn't have a pop bumper. I mean, if Steve Ritchie called it a career here, right? Like, this would be a pretty great run. It would be. Like, if he was just like, ah, screw it, I'm gonna go be a, I gotta go farm transistors over here in California or grow some asparagus. So, would you say our first episode of Steve Ritchie was like the Star Wars prequels, and then this is like the original episode four through six of your best material, And now we're going to the later trilogy. The Last Jedi was good. So I guess that's like Spider-Man. Although when he went to CERN, he left there and then came back. So it's actually, is there a fourth trilogy? Yeah. He's in uncharted territory. Steve Ritchie is a chameleon. He is an odd fellow. He's engaged in the community. He's passionate. He's fun. He holds no punches. And he's lasted forever. And he will never retire. Never. From his own, he has no plans on retiring. He is probably going to die making a white wood. They're just going to roll him into the machine and just bury him right there. Hey, Harry Williams, design games in the 30s all the way into the 80s. So there's precedent. So I'm really looking forward to our next Steve Ritchie episode, but we're going to push that out a little ways down because we've got some really cool other episodes coming up. So in our next episode, we're going to, it's going to be entitled Moving Units, the Bally Art Revolution, and that's going to cover Bally's design, philosophy, and art from around 1978, 79, all the way up to about 1984. So there's some pretty amazing stuff in there. Yeah, when they stopped outsourcing artwork and decided to create their own in-house art department, made some of the most awesome backbusters you'll ever see. Let me get Stewie for this one. Hey, Stewie. Stewie, we need you to do the outro. Oh, thank you. As always, you can send your comments, questions, corrections, and concerns to civilballchronicles at gmail.com. We look forward to all your messages and we read every one. Please subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or your favorite ball catcher. Turn on automatic downloads so you don't miss this single episode. And remember to leave us a five-star review wherever you found us or on This Week in Pinball's Promoter Database. That way more people can find us. Do you want to support the podcast? Sure, we all do. Do you need a t-shirt? Of course you do. Swing on over to SableBallSwag.com and pick up a SableBall Chronicles t-shirt to help us keep the lights off. Back to you, David. Wow, thank you, Stewie. 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