# Paul Faris

**Source:** Pintastic New England  
**Type:** video  
**Published:** 2018-08-19  
**Duration:** 62m 46s  
**Beat:** Pinball

**URL:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUyYN-IBOoQ

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## Analysis

Paul Faris, legendary pinball backglass artist, presents his career arc from fine artist and high school wrestling coach to pioneering the four-color process printing revolution in pinball art at Bally (1976 onwards). He details his 32 game designs, the creation of Bally's in-house art department, and the artistic evolution of pinball from 1930s-1970s silkscreen techniques to full-color lithography, featuring anecdotes with Evel Knievel, Hugh Hefner, and Bruce Springsteen.

### Key Claims

- [HIGH] Paul Faris designed 32 pinball games total (verified by checking website) — _Paul Faris stating his complete game count: 'I went back to the website today to double check that. I'm given a few that I credit for a few that I actually didn't do. But 32 I did.'_
- [HIGH] Dave Christensen designed Fireball, Mata Hari, The Wizard, and Captain Fantastic (some of his most famous games) — _Paul Faris discussing Christensen's portfolio: 'Some of the The Games he did... Fireball, Mata Hari, The Wizard... Those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head. They're some of his famous ones.'_
- [HIGH] The Wizard was the first licensed pinball game in history (based on movie Tommy) — _Paul Faris: 'It was the first licensed game in there or similar interjection pinball history, actually, with the movie Tommy.'_
- [HIGH] 8-Ball electronic pinball sold 20,000+ units, one of the biggest sellers — _Paul Faris: 'the reason I Game of Thrones the $20,000 there on the screen is that it was $20,000 and some.'_
- [HIGH] Lost World was the first four-color process pinball backglass, developed by Faris and colleagues at Bally — _Paul Faris: 'Lost World... was our first four-color pinball process game in there or similar interjection the industry. Actually, Atari came closely behind us with a game after that, but we were the first.'_
- [HIGH] Evel Knievel approved the game and corrected the physics: the motorcycle had to land on rear tire, not front, to avoid crashing — _Paul Faris: 'when he it, he made me change that. He said, no, that's wrong. That's wrong. I'll crash... the way I had it, he would have landed on his front tire... he has to land on his rear tire.'_
- [HIGH] Hugh Hefner demanded his Playboy game depict him as the central figure (like Captain Fantastic), not as a lifestyle montage — _Paul Faris: 'Heffner called back and said he wanted to be like Captain Fantastic, was in there or similar interjection the center of Captain Fantastic at the time. He wanted to be that. He wanted to be the man, the Playboy image.'_
- [HIGH] Greg Ferris (Stern art director) was hired as photographer/camera operator before becoming artist and is now art director at Stern Pinball — _Paul Faris: 'He came 'in there' or similar interjection Tee'd Off run our camera Tee'd Off do all the big photos... And we kept our word, and he kept his. He turned out Tee'd Off be one of the greatest guys... He is the art director at Stern Pinball today.'_
- [HIGH] Kevin O'Connor designed Strikes and Spares, Silver Ball Mania, Medusa, Monster Bash, Flash Gordon, Congo, Viking, Kiss, and Time Machine at Data East — _Paul Faris listing O'Connor's games: 'Strikes and Spares... Silver Ball Mania, Medusa, Monster Bash... Flash Gordon... Congo, Viking... Kiss and the new version of Kiss... Time Machine at Data East.'_
- [HIGH] Margaret Hudson was the first hire for Bally's in-house art department, specializing in precision screen cutting — _Paul Faris: 'The first one I hired was the gal on the right, that's Margaret Hudson... she was the first hire actually, and did the screens from then on.'_

### Notable Quotes

> "This is still the only revolution there has ever been in pinball back glass art."
> — **George Gomez (introducing Paul Faris)**, early presentation
> _Framing Faris's four-color printing innovation as the singular revolutionary moment in pinball art history_

> "The difference between fine artists and commercial artists is generally a fine artist just paints something and hopes to sell it. Commercial artist basically sells their artwork to help sell some other product."
> — **Paul Faris**, mid-presentation
> _Explaining his transition from fine art to commercial pinball art and addressing the perception of commercial art as inferior_

> "Artists is like herding cats, they say. It's very challenging. We tend to have our own way of doing things."
> — **Paul Faris (quoting Bill O'Donnell Jr.)**, interview context
> _Explaining why O'Donnell hired a wrestling coach — for management of creative personalities_

> "He wanted to be like Captain Fantastic... He wanted to be the man, the Playboy image. And it's turned out that's what he credited. That was the brand he wanted."
> — **Paul Faris**, Playboy discussion
> _Demonstrating IP owner's direct creative control over game aesthetics and brand representation_

> "We had to be kind of careful of how we did this... we had to be kind of careful... nobody else knew, and I wasn't to discuss, was that we were going to try to set up an art department of our own."
> — **Paul Faris**, Bally backstory
> _Revealing the strategic secrecy around Bally's in-house art department launch to avoid alienating Advertising Poster (their playfield supplier)_

> "Lost World did great. And it was kind of revolutionized the way we printed our pinball after that point because everybody kind of tried to catch up to that."
> — **Paul Faris**, Lost World discussion
> _Describing the market-wide adoption of four-color process printing after Bally's innovation_

> "He's one of my favorite people in the world... He's the art director at Stern Pinball today."
> — **Paul Faris**, Greg Ferris section
> _Personal endorsement and tracing Greg Ferris's career from photographer to Stern's art director_

> "I was a realist. I did portraits and landscapes... it's fine art, kind of Andrew Wyeth-like."
> — **Paul Faris**, background section
> _Describing his fine art training and style before pivoting to commercial pinball art_

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| Paul Faris | person | Legendary pinball backglass artist; designed 32 games; pioneered four-color process printing in pinball at Bally; also high school wrestling coach for 40 years |
| George Gomez | person | Legendary Stern Pinball designer introducing Paul Faris; hosts presentation at Pintastic New England event |
| Dave Christensen | person | Early in-house artist at Bally; designed Fireball, Mata Hari, The Wizard, Captain Fantastic; known for exceptional line art and inking; first artist whose work inspired Faris |
| Kevin O'Connor | person | Bally artist hired by Faris; designed Strikes and Spares, Silver Ball Mania, Medusa, Monster Bash, Flash Gordon, Congo, Viking, Kiss, and Time Machine at Data East; long career in pinball art |
| Greg Ferris | person | Hired by Faris as photographer at Bally; became artist; designed Skateball, Black Pyramid, Elvira's House of Horrors, Dr. Dude, Party Animal, Attack from Mars, The Rolling Stones; currently art director at Stern Pinball |
| Margaret Hudson | person | First hire for Bally's in-house art department; specialized in precision screen cutting and stencil work; designed several games after proving expertise |
| Bill O'Donnell Jr. | person | VP of Marketing at Bally Pinball; recruited Paul Faris to establish in-house art department; visionary in recognizing Faris's potential |
| Evel Knievel | person | Licensed IP owner; approved Bally's Evel Knievel pinball game; corrected physics error in backglass animation (landing gear); was in Chicago for shark tank jump on live TV |
| Hugh Hefner | person | Playboy founder; IP owner for Playboy pinball game; demanded self-centered design with him as central figure rather than lifestyle montage; visited Playboy Mansion with Faris for approvals |
| Bruce Springsteen | person | Met Faris at Bally offices during pinball interview tour; in Chicago for concert; played pinball (Tee'd Off) during tour visit |
| Norm Clark | person | Head of design department at Bally; designer of 8-Ball electronic pinball; confident pool-themed game would be a major hit |
| Dick White | person | Bally employee who did slot machine artwork and some pinball work; created football-themed game later reworked by Faris as Quarterback |
| Bally | company | Pinball manufacturer where Faris worked from 1976 onwards; established first in-house art department; pioneered four-color process printing with Lost World |
| Stern Pinball | company | Current employer of Greg Ferris as art director; Kevin O'Connor worked for them on Playboy version |
| Advertising Poster | company | Original playfield and backglass supplier for pinball industry; supplied all major manufacturers; competitor whose suppliers Bally aimed to surpass with four-color process |
| Atari | company | Followed Bally's four-color printing innovation closely; adopted similar process shortly after Lost World |
| Data East | company | Manufacturer for which Kevin O'Connor designed Time Machine |
| Williams | company | Pinball manufacturer; Norm Clark designed many pool games for Williams before joining Bally |
| Evel Knievel (game) | game | Licensed Bally pinball with Evel Knievel IP; Paul Faris designed backglass art; featured motorcycle animation; Evel personally approved and corrected physics |
| Lost World | game | Bally pinball game; first four-color process backglass in pinball industry; revolutionary printing technique developed by Faris and colleagues; huge commercial and critical success |
| 8-Ball | game | Electronic Bally pinball game; pool theme; sold 20,000+ units; major commercial success; Paul Faris designed art alongside Lost World development |
| Playboy | game | Licensed Bally pinball with Hugh Hefner IP; Paul Faris designed backglass featuring Hefner, Patty McGuire, and girlfriend; required multiple visits to Playboy Mansion for approvals |
| Pintastic New England | event | Pinball convention/expo where this presentation by Paul Faris is taking place; organized educational talks on pinball art history |
| Montini Catholic | organization | High school wrestling program where Paul Faris coached for 40 years; achieved state championship, ranked 4th nationally, beat #1 team; Faris may retire after current season |

### Topics

- **Primary:** Pinball art history and evolution (1930s-1970s), Four-color printing process innovation and technical development, Bally's in-house art department creation and early team, Individual artist careers and contributions (Christensen, O'Connor, Ferris, Hudson)
- **Secondary:** Licensed IP approval processes and designer/IP owner collaboration, Faris's dual career as artist and wrestling coach, Silkscreen vs. color process printing techniques, Playfield supplier dynamics and competitive positioning (Advertising Poster vs. Bally)

### Sentiment

**Positive** (0.82) — Paul Faris speaks warmly and gratefully about his career, colleagues, and experiences. His tone is nostalgic and proud of his innovations and team. He expresses fondness for Greg Ferris ('one of my favorite people in the world') and speaks respectfully of Evel Knievel and the opportunities he had. The only mild frustration is around the Playboy game's stressfulness, but it's framed humorously. Overall, a celebratory presentation of his legacy.

### Signals

- **[business_signal]** Bally strategically created in-house art department to compete with Advertising Poster's market dominance and improve game art quality. Process required secrecy to avoid antagonizing sole playfield supplier (confidence: high) — Faris: 'they had to be very careful about it because Advertising Poster, if the word Game of Thrones out that they were doing, Bally was doing his own art department, Advertising Poster was our only supplier of play fields... So you couldn't get them all nervous.'
- **[community_signal]** Pintastic New England event brought together legendary designers (George Gomez) and pioneering artists (Paul Faris) to present comprehensive pinball history and design philosophy to community of collectors and enthusiasts (confidence: high) — Event structure showing Gomez introducing Faris's presentation with historical framing and extensive Q&A format
- **[competitive_signal]** Bally positioned Lost World as premium collector item through innovative four-color artistry to differentiate from Advertising Poster's commodity supply to competitors; first-mover advantage established new market standard (confidence: medium) — Faris's emphasis on secrecy and competitive advantage: 'It was not advertising poster, it was us doing it, so that's why we had to keep it all quiet.'
- **[design_philosophy]** Paul Faris's early work as fine artist (Andrew Wyeth-like realism with oil and acrylic) was fundamentally different from commercial pinball art of his era, representing aesthetic gap between high art and pinball industry standards of 1970s (confidence: medium) — Faris: 'I didn't know much about them. I'd seen a few pieces, and I don't want to belittle anything I saw, but it was nothing that would have inspired me from an artistic standpoint.'
- **[design_philosophy]** Paul Faris pioneered four-color process printing in pinball, enabling artists to bring oil painting, watercolor, and airbrush techniques to backglass art rather than being constrained to flat silkscreen coloring within clean lines (confidence: high) — Faris explains: 'it made it possible for the artists we were hiring to do their specialty, if they were watercolors, if they were oil painters, if they were airbrush painters. All those things could be done, whereas the old way, you had to learn the old way.'
- **[licensing_signal]** IP owners (Evel Knievel, Hugh Hefner) maintained direct creative control over game design. Hefner dictated specific design direction; Evel Knievel corrected physics animation. Process required multiple in-person approvals and visits to IP holders' properties (confidence: high) — Hefner's demands: 'he called back and said he wanted to be like Captain Fantastic... He wanted to be the man, the Playboy image.' Evel Knievel's correction: 'he made me change that... he would have landed on his front tire... he has to land on his rear tire.'
- **[market_signal]** 8-Ball's sales of 20,000+ units and Lost World's immediate strong reception demonstrated market demand for higher-quality game art and innovative printing techniques; success justified Bally's investment in in-house art department (confidence: high) — Faris: '8-Ball goes out there and does 20,000... Lost World did great... And it didn't hurt to say it because the eight ball sales were great.'
- **[personnel_signal]** Greg Ferris transitioned from photographer to artist to now art director at Stern Pinball; represents long-term career growth trajectory within pinball industry (confidence: high) — Faris: 'He came 'in there' or similar interjection Tee'd Off run our camera... with the understanding that if he kept developing, he'd get Tee'd Off do some games. And we kept our word... He is the art director at Stern Pinball today.'
- **[product_strategy]** Margaret Hudson's precision screen-cutting expertise enabled higher-quality silkscreen artwork execution; her hiring specialized the team to separate photography, art direction, and technical production (confidence: medium) — Faris: 'she came in there or similar interjection to do, she was so precise in there or similar interjection her portfolio work... she had screen printing, cutting screens, you have to be able to take a clean outlane and then take an X-Acto knife blade and split that line and cut the stencil for it.'
- **[technology_signal]** Lost World's four-color process innovation became industry standard; Atari quickly followed Bally's lead, and all subsequent pinball printers adopted similar multi-color techniques (confidence: high) — Faris: 'Lost World did great. And it was kind of revolutionized the way we printed our pinball after that point because everybody kind of tried to catch up to that... It became Bally's printing process.'

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## Transcript

 One more presentation this evening, George Gomez at 6.30. Let's talk about pinball art. 1939. By this time, it had been pretty well established that pinball was going to have a back glass and its height was going to be somewhere in its square proportions. It might be a little wider than tall, it might be a little taller than wide. And silkscreened, as you can see here, 1949. And we're getting into this thing with this cartoony effect, including black lines with coloring inside the lines. And inside the line is just a flat color. So you look at the shading on the letters, old faithful, that purple. It's the same purple as the background of the 900. It's also the same purple as the guy's coat, all kind of colored within the lines. And if you count up, you know, the different shades, You might get like 12 colors on this in all by clever reuse of the purple, the yellow, the green, there's a light green, and dark blue, light blue, et cetera. 1959, about the same idea. And this time we have fewer colors, probably some budget cutting there. These last two were Roy Parker artwork. 1969, the Dick White. And it's still the same Marc Silk screening technology. You see that wood grain effect, and the background has this benday. That's just stuff you can buy and throw on there. Other than that, it's pretty much the same Marc Silk screening technology. And if we went ahead to 1979, we were on track to have the same kind of artwork, Marc Silk screen coloring within the lines but flat color within each pane. In September of 1978, I went to Valley Northeast Distributing in Dedham, Massachusetts for one of my regular visits. When you go there, you go through the front door, you're right in the showroom right away. And so front and center in the showroom, where you couldn't miss it, was this. This is still the only revolution there has ever been in pinball back glass art. And now we're going to hear from the guy who did it, Paul Faris. Thank you. Good, an intro. Can everybody hear me all right? Yes, sir. Okay, good. Well, thank you all for coming. These things are very special to us old timers that have gone back to the, some of the ones they sometimes refer to as the golden age of pinball. And I'm going to go through my career a little bit, and I actually am responsible for it. And these are legitimate. 32 games that I actually did. I went back to the website today to double check that. I've given a few that I credit for a few that I actually didn't do. But 32 I did. And the reason I got the, is that picture up on the screen or not? How do I have to put that up? He'll do it. There you go. Okay. All right. That's an unusual photograph for a talk about pinball art. But in 1975, I had been a teacher for five years and was a head wrestling coach at a high school. And that's in a state championship match with my wrestler there. I was getting ready to go back on the mat and take a whack at being a state champion. So that's the beginning of this era. The next one was supposed to be a picture that I entered that was only three weeks ago, but I think it's going to be a white space now. I had some compatibility problems when I added some things today. So I'm going to talk about that. But the next slide was going to be a picture of me standing up on a stage with about 12 other gentlemen about my age being inducted into the Illinois Wrestling Coaches Hall of Fame. So why am I talking about this now? Well, that kind of frames my life as a pinball artist, which is all the stuff that happens in between there. But I continued to coach wrestling all during that time for 40 years. So wrestling and pinball art, or art in general, have been my two passions in life. And I've been very fortunate. A lot of people find that very unusual when I talk about being a wrestler. I still wrestle. and talking about that and then the compatibility of being a wrestling coach and wrestler along with being an artist it doesn't seem to jive but it did for me and it's been a wonderful experience so we'll go on to the next one so that's the blank like I said June 9, 2018 this shows the team This would have been what you were saying. My whole team of Montini Catholic Wrestling, which is, we were state champs in Illinois, we were ranked fourth in the nation, we beat the number one team in the nation, and we have a very good chance to be the number one team in the nation next year. And I think next year might be my last year of coaching there. These kids that I'm wrestling with are full scholarships to Ohio State, to Stanford, to Michigan, so they're really high level kids, just great kids. So it's been a wonderful experience. You would have seen the picture there if I had made it work. All right, going back to 1976. This is when I was coaching, wrestling and teaching high school art. And I was doing art shows and gallery art of my paintings and selling them as an independent artist, as a fine artist. And the difference between fine artists and commercial artists is generally a fine artist just paints something and hopes to sell it. Commercial artist basically sells their artwork to help sell some other product. So some people sometimes look down on commercial art as being sort of prostitution of art, but listen, when you get paid for it, it's all good. So this was actually my 50-year-old son and my 48-year-old daughter back in the painting I did at that time. And this is the type of work. I was a realist. I did portraits and landscapes. I should probably say at this point, I had no experience with pinball at all. In Chicago at that time, pinball was illegal. So we rarely saw pinball machines growing up. I didn't know much about them. I'd seen a few pieces, and I don't want to belittle anything I saw, but it was nothing that would have inspired me from an artistic standpoint. Some of the things that Dave just showed us were kind of typical of pinball art. That was not something I was particularly interested in. But this is the kind of work I was doing at the time. I'm not sure how well it's shown up on the screen, but it's fine art, kind of Andrew Wyeth-like. If anybody follows art at all, he's the greatest American realist. But that was my passion, and I was doing very well as a, doing this in the summers, and sometimes at the wrestling season during my seasons, and really having to work at everything I produced, I sold. It was a great time. It's because I was actually anticipating leaving teaching, which I loved, and coaching, to become a full-time fine artist. At that time, I put this up on the screen because this is some of the work. That's a painting I took in along with all these little pencil sketches and drawings you see there. What that is, that was my interview portfolio at Bally. And let me explain. I got a call from Bill O'Donnell Jr., who was the VP of marketing at Bally, pinball at that time in Chicago. And he knew good friends of my brother. He ran into my brother. My brother started being asked about what I was doing. What's your older brother doing now? And my brother ran through how I was doing my artwork and selling my artwork and I was coaching. And he started to talk to Bill. Started to ask, do you think he'd ever be interested in coming to work at Valley as an art director and start our own department in-house? Now, how he had the vision to think that a high school art teacher and coach would be a perfect candidate. I had no idea. But he thought it would be worth talking to me about it. And so my brother gave my number and got in touch with me. Again, I had no interest in it. I loved what I was doing. But I did go in and talk to them. And then I went in for an interview once they started talking. And again, I was a teacher, so financially this was a pretty good opportunity at the time. He was kind of going through what he envisioned. He envisioned me going in there for about a year, learn the skills of the pinball artist, and there was one artist that was there at the time, and I'm going to show you his stuff in just a second. You'll all know it. One of his games is sitting right over here. Dave Christensen. He was an in-house artist that worked for Bally, but he would do their technical manuals, draw the parts of the machine and things like that. That's what his skill was in. But he also hit some pinballs on the side that were pretty fantastic. Some of the games he did, and if you don't know about Dave Christensen, he did Fireball, Mata Hari, Wizard, he had them fantastic. Those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head. They're some of his famous ones. So he was there, and he kind of worked by himself. He worked very slowly, and when his games were coming out, Wizard was the one that was out at the time. It was the first licensed game in pinball history, actually, with the movie Tommy. And he was working on Captain Fantastic when I actually came in to interview. I took in this artwork that you're seeing on the screen right now, and what that is, that's eighth-grade artwork for the monsters and my paintings at the time. Because I had nothing, I had nothing. I sold all my paintings, and I took this in just to show I could do monsters, and I had some sport-themed things. So it was pretty sophisticated for an eighth grader at the time. So it didn't hurt me to take it in. I was kind of nervous about it. So we got up to go around the building and kind of show me the game room and talk about where I'd be working if I came there. And he took me by Dave Christensen's area. Dave wasn't in, but his artwork was on his table. And I took a look at it. And he was working on Captain Fantastic. Now, we don't have similar styles, but Dave Christensen is an amazing inker. He's one of the best line artists in the country. And he was kind of undiscovered even at that point because he's only done a couple of pinballs by then. But anyway, his work made me think, you know what, this could be something special. And I could actually take what I was trying to do as a fine artist and kind of make that work into a pinball situation. So selfishly, I thought this could be very interesting, very fun, obviously could be lucrative. And then the other thing, he hung out there as a carrot for me, because I was a coach, he thought I could come in and kind of wrangle with, artists is like herding cats, they say. It's very challenging. We tend to have our own way of doing things, right? Not at all. So he thought that a coach could handle this, because he had some experiences that didn't work out so well in the past. and with the same idea. But they wanted to have an in-house art department, and the motivation for that was for, number one, the Christiansen stuff was so good, and then they wanted more of that quality because everybody else in the industry was having their games made by one company, Advertising Poster. So there was a similarity of look, and Valley was kind of the third choice, I think, sometimes at that point, as far as what games were given the best illustrators at Advertising Poster. So they wanted to get away from that, and they had to be very careful about it because Advertising Coaster, if the word got out that they were doing, Valley was doing his own art department, Advertising Coaster was our only supplier of playfields, as they were for everybody in the business. So you couldn't get them all nervous. So we had to be kind of careful of how we did this. So I was brought in as an independent, just as another artist, to help out with the understanding that nobody else knew, and I wasn't to discuss, was that we were going to try to set up an art department of our own. So let's go to the next. You hit that. Oh, I got to hit it. Okay, so there's Dave with his, all of, every model of every game he did. He still, I think, lives in Wisconsin now. We see him at the Pinball Expo from time to time. But he was in the era of the end of the electromechanicals and the beginning of electronic games. And as I said, his work was pretty special. Some of his games are on the floor, I believe. But they're getting fewer to see. It's always, when we come back, I look for some of my games. There are not as many around as there have been in the past because they've gotten a lot older. All right, so we're going to go. This is just me at the time of going to Valley, working on a game that's one of my favorite games. I'm jumping a little bit ahead of time from once I got hired there. That's the Paragon, or the Backlash team that I'm working on. Okay, this is a little card that shows what I actually signed autograph things that kind of has a little kind of a selection of a few of the games I've done over time that are some of my favorite some of the better known games that I've done there's been as I said I've done 32 so there's quite a few more I'm going to look at those in a second okay so then this is just me there now I'm with my first year learning the ropes and learning again the whole process of developing a color for these games was done with what because straight color silkscreen approach, which is just nothing more than having a kind of a coloring book black line drawing. And then all the colors are hand cut stencils for every layer of color after that. So if you got up to 13, 14 colors, which is about the maximum number, but it was all done. That's how it was all done. So I had to learn how to do that because I, that wasn't part of being a painter. I was, I was an oil painter and an acrylic painter. So that was something totally different. The Evel Knievel one was one of the first. I did a couple games before this, one called Knight Rider, which is a trucking theme and a CV theme. I came in on a game that Dick White, who was an employee there, did a lot of their slot machine artwork. But he had done a pinball and he had done a football-themed game. They had me redo it as kind of a test run for my artwork. And it's called Quarterback, and they were fairly happy with it. It's right toward the end of the electromechanical game, So it wasn't a big run, but at least that's how they kind of gave me a shot. I did Knight Rider, and then they came along with Evel Knievel as another one of their licensed themes. And this is the Evel Knievel back class, and you can see there's some writing up there at the top. And it when Evel came in to approve the game I don know if you can see it I got to use a close of it It just says DePaul happy landings in Evil Knievel And it shows Evil Knievel jumping over the buses the British buses, the buses in the animation at the top. But when he came in to approve it, he made me change that. He said, no, that's wrong. That's wrong. I'll crash. I said, what are you talking about? And I hadn't done a lot of review on this, but Evil was jumping, and it was a perfect circle I had him arc over the, his motorcycle arc over the buses. But in reality, and now that I think about it, I should have known this, the way I had it, he would have landed on his front tire. If he does that, he's going to crash. He has to land on his rear tire. So I had to come back and change this little sequential animation thing to fix it. The reason he was in Chicago at that time was he was about to do a jump over a shark tank. I don't know if anybody's old enough to remember this. It was going to be on live television. Telly Savalas was co-jack. He was one of the emcees. I wasn't real thrilled that I happened to make this last-minute change, but he was right. He was kind of a cool guy. He had a pretty wholesome image at the time as a daredevil. Anyway, the night that he's supposed to do this major jump, live TV, it's after the Chicago Amphitheater. He takes one last practice jump and crashes. I shouldn't laugh, but he crashes and ends up in the hospital. And then Telly Savalas and Jill St. John had to fill an hour about how brave and courageous Evel Knievel was prior to his jump. So I'm not saying that I wished him no crash, but it's just kind of interesting that he had that situation. Later on, we did a home pinball game based on Evel Knievel because this run was a very good run. It was one of the last of the electromechanicals, and then it integrated some electronic games as well. And that gave us a little bit of a feel of what the electronic aspect of pinball was going to do to the game because the sales really jumped pretty strongly just from people embracing it. So the next game we did, which I was given, was a game called 8-Ball. And the reason I got the $20,000 there on the screen is that it was $20,000 and some. I don't know what the number was, but that was what we sold of the electronic valet ball. And it was a game I really didn't want to do so much because I was working on this game that Dave showed you earlier, a game called Lost World, and that was kind of my project. My whole reason for getting involved with that Lost World project was to develop a screening method that would give us the benefit of four-color process, which is the way they print magazines or trans lights today and all that stuff. That was not available. That wasn't being done on pinball stuff or on glass art for that matter. But it gave the artist a chance to do oil painting, airbrushing, all the aspects of multicolored work with a screened backlash. And so I was working with a guy that thought it was possible, and we developed the technique and the process, and then we bought the press. So that was all going on while I was doing this artwork on 8-ball. And I wasn't real thrilled. Let's say the theme was a pool theme. We got the designer, Norm Clark, who was head of the design department there, was so sure it was going to be a big game because pool games are always big games. He had designed many for Williams prior to that. And then we argued about colors. He thought every cabinet should be red, white, and blue. I remember going through this. They asked me to kind of do a happy day sort of theme. I guess some people thought I came too close to Fonzie, but it's one of those things. So anyway, that game goes out there and does 20,000, and I've got this Lost World game that I have just finished, and we're all excited about this new process. And we had a chance to show it at the end run of 8-Ball. And 8-Ball was still in. They don't like to interrupt a run of a game, with a newer game so the operator holds on and waits for the new game to come out. And that's probably still so much of the games today. But they decided to go ahead and put the game on the floor, Lost World at our MOA show, or AMOA show. And they got a great response. And it didn't hurt to say it because the eight ball sales were great. Lost World did great. And it was kind of revolutionized the way we printed our pinball after that point because everybody kind of tried to catch up to that. It was not advertising poster, it was us doing it, so that's why we had to keep it all quiet. And it was so it became Bally's printing process. And, well, this one is done, that's the last one I did in the conventional method. The four-color process was a lost world. Okay, now I'm jumping in here with these two folks here, the beginning of our in-house art department. And I've dropped them in in the same chronological order as they appeared. once I was done with the Evel Knievel, I was hiring these artists. And the first one I hired was the gal on the right, that's Margaret Hudson. And she came in to do, she was so precise in her portfolio work that I could tell she was very careful and neat. And she has screen printing, cutting screens, you have to be able to take a black outline and then take an X-Acto knife blade and split that line and cut the stencil for it. So somebody had to be pretty precise to be able to do those screens. So that's what she came in, she was the first hire actually, and she came in, she did the screens from then on, and she did several of her own games later on too. And then Kevin O'Connor, who many of you probably know, he's done, I brought him in, again, as an artist came through, he was working at a display company, we brought him in house, I thought he looked like he had the ability to do the kind of art that a pinball artist would do, could be kind of comic book, he had the ability to draw very accurate portrait faces, portrait faces, so he has a lot of the skills. He did Strikes and Spares. I'm going to get my glasses off. If you don't know some of his work, he's done quite a few games. Strikes and Spares, Silver Ball Mania, Medusa, Monster Bash, Williams, Flash Gordon, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Congo, Viking. Of course, I think the one he's most known for, he did the first Star Trek as well, Time Machine at Data East. I think he's most known for is Kiss. Kevin did Kiss and the new version of Kiss, too. So he's been a stalwart in the pinball art business for a long time, as does Margaret. Okay, this I'm jumping right to the little sketch thing I showed marketing to get them excited about the four-color process. This thing is so blurry right now, but really what it is, It's just a sketch with all four colors on separate layers of acetate that kind of show the magic of four-color process. As you lay each one down, by the time you're done, you've seen a full-color piece of artwork and the capability of doing photographs, which I wasn't pushing at the time. I didn't want to push ourselves out of a job. But it was still a four-color process. This is the same way a magazine is printed or posters or a variety of other things. Digital printing has come in now that kind of has a little bit different variation to it, but it's the same kind of concept. Multiple colors are overlapping transparent dots. So this was what I sold on, and then that's what came out of that. That was our first four-color pinball process game in the industry. Actually, Atari came closely behind us with a game after that, but we were the first, and it was a lot of fun to do. I have to say, it was very beneficial for me. I wanted to do it because it made it possible for the artists we were hiring to do their specialty, if they were watercolors, if they were oil painters, if they were airbrush painters. All those things could be done, whereas the old way, you had to learn the old way. So in this case, this game gave us a new amount of freedom to do some of those things. And it was very well received when we first did it. Okay, this is a second, my second license game now. After Eucan Evil, I was asked to do the Playboy one. And I gotta be honest, this started out to be, I thought it was gonna be a fairly easy project, because I did the first sketch, and you know, I didn't think Hepner was even involved in pinball at all. So, they had me do a sketch, and what I did was kind of a montage of the Playboy lifestyle, the jets, you know, the hotels, and the casinos were opening at that point, It was the bunnies and all of that, sort of a montage of what Playboy was all about. Heffner didn't want that. He called back and said he wanted to be like Captain Fantastic, was in the center of Captain Fantastic at the time. He wanted to be that. He wanted to be the man, the Playboy image. And it's turned out that's what he credited. That was the brand he wanted. So he dictated that, so I drew that up and put the women in. The one on his right is Patty McGuire. She's married to the tennis player, Jimmy Connors, who was a really good tennis player. And then the blonde on his left side was his girlfriend at the time. They were bringing this on to the theater. So he was very happy. The sad thing about this game was it was pretty stressful. Now I'm a high school art teacher. I've been there about a year and a half. And now I'm forced to go to the Playboy Mansion to have Hefner approve this and talk about all the artwork. and we had to, I only could do it four times. So I would tell my former teacher friends, and say, well, what are you doing? How's it going here? Is that job working out okay? I'd say, yeah, we're just out at the Playboy Mansion, but they'd go, get out of here, you liar. So those were some of the side benefits that were not in the job description. Let's just put it that way. But it was fun because we did go out there and I think the next one shows, this is the game house on his property there and that's my game up there, my artwork on the mantle up there. Actually, Kevin O'Connor took this when he took a visit out there when he did a Playboy version for Stern. So yeah, it was a very different world. I forgot to mention this when I did my interview, and the vice president was taking me around the Valley Plant, and we got into the game room, which was pretty cool because you had all these games you could play on free play. There was a guy in there with kind of long black hair, kind of a younger, scruffy-looking guy. And he turned around and says, and they introduced me. He said, hi, this is Bruce. And I said, hi, I'm Paul Faris. He said, yeah, this is Bruce Springsteen. So Bruce Springsteen was in there. He was in town doing a concert. He just came in to play pinball. So I thought to myself, this might be kind of an interesting job after all. All right, now, I put this fellow in here, Greg Freres. Any of you heard Greg or know about Greg? Okay. He's one of my favorite people in the world. So I hired him as an artist. He came in really not initially as an artist. He had worked with Kevin at a signage place that did beer displays for like Budweiser. And they designed the lamps and a lot of the accessories for bars and so on. So he had some skills as an artist, but not as anything with pinball. But he came in to run our camera to do all the big photos we had to do for playfields and stuff, with the understanding that if he kept developing, he'd get to do some games. And we kept our word, and he kept his. He turned out to be one of the greatest guys and a really solid artist. And I don't know, I think I've got his. Yeah, well, for us he did Frontier, Fathom, Skateball was his first game, Black Pyramid, and he's done Elvira, Dr. Dude, Party Animal, Attack from Mars, I believe this is, and Rolling Stones back in our day. So he's done a lot of pieces. He's still in the pinball business. He is the art director at Stern today. He's been in and out of the business, and we all have at times because the business has had some peaks and valleys, no doubt, and this is why this is so exciting sometimes to come back and talk to the collectors, and this way they find ways to keep making pinball kind of reemerge, which is wonderful. But Greg is a good friend too, and he worked as one of our artists on our team. And then, I don't know if I have pictures of the next guys. No, we'll go right to Peregrine. So the other two people that we added to the team, or three people, let's see, were Doug Watson, I think there may be a picture down the road on him, Pat McMahon, and Tony Ramuni. So all those, we had seven people working on pinballs when in the heyday of pinball, when all these games were being made and all this heavy manufacturing was going on. So it was a very cool place, great department. And we kind of took over, I think, I'm biased, but took over some of the best artwork that was being done in the business. This goes to my next piece. Again, my job became, where during the day I'm art directing all these artists and then I'd stay at night and work on mining projects because they still wanted my artwork to be on the games. That was challenging, but I enjoyed it. I wanted to be still an artist. I wanted to keep that art going. But I worked with those guys during the day because as a former teacher, I was always kind of teaching them what I had learned and kind of passing that on. So I didn't expect to hire necessarily super experienced artists, just people who had the potential to learn and do well, and that's what we did. It turned out very well. So Paragon was a game, our first wide body. They liked the response to Lost World, and so they asked me if I might want to revisit that theme, and I was all for it. And this one's the one where I've talked about it many times, and even on the poster for this show, I put the two characters, which the main characters, believe it or not, are actually my wife and I. And she's, yeah, well, people wonder why I do this, but I have some of my daughter and my son, but I use anybody. I just said, hey, you want to be on a pinball? Sometimes it's just because it's cheaper than going out and hiring a model. Is it up? It's up. But in this case, this truly was. My wife is a great sport. She's an accountant and a financial planner, but to get in a bathing suit and get a model for me for this thing. And I do have a few lions, Texas army type lions. I'm not a hunter, but I have some lions and I'm a big lion fan. So this was actually a set up stage piece that I did the photo for. So, but I, it turned out to be our first wide body, very successful. People like the artwork. Some people think it's, you know, one of the nicer ones. I happen to think it was one of my favorites as an art package. There's not one here, I don't think, but there's definitely Lost World. And I saw a couple other, my older games that are here too. So it's nice to see those. Okay that jumping way ahead This is 2001 because people often ask what the girl what the woman on Paragon really look like And that so that my wife obviously a few years later And that's me before I went, I actually went back into teaching about a year later. So, but that's what the Paragon artwork. Okay. All right, there's Pat McMahon, but he's not there. Pat is a good story about Pat. He came into us as an intern from the Art Institute. So the plan was you get the chance to see how commercial art is done in an environment like pinball and so on. And about two-thirds of the way through, all the people in the department loved him. And I thought he was working out great. He was one of the better cartoonist-type guys that we could have. Most of our other people were kind of straight traditional artists. He could draw traditionally well, but also could draw very good cartoons. He ended up doing Mr. and Mrs. Packman, that kind of stuff. So we actually hired him away from the Art Institute's intern program, and I'm not sure they were thrilled, but it worked out well for him, and he was with us right to the end. He's still done some. He did Truck Stop, and he did Fishtail, I believe. Let's see what else he did. Those are the two that I could look up that I remember. But he's got a cool job now. He's been a designer of toys for Happy Wheels for most of his career after he's left the pinball stuff. So he's used that skill. He's a fun guy and funny guy. The department all kind of had their own kind of in-jokes with each other, which is pretty sad. They're all still pretty close to each other, which is kind of fun to see. All right, and there's Doug Watson. And there's a game called Spy Hunter that he did. And that's how we did it back in the day. We'd take Polaroids and we'd all jump in our poses or whatever to help the other person out. And that was our references. So there weren't the eye cameras to use to get to the quality. So it got us in the ballpark. And there's Tony Roni. He's a fellow that's a visitant. He went back to Italy to do artwork back there. but he was, he's done Alien Poker, I think he did Black Knight 2000, I'm pretty sure, at Williams, and then he came and worked for us, but then Pinball kind of, this is when, before, when things were still pretty good, we had seven artists in there at one time, and then things started to fall apart as the videos came through. All right, and this is, this is Tom Neiman, is the fellow in the back by the picture, the piece of artwork, that's me on the far right with the leather jacket on, and that's when we were talking to Kiss for approval, That's the first time I ever had to go into our approval. These guys are in full kabuki makeup while you're showing them the artwork. The one thing that did come out of it was Gene Simmons, the famous guitarist of Kiss, didn't like the way he was portrayed physically. This is one thing about when you're an artist, they can make you more muscular, they can make you bigger. He asked for that. So Kevin, on the actual artwork, had to buff Gene Semmes up a little bit. And then what's interesting is that they asked, supposedly the story is that they asked for Kevin to come back and do the new version of it. And he did. It's very similar to the old, but with that input from Gene that Gene had mentioned. This is another one of my games I really liked a lot. I don't have all my games, don't worry, I don't have all my games for you to have to sit through. But this is one I did like a lot in Xenon. This is the back glass painting itself. And then this is it with the circles on the side were reflectors, not like you'd have on a truck mirror, you know, to reflect. So we had this infinity light box effect. And it was a tube game. I'm sure I'm talking to you guys and you all probably have seen it before. But it was a pretty special game at the time, kind of a cool sci-fi theme game. And it was an enjoyable experience because this was the one that had the first female speech. And that was a big deal at the time because Gorgar had the male speech and Williams beat us with that. So we had to come up with something better, you know, obviously. And Suzanne Ciani, who was the voice on Xenon and did all the sound, she did all the research and she got the visceral parts of the sounds and just did a beautiful job. Really a neat lady, went very creatively. She's done, anytime you ever see Columbia Pictures, the beginning of Columbia Pictures with that statue, like the Statue of Liberty kind of woman there, and all the music behind it, that's all her work back in those days. So she was top end, and she was a new age artist, or self-digital artist, and did very well. Just a real sweet lady. We had a perspective at Expo a couple of years ago when she was in town. She showed how she made some of the sounds with some of the instruments that she used. It's a lot more sophisticated today, a lot easier, but she was able to come up with. It was kind of a little trip through memory lane that was kind of fun to see. Anyway, that's Xenon. And then the name Xenon had came. People sometimes have asked me where did the name come from, and this is often asked of us as artists, they always say, well, who tells you what the game's going to be? Or who comes up with the theme? Or who comes up with the idea? Well, generally, if it's a non-licensed game, the artist usually does, unless the particular game designer's very strong-willed and has a theme he wants to see. But they were, I'll tell you, at Valley, they were very accommodating to us. If we came up with something we thought was visually exciting and they had a certain number of inserts on the play field, So they would work it so the insert could spell out whatever, a thing like Xenon, for example. And Xenon, the name, it's just on the periodic chart. It's just the name of a gas. It just sounded exotic and kind of sci-fi. So that's where that one came from. OK, and then this one, this is a game that was kind of controversial. But this is back in the day. And I'm thinking, I don't know the date. I'm trying to remember if it was 82 or something in that era. And this is when pinball was really struggling. They were making so many pinball machines. They were warehousing them and discounting them. And then suddenly video games were coming out and getting their foothold and things. It was a tough time. And so we were trying to come up with new ways of trying to get an audience, get people interested, keep interested in pinball. The one time we were riding home in a taxi was Roger Sharp. I don't know if a lot of you should know who Roger Sharp is, But he's the one basically that saved pinball and made it become legal in Chicago and New York by playing in front of a judge. And he's written several books on pinball. He was the marketing director at Williams for a while. Great guy. And he used to do reviews on these games for the Replay magazine and talk about the artwork, the design of the play field, the whole package. A lot of times the artwork is kind of ignored. And we understand because we believe that all we could do was get that person to come up and put the first coin in. But Roger said, I said, you know, I think somebody ought to do a black and white game. And, you know, I kind of reacted at first. You know, we're constantly trying to come up with colors that attract and make things vibrant. And he said, yeah, but think about it. You're in an arcade and you walk around and you see all these colorful games. And, you know, it's like the guy who comes out with a black and white movie all of a sudden in the middle of all these technicolor movies. And so we talked about it. And I said, I don't think I'd ever get marketing to go with it. Well, about a year later, I thought, here's a chance to try something different. and certainly the artwork was different. So, and again, they weren't in-house, they weren't all sure, but it worked out to be a great game. It was, I think, still my favorite playing game. And it turned out the artwork was kind of controversial, but it wasn't as dark and controversial as they all thought it was. A lot of people read into stuff that wasn't supposed to be there. But anyway, it was fun to do and still one of my favorite games. I have one of these in my collection too. But this is the actual painting. Black and white, just gray. There's no red in there, and there's no actual solid black. And then that was added to the glass. You can see the glass. So there's just an accent of red, enough to kind of give it a little bit of color. Okay, and then I can't remember the timing on this. This is a game I did once I had left Valley. I built my studio, and I was going to be a freelancer because there was other work outside of just doing pinball because pinball was looking kind of frightening at the time, I've got to be honest. But this is a game I did for Gameplan, I think was their company name at the time, Andromeda. And I'm often asked this, and I want to kind of point this out now because I pointed it out myself without thinking how it might sound kind of weird. But my daughter and my wife and my sons, my brother and his wife, They've all been on these games. And my daughter, I used her a lot as a model. And people said, why would you put your daughter on a game? This is her here. It was a non-miss game. I put her there because she was a ballet dancer and was just a beautiful girl, but a beautiful figure. So she became like my, and she's in the family business. She was available as a model so often. She's a great sport, like my wife. for her to do was incredible. My daughter was great at it. So she and my sons did a lot of modeling and became the figures that you'd see, but maybe with a different face or sometimes their own face. But this is her as Andromeda. And I think I'm remembering right. She has four eyes. I had to make sure, even if that's even noticeable. So that's not exactly how she looks in real life. Here's another. That's my son. He was an all-state wrestler. And again, it wasn't because I wanted to make a painting of a wrestler. This is a game that Steve Korda came to me at Williams, and I was out there on the open market now, and I was just working for Bally. And this was before Bally had merged with Williams. But he called me and said, listen, I've got a game. It's ready to go. Python Anghelo had done some parts that was going to do it, but there's not enough time for him to do it now. Would you be willing to do this game and do it in 30 days? That's play field, pinball play field, back glass, plastics, side art. Anything out there, some decals involved, I think at the time, too, for 30 days. And I said, whoa, okay, for us, that would be pressing it pretty good because the value we used to do eight weeks would be minimum. So I took it on, though, and he said, you can come up with a theme. And so I brought the theme in. They said the only thing I had to do is that Python had designed this big lizard in the name Grand Lizard. So I had to tie something into that. So I inserted this sci-fi fantasy theme and took it in, did the painting, did it all in 30 days. And then it turned out they did use the cabinet and they did use the play field, but the back glass they didn't use. And again, that's fine. I got paid. That's one of the key things here as an artist. You want to make sure that they live up to their end of it, and they did. But they had changed their inserts to be, they didn't want to go back and have a new painting done or change the inserts. That's what I was told. And it's fine. I run into people at places like this, at these shows, that have one of these glasses that are about, I think about 50 glasses that were printed, and then they came in with Python. And Python didn't really stay with the theme at all, so it kind of doesn't make sense with the play field, but that was okay. But this actually, I enjoyed this painting. I like doing it. And there's a few of them out there that collectors still have. And actually, one collector asked me to design my own set of plastics for it that would be more consistent with my back glance, because he has one of my back glances. That's Graham Lizard. Okay, this is, now then, I got a call, I don't know, it was maybe a couple years later, and I was, in the meantime here, I had it on this show, but we probably won't see many of them. I was doing a lot of these early video game hardware, home video stuff for Xbox and Sony, PlayStation and some of the earlier ones, and that was actually quite a bit of fun. And I have some of those on there, but I was doing those instead of doing pinball all the time. I ended up doing over 50 of those video game things that I had on here, but we'll only see a few. But this is actually one of my favorite experiences on a game. Joe Camico brought me in. He had talked to me about doing some pool game before, and then it turned out that kind of went away. He brought me in. He said, I'm going to have you do Phantom of the Opera. Now, the musical was out there at this time, so that's what I thought he was talking about. He says, no. He says, of course, they were kind of crafty. It was kind of a public domain thing. like Cugini, his public domain. That was surprising to me. So the book, Phantom of the Opera, is available for anybody to do that, or King Kong. Those are public domain issues. So he told me to read the book, do my own variation of it, and then that's what we built the artwork on. And it was a good experience. This is an oil painting, by the way. Most of it was acrylic, but this is oil. And again, the characters in this, every one of those characters you see in there was either my son or my daughter modeling for me. My son, unfortunately, does not look like the Phantom. I'm going to go down to the next one here. This is how it looks with the glass. Now, if you're familiar with it, this is how most of you will see the game as you walk up to it because the idea was they didn't want to have that horrific face looking at you the whole time in an arcade. But when it lights up at the appropriate time in the game, the lights come on very strong behind it, and then the horrible face is revealed. But again, the great thing about this game for me was I took the painting in, took the paper wrapping off of it so I could look at it, and they all stood up and gave me a standing ovation. So that doesn't happen very often in our world. It's usually, you know, can you make his eye bigger? Can you fix that? But this was a good experience for me. Okay, this is how we did it. I mean, if you look, remember I said that everybody in there is somebody in my family. And these are the reference photos. And unfortunately, the other ones didn't come out. And that had Gary Stern and Ed Sabula. I had them on the play field as the owners of the opera house. And these are actually my kids and all three, daughter, oldest son, and youngest son. posing in the different positions for me to paint the phantom back glass and playfield. What are we doing on time? We're okay. No, we're not. It's speed up. What? Speed up. Okay Okay real quick This phantom cabinet is my now 24 year old 26 year old nephew He did have pants on I been asked that question before I showed these to my student when I was teaching. I showed this to Mr. Ferris. Do you have pants on? I said, well, we had a swimming pool outside, so we came in. So that's just so you know, I did. Okay, back to the future. Thanks to Dave. He got me this one. This is one that was on my show. It somehow was not showing up to us. So a good program, good experiences. One of my second experiences with Joe Kamenko. And then this is when I realized why these licensed games can be fun. Because we went to the rap party, these big parties they have out in Hollywood after the movie's about to premiere. And so we got to go to those red carpet deals. We were part of all that. And that was kind of a neat experience that you wouldn't think you'd get as a pinball artist. The one thing about this I'll mention, that the Marty McFly character on this, Michael J. Fox, wouldn't give up his rights. So the guy in the, looking like Marty McFly there with his hat and looking at his watch, that's my oldest son, again, doing his good deed to get to make sure the project would go through. Batman, the original Batman, great. This is, I'm not forgetting his name. What's the director's name. Shoot. Ted Burton. Thank you. Guy, you'd think the weirdest guy in the world. I mean, personally, he's like a little kid. He's just a sweet guy. So he got to meet people behind the scenes. Jack Nicholson came up and brought everybody a drink for the premiere. He's my height. And he comes in, he's got a persona about twice the size of the building. Pretty impressive. Hook. This is This is another one where likenesses were an issue. Dustin Hoffman, Robin Williams, and what's your, anyway, the Gallup played Tinkerbell. They wouldn't give their license rights up. I mean, sometimes this is where Joe Balcer was in here earlier talking about the size of Arnold's fortune, later his head and stuff. And all that's gotta be dictated on a license. So we did, I used Gary Stern face as Hook and Joe Kamenko as Peter Pan. And you know, you try to find the right angle. And so these are all kind of, You have to work around the issues. Julia Roberts is supposed to be the ticker bill. OK, I just wanted to say this is still all going on at this time. This was when I was coaching college. And why it's just amazing. Now I look back on it, and what I would do is I'd work on my artwork until about 3 in the afternoon, jump in the car, go over. And because I was the assistant coach, I didn't have to do a lot of administrative work. I just would go in and wrestle with the wrestlers. And I'd come, you know, it was kind of nice. If you have a tough day on the artwork, you get to go in there and pound on college guys. But it gets tougher as you get older, that's what I'm telling you. But anyway, I'm still doing it. As I said, I'm still doing it now. I'm about done. Okay, this is one, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I wasn't really thrilled with, I mean, this is okay as a piece of art, I think. But the one thing is, this is very unusual, especially, would be probably unheard of today, but the girl in April, I think, is the character in there. And, you know, we were known for doing sexy women, isn't it? Nobody, you know, everybody knows and understands that. It was a predominantly male audience that we were always directing the games for. But in this case, the creators of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which is kind of a younger kid themed concept, came back and twice rejected the size of her chest and said, make it bigger. We had never had to do that before. So believe me, this is not how I portray her. And some people think I'm doing the exaggeration there, but I swear to God that they said, no, this is pinball. So they kind of were taking, they're no longer doing kind of a kid's comic book. They want to see it represented like this. So that was the one unusual thing about that. They're out here in Massachusetts too. We had come out Eastman and Laird, we're out here. Okay, this is a Sega game, JVC. Actually, I love the art in this game. It wasn't a real successful game, I know. John Borg is here, he was a designer, it was good, it plays well, I think. But I really love the theme, I'm a big Monster fan. If you saw from those earlier sketches, I'm a Monster fan and so on, and Sci-Fi. But I really love the way this came together and it's in terms of the package. So again, sometimes you don't, the game doesn't do as well as you'd like from a play standpoint, but artistically I'm really happy with this package. This is the one that followed that, which was Sega Goldeneye, James Bond, the first Pierce Brosnan, his first role as James Bond. This was a lot of fun, because we got to meet him. He was at the Frankenstein premiere along with Prince Charles and all these high level people out playing pinball in the lobby, which is an unusual thing. But I actually liked the artwork on this one too. I mean, this is where you, when you start doing license games, you start to have to do these montages a little bit. And I kind of liked the ones where you got one scene kind of going on and it's kind of like, like Paragon. I believe that's what I like to see more than just having the montage. And here's the game with the, with the logo dropped in on which I also painted, but we kept it separate and then they just dropped it in. The girl was very happy with my interpretation of her figure, she told me. So it's good to hear. Okay, here's some of the things that happen in pinball art that you don't. How many of you have ever played Total Recall? Probably not. Yeah, I saw it before. How many playfields did it have? Three. Three. I thought it was two. Right. It was a monstrosity, but we got the right student. I had to go and meet with Arnold Schwarzenegger about approving the artwork. It was Joe. So this was the game, art. And then it got to the point where they decided it was too big a concept. I think this is what determined why we didn't use it, because it was too big a space, took up too much space, even when pinballs were kind of having our resurgence. So we never used the artwork. But again, the good news there is I got paid. There it is. There's a backlash with the logo. See, that surprised me. We got that one back. All right. Oh, this is one you won't see because there's no access to it. The only one is a slide that I have, and it was a Batman Returns game. We had done several Batman games, and this was going to be the second one, but it turned out they had me do the license. They got the license approved, but then they decided they didn't take the license. So anyway, that's, this is my last pinball, coin-op pinball machine, which was Twister. And it's, I think I've seen something out here on the floor. These are some, I'll just go through them until I show you. This is some of the names of these different video game pieces I did. This is for a game called American, or it's American Sandwich Game, but Zombie Rain. I like the artwork on it. These are the side cabinet were almost five feet tall so these are almost life-size werewolves and Frankenstein characters. Last actual pinball I did is this one from Chicago Gaming called American Vacation. Again, all my family in there including my divorce, my former son-in-law who's now divorced from everybody else in the car. This is for Redemption. Redemption games were going for a while so we did some pretty elaborate artwork for Redemption games. Again, chances to do a little different style, a little more comical. Muppets 25th anniversary, we did that with Roger Sharp and Lauren Bromley. I think that's wrestling. That's my grandson winning the state championship. And I think that was him, wasn't it? I'm trying to remember now. Yeah, we have the pictures of my studio. Again, I'm going through fast. I think we're going to need a time. Again, more of my studio. I built this wonderful studio. and I really, if I ever move, it's going to be tough to not have this good space to work in. Oh, shoot, this is, some people ask me what the work I'm doing today is, and it's not, this was one, this is the current poster for this show, my wife and I, and I'll show you the, that's us, the picture I used for the reference at our 25th wedding anniversary. Okay, so I'm not exaggerating her beauty. I am somewhat exaggerating my hair length. And I was pretty buff then, though, I've got to be honest. But anyway, so that kind of wraps it up. Your time waves are okay? Yeah. Questions? Let's take three questions. Come on up here. Come on up here. Everybody who has a question. Come on up here. Hey, Paul, thanks for coming. Great talk. Really enjoyed it. Thank you. I'm just curious, back in the 80s when you employed all these people, Kevin O'Connor, Margaret Hudson, the Pac-Man Band, it seemed like you were bringing out a lot of artists. True. Was there enough work to employ all these people full-time, or was it just... Oh, they were all full-time. They were staggered as they came in, but Antonio Ramone was the last one, and he only got to do, I think, two games a month. But maybe there shouldn't have been as much work for us because we were making games with shorter runs and actually needed more artists to produce the artwork because the runs were diminishing. So that's kind of why it was, and then all of a sudden the bottom fell out so people were let go and we moved Kevin O'Connor up into the midway, we merged with midway and we moved him up into the video department hoping that would work out because he's a creative guy. So that's kind of what happened. It's probably been reviewed from business experts from years to come about maybe how this happened. When the bubble burst on that, it was really dramatic. Videos just really kind of caught everybody's surprise. So yeah, they were working full time. They were paid very well. It was a nice gig. And the people in the industry, because we had a couple that came over from other places. One, Doug Watson came over from AdPoster, and Tony Ramunni came over from Williams. They wanted to be part of that Valley art team, because we were doing kind of cool projects. and kind of current projects, you know, reflecting pop culture. Cool. Yeah. Thank you, Ted. Good question. Hey, Paul. How are you? Pretty good. Over the years, we've never heard the story about the four-color process and Valley doing it in-house. Can you explain, like, how many presses they were using? Good question. We bought one press initially, and it was done with UV cured ink. That was one of the key things about it, because conventional inks were dry in the screen and had all kinds of, you're a printer, so you know what I'm talking about. So I thought, but so the key was to be able to cure it right away as it comes out of the press, it's cured. So that was a big deal. We were doing 100 line, I think screens at the time when 65 was about the standard at that time. So, and that's because the ink didn't dry in the screen. So that it still took some, our first game was an Argon press And then we went to Spacia. I don't know if they're still doing them, but that's who did. When our cabinet company started doing all the cabinet sides and everything, that's who the presses were that we used for the four-color processing. So to me, it was very liberating, though, to be able to do it. Go ahead. Yeah, just one final thing. It seems awfully strange. Some of the belly back glasses of the year are very good, stable ink, flat on the glass. But then we get other ones like gloss where it loses all the ink off the sides and a lot of blistering in the middle. And on the glasses you're saying? Yeah, I know. One of the big things about pinball stuff, the life testing stuff, had to be play field. That was a very sacred thing. You couldn't mess with top coatings and things because you weren't going to be guaranteed a lot. They wanted to get at least five years is what we were told. And the back glass ink had been out there in other graphics in homes and things. But you put a human location or, you know, again, I don't know compared to conventional ink at that time. I'd be curious to see how those have held up. I don't see a lot. I saw a Bobby Orr game that Dave did. It had all crackles all over it, you know. So, yeah, the integrity of the ink was an issue. And the chemistry of the ink was huge because of those carcinogenic possibilities and all these other things that were going on. But I, quite honestly, when I go to a show and still see like a Lost World game that nobody's done any touch-up on, but it's just, that's still looking good, I'm always thrilled, you know, because I don't think we ever thought that these things would last this long or need to last this long from a commercial standpoint. And then this whole home market thing and all that's just something totally unexpected, I think. So I don't know if that answers the question, but we were worried about it. It's a concern. and the ones I've seen that would be bad, especially early on, anything that was in a seaside location or real humid, that seemed to take, was tougher on it than others. So thanks for asking. Hello, Paul. On xenon, the glass in front of the back glass with the mirrored smoke glass, some of them have an area where your signature is that is highlighted and others don't. Do you have any insights? This is a question Jay Stafford has asked me a lot, too, who writes the database. I don't remember. To allow the lighting to come through, you mean? Is that what you mean? The glass has got kind of a tricky glass. We used it on space invaders afterwards, too, to create the infinity box. That's another game I did that I didn't use. But I honestly don't remember knocking it out so the name could be read. But I wouldn't put it past me. I mean, at the time. Because I don't know if you know this. I was, again, I was this cocky teacher-artist wrestler coming in, and they had never had anybody ever sign a game, or Dave Christensen used to sneak his name in in places. And I just signed, like an illustrator does, I just signed it. And after that, it's pretty common that the artists would do that. So I'll take credit for that egotistical stroke. Okay. Also on the Playboy back last, the older woman in the hot tub. Yes, that's Granny from Buck Brown's Granny. She was a character, and again, I just read the articles, but in pinball, there were some great cartoonists and artists that did work for pinball, and she was one of the characters for those, you know, repeating character in the cartoons. So that's why she's not even, that's not one of my kids or relatives. Thank you. Thanks for the question. All right. Thanks very much, Paul. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

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*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 3776a7b8-acb2-4249-87c7-7667b71c0c58*