# Whizbang Pinball Panel

**Source:** Pintastic New England  
**Type:** video  
**Published:** 2018-06-03  
**Duration:** 57m 28s  
**Beat:** Pinball

**URL:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL5bczTvxw0

---

## Analysis

Greg Ferris and Dennis Nordman present the creation story of WhizBang Pinball's "Big Juicy Melons" (formerly "Sweet Juicy Melons"), a custom pinball machine inspired by vintage fruit crate label art. The presentation covers their transition from Williams/Valley Pinball careers through custom game building in Dennis's garage (2009-2010) to production partnership with Stern, detailing design iterations, cabinet engineering challenges, and the collaboration with Stern's technical team.

### Key Claims

- [HIGH] Dennis Nordman and Greg Ferris conceived WhizBang Pinball in 2009 at a breakfast in Seattle after a Northwest Pinball Show — _Greg Ferris speaking at Pintastic New England panel, describing the origin story directly_
- [HIGH] WhizBang built exactly four games (Wipe Out Nelly prototypes) because they found exactly four Continental Cafe EM machines to use as donor cabinets — _Greg Ferris and Dennis Nordman discussing their deliberate limitation to four games rather than scaling to 30-50_
- [HIGH] George Gomez at Stern championed the decision to bring Big Juicy Melons to production without 'dumbing it down' for mass manufacturing — _Greg Ferris crediting George Gomez's vision for maintaining custom game qualities in production_
- [HIGH] The first six production games shipped with incorrect wood trim color/placement on the cabinet — _Greg Ferris acknowledging color trim mistake in early production units, joking they'll be 'more valuable someday'_
- [HIGH] Kerry Hemming developed a 'pin kit' system to convert EM games to solid-state, enabling three solid-state versions of Wipe Out Nelly after the initial EM prototype — _Greg Ferris describing Kerry Hemming's instrumental role with his bus/modular conversion system_
- [HIGH] Dennis Nordman was laid off on 'Shane Black Thursday' (Williams downsizing day) after completing Scared Stiff with Greg Ferris — _Greg Ferris referencing the layoff and paying homage to the date in Scared Stiff backglass artwork_
- [MEDIUM] The original Continental Cafe cabinet had a date stamp (4-13-56) inside, which Greg photographed and found meaningful — _Greg describing the preservation of this detail from the donor machine_
- [HIGH] Theatre of Magic Copera engineered the base crate to fit into standard Stern shipping boxes while maintaining the crate-as-cabinet design — _Greg Ferris crediting Theatre of Magic Copera for solving the mechanical integration challenge_
- [HIGH] All four original WhizBang owners approved scaling the game to production at Stern — _Greg Ferris describing direct conversation with the four owners who gave permission to productionize_
- [HIGH] The back glass required double-hit printing (multiple passes) to achieve desired color saturation and quality — _Greg Ferris expressing satisfaction with the printing quality and double-hit specification_

### Notable Quotes

> "We flew home really fast and stealthily so nobody would know what we were working on."
> — **Greg Ferris**, ~08:30
> _Illustrates the secretive nature of WhizBang's founding and desire to keep the project hidden from industry_

> "We Are Pinball designers. We Are Pinball not manufacturers... we don't want to fall off that skinny branch."
> — **Greg Ferris / Dennis Nordman**, ~22:15
> _Core philosophy explaining their deliberate limitation to four games and unwillingness to scale manufacturing_

> "How much are we going to have to dumb this down for production? He said, no, we're not going to do that."
> — **Greg Ferris (quoting George Gomez)**, ~32:45
> _Key moment confirming Stern's commitment to maintaining custom game integrity in production_

> "The crate is holding up the game... We couldn't, that was the biggest question at Pinball Expo was when are the legs going to go on."
> — **Dennis Nordman / Greg Ferris**, ~20:00
> _Highlights the unconventional design challenge and audience skepticism about the pedestal-less cabinet concept_

> "I plunged right through the cabinet, just missed my knee."
> — **Dennis Nordman**, ~14:30
> _Humorous illustration of the physical danger and difficulty in hand-crafting the cabinet modifications_

> "I threw them on the ground and jumped all over them and stomped on them and beat them with screwdrivers... Then I torched it and wire brushed it and I just beat the hell out of it. It was cathartic."
> — **Dennis Nordman**, ~15:45
> _Describes the physical and artistic process of weathering cabinet wood to achieve authentic fruit-crate aesthetic_

> "Without Dennis Nordman, I did get in the business at Valley working on Harlem Globetrotters, things like Fathom."
> — **Greg Ferris**, ~03:30
> _Establishes the foundational working relationship and mutual influence between the two designers_

> "Those are real fruit print labels too. I didn't make that up."
> — **Greg Ferris**, ~11:00
> _Confirms the historical authenticity of the fruit crate art inspiration, establishing design credibility_

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| Greg Ferris | person | Legendary pinball artist and designer at Valley, Williams, Jersey Jack Pinball, and Stern; co-founder of WhizBang Pinball with Dennis Nordman |
| Dennis Nordman | person | Legendary pinball designer known for Party Animal, Whitewater, Scared Stiff; pioneered pedestal-style pinball cabinet design; co-founder of WhizBang Pinball |
| WhizBang Pinball | company | Custom pinball design partnership founded by Greg Ferris and Dennis Nordman in 2009; created Big Juicy Melons (formerly Wipe Out Nelly/Sweet Juicy Melons) |
| Big Juicy Melons | game | WhizBang Pinball's fruit-crate-art-inspired game; originally called 'Wipe Out Nelly' and 'Sweet Juicy Melons'; started as four custom EM conversions, expanded to Stern production |
| George Gomez | person | Legendary Stern Pinball designer who championed Big Juicy Melons for production and ensured design integrity was maintained |
| Stern Pinball | company | Major pinball manufacturer that partnered with WhizBang to produce Big Juicy Melons at scale |
| Kerry Hemming | person | Developer of 'pin kit' modular system for converting EM games to solid-state; instrumental in enabling three solid-state WhizBang games |
| Mark Wehner | person | Former Williams colleague of Dennis Nordman who worked on Scared Stiff and Indy 500; recruited to help convert EM components for Big Juicy Melons playfield |
| Ken Jeff Walker | person | EM specialist and Team EM member who assisted with EM game restoration and component wiring for Big Juicy Melons prototypes |
| Theatre of Magic Copera | person | Stern Pinball engineer who engineered the base crate design for production shipping and mechanical integration |
| Valley Pinball | company | Pinball manufacturer where Dennis Nordman began his career designing cabinets and worked with Greg Ferris; connection to pedestal-style cabinet legacy |
| Williams Electronics | company | Major pinball manufacturer where both Greg Ferris and Dennis Nordman worked on multiple titles including Scared Stiff, Party games, Indy 500, and others |
| Continental Cafe | game | EM pinball game used as donor cabinet for the four original WhizBang prototypes; Dennis Nordman purchased one at 2006 Tilt art exhibition |
| Churchill | company | Cabinet manufacturing vendor for WhizBang's Big Juicy Melons production; handled wood assembly and weathering at production scale |
| Reina Cortes | person | Stern Pinball cable designer credited with efficient and quality cable design work for Big Juicy Melons production |
| Pat Powers | person | Stern Pinball technical support and troubleshooting specialist known for customer service on SAM Stern games |
| Dave Cadot | person | Stern Pinball lab technician who builds up games during development and testing phases |
| Jersey Jack Pinball | company | Pinball manufacturer where Greg Ferris worked as artist, including on The Wizard of Oz |
| Pintastic New England | event | Pinball convention/show where this panel presentation took place |
| Pinball Expo | event | Major pinball industry trade show where WhizBang first publicly displayed Big Juicy Melons in fall 2009 |
| Team EM | organization | Community resource group specializing in electromechanical pinball game restoration and technical support |
| Gary Stern | person | President/owner of Stern Pinball; decision-maker on whether to bring Big Juicy Melons to production; Greg Ferris created caricature of him holding melons |
| Cassandra Peterson | person | Original Elvira performer; worked with Greg Ferris and Dennis Nordman on two Elvira pinball games; described as perfect match for pinball |
| Steve Ritchie | person | Legendary Stern pinball designer who worked with Greg Ferris on Star Trek: The Next Generation and other titles; known for straightforward game action |

### Topics

- **Primary:** WhizBang Pinball founding and design philosophy, Big Juicy Melons game development and cabinet design, Transition from custom/garage manufacturing to Stern production partnership
- **Secondary:** EM to solid-state conversion technology and engineering, Fruit crate label art as inspiration and aesthetic direction, Greg Ferris and Dennis Nordman career history (Valley, Williams, Jersey Jack), Playfield design iteration and mechanical problem-solving
- **Mentioned:** Production challenges and quality control in scaling custom games

### Sentiment

**Positive** (0.85) — Throughout the presentation, both speakers express pride and enthusiasm about the Big Juicy Melons project, from inception through production. Appreciation for collaborators is consistent. Humor and self-deprecation about mistakes (trim color error, plunging through cabinet) are presented light-heartedly. The only negative sentiment relates to historical Williams layoffs, but this is presented as motivational context rather than current grievance. Strong satisfaction with Stern partnership and vendor relationships.

### Signals

- **[business_signal]** WhizBang Pinball partnership with Stern demonstrates successful acquisition/collaboration model for boutique custom designers scaling to major manufacturer (confidence: high) — Detailed account of how custom game attracted Stern's attention through George Gomez and was moved into production without compromising design vision
- **[community_signal]** WhizBang actively solicited community feedback during development (playfield iterations, artwork colors, mechanical decisions) and incorporated player suggestions (confidence: high) — Examples include Roger's suggestion for rollover switch, community feedback on gobble hole vs eject hole, showing artwork variations to family/community
- **[community_signal]** Four original WhizBang prototype owners unanimously approved scaling to production, demonstrating strong community support for the game (confidence: high) — Greg Ferris describing direct conversation with owners who endorsed production move and allowed one prototype to remain at Stern for two years during development
- **[design_innovation]** Big Juicy Melons pioneered unusual pedestal-less cabinet design where fruit crate structure serves as primary support; required novel engineering solutions (confidence: high) — Dennis Nordman describing cabinet modifications, connection to his original pedestal-based Valley Pinball work, audience skepticism at Pinball Expo
- **[design_philosophy]** WhizBang committed to limiting scale (four games) to maintain design and craft integrity rather than pursuing mass manufacturing (confidence: high) — Greg Ferris and Dennis Nordman explicitly rejecting offers to scale to 30-50 games, describing themselves as 'designers, not manufacturers'
- **[market_signal]** Fruit crate label art aesthetic represents conscious departure from typical pinball themes, positioning Big Juicy Melons as niche/collector-focused title (confidence: medium) — Detailed discussion of fruit crate art inspiration, emphasis on historical advertising art authenticity, vintage aesthetic direction
- **[personnel_signal]** Multiple Williams-era collaborators (Mark Wehner, Ken Jeff Walker) recruited to assist on Big Juicy Melons project, indicating strong historical network (confidence: medium) — Greg Ferris identifying team members' prior Williams collaboration and EM expertise as reasons for recruitment
- **[announcement]** Big Juicy Melons (formerly Wipe Out Nelly/Sweet Juicy Melons) officially transitioned from four custom prototypes to Stern Pinball production series (confidence: high) — Greg Ferris describing the approval from all four original owners and the move to Stern manufacturing; presentation shows production cabinets being assembled at Churchill
- **[product_concern]** Manufacturing error: first six production units shipped with incorrect wood trim color/placement on cabinet (confidence: high) — Greg Ferris acknowledging the mistake with humor, predicting these units will become more valuable as variants
- **[technology_signal]** Kerry Hemming's modular EM-to-solid-state conversion kit enabled WhizBang to produce both EM and SS versions of Big Juicy Melons from same core design (confidence: high) — Detailed description of the 'pin kit' bus system allowing three solid-state games to be built after initial EM prototype

---

## Transcript

 In accordance with Chapter 2.3 of Massachusetts General Laws, we're hereby reminded that this meeting is being recorded, and these microphones are pretty sensitive, so if you don't want to be recorded, keep your silence. We're also being live-streamed over the Internet, and some questions could come in from over the Internet, but of course you're here, so we'll get to your questions first. When we do have a question period, please line up along that sideline for that audience microphone right there. Today we'll be covering a general range of things happening in the pinball business or pinball history. We'll have some late breaking news during the course of this afternoon, some that I know of and some that I'm anticipating. And then this evening will be Lloyd Olsen with the L3G show. For our first presentation, this is the story of the fruitiest machine yet to come out in the world of pinball. And Greg Freres here, well known as the artist, Harlem Globetrotters, Speakeasy, Lady What, a very different looking game. And then on into the whole party series and also Fire, Doctor Who, the party ceremony where he worked with Dennis. And also Star Trek. Let's not forget that Greg was involved with Star Trek art and helped Jersey Jack with Wizard of Oz. most recently, the game that we're going to talk about today. Dennis, I went through my list of the people who were at Pinball Expo 85, and I found your name there. So you were one of the people who was trying to get hooked up with the industry in the mid-'80s and after doing your cabinet deal with them. And then you came in for the Special Forces, and then your first party game, Party Animal, and on into all the other party games. Indy 500, Whitewater, big crowd pleaser. Pirates of the Caribbean, or Caribbean, either way. And now, the game that we're going to hear about. So the other company in big ball, Whizbang Football, gets to tell their story. So Greg, come on up. Thank you. So this is Melon Farming 101. Check your syllabus. Make sure you're in the right class. I'm Professor Freres. This is my graduate assistant, Dennis Norton. Anyway, that's how we're started. That's how we roll. Anyway, we got a lot to talk about here. I'll try to leave plenty of time for questions. I'm going to, since Dave did such a great job on our history, I'm going to move through the first part of this a little bit faster than normal. We do one show, so if you've live streamed this from Seattle or anywhere else, you're going to see some duplication, but I apologize for that. But if you're that hardcore about pinball, that's great. We appreciate it. So moving forward, we had to develop a style, a whiz-bang style, and it took us years of development to get the whiz-bang style down to what we thought would be the right thing. So, you know, we put our thinking caps on, and, you know, Dennis. Dennis has always been a great inspiration for much of my artwork. Party Animals, he was the wolf man. You know, on his own, a whitewater game, he is Bigfoot. So he's always a great visual inspiration for a lot of things. He's also one of the guys in the truck on Lone Alley, if you take a close look at that. We enjoy working in pairs. We've done two Elvira games, and we're very proud of our accomplishments with Cassandra. She's wonderful to work with, and she's just a perfect match for pinball teams. Without Nordman, I did get in the business at Valley working on Harlem Globetrotters, things like Fathom. I also got to work with Steve Ritchie later on in my career, and got to work with him on Star Trek The Next Generation, and also the most current Star Trek from Stern. Steve's great to work with. One thing he did tell me when we started on Next Generation was, you know, you do artwork for all these funny games, and I don't do funny. So he said, I just want you to do straight artwork, nothing funny. And I said, good, what are we working on? He said, Star Trek Next Generation. I said, perfect. So there's nothing funny there, including that joke. Anyway, moved on to No Fear with him. There we did get to combine some of my humor with his, you know, straightforward game action, you know, full on action. So that was a fun project to work on and it was Steve's last for, you know, Williams at the time. Revenge for Mars got to work on Pinball 2000, got to be there for the end of Pinball at Williams. So that was both fun and sad at the same time. Dennis got started. Wait, wait, Greg. You've got to tell them the Edsel story. Oh, you want the Edsel story? Yeah. All right, so see the Edsel that the big giant guy is stepping on over on the left there? So while we were working on Pinball 2000, Neil Macastro, I overheard him talking to a distributor, showing him an early version of the game. And as I walked past the office that they were in, I heard Neil say to the distributor, yeah, it could be good or it could be the next Ed Salt. He goes, I'm not sure. And we were working our butts off to try to do the next greatest thing in pinball. And when I heard that, the wind was taken out of my sails. And so I had to pay homage to that moment and crush an Edsel with a giant Martian. Without me, Dennis came into the business through unique cabinet design. And if you take a close look at the one on the right, it is a pedestal-based cabinet. And if you look at Walt Nelly, it is a pedestal-based cabinet. So there's some interesting correlation going on between the start of his career at Valley and where he's come with Walt Nelly right now. I designed this cabinet in college. I majored in product design at Ohio State. And then our senior year, they let us design whatever we wanted to do. And I thought, I'd really like to update and modernize the pinhole industry. So the model is what I built for my class project later. When I was at Williams, I added the demolition manor. But I also built a full-size version, took it to Schaefer Distributing in Columbus. and they set me up with an appointment with Chuck Farmer, who was then president of Valley Pinball in Bensonville, and he had come from Columbus. So I called it out to Valley, and they liked it, and they hired me, and that's how I got my start. I love that story. Actually, Greg didn't like the cabinet that much because I made it, I gave it a real small back glass just because I thought visually it was balanced looking. They didn't like it because it was little. Right. We want art. So here's a couple more games after he got his start at Valley and a restart at Valley. You know, we, our careers have blossomed. One of the better games came out of Stern recently, Pirates of the Caribbean, back in the, you know, back when Stern was still moving upwards. I think your pirate ship is one of the favorite toys of many pinball games. It's very cool. Party Animal, we got started together on Party Animal. I had suggested to another designer, hey, let's do a game called Party Animal. He had nothing to do with it, so Dennis took hold of it and created the first of the party series of games that we worked on. Dr. Dude, Dennis had an idea to work with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle license. And I was like, yeah, and I was like, really? Let's do our own comic thing, you know. So Dr. Dude came out of that. Party Zone was after that. You know, working at Williams, it was great because they allowed us a lot of freedom in our design ideas and our theme directions. So, you know, we always look back fondly on our days at Williams because they gave us a lot of freedom to do what we wanted to do. So we appreciate that. And then Scared Stiff, that was the final game that Dennis and I worked on. Dennis unfortunately got laid off on a day called Black Thursday, which is also, I paid homage to that in the artwork of the back glass on this month. A lot of people got laid off that day, and it was unfortunate, and it was a sad moment in pinball history because we just needed to keep moving pinball forward as best as possible in a very down market. I hate that story. I know. So, now, let's talk about Whizbang Pinball. In 2009, we were a bit underemployed, as the world was, and so we were out at the Northwest Pinball Show in Seattle together. we hadn't seen each other for a couple years and we decided that we needed to try something a little different. I kept hearing everybody talk about custom games and to me I was like wow, custom games would be cool to work on. I never thought of that, being an industry insiders. So I started bantering that around and the day we left Seattle we had breakfast at the Cafe Mecca and bar and came up with some ideas of this custom approach to pinball. I said, you know, we're just two industry guys. Maybe we could think about something that would be a little more custom. So we got in our woody and took off to the airport and had a great breakfast before that. I told Dennis, I said, you know, I couldn't sleep last night, so I got this idea. When I told him the idea of doing custom games, he really appreciated it. We flew home really fast and stealthily so nobody would know what we were working on. And we decided to call it Whizbang Pinball. This is where we had a flashback. In 2006, there was a beautiful showing of artwork called Tilt, the Art of Pinball, in a museum in southern Illinois. And it was the best curated art show for pinball for pinball that I have ever been a part of. They really did a nice job. It was a legitimate art museum. They had games. They had original artwork. They showed sketches and finished art and finished games. So it was really a nice show. And at that show, I hadn't seen Dennis since the layoffs around Scared of the State of Time. That was a few years. Yeah, it was a long time. And Dennis decided he really liked this Continental Cafe game and he thought the retro quality of it was just unique. So he bought it and brought it home. and basically put it in his garage in 2006. And when we had breakfast that day in Seattle, he said, you know, I've got an old EM game at home that we could use. And maybe we could like hot rod that thing and turn it into something cool. So... When the guy delivered it to me, I started to backlash his practice. So you did get discounted, but you can't get back classes. As it turns out, it's not a great playing game, but we decided that we were going to use it as a host game. Just taking an old car and turning it into a hot rod. That was our next approach of how we were going to handle everything. So we brought it to people that are smarter than us when it comes to electromechanical games. We brought it to one of our neighboring Team EN members If you know anything about Team EM they are a great resource If you buy an EM game and don't know what to do next, they are great to go to. They are very helpful, and they will help you get the job done to get your game up and running if it isn't, or if you have trouble with an EM game. These guys are all great and they're very sharing with their knowledge. So we brought it to Ken Walker. He became part of our team, just kind of helping us get this hot rod idea off the ground. I took that picture. It says 4-13-56. I thought that was cool because that was inside the Continental Cafe cabinet. And that's when somebody signed off on whatever it was that day that he was inspecting. So that was pretty cool. So we come to the pitch. So Dennis calls me, it was about July of 2009, and goes, okay I got this great idea. And he says, you've got to come out to the house and we've got to talk about this right now. I've got to show you something. So he said, basically we both like the art of fruit crates. When you look back on fruit crate art, it's just so rich in the history of advertising art. And it's beautiful work and risque, too, at times. These were people that were trying to grab the attention at market to sell their product over somebody else's. So they were all very colorful and unique in their own way. And so that was the first part of the pitch. Let's do something with fruit crate labels. And then, of course, we're pinball guys, so we love vintage pinball artwork and pinup artwork. So, you know, the combination of fruit crates and pinball and pinup just kind of led to, you know, okay, yeah, that's what I do. I can handle that. And Dennis is great with tools, so he can handle the hard part, the heavy lifting. So that's how basically, Wo Nelly was born. He said, let's call it Sweet Juicy Melons. That was his first pitch. And I said, that's cool, but it's a brand. It's got to have like a hook to it, you know? So that's when we attached Wo Nelly to it. So like that's the attention getter. And then eventually it went from sweet to big for various reasons. This was the sketch that Dennis showed me for the cabinet and I was blown away. I was like, oh my god, that is perfect. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just the right way to go. Those are real fruit print labels too. I didn't make that up. Yeah, those are pulled right from the internet just to get the point across. So then I started, I went home and started sketching and coming up with ideas and, you know, getting things moving forward. There it is, Sweet Juicy Melons. So this was... You'll notice on that glass there was two score displays. So we decided, we just thought we were building one game, a work of art, we called it, that we were working on. So we decided let's just make a one player game and you'll have more room for art. So that made Greg happy. Thank you. Thank you. So the garage phase starts now. This is when the real heavy lifting starts. So Dennis had to get busy on this cabinet, and he chopped it. He took the angle off of it and just turned it into a crate shape, just a rectangular piece, which led to more trouble than he thought it would. Right? Yeah, this particular game had the, it had an old fashioned ball lift where you push a lever to lift the ball up to the play field and when I cut the cabinet down it changed the geometry of that ball lift. The ball lift groove was in the side of the cabinet. So it changed that geometry. So what I ended up having to do was cut out a special piece of wood to fill in that ball lift and that channel and then route another one. So the first time I routed it, I had my plunge router. I had a guide all set up so I could get the right curve, but I forgot to set the depth on the plunge router. I plunged right through the cabinet, just missed my knee by that car. I'm good at doing stuff like that. So this took a, you know, this was a process. He fitted pieces of wood on to frame it to make it look more like a crate. We kind of knew where we wanted to put artwork with decals to give it the illusion of a fruit crate. Yeah, outside, behind his workshop, that's when the real magic happened, right? Yeah, I just, I have this gravel area out there, so I wanted to make these pieces of wood look old and beat up, so I threw them on the ground and jumped all over them and stomped on them and beat them with screwdrivers. I wish we had video of that. Then I torched it and wire brushed it and I just beat the hell out of it. It was fun. Cathartic. So this is taking shape with the way we were moving forward. We decided to put slats on the base crate to give it the illusion that there's actually fruit inside. So that's kind of how that ended up. This was before we went to Expo in the fall of 2009. this was about where we were at and this is what we were going to bring to Expo. And when we brought it, everybody at Expo was like, well when are you going to put the legs on? And we said, well we're not going to put legs on it. Well why not? Because the crate is holding up the game. We couldn't, that was the biggest question at Expo was when are the legs going to go on. So I guess people really want legs on pinball games. Now it's mounted to the crate, it's bolted to the crate, but it's bolted with these rubber motor mount type things that have a stud coming out each end. So it's still flexible, you can still shape it. And there's leg levelers in the bottom of the crate. We have pictures of that later, just to illustrate better. So this is me when I was thin. And this is Pinky, another Continental Cafe that we acquired. And people said to us, why don't you build more than one game? We only had one Continental Cafe, so we started looking for more. We found three more. Yeah, so that's how we ended up with four games. Everybody said, how did you arrive at four games? Oh, we found four Continental Cafe games, so that's where we ended up. We did not want to go beyond four. People tried to convince us to do 30 or 50 in Dennis' garage. And we said, nope, we are not manufacturers. We are designers. And we are going out on a skinny branch here just to get these four done. So we don't want to fall off that skinny branch. We knew what our limitations were. We knew that we were not manufacturers and didn't want to ever be manufacturers. Building four games was tough enough. This is really where the heavy lifting came in when we needed more help. We recruited Mark Wehner. Mark worked with us at Williams. He worked on Scared Stiff and Indy 500 with Dennis. A great guy. He's got a lot of EM games in his collection. So between him and Ken, they really did a lot of work to get the EN components wired up onto the new playfield for 1.9. This is kind of iterative playfield work. The one on the left is Dennis's first approach. And the one on the right is the one that is closer to the finished piece that you see on the floor today. The original game had three gobble holes in it. And I knew I didn't want to have three gobble holes. I knew I didn't want to have three gobble holes, so this game had one gobble hole, and I rearranged everything from what the my middle cap basically was, but it's still very EM looking. Mark convinced, I didn't think the pop-upers would have a lot of power, or the flippers would have a lot of power, and Mark Wayman convinced me that, no, you can bounce the soft-sompers together and it'll be strong enough, it'll be light. So then I just started over and redesigned the whole thing. The thing that makes this game a lot more shootable than most early wood rails is that it has return links. So you have control over the ball and you can actually make shots now. I made a shot that goes back to the top with the return links. And I just had one gobble hole in it. When we showed the game with the gobble hole, a lot of people didn't understand what was happening. The gobble hole, if you don't know, it just takes the ball and it ends your game. It ends that ball. But it usually hits you some big report, but a lot of people have no idea what was happening. So we changed it to an eject hole, and now it takes the ball. And I like it a lot better this way. But our first four games still have the gobble hole feature. And some of our owners are like, why'd you take the gobble hole out? We knew, we were like, well, bigger market, we don't want to confuse people, so we needed to take it out. This is just progress. We had to label everything from that EM wiring system so that when we went to plug it all back in, we'd know everything would attach to it. This is just iterations on artwork, a blue background or a red background. Show it to the family, get some votes, you know, see what works best. Take it to a show, see what happens. This is our first flip in spring of 2010. So it took us, you know, from July of concept to getting the first flipping game out to the Milwaukee show. And we got a pretty good response at that show. show. People were interested to see what we were working on. Kerry Hemming, the guy facing us in this shot with the name tag on, he became instrumental in the product, in the process because he said he was working on a system whereby he would convert an EM game to a solid-state game. So would we like to work with him on that? And we said, sure, we don't know what you're talking about, up. We'll do that. So he definitely was instrumental in with his pin kit as he calls it to convert EM to solid state. So he came up with a bus system, a modular system that you know it was allowed us to then do three solid state games after the first EM game. Roger came to that show and flipped it for the first time and it looks like he's having a good time, right? And he said, you know, over here, this lane over on the left could use more scoring, so why don't you put a rollover switch over there? So we did. So we thanked Roger for that and gave him an ugly caricature, as I am wont to do. You know, I never caricature anybody pretty. I grew up reading Mad Magazine and they know pretty people in Mad Magazine. So, you know, I treat everybody equally. So don't feel bad if you ever read a caricature from me or you. Anyway, there it is. That was the finished product there. We got a beauty shot of it just to record it. This is the finished product that four wonderful owners own right now. We asked them directly, Hey guys, we're getting a lot of requests for this game. Do you think it would be okay if we took it to the next level and went to production? All four of our owners said, absolutely. We want to see you guys do whatever you need to do with this game. So we couldn't be more happy with their support on that. So now we're transitioning to the stern shop. So the first thing we had to do was convince Gary that this is the right thing to do. So I did a caricature of Gary holding a couple of melons. And he was interested in it right from the get-go. George Gomez was actually the guy that said, oh yeah, we've got to bring this in, we've got to do this. Kudos to George for seeing the vision as we saw it and thinking that it would be great for both home use and operation. That was the key. My question to George was, hey, how much are we going to have to dumb this down for production? He said, no, we're not going to do that. We're going to try to make it just like what you guys built so that it looks and feels exactly what you guys had gone for. So, again, kudos to George on that. This is Darren. Darren is one of our four owners. He allowed us to keep his game that he had paid for in my office at Stern for two years. and again we couldn be happier with his support in allowing us to keep it for so long So we delivered it to him this January and that was done Tom Kopera instrumental in taking the mechanics of the game from our concept our prototype to the finish line at Stern He was the guy that had to figure out how are we going to be able to ship this in a standard Stern box with the base crate. So he engineered the base credits so that it would fit in a box that would all fit together with the game in the Stern box that was shipping it. So that was helpful. And then every other aspect of the mechanics, too. John Trudeau, his first task at Stern was to convert Dennis' AutoCAD files into SolidWorks. So he helped out when he got to Stern. This is our first white wood at Stern. Just another white wood, but there it is. It's got big flippers on it, just for the photo op. But we haven't gotten short flippers in yet. And this was the big deal. This is a beauty shot of one of our four games. And this is what we brought to our cabinet company, Churchill, to say, hey guys, I know you guys build pinball cabinets every day, all day long, but this one is a little unique. And we brought them out to look at the game, and they basically had a heart attack because it's so different compared to what they're used to doing. But we spent a few days with them, and they got it. You know, they put it together, we got the trim wood weathered at another company, and then they shipped it to Stern. So we're real happy with the results of the cabinetry on that. This is the first cabinet that came from our vendor. And they painted it all black for whatever reason. I guess that's the only color they had. So we call it the stealth cabinet, just so nobody would know what we were working on. This is starting to fit parts to make sure the cabinet works with all the specs that Tom Kopera had given them. This shows the spike system in the backbox. and the speakers, so that was George's idea, to fire the speak words downwards onto the glass. And it works great. It really worked nicely. We're happy about that. Some behind the scenes people at Stern. Reina Cortes is our designer of all the cables. She does a great job. She's very efficient and very good at what she does. Pat Powers, of course, most people know Pat. Working with him on the phone if you've had trouble with your stern game. Pat's a great guy and he's a great trouble shooter. He knows how to get the job done. Dave Cadot builds up games in our labs. And Paul Mandeltort is from Marco, but he worked with Stern for a while. He's moved on. As we moved from the garage shop to the Stern shop, we knew that there was going to be some amount of modification that would need to be made. One of them was the back glass grew slightly in size. It didn't affect the artwork too badly, but it was one of those things where I had to compensate for a slightly larger backless. This is more progress of the cavity being put together, the lockdown bar. We spec out maple for the lockdown bar, so it's nice and lasting, not soft wood. At the press proof, we have to take the backbox to the press proof at the printers so that we get the right amount of saturation in the printing. We brought a backbox along to make sure that we got the right color. I couldn't be happier with the printing on this back glass. We actually double-hitted. There's a lot of quality built into the printing of this back glass. and I couldn't be happier with the results. Tweakage. So once we removed the gobble hole, we had to really look at that area, that eject hole, to figure out the best-case scenario. And at first it was just an eject hole that was going to send it back into the jet bumper area. But the problem with that was it wouldn't stick, right, Dennis? Right, yeah, we had a lot of trouble. We had a metal ball right behind the hole, but it would never suck the ball in and keep it. So fortunately, we had room behind it, so we just put a little tunnel behind it. The ball goes into the tunnel and then rolls back and sticks in the eject hole pretty nicely. I wish we'd have had room to put a target back there just so you could get a noise as soon as the ball went in, but there was no room for that. But it works great now. Yeah, the tradeoff was we had to lose a lamp under the plastic right there, So it's a little bit dark spot on the play field. But the modders are already looking into that. We got our wood samples in from the wood vendor and stained the colors that we wanted stained. And then as soon as we said, yep, that's what we want, we got wood. The bad joke is Stern woke up with wood that day. They delivered this to Stern instead of Churchill. And so everybody at Stern was like, what is all this wood doing here? So we then had to reship that back to Churchill to get it going. So these are shots from Churchill of the cabinet progressing, moving together, gluing, nailing, and getting it all put together. The Carl Weathers trim now at production quantity. and unfortunately we made a choice in the beginning that the first six games are the wrong color trim on the wrong parts of the cabinet. So there are six games out there in the world that will have the wrong trim, so yeah, those will be more valuable someday, 20 years from now. This is coming to fruition over at Churchill. Dennis overseeing some of the early work on putting these cabinets together. Probably getting in their face a little bit too much. They're not used to having people telling them, it should be more like this. It was fun days over there. I'm going to do a little derivative piece here. There are people that are building their own Wonellys. We call them the homegrowns. And what they did is they bought, when we printed the parts for our four games, we had to print an overage of parts. So we printed 100 back glasses and sold those to help raise money to finish the other games that we built. We printed an overage of playfields so that people could buy playfields and hang them on their wall. Little did we know that people are so resourceful that they would buy these parts and then go find a Continental Cafe and tear that apart and try to make their own. Brad Grant, number one homegrown out in California, he got it done within like four months. And our hat's off to him for pulling that off. I mean. BRAD GRANT JR.: Took us three years. I mean. Yeah. And these are our games. Oh, also Bruce Zamos from New Jersey is a second home grower. So he got one finished, and he's got that up on the Internet somewhere. But, you know, and there's like three or four other people that are working on them. So very resourceful people. My hat's off to them. That's a line up of the three solid state games with the speakers on top that we had to accommodate after Carrie Emming told us, oh by the way, you have sound now if you want it. And we were like, oh, okay. Now we've got to get some music or something. Okay. We did an outdoor shoot in November, which was, you know, it was a warm day, but as the day progressed it got a little cooler. So it was a fun afternoon. Charlie from Spooky Pinball told us, I know the perfect person that could be a model for you if you ever do a photo shoot. His wife worked at a bank, and the bank president's daughter is now Melanie. And so there she is. Which thing? Yeah. Who was that? Anyway, this is at Stern. This is games coming together. And there you can see at the front, on my decal for the Coindor decal, I have gray wood, but we have brown trim. So those are some of the first games that went out the door with the trim reversed. So no big deal. This is Dennis approving playfields at our play field vendor. Rack playfields, the first playfields. And you know, Dennis can't just live with it the way it is. It's gotta be perfect. So he was out there on the first six games getting them prepared to go to shows. We had a photo shoot game that Jim Shelbert helped us photo shoot. He went on the line when we got started to make sure everything was getting screwed together properly. Bigfoot showed up one day to put his approval on it. Don Thorne is another behind the scenes guy that you don't always hear about. He runs our whole factory. does a great job. It's a tough job and he's right there finding things that might be wrong and getting the trouble out of the way before it becomes a bigger issue. Al Dale is our manager of operations, great guy. We have fun with Al and he didn't want his picture taken but we got him anyway. This is Tom Kopera and Dennis putting together one of the base crates, one of the first base crates. Again with the wrong color wood, which would be brown, but it was great. We took it to Texas. We've been on the road quite a few weekends supporting Wonelli. So we got a really warm reception at the Texas show with the first prototype games that we brought there. People, every show we go to, we hear the same thing and it's wonderful to hear this. This game is not what I thought it would be. It's better than I thought it would be. We really appreciate hearing that because you can't tell the book by its cover. You can't tell the game by looking at a picture of it on the internet. If you haven't already played it, please come out and talk to us and have a good time because we really feel there's a lot of fun and quality built in. It's just a unique blend of old and new. It's very hard to understand what that is until you actually play it. Because play field is very simple. This is a perfect example of the classic rule of game design, and that is easy to understand, difficult to master. That's what this game is. It's very simple to understand. It's very difficult to score over 3,000 points. This is a shot of Milwaukee this year. Kerry Emming playing the game, the guy that designed our first board set. Uris, one of our buyers to the left of the game there. So, you know, it's all coming together. People are happy to see it come together. Todd McCullough out at Seattle. So the picture on the right, this is great. All of us are standing. Nobody is crouching. I love that picture. I really feel short. Why? Good use of the crate at the Milwaukee shop. So, yeah, real pinball. We're back to making real pinball. This is a unique project for Stern. We really respect them for seeing the vision that we saw and we hope to sell this game for a while. It's not a limited edition. A lot of people have asked that question. They've gone out and bought 300 parts. We've built 150 so far. If there is demand, we will build games. That is how it's going to work. This was the final test line at Melrose. This is as Melrose Park was winding down. It was really winding down. The line had been taken out. The track that you see on the floor there is the track that the cabinet line would come down if you ever been to the Stern factory in Melrose That what was left that day of all the lines at Stern So it was pretty barren and we were still getting these last games out the door from Melrose I believe Well Nelly could be considered the last game in Melrose, but I'm pretty sure that's true. We'll see how history plays out. He's the first cabinets at Elk Grove Village, so here we go. Brand new home, first playfields on the line at Elk Grove Village. Historic. Jack Benson is our programmer. Young guy, he knows what he's doing. He's got a lot to learn. He knows we're old. We know he's young. And, you know, we work pretty well together. So he has respect for us once in a while. Maybe on a Friday afternoon he has respect for us. And we give him a lot of grief. But we've had a lot of fun working with Jack. And he's learned a lot about pinball in a very short time. He's a great player. And he just wants to make great games. So that's what we need in the business. This is Barty. She is our final inspection line supervisor. She also has been in pinball for many years and really, really does a great job with what she does. She will cut down the line if she sees some flaws that she doesn't like. Everybody gets angry with her, but she holds her ground because she wants quality products. Very good at what she does. Steven Martin, recent, he's been with us for about two years. He does production graphics, does a lot of the brochure work that we put out, and helps me get all of our games to the finish line with our printers. So I call him the bulldog because he's really efficient and watches over every detail of artwork, stuff that I might miss that gets past me, he'll catch it. This is Jerry Thompson and Jessica Rowe. Jerry is a great pinball guy from Seattle. He worked on Mustang with Stern, and he did some voiceover work for Mustang. And when we started working on Woneli, we said, hey, Jerry, we want you to do sound effects and speech for us. So he came on board, and he sourced the perfect Melanie voice that we feel is the perfect Melanie voice. Jessica Rowe from New Orleans or Louisiana. When we heard her sample, we were like, oh, yeah, that's the one. So I'll give you a word. Let's see if this works. Sharpers of pinballs. How'd that happen? You're about as sharp as a pinball. So that's Melanie's papa. And then Melanie comes back with, Oh, lighten up, Daddy. So anyway, we try to build in choreography with speech and sounds and music and try to make the entire experience entertaining. And especially with this game, we want the owner of the game to experience a deep set of sound effects and music and speech. We don't want the speech to get annoying or grating or repetitive, so we've definitely built in a lot of speech for this game that will be coming. The other crazy thing that happened here with the farmhand character, we got Rod Olson through Jerry. He's just a friend of Jerry's, and Jerry said, Hey, I got this guy. He's fun to be with, and he just wants to do some speech for the game. So he ended up becoming the guy on the back last that's crazy. And it just, like, it worked so well. We were, like, impressed with his work. And we basically let him go. It's like we told Jerry, just get in your studio with him and just let him go, you know. Just whatever he comes up with, we'll use it, you know. And so he's been great. So anytime you hear any cackling or crazy stuff, that's Rod Olson. He brings a lot of life to the game, and we're very appreciative of that. There we go. I like big melons, and I cannot lie. So this is some of what Dennis was talking about earlier with the crate. So I wanted to show the crate before you put the game on it. So there's the rubber engine mounts, but it gets bolted in, And so the hand there is showing that there's a lot of play in there with the rubber engine mount. So it's solidly placed and bolted to the cabinet, but it gives you the illusion of the feel of being on legs. So that's all good. We like that. And, of course, people didn't realize that the base crate had leg levelers on it, So we wanted to show that aspect of the base crate as well. The game that's on the show floor, if you haven't seen it, it has legs on it right now with the base crate just sitting under it. That's only to show you that you get both base crate and legs with the product. We have a decal also if you get a game that says use the pitch of four degrees. We've changed our mind on that. Five and a half to six degrees is a better setup. It makes the game play nice and snappy. If you want it to play more like an old EM game, then you can pitch it for. Game operation. We want operators to play this game. And Attaball out in Seattle has been operating it for about two months at 25 cents a play. and they've had weeks where they're earning $225 to $250 a week at 25 cents a play. So a lot of people having fun with it out there. But we want to see more operators get on board with it. So it is available now. We want everybody to know that. Local distributor, talk to your local distributor. And if Marco was here, you could talk to Marco, but they're not at this show. But there is a distributor here, oh I forgot his name, thank you very much, that is Amelie Lonelly, of course. And if you bought one of the first 74 games, there was a leg kit. These leg pieces go on the game if you put it on a crate. There are replacement pieces that easily go on and off to cover the leg holes. So the game will come with leg bowls in it, but you can take those off and put these on. Since the first 74 games, you will get that automatically, but the first ones that went out did not have those. So we sent out a kit recently. If you're one of the first 74, you can talk to your local distributor and get that kit, which includes an uncrushed beer can. And there's the beer can. We're working with local breweries to see if we can actually get a summer blonde ale out of this. We really want to see that happen too. That'll be fun. And of course we have swag. So you can get it at the Marco booth if he was here, but you can definitely get it at the Stern store. You can get vintage stuff from us through Pinball Life. You can get t-shirts and back glasses from the first run. And you can go to Marco for t-shirts as well. So, if you need any swag, see those people. And that is the end of the show. Is that a challenge for a student to somehow come up with that? No. There I go. Tom Capera had the experience of slot machines. So the score reels are run by stepper motors. They're very similar to a slot machine reel, and we actually had them injection molded. Okay. Did you talk about updating the score from, like, old EMGs you would chase the special within a single ball, and it all resets to the next ball. Did you see how you just started chasing the score ongoing throughout the game, and it's this very classic Nordman in that, like, here's your next shot, here's your next shot, here's your next shot? You know, did you work on the score before the game, or did somebody else do the programming for you? Well, I didn't do the programming. As you saw, Jack Benson did the software, but we all had input to the scoring and how it works. And actually, since we eliminated the gobble hole, the scoring feature that we have now, which is called... Thumpin' Time. Thumpin' Time. There goes my brain again. That was created by Greg and Mark Lena, and I really liked it. So you can just keep building Thumpin' Time. You make the lanes, you light the pop bumpers, you go into the eject hole, you get Thumpin' Time, and then the links start flashing and you start it all over again with higher values. Great. So thanks for, thanks guys. Thank you. What was your favorite game by the end of your time? You know I get that question asked a lot and to be honest each game I'm working on is my favorite game. The game that I work on currently is always my favorite game. Apparently Whitewater has been my most popular game. Yeah, that's totally my favorite as well. Thank you. Greg, how about you? What's your favorite? My favorite? Probably, I mean, Womenele was unique in the fact that we started it outside of the industry and then brought it inside. So that to me is like an accomplishment for us. So, yeah. So, I know your game didn't come to Stern through the normal Stern development channel, but I learned when I went on the Pinball Expo tour last year, there are code names for games. Was there a certain code name for Will and Ellie? I don't think we ever had a code name for Will and Ellie because the public already kind of knew that it was available. Jerry, do you have anything you want to add? All right, so on the Stern Facebook page, there's a video shared by a local place called Logan Arcade in Chicago where they seem to have hooked up some physical chimes to your game. Do you know anything about that? to elaborate on the physical chimes in Lone Alley? Sure. We opted not to put chimes or bells in the production version because once you can put it on location, you can't turn the bells down. You can put tape on them. You can disable them. You can't turn them down. So we decided not to put the bells in the production version. So what we can do, though, if the wiring is all there, We got to a point where we ended up putting the wiring in, and so you can physically attach a set of chimes or three bells to the game and have it work. A lot of EM purists would have talked to us and would like to turn the music off, turn the sound off, and just have bells. So we are going to be able to accommodate that, and we are thinking about doing maybe a kit for that that would be available at some point in the future. So you can make it play just like an EM. If you want to just put the angle back down to four degrees, and turn the chimes on, turn the sound off. So you've got two games with this game actually. Yeah, you've got an EM and a stylus stick. But yeah, you can, what was I going to say? the, ah, forget it. Okay, and so Stern Pinball really considers Wonelli, what they call, a new segment that they call a studio release, which is sort of, we're sort of starting to see Stern develop kind of new segments with what they call cornerstone games and now, and then contracted games, and now we see like what they call studio release. So it's like, so this is obviously Stern's first studio title, do you foresee a future where there's more studio titles and where you guys might be involved in that? Not elaborating on anything specifically, but down the road, do you anticipate something more like Ronelli where there could be a game that's made within the game studio and released in a normal production year? Yeah, we hope so. It's a little different dynamic now. I've been working at Stern for two and a half years now, so Dennis and I make a large on the outside together anymore. He's still independent, so it'll be a little tougher to pull that off, but we would love whatever measure of success that Stern needs from Mo and Elliot, we hope that we reach that benchmark and are able to do a second design for that studio title that they've given him. We hope so. Great. Okay, last call for questions in the room. Alright, well thanks again.

_(Acquisition: youtube_groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_

---

*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 3efb3ed9-c233-4b70-8a9b-14e5eaf58666*