# Scott Danesi - Pinball Expo 2018 - Pinball News

**Source:** Pinball News (Pinball Expo 2018)  
**Type:** video  
**Published:** 2018-10-23  
**Duration:** 61m 46s  
**Beat:** Pinball

**URL:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4BhS6M1hZs

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## Analysis

Scott Danesi and Charlie Emery from Spooky Pinball present Total Nuclear Annihilation at Pinball Expo 2018, detailing the game's design, engineering, code architecture, artwork, and music composition. The presentation covers the collaborative team effort, technical implementation using P-Rock Multimorphic System and Python, 3D design workflow, hidden Easter eggs in Matt Andrews' artwork, and the trademark issue that led to the 'Nuclear' addition to avoid Atari's Total Annihilation trademark.

### Key Claims

- [HIGH] Spooky Pinball has put over 1,000 pinball machines on the planet since February 1, 2013 — _Charlie Emery official statement at Pinball Expo 2018_
- [HIGH] Total Nuclear Annihilation is Spooky Pinball's biggest-selling game ever — _Charlie Emery direct statement at presentation_
- [HIGH] The game uses P-Rock Multimorphic System with full RGB, LCD screen, and embedded Linux OS — _Scott Danesi technical description of TNA architecture_
- [HIGH] Atari renewed the Total Annihilation trademark in February 2017, prompting the name change to Total Nuclear Annihilation — _Scott Danesi explaining trademark avoidance; TNA initials were bonus coincidence_
- [HIGH] Matt Andrews created the entire back glass artwork in Adobe Illustrator to a professional level unusual in the industry — _Scott Danesi praising Andrews' technical execution compared to other artists like Rick Ferrer_
- [HIGH] The girl in the back glass is modeled after Scott Danesi's wife — _Scott Danesi crediting Matt Andrews for this design decision_
- [HIGH] Steve Ritchie initially complained the left scoop ejection speed was too fast and could 'burn people,' but later came around to liking it — _Scott Danesi anecdote from MGC whitewood testing_
- [HIGH] TNA code uses Python and Skeleton Game Framework, with the minimum scoop dwell time set to 100 milliseconds due to switch activation debouncing — _Scott Danesi detailed code walkthrough with specific technical examples_

### Notable Quotes

> "We're very content being where we're at, our place in the pinball world, and we're lucky that after me doing some games, and we did a game for Ben Heck, that Scott had enough faith in Spooky Pinball to give us a chance to make Total Nuclear Annihilation for him, and to date, it is our biggest-selling game ever."
> — **Charlie Emery**, early presentation
> _Establishes TNA as a watershed title for Spooky Pinball and acknowledges trust relationship with designer Scott Danesi_

> "It's basically English. That right there, that line of code, is what I type in to make a coil fire. I don't have to worry about anything else."
> — **Scott Danesi**, code section
> _Explains why Python was chosen for TNA—accessibility and simplicity for complex pinball programming_

> "I don't have to worry about disabling the coils or making sure it's on too long or not on too long or anything. That is the code that I fire that coil. It's super easy. I think Python was a really good choice for this because it's not intimidating because the rest of the whole structure and making a pinball machine is hard enough as it is."
> — **Scott Danesi**, code section
> _Rationale for language choice reflects broader design philosophy of reducing cognitive load_

> "If you're an art nerd and you've been in that realm, to do that in Illustrator is insane. But that's Matt Andrews. He's pretty damn amazing."
> — **Scott Danesi**, artwork section
> _Acknowledges exceptional technical artistry of Matt Andrews; context of having worked with industry veterans like Rick Ferrer_

> "In February 2017, Atari renewed the trademark to the game from the 90s called Total Annihilation. And Atari is, at this point right now, they've got a lot more money than I do. And I don't know if you know how court works, but it's pretty much the person with the most money wins."
> — **Scott Danesi**, artwork Easter eggs section
> _Candid explanation of trademark conflict resolution and financial power dynamics in IP disputes_

> "Yancy came up with throwing nuclear in the middle of it. And then he was kind of like waiting for me to realize what the initials were and I wasn't getting it. He's like, get it? I'm like, sure. But it ended up being TNA, which is kind of silly."
> — **Scott Danesi**, artwork section
> _The TNA acronym was coincidental wordplay that emerged from trademark avoidance strategy_

> "He gave me time during the day to actually work on it a little bit when I had some free time to just think about some things and do that. So that was pretty nice of him to let me do that."
> — **Scott Danesi**, Easter eggs section
> _Reveals Terry (Pinball Life owner) provided significant logistical and time support during development; gratitude marks mentor relationship_

> "I composed the music itself. Each reactor in the game has a different soundtrack, so it's a different sound or a different song completely. All the sound effects are all custom, and I did all of this using 100% digital music composition software."
> — **Scott Danesi**, music section
> _Clarifies full custom audio pipeline; addresses criticism from 'purist friends' about not using analog hardware_

> "We released that in January... Actually I released the digital in February. We released it on cassette in January which is kind of fun because we like hey cassette you know 80s like the cassettes caught on in this reality."
> — **Scott Danesi**, music section
> _Indicates album was released across multiple formats including physical cassette; consistent with retro-futuristic theme of game_

> "It's ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous. Something, too, to point out here, and it's pretty neat, is the girl in the back glass is actually modeled after a picture of my wife, which is pretty cool."
> — **Scott Danesi**, artwork section
> _Personal touch to game design; wife provided behind-the-scenes support by reducing household obligations during development_

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| Scott Danesi | person | Game designer, programmer, and engineer for Total Nuclear Annihilation at Spooky Pinball; works at Pinball Life; designed game concept, prototyped in whitewood, handled music/sound/programming/design aspects |
| Charlie Emery | person | Co-owner and operator of Spooky Pinball LLC alongside wife Katie; manages manufacturing, team, sourcing, and production logistics for TNA and other Spooky titles |
| Ben Heck | person | Pinball designer whose work with Spooky Pinball established trust relationship that led to Charlie Emery being given opportunity to manufacture TNA |
| Matt Andrews | person | Artist who created all artwork for TNA including back glass, playfield art, and plastics; designed original artwork in Illustrator; known for hidden Easter eggs and technical proficiency |
| David Van Ess | person | LCD animator for TNA production animations; created animations for all Spooky Pinball games except America's Most Haunted |
| Jimmy Lippum | person | Operating system engineer based in Austin, Texas; created embedded Linux system for TNA P-Rock platform |
| Michael Ocean | person | Skeleton Game Framework engineer; built Python-based framework that served as starting point for TNA code |
| Jerry Stellenberg | person | P-Rock Multimorphic System engineer; responsible for hardware engineering and production of P3 system used in TNA |
| Terry | person | Owner of Pinball Life; Scott Danesi's boss who provided parts support, design time, and mentorship during TNA development |
| Steve Ritchie | person | Legendary pinball designer who played TNA whitewood at MGC; initially criticized fast scoop ejection speed but later embraced design decision |
| Spooky Pinball | company | Boutique pinball manufacturer founded February 1, 2013 by Charlie Emery and Katie in Benton, Wisconsin (pop. 900); has produced over 1,000 machines; manufactures TNA |
| Pinball Life | company | Pinball parts manufacturer and reseller where Scott Danesi works; owned by Terry; provided parts and support for TNA development |
| P-Rock Multimorphic System | product | Latest pinball technology platform used in TNA; features full RGB lighting, LCD screen, robust read-only embedded Linux operating system |
| Skeleton Game Framework | product | Python-based game framework created by Michael Ocean; provides baseline ball-in-play game engine allowing designers to focus on rules |
| Total Nuclear Annihilation | game | Spooky Pinball's biggest-selling title; single-level playfield designed for easy understanding and hard mastery; supports multiplayer/co-op modes; uses P-Rock system; released with music album on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, and cassette |
| America's Most Haunted | game | Spooky Pinball's inaugural game; David Van Ess did NOT create LCD animations for this title (unlike all other Spooky games) |
| Total Annihilation | game | 1990s game whose trademark was renewed by Atari in February 2017, forcing Scott Danesi to rename his game to Total Nuclear Annihilation |
| Atari | company | Renewed trademark for Total Annihilation in February 2017; Scott Danesi's assessment that legal resolution favors the wealthier party |
| Lion Man | product | Unreleased movie starring Doug Manley and Jay Brand; referenced as Easter egg in TNA back glass artwork (movie poster in background) |
| Bug | person | Son of Charlie Emery and Katie Emery; referenced as being home during Pinball Expo 2018 presentation |
| Yancy | person | Contributed to TNA name solution by suggesting 'Nuclear' addition to avoid Atari trademark; present at some TNA development discussions |
| Pat Lawler | person | Legendary pinball designer known for hiding red buttons in machine artwork; Scott Danesi unknowingly included red button Easter egg in TNA back glass |
| Rick Ferrer | person | Industry-recognized pinball artist whose work Scott Danesi has handled; used as benchmark for comparing Matt Andrews' exceptional technical Illustrator proficiency |

### Topics

- **Primary:** Game Design and Engineering, Code Architecture and Python Implementation, Artwork and Easter Eggs, Music and Sound Design, P-Rock Multimorphic Platform Technology
- **Secondary:** Spooky Pinball Manufacturing and Operations, Intellectual Property and Trademark Issues, Playfield Mechanics and Design Workflow

### Sentiment

**Positive** (0.85) — Enthusiastic, celebratory tone throughout presentation. Scott Danesi displays pride in technical accomplishment and collaborative effort. Charlie Emery expresses gratitude and satisfaction with game's market success. Both speakers engage with audience humor and maintain conversational, accessible tone despite technical content. Only mild self-deprecation about code quality and exhaustion from project scope.

### Signals

- **[business_signal]** TNA confirmed as Spooky Pinball's biggest-selling game to date, validating boutique manufacturer's market positioning and design philosophy after 1000+ total units shipped since 2013 founding (confidence: high) — Charlie Emery direct statement; context of Spooky's growth from near-bankruptcy (implied by startup narrative) to market success
- **[event_signal]** Pinball Expo 2018 panel featuring two co-creators of successful Spooky Pinball title presenting technical and creative details to enthusiast audience (confidence: high) — Panel format at major industry event; audience questions and reactions; presentation of never-before-seen artwork and code samples
- **[design_philosophy]** Scott Danesi acknowledges tension with 'purist friends' over use of 100% digital music composition rather than analog hardware synthesis for TNA soundtrack (confidence: medium) — Scott's comment: 'some of my purist friends kind of shake their heads at me'; rationale given as time constraints during production
- **[design_philosophy]** Intentional integration of Easter eggs and hidden tributes throughout TNA artwork including movie poster (Lion Man), failed tech products (Mini Disc, Crystal Pepsi), and industry nods (Pat Lawler red button homage, old Spooky logo) (confidence: high) — Extensive walkthrough of back glass artwork Easter eggs; Scott notes discovery of Pat Lawler homage after game was complete; Matt Andrews' signature logo integration
- **[licensing_signal]** Trademark conflict with Atari's Total Annihilation (1990s IP) forced design pivot and game rename mid-development in February 2017 (confidence: high) — Scott Danesi explicit account of Atari trademark renewal triggering need to add 'Nuclear' to title; Yancy credited with solution; commentary on financial/legal power dynamics
- **[personnel_signal]** Team assembly for TNA represents distributed talent coordination: Scott Danesi (concept/design/code), Matt Andrews (artwork), David Van Ess (animation), Jimmy Lippum (OS), Michael Ocean (framework), Jerry Stellenberg (hardware), with Charlie Emery managing operations (confidence: high) — Detailed credits presented by Scott Danesi; emphasis on specialized roles and expert contributors
- **[announcement]** Total Nuclear Annihilation officially presented at Pinball Expo 2018 as completed, shipping product with full technical and artistic documentation (confidence: high) — Comprehensive presentation of design, code, artwork, and music; game described as in production with 1000+ units shipped; available for purchase
- **[product_strategy]** TNA deliberately designed as single-level playfield for easy understanding and hard mastery, targeting dollar game/casual play unlike modern trend toward complex multi-level designs (confidence: high) — Scott Danesi: 'I wanted to make a game that was just really easy to understand, hard to master so that we could play dollar games on it like with my friends'
- **[technology_signal]** P-Rock Multimorphic System adoption by Spooky Pinball with custom embedded Linux operating system enabling robust, read-only game architecture for TNA (confidence: high) — Scott Danesi detailed technical description of P-Rock platform; Jimmy Lippum's OS engineering; full RGB and LCD screen capabilities; described as 'latest pinball technology'

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## Transcript

 Okay, so I guess I'll talk. Well, hey, I'm going to first start out by saying thanks for you guys for coming here and listening to my crazy ramblings with my raspy voice. I'm going to do my best to talk loudly, but my voice is completely blown out, which is amazing. Actually, I kind of like it, though. It sounds like, I don't know, it sounds good. We started a death metal band three days ago, and he's just getting used to the vocal style. Yeah, I need to do some research online how to do that without hurting myself. Maybe turn the amp up, maybe? I don't know. I don't know how that works. So anyway, hey, I'm going to talk about some cool total nuclear annihilation stuff today. I've got some things in here with – I've just got some really cool slides in here with a bunch of pictures that haven't really been seen much and should be hopefully interesting. So with that said, let's go through and talk a little bit. So introducing myself. So, well, who are these people up here? I'm Scott. I designed and programmed and engineered and did a bunch of crap on total nuclear annihilation, the pinball machine that was made by Mr. Spooky over here. Charlie, why don't you introduce yourself and say who you are. I am Charlie Emery, owner of Spooky Pinball LLC, the world's smallest functioning surviving pinball company. Yay us. Yay. Charlie is refusing to stand up, so I think I'm going to sit. I'm comfortable. I'm going to even it out. This is a little strange. I am not wearing pants. I'm wearing shorts. So what I do for a living is actually quite interesting. I work for a company called Pinball Life. Most of you probably have heard of it. If not, you probably don't repair your own machines or you get your parts from somewhere else, or pinball parts manufacturer and reseller. So I've been doing that since 2015, I believe, I think. And then I do the engineering and a bunch of other technical stuff over there. And it's a lot of fun. And in my spare time, I apparently make pinball machines. I don't know why I do that, but it's something that I did. And, yeah, it's a fun job. My day-to-day life, if I actually were to tell you what I actually do for a living on a day-to-day basis, it's very strange. I can give a fun example. A few weeks ago, I had to take a kiddie ride that my boss had purchased and rig up a Raspberry Pi with a display screen in it that plays any video that we want. when you start up the kiddie ride. And what video did you choose, Scott? Is anyone easily offended in this audience at all? No? Okay, so we got one person. Jay. It's something called safe for work pornography. So basically what that is is kind of, it doesn't really describe what it is, but they took an old 70s pornography video and they did cartoons over all the dirty parts. So, you know, it's safe for work. There's still people in it, but they're not doing what you think they're doing. They're playing pinball or, you know, playing the harmonica or other gross things. So, you know, it's pretty funny. If you guys are curious, you can look that up. I wouldn't recommend doing it at work, though. The sound is still a little bit offensive. So anyway, Charlie, what do you do for a living? My wife, Katie, and I, who was out at Pinball Life yesterday for the charity event and is home with our son, Bug, today, we own and operate Spooky Pinball LLC. We started on February 1st of 2013, for those of you that don't know us. And to this date, we have put over 1,000 pinball machines on this planet, which we're really, really proud of. And we do it all in a tiny little town in Wisconsin of 900 people called Benton. and it's as grassroots, small-town, mom-and-pop pinball as you will ever see. We're very content being where we're at, our place in the pinball world, and we're lucky that after me doing some games, and we did a game for Ben Heck, that Scott had enough faith in Spooky Pinball to give us a chance to make Total Nuclear Annihilation for him, and to date, it is our biggest-selling game ever. Crazy. So the next thing on the slide about me is I have no idea what the hell is wrong with me and why I wrote what's my favorite mythical creature. I don't even know the answer to that. I guess if I had to pick something, it would be like a unicorn or something, or maybe like a combined unicorn with, I don't know, a lion. Yeah, like a lion, unicorn, lion man. I don't know. Charlie, what about you? What do you got? We're going to stop screwing around for this, I promise. We're going to get into something actually interesting. There is interesting. Favorite mythical creature. Well, I would say Godzilla, but that always gets me in trouble now. So I'm just going to say Bigfoot. I've always had a weird phobia of Bigfoot. Godzilla's not mythical. No, he's real. Yeah. Okay, cool. All right, guys. All right, let's talk about some stuff. So what am I going to talk about today? We're going to talk a little bit about the game, like what the game is, a little bit of the play field design. I'm going to go and show a screenshot of what some of the code looks like. I know some people might not be interested in that, but there are a certain amount of people out there that are nerdy like myself that would actually like to see it. So I'm going to show that. We've got some never-before-in-art that I was able to dig out of Matt Andrews, who did the art for the game. We'll talk a little about the music. I'll show the light show generator that made those light shows. And then we'll talk a little bit about the game number two stuff. Wait, what? Not that. No, it's fine. Don't worry about it. What? There's nothing weird in there. I didn't approve this. You're kidding, right? No, I'm not kidding. You're kidding. It's too late. It's too late. It's made. The PowerPoint's made. It doesn't matter. All right. Total Nuclear Annihilation brought to production by Spooky. So this game, I think, is there anyone in the audience that has not played it or is not familiar with the game itself? Okay, perfect. All right. We've got like a couple people. So it's a single-level play field, which is a thing that hasn't been done in a long time. But basically I wanted to make a game that was just really easy to understand, hard to master so that we could play dollar games on it like with my friends, right? For amusement only. Yeah, for amusement only, of course. It uses the latest pinball technology, the P-Rock Multimorphic System. So it has like full RGB. It's got an LCD screen. It's running a ridiculous computer inside of it. It's meant to encourage multiplayer games. So it's got things like co-op and strange modes in it which you can actually work together to go through and destroy reactors. It's kind of fun. The team that actually worked on this game was actually more than myself. So I did the original concept and the original prototype in the Whitewood format. But Charlie here from Spooky Pinball did all of the, like, paying the bills and stuff. and managing the team over there at Spooky. Sourcing all the stuff that we don't get from Pinball Life, all that kind of stuff, the custom metal, the playfields, we do that, we do the cabinets, we do the glass, the decals, all of that stuff. Yep, absolutely. And we have a guy named Jimmy Lippum. He lives down in Austin, Texas. He did the operating system, so he is much more smart than myself and created this embedded Linux system for TNA so that the computer is super robust. that can just be powered off whenever. It doesn't matter. It's a read-only system. It's pretty cool. I don't know too much about it because it's way over my head, but it's definitely reliable and great. Michael Ocean was the Skeleton Game Framework engineer, so he built this thing called Skeleton Game, which is what I started with, and that is all written in Python. That basically gives you a blank game to start with that will, when you hit the start button, it will kick a ball in play, let you play three balls, and then end, and that's where you start. So it gives you just a good starting point. It's kind of cool. Gerry Stellenberg did the multimorphic P3 system. He did all the engineering for that and all the production for that. Matt Andrews did the artwork. David Van Es did the LCD animations, so the actual ones that were used in production, not the crappy ones that I had on my whitewood that I may or may not have ripped off the Internet. David Van Es has literally done the animations in every game you've ever seen from Spooky Pinball with the exception of America's Most Haunted. The guy's amazing. That's pretty crazy. He's super talented, too. It's ridiculous. And then I did the rest of it, which was like the concept, design, music, sound effects, that kind of stuff. I actually did the programming for this game as well. All the minor details. Yeah, it's so overwhelming, you guys. Don't do this, please. Save yourself. All right, so early on designing the play field, people ask me this question all the time. Like, how do I go about designing a pinball machine? Did I just build it, or did I do something in the computer first, or what? So the unfortunate answer is I built it in 3D and SolidWorks. So SolidWorks, if you guys don't know, is an industry standard application that does 3D part creation and assembly creation for mechanicals. And, you know, I'm trained up in that software, so I have a little bit of an upper hand in that unfortunately. But you don't have to do it this way. You can actually just build a pinball machine just by physically building it. But this is how I did it. So here's a screenshot of an early on version of TNA. This one has the plastics removed from it so you can see the stuff underneath. But most of the parts are there. Everything is kind of mocked up in its place. And it's pretty cool. So and from here I draw this in 3D. We then take this 3D file, and I export it out to AutoCAD format. I'm sure most people have heard of AutoCAD. AutoCAD is a great 2D program. It is the industry standard of two-dimensional drafting. So luckily, SolidWorks will spit that format out no problem, and then this format can go off to the CNC company to actually cut the play field. So the plastics, the apron, the ball guides, like all this stuff had to be converted into a flat DXF, is what we call that for AutoCAD. So I had to convert all of that stuff out. So it was just pretty ridiculous and time-consuming. But, you know, it's worth it when you can send it off to a machine and have the machine actually cut the pieces for you instead of hand-cutting them. All right, so what's the code? What does the code look like? Um, I've got a simple, um, example of the code that I'm gonna show you guys. Uh, as I said earlier, it uses the Skeleton Game Framework. Um, it uses, uh, Python, which is a programming language that is super simple. They actually teach Python to children to get their mindset, uh, going in a programming sort of way, to get them start, uh, to think in a programming way. Um, and I'm gonna show you what Python looks like. It's basically English. So here's, uh, if you guys can see it, hopefully you can read it in the back there, but this right here is a little screenshot of the code that happens when a ball enters the scoop, the left scoop. So it has to make a few decisions when when the ball falls in there. So the first thing it's doing is, this is the definition for the actual scoop switch getting hit right here, so it's saying if that switch gets activated for 100 milliseconds, then do something. So then it executes the code below. The first thing it's going to check is it's going to say, hey, is the mystery mode lit? Should I award a mystery mode for this person? And it's also checking if multiball is not active. So it's making sure that you're not in multiball and mystery is lit. So it's saying, all right, so is mystery going and you're not in multiball? Let's fire off the mystery mode. hands it off to the mystery mode and doesn't do anything else. It just exits right here. If those two, if mystery's not lit or it's in multiball, it goes on to the next thing and says, is the reactor ready to be started? And then also is, it makes, it's also checking on this line saying, and making sure that the reactor's not already starting, because it's about to start that reactor. So if the ball goes in there and bounces, or if a switch is flaky, you don't want it to try to start the reactor multiple times. It could cause an issue. So from there, it hands it off to the something I have called core control mode, which will start up the reactor for you. Now, if none of those are happening, right, then the scoop is not lit for mystery. You're not in multiball. You're not ready to start a reactor. What it has to do is it has to kick the ball out, right, at you extremely quickly, right? It's something that the guys that you that play this game, you can see that that ball comes out of there extremely fast. Well, it still does make decisions before it kicks that ball out. So it looks at the user settings of the service mode and says, well, there's something called left scoop processing speed, which allows you to slow that scoop down a little bit. So there's a few settings. There's normal, there's medium, and then there's lame, which is just something kind of funny I put in there just as a joke. But first thing it does is it checks if that setting is set to lame. If it's set to lame, what it does is it will wait 200 milliseconds, which is .2 seconds, and then it will fire the ball out. So it gives the player just a little bit more time to react to that ball coming out. And then if that happens, it just ends the little definition here. Can we tell you a Steve Ritchie scoop story? Yeah, we can. The first time Steve played the game, he's like, Scott, you need to slow that scoop down. It's going to burn people. Yeah, he was mad about that for like a few games. And then after a while, he came around and was like, you know, I like that that fast. You know, I can't do a Steve Ritchie voice. You should be mean. Just let him kick it right in the square in the nads. Perfect. Leave it alone. I wish Steve Ritchie was in here to say that. But, yeah, it was pretty funny. That was at MGC with the prototype, so that was pretty good, or the whitewood, I mean. So the next one is checking if it's medium. If it's set on medium, it actually waits 100 milliseconds before kicking out. And if it's set to normal or set to something else, it just kicks it out immediately. So it doesn't wait at all. So the minimum amount of time that that ball can actually be in the scoop on TNA is 100 milliseconds because of the top definition there where it says that switch has to be active for 100 milliseconds before it does anything. So that's kind of neat. I mean I sorry if that boring for some people It is My wife actually was like dude you got to take that out of this presentation You going to like Go to the next screen fast Seriously yeah That what Yeah exactly You falling asleep over there Jack Okay, okay. He's trying not to. Okay, cool. All right, guys. So, and down here, too, check this out. This is Python and the P-Rock game framework. It's basically English. That right there, that line of code, is what I type in to make a coil fire. I don't have to worry about anything else. I don't have to worry about disabling the coils or making sure it's on too long or not on too long or anything. That is the code that I fire that coil. It's super easy. I think Python was a really good choice for this because it's not intimidating because the rest of the whole structure and making a pinball machine is hard enough as it is. You might as well use something that kind of makes sense. All right, so we're done with that. Let's look at some of the artwork stuff. This is kind of cool. I'm going to show you guys some of the Easter eggs that are hidden in the artwork, which is pretty cool, actually. That artwork was done by Matt Andrews. It's that Outrun-style artwork. It's meant to look like this retro-futuristic-style thing that, you know, I don't know if it's actually a thing. I guess it's like the steampunk of the 80s, I guess is the easiest way to explain that. If you guys know what steampunk is, some people don't, some people do. But anyway, here's the final back glass. So this is what it looks like in production. It has the score windows cut out of it right through the artwork that was there. How many of you guys are Photoshop guys? That was completely done in Illustrator. That's amazing. If you're an art nerd and you've been in that realm, to do that in Illustrator is insane. But that's Matt Andrews. He's pretty damn amazing. That's pretty crazy. And I've handled artwork from several artists in Coon, like Rick Ferrer. One of the big names. And I've never seen anybody send me a file in Illustrator to that level. It's ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous. Something, too, to point out here, and it's pretty neat, is the girl in the back glass is actually modeled after a picture of my wife, which is pretty cool. Matt Andrews came up with that idea. Somebody's scoring points. Yeah, you know what? I mean, I totally came up with that. It was my idea completely. But it was like a thing that sort of happened. I think it was really cool. I think it's a nice little homage to her. She did a lot, actually, on this project behind the scenes by not making me do as many chores as I needed to do while I was working on this game. So that is her little nod there. So not really an Easter egg, but, you know, that's what that is. So here's a little sketch. This is cool. This is actually a sketch that Matt Andrews sent me when we were first trying to lay out the back glass. So it's pretty far along, actually. So at this point, the girl actually does not look like my wife in that picture. And you can also see the nuclear is missing from there. I don't know if you guys heard the story about why the nuclear got added. No? Okay, so in February of 2017, maybe? I think it was 2017. In February 2017, Atari renewed the trademark to the game from the 90s called Total Nuclear Annihilation. And Atari is, at this point right now, they've got a lot more money than I do. And I don't know if you know how court works, but it's pretty much the person with the most money wins. So we had, I don't know if Yancy is here, but we were trying to come up with ideas to change this and Yancy came up with throwing nuclear in the middle of it. And then he was kind of like waiting for me to realize what the initials were and I wasn't getting it. He's like, get it? I'm like, sure. But it ended up being TNA, which is kind of silly. them. Charlie tried to call it Scott Denisi's Total Nuclear Annihilation. I was like, that's just, that's ridiculous. Okay, let's move on. Let's take a look here. Let's look at some of the hidden stuff in the back glass. This image of the back glass you're looking at right here does not have the score displays in it. It's actually, I just put the wrong image in the presentation, but it's kind of cool to see that. This was done before we had the score displays actually in the back glass. So it's slightly different. Let me, like, scroll back real quick here. You can see some stuff was moved around. The pyramid was moved up slightly to make room for those score displays. And the spooky information on the left side was also moved up. So maybe you can kind of see the difference there. So let's go into that. So let's see. First thing is over here on the right side, there's a guy standing in front of a computer. This, zoomed in on it, That is actual, that's an actual screenshot of the computer code, the core control code. That's, it was just actually from my laptop. Matt's like, you got any, you got any code we can put in here? Like, what do you want me to make it say? I'm like, well, I mean, I can just, I can just like, you know, I alt print screen, right? I'm like, here, use this. So that's kind of funny. You can see like there's like some comment lines in there. It actually looks pretty clean. My code isn't super clean like that. like if you actually looked at the code, you know, but it looks good there. It's kind of funny, and no one would have ever really known that. You know, you can't read it, really. So some other cool stuff. Let's see. All right, this thing down here on the nuclear barrel, it says parts from Terry on it. Well, Terry is my boss. Terry is the owner of Pinball Life, and he helped out tremendously on this project by giving me whatever parts I needed to build the prototype, and I am very, very thankful for that. I could not have done it without Terry's support because he also helped me. I was able to, don't tell him, this is being recorded, crap, I'm going to get fired. But he gave me time during the day to actually work on it a little bit when I had some free time to just think about some things and do that. So that was pretty nice of him to let me do that. All right, what's next on here? I don't even know. I did this thing. Oh, this is good. You guys ready for this thing? So down here in the bottom corner, there is a busted down movie poster with some lights on it. This is actually a movie poster of the movie Lion Man. I don't know if you guys have seen that movie at all. It's really good. This is in the future. It hasn't come out yet. Oh, yeah. I'm sorry. I forgot about that. This movie has not come out yet. This movie stars two people, Doug Manley and Jay Brand. Those people actually are sitting in the audience right now, right behind you. Stand up, guys. Stand up. Come on. Stand up. These guys, they're in the movie Lion Man. High five it. They aren't sitting together. What did Doug do this time? I don't know. That's good stuff. But anyway, that's a movie poster. We wanted to sneak in some kind of Lion Man reference in there because, you know, why? I mean, because Lion Man's Lion Man. So, I mean, everyone knows that. All right, what do we got up here? Oh, there's some stuff up here. Check this out. Let's zoom in up here. So there's just some billboards in the background. Matt Andrews wanted to sneak in some billboards because there were some joke advertisements in my Whitewood machine. I think I had an advertisement for Crystal Pepsi at one point. Just because I was joking. I was like, hey, I'm going to put advertisements in here from the future of failed 90s or 80s products that, you know, but pretend that they were like they caught on a lot and like they are like the thing, right? So the first thing over here on the left side is something called Biddy Disc. I'm sure you guys can probably recognize the shape of that. Remember those mini disc things? Those didn't catch on, but in this reality, they did. All right. I liked mini discs, though. They were small. Yeah, but it was like a CD inside there, but it was totally protected, so you couldn't scratch it. It was smart. Is that what happened? Oh, man. All right, so apparently it caught on everywhere except America. So that is what I was informed. All right, the next thing. All right, super obvious. Crystal Cola. This was invented by Crystal, who's sitting in the audience there. I'm just kidding. She didn't invent that. It's with a K spelled wrong. Close though. But no, there's like a missing, there's missing letters. So anyway, that was like Crystal Pepsi like throwback, like make fun of things. So kind of funny. This is apparently, I think this is supposed to be the Fiero that I have. I haven't quite figured that out yet. Matt won't admit to whatever that is. But I thought it was kind of cool. He called it the S19. I don't know, made by some fictitious company. Matt also put his own little logo in here, which he hid pretty well. It's kind of fun to try and find in Matt's artwork where he hides the logo. He's really good at disguising it, so it's very hard to find. He also put in, and this took me forever to find, and we didn't see this until, like, much further along. It's the old school spooky pinball logo. Remember that? Or the spooky podcast logo. Didn't that, like, decommission a long time ago? That was before Greg was nice enough to draw us a whole ghost to go with the eyes, and we had just the eyes. Nice. All right, what else do we have here? Oh, okay, cool, there's some more drawings in here. This is the cool little futuristic helicopter that Matt drew. So Matt sent me this little image when he was trying to sketch out ideas for a futuristic helicopter. I thought it was interesting. It's kind of cool. That's the final on the left, and then on the right side, this is his sketch. So pretty neat. I think there's another one of these, too. Oh, yeah, this thing. This thing Matt calls the chicken mech. I don't know. it kind of looks like a chicken, I guess. I doubt it flies, so like a chicken. It's kind of neat, though. He drew that up, and I was like, oh, yeah, we've got to put that in there. That's cool. Very talented dude. I mean, even that black and white photo of that is just really cool. All right. Is there any more? Oh, there is more. There's more. Okay. This guy is the security guy. Matt drew up a security guy who's supposed to be trying to fight you. I don't know. just, he's like announcing things and stuff. I don't know what he's doing. But he put him up there. But I got the actual sketch that he drew which was really highly detailed for how much he scaled it down. It almost feels like a waste. But there he is. He doesn't have a name either. He's just security guy. Yeah. Yeah. So that, let's go back real quick. So what he's talking about is the The girl in the back glass is holding a red button. And this is funny because it wasn't until about three or four months ago that I even knew that Pat Lawler hid red buttons in his artwork, or in his machines. So this is actually just a coincidence, but a really neat coincidence. Yeah, kind of neat. You know, I should have circled that. So that's kind of fun to talk about. Yeah, it's a red button, and she's holding it. It's a detonator. And her name is Scarlet. Oh, yeah, her name's Scarlet. That means red, right? All right, cool. Another accent. Another accent. I don't know. Is it? All right, so some play field art. Check out this. So on the left, we've got the actual production play field art, and on the right was one of the sketches that Matt gave me when we were first doing some things. and I put some notes on it in red to have him incorporate some of this stuff into the plastics and also the play field. So there's things like, you know, spell core on the top. There's the grid down in the center. There's things like spinner advances, reactor, all sorts of other little random things here. I'll scroll down a little bit to see more here. In the middle, there's a destroy all reactors for Total Nuclear Annihilation, and you can see that actually made it onto the play field there. right above the island. I believe, Jay, you drew this island, didn't you? Yeah, I think you did, and the white wood. It had people on it, but then when I cleaned the play field with Novus once, they started coming off, and I decided just to kill them. Plus, they had spears and stuff, and it didn't really fit. It wasn't real futuristic. If they had laser guns, then maybe it would have... All right. And then down below we have the ball save timer. And then the bonus data display module, which is kind of fun. So here's some of the, also the artwork mock-ups for the plastics. So the bottom obviously is the production plastic, and the top would be the sketch that he did. So there's the completing the grid and how it made it on the production game. There's the spinner advances reactor, which is kind of cool. I just keep looking at this stuff and I could never do art like this. It's just very impressive. There's Spell Rad, Delight Mystery. That's on the left side there. This is really cool too, actually. So Matt created a custom font for TNA. So this is the font that's actually used on the side armor. So the side rails have a laser cut total nuclear annihilation in them, and this is what he created for it. So it's just like a futuristic laser font. He also made it, which is quite interesting, is you'll notice that this font is also laser friendly, so you can, for the most part, you can cut all of it, except for the B, I think. The B had a problem where we had to fix it later on, but like a piece would fall out of it. But all good. All right, so the music and sound effects. I'm going to start speeding up a little bit, too, because I'm running low on time. I got a lot of stuff here still. The music and sound effects, I composed the music itself. Each reactor in the game has a different soundtrack, so it's a different sound or a different song completely. All the sound effects are all custom, and I did all of this using 100% digital music composition software. So some of you guys probably have seen some of the live streams I've done with a lot of the analog hardware. I did not actually use the analog hardware in the composition of this music. I did it all digitally, which is fine, but some of my purist friends kind of shake their heads at me. It's too hard. It's too hard. When you're in a time crunch, you've got to do what you've got to do. The album itself. So I actually released the album. The music is released on an album on iTunes, on Google Play Music, on Spotify. We released that in January Actually I released the digital in February We released it on cassette in January which is kind of fun because we like hey cassette you know 80s like the cassettes caught on in this reality, and, you know, they became a thing, right? So cassettes and mini-discs, apparently. Mini-discs were too expensive and stupid to make right now. Like, they're done, I think, right? Like, no one uses them anymore, right? No, they're gone. Okay, perfect. You have one? Yeah, you still use it? Sometimes? Okay, so he's saying they're really good for connecting to the sound boards when you're recording live concerts and stuff. So, no? If the band will allow you, yeah. No, well, all right. Okay, so the light shows. This is interesting because at first, the light show generators, I used the Dutch Pinball Suite. And later on, I actually switched over to the open source skeleton game, Light Show Generator. So this thing allows you to create a little movie. And what you do is you export this movie into a framed PNG sequence, is what it's called. It's just a bunch of images. And what it does is it plays it back over the top of a picture of your play field. And it will create a light show for you. And then you just take that light show file and dump it in your game. and voila, there you go, you have a track mode stuff. So it's kind of like cheating. Those light shows that I did, I did not do by hand. So that would have taken an eternity to make those. It would have just been insane. Yeah. Absolutely, yeah, this is a bad example. I was messing with something when I was taking screenshots and I was trying to make a TNA scroll across in a track mode, which I haven't done yet. Maybe I just spoiled the next release surprise. But, you know, I just did it in white in that one, but it's full RGB. So TNA is all the GI, all of the inserts, everything is RGB, so I can do whatever I want on it. It's basically just a very, very low-resolution display at that point. Yep, pretty cool. So now let's show some stupid, embarrassing photos. I have some good ones in here. These are pretty fun. So this photo we're looking at, this is super interesting because this is at MGC 2017, right? Yeah, MGC 2017. I get the dates all messed up. I needed a cabinet that was more shallow than the normal spooky cabinet because the single-level play field would have looked really funny in a Rob Zombie cabinet where it's very deep and built for ramps and, you know, things sticking up very high in it. And so Charlie built me this cabinet and brought it to MGC, and it was like sitting in the back of the spooky booth the whole time, no one asking any questions. I'm not sure why Sarah and I got into the cabinet. But, I mean, if there's an MGC cabinet. Scott was that excited to see it. That was the first time you'd actually seen a total nuclear annihilation cabinet. That was the first time I'd seen it in real life, yeah. So it wasn't on legs, it wasn't painted, nothing. So, yeah, that's that. I looked really funny and stoned. I promise I was not. And we knew at that point that the game was going to get made. Nobody else did. So the fact that that thing sat in the booth all weekend and nobody asked any questions was like, hello. That was pretty funny, actually. So anyway, I just decided to sit in it because that's what normal people do, right? Yes? Yeah? I think. All right, here's a picture of me actually painting that cabinet. So that's pretty fun and boring. All right. There's a picture of Andrew. Andrew is the owner of APB Enterprises. He does eat paint, but I promise he is a sane person. He's helping me as well. Andrew was a big help assembling the prototype machine. He came over after work and helped me put together the wiring and anything else that I needed to do. This was officially the first time that I saw the back glass printed on glass. Translates are one thing, but that art printed on real glass, and by the way, that's really heavy, and I was struggling to hold that up for as long as the picture was taken. I'm just like, come on. Seeing that with the sunlight shining through it is totally incredible. I recommend if you guys are ever getting stuff printed on glass, do it. It's just amazing. Anyone building a custom game, price out how much it is to print something on glass because it just makes that much of a difference when light goes through it. All right, did I skip one? No, I didn't. All right, so here is a picture of the prototype machine when I had an actual white wood in it that was cut from Spooky Pinball. So this one's cut, and the inserts were populated by Spooky, and then I just started populating it for Fitment. So this was kind of cool because we had the side rail prototypes on there as well. I don't think these are the actual production ones. I think there were some minor changes that had to happen. But, yeah, I mean, it was pretty close. We didn't do too many takes of that. But this is a really cool look at when I was first mocking up the parts to make sure everything was fitting. Here is the first set of plastics ever made for T&A. And I think this picture was taken. Did you take this? I think this is, yeah, so Charlie took this one. Yeah, that's in the print room at Spooky. Yeah, so he was very happy to send me that. I then got those plastics, and I was able to kind of mock them up on the white wood that I had and just make sure that they fit, make sure they looked great. And it's just, it blows your mind when you start seeing stuff like this come together because you can see it in a computer all day, but when you see it physically start coming together, it's completely different. It was fun, too, because when we brought the plastics in, we brought the printed play field in at the same time, and Scott's office is at one end of the building at Pinball Life. Terry and Margaret are in the front half. So I went into the front half. I always go through the back half of the building where Scott is. I went to the front half, and we had everything sitting up, two sets of plastics, two sets of play field, everything that Scott needed to complete a pre-production model. And Terry's like, Scott Danesi, get up here now. Like, he was pissed. He sounded pissed, which isn't uncommon. I mean, I get in trouble at work sometimes, like everyone else, I think. Maybe that's not normal. I don't know. But, yeah, Scott walked in, and I think we almost made him cry. They almost got a tear out of me because they had, I think, two playfields printed. They had the cabinet decals. They had the back glass. They had trans lights. It was everything. I was blown away by seeing that because, again, seeing a picture of the play field with the art on it on a computer screen and then seeing it in real life with a clear-coded play field is a completely different experience. It's nuts. I was trying to hold back tears because he was recording me and I didn't want to look like a person who cries, but I guess it's normal to cry. I probably just should have. You know what? I can't do it now. I'm too happy right now, guys. All right, so here are the first pictures of the fully assembled, with all the parts that Charlie brought me that day, prototype TNA. So these pictures are taken at Spooky Pinball Headquarters, where I brought the game to show the guys there, and to start really going through and taking pictures, like real professional pictures of it for the flyer and for the announcement of the price and everything and opening up sales for it. So it's pretty cool. And if you look, too, the apron decals are actually a prototype that I made. Oh, yeah. Stealing elements from Matt Andrews' artwork because they weren't done yet and we needed to do something for the photo shoot, and then Scott kind of had them go back and do – it was like the next week. he had them done. We threw them in there for giggles. I still have a set of those, actually. We were in a hurry to make sure this thing just got done, but there were things that we forgot, like the apron cards. I forgot to make those. It's fun stuff like that you forget. This is interesting, because I think that machine was that spooky and actually had its back glass destroyed. Was it your fault that actually? It was my fault. Oh man. So I was on the other end of the building and they had taken my game apart to look at some things and I had the back glass, the prototype back glass in there. And I hear like a, you know that noise, the tempered glass breaking noise and I'm like, oh, someone's in trouble, you know, like kind of laughing about it. And I kind of walked over to where the noise happened and it was all purple and pink all over the floor and I'm like, no, no, no. We made him another one. It's okay. Yeah, I mean, I got another one. It's okay. But it wasn't, it's not the one. It occupies the space the original one was in, Scott. But it's not the one. I want the one back. It's not coming back. A little bag, yeah, just like hang it there. Yeah, that's too great. Oh, man. So we took it outside to take pictures. So if you know anything about selling pinball machines, you always take them outside, put them in the shade, and then take pictures. Don't ever put them in the sun. It makes them look awful. I don't know why. But the shade is perfect. So there's a picture of us hanging out. I think there's old man Brian Kelly there. We've got Jesse. There's Brian. There's Bug in the background. And there's me standing there doing some God knows what on my phone. But, yeah, that's that. And there's a couple of my friends enjoying the prototype machine, like any normal person would do. I think that's normal behavior. They could be mythical creatures. So in 2017, during Expo last year, we had a little open house release party for TNA where we brought in, well, I brought in all three of the iterations of pinball machines that I had, which were in the order that you're seeing here, starting with the closest one. That's a production machine with a butter cabinet. The middle one is the prototype machine. And the one in the far back over there where the guy in the red shirt is playing, that is the Whitewood. So we had three machines there, and it was a great time, actually. And you can see in the background, too, actually, there's a Playboy on top of one of Jay's creations called the Vajazzler, which is a giant turntable which has a power outlet in the middle that can actually rotate and still work. It can rotate an infinite amount of times. So you put a pinball machine on there, you jump on it, you play. Okay, infinite, maybe not. And the silver curtain right on the other side of the Playboy is one of those funhouse vortex tunnels that you walk in and it screws with your balance. And inside it was an Orbiter One. and you had to play that in a vortex tunnel, it was, I got through the first ball and I was, well, I'm done, I'm out, couldn't do it. Yeah, that's a pretty cool one too as well. Yeah, that was the release party we had. Here's a random picture of Charlie and I at... Midwest Gaming Classic. Well, we jumped in the Stern booth and just started signing Ghostbusters flyers for people. No one really cared or kicked us out, so we just kept doing it. I don't know, like, I guess no one, yeah, it was fine. We threw that on Facebook and George Gomez offered us jobs. It was cool. It was pretty funny. Here's another picture from MGC. This is a picture of the Whitewood audits. There's a section in the service menu called reactor audits, which tell you how many times each reactor has been started. And what you can see down there in the bottom is actually, this was after Bowen went through and completely annihilated the game so there is one Total Nuclear Annihilation on the original Whitewood it was the first time it was done and what's really funny about it is if you look at Reactor 9 started there's actually, that was done two times Bowen didn't beat the game the first time he played it he got to Reactor 9 and failed miserably and we pressured him again to do it You got to Reactor 9 and failed miserably. Yeah. Because could you imagine that feeling? I've never been to Reactor 9 without putting the glass on. I've never been to Reactor 5. Yeah. I mean, I started Reactor 5 one time, and I felt really good about it. Like, that's great. But could you imagine getting to Reactor 9 and then draining on Ball 3 and watching that bonus count start? I mean, that would just be – that's awful. It's awful. I literally can't imagine what that must feel like. Yeah, it's pretty bad. So, yeah, I don't know. Anyway, so I'm going to talk, the next slide, I'm going to talk a little bit about the next game that I'm working on now. There's a preview of the next slide on my screen right now. Charlie doesn't know what I have on my screen right now. What do you got, Scott? Nothing. That's it. Charlie didn't approve my presentation before I did it. So anyway, the theme actually has been decided on at this stage. The current stage of the project is I've already cut two whitewoods. I am in the process of cutting a third whitewood because I have geometry errors that just don't work right with the guide rails. I'm probably going to be cutting about seven of these total is my guess before I get it right because it has to absolutely be perfect. I am very, very OCD about shots, about rattly shots or not lined up shots or just shots that just don't feel right when you actually shoot them. And you cannot simulate that in a computer. There's just no way to know what's going to happen until you actually play the game. So I'm going to be cutting a bunch more of these. But unfortunately, we're not going to be showing anything, just because I want to keep it under wraps for a while. I thought you said that was it. What? What? Haunted House Party? What? Is that it? Haunted House Party is a theme for sure. You told me you were working on something. I don't want to talk about it. So anyway, the spooky release plan. So people ask me this all the time. So after Alice Cooper the next spooky game that will come out the next new spooky game off the line will be the game that I working on right now which is very exciting and very stressful for me But the best part is if I need more time and I need to slow down and there's demand for it, we can run TNA again once we stop. I think if there's interest, that might give me a little more time to make sure everything's right. So I'm hoping that does. And I can tell you from a business standpoint, we came off a couple of manufactured games. Contract manufacturing. Yeah, contract manufacturing gigs, which were fantastic for Spooky. It was terrific. It gave me a little more time to work on Alice, but I still wasn't happy with where it was. So Scott having Total nuclear annihilation there To kind of bail me out And give me some more time For the first time in spooky history really To kind of refine some things And there's still things in it Pinball's like an artist You're never completely satisfied I've never seen anybody more nervous than Scott Because my first game Was Rob Zombie Which sold out quick And then it had kind of mixed reviews And it's found it's audience now And it's all great But Scott's first game out of the gate is like 2017, pinball news. Thank you, Martin. Game of the year. It's won trophies all over the country. So I'm telling you, this young man's a little nervous about, oh, I've got to follow myself with something that doesn't suck. It's called the sophomore effort. Yeah. And it usually isn't good. I'm just kidding. He's incredibly capable. I'm super happy with what's going on right now. Yeah, and he should be. and is spooky. Scott is an absolute godsend. He's wonderful to work with. Just a lot of good people that have helped us get where we are today and Scott's a huge part of that. I'm going to start crying. I'm just going to stop. Nope, nope. I'm not going to let Jay see me cry. I don't have a handkerchief or anything though. You know, I could cry probably. My voice would choke up a little bit. It would probably just sound the same. We're in a very good spot. Who knows? Our biggest selling games to date are Total Nuclear Annihilation and Alice Cooper, and they're back-to-back. So you don't see us with a giant flashing light in the vendor hall right now saying, come buy our spooky games because we're trying to catch up. And considering where we started like five, six years ago, it's a tremendous thing to have happen for our tiny little family-based company. So no pressure, Scott. Well, I'll tell you what, though. You know what's really cool is Alice Cooper is capped at 500 units. And my game doesn't have a license, so we can make however many, right? It doesn't matter? Total nuclear. How many games have sold? Scott keeps calling Katie because he wants to buy 501 because that means I can never catch him. I'm seriously going to buy that game. I don't even know what number we're at right now, but it's... She told me yesterday it was 498. Okay, guys, so if anyone's on the fence right now, because I'm going to make him buy me a shitty plastic trophy once I hit 501. That I can never take back because our contract with Alice Cooper is exactly 500 units. 501, guys, come on. And for the first time in spooky pinball history, we announced it on the podcast, and it kind of got some people a little riled up. Oh, they're trying to do a cash grab. We're going to build 550 total nuclear annihilations, whether they're sold or not. And we've never financially been in a position to just go, you know what, we're going to build some games. And people call, and we're all caught up. You want a total nuclear? It's sitting on the floor. You can take it. We're going to take them to shows. You can buy them there. So for us, that's a huge milestone. And we're confident enough in what Scott's working on with, what is it again? haunted house party that, yeah, we're sitting pretty good right now. It feels really, really nice. He's pretending not to be mad at me right now because I wasn't supposed to show that. Yeah, don't pour it on this laptop. I need this. So anyway, going back to what I'm working on now, though, the roles are a little different, though, than TNA, which is really exciting for me because the design, the prototyping, prototyping and the engineering will all be done by myself, which is obviously a much shorter list than DNA. The rules, the software, the storyboarding, all that stuff is going to be done by Spooky Guys, right? So I don't have to do the programming, which is going to be awesome. Yeah, I don't want to do that again, even though it's not difficult, it's time consuming. The animations will be done in-house at Spooky, and the audio is actually up in the air at the moment. I don't know if I will do that or someone else will. I would love to, but I don't know yet what's going on. I can write house party music, though. It was a blast last weekend. We actually had Bowen Kerins, David David Van Es, Scott Denisey, and myself, and we flew everybody up to Scott's house and crashed at Casa Denisey. That was fun. Yeah, and just kind of started planning everything out and to have guys like Bowen and David David Van Es and everybody from the get-go. where it doesn't all have to fall on one guy, is absolutely tremendous. And, yeah, of course, Scott's going to be directing all this, and it's going to be the way he wants it. And to date I have costed out exactly nothing from anything he's ever done, and that's not about to change. We would rather make a great game than make an extra $10. Yes, exactly. Anything I put in there? Well, let's leave, you know, we don't need emeralds or diamonds or anything in there. Diamond-plated kickback scoops. So, yeah, that's basically it. Now, I mean, do you guys have any questions about any of this stuff? It's very complicated. That is a terrible picture of myself. That's an awesome picture. You know, that's actually the first selfie I ever took in my lifetime. It shows. Yeah. I was trying really hard to make it pretty. What do we got down there? So it's called Pinnix, actually, and its intention is to be open source. Jimmy has not got it to a point where he wants to release it yet to the public because he wants to have a release plan and make sure that there's support and documentation out there for it. But he definitely is going to release it eventually. I think last time we talked, he's definitely going to release it, but he may have changed it. It's a really incredible system, actually. So it has updating capability via USB already built in. So you can honestly just stick a USB in there with code on it, and it just blasts it right to the game, restarts it, boom, it's done. It certainly has made my life a lot easier and the tech support a lot simpler. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so the question is, do I have any concerns about using Python and working within its limitations going forward with the pinball machines? So something interesting about how P-ROC works is all of the high priority stuff in terms of enabling, disabling coils, turning on and off lights, reading switch, scanning the switches, all of that stuff is handled in C. So there in C, C++ actually, but that is a very highly reliable and very limitless and complicated programming language, which obviously is I do know how to program in it, I'm not good at it, and I don't have to be, which is the the best part. Python is for laying out the rules and for laying out like when sounds should be played or when a light show should be triggered. So the Python limitations are not even a factor in this because of how we've got it structured. So it just makes it for, you know, programming the pinball machine much easier that way. So hopefully that answered the question. Yeah. Over there? The butter cabinets, we do those actually, it started early, early on in my printing career, early pinball career, I spent a long time in the printing industry. We convinced Jersey Jack that it would be just amazing to do those first thousand Emerald City limited edition WAS games in what we deemed the butter cabinets. Terry said they looked like they'd been dipped in butter, they were so pretty. It was basically direct print with automotive clear coat. There's no decals involved. Jersey Jack kind of went away from it over the years, and it was something that I had actually come up with, and like I said, we talked Jack into it and give him credit for taking the risk and trying it. We decided on Rob Zombie that at the tail end of the run, we were going to do a handful of games in that style again because we hadn't done it in a few years. And Rob Zombie has one. Terry has one. Matt from Back Alley Creations who did all the toys in that game, he has one and I have one so there's only like five of those out there but on Total Nuclear we decided to offer it as an upgrade it's $1000 because it's ridiculously hard and expensive to do that without causing a problem, I mean they have to be wrapped handled, everything's special you have to be so careful with it and yeah I was shocked how many people actually jumped on it They just want something. We don't really do like an LE version of anything, but we do give you the option to upgrade some stuff that doesn't really change the gameplay, but it gives you a prettier package for your game. And it's a little beyond that even. It's all done basically on a UV flatbed. So it's digital, which means you can get much more detail, much more vibrant. Well, I'm not saying that. Screen printing, you can do some pretty crazy neon colors and stuff too. but you're not going to get the level of detail that you'll get with what we're doing. It's kind of wasted a bit on the TNA cabinet art because it's meant to be retro and it should look like it was screen printed. If you go into Rob Anthony's room and see the Alice Cooper in there, that's a decaled version of Alice Cooper, but that in the Butter Edition cabinet is absolutely ridiculous. Nobody needs that. I'm not encouraging people to buy it. If you do, we encourage you to come pick your game up in person. We have shipped them as far as Australia without any problems, but you have to handle them with kid clubs. I mean, I'm making them sound more fragile than they are. They're not fragile at all. They're really not. The game that's, if you were out at the Pinball Life open house, that thing has been all over the country, and it's been shipped where I haven't been, and it's still fine. But if you bang it off a doorframe, you're going to cry. No, you won't cry because I banged mine off a doorway. I have a butter cabin, and I've got to tell you, he's being way too careful with his stuff. the butter cabinet actually holds up better than a decal cabinet because I hit mine on the doorway. It put a little scratch in the clear coat, but you can just buff it right out. I do not suggest this. If you do that with a decal cabinet, it hits the ink. If you know Doug Manley and he can come in and fix your clear coat, then yes. I have a Doug Manley, yes. Ridiculous. it's when you when you play the game especially it's meant for you to play with your friends the ball times are not long uh that makes operators extremely happy it's fast it's brutal but it's also addictive and fun um we have one that we operate in benton wisconsin it's again it's 900 people we have three games in the bar we have jetsons the original america's most haunted that ben heck and i built together and uh my tna and all the money from that goes back to the volunteer fire department in our village. The TNA cash box at 25 cents a game is overflowing every single time I go up there to clean it out. It's ridiculous. Actually, it's super easy. There's this place called Duplication.ca. They're from Canada. They're one of the major players in cassette duplication right now. They also duplicate CDs, but I don't think CDs are retro enough yet. But they still do tapes. Tapes are making a comeback right now, which is strange to hear, but people are starting to collect them. They're harder and harder to find at thrift stores. All the hipster guys are going in there and grabbing them. My son inherited my dad's 97 Chevy S10 with a cassette back in it. Scott gave him a copy of the cassette. The first day he comes home from school driving his truck for the first time all by himself. All he hears is, just shaking the whole neighborhood. That's ridiculous. Any other questions? No? Got one over here. Yeah. It's, when we first started Spooky, we never, this sounds terrible, we didn't consider operators. We just, everybody I knew was a home guy. And, you know, just trying to make games that made them happy. And a few people operated TNA. By the time we got to Rob Zombie, it picked up a little bit. But the Domino's, a lot of those games went because it was a Domino's pizza game. If you own a Domino's, you could throw it in your place. So they did that. That was kind of a big thing. TNA is, I wouldn't say it's 50-50, home and operator. It's probably 60-40, but the interest from operators, and that's a whole big bell learning curve for us and what it takes to keep those guys happy. It's ridiculous, yeah. Because as soon as word starts getting around that, hey, this pinball machine is making money and the ball times are short and people were playing in groups, it went off the rails. So we did take a little bit of flack early on that some of the home guys were like, hey, why are you catering? Because we were getting games to locations where – but every time we'd send a game to a location, five more would sell. And a lot of them were to home guys. They'd go play one on location and they'd heard about it, but it wasn't in New York or it wasn't in Los Angeles. And they would go there, they would play it, and they would buy it. And so we learned fast that Gary Stern not wrong. You've got to take care of some of those operators, man. They're really vital to this industry, even today. All right. Well, we reach 4 o'clock, so thank you again for coming and telling us all this stuff. Have a good day. Thank you.

_(Acquisition: youtube_groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_

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*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 83df5b38-f90b-4d08-bd1b-c752e7d1f810*