# David Thiel

**Source:** Pintastic New England  
**Type:** video  
**Published:** 2018-06-03  
**Duration:** 87m 14s  
**Beat:** Pinball

**URL:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r55IKz7mFgc

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## Analysis

David Thiel, legendary pinball sound designer, delivers a comprehensive retrospective on his career spanning from 1980s Mattel Electronics video games through his work on modern Stern Pinball titles. He discusses his creative philosophy, technical evolution from FM synthesis to studio-based audio production, studio setup challenges, and first experiences across multiple games and platforms, emphasizing how expanded memory capabilities transformed pinball sound design from real-time synthesis to pre-rendered studio production.

### Key Claims

- [HIGH] David Thiel has worked on approximately 20 machines since rebooting his pinball career in 2006 — _Speaker states: 'all the machines, all 20 machines that I've worked on, have never come down into my studio'_
- [HIGH] Dialed In is a Pat Lawlor game where Thiel did extensive backbox audio work and speaker redesign — _Speaker: 'We did a lot of work on Dialed In to redo the back box and make better speakers. And it's a Pat Lawlor game.'_
- [HIGH] Lonnie (from Screamin' Eagle, Kentucky) has touched roughly 59 solid state pinball projects across multiple decades — _Speaker claims Lonnie worked on 5 games in the 80s, 18 in the 90s, 19 more in the next decade, plus Aerosmith, totaling ~59 games_
- [HIGH] Modern SAM system pinball machines have approximately 26 megabytes of audio storage available to sound designers — _Speaker: 'on the SAM system, we were limited by space. That was 32 meg, of which I got about 26'_
- [MEDIUM] Richard Denton created the original operating system for Data East pinball games that influenced modern Stern Pinball software — _Speaker: 'Richard created that. We wanted to hire, and we did all the software... Richard wrote this operating system, which I'll bet there are little bits and fragments which still exist in Sam Stern Pinball today'_
- [HIGH] Thiel's first pinball audio credit was unknowingly Q*bert Quest, which used code he provided to John Craig — _Speaker discovered 20 years later at pinball museum that Q*bert Quest used his sounds: 'I gave him my code, and I didn't know what they were going to do with it'_
- [HIGH] Thiel left Mattel Electronics around 1983 due to seeing the company's video game division failing — _Speaker: 'I saw the tip of the Titanic starting to go down, so I left Mattel Electronics, and about eight months later... Pulled the plug'_
- [HIGH] Time Machine was among the first 'singing pinballs' with radio station-themed jingles recorded in three-part harmony — _Speaker describes recording jingles for Time Machine with radio station stingers: 'we created these radio station stingers... they came back in glorious three-part harmony'_
- [HIGH] Thiel worked at Microsoft (1993-2000) in the advanced user interface research group focusing on interactive sound and personified interfaces — _Speaker: 'in 93, I got a job offer, very strange, to join the new research division at Microsoft. So they located me to where I am now.'_
- [HIGH] Pirates of the Caribbean was Thiel's first game back after a 17-year hiatus from pinball sound design — _Speaker: 'And that was my first game in there 17 years' and references returning after leaving in the early 90s_

### Notable Quotes

> "I'm not going to talk a lot about because at 6 o'clock, if you're still here, Jersey Jack Pinball's going to have a seminar, and we're going to talk a lot about Dialed In"
> — **David Thiel**, ~10:30
> _References Jersey Jack Pinball seminar later same day, indicates JJP involvement with Dialed In_

> "Everything I do is owned by the person paying me, mate/man. So I don't own this. He owns this."
> — **David Thiel**, ~13:00
> _Explains work-for-hire copyright ownership model in pinball industry, relevant to soundtrack availability discussion_

> "Lonnie has touched probably more solid state pinball projects than any programmer alive. I'll make that statement."
> — **David Thiel**, ~27:00
> _High praise for Lonnie's prolific contributions to pinball history, estimated 59 games_

> "the single most important thing that changed is there's more memory... try to wrap your mind around that... if car technology improved as much as memory technology, you could now buy a car in 2006 that would go 9,600 miles on a gallon"
> — **David Thiel**, ~58:00
> _Explains fundamental shift in pinball audio design capabilities; demonstrates radical technological change from 1980s to 2000s_

> "My entire career to this point, I'm now 33 and I'm a parrot. Cool. But they paid me well to be a parrot."
> — **David Thiel**, ~48:00
> _Self-deprecating commentary on his Microsoft work as voice talent for interactive UI demonstrations_

> "I missed a golden age of pinball... I think we're potentially working our way into a new golden age of pinball"
> — **David Thiel**, ~44:00
> _Commentary on pinball history and optimism about current market trajectory_

> "They're all pre-rendered. They're like dead fish. The older they get, you can start them, you can stop them. That's about all you can do with them."
> — **David Thiel**, ~59:00
> _Critique of studio-based audio limitations compared to real-time synthesis in interactive game design_

> "I remodeling my studio and I'm buying one of those industrial lifts that they use on construction sites... from now on, all the games that come out of my studio will have the benefit of being down in there"
> — **David Thiel**, ~7:00
> _Reveals studio infrastructure upgrade to accommodate pinball machines during development, improving workflow_

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| David Thiel | person | Legendary pinball sound designer; career spans Mattel Electronics (1980s), Data East pinball (1980s-early 90s), Microsoft research (1993-2000), return to Stern Pinball (~2006-present); known for audio design on Pirates of the Caribbean, Dialed In, and numerous classic games |
| Pat Lawlor | person | Legendary pinball designer; designed Dialed In; referenced as iconic figure in pinball design history whom Thiel worked with |
| Richard Denton | person | Rocket scientist and software engineer; created operating system for Data East pinball games; co-founder of company that became Incredible Technologies; influential in pinball software architecture |
| Lonnie | person | Prolific pinball programmer from Screamin' Eagle, Kentucky; worked on approximately 59 pinball projects across decades; estimated to have touched more solid-state pinball games than any other programmer; worked with Thiel at Action Graphics and Data East |
| Gary Stern | person | Founder/owner of Stern Pinball; son of Sam Stern; initiated partnership with Data East to create System 11 board and modern Stern Pinball operating system |
| Sam Stern | person | Father of Gary Stern; legacy figure in pinball industry referenced in comparison to his impact on Bally |
| John Craig | person | Pinball audio engineer for Gottlieb; worked on Haunted House and other games; received Thiel's code for Q*bert Quest pinball machine |
| Lonnie Rosenfeld | person | Still works at Data East (or successor); Lonnie recruited from Incredible Technologies after Thiel and others stopped working with Data East |
| Dennis Norton | person | Pinball designer; worked with Thiel on Pirates of the Caribbean; described as 'lovely and charming' |
| Dwight Sullivan | person | Chairman/executive at Stern Pinball; worked with Thiel on Pirates of the Caribbean; created instructional video for Thiel |
| Jim Sullivan | person | Associated with Stern Pinball leadership; worked with Thiel on Pirates of the Caribbean audio/voice direction |
| Steve Ritchie | person | Legendary pinball designer; designed games Thiel worked on; Thiel humorously suggests Ritchie's World Poker Tour inspired Chris Granner to retire |
| Seth Green | person | Voice actor; provided voices for pinball game featuring duet with Thiel (Pirates of the Caribbean reference) |
| Chris Granner | person | Previous Stern Pinball sound designer; retired from sound work; designed first Stern game (World Poker Tour); opening created for Thiel's return |
| Byron | person | Announcer for Tacoma pinball show; helped Thiel move Dialed In machine down to studio; convinced Thiel never to do this again |
| Mattel Electronics | company | Video game company (1980s); owned by Columbia Pictures; Thiel's first pinball-adjacent employer; included Q*bert, Reactor, Krull, Argus, Guardian, Protector |
| Data East | company | Japanese video game company; partnered with Stern/Gary Stern to create System 11 pinball board; created ~9-10 games with Thiel's audio; demanding client; employed Lonnie after Thiel/others left |
| Stern Pinball | company | Modern pinball manufacturer founded by Gary Stern; uses SAM system with ~26MB audio storage; Thiel's current/recent employer; Dialed In manufacturer |
| Jersey Jack Pinball | company | Pinball manufacturer; having seminar later same day at Pintastic New England; associated with Dialed In pinball machine |
| Incredible Technologies | company | Company formed by Thiel, Richard Denton, and Denton's wife after Action Graphics folded; initially funded through Commodore 64 porting work on Winter Games |
| Action Graphics | company | Company in South Barrington founded ~1983; employed Thiel, Richard Denton, Lonnie, Pat Lawlor, and others; lasted 2 years; poorly run despite hiring excellent people; converted Commodore 64 games |
| Microsoft | company | Employed Thiel 1993-2000 in advanced user interface research group; relocated him to Seattle; paid well for voice talent work on interactive UI prototypes |
| Dialed In! | game | Modern pinball game by Pat Lawlor; manufactured by Jersey Jack Pinball; subject of extensive audio redesign by Thiel; features backbox speaker improvements; theme is cell phones; features songs/jingles by Thiel |
| Pintastic New England | event | Pinball conference/exposition; early morning (7 AM) session featuring David Thiel; later includes Jersey Jack Pinball seminar |

### Topics

- **Primary:** Pinball audio design evolution (FM synthesis to studio production), Memory and storage technology impact on game design capabilities, Career retrospective: early video games to modern pinball, Studio workflow and physical infrastructure for pinball sound design
- **Secondary:** Work-for-hire copyright ownership in pinball industry, Pinball history and legendary designers/programmers, Data East partnership with Stern Pinball, Interactive audio design challenges in real-time gameplay

### Sentiment

**Positive** (0.75) — Thiel expresses passion for pinball, pride in his contributions, humor about career pivots, and optimism about current pinball renaissance. Some self-deprecation regarding his Microsoft work and nostalgia about missed golden age, but overall reflective and appreciative tone.

### Signals

- **[business_signal]** Action Graphics (South Barrington company) employed multiple legendary pinball figures (Thiel, Denton, Lonnie, Lawlor) but failed due to poor management despite excellent hiring, indicating talent concentration before dispersal (confidence: medium) — Thiel: 'The one thing this guy had was the ability to hire good people. He couldn't run a company, but he really hired good people... after two years it went away'
- **[community_signal]** Pinball community recognizes and celebrates pinball history; Pintastic New England audience included knowledgeable fans familiar with legendary designers like Pat Lawlor, Steve Ritchie, and programmer Lonnie (confidence: medium) — Thiel references showing photos of Paul Ferris, Stan Lee, Pat Lawlor, and others with audience recognition; t-shirt given away for correctly identifying Pat Lawlor
- **[design_philosophy]** Thiel's approach to pinball audio emphasizes musical hooks and jingles to grab player attention, particularly on licensed properties where music must differentiate the experience (confidence: high) — Speaker discussed writing songs/jingles for Dialed In cell phone theme ('McDonald's jingle' approach), Q*bert pyramid tune (repurposed car dealership jingle), and Time Machine radio station stingers to create memorable audio identity
- **[market_signal]** Current pinball market potentially entering new 'golden age' following previous golden age during Space Shuttle era through Williams' closure (confidence: medium) — Thiel: 'I think we're potentially working our way into a new golden age of pinball... this was a golden age between, what, the space shuttle through to when Harry Williams shuts the door'
- **[licensing_signal]** Video game IP licensing (Columbia Pictures/Mattel) provided early opportunities for pinball-adjacent audio work; Krull video game created to support theatrical release (confidence: high) — Thiel: 'Krull was a science fiction film from Columbia Pictures, who owned Mattel Electronics, and they handed us this thing. We want a video game to be ready to be in theater lobbies when we have Krull.'
- **[personnel_signal]** Chris Granner retired from Stern Pinball sound design role, creating opening for David Thiel's return to pinball after 17-year hiatus (confidence: medium) — Thiel states: 'Chris, Chris Granner retired from doing sound work for Sam Stern at that time... But there was an opening, right? And again, it's who you know.'
- **[product_strategy]** Jersey Jack Pinball conducting dedicated seminar on Dialed In later same day at Pintastic New England, indicating active marketing and community engagement around the title (confidence: high) — Thiel explicitly mentioned: 'at 6 o'clock, if you're still here, Jersey Jack Pinball's going to have a seminar, and we're going to talk a lot about Dialed In'
- **[technology_signal]** Pre-rendered studio audio in modern pinball games lacks real-time interactivity of older FM synthesis; designers must pre-render all variations to simulate responsiveness to gameplay (confidence: high) — Thiel: 'There's no synthesis... They're like dead fish... you can start them, you can stop them... you have to pre-render all the different variants that you would need'
- **[technology_signal]** Fundamental shift in pinball audio design from real-time FM synthesis with severe memory constraints (4K-64K) to studio-based pre-rendered audio with 26MB storage on modern SAM system (confidence: high) — Thiel detailed memory progression from Q*bert (4K) through Data East (8K music, 64K compressed voices) to modern SAM system (~26MB available), explaining how this transformed audio capabilities from live synthesis to studio production

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## Transcript

 The show will start for Saturday, and we have some big figures in the industry sitting in the audience. They're going to be on later today, so I hope you'll come back for later seminars today. But now it's time to hear about that other dimension of pinball. So you can hear the sound is half the picture. Dave Dale, welcome. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Dave. So, you can hear me, right? I can't believe this many people are actually awake right now. I can't either. I told people yesterday, you know, if you party hard, just like stay up all night and show up here. You can get breakfast at 11. Okay. So, this is great. I'm really pleased to see all you folks. And let's see, it's pentastic New Robert Englunds. Yes. Right? It's not New Robert Englunds pentastic. It's not inside New Robert Englunds or anything? No, no. It's fantastic New Robert Englunds. Wow. I'm still getting acclimated. See, this is 7 AM for me. I just jumped out of bed, and I'm giving this talk. Because I flew in from Seattle. OK, first thing I always do is a sound check, because getting your pictures up on the screen is always easy. Getting the sound to work and a thing like this, always hard. Yes! See? It's hard. You're out of business. Let's play that again. Did you get all that, Butch? Heck yeah. Oh, okay. No, could you back up and start over? Fantastic doing. I'm going to have you. Woo! Okay. So I got a lot of stuff, and I tend to ramble. And I, you know, rambling, some of my ramblings are marginally interesting, but I want to get going on the thing, the show I prepared. That's a dialed-in sound when you go through the theater, when there's something there, and then you get like 50,000 points. never forget your first orgasm so that's what that's what I was trying to do and that's the theme for this show because I wanted to kind of filter my experience through my first times either the first time I did something or the first time that I did something that had never been done before so this is one of them I work at my house where I have a home studio. But this home studio is in a nice 400 square foot space underneath my garage, down those 18 concrete steps. So, since I started, rebooted my career in 2006, all the machines, all 20 machines that I've worked on, have never come down into my studio. I keep them up in the garage above, which is an unheated garage. This is not an ideal situation. I get some code back for my thing. I put it on a USB stick. I run upstairs. It's 50 degrees. I can see my breath. And I test the game. But I don't do that as much as I should because, well, it's up those stairs and it's 50 degrees. So we did a lot of work on Dialed In to redo the backbox and make better speakers. And it's a Pat Lawler game. And I said, you know, the way I always used to work when I had a studio on the ground floor is the machine needs to be next to me for a lot of reasons. And it makes it better and faster and gooder. So those are heroes. I tapped the community, a good friend of mine, and the other guy on the right side is the guy who does the announcements for the Tacoma show, Byron. These guys came over and we brought that machine, found those 1800 steps into my studio. We learned two things. One, yes, it was a great idea, dialed in as a much better project for my having done it. Two, these guys told me, don't ever do this again. So I'm going to continue to do it, but I'm remodeling my studio and I'm buying one of those industrial lifts that they like site construction stuff on. I'm I'm going to bring the games in in the garage. I'm going to put them on my Harbor Freight thing. I'm going to put it on this thing. I'm going to hand crank them down. Then I have my other Harbor Freight thing that will roll them in my studio. And this 67-year-old guy is going to be able to move these games around. And from now on, all games that come out of my studio will have the benefit of being down in there. That's a first time. Okay. Dial in. I'm not going to talk a lot about because at 6 o'clock, if you're still here, Jersey Jack's going to have a seminar, and we're going to talk a lot about dialed in and things Jersey Jack. And I have about 15 minutes of stuff all dialed in. But this is the first time I ever wrote a song about a cell phone. Okay. So that's a hook. And this is a license-free product, and so we have to grab you in any way we possibly can. So this is kind of a McDonald's jingle, okay? and I hope that I've now firmly implanted this earworm and that you will be compelled to satisfy your need to hear this by buying one of these. OOM stands for out of mode. I used to call the music that played when you first got the ball and you were trying to qualify things main play. But we've I started calling it out of mode because main play sort of means we got this one piece of music until you do something. And out of mode is literally the state of I'm not in multiball. I haven't started any modes. I'm in that state. And to me, it implies a suite of things. So in dialed in, you have I've got a new. That's what you first get. and it does the job by making the cell phone more tangible, giving you a little energy. But as soon as you play the mode, you are now in the exalted state of you are ready to lock a ball, ball lock enabled. So we have a different piece of music for that that tells you. Oh. And once you've done that, you've locked a ball, then you're in multiball ready. That's yet another more energetic, tenser piece of music that says, get the ball to the phone scoop, start your multiple. Okay, and you can sing. Please. I heard someone laugh and said, burning sensation? That's the burning sensation. Okay, so what we're looking at is our, my stuff I captured from my workstation. And the particular notes you're seeing are the melody and being played by an instrument. And in that particular synthesizer, that instrument is called burning sensation. And here, it sounds like a burning sensation. The other one is green. The other one is blue because it sounds like the mighty ham and cheese of... I read this kind of an out of the way question, but will there ever be an actual soundtrack released for this game? So, for those of us here... Yeah? How much would you pay for that? As much as an actual game. See you later, and I can make some decisions. Yeah, see, the one thing you have to understand, that I had to understand when I first started in this industry, like in 1980, is you do this thing that's called work for hire. And this is the complete tyranny of capital over work. So I work for hire. Everything I do is owned by the person paying me money. So I don't own this. He owns this. So you have to talk to him. If you want the soundtrack album, which I would be thrilled, and that would be great. Somebody wants to actually hear this music, that would be fantastic. Yeah, it was super exciting. You never know. I was actually super excited for this game because it was first declared to leave the financial for a while. So it's like . JOHN W. It would end that. . . That's one thing I might pay attention to more than on the music. JOHN W. Yeah, it's a lot of fun to have a, well, it's fun and terrifying to have a blank canvas at the same time. We'll go past this. Oh. See? You didn't know there were lyrics for that. But now, you'll never be able to forget that. You'll be playing the game and you'll get into that selfie mode. You'll be going, Crazy vibe, woo, selfie time. Cool. Okay, all this started in 1981 for me. Prior to that time, I had been a professional musician who liked a gypsy with a union card, traveled around the United States playing music in rock bands and lounge bands and show bands. But I needed a day job, and I was in an insurance company for two years, and then some headhunter found out that I was like this Apple II hobbyist. And Gottlieb, the video, the pinball company, had decided to create a video game division. Actually, that's not true. Columbia Pictures, who owned Gottlieb by that time, told them, have a video game division because we're having a hard time selling pinball machines in 1980. So, I was a software engineer. And when it came time for the first game to be, you know, nearly done, they needed, gosh, we need music, we need sound for this thing. And I just thought... So a career that I could not have imagined, and I had a decent imagination, sort of came to be, because I'd been a musician, then I became a computer programmer, I taught PL1 at an insurance company, and then I put these two things together. Wow, this one's really good. Right? OK, stop that. Now the interesting thing to notice there, because I started in Nvidia games, but pinball always loomed large in my career. So what about this is pinball? Tell me. See those little things up there? Oh! Drop targets! I had no idea that I would end up doing this, but that's where I started, and we're in the context of a pinball company. I've been a musician since I was a sophomore in high school, getting paid to entertain people and do stuff. And in the bands that I was in, you know, we recorded original songs. We tried to make it, you know. We never reached critical mass. One year into my career doing this, Parker Brothers had bought the rights from Gottlieb to make home game console versions of our coin-op games. And so they made an Atari 2600 version of Reactor. And that first Christmas... There's a sensation in playing the Reactor video game that people really get into. It's your turn. Reactor! Reactor from Parker Brothers, the ones to beat. My music's on TV! You can imagine, I've been trying to do this for more than 10 years, staying in bad hotels, traveling, doing everything I could, and 10 months at this video game company, and my music's on TV. So that was a first for me. Here's another first. When you write stuff for video games or pinball machines, you frequently need to have a heroic theme, because somebody has done a good thing, and you want to make them feel good. And writing heroic music is an interesting thing to do. You have to figure out how to do that. I mean, I'm a lounge band guy, right? What do I know from heroism? So this is the first attempt at that. Gottlieb's second game was the first called Video Man, but because it was too close to Superman, it became Protector. That was too wimpy, so it became Guardian. And then after a focus group, it became Argus. While Artist was never produced, it did start my quest to figure out how to write heroic music. You've done a good thing. And that was the other first, sadly. It was the first thing that I spent eight months of my life on, and they didn't make it. Sir? This is me. You did the sound, or this word involved in the sound pretty quickly, . Yes. Yes. I have been trying the music. When you start the game with the music, I watch the movie to try to find where the heck that music was, because that one four-measure piece of something like haunted my soul. I've been trying to figure out where that came from in the music, and I've been trying to figure out the . Okay, well, I'll... . I only have an hour, but I'll elaborate on this. The question was, yes, did I do Crawl? And I did like five or six games for Gottlieb, did The Sounds Four, and Crawl was my first license. Crawl was a science fiction film from Columbia Pictures, who owned Gottlieb, and they handed us this thing. We want a video game to be ready to be in theater lobbies when we have Crawl. And be careful what you ask for, because Krull was not well received. And the video game is actually kind of better than the movie was. But the intense association with this thing is it's going down. Krull didn't do all that well. But yes, Reactor. And there's some other game that I did. My first hit game, finally, after we did Reactor, which was not a hit, but they made it at least. Then we did that other thing with the four names, and that didn't get made. But the third one, third time's a charm. Oh, my God. And this is really the first time that I used this technique, sort of the jingle technique, which I used liberally and dialed in. And so I wrote a lyric for that tune, but it's not actually for Cuber. Cuber's Pyramid Completion Tune had been written years before by me as a jingle and submitted to a local car dealership. You get a lot of great car when you buy one from us for the best deal on a new or used car. They didn't buy it, so it ended up in Cuber. And you notice some of these clips are pre-recorded because at 7.18 Pacific Standard Time, I don't sing. I don't sing real well anyhow, but you don't want to be subjected to that. Then I have another first. It's the first time, keep in mind that work for hire thing. You know, the company owns it. Something happened in my work and I had absolutely no idea. Somebody made a pinball machine out of cuber. And what I didn't realize at the time, or even until 20 years later when I happened to go to the pinball museum out in Las Vegas where they have a cuber quest, and I played it and I'm like, oh my god, these are all my sounds. The great Craig Byer Waltz, who was the pinball audio guy, working on the same hardware as I was for video, you know, Haunted House and all these great games, I gave him my code, and I didn't know what they were going to do with it. And he basically just kind of rearranged the deck chairs. And so I kind of, I did a John Trudeau game. I had no idea, but that's really my first pinball credit, and I wasn't there. So, I saw the tip of the Titanic starting to go down, so I left Gottlieb, and about eight months later, let's see, it was Coca-Cola at that time owned it. Pulled the plug, it became Premier, and then the video game thing just went away, and Sony ended up owning the assets, and then 20 years later, there are Qbert and Major films and all this stuff. I didn't even get a t-shirt. So I went, like a lot of our coin-op brethren in 1983, I left to a company in South Barrington called Action Graphics. And it was a cool company. I got to be an aesthetic engineer. Cool, huh? Yeah, management's going, what the hell? You want one on your card? Just let me do it. I'll work hard. And this is a first for me because I met a lot of really good people. The one thing this guy had was the ability to hire good people. He couldn't run a company, but he really hired good people. And I met these people the first time. The only reason I'm bothering to tell a pinball audience this is in this company where we did conversions, ports, of like 2,600 games. pitfall we converted to the Commodore 64 and the Colecovision that kind of stuff we are pure then we did original product and we did pretty good stuff but the company was so poorly run that after two years it went away but I met some people now nobody knows who Richard Denton is hardly anybody Dave knows Richard Denton is He knows everybody. Richard and his wife and I, when this company went away, formed a company. We're owed four months of salary at this point. We have no seed capital. But we're associated with a very successful Commodore 64 game called Winter Games. And the publisher wants to port that to everything. So they paid us to do that. And on the wings of that, we formed a company that eventually became Incredible Technologies. But Richard was a rocket scientist, literally. His first gig out of school was to be down at Cape Canaveral where he launched software for the shuttle. And after they got the first shuttle up, he was satisfied and he quit and he came back to Chicago and he went into video games. So I met Richard, and he really had a, I wanted to say had a heart, but he really wanted to do a pinball operating system. That what he wanted to do So the opportunity came to us because Gary Stern wanted to do with Williams what his father had done to ballet Don go there You paying I know. Basically, he wanted to start a pinball company. And if you want to get operators and distributors to accept your new company, if they already have parts in their warehouse that they can use, and replacements and stuff. So he teamed up with Data East, the Japanese video game company, and they knocked off the System 11 board. And that's legal, right? Williams would have nailed him to the wall had it not been legal. You can do that. But you have this problem, this copyrighted bit of intense software that actually runs that hardware. Well, that you had better create. Richard created that. We got hired, and we did all the software, the light shows, all the stuff, for the first nine, ten day of East Camps. And they didn't care about the soundboard, so I got to, I'm not a double E, but I got to spec the soundboard, and I made it a stereo soundboard. So that's another first. So Richard wrote this operating system, which I'll bet there are little bits and fragments which still exist in Stern games today. Nobody throws away something that works. So Richard's really important in terms of pinball. Then there's this guy. This guy. Oh, no, no, no, don't do that. Oh, don't do that. Lonnie Rock from Screamin' Holler, Kentucky. So Lonnie worked at Action Graphics. And, you know, show of hands, anybody know who Lonnie is? A few people, right? Well, Lonnie has touched probably more solid state pinball projects than any programmer alive. I'll make that statement. He's been the lead on at least 20 or 25 of them. He's been there doing other stuff on them. He managed them. He's been programming on. In the first decade, in the 80s, he did those five. And then in the 90s, he did those 18. And then in the next decade, he did 19 more. And we're only in 2016, and his last one was Aerosmith. And so that's like 59 games that he's touched. So he's kind of important in pinball, right? And then this guy worked at Action Graphics. Who knows who this guy is? No, not you. Nobody else? Say the words. No, somebody else, not you, Mitch. Pat. Who said that? Okay. I promise you. You get a t-shirt? Yeah, you get a t-shirt. And I'll explain... You should have started with that. I'll explain the significance of the t-shirt later. I didn't bring the gun. I really wanted to help you guys with T-shirts, but I couldn't bring it on the airplane. So, and Pat's a good guy to know, you know, in terms of pinball. And all these guys worked at this goofy little company for two years in South Barrington. It was, what a strange place to become, you know, pinball, but they kept calling me, and I didn't realize it. So, as part of this deal with Gary Stern, I got to create a soundboard. I got to create a synthesizer controller and all the software that's involved. And then I wrote my first pinball audio package for LaserWarp. It was a Yamaha 2151. It did eight voices of FN. It had three good stereo amps, three amps, which a lot of people use stereo on the bottom thing, and that was novel. Williams had two amps, and they took the stereo signal and merged it and just modeled it. So this was an improvement, and it really sounded good. So that's, and then this is my first big jackpot. And Lazy War is a game virtually without modes. All you're doing is you're doing the yellow stuff and the blue stuff and the red stuff and working your way up to enabling the big jackpot. And that's really the whole game. But doing that is a lot of fun. So when you get to that big jackpot, we have the ion mechanics. And I think it compares favorably to the windup for the multiball in, I think, Sam's family. Is that the one? I've always really liked Lisa Warren, especially the audio in that game. Good. The audio really stood out to me. I tried. This is my first. And you don't know what you don't know, and you don't know what you can do, and you don't know what you shouldn't do. But the client was real demanding. And I mean, this is like the fourth iteration of this. The designer, here, here's a jackpot. And all of us need to be bigger. We're competing with Williams. It needs to be bigger. So this one, you have to be careful, because you're very likely to drain well before this is over. Yeah, yeah, the guys in the background is like screaming because he's been hit by a laser blast. It's pretty cool. This is my first lyric that actually was ever exposed to a pinball audience. And we started a tradition with this game of creating a karaoke event at game over. Actually, I jumped. This is the third, fourth game, Time Machine, which this was actually the first pinball that I ever did that actually sold pretty well. No, I'm totally confused. That was return to base, return to base, you're finding laser war. Never mind. The time thing is catching up to me. No, this is time machine. Duh. This is really one of the first singing pinballs. That's what it said on the flyer, the first singing pinball. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Dark Black Night 2000, notwithstanding, we had recorded, we went, wrote these little jingles because the whole metaphor for Time Machine was kind of like a radio station. So we created these radio station stingers. And, you know, we turned to the 50s and we sent these down to Texas where those things get done. And they came back in glorious three-part harmony and stuff. Then we jammed them into a horrible compression thing. And so we had about six or seven of these. And it was very cool. That's Jack in the front. I know that guy. That's actually Kevin. Kevin O'Connor. Sorry. Sorry. OK. So now it's like 1989. And we do about nine or 10 games per day at East. But they were, frankly, a somewhat demanding and annoying client. And it wasn't really worth what we were spending to give these packages to them. So we quit. And then they hired Lonnie from us. And then Lonnie's been there ever since. He still works there. And so I stopped doing pinball at that point. And then in 93, I got a job offer, very strange, to join the new research division at Microsoft. So they located me to where I am now. So there's supposed to be a sound there. I missed a golden age of pinball. Now, for me, this is important, that article, a golden age, because I think we're potentially working our way into a new golden age of pinball. But clearly, this was a golden age between, what, the space shuttle through to when Williams shuts the door was clearly some of the best machines ever made. I wasn't paying attention. I was busy trying to be a researcher. So this is another first for this talk. I'm going to show you something of what I was doing, why Microsoft flew me 1,700 miles and relocated me and did all this stuff. I was in the advanced user interface group. We were doing research on how to make computers better for you. And keep in mind, this is 93. And think about the kind of things computers were doing at that time. I mean, what they were working on when I got there was what they called, ready? The personified user interface. And what all that means is there's like, you interact with the character instead of a command line or exploring the interface with a mouse. You literally deal with some entity and research at Stanford, these are the guys you have to blame for the paperclip and all that. They were the ones who said, They had tested people and people had a better computing experience. They wanted to have a pal in the computer. They really did. But what we could do to make a pal and what they wanted, well, there's a certain distance between that. But they hired me because they didn't know how to make interactive sound and you couldn't hire anybody from a university with a PhD to make interactive sounds. They hired me. The task for this particular research prototype was building a playlist of music that you want to listen to. And this particular thing was more like a marketing demo that was done at CES 1995. And so this is the first. Nobody has seen this in a long time. But it does illustrate some of the progress we're making towards more advanced versions of the social interface. Who's that guy? Hello? . . . . . . . . . . . . Let's do a demo. Showtime on stage. Taking requests. What have you been listening to? Wayne Deacon. Everybody loves Wayne Deacon. No thanks. How about playing something classical? How about playing something classical? Okay. Now the important thing to know about this is that Microsoft flew me 1700 miles and made me a researcher and stuff so that I could be a parent. That's me. I'm kidding. Because it suited the nature of the work, right? You know, they had this application which encompassed the database of 100 CDs and we knew stuff about the artist and played bass and all this stuff. And so you needed a pretty big vocabulary and it kept changing. So hiring some professional talent to do this, we'd be in and out of the studio all the time. We've been two congressmen. So I finally said, I can do a parrot. So yeah. My entire career to this point, I'm now 33 and I'm a parrot. Cool. But they paid me well to be a parrot. So I worked there until 2000 and I took off some time and did more working and enjoy myself. But Chris Granner retired from doing sound work for Stern at that time. He did the first Sam game. It was a world poker tour. It was a Steve Ritchie game, so I understand why he retired. Just kidding, Steve. Just kidding. But there was an opening, right? And again, it's who you know. So theoretically, the next game up was going to be a Pat Lawler game. And Lonnie still works there. I know Lonnie and Pat from Action Graphics. And I had sent a piece of email out to Lonnie saying, I am looking to get back into this. So I got the call. So I went to Chicago just for three days. I don't have any more t-shirts, but I encourage enthusiastic participation. What game is that? Irons. Pirates of the Caribbean. That's right. Pirates of the Caribbean. For the lovely and charming Dennis Norton, whom I met for the first time doing this. Then I met this guy for the first time. Oh, no, no, no. All right, David. You wanted to know where the left orbit was. This is the left orbit. Here's the flippers. Here's the left orbit. And the left over goes up like this, underneath the exit of this back here. It goes like this, and then into the top popper here. This popper pops up and gives you to this upper plate, the lower plate here on the right. And that's the hands and voice of the chairman, Dwight Sullivan. And frankly, that's not the way we work. But that was my first game in 17 years. And games have gotten a little more complicated than the laser war. And even by today's standards, pirates is a whacked play field. I mean, there's a lot of strange stuff going on in there. So Dwight gracefully made me a video, which I can now flog years later. Now, what's changed in the 17 years while I was off being a parent? Relative to the work I do, the single most important thing that changed is there's more memory. See, back in the old days, transistors were big, children. They were very big and you didn't get many of them because they were so big and required so much expensive silicon. And that means memory is made out of transistors. So all that Q-Bert and reactor stuff was done with 4K of memory. You know, there are children's toys that have more than that now. Then the work that was done at Data East, the program space for all the music and all that stuff I think was 8K, and then the space for all the compressed voices and singing, Return to the 70s, that stuff was like 64K, and that's what we had to work with. Well, what do we have to work with now here on the Stern-SAM system? Now, to try to wrap your mind around that, let's pretend that this wasn't silicon, but rather cars. Cars in 1980. Now, if car technology improved as much as memory technology, you could now buy a car in 2006 that would go 9,600 miles on a gallon. So you basically have to fill it up once a year. So that's how radically the technology has changed, and that changes my job, because what I used to do was make all the sounds live on the pinball machine. The sounds were being created in the pinball machine, limited by whatever hardware happened to be there. Now, when you have 388 times more storage, it's a studio solution. Anything I can record, I can put in the game. And I got about 15 minutes worth of storage, and it moves everything into the studio. And if it's in the studio, that means I can iterate over it. I can keep making it better and better and use all kinds of resources. So it's an extremely different task than it was the last time I touched a pinball. Let's go. Okay, trust me, you don't do that with FM, right? That's a result of the studio. And I can record and do anything. And sometimes I sing. The first time I ever sang in a pinball machine actually got produced. This is a duet with Peter's son, Chris, who is voiced by Seth Green. now I never met Seth Green I just ripped all this stuff out and then I did a mashup but it's a duet So that's just not FM, right? Now open your mind, what can you do? It's studio-based, and that's really great. There is a problem, though, relative to doing sounds for an interaction, like pinball, where the ball is wild and you never know what's going on. There's no synthesis. So all these things are the product of the studio, but they're all pre-rendered. They're like dead fish. The older they get, you can start them, you can stop them. That's pretty much all you can do with them. So if you want to have anything that's vaguely like adapting to the pinball play, you have to pre-render all the different variants that you would need. And on the SAM system, we were limited by space. That was 32 meg, of which I got about 26. So it's less interactive, but the assets do sound gorgeous. OK, so my third game, I'm still trying to figure out what to do with the studio. But it's a Steve Ritchie game. And so this is my first Steve Ritchie game. And to do that, I had to fly back to Chicago because Steve didn't like what I did on Pirates of the Caribbean. La, la, la, la. He just thought it was too wimpy. If Steve Ritchie had made Pirates of the Caribbean, And he was like, argh! That's how the game would have started. And fight better, you do. It just would have been a completely different game. So I flew to Chicago only to convince Steve, hey, you're the client. I do what you want. I did what they wanted. So take it up with Dwight and Dennis. They wanted this, what you consider Wimby. And you want gnarly? I can do gnarly. So I got the gig. and I fly to Chicago and this was the first one I did for Steve. So I've got to move this along I've got a lot more stuff But that was challenging And I submitted three things to Steve and he rejected all of them And because I was like absent during the golden age of pinball I really wasn familiar with a lot of Steve stuff So then I got the pinball emulator on my system, and I loaded down some of Steve's games, and then I listened to them. It's like, oh, that's Steve Ritchie music. And so that's pretty close. It's not what he would have done, but it worked for him. And then he was happy, and I think Spider-Man turned out okay. Then, another challenge with this studio-based thing is we did Indiana Jones, and we got the London Symphony Orchestra. John Williams waving his stick in front of them. We got the Indiana Jones March for main play. Cool. But I have like 17 more modes, and we didn't get anything but that. So now, how can I sound like John Williams? I tried. So that's a first, trying to channel John. Now, boy, was I ever wrong. This is the first time I was ever wrong. I'm doing my first John Borg project in, what was it? Whatever game it was. Oh, it's Iron Man. And initially I had seen the movie in the theater, and I didn't think the music was all that memorable. And Borg disagreed with me. And then he sent me all these YouTube videos, which were like the still picture and a track and a soundtrack. And then I had to change my mind because he was right. Ramin Dwadi's music is so powerful that in the mix for the movie they had to like turn it down because it would have just taken way too much attention. It's perfect pinball music. So we licensed some tracks, three or four tracks, and we sliced and diced them into the game. But then I had to channel his stuff so that I would make things for the like the second movie which we didn't have any access to. So this is the piece I did for that. And you can sing along. Alright. I've done this. This isn't really a first, but I want to do it with you guys because I like you. We're going to sing along in Klingon. Now, you know, the Internet makes this kind of research a whole lot easier. I had this notion in my mind for the Klingon multiball that I wanted to have the Klingons doing that thing they do in the bar the night before the big battle where they all down a lot of Romulan ale. and then they sing their war songs. And that's what I wanted to have as the background for Klingon multiball. But I needed some lyrics, so... Be-jack-be-chow. Okay? This is important. Be-jack-be-chow. You're going to do this. So, and technically this means if you don't surrender, but for our purposes it just means surrender, okay? So there's four syllables, V-J-B-C-H-O-L. V-J-B-C-H-O-L. Okay, everybody. V-B-C-H-O-L. Now, to make this happen, I have a course. I have a piece of software that simulates like a symphony chorus. But I had to teach it how to sing Klingon. And so just like feeding the Votrax chip for Hubert, I had to break this down into its language, which is that. So that's what it looks like, B-J-B-C-H-O. So this is what it sounds like, just the choir singing Klingon. Okay, everybody ready? Now, I understand it's a little syncopated. I don't expect perfection. You're not getting paid. So we're just going to do our best. But I want to see a hearty effort because, you know, it's almost 11 o'clock. You've been sitting around long enough. You can do this. So this is the whole thing with the music and the thing. And you just sing along. I'll try to prompt you. Be Jack the Bad Juggle. Good. You're on your own. Be Jack the Bad Juggle. Be Jack the Bad Juggle. Give yourself a hand, you amazing Klingon warrior. All right. See, it's a first time for you, too. Okay. Then another first is I deal with this guy who's got what I think is a daring vision. In 2013, I went to the show in Tacoma, and this guy doesn't bring a game. He brings a PowerPoint slide, and he's making this wacky game where he puts a video thing in the play field and stuff. I thought it was really a good idea. So I proposed a notion of deferred sweat equity where I would do all this work and someday maybe never get paid for it. Especially since I have a paying client here in the audience. I am going to get paid for this work. I don't work for free. Trust me. Oh, and so this, it's taken this guy forever, but there's one out there on the show floor in the vendor space. This is the P3 system for Multimorphic. And he did a game called Light Speed, Escape from Earth. And I did all the stuff for that. And I never lose an opportunity because if any of you play it out there on the show floor, you haven't heard So you're going to get to hear a few of the things. And the way I like to work with these things, especially this is an original title, is the music is there for a lot of reasons. But one of them is to establish a sense of place, what you're doing, who you're doing it with. So the first thing about Lexi is she's a space girl who crash lands her ship into the Florida Everglades because there was a government base there that shot her down. So the first thing that's important is the Everglades. See, it changes the blockage a bit. And that's OOM music, right? It's not the most energetic thing ever, because you're just trying to qualify targets and make things happen. It just wants to establish a sense of place, give it some energy, make it happy. The next thing is there are locals down in this space. You're in the Florida Everglades, and you meet some interesting characters. And so they have adventures with these characters. And one of them is you go to a bar, and what does Lexi know from beer? And I never lose an opportunity to use a banjo. Then another element in the game are the bad guys, the government agents. So you interact with them several times. And this is the music for when your light's out multiball. You have to hit targets, turn off lights, and then you enable the jackpot fix. Okay. Then at the end of the game, when Lexi has retrieved all the parts and gas and everything she needs to repair her ship so she can do her escape from Earth, in her parting shot, she destroys Area 51, whatever. So this is the music for Lexi Fights Back. All right. And I got a new client. And this is one of my versions of one of the, the one tune that we licensed from the thing. And we did a post-mortem, which is... Ah, I could have pushed! And, you know, it's actually, you know, it's the project that refuses to die or even, you know, so doing a post-mortem is a bit premature, but... I'm going to talk about, since I didn't do very much of the music in the game, I'm going to talk about the sound effects, which actually is what I spend 60% of my time on. Because you really don't play the music, you play the sound effects. And it's really tough to express yourself in three seconds and come up with two or three hundred meaningful things that are exactly the right thing, that are all different, that are either rewarding or whatever they need to be. need to be. So The Hobbit is one of the most amazing licenses I've ever worked with. Warner Brothers was extremely liberal, and we got clear stereo recordings of the voices and clear stereo recordings of the sound effects, seven and a half hours of them. That's why the project never ends. And so what I do with that is I take that clear sound effect thing and I re-merge it with the image to help me figure out what these sounds are. And so this is an example of what I work from. So listening, you can imagine, if you didn't put that back with the image And you're just listening to that, trying to go, and what exactly is that thing? So you've got to do that. One of the most disappointing moments in my life is when the Hobbit got out there, and then I started reading on Pinside how people said, gee, we don't know when anything's going on. There seems to be nothing for when we score things or do things. It's like, seriously? Singers are what I call these things, right? And there's like 442 of them in the game. And so clearly there's some kind of disconnect. I have not done something right. If you haven't noticed, there are 442 of these things being triggered appropriately. So what do these things do? One of the important things is knowing when a mode starts. Because you do a thing, then you're in some kind of new activity. So there are 32 book modes, plus a bunch of other stuff. And every one of these has unique introductions, some video and sounds to go with that. So here's an example. Wow. You missed that, huh? Okay. Then when you complete a mode, that's even more important. because you can visit a mode, but when you actually complete a mode successfully, that's a big deal. You get a bunch of points for it. You want to know you did it. So there are 32 of these. Maybe. My laptop works. You know, that's me. You know, excuse me, you did a good job. You know, I'm doing what I can. And then the whole notion of scoring something, because this game is just filled with stacking and all kinds of other stuff that wreak havoc with the coherent story we're trying to tell you. So scoring events are really important, so they have to be big. Oh, I hate you. Okay. Then you activate a feature. And this feature is an unusual feature, because most games don't have a stand-up target on the outlay. This one does. And when you hit this during multi-balls, you add a ball. So it's like a life-saving thing. And for this, Bjorn, the shapeshifter character who can turn himself into a bear, he's the thing that represents this. So when you do that and hit this crazy target that you're not looking at down here, you get this. Well, maybe you don't. You know, the deeper I get into this presentation, the lamer this laptop gets. I'll try it one more time and I'll just pretend it was really nice. Okay, I give up. Okay, so then the last of my firsts is I also got yet another new client. And so I may have never met this client had the Hobbit occurred in some normal time period. But the Hobbit really did take a long time to do. Because it is the biggest software package that has ever been done, probably ever will be done, for a pinball machine. So if you want a machine that's immensely collectible, because it will be unique for 100 years, you should get the Hobbit. None of these things are going to play. Well, my talk's over, so I guess that doesn't matter. Well, I have one more thing. So I started working with Highway Pinball and the Alien Project, which is taking quite a while to get to the point, and I won't talk about any of the other things that are going on. But the first thing people ask when you say you're going to do an Alien Pinball is, where's Hudson? It's just going to be a stand-up fight, sir, or another bug hunt. Hey, man, I don't want to ring up your parade. We're some real pretty shit now, man. Look, I'm telling you, there's something moving, and it ain't us. Oh, man, that doesn't speak at all. Woo! Game over, man. It's game over. Okay. So, yeah, rest assured, there's plenty of huntsmen. Okay, and the last thing I want to do is what I think of as an autopsy. We're going to take a piece of music, assuming this will play it, we're going to take a piece of music apart and kind of show you how it came to be. And this is the music from Ambush Multimole. If you hit the Xeno guy five times the first time, you start a battle mode where the Xenos attack you, and you get this great display, this scanner, which shows you where they're coming from, and that's live. That actually works. The target's on the left, you see it, and Hudson calls out their distance of the closest one, sneak. This is an autopsy of the piece that I wrote for Ambush Multiball for Alien Pin. This is an action scene where the Xenomorphs are attacking our space marines. First section sounds like this. The melody is composed of brass primarily, augmented by some strings. The low brass is the primary instrument. And there's a line underneath that played by trumpets. It's pretty good enough to make it a bit more tense. Then, in my mind, the C-memories sound like strings played with a Bartok articulation. If we put that together, then we need something creepy, because this is, after all, alien. So we go to some strange articulations in the second strings. And then I'm going to do it. And we need some rhythm. This is pinball, after all. We augment that with some cymbals. And we're channeling James Corner, not infringing on his copyrights, but he really likes to use anvils hit with hammers. Let's listen to that. Okay, so then the rhythm. Look down and get back up again. So the whole thing, section A. Section B is a section that goes between one part and another, and it features some nice cellos. It just sounds... Right? And there's the section C. Again featuring those Bartok strings doing xeno riffs. And we do something different with a little brass in section D. Which is our Marines trying to get it together with a percussion. It starts getting pretty heavy. But then I believe these xenos come back. There's so many of them. And in the final section, we have the Marines trying to get it together, all together, going up in a figure played by the brass and the Bartok strings Thank you There more to that but close enough I'm done. Only six minutes over. I want to thank Gabe and Dave for inviting me and bringing me out here. This has been really nifty. I had never given a presentation like this east of Chicago. And the last time I was in Boston was over 20 years ago, and I was a researcher. I want to thank my wife, who puts up with me. I work at home, and all that implies, and she's very supportive and really takes care of me. Then, I mean, the most important thing is, I get paid by clients, but you guys are really what I do it for. I mean, if I don't make you happy, if I don't tickle that part of your amygdala and make things happen, then I've failed. And so I thank the pinball community because I couldn't have this gig without you guys. It's fantastic. Then those T-shirts that were given out. Don't give it back to me. No, no, I'll give it back to you. I just want to hold it up. The only reason I do this, I promised I would do this. Last year, I wrote some music for this podcast, and it's a counterpoint thing. They have a program at Michigan State University, and Ryan Claylor is a professor there, and he's also a huge pinball fanatic. And I met him at Expo a couple years ago, and he's a big P3 guy, too, and he did a t-shirt for them. And he commissioned me. He wanted me to write the music for his podcast, which I did. And then he had a special episode 11, which just went live on July 1st. He's a good interviewer, but like all podcasts, the one feature they lack is brevity. So there's like a three and a half hour thing, more that you should know about me, out there. And if you're curious at all, if it's piqued your interest, MSU, Michigan State University, comics, podcast, that'll get you there. Those are the Google terms. That's all you need. Or a goggle. Or a goggle, yeah. Did I put goggle? It's better than the band. My wife's a Microsoft in you. No, no, no. My wife's career before we moved here, early on in our marriage, she was a professional proofreader. It's hell of a little of the proofreader. So I don't let her anywhere near my stuff, because it's just so mind-crushingly, you know. Maybe you should. All of you say, yeah, I know. Maybe I should. I should. Maybe you should. Yes, pride goes before a fall, I know. So I think that's it. Oh, I thought this was a very noble thing of me. So put that up there. So any questions? I don't know. Do we have any time? Sure. Anybody have a question? Sure. Can you tell me about the ideal specifications of the system, maybe, of Gottlieb hardware since you worked with that? That's one thing I've never really been able to find out enough too much about. It was like that earlier, Gottlieb video game slash pinball game. Oh my god, that board? Yes, well, that board. The sound board for the Gottlieb thing had been developed by a guy named Jim Weisz, And it was built for Mars, God of War. It was like God was first talking to binball games. And of course, they wanted it to sound like Mars, God of War. But it was the Vultrax chip, so it sounded . And I inherited that board when the video game division was created. So I got a piece of sample code. And the thing about the specs of that board is that there's not much there. There is no sound chip per se on that board. There is a 6512 running at less than 1 megahertz. There is 128, ready, bytes of memory, so basically half a stack for you, and 4K of ROM. So clearly, sampling is not an option. You could sample, and at the sample rate, you can play stuff back with the less than 1 megahertz processor. You get about a second and a half of sound. So obviously, that's not a solution. Every sound you hear is code. But it's not like legitimate code. Literally, the process is I have a processor and has eight bits of output, which go to a converter, which create a voltage, which goes to an amplifier, and that determines the excursion of the speaker. That's it. Now, if I do that periodically, I move air in a way that, If I do it fast enough and periodically enough, you hear a tone. OK? You have to do it programmed in every single individual waveform you want. JOHN W. Every sound in all those games is some kind of algorithm. And it's so wacky to write these things, because I'm a traditional synthesis. I come from Mo, Gart, and blah, blah, blah. And you start with a rich waveform. You use filters. You do things over time. You make interesting sounds. None of that technology applies, because you don't have the horsepower to do anything vaguely like that. So you're literally trying to imagine how to move the speaker to make a thing that you want. And I learned how to do that. I learned by writing tons and tons of little tiny pieces of 6502 code. I guessed that 85% of my stuff ended up on the floor, because I had an idea. What if I do this? I exclusive order this bit and do this and do that and then? Sounds like shit. OK, never mind. And you just keep writing code until you find something. And the best sound, the sounds that I'm most proud of, were the ones where I actually had a notion of, I want this to sound like this. How can I come up with this algorithm? So the coin sound for Gottlieb sounds like somebody dropped a quarter into a glass jar. That's an algorithm. I found that algorithm. I know how to make that sound. And any Arduino board could probably do that now, like at least 256 copies of it in high quality stereo. But that saturated the 6502 back in the day. And the other important notion, and this is the same technique used by Dicker, Sam Dicker, and Eugene Jarvis for like Robotron. Robotron, there's never more than one sound ever going on at a time. And you kind of, really? Yeah. Never more than one, because those algorithms are so complicated, and you have so little horsepower that you can never run more than one copy at a time. And so we're just constantly switching algorithms. And we do it so fast that your mind goes, ooh, a new sound. That must be masking the old sound. It's like a persistence of vision thing for the human sensorium. We get away with that trick. So, yeah, there's nothing there. There's nothing on that song somewhere. A DAC, a processor, half a stack. So you have to be really careful when I'm writing code not to use anything vaguely like recursion because I can march the stack right through my variables and then it would break. And then that's not allowed because all these, you know, guys who operate these machines would come and get me. So I was really, really careful to test all this code to make sure that it worked. I was wondering if the focus in, you know, when you go and create sound for a new pinball machine, does the sound start on a computer or does it, where does it go from before it goes to the machine? You know, the computer, I'm staying in this industry. I'm an old guy and I'm just thrilled to continue doing this because the computers, my tools, and just every year get better because transistors get smaller and I get bigger disc drives. Is there a specific sound that you focus with? Well, but the key is where do the sounds start? Here. And it really doesn't matter how they get manifested. They start here. I could have written them on paper, done them on piano, and then given them to somebody to record. Or in my case, I don't have a budget to do that. So I come up with stuff. I enter it using a musical typewriter. The way I think of a keyboard is just a way to get notes in without having to hand code them. And then I work in layers, right, because it's just me. So if I have something that's going to, like that piece of music, right, that had about eight different things going on, you know, I do those one at a time, and I have to build this one and then imagine another one that would fit with that one and still do the job that I wanted it to do, make you feel creepy, make you feel energized, whatever I'm trying to do. But it always has to start here. It's lazy stuff. I mean, I play keyboard and I try to avoid composing from the keyboard because the notes that I select are kind of constrained by the way I play keyboard. But I'm playing an orchestra, right? And playing a violin from a keyboard is like whacking it with a hammer. It makes no sense. All you can do with a keyboard is say, this note, this hard. But a violin kind of gestures that are involved in the subtlety of a hand doing this, and this hand doing this, and this neck doing this, and all that stuff. There's so many articulations, ways of playing the same note, that playing it from a keyboard is only just selecting the note. It's just job one. Then I spend a whole lot of time with these meta controls, selecting articulations, changing things over time, putting in all the human gesture so that it doesn't sound like the dreaded MIDI music. You know, if you really want to make me feel bad, go on to Kinside like somebody did after October and said, oh yeah, music from Dell, they really sound like MIDI music. Oh my God. I work really hard to make sure that's not true. I can't imagine what it's like to go through all those articulations, like every single melody. Oh, it's crazy. I mean, that's why... Especially how detailed one of those sound libraries can get. You know, when you're driving an orchestra, I had to learn how to drive an orchestra. And I've been, you know, the first project I had to do, I had to drive an orchestra. Pirates of the Caribbean is largely an orchestral score. And it's pretty good. I like the composition and stuff. if I were to do an orchestra again on that thing, my orchestra would be 11 years better. I mean, bigger and cooler and in every way, because I've learned so much about driving an orchestra. And it's exciting to continue on. I'll never plumb the depths of all the potential resources I have to make sound. I'll never live that long. Up to the end of the creative process, Given the volume of sound assets that you're creating for the pins now, do you work with a very strict formal structure where you're briefed in on the length and duration and use of the assets, or do you work more organically? More organically, for sure. And I'm a specialist. See, I work in time, right? Everything that I do exists in time. Unlike a picture, there's no time associated with a picture. That picture is just a picture. You can glance at it, you can look away, you can spend ten hours with it. There's no time imperative with that picture. But if I were to have a speech thing start reading this, then it would take n number of seconds to read this whole thing. So everything I do exists in time, and time hugely compromised by the interaction of a ball bearing bouncing around on a play field doing God knows what But when it decides to do it, the player, oh, I'll cut the ball here. I'll just hold it for a while and see what happens. So the art of interactive audio, which is a superset of the art of audio, is still being invented from my point of view. I started inventing things to do in 1980 when I first started doing this. And I'm still trying to invent techniques and things that allow me to be musical, to be effective to create audio assets that work in three seconds or five seconds or this combination of things that I could not have anticipated. I mean, I know they're all likely to happen, but I never know when and stuff. So how do I make this one tell you you've got 2x scoring going on and how do I let you know that the ball is going on the left orbit all the way around to the right, meanwhile coming down, hitting the spinner, and then doing this and that you effectively get the results of all that in the audio domain. How do I mix that? Because I'm not there. I have to create a mix that works unattended. So I'm like a deaf audio engineer when it finally gets used. So I have to come up with ways to pre-vision and create a dynamic mix thing. And it'll never be as good. If I can get you to play the pinball once, and I take a video of that, and it had no sound, and then I get to post that, right? I would always have a better result than the thing I can do live. Because I have the advantage of iteration, and I can go back and do it again, and all these things. But that's not the nature of the beast. The magic is that it is interactive, and that you are a participant in creating the sound. The most interactive sound thing I ever did was Monday Night Football. Okay, and that was whatever that was, 1988. . Yeah, you got to play Monday Night Football when you can hear it. And the interesting thing about it is I can tell you that and you go, wow, I should try that. And when you play it, you go, what was so special about that? about that. But when you think about it, everything in the game, going through a lane, hitting a drop target, all those things are musical. But because of the system I had and I was creating it at runtime, everything is guaranteed to be musical. All the sound effects are aligned in time. They're all aligned tonally. So if the background is over G and now it's over D, all the sound effects now play in D. So I guarantee musical success for all these feedback for the stuff that you're doing. So you become a guaranteed musician playing Monday Night Football that creates a unique soundtrack for your pass through football. And I'm still trying to do that, but now with pre-rendered assets, it's harder. We're still now having beautiful assets trying to get back some of those properties of interaction. That was a long answer. I don't even know if. I forgot the question. Yeah, I forgot the question. Where are we? Is this Houston? Anybody else? I can shut up now. I just wanted to say that there's stuff like in LaserWire and Time Machine, those two games, especially in Sound of Water, it's really stuck out to me. Especially in some of the small things, like in LaserWire, the more you get bonus multipliers, it will actually play that jingle in a little bit of a higher key. Yes. So the point is... And all those little tiny things, I just like so much. Yeah, you know, at that level, When I first started for Data East, Pinbot was the game that we brought into our shop, and I saw what Chris Granner was doing, and I saw what Chris Williams was doing. That was my competition. That's what I was trying to distinguish myself. So I did something. You can't imagine two different pinball sound packages than Pinbot and LaserWarp. They're very, very different. But one of the features of them, what they were doing and what I started doing too, was all this dynamic stuff. So he was saying, as you progress through the game, the things go up. They go up in pitch. Well, then all the reward centers for going through lanes and stuff track that. So they all get higher, too. And higher is more exciting, right? So the music is quite dynamic, because it's being created at runtime. And it's just code. And to do that now, I would have to pre-render a version of every one of those that I wanted. But worse yet, when we play these tunes, they're blobs of audio. We don't know anything about them. We start John Williams off playing Indiana Jones, and he's playing. And all the processor knows is John Williams is playing. We don't know where he is, where the tempo is, where anything is. And the only way to get some of that back is we have to artificially track it. We have to create a synthesizer that would track all those features and then provide that information back to the system. So it is possible, but it's not currently being done. Is there a differentiation between music and sounds as far as pinball goes? Not as far as I'm concerned. I have sound effects in music, and I have music in sound effects. It's not a distinction that I... You use music in pinball the same way? Yeah, yeah. The only consideration to me is if I start putting music in my stickers and that kind of stuff, I want to be aware of what it sits over. So sometimes I'll constrain, like in Dialed In, all the out-of-mode music is in the key of A. It's all in the key of A, because all my stingers and scoring events and all that stuff are going to be superimposed over that, and I don't want it to sound dorky. I want it to sound better and somewhat musical. So I have to constrain my creation of the musical sound effects to, or I have to constrain the musical creation. And I also even compositionally will kind of keep things mostly in one chord, like a James Brown tune, just so things fit more gracefully on top of it. If I ever find a programmer who has enough slack to implement my meta-sequencer thing on top of this, then I'll begin doing some of this other stuff again. I was curious about some of the stuff that they did between, like, life synthesis and just, like, what we're doing now with, like, here, audio recordings. A lot of the things that they did was when they would use, like, specific manipulated recordings of an So the instrument would be used to synthesize and play at different pitches and stuff. So it would be interesting to try to . Well, we do some of that now. Actually, both in the Jersey Jack system and the multi-morphic system, we take pieces. And in fact, well, I'm dialed in. After you complete three modes, that main play tune comes back. It's faster. And if you complete some more modes, the main play tune comes back faster still. In fact, there were five levels of tempo. By the time you've done 10 modes, it's almost comically fast. I just backed it off so that it wouldn't be ridiculous. But it's cranked out. I got a new phone. Because you have done 10 modes, right? So we did bring back some of that stuff. But the way I did it is I pre-ringed. We have infinite space virtually on pinball these days. So I just made five versions of the main play tune. And the programmer just has to pick the right one. I noticed you were using contact in the video. You're using contact. It's just playing, like, read files of samples of all this. Yeah. So if you could implement a lot of that, like, by sampling, it would take a lot more processing and part of the machine, because that would be a really nice time. Well, there's a separation. See, back in the day, I was the sound guy, and I was the programmer, and I controlled my own destiny, and I liked that, and that's why I, out of self-defense, said, I'll take it. Here, let me take care of it. But systems, along with those tiny transistors, just get huge. And I'm even marginally aware of the system software that plays stuff on any of these systems. And I also have four clients, and every one of them has a different system. So there's no way that technically I can grok all that stuff. So I am beholden to them to implement some of these features. But as we move on, we get some slacking projects. And we're going to do more of this stuff. That's what's so exciting. These projects are just the best work we've done so far. Well, I've got one last question. When you're composing a tune, do you come up with a jingle first and then write the notes to fit that jingle? Yes, yes, and no. But it really depends. Some of these tunes, see, I think of it from my own thinking. There are jingle tunes, and then there are Amadeus tunes. And Chris Granter, who I think is a fabulous guy, works in the Amadeus mode more than I do.

_(Acquisition: youtube_groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_

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*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 91b0a23e-2b8b-4a09-9646-52f190efd31f*