# The Seasoned Vet Keith Elwin **Source:** Silverball Chronicles **Type:** podcast_episode **Published:** 2025-10-03 **Duration:** 135m 48s **Beat:** Pinball **URL:** https://b89f0af8-9ad8-42e8-8a62-5abf0ccc15db.libsyn.com/the-seasoned-vet-keith-elwin --- ## Analysis Silverball Chronicles episode featuring David Dennis and Ron Hallett discussing Keith Elwin's evolution from competitive pinball champion to designer. The episode traces Elwin's career from childhood play in California through competitive dominance (earning the nickname 'The One' and IFPA player #1 status), his operator/technician experience, creation of the Archer homebrew prototype, and eventual recruitment by Stern under George Gomez's direction to design Iron Maiden. The hosts explore how Elwin's unique background as both elite player and hands-on operator shaped his design philosophy. ### Key Claims - [HIGH] Keith Elwin has never won an IFPA world championship, though he's won numerous PAPA and Pinberg titles — _David Dennis explicitly corrects this at the beginning: 'Keith Elwyn has never won an IFPA, ever. Okay. That's like the one world championship he's never won.'_ - [HIGH] Keith Elwin was assigned IFPA player #1 because he was ranked #1 when the IFPA originally implemented player numbering — _Ron states: 'he is player one' and explains 'when they originally did the rankings, the numbers, it was whatever you were ranked at at the time they came up with, and he was number one.'_ - [HIGH] Keith Elwin is a six-time PAPA World Champion — _David Dennis: 'He is a six-time Papa World Champion.'_ - [HIGH] Keith Elwin created instructional videos called Pinball 101 and 102 that featured animation work he did himself — _Ron references: 'Pinball 101 and Pinball 102... he does the animation that's in the videos.'_ - [HIGH] George Gomez specifically noticed Keith Elwin's Archer homebrew and recruited him to Stern — _David Dennis: 'So Stern noticed Archer, and George invited Keith for a visit to Stern. I think George specifically noticed Archer.'_ - [HIGH] Keith Elwin grew up playing pinball at a local pizza parlor and 7-Eleven in Carlsbad, California — _David Dennis: 'Keith grew up in Carlsbad, California, where he spent much of his childhood playing pinball machines at a local pizza parlor and a 7-Eleven.'_ - [HIGH] Keith Elwin's early operator and technician experience maintaining machines across San Diego and Los Angeles significantly shaped his mechanical understanding and design approach — _David Dennis discusses how Elwin's maintenance work 'sharpened Keith's mechanical understanding and know-how' and contrasts him with designers who only played: 'Not Keith Elwin, not George Gomez. They understand I need two screws and this thing's got to come off.'_ - [HIGH] Keith Elwin was called 'The One' during his competitive dominance, referencing the Matrix character Neo — _David Dennis: 'Keith dominated competitive play for well over a decade, earning the nickname The One' and Ron explains 'he is like Neo, right? Like he can see things in the Matrix better than everyone else.'_ ### Notable Quotes > "Keith Elwyn has never won an IFPA, ever. Okay. That's like the one world championship he's never won. but he's won tons of Papa's and Pinberg's." > — **David Dennis**, 00:00:30 > _Correction establishing a key gap in Elwin's championship resume despite overall dominance_ > "I used AI to build this episode... According to AI, it's 485 pounds... if you're not an expert of your content, it's very dangerous." > — **David Dennis**, 00:00:50 > _Meta-commentary on AI-assisted content creation risks and the need for human expertise verification_ > "Rip the spinner, Hallett. Yeah. Yeah. You are the spinner expert. Everybody knows you know how to juice the spinners." > — **David Dennis**, 00:02:00 > _Running joke establishing Ron's expertise with spinner mechanics, a trending topic in pinball_ > "He's like the best player. He's the best player in the world... by the end of the tournament, guess who won the tournament and got an Elvis? Keith Elwin." > — **David Dennis**, 15:30 > _Establishes Elwin's early dominance at competitive tournaments around 2004_ > "My love for the game really grew in addition to operating and doing tech work around Carlsbad. It was less of a job, less of work, and more of a training ground for what would eventually bubble to the top for Keith." > — **Keith Elwin (quoted)**, 25:45 > _Elwin's perspective on how operator/technician work became foundational to design philosophy_ > "I wasn't planning on working in the industry. It kind of just happened after Archer. It was a passion project, but it actually ended up being more of a proof of concept." > — **Keith Elwin (quoted)**, 38:20 > _Reveals Archer homebrew wasn't initially career-focused but became demonstration of design capability_ > "We went over to Harry Carey's Steakhouse, and I was bought in." > — **Keith Elwin (quoted)**, 42:50 > _Casual reference to Stern recruitment pitch at iconic Chicago steakhouse_ > "It takes a long time to get up to speed when you're bringing in a new crew... The other thing is a lot of these designers that we all know and love are like 60, 62." > — **David Dennis**, 40:30 > _Contextualizes urgent need for new designer talent due to aging designer cohort in early 2010s_ > "There's, like, John Borg's, like, the youngest guy, and he's, like, in his mid-50s, right, at that time?" > — **David Dennis**, 41:00 > _Emphasizes generational gap in pinball design workforce, with even 'youngest' designer having 30+ years experience_ > "The danger is that he hasn't sort of learned the do's and don'ts... But I think his combinat[ion]" > — **David Dennis**, 46:30 > _Identifies both risk and promise of bringing fresh designer with unconventional background to major manufacturer_ ### Entities | Name | Type | Context | |------|------|---------| | Keith Elwin | person | Elite pinball player, competitive champion (six-time PAPA World Champion, IFPA player #1), operator, technician, created Archer homebrew, recruited by Stern to design Iron Maiden | | George Gomez | person | Stern pinball designer and architect who identified and recruited Keith Elwin after seeing Archer homebrew; described as 'genius' by hosts for strategic talent acquisition | | David Dennis | person | Co-host of Silverball Chronicles podcast, pinball historian, casual competitive player | | Ron Hallett | person | Co-host of Silverball Chronicles and Slam Tilt podcast, known as 'Rip the Spinner' expert, tournament organizer | | Stern Pinball | company | Major pinball manufacturer that recruited Keith Elwin; considering succession planning in early 2010s with aging designer roster | | Archer | game | Keith Elwin's homebrew pinball machine based on animated spy-comedy show; used as proof-of-concept that led to Stern recruitment and became basis for Iron Maiden design | | Iron Maiden | game | Stern pinball game designed by Keith Elwin; commercial release of concepts developed in Archer homebrew prototype | | Raymond Davidson | person | Competitive pinball player known for winning multiple WWE LEs; pre-Elwin dominant tournament player mentioned for comparison | | John Borg | person | Williams/Bally-era designer, relatively young member of designer generation in early 2010s despite 30+ years experience | | Joe Balser | person | King of Clunk designer at Jersey Jack Pinball, mentioned as contrast to Elwin's play-style-informed design approach | | Pat Lawlor | person | Jersey Jack Pinball designer known for dialed-in design approach with mechs and stop-and-go mixed with flow | | John Trudeau | person | Stern designer known for quirky, distinctive design aesthetic contrasted with other designer specialties | | Steve Ritchie | person | Legendary Stern designer known for flow and speed focus; compared to Elwin as potential 'second coming' | | Silverball Chronicles | media | History-focused pinball podcast co-hosted by David Dennis and Ron Hallett; this episode features long-form interview-style discussion of Keith Elwin | | Slam Tilt | media | Long-running pinball podcast hosted by Ron Hallett and Bruce Nightingale; referenced as 'other podcast' where spinner mechanics were discussed | | IFPA | organization | International Federation of Pinball Players; maintains official player rankings and world championships | | PAPA | organization | Professional and Amateur Pinball Association; Keith Elwin is six-time world champion in PAPA competition | | Pinberg | event | Major tournament (historically drew ~1,000 participants) where Keith Elwin won multiple championships | | Carlsbad, California | location | Keith Elwin's hometown where he grew up playing pinball at pizza parlor and 7-Eleven, and later operated machines | | Randy Elwin | person | Keith Elwin's brother who contributed coat/artwork to Archer homebrew prototype | | Harry Carey's Steakhouse | location | Chicago steakhouse where George Gomez pitched Stern design opportunity to Keith Elwin during recruitment | | Mike (Homepin) | person | Homebrew pinball manufacturer who emailed Silverball Chronicles to correct Blues Brothers machine details and discuss Taiwan manufacturing transition | | Libsyn Ads | company | Podcast advertising platform sponsoring episode | | Flippin' Out Pinball | company | Pinball distributor and retailer; podcast sponsor providing equipment like stair-climbing hand trucks | | Ken Cromwell / Greg | person | Hosts of Flippin' Out Pinball podcast; Ron has stated interpersonal conflict with Greg despite praising podcast quality | ### Topics - **Primary:** Keith Elwin's competitive pinball legacy and IFPA/PAPA achievements, Transition from elite player to pinball designer through homebrew prototyping, George Gomez's strategic recruitment of new design talent amid aging designer cohort, Archer homebrew as proof-of-concept and basis for Iron Maiden commercial release, Operator and technician experience as foundational to robust mechanical design - **Secondary:** Comparison of different designer specialties (flow, quirk, clunk, stop-and-go), Pinball instructional content (Pinball 101/102) and skill development, AI-assisted content creation risks and need for expert verification ### Sentiment **Positive** (0.82) — Hosts express genuine admiration for Keith Elwin's competitive achievements and design potential. Respectful tone examining career trajectory. Minor tension in Ron's mention of Greg interpersonal conflict, but largely celebratory discussion of industry evolution and fresh talent acquisition by Stern. ### Signals - **[event_signal]** Pinball Expo 2004 tournament featuring new Elvis machines was early showcase of Keith Elwin's dominance, winning tournament title (confidence: high) — David Dennis: 'My first Expo in 2004, the tournament game, back then, the tournament at Expo was whatever the new game that was out, that Stern had out, which at the time was Elvis... by the end of the tournament, guess who won the tournament and got an Elvis? Keith Elwin.' - **[competitive_signal]** Keith Elwin's dominance and technical mastery of gameplay exploits (e.g., Creature from Black Lagoon multiplier bug) established him as elite competitive player with chess-like multi-step strategic thinking (confidence: high) — David Dennis: 'Keith figured out on, like, Creature from the Black Lagoon, there's some weird way that it works where a multiplier increases by so much. But he figured out exactly what bug or something made it work the way it did so he could exploit it.' - **[design_philosophy]** Keith Elwin's design approach informed by operator/technician background emphasizing mechanical simplicity and reliability, contrasted with designer-only background (confidence: high) — David Dennis: 'This very much sharpened Keith's mechanical understanding and know-how of how things work on location, how things break, and how to design things in a solid manner... Not Keith Elwin, not George Gomez. They understand I need two screws and this thing's got to come off.' - **[community_signal]** Keith Elwin's calm, analytical competitive playing style masks intense internal focus and self-critical dialogue (confidence: high) — Ron: 'I've been next to him playing, and I could hear him talking to himself in a derogatory matter.' David: 'he's not panicked. He's not emotional. He's not, he just kind of is there. He's very zen-like.' - **[personnel_signal]** Aging designer cohort driving urgent need for new blood in pinball design, with most active designers in 60s in early 2010s (confidence: high) — David Dennis: 'The other thing is a lot of these designers that we all know and love are like 60, 62... So they're looking at, like, 10 more years, and it's like, oh, now I'm 72. It takes a long time to get up to speed when you're bringing in a new crew.' - **[personnel_signal]** George Gomez recruiting Keith Elwin from competitive pinball community to Stern design position (confidence: high) — David Dennis: 'So Stern noticed Archer, and George invited Keith for a visit to Stern. I think George specifically noticed Archer.' Keith Elwin: 'I chatted with George about Archer. He gave me some feedback, and then Stern flew me out to visit.' - **[announcement]** Keith Elwin's Archer homebrew prototype served as foundation for Stern's Iron Maiden commercial release (confidence: high) — David Dennis: 'When you look at this thing, immediately you say, oh, it's Iron Maiden... It's a very cool-looking pin.' Hosts note Elwin immediately removed Archer videos from YouTube after Stern deal, indicating playfield design recycled into commercial game. - **[product_concern]** Risk of fresh designer lacking institutional knowledge of pinball design conventions and pitfalls, though offset by unique competitive player perspective (confidence: medium) — David Dennis: 'The danger is that he hasn't sort of learned the do's and don'ts or the, oh, you never put a target there because, you know, this reason that's just inherent in a lot of those designers.' - **[technology_signal]** Evolution of homebrew pinball accessibility improving over time, from Keith Elwin's custom PC-based Archer (early 2010s) to modern easier options with P3 rockboards and CNC access (confidence: medium) — David Dennis: 'Back when he was doing this... you can't just go and buy a P3 rock board... nowadays, it's a lot easier to go to like a local woodworking community where they have like a CNC machine that you can borrow.' --- ## Transcript Marketing is hard. But I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now, and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience and their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads. Go to LibsynAds.com. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N, ads.com today. I went through your notes and made some corrections. Keith Elwin has never won an IFPA, ever. Okay. That's like the one world championship he's never won. but he's won tons of Papa's and Pinberg's. Okay, so here's the thing. I used AI to build this episode. I could see, like, I looked up Evil Dead. You know, I'm getting an Evil Dead at some point, and I'm like, how heavy is Evil Dead? It's got to be closer to life, 400 pounds. I mean, it's got to be at least 350, right? According to AI, it's 485 pounds. I'm like, no, no, it's not. And I found where one of the distributors has that as the weight, which is totally wrong, but that's where it must be grabbing it, 435 pounds. So if you're not an expert of your content, it's very dangerous. Most definitely. Right? Because I made a bunch of corrections already. Oh, it said Tim Sexton was on Jaws. I took that off. Exactly. And it also said a bunch. It was a bunch of that stuff. And I'm like, no, that's not right. Right. Thank you. Hello, everyone. I'm David Dennis, and this is Silver Ball Chronicles. And with me this month is Ron. Rip the spinner, Hallett. What's up, my friend? Rip the spinner, Hallett. Yeah. Yeah. You are the spinner expert. Everybody knows you know how to juice the spinners. This was a big topic on Slam Tilt. Slam Tilt podcast, my other podcast. We got that out of the way early. Excellent. Two months in a row. Get her done. Get it out of here. We know that you're the expert of all things to get that spinner to go and which spinners to avoid. So that's why you were wrong. Rip the spinner, Hallett. I love opto-spinners. That's a trend I can get behind in pinball. There you go. There you go. What's going on? We're on the verge of Star Wars. We've had Harry Potter. Yes. Yes, we have. Very exciting stuff. Now that I say that on the verge of Star Wars, it's coming out probably tomorrow. and I'm not going to edit this for like a couple of weeks or maybe a week, and then it will be totally. Anyway. We were invited to the media event. Did you know that? Ah, I saw that. So Stern is doing the thing where they invite the people to the media event to come in and play the games and shoot the pictures and stuff, and I would love to do that, not travel into the States right now. Do you know how much it would cost? Do you know how much it would cost for me if I were to go for like just one day? Why? And I have a direct flight from Albany to Chicago. You know how much that would be? Four hundred dollars. That's not even for the, I have to get a hotel, take Ubers around, do the different things, and then be back the next day. You're in Chicago. You could just sleep at Cub Stadium like all the fans. You just roll in and just never leave. But I do appreciate the invite. The shower in the washrooms in there. All the bathrooms, yes. Anyway, Patreon. Hey, we've had a couple people join us over on Patreon. Welcome, Jason and Robert. It's wonderful to see you. New cronies. We've got a couple new cronies. We've had a few people go up in their tiers from pro to premium, and then we've had a few people drop out and a few people join us, but that's what it's all about. Just come in, say thank you. You want to shoot us a couple of bucks just to give us a tip of the hat. We greatly appreciate that. the $3 a month premium crony. $3 a month pro crony is where you can start out. But if you want the perks, you've got to jump up to $6 a month. That's where you get access to the Discord chat room where we spill all the secrets that I discover. Most of it is stuff that other people tell me. And you know what I mean? I just throw it in there. I knew it was Star Wars. I knew it was Star Wars all along. Everyone knew it was Star Wars. It was all I knew forever. It was a big deal. And I also know that it's Beetlejuice. Oh, really? You think it's Beetlejuice? When you haven't heard any other rumor, like literally that is the only one I've heard, you know it's Beetlejuice. Nope, those are the ones that I've discovered through my active research. My dream is that it turns out it's actually Beavis and Butthead. I'm like, oh, my God. Yeah, no, it's not. I'll give you that. Yeah. Now, the big one is the early ad-free access. So we've got ads on Silver Ball Chronicles now. If you want to avoid those, $6 a month is where you've got to be. If you like T-shirts, if T-shirts are your thing, join us for three months at the L-Elitist Crony level, and you'll get a free T-shirt shipped to your door after three months. You know, being we're saying all this at the beginning, this means we don't have to say it at the end, right? No, no, we'll say it multiple times, because if you want to get ad-free access, I want to make it as annoying as possible on the free feed. Ah, yeah, okay. Yeah, please leave us a five-star review wherever you found us. It helps the algorithm push us up to the top to help others find us. Silverball Chronicles can also be found at facebook.com slash silverballchronicles, and you can grab a T-shirt alone over at silverballswag.com. You can choose from a couple of different design choices, hoodies, mugs, and stickers. You're a big hoodie guy, Ron. I see you wearing hoodies all the time. Really? I never wear hoodies. Thanks for supporting the show, Ron. I love sweaters, but I don't like the hood in the back. Silverballchronicles at gmail.com is where you can get a hold of us for corrections, comments, anything you want to get. There's a couple of pretty good comments, a couple of good emails in here as well. So we want to thank everybody for that. A couple of controversies last month. By trying to avoid the whole Taiwan and the two Chinas conversation, I stepped in it. So I've added a note. As well as if you don't know what we're talking about, just throw it into the Google. Yeah, you totally blew that one, bro. Mike from Homepin emailed us. He did. He actually emailed us. And he didn't hate us. So I think we won. Tip of the hat. Do you want to jump in here, Ron, and read a couple things? Sure. I've condensed the email. I've taken a few pieces out that I thought were particularly relevant because I didn't want to read the whole thing out. So I've kind of picked and I've chosen and I've massaged it a bit just to make it a little more condensed. And, of course, I added a nice part here from the email to feed our ego. Mike said, a couple of small things that I would like to clarify and or correct, if I may. Okay. The Blues Brothers machine you played that had the continuous ball save, this was at Texas Spinball Festival, was a very early prototype. In fact, probably one of the first batch of 10 we made especially for our best agents to get them out there. Dick was very quick, and he means Dick Dick Hamill, is he a programmer, was very quick to correct it all for us. This problem actually turned out to be a combination of hardware and software that caused this, though. It was a little tricky to pin down. Now, I've heard that they are remanufacturing some boards to send out to correct that issue because it's a mixture of software and hardware. So that's likely why the one that you played was still not quite up to date. So we'll take it on the chin for that one. It was very respectful. Now, this is my favorite part. Yes, as far from hating Americans, I get along fine with most. Just not the dickheads who seem so prevalent on Pinside. What a complete cesspit that place is. A mostly unmoderated mess. I'm glad to be well shod of the place. Oh, that's got to be like an Australianism. Well shod of the place. I've got to remember that one. I liked it. It classes us up a bit. He also says you didn't mention that the machine actually ships with three licensed Blues Brothers songs. Can you name them? Ah, no. What was one of them? One was Shake Your Tail Feather. Oh, good one. Yeah, and there was two other ones. I can't remember what they were. At least I remember one of them. Yeah, so here's something neat about the move to Taiwan specifically. It says, I downsized drastically when we moved to Taiwan, so we just don't have the same staff level or space that we did in China. In fact, the factory is one quarter the size of our place in China. Sales are strong, and we are still backlogged heavily at the moment. I would like to address the comments about Taiwan. Taiwan is a free and independent country and has never been part of the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, or today's mainland China. That is not what the CCP wants the world to believe, of course, as they falsely claim Taiwan to be part of a renegade province of China. Living and working in Taiwan is a breath of fresh air compared to China, and actually even Australia. Oh, burn! I've never lived in either place, so I have no... I can't really say anything. A whole two Chinas thing. Probably going to step in it again here, but just throw it into your Google machine, read about the two Chinas, and you can see the controversy there. Ignorant Canadian. Typical. Anything else we want to talk about there? No, no, Dan. We've got to talk about this one there, yeah. Oh, of course. Our latest and greatest sponsor is Flip N Out Pinball. You can check them out at flippinoutpinball.com. You're a big proponent of Flip N Out Pinball. Is that correct? Yes. We were talking, I don't know, a couple of months ago. I was like, I got to get these arcade machines down into my basement. And I said I was very much like dreading that whole situation. So I did the thing, right, where on the bottom I put the cardboard and I ratchet strapped it to my James Bond, right? And then I laid it down kind of flat and let it slide slowly down the stairs. Have you ever done that? Why don't you do that? So you do it. You slide it down, and then when it gets to the bottom, you just lift it back up again and put it on a little cart. I did it all by myself. You don't do that? I used the stair-climbing hand truck. The Escalero, which you can also get at Flip N Out Pinball. I look like an idiot doing this all by myself, carrying this thing down there. You just have to reach out to Ken or Greg at FlipTheLetterNOutPinball, and they will set you up with something so you don't look like an idiot, you don't throw your back out. Very, very good. Oh, speaking of Ken and Greg at Flip N Out Pinball, have you heard their new podcast? Yes, I have. It's really good. It's like one of those chit-chat podcasts as opposed to what's going on in the industry stuff that you usually get on the pinball show. It's very, very good. Well worth the listen. I don't really like Greg. Him and I have had some serious issues in the past. Man, you have a lot of issues with people. I have a lot of enemies with very good-looking people in pinball. If you're a very good-looking person in pinball, you and I got heat, and I put Greg at the top of that list. However, podcast is really good, and Greg will help you out in any way if you order your pinball machines from Flip N Out Pinball. Pinball has had a dramatic change since the end of the modern DMD era at Stern. The names we all knew and loved from the 80s and 90s have all begun to retire, slow down, or leave the industry. A new wave of designers has had to come in to breathe fresh air and to continue the love of the hobby and learn from the masters of the past. The first major new designer to come along was the tournament player Keith Elwin. Some say Keith is the second coming of our Lord and Savior Steve Ritchie. Others say in Elwynn we trust. But is this all hyperbole? Has Keith Elwin actually changed pinball design? Are we looking at a new era or just another designer? Join us this month as we talk about the second coming of the golden age of pinball with the seasoned vet, Keith Elwin. So what are your first thoughts right out of the gate when I say Keith Elwin? Until he started designing, it was pinball world champion. So somebody's like, somebody's sitting around, you're at a, you know, a pintastic or something like 12 years ago. Somebody's like, yadda, yadda, yadda, Keith Elwin. My first Expo in 2004, the tournament game, back then, the tournament at Expo was whatever the new game that was out, that Stern had out, which at the time was Elvis. So they had a big row of Elvises, and I see these players, and there's this one guy, Keith Elwin, and I heard something like, that's Keith Elwin. He's like the best player. He's the best player in the world. So I watched it. And sure enough, by the end of the tournament, guess who won the tournament and got an Elvis? Keith Elwin. And then the next year, it was Pirates of the Caribbean, and guess who won the tournament and got a Pirates of the Caribbean? It would be Keith Elwin. I mean, the joke back in the day when I joined the hobby was Raymond Davidson kept winning WWE LEs, and he just had a pile of these in a container somewhere. So before him was very much Keith Elwin then. Keith grew up in Carlsbad, California, where he spent much of his childhood playing pinball machines at a local pizza parlor and a 7-Eleven. He started taking the game seriously at around age 12. eventually becoming a competitive player, then an operator, and a technician, and of course, the designer we all know today. When did you start taking pinball seriously? What do you define seriously? To me, it's always been a hobby. I've never done it for a living, so I can't really take it seriously. So in the podcast that I have pulled this from, and you can see them in the show notes that I talk about, I reference, you know, head-to-head pinball podcasts, some of the earlier of those. There's an article in the Kineticist, just another pinball podcast. There's a good flipping out pinball podcast. All of that information, they're very much talking about this kind of the idea of taking it serious. He took it seriously all of a sudden. And, like, I run, like, with you, this pinball podcast. You're on two pinball podcasts. You play a lot of competitive pinball. It's part of your vacation time and stuff like that. Some would say you take it seriously. So if we are serious, what kind of serious is Keith Elwin at 12? He's pretty serious. I think he would take it serious when he's an operator and he has to make money from it. Operating and maintaining pinball machines. This sounds like a lot of fun, doesn't it? Operating pinball machines. But then it comes with the maintaining part. that's the crappy part is the stuff breaks you always got to monitor it quarters get stuck in the slots like all that seems like the pain in the butt so when you're maintaining and operating machines across San Diego and Los Angeles which of course includes like placement you got to get the thing up and down stairs in things you got to repair things there's the daily upkeep this is a huge deal that I don't think people understand because this very much sharpened Keith's mechanical understanding and know-how of how things work on location, how things break, and how to design things in a solid manner. Doesn't that make sense? It makes perfect sense. I mean, if you're a person that just plays pinball, you don't ever think about, oh, what if I have to take the DB5 vertical up kicker off and clean underneath or get a coil or something stuck, and it becomes this god-awful mess to try to take it off. No, no, no, not Keith Elwin, not George Gomez. They understand I need two screws and this thing's got to come off and it's going to be heaven. And I think that really helps Keith in the future. Well, Keith says, my love for the game really grew in addition to operating and doing tech work around Carlsbad. It was less of a job, less of work, and more of a training ground for what would eventually bubble to the top for Keith. But while he's building and maintaining this empire over in California, he's also playing competitively all across the country. Keith dominated competitive play for well over a decade, earning the nickname The One. Have you ever called Keith The One? I have not called him The One, but yes. You have heard that nickname, right? My podcast mate Bruce calls him the one all the time. Yeah, and the gag is that he is like Neo, right? Like he can see things in the Matrix better than everyone else. He was winning before the Matrix existed. So he is in the IFPA, which is the official ranking, whatever, of pinball. Everyone has a player number, and it's usually whenever you join the IFPA. Yeah, I'm like 10,000. Yeah, I'm like 365 because I'm old. But Keith is player one. What? Because when they originally did the rankings, the numbers, it was whatever you were ranked at at the time they came up with, and he was number one. So he will always be player one. That's pretty awesome. So when I go to a tournament and I've got to give them my IFPA number or whatever when I fill out my card, it's always like, oh, God, and I've got to look it up. Yeah, five figures, that's got to be a pain. I'm pretty sure it's five. It's either 8,000 or 10,000. I remember last time I looked it up, I'm like, geez, that's a really big number. Now, he is a multi-time world champion and clearly a staple of IFPA leaderboards. Where, like, even today, he's, like, huge on these lists. Is that right? He doesn't play that much anymore. But when he does, he usually reaches quarterfinals, semifinals somehow. Yeah. So he is a six-time Papa World Champion. His skill is unparalleled, and his competition success is wild. He has this weird, deep understanding of ball physics, and it's almost second nature or muscle memory. He understands playfield flow almost on a granular level. It's really weird when you watch him on a stream play. Like, he's just, he's dialed in. He's not panicked. He's not emotional. He's not, he just kind of is there. He's very zen-like. How would you describe his playing style? More intense than it appears. Because everyone's like, he's super calm. No, I've been next to him playing, and I could hear him talking to himself in a derogatory matter. Like, it's a, well, I can't, I'm not going to swear here, but, you know, you get the idea. Hit the red shirt. Come on. So he's in there. Yeah, he's in there. They named terms after him, like the L-win. The L-win is when you have four balls trapped, two on each flip. So he is, like, he is the one. Is that fair to say? Well, he was the one. Now all the kids have come in and taken over. Yeah, so consistently ranked number one for years. He won Papa's. He won Pinberg's. And Pinberg being, back in the day, was a huge, huge tournament. A thousand people. Yeah. His analytical play, I think, is the most interesting thing. You can see in his head kind of the math calculations of following. So this is the thing that I can't do. When I'm playing pinball, I'm focused on trying to keep it, like nudging it out of the outlanes. That's like the biggest thing that I'm focused on, right? And trying to hit a shot. And then there's like this next level that you probably know. It's a high level tournament players. Because I, these guys, like, Keith figured out on, like, Creature from the Black Lagoon, there's some weird way that it works where a multiplier increases by so much. But he figured out exactly what bug or something made it work the way it did so he could exploit it. Like, my mind just doesn't, I would never, I would never be able to do anything like that. I'm just like. Yeah, that's the high level where he's able to think like a chess player, so many steps in hand. I'm like, can I light a spinner and hit it a lot? Right, but your thing is I can light a spinner and hit it a lot, but you're focused more on that strategy as opposed to just trying to survive. Where I'm like, just keep the ball in play, shoot the ramp, get the blinking light, and I'm not a terrible player, right? So it's funny to see these different levels of knowledge and understanding. Now, Keith, for the fun of it, started to kind of design his own pinball machine, and he started to build a custom homebrew named after the intellectual property of Archer, the television show, and it started to impress some industry insiders. Yes. So let's take a look here. Before we talk about that, I could also mention he did a couple of pinball instructional videos also. Pinball 101 and Pinball 102. Oh, yeah. He was like the first Patreon guy or something. I don't know if it was Patreon, but I have them. And they are very helpful and entertaining. They were not just – and he did some – he does animation. I don't know how many people know that. Like he does the animation that's in the videos. He had like a – I'm trying to remember the name of the character. It wasn't Tommy. It was some other kid who like he watches the videos and becomes a pinball wizard. Okay. I recommend them. They're out there somewhere. Pinball 101 and 102. Everyone forgets about that. He did that before he started the design stuff. Yeah, it was sort of like how can I monetize my skills? Well, I can tell people how to like, you know, if you shoot the ball further down the flipper, you shoot this part of the play field. Make quick flips. Do not hold the flipper up. Yeah. Oh, that's... You know what really opened pinball for me? The one thing that was like the ultimate epiphany, and I think this was probably one of the first things that most people learn, but for me to this day, I'm still like, oh, man. If only I had figured that out sooner. Was the dead flip, where the ball just bounces on the flipper, and then you catch it with the other. That was like game-changing. The most important skill, according to his video, if I remember, was that. I remember the first time I saw someone do that. At Expo on Adam's Family. Ball just comes down. He just lets it hit the one flipper and bounce to the other, and my mind was blown. Like, why didn't he flip? He didn't flip. What was that? It's like when kids learn to not double flip. Like, that's like a big skill to learn. And mash in the, you know. But the Archer game, I think all of us in the community were kind of watching that because he had his YouTube channel. He would post updates for Archer, and he would have gameplay on there, and we kind of saw it develop over time. And he had stuff in there that ended up not being in Iron Maiden, which we'll talk about. But he had like a very target in there. If you go over to, and it's tough to kind of find stuff for Archer. I mean, you can find it, but it's an effort. The easiest place to go is to go to Pinside, and then you can kind of go to Keith Elwin. You can look up Keith Elwin, and then scroll to the bottom, and you find Archer. And there are a couple of photos there of this prototype Archer. When you look at this thing, immediately you say, oh, it's Iron Maiden. Yeah, I played it. But it's not Iron Maiden. There's a lot of significance. I believe he brought that to his show after Iron Maiden was out. Super cool. It's a very cool-looking pin. And here's the thing, okay? Back when he was doing this, and this was what, 2010? Like, he did the design. I think his brother, Randy, did the coat. Yeah, and this was, I want to say it was like 2012, it was like the early 2010s. I can't recall. I apologize. guys, there's no, like, there's no community support to be able to sort of build your own pinball machine, right? Like, there probably was, but it's probably much smaller than it is now. But that, like, you can't just go and buy a P3 rock board. Yeah, I don't remember what any of this ran on. I think it's just a PC in there. So we're talking a whole other, a whole other adventure here, when it comes to, you know, doing that. And then nowadays, it's a lot easier to go to like a local woodworking community where they have like a CNC machine that you can borrow for a couple of hours. The effort that I think it took Keith and his brother just to get started, I think was a big, big deal. I think that is what really sort of started to impress those within the pinball industry was, hey, here's a guy that's coming up with some great ideas. And eventually he would be considered the most consistent and celebrated modern pinball designer. But why did Keith decide, you know, competitive pinball is okay, but I want to try homebrew? I mean, he wanted to build a game. He spent all this time working on them and playing them. Why not build one? Yeah, it seems like the next kind of logical step. If we wind it back, it was the last generation of sort of pinball designers that all just kind of started building their own pinball machines at home. And then they would present those to the industry leaders at the time at Williams. And they would, you know, they would try to kind of audition for a job. I don't know if that was exactly Keith's end solution was to get a job at Stern. However, I think it was inevitable when you start playing with pinball design. What does Keith say? Oh, sorry. I'm on YouTube right now trying to find his channel. I think it's actually Pinball 101 is where he has his videos. I thought you had to buy them. Yeah, I think you still can. No, he doesn't have the whole Pinball 101 out there, but I'm trying to find, like, the Archer videos and stuff. This is where he would have things like he would do, like, he'd do an overhead shot of the game and do, like, a walkthrough of stuff like Ripley's Believe It or Not. like, you know, if you want to see a 40-minute game or at least believe it or not. Cool. Keith said it made sense to try and make something new. I was already thinking about layout ideas. I wasn't planning on working in the industry. It kind of just happened after Archer. It was a passion project, but it actually ended up being more of a proof of concept. The thing with the animated show, have you seen Archer? I've seen parts of Archer, yes. I enjoy Archer. It was never – I'm a guy. I love James Bond. I love spy stuff. I love spoofs. I love all that stuff. I really liked Archer, but it didn't, like, suck me in. Some people it was really like, some people were like, this is one of the best shows of all time. It was good. I enjoyed it. But it never really was, like, the craziest thing. Keith really liked the art style. He also said that he liked the spy theme and, of course, comedy. So Stern noticed Archer, and George invited Keith for a visit to Stern. I think George specifically noticed Archer. Because I think around this time, let's call it 2013, 2012, it's very obvious the industry is starting to kind of go through a bit of a change. The other thing is a lot of these designers that we all know and love are like 60, 62. Yeah, they're getting up there. So they're looking at, like, 10 more years, and it's like, oh, now I'm 72. It takes a long time to get up to speed when you're bringing in a new crew. And almost everybody in that era was an old Williams or Bally designer. Is that right? Or T.D. Yeah, yes. They've been around for a while. Yeah, there's, like, John Borg's, like, the youngest guy, and he's, like, in his mid-50s, right, at that time? Yeah, I don't know how old he is, but yeah. So it's like he's like the young kid on the block, and he's been designing for like 30 years. So we need to get some new blood in there, and I think George correctly, you know, George being the architect, right? He just, he's a genius in my opinion. He knows we need to start bringing in some new blood, and you know what? He's keeping his eye out, and boy, oh boy, was he impressed by Keith Elwin. And Keith, of course, initially hesitant to go into designing, but was pretty excited and eventually accepted the offer to take Archer and turn it into a Stern cornerstone pinball machine. Keith says, I chatted with George about Archer. He gave me some feedback, and then Stern flew me out to visit. I thought, yeah, let's do this. Let's go all in. Right. We went over to Harry Carey's Steakhouse, and I was bought in. As soon as he was hired, we all knew it was going to be Archer. at least the play field, because he immediately pulled, as you can see, because you can't find them, he pulled all of the videos he had for Archer from his YouTube channel. They immediately just, and I don't think they've been back since then. So we knew the play field was going to look like. So when you hear, hey, Stern just picked up Keith Elwin, what's the tournament community think? Are they all like, yes, he's gone. No, not like that. They're thinking, like, yes, maybe we can get some new designs. So, like, the quirky pinball designer was John Trudeau, right? Like, he had the weird designs. That was his gimmick. There was the flow and speed guy, which was Steve Ritchie. That was his thing. Some of the J.J.P. crew is coming together. You've got the King of Clunk, Joe Balcer. Pat Lawler's back. The Incredible dialed in, yes. Right? So he's all about kind of mechs and a little more stop and go mixed with flow. So what kind of excitement are we looking forward to here with Keith Elwin? A guy that's never done a game, so he's not going to be repeating himself over and over. There's some danger in that, right? The danger is that he hasn't sort of learned the do's and don'ts or the, oh, you never put a target there because, you know, this reason that's just inherent in a lot of those designers. But I think his combination of operation, operating machines, his tech work and his tournament play gave him this holistic view of pinball machines that I don't even think the previous generation had. So the previous generation grew up with electromechanical and, you know, the birth of maybe like high speed and those kind of early pinball machines. They didn't grow up with a modern DMD games and deeper code and stuff. How do machines behave? How does the play field interact with the code and what breaks and what engages players? I think Keith had a leg up in that. I would say he was the best player to become a designer. Let's just say that. There have been great players who are coders. Keith was the first, I would say, world-class player that was a designer at a pinball. And well-rounded, too, right? He operated. He fixed his own machines He did all He ran his own business and he played high level He got this weird kind of rounded vision where when you look at somebody like a Keith P. Johnson Keith P. Johnson's kind of a computer nerdy kind of guy. And a top player. Don't forget that. Well, yeah, exactly. But the thing is his niche or high understanding is code and how things interact and things like that. And then he kind of moved over into pinball, and then he was a high-level player and a big winner in his own right. But I don't know if he had that breadth of knowledge that somebody like a Keith Elwin had. So Archer becomes Iron Maiden Legacy of the Beast, and this is released in 2018. And a little trivia for you. So when John Trudeau had his incident, when he was fired, left CERN, Keith got his office. I'm sure he cleaned it thoroughly. Iron Maiden. So I joined the hobby in the fall of 2018. Iron Maiden is released in the beginning of 2018. There was some initial disappointment in the theme. Is that correct? Not from my end. You've got to remember, from my end, I hang out with a lot of the Orange County guys, Rock Fantasy, that area, and Iron Maiden was like, this is the thing. Like, holy crap, oh my god. I think Rock Fantasy had, they had a pro and an LE. They had multiple Iron Maiden. Wow. So Iron Maiden, the heavy metal band from sort of late 70s through the mid-80s, right? Oh, no, into the early 90s, probably. They're a significant era, I would say. I mean, they're still together. They are like the grandfathers of metal. They inspired the likes of... Well, I would say Black Sabbath are the grandfathers of metal. But, I mean, they made their way through live shows. There's concerts Because they got almost no radio play Yeah, because they were too Scary They didn't really get any radio play They talked about the number of the Beast Being their largest One of their largest sellers And oh Satan They're probably one of your Harder working bands As far as the amount of concerts they played The amount of tours they were on They would go on to influence like Metallica and kind of all those big bands. They have live shows with the big Eddie and all of it. Eddie, can you explain what Eddie is? He's their mascot. It's like this dead zombie thing, right? So that's their thing is that they have this Eddie thing. He's on their plane. I think their plane is like Eddie 1 or something like that. No, Air Force 1, Eddie Force 1, something like that. Iron Maiden was big and huge and whatever, but they had very much like this odd resurgence. I was never an Iron Maiden fan when I was in high school. I much preferred kind of that, you know, Radiohead kind of new stuff that kind of came along. I enjoyed Iron Maiden. They've had a resurgence recently where what is old is new again. And I would say very cool nowadays, very much like Iron Maiden. This machine is designed by Keith Elwin. It has the artwork by Jeremy Packer (Zombie Yeti), Zombie Yeti. And this is his, what, his follow-up game to Ghostbusters. Is that correct? Deadpool might have been before this. I'm trying to remember. No, Deadpool was in the fall. The program by Rick Nagel and Mike Kyzivat. Kisivat. Mechanics by Harrison Drake. He's the engineer. Jerry Thompson, our buddy Jerry over there on sound. Call-outs by Brendon Small. and the British lady whose name escapes me. The British lady, yes. If you have a lady in your game, she must be British. Those are the rules. The thing we should talk about, when Elwin started, it wasn't just him that was new. He has the team. And typically at Stern, they didn't have the same teams going, you know, to do multiple games. They would move them around. Yeah, you don't want the same feeling every time, right? Since Elwin started, he has had the same team, which is basically him, Rick Nagel, and Harrison Drake. It's like the three of them have been done. All these games we're about to go through. And Zombie Eddie's done art on many of them. All but like two, maybe? But it's like when they talk about the Elwin team, that's what they're talking about. And that's unusual, right? You don't want things to get stale. So usually you're switching up the programmer. But then again, if it's working, why would you do that? See, that's my thought about that. Steve Ritchie has always said there's only one dad. There's only one pinball dad when you're playing pinball or when you're building a pinball machine. And that's like the designer project manager, right? So you're not only just designing a play field, which seems like fun, but you're managing the budget. You're managing some supply chain stuff. You're managing the programmer. You're giving the programmer guidance as to how you think the play field should be leveraged with the code. You're managing the mechanics and what works and what's fun and what's easily designable. Like, you're not just designing a play field, which I think some designers struggle with. But this was Keith, I would say, on top of that pyramid has really shown, and especially right out of the gate with Iron Maiden, that he's able to manage a lot of those moving pieces. was it pretty obvious when it sort of came out right away that you're like aha we were right it is Archer well yeah that too we all knew it was going to be the play field we also knew it wasn't going to be Archer right yeah exactly and there's some cool themes about this that he kept from the original Archer layout but he did make some significant changes as well there was like an up and down ramp I think on the left side through the shot Very target was removed. Most of that was for serviceability. There was a subway originally that came up from the scoop on the left side. So there's been some changes, and a lot of that probably has to do with build of materials, serviceability, and flow in general. And, yeah, whether it worked or not. Yeah, exactly. And I think Iron Maiden really emphasizes, like, loops. So there's two loops in there that you're always kind of able to loop a lot, which is a lot of fun. combo chaining so shooting a ramp and then another ramp and then a loop and then a scoop and then a corner it's designed to not just be like shoot the ramp and then shoot the target and then shoot the target it's made to be flowing and constantly being chained together and it really rewards skillful control do you have skillful control Ron? I try to but it doesn't always work out so you're able to kind of keep the ball going like, what, two or three combos? Four combos, maybe? I wish. My accuracy has been going in the toilet. But usually with loop shots, that's more timing than actual accuracy. So if I can get into a good flow, you can still loop a bunch of stuff. I get addicted to looping on that game. And then it kills me. I'm draining myself. But it's totally worth it. So what does Keith say? Keith says, I wanted to make something that rewarded shot accuracy and gave players choices. It's all about the choices. Yeah, you can play, you can go down different paths. So one thing that I think is really unique about the way that Iron Maiden came together is its play field clarity and rules. It's very obvious of what to do, but then there's like this extra level, There's these extra levels that skillful players can go after. So it's not just trying to get so many loops. It's like, oh, now I've got super loops. And my score goes up. And then, oh, now I've got ramps and ramp modes. And now I'm into a mode. And then, oh, if I bring in this drop target thing into something else. It's really cool the way that it all kind of melds together. Yeah, Elwin has his things that he likes. And this game, like modes. A lot of your modern games, they have like 10 modes, 15 modes. They have tons of modes. Elwin's idea was, why don't you have less modes and just have them be more memorable? Do five modes, six modes. Don't do like 10 or 15. That was really Keith P. Johnson's thing, was let's have a dozen different modes that do different things. The other thing was have some kind of thing that builds throughout the game that you can get to. And in the case of Iron Maiden, it's all the power features. Power ramps, power loops, power this, power that. It leads you to the, what's the multiball you use? Cyborg. That's how you get to Cyborg. Yeah, so then you're even rewarded at the end of that path. Yeah. Which is really cool. When I played Iron Maiden, it felt to me like this is what Williams would have made had they still existed. Ooh. Honestly, because the call-outs were really good. There was only two voices, which I like. I'm sick of games with like ten different people doing call-outs. Just give me one or two that are really good, and I'm fine. So the first time I played Iron Maiden, I was buying a pinball machine from somebody kind of in the random rural Canada. Raven? No, it wasn't Raven. It was Venon. Oh. So I'm driving out to this place, and he's like, oh, we're going to go to my brother's place. I'm like, okay. So we zip over to his brother's place. I'm like, I hope I don't get murdered. So we go over to his brother's place, and in there is a brand new LE Iron Maiden. And, of course, the game had been out for, I don't know, what, four months, six months or something at that point? And I'm like, what? And I played that game, and I immediately felt like a superstar. And I think that's why this game achieved so much so quickly, because somebody who hadn't played pinball very much could keep the ball alive and felt like they were accomplishing things really quickly, even though I was doing almost nothing. Right. I was like, oh, I can shoot up the middle on this ramp. I can I could oh, I could shoot the loops a couple of times. I could shoot that spinner very easily. Right. It was like, ah, this is exciting. and I think that that was one of the big pieces of it, is it felt like a big deal. Some people had some commentary about the animations. They didn't like the animations because it was used from, like, a mobile game or something. They were fine. I think they're great. They're fine. I have no issues with them. Okay, so you look at the premium. I'm sorry, if you look at the pro, the pro is like an eclectic group of a bunch of the different eddies. You've got a zombie Eddie, you've got a cyborg Eddie, you've got a revolutionary kind of soldier Eddie. They're all kind of in there. The Premium. That's the Egyptian theme. It's the art package, right? And that's from the Power Slave? Was that the album? I think that's the one with it's all Egyptian. Awesome. It's so cool. I love that art package. The premium is very, very cool. And then the LE's got that sort of war theme. This game looks great, sounds great, plays great. Like, did Keith Elwin just kill it on his first game? He did, and he showed his love for Congo, which we'll see come up a couple more times. So explain that. explained. So Keith took this design and he played homage to a couple of other designs. Is that right? Well, he, I believe in an interview he stated, the left ramp on Iron Maiden, it goes through the pops and goes up. That's kind of his version of the Congo volcano ramp on the right. Which was on the right side of Congo. Yeah. And we'll see more Congo later. So he really had a really cool thing. The other thing is he's got four flippers. He's got two at the bottom, one on the right, and then a mini flipper kind of up on the top left that shoots another small loop. Yeah, four flippers. That was... Stern wasn't making games with four flippers. But they were making games with three pop bumpers. He had to have three pop bumpers. He sold the three pop bumpers. He's got three drop targets that are in the center, kind of almost sweepable, but not quite. Oh, they're 100% sweepable. Are they? I always I had a hard time getting them. I think if you sweep them, it gives you like two completions or something. There's like an award for sweeping them. Oh, yeah. So there's like the scoop on Archer on the left side is sort of replaced with a clairvoyant mystery orb stand-up target, which I think was a smart decision. Oh, definitely on the pro. Because I can tell you, having a premium myself, the orb doesn't always register, and you have to screw with it. Oh, bummer. There's a couple. I think there's two orbs in the premium. So what does Jeremy Packer (Zombie Yeti) say about Keith? He says, Keith is great. He's quiet, but when he has a vision, you see it fast. And would you say that the vision of this game was fully completed? I'd say so. Yeah. You know what? The only thing that I think would make this game better is a magnet on the backboard. Oh, what, to suck the ball in? So like Lord of the Rings type? The middle ramp. Yeah, not suck it in. Just when it goes up, that it sticks to the back panel under the Egyptian eddy. That's the other thing we didn't mention. The target you hit in the back is like a special target. It's able to detect the closer you are to the center of the target. But I think if that was a magnet where you shoot it up and it holds it and drops it, I think that's cool. That's the only way I could improve this game. It's like Kiss? Yeah, exactly. Now, on the left side, when you shoot the pro, when you shoot that through the pops, up the ramp, it goes all the way around. But on the premium, when Mummy multiball is lit, it kind of raises a secret entrance. Mummy Lock is lit. It'll raise the back panel, like a slot in it. It'll actually go behind the back panel, and it locks in the sarcophagus. So cool. That's when it works. Not always the most reliable. Let's put it this way. Whenever I have an Iron Maiden premium, when we use it in a tournament, we turn all that off. Yeah, tournament players are all weird when you do that stuff. You're like, I don't want any physical. No, I've left it on, and something will go wrong with it every time. So the Premium and the Ellie has the 3D-molded toys, the Eddie toys. It is the better package. The Premium is the way to go. Ellie is nice, but I think the Premium is the way to go. It's got that strobing blaster thing in the back that does different colors or whatever. I don't think that's in the Pro. First of all, I'm not an Iron Maiden fan. I love Iron Maiden music when I play this game I love the animations I love the art Like this game was a complete home run But here's the thing Was it a home run because he had been spending years Building Archer So you're thinking the way I'm thinking It's what they say about bands They have their whole career to make the first album But how about the second album That's where the real test is And that's what I was thinking When this came out and it was this big hit Like okay what's he going to do for his second game He's got to come up with something new now. Yeah, come on, man. Let's see what you got here. And then the rumors started that Stern had Jurassic Park. Jurassic Park. Yes. Yes. So this was released in 2019, so a follow-up the following year. So Keith is on a 12-month development cycle, it appears. This is the Jurassic Park adventure theme designed by Keith Elwin, artwork by Jonathan Bergeron, who goes by Johnny Crap, recently did Dune, programming by Rick Nagel, sound Jerry Thompson, and call-outs by various voice actors. And don't forget Harrison Drake. And a British lady. Oh, another British lady? I think there's a British lady. It's definitely a British guy. So this is based... There's a guy that's supposed to be Australian or New Zealand, whatever accent he's supposed to be. Yeah. So the theme of this pinball machine is loosely based on the 1993 film and the novel by Michael Crichton. We say loosely based because they had no assets. So Steven Spielberg buys the novel rights in like 89. He purchases the movie rights for one and a half million. We're getting all into this thing here. It is a childhood tentpole for many of the younger Gen X and the millennials. And I'll tell you, I liked Jurassic Park. It was not like I had friends that were like, oh, my God, they had all the toys and they wanted to see it every time. And then when Jurassic World came out, they were like, oh, my God, this is the greatest thing. It's got a follow up. This is not really based on the films. It's more based on the idea of Jurassic Park. with the John Williams music that people know. Yes, Elwin got to have his first experience of having a license but with no assets and see what he can do with it. They basically had the name. Obviously, they can use dinosaurs. They had the John Williams music, and they had Medri. And they can use, like, the logo. Yeah, that's it. You can't have anyone from the movie, any clips from the movie, anything from the movie. There's no video. Yep. Let's see what you can do. Now, there's pros and cons to this. The pro is, I want to get the movie. I like the movie. The movie is the greatest. That was my Zach Manning impression. And then on the other side of the spectrum is like, oh, I have the world, and I can do whatever I want. I can make any story I want. It's almost like a pseudo open license, right, or original license. Which, from what Keith said, what they went with was, you're a worker on the island, and you need to get off the island because of all these dinosaurs. This is their story. All the employees on the island. You need to rescue people. You need to capture dinosaurs. You need to get the hell off the island. Now, I think that adds a lot of fun to it. The code is really where this pin shines. So you have to lay traps. You've got to capture dinosaurs. You travel. There's a map on the middle of the island, and you kind of travel from one place to, like, the visitor center. And you can travel different ways. You can go to the right, the left. You can pick any dinosaurs you want to capture or avoid. If you don't want to battle the T-Rexes, you don't have to. And then there's somebody like me who's like, I just need to just anything. Just I'll play anything. It's too hard for me to try to navigate my way through. And you navigate your way through with this brilliant mechanic known as, what is it, the George Gomez Jeep? Oh, yes, the Jeep. They have a Jeep. You hit, it's a captive ball in the front. You hit it and it spins the Jeep back and forth and it chooses your path. So whichever way that this pseudo-target flips left to right is depending on which way on the map you travel. The other thing that I think is absolutely brilliant about this pinball machine is that instead of using the term like jackpots, oh, I'm going to shoot the blinking light and I get a jackpot, I'm involved in the story because I'm rescuing people from dinosaurs. I'm rescuing people from imminent death. Or they get eaten. They couldn't show that. Boo. But there's the blinking light on the play field is like the dinosaur moving towards the person to get eaten. Yeah. So there's like, it's brilliant. It is absolutely brilliant. According to Ellen, they did have some pretty funny death animations, but the licensor said, no, you can't use those. So I want to know what they are. I want to see what that looked like. It's a pretty deep rule set. Like, it's pretty smart. So you set traps, you rescue people, then you can capture the dinosaur, and then you can collect dinosaur bones by completing a task or not completing a task. I think we're forgetting the whole rule set. I think the play field is a masterpiece. I still think it's its best one. That's where we'll go now. Let's talk about why the play field stands out like no other. I mean, after Maiden, when this came out and I'm playing this thing, And I was like, this guy is at a different level when it comes to the playfields. The amount of shots that are in this thing. And it's not a wide body. Did you go, all right, let's see what's going to happen here with Keith. And then this thing came out, and you're like, holy crap. Let's put it this way. It's sitting downstairs right now. Yeah. Of course, Noah's maiden. So when I played this game for the first time, I was dumbfounded. I was like, oh my God, this is great. However, I think there's one shot too many. Yeah, wrong. It's perfect. I think that left orbity shot or the plunger 180 ramp thing, I think it's just a bit tight in there. I think everything could be opened up just slightly. Nope, it's perfect. Nope, you're wrong. But, so when we're talking about this play field, Yeah. The only criticism I've really ever heard from this, and that was people who didn't like the art. I like the art. And I think people don't like maps for some reason. They don't like maps in the center of the play field. I see that as a trend. People, as soon as there's a map there, it's like, oh, oh, the art's bad. So there's a couple of really interesting things on this play field that I don't think had been done before. One of them is the plunge. The plunge ends up in a 180 ramp. You mean like on any John Papadiuk game? World Cup soccer, it's a 180 ramp. No, but what I'm saying is that they've got it on the plunge. Now he's integrated it into the play field, not just the plunge. He has a really cool Raptor pit on the left side. The premium is the better one, obviously. The pro is really good as well. Yeah, that's the other thing I should mention about the Elwin games. In most cases, you do not lose a lot with the pro. Yeah, they're pretty similar. You'll still get great gameplay with the pro. You still get the shots. You get the shots and the gameplay, you might lose some of the mix. The wow factor here is the T-Rex that eats the ball. Which supposedly wasn't even in the original plan. That was a Gomez thing. He's like, what, you don't have a T-Rex eating the ball? You've got to have a T-Rex eating the ball. Yeah, if it didn't have a T-Rex eating the ball, I think there would have been a riot. What do you think? I don't know. We have a King Kong that's out, which we'll get to, which he doesn't really eat anything. Yeah, or a shark that doesn't eat anything. Yeah, well, we'll get into that, too. And it seemed to work pretty good there. The cool thing is that ramp on the right side, which I think is too tight, If you shoot that ramp, it comes around and then it drops it on the play field. Yep, right to the upper right. It doesn't return it to the flipper. That's so smart. Well, no, it comes right down to the upper flipper. I know, but it doesn't go back to the, it doesn't feed it like a, like a Steve Ritchie would bring that right back to the flipper. Unless it's Elton John, then he jumps, then it falls in front of the flipper. Then he just stole that from Keith. Oh, okay. So it's got, it is a great play field. And then I thought, so I'm new to the hobby. There's this Keith Elwin guy that I know is a high-level tournament player. He releases Iron Maiden, which I really like, and I don't like Iron Maiden. And then he releases Jurassic Park, and I'm like, whoa, this is really good. Really, really good. But he also, again, played homage to a few other pinball machines in here, or he ripped off some ideas, if you will. Well, it has the smart missile. It's done a little differently. The original Jurassic Park had the smart missile, which was the button on the launcher. And this one, it's actually a shot. You've got to squeeze the ball past the Jeep, the truck, and you hit a target in the back right. The left in lane has a up post, which I think is from Cactus Canyon. Is that right? Well, it's using Cactus Canyon. I'm sure it's probably using other games. But this will become more a key staple also. When he stops the ball, he likes to stop it in the in lane. There's no scoops. Nope. This is the second machine with no scoops. Yeah, he doesn't like scoops. Slows down the gameplay because it goes into the scoop. It sits there for a second. It goes bleh and spits it back out. He doesn't like that. Screws up the flow. Right? It's another mech that he can use somewhere else or another coil or another spot on the node board. Wow. This game. Yeah, this comes out. It was great. And they had it as a new game. It was at Pinberg in 2019, a Pinberg that Elwin won. So I remember seeing him. He was walking to the section where all the Jurassic Parks were, probably checking out how they were holding up. Meanwhile, he's winning the tournament, and I'm thinking, man, it's a pretty good weekend for him. He's doing pretty good. He's doing okay. How about the artwork on here? So this is not – Zombie Yeti. You know, it's not Zombie Yeti, but it's also not a traditional, you know. I had no issues with it at all. I like it. I like it. This premium art package with the raptors in the kitchen and the raptors in the back glass, here's a second example of Keith Elwin saying, I want the premium to be the coolest art package. And boy, oh boy, is it ever the coolest art package. So good. Oh, wonderful. That's the second Elwin game that I have downstairs. Has Keith made a better game than Jurassic Park? A better game? I mean, we'll see how King Kong ends up. So his next game, this was the COVID game. Yes. The second COVID game. This is Avengers Infinity Quest. So I had some money on the sidelines to buy a pinball machine. And I was getting ready to, I was just warming that money up. I was rubbing it, getting it all ready. and I was about to pull it out of my pocket and then the world ended and then I put that, I didn't touch that money. So then all of a sudden, the first COVID game comes out, which is Ninja Turtles. And that is a theme that speaks to me. Loved the Ninja Turtles. I was all in on Ninja Turtles. But then Infinity Quest comes out after. Avengers Infinity Quest. And I am a big fan of superheroes. So I'm like, holy crap, what do I do with this money now? It's burning a hole in my pocket during COVID. And Stern is just smashing it out of the park with everything they do here on these releases. And, of course, we know in Elwynn we trust. Designed by Keith Elwin, artwork by Zombie Yeti, programming by Rick Nagel and Raymond Davidson. There's a name you should recognize. Sound by Jerry Thompson. And call-outs by... Custom voice actors from Marvel. And mechanics by Harrison Drake. Custom voice actors. How many Marvel games have good call-outs? Iron Man, because they just used the movie. Deadpool, somehow. I don't know what happened there. I don't know how that occurred. Spider-Man, because they got Jameson. But not the Redone Spider-Man. No, not the Vault one, no. When Vault meant something different. This is based on Marvel, not the Marvel Studios film, The Avengers. This is based on the comic books. Okay, so not Endgame, not the movies, the Infinity Gauntlet saga. that again very much like Jurassic Park is giving Keith some freedom he can kind of make the story as he will with familiar characters that everybody loves like Thanos and the Avengers but he's given that flexibility to make them do kind of whatever he wants but not a flexibility when it came to the video assets where they had to use basically static stuff that they had to use and figure out how they were going to use it. We're kind of, we're well into the Spike 2 era now. They're still learning how to use that back LCD screen, right? How to not have too much images or too much kind of distracting stuff. Well, I thought in this case, it's just what they were given. Like, you must use these. It did not go great. So when this game launched, I saw this and I said, what? This looks amazing. At first glance, this game looks awesome. There's this under the playfield subway that you can see through the playfield. Yeah, which is basically Flight 2000 ball lock. I think Gomez and the team gave Keith some more leeway when it came to his weird ramps that are zigging and zagging and crossing the play field. And then you see that Captain Marvel ramp on the premium LE, and it kind of goes up and to the left. And you're like, holy crap, what is going on? It's also the ramps in the back look very, like, they look a lot like Gottlieb, the Gottlieb metal ramps. Right out of the gate, most people assume this is Keith's worst game. No. I think they do. I think a lot of it is just the rules confuse people with the whole gems and everything. That doesn't bother me. What bothers me is that it just, it seems like a bit of a mishmash. I don't know what it was about this game, but at first glance, I'm like, I'm all in on this. And then after I played it, I thought, eh, I like Jurassic Park more. You know, like, I'm one of those weird people that kind of liked Ninja Turtles more, because I like the ass-kicking of Ninja Turtles over the constantly shooting the same shots over and over again that I felt like I was doing with the Avengers. the other thing was there's a couple of like so Keith gets into the 180 ramps he loves the 180 ramps because it can give him more playfield space I think so I'm like oh he's doing the same thing again and it's like I thought the portal lock although really cool was a disappointment it takes a while for it to go down there and yeah you don't miss it when you have a pro So let's put it that way. So the thing is, what I thought it was is you would hit that spinner, the spinner would raise up, you'd shoot into the portal lock, and it would roll down to the buck and pop up. But what it does is it kind of sits there and goes, clink, clink, dunk, clink, clink, dunk, clink, clink. It's really terrible. It's Flight 2000. It's like the lock stepper thing that's on Flight 2000. That shouldn't have made it through. And I'm not a pro. I'm not an expert. I get it. I'm sideline quarterbacking here. That shouldn't have made it through because it is not fun. And if somebody like Keith doesn't like scoops because it slows down gameplay, boy, does that ever slow down gameplay. They still sold a bunch of them. They sold them. They did have some problems with that Captain Marvel ramp, didn't they? If it wasn't quite bent correctly, it didn't quite. Yeah, it didn't feed right. It was good. It was good. So the rule set centers around collecting gems from the gauntlet, battling Thanos and his fellows. You got to get those six gems. Each of the gems have like a perk. It gets confusing. Well Keith says we wanted it to be replayable like a good comic book arc Every game you can take a different path It the most strategic Elwynn There a lot of strategy in where you put the gems and stuff And even, I think, the high-level tournament players got all whiny because they didn't know exactly what the perfect strategy was. Well, no, the high-level ones all loved it, I'm sure. And they would all come up with their own perfect strategies. That's why they're top-level players. Because, like, most of the games are like, do the thing, right? Like, you're playing Batman 66, and you're like, oh, I want to Mr. Freeze and then Eggman and whatever, whatever. Okay, which one am I supposed to go through? And, like, where am I supposed to put the gem on? But you're the influencer in the hobby that's like, I don't like it. Which then influences other people. You are. People listen to you. They shouldn't, but they do. I'm pretty stupid when it comes to rules and stuff. So I'm frequently confused. But if more of you with a microphone end up kind of complaining about that, the more it brings people down. I would say out of all these games, this one is the one that confused me the most. Where I just, I don't really have a clue still what I'm doing. I think, though, this is the third game. You can't, I mean, come on, the follow-up game of Jurassic Park. Like, how do you keep up to that? But this game does solidify Elwin's signatures of aggressive flow. This game does indeed shoot really well. The layered rule sets, so kind of the base level multiballs and, you know, stuff for me, and then kind of the extra little bits and wizard modes and then advanced collectibles and things like that. The theme integration, I think, was really good with the toys and stuff. But I feel like if you took this game, you could take the art off, put a totally different theme on it and be none the wiser. I don't... I feel like this game could easily be any other theme. Whereas Jurassic Park, I don't think it could be any other... It has to be Jurassic Park. And I think that that is kind of the letdown. There were some rumors that, in fact, this originally was Ninja Turtles. Yeah, I never heard that. And then it was switched. I never heard that. Well, Keith Elwin, you can email us at silverballchronicles at gmail.com to let us know if that's true. Well, what Keith said about this game, because it was the second pandemic game, he says it was really weird doing everything remote. Art, code, sound. Normally we're all in the same building, seeing each other's progress and bouncing ideas around. That energy was different over Zoom. That, I think, is actually the linchpin. Is our energy different over Zoom? We're over Zoom right now. I don't know. When we're together, there's a lot more hugging. Oh, dare I say those hugs are so long and warm, they're almost a couple. So it is a little bit different. But not that different. But I think the camaraderie that you get in an office space where it's all like testosterone and harassment and, you know, you got Steve Ritchie walking around yelling at everybody playing on a guitar. I think you're missing something in that chaos. Will that hold up? I don't know. Even though it was the pandemic, they still sold a ton of them. And Keith says, I was shocked. People were still so excited. We had no shows, no launch parties, but the buzz was still there. That was encouraging. Stern did this really cool online head-to-head event. I remember that. Do you remember that, where everybody kind of was online and you would play against each other? Yeah, we did stuff like that. We did a lot of stuff like that during the pandemic. Yeah, that was a whole thing, guys. I like how you haven't noted the bottom. Terrible call. I'm Iron Man. Jurassic Park struggled. It depended who, like, the voice. The one guy, like, welcome to Jurassic Park. That guy was good. But then, you know, the guy was supposed to be New Zealand or Australian, whatever he was. That was pretty bad. Or the guy who was trying to be the non-offensive African-American. Oh, the guy was supposed to be Samuel L. Jackson? Yeah, but he's trying to, like, not be Samuel L. Jackson, who was pretty awesome in Jurassic Park. But the same thing kind of happened here in Avengers is that they had these, like, requirements, I guess. Yeah, you have to use their voice talent, and that's why we get stuck with these crappy call-outs in all these games, including the latest X-Men. For example, it's like if you say Iron Man, you have to say it with this cadence. I'm Iron Man, and I'm playing the game, and I'm like, no, you're not. You're not Iron Man. The one you can't screw up is Hulk. You can't get Hulk wrong. Yeah. You've got to yell, me Hulk smash. You know, you can't really screw that up. But the worst one, I think, that basically ruined this entire game for me that I could never own. Literally the only reason I would never own this game is one call out because it would drive me crazy. It said Rush Dogs and you just can't. It's the Captain Marvel ramp. Okay. Where she's like, by the code of binary. Oh, binary. Where you're like, what? What the hell does that mean? I know it's something from the comic books. I know it has to do with, I don't know. We see binary sets of ones and zeros, and that's the way it works. Yeah, it's just, oh, God, it's terrible. So I think it was after this game where things really, really changed for Keith. Like, he was on the pedestal, right? People were like, wow, Keith is, like, three for three. he hit two just grand slams, and then one like, what, double, and then now it's like he's doing something else. And this is, I think, when he became, what, the savior? The savior of pinball. I didn't know I needed to be saved, but yes. He became the GOAT at this point. Is that probably right? He's always been the GOAT. Come on. We didn't mention that in his games. That's kind of a theme. There will be a goat in there somewhere. Hey, guys, as a quick heads up, I wanted to let you know that in my real life, I'm David the Advice Guy. At Dennis Financial, we aren't investment advisors or insurance agents. I always thought that sounded terrible. We want to provide you with sound financial advice. In fact, we want to provide you with investment and insurance advice for life. We take that honor very seriously. Do you know individuals who receive financial advice for 10 years have two times the financial assets of unadvised individuals? For example, you've got mortgage insurance at the bank, right? Well, did you know a 40-year-old non-smoker can save $30 a month every month for 20 years just from shopping around for a more competitive rate? Now, just imagine what a pinhead like you could do with that extra money. Toppers and shooter rods, anyone? If you're looking for a more human dimension to your financial advice, Dennis Financial Inc. has you covered with advisors licensed in most Canadian provinces. Contact me via email at david at dennisfinancial.net for a free rate quote and a copy of our value of advice e-book, or check out dennisfinancial.ca. Insurance solutions provided by Dennis Financial Inc., Canadian residents only. Yeah, yeah, there's lots of, like, really cool little Easter eggs if you see them from time to time in the pinball machine. I think members of his team did that to try to get a reaction out of him, and then he just kept doing it. Yeah, but I think Keith just is emotionless and doesn't show that that's actually funny. So there were some rumors. I remember when I would listen to all these podcasts, head-to-head pinball podcasts, when I would listen to the pinball show or the twit podcast back in the day, they had these conversations around the excitement at Spooky that they were going after the Godzilla license because they were big horror Toho fans, right? Horror and Toho fans. I would never consider Toho horror. I'm sorry, yes. Horror, comma, Toho. Kaiju. They like Kaiju. Spooky used to have a podcast back in the day, and one of probably their highest rated podcasts was the one where they revealed that they did not get the Godzilla license and how it was snatched out from underneath them and the anger and horror that came from that afterwards. Yeah, they were pissed. They weren't just angry. They were furious because they thought that there was some underhanded tactics, or indeed there were underhanded tactics, I don't know, in how that license was snatched away. And the community said, I don't want Stern to do Godzilla. Stern will do a terrible job. I want Spooky to do it because they'll have all the cool toys and mechs that you want. It's kind of like when you find out your theme is being made by a certain company, and you're like, I want my theme to be made by this company instead. One collapsing building later, everyone forgot about that. How did Stern create a redemption arc for the ages? and that was giving the one, Keith Elwin, the Godzilla theme. 2001, so this is the sort of the... 2021. I'm sorry. 2000, we went back in time. Yes. Yes, 2021, this is the second pandemic game for Keith Elwin. This is the one that had all of its development through the pandemic, not just the end. This is the Toho Monsters Kaiju theme. Keith Elwin on design, Jeremy Packer (Zombie Yeti) on artwork, Rick Nagel and his team on programming, Jerry Thompson on sound, Harrison Drake on mechanics. I got to keep bringing him up because he's not in your list here, and he's very important in this one. And the call-outs by various voice actors and the classic Toho film samples. The voice acting, much better on this game, but does have a couple of issues, but those issues are more fun. Yeah, it's the same guy. It's the same guy does all the, yeah. Let's start on the high level. So the classic theme here is Godzilla. Godzilla, or Gojira. Gojira is a Japanese monster or kaiju franchise centering on the title character, a prehistoric reptilian monster awakened and empowered by nuclear radiation. So this film series is recognized in the Guinness World Records as the longest continuing running film series, having an ongoing production since 1954 with several hiatuses of various lengths, reboots, revisionings, and redoes. The Godzilla franchise has 38 films as of this recording, 33 Japanese films produced and distributed by Toho Co. Ltd., Five American films. They don't count. One by TriStar Pictures and four films in the MonsterVerse franchise, which is the King Kong Godzilla legendary pictures thing. The films have been considered to basically be an allegory for nuclear weapons. The earlier Godzilla films, especially Godzilla, portrayed Godzilla as a frightening nuclear monster. The first two, basically. Godzilla really represented the fear of many Japanese that they held about the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War and the sort of the trauma that came from that. I thought this was really cool in my research. Godzilla is a combination of two Japanese words. Gorilla or gorilla and jurira or whale. Huh? So he's a gorilla whale. Gorilla whale. That's kind of cool. And then you kind of stick it together and it's garjura. It's cool. It's really cool. Japanese culture is a whole thing, eh? Yeah, eh? Awesome. I would love to go to Japan someday. So the game design. Like I said, 100% COVID lockdown game from start to finish. And Keith says, usually I could just go into the lab and tweet something in the middle of the day. During lockdown, I had to be more methodical, make notes, wait for the right time to test, sometimes even ship the game for someone else to test. That's wild, eh? But I think this game benefited from that extra kind of learning that maybe they didn't get during Avengers. But now he's, like, making notes. He's kind of figuring out what to do. He's learning. He's, what do they say, like, going with the punches. Now, this game is heavy flow and creative loops with some seriously really unique ramps and some awesome mechs that are built into that. When you step up to Godzilla, let's talk about the premium because all the other ones don't matter. Actually, you can have a pro and it would be perfectly fine. When you step up to that game, what do you notice immediately? The building. And actually, Mechagodzilla on the right side, I noticed him too. There's like this building. And it's in the pro and it's in the premium. So you still get the building. It's still there. It's still ominous and big. And to the left of that is like a bridge with a Godzilla toy behind it or a flat plastic. And then on the right side, you've got that Mechagodzilla, which is like a Godzilla that was made to attack Godzilla but was like a robot. It looks impressive when you first look at it. You're like, what is going on here? This looks awesome. I cannot wait to play this game. And I think that first kind of impression that you get when you say, holy crap, I think that's maybe the worst part of this game, because it just keeps getting better as soon as you put a quarter in and you start pressing that start button. Isn't that right? Oh, yeah. When you look at some of the other games released around this time, and you look at Godzilla, the only thing that goes through your mind is, why do they give Keith more money than everybody else to build a game? They say they don't. Stern has said that. It's not true. They have said repeatedly that they do not give Keith any kind of extra bill of materials. Maybe if they saved $50 on one game, they might give the $50 to Keith on his next game. But we're not talking a big deal, a big difference. But, man, when you look at this game, come on. They had to give him a little extra on this, didn't they? Like, come on. It's loaded. When they did the reveal stream on this game, the first time multiball started, and it starts playing Godzilla by Blue Oyster Cult and the building collapses, I saw someone in chat put, like, they just sold 1,000 more units right there with just that intro on the stream. And I totally, like, yes, that person is 100% correct. So specifically on the premium, you shoot kind of in the building, like the main floor or the bottom of the building, right? Yeah, and it has a buck that pops and puts it on the ceiling of the building. And you lock what? three balls up there. Yep. And then when you go to launch Godzilla Multiball, Blue Oyster Cult starts, which is this kind of fun go-go Godzilla kind of song. The fact that everyone knew they were doing this game because of the whole spooky steal and all that, and I was just like, man, they should have whatever the main multiball is, it should play Godzilla by Blue Oyster Cult. Yes, brilliant. And I figured they might be able to get that because if you go to Toho's own YouTube channel, They have a video on their channel that uses Blue Oyster Cult. It's Godzilla. So I figured it can't be that hard to get. Yeah, and Blue Oyster Cult needs all the money they can get. So licensing is... But I figured it wouldn't be too hard to get that. Yeah, we're not talking Stairway to Heaven from Led Zeppelin. When I saw that on the stream, I'm like, oh, my God, they did it. Like, it literally is exactly what I wanted. So then all the lights are going off, and the building lowers down, and then the front of the building opens up and all the balls drain right down the middle. Well, they come right at you, but yeah. So it's really cool. It is a pinball moment like we haven't seen for years. But that mech is kind of like a mech we've seen before. It is? Yeah, it's kind of like the Doctor Who thing. Well, okay, it's different levels, but the shot path's changed depending on what level it's on, which is cool. That is the best part of this entire pinball. And don't forget Mechagodzilla, too. He ain't no Slash. I mean, he's basically just a sculpt with, like, a magnet. He's got a tummy grab. But he tummy grabs the ball, and it's still cool because he's Mechagodzilla. So I know we're fawning over this game. I know it's number one on the pin side, top 100. I know. I get it. It's got some weak points. And we'll talk about some of those weak points in a moment. but the impact that this game had right out of the gate was like, I mean, Jurassic Park was like, whoa, Jurassic Park is awesome. This thing, nobody had even played it yet, and immediately they were like, oh, my goodness, what is going on here? So that building will move up and down, and then that changes where the ball enters and exits on different ramps. It's a diverter that moves around, and it looks great, And it's called the Drake Industries building. Yes. Because it was built by? Harrison Drake. And this, you've got a Godzilla, right? Yes. So how does the mech work? I mean, it's on a motor and it goes up and down. Yeah, but it's like, it's not going to jam your finger and cut it off, right? I hope not. If there is, there's no warnings. But you haven't had any problems with the building? I have not had any problems with the building. I don't think anybody has had any problems with the building. The only issues they had were on the early production runs where sometimes the Vuck wouldn't kick the ball up well enough because, like, part of the ramp underneath was catching, so you had to put, like, a business card under there. But they fixed that pretty quick. And the game, the other question is when everyone knew it was going to be Godzilla, like, what Godzilla is it going to be? Because there's different eras of Godzilla. and, I mean, if you're a Godzilla fanatic like me, I think the best era of Godzilla is actually the 90s, the Hay Day era. The Hay Day era. Yeah, they're some of the best. So when were the really cheesy ones? The cheesy ones that everyone's going to remember that I figured they would do the game on, that's the original Showa era. So that's what we're doing here. Yes. So it's off of the invasion of Astro Monster from 1965. That's when Godzilla goes to the moon. Oh, God. Not the moon. He goes to another planet. And that's where he gets the aliens in the game from. What are they? The zillions? Zillions, yeah. The zillions, yeah. Yep, that's where all that's from. So most of the plot is from that movie, including the shoot the wamps guy. Shoot the wamps, who's supposed to be like a New York accent. He's in that movie. Okay. More useless crap. But, yeah. But that's what we're here for, is useless knowledge. That's what the game is based around, Invasion of Astro Monster. But then he also has all the other villains you would want villains. Other kaiju, King Ghidorah, Rodan's in there, Mothra's in there, Anguirus is in there. Godzilla's son? Oh, yeah, son of Godzilla. Minya. Oh, I thought it was Terry. Terry. Jesus. Terryzilla. He also has the Hedera, the Smog Monster one, Megalon, Gigan, like all the characters you would want. They got, I believe in what they said, that Toho was very like, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, just do your thing. Just do your thing. They didn't have much in the way of restrictions. The best licensors are the ones that are like, do your thing. We're good at RIP. You're good at pinball. Make good pinball. Licensors who put too many restrictions or handcuffs, the game suffers. A great example, my favorite pinball machine that I happen to own, the greatest pinball machine of all time, James Bond, tends to struggle a little bit with the licensor restrictions and thus made the game slightly worse. Still the greatest game ever made. Uh-huh. That and Tron, two greatest games ever. Not from sales. That would be this one. Let's talk about a couple of the little bits and pieces in here. One of them is the Godzilla grabbing magnet thing. What do they call that? The Godzilla. Oh. The thing. Yeah. What is that called? Magna grab. Magna grab. Yeah. So you shoot into the building, and it loops around. Then this magnet, which is like a cylinder, grabs the ball and flicks it up to the left orbit because it kind of goes in an arc. You can hit this magnet and it will stop it dead and then flick it. Yeah, and it goes almost 100% of the time perfectly to that left flipper. And then you can shoot the orbit or you can shoot the ramp or you can shoot the spinner. It's unbelievable that that works. And on this game, it's got the lane on the right. It's basically kind of like the hippo lane in Congo. He has the floating upper flipper on the left, which I think he said one of the inspirations for this, of all things, was from Doodlebug. Cool. If you remember, Doodlebug has, like, the flippers are in a little bit, so it's a space so you can drain, you know, behind the flipper. Supposedly that's where he got the idea of having just the floating flipper. But you know what it has? It's got a scoop. It does have a scoop. He relented. He relented. He has a scoop. He does. But the scoop, although very important, you're not in it all the time, and it's not really easy to shoot it in there by accident, which is nice. I don't think we mentioned earlier, like, Avengers doesn't have any pop bumpers, does it? Yeah, it does. It's got two. It's got two? I think in the back. At least it has one. So we're not stuck with the must-have three pop bumper stuff. Keith is the first guy in forever that was able to break Gary Stern rule of no three nest pop bumpers. Yeah, now we're down to one in Godzilla. And it's in a tough place because it's right by that scoop, and it screws me almost every time, which is what it's designed to do. This game is pretty, pretty great. It was really important to Keith to make sure that you weren't on one linear path as well. So with the code, they were able to use a lot of the video assets, cut them up in various ways, and make their own paths, which was really cool. So kind of on a high level with the code, you shoot, what, two ramps, and then you can start a battle. Yeah. And then you choose which kaiju you're battling against. Yeah, you want to battle. Which I think that was one of the few restrictions is they couldn't use clips with Hidora in it, the smog monster. So they had to use, like, they made their own. So they could use his likeness, but they had to make it from scratch and couldn't use the movie clip, which is bizarre. Yeah, well, he has a really tough agent. Oh shit, Jaguar, he's in there too, I forgot They've got like everybody Everybody you can think of is in this cave So then the other thing is you can summon an ally So you can get like a buddy to help you out Like a Mothra, I think, right? Yeah, Mothra's your friend And then they team up against Anguirus is your friend So there's a lot going on But let's talk about Okay, now that we've fawned over it Oh yes Let's talk about a couple of the things that people rag on. Okay, one of them is that the era of Godzilla that they used for the art, which Zombie Yeti, the master that he is, they went with like the comic book-y Godzilla, which kind of looks more like... Super bright. Yes, super bright, not quite as gray or kind of muted colors. It's more of a bright color. Looks a little bit more like a cucumber. Do you have thoughts on that? He still looks like Godzilla to me. I had more issues with the figurine they used. Okay, so the figurine that they used for Godzilla on the back left behind the collapsing bridge mech to the left of the door. What's going on there? He's green. I know he's green on the art, and he's too small compared to the Mechagodzilla. He looks like Mechagodzilla is twice the size as him. One thing that does upset you, and you've said this multiple times on the podcast, is you don't like when scale is off. Yeah, so I have a different Godzilla in mind, one that's much bigger and the scale's correct. Another thing that I find kind of strange is that the Mechagodzilla with the tummy grab behind the rotating target, spinny target. Oh, the turntable, yeah, with the spinner on it. We forgot to mention that. Super awesome, which is his defense shield, I think. one thing that I find particularly unrealistic is he's cut in half and when you lift up the play field there's no legs under there well no so there are some gripes to be had a lot of it around art which I think is not actually I think all that griping the art is good come on the art is amazing this is like their best selling game they've ever done I don't know if it's sold as much as like when they were that East, like Star Wars was their number one seller. I don't know if it sold that much, but... How many do you think it sold? Do you think it sold 8,000 units? More than that, I would say. Did you think it hit 10? I think it did. I think if it hit 10, we would have heard, don't you? I would think they would have announced something. Like, why wouldn't they? Like, there's no way that Keith Ellman would not walk into, you know, Papa or something and be like, sold 10,000, and then just walk out. Like, come on. I'd tell everybody. But we keep saying they sold, they sold. They're still selling these. This is still in production. Not only is it in production, they made another version of it. The 70th anniversary, black and white and red. Which I think is cool. Even though it's the same game, just with black and white and red. 70th anniversary. Can you believe it's been 70 years? Yes. Man. Godzilla's old, man. So is this Elwynn's masterpiece? I mean, as far as selling games, yes. I'm still partial to Jurassic Park, honestly. Bill. Okay, that's fair. As far as pure gameplay and just the layout. But as a Godzilla fan, I mean, you couldn't ask for a better direction. So, again, I'm an okay player. I'm not really great. Anytime I play in a tournament, like, if it's a real tournament, I'm like, lower half. If it's a local tournament, I'm like, just out of the playoffs or I'm first one out of the playoffs. So local tournaments aren't real tournaments. That's mean. That's right. So I'm, like, first at a playoffs or just barely making it in. Like, I'm an okay player. I find when I play this game, I feel like I'm accomplishing so much. There's so much going on. I'm collecting fighter jets. I'm doing tail whips. I'm charging up, like, electrical stuff. I'm locking things in a building. I'm fighting a person. Like, I have no idea necessarily what's going on. But, man, I feel like I'm accomplishing everything. And by doing that, I feel like it's taking away some of that accomplishment. Oh, it's too nice? You wanted to say you fail sometimes. No, it's just it feels like it's just it's too rewarding, right? It's like I'm always eating cake. So I don't know if it's like I don't know. So then when I actually get like like a really good slice of cake, I can't tell the difference between the cake I've just been eating and this really fancy $500 cake. Like it's just it's just it's a bit too much. And it's fine. I still like it. It's still a masterpiece. But that is a bit of the gripe is I feel like I am getting everything. Like I always say from somewhere from the business perspective, the amount of games they sold, it's perfect. There are no problems. As far as Stern's concerned, it is perfect. I don't know. Maybe it's like when they made The Addams Family, right? And they're like, ooh, did we do too much? Did we put too many modes? Is the code too confusing? You mean Addis Family, the game that everyone these days says they hate, even though it sold like 20,000 units and still commands like a ridiculous price? Right. So I feel like it's almost the same thing. Like the code has now gone to a whole other level where you're like being rewarded for everything and everything is wonderful and you get a big hug all the time. Anyway. The thing about code, and I figure I might as well bring this up now. One of the things, and I've had discussions with other people about this, kind of an agreement. The Ellen team, it's just different than any other team in that typically in these teams you'll have the person who does the play field and they're like the project manager and they're coordinating everything. Then you'll have the main software person and they're the one coming up with the rules and all that stuff. On the Ellen team, Ellen's doing the play field and he's doing the rules. He's the one like, I want the game to do this and they make it do that. And it's different than any other team. No other team is like that. And I don't know if any other team can do that. I think he's got all that capacity in his brain somehow. And the other thing he said, the other thing that, and I don't know if you feel this way, like all these games are released now, not just Stern, but they're generally released, they're always incomplete code. Like they're not at 1.0. They're not done yet. And a lot of them you'll play and you can tell like, man, This game's missing all kinds of stuff. This is like alpha. This is like alpha level code. Oh, I lived through James Bond. I know. You never get that with an L1 game. Like, no matter how early the code is, when it's released, when the game's out, you feel like you got to play a complete game, even though if there's not a ton of stuff in it yet. You never feel like it's at alpha. It's like Keith gets it a little bit. Like, he's like, I got to have these things. These particular things in the game for people to feel. Yeah. And the other thing, I can't remember which game this was, but he said, like, purposely the game was released at a certain code level because he wanted to see where people went with it. Yeah. To decide where he would go with it. Because he might have a feature that you didn't think much of, but, you know, most of your players are like, we really like this feature. Like, okay, I guess we'll go that direction instead. Like a lot of teams, like, clearly you could just sit back and say, I've got to have the basic multiball, and I got to have this mode and that mode, but it's more than just that. Keith, for some reason, understands that each game is uniquely different, and each game needs to have these basic building blocks in place, not just the multiball, not just the this, not just the that, but it's got to have this basic thing. And then what he's doing is he's kind of tweaking and refining, where a lot of the other code teams and teams in general, what they do is they're like, okay, I got to have those basic things in, But then they will absolutely change, like, the way the scoring works on those things or the way things stack because they're like, oh, I don't want to stack that with that because then it'll create this problem. Whereas, like, Keith has already thought that out. It's pretty crazy that he's able to do that. But the thing is it's also pretty crazy that his team is able to back him up with that. And I think people are like, we need games released at 1.0, like, complete code. Like, not really. No, don't do that. I don't, because do you want it like a Gottlieb situation where here it is, it's done, and then you find out something about it. It's like, nope, it's done. And nor do you want to have the situation we've had with Wick and X-Men where it's like, this is terrible, we have to change everything. Okay, if Godzilla is Keith Elwin's blockbuster, his next pin is really like his indie arthouse darling, and that's James Bond 007 60th Anniversary Edition. And it's a Spy James Bond film series pin, artwork by Kevin O'Connor, programming by Mark Panaccio, Jerry Thompson on sound, and it's got classic Bond clips and music by John Barry, the James Bond legend. So, Harrison Drake also did a lot of the engineering here, along with Robert Blakeman. So this is a pretty unique pin in pinball today. Is that right? Yeah, single-level play field. It's supposed to be like an old throwback machine. It has reels in it, like an EM. It's like a homage to the older pins. The last version of this that Stern did was really the Beatles. And I think the Beatles is an amazing pinball machine, and I would totally have one of those if I had money. Well, speaking of money, that was the issue with this machine. This machine is polarizing for a couple of reasons. That first reason was the cost. Do you remember the cost of this pinball machine? $20,000. So a lot of manufacturers will set a suggested retail price, and then they'll send it out to the distribution network, and those distributors will just sort of, oh, I'll sell it for this or that or whatever. But some of them in fact demanded like because there only 500 of these pinball machines made worldwide Now as a huge James Bond fan who has James Bond memorabilia who can quote like every machine or every movie, has the pinball machine in his basement, like loves James Bond, I can tell you that there are some crazy collectors in the James Bond kind of background universe. that would totally buy this. That would totally buy this. And most of them would be like affluent, like European people or Americans. But boy, oh boy, I think they missed the mark a little bit on this. I think what pissed people off is it's an Elwynn game, so everyone wants it. But then it's priced completely out of where most people are going to be able to ever buy this thing. When the Beatles came out, they were like, this is the most expensive license of all time. And it was like a fortune at like, what, like $10,000, $12,000? Something like that, yeah. And then this thing was just ridiculous. It was ridiculous. But it wasn't for pinheads. This truly was not for the pinball players. This was for rich bond collectors. Yes. And I think the issue here, one of the other things that steamed a lot of the clams in the pinball hobbyist groups were that this was the James Bond pin that most of the pinheads wanted, which was done by Keith Elwin, was every James Bond. Every Bond. Not just Sean Connery. This is one of the few things that has that, like, as far as art. Like, I can't think of any other of the James Bond games at all that have, like, every Bond on it. So you've got Connery. Even George Lazenby. Lazenby's on there. Like, come on. He was in one film. One of the greatest, but come on. And then you got Roger Moore, Daniel Craig, Pierce Brosnan, and Timothy Dalton in two films. You've got them all. You've got Oddjob. You've got Jaws. You've got Trevelyan. You've got Le Chiffre. You've got Blofeld. You've got Zoran. You've got all... All the bonds are holding guns. They're all there. Like, it's... Yeah, it's like the thing. But what we didn't get that, we got George Gomez and Lonnie D. Ropp, which are fine. George Gomez is my favorite designer. Lonnie D. Ropp... You said it was the greatest game ever just a few minutes ago. It is the greatest game ever, but it could have been the greatest game that we will ever see ever without being surpassed. Okay. Okay. It really kind of upset folk because this was not for you people. It has four spinners. It has four spinners. Four spinners. Keith Owen said, we wanted to honor the early days of Bond and pinball at the same time. Did he do that? Oh, yeah. Look at all the drop targets. Look at the inlines. You got inline drop targets, all the regular drop targets. You got a spinny toy. He made flow without any ramps. Four spinners. They got reels. In the backbox, instead of an LCD, they have actual physical moving reels that rotate. They had to prove to people that they were real. Everyone kept thinking they were video. I remember that. It's like, that's not actually real. That's video. It's like, no, they're actually real. So I think the thing is here that trying to get around the requirements of what is to be on the LCD screen, because it was such a pain in the ass during the other James Bond that Gomez did with Lonnie that they probably said, let's stay away from all of that in this pin somehow. And they came up with this gimmick. And unfortunately, I don't like this gimmick. Oh. I don't. The thing with the movies was, I believe, you can use movie clips, but you can't have any graphics on top of them. And you can't interrupt them under certain circumstances. So, yeah, that's why it doesn't have any. Yeah, that's the way it is. And you can't use any call, like you can't cut call-outs or clips from the film. And there were so many amazing opportunities to be able to take things that characters said at certain times. Like, there's not very many quips of James Bond played unless it's in a clip. Right? Like, he doesn't make any of his gags or jokes or double entendres unless it's in his videos. Yeah. One of my favorites, yeah. But he does that, but it's on the video. He doesn't just say it when you shoot a target. So it's disappointing. The spinner, the odd job hat spinner, do you see that in the middle of the play field? I do. So awesome. That spinner was originally supposed to be on George Gomez game, and it was supposed to be in the middle of the play field. However, George did not like it because it messed up some of his shots. So he removed it, and Keith is like, yoink, and stuck it in there. I think that was a mistake I think that still should have been in the other pin The greatest pin of all time The greatest pin of all time Would have been even better But they were at a node board space Have you played this? Yes Is it great? It was fine It's the same feeling I had It plays shorter so you'd really have to have it And play a bunch of games on it for a period of time It was that pintastic And I played it quite a few times And I'm like, hey, this is kind of fun, but I prefer the other pin. Is it $20,000 of fun? No, not even remotely close. Okay. It's fun, but I don't know. There's one of these for sale new in a box on like a forum here in Canada, and they still want, I don't know, $23,000 Canadian, and I'm like, there's no way. There's no way. What is that, like 5K US? the art was also panned because it's like a mixture of hand drawn and photographs but some of the photographs are more washed out than the others because you can tell they were taken in different eras with different cameras and it was clearly a licensor requirement that you're not able to Christopher Franchi the art yes so he can't take the art and jazz it up it's like no you gotta use the photos so they kind of look like like Roger Moore is washed out, James Bond, like, sorry, Sean Connery is more like, it almost looks hand-drawn. Who owns Bond now? Someone bought it. So here's the thing. James Bond licensing is quite complicated. So there's a company called Dijak. Dijak owns, like, the IP, but then, like, the movie rights, those were owned by the Broccoli's. They've sold the movie rights and everything to Amazon. Amazon, okay. And then my understanding is that the licensing has also moved from Dijak somehow, but I don't know how this is going to work out. And you know what? It's pretty scary to think Amazon might have James Bond. It's going to be great. It'll be a whole James Bond universe. You'll have the adventures of Moneypenny. You'll have maybe Q will get his own show, where he invents all kinds of new spy equipment. It's going to be great. Yeah, it'll be great. It's just what everyone wants. Yeah. But the only saving grace is that Denis Villeneuve apparently has signed on to be the director of the next James Bond film. I don't know. Is that the Dune guy? That's the Dune guy. That's the only reason I recognize that name. I just remember it was like a French-sounding name, the guy who did Dune. From Montreal, Quebec, Canada. So how do we follow up an indie art house? we go with the first summer blockbuster summer blockbuster of all time Jaws which just had it's 50th anniversary I think I just watched this with my kids they loved it actually it's playing in theaters now my kids love this film I love this film wait a minute you had your kids watch this of course I did there's people getting their limbs chopped off they're 10 and 8 and they loved every minute of it. Okay. So this is Keith Elwin's design. We got Harrison Drake on engineering software by Elizabeth Elizabeth Gieske, who is a newcomer. Rick Nagel, Michael Barnard on artwork, who is a new name as well. Jerry Thompson on sound. And it's a great game. It's a great game. Yeah. Remember, it's not just Jaws. It's technically Jaws 1 through 4, I think. It goes up to, like, Jaws Revenge. Even though I don't remember seeing too much stuff from the other Jawses in the game. This coming from the guy who says there's only three Star Wars films. That's true. The weird thing about Jaws was this was the game, this license was out there for a while and was rumored. And Jersey Jack supposedly turned this down because they would only get the shark. Yeah, so you could only have the shark. There's no video clips. When Stern got this, I was like, well, how's this going to work? And then it came out, and literally they had, like, everything. Yeah, so everybody assumed it was going to be like Jurassic Park, right, where it's like the Jaws universe. I mean, they didn't have Brody. They didn't have Roy Scheider. They didn't have – because they couldn't get a hold of his family. Like, his family would not respond to them to give them permission to use his likeness. But they could use it in the actual video clips. So he's in the game. He is basically your hero. You're kind of playing as him. But it's cool. Jaws is the 1975 American thriller film by Steven Spielberg. Stars Roy Schneider as the police chief. Scheider. Everyone says his name wrong. There's no N. Roy Schneider as the police chief of Martin Brody, who was helped by a marine biologist who was Richard Richard Dreyfuss, and a professional shark hunter, Robert Shaw. Quint, yes. Yeah, just awesome in The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3. It hunts a man-eating great white shark that attacks beachgoers in New Robert Englunds's summer resort town. It was shot mostly on location in Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts. From May to October of 1974, Jaws saw some major, major motion picture issues when it came to malfunctioning shark toy thing and trying to shoot it on the water was really difficult. Yes, Spielberg's assistance in actually doing it in the ocean went way over budget. He thought he was going to be fired. It was really, really, really a whole thing. It brings out John Williams in his beginnings as a musical composer. It had a $9 million budget. It made $477.9 million in the box office and destroyed the entire beach season for probably half. John Williams has been around since the 50s, FYI, doing movies. Yeah, but he, like, really hit it when he got into blockbusters, I think. Well, when he got with Spielberg, that's for sure. Right, like him and... You know what's crazy? You know what's crazy? George Lucas. Robert Shaw. Yeah, that was a suggestion from Spielberg. Hey, you should use my guy, John Williams, to do your Star Wars movie. That worked out. Robert Shaw is in two pinball machines. Oh. Technically, maybe three. Is he in the $20,000 one? He's in your James Bond, your greatest game of all time. He's one of the henchmen. From Russia with love, he's the main henchman. So he's in two games, possibly three if he's in the $20,000 one. I just thought that was funny. I have all these celebrities who aren't in games and won't be in games. And then you've got Robert Shaw, who probably is, well, he died in, like, 78. So he has no idea he's in all these games. I guess his family's been very accommodating. Yeah, so what about the game? Wow! That blew my mind. It blew your mind. Yeah, he's good as the henchman in that, too. He is so good. Yes. So good. So the narrative and design of this game is pretty cool. It's designed very much like the film to create like some suspense and tension. I love it. And hurry ups. Like it's really good. You put Shum in the water to get the shark out. Then you got to hit him with the harp, get the barrels on him. It's so good. All the stuff from the movie. So you got like beach attacks that lead into an investigation. And then you're on the boat to hunt him. and it's really cool the way that it goes there. So you can tell that Keith understands the IP. He's probably a really big fan of the film. Well, Keith says, I wanted the player to feel the tension of the hunt. That third act is everything. So the chum line is like a drop target that pops up under the play field and moves left to right. And it's a fin. And it's a fin. And there's some issues with that because sometimes it creates air balls. Yeah. Well, it was even worse. They originally tried to make the drop target shake like a fin. And what happened there is the ball just went everywhere when it hit it. Like, by everywhere, like fly out of the game, all kinds of crazy stuff. So they couldn't do that. Yeah, so they kind of did that. Now, that's in every model, pro and premium. It also has a really cool small flipper on the right side that can actually be auto-flipped up and kind of lock balls that shoots then drop targets on the other side of the play field, which is super cool. You can also shoot up the lane with it. It's super cool. It hits way more things than you think it does. It's really well placed. It's very well designed. Now, the Premium LE has a boat that has a captive ball, and then it lifts up and the shark comes up and you bash the shark in the face. It also has the Orca boat on the left side, which is like a mini playfield. Yes, an upper playfield. This is Keith Elwin's first upper playfield. He did a pretty good job. Yeah, it's got one left flipper and three right flippers in this game. So here's the thing. Shark no eat ball. Ron, why shark no eat ball? Because they tried it and it didn't work. Shark no eat ball no fun. Ellen says, I wanted the shark to be the star, but also we wanted you to feel like you're in the water, on the boat, and under constant threat. They tried to make the shark eat the ball. It was not fun, as well as it was a licensor requirement that the shark pop up from the playfield. The shark had to scare you like in the film. That was a thing, a licensure requirement. So if you wanted the shark to eat the ball and pop up out of the playfield, it just ended up not being all that fun. Now, if Keith had another six months, could he have figured it out and made it more fun? Yeah, probably. But I don't think it's actually that. I think it's great the way it is. I love it. Another Elwynn first. actual video clips in narrative format. He had video clips in Godzilla, but that was interspliced a lot with their own custom graphics. Here is an actual video clip movie. Like when you think about film. What do you think about that? Do you think it's cool? Does he pull it off? Yeah. I mean, when you do the, shoot the barrel, go, go, go, and it's right on the screen. Like all the scenes from the movie. So good. Call-outs. It's got great call-outs, finally. Yeah, they got, well, call-outs from the movie, and they somehow got Richard Richard Dreyfuss in there. They got Richard Richard Dreyfuss. Yeah. The actual Richard Richard Dreyfuss. And he sounds enough like Richard Richard Dreyfuss to still be Richard Richard Dreyfuss. Yeah, it's not like Richard Richard Dreyfuss' brother, who's the guy that does other things when Richard Richard Dreyfuss needs to talk about things. Tom Hanks. To be fair, Tom Hanks' brother does sound just like Tom Hanks. So it comes together really, really well. However, not everybody loves this game, which I find strange. It also has all these extra little mini games that they put in there. You talk about that. I just remember they exist. I don't remember what they are. So, like, the video mode has a Jaws 3D thing, and it comes with 3D glasses, and you could put it on. Oh, yeah, yeah. I was thinking more of the mini games they put in later where you can just play a completely different game. Very well done. In general, I think this is a great game. I don't think it is Godzilla. I don't think it's Jurassic Park. But, you know, I haven't played any Godzillas, or I haven't played any King Kong. I think it might be some of the biggest gameplay difference between his pro and premium, because it has the upper play feel. And I did feel that added a lot. Like, I would prefer the premium if I was going to get one of these. Yeah, agreed. It also has a 180 ramp. Keith still always repeating and recycling 180 ramps. And a spinning disc thingy. Yeah, so we're starting to see now, I think, a lot of Keith's fingerprints. He's in enough games now, he's made enough games, that we're starting to see similarities and commonalities. However, he's still finding ways to make things very different, which is really impressive. I'm really impressed with how he's still able to find kind of weird shots here and there, but he's starting to develop a style, right? I think Jaws was probably the longest they took to get to 1.0. Yeah, it took a little bit of misquotaging. And they also released the new 50th anniversary Jaws, which is a premium with a sticker and the art package that everybody wanted, because the premium art package didn't go over really well. Which I don't understand. I'm not as infatuated with the movie poster that everyone, you know, the one where he's coming up, iconic movie poster of the woman swimming and he's coming up. I liked the premium Translight where you're basically Quint about to get eaten. Yeah, it's cool. I think the 50th anniversary one, it's got like the whole top section of the side art is just white. Yeah, I get you. If you're looking for something more original, this is the way to go. If you're hardcore movie people, you're probably going to want the Pro, the LE, or the 50th. And I would say that this is one of his longest players. I think Keith has figured something out. People like long playing games. Ah, not all of us. No, I agree. I much prefer short. I like the Steve Ritchie ass-kicker, John Borg ass-kicking games. I prefer those types of games. But I'm not everybody. I think people like to stand up next to a game and play twice as long as you would on a Richie and do better. And I think when it comes to online reviews on Pinside, the longer the playing game that you can build, the higher up that list you're going to go. I think people give Steve Ritchie a hard time or John Borg a hard time because their games are hard. Really? Spider-Man is pretty easy. 24 plays forever. But that was a kind of a, like, that's not, that's like the anomaly. T3 plays forever. I can go on. Shut up, Ron. Every Keith Elwin plays long. My Jurassic Park, I could never get long games on that thing. It's because it's got one shot too many. No. How about the James Bond, the $20,000 one? That doesn't play long. Yeah, but nobody plays that game. Because it's not around anywhere because it's $20,000. Keith makes longer playing games, and I think people appreciate that more, and they inevitably think a game is a better game if it plays longer. I don't think that that's right or wrong, but I think that's what it is. It's like different strokes for different folks. I had Tron, an absolute ass-kicker, next to the Simpsons, which was a long player. Great match. But if I have just one that is an ass-kicker or one that's a long player, it kind of gets boring. Or you could just buy a Starz and you'll never be bored. The official game of Final Round Pinball Podcast. Who? I don't know who that is. What did I say? I like the art. I did like the art on this one. Some people might say it's too blue. It's like you're in the freaking ocean. What color is it supposed to be? A lot of people said that it's the best theme integrated stern since Jurassic Park. The limited editions disappeared. Oh, yeah. Tournament folk loved it for the most part, but they didn't love it as much as Jurassic Park and some of the others. Like, all these Elwynn games we're mentioning, how many are no longer made? I think they stopped making Iron Maiden. Just recently, this year. Which is ridiculous. How about Avengers? Did they stop making that? Yes. Yeah. I think every other one he's done. Like, recently, right? Like, the last six months. I think every other one he's done is still technically in production. Think about that. I don't think they have any other designs that can say that. It's pretty, pretty, pretty good. But that's not all. There's one more game. This is the 2025 release Monster Adventure theme. King Kong, Myth of Terror Island. Artwork by Kevin O'Connor, Greg Freres, who I thought retired, and Jeremy Packer (Zombie Yeti), Zombie Yeti. Programming by Rick Nagel. Sound by Jerry Thompson. Call-outs by Brian Q Quinn, who is the fellow that does all of these call-outs. And Rick Z... Yeah. Rick Z... Zip. Zip. Yeah. And Engineering by Harrison Drake. This game came out, and I have to say, I love King Kong. I like King Kong more than I like Godzilla. I've always kind of liked King Kong. I've always liked the idea of King Kong more. I like that kind of 1920s adventure on the island. Right? I really like that kind of aesthetic. I think it's cooler. It's cheesy, but it's less, like, cheesy-cheesy than Godzilla. You know, I really, really love that movie with Adrian Brody and Jack Black. Oh, I hated that movie. Really? Yes. Oh, there could be some parts that could be cut out, to be honest. that was by what's his face, right? The Lord of the Rings guy, Peter Jackson. And I was just like, yeah, I saw that in the theater. And I'm like, when she was like ice skating with him or whatever. No. Remember they were in the city and he's like on the ice or whatever, whatever the hell that was. No, I'm not, everything is overdone in that movie. Like in the original movie, he fights like one T-Rex. In this one, he fights like two of them. they re-institute the whole spiders attacking the guy scene that was in the original one and removed, but it's like so, everything is just so over the top. It was the era in the 2000s where they're like, what can we do with CGI? And it's just, eh. If I was going to watch a Peter Jackson movie, it would be Braindead. Huh. I love that movie. But this is not based in any way on any of those films. This is based on the book. This isn't even based on Skull Island. which was the original island. This is based on the book. Which that whole thing is weird because the movie, they were making the movie and to try to get, to drum up some buzz for the movie they had like a book commission that came out a year before the movie which is basically the same plot as the movie. But this has nothing to do with most of that. Yeah, he's still climbing a building. So there you go, you got the high points. He's on an island somewhere. He's got a lady that he touches. It's not the Empire State Building because that's an extra license, but it's just a building. It's the Nagel Oil Building. It's got some stuff to it, but it's not the same. Because, again, we're able to get the IP of King Kong. We're able to get a gorilla. We're able to get kind of the high points. But now we've got our own world that we can create. so we don't have as many handcuffs when it comes to movie clips or licensors and stuff. And like James Bond is a great example, you are handcuffed to deal with a lot of that stuff. This game, the play field was done, the art on the play field was done by Kevin O'Connor, and it's to make it look like the original King Kong from Data East, which was never released. Yeah, that's how I recognized, as soon as I saw the play field art, because I've seen the prototype. And it looks different. When you look at it, you're like, this looks different because it's not zombie Yeti. And you can tell that it's somebody who knows what they're doing because it's slightly different. It's got that 1990s-looking aesthetic. And I kind of like it. It's different. It's very cool. But it's still got the purples. It's still got the greens. It's still got the oranges. It's really cool. Yeah, it was the three-person team that did the art on this one. It's got a couple of really cool mechs. One of them is on the left side. There's the spider magnet, which is like a magnet in the field, but then the spider gets magnetized to the ball and bounces up and down. On the premium, there's an actual spider, and he looks like he's humping the ball. It's cool, right? It's taking something that's kind of blah and boring and making it cool without adding a lot of expense. And this game has a couple features, again, taken from older games that Owen likes. Basically, he's got the drop target bank that you sweep. That's from Quicksilver. I think he's even said that. The classic stern. And this game also has, I don't know what it's called in King Kong, but in Kongo it's called Skill Fire, where you try to plunge the out lane as many times as you can. Oh. It literally has a mode that's that. So, yet another Kongo reference. It's got a really kind of neat ball return on the left side. Yeah, it has to use the action button to make a thing pop up so the ball will feed the upper mini flipper. What do they call it, leap of faith? All I know is this thing shoots incredible. Yeah, so I haven't played this. It's got King Kong in the back corner, and he, like, punches the glass. Yeah, and the premium in L.E., King Kong actually moves around. He waves his arms. You lock balls in the subway car, and then when multiball starts, he, like, pounds the subway car. It lifts up, and the balls come out. Is this all time? We've got to see where it goes with the software because it's still really early. I mean, I'd love to be able to play it more. If you hit, you just hit that side ramp once. It's like, oh, I've got to hit that again and again. It's so smooth. And it goes around. I love, he loves habit trails, and so do I. So the little curvy helixes and stuff, I love that stuff. More, give me more. Keith says this one's about capturing the scale and chaos of King Kong. Kong isn't just a toy. He's a threat. Did you say he's a threat? Oh, King Kong's definitely a threat. It's just there's not enough code. I haven't played it yet. But this has the potential. Like, it shoots. I've seen some people playing this online, and it shoots just unbelievably. Oh, yeah. Just watching that ball move around. Here's the thing. I think he has the right amount of shots. He has the right amount of shots. so they're nice and wide. And he has the center post. Okay, here's the thing. It's got that gong on the right side, which is really cool. It's got the train car ball lock, which is really cool. Like, he's got a lot of really neat little bits and pieces in there, and I think they're coming together when it comes to code. But it's got that weird kicking back target thing where you speed up and around. I'm disappointed there because it seems like it's hidden. Like, you can't see it hit the target and jump back. You just sort of shoot up the orbit, and then it kind of comes back. Well, I have heard from many people now that they prefer the pro. Okay. Because the way the gong works is you hit it, and it doesn't go down right away. You've got to hit it a certain number of times, and then it goes down. Yeah, it's like a solid wall. Yeah. And on the pro, it's just like, it's just open shot. There's a plastic there, a picture of a gong. Is that because tournament players are whiners and it's too dangerous to shoot with bong? Oh, 100%. They're whiners and they don't like dangerous shots. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So then that's why. But it might shoot better overall if you don't like just hitting a dead wall and having it come back at you. Lovely, lovely pinball machine. Can't wait to play it. It's got this really cool Art Deco aesthetic. It's got the island section. It's got the river section. It's got the New York looking section. It's pretty packed. It's cool. I think Elwin said the only thing they had to cut, like he wanted originally the King Kong's mouth to move. Oh. So when it roared, it would actually move. But that was like one thing too many that would have put him over whatever the limit is that the board can support. So that got cut. And then that escalated into a whole bunch more cost. Can't wait to play it. In the end, that's really above almost all the designers. Keith Elwin will be the one most people are waiting for. to see what he comes up with. I mean, I know people that literally just, they're on Team Elwin, like every game he makes, they're going to buy. Keith Elwin continues to evolve as both a designer and a storyteller. He's blending these precise layouts with innovative mechanics. He's got these wonderfully layered rule sets. I think his background as a top-tier player gives him this uncommon understanding of flow, mechanics, and depth. I think it's the reason why Keith keeps topping the charts. Do you think Keith Elwin is making all the other designers at Stern look bad? No. But do I think he's at a level above everyone else? Yes. I also think it's the fact that he's new enough that he's not repeating himself. Like, you don't look at this game, oh, this is just like this, or this is just like this. They're all different enough. Yeah. The question is, can he keep that up? because after a certain point, there's only so many things you can do in that, you know, small space. But it's going to take a while, I think, to exhaust all the good ideas. Let's keep watching that arc from Archer to King Kong and see where it continues to go. Keith, keep showing us what you've got. And don't make any more Avengers. Wow. Wow. Put that stuff up on the screen. I don't remember the lines. Come on. As always, you can send your comments, questions, corrections, and concerns to syllablechronicles at gmail.com. We look forward to all of your messages, and we read every one. 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Especially when you're across San Diego, which, of course, is German for like a whale's vagina. What? Edit. Edit. No. Come on. No. No. goes, yeah, it's a Japanese monster or kaiju franchise centering on the titular. Titular. Titular. Titular. I hate saying that word. Prehistoric reptilian monster. Edit. You want to start again? Yeah. You've made it on time for the McDonald's breakfast menu. You think to yourself, finally, I can start my day. But what if breakfast could be even more perfect? With the hot honey sausage egg biscuit, it finally is. Go to McDonald's and get it while you can. Come play in the snow. Now is the perfect time for a getaway to Mohonk Mountain House. Get outside and experience our awe-inspiring mountaintop views with snow activities like cross-country skiing and snowshoeing. Race down the hill on a snow tube or glide across the award-winning ice skating rink. After, come inside to warm up by a wood-burning fireplace and locally sourced cuisine. All this and so much more, all included in your stay. Find out for yourself why Mohonk Mountain House is the perfect winter getaway. _(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_ --- *Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 9d6096d9-3b78-4ae5-9957-4bb67d68c274*