# Gary Stern 75th Birthday Interview - Part 1

**Source:** Pinball News & Pinball Magazine Pincast  
**Type:** podcast_episode  
**Published:** 2020-06-12  
**Duration:** 77m 50s  
**Beat:** Pinball

**URL:** https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pinball-industry-news/episodes/Gary-Stern-75th-Birthday-Interview---Part-1-eidsvc

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## Analysis

Gary Stern celebrates his 75th birthday in an exclusive in-depth interview covering his remarkable career spanning Williams Electronics, Stern Electronics, Data East Pinball, Sega Pinball, and modern Stern Pinball. The discussion covers his early exposure to pinball through his father Sam Stern's acquisition of Williams in 1947, his education (accounting degree, law school), legal practice, and transition into the pinball business. Stern discusses manufacturing philosophy, the evolution of pinball as a product and lifestyle brand, and the company's COVID-19 response in 2020.

### Key Claims

- [HIGH] Sam Stern bought 50% of Williams from Harry Williams in 1947 after sitting at Harry's desk and asking him to sell — _Gary recounts the famous story of his father's 1947 acquisition of Williams; notes he was 2 years old at the time and later moved to Chicago in 1948_
- [HIGH] Gary earned an undergraduate degree in accounting and a law degree, practiced law for two years before joining the pinball business full-time — _Gary explicitly states his academic background and that he practiced law for about 2 years, representing some game companies, before transitioning to Williams full-time_
- [HIGH] Gary has been riding a motorcycle to work at age 75 — _Gary states he rode his motorcycle to work during the COVID-19 lockdown period discussed in the interview_
- [HIGH] Stern Pinball was allowed to restart production on May 29th (2020) and had ramped up to approximately 120 hourly factory workers by interview time — _Gary states exact restart date and provides specific workforce numbers during COVID-19 discussion_
- [HIGH] Gary has a granddaughter and expects a grandson due July 22nd; his younger daughter is expecting his first grandchild nicknamed 'Sprout' — _Gary explicitly mentions granddaughter and grandson expected July 22nd, references his daughter expecting a child_
- [HIGH] Williams factory was located on Huron Street in Chicago; Stern Pinball factory is west of the Chicago airport in Olk Grove/O'Hare area — _Gary mentions Huron Street for Williams and references factory location west of airport near where he lives_
- [MEDIUM] Pinball playfields use a soft coat (not hard coat) finish for durability, which Gary notes was a misnomer in the industry — _Gary corrects terminology around playfield coating, explaining soft coat is the accurate term and noting he initially worried about no game wear-out_
- [HIGH] Harry Williams worked as a consultant for Valley after leaving Williams, and later returned to work with old Stern — _Gary describes Harry's consulting work across multiple companies in the pinball industry_

### Notable Quotes

> "Well, if you use that to sanitize your hands, don't drive your car right away and get stopped by the police because you're going to make your truck smell like tequila."
> — **Gary Stern**, mid-podcast
> _Humorous anecdote about COVID-era sanitizer sourcing from tequila makers; illustrates Stern's personality and practical problem-solving during lockdown_

> "If I was retired, I mean, there's no biking. There's no motorcycle biking. There's no boating. There's no boarding, snowboarding. And those are the three things I do in addition to work."
> — **Gary Stern**, early-mid podcast
> _Reveals Gary's active lifestyle at 75 and his commitment to pinball work over retirement_

> "My title was boss's son."
> — **Gary Stern**, mid-podcast
> _Gary's humorous description of his informal authority at Williams, reflecting the family business dynamic_

> "The world would go on without pinball but a little bit of the fabric of life would be gone."
> — **Gary Stern**, later-podcast
> _Expresses Gary's philosophy about pinball's cultural importance; quoted frequently in pinball discourse_

> "Guys that are car guys love cars and they design cars and they build cars... and likewise you know they want to design pinball so we can play it."
> — **Gary Stern**, mid-podcast
> _Articulates Gary's design philosophy: passion for the product drives both enjoyment and financial sustainability for continued innovation_

> "If you don't have the parts here, you can't build the games and you send the workers home... If you have too many of the parts, you got to throw them out."
> — **Gary Stern**, mid-podcast
> _Demonstrates manufacturing discipline and responsibility to workforce; core to Stern's business philosophy_

> "We want to design the next one. So we need to make money on this one so we have money to design it."
> — **Gary Stern**, mid-podcast
> _Explains the capital reinvestment model for continuous innovation in pinball design_

> "I had my pop bumper caps and my posts that I would move around... instead of doing my homework."
> — **Gary Stern**, early-podcast
> _Childhood anecdote showing early fascination with pinball mechanics; illustrates lifelong passion_

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| Gary Stern | person | Chairman and CEO of Stern Pinball; celebrating 75th birthday; active motorcycle rider; lawyer by training; career spans Williams Electronics, Stern Electronics, Data East Pinball, Sega Pinball, and modern Stern Pinball |
| Sam Stern | person | Gary's father; purchased 50% of Williams from Harry Williams in 1947; president of Williams; died in 1984; career in game distribution and manufacture |
| Harry Williams | person | Co-founder/designer of Williams Electronics; sold 50% to Sam Stern in 1947; remained design consultant through multiple companies; worked as consultant for Data East/Valley |
| Williams Electronics | company | Major pinball manufacturer where Sam Stern acquired 50% stake in 1947; factory on Huron Street in Chicago; operated as union shop with 250-300 workers at Stern peak |
| Stern Pinball | company | Modern pinball manufacturer currently led by Gary Stern; restarted production May 29, 2020 during COVID-19 with COVID safety protocols; manufacturing operations west of Chicago O'Hare airport |
| Data East Pinball | company | Pinball company in Gary Stern's career timeline; mentioned as part of his industry history |
| Sega Pinball | company | Pinball manufacturer in Gary Stern's career history; part of timeline from Data East to modern Stern Pinball |
| Stern Electronics | company | Company associated with Sam Stern and Gary Stern's career; mentioned as precursor to later pinball ventures |
| Pinstar | company | Short-lived company created by Gary Stern; mentioned in the timeline of his career |
| Chicago Coin | company | Company Gary took out of bank foreclosure using his legal expertise; operated as integrated manufacturer with union workforce; peak of 250-300 factory workers |
| Jonathan Houston | person | Editor of Pinball Magazine; co-host of this interview podcast |
| Martin A. | person | Editor of Pinball News; co-host of this interview podcast |
| Dave Peterson | person | Gary Stern's business partner; daughter Lindsay married in Savannah in March 2020 |
| Kevin | person | Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Stern Pinball; responsible for factory operations and sanitizer sourcing |
| Erin | person | Gary's older daughter; works in film industry as assistant director (second AD) in director's guild |
| Lizzie/Lindsay | person | Gary's younger daughter; does digital marketing work for Stern Pinball; expecting first child (Sprout); previously had pinball machine in college |
| Harry Weaver | person | Union business agent (IBEW); started in Williams stockroom as worker; negotiated with Gary during labor discussions; longtime acquaintance of Gary from childhood |
| Luna Castro | person | Head of Seaberg; tricked Gary into continuing education/law school |
| Humpty Dumpty | game | Pinball game associated with 1947 flipper introduction; timeline uncertain relative to Sam Stern's Williams acquisition |
| TURTLES | game | Stern pinball game that Gary learned to play; has a machine in his apartment |
| AC/DC | game | Pinball game mentioned as being in daughter's home with young granddaughter |
| Batman | game | George Gomez-designed Batman pinball game mentioned; damaged game acquired by Gary's family and circulated between daughters |

### Topics

- **Primary:** Gary Stern's career history and company timeline, Early pinball history and Williams Electronics acquisition in 1947, COVID-19 pandemic response and manufacturing during lockdown (2020), Manufacturing philosophy and vertical integration in pinball production
- **Secondary:** Gary Stern's personal background (education, law career, family), Pinball as cultural product and lifestyle brand, Union labor relations and factory workforce dynamics, Evolution of pinball product durability and secondary market value

### Sentiment

**Positive** (0.82) — Gary Stern is enthusiastic, reflective, and warm throughout the interview. Nostalgia and pride in his career accomplishments dominate. Anecdotes are told with humor and fondness. Discussion of COVID-19 challenges is presented matter-of-factly without complaints. Strong affection for family and the pinball industry evident throughout.

### Signals

- **[business_signal]** Vertical integration in classic pinball era (Williams, Chicago Coin) required 800-1,000 union workers vs. modern Stern's 250-300 peak, indicating significant outsourcing and supply-chain consolidation over decades (confidence: high) — Gary contrasts historical in-house coil winding, transformer making, plating, and harness manufacturing with current operations; notes union representation included Williams, Chicago Coin, and Bally in Chicago
- **[business_signal]** Stern Pinball successfully navigated COVID-19 restart with comprehensive safety protocols and ramped production to 120+ hourly workers by mid-2020, indicating operational resilience and pent-up demand (confidence: high) — Gary states production restarted May 29, 2020 and mentions 'a lot of back orders to fill which we're thrilled about'; describes detailed safety measures including temperature checks, 6-foot spacing, masks, dividers, and weekly sanitizing service
- **[community_signal]** Pinball product evolution from disposable operator commodity to durable collector/enthusiast lifestyle brand with significant secondary market value (confidence: high) — Gary notes soft-coat playfield durability initially concerned him about game obsolescence but now creates 'great value' and resale market across operators, enthusiasts, and rec-room buyers; acknowledges three distinct customer channels
- **[design_philosophy]** Gary Stern's business model emphasizes profitability on current games to fund next generation design, rejecting external-only financing; core belief that designer/manufacturer must love the product (confidence: high) — Gary states 'we want to design pinball so we can play it' and 'we need to make money on this one so we have money to design the next one'; compares to car designers who build cars they love
- **[market_signal]** Pinball industry transitioned from disposable operator commodity (1940s-1980s) to collectible lifestyle brand with multiple stakeholder classes (operators, enthusiasts, rec-room/FEC buyers, Gen Z barcade players) (confidence: high) — Gary explicitly identifies four market segments: operators, enthusiasts/collectors, rec-room buyers, and young people in barcades/FECs; notes this creates different product value across channels
- **[market_signal]** Secondary market for pinball machines now economically significant; soft-coat playfield durability extended machine lifespan, creating sustained resale and collector value unforeseen in early EM era (confidence: high) — Gary recalls initial concern that hard-wearing playfields would eliminate game obsolescence and secondary market; now notes durability creates 'great value' that thrills the company
- **[personnel_signal]** Harry Williams remained design consultant to multiple companies after selling Williams, indicating strong industry demand for his expertise and portable nature of design IP (confidence: high) — Gary states Harry worked as consultant for Valley after leaving Williams, then returned to consult for 'old Stern'; describes Harry's dual residences in L.A./Palm Springs and Chicago
- **[technology_signal]** Manufacturing complexity and specialization has dramatically increased since Harry Williams era; modern pinball requires electronics designers, software engineers, and specialized fabrication unlike single-designer model of early pinball (confidence: high) — Gary recounts Harry Williams' observation that he 'used to be able to do everything' alone but now requires multiple specialized roles; reflects on evolution from coil-winding, transformer-making, plating departments to modern design pipeline

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## Transcript

 Gary Stern celebrates his 75th birthday. Exclusive in-depth interview with Gary. Longest episode ever. Hi, my name is Jonathan Houston and I'm the editor of Pinball Magazine and I'm joined here with... Martin A. and I'm the editor of Pinball News and we're here with this special interview podcast. to help celebrate Gary Stern landmark 75th birthday. And we're going to do that by calling him up and having an in-depth interview with him about his career and his life, really, in the pinball business. And I'm sure we've got plenty to talk about. Isn't that right, Jonathan? Well, we've got 75 years to cover, so... Well, we won't do it in real time. No, but still, there's obviously plenty to cover. If you're familiar with the career of Gary Stern in pinball, his father is Sam Stern, who designed pinball machines, owned Williams, partly at some point, had a significant role in Stern Electronics, and eventually passed away in 1984. Gary was involved in working at Williams when his father was president over there Stern Electronics and then Pinstar which we'll probably try to touch on as well Data East Pinball, Sega Pinball and then Stern Pinball so we'll basically be covering all of that hopefully in this interview looking at how those various companies were formed why they ceased functioning or ceased operating and what they got up to while they were in pinball manufacturing. Right. And they've certainly produced some interesting and, well, remarkable games over the years. And it's been a long career for Gary, and it's far from over, and he's got a lot to tell us, I'm sure. Yeah. So please do me the honour and could you call Gary? Yeah, okay, just scrolling down to my contacts list. Okay, calling him now. Okay. Hello, it's Gary here. Oh, my God. You rang the wrong Gary. Sorry. Okay, better hang up. I'll explain it to him later, what happened. I'll just tell you. I can't believe it, actually. It's been Gary who's been trying to get into our podcast for over two years now. And then the one time that he gets on and you disconnect him? Well, we have more important things to talk about. No argument there. Okay, fine. Let me call the right one. Okay, here we go. Come on, Gary's turn. Okay. Hey, welcome, Gary. And happy birthday. Thank you so very much. Yeah, so we hope you're still in good health, especially in the current circumstances. Yeah, how's everything going on with the whole coronavirus thing for you? And you've been, obviously your travel, I guess, has been reduced significantly. You're not flying around the world, but are you still going into the office regularly or working from home or what? Both, both. I haven't been out of Chicago, been as far as Rockford, Illinois, but I haven't been on an airplane, I haven't been out of Chicago since coming home from the March show in New Orleans, the A.E. show. I went from there to Savannah to my partner Dave Peterson's daughter, Lindsay's wedding, which was lovely, and home. And that was the end of it. That was just as everything was wrapping up. It was all locked down at that point. Yeah, yeah. We're mostly home. The company, of course, had to shortly thereafter stop other than maintaining. I mean, a lot of people are working from home. The game design continues. Some cases more efficient, some cases less efficient. We were allowed to have people in the building to maintain the building and to maintain the computers and make payroll and what have you. And I was here a little bit, but I'm in the office now. I'm mostly from the office. Our salespeople are here at least once as a group, at least once a week, one day a week, but they're working from home. We're experts on Zoom. We're all out now. Yeah, yeah. And the production people, we're increasing production. We're building games. We're shipping games. We were allowed to start production by each state in the U.S. has different rules. So we were allowed to start production on March 29th. Excuse me, May 29th. Yeah, and so we're up to, you know, in the factory itself of the hourly workers, we've got about, we're already up to 120. I got to turn that off. Well, you're a busy guy. I'm sure you're... That must be Gary calling in just trying to get back at us. so we're building games and we've got a lot of back orders to fill which we're thrilled about so if people went to the factory now compared to when they went to say the expo tour last year what differences would they notice as far as the factory floor and the working practices and the social distancing and all that kind of stuff? First of all you would come in the back door only the front door is not available the we're going to switch to the side to the uh normal employee entrance but we were going right from the back where the parking lot was we'll switch that next week but there will still be one door only and whether you uh work here or you're a supplier visiting or whatever your temperature will be taken and noted uh and if it's over 100 uh we uh don't we have you not come in um and uh they work working people come the factory workers coming in when they're all coming at once we've got uh space uh we have a you know markers every six feet and so standing in six foot you know apart from each other i came in same time as everybody else as i was here about 6 15 one morning and uh i stood in line six foot from everybody else. You have to have a mask on, of course. And then once you're in the building, you'll see that we've created dividers in the cafeteria. You guys remember where we have the cafeteria tables. There's a divider and people can only sit, nobody can sit across from each other. So one per divided section. The microwaves are turned off because we really don't want to be handling people's food. There are all kinds of dividers in the assembly area. The assembly line is divided. They have big red X's where you can't be standing to work. Unless you're in your own office and you're an office worker, you're wearing a mask. If I go out to the factory, I have a mask on. We have some face shields. And for the few places where people are closer than six foot to each other, for example, packing a game, then they have a face shield for sure on. Other people have it on. So the factory, we have a service come in here once a week to do a major sanitizing. We own a heck of a lot of hand sanitizer. And, in fact, we got a $5,000 skid of sanitizer. But before that, we were getting it when we had a limited number of people. Before we could get that, we had various distilleries, liquor manufacturers here were making sanitizer. So Kevin, our COO, came in and said, here, smell this. And I said, that's tequila. He said, yeah, it was from a tequila maker. I said, well, if you use that to sanitize your hands, don't drive your car right away and get stopped by the police because you're going to make your truck smell like tequila. Right. Good stuff. All kinds of stuff. Woodworking areas. We do our own playfields here. Many of them. Two sources, of course. like everything else, but we do a good percentage of them. And that's all kinds of dividers. And there's all kinds of, we're still building, we're still changing as we add more people. And we're adding, you know, people all along. We need to get our production rate up. That's great to hear. I'm pleased that you've, I mean, obviously, it's been a lot of work for everyone to try to adjust to this new working practice. But congratulations on coming back. Thank you. And as you know, it's sometimes a little uncomfortable wearing the mask, but we have to. I hope it's not. Well, guys, I hope it's blowing up here, and I hope it's not supposed to rain. I hope it doesn't because I rode my motorcycle to work. So I think just that alone, 75 and driving a motorcycle, that just simply deserves an applause. No, that's no big deal. So my daughter said to me, my younger daughter, who does some digital work for us, she's also expecting my first grandchild, who we call Sprout. Congratulations on that as well. Yeah, I have a granddaughter on the other side, and I'll have a grandson due July 22nd. And any event, so she says, well, now you'll see what it's like to be retired. And I said, wait a minute. This is the fact that I have to be at home or this or that. That's not retired. If I was retired, I mean, there's no biking. There's no motorcycle biking. There's no boating. There's no boarding, snowboarding. And those are the three things I do in addition to work. uh in fact my boat is you know i have a an old boat and it is not in the water i can't even get the boat yard on the phone i'm really annoying me uh because the harbors aren't open yet because in in the city of chicago the city of chicago where i live uh my apartment is the factory as you know is west of the airport in okraville the city of chicago is uh you know has its own tighter rules even than the state has so yes yes i saw that yeah so anyway that's the um that's where we are now but uh let's let's go back to the beginning as it were then shall we um you know the 75 years ago almost and um just a question we have to ask then is um do you remember your your first time seeing or interacting with a pinball machine and and did you have pinball machines in your home or anything when you were when you were a kid we had we we had some different games we had some pinball we had a bumper pool table uh because we were making those so we had all various things i also had i shared with a friend a pet rabbit and the rabbit lived he remembered the old electromechanical games in the backbox at a wood back and later a metal back It had a hole in the neck, in the bottom, that the wires came through. Rabbit's cage was a backbox with chicken wires stapled on the, laying on the back, with a chicken wire stapled across where the back glass would have been, and where the wires would have gone through a little door built there, and that's where the rabbit lived. Multi-purpose backbox. pardon and that's a multi-purpose backpacks i'd say yes absolutely and i had in my desk uh you know in my in my little desk in my in my room that i was supposed to do my homework on i had uh you open the drawer and i had my pop bumper caps and my posts that i would move around i also had uh yeah you guys aren't familiar so much with our baseball machines you you guys might be in your list yeah but you know remember we had a man running unit in the back yeah and in those days the men that were running they would you know they'd pop up from uh from laying down up 90 degrees and then they'd walk around and they were made of cardboard as riveted to a wire form and later they were made of plastic but uh they were they were cardboard and i had all kinds of those in my desk too that I used to I used to play baseball, little baseball games in my, instead of doing my homework. So I had pinball parts and baseball game parts in my desk and I used those instead of homework. So at this point, was your father was he the president of Williams at that point or was this before that? When Harry Williams was still in charge well harry was the designer and sam was the sales guy business guy when they came in you remember it was 1947 uh you don't remember this but we weren't all around sorry about that i don't remember it very well either because i was two yeah 1947 my father had been a was a uh a game distributor he'd been an operator and then he became a game distributor which In those days, many of the distributors or resellers of games that were selling to other operators were operators first, and then they became distributors. And that way they got the games cheaper and sooner as an operator, but they ended up concentrating on selling. And he came into Chicago. You guys have heard this story before. and to see Harry Williams when the factory was over on Huron Street. And he kidding around, sat behind Harry's desk, put his feet up. He was a 35-year-old punk kid, which I can say because I'm 40 years old. And kidding Harry said, why don't you sell me the company? So Harry said, I'll have to think about that, and went up in his airplane and flew around Chicago for three hours, came down and sold my father half a Williams. So Sam started doing sales. You know, I moved to Chicago with the family, moved in 48 when I was three. He moved to Chicago and I've been around it all that time. He initially in the beginning, as I said, he did sales. They didn't even let him in the factory, even though he owned half of it. But ultimately, you know, he's Harry was a designer. He wasn't a business guy. He didn't want to be the business guy, and Harry was like a second father, but he turned it all over to Sam very quickly. Right. As far as running it. But Harry was in design, and so he was in design. Of course, Harry carried on designing for many years after he left the company, didn't he? Yeah, absolutely. He was with us always, even after he sold his half to Sam. He was with us always. He'd work out at Palm Springs and come back to Chicago, L.A. area first, but then Palm Springs. And he'd come back to Chicago. And even when Sam went to Valley for a year or two, Harry became Valley's consultant instead of Williams' consultant. and then back with us at Williams, and then at the old Stern. Of course, neither of them survived long enough to see this company, because my father died in 84, and we started this in 86. Right. So now you mentioned that your father bought Williams in 1947, and I'm just wondering, the Flipper was actually introduced in 1947. saver at that point was the flipper already introduced or had that still to come do you remember i don't know but that's a very good question i don't know if if that if he bought right before right after humpty dumpty i don't know the answer to that that's an interesting question we'll never know i guess because uh i don't think we'll know uh the only thing that The only chance we have. I have got to clean out the storage area. I've lived in my apartment building 13, 14 years, and I have a storage cage down below. And I have two boxes, you know, like file cabinet boxes, full of old Sam's financial stuff. I've got his canceled checks from the side of 84. And I've got years of canceled checks. I just got thrown out. And I may have some document in there that would relate to the purchase is investment in Williams. And if I can get the date he invested, that'll tell you, you know, then we can get the date of Humpty Dumpty. But I don't know. I'm going to try and get to that in the next few weeks. I thought I would get to it during this, you know, stay at home. But I didn't. I didn't mean to get to it for about 10 years. yeah it sounds like there's a lot of really valuable information there and plenty of people would love to see that please be careful not to throw anything away that's not so interesting what i have that's probably more interesting is a a couple briefcases uh that were harry's stuff that after he died his wife sent me and i had to send them over to the strong museum you know they uh the museum of play yeah yeah because they'll keep all that stuff i have to send that to them Right, so, obviously your father was a president at Williams in the 60s. You also worked there I believe in the stockroom But did you also have a job position there or was that too young for you When I was 16 in the summers I could drive, and my summer job for the first number of years was, while I was in school, was at Williams. And I started in the stockroom at 16. I was in the office some other years working on learning inventory control, and it was all manual. There were no computers. We had a card system. When you decided to make 100 games, you added, you know, on every card that had that part for that part, you had to add a requirement of 100. When the parts came in, you deducted it. And there was nothing like a computer system we have now. And we're in the midst of putting in a new ERP system. Sort of got slowed up with this COVID-19 situation. ERP system, did you say? ERP. ERP. Oh, right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. You understand it better than I do. I know. So any event, but I, and I, I, one summer I was a personnel manager for a short time. Since it was a whole somebody had to do. I also worked summers. I, my undergraduate degree is in accounting. So I worked one summer for a major accounting firm and determined that that wasn't how I wanted to spend the rest of my life. So did you actually have a job title or were you just a sort of jack of all trades to diminish the... You know, I got an undergraduate degree in accounting, a bachelor of business administration. And Luna Castro, who was the head of Seaberg at the time, tricked me into continuing education. I went to law school and I practiced law for a couple of years, including representing some of the game companies. And then I went to work Williams full time. and so people would ask me, you know, well, I'm talking to you, what's your authority, what's your title, what's your authority? I said, boss's son, and he said, okay, I understand, and we can carry on now. Right. So my title was boss's son. So from all those roles, were there any sort of things that you brought from that, which carried through your career in the pinball business, the importance of certain aspects of the business and managing them? Probably everything, certainly material control. I built test fixtures, so I understand life testing and quality and so forth. Material control, we are game designers, and we are creating a global lifestyle brand. but first you know first we have to be able to manufacture it and you've undoubtedly heard me say before that guys that are car guys love cars and they design cars and they build cars ayah coker somebody from chrysler i don't want to mention delorean but that type of thing um and um uh and likewise you know they want to design the car they want to build it So, A, somebody enjoys it, and B, so they make money with it so they can design the next car. Well, the same is true here. We want to design pinball so we can play it. I have a Turtles in my apartment because I had to learn it. And we want to design the next one. So we need to make money on this one so we have money to design it. Certainly more complex now. Harry Williams used to say when he was working with us at the old Stern, and he'd say, well, you know, I used to be able to do everything in the game. I could come up with an idea. I could draw it. I could draw the circuit. I could make the white wood. I could make some of the mechanical parts. And by drawing the circuit, I could make it work. I could do the wiring. This was back then. Now he could do the drawing, but somebody else had to do the electronics design and somebody had to do the software and so forth and so on and it was much more complex. Well, I just watched everybody do everything but certainly as I started to say material control, if you don't have the parts here, you can't build the games and you send the workers home and we have a responsibility to provide work. If you have too many of the parts, you got to throw them out and there went the money that you were going to use to design the next game. It is first and foremost a business, you know, and we're creating, you know, a game, a lifestyle. And certainly in today's world, much more than ever, because as you know, we have collectors and enthusiasts. We have rec room buyers and we certainly have young people, millennials and Gen Z's, playing games in the streets in our new barcades and what have you, and FECs and so forth. So, you know, we're cool and became a lifestyle. So going back to those days, the games were very much, as you said, with your father. They were sold through distributors to operators. Yeah. And at some point, operators would replace the last game with the new one and throw out the old game. Pinball, I guess at that point, was almost like a disposable product. and there wasn't really a secondary market for those games. In fact, operators often didn't want a secondary market. They didn't want their competition to get hold of them. So there was a good throughput of games. They did resell games, trade them into their distributor, and they did. Pinball has always had a resale value, but certainly more significant now, but it always had some resale value. Although with the hard code that we have on playfields and they last so much longer now, Not perfect, but, you know, longer. And it's not a hard coat. It's a soft coat. That's a misnomer. I don't know who decided to call it a hard coat. But at any event, I can remember when it was first started, I said, oh, my. What have we done? We'll have no more games wearing out. And now the fact that they don't wear out creates that great value, that resale value for the secondary market, whether it be operators or enthusiasts or rec room buyers, any three of our three channels. So now we're thrilled that we have them lasting. Okay. Well, you mentioned that after you finished school or college, you were a lawyer at that point. Yeah, exactly. I'm still a lawyer. I haven't been disbarred. I've been inactive. What was your specialism? I no longer pay to do my continuing education. I don't have time anymore. I'm too busy with this. So what was your specialism? What was your area of expertise in law? I worked for a small boutique corporate law firm. We did a lot of bank work, and we did corporate bankruptcies. and in fact if you think about that being you know I took Chicago coin out of a bank foreclosure and that was one of the things that we did that I had learned to do yeah financial lawyer bank law, finance law and how long did you do that for before not long enough to be good they tell you it takes you about you know the five years three to five years of practice before you're really you know in the swing of it i you know i clerked as a lawyer so that meant i went to court with motion calls or not not appearing before the judge or not potentially once or twice i was in front of the judge and he got confused and thought i was the lawyer and i didn't say that i wasn't so i could have gotten in trouble but uh the uh i practiced for two years which is really practice because you really need more than that to be a competent practicing lawyer. It gives you enough to understand. My undergraduate degree is in accounting which is the language of business. If you don't understand the numbers of the business you can't decide or understand what it's doing. That's how you analyze. And then I practiced law for a couple of years which gives you a good background understanding things i must tell you that a lot of the law has changed since the days i practiced of course yeah so so what did you stop when why why because i couple two reasons i'm going to tell you one is i wanted to be in the pinball business and the other is that as a lawyer you're dealing with other people's problems and i probably lost more sleep over handling a pro bono case for an indigent or a small businessman's difficulties uh then any you know any big case you represent a big bank they're big enough you make a mistake they can fix it or you can fix it or something and so I wanted to be in a pinball business and other people's personal problems really, although I'm involved in good work shall we say I lost too many it's very trying and I felt that that wasn't how I wanted to spend my life I'm happy to help some people but not as being my profession to help people. Right. Whereas I can help people have fun and enjoy themselves. And, you know, yes, we need food and a roof over our house, our heads, you know, good health. But amusement in a modern world is as much a necessity when we're past survival. that's true you know I've always said and you've heard me say that the world would go on without pinball but a little bit of the fabric of life would be gone so we are here being sure that we keep that fabric of life going and that we also make work for people and provide jobs because that's capitalism and that's how people working is how you make your money and get your food and so forth so your father obviously has a very long history in the pinball business you wanted to be in the pinball business and obviously found a way to get in, is there anybody else in your family who's involved in pinball in any way? Only in the sense that well first of all my three year old granddaughter is becoming very good and if something's wrong with the game maybe a ball got stuck or something she calls me they put her on the phone um but they have a an acdc and a uh one of george's uh batman uh and that batman that was funny that batman um was was a damaged game so they got it and it was uh and uh it went to lizzie my younger daughter and she was in college and she was talking to my older daughter erin and uh and there was a knock at the door she was in indiana in college and uh she said oh erin that's my pinball machine i gotta go erin said you're what you got a pinball machine and next you know my phone rings lindsey's getting a pinball machine erin says i never got a pinball machine how come she's getting a pinball machine. Why don't I have a pinball machine? So great. Well, so Lindsay had the pinball machine. We, we moved to the Chicago when she moved up here and, um, it was in a house she was sharing with some girls. And then, then she, uh, she was moving to Denver. So Aaron calls me, Lindsay's moving. She can't take the pinball machine. Can I have the pinball machine? I said, okay, Aaron, you can. Now Lindsay calls me, you gave away my pinball machine why'd you give away my pinball machine you can't win can you another one another day you know it's all about the pinball machine so any event yes they've had pinball but when you started there was no there was no um never brother or anybody else who was involved in the pinball no my brother's uh is a retired surgeon now he's he's older than i am he's 69 and so no he doesn't he's not in the business how is he older than you are if he is 69 and you're turning 75 79 sorry good catch good catch he was born in 41 and I was born in 45 so yep good catch so and And my kids, you know, are ones in digital marketing and the others in film business. She's an assistant. She's in the director's guild. She's a second AD and assistant director. So with your father being in pinball so much and you being in pinball so much, your brother was the one who got away then. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, my father had his son the lawyer and his son the doctor. Right. Yeah. Right. So you decided that you were going to get into pinball. You were going to leave law, get into pinball. Where did you go from there? I went to work at Williams. And I went to work for my father as the boss's son. I was his assistant. And I had a unique authority. I don't know. He was running the company, but I was sort of his number two. But, you know, there was something professionals in charge of engineering and professionals in charge of sales and professional in charge of the factory. I, you know, we I was we had a union in that in that factory. And I, you know, it was it was a more integrated business in those days, both there and when I took over Chicago Coin, where we we had we wound our own coils. We made our own stack switches. We we made our own transformers. We had our own plating department to plate the metal. We didn't do woodworking. We made our own wiring harnesses, of course, which we do at Stern here. um we and so we had you know where where we maxed out here uh where we've had uh 350 people so let's say um the 300 250 300 in the factory in those days you would have 800 a thousand people in the factory and you were a union shop and um we um i remember negotiating with the union and i had sitting behind me i had the personnel manager i had uh the um uh manufacturing uh vice president and i had the finance vice vice president and on the other side was the union business agent harry weaver and probably a committee of 11 or 12 and he got mad at me one day he had started in our stockroom as a worker right he became the union business agent uh ibew international brotherhood of electrical workers uh they represented a couple they were they had chicago coin they had uh i think they had bally in this when they were in the city and they had williams and he said to me one day he got mad we were negotiating and he he got mad and said i should have left you in that box and shipped you out because when i was a kid you know eight ten years old i was down at the factory on a saturday with my father playing in the stock room and got in a box and he pretended to staple it up and ship me out you know so so yeah we went way back even though we were on either sides of that table you know he was a good guy he was a good guy he believed in industrial justice you know treating people fairly you know it's very very you know he's a good guy just thinking about the timeline of all this because you you must have come out of college about what 73 74 something like that no no no no no no no i graduated high school in 63 i graduated college in 67 i graduated law school after six months of active duty in the military and then six years uh after that uh you know i was i was in the army as a reservist um so i graduated law school in uh January of 71 67, 68, 69 77, 71 January of 71, I was a six months behind because of the six months of active duty in the military sure, okay that's where I learned to type oh what? on duty I was a clerk type, it's hell on keys that was our motto for our company, hell on keys there were no computers there was no computers so then you um well i suppose to jump to the next stage is is the point where you you bought out chicago coin yeah yep we bought that happened and and what did it what did it give you um in terms of um starting a a new company yeah we we had left uh williams uh sam and i and i did some uh uh stephen kaufman a sales sales guy and i we had a little company called kiss kiss amusements that worked out of my my apartment and we were selling belfrude and seabird slot machines to canada they had a unique law they had legalized free play pinball machines but up to then there was no free plays allowed on pinball in canada so they legalized the free play and the laws were in English parallel English and French Yeah Canada And somewhere coin in a slot and free play was translated to slot machine and free play So we were selling free play only slot machines. I don't know why people would play that. I haven't figured it out yet and what was done with those free plays. and so we were doing that out of Kiss Kaufman my buddy he was the president of the company again I was the secretary because you know you have a corporate secretary and you have a corporate president and the reason I was the secretary is as I said I could type was the name Kiss from the initial letters of all of you no keep it simple stupid what's that one Stern Kaufman no no it was keep it simple stupid Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we had the opportunity, I did. My father knew the bank that was the lender, the guys at Cole Taylor. I still do my banking. This was 76. I still do my personal. And our company banking now is a company that is the successor or survivor of Cole Taylor, of that bank in 1976 that was owed money by Chicago Coin. And Sam knew the, he was 67 or so. Let's see, it was, he was born in 12, and that was. 77, was that what it was? Yeah, that was 76, 76, I think, late 70s. So he was semi-retired, and my sister-in-law had said, you've got to get him a job. He's cleaned my closets twice this week. And so, coincidentally, the guys he knew were the bankers for Chicago Coin and the Wahlberg and the Ginsburg family, and the company was troubled. So they foreclosed and sold us the assets. We had a nice... Sam died in 84. We had a nice – and he came to work half a day, and it was really – it was fascinating. And we had a run up and a run down because the business went up and then came back down and so forth. And we closed that. He passed, and then two years later I started this company, Stata East. Right. So you're jumping ahead a little bit because I'm actually wondering how did Stern Electronics get started? Was that based on the assets that you got from buying Chicago coin? Yeah, yeah. We bought you the assets of Chicago coin out of a bank foreclosure. And what were those assets? Did you get factory? Did you get tooling, equipment, designs, people? We didn't have much in designs, but inventory, drawings, factory, equipment. We just turned, you know, we started one day as us. It closed and they had an auction and we reopened it and brought people back in. Same electrical worker union. Yeah. But remember, that was my background in law. Sure. How long would it have been then between Chicago Coin closing or stopping manufacturing, I should say, and you buying them and then starting up again? Months. Really? Months, not years. Months. Okay. And the intention with Stone Anachronix was to make pinball because you also did a lot of arcade games. We did video games. Yeah. Yeah. We didn't do arcade. Remember, Chicago Coin did a lot of guns and baseball games, even though Williams did baseball games and so forth. We did some shuffle alleys, puck bowlers, and we did a lot of video later. but the business went up and came back down and we it's not a great secret that we were Ace Greenberg the head of Bear Stearns at the time was going to take us public and we missed the window and so be life I would have been too rich there's no such thing as too rich there's no such thing as being too rich i think it was it was the wife decades and decades ago the wife of the boss at bloomingdale's the department stores said you can't be too thin or too rich but i'm not going to agree with that you know i think that uh you know too much too young it can be harmful. Yeah, true. So we hear a lot of talk in seminars and in exhibitions about manufacturing facilities at Bally and Williams and Gottlieb. We never really hear much about what you had going on at Stern. Where was the factory? What was it like? It was the same. It was 110,000 square foot at 17 Now, 110 is what we have. Maybe it was 140. I'm not sure. I think it was 140. At 1725 West of Versailles, which was basically the same neighborhood as Bali, which was on Belmont. uh we were uh uh it was on belmont uh a mile from us and and and williams after it moved from uh these from um uh 4242 west fillmore it moved to 3401 north california which was around the block from that was the old linda and factory around the block universal around the block from um uh bally and we had the same thing we had wound our own coils we made our own switches the same international electrical work brotherhood of electrical workers um uh uh uh made our own harnesses we had punch presses the old style punch presses from the 40s and 50s uh williams were from the 50s ours were probably from the 40s uh it was the same same kind of thing just a little smaller but same thing as Bally and Williams old school very vertically integrated manufacturing and therefore why was it done that way back then rather than the way it's done now where we have a lot of more other companies producing components and assemblies for you why did every company want to keep it in house I think that was I think you're talking about the difference in, I believe that's true of manufacturing in general. There's very less vertical and more horizontal, you know, it's more horizontal, very little, not as much vertical in manufacturing. And one thing about it is if you're vertical, you've got a lot of overhead. And so your flexibility is more limited because you've got to make X number of games to break even. I was taught you don't figure break even or that's all you're going to do, but I do. And whereas if you have a slow up and you're not vertically integrated, then you don't buy you don't have somebody else owns all that equipment and they got to find other work for it um so and another aspect of it is that when you buy a component you know what it costs you when you buy when you make that component you estimate the cost how much labor am i going to have in it and so forth uh and you have all the variables to it you have a fixed cost when you buy it you have a variable cost when you make it yourself this is jumping ahead there's pluses to both ways of it um i think a more modern trend certainly is uh is uh uh less vertical integration yeah that's what i was going to just jump ahead very briefly and say you know these days when you mentioned earlier that you make make your own playfields for instance in some cases you know not all of them, but how do you decide what would be a good manufacturing product to bring in-house? Okay. Or what should be sent out to suppliers? Good question. One is the investment in equipment, which the play field did require a lot of investment. Another is the labor content. We make our own wiring harnesses. It's labor. and if we have somebody else do it it's going to take them just as long and the same amount of labor except they're going to mark that up to us so it makes sense to make it and the third reason is for control in the case of cables that why don't you make them in China? The problem is the lead time and the change over in the game business is such that you really need to be more flexible than shipping a bunch of cables wiring harnesses from China. And this is not the typical wiring harness, you know, that you see in your computer. You plug one end into the monitor and one end into the computer. This is, you know, this is down from a half mile to a quarter mile of wire, but a lot of breakouts, a lot of daisy chaining, a lot, you know, a very complex cable. When I say down, when we went from the White Star Sam, what have you, system, which was a matrix system, to a bus system, that reduces a lot of the cabling and is much harder and allows you to do a lot more things than we could have done in the past. So part of it is cost. Part of it is flexibility. Part of it is investment. And part of it, talking about playfields, is what is the most important thing that you need to be sure that you have, that is unusual, that you must have. And the backbone of a pinball machine is a play field. We were having a lot of trouble with playfield supply, having it on time, having it good enough and so forth and decided that this is something we had to take control of. We do have a second source making playfields for us. We do part of the work. We don't do all of it. we don't have a big machine that prints playfields and we certainly don't silkscreen the old way, that's local they're printed digital printing, that's modern and that's, you know, those are three, four hundred thousand dollar machines that have a limited life to them so better somebody else is doing other things so it's equipment cost but the wood itself and the routing it and getting it done timely, we have control of the whole process and we do a good part of it ourselves, although even the part we do, we have a second source for. Right. Okay. Well, that's what we're going to be doing now. I know Jonathan's got some good questions about how things work. The game itself is very important, but we do have to consider the manufacturing, and that is also very, very, very important. Right. So if we're going back to Stern Electronics for just a bit, when you bought Chicago Coin and started manufacturing, you started out producing electromechanical games. That was only for like the first two or three games. Yes and no. We finished what I'm not going to claim is our game, the Rawhide games. Right. which were on the line, and they were electromechanical. Our first game of our own, which is in my office, is pinball by Stern. Right. With that big ball rolling down the play field, in the back class, rolling down the city. And that happened to have come, that artwork was on a Chicago coin calendar. and so we we that game was built both solid state and electromechanically and remember the first solid state games had the same rules even though you could do something different with with solid state they had the same rules in electromechanical they had chimes in them. They didn't have electronic sound, so forth and so on. So it was the same game. What happened was that we knew that operators were not familiar with solid state electronics and they could fix electromechanical so we knew that they would want more electromechanical games and less solid state games. Just is in 1953, Raymond Lowy, a great designer, designed the Studebaker, the two-door version, which was sporty and low. And Studebaker knew that car buyers wanted the four-door family car. And so they planned on three quarters of the production being the four-door and one quarter being the Raymond Lowy low, sleek, sporty two-door. Of course, the public wanted three-quarters of their demand was for the Raymond Lowy because it was modern and special-looking, and one-quarter was for the Studebaker four-door upright car. Likewise, with solid states, Bally found the same thing, whereas we thought most operators would want and did want, as a matter of fact, electromechanical, the solid-state game, which played the same, earned more money because the player saw something new, and that was a gas-discharged display. And that was revolutionary. And a style change like that, whether it be a gas-discharged display or whether it be a dot-matrix display, or ramps being added to games. Those are the things that got games, obsoleted old games and made new games exciting. Right. So was the transition from electromechanical to solid-state, was that a smooth one? Because we know that Gottlieb really struggled with it. Well, Gottlieb struggled. They didn't want to do it. And they were playing around with Rockwell and a 4-bit microprocessor, whereas the rest of us used the 8-bit microprocessor. And God, I don't know what I just said. I have no idea what that is. But, yeah, they struggled with it, and they never really made it there. You know, you remember their system was... Yeah. But was it a smooth transaction for you in the sense that you had to come from electromechanical and all of a sudden you needed a solid state system to drive these pinball machines you know at Stern at old Stern we reverse engineered the Bally system and made some changes to it but we reverse engineered it which they were aware of and the biggest problem that one had in those days is well a problem I'd say the biggest is and certainly there are a lot of changes the type of wire change pushback wire but among the difficulties was you remember games had EPROMs with the memory in them what you may not remember is the early games didn't have EPROMs they had ROMs mass ROMs and the lead time was significant to get those ROMs. And it wasn't you programmed them yourselves. They came from a factory already programmed, and you weren't going to update that program, you know, and so forth. And so then when we finally got ROMs for pinball, now we want to make the next game, which was Stingray? What was our second game? You know what? I'm brain dead there. I'll look it up for you when you go ahead. Yeah, yeah. So at any event, we didn't have ROMs. We didn't have ROMs well-ordered. So my father totally disagreed with me. And, of course, I was the president. He was the part-time vice president. You took a stingray, by the way. Yeah, I was a stingray. And so I said, here, we'll wire it. The rules were basically we'll stack switches. And if we had a rollover did A and a star did B, we'll stack those switches. And now that rollover did A give 10,000 points and B like such and such, you know, and we'll have a double stack rollover. And we did things like that. And Sam, of course, said, no, you can't do that. So I also put a flipper in the middle of the play field and showed it to him. And that was sort of distracting. and he said, you know, oh, well, you can't do the flipper, so we forgot about the switches, and that's how we did it with ROMs temporarily. But that was a big problem. You were limited because you had to decide what you were making, and the lead time was significant to get mass ROMs and difficult. Would you have used the same ROM for multiple games then, really? We did it a little bit in the beginning. Thereafter, no. I can't tell you how many times I did that. It was just the one time or more. You've got to remember, guys, you're asking me about 40, 50 years ago. You've got the recall from that time. 50 years ago? We're trying to make the most of it. 1976 77 so what you subtracting is that 40 50 40 years ago right Right Yeah Sure. And you're still very sharp, I have to say. Yeah, you have great recall of all these details, which is amazing, considering how many different aspects of the business you've been in over the years. So you're making pinball games. you've moved from electrical to solid-state games, and then the video game boom kind of kicked in in the late 70s up to about 1980. And you ended up building quite a lot of video games as well. Yeah, we did. Tell us how that happened. We had some of our own, and we had to. We had some of our own, and we had a lot of Konami games. our best of our own of course was Berserk and Frenzy I had a boat an expensive boat in those days now I have an old cheap boat but I had an expensive boat and it was named Evil Otto and it was named Evil Otto because Evil Otto paid for that boat if you remember Evelado in Berserk was this sort of ownership of various forms of transport something which you mentioned earlier about Harry Williams having his plane you got your boat was this the kind of thing with pinball manufacturer what you want to do you want to ask Gomez and about cars sure right well still i i see you to me all cars are good if the top goes down that's all that counts right so um um what i'm curious about uh because i tried to research it and i couldn't find it there but um is it correct that stern electronics at some point owned williams or is that not true no no no no that's not true but you bought seaberg though didn't you yes we yeah we owned seaberg we owned seaberg for a while and then and then sold it off yes but seaberg did i bought it out of a bankruptcy i'm starting to see a pattern emerging but well we also So we also, at that company, we had a video game sub that also did all our printed circuit boards, vertically integrated, and that was called Electronic Sound. No, that's wrong. That was another company. It was called Elect... God. It was called... It was... Hold on. I got to hit Shelly. I'm having a... hey shell what was it that's great having all these resources on tap shelly is right there next to next to gary to be able to answer these questions yes yeah that's it it was it was url which was universal research lab which is they were just a few you know a few minutes from where we are now we also had uh out of a bankruptcy I bought August J. Johnson, which was Scott Leaves Cabinet Company. So Stern was a conglomerate of companies that we acquired that were distressed. Right. So since you just asked, you went next door and asked Shelly Sachs, that sort of makes me wonder, how long have you known Shelly Sachs? Hey, Shelly, you got to come in here. Okay. okay yeah yeah so where did the two of you first meet? how long have I known Shelly Sachs? you've got Jonathan and Martin hi guys February 1st 1979 wow it's in your memory wow and where was that? what was the occasion? I had been working at Montgomery Wards in labor relations wasn't going anywhere I was trying to be a buyer I passed their stuff then they discontinued it and I had a friend at the time who knew that Stern was looking for an admin person and so I said what the hell and the rest is history and I started out with working with I didn't have Gary right away the first few months he had Fran oh yeah Fred I remember I had Sam and Larry Siegel and then I inherited Gary and eventually Stephen Kaufman and Tom Campbell and Ben Ricchetti oh god yeah and Ron Monzo oh god oh yeah lots of people Shelly you remember when we redid the office over the old stern a when we were down on the versi yeah and I had the big glass wall yeah in front of it yeah you sat in front of it and I was going to make it one-way glass so you couldn't see it and I could see you. I don't remember you talking about that. Yeah, you pitched a fit. Oh, well, I probably did. I probably did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we've been together, how long does that make it? I don't know. 79? 50? No. 40? 41 years? Yeah, 41 years. Okay, all right. There you go. Did you have a party for your 40th anniversary? We used to go to lunch. We don't do that anymore. Yeah, we have to do that. I think I've got to go to lunch more often. Well, once they open up, you're being able to eat inside. That's true. We eat outside. We still eat outside. Yeah, we eat outside. Outside. Outside is summertime. It's okay. Outside is fine. Yeah. Except for last night outside. The sky opened up. We had remnants of Cristobal, the hurricane or whatever it was. Right. Oh, my phone just went dead. At least your Skype is still working. Yes. Well, no, it's not on my phone. I'm on the computer. You're on the real line, the computer line. That's why it's working. Yeah. Okay. So thank you, Shelly, for stepping in and clarifying that. All right, guys. What's next? So what happened at the end with Stern Electronics? Why did the company shut down? I know there was the infamous hold to the video game boom. All of a sudden, everything, the market completely saturated. Let's put it like that. It stopped, and we just lived by the sword, died by the sword, shall I say. We grew very, very big. We had had some investment getting ready to preparing, hoping to go public, and it didn't work. And that was years before, and we never recovered from that completely. And we've learned a lot. It's called missing the window. It happens. So it means that we have to continue with this, and that seemed to have worked out just fine. um having said that you you let's see after that you remember that uh that uh i uh we worked out of my uh i did some different sales and what have you we worked out of my townhouse shelly and i put together the business plan for date east pinball and then got date east interested but we were also doing uh we were working with video vendor which was a vending machine that um for rental and return of videotape remember oh yeah yeah that was a big deal in those days and we we had uh we did a conversion kit for pinball and proved the that concept was no good which is a gametron game that you did with a pin star yeah it was a you know it was gametron was a narrow body version of flight 2000 right it actually in my opinion played better than Flight 2000. Harry Williams will tell you when you make a wide-body game, there's so much more geometry left to right that you have to fill up. So A, it's expensive because you've got to buy lots of extra parts and B, it just doesn't play the same. It's like trying to play tennis on a round tennis court or trying to play singles on a doubles court. So it turned out when we narrowed that game, and I worked with Steve Kirk, but Joe Joost who had been a mechanical engineer for us and later for Williams great guy, great mechanical engineer both these guys have passed away it actually in my opinion played better now I'm a casual player but it played better it didn't have quite the same mechanism ball walker we used existing EJETs and we made them over at Gameplan I think it played better than Flight 2000 and certainly Flight 2000 one of my favorite games I typically talk about what's my favorite game is what's on the line but if I have to go back I'm going to give you Flight 2000 as one of my favorites and so I think it was better as an aerobody we proved the concept didn't work because why would you take your money buy a kit take your used pinball machine put this kit in it and have something without a resale value when you could trade in your game and buy a high speed right high speed at the time we'll come to pin star and Steve Kirk as well in just a moment but can I just flip back because right at the end of Stone Electronics there was, well ever since I think at that point there's been a, I want to say a popular misconception, but maybe it's not a misconception, that it was a game, Orbiter One, which was so expensive that it caused the downfall of the company. I think you've just explained that's not the case. Absolutely not. No, Orbiter One was a neat game. I worked with Dixie Dixie Reinhardt and his partner, and Dixie, his partner, whose name slips my mind, they were plastics engineers. they had designed the toilet for the space shuttle and they did a lot of different plastic stuff, they did boots ski boots and Dixie was living in a teepee behind his house I don't know why he wasn't in the house in a teepee behind his house in Aspen Colorado and we worked with these guys trying to do something different uh and i think we had a you know a concept that we never turned into a game it was a novelty but it never became a game um and no it was no we were trying something different you know it wasn't there it wasn't our last hurrah no uh-uh no dixie i spoke to i was on the mountain and coincidentally he called me i paid him off in in uh in uh in games uh at the end and he reminded me of that he called me uh he just by coincidence i hadn't talked to him in decades and he he was i was on the top of bail and then he called uh he had he had designed a plastic boot shoe for the japanese company and sold it to them and i guess live happily ever after off of that. And then recently at Toy Fair I ran into a guy who told me that Dixie passed away in the last year or so. That wasn't him. So Dixie has passed away. But no, that wasn't the end of it. That wasn't the cause of it. No. when you see that ball go behind the flipper yeah come back on the play field i mean it's just you know we tried you know we're a little bit more conservative but uh we tried a few things that were very novel and okay maybe they weren't the smartest thing you know uh pinball is a pinball machine. Right. So, Orbiter 1, that game came out in 1982, but I think eventually Stern Electronics sort of closed down in 84, or... Yes, that's correct, 84. Right. My father died in 84 also. And was that related to each other? No. No. No, it wasn't. so so what happened to the no he had been actually he had been in a nursing home for a year or two at that point okay yeah you know if i i'm going to say you know this is a little weird to say but maybe he should have died a year sooner his last year was not a rewarding year yeah often the case when people go into nursing homes i think yeah yeah he couldn't you know he prior to that, when he was living at home, he had a caretaker living with him and taking him around and what have you. And at what age did your father die? He was 72. So you already outlived your father in the sense that you're already older and in very good shape, I have to say. Well, you know, I've lost some weight recently, too. I went on a diet when I was stuck at home and I've exercised more. So I've lost about 15, 20 pounds. Wow. And I said, I've got to digress for you for a minute. And I have my physical on Monday the 15th, although all the blood tests have been done already, so I know the result. Now he's just got to listen to my heart and this or that. And I started with this doctor when I was 60, and I moved back in the city. And I said to him, I picked somebody younger than me because I wanted somebody who was going to survive me. I didn't want to be changing doctors because my doctor was older than me and died. So I got a younger doctor. Now he's, you know, he's head of the department. And I said to him at the time, well, okay, I'm 60. I guess I've got probably 10 or 20 years. You know, I'll be 70 or 80 when I pass. You know, and I said, well, actually, I've made it to 60. So maybe that gives me a little bit more. I've got I've got 15 to 25 instead of 10 to 20, 15 to 25 years, you know, 75 to 85. And he said to me, well, 75 is the average. So he didn't give me one single day for having lived already to 60, you know, and changing the percentage. So I must be on borrowed time, but I intend to borrow it as long as I can. Right. So getting back to the timeline, what happened to the assets and the rights of Stern Electronics and their IP and so on? The assets, the bank foreclosed, and the bank was in worse shape than we were. If you remember, there was a banking crisis at the time. You know, remember the interest rates had gone up to double digits at one point. And so the assets were sold at a foreclosure, you know, which is fact and all that. The IP I bought from the buyer. So my ex-wife and I own the old Stern IP. Right. And at the point of the closure, was it sort of a controlled winding down of the company? You know, you knew it was coming to that point and there were no lines up and down the line? Shelley and I worked with them, yes. It was sort of controlled, as much as they're controlled, yeah. Right, so there weren't a whole bunch of new game designs that were, you know... Oh, no, no, no, no. No, there was nothing that was not built up. All right. So the equipment was... The old artwork and the old berserk belongs to me, that kind of thing. Have you still got that artwork and the files? No, it belongs to me, but nobody's got copies of most of it. But if you have a copy of it and you want to reproduce it, technically it's mine. I'm not going to say that I do a bunch with it. I don't have old ROMs or anything. I don't own an old berserk. no and uh and i guess playfield designs are not copyrightable is that right so the art is copyrightable the layout is not right so of course that uh that came in rather handy when it came to uh to making the beatles game well i i i own that you know i i own that playfield right so but you know it but you know there was a you guys remember uh a lawsuit between Bally and Williams on Hyperball Rapid Fire. Basically, one tried to sue the other on a play field on a copyright, and they said, no, no, the copyright judge said, uh-uh, copyright's on the art, and you have different art. Right. Okay. So Stern Electronics closed down. What happened to the equipment that was sold off, and any inventory? to machine reaction. Right. It's not like when you started Data East you still had all this equipment from Stern Electronics. No, no, no. No, we built everything new. Well, thanks very much, Gary. We're just going to take a little break there and we still have a lot to discuss, particularly the more recent events in the Stern Pinball Factory. So we will be back talking to Gary Stern and continuing the celebrations of his 75th birthday with our unique and exclusive podcast interview with Gary in part two, which will be coming up soon.

_(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_

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*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 9eeeaf98-56c8-48a2-bd0a-8a8a83457d6a*