# Episode 96 - Pinball Composer w/ Chris Granner

**Source:** Wedgehead Pinball Podcast  
**Type:** podcast_episode  
**Published:** 2025-08-18  
**Duration:** 81m 16s  
**Beat:** Pinball

**URL:** https://www.buzzsprout.com/2265853/episodes/17680160-episode-96-pinball-composer-w-chris-granner.mp3

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## Analysis

Chris Granner, legendary pinball sound designer and composer for Williams, Stern, Capcom, and other manufacturers, discusses his 40-year career composing for ~40 pinball machines including iconic titles like The The Addams Family, Twilight Zone, Indiana Jones, and Lord of the Rings. The episode covers his entry into the industry, his creative process, the technical constraints of the Yamaha YM2151 synthesizer chip that defined 1980s-90s pinball sound, and his collaborative relationships with legendary designers like Mark Ritchie, Pat Lawlor, and Steve Ritchie.

### Key Claims

- [HIGH] Chris Granner worked on approximately 40 different pinball machines during his career — _Host Alan cites this as a fact pulled from previous Chris Granner interviews_
- [HIGH] The Yamaha YM2151 synthesizer chip had 8 individual voices (monophonic notes) available for sound design, plus a separate drum track — _Chris Granner technical explanation of the chip's architecture during the interview_
- [HIGH] Chris Granner developed a novel rhythm guitar technique for Taxi using voice alternation and timing delays to create the illusion of a strummed chord from a two-voice synthesizer — _Chris Granner explicitly states this was the first time he developed this technique and describes it in detail, noting 'it's still one of the things that I'm proudest of in my whole career'_
- [HIGH] Mark Ritchie was Chris Granner favorite game designer to work with because of his collaborative and curious approach, in contrast to Pat Lawlor and Steve Ritchie who had more directorial control — _Chris Granner directly states 'Mark Ritchie is my favorite game designer to work with' and elaborates on the differences in working styles_
- [HIGH] Craig Beierwaltes was the hiring manager at Williams who recruited Chris Granner, after being impressed by Granner's demo tape created on a Cyber 175 supercomputer using a Fortran program — _Chris Granner recounts the hiring story in detail, including Beyerwaltz's famous quip about making an $18 million supercomputer sound like a $2.50 microprocessor_
- [HIGH] Brian Schmidt and Chris Granner worked closely together from early 1987 through 1990-91 to add capabilities to the pinball music programming language — _Chris Granner states this collaboration period and mentions it predated Schmidt's later work at Microsoft on DirectX and Direct Music_
- [HIGH] Chris Granner attended Eugene Jarvis 65th birthday party where he had dinner with Kendall Hale and their wives (who are both writers) — _Chris Granner recounts this personal anecdote in detail_
- [HIGH] Gottlieb games from the mid-1980s emphasized sound design, with Kendall Hale as a key composer during that era — _Chris Granner confirms this and notes Hale still does work for Stern_
- [HIGH] Mark Ritchie was the designer of Road Kings, which was the first game Chris Granner worked on at Williams — _Host Alan states this and Chris Granner confirms it in context_
- [HIGH] Fish Tales joke about dynamite fishing ('you gonna talk or are you gonna fish?') originated from a real anecdote involving Mark Ritchie, Jack Skalon (mechanical engineer), and Chris Granner brainstorming the game's theme — _Chris Granner recounts the full story of how this call-out was created, explaining Mark pitched the fishing game concept and the joke emerged from their discussion_

### Notable Quotes

> "The sound design and musical compositions in a pinball machine can drastically affect the state of a player's mind through the triggering of clever reward signals to our brains via sound waves."
> — **Alan (Host)**, opening segment
> _Sets the thematic frame for the episode's emphasis on audio as a psychological tool in pinball design_

> "I am his Huckleberry."
> — **Chris Granner**, mid-episode
> _Chris Granner's memorable, pop-culture-inflected way of expressing his deep professional admiration for Mark Ritchie (reference to Tombstone/Doc Holliday)_

> "So what you're saying is you made an $18 million supercomputer sound like a $2.50 microprocessor with a $0.75 8-bit D-to-A converter. Is that basically what you're saying?"
> — **[name withheld pending review]**, hiring story
> _Legendary hiring manager's response to Chris Granner's demo tape; reveals the wit and technical literacy of early Williams leadership_

> "It's the limitations of the device that I think I associate your sound with... you became so adept at ringing every little bit out of it."
> — **Alan (Host)**, mid-episode
> _Articulates how hardware constraints defined Chris Granner's distinctive sound signature across games_

> "The first thing you do is you go, you can't play a three-note chord, right? So now all of a sudden of the three notes that you want this chord to have, which two are the most important?"
> — **Chris Granner**, technical discussion
> _Explains the core creative constraint that forced innovative voice allocation and composition strategies on the YM2151_

> "Mark was a very different kind of a guy. He was younger. He hadn't had those kind of life-towering successes. And so he was a little bit... he was a curious guy and he wasn't above changing his mind about something."
> — **Chris Granner**, designer comparison
> _Contrasts Mark Ritchie's collaborative humility with the directorial approach of Pat Lawlor and Steve Ritchie_

> "Mark really wanted me to be me, you know, more than he wanted me to execute a vision that he had that involved sound."
> — **Chris Granner**, designer philosophy
> _Core reason Chris Granner preferred working with Mark Ritchie; emphasizes creative autonomy and mutual respect_

> "I'm a horrible programmer. I'm a terrible programmer."
> — **Chris Granner**, technical section
> _Self-deprecating but honest assessment of his programming skills despite mastering assembly language macros for music composition_

> "It's still one of the things that I'm proudest of in my whole career. It was a really fun thing to sort of discover that, damn, that worked. That actually worked."
> — **Chris Granner**, Taxi rhythm guitar technique discussion
> _Shows emotional investment in technical innovation; the rhythm guitar technique remained a career highlight even decades later_

> "You know, we make the cool assets and we make sure that the programmer puts them in the right place and stuff like that. But there's a lot, a lot of work that goes into making that happen."
> — **Chris Granner**, collaboration discussion
> _Emphasizes the hidden labor of programmers and the collaborative nature of sound design implementation_

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| Chris Granner | person | Legendary pinball sound designer and composer; worked on ~40 machines for Williams, Capcom, Stern, and JJP; known for mastering the Yamaha YM2151 synthesizer chip during the golden era of pinball sound (1980s-1990s) |
| Alan | person | Host of Wedgehead Pinball Podcast; owner and operator of Wedgehead, a pinball bar in Portland, Oregon; describes Chris Granner as his audio hero |
| Alex | person | Co-host of Wedgehead Pinball Podcast; referred to as 'the water boy'; participates in interviews from the podcast's basement studio |
| Mark Ritchie | person | Legendary pinball designer; designed Road Kings (Chris Granner's first Williams project); known for collaborative design approach and curiosity; Chris Granner's favorite designer to work with |
| Pat Lawlor | person | Legendary pinball designer at Williams; designed Addams Family and Twilight Zone; had directorial approach to sound design; worked extensively with Chris Granner |
| Steve Ritchie | person | Legendary pinball designer; designed Flash, Firepower, High Speed; described as collaborative but opinionated regarding sound and music; worked with Chris Granner |
| Craig Beierwaltes | person | Legendary Gottlieb sound designer; was the hiring manager at Williams who recruited Chris Granner; known for his wit and technical knowledge |
| Dave Zabriskie | person | Legendary pinball sound designer; worked at Mylstar; had doctorate from Northwestern; mentioned as one of the exceptional sound designers in pinball history |
| Brian Schmidt | person | Legendary pinball sound designer and programmer; collaborated closely with Chris Granner from early 1987 through 1990-91 to enhance pinball music programming language; later worked at Microsoft on DirectX and Direct Music |
| Kendall Hale | person | Composer for Gottlieb games in mid-1980s; continues to work for Stern; attended Eugene Jarvis's 65th birthday party where Chris Granner met him |
| Eugene Jarvis | person | Legendary pinball designer; hosted 65th birthday party attended by Chris Granner, Kendall Hale, and others |
| Jack Skalon | person | Longtime mechanical engineer who worked with Mark Ritchie; contributed to Fishtales design; was an avid fisherman who informed the game's theme and fishing anecdotes |
| Greg Dunlap | person | Regular contributor to Wedgehead Pinball Podcast; introduced Alan and Alex to Chris Granner at Northwest Pinball Arcade Show in Tacoma |
| Python | person | Artist/designer involved in many Mark Ritchie pinball projects; created playfield artwork and visual designs |
| Williams | company | Major pinball manufacturer where Chris Granner began his career in the mid-1980s; produced iconic games he composed for including Addams Family, Twilight Zone, Indiana Jones |
| Stern Pinball | company | Modern pinball manufacturer; Chris Granner has worked on Stern games; Kendall Hale continues to work for them |
| Gottlieb | company | Classic pinball manufacturer; had strong emphasis on sound design in mid-1980s; employed Craig Beyerwaltz and Kendall Hale |
| Mylstar | company | Pinball manufacturer (also known as Gottlieb Premiere); where Chris Granner interviewed with Dave Zabriskie but was not hired due to hiring freeze |
| Capcom | company | Company Chris Granner has composed for; mentioned as one of his past employers |
| Wedgehead Pinball Podcast | organization | Podcast hosted by Alan and Alex; based at Wedgehead pinball bar in Portland, Oregon; episode 96 features Chris Granner interview |
| Northwest Pinball Arcade Show | event | Pinball event held in Tacoma, Washington where Alan, Alex, and Chris Granner met in person a few months before this episode |
| University of Illinois Urbana | organization | Where Chris Granner studied music; had access to Cyber 175 supercomputer for creating his demo tape |
| Yamaha YM2151 | product | Synthesizer chip used in pinball machines starting in 1986; defined the sound of 1980s-1990s Williams/Stern games; Chris Granner is considered the greatest composer for this chip |
| Cyber 175 | product | Supercomputer at University of Illinois that Chris Granner used to create his demo tape using a Fortran program |

### Signals

- **[design_innovation]** Chris Granner developed a novel voice-alternation rhythm guitar technique for Taxi that created the illusion of strummed chords from a two-voice synthesizer by alternating which voice played the high and low notes in sync with a shuffle rhythm pattern (confidence: high) — Chris Granner's detailed explanation: 'I made one of them be the first note that you heard... And the other track was the second note... when you put those things together and you do a little volume magic... you can actually create the rhythm guitar part'
- **[design_philosophy]** Contrast between directorial designers (Pat Lawlor, Steve Ritchie) who had clear visions for sound vs. collaborative designer (Mark Ritchie) who valued input and was willing to change his mind; Chris Granner preferred the collaborative model (confidence: high) — Chris Granner: 'Mark really wanted me to be me... more than he wanted me to execute a vision that he had... With Steve and Pat, they knew what they wanted, and they pretty much insisted to get it'
- **[design_innovation]** The 8-voice limitation of the Yamaha YM2151 chip forced Chris Granner and his contemporaries to develop creative voice allocation and density techniques that became signature elements of the era's sound identity (confidence: high) — Chris Granner's explanation of voice management: 'How dense and how idiomatic can I make a two-voice synthesizer part... Those were the kinds of problems that I was solving'
- **[personnel_signal]** Brian Schmidt and Chris Granner collaborated closely from early 1987-1990/91 to enhance the pinball music programming language; Schmidt later went on to work at Microsoft on DirectX/Direct Music, suggesting pinball innovation informed broader tech industry work (confidence: high) — Chris Granner: 'Brian Schmidt and I worked very, very closely together adding capabilities to that language... that predated a lot of the work that Brian then went on to do... at Microsoft'
- **[historical_signal]** Transition from recording-based audio (modern games) to live synthesizer performance (1980s-90s Williams); audio architecture changed from stored samples to algorithmic generation due to ROM storage constraints (confidence: high) — Alan's explanation: 'instead of recording music and then storing it to be played later... you actually had to program all the notes using assembly language, and then that code would then get played, quote, live by the synthesizer chip'
- **[design_philosophy]** Mark Ritchie's approach to game design involved collaborative brainstorming sessions where mechanical engineers, programmers, artists, and sound designers contributed ideas organically (e.g., the Fishtales dynamite joke emerged from fishing anecdotes) (confidence: high) — Chris Granner on Fishtales: 'Chris, I want to make a fishing game... Mark would be talking about bass, catching bass... and I said, did you ever hear that joke...'
- **[content_signal]** Wedgehead Pinball Podcast episode 96 is a comprehensive career retrospective with a legendary industry figure; includes technical deep-dives on synthesis, design process, and interpersonal dynamics between major designers (confidence: high) — Hosts conducted detailed technical interviews about YM2151 capabilities, assembly language programming, voice allocation, and designer working relationships
- **[industry_signal]** Chris Granner's assessment suggests clear tiering of designer approaches: Pat Lawlor and Steve Ritchie had 'towering success' and directorial control; Mark Ritchie represented a younger, more collaborative generation (confidence: high) — Chris Granner: 'Pat and Steve... were the masters... they were in charge of their projects... By the time I got to be hanging with those guys, they knew that the success of a project was driven by their good hard work'
- **[historical_signal]** Gottlieb games from mid-1980s had strong sound design emphasis with composers like Craig Beyerwaltz and Kendall Hale; represented a competitive sonic positioning before Williams dominance (confidence: high) — Chris Granner and Alan discuss Gottlieb's emphasis on sound and specific games like Hollywood Heat and Victory by Kendall Hale
- **[design_innovation]** Sound designers work closely with programmers to integrate call-outs and voice lines; Fishtales' 'You gonna talk or you gonna fish?' originated from collaborative brainstorming and became iconic game audio (confidence: high) — Chris Granner's detailed origin story of the Fishtales joke and how it became a timed call-out for not launching the ball
- **[technology_signal]** Chris Granner developed expertise in translating written musical notation into assembly language macros; mastered rapid typing and note-list creation from manuscript paper as a core skill (confidence: high) — Chris Granner: 'I could sit with the manuscript on a notepad or a music stand and I could read it and type... I became very good at... typing a note just brutally quickly'

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## Transcript

Music Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast. I'm your host, as always, Alan, the owner and operator of Wedgehead, a pinball bar in Portland, Oregon. Joined in the basement studio of my trusty co-host, it's Alex, the water boy. How are you doing? I'm doing good. I'm doing particularly good because we have a high enough profile guest that I get to skip our coffee fundraiser plug, right? Those are the rules? Yeah, that's the rules. We don't need to do that on this episode. We don't waste anybody's time. We're going to get right into this. Pinball, you know, is a sensory game, a psychological game, and a game of conditioned behavior. Much like the famous Dr. Yvonne Pavlov demonstrated in his famous study about conditioning dogs to salivate simply by ringing a bell before feeding them. The sound design and musical compositions in a pinball machine can drastically affect the state of a player's mind through the triggering of clever reward signals to our brains via sound waves. And perhaps no other single aspect of a pinball machine is less celebrated than what a truly transcendent sound designer brings to a pinball machine. Because if they do their job well, the lead designer and lead programmer will probably end up grabbing most of the credit in the court of public opinion, rendering a job well done in the sound department almost camouflage. But somebody is responsible for that sound effect on that spinner rip, for that heart-pounding music cue before your multiball, for those iconic call-outs that stick in your brain forever. And that person, of course, is the sound designer. Pinball throughout its history has had some truly exceptional sound designers, including Dave Zabriskie, David Thiel, Brian Schmidt, and Dan Forden, to name a few. But for my money, nobody ever did it better than our guest today, the legendary sound designer and composer for Williams, Capcom, Stern, I think even a JJP game. He's the undeniable goat to me, and it's an insane pleasure to get this opportunity to talk to him on the show. Mr. Chris Granner, how are you doing, Chris? I'm very well. Wow, what an intro. I hope I can be half as cool as that intro. You're already twice as cool, Chris. I was going to say... That's sweet of you to say. It's nice to meet you. Nice to be here. Yeah, we had the pleasure of meeting you in person at the Northwest Pinball Arcade Show up in Tacoma a few months back. We were introduced via Greg Dunlap, a regular contributor to the show. And we're very, very thankful for that introduction because you are kind of the audio hero to both Alan and I of pinball. And so it was really a pleasure to meet you. We're very happy to have you on the show today. Awesome. Yeah, well, I can't wait. I really enjoyed reading over some of the notes you sent, Alan, and I'm looking forward to getting into it. Yeah, so I'm going to go over some quick facts real quick. Just some stuff I pulled from some of your previous interviews that I found online, and I'll make sure that I link all these in the show notes if you want to hear. Chris has gone around to different shows and given his own presentations on his career, so I want to cover as much new material as we can, as well as making sure everyone hears some of these stories. But he's worked on about 40 different pinball machines and their sound packages during his time in pinball. He started off studying music at the University of Illinois Urbana. Yeah, a heavily abridged list of some of the most popular games Mr. Grann has worked on that the listeners might recognize. Pinbot, F-14 Tomcat, Cyclone, Taxi, Earthshaker. Elvira and the Party Monsters, Diner, Doctor Dude, Terminator 2. And 3. Yep, Funhouse, Whirlwind, Addams Family. Fishtails. Whitewater, Twilight Zone, Indiana Jones, Pinball Adventure, The Williams. Roadshow, Indy 500, Monopoly, Ripley's, believe it or not. NASCAR, one of the best Pat Lawler games of all time. Lord of the Rings and Simpsons Pinball Party, to name just a few. That's an insane list. Mr. Granner, do you think we missed any heavy hitters there? Does that kind of sum up? Those were certainly the high points. I'm trying to think if you left anything crucial out. It's worth calling out the Sopranos game for sure. You have to put some weight around World Poker Tour, which is a very interesting game, mostly for the tech around call-outs and just the incredible, incredible package that Keith P. Johnson did in programming this just insane matrix of cards call-outs that we did in that game. I mean, he cursed my name for a month while he worked on it because I had sort of dreamed up this whole scheme, but he was the one who had to make it work. And he did. He did make it work. And so and that's going to be a theme, you guys, that we get through is is that none of this happens in a vacuum. My really still to this day, my favorite thing to do when I work on games is to collaborate with the programmers because they are the ones who really do bring the magic. And, you know, we make the cool assets and we make sure that the programmer puts them in the right place and stuff like that. But there's a lot, a lot of work that goes into making that happen. And, you know, the games that I've worked on over the years sound as great as they do because I've worked with some just unbelievably great, you know, game programmers over the years. So just, you know, that'll be something that we'll come back to. And it's interesting. You've worked in such a like a large breadth of generations of games, right? But before you even started on any of the games we mentioned, you almost ended up at Milstar, you know, better known as Gottlie Premiere, better derided as Rat Slime, right? That's what they insulted it with? Yeah. 1985. Even had an interview that ended with a job offer from Dave Zabriskie? Apparently they were under a hiring freeze, I heard you say in a previous interview, which ended up kind of working out better for you since you were able to secure a job kind of shortly thereafter at Williams. And then obviously the rest is history. But if you wouldn't mind talking about Dave a little bit, because Dave is also, like you, kind of a legendary pinball sound designer. Amazing, amazing guy. Yeah, Dave is Dave is incredible. I didn't really get to know him very well. You know, when he was at Mylstar, it was really only very briefly that we sort of touched base at that point. But he wasn't he was associated with the North. You know, he had his his doctorate came from Northwestern. He didn't do a ton of work with the computer music people, but he did some, and it was through that department that I connected with all of these people and really was in a place to be in the right place at the right time to snag that Williams job. I met Dave in the process, but the guy that I actually interviewed with was Craig Beyerwaltz. He was another kind of a legendary, Gottlieb, sound guy, and at the point where we were connecting and I was up for this job, It was he that was he was he was going to be the hiring manager. And so it was he that took my demo to, you know, my little goofy bleeps and bloops demo tape and kind of jaw on floor said, you made this. How did you make this? And I said, I made it with this Fortran program that I wrote for the Cyber 175 supercomputer on the campus of the University of Illinois. And he goes, so what you're saying is you made an $18 million supercomputer sound like a $2.50 microprocessor with a $0.75 8-bit D-to-A converter. Is that basically what you're saying? I go, exactly. That's exactly what he does. And he said, you're hired. When can you start? So that was pretty cool. That was a pretty good moment for sure. That's pretty good, yeah. Yeah. Well, and what's interesting is like Gottlieb in the mid 80s really had some great sounding games that, you know, people don't really remember too fondly today. But I'm a Gottlieb fan, so I do really like all those games. Yeah, and they really did kind of put an emphasis on sound. And I wasn't I'm not super familiar with the names of that era, so I don't realize who was behind all of that. But I know that was kind of a bit of their calling card until Data East started pushing their stereo. The two games from that period by Gottlieb that really stick out for me, and I played Gottlieb games from the early 70s a lot. When I was first getting into pinball, those are the games that I was really excited about. By the mid-80s, they had also moved on to somewhat hipper sound technology, and the guy who was composing for them and doing their soundtracks was Kendall Hale. And he's an amazing, amazing guy whose name still comes up a lot. He does a lot of work for Stern these days as well. So, you know, still as amazing as ever. Do you guys have like a secret fraternity? Superball sound engineers? Like, do you guys meet up once a year or every four years? Whenever we get together, it's a super fun time. You know, I haven't seen, I've spent actually very little time with Ken, but we ended up having dinner together at Eugene Jarvis's 65th birthday party. And I'll, let me tell you, that was a massively cool party. Ken and I really hit it off and our wives also really hit it off. It turns out that they're both in the same field as well. They're both writers. So that was a wacky small world, you know, kind of a dinner party. But no, the two games that I really dug from that era were Hollywood Heat. It was a fabulous Ken package, you know, real kind of a Miami Vice spinoff. And then it was called Victory. It was a game. And we're going to come back to that because we're going to talk about Whitewater. I borrowed an idea from Victory that we implemented in the rules in Whitewater, and we'll talk more about that. Victory is a cool game. Honestly, a lot of Gottliebs were putting in ideas that were ahead of their time and then got later adopted, maybe more successfully by other companies, other designers. I do want to say the last thing from the run-up to you getting into the industry and us asking you some questions is, you know, the first game you worked on at Williams was Mark Ritchie's Road Kings. And I've also heard you say that Mark is your favorite game designer to work with. That is true. One of our earliest episodes was about the Ritchie brothers, and we talked about our love for Mark Ritchie as well. So I got to meet him once at Texas Pinball Festival and had a great time just talking about our shared love of Kurt Russell movies together. Very good. I just want to know if there's anything you have to say about working with Mark that you want to elaborate on the show or tell some of the listeners who may not be as familiar with him. Well, since you gave me this opportunity, I got to tell you that I am I am his Huckleberry. So just saying. Sorry. I didn't know you were going to bring up a Kurt Russell movie right there like that. No, no. I mean, Mark, you know, in saying this, I don't, I take nothing away, okay, from Steve or Pat or Dennis or any of the really great, you know, designers that I've worked with over the years. They all have their individual strengths, you know, peculiar just sort of, you know, tendencies and things that they kind of do, you know, kind of every time out or something like that. And I guess the thing, you know, for me that, you know, both Pat and Steve, you know, really had like towering success, right? You know, Pat with Adams and then Twilight just, you know, sales records after record, right? And Steve with Flash and Firepower and especially High Speed, you know, all these games that just, you know, that just killed. They did so, so well. By the time I got, you know, to be hanging with those guys, they were the masters. They were the directors. They were the, you know, they were in charge of their projects and rightly so. They know that the, you know, the success of a project is driven by their good hard work and talent. And, you know, mostly they didn't disappoint. Right. But it did leave it left me more listening to those guys and saying, OK, so what you know, what do you think you want? Especially Pat would come by the time I would I would get to a machine and he would like introduce me to that machine. We'll talk more about the details of that, but he would like walk me through the entire thing and he would basically sing the game to me, but not the music so much. What the choreography would be as we went from rule set to rule set, he had all that stuff choreographed out in his head and he knew exactly what he wanted. So I was basically sitting there and taking notes and transcribing what he said. Made my job very easy because I just then had to execute on that, you know, and that was pretty cool. With Steve, the challenge was a little different because Steve really did want to collaborate. He's a fabulous guitarist, really good musician, and wanted to make the sounds and music his own. And so there was a lot of collaboration with him, and mostly that was really fun. And I enjoyed working with Steve as well. But Steve liked it the way that he liked it. It wasn't really so much a discussion with either one of those guys in terms of what it was going to be. They knew what they wanted, and they pretty much kind of insisted to get it. Mark was a very different kind of a guy. You know, he was younger. He hadn't had those kind of life-towering successes. And so he was a little bit, to say that he was humble is wrong. He wasn't humble, but he was curious. Okay. He was a curious guy and he wasn't above changing his mind about something. He wasn't above saying, tell me what you think of this. Tell me if you think this is a good rule. And we would have lots and lots of conversations about, you know, about the rules of the games and what kind of style would be right, especially conversations, you know, between he and I and, you know, the programmer on the project or the artist on the project or the mechanical engineer or whenever Python was around and involved. You know, obviously he was, you know, he was a big part of many of those games as well. There was just something about the process that made, you know, where I just felt I felt more included. And I also felt more like my voice and my aesthetics were going to be more prominently featured. And when it came down to it, Mark really wanted me to be me, you know, more than he wanted me to execute a vision that he had that involved sound. But it's, you know, that's, again, like I said, not to take anything away from Steve or Pat, but it was a much more collaborative relationship with Mark. And then I just feel like, you know, the themes that we sort of landed on felt more, I don't know, you know. Yeah, they seem more up your alley. Now, more genuine, more authentic to me, you know, ways in which I could be more authentic in my art, in my writing. Yeah, I think that's the gist of it, I guess. Well, you started in what is called the System 11 era of pinball, which meant that the games had ramps and they had multiballs at this point. Alex and I did a couple episodes of our show, and I called this the Metamorphosis era of pinball. It also kind of famously featured a Yamaha YM2151 synthesizer chip starting in 1986 for which I think you became its greatest composer. And the way I understand this synthesizer chip as a layperson trying to relate this to the audience is that instead of recording music and then storing it to be played later like a modern game would do today, The storage limitations of the day made it such that you actually had to program all the notes using assembly language, and then that code would then get played, quote, live by the synthesizer chip. So essentially, you were a composer and a programmer back then because you had to be. True enough. Yeah, that's absolutely true. And somehow the world survived. You know, no bombs went off in the Kremlin as a result of my writing code. And, you know, no space shuttles crashed back to Earth. Nothing bad happened. That was, you know, that was lucky for all of us. You know, we got through that period. I'm a horrible programmer. I'm a terrible programmer. The kind of programming that I had to do was essentially write assembly language macros, each macro of which represented a command for the chip to do something, Whether it was to load up a voice patch or whether it was to turn on a note that played that patch at a certain pitch for a certain duration or whether it was we actually used the command rest, which is a musical term for stop playing. Basically, that was the instruction to turn off the synth while it was playing that note, stop playing that note. There was also ring, which was continue to hold that note and just for a certain amount of time that we wanted to pass or things where we wanted it to change pitch. We could say note, play a C, and then play a D. So we would say note C4 of a certain duration, and then note D4 of a certain duration, and then it would go for bum, and it would do that. I could also go, I could say note C4, and I could then say slur C4 or D4, and it would go bum, and it would slide up there. So that kind of thing. So all of those things, just the very, very primitive operations of how you make music operation by operation, very, very low level programming. And that was the level of programming that I basically sort of had to immerse myself in to make these games kind of work. You know, one of the things that we all got pretty good at, you know, myself and all my colleagues got pretty good at during that period was figuring out some way to write, You know, to get your vision down on something, either on paper or, you know, down under your fingers if you were a good enough keyboard player. I was not, but something. And I did write most of my stuff out on manuscript paper. And so the thing that I became very good at was I could sit with the manuscript on a notepad or a music stand and I could read it and type. And I could type a note just brutally quickly. And I was able to do that. And I was able to operate in the text editing world of creating note lists that represented the score that I wrote, that represented the compositions that I wrote. And that's what I got very, very, very good at during that time with the early days at Williams. Yeah, that's crazy to me to hear because it sounds very, very much like learning an entirely new instrument with a very convoluted method of playing it. Kind of, yeah, yeah, that's well said. It's a good transition to our next question here, if you don't mind me taking it out. Alan had written down that he considers this the golden era of pinball sound and your games in particular as representative of this era, which I would agree with. I think it's a very unique sound. I think a lot of people kind of go back to this chip heavy sound and it's very much associated with like 80s nostalgia. It's a unique kind of era of music. That Yamaha chip was an extraordinary piece of technology compared to what came before it, but it obviously had many limitations that we don't think of today. Very true. I think that so much of the personality of those soundtracks came directly from the tools of the day and their limitations. Can you speak to why hardware limitations can sometimes breed not only creativity but also flavor the art itself? You know, just skipping sort of lightly over the technical, the architecture of the chip itself or the method that the chip used to actually generate noise of any kind. The notion that you could say, make this part of the instrument. You know, we had eight individual voices. So the tones, eight sounds at once could be made by this thing, each sound being a single note, right? So you could play eight notes in unison and no more. You could also play a drum track with our little one-armed sampling drummer. That was sort of like an extra piece of hardware that we glommed onto the side of it. You know, the chip itself was making eight tones at once and no more. In order to make a piece of music that sounded like, you know, something in the style of whatever it was that I was trying to make, you know, I had to say, how am I going to divide up these eight voices, right? Take the drums and put them off to the side. We've got a one-armed drummer over there who's going to play the drum part. And then what else can we do Well we got to have a bass and so that one voice taken up Then you going to have you probably going to have some kind of a you know a rhythm instrument you know playing the basic sort of rhythm of the thing And typically, you know, when you think of that, you think of a guitar, you think of a piano, just the two most sort of like basic versions of that or a synth or some kind of other keyboard. Right. I don't want to give away too many voices because I don't have very many. Right. And I know that I'm going to need more than one voice to play like for this is the lead melody. I'm always going to use two voices for that because it makes it just sound a little thicker and I can put a little delay on one of the voices and just give it some some space, you know, make it feel like it's a it's a it's a little bit more alive. So in my rhythm track, I've got two voices that I'm devoting to that. How dense and how idiomatic can I make a two-voice synthesizer part or a two-voice piano part or a two-voice guitar part? Those were the kinds of problems that I was solving, you know, on an ongoing basis. So the first thing you do is you go, you can't play a three-note chord, right? So now all of a sudden of the three notes that you want this chord to have, which two are the most important? So those are decisions that I have to make. Then there's the whole notion of, and I don't think I've ever actually said this before, so I'm really glad you asked this question. This was something that I developed. The first time I developed this particular technique was for taxi. And what I wanted to do is I wanted to get a rhythm. I wanted to get like a shuffle, kind of a rhythm guitar feel. And the thing that you have when you have a rhythm guitar is you have something kind of going and the chick is a downstroke of your pick with the lower note sounding first and the higher note just a fraction later. But then that upstroke is the opposite where the upper note is sounding first and the lower note comes a fraction later. So what I did was I took a passage, a two-note passage. This is a very rudimentary description of what I did, but I made the two tracks that I dedicated to this guitar, I made one of them be the first note that you heard, whether it was the low note or the high note, it was always the first note. And the other track was the second note. And because you're going back and forth and going chika, chika, chika, chika, that means that the low note is first and then the low note is second. And so the track that was playing the low note was switching between those two things. Or, you know, a simpler way to say it was that each of those two tracks would bounce back and forth. So if I was playing a chord that had a dumb and a dumb in it, then one track was going to be going dumb, bum, dumb, bum, dumb, bum, dumb, bum, and the other one's going to be going bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, slightly delayed. And when you put those things together and you do a little volume magic and you do a little, you know, you tighten up the note and make it not speak as long. And you can actually create the rhythm guitar part to the main taxi tune. And it's still one of the things that I'm proudest of in my whole career. It was a really fun thing to sort of discover that, damn, that worked. That actually worked. This era to me is the golden era of pinball sound. Like I said, you're the greatest composer of it. And what I really think is very interesting is I've heard you talk at length about the Yamaha synthesizer chip, almost in probably the same way that Willie Nelson talks about his guitar trigger or something. Like in a way that like it became your instrument and you created such like a depth of sound. It's the limitations of the device that I think I associate your sound with. When I think about your work and you did work after this chip, your compositions. It's got the fingerprint of the YM2151 in there still. It feels like. Yeah. And it's very cool. And I just love that like the sound of this whole generation of pinball to me, and you worked on some of the most successful games of all time, is dictated by this little piece, this little synthesizer chip on a board, just how you became so adept at ringing every little bit out of it. And I love kind of like the trilling notes, like there will be like a trilling effect that you'll do on, especially like on fishtails or whitewaters, you know, like to really, it's just very evocative. And it's insane to me to think about it. You're doing things where you're like, I have to program these sounds to be played. Like, it's not like I have to get this right one time and I record it and then I put it on a ROM. And then, you know, when this switch is hit on this game, then it just plays. It's like I have to, like, compose this music to be played off of the synthesizer. It's like a live performance every time. And that's very cool to think about it that way. Yeah, yeah. Thanks. Well, that's that's very nice of you to say. And that's an interesting observation. I'd say that's true, that it is, you know, that that system was something that I, you know, I became pretty good at doing that. Finding ways, you know, the programming language that we use to, you know, to write down those note lists, you know, enabled us to do certain kinds of things. We had, you know, some control over what that, you know, what that language was, especially during the, I'm going to say from early 87 through 1990, 91, Brian Schmidt and I worked very, very closely together adding capabilities to that language. We were doing all kinds of things that predated a lot of the work that Brian then went on to do, you know, for Microsoft, you know, at the point where he was working in that DirectX world, that direct music. Another legendary pinball sound designer. Indeed, yeah. Like, we gotta mention him as well. He was great. He was a great guy. But I want to ask you about just sort of the creative process or, let's say, scope of work for a Pinball Machine sound package. I want to dive into, like, how this starts. Like, you're brought into a project. Like, do you create, like, a list of music themes based on a number of modes? Is there, like, a checklist you have where you're like, I need a pre-launch tune. Then I need a main tune. Then I want a multiball theme. Or what you're also very known for is a high score theme when you enter your initials. What I love about a lot of your games is they have a unique theme that you only hear when you're entering a high score. He kind of saves the coolest songs for the initial entry. Are you thinking about call-outs and all that kind of stuff? I've listened to a lot of your interviews. Like I said, I'm a big fan, but I don't think that I've ever heard you talk about necessarily the workflow process that you had when creating sound and music packages. Where do you start? It's a great question, and the answer is different for every designer because I am brought into a project at the point where the game designer is ready to talk about the sound, right? I guess a project like most of Mark's games, he's drawing and he's doing the things on the playfield that turn into the toys and that turn into the shots and things like that. The physical, the dimensions, the XY dimensions of the playfield coming to life and taking shape. He's bolting things onto whitewoods and ramps and various pieces of the process. And the theme of whatever game it is he's making is taking shape on his whiteboard. And he's got notes that are notes about rules. He's got notes. If Python's involved, Python's got drawings all over the whiteboard that he's just noodled out. Those are part of things. Still one of my favorite examples is how we got to many of the coolest parts of Fishtails. Chris, I want to make a fishing game. You know, do you fish? I go, no. And he's like, wow, man, you're really missing out. You know, he and I don't remember, Jack Scalin, he was a longtime mechanical engineer. Jack did fish. And so, you know, Jack and Mark would be talking about bass, catching bass and, you know, doing this, that, the other thing, you know, out in the river and stuff like that. And I said, did you ever hear that joke about the guy who the fisheries people were trying to catch because they thought he was poaching and fishing illegally? And they go, no. And I said, yeah. So there was this guy and they, you know, the wardens heard about this guy. And they decided to go out and watch what he was doing. And the guy saw him and said, why don't you jump in and come with him? So they go out in his boat and he reaches into his cooler and he pulls out a stick of dynamite. He lights the stick of dynamite and throws it in the water. Boom! And up come a hundred fish. And the warden is sitting there going, dude, you can't do that. That's blatantly illegal. You just caught all your fish for like the next three years. You know, you can't do that. And the guy reaches into the cooler and pulls out another stick of dynamite, lights it, hands it to the guy, and he goes, you going to talk or are you going to fish? And it's a good joke, right? You know, it's kind of a funny joke. But the idea that you had pressed start and that the game had served you a ball and that you had then had the temerity not to launch that ball onto the playfield. Yep. After a certain amount of time, you are the butt of that joke. And it'll say, you got to talk or you got to fish? And that was where that line came from. To me, when I got to 1991 or whenever that was, that was an old joke for me, right? And that was about as much about fishing as I knew, right? Yeah. But I'm like, okay, God, we're going to make a fishing game. Don't you just like sit under a tree and fall asleep? Is that fun? And then I walked in one day and I saw the words on his whiteboard, stretch truth when lit. And I'm like, oh, this isn't a game about fishing. This is a game about lying. And I'm like, OK, now I understand. And that's so how big was it? You know, was was obviously a big, you know, part of the central rules of that game. And those things came about in a very, very organic way, you know, where it's like, OK, fishing game. What's on a fishing game? What happens when you fish? And those were a couple of things that happened. We pieced together all the rules of that game in a very, very organic way. And I'm like, so country music, right? And Mark goes, bluegrass, man. I'm like, oh, dude, you know, and I'm like, you know, I can fake anything, but I'm not faking that. You know, that's what, you know, when I play, I play the six string flat pick Martin guitar and an eight string mandolin. And that's what I, those are my instruments, you know, typically don't, I can't play fast enough to call it bluegrass, but I love, love, love that music. That Yamaha can play very, very fast. You may have noticed. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you notice. We can do very, very virtuosic sounding things with a synthesizer that mere mortals like me, you know, who's, you know, the arthritis is kicking in at this point and there's no hope for me to ever play that fast. You know, really, really good time. But a better answer to your question is more like the process that I went through with Pat on every one of Pat's games. And that was, OK, Chris, time to talk about the sound package. Bring your notebook. And I would go in and he would start going, OK, here's the game. See the game, see all the shots, see all the things that you can do. The theme of the game is this. I'll start you at the beginning. The ball gets launched and I want the music to be, you know, for Earthshaker, it was, you know, some kind of like a, some kind of a basic, some kind of a, you know, just like a road trip rock and roll, you know, kind of a vibe. That's where we started. And he goes, OK, so then you launch the ball. You know, I want to hear a car, you know, pulling, peeling out and pulling away. So that's what we get. He would go through the entire game, all of the rules that he had thought of and talk me through every piece of it. And I would be writing down, OK, you know, I need this sound for that. I need something that stretches across this gap. I need a piece of music that's doing this. Here's the big show that takes me to the next sort of place. The first thing that I have is I have a list of rules and a description of all of Pat's little choreographic notes that he's thought of so far. So I start with there and then he goes, OK, now let's look at every switch in the game. And we start and go through and say, OK, ball launch, you know, and shooter groove, you know, ball present, you know, switch. What sounds are associated with those things? And typically we get through most of the things that are just like are common on every pinball game. That's a list that, you know, something where I'm going to compose a unique object for each one of these switches that does a particular thing. A lit return lane, an unlit return lane, lit out lane, unlit out lane. Ramp entrance, ramp complete switch. Spinner optos. Ball catchers, the vertical upward kicker. Vux that Stern called them. I think Williams just called them kickers. Casting club element at Fishtails is one of those kickers, right? Obviously, the fishing reel itself, Mark's catapult reel, you know, catapult mechanism that he invented for Road Kings for big guns and then used over and over and over again, you know, used that a lot. Each one of those switches then sort of represented a sound that was going to be made as well. So at that point, we've got most of the rules that the game designer has to start with and all of the switches and all of the common sounds that we're going to need for the whole package. And I always like to start with the music first and just set the tone of the game and also make sure I'm on the right page, you know, with the designer and any kind of revisions that need to be done. If I get off on a foot that wasn't quite what he was thinking and we ended up having to, you know, have a conversation about that, you know, then we do that. What was your sort of like you worked with the same designers multiple times? Was it one of those things where it became like you got to know them pretty well and then your sort of, let's say, hit rate went up over time? Absolutely. Yeah, no question about it. And they got better at asking me for stuff, knowing what I could do, right? I don't know if you want to get to the taxi question now. I can talk a little bit about that if you want. We can wait. Just to say that Mark is like, when he first started working on that play field, I thought it was going to be a Grand Prix game because he was going to have those cool figure eight ramps and we were going to have this great sort of racetrack theme or whatever. And Python came in and just sort of shat all over that idea. He just thought it was a really boring, stupid idea. And it's been, you know, racing games, been done a million times. He's like, it's boring, man. Don't do that. You know, let's do let's let's let's be in a taxi and you're driving in a taxi cab and you're picking up strange passengers, man. You know, you're picking up Pinball as a passenger and you're picking up Dracula from the Cyclone game and some other people as well. You know, and and that was kind of like, oh, man, you've got to be kidding me. Again, it was like taxi driving, you know, driving in traffic. Is that supposed to be fun or something like that? I don't know. So I didn't, I really had a bad attitude about it at the beginning. And Mark goes, you know, Mark loved the idea, of course. And he's like, Chris, it'll be fine, man. Just write me some Little Feet music. And I'm like, oh, well, yes, I could do that. You know, so he didn't. So I didn't write Little Feet music. I, you know, I wrote my own music. But I, you know, Little Feet was at the time, it was absolutely my favorite band. And so just that whole kind of like country with a boogie beat, kind of a style, that very easy shuffle, obviously needed to have a very cool, Rhythm guitar passage and that was right away I started to think about that problem and started to solve that problem. That was the beginning of the tune that I still think is my favorite tune, that main taxi tune. It has so many good elements in it. It has so many things that I love about music in general and particularly about that chip and what you could do with it and just how just effortlessly beautiful a simple little piece of music could be. Really kind of all came together for that, you know, in that particular tune, you know, very much so. I want to bring up your influences as a musician because, yeah, I've heard you talk lovingly about that taxi main theme and that it was, you know, Mark had encouraged you probably because you guys were friends at this point and he knew you well. And he's like, hey, give me a little feat. Give me some little feat. Yeah, exactly. And you're like, yeah, I got you. Or like how Mark's like, again, bluegrass for fishtails, right? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I've also heard you call your soundtrack for Whitewater your Bruce Hornsby period. Are there any other pieces of your work that you remember being particularly influenced by other musicians that you can tell us about? Probably the biggest one and the one that doesn't get nearly as much credit these days, but some of the clips that you sent over for me to review, sort of lean to this a little bit, is Scott Joplin and Ragtime. And I used to play that stuff. I used to play a little Scott Joplin. And the thing that's great about Joplin is that capturing the essence of that rhythm is a very, very simple thing. Once you understand what the kind of like how the building blocks are of what you're doing and doing something that has that dum-Bradlee Ching, dum-Bradlee Ching, dum-Bradlee Ching, dum-Bradlee Ching, dum-Bradlee Ching, you know, bass left hand sort of form. And then a kind of a... I just made that up. That's what Ragtime is, you know, is those two things combined. You know, obviously, Fire was a, you know, was the place where we really got started, you know, with it in a big way. But then right down through my catalog, you'll find me, you know, reaching for that kind of like stride piano, kind of old timey, well, Ragtimey piano forms all through, you know, it's featured prominently in Adam's family, very prominently. And then it's like all over Twilight Zone. That's very definitely, you know, something that I that I reach for. And all of the kind of like, you know, maybe you call it trad jazz, you know, New Orleans jazz or something like that. That kind of writing, you know, always really, really appealed to me. And, you know, those forms, those, you know, classic 32 bar song forms and stuff like that. 12 bar blues, all those kinds of things, you know, that fit into this kind of like, you know, I didn't I was never like a really big, like a kind of a bluesy guy. I'm not a big buddy guy guy or people like that, but the blues form pervades popular music of all different genres. Just doing something that's got the 12-bar blues form is a tried and true way to get something down when you don't have any better idea for something that it should be. Musical forms, they have very distinct sorts of language that they paint for the listener, put the listener in a particular kind of a place. You know, all of the all the things that the pop music is and that classical music is as well are things where where that's really what we're after. I was fortunate to, you know, go through a very forward looking kind of avant garde experimental music program at Urbana at University of Illinois. And we learned about abstract expressionism. We learned about, you know, really crazy stuff and people, composers who went around saying, who cares if you listen? Well, I care. That was something that I didn't exactly subscribe to that school of thought around integral serial blah, blah, blah. The academic cats in the 50s and 60s really got themselves into a state, that whole notion of doing it because there was a form to it or that there was a structure to it that allowed these composers to do all these kind of really wacky things. To me, they just sounded wacky. And, you know, if you like wacky, that's cool. You know, if you're going to do wacky music like that, you should probably like it. And I did like wacky music, but I wasn't particularly interested in like in the structures, organized the wackiness. That wasn't what it was about for me. I just thought, oh, that was like that was an interesting, unusual, strange and weird sound. You know, if you play that, then, you know, maybe they let that ring in the space for a minute. And what's the next thing you think of? And and so my my like student works and things like that, you know, tended to be much more kind of like intuitive and with simple forms and simple, simple harmonic structures compared to what many of my my student colleagues were doing, you know. But I did like I did enjoy the occasional, you know, just like super goofy, you know, sound and strange chords and things like that. And so when I stumbled into those things, you know, whether it was by mistake or whether I would say, I wonder if this thing will work. And I'd try it out and I'd go, oh, wow, that was a little weird. That's not what I thought. Play around with it a little bit and see if I could turn it into something cool. It taught you to be experimental. Yeah, exactly right. Exactly right. So so there was a you know, that was something that I learned from, you know, just from the environment that I was in, you know, in school. Right That I managed to carry with me you know really just it was fortunate for me And I believe that it was fortunate for the industry that people that were there that were my primary audience which were the game designers and programmers at Williams had a positive initial response to something that was unfamiliar that they didn hate it because it was unfamiliar You know, the very tippy top of the best at that was Eugene Jarvis, but right down through Steve Ritchie, who was much more of a traditionalist than, you know, than he would ever admit, I think. He was somebody who liked what he liked. Things were going to be that kind of hard-edged, guitar-oriented rock with Steve pretty much right out of the gate. That's no longer true. Now that we're doing licensed games all the time, Steve's games have orchestral music in them and songs. He just did a whole Elton John game, right? He can do a lot of other stuff, but when he was the king of pinball, he liked it the way he liked it. And so we got High Speed and we got Getaway and we got Terminator and we got those things, you know. But then again, we also got Star Trek, right? Next Generation. Yeah. And, you know, and Forden did just, I mean, Dan Forden, he's one of my dearest friends. And that was just an epic, epic game. You know, you would ask who's like my favorite. That's my favorite game that I did not do. Oh, yeah. We haven't gotten to that question, but I did want to ask you that. Yeah, I just stumbled on it there, so I thought I guess that's kind of a spoiler. Sorry, Alan. No, go for it. We were going to ask you that. No, it's a wonderful, wonderful package, and Dan really had a great gift. He understood the DCS system. At that point, that was the second DCS game, right? We were kind of into that spot. I really am jumping ahead. We should probably come back to that and talk about DCS in another point. But yeah, you know, all these all those people, you know, so you think about the Beatles, obviously you think about the Grateful Dead. I mean, I'm a mad deadhead. I met my wife because I'm a deadhead. And so is she. And, you know, there's music that that's that's been floating around. And, you know, in those in the cracks between, you know, between the Beatles and Dylan and the dead and Little Feet and the Allman Brothers. And and, you know, certainly, you know, and Crosby, Sills and Nash, huge, huge fans. So these are all, you know, like, do you, are you guys old enough to know these? Yes, I was, I was raised on this stuff. My parents were listening to all this stuff. Okay, there you go. I was raised on classic rock, but what's interesting about all of your music is that it fits so well on all these games. And yet, as you said, it's kind of like, it's not the typical, it's not mainstream, like, we're doing bluegrass, And we're doing ragtime influences and we're doing all this stuff and people like and the pinball machine like wait what? And yet some of the best sound packages of all time are because you were able to create music with your influences and with your experience. And you had enough leeway even on the tighter leashes that that maybe Pat Lawler had to just get the best out of these things and to become iconic. These games are iconic because of their, you know, the sound and like a lot of why stuff feels so special. Yeah, that's that's something that we actually George Gomez, when we talked to him, he brought up is that like shots specifically will feel good. People people make a shot on a pinball machine and they go, oh, that feels good. And Gomez is like, well, why is it feel good? And a big part of that and something he mentioned was the sound. Absolutely. It's interesting with making something feel special with the choreography of light and everything combined with that. is just a huge, huge part of pinball and kind of what makes the game feel good. Can you discuss the psychology a little bit of what you're trying to do when you're coming up with sound effects specifically is the one I'd like to focus on more than necessarily songs? I know you mentioned a little bit just the experimentation process there and how you had an appreciation for that, but how do you nail the right emotion with a sound effect? You elicit emotional responses through sound. Some of my favorites, I just got to get through some of these because I want the listener because I'm sure they can hear these in their mind as they're listening to this episode. The gumball shot in Twilight Zone, right? The locking ball in the turbo shot on Indy 500. Yeah, that's a good one. The man overboard call out and hurry up theme. And obviously all the epic multiball starts like in Whitewater, Fishtails, Adam's Family, Whirlwind, Funhouse. The list goes on and on and on. But what I like about playing your games is when I need to hit something, the game is telling me I need to hit something. And I feel it like the music cues and the sound effects start to like raise in importance. And I think it's something you're good at. And that's, I guess, what we want to ask you about is like the psychology of using sound. You know, the first thing that you get into is what is the ball doing and how long does it take for the ball to do it? When you make an orbit shot or a ramp shot or something, you know, there's a specific amount of time that that ball takes from the time that it makes the lower ramp switch to the time that it makes the complete switch. And then you've got a couple of different possibilities because this is what interactive stuff is, you know, is all about. It's and it's real. It's real physics, you know, so you could hit a ramp shot, but not make it all the way up. So then you've got a ramp entrance that fails. So if you see if the switches that this game sees are ramp entrance and then ramp entrance again, That's a ramp fail. And at the point where you see that second thing, you know, that's potentially another sound. And we didn't always do it that way. You know, sometimes I just did it with one sound where I'd go, you know, the typical ramp entrance sounds something that goes. And then if you finish, then you go or something like that. And you have a nice conclusion to the thing. If it's a shot like the boat ramp on fishtails, then each one of those is a sequence. And you go through and it gets higher in pitch, higher in pitch, higher in pitch, you know, and gets further and further along through the sequence and you get towards, you know, either the hurry up state or the frenzy state. So you have a sound that can go and then if you fail, that sound might actually just be programmed by going, you know, or something like that, which is it's just the dumbest thing. You know, it's the simplest, just most basic sort of approach to have a rising thing and then a falling thing, you know, and to have a rising thing to a boom, there's some kind of an explosion thing, you know, and a lot of what Pat used to do when he would tell me what he wanted the game to sound like was we have these technical terms, right? One of the technical terms was P-A-D-O-W. Larry and I would sit there and go, how do you spell that, do you think? We'd mess around with Pat a little bit like that, but he would go P-A-D-O-W, P-A-D-O-W, and that's what he wanted the sound. So that's like a two-syllable celebration explosion. That would be what he'd want on those particular things. But getting to those things often featured that lead-up sound. So it would go, you know, kind of a thing like that. A lot of what I do in imagining what a pinball sound should be is I think in those technical terms. I think in those sound-effecty words. And I think about things that go, you know, things like that. Or things that go, you know, or just all kinds of goofy things like that. You know, when you think about the sound of a spinner, a spinner starts with a bright, sharp thing and then drops very quickly and then slows and then slows down. And I mean just the single sound that goes pew. And if you repeat that rapidly and then as it slows down, what you get is pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew. And eventually you hear the whole thing, but it starts high and ends low, which maps to the fast then slow thing that's happening with the switch, right? So all of the real visceral physicalness of pinball, this is why pinball is so cool, is that it's so real. It's real stuff happening on a real play field. I was talking to somebody at Zynga just this week, and this woman that I work with, she's like, Pinball, what do you think it is about pinball? And I'm like, I think it's gravity versus your desire for success. And gravity is going to win, but you can make it an interesting contest. And that, to me, is what pinball is. That's why pinball is special, is that the basic mechanic, you versus gravity, you and a pair of flippers versus gravity, that's the whole thing. That's the whole game. It's Sisyphus, right? Like it's pushed the rock up the mountain and then eventually the rock falls down the mountain and you start over again. I would really avoid that metaphor. That is not where I was going with this. I was thinking much more in terms of a get to than I have to. So now you're right, of course, you know that you are pushing a ball uphill and then that ball is going to roll back down. Sure is anything, you know, so we're getting if we're getting philosophical, like I do jokingly say this to people about pinball and I don't not mean it. But, you know, I say like pinball is great because it teaches you about life. Like in the end, we all lose now. And you don't get to control everything that happens to you, but you control how you react to it. And so like pinball is a special game that we all share. That's why we have this show. That's why I run an arcade. That's why we're talking to, you know, one of my personal heroes here who made a lot of the sound packages for people that are into pinball. It's a special game. You know, it's absolutely meditative for some. It's competitive for others, but there's a reason why we all are drawn to this mystical, physical game under glass. And what makes it feel special and what we like about it is a little bit different to every person, but it's no doubt it leaves a strong impression on the people that it sits with. It doesn't hit everybody, but the people it hits really stick with it for sure. Well, you gotta, you know, you gotta enjoy watching that boulder roll back down the hill. And I know that Chris Granner will make it sound cool when it does. We'll do our best. We're doing our best. So I also watched, you know, you spoke briefly about him, but everyone loves this guy, you know, or hearing stories about the great Python Anghelo. You said at Pintastic in 2019, I watched a seminar that you did, and I'll link it in the show notes so we don't have to go through the whole thing. And people that want to hear more of these stories that we don't have time for can go hear about them. But he basically said, Python, on the team at Pinball, that your roles were to bring a machine to life. And you credit him with a profound impact on how the games at Williams got made from then on. So what I want to ask you about is Python as a game designer, because he's well known as a prodigious and, you know, kind of material illustrator. But it sounds like when we talk to like Roger Sharp or I talk to Mark at a show or now I'm talking to you or I listen to you speak. It sounds like he brought so much more to a lot of the projects that he worked on than just sometimes doing the art packages. And I know everyone loves Python stories, so please feel free to tell us any Python stories you may have. I thought about that and I thought about the stories that are the best Python stories. And really, there's only one that sums it up and kind of brings it into our present moment as well in so many ways, speaking of sort of like dark turns of mind. Before I tell the story, I really want to say this about Python. Python was a spiritual guy, and he really did. He saw the world as the way that the great mystics see the world, that all of us, all of this is one thing. We are all one thing. This is all one thing. It's all connected. And he saw connections everywhere he went and he made those connections and he drew them into his drawings. All of that wild metamorphosis stuff that he would do in his art was all connected to this, to the idea that that everything flows into everything else. He himself was just, you know, he took a kind of a childlike delight in just the wonder and the beauty and the unexpectedness and the radical, the revolutionary nature of things in the world, things and forces and energy, how there was no real controlling all that stuff. And that the, you know, that a discerning artist's role in that world is to point those things up, is to point to those things and to help bring those things to life. So the idea of a machine coming to life, that was just part and parcel of, you know, what he thought of as the everyday magic that surrounds us. That's what I really want people to understand about Python is that he was he inspired us because he was so inspired himself. He was inspired by the world around us and he spoke passionately about it. He was, you know, he was a true artistic, you know, not just for visual art, but also for game design and for how these things work in the world in a bar or a game room or out in the out in the wild somewhere. And how people interacted with them and how they felt and what they thought. Those were things that really did occupy his mind. He was also apocalyptic. And so he was also subject to great bouts of despondency and despair. And the story that we still to this day, we still tell the story. We tell it to each other because it's like a cliche. It's a cliche about how in a given situation, if you have this uncertainty in certain outcome and if it goes a certain way, then we could very well. Can I swear on this show? Of course, please do. If things you know, if something uncertain that we're hoping goes one way doesn't goes the other way, then we are fucked, man. And I can't think of how many times he would walk into an office where I was sitting or walk into Mark's office or my office or anybody and would go, oh, man, we are fucked, man. We might as well go to Oinkers. And that's the line. Oinkers was the name of the bar down the street. It's not called that anymore, but we just all, you know, we all know that the bar down the street from what is now the WMS, or I guess anymore, it's not even the WMS. But what was a long, long time at the corner of Roscoe and California, you know, about a block and a half down the street on Elston and Roscoe was this bar called Oinkers. It's now called Chief O'Neill's. It's still there. And whenever the Williams Pinball alumni reunions happen, it happens once a year. We get back together. That's where we go because because we all think of ourselves. Yes, we are all a little bit fucked and we might as well just go back to Oinkers and have a drink and think about it. But we still, you know, Barb, you know, my wife frequently will say, it sounds like we're going to Oinkers. And the whole idea that these days that we maybe actually kind of are fucked is not such a crazy idea anymore. And, you know, and I don't actually think we should go to Oinkers. We shouldn't give up quite yet. Exactly right. Yeah. We should try to stay tough and stay the course. Keep playing the ball. Keep the ball and play as best we can. That's probably what we should do. But anyway, that's my best Python story. That's incredible. You have to say it in a Romanian accent a little bit. That's incredible. I don't know. Oinkers have sounded pretty good lately. Yeah, exactly. I can understand that. Speaking of awesome stories, you have an awesome Arnold Schwarzenegger story that you've told a lot of times, but we do have an audience that I think may not have heard it yet. And I was wondering if you could care to retell it at least one more time for us on the show. Why not? It's the best story I've got. So we're making Terminator 2. We're actually working on the pinball and the video roughly at the same time, but the pinball came out first. And, you know, we were just trying to get it all together. And Steve said, we got to, you know, we need a script. We got to get the script going. So we, you know, we started working on the script and, you know, the various all the things that you know from from the playing the game about the, you know, the lock sequence initiated and working your way through those those different moving cannon and making that shot, those skill shots and what the game says, you know, to get you through this, that or the other stages. And, of course, eventually something somebody always has to say, get the extra ball. You know, we need to go to the licensed people and get them to get Arnold in front of a microphone and read our script. We, you know, we reach out to Roger and say, Roger, you got to, you know, arrange this trip. And he comes back a couple days later and they're like, what is it that you want him to say? Here's our script. You know, we have a couple of pages of script. And they came back and said, how do you want him to say this? We're like, we need more information here. And we're like, well, I don't know. How does the Terminator say get the extra ball? And we're all just sitting around going, you know, everybody, you know, kind of like at that point, we're already kind of, we've been used to making fun of Arnold because, you know, making fun of Arnold in the way that he speaks in this total monotone. You know, he finally found a role that was like his perfect role. You know, he just had to act natural. So we're like, well, get the extra ball. You know, it's something like that. Right. And we're all kind of looking at each other going, OK, you try it then. You know, so we're all trying it. And, you know, it didn't sound quite right to any of us, you know. So like, huh, well, that's what we need him to say. And they came back and they said, could you have a soundalike do it? I'm like, well, I suppose we could. You know, so, you know, this is like on a Friday. I said I'd contact a couple of the voiceover houses here in town and I called a couple of these people and they said, well, we'll have some people call you. So this is like Friday at the very end of the day and Saturday morning, nine o'clock, my phone rings. I go, hello. And you hear, hello, Mr. Grana. This is Arnold. And I'm like, oh, you're one of those Arnold guys. Great. So say, get the extra ball, the way that the Terminator would say it. And he would go, get the extra ball. And I went, huh. Is that what it's, you know? Is that what, you know? And I just, it was like I couldn't, it wasn't computing for me for some reason. So I said, okay, thanks, you know, and I hung up. And two minutes later, you know, the phone rings again. Hello, Mr. Grana, it's Arnold. I'm like, oh, great. Everybody's a comic. So, you know, again, get the extra ball. Oh, man, I don't know. And then beep, beep, I got a call waiting. I can, you know, click over to the other line. Hello, Mr. Grana, it's Arnold. Now I've got two Arnolds on the, you know, one on either line of my call waiting, you know, and the same thing, get the extra ball. And I'm like, OK, so that third guy, maybe he's got something. Turns out that third guy was Fred Young. Oh, legend. Everybody's used Fred. He's the most amazing, was the most amazing. Rest in peace. Safe journey, old friend. That was the first time that we met Fred. That was the first thing that he did for for pinball. He played the role of Arnold in this story. So he came in and he read our script and he read everything and we sent the whole thing off to Arnold and to the movie people. Next week, the word comes back. We go down to Roger's office. Me and Steve are sitting in there and he goes, not only will he not do it, we can't use a soundbite. And Steve goes, if we don't have access to this voice, what are we buying exactly? It was a little bit like this maybe isn't working for us. And Roger's like, okay, okay, let's take a beat. Let's take a breath. Give me the weekend. Let me work some magic here. Let me see what I can do. So Monday morning, he calls us back down. He goes, OK, talked him down off the ledge. You know, Mario Kassar, the exec producer of the movie, you know, got Arnold out to the ranch and talked him down and basically talked him into doing it. He said, you know, you're on location. You're doing this shoot. We can fit this in in 20 minutes in between takes, you know, and we'll do it in your trailer. Be easy peasy. And I'm like, oh, wow, do I get to go to the movie set? And they're like, no. Oh, I'm like, okay, well, fine. Sure, no problem, you know. So it turns out that Lee Orloff was the recordist for the film. He did the session. He engineered the session. And, you know, it turns out that Arnold, being the Terminator, reading pinball lines, sounded like just what you would think it would sound like, you know, which is what we always thought. It was like, surely this is obvious. And surely it's not what Fred sounds like or what any of those other guys sounded like or what we sounded like ourselves. It sounds like Arnold saying it. A week goes by and we get the tape back and we all crowded into the studio and we listening to the tape And we hear him just you know go down the list Lock sequence initiated Fire at will. You missed. Jackpot. Direct hit. And he's doing all this stuff and we're like, oh my God, this is perfect. It's exactly what we thought. And he comes to the line and he goes, get the extra ball. And we're all like, oh my God, Fred absolutely nailed it. Everybody nailed it. Everybody did it exactly right. There's only one way to say it, but only Arnold could say it like Arnold. You know, we all knew what it was supposed to be, but only Arnold could actually do it. So we're like, yay, you know, this is great. And he goes on, he does everything. He does everything perfectly. Lee was an amazing sound engineer. He caught sounds and interruptions that I never would have caught. He'd stopped at one point. He goes, oh, wait, truck. I'm like, really? I went back and listening. And he was like, wow, there was a truck. I never would have heard that. You know, aside from $15,000 worth of microphones and all the rest of it, beautiful session. And he comes to the end and he's read everything and everything is perfect. And we're all just like, oh, my God, this is going to be so great. And you hear Lee off, Mike go, anything else? And Arnold goes, yeah. And he like falls completely out of character and he leans in real close and he goes, fuck you, asshole. And we all just like hands raised in the air in the studio going, woohoo! And of course, that was the first sound clip that went in the game. Anybody who has a T2 has the fuck you asshole realms. And it's a given and it's a legendary story. It's a great, great story. And that is the story of how Arnold Schwarzenegger said fuck you asshole directly to me. Yeah, it's an awesome story, and I just wanted to make sure that we got it on this episode. I know you tell it a lot, and I never get tired of hearing it, but I think we have a lot of the audience that may have never heard that story before, so I had to make sure we got it. To be honest, I don't get tired of telling it, so I'm happy to tell that story. It's a funny story, it really is. On most of your sound packages, you often will have a different theme or tune for different stages or modes in the game. And, you know, like I said, I think this leads to a super rich playing experience like we alluded to at the top. You even hit some really awesome tunes for when you achieve a high score. And as the player is entering their initials, which is a big moment for, you know, seasoned pinball player. I want to ask you, like, was it just that you were like that prolific that the music was just like flowing out of you in like a torrent that you needed to find extra slots for all this music that you were composing? Because it felt like your games, especially in the 80s and early 90s, just had so much packed into them. To me, I'm always like, they feel like you were turning in homework for your AP class or something. Like, it felt like extra credit stuff. It felt like you're doing like... Going more than anybody, probably. Yeah, you're doing like side quests or something on it. The answer to your question, you know, was I being wildly prolific and just had more, you know, ideas than the game had slots? The answer is no. That is not what's happening at all. I was scrambling to keep up. You know, I was actually, you know, through the meat of the most prolific time, I was working on multiple projects and I was always too busy and it was always kind of an insane, you know, sane time. But the main thing about those high score to date tunes is almost all of them are things that I wrote early on in the process of working on a game and didn't hit the mark. And the game designers went back and said, no, no, that's not really that's not really what I was after. Pat was the only one who overtly said, hang on to that. We'll find something to do with it. You know, let's not waste anything. But a lot, you know, a lot of cats didn't even, you know, weren't even that polite about it. Yeah, I don't like it. I don't I don't think that's right. And then and then we would get to the end of the project. And it's like, oh, what are you going to do for high score? And I'm like, well, how about this thing? And by that time, they'd already sort of gotten I'd managed to sort of like rein in my ideas and make them sort of conform to, you know, what the designer had kind of wanted anyway. And then we got to this place where it's like, oh, well, how about, you know, this is just kind of a funky thing and it's the end of the game and, you know, it's not like we're leaving them back or anything like that. How about this? That's how, you know, I think the first one that was done that way was Millionaire. The high score tune I wrote for that, it was my first attempt at the main bass play tune. That main theme on Millionaire is so good. Yeah. Oh, thanks. Thanks. That's a fun one. On our next episode together. It's an overlooked game. It's an overlooked game and we are definitely going to play that and talk about that. Sure, yeah. Interesting that a lot of those were like early songs written for stuff. Early and throwaway songs. My favorite story, not my favorite high score tune, my favorite high score tune is definitely the Fishtails tune. That was just, it's just a blast. It's just so, so much fun. It's so good. The best story of this version was the tune that I wrote. It was for one of the early modes in Dr. Dude. And Dennis is like, oh, man, this thing just sounds like taxi. You know, I don't like it. You know, I had a line that I would use with everybody and I would say, look, live with it for a week. And this was the only time that Dennis ever did this or anybody else either. He goes, I don't like it in a week. I was like, fuck, OK. OK, I guess that one's not going to work. You know, dude, I just quit smoking. You know, I was like I was a little bit, you know, kind of off my game. And I would sit in my office and chain smoke and write. And then I quit and I couldn't write. I couldn't write for like six weeks. It was awful. And it was it was that game where I was figuring out how to write again. And this is one of the things I wrote. It's like, yeah, it sounds like taxi. It's the one thing I know how to do here, you know. So anyway, so that tune, that that funky kind of, you know, I use that same guitar algorithm Of, you know, that two voice back and forth guitar tone thing that I was describing with Taxi. I used the same thing with this tune. That's why they thought it sounded like that. I just thought that the dueling slide guitar passages, I just thought those were really tasty and I really liked them a lot. So that was the best story. It never made it into Dr. Dude. I didn't get it into a game until the Whitewater high score tune. And the Whitewater high score tune is the tune that Dennis didn't like in a week. For Dr. Dude. For Dr. Dude. And then three years later for Whitewater, I snuck it in on him and I don't think he remembered. I don't think he remembered it was the same tune. You had the time wrong, but you did call it. Yeah. You came around eventually. You know, the difference between being early and being wrong, really, there's no daylight between those two things. Any stock investor will tell you there's no difference between being early and being wrong. You know, Dennis might not like it, but his kids are going to love it. Yeah, his kids are going to love it. Exactly. But I was going to say, it's funny that those were like early cuts and stuff, and that explains why so many of them are just incredible, because it's straight Chris Granner dope that hasn't been cut down by the designers. Yep, that's true. It hasn't been chopped up. It's the purest form. Well, that's a very, that's a really positive spin. Fair enough. Is there any pinball machine that you didn't get to work on but wish that you would have had the opportunity to do? Attack from Mars, such a great game. And Brian, you know, working closely with Brian, you know, on Indie was an incredible treat. You know, a lot of people don't know this. He was one of the principals in a group of guys who started the startup company called Spooky Cool Labs that made a social slot game, you know, under Joe. I'm going to go to Kamenkao's direction that Zynga ultimately bought, and that was how I got to Zynga 13 years ago. And Brian was, he was essentially kind of like one of the main movers and shakers in that organization, so I got a chance to work with him again then. Yeah, working with him on Indy was fantastic. You know, just the timing of everything else that was going on, you know, with, you know, at that point I was working on Indy 500. I was working on a WWE game for Mark Turmel, you know, over on the Midway side. You know, it was too much. I was never going to be able to do that game. And Dan Forden, you know, did do it. And of course, he just killed it. Oh, an amazing. Yeah, it is a good. It's an amazing game in an incredible package. I wouldn't change a note. I just wish I'd done it myself. Yeah. You wish you wrote all of that. Add it to your resume. Yeah, exactly. Scratch out Dan's name right in Chris Grader. Yeah, we never do that. We do have a little bit of a mutual admiration society. You know, he's like, yeah, I like my stuff, but I like your stuff, too. You know, that kind of thing. You know, we both kind of like our stuff. You know, we kind of like our own stuff. But that's, you know, that's kind of how you want it, I think. One other thing I wanted to ask you, we talked a lot about the Yamaha chip and the System 11s. Did you have a favorite generation of game or like hardware to use? And then a question from a musician buddy of ours that's a listener of the show and has been on it previously. And he wanted to know if you have a favorite analog synth that you use outside of pinball. It's made by a company, and the guy's gone now, he's passed on, but the name of the company was and is Buchla, B-U-C-H-L-A, and you can still get Buchla components, and nothing else sounds like a Buchla synth. They're pretty remarkable. The name Suzanne Ciani should be familiar to you guys. She was a student of Don Buchla's, was the person who really brought that sound into people's consciousness, especially in the early 70s. And, you know, a lot of the commercial music that she did was done with the Buchla. And it is a glorious instrument. It's really something, it's a horrible pain in the ass to work with. But it really does make some fantastic sounds. So I guess that's the only one that floats out there that would be, you know, something that's kind of soft spot in my heart, I guess. Sorry, ask the other question. That one distracted me. No, no, that's good. Oh, you were talking about favorite hardware. You know, the late stage WPC games where the Yanaha really came into its own and they gave us enough memory to really be expansive with the note lists. And we could just do a lot of it. At the time, you know, you may remember that Twilight Zone was originally going to be the first DCS game, and the DCS tech just wasn't ready in time, and we had to backtrack and basically redo the soundtrack package for the Yamaha, for the WPC hardware. The consolation prize was that they figured out a way to stick eight megabytes of extra EPROMs. And they basically said all those little sound effect-y, you know, clocks and ticks and little snaps and clicks and things like that, just record all those and we'll just treat them like drums. You know, we'll treat them like little drum samples and just play them rather than try to recreate. So a lot of the stuff that you hear in Twilight, all of the sounds that kind of go and die out like that. Yeah. And those are all done with a single sample and then just repeated in a loop and dropping the volume down each time through the loop. That's interesting that they're like, okay, we can give you a workaround at least. You can kind of still go get what you're going for. And then at that point, the other thing that was happening was that working in the DCS space means that you're working in the project studio space. So now we're learning new, you know, MIDI sequencer tools and we're buying synthesizers and equipping a little project studio and making music with all that stuff. And the system that I had, I was just like kind of like feeling my way through these tools. You know, I had a Proteus 2, you know, orchestral module. I had a percussion module that was mostly where my drum samples came from. I had a Korg wave station that I still, I guess I don't have it anymore, but it was pretty cool. It made some pretty nice synth-y sounds. And that was the core of instruments that I used to make the sounds for Twilight Zone, the DCS version. And to be honest, I never really felt like I was sort of like catching my stride. You know, earlier you mentioned that even, you know, in later games, I still sort of sounded like I was riding for the Yamaha. That's very much what I was doing in that point. I was just like, okay, I just need to get this to work and don't want to think too hard about the composition part of it. So I'll just do what I kind of know how to do. You're leaning on your experience. Exactly. Exactly right. And then when it came time to where we had to roll back and go back to the Yamaha, that made it easy because I had the music already written on paper and I could just go into my office, close the door, hire somebody else. We hired Rich Karstens to come in and do most of the conversion of stuff that was going to be digitized sound and voice and stuff like that. He worked on all that stuff and I just sat there and cranked note lists and cranked and cranked and cranked. And at the time, and for years afterwards, I had a bad feeling in my mouth about it because I thought that was a failure. That felt like a failure that we didn't get it done and we didn't get it done as a DCS project. But now I go back and I listen to the Twilight Zone package. That was the best work that I did. I still I'm going to maintain that to this day. If you listen to some of the crazy, crazy guitar solos that I did in the deep versions of a lot of those tunes, Just the sheer number of tracks and the variety of different styles and the way that the whole thing hung together with the voice that Tim Tim Kitzrow did. You know, the voice of Rod Serling that he figured out how to do in just a splendid way. Just, you know, I mean, there's just so much content in that game. And it was me at my very best. You know, it was, you know, it's like you said, that was my instrument and that was my period. And that was the best version of it. Whitewater is also a very, very cool game from about the same time. But Twilight Zone, you know, my website has like nine tracks from Twilight Zone and the number of just a variety of things that I stumbled into and doing all that stuff and how I made it work in that goofy noteless world. I'm very proud of that work. And you should be. Yeah, it's absolutely phenomenal audio package on that game. Thank you. We're going to end this episode with one final question. And this is very Portland-centric because we are based in Portland. But it may surprise you, Chris, to learn that the Sopranos machine that you worked on 20 years ago is kind of a smash hit on location here in Portland. There are currently 24 Sopranos pinball machines in active operation in the Portland metro area. Amazing. And, you know, since we have a lot of listeners here, can you tell us just a little bit about what you can recall about working on that sound package? Because everyone here knows that game very well. And it also is a very, very good sound package. Well, it's Chris Griner. I mean, yeah. Chris Griner. Woke up this morning, bought myself a gun. I didn't know the show when I first started working on it. Lonnie or Mikey or Gary, maybe somebody said here, you know, and handed me a four DVD set of the first four seasons of the show. And I went home and spent three weeks basically binging The Sopranos, the darkest period of my life. I don't recommend that method of absorbing that content. I mean, just the other week I read an essay, a Substack blog post. It was an answer to a mailbag question. And this guy was basically saying that had Sopranos not been made, it's really quite possible that peak television might not have happened. And a lot of things that happened after The Sopranos might not have happened had The Sopranos not been such a runaway smash hit. And it really was. It was just an incredibly, you know, incredible, you know, critical success. And it wasn't just because David Chase was a great showrunner and it wasn't just because, you know, Gandolfini was an amazing actor, although both of those things are true. You know, it was a whole package that really came together and, you know, spoke to a lot, a lot of people. The Godfather still floats around in our head as being something of a, studying something about mafia life and what it means to kind of be made that way and to be part of that kind of scene. You know, to have those characters become as human as they did, obviously that was a very powerful and compelling story. To pull it into the pinball world, have the tunes that we had, you know, we had the title tune that we were able to license and use. That was great. Most of the sort of set pieces in the soundtrack do, you know, prominently feature whacking various people. Yeah. There's a lot of gunshots. There's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of death and dying and blood and stuff like that. And, you know, that's kind of what the show is about. So, you know, that's what it is. And the call-outs are all things that we were able to, you know, at that point we were being inspired by Keith P. Johnson's just epic work on Simpsons call-outs. So we wanted things that pulled elements of the characters, you know, ways of speaking into the call-out script. And Gandolfini wasn't made available to us, as you probably know. He doesn't appear in the game. We got custom speech from the psychologist, from Big Pussy, from Dominic Chianese, Uncle Junior. Little Stevie was an epic, epic day. And then from Edie Falco as well. So we had five different actors that all came to this one studio on 42nd Street, just, you know, block and a half from Times Square. And I got to go and spent the day at this studio recording all of these just epic, epic actors. Amazing, amazing actors. And the voiceover call-outs in that game are very, very strong. It was a life highlight for me to be able to go out and make that trip and do those recordings. So, you know, that's really the thing that I can call out about. It's not a package that, you know, doesn't have a lot of memorable tunes in it to me. There weren't things where I said this was true of much of the work that I did at Stern. It wasn't like, you know, it was good work, right? You know, the Elvis package is a really cool package. You know, you called out earlier, Alex, you know, the NASCAR package. That was a really fun one to do. Oh, NASCAR sound. There was a lot, right? But the BSMT system was one that I just really fought with and never felt comfortable with in the way that I felt comfortable with the Yamaha system. Did you ever pick up the phone and yell at Brian Schmidt for that? I didn't yell at him. Hell, I thanked him. He made it possible for me to work on that system. You know, I mean, he was never anything but just like tremendously professional and tremendously helpful in all ways. You know, we really when he left Williams, there was a couple of moments where it was like, oh, are we like sort of like in competition or something like that? And we had to sort of like sort that out. And it turns out we never really did compete. So that was better. I like the lore that's coming out of this episode is that you guys have like a kind of secret fraternity of sound designers that you all kind of operate in this elliptical. Orbit of one another and then you meet once in a while in an undisclosed location and just geek out about pinball tunes in the good old days. Big time, big time, absolutely. Well, we just want to thank you, Chris, for coming on the show and giving us this time to talk about some of the work you did. I want to thank the listeners for listening and I'll put some clips into this episode that you've already listened to. But the next episode with Chris that we're doing, we're going to get to hear some of his music. I spent a bunch of time putting it on my soundboard, so we're going to listen to this and hear the music that we're talking about. All I want you all to do, what I say at the end of every episode of this show, is use the pinball map, go out, find a pinball machine near you on location, and go play it. Find some Chris Granner games and go play them and listen to what we're talking about. And come back next week and we'll play even more for you. But until next time, good luck. Don't suck. Thanks for listening, everybody.

_(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v5)_

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*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-08-04 | Item ID: 9f8e23c3-907a-464f-834f-11ed864e4b9d*