# Chris Granner

**Source:** Pintastic New England  
**Type:** video  
**Published:** 2019-08-13  
**Duration:** 43m 4s  
**Beat:** Pinball

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

---

## Analysis

Chris Granner, legendary Pinball sound designer, presents a retrospective of his top pinball soundtracks at Pintastic New England, featuring stories about iconic games like Funhouse, Fish Tales, Twilight Zone, and Terminator 2. He discusses the evolution of pinball audio design, the transition from Yamaha chip-based sound to DCS technology, and shares anecdotes about collaborations with designers like Steve Ritchie and Python (Mark Ritchie), including the famous story of recording Arnold Schwarzenegger's voice for Terminator 2.

### Key Claims

- [MEDIUM] Marcel Gonzalez discovered System 11 test board extraction technique ~16-18 years ago at Chicago Pinball Expo — _Chris Granner describing Marcel's archival work at cgmusic.net_
- [HIGH] Terminator 2 voiceover was recorded by Fred Young, a soundalike, after Arnold Schwarzenegger initially refused and licensing prohibited soundalikes — _Chris Granner recounting the Terminator 2 production story in detail_
- [HIGH] Twilight Zone was originally intended to be the first DCS game but hardware/software weren't ready — _Chris Granner explaining Twilight Zone's development history_
- [HIGH] Addams Family soundtrack missed top five by one vote in the ranking — _Chris Granner noting it was number six in the voting_
- [HIGH] Addams Family introduced the structural concept of mode introduction and conclusion to pinball soundtracks — _Chris Granner discussing the innovation in soundtrack structure_
- [HIGH] Funhouse was conceived as a high-budget 'kitchen sink' game after years of quick, cheap, uninteresting games in 1988-1990 — _Chris Granner explaining Pat Lawlor's decision to invest heavily in Funhouse_
- [HIGH] The Rudy head mechanism in Funhouse was originally quoted at $35 but upgraded to $65 more expensive version during sample production — _Chris Granner recounting the Rudy head cost escalation story_
- [HIGH] Fish Tales was Granner's first game where he felt he wasn't 'faking it' musically — _Chris Granner stating Fish Tales was his favorite game to work on_

### Notable Quotes

> "This is the most important game that we've ever made. This game is Python's gift to us. This is the game where we learned that our job in making games is to bring a machine to life."
> — **Chris Granner**, N/A
> _Granner's emotional tribute to Pinbot and Mark Ritchie (Python), highlighting the foundational design philosophy that machines should feel alive_

> "fuck you, asshole."
> — **Arnold Schwarzenegger**, N/A
> _The payoff line from Terminator 2 that became part of pinball machine ROMs, delivered improvisationally by Schwarzenegger after completing his scripted voiceover work_

> "If we don't get him, if we don't have the Terminator's voice in the game, why are we doing this again?"
> — **Steve Ritchie**, N/A
> _Ritchie's reaction when Arnold initially refused to record voiceovers, expressing the importance of authentic IP voice to licensed game design_

> "live with it for a week, and almost without fail, they've forgotten that they didn't like it."
> — **Chris Granner**, N/A
> _Granner's design strategy for handling designer objections to proposed audio elements_

> "You just can't believe how good a playoff that really was. Life didn't get any better than that for me."
> — **Chris Granner**, N/A
> _Granner describing the Taxi main theme, which he identifies as his favorite composition and the first game where he felt completely authentic in his work_

> "We're going to throw the kitchen sink at this thing. We're going to make the coolest thing we can possibly make. We're going to make something crazy, a crazy Louis Toy."
> — **Pat Lawlor**, N/A
> _Lawlor's philosophy for Funhouse that reversed years of cost-cutting and established the game as a turning point for Williams_

> "It took me like an hour to put that together. There was like no time at all."
> — **Chris Granner**, N/A
> _Granner's comment on the Caribbean-themed breakthrough moment in Addams Family soundtrack composition_

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| Chris Granner | person | Legendary pinball sound designer; created soundtracks for Funhouse, Fish Tales, Twilight Zone, Terminator 2, Addams Family, and others; audio director at social game company |
| Marcel Gonzalez | person | Audio archivist who developed System 11 test board extraction technique; maintains cgmusic.net archives of pinball game soundtracks |
| Mark Ritchie | person | Legendary pinball designer known by 'Python'; designed Pinbot, Taxi, and other iconic games; philosophy centered on bringing machines to life |
| Steve Ritchie | person | Prominent pinball designer; collaborated with Chris Granner on Terminator 2; described as great guitarist and collaborator |
| Bill Perot | person | Early Williams sound composer and programmer; wrote Yamaha operating system; created Pinbot music and high-score entry tune still used in modern pinball |
| Fred Young | person | Voice actor and soundalike; recorded Arnold Schwarzenegger voiceover for Terminator 2 pinball; worked extensively on Stern games in the 1990s |
| Pat Lawlor | person | Pinball designer; made decision to invest heavily ('kitchen sink') in Funhouse production, reversing cost-cutting trend |
| Arnold Schwarzenegger | person | Actor; recorded voiceover for Terminator 2 pinball game at film set, delivered the improvised 'fuck you asshole' line |
| Dan Lee Orloff | person | Sound director for Terminator 2 film; recorded Arnold's pinball voiceover with $30,000 professional microphone setup |
| Nick Widmont | person | Video artist at Zynga Chicago; assisted Granner by removing white backgrounds from promotional pinball game images |
| Roger Sharpe | person | Industry figure; negotiated with Arnold Schwarzenegger to record voiceover for Terminator 2 pinball after initial refusal |
| Funhouse | game | 1990 Williams pinball machine; landmark game featuring Rudy animatronic head; designed by Pat Lawlor; marked return to high-budget, innovative design after cost-cutting era |
| Fish Tales | game | Williams pinball game with fishing/lying theme; Granner's favorite game; features bluegrass-influenced soundtrack and tall-tale voice callouts |
| Twilight Zone | game | Williams pinball game; originally intended as first DCS game; uses Yamaha chip; soundtrack available on PinSound boards with original MIDI compositions |
| Terminator 2: Judgment Day | game | 1991 Williams licensed pinball; featured Arnold Schwarzenegger voiceover; represented early licensed game experimentation with voice acting |
| Addams Family | game | Williams pinball game; ranked #6 (missed top 5 by one vote); introduced mode-based soundtrack structure; features Caribbean-themed breakthrough moment |
| Taxi | game | 1988 Williams pinball designed by Mark Ritchie (Python); Granner's #4 ranked soundtrack; marked first game where he felt musically authentic |
| Pinbot | game | 1985 Williams pinball; revolutionary game per Granner; Mark Ritchie design; established philosophy of bringing machines to life |
| Whitewater | game | Williams pinball game; features nine-stage river main theme with synth layering technique; uses air guitar ending tune originally from Dr. Dude |
| Dr. Dude | game | Williams pinball game; featured in Granner's honorable mentions; known for air guitar soundtrack elements |
| Williams Electronics | company | Major pinball manufacturer; context includes Williams, Williams Bally Midway; produced most games discussed |
| PinSound | product | Aftermarket audio upgrade system allowing custom sound modifications; Twilight Zone boards now available with Granner's original MIDI compositions |
| Carolco Pictures | company | Film production company; held licensing for Terminator films; negotiated voiceover restrictions with Williams for Terminator 2 pinball |
| cgmusic.net | website | Online archive of pinball game soundtracks curated by Marcel Gonzalez |
| Pintastic New England | event | Pinball event where Chris Granner presented this retrospective talk |

### Topics

- **Primary:** Pinball sound design evolution and philosophy, Yamaha chip-based audio vs. DCS technology transition, Licensed IP voiceover production and challenges, Designer-composer collaboration dynamics, Iconic Williams pinball machines (Funhouse, Fish Tales, Twilight Zone, Addams Family)
- **Secondary:** Pinball game production economics and cost pressures, Mark Ritchie's design philosophy and legacy, Pinball audio archival and preservation

### Sentiment

**Positive** (0.82) — Granner is enthusiastic and nostalgic about his work; deeply appreciative of collaborators; emotional when discussing Mark Ritchie; celebratory tone about game achievements; minor frustrations noted about production constraints (e.g., Twilight Zone hardware delays) but resolved positively

### Signals

- **[business_signal]** Williams experienced multi-year slump (1988-1990) with increasingly quick, cheap, uninteresting games that weren't selling; Funhouse represented deliberate reversal of this trend (confidence: high) — Granner: 'we'd gotten into...making games quicker and cheaper and less interesting...our sales were doing nothing'
- **[community_signal]** Marcel Gonzalez's audio archival work at cgmusic.net preserves and makes accessible Williams-era pinball soundtracks in pristine form, enabling new appreciation and study (confidence: medium) — Granner's explanation of Marcel's extraction technique and ongoing archive maintenance
- **[design_philosophy]** Granner's technique of suggesting designers 'live with' proposed audio elements for a week often results in acceptance of initially-rejected ideas; demonstrates trust-building in designer-composer relationships (confidence: medium) — Granner describing pattern with designers across multiple games
- **[design_innovation]** Addams Family introduced structural mode-based soundtrack organization (introduction/conclusion/summary moments) that became standard for modern pinball audio design (confidence: high) — Granner explaining: 'we made significant strides in what the shape of a modern pinball soundtrack was by introducing this whole notion of modes'
- **[design_philosophy]** Mark Ritchie's foundational principle that pinball games should bring a machine to life, established with Pinbot; this philosophy guided subsequent design decisions across multiple titles (confidence: high) — Granner's extended tribute to Pinbot: 'This is the game where we learned that our job in making games is to bring a machine to life.'
- **[licensing_signal]** Arnold Schwarzenegger initially refused to record Terminator 2 voiceovers for pinball; licensing restrictions prohibited soundalikes; only resolved when Roger Sharpe negotiated directly with Schwarzenegger on film set (confidence: high) — Detailed account of failed soundalike attempts, Carolco Pictures rejecting approach, and eventual on-set recording with professional sound director
- **[product_concern]** Williams faced production cost crisis with Rudy head mechanism in Funhouse; original $35 mechanism proved unworkable; late-stage upgrade to $65 version required during sample production after public commitments already made (confidence: high) — Story of Pat Lawlor's discovery of manufacturing failure and Neil's reaction to unexpected cost increase after orders already taken
- **[technology_signal]** Twilight Zone was originally intended as first DCS game but hardware/software constraints forced reversion to Yamaha chip; later appreciation for Yamaha version exceeded initial MIDI synth composition (confidence: high) — Granner stating: 'It was originally intended to be the first DCS game. It didn't work out because the hardware and software weren't ready.'
- **[licensing_signal]** Licensed games require early-stage coordination with IP holders on voiceover expectations; Terminator 2 case demonstrates tension between game designer needs and movie producer concerns about character authenticity (confidence: high) — Extensive Terminator 2 production narrative showing negotiation cycles

---

## Transcript

 A couple of special thanks. The music that you're going to hear tonight is stuff that you can go to cgmusic.net and listen to in the archives, if some of you have probably done that. The guy who put the tracks together that are there is Marcel Gonzalez. Marcel showed up at a pinball expo in Chicago, God, I'm going to say 18 years ago, a long time ago, 18, maybe 15, 16 years ago, something like that, with CDs of the music of the games that he loved. He'd done some really cool things, as you'll hear tonight, I hope. He had taken the System 11 test board and plugged EPROMs into it and fired off sound calls at that thing and recorded the output pretty much as directly as you could. Sound effects, music tracks, speech call-outs, basically anything that would make zero to FF came out of the speakers. and recorded it all and brought it into a digital audio workstation and assembled a hearing of the audio that the game played. And he did it in such an artful way and added a couple of really interesting touches that I really like a lot. And basically it's made it possible for me to kind of like remember and have you guys still kind of remember what this work is like. And I have to stress that you can't go to a game and play it and hear what he's done. This is actually like a way to hear the soundtrack in a more pristine way than the game would ever allow you to do, unless you had some kind of massive 3,000-watt system that you were able to completely overpower the mechanical sound of a pinball game as you're playing it. Then you might be able to get to the point where you're hearing something like what he's doing. but all the mechanical noises are gone. And now it's just the Yamaha chip that made the sounds and the little one-hand arm drummer that we have. It's our eight channels of Yamaha and one arm of drums, and that's what we have, right? So anyway, that's Marcel, and so I always have to say thank you to Marcel whenever I do one of these things. Nick Widmont, you're going to see later, you're going to see pictures of the games that I have. I have a box full of promo pics from Williams Bally Midway Days. So it's just like the game itself on a totally white background. And I went into work the other day, and I'm just going to drop these things in, drop these slides in. And somebody said, you ought to make those things transparent. I'm like, I'm a sound guy. How do I do that? And Nick Widmont, I'm happy to say, is a wonderful video artist at Zynga Chicago. And he took all of my pictures and removed the white and gave me a transparent background. So thank you very much, Nick. So this is what we're going to do. I sort of talked about this slide before, how we got there. We're going to do a little bit of, we had an honorable pre-mention just a minute ago when we were doing the sound test. There's a couple of games that people did vote for, but that didn't really kind of even get into the honorable mention. Didn't make it into the top 10, really. But they were good choices, and they were cool games. And Dr. Dude was one of them. And the particular clip that I played earlier, There's a certain style of music that I got to sort of like embrace and really push in my career as a Williams Pinball sound guy, and that is air guitar tracks. So that when I sit around going like this and do all that kind of crazy stuff, I got to say, okay, I know I can't play that. I know probably Eddie Van Halen can't play that, but my Yamaha chip can play it. And if I stand there and go, wah, and my Yamatabe chip goes, wah, and it's going to work. It's a thing. So what you actually heard, the Dr. Dude double jackpot clip that you heard earlier, that's actually, to me, that's the pinnacle. That's the peak air guitar track ever. And so for air guitar, Dr. Dude was the shit, man. It was just that was the way that it went. So that's kind of like an honorable pre-mention. The other thing you heard a minute ago came from Pin Bot, which we'll talk about that later. But the track that you heard was not my track. It was a track written by my colleague Bill Perod, who was how I heard about the John Williams in the first place in 1986. And he was there. He was working there. He wrote the basic operating system that was the Yamaha operating system that played all of this stuff. And he was also something of a composer. And he wrote this really crazy track as a first pass tune for Pinbot when it first came out. And Ken Fedesna and Joe Dillon, the head of sales, walked into his office. And we were all kind of like in his office. And I had been on the job for maybe four months. I had done the Road Kings soundtrack. And I guess we were working on Joust 2 or something like that. And Bill was going to go do Pinbot. So he had written this track. And it is a wild, incredible track. There's all kinds of just insane things going on. And Pinbot was a real revolution, a really huge thing for us, which we'll talk about in a minute a little bit more. But Dylan walked into his office and he goes, I'm in space, but I'm not in deep space. Joe was a crazy guy, a salesman. And everybody's like, OK. Bill's like, OK, well, think about that. And everybody walked out of the office. He goes, deep space? The fuck is deep space? I don't know, maybe something more kind of like droney, And he goes, you want to try something? And so you're going to hear later what I tried. And then we kind of went that way. But his tomb is the High Square Today tomb. So when you get your initials, when you enter your initials on pinball, you're listening to Bill Perot's track. It's an immortal track. It's an awesome, awesome track. And Bill is an awesome guy. He's a great, great guy. OK, so those are my sort of like pre-mentions. So what I've got going on here is I've got, we're going to do, There's three honorable mentions that didn't make the top five, but I still had to have them in this deck because I have a story to tell about them. So that's really why. And so what I've got here is I've got a little, I think maybe you can see there's a little sound icon there. And I think that when I hit this button, you're going to hear the track that I want you to hear. And then I'll hit another button, and then you'll see the game. But I'm going to delay between those two things so that you can have some sense. And if you know the work, you're going to know. And I'll see the looks of recognition. But do me a favor and don't shout out. just in case, right? And we'll just, you know, we'll have a little fun with it. Okay, if that's okay. So let's, fingers crossed, everybody. The Fedback Pop. Fire up at will. Awesome. We can listen for a couple seconds there. Let this play. This is the first tune that only I wrote that Steve Ritchie didn't have a hand in writing. So I'm starting here. His other stuff, the other tracks of the tune are cool. I mean, I got this I wrote this one. He didn't have a hand in writing. I have to include that slide and I have to include that game for two main reasons. One is that Steve is speaking next and I had to have a Steve game on the list. It turns out that my work, that the places where I got to hit my peak happened just randomly not to happen on Steve's games. There are other games that I've done that I feel like, for whatever reason it worked out, I did better, the game did better, everything about it was like a more positive experience. This was the best collaboration that I had with Steve. It was a marvelous, marvelous game. No regrets at all. Steve's a great guitarist, I love working with him. I'll work with him again in a heartbeat. And since this game, we've done several things. But this had to be the main reason that this slide is here is so I can tell you my fuck you, asshole story. And I don't know whether people know the fuck you, asshole story, but I have recorded audio proof that Arnold Schwarzenegger said fuck you, asshole directly to me. And now I'm going to tell you that story. So we're doing this game. And we're still early days with licensed games. So how do you do a licensed game? You get a bunch of images, and you maybe get some story and script and stuff like that, and you know what the movie is going to be about. So we're doing all this stuff, and we need somebody from the license to do some voiceover for us. And they're like, well, what do you need us to do? And we said, well, we need stuff like get the jackpot and get the extra ball and stuff like that. And they're like, wait, so you want Arnold as the Terminator to say, get the extra ball? What does that even sound like? And I go, I don't know, get the extra ball, or something like that, right? So everybody's like, man, I don't know. That seems weird. And somebody at Carolco, the movie production company, goes, could you find a soundalike and have him record the script that you have in mind, or some part of the script that you have in mind? And we're like, OK. So I call up a couple of voiceover shops in Chicago. And I go, I'm looking for an Arnold. I'm looking for a Terminator. And they go, oh, great, no problem. We'll have somebody. This is like Friday at 5 o'clock. I'm calling them up. And so on Saturday at 9 o'clock, they waited till 9. It was pretty nice. My phone rings. Hello. And hello, Mr. Grana. This is Arnold. And I could tell that it wasn't really Arnold, but that was more or less what it sounded like. He's talking like this. Hello, this is Arnold. This is the Terminator. So I like really great Well say get the extra ball And they went get the extra ball I like oh wow OK well OK well cool Here, say, and I had a couple of other lines. They would say a couple of other lines. OK, thanks. Well, thanks. I'd take their names, make a little note, hang up. It rings again. Hello? Hello, Mr. Granat. It's Arnold. And so between 9 and 9.15 in the morning that morning, I got four phone calls, two of them I had on call waiting at one point. And I had two guys going, just a minute, I got Arnold on the other line. Hello, Mr. Granite. Okay, get the extra ball. Get the extra ball. So this is going on, and it's so weird. And finally I picked a guy. The guy that we picked was Fred Young. And that was the first thing that Fred Young ever did for us. And the rest for him is history. He did game after game after game for Stern. All through the 90s he was doing tons and tons of work for them. Unbelievable, man of a thousand voices, super cool guy. And he's going, get the extra ball. Oh, isn't that great? Because he cracks himself up all the time. That's the best thing about Fred. So we're like, OK, so Fred, come into the studio and record this thing. We had to do just 10 or 12 lines or something like that. So he records the script. And I'm listening to him. Get the extra ball. Get the extra ball. It's like, god, there's something about that that's just like, I know they're going to hate this. They're just going to, the movie people are going to hate this. Arnold's going to hate this. And we're like, OK, well, here's our, This is what we're talking about. This is what we have in mind. So we send it off. Two days later, we get back. We're like, bad news, guys. Not only is Arnold not going to do it, you can't hire a sound-alike to do it. And we're sitting in Roger Sharp's office, and Steve goes, if we don't get him, if we don't have the Terminator's voice in the game, why are we doing this again? That was pretty much his reaction. And I'm like, yeah, I'm kind of with him. It's like, I'm not sure what to do at that point. How behind my back can I tie two hands? So Roger goes, give me the weekend. Give me something to work on. So we come back the next Monday or whatever, and Roger's like, OK, what's his name? Casals got Arnold out to his ranch and talked him down off a cliff. And basically, he's got Arnold's consent to do this thing. He's going to do it. But we're going to do it in his trailer in between sessions because the movie was being shot right at that time. So we're going to do it in his trailer in between sessions. I'm like, great, I'm going to the set. He goes, no, no, no, we're going to have a real sound guy do it. And the guy who did it was Lee Orloff. He was the sound director for the film. And there was like $30,000 worth of microphones and this incredibly fancy setup that they put together to do this session. And they delivered to me a DAT tape with my script, with our script. And so we got this DAT tape, and we're coming down, And we drop it into the studio. And the whole group team is in the studio. We're listening to this thing. And it sounds perfect. Everything's great. It's like, oh my god, this is great. And we get to get the extra ball. And he goes, get the extra ball. And we're like, my god, Fred, you nailed it. We all nailed it. It all sounded exactly like it was going to sound. We just didn't know that that was what Arnold was going to sound like. Well, it turns out that it's really easy to do a Terminator voice, get the extra ball. That really is exactly what it is. You guys could all do it yourselves. It would have been fine. Anyway, so he goes through and he reads the whole script. And Lee Orloff is amazing. He's going, oh, wait, there was a truck. I'm like, there was? And he rolled it back and turned it way up. There was a truck. I never would have heard that. I'm like, great, thank you, Lee. Gets through the whole script. Everything's great, beautiful. OK, and Lee goes, so anything else? And Orloff goes, yeah. And he drops out of character completely. And he goes, fuck you, asshole. And we all just went, yes! And I don't know how many people have a T3, a T2. Got a T2? You have the fuck you asshole roms? You don't? Oh my god, see me afterwards. You're like the first guy that I've met that doesn't. I figured that everybody had that. It's a really cool thing. Anyway, so that's my fuck you asshole story. Just had to tell that story. It's a good story. OK, so that was honorable mention number one. This one isn't going to surprise anybody, I don't think, other than that it's only honorable mention. I played that version of that theme because it was only at that moment where we finally got to the point where, and not to take anything away from the dozens of other magic moments in that soundtrack, wonderful, wonderful soundtrack for Adam's family, that was the place where we sort of broke through and somebody said, oh, we should do something that's sort of like Caribbean. Wouldn't that be fun? And it's like, oh, we could totally do that. It took me like an hour to put that together. There was like no time at all. And everybody was like, oh, perfect. And it was at that moment that we all started to really fall in love with it. Before that, it was kind of weird, and there was all these modes, and there was so much going on. The Addams Family is, certainly at the time, was my best soundtrack. And I would never have not voted it in the top five myself. It was never my favorite soundtrack. And so the fact that it didn't make the top five here was not something that I was willing to put my finger on the scale about. But so it didn't. This was actually number six. So missed by one vote to make the top five. But it's a really remarkable, as everybody knows, it's a remarkable game. And the soundtrack has an incredible depth to it. And we made significant strides in what the shape of a modern pinball soundtrack was by introducing this whole notion of modes and how you have to introduce a mode in sound and how you have to then conclude it. So you have this welcome moment and you have a summary moment or something like that. And that structure and how much time each one of those parts of the presentation takes, that's my job. That was the job that I had to solve. And over and over again, still to this day as the audio director for a social game company, I'm still solving that problem every day. That's the problem that I and my guys have to solve. So Anna's Family, super cool game. Didn't make the top five. So this next one, go. I'm just going to let that play while I get my session started. That was Steve Space. Right? I get emotional about this. This is the most important game that we've ever made. This game is Python's gift to us. This is the game where we learned that our job in making games is to bring a machine to life. That's what this game is about. It's a machine coming to life. It was a game that was made to be the thing that is in fact the most important thing about an interactive game, an interactive amusement game. That's what we do. We bring a machine to life. Every game that you have on your pocket is a machine, it's a little computer program, and if you like it, it's because somebody programmed it and somebody created art and sound and everything for it and made choreography that made you go, oh damn, that thing is alive. And that's what this game was. It was the first one. And that was Python, that was his gift to us. So we really miss him. Anyway, thank you. That's why I had to share that one. For some reason I always choke up when I tell that story. I have a regret in my wife. The last time I saw him, I walked away from a conversation. He was going, Chris, one more thing, one more thing. And I'm like, I couldn't take one more thing from him. He was a really infuriating guy. But yeah, he moved the needle in our industry, maybe more than anybody did. So this one's for you, man. so that was those were my honorable mentions as much honor as I can bring thank you for your indulgence so this is number five you've just crossed over into the twilight zone So really you know the stories one could tell about Twilight Zone One obviously is that it was originally intended to be the first DCS game It didn work out because the hardware and software weren ready We had done a bunch of work on it already I had written a bunch of music, including that piece, for my synthesizer studio, MIDI Studio. Recently, thanks to Brendan Bailey, who's here tonight, we made a presentation a couple of years ago in Chicago where I dug up that DAT tape and we put it out there and now there are, I think you can get a, what's the guy's name, Pinsound, Nicholas Pinsound, is that what it's called? You can get a Pinsound board with those sounds in it, so if you have a Pinsound board for your Twilight, you can hear the original stuff. To be perfectly honest, I think of anything that comes out of my MIDI studio now, I judge it on standards that are more appropriate for MIDI studios to be judged on. And I listened to that stuff, which I made in 1992 and 1993, and went, yeah, god, that really sounds kind of like Yamaha cheesy Yamaha synth music written from slightly better synthesizers. And so it's not my favorite thing anymore. For a long time, this stuff, all the stuff that we ended up having to rush to get together to get the game an hour in time after we had bailed and decided to just make it with the old hardware, was stuff that I just loathed. I didn't like it at all. It was like, oh man, this is not nearly as cool as it was. But then after pulling it together and pulling out all the tricks that we knew about how to make a Yamaha soundtrack, it turns out that it's probably top two or three maybe of all the soundtracks that I've ever done. It's an amazing body of work. There's much stuff there. We whipped it out in no time at all. It was all written already. All I had to do was transcribe it. It turns out that we did a really good job. Over the years it's really grown on me. Now I actually like the Yamaha version better than my early synth version. Now whenever I present Twilight Zone, I'm always presenting this version. Yeah, that's a thing. OK, so number four, well. You're about to hear the perfect melody. Big drop. That's just so great. You just can't believe how good a playoff that really was. 49 games on Berlin Test. They're all lined up playing that song. That was, basically, life didn't get any better than that for me. This has always been my favorite. That tune is my favorite tune that I've ever written for games. And, you know, it was another Python game. It was a silly thing that was originally going to be called Super Grand Prix. That was the idea. It was going to be a racing game, and the figure eight ramps were going to be like this big fancy racetrack thing. And when somebody said, oh, we're going to, you know, Python came in and he said, that's a terrible idea. It's a shit idea. You know, we need to do something more interesting. It's got to be more human. It's got to be more right. So we get, you know, so what do we get? We get Santa Claus. We get Pinbot. We get Dracula. It's way more human because we brought Pinbot to life before. So, you know, this is the same story. We keep on telling the same story. Anyway, that was Taxi, and it was a magical game. It was certainly Mark's first big real breakout game, and I'm really proud to have worked on it. It's also kind of like, it has a vague sort of reminiscence of Little Feet and stuff like that, and at the time that was totally my favorite band, and that's the kind of stuff that I liked. So this was the first game that I did where there was nothing about what I was doing where I was faking it, and so that's why it's important to me. Came out number four. probably put it number two so number three yeah More air guitar. This is Juuling Slide air guitars. Originally written for Dr. Dude. Dennis didn't like it. He didn't like it, and I have this thing that I do with designers, where I go, live with it for a week, and almost without fail, they've forgotten that they didn't like it. In a week, they've forgotten, and it's like, I sort of got away with it, or something like that. Then as he goes, I don't like it in a week. I don't like it. Take it out. I'm like, wow, okay. I can't remember even what. It was like for one of the early, the first modes, one of the first single ball modes of the game, I can't remember even which one it was. It was like party, something personality, not magnetic personality, it wasn't that one. It was the part, what are the three characteristics? It was the heart, it was the heart, yeah. So anyway, so that was for Doctor Dude. It reappears as the end of your initials tune for Whitewater. Whitewater was important though, and it would have made my list because of the main tune. That main tune has nine stages for the river. And we managed to do something that would be very hard to do now that you don't have a synthesizer making live music. And that is start playing something, and then play it again with adding a bass, and then add another synth, and then add a guitar, and then add a second guitar. And so we did that, and it was easy to do with a synthesizer. It would have been very hard and very memory intensive to do if we'd have to track out each one of those things individually. So that was important for that way, too. And it was really cool. It was sort of like my Bruce Hornsby period. So everybody should have one of those. If you're a composer, you should have a Bruce Hornsby period. OK. There's nothing else to say about this. I keep on using high-score today tunes. OK, I'm sorry. By the time I get to there in the project, when I'm really on a roll, I've really got to get on it. Fish Tales was the next game that I was going to do that I didn't have to fake because it was like, oh, we're doing a bluegrass game. We're doing a fishing game. It's going to be something country, and I'm kind of a country boy from the western shore of the Michigan Sea, but whatever. I love bluegrass, and that was what that music was, except when I got there, it just seemed like we'd gotten into that whole deep-sea fishing thing, and it was like, oh, we've got to do something tropical. So that was that whole thing, but it was like fishing, really. You sit on the bank under a tree. with your pole hanging in the water and nothing happens for three hours. That's fishing for me. And then I walk into Mark's office and I see on some little drawing of a play field or something like that, this little circle indicating a light. And underneath the light it says, Stretch truth when lit. And I'm like, oh, it's not about fishing. It's about lying. Now we can do something with that. So Fishdale said, of course, you would not believe it was this big. Right, right. Or, it was not, it was this big, man, I'm not kidding, fuck. We had to cut the end of that one, but that was our friend here doing that voice. And George Petro had got to go, it was this big, right? And I did something like, I told you it was this big. And so we did all of that stuff, and that was what the game really was about, of course. So that was pretty fun. Fun game, and is actually my favorite game. That's my favorite game. I just love that game so much. Those boat ramps. It's just magic. Number one. This was your pick for number one. It would have made my top five, but I didn't have it at number one. So, there isn't really much to say about Funhaus. It was a game that came along at a moment where we really needed a home run, and we got a home run. The best story about Funhaus that you can tell is that the Rudy head was probably, what would you say, a $100 mechanism or something like that that appeared on the original bill of sale as a $35 mechanism. And even with a $35 Rudy head, which was never going to work, but they managed to hold six together with bag bomb and duct tape or something like that. Even with that, the bill of materials was already like higher than anybody had ever you know And so the whole conceit about Funhaus was we been making games quicker and cheaper and less interesting incrementally quicker and cheaper and less interesting for about three or four or five games in a row. And our sales were doing nothing. We were just doing nothing. We were stuck in this quagmire of 1988, 89, just the beginning of 1990, you know. And even games like Doctor Dude, which started to have some things on it, they were still going, no, no, no, you've got six weeks to make this game. We were like, fuck, we can't make a game that fast. So all that stuff was going on. And Pat came in and basically said, we have to like, completely, we have to do it. We have to make the other decision. We're going to throw the kitchen sink at this thing. We're going to make the coolest thing we can possibly make. We're going to make something crazy, a crazy toy. And that's what we're going to do. And then they realized how much it was going to cost to make that head and everything else that they wanted to put in the game. And they went, let's do a cheap version. So they put a cheap version on the original build materials. That's what we all built. And it wasn't until we got to the sample run, just to the 150 or whatever they were going to make, when they got to that line and they'd already committed. They showed it at a show and everything. It's like we were making this game. We had people who were taking orders. Everybody was super excited about the game. And they got there and they went, this thing is going to break. There's no way we can make this thing without it's going to break. And Pat goes, oh, John, didn't we have another design for that thing? Oh, yeah, yeah, here's one. We think this will work a little better in manufacturing. It was $65 more expensive. And Neil was going, you're fucking kidding me. You're going to make me spend. There was nothing he could do. They totally had gotten him. They totally fucked him. They slipped it through. And the rest is history. So we have this crazy game. And that's how we kept on going. That's how we kept on finding some way to lure you guys all into still being interested. And to this day, we're still kind of looking for that same magic. We're looking for something that somebody going, ooh, bitchin'. We're looking for something where somebody goes, ooh, bitchin'. That's what we're after. And if, like Funhaus, like Pinbot, that it's a machine coming to life, we do that, we actually bring it to life, then we win. And it's a win-win for everybody. We all win. So that's my list. Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay, I'll ask the first question, as I said I would. Now, when you look at your list, there's a great preponderance of unlicensed themes, which, of course, gives you the total artistic freedom. When you think about the way games are done nowadays, with that LCD screen just begging for so much investment or else, if you don't want to create all that video and audio, you get a movie, and it's given to you, And if you have to work with a movie, knowing that they're going to just use stuff from the movie on the video part, do you think that would make your job much less fun? Less fun would not be the measurement that would concern me. It might be marginally less fun, but more we would spend our time doing a bunch of other stuff than writing music and making sound. We'd be spending time working with licensors and we'd be spending time working with licensed partners trying to get approvals for stuff. And we would spend all this other time doing stuff that's, you know, when you have to do that, you know, that's actually kind of like mostly what I spend my time, I spend a lot of time doing that stuff now. And those people are my partners and we're making something together and it's a thing that works. It's far, far less interesting as games than what I think that we ought to do. I mean, Pinbot and Fishtails and Taxi and Black Knight, thank you, are, there are IP. That's the IP that we made up. It's not derivative, and it does have personality. It did come to life, and it's far, far cooler and far more worthy than to make a game about a movie or a game about a TV show or a band or anything else. It's not wrong to do it, and I get why Gary wants to do it every time. It wouldn't be my first choice. I'm not excited about it. I know how to do it, and I think I do a pretty good job of it, but it's not something that wakes me up at 3 o'clock in the morning going, I know what I'm going to do. So, yeah, it's a fair question. And the video monitor, anything that takes the player away from the flippers and the ball on the play field is bad for pinball. That's all. During the 80s, what hardware and software did you use when you developed or composed the music, and then at what point would you hear it on the Yamaha? So we used the hardware and software that we used was the hardware and software that we created that was in the game. So we had development environments that consisted of a pinball sound board with a Yamaha chip on it and some kind of emulator circuitry that ran the operating system, a version of the operating system that ran in the game. And we were able to fire sound calls at it just the way that a game would fire sound calls at it. What it was actually firing sound calls at was a little sort of like an interpreted program that interpreted the note list that we created. The note lists were things that look a little bit like MIDI instructions, but we typed them in by hand. I would say, note C4, 6, and it would be a note at middle C for six ticks or beats or whatever. I would sit there and just go, note, note, note, or copy, paste, copy, paste, subroutine. I found all kinds of cheap shortcuts to creating massive long passages and things like that. Or you build in loops and things like that. We created parameter manipulation that are like MIDI continuous controller type things. We had a language for that that we could do either in a segment that was asynchronous, or we could do it as just a move and put it inside of a loop and make things move. He once accused me of writing a million notes per nanosecond. But that's how all the cool, like the little bubbly sound effects and fish tails and stuff like that, all that stuff is just like thousands, well dozens or hundreds of notes being fired off very quickly in a very sort of a specific kind of bubbly shape. And it worked, it just worked. So that was, is that the answer? You mean to tell me Whirlwind isn't on this list? Well, I suppose I could have made a case that Whirlwind deserved an honorable mention, because certainly there was a lot of cool music in Whirlwind, there's no question about it. Probably the second greatest air guitar tune ever lived in Whirlwind. Especially with the second half of the main theme after you lost the first fall. Well yeah, that was also, I mean there are many, you know, thanks so much for calling that out. It would have been hard to, it is hard to not credit all of the ones that we did because having sort of just achieved a certain level of sort of skill with it, because it took a couple of games to sort of work out the kinks of how you wrote music for that chip. Once we sort of had the basic tool set, and Pinbot was kind of the first one where we really had it down. From there on, we really just had fun. And any of the games, F-14 or Fire or Big Guns or Cyclone, oh my god. Any number of those games would have certainly qualified. Earthshaker, a wonderful, wonderful game. Diner, Police Force, yeah it was a great list. Whirlwind actually had a, Whirlwind was one of those games that I was talking about before where Pat blew everything up with Funhaus. Whirlwind was a game that he did just before that and it was the last one, sort of the the last and best of those, compress the schedule, make it less complicated, make it more straightforward, do the simplest thing. It was Bill Futsenroeder was the programmer. And he already had the whole game programmed to 98% level on day one of the project because he had just so many templates. He'd done so many games in so many games. So we had this whole thing done. And all I had to do was just fire assets at him. So I sat in my office and just wrote like a banshee and cranked out massive amounts of stuff. And I'd write two or three things in a day and send it up. And the first thing the next morning, I would go up, and they'd be in the game. They'd just be in the game. They would just appear because that was how Bill worked. So that game, that development for that game went very, very quickly, almost so quickly that it's not memorable. I mean, it was memorable. It was a tremendously cool game. The storm is coming. Ed Boon, right? Return to your homes. It was really cool stuff. But yeah, so I'm sorry I didn't make the list. Did you vote? No, I didn't vote. I just love the thing with my neck. If I had known it was there, I would have voted for sure. But I kind of miss a lot of things. Fair enough. Well, so especially with how you seem to be so attached to PinBot and bringing the game to life, I know you didn't do the sound for this game, but the machine write of PinBot, the second game in that, what are your feelings on how Dan Forden did for that game? I love his soundtrack for that game. Yeah. That's easily one of my favorite pieces of anything on that sound chip I've ever heard. Yeah, Dan killed it. I actually started on that project, And Python and I had our biggest falling out over that project, and I had to back off of it. And I ended up doing Funhaus more or less at the same time. So no real regrets. And also because of what Dan did for that game. He really did a wonderful job. Yeah. I'm a musician myself, and I love to study the sound hardware that goes into those games, because I've been playing pinball since I was very small. So I love to study the hardware and the music that goes into all of that. So it's really interesting to see all of that. I'm glad you made it. Glad you came, for sure. Yeah, I'm glad to see you here too for that too. Thank you, thank you, thank you very much. Are we stopping? Yeah, I guess it's time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, cram it all in. There it is, right, exactly. Thank you so much everybody. Thank you very much. Thank you.

_(Acquisition: youtube_groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_

---

*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: cb507f67-8ceb-473f-a763-391c4906c51f*