# Episode 87 - Pinball is Supposed to be HARD!

**Source:** Wedgehead Pinball Podcast  
**Type:** podcast_episode  
**Published:** 2025-06-16  
**Duration:** 57m 40s  
**Beat:** Pinball

**URL:** Buzzsprout-17308274

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## Analysis

Wedgehead Pinball Podcast explores the philosophy of difficulty in pinball, arguing that hard games are more rewarding and engaging than easy, long-playing games. Hosts trace pinball's evolution from 1940s nail games through the modern era, showing how game times have progressively lengthened as the market shifted from location operators to home collectors. They contend that modern pinball's trend toward complex rule sets, extended play times, and generous ball saves has created 'runaway games' that lack the challenge and satisfaction of harder machines.

### Key Claims

- [HIGH] Gottlieb released Humpty Dumpty in 1947 as the first pinball machine with flippers (six of them, reverse orientation) — _Historical fact stated as foundational to episode discussion; widely documented in pinball history_
- [HIGH] Steve Kordek is credited with introducing facing flippers at the bottom of the playfield, which became the standard layout — _Hosts acknowledge Kordek's historical contribution; standard pinball history reference_
- [MEDIUM] Stern sells approximately 70% of their games to the home market; boutique manufacturers (JJP, Spooky) likely sell 90%+ to home collectors — _Host admits lack of direct research on boutique splits but estimates based on observable market trends_
- [MEDIUM] Modern Stern games average approximately four minutes of play time based on operator audits — _Host states they 'pulled a bunch of different operators last year' and averaged audits; specific methodology not detailed_
- [MEDIUM] Boutique games (especially Jersey Jack) play significantly longer than Stern games, sometimes 10+ times longer — _Anecdotal evidence from hosts' personal experience; acknowledged as non-systematic observation_
- [MEDIUM] Hard games receive initially negative player reactions at shows because modern players lack experience with genuinely difficult pinball — _Hosts observe pattern where players try difficult game once, lose, and post negative reviews online without deeper engagement_
- [MEDIUM] Chicago Gaming's throwback games (Pulp Fiction) successfully filled a niche for shorter, harder games — _Host opinion based on perceived sales success; specific sales data not provided_

### Notable Quotes

> "the ball is wild... pinball's hard fun pinball's hard it's supposed to be it's an arcade game"
> — **Host (discussing Harry Williams quote)**, ~0:12:00
> _Core philosophical argument: difficulty is fundamental to pinball's design heritage and identity_

> "I'm of the mindset that pinball should be enjoyed at the length of a song. I think I've said that on the show three minutes or less."
> — **Host**, ~0:26:00
> _Personal design philosophy; direct statement of hosts' ideal game length and what they implement at Wedgehead_

> "It's very bizarre how it just feeds like that... there's such a drastic difference between a good game and a great game that it feels unjust"
> — **Alex (co-host)**, ~0:32:00
> _Critical observation of modern game design: runaway games create disproportionate reward for incremental success_

> "a hard game is more fun... it sharpens your senses. And when you overcome the odds, it's satisfying because you know that what you did was actually challenging."
> — **Host**, ~0:50:00
> _Primary argument for difficulty; frames challenge as source of meaningful achievement_

> "if you play a really friendly copy of a really already friendly game i'll play one game on that thing... whereas if i go play something and it kicks my ass i'm immediately i can do better than that"
> — **Alex**, ~1:00:00
> _Empirical observation of player psychology: difficulty increases replay value and engagement_

> "When you put out a difficult game, it usually gets a really negative initial response because people aren't used to a modern game kicking their ass."
> — **Host**, ~0:47:00
> _Identifies market resistance to hard games as a barrier to manufacturing difficult pinball_

> "I will remember that forever [Flight 2000 game costing $20+ and failing multiball shots]... that hard games are much more addicting than games that are easy"
> — **Host**, ~0:55:00
> _Personal anecdote illustrating emotional engagement and long-term memory formation through difficulty_

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| Wedgehead Pinball Podcast | organization | Podcast hosted by unnamed primary host and Alex (Waterboy); operates a pinball arcade in Portland with machines set to difficult settings |
| Gottlieb | company | Classic pinball manufacturer; released Humpty Dumpty (1947), first pinball with flippers |
| Steve Kordek | person | Legendary pinball designer credited with establishing the standard flipper layout (facing each other at bottom) |
| Williams | company | Major classic pinball manufacturer; released Hayburners 2 (1968), first three-inch flipper games |
| Stern Pinball | company | Modern pinball manufacturer; ~70% home market sales; games average ~4 minutes play time; still caters somewhat to location operators |
| Jersey Jack Pinball | company | Boutique manufacturer targeting home collectors; games play 10+ times longer than Stern; over 90% home market sales; delivers 'grand epic experience' |
| Spooky Pinball | company | Boutique manufacturer; majority home collector market; produces games with varying difficulty (some hard, some easy) |
| Chicago Gaming Company | company | Manufacturer that released Pulp Fiction and John Wick as shorter, harder games catering to niche market |
| Jack Danger | person | Pinball designer attempting to move flipper placement away from standard bottom orientation |
| Pat Lawlor | person | Legendary pinball designer from 1990s; known for giving extra balls generously in game design |
| Scott Denisi | person | Spooky designer; creates harder games; acknowledged as exception to boutique trend toward easy, long games |
| Humpty Dumpty | game | First pinball machine with flippers (1947); had six flippers in reverse orientation; represents birth of flipper-based pinball |
| Flight 2000 | game | Vintage pinball game used by hosts as memorable example of difficult, engaging game; hosts spent $20+ trying to start multiball |
| Godzilla | game | Stern pinball game; example of long-playing game with runaway potential; games range 3-40+ minutes depending on player skill; heavily used in discussion of modern game design problems |
| Firepower | game | Hard pinball game; cited as example of genuinely difficult game where high scores are unquestionably impressive |
| Dracula | game | Hard pinball game; cited alongside Firepower as example of games that provide genuine challenge and satisfaction |
| John Wick | game | Chicago Gaming pinball; cited as hard game that received negative initial response despite being well-designed |
| Rick and Morty | game | Pinball game mentioned as exception to trend; implied to be relatively difficult compared to modern average |
| Pulp Fiction | game | Chicago Gaming pinball; successful short, hard game that 'sold well' and offered 'breath of fresh air' |
| F-14 Tomcat | game | Steve Ritchie design; first pinball machine to feature ball save, marking major design innovation in mid-1980s |
| Harry Williams | person | Historical pinball figure quoted: 'the ball is wild' — used to justify difficulty as fundamental to pinball philosophy |
| Big Game | game | Classic pinball used by host as baseline easy reference; available at Wedgehead venue |
| Creature | game | Hard pinball game cited as example; players need repeated plays before forming opinion |

### Topics

- **Primary:** Difficulty philosophy in pinball design, Evolution of pinball gameplay from 1940s to modern era, Market shift from location operators to home collectors and its design consequences, Ball save, multiball, and rule complexity as modern design trends, Player psychology and engagement with hard vs. easy games, Game time length as design metric and player preference, Runaway games and variance in modern pinball
- **Secondary:** Manufacturing risk in releasing difficult games (negative initial reception)

### Sentiment

**Mixed** (0.55) — Hosts are passionate and positive about hard games and their philosophy, but critical and frustrated with modern pinball industry trends toward easy, long-playing games and perceived lack of challenge in contemporary design. They view the shift to home collector market as problematic for pinball's core identity. Tone is conversational and collegial between hosts but contains frustration with broader industry direction.

### Signals

- **[business_signal]** Manufacturers fear backlash from releasing difficult games because modern players lack experience with genuinely hard pinball and form negative opinions after single play (confidence: high) — Hosts state: 'When you put out a difficult game, it usually gets a really negative initial response because people aren't used to a modern game kicking their ass'
- **[sentiment_shift]** Hosts observe that players often misattribute negative reception to hard games as objective design flaws rather than player inexperience (confidence: medium) — Pattern noted where players 'waited in line at a show, got their ass handed to them, and then went post online like man John Wick sucks'
- **[competitive_signal]** Tournament rounds are lengthened by outlier runaway games; one 45-60 minute game delays entire round with 20 players (confidence: high) — Hosts observe: 'if you have 20 good players all playing stern games at the same time, one of those 20 will have a 45 minute game'
- **[design_philosophy]** Modern Stern games reward player progression with increasing ball saves and multiballs, inverting classic arcade philosophy where difficulty increases late-game (confidence: high) — Detailed analysis of Godzilla: early game single multiball vs. late game cascading multiballs with ball saves creates runaway potential
- **[design_philosophy]** Multiball and ball save mechanics have become the primary reward structure; players seek ball saves over multiball completion itself (confidence: high) — Host: 'the multi-ball doesn't even matter the ball save is what you're playing for'
- **[design_philosophy]** Modern pinball has shifted from arcade-era difficulty-based design toward home collector-friendly long-playing games with abundant ball saves and multiballs, creating engagement-flattening 'runaway games' (confidence: high) — Extensive historical comparison showing game times grew from 60s to 90s to 180+ seconds; hosts trace shift to home market dominance (70% Stern, 90%+ boutique)
- **[industry_signal]** Pinball game times have progressively lengthened throughout industry history from 60 seconds (1950s) to 180+ seconds (modern), driven by competitive pressures and market evolution (confidence: high) — Comprehensive historical timeline: EM era ~60s, 1970s peak ~90s, 1990s Renaissance 180+s, modern Stern ~240s, boutique significantly longer
- **[market_signal]** Niche market opportunity exists for shorter, harder pinball games; Chicago Gaming's Pulp Fiction and John Wick identified as successful exceptions (confidence: medium) — Hosts note Chicago 'kind of hit that' and suggest Pulp Fiction 'sold well as far as I can tell' but no detailed sales data provided
- **[personnel_signal]** Wedgehead arcade operates games at factory default settings with tight tilt and steep playfield positioning; deliberate but measured approach to difficulty (confidence: high) — Host: 'The vast majority of our games are set at factory default... they just have a tight tilt setting, and they are set up steep'
- **[sentiment_shift]** Growing disconnect between casual players' expectations (longer, easier games) and enthusiast/competitive players' preferences (shorter, harder games) (confidence: high) — Hosts frame as bell curve: 'too short and it's not even a game and too long means you miss seeing the birth of your child'

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## Transcript

 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, uh, yo, get it twisted. This rap shit is my motherfuckers. A fucking game. Fuck what you heard. It's what you hearing. It's what you hearing. Listen, it's what you hearing. Listen, it's what you hearing. Listen, X gonna give it to you. Fuck way for you to get it on your own. X-Gone deliver to you. Knock, knock, open up the door, it's real. With a non-stop pop-up, I'm staying still. Go hard, getting busy with it. But I got such a good heart that I make a motherfucking wonder if you get it. Damn right, and I'll do it again. Cause I am life, so I gots to win. Break bread with the enemy. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Wedget Pinball Podcast. I am here in my own home and not in the basement studio of my co-host today, Alex the Waterboy. How you doing? I'm doing pretty good. The basement studio got kind of like commandeered to actually hold pinball machines now, you know, so we're gonna we're gonna have to figure something out there. I saw the pictures. Pretty cool. Yeah, it's a nice setup, but we lost our TV. That's really the only thing we lost. So we'll be back there soon enough. But today I'm here to talk about something much more serious, you know, which is our coffee fundraiser. We're still raising money for our upcoming trip to Colorado. To be honest, I hardly remember a time when we weren't raising money for this trip. For only $5, you can show your support for this podcast. Keep Alan motivated on those long nights of editing. The fact we get an episode out every week is nothing short of a miracle. And while I can't be there in person trying to guilt you into donating like I would if we were in a church or something, I can guilt trip you now. Maybe skip the craft beer the next time you're out and switch to a domestic for a round. They taste better anyway. And just like a cold bud of light, the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast will be there for you every week. So go to ko-fi.com slash Wedgehead Podcast. Throw us a few bucks if you like the show. You'll get an invite to our Discord server too, where I promise I will quit asking you for money. But on to the real reason we're here today. Today's episode, what is our topic, Alan? That was an awesome intro. Today's episode could be essentially considered a pure distillation of what we talk a lot about on this show and will dovetail nicely with my own personal ethos in the way that I set up the games at Wedgehead. Some of it is covered in a previous episode we did, episode number 24, Pinball Setup. But a lot of what we are going to cover in this episode won't be how to make games easier or harder, but more about the philosophy of how difficult or easy a pinball machine should be. It's something I see a lot online and something that gets discussed all the time, both online and in person. And usually it's always one way. It's along the lines of, blank new game is too hard. or the left out lane is just too hungry on blank game. And that's why we're going to discuss it here in depth on this episode, because I do think that I personally am a little bit misunderstood. If you've listened to the show much at all before, you'll know that I appreciate a challenging game or a hard setup. And while I do set up our games hard, my end goal isn't to make every game as hard as possible. There are plenty of ways to make the games that we have on the floor harder than what I would ever actually do in practice. The vast majority of our games are set at factory default, for instance. They just have a tight tilt setting, and they are set up steep. And both of these are easily adjusted for a reason straight from the factory. Some people would say that's just hipster bullshit, but we're here to say otherwise. So this week's episode will be an exploration about why players need to stop looking at the randomness of certain features and seeing them as some sort of bug or flaw of a machine, and to start learning to embrace them as a core tenant of what makes pinball fun in the first place. and that's variance if you don't love the variance then you should just stick to video games because real pinball is supposed to be chaotic as harry williams famously said the ball is wild i mean it's something we talk about all the time right pinball's hard fun pinball's hard it's supposed to be it's an arcade game and it's kind of like the arcade design philosophy which is what drove pinball for most of its history until very recently so that's kind of what we're going to get into a bit is just like why it was the way it was why it's changing to more of what we're seeing now i don't know just kind of get into those details right yeah we're going to start with sort of the history of the game of pinball and you know before pinball even had flippers the games were all like 30 second long plunge and nudge experiences pinball actually got its name during this era when the playfield would have small nails or pins hammered into the playfield that the plunge balls would bounce off of and into holes with number scores written on them You had to manually add your score up, and oftentimes shopkeepers, you'll like this, Alex, would give out prizes like cigarettes for putting up a good score. I do like that. You know, that's how you get the kids to keep coming in. In 1947, Gottlieb changed the game forever by releasing Humpty Dumpty, the first pinball machine with flippers, even though it actually had six of them, and they were set up reverse from the standard orientation of flippers that they would soon become. At the time, five balls became the standard and the flippers were smaller than today at two inches long. It would stay like that for about 30-ish years before we got the bigger three-inch flipper bats. Games during this early EM era from the late 1940s through the 1970s still relied heavily upon nudging in addition to flipping to get the ball where you needed it to go to score the most points. And games during this era would typically last about 60 seconds. Yeah, it's interesting. Humpty Dumpty. So we if anyone's ever seen that game or not seen that game, it's the first with flippers, but it's not like used to the effect that you would imagine most pinball machines using flippers. They're kind of just like up on the play field to add some more movement to the ball. Yeah, it is the first time, right, that the player could interfere with the ball directly, like with a button. Yes. So, I mean, it's a very, very, very noteworthy thing, but it is very far from what modern pinball became. another 10 years later or whatever it would look totally different than Humpty Dumpty. It took a few years but then you know like Steve Kordek legendary designer like to take credit for putting the flippers next to each other facing each other at the bottom of the playfield and he's like and that's where they've stayed since he's like I put them there and then that's sort of where they stayed and he was really proud of that and you're like yeah I mean it he's right you know like it's where you think of flippers at now and facing each other like Jack Danger's doing his best to change that back right yeah get him somewhere else but then williams released the first three inch flipper games on their game hay burners 2 in 1968 but they wouldn't be adopted as the standard until the mid 70s like all kind of things in pinball the advancements it's sort of like the first one comes out it's not usually immediately adopted it takes a couple years for games to be out on location and for people like oh that's the feature we gotta steal like that's the way to do it but pinball lower third placements you know got more standardized during this period and the italian bottom without lane in lane slingshot flipper on each side with a center gap or drain in the middle slowly became the standard with these longer three inch flippers so you have inlanes larger flippers and controlled feed increase the average game times up to 90 seconds or so the 1970s were the peak of pinball's popularity and as the game advanced the ball times were starting to get much longer three ball adjustments had been around for at least a decade by the mid-1970s, but you started to see the C-chain shift from five balls down to three balls at the end of the 1970s to help keep the games from getting too long and stifling the operator's earnings. Right around the same time, pinball makes the leap into the solid state era. The first wave of solid state games were almost identical to EM games, but they got stronger flippers and more complex rule sets. Well, some of them got more complex rule sets. The Scott Lee have stayed the same for a while. That's true. That's true. That's what makes the System 1 so good. They are EMs in rule set and layouts with just stronger, snappier flippers. But pinball almost died in the mid-1980s, but underwent a rapid metamorphosis in the second half of the decade. We got ramps, multiballs, and even the first ball save in pinball history in Steve Ritchie's game F14 Tomcat. Pinball was evolving to a game of even greater player control with safer feeds. extra balls weren't just an occasional feature but a mandatory one and game times ballooned well past two minutes a game for the first time in pinball's history man two minutes two minutes like a marathon yeah back then it must have felt that way it is just like a very different mindset and i think that was it's interesting because it's kind of like the pinball development is kind of reflects like the you know they got challenged by the growing arcade scene in the early 80s or whatever it almost died they had to compete with that and it was like the arcade games kind of started shifting to longer play as well instead of just being like brutally hard like they were when arcade games started taking off and that's kind of something that like pinball benefits and suffers from throughout the years once video games got on the scene and i think it's interesting how i would say it benefited from the competition of video games through the 90s and then as video games became a home thing predominantly and no longer an arcade thing we start kind of seeing this weird shift but i'm skipping ahead a little bit yeah the 1990s usher in the pinball renaissance uh in this decade where pinball finally gets everything it still possesses to this day this is where we get modes ramps and orbit speeding safely to the flippers repeatable combo shots big mechanical features multi balls get ball saves or out of ball features you know scoops or mode holes that hold the ball and tell a story. Extra balls keep being increased to offer the skilled player a way to see the new wizard modes at the end of the game's deeper rule sets. And this is where pinball games pass the three-minute mark. These are basically like, if you look at the 90s games, the Bally Williams 90s games, by today's standards, the rule sets are simple, but they're essentially the same as what we're getting now. There's nothing in a new game outside of insider connected that the 90s games didn't have any any reasonable thing under the glass these games possessed and from the 90s on the last 30 years of pinball have been just refinements of what it became in the 90s yes 100 it's it's definitely like a more of a like evolution rather than like uh you know a drastic change between generations or whatever And then Jersey Jack starts his company to cater specifically to the rapid-growing home collector market. He intended to double down on all the things that they wanted, which amongst other tech advances, was even more complex and deep rule sets, and more multiballs with more ball saves and more mini wizard modes. and from their very first game game times were much longer than the machines that stern was making in the late 2000s and early 2010s when stern was still catering to the on location market a market where operators needed to make their money back and then some stern follow suit and now we are in the modern era where stern sells 70 of their games to the home market i haven't heard jgp state their splits but i gotta assume that jgp and the newer boutique manufacturers are upwards of 90 percent yeah i i should have done a little bit of research beforehand but i know it is something like that as far as like spooky games where you know there are known quantities the the vast vast majority of them are going to home collectors and that is definitely what drives a huge amount of the market and the design choices across every brand across all of their games because every game has to appeal to as many customers as possible which is also something that we'll get into a bit later in the episode. The change to selling to the home market, it rapidly increased the average game time. Just the trend all the way from pinball's history is it's slowly gotten longer and longer. You know, I pulled a bunch of different operators last year for another episode that I was working on, and I finally just recorded, by the time you're listening to it, it's already been out, and I asked them for the average Stern game audits. I then averaged them all together and got almost a four-minute game time. And I don't play many boutique games, nor did I collect the audits like I did with the Stern games, But in my anecdotal evidence, the boutique games that sell almost no games to operators play so much longer still. Like they're longer playing than the Stern games. Would you say that's... Definitely some of them. I wouldn't say that's necessarily a rule because like some of the American games, I would consider harder than Stern's. sterns and a couple of like the spooky games you know namely the scott denisi ones but even something like uh nightmare castle plays pretty quick just because those shots are fucking hard but like jersey jack which is kind of the biggest name on the boutique side the biggest one kind of driving that i think definitely plays at least in my experience far like a like an order of 10 times it's it's just insane how long a jjp game can play when you start going on it yeah because i do think that stern because they still sell 30 to us operators they are still plugged in and attuned to the concept that like these games need to be played and then they need to extract your money and then move you along to either put more money in or to get off the machine so somebody else could put their money in and like jersey jack doesn't make games like that they're not thinking about that at all i think it's very clear when you play right jersey jack is trying to deliver like this grand epic experience every time you hit the start button and the sterns definitely carry more of the old school design ethos into them and they do deliver that really deep deep rule sets or whatever but it's a it is definitely a rarer experience to have a really long runaway game on a stern than a jersey jack it feels like the jersey jacks it's like most of the time you go up there you're playing a really long game even without knowing what you're doing oh yeah especially without knowing what you're doing. It feels even longer. The less you know what to do, the longer it feels. The clock might not agree, but it's just like fucking... It can be a hellish experience when you just being fed ball save after ball save and you have no idea what you supposed to be shooting for because the game just keeps yelling out shoot anything It's... Yeah, dude. It's really something. Yeah, so that brings us to our current state of pinball, which, as shown, it's been a game that has risen and fallen in popularity over time, and over the same course of time, it's gotten progressively easier, and players' expectations of what a game of pinball should be have changed. Now, everyone's going to have a different opinion on this, but everyone in their mind has an expectation of a pinball machine's ideal length. It's like a bell curve because too short and it's not even a gate and too long means you miss seeing the birth of your child because you were playing a slow and loose copy of Jaws and lost track of time. Right. Yes. And there's a middle ground that everyone wants. And for certain people, that's five minutes for certain people. That's 10, 20, 30 minutes. I'm of the mindset that pinball should be enjoyed at the length of a song. I think I've said that on the show three minutes or less. And if you're having a great game, then it could be like a rush song. It could be a little bit longer, you know, but it's got to be rare, dude. It's got to be very rare and hard to get into. You know what I mean? Like a rush song. Yeah, I would. I would agree with that in my gripe is that it's like when you play the older games, the difference between like a good game, like if we're playing like big game in my basement or something the difference between like a very very good game and just like a mediocre one is you know like two minutes versus like four minutes yeah whereas if we play godzilla if i play a really dog shit game of like the stern godzilla and it's you know three minutes or whatever and then i have a good game it'll legitimately be you know 30 40 minutes or whatever and that's the crazy part to me is that it's like the stern games it's like when you start doing good they start rewarding you with more and more safety which is the opposite of what you you'd think as you get going like when you get back into classic like classic arcade game design as you get further into the game it gets harder and it's weird with modern pinball the way we've changed where you get further into the game and it gets easier you get into like you get into stir like godzilla specifically just because i know that one very well but this isn't to just brag on that game but it's like in godzilla it's like as you get going you start you're making progress on a lot of multiballs at the same time so on a shitty game you might only get into the main godzilla multiball or whatever and then on a decent game you might get into two but that's kind of rare it feels like you either get into one or you get into like five yeah and then on that game where you get into five multiballs you all also make it to a like a mini wizard mode where you're now in single ball play but with a ball save and then when you drain that ball you get fed a multiball and when you finish that it now has lit another multiball and it just it's just kind of keeps going and going and in that process you've collected you know three extra balls or something it's very bizarre how it just feeds like that so that's when i always use the term like a runaway game that's very much what i mean it's like there's such a drastic difference between a good game and a great game yeah that it feels like unjust and it feels weird it to me i get why they do it because it feels rewarding when it happens occasionally and you're like holy shit i'm really blowing this thing up but it's like very it makes the good games that are three minutes feel like a waste of time because it wasn't one of those 45 minute ones because we find ourselves now in an era where i think that maybe the average game time like if you're going to stern audits and go into like a valley williams audits it probably doesn't look that much different from the 1990s but if you've ever been to a league night or a tournament you can see the difference firsthand Good players will blow up round times to 45 minutes or an hour. The average game isn't that much longer, but the median game is a hell of a lot longer today than it used to be. If anyone doesn't know math, the difference is the middle number of the runtime of a game versus the overall average. The Sterns will have probably some games that are much shorter because the ball is moving a lot faster, but it'll also have just runaway games that will drag that overall average up. But the difference is astounding, you know, between the two. Yeah. And it is interesting, like specifically at like a league or a tournament where you're doing rounds and there's a bunch of players on different games. That's when you really notice it because it's not like you have every it's not like every other game on a stern is 45 minutes. But if you have 20 good players all playing stern games at the same time, one of those 20 will have a 45 minute game. Yeah. And that's when you're like, oh, shit, this is a round is now going to be like, you know, the vast majority of everybody is going to be standing around for as long as that person's like going and i think the main difference between the 90s games and this the modern stern game is that a lot of what they would do back in the 90s is like here's another extra ball here's another one here's another one that's kind of like what pat lawler used to do on his 90 games yeah he would just give you extra ball after extra ball stern games do that too on factory settings for most of their setups but in a tournament you can't play extra balls the other thing that stern does do that you can play in tournaments and what drags them out is here's another multiball here's another multiball with a ball save here's the way to add a ball the add a ball gives you a ball save it's just like what alex said earlier yeah here's a way to relight the ball save and it just it's like the multi-balls have become this crutch where a multiball is basically like getting a you know like a star and mario kart the multiball doesn't even matter the ball save is what you're playing for yep and you're like well that's like you know that that's weird and unfortunately in my opinion is i don't see any sign of getting shorter playing games with home collectors currently dominating the market because i think the ego strokes are necessary for rich old men with no friends i will say like when you're playing by yourself the long games having an outlier long game doesn't bug me nearly as much like i enjoy like i you know i i enjoy having longer playing games i do think it is massively overstated online how people think longer playing games will have more replay value and in my experience it's the opposite like it'd be like saying that like a legend of zelda game has more replay value than like street fighter right you're like you're like okay legend of zelda like it's a great game and you might go back to it like time to time but like there's people that have been playing you know street fighter hours every day for the last you know 30 years so which one really like it's like the depth isn't the end-all be-all to replay value that some people think it is but i do think it's odd because it's like like i was kind of alluding to earlier it feels like everybody making any pinball machine like stern included all with some exceptions i'll talk about i guess but it's like all the boutique companies most of them every game they're trying to capture every seller that they can so they they shoot for the average and they think the average is the answer here is these really like a deep friendly game with lots of multi balls and you know layers and layers of wizard modes or whatever and i'm just always surprised that no one realizes like there's a niche missing that's not being answered in chicago kind of hit that like we did with our throwback games there have been some attempts at that chicago kind of did that with pulp fiction and it's awesome it's a breath of fresh air i think it sold well as far as i can tell and there are some other exceptions like john wick i would say Oh, yeah. Or Rick and Morty. The hard part is when you put out a difficult game, it usually gets a really negative initial response because people aren't used to a modern game kicking their ass. They don't have 20 years of people being like, no, no, like creature can fuck you, you know, if you get like a move that car reject. But it's a fun game. But it's a fun game. Dracula is a good game. Firepower is a good game. They don't have that, so they don't put 10 games into it before making an opinion. They put one game in, and then they go post online, and they're like, man, John Wick sucks. Yeah, they waited in line at a show, and then they got up there and got their ass handed to them, and they're like, this game sucks. Yeah, and so that, I think, is what makes companies scared to put out difficult games sometimes. I understand the dilemma that they're in, and that's why I said, I'm not holding my breath that this is going to change anytime soon. i'm hoping that not in mass i'm always hopeful that someone will be like hey there is a market for these occasionally because not everybody buys every pen and that's the other thing everybody likes these uh long you know what we consider to be easy games even if the objectives aren't easy they play longer that's that is one distinction that's what we mean by easy game we mean long playing we don't mean it's easy to complete the game like godzilla is not an easy game to complete but it's an easy long playing game it's an easy yeah i should say it's like an easy layout not easy rules people love that so i was going to say do you want to get into uh you know the opposite the argument for why hard games are good yeah i mean this is what like if you listen to the show you already know our takes on this but i wanted to talk about this on this episode in depth why are hard games good because i understand we all started playing pinball i think everyone's natural inclination is always like to shrink from a challenge and to be like oh that game was hard therefore i don't like it people like to progress in a game and get further in a game it makes them feel good but hard games are really good and you'll hear us talk about all the time and our whole friend group is basically the same way my first and foremost thing and this is what i always say this is what i always lead with i always go a hard game is more fun and then i get the groans and the arguments, but I go, it sharpens your senses. And when you overcome the odds, it's satisfying because you know that what you did was actually challenging. You know, people are impressed by other people that run full marathons or the ones that climb mountains or swim across the English Channel because it's obvious how hard it was to get there. You had to train. It took time and dedication, patience and failure to finally get there. It's not fun. And I know this from experience, because if somebody posts their big score on their home game where it's ridiculous and it's this crazy score and you go, yeah, we'll set it up hard. They will freak the fuck out because they don't like being told that their accomplishment was easy. You know what I'm saying? Like, because they know it's not satisfying when something's handed to you. Right. And that's my argument for why hard games are good. If you're playing a firepower and you put up a big score on firepower, people who have ever played firepower know how hard that fucking game is. You know what I'm saying? Versus like when I see people post their Godzilla scores, I'm like, yeah, but so what? That's your home use Godzilla. Like, so what? That's not a big deal. And they get mad when they see that because they want to feel accomplished. And my argument with hard games is like, that's what hard games give you. It's unimpeachable. like when there's a hard game out there and you put up a billion points or two billion points in a tournament on a dracula everyone fucking knows you're a god you know what i mean yeah no one can take like a hard game away from you yes and so like first and foremost to me like hard games are just more fun i i love a hard game you'll see alex or i it's like i'm smiling when i'm playing a game that's hard and we've talked about on the show before but like one of my favorite memories is playing that flight 2000 when we were uh in indiana at a wizard's world yeah yeah and you and i both put in at least ten dollars a piece trying to start the multiball on that flight 2000 and we each failed multiple times getting within one shot of starting it and like i will remember that forever i had so much fun that's the biggest thing to me is that hard games are much more addicting than games that are easy and i mean that both in like the setup and of the game itself if you play a really friendly copy of a really already friendly game i'll play one game on that thing even if i don't get close to a high score on it because someone else will probably have spent time if i if i play a 20 minute game on something first first game out of the bat i'm not going to play another game on that that day that's kind of like enough for me whereas if i go play something and it kicks my ass i'm immediately i can do better than that like that was a fluke and then it kicks your ass again and you're like okay like i can i definitely can do better than that and it's like those are the games you keep going back to and it's not I don't think I'm a masochist. It's just because it's addicting. It's like human nature. When something challenges you, you want to rise to that challenge. Yep. Whereas if something coddles you, you're like, that's enough. Yeah, I've had enough. And I know some people, like sometimes, I mean, there are days where if I'm playing like dog shit, then I go find the easiest game that is in the place and I go play that to make my ego recover a little bit. I'd be like, okay, thank God. I can like actually get it together on something or whatever, which is sometimes hard to do with your lineup at Wedgehead. But there's usually there's usually something. Yeah, there's always something easy there. But yeah, I really think that is the biggest thing for me is that a hard game is more just more addicting. There's multiple reasons why I think hard games are good and we're going to keep getting into them. But I always want to lead with that one. You know, some people like the regulars like jokingly and then other people completely not jokingly are like, Alan doesn't want you to have fun. Alan doesn't want you to have fun when you play his games. That's why he sets them up like that. And I was like, it's quite the opposite. it i personally think that that's what makes the game fun so before we get further in this episode like they are set that way because i truly believe that those games are more fun that's it that's that's the number one reason more lasting fun there is no that's the crazy thing about because i know at least something some part of the set trigger this was a negative review regarding how you know unjust your games are being on free play and set up how you choose which is almost entirely factory defaults just to reiterate there's i think two games in there that have lightning flippers installed that weren't from the factory everything else is essentially just factory defaults with king kong set to one extra ball pretty much other than that it's all factory software all factory posts everything is fucking factory with like just two or three exceptions out of 25 games that's why that is just a triggering review for us yeah but there's nothing else to be gained when you're at a free play arcade that's why i don't get the criticism is it's like why you think you're like no they're set up like that just for fun they're fun people think that it's like it's always like a money grab like it's always like a thing like that and you know for me i just that's how i want to play a game like that game is fun to me i love a really fast game when you play a floaty copy of the game with tired flippers and you just walking up and you can lose the ball that is a money grab to me because i just put a dollar in and i not having any fun and that the thing that just like agitates me no one ever you never see anyone complain online this game was set up too easy and you're like do you guys actually it's just bizarre because i think that genuinely can completely ruin a game's experience for me if you feel like you can't lose the ball that's yeah that's how i feel it feels like you're in purgatory like not being able to lose the ball feels like purgatory and just like if you've ever seen the roger sharp movie where he's like he has to go and he's like trying to hand off his ball to the worker at the sex store where he's playing the pinball and he's like i just can't let the ball drain you know like that's how you are as a pinball player you're playing it and you're like i could just walk away but like it feels wrong and antithetical to pinball when you're in a game like that to not keep playing i will walk away from a game but it feels very insulting yeah and so it's a rare thing like and so it's like for me i'd rather the operator set it up so that it's snappy and fast and hard and and you can't lose the ball but there are more reasons for why you would want and why difficult games are good and i think the next one is that if you want to get better and develop your pinball skill that's what a hard game does you'll develop more nudging in one day of sessioning an old solid state than you will in weeks or months of sessioning a modern game yeah that is the easiest way i think to sell people that are kind of getting into like when you kind of get bit with the pinball bug and you're like i don't like those old games i like playing the new stuff and it's like well if you want to get better at the new stuff go play the old ones because playing solid states is like putting your skills in a pressure cooker compared to playing fucking moderns it's insane how quickly you will develop better ball handling skills when you're playing old games versus modern games and that's just a result of like it's so much more dependent on those because none of the feeds in a modern a classic game deliver back to the flipper so every single time you're making a shot you're fighting for control on the flipper whereas a modern game basically in a modern game you're only fighting for control if you fuck up a shot if you brick a shot or something so once you flip shot accuracy and you can hit your shots most of the time or you know not to shoot for dangerous things and even even if you do brick a shot it's like a safe feedback from it then you you get sloppy with your with your ball handling and it's like that's not an option on classics yeah and the difference between winning and losing a match or having a good game or a bad game on solid state is all about ball control and little micro nudges and you develop that skill by playing older harder games that's it 100 go look at any serious tournament player the games that they have at the house if they have games at their house they will have old games there you know like our friend zoe they have a whole house full of weird old shit zoe and roan that's the kind of stuff that makes you better at pinball those skills carry to everything and once you do develop skill or you have friends that you play with that have pinball skill then a hard game means that you can still play games together because outside of launch day i won't be playing multiplayer games on a modern machine and whenever i do break this covenant i regret it every single time dude every time i get locked into like a multiplayer game i'm like what the fuck man why are we doing this it's a rare occasion that you and i will be like oh yeah like you know like 007 or whatever and we start it's very rare that you and i will play an lcd stern multiplayer and every time it's just like god damn it like this is a test of my will because you just you end up just spending more you're just looking at instagram or whatever for like 10 minutes at a time and then you have to like get back into it and you're like oh god damn it it just sucks that is also the single biggest reason it's awesome having a classic game at home is because it's so much nicer for playing with like friends and family that come by when it's like oh you have a shot on this like yeah watch you if i play grand prix with like one of my brothers or something if they come and visit me ever and they see me plunge you know get the ball into the pops and then it just goes straight down the middle if they see that happen to me it's like oh okay like now i have a chance and that's the difference you're like if we play like stern godzilla like i'm sorry like they do not have a chance yeah exactly yeah it balances things and again like i was saying earlier uh like a runaway game you know a phenomenal game of grand prix well grand prix specifically is like my grand prix a phenomenal game is probably fucking two minutes whereas a shitty is one minute yep absolutely Well, a shitty game on my grampy is about 15 seconds. Yeah, it's possible to just plunge three house balls in a row. It can be really, yeah. So it's like, but that's still 15 seconds to two minutes is still a lot different than like a Stern where they'll have two minutes of play time. And I, you know, if I'm actually trying not phoning it in too hard or whatever, I'll have, you know, 20 minutes or something. Yeah. And I mean, easy games just mean longer game times. Right. And these quickly compound over an event such as a tournament or league night. And if you've ever been stuck out past midnight on a weeknight where you got to work the next morning, you'll know what I'm talking about. Tournaments or league nights are super fun up until they aren't. Right. And modern pinball machines play longer in the same way that movies are all three hours long now, too. You know, when people were going out to see movies in theaters, most movies were 90 minutes or under two hours. now every movie is some kind of rehash sequel or multiverse blockbuster with 30 tickets and they are bloated three hour long slogs in much the same way pinball used to play in two minutes or less and every single year we stray further away from god's light that's the point of the show i'm like every year these manufacturers could make these games again and every year they choose not to every single year they choose not to yeah that's like what really i think i've brought up on the show i've definitely brought up in person many times but i really think that we need some kind of like genres applied to pinballs right now we basically define things as ems like early solid states dmd games and then uh like modern lcd games and it's like we need some other kind of distinction because we need them to be able to make and sell a game like john wick and people to not immediately complain that it's too hard. Not immediately complain that it's not Godzilla. You know what I mean? Exactly, because you're like, John Wick is not trying to be Godzilla. They could have made the feeds from that center ramp reject friendlier. They could have made the feed from the pop friendlier. They could add four more multi-balls that you just make progress to passively. You know, they can do all, that's all stuff you can easily do, but people are confused when they don't. And you're like, that's because it's to serve a different purpose. so i really really really wish they would put out like i wish you know how they always do those like 30 minute deep dive on the game or whatever and gomez is always like here to present you know john wick i really wish it would be like here to present like a new i'm trying to think of a tournament game i mean like it could just be a tournament like a new tournament game like a new like whatever it's like here's the ass kicker or here's the fucking like adventure mode yeah like do you want to play in like it because it's like there are different there's different sides to this it's a bummer to just kind of see it all try like everyone gets upset when it doesn't when it's not this homogenized thing moving the way they think it needs to yeah which is why whenever i see them at shows or whatever i try to be very vocal whether it's black knight sword of rage or now with john wick when i get these games i'm like the ball times are right the rule sets are right to me like i love these games but i know they're getting heat when they first release those games and i always try to go and i'm like this game's awesome this game's awesome there is a market out there and maybe the current market is more towards easy games the only way you're going to get me to play a modern game is if you make it harder if you make it shorter playing i was having a lot of fun on king kong until i had a really long game and you know what i mean and then now i'm like i don't know it's over i don't want to do that again because i'm just like yeah because i want to progress my game if it already took me 20 minutes to get there like every time i press start i don't want to be like i don't got 40 minutes in me yeah and so like that's the problem with those games to me and as an operator easy games destroy your ability to make money you know pinball machines have a ride capacity where only one player can ever be playing at a time even multiplayer games are really just multiple players playing sequentially so there's like a ride capacity and like i talked about in the last episode pinball economics 101 so if you're setting games too easy you're shooting yourself in the foot like our friend aj who operates in flip a coin just said his king kong just had the lowest opening weekend of any spike to stern and he said but people were playing it the whole time it's just their games were long enough that they weren't getting the fuck out of the way to put in more money you know what i mean that's the thing and if you're setting your games too easy you're just shooting yourself with a foot beyond that's why i get my reputations because like i'll play a game like we had king kong and day one alex comes in and like we're all having a good time we're like everyone's first impression is like yeah it's super fun it's long like everyone immediately was like yeah it's long like even when they're not having great games yet and then alex comes in and gets like five extra balls and plays this marathon game with two other regulars yeah i got three extra balls and i think six multi balls on my ball one which just felt preposterous yeah it's like i've played an entire fucking like i've lived a lifetime before players two and three have even plunged their first ball and you were trying to be like i'll get one more quick game in before i head home i have to go home and see my dog yeah i had to get home and let me out it was just like yeah i'll play one more and then immediately immediate regret yeah dude which is it's a feeling when you're like i'm doing good and i like feel guilty well and because you're playing with two other great regulars and they're trying to enjoy the game and then they're just waiting for you as you're just like crushing it and they just want to get their reps on the brand new game and have fun and kind of learn it and that's why it's like these these games are terrible multiplayer games like they're just terrible they genuinely are it's something that could be partially rectified with software if we happen to have any you know stern employees listening to this i would love to see um some kind of like multiplayer default setting where when you hit multiplayer on a free play game or like something where it's like oh it just disables all extra balls and it limits ball save during multi balls and shit because i know how much of an impact that software stuff can have on your average ball length yeah and it would just be nice especially just being like oh it just disables extra balls when you started a multiplayer game every time something like that would just be nice because you're like okay speed this long yeah i mean and that's that kind of gets my next point which is like 2025 our attention spans are cooked let's just face it like like just be real like pinball is a steel ball controlled by gravity rolling around a slanted board with some flashing lights it's absolutely captivating for a certain amount of time but after a while any game of pinball will get tedious that's why i hate easy games it gets tedious like i hate when i'm in the middle of a game being like eh okay i've had enough like i've had enough of this it is interesting in a world like just quickly shifting to abandon long form video content entirely and just only watch tiktoks and instagram reels like pinball machines are like going so hard the other direction it's weird right like it's weird that they're getting longer and longer and longer yeah you're just like interesting well this is what i always say like if you don't think so if you're listening to this episode you're fucking way out of line alan like you always are you're pounding this for no reason try this experiment for yourself if you own a game at your house most games are being sold to home collectors and people are buying these long playing games open up the coin door and change your settings to 10 ball play give yourself more tilt warnings or throw out the tilt bob all together jack danger style pump the ball save timers up on everything to their max settings lower the requirements to start each multiball you know place rubber bands over the outlands even in at those settings even if you're an absolute absolute rube you have no pinball skill you will be able to have a 40 minute plus game and now after that game you may have had a ton of fun and you may get to see some modes you've never seen before and you'll certainly put up your best score that you've ever scored but here's my challenge i challenge you to press start again right after that game knowing that you're signing yourself for for a marathon like game that every time you hit the start button now imagine having three friends over and playing multiplayer games together with a setup like that and then you understand what i'm talking about because that's what happens when you have friends that are into pinball and play and are skilled players you're always setting yourself up for like man this could turn into a fucking long game and then you're standing in a room full of pinball machines that you're not playing and instead you're standing around watching them play a fucking 20 minute ball Yeah, it would be like if you were playing fucking Skyrim and you're just like taking turns every 20 minutes. Yeah, yeah. And you're like, what are we doing here? I think they have their place. We've said that on the show before. Alex loves modern games. I tolerate them. I do enjoy some of them. There are time and place, but I just think that they're bad multiplayer games. And I think that especially if you're the type of player that like is competitive and wants to get into competitive pinball like tournaments and leagues. i'm just baffled by the fact that like we have all these top level tournament players working at companies and then the games just get longer and longer and worse and worse for tournaments like i don't fully get it i'm just sitting there like yeah i get that this is good for the home market and it makes the rich guys without skill buy a game and put it in their basement and then feel good about themselves but like there's got to be a balance man yeah like dude because these games are like you shouldn't be playing a lot of these games in tournaments at least in tournaments where good players show up you know if your local scene is all noobs okay whatever play whatever you've got at that point but it really that's what i'm saying like it's like if you have 20 people playing concurrent games or whatever it just takes one out of 20 to have like a runaway game and suddenly the night is now getting an hour longer you know hopefully you've listened to us enough and you like the show enough and you at least humoring us on why even if you a big staunch defender of these super long super deep easy games but you like man maybe i try out what they're talking about like we're going to talk a little bit about how to make a game hard if you have access to a game here's maybe what you want to try to do to make these games a little bit harder because yeah a little bit harder and a little bit more fun exactly that's the important part and the first thing i say is to keep your games freshly cleaned in the case of older games waxed listen to our episode number 66 pinball maintenance for more information about the easiest and best way to do that don't listen to dipshits on pin side who will try and scare you away from making this task simple and easy a clean game is a fast game and the ball will slide more across the play field this happens a lot to me people like alan did you rebuild the flippers on whatever game i was like no i just got clean today the games get clean like once a week and like the first day the ball is just fast as shit the first day or two you know after a fresh clean you know and then tighten that tilt a loose tilt means that a skilled player can save almost any ball with zero repercussions i think i said on the discord the other day that i'm like if you give me a loose tilt you'd think i'm fucking bowing karen's that is one thing that it's like in it even at home it's like i always am like well i've got i've got rubber feet on my games and they're sitting on carpet it's impossible it's physically impossible to slide the games at my house so i'm always like oh the tilt doesn't really matter that much and then you realize when you actually set it tight you're like oh no just nudging like it really reigns in what you can get away with even nudging let alone sliding if you have games on concrete floors or whatever and you're actually moving them around you can do fucking anything with a loose tilt like you will just never lose it yeah the other thing we do a lot of and we get some flack for is that we make them steep you know i think steeper games are faster and i think the faster speed shortens your reaction time you know there is some disagreement on this some people claim that flat games are actually harder due to side to side action being greater and causing the ball to float more and they will say that it's harder to trap a ball in a flat game i personally have never had an issue trying to catch a ball in a flat game and the only extra challenge from playing a flat game to me is trying to make sure i don't die of boredom before the game is over but uh your mileage may vary yeah that's one that's Like, like, theoretically, I'm like, yeah, sure. If it's flat, you should get more side to side action. You get slings and outlines. In reality, I've never once played a floaty game and been like, whoa, this one's a handful. Yeah. Like, no, they're just slow as shit. You see everything coming from a mile away. So if you can read ball predict, like if you can, you know, read where the ball's going at all, you have so much time to react on a floaty game compared to a steep one that it's like, no, there's no there's no argument to me that a flat game is going to be harder. And I know it's only anecdotal, but it's like, man, every time you put me on a flat game again, dude, it's just, it was just like when we played at the show, the first time I played Evil Dead, 20 minute game right out the gate, set the GC. No problem. It was flat as shit. It was super easy. Tilt was loose. So I could just bounce balls. Like I could see the ball bouncing towards an out lane and save it. And then I played it when Todd brought it in at wedge and it was set up steep. And all of a sudden you're like, oh, this is way more fun now because, you know, I'm not. It's just how it's crazy how just like, you know, one and a half, two degrees or whatever completely will change my impression of the game, which is also, you know, that's kind of it comes up in our episode about pinball shows in general. But it's just like pinball shows are a horrible place to judge games because people set them up horribly there. Oh, God. Yeah. It's just like, yeah, try games again. If the only place you play it was at a show. And the other thing I say, like part of a setup is like tune your slingshots. If you want a game to be hard, adjust the little switch contacts to be more sensitive. You know, when a ball grazes the sling and it causes it to fire, you know, it'll fire more often. You can also, in the newer games, adjust your sling coil power up from factory settings, and the slings are there to add chaos. So more slings equals more danger, and more danger equals more fun. Yeah, dude, we love slings. It is funny. That's one that we always joke about. No one ever leaves a tech note when a slingshot quits working. Everyone's like, oh, sweet, dead sling. the game just got easier this is so much better it drives me dead slings are like my pet peeve when you expect a ball to bounce off a sling and it just kind of glances off of it rolls down or whatever it just immediately makes me so angry and it's just it's a funny one because i've never seen that left on you know when when places have whiteboards to leave notes never seen anyone ever complain about a dead sling ever nope no one will ever complain about a dead sling no one will ever complain that the tilt bob fell off and is sitting at the bottom of the cabinet and is now impossible to tilt you know nobody will complain about those type of malfunctions right yep the other things i say to if you want to make your game harder you can move the adjustable outlaying posts to their wider settings well adjustable outlaying posts are you are you telling me those outlaying posts with like four holes pre-drilled into the play field the the designer was intending for those to be adjustable you know some people would say that it's against the designer's intention yet it's funny how they go out of their way to make sure that you can adjust them as you see fit boy i thought they just put fucking holes in the play field to look pretty alan i didn't know you were supposed to i didn't know you were allowed to use those to change the game yeah i mean you can but you'll be going against the you know the cardinal sin which is you know the designer's intention yeah by god if you change anything the way it came out of the box even though many times in history the way they shipped the games changed over the course of a production run if you dare to do that as an operator you will get chastised to no end online yep it's it's just mind-blowing to me that they give you something you can adjust but if you dare to adjust it people will bitch yep the other thing you'll see us do this is uh this is kind of our standard setup on the wedgehead games keith ellen games put lightning flippers in them it needs it like They're all better with lightning flippers. Lightning flippers, if you're listening and you're new, lightning flippers are very, very, they're like 1 16th of an inch on each flipper bat shorter. So they're just a fraction shorter, and together they create an extra eighth of an inch gap between the flippers. Our first ever episode of this podcast was all about lightning flippers. Yeah, we're big lightning flipper guys. They're fun, man. I think it's super fun. First of all, they're cool. They look very cool. it's like uh to me it's just like lowering a car you're like it's cooler yeah it doesn't even matter if they function different it's just cooler because now there's lightning bolts on the flippers but also it's a very minor difference it does like it's like an accumulative thing right like if you do all of this stuff the game will be noticeably harder but lightning flippers alone especially if you have a game with like a you know a reasonably loose tilt like flippers hardly even matter so the fact that that's another thing people were really complaining about is pretty funny to me i also think it's hilarious when you'd like see anytime an artist draws flippers almost all the time they're drawing little lightning bolts on them yet the players in reality are like fuck you fuck you for putting these lightning flippers in you're like you know like whatever dude luckily for us like i joke about like the mean comments we get or whatever or people are upset the vast majority of our regulars the reason why we do this is because like we have a whole community of wedgehead regulars who love this shit like that's why we do it these people understand that hard games are fun they come to us because the games are set up like that they like that too we're not the only ones we're not operating on this fucking island it's more like we love coming to wedge because like it's sharpening my skills you know it's going to the gym and getting up shots when i go somewhere else everything's easy and you have helped me become a good player and these games are more fun it's fun when the ball's moving fast dude and it's fun when you can it's fun when the ball's moving fast the last thing you could do to make a game of pinball much harder and this is something that alex is probably more the expert on but it's just to drink way too many beers and then all pinball got harder oh it gets way you know it's harder and just like we've been saying this whole time the harder it gets the more fun it is so you just keep drinking those beers you know it's a perfect system you know some of this stuff i think is just like you know you don't have access to a game you don't you can't take the glass off so you know some of the stuff you can't do but i do think that if you run into a operator in your town who's a you know a passionate pinball player they're part of the community go up to them and go you know it'd be a lot cooler if this game was faster you should make it steeper you know the tilt's a little too loose like i love hearing that most operators i would say most operators at least that i know love it when you tell them to make a game harder oh that's my favorite because they're like oh shit you're like okay if you don't mind like yeah by all means I love when regulars now, like I said, we have all of our great crew and like we'll have a game day one that I haven't even done all the tuning to yet. And they'll be like, Alan, this Dolly Parton's way too easy. You know, like when we had Dolly on the floor, I was like, I haven't even touched it yet. And I was like, OK, we're like, yeah, like wildfire. We're all like, like, I don't know about this one. And then you pull like the outland post. I'm like, OK, this is pretty fun game. Well, it's fun to have regulars that are like instead of complaining that a game's too hard, they're like, this game's not hard enough. Tune it up. We have our buddy Colin, who's in the Discord, and he's always being like, Lightning Flippers, Lightning Flippers, Lightning Flippers. He has Lightning Flippers. He's like, you need to put those two-inch flippers on it. You need to put the thing flippers on it. Safecracker flippers. Yeah, dude. And he's always like, harder, further, go further, go further. And the reason why is because we're all here to have fun. That's what I want to reiterate. Hard games are fun. I just want to reiterate that you're a free play location, so you're not gaining anything from making your games harder. No, the only thing you're gaining is just like people like it. So it's just and, you know, the thing is, is like you can't appeal to everyone. You know, sometimes you make decisions that are just like, I think this is more fun. My friends think it's more fun. Our regulars think it's fun and it makes us stand out. So it's like, you know what? We're just going to do it. And some people are going to be offended. And so what? Too bad. Yeah, there's only you can only yeah, you can you can't please everybody. You know, in this episode with talking about, you know, the cost for machines go up each year. So so does the price per play. and even though we are still way behind inflation on price for play, this is going to keep creeping up year after year. And to compensate for customers paying more to purchase a game, manufacturers make the games deeper. And to see the added depth of the game, they creep up the ball times. When these home market design games go on location, the operators at some point have to charge more for these games that both cost more and play longer. So it's a cycle where the games cost more, so they get easier, which means their ride capacity is lower, which means their earning ceilings are less, which means the games have to cost more to make the same money and fewer plays which raises the price per play which causes the games to play longer etc etc etc there are two levels for controlling the market feasibility and cost of games on location one is the price per play obviously games cost more and play longer they cost more per play but the other lever is time and in this case time on device back in coin op history they used to they would always talk about this when they're developing games. They would call it time on device. Instead of raising the price, you could also lower the time spent on the device by making the games play shorter. You know, an average time savings of 30 to 45 seconds a game might not sound like a whole lot, but over the span of thousands and tens of thousands of plays, it adds up to a lot. And when you have a hot new game, you need players to keep putting money into it and keep the line moving to make your money. So contrary to some negative comments that will get let off the pinball rap or on the Reddit or a Google review, I set up our games the way I do for all the reasons I listed above. I deeply believe that pinball is more fun when it's hard and it keeps our tournaments and howdy partner events moving along and gets everyone out of there at a reasonable time. I believe that playing hard games will sculpt you into a better player. It's what did it for me and I believe that the only things we're doing in life are hard in general. All these settings are operator settings for a reason set by me as the operator the nonsense i sometimes hear but that's not what the designer intended when i set up a game too steep or move an outlaying post but that's just not true like alex said these posts have multiple holes for a reason and those leg levers have three inches of thread for a reason and far from saying that the designers don't design their games to be set up steeper than 6.5 degrees we had george fucking gomez on the show recently and he straight up said that he designs his game for the street for operators like me to set them up at seven and a half degrees you could go to the stern factory and see the games in their lobby set up steep i have the pictures i can show them to you pinball designers are developing these games with the knowledge that they can and will be adjusted up or down depending on the owner and they have to play well at all settings so i will end this episode with a plea to go out and play some pinball in location, look for a challenging game, and challenge yourself to session it. Don't blame the setup. Take accountability for the weaknesses in your game and work on them. Steve Ritchie has a famous mantra, play better. And we have our own version too. And that's good luck. Don't suck. What y'all call me? 1-D-M-X Come on, God, come on, die Ayo, ayo, ayo, what's my name? DMX and I be the best, you see the rest They lookin' like they need a rest One more time I'ma spit at you some shit that's gon' get at you And be fuckin' with your mind Stop talkin' shit Cause you out there runnin' your mouth And really don't know who you fuckin' with Here we go again How many times do I have to tell you rap niggas I have no friends? You still acting up. Running around here like some brand new pussy that's about to get fucked. Yeah, you don't stop. I'm still getting down for whatever, whenever. That's why my shit is hot. Can't keep it real. Now, some of us do, but most of us don't. That's just how a nigga feels. I said, run. For my people that'll keep you looking see-through. What the fuck are you trying to creep through? D-M-A-N. Just wanna, we got it. Come and get it, nigga. We ready. All you gotta do is set it, baby. Outro Music

_(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_

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*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: f224ec7b-2c20-4736-9730-74a35c5c15ce*