# The Art of Kevin O' Connor

**Source:** Pintastic New England  
**Type:** video  
**Published:** 2022-01-05  
**Duration:** 86m 56s  
**Beat:** Pinball

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

---

## Analysis

Kevin O'Connor, legendary pinball artist, recounts his career spanning from the 1950s through modern pinball at Bally/Williams/Stern. He discusses his artistic influences (Mad Magazine, Frank Frazetta, Robert McGinnis), early career in commercial art and point-of-purchase design, breakthrough at Bally's art department under Greg Ferris, pioneering airbrush techniques on backglasses, and iconic games including Kiss, Star Trek, Flash Gordon, and Star Wars. He reflects on the evolution of pinball art from rapidograph ink and silk screens to modern digital processes.

### Key Claims

- [HIGH] Kevin O'Connor was hired by Greg Ferris at Bally after showing a Frank Frazetta painting copy in his portfolio — _Kevin O'Connor, speaking directly about his hire at Bally_
- [HIGH] Bally's art department founding team consisted of Greg Ferris, Margaret Hudson, and Alan Dick White working on slot machines initially — _Kevin O'Connor describing early Bally art department composition_
- [HIGH] Kevin O'Connor pioneered airbrush techniques on pinball backglasses at Bally, which no other company was doing at the time — _Kevin O'Connor explaining airbrush innovation and Greg Ferris not having used the technique before_
- [HIGH] Bally built an exhaust system in Kevin O'Connor's cubicle to support his airbrush work — _Kevin O'Connor describing infrastructure modifications for his painting process_
- [HIGH] Kiss game approval involved taking the backglass magic marker sketch to a Kiss concert at Magic Mountain amusement park in California where the band was in full makeup — _Kevin O'Connor describing Kiss band approval process with Greg Ferris_
- [HIGH] Star Trek backglass originally had phaser violence scenes that were removed per Paramount's request for the movie version — _Kevin O'Connor explaining gesso/whiteout rework of Star Trek backglass uniforms and violence removal_
- [HIGH] Kevin O'Connor applied for and took position as art director of Bally Midway around 1990 during the video game expansion era — _Kevin O'Connor describing his move to Midway as art director in 1990_
- [HIGH] Lucasfilm purchased a 30 by 40 Star Wars painting from Kevin O'Connor after submission to a committee review process — _Kevin O'Connor discussing Star Wars painting sale to Lucasfilm_
- [HIGH] Sam Jones (Flash Gordon actor) contacted Kevin O'Connor recently to discuss trading memorabilia and creating Flash Gordon posters together — _Kevin O'Connor recounting phone conversation with Sam Jones coordinated by Joe Kamenko_
- [HIGH] Dave Christensen, a Williams artist, insisted on inking every single screen himself, causing games to take longer to produce — _Kevin O'Connor describing Dave Christensen's meticulous screen inking process_

### Notable Quotes

> "I paid that game the ultimate compliment, Kevin. When that game came out, I bought the back glass from the distributor, NOS, just to have the back glass because this is like the ultimate mirrored back glass."
> — **Host (Pintastic New England)**, Opening remarks
> _Shows the prestige and lasting impact of Cameron Silver Ball Mania's artwork in the community_

> "And the person that met me in the lobby was Greg Ferris. And he was impressed with...I think that most of the thing that we most hit it off with was that I had copied a large painting that I did from a cover of creepy magazine done by Frank Frazetta, and that sealed the deal. He hired me almost on the spot."
> — **Kevin O'Connor**, Mid-presentation
> _Explains how O'Connor broke into Bally and the critical role of Frazetta influence in his career_

> "I can't think of any other company that was doing it at the time. Actually, Greg had not done airbrush either or even seen anyone do it...So I brought that in, and no one else had been doing that at Bally."
> — **Kevin O'Connor**, Airbrush discussion
> _Documents O'Connor's innovation of airbrush techniques as exclusive to Bally at the time_

> "They were in full makeup ready to go on stage when they did their approval of this with some changes whereas they wanted to be portrayed more as superheroes with muscles."
> — **Kevin O'Connor**, Kiss backglass discussion
> _Details the unusual approval process for Kiss, with band input on final artwork aesthetic_

> "Paramount came to us and said, we're putting this movie out. We really want to change the uniforms. And I took...a big can of white whiteout from back then but it dries to like a canvas texture and it was called gesso and I had to gesso over everyone's uniform and repaint them with the new uniforms."
> — **Kevin O'Connor**, Star Trek backglass discussion
> _Shows practical challenges of IP approval changes mid-production and physical correction techniques_

> "I would either go buy models or just find reference. Getting them from the right angle was quite a chore, but I think I did a lot of it with just buying little cars and models and photographing them in perspective."
> — **Kevin O'Connor**, Roadshow backglass discussion
> _Demonstrates O'Connor's meticulous research and physical reference methods for period-accurate artwork_

> "Dave Christensen never allowed anyone to do that. He would ink every single screen. So that's why his games took a little bit longer to get out. They could never give him one that they needed quickly."
> — **Kevin O'Connor**, Studio discussion
> _Illustrates the different work philosophies and quality standards among Bally's art department_

> "We were such good friends over the years and still are, and he spent many years in my band as the drummer of a band called The Hypnos, which lasted for years."
> — **Kevin O'Connor**, Greg Ferris description
> _Reveals deeper personal relationship between O'Connor and Ferris beyond professional collaboration_

> "I kept [The Flintstones] because all of the actors involved, John Goodman, Rosie O'Donnell, Rick Moranis, had all signed it back, so I still have it from this Larry Day and my grandchildren play it all the time."
> — **Kevin O'Connor**, Flintstones discussion
> _Shows personal connection to games beyond artwork, and engagement with actors during production_

> "Once I realized that you could submit this to a committee who would pick out, you know, many artists would submit Star Wars artwork to Lucas for consideration to purchase. And I was lucky enough they purchased this one. And they paid very well, too."
> — **Kevin O'Connor**, Star Wars painting discussion
> _Documents formal fine art sale process to Lucasfilm and financial validation of pinball art_

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| Kevin O'Connor | person | Legendary pinball artist with 50+ year career at Bally/Williams/Stern, pioneered airbrush techniques, created iconic backglasses for Kiss, Star Trek, Flash Gordon, Star Wars, and many others |
| Greg Ferris | person | Legendary Bally/Williams art director who hired Kevin O'Connor, co-founded Bally art department with Margaret Hudson, worked as drummer in O'Connor's band The Hypnos, later became art director at Stern |
| Margaret Hudson | person | Bally artist and production specialist responsible for cutting silk screens and managing production workflow; described as 'all-around beautiful person' by O'Connor |
| Dave Christensen | person | Bally artist known for extreme detail ink work and meticulous hand-inking of every screen; slower production but higher quality praised by O'Connor |
| Alan Dick White | person | Early Bally artist who worked on slot machines and games like Bad Cats and The Nippet; known for thick-lined cartoony style with hyper-realistic detail |
| Frank Frazetta | person | Major artistic influence on Kevin O'Connor; paperback novel and pulp cover artist whose work O'Connor studied and eventually copied for Bally portfolio |
| Mark Drucker | person | Mad Magazine artist and early influence on Kevin O'Connor's artistic development |
| Jack Davis | person | Mad Magazine artist and early influence on Kevin O'Connor's artistic development |
| Robert McGinnis | person | Paperback novel and movie poster artist; major influence on Kevin O'Connor's artistic style |
| George Gomez | person | Legendary Stern designer who collaborated with Kevin O'Connor on Monster Bash; notes on sketches requesting design changes |
| Sam Jones | person | Actor who played Flash Gordon; recently contacted Kevin O'Connor about creating limited edition signed posters of Flash Gordon backglass; active in convention circuit |
| Dave Link | person | Pinball sculptor at Williams, likely responsible for Flintstones sculpture work per O'Connor's recollection |
| Pat McMahon | person | Artist who came to Bally via Art Institute work program; evolved into full illustrator under O'Connor's mentorship |
| Doug Watson | person | Artist who joined Bally art department; later became content creator and Pinburgh volunteer |
| Tony Ramone | person | Artist who joined Bally art department around 1990, likely coming from Harry Williams prior employer |
| Bally | company | Major pinball manufacturer where Kevin O'Connor spent early career developing backglass art innovations; had art department at Western and Belmont before moving to Bensonville, Illinois |
| Bally Midway | company | Division of Bally expanding into video games around 1990; Kevin O'Connor served as art director, working on Masters of the Universe, Mad Max-inspired game, flight simulator, and Spy Hunter |
| Williams | company | Pinball manufacturer where Kevin O'Connor worked after Bally; continued creating backglass artwork for licensed titles |
| Stern Pinball | company | Current dominant pinball manufacturer; mentioned in context of modern game discussion |
| Lucasfilm | company | Star Wars IP holder that purchased original 30x40 Kevin O'Connor paintings after committee review process |
| Kiss | game | Iconic pinball game with backglass artwork approved by the band in full makeup at Magic Mountain concert; featured portraits on cabinet using stencil technique |
| Star Trek | game | Williams pinball game with backglass artwork by O'Connor; underwent significant revision when Paramount switched uniforms for movie release and requested removal of phaser violence |
| Flash Gordon | game | Williams pinball game based on De Laurentiis movie; features O'Connor backglass art inspired by black-and-white original film; actor Sam Jones recently engaged O'Connor about poster collaboration |

### Topics

- **Primary:** Kevin O'Connor's artistic influences and early career, Bally art department founding and early team dynamics, Airbrush innovation as Bally competitive advantage, Silk screen production process and technical constraints, IP licensing approvals and studio collaboration with major IP holders
- **Secondary:** Pinball artist career paths and studio mentorship, Evolution from manual ink/screen to digital art processes, O'Connor's transition to Bally Midway and video game art direction

### Sentiment

**Positive** (0.82) — O'Connor speaks with genuine affection about his colleagues, pride in his pioneering work, and nostalgia for the creative freedom and collaborative spirit of early Bally. Reflection is appreciative rather than critical. Mild frustration expressed only regarding licensing constraints and IP approval processes.

### Signals

- **[business_signal]** Lucasfilm established formal committee-based fine art purchase process for Star Wars artwork, paying premium prices to acquire original paintings from freelance pinball artists (confidence: high) — O'Connor: 'Once I realized that you could submit this to a committee who would pick out, many artists would submit Star Wars artwork to Lucas for consideration to purchase...They paid very well, too'
- **[community_signal]** Recent contact between Kevin O'Connor and Flash Gordon actor Sam Jones indicates ongoing community interest in pinball art legacy and potential collaboration on limited edition poster project (confidence: high) — O'Connor recounting phone call: 'Joe Kamenko called me...he goes Kevin, Sam Jones is on the phone...we were able to trade...he goes, I have T-shirts, I have all sorts of memorabilia...maybe you want to part with it but we want to do posters'
- **[event_signal]** Pintastic New England event featuring Kevin O'Connor presentation demonstrates ongoing community interest in pinball art history and industry veteran retrospectives (confidence: high) — Event title and framing suggesting O'Connor invited as keynote artist for detailed career retrospective
- **[design_innovation]** Airbrush techniques pioneered by O'Connor at Bally represented significant competitive advantage; no other pinball manufacturer was using the technique at the time (confidence: high) — O'Connor: 'I can't think of any other company that was doing it at the time. Actually, Greg had not done airbrush either or even seen anyone do it.'
- **[design_philosophy]** Kevin O'Connor's approach to playfield artwork design involved understanding game rules deeply and creatively integrating them (arrows, bonus lights) into artistic compositions without extensive designer collaboration or daily standups (confidence: high) — O'Connor: 'I just would ask the designer, what are the rules, and figure out a way to tie them in...As long as you had their rule, 2X on the arrow, that's really all they cared about.'
- **[licensing_signal]** Star Trek licensing required mid-production artwork revision when Paramount switched movie uniform designs and demanded removal of phaser violence scenes, demonstrating evolving IP control standards (confidence: high) — O'Connor: 'Paramount came to us and said, we're putting this movie out. We really want to change the uniforms...they nixed any sort of violence on there like the phaser guy'
- **[manufacturing_signal]** Bally built custom infrastructure (exhaust system in O'Connor's cubicle) to support his airbrush work, demonstrating manufacturer investment in innovative art techniques (confidence: high) — O'Connor: 'Bally eventually built an exhaust system right in my cubicle, actually. It just went out the door.'
- **[personnel_signal]** Kevin O'Connor and Greg Ferris maintained deep personal relationship beyond professional collaboration, with Ferris playing drums in O'Connor's band The Hypnos for extended period (confidence: high) — O'Connor: 'We became such good friends over the years and still are, and he spent many years in my band as the drummer of a band called The Hypnos, which lasted for years.'
- **[personnel_signal]** O'Connor and Ferris actively mentored younger artists like Pat McMahon through Art Institute work programs, establishing pipeline for next generation of pinball artists (confidence: high) — O'Connor: 'Pat McMahon, who came on a work, Art Institute work program to us and evolved into an illustrator'
- **[technology_signal]** Transition from rapidograph ink pen technique to brush-based illustration work accelerated by O'Connor's adoption of airbrush, representing major shift in production speed and visual effects capability (confidence: high) — O'Connor: 'I was pretty quick at inking, and I was starting to develop, I was starting to get away from the rapidograph pen and starting to use more of a brush. Things were going much faster with me.'

---

## Transcript

 Welcome everybody. I think I've mentioned earlier today that I really love the art on Silver Ball Mania and I'm so happy that the Silver Ball Mania guy is the most prominent guy on our poster. Remember, he's not naked because he's chrome-plated. That counts as clothing. We are so honored to have the guy who did Silver Ball Mania. I paid that game the ultimate compliment, Kevin. When that game came out, I bought the back glass from the distributor, NOS, just to have the back glass because this is like the ultimate mirrored back glass and it seems like you had a chance to do something that was just your mind saying, what is so great about pinball? Let's start there. Please welcome Kevin O'Connor, pinball artist. Thank you. Thank you very much. As a young man growing up in the newly developing suburbs west of Chicago, we were surrounded by prairies and nearby woods where we, as boys would back then, carved out makeshift baseball diamonds, climb trees in the forest pretending we're Robin Hood or World War II soldiers like our dads being born in the 50s. And for 25 cents in grade school, I would draw a World War II tank or a battle scene on your school folder for 25 cents. Commercial artist. I would say that would be my first commercial art job, if you will. We can go with the slides now. In 1965, I was 13, so I was coming of age, and the Beatles had hit on Ed Sullivan, Batman was on TV, and I saw my first James Bond movie, which, you know, as a 13-year-old, blew my mind. So let's get some of my most serious influences here. I just love, I would pour through Mad Magazine, the art of Mark Drucker and Jack Davis. We would be able to go down to the corner drugstore and browse as much as we wanted in the newsstand, and there were comic books and, you know, creepy magazine. and I just love the detail of the art of Hal Foster and was greatly influenced by covers of Frank Frazetta at that point. This is, you know, they were paperback novels. This is before the time when they would say, hey, if you're not going to buy something, get out of here. The ladies were nice in the drugstore and we could browse anything we wanted. And this is another influence. Robert McGinnis was a big influence. His paperback covers and movie posters. I would just, you know, you couldn't get me away from the movies. After I saw the movie, I would just stand and, you know, my parents would try to drag me away from the movie poster, which was outside. This is Frank McCarthy's work, and, you know, I just love the explosiveness of it. and I was greatly influenced by that also. So it's going to be hard to get through these notes. I think I'm better off just... Yeah, we had Paul Faris here, so we know that he came to ballet. If anyone wants to really get into how the ballet art department first began, And you should probably take a look at Paul Faris'. Let's hear it for Paul Faris. He was great here. But I started out in a printing house where I was, you know, packing boxes on the dock. And, you know, someone from the office came down and said, you know, you're not very good at this. Is there anything else you know how to do? And I said, well, you know, I can draw. take some art classes. So I went upstairs and started drawing industrial parts for catalogs. That's what they printed was industrial catalogs. So eventually I wanted to move on and just looked at ads in the paper and I found an ad for point of purchase design, which I had no idea was. But this is basically the kind of display that, you know, they would be in bars. There were, you know, grocery store displays, all sorts of things that we did. But mostly they were lit up in injection molded plastic. And it was here that I started to hone magic marker skills. and that's what all the designers used to present their ideas. Eventually I worked in two point-of-purchase studios, so I had quite a good portfolio of design. And at this point I was determined to move forward with my illustration interests, so I answered an ad in the paper that said, that artists wanted for the world's largest manufacturing of coin-operated machinery. I asked my dad what that was. He says, I have no idea. It's probably a vending machine company. So I went, and this is the building that I entered, and it had, as you can see on the side here, it had this great big sculpture of an abstract person surrounded by balls, and it was very intriguing. and the person that met me in the lobby was Paul Faris. And he was impressed with the, I probably had about an inch thick of designs that had nothing to do with, you know, they're all magic marker designs of, you know, products and whatever, but I think that most of the thing that we most hit it off with was that I had copied, this was quite a large painting that I did, I believe it was a cover of a creepy magazine done by Frank Fazzetta, and that sealed the deal. He hired me almost on the spot right there because of this painting that I had dragged in, you know, with the head of frame on it and everything. So let's see what else we got here. So when I entered the department, It was Paul, Margaret Hudson, and I think Alan Dick White, who had worked at Ad Posters before, were doing slot machines. And this was up in an engineering department with 200 engineers. Yeah, so Dick White is known for like 4 million BC. So kind of a thick-lined, a few colors, but hyper-realistic detail on that one. and his more cartoony stuff would be like the Nippet was another Dick White. Yes. I think Paul at the time, he was working on 8-Ball, and he had done the Evel Knievel, I think, at that point also. But the person I was most influenced by was Dave Christensen. He was a quiet guy who worked in the corner, and he had extreme detail in his ink work that he would noodle over for hours and hours. He did not work very fast, but when I saw some of his work, I was just blown away by it and I was like, that's how I want my work to look. This is one of my favorites, Voltaire Escapes Cosmic Doom. and he's saying it was such a beautiful place once, and she says, forget it, baby, we're on our way. You know, it's a typical Dave Christensen to put a little, you know, just a little touch of his personality in these things. That's Chicago's skyline is what's burning, I've been told. Yes, nuclear holocaust. This is my first game that I did, and it's done with, you know, the style that they were using at the time, which was the rapidograph pen, which is an ink pen that has a needle in it. And I had already had experience with my industrial drawings, so I was okay there, but the color part of it, I believe I got helped out there from Margaret Hudson. She was doing most of the production. In those days, we'd cut each Marc Silk screen separately. So we can say, for example, that the red, it's very uniform red because that is a screen for just, if the red is going on, the red is going on 100% saturation. Right. These were screened right on glass, so it would be first you have your black line, and everything had to line up after that, the yellow, red, blue, and so on. So you'd have probably about 12, 13 screens on one board or colors. And that includes white because there is no white background, so the white's like the last, right? The white is the last screen that goes on, and mirror was always first, but it was done somewhere else. this is actually the magic marker sketch for the first my first planned four color which is a process like a litho process that paul was trying to introduce for us to do on glass so um as you can see i you know my marker magic marker skills were coming into play there because I could display the full range of color that I was going to use on this. And sometimes I like looking at this better than I like looking at the other one, I mean the actual production piece, because the production piece is a black line, which I don't have anymore, and then behind it is airbrush painting, so all this sky and everything was blended softly. So all I have is that part. I don't have the black part, but I have the background painting to it. There's the finished product with the black line and the softer. So this is like a home pinball machine. Yeah, that was like a home pinball machine. Supersonic was another chance for me to use airbrush on that. And let's see what we've got here. Before we get to Silver Ball Mania, were you and Paul talking about you want to show how different your art was than the other companies? Was the airbrush a positive thing, the blending, so you were deliberately showing off all the stuff you could do? I can't think of any other company that was doing it at the time. Actually, Paul had not done airbrush either or even seen anyone do it. I learned it at the second studio, the point-of-purchase studio that I had worked at, where I worked in a small closet that had a big exhaust over the top of it, and lined up were, I don't know, I'm getting off track here, But lined up were all lacquer paints, and it would be like five guys standing in a row airbrushing lacquer paint. And we'd have masks on, but it didn't really work, and it did affect my lungs after a while. But that's where I learned my airbrush was at the studio. So I brought that in, and no one else had been doing that at Bally. And Paul was just painting with a traditional brush and paint. Or that's how he wanted to when he first painted Lost World. So this was another combination of a black line, ink drawing, which I believe we printed it like with a light blue ink onto a board so that my airbrush would match perfectly when we put the black over it. And the rest was done with airbrush in the back. and I also got a chance to do layouts for these brochures too, so I was working with the advertising people too. This is actually a magic marker sketch also, and at the time I was doing them full size, so they were pretty big magic marker sketches. Kiss was the size of Kiss, which is bigger than the back glass. We would do them slightly bigger, maybe 20% bigger, so that when we reduced it a bit, it would just tighten up a little bit. So I'm going to show you a lot of magic marker sketches because you've already seen the rest of them. This is another airbrush sort of tour de force that I had. They actually eventually, Bally built an exhaust system right in my cubicle, actually. It just went out the door. And that orb thing in the center, that was separate pieces. That was, yeah, photography. and the I belongs to Margaret Hudson, who was right there with us doing production. Around the time when, this is around the time when I believe the first Black Knight was the two-level concept. So, you know, we got busy. The marketing wanted, we've got to come out with two level. So I got involved with, I actually did probably pre-3D or solid works. I would sketch what it would look like, you know, in perspective. And so this is probably like one of my first sketches that Gary Gaten started cutting as a white wood for a game, I think we were going to call it Kronos, but we had a lot of, and actually envisioned it as three levels. So this is how it evolved. I'll go through these. But I want you to notice some of the ramps in the middle, some of the two metal ramps in the middle, and see if we can find some similarity in how this evolved. This also was a big round thing. I think it was going to be a, maybe not a spinning disc, but it was a disc that if you lit up from behind, it had dispersed color. So they were going to play tricks with the lights on that. So eventually Gary Gaten went on to a different game, and I think I switched the order on these. But these are some ideas for two-level games, double agent, double dynamite, all like thumbnail sketches, double deck, pirate game. Had to have double in there. Yeah. Samurai, he had two swords. But eventually, when Gary was still on the project, He liked the name Kronos because he was going to try to tie in a timed theme to it. And here's another version that was a little bit more finished that I had, which I did on black paper with colored pencils. Also, Tron was coming into it during that time. So I was trying to simulate this vector look, but just with traditional art. So eventually, this is what the two-level game evolved in. And you can still see the two ramps that I had envisioned. But Claude Fernandez at this point had taken over the game. And Tom Neiman from marketing came to us with, said they had this De Laurentiis movie that they were going to tie into. It was Flash Gordon, which I was a big fan of the black and white one with the spaceship that had the sparklers coming out and sort of falling down on the ground and going, you know, pow, pow, pow, you know. I've got a question here. You've talked about some learning from the point of purchase studios and so forth. But when you get to this point, somebody has to tell you the unfortunate limitations of doing the play field. So that arrow is going to be there and the bonus lights. Maybe you can negotiate a little bit of the placement, but you've got a lot of stuff to work around here. So how did you learn that? Did you have coaching, a mentor? I just would ask the designer, what are the rules, and figure out a way to tie them in. You know, like this is Emperor Ming's castle here. In those days, the designers, they weren't as art savvy as the designers are today, and they would pretty much give you a free hand and say, yeah, that'll work. As long as you had their rule, 2X on the arrow, that's really all they cared about. Once in a while, we'd be able to discuss whether or not, you know, this array of lights down at the bottom, you know, could it be rearranged to fit art better. But basically, it's what they gave you. In those days, the whitewood was finished, and then it would come to us. It didn't evolve really through the art department. It just came to us practically finished. So you weren't in the daily stand-ups as the game design was evolving and all that. This is the way the painting looked without the extra silkscreen, solid what we call spot colors, and the mirror, which was the first screen that was put on there. It would come to the printers with the mirror already done from another source. But this is the way the painting looks that I have. And Sam Jones, who was kind of scheduled to be here and wasn't able to for different reasons. Yeah, I finally, you know, one day Joe Kamenko called me. this is recently and in his the way his inimitable way he's like Kevin Sam Jones is on the phone Sam Jones on the phone hello Sam Kevin O'Connor we got around to talking and I mentioned that I still had the painting he goes oh my god you still have the painting oh we got to trade we got to trade something I'm like, I don't know. He goes, I got T-shirts. I got all sorts of memorabilia. And I'm like, even though I had collected toys and all that sort of thing, I'm trying to get rid of stuff now. I'm not trying to collect anymore. So I was like, he goes, and I sensed Joe in the background. So he said well maybe you don want to part with it but we want to do posters So that sort of in the works where he going to sign half the posters send them to me i sign half so who knows in the future we might have flash gordon posters with sam jones yeah i think he's going to be down at texas again uh in march he does a lot of conventions it's kind of his life really oh he's in framingham for uh is it the comic con that competes with the comic Comic-Con we're aligned with is happening right now. Yeah. So he's here in the neighborhood. He's got a, it's a whole movie, actually. What's it called? Something, Life as Flash or something like that. And it goes in depth into what happened to his career after Flash Gordon, where he had disagreements with the De Laurentiis family, and it sort of ruined his career. But he did wind up with a lot of credits, TV credits and some movie credits also. Viking, that was, I believe the designer was Jim Patla, and he came to me with a whitewood and said, do whatever you want. And at the time, you know, I had been crazy about the movie The Vikings, and I was also reading the book The Vikings, and it had a scene from this King Harold's Hall, this fight between the hero and the... It is your palette. Okay. So we've got our references right here. So that was one where I had a free hand to do whatever I want, and I thought this PowerPoint, I updated it with a magic marker sketch, but this is the painting anyway. so this is the full painting without any displays in it which, yeah, everybody's seen this so I'll move on we'll continue, everyone's seen Kiss this is the Paul had a better picture of this this is Kiss approving or disapproving the magic marker sketch but you can see the size of it here with Tom Neiman and Paul Faris they took this to oh yeah that looks like Paul Faris over there and Tom Neiman's right up in the corner and they took this to one of their concerts which was at Magic Mountain amusement park in California and they were in full makeup ready to go on stage when they did their approval of this with some changes whereas they wanted to be portrayed more as superheroes with muscles. It's the same, Kevin. Okay, good. Thanks. Skateball was, Greg Freres actually did the back glass on this, but at that time, if we got in a bind, a time crunch, I would take on the play field. I was pretty quick at inking, and I was starting to develop, I was starting to get away from the rapidograph pen and starting to use more of a brush. Things were going much faster with me. Anything mechanical, I would use the pen, like to circle inserts, which was all done by hand back then. But like figures and any of that sort of thing, I started using a brush more like a comic book artist would. Now, I have a question. This is one where you divided up the art. So nowadays we think of some other components. So the cabinet, was that you, Greg, or yet another person? Do you remember that? I think I did that cabinet. Plastics? Plastics are mine also. I think I did that cabinet also. But, you know, you're very limited as to what you could do on the cabinet. It was all stencil work and sprayed stencils. So they had huge metal stencils with handles on them. One guy would put it up there, and the other guy would come across and spray it on there. So it was kind of primitive and also very limiting in what we could do. You couldn't cut into the metal and have it too thin in one spot because the paint wouldn't go in the right place. How about the tolerances? because they are in registration to an extent, but you probably couldn't get very fine. No, not really. KISS was probably the most detailed that I, besides I have their portraits on the side of that, and that's still the stencil technique. This is the original magic marker sketch for Star Trek that had the TV show, what we called the pajama uniform. And later on, after I finished this painting, this is the way I finished it, and Paramount came to us and said, we're putting this movie out. We really want to change the uniforms. And this too, the Enterprise? The Enterprise, I'm not sure that I changed it. It wasn't very different in the first movie. also they nixed any sort of violence on there like the phaser guy getting so I had the painting and I took it's basically like a big can of white whiteout from back then but it dries to like a canvas texture and it was called gesso and I had to gesso over everyone's uniform and repaint them with the new uniforms on that became the back glass. This is the painting before I gessoed it. Here's some of the original crew. And we had some fun in the studio. Paul Faris is the guy waving on the side. I'm in the back. I believe I'm looking over my cubicle, and could my tie get any wider? I'm not sure. And there's Greg, and obviously beards were the thing back then, as they are now again. But Greg, I recommended Greg from one of my point-of-purchase studios that we worked at together. It was a really nice modern studio. and it was a great place to work, but we both wanted to be illustrators. But I believe he came in to work the cameras at first, and Paul promised him we'll work you into the illustration as time went by. But we became such good friends over the years and still are, and he spent many years in my band as the drummer of a band called The Hypnos, which lasted for years. That's Mary Beth Bush in red, and she was doing a lot of advertising or helping out with the advertising and creating brochures. Margaret Hudson, an all-around beautiful person, was doing all our production work, cutting screens, cutting the screens for the playfields, mostly in the plastics. Dave Christensen while I'm telling you that we cut them we cut them out of this material called amber lith and you would cut out what you want where you wanted the ink to be and peel away where you didn't want it to be so it was a very tedious job Margaret was very good at that and she was a very good worker the point I was going to add in here Dave Christensen never allowed anyone to do that. He would ink every single screen. So that's why his games took a little bit longer to get out. They could never give him one that they needed quickly. I can't remember who the guy was. It was a marketing guy with the black hair and black beard. I don't really remember his name. We were a small family. We had a lot of fun and a lot of good times. And this is still at Western and Belmont. And before we moved to Bensonville, Illinois, where we added first, I believe we added Tony Ramunni. And I'm not sure where he came from. I think he came from Williams. Not sure. But then Pat McMahon, who came on a work, Art Institute work program to us and evolved into an illustrator. And also Doug Watson. I wouldn't, I had left the. Yeah, it looks like Tony Ramunni did come from Williams. Okay. at this point in 1990 I got a chance to apply to be the art director of Ballet Midway and at the time Midway was emerging into the video game industry and they were doing well with Pac-Man and Mrs. Pac-Man and I thought this would be a good avenue to expand into. So I took the job as art director. And there I was mostly doing a lot of concepts with markers. This one on the lower left is what would have been a scrolling game, you would call it. And that was for Masters of the Universe. That was one of my ideas. So a Zaxxon type scrolling. Yes, exactly, Zaxxon, there's the word. On the right, that would have been a scrolling game, too, that was inspired by Mad Max movies that were out at the time. On the top was our attempt to start doing a flight simulator, so they needed a very symmetrical type of vehicle, so I did sketches of it, which got approved, And then I built models, which they were going to digitize and try to create a flight simulator, which at the time there weren't, I don't know, very many. Maybe Atari was doing a vector one, but they were trying to do a rasterized one. Spy Hunter was another game I worked on. and I actually started getting my feet wet with the computerized, with the digital world on Spy Hunter. I wound up leaving under certain circumstances. I wasn't agreeing with an employee that was working there, and so I wound up leaving. and I decided that I was going to start out on my own in freelance. So I immediately got hired back as a freelancer by Greg, who emerged as the art director. He was Paul's second, I don't know what you would call him, his assistant. And this was a John Trudeau game that he had very specific ideas of what he wanted. He wanted old-fashioned 50s drive-in. Yeah, now how about the cars? I noticed that you were period correct since the game was officially set in 1959, and none of those cars are any later than 1959. died. Was that you or was that Trudeau? No, I would either go buy models or just find reference. Getting them from the right angle was quite a chore, but I think I did a lot of it with just buying little cars and models and photographing them in perspective. Otherwise, it would have been impossible to do. This is before they decided that there was going to be a display on the bottom. This is what the back glass would have looked like. This is the magic marker sketch. And this empty white spot would have been where the display was, the LED display where he would simulate the movie scenes and the rest of the scoring and all that. but that's the original magic marker sketch for it. There, of course, is the painting, which I was going for a campy movie poster look on. How about the license or approvals? Any trouble with them? Their licensing approval was very loose at that point with Universal compared to what it was when we got up to Monster Bash years later. So the side of this cabinet was all inked with a brush, but still we had constraints on the number of colors. This is probably four colors, white, green. The yellowish highlight looks like, or is that just white? probably just white. I think we were limited to four colors on this. Four solid Marc Silk screen colors. This, I wish I had... Yeah, I think this is the magic marker sketch so anyone familiar with the artwork can see that I was following, it was approved almost as is and I followed it very closely with my painting. But this is all magic marker. I have most of these magic marker sketches still. So I keep them in the drawer and they're still nice and bright, you know, fun to look at. Flintstones. Flintstones is a game that I kept because all of the actors involved, John Goodman, Rosie O'Donnell, Rick Moranis, had all signed back last, so I still have it to this day. and my grandchildren play it all the time. And here again, the idea of the drive-in down on the... Oh, yeah, they recycle move your car in Flintstones. This is us having a little bit of fun on a movie set, which it was always great. We went on the movie set of, I think it was Star Trek 1, It was one or two that had a scene where it was supposed to be out in a snowy planet landscape. And I had on that day, I had a black jacket, and I was all dressed in black. But they were blowing around this styrofoam, and it was sticking to me. We were very close to where they were filming, and it was sticking to me. But this is the town of Bedrock, which they built in a quarry, and we were driven out there one day, and they just let us run through the buildings and play around in there. So that was a fun day. The play field, I also have this game because a lot of my designs were approved for the sculpture of this. along the sides you see the town of Bedrock and the dinosaur in the back I'd done concept renderings for all of those and they wound up in the game so I hung on to it for all these years So who did the sculpting? Did you sculpt or did you have Probably at that time it was probably Dave Link The biggest name in pinball sculpture I've heard Dave Link did some He's an interesting guy I hope you get to meet him someday. This is the magic marker sketch from Monster Batch, which George, you know, I borrowed some of these from George. It had notes on there. The girls in the cages, nixed by Universal. So they didn't belong in there for some reason. I'm not sure. I think a few things have changed in the background. I have the mausoleum behind Dracula, and I think I still have the two beds back there. Maybe I had one bed back there, but the pyramid was gone, I'm pretty sure. Anyway, that's the sketch for that. Here's some more things I borrowed from George. just an idea quick facts from KO to George Gomez and these are the original I put on some sort of corny tagline Universal Monsters live at Budokan which was like at the time it was Cheap Trick was live at Budokan or something or the Hollywood Bowl or something like that So it was just a way to... Here's an idea for the Dracula character I put on there, Dracabilly. And George had written on here the stump guitar, which was nixed by, well, just about everyone. But I wound up, I believe this wound up as the backbox, and I had two arms and hands on there. One was playing the guitar and the other one was fingering the fretboard, I'm pretty sure. You're a guitarist yourself. That's correct. Do you decorate your own guitar for live performance? No, I don't decorate guitars. I have a lot of guitars, and I played all the way up until this summer. Because of COVID, it was only about halfway through summer, festivals started coming back. and I'll only play either a festival or like a show that's maybe an hour and a half to two hours long and the band I'm in knows that I won't play in a bar anymore, stand on my feet for four hours, I just can't do it, my fingers won't do it anymore either. this was probably the most complicated has the most technique on a painting that I am most proud of and here again we're dealing with Lucas they were very picky about how everything looked and there was a lot of approval needed on all of this. But I pretty much nailed it in the beginning. I did all the color sketches and everything that they needed. And this is a 30 by 40 painting, which they purchased from me. So once I realized that you could submit this to a committee who would pick out, you know, many artists would submit Star Wars artwork to Lucas for consideration to purchase. And I was lucky enough they purchased this one. And they paid very well, too. So, and with that in mind, I would say, well, I have these other two paintings, too. And both of them were, let me see, here we go. You know, these are also 30 by 40 large paintings, but they were split up into, you know, the backbox and the side of the cabinet. But they're also a lot of intricate detail, and they took a long time. and they're complicated pieces to do. So they said, well, we like the one with the good side, they called it and we not really that interested in the evil side And I said well if you put them together if you take a look at them they like a puzzle piece that fits together And they said, oh, we see it now. Okay, we'll buy both of them. So I wound up selling both of them. So you have sales skills as well. This is an example of how a painting would start out. I would draw it on there with a colored pencil, all the darks, and then start blowing in local color with my airbrush, giving an idea where stars would be. There was probably more stars, but the technique for my star fields, which, you know, how the heck am I going to get all these stars on there? Because if you look at a Star Wars movie, it's like deep space with millions of stars on there. And I came up with a technique of I would dip a toothbrush just in the paint and then start just flicking it off to the side until I had just the right amount of stars, and then I'd flick it onto my painting, and that's how I got all the stars on there. Some people speckle their cabinets there. There's me with a painting a little bit more in progress, and this is in my studio, which is where I was working out of as a freelancer. I had my airbrush station right there, and you can see right above my drawing board, I had built my own little exhaust system right in my studio. It helped a little bit, but you could see how dark the paint is that collected on there. Well, of course, I was breathing much of that in myself, too. So that shows how it got split up. The art got split up on the cabinet. This is the, what would you call it, the video portion of, it was displayed on a mirror or from a mirror. The monitor was mirrored onto the special glass over the play field, so you had to shoot everything reverse, I guess. too. So John Papadiuk, the designer of Star Wars Episode I, decided he was going to be Qui-Gon Jinn and he asked me if there was a way that I could be Darth Maul. I said, sure. I went and bought a blank mask. At the time, there were no Darth Maul masks. So I actually built this mask and made all the horns out of foam and painted the whole thing up. And we both actually took lessons from a, I believe it was a taekwondo where they use different weapons and they showed us, you know, stick fighting, taekwondo stick fighting. So we took some lessons. I got the rest of the outfit together and they filmed us in front of this green screen and put in all the backgrounds later on so here's us doing our thing there's me wearing my mask and there's John Papadiuk in his outfit so I don't know it was when I got done with that it was probably it felt like it was 90 with the with all that gear on and we were soaked from head to toe, both of us. In 1985, I got a call from a person I had no idea who he was, Joe Kamenko, could you please come in and take a look at a game that we had? And little did I know that it was the adventure that I was about to go on to this day with Joe Kamenko. But he was with Game Plan at the time and and I walked into their facility, which is on Peterson Avenue in Chicago, and it was just Gary and Joe there. And that's when I met Gary Stern, who we're good friends to this day. Gary's a great guy. I love him to death. This was the first game that they had me work on. It was a Loch Ness Monster, and this is as far as I got with it. It was with the play field and the plastics. and the rest I don't know all the history of how or why it never became anything, but I'm not sure if there was a back glass, if there was another artist who came in to do the back glass. It was a wide body, so it had a high bill of materials cost. It was a pretty expensive proposition there. Okay. So the first game that Data East actually produced was Laser War. And I did layouts for, this is going to be photography. He was good friends with a photographer. I believe it was Don Marshall who took these photos. And also Joe's sister was a costume, she was a fashion designer. So it was like, I'm going to have my sister come in and design all these costumes. And so I drew up the set and how it could possibly work in a concept sketch. and this was the photographic result. The play field and plastics, I did all those. The cabinet was a stencil on this and I did this back artwork that was done strictly for the flyer. The next one, again, another photographic one where Joe was very good friends with this photographer. So they said, well, we're going to simulate Washington, D.C. by going up to Madison, Wisconsin. Their Capitol building looks very much in a miniature way like the Capitol in Washington, D.C. So it was sort of not being able to get a James Bond license at the time or circumventing a James Bond license by creating their own scene here. Torpedo Alley, I did a layout for this also. I did the logo, and I did this background naval scene here. But just a side anecdote that maybe people do or don't know is The captain with the red jacket on had tights on very similar to the girls. And when we finally got all the photos, everybody agreed the tights have got to go. So I retouched the photo to put regular pants on him. This is the magic marker sketch for King Kong. It was quite complicated because of the fact that Joe wanted the Chicago skyline. and he wanted the Sears Tower and the John Hancock building to replace the Empire State Building. So I had to use reference for the Chicago River. I added things to the painting that you won't see here, like reflections of the sunset in the building and so on. But this is the magic marker sketch. And I thought you guys would like to see sketches more than the paintings that you've already seen. But this is a painting in progress, and I would mask off the sides so I could test my colors out, but that's a painting in progress. Robocop, eh, I didn't, it was, at least I finally got another chance to do some art on that, but there was very little reference that they gave us, and I don't even know if I knew what the whole movie was going to be like. I don't think they showed us the, we didn't get any previews of it. We just got a few. And the same thing with Flash Gordon. All they gave us was a booklet that they were going to, sometimes after you came out of a movie, you could buy a booklet of the movie. And that's all I had on that, too, so there was very little reference. I don't know why. This one, that's just a. Retro, here comes the retro again. There's the brochure. I always call on you for the retro material, which is great. Yeah, this was before Joe was able to procure a license. If he couldn't get it right away or when he wanted it, he would go off and do something similar to it. So this was before he was actually able to acquire the Back to the Future. and we worked out a way to do a time-related, time-travel-related theme. That's what we came up with. This was my ex-wife in the front. This was Margaret in the back. In the back was a guy. He was a friend of Joe's, but Joe said put him in there and put him in there with his high school jacket on. And this was sort of a John Travolta character. Saturday night, he represented the 70s, I believe. In a 59 Cadillac back end? Yeah. With a futuristic... There's a magic marker sketch for Star Trek, the second one I did for Data East. This one was the one they selected in favor of the two. And I think it was a four-color. I'm pretty sure it was a four-color. Here's a sketch for the backless that not too many people get to see. that's not how it wound up looking yeah this is a magic marker sketch also so you can see I was getting pretty intricate with my magic markers at the time and just adding in little touches of brush work so you started on this game before Joe told you that we're going to have this magic screen thing in the middle then? I think if we go back to here that's when I didn't know it was going to be in there. I think I knew it was going to be in here. Yeah. So I have this painting but the middle is blank because the crew had to be painted separately so they were painted on a separate board and this part of the painting is empty sadly. This is magic marker sketch for the Playboy 35th anniversary which we went to the Playboy mansion and work was work yeah work was work this is at the point where Hugh Hefner said that he wanted his I think it was Kimberly Conrad became his wife but she was just his girlfriend at this point and he wanted her to be featured and he had another favorite playmate, Ava Fabian. She's pictured out in front here. And she was in a couple movies, like a ski school or something like that. She wound up in a couple B-type movies. And you can see I was starting to put in the granny character in the back and add, you know, I was going to add characters. At this point, we knew this was going to be a photograph, but we knew that I was also going to add in characters from the magazine. Here's a sketch that they went in favor of the pool scene, but this is a photo shoot concept that wasn't rejected. It was just second place. Yeah, second place. and that's how it ended up I think I remember you telling stories this is like the most complicated composite you had done up to that point Hugh Hefner and Kimberly Conrad were not in this photo they were stripped in, we used to call it back then but everything else was in place I'm between Annie Fanny sitting at a table and the girl in the blue bathing suit was from, I believe, a show called Full House, something like this. And then Ava Fabian wound up being in the back next to that bunny back there. So any of these, you know, I painted any of these other little add-ins, the granny character and the Annie Fanny. so you know there was it was a little bit complicated at the time here's I did a straight airbrush painting for this back by back back glass another playboy on photographic side to the cabinet but all the rest of it was done you know traditional ink and color on the play field field Monday night football I don't know if I have this I'm not not particularly proud of this but it was something Joe said I gotta need this done in three days so okay there you go the Simpsons that was a fun project to work on and at this point they really let me do it put it together however I wanted to with but my sketches would come back with corrections on the side you know make a you know like the number of spikes and Bart's head has to be what the style guy says make his fingers a little bit fatter came back with a lot of corrections on it but this is one that an early one that made it through with before you know licensing became so intricate and complicated well but there is one thing that has Matt Groening's signature that was part of the license right that yes yeah I was not able to sign that one but I'm here to tell you people that I did do this artwork and of course the playfield they had no idea what to do with the playfield so you know they were fine with me doing whatever I wanted on that with their corrections or additions you have I don't know they would have have a doughnut by Homer or whatever whatever suggestion they would make that just shows a little bit more detail well this is the other yeah I think on this one they they did a like an ass ass we call tracing paper overlay over the whole thing and did made little Corrections which, you know, that's fine. I wound up doing all the inking and everything for Sopranos. Back to photography because of the license, but this is a Stern game. Batman had, they were getting pretty complicated or intricate with their style guides. So there are things in this back glass that our style guide, that I've composited, the Batman, the Joker, the Bat Bike, and the Tumbler, I think they call that a Tumbler car. But all the portraits are what we call paint overs. So they're photographs that are very in quality, and they need tightening. and so I basically have to paint over the photograph to sharpen it or get more color into it. And the shadows. Yes, all these characters in the back, plus the Maggie Gyllenhaal character, those are all paint overs done by me. And the relative sizes of the heads are part of the trivials. Yes, that's my composition. He has to be bigger than anybody else and all that. And so I have to composite all that together. This, when I did Pirates of the Caribbean, we got a time crunch to get it into production. And I had it all mapped out, you know, photographically composited of how I wanted to do it. And then I transferred that on to a board and started painting it. And we lost, they lost track of time on that and said, we're going to have to just use your photographic composite. it. So this got about 50% of the way through it was finished. And I went back a few years later and finished it off. So this is the actual painting that I own now. And it very much looks like what wound up being the back glass of the pinball machine. Terminator 2, that was my first game with Steve Ritchie. I was a little nervous about it, but we actually got along great. Steve's a great guy. He's got sort of a rough exterior, but underneath he's... Okay. We talked before about how in the ballet days, things were being just plopped over the fence to the art department. Here's what it's going to be. Put art on top of it. Where Where are you now in working with Steve and the team? Are you getting stuff handed to you? Are you doing more back and forth or in there every day? Where are you in terms of how involved you are? Well, I worked with Steve on some Star Trek stuff and that was strictly through Lucas. Everything we did was through Lucas. There's a lot of style guide involved in doing that. Terminator 3. I don't know if you're asking me about then or now. Okay, well, so have you at this point in time turned a corner where as far as the game design, you're hearing more about what's going on with the game as it progresses on the playfield layout and such, or are you still just... I probably got Terminator 3 at a point where insert-wise and the blueprints at the time that they would give you were 85% there on Terminator. At this point, I was still a little bit intimidated by Steve. Steve. But as we got to know each other, you know, he softened up over the years. Avatar was all Style Guide composites. 3D? Yeah. This was a, I think they call it lenticular lens. So it had some depth to it. So there was a lot of technical stuff involved in producing this back glass. There were parts missing from, at this point I was getting my feet pretty well solidly footed in the digital world. That was because I was working, I started working on a real job too, and that was IGT. Joe took me in the back of Stern one day and said, Kevin, I'm leaving here. I'm going to Las Vegas to head up a slot machine. You're coming with me. I was like, I don't know if I want to move to Las Vegas, Joe. So I decided that I really wasn't going to take the job because I didn't want to move my family and so on. He said, all right, you're going to work. You're going to telecommute, which at that point I was like, I'm going to do what? Because it was a fairly new way. Yeah, you couldn't order up Internet service at megabit speeds. But you know my experiences with IGT I was starting to get my feet wet with the digital world So I believe that parts that were missing of these floating mountains and things they weren complete So I start to put them together and paint over them to make them complete Because when you look behind this big dragon... Yeah, well, a good example, Lou, the letter R on top of that wing. As you walk past the game, you'll see the R and the wing move relative to each other. Yeah, it was mostly like some of these, like the flying dragon, that mountain was behind him, but once you removed the dragon, there was a blank spot all the way through there, but it needed to be completed because you could see behind it. Spider-Man, mostly style guide. Yeah, mirroring. I think I took, there was another version of this, so I took this stuff out because it's just, I mean, I put it all together. You know, these are, you know, they give you a cityscape, and then they'll give you all the different characters, and I added explosions and light rays, things like that to it. Here again, a lot of style guide, but really tricky to put together, you know, the cityscape and it wasn't it wasn't exactly how I wanted the perspective to be so you know there's a lot a lot to do there and there's touches of my art in there also but you know it's all got to got to work together X-Men isn't that same thing here Lucy they came to me and they said that they I wanted to do more of a retro style with the ink and flat color. And I didn't really know that much about ACDC, so I kind of delved into their world and I came up with sketches, and they liked them, so that's where that's at. So you were more a rockabilly guy by your musical preference then? Yes. Or retro? Well, the band I'm in, or mostly have always been in, is like 50s and 60s. So we'll do mostly like, you know, of the 50s, it's Jerry Lee Lewis and Eddie Cochran, you know, stuff like that, Elvis Presley. And then we'll kind of spill over into the 60s or like early 60s Beatles and Rolling Stones. so it's been fun it's a little harder to do than it used to be for me we don't have roadies or anything like that so I'm usually hoisting my own stuff up on these stages it gets tiring Kiss, I think when they told them that the original artist was going to be on this project they asked, he's still alive? So they were surprised, but they let me go in. At this point, the back glass had shrunk height-wise, so that presented a challenge. And the only way I could get the drummer and Ace Fraley in there was to have him down in a crouched position, because that's all I had left. I didn't want Gene or Paul Stanley to be crouched down. I didn't think they would like that. And Ace Frehley, at this point, I don't believe he was involved with the band or any of the approvals. So I was able to do whatever I want. And then, you know, I did sort of a retro play field, ink, flat color looking. And the cabinet is the reprise of your ballet cabinet. Yes, but all four color drawn, painted. There's one of the sketches. I presented everything in black and white at first. And there's a sketch of the cabinet, which stayed pretty much the same. This is a sketch of a girl that was going to go on a game. I can't really say which one. and here's Batman 66 which I did the play field for and there's all sorts of different things going on here there's style guide there's digital there's a digital city that we created and the portraits I had them all in place where they were going to be but I believe Christopher Franchi took them and enhanced them. And he's a fantastic artist. He loves to do Batman stuff. He does a lot of Batman stuff. He's sort of an official Batman guy. So they got him into the finish. And he brags about how fast he works, too. So another point. Yeah, and you've got to remember at this point, Stern knows that I'm working at IGT and I have a limited amount of time to, and I'm working full time in the day, so I'm just doing this on the side. But a lot of these really super talented artists that they find to come in and do these jobs, they don't want to do the play field. There's an art itself to doing the play field and being able to read all the engineering drawings, which evolves over my whole career, basically. And what size the inserts are going to be, what the tolerances of the ink that's going to be around the trap. Greg talks about that, too. He can bring in these great artists who do, give them a rectangle the size of a back glass and say, fill this with something very dynamic that will catch the bar patron, and they're fine. But when it gets into, yeah, look at all these little circles, you have to work around. I'm going to keep moving here. Game of Thrones, they came to another time crunch. At this time I had moved to an online gaming company that Joe had created called Zynga. We eventually got bought out by, they were affiliated with Zynga, it was the parent company in San Francisco. So Greg knew that I couldn't take on a whole game, but they got in a time crunch and asked me to do paint overs and do the layouts and color correcting for a couple of the back glasses for Game of Thrones. This is based on sketches from a Star Wars artist called Bob Stavlik that they had hired to do all the Star Wars stuff. He's sort of a staple in the Star Wars stable, if you will. but let me tell you something until you draw all the all the details on an Imperial Walker or any of these vehicles you just don't know what you're in for so there's quite a bit of detail each one I had to do on a separate file because there were so many layers to just an Imperial Walker I wouldn't be able to put this whole scene together in one file till the very end. So I would draw the walkers, I mean, draw them, paint them, all in one file, then flatten it so that when I put it in this landscape, which I also painted, there weren't as many layers. It would be just one layer for a vehicle, one layer for explosions, one layer for walkers, and so on. But I'm pretty proud of the way it's turned out, mostly because of the fact that it came back from Lucas with virtually no changes on it. So there's another one it did, also based on Bob Stavlik's original concepts. This is one of the most complicated drawings I've ever done in my life. I mean, if you can, I don't know, we can't really zoom in on it, but the closer you get, the more you see, and the less you'll be able to identify what is this shape. You don't know what the shapes are. If it's some sort of a pipe that comes around like this, if it's a panel, you don't know what they are. They are just shapes. But I had to sharpen them all to make this thing digitally work. And so this is just a mountain of layers to get this done. And, you know, try it on a Sunday afternoon if you have got nothing else to do. After you did that crossword. Yeah. This is, let me see. Let's see some non-pinball stuff. Yeah, this set of, this doesn't, I had another set that showed the evolution of the Black Knight, but it was one of my original sketches that had a mace in it, and this is before Steve actually put the mace, had that mace idea, and it was just going to be a bash toy that had sort of a mace attached to a chain, and Steve got the idea to get it. Make it spin. So I did a lot of complicated art for backgrounds, a lot of concept, marker concepts for Zynga and IGT. This is all simultaneously while I'm trying to stay in pinball too, which I don't do anymore. When I turned 65, I retired from slot machines forever and went back to pinball. But this is an idea of I go back to a future game we did where I would have done all the backgrounds and I did all the symbols also. So there's a whole new learning curve to the size of symbols and their importance that you needed to learn. These are more concepts for... Actually, these are finished backgrounds that are also very complicated with lots of layers. This is Biff's penthouse for Back to the Future. And this was pretty challenging. I think it's Hill Valley, as they call it. The town square. Yeah, the town square in the future. And there weren't, all there were were like, you know, a view of the building here, a view of the courthouse there, and I put it all together. So it was a pretty complicated illustration for me. And they call these picking games where you just touch on your... All these glowing things. Yes, those are all glowing pick items. This is for a slot machine. Great time doing this. This was done traditionally. It's probably one of the last traditional things I did at IGT. problem with it doing traditional art I still have this painting by the way and it was so much fun for me to do as an Elvis Presley fan and you know I'm like I get to paint guitars and make sure they're correct yeah but the problem was they stopped me from doing that because they couldn't manipulate it or stretch it into any other format so they stopped me from doing that, and from then on I had to do everything digital. I did a hundred of these different, where I would design what they called facades, which is the part down on the bottom that goes around game elements that they would have. That was also a painting. The center game element was also a painting that was sort of where they backlit the drops. So there was all sorts of different ways that they would display a side game that you would play. But I did all these toppers. Here's one for Animal House. That's a sketch for Animal House facade. And then later on, Joe developed a group, innovation design group. that he was working on a community, he was trying to get this community game concept going. So here's one for Star Wars. These are some... Another favorite for the retro art people, Rock and Roll. I did a lot of redemption, what they called ticket spitters, redemption games. There was a time when I could walk into a Chuck E. Cheese and see three or four of my games in there. I worked very closely with Bromley when she first started her company, Lauren Bromley, and did some other things. Here's a Seawolf illustration, a completely digital. Rock and Bowl was the old style with the ink and the screens. So this kind of gives you an idea how pinball has evolved into the psyche of advertising people and moved off into directions that you never thought you'd see. So I got a call. I think they're called the Wow Factors. They said, we're from the Wow Factor, and we want you to do artwork for a sign on Times Square for the Coca-Cola company. So, you know, I was very excited to do it, and I said, I can do it. I can digitally paint where all the shots are going to be, and it's going to be food-oriented. But I was very surprised when they gave me the layout that I had to follow, and it was all these squiggly lines in here, and they said you're going to have to do your art within the confines of this. So that got pretty challenging for me, but I wound up walking in Times Square one night and was able to photograph it. And this is like a changing image. So we see just two examples of what fills in those different shapes. This went to an animator who put animated flippers in there. I didn't paint the flippers in. He put animated flippers and made the ball, you know, it actually looked like it was playing while you were looking at it. When was this? That was probably around 2000, something around. It's dated 2005. 2005? Yes. Okay. Oh, it's got a date on it, 2005. Well, that's when the photograph was taken, So I probably would start working on this maybe two years before that. Here's one where I got a call from some people in France, and the idea is that in Paris, everyone's car is bashed in because their parking is so tight there that it was explained to me that And that's why there's so many fender-bender-looking cars that are driving around Paris, because they haphazardly try to get into any spot they can. And so they were going to display. They just pushed the other cars. They were going to film cars trying to get into this spot. This was actually for Ford. And the product of the Ford was they were trying to sell their self-parking car. and so Ford hired this company to do this billboard that would display, they had a camera on the car trying to park, and every time it would hit one of the parked cars, it would light up your clumsy, your cruel, brutal, savage, your monster. I think there were pinball sound effects in the animated version. And next to it you see the near-finished product. There was a video of it. I don't have the video. It's around in pinball circles. You can see it. the m around young We're lucky today, we're paying the worst driver. the 60 Chevy here. If I look closely, they may have changed that. Yeah. I think, you know, I... 60 Chevy Impala comparable. I want to give some credit to Pat McMahon, who's a genius when it comes to, like, cartooning. If I get in a bind where I really need, you know, an expression, like, I needed this girl's expression in the front, I would call on Pat, and he'd always be happy to help me out. And every time you'd get something, you'd just go, this guy's a genius. And it's evident in all his pinball machines, too, the expressions on people's faces. He's just great at cartooning. I think that might be it. Well, thanks for staying an extra long time. I think this is the best profile of the work you've done. and sometime we've got to get you and Lauren Bromley together up front here and talk about some of that non-pinball work too that is so much fun. And a lot of it is very pinball inspired too. Yeah, she did one, I think she did one, it looked like a pinball machine. I had it in one of my slideshows here. It looked like a pinball machine, but it was a coin roller. but it had ramps and stuff that you could go up. Yeah, drop the coin and move the stuff. Yeah, I did that one too. I can't remember what that one was called. Well, there are so many. Yeah. But yeah, certainly Rock and Bowl was one of their best sellers. Yeah. All right. Well, we have to take a little lunch break here, but I hope you've all learned a lot about how Kevin, one of the pinball greats, works. and I'm so glad to hear that he's done with slot machines to be all pinball all the time. All right, thanks for coming, everybody. And thanks to Dave and everyone at Pintastic who's been really great to me.

_(Acquisition: youtube_groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_

---

*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: f4fd8c4b-da9a-4028-bbbd-e75c79479e48*