Welcome everybody to the Head to Head Pinball Podcast. This is episode 44. And my name's Martin and with me... It's Ryan C. How you going, Marty? I'm very good. How are you, Ryan? Good. I'm looking at your face for the first time today as an experiment to see if we have better chemistry if we stare into each other's eyes. I don't think we could have better chemistry. This is quite creepy. We've got a big episode coming up today. We've got news on Dutch Pinball, Stern, Iron Maiden, Supreme Pinball Machine. We have some exclusive news on that, CGC, Highway, JJP, and we've got a great interview with Michael, who is the owner of AMD Pinball, who are the sole distributors of Stern in Australia. So let's start off with some news, Marty. What's the first news piece? Well, have you got some Hulk-based news? There was a thread on Pinside about Lou Frigno. He was at the Texas Pinball Festival. Who is Lou Frigno? He's the guy who played the Hulk in like the 70s or 80s or something. So I don't know. I've never watched the Hulk, but I was like, cool, I get to kind of meet someone that was famous, kind of like Adam West back in the day. So Adam West at the Pinball Expo. And then I found out he was charging $40, I think, for a picture. And I was like, ah, I don't like him that much. It's like $5 max just for a Facebook post and some likes, you know. No. Anyway, I think he got a free pinball machine out of the deal. And everyone, there's this big threat on Pinside because people, I think the guy who organized the Texas Pinball Festival asked for help, who can kind of deliver a pinball machine to Lou and help set it up for free, right? He's not paying for anything. And everyone kind of went crazy and said, well, he didn't, you know, posed for a picture for free, so why should I help him, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, someone was like, put their hand up and said, this would be a good story, I'll do it. And then he posted a thread, this is another thread, saying... It's almost like a diary entry. Like, it's slow, but almost day by day what's happening, trying to give this man a free freaking pinball. Yeah, I'm trying to help you out, and he's just kind of become unavailable, and the whole thread kind of turned into, you know, famous people are assholes kind of thing. because they're just normal people, so the fact that they are arseholes and famous doesn't cut out the arsehole bit. So it's not really news, but I will link it in the show notes. I found this thread absolutely hilarious because it ended up turning into this guy Ted on Pinside just turned it into five pages of him posting pictures of him with famous people. Okay. That's really good. Yeah, it's a burning news. What's the heart of the press? It's the number one thing that people want to know about. Some serious stuff. Dutch Pinball Money. What's the update on that one? Okay, so those people that were in on their Big Lebowski received the following email this week. It's a nice cheery piece from our friends at Dutch Pinball. It says, We are reaching out with the kind of news we desperately never wanted to do. Just know we are continuing to do all that we can to rectify this situation. Unfortunately, we find ourselves at a critical point in time. We have been subpoenaed by our former contract manufacturer, ARA, and as a result, we have been put in a counterclaim. No surprises. We all knew that ARA was going to come back. Given the seriousness of this, we are not able to provide any details about this process until it goes to the courts for their findings and decision. What started out as a dream of creating wonderful pinball machines, doesn't it all, always, has become an ongoing and terrible nightmare. We deeply and sincerely wish we had better news to share, especially for all of you who have been so supportive of us over the past few years. We honestly have tried everything we could to give this project a positive outcome, but with the pending lawsuit, we have to put everything on hold. This does not mean that production by XY Tech... LAUGHTER XY Tech, come on. XY Tech had to be postponed until further notice. the only thing we ever wanted is to build a beautiful game for you and many other people to enjoy our dream has been shattered by forces we could not control we are heartbroken about this but have not given up hope that all will be resolved and games will get built and shipped but the question of when this might happen is still an unknown be assured that as soon as we have any news we can share we will send an update all of our very best, Barry and Yarp. I'm glad they signed it off as all of our very best because I was, you know, they kind of suffered the blow of it. Just, if people are new to this, basically this is a Dutch company. They wanted to make this machine. They got a contract manufacturer. Contract manufacturer means they're not building it in-house. They get a company and they say, here's everything, you build it for us and we sell it. You know, you build all these other things like a lot of folding machines. Anyway, this company is called ARA. Apparently, okay, no one can really confirm this. It's kind of Dutch Pinball saying that they wanted more money because they didn't realize how hard it was or maybe parts were more expensive. They agreed to pay that amount of money more per unit. Then they apparently wanted more money on top of that. That's when Dutch Pinball said, no, we're not doing this, and they kind of broke their contract and tried to find someone else to make it. That was uncovered a year, a year and a half ago. They went to China and found a company there that does it, and now it's fallen apart. So that's the whole situation in a nutshell, I guess. I mean, the writing's on the wall. The writing's been on the wall for a very long time, and this is just delaying the process. But it depends. If Dutch pinball have been telling the truth all along, I'm not really well-versed on Dutch law, on contract breaking and business-to-business stuff. But, I mean, if they're telling the truth, then Dutch should win the case, right? Like, if those guys broke contract on the price. But, I mean, Dutch have lied about certain things along the process, so it's hard to believe one side when you don't know the other side, considering their track records. All right, so I'm going to move something that I was going to talk about in my week to this. because I got an email, another email, that was very similar this week. Hello, backers. Sorry, the title of this email was a very sad goodbye. Hello, backers. It is with an extremely heavy heart that we must inform you that OSIC is shutting down and will be unable to deliver the remaining OSIC X headphones. The Ossic X was an ambitious and expensive product to develop. With funds from the crowdfunding campaign, along with angel investment, we were able to develop the product and ship the initial units. However, the product still requires significantly more capital to ramp to full mass production, and the company is out of money. Over the last 18 months, we've explored a myriad of financing options, but given virtual reality's slow start, and a number of high-profile hardware startup failures, failures. We've been unable to secure the investment. We've got to proceed. Blah, blah, blah. Our dream has been shattered. We just wanted to do the best for you. We had this fantastic product. Oh. How many things have you backed on Kickstarter money? Five. How many of them have you got? Two. So one of them is this. Yep. Another one is the Stern book. All right. What's the other one? You're laughing your back, because that's the only thing you can do. It's either laughing or crying, right? And the other thing I've got is a smartwatch called GameBand. So it is a smartwatch that's got sort of replicas of the old sort of arcade games, right? So it's the pre-order model, right? This is... Kickstarter is, unashamedly, a pre-order model. That's really what it is. I guess probably there's a couple of differences here. First one is the headphones, $400. Yeah. Okay? For some people, that would be a lot of money. It's a freaking just loose change for me. I just sort of chip over and $400 just comes out of my pocket. And I think the smartwatch might have been $200. That's not $8,000. That's not $10,000, right? All right. So what... All right, continue. Okay. So I had a big rant about this last night on my stream. I may have shrunk a bit. Here's the problem with these projects. And it's probably destroyed, nearly destroyed a couple of companies and has destroyed some companies. I know there's been other reasons around licensing, etc. But there's a common thread in all of this. And the answer, the good answer to this is spooky pinball. But let me tell you the problem. The problem with these Kickstarters and things like this, and also it nearly broke Jersey Jack as well, is too ambitious too soon is really what happens. Particularly with these Kickstarter ones, once they hit their goal, that's it. They should go, right, we're going to make 100 of these based on these specs, and that's it. But what they do is they get a little bit greedy and they go, right, well, if we get this stretch goal, we're going to add this functionality. If we get this, we have to then add. And so what actually happens is they go from being boutique. Here we go. So that's the whole spooky thing. They go from being boutique to all of a sudden having to deliver $10 million worth of product. That's a very different business. You actually have to now become a proper manufacturing facility with an R&D department, with quality controls, with a production line. And this is the problem. And so the parallel I drew when I got my email about my stupid headphones, although on paper they were going to be the best headphones in the world, is that these companies try to become a fully-fledged pinball company too soon. And that's why I said Spooky is the answer, even though Spooky had trouble as well. But Spooky came and said, we're going to release America's Most Haunted. It's not the most fully-fledged machine. if you look underneath it, it's pretty simple, and we're going to make 150 of them, and that's it. And that's what we're going to focus on. Yeah, I've only ever backed one Kickstarter project, and it was the OUYA console, I'm not sure if you remember that one. Did you get it? Yeah, no, I got it. It was something like one month late or two months late. But it was pretty shit, though. Well, there's no games for it. They kind of, you know, everyone kind of realized you were just playing your phone. It was good for emulators, and that's about it, and XMBC. But anyway, that was enough for me. I was like, no more Kickstarter. Like, I don't like, I need that instant satisfaction. I don't want to wait a year or whatever it was to get something. Yeah, the Stern book is a bit of a baffle. I mean, I guess that almost leads on to our next bit of news. But just to finish up on Dutch, I mean, yeah, the chances of them kind of coming out of this, I mean, even if the lawsuit takes a year and they make it all their money, they're probably just going to refund everyone, right? I mean, there's like 40 machines or something that they could auction off or something. But regardless, I don't think people that have pre-orders are going to get their machines. The 40 machines will probably end up to the highest bidders, you know, going to someone else. And the company's over. No one's going to wait another year, two years for the big, little, nasty pinball machine. It was shit hard. Like, when it got shown, when it was shown, it was like one of the first pinball machines with an LCD screen. Yep. Now every store has that. So what's the factor here? Yeah. Ask you the thing. I don't know. Look, it's really, it's probably those people that have got money in it, right? Those people that have got money, either get your money back or get a machine, right? That's really going to be the closer. That's going to be it. Are you going to get your money back from that Kickstarter thing? No. They produce nothing and you get nothing back. Nothing. Their parting note was, thank you for all of your support and we sincerely apologize that we could not deliver all of the headphones. Did they deliver anything? Yeah, apparently they ordered... There was always, like, one of the levels of backers was, like, a developer backer, and they were the ones that were the developers. And all the feedback was that they were terrible. But what they had to do is they had to now support five operating systems. So as a result, they actually had to put, like, a Raspberry Pi, like, mini computer inside these headphones just for compatibility. That is because they went to those upper tiers of backers, the specials. just cap it, deliver it, get a proper product, then go to market. Yeah. There's a lot of excuses for the Stern book being delayed, and one of them, I guess people are guessing, is the John Trudeau kind of incident. And it's in the news again this week, and this time not for kind of having stuff on his computer that he's not meant to have. It's due to allegations of, I don't know, what is it, Marty? I've forgotten already. It's basically... It's abuse. Yeah, it's abuse of a minor. So this is... I mean, both of them are serious things. This is like a massive X. I don't think the people, they're like, oh, innocent until proven guilty. When there's smoke, there's usually fire. And yes, it hasn't gone to court, but yeah, I guess it's the ugly chapter of pinball that people would just kind of want to close now. So he's never, ever coming back to pinball. Could have said that, you know, 40 weeks ago or something when this happened, but that's pretty much the nail in the coffin, right? Like, yeah. It's just awful having to speak about it. Yeah, there's nothing much we can say, but it's pinball news, I guess, because he used to be a designer. I feel really sorry for Sturm because, you know what I mean? Like, he gets his employee and then all of a sudden he's, like, he's doing all these things and then they have to spend, like, millions of dollars, you know, redoing pinball machines that he did and, yeah, Yeah, it's not good. Speaking of Stern, I saw a post today that the new production Guardians of the Galaxy Pro pinball machines are now coming out of the factory with the service rails back on. Okay. So that appeared on Iron Maiden, and that was the first time in I don't know how many years, maybe it was five or ten years, that Stern used the service rails on the Pro model. It used to have the pegs, which they're really annoying, those pegs, especially when you want to work on the flippers and something that you can just kind of slide out. So that seems to be... I thought it was maybe just for Iron Maiden, but this is obviously something that's now standard going forward. So that's good news for Pro-Earners, I guess. Do they still have the latches inside the Pros? Yeah, that's on your alleys as well. You'll have that on your alley. Oh, what? Apparently it's better. It's another click, but apparently it's better. for stability or something. I don't know. Okay. Talking about Iron Maiden, I saw this. I can't believe we're talking about pin-side stuff in Facebook posts on our podcast, but this has made me laugh. We've been talking for the last couple of weeks about Iron Maiden sliding down the rankings due to people kind of hating on the theme. This is a post on Facebook which actually made me laugh. I first thought it was pin-side PD. and I had to look up and it wasn't. Stern posted some news, I think the premium pictures, which are absolutely amazing, and someone posted, please include a pin sound board so I can upload some music so I can stomach and I'll buy an LE. Seriously, enough with the heavy metal bands already. Ugh. Great game and design, though, Mr. Allen. I played the hell out of it, and then in brackets, with earplugs and a vomit bag close by, Oh, my God. Ah, that is, that is Pinside leaking out onto Facebook, so. Yeah, and look, it's highlighting that, you know, rock bands aren't going to be for everybody, and, you know, probably Iron Maiden is probably the most extreme rock that they've done, so it's going to be even further away from what people like. I mean I know that those rumours a while ago, surely they're not going to do Slayer that is way too hardcore right look I think it's one of those things I think it's one of those things where if you say it enough people will start thinking that it's true and I just think that there's been so many people that have said Slayer, Slayer, Slayer, Slayer and after a while someone's gone yeah I think Stan might be doing a Slayer machine Yeah, that's what's coming up next. And all of a sudden, that gets spread that they're doing a Slayer machine. Yeah. I don't know. You know, when it comes to hard rock or metal, Iron Maidens is probably as far as I'll go. I haven't really heard that much of Slayer, to be honest. I could stomach... Well, I mean, it's funny, because what this guy says about Iron Maiden is what I think about Slayer. Like, 10 seconds, and I feel like I want to vomit. It's just people screaming through the microphone. Anyway, some more positive news. Yes. If you want to get – it was funny because the Supreme pinball machine was announced by Stern as a kind of a collaboration with Supreme Clothing Company. Well, it wasn't announced by Stern. It kind of was announced by Supreme. And we had a whole segment about it. It was quite funny. And then we didn't hear anything, and we're like, were they made? How many were made? What did they sell for? and people were like, oh, you know, they sold off to all the pre-order lists, the people that buy every Supreme thing. No, they weren't. None of them have sold. And apparently the rumor is 200 units at $10,000 each. Now, 200 units for us, for something like that, in the pinball community, seems like a lot, doesn't it, Marty? Like, man, that's a lot of shit pinball machines going out into the market, right? it's a re-theme of a $3,000 Timor machine well okay but take value aside I played the Spider-Man Home Edition and it's a fun game it's a $3,000 game but it's a fun game when did you play it? at Papa oh okay yeah so Jordan and I played it yeah Jordan and I played it and both of us kind of and he kept going back to it as well and both of us kind of looked at each other and went it's actually not bad. It actually, it's not fully featured, but it feels like a service game. The only real sort of dead giveaway is the really pokey little DMD at the back. But it's a fun game. Okay. Yeah. So I actually went today and looked at some Supreme forums really quickly and the Supreme subreddit and it's quite funny because everyone who seems to be interested in saying this is a good price for Supreme stuff, they only say it's a good price because they want to flip it. They're like, oh my God, 200 units? I could buy this for 10K and sell it for 25K the next day. This Supreme thing, it seems to be pretty much, there's bottom feeders, I want to call them bottom feeders, that literally just flip every Supreme exclusive thing. They create scripts to buy the exclusive thing. And then there's the actual super rich people that have to rely on this secondhand market because, you know, it'll sell out. So I'm actually really interested to see what happens. Like, I will go on the Supreme website on Thursday, I think it is, Marty? Yep. Yeah? Is it Thursday our time or US time? I would say it's probably US time. But my question to you is, like, as you were scouring the forums, in the Supreme Committee, is there a lot of talk about these pinball machines coming up? It's funny because I think some people know a little bit about pinball, and there was someone saying this is just the Spider-Man kind of re-theme. Most of it was on Reddit, and you know what Reddit's like. You get votes that are posted, upvoted and downvoted, and all that stuff, like the good information, is at the bottom, and the ones that were upvoted like crazy were like, oh my god, I'm going to tour a unit, it's crazy, and pinball's so cool. The arcade and hobby collecting scene is crazy. This is a good buy. I don't know. Really? Yeah, yeah. It's all hype. So what are they going to resell them for? 20 to 30 grand, apparently. I don't know. Let's see. Let's see if they all sell out. Apparently, some people... If you go on eBay now, some people are selling spots. Some people are so confident they're going to get it. And then you can spend 8,000 US to have the ability to buy it for 10,000 US. So people have created like scripts and kind of like auto, like, you know, like the automatic bidding. Yeah, yeah, yeah. An automatic buying tool that they know will work on the Supreme website. So literally the second it drops, it's automatically checked out and then they'll pass that on to somebody else, right? And they'll get an $8,000 clip just for giving that to somebody else. So someone else pays $18,000 for it. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, but I mean, I don't think those are selling. Who knows? But there were a couple for about $22,000 to $25,000 that they said, I've got a confirmed pre-order. This is how much you kind of have to pay for it. So maybe there is some kind of like super supreme VIP list where they actually get it before, or maybe those people are so confident they can get it, they're selling it before. I don't know. But as I said, I'm interested to see if it sells out. I'll be like, I'm impressed. I'm impressed that they could sell 200 of these for 10K in like a day or something. That would be mighty impressive in my books. Well, you know, we're looking at it through different lenses. So we would look at it and say, as a pinball machine, is it worth $10,000? Has it got the number of ramps? Has it got the right rules? Has it got sound? Has it got the art package? All that kind of stuff. These people would be looking at it as equivalent to a $10,000 bracelet or a bag or something that is just an item that is now a commodity to be traded. Exactly. You've got to put that into perspective. One of the top comments as well was, I've got to buy this so that when they start redoing MTV Cribs, it's sitting there in the corner. which I thought was a funny joke because it's like 10k as a piece of furniture to somebody is nothing furniture you can play and as we mentioned when we first talked about it it had like one and a half million views in a day there are like maybe 10 this is a number I'm pulling out of my ass 10 to 15,000 possible buyers for like any one pinball machine in our little kind of community market right sure or maybe more maybe there's a lot more for Supreme there's like millions. Well, and also at the end of the day, if it's $10,000, $20,000, $25,000, it's still more playable than a $30,000 magic girl. So, do you know what I mean? Jump back to our episode. I think it's like episode 32 or something. I can't remember. But the episode title is The Supreme Youngstown Hewson. and we detailed all of the things that this pinball machine has that even super alleys don't have. It has a custom painted door, a custom... It's just little things. The attention to detail on this pinball machine is second to none, regardless of it being a re-thing. So it's got that going for it. Well, look, same as you, I'm just really curious to see whether it sells out or whether it sells nothing. All right, we'll see, and we'll let you know next week, guys. Let's move on. That was episode 30, by the way. 30, okay. Yeah. I was close. You were. CGC. Who is CGC? They're the guys who have, I'm not going to say the easiest job in pinball, but they basically don't need to, all the struggles that Stern and Jersey Jack and Spooky have to go through, these guys don't have to go through all of them because they have lists of Pimble machines that people want, like Medieval Bandits, Attack from Mars, Monster Bash, etc, etc. And they know they're going to sell. Yeah. And these guys might actually be the second biggest Pimble machine manufacturers in the world. It'd be close between them and Jersey Jack. No one releases figures, but yeah. So I believe there was a statement released by CGC this week, Ryan. Yeah, last week we talked, I think it was last week, we talked about a Facebook post that got deleted where someone was saying that you can win a Monster Bash Alley pinball machine at the latest pinball festival, which I think was coming later this month. CGC released a statement saying, in recent weeks there have been incorrect statements coming out for all of those that are trying to promote the up-and-coming pinball events. Let me make a couple of things clear. No pinball promoter is going to take over the marketing and timelines of CGC. When we are prepared to announce, I promise that the information is either going to come directly from CGC or an authorized global partner dealers. We appreciate everyone's enthusiasm for our next releases, and no one is more excited about our next releases than CGC. I promise that we have once again raised the bar of our alleys, and it's going to be over the top. In meeting the demands of today's current market, It is our goal to announce only when we are prepared to start manufacturing and shipping. So that was from Doug. Now, wouldn't it be amazing if that was actually a publicity stunt from the company? Because I think the post was, win a Monster Bash Alley pinball machine. Like, who's going to give away, you know, how much is there? Like, a $9,000 pinball machine at an event. so yeah I guess we'll see it's meant to be last time we heard it was like meant to be at the end of this month so maybe two more episodes time we'll have some news about that we'll still be talking about it but look winning a pinball machine like that that's a big draw card for an event right so yeah I would go to any not any yeah I'd almost fly to any event in Australia if you have a chance to win like an $8,000 $9,000 pinball machine yeah But if it was win a pinball machine, unnamed, versus win a Monster Bash remake LE, you would go because you know what you're getting. All right, Marty, how about this? If you had the option, all right, if you win a pinball machine, and they said, okay, behind door number one, Monster Bash LE, behind door number two, Supreme Pinball Machine, which one would you choose? I would actually choose the Supreme Doom War machine. Why? Why wouldn't you? Because you would just spend it for $30,000. Yes. No more. Sell it to some rich kids. Absolutely. Of course you would. Yeah. Oh, funny. Nothing more to say about that. I mean, who knows what they're going to do? Like, extra armor or something? Like, holy shit, the alley has, like, the universal monsters etched into the armor. I can pre-order now. Bam. Yeah. I don't know. Anyway. What else? So this week we also saw, so I remember we were, I don't know whether we were talking about it, but there was word out there, actually I think it was on Pinside, where somebody had mentioned that with Highway Pinball thinking about putting a Playboy machine out there, that the first thing that they did was have a digital version of it to flip. And somebody has put some video footage of that, which we will link in the show notes up on YouTube. What did you say the date? Did you say the date of that video? Yeah. It's been up for like years. So this is just kind of sitting there for everyone to see. Were you about to ask me what I thought of it? Yeah. Okay. I would love for it to come out just to see the reaction of everyone because, I don't know, I like laughing at people's reactions of things, and I know this reaction would be over the top, because basically it was kind of like, shoot your shot, and watch, like, a Playboy clip. Watch another shot. Watch the movies. Watch the, yeah, yeah, and the deeper you get into the game, the more revealing these clips kind of tend to be. Yeah. I don't know. Guys, if you want to... No, I can't say that. Well, let me tell you my impressions of it, because I was looking at the pinball, and the gameplay. Okay. It reminded me of, like, a wide-body Data East. And in particular, it reminded me of, well, actually, even though I know this is an arrow body, but it kind of reminded me of Baywatch. Just something about the layout reminded me of Baywatch. It has, like, almost like these two dual ramps on the left, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. it just looked like a data race. It just didn't look... Anyway, guys, watch the video and email us or comment on the whatever it is, just what you think. But to me, I looked at this and I went, well, not only is the theme just a bit out there for now, if you're going to do a controversial theme like that, nail it with the gameplay, nail it with the layout, nail it with the sound. Oh my God, I wish I could remember the call-outs. The call-outs were just terrible. Sure, it's the placeholder, right? But it just... Oh, the girl's not good. Yeah. Shoot the right round to reveal my boobies. This is the thing. I mean, when you think of Playboy, you kind of think of Hugh Hefner as this, like, this, you know, young character with all the bunnies. You know, what's better than a pinball machine from that time? like the classic Solace, that pinball machine, when you elevate it to today's technology, then it just becomes really cheesy. Like, what I was about to say before is, if you really want to get your rocks off, just open up your browser and tap on a couple of addresses. It's so easy. Like, you don't need that in a pinball machine, you know? Like, the times have changed. You don't need to go out and buy magazines anymore for that stuff, guys. Okay, it looked like a virtual pinball that would never make production. Do you know what I mean? Like, someone just wanted to make it, and yeah, that's all I need to say about it. They probably made that video just to try and secure the license because that's kind of what they have to do. Terrible, I think, is what we're saying. Oh, sorry, yeah. Anyway, moving on to Jersey Jack, just a little bit of news that I kind of scouted on Pinside this week. Someone noticed that the new rules kind of graph shows that there's a new multiple coming in a new software update sometime in the near future called Fear the Multiple and I think basically you need to get four or five of the theater modes that there you know there the super spinner thing in the middle of the theater the vault drop target I know there's a spider there sometimes. Yeah, there's a spider, but once you kind of hit enough modes, it kind of just like starts this mode where you're getting a lot of points in the middle. Yeah. And now, I think now if you, there's an ending to that, you know, like if you get all of them, you'll get a multiple. I don't know. I just thought I'd add it in there because it's an amazing game, and we haven't heard an update from it for a while. So let's head to our interview. Now, before I listen back to this interview, and I kind of realize we never really talk about who Bruce is. So we interview a guy called Michael. He works with a guy called Bruce. They're like partners, right? Brucey baby. Brucey baby, right? Bruce is the style. When you ring up AMD, most of the time you're going to talk to Bruce. He does look like Gary Stern. and he's very straight to the point and he's a straight shooter. So when we talk about Bruce, that's who we're talking about. So the interview does go for about 50 minutes and basically he talks about everything to do with distributing Stern Film All Machines in Australia. And what it took to get those Iron Maiden Limited Editions into the country. So let's head to the interview. Let's do it. We have Michael from AMD. AMD are the largest distributors, I believe, of pinball machines in Australia. How are you going, Michael? Good, mate. Yourself? Good. So AMD have been distributing Stern pinball machines since, I guess, Stern changed over from Data East. Is that right? Actually, including Data Roost days as well. So Bruce has been importing Stern Pinballs since about 1991 or 2, which would have included games like Jurassic Park and Star Wars and the original Batman, I believe, as well, from Data Roost. And we've been the, I guess if you want to say, the official Australian distributors of Stern Pinballs since then, right up until today. So you've been through a lot of the peaks and troughs, of the roller coaster of the pinball market. So obviously it was not lucky, but a lot of people didn't like that Ballywilliams kind of dissolved. But I guess for you guys being the distributor for them, that was better news for you guys as Stern was the only people producing pinball machines in the early 2000s. Yeah, I think it's still, in a sense, a relative market. Those peaks and troughs you talk about affected not only pinball, but a lot of the other products that we deal with as well. And there's a lot of influential factors that determine these peaks and troughs, whether it would be the industry as a whole, whether it would be the exchange rate. A lot of things are beyond our control, things like freight charges, which seem to change with the Carl Weathers. Look, certainly the downfall or the dissolve of Williamson Valley wasn't a bad thing for Stern, but it certainly affected Stern. You know, it's no hiding and no surprise that, you know, Stern have had their low periods as well. Knock wood. We haven't seen that for a long time. Now, so you as a company, I mean, we're obviously going to focus on pinball, but, you know, you obviously do other things as well. So, you know, when we saw, I guess, the downturn of pinball, did you then, you know, have to focus on other things? Like you supply redemption machines as well. Yeah, absolutely. You know, as a business, you can't rely on one, you know, single product, you know, and we've had to counterbalance, I guess, any soft periods of particular products, you know, including pinball, with other products. We can't survive on just pinball alone. We can't survive on other products just alone. So we have to sort of mix our product range to suit the market trend. Pinball machines for the last, you know, 8 to 10 years have sort of, you know, made up a good 50% to 60% of our business. You know, we can't survive just on pinball. You know, we have to focus, we have to still concentrate on other products as a business to survive. But do you have to sort of almost predict, you know, like obviously, you know, the downturn of the pinball industry, did you see that coming or do you sort of have to react very quickly to that? Hard to say. You know, in business there's no guarantees. and it's a very hard, there's no crystal ball for that, which would make life a little bit easier if we did, but if there was a crystal ball. But we just have to ride the wind, and while the sale's up, you're full steam ahead, and you've just got to be conscious that nothing is forever in business, and you have to be able to restructure and change your product line-up to suit the market trend. And, you know, Pimble, for the large part, for the last, you know, 10 years for us has been fantastic, And we don't, I mean, you talk about, you know, an InVision or a Crystal Ball, we just can't see that ever change. We can't see that changing in the near future. It just seems to be on an upward trend and we can't think of any reason, I mean, except for maybe an exchange rate or maybe something catastrophic happening with Stern Pimble. We just can't think of any reason to suggest anything else but this upward trend. Do you know the percentages of home sales versus people that are putting these on site? I mean, obviously, you just sell the pinball machine, but do you have a rough idea in your heads of how to change it? Yeah, look, at least 90% to 95% go to mums and dads and home. Yeah, go to the home market. Absolutely. Wow. Yeah, and that's a complete polar opposite to where it was 20 years ago. Selling a pinball machine into the home market would be reserved for extremely wealthy or extremely privileged individuals, you know, and everything else went to operations. That's just the complete opposite to where it is now. Is that a recent thing, do you think? Because, you know, I guess we've sort of been really conscious of the home market really exploding probably the last, I guess, four or five years. Has it been earlier than then, than you really started seeing the home buying? Probably, say, as early as, like, 2009, 2010. I think that's probably when we saw the real shift toward the home market. I think it was more as a result of Stern's decision to use licenses that were a little bit more current and valid. I'm not taking credit for everything, but I think a lot of what we did in terms of marketing towards the home market certainly helped the shift into sales, into man caves, into the home environment. But I think there's a lot of factors that contribute to the home market exploding the way it has. Does that mean that you have to then provide more support because you've got machines in homes, not necessarily with people who know how to maintain these machines? Look, in a nice way, it's certainly a different experience selling games into the home market. I think we've certainly recognised that and I think we've certainly adapted our business to suit that, whether it be holding more parts, whether it be changing the way that we react to service calls. Selling into the home market is certainly different to selling to an operator. You know, an operator will understand the nature of pinball and so will enthusiasts. Enthusiasts will still appreciate the fact that it's still a pinball machine. Things go wrong. Gloves fall out, balls get stuck, rubbers fall off. You know, there can be some electrical, electronic challenges. the first time pinball owner won't understand that and it's almost an education process for us to say to new customers, hey, these are all the worst case scenarios when you buy a pinball machine, just so you're aware. But the way that we support that, I think, is the real difference. But it's certainly a different challenge selling games into the home market, that's for sure. Sure. And is Australia like... I remember we talked to someone at Stern and they said that Australia, as a standalone country, is probably the biggest market outside of the US in terms of pinball sales. Maybe Canada might be up there, but since they're so close to the border, I guess some sales kind of get bundled in the US market. Do you have those figures? Do you know how big the Australian market is compared to the rest of the world? No. Unfortunately, I'm not privy to a lot of those figures, although every time I am privileged to see Gary Stern probably two or three times a year at various shows abroad, he doesn't reflect on those figures too often. I think he just sort of wants to keep us on our feet, you know, and not give us... Play more. Yeah, not sort of give us too much... give us any reason to be complacent. But, you know, I certainly think on some specific titles, you know, being ACDC, I think we would have been one of the larger export markets. I think regions like Italy and France are still large markets for export for Stern as well. I think it really, you know, with any given title, every market will have its strengths and weaknesses. You know, games like Mustang weren't a very good seller for us. obviously to the US market would have been a fantastic game for us it wasn't and then you get games like ACDC which extremely strong for Australia but maybe not as strong in countries like France and Germany sorry France and Italy sure I mean was there a period as well that I remember someone telling me that there was so little demand for certain titles that you guys didn't import certain like there was some titles that you didn't import at all oh absolutely NBA would have been I think we would have Air freighted less than 5 or 6 into the country And games like 24 And CSI very similar Numbers it was really Up and only until Ironman And Avatar probably Even towards Rolling Stones and Tron Where we started to really ramp up our sales And again when we talk about Reasons behind that I think partly the strengthening dollar, I think the strength in the licences and those factors alone contributed to our marketing and allowed us to really grow that home market and start that trend off until it gets some momentum in the home market sales again. How does titles like Simpsons Pinball Party and Lord of the Rings, they're kind of seen and put up on this pedestal like Stern's kind of like best from that era. Obviously, as Australia is an isolated market, but do the numbers for those machines kind of compare to, let's ignore ACDC because, you know, Australian band, everyone went crazy over it. The dollar was like parity at that time, I think, or even better. How does that compare to something like Ghostbusters or one of your best sellers in recent times? Still no comparison, to be honest with you. You know, the figures that we do these days, with current titles probably three or four times what we were doing with games of that era. It's unfair to actually compare games of that era to games today purely because of the market strength. Those games were very strong and very good games and for the time we were producing very good sales relatively. But if we were doing those numbers with titles today then we would be very concerned. They're certainly not comparable to the sales that we're doing today. Wow, okay. I'm surprised that you managed to sell Rolling Stone. Look, you know, that wasn't an easy sell, even given the strength of the band and the title. You know, the problem is if they release that game today, you know, I'm sure we'd probably sell four times as many as what we did back in 2008 or 9, whenever it was released. But it wasn't a terrible game. It was just not a strong seller. So, if you mentioned one time when we talked on the phone, there's a vast difference in buyers between certain titles. Like a Star Wars will come out and you'll attract a certain amount of buyers. Guardians of the Galaxy comes out, a more current theme, and it's a totally different... Obviously, if you draw a Venn diagram, there's a group of people that will buy every title no matter what. Am I right? Oh, absolutely. There's guys that really have an affiliation with Marvel and Marvel characters and Marvel themes, with the X-Men and Avengers and so forth. And then you've got the guys that really love the rock and roll themes, so they'll be buying the Kiss, the Metallica, the ACDC, obviously Iron Maiden this year. And then you've got the guys that will buy the movie titles, you know, Walking Dead, Guardians of the Galaxy, Game of Thrones. So I think with every title or every release, it certainly strikes a different audience and a different demographic. And the good thing for us, and we find that occurs with every new title, is that it brings a new demographic or a new branch of customers. So our customer base is forever growing. And, you know, maybe they only buy one machine or maybe two, but our customer base, and, you know, for any business for that matter, that's obviously more important because it extends your reach and exposure for anything else that you're doing in the future. So that's something we hold very close to our chest and that's something we're pretty protective and proud of. but we just noticed that with every given title, with Iron Maiden, say, for instance, we would probably have, out of the limited edition games that we sold, we probably would have had a good 10 or 15 new customers that we've never had before and may never have ever reached had it not been for Iron Maiden. So these are Iron Maiden fans that heard about it before it was coming out and like... Yeah, look, the strength of social media these days, I mean, it's sort of neither a good thing nor a bad thing. I mean, unfortunately for a lot of people with Iron Maiden, you know, with the limited edition, we had virtually oversold on Iron Maiden limited edition before the game had even been released. You know, the nature and the viral nature of social media these days, I mean, people knew about it before it was even officially released. And I mean, again, it's not neither a bad thing or a good thing, but the problem is that we end up with a lot of unhappy customers who are repeat customers who are very good customers that obviously just miss out on the limited edition. And so do you, like, obviously, you know, you would have had a bit of a lead-up knowing that it was coming, but even before that, were people sort of saying to you that they wanted an Iron Maiden machine? And probably the two-part, probably the bigger question is, you know, do people sort of scream out to you about the kinds of things that they want to see in a pinball? We get some notice, you know, and it's always different. We will quite often ask about some titles and we may only get two or three days' notice. We might get two weeks, we might get two months, in which case we're always asked to keep our mouth shut. Yeah, of course. And not talk about it until it's officially released and that ties into the way that we handle our business as well. We don't take deposits and we don't take orders from our customers until it is officially released from Stern. That's just the way that we handle things here. But, yeah, people find out about new titles way before they're supposed to, again, through social media and through the forums and so forth. And, you know, it's a good thing because it creates hype and it creates exposure and people talk about it, it gains interest. So do you have a spreadsheet and a list of any title that someone... Because obviously people might hear about it before you officially hear about it. So if I ring you up tomorrow and say, Michael, put me down for a Goonies super limited edition, and you're like, I don't know what you're talking about, but you have to create a new spreadsheet and put my name on it and my number, is that what happens? Yeah, it happens weekly. It happens all the time. Yeah, and it's a good thing, you know, because people get a whiff to something and they say, oh, you know, I heard so-and-so title, I see such-and-such title is going to be produced and we'll do the honourable thing and the best thing, the only thing that we can really do is we have what we call an expressions of interest list and your name goes on that list if that game ever comes to fruition and we know who to contact and process an order with. Have you ever had someone that's, like, put their name down for something like five, ten years ago and it's impossible or you think it's never going to come out? Do you have these lists that are just kind of sitting there doing nothing? Yeah, well, we had one for Iron Maiden a long time ago. I could name names, but I probably shouldn't. But there was quite a few people... Well, yeah, there's a guy in the industry, OK, that said he'd been on the list for about ten years. It's probably the same guy I'm talking about. He had his name down for a long time on this list for Iron Maiden and he was number one on the list and he got his game. He didn't buy anything for years in anticipation for this. In those cases, it's just we're happy to oblige and we're glad that he got his order. So what I guess I'm trying to get at is if people are shouting names and things that they want, do you sort of pass that on to Stern about the demand that you're getting for certain titles? Stern will... Well, to answer your question, yes, but to give you a little bit of an idea of how sometimes titles are discussed, Gary will call Bruce and myself and throw some ideas of titles that they're thinking about doing, and then sort of gain or try to gather up an idea of what we believe of the title, what we believe the market strength of that particular title will be. He might throw five or six titles and then we'll discuss them at some various lengths and we won't hear from about that for maybe another two or three years and then all of a sudden they'll come to fruition. We go, oh, I remember talking about that. Yeah, but that's normally how the process goes. In terms of the limited edition, the allocations, this is something that I should probably talk about is getting back to Iron Maiden limited edition. There was a lot of people that missed out and there's a lot of people that weren't happy about it and unfortunately that's just the nature of limited edition games and if we had it our way, we would supply everybody with a limited edition game, not one of one. That's without a doubt. We don't hold back sales for any reason. What normally will happen is Gary Stern will ask us, how many do you think we want? What do you think the market strength is? And we'll tell him a number and it'll always come back with a counter number and... So when is this conversation happening? Is this conversation happening before the title is announced or after the title is announced? Normally a couple of days before the title is released and that gives us a little bit of lead time into what we... and we're talking about commitments here as well so it's not something where we just ramble a number off the top of our head. We have to obviously sit down and discuss it and work through again when we talk about that expressions of interest list and say, okay, this is the market strength at the moment Once we release the game, where do we think the market strength will be and how many do we want to make a commitment for? And a commitment is a pretty strong word, but that's what it is. Because you've ultimately got to actually pay for those machines. You're not just saying, we think we've got customers. You're saying, okay, put us down 50 and we have to order 50 of them. So you've got to be pretty sure. Correct. And that's what I say. When I say commitment, it's not a loose term. When we make a commitment to something, it's not something we can change. So when we make a commitment for sort of 50 games, that's our order. And until that's confirmed and until it's released officially from Stern Pinball, then we won't take any orders. There was a little bit of a latency with the release and our confirmation of numbers, especially with Iron Maiden, and that's just something that we, you know, the time difference between the US and Australia sometimes, you might not get a response for a day or two. and we had to postpone a lot of the orders until we knew for a fact that we were going to get that number of 50 units. Martin knows all about that. He was waiting for that to happen. Well, I was actually in China at the time and was actually with Gary Stern and I saw a lot of emails somewhere a little bit colourful between Bruce and Gary Stern, you know, regarding confirmation of the number of LEs because I knew that we were going to have a lot of customers back home, you know, sort of holding their breath to make sure that they were going to get their limited edition. I also know a lot of customers quite personally. A lot of them were texting me. A lot of them were contacting me through Facebook sort of, you know, am I going to get my game sort of scenario? You know, it puts us in a difficult position, you know. We don't live in that perfect world. So, you know, if we could supply everybody with a limited edition game, we would. Unfortunately, we just can't. But do you get that with every title, or was that just an Iron Maiden thing where everyone was just really desperate for this machine? Is that something that happens with every release? Not every title. I would say the big titles, you know, certainly Star Wars, certainly Ghostbusters, certainly Iron Maiden, certainly Metallica, certainly ACDC. But then you get titles like, you know, Guardians of the Galaxy, Aerosmith. the limited edition games didn't sell as quick as what we thought. And again, this comes down to, when I speak about our commitment, this is where it gets a little bit scary, because if we discuss a market strength for a title like Aerosmith, which by all accounts should be a pretty strong title, and it's got the right designer, it's got the right artist behind it, we believe X amount of games should be our market strength. and we could very easily, you know, it hadn't happened with X-Men, you know, where we can very easily end up with 10 limited edition games on the shelf, you know, and when you start talking about the price of a limited edition game to do the math, there's a lot of money sitting on the shelf there. So how do you, I mean, how do you make that, you make that commitment based off how many people on your list, the theme, but do you get access to, like, they let you know the designer, they let you know the coder, maybe the artist. Do you actually see the Timor machine? Do you see footage? Can you base your order off anything except just the words, like Dwight Sullivan, you know, this guy? No, we quite, you know, without disrespecting the designer or the coder or the guys that's doing the art package, the programmers, without disrespecting any of those guys, we normally don't take a lot of that into account. And that's the honest truth. the strength of the title is based on the expressions of interest and where we believe that game will sell. And we have to take that view. If you took on too many variables of determining a market, you do yourself a mischief and you go crazy. I'm sure there are a lot of enthusiasts out there that will buy a game that are only Steve Ritchie games or they're only John Ball games. I'm sure there are enthusiasts like that. there aren't that many for us to influence our purchasing. And that's just a fact. Not even Lime and Sheets. Not even a Lime and Sheets game. Because all of his last three games have been total sellouts, right? Yeah, look... Metallica, Walking Dead and Batman. Yeah, look, all very good games and all very good selling games. Just because we want X amount of number of games as well doesn't mean we get that. Let me just say that. So we can always put our hand up, and it happens with every title, you know. And it's a little bit frustrating. It happens with Iron Maiden. You know, Gary says, how many do you want? We want 50. No, you can have 35. And then it becomes this battle, and that's where I sort of take the chain off Bruce's collar and let him go because he... You're going to lose your baby. Yeah, look, you know, Bruce and Gary Stern, if you've ever seen them together, they look like they've been separated at first. You know, they're of the same vintage and they've been friends forever. But they've been made for a long time. They've been friends forever, you know. I don't get how the conversation go past that, like, 50, no, 35, no, 50. Like, do they settle somewhere in the middle? Well, this is what I say to Gary. I say, well, if you're not going to give us 50, why ask? You know, just tell me how many you want to give us. But it doesn't go down like that. They ask us how many we want, and we have to fight for that. And again, it's always an issue where Gary and Bruce will bang heads in order to strive to get the number of games that we want. But, yeah, Gary and Bruce will... So does it ever go the other way? Like, does Gary say, I want you to take 50 WWEs, and you say, no, 10? Absolutely. Correct. Okay. Absolutely. It's up to us as a business to make a commitment to a particular title of game. And sometimes we can get it wrong too. Like I expressed with X-Men, we got it wrong, we overcommitted. And then you get games like KISS where we probably didn't commit to enough, you know, and then we struggled to fulfil some orders. And it's very difficult. I mean, also taking into consideration, guys, that we don't see the game, what it looks like, any of the artwork package, anything on the play field, none of the features of the machine. We see it at the same time as you guys see it. Yeah. So you talk about how hard it is to determine the market strength of a particular game and to determine our commitment. We haven't even seen the game either. Yeah. It's very difficult. Yeah. Very difficult. So after the initial, sorry, Marty, after the initial ordering process of ordering, kind of like, you know, there's a certain amount of pros and alleys, and then lastly is the premiums, and you've got orders for them. After that, like, there were some titles like The Walking Dead and even Metallica, which kind of matured over time code-wise, and then there's, you know, a second wave of buyers. Do you ever have those titles kind of, like, in stock, or do you just then, like, after the initial batch, just order what you have paid orders for? A bit of both. You know, we'll always... Our biggest problem for the last probably three or four years is stock. You know, everything that we buy is normally pre-sold and we'd love to have, you know, a full range of games on the shelf. It's just not always possible. You know, one, being a cash flow issue and two, just they can't make them fast enough sometimes, you know, and take, for instance, Ghostbusters was a tough year for us because we had so much demand for Ghostbusters. We wanted to buy so many more Ghostbusters because we had such a big demand for it. They just couldn't make them in time for us. I wouldn't say that we lost sales as a result, but we had a lot of people waiting for the games. We have a lot of... I was only talking to a customer this morning about Iron Maiden and he said, look, he really wants a pro, but he'd be happy to wait a year for Iron Maiden just to sort of make sure that everything's OK with the code, to make sure that there's no bugs and glitches, to make sure there's no mechanical files, if there are any fixed kits that they get applied to the game, etc. There are, you know, I would say more so with the enthusiast market that there's an element of just waiting to sort of see what the game comes... You know, it's a big commitment to buy and to put a deposit down for a game that you've never seen and or never played. You know, it goes a little bit against the grain of the natural purchasing procedure. You know, you don't buy a car without going and test driving it. Yeah. The same thing happens with the pinball. A lot of these guys buy pinballs on their limited edition. We sold our allocation of 50 limited edition Iron Maiden pinballs without even seeing a photo of the machine. You know, nobody... Or the Batman without seeing anything. That's right. We don't have a choice because we know that the limited edition is limited. It's going to sell out. So we sort of just got to... You know, it comes back to why information is leaked and why podcasts like us pesky people sort of report on this information because people are trying to make as much of an informed decision as they can, particularly when it comes to limited edition where you don't have a choice but to either put your money down or not. Yeah, and we've been obliging to a lot of concerns. we've had, especially our new customer base, you know, we'll have new customers for the first time will come and say, OK, I want to buy a limited edition, you know, I'd like to leave a deposit, but I don't know what the game looks like. But I love Iron Maiden. What happens in the scenario if we don't like the game when it's released? If we see a photo of the machine or we see some gameplay of the machine and we just don't like it, you know, what happens then? And we oblige by saying that we will be happy, more than happy, to return that deposit in full without any penalty at a moment's notice if you decide to change your mind. You know, really, for us, it's the least we can do as a bit of respect for, you know, requesting a deposit on something they haven't seen, but also we know that we're going to sell it anyway. You know, we've got a waiting list for people if or in the event that this happens. So it's not really a risk for us and it's something that we extend to our customers. So, I mean, you're dealing with Stern here. They kind of dominate the pinball market, and you're obviously in a very difficult position as a distributor, like you've just mentioned, all the factors you have to take into account. But at the same time, you know that when Stern announces a machine, there's going to be demand for it regardless of what it is. They're going to bring it out. There's not going to be a five-year delay. The company's not going to go bankrupt overnight. saying that there's been a slight kind of resurgence in original themes with Dialed In and Total Nuclear Annihilation. Is that something that you would welcome Stern to kind of bring out if they decide to enter that market? I know we had Wonelli, but that was kind of more of a contract game with Withbang released under the Stern banner. Is that something that you'd be interested in? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we sort of, you know, we don't take this lightly. I mean, we're very confident, we're very humbled by the fact that, you know, we talk about the limited editions, that people have enough faith and confidence in Stern and AMD, for that matter, to deliver a game in a timely manner as per, and to meet their expectations, if not exceed their expectations. We're very humbled by that. We certainly don't take that for granted. in terms of original licensed games I have been a number of titles have been run past us original titles none that I would mention but we would certainly recommend, we would certainly welcome that if that ever came to fruition in saying that though it would make me I wouldn't say nervous but more concerned purely because licensed themed games have sold so well you know and as a technician myself you know the golden rule is if it not broken don fix it So if licensed titles are selling well and rock themes seem to sell strongest, hey, let's keep running with that, you know, until... Well, again, when you're talking about the fact that you've got to give a commitment, it would be much harder to gauge an expression of interest on an original title. are hugely, hugely difficult. Hugely difficult. Because you'd be basically... You said you don't take developers into the formula because it's just too hard, but I guess that's when you really have to take the developer and the coder and the artist into consideration. Yes and no. I mean, you talk about titles like Wonelli. It was our decision to order those games in on an order-only basis. You know, we weren't going to buy 20 of them and put them on the shelf. And it's probably a good thing that we didn't. I'm not saying it was a bad game or it was just... It was something terribly wrong with the game. It was just something a little bit boutique and a little bit niche. And we would... Like you say, it is very difficult to determine the market strength of something that isn't licensed because you just don't have that to lean on. So, Wonelly was something very boutique and very completely against the grain for Stern, and I think that definitely transpired in the sales. Do you think there's a market, I mean, Stern have kind of joked about it before, because, I mean, Wonelly and the Pats Can Crusher, they both, they run Spike. You know, they have that little D&D in there. You know, it's that tiny kind of LCD display that acts like a D&D. do you think that there is a market for them redoing their old Stern Electronic games from the late 70s and early 80s and putting it in some kind of spike system? Possibly, I think the factor that you'd have to consider and would probably be the decisive factor for Stern is whether they could transition older games into spike and that's something of a concern that I've spoken to about with Gary was if we wanted to vault release games that are in high demand and the spam system becomes obsolete, can the spike system do what we want it to do with older themes and older titles? And the short answer was yes, we can do it. I mean, anything's possible. It's just a matter of is it a viable possibility? Is it something that's going to be worthwhile and something that's going to be a smart business decision. So, you know, we have very little influence over what Stern release in terms of titles. We have very, very little influence. We have our suggestions and we have our, I guess, our opinions, but we have certainly very little influence over what they ultimately do at the end. And we're OK with that. we'd be silly to argue that. I mean, we've had a very good run over the last 10 years and I just don't see any reason why that's going to change in the near future. Hey, Michael, I mean, with Stern releasing, like, maybe one Vault edition per year and last... What was the last one? Was it Spider-Man or was it one after that? Oh, sorry, ACDC. ACDC, obviously. Yeah, that's the last year. Yeah, and Spider-Man before that. Now, maybe you know, maybe you don't know what's coming next, but if you were to base it on the customer inquiries of wanting to buy something that isn't available, like Tron, what titles are up there, and do you think would make good candidates for Vault releases based on people calling you and asking you for titles you can't get? Oh, Tron. Yeah, off the bat, absolutely straight away, Tron. Tron would have to be the most sought-after Vault game that we get requested. it's always it's always the game that is no longer in production that people want you know that's just Murphy's Law you know as soon as they stop making Star Trek everybody wants Star Trek they stop making Walking Dead everybody wants Walking Dead you know so I mean that's why Stern games kind of like especially in the Australian market really hold their value is because eventually they stop making them and you know like then the price kind of goes up whereas if things are made forever, like for some of these original titles, then, you know what I mean? Like, what's the point in buying a second-hand one when you can buy one new? Do you think, you know, yeah, you guys sell Stern exclusively. Now, is that by your own choice, or is that kind of like, you know, because you're contracted to only sell Sterns? We have an obligation and we've made a commitment to Stern to be exclusive to Stern. And that's been an agreement that's been in place forever, since day one. And we have no reason or any desire to move away from that or change that. Again, if something's not broken, you don't fix it. That's probably one of Bruce's arguments when he's arguing with Gary, when Gary says 35 Iron Maiden LEs. He's like, this is the only thing I can sell, Gary. Come on. We use our long-term successful business relationship to get a lot of things over the line with Mr. Stern. And, you know, sometimes with varied results, you know. But we have a long-term, very successful, very positive relationship with Stern. And I must say that we deal with a lot of manufacturers around the world for a lot of other products that we sell here. and stern pinball, pinball machines in general, would have to be the hardest product to support purely because of the mechanical nature of what pinball machines are. But I would say, without a doubt, and I'm not saying this with my stern hat on, I'm saying this as a technician and as someone that's been in the industry for a long time, the level of support that stern pinball give us, which allows us to support their product in return locally, is superior and is so above grade, it's not funny. You know, anything that we need, we get. Anything that we need to support their games, we get. Yeah, it's easy for us to support their games if the manufacturer supports us in return. And as a result, that's the reason why we've been selling games for 25 years for Stern. Can I ask you a question then? So it's kind of to do with, not necessarily allocation, but take the limited edition out. What's sort of like the percentage split that you would sell pro versus premium? Oh, good question. And that varies in different titles, obviously. From memory, we probably sell broken down between pro, premium and limited edition, probably about 40% limited edition, probably 40% premium and then about 20% pro. and then those numbers can change at any given time variously, just slightly, but normally... I think they're rich. Yeah, well... The pro is the elite. You know, the... Every title is different, as you know, and every model presents its own challenges, you know, and you take, for instance, games like Guardians of the Galaxy or Star Trek with our salesman's hat on, you know, trying to determine the differences between a pro and a premium, it's very difficult sometimes. And a lot of people will take a pro simply because they don't see the bells and whistles that may be available on the premium. And then you get games like Metallica, say, for instance, or Star Wars, where there's huge amounts of differences between the premium and the pro. And people see that and they can appreciate that and they don't mind paying a little bit extra for the premium games. So for every different title, there's a different percentage broken down between the models of each title. One last thing, just I guess probably around the allocation that'll be done. Did you think that everybody was surprised at how well Iron Maiden sold? That's a good question. You know, no, I don't think they were surprised how... I don't think they were surprised at the strength of that licence. You know, Iron Maiden is a current very strong, extremely strong license. I don't think people were... That's a good question. I'm trying to think if that answers correctly. I say that because a lot of people have said, well, why didn't they only do 500 limited edition? Surely they could have done 1,000 or more. And we just don't know. Look, the problem is if they start changing the number of limited edition games, it becomes unfair to the people that do get them. They have to, and I know CERN are very protective of the limited edition owners, in the sense that they try to limit where they sell replacement decals or armour or even components of the limited edition games because they simply want to protect the limited edition games, sorry, the limited edition owners. They don't want people dressing up pro and premium games to look like limited edition games. They, it's a very good question, to be honest with you. I don't think anyone was surprised. I don't think anybody's ever surprised that we sell our limited edition games. I mean, they are limited by nature. They only make so many worldwide. If you get one, you're extremely lucky. And if you get one, you're almost a certainty not to, sorry, you're almost a certainty to retain the value of that game should you decide to sell it, you know, in the future. it's certainly a special thing I think Job World understand by creating or providing the market with three different options they've certainly catered for three different types of markets that really enjoy that particular title every horse has its course and I think there's certainly mums and dads that can't see the value in premium and limited edition models there's enthusiasts that want all the bells and whistles that don't mind paying a little bit extra for extra on the playfield. And then there's that collector enthusiast market that has to have a limited edition game. And if they don't get a limited edition game, they won't buy the machine. They'll wait. Sounds like money. Oh, Al's dead. Where are the alleys, by the way? Are the alleys and the pros on the water at the moment? They'll be shipping at the end of this month, which will bring them into Australia in July. So they're coming in together as one? Yeah, so end of June, beginning of July. There'll be limited editions. There'll be some very varied games in there as well. I think there may be even a small number of premiums, but the bulk of the premiums will come in the order after that, which will land them... They'll be landed here sort of late July. That's a lot of waiting, Marty. You've got to go. Yeah, you know what? I've still got a save up, so I'm absolutely fine with that. Do you do trade-ins on Hobbits, mate? No. Michael, one last question is, do you think the overall growth of pinball with other manufacturers, do you think that's beneficial towards yourself, which I guess means beneficial towards Stern? Or do you think that with too many players in the market, it can have maybe a detrimental effect on people's confidence. I mean, like Stern, I guess they have their hiccups with the ghosting issues and some of the cabinet stuff, which has all been resolved. But do you think like highway pinball collapsing, for example, and Dutch pinball not being able to ship anything, do you think that has a negative effect on the confidence of customers that buy machines off you? Absolutely. Yeah, I think everything that happens in the pinball industry has an effect, whether it be good or bad on our industry as a whole. You know, with companies like Highway and Dutch Pimble not being able to produce games and people having their money, I guess, either lost or in limbo, it certainly has an effect on what we're doing here. I mean, there was that debacle with a distributor down in Melbourne with the original Wizard of Oz Jersey Jack games where people lost a lot of money and then there was class actions and there was suing involved. All that had a negative reaction and a negative influence over what we were doing here. And it's not fair, but we have to be strong enough and good enough to get around that and to persuade people that, hey, that's not us. That's nothing to do with us. But people were surely, they were shaken by that. They were concerned by that, as you would normally. That's an immediate reaction. and it was to be expected. I mean, but the other side of that coin is when you've got manufacturers like Jersey Jack producing really good games successfully and in numbers and making an impact on the market, that's certainly a good thing because it keeps Stern excited to make, you know, better, even better games to make even... I mean, if it wasn't for Jersey Jack, you know, You have to question, would we have ever seen an LCD display on any of the Stern games? And the fact that we do, the fact that we have LCD screens on new Stern games is fantastic. It's changed the whole dynamic of what I've ever known pinball to be. I mean, I've been in the industry for 24, 25 years. I was so heavily traditional in the dot matrix display. if you ask my opinion of an LCD screen I said no, the game's on the playfield I don't want to see screen footage or I'm not going to be looking at the screen but after seeing it for the first time on Batman I was just like, oh my god, how good is this? and we've never looked back and we probably won't look back I think Jersey Jack has certainly influenced Stern in a positive way and the market's in a healthy shape at the moment the market's in a good place In summary, I guess, just like us We can't wait for the five days of Deep Root to see where that holds. Michael, thanks so much for coming on the show and letting us kind of pick a brain about what it's like to be the sole distributor and importer of sperm products into Australia. And, yeah, Martin looks forward to getting his Iron Maiden. Absolutely. We look forward to shipping it to him. Yeah. Can't wait, mate. Thank you. Thanks, guys. All right. See you later. Thanks, mate. Cheers, mate. Bye-bye. So that was Michael from AMD. What did we learn, Ryan? One of the biggest things that stood out for me was the allocations. And obviously, I think the Australian market is pretty different than the U.S. market. There's a lot of collectors here versus a lot of operators in the U.S. And CERN always puts out different numbers. There's always, you know, maybe it's 50-50 now, maybe it's 50-50. And he said that the number of alleys coming into Australia for most titles, you know, most titles, 40% LE, 40% premium, 20% pro. Those figures really surprised me because surely that isn't... That's not a lot of machines. That's not the fact that it's a lot of machines. Well, it's not. If you think about it, if it's 50, 50 limited edition, so it's the same in premium, so there's another 50. So it's only 125% in Australia. I thought it would have been a lot for each title. Yeah. So three or four titles a year, so like, you know, under 500. Yeah, we're trying to just unpack their business model here. Yeah, I don't know. There's usually more than 50. You know, most LEs are kind of a bit more than that anyway, but those are just some rough figures that he kind of pulled out, but I thought surely there'd be more pros out there for operators. Yeah, exactly. I guess it kind of proves that Australia isn't there yet with the whole operator market. Well, didn't he say, you know, he reckons that, was it like 90% of the machines go to home users, mums and dads? Maybe that's why there's so many Aussies that, you know, per capita are kind of interested in pinball because of that strong home market and why we have, you know, the third most amount of tournament players and the second most amount of podcast listeners. But it probably also explains why you just don't see a lot of pinball out there in the wild. We just don't. Like, we talked about, you know, Brisbane and Gold Coast having 157 machines. In Melbourne, we would have 50 machines, 60 machines. Yeah. That's not a lot. Yeah. And, you know, how many people live in Melbourne? Like, three, four million? Yeah. So, it's a bubble, guys. All right, let's talk, let's go to Slam the Top 100. Yes. Slam the Top 100. So just for people that are listening for the first time, because you are getting a lot of new listeners, Slam the Top 100, basically we generate a number from 1 to 100 that corresponds to the pin side, top 100 list of pinballs of all time, and then me and Marty argue back and forth about which one is better. And then the next day we put it up on Facebook and people vote for who had the best argument. But sometimes it doesn't always go that way. Last week we had Ming arguing for fishtails and Martin arguing for Transformers. What were the end results, Marty? The end results were, it was a record week. We had 75 people vote. Yes. You got 36 of them. Oh, well done. Nice job. Well done, Ryan. But obviously the more superior argument for Transformers with 52% of the vote or 53% of the vote, if you count an email vote that we got as well, I was the winner. So tell us what you really think, Marty. Which one would you rather play? Transformers. Really? Absolutely. Without a doubt. And I think that's why people voted for me, because they knew I was telling the truth. And I'll say this, because I just find fishtails, it's like what I said, it's a really basic rule set. It's the boat ramp, boat ramp, monster fish or it's multiball. That's kind of it. I mean, there's a video mode as well. Yeah, that's why I lost. I didn't mention the video mode. And I think that you know, it really hadn't stood the test of time against most machines and I think Transformers probably represents unexplored territory. People sort of look at it and go, well it is a modern stern and yeah, maybe I don't understand the rules but it's got a bit of an interesting layout and all that kind of stuff. I honestly would easily have a Transformers over Fishtowns. Easily. Yeah. It was funny because in the votes, we said, well, you talked about how good the sound was, and even when I was trying to bag Transformers, I said, yes, it does have good sound, and that's the only good thing about it. One person who voted for Transformers to win was David Thiel, who did the sounds. Transformers. I thought that was amazing. I thought he was going to vote for that. Thank you. I think the gift that I put of, what's her name? Megan Fox. Megan Fox. That might have helped as well. Sure. This is my Fishtails gift. We had an awesome comment on Facebook. Do you want to read that one, Marley? Yep. So this is from Tom. He said, so my daughter was going to be named Alexandra, but a lot of old family had issues and kept saying Alexandria. My wife was in labour and we were at the hospital discussing name options. She was napping and Transformers was on the room TV. Megan Fox in Transformers basically got my attention and when my wife woke up, I asked her what about naming our daughter Michaela since that's Megan Fox's character's name. My wife liked the name Michaela and my daughter secretly was named after the gift that we put up there above, so had to vote for Transformers. That is an amazing story. I wonder if his wife actually knows the story of that. His wife's asleep, his wife's just gone through hell, gone through labour. He's sitting there, and as Jeff Teola says, he went from six to midnight. He's like, all right, that's a good night. I love that story. It's not like they named their child after a pinball machine. I would never ever do that, Marnie. That's tacky as... Have I told that story? I don't know. I don't want people to know the name of my kid, but it happens, okay? My kid is called Transformers 2. It's called Terminator 2. Oh, I stuffed up the joke. Oh, well, we've still got some more feedback as well. So someone said that they're voting for Transformers. This is from Eddie Stephens. Thank you, Eddie. And not just because Richard Rose hates it, it's so underrated. always compared to games released at the time sounds are insane at a sub and a shaker and Black Ops Helicopter sounds woof woof woof woof woof rattling the glass better than Star Wars in every way it's funny because it must be so frustrating as a sound engineer kind of working for Stern maybe up until recently or maybe still now the guy I have now that worked on Ghostbusters and I think on Iron Maiden as well he is quite a talented guy because I love the sounds that come out of those machines. David Field does amazing sounds, but the sound system on these Stern pinball machines, I think, don't, you know... Don't do justice. Yeah, transformers need, like, an external sub or, you know, the pinball pro or what are they called, the super fidelity sub kits, and it just, it is, there's certain sounds that'll make the whole machine kind of vibrate, And, yeah, it must be frustrating for him not working with a sound system that is giving his sounds full justice. Anyway. Two more comments. Two more comments and then we're done. So one of my favourites from Jeff Rivera from the People Podcast, he said, neither belongs in the top 100. I refuse to vote. Yeah, fair enough. Point well made. Sorry, when I saw it getting close, I was like, you know, maybe you can vote now. It's like he just bowed. And he still didn't bow. No. And Jonathan said, Fish Tales for the win. It is like an old school Iron Man. Transformers is lame. Megan Fox is hot. Shane Sheehan isn't in the game. Admit it, Marty. It was a gift they won. It was. Absolutely. An old school Iron Man. It is very brutal. It sounds absolutely unforgiving, but I'm not sure if you'd call it an Iron Man, though. Yeah. All right. Do you want the first number or the second number, Marty? No, we'll do it as usual. You go the first number. Please generate a number from 0 to 100. Okay. 19. Oh, 19 is Wizard of Oz. Yes! We both have that machine. You've got to lie, Marty. I heard you say last time on the stream, ah, what a great machine. I love this machine. You've never seen that? Complete lie. Nope. Guys, it's on Twitch. It's never been said. Okay. You should have taken the first number, Marty. All right, here we go. Please generate a number from zero to 100. I'm scrolling down the bottom of the list. Oh! Four. Monster Bash. Monster Bash! Okay. Do you want to do this? Do you want to do this? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, okay. I know Wizard of Oz back to front, but I'm just thinking, what can I say about struggling already? Okay, let's get the timer out. Wizard of Oz, the best widebody of all time. This machine propelled pinball forward. It stagnated for about 20 years when Buddy Williams went under, and this is the machine that got pinball back on track. Absolutely beautiful machine in every way to look at, to play, super deep rules. Absolute Masterstroke by Keith P. Johnson He said it's Lord of the Rings version 2 and Lord of the Rings is Stern's best pinball machine ever. Full RGB LEDs beautiful screen a wizard mode that you will never get to, Marty That's my 30 seconds You ready for more? You ready with Monster Dash? Of course I am Ready, set, go Let's go the triple threat right now You've got Gomez you've got O'Connor and you've got Sheets Jr the three of those, think about it one of the best layouts that George Gomez ever did with one of the best rule sets that Lyman Sheets ever did it's fantastic, what I like about the rules in particular is it's one of those ones where you kind of know what you need to do hit the wolfman, hit the wolfman, start wolfman hit Frankenstein and then you can start multiball, bring that in with other modes oh, it's amazing time's up Okay I'm going to spend my 30 seconds Bagging Monster Bash Even though I could probably spend 5 minutes talking about Wizard of Oz Are you ready Marty? Yep Monster Bash, boring layout The biggest fan layout you can ever do And it just has a bunch of toys on there And people are like, oh my gosh, the playfield is so packed Packed with what? With a little moving theory that you hit? Fucking boring, okay Now, that left ramp, the bride ramp The worst designed ramp in pinball because you can shoot that and get like 90% and it'll go all the way up and then it'll slowly trickle the way back down. That is the number one shit team out of that pinball machine. Boring rules. You pretty much get one multiball that you have to try and stack and if you don't do that, you're getting nowhere. Done. Except for the two other multiballs that do the same thing, but sure. I'm talking about Frankenstein. If you don't get a Frankenstein multiball, everything else started. Yeah, well, there's other multiballs. So, I am so confident of this win. This is going to be my rebuttal. You ready? Yeah, I'm ready. Set, go. Monster Bash. The show of the centuries is about to begin. Rebuild Frankenstein and he'll jump off his slab, ready to jam on his keyboard. If you can dig out the mummy, he'll dust himself off and plug in his face. It'll take a quarter moon, half moon, four million for the wolfman to give you a howling drumbeat. As fast as you can spell Dracula, the world's coolest vampire will fly out of his coffin dying to sink his teeth into a mean guitar riff. Lure the creature up from the slimy depths of his beloved lagoon and hear him crank on his sax and in no time the bride of Frankenstein will be warmed up and will be wailing about her golden time. You couldn't even read the flyer in 30 seconds, Marty. Come on. Guys, make Marty pay, guys. Come on. Reading from the flyer. Lame. Lame. It has to be your own stuff. Please, I'm going to give you a badge as well, Marty. I'm going to give you a drunk Trudeau gift because it has creature in there, okay? And creature in the back of the game. He didn't even get what they talked about, the phantom flip. The best rule in pinball ever. It doesn't fucking work. This is what happens. Every time the phantom flip, I see it on the pinball machine. Like, you know, maybe 80% at best it works. And then you kind of let it do its thing. And then everyone's like, oh, it's self-learning. Like, you know, what it does is it knows if it made the shit or not, and it self-adjusts. I'm like, your pinball machine hasn't fucking moved in two years, and it's still not working every time. It doesn't self-adjust. Like, that is the biggest fucking lie I've ever heard. It doesn't self-adjust. If it self-adjusts, show me, someone sent me a video of it working ten times in a row. Doesn't exist. Possible. It's bullshit. It's fucking boring. And everyone who buys a Monster Bash Alley, shame on you. Guys, we just joke about this stuff. We both love both machines. And it's just whoever had the best argument and the best gift, we'll put that on Facebook. And we'll see who wins next time. Awesome. I like this a lot better when I can see your face, Mike. You know my bullshit face now. You couldn't even look at the camera. I was giving you the finger the entire time. I didn't see that. Yeah. I didn't see that. I was trying to put you off. Anyway. So we had some events recently. Yeah, there's a lot of events that go on this week. And it's funny. There's just every weekend, there's pinball happening around the world. Which one should we start with? The Coolie Classic? Let's start with the Coolie Classic. So this was in Koolangatta up on the Gold Coast. The Goldies. Right, so the Gold Coast, you know, is about, what, an hour and a half or so from Brisbane. Yep. Brisbane is kind of like the central hub of pinball at the moment with competitions and places. So I guess it's got like Portland. I think Portland in the US is the biggest place. This is the Miami of Australia. Yes. They get the best Carl Weathers. Not very good for work there. compared to Melbourne. Yeah, it's a big tourist destination. Over Christmas, it's packed. Yeah, don't go there when it's busy. Great Carl Weathers all year round. So I had a look at some stats of the figures and the attendance compared to last year. Last year, the Three Stripes event had like 20 or 30 people. This year, there was like 60 or 70. 70, yeah. Yeah, a lot. There's over 100 competitors, I think, across. There were five events. We weren't there, but the three-strike tournament was won by Jordan Treadway. Good on you, Jordan. He flew up there. We actually got to watch that one live. Someone was Facebook streaming the finals, and it was brilliant to watch Jordan win, basically on bonus. So it was very, very close between him and Jason Lambert. The main event... Coolie Classic. The Coolie Classic, yep, was won by Jason Lambert, and he also organised the event with Holly Mills and Peter Watt. So massive effort to kind of tournament direct, organise and get out the win. Then there were two Flip Frenzies and they were won by Jason Lambert, won by Paul Jones, who's the current Australia's highest-ranked player. And then there was the Australian Women's Championship, which was won by Holly Mills. Oh, good on you, Holly. She's awesome. She is. I met her when I was there. Yeah, she's lovely. So, yeah. Awesome. We weren't there, so there's nothing else we can really say about it, except that that was pretty big. It was a big event. Yeah, I mean, the New York City Championship, I mean, everyone's been talking about that. I mean, that had 120 players, so this is not far behind that. Yeah, and they had two Iron Maidens there as well. Yeah, two Iron Maidens, so lots of feedback from that. I actually got feedback from someone, I won't mention who, and they said they didn't like it. and I kind of pushed them on why, and they just said, you know, and this guy owns a lot of machines, and he's a very good player, and he just said that he, I don't know, there's nothing, I can't remember what he said, but he just didn't like it. Yeah, fair enough. It's off everyone. Yeah, you can't please everyone all the time. I know. And so we also had Rage Tilt at Ryan's version 2.0. Huge event, Marty, huge. it is so you you would have had close to 100 people not soon enough it it oh man it I mean luck gets in the way of pinball right Like this stuff is more important but a lot of people got committed and at the last minute didn't rock up. Oh, hey, I went out last night and got really drunk. I can't come to your event. I'm like, yeah, that's cool. But, you know, 25 or 26 people ended up rocking up, so more than last time. I made people rage nonstop, Marty. I reckon I hold the title for the hardest competition in Australia at the moment. Well, I may have mentioned last week, just in passing, about how tough your machines were set up. Yeah. Super tough. I mean, 12 rounds of match play with probably a half an hour, 40-minute break done in less than five hours. So pretty tough machines. it's not for everyone you know as I said my goal is to make everyone kind of try and be better at pinball by punishing them into pinball submission Marty your first couple of games on like Metallica and ACDC you were in the zone I watched you on Metallica getting to crank it up and just absolutely blitz the machine yeah I watched you on like Ball 1 or 2 be like 167 you know million on ACDC with no outlanes yep so you were you were definitely in the zone for some reason I was just nailing those ramps and I remember one stage on the fly on the fly on the fly over and over again without trapping out the ball I was just like wow seven times in a row but I also remember I had a two ball multiball so it was jam multiball and I was two balls up the right ramp following each other then to the left ramp following each other then to the right ramp following each other like flip flip flip flip But it was, and so I actually, well, I got GC on that machine. And the second time you played ACDC, you put up on your second ball 114 million, I think it was. Sure. And I was sitting on something like 10 million. I failed jamming. I was nowhere to be found. But on my last ball, I managed to kind of stack jamming and album. And it was by mistake because I never play stack multiballs. But it just kind of, I went for the shot, accidentally hit a TNT target. and then I played both of them. And I got to choose a song before I did that and I chose Thunderstruck because Thunderstruck is Thunderluck. When you have jam, multiball and Thunderstruck and a lot of balls whizzing around, you basically can't not get a jackpot because if you hit your shot, you're getting a jackpot. If you miss your shot, you're getting a Thunderstruck kind of, you know. So ACDC is going to go down as one of the greatest tournament games of all time because this is the good thing about it as well. Iron Maiden, you know, amazing machines, a lot of stuff going on. When you have the song jackpot lit and the cannon's about to start on ACDC, you know, you've got your song jackpot lit and it's moving the cannon to make the shot. You can still be in multiple and crazy stuff's going around, but that's like a staging moment. You know, all the lights go red. You know, it's that nervous factor. Whereas in most other games, they can't do that. There's no staging. You might hit a jackpot, but the ball is whizzing back around. You don't get to enjoy it. You don't get that kind of nervousness before. So I managed to pull off a big song jackpot, and I caught you, and I ended up winning that game. But that was the highlight of the day for me. So tournament distractions, Marty. This is the hot topic of the week here and in New York. So, yeah, I don't know how much I want to say about it, but it really got to me. and the reason why it got to me is because sometimes you feel like someone's just got a, you know, there's an angry outburst, and then it's going to stop. But when it's relentless, it's like a grinding cancer, and it's just like enough is enough. But it was from the start. Before the tournament started, he realized that he wasn't going to play all the games, and he's never played in a tournament before, and the comment was, this is bullshit, it's not fair. it should be one person, you play the game every single time because what if I don't get to play the game that I'm good at? And then it turned into your big buck hunter is broken because I hit the buck two times really quickly and it caused a tilt on the machine. Steven Bowden, please add that to your excuses for losing. I hit the buck two times really quickly and it caused the machine to tilt. not him moving the machine, hitting a switch two times in succession. You know, the flippers were fucked on every single machine. You know, I don't know. It was, as I said, I tried to calm this person down and say, look, I was the same when I first went to a tournament. I smashed my machines at home, and then I was kind of, I took a bit of a bruise to my ego because I couldn't score high on these machines. You know, I've never seen machines set up so high when I was at a tournament, blah, blah, blah. And it was all just going over his head. So, you know, what can you do? I mean, I couldn't really kick him out. I don't think he's going to be coming back again. I don't think it ruined the day for everybody, but it drained a lot of my energy because I can't be around people like that because they're just soul suckers for me. I don't want to give too many details of who he is. I'm pretty sure people will figure it out. But basically, he got a lift there by someone, so I couldn't really ask him to leave because he doesn't have anywhere to go. but it's yeah I don't think that character is suited for a tournament because unless he's winning and rubbing in people's faces I don't think he's going to be having a good time so I mean I think a tournament has to be open to everybody so I mean this this will happen but I just hope the other people were other people there that have been going to a tournament for the first time I hope it didn't ruin the experience for them because I talked about it kind of like famously on one of our first episodes that I went to my first tournament in Melbourne and there was a guy that was not as bad as him but still kind of like a bit of a dickhead, and that put me off going back because I didn't want to hang around people like that. This is an anomaly. It's a one-off. Sorry, let's just go by the results quickly. Give respect to Richard Rhodes, who pulled off an amazing last game on Star Trek to come away with the win. He wasn't in the top group the entire day, and then he got in right at the end and then blitzed the last game to win. Fab came second, I came third, you came fourth. similar results to last time and a quick thanks to everyone that helped me out moving machines because moving machines all around my house and into the garage, not easy and thank you everyone for helping me out to do that New York City Championship I woke up in the morning and I watched it and I don't know, the more I'm getting to pinball the more I really appreciate when you put four high caliber players like that on the same machine and set it up really hard it's amazing to see their flipper skills and their strategy kind of being totally different. Like, Keith Elwin's Aerosmith game was totally different to Bowen's and totally different to John's, and they all got different scores, obviously. It was just interesting to see stuff like that. And what was really interesting, and I think we saw it on Aerosmith, I think it was Aerosmith where, coming into the last ball, Bowen had nothing. Yeah. It was Aerosmith, wasn't it? Yeah, Erasmus. He had nothing, so he couldn't go for the three multiple option. He got it up to five, and then he just... Scrayed. Yeah. I don't know. It ended up being won by Bowen and with John... I don't know how to say his last name. Reppagool? Yeah. He's a guy who's always on Papa and an awesome voice. And Keith Elwin came third. and it's weird because I guess he's possibly the first person to, first kind of like high-level player to not only design a pinball machine but also code it. So he knows everything kind of back to front and then someone else beats you on your machine. I know it sounds like, it can't be the best feeling, right? Like, I mean, Lyman Sheets would get beaten on his pinball machines all the time, but he didn't. I remember Bruce telling a story on Slant Up podcast where Lyman kind of was trying to shoot the crank it up collect or the crank it up start on Metallica. And he kind of walked away from the pinball machine. He was like, fucking stupid scoop or something like that. He's not responsible for that. Because he designed it and he wrote the code framework for it as well. So the key strategy was totally different. It was shooting loop jackpots all day long and everyone else was kind of playing modes. so it's just really good to watch and that's why I'm glad that you're watching these things particularly these live tournaments because if you think about the first two games I started driving in as I think John had won the first game and he had just nailed the first game and he was looking really good on the second game and I just thought you know what he's in a really good position now to win this and then it just had this massive turnaround yeah and And, yeah, I love watching it over the stream. That's what I'd love to watch that in front of me, you know. Like, I can't wait for, like, you know, Jordan and Richard and you to be playing off in, like, a final kind of round at my house with the machines set up just brutal and just watching different strategies because everyone has different ways of attacking machines when they're set up harder or more difficult than the standard. There isn't just one way to play Aerosmith or one way to play Iron Man. There's different ways to attack it. Yeah. So, and again, you just watch them nail their shots. And what I also love is the commentary that you have as well. So it was very well commentated. Thank you, guys. Waparelli. Really sort of talking you through what they're doing and where they're making good and bad decisions. It's really good to watch. And so just so you know, the winner of the Women's Championship at the New York City Championships was, I think it's Elisa? I want to say Elisa, Elisa, Eliza? Correct us, email us in and tell us. But yes, it was, I'm going to say Elisa Parks was the winner. So well done there. What a normally, right? I know. and I think, wasn't it, Step Wider came second. Congratulations. So the other thing that happened and, I mean, there's a lot of kind of horrible news that we're talking about this week and, you know, I hate that we're talking about, like, you know, the 25 people coming to my house for paintball and we concentrated on that kind of annoying guy, but, you know, things have to be, I guess, addressed so they kind of don't happen again and people are aware of it. So there was another incident that happened on the weekend at the New York City Championship, Marty. Yeah, it's kind of a he said, she said, two sides of the story. A couple of people from the Slam Tilt podcast were there, and I guess they will be talking about it on their episode that drops every Wednesday. We're not going to give you second-hand information because we weren't there. So a couple of people from the Slam Tilt podcast were there, and I guess you can hear that on their show in a couple of days. Yep. And that's all we will speak of it. Yeah. This week in pinball. What would you speak? Well, I know we can't really talk about the tournament that we did together because we've already talked about that. Did you enjoy yourself? I mean, okay, besides the guy, did you enjoy yourself more this time than last time? Yes. Because, I mean, as I said, you were in the zone and you did play a lot better than you did last time. Yep. It just, just like the last two games, it's kind of just F you and E A. It really did, and not in a good way. So it was, it was just, overall, loved it. I loved it. And you know what? Yes, I had a big old whinge last week about the fact that you ruined Lord of the Rings. Good news is, I didn't have to play it. Because apparently, in this competition, you don't get to play all of the machines. That's bullshit, Matt. Hey, I was playing... One more story about that. I was playing Big Bug Hunter, right? And I was playing an absolutely horrible game, right? Remember that story I told that when the ball's in the pops, it doesn't kind of, like, hold the ball saver? Yep. And your ball saver can run out. So what happened is the balls were in the pops for so long that when it exited the pops, the buck, the deer, whatever it is, ran out all the way to the left, and the ball ejected right in between, you know, where the deer was and the side of the pinball machine. And you can't shake it out because the buck is angled in a certain way. So I just had to wait for kind of the ball saving for the buck to move. And I just sat there for about 15 seconds and said, this is going to drain straight down the side. I'm not going to be able to stop it at all. And sure enough, when the buck moves, hit the top of the sling and straight down the out lane. And I was like, I've played so many games with that machine, like leading up to this comp, you know, and it's never happened. and it had to happen in the comp and I had to take a last on that game because of that. So, anyway, great event. Moving on. Marnie, what did you get after this week? So, I'm going to tell you a bit of a story. A very interesting one. And it's one of these stories that... It's a positive story, right? It reminds us why we do pinball, right? So, this is it. Yeah. So, do you remember when I sold my Jurassic Park? And how it happened was somebody posted up on Facebook saying, in one of those buy-sell pinball groups, saying that they're looking for a Jurassic Park. Someone linked me, and I sold my machine to this person. About half an hour after that I got in contact, another person reached out to me and said, oh, look, if anything, if things fall through with the deal, let me know, because I've been looking for a Jurassic Park for a long time. The deal had gone through, so it didn't really happen. But what's happened since then is I've just been in contact with this guy talking about pinball, talking about everything. And then when he did find a Jurassic Park, he then sent the pictures and I did sort of back and forth. And then he got the pinball machine and he loves it. He actually also came along to Bayside. So I got him along to the tournament. So I got to meet him. Then his Jurassic Park, the T-Rex, didn't work properly. so I went over there to have a look. The blind leading the blind. I know, right? But at least I had a Jurassic Park, so I could go and I could do switch tests and I could have a look at loose connectors and all that kind of stuff. And I even went into the service menu and did all the tests there and all that kind of stuff. So I then got in touch with a good friend of the show, Lucas. He then did some troubleshooting over the phone, It turned out he needed a crankshaft replaced, which he did. And so he's now got this Jurassic Park, which is fantastic. But he was looking at potentially buying my Hobbit. So I said, look, just come over for a flip anyway. But that's not the point of my story. Where are you going with this, Mike? The point of my story is two things. First of all, this gentleman, his name's Ben, is the best-looking person in pinball. I don't know if you remember the ridiculously good-looking guy that had that photo when he was, you know, in a marathon and someone took a photo of him. This is what this guy's like, right? But when he came over, we were sort of talking, and it turns out, it turns out, and I'm just going to plug in for this, he runs a website called beardandblade.com.au, which is men's grooming products, and you've totally got to go on there. You fucking told this whole story just so that guy being good-looking. Yep, correct. but also he's a good he's just a really good bloke part of my story was for those dickheads that we had to deal with on the weekend there's also good people that you meet that get introduced to the hobby and have a good time that was the summary beardandblade.com.au fucking hell mate I just thought it was great it was like oh my god I love that shit anyway alright I want to talk about because that leads onto my story a little bit so can I Can I jump in with mine and then go back to yours? Talking about people that do amazing things, I saw a pinball machine come up on the weekend, and it was in a different state. I rang the guy up. We kind of did a deal over the phone. He was moving, so he needed the machine gone. This was like an hour and a half before the tournament. I rang someone that was close by, said, Hey, mate, I need your help. I need this machine picked up today. Do you have transport? He said, No, but I know someone who does. within an hour, the machine was not only picked up, it was also paid for by this person without me paying them yet. And I know this person well enough that he did that for me. And it's just, as I said, the goodness in this hobby totally cancels out the one or two dickheads. And that's why the dickheads, yeah, the cancer, it stands out so much because everyone else is so nice. Now, Marty, you don't know what this pinball machine is. No, because, you know, five minutes before the time you said, by the way, I bought a new pinball, and I'm not going to tell you what it is until the podcast. So tell me what it is. It's a new segment. It's in a different state, so I'm not sure when I'm going to actually get it. It needs a bit of love. Marty, this is a new segment called Piss Off, Marty, and try and get him to guess which pinball machine No, I love this. Let's do it. Let's do it. I was hoping you'd do this. Let's go. So I'm going to give one hint every week. And you can have... So you're not going to tell me tonight. You're just going to give me a hint. And if I don't get it next week, you're going to give me another hint. Well, if you really want, I can keep on giving you hints. Okay. Open up the Pinsire Top 100 list. So it's in the Pinsire 100. Yep. Okay. So it's not an absolute turn. Okay. This pinball machine is in between 50 and 100. Okay. Give me two guesses, and then I'll give you the next clue. It's not the Big Lebowski. It's not Kingpin. How that gets number 63, I just don't know. You've eliminated to 48 pinball machines by the way. I'm just going to try and think of the kinds of machines that you would get. It needs a bit of love. So it probably won't be a brand-new pinball machine, right? Right. In the last couple of years. Yeah, okay. I'm going to say whodunit. No. Well, I don't know. I don't know what... I just have to aggressively say something. You have to pick one between 50 and 100. One more guess, and then I'll give you another hint. Well, give me another thing first. Like, can you narrow down... It was made before the year 2000. Well, that's kind of what I thought it would be. It was not made by Bally or Williams. It wasn't. It wasn't. That eliminates a lot of them, Marty. So it's got to probably be a Data East. Blech. Never Data East. It's not a Data East either. Well, then it would be an older game. Let's say... Let's say... Let's say... Sword of the Fury. No. Okay. It is made the same year as Sea Witch. Oh, wow. It's that old? Yeah. Okay. So, like, one. That could eliminate... You know, it's one. Eight Ball Deluxe. Nope. I don't even know when Sea Witch was made, but... Well, it's number... Sea Witch is number 91, so you can see what year it was made, 1980. It was made one month after Sea Witch. Firepower. Nope. Frontier. Nope. Bloody hell, I'm just scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. Quicksilver. That's it? Ooh, that's a good game. Yeah, I've heard that it's a very good game, and it was kind of on the list. I remember asking Bruce and Ron what the best kind of semi-electronic games were, and I think Bruce said, like, that is easily the best of that era. Yeah. I just thought it's one of those machines. I looked it up. 1,200 units back then. I mean, Sea Witch was double that, and Sea Witch is impossible to find. So I'm like, I'm not going to even bother kind of looking around for it. And then one just kind of popped up. It needs a lot of work. And by a lot of work, I mean, like, it doesn't work. It doesn't have farts. It's a good project, yeah, for sure. I'll tell you, one of the best things about this machine, it's one of the best, but it's also a challenge as well. It literally has that bank of drop targets right in the middle of the playfield, but it's actually quite an angle. It's a good angle. Yeah. It's such an angle that you can sweep bank. Well, not only sweep them, you can bank a shot to the spinner off the drop targets. Yeah. It's a two-for-one shot. Yep. And I need games that have valuable spinners. I'm obsessed with spinners at the moment. And Sea Witch isn't coming in for me because, you know, the drop targets are worth so much in Sea Witch. But I think if you get the right values... Anyway, I'm still looking for a Stargazer, by the way. Apparently, if I keep on mentioning it, eventually it'll just fall into my lap. Yeah, that's like me mentioning that I need to sell my Hobbit. Like, that's going to make a difference. It's definitely... Well, you've lowered it to 10 grand. So that's cheap. For your model, that is a really good buy. I'm always tempted to buy it and then... No, mine's on the site. There's no point in doing that. I was almost going to say, just buy it and then try and sell mine. Anyway, back to your week money. No, look, the only thing I was going to say is that any day now, my pin stadiums are going to arrive for my Iron Maiden that is months away. But this week, so there is actually some video footage that you can see on the Penn Stadium Facebook page, but straight down the middle this week we'll be streaming an Iron Maiden LE, so make sure you watch that. We'll link their Twitch in the show notes or whoever it is, I guess. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it was a... When I was watching Iron Maiden on the stream today on New York City thing, I couldn't help to think, every time I see a game that has like... Obviously, they could have saturated the colours a bit on the, you know, increased the brightness on the footage. But there's a big dark spot on a lot of people that stream it. So if there is a game that kind of needs, not needs, but would warrant pin stadiums, I think I'm in as a good candidate. Yes. What else do you have to say this week, Marnie? That's really it. That's really it. Shall we go to the mailbag? Let's go to the mailbag. Well, it's mailbag and it's also some comments as well. So we're sort of doing a bit of backtracking on some of the comments that we have on the Facebook. Unfortunately, most of them get caught by the spam filters. We've got to go in there and release them. but the first one is actually from Peppers. Now, Peppers also watches my stream as well, so I know that he is a Hobbit owner, so he said, Love your interview with Keith P. Johnson. I'm really energized about my Hobbit. Thank you for making my day. Cool. The other one was from Kui. I hope I pronounced that right. I did it out of the help of pronouncing his name. Great episode with Zombie Yeti. To answer your question about Paragon, On my machine, the ball constantly lands on the lower right flipper squarely on the left third of the flipper if the flipper was divided into thirds, with the centre of the flipper being the middle third, as opposed to the very tip like it does on the pinball arcade. The idea is to repeatedly hit this spinner so that it loops around to the waterfall, which is the squarely shot on the right, and then back to the lower flipper to advance your bonus. the way it is programmed on the pinball arcade is not quite accurate, at least compared to my machine, but the game is just as difficult. Pinball arcade unfortunately loses out on drop catches and tap passes, which are essential in the real game. I hope this helps. And that's something that I actually forgot about because, yeah, tap passing, drop catching, it's so essential in how people now play the older games. I'm not sure if they played them like that back in the day of the arcade. but yeah I guess you can't kind of like press the trigger in the same way as a real That's right So another thing he kind of mentioned is I kind of said oh yeah I've got access to one Paragon which is Marcus's and it has that kind of that gate, that rail in between the flippers so I'm not getting that full Paragon experience and we kind of had it back and forth about he was saying that's not the real Paragon and I I agree. And Marcus has already started his kind of tournament. He's, you know, qualifying for his tournament, so he can't change it now. But this is a shout-out to Marcus, and everyone has to write in, so I can say, hey, look at all these Paragon owners. Apparently, it's not a real Paragon if you don't have the ability to get scissored for the ball to get through. If the ball is hitting a gate and bouncing back. Well, and he's a complete purist, so he will listen to that. Well, he said that it was, that's the way, he didn't install it, that's the way it was set up because he got a re-import from Europe, I think it was. So I guess he just doesn't want to muck around with it. That's how it came to him, yeah. I guess so. That's how it came from him, but I don't think they ever did that from the factory, but maybe someone will correct us if some of them were done like that. So thank you for that email, Quay. Cool. And the last one is from Ando. he said finally had an opportunity to listen to the latest podcast, loved it said Zombie Yeti was really cool and my favourite episode so far keep up the great work I love this bit I greatly enjoy your accuracy and detail I'm telling you now that's only from Ryan humour? just great well I can take some credit for that and he loved the zombieyeti.com slash pinball art inventor It was one of the many funny moments. He said, rock on. Best regards, Ando. Thank you for your message. We did get one email, but we're not sure if we should mention the name. We didn't know if it was meant to kind of be a confidential email, but basically it was someone saying that they used to work for Scientific Games. Is that what they're called? The people who own the license for Bally Williams and are taking that away from Timberlake Aid. and apparently they made last year $3 billion. Billion US. Billion. Billion dollars in revenue from, I think it was just their mobile games. So, you know, I was listening to the Collected Gamers podcast today and they were talking about the fact that they think that they want a piece of the pie and they no longer want to just kind of license out all this IP. They want to make it themselves. So it'd be interesting to see if that is true. I guess things are pointing towards that. And who knows? They might change the model around, and it might be, as mentioned in the email, like all the games are free to play, but you can only play two or three per day, and you have to put in kind of like credits. You have to buy credits, like fake quarters to pay. I don't know. I'm not sure if I agree with the whole freemium model, but... Look, most apps these days are... But to be fair, they also manufacture slot machines as well. So they would get a lot of... If you look at the top revenue earners, you go on the App Store on either Android or iTunes. So what's it called on the iPhone? Is it called the App Store now? Yep, sure. Yep, okay. So you go to top apps, top grossing, and what do you find there? Like nine out of the ten will be slot games. And that has boggled my mind for the last decade, because that's how long it's been. It's crazy to me that people play slots and pay real money with the opportunity to win nothing. No, that's right. It's crazy, isn't it? But they actually manufacture real slot machines as well. Sure, yeah. The ones that you see in the casino. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's a lot of money. Like, $3 billion. you can't look at that and go yeah you can make that easy we're just sitting here doing a free fucking podcast we could be billionaires Marty we're just sitting here fucking people going to our tournaments and being assholes honestly if we had a dollar for every bit of bullshit we said we'd be billionaires we would be buying the supreme female machine and flipping against all you motherfuckers out there That's it. I actually want to sing you out, Marty. Oh, my God, do you? And I'm going to watch you do it this time. Oh, no. Okay. You ready? Yep. I'm going to lead you in, and you can tell me if you remember this song. It's from the 90s. Okay. You should know it, because it's so super lame. As you say it. Put me up. Put me down. Put my feet back on the ground. Put me up, take my heart and make me happy. Ya-ya-ko-ko-jumbo, ya-ya-ya. Ya-ya-ko-ko-jumbo, ya-ya-ya. Before I put the kids to bed, I put some 90s music on and that came on. I'm like, ah, man, I haven't listened to this song in like 20 years. brilliant yeah awesome what a way to end this episode people listen to this for the first time saying what the fuck is this a pinball podcast yeah did we break one of Christopher Franchi's rules yeah I don't know probably all of them this episode I'd say alright alright so thanks everybody where can people find us Ryan head2headpinball.com you can subscribe to us there and you can jump on iTunes and get all of our episodes automatically downloaded to your phone. We release an episode every week. Interact with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Email us at head2headpinball at gmail.com and we read out or reply to all emails that we can. Awesome. Thanks everybody. We have a big interview coming up next week if we end up doing it, so listen in to that. That's a bit of a teaser. could it be could it be a designer could it be a coder could it be an artist could it be a hydroporlona could it okay I'll strike one person off the list it's definitely not a sexual predator oh terrible what a way to end I'm sorry I'm cutting that anyway we'll speak to everybody, next week. Beardandblade.com.au. Alright, you idiot.