This is the most amazing thing I've ever seen! It's time for another Pinball Profile. I'm your host, Jeff Teolis. You can find our group on Facebook. We're also on Twitter at Pinball Profile. Email us, pinballprofile at gmail.com. and please subscribe on either iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play. Like that new intro? Well, I love music, so why haven't I been playing any? Well, the simple reason is I've been lazy and just want to get these out. But when you've got our next guest on, I think music is something you need to play, especially the sound effects. He is the master. He's David Thiel, and he joins us right now. Hey, David, how are you? I'm great, Jeff. Absolutely great. I really appreciate you reaching out to me. I did that episode where I was talking to some of the employees of Highway Pinball, and obviously people you knew very, very well. As you said, it was good to hear the boys again. And you kind of had an interesting perspective of that time because you were certainly working on Alien, but also doing some stuff with Daladin with JJP at the time. So I was kind of curious what that was like when you heard the interview and obviously what happened with Highway and your experience there. Well, yeah, it was wild. Normally clients are really like it when I'm exclusive to them, but very few of them are willing to pay for that. Had The Hobbit not taken quite so long, I may have never met Andrew Highway, but it did. It took forever. And I booked these things. Each game is typically a contract. And foolishly, I've done these things as fixed bid contracts. So I get paid on a milestone basis. So when my contribution of the game is like 25% done by some metric, then I put an invoice and I get some money. And The Hobbit was taking a long time to get done. And to get to 75% done, I was waiting a lot for them and no money was coming in. And 2015 was probably the worst year I've had since I've started this in 2006. So I talked to Jack and I said, you know, Jack, you know, I've got to take some other clients because I can't make it on, you know, what I'm making, waiting for The Hobbit to get done. And he understood. He wasn't happy, but he understood because Jack's a great guy. So then I went to Expo looking for clients very specifically. And I knew that Alien Project had a sound guy attached. I got in contact with Oreck because he's here, not eight time zones away. And he said, well, he didn't think anything was happening and he would love for me to be on the project. So I talked to Andrew in October. In principle, we agreed because his sound guy had been involved, but basically had done nothing because they were way behind on that project. So the real Alien saga starts with the American team in January of 2016. At the same time, The Hobbit finally got done and I was beginning to work on Dialed In. So really, those two projects were kind of at the same time, but Dialed In wasn't knocked out in a day either. So there were nice times when I knew I was waiting for things and I could interleave the two projects very well. So I really never had any problem doing them both simultaneously. From my point of view, there were a lot of interesting contrasts between the two. One's a very strong license. One's a made up metaphor. One was done in Chicago with three full time programmers. Alien was done with this distributed team all over the place. In fact, I never met any of these guys physically. I had met Oric, but really I'd never met the two programmers or the video artist, Kelly, until Expo that year. I wonder how that process worked with Alien in the sense that was the whiteboard done and then they have to make code? Do they have to manufacture it? How do you come in there with sound at that point when the code's not even done? The only way this worked is that Brian Domini is a really sharp guy. He created a very bare-bones but tremendously functional simulator. The simulator would run pinball rules, and it would show you the status of the lights on a, it wasn't a playfield, it was really just an ASCII display, but you could see the playfield lights. Then you could use the keyboard to simulate ball movements, hitting switches. And then that would run rules, and then that would play the sounds, and that would put the, you would see what would be going on the two different video streams that we had, one in the play field and then the other small display, which was the airlock display. And armed with that simulator, we really got the thing to like 80% done. That is a testimony to Brian and the rest of us. It's not, I don't recommend this to anyone, but it was functional and it worked. But at some point, the simulator isn't really a simulator and the ball is wild. And so there's a whole lot of things you can't test or tweak or do until you're actually flipping a game and hearing the integration of the code, the sounds, the video, the play field art, the inserts, until you can experience that directly and test it directly on a machine with the dynamics of a ball. It's kind of a fool's errand. But we got remarkably far because Joe didn't get a machine, I don't think, until sometime after a full year. I think it was like in January or February is when one of us of the five U.S. developers actually had a machine. And then his, I called it a Frankenberger because it didn't have the right lights and it didn't have a working Xenomech and it didn't have a shaker motor. It was a mess, but he could flip it. And the project was plagued by that. And the fact that it ended up with such a good result, I have one, and I believe it's a very good result. Just nothing short of a miracle, really, because it is not the way I have ever worked. And it's not the way anybody else works. This would only be done by a company who was doing it for really the first time or second time and didn't know any better. Well, you've worked with a lot of different companies, even recently, too. And we'll get to Deep Root where you're currently right now. but you've done so much with Jersey Jack, even Multimorphic too, with Lexi Lightspeed. So I guess the way Highway ran is certainly different than the way everyone else runs. And when I think of Multimorphic, which, by the way, I love playing. I played it at Bat City Open last year in June in Austin, Texas. A very, very fun game. Great sound, so well done on one of your many games, David. But was that an easier game to do because of the way that one was set up? Because the game was based sort of on video in a way, because the playfield dynamics were graphic, the simulator was a lot more elaborate than any other simulator I've worked on. You could literally put the playfield up there on the screen. The part you're missing is the upper top third, and that's being simulated in a crude fashion. But for the integration of the sounds and the rules and the graphics that simulator was a lot fancier partially just because it was based on their development platform which is kind of a video development platform It has to be because the play field is video. I love the Multimorphics project. That's a one-off for me in terms of investing sweat equity on a potential project. I don't even want any of my other clients to think I do this because to my mind, it's deferred compensation. Don't start coming to me. I don't do these for free. I have to pay the plumber. Exactly. So that being said, now you're with Deep Root. Are you exclusive with Deep Root now? Well, yeah. Deep Root is still early days for this. Robert has the most aggressive goals that I've ever encountered, and I've worked with a lot of startups. When I started with Data East back in 1987, they were a startup, and Multimorphic is clearly a startup. The Jersey Jack only had the Wizard of Oz out when I started working with them. So I sort of considered them sort of a half startup. Clearly, Highway was a startup. So I've worked a lot of companies at the beginning. I have a perspective. And what Robert is trying to do is different than any other company that I have seen in trying to do it in a positive way. He has very aggressive goals pretty much at every point in terms of design and his manufacturing and his approach and product that he wants to make. He has very, very aggressive goals. And he's got capitalization to put behind that. I was very impressed when I went down there to see where he was spending his money, who he had hired, the quality of the people he had, what he was having them do. so it yeah i said okay this is really sounds like something very exciting and uh yeah i can be part of this when people talk about the games that they love you know we hear a lot about the design of the game or the theme the code and the rules the art package is very very important where do you put sound and call outs because when it's great it's fantastic when it's rough boy you hear people kind of mock some of the call outs and and we're talking more about things like themes that i think of one game where there's some rough call-outs that people don't want to hear. They make fun of the jackpot call-outs. And then there are others that are brilliant. You want to hear that. It gets you very excited. So where does sound and call-outs go for you? Well, I've had a career, 30 years of a career in basically coin-operated games. And I was a musician who performed live for people for seven years. I made my living doing that. I'm still an entertainer, but there's a level of indirection now between me and my audience. And the first trade show that I ever went to was for a video game, the very first video game done by Gottlieb. And it was a game called Reactor. And we were all very proud of it. And it had some remarkable, almost rock and roll in a 1980s sound package. And it really sort of kicked ass. And I was really thrilled with that. And we took it, it was in Chicago, it's on the AMOA or something. And it all gets set up in the hall. Then everybody turns everything on and I didn't hear any of it. And I've probably been, I'm still crushed by that notion because it's still true. Audio is on a coin operated device and pinball specifically, it's the only of the enterprises which is optional. Obviously, you cannot not see the art, you cannot not play the play field and you're going to experience the rules and the back glass and everything. But a lot of people experience the games and really never hear them. So many players play with headphones now, although there are some games, you know, the Jersey Jack ones that you were associated with. You can plug in and hear the call-outs. I really like that aspect, too, because a lot of the people wear sound reduction for maybe more so the people around them. I think if you're on your own game at home, no one's wearing headphones. But in arcades where you want to shine, well, you're competing against 20 other games or whatever's there. So you do see a lot of headphones. It's got to be a little heartbreaking. There's two things. One is that it's out of sight, out of mind, and the entire enterprise is sort of colored by that notion because humans are really visual creatures. And the way they think, I mean, you know, let me show you that. Nobody ever tells you, let me hear you that. So these are all built-in biases and things you have to work around. However, the really good filmmakers, Spielberg and those guys, the really good directors know what the contribution of a good audio package is to a movie. And the good game designers understand that as well. Because more and more since we've shifted away from public operation of these machines to private operation, more and more of these machines are being heard. And so when you get it right and you make a really good interactive sound package that is thematically appropriate and has a lot of emotion in it and is very communicative. And I try to design as much information into all aspects. I mean, obviously, call outs can be very literal, you know, shoot the ramp, they tell you. But there's a whole body of non-speech audio built into the sound effects and even the music that is trying to tell the player something. So, for instance, in Pirates, there's a basic background. You put your money in, you start the game up, you plunge, play field's valid, you hear something called out-of-mode music, and that's playing. The minute you qualify any multiball, so you've done what it takes so that a particular shot will start a multiball, that music changes. It's the same music, but it's distinctively more intense. You may not get that the first time it shifts. You probably notice it if you can hear the game. But after a while, it's just in the back of your mind. You don't even think about it in terms of words. It's, ooh, ooh, I know I'm ready to start a multiball. I'm not sure. I have to look at the inserts to see which. So even the music is there to tell you something if I designed it. And then, of course, the sound effects, yeah, they're there to battle through the chaos, because the ball is wild, and tell you, oh, you've just done a wonderful thing. And that wonderful thing was you hit a lit ramp when it was queued up for 10,000 points. And so you make a ramp sound, which is a very different kind of sound than, let's say, a sound for a slingshot. And you've just gotten your 10,000 points. Sound has a lot of things about it that players ideally should leverage, because the ball is so fast now that when a ball goes into a bank of targets, it's kind of hard to say, oh, I hit A or I hit B or I hit C or I hit B and C. It's hard because the ball is moving so fast. It's really difficult to visually disambiguate that. But a set of good sounds designed for that bank of targets being triggered properly, you'll know every time if you hear it. You know, when I first got into radio, we were using reel-to-reel machines for sound effects and we were using carts and tapes. And then, luckily, Pro Tools came out. And so I just got a glimpse of this, and my eyes just exploded, because I can't imagine what it was like in the early days for you doing these sound effects in the 80s with Data East. I see you with the keyboard there, but what was it like really, not without the kind of computer technology that we have today? Well, there's a huge shift, right? And it is all tied to the size of transistors. Back in the 80s, transistors were big and expensive, and so we didn't get many of them. So the games like Qbert and those kind of things were done in 4 bytes of memory That was it total So obviously everything has to be a program Everything is an algorithm generating sound data And it was wonderfully versatile but very difficult to do And there are only about five people. It's like Eugene Jarvis got it started, Williams doing sound for Steve Ritchie games for Flash. And it's a brilliant package. So then you jump forward seven or eight years and Yamaha has made an FM chip. So now there's a chip that will run these algorithms, and you get eight oscillators worth of this stuff. And you have to make music and sound effects for a pinball machine out of eight things. And that's a different discipline. And Chris Granner was great at it. Chris had been doing it for about nine months before I started doing it. And that was a tremendously flexible FM synthesis stuff. It was amazingly broad. And so, you know, Chris's work sounds nothing like my work. But that was still, the synthesizer inside the box was creating those data streams at runtime. So you were limited to whatever you could do with an 8-bit processor in the synth chip, which was eight voices. Then you jump forward to when I restarted my career in 2006, and transistors have now gotten really cheap. And I have 28 megabytes worth of data. And so everything now, the production of all the sounds moves into the studio. So you can apply your entire studio to creating an audio stream. And that's totally different once again. Anything that can be recorded can be played back inside a pinball machine. So the London Symphony Orchestra plays the John Williams waving his stick. It plays the Indiana Jones march for the Indiana Jones game. You got it, right? Because we recorded it and we played it back. That brings me to my next question, because when you do games that are involving movies or television shows, you've got so many sound bites and even scores and soundtracks. Is it really just figuring out what goes where as opposed to adding new sounds that aren't part of those movies or soundtracks? Well, there's three classes of assets, right? And for call-outs, for the speech, that's true, right? You get access like in The Hobbit. We had the speech from all three movies in isolation. And I sliced and diced that like a Cuisinart and cut out, I don't know, 1,300 or 1,400 little bits from all three movies. And we used those where we could, where it made sense. Sound effects, not as much. I mean, sometimes there's a sound effect that's so identifiable and so perfect. Some of the Star Trek sound effects, for instance, for the Star Trek pinball game, there are just some classic ones that survived from 1966. And you go, oh, you hear that, and you can just use those. Most of the time, no, I have to create things. And also the sound effects for pinball just need to be bigger. Pinball sound effects in the context of a television show would be so big and distracting that it would make no sense. But you need broader gestures in a pinball machine so that I can get your attention and say, hey, hey, you just did some pop bumpers there. Ooh, you just scored a target. It depends what I'm given. For instance, in Tron, it was weird. Disney, which doesn't have a reputation as being very liberal, in the Tron production, they gave me the raw materials. They didn't give me the sound effects they used in the movies, but rather they gave me the raw materials that their sound effects guys used to make the sound effects. I mean, they gave me gigabytes of raw material. And then I used those and combined those and layered those up and added my own stuff. And sometimes the sound effect might have five or six layers in it to make a little three-second bang. You know, music is a whole other thing. First off, the rights are generally so dear. Sometimes they're totally unavailable. Sometimes they're very expensive. And then sometimes, like Star Trek, for instance, Steve Ritchie didn't want the Michael Giacchino score from the new movies. He didn't care for it. He didn't think it was Steve Ritchie, pinball-y, aggressive enough. I tended to agree with him. Nothing against Michael. I think they're great movie scores. But I didn't think they were pinball appropriate or Steve Ritchie appropriate. You mentioned Tron, and certainly Daft Punk was a big part of that. You've worked on a couple of games from rock bands in Rolling Stones and ACDC. So definitely people are playing those games to hear the iconic songs. They probably bought the game because of the theme, or certainly they love the game, but definitely the theme had a big interest, and maybe they want to hear Hell's Bells Cranked. So do you have to be careful not to overshadow the song? Yeah. Well, I'll say straight out that music games, as they're done now, are not my favorite projects to do because they've kind of, it's like a pinball machine, which is a jukebox. And yes, it tends to tie at least one of my hands behind my back, sometimes both, because you want to maintain the integrity of playing the music. But, you know, the pinball machine's activity is anything but sequential or passive, you know. Do you want to listen to the music or do you want to have everything that you're doing as you play made bigger and made sensible? It's a tough balance to achieve to convey all the things that a player is doing in a game and not mess the music up. And for that reason, it's not my favorite thing to do because I find it harder. In some ways, I've thought that we should just have an option for any game where you turn the music off and jack in your boombox and whatever music you want to listen to behind the sound effects and the speech. So I see you with a keyboard all the time. Is it safe to say you might like prog rock a little bit? Yeah. Well, as a keyboard player, I have tremendous guitar envy. Okay, that makes sense. Having played in rock bands, it's always tough to compete with guitarists. And my favorite, absolute favorite guitarist, what I listen to, the rare time that I have time to listen to, I listen to a lot of Jeff Beck, who's even in his golden age is still out there touring. And what he can do, I very much covet the kind of expression that a guitarist has, because an amplified guitar takes the tiniest little gestures in both hands and makes those so big. I mean, I love Angus, too. I like ACDC because I like Angus. Well, I think when we close out the show, we'll play a little Jeff Beck to send you out. But I'm wondering about the keyboardists. If you had to rank them, Keith Emerson of ELP or Rick Wakeman from Yes or John Lord from Deep Purple, those guys are gods. Yeah, yeah, they are. Well, see, I'm very fond of Jan Hammer, too. Oh, for sure. A little Miami Vice? Yeah, yeah. I saw him play with Amaha Vishnu. That was way back in the day. And I saw Keith Emerson, too. So, you know, Keith Emerson was one of the only keyboard players who managed to, on stage, cross that divide with those tight leather pants. And he had the two keyboards parallel to his body or perpendicular to his body. He stands between them with his pants and facing the audience. And then at some point, he sticks a knife into the top of the keyboard to hold down a couple of keys. I mean, you know, Keith was, in terms of pure rock and roll performance, there was nobody like Keith. And then Rick Wakeman's huge stacks of organs, and my goodness, I mean, there's some legends there for sure. Yeah, yeah. There's so many great keyboard players. It's humbling. So you're now with Deep Root. I know we all excited for the five days of Deep Root and you probably heard many people say Wow they coming across pretty aggressive as you even said pretty confident and they have some great names behind there too When you hear some of the press releasings and even the bravado, if you would say that, do you get a sense of, I'm fine. I know what's happening. Don't you worry about it. I've been to San Antonio. I know what these guys are doing. We're good because we've unfortunately seen the other side, and this isn't fair to Robert or anyone. we've seen some of the companies not do so well. Well, yeah. I mean, we heard a lot of crazy come out of Andrew's mouth, and it turned out to be crazy, you know, Mr. Highway. And so I think we're all a bit wary of crazy. And I haven't said this to Robert, but, I mean, I'll say it publicly, that had I only read his two This Week in Pinball interviews, you know, I probably wouldn't have taken him serious as a client because he said some things I thought were a little crazy. But I talked to Robert, and you talk to Robert, he's not crazy. And then he flew me down there, and I saw what he's up to and his approach and what he's trying to do. And then, yeah, my head was turned a little bit. I've worked with a lot of the great people from Williams. Having never worked at Williams, I've worked with almost all of them, but I haven't worked with Barry. And so now I am working with Barry, and that's real nice. I've worked with Dennis a bunch. Mostly I come on a project after Dennis has walked. So are you... Never mind. He started Alien. He started the Lightspeed. I mean, Dennis is always starting things. And I end up being on these projects and finish them. So I've worked on Wheel of Fortune and Pirates. I've done a bunch of Dennis. So I know Dennis. The opportunity to collaborate with Dennis and Barry is really neat. I didn't know John because my time at Gottlieb Mylstar, I was gone probably a year before Premier started, and Jon Norris was primarily a Premier designer. Robert has really assembled some really talented, hungry guys. They may be old, but they are hungry. You know, John Papaduka has been in the news lately, and I, for one, would love to see a great rebound because with the exception of maybe one game, They are some of my favorite games of all time. And him getting back in it and having a company kind of back him, my fingers are crossed. Let's just say that. So you said you're working with Barry. You said you're working with Dennis and Jon Norris. Are you working with all of them and simultaneously? Yes, I'm working on two projects that John started that are John projects. Papaduke. Sure, John Papadiuk. And, you know, I think it's really the best circumstance for John and for Deep Root. The situation, the context that they put John in, I think is where he needs to be and is probably the best way to exploit John. So, you know, that's all fine and good. Yeah. There are certain things that at this point I don't think anybody would let John get close to. Fair enough. If you know what I mean. Yeah. So and at Deep Root, he's not anywhere close to them. He's doing the things that he's good at. And so, you know, it's fine. Frankly, there's going to be enough product that even I won't even be able to do it all. Right. There will be other sound guys involved in this. They have very aggressive plans. I don't think I'm speaking outside of my NDA because I think Robert has indicated, you know, they really want to do a lot and do it great. There must be a huge demand to be able to come out in a short period of time, as Barry Osler had said on this program, that if games are ready, they're going to be ready to ship within two weeks, and they're going to be out and about in full code. If Deep Root has so many different designers, which they do, I would assume we're going to see all of a sudden, 2019, several games come out. And I just wonder how much money is out there to purchase new games. I wonder what that landscape will look like. Yeah, I don't know. I've been in this a long time, but I've never been part of the mechanics of actually product planning or product release. I've been sometimes happy and sometimes the victim of decisions made along those lines. And that's true here as well. I don't know. I think as it gets deeper into it, they'll figure out. I hope they'll figure out the strategy, you know, the one that makes the most sense. But I don't know what it is right now. I'm very optimistic about it, not a pessimist about it, because we don't know. And every company is different. And, you know, wouldn't that be the great thing to prove those doubters wrong? And, boy, I believe in a lot of the people that are at Deep Root. So that's, I think, where I stand. Well, you know, take a giant step back. I started in 2006. And for six years, there had only ever been one company. And that was true well until, like, 2012. So for over 10 years, there was one company. And I really don't think that was good for anybody. It wasn't good for players or the people buying machines. It certainly wasn't. I don't think it was good for that company. Ultimately, that position, it's not that you get lazy, but you get complacent. Competition is the thing, is the furnace which creates the really good stuff. And it couldn't be any healthier than it is right now. Well, it could be healthier, I guess, five months ago when there were two other live companies. But we've done pinball and highway. But still, the remaining companies, this is so good for everybody. You look at what's available to people who now have some discretionary money and time. It's fantastic. Speaking of European pinball, you're actually going to be heading over to Germany in a very short time for Pinball Universe. What's that all about? Well, a friend, this guy that I met at Expo, Martin Jim Weisz, I've seen him there for the last three years, and he's a real nice guy. And his English is pretty good, dramatically better than my German, which is non-existent. And several times he's brought pinball folks over, and they put on an all-day appearance. And Chris Granner's done it. Steve Ritchie's done it. I think Greg Frerich. So he invited me, and I've never been to Germany. It's a long trip from here. But I decided, okay, I'm going to do it. Because if I don't do it now, I probably will never do it. And on a Saturday, I'm doing like 10 in the morning until 8 at night, a series of talks and fireside chats and signing things. And I've got a lot, a lot of ridiculous amount of material to draw upon. So I've been trying to package that up so I can present lots of audio. and I have what I call audio autopsies where I take a piece of music or a sound effect apart into its parts and show how that went together and why I did that. So I'm really excited about this trip. I will say I'll feed a zine right now because you've got to get ready for that. But thank you very much for joining us today, David. Well, thank you so much, Jeff. I really enjoyed your podcast. It's wonderfully professional. Wow, thanks very much. Where do I send the money? redmond hey david thanks very much and all the best okay you too have have a great one a little yawn homer to take us out this has been your pinball profile you can find our group on facebook also on twitter at pinball profile emails pinball profile at gmail.com and please subscribe on either itunes stitcher or google play here's a little jeff back for you david i'm jeff Teal.