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Down The Rabbit Hole With John Popaduik

Silverball Chronicles·podcast_episode·2h 9m·analyzed·May 17, 2022
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.032

TL;DR

Silver Ball Chronicles profiles John Papaduke's rise as a whimsical 1990s pinball designer.

Summary

Silver Ball Chronicles explores John Papaduke's (J-Pop) pinball design career from his early work at Bally through his seminal 1990s Williams titles. The episode traces his journey from Canadian operator to God-tier designer, examining his signature design philosophy of flowing ramps, magnets, and asymmetry, with particular focus on his debut title World Cup Soccer (1994), which sold 8,743 units and established his design voice.

Key Claims

  • John Papaduke worked at Bally without a green card/work visa, was let go during Williams takeover in 1988, and was later rehired after obtaining proper paperwork

    high confidence · David Dennis and Ron discuss Papaduke's immigration/work authorization status based on Pinball Profile interview; Dennis states he didn't have required documentation

  • World Cup Soccer took 10 years from initial concept at Bally to release at Williams in February 1994

    high confidence · Direct quote from J-Pop: 'World Cup soccer took 10 years to get made. By the time I was at Valley, I did lots of prototypes'

  • World Cup Soccer sold 8,743 units and was the first WPC-S security chip game

    high confidence · David Dennis states sales figure and security chip designation; explains WPC-S prevented CPU board swapping between titles

  • Papaduke created a late-1980s Alice in Wonderland prototype featuring a spinning bottle mechanism, teacup pop bumpers, Cheshire cat ramp, and mini flipper in the drain area

    high confidence · Dennis references Mike Dimas YouTube video (Pinball Shenanigans) documenting the Alice in Wonderland prototype still in Toronto; prototype never observed powered on

  • Papaduke's design trademarks include asymmetrical layouts, flowing ramps, prominent magnet use, and a distinctive ball-shaped shooter knob advertised as 'unique new pinball grip'

    high confidence · Ron and Dennis discuss identifying Papaduke games by shooter knob and design philosophy; Dennis notes it appeared on flyer advertising

  • Larry DeMar significantly contributed to World Cup Soccer's rules, transforming the core concept from simple goal-scoring to include World Cup final against Germany

    medium confidence · Dennis states 'Larry DeMar kind of stepped in and helped out with that part' regarding rules development

  • The goalie figure in World Cup Soccer was based on a real friend's photo; the friend didn't realize until game release that his image was used

    medium confidence · Dennis tells anecdote: 'He asked his friend for a picture...however long it took to make the game...hey, that's me. I'm the goalie'

Notable Quotes

  • “J-Pop says, I really came in on the coattails of Pat Lawler, Steve Ritchie, Larry DeMar, Python, Futz, which is Bill Futz and Reuter. I had great mentors and teachers.”

    John Papaduke @ mid-episode — Establishes Papaduke's lineage among Williams greats and acknowledges the mentorship dynamic that shaped his design philosophy

  • “World Cup soccer took 10 years to get made. By the time I was at Valley, I did lots of prototypes of Whitewoods, and then we got bought by Williams. I was at Williams for a while and got let go, and then I got hired back.”

    John Papaduke @ mid-episode — Demonstrates persistence and the long development cycle for World Cup Soccer from Bally prototype to Williams release

  • “Persistence is key when it comes to sort of breaking in as a designer, right? There's very few jobs. There are sort of an elite closed group of manufacturers.”

    David Dennis @ mid-episode — Articulates the structural barriers and rarity of design positions in pinball manufacturing

  • “Zach Mitty of the Pinball Network and Flippin' Out Pinball talk about this from time to time. He describes John Papaduke as whimsical, as wizard-like with his ramps and the way things flow and divert and move around.”

    David Dennis @ mid-episode — Industry characterization of Papaduke's design aesthetic by respected community figures

  • “The Magna Save is not where it usually or normally is which is on the out lanes so you have a moment to react. It almost right above your flippers kind of slightly to the left.”

    Ron Hallett @ late-episode — Technical critique of World Cup Soccer's magnet placement flaw that undermines its effectiveness

  • “If you showed me this plate film, so what designer did this, I'd be like, looks like John Papaduke to me. Immediately he has this flare and pizzazz and difference right out of the gate.”

    Ron Hallett @ mid-episode — Demonstrates how recognizable Papaduke's design fingerprints are in the Alice in Wonderland prototype

Entities

John PapadukepersonDavid DennispersonRon HallettpersonWorld Cup SoccergameAlice in WonderlandgameNorm ClarkpersonLarry DeMarperson

Signals

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Papaduke persisted through significant career disruption: let go during Bally-Williams merger due to work authorization issues, rehired after obtaining proper documentation, took 10 years to release debut as lead designer

    high · Dennis discusses work visa issues and 4-year gap between Williams takeover and World Cup Soccer release; Papaduke quote: 'I didn't give up...Persistence is key'

  • ?

    community_signal: Industry figures (Zach Minney/Flippin' Out Pinball) describe Papaduke's design philosophy using language of 'whimsy' and 'wizard-like' quality, emphasizing flow, diversion, and mechanical elegance over technical complexity

    medium · Dennis: 'Zach Mitty...describes John Papaduke as whimsical, as wizard-like with his ramps and the way things flow and divert and move around'

  • ?

    historical_signal: Goalie figure in World Cup Soccer based on real friend's photograph; friend remained unaware of image usage until game's public release, discovering his likeness had been memorialized in playfield design

    medium · Dennis anecdote about friend providing photo without realizing it would appear in final game art; friend surprised when seeing game publicly

  • ?

    design_philosophy: World Cup Soccer's Magna-Save placement above flippers is ineffective in practice; magnet too weak to save fast-moving balls and positioned away from standard out-lane save position, reducing its utility

    high · Ron and Dennis discuss magnet placement as 'stupid' and note it 'only works with a slow-moving ball' and is easily forgotten by players

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Papaduke's distinctive ball-shaped shooter knob became recognizable design signature; officially marketed as 'unique new pinball grip' in promotional materials, always in gray color

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.390

0:00
Ever notice how ads always pop up at the worst moments when the killer's identity is about to be revealed? During that perfect meditation flow.
0:12
On Amazon Music, we believe in keeping you in the moment. That's why we've got millions of ad-free podcast episodes, so you can stay completely immersed in every story, every reveal, every breath. Download the Amazon Music app and start listening to your favorite podcasts ad-free, included with Prime.
0:37
The Pinball Network is online. Launching Silver Ball Chronicles. I got my drum part ready. Your drum part? Yeah, I noticed you've been putting the drum brakes in. Yeah.
0:58
So I'll see if anyone recognizes what I played today, unless you know it or recognize it. Hello everyone, I'm David Dennis and this is Silver Ball Chronicles of Pinball History podcast. With me this month is Ron. I'm the only one that didn't get Corona. Hallett, how you doing? Alright. Yeah. With you this month, is there other people with you other months? There is, yes, but I hide those episodes. Okay, because you know I don't listen to the episodes. Actually, I only listen to the end. That's right. The most important part. Yeah, that's all I listen to. When Nordman appears. Yeah, that was a long, long promo there. Yeah, we asked Nordman if he would provide us with two minutes, and sure enough, he went a full two minutes. It was a symbolic two minutes, 30 seconds. So you didn't even script that. You forced them to have to come up with two minutes of material. Yeah. Yeah, it was great. That's pretty rude. It was good. He also helped out in my commercial, if you had listened to that one, which most people didn't. Oh, yeah, you got some kind of, like, financial thing. But I'm not in Canada, so I can't use your services. Trying to feed my kids here. Come on. I'm here to feed people pinball knowledge. People like Jason R. from the Twipped Promoters database. Yes. He says, educational and entertaining. He capitalized and. And the episodes are pure pleasure, a comforting tale by the fireside, laying out the facts of the pinball industry history. Just what you want from a podcast. Respectful, but also playful and honest with the subject matter, too. Ooh. We're playful. And honest. Honest. This is going to be an honest one this month, Ron. Oh, yes. We also have some inquiries about the last episode. Inquiries or corrections? Did we screw something up? Well, we had a... It's some of it's like discussion, some of it's corrections, but Dan Costa emailed in to silverballchronicles at gmail.com, and he said, hey, fellas, love the latest podcast about Dennis Norman. Have a couple of questions regarding Demoman that I don't believe were answered on the podcast. His first question, Ron, I believe you mentioned that the sound team flew to Hollywood to get custom call-outs from Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes. Any idea why they got 10 call-outs total from them? The game seems like it has very few call-outs, and I'm curious why they'd fly all the way out to get the call-outs.

  • World Cup Soccer's Magna-Save is poorly positioned above the flippers and too weak to reliably save fast-moving balls

    high confidence · Ron and Dennis describe the magnet placement as 'in such a stupid place' and note it only works with slow-moving balls

    • Williams (Williams Electronics)
    company
    Bally (Bally Midway)company
    Kevin O'Connorperson
    Vince Pontarelliperson
    Tim Kitzrowperson
    Pat Lawlerperson
    Steve Ritchieperson
    Silver Ball Chroniclesorganization
    Mike Dimasperson
    Pinball Shenanigansorganization
    Slam Tilt Podcastorganization
    Zach Minneyperson
    Flippin' Out Pinballorganization

    high · Dennis notes appearance in World Cup Soccer flyer: 'Plunger features a unique new pinball grip'; Ron: 'when I think of John Papaduke, once I see that shooter knob, it's like, oh, it's a Papaduke game'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Papaduke's signature design approach features asymmetrical playfields, long flowing ramps, prominent magnet use, and rejection of symmetry—establishing a distinctive visual and mechanical identity across his games

    high · Ron: 'Long, flowing plastic ramps and a love of magnets and a hatred of symmetry'; distinctive ball-shaped shooter knob present across games as design trademark

  • ?

    licensing_signal: World Cup Soccer leveraged 1994 FIFA World Cup US hosting as timely licensed theme; Striker mascot official license; coincided with peak pinball market demand for sports licenses

    high · Dennis notes 'The World Cup was in the U.S. in 1994. This is a big deal. This is actually a licensed theme. The dog is a license. He was the official mascot.'

  • $

    market_signal: World Cup Soccer achieved exceptional commercial performance with 8,743 units sold; positioned as instant hit in competitive 1990s pinball market during peak arcade/location play era

    high · Dennis states: '8,743 units...that is astronomical' for a single pinball title

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Papaduke's trajectory demonstrates importance of mentorship in closed design ecosystem: benefited from tutelage by Pat Lawler, Steve Ritchie, Larry DeMar while at Williams; DeMar provided key rules design support on World Cup Soccer

    high · Papaduke quote: 'I really came in on the coattails of Pat Lawler, Steve Ritchie, Larry DeMar'; Dennis notes DeMar 'put the sharp point on the pencil' for rules

  • ?

    product_strategy: World Cup Soccer introduces multiple novel mechanical features: interactive soccer ball mechanism with directional spin, complex diverter system for ball routing, goalie figure with moving parts, wire-form ramp structures

    high · Dennis details soccer ball's dual-direction spin, opto detection, goalie movement, and ramp quality; notes 'something really, really unique and something that has never been done like that before'

  • ?

    design_innovation: Alice in Wonderland late-1980s Papaduke prototype discovered in Toronto; never commercially released; remains non-functional (never observed powered on) but exhibits complete design vision with innovative drain-save mechanic

    high · Dennis documents prototype discovery via Mike Dimas YouTube channel; describes full feature set including mini flipper, spinning bottle, teacups; notes 'I've never even seen it turn on'

  • ?

    technology_signal: World Cup Soccer was first WPC-S security chip game, introducing CPU board security that prevented cross-title board swapping—marking technological shift in platform design to prevent unauthorized modifications

    high · Dennis explains WPC-S prevented 'changing out the ROM on the CPU board' and required swapping security chip; compares to Nintendo cartridge security approach

    • 3:53
    I have the same question. I'm very curious, too. That totally makes sense. Back in that day, though, flying back and forth and doing that thing was pretty common. You would figure, though, they would have got more quotes, because there are actual custom quotes in there that you can tell, like jackpot call-outs and stuff. Maybe that's all they did. and it's like, we'll just do pinball-specific stuff, and we'll use movie clips for the rest. Maybe they only gave them, like, five minutes. Yeah, maybe that's all the time they got with those to do the call-outs. Yeah, so long. Can you do your, okay. All right, we got it. Okay, that's the whole step. Let's get out. Go to Planet Hollywood and get out of here. Yeah. The second question from Dan. Oh, yeah. In Bowen Caron's tutorial at 2715 on YouTube, he gets to demolition time and mentions there are three tasks you need to perform. The three seashell bonuses hidden around the game. Bowen never fully explains the two steps to get to the bonus round. Any idea how to get to that bonus round? Okay, how do I explain this? Bowen would occasionally throw in little tidbits like that. that are completely untrue.
    5:09
    Like if you watch, I think, on his Dracula, Bram Stoker's Dracula one, he says if you do a certain thing, Dracula washes your car.
    5:23
    He also would post every year on April 1st, he would post on Rec Games Pinball about the Beavis and Butthead prototype pinball machine he played. And then crush your soul. I mean, he would never say it didn't exist, but obviously he's just kidding. So, yes, I have a feeling that's one of those things that does not exist. He made it up. Oh, very fun. Very fun. Ben Madison also has some feedback on an episode from a couple of episodes ago. In our System ADB episode, I mispronounced te-a-te-a-te-kay-da.
    6:00
    I said terracotta. Remember the music? Okay. And it's pronounced T-A-C-T-A-D. Backwards D, upside down E. There's an umlaut. He literally still can't do it, even though you gave him the actual way to do it. How do you say that, Ron? Oh, I have no idea. Thanks so much to Ben for that. Ben and I have messaged back and forth a couple of times. Ooh, man, I'm getting a lot of fire here at the Gmail account for my comments about EMs. I have not made any friends amongst the EM folk here. You said how great they are? I was just teasing about the episode. Now, I love EMs a lot. I really enjoy them. I play a lot of them, actually, in our league. And we will be doing an EM-specific episode. there have been a few people that have actually sent us in some really, really good sources with some of the EM masters of their day. So the episode will shape up pretty well. I have not started on that because, quite frankly, I wanted to get to this topic because it's a bit different than most of our other topics. Any other words, Ron?
    7:19
    Nope. Let's get into it. John Papaduke, also known as J-Pop, created some of the most interesting and whimsical playfield designs of the 1990s. He went from God-tier Bally Williams designer to startup pinball company owner, and finally, a pinball pariah. John once described his journey as a long tale of woe in some cases, but also tales of glory in others. His name was once included with other pinball legends, but in 2022, J-Pop has been reduced to a pinball leper. People would often say, what could J-Pop have done with Bally Williams if they had never closed? Now, now the question most likely heard is, where did it go all wrong with J-Pop? And why isn't J-Pop in jail? Does John Papaduke deserve all of this criticism and abuse, which has sullied his awesome 1990s Bally Williams legacy? This month, we go down the rabbit hole with John Papaduke. Ron, you're a huge John Papaduke fan. I'm a huge World Cup soccer fan, yes. You've got all of J-Pop's games in your super high-value collection? No, I just have World Cup Soccer. I liked it down the rabbit hole. That was good. That was very good. Took me a while to come up with that. How would you describe J-Pop's design philosophy? Long, flowing plastic ramps and a love of magnets and a hatred of symmetry,
    8:59
    which he would say himself. just look at a game like Circus Voltaire look at the swing shots notice they're not even one is a little higher than the other he did not like symmetry so let's rewind here let's go all the way back to John Papaduke's early life I have so many really great sources this month they are all included in the show notes often those show notes are in your podcatcher or they're on the Facebook page post Now, if it's a podcast, I haven't been able to link directly to it because that screws up our feeds, which is some of the problems we have sometimes in various podcatchers. So I'm trying to keep those sources in there as intact as possible. If they're having any trouble or anything, just give me an email at silverballchronicles at gmail.com, and I'll shoot them over to you if there's some issues. But there's some good ones this month, Ron.
    9:55
    As a teenager, John Papaduke grew up in Toronto, Canada, or as we call it up here, Toronto. It was here that he worked at a pinball operator repairing machines. At 19, he wrote Norm Clark, who was a ballet designer, and Norm would eventually invite him down to the factory in Chicago for a tour. Ron, you remember letters, right? Yeah, I remember letters. That was still in my era. What was it like writing letters? I'd handwrite them, unless you had a typewriter, and then you'd have to mail them. Then you've got to wait weeks. You've got to wait, yep, until they get them. Then they've got to get around to writing back. Then they've got to write back. So there's a lot of waiting. Yeah. So Chicago is actually a sister city to Toronto, and the reason for that is they were both sort of built around the same time. I've been to Chicago a couple of times when I lived in Toronto, and I love Chicago. Chicago is an awesome city. It's very much like a really big Toronto. The architecture, the people, we both get lake effect of snow up that way, so there's a shared camaraderie for the hatred of blowing snow. It doesn't have a sky dome, though. No, it does not. It does not. Oh, wait a minute. It's not called that anymore, is it? No, everybody still calls it the sky dome. Okay, good. It has a Rogers corporate name, but nobody actually calls it that. It's just like in Chicago, it's still called the Sears Tower, even though it has a different name. Exactly, yeah. Nobody, like, people will not change the name, which is pretty awesome because there's that Disney Plus movie, Turning Red, and they call it the Sky Dome in that show.
    11:31
    Everybody in Canton is like, frigging right it is. So to pop over from Toronto to Chicago is fairly simple. It's a bit of a drive. You've got to go around the lake. You've got to go into America. You've probably got to stop at a White Castle, but it's tons of fun to get down to Chicago, even better if you can afford to fly. Okay. After giving the tour, Norm Clark would take John back to the airport. And after a conversation and some constant sort of back and forth, Norm is said to have offered John a job at Bally. Norm Clark was a big deal in the industry around this time, especially at Bally, right? That would be correct. Well, he was a very long-time designer. I actually think I met him at an expo. Yeah, I got an autograph from him. Did he have the same pole as Buddy at Williams? Steve Kordick. Yeah. They were always, like, at the autograph sessions, they were always, like, next to each other. Buddy, Buddy. The job that John was given at Bally was basically on the tech side, where he would, you know, work in the Whitewood lab, which is where the designers would sort of say, you know, put drop targets here and put a target there, and then he's got to move them around and wire it and tweak it. He'd finalize everything in the lab, and then the theme would be chosen, and it would be passed off to the artist team. Then, of course, it would go to manufacturing. J-Pop was given a great education by some of the pinball greats around this time. That would include Norm Clark. And in the orbit at this time, at the sort of Bally Midway era of Bally, You know, he's got the Dennis Nordmans of the world from our last episode, some of the greatest artists at the time with Greg Freres.
    13:22
    You know, there's a lot of really talented people, and working with those talented people, you can only soak that up. On his spare time, John would create his own prototype. This was from an acquired F-14 Tomcat, oddly enough a Williams, and he built his own playfield. This thing had long wavy ramps, an interesting art package, and some unique looking mechanical features. This is the coolest thing. I have never seen this before. I only found this when I was doing my searching. He has a prototype for Alice in Wonderland, and this is in the late 80s. I've included a link to a YouTube video from Mike Dimas, who's a Canadian pinballer and YouTuber who documents his adventures buying, selling, restoring, and hunting for pinball machines. It is known as Pinball Shenanigans over on YouTube, so go ahead and give him a like and subscribe.
    14:24
    I'll include the link in the show notes so you can take a look at this. But he stumbles upon Alice in Wonderland, the prototype still in Toronto that John Papaduke made. There's also a pinball profile with Jeff Teolis where he talks to the owners about this pin, also included in the show notes. So when you look at this, Ron, I've got a picture up in front of us. This is John Papaduke. This is quintessentially John Papaduke, just looking at this first image. Yeah, if you showed me this plate film, so what designer did this, I'd be like, looks like John Papaduke to me. Immediately he has this flare and pizzazz and difference right out of the gate.
    15:07
    So we're looking at the playfield here. In the middle there's like a crooked, crazy kind of clock that's under the playfield, kind of like Black Hole, how it's got a hole in the playfield and then there's something underneath it. It looks like a clock under there. I can't really see two. More like Spectrum, not Spectrum, Electra. Electro-sized size of it. There's an interesting sort of like, what do we call these pints up here? What do you call those? I don't know what that is. That's supposed to be a bottle? Yeah, it looks like a liquor bottle, actually. But it's like a spinning bottle. That's part of Alice in Wonderland is this spinning bottle. It has teacups on the pop bumpers, which is really, really cool.
    15:52
    The art is directly taken from the Disney Alice in Wonderland, which is probably a no-no when it comes to licensing, but of course this is the prototype, so it's not a big deal. We go to this image, and this is a different image. There's a magnet that's right in front of, like, there's a famous scene in that movie where there's, like, a... What is that thing that screams? Like a horn or whatever drinks the tea and it burns his mouth or something. So there's, like, a vertical up-kicker in there. Sort of like the Totem Genie magnet as well, right, where it goes below the playfield. The Chesser cat ramp, so there's the Chesser cat, and then there's the ramp has like his tail kind of looping down around it. He's playing cards on the ramps. But then we get to the lower play field. There's something really weird in there. Yeah, there's a mini flipper below where you would drain, so you can use it to save the ball. It's like it's not even a full apron. It's like half an apron so you can see the flipper. It's like on the out lane it comes down around to like a mini flipper that's fully embedded in the apron that kicks it up. So I guess you'd have to flip your flipper up on the top, and it would kind of go back out into the middle of the play field. Yeah, and a funny story is on my podcast, Slam Tilt Podcast, I'll just get my plug there. Jeez. We didn't even make it in like 10 minutes here. One of our Rochester locals, he built his own homebrew, and he has this in the homebrew.
    17:26
    The same mix. The same thing in almost the same place. So we sent him this picture. It's like, ah, Papa Duke beat you with this idea. In the video, as well as on sort of the conversation with Jeff Teolis, there's no sort of mention of this machine actually flipping, right? No, I've never even seen it turn on. So it's one step below Magic Girl, which we'll get into later, in that at least Magic Girl I've seen actually in a track mode. This I've never seen even powered up. So I have no idea whether it actually works. It's kind of really, really neat. Immediately the fingerprints of the designer are all over it. All over it. This takes us to the Williams takeover of Bally. In 1988, Bally Midway was purchased by Williams to become Williams Bally Midway, or as most people call it, just Bally Williams.
    18:17
    John was working on a game called Ice Castle in May of 1989, which never made it into production. Then J-Pop was abruptly let go. Well, he was let go. This came up in the, I believe, the Pinball Profile interview, that he didn't have a green card. So the whole time he was working at Bally. He was just kind of working under the table? I guess something like that, to that effect. So when Williams took over, they looked into all that stuff and like, yeah, we can't have that. Yeah, so for a Canadian to work in the United States, the United States needs to give you the thumbs up. Yeah. Because they don't want, you know, dirty Canadians kind of coming down there and taking American jobs. Well, isn't it like, it's a green card to live here, but isn't there like a working paper stuff? Yeah, work visa. Work visa, yeah. Yeah, so he's down there on a green card. He doesn't have a work visa. Yeah, listen to the podcast, the Pinball Profile. It explains it. But, yeah, basically he didn't have the paperwork needed to be working where he was working. And Williams was like, no, we can't have that. So right out of the gate we got some questionable ethics by John Papaduke. Or maybe he just didn't realize he was supposed to get one. That's totally a possibility with him. I had a good friend who had, he basically had his documentation. He would travel down. He worked for BlackBerry. And he would travel down to the U.S. and have meetings and do things like that. Eventually he was dinged at the border because he didn't have the proper paperwork to actually be, quote-unquote, working in the U.S. Yeah, there have been vendors, Classic Playfields, who are based out of Canada. They were going to a pinball expo, and they got stopped at the border and had issues because it was considered work. Because if you're displaying your stuff at the show.
    20:12
    Yes. You know, they tried to say that they were, it was just, it's just. Like a hobby thing. No, they were trying to say, like, they weren't selling anything. They were just showing what they had. They weren't going to take orders, which probably was not true either.
    20:29
    So I don't know if Americans understand. Canadians have this long-running love-hate relationship with the American border. and most of us are trained at a very young age to wear like five layers of clothing back from the U.S. into Canada across the border so we can get through our daily maximum numbers for duty and taxation. So none of these stories actually surprised me in any way.
    20:57
    And fireworks. Getting the fireworks was always a big thing when I was a kid. But John made it back to Williams. He did. Eventually he got back, I assume, because he got his paperwork in order. Yeah, I assume. Yeah. J-Pop says, I really came in on the coattails of Pat Lawler, Steve Ritchie, Larry DeMar, Python, Futz, which is Bill Futz and Reuter. I had great mentors and teachers.
    21:21
    These guys made a lot of money for Williams. They allowed some of us to come in and get design positions. We were paid fairly well. We used ideas from these senior designers, and off we go. Imagine sitting down and working with those greats, even today. But these guys were at the top of their game in sort of the late 80s, early 90s. Like, everything was a hit. Everything was selling. They got all the licenses they wanted. They had a powerful system at Williams when it came to computer programming and everything. This was it. This is the time that J-Pop is learning from those designers. Now, it wasn't until February of 1994, basically four years, that John Papaduke would release his first pinball machine as a lead designer. That machine is World Cup Soccer. It is a licensed sporting event theme. It's basically a soccer game. It's from February of 1994. It's a Williams WPC-S. It sells 8,743 units. that is astronomical,
    22:31
    The Art by Kevin O'Connor, Music and Sound by Vince Pontarelli, Dots by Eugene Greer and Scott Shlomany, and Software by the great Larry DeMar and Matt Corral.
    22:46
    This is a great game. I love this game. Super exciting. I play this game quite regularly. It's the first security game. Do you know what that means? No. So that's the WPC-S. Yeah, WPC-S. They started putting a security chip on the CPU, so you couldn't use the CPU in other games, different titles. Oh, so you couldn't, like, if you had a machine went down, you couldn't switch the boards? Like, I couldn't just put different software. I couldn't just change out the ROM on the CPU board and have it be another game. You'd have to change out the security chip also. Oh, my. Yeah. It was very Nintendo. Nintendo did that with their cartridges. Well, J-Pop says, World Cup soccer took 10 years to get made. By the time I was at Valley, I did lots of prototypes of Whitewoods, and then we got bought by Williams. I was at Williams for a while and got let go, and then I got hired back. I didn't know it was going to be World Cup. It was just a Valley game, but I didn't give up, and, you know, it just kind of came out. So if I had given up, I wouldn't have had games made. I wouldn't have had anything made. Persistence is key when it comes to sort of breaking in as a designer, right? There's very few jobs. There are sort of an elite closed group of manufacturers, especially more now, which is Valley and Williams as opposed to Valley Midway and Williams. So persistence is key, and that pays off even to today. And the story on this is he was helped out a lot by Larry DeMar in this game. I guess the original concept of the game as far as if you played it, You score goals, and you get to the World Cup final, and you try to beat Germany. None of that was like the original concept as far as the rules went, but Larry DeMar kind of stepped in and helped out with that part. Yeah, he really, really put the sharp point on the pencil with this game and really made it something special and interesting, not just shoot goals to the bash toy. And Tim Kitzrow, the voice of the game. I love that guy. We talk about him all the time. He is one of the greatest pinball voiceover artists, definitely. If you've ever played World Cup soccer and his call-outs don't get you excited, then you should play something else. You're never going to get excited. I play this in my league weekly. I have a friend of mine pick this up not too long ago. When I go over, I play this one a lot because I really like experimenting, figuring out, playing around. And it's the call-outs that I find myself repeating a lot with his gravitas, right? It's so much fun to just be immersed in the shenanigans that is World Cup soccer. Because it's way over the top. Oh, I love when the goalie keeps blocking you. This guy is a wall! He just hit him over and over. Oh, you got the flyer up. Here's the funny thing. We're looking at the flyer right now. for World Cup Soccer. It's the biggest game in the world, World Cup Soccer, because the World Cup was in the U.S. in 1994. This is a big deal. This is actually a licensed theme. The dog is a license. He was the official mascot of the 1994 World Cup. Do you know his name? No. It's all over the game.
    26:07
    Striker. Oh, yes, Striker. Striker, the World Cup pup. I love that. But if you look in the flyer we're looking at, they show Soldier Field in Chicago, which is where some of the games happen. But the funny thing is, if you look at the field, you can tell it's during a football game. Oh, yeah, it is during a football game. Whoops.
    26:28
    I always thought that was funny. Like, here's World Cup soccer. Let's watch some American football. Yes, it's the wrong kind of football, but it's football nonetheless. You can see by the flyer, you see how it's got gold legs? Yes. It had, like, gold accents, gold legs, the main habit trail, and it's all gold. Yeah, because the World Cup, like, trophy is, like, this gold thing. The problem is the gold plating on the habit trail just falls off. Like, mine isn't even gold anymore. It's just lost all its color. I didn't even notice on the game that I played that it was gold at all. So that's how funny that that is. I don't think I've even noticed. Did you know it kicks like a soccer ball? It's a game with over a billion passionate fans. The game with more thrills, action, and upsets than any other. It's World Cup Soccer. And this summer, it's coming to the United States. Wow. Oh, yeah. This game is, when we, I've heard Zach Mitty of the Pinball Network and Flippin' O Pinball talk about this from time to time. He describes John Papaduke as whimsical, as wizard-like with his ramps and the way things flow and divert and move around. And this game is exactly that. So when you look at, like, the ball lock on the left side, you shoot a ramp. You can shoot either the left or the right ramp, and based on a diverter, so a coil will engage, it will close a route and open another route, and the ball will zip around into the left habit trail or the left plastic ramp. And then there's a magnet on, like, an ultra-mini play field that will just turn on and grab the ball and then send it to the left as opposed to down the ramp and it will lock that ball. And the right ramp's probably one of the smoothest shooting ramps ever made. Oh, beautiful. And they're huge. The ramps themselves, if you take them out, my God, they're like big, long pieces and they usually get trashed. Mine are trashed. Especially if they were dirty, right? Like the ball just would stuff them up really, really bad. It has a cool soccer ball, an actual three-dimensional, like a soccer ball that spins. Like half a soccer ball in the middle of the play field that spins. And this is an odd thing. So I had seen this soccer ball. It's up by the pop bumpers in the top side, and it's almost a full-size soccer ball. It's like a kid's size soccer ball. And at times it will just sit there. Other times it will spin and kind of bounce the ball in kind of random directions. At first I didn't think it was a great idea. That's great. But as I've played the game, I'm like, wow, this actually works really well. It spins both ways, both directions, and it has, I think, an opto. It can detect when a pinball hits the ball. Huh. Yep. So if you, most of the time, it spins towards the goal, unless you're at the World Cup final, then it spins against you. The soccer ball is something really, really unique and something that has never been done like that before. So, head of the gate, we've got something really interesting and different. And then we have a goalie, which is really just an upside-down stand-up target with the picture of the goalie in front riveted on. And the goalie is actually a friend of John Papaduke's. Like the picture on it? The picture, yep. He's got a great mullet, by the way. He asked his friend for a picture, and he gave him a picture, and then the friend, however long it took to make the game, all of a sudden like, hey, that's me. I'm the goalie. So the goalie basically sits in literally a soccer net, and it just sort of flicks kind of back and forth, and it opens up kind of a third of the play field, and then he's kind of in the middle, and then he's on the other third, and he sort of zips back and forth. The ball will go into sort of like a trough and then down into a vertical upkicker, which will pop the ball up onto a wire-form habit trail or a wire-form ramp down to the right flipper. Yep, which is simulating a striker kicking the ball at you. Yeah, exactly. It's you're kicking it into the net, then, you know, it's on the side, and they're kicking it back into play. And this wire demonstrates another Papaduke trademark that he had, I think, on pretty much all his games. Can you identify it? Yes, I can. I know you're saying it's a unique. It's a unique. Plunger features a unique new pinball grip.
    31:04
    Basically, for the shooter rod, instead of the typical end of the shooter rod, his is like a ball. So instead of it being the sort of standard Valley Williams kind of black shooter rod that's flat on one side, this is like a ball. Yep, it's like a ball. And he would use this, I think pretty much all his games have this. It's definitely, when I think of John Papaduke, once I see that shooter knob, it's like, oh, it's a Papaduke game. I never knew they actually advertised it in the flyer, though. It's like a unique, new pinball grip. Ooh, it's unique and new. And it's always gray. When it comes to the art style, it's very, very cool as well. It's very purple. And it matches the theme perfectly. It really, really does. But one thing that I do not like about this game. The magnet? Yes. It is the worst Magna Save of all time. Yes. Because I always forget it's there, and I never use it because it's in such a stupid place. So your flippers are basically the opposing team's goal or your goal, right? And you have a goalie sitting in front of there that's got his hand in the air, and he's stopping the pinball.
    32:22
    But the Magna Save is not where it usually or normally is which is on the out lanes so you have a moment to react It almost right above your flippers kind of slightly to the left Why does this not work? Because the only time you would use it in actually trying to save something from going down the middles, if you shoot the left ramp and it doesn't make it up and it starts coming down, but the problem is the magnet's not strong enough. It'll just blow right by the magnet every time. So it only works with a really slow-moving ball. So for actually anything coming down the middle fast, it's useless. It's a really cool idea and concept. Like, hey, instead of the magnet saves on the side, I'm going to put it in kind of the middle. But in practice, it is terrible. Every once in a blue moon, you can save a slow moving ball with it. But you'll probably forget the button is there by that point, and you'll drain anyway. Right. So for me, it's like, oh, I'm going. The only time it ever really goes down the middle is when there's, like, no saving it. like it is literally right down the middle, or I'm going for like a drop catch, or I'm going for a dead bounce. So a drop catch is when your flipper is up and then you kind of cradle the ball when it comes down almost catching it. A dead bounce is when you leave your flipper down and the ball comes down and bounces from one flipper and you kind of over to the other and you kind of cradle it there.
    33:43
    But when I go to like do a dead bounce and I've misjudged where the ball is coming, I don't have enough time in my brain to think, hit the MagnaSave because you missed the ball. It just goes in the middle.
    33:54
    So it's completely useless. Eh, everyone's in a blue moon you can use it. So it's not completely useless. The other weird thing about this game from a technical standpoint, I always got to throw a weird tech thing in. He uses all the wedge-style sockets, like, throughout the game. I don't know why. It's like they tried it on this game. It's not on later games. And by that I mean, like, Let's say the lights underneath the inlanes are usually always bayonet style. Bayonet being like the ones you turn in and twist. Yeah, you turn. Yeah, you twist it in.
    34:27
    All the sockets were all the wedge style, 5-5-5. You just kind of plug them in. Yeah, which causes kind of a pain in that the lights don't stay in as well. Sometimes they come out. You can actually see, and we're looking at a picture, you can actually see them, the sockets in the inlanes. They'll rattle and they might pop out. It's just weird that they did it in this game and they didn't do it. I've had games made by Williams after this, and they just abandoned it. So it must have been something they were playing around with. How about the skill shot? That's another, I would say, J-pop identifier. He loves the skill shot like some kind of apparatus.
    35:04
    And this is obviously his first game. His first time. The coin toss. You hit it. It comes around like a little reverse. Like a 180? Yeah, 180, and you've just got to skillfully plunge, and how hard you plunge will determine which little space it goes in, and there's three spaces. And eventually, by all the balls, you want to get all three. You want to get all three because it will light a World Cup letter.
    35:30
    So let's, okay, now you're getting into code. So this is where sort of the shine of this game really comes through, and that's with somebody like the legend Larry DeMar. So what are your kind of objectives when it comes to World Cup soccer? It kind of makes it unique, right? Your objective is to win the World Cup. America has to vanquish the world. Well, you can pick your own team. I don't know how many people realize that. It's not something that's at the beginning of the game. You can go into the settings and choose any team you want, I think except Germany, because they were the World Cup champion. But you can pick other countries. So when you win, it'll say, like, U.S. wins or Italy wins or whatever. But you're playing against Germany because they were the previous World Cup champion in 1990. So you're trying to beat them and become the new World Cup champion.
    36:21
    That's the basic wizard mode, I would say. And if you get to, you have to spell World Cup. If you spell World Cup, when you get, you hit the hardest shot in all pinball to hit, the final draw scoop, which is so hard to hit. it will start the World Cup final, and it will just start firing balls out at you. Well, it actually doesn't have an auto launcher. But you will get, I think it's a five-ball multi-ball, and you just have to keep hitting the goal. And they keep scoring against you back and forth, and you need to beat Germany.
    36:56
    So you can go all the way to the wizard mode, and you can still lose. You can lose to Germany if you don't score enough goals. Do the United States won the 1994 World Cup? No. No, we've never won a World Cup. That was Brazil. Brazil won.
    37:11
    Yes. Runners-up were Italy. Very, very cool. Canada is in the World Cup soccer, the FIFA World Cup this time, so that's a big deal. Us getting in is a big, big, big deal. Competing against these European and South Americans is a big, big deal. We'll just cook the ball in maple syrup like we usually do because then it goes a lot quicker. You'd probably do good with the fights too. One of the most interesting things that I stumbled upon when I was doing the research was way back in one of our first episodes. I listened to a lot of John Norris, who is the patron saint of pinball, and he basically sort of threw a little bit of shade on World Cup with Gottlieb's World Challenge soccer. Well, John says, John of Gottlieb fame, he says, six months before the 1994 World Cup, we went for a license. We learned Williams was making a World Cup soccer game. We had six weeks of production we needed to fill with a little production run. We decided to take a design car op, switch it over, add a couple wire ramps, and steal some thunder from Williams' game. We only wanted to make $1,200, but we upped production because of demand. Gottlieb Premier at the time was able to actually just bang out machine after machine after machine. They were just a manufacturing powerhouse. They didn't have the 12 to 18-month turnover cycle that a lot of these designers had. So they were able to get World Cup out. They were able to get them into bars quicker at a lower price point. And they stole quite a few of the sales that probably would have gone to the Williams game. In John's first game, he sells 8,743 units, which is astronomical. When we look at all those other kind of first-timers with, you know, like Dennis Norman in the last episode, it was like 3,000 was a big deal. We are on, what, the peak of the peak when it comes to these games. And this is where we start kind of rolling down that sort of death of pinball hill, right? Yeah, it didn't do the 10,000 that a huge one would do at the time. But 8,000, like today, 8,000 would be like insane. Anyone would love 8,000 games today. Yeah, absolutely. But, you know, when you're learning with all of these folks, there's a lot of, you know, learning curves that you go through when it comes to design. Like don't put a MagnaSave in a dumb place, that kind of stuff. But John also did a lot of really good things when he worked at Williams. Well, he says, if I did anything well at Williams, it was just the ability to work with the team and pick themes. We were able to go and kind of find themes that hadn't been done in a long time and bring those up. John's really good at themes that have a wide spectrum of interest, right? So like race cars and rock bands and military are all kind of man themes. But when you get into some of the themes that J-Pop is doing, those have a much wider breadth and reach. Kind of like when you look at George Gomez, right? A lot of his games are, yeah, they're macho-y, but they also kind of have a fun, interesting kind of spin on them as well. Being able to do that means that you're able to sell more units. John's themes are really like sort of magic and circus and fairy tale and really, really, again, let's tie that back, whimsical. I'm surprised he didn't end up a Jersey Jack, especially the early days. Would have been perfect for his philosophy. say? Games were designed to make money. They had to be on time. They had to be above average in earnings. And all of your success was easily measured in those numbers. How much money did it make? How many did you sell? What was the profit margin? Those are very, very easy measurables. Well, J-POP didn't really fit into that system very well. This system was quick and refined It was like a well-oiled machine. J-Pop was much slower, more calculated in his designs, and that, of course, would cause problems.
    41:29
    He said, in fact, that he had to be broken down by the Williams management and those around him and built back up to withstand the stress and pressure of the Williams philosophy. Bally was much softer, where Williams would come right out and tell you you sucked and you had to try harder. It was designed to get the best out of people, and we've spoke about that Williams pressure cooker and the Shark Tank quite regularly on our podcast. This brings us to, I think, my favorite J-pop game for a few reasons. Okay, okay. So the next hour we'll be talking about this. Okay. We're talking about the Theater of Magic. This is a magic theme or theater theme, I guess, if you want, or whatever. It's March of 1995, so about a year later. It's another WPCS system. It sells 6,600 units, so a lot less. The art is by Linda Deal. The music and sound by Dave Zabriskie. Dots by Adam Ryan, Brian Morris. Mechanics by Jack Scullin and Ernie Pizarro. Software by Jeff Johnson. So we've got a very new group here, right? This is, we don't have any staples. We've got kind of all new hitters here when it comes to this game. So we're going to get, I think, something very different. Theater of Magic is awesome. I like it. You like it. It's not awesome. You just like it. I mean, it's magic. It's so good. I don't care what you say. This game is awesome. And I am blown away that Chicago Gaming has not done this as a remake. I don't get it. It is so good. It'll probably be coming. But we have the skill shot, which is a whole separate piece in typical Papa Duke fashion. Yeah, so instead of this weird kind of contraption on the side, It's like you go up into and you go down to the ramp, and it goes right down to your right flipper instead of, like, into an orbit. But it's kind of fancy as well, right? It's super smooth. Ramps, magnets, cool trunk mechanism. It's got the greatest change state toy probably ever made. The Tiger Saw that I think was originally supposed to actually move, but that was costed out. Super flowy. It is super flowy. Super flowy. You're shooting this ball, and it's coming right back to your flippers, and you're just like, ah, yeah, here we go. Woo! And it's got the thing that pops up from the play field. I don't remember if it has a name. It's like a trunk? No. It's like the cellar. Cellar, maybe. It ain't the trunk. The trunk's the big thing. It's the big toy. The basement. Haunted basement. There you go. It's like a trap door into the haunted basement. the um the standout for this game i think is really the art design and theme the direction linda deal you know one of the few females in pinball really i think does a heck of a job of taking the play field elements putting them into the back glass and just making it seem like David Copperfield-esque. Right? It's a female magician. She's got tigers and cards and lions and explosions and it's cool. It's super cool. But let's kind of start at the first here. Let's take a look at the flyer. It just says there's more. That's all it says. There's more. It's kind of a crap ending. You've got to open the flyer, I guess, or flip it over. There we go. Oh, lots of words. It's got the magic Touch. Theater of Magic. Oh, you've got to say it like Tom Chris Kisrow. The Theater of Magic.
    45:34
    There, exactly. It's got very, you know, Williams is always funny because they always go way over the top with their flyers. But they've got four images of kind of the neat elements. One of them being this, what they call the spirit ring, which on the ramp, the left ramp, You can shoot the ball up, and it comes back to your left flipper from the right ramp. But there's this hovering sort of magnetic ring, and it will suck the ball up off of the ramp and then drop it onto another habit trail wire form that crosses the play field, goes to the other side to your right flipper. And then above it, it says, presto. I'm just trying to figure out what that first word is in their text. I have to zoom in more. I can't stir soups. Is it stupendous? Stupendous, yeah. Oh, it's stupendous. Okay. So I guess it wasn't that. Stupendous displays of spellbinding power. Amazing acts of enchantment. And incredible achievements in pinball engineering. It's all inside Theater of Magic. Trey Park. The game is not something typical. And that's what I think is really, really cool. It's not cars and rock bands and, you know, blowing stuff up and high-speed action, but it has all of those elements in an interesting and kind of fun theme. But this sort of new crew, the dots team, the art team, and the rules and stuff, they all kind of come together really well as a team, and they all bring something that's very, very different when it comes to flavor compared to all of the design teams before them. Now, Brian Morris, one of the DOTS guys there, he was hired around the same time as Adam Rine, and they were brought in after the Williams gaming layoffs when Eugene Jarvis and Scott Slomany were promoted, so they were no longer able to do sort of the basic programming. They were now sort of in a management. So this is Adam Rine talking about Brian Morris. He is a guy from Chicago. We saw quite a few people. I was there for a lot of the interviews. He's a fantastic dot artist, a really great and warm guy. I think he's the only person in my entire life who I saw interview while wearing sandals and still got the job. Yeah. Impressive. People say John Papaduke is kind of weird. He's a bit different, right? Well, the team that he's kind of surrounded with are obviously kind of weird and different people, too. And you can tell when you look at the games that were released around this time how kind of quirky and different Theater of Magic was, which I think is kind of a disappointment as to how many machines it sold. Only about 6,600.
    48:22
    The development cycle around this game was quite stressful for John Papaduke. He would actually take a little bit of time off to just sort of take a vacation. And as people like Keith Elwin know at today's Stern Pinball Inc., you know, taking time off is not really a thing you get to do. Well, J-Pop says, you take two days off, but when you got back, your manager would say he needed to talk to you. What happened was while you were away, a group of people, other designers, management engineers, would look over your game and say, we don't like this on your game. We'd like you to change it. I was a new designer, and I had to deal with that. Yeah, that's a lot of, like, pressure, right? Like, oh, you're not going to want to put that on there. It's going to break. Oh, you can't put that on there. That's not going to earn money, right? Like, or there's, like, a level of jealousy in the Shark Tank, right? Like, ah, that's a good idea. Why didn't I think of that? You know, so there's a lot of politics being played at the time. So the more, if you take two days off, you know, you've got to prepare for when you get back, you know, the politics you've got to play when you get there. This is the second game that J-Pop has actually officially released, and he's really starting to build on his design philosophy of kind of the whimsical, interesting bits and pieces.
    49:33
    J-Pop says, I often go back decades and look at older games. nostalgia or old great pinball stuff that had been forgotten and just add new things. So he's taking kind of things that have been done and then mixing them with kind of the new. And you can see that in a lot of his design elements. We often describe Williams as a machine, right, Ron? They were just an absolute brute when it came to manufacturing. Yeah, they had massive teams, 30 to 40 people as resources per game. For example, J-Pop says, in the old days, we would take it down to the cable department, say, draw this, get this updated, and that was it. It was done. You just, with this bruge of a manufacturer, the designer kind of goes down to a team of people and just says, hey, you know, I've got to do this, and then it just appears. And I think the greatest example of, hey, I got this idea, I need it to be built, I need it to be designed, here are some images and pictures, is the Theater of Magic trunk. This is a change state toy. And what do I mean by change state? It has multiple states. And it changes. I figured that out all by myself. Good for you. Who says the American education system is not great? What's cool about the trunk in change state is that it will rotate and move, and there's different things at different parts of the trunk. And the way it works is that, you know, everybody knows the old trunk tricks in magic, right? The magician assistant goes into the trunk, he goes yabber-kadabber, and then the individual inside the trunk is gone. Or they cut the trunk in half. Or the trunk is, like, iconic. This trunk is a bash toy. So you shoot the ball and it hits it, right? That's the thing. You hit it so many times, and then it'll turn 90 degrees and show you another side, a hole or a scoop. And then you shoot the ball into the scoop. And then there's like a little subway system, and it kind of pops up and goes out around behind the ramps and kind of comes out again. And then it'll rotate in the other direction, and it will have a magnet on the side, which will, when you shoot it, it will catch it, hold the ball, and rotate in behind, drop the ball into kind of the secret hole in the back, and then rotate back, and it's like, oh, it disappeared like magic. Yeah, you don't see it drop. It's just gone.
    52:00
    Where did it go, Ron? It went into the basement because it's going to come out that basement thingy. Right, the pop-up and eject, right? Which makes a certain squeaking noise on every theater of magic I've ever played. It's literally the noise it makes. This is the greatest toy of all time. But I don't think this kind of toy is something that John Papadu could develop by himself. He needed a strategic team of engineers and designers to make something that would withhold the ball hitting it all the time, the rotation stuff, the magnet wiring, all that stuff, right? Mm-hmm. We found out a couple of episodes ago that Lyman Sheets actually worked on the prototyping programming for testing the mechanics to this crate. So the crate would sit in a test fixture and a ball would get smashed against it like a million times. And it was Lyman who worked on that. It's a really awesome game. I'm surprised I don't have one. Actually, I'm not. It's super expensive, and it's more expensive now than it's ever been. but it has a lot of kind of flaws in the code, right?
    53:16
    Yeah. What are those flaws? You can hit the left orbit and go into the lanes and just get the multiplier, and it never ends. It's like you can just keep increasing it over and over and over and over. So it's not the greatest tournament game. But for home use, I mean, it's fine. Yeah, you just shoot the left lane. It goes up into a capture hole. It pops out into the lanes. It comes back down to the right flipper, and you just repeat, repeat, repeat, Repeat until you're, you know, winning. Oh, I love this game. God, I wish I had one of these. Well, it's not going to be cheap. What's that? The game. Oh, yeah. Oh, God, no. We're selling a lot of Papa Dukes like this title and the one we're about to talk about and the one we're going to talk about after that. They ain't cheap. They sell for a ton of money now. It's a big, big deal. Big deal. His next game was Tales of the Arabian Nights, often called Totem. it's a mystic fantasy middle eastern theme it's from may of 1996 this is a wpc 95 machine it sells 3128 units you can see we are tumbling down that hill fast art by pat mcmahon music and sound by dave zabriskie dots by adam ryan and brian morris and software by louis karzach this we covered in our Mechs That Made Us episode, I believe.
    54:41
    But it's based on the Arabian Nights, which is the English version of the Arabic language collection of Middle Eastern folktales known as 1001 Nights. It is a very interesting and strange theme when it comes to pinball, because at this time we're getting games like, you know, No Fear and Indy 500, you know, Elvira's coming out here in another year or so. Like, this is a really kind of standout, weird game.
    55:16
    Here's a quote from that. I would argue, though, most people know what a genie is. Yeah, it's an unlicensed theme, but it's a theme that's like, oh, yeah, totally, everybody gets that. Well, Adam Ryan says, I like that kind of theme. I like the Middle Eastern theme. A little more flair to the visuals. The music was very good in that game. I think it's just a pleasure. Papa Duke was just a great guy to work with.
    55:40
    We spoke a little bit about this game in a previous episode, but is there anything that sticks out here that you really like? Just like most of his games, he shoots really good, nice flowy, long flowy plastic ramps. Another cool skill shot. This time it's a sword, and you try to charm the right snake so you don't get bit.
    56:07
    Yeah, you have three little baskets. You've got to shoot it into the right basket. And then you have the genie, the actual genie on the play field. The bash boy. You hit it. It's got the magnet stops it, and the magnet drops into the play field. They've taken that theater of magic ring that sucks the ball off the ramp, but instead of it being horizontal, now it's vertical, and it's like the genie is throwing a fireball back at you. So it sucks it off the ramp, drops it onto a wire form, just like it did in Theater of Magic, and it goes back down to the right flipper, but it's like the genie is catching the ball and throwing it back at you on fire. God, it's so cool.
    56:51
    This is so cool. If you want more of the details, please go back to the other episode, But there's a couple of other pieces I want to pull in to this episode because I found some quotes in a later interview with John Papaduke where he spoke about this game. And it was all about gauging success. And I spoke about this a moment ago. Games had to earn money. And they had to have above average earnings. They didn't get that. You were not going to keep your job. And you were not going to sell games. J-Pop says, I get feedback on that game. This rule is bad or this rule sucks, but at the time it was the best game we could make in that time frame. The game worked very well, upwards of $350 to $400 a day. That's crazy. $350 to $400 a day. And this is like in like 1996 or 94? What is this? 96. Yeah, this is in 1996. So, you know, $400 a day, right? And we'll do what? Maybe we'll do 330 days a year, right? because there's holidays, that game is making $132,000? I'm thinking after the initial couple of months it's going to die down a bit, but yes. Holy moly. What do you think games earn today? I think most of them are in homes, so they don't earn anything. Yeah.
    58:09
    Yeah, how true is that? Now the battles, we spoke about that a moment ago, the battles of the warring teams. Well, this game had a lot of battles, and they were around the spinning lamp mech. So there's a spinner in the middle of the play field, and on top of that is the lamp, and you hit it and it spins around, and it's got leaf switches underneath that kind of move around and count that. And we talked about before about taking stuff from older games. That is from older games. There are lots of old EMs that have, like, the little spinner toy. Like, usually they have a couple posts, and you just hit them and the thing spins around. That's literally what the lamp is. It just has a plastic piece on top. But this had kind of taken it up a level. Taken an old idea and updated it. Yeah, and it's done, really. No matter how cool it is, it was probably on some EM somewhere. Yes, we don't want to upset the EM folks that listen to the podcast here. Boy, they send me the hate mail. Yeah, to you, not to me. I love EMs. They do. They specifically call me EMs. Yeah, yeah. But the thing is, I cut out all your hate for EMs. So I just, it's all about being a puppet master. I love EMs.
    59:19
    Yeah. This brings us to the game that I think probably gets the highest dollar value of any, well, kind of, of any J-pop game, and that is Circus Voltaire. It's a circus carnival theme. It's from October of 1997. It's a WPC-95. It sells 2,704 units. This is designed by John Papaduke with Cameron Silver. Art by Linda Deal. Dots by Adam Ryan and Brian Morris again. Music and sound by Rob Berry and Dave Zabriskie, and software by Cameron Silver, who's kind of a newcomer to the Bally Williams around this time. He's Australian. Yes. I'll bring in some Cameron Silver stuff in a couple of the other episodes that we do. Some of the bits and pieces about Circus Voltaire is that it is kind of a really over-the-top, kind of strange, I don't even know. He can't explain it. He's lost for words. Which takes a lot for me to be lost for words. I mean, it's Circus, but it's spelled wrong. Is that like the Canadian spelling of Circus or something? It's like French-ish. It's spelled, yes. C-I-R-Q-U-S. Circus Voltaire. This we talked about in Mechs That Made Us, and we did a huge deep dive into all the crazy mechanics and pieces of that. So we're not going to retread on that as much as I think that this is a really cool game. Not one that I would own for a few reasons. The outlanes kind of suck as well as it's really outrageously expensive. But again, I want to pull in some pieces that I discovered from other sources that I saw and I was able to bring that in. Well, Adam Ryan doesn't seem like he was too crazy about the art package. Adam says, I was not crazy about the art package. The acid greens and the oranges and the yellows. It just got a bit much after a while. It does look like a unicorn threw up all over this play field. I like it. It does stand out. I like it. Yeah, it stands out. And what do you want? Do you want the game to earn? Stand out. Exactly. Linda Deal had some really cool design choices, like the speakers are in the back box, but the arch extends all the way from the top all the way to the bottom, so the speaker grill is integrated into the back glass or the trans light. The DMD is in the play field. It's not on the back box. Means Williams must have had some confidence in J-Pop by this time to let him do that. He's earning above average. He's selling above average when it comes to the pins at the same time. Now, he's not getting the sales that they did, you know, three or four years prior, but he's still kind of outperforming the other designers at the time. Interesting note from J-Pop. He says, on the Ringmaster, we chose these microswitches instead of optos. I think that was a fatal error. It was costing. We will keep the micro switches in instead of adding $7 more for the opto set. That hurt operators. This is the era where we're starting to kind of cut and slash a little bit, right? We're going through, ooh, I don't know if we should, we can save $7 there, right? But it is obviously a big deal. The play field mounted DMD was originally in Capcom's 1996 Flipper football. So it's not like J-Pop invented this. Yeah, but no one played that. Nobody played football. That was a bomb. Yeah, we'll talk about Capcom in a whole episode. Sorry, Python. That was a Python game there. But this was also, it was the first solid-state game to have a disappearing pop bumper. Because, once again, it was already used on Williams' 1958's Gusher. So taking an old feature and updating it for a new game. J-Pop was not much of a, he was, I've often described him as a guy who is able to build a lot of sizzle, but sometimes the steak is not that great, right? He's very flashy, he's very wonderful, but yet sometimes he struggles a little bit. One of those is that there is a lot of stuck ball problems that appear on Circus Voltaire. Well, J-Pop says, at some point you have to stop working. I think circus had the most ball hang-ups of any prototype with the ramps. Everything wasn't linear, and the ball would get stuck everywhere. The theme was also, I mean, the first theme we got is World Cup soccer. That's pretty straightforward. The other one we have is like a magic theme. Then we've got a Middle Eastern theme. Now we have a circus theme, but it's like, it's not just a circus. It's like a weird circus. It doesn't have like, it's like something out of an acid trip. Where's the clowns at? Plus, they have a major spoiler, like right on the back glass. Oh, yeah? The whole game is, who is the ringmaster? It's the identity of the ringmaster. They give it away on the art. Spoiler alert. It's the lady. She literally has the ringmaster mask in her hand that she's taking off. Around Williams, you had Steve Kordick, who is really a mentor and a master of design, who rose up from designer into the ranks of leadership. Williams. You know, when we look at something like a, like Bally Williams, we had also mentioned like a Norm Clark. The modern version of that today is George Gomez. George Gomez is a master of manufacturing managing design managing egos and also designing games This person George Gomez knows exactly what he doing What did he think of Circus Voltaire George says hated it Hated it with a passion. I don't know why. Just hated everything about it. I didn't get it. Wow.
    65:12
    It's like I can't even tell you why I hate it. I just hate it. It's just so bad. I don't hate it. It's got one of the better wizard modes. It's probably one of the first games I can think of with a multi-stage, final wizard mode, which is a more common thing in today's pinball. Adam Ryan, who was on Dots at the time and worked with J-Pop quite regularly, would say that John Papaduke, especially in Circus Voltaire, wanted to let his creative flow, he wanted to push the boundaries and the edge of what was known as pinball. At this point, it was all no fear and NBA fast break, a Gomez design. It was very hard driving sort of one-dimensional. He wanted to have more artistic flair in a whole package. And I would say he certainly got that objective. This is when everything falls apart. The wheels are off at Williams. Everybody is generally laid off. Well, we have the Pinball 2000, but that was another episode. Yes. J-Pop would move into Pinball 2000, where he would do Star Wars Episode I. That game is so bad, I don't even want to talk about it. Oh, it's not that bad. You can go back to our Pinball 2000 episode in the archives. Swing on over to silverballchronicles.com or look up Silverball Chronicles in your podcatcher. It's easier to filter through that. If you're in the TPN-only dedicated feed, it's a little more difficult to go back in the archives. But eventually, J-Pop would leave Williams, and it was an odd time because there were so few jobs in pinball anyway, and they were all competing to get those jobs in a market with only a stern pinball. Well, J-Pop says, all of us pinball people have a similar experience. In the industry ebbs and flows, we move from project to project, company to company, and we just try to apply what we know and move forward that way. This is certainly an ebb when it comes to the pinball industry. there's a handful of pinball rock stars out there, including Steve Ritchie and Pat Lawler and George Gomez and all these designers that are all looking for a home. You've got all the programmers like Dwight Sullivan, Keith Johnson, Lyman Sheets. The market is flooded with talent, and only a handful of them will land somewhere.
    67:35
    And J-Pop would actually say that I never called myself a rock star. I've always had an issue with the whole legendary thing. So humble. Everyone scattered over sort of the next decade in pinball. John didn't end up at Stern, but he did teach toy design at Columbia College in Chicago for eight years.
    67:57
    This is where eventually he would resurface in 2005 at a company called Zizzle. Ron, you have a few Zizzle pinball machines in your collection? I do not, but I have seen them. So Zizzle was a company founded in 2005 by Roger Schiffman, who is the co-owner of Tiger Electronics, along with a former marketing guru behind Furby. Oh, I remember Furby. With Mark Rosenberg. Schiffman credits his wife for the name of the company. The first toy released by Zizzle was for a company called iZed, and it received a lot of comparisons to the Furby. So I guess we were okay with stealing our own IP. Wait a minute. It says IZ, but you said IZ. Is that a Canadian thing? It, I, no. I just, I think it's English. But it's a Z. How is it Zed? No, it's a, it's a Zed. I don't get that. That confuses me. I'm just confusion. I don't get it. The company receives licenses to produce Pirates of the Caribbean franchise toys, as well as Nickelodeon Spongebob Squarepants and the classic in my house, Dora the Explorer. Those are some big licenses. These are big. I mean, granted, at the time, we had spoke about this in the last episode, Pirates of the Caribbean was huge. Huge, huge, huge. And getting that IP was pretty easy because everybody had that IP. One of the product lines at Zizzle, miniature, like, three-quarter or half-size plastic pinball machines. They were purchased at places like Costco or Sam's Club in the U.S. or, you know, you might be able to get them for Christmas gifts through your Sears catalog, that kind of stuff. J-Pop would do 2006's Marvel Superheroes and Villains and Pirates of the Caribbean Pinball Machines. In 2007, he would be in Marvel's Superheroes. He would do Pirates of the Caribbean at World's End. and then by 2009, Sizzle was shut down. Should we review what these pins look like? Sure. Let's go with the biggest sort of seller that most people know, and that's Pirates of the Caribbean Dead Man's Chest. Not going into the other ones. That's a waste of time. It's a three-quarter inch ball size. It's a 24-volt DC kind of frame case. It does have one solenoid that operates three pump-uppers simultaneously. It's got slingshots. that are done by the same solenoid, and it does actually have flippers. It has a flyer. Should we click on the flyer? It actually has a flyer. I'm curious what a flyer for a Zizzle would look like. We are on the Internet Pinball Database, ipdb.org. You can take a look at all these. I've included a link in the show notes. Let's see. It says, Arcade Pinball featuring authentic pinball action, music, lights, and sound effects. Yeah, it really does not have the Williams flair. You've done it, Mighty. Multi-level pinball action based on the blockbuster movie.
    71:08
    Full size, over four and a half feet tall. This doesn't seem very tall. It's a John Papaduke design. How do I know? The shooter knob. It's the ball shooter knob.
    71:18
    You kept it even out there. It is. Even with this. I mean, it's a pinball machine, right? It's not a commercial unit. It's obviously a home unit. But there's a clear ramp on the left side that if you don't make it all the way up, it kind of bails in behind. It has a chest kind of horseshoe-y thing in the front where you shoot it in, it comes right back at you. It has a wire form ramp that goes from the right ramp to the left flipper. And that's Johnny Depp on it. It has one of those like whirlpool kind of things behind the chest. Like it's a pinball machine. It's obviously for children.
    71:59
    I think it was priced right. Let me look through here. What were they priced for? $10,000. You had to submit a video. So it was only for rich children. Have you played a Stern the Pin? Yes, several. Yes, I have as well. There's one in my league, the Star Wars one, which is the better Star Wars layout. and it has this weird fiber board play field that is almost indestructible actually, which is quite interesting. But it has one node board that fires kind of multiple things at the same time. So the slings go off at the same time regardless of which sling you hit as well as the pop bumpers all go off regardless of which pop bumper you hit. This follows the same philosophy, but there's a really cool image of the play field out of the game itself. and it's that same kind of fiber board looking thing with a board mounted underneath and very few wires. It's interesting how similar this is to a modern day Stern the pin. It's much smaller though. It's totally smaller and definitely not as good, but you can see that the direction is the same kind of way you want to go. Fun stuff. Hey Pinheads, when I'm not doing this podcast, I'm Dave the Financial Advice Guy. In a recent survey we found that 70% of those polled were concerned about their retirement strategy. Canadians have a number of concerns when looking out over the next 15 years. Professional financial advice is key to helping you through a variety of challenges ranging from inflation, market volatility and determining how to maximize your retirement income in the safest, most effective and tax efficient way. Today's economy requires an experienced hand and a personalized plan. Don't take my word for it. Just listen to Nordman. I am the Nordman, and I approve of Dennis Financial's investment and insurance advice. Their opinions on vacuum form grants are great, too. If you're looking for a more human dimension to your financial advice, Dennis Financial Inc. has you covered with advisors licensed in most Canadian provinces. Contact me via email at david at dennisfinancial.net for a free rate quote and a copy of our value of advice e-book. Or check out dennisfinancial.ca. Insurance solutions provided by Dennis Financial Inc., Canadian residents only. I've included another YouTube video from the Northwest Pinball Show, where John Papaduke pops up and reveals his plans for his own boutique pinball startup company, which he has called Zidware. This video is a lot of fun. Most of it comes from the gold that can be mined in the question and answer and trivia throughout the seminar. The other cool thing is the host of this is Jerry Thompson, who's most well-known for doing the sound for most of the modern sterns that you love. Yeah, and he lives in the Northwest, so that's why he's there. So this brings us to Zidware in 2011 to 2012-ish timeframe. What do you know about Zidware?
    75:23
    Just in a nutshell. They were going to make games, really expensive games. We got Zombietti out of it. It didn't really go well. Not from a business standpoint. No, it didn't. Yeah, yeah. So most of the information within this section around Zidware comes from a podcast recorded in 2015 by Nate Shivers on Coast to Coast Pinball. Let's put a little context behind this before I start. One is it's been three years of kind of stumbling and bumbling, and we'll expand on that in a moment. J-Pop has some hindsight and has an incentive to sort of, let's say, come up with a narrative which fits within him. So this is just taken verbatim. Ron and I will add our own stuff in there. And I also have some quotes that I've found from various places. These sources for all of these, again, in the show notes. So let's wind it back. What's Coast to Coast Pinball and who is Nate Shivers, Ron? Coast to Coast Pinball was an early pinball podcast. Short form. I'd say like maybe 15 minutes. They weren't very long episodes, but they were frequent. And it became one of the really popular early pinball podcasts. Nate Shivers was the host. We had Top Cast. Top Cast is a great source for us here in our previous episodes where they speak to sort of the manufacturers. That was kind of around, what, like 2002, 2003? No, more like 2007, 2008, somewhere around there. And they did like two years and then they kind of stopped. Yeah, they're interviewing people. And then kind of the next big force within that was certainly Nate Shivers. As we move into more modern narratives, I'll be bringing in more Coast to Coast Pinball episodes that I'll reference and things like that. But he was and somewhat still is, he is the host now of the Stern Insider Pinball podcast. Yeah, just like Stern Insider, yeah. Yeah, so it's the free service. You sign up and you don't have to pay a fee. You can go in behind the Stern sort of website. And when they do a launch of a pinball machine, Nace is not a full-time pinball person. He does it as a hobby. My understanding is that he ended up moving to Europe for work. Yeah, he works for a guitar company, and he was going to work for Stern. And the guitar company offered him a deal he couldn't refuse. So he said, sorry, Stern, and then he moved to Europe. Yeah, so he's, I mean, they're all on good terms. I've never met Nate. I've listened to quite a few of his episodes. He seems like just a stand-up dude, just a really nice guy. I look forward to shaking his hand sometime because he's done a lot for the pinball hobby. He's really kind of created a lot of these primary sources that, again, we reference on this podcast, which is the most important thing that he probably could have done is what were people thinking at the time. One thing that sticks out, though, is episode 197, which is called An Evening with John Papaduke. It was recorded on the 26th of September in 2014. It was by far his most listened to episode he ever did. This was, and J-Pop just, he rambles, he goes on and on and on and on. There was not a lot of editing. It's a difficult listen, but I was able to get through most of it. I was able to pull the quotes from an AI software that kind of creates transcripts and things. It was really, really helpful. But this episode was really hard to find because the episode has been removed from the feed, as well as when you go to the website and you try to get it or listen to it, it has been erased. I find it interesting. I haven't asked why. That's not what we do here. We like to speculate. That's the excitement about our podcast, is we kind of try to figure these things out as opposed to asking the sources, because that's more interesting. But I did have some help with a fellow pinballer who used a thing called the Wayback Machine. Do you know what the Wayback Machine is, Ron? Carcive.org. Yes. So you can go back on the Internet and find things that were removed. Please remember, folks, whatever you put on the internet will always and forever be there, no matter how hard you try to erase it. So, the Wayback Machine, I went back on the website and I was able to pull the episode. I've included a link to the Wayback Machine and the website in the show notes. This is a great snapshot about J-Pop and Zidware in 2015. Nate Shivers would say that John is a very likable guy, but we have a bad situation here. And John knows that. There have been a lot of mistakes made here. This is kind of setting the table, right, Ron? Yes.
    80:17
    Now, you joined pinball in what was it, 2012? No, 2004. So you can probably remember a lot of this. Now, I joined pinball in 2018. So all of this had happened well before I had joined, and I only get the bits and pieces of what happened with Zidware and John Papaduke and why everybody hates John Papaduke now. So I hope I'm doing everybody who's recently joined the hobby a little bit of the work to figure out what's going on here. So this is the summer of 2011. You remember the summer of 2011? Sure. I was alive. Yes. Zidware planned on making 13 pinball machines, a specific, very niche boutique. Now, eventually it was increased to 19 machines, because, I mean, how can you make money making 13 machines? The price tag for these machines was $16,000 U.S., and the highest LE machines at the time, So we're thinking like ACDC, those kind of things, were $6,000 from Stern. That is a huge price tag. Yeah. People talking about the Super LEs now. Yeah. Stocks did wear pricing. So Batman 66, I think that was what, 15,000 years? 15,000, yeah. Right. We're talking about only 500 Pirates of the Caribbean from Jersey Jack are made, and for some reason people love that game, or the people that own it love the game. I don't get it. But those are going for like 16,000 U.S. now. You know, sometimes you see them for 20. It's something crazy. But there was a lot of excitement when John Papaduke announced that he was coming out and going to create games again. So J-Pop says, I didn't expect to sell even four games. I couldn't believe the enthusiasm from the community. So many people were encouraging me to do this. What would J-Pop have designed if Bally Williams had stayed alive? He created four games. Those four games are just absolute epic machines. And then he made Star Wars. What are some of the cool features that were around this game that he was promoting? What were the big plans? Well, the ball's going to shoot up and freeze in midair. He's going to make a ball hover. A ball hover. Yes, he's going to make it hover in the air. Like a helicopter. You know, he's going to have whimsical ramps. He's going to have great art. It's really exciting. And you can see that in that Midwest video on YouTube if you want to go back and watch that. Things didn't quite go as well as they had expected. He kind of laid out all these plans, and then he figured, okay, we've got to get it done. You've got to take risks to start up something so awesome. Well, J-Pop says, if we knew everything from the very beginning, does that mean you never do anything? You don't build any games? This is America. You risk things. You risk everything. And you move forward to create something new. We call that the American dream. A lot of times those people make mistakes. Yeah, that's inspirational. Yeah. The Canadian with the American dream. After eight to ten months, John began noticing what the cost of labor was, and then he couldn't make any money. So he came up with the idea to increase production and make the original ones a special pioneer edition. Yeah, so you're getting kind of like if you were first in, you get like the elite, you know, the big time super LE. But he's going to have to make more than 13 and 19, right? He just can't get the scale that he needs to make the money on those productions. He also brought in NDAs or non-disclosure agreements, and that anyone who helped out Zidware around this time had to sign an NDA so that they weren't allowed to sort of talk about and spill the secrets at Zidware. In 2012, there are no other startups and there is almost no homebrew pinball machines. At this time, we're just getting ready to go back on that roller coaster of pinball. Things are pretty much dead, but they're coming back. But there's no other boutique people. There's basically Zidware and that's it. There's a little bit of rumblings around Jersey Jack. There's a little bit of rumblings around the to soon be spooky pinball. But John is really blazing trails here when it comes to creating Zidware. But he's got to bring people in to help him out. One of those people that pop up is an individual named Ben Heck. Mr. Heckadorn. Ben says, aside from the anybody who walks through the door NDA, John never had a formal agreement or contract with me. There was no indication of payments, royalties, usage of likeness, nothing. Yeah, you just sort of are signing paperwork to sign paperwork when you're working and helping out. I mentioned before that John sort of rambles, keeps talking about pinball secrets. You know, the NDAs didn't work, but that's why he had them anyway. It was really important. But what he's doing is still kind of very secret. But it was the spring of 2012.
    85:26
    John would go to vendors. Vendors are people that make parts. And he would ask them to help and build components.
    85:35
    They were doing work with other companies, like Stern, for example, and they wouldn't work with Didware. This became a huge problem. So if you can't buy cabinets or solenoids or brackets and things like that from the manufacturers that are making them, because they're working with somebody like Stern, you're going to have to source that yourself, or you're going to have to build it in-house. And this is where things really start to go bad, right? Oh, yeah. The first game that was announced was Magic Girl, right? So he showed some sort of stuff about Magic Girl. But then quickly, the next game called Zombie Adventure Land, or Ben Heck's Zombie Adventure Land, was announced. So why did they take orders on a second game when the first one wasn't even done and they were having issues finding parts. They brought on another 100 prepaid customers. Well, J-Pop says, there is that misjudgment. You know, John's bad decisions. I started working with Ben kind of in the summer, later in that summer when I started Magic Girl, so he would help me cut play fields. Him and Charlie were always very helpful. Yeah, so Charlie is Charlie Emery who would eventually start Spooky Pinball. He was an operator. So let's, again, Ty, let's wind this back a little bit. Well, who's Ben Heck? Well, his name is actually Benjamin Hecadorn. He's an engineer and pinball designer and a console game modder. He specializes in creating accessibility controls for video game consoles. Yeah, Ben Heck is a big deal amongst people who have accessibility problems for playing video games. So, for example, if you've got a disability and you want to play an Xbox, you need a special controller to play an Xbox game with your disability. Ben designs and sells those on his website. That is a big, big deal for the disabled community. So that's where he gets kind of the console modder part. He also was a podcast host around this time, and he focused on authoring modifications for video games. You call them hacking. You hack your games, that kind of stuff. He's on Pinside. Oh, yeah, he's on Pinside. He is quite the active troll in the Deep Root Pinball. Yes, he's quite the troll. He cracks me up. He's also a regular on Canada's Pinball Podcast, where he sort of talks about various things. Ben Heck is pretty entertaining, but you got to kind of, you know, you got to wade through some of the BS, I think, too. But he's definitely my kind of guy. Remember the quotes that I found here are more recent quotes, now that all these explosions have happened around Zidware and Deep Root and stuff like that. So Ben Heck has the advantage of hindsight with now when he's creating, when now he's writing these things. So I pulled some of these quotes from Pinside. So let's talk a little bit about Ben Heck's Zombie Adventureland, Ron. Well, Ben says, Ben Heck's Zombie Adventureland was John's idea, not mine. This game was born of a has-been hack trying to trick someone into performing a bunch of free labor, hoping my ego would take the bait. My ego doesn't work that way. I want to have creative control, not see my face on a back glass. This is from 2022. Ben Heck's involvement was very short-lived, as did we're, and according to his post on Pinside, again included in the show notes, his involvement with Papa Duke was never even committed to in a contract, and it mostly consisted of just hanging out and brainstorming. The name of the game was eventually changed to Retro Atomic Zombie Adventureland after Heck's association with the project dissolved. This game would eventually get rolled into Deep Root Pinball, and that's a whole other podcast. Ben became an outspoken critic of J-Pops as time went on. This is the time when John Papaduke tried as he could to bring in as much help from various directions as he could. He didn't have enough money to do these things. It was costing him a fortune to build things like cabinets and boards and things. So that's why he reached out to members of the community. For example, Jimmy, aka Compy on Pinside, was a programmer that J-Pop tried to bring aboard. And Jimmy says, it was great at first to get a phone call from someone whose games you grew up playing. I was originally contacted to do the software and operating system for his games. Not just Magic Girl, but the system and framework common to all of his games that used the same board set. John was willing to talk for hours about how they did things in the old days and whatnot when it came to the technical aspects or even the financial aspects of our conversations regarding timelines and the technology he would use he was generally clueless he was very quick to try to appeal to me to come work with the real game designers and do something great however when any discussion of compensation came up they were quickly shut down and i was told it would be an apprenticeship ship. Yeah. He continues, I'm glad I got out of it unscathed, but I really, really do hate it for the people that did step up and try to pull the project together because they thought it was good for pinball. Yeah. I mean, I can empathize with J-Pop, right? He doesn't have a lot of money. He's taken some people's money. He's trying to deliver a project. He's trying to deliver a product. He's trying his best to do what he can, but that's kind of sketchy. You know what I mean? Like, we're trying to sell a dream here. And when it comes to selling a dream, we've seen that quite a bit in pinball, and it just continues to happen. I had mentioned before that Ben Heck, he would leave to work with Charlie Emery at Spooky Pinball. Spooky Pinball has really grown and flourished in the pinball community. They're really just a wonderful startup that did it right. They just sort of picked away little bit by little bit. But Spooky Pinball was not really around in 2012. But within Ben Heck's orbit was Charlie Emery, and they began to build what would become Spooky in 2013. Ben says, Jay Poppin starts slandering me, even though I'm helping Spooky become a real company while John was finding his next scam victim. Really grinds my gears. I helped created millions in wealth and many jobs. John only destroys wealth. That's why this game pisses me off. It's an affront to me as a person, and I'm embarrassed my name was ever attached to it. It's a monument to greed and sloth, to creative bankruptcy and deception. Let it die. It doesn't deserve to live. Yeah, so Ben Heck is basically saying that he's trying to wash his hands completely of all of this zombie, you know, Adventureland stuff. Again, it should be noted that Ben is speaking with hindsight. He's also speaking because he had a falling out with J-Pop. It's probably what he's saying is probably right, but whatever. As well as he also had a falling out with Charlie Emery and left spooky because of kind of the way Ben Heck is. Yeah, they weren't making his game and he got pissed. And then he blasted Charlie Emery, kind of like he just blasted J-Pop online. But Charlie did not respond. And then they ended up working together again like a year or two later. You know, Ben has been working with Charlie Emery and Spooky Pinball, but they're designing kind of a game with Chicago Gaming. So we haven't really heard about that in the last little while, but that's kind of exciting. It's going to be cool, I think. Now, manufacturing expectations, right? J-Pop in his interview says that they had low number of expectations, but they expected to sort of make six games a week. And he comments that even Charlie, well, they can make four to five a week at the time. So he's got high expectations. Now, this is the dilemma, and it is the Achilles heel to every one of these boutique manufacturers that started up kind of after Zidware and even to today. and that's trying to build the machine that you have in your basement. Well, Williams wouldn't allow you to fall behind. 500 people would be out of work if you didn't start something on time. There was always that pressure and stress. J-Pop says, I set up my new company to make beautiful games, and they're all well-engineered, but I didn't set it up to manufacture. Like on this date, this game must be in production, and it must be at this cost, therefore we need to hire these people to get there. I came about it from a different philosophy.
    94:09
    Yeah. That philosophy was not a good one. Whatever philosophy that was, yeah, throw that out. The Williams philosophy is the right one. Or at least one of the right ones. His philosophy would be one of the wrong ones. Now, he did give, like, a release date and production dates, and he announced those games, right?
    94:28
    Do you remember seeing him around shows? I don't, no. No. I wasn't really following because it was $16,000. I was never going to buy it. So I really wasn't following it because it's like, no, I'm not getting that. Yeah, you're like, give me that Pirates of the Caribbean. No, 2012, I was like, give me that ACDC. J-Pop said that no one really started a small boutique pinball company before. You know, Williams had like standard boards and standard cabinets and these parts, and they just had parts and parts and parts. You know, Gottlieb, we spoke about that in our previous episodes, the Gottlieb Premier, they did just-in-time manufacturing. So something would, you know, parts would come in on one side of the building and out the other side came pinball machines. Well, he didn't have that luxury. He was literally starting from scratch. Well, you needed things like cabinets. You needed trim. You needed cabling. You needed a driver board. You needed lights. You needed light sockets. And all of this compounded for John Papaduke. And the schedules that he created constantly changed until eventually it was just subject to change. So let's talk about board sets. Ron, what are some of the board sets out there today? For every manufacturer? I mean, it depends on the manufacturer. CERN has the Spike system. Chicago Gaming, I think, has their own custom system. Yeah, they've paid a designer, they've paid manufacturers in Asia or something to make these surface-mounted fancy boards and send them over. American is using the P-Rock. Multimorphic boards. Spooky was using them, but now they're using, I think they're using a combination, but they're using like a pinhead. Well, that was the original board, pinhead. I think the new one is called Pinotar. So that's what Spooky's using. So basically you've got to either use an existing board set or come up with your own. At this time, there was nobody out there. There was nobody out there to help you with this. There was no off-the-shelf thing. There was nothing that you could do. today we have a great guy named jerry stellenberg and his multi-morphic p-rock and and the p3 rock board set now you can kind of go into pinball life you can order these they can get sent to you you could build your own pinball machine if you need to sort of mass produce them you can buy these machines and run the cables yourself he's done a lot to help boutique manufacturers of pinball, as well as created a massive homebrew community. The P-Rock and the P3 Rock system was a game changer when it came in, but around 2012, that kind of wasn't there yet, and then as we get kind of a few years down the road okay it starts appearing Ben Heck he was working at Spooky and he created his own board system called and you alluded to it a moment ago the Pinheck board system That was eventually used in Spooky America's Most Haunted. I think it was used in the other one. What was the next one? Rob Zombie. Ben says, in hindsight, he probably just wanted our board set. Remember, he also asked Jerry to make a custom, cheaper P-Rock for a $0 engineering fee. Then when Jerry shockingly said no, John hired someone else to rip off P-Rock. Penhek would have been underpowered for a game like John's, but I doubt he knew enough to be aware of that. So P-Rock had kind of come around, and it sounds like John Papaduke tried to reverse engineer the P-Rock. So he tried to pull a stern. He tried to stern it, or he tried to daddy-ease it, too. Yeah, reverse engineer the bally system and use that. Yeah. I mean, come on. When it works, it works, right? People forget. Yep. So, I mean, you can't blame the guy, really. Come on. Now, this brings us back to the Jimmy or copy on Pinside again. Yeah, he said, when I found out that he just wanted to clone the entire P-Rock board system and framework, that's the point that I stopped talking to him entirely. Whoa. So, there you go. It's confirmed. Tried to steal the P-Rock system. Didn't go really well. Well, now we're into the third game. It's 2013. Once again, we have hit a brick wall. The third game. Now, again, he hasn't made any games yet. Not a single one. So, we're announcing a third game. And we're talking Alice in Wonderland. Finally, we can tie the loop back. Getting back into the whimsy, right back to his first game. New game, more money to move things along, right? Did he have a plan on paper? Not really. But Nate Shivers, got to give him a pat on the back. He asked the right questions. He said, well, why three games? Jay Pop would say, well, three games, that's when you're able to figure out when you have a look and a design feel and three was the right number of games.
    99:25
    That's a great reasoning there. Yeah. I mean, come on. If you, if you don't make three games, you don't have a design style. So you can take a look at American pinball. There are what, three, four games in now. They all, you know, American pinball now because they have three. So, so when you're waiting for parts, well, there's somebody you can still keep busy. Artists. You need artwork. So J-Pop says, We're building a pinball platform. All the games share a lot of similar components. Sometimes you'll be waiting on parts or a vendor. So in the case of the artists, I was kind of training them how to think about pinball. They're not from pinball, and although they're extremely talented, the problem is once they finish a project, they'll basically be going to contract themselves out somewhere else. So it was really important for J-Pop to continue to keep his artists busy so Zidware didn't lose them. Because a lot of these artists that you will find, Stern artists included, they spend a lot of time making band posters or T-shirt designs or, you know, art for CDs or vinyl records or whatever. Like, they have other jobs, right? They got to keep doing stuff. Well, they could disappear. And that's a bad thing. But while you're waiting for, I don't know, trim, cabinets, you're trying to steal board sets. you can still keep the artist busy because, quite frankly, the pinball play field is going to stay similar. Who is he talking about? He's talking about Jeremy Packer. You might know him as his nickname, Zombie Eddie. Probably what, top three greatest pinball artists of all time? There's so many artists through the years. Definitely recently, yes. Yeah, I would. I mean, we've talked about this before, is recency bias. So you're more biased to think the games of today are better because you're further away from the games than they were the last time. You just need to look at Paragon or Fathom, and that'll change your mind. That's why I'm saying top three. You've got, like, Greg Ferreres, still killing it. You've got, you know, Greg Ferris.
    101:28
    Amazing. That's the same guy. Greg Ferris. I think you're thinking of Paul Ferris is who you're thinking of. Paul Ferris. Oh, God. That's bad. I'm going to leave that in. I'm not going to put that in.
    101:39
    So let's talk about Jeremy Packer because I love Jeremy Packer. In my basement, I was able to get one of those Stern Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles banners. That is my childhood. He did, it's perfect. It's absolutely perfect. I love Jeremy Backer. I love you, Jeremy Backer.
    101:58
    Jeremy is from northern Indiana and had no choice but to escape the malaise via a steady diet of comic books, cartoons, movies, music, and video games. Northern Indiana, most well known for corn. Demand or just corn? Just corn.
    102:18
    He spent a lot of time drawing and escaping and would hone his craft with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film and Animation with a Fine Arts minor. So this guy knows what he's doing when it comes to Arsh. He has had the pleasure to work with some top-tier companies including Nike, Adidas, Hasbro, Reebok, DC Shoes, the video game maker EA. He's also produced artwork for some of the greatest musical bands in the world. Foo Fighters, Deadmau5, Deftones, Primus, and on and on. Most recently, Zombie Eddie has created the most amazing pinball packages, including two Twippy wins. We've got Ghostbusters, Iron Maiden, Deadpool, Primus, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Avengers Infinity Quest, and most recently, as of this recording, Godzilla from Stern Pinball. What's Jeremy Packer's best art package? Magic Girl. It's pretty awesome, isn't it? It is good, yes. It is very good. I'm gonna go TMNT, Ninja Turtles. Okay. I think it's probably his best art package? Yeah. Didn't he have Ghostbusters? He had two in one year, and I actually thought that one was the better one. I think it was, what, that one and Avengers. And everyone was saying Avengers. And I was like, ah, I think that Turtles one's a little better. Yeah, yeah. He really caught the spirit of Ninja Turtles, in my opinion. He's just Nickelodeon. They really lucked out, I think, with picking up some of the stuff with Zombie Yeti. He's done a couple of other things. But that's, whatever. Let's put it this way, when it comes to his artwork. When they did Avengers, Marvel was like, who is that guy you had do Deadpool? We want him. They wanted him back, so there you go. As for pinball, Zombie Yeti was discovered, quote-unquote, by John Papaduke online, and he enlisted him to do Magic Girl. And right away, you could tell John Papaduke's artistic sort of vision and eye, he could pick that out and be like, this guy's going to kill it, and you know what? He really has. Saba Yeti says, my professional start in pinball was with John Papaduke in 2011. He found my portfolio of illustrations online when I still had a day job as creative director for a software company. I think an enormous portfolio of five-character illustrations at the time. From there, I had worked with John Papaduke on Magic Girl, Raza, which is retro-atomic zombie adventure land, Alice in Wonderland, and a few other projects for almost four years. Then we stopped communicating. Oh, that's weird. Well, we'll get to that in a minute. But right out of the gate, John Papadu could pick out that Zombie Yeti was something special. And I'll tell you, when you look at that Magic Girl, it is. So you can actually buy Magic Girl, original Zidware Magic Girl play fields and things like that, right? So John was selling play fields. He was selling things, trying to generate some money and all, you know, the T-shirts. They made a bunch of T-shirts, which you can find on eBay, which I think is hilarious. You know, he kept this artist busy because that was the only thing that was generating revenue for Zidware. And we can see now with hindsight, we're in 2022, and it's been 10 years. Zombie Yeti has been a force in pinball. I have included a couple of really great interviews in the show notes. Please go ahead and read some of those interviews with Zombie Yeti. And there's like an artist profile and stuff. Super, super good. But what was it like working with J-Pop Ed Zidwer? It must have been difficult being one of these people that he was kind of bringing in and kind of paying, kind of not paying, kind of working with. Well, so this is from J-Pop about him working for himself, I guess. These games last a long time, so why not put our best efforts in redoing something, updating code, redrawing, whatever it might be. All these things have kind of hurt me, or at least hurt the projects I'm trying to finish, because it means delays. It means you're spending more money. You're trying for excellence. You're trying for perfection, and it's difficult. Yeah, so, I mean, right there it says he's trying for excellence and perfection, right? And that doesn't work. At Bally Williams, you know, they told you it sucked and to move on and to get it out the door. Where he's, you know, you can't get any flipper mechs, so what do you do? Well, you might as well tweak this and change the ramp there. Well, oh, now you changed the ramp. We've got to go to the manufacturer and have them change it again. Or are we going to change the art? Like, we're spinning our wheels here because, quite frankly, we can't manufacture a pinball machine. We've got to come up with something else to pass the day. Well, J-Pop says, I'm not good at getting a game out and having people trash it. I should be smart enough to get a team together and do it right. Let's go back to Ben Heck in 2017. And some people would say that J-Pop was trying to sucker people in to help him to continue. Well, Ben Heck says, suckered in isn't the right term. It just seemed cool to get to work with a legend. Back then, nobody thought any differently. This happens all the time with indie Kickstarters. Everybody wants to work with the insert old school programmer here until they realize it's a bunch of bull. I also thought that a game about me was stupid. Flattering, but stupid. I'm a lot of things, but egotistical isn't one of them. Mm-hmm.
    107:34
    Mm-hmm. So, yes, not a hard decision to go help Charlie instead, who said, we'll pay you X per game. Wow, simple, right? It wasn't just me. John went through all this help like shit through a goose. So he's, again, now he's bringing in the artist, right? And he's giving the artist more projects to do, and it's continuing and continuing and continuing. So we've got programmers and artists and guys to help with play fields, and there's just a revolving door of people coming in and coming out, which in itself continues to create issues. Well, I mean, we're through, what, three years now, and we've missed deadline after deadline after deadline. Now, this isn't unusual, though, right, Ron? As far, well, depending on the pinball manufacturer. Yeah, of course. I mean, Stern is like clockwork because they're a manufacturer. They've always been and always will be. But JJP had some serious issues with its first two machines as well, didn't it? It took a long time.
    108:27
    A long time. They're still at about a game every two years, year and a half, two years. Yeah, they're releasing them, right? It's not like you're giving them money and you've got to wait. But, you know, that first Wizard of Oz stuff, and we'll do another, we'll do a JJP episode some other time. They really struggled with that. I think with Guns N' Roses, it was the first time they announced the game and released it immediately. Yeah, the problem with that has been the pandemic in manufacturing. I mean, before that, even like Wonka, it wasn't announced and boom, you can order these. They're available. It was still a little delay. I would say the delays got progressively less with each new game, but yes. But as far as Zidware, J-Pop says, so you are kind of moving ahead. But then as you move along, as the six-month increments go by, all of a sudden you're engineering your cabinet. You have trim that goes around the cabinet. Oh, and you need a driver board. And then you need cabling. And then you have to have a cable guy. And then you have lighting. And then all these things kind of compounded. And it just seemed to kind of get worse and worse and worse. So J-Pop is self-aware. He's self-aware that building pinball machines is hard. He understands that he's in trouble here. Now, this is, again, from the Coast to Coast interview in 2015. It's been three or four years. He knows stuff is bad. But how do we still not have a f***ing cabinet with trim on it? What's going on here? I think another issue he had is instead of just ripping off, like he tried to rip off the P-Rock, but stuff that you could rip off, probably like just do a Williams cabinet design. Just make the mechs the same. Or he could have just, I think you could just buy the mechs from Pinball Life. I mean, just get those. He didn't do any of that. He kept trying to make all new stuff for like everything. He wanted to revolutionize pinball. Even basic mechs. Like, no, we need a new version. Yeah, like even Jersey Jack to this day and, you know, American pinball. They use old Bally Williams. Yeah, they use Williams mechs, not just flipper mechs. Like, the trapdoor on Dialed In is the same as the trapdoor on Funhaus.
    110:32
    You know, they're not even reinventing the wheel. I mean, shouldn't he know that? Didn't he work at Williams? Doesn't he know that? He's a designer. He's not a manufacturer. Right. And we spoke, again, like an hour ago now, we spoke about how he would go down to the Bally Williams engineering team and say, here's a drawing. And then the cable guy would come back and there's your cable. You know what I mean?
    110:54
    Well, it took him a year to build a cabinet. Originally, they had a Bally Williams cabinet, but that wasn't good enough, apparently. Then he started a blog, right, because he noticed that he needed to have more communication. and then the communication would slow down and would become non-existent.
    111:13
    And then, apparently, it's said by some of these sources, that he actually stopped answering the phone. Now, do you remember when this started to happen?
    111:23
    I was not. This was all on Pinside, most of it, and I probably wasn't paying attention. Zombie Yeti, his first post on Pinside. He said, I'd worked with John Papaduke on Magic Girl, Raza, Alice in Wonderland, and a few other projects for almost four years when he stopped communicating. I found Pinside and learned the fate of Zidware for the first time.
    111:45
    So he literally worked for them, and he found out what happened to the company by going to Pinside. Yeah, and the reason he found Pinside is because he was trying to get a hold of John because he wasn't answering his phone. ZombieHead, he continues, I was crushed by the death of Zidware and the lack of John letting me in on it until it was too late. But even more than that, I was crushed that he hadn't told me he was using other people's money to fund these projects. All around, it was a gut punch for me. Poor Jeremy Packer.
    112:12
    Oh, my goodness. So John Papadu's basically digging a hole, right? Yeah. I mean, you've got to dig up, Scoop. Well, John says, so with pride and the arrogance I had, we can do this. You kind of set yourself up for almost an impossible task. It's maybe a good meaning task. You're trying to do a good thing, but actually you're not very smart. You know, John's really an idiot because he's trying to do these things, and now he has a lot of unhappy customers, and he's late and on and on. He's self-aware. He understands what's going on. Now, I'm going to empathize a little bit with J-Pop, and this is something that happens all the time amongst people in general, is that we try to fix something that's broken. We try. We don't want to fail. We have this fear of failure and we don't want to just quit. And, you know, we feel bad. He feels bad. He took these people's money. Right. He wants to get them a product and he's he's fighting tooth and nail to get the product to them. But the problem is that that just keeps compounding. Right. Compounding, compounding. Now he's three games in. He's got all this art. He's got he's hardly got a cabinet that works. You know, in the interview with, you know, Coast to Coast, he's like, oh, I got this back here. I got the cabinet sitting in here behind me, and we got the game together, and it's coming together. Like, he's trying his best, but man, he's blowing it here. Well, this brings us to 2015 May, when a statement is released by John Papaduke, who is the president of Zidware. And it is called Action Plan for Purchases of Magic Girl, trademark, Raza, and AIW, which is Alice in Wonderland. So I've taken a few pieces. This is quite the document here. It's included in the show notes. It's included in Pinball Supernova website where he has reposted this statement. And in the one line, the one quote that really cracks me up here, and I feel bad for all the people involved in Zidware, but I quote, first and foremost, my apologies for not being a better businessman, end quote.
    114:24
    Yikes. In a nutshell, John says that he has had someone review the company to look at the numbers, to take a look at the money that's been in and what needs to be done. And the company is well underwater. Surprise. Now, they couldn't issue refunds to those people, and they couldn't make games because the money's been spent, and they don't have any games. John also, in this letter, says that he sold the rights and the materials to the games of Zidware to Bill Brandes of Pentasia, who actually in the press release remains nameless, and he was going to complete the project with a licensing agreement. So he didn't sell him the company. He sold him the licensing agreements. As a business person myself, I would say that that's probably to avoid some level of legal liability for Bill Brandis and his company, Pentasia. So the licensee sent out an agreement to the purchasers that they would agree to the new terms of the purchase of their pinball machines. Their deposits, which were paid to Zidware, would roll over to the new company. and they'd pay more than the original agreed upon price because of the cost of developing the machines. Those people who put in their money would have to pay more in the end. So a lot of them have paid their full deposit of $16,000 U.S. five years before this. And they had to agree to not bring legal action against Zidware during the delivery period or within four years of that delivery period. Then in the last line, the only alternative for Zidware, for these pre-order folks if they didn't agree to these terms, was that Zidware would file bankruptcy. Yikes. Do you remember this? Yeah, I remember this. What was the feeling at the time? I'm suing them. Suing them? Yep. Getting my money. Mm-hmm. Right, so this person kind of comes in as an angel investor. It's the same thing that happened at JJP, right? Somebody swung in and bought the company. But this is kind of a little more sketchy than that. It was a little less transparent.
    116:43
    Wow. So it's taken basically all this time. And they say you can't sue Zidware. If you sign the new agreement, you can't sue us. People all bailed, right? Every single person was like, I'm out of here, and I'm suing them, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. But a lot of people still stayed on. They held on to the hope. They wanted to see that magic girl. They wanted to see that floating pinball. You know, they got $15,000. So if you put like $15,000 U.S. into the stock market in 2011, just let it roll for five years, surely you would have made like 5% return on your money. But you basically gave it to J-Pop who couldn't get a machine off the ground, and you've lost all that money, and you've lost the opportunity to grow that money. Crazy talk. But it finally happened, right? Magic Girl debuted. I remember that. Yeah, the Northwest Pinball Show. The Northwest Pinball Show. Finally. The machine comes to life. Bill Brandis pulls it out of the fire. Pintasia shocks the world. But many of the mechs promised didn't work. And the machine was not quite as expected. But it was there, right? It didn't work. I've seen the actual game. It literally was behind ropes. It's like, you can't play this. It doesn't work. So this is the magic fantasy theme. It's from February of 2017.
    118:08
    Williams, WPC95. Oh, no, it's not. It's whatever the heck board system this is. We don't know how many units were actually made, nor do we know how many work. The design was John Papaduke, art by Zombie Yeti, and the software from the guy on Pinside, who eventually just left. Now, we're not in 2017, but I figured I'd run down this machine here because this is getting sad. It's getting worse here, folks. Not only did the shots not work great, the Mylar art was bubbling on this machine.
    118:41
    There was no ball search turned on, which seems like the most basic possible thing you could program.
    118:49
    Many of the features were turned off since they weren't complete or didn't work. So basically it was a white wood with pretty art and flippers. Well, it can't be white wood if it has art. It was like a box of lights. Yeah, and Pentasia bailed soon after that. Yeah. Oh, yeah, there they are. Yep, June. Because they lasted a couple months. A couple of months. And then Bill Brandes is like, oh, my God, we were sold a bill of goods. This machine is not even remotely close to being finished. This has been four years, and this machine is not even close to being, like, finished. Like, how long did it take Zach to make his, you know, from your show, Slam Tilt Podcast, how long did it take him to build his machine? Like, 18 months? I feel like a year, year and a half. Yeah. At least it works. It works, yeah. Well, this is where it gets messy again. Oh, yeah, it got really messy. American Pinball. So you remember this, apparently. Oh, yeah. Startup company. So for whatever reason, they figure the best way to start the company off is hire J-Pop. Oh, you need a designer. You might as well find one who's not building anything. So J-Pop started contract work on a game called Houdini from American Pinball. His name basically sold pinball machines. So he showed up at a pinball show, I think it was Expo, with a prototype of Houdini. It wasn't Expo. I would have seen it. No, it wasn't Expo. I'm trying to remember where it was. It might have been like Houston or something. It wasn't Expo because I would have been there. It was behind like ropes and it wasn't playable.
    120:25
    Is it Vegas? Scroll up, I think it said. Yeah, it was literally, yeah, not even ropes. It was like, you couldn't even get close to it to actually look at it. Venetian. Yeah, so it would have been in Vegas. Yeah, so it was at Vegas. They put it in a room, like a gate in front of it, so you couldn't even get close up to it. So the only pictures that exist aren't the greatest. Yeah. And when you look at this, it's quintessentially J-Pop, is it not? Yeah, it's got the LCD display now in the back of the game. It's there in the back box. Yep. It's got the whimsical clear ramps. It's got beautiful, beautiful art. I've included all of the links to a Pinball News article, which has a lot of the images here. It is. It looks great. Looks awesome. J-Pop is back. Yeah, but they took so much flack for that. Ooh, did they ever. So American Pinball, so this is a subcompany of Ametron, which is a large third-party contract manufacturer. So they know how to make stuff. So they're going to be able to make this game.
    121:27
    Well, they also agreed to try to save Magic Girl. Yeah, they really wanted Papa Duke. It's like, we'll make Magic Girl for you. So they were going to manufacture it. I mean, obviously, part of the problem with the other pin company, with this Mr. Brandis fellow, is that they weren't manufacturers, right? He was just somebody with money. So basically the people who didn't drop their order and sue that just stuck around, they got the Magic Girl. Yeah, they're like, oh, thank God. American Pinball built the Magic Girl. It didn't work. Oh, six years. Six years after the first pre-orders, deliveries were finally scheduled, and they made all the specs at the American Pinball factory provided by John Papaduke. The machines were finally being delivered, and the features were not working. And they would even break. There was no floating ball. There was a million ball hang-ups. The LCD screen would stop working. In fact, people, when they heard that they were finally making this machine, started sort of speculating that it would work and they would buy in or they would buy one from somebody. some of the reported prices were $23,000 U.S. to purchase a spot or purchase a spot from somebody. And man, oh man, these people were burnt. Kind of. If they were going to spend that much, they were already rich, so they don't care. So many people were speculating they would hope to flip it, right? They'd make five or six grand, sell it for $30,000 because there's only like a dozen of them. J-Pop really understands collectability. and there are many reports that there are multiple Magic Girls with the serial number number one. There's also a few that have a serial number zero or a prototype serial number. So those look more collectible unless you actually know what you're looking at. There could be like a dozen number ones with a sticker that says number one. Mm-hmm. Now, there was a lot of fallout. And you had mentioned that American Pinball took a lot of flack for this. As they should. So they had to basically, they did the Magic Girls, they dumped J-Pop's Houdini, and they built a new Houdini in, like, a few months. So they were, they felt like they were actually sold a bill of goods by J-Pop, which they probably were, similar to, you know, Bill Brandis. The machine was supposed to work, and here was the designs and all the, but none of, like, they built it to the spec, but the spec didn't work because J-Pop is an artist, he's not an engineer. and they, again, canceled Houdini and they got Joe Balser to make it. And Houdini, I haven't played this. They're still making it to this day. Yeah, it's a decent game as far as I can tell. Zombie Eddie, he eventually started at Stern, starting with Ghostbusters, so it worked out for him. Boy, oh boy, Ghostbusters. Oh, man. But the lawsuits, they really, really started to pick up now. But eventually, another savior would arrive and purchased Zidware. Somebody with a lot of money.
    124:38
    A company that was exciting and dynamic and once again would change the face of pinball. That company was, Ron? Deep Root. Yes. an investment manager and pinball enthusiast, Robert Mueller, would step up and finally get retro atomic zombie adventure land completed, and we would get the pin bar. But that's another story. Yeah, that's something. So, swear to Google if you don't want to wait for that episode, folks.
    125:13
    Some people say the path to hell is paved with good intentions. and I think this is a prime example of that, Ron, that J-Pop really did actually try to do the best thing, but through the best of intentions, through blunders and mistakes and guilt, he really screwed up. And he kept making it worse. And he has ruined his name in pinball, And I feel horrible about everybody involved. And I do, in fact, feel bad for J-Pop. I really do. But, man, he blew it.
    125:58
    Well, J-Pop says, when I look back at what Stern does now and what we did at Williams, that was a basic philosophy. It was capitalism driving everything. You need a prophet and a very focused team to be in production. J-Pop is certainly an artist and not much of a capitalist. That's for sure. There is a reason, Ron, that Stern Pinball is as successful at what they do. You know when you watch Shark Tank or Dragon's Den here in Canada, where they have a company and they pitch it to the people of the investors, right?
    126:34
    I've never watched it, but I know of it. You are familiar with it? I am familiar. They often tell people to cut their losses and get out and move on, that their idea is dumb and never going to make money. this is a prime example that when j-pop first noticed that he was in over his head he should have cut his losses sucked it up failed and moved on let's sit down and have another segment of life lessons with dave through failure ron we learn but if we're scared of the embarrassment or the shame of failing and we keep on pushing we only dig that hole deeper till we end up hitting a sewage pipe. Wow, deep, man. Through failure we succeed. There, I said it in one line, like that.
    127:27
    Hey, Stewie, we need you to read this again. As it is, you can't just pre-record this. Whatever. Let's see. As it is, you can send your comments, questions, corrections, and concerns to Feverball Chronicles. Wait a minute. That's spelled wrong. You're telling me to say the wrong theme. Oh, it is? Oh, great. Great job there, Dennis. Never trust anyone with two first names, that's what I say. Let me try it again. As always, you can send your comments, questions, corrections, and concerns to CivilVol Chronicles, with an S, at gmail.com. We look forward to all your messages, and we read every one. Please subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Play, or your favorite pod catcher, and turn on automatic downloads so you don't miss a single episode. Remember to leave us a five-star review wherever you found us or on this week in Kimball's promoted database. That way more people can find us and then maybe we can make more of that flipping out money. Wait a minute. That's a new one. That's not usually in there. Yes, Dewey, we're all set. You can go. That is new. More flipping out money. Okay.
    128:41
    The players are taking the field! The entire podcast is literally just World Cup soccer. That's it. Oh, wait a minute. Yeah, this is a more personal podcast here. I mean, it's a Canadian.
    129:08
    Something. Yay! I was reading the notes. You forgot important information. Do you want to read the quote? So J-Pop, I'm the official J-Pop guy. I love it. But I don't have the accent.
    129:22
    J-Pop says, all of the people, and whenever I say that, I think I'm like one of those old, like the cow says.
    129:30
    Contract manufacturer called, I just had it in my head. That's a weird name for a company. I just had it in my head. What do you think of that? Was that a good episode? We'll see. Okay. We didn't go through all the games like we usually do. I know. It was more like reading posts on the Internet. So we'll see how people like that. Yeah. Yeah, it's a whole thing. I didn't get to do my drum part. Boo. Oh.