Journalist Tool

Kineticist

  • HDashboard
  • IItems
  • ↓Ingest
  • SSources
  • KBeats
  • BBriefs
  • RIntel
  • QSearch
  • NName Review
  • +Health

v0.1.0

← Back to items

Gerry Talks the Past, Present, & Future of the P3 - Interview

Pinball Pursuit·video·49m 57s·analyzed·Dec 14, 2025
View original
Export .md

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.035

TL;DR

Multimorphic founder details P3 platform strategy, licensing process, and vision for pinball industry consolidation.

Summary

Gerry Stellenberg, founder of Multimorphic, discusses the company's P3 modular pinball platform, licensing strategy for games like Weird Al and Portal, the add-on game ecosystem, and his perspective on industry consolidation and community growth. He emphasizes the P3's dual-game capability as a solution to space constraints and high pricing, details the licensing challenges for music and IP, and outlines how third-party developers can create add-on games through an app store model.

Key Claims

  • Multimorphic has released nine P3 games including Portal, Princess Bride, Rush, Weird Al, Heist, Lexi Lightspeed, Cannon Lagoon, Cosmic Kart Racing, and Final Resistance

    high confidence · Gerry lists released titles throughout interview; Portal and Weird Al specifically confirmed as recent releases

  • The pinball industry has grown significantly since 2010 due to P-ROC board enabling new developers, but may need manufacturer consolidation as 12-14 companies compete for limited licenses

    high confidence · Gerry: 'There are a lot of pinball companies making games right now. And the community's not big enough for twelve, thirteen, fourteen separate pinball companies all fighting for the same licenses. So I think there has to be some contraction in the industry from a manufacturer's perspective.'

  • Licensing five Weird Al parody songs required negotiating with twenty different companies for royalties due to changing ownership of original songs

    high confidence · Gerry: 'Every quarter I have to send royalty checks out for sales for these songs, and I'm sending checks to twenty different companies for the five songs.'

  • Valve was contacted through cold emails to multiple addresses, eventually reached through connection via tournament player Bo Karemans, who had a friend at Valve who championed the Portal project

    high confidence · Gerry describes email outreach process and breakthrough: 'The story goes that they saw all my emails...somebody has to champion the project...Bowen's friend was the guy'

  • Multimorphic P3 pricing at $3,400-$4,000 is intentionally designed to address the $12,000+ pricing of traditional machines

    high confidence · Gerry: 'Hopefully we're addressing some of that by giving people the option to buy games at $3,500, $3,400, $4,000.'

  • 30-40% of Multimorphic P3 customers purchase add-on games beyond their base module

    medium confidence · Gerry: 'There's a good section of them probably 30 to 40 percent of the customers...end up purchasing these side games'

  • Heist received comparison to 1990s pinball games by recent community posts, with some calling it 'as good as any game from the nineties'

Notable Quotes

  • “Everything I have in the house is a multi-app capable device. Why do I have twelve individually themed standalone products that cost a lot of money and take a lot of space?”

    Gerry Stellenberg@ 2:33 — Explains core innovation philosophy behind P3 platform — modular gaming as response to collector pain points

  • “Every quarter I have to send royalty checks out for sales for these songs, and I'm sending checks to twenty different companies for the five songs.”

    Gerry Stellenberg@ 11:50 — Illustrates complexity and ongoing cost of music licensing in pinball; reveals administrative burden of parody licensing

  • “It's not Portal 3, but it is a Portal game in the Portal universe and a pinball experience leveraging a lot of assets from that.”

    Gerry Stellenberg@ 16:58 — Legal clarification statement for licensing protection; indicates careful IP negotiation with Valve

  • “The community's not big enough for twelve, thirteen, fourteen separate pinball companies all fighting for the same licenses. So I think there has to be some contraction in the industry from a manufacturer's perspective.”

    Gerry Stellenberg@ 24:32 — Candid assessment of industry consolidation pressure; influential voice predicting manufacturer shake-out

  • “Never look away from the flippers. I love it.”

    Dr. C (interviewer)@ 44:10 — Endorsement of P3 design philosophy distinguishing it from LCD-heavy competitors like Jersey Jack Pinball

  • “Our whole design mantra is never look away from the flippers...which means you can focus on gameplay while you're playing.”

Entities

Gerry StellenbergpersonMultimorphiccompanyBo KaremanspersonStephen Cameron SilverpersonDennis NordmanpersonJay Alex LevypersonValvecompany

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Gerry predicts necessary industry consolidation: 12-14 manufacturers competing for same licenses in community too small to support all

    high · Direct quote: 'The community's not big enough for twelve, thirteen, fourteen separate pinball companies all fighting for the same licenses. So I think there has to be some contraction in the industry from a manufacturer's perspective.'

  • ?

    community_signal: Third-party developer ecosystem enabling hobbyist/learning programmers (son in Deluxia Studios) to create pinball games; democratizing game development

    high · Gerry on Nezik City: 'Deluxia Studios wrote it, which is a father and son team...and the son is learning programming, and this is his first pinball experience'

  • ?

    community_signal: Recent community posts compare Heist to 1990s classic games favorably; perceived as delivering vintage pinball quality and experience

    medium · Gerry: 'I've seen people post recently, as recently as a month ago, that they think that Heist is a nineties-style pinball experience as good as any game from the nineties, which is a huge compliment'

  • ?

    competitive_signal: Multimorphic competing on UX/ergonomics (never look away) and value (modular platform enabling multiple games) vs. premium/collectible positioning of traditional manufacturers

    high · Multiple references to space constraint solution and LCD avoidance design differentiation against Jersey Jack

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Multimorphic approach to add-on games: designers select physical playfield modules matching game mechanics (scoops for Elemental, doors for Dungeon Defender)

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.150

0:00
Hello and welcome to the Pinpulper Suite. I'm Dr. C. And I'm Mrs. J. As you can see, this isn't our normal setup. Tell us more. We're doing our first ever interview and we are so excited to have jerry stillenberg of multimorphic on the show how you doing jerry hey guys i'm doing great thank you for having me yeah we're so happy um for those who are unfamiliar with with who you are and what you do give us a little bit of a you know elevator pitch oh gosh i am founder of multi-morphic with the goal of bringing new ideas innovation new pricing models all the cool modern things to pinball i'm a technology guy electrical computer that kind of stuff growing up through college i've tinkered i've created custom machines and control circuits and code and all those things and now we make machines that's so cool so cool is your degree in electrical engineering or was it Computer engineering, which is electrical plus software. So I've got two of the aspects needed for pinball development. Yeah, that's so cool.
1:30
How did you go from whatever your job was before to making pinball? All right. So I had normal jobs like you would expect that I did. I worked for companies making always some kind of electronic hardware to do cool things, mostly in the networking area, data networking and security products, processing of data with hardware, intrusion prevention, firewalls, those kind of things. So while doing that, I built a collection starting with one machine, quickly growing to two and then three and then 10 and then 12 pinball machines. That's what you have to look forward to. I was going to say, don't get any ideas. It's going to happen. There's no way to control it. It happens to everybody, except now we have a machine where you only need to buy one and you can play tons of games. But that's the end of the story. That's the end of the story. So I had 12 machines, and I'm sitting here looking at my computer, my phone. Everything I have in the house is a multi-app capable device. Why do I have 12 individually themed standalone products that cost a lot of money and take a lot of space? Let's try to do something with these things where I can get more life out of them. And so that kind of spawned the idea to build a multi-game capable system. That's so cool. We're curious, what was the first machine that you bought and why did you buy that one? Easy. It's easy. theater of magic second one was attack from mars first one was theater of magic i started playing pinball in college at the pool hall and it was in the mid 90s and those were the game they had so i started my first game first game i ever played that i remember playing was on a theater of magic.

medium confidence · Gerry: 'I've seen people post recently, as recently as a month ago, that they think that Heist is a nineties-style pinball experience as good as any game from the nineties'

  • Virtual pinball platforms (Williams games on Switch/digital) have introduced people to pinball and converted some to physical machine purchases

    medium confidence · Gerry describes brother's journey: 'he started playing on a Switch...now he's played probably triple the pinball I have because he goes to a local family fun center'

    • Gerry Stellenberg@ 15:19 — Core P3 design differentiator; addresses usability complaint about competing machines

  • “I think there has to be some contraction in the industry from a manufacturer's perspective. But I don't think that should affect the ability of the community to grow.”

    Gerry Stellenberg@ 24:33 — Separates manufacturer consolidation prediction from overall community health outlook

  • “Weird Al was like, looks great. You guys are doing a wonderful job. No feedback, very little. But Valve was very involved and had very specific things that we needed to make look accurate to their eye.”

    Gerry Stellenberg@ 19:51 — Reveals difference in IP holder engagement style; Valve as hands-on partner vs. Weird Al as trusting licensor

    • Portal
    game
    Weird Al Yankovicperson
    Heistgame
    Weird Algame
    Princess Bridegame
    Elementalgame
    Nezik Citygame
    Dungeon Door Defendergame
    Lexi Lightspeedgame
    Jersey Jack Pinballcompany
    Spooky Pinballcompany
    Dutch Pinballcompany
    P-ROC boardproduct
    Texas Pinball Festivalevent
    Tee'd Off / Pinball Suiteorganization
    Michael Oceanperson
    Josh Rupperson
    Deluxia Studioscompany
    Dr. Cperson
    Mrs. Jperson

    high · Gerry on Elemental: 'It doesn't matter what playfield module you have installed...It doesn't matter because we're using the scoops in front of those physical experiences'

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Valve required hands-on involvement in Portal game development vs. Weird Al's trust-based approach; IP holders have varying control preferences and engagement styles

    high · Contrast: 'Weird Al was like, looks great. You guys are doing a wonderful job. No feedback, very little. But Valve was very involved and had very specific things that we needed to make look accurate'

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Music licensing for Weird Al parodies extraordinarily complex: 20 separate royalty payments required quarterly for just 5 songs due to ownership fragmentation

    high · Gerry: 'Every quarter I have to send royalty checks out for sales for these songs, and I'm sending checks to twenty different companies for the five songs.'

  • $

    market_signal: 30-40% customer adoption rate for add-on games suggests strong engagement with P3 ecosystem and willingness to purchase supplemental content

    medium · Gerry: 'There's a good section of them probably 30 to 40 percent of the customers...end up purchasing these side games'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Bo Karemans, high-level tournament player, hired by Multimorphic for rules development, indicating talent acquisition from competitive community

    high · Gerry: 'We hired Bo [Karemans], high-level tournament player, a long-time pinball guy...to help with rules on Final Resistance'

  • $

    market_signal: Multimorphic's $3,400-$4,000 P3 pricing intentionally designed to address $12,000+ industry standard as market accessibility issue

    high · Gerry: 'Hopefully we're addressing some of that by giving people the option to buy games at $3,500, $3,400, $4,000. The pricing model that we've come up with is intentionally trying to address that kind of difficulty paying $12,000 for each game'

  • ?

    product_strategy: P3 platform design philosophy ('never look away from flippers') explicitly positions against Jersey Jack and traditional LCD-heavy machines as usability advantage

    high · Gerry: 'You don't have that problem in a Multimorphic P3 because our whole design mantra is never look away from the flippers...focus on gameplay while you're playing'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Virtual pinball (Williams games on Switch, digital platforms) serving as effective onboarding tool converting players to physical machines; mentioned brother played 3x more pinball after virtual introduction

    medium · Gerry: 'he started playing on a Switch...now he's played probably triple the pinball I have because he goes to a local family fun center that has like twelve'

    • 3:29
    Yep, they always say you remember your first. Right. Love it. So looking through your machines that you've put out, you have a mix of original themes and licensed themes.
    3:46
    How do you decide what to bring right? How do you decide which way to go? And what is the future of Multimorphic Group?
    3:54
    How you decide what to go when you have no money is very easy you develop some kind of idea that you have in your head and piece it together yeah it's a startup company we we got some seed money from friends and family based on the prototype i built with a friend in my garage but we basically got started with nothing and pieced something together we came up with a design dennis nordman who designed Whitewater in 30 plus other games. He saw our prototype. We talked to him. He worked with us for a bit. Came up with this idea for Lexi Lightspeed, our first game.
    4:34
    And we built that first. We built Cannon Lagoon, Cosmic Kart Racing, Heist, all original ideas. And Heist was launched right before COVID.
    4:48
    It did okay. It did better than all the others and kind of brought in enough revenue where we're like okay let's go get a license so that's when the brainstorming started i mean everyone knows pinball machines sell based on people's nostalgia for whatever the title is for sure original themes they can be successful they need a special hook and they need longevity that the company needs to support them to convince enough people to give it a chance and then to grow with it and then realize okay i want one too and but original i mean but licensed ips people just connect or don't connect name and they they choose to buy just based on their nostalgia so you you mentioned that um heist did better than some of your other ones why do you think heist did better well everything did better than the one before it up through heist and weird owls so that was kind of the platform getting a little bit more adoption and recognition and people started to realize, okay, this makes financial sense for me. That was part of it. But Heist is just a really cool idea. The team built a really cool illustrated story around. We hired a comic artist who lives in Houston. He did all the artwork. It looks like it's straight out of a comic book. Steven Silver, a creative director, designed these characters. They all have backstories. They're all the stereotypical heist characters, Cat Burglar and Demolition, the mastermind. They all sound like they're perfectly integrated in the story. Mr. Big is the bad guy. He's a character. He controls this three-dimensional crane. It extends. It moves up. It moves down left and right.
    6:37
    I don't know. Everything just seemed to come together, and people really liked the presentation of it. They liked the story. I've seen people post recently, as recently as a month ago, that they think that Heist is a 90s-style pinball experience as good as any game from the 90s, which is a huge compliment. Yeah, it's a huge compliment. And it's funny because we do these videos where we talk about what our dream themes would be if we made up our own, and I said Heist. Mine was more Vegas-style, Ocean's Eleven. But when I heard that you guys had one, I was like, oh, I've got to try it. I was very excited. It's a fun idea.
    7:18
    That's basically what we did. We modeled kind of the rules and the story after the Ocean's Eleven kind of theme. So, yeah. Oh, that's so cool. I just wish we could find somebody that had a heist. I really want to try it. We haven't tried it yet. Yeah. We'll have to find a machine somewhere. Yeah. We have to fly out to Round Rock, Texas. We have a showroom full of all of our games. There's a whole lineup of them. You can walk by one by one, play them all.
    7:41
    You're going to be a Texas Pinball Festival, right? Yes, always. So the announcement we're making, our first ever convention we're going to go to is Texas Pinball Festival. Oh, fantastic. Well, we pack up the whole showroom and bring it, so you'll be able to play all of it. Love it.
    7:55
    We're so excited. So when it came to working with Weird Al, when I was looking at themes that I wanted for our Dream Theme video, I was like, oh man, it would be so cool if there was a Weird Al machine. Because he's got, obviously his music career, you could pull in UHF, you could pull in his kids show. That would be so cool. And I wanted to make sure no one had done it. So you guys had it. So I didn't end up pitching it. But it's still like, I love Weird Al. I went to his bigger, weirder concerts.
    8:29
    I had an extra ticket. No way. And Mr. J did not go with me. But I want to hear about how that came about. Like who approached who? How closely did you get to work with him? How many of the assets from, you know, his films, his shows, and his albums did you guys have access to? Tell us about the experience. Okay. So we, when we're discussing licensed IPs, it's always the same process. We're always all throwing out ideas every day, all hours of the day, week after week after week after week. Even while we're designing one game, we're talking about ideas for a future game. I don't remember who it was, me or Steven Silver, probably one of us. We're like, what do you think of Weird Al? And the other one of us was like, yeah. Yeah. That's how I was. It was kind of like we both felt it was a no-brainer. The challenge was we hadn't done a license before, and we didn't know the process. We didn't work with any kind of resource who helped pursue licenses. So I just started Internet searching and emailing people that seemed to be connected to him.
    9:47
    Eventually, I found someone who was listed on some website as his agent. Message done, no response. Message done a couple more times. Eventually he got back to me and said, I'm not the guy you need to talk to so-and-so. And so-and-so was the guy. It was Jay Levy, Weird Al's manager. Oh, yeah. I know Jay Levy. I've heard that name.
    10:07
    So I talked to Jay, pitched the idea. They were on board pretty quickly. He obviously talked to Al about it.
    10:17
    Then once we had approval to do the game, we had to pick the music. and we wanted to get so many songs that people recognize hamish paradise my bologna i'm just a couple we we wound up with five songs that everyone knows yeah and then we got 12 more songs from his original catalogs or his his style parodies not okay not full parodies Dare to be stupid and all those Traffic Jam, a number of them Yeah Those are owned by him he still owns the songs they're distributed or published by Sony Music and then the parodies, the full parodies are much more challenging to license because you're not licensing the parody, you're actually licensing the original song. Oh, really? Oh, interesting. Because he didn't just take advantage of whatever it is, parody law or whatever that says you can just make fun of something and do it however you want. He was honest and paid royalties to the people whose song he parodied. So we had to as well. And some of those songs have changed hands 12 times throughout the ownership process and multiple studios own parts of them.
    11:45
    Just five songs was quite complicated to license. Every quarter I have to send royalty checks out for sales for these songs and I'm sending checks to 20 different companies for the five songs. For the five songs you have. That's nuts. But his originals, no problem.
    12:06
    I mean those are two checks. One to him and one to Sony. Easy. My question is, because again we haven't played the game yet. Is Albuquerque his 12-minute song in the game? We talked about it. How do we integrate that? Everyone's like, it should be the wizard mode You have to play all 12 minutes of it But we didn put Albuquerque in Our wizard mode is actually you doing a speed run of all of the modes you played during regular gameplay So you get a snippet of all the experiences you already did, and you got to do one or two shots for each one. Got it. Okay. That's fun. What is your favorite mode in his game? Favorite mode?
    12:50
    There's a lot of really good modes in the game. And they're all so unique because we take the screen and we completely change what you're looking at. And it's themed based on the song. Probably Mission Statement.
    13:02
    Okay. Mission Statement is a style parody. It's still some ish, I believe. Yes, that sounds right. And we licensed from the people who did the music video.
    13:13
    You know this. The little drawings that he does. I'm a weird elf. She has no idea what's going on. I know exactly what you're talking about. So the song is about catchwords people use in corporate speech. Synergy. Oh, gotcha. Synergy. Yeah, synergy is like the chorus.
    13:30
    So then there are these, basically they, it's like a real-time comic sketch that you see the line art being drawn as it progresses through the song. And so we licensed those exact doodles. Integrated the music video into the game. So as you're playing the thing, you're seeing the video on the screen. and drawing lines. As you're playing it, you're collecting corporate stocks and you're cashing in, you're selling out, and you're collecting jackpots and things. That's so cool. I cannot wait to play it. March?
    14:05
    Unless Erica, from Erica's Pinball Journey, lets me play on hers when I travel to California next. In February.
    14:14
    Very cool. Well, since we're talking favorite we talked about your favorite or at least dream machine we talked about your favorite mode in weird al what's your favorite multi-morphic machine i don't i don't have one i mean like your children yeah yeah it kind of is i was heavily involved with i did a lot of the development i did most of the development on lexi light speed okay i did all the software development i helped direct a lot of this stuff. So I have a personal connection more so to that one than any of the others. But all of them, I sit in the design meetings, we all bat around ideas, we all talk about rules, we all talk about what would be fun and what wouldn't be fun.
    14:58
    I really do like them all. Portal is our latest. And in Portal we did a couple of things that just physically aren't possible with other machines. Balls go in here, they come out here, and how do you do that on a traditional machine? we also have the screen so with the screen we can present data and information to you without you having to look up to the box which means you can focus on gameplay while you're playing you're not which is your biggest complaint when you play games with a big lcd especially like a jersey jack like i can't look up yeah the ball goes into a lock and you look up and then it releases and it drains before you're even looking exactly drives me crazy you don't have that problem in a p3 because our whole design mantra is never look away from the flippers i love it salt so you're getting to with portal now i'm a huge portal junkie i love it we're two for two with you you have no idea we got heist we got weirdo we got portal what else right so when we did our like reveal video for the spring we talked about like all the things that have been revealed so far and i put you guys at the top of what i was most excited for because portal is it's one of my favorite games of all time if not my favorite game of all time and i love that you essentially got to make portal 3 with with this game because you had the original actress of Gladys and you were able to tell the story. Tell me how that came about. How did you get in contact with Valve? Whose idea was it? And how did you put it all together and make this perfect storm work? So let me preface by very clearly stating for the record, it's not Portal 3, but it is a Portal game in the Portal universe and pinball experience leveraging a lot of assets from that.
    17:03
    No one thinks it is Portal 3, but I need to say that for licensing reasons. I said it. You didn't say it. That's fair.
    17:12
    We, again, batted around tons of ideas. We talk about video games. We talk about TV shows and movies and books. You name it. We talk about products, toys. There's an idea out there. We've probably talked through some aspect of it. four people in the inner core of our design team are humongous portal fans so basically if we could get that theme it's the dream theme for pretty much the whole design team which meant that we would do it justice that we yeah we would deliver an experience that hopefully portal fans with uh i again tried to cold call this was this was years before we actually produced it okay um so i went to val's website and they list a whole lot of people and a whole lot of email addresses and i started picking them email um hey i'm thinking about doing this i emailed gabe noel and anyone i could see and find i tried a few no responses i'd try a few more no responses tried a few more, then I'd cycle back through them again and try again. Never got a response. Then at one point, we hired Bo and Karen's high-level tournament player, a long-time pinball guy. He does all the Papa videos, tutorial videos, and things. We hired him to help with rules on Final Resistance, Scott Denise's game. And he had a friend who works at Valve. Oh, that's amazing. So he contacted the friend, asked if we could set up a meeting. Yes. The story goes that they saw all my emails. Oh. but in order to work out a deal like this somebody has to champion the project somebody within valve has to be okay this is this is something i want to make happen and so bowen's friend was was the guy and we worked with him and his team directly they got us access to all the assets we had everything we needed from the portal universe um glados we did license the right to use her voice from port two we hired mark silt to do new call outs for a new personality core that we develop but we worked with them pretty closely sending them videos of progress and having feedback from them meetings telling us to change the color of this or tweak that because it doesn't represent the objects correctly or whatever it was a pretty involved process as opposed to weird out weird i was like looks great you guys are doing a wonderful job no feedback very little But Valve was very involved and had very specific things that we needed to make look accurate to their eye. Okay. So a lot of – it's not Portal 3. We're just going to say that.
    20:13
    But it is a game that features Portal. There's another Valve game out there that people are clamoring for a third one. any teases at a Half-Life pinball machine? No teases. You get no teases. Dang it.
    20:34
    I will tell you it's come up in conversation. That's a start. Okay. Ooh, I like that. That's a good enough tease.
    20:43
    I mean, you could name any idea. We've probably talked about it. Tried to figure out what kind of connection it would have with the community. Half-Life would connect probably well with the same type of person who liked Portal. You're not wrong.
    21:00
    And we have a connection with Valve at this point. Exactly. That's why I had to ask. But we also don't want to do two videos in a row or only movies in a row. So we like to mix it up. I don't think we've done the same style of game twice yet. No. Definitely. Because you have had Yeah, Weirdos Music. You had Final Assistance, which is Insider Pinball. And then you had Princess Bride, right? That was the next one? I don't know. Princess Bride did Portal. Okay.
    21:35
    I love that. So with your whole P3 model, you found a hole or something you wanted to fix, and you fixed it. And that's essentially what we're doing with our channel. we were looking for tutorials that were more staged i guess not live play tutorials and we couldn't find them so we made them ourselves um what do you find in the youtube or tutorial community that you would like to fill that hasn't been filled do you have any yeah any video ideas things you'd like to see you're acting as if i have 16 hours a day working on pinball development i used to play a lot of pinball and watch streams and watch videos and stuff i i feel like i'm sidestepping your question but i literally don't watch dreams and i feel bad because some of my team members like did you see such and such on stream like nope they still stream pinball these it's crazy i know kevin does or did because he streamed our lunches and things but i i think i i i think what you do is awesome i i think helping people understand how to connect these games and everyone approaches them in a different way some people are just about scoring and some people are just about story and some people are looking to improve their skills and there's types of videos for all of them.
    23:05
    So how do you think that we go about growing the pinball community? Because I swear every other month there's somebody talking about how pinball is about to collapse. There aren't enough people in the hobby. What do you think needs to happen to help this hobby really grow more? it's growing or it did grow very significantly for the last 15 years or so i'm coming out of about 2010 a lot of things happened right around there the p-rock board came out and helped new people develop re-themes or new projects uh dutch pinball got started with that jersey jack came out around that time spooky pinball started around that time um pinball started growing because more people could develop games more people could turn their ideas the things they were passionate about into games so there was more variety more choices people started buying them maybe it hit the right timing between people growing up with pinball finally coming into secure jobs and salaries and enough money to purchase these games i don't know but it has grown significantly has it peaked? No, I don't know. There are a lot of pinball companies making games right now. And the community's not big enough for 12, 13, 14 separate pinball companies all fighting for the same licenses.
    24:32
    So I think there has to be some contraction in the industry from a manufacturer's perspective. But I don't think that should affect the ability of the community to grow.
    24:43
    Video pinball, while none of us play it that much. We're all physical pinball folks, at least at our company, and most of the people we talk to much prefer physical pinball over the video experience We on the same boat for sure Okay But that helped introduce a lot of people to what pinball is and a lot of customers of the virtual pinball platforms started buying physical machines. I mean, my brother, who took second place in our Salt Lake Area League and is three or four points away from qualifying for state, He started playing on a switch because we were getting into it. And then he got his own virtual cab that he could play on. And now he's played probably triple the pinball I have because he goes to a local family fun center that has like 12. And he's hooked. And it all started with him on his switch just playing the virtual pinball. yeah and nowadays you can you can download a full cat catalog of williams games or whatever you can learn all the rules in the digital platform and then translate those into real play so and honestly on some of those williams games he's better than i am because he knows the rules better than i do yeah so so i think that helped the growth a lot um what's it going to take to keep growing I don't know it's tough prices are going up everywhere on every product in every industry but prices are going up a lot of people being priced out there's probably some kind of correction that needs to happen but hopefully we're addressing some of that by giving people the option to buy games at $3,500 $3,400 $4,000 the pricing model that we've come up with is intentionally trying to address that kind of difficulty paying $12,000 for each game. It doesn't make sense to me. For sure. I mean, not only the pricing model, but the space. Not everybody has space to have a dedicated game room. And I'm super stoked about the idea of having three, four, who knows how many games in one. Love that idea. I started collecting in an apartment and I had room for two games. That's all I could have. And I stopped at two games. I didn't force more in there. But then I bought a house and that's when it grew. But in the apartment, yeah, a P3 would have been great because I could have had 12, 13, 14 experiences with one machine. Yeah, it's so cool. Tell me a little bit about how you go about programming these, I guess, I don't know what you call them, games that aren't the themed game for your models. So you released, I think it was Elemental. That was for everything. Tell me a little bit about that experience. and then like what's it like to develop new rules for an existing like board let me start with the second one uh i started the industry by developing the p-rock board which is a board that allowed people to write new rules for their williams or stern games i had a judge dread i put the P-Rock board in it and I wrote new rules for Judge Dredd, called it JD.
    28:04
    And people downloaded it, they bought a P-Rock, they put it in their machine, they could play the new rules that I wrote for that game. It was really the first time in the industry that you could take an existing game and just enjoy something completely different on there. I themed it around what the play field was because it had certain physical features.
    28:25
    Fast forward to P3 and we have this digital display in the play field which allows us to create immersive experiences we can change it to look however the theme needs it to look to tell you the story of why am i shooting this shot over here while you're shooting it because there's a character on the screen who's pointing at this shot or something i don't know um so throughout the design process we're sitting there thinking you know what?
    28:57
    Yes, we're building this game for this theme, but it would be really cool if there were another game that allowed you to focus on this loop and had you hit this loop 10 times and then opened up a door over here and then you shoot that. Okay, there's an add-on game. That's what we call it. Add-on game idea. Store that away.
    29:14
    Elemental is a game that leverages the scoops. So the P3 has a playfield LCD that goes back a little more than half. of the way back through the playfield. Beyond that is a row of six individually controlled scoops that can pop up. And when they pop up, you can shoot the ball into them. The ball goes into the system. It gets fed out somewhere else. But those scoops, if they're all up, it can fully block the entire path to the up playfield.
    29:46
    So imagine a game like, a video game like Space Invaders. It could draw characters on the screen. It could go back and forth, left and right. We can feed balls to the flippers. You shoot a bullet, a ball, at one of these things on the screen and you don't want the ball ricocheting around. Space Invaders doesn't work like that. In Space Invaders, the bullet goes off the top of the screen and it's gone forever. So lift up all the scoops, shoot the ball, see if you hit the thing, the ball goes away. You feed another ball to the flippers, you have more bullets and you can keep doing that forever. So these scoops are super useful. Well, in Elemental, we lift up one scoop and one of the four elements depending on the level you're in starts flowing out of that scoop so on the screen we draw all water coming out of one of the scoops and it starts filling up full of water on the screen and if you shoot the scoop it shuts off the water because it's closed and another one opens up and starts with a small stream that grows over time. So the faster you shoot all these scoops, the longer you get to play because the pool of water doesn't fill up on the screen. It doesn't matter what playset you have installed. You could have Heist, you could have Weird Al, you could have Portal in there. It doesn't matter because we're using the scoops in front of those physical experiences. And then there are other games where we or third parties who develop games can leverage the physical devices on the playfield. Nezik City is a new game that came out. Deluxia Studios wrote it. which is a father and son team that happen to own a P3, and the son is learning programming, and this is his first pinball experience. Oh, that's so cool. That's cool. And it's this AI-based concept inside the city.
    31:36
    Heist is based in a city, so all the physical elements have city. There's a jail, there's a bank, there's the green, all these city elements, and they have this AI element that you're battling throughout the city and they they leverage the physical experiences really well so yeah it's just anyone who has an idea can figure out which physical module makes the most sense for dungeon door defender written by michael ocean is a castle defense game castle defense you have something in a video game yeah castle and you're defending it from all the monsters that are trying to walk through the breakthrough yeah so you're you're firing bullets at them or whatever but in the pinball world you're shooting the physical pinball over top of these illustrated graphical zombies or whoever's attacking this or yeah i saw josh uh rup from loser kids stringing dungeon door defender because he has uh for princess bride it works on that one yeah so michael started it with heist because heist has the jail door jail door is perfect it's the it's the dungeon door yeah so dungeon door defender and then we came out with princess bride he's like okay there's two doors on princess bride there's a castle door and max's hut so he implemented the dungeon i think around max's hut so that's that's the door you're defending and yeah it's the same exact game it works on two different play fields That's so cool. I love it. How do you deal with, is it like a profit sharing or is it with these third parties that develop it? I'm guessing it's like an app store where you're taking a percentage and they're taking a percent. that's exactly what it is they set the price whatever that price is we take a percentage of that for for to cover the cost of testing it making sure it's safe for people to play on their machines making sure it's um reasonably acceptable content it fits within our our level of family friendly that we want to maintain we appreciate that not to say there won't be games that come out that are more adult-oriented, but there'll be options, I'm sure, for enabling more family-friendly gameplay on them.
    33:55
    But App Store Model is absolutely right. They set the price, they earn most of the money, and then we just take a fee to cover the expenses of hosting it, testing it. So how many of your customers... Oh, that's our dog. Sorry about that. how many of your customers who purchase a module end up purchasing these side games as well there's a good section of them probably 30 to 40 percent of the customers who have a module buy the mini games that can be played on it really depends on the game but some didn't sell well at all only sold a few copies because it doesn't connect with the audience and some sold really well so the average is probably around 30 what is your best selling third-party game best selling third-party game is by far dungeon door defender it's the one that looks the one that i'm most excited to try out so i'm not surprised yeah it just the the the it connected really people got really excited i've seen streams where people are over the moon excited about playing the game michael just did a really good job on it i mean all the mini games we used to call mini games they're called add-on so got it got our all unique they're all really cool ideas some connect really well with people and some are a little bit farther out there and connect with a different set of customers that's so cool okay we have two more questions for you first off I love TNA total nuclear annihilation for those that know tell me a little bit about Final Resistance it's the spiritual sequel to TNA is that what I understand so yeah Scott loves the style of electronic music and apocalyptic environments he's really good at creating this high energy feeling great light shows not too complex a layout but a layout that works really well to deliver the vibe and final resistance so Total Nuclear Annihilation was a single layer game single level didn't have ramps and things he managed to create an experience in the modern age of really complex pinball layouts that isn't it's pretty simple and people absolutely love it i love it it's a it's a wonderful game it's i love stealing locks from people in tournament play it's it's the best thing okay so you're hoping they lock two and then i can just steal and get my react good oh so denisey lock there is a denisey lock and final resistance. It's a single ball Denise Lockett. Can you steal it? I actually don't remember.
    37:03
    Anyway. Here's hoping. If you can't today, maybe you will be able to come up with a list. I think there is an option you can set to allow it. Regardless, Scott has been a longtime friend. He got started with the P-Rock. He designed Earthshaker Aftershock as a re of Earthshaker He worked with the Dutch pinball guys and helped out with some of them some bride of pinball too i think he did some testing for them on that big lebowski and stuff and then he built this amazing custom game that got picked up and manufactured and he's made a big name for himself which is super awesome and he wanted to he wanted to deliver a game for the p3 that bridges the get between really high resolution motion graphic stuff on the screen and what most pinball people are familiar with which is a static playfield artwork on a piece of wood so the the gameplay experience and final resistance is the playfield graphics don't change they're static we have virtual representations of inserts and the lights and things we do draw animations on top of those when you hit a shot stuff happens and instructions pop up and tell you what to do but the screen is mostly static and the physical shots deliver the same kind of experience that a traditional game so he was hoping to bridge the gap between the the the super high tech way out there versions of P3 games and traditional pinball to kind of bring more of the traditionalists into the platform. Got it. And that's an interesting thing because we've had some pushback from the traditionalist community. Have you guys had a lot of pushback from people in the community of being too far forward thinking people wanting to keep it back to the way that it was? Because I love the way that it's going. I love the idea of these separate little games that you can play in an app store.
    39:16
    Yes. Have you overcome that? Yes. Yeah, even today, where we've been selling the thing, we've been shipping it since 2017. We designed it in 2012, started taking it to shows in 2012.
    39:31
    Even today, we'll post a video or some kind of graphic or something will launch a new game and 20% of the comments will be like, I'm not playing that, it's a video game, or I'm not playing that, it's got three buttons on each side. None of that stuff makes any sense to me. We've taken a traditionally static piece of wood, a statically painted piece of wood, and we've added more pixels to it. It's the same thing. the ball rolls over a surface we've just added more pixels to it and those pixels allow us to display immersive content and information um buttons on the side yeah you control the flippers with buttons if you can control more things with more buttons great or i mean shadow does it right shadow you have the little diverters on either side i own the shadow yeah yeah so there are things we've done in the p3 that the traditionalists balk at and sometimes they overcome their preconceived biases and give it a chance and like it other times they refuse or they they force themselves not to like it which is their preference and in some cases it just doesn't connect with people and that's fine too every game's different people are different there's a variety of pinball games in the world people could choose but yeah we've met a ton of that and at some point you got to decide do we cater to the whims of or try to cater to everyone's goals and wants from a game or do you just do what feels right to you and we do both we we tried uh you know when we get a lot of complaints about something we've tried we might pull the pack a little bit but we never lose our own vision and our vision is to deliver progressive experience with new features and technologies that deliver the the modularity and the swapping and the cost effectiveness and minigames and all that well i think a good example of this is you guys heard the feedback of like the front half not having much despite having this really cool screen and so you added the the portal module that lets you play a little bit far forward is that something that you're looking to leverage moving forward would you ever do it to some of your older games we get that question a lot i i think people are like oh they finally put stuff closer to the flippers the interesting thing about that and i've said this all along if you go look at whatever it is attack from mars the shadow Venom, Medieval Menace all these Jaws, all these games that people absolutely love they all have everything close to the back and the reason they do is because when you put something in the middle of the playfield close to the flippers it blocks your shots. You can't so there are a lot of games that bring things closer to the flippers on the sides. There'll be a scoop down here or a loop will start really early. There'll be a ramp off to the side but there are some games that put them smack dab in the middle and those layouts are no fun to shoot because they're blocking your access to everything yeah so so it was an intentional design choice to leverage the screen up front put the physical things in the back and once people started to lean into the everything's way way back there and we're like okay well we can we always said we could and we would put stuff closer to the flippers we just need to do it in a way that makes sense for the theme and portal gave us a good opportunity to do so and there will be other games that give us an opportunity to do new cool things in front of the flippers and yeah we're excited to see people react to it with different ways but that ray of in portal in that spinner in target on the left side are close to flippers and when you hit them in the ball flings back right in your face like the ramps on shadow you're like well that was unfair but it's not unfair your aim was bad and you wanted us to put that thing right there and we did and you had no time to react right you did this to yourself yeah aim better it's like people that play Black Knight Sword of Rage and it's that Black Knight is right in front of the flippers and if you hit it just off you're done for it feels that way right I always remembered that Hired to the Caribbean by Sturt they released it I think it was a 90s game no it wasn't a 90s game I think it was early 2000s maybe in 2010 or something yeah I don't remember everyone listening is like you dumbass it was you're a pinball manufacturer you don't know anything um i always remember the the heart chest on the right side and i was like man that thing is super close to the flippers but you overlay that layout on top of a p3 design and it's all the way up on top of the scoops so there's some perception of things close to the flippers that aren't really as close as people think they are yeah but when you look at a p3 you see this rectangular screen with a hard edge at the top and that draws this mental barrier here and you see nothing in front of that you're like okay i see all of this space in reality you look at most games and most of the stuff is way back there oh yeah we're we're renting batman 66 right now okay and it's everything's in the back the turntable the ramps there's some targets on the side like stand-ups. That's it. It has to be like that, or else it'd be no fun to play. Yeah, because the games that are super close, they're brutal, and you can only play them for so long.
    45:39
    The most brutal one I can remember is Bram Stoker's Dracula, and there's two or three targets right in the middle there. And they feel super close to the flippers. They're not. They're also way back right near our scoops. It just feels that way. okay last question for you what can you tease that's coming next year i assume your new game is going to be a texas pinball festival so you guys have done the last couple years can you give us anything i understand if you can but i gotta ask we have released we've launched games right before tpf our last four games i think we lost right before tpf that's always our goal TPF is our home show and we take a lot of machines there I don't know if we'll make it this year I'll tease you that we might not have a game this year when we're ready we'll release it if we get it ready in time for TPF it'll be there if not it'll be later but what we do as a company and we've done it on all of our games and it drives me nuts that the rest of the industry doesn't do it and it drives me even more nuts that people allow the other companies to do this.
    47:00
    We release games with mature code. If you see the game at a show, it will present in a way. It might not be finished. It might not have the wizard mode or all the modes in it. We released Portal with four test chambers, and we added some more later. But what you saw in that game, those modes were complete. They had the full experience. the entire hub mode was done it had all the voice call it's all the music all the light shows all the stuff was done and that's important to me i don't think it's right to ask people to pay money if they can't play the whole game visualize not necessarily play it but even visualize looking at the videos of it they can't see what the final experience will be like i think that's unfair i it's unethical and i'm amazed that the industry the community allows manufacturers to do that um we won't do that and we've we've had people ask us to make tutorials of some like the newest games and we have to tell our audience like we're not going to do it because it doesn't make sense to make a tutorial until the whole code's there otherwise the rules might change or whatever You're going to have to change it. Yeah. So it totally gets you. So I can't guarantee the rules won't change as we iterate and stuff. I think we might put out a game that's fully polished where a certain mode isn't connecting with players or it feels too unfair or it'd be better if we did things and we'll change.
    48:32
    But what you experience at a show with a P3, the games we release, you'll know what the final result is going to be by playing. That's super exciting. Love that. Well, we're dying to play P3. Hopefully we get one before March, before Texas.
    48:56
    But otherwise, we're going to see you there. Yeah, we're so excited. Well, please find me. I live in the booth as much as I can. I do have to eat occasionally and stuff, but I'm there as much as I possibly can be. And I love talking to everyone. and I hope you come up and say hello. I'll walk you through whatever games you want me to walk you through and hope you enjoy it. Cool. Well, thank you for being our first ever interview guest. You did a great job. We hope it wasn't terrible for you. I said I was going to judge you and you did wonderfully. For everyone that's watching, what's our grade? How'd we do? You get an A, a full A.
    49:36
    A five on the HR scale. I got to leave a plus for future growth or something. but there we go we'll have you on for the next game and and we'll do it there you guys are awesome thank you very much hey thank you so much and thanks everyone for watching we really appreciate it and until next time keep flipping