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The Architect – George Gomez Part 2

Silverball Chronicles·podcast_episode·2h 22m·analyzed·Oct 15, 2022
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TL;DR

George Gomez: Architect of modern Stern Pinball creativity and design culture.

Summary

Silver Ball Chronicles explores George Gomez's career as a pinball designer and his pivotal role in rebuilding Stern Pinball's creative studio in the 2000s. The episode covers his transition from Williams/Midway to contract work at Stern, focusing on early games like Playboy (2002) and Lord of the Rings (2003), discussing design philosophy, team dynamics, and licensing challenges.

Key Claims

  • George Gomez is the creative architect of modern pinball and Stern Pinball's design studio

    high confidence · David Dennis opening framing: 'George Gomez is the creative architect of pinball as we know it today... without our homie-gomie, Stern Pinball would not be the creative studio that it is today.'

  • Playboy (2002) was the final Stern Playboy pinball game as of 2022

    high confidence · David Dennis: 'This is the final Playboy pin as of 2022.'

  • Lord of the Rings (2003) sold 5,100 units and may have broken Revenge from Mars' record of 6,878 units

    medium confidence · David Dennis: 'sells 5,100 units... Did Lord of the Rings break that record? Maybe. I don't know. They did a ton of runs of it. But George said, I think it stands to break that record.'

  • Stern's margins are tighter than Williams, requiring careful attention to costs

    high confidence · George Gomez quote from mid-2000s TopCast: 'things are way tighter than they were at Willie... They have to pay close attention to margins. Their margins are pretty tight.'

  • Keith Johnson was the primary creative force behind Lord of the Rings rules and code

    high confidence · David Dennis and George Gomez: 'Keith Johnson was into it... This was Keith Johnson's magnum opus... George says, Lord of the Rings gets the credit it deserves because of Keith... this isn't his game. You know what I mean? Like, this is Keith's game.'

  • George Gomez worked as executive producer at Midway on NBA Ballers (2004-2008) after Williams pinball division closure

    high confidence · David Dennis: 'He was leading game development on a few teams... George was the executive producer for that [NBA Ballers].'

  • Stern began contracting George Gomez in 2002 while he was still employed at Midway

    high confidence · David Dennis: 'In 2002, you got a call from Stern... He stayed at Midway, but on the side, he did some designs for Gary Stern's new company.'

  • Lord of the Rings licensing makes a Vault Edition or re-release extremely unlikely

Notable Quotes

  • “Without our homie-gomie, Stern Pinball would not be the creative studio that it is today.”

    David Dennis @ early episode — Establishes Gomez's foundational role in Stern's creative culture and design philosophy

  • “I think these products are a lot of fun to do because they are done in sort of a low-pressure kind of way. I love them. There's a lot of really talented people that support me on the inside.”

    George Gomez @ mid-2000s TopCast interview — Reveals Gomez's perspective on contract design work versus full-time employment at Williams

  • “Things are way tighter than they were at Willie. They have to pay close attention to margins. Their margins are pretty tight.”

    George Gomez @ mid-2000s TopCast interview — Illustrates the operational and financial constraints of early 2000s Stern versus Williams-era abundance

  • “When I design a game for Stern, I'm not there every day, and I'm not working at this thing day and night, every night. I'm basically drawing in broad strokes.”

    George Gomez @ interview (mid-2000s era) — Clarifies Gomez's limited hands-on involvement in Stern games due to contract nature of work

  • “Lord of the Rings gets the credit it deserves because of Keith. Lord of the Rings wouldn't be what it is, and there's a lot of stuff in the game because of Keith.”

    George Gomez @ interview — Acknowledges Keith Johnson's critical creative contribution to Lord of the Rings rules and gameplay

  • “I just don't have an affinity for Lord of the Rings. I wasn't that into the fiction.”

    George Gomez @ interview — Reveals Gomez designed one of pinball's greatest games despite lack of personal investment in the theme

  • “They earn every dollar. I mean, every dollar is hard fought. Nobody's getting rich over there.”

    George Gomez @ interview (mid-2000s) — Describes the financial pressure and work ethic required at early 2000s Stern

Entities

George GomezpersonKeith JohnsonpersonGary SternpersonDavid DennispersonRon HallettpersonDwight SullivanpersonKevin O'ConnorpersonWesley Changperson

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Early 2000s Stern margins under pressure; financial constraints required every employee to generate ROI; no slack for experimental failures despite stated desire for creative risk-taking

    medium · David Dennis: 'They could not take having real bomb games... They have to consciously design their game. No goofing around... Nobody's getting rich over there.'

  • ?

    business_signal: Stern's operational constraints (tight margins, small shop) forced more conscious design decisions compared to Williams' abundance model; represents shift toward sustainability

    high · Gomez: 'Things are way tighter than they were at Willie. They have to pay close attention to margins... They have to consciously design their game. No goofing around.'

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Ongoing speculation about Lord of the Rings Vault Edition/re-release; community refuses to accept licensing finality; recurring Pinside forum discussion topic

    medium · David Dennis: 'People always talk about, oh, are they going to vault Lord of the Rings?... it's like I have a Tron. Every now and then, it's popped up on Pinside again.'

  • ?

    competitive_signal: Lord of the Rings positioned as flagship Stern game with multiple production runs and potential to exceed Revenge from Mars sales records; represents manufacturing scalability strategy

    medium · Gomez: 'I think it stands to break that record... My most successful Stern product... It continues to be made. This is an anomaly in manufacturing.'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Gomez's lack of personal investment in Lord of the Rings theme (not into the fiction) did not diminish game quality; design excellence transcends designer enthusiasm for IP

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.431

0:00
From unsolved mysteries to unexplained phenomena, from comedy gold to relationship fails, Amazon Music's got the most ad-free top podcasts, included with Prime. Because the only thing that should interrupt your listening is, well, nothing. Download the Amazon Music app today. The Pinball Network is online. Launching Silver Ball Chronicles.
0:48
No, I can see it on my side. I can hear you. Use the chat. You are typing in the chat. You can hear me.
0:58
That's good. I can't hear you. You can see your audio. Test. I can't hear you. Let me see. How's that? That's better.
1:18
Hello everyone, I'm David Dennis Listen, this is Silver Ball Chronicles, a pinball history podcast. With me, as always, is Ron Shaken, not Stirred Hallett. What's up, fella? I'm Hallett. Ron Hallett. Yeah, very good. Very good. Thank you. Yes, James Bond was announced. My dream theme. I had no inside knowledge on this. I just sort of had seen on Pinside that they had James Bond. So I went all in on that one. and I'll tell you, it is expensive.
2:17
But it actually does tie into our episode. It ties in so well, which is actually the reason why we're doing this episode, because it's by the legendary designer George Gomez.
2:31

high confidence · David Dennis: 'The licensing would be a nightmare... Licensing nightmare. Stop talking about it.' Gary Stern: 'It's not totally up to us...'

  • Stern could retool manufacturing lines more easily than Williams due to smaller scale and nimbleness

    medium confidence · David Dennis: 'Stern wasn't the manufacturing monster that Williams was. It was much smaller, and that meant that they were nimble and that they could pivot much easier back and forth from titles.'

  • Hugh Hefner paid $75,000 in 1992 for a crypt beside Marilyn Monroe at Westwood Memorial Park

    high confidence · David Dennis: 'Hugh Hefner would say that spending eternity next to Marilyn is an opportunity too sweet to pass up... for which he paid $75,000 in 1992.'

    • “I insisted we do Lord of the Rings. It was a great game. The second Matrix movie, if we made Matrix and it came out at the same time as the second movie, not so good.”

    Gary Stern @ interview — Reveals Gary Stern's deliberate IP selection strategy and timing considerations

    Ray Tanzer
    person
    Chris Grannerperson
    Margaret Hudsonperson
    Hugh Hefnerperson
    Stern Pinballcompany
    Williamscompany
    Midwaycompany
    Jersey Jack Pinballcompany
    Playboygame
    Lord of the Ringsgame
    Revenge from Marsgame
    Strong Museumorganization
    Silver Ball Chroniclesorganization

    high · Gomez: 'I just don't have an affinity for Lord of the Rings. I wasn't that into the fiction.' David Dennis: 'this guy creates like probably one of the greatest play fields... and he's just like, eh, it was all right.'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: George Gomez provides minimal hands-on direction at Stern; designs 'in broad strokes' as contract employee while internal teams and specialists (like Keith Johnson) handle detailed execution and production engineering

    high · Gomez quote: 'When I design a game for Stern, I'm not there every day, and I'm not working at this thing day and night... I'm basically drawing in broad strokes.' David Dennis: 'He would just sort of do the play field and everybody else would do the mechanics.'

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Lord of the Rings licensing complexity blocks any future re-release (Vault Edition, LCD update, etc.); IP holders maintain control preventing manufacturing revival

    high · David Dennis: 'The licensing would be a nightmare... Not going to happen. Licensing nightmare.' Partial Gary Stern quote: 'It's not totally up to us...'

  • ?

    manufacturing_signal: Stern's smaller scale enabled nimble production pivot between titles, contrasting sharply with Williams' massive fixed-line infrastructure; allowed Lord of the Rings multiple manufacturing runs

    medium · David Dennis: 'Stern wasn't the manufacturing monster that Williams was. It was much smaller... they could pivot much easier back and forth from titles... This is an anomaly in manufacturing... Williams never revisited a game.'

  • $

    market_signal: Playboy theme's cultural cachet declined by early 2000s; Stern miscalculated theme acceptability in emerging home collector market; represents shift from arcade/bar culture to family basements

    high · David Dennis: 'George would say that Stern guessed wrong on how acceptable the theme would be in normal America. Families were now shopping for pinball... Dad probably secretly wanted the Playboy pin down there... difficult to get that past his spouse.'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Keith Johnson elevated from rule designer to primary creative force on Lord of the Rings; work on LOTR and Simpsons Pinball Party defined his career trajectory and industry reputation

    high · David Dennis: 'This was Keith Johnson's magnum opus... basically made Keith's career... Everybody's going to forget that because this game and the Simpsons Spinball Party absolutely put him on a different tier.'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: George Gomez transitioned from Williams full-time designer to Midway executive producer (NBA Ballers franchise) to Stern contract designer; represents career path adaptation post-Williams collapse

    high · David Dennis: 'In 2002, you got a call from Stern... He stayed at Midway, but on the side, he did some designs for Gary Stern's new company.'

  • ?

    product_concern: Playboy (2002) required theme customization (clothed/nude insert swaps) to manage market acceptability; modular approach suggests awareness of market fragmentation

    medium · David Dennis: 'the game has drop targets and pictures around the play field and you can swap those out... some of the ladies can be clothed, they can be topless, or completely nude... Nudity was the default.'

    • Fantastic. Should we do an update here for everybody, though? Sure. Let's see. It says, Banter, what have you been doing? Oh, am I not supposed to read that part? No, don't read it aloud. Don't read it aloud. No, because you're letting people peek behind the curtain here. Who's Banter? I don't know who that is. Don Banter. Ah. What was our last episode again? I don't know. That was like a month ago. Yeah, because all kinds of stuff's happened. I mean, new games out, shows attended. Yeah. You're still in the top 100? I've never been in the top 100. I've been in the top 300. You can lie. We don't lie here. Yeah. We're about history. And history is not lying. That's right. And it's all exactly verbatim with no speculation in Speculation Corner. Well, it is funny when we directly quote people from interviews and then we're told that's wrong. Yes, but you said that. That's exactly what you said. You literally said that in an interview. That's the fun part about what we do is people ask us from time to time, hey, why haven't you done any interviews? and the thing is I don't want to have somebody rejig around their perspective now that they have hindsight. I want to know what they thought at the time.
    3:46
    And then that, of course, maybe they're a little misconstrued or maybe it's out of context or whatever, but it's still what they said. It's tons of fun. Yeah, I mean, I don't think Steve Ritchie would say Gary Stern's the Antichrist now, but he did say that. No, he wouldn't say that now. But he said that 14 years ago. That's terrible.
    4:06
    Oh, Steve Ritchie, you crack me up, my friend. Ron, we've recently sold out. We've joined Patreon. We have? Patreon is an online website where you can support us, say thank you, and get some really cool perks. Now, Ron, overall, I really enjoy making the content and building out this podcast. And honestly, I hope all of our content lasts well beyond our active years and we can continue to tell these cool stories in pinball. I enjoy our banter, even the stuff that I cut out. It does make me feel a little bit icky asking for money for making the podcast.
    4:47
    I didn't really want to go this route before, and it seems like we're begging or demanding compensation for something that we actually enjoy doing and making for the community. Neither of us actually need any money from our listeners, and I don't want to seem insincere when we're doing the podcast. I'm not really money-oriented, and I don't think you are either, but we figured if you wanted to say thank you and you wanted to support the podcast and enjoy some interesting perks, we would create Patreon.
    5:24
    And by we, you mean I checked out our mailbox and said, Oh, I see we've joined Patreon. I guess we're doing this. That's right. On Thursday night, I'm like, you know what? Let's start a Patreon. If Dennis Creasel can have a Patreon, Silverball Chronicles can. Anyway, you can swing on over to patreon.com slash silverballchronicles. You can check us out there. We have levels. I like, are we calling them cronies or cronies? Cronies. We're going to call them cronies. Cronies?
    5:55
    Listeners to the podcast are cronies. So if you sub for a month, you could become a pro crony for $3. $3 a month. That's right. Just to say thank you. There's no big commitments. You know, sub for a month on Patreon, then cancel. Whatever you want to do, just swing on over and join us. That's $6 a month. You could be a premium crony. I like it. You're taking the Stern model there. That's right. Premium. Okay. You get a free sticker after three months. Ask this through our private Discord chat room. And have your questions take priority on the podcast. What does that mean by take priority? Pretty much we answer everything. So we answer them first. I'll make sure that if I have a thousand comments. Oh, yes, because we get a thousand comments. We are inundated with comments, John. So I'm just going to make sure that they get priority, as well as they can vote on some upcoming topics. So we'll have some votes in the Patreon app and on the Discord as to what's coming up in future episodes, and they can choose that. But the big one here, Ron. Is this for the premium cronies? This is for the premium cronies at $6 a month. This is early ad-free access to Silver Ball Chronicles before it's posted in the general feeds. So if you're a $6 a month or higher crony, you'll be able to get that podcast before it goes on the TPN and Silver Ball Chronicles feeds. What does ad-free mean? Remember, folks, I don't listen to any of these episodes. Except for the end. I listened to the bloopers. Somebody mentioned that as well. They're like, isn't the show already ad-free? I'm like, well, I put my ad somewhere hidden. Oh, that's right. You put your Canadian finance, financial advice. Exactly. So I'm going to make sure that that's not in the one that's on Patreon. Or if we happen to get sponsored by Harry's Razors or something like Manscaped, You won't hear any of those things in the Patreon feed. But what's the top tier, Ron? The top tier is the elitist crony. We're not going to call it Ellie. No. Okay. They get all the perks we just mentioned plus a T-shirt. Stick around for three months and we will automatically send you a Silver Ball Chronicles T-shirt. Of course, we're still going to be on Facebook, facebook.com slash silverballchronicles. Chronicles, and you can still get our swag at silverballswag.com slash silverballchronicles. And don't worry, Stewie, we'll still read all the same stuff at the end of this episode. Yeah, we're just going to add the Patreon stuff to drive the people crazy.
    8:32
    So, corrections, comments from the previous episode. We did Gottlieb System 80 in our last episode. It went long, Ron. It was a long episode. Yeah, people told me that. It took me a long time to edit, as well as it was summer. I spent a lot of time traveling to the beach, getting my tan on. Actually, my sunburn. Getting my sunburn on. Anyway, we ended up getting only a couple of comments on those. One of them is from Raymond Davidson, or Ray Day, who is a Stern coder, who asked, hey, I didn't think that Solar Ride had a vary target. And you know what? I sort of just said, oh, I love very targets, but I got looking at that and I got the game mixed up. Solar Ride is not dragon. It's a lady, you know, riding a space horse. And I got that mixed up with a lady riding a dragon. So I was thinking of the wrong game when I made that quote.
    9:35
    Anything from Bruce Nightingale from the Slamtail podcast? Any corrections from him? from my podcast, the Slamtail podcast, usually biweekly. There's my plug. No, Bruce didn't have any issues that I know of. But remember, it's Gottlieb, and he generally hates Gottlieb. Also, Bruce is looking for a back glass for the games. He hates the Gottliebs, but he has a Gottliebs the games that he's looking for a back glass for. Yeah, but which game? The games. That's the name of the game. Like he's looking for multiple back glasses or just one? No, the games. Who's on first? I don't know. Third base.
    10:12
    But if you know anybody, you can send it to our email here, silverballchronicles.gmail.com. That's right, and I will forward it off, or I might buy the back last and smash it so Bruce can't have it. Oh.
    10:27
    So what are we talking about today? What's related to Bond? George Gomez is the creative architect of pinball as we know it today. He might not admit it, and he might not know it, but he is the biggest thing in pinball. And not just because he's made My Dream Theme, and Batman, and Deadpool, and, you know, all those other great games he's done. But anyway, without our homie-gomie, trademark, Zach Minney, Stern Pinball would not be the creative studio that it is today. Stern Pinball wasn't always the powerhouse that we see in 2022. In the early 2000s, it struggled to stay afloat, and by 2008, it had almost collapsed, like many manufacturers, during the 2008 financial crisis. When Stern began to rebuild in the 2010s, it was the creative curiosity of George Gomez that enabled him to build a modern pinball design studio and change our hobby. George collected not only great designers, coders, and engineers, but also passionate dreamers who, like him, wanted to build something special. What did he envision Stern's creative arm to look like? How did he react to being thrown into a massive and terrifying task? Join us this month as we talk about The Architect, George Gomez. What do you think of that title? I like it. You like that? Yeah. The architect.
    12:03
    It's because he's building stuff. Mm-hmm. He also has an amazing signature, and he uses a drafting board. He has the best autograph in all pinball. In all pinball. Yep. We had visited George Gomez before in episode 14. Can you believe it? That's like 10 episodes ago. Wow, we have that many episodes? This one has a lot of arcade stuff. That's what that episode is called. It's all about the beginning of George Gomez, where he worked before, and how he became the powerhouse that he is today. We also touched on him a lot during Millennium Moment in Episode 16 on Pinball 2000. George was an engineer who worked at Midway, and then Marvin Glass and Associates in Chicago back in the 80s. Then he moved to Williams in the 1990s, creating some amazing classics like Monster Bash, Corvette, Johnny Mnemonic, Johnny, And as mentioned, he was one of the chief architects of Pinball 2000. So what happened after the collapse of Williams? Williams closes its door, sends everybody else out on their ass. Well, what was George doing in the 2000s? Well, to be clear, Williams shut down its pinball division. Their video game division, Midway, was still churning along at that time. Yeah, very true. They also still did a lot of gambling machines. Yeah. That was the moneymaker for them. So a lot of the team staff members, they moved to Midway, where they had to interview and do Midway games. Some of them went to the gambling component. Some of them just left because they were just devastated and done. They went off and did freelance stuff. Gomez, he was on the front lines of that Williams pinball division. And when that hammer came down, he used quite a few of his relationships and, of course, the position that he had at Williams to get a job as executive producer at Midway. He was leading game development on a few teams that were producing games for the Xbox, eventually the Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, and then PlayStation 3. Do you know the games that he worked on? I know he did NBA Ballers. That was a whole franchise, and I didn't know this. I remember the first NBA Ballers not because I played it, but because I can remember the art of the box for some reason, the basketball players in the front. It was very cool, kind of street art. Basically, it was NBA players playing street basketball, and there was a game in 2004, 2006, and 2008. So George was the executive producer for that. I don't know if it was a big seller or not. I'm sure it did okay. You know, nowadays we just have like the NBA series, right, like with 2K. They don't have these street ball circuits and other things. It's kind of a bummer nowadays. It's not quite as fun. But how did he get back into pinball, Ron? Well, in 2002, you got a call from Stern. Gary Stern, always looking to stir up some sort of new business. He added George as a contract supplementary designer. So he stayed at Midway, but on the side, he did some designs for Gary Stern's new company. It's no longer Sega. It's now Stern Pinball, Inc. And Gary would do similar things with Steve Ritchie. He was a contract employee, and so was Pat Lawler. Yeah, it was just easier to bring them on and contract. You pay them a little bit per design. You bring them on, you've got to give them health insurance, an office, a full-time job. They've got to keep them busy. But you know what? Just send us a play field and we'll pay you. That's basically what I think has happened here. So what did George think of Stern Pinball? Well, George says, I think these products are a lot of fun to do because they are done in sort of a low-pressure kind of way. From that standpoint, they're very hobby-like for me. I love them. There's a lot of really talented people that support me on the inside. They take my stuff and make it producible. They do a lot of things that I otherwise would have to do. I bet this is a huge change from the way they did it in Williams, right? So in the 90s, right, you had these massive teams. You had these amazing engineers, and they were all just at your beck and call, right? You go into the machine shop, and you work on a ball guide or whatever, or you send over your wiring harness diagram, and it eventually just shows up on your desk the next day or two days later. So it must be really weird how things happened at early 2000s Stern. Yeah, and before I say this next George quote, a lot of the former Williams guys will usually call it Willie. That was a whole thing. You see that a lot. But so George says, it turns out things are way tighter than they were at Willie. They have to be. They're a small shop. They have to pay close attention to margins. Their margins are pretty tight. This comes from an old TopCast episode with George Gomez. So this was recorded in what, like 2010 probably? No, no, probably mid-2000s. Mid-2000s. So we're getting George Gomez kind of talking about his projects at the time. So he's not able to sort of look back and say, oh, well, maybe I should say this or whatever. This is what he was thinking. And, you know, flat out, I mean, he basically says, this is not Williams. They need to watch their margins. And I would say that's probably still true today. What do you think?
    17:29
    They're not at Williams' level. No one will ever be in this market at that level again. But they've stated they are in an area now where they can experiment. They can take a bomb or two, which hopefully will lead to more creativity. Yeah, you've got to mix it up a bit. But in this stage, they could not take having real bomb games. You were playing in your lane. So one of the things, one of the stories they talk about at Williams was that, you know, Steve Ritchie would have a buck assembly, and George Gomez would have a vertical up kicker, a Vuck assembly, and Pat Lawler would have a different Vuck assembly, and all of that redundancy would create overhead costs. Well, that's not happening at Stern. There's one Vuck assembly, and that's what you're using.
    18:16
    You don't like it? Don't put one in your game. What is the first contract game that George Gomez does? Playboy. Back at Playboy again, guys. Third kick at the can here. And the last one at Data East was absolutely terrible, and it was not as nostalgically cool as the one from Bally in the 70s, but let's try again. Maybe we'll get a good one here, Ron. It's the, of course, Adult Entertainment Lifestyle Magazine license theme. This is from January of 2002. It's a Stern White Star board set. We're unsure how many units are sold, but how many do you think? If you had to guess. Not that many. Like 1,000? A couple thousand, maybe. They're probably just tread and water. A couple thousand is probably high. Yeah, I really have not seen that many of these. I don't. I've never seen one. Oh? I've seen a picture, but I've never actually seen one in the wood. I was going to say in the flesh, but that doesn't make sense. Also, in the wood kind of makes me laugh at this one, too. It's designed by George Gomez, art by Kevin O'Connor, mechanics by Wesley Chang, Dots by Mark Galvez Sound by Kyle Johnson Software, the first time they've worked together Dwight Sullivan, Lonnie Ropp, and Oren Day So you see Dwight Sullivan there over from Williams He's there, he's kind of slid in from Williams He's spent some time on the sidelines as well but he has finally ended up at Stern Was Playboy in the 2000s as cool as it was in the 70s, Ron? Uh-huh. Society-wise, probably not. Probably not. It was getting kind of, I don't know, gross. Remember that Williams, in 1999, actually had a Pinball 2000 license for Playboy, which would have been probably grosser. George loved Jim Patla's game from Bally in the 1970s. That was the original version. He also said he didn't care much for the Data East version, which I think is on par for everybody. this game adds I think an extra interesting modern layer to it which is that the game has drop targets and pictures around the play field and you can swap those out for the ones in the goodie bag or the coin door or coin box in the coin door which means that some of the ladies can be clothed, they can be topless, or completely nude. You just replace the stickers on the play field. So you can have boobies on your pin. And nudity was the default, by the way. It was the default. Yes. This is not the stern of today. I remember George saying that in an interview, that the clothed versions were, they were the ones in your goodie bag. Huh.
    21:12
    I'm not a prude, nothing against Playboy, but it's just at this time, I just don't think it had the cachet and the nostalgic 70s sexy thing going on. Now it just seemed kind of grody. But I got the flyer up here. And they're waiting for you. It says so. We're waiting for you. At the bottom of this flyer, it has interchangeable inserts, including clothed and nude. designed by George Gomez, designer of Monster Bash. He's getting some pretty good prime billing on this pin. Yeah, Stern did the same thing with Steve Ritchie. I think the flyer for T3 said, like, he's back. Steve Ritchie's back. I'm sure Pat Lawler got similar treatment. On the flyer here, the girls are waiting for you. I don't know what they're waiting for. It outlines all the various toys on the play field, including the Tease Me Baby the game, we'll say Tease Me on the screen, which is weird. The centerfold toy unfolds at the start of the three-ball multiball, and exciting women can be hiding everywhere. So behind one there's like a peekaboo, what is that, like bead door thing? I mean, it's on brand, wouldn't you say?
    22:42
    Yep, and the art is, there's hand-drawn elements, but all the inserts are basically Photoshop pictures. The biggest complaint I think I had of the other Playboy game at Data East was that they went all photorealistic and they didn't have any real hand-drawn stuff. that actually plays well in this pin, I think. It shoots fine. Yeah, I mean, probably. It's a Gomez, right? I don't think any Gomez shoots terrible.
    23:15
    Around this time in 2002, Hugh Hefner was getting married, and she was the one that was to be predominantly featured. And I did some Googling. You know, just don't look at my search history on my computer now. And I found the list of Playboy Playmates from 2001. I tried to figure out which one was the one that was predominantly featured. The difficult part was all the photos in the Wikipedia page are all like their modern day photos. So it's really hard to match it up to the ones that's on the cabinet. But if you know which one that is, after all the searching I did, I couldn't find who that was. You know, if we tie it back a little bit here when it comes to the theme, George would say that Stern guessed wrong on how acceptable the theme would be in normal America. Families were now shopping for pinball and for the basement. Well, Dad, he probably secretly wanted the Playboy pin down there. Odds are it was going to be difficult to get that past his spouse. So the market has started to change. We're moving from that sort of Williams era, the Sega era, where it was arcades and bars and men, and it's moving into home sales. Although Stern would still tell you at that point, it's all operators. They do not really cater to the home. Do you think he struggled a little bit in this new environment? Do you think George struggled a little bit trying to manage his design? Well, he didn't really have a chance to manage it. He'd do the play field. Yeah, that's true, right? He would just sort of do the play field and everybody else would do the mechanics. So he quite literally didn't do a whole lot of engineering work. He would give that play field design, the drafts, the ideas, and he would just say, here you go, Stern, and then they would do it. What George would say about Stern, he would say they earn every dollar. I mean, every dollar is hard fought. Nobody's getting rich over there. They have to pay attention because they don't have the luxury to go off and just play. They have to consciously design their game. No goofing around. This is the final Playboy pin as of 2022. Is that difficult, Ron? Is that difficult for you? That's difficult. I think it will be the final Playboy pin ever made at this point. Hugh Hefner, he would die in September of 2017 at the age of 91, which when I looked that up, I was like, I can't friggin' believe that. Hugh Hefner is interred at the Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles in a crypt, get this, beside Marilyn Monroe, for which he paid $75,000 in 1992. Hugh Hefner would say that spending eternity next to Marilyn is an opportunity too sweet to pass up. Wow. Good for you, Hugh Hefner. Let's say Playboy's, you know, what, brushing some rust off, right? Let's just say he's getting back in the groove. What's it like working at a new company? What's it like designing again? Then we go with Lord of the Rings, the George Gomez, Keith P. Johnson masterpiece.
    26:30
    It is the fantasy movie slash book epic licensed theme. It is October of 2003. It is a Stern White Star. Now, this was modified. I think there was an extra board on there. sells 5,100 units. And for some reason, I don't know why I know that, but it's in IPDB. So somebody must have said something or sometime. This is co-designed, actually, by George Gomez as the lead, with a lot, like, heavy input by Keith P. Johnson, who is now at Jersey Jack. Art by Kevin O'Connor and Margaret Hudson. Mechanics by Ray Tanzer. We remember him, right? He was over at Gottlieb. He's now still at Stern. and his extended team, the sound and music by the legend Chris Granner, and software was led by Keith Johnson. This is the first game specifically developed to use an in-term White Star MPU board, which had the new 16-bit sound system.
    27:33
    Wow, Stern. Yeah, this is upgraded sound. Oh, everybody who worked at Williams was just shaking their head at this time. Right. I think Dwight Sullivan once said it was like going from the holodeck on the Enterprise-D to like back to the old original series. It was just the technology difference was just terrible. Do you dig this theme? I've never seen any of the movies. Oh, my God. Ron. I'm sorry.
    28:02
    This is there like some of the best movies and fantasy movies like ever. Have you read the books? No. No, the books are good, but they're not great. But you know, the second Matrix movie was coming out around this time, so they had a choice. They could either do Matrix, the second Matrix movie, or Lord of the Rings. Ah.
    28:22
    Gary says, I insisted we do Lord of the Rings. It was a great game. The second Matrix movie, if we made Matrix and it came out at the same time as the second movie, not so good. George Gomez, Ron, he said, I just don't have an affinity for Lord of the Rings. I wasn't that into the fiction. So this guy creates, like, probably one of the greatest play fields and greatest machines ever. And he's just like, eh, it was all right. Theme was okay. Wasn't really into it. Yeah, he wasn't into it, but Keith Johnson was into it. Keith Johnson. This was Keith Johnson's magnum opus. This pin, and along with the Simpsons pinball party, basically made Keith's career. You know what I mean? Like, we all know Keith Johnson. We'll continue to know Keith Johnson. and he could probably do no wrong for the rest of his career, no matter what kind of game rules he's got, or 47,000 different characters to choose from when you start playing a game. Everybody's going to forget that because this game and the Simpsons Spinball Party absolutely put him on a different tier. Well, George says, realistically, Lord of the Rings gets the credit it deserves because of Keith. Lord of the Rings wouldn't be what it is, and there's a lot of stuff in the game because of Keith. Even George says this isn't his game. You know what I mean? Like, this is Keith's game. He made a play field that is pretty frigging awesome, but he's still under contract. Right? They don't bring him in because they are on a shoestring budget. But I'll tell you what. I bet you Keith did not stick to his budget. You know what I mean? I bet you he worked hours and hours and hours on Lord of the Rings, and it shows. Evenings, weekends at home, guaranteed. This game is beyond any of you.
    30:14
    Run! I'm sorry. Well, George says, when I design a game for Stern, I'm not there every day, and I'm not working at this thing day and night, every night. I'm basically drawing in broad strokes. There's a bunch of guys inside that really finished my stuff and really took it to the next level in terms of developing and getting ready for production, et cetera. I don't have the time to devote to it the way I would if that's all I was doing. It would get a lot more attention. Yeah. So he's not there. This is a part-time thing. He's just building the play field, man. Keith took that ball and ran with it.
    30:49
    George would literally build the whitewood, put all the things together, and then Stern engineers would jump in, put all the pieces to the pin, do all the heavy lifting. Somebody like Keith would just work day and night to make an epic level code. and Gomez gets all the credit for Lord of the Rings. Credit deserved, but, you know. And the Lord of the Rings Whitewood is now at the Strong Museum in Rochester, New York. Really? Yes, it is. It's been there for years. What an odd place to have the Whitewood to that game. Why? They're the museum of play. It's all about gaming. Huh. Mm-hmm. You should go there. Strong Museum. Giving it a plug. Rochester, New York. George's highest-selling game was Revenge from Mars. Sold 6,878 units. That's that pinball 2000 game.
    31:43
    Did Lord of the Rings break that record? Maybe. I don't know. They did a ton of runs of it. But George said, I think it stands to break that record. The way that Gary builds games, he just keeps revisiting a title. My most successful Stern product, and I think maybe their most successful game. I'm not entirely sure. It wasn't made in one run. It continues to be made. This is an anomaly in manufacturing. So Williams never revisited a game. Even if it sold, like, okay, and then immediately at the end of the run it just sold gangbusters, once they stopped, that was it. Unless it was Adam's family. Yeah, unless it was Adam's family. But they didn't go back and sell more medieval madness. They didn't go back. Monster Bash, right, criminally underproduced game. They didn't go back and make more of them, even though they knew they had a frigging amazing game on their hands. People talk about, oh, what's on the line at Stern and manufacturing lines and stuff, but I don't think they really appreciate how incredibly complex that that stuff is. To retool a line, so to change everything off and to change everything back on, that is not an easy thing to do. The costs to that would be amazing, the staff, the errors that might happen, and just the ability to take a toy and put it together and then switch to another toy the next week. To me, that blows my mind, let alone a manufacturer. There's a reason why Ford makes a car for like eight years and doesn't change anything. It's incredible.
    33:14
    But Stern wasn't the manufacturing monster that Williams was. It was much smaller, and that meant that they were nimble and that they could pivot much easier back and forth from titles. This brings us to something interesting. People always talk about, oh, are they going to vault Lord of the Rings? Are they going to bring it back? This happens all the time. Oh, my God. It's like I have a Tron. Every now and then, it's popped up on Pinside again.
    33:40
    Oh, my goodness. There's a vault edition of Tron coming out. Well, do you think, Ron, that they will ever do Lord of the Rings again? No, they will not. Never going to happen. Absolutely. It's a white star game. The licensing would be a nightmare. People also go, oh, why don't they get an LCD screen, and it would be so great if they put the LCD animations in. Yeah, it would be great. Not going to happen. Licensing nightmare. Stop talking about it. Well, don't believe us. Get it from the man himself, Gary Stern. Yeah, let him put a nail in the coffin and destroy your wonderful future. Because when he was asked about doing a Tron or Lord of the Rings Vault Edition, Gary said, would we ever build it again? You know, it's not totally up to us, But I would say that if anybody's into pinball, buy what's available now. You could buy a Tron or a Lord of the Rings if that's what you want. Or buy a Black Knight or Monsters. There's so many great games around. Don't save your money waiting for another Lord or Tron. I'm not saying we're never going to build either of them again. But I'm saying don't wait. Buy something that you want now. Exactly, Ron. He is such a salesman.
    34:52
    Buy the latest Stern games. Yeah, buy Black Knight or Monsters, which were the games out at the time then. This is from episode 96 of Head to Head Pinball Podcast with Ryan C. and Marty Robbins. God, I miss that show.
    35:10
    How do we follow up one of the greatest games of all time? Well, we follow it up with a pretty epic TV license. That's The Sopranos, gangster mafia TV series from HBO. Oh, so it had the F word in it. Lots of F words, yeah. February of 2005, it's a Stern White Star. Again, this modified system. This was designed by George Gomez and some of the concept items from Lyman Sheets. Dots and Animation by Mark Galvez. Software by Dwight Sullivan, Lyman Sheets, and Lonnie. Lonnie Ropp. Don't assume people know who that is. Sorry Lonnie Ropp Don screw up James Bond Lonnie don do it let talk about the theme of The Sopranos This was the American crime drama created by David Chase It was on HBO The story revolves around Tony Soprano, who is James Gandolfini, I think probably one of his best roles ever. He's a New Jersey-based Italian-American mobster. Hey, you know what they're talking about, Hey, Ron. Yes. You know the Italians, they talk like that. He didn't talk like that in the show. No. He was portraying a mobster and his difficulties as he tried to balance his family life with his role as the leader of this criminal organization. The series often explored these interactions through his therapy sessions with his psychiatrist, Jennifer Melfi, who's Lorianne Baracco? Yeah, she was in Goodfellas. Oh, yeah. Ooh, that's another good Italian movie, Rodney. Hey! The series also featured Tony's family members, his mafia colleagues, and rivals in prominent roles, most notably his wife Carmela, who is Eddie Falco, and his protege, his distant cousin, probably the greatest character ever, Christopher Mo- Oh, God. Can you say that? Multi- Multisanti. Yeah, that sounds good. Yeah. Christopher Montesanti. And I'm thinking Eddie Falco is probably Edie Falco, I'm guessing. Yeah, Edie. That's right, it is Edie Falco. Yes, we're saying Edie's wrong for the last two years. Still saying him wrong. This is how we do it, folks. This is how we do it. If you want to hear me mispronounce names, sign up for the $6 a month Patreon over at patreon.com slash silverballchronicles. I'll just post voice notes of me trying to say words. Anyway, The Sopranos is widely regarded as one of the best television series of all time. Ron, don't let us down.
    37:54
    Did you watch The Sopranos? Uh, no. I didn't have HBO, sorry. I didn't watch The Sopranos either. I was a bit too young. I mean, not young for the content, just young to get why it was so good. I think I'm going to go back and watch it, though. I just got, like, other things to watch at the moment, like She-Hulk.
    38:15
    In 2013, the Writers Guild of America named this one of the best written TV series of all time. In 2016, Rolling Stone called it the best TV series of all time, and it had won 21 Primetime Emmy Awards and five Golden Globes. Ron, how many Golden Globes have you won? None. You are not as good as The Sopranos. No, I'm not. The Sopranos was a phenomenon, right? Yeah. It was a big deal, man. I didn't watch The Sopranos, and I heard about The Sopranos. I knew of The Sopranos. Everybody knew. It's crazy. It was a huge phenomenon. Well, David Chase was the writer of that. He actually wrote a prequel movie to the series that followed Tony Soprano kind of like before all of the events of the show. So in 2021, The Many Saints of Newark was released. This was one of the pandemic movies of 2021, and the release really, really suffered because of that. I didn't go to a movie theater until the end of 2021, and even then it was terrible. And that was only for a Marvel movie. I mean, come on, Spider-Man?
    39:34
    I'd totally get corona to go see Spider-Man. It scored a 71% Rotten Tomatoes. Pretty good. I think I'm going to go and watch this.
    39:41
    Now, this pin was released around Season 5 and 6. Season 6, the final season, actually had two parts. The average score on Rotten Tomatoes for all six seasons is 92%, which is really good for a series. Did everybody at Stern think this was a great idea, great series? I would assume so. The line-and-sheet said, the licensing for the game was fantastic. The guys at HBO in New York got up to speed quickly. All the people on the show, they all did custom speech for the game. They were just happy to be part of it. It was amazing. I wish those days would come back. And this quote is from Slam Tilt Podcast. This is a big license. This ain't CSI or Roller Coaster Tycoon. It's not. During this time at Stern, you know, they had some turds. And I don't think this is a turd theme. The arse, the arse is kind of dirty. The theme, not so much. Well, the thing is, it had everyone, like even though I didn't watch the show, I knew the dude who was Tony Soprano. And Tony Soprano's in it with custom speech. It's amazing. Couldn't believe it. And the game has F-bombs like crazy, just like the show. Theme integration. It's really to the top. It's theme correct. That's right. Is there also a pizza shop in the arse?
    41:01
    Because it's Italian. There's a safe. There you go. It's where you hide your pasta. And there's a stripper pole, and it is very true to the series. This was Lyman Sheets' first game at Stern Pinball after leaving Williams in 1999. How do you make Sopranos an action-based game, though, Ron?
    41:21
    There's a lot of sitting around and talking in this show, so how do you make it fun and flowy? Well, Lyman said, I enjoy Sopranos a lot. It was a tough one, too. George and I were just sort of scratching our heads going, what are we going to do in this game? you're going to sit around a table, eat food, and talk psychiatry or whatever, and then we just ended up making it a gangster game. You're doing gangster stuff, and that all worked out pretty well. Okay, so then it's like not exactly like the show, but it's enough like the show with some gangster elements in it. That sounds great. Yeah, it's very similar to Capcom's Kingpin in that you start at the bottom of the ladder, and you work your way up. Ah, very nice. And we're in Kingpin, I think it was, well, you wanted to beat the Kingpin. And Sopranos, you wanted to beat the boss. Oh, very good. Now, there's no silliness on the flyer here as I look through it. It just says the Sopranos. Like, there's no funny catch phrases. There's no puns. No, there's, you can party with the dancers at the Bada Bing Club. There's a fish that talks. He always does wisecracks with original speech by Big Pussy. Yee. That was his name. That's the character's name. It's got Tony Soprano's boat, the Stugatz. The Stugatz. You got to say it like that. It's got a safe. And if you look at this play field, it is very, very similar to Lord of the Rings. There were people at the time, I remember when this came out, they were superimposing the play field of Lord of the Rings over this, and almost all the shots match up. That must have been really hard back then, because we didn't have, like, the Photoshop tools that were so easily accessible. You had Photoshop there. Yeah, but it wasn't like nowadays where it's like everybody and their cat knows how to use Photoshop. Yeah, but it was extremely similar. This is a great game. I've played this a few times. It's got, from what I've been told, a killer wizard mode. Really? You've never been? I've never. No. But you're so good. You're such a good player. Yep, and I've never been.
    43:21
    And it does play long. It plays very long. It's like Lord of the Rings in that it can play a very long time. This is the Photoshop era. The early 2000s, yeah. But we're in full Photoshop era here, where basically they just took one of the promotional pictures, is the back glass. Yeah. And then the play field has a completely different style where it's not Photoshopped at all. It's all hand-drawn, but with random Photoshop pictures of people. God, I hate that. So, yeah. It's not the prettiest thing in the world. But it's pretty straightforward. But I was a fan. I mean, it's got a safe that actually comes apart when you hit it. Yeah, it cracks open. It's got a talking fish. The boat has a physical lock? The boat has a physical lock. I mean, yeah, it's got the dancers on the pole actually spin around. Awesome. It's a great game. This is a diamond in the rough. It's like Gomez doesn't make bad games. You know what I mean? Citizen Spinball Party had the dough mode. This one has the F-bomb mode where they just say the F-word over and over and over.
    44:24
    Is this game underrated? I don't know. I always liked it. I haven't heard a lot of hate for it. You don't hear a lot of people saying, like, I want a Sopranos. Yeah, nobody ever goes, oh, man, I'm really looking for a Sopranos. But they should. It's a really great game. I know there's always an issue with it in tournaments because you could soft plunge, hit the target, drain, lock the ball, and do that over and over, and it doesn't count as actually having the ball in play yet. So you can start multi-ball without even starting the ball saver. It's kind of crazy. I'm looking for the Pinside rating, and I don't think it's... It's 125 on the Pinside Top 100. That seems underrated. Yeah, I don't know if there's 124 games better than Sopranos. Oh, look what's right above it.
    45:15
    2008, Batman the Dark Knight. That's the next game. Amazing how that works. Look at that. Segway. It's a DC superhero comic book license. Killer license. July of 2008. This is a Sam board set at Stern. Designed by George Gomez. Art by Kevin O'Connor and Margaret Hudson. Dots and animation by Mark Galvez and Tom Kizivat. Sound by Ken Hale. Software by Lyman Sheets and Lonnie Robb. This game has some really cool mechanics in it. We've talked at great length in this game in our Lyman Sheets episode where we featured the Dark Knight. But is there any additional thoughts that you would have on this game that you wanted to toss in? I mean, it was killer license. I remember it was the game at the Expo before everyone got fired. That's all I remember. It's got some good shots. If we talk about Gomez's addition here, it's got that awesome crane neck. You've got to love the crane. Gotta love the crane. It's got the Joker, the spinning Joker thing.
    46:29
    You had just said this was during the Lehman Brothers recession in 2008-2009, where there was a significant financial crisis at the time. George was at Expo that year with Batman, and shortly after that Expo, Gary had to let a bunch of employees go. It was literally Monday. Monday after, yes. And I remember this because George and Lyman both did a seminar for the game during the banquet, which was kind of weird. Usually you have actual seminar rooms and seminar time, but they decided to do that during the banquet. So you did eat their sorrows away. I just remember them talking about how the center ramp was a pain to get working. That's one of the things. And I remember that was the tournament game. And they had just a whole line of Batman Dark Knights. And I remember seeing Pat Waller was there very briefly and left because he had quit off of CSI. So it was, yeah, wasn't the best time. Stern was definitely in survival mode. It's hard to get Gary to talk about this time in depth. Like to get him to really kind of break it down. And I think it's because Gary's not a backward looking individual. He, like, will learn from his mistake and just move forward? Or he'll learn from a scenario? Like, he doesn't want to keep revisiting things, as you can see by Black Knight and Munsters.
    48:00
    But I did find this quote that I pulled from Head to Head Pinball podcast. And Gary said, in 2008, we stripped the company. I'll tell you, it was exceptionally hard, but it had to be done to make it, though. The Lehman Brothers recession, we had to lay off people, downsize the company significantly to make it through. It was a tough time, but they had to do it. Now, George, he was still working at Midway, right? He was still on contract.
    48:26
    And you can see, two and a half years between designs, he really is just filling in his time at Stern as a hobby, basically. So, big deal, right? Still got a job. Well, through 2006 and 2007, the two years prior, Midway Games did struggle with profitability. The last nail in the coffin was the 2008-2009 recession. And it basically limped along till its death in 2011. Midway had stopped doing coin-op in the mid-2000s, early mid-2000s, were doing home games and stuff. That didn't work out either. Yeah, poor Midway games. So George Gomez says, Batman came out in the crash of 2008, almost killed Stern, and definitely killed Midway. So I found myself out of work in December of 2008. Yeah, George would leave Midway Games and he would end up at a place called Incredible Technologies, where he worked as a designer. Those are the makers of Golden Tee and various slot machines.
    49:35
    What I found kind of cool here is that in 2009, Stern re-ran a limited edition of Lord of the Rings. This is six years after its original run. That's because Jack Guarnari, Jersey Jack, their biggest distributor, kind of pushed for this. So they did another run, which is funny to say now that he is their competitor. But, yes, he was their biggest distributor. Stern's rebirth coming back and the whole 2008 thing, well, you know, we'll talk about that in another episode. We'll include that in our Pinball is Dying series, which is a continuing series. But in 2011, Stern had begun to slowly make its way back after the massive restructuring and changes in its ownership structure. In July of 2011, George Gomez was hired at Stern full-time as a designer and part of the executive committee. So he was very much part of, like, the big leadership team. He was no longer just contract. He wasn't just an employee. He was really part of the executive structure. Gomez was tasked with rebuilding the creative and design teams. This is where we get into the architect stuff here, Ron. Super Awesome Pinball Show, Episode 31, and the first Fireside Chat that Christopher Franchi hosted. Two wonderful episodes of the Super Awesome Pinball Show. So this is where we get a lot of the information here in the later half of the podcast. So George says, in 2011, we sat down and said, what does this business look like in 10 years? It's a great amount of effort, some amount of luck, and some proactive strategy. What do we want it to be? How do we want it to work? That seems like a big change in what George Gomez was doing as a project lead at Midway and a designer part-time. he's now building an entire design studio but he's also doing it with a bunch of corporate executive type folk kind of watching them so this is when i think the massive task and understanding of that task creates a level of panic for george george says i was having a tough day at stern early on in my tenure there i happen to be having lunch with eugene which is Eugene Jarvis, and I said, man, this is hard, like hard. And he gave me a piece of sort of inspirational kind of stuff. Eugene said to me, you are uniquely prepared to be the guy in your seat right now. No one else can do what you're doing because the combination of things is what's going to allow you to be successful in this. At the beginning of my time when I walk into Stern Pinball, and there's like nine guys in product development, and I got business strategy guys go on and on saying, yeah, but we need a pro, premium, an LE. We've got to do code bases for each play field and all this peripheral stuff. And I'm like, oh, my God, I'm going to lose my freaking mind. Jarvis is a really smart guy, a genius. He said, yeah, chill out, hang in there. He's very laid back, you know. He's like, dude, no one else can do this. Just, like, chill out.
    52:54
    Wow. This is one of the greatest quotes I think I've ever pulled in our podcast. This really lays bare George Gomez.
    53:06
    You know, everybody sees him as this guy who is the architect of building what Stern is today, but he's just a guy, a guy that freaks out.
    53:16
    And it's somebody like Eugene Jarvis that's been through this before and who is much more laid back that just says, man, just chill out. You're uniquely prepared for this. Everything you've done before is leading to today, and you'll be fine. And if we look 10 years out, so this is 2011, we look out now to 2021, last year, 2022, this year, we can see, you know what, George was uniquely prepared for that, because, man, look at Stern today. And Eugene Jarvis, if anyone's wondering, well, who's that? He's the CEO, founder of Raw Thrills. Probably the only company that makes arcade equipment that actually makes money these days, at least out of the U.S. One of George's first moves was to rehire Steve Ritchie around Texas Pinball Festival in 2011. And he also convinced Lyman Sheets to return. They would end up doing ACDC. Yep. That was, I remember that because they had Steve Ritchie do a seminar and he said, Hi, I'm Steve Ritchie, and I design pinball machines. And how he's starting at Stern, and then at the very end he said, and Lyman's coming back, and we're going to start working on a game tomorrow.
    54:28
    And like a year later, Texas Pinball Festival 2012, ACDC made its debut, or at least the LEs did. Yeah, and the pro-premium-and-LE model was born. And it has proven to be ultra-successful. So successful, other companies try to copy it and just call them different things. Yeah, but they call them really confusing. They're confusing.
    54:51
    Like the deluxe or special editions or collector's editions. Just drive you nuts. George's next design, but he gets to design, right? He gets to design. Yeah!
    55:05
    What's he going to design, Ron? Transformers, more than meets the eye. Yeah. Which would have been a big license, because I think at that time you had the Transformer. Was that Michael Bay? The Transformers movies. You have a movie. Yeah. This is 2011. The toy license theme, which is close enough to the Michael Bay movies around this time to sort of leech off of that. Sound and music by the man himself, David Thiel. Art by Kevin O'Connor. Dots by Mark Galvez. Software by Lonnie Ropp and Wason Cheng.
    55:41
    Transformers is more than just toys. It is a media franchise around this time. It is by the American toy company Hasbro and the Japanese toy company Takara Tomy. It primarily follows the Autobots and the Decepticons, two alien robot factions at war that can transform into other forms, such as vehicles or animals. Or a videocassette. Which was kind of neat. No, it wasn't a videocassette. It was an audiocassette. Oh. Yeah, that was very not nerdy of you. I think it was, what, Soundwave? Yeah! I can't believe you know that name. Good for you. I did watch the cartoon. Yeah, I didn't. I had lots of friends that were huge, and it just didn't get me. I don't know what it was. Well, because I'm old, I have Megatron in his original form, the gun, without any of the safety stuff. So I don't have the orange thing at the end that tells you it's not a gun. So it actually does look like a gun. I had the airplane, which was way larger than all the other Transformers. I don't remember which one that was. Was that Sonic something? I just felt it was way bigger. It was more like Voltron size. Cool. The franchise, of course, encompasses toys, animation, comic books, video games, and live-action films. As of 2011, it has generated, get this, $25 billion in revenue. make it one of the highest grossing media franchises of all time. The pin, loosely based on the movies, is mentioned. This was a dream theme for some people. When some people heard that Stern and George Gomez was doing their beloved toy franchise, people were excited. It's one of the first times I can remember them doing a teaser trailer when they started doing those. If I remember, it was like George is in the factory and he's working at his desk and some of his stuff like transforms or something like that. Very cool.
    57:47
    This had three versions, the Pro, the Decepticon Violet Limited Edition at 125 units, the Autobot Crimson Limited Edition at 125 units, and the other Limited Edition combo at 500 units. Which is pretty cool because it's half and half, half violet, half crimson. Yeah, but if you were like, if you got the Decepticon one, it was less of units, it was very collectible, it was super cool. It was a really, really great idea. It had some pretty neat toys. So the upper playfield has this chromium, like, upper playfield thing where the ball goes up and it bounces against, like, a giant robot guy. I don't even know what that is. I've only ever played this game once, and I was really underwhelmed. I was really disappointed. Honestly, I always thought it was pretty cool. I prefer the pro.
    58:48
    The LE has the upper right mini play field. You get the ball in, and then you can hit the flippers to bounce the ball back and forth, try to get as many – you want to keep it in the middle of the play field. So you don't want it anywhere else. In the middle of the little mini play field. It's very similar to the engine in a Corvette.
    59:11
    Same thing when you start a multi-ball. You hit the buttons, but you want to try to – you just don't mash them. You want to get them back forth so you can get the ball bouncing back and forth because then you get more points. Very cool. But unlike most of the games, the way Stern makes it now is typically the designer designs the premium LE design, and then they strip stuff out of it for the pro. Transformers was different. The Pro was designed first, and then the other stuff was added. This was Kurt George himself at the seminar, at least I attended, where he went over the design. So he did the Pro first, and then they added the stuff, like that little mini play field. Which is why it seems like there's two kind of upper play field things just kind of stuck on the top. The Pro, I always thought, shot better. The issue with the game, it's very grindy, very, very, very grindy. Hey, guys, as a quick heads up, I wanted to let you know that in my real life, I'm David the Advice Guy. At Dennis Financial, we aren't investment advisors or insurance agents. I always thought that sounded terrible. We want to provide you with sound financial advice. In fact, we want to provide you with investment and insurance advice for life, and we take that honor very seriously. Do you know individuals who have received financial advice for 10 years have two times the financial assets of unadvised individuals? For example, you've got mortgage insurance at the bank, right? Well, did you know a 40-year-old non-smoker can save $30 a month every month for 20 years just from shopping around for a more competitive rate? Now just imagine what a pinhead like you could do with that extra money. Toppers and shooter rods, anyone? 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. Now, there's a reason for that, right? Like a lot of people say Lonnie Ropp's code tends to be, especially in this era, very old school, and everything is very deep. You've got to really dig and dig and dig. You have to hit a bunch of shots to start one of the modes, which are all the inserts in the middle of the play field, which it is somewhat hand-drawn, the artwork, although it's still – Yeah, it was a good mix. It didn't look like some Photoshop in there. But, I mean, I always thought it shot good, and you can hit stuff. You can hit – I don't know why you want to hit Optimus Prime, but you can. There's a little ramp thing goes airborne and hits him. The Megatron is a, and this was confusing me because as a kid, Megatron was a gun. But I guess now he's a tank. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, you hit him. And on the LEs, the cannon, it had force feedback. It would, like, jerk back whenever it fired. Even though the ball wasn't actually coming out of it, it would make it look like it did. Cool. So, I mean, other than the grindiness, I thought it shot well. It was definitely dead on with the theme. And it had, like, actual, like, sculpted toys. You know what I mean? Like, the Optimus Prime was, like, actually molded. I believe the Optimus Prime, the dude who does his voice is actually in there. Oh, from the cartoons.
    62:39
    Well, I think he's the same guy. I can't remember his name, and Transformers fans are yelling at me right now. I'm sorry. Yeah, and I didn't look it up because nobody's got time for that. But I think it was a combination. You know, I think they used clips from him from, like, the movies, but then I think there were other voice clips that were not him that were done for the game that weren't quite as good. This is also an odd time for Stern because they've got these ramps. So usually in a game you've got these molded ramps or you've got, like, habit trail, like, wire form things. This game has, like, integrated the plastic set into the ramps. They're kind of big and bulky, and they don't really look that great. I thought they looked pretty good. And they have the metal ramps with the actual, like, Autobot logos. Yeah, that's cool. And you could pick what side you wanted to be. You could be a good guy, Autobot, or you could be a Decepticon. Oh, so scary. It's more than meets the eye. Dennis K., one of our patrons over at patreon.com slash silverballchronicles, says, Transformers, the clunkiest clunk game to ever clunk. My time was on the LE model, and it seems the game is meant to clunk. But it's odd compared to pretty much any other pinball machine. You're launching balls into Optimus Prime. There's a captive ball to clunk against for Bumblebee, a rotating Starscream target, and a weird player-controlled upper playfield. The game just feels like it goes out of its way to keep the ball random, with even proper shots coming back like bricks. Clunksville. I noticed you said L.E. Yeah, so that's what you said. You said that the pro is definitely the better. The pro is the better shooter, yes. Was it a big disappointment, though? Who knows? Were people kind of disappointed in the game? We never know how much they're going to sell. But, I mean, compared to other titles from the time, I mean, it probably wasn't as well regarded as Tron. That's true, because that's like, what, the greatest game ever? According to you, yes. Now, they also did Transformers The Pin.
    65:02
    And you can check this out on Pinside. They've got some stuff there where you can throw it into your Google machine or YouTube. This is a smaller size pinball machine. Let's put that in the air quotes there. It was sold at Sam's Club and Costco around like Christmas time. And Stern was testing what they would call the pin market or the home market where they could develop a game that was kind of a pinball machine. It wasn't a commercial machine. It didn't have all the commercial stuff. No coin door. It was smaller in stature, but it had pop bumpers and flippers and a couple of ramps. And 11 years later, they're still doing it. And they're still doing it. They've gotten a little better at it, I would say. Still not great, but we're in this hobby because we like the pinball machines, not the pins. But we're not the target market for the pin. The pin target market is for, like, mom and dad who are in a game room billiard store, and they see something for a reduced price that's basically a pinball machine. And it has the theme that they like. I don't know if I've ever played one. It looks like a toy. It does look like a toy, yes. This is not the pin like we know the pin today. Yeah, this is the first kick of the can. And I appreciate what they're doing. I think I know what they're doing. I can see where they're going.
    66:28
    You can tell it's obviously the first version. I'm trying to think if they even call it the pin now, the whole models. I think we just... I think they're just home edition. I think they're home edition. I think us people in the hobby keep calling it the pin. I don't know if they... Because we don't want to call it a pinball machine.
    66:46
    We want to reduce its level. We want to hold it down. Not being held down, though, in 2011 was the Avengers. This is the Marvel superhero movie theme. Huge license.
    67:01
    Huge home run license. This is designed by George Gomez. It's got the art by Kevin O'Connor. Sound by David Thiel. Dots by Mark Galvez. Once again, Lonnie Ropp and Waysen Cheng on software.
    67:19
    The Avengers, the 2012 American superhero film based on Marvel Comics' superhero team of the same name, was a smash hit. It is the sixth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or as we know it nowadays, the MCU, written and directed by the King of Nerds, Joss Whedon. The film featured an ensemble cast, including Robert Downey Jr. in his defying role as Iron Man, Chris Evans, Mark Ralphio, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, and Jeremy Renner, as the Avengers alongside Tom Hiddleston and Samuel motherfucking L. Jackson. In this film, Nick Fury and the spy agency S.H.I.E.L.D. recruit Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Bruce Banner, Thor, Natasha Romanoff, and Clint Barton to form a team capable of stopping Thor's brother Loki from subjugating Earth. This has a $200 million budget, and it destroyed everything at the box office for months. It did $1.5 billion at the box office. And it is a 91% Rotten Tomatoes, so it itself is actually a good movie, too. You going to ask me the question? You have not seen this. I have not seen this. No. So, Ron, I am a big fan of the Marvel movies. I'm a big fan. The ride that the MCU has taken on here from those first sort of Thor, Iron Man movies into the Avengers movie and then into the Endgame, it is a ride and an experience all of its own, and I honestly think you have missed out on a zeitgeist. It was so awesome. Nah, not into superheroes.
    69:25
    You're a nerd. All nerds are into superheroes. Not all nerds. I haven't seen Doctor Who either. I haven't seen Doctor Who. That's for real nerds. Oh, that's like a different level of nerd. Gotcha. If you're into British television nerd stuff, you are something else. Okay, Monty Python. Yeah, but that's not sci-fi. That's not British, Ron. It was on PBS in the U.S., so it counts as U.S. So it's got these ramps again. These integrated ramps. Man, what's the problem with the ramps? So I, this, they look cheap. Funny story. Where I work, well, we just merged with another company. Their headquarters, they have an Avengers in their break room. Did you go and blow it up? Actually, it needs an upgrade. The code is a few versions behind. And the ball keeps getting stuck in the lock area. Oh, we'll get to that in a second. The issue that I have with the ramps on this game is that they're so big around the in lane and out lane that they really cover up the in lane and out lane. So if the ball is in that area, it's kind of annoying to see them when you're trying to nudge it out. It kind of gets in the way. That bothers me. Photoshop. Yeah, all Photoshop.
    70:44
    All the call outs, none of them are from the movie. They're all just actors doing, and it's confusing. There's Black Widow call-outs, but it's a dude. It's like, wait a minute, did I miss something here? I thought Black Widow was a woman, not a dude.
    71:02
    It would be like they'll all refer to themselves in the first person, and then Black Widow doesn't. It's very confusing. They couldn't find somebody to talk like that. And you had the ramp, the Black Widow ramp. Oh, the Black Widow ramp. Which would, George Gomez would later kind of tweak that a bit, and we would get the Deadpool ramp. Yeah, the katana shot. But now we have this ramp. And I must have the most amazing Avengers at the place I work because it works most of the time. But it's known for not working, like, ever, that ramp. Ever. It's terrible. So I have a friend of mine. He has one of these. He has the limited edition. So they had the Pro the Premium and it had the Avengers LE and then the Hulk LE So there was 500 limited editions 250 Hulk 250 the Avengers And the Hulk, if I remember, was like all green. Yeah, and it had a green DMD, right, instead of the red DMD or the orange DMD. It was awesome. I think this game is really cool. I really like this. This is right up my alley. My friend's Black Widow ramp seemed to work quite regularly. It's a difficult shot. So let me describe the shot. So it's to the left of the right orbit, and it's a quick left turn. So it goes up the ramp really quick to the left. There's a spinner there. And then it crosses across like a bridge, if you will, onto the left ramp down to the flipper, that ugly-ass plastic ramp. It's really difficult to shoot, as well as the momentum of the ball kind of dies sometimes if you don't get it in there quite right. A lot of people crapped on that as being a failure of geometry. It's got a lot of mechs in it. It's got a lot of cool stuff. It's got Hulk. It has a Hulk toy. A Hulk toy. And his arms move. He turns. He turns up and down. He says Hulk smash. Balls get stuck in his arm and behind him frequently. Right. So it goes into ball search all the time. The bridge that the Black Widow ramp bridge actually lifts up from the premium alley. Like Hulk has picked it up to smash it. It's pretty cool. Because Hulk smash. And it has drop targets in front of that. It's got lots of drop targets. I didn't realize that until the other day, but other than that, it's got the four Hulk drop targets, but it's also got all the targets on the left are also drop targets. Like, damn, there's a lot of drop targets. There's a big budget on this game. Then there's the spinning Tesseract thing. So the Tesseract is like a cube, and it sits on top of basically the same spinner that was in Tale of the Arabian Nights, the lamp. So you hit the thing, and it spins. Now, my friend actually took this ugly-ass cube off and put, like, a really cool lit crystal thing, and it looks awesome.
    73:59
    This, not so much. So good. Yeah. I mean, it's, again, it has. It's grindy. It's very grindy. You thought it was grindy on the Transformers. Each shot is an Avenger, so you have to keep hitting their shot to activate them. And you want to activate all the Avengers over and over and over. It's got a lot of mechanical action and stuff that pinheads want. So what was really cool about this game is it's got a diverter on that bridge ramp, on that Black Widow ramp, and it'll divert the ball, and it'll fall, like, into the mode saucer, which is in front of the H drop target, just below the ramp. When that happened the first time, I went, holy crap, that was cool.
    74:45
    Like, it's those little things that I think Gomez gets, just those, you know, people talk about pinball moments. Well, that's not a moment. That's just one little change in the way it happens that makes a big impact. It's got the Hulk in it. He moves. Oh, it's great. And he does all the Hulk stuff. Hulk smash. Makes funny comments and stuff. This isn't a great game. The Hulk LE is a great game. It's just expensive. Especially for that much grinding, man. It's very green. The green Hulk. So green. Looks great. Go play this game. Custom art, too. It's got Hulk everywhere. He's just, he's hulking it up. Now, one issue that this game did have is it had wedge sides in the GI. Well, yeah. Well, specifically in the back panel of Stern Games of this era, and probably still currently, they will have the GI lighting that goes across the top to illuminate the back part of the game. They're typically bayonet sockets. For some reason with Avengers, they decided to try wedge sockets back there. I don't know if it's cheaper or whatever, but they put them back there, and the lights kept falling out, end up on the play field rolling all over the place. I believe this is the only game they did it on They went back to bayonet sockets after this Yeah the ones you twist The ones you twist yeah They replaced them with the ones you could just press in But the problem is they fall out easy Stern had initial issues with a lot of those They started using the big wedge flashers Like on the domes And they would just fall out Like on my Metallica They just fall out constantly So they came up with a little bracket thing now That's just underneath them so it can't fall out So they're like looking at ways to sort of save money here and there, right? I would assume that was a money-saving thing. I don't know why else.
    76:34
    I don't get it. I don't see how that saves that much money, though. I mean, it's just a different type of socket. They still have to solder them in. They still have to mount them. So I don't know. It's also got that really cool ramp diverter thing where it's got like a low-key scepter.
    76:51
    And it's like 3D, right? Like, it's not just, like, a ramp. It's got, like, spikes in all directions and welding bits. It's really – it's a really unique game. And I would say the only issue with the game is the grindiness. Other than that, I think this is a home run. And the ramps are a bit ugly. We still don't have any premium yet. So we just got Pro and we got the LE. Yes.
    77:18
    Was it a disappointment, though? Did this disappoint everybody? Did they go, oh, man, this game. It's not ACDC, right? George said, I can guarantee you that I didn't work any less hard, that I didn't put as much of myself in the games you hate as in the ones you love. I'm all in all the time. If I'm doing it, if I'm going to put my name on it, I'm all in. Sometimes I get it right. Sometimes I get it wrong. And that's just the nature of the beast. Well, here's an example of a chance where he could take something that he didn't quite get right and make it better. and that's Batman 66, the licensed superhero TV thing. Do you think he's into superheroes? Yeah, well, I think he's into things of his era, and he grew up watching Batman when he was a kid, just like he went to his first Bond movie, which we'll find out about.
    78:11
    So designed by George Gomez, art by Kevin O'Connor, he did the play field, and this is the first appearance of one Christopher Franchi, who did the cabinet art and little bits of the play field, and a legendary back glass. The LCD animations, ooh, they're not talking dots anymore, Chuck Ernst and his team. Sound and music by another newcomer. This is one of the games where he's really breaking out. Jerry Thompson. Love me some Jerry. And software by Lyman F. Sheets Jr. I think I'm going to buy this game, Ron. I love Batman 66. I watched this with my little girls. This is an amazing game. This is the game that really introduced me once again to the excitement of pinball. I saw Deadflip stream this with Lyman Sheath and Mike Vinacore. This was important and stern in that this was not a cornerstone game. This was a kapow game. This was a, what's the right term for it? Like boutique game, boutique title, where there is no pro, there is no real cheaper model. Like you have the expensive model and the more expensive model. This was also the game that really launched Mike Vinacore into the pinball industry. He had always been on the periphery, but this is the one where he really jumped in. It was Lyman Sheets that brought him into Stern. and Mike would say that Batman Will Go Down is one of my top career highlights.
    79:50
    Lyman went to bat for me and I owe my career to him. Thank you for bringing in Mike Vinacore because he was on Stranger Things and really I think with Lonnie turned that into something special and he's also working on James Bond. He was also at Jersey Jack before he went to Stern. Now at Expo when this showed up, this was a box of lights. Yeah, it was. I was at the seminar I was at the reveal Lyman was not happy about it well he got kind of thrown under the bus George literally said I'd like to show this to you but Lyman won't let me that's literally what he said like wow okay it was nowhere near ready but they were in a situation where for the Super L.E.s we'll talk about that you could get your name in the game voiced by Adam West and Adam West's health was not, it was failing. He did not have much longer on the earth. So they needed to get all the stuff done, all the call outs and everything, as soon as they could. So, yeah, when it was at the expo, it literally was just behind velvet ropes sitting there in a track mode. He couldn't play it. That's a bummer. And it had the topper, which the topper had the bat signal thing on it. So, but, yeah. I mean, and I know, I believe, Lyman started working on it, but then ended up going in a different direction, so I had to kind of just start again. So that was one of the things that made it take a while. The mechanical excitement on this game, right, has got that, so basically what this is, it is the Dark Knight. But what George has done is he's able to sort of take the things that he liked about The Dark Knight and rejig a couple of things to the way that he probably wanted the original vision.
    81:41
    And then Lyman took that to the next level. Big time. Well, George had the turntable. So the turntable originally was the turning Joker thing, right? So it was like some targets, and then Joker would turn around and show himself. It was kind of boring, right? This is not boring. There is so much stuff. You got the villain vision TV screen LCD. You got a bat signal. You got a magnet in front. You got a turntable thing, which is like the Tesseract, but it's all on one large device, like a Lazy Susan. And this whole thing turns around. George Gomez stretching his mech muscle. Did he ever. It's huge, too, and it's heavy. It is one insane mech. The mechanical shenanigans on this game is something else. My understanding is that a lot of the mechanics on this game was done by Tom Capera. Yeah, he's linked with, yeah, a lot of games with George Gomez. Like, he came up, he made the glove work in Johnny Mnemonic. We love the glove.
    82:46
    It's got the crane, so it's got the return of the crane from the Dark Knight, but it's back a little further, correct? And it rotates better. It's got the penguin on it, which is super cool.
    82:59
    But the game does not flow really well, right? It's not very flowy. It's kind of got what I like to call the Gomez clunk. The Gomez clunk. Are you patenting that? Some of it's clunky. Some of it's flowy. I think it's a good mixture, right? Like the spinner's not on an orbit. There's not one orbit locks into it. The left orbit locks into a ball. It doesn't go all the way around. It doesn't go into a ramp.
    83:27
    Or it goes into, like, one of those saucers at the top where your mystery is. Like, it's got a little clunk to it, but I enjoy that. We're not talking Simpsons here with clunk. But we're not exactly talking Steve Ritchie Flo either. Who will save our dynamic duo? Find out next Bat-Time. Me. Next Bat-Channel. No, same Bat-Time, same Bat-Channel. Rodney C. over on our Discord and our Patreon asks the question, What would James Bond be without Lyman's coding?
    84:02
    Lyman saved Batman. Wait a minute. What would James Bond be without Lyman? Will James Bond be any good? Because Batman is only good because of Lyman. That's not true. That's not fair. You don't think so? No. I mean, I think the code is a huge part of the game, but I think the turntable is cool. I mean, yes, it's not a flow monster, but a lot of people put a lot of weight in that. Maybe I'm biased.
    84:26
    Okay. I totally get what Rodney means, like totally understand what he means. And I think it went from like a B plus to like an A because of the things that he was able to do with the code. I don't think he saved it. We're not talking the Walking Dead level of saving it here. But I think he certainly did add some sizzle to that steak. Now, there was multiple versions of this game. The Premium, the LE, and the Super LE. And the Super LE pissed people off. You had to submit a video. Yeah, if you wanted one. I think it was like 15K. Yeah. 15K for the Super LE.
    85:15
    And then I think they added more. because originally it was supposed to be a certain number, and everyone would get a gadget.
    85:26
    I don't remember if that was the LE or the Super LE. The Super LE, there were only supposed to be 30 of them for the 30th anniversary of Batman.
    85:37
    Then they went and added another 50 units. You got that backwards. Did I? Yeah. It was originally supposed to be whatever the year it was for Batman. like 50 years of Batman, and then they added 30 units because it was 30 years of Stern because they were going back to Data East. So they added it and make it like 80 units.
    86:01
    That wasn't super Ellie. I just remember because people were pissed off. People were not happy. They were not happy with that. Like, wait a minute, there's only supposed to be 50. Now you're telling me there's 80. Not only is this game, I would say, a coding masterpiece with Lyman, not only is it a typical fantastic Gomez layout, which is a little bit different,
    86:25
    the art, the cabinet art, the playfield art is stunning. The pro or the premium level is gorgeous. The LE is even better. And the super LE is gorgeous with the Batmobile on the side. But look at these characters by Christopher Franchi. The style of art that he does, amazing. Christopher Frangie has done, like, Batman DVD box set stuff. He's done, like, collectible lunch boxes, and he's done a lot of really interesting art. And it is, this machine, when it is off, is just as amazing as when it's on and you're playing it. It is something else. Can you tell that David really likes this game? God, I really like this game. I like the topper. Topper's amazing. It's got like Batman and Robin sitting in a Batmobile with the little domes. Not only that, it frigging shoots the Bat-Signal up on your ceiling. Gotta have Bat-Signal. How do we follow this up with an even more expensive game? Supreme. This is the licensed clothing brand theme. This is the first clothing brand pinball machine since No Fear. It's from May of 2018. It is a Stern Spike System. There's 200 of these floating around, designed by George Gomez, art by, I don't know, whoever the hell the Supreme art thing is, sound by Jerry Thompson, software by Dean Grover. Now, I had to look this up. I know what Supreme is. I've heard of Supreme. I don't get it, but I've seen it. You're too old, I guess. So Supreme is the American clothing and skateboard lifestyle brand, which was established in New York City in April of 1994.
    88:16
    The brand is targeted at skateboarding and hip-hop subcultures and youth culture in general. The brand produces clothing and accessories and manufactures skateboards.
    88:28
    It is most well known for its red box logo with Supreme, and the Supreme brand is very, very popular in China, Japan, Europe, and in the United States. Basically, you got a white shirt that has red on the top that says Supreme and they're like, I don't know, what, 200 bucks? Ridiculous. Supreme is owned by VF Corporation and everybody who's into Supreme, I'm going to crush your soul, that is the same parent company that owns Jansport, North Face, and Timberland. So it is not very fancy. So why would they do Supreme? So this machine is basically a white machine with a red stripe down that says Supreme, and it's like a home pin kind of game that was modeled after Spider-Man Home Pin, which was their next version of the pin. So why would they do this? Well, Gary Stern says, Supreme, we were working on a large co-branded private label game that we don't sell. They used it for their commercial purposes on their shelves. But think of the exposure that Supreme gave us. They gave pinball. The videos that they did, they had like 3 million views, something like that. The first day they had their video up and they sold out in three seconds. I mean, this is great exposure. That was great exposure. Yes, it was. It was. Especially to the younger crowd. There was one of these at Sunshine Laundromat. Yeah, I've never played this game. Well, I played Spider-Man Home Edition, so I have played this game, kind of. It's the same thing, it's just the art is different. It does look cool. It is fairly cool. There's only 200 of them, so it's pretty exclusive. I remember when I first joined the hobby, seeing one of these on eBay for something like $25,000, which I thought was crazy. But now with pinball prices like four years later, I guess it's probably not that crazy. anymore. But this machine had a rampant flipping issue where people tried to get in and buy the game and then again try to flip it on eBay or elsewhere. I don't really have much to add here, but if you've got something to talk about, please feel free to email us at silverballchronicles at gmail.com So that brings us to what? Gomez's modern home run classic? And the thing is to show the state of Stern, as of at least this year, I don't know if it's still available, you could still get a Batman 66 and pretty much all the games we're going to go through right now, you can still get. Like four or five years later. We're also going to point this out that because there hasn't been a whole lot of time to pass since 2018 to today, a lot of the stories and interesting little bits here or there have not come up to the surface just yet. These are still in production. We haven't had five or ten or twenty years of history to sort of pull out some of those stories. So there's a little bit less intrigue around these games and more how much Dave friggin' loves all these games.
    91:42
    So Deadpool is the Marvel anti-hero comic book license theme from August of 2008. It's a Stern Spike 2. We're not sure how many number of games was sold. designed by George Gomez, art by Zombie Yeti, Jeremy Packer. It has its mechanics by Robert Blakeman, sound by Jerry Thompson, Sean Myers, Vince Pontarelli, and Tim Kitzrow. Animation by Chuck Ernst, who's the lead, Joshua Clay, and Zach Stark. Software by Tanya Klyce as the lead with Tim Sexton, Mike Kissevat, and Wason Chang. Deadpool is the anti-hero appearing in the American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character first appeared in Marvel Comics' New Mutants No. 98 in 1991. Deadpool, whose real name is Wade Wilson, is a disfigured mercenary with superhuman ability to regenerate and has great physical prowess. The character is known as the Merc with a Mouth because he has a tendency to joke, talk constantly, and often breaks the fourth wall for humorous effect to create running gags. In 2016, after years of wrangling, heartthrob and Canadian royalty Ryan Hot Maple Reynolds had a Deadpool movie made. Now, of course, this movie was outside of the MCU, so often that means it's probably a bad movie. But you know what? It turned out to be really, really good. The budget for this movie was $58 million. Most of it was shot in Vancouver, Canada. And it made $782 million, and it holds an 85% Rotten Tomatoes. Deadpool 2 was released in 2018 and currently has a third project underway. Since Fox was purchased by Disney in 2019, Deadpool will be joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
    93:52
    Ron, have you seen Deadpool? Yes. Yeah! We did it, folks. I saw Deadpool 2 also. We did it. We did it, everybody. We can end the podcast now. Thank you.
    94:09
    Yes! It's a great movie, isn't it? It's good, yes. It's good. It's great. Deadpool 2, what do you think, better?
    94:18
    I kind of like the first one. Yeah, I like the first one better, too. But it's still a great movie. We've seen this a few times, right, when they've done, like, Guardians of the Galaxy at Stern, or Deadpool is a great example. They kind of wait until the first one is a hit, and then they kind of try to release around the second one. So they can kind of tie into that and kind of ride that momentum.
    94:40
    Very, very smart strategy. This was also a very controversial title. This was the first release that I saw when I joined the hobby. I saw the live stream with Deadflip dressed as Deadpool. God bless him, a very skinny, tall Deadpool. George Gomez was there talking about the game and the coders were there and I had no idea who these people were but I was like wow this is kind of exciting and I thought this was a really cool game it really sparked my interest but there were a lot of people that were really really not happy when this was released because it's based on the comic book version of Deadpool and it was not based on Ryan Reynolds version of Deadpool and there is zero Ryan Reynolds and zero movie around this at all. It was the right decision because they were able to do pretty much whatever they wanted, which would not have been the case if it was the movie. This game is so great, but at first it did not. It was the code was maybe a little underbaked. People had a difficult time leveling the game, so the katana ramp wasn't really the greatest. We'll get into that in a minute. So they had a hard time shooting that. You know, some people didn't like how really bright red it was. The biggest issue was the original designer. In August of 2017, John Trudeau, who was the original designer for Deadpool, was charged with criminal sexual abuse and possession of child pornography. He subsequently pleaded guilty. He's still in prison. This man is a piece of garbage, and we have had a difficult time on the podcast trying to figure out how to handle this. We've basically decided to leave him on the periphery, kind of talk about him, but not really talk about him. This is the one time we're going to talk about this piece of garbage, and we're just going to leave it at that. So what did George Gomez say about this? George said, life is very unpredictable. We were blindsided as a company. We had no idea whatsoever. It was a difficult situation for us to be in, for the company to be in. And as a guy leading product development, I thought the best way forward was to make a clean separation, throw out the work. The company supported me, and the company had invested a fair amount of money at that point. But we had to move away from that designer. Nobody mentions his name anymore. Yeah. No one mentions his name. Everybody wants to move on. This puts Stern in a very bad situation. They had a partially finished game that was ready to go, and this happens. They're selling Ghostbusters, which was the last release by this designer. Shocks everybody in pinball. Stern is a company that spends money to develop these things. And they were able to say, you know what, let's just throw this piece of garbage out. Let's throw out his play field. Let's get rid of everything this team has done and start again.
    97:57
    And it was kudos to Stern and kudos to George for doing that. And I believe Keith Elwin got his office. So it all worked out. through great hardship and turmoil, I think came George Gomez's best game, aside from probably James Bond, which we don't really know how that's going to go, but I'm willing to put some money on that. I don't know. This is a great game. So George, with Batman 66, was able to go back and revisit something that he thought that he could fix or make better, and that is the Katana ramp. I.e., the Black Widow ramp. The Black Widow ramp. So remember, we had talked about that just a few moments ago and how it was just a little bit off, right? It didn't quite work. It was good, but not great. So what George Gomez did is he said, okay, well, what if we make you shoot up and it bends left on the play field, and then it goes up a ramp on the left side, right? So instead of the ramp being very close and instead of the turn being very tight, we're going to make a gradual turn and it's going to get enough momentum to go all the way up. One of the most instrumental people to help George design the angles of the ramp and the entrance to the ramp was Keith Elwin. Because Keith Elwin can just shoot a shot over and over and over again because he's just that freaking good. Yeah, that ramp's so good they use it twice in the game. It's literally in there twice. Twice? Yeah. It's the same part. It's the main. Oh, it's the same. Yes. Basically, it's the back ramp and the left ramp. It's the same exact part. You could swap them if you wanted. Yeah. It's just at a different angle. Like left, like they just twist it. That's good for the bill of materials. Keeping that down. Only need one ramp. George knows. He also added the katana, which is the ball lock from Lord of the Rings. But cooler. because it's like a ninja sword, and there's no really annoying clunky ramp shooting up onto it. And this is his first Cornerstone game with the new model, with the three models, the Pro, the Premium, and the LE. I just thought of that right now because that really was the first time he did it. His Batman was a Premium, an LE, and an Athlete. Yeah, the Batman was the special Kapow title release. Yeah, I love Deadpool. This also has one of the most unique shots in pinball called the shaked target. Snicked, I think it's called. Snicked? You basically hit it off a stand-up target, and it will have enough momentum to then go up the ramp. So this katana ramp, rather than going through the entrance, which is next to the drop target in the center of the playfield and zipping up, it has enough momentum to bang off a stand-up target right by the left pop bumper next to the spinner, it goes right up that range. I can't believe it works. It does. A surprising amount of time. And you can actually be like, I'm going to shoot that shot. It doesn't just happen randomly. Like, you can actually shoot it. It totally does happen randomly. But, yes, you can actually shoot it, too. Which makes it that much better. And when you hit that target, it starts two times scoring, which is, I think, a really unique way to start, like, If you hit it again, three times. If you hit it again, four times. Super, super cool. Do you want to talk about Little Deadpool? A lot of people hated this. Because it's a Deadpool figurine, and he's on a spring.
    101:27
    He's a bobblehead. His head, like, bobbles all over the place. So it's like a stand-up target behind drop targets in sort of like a little capture area. You shoot that little target, and he just sort of jiggles. And a lot of people crapped on that because they're like, oh, it's just a bobblehead on a string. But, man, it's pretty great. It's great fun, even though mine fell off. A lot of people have had them fall off. I've also seen people go and get Funko Pops and put them up there, like the Bob Ross Deadpool Funko Pop. That's a great idea. See what I mean? The other thing is that they took this. I love this game. We're going to talk about this for a while, so sit back here, folks. Deadpool is amazing. On the pro game, okay, on the left ramp, there's a plastic that sticks up around the cover. So at the top of ramps, there's usually a cover to keep the ball from flying off, to keep the momentum going around the wire form or the ramp. There's a Deadpool flat plastic on there, and he's like on a hammock. It's not just a pro. Really? If you have a premium or an LE, they give you the plastics, and you can install them if you want. I install all of them in mine, so I have them up there. It's so awesome. Yeah, and every time you hit the ramp, it hits it so hard, he'll kind of sway around.
    102:45
    It's great. It's so great. And the Premium has molded toys. The Pro has flat plastics, which is kind of a bummer. But they're saving money. But they went all out with the world of Deadpool. So since they got the comic book, and they were very open with them, kind of doing whatever they wanted. So they made all these songs. There's all this music, original music of every different type. You have, let's see, country, heavy metal, rap, polka. It's, like, ridiculous. And they're all songs about how great Deadpool is. How great Deadpool is, of course, because he's Deadpool. And the guy that does Deadpool in the game, I guess, is the guy that does him in all of, there's, like, Deadpool video games. This is the same guy that does him for all, so he does it for the pinball machine also. The Premium LE has drop targets at the bottom, left and right side, which slow down the gameplay a little bit. It's got tons, tons of drop targets. It's got three drop targets in front of Deadpool, little Deadpool. On the Premium LE, it has a disco spinner on the left side with a disco ball, which is pretty cool. And the return ramp down by the katana, it goes around the orbit, up the shooter lane, and then kind of back on. It's so great. And it comes with, well, I think the Premiums. You can get a cassette with all the songs on it. And I think the LE might have vinyl or something. I think the LE came with it. It did. It came with it. It's ridiculous.
    104:13
    The art package is awesome. The art package is good. Now, you brought this up before. I have a thing against red. I prefer the pro over the premium. The trans light?
    104:26
    Yeah, for the cabinet and the trans light. I like the pro art package. Okay. I prefer the pro trans light. I like the premium cabinet where he's, like, fighting a shark. Yeah, and he's pulling out the tooth to get the DNA or whatever.
    104:46
    And he's got, like, a little, like, floaty, unicorn floaty thing. But in the game, like, you start off, you're in, I guess, his X-Men headquarters or?
    105:00
    No, he's in Deadpool. No, he's in whatever headquarters because the other X-Men are hanging out with him. But they're all playing, like, he's playing his own game. He's playing the Deadpool pinball machine. But, of course, it's in LE because, I mean, what else? You know, on the screen he's playing Deadpool LE, like Colossus. And they'll be playing. They got old Stern video games there, like Frenzy and Berserk. And then I think they have Stargazers in there somewhere. They're playing the Flight 2000. They're playing old Stern pinball machines. It's so good. End-to-end, this game is so good. But right out of the gate, it really did not do well. Pinside tore this game apart, as they normally do. Straight Down the Middle, a pinball show on YouTube, did not give this a very good review. It took a while to develop, because they were behind to begin with because of the whole situation where they had to start from scratch. And the original plan, it was supposed to be deeper than it ended up being, but they just didn't have time. I've gotten to there, the Wizard Mode, the Mr. Sinister. I think the true Wizard Mode is what, getting there twice or something? Yeah, Mr. Sinister 2. But, I mean, things like the super megalocracolodonosaurus, whatever it's called, it's just so silly.
    106:26
    It's great. I said on the podcast, I like silly stuff, and you can't get any sillier than this game. Yeah. Now, LEs for this game sat forever. Sat forever. I remember in, like, the winter of 2019, you could still buy an LE for this game. It took forever for them to sell out. And the LE was really cool because instead of it having the Megalodon, the shark on the side, it had the T-Rex on the side. And it had this really nice red powder coat. And it was very cool. really nice back last thing. That being said, the art is awesome. But is it Zombie Eddie's worst art package? Does he have a bad art package? I've never seen one. Now, let's – no, we're not saying – I'm not saying they're bad. Zombie Eddie does not do bad artwork, ever. Ever, ever, ever. But is it the worst of his art packages? If all your art packages are killer, I don't know if you can even say it. Use different wording. The least awesome. You just don't want to upset him because he's great. You don want to go up to Zombie Yeti and be like hey man you can go to hell Ron Hallett I mean if you don like excessive red I can see why you might have an issue with this because it is very very red And there also a million Easter eggs Oh, yeah. All over this game. I had a co-worker over, and he was looking at the art, and there's, like, because I don't really follow the comics, he does. So he was spotting all this stuff that, you know, oh, this is this character, this is this character, this is, like, oh, I have no idea. Yeah, little Deadpool tells you to eat your veggies, and he's got a thing of wax because he's waxing up the metal.
    108:15
    The muscle of Colossus through the Colossus shot. I like the Colossus shot. There's a lot of people that do not like the Colossus shot. I like the Colossus shot. It's a great shot. What else are you going to put there? Deadpool's got all these Colossus. I'm finally in my own game. I've made it. So if you look on the Disco Orbit side, there's the vampire who I believe is – he just had a movie that did really bad because it's not in the MCU. I know the one you're talking about. Yeah, it was a bomb.
    108:51
    He's near death because he's got some disease, but he gets tainted blood, and now he looks like a male model and kicks ass. Exactly. So that's Morbius. And then on the side there it says, Disco will never die, because it's the disco loops.
    109:08
    And my favorite one is the plastic on the left side. So there's a group of plastics that cover by the disco loop on the left side, where there's a list that Deadpool has written. One of the things on that list says, Pinball is easy. That was one of the things that Robert Mueller had said, that pinball was easy.
    109:39
    So Zombie Yeti made sure he tossed that in there. Such a smart piece. And I tell you what, this is a long burn game, but it is at all time great, and I think it is Gomez's masterpiece. I think this is his best game. Now, a lot of other people love The Beatles. That's the music theme from November of 2008, basically released two months after. Another Kapow game, another Kapow game. Gomez had a very busy 2018. It was a Stern Spike 2 game. There's 1,964 of these games. We'll know more about that in just a moment. This is the concept by Joe Kamenkow from Kapow Pinball, designed by George Gomez, sort of, art by Christopher Franchi and mechanics by Tom Capera, software by Jerry Thompson, love me some Jerry, and software by Dean Grover. Now, the reason we know how many editions of this game were made, Ron, was the Gold Edition had 1,614 units, the Platinum Edition had 250 units, and the Diamond Edition had 100 units.
    110:43
    1964 was when the Beatles came to America. What do you think about this for a license? That's a big license. It's the biggest license of all time, probably. I love when they had this game. It was at Rock Fantasy, which is all the people hang out. They're all like metal, metal. Everything's metal. They put this game here. The guys were singing along to every song. Everybody knows the Beatles. It doesn't matter. I want to hold the hardest core metal head. It's like I know these songs. It's the Beatles. Of course, George says Joe Kamikow and I did the overall concept for the rules of the game and collaborated on conceptualizing the game features. I felt strongly that it should be built on a simple, single-level board from that era. But we settled on Sea Witch, even though it's from the 70s, based on its popularity. And I think they made the right decision there. So this was pretty controversial. Which, for those at home, Sea Witch is from 1980s. Sorry, George. But, yes. I guess it's close. It's the beginning of the 80s. It took 10 years of relationship building with Joe Kamenkow and the folks over at Apple, who own the IP for the Beatles. Phone calls, gift baskets, Christmas cards. It took a long, long time to convince them to build a pinball machine. There's, in fact, a rumor. I don't even know where this started. Maybe it's not a rumor. Maybe somebody actually said it, but it's taken hold that the license itself, just buying the ability to make this game, cost a million dollars U.S. Well, Joe Kamikow says there's never been a license in pinball as expensive as the Beatles. We took a big risk to make this game. It's a specialty boutique product, which Stern does once a year or two. We had to do it right and make it different. Everything was sent to Apple in England. And when they were happy with it, it had to be taken to Proy, which stands for Paul, Ringo, Olivia, and Yoko. And it was the Beatles they envisioned in life, and it was approved. This is the Beatles coming to America art. That was the issue that everybody had. There was some rumors, I remember at this time, that, oh, you know, hey, Stern's got the Beatles license, right? Like, Stern's got the Beatles. It's going to be like Yellow Submarine or, you know, it's going to be like Rubber Soul. I think the kid says it was. It was either going to be early Beatles or it was going to be Yellow Submarine. Those were, like, the two options.
    113:09
    Speculation runs rampant online, especially when people just make random, like, uneducated guesses or what they would like to see with their own sort of bias. But coming to America, Beatles, Beatles collectors, people that are into the Beatles, are all in around that sort of mop-top, smash-hit-pop Beatles, right? I prefer kind of the middle-stage Beatles, but you can't deny that coming to America Beatles is what you think of when you think Beatles, or the majority of Beatles. And let's face it, the Beatles collectors, the people with the money that are going to buy one of these things, they're going to spend it on the Beatles that they want. and they did sell these machines. They were priced like a premium and a lot of people had issues with that. They were priced very high. Very high. Now it's no big deal nowadays. You know, nowadays they'd be like, I'd buy a Beatles for that because quite frankly, in the last two years,
    114:08
    pinball has not stopped rising and it's kind of upsetting. But let's tie it back to the coming to America Beatles here. Stop griping about prices. One of the first podcasts I had ever listened to was Head to Head Pinball Podcast number 69, Christopher Franchi on the Beatles pinball art. And I can remember the exact moment in vivid detail as to where I was and what I was doing in my car when I was driving around listening to this podcast. It was awesome because it was so animated and so much fun with Chris Franchi. He talks a lot about the art. The other thing that we have here is a couple of great quotes from Joe Kamenkow, who also appeared on Head to Head Pinball, to talk about the Beatles pinball machine. Joe says, Frenchie and I started getting a proposal together with back glass and cabinet art. He and I wanted the Coming to America Beatles. This was the biggest era of the Beatles for the Baby Boomers, the Ed Sullivan Show Beatles. There you go. Thank you, Joe Kamenkow. Now, there was a lot of drama around the pricing of this game. The gold editions were priced at $8,000 a year. Which is more than a premium. A lot of people were like, well, there's no ramps. There's no massive deep code. There's stuff that's missing here. So a lot of people had a lot of issues with that. They also had massive issues with the fact the platinums had no price and the diamonds had no price. So they had no MSRP. So dealers could sell it for whatever they wanted to. I remember at this time seeing distros listing their diamond editions, so there was 125 of these things, listed for $25,000.
    115:55
    I'm not sure how many actually went for that price, because we will never know, but there was a lot. Now, I've also seen listings on Pinside for some around $10,000 not too long ago that were still waiting to be sold. I had also heard rumors written on Pinside. So when people are like, oh, look at these elitists over here with their rumors. Well, this is most of the stuff I read on Pinside anyway. Distros were required to buy these in packages. So you couldn't just, as a dealer, go, I want to have 25 golds and I'll sell 25 golds. You had to buy them in packages. Seven golds, two platinums, and one diamond if you wanted to sell any of the machines. So you had to buy that allotment, and then you had to sell that allotment before you could order another. The thing is, there was no difference between gold, platinum, and diamond except the art package. The design, everything was exactly the same. And a plaque. It had a nice little plaque. Some serious, you know, Beatles collectors, they're going to want that diamond edition or a platinum edition. They're going to want a numbered, low-numbered special one. I think the platinum one actually had the best art package. The back glass, I think, was the coolest, where they're, like, jumping up. They're doing the Beatles jumping thing. The art had tons and tons of just amazing little Easter eggs all through it, and names and people drawn into the background. It was beautiful. I actually think it was Christopher Franchi's best art package. He did. I know a lot of people say monsters, but I'm partial to the Beatles one. No, the Beatles is a runaway smash hit as being probably the greatest art package that Christopher Franchi ever did. And I think probably it pains us today that he's not in pinball as often as he once was, because when we look at something like this machine and we go, man, it really is a work of art. And it's the same thing with Batman 66. You look at that, and it's better turned off, just sitting in your living room, that it is turned on and playing. But Gomez's main contribution, he redesigned the loop so it would loop better, added that, I guess you would call it the super jackpot shot on the left side there that didn't even exist before, added a magnet to the top, stopped the ball, and the little rotating disc that most people hate because it drains them. It's like an album, and it rotates. Beautiful. Kudos to Mike Kubin, the original designer. And shout-out to Stern and Joe Kamenkau for taking the risk of doing what they did because they made something truly special and spectacular. That game took a long time. It was another slow burn. And I tell you what, give you another five years, and that game will be a big deal in five years. But it took forever to sell out. Forever to sell out.
    118:46
    What about the Star Wars Home Edition? Let's run through this one pretty quick because it's kind of boring. Star Wars Space License Theme. Of course, Star Wars. July of 2019. It's designed by George Gomez. The art by Photoshop. Sound by Jerry Thompson. Software by Dean Grover. It is a Spikes II redesigned Spider-Man the Pin. It's not Photoshopped. It is painted. Everyone says that. And it actually plays really good. It's a slight redesign of Spider-Man the Pin again. Yep. I just thought it... More metal. I think it shoots good. I think this shoots better than the stern Star Wars. There are people that literally think, like, I like the way this thing plays more. It plays better than Steve Ritchie's Star Wars. Star Wars the Pin. And I've actually, oddly enough, of all the games that I have in my area, the one that somebody actually has in their house here is a Star Wars The Pin, our home edition. And it's really good. It's really good. It does feel cheaper. Yeah. It doesn't feel like a commercial-grade machine, but it doesn't feel like a toy either. It would never survive the way I play. because I played this at a show and the lockdown bar was just because it's the way it's made. It was like coming loose and like falling apart. All my slapping and stuff. I think it would be an issue. The Star Wars, the pin in my town, I have a friend that keeps it in his home in the winter because it's at a youth center in the spring, summer, and fall. So it goes to the youth center. Kids beat the crap out of it, and then it comes back to his place. This thing has so many plays on it, like not babied. It is held up amazingly. He's done rubbers, but other than that, this thing is amazing. The play field itself is not, you know, layers of wood. It is actually pressed board with a plastic topper on top. It has one node board for the pops and one for the slings, which is really weird. So as soon as it hits one pop bumper, all three of them fire. And as soon as it hits one of the slings, both slings fire. And the reason for that is to reduce, well, there's only one node board, so it reduces the cost of that. It has drop targets, like actual stern drop targets. It is the same size as a commercial pin, so they didn't make it smaller. It doesn't have a coin door. It has an LCD screen, which is crazy.
    121:20
    It's small. It's too small. But it's the small one in the back. and the code itself is fairly basic. It's like System 11 code, right? It's like shoot this shot so many times, collect your characters, and then shoot some jackpots. It's like fun. It is fun. It's totally fun. This game is great.
    121:41
    It just feels a bit weird when you play it. But if you want to save a bunch of money and you don't like the Steve Ritchie Star Wars and you just want to, you know, say, Ritz or Trap over and over again when you're playing Star Wars? This is the game for you. It's great. I have no problem around it. Do you want to hear my conspiracy about this game? I'm reading your conspiracy and it's dumb. I think that one of the reasons they chose Star Wars to go with a pin or a home edition model was that they have so many of these Star Wars parts sitting around the Stern factory, like the small LCD screen for the play field, the TIE fighter on a spring, and the Death Star that they were like, let's build a pin so we can use some of these parts. The only problem with that is they're still making the regular Star Wars to this day.
    122:33
    So your theory is, you know, fail. George Gomez, feel free to e-mail us at silverballchronicles at gmail.com. Let us know if my conspiracy is correct. his next follow-up game was heavy metal from 2020 this was a contract game so basically a brand asks stern to build them a pinball machine and they can choose to have various games they can have a you know a from scratch build cornerstone game they can do a you know a boutique game like a Kapow title or something like that, or a contract game usually ends up being, hey, here is our home edition model. Do you want metal ramps or plastic ramps? Do you want an LCD or, you know, a DMD like the Spider-Man pin? And then they slap their, you know, logo on it and some of that stuff, and then they just make, you know, 100 of them. And this is a prime example of that. Heavy Metal from 2020. now this is of course named after heavy metal which is the 300th issue of heavy metal magazine this was made to commemorate that and it had been running since 1977 this pinball machine is actually kind of unique because it features a pretty amazing soundtrack from sebastian bach and brandon small in addition to some iconic tracks from the heavy metal movie including Blue Oyster Cult, Cheap Trick, and others. Yeah, Brendan Small is in two other Stern games. Do you know what they are? No, I don't. Actually, no, three other Stern games he's in. He's Jackie in Aerosmith. Oh, my goodness. He's Sparky in Metallica, and he worked on the soundtrack on Black Knight, Sword of Rage. Very cool, very cool. Now they plan on building 300 of these units, but only actually have made 100 so far. I played it. It is weird that it has a DMD and no LCD display. Now, the next version of one of these games, and the reason we've brought these up, because I don't know if I'll bring them up on any other episode, but they also made one of these for one of those stupid NFT companies. How funny is that, that one of these crypto NFT companies, I think it's the Yacht Club, the Ape Yacht Club or whatever, which is a big fancy NFT BS thing. This is a billion-dollar pyramid scheme, and these guys chose a home edition pin? Come on. Are you going to run your ad, like, right before you said that or after you said that? Oh, it's probably been before. I've been recording for a while. But if you're listening on Patreon, it's a $6 a month or higher level. You didn't get to hear that commercial. You're making so much work for yourself now. You're going to have to have all these alternate edits. So this brings us to my dream theme. The last pin we're going to talk about today. Well, what we can talk about. Well, yeah, we haven't really seen it or played it or anything. We've just seen the videos. So this is James Bond. This is the movie 007 franchise, September of 2022, Spike 2. This is George Gomez design. Art by Kevin O'Connor with lots of posters. Lots of movie posters made by various artists that he had to rework to get it to fit in the game right. So there was some repainting and stuff that had to be done. But all the artwork is based off of James Bond movie posters.
    126:11
    It's so new, we have trouble finding pictures. Oh, there's the side art right there. So I am a huge James Bond fan. Really? Don't say. I've been bringing this up for months. Yes, you have. So I first read this rumor on Pinside that they had the James Bond license, so I was pretty excited for this. But a lot of people crap on that art, my friend, but it is through and through James Bond art. I have some of this art actually framed in my house. So I am over the moon with this art. The play field art leaves a little bit of desire. Not going to lie. The mechanics by somebody and sound by somebody is probably Jerry Thompson. And animation by Chuck Ernst and his team. I believe Tom Capera had some involvement. Yes, Tom Capera was on that.
    127:05
    Software by Lonnie Ropp and Mike Vinicore, the same team that did Stranger Things. Putting a lot of faith in you, Mike Vinicore. You can do it, buddy. Lonnie, you know what to do, too. Yeah, I believe it's Mike Vinacore is primarily rules because he doesn't, I don't think he's a programmer, and Lonnie will be doing the code. From what we've seen of the game in the video that we weren't supposed to see that was up for a day before it was pulled, the light shows look pretty nice. You know what? I was not as offended by that video as most people, so I'm pretty happy. But let's talk about the theme. Let's talk about the theme. It's James Bond. The James Bond series focuses on a fictional British Secret Service agent created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured James Bond in 12 novels and two short story collections. The character, also known by his codename number 007, has also been adapted for television, radio, comic strip, video games, and, of course, film. The films are one of the longest continually running film series and have grossed $7.04 billion U.S. in total, making it the fifth highest grossing film series to date. Now, it started in 1962 with Dr. No starring Sean Connery as James Bond, and the latest film is No Time to Die from 2021. One, there have been 25 films in the Eon production series. There's also been two unofficial James Bond movies. The funny thing is, Ian Fleming was not a fan of Sean Connery, the choice of Sean Connery. And then after the first movie, not only did he do a 180, he added Scottish ancestry to the character because he liked Sean Connery so much in the movie. Absolutely. Absolutely. So the Pinball Machine is based on Sean Connery's James Bond films. Some people say Sean Connery is the greatest James Bond. They would be correct. Yeah, I probably agree. I really like Daniel Craig, though, and I know that's a bit controversial, but Sean Connery is so amazing. So the movies are 1962's Dr. No, that's the theme around the pro model. It has a 95% Rotten Tomatoes. 1963's From Russia with Love, which is a 97% Rotten Tomatoes. From Russia with Love is actually my favorite James Bond movie.
    129:37
    1964's Goldfinger with a 99% Rotten Tomatoes. Every movie for three years got better. So you can see the rocket ship on James Bond as a franchise.
    129:49
    Goldfinger is also the movie that created the quote-unquote James Bond formula. in 1965 they followed that up with Thunderball, which is the theme on the LE model, that is an 85% Rotten Tomatoes, that's a great one, 1967's You Only Live Twice is the premium theme, which scores a 73% Rotten Tomatoes, which actually is a really great James Bond movie I think 73 is too low Donald Pleasance, he's in two pinball machines now that's the one with the rocket ship in space where they have like the rocket ship like fight scene at the end. Oh, it's such a good movie. And 1971's Diamonds Are Forever, which is Connery's worst James Bond film, scores a 63% Rotten Tomatoes and itself is a bit ho-hum. Now there is a gap in there between 1967 and 1971, and that's because there was another James Bond movie in there called On Her Majesty's Secret service that was left out of these movies on the pinball machines and that store starred george lazenby an australian who was quite controversial and continues to be controversial today as james bond that is my wife's favorite james bond movie and i think it's awesome although the pinball machine does have an insert in between the flippers that actually says honor majesty's secret service yeah that's a pretty common thing across james bond movies as he that he's on his Her Majesty's Secret Service, so I don't know. I don't think there's anything there. There might be. I'm going to put this out there on the Internet. I'm going to look like an idiot now, but I don't think so. Now, this is George's dream theme. George, after he completed the Midway game Tron in the 1980s, was flying to Japan to do a JAMA, which is a board-type thing for arcade machines, conference. He had a Walkman, and he was listening to James Bond's greatest hits on a cassette when he came up with the idea for Spy Hunter, which is a spy-based car chase game. Which he wanted to use the James Bond music for, but could not get the rights because it was too expensive. So they settled on the Peter Gunn theme. Which everyone seems to settle on the Peter Gunn theme. Must be the cheapest license ever. It's so great. Peter Gunn knows how to do it. He has brains. It's better.
    132:15
    It's great. You know what pinball machine that's in? No. You don't? Is it in Spy Hunter? No. Actually, the Valley one, probably not.
    132:26
    No, it's in Whodunit. Oh, yeah, that's right. I did know that. I think I listened to that at your house. So there's a bit of a controversy around the art. A lot of people are pretty critical. The controversy, the game's not even released yet. I know. We're ahead of history. I think the Pro looks awesome. I think the Premium looks awesome. I think the LE looks awesome. They're going to release another LE in a few years. It's the Goldfinger LE. Yes, it's bizarre that the LE was Thunderball. You would think it'd be Goldfinger. But George has already said in interviews, almost intimating that that was kind of his choice, but they had to go with Thunderball. but if they made enough of the games, then perhaps a goldfinger will be down the road. The play field is broken into areas, so like the spinner areas, diamonds are forever. There's the rocket area, which is like a rocket on a spring and a coil in front of drop targets. Those drop targets position and look, by the way, very similar to the ones in the pin. And it has these stand-up targets around the rocket. this is almost like George Gomez taking the Hulk toy and making it maybe like different, you know what I mean, where the ball would get stuck with the Hulk and a few other things. I think this is kind of like his next version of that, like the Black Widow ramp or the rotating thing on the turntable on Batman 66, right? So it's like, I think it's another kind of twist on that. The Premium LE has a ball diverter into a lock into a wire form around the rocket. The rocket is you only live twice. It has the pop bumper area, which is Dr. No, which is really cool. It has the ramp on the side, so the left spinner goes all the way around up the ramp, which is very similar to the Avengers, into a place where the ball can stop, and on the premium LE has Bond on a wand, where James Bond has like a magnet on his little rocket jetpack booster. Ah, so awesome. It looks like the Rescue 911 thing. It has possibly the most faces ever on a play field. That's a whole thing. So it's got all the villains, it's got all the Bond women, it's got all the henchmen. And it has some of the most text I've seen on a play field in at least 30, 40 years. Yeah, it's got the movie posters on the play field, like from Russia with Love and Goldfinger. There's a lot of original text. Like, you should be able to know what to do on this game without ever looking at the LCD from what I see on this play field. One of the Easter eggs here, and I would love to talk to George Gomez as to why they went with this, But if you look at the villains, okay, it lists Dr. No, Rosa Klebb, Goldfinger, Largo, Blofeld, and a.k.a. Mr. Henderson. Oddly enough, in the movie, You Only Live Twice, Blofeld is the guy with the scar, okay? In Diamonds Are Forever, they recast Blofeld to be this a.k.a. Mr. Henderson character. So they obviously didn't want to list Blofeld twice on the playfield. It was a Blofeld Blofeld. So they put it as a.k.a. Mr. Henderson. The thing about this is Mr. Henderson, the same actor that played Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever, played a different character in You Only Live Twice called Mr. Henderson. Because of the terrible casting decisions that they did in James Bond in the 1960s and 70s, they've had to rejig the play field around. Well, to be fair, they've had a different Felix in every movie. Yeah, exactly. Felix Leiter. Yeah, totally. So I find that kind of neat. There is a Godzilla tie-in to this game. Oh, great. Let's talk about Godzilla again, everybody. There is. Because the Bond girl for You Only Live Twice was the main female star in King Kong vs. Godzilla. Oh, yeah. King Kong vs. Godzilla. Everybody's favorite movie. Yep. Directly related to this game, folks. You heard it here. You heard it here first. Make sure you credit us. As the Aston Martin. With the vertical up kicker that goes through the car that looks like the ejector seat. Yep. That is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Lots of next. Now, a lot of people have asked, a lot of people have said, oh, well, is this going to last? Is that going to last with the ball popping up there? Sure, well. George Gomez wrote on Facebook that they've had it on a test fixture running the ball up and down through that thing about a billion times, and it has not broken yet. So good on them. That would be probably the Goldfinger area. Then on the left side, it has a Thunderball area where on the Premium LE, it has a figure underneath James Bond fighting like what looks like under the water, similar to Creature in the Black Lagoon on Monster Bash. Before we tie this up, let's talk about this weird ramp over here. This ramp has two entrances, one from the left flipper and one from the bottom flippers. How cool is that? Yeah, it's a dual ramp. Ron, I'm probably in on this James Bond pin, although the price increase on this is kind of difficult to deal with. But we're not here to talk about price. Buy what's on the line. As Gary would say. Before we close it out here, Rodney C. over on our Patreon asked, what is George Gomez's best game and what is his worst game of this era? Just this era? Just this era. I would say this Deadpool is probably the best one. And the worst one is probably Playboy. I thought that. I think his worst game ever was Playboy. I thought that shot pretty good, honestly. I go by more how it shoots. I would say, like, Transformers, L.E. Ah, okay. So you're siding with Dennis K. over on Patreon saying, Clintfest, is George Gomez the greatest designer ever? He is the most. I mean, he has the most talents. I'll say that. in that he could design the play field, also build the next if he has to. He's also running the entire development now over there at Stern. I think he is the greatest. As Eugene Jarvis said, he's the one person in the world that was the unique talents needed to be in the position he is currently in. I don't think anybody has affected pinball as much as George Gomez. And I don't think he realizes that just yet. One thing we know, he's not a salesman. And he almost never lies in any interview to the point of bringing up James Bond long before it had been announced. Something else. He's something else. You know, I would say that Gomez truly is a modern legend in pinball. So if you think of all the major legends within the industry, if you want to build a Mount Rushmore, I'm putting Harry Williams on there. I'm putting Larry DeMar. I'm putting George Gomez. Steve Ritchie. You know what I mean? like George Gomez has done so much for this hobby that I don't think he fully appreciates how amazing he is and what he has built. He is the architect. So from George, when I think back to the fact that when I walked in the door, there was like nine guys in product development, and today I've got a hundred and a bunch of consultants on the outside. It's been a journey. I think back to that day in 2011 when Jarvis said to me, nah, chill out, man.
    140:07
    Thank you. stuff now? You have to read more stuff, Suey. I want a raise. Join us on Patreon to support the show. Our pro-crony level is the perfect way to say thanks, and it starts at $3 a month. Want to get early access to episodes before everyone else? Who doesn't? Have a strange love for stickers? That's kind of weird. Do you know what Discord is? I think I do. They're probably not. Interested in having your comments and questions take priority in our episodes? jump on up to the $6 a month premium crony level. Really, you're going to call it crony. Want all the other perks and a shirt after three months? Join us at $20 a month and you can be an elitist crony. Oh my. Maybe you just want a shirt. I understand. Swing on over to silverballswag.com and pick up a Silverball Chronicles t-shirt.
    141:34
    Very good. I've got to let you go mow your lawn? Yeah, I can hear someone mowing their lawn right now, so I guess it's good conditions. Hugh Hefner is interned at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles. Interned. He didn't intern. Interned.
    141:56
    It was released in 2001. It's called The Saints of... Oh. It wasn't released before the original series. That would make no sense. Actually, no, it would make perfect sense. It would, wouldn't it? David Chase invented a time machine to go back to create the prequel.
    142:15
    The LCD animations. Ooh, they're not talking dots anymore. Chunk. Chuck Ernst. The films are one of the longest running. continue. The films are one of the longest continually running films this series. That's a really hard sentence. The films are one of the longest continually running film series. I just said it.
    142:40
    Really? You can't just pre-record this? Why do I have to do this every time? Whatever. Remember to leave us Oh, he's got crap up on the screen so I can't see what I'm reading. But I wasn't done with the other section. Oh, sorry. That was it. No, there was another section. Unbelievable. Now I forgot what I was. Did I say to turn on automatic downloads? Yes. Okay. I'll do it again. All kinds of gold you'll have to cut out now. The thing to know when the drains don't flow. John Stewart. We get the job done. John Stewart takes clogged drains seriously. Their team of technicians is trained to solve any clog or issue in our areas old. Complex drain systems equipped to respond to your emergency fast. John Stewart and Drain Cleaning. since 1976, serving Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Northern Connecticut. Visit JohnStewer.com to learn more.
    143:35
    JohnStewer. We get the job done.