Episode 238: Walter Day, an oral history

Pinball Profile·podcast_episode·39m 31s·analyzed·Dec 25, 2019

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.032

TL;DR

Walter Day recounts the founding of Twin Galaxies and birth of organized esports in 1982.

Summary

Walter Day, founder of Twin Galaxies arcade and pioneer of organized competitive esports, discusses his role in creating the first standardized scoreboard system for video games in 1982. The episode, recorded at Free Play Florida during Day's 70th birthday year, covers the genesis of competitive gaming culture, the challenges of standardizing pinball scores, his connection to pop culture (Wreck-It Ralph, Ready Player One), and his practice of transcendental meditation.

Key Claims

Twin Galaxies arcade opened November 10, 1981 and became the world's most famous arcade within three months
high confidence · Walter Day directly states this timeline and credits the February 1982 Defender score event as the catalyst
Steve Jurassic set a world record on Defender in February 1982 playing for approximately 24-25 hours and scoring 24 million points
high confidence · Walter Day recounts the event that prompted him to create the Twin Galaxies National Scoreboard system; notes he sometimes mixes up whether it was 14 or 15 million points after all these years
No manufacturer or magazine kept track of video game world records prior to Twin Galaxies establishing the scoreboard
high confidence · Walter Day called Williams Electronics, Replay Magazine, Playmeter Magazine, Nintendo, Exidy, Atari, and Midway; all said 'no one keeps track of the scores'
Pinball machines cannot be legitimately standardized for competitive scoring due to mechanical variability, wear, temperature changes, and field modifications
high confidence · Walter Day extensively explains the impossibility of merging pinball scores across venues due to machine condition, flipper strength, post positioning, and playing surface variations
Twin Galaxies maintained leaderboards for approximately 350 different games during the arcade era
high confidence · Walter Day states 'we would determine the standings, the leaderboards, for like 350 different games back in that era'
Twin Galaxies had 1 different people ranked on the Twilight Zone leaderboard alone from dozens of different certified contests
medium confidence · Walter Day mentions this specific example of leaderboard fragmentation; number appears unclear in transcript ('1 different people')
Billy Mitchell did not use MAME for his Donkey Kong records; MAME was not available for arcade cabinet use during the era in question
medium confidence · Walter Day, as someone who verified records at the time, testifies to Mitchell's innocence and states 'no one had MAME back. No one was using MAME in an arcade cabinet way back then'

Notable Quotes

“We are the first gamers. We are the pioneers who brought cyberspace into reality and made it the biggest entertainment modality in world history.”
Walter Day @ ~16:45 — Reflects Day's perspective on the historical importance of the arcade generation and their role in establishing gaming culture
“Oh, yeah, well, prove it. Prove that you can do this.”
Walter Day @ ~22:30 — Pivotal moment where Day challenges the magazine claim about Steve Jurassic, leading to the event that inspired Twin Galaxies
“Is this a new world record? And they said, we don't know because no one keeps track of the scores.”
Williams Electronics (paraphrased by Walter Day) @ ~27:00 — The key realization that prompted Twin Galaxies to create the first organized scoreboard system
“Twin Galaxies is considered the birthplace of organized competitive esports because we united all the arcades together so that we wrote the rules and they all followed the rules.”
Walter Day @ ~33:15 — Core explanation of Twin Galaxies' historical significance and role in establishing esports infrastructure
“No two pinball machines behave exactly right. So it's virtually impossible to standardize a pinball machine that has so many working parts and moving parts.”
Walter Day @ ~44:00 — Explains the fundamental technical challenge that prevents unified pinball leaderboards
“Without Walter Day and Billy Mitchell, Twin Galaxies, there would have been no Ready Player One.”
Ernest Cline (quoted by Walter Day) @ ~62:30 — Demonstrates the cultural impact of Twin Galaxies on major pop culture properties
“Transcendental meditation, that you only do like 20 minutes early in the morning before you start your day, then you do it 20 minutes, maybe more at 5 or 6 in the afternoon when you come back from work, and it completely clears you up and refreshes you.”
Walter Day @ ~82:00 — Personal wellness practice Day credits with maintaining his health and creativity at age 70

Entities

Walter DaypersonTwin GalaxiesorganizationSteve JurassicpersonBilly MitchellpersonFree Play FloridaeventErnest ClinepersonChasing Ghostsproduct

Signals

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community_signal: Billy Mitchell Donkey Kong record authenticity dispute: modern analysts allege MAME usage based on videotape analysis; Walter Day testifies to innocence based on historical knowledge that MAME did not exist or was unavailable during the era
high · Walter Day states 'there's a modern group of people who...feel that some of the behavior displayed on his old videotapes of his gameplay indicates from their perspective that he had used MAME' but counters 'I was the guy who actually verified this stuff...there was no MAME available'
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community_signal: Walter Day maintains visibility and cultural presence at gaming events by wearing his referee shirt consistently as an identity marker, even in unrelated contexts
high · Day notes he was photographed at a Colorado Rockies baseball game in 2013 in the shirt, leading to jokes about whether he ever removes it; he has since worn it while climbing mountains in Australia and other activities
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event_signal: Free Play Florida is positioned as a premier gaming festival attracting multiple generations, families, and industry figures, with ambient goodwill and strong community engagement
high · Walter Day describes it as 'among my very favorite shows' and notes 'the sense of an ambient energy or an ambient goodwill feeling that's here at this place that is very much in the top tier of gaming events'
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design_philosophy: Pinball machines are mechanically variable by design; standardization for competitive scoring is fundamentally impossible due to wear, temperature sensitivity, and field modifications
high · Walter Day extensively explains: 'No two pinball machines behave exactly right...it's virtually impossible to standardize a pinball machine that has so many working parts and moving parts and so many nuances'

Transcript

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0:00

Just one look at you, and I know it's going to be a lovely day. It's time now for another Pinball Profile. I'm your host, Jeff Teels. You can find our group on Facebook. We're also on Twitter at Pinball Profile. Email us, pinballprofile at gmail.com. Please subscribe on your favorite podcatcher, and check us out on Instagram at pinballprofile. Pinball Profile, here at Freeplay Florida, where I've seen this man several years, and it's always a treat to see him here in a special year for him, turning 70 years old this year. Walter Day joins us. Hi, Walter. How are you? I am honored to be on Pinball Profile. Thanks for reining me in and getting me here in front of your microphone. It's a great show. The Freeplay Florida show is among my very favorite shows, and it's one of those things where there's like this sense of an ambient energy or an ambient goodwill feeling that's here at this place that is very much in the top tier of gaming events that I ever go to. So Free Play Florida is special to me. People really like this event. It's great because there's a lot of families here too, so you're seeing all different generations of people playing arcade games, playing pinball machines, and that certainly has to excite you because for some of the younger people, they're seeing some of these games for the first time, some of the retro games or some of the pinball machines. and back when I was a young boy, this was just like my best friend. These games when they came out, but they've gone into home systems now. So to see these machines out here, it's really special. It must mean a lot to you. Oh, yeah. It's very interesting to see the genesis of not only the games as an entertainment modality, but also the genesis of just like a social revolution. New generations are discovering the old, going-up games and embracing them and absolutely loving them to death. So there is a younger generation that's coming in and displacing, replacing the older generation as the older generation moves later into their life, what have you. So a lot of young people do like the games and are fascinated with the games. And when they find the games, like their parents bring them or their uncles bring them, they can't believe that something like this exists and that there could be this much fun in one single room. For me, when I was a young boy, I certainly remember games like skeetball and things where you might win prizes. I certainly remember pinball machines, but I'll never forget the first time I saw Space Invaders, and I was like, what is this? How is that on the screen? How is this possible? And then came Pac-Man and Centipede and all these wonderful games to where we are now in the home gaming system. But, I mean, that, I was a young boy at the time, but that had to just really be the game changer. You know what's interesting about that, and I completely agree with that. It was the game changer, completely. it's very interesting that all of us many of us, most of us who come to these going up big festivals here I like to think of them as festivals because they have so many different parallel features to them going on, it's not just video games it's not just pinball, it's also the society, the community, the culture the home games, the designers the game creators the artwork, the voice over artists, so many different aspects of what we call the global gaming culture all merged together into what I think of as a festival. So it's a festival here. And it's so interesting that the people who are coming here are the people who actually ushered in the age of gaming. We are the first gamers. We are the pioneers who brought cyberspace into reality and made it the biggest entertainment modality in world history. I mean, 2,000 years ago, they had the amphitheater in Rome and they had the gladiators fighting. And I think that they thought that probably was the end all and the be all of entertainment but now i think that the video game age is far more fun far more provocative far more entertaining and far more creative that nixon has ever come before it and also more and more people are able to embrace it than ever before because not only are the games so wide embracing in their qualities and their character meaning there's there's there's maze games there's fighting games there's driving games there's shooting games there's dancing games there's music games there's so many different team games individual games, there's so many different spins on the gaming modality that there's something for everybody at the same time, modern technology allows the infrastructure on the internet to connect everybody with everybody else no matter where they are, you can compete or communicate with almost anybody else especially who's on the internet, so it's amazing that the gaming community is literally, not just in figure of speech, literally is a global gaming community that we think the number is at about 2 billion or more people now. I'm not surprised. Now, that's why I wanted to talk to you, because, yes, with the Internet, this is easy. But let's go back to before there was the Internet. So 25 years plus ago and even beyond that, that's not how we found out what others were doing. And that's where you came in with Twin Galaxies. So I want you to tell those who don't know your reasoning for putting together Twin Galaxies and how it grew to be such an amazing way for people to connect, like you mentioned. Okay. So everybody, when they travel, especially during the summer when they go on their road trips, they should all swing by Iowa. And they should go to Ottumwa, Iowa. O-T-T-U-M-W-A. It's in South Iowa near the Missouri border. They should go there, and they should go to downtown East Main Street in Ottumwa, Iowa. And there on the wall, out on a building at 226 East Main Street, is a big bronze plaque, a big bronze memorial historic marker that's embedded against the wall at 226 East Main Street. And it weighs 220 pounds, okay? It's 35 inches wide. I think they paid $6,000 to have it made and put up and everything, over $6,000 actually. essentially it says on it the words twin galaxies then below that it says the historic birthplace of organized competitive esports and the bronze plaque tells the story of how twin galaxies which was an arcade that opened up on november 10th 1981 overnight had become the world's most famous arcade and had put organized competitive esports on the map for the first time, long before the expression esports ever came into existence. And here's how that happened. Three months into the existence of Twin Galaxies, in February of 1982, I was running the arcade, because I owned it, of course, and someone came up to me and said, look, I can beat this score in this magazine. And I says, what magazine? And he pulled out a copy of the January 18th, 1982 edition of Time Magazine. And it had a big cover story on it about video games taking over the world. How big of a deal they'd become with Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Centipede, Tempest and Frogger. And in that article, it was like a 10-page article. It was a very big deal. It was a major story. It was a little feature box that talked about a kid in Chicago named Steve Jurassic. almost like Jurassic Park. And it talks about how he put one quarter in a video game, Defender, and he played it for essentially 15 hours and got 14 million points. What? Or maybe it was 14 hours and got 15 million points. But I always get that mixed up after all these years. But essentially, I looked at the article, and then I looked at him, and I said, oh, yeah, well, prove it. Prove that you can do this. And so that weekend, he put a quarter in the game, and after so many hours, I saw, wow, he's really good. and as you begin to get past 10 million points and getting close to 15 million points I begin to call the radio station and they got very excited about it much to my surprise and came down and started covering it as a live breaking news story then I called the TV station they came down in person and the TV ABC News started covering it as a live breaking news story and then I called the newspaper and a reporter came down and they started covering it newspapers don't cover things live because you know they have their time frame their deadlines, but they covered it as a story. But then the most miraculous thing happened. As he began to get closer and closer to breaking the record and going beyond it, we started getting calls from the media in St. Louis, five-hour drive away, Minneapolis, six-and-a-half hours driving away, Chicago. Far-flung cities began to call up their media to inquire about this story. This story was a fascinating story that the media was absolutely, absolutely plugged into. Almost addicted to. They were intrigued by just the spiritual essence of man versus machine. Man's creativity beats these new age, space age monsters, the machines. So it was an amazing story how this one guy, this new kind of heroics, with one quarter and a lot of courage in his heart and two fists, He beat Defender and he went on for 25 hours and made 24 million points. And on Monday morning, I called up Williams Electronics, who made the game, and said, look, here's what happened. Is this a new world record? And they said, we don't know because no one keeps track of the scores. Bingo. They literally said every day we get called about scores and we don't know. No one keeps track of the scores. And I said, oh, OK. I got an idea. So I thought about it. And then I called up Replay Magazine and Playmeter Magazine, which are the two coin-op magazines of that era and also of this modern era, even now. And they both said we get called every day on all sorts of high scores and all sorts of games but we don know because no one keeps track of the records And so then I called Nintendo and Exidy and Atari and Williams and Midway I essentially called seven manufacturers and two magazines and asked them all these same questions, and they all said, we don't know, no one keeps track of these scores, these records. What a missed opportunity, and you jumped all over. And so what happened is I thought about it that night, and the next day I called back all nine of those phone calls, and I said, we have a scoreboard here, which is true. It's up on the wall, and we're keeping track of the records. And all nine of them, through some miracle or divine karma or divine fate, all said, that's great. Thank you. We will put your name and your number right here on our front desk Rolodex. when anybody calls, we refer them to you as the experts who know what the world records are. And a couple of them said, by the way, who are you? And I said, oh, after I gave them the number and the name and everything, I said, oh, and off the top of my head, I made up the name, because the arcade was called Twin Galaxies. And it says, oh, we're the Twin Galaxies National Scoreboard. That's great. And from there, I hung up the phone, that's the last phone call, and went back into the arcade and began to play GORF again. 30 minutes later, one of my arcade attendants taps me on the shoulder and says, Mr. Day, someone's on the phone. They're calling long distance. It's about a video game score. And so I go to the phone, and sure enough, it's a kid named Casey Murphy calling from Goodlettsville, Tennessee, and he had a high score on the Gallagher. It turns out that not long after I had called Midway, he called Midway wanting to know the high score, and they probably said something like this. Oh, oh, wait a minute. We have a place for you to call now. Here it is. I got it on my Rolodex. Twin Galaxies. Called Twin Galaxies, Walter Day, on Tumble Island. Here's the phone number. And essentially, I had my first phone call there, and I looked up at the scoreboard and saw he told me his score. And I looked at the scoreboard on our wall, and I saw that our night watch person, which is a lady who was one of my night attendants, had a higher score than him. So I turned back to the phone, and in a very solemn voice, I said, Sir, you have the world's second highest score.

12:07

And he got all excited. and say, oh my God, I can beat that, I can beat that. And you call back the next day with a higher score. So let me relate to 2019 right now. We're talking about video games, but it also translates very well to pinball, and you also were the authority for pinball. You saw in your record books that you authored as well. But that kind of pursuit of the grand champion score as we relate to pinball, or even in tournaments like here at Freeplay Florida, they see what the top score is, and they think it's attainable, and that's the goal, to beat it some way, somehow, and maybe it's a different path than you normally play where you put in a lot more risk to get a greater reward. It's very similar, that kind of competitive nature, from back in 1981 to it is right now, even in pinball and, of course, in video games as well. Okay. Now, everything you said is incredibly important to address, but I'm going to put that right to the side for a second and finish one more idea on the original narrative. Okay, and what that is is this. when the arcade era was dawning and suddenly over 50,000 towns had an arcade, a modern video game arcade, as we'll call it. I mean, in every single place, immediately people saw that, wow, there's high scores on the machines. And so the big ego trip, the big goal was to have the highest score. So high score competitions happened spontaneously and every arcade or every place the games were, you're in competition to have your initials be at the top. So high score competitions began to happen in every single arcade in North America. When a person was good at a game, a crowd would gather around him and watch him play. And those who are old enough to remember that will remember that. Wow, if you were good at a game, you'd have a lot of people watching you, looking over your shoulder. And clapping when you're done. Clapping when you're done and clapping when you go through a difficult thing and make it through it and stuff like that. So the aspect of spectator sport, that spiritual energy was completely already up and running. There's modern people in the modern e-sports industry who are sort of believing, erroneously, that they were the ones who helped invent spectator sport. And spectator sport, it's actually a spiritual dynamic. Everybody's fascinated by the top gamers and people who excel. It applies to every sport. and including video games. So what happens now is there's an infrastructure in place that allows the essence of spectatorship finally to fulfill itself to its fullest degree. Because of technology, it's possible for anybody in the world with Twitch and other things to play to an audience as big as they can get or as small as they can get and everybody can watch them play and ooh and ah over their expertise in gaming. and when they have the big stadiums filled with people, it's possible for 3 million people to actually pay for a view and watch a League of Legends or a Dota or something like that championship happen. So it's false in believing that the modern era invented the idea and the reality of spectator sports. No, it was alive and well in every arcade back there in the ancient days. It's just that there was no technology that allowed that phenomenon to fulfill itself. So that's part of the nature of what our generation created, the spectator sport. Now, another thing to consider is that when Twin Galaxies came into existence, all these different contests that would happen, all these different arcades, it was like drawing a line in water. In other words, as soon as the contest was over, all the results would be thrown away or disappear. When the arcade closed, all the results of all their contests would be thrown away or disappear. when a game was moved out of the arcade and moved to a different Walmart in another city or something because that was typical because most people had leasers or route vendors, operators who would bring the games in so when the games got moved the high score legacy on that game was washed away and forgotten and no longer so in other words there was no reality to any of these arcades being part of what we call an organized sport when Twin Galaxies came into existence it united all the arcades in the world but in reality all the ones that heard of us and interacted with us because a lot of them never knew of us because there was no internet back then to get our word out but the thousands and thousands of arcades that didn't know of Twin Galaxies we united them all in a big global esports arena that's why Twin Galaxies is considered the birthplace of organized competitive esports because we united all the arcades together so that we wrote the rules and they all followed the rules. We enforced the rules and they all followed the rules. We would determine the standings, the leaderboards, for like 350 different games back in that era. And so you would know, no matter where you are, what the scores you had to beat. And so you became part of a tradition and a legacy that was preserved even up to this modern time. So, again, here on Pinball Profile, I would assume with Twin Galaxies, we certainly know that they had to submit the scores by calling, But then that obviously changed to submitting video cassettes of scores showing how this was done. Was that the same for pinball as well? How did it work? Well, for video games, it was necessary to tighten things up because lots of cheating became apparent. Because I didn't believe that people would lie about a video game score, but people were very hungry just to try and improve the quality of their life. And they thought if they were video game superstars, that it would bring more fame, more glory, more money, more happiness. and that didn't quite work for most of them. Most of them were kind of like a little bit off anyway.

17:55

So pinball is a special, special subject. I love pinball. Isn't pinball wonderful? It is. And when a manufacturing run is happening for a pinball game and the pinball machines roll off the assembly line, even from that very, very first moment, no two pinball machines behave exactly right. so it's virtually impossible to standardize a pinball machine that has so many working parts and moving parts and so many nuances that all have a life of their own that begin to go off or change or flippers become a little different you know the just so many ways that things just modify themselves and change so that the games can't really be considered exactly the same Tilt bobs, pitches, you know, how many balls are on them. Absolutely. There are so many ways that make it really impossible to legitimately gather scores from one contest venue and another contest venue and blend them together. It's not only with the games being mischievous and changing their own qualities on their own because of aging and because of the room temperature changing and stuff like that. So many different things. Strength of flippers. Exactly. But also, different organizers' events make it a more enticing, interesting competition at their particular venue. At that time, we'll do changes with the lanes and stuff like that, and the flippers and stuff. You can move the posts for sure. Yeah, moving the posts around. So therefore, it became maddening to try and do a legitimate scoreboard that was 100% accurate. simply because we had the Twilight Zone. I think we had 1 different people ranked on leaderboard for Twilight Zone alone And they came from dozens of different contests The contests were certified done by Papa and Ifba and all the different ones It's just that, you know, that some of them clearly had different posts were moved around and the flippers were wrong and stuff like that. And that would reflect in scores becoming outrageously high or outrageously low or something like that. And the surface of the board, the playing field, could be older and scratched, and so the ball slows down. Somebody could put a bunch of Novus on there to grease it up a little. Yeah, and someone will go and renovate a game so it's at the top line. Now it's slick, and so the ball's all over the place. And some people might play better with the ball going fast, but I think most people have a better control of when the ball's going slow. It was really a difficult thing, which is too bad because pinball is so glorious, and it would be so cool to have the ultimate level set of leaderboards that truly define one person's skill as opposed to another person's skill, which in essence means leaderboards. So what we have here is a situation where two people can be of equal skill level, which is actually hard to determine, but let's say we had two people of the same skill level and one played on the same machine on the East Coast, other played on the same machine, a similar machine on the West Coast, and one person's score can be greatly, greatly greater simply because of the condition of the machine. So the machines are almost impossible to make them objectively the same so that the scores can be legitimately merged together without one person being favored more than another. So here at Freeplay Florida, I've seen you walk through the pinball room. Of course, the huge showroom has tons of arcade games. It has tons of pinball machines. And, of course, there's a Donkey Kong right beside you, and Billy Mitchell's there. And every time I think I see you, I see you and Billy together at the shows. Billy, obviously, was questioned for those who don't know about the Donkey Kong score. Just want to get your thoughts on that. Well, there's a modern group of people who, using what they think is accurate technology of analyzing machines, feel that some of the behavior displayed on his old videotapes of his gameplay indicates from their perspective that he had used MAME. But I was the guy who actually verified this stuff and watched a lot of this stuff and knew what was going on. And I just know there was no MAME available and no MAME was being used by anybody back then, including Billy. So my statement has been that Billy didn't use MAME because I would have known it and it would have been very obvious and no one had MAME back. No one was using MAME in an arcade cabinet way back then. So I would testify that he's not guilty of using MAME and all that stuff. Even though there's all sorts of modern people who think that they have the evidence and stuff like that. But there's a lot of legal stuff going on about it. So we'll just see how it turns out. I've seen some of the legal documents that Billy has presented online, too. So you're right. We'll see where that goes. But I just saw him crush a Donkey Kong game out here. So if anybody can do it, he certainly could. Well, Billy actually is one of the great, great, great gamers of all time. And so if anybody can do it, he can do it. For sure. You talked about Twin Galaxies and running that. You know, there was a nice little tribute, whether it was done on purpose or not. But if the kids watch Wreck-It Ralph and you see that character in there, that's Walter Day. Oh, yeah. That's Walter Day. What happened is this. There was a movie called Chasing Ghosts. So Chasing Ghosts is a documentary on the story of that famous Life magazine photograph with all the people posing in the street behind the video games. There's a famous photo in Life magazine. And it's probably the most famous photo generated by the global video game industry. And so a documentary was made on the making of that photograph. and when the documentary was almost completely done, it was about to be shown at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007, Pixar Studios asked the producer-director to bring in the film and show it to their whole staff. And so they brought it in and the whole staff, everybody emptied all the cubicles and the whole company got down to the theater and watched it. And I'm the featured main person in it. And they just loved the story. They essentially decided, just as what's called a tribute character. Mr. Litwack. Mr. Litwack, make Mr. Litwack based on me. So it is me. But that's not the only kind of pop culture reference that certainly comes to mind when you think of Walter Day. The author of Ready Player One, Ernst Klein, has actually said that he was inspired by Twin Galaxies and you. So that's pretty flattering for something that turned to be a major motion picture, too. Oh, yeah, yeah. He got up on the stage in front of a whole bunch of people and says, without Walter Day and Billy Mitchell, Twin Galaxies, there would have been no Ready Player One. because he says when he grew up, he followed our exploits in the magazines closely when he was a little kid. And then when he was writing Ready Player One, he would go to the movie Chasing Ghosts that everybody should go see and he'd watch that again and again and again while using Chasing Ghosts as the inspiration in my story and the story of Twin Galaxies as inspiration for making the book. Pretty amazing, huh? It is pretty amazing. Even though here at the show and every show I see you, you're wearing the referee shirt, You actually retired from being a referee in 2008. Oh, yeah. I don't function really as a referee. I wear the shirt up because it's part of the appearance aspect, you know. But one time I went to a Colorado Rockies baseball game in 2013, and we rushed out of that Donkey Kong Championship called the Kong Off, and I still had my shirt on. And we got photographed at the stadium wearing my shirt and sitting in the stands. And people began to say things like, doesn't he ever take it off? He's wearing that in a baseball game. So I thought that was such a funny joke. that I've been wearing this shirt through all sorts of things. I even climbed a mountain in Australia, and up on top of the mountain, in my referee shirt, I sat down and meditated cross-legged there. And people are getting used to the idea that, like, where's Walter, where's Walter. Exactly. I'd love to see a show where everyone came in with referee shirts or, like, a footlocker convention or something just to kind of throw, where's Walter? That'd be tough to find you. Yeah, that'd be pretty funny. That'd be pretty funny. So we mentioned earlier, 70 years old, congratulations this year. but you've kind of maintained the fountain of youth, and you have a little bit of a secret when you go away in December. Oh, well, the thing is I practice transcendental meditation every day, and they call it TM for short. I can't begin to tell you guys how important it is for everybody who does it. It's like the biggest secret for giving me a leg up in life that I've got, and essentially what it is is this. In 1968, 69, I was part of what was called the hippie culture. I had long hair and a beard. I was actually like 60 pounds heavier of muscle. I used to bench press 310 pounds. Isn't that amazing? That's the weight of a pinball machine. Yes. And essentially, I had been taking drugs, though. You know, marijuana, LSD, and stuff like that. And I had nonstop headaches. I stopped taking the drugs, but I had nonstop headaches, nonstop backaches. My feet ached. My stomach was always sick, and I couldn't hardly digest properly. I couldn't sleep at night. I had depression and anxiety. awful experience. And I met someone else who had had the same experience and they said, oh, I went and learned something called Transcendental Meditation that's taught at this local center there in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And they said, after a few weeks, all that stuff went away. So I said, really? So I went down to what was called the TM Center and I learned the technique. It's an actual thing you do. It's not a philosophy or a theory that you think about. No, do I believe in this or believe in that? Nothing to do with your belief. It's actually something you sit down in a chair and close your eyes and do. And when you do it, it triggers off the state of unique consciousness that scientists are amazed by and say that it's a unique fourth state of human consciousness, different from waking, dreaming, and sleeping that everybody commonly experiences in the cycle every single day. So essentially, I went and did it. And within weeks, all those bad symptoms of the headache, the grief, the depression, the anxiety, the ache, hurt in the back, the feet, the achy feet, the low energy level, the bad digestion, not sleeping, all of that went away because it turns out that the transcendental meditation, that you only do like 20 minutes early in the morning before you start your day, then you do it 20 minutes, maybe more at 5 or 6 in the afternoon when you come back from work, and it completely clears you up and refreshes you. A lot of people come home and take drugs or drink just to try and escape the incredible tension and stress of the day and unwind. This is natural. That's their way to medicate themselves and unwind, okay? You sit down into transcendental meditation. It goes deeper and better and farther and completely clears out all the stress that you accumulated in the day and then starts working on the huge backlog that you've been carrying around your whole life that's affecting this part of your health and that part of your health, things that aggravate diabetes, things that aggravate nervous system stuff. That's all caused by this heavy, heavy residue of stress that you can get it out of you, and it changes the course of your life. And it's unbelievable because it works and it worked for me. And I'm so impressed that I continue to do it because it got better and better and better. Because it turns out that it also repairs that part of the brain structure that's responsible for the creative expression, for the creative process. Your creativity doesn't exist out of nowhere. It's actually connected to the condition of your nervous system. And TM certainly would help that. And then you're going away to India. I go away to India, not because of religious stuff, but because I go to a famous health spa there. that does something called Ayurveda. It's an ancient word meaning like science of life. And it reverses the process of aging. And what it does is it detoxifies the body and balances the body's health at a deeper and deeper level than modern Western pharmaceutical medicine is able to. Most of the pharmaceutical medication, if not all of it, actually has major serious side effects. And that why every ad you see on TV says you can take this blah blah and their warnings will be incredibly long 30 different things you got to watch out for Walter you live life to the fullest There no question about it And when you get back from India when you get back from shows like Freeplay Florida you'll be back at your home in Iowa, where I think you and I were talking beforehand, you've got to check out the Major League Baseball game next year when the Yankees and the White Sox play at the Field of Dreams. Yes, the one from the movie. And I think I told you I'm a huge fan of the book before Field of Dreams. It's called Shoeless Joe by Ray Kinsella, a Canadian author. Wonderful, wonderful book Now made into that movie And now going to be seeing Major League Baseball You've got to go to that Oh my God Well, the thing is They're only going to make 8,000 seats I think it's July they're going to have it Up there in Dyersville, Iowa Where they have the Field of Dreams What they did is They went a quarter of a mile A half a mile away from the old Original movie set, Field of Dreams Which still exists It still exists I played baseball there two or three summers ago It was a wonderful experience And they're building what they say is a temporary stadium a field to house the seat 8,000 people then they're going to tear it down I'm willing personally to even leave the campaign to leave it there permanently they should have the Field of Dreams annual all-star game every single year oh yeah it's a tourist attraction I can't believe that they've been considering like when they did Lord of the Rings in New Zealand and they made all the Shire buildings they agreed because I think the New Zealand government was worried that it was going to impact the environmental conditions. So they agreed, oh, we'll return it exactly as it was, not realizing that they had a gold mine that's equivalent to having Disneyland, where people would come to Lord of the Rings world. Make it somewhere where you could stay overnight. Absolutely. So that's what they've got to do. That's what they've got to do. They've got to make this 8,000-seat thing become a permanent part of our cultural heritage.

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I'd play there in a heartbeat. That would mean the world to play there. Oh, yeah. It would be so much fun. And that's one of the things they do. As you know, you already know, I go to stadiums every summer. I went to four new stadiums this last summer. I went the first time, I went to Milwaukee Brewer Stadium. Nice. I liked it. I went to Minneapolis Twins, which was... Target? Target Field. That was my favorite. That was the best. But I went to Miami. The stadium was pretty good. Sure. And I went to Tampa, and I really liked that stadium, too. So next summer, it's going to be either doing Houston and Dallas back-to-back. driving. Well, they have a new one in Arlington. New Dallas? Yeah, the Texas Rangers have a new one. Well, I didn't know that. That's news to me. Brand new. So, I'm either going to do Dodgers, San Diego Padres, and or Houston, Dallas, but also one of the East Coast things because that could be a combination of Yankees, Phillies, Orioles, Washington, Baltimore. Washington Nationals, yeah. I've done that trip. Are you done with those already? I'm a huge baseball fan. I actually cover Major League Baseball for our radio station, so I only have six parks left. I did Oakland this year, did San Fran, did L.A., and I'm forgetting another one I did earlier. But, yeah, I try to tackle them all, too. And the great thing is my wife likes baseball, too. Oh, that's so cool. So the only team I don't have any attraction to go and see is the Mets for some reason. I don't have really a noted bias against them. You know how you get excited about something? I don't get excited about going to see the Mets. But the Yankees, I'm from Boston, so I'm a Red Sox fan, but I don't have access to grind about the Yankees. I think the Yankees are incredibly cool. They're amazing. And I guess part of this, because also for me, I'm from Boston, I'm a Patriots fan, and I know how people rank on the Patriots, just like the people who are not Yankees fans against the Yankees. What's wrong with a deflated ball, Walter? There's nothing wrong with that. I don't know. I mean, there's so many people arguing both ways, whether it was true or not. Sure. So when you come back, are we still going to see more of these amazing trading cards, which you've covered a lot of great people who bring positivity to arcades, to pinball? Well, first of all, the trading cards, I've designed 3,850 cards. That's general. It might be 50 more this way or 50 less that way, but it's about 3,850. Over 2,000 of them are actually in print and circulation around the world. So it's a pretty remarkable thing. and I make no money off it. I'm a terrible businessman. I've given away over a quarter of a million trading cards for his gifts. And so it's been a fun for me because I'm 70 years old now. I'm not wealthy at all, but I'm not worried about whether I become a... I don't have any big financial goals that I have to be wealthy or have to do this or that. I'm pretty content with a lot of the ways my life's going just as long as I can pay my bills and continue to have funds. So I don't identify my value by how much money I have in the bank. So I'm not worried whether or not the cards sell or not, in other words. So I give so many cards away. And the goal of the cards is to honor as many people as possible who deserve to be honored. And what that means is that this amazing gaming culture did not happen overnight. It happened because hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people around the world contributed their heart, their love, their creativity, their intelligence, their assets, their money, their time to make this amazing culture become what it is. like this event alone, all the people who donated as a free service, their efforts to make this incredible adventure, this whole event. So the trading cards honor lots of people, including Pinball Profile. So you heard it first. So we're going to do a Pinball Profile. Wait a second. Hold on. People are going to think I did this interview for that reason. I just wanted to talk. I see you all the time here. This is ridiculous. No, I'm not going to throw you under the bus. this is exactly something that I do people who do podcasts I honor podcasts on trading cards I probably have, maybe there's a dozen podcasts that are on trading cards so far only because it's hard to catch up to them I do that because you're doing what I call oral history by the way, that right there is the highest form of flattery you can give me because that is exactly what I want to do with this pinball profile, with people like yourself to be able to have something that is archived, and I want to know more about Walter Day or whomever I'm talking to, and you've got this nice piece to learn about your story firsthand from you. Well, then you understand essentially the heart of what I'm talking about. I used to be a ragtime piano player. I used to actually perform big concerts like Scott Joplin, Maple Leaf Rag, and all the songs from The Sting, the movie The Sting. I could play this before the movie even came out. And there was a book that came out in 1949 called They All Played Ragtime. And it was these two ragtime pianists who went around and interviewed everybody who was still alive from the original ragtime era of 1895 up to 1919. You know, the people who are still alive. And they interviewed about 40 people who had been part of that generation. and after they interviewed them, went around tape recording, interviewed them, within the next few years, almost all of them died because they just barely caught them at the end. So all the stories that they say from the dust heap of history that they do under the banner of oral history went on to be enjoyed by future generations. So you never know, you as an oral historian, what important anecdotes and memories and memoirs you're going to find on your tape recorder that could have been lost because you never know when people are going to leave the world. And all their stories will be lost if you don't go and find them. Oral history is extremely important because it fills up between the gaps because there will always be the stories about the big famous names like Nolan Bushnell and David Crane and stuff like that. But it's the thousands and thousands of people who, working together, made the culture what it is and supported the culture and uplifted it to become what it became. And their stories are just as valuable and just as important as the stories of Nolan Bushnell or David Crane or John Romero who did, you know, Doom and stuff like that. So I always support people who are doing oral history because they're going out and getting in the trenches in the front line and finding stories that are going to be overlooked by the history books So everything they're doing is of major importance, and they should be honored because they are truly as much historians as the historians who might be operating out of the Smithsonian Institute. Wow. Thank you very much. That's so kind of you to say, Walter. And, you know, for many people listening to this program, you know, there might be a few thousand that know your history, but there might be a few thousand that don't know anything about Walter Day and want to find out more. So where can people contact you, Walter? Well, I have a website where the trading cards are. It's called The Walter Day Collection. Four words, .com.