You made it. Hello. Hi. We've been trying to plan this for a while, right?
I know. Since like beginning of summer, I think
it's been a minute. I've originally you were like, but I convinced you, right?
Yeah. Very convincing.
Hey everybody, it's Jeff from Dirty Pool Pinball and uh I'm here with another DPP podcast, but it's in person. It's not live this time, right?
No, not live. I guess we have dogs here. That's kind of live. They could interact.
Yeah. Yeah.
Dog chat interaction.
Real dogs. So, in my effort to put more and more faces to uh different pinball related things, I'm joined by Ryan Gratzer.
Gratzer.
I said it correctly. Uh you may not know Ryan's face even though he has a podcast uh with his buddy Scott called Mapping
Mapping Around.
Mapping Around.
It's funny. That's like a mousing Around joke. Is that Is that where it came from?
No.
Anyways, uh you may have used this app. In fact, you probably have definitely used it. It's called Pinball Map.
Mhm.
This is Pinball Map. Yep. one of the people in Pinball Map.
That's right. So, you and Scott started this uh in 2008, so 17 years ago.
Wow. That's an insanely long time. And we talked a little bit about it and you kind of blew my mind. I'm going to give a little hint preview of later on that you have over 100 admins that help you run this.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
So, it's kind of crowd sourced. For people who don't know what Pinball App is, can you give them a quick rundown of kind of like what the platform does?
Sure. Yeah. It's uh there's a website and there's an app. Uh, and it is a source for finding public machines to play. And it's user updated. So, anyone can add machines, remove machines from locations that are listed on the map, filter to only locations that have those particular machines they're looking for. And, uh, it covers the whole world, which is insanely useful for, say you're interested in buying a game that has just come out and you want to know where it is on location. insanely useful tool if you're interested in just buying a game in general. I mean, it's or if you just have a a game that you remembered as a kid that suddenly like you're like, "Oh man, I wonder if anybody has this." It's not like you can really go knocking down random strangers doors and jump on their pinball collections. No,
as nice as that would be.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Maybe you could add that as a feature.
Yeah. Some people do want to have their houses listed with a number and say, "Call me."
And And how do you address that? Uh we we have had ones slip past moderation before and uh last a couple years like that and they said it was no problem. But we we feel like there might be some liability risk of saying like here's my $100,000 worth of assets at my house and my home address. I don't
Pinball machines are expensive. I don't know if you know that.
I I I've heard I don't I don't collect, but I've heard
Really? You don't have any pinball machines? Uh well I do have two but but they're one was a gift uh to my parents. Okay.
And then one was before Pinflation so it was a
So it was reasonably priced.
A flight 2000 for $450.
I used to own a flight 2K as well. It's a good game. It's a good game. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So Pinball Map has a lot of locations. Which location has the most pinball machines? Um, please don't say the Pinball Museum in Nevada.
Yeah. Uh, it's either that or uh, Pastimes. I don't even remember.
Okay. Well, pastimes makes sense. That's uh, Rob Burke's uh, location who runs Pinball Expo and has obviously bazillions of machines
and like more in storage probably aren't even set up. Yeah. So, what got you into pinball that you were like, "Oh, man. I should start a giant platform with a 100 people helping me run it to find pinball machines all over the planet?" Well, I've been into it my whole life cuz my um in this neighborhood actually that we're in right now, some friends of my parents gave them a paragon machine. I think it was like a late wedding gift.
Uh
was it in good condition?
Great condition. Brand new.
Oh my god.
Brand new. It was from, you know, in basically 197879. I think that machine came out right on the cusp there.
Sure.
Uh, so brand new machine and we still have it. And so I was just born with a machine in my house and I played a lot of Paragon.
That's amazing. Not only just a great machine, a great wide body like Hot Dog and Cheetah. What are some Cheetah? Not Cheetah is a wide body, isn't it?
Yeah. Future Smide, some some great some great big games. But that's awesome. So you had literally pinball in the home from growing up.
Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I wasn't going out and playing that much. I mean, it depended when I got a little older, you know, 12, there was like a pizza place with the Caribbean Antonio Cruz that I played a lot, like that's a cocktail machine.
Um, and then there were a couple machines here and there that I played, but I mostly just played Paragon. And so it was, you know, it was I always loved pinball. And then when I moved to Portland when I was in like 2004 or so, uh, I suddenly realized there was pinball everywhere.
Well, definitely in Portland. Portland is just like ground zero for pinball. You can't go to a bar. You can't go to like a gas station that doesn't have a pinball machine in Portland.
Yeah.
Which is awesome, by the way.
Yeah. Tons and tons of machines. And right away, we were just playing tons of pinball. And then I in at that time there was kind of an exodus from Southern California to Portland. So I had already had a lot of friends that had moved up there and I would just run into other people like, "Oh, I didn't know you moved here. I didn't know you moved here." And
like pinball rats leaving a pinball ship to go to a pinball heaven.
Yeah. And then one of my friends um was uh in a pinball gang up there called Crazy Flipper Fingers.
Okay. And
what kind of trouble does a pinball gang get into?
Just drinking.
Drinking the sauce. Just the juice.
That's the trouble.
Um
that's not trouble. That sounds like solutions.
Yeah. Yeah. And uh so we we I would meet up with them and we'd play a ton. Um and I had various friend groups that we all just happened to play pinball.
Is this where you met Scott?
Yeah. Yeah. So through met through mutual friends and I was looking for a new place to live and he liked pinball and I moved into his house.
Nice.
Yeah.
Did he have a pinball machine at the time?
Uh we bought one short he bought one shortly after. He bought a World Cup soccer and then I brought my Paragon up so we had them both in the garage.
Nice.
Yeah,
that's a good pairing.
Yeah. Yeah. Great pairing. We had them wedged into the basement. Uh and we were playing in the Portland Pinball League at the time. I imagine that's a pretty competitive league with the amount of players that there are up there.
Yeah, but back then it was it was very chill. Very chill. Cuz it was like kind of there was no uh IFBA points at that time.
No whopper farms going on.
No, it was so it would be, you know, 15 of us uh ranging in age. Uh there were definitely some older folks that had been playing pinball since the 70s that were there. And um
shout out to Jean from Ontil, right?
Yeah. Yeah. And um we um were tracking machines to play in Portland with a a Google map. You could like do a custom Google map and just make drop markers and write notes for what machines were there.
Got it.
But back then you couldn't search custom Google maps. So you you couldn't like type in and be like I don't know. It just made it hard to navigate basically. So, Pinball Map almost came out of a not a deficiency of of Google Maps, but you were just like frustrated that Google Maps didn't do more and the API wasn't available or like
Yeah, that was it. That was it. We were just like, we want something we could search and um something that's a little easier for anyone to hop in and update so it is more maintained.
So, you mentioned like back then and I think like timeline is kind of an interesting thing to talk about. We mentioned this a little bit. I just because you have so much data about games being on location for 17 years you said right?
Yeah.
So like what have you noticed about the pinball kind of like landscape or marketplace that has been like kind of interesting an observation like do you see that there are more growth of games on location? Like just have there have been any kind of standout things about your observations of that? Um, well, I'd say, you know, when we first started it, there were a lot of uh '90s Williams machines on location. Um, and and of course that those like 2000 Sterns um on location and those have become much more rare. You know, there were like like the most common machine in Portland at the time was Medieval Madness.
I mean, that makes a lot of sense. But this was like before the remake.
Yeah. Before the remake. So this was OG actual, you know, smaller display.
Yeah. It was almost like annoying that like, oh, they have another like Yeah. It was just everywhere. And
fantastic Brian Eddy game, but if it's the only Brian Eddy game that you keep running into, I could see how that would be fatiguing.
Yeah. But nowadays, you're you're kind of, you know, you're looking I mean, there's a remake, so it makes it easier to find it. But still,
do you think that's because operators are less inclined to be able to or want to maintenance a game that's older because the newer ones supposedly need less maintenance? or I mean what do you think is the deciding factor in the kind of shift of modern games taking over? Um yeah, I think it is that you know they could they were able to maintain these machines fairly well for 15 20 years or something like that. But once you extend beyond that, it becomes probably more persistent work to do compared with just plopping down a new machine
and an operator's trying to make some of that green that moola, right? So they're going to want to bring people in with the latest and greatest
the freshest stuff. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I mean there is there is definitely a market for people looking for some of the older machines you can't find as easily on location, but still I think it's more tried and true to put out a brand new machine. So it's kind of putting you on the spot for statistics, but I am curious like do you have an idea of kind of what the total number of games on location maybe 10 or 15 years ago versus now might be? Like has there been a consistent growth? Is it exponential? Is it not growing? You know, there's a lot of caveats to a question like that because we're we're getting places submitted to us and we add new locations, but they're not always a brand new location that just got a machine. Sometimes Sometimes it's just a map user happened to go over here and see that there's a machine. It could have been there for 10 years, right,
before being added to the map. So, it it's hard to say really. That's cool that the power of the crowd sourcing though is helping to discover machines that are on location. I know somebody had posted that there was a oh my god I want to say it was Johnny Nemonic but somewhere in the remote edge of Hawaii there was like this one game like just out there and apparently it was like practically unplayable but you know it's on pinball map now you can go check it out.
Yeah. Yeah. It's really cool to see uh locations being added in far-flung areas. I mean we have two or three locations in the in the Maldes. I I was just about to ask what's the like most remote place that has a pinball machine that you can think of.
Yeah, someone asked for like having us have a stat that kind of uh pulls that automatically. So, we do like a radius and see which one is the farthest from you. That's pretty I don't know outright, but yeah, I mean there's not a lot in China listed. At least maybe one location listed in China.
I mean, is that because there aren't a lot of people updating the map in China or is that because there's less pinball machines in China or both?
Yeah, probably both. both. But probably definitely has to do with people not updating it there. All we get are probably bot attacks.
Japan has that pretty big what is it? Silver silverball museum I think. I forget what the name of the Japan
and we have three administrators from Japan that help you know find the places there and keep them updated and stuff like that.
That's pretty. So I wanted to touch base. So we mentioned earlier that there's like over 100 administrators. So, uh, you kind of like approve people that are trustworthy or have shown that they are able to do this work to update location gains.
Yeah. We like them to be kind of like neutral characters, like not operators, not owners of locations. Uh, sometimes they eventually turn into operators and owners.
Sure.
And we don't boot them out at that point.
What has there been any like nefariousness of like people lying about games on location or something like what is the strangest uh encounter you've had with the moderator? Yeah, there has been. There and it's
any shareworthy stories. Not to like call out anybody's names, but is there something just quirky that you were just like, I didn't think I would have to have this interaction?
Yeah, there's been, you know, 17 years is a long time, so things do happen. And we don't always like to highlight the bad stuff to give people ideas, but there have been
that's fair
three or four cases of our administrators
being operators and uh suppressing their competitors locations.
Ew.
Not adding them or removing them.
Don't do that.
Don't do that.
And then we always we're always contact them. We're like, did you just do that? And they're like, yeah. It's always like a mopey like, yeah. Uh they were like, "Yeah, you're not an admin anymore. Sorry."
If you want to get removed from being an admin from Pinball Map, uh go try to tank your competitors.
Yeah,
Shane.
Yeah, Shane was one of them. No, just kidding.
Shane runs on it. We like to bag on him just cuz I don't know.
That's the league we're in cuz he gets every new game within seconds before it's available to anybody. It's more of just a frustration out of love, I think, for making fun of Shane.
Yeah, definitely. Um All right. So, you've got all these people. How does someone become an admin? If they were, if say they're a really passionate person, they're in a location that doesn't have a lot of pinball map updates. Is there a way they can contact you? Yeah, I mean, we don't add many admins these days. And that uh it was structured the map was structured differently at the beginning where right now it's this giant unified global map where previously for the first 6 8 years or something like that we had separate regional maps that didn't even communicate with each other or cross over
like realms from Game of Thrones.
Yeah, basically. Yeah.
Okay. I can't I can't name any of the realms, but I but yeah, like you know, cuz so it started as the Portland map and we were just like, we want to have really good data.
So, we're not going to add a random location in the middle of Montana that you pass by on your drive and no one's going to drive by there for 10 years.
Sure.
So, we just want this area that we live in and we know a bunch of people that are going to be updating it. But then other people contacted us and said, "Please do it for LA and the Bay Area and Seattle and stuff." So we started creating distinct regional maps for those areas and we said, "We'll do it as long as you serve as administrator."
Update. So you'd mentioned uh this is like the tech portion, right? Uh you mentioned that pinball map was on a different platform at one point, I'm guessing, when these realms existed and then when you integrated kind of the global map, it converted to a different platform.
Yeah. Well, Scott's a professional programmer.
That helps.
I'm an urban planner. Uh,
that also helps.
Yeah, I do mapping for work. Uh, so I guess that kind of is related.
Sure.
But, uh,
can you give a crash course on some of the technical like how what the platform started on programming wise to what it is. I mean, we don't have to do lines of code here, but
yeah, it started as a a Pearl project, Pearl Mason. Uh, and I can't remember all the details about Pearl Mason, but it's some sort of PHP hybrid of Pearl. We got to wait for the dogs. The dogs are freaking out.
They are so excited about pinball, they want to be involved in it.
They like Pearl. Yeah. If you have a dog, it probably likes programming in Pearl.
Yeah.
What other animals like would choose? So, since they're barking, we might as well make this dumb dumb bit. So, I want you to pick an animal and what programming language they would probably use and then I'll do one. We'll go back and forth.
All right. Well, Python would probably be a snake.
Okay. That's pretty lit literal, right? Uh, all right. All right. I'll go with like
uh pandas probably like maybe Unity cuz it's like you don't have to know a whole lot, you know, right? You can be lazy about it, you know?
Mhm.
And then let's see what would So I could even segue into what we changed into after Pearl.
Okay.
And think about what animal that would be. So after Pearl Mason, we switched to Ruby and Ruby on Rails for the the web framework. So, I didn't really know about what Ruby like was as a talking about
what scripting language it's run on and you had mentioned that it was like run on Ruby, a platform that I've never really heard of before. Um, can you talk a little bit about like what Ruby is and like what its like source is?
JACKPOT.
Did you hear the Winchester tour guide? Yeah, I thought I did. Someone got a jackpot.
That makes sense. This is a pinball podcast after all.
Super.
What is Ruby?
Um, it's a very elegant language created by a guy in Japan. Uh, it's for me, someone who's not a professional programmer, very easy to understand because it's written kind of in human readable language. Is it still like class object like type format or
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But so Scott who programmed was like this is a great platform for this and this is what we should be using.
Yeah. I think he they were using it at his work. Um and uh so yeah he thought it would be just a little faster uh more modern.
Okay.
Yeah. Right. has I'm assuming that obviously the platform's still on it after how many years that this was clearly a good decision and a good backbone for what Pinball Map does.
Yeah. Yeah. Lots of huge sites use Ruby on Rails. Shopify, Twitter used it at first.
Oh, interesting. A ton. Yeah.
Cool.
GitHub is Ruby on Rails.
Get you hub.
Mhm.
That's a dumb joke.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You've created this massive platform now. Tons of people use it. There has to be such a sense of gratification that you've created a way for more people to find pinball machines. Like I mean really I guess I asked where it came from, but like
was it really just you wanted more places to be able to find games in your local area?
Yeah, we just wanted to help others find places and have it nice and easy to update and and bark bark
and bark bark bark. We could just pretend to be dogs. We could just move our mouths like spark part. To your point, uh, you know, we we feel obliged, I think, to keep it updated. Um, keep working on new features, uh, take into account people's feedback that they give us in order to give them things they want because we've realized, yeah, it turned into a useful tool that a lot of people were using. I mean that honestly that's one of the biggest reasons that I really wanted you to be on the podcast is that like there's something about pinball people and pinball creators that are just like obsessed with doing something to help pinball, right? And uh I don't know if pinball would survive without all of the assistance if it was just companies making pinball machines. And I, you know, I think to, to your credit, and thank you for doing this, Pinball Map is a resource that I have used a ton in my travels,
right?
Uh, and I'm sure plenty of people on the internet feel the same way. But without people doing cool stuff for pinball and not trying to just exclusively monetarily benefit from it, which really, is there any money in pinball? Like,
yeah. yeah. I mean, we all have jobs and so we don't need to make a couple hundred dollar extra a month or something like that. And you know, it kind of would change the dynamic if we added some sort of monetary aspect to it.
I would be happy to pay a 99 cent or like dollar fee or whatever, but I'm sure some people wouldn't. But
yeah, and we we get donations uh very very nice donations from people that 100% cover our costs.
So, let's talk let's talk about cost real quick. Also, if you don't mind, I'd love to get that link in case somebody who's watching this may want to donate uh to support your platform. Uh but you've got server costs. I mean, like what what are some of the kind of like financial hindrances to creating a product like this?
Um well, right now it's there's not that many costs in general. I mean, for for a while, we kept it as cheap as possible and so for most of its life was probably like 15 bucks a month. Oh,
that's not too bad. How much data bandwidth do you do you find that people are pulling from the site?
Um I don't know. We don't get charged by with
Oh, it's not how it's even handled. Okay.
Yeah. I mean, maybe if we exceeded something and you know, we just we don't have time or interest in like looking at uh web analytics really. So, I don't know. We don't know how many blah blah blah.
Sure.
All the time. We know how many edits are being made. That's the thing that's interests us that we can track. Um once we started getting more donations and we it gave us a little bit more freedom to uh beef up our server because for a while it was like you know we have we have one gigabyte of RAM and we need to work super hard to make sure we're always under it and and that helped us for many years because we could really optimize the data so or optimize the the code so that uh we weren't like wasting resources
which helped us in the long run and now It costs more because we get more in donations and we kind of just like
have more server uh CPU and more database RAM basically to to make it so there's never really any slowdowns.
Gotcha. And for people that are wondering, you you gave me a number for how many edits there are roughly per week in terms of like additions and stuff that happen. Do you can you mention that?
Yeah, I I looked it up yesterday. um because we get a little email at the end of the week that tells us how many machines were removed, how many were added, how many comments were made on machines, blah blah blah. And um I for for the month, I'll just go to month. Month is a little easier. We get something like 8,500 average edits a month.
That's incredible. That's a lot.
It's a decent amount. It helps keep it up to date, I think. Sure.
And if you That's really a neat thing about pinball map. seems like almost always the machines are exactly as they are on the map. Like
the time in between it being removed or changed. Ace Gogi is a good example. Ace cycles games constantly.
Um but I mean thankfully since we're local I imagine you get submissions for that pretty frequently.
Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, people can add and remove machines, you know, with no moderation or anything like that from a location. So that's just happening constantly. And we have a uh on the website we have a feed called pinomap.comactivity and you could just see globally all those edits being made.
You mentioned some of the features that uh people have added or that you've expanded in terms of like search filters. You mentioned that people can comment. Can you talk a little bit about like just some of the things that you can do with dogs barking? Thankfully, since we're just looking at each other, it's just a simple jump cut push in.
Yeah,
but they do need to shut the up.
If If they didn't bark, I would almost be more concerned,
right?
Um,
yeah.
Sam.
Okay. I think the dogs have finally shut up.
Okay.
Okay. So, we were talking about uh some features and other things that have been like added to the platform as it has grown. And you mentioned comments and I was like if there was any unique search filters because you had mentioned trying to add some new unique ones.
Yeah. Yeah. We' add filters for um number of machines at a location. So if you want to see, you know, you don't want to see all the spots with one machine, you want to chop those out only shows places with 10 plus machines or something like that.
Makes sense. If you want to go to a place with a bunch of friends is stacking up on one game is I don't know.
Yeah. Yeah. Um we we create tools for operators so they can look at their own machines. We can you know tag locations by operator basically and they could say show me only my locations so they can more quickly update their own locations as they like are swapping machines.
So the tools are helpful for people that are operators as well as pinball players in general.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean serving operators has been a big motivation for us and we I think we list like 500 of them or something like that on the Yeah.
How many I mean I guess how many operators are there let's say just in America roughly based on that.
Yeah. I don't know. I mean I'm sure we only get a subset of them tagged because we just we say you know contact us if you want to be listed as an operator. So it just you know every week we add a couple basically.
Gotcha. And then we let them if they want to have their email added, we can uh send them notifications about comments made on their machines.
That's incredibly useful if there's a game that has say repeat issues that have been present for multiple days or weeks.
Yeah. Yeah. And so every day we send those out as like a once a day digest of here's all the comments made on your machines. By far one of the things that has frustrated me most about location games is if like especially when you're trying to introduce people to pinball and you show up and the games are just like in such a condition that they don't play right. Someone who doesn't know a lot about pinball may just assume that that's the way the game is supposed to be and it's just not fun. So, you know, it really is nice when operators keep their games in top condition. And shout out to every operator who takes the time to make sure that their games run awesome at the arcades. Like you are the absolute heroes of the pinball community for sure.
Yeah. And you know it's it's understood by everybody that machines break. Totally. No one thinks machines will run flawlessly forever. So having a record in a way of comments saying left flipper's broken and then the operator comes in and says left flipper's fixed means that for me and you looking up locations we could say oh this is a maintained location. There's somebody here that's working on this stuff. And I think that helps us make choices of where we want to play.
Absolutely. You don't want to drive a certain distance to just suddenly be not having as fun a time as you maybe could have or to check out a very specific game.
If you are looking forward to playing a specific game and you show up there and it's not working, that can be frustrating. Even if the PE even if the person that is running the place is being very diligent about repairing games, sometimes timing is just what it is.
Yeah. Yeah. And people do get upset about that.
And while people getting upset, whoa, back that ass up. What are you talking about? I've never seen a pinball person get mad about anything.
I know
you have.
Oh, for sure.
I haven't. Not personally. Yes. It was a little bit of sarcasm. Thank you.
Have you seen the channel?
Yeah.
Um I mean that's I think that's pretty much all the major questions I have about the platform. I mean this has been incredibly informative. I absolutely appreciate you taking the time to do this. Again, like I've been trying to get Ryan here for for months, I would say almost at this point. Um, I will say we always open it up to to guests to to plug anything in particular if they've got any updates either personal or workrelated that they'd like to talk about maybe with your podcast or maybe with pinball map updates.
Yeah. Um, I don't know. Let's see. Like I I think next year or so in the app we're trying to this is a big update we'll do. Uh, so look forward to this. We're on the on the website you could zoom out to the entire world and see every single location in the entire world, but um on the app right now there's kind of like zoom limits just because it's not set to efficiently pull in 12,000 locations worth of data all at once. But
um that has we've on the back end made it so we can do that. we just have to do an app update to actually make it support uh showing the entire world's 12,000 plus locations. So, that'll come next year.
That's an amazing example of something that's like probably never going to be needed, but is just cool that you can do it.
Yeah.
Yeah. Um Yeah. And then we have a podcast we do once in a while called Mapping Around with Scott and Ryan. And uh we just talk about things that we've added to the website or app. Um, you know, we we don't really need donations. We're We're fully covered. So, I think the best way is to support the map by editing it, like updating locations. We do. I have a a gift for you.
What?
Let make sure it's right in there. It's a coin pouch.
Wow.
We have little coin pouches for sale.
Thank you very much. Yeah,
if you would like your own pinball map uh coin pouch or you would like to give donations, I imagine there's a website to go to and that would be
um pinballmap.com and
tough one to remember.
Yeah. Yeah, you can find that slashstore and Yeah.
Very cool. Thank you very much. Yeah.
Um
cool.
Um so we usually praise the great pyramid. I'm trying to remember if there's anything else on the list and uh Yeah.
Okay.
So we p should we praise the pyramid? We just press it like we
just What do you mean? You know how to praise the pyramid. You can make
I want the I want the best.
You're going big pyramid.
Yeah, big big pyramid. Thick.
That's more of a That's more of an Aztec.
Yeah.
See? Okay.
Yeah, that's good. I like I like what you got going on there.
Uh all right. Thank you very much everybody for watching. Uh if you have seen this video, please be proactive on Pinball Map. If you have a location that's near you, uh the best way that you can help, like Ryan said, is to update locations and just, you know, be proactive. Keeping a up-to-date map of of games everywhere helps more people get exposed to pinball. And honestly, I think we all can agree that that's a good thing.
So, I agree too. Yeah.
There you go. Thanks very much everybody. Have a great one. And uh yeah,
he's killing me in League right now. I'm not happy about it.
We'll see what happens in finals. I always tank in finals.
I'm top of B now. I got bumped. It's where I belong.