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Pinball Magazine & Pinball News PINcast July 2022 recap

Pinball News & Pinball Magazine Pincast·podcast_episode·2h 10m·analyzed·Aug 2, 2022
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TL;DR

July 2022 pinball recap: Wayne Nines dies at 104; Queen Pinball revealed; JJP discusses Toy Story 4 success and product strategy.

Summary

Pinball News and Pinball Magazine editors Jonathan Houston and Martin Ayobe recap July 2022 industry events, beginning with the deaths of legendary designer Wayne Nines (104) and Paris Pinball Museum owner Raphael Lanker. They discuss the official reveal of Queen Pinball by Pinball Brothers (Champions/Rhapsody editions, $9,295–$10,995, produced by Adresi Gaming), and conduct an extensive interview with Jersey Jack Pinball owner Jersey Jack Guarneri about Toy Story 4's successful launch, licensing strategy, the discontinuation of Standard editions, and four games currently in development.

Key Claims

  • Wayne Nines designed 170+ electromechanical games for Gottlieb and was involved in hundreds of other titles as chief engineer

    high confidence · Jonathan Houston, editor of Pinball Magazine, citing his published interview with Nines in Pinball Magazine #5

  • Queen Pinball production will begin in September 2022 (fall/autumn), with first US public presentation expected at Cointaker's pinball tailgate party in September

    high confidence · Jonathan Houston and Martin Ayobe discussing official announcement details

  • Queen Pinball will be manufactured by Adresi Gaming in Milan, Italy (same builder as Alien Pinballs for Pinball Brothers)

    high confidence · Martin Ayobe states PR confirmation from Pinball Brothers

  • Jersey Jack Pinball eliminated Standard editions because operators were buying Limited and Collector editions instead, making Standard the rarest model despite intended cost positioning

    high confidence · Jersey Jack Guarneri in interview

  • Jersey Jack has four games currently in development as of July 2022

    high confidence · Jersey Jack Guarneri explicitly states: 'We have four games in development right now'

  • Pat Lawler has taken time off and is deciding what to do next; Jersey Jack Guarneri defers confirmation of his retirement to Lawler himself

    high confidence · Jersey Jack Guarneri in response to questions about Lawler's retirement status

  • Toy Story 4 licensing was acquired before the movie was released; production occurred during a year-plus delay of the film

    high confidence · Jersey Jack Guarneri explains licensing timeline and decision to develop Willy Wonka during the Toy Story 4 delay

  • The Hobbit pinball redesign (addressing Smaug appearance) cost Jersey Jack over $1 million and took more than a year after release

    high confidence · Jersey Jack Guarneri recounting historical licensing lesson learned from Hobbit

Notable Quotes

  • “his head was still young. It was amazing. And he often complained to me about that, saying that his mind still wanted to do things, but his body just couldn't.”

    Jonathan Houston @ early segment — Poignant memory of Wayne Nines' mental sharpness at advanced age; emphasizes his vitality despite physical limitations

  • “And so you have tiny David Gottlieb kicking Jimmy Johnson out of the door, and he never bothered Wayne again.”

    Jonathan Houston @ Wayne Nines biography — Establishes pivotal moment in Nines' career; David Gottlieb's defense of Nines led to his long tenure at Gottlieb

  • “It's embarrassing to say how many dollars of sales there were because it's just very humbling.”

    Jersey Jack Guarneri @ Toy Story 4 launch discussion — Indicates strong commercial success of Toy Story 4 launch, described as exceeding expectations

  • “The limited edition was always the great selling game and the collector edition was always the sellout. and the standard game...became the rarest games that we ever built.”

    Jersey Jack Guarneri @ Standard edition discontinuation discussion — Reveals market dynamics that surprised manufacturer; operators purchased LE/CE over Pro despite pricing

  • “I didn't want that to repeat with Toy Story. Really didn't...Let the road play up to me.”

    Jersey Jack Guarneri @ Toy Story vs. Willy Wonka licensing decision — Explains strategic pivot from Toy Story to Willy Wonka; prioritizes known assets over uncertain future film releases

  • “The hair on the back of my neck went up because I had The Hobbit...And we don't know what Smaug's going to look like”

    Jersey Jack Guarneri @ Hobbit licensing story — Origin of caution about film-dependent licenses; lesson that shaped Toy Story licensing strategy

  • “I have four games in development right now.”

    Jersey Jack Guarneri @ product roadmap section — Confirms JJP pipeline; raises question about fourth designer (Pat Lawler's retirement status)

Entities

Wayne NinespersonRaphael LankerpersonJonathan HoustonpersonMartin AyobepersonJersey Jack GuarneripersonPat LawlerpersonPinball BrotherscompanyQueen PinballgameToy Story 4

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Jersey Jack Pinball aims for approximately 9-month game release cycle but disruptions (pandemic, global events) have disrupted schedule

    medium · Guarneri: 'Ideally...we would love to put out a game every nine months' but 'every time you have plans, what happens? Things change'

  • ?

    business_signal: Jersey Jack Pinball discontinued Standard edition tier due to market inefficiency; operators preferred higher-tier models regardless of price

    high · Guarneri explains Standard became 'rarest games' because operators bought LE/CE instead; model eliminated from future production

  • ?

    community_signal: Jersey Jack Pinball organizing Toy Story 4 collector plaque signing events; both Guarneri and Lawler participating in collector engagement activities

    medium · Martin Ayobe: 'I know [Pat] is signing collector edition plaques for the collector edition Toy Story game' and Guarneri confirmed he is also signing

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Wayne Nines' death treated with genuine respect and celebration of prolific legacy; strong emotional response from community members

    high · Extended biographical segment; personal anecdotes about Nines' health and character; community tributes referenced

  • ?

    event_signal: Queen Pinball scheduled for first US public appearance at Cointaker pinball tailgate party (September 2022) and likely Pinball Expo (October)

    medium · Martin Ayobe: 'I think it's going to have its first public presentation...at the super awesome pinball tailgate party' at Cointaker; expects Pinball Expo debut

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.393

0:00
Pinball legend Wayne Nines dies Queen Pinball revealed Turner Pinball announced Interview with Jersey Jack Hi, my name is Jonathan Houston, I'm the editor of Pinball Magazine and I'm joined by me, Martin Ayobe I'm the editor of Pinball News, and we are here to look back at all the events in the pinball world that took place in July 2022, or at least all the important ones which are worth reporting on. Yeah, and not so much all the events, but we're focusing on the pinball industry events, because it's far too complicated to cover all of them.
0:48
We'll talk a little bit about the war you're heading into. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so kicking off with... Very, very sad news.
0:59
Not entirely unexpected, I guess, but Wayne Nines, the legendary pinball designer, probably the most prolific game designer ever in the pinball industry, died just a couple of days ago at the grand old age of 104 years and one day. Yes. And I was, at first, I learned on his birthday that he was in hospice, and that his two daughters, Patty and Phyllis, I think usually goes by the nickname Betty, so we have Patty and Betty, were with him. apparently his son wasn't but well I visited Wayne twice I stayed at his place twice to do my interview with him for which was published in Pinball Magazine number 5 and everybody that has met Wayne or knows Wayne knows what a wonderful friendly personality he was and he loved talking about his career in pinball, the games that he worked on, as far as he could remember. And while he was certainly of age, his head was still young. It was amazing. And he often complained to me about that, saying that his mind still wanted to do things, but his body just couldn't. and we're obviously not talking about going water surfing or water skiing although he still did that I think he mentioned that he did that way into his 70s so he was a very supportive guy as well but his resume in pinball is probably unmatched he started out at the Western pinball company it was called Western under Jimmy Johnson and one day not getting properly getting into an argument about his payroll I suppose decided he packed basically packed his tools and he left had the choice to either go and see if he could work at Genco or at Gottlieb decided to walk in at Gottlieb and that's where he worked until his pension started at the line and quickly well, basically on the first day Jimmy Johnson came looking for him knocked on the door of David Gottlieb and basically Dave Gottlieb who is a very small person in length,

  • “Pat was important to bring into the company back in 2013...I don't know what he's going to be doing in the future. I truly don't know.”

    Jersey Jack Guarneri @ Pat Lawler status discussion — Defers Lawler retirement confirmation; indicates uncertainty about his future role

    • game
    Jersey Jack Pinballcompany
    Paris Pinball Museumorganization
    Gottliebcompany
    Adresi Gamingcompany
    Willy Wonkagame
    The Hobbitgame
    Barry Oslerperson
    Highway Pinballcompany
    David Gottliebperson
    John Yowseyperson
    Stern Pinballcompany
  • ?

    licensing_signal: Jersey Jack Pinball learned from Hobbit licensing mistake; now prioritizes waiting for film releases to avoid costly post-release redesigns

    high · Guarneri recounts $1M+ Smaug redesign; applied lesson to Toy Story decision to pivot to Willy Wonka during film delays

  • $

    market_signal: Toy Story 4 launch described as exceptionally successful sales event; Guarneri states sales figures are 'embarrassing' and 'humbling' in magnitude

    high · Direct quote: 'It's embarrassing to say how many dollars of sales there were because it's just very humbling'

  • ?

    community_signal: Pat Lawler appears to be on hiatus or transitioning from Jersey Jack Pinball; retirement unconfirmed but taking 'time off' per Guarneri

    high · Jersey Jack Guarneri: 'At this point he's taking some time off and he's deciding what he's going to do' and defers retirement confirmation to Lawler

  • $

    market_signal: Queen Pinball Champions and Rhapsody editions priced at $9,295 and $10,995 respectively; positioning as premium product with $1,700 LE premium

    high · Official pricing announced: Champions $9,295; Rhapsody LE $10,995 (1,000 unit run)

  • ?

    announcement: Queen Pinball officially revealed by Pinball Brothers with two editions; timing possibly aligned with Queen band's Greatest Hits milestone (7M copies, 1,000th week on UK chart)

    medium · Martin Ayobe speculates: 'I did wonder...whether the announcement was a tie-in with a recent news report about Queen...just sold over 7 million copies'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Jersey Jack Pinball has four games in active development as of July 2022; unclear designer allocation given Pat Lawler's hiatus

    high · Guarneri: 'We have four games in development right now'; raises question about fourth designer beyond three known remaining designers

  • ?

    technology_signal: Queen Pinball code implementation uncertain; hosts express curiosity about how developers handled random song snippet mechanic from prototype video

    medium · Jonathan Houston: 'Code wise what they did with it...I'm very curious to see...whether they managed to improve it'

    • 4:09
    basically told Jimmy Johnson, who is a bear of a guy, to go screw himself. As they were. Yeah. And so you have tiny David Godfrey kicking Jimmy Johnson out of the door, and he never bothered Wayne again. And that was the start of a very good relationship between Wayne Nines and David Gottlieb and probably allowed Wayne to grow into the company as an assistant to Harry Mapps, who was the main designer at that time,
    4:54
    then becoming a pinball designer alongside Harry Mapps and then taking over. In the meantime, Harry Mapps invented the flipper, and that's when things really started off for Godley. And Wayne designed, like, the exact number is probably in Pimple Magazine, number five, but let's say 170-plus games.
    5:18
    And yes, those are electromechanical games, but it's still amazing to see how creative Wayne could get with just a couple of elements, like, okay, we got bumpers, we got pop bumpers, we got targets, we got rubber rings, we got poles, we got a couple of flippers, what can we do with them?
    5:42
    And he managed to crank out such creative games, often overlooked by the new generation at pinball shows, But there are collectors who realized what brilliant games Wayne came up with. And at that time, Belly and Williams were also around. But Godspeed was absolutely number one in pinball manufacturing. And Belly and Williams couldn't even come close. That was only that once Solid State was introduced, that Belly and Williams took over, and Gottlieb sort of missed the boat on that one.
    6:32
    So following his career as a pinball designer, Wayne became chief engineer, which basically meant that Ed Kerinsky was the next pinball designer to design games at Gottlieb. Gottlieb had to sign off every game or Wayne had to sign off every game that Ed designed so if it didn't get the approval of Wayne the game would not go into production so he designed 170 plus games himself but he was involved in like hundreds of other titles as well because Ed Krinsky also designed 100 plus titles so by far they're the most prolific pinball designer and a great person to meet. I'm very fortunate that I was able to visit him at his home in Mountain Home. And it was a shock to me to learn that he was in hospice. And I was still thinking to myself, well, it doesn't have to be that bad, but, well, the next day he already died. Yeah, that was kind of a shocker. He just celebrated his 104th birthday Yeah, I I'll tell this anecdote Wayne told me I think probably two or three times in the story of when he celebrated his 100th birthday was a friend of his and he said like Wayne, you're going to be around until 104 and it sort of feels to me that Wayne probably well he told me that story a couple of times and I think Wayne was like I'm going to stick in there to 104 and then there was nothing left to accomplish well probably true but it certainly gave him something to aim for and typically Wayne he achieved it and I think he's been an inspiration to so many people in the industry hasn't he I can only hope so. And still, some of his games are, I think, could easily be adapted into pinball slash redemption type games with a slight twist. You know, the way Wayne was designing his games in those days, they were all about winning free plays. and you convert that to redemption nowadays there's so much possibilities there so well yeah and of course he invented the alibaba system as well didn't he did yes I was going to say I think he was the first to introduce gobble holes and kick out holes or drop through holes where the ball would pop up somewhere else. He was very creative with the limited part that he basically had to design the game.
    9:49
    Well, it's a pity that he's gone. Obviously, at 104, it's inevitable that at some point he's not going to live forever. So we realize that. but that still doesn't mean that it wasn't the shocker for me to learn that he actually made it to 104 in one day and then yeah well a very inspiring life and very productive and we can all only hope to live to that kind of ripe old age right and especially with if you see how bright he was still at the age of 100 there's people in their 60s who are already completely gone and lost it and don't remember anything not with Wayne so if you're going to live that long you'd be so lucky to have Wayne's health and of course my condolences go out to Wayne's family and everybody who was... Yes, exactly. Yes. Okay, so... And while we're on the subject, that wasn't even the only tragic loss in the pinball community.
    11:18
    You want to touch on the other loss later on? No, let's do it now, as you mentioned it. and I'm afraid we have to report the sad death of Raphael Lanker who ran the Paris Pinball Museum with an absolutely amazing collection of mostly mechanical or electromechanical pinballs and slot machines as well. Yes.
    11:44
    It was kind of like a private collection but he would always welcome visitors to his Paris Pinball Museum. Yes. Yeah, to, you know, if they were fans of the game, he'd be delighted to tell them all about the history of the game and show them how the game progressed over the years through his absolutely pristine machines. And I, unfortunately, was never fortunate enough to go and visit his museum. But you were, were you? Yes, yes. I've been there I think two or three times many of the games that are featured in Pinball Magazine number 5 which are Wayne Nines designs have actually been photographed in the Paris Pinball Museum so I was allowed there to go in there take the glass of the games take photos of the playfield of the back glass, everything which was very kind of Raphael he was a very outspoken former operator I think he was actually still operating games in some bars but not at the scale that he used to do but I think Raphael basically owned Paris and he made a fortune operating pinball machines and other operating amusement devices of course Yeah, but pinball was his big passion.
    13:19
    So he had the museum. I think he had one or two hired technicians to keep the games in tip-top shape. So it's a collection with games in pristine condition, which is something that's very rare to combine, 200-plus games. most of the games that Gottlieb manufactured, actually I think the majority of the games in the museum is Gottlieb and only a handful, Bellion, Williams and Jenko and some other ones Let's hope that his collection survives and goes to a good home I can't imagine anybody else is likely to be able to rehouse all of machines yeah well the family of Rafael Lankar announced that they will make an announcement on the future of the regarding the future of the museum on his Facebook page I haven't seen anything yet but in all fairness I haven't checked either so no anyway we don't want to dwell on too much bad news but it certainly is sad for friends and family of Rafael we certainly lost a personality and not everybody was happy with the character that Raphael was, but we got along very, very well when I visited him, so another sad loss. Indeed. Okay.
    14:57
    Well, let's move on to some slightly happier news then, and we have a new game revealed. There's a lot of new game, yes. Well, it's the official reveal. of the Queen Pinball machine from Pinball Brothers. Yes. It's a game we've seen before, because last year it popped up in a pop-up store. Queen there. A merchandise pop-up store, to be precise.
    15:25
    In London. It was, which I was fortunate enough to go and visit and do a report on. and I'm kind of surprised how like that prototype version, the actual production version is. The artwork is very similar. It's not identical, but it's got a slight rearrangement of the back glass, which I thought was probably going to look like a, well, it's a placeholder, but it isn't. It isn't. It's a properly approved rendition of the four characters from Queen. I hear it cry for off-the-market mods. Yes, well, it could very well be.
    16:10
    But the playfield is also very similar. The one that was on display in the pop-up store in London was missing various sections like ball guides and ramps and things in order to get the ball and keep it in the right places. But that's all now been completed But the basic layout of the game is I'd say the same I didn't notice any particular differences So anyway So speaking of the layout of the game Yeah I informed with Roddicker I suppose I recall his name Who's the PR guy for Pinball Brothers And I asked for credits Who did what on the game and so on Now, this game started out as a design by Barry Osler and Dave Sanders at Highway Pinball. But the current credit for pinball design goes to the Pinball Brothers design team and Alexander Spohr from Germany.
    17:14
    Yes, who was part of the team, I believe, at the time. Well, he was part of the team in a management position, but I think he stepped down from the management position. But he obviously is still involved. Yeah. I mean, the game as designed at Highway Pinball was a wide-body game, I believe. So it was reformatted and redesigned to fit into a standard-body cabinet. Right. But yes, it was a Highway Pitball title, I should say. It was always going to be based on the live performances of the band.
    17:55
    Particularly in the Wembley Stadium. Particularly in the Wembley Stadium, yeah. And that hasn't changed. That's exactly how it is now. I think it was originally going to be called Queen Live when it was a Highway Pinball game because of, that's exactly what it was. So they were showing concert footage rather than music videos. Right, and now it's called Queen Live in Concert. Yes, that's right. Well, Queen and then Live in Concert is almost a subtitle to it. Anyway, getting back to what's been announced, there are two versions of the game. There's the Champions Edition, which has a retail price of US$9,295. US dollars, and the Rhapsody edition, limited edition, which costs 10,995 US dollars, so $1,700 more. And that edition is limited to 1,000 units, I believe. It is indeed, and we believe that all the Queen games are going to be built by the same company who's been building the Alien Pinballs for Pinball Brothers, and that's Adresi Gaming, who are in Milan, in Italy, or in the outskirts of Milan. Right. So Yeah, and that has been confirmed to me by the PR guy from Pinball Brothers.
    19:16
    Too bad there's no gameplay video yet. It was a little bit of a weird announcement. There didn't seem to be anything in particular which prompted it, but I get the feeling that it was a licensor who wanted the game to be announced around about that time. I don't think the Inboard Brothers are necessary in their state to show everything they'd like to show of the game at the moment. Because, as you say, no gameplay video. I did wonder, although I haven't had this confirmed at all, whether the announcement was a tie-in with a recent news report about Queen, the band Queen, which was that they have just become the first act to sell over 7 million copies of an individual album which is Queen's Greatest Hits. Recently, another time to the timing of it, it spent its 1,000th week on the UK album chart and it's been calculated it's owned by one in four households in the UK. Right. So there was a bit of press and publicity all around the Queen If you look at those numbers It makes a lot of sense to do a queen pinball machine Absolutely, yeah I mean, it was one of the ones that hadn't been done before Yeah, exactly Now that Champions Edition that you mentioned That will only become available The first quarter of 2023 So up to then It looks like it will be the Rhapsody Limited Editions I don't know I'm not sure whether the game is actually going to be produced before that point, or whether that's going to be the first title, or the first model. From what I understood is that production will begin in September of this year. Oh, is it saying, yeah, it is saying the fall, yeah, and the autumn of this year. So I expect the game at least to be available, for example, at Pinball Expo in October.
    21:13
    Yes, I think it's going to make its first appearance in the US at the super awesome pinball tailgate party, which is being held at Cointaker, because Cointaker, of course, the US distributors for Pitbull Brothers games. So that's in September, I think. Yeah, probably. I don't know the date on my head. I got an invite for that. Yeah.
    21:35
    Oh, cheers. Lots of events, but being in Europe, slightly difficult. It is indeed. but I think that's where it's going to it's strange to have its first public presentation anyway how finished it will be at that point I'm very curious I think there was a slight either a video or a rendering of a virtual version of that game available on YouTube I'm very curious to see Code wise what they did with it And whether they managed To improve it I remember that video Where you basically hit a target And you get a snippet from a song Like You hit a target and it goes Radio Gaga And then you hit another target and you get a different song Which is kind of Sort of Random isn't it Yeah exactly So, oh well. Yeah, we'll see. So, anyway, we need to move on because we have a lot of news to cover this month. It's been very busy. And we have a very lengthy interview with Jersey Jack. We do indeed. So let's move to Jersey Jack as our next company because obviously they are making Toy Story, Toy Story 4 to be precise. Yes. And there's been some new code for that released this past month, version 1.07. which I expect, as it's being developed, it was already very well developed by the time the game was released. So these are now just a few little tweaks to it to change the multi-ball to qualifying difficulty and things like that, and on scoring in some multi-balls and a few other bug fixes and improvements and to help improve the score bit handling as well. So nothing major, but some tweaks to it. But obviously there's a lot of buzz around Toy Story at the moment. So we wanted to find out what's happening on that game and what's happening at the Jersey Jack Pinball Factory. So only one person to speak to about that, and that's Jersey Jack Guarneri himself. Since the last time we spoke, you've certainly launched at least one new game.
    24:15
    And tell us a little about how that went on launch day. You must have been pretty excited with the sales on the day.
    24:26
    Launch day was really great. I mean, it was kind of interesting because people are waiting a long time for your next product. and you're hoping, you know, that it's well received and people love it. And that's what happened. And it was strange to me in a little way because I was working on this title for such a long time. And what happened, you know, was like this title wave, which was great. And then I kind of stood back for a moment and thought of the historical part of it where nobody ever did Toy Story at all in the amusement industry on any product. And here's a Toy Story game. It's Toy Story 4, but, of course, there's elements of all the movies with the characters on the game. and, you know, we sold.
    25:30
    It's embarrassing to say how many dollars of sales there were because it's just very humbling. So it was great. It was really great. But I think it would be amiss of us to skip over the fact that it was Toy Story 4, which was not what people were expecting, I think. That's fair to say. I don't think I was really surprised that it was a Toy Story game. That had been well trailed in advance, if not ever sort of confirmed, officially. But there was a kind of, oh, it's Toy Story 4, rather than it's Toy Story.
    26:10
    Was that kind of expected? Did you think when you announced the game that people were going to say, oh, it's not what we were thinking it was going to be? or do you think that people just wouldn't mind it's Toy Story? Toy Story is Toy Story.
    26:28
    Personally, you know, I felt that Toy Story was Toy Story because I was so far into it for so long. I trusted and trust the design team, Pat Lawler and John Yowsey and his whole team to come up with the best assets, the best rules, the best play modes, the best action, the best thought work, the best sounds. You know, we had real people from the movie, you know, and they were doing voices, call-outs, things like that. So we spent a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of thought, a lot of energy, a lot of passion to make the greatest game we could make. And I think with the assets of Toy Story 4 and the storyline and the arc of the characters,
    27:24
    I think Toy Story 4 made the best representation of what to pick, especially with the video assets being the latest, greatest assets to work with. Tell us a little bit about the licensing of this then, because when you first licensed it, it was before Toy Story 4 was even released. So you had the first three movies, and that was what you licensed, correct?
    27:52
    Yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously over time that changed. But what was the... Well, it didn't really change. The only thing... Well, the only change was that Toy Story 4 came out. You know, we had Toy Story 1, 2, and 3. We didn't have 4. and then 4 was announced and then at some point and I don't remember the dates exactly but at some point it was announced that Toy Story 4 was being pushed back by a year and a half.
    28:22
    So at that time Pat focused on Willy Wonka because we had a longer window to get into Toy Story and I had a shorter window to complete Willy Wonka. I had a couple of other pinball companies trying to actually give me trouble about Willy Wonka, claiming, well, they're not doing it, they have the license, but they're not doing it, we want to do it kind of thing. So, you know.
    28:52
    Okay, this just got me thinking. If you have the license for Toy Story 1, 2, 3, and they're pushing back Toy Story 4, Wouldn't that just be a great opportunity For you to actually release Toy Story 1, 2, 3 And a year and a half later when Toy Story 4 comes out You get a new push For your game, basically It's a new movie, but 1, 2, 3 You know Why switch to Wonka Instead of saying You know what, we'll do 1, 2, 3 And good luck with 4 Well, you know everything's great in the rearview mirror. You know, you make a good argument, but at the time you're trying to work on something that's going to take you a long time to make it, and you don't know what the floor is going to be. And I'll tell you what kicked in in my mind. The hair on the back of my neck went up because I had The Hobbit, which was a great, great, great property. And The Hobbit was going to be two movies. Okay, but a character that's the main enemy, bad guy in the movie is Smaug the dragon And we don't know what Smaug's going to look like And now it went from being two movies to three movies Really? And I had this whole like deja vu all over again feeling like Yogi Berra said And I said, you know, I don't want to get into that because what happened with Hobbit, if we go down memory lane,
    30:35
    we released the game, we showed it with the assets we had, and Smaug looked like a wet rat once we saw what Smaug really looked like. And it took me a year to redo the game and more than a million dollars to do that to give the greatest impression of what the license was. And we were successful. You know, there's so much in that game, and there were four different models because we had so many assets. But timing is kind of the important thing. I didn't want that to repeat with Toy Story. I really didn't. And I said, okay, well, we actually know what Willy Wonka is. We know what the actors look like. We know what the music is. We know everything. We don't really know the whole story of Toy Story, how it's going to play out. And certainly no studio is going to trust me or any other pinball company with a multi-billion dollar franchise that people are going to keep their mouths shut and they're going to divulge character information and videos and all kinds of assets for something like this. So, you know, as I think about it, my previous experience taught me, don't go down that road. Let the road play up to me. And, of course, as you said, you had other companies breathing down your neck wanting to take the Wonka license away from you, so you had to bring that game out and satisfy Warner on that, too. Imagine jealous people or competitive people. Let's not say jealous. I'm not negative. I'm positive. So there are other competitive people that see you doing something, and they want to do it also. Not that they thought of it. It was an original idea. And they kind of said, hey, we understand so-and-so has this license, and they haven done anything with it in the year that they had it You know let us have it And you know when you get asked questions about things I want to be honest and I want to tell people that are partners with us in licensing and other things what's going on. And so the opportunity kind of presented itself to jump into Willy Wonka. And, you know, there were rumors that it was, you know, Toy Story became Willy Wonka, this, that, and everything. There was nothing there. There was nothing to speak of. One came, became another one. It didn't happen that way.
    33:19
    Okay. Now, when you were actually coming up with the Toy Story product, Toy Story 4 product, this is unusual because you brought out a limited edition and a collected edition. You didn't bring out a standard edition.
    33:36
    Why no standard? and also related to that, why have you limited the maximum possible run to 6,000 machines? Isn't that, is that something to do with the license? Or is that, that sort of restricts you in the future, doesn't it?
    33:55
    Well, so let me take your first questions first. The limited edition was always the great selling game and the collector edition was always the sellout. and the standard game, which the thought process was it was going to be for operators because operators, since I'm an operator, I could say we're a little bit more cost conscious. The standard game became the rarest games that we ever built because the operators bought limited and collector edition games and put them on their locations just because they could. So it wasn't a thing about price. So that model kind of from our portfolio eliminated itself because why would we make something and sell so few of them just to say that we have these three models? I mean, as the facts change, your opinion and your actions should change. You shouldn't just say, well, we're going to do it. Why are you doing it? Well, because we always did it that way. Well, it's probably not the right answer, you know. And putting a number on how many of something we're going to build, it's internal. You know, when we get to a number and we build it, we need to build the next game. We need to build the next game. We have four games in development right now.
    35:23
    You know, with Guns N' Roses, it was great. In a way, you know, you had to deal with the pandemic and all the things that go along with the pandemic. So we just focused on building Guns N' Roses and building it, building it, building it, building it, and doing that. And we kind of skipped a year where we didn't put out another game.
    35:45
    You know, ideally, I think we would love to put out a game every nine months or somewhere in that time frame to do it and get better and get along on track. but every time you have plans, what happens? Things change. And with all of the events of the world, we all know those things that have changed, how you do things and you adapt.
    36:14
    Does that mean standard editions are a thing of the past? Just quickly. At this point, I would say yes. I don't know that we would do it. You know, my famous quote, I don't own it, but never say never.
    36:31
    Anything's possible. So, you know, if you have me on your show in three years, you say, remember back when you said you would never do that. You know, I don't know. I don't think so. Maybe, but I don't think so. Any chance that we might see other models of Toy Story 4?
    36:50
    Any chance that you might see other models of Toy Story 4? I don't think so But again I would say You mean like what happened with Hobbit right Black Arrow Went back and made Black Arrow edition And all those you know And people it's a crazy thing I hear from people I'm not going to say every day but I would say a couple times a week where people call me And say you know anybody that has Hobbit games I'm really looking for Hobbit It's kind of funny right now touching back on what you just mentioned you said you have four games in development right now as we understood Pat Lawler retired that leaves three designers at Jersey Jack right now that we know of if each is working on one game then does that mean there's a fourth designer hmm no you do your math pretty quick you do your math pretty quick so I'm not ready to reveal anything at this moment but stay tuned okay well picking up on something that Jonathan mentioned there about PACT obviously he was instrumental in the company's success over recent years I couldn't help but notice that one of the first things that leapt out to me when I saw Toy Story 4 and the back glass was, oh, look, there's a PLD logo on it, the Pat Lawler Design logo. I haven't seen that on any of Pat's earlier games. I haven't seen that since he was a contractor working for Stern. So does that mean that Pat designed this game outside of his employment with Jersey Jack? had he actually retired by the time Toy Story 4 was designed and is he still because we haven't had an announcement that Pat was retired so what's the status with that at the moment what's his status with the company yeah I think the PLD logo the hand grenade pushing the red button I think that's on every game that he's done I don't think so Well, I think it's not really working. I went back and looked at every back glass, and I couldn't see it. Maybe it's somewhere else.
    39:20
    But I don't know. There's nothing unusual then about Toy Story 4 and Pat's status with the company at that point.
    39:31
    Well, I haven't heard Pat announce his retirement. I haven't heard that. So, you know, I've been asked the question in public and private, but, you know, did Pat retire? And my answer is the same, pretty much. I would say I would defer to ask Pat the question and let him provide the answer of what he's, you know, doing or not going to do. But, you know, Pat was important to bring into the company back in 2013, and I'm thrilled that he, you know, did what he did with the company for us. and I don't know what he's going to be doing in the future. I truly don't know. I haven't sat down with him and asked him what he's going to do. I think at this point he's taking some time off and he's deciding what he's going to do.
    40:30
    Well, at least that's something that we now sort of have a confirmation that he's taking time off. And hopefully all for the best Don't get me wrong I know he's signing He's signing collector edition plaques For the collector edition Toy Story game I know that As are you I guess As I am yes That's true So On a completely different Topic and we might get back to Toy Story for in a minute.
    41:10
    But obviously, you've been around the block a couple of times when it comes to selling pinball games, being the owner of a pinball company, Jersey Jack Pinball. You've attended plenty of pinball shows.
    41:31
    JGP is now 10 years in existence. if we look at probably the biggest competitor being Stern Pinball would you say there's a difference in Stern Pinball customers and Jersey Jack Pinball customers or is it just all people that love pinball well I think there's a loyalty to both companies I think there are people, when I had pinballsales.com and it was Stern's biggest distributor,
    42:08
    there was obviously one company making pinball machines, and the choices were limited, right? It was used or new, and if you were buying new, you were buying a new Stern pinball machine. When I started the company, it's 11 1⁄2 years now, going on 12, so it's a little sapling that's growing bigger as we go along.
    42:32
    You know, there were people that were early supporters of what I was doing. They just, you know, I haven't thought about it or talked about it in a really long time, but these people gave me money for a game they never saw and they never played. And for the most part, they waited patiently for a very long time to get the game. And I think I got an email from Paul Brown the other day from California, who's been a customer for more than 20 years, and he was with me in the beginning. Just so appreciative, thank you, and a humbling type of emails that I saw the Jersey Jack pinball because to a lot of people it was raising all the boats as the tide was lifted. So new technology, other companies adopted ideas that we had. To think of a game without RGB LEDs today or without a monitor in the back box or, you know, a subpar kind of sound system or, you know, Wi-Fi connectivity and all those things today, they're kind of all taken for granted. If somebody just came into the pinball scene right now, they wouldn't really know the history of how those things came about. In the beginning, what I wanted to do was keep the best love things about pinball and change some things and add some things, bring new technology, which I would believe would bring a new player base. And I try to do the same thing when I do licenses. I try to expand the player base with licenses and titles that we do. So what I said earlier, amazing to me that the coin op industry since 1995 and Toy Story came out as a huge hit for Pixar and Disney in 1995. Nobody, not one coin operated game manufacturer in the whole industry thought to license Toy Story. for any of their games. Not for a video game, not for a redemption game, not for a pinball machine. I must be some kind of genius, which I really don't think I am. But imagine that. Nobody ever did Wizard of Oz. Wizard of Oz was a 1939 movie. It took until 2011 for me to license Wizard of Oz. Then any Wizard of Oz was done for anything. So, again, you know, one of my favorite entrepreneurs who put a thing in the universe, deep jobs, try to give your customers what they don't even know they want yet. I think there's a lot of loyalty to Stern Football.
    45:28
    You know, I was happy to be a big part of helping Stern move forward. You know, I remember the days when I was selling Austin Powers and John Borg was on the line tweaking games, and then I called him a couple weeks later and he got laid off from the company. And it was the killer because, you know, that was what I was trying to sell was Thorn Pimble machines. And when we did Platinum Monopoly games and we did Gold Austin Powers and we did Gold Record Elvis games. When Gary and I had the idea of riding in this convertible, let's take Family Guy, it's such a great game that Pat Lola did, and turn it into Shrek and put green molding on it. That was so unusual. Gary said to me, you know, when Japanese car companies made cars and they made them with brown interior and black interior, once they went into colors, they got into all kinds of trouble. And look, Gary was very smart. He kept the company going, and we did a lot of work together to build pinball and to keep the flame alive. And look at today. Look at all these people that are designing pinball machines, all these little companies that are trying to get bigger. And what it is now is you have so many new people at the shows. You mentioned shows. You have so many new people at shows that are just discovering, not rediscovering, but discovering pinball for the first time. Young people, people with families, people with disposable income. In spite of inflation, in spite of quote-unquote recession, in spite of all those things, everybody is going to have a game for their home, for the experience of it. And these games, they're really priceless. You know, I never get people calling me, you know, from 25 years of selling games to the home, saying, hey, you know, we're moving, I'm selling my games. It just doesn't happen. People just take them with them, and it becomes part of the family, and they keep them. Well, picking up on something you were talking about there, all the other companies, when you started out, Jersey Jack, people 11 and a half years ago, you were able to offer the people buyer something they weren't getting from any other company or the only other company at the time. So you were able to bring them a fully featured, immersive, high-tech, large LCD, full sound system game.
    48:06
    Nowadays, there are still companies starting up, even today, announcing that they're going to get into the pinball business. There are companies still to announce they're about to come into the pinball business. What can they add that isn't already being catered for by the plethora of other companies already making games, including yourself and Stern and American and Multimorphic, you name them.
    48:32
    What new idea can a company that's starting now in the football business bring? Well, they can watch what we bring with our next games and then they'll know the answer. Okay, well Allow me to Rephrase Martin's question Or, well, maybe not rephrase Is this cross-examination now? No, no, no You mentioned that Nobody in the amusement industry Went after Toy Story 4 Nobody went after Willy Wonka Nobody went after the Wizard of Oz.
    49:17
    Now, if we sort of take a helicopter view on the pinball industry, could it be that pinball companies consider these themes to be suitable for kids, and we're taking ourselves way too serious and want to make the next cool stuff for teenagers and hipsters and not so much cater to the younger, the children community. Could that be the case? Right. So, I mean, bimbo companies are in the market to sell machines regardless of where they go, right? If you have a theme that children love, why not just make that game because you're in the business of building machines, right? Or do I get that wrong?
    50:17
    Variety is the spice of life, I think. I think if you make everything that's a comic book theme or blood and guts or just rock bands and things like that it gets boring, you know? I mean, there are rock bands that came to me that wanted me to do a game. and they sold 30 million albums. And then there's a rock band, a friend of mine came to me and said, he wants to do Guns N' Roses. Well, they sold more than 100 million albums. And the person's a friend and a co-designer, and so who am I going to go with to make the game? What am I going to do, make the game for the band that sold 30 million albums or the band that sold more than 100 million albums? You know, so some of these stories, they do write themselves. You know, you can be very adaptive, very open to things. And look, you know, I said it years ago, if I like chocolate ice cream and you like vanilla, and I only have a store that sells chocolate ice cream, I'm out of business. And what am I going to say? Well, nobody wants ice cream anymore. That's why there's so many flavors. And I think with pinball themes, there are some themes that really lend themselves to tell a great story, and you can get the assets, enough assets. There's never enough assets, let's say, but get enough assets to make a great game. But not everything is a pinball machine. I don't think I'll be doing certain different artists, certain different. You know, I got to say this, and I can't say names, unfortunately, at this stage, but there are people that contact me, and they're well-known artists, they're well-known bands, they're well-known groups, they're well-known type of license, and they want us to do a pinball machine. And they say, we only want Jersey Jack to do this game. We're not going to offer it to anybody else. And, you know, I respect them, and I have a conversation with them, and I explain that in the nicest of ways that while, yes, that person is great and I'm even a fan, it does not at all machine make.
    52:33
    And it's sad. You can't do them all. If we were making, you know, a broken record line for me, if we're making T-shirts or lunch boxes, it would be something different. But we're not. you guys know better than me what goes into these things to make them at the level that we make a game and there's a big commitment not just in money of course but time, energy and we all know you need a design team that cares about what they're making because I don't think I could have a kitchen where I'm serving a steak and have a vegetarian cook it and do with love. So you've got to get the right themes from the right people that design them, and they come out great. You mentioned the size of the team that works together to create these games. Would you say that right now Jersey Jack pinball is right-sized? Does it have the right number of people working for it?
    53:40
    We're always hiring, okay? There's never a bad time to hire a really talented, passionate person that wants to become the Jersey Jacket. As we're recording this, it's August 1st. I don't know if I'm giving away any secret. Tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of Steve Ritchie joining the company.
    54:02
    So just think of that. That was in the blink of an eye. that was a year ago that I was out there in Chicago with Steve and Pat in front of the door welcoming Steve to the building. So, you know, it's never a bad time to hire good people. Oh, wait, we can get Steve home.
    54:26
    Well, you can get Steve. I'm sure you can get Steve. Steve, why don't you go? I had a question Oh yeah I remember So What you just said about Certain bands Being interested in Becoming Featured in a Jersey Jack Pinball machine Or have a game themed after them I came to think of an artist, and I was wondering, would that actually fit the Jersey Jack criteria, so to speak? I can't imagine who you're thinking of. well since you're Jersey Jack pinball there is a worldwide known artist from New Jersey that hasn't been featured in a pinball machine ever and I figured actually I came to figure like why not and that would be Bruce Springsteen would that be a potential license for a Jersey Jack pinball machine you know it could be but you know bruce springsteen is funny there was just a picture of him in a newspaper today or online not the newspaper but online news was he was at a he was at a local bar in asbury park and he was wearing funny shoes and uh he's getting a lot of flack about the price of his concert tickets because they have something called dynamic pricing and uh some of these tickets now are four and five and six thousand dollars to watch a two and a half hour three hour concert and you don't get a pinball machine with that five to six thousand dollars you just get the memory of the experience of hearing him do his greatest hits and i did i did a great business level here yeah i mean um if bruce is listening and he wants to do a jersey jack game uh my number is all over the place, it's real easy to get in touch with me, just Google search me and I don't know that I'll have as many hits as he would have that come up, but it's easy to find me and we can talk about it. That doesn't sound like you, you're normally the one who goes chasing the licenses, you don't wait for them to come to you, do you? you know music's an interesting thing because you know music seems music games it took me a really long time to do a music game and people ask me a lot of times and i remember years ago even when we had games from the other company i used to sell games for it was i would almost use the word polarizing because there are people that either loved it or hated it and and you lost those three or four months or six months when you had that certain game to sell and nobody wanted to buy it you know it's it's hard to believe that in those days there was really only one game to buy and today um you know there's a lot of different games to buy brand new uh remakes uh used games so So I think you really have to be, you know, you have to be really committed to what title that you want to go after and what you want to build and what market it's going to be in, right? I've said it many times before. I mean, licensing, it's not difficult.
    58:14
    But brain surgery isn't difficult either if you're a brain surgeon, right? So the way I feel about licensing, it's not really difficult. I look for things that cross geographic boundaries and cultures. I look for things that are multigenerational and something that you can tell a story about and have fun with. I'm still hearing Bruce Springsteen.
    58:41
    So he'll shut it down a bit. You can get such... You never know. I don't know how to... Multigenerational? internationally known.
    58:54
    I don't know how you found out what our next game is, but, you know, I'm a little strangled. So are you still sort of trawling the marketing catalogs of various movie, TV, music, and other companies to looking for licenses, or are you kind of well set for the next few years now?
    59:22
    We have a number of licenses, but again, you know, just what I said about employees before and people that want to come work with us, I'm always looking because these things, they sometimes take years to negotiate, believe it or not. And then when music is attached to them, sometimes the music takes years to negotiate. and to get all the start dates lined up and all the end dates lined up and all the stakeholders lined up and everybody to agree. And so it's a fun process. I love it. It's only part of what I do.
    60:06
    But, you know, if you get Bruce Springsteen to call me and we have a good conversation. I might entertain that.
    60:18
    I don't think he owns his music anymore. I'm not really up on Bruce Springsteen. Oh, so it's just only, I think.
    60:26
    Yeah, so there's somebody else to negotiate with. Yeah, that's right. You already make it harder for me now, you know. This guy doesn't even control. What kind of guy is this? He don't even control his own music. Oh, but the thing is, he probably doesn't own the master recordings of his songs, but any new show that he does, if it gets recorded, is a new master. So, take a live recording. And I understand Bruce is the greatest live, so why not? Are you going to buy me some tickets of Dynamics, I think, for a show in New Jersey?
    61:06
    I'm not sure how dynamic my wallet is. What do you think about that? Isn't that It's just amazing people. I know we all... For me, it works the other way around. I mean, I see concerts where I want to go, and we have this thing here called Ticket Swap. There's always people bailing out at the last minute that they can't go, and I buy the tickets for $10, and I intend to show that people paid $100 for them.
    61:33
    Wow. So that's also dynamic pricing, I suppose, but it works the other way around. So I get the same show for cheap. I haven't seen any and I'm not embarrassed to say that well I got to go with Joanne a week or two ago a couple weeks ago to see Billy Joel for the 10,000th time in Madison Square Garden she's I would say a super fan and she got tickets first row right behind the stage which she would say behind the stage what kind of tickets are those you know and I think she paid 150 bucks a seat and online they were going for like a thousand crazy after a while. And I had, even though I've seen Billy Joel since 1975, I had a great time at the show because we were right there. We were, you know, a few feet away. And then you're looking at Madison Square Garden path and people all the way up like have to see him on the jumbotron or with binoculars. And it was just a great show. I had a great time. I always have a good time with Joanne, but, you know, I had a great time because the concert was good, and I was closed up, and I felt like I was in it. I wasn't looking at a TV. Yeah, I wasn't looking at a TV in a concert or, you know, hearing the sound. It was a whole different experience. So I get why people want to be closed, you know, but you can't always be closed. Well, not that there are 60,000 people that want to be closed.
    63:05
    That's challenging, you know. Well, you know, I tell you what, Manhattan is back. The city's back. Everywhere I've been is just packed with people, and I think they're just thrilled to get out and get back to normal life and do things that we weren't able to do for a year or so. It's just great.
    63:24
    Yeah. Kind of speaking of which, you mentioned just now that licensing is just a part of your day-to-day work. Do you want to tell us roughly, as an example, what other aspects of the company you work for, control, or decide on?
    63:44
    What's the job? Well, I'm involved with all of the games that are in production. I'm involved with the processes, the calls that happen, Zoom calls, meetings. tomorrow I'm going to Chicago for the day I'm just taking a quick hop out there because I got a lot of other things going on this week but go out for the day 5.29 tomorrow morning I'll be boarding my flight I'll be celebrating with Steve I suppose yeah that kind of worked out by accident but yeah I guess so I want to see how he's doing physically with my hands on his game and shoot it and everything like that, and I want to check in with Eric, I want to check in with Mark, and being there is a little different than, you know, being on Zoom. You know, being on Zoom and all of that kind of stuff. So, you know, the day goes pretty quick. I get these, sometimes I get these podcast people that want to talk to me for hours. Oh, they go there. You know, those guys, you know, I try to stay away from that. You know, I do get a good number of customer calls during the day. People call me about a lot of different things.
    65:09
    Sometimes a problem, believe it or not, and most often it's a lot of good things. So, you know, I don't know. You know, I'm busy, which is great. Okay. I have a design-related question. Now you not a game designer but you in touch with the designers and so on and so you might be able to answer this question As you know we facing supply chain issues well, the industry is facing supply chain issues, which is causing difficulty to actually manufacture or continue manufacturing games that use certain parts, because those parts are not available.
    65:59
    With new games being designed, is there a policy to sort of like try to design a game that doesn't use parts that might become difficult to source? Or is it just designers have free reign and they should design the best game, whatever, regardless of the parts that they want to use in that game? it's more the latter than the former because I thought you were going to say we could define games without plots and stop the sentence there but that's not possible you've got to give people the freedom to be creative and make things that haven't been made before you still want to see that you don't want to see every game have a spinning disc and an inline drop target set in every game just because you have them in stock.
    66:55
    I don't think that's the way to encourage creativity or actually to encourage sales and people loving what you're doing. I think, you know, you still have to...
    67:14
    Yes. I think we lost each other. And you want to make something? No, there we go. We're back. We'd love to for a second, Jack.
    67:25
    Oh, okay. I mean, you still have this area, and you want to do something that hasn't been done before, and that's always a challenge.
    67:36
    And, you know, I guess songwriters have that problem. I guess artists have that problem. I guess a chef has that problem. You know, you have certain ingredients you can cook with, and you want to be more creative and make something interesting that people will love. And that's what you want to cook up. You want to cook up the best game you possibly can.
    67:57
    I'm going to pick up on Jonathan's point about supply chain issues. This has been something that's been going on for a couple of years now, pretty much ever since the pandemic. How has the supply changed over that time period? Have various parts sort of become more and less available, or is there a general increase in availability now, or is it just the same as it always was?
    68:25
    Well, you've got to remember something. When I started the company, there were vendors that were told if they dealt with me, they would never deal with other people. So my supply chain problems started the moment I started the company.
    68:38
    It was long before, it was way long before the paperboy knew what the supply chain was, right? It was Jack started a football company. Well, we're going to make sure Jack doesn't get any parts so he can't play any games.
    68:55
    So, you know, you navigate around things. I'm sorry. You know, you navigate around things. I mean, we are a company that has some really talented, creative people that problem solve, right? And they anticipate a lot of things. do we run into a speed bump once in a while? Sure, everybody does. But you know what? We pay our vendors very, very well in a very timely way, and they love dealing with us because we don't have to go to a bank to borrow money or anything like that. Okay? We're very self-sufficient financially. We're very capable of doing whatever we need to do, and our vendors love us for that. So, you know, we've had problems. I wouldn't say we didn't have problems, but we navigate around them. And, you know, we keep innovating as well. You know, when you innovate technologically, you're always adding new things to what you're doing. You know, when you keep things the same, it's safe, but you kind of get the same thing all the time. I was just wondering whether you see any kind of easing in availability or lack of availability, I should say, of components, like electronic components, whether that is something which has not changed over the years or whether it's something which now COVID is starting to be less of a factor.
    70:28
    You're finding various components of your games are becoming more available. Well, I have a friend that unloads ships. He works at the top of one of these gigantic crane things that lifts the containers off. And I saw him a few weeks ago. He's working like more than 100 hours a week, which is amazing.
    70:50
    I can't even imagine what he makes. But anyway, he was telling me about California, and he said that there was, I'm going to get this wrong, but you'll get the right idea. You know, like a few months ago, there were 120 ships waiting to offload their goods, and as of a couple of weeks ago, there were only something like 18 waiting to offload their goods. So I don't know how true that is. I don't know if it's factual, but, you know, he does that, and I'm sure he talks to his counterparts around the world. so that seems to be easing up you hear better things about retail stores having stock of things maybe some retail stores have too much stock of things and prices are on the barrel and other things might be coming down I'm not an economist and I don't know excuse me I don't know enough about the whole situation do you still see cars sitting in parking lots where they're not getting delivered because they're missing chips I was with a friend over the weekend that was telling me he picked up a BMW, or I think it was a BMW, and there were chips missing from the car where the heated seats didn't work and some other creature comfort things like that didn't work because they're waiting for chips for different features in the car. But you can take delivery of the car, so I guess if it's cold and the weather changes, you better go out with a cooling warmer or something like that. Warm up your seat because your seat's not going to work because there's no chip. Never record it in any seat heaters. I'll take one of those BMWs without those chips. Yeah, you know, so I don't know. That is a very interesting point you're making there because one of the things that I've noticed now is happening more and more is that things like heated seats, heating steering wheels, heated windscreens, things like that, they're starting to become post-purchase options. So you can buy the car, and then you decide, you know what, I think I like the heated seats. And you pay the company, and they'll enable it remotely in your vehicle.
    73:09
    So, yeah, it's absolutely happening now. People are getting mixed feelings about this. It's like the downloadable content, the DLC. So how about they put you on a subscription service for your heated seats? Yeah, absolutely. You know, in the summertime you don't pay for it, but in the winter you've got to pay like $30 a month for the winter. In the wintertime I need my heat seated, in the summer I need air conditioning, so charge me for heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer. I was just wondering whether that was a model that Jersey Jack Pinball might embrace, in that you buy a game and you buy upgrades afterwards. Well, we're doing Scorebit, which is an amazing online connectivity feature of our game. It's loaded into the games. There's no charge for it. There's no monthly charge for it. You don't have to scan some kind of antique code on your phone or anything like that. And it's awesome. And there's a lot more features and a lot more things coming out with that in the future. That's going to be even more exciting. I didn't put a full-scale computer in the game to do nothing with it. You know, that thing can fly to Mars and beyond.
    74:28
    As great as that all sounds. Infinity and beyond, actually. Right, okay. So as great as that sounds, what about heated lock bars and paper buttons?
    74:38
    You know, Jonathan, that's a damn good idea. How about lock bars that sanitize themselves would be even better. well that's true I was just thinking in relation to Toy Story because you do have in the collector edition you have additional content in the game which is not in the limited edition so would that be something which you could unlock by purchasing an upgrade I mean you could obviously purchase upgrades for the hardware so right now all your listeners just cringed and they said Please don't give Jack any more ideas. Oh, I'm sure you've thought of that in many discussions about what you can sell. Please don't give Jack any more ideas. Hold on. I think at this point our marketing leader starts running.
    75:33
    Well, you know, before you wanted me to give away all kinds of ideas to pinball companies starting out, telling them what they should do. I don't know. I just gave him a great idea I hope so I hope somebody announces We've been waiting for that Heated slipper buttons You know So Okay We've talked about licensing You've done The licensing for Jersey Jack now For almost 12 and a half years Or something like that I lost count is there a license that another pinball company picked up that you were like I would have loved to get that for Jersey Jack you know I think if I answer that honestly yes there probably is and now you follow up the question now you follow up the question what is that license exactly Exactly. What is that? You're just as quick as me and my mom. Yeah, well, I'm probably not going to say, but, you know, you can't get them all, right? So you can't get them all, and you hope for the best execution and the best reaction from the customer base because I think more people is good. I think more manufacturers is really good. I think the industry gets healthier I think the shows get bigger I think the awareness of pinball gets bigger the more people doing it you know if you only have one you know bidder in an auction it's not an auction it's no fun so it's nice to see what people think sometimes I see licenses and I say to myself gee that why would somebody do that you know and sometimes it seems to work out good and sometimes it seems to work out not so good. I have seen some licenses other people have that I've passed on.
    77:48
    So, you know, maybe they go and they say to somebody, you know, Jersey Jack really wanted this, but we wouldn't give it to him. But we're going to give it to you instead. So, okay, well, it's a good way to pitch it, you know.
    78:03
    Right. Yeah, there was something else I was going to ask you which I can't actually remember exactly what it was at this moment so I will ask Jonathan if he has another question while I try and remember what it was I was going to ask well the only question when you sort of touched on it you mentioned that you were sort of aiming to release a new title every nine months and I was wondering I think in earlier interviews you indicated that we might see a second JJP game revealed this year but I'm also curious would that mean that we get to see two titles next year am I still here? yeah you're still here Well, that would be a great thing. Wouldn't that be a great thing? I mean, we have this amazing customer base that I'm always humbled that they love what we do. And they respond in kind by buying and loving the games that we do. So we don't take that for granted. we would like to see two games a year and depending on how time goes there's not 18 months to a year right so there's going to be a game if we're on a nine month kind of schedule there's going to be nine months and you know one game there could be a year in there where they both one comes in early and one comes in late and there's still nine months apart right so if you had a game in the earlier part of the year and a game nine months later you can still hit october november december something like that you know right it would be nice i i'd like to see that i mean i see i see all the internal progress that's being made with with um people and processes and um all the things happening and it's it's very encouraging to me you know when you when you start something that was basically a chemical reaction in your brain, and then it becomes this amazing reality where there are thousands of games all over the world, and people playing them, and people have every game, and you see them everywhere, and I no longer can keep track of all the many things that go on because of the games around the world.
    80:46
    It's kind of really cool. It's kind of really cool to see that. You mentioned earlier while we were talking about the way that operators tend to purchase games in the early spring for a summer season, particularly in Europe, and then later in the fall. Nothing much happens during the summer months. Is any of that, does any of that impact on when you announce a new title or with your focus being more on the home collector market, do you just announce a game when the time is right or when you're contractually obliged to?
    81:26
    Yeah, I think my standard answer for that is it's never a bad time to launch a great game. So I think when the game is ready to go is the time to launch it. I wouldn't mind.
    81:40
    I don't know if it will ever happen. and I wouldn't mind having a game or two in the bag ready to go and be able to launch it at a specific time, you know, of our choosing to match the nine-month window, let's say, or something like that.
    82:02
    So we have to see. You know, again, it's still a lot of things in play when you, you know, we've said this a million times, you know, and there's a lot of parts and a lot of people and a lot of processes to coordinate to get everything together. It's amazing to me, and I'm only doing this now 46 years.
    82:32
    Well, I guess we'll let him. We'll open him up. Yeah, people open him up and they work. So it's just an amazing thing. now it's um toy story was unique in many ways toy story 4 um particularly in the fact that you had a large number of games pre-assembled ready to go at the launch time and obviously that is something you've been working towards ever since you started the company was that kind of level of stock was that only possible because you were able to keep running guns and roses for such a long time or is that something you think you'll be able to maintain for future releases?
    83:14
    Well, you know, when you're running Guns N' Roses, you can't build the other game because both lines are building Guns N' Roses.
    83:21
    But you have Guns N' Roses, don't you? It doesn't just stop suddenly. Well, you plan out when you're going to end that game and when you're going to start the next game and change over the line and train people and start building games and make sure what you're building works and go from there. But it was real important to everybody in the company that we have a good amount of games to be able to ship day one, see them on location, see them in public venues. I asked our distributors,
    83:57
    and the call that I did with all our distributors around the world in advance of the release of the game, And I asked all the distributors to try to get games on location because more eyeballs and more hands would be on the game to see and play it. You know, there's nothing wrong with home sales, right? I find it home sales, but not everybody is Jason Ruffer where they could have 100 people over there. They're born 200 people over there to play a game and do a launch party or something like that. And it happened that way. I still see so many games popping up every day. I see several a day some days where they're on more and more locations. And I think it was great. It was a great execution. I was very happy about it. I think everybody was happy about it.
    84:47
    And do you think that the way the market has changed now in the amount of time it takes for some people to get a game, they can order the game on the launch day and they may not get it for a year. and that's obviously very different from how the market used to be. You know, in six months' time, the run will be done and you wouldn't see any more of that model again. Are people happy? You know, are people patient and willing to wait that kind of lead time on their games or does everybody, you know, I've got to have the game now while it's still hot?
    85:24
    Yeah, there's a little of all of that, all those flavors are in their mind because the people that ordered more were allocated more. The people that ordered less were allocated a little bit less. So if a distributor ordered 100 games, for argument's sake, they were allocated a percentage of the 100 games so that they had some stock. Now, what I heard from some distributors weeks ago was that, hey, you know, my customer's on a cruise, and the game I set aside for them, they're not going to be back for two weeks, so I can take this game and sell it to a customer right now, and in two weeks I'll have more games, so I'll be able to replace his game, because we're building games faster. So, you know, some distributors had seemingly games in stock, which is what we really wanted to have, and some distributors didn't have games in stock, because, you know, it's an old thing in our industry. You have, sometimes you have distributors that say, you know, if I could get the games, I could sell them. Right. Well, that's true. That's a good point. But if you order them, you can actually get them. If you don't order them, we're not going to build them and ship them to you. So, you know, you have to manage your business, you know, and what are you doing? You can't just wish or hope. You know, hope is good for Sunday morning in church. It's not good to run a business on hope or wishing. So, you know, if a distributor says the line to me like, well, you know, I could have sold a lot more if I could get them, you know, well, actually you would have gotten a lot more if you would have sold... What can I do? In all of your collector edition games, there are only a certain number of them. I limited edition, but that's the problem. If there are only a thousand, what's the right number of collector edition games?
    87:25
    You know, I don't pretend to know. I don't know, you know, because look, what did I say many, many, many years ago? I mean, they built 22,000 Addams families. Go find a good Addams family right now. I mean, if you find a good one, it's like 25 grand. You know, so building 1,000 collector games from the entire face of the earth, that's not a lot of games. It would have been a lot of games 20 years ago when there weren't this many people involved in buying pinball machines, especially for their home. Today, it's not a big number. People hear a number of games. Wow, there's a thousand. Those aren't, wow, how many? They must be all over the place. Really? I'm still getting calls daily from people saying to me, listen, if you've got somebody who drops out, I need a game. or we've had celebrities call us. We've had major business personalities, people that run like Fortune 50 companies, call up and say, Jack, you know, I don't know you, but I know you're Jersey Jack, and I'm really looking for a collector edition Toy Story game. My kids love the game. My grandkids love the game. I really need to get this game. And I'll be like, okay, well, here's a couple of distributors, that, you know, you can talk to, and if they have somebody drop out, I'm sure you can get a game. You know, what am I going to do?
    88:53
    We wanted to make money on this. We wanted to put in there. Well, you wanted parts for 1,000 games. We didn't order parts for 2,000 games, so it's a finite amount. And we're not going to go back and order more parts. It's done. It's finished. It's done. I see a bright business model for dynamic pricing on collector edition games?
    89:15
    I think it happens. It's called the free and open market. I mean, you know, obviously, go buy a collector edition Pirates of the Caribbean. You know, I was with you guys in London, and you interviewed me, and we were talking about Pirates of the Caribbean. And it was January that year, and I announced, very nonchalantly, by the way the factory is sold out of Pirates of the Caribbean and there were some people that just said oh you know that's just Jack being Jack he's a sales guy he's Jersey Jack what's he going to say and I don't know when I tell people the truth and they want to overlay it with some kind of bluster or whatever and then they find out there are no games and now those games are going for I don't even know what they're going for a few dollars more than what they cost originally I would guess So it's supply and demand. There's a very, very big demand for Jersey Jack pinball machines, thank goodness, and again, very humble about it and very thankful for it, but there's not supply. There's not supply. Could we go back and build more Wizard of Oz games? Could we go back and build more pirate games? Could we go back and build more of another model?
    90:33
    I guess we could, but I've said it before. I like to go forward. The windshield is a lot bigger than the rearview mirror. Let's go forward. Let's make some more new games. You know, let's go create more.
    90:46
    And those people who did buy the Pirates games, is there anything, you mentioned it earlier, everybody asked the question. I'll ask you too. Is there any hope? The software update is coming soon. Yes, the software update is coming soon. There are a large group of people that test software with our team, and they know what's going on so that the rest of the world knows what's going on. We've never abandoned any game. You know, people in the beginning said, oh, they'll never finish the code for Wizard of Oz. Really? It was years and years later, we're still releasing code for Wizard of Oz. You know, we're still releasing code for games.
    91:24
    You know, we want it to be on the scoreboard platform. We want it to be the best it's going to be. The people that work on these things do them with, you know, it's like a broken record again. It's just the level of intensity and passion that they have to do this stuff is just off the chart. And we're thankful for it. But, you know, it takes time. It takes time to do it the right way.
    91:50
    Getting back to the number of collector's editions, we were just talking about any chance of that becoming a dynamic number at some point in the future? But, you know, I think this time around we saw that 1,000 games probably wasn't enough, okay? And I'm not saying that the next one will have more than 1,000 games.
    92:17
    It would be nice to come to a number where everybody's happy. You know, last time with Guns N' Roses was 500 games. it wasn't enough because, you know, people just went crazy with the games. So this time around with 1,000, my hope, again, hope is that word, was that it would be the right number. You know, distributors got allocated games based on what they wanted and based on what their sales were before. so there were distributors that got games and they wanted more. No distributor that was allocated games said, this is too many games, take some back. Or no distributor didn't say, well, if you have any cancellations, I want more games. And really, here's the big disadvantage right now with the collector edition Toy Story game. Nobody's really seen the game. So when this game gets out there and people see it, touch it, feel it, and play it, that's when some people are going to go a little wacky. That's when there's going to be some feeling that, gee, I'm so thrilled I got this game. And that's a lot different. Your imagination is great, but reality should not disappoint with the game. I think everybody would be very happy with the game. There'll also be a lot of people who see the game and think, I wish I could buy one of those and they can't because they didn't know at the time or they were too slow or they didn't I don't want to use the word too openly because it has connotations but they didn't believe that the game was going to be as good as it is that kind of implies that the number is too low you know, you should make more so again Go back to what the title is, right? So with the game with the title Toy Story, and all the boxes that game checks worldwide, you know, the first Disney Pixar kind of franchise and the movie series is over. It's not going to be a Toy Story 5 or a Toy Story 6 movie.
    94:42
    You know, we memorialized the series with Toy Story 4 and people are always going to want that game. I think it's going to become a classic like Wizard of Oz and like so many of our other games where it's there, you got it, great, you love it. You know, people that want it, people that are waiting for it right now, I talk to some of those people and they're just so happy and so excited that they got a collector edition game coming. We had some customers that actually bought limited edition Toy Story games so they had something to play. And then when their collector game comes in, they're going to sell their LE game to somebody else. So they love what we did. I can't argue with that. I would never argue with the customers. So they love what we did. I'm happy to hear that. And there you have it. Jack Guarnieri of Jersey Jack Pickball. Thank you for your time and such a lengthy interview with quite a few scoops, actually. Yeah, I think it's very interesting.
    95:52
    Obviously a few things that can only be hinted at, but hopefully you got the idea of what Jack was referring to. Yeah, yeah.
    96:01
    I was surprised to see that I touched on a couple of subjects that Jack wasn't expected to talk about, which he didn't, but sometimes you can say a lot by not saying anything. Absolutely, yes. Good. So thanks again to Jack, and time to move on to our next company. And, well, there's quite a lot to pick from these days. Who should we go with? Well, let's go with Stern Pinball, because that's in my stream right now. Oh, okay. Right. So, well, they've certainly been expanding their insider-connected leaderboard system throughout July, I guess. So they started off with a global rush leaderboard, which basically...
    96:53
    It's got two more, if I'm not mistaken. It's fine, I've always got two more. Oh, yeah, but this month it was rush, I think. That ran from July the 1st through to the 14th of July. Now, I haven't been paying much attention to these leaderboards. I've seen the news, of course, but I figured it would be like, okay, you've got your game connected, and there would be worldwide leaderboards on every title that they have produced. Apparently not. Oh, well, there are, but they only run for a very short amount of time, each one, rather than being perpetual. So you've got like two weeks in order to play the game and get your name on the high scores. so as I say, Rush was the first half of the month ran through to Bastille Day on July the 14th and then from the 15th to the end of the month, the 31st it was Mandalorian time so if you didn't take part in any of those, it's too late now but I'm sure they will be recycling that idea and bringing those games and other games into play there's probably one running right now, I just don't know exactly what it is Right, okay. And then there was the San Diego Comic Con, where Spare usually has an appearance, and in the past they teamed up with, kind of forgot the name a metal company a metal record label And this year they sent out a press release that they are actually teaming up with the Rebellion Republic who are doing music merchandise.
    98:29
    And Stern will be, or actually, well, they share the booth together. And I suppose it was Rebellion Republic who booked rock singer Ozzy Osbourne and comic book artist Todd McFarlane for some signing sessions in their booth.
    98:52
    Yeah, I think McFarlane had been doing a special edition of comic to coincide with Ozzy Osbourne's highly anticipated new album called Patient No. 9. Yes. It did seem a bit of a strange pairing of those two and Stern Pinball on the same stand. No obvious connection at this stage, we should say. Yeah, well, there has been some speculation since the announcement, of course, that Ozzy Osbourne will be featured in a Stern Pinball machine. And Todd McFarlane is actually the creator of the Venom comic, which is rumoured to be featured on a Stern Pinball machine. actually probably on their next Cornerstone title. Yes, so the rumour has it. That wasn't Stern's only appearance at Comic-Con, because they also had their Stern Pinball pop-up arcade, which was running in... At the Marriott. At the Marriott Hotel. Yes, the Marriott. Yeah, I think it was hosted by Jack Danger. Last year's I followed that, this year I didn't, but it always is a fun event to go to, and people can win lots of Stern swag and so on. So, yeah, people who hardly play pinball at all play it one time at a show and go home with lots of Stern merchandise that they are really clueless about what to do with.
    100:20
    And give it to us for our quiz. That would be great. Yeah, exactly. So Stern was present at Comic-Con But unlike Some people predicted And many were expecting No game reveal No, not yet They obviously didn't announce a game Earlier in the year So we're kind of expecting An announcement fairly soon Well they did announce That their second Cornerstone title For this year would be revealed Or announced in August which is the month where we're currently at. So this month, and we'll talk about it in our upcoming recap of August, of course, next month, we're expecting a new Stern title to draw. Yep. So we already hinted what we suspect it's going to be. Right. So we'll be looking at those. Yeah. Yeah, other announcements from Stern, they're doing a new edition of their Heads of Stern Pinball Invitational, where eight players get to showcase their skills on Godzilla. I think last year the winner won a pinball machine, but it was only eight players. it felt kind of odd and I'm not even sure whether the level of play was that competitive at the time well it is an invitational so if you're invited you're in luck because you have a chance of winning a pinball machine yeah not bad but how you get picked is one of the mysteries of life so we'll wait to see whether people will be able to qualify for a Stern Pinball invitation. Previously minimum qualification was to live in the area around Stern Pinball Factory. Right. And a little bit of other news. Gary Stern was interviewed for Barstool Gamers or something like that, or Barstool Sports I think. I think they linked to that on the Stern social media. So if you're interested in hearing Gary Stern and dish up the story that he told already a thousand times before. Check in with that. No disrespect to Gary, but of course, if you... It's a different audience, isn't it? Well, yeah. They won't have heard him speak before. It's not aimed at pinball fans. It's aimed at, well, I guess bar people. Yeah. So, oh well. But the big news this month from CERT is no new code. Oh, there goes my net. Oh, sorry about that. You'll have to stay awake for the rest of the podcast.
    103:12
    Along with, hopefully, with the listeners, both of them. So let's move on then. So we've got no new code to send you off to sleep. Let's see what we can bring up from some of the other companies. Yeah, okay. So some people are very excited about the next topic.
    103:31
    I'll still have to see it. But, well, we thought we'd seen the end of Deepwood Pinball, and maybe we have, but maybe we haven't. No, because instead we've seen the launch this month, or I should say last month in July, of a new pinball company called Turner Pinball. Yeah, technically I think I did a Whois on the website, and I think it was registered in April. So It's already in existence for a couple of months But they surfaced This month They did a sort of puzzle which was kind of complicated I believe from watching The video where they were talking With the winner of the puzzle Who solved it And Oh well It seemed a bit sort of nerdy to me Because if this is the Launch of a new pinball company You spend the first 20 minutes talking about a word search puzzle you put on, not even your own website, but the old DeepRoot Pinball website. Yes, so the story is Chris Turner owns a company called Turner Logic who did the programming for the DeepRoot Pinball machines that never got to see the light of day. And also, I believe, did some of the financial software for DeepRoot, a group of companies who were the investment. Right, okay. So, having had a bit of taste of pinball, Chris expressed in a video that's currently available on turnerpinball.com that he is looking to work in pinball more, and that's why he set up Turner Pinball as a subdivision of Turner Logic, so to speak. but working in pinball doesn't mean necessarily to me that he will be manufacturing games especially this is a programmer well yeah although it seems to be expanding into areas not strictly related to programming or software I mean his company, Chris teamed up with somebody else and they bought all the life insurance policies that Deep Root had.
    105:53
    So they got them at a very good price. So they're now in that business. And he also bought an awful lot of the assets which were on sale as part of the liquidation of Deep Root Pinball. Right. And although he's very keen to say he's not Deep Root Pinball 2.0, started off by using the DeepRootPinball website which now that the puzzle is over redirects to turnerpinball.com website and the prize for the person who solved the puzzle was a DeepRootPinball translate so not entirely mixed messages yeah ok So the message I got, and excuse me for not over-hyping this or getting really enthusiastic about it. So we got a programmer with a lot of cash who's interested in working in pinball, but that doesn't mean that you know how to actually manufacture pinball machines. And we have seen that go wrong too many times. I wish him all the best. Oh, absolutely. But the only advice I would give at this point is, like,
    107:20
    it only happens if you have the right team around you. So get the right team and see if you can make it happen. And he's already expressing in the video that's on the website that it's going to be a long journey, so I'm not expecting any games to be announced anytime soon. But I'm still happy to see that we have another party interested in pinball manufacturing. It does seem that he's actually trying to buy more of Deep Root Pinball's intellectual property, which is a bit odd.
    107:54
    But, you know, I don't know if that means that he wants to buy any of their designs for games and bring those into production. I kind of hope not. It would be nice to see, you know, it would be nice to draw a line under that at all, after the experiment with DeepRoot and move on and do something new with a more positive spin on it. Well, we might want to draw a line, but we know that American Pinball is also looking at buying some of the IP of DeepRoot Pinball. So some of these designs are very likely to appear at some point in the future with some companies. Yeah, but it could be re-themed into another game and not even be apparent that it was a Deep Root Pinball design. Yeah, that's true. Okay, so we wish Chris Turner and everybody at Turner Pinball the best of luck with their new company, and we will bring you updates as and when we have anything to report. Right, okay. So, moving on overseas all the way to Taiwan, where HomePin is based, I'll leave this one to you Well there hasn't been a huge amount of news From Homepin this month They did show a picture of An instruction card from This is Spinal Tap Which includes Some rules Which are maybe not the Clearest rules to be honest But I'm sure it will all make sense Once you actually get your hands on the flip buttons But they also announced a special USB programming cable for updating the code in home pin machines.
    109:35
    Well, you know, most other companies seem to allow you to either put a USB stick or an SD card in with new software and it will update itself. Or Wi-Fi. Or Wi-Fi, very good. Yes, that's right. Well, apparently for home pin games you need to plug a laptop or a desktop computer into a USB port, or use the USB port of one of those computers with this special cable and connect it to the home game and run a special bit of software on your computer to upload the new code, which kind of almost takes you back to the, like, pinball 2000 days where you had to do that kind of thing then.
    110:21
    But, well, I suppose they're probably not going to be updating them that frequently. So, once you've got the cable, then you'll be good to update any of the home pin machines in the immediate future.
    110:36
    Yeah, the best news we keep, of course, for last, and that is that this is final circle has a mechanical knocker and a bell in the back box. Indeed, yeah. An electrical bell, I should say, one that can be powered on demand by the game. So... Like a doorbell. And who is it? That's right. As I said before, the game's going to preview at the Pinfest show in Australia. Yeah, that's in September.
    111:14
    Yes, correct. And I'm hoping social media is already referring on a regular basis to the Pinfest website and so on. Well, we look forward to seeing the game revealed, and obviously we're still very curious.
    111:34
    This is Final Tap, it's a theme that has been anticipated by many people, so the bar is pretty high on what people's expectations are, and it's very easy to get off on the wrong fruit, I would say, if you don't meet people's expectations. Oh, I think expectations are mixed, because yes, like everyone can see, it's a fantastic theme, and with lots of possibilities, but on the other hand, it's the next game after Thunderbirds. So, you know, there's a mix there of, somewhere in between those two possibilities is where this final tap is going to come. Right, okay. Well, we'll just have to wait and see. Yep, we should all should be revealed in September. Right, so moving on to Pimble Adventures, which is a company that has been announcing a bunch of titles, including the Pony Factory and Elements.
    112:37
    Actually, not so much news. We're still waiting for production games to show up, which apparently have been in production for some months, but at the moment it seems that the production pace is not that high and I still have the feeling that besides a contracted design team I still get the feeling that this is a sort of a one man show which doesn't have to mean that it's a bad thing if you can source it out to the right parties you can get a long way but for all we got this month on Instagram was a gift from God U-turn shot from the Elements game, which is not even the game that's supposed to be in production and a switch matrix breakout board for Pony Factory where individual switches are connected to the rows and columns. Yeah, I thought it was interesting they had a dedicated board just for Pony Factory it's not like a general purpose board where it could be used on lots of different games every switch output was labelled on the board with exactly what it connects to on the polyfactory playfield so you know maybe I mean that's probably fair to say that most games these days have custom PCBs under the playfield usually for light and to connect switches and solenoids so not that unusual but I thought it might have been a bit more sort of a generic board because all it does is it has the switches and columns, sorry the rows and columns for the switch matrix coming in on one side and coming out on the other and sort of at the sides is where I think like something like 16 different switches can be connected. It doesn't need to be specific to that game but it is, it says body factor on it and everything is labelled according to its use. Yeah it was interesting to see that they were working on the elements the game and trying to fine-tune the shots for that. I quite like the gift from the goal. It's a very tight U-turn ramp. Not ramp, U-turn lane, with just a stand-up target at the end, so you had to make it all the way round the U-turn to hit the target, and then the ball rolls back again. Right, that's fair. I don't know how long the shot is, because it seems interesting, but if it's closer to the clip, then it probably won't work. Well, it could be a very powerful rebound, couldn't it, off that, and quite dangerous. Yeah. But obviously, just like with Thunder, or sorry, Turner Pinball, I wish Pinball Avengers all the best, but at this point I think it would be time to get games into production and to distribute it so people can actually get their hands on them and play them, because what we see with DeepRoot is you can design a dozen games if they're not in production at the end there's no business model there well this is going back to the old John Pappaduke and Zidware games isn't it Magic Girl, Razor and House in Wonderland you can keep designing and designing but unless you can actually produce something that's where the money's coming in at some point you're going to run out of funds and hopefully that's Not the case, but... Well, one thing you say about Pinball Adventures is they haven't taken any money off anyone yet. No, that's absolutely true, and that's something absolutely true and important for. But at some point, we'd like to see production so that people actually can buy the game. Absolutely right. Yeah. Okay. Well, hopefully soon. Hopefully soon. One company which is producing games is American Pinball, and they are producing Legends of Valhalla still. and if you have bought one of their games recently, there's a nice surprise for you because there are art blades which are now available. You know, the arted pieces which stick on the side of the, the interior side of the cabinet and match the playfield art and they have arrived at American Pinball and are being shipped, or being prepared to be shipped over the next few weeks to owners of Legends of Valhalla games. But you have to register your game at American-Pinball.com in order to receive this. If you're in the US, that is, if you are overseas, then you should contact your distributor, who should be able to get you your upgrades for your Legends of Valhalla game. Yeah, still very applaudable that American Pinball is sending upgrades to games that have already been sold. yeah very nice yeah I think it would just took a bit longer than planned yeah but we don't see that many companies doing that kind of stuff no very often they'll be available to purchase as an add-on yeah so nice for seeing American Pinball and that's about all the news of American Pinball at the moment I think it is yep so let's move on to our next pinball company Spooky Pinball yeah not a lot of news there some reason their previous website www.spookypinball.com seems to have disappeared and just has a sort of default landing page saying something interesting is coming right so now if you want to go to spookypinball you have to go to new.spookypinball.com and that will give you their full website along with their code updates of which they're Well there is one This month Yeah Let me grab a pillow Okay Here we go It's Halloween and Ultraman Obviously pretty much The same game Different themes On it Just a whole bunch Of updates Or Well just tweaks Really They're not Major feature changes And Bug fixes Really The Things that Weren't Working correctly Should now be Working a lot better some switches have been added to the switch test the sling shock power wasn't being set properly mostly bug fixes and also gives you the ability to the games can store music changes during the game so I don't know exactly how that works but apparently it's a big new feature and the wizard mode was not stopping all save times that were running so it's nice that that does now work. So anyway, a bunch of updates that is version 1.08
    119:47
    for Halloween and Ultraman on the new.spookypinball.com website Right, ok I'm not sure whether we discussed this I think I mentioned it already in the Pinball Magazine newsletter that last month was out rather late for which I apologize, but it went out anyway.
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    The Loser Kid Pinball Podcast did an interview with total nuclear annihilation designer and programmer and music producer Scott Denisey, and he sort of confirmed, or well, he basically confirmed that Spooky Pinball is very likely to do a second run of Total Nuclear Annihilation with some already existing aftermarket mods pre-installed in the game when you buy it. So, sort of an upgraded version of Total Nuclear Annihilation. Scott himself is working on updated code, which basically means Corbett integration and some minor tweaks and bug fixes.
    121:01
    And, well, there's no other news other than that the game is already being rumored to be taken back into production prior to Rick and Morty, I think.
    121:18
    And then it didn't happen. It's likely to happen after the run of Halloween and Ultraman but that hasn't been confirmed and neither do we know at what price point because in the meantime parts get more expensive and so on so we're waiting for an announcement on that of course we don't know what the next full or next new title to be announced by Spooky Pimple is going to be or indeed when they're going to announce it and well the interesting thing is while I can see that there is demands for Spooky Game or Total Nuclear Annihilation in America that was up until Halloween Spooky's best selling title although prior to Rick and Morty it was Spooky's best selling title and in the meantime they sold a lot more games I'm not sure whether that means that they can do another 500 Total Nuclear Annihilation games it will be more interesting to see whether they can actually get the game out into the world because Europe and I think Australia hardly don't have any Total Nuclear Annihilation I think I imported four into the Netherlands myself and by the time they got an importer here the game was no longer in production so the number of total nuclear relations in Europe I think is under 20 and I think the game could be a real hit over here if distributed properly and priced suitably right so I'm very curious to see whether Spooky will be able to tap into the overseas market so to speak and of course we wish them best of luck in doing that and we hope for an announcement soon yep ok well we also hope for some announcements from some of other companies but there hasn't been any news from Chicago Gaming this month or Dutch Pinball or Multimorphic or Haggis Pinball wow ok well it's nice that all these companies exist but I think they're all just getting on building their games doing what they do yeah well yeah hopefully yeah And then there's some other news to cover. We already touched on the passing of Raphael Lancard.
    123:59
    But Imodo Harney had an interesting message to share. She's working on a new project, a movie. A feature film, yes. called Skillshot Baby.
    124:19
    Tell me more. Yeah, well, Emoto is working with James Moriarty, both from the Marco Media outfit, and they have teamed up to fund a feature-length film which they say is made by, for, and about pinball fans, which is a little disappointing. I think it would be nice if it was aimed at a wider audience, but even so, pinball fans know what they like. So what they're doing is they are putting together a short version called School Shop Baby Pinball Epiphany. And that is kind of like a demonstration of what they want to do with the full length feature film. So in order to get this skill shop baby Pimple Epiphany up and running on the 16th of July, they started a Kickstarter campaign to help fund it. I think it's something around $12,000 they're looking for to pay for the filming, production, actors, the cast and crew, anyway, to make it. and then if you want to get involved in this, then all you have to do is go to skillshotbaby.com and you can find out all the details about it. There was an online audition for roles held on the 9th and 10th of July, but of course that's all been and gone. So no chance of getting in on that, but as with most of these Kickstarter projects, there is quite a wide range of different rewards for funding or helping to fund the Kickstarter campaign. So if you go over to their website, skillshopbaby.com, have a look, see what they're planning, and see if it's something that you would like to contribute to. Right. Okay. And then there was some other interesting pinball news, I would say, on the cover art for the new Eminem Greatest Hits 2 album that basically looks like a pinball backglass. It does, yeah. Curtain Call 2 is the Greatest Hits album, or the second Greatest Hits album. It looks like I suppose a Gottlieb type Displays But probably not Gottlieb type Back glass No it's more belly based So it's got a big picture of him Looking a bit David Blaine like I suppose Oh the magician Guy who's stuck himself in a box And does weird things Anyway As soon as I saw it I immediately looked at it and went, oh, all the scores are in the four score windows. I'll read something upside down. Oh. I had no idea.
    127:33
    Yes. It took me back to my days at school. It was early days of having a calculator. So you type in, you know, some number sequence and upside down, and it would read something vaguely rude. So we got Boobs. Yeah. Hellish. Yeah And Oh well We'll leave it to the people To discover it themselves Yeah And speaking of such Pinball footage In non-pinball areas If you're a wrestling fan You probably already noticed The All the bumper clips As they are called And the theme for WWE SummerSlam Which was actually held last weekend Are sort of Filmed inside a pinball machine Virtual so to speak So you're sort of following the ball Inside a pinball machine That kind of thing Which was a very nice touch I have to say The show itself If you like wrestling Is very interesting as well to watch I happen to like wrestling So I was pleasantly surprised to get some people with my wrestling. Fantastic. And talking of videos, pinball related, then we spoke last month about the Fantastic New England seminars, which were up and coming at that point, some of which have been released already. I was watching Jersey Jack pinball seminar just before we had our interview with Jack earlier. So one of the, probably the landmark interview that was done at Pintastic is with Roger Sharp where he talks about what he thinks pinball would have been like if Williams had continued making games. So that video was just actually released today. So, what a coincidence. Yeah. Pinball Day, which is also Roger Sharp's birthday. Absolutely. It all ties together. Happy birthday, Roger. Yes. I think we've both wished him a happy birthday on Facebook as well.
    129:45
    And so, yeah. So if you want to watch that, check out the Pintastic New England YouTube channel and see what Roger's thoughts are on where pinball could have gone. Right, okay. So that rounds it up for our recap of July 2022. Indeed it does. I hope you enjoyed our pincast this month, and of course we will be back with a look back on all the pinball events throughout August 2022 at the end of the month. Right. So we expect at least one game review by Stern, and who knows what other news there is. Well, whatever it is, we'll be here with it. So from me, Martin Ed, editor of Pinball News, and me, Jonathan Judson from Pinball Magazine,
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    we wish you, thank you for listening, and we hope you'll be back next month. We'll see you then. Bye-bye. Bye Oh Martin No Gary Oh no What happened I don't know He didn't call