Thanks for tuning in to Loser Kid Pinball Podcast. I am Josh Rupp. With me, my co-captain. Scott Larson. And Scott, we've got an amazing episode today. I'm excited for it. Plenty of Stern machines are being released right now. We just had the Jaws 50th that came out. It sounds like someone dropped a pinball machine upstairs. Yeah. On you? I don't know what just happened. No kids bleeding so far, so I think we're okay. But if you want some new CERN pinball machines, where are you getting them, Scott? I'm going to call Zach and Nicole many a flipping out pinball. There's a lot of great options out there, and, you know, there are some that are coming out too. So reach out. Looking for accessories too. I'm always looking for ways of making my machine look a little better. Also, any old games that you may be interested in, they have a good program that you can find some old ones too. So Zach and Nicole many flipping out pinball. Definitely. If you're looking for that fun house too, just type in Loser Kid in your promo code on checkout or talk to Zach and Nicole, and they'll get you set up for that to get a new fun house in your house. All right. This man came into the scene in the early 80s with a small game called Tron. And I would say that has kind of weirdly redefined our world. Like it's become a cultural staple. And ever since then, he has made game after game that has just wowed us. And when we talk about like the Rushmore of pinball, George Gomez would definitely be up on it for all of his accomplishments and whatnot. So I want to thank the man for coming on today. George, thank you for joining us. Thanks, guys. It's great to be back with you, this time with hopefully less pressure than the last time I was on. We were talking about the WIC controversy. Yeah. WIC gun day. Right? um you know uh always happy to to talk with people and see if i can um answer questions enlighten you on anything that um certainly there's a lot of confusion about stuff um from the outside in right well isn't it kind of funny too they keep bringing up gun gate and it's like that that felt like so long ago but it was like it was kind of fun we had to have He had you on because he figured that you were the man to talk about it, and it just seems so silly now compared to where it was 20 months ago. It's hard when you first see a game because the first thing you see is it's like a movie poster. It's not like you get to see the interaction. Once you see the video assets, you're like, oh, okay, well, if that's really what you're hanging your hat on, then it seems a little silly. But there's certainly enough WIC in the game to make it relevant for WIC fans. I mean, I think, you know, I think I think that there's a thing that happens in the pinball community where people see or hear things and they they they imagine them a certain way. And so I see lots of, you know, sometimes I see people react very negatively to something and then like a week later, they love it. Or vice versa, right? It's like, you know, a lot of emotion, a lot of drama. Well, that's probably good because it means people care about the product, right? I mean, in some ways, it would be worse if you put out something and you heard nothing. Absolutely. So there's something like that. Now, the reason why I thought about bringing you on is a couple of things. There have been a lot of shakeups at Stern. But I also, when I was down in St. George this weekend, I went into Costco. And I walk into Costco and anybody who's been to a Costco, no, they're all laid out the same. So I walk past all the electronics and at the very end of the electronic thing, before you turn the corner, there is a Star Wars Home Edition, the Costco Home Edition. And we've done this before. We actually didn't get the Costco Home Editions here in Utah the last go around. So this seems like a couple of things. It seems like a bigger release, like mass penetration for one thing. Two, I noticed there were people waiting in line to play it. I played a quick game. I didn't want to dominate, but it played very well. It was a great representation, which I'm sure they don't have text that they're setting up at Costco. They probably just opened up and followed the video. And so a couple things. This seems like a good way of getting back into it. So how did this come about to reintroduce having machines at Costco again? Right. So let's go back in time. The very first time you saw them there was a bit of an experiment, and so on their part and ours. and so that meant that it was in more limited geographic locations relative to their stores and so we had success with it and so they liked it and they said let's do this again and so the titles first of all both this particular home edition, you know, I designed this game a long time ago, right? And we did a run before Costco, you know, there was a run of these games that was made long before, even before the Jurassic Park game, right? And so this time around, they said, you know, clearly, from our perspective, what we're trying to do is expand the universe of pinball, right? So this is an audience that is potentially new and and these these games are intended to essentially be a gateway meaning they're you know they're they're more affordable um we want people to get to know and love pinball perhaps put them in places where it's it's it's more difficult to put a full commercial game. So, and then eventually, we want people to love it so much that they will go into the big games, right? So, I mean, that's always been the, you know, we've tried, you know, we, going back, you know, probably 10 years, we've tried many different versions of home editions because we want that expansion, right? We want the market expansion and we want, you know, I mean, we're all about growing the audience. So that's a way for us to grow the audience. It's a new audience. You've noticed we put a lot of work into the box, right? Because, you know, it has to be, it has to totally look and feel like a consumer product. This particular version, a lot of work has gone into making it as user-friendly as possible, right, the out-of-box experience, and also lots of attention to durability and reliability because it's going into consumer environments in a different way. The people may not know how to fix or where to get the game fixed. They may not even know. I mean, we've gone so far as to we've designed a system that allows you to put the balls in the game without taking the glass off. There's a whole setup video that goes with them. There's QR codes that help you set it up. The new menu system, which you're starting to see on some of the games, and it's actually designed for Spike 3, that is in these games. There's a lot of things that – so a lot of attention to the out-of-box experience, a lot of attention to reliability and durability. They have full commercial playfields now. so you know it's the same plywood um you know the same plywood sandwich that's going into your your commercial games the maple top and bottom all of that stuff um of course all the mechs um the same mechs you know same flipper assemblies same pop bumpers um same electronic system um the the beauty of spike is that you know you guys know it's modular so it's always be you know we can scale it up and down. So those games, the limitation with those games is we do the entire game with a single-node board. So, you know, and that's really just about trying to keep the cost affordable. The other thing that happens, you know, you get a lot of reliability by simply, by strictly focusing on simplicity, right? So simplicity inherently buys you some element of reliability. We watched the Jurassic Park. We know what broke. We know what was right. We know what was wrong. So this is another bite at the apple. A lot of engineering went into this game, so I think they're going to do really well. And I think next fall you'll see another game. Well, and that's actually what I was about to ask. If home pins are going to become a thing at Costco, One other thing, too, is, I mean, it's easy to see the economy isn't what it used to be a couple of years ago. And having your traditional dealer distribution buyer base may not be able to take on what they used to. Is this a way to keep the line running and to help keep Stern employees working but still get product out the door and keep the factory moving? At this point, it's not significant enough. I mean, I don't like we don't think of it that way. Our, you know, honestly, our business, while it's compressed, it hasn't compressed any significant amount relative to like, you know, it's less than it was during COVID. But it's, you know, it hasn't, you know, you know, JAWS has done really well. D&D has done really well. Um, you know, for the most part, we haven't, you know, we, we have felt it in things, you know, like, clearly we don't have, you know, during during COVID we had, you know, a year and a half productions worth of back orders. So it's not like that anymore, but it's more what business was before that time, meaning that there's a consistent number of back orders. You're making games at a rate we haven't seen. The factory is – there's 500 people out there today. There were 500 people out there six months ago. One question I have is when you buy through a dealer, typically, if someone has never set up a machine before, there are lots of little fiddly things. OK. And so when you're going through Costco, they don't have an expert of pinball at the location. I mean, you're taking it home and you're setting it up yourself. So should people encounter any issues? Is there a direct line to Stern? Like, how do you deal with those technical support issues that always come up with machines? Right. So, so we, you know, I don't know if you guys know this, but we have, we have a network of people that just, you know, that, that we can send anywhere to, to deal with stuff. Right. So, like, if you – a lot of them are the same people that somebody like Zach is using if, you know, if he sells a game into Ohio or whatever, right? So I think there's – your first line of defense is certain tech support. And a lot of the engineering focus was in, you know, A, let's make sure we screw it together right. B, let's make the out-of-box experience as consumer-friendly as possible. And C, if they do need help, let's be there for it. It's really not a lot different. The same guys that service that service your commercial games. And like I said, simplicity brings a lot of reliability inherently. So if the Home Pin is going to be a thing with Costco, Are you guys going to go back to the well and just use what you've already built, or is there going to be more home pins coming in the future for different themes and whatnot? No, you'll see new themes, right? Like next year's theme, you'll see a new theme. We just happen to have – so we have – you know, we had the Star Wars. Star Wars is, you know, it's an evergreen license, right? It's like – 100%, yeah. You know, so you like, how would you not, you know, you're talking about, you're talking about a consumer market that they're going to gravitate to, you know, a Jurassic Park, they're going to gravitate towards, you know, a Star Wars, you know, you may see. So think of the large broad appeal licenses. That's what you're going to see in those environments. Those home editions are going to be whenever, you know, you're probably not going to see, you know, you'll probably see something like a broad appeal family theme long before you see like, you know, a rock band or a more narrow theme. Does that give you more of an opportunity to take chances with cornerstones like with Dungeons and Dragons and stuff like that as well? I'm not sure. I mean, it definitely, like something like Dungeons & Dragons would definitely, you know, is a theme that would end up there for sure. You know, that I could see that landing, you know, I could see that landing at a Costco for sure. Mm-hmm. you know, for the toy. I'm using the same TIE Fighter from the big games. So I want to do more to leverage the effort for the big games to make the effort for the home editions more efficient. One thing I liked on this game is that the ball lock, it's on the play field. It's a physical lock, and it's very visual. and so to start multiball for a novice you can easily say hey that ball is sitting there go ahead and hit that ball and then it starts a multiball and so i i was really impressed with how that was integrated it was it was the most intuitive way um on a on a cornerstone game a lot of people who are into pinball they're going to know oh the green light that's a lock and that's how you can start multiball but for the average person you're not going to have that intrinsic knowledge that you build up over years of playing pinball? So I'll tell you that I did that on the very first, you know, the very first, like I want to say it's on Supreme, it's on Spider-Man, it's the same device and I did it, but I did it for a different reason. I did it because I was trying to get a feature, a physical feature without any devices. So, you know, I wanted to, The actual act of hitting the ball is what frees the ball. And the actual, you know, the fact that the ball rolls in there is what locks it. So I was looking for, like I'm always talking to guys here in the studio about how do you do something with nothing? And the magic of the home editions, for me, when, you know, I've done most of them, you know, jack to the dress park game, but, but I've done most of them today. Like I did Supreme, I did Spider-Man, I did all those. And, and the, and, and really that play field is an evolution of those just for economy's sake that, that, that that's, you know, that's, it's just an evolution of that. The, but the, the, the, the, the challenge, and it's a really fun, interesting challenge to me is how do I do something cool with very little? You know, when I, And there are designers in the building that maybe think otherwise. Like, I know I want all the stuff. No, I get it. I get it. You want all the stuff. But the real design challenge is how do you make something cool with nothing? Right? To me, that's pretty interesting. So that's why when we first talked about this, not too many guys want to raise their hands to work on it. So I said, you know what, I'm going to take it. I'm going to do it because I think it would be a lot of fun. How do I do something with very little? Do you think part of that comes from your background in making toys and stuff too? Because you have to kind of minimize there as well, right? Absolutely. The toy business, you know, you see something on the shelf at a toy store, divide by five. That's what it really costs. so you can imagine you know you can imagine a guy trying to make something cool with five dollars in some ways i think this could be an asset though i mean i i have beatles which is you know a new version of a single level right and i like that it gives me a different option it gives me a different vibe and it's a lot more streamlined a little bit like what you guys did with Bond 60, where it's a street-level game that has paths. And I like it because it does give me a different feel. And it seems like, I guess I would argue, a reader, they love those novels that are 800 pages and 900 pages, the really deep ones. But sometimes it's fun to have a 150-page burner that you're just, I'm just going to go and I'm going to have fun. I'm going to sit of the beach and I'm going to flip through this. And this feels like, hey, this is such a great game that I can come up and, you know, people like, okay, explain to me how to play this. And if I get one of these games behind me, it takes me a minute to explain, well, you need to set this up and then start something. But when you have that, it's like, go. It's super, super fast. Just whatever you hit, it'll be good. Yeah, I think, I mean, it's, um, they're designed to be what they are, meaning that, you know, it's, you know, bring it home, family entertainment. It really simple It enjoyable It a lot you know it it uh this one has you know it got a bigger screen than the last one The sound sounded a little more, it seemed a little louder than previous home editions, too. Did I hear that wrong, or did it just sound better than I thought? You know, it doesn't have any more speakers than the last set. Okay. But there's – but we did – we have tried to improve almost everything. So it's possible that that's got – it's got the same – instead of two speakers like on – it doesn't have the woofer in the cabinet. Yeah. And it's got the same speaker that's in the commercial games. have you played or have you heard what Marc Silk did to his game so he has a Star Wars Home Edition and he actually modded it so he added an amp and he changed out the speakers and put a subwoofer and it is like you're in a theater because when you hit the button that opening thing it just overwhelms you Like this is awesome. Like I, have you ever considered adding that as an option to say, Hey, if you want, you have kits, you have like speaker light kits and you have, you know, topper kits. And it's like, Hey, maybe Stern, if you want to buy a, a, an upgraded speaker kit, even for the home edition, I wonder if there's enough demand to make it worth your while. So it is designed, um, so that you could upgrade it if you wanted. and you're going to see, you know, I'm sure you guys want to talk about Spike 3. When we do Spike 3, you're going to see that one of the things that you're getting is a much improved sound system. And with a much improved sound system, we're making it so that if, you know, for example, if LEDs or music games ship with the much improved sound system, You can add the much improved sound system to everything you have. And it is impressive. I think you'll like it when you see it. And so, yeah, I mean, it's easy to upgrade. Everything's there. You just have to know how. Yeah, everything's there. But, I mean, and, you know, you never know. the kit that upgrades, you know, we could probably create an evolution of the kit that's going to upgrade the Spike 3 games. So you keep talking about Spike 3, and I want to know, because this was originally announced at Expo in 2021, and it's been almost four years now. How close are we? Are we going to see this in the next game? Yeah, you can probably see it in the next game. In the next game? And one thing you talked about, Expo, is maybe redesigning the cabinet a little bit to be a little better streamlined and to kind of trim some stuff down. Yeah, you're going to see the – you're going to see – so let's talk about Spike 3. So you don't realize it, but you've been seeing bits and pieces of it for a little while. You got the quiet power supply. You're getting the improved menu system. There's little things that have been sort of rolled into the line. And the way when we launched Spike 3, you're going to see some cabinet improvements that have to be there because of the improved sound system and because of the improved display. But there's going to be further improvements. Like the big cabinet improvement is probably going to lag it. It's probably going to come in, you know, maybe not, you know, it won't be there for the first game. It'll probably be there for the second game. So you'll get the bulk of the, you know, you'll get the bulk of the system when you, when, you know, with, with probably with the next game. And then, and then you'll see even further refinements. I know you can't exactly say everything that's going to be involved, but talk. I want you to talk about the limitations as a designer that you encounter on the Spike 2 system because usually that's what drives innovation is whatever environment you're working in, you come to an impasse. And you're thinking, I wish there were a better way to implement my ideas, and I'm assuming that's what's been pushing Spike 3. Well, so actually not. Oh, okay. All right. Tell me where I'm wrong. Great. So when you think about Spike 2, what I want you to consider is the breadth of games that we've done on it. And for example, just think of all the different video display things that we've done on Spike 2 games. And I mean, really take a good hard look, right? Like everything from full-on movie, you know, movie clip games, like, you know, for example, one of the very early Spike 2 games, Batman, Batman 66, tons of video content, right, of TV, you know, footage. Look at a game like Metallica with tons of custom, all, you know, all new animation, right? So all of that stuff has happened within the breadth of Spike 2. So I would say that, if anything, we've gotten very good at doing a lot within the context of the system. So why do we do it? Why would we do a Spike 3? Well, some of it is strictly technology moves on, and so processors improve. And, you know, everything that comes with that has moved on in the time that we've, you know, the beauty of a system like Spike 2 is, I mean, it's been around a while, and we have made such a breadth of different types of games on it. And yet, technology has moved on. The processor in Spike 3 is substantially more powerful than the processor in Spike 2. and with it graphics and everything else. So, you know, it's an opportunity to refresh the line, right? And it's an opportunity to bring you things that we didn't have in Spike 2. You know, you want to connect your headphones, you know, wirelessly to the game and you want to do, you know, you want to have a better, a more improved sound system. And you want, and from our standpoint, we want a tool set that's more current. So to your point, it's not that we can't continue to make games on Spike 2, but it's that, boy, we could make things a lot easier. We can make things a lot better. So think about on Spike 2, the Linux-based distributable that we operate on hasn't had support for a long time. So the world's moved on, and now we have access to better tools and more efficiency, and it's easier to do cooler stuff. So those are all the reasons, and you guys want – I want a better display. I want better sound. I want to connect my headphones. I want more lights. I want more stuff. I want – so it's going to give us all that power. Definitely. Well, and can you talk about, because we're talking Spike 3 right now, but it's funny because, like, White Star was around for about seven years, and then Sam System was around for about seven years, and then Spike 1 was only around for, like, two, three years before you guys upgraded to Spike 2, and then Spike 2's been out for more than a decade now. Yeah. So why was Spike 1 only a couple of years, and we've had Spike 2s for so long, and then are you guys just trying to get it all right with Spike 3 before you reveal it? So Spike-1 was a paradigm shift in how you design a pinball hardware set. And so the problem, meaning that the notion of a networked system within the pinball machine was radically different. The, you know, the nodes supporting different architectural areas of the game, the expandable and, you know, modular version of the notion of a system that supports pinball machines, you know, this was all new stuff relative to how the prior systems had been done. So it took us, like, we went down that direction, and like anything else, we learned a lot very quickly. And so we found limitations in spike one, which quickly made us say, no, no, no, we got to do more to make it what we imagined in terms of scalable, modular, you know, more expandable. And so while those concepts existed right from the beginning, that's the reason we went in that direction, the initial execution wasn't quite there for us. We started bumping into things. one of the very first things we bumped in is bumped into is we we had this idea which actually survived into spike 2 and has made spike 2 very very successful which is a custom note when you know you you design generic nodes to do the things you know you have to do and you add them and subtract them as needed a great example of that is the home additions versus an le right that has an LE has the kitchen sink in it and a home edition has almost nothing in it. And so you have to be, you have a system, the very same system supports both. When we did spike one, we quickly figured out that we had created a lot of complexity in different kinds of generic nodes. And, and in fact, somehow created more complexity for ourselves than we needed to. So we said, you know what, let's do the core nodes and then let's do custom nodes when we need something special. We need to support a display on the play field for Star Wars. That's a node. We need to support a different thing that doesn't exist. We create another node. All the nodes go on the shelf. They go into the inventory. Designers take them off as they need them and use them and apply them. So yeah, that's the reason we got out of spike one quickly because, you know, we learned a bunch of things that we didn't know. And so, and spike two, the other thing that happened with spike one is that we started thinking about the notion of how, you know, how does the system have a long life? And right away we bumped into things. We said, okay, we got to improve that if we want that to have that to be that sustainable for that long you compare that system to anybody else's pinball system nothing has been as reliable nothing has been manufactured in the quantities that it has been um and you know nothing has been as flexible well i have to say it was very flexible i know we talked to i can't remember the gentleman that works there but um we were talking at expo a couple years back and they were talking about the challenges you guys faced with COVID because everything was in high demand and the chips that you were getting were also the same chips they were using for like the F-150 trucks. And it was like, they had a month to figure out how to, because Godzilla was coming out, they had a month to figure out how they were going to go from not having any of these chips to mass producing Godzilla because it was time. And so it's impressive. I think it speaks to you guys and your company of how you were able to find challenges and overcome them, right? Yeah, the Electrical Engineering Group during COVID, what they call the AVL, the approved vendor list for components on a board, the AVL was changing monthly. I mean, it was crazy. um those guys did such a great job and and to your point uh spike is what allowed them to do that with spike three i'm assuming that that will change your ability to even do more with presentation and and so tell me about when you're choosing to present a game because things like expression lightings, which I think yours is the best in the game. How it was just integrated into the side. It looks smooth. It looks seamless. And the light show that you guys do on those. You're not going to see them until the, you're probably going to see the new generation of expression lights will, will happen probably when the, when the new cabinet happens a little bit after the intro of spike three, probably the game after, but that um yeah you get ready yeah okay that's great and you're bringing that in the one achilles heel that uh that games that are so dependent on sound which would be music games like the achilles heel has always been i you go to logan's arcade which is a great arcade it's so loud in there that you you just have to know what you're doing like you're not going you you can't really hear the call outs and you mentioned you know people want to play with headphones so like what does that mean does that mean just bringing and plugging into a jack does it mean bluetooth connection does it mean a different or i guess maybe something you're looking at in the future it's it's going to be a lot more sophisticated than plugging into a jack yeah like i said the sound system is going to be impressive to you i think and um i i think that a lot of engineering has gone into a lot of things. I, you know, it's taken us this long because we continue to be, you know, we continue to have to produce games in the context of we're also developing a system and we're also supporting Insider Connected and we're doing a lot of things, right? So, you know, we're designing home editions and we're supporting an accessory program and, you know, we're a little busy. So it's taken us, taken us, And yes, not the same – not everyone works on everything, but it's still – collectively these projects happen in the studio. And so it's a lot of stuff. So Scott brought up Metallica Remastered. Yeah. From the outside looking in, it looks like Metallica did fantastic. And the idea that these remastered games are definitely a demand for them. I assume moving forward, you guys want to do more. Is Spike 3 going to be capable of easily translating the older games like Sam and White Star to help evolution, a catalog of these remastered games? So Spike 3 can definitely support them. I don't know that it's going to give us, I mean, one of the things we get with Spike 3 is we get better tools. So the tool set that allows us to put content in the games improves. But the reality is that you're talking about an effort to translate technology from a long time ago. So the system could certainly support it. That's not been the challenge. The challenge has been the amount of work that we have to do to do that translation. And so that translation is really the – and it's not hard. It's just work. So you say to yourself – so you look at the economics of it and you say, okay, so at best, some of that old stuff is going to probably be – I mean, Metallica Remaster has been a hit, right? um Metallica remaster is for all intents and purposes um it now now it's become a product line because you know yes we can remaster our old stuff um and and so there's always there's a question what what will we remaster and how will we remaster it and so but you get into talking white star and those challenges are bigger doesn't mean that they're not you know they're not impossible, but it's not like, you know, it's not a trivial development effort. It's like, okay, it's like, we're going to, we've got to put some people on this, and we've got to really do this. I mean, look at your remastered game, and you know, that's three-quarters of the work of a cornerstone in a minute. Right? It's just, look at those animations. Just the Just look at the animations alone, right? Yeah. And then, you know, a full-on art package, a mechanical engineering pass for reliability on the play field, a game design pass on, you know, sort of how do we make it cooler? I mean, you know, right? You got, I think, 12 more songs. It's an effort. Really? Like a thousand new speech calls or something. Well, your challenge with Metallica has always been it's considered one of the best rule sets and codes and by the great Lyman Sheets. So how do you honor Lyman's memory and everything he's done and also add another layer to that? And what Raymond has done has been spectacular to say the least. We did it with those sensitivities in mind, right? It's – yeah, we did it with those sensitivities in mind. I mean it's kind of like it wasn't – it didn't escape us. You know, you're talking about somebody – you know, I mean the man created a lot of masterpiece work. But, you know, you just can't ignore – you can't ignore that when you sit down to I'm going to make another one of – Yeah definitely You talked about you know accessory lines and that always been challenging for Stern Just because obviously this is a nice supplemental line but your main purpose is to make the games right So we still have some that we're still waiting on. You know, you have X-Men that are coming out, and you have D&D and Kong. So just want to get your take on the updates, on how those are coming, and when people are going to be looking forward to those. And I know you have to get a lot of approvals and all that stuff. So one of my focuses this year is to bring accessories closer to the release dates of future new releases, right? So the accessory business is a really nice piece of business, and we agree that everyone wants accessories when we launch a game. Clearly there's challenges. So there's some stuff that I'm doing internally to make that happen. The problem is that there's a little bit of a hangover from stuff that was in the pipeline before we sort of made those changes. So, you know, you're probably going to see X-Men before the end of the year. You know, you're going to see, you know, you're going to see, you might see Kong sooner. You know, you're going to see, we're still continuing to focus on the accessories. We love the accessories. One of the challenges with the accessories is that some of the integrations require the team. So at the same time that the team is mired in making the game and releasing the game and finishing the game, in many cases, accessories have to happen. And so we think there's value in, you know, we think the best integrations of things like accessories and expression lights and speaker lights and all that stuff are the ones where the stuff is truly integrated into the package. it's not just some peripheral it's a very well choreographed uh integration right with a rule with stuff that makes it like okay now it's it's a thing i gotta have um i'll tell you that i'll tell you this the you're not going to be disappointed you're disappointed that you have to wait for the x-men topper but you're not going to be disappointed when you see it one question I had you know Insider Connected has been fantastic I know you guys have talked about it it's been a wealth of information that has really helped drive what you guys are doing there at Stern one question I have is is Insider Connected's AIP ever going to be opened up and allowed for third party creators to use the data so yeah it's a great question and I'm going to turn the question around to you and say, what do you guys see? How would you, you know, what would you do with the API? If I gave you the API, what kinds of stuff? Because it's not impossible. It's, are there challenges? Sure there are. You know, I mean, you know, we want, you know, we want stuff that's robust and, you know, reliable and, you know, passes all the requirements and all that stuff. But, I mean, it's like, honestly, you tell me, what would you see? What do you envision? And, you know, it's absolutely worth a conversation. Definitely. I think it would be cool to maybe do some custom Loser Kid stuff. I think that, I don't know. we've been working, doing some stuff with PinQuest and whatnot, and it'd be cool, May, to integrate and be able to help location operators and whatnot to help drive more, I guess, customer involvement along with maybe us as content creators or those that are other party develop app people. What do you think, Scott? Yeah, so this is what we do with PinQuest, which is great, because we tried to find things that were close to their location, but also things that anybody could do so they could upload their scores. And if they got your challenge and my challenge and they got, you know, a Loser Kid pin that we, you know, Neil helped sponsor and he sent him out a pin, that would definitely be a great way of integrating. Another thing is, you know, I thought of it would be fun for me, and we've talked about this before, George. I know that having all the data is super expensive and people definitely would love to have like I just hosted a pinball tournament here on Saturday. And so we had a youth tournament and we had a women's tournament here and being able to have like a local leaderboard for the tournament that I could – and I'd be happy to even pay for a subscription to say, hey, I'm willing to have that broadcast. broadcast so when people come it's like hey i'm having a pinball night at my house and now everybody can see you know the the highest of the day or the highest of the month and be able to use stuff like that so that would be you know that'd be a fun engagement thing just for people coming over to be fun if you notice me writing i'm taking notes yeah yeah so so that would be great especially for you know just like a game night at my house and you could even do like a challenge who gets the it can even just be casual game night who gets the highest score on this they get a trophy who gets the highest score on this because that would be such an easy way to host and then have prizes as opposed to people coming back and saying what they want and you notice behind me most of my most of my games are stern so that would be super easy to integrate yeah i mean we're you know we're open to stuff like that we have to it's you know it's got to be done in a certain way. It's going to work in a certain way. Um, and it, it's not a no, that's for sure. It's, it's just a, we got to figure it out, um, in, in the best way for everybody. Right. Like, um, you know, the, the, you, you know, this from the, the real world, when somebody opens up their environment, you know, there's challenges, right? There's security challenges. There's all kinds of things, right? It's the reason, you know, Apple for a long time held, you know, kept their environment so, you know, closely guarded, controlled, you know. So, and of course, you know, with the advent of app stores and everything else, you know, you begin opening the doors a little bit, right? But stuff still has to be managed and has to exist a certain way. So, yeah, it's not out of the question at all. Not out of the question. It's just something, you know, it's the thing we got to figure out. How do we do it? How do we do it in a way that works for everybody? Definitely. Yeah, because it would be cool for a location to have its own custom quests to help drive more engagement and stuff like that as well. Because the leaderboards have been fantastic. It's great to go to a local bar and say, hey, I see that score up there for Foo Fighters. I'm taking that on right now because I know I can get it. So just, you know, it's amazing how much the world has changed with entertainment and stuff like that. and just to see stuff like this is it's it's crazy to have these conversations because this is something that probably wasn't even thought of even just 10 years ago and now it's like it's a possibility the door is there you know so no it's been great and also that the one thing that you did bring out now i want to circle a little bit back around to the to the top you notice i'm a big topper guy i have toppers on every single machine and the challenge has always been, you know, it has to make sense for you to run a certain amount of toppers to make money, right? Because you're not going to make a one-off topper unless you really want to make an Iron Maiden Egypt topper for me. I'd love it. Getting into that extra topper mode where you're like, hey, we have this lighting thing that will connect to your game and then have the plate that goes in. You just did one for Star Wars. Yeah. So it seems like that opens the possibility of going to other games that didn't really have the ability to have a full topper integration but being able to do – I'm assuming licensing – this is me guessing. I'm assuming licensing for a flat plastic piece that goes into a lighting thing above a game is probably a little more streamlined than a full topper integration. I think you hit the nail on the head, right? That particular topper that you're referring to, you're going to see more of that. And it's a modular system. So what the beauty of it is that if you don't want to spend on the big, super-duper expensive Uber topper, you can, you know, here's a price point that's maybe more affordable and still has a bunch of functionality. um it has you know it has every one of those toppers even that that one has a ton of engineering in it um you know that that links it um those new toppers that you're referring to are you know totally in concert with the expression lighting so they're essentially work just like expression lighting for your speakers um and and expression lightings for the game. So when that, that software was absolutely done in, you know, with that in mind. So, and I say, you know, I think that that we tried to make it so that you can buy, you know you can buy the generic one or you can buy the Deadpool one or you can buy the Jurassic Park one, you buy the Star Wars one, whatever it is, eventually you're going to see them and, and you can, you know, you can do whatever you want with them. okay speaking of deadpool last time we talked to you you were on your list to get your own deadpool and you kept pushing it back because the orders kept getting filled did you ever get your own deadpool okay now george just turned the camera uh he showed us the deadpool that he finally got okay did you do now i know that you could do your own little custom you could do like a different uh side piece you could do a different speakers what did you do anything special on your personal Deadpool? So my Deadpool has speaker lights, you know, has stern speaker lights. It's got the quiet power supply. It's got the shooter knob. It's got art blades. It's what you would the only thing it's got is hopper. It's got Deadpool topper. It's got the ninja stars. Hopper caps. it's got, I'm trying to think what else it has. Did you do the side armor? The blade side armor? I didn't do the side armor because I've been thinking about powder coating the armor and doing something special with it. I haven't gotten there yet. I also it's a premium, it's got the premium trans light, but I like the pro trans light better. Yeah, I like the Pro Translate too. It's good. So I think – so I've been – I haven't done it yet, but I've been meaning to get the Pro Translate. Yeah. Nice. Nice. So – These are the perks of running the business. Yeah. I have a funny – this is really funny. The art guys always make me special plates for my games, right? So here's the – Oh, wow. What was the name of that man? And this is Deadpool number 503 of 500. We only made 500. That's awesome. We only made 500 LEs, but they thought it would be funny. I was like, this is something Deadpool would have. Yeah, that's what I was about to say. That is totally in keeping with Deadpool. And even like, you know, someone like Rush, they actually have like a Fear trilogy that has four songs, you know, just stuff like that. Exactly. That's totally where that came from. Wait, but did you make 503? No, we made 500. This is just the custom Gomez edition. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So, you know, speaking of employees and whatnot, we've heard a little bit of different shakeups down there. I didn't know if you could talk about, you know, Tim Sexton leaving or maybe – or Jack Danger becoming the head of community down there. Right, right. So it's interesting to me that you guys characterize them as shakeups. Well, okay. Sure. Realignments. People move in jobs all the time. But the real question people have is that they are currently on games that are in a development cycle, right? And so that's really what the question is. As personnel move on or change positions, the question is what happens to these games that are on an arc? And you can even argue John Wick is still on its arc. You could argue X-Men is still on its arc. And so when you have that and Jack is in process, I'm assuming before he did this transition, he was working on his next game. And he still is. Yeah, so what happens with these arcs and how do they get fulfilled? Right, okay, so we'll go one at a time. In the case of Wick, Tim actually left the company, right? So he wanted to go do something else. He went and did something else. Sure. But the arc of the game, you know, the game, like, it's not designed week to week, right? It's designed in the beginning, and the changes that happen to the game, a lot of them are really based on us watching you play them. So once a game is in the wild, one of the things that we do very actively is we watch how people play them. because we have our internal audience, no matter how much testing we do, no matter how many people we bring in, we can't watch, you know, a thousand people play it, right? We can only watch, you know, and our world is somewhat skewed because we have some of the best players in the world walk in the halls. so you know watching like a game played internally in the studio and a game played when you have a thousand games out there is two different things in addition to that we now have a lot of data as you mentioned earlier we are inundated and insider connected data which tells us a lot about how people play the games and what they're doing and how they're doing it so So everybody bitches about it's not at 1.0 when it goes out the door. I'm not entirely sure it's in your best interest for it to be at 1.0. Sometimes that 1.0 is terrible. You want a solid 8 or something like that? And then I think you want to let us watch you play, and then we want to see what you're doing. And we want to say, oh, that's hard. That's easy. That's not a lot of fun. We thought that was fun. And so we make we make changes. We make adjustments. We do things to the games. So, I mean, I think that's some of what you you know, that's not what you see. um and like i said in the case of in the case of wick you've seen yes tim left but you know somebody else is on it i'm not a big like by the way i'm not a big fan of the cult of personality associated with the success or not success of a game because as a company as a studio um you know i think all of the senior people in the building have something to say about what the games are and how they are. And so I think that, that, you know, I've been like on my personal social people, but now who's, you know, who's the software engineer on such and such, you know, well, I'm not going to get into those discussions because I don't want, I don't like the notion that this is considered, you know, it's like you have your favorites and you're allowed to have your favorites and you, you know, but, but I, I want to say that the, my, it's my job to, to sort of guarantee the quality of the product, leaving the building in terms of playability, you know, et cetera. Right. So I think that, you know, I think that I'm more, I'm more of the mind that, that, you know, I have, I have a, I hope you understand that I have a reputation of getting the games to a place and I'm going to get the games to a place and it matters less. whether this guy or that guy is on it. So Tim leaves. We're going to finish the code on WIC because we always do. And it's an opportunity for me to look around the studio and say, this was the vision. Is the vision still true? And do we need to veer from the vision? Do we need to do something else? The designer of the game, by the way, Elliot Elliot Eismin, is still in the house. So I just got a lot to say about it. So and not to mention, you know, I got a studio full of game people, right? So everybody's playing WIC and everybody's coming into my office and saying, I want this. I like that. I don't like this. I don't like that, you know? And so that's how we make decisions. That's how we make great games. And so, you know, if you have some very good developers, You have some very good engineers. You have some very good designers. You have some very good code people. And everybody plays the games. Everybody has something to say. That's how you get great games. So anyway, so that's the situation. The games are going to continue to be made. You mentioned, I think you mentioned Jack, right? Correct, yep. Jack's new role, right? Um, so Jack, first of all, the game he's working on now, he's going to be the, you know, he's going to see to the end. So like, um, and, and wherever it, you know, if, if he needs help, I'll give him help. Right. Um, the Jack miss really missed the, you know, the death flip stuff. Right. And on top of that, the company, we've wanted sort of that kind of a voice to the community, that sort of relationship. And so it seemed like a natural right It seems like this guy got a reputation here He knows how to do this He knows how to do it better than anyone in the building, that's for sure. And so, yeah, maybe, you know, he wants to do it, and maybe that's a better place for him. It's better for everybody. But he's going to finish his game. And, you know, whatever help he needs, because he's got responsibilities. You know, you just saw him at Comic-Con and stuff. And it's not like his game wasn't getting worked on when he was at Comic-Con. His game was getting worked on. So we're going to, you know, look, I like, first of all, it's like it's when you pull somebody out of a game completely, like, and I've had this situation. You guys know. Yep. the horror of Deadpool and, and, and even Bond. Right. So you have, you have a, so I would never do that. Right. I would never consciously say, okay, you know, um, drop this and, but you know, if he needs help, I'm there. I mean, you know, it was like, okay, these guys got your tight up with, you know, I think when he's done with this game, he'll move into, you know, that position full time and, and, you know, he'll work with the marketing guys. It's a, a relationship to the community is a super important thing in, in, in the modern era. Right. You can't. Oh, definitely. Right. Yeah, you can. And like you said, Jack's, Jack's got a gift and a talent when it comes to that. And it's, people almost gravitate towards him because of that. Right. So it's an asset that you might as well be using and using to its full potential and so yeah so because i guess that was one thing too we were concerned that like when we heard that jack was head of community we're like oh does this mean the game's being stopped but i'm glad that you've also said that he's still working on that game because i know a lot of people love his designs as well yeah yeah and it's you know i think you're gonna love the game he's on when it comes out so i think that there's um yeah that no i would never i wouldn't do that. It's like, you know, it's like, I think that's, you know, that doesn't, that would not be in our best interest. It seems to maximize the skill sets of the employees in the best way. And Jack's skill set is engagement. That old business, you know, that old business book, right? Right, right. See on the bus, you know, got to get, got to get all the right guys in the right seat on bus. so uh alan key came out and actually came with scott on the king kong release he wanted to know uh what are you most proud of accomplishing in your incredible career that's a tough one meaning that you know um i mean i i would guess that my contribution is to making this company where it is right the building the studio I've built um I think uh I think that's you know I mean I when I I love all the you know I mean I I'm proud of all the games I'm proud of all of the opportunities and and uh um you know challenges that that that have come along um and overcoming them I mean you But I think that – I think building probably, if you ask me today, it's interesting because I was kidding with somebody that of all the games I've designed, maybe the one thing that is going to impact more people and that has been transformational to pinball is Insider Connected. Right? It's inventing Insider Connected. It's not – and yet that's not – as a designer, I don't – I didn't think of it in those terms. I've got a portfolio of amazing games, and yet the thing I've invented that is probably going to impact pinball more than anything is CyberConnected. So, but I guess I'm super proud of the studio, the work, that's the company really. I mean, I think when I started here, there were nine people in product development, right? And the company was absolutely on life support. and so so you know 14 years ago we were not the company we are today and I think the success of the studio has been the success of the company and vice versa definitely I have one other question you have a list of amazing games okay so if there's any game in your history that you consider the most memorable development, what would you say? That's tough. I would guess that memorable, you know, Pinball 2000 was a huge challenge. And under a lot of pressure. They all bring something. You know, the games, it's almost like, you know, It's like when you listen to a piece of music and it takes you back to that moment in time in your life and you know, like everything that was going on in your life when it's a significant piece, you know, you think about it and you go, OK, you know, you remember all the trouble or all the good or all the combination thereof. Whatever it was, right. You listen to a piece of music from when you were in college or you listen to a piece of music when you first started working. And so when I play the games, when I play my own games from that – from whatever era, I think about the things that were going on in my life at the time because making these games is such an all-consuming thing that you're sort of like your life wraps around the notion of making the game. It's not the other way around. For me, it's always been life happens around me making the game, not the other way around, which is maybe not a good thing, not a good thing to aspire to, you know, but they do consume me. and when they consume me, they bring those memories, you know, good and bad. Lots of challenges. I mean, I can think of, you know, the first game, Corvette, was hugely challenging. I didn't know what the hell I was doing in terms of pinball. I was a seasoned designer. I was, you know, 15 years into my career or something. But I think that there's lots of them all the way along. Deadpool was a huge challenge, right? You know, how do you do a game in six months when you've got this demoralized design team and you've got to turn this entire thing around? You've got to, you know, like close the door on yesterday and start over. Like what – Bond was a huge challenge, licensing challenge, again, a short timeframe. Yeah, but I think Pinball 2000, just from the standpoint of here's a company that's – in essence, I failed because the company ended up closing anyway. Well, I would – I could say you could look at that multiple ways. I would say professionally from Williams' standpoint, but we all know the story behind that is that pinball was still making money. It just wasn't making Williams as much as they wanted, which seems interesting. But it's still a fun game. Every time I go to my friend's house to have the, you know, Revenge from Mars, I always go and play it just because it is so different and it's a fun environment to play. Because I have Attack from Mars, and so it's just fun to see the new version. It's a hilarious game. I love it. Yeah, I mean, I think of – I don't think there's a – you know, Steve Ritchie used to say, probably still says, making these games is a fight. and you've got to love the fight. And I don't think he's wrong. I think that every game, I don't think of a single game, I don't care, video game, you know, when I worked on Xbox PlayStation stuff or when I worked on coin operator stuff, even in the toy business when I was inventing toys, there are challenges. There are huge challenges. and, you know, it's what it takes to make stuff. You know, you just celebrated 70 years of life, George, and, you know, you've accomplished so much. Is there anything you want to accomplish before you retire? You're not retiring, right, George? You're keeping going. You know, I'll tell you, I want, I haven't, you know, a lot of people are asking me about the retirement, asking me the retirement question because I'm, you know, like you said, I had June 1, I turned 70. And, you know, it's a milestone that gets you thinking, right? Like I think, you know, if I'm, you know, I don't know, if I'm lucky, I have 20 left. If I'm not lucky, I have less than that. So you start thinking about what do I do with the time I have? And, you know, you don't think that way when you're 60, right? You don't think that way when you're 50. It seems like that's such a far, that's so far away. That's so long. But now you start thinking, I don't know, you know, it's like, what do you do with 20 years? What do you do with 10 years? What do you, you know, and that's a, nothing's promised to you. So it could be less than that. It could be anything. I think that I want the legacy of the studio and the company to survive into the future to become even greater and better and bigger. I want someday to be away from here and out of the community and look and see that people are still making Sturvimo machines and that new designers I don't even know yet are making the games and I'll say I had a hand in that, right? Well, it seems like your legacy at Stern is building the juggernaut that it has become. And if you look at anybody who's been lucky enough, as Josh and I have, as coming and visiting the factory and visiting the machine that Stern has become, anybody who's familiar with pinball knows that you have a huge hand in making it so integrated. And so at least from a fan perspective and that your mark is cemented in everything that you have done to bring me and Josh into pinball. And it's been fun. It's been a fun ride with everything and everything you're doing to continually bring back old titles. I mean, Metallica, I know my huge wish list is I'd love to see a remastered Lord of the Rings. I'd love to see a remastered Tron. There are a lot of different ones that I would love to see and add to my collection. So would I, by the way. Yeah. I'd love to see a Tron. I'd love to see a Lord of the Rings. You know, you never know. Yeah. Might get to work someday. I did find it funny because I was playing around with AI, and I just Googled. I added into the chat, GPT, what are the games that are going to be released this year? and one of them came up was Lord of the Rings. I was like, wow. Maybe one of the other companies is doing it. Yeah, it was just funny because it was like I don't even know what data mine they got that from. So I thought it was great. You know, you guys mentioned AI, right? And, you know, a lot of our licensors nowadays have specifically, you know, prevented, you know, they don't want in their contracts, you can't do anything with it. And some of them, you know, you have to disclose what you're doing. Yeah. Well, it's the same thing as like, so I am of the Star Wars era. I mean, when I grew up, I, so I'm 50 now. So I was three years old when Star Wars came out. And so, you know, that three to eight years old, I mean, that's like my childhood. I had all the toys and I had all that kind of stuff. And the art of Rob McQuarrie, who he formed the Star Wars – the two most important forces outside of George Lucas obviously are – yeah, there you go. Yeah, the Rob McQuarrie – yeah, George is showing us the art, the books that talk about that. So Rob McQuarrie did all the visual things and that helped shape that. And adding John Williams' soundtrack, those two together, married with George Lucas' story, is what made Star Wars the cultural phenomenon that it was and is and continues to be, which is why you are still selling the Star Wars product from, what is it, 43 or 46 years later. after the inception of it. Yeah, I mean, look, it's a juggernaut brand, right? But I think the AI tools, they're here. They're going to be here, right? It's a question of how do you use them as like we would only use them as, it's a thing you bounce ideas off of. you get a bunch of stuff back most of it is unusable as you get it but it may spur another thought right so it's kind of like you say you know what you know what color palette should this be and and you know i'm looking for something really you know really different and it may come back with something you hadn't thought of now you know everything i've seen none of it's shippable It's all like, okay, I can do something with this if I do this. Some of the, you know, five years ago, I tell you this story, it's a little bit of a sideline. Five years ago, the company sent me to a summer thing at MIT on additive manufacturing, right? I wanted to learn. I wanted to learn. I wanted to learn from the best. I thought it was going to impact our business. It has. But one of the things that they were talking about back then that they exposed me to was a thing called generative design, which is essentially an AI-powered mechanical engineering tool. Right. So, you know, you can create you can give the tool a series of constraints, manufacturing processes, material considerations, and it will spit back a solution that looks like an alien did it. It doesn't look like anything, you know, that a human would design. Right. And in the course, when they were talking about this, they brought in these Ford guys, and these Ford guys were – a lot of these big companies, especially the auto guys, are way advanced in some of the stuff because they have the money to do this kind of stuff. So they had designed this bracket for a minivan seat, and the guy showed us the design, and it was like nothing you'd recognize. And then he said, this is the right seat bracket, and now I'm going to show you the left seat bracket. And a human designer would have mirrored the part, right? A human designer, that's how you think, right? I'm just going to make a mirror of this. You know what? The generative design tool that the guy was using, the left bracket looked nothing like the right bracket. So it's a different way of thinking. That's an AI-powered design tool. It's just – I just saw on Instagram somebody served me up the latest Ferrari. Look at – go look this thing up, the F80. Go look up the suspension components on that thing. They're all generative design. So now it's real. Five years ago, it was like a thing that people were playing with. Now it's really happening. So now we don't, you know, I don't, you know, we, so are we using AI? Well, those tools are coming. They're going to be in your, you know, they're going to be in your tool sets, right? Right now I can take my CAD tool, I can pay for a subscription component of my CAD tool that will allow me to apply these general design techniques. Now, most of the stuff we're doing, we don't need it, but it's not to say that someday it's not going to be more prevalent. Ironically, even Michael Crichton saw this back in the day. if you read the book Congo, he basically found the solution to parachute in because he was using a computer algorithm to predict the best way of getting in. And that was like, he wrote that in 1980 something. Well, George, I want to thank you for coming on. It has been an absolute pleasure. We've ran about an hour and a half. And so we don't want to take up any more of your time, but we will see you at Expo here in October. For sure. if you want someone to get a hold of you, what's the best way for them to get a hold of you? George.Gilmiss, CernPinball.com. Perfect. And if you want to get a hold of us, we are LoserKidPinballPodcast at gmail.com. You can get a hold of us on all the socials, at LoserKidPinball, on everything you can think of. And if you want to get a hold of some of our sweet swag, like Scott's wearing or I'm wearing, CernBallSwag.com slash LoserKid. Scott, give us our last words. You know, I want to ask people, are you buying the Costco Star Wars? Because I'm seriously looking at putting this in my rental, and I think this would be a great one. So anyway, stay in touch and let us know if you have any questions. Thank you.