Okay. Not a great collaborative environment. How about this then? Nah. No. And then it wasn't until you got to the point where he would say, I can't hate that, that you knew you had something. So that's what working with Steve is like. You just kind of chip away and you throw the bad ideas out there, even though they're not bad ideas. Right. But once you find the thing that hits the right nerve, then he'll say, I can't hate that. And things can progress forward. Steve is such a funny character to me. I've met him at shows and he's it's weird because I've heard him described as being super, super serious. is but he also has like a he does have like he gave my business partner gave him go to goes to give him a high five and then steve hits the high five and then does like a pratfall on the ground and then he gets up and he just shouts out to the whole concourse of people he goes that guy hit me did y'all see that that guy hit me the few times i've met him he's been kind of funny but he's also very serious like so i guess we're just he's like an enigma is like i'm trying of wonder like what it all is to work with Steve Ritchie and I'm sure he contains multitudes it seems but as most pinball people like I love his games I I love Steve Ritchie for everything he's done for pinball so we just we love talking to people who worked with him like I said he's unique he knows what he wants well he knows what he doesn't like he may not know what he wants but He knows what he doesn't like, and it just takes some time and patience to get to a point where you get it to finally have him say, that's bitchin'. So you can get something besides that's not bad out of him. Right. I can't hate that goes to, that's bitchin'. And then, okay, we're done. Sign it. Just ship it. Well, I want to bring it back to you. I'm a fan of the artwork through all the years that you've done, Greg. But I think from this post-merger era, my two favorites, the first Elvira game and Star Trek The Next Generation, which are two wildly different takes. Elvira and the Party Monsters just seems like distilled Greg Ferrer style to me. I don't know how you feel about it, but it just feels fully matured. You're drawing on your love of campy Mad Magazine type humor. our fascination, you said, with the Universal Monsters and the Weirdo model kits. And Star Trek kind of seems like a stylistic departure. In your Northwest Pinball seminar, you briefly touched on a technique that you use for the character faces on the back glass. But can you describe that for our listeners? Because it's, you know, it's more realistic, you know, it's less cartoony. Yeah, it is. So at the time, like I said previously, no funny stuff. That was Steve's edict, right? Yeah. So I knew I wasn't going to be able to do a caricature version of the Starship fleet, right, with the crew. I was going to have to figure out how other illustrators made what they did so great. So I literally took a class. I took an intensive four-day seminar. and fortunately at that seminar there was an airbrush artist that had done a lot of work for Star Trek so he had rendered the Starship Enterprise numerous times so I glommed on to that guy and I said dude you got a brain dump on this one so hard because I've got to be able to you know, accurately describe in illustration the Starship Enterprise. And I said, and I know the rabid fans out there, you can't get away with sloppiness. Yeah. And going back to the portraits, you know, again, I wanted to render these people as close to what I could at my skill set at that time. I was pushing myself pretty hard to really come up with something that was completely different than anything I had ever done. I learned from an artist, Thomas Blackshear, I think is his name, an illustrator. He had done a lot of work for Star Trek. And I looked at a lot of his pieces. And again, no Internet, no Google. I did my own research and saw his work, and I said, that's what this needs to look like. But we can't hire Thomas Blackshear to do this game because he'll be too expensive. And he'll go, well, Playfield, what is that? How do I do this? Right. So I took it upon myself. Again, here I am, you know, aping yet another artist. I don't have my own style, probably. I really studied his work and learned that he starts, as does like Drew Struzan, with a pencil, tight pencil drawing on the illustration board. And so I developed all the characters tightly, brought them to the illustration board, literally drew with pencil all the values, you know, all the darks and lights and got them all on the illustration board where I wanted them. This is way after I developed like the actual layout and composition and then went in and layered, painstakingly layered watercolor and acrylic and airbrush and color pencil. And I threw everything at it to try to replicate that Thomas Blackshear, Drew Struzan kind of, you know, quality to the work. Probably not as loose as Drew, but definitely, you know, closer approximating the Blackshear work. So that's something that pushed myself hard, and I'm proud of the finished product. But at the trade show when we debuted the game, somebody came up to me and said, so you worked on this package? And I said, yeah. He goes, it looks great, but why did you guys opt for photography? And I said, pardon me? he goes why did you use photographs of the characters I was like I didn't wow I tried to explain to him you know the painstaking process I went through to create that illustration he was like oh okay he goes I thought it was photographs he walked away and I was like I didn't know what to think I was like damn was that a compliment or did I just get dissed really hard I was like I, you know, I might have lost sleep that night. I don't know. But I just felt like, wow, that's a weird thing to say. But OK. I mean, I worked from photography. I but I did not sit there and put photographs on the illustration board and then airbrushed on top of them like some other artists at that time were doing. I think it's a great art package. I mean, I love the cabinet, especially just the play field. And I mean, yeah, it's one of my favorite games. I think that game just came out beautifully. Yeah, the team, it was a team effort. I mean, Dwight, Steve, me, I mean, there was a lot of late nights and a lot of collaboration. And me being the non-Trek person, I think that kind of helped because I had to learn a lot, awfully quick, about the Star Trek universe, right? It was a fun project to work on. So at this point in time, like we're in the early mid-90s, how long did the average game take you to fully illustrate? Like how'd that compare to doing it back in the early 80s? And I guess what was the workflow like? Were you working on multiple games at the same time or just one at a time? No, it was one at a time. You got to remember, I was like the art department manager since like 82 or 83 when Kevin left the art department to go work for Midway. I was always the art department manager or slash art director, whatever you want to call it. So I was kind of balancing both sides of the fence. In fact, we had time management people come in one time at Williams, and they said, if you have a job where you're doing one thing full time, but you're doing another thing kind of part time, got to lose the part time thing. They meant at work, you know, you can't have a hobby at work. So you have to devote yourself. So if you're a manager, you shouldn't be doing other stuff that people work for you should be doing. I was just like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not, I can't, I can't do that. I need to keep my hand moving. I need to keep active in the design process, you know? And suits just don't understand artists ever. That's like the tale as old as time. Like the suits just do not understand the artistic mind and the creative mind at all. One thing that was a little bit different. So by this time at Williams, Kevin O'Connor and Margaret Hudson were freelancers. OK, Midway had collapsed and Bally sold everything. So there we were. When I would do a play field, for instance, I would do a tight pencil drawing of the play field and I would call Kevin and go, I got another play field for you. And he would ink the play field from my tight pencil. And there was no interpretation. It was very much like the comic book industry, whereby you have a penciler, and then you have an inker, and then you have a colorist. So we kind of adopted that mentality of how to break up the workflow so that we could get these games through the process faster. Kevin would do the ink. He would send that back to me. I would do a color sketch. I would send that over to Margaret, and Margaret would then cut the rubylith color separations for the project back to her days back at Bally. What she learned there, she was now using in her freelance days as a way to earn money. That was a way to break up the amount of work that was being done, where other artists like Pat McMahon or Linda, they might have been inking their own playfields, or Doug Watson might have been inking their own playfields, whereas I was offloading it so that I could weigh my time as a manager and not be, like, you know, caught buried, even though I did spend a lot of hours, you know, still doing artwork. Basically, yeah, back then it was one project per artist at a time. And what were your timelines on a project? Oh, yeah. How long did the average game take? Average game, probably nine months, maybe nine to 12 months, but 12, that's a year. So that's pushing it. So I would say, yeah, probably like nine months total. I think some other things that I heard about your time here was you created the original pencil sketches for the composition, which became Medieval Madness. But John Yowsey ended up completing them and doing the final art package for Medieval. This is exactly what we were talking about at the beginning with you. And we kind of credit it with you and Dennis and your games. It's like it's still full of like silly, campy humor. So it feels like a game that you would have loved to have done. Is there a reason why you didn't end up doing the full art package? and John did, and similarly with Monster Bash and Kevin O'Connor doing that art package? There was a good reason for that. At the time, pinball was fledgling, right? And so, but WMS was also making slot machines. I was kind of not reassigned, but adding to my workload, they kind of had me overseeing some of the slot work too. Not all of it, but some of it. And so I was flying out to Vegas probably three times a year and learning more about slot machines at the time. So my time was being stretched into other endeavors. And I really, really wanted to work on Medieval Madness. And Brian wanted me to be part of it, to bring some of that vibe to it. It was important for me. Working with John was always wonderful. I'm a great admirer of his work. and he was always a very humble guy for the amount of work that he did and just the beauty of his finished work. So I figured we could work together really well. So I said, John, would you mind if I worked as like a heavy-handed art director on this and gave you sketches as like idea jump off points and then you can take it from there? And I came up with a term. I said, you can Yowcify it for me. He said, I'd love to work with you, collaborate. Yeah, we did just that. And I went through the whole process, like we described earlier, of thumbnails and pencil sketches and the lockup or the word, you know, the whole Medieval Madness logo, title logo. I brought that to fruition. I did a color sketch of the cabinet. I did just a pencil sketch of the layout of how I envisioned the king coming out of the castle with his two troll henchmen side by side with a nice, you know, fisheye lens of the castle, you know, behind them and throwing the dragon up on top and gave that pencil sketch to John. I said, here you go. And then literally the team sat in a meeting, the entire design team, and we came up with a hit list of sight gags for the backlast. And we said to John, this is kind of what we want to include in the backlast. And the list was like probably three pages long. And he said, I'll try to work some of that in there for sure. And I'll be damned if he didn't hit his mark. There's a lot of what was on that written page in John's final artwork. And he also came up with a few of his own. I was more than impressed by his finished work. Like the idea of the flaming arrow with a marshmallow on the end of the arrow, that's my idea. It wouldn't have been nothing without John's rendering and his ability to render that into something that was just beautiful. So exciting to work with somebody that you trust and you both trust each other and then to see it come to fruition, I was just amazed. So was this kind of a callback kind of how Paul Ferris brought you in and did a similar thing Like you were talking in the last episode about how he kind of did that to you with Fathom a little bit like he was a little bit of a heavy handed art director and being like this is kind of what I envisioning And then you executed it Then you got to kind of do the same thing with John later. There's a lot of similarities there for sure. I never really thought about, but yeah, for sure. You know, and in some cases, some art directors, that's how they do their job, right? They literally give a layout to somebody and say, here's kind of what we're thinking, you know? I've always tried to let the people that work for me have their say in how they envision artwork on a back glass or a cabinet or a play field to be, and I just tried to guide them or support them or fight for them when needed instead of being a heavy-handed art director. Before we close out this section and your time at Bally Williams, we just wanted to ask, you know, we'd be remiss if we didn't, if you have any good stories about working with Python Angelo, the late Python. You know, he's kind of a man of legend at this point. I feel like any opportunity we have to ask somebody that worked with him firsthand, we got to. Python, may he rest in peace. He was the most interesting character I've ever worked. And I say character because he just was a character. There's no better way to describe him. He wasn't always easy to work with. And he said it best at one of the pinball expos. He gave me an award. He got up to speak. This is near the end of his life, too. So he had already been treated for cancer and was going through all that stuff. He did a whole seminar of design awards in his own way. And he started with me. And the award was an actual seashell because of the marvel that is the seashell. And only he could describe what was happening, you know, with the design, the natural beauty of a seashell and the fact that it's probably based on the Fibonacci, you know, I can't remember everything right now, but there's a lot to all that. And anyway, he used a seashell as the actual award. And he said it best. He said, Greg was like the British Navy and in comes the Python pirates, right? The British Navy had to figure out how to either dispatch these guys or work around them or work with them so that things could turn into a final product. But my first day at Williams was a telltale sign. And I've told this story many times. So it's nothing new. But Ken Fedesna came to me. He was the GM at the time. And he goes, Greg, I know it's your first day on the job here at Williams, but we can't find Python. If I had a dollar for every time somebody said, we can't find python i i'd be a wealthy man right now and i could have probably retired uh much earlier no no that's not true i heard he was like a feral cat i have heard that before like he kind of came and went and he was just he was on his own time he knew what he had and he was a smart man that way and he would get most of his work done in a big hurry at the end of the project I knew I could see what he was capable of doing because a lot of times he would do these magnificent sketches on a wall at night, you know, by some probably infused by some chemical of some kind. He would do these amazing things on a wall or on a large sheet of paper, you know, and the next day you'd come in and look at it and go, wow, that's that's incredible. I'd be like, why don't you put that on a pinball machine? And he'd be like, Magoosh, the pinball machine is just a vehicle for, you know, it is a way for people to have fun and put their money somewhere. They work hard and they play hard and so they have to put their money somewhere. So why not a pinball machine? But it is not worthy. It is not worthy of my artwork, you know. And so I do the artwork for the pinball machine. I was like, okay, whatever. Yeah, like I say, character, you know, that's all he was. He knew he was a character. He did what he did, but he was not always easy to work with. Yeah, he sounds like a tour de force, but I'm grateful. There's something about his art packages that there are some that I love, and there are some that, like, make my skin crawl. There's, like, an uncanny valley to some of them. They're all uniquely Python. Yeah. And I just, it hits me though. Every Python package hits me. So, and that's a special gift. Yep. But we want to talk about after this time kind of pinball sort of collapsed for the narrative here. You had to leave and you went and worked in video games and you had to do some freelance work, but we are a pinball podcast. So we're going to skip over a decade or so of your life here. Yeah. Not to downplay it, but you know. Did some cool work, but we want to talk about when you and Dennis got back together and you built your own machine, which ended up becoming Woe Nelly. And the whole game is built to look and play like an old EM machine from maybe the 1950s, early 1960s. It's got the short flippers, like the bullseye targets, and the original prototypes you built even had like gobbles. And Stern eventually made a run of these games. Can you tell us the story of what sparked the interest in doing an old school EM style game in the first place? Yeah. So Dennis and I had been out at the Northwest Pinball Show and we heard a lot of talk about like one off custom games. We saw the results of, I think, one at the time. I forgot which one it was, but it sparked an interest for me because I was newly unemployed at the time. I was trying to figure out what my next steps were. And I had never freelanced before. So freelancing was all new to me. And at the time, we were in literally what they called the Great Recession. When I'd call different game companies and stuff, it was like, yeah, we're kind of not doing much either here. So thanks anyway. You know, that kind of thing. Or if I'd give them my hourly rate, which I thought was very fair, they'd be like, oh, we never pay that much. It was not a fun time. So I tried to figure out how am I going to make this a fun time and maybe earn some money somehow. So I told Dennis, I said, what do you think about like just putting our heads together and coming up with something that has the look and feel of a custom game? And he loved the idea right away. We just kind of took off from there and put our heads together and started writing down some ideas. we came to a point where it was like, okay, what if we take, whether it was he or myself, what if we take an old EM game and turn it into something different? We know enough people out there that are into EM games that maybe we can do something here. He actually said, well, I have an EM game that I'm not sure what I was going to do with anyway. So maybe we could use that as like the donor game to get started. I'm sorry, I haven't thought about this, but I forgot the name. Oh, Continental Cafe was the game that he had, an old Gottlieb game from, I think, the 50s, late 50s. And so we employed Mark Wehner, who has an extensive collection of games, and he had worked at Williams. So we already knew Mark. Oh, boy, my names are escaping my brain right now. We put together a team. I'm sorry. I know what you guys can do. You can edit this part, and then I can come up with the name later that I want to give you, and then we can slice it all back in. Yeah, right. Slice it all back in. No, I'm just kidding. But not really, though. I was just kidding there, by the way. My mind is as sharp as a katana blade. It's a little joke I like to play with Ken Walker, who was an integral part of taking Continental Cafe apart and helping to teach Dennis about the workings of all the EM parts and getting them all to work on the new playfield design. This is my real voice, by the way. My other voice has been a bit that I do to mess with silly podcasters who ask me dumb questions, which I will now revert back to for funsies. So anyway, I'll do a nice voiceover.