Pinball Innovators & Makers Podcast Ep 18: Gerry Stellenberg

The Pinball Network·video·1h 14m·analyzed·Dec 22, 2023

Analysis

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TL;DR

Gerry Stellenberg traces P-Rock and Multimorphic origins from college pinball fandom through engineering to homebrew revolution.

Summary

Gerry Stellenberg, founder of Multimorphic and creator of the P-Rock controller, recounts his journey from first playing pinball in college (Theater of Magic/Attack from Mars) at Virginia Tech in the mid-1990s to becoming a driving force in the homebrew and custom pinball movement. He describes his engineering background, early experiments controlling a TriZone machine with National Instruments hardware and LabView software, his pinball machine collection building in the early 2000s, and the organic evolution of P-Rock from a personal project to a community-driven platform that became foundational to modern custom pinball development.

Key Claims

Gerry Stellenberg first played pinball at Virginia Tech around 1995-1997, specifically Theater of Magic or Attack from Mars, after friends at a pool hall introduced him to the game.
high confidence · Gerry directly describes his college experience and the specific machines he remembers playing
Stellenberg's senior project in computer engineering class was to build a labyrinth-style game with optical sensor gates and custom control electronics, predating his pinball work.
high confidence · Gerry describes the project in detail, including his partner's woodworking and his electronics/programming role
Stellenberg's first custom pinball machine was a TriZone he obtained cheaply ($25-50) from a local collector who had no control boards, which he retrofitted with National Instruments digital I/O boards and LabView software.
high confidence · Gerry provides specific details about the acquisition, his father helping transport it, and the LabView implementation
Stellenberg worked at National Instruments in Austin, Texas, where he gained access to tools and knowledge that helped him develop his initial pinball control system.
high confidence · Gerry explicitly states he was hired by National Instruments out of college and used company resources to solve control problems
Les Pitt, a coworker Stellenberg met at Tipping Point Technologies in 2001, became a long-term collaborator and helped with mechanical aspects of pinball projects.
high confidence · Gerry names Les Pitt explicitly and describes their collaborative relationship over many years
P-Rock was initially developed not as a commercial product but as a sidetracked evolution of an earlier P3 (modular pinball platform) concept that Stellenberg and Les Pitt were working on.
high confidence · Gerry describes the P3 concept being blocked by lack of available controllers, leading him to design P-Rock as a solution
Stellenberg quit a demanding job at Tipping Point Technologies around 2006-2007 where he was burning out working 16+ hour days on network intrusion detection systems, which motivated his shift toward pinball entrepreneurship.

Notable Quotes

“And I just floundered around and lost the ball instantly. So I was like, wait, you're good at this and I'm not. So clearly there's something I need to learn.”
Gerry Stellenberg @ early in episode — Illustrates the competitive skill-based appeal that hooked Stellenberg on pinball—the desire for self-improvement through mastery
“I can't tell you why I wanted to do that. I don't remember. but that was my first thought and so I spent the second half of my senior year in college looking for a machine to basically rip apart take out the boards and stuff”
Gerry Stellenberg @ early-mid episode — Shows Stellenberg's instinctive drive to tinker and rebuild systems, a core trait that led to P-Rock
“I have 12 huge expensive things in my home that every time I turn the switch on they're the exact same thing but now I have a I think I had a mobile phone at the time we certainly had nintendos and things that you turn them on and they have a lot of content... Why isn't the pinball machine a device that we can run different software applications on and do different things?”
Gerry Stellenberg @ mid-late episode — Key insight that motivated the P3 and P-Rock vision: applying modern computing paradigms (apps, software switching) to pinball hardware
“I think I had a mobile phone at the time we certainly had nintendos and things that you turn them on and they have a lot of content I think the dreams of smart refrigerators were even coming out then with apps and things that you would run in your refrigerator”
Gerry Stellenberg @ mid-late episode — Contextualizes the early 2000s tech landscape and the gap Stellenberg identified in pinball hardware
“Everyone who's helping should be taken care of. So I started looking around at what I wanted to do.”
Gerry Stellenberg @ mid episode — Reflects Stellenberg's philosophy on employee/collaborator treatment that has influenced Multimorphic's culture
“It was simply that eventually the people reaching out to me because I think at some point I said, yeah, I'm going to build a few extras.”
Gerry Stellenberg — Shows the organic, community-driven transition from hobby to commercial product

Entities

Gerry Stellenbergperson Multimorphiccompany P-Rockproduct P3product Les PittpersonVirginia TechorganizationNational Instrumentscompany

Signals

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business_signal: Stellenberg's burnout from corporate work (16+ hour days at Tipping Point Technologies) directly precipitated his pivot toward pinball entrepreneurship and the decision to build P-Rock commercially
high · Gerry explicitly connects his exhaustion in the corporate environment ('I kind of burned out on helping other people be successful') to his decision to pursue personal projects and eventually P-Rock
?
community_signal: Early online criticism from rec.games.pinball (a responder telling him 'stop trying to fix pinball machines. You have no idea what you're doing') was encountered but not heeded by Stellenberg
medium · Stellenberg recounts: 'I remember posting on RGP... And the response... basically said, stop trying to fix pinball machines. You have no idea what you're doing. Don't ever touch one again. Well, many people are full of bad advice, Jerry. I didn't listen.'
?
community_signal: Stellenberg actively reached out to rec.games.pinball community to gather requirements for P-Rock functionality before even deciding to commercialize the product
high · Gerry states he reached out on RGP 'asking people about functionality for existing machines' and received organic interest: 'some of the emails I got that were, this is really cool. If you ever make this board, it'd be cool if you could make a couple extras'
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design_philosophy: Stellenberg's vision for P3 and P-Rock was explicitly modeled on smartphone/app ecosystems—treating pinball machines as hardware platforms that could run different software applications rather than fixed single-game devices
high · Stellenberg articulates: 'Why isn't the pinball machine a device that we can run different software applications on and do different things?' comparing to phones, Nintendos, and emerging smart appliances

Transcript

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0:00

The Pinball Network is online. Launching Pinball Innovators and Makers Podcast. Hi, and welcome to the Pinball Podcast focused on the innovators and makers who are crafting homebrew, custom, and rethemed pinball machines, the technology that makes these personal projects possible, and the companies helping with these journeys. Custom pinballs are a deeply personal and technically challenging undertaking, requiring time, money, knowledge, and most importantly, the desire to make it happen. I'm Dan Rosenstein, your host. Join me and let's go under the playfield and see what's needed to make a custom pinball possible. Hello, pinball innovators and makers. Welcome to episode 18. Today's guest has been instrumental in kicking off the growth we have seen in the custom and homebrew hobby, which has become a true catalyst for many of the pinball companies that have emerged over the last decade and leading to the renaissance moment we have now. A pinball maker and innovator to the core, please welcome the creator of the P-Rock Controller and the president and founder of Multimorphic, Jerry Stellenberg. Welcome, Jerry. Thank you, Dan. Super happy to be here. So, Jerry, let's start off with your, you know, how did you get into pinball? What is your intro into it? your origin story if you will uh let's see i hadn't really touched a pinball game until college uh college at virginia tech 1996 97 95 somewhere around there i was big into to pool and playing in the pool hall my friends were into pinball and they they sucked me in they they they got me hooked do you remember what that first machine was it was either theater magic or attack from Mars. I forget which one. I think it was Theater of Magic. Somebody left a credit on there and said, Jerry, go play it. And I played it and it took about 30 seconds and I wanted to play it again. What was it about that first experience other than being with your friends? We'll talk about community a bunch throughout this episode. What was it about playing it that drew you in while you were in college? I think I didn't recognize or realize before I played it that it was skill based, that you could actually control the ball. And watching my friends play, they were good at aiming and hitting shots and controlling the ball. And I just floundered around and lost the ball instantly. So I was like, wait, you're good at this and I'm not. So clearly there's something I need to learn.

high confidence · Gerry describes in detail the burnout experience and the decision to leave that role

The P-Rock board was designed in 2008 with the goal of enabling diverse software applications on pinball machines, similar to how smartphones and smart devices were emerging at the time.

high confidence · Gerry explicitly states 2008 as the design year and references the smartphone/app metaphor that motivated the vision

“stop trying to fix pinball machines. You have no idea what you're doing. Don't ever touch one again.”

Unknown RGP forum responder @ mid episode — Early criticism from rec.games.pinball that Stellenberg ignored, foreshadowing his success despite skepticism

Tipping Point Technologies

rec.games.pinball (RGP)organization

Dan Rosensteinperson

The Pinball Networkorganization

Spider-Man Blackgame

market_signal: P-Rock emerged organically from community demand rather than top-down business planning; initial requests from RGP forum users for 'a few extras' evolved into a formal product offering

high · Stellenberg states: 'It was simply that eventually the people reaching out to me... at some point I said, yeah, I'm going to build a few extras' and emphasizes this was not originally intended as a commercial product

community_signal: Gerry Stellenberg's engineering background and hands-on tinkering approach directly shaped P-Rock's design philosophy—treating pinball control as a systems engineering problem rather than a pure software or mechanical problem

high · Stellenberg explicitly connects his computer engineering degree, early labyrinth project, and work at National Instruments to his pinball control system design methodology

personnel_signal: Les Pitt's role as a long-term collaborator with strong mechanical/fabrication skills complemented Stellenberg's electronics and software expertise, establishing a foundational partnership dynamic for Multimorphic's later work

medium · Stellenberg describes meeting Les in 2001 and their ongoing collaboration over 'so many years' where Les would handle mechanical challenges like welding and fabrication

technology_signal: P-Rock represented a fundamental shift in homebrew pinball by providing an open, standardized control platform at a time when no commercial off-the-shelf solutions existed for custom machines

high · Stellenberg notes that in 2008 there was 'no pinball controller... no off the shelf thing with open software' except pin MAME schematics, making P-Rock a critical enabling technology

And it just made me, just like playing pool. You play pool against people that are better than you. And you're like, man, they can do things that I can't do. I want to learn how to do that. So I guess self-improvement. So this was, was this truly the very first time you had been exposed to a pinball machine or you had never seen one growing up or never played on one or don't remember playing on one? I can't remember playing one. I'm sure I saw them somewhere, but no, I don't remember playing. We used to go to the arcade and play video games, but I don't remember ever playing pinball before that. Gary, you mentioned you went to Virginia Tech. Are you from the East Coast originally, just regionally? You don't have to give away where you're from if you want to. Yeah, no worries. I grew up in Delaware, school in Virginia Tech, and then after that, made my way down to Texas. And pinball was legal at that time. So it's not like you weren't exposed to it because it was illegal to play. So that's interesting that college was your first foray. So how did you go from, you know, in the pool halls, in between playing games, playing with your friends on Theater of Magic and Attack from Mars, to getting into the homebrew and custom scene? This is like before you started anything with P-Rock. Like how did you foray or make your way to the custom and homebrew scene? So basically when I wasn't eating, playing pool or pinball or doing anything else related to living my life, I was studying to be a computer engineer, which is kind of a combination between electrical engineering and computer software, which are the main facets of developing computer hardware like a P-Rock board. But I'm someone who was fascinated by how things work, by creating new things, by taking ideas and twisting them around and trying to do cool new things with them. My senior project in our computer engineering class was to develop a game. We were allowed to do anything, but my partner and I chose to develop a game similar to that table labyrinth game where you – the X and Y table and you'd roll a ball around and try through gates. So we developed basically that. We took opto pairs and mounted them various places around a table, moved it around, and we wrote the code for that. I think it was an assembler. It was a little microcontroller class, and that basically is Pinball. And I guess I did that because of the Pinball experiences and wanting to recreate that fun environment. But the ball rolling around through gates is basically the beginnings of every other project I've done for the rest of my life. So let's talk about that labyrinth just for a sec. Did you use an existing labyrinth or did you build up like the whole thing from scratch? Was it made out of wood, out of metal? How close to the actual game of labyrinth was it and how far was it? What was mechanically controlled and electrically controlled? We developed it from scratch. My project partner, just another guy from the class, he was interested in woodworking and building stuff. And he kind of took on the fabrication side of things. And I handled most of the electronics and almost all of the programming. I don't know how he got me to do all that because the class was about electronics and programming, but clearly I was a sucker. But no, it was a lot of fun. It was basically from scratch completely. We cut holes. We added the – I think it was more manually controlled than Labyrinth was. We would just use levers to move it around. But it would guide you through a sequence of gates. Instead of trying to avoid holes and get to the end, this was just a bunch of opto-gates that you were told via LEDs which one was next. which one you had to go to. Oh, that's super cool. So you're still mechanically, if I'm understanding it correctly, you're still mechanically controlling the level and position of the board so the ball can move. It's moving through gates and you're basically like a slalom course saying you've got to go through these gates. So instead of labyrinth, maybe it's slalom. Oh, that's super cool. So then let's rewind a little bit. You went to school for computer engineering. You found this love, you sparked this love for pinball in college. If you don't mind, let's talk about the earlier years. Like, what was Jerry like as a kid? Like, did you have the knack? Like, did you, you know, at the age of six, did your parents know you're going to be going off to engineering school? Like, tell the listeners about that. I don't think it was that early. No, I knew I, my dad brought computers home when I was 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. I remember starting on an NX-86 something or other that could barely do anything. I think we like everyone used them for word processing and that was about it I got into the bulletin board stuff connecting to bulletin boards through the modem in early high school I think, 13, 14 started downloading programs and learning how to do very basic things I took some programming classes in high school because computers were really neat and interesting and I had dug into them a little bit but So, yeah, it was high school. I started programming a little bit and I just knew that I wanted to build stuff. I wanted to create stuff. I wanted to design things. I can't tell you what connected me to that. But probably dad bringing home those computers was the start of it. So on those early computers, so my you and I, if I did my math correctly, are roughly the exact same age based on what we both went to college. And based on just some of the things that you just said was it was very similar. My dad also brought home x86 computers when I was very, very young. And I remember playing Friendlyware, which was kind of like the first, like, here's everything a computer can do type piece of software. Other than word processing, do you remember any other software on those early computers that might have been interesting to you? The only ones I remember were Sierra's King's Quest. And was it Zork? Zork, yeah. Yeah. Look left, walk right. Was that Zork? Yeah. Okay. I don't remember if Look Left, Look Right was Zork, but Zork was definitely in that time frame. That's awesome. So then fast forward, let's take you, you know, you've studied computer engineering at Virginia Tech. You've been playing pinball with your buddies at the pool hall. So how did the bridge from playing pinball to being interested in custom and homebrew happen? So it actually happened very quickly, and yeah, it happened before I left college. So I went to a job fair at school and talked to a bunch of companies, one of which was National Instruments, which is a company in Austin, Texas, known for test and measurement stuff. They offered me a job. I accepted it. And I started wondering, you know, this company makes a lot of digital I.O. boards and industrial control type stuff.