Journalist Tool

Kineticist

  • HDashboard
  • IItems
  • ↓Ingest
  • SSources
  • KBeats
  • BBriefs
  • RIntel
  • QSearch
  • NName Review
  • +Health

v0.1.0

← Back to items

Gomez – This One Has A Lot Of Arcade Stuff

Silverball Chronicles·podcast_episode·1h 45m·analyzed·May 5, 2021
View original
Export .md

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.034

TL;DR

George Gomez's path from industrial design to arcade/pinball icon via Midway Games.

Summary

Silverball Chronicles episode featuring a deep-dive into George Gomez's early career, covering his transition from industrial design through arcade cabinet work at Midway Games (Space Invaders, GORF controller, Satan's Hollow) to eventual pinball design. The episode traces how Gomez's formal design training and arcade experience shaped his approach to pinball, establishing him as one of the industry's most respected designers.

Key Claims

  • George Gomez is currently an executive vice president and chief creative officer at Stern Pinball

    high confidence · David Dennis explicitly states this in the introduction

  • George Gomez studied industrial design at the University of Illinois in Chicago, graduating in May 1978

    high confidence · Directly attributed to biographical information presented in the episode

  • Midway Games produced over 70,000 copies of Space Invaders, with the factory capable of building 11,000 games per day

    medium confidence · David Dennis cites production figures; likely sourced from George Gomez interview material

  • Satan's Hollow failed to sell any units in the Bible Belt / Southern United States due to the Satan theme

    medium confidence · George Gomez quoted as saying 'we didn't sell a single game in the Bible Belt'; acknowledged as a marketing mistake in retrospect

  • The Gorf controller features a hidden 'Gomez' signature in the dot-matrix style display on top of the joystick

    high confidence · David Dennis provides detailed description of the Easter egg with specific reference to show notes images

  • Dave Nutting and Associates was an exclusive 'captive' design team contracted to Midway, working off-site but pitching designs to the internal Midway team for production

    high confidence · David Dennis explains the captive design model in detail

  • In 1982, Bally merged its pinball division with Midway to form Bally Midway Manufacturing

    high confidence · David Dennis states this as a documented historical event

  • Tron (1982) was promoted as featuring state-of-the-art computer graphics and was a Disney/video game industry partnership project

    high confidence · George Gomez quoted via Tom Neiman's licensing information; Tron facts confirmed by David Dennis

Notable Quotes

  • “You really should design something that you're passionate about because you're going to get your best work that way. You're going to love to go to work. You're going to love to do this.”

    George Gomez (recounting advice from a university teacher) @ ~early in episode — Formative career advice that influenced Gomez's decision to pursue game design

  • “I'm a designer. I think you know you guys really need help. And I want to make games.”

    George Gomez (at age 22, pitching to Midway) @ ~early career section — Demonstrates Gomez's early confidence and sales pitch to secure first industry position

  • “As far as the eye could see running off into infinity was the assembly area the factory. Your senses were assaulted by the sound of air tools and the bustle and hustle of literally hundreds of people.”

    George Gomez (describing Space Invaders production at Midway) @ ~mid episode — Vivid description of the scale of Space Invaders manufacturing success

  • “We've really screwed up putting Satan in the name. Because if I recall, all the sales and complaints that we didn't sell a single game in the Bible Belt.”

    George Gomez @ ~Satan's Hollow section — Acknowledges marketing/regional sales failure of Satan's Hollow game

  • “Bill Adams is the guy that moved me into actual game design. He had a very clear vision for this game, a very evil villain boss.”

    George Gomez @ ~Satan's Hollow section — Credits Bill Adams as key mentor transitioning him to full game design role

  • “Tom Neiman was Bally Midway's licensing guy, and he told us that Disney was going to make a movie about video games that was going to feature state-of-the-art computer graphics and that they were looking for a video game partner.”

    George Gomez @ ~Tron licensing section — Explains how Bally/Midway secured the Tron arcade license opportunity

  • “I remember as a kid going to see, I think it was Alice in Wonderland, one of those Disney movies. And the trailer that they showed before the movie was for Tron. That's how old I am.”

Entities

George GomezpersonMidway GamescompanyStern PinballcompanyBally / Bally MidwaycompanyDave Nutting and AssociatescompanyBill AdamspersonAdish GoschpersonTom Neimanperson

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Satan's Hollow arcade game failed to achieve sales in the Bible Belt / Southern United States due to Satan theme, acknowledged by George Gomez as a critical marketing/regional sales mistake.

    high · George Gomez quoted: 'we didn't sell a single game in the Bible Belt'; identified as regional sales failure

  • ?

    community_signal: Silverball Chronicles expanding media presence to Twitch streaming with history-focused content, merchandise sales (silverballswag.com), and integration with broader pinball podcast network (Loser Kid friendship recognition, TWIP database participation).

    high · David Dennis announces Twitch streaming channel launch, merchandise sales, Loser Kid Pinball friendship ordination, TWIP database participation

  • ?

    design_philosophy: George Gomez embedded a hidden signature ('Gomez') in the dot-matrix display of the Gorf arcade controller, demonstrating subtle Easter egg approach to design attribution when official credits were not provided by manufacturer.

    high · David Dennis provides detailed description of signature hidden in controller display; referenced in show notes images

  • $

    market_signal: George Gomez's career path from formal industrial design training → arcade cabinet controls/design → full game design → eventual pinball innovation establishes archetype of designer leveraging cross-disciplinary skills and formal education.

    high · David Dennis explicitly frames Gomez as unique among pinball designers for developing skills outside pinball before applying them to the hobby

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Bally Midway pursued Tron arcade license as deliberate strategy to boost sales post-1982 merger, with licensing director Tom Neiman securing Disney partnership for state-of-the-art CG arcade game.

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.318

0:00
Ever notice how ads always pop up at the worst moments when the killer's identity is about to be revealed? During that perfect meditation flow.
0:12
On Amazon Music, we believe in keeping you in the moment. That's why we've got millions of ad-free podcast episodes, so you can stay completely immersed in every story, every reveal, every breath. Download the Amazon Music app and start listening to your favorite podcasts ad-free, included with Prime.
0:37
The Pinball Network is online. Launching Silver Ball Chronicles. I have a question. Tell me if you can hear this at all. I'm a little far away from the mic. No, yeah, it sounds good. No, no, no, I mean, I'm about to do something. Hold on. Oh, okay.
1:12
That sound terrible? No, it sounded very good. wow Ron you're so talented it pisses me off Hello everyone, I'm David Dennis. This is Silverball Chronicles. With me is Ron, new Mike Hallett. How you doing, sir? Well, it's not really too new. This is at least the third episode I've used it. That's right. It's new because I'd forgotten to bring it up last month. Nobody could tell that I cut out all of my stuttering and confusion during the introduction because I couldn't think of something to call you. I just called you Ron Hallett, which is disappointing.
2:27
We've changed up a little bit of our recording, so we're hopefully a little bit clearer here in the last couple of months. I think I'm figuring most of this out. The editing is not fun, but I'm figuring it out. After a year, congrats. There you go. You know what I just figured out? With the recording software I use, when I mute myself so you can't hear me, it still records me. That's interesting. Yeah, so if I give you the track, every time I mute, you'll just hear me clearing and all this stuff. So I better make sure I don't say anything derogatory about you while I'm muted, thinking you won't hear me. That's right. You certainly want to say only good things. Only good things. That's right, because you don't know when I will sneak up, and I'll just be in your window, and I'll be looking in. I'll be like, what you doing in there, Ron, with your drum set? What are you doing? Anyhoo, let's get on to the podcast here this month. You haven't picked up anything, right, here in the last little while? Jurassic Park. Oh, my goodness. Pro or premium? Premium. Yes. Got to go premium on the Jurassic Park. And you can find out all about it in the latest episode of the Slam Tilt Podcast. There you go. Contractually obligated to at least mention it on every podcast.

David Dennis @ ~Tron section — Personal anecdote establishing timeline and cultural impact of Tron marketing

Silverball Chronicles
media
Slam Tilt Podcastmedia
Loser Kid Pinball Podcastmedia
Space Invadersgame
Gorfgame
Satan's Hollowgame
Trongame
Blue Sharkgame
David Dennisperson
Ron Hallettperson
Python Angeloperson
John Borgperson
University of Illinois Chicagoorganization

high · Tom Neiman (licensing guru) informed team of Disney's video game movie project with state-of-the-art graphics; George Gomez designed the arcade cabinet

  • $

    market_signal: Pinball podcast ecosystem exhibits strong cross-promotion and community support structures: contractual mentions (Slam Tilt), friendship ordinations, merchandise swaps, and coordinated database initiatives (TWIP).

    medium · Ron Hallett contractually obligated to mention Slam Tilt; Loser Kid sends Silverball Chronicles branded merchandise; TWIP pinball promoters database launched with 5-star review system

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Bill Adams is identified as key mentor who transitioned George Gomez from arcade cabinet design (controls) into full game design role at Midway through 'relentless nagging and programming.'

    high · George Gomez credited Bill Adams as 'the guy that moved me into actual game design' with 'very clear vision'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Adish Gosch's MCR2 hardware board set represented evolution from Dave Nutting and Associates' earlier arcade board architecture at Midway, enabling in-house game design capability.

    medium · David Dennis describes MCR2 as 'a little bit of a different board set than they were using' compared to Dave Nutting designs

    • 3:43
    We are 12 months into your contract. We've done that renegotiation a couple of weeks ago. It was pretty good. few riders you wanted to make sure that you had only brown m&ms in a brandy glass so we figured that out yes the van halen rider very good yes i i got that from wayne's world too actually i think it was the opposite though they wanted all the brown m&ms removed which i don't understand they were my favorite brown ones yeah remember they used to have the light brown ones like the tan ones they remove those i was disappointed well great so uh in my news thanks for asking ron uh i've started up the silver ball chronicles streaming channel over at twitch.tv slash silver ball chronicles where i've been doing some streaming so i did a tech stream to make some poor stadiums which are like pin stadiums but much worse and significantly cheaper after going through this exercise if you are in the united states i would highly suggest you swing over to pin stadium and pick up your pin stadiums from scott rather than trying to build your own because quite frankly they just don't come out as well but they work i guess so swing on over uh give me a follow enjoy uh joining us and uh coming into some chat we like to we like to have it more uh history based you're required to wear a monocle if you are watching the silver ball chronicles stream over there now when i'm doing a couple of shows i think uh doing up these show notes which I'm sharing my screen right now. I think I'm going to do something similar like that in the pinball category. Everybody at TPN is trying to build that category, get more exposure, more people into that category.
    5:27
    But I'm going to mix it up a little. I'm going to play some pinball as well as I will be doing sitting down while I do some research and things like that and sharing my computer so you can follow along on how we actually build out an episode.
    5:40
    Nice. Also, I have to say I have a big shout out to the Loser Kids over at the Loser Kid Pinball Podcast. Please listen to them. We have been ordained as a friend of the pod, and I recently received my Loser Kid Pinball hat with a few stickers and a keychain. So thank you so much for that. swing on over to facebook.com slash silver ball chronicles to engage us and comment on some of the postings and some of the photos that we put along and of course this week in pinball has also launched the twip pinball promoters database that's where you can go in you can search for all of the different podcasts and streams and youtube channels within the pinball industry you the listener can leave us a five-star review there that would be awesome and you can also check out some of the other promoters t-shirts We have t-shirts? We do. We've got some t-shirts. How do I get one? You can get one of those by swinging over to silverballswag.com. That's where we've got all of our shirts. In addition to that, I'm going to have to say we're a big deal in New Zealand. We sold a shirt to Mike. Yes. Mike says, another great episode of Silver Ball Chronicles, and it sounds like I had a mention on the episode with my purchase of one of your Silver Ball Swag t-shirts. He can predict the future. He can. It's because they are as New Zealand. He says, what a coincidence that this episode on Pat Lawler that I have some of the games you discussed. It was great to hear some history about them that I was not aware of. I have the following Lawler games that I purchased secondhand back in the late 90s. Earthshaker, complete with Sinking Building, one of the first 200 sample games, but no Diamond Plate, unfortunately, because the wear and tear is getting worse. Whirlwind, love that fan in the summertime. and Funhaus, my first game I purchased because of Rudy. It was a big deal, our Pat Lawler episode. It went very well, I think. One thing that we did, well, there was two significant things that we did. One of them was that I left out the discussion on our last episode on the seance mode in The Addams Family. Of course, that's the one where you shoot the shot and the knocker inside of the cabinet goes as though somebody is knocking at a door in Seance. Huge oversight. That is probably one of the coolest things in a list of cool things on that pinball machine. The other thing is people were like, well, what the heck? Where's Twilight Zone? What did you do there? And while, quite frankly, I had planned on doing a third Pat Lawler episode, but then after the episode, when I started to do the editing, I said, oh, crap, we probably should have included Twilight Zone in the previous episode. Because we did all his Stern games. I mean, he only had a couple left at Williams. I know. That's when I realized that, okay, now I'm screwed. So we're going to have to come up. I'm going to have to come up with some unique way to figure out where to stick Twilight Zone within another podcast. But wait a minute. What about Roadshow and No Good Gophers and Safecracker? Yeah, I'm not going to be able to talk three hours on No Good Gophers. Oh, that's a slam ramp. Yet another cool Waller innovation. There you go. So we've got a couple of extra little bits of feedback here. This one's from Pinside. It's from Northern Dude, who is a fellow Canadian. Northern Dude, that's, yes. What I will have to say is that you were one of my Pinside Secret Santas over the last couple of years. Heard it here first, folks, and so did Northern Dude. Have you ever done the Pinside Secret Santa? I have not. Remember, I'm hardly on Pinside. well it's probably one of the best parts i would recommend it well as as a canadian we all join the pin side secret santa and the reason we do that is because we're all hoping we get ed robertson i love you send us an email just say hi just just pop in just be like hey guys i'm ed robertson i listen to the show just that would make me that would just make me feel so good so pin side northern dude uh he left us a message which i forgot to mention on the previous episode Oh, you could read it in your Canadian accent, so it's authentic. That's right. Okay.
    9:59
    Actually, he's from sort of the middle of the country, so it's more like your... Is it Wisconsin, Canada? He's like your Wisconsin-y accent. That's what he's got out that way. So, started listening to the pod today on the road, and the timing couldn't have been flukier. I was on Kijiji, which is Canada's Craigslist, this week in Iran to pick up a pin. But I know what's coming up about three minutes into the show. You're running through the early Williams. The Orsler produced pins. I know, I know. Scorpion comes up. Wait, what a unit. I'm so excited to have purchased a scorpion. Wow, you do voices too.
    10:42
    So we didn't have any corrections from our previous episode, which is very nice. I don't think Bruce listened to the episode, but we did have an amazing message from Eric. Eric says, just listen to your latest episode where you were talking about Wrecking Ball by Pat Lawler, which eventually became Banzai Run. He said, last year, just prior to the lockdown, I visited a good friend, and in his private collection, he has the original Wrecking Ball prototype machine. I've included a picture of it. Didn't get a chance to play it, but he says it's still in working condition. In one picture, you'll notice it's placed right next to a bonsai run and next to about 200 plus other pinballs. Wow. That guy's got a lot of games. Also, tell David that it's pronounced distributor, not distributor. That's what it's all about. Very good.
    11:30
    Distributor. My favorite is the Australian way of saying innovative. Just innovative. I love that. I'm very partial to aluminum.
    11:41
    Oh. Very good with that one. I'm a big fan of that one. As you know, of course, if you have any corrections, even ones about my pronunciation, you can send that over to silverballchronicles at gmail.com, or you can jump into our Facebook page as mentioned before. Anything else you want to add, Ron? No. What are we talking about? The topic today is Mr. George Gomez. We're going to start with George Gomez's early career. And as you know, our homie Gomi has created some of the most well-received pinball machines our hobby has ever seen.
    12:18
    George Gomez has spent time at Williams, as well as Stern as a contractor, and is currently an executive vice president and chief creative officer at Stern Pinball. Often when people are talking about other pinball manufacturers and the struggles that they have, they often say, that pinball company needs their George Gomez. In fact, one of the toughest critics around in pinball, Mr. Python Angelo, called George a good guy and very passionate. Wow. George Gomez, although not the king of flow, certainly has created some of the flowiest and most fun pinball machines of all time. Our topic today, Gomez. This episode has a lot of arcade stuff. Great title. Thank you. I worked on that for a while. Thank you. George Gomez's early career, of course, Ron, this is an interesting episode because unlike a lot of the other designers, creators, innovators within pinball, George spent a lot of his career outside of pinball and spent a lot of time developing various skills that he would then bring to pinball. And I think that's what makes him certainly unique. Do you have any thoughts on George before we jump into his early career? Best autograph in pinball. It is hands down the greatest. Yep. I have a video of him just doing his autograph. It's that incredible. I had to film it.
    13:47
    George Gomez, if I ever bump into you, I would love to get a Deadpool Translite signed that I can put on my wall. George, of course, is a first-generation Cuban-American who fled Cuba during the Cuban Revolution in the 1960s. His family ended up in Chicago, and he studied industrial design at the University of Illinois in Chicago, graduating in May of 1978. He originally wanted to be an architect, but ended up doing product design. And I think a lot of George Gomez's amazing handwriting probably comes from the fact that he wanted to be an architect. And, of course, you have to have very good design skills and very good quality, especially back in the 70s and 80s when you didn't have computers, to draw a lot of those schematics and designs. What do you think? I think you have to have very legible text. Big deal. So, of course, after graduation, like most people, he took the summer off. And George says, in the fall, I started looking for work. I had another teacher that had said, you know, you really should design something that you're passionate about because you're going to get your best work that way. You're going to love to go to work. You're going to love to do this. And at the time, I was playing a lot of video games in the student center at the university. I had never made that connection that, you know, I could design a game. Yeah, so back in the late 1970s, that's when coin-op was really moving into the video game space. It was a very simple machine with your monitor and your joysticks and very simple games. So you can imagine a 22-year-old George Gomez saying in the 70s, oh, you mean I could do this, which is a big deal. And I think that probably still happens nowadays when people are playing games, that they realize sort of all of a sudden, like, oh, my goodness, I can choose to build something like this. And you know what came out in 1978? Space invaders.
    15:50
    Big deal. So he figured, hey, I'll call out one of these companies and ask for a job. So he ended up calling Midway Games on the outskirts of Chicago in Franklin Park. This was when there was a change in coin op. Most of the people working in the industry had been there for years, and now the newer generation with formal education in electronics was graduating from university.
    16:08
    George says the company at the time had a lot of engineers. They had a lot of mechanical engineers, and they had electrical engineers. Most of the software people were electrical engineers by training or mathematicians at the time. I said, I'm a designer. I think you know you guys really need help. And I want to make games. I went in there with a bunch of stuff that was kind of my vision for what they should be doing. When you're 22 years old, you know what you don't really even know that you don't know. That's right. So that's that sort of young p*** vinegar, if you will, right? You just sort of go in and you're like, hey, you know, you're doing all this stuff. You should be doing this. And you do that in your early 20s because that's when you've got all this sort of confidence. You haven't been destroyed and jaded by an industry. Isn't that right? Yeah. And you know what they were making when he went there? Space invaders.
    16:56
    And they made a ton, a metric ton written here, of space invaders. George says as far as the eye could see running off into infinity was the assembly area the factory Your senses were assaulted by the sound of air tools and the bustle and hustle of literally hundreds of people I mean, that's a game they produce over 70 000 copies Pat lawler's game only sold about 22 000 units And of course he's talking about the adams family there midway would build 11 000 games a day One end of the factory semi-trucks bringing in raw goods. On the other side of the factory, they were trucking off the finished product. That was just how massive Space Invaders was. Now that – I mean I enjoyed Space Invaders. I played Space Invaders. But I didn't get – it doesn't have the hold, like the claws in me like it still does some people nowadays. but Space Invaders was just a pinnacle, a watershed moment within sort of video game coin-op, wasn't it? Yeah, I think that's – it was either that or Pac-Man. I think it was Space Invaders. It led to a yen shortage in Japan where it was made. Wow. Yeah, that's right. I do remember that. I saw that in a Netflix documentary not too long ago speaking about that, that the little coins are – I guess in North America it would be like your quarter. There were a bunch of quarters missing because there were so many people playing Space Invaders. What Midway was doing, a lot of these games would be made in Japan, and their cabinets that they would make were typically a little smaller than what they made in the U.S., and they would license the stuff. So companies like Midway would build games like Space Invaders, like Pac-Man, because that originally was made in Japan. Yeah, they didn't create those games. Midway didn't create those games. They just licensed the distribution arcade rights for North America or the U.S., and they would manufacture a cabinet and do up some nice art and whatever. One of the coolest things was that they would do a Space Invaders Deluxe, and that had this very cool almost ghosting effect where it would use a mirror, and it would have in the background like a blacklight moonscape. And then in front of it almost floating was the Space Invaders thing, which I thought was super, super cool. and of course that would come into something that George Gomez would work in the future. Something with a holographic image on glass. Something that might happen in the year 2000. It might involve pinball in the year 2000. They put George back in the mechanical engineering department. So they did give him a job and they said, hey, you're a product design person. You've got your pretty handwriting. Why don't you start making some control panels, like guns or periscopes, that kind of thing? And his first game was Blue Shark, a fish hunting game, where he had a spear gun for the control panel. Okay, so it's kind of like a thing sitting on the panel, and you hold it like a gun. It looks like a spear gun, I guess, right? And you shoot the blue shark. Then he designed what I would consider one of the more iconic arcade controllers of all time, the Gorf controller. Yes, the Gorf controller is what put Gomez on the map, I would say, and still does. And it's so silly, honestly. If you think about, like, oh my goodness, this controller is so important that we, on a pinball podcast, you know, like 40 years later are talking about this thing as it being that important, which I think is weird. Right? Like, it's kind of weird. It's a very comfortable controller. Yeah, and this was repurposed for Tron a few years later. And Satan's Hollow. And it was repurposed for Satan's Hollow, so it was quite the design.
    20:42
    Midway at the time, of course, was not keen on giving design credits. We talked about this in our Stern Electronics episode, where it became a thing where all of a sudden design credits were being put on the machines or in video games in the sort of after-game credits or things like that. At this time, that was not a thing. So, you know, nobody would know that George Gomez had created this really cool controller. Except for one thing. Isn't that right, Ron? Yeah, George says there's this thing that looks like a dot matrix, little red and black display panel on top of the joystick, like facing you. And it's backlit. If you search in the area, you will find George Gomez's name in there. It says Gomez. Yeah, so I've included a link to that in our show notes. that Gorf lens, there's two images,
    21:37
    and what it is, is when you look at the top of your hand part, there's like this little plasticky, it looks like a DMD, like a DMD thing. Now, it doesn't just say Gomez left to right very easily. So you have to kind of look at it, And you can see that there's a G and an E and an O and a Z. Yeah, he had to move him around. I guess he didn't want to make it too obvious. Yeah. But the letters are in there. It's super, super cool.
    22:13
    And I don't even think people that are reproducing those pieces of art and things like that have actually ever, you know, know that that could actually be in there unless they're in the know or they listen to this amazing podcast.
    22:31
    What do you think? Is that cool? Is that kind of a neat little Easter egg, Ron? Oh, yeah. That's a good one. So if you ever see a GORF, take a look and see if you can find that. Very cool. If it hasn't worn away or is missing. Yeah, totally. Or it's not, like, you know, broken completely. But now, GORF was designed by Dave Nutting and Associates, which was like a captive design team at Midway. Can you explain that a little bit there, Ron? Captive? Did they keep them like in a room and force them to design games?
    23:01
    Yeah. You're not coming out of there. You're not getting a sandwich until you make something. Yeah. So captive meant that they had like an exclusive sort of contract with Midway, that they would be able to design whatever they wanted. They were off-site. They were in their own spot, but they would create their own design product, and then they would then pitch it to the Midway team, and then Midway would sort of finish it off. Now, Dave Nutting and Associates, most famous for computer space for Atari in 1971. That's the one with that flyer. It's got like the woman in front of the game. Yeah, and it's in this odd cabinet that looks like a periscope. It's basically sort of the first coin-op video game. I guess I would describe it sort of like Asteroids kind of. You're like a little ship that kind of floats around in space. The cabinet looks like it's 1971. Let's just say that. Yeah. Yeah, it's a whole thing. They also did a game called Wizard of War. They did Seawolf. You know, Dave Nutting came up with a lot of really crazy, off-the-wall ideas with his sort of design team. And of course, they actually have tons of patents when it comes to computer programming and chips from the era. So it wasn't necessarily just the designs and the games that put them on the map. It was all of the behind-the-scenes technology, board sets, and the way chips work together. That's where the real gold was. Now, after the games were built or designed by the Dave Nutting and Associates teams, the internal midway team would sort of fancy up the presentation. So, for example, cabinet controls. So they would say, oh, we need a steering wheel. Well, it would be the midway team, like the Gomez's of the world, and the team around him, where they would design a controller or a steering wheel that could be mass produced, be effective, and work in the field. That was really what Midway did with their relationship with Dave Nutting and Associates. Well, there were changes coming at Midway. In 1982, Bally merged its pinball division with Midway to form Bally Midway Manufacturing. That's why the pinball machines of the era started saying Bally Midway on them instead of just Bally. Right. Things were really changing. So in our last couple of episodes ago, we talked about the death of Williams from 1981 to 1984. Well, they weren't dead. They were on life support. Yes. They're dead. That's it. Didn't you hear that episode? That's it. Pinball died. No, they didn't. So we'll revisit what Bally, Bally Midway, became through their death in a couple of episodes down the road. But this new management's focus was like, how do we shake things up? And one of those ways was, well, maybe we should do some more in-house designing. And this is where George's first game came from. So George and a couple of his buddies, Bill Adams, a software engineer and –
    25:55
    Adish. Adish Gosch, a hardware engineer. They would often go to lunch and solve all the issues at Midway in the world. They wanted to make their own video game and often tried to get a foot in the door. But with high-profile external competition like Dave Nutting's and Associates, that was tough. so finally after bill adams relentless nagging and programming they were given their first product so one of the one of the things that was was kind of neat about this one was um that of course that internal team was not necessarily the design team they would sort of fancy some stuff up but this is where Adish would create the MCR2 hardware board set which was a little bit of a different board set than they were using it like Dave Dudigan Associates. And they begin their first game, Satan's Hollow. So I have not played Satan's Hollow, and I assume you have. Oh, you've never... I played that for years, yes. So can you sort of describe it? Satan's Hollow. It's red and involves Satan and the devil. You use the Gorf controller except now it's red, but it's literally the exact same controller.
    27:01
    You move up. You're like a ship. You can move right and left and up and down. You can only go so far up on the screen, though.
    27:11
    You shoot the characters and they come down after you. It's got a cool little progress meter thing. There's a castle on the side and the thing keeps going up higher and higher and the guys come down and they they actually can steal you know like on a video game you'd have like you're playing your character and then on the bottom you'd see how many ships you have left they could steal those ships okay like your actual like you're like wait a minute they're actually grabbing my ships for my how can they do that and you have to shoot them to get your ships back and then every so many boards Satan himself will appear and he has like fire coming down at you and you got to kill him. Very cool. Very cool. So I'm on the Wikipedia page. I'll include this in our show notes. And it says that the player must shoot formations of gargoyles in order to pick up pieces of a bridge that must be built over a river of lava. Once the bridge is complete, the player can cross to face Satan. You can play multiple rounds too and just purposely not complete the bridge. And we talked about Gorgar having a bit of a sales issue for Williams and Barry Outsler because of the inclusion of a Satan-ish character.
    28:23
    This game is actually Satan. So it's not even left to interpretation. Why would they choose that? Because they didn't want to sell any games in the South. George says, Bill Adams is the guy that moved me into actual game design. He had a very clear vision for this game, a very evil villain boss. The evil boss became Satan, because at the time there were a lot of films featuring Satan. The Exorcist, The Omen, The Damien series, etc. I mean, who's going to be the ultimate evil boss? Yeah, we're not going to have a Satan-like character. It's going to be Satan. Yeah, that's right. There's one ultimate boss, and I think we can all agree that Satan is that ultimate boss. And the thing is, when you're trying to kill him, too, his face will get bigger the longer you can't kill him. Another cool feature. And you said that this didn't sell very large in the South. But, I mean, you could spit it as a way that you are doing the Lord's work and you're killing Satan. Well, George says we've really screwed up putting Satan in the name. Because if I recall, all the sales and complaints that we didn't sell a single game in the Bible Belt. Yeesh. When it comes to video games and pinball, for that matter, sales are king. It's all about selling the product and making sure the distributor is able to make money. I'm a big fan, though, if you haven't. You can't tell. It seems kind of cool. They used to have that in the Chuck E. Cheese I went to as a little kid. I used to play a lot of Satan's Hollow. Wow. Chuck E. Cheese. I was surprised you said wow you were a kid Ron I've always assumed you were 45 forever but the next game did not have sales issues because it was a license yes we know ladies and gentlemen that there is one thing that David Dennis loves and that is anything to do with Tron you do? oh that's right you have a Tron yes that's right the greatest of John Borg's designed pinball machines but also one of the greatest arcade machines of all time, designed by Mr. Gomez. Is it the greatest Jeff Bridges movie, too? Ooh.
    30:37
    That's a good one. Is it the greatest Bruce Box, Box, I can't remember. It's Boxliner? Yeah. I don't remember how to say his name. Poor guy. I don't think he's ever done anything else. I think he was in a show, but he's actually trying. Bally wanted to pursue a license, so at this time they were trying to find various ways to juice sales. And if you remember in our previous Bally Art episode, one of those ways was licensing. And Tom Neiman was the Bally licensing guru. Bally brought him in to be able to sort of dig up a couple of ideas for licenses. And George Gomez says Tom Neiman was Bally Midway's licensing guy, and he told us that Disney was going to make a movie about video games that was going to feature state-of-the-art computer graphics and that they were looking for a video game partner. I have a little fun Tron fact. Let's just say how old I am. I remember as a kid going to see, I think it was Alice in Wonderland, one of those Disney movies. And the trailer that they showed before the movie was for Tron.
    31:40
    That's how old I am. So Tron wasn't out yet. And they showed the scene with the MCP, the thing controlling everything. The master computer. The big rotating head. And that scared the hell out of me. wow that's amazing so tron from 1982 is an american science fiction adventure film which was directed and uh and and really um created by stephen lesberger it was a film that starred jeff bridges bruce boxliner david werner cindy morgan and bernard hughes now jeff bridges plays kevin flynn a computer programmer who is transported into the software world of a mainframe computer in which he interacts with at his work. Why was this such a big deal? Well, it really pushed computer-generated imagery, or as we call it now, CGI, to a big, big, wide mainstream audience. It, of course, received nominations for Best Costume Design, Best Sound at the 55th Academy Awards, and it received an Academy Award 14 years later for technical achievement. This is something, of course, that I didn't see right away when it came out, but I did see it years later. At the time, let's say early 90s, right, we didn't really understand computers and technology like we did today. so when i first saw this ron and again i saw that master computer 3d image i saw the way the light cycles were the tanks it had all these like polygonal jagged edges i was like oh my god that is what i would picture it be it was like inside a computer it was it was something pretty phenomenal and it had david warner so it's going to be awesome oh he was great loved him he's awesome in time bandits time bandits yeah he's the bad guy so i mean this um this was a big risk not only for for sort of disney and the others because it would be a lot of money to design literally design um you know from the ground up computer generated graphics you know star wars was was a big deal right because they still used models and stuff right yes they did but this was a This was 100% computer generated. Big, big, big, big deal. But it's a risk because this might be a huge flop.
    34:12
    And then you've got time and effort and things that you've put into designing an arcade machine, and the movie's bad. And we talked a lot about that in our John Borg episode where a lot of those movies did not do well, and the pins as a result did not do well. The same risk is here. So it hit an $18 million budget in 1982. Now, if you throw that into an inflation calculator, that's the equivalent of $47.3 million. Now, that is a huge budget in the 1980s. Is that American or Canadian? The thing to remember for our listeners and the big difference with the way licensing is today, when you see Stern do a game today based on the license, there usually will be at least one movie that's already been out and been a hit, and maybe a second one's coming out. So they're not really taking a risk. Yeah, they're not gambling. Like Guardians of the Galaxy, when that came out, it was when the second movie came out, because they knew that was already a hot property. Okay, we'll do this one.
    35:15
    Back in the day, they would do these things. Like the movie's not even out yet. They would get a script for this new movie and use it to develop the game, and they have no idea whether the thing's going to be hit or not. So you'll get things like Tron that's a hit. But in pinball, you can get things like Congo or Johnny Mnemonic or the movie's Bomb. It's way different then. But I think it was cool in the fact that they had Terminator 2. They had the script. They knew about liquid metal and all that before the movie was ever released. That's dangerous. That's dangerous releasing that kind of stuff. But I will say it ended up being a good gamble because the Tron movie did do $150 million in 1982, which is the equivalent of $131.5 million in 2020. It was a hit, but it was a hit at the time, and then it sort of kind of faded away, right, because it aged really, really quickly, that computer-generated imagery. By the time the mid-90s came around, it was very antiquated, and it had almost like a cult following with Tron as opposed to a continuation of a franchise like Star Wars that just kept being built and built and built and grew and grew and grew over generations. So on to the game because I know you love Tron. We could probably do a whole thing on Tron. Just Tron. Just the Tron episode. We'll talk about Tron the arcade. We'll talk about Tron Legacy. we'll have a whole thing on Daft Punk we'll have a whole episode oh my god Daft Punk could you imagine they allowed all of the teams of course to compete to do Tron so they got the license and that included Dave Nutting and Associates and Arcade Engineering who were most well known for Omega Race and Solar Fox they were based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and when you do a competition you got to come up with a lot of those names and what do you want the cabinet to look like and those things. Now, Midway and Disney, they put a plan to hold a nationwide Tron competition at the Aladdin's Castle arcade chain, which was owned by Bally. The competition would launch a few months before the film. It would lead up to a huge Madison Square Garden, of course, in New York City, where the winner would go on to the premiere of the film. So time was really, really important on this project. There was a lot of pressure to make sure that you delivered a game that could be manufactured, it could be in the Aladdin Castle's arcade chains, and it would be effective and entertaining and tie into the release of the film. Think about that, though. It's before the movie's out. So you're playing the game, and then you'll watch the movie like, oh, okay, I played that in the game. I'm in the game. So as we were saying, we have all these different groups within Midway fighting for this license. And George Gomez says, we were just this no-name research and development group that had a minor, very minor success with Satan's Hollow. They would have laughed at us because I don't know if we made 10,000 Satan's Hollows. And the company had just come off a 70,000 run of Space Invaders. George knew he had to bring something big.
    38:43
    So they got to read the scripts, which is just mind-blowing to me. Here's this major motion picture. Here's the scripts. We haven't even made it yet. Yeah, here's a Disney script that we're spending, you know, $50 million on. Although this was older Disney. This wasn't the current just owns everything Disney. George said, Addish had designed the MCR-2 hardware set. As we said, we first used it in Satan's Hollow. Bill and Addish decided that using the MCR-2 Satan's Hollow hardware would be a huge advantage because we could start developing right away. So they said they worked for weeks leading up to the presentation. They worked on ideas, and when they showed up, they had big poster boards that outlined what we thought would be the waves in the game.
    39:22
    Bill had stuff moving on the screen, and George had a mock-up of the cabinet with the glowing grip and some very rough art concepts.
    39:31
    Just think of the glowing controller, too, because if you watch the movie, that's all what it's about is glowing stuff. they used like black lights in the movie and then they then they superimposed you know different colors and then they like hand drew all over the the the negatives to make this this really super cool design i you know when you look at that tron cabinet it has black lights kind of pointing at you the the controller is purple and glows it's super super cool of course now you're going to bring in somebody like the Dave Nutting team, and they did this super fancy, all hype, flashy music, but no content presentation. So they came and said, here's this grandiose, massive vision. But George and his team showed up and said, like, here's like a cabinet, here's some glowing stuff. Here's something already running on a board set. We don't have to design everything. It's almost ready to go. And like I said, time was the most important thing for this machine. Dave Dunning was going to make it like a 3D vector graphics game. Okay, so this is when we're getting into 3D. This is a big deal. Yeah, but that would have taken too long to do. So George's team got the job, and it went on to sell 35,000 units. It was reported that Tron made $30 to $45 million by 1983.
    40:50
    Hey, Pinheads. I just wanted to let you know that when I'm not making cheesy jokes to make Ron laugh, I'm David, the financial advice guy. At Dennis Financial, our advisors strive to provide a return on life for our clients, not just a return on investment. The value of advice is something that we take seriously. A valuable financial advisor doesn't just provide investment and insurance advice. That's because an advisor takes the time to gather intimate knowledge about their primary client, understand their personal preferences, recognize their fears and hopes, and gain knowledge about their client's errors before providing financial advice. If you're looking for a more human dimension to your financial advice, Dennis Financial Inc. has you covered with advisors licensed in most Canadian provinces. We're also doing secure online meetings to engage with clients who need advice but don't necessarily want to wear pants or leave their house. Contact me via email at david at dennisfinancial.net for a free rate quote and a copy of our value of advice e-book or check out dennisfinancial.ca. Insurance solutions provided by Dennis Financial Inc., Canadian residents only.
    42:25
    in the script. So the way it works is you've got four mini-games, right? You've got the spiders, you've got the cone, you've got the light cycles, and you've got the tanks. Three of the four are in the movie. The spiders were cut. That was never in the movie, but it was in the script. So you actually have a scene that was not in the movie, but is in the game. And then they also made the sequel, which is Discs of Tron, which was the Discs of Tron. Yeah, that was where they have the disc on their back. They throw the discs at each other. They throw the discs at each other in sort of a gladiatorial kind of combat. And that happened in our John Borg episode too, right, where we talked about the Lost World Jurassic Park, where they cut out the Snagger, which is really a big toy in that pinball machine. So there is some risk to having those original scripts because they might be adjusted. Tron would actually win Coin-Op Game of the Year by Electronic Games Magazine. This was a huge hit that George and his team should be proud is a part of, is such a strong part of video game and coin op history. So you got to move on to the next project, right? Once you sell 35,000 units, you got to go on to the next project. It's got to be big, too. So Midway sent George to Japan to learn about JAMA, which was a control and board harness system that was big over there. You familiar with JAMA? I've heard of JAMA. So when I first got into the pinball kind of stuff, I was originally, I had been dabbling in, you know, thinking about getting a arcade machine. And they had talked, it was Jam of This or something. I asked a buddy and he's like, oh, that's like the board and harness system that you can sort of swap in and out. The issue was back then, unlike the pinball machines, which kind of, like if you were Williams, you were on System 6, System 7. You know, it's the same architecture amongst games. video games they could be completely different game to game like you can't like you could take an asteroids board or an asteroids deluxe board and put it in asteroids and it won't work right because it's mapped differently yeah that doesn't that doesn't you can't build scale with something there's no consistency so jama is just more of a standard i'm just going for my old video game days here i believe it's just a standard of like the controls or everything is so you can you can use it from game to game and it will work yeah an example i think of of jama games are like uh teenage mutant ninja turtles arcade game and the simpsons arcade game by konomi those are jama so you can swap them in and out so on the uh on the trip to japan george had a walkman with him remember those you probably don't remember those like a sony walkman i remember seeing them uh they were yellow see my in my day they were discman which were just the worst well he had a walkman with James Bond's greatest hits tape in it because he's a big Bond fan. Uh-oh. Ooh, does that? George Gomez is a big Bond fan.
    45:19
    But on his way back, Bill was on his case about another game, which should be a driving game, he said. Since George was listening to that tape, he wanted to do the whole spy driving thing. Yeah. The thing with James Bond and the sound and the music of James Bond is that it's very zen, right? It's exciting. but at times it can be just sort of you could just kind of fade out into it which is very big deal i'm a huge james bond fan i'm all in on anything that's james bond actually this time last year i re-watched every single one of the james bond films with my wife to get us through the first lockdown and you realize that goldfinger is the best uh i would argue that from russia with love is better than kill finger but only slightly no no no no no no no kill finger wipes his ass with a personal oh this if that border was open i would come down there right now and i would burn your house to the ground we're talking about spy hunter spy hunter is a driving game okay so uh this is where george added the notion of a car with kind of james bond like weapons when you collect those weapons, you're rewarded with music and this sort of cinematic feel to the game.
    46:37
    Transformers were really big in Japan at the time during this trip when George was there. So then that sort of idea of a transforming car that would go from a car to a boat kind of came into his mind. George says things like the weapons truck are a great example of figuring something out by doing. When we brought up the game, the car just grew weapons and ammo in video game fashion based on checkpoints. This felt wrong to me because cars just don't grow weapons and ammo just because you drove further down the road. I looked at Knight Rider and said, we need a truck that he drives into. Wow, so Knight Rider was the inspiration.
    47:14
    That makes it even more awesome. Once again, David Hasselhoff just sneaking his way in here. So George says, Tom Leon, my partner on the game, hated the idea of the truck. I talked him into putting it in. Once we had it in, we figured out that calling up the truck and having to avoid getting killed, negotiating the car to line up with the truck, and trying to stay in the fight the whole time was the big strategy thing. That's right, because you've got to get out of its way. It goes in front of you, and then you have to get into the thing without hitting anything else. Right. You've got to get behind it. You've got to kind of navigate in, and there's still bad guys coming up behind to the left and to the right. You basically have a road that's straight that moves left and right. There's oil slicks. There's bad guys coming after you. This game was really big. It was ported to Atari's 2600, the Commodore 64, Apple II, Microsoft DOS. And the version that I had that I purchased on vacation from a hawk shop in Florida was the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES version. The NES, yes. The interesting thing is he wanted, George Gomez wanted the James Bond theme in the game, but they just couldn't get the rights. It was too expensive. So they went with the Peter Gunn theme, which seems to be, I can, there's a couple other games that use the Peter Gunn theme also. That must be the go-to. When you can't get the theme you want, we'll just use Peter Gunn. Yeah, and the Peter Gunn theme, for those of you that don't know, is the one that's like.
    48:40
    I think they use that in the Blues Brothers too. Now, if I were a good editor, I would have actually taken that music and stick it in there. But quite frankly, I'm not doing that. But now for the first time, we're going to bring this back to pinball. Because did you know with the success of Spy Hunter, Midway wanted to leverage the property and they wanted to make a pinball machine. Oh, the amazing smash hit Spy Hunter the pinball machine. One of the biggest pinball machines of all time. So George Gomez says the pinball guys didn't know who I was, nor did they care. They were basically the first rock star designers in our business. So they were looking down on George. Yeah, well, George was just the arcade guy that made some control sticks and a box to put boards in. Yeah, and games that sold way more than any pinball. Greg Kamek was the designer of Spy Hunter, the pinball game. Of course, you'll know him from the Xenon fame. And, I mean, the guy's a bit of a legend when it comes to designing pinball machines. So George Gomez says, so when I walked into Greg's office, I may have said two words to the guy. I got the chilliest reception I've ever gotten. So I walked out of there going, okay, this isn't going to happen. This guy's not going to let me do anything relative to pinball. I regret that to this day. I would love to do a spy hunter pinball. Yeah, but I guess if you could swing a James Bond theme, you might get the best of both worlds. Hmm. Huh? Hmm. Huh? I don't know if you know this or not, but George and the team actually created the whole Spy Hunter brand and idea. So it wasn't like it was a license that somebody had come up with. They sort of developed this whole idea themselves. When you create your own intellectual property, which is, of course, owned by somebody else, that can spiral into something pretty cool, like a touch with fame. Oh, I didn't know this. Did you know in 2003, Universal Pictures picked up the Spy Hunter license for a feature film? It was going to have The Rock. Dwayne, The Rock Johnson, the most electrifying man in sports and entertainment, to take the lead role. So this has bounced back and forth from writing and directors, including John Woo from Face Off fame. It currently sits in what they call in the film industry, development hell. The Rock dropped out. He dropped out, man. so 2005 he dropped out there's been no updates on anything about this film since 2013 lalacouse's john woo face off let's just discount all the classic hong kong action flicks he did yeah hard-boiled that was a good one with uh oh what's his name chung yao fat i think it was a guy's name yeah i was a big uh i enjoyed john woo back in the day even uh even mission impossible too where you're like what is going on there any movie that just randomly have has doves flying in in slow motion you know i think i'm i think oh yeah doves he liked the doves but you know more changes are coming to midway there was a new management team and they all ended up being former ge or general electric management folks who came from a massive corporation and in the 1980s particularly in the corporate world the term mergers and acquisitions was the buzzword at the time which basically meant that if you aren't buying you aren't growing so it was all about building empires when your company was in trouble and according to george gomez he says they basically took and squandered the video game war chest 1982 the midway division was a 500 million dollar company they were bigger than the mother company yet the mother company was holding the purse strings and calling the shots so the ge guys wanted to buy and bought lancer yachts and because they said we're an entertainment company they bought six flags they bought chicago health clubs and this was all bought with the midway video game money remember the bally health clubs remember those yeah so this is a this is a whole this is a whole thing and this is going to come into our midway pinball episode but i wanted to bring it up here because it certainly shows what's going on within midway itself you know at this time you weren a train company right you were a transportation company So then that meant well if you weren just a train company you were a transportation company oh you had to get into all forms of transportation right Then the same thing here, right? These GE guys come in and they go, oh, we're not a video game company. We're not a pinball company. We are an entertainment company. So we have to get into the entertainment business. Worked great for Radio Shack, didn't it? It certainly did.
    53:25
    Now, of course, then this is a time when they were reduced to making 100 games a day because, of course, video was crashing.
    53:35
    And when that happens, you have to do a thing called right-sizing your staff. George says, at midway, every 30 days, my boss would call me in his office and say, listen, you've got to find X amount of dollars in your budget. X amount of dollars in my budget basically meant I had to lay off some people. So the layoff would happen and he would say, OK, let's have a pizza party and let's rally everybody. We're back in it. After three or four times, I'm sure that that just starts building, you know, a I don't give a crap attitude within your staff. Like I worked in Toronto for for about eight years in that area. I had a lot of friends that worked for a company called Blackberry. and this was really when they were starting to be completely destroyed by apple and the iphone when it came to sales then with the rise of android it made it even worse got a few friends that worked at blackberry and it was slowly being whittled away every quarter there was layoffs and just the look of dread on the faces of my friends and then one of them would get laid off and the other one would sort of be elated that they made it through. And then, you know, the next quarter would roll up and some more layoffs would come. Just that amount of stress and anxiety just must be horrible. And that's the same thing that's happening at Midway at this time. They've gone and spent a bunch of their war chest on a bunch of other things. So now they're having a difficult time weathering the storm. So the atmosphere was changing at Midway, as we said. George wasn't enjoying his time there at this point. So one of the artists at Midway's dad was a partner at Marvin Glass and Associates, a toy design company. And George says, so I pick up the phone and call Howard Morrison. Hey, Howard, I'm still at Midway, but things around here are really shocking. I want to design toys. I think that'd be cool. Yeah. So, you know, again, very much like George Gomez, he just picks up the phone, leverages a relationship and says, hey, I would love to make a change.
    55:37
    And this is when Marvin Glass and Associates comes in. Now, nobody really knows what Marvin Glass and Associates is, but everybody knows what Light Bright, Rock'em Sock'em Robots, and Operation is. And those games were designed in-house at Marvin Glass and Associates. This was, as George will call it, a shark pool. and we had pulled some quotes in our previous episode with Pat Lawler on the Shark Tank at Williams where George referenced his time at Marvin Glass as a way to prepare him for his time at Williams. Now Marvin Glass had 30 designers and 30 model makers and this was a cutthroat location because if you were the winner and you created an amazing hit game like Rock'em Sock'em Robots You were a superstar. Gomez says, and then I did toys for five years. I love Marvin Glass, who was a tremendous experience. It was another shark pool. It was, really. I could have never survived the Williams Shark Pool had I not done time in the Marvin Glass Shark Pool. Yeah, George was about to get married at this time. He says that he had bought a new condo. And, of course, like most people do, he bought a 1985 Corvette. Hmm. Then there was a Marvin Glass and Associates internal dispute, and the Associates and Marvin Glass then dissolved. The company split into a bunch of splinter companies, and around that time they used the term broken glass, that they all splintered into broken glass, which is, hey, that's pretty good. Pretty, pretty, pretty good. This is when you go freelance, right? When you're out of a job, time to go freelance. George would do some freelance design work in 1984. He reached out to Dave... Muraski?
    57:37
    He reached out to Dave Muraski, who was the president of Midway for years, and he started sending work to George. George also did work designing Battletech pods. That was like a really cool, immersive arcade machine thing. He also did redemption games at Bromley Incorporated. Now, he would say that he was generally unchallenged and uninspired at this time because he was just kind of doing whatever he could.
    58:02
    And George, as I'm sure that we can figure out now, is all about innovation and working in fast, creative environments. Now, of course, this is where he starts getting some exposure into pinball, and we can start moving into the real reason people listen to this podcast. After a full hour?
    58:23
    They've already turned it off. That's it. That's it. He was looking into pitching ideas, and he pitched a guy named Gil Pollack. He was at Gottlieb, and that's how he got to know a gentleman named Ray Tanzer.
    58:39
    You'll remember Ray Tanzer from our Gottlieb zombie pinball episode. Ray currently works at Stern Pinball. George says those guys would say things like, you know, hey, we think it would be cool if you could get a pinball to walk up the stairs. What? That's crazy. Yeah, they would give him these silly little projects to work on, and they would just send it to him. So George made a little plastic working model of a pinball walking up the stairs. He took it up to a motor, and the pinball would walk up the stairs. So this scenario would play out repeatedly until George had a room filled of a dozen of these mechanical prototypes that went completely unused. One of the people George would show a lot of these fun innovations to was an individual that we've bumped into quite a few times named Ken Fedesna. Of course, he was the president of Williams at the time. Kenny? Yeah. So George would then try to sell those mechanical mechs to Williams to use in their pinball machines. Ken would tell George, yeah, you know, the problem with this is our designers, that's your problem. There isn't anything wrong with this stuff. It's just that Pat Lawler is not going to take your mechs. He's got his own ideas, and no one's going to take your stuff. Yeah, so if you're a George Gomez and you've got these designed mechs that you would get from – you're at the bar one night and Ray Tanzer says, hey, wouldn't it be really cool if you had a shaking motor? And he would go into his office and he would build the shaking motor, and then he would go back to Williams. And he'd say, hey, Ken Fedesna, who's a big deal, look at this really cool toy. Well, Ken would say, man, there's no way that Steve Ritchie, Pat Lawler, or any of those designers are going to put it in their game, right? They're going to do their own design because they have a lot of pride in designing their own pieces, right? So one day, Ken Fedesna wanted to review some of those prototypes. So Ken showed up with a gentleman named Neil Faulkner for a meeting. They reviewed a bunch of things, and Ken would say, what else you got back there? And George would bring more and more mechs out of his closet that he had and all these things just jammed in boxes. And George says, Kenny and Neil were over on a Friday or something. And on a Monday, I got a call from Debbie Silkwood, who was Kenny's secretary, saying, hey, they want to have lunch with you. Then I said, huh, they're going to offer me a job. Williams didn't offer George a job in pinball, but they wanted him to work on some coin-op machines. They wanted to compete with Bromley, and they wanted to build redemption games.
    61:06
    So George, who had recently become divorced, thought, hey, that's a good idea for a fresh start, right? Things are, I need some reinvigoration. Sure, I'll jump over to Williams and I'll build them some redemption games. So George started working on novelty games at Williams. Or as he put it, I was the dark horse designer because nobody gave a shit about novelty games. They're kind of small potatoes and I was amongst the pinball gods. Yeah, so at this time, Adam's family was just exploding on the pinball scene. And you've got George Gomez, who I said would eventually become probably my top three designer. is just sort of sitting there building some novelty games. So around 1994, a company called Capcom enters the pinball space. Or should we say the Capcom video game company decided, we want to do pinball. Exactly, exactly. Now, Capcom purchased a company called RomStar, which had become GameStar, and all of their manufacturing capability in Arlington Heights, Illinois, just outside of Chicago. ago. Now, Capcom, of course, you will know from Street Fighter fame, Mega Man, 1943, Ghosts and Goblins. They're, you know, a big deal. Capcom wanted to get more of the arcade market share. So if people are in there and they're spending quarters, you can get all of the quarters on Street Fighter in your arcade games, but you might be missing out on those quarters that are going into pinball machines. And after you see the explosion of things like Addams Family and Terminator 2 and High Speed 2, you sort of notice like, hey, we're missing out on some of these quarters. So you want to expand. The best way you expand is by a company and rename it. And unlike Atari, Capcom aggressively went after pinball talent, including guys from Williams that you may have heard of, like Mark Ritchie, Python Angelo, and Chris Granner. Yeah, they went on an aggressive attack. Like back years ago when Atari came in with that same strategy, they brought in new designers like Steve Ritchie and old mechanical engineers, and they did some crazy stuff. Well, Capcom, what they did is they decided to just go and steal some of the best creative minds and designers at the time. Actually, Atari didn't even do that. They just had engineers do their games. Steve Ritchie had to go to the president and say, I built this on myself. Can I make it? Yeah, exactly. So this was George's opportunity to sort of get a foot in the door. So Ken Fadezza comes by George's office and says, what do you think about pinball? You know, here's what I need to do is like 20% of your time should be spent on pinball. That's kind of ridiculous, right? You can't spend just 20% of your time on pinball. How do you do that? So George links up with Tom Capera of Cactus Canyon and Johnny Mnemonic Glove fame. There's an amazing interview on the Pinball Network's The Pinball Show interview series with Tom Capera, episode one. Well, well worth the listen. It's in the show notes. This began a relationship as George and Tom started working together for years after that, and still kind of are, as Tom is doing work for Stern. Tom is one of the lead fellows at Stern, actually, which I would say, and has worked on some of those amazing mechs, things like Elvira's House of Horrors, very much a Tom Copra engineered machine. Capera. Tom Capera engineered machine. Yes, Tom is a classically trained mechanical engineer. George Gomez says it's made him look like a hero for years. He's made a lot of George's blue sky craziness into mechanical reality. Yeah, so the first thing you've got to do is you've got to come up with a theme, right? Hey, George, you can spend 20% of your time designing your own pinball machine, which sounds like impossible. Like, come on. But anyway, you've got to come up with a theme. Now, I had mentioned George had a 1985 Corvette. George is a huge Corvette fan, which is why he decided to go with the Corvette as the license. So George visits Roger Sharp about getting the license, and Pat Waller had dibs on it. Ooh, dibs. Dibses. You've got to be careful with dibs. He says, can you get Pat to pass on the license? And George Gomez says, Roger basically tells me, look, if you don't get clearance from Pat, you know, I mean, at this particular moment in time, you're 11th man on the team. Nobody knows you. Nobody gives a shit about you. You're in the shark pool. George would say that he was the goldfish in the shark. So, of course, imagine being at the bottom of the totem pole asking. Does that quote actually denote that Roger Sharp swore? Yes. I just can't. That ruins my whole. I can't see that. He must be lying. Yeah. That can't be possible. Well, if you ever see Mr. Sharp, you can ask him if that's a true quote. This is a whole thing You have to ask the guy that has the highest selling Pinball machine of all time To pass on a license That's a big deal So George Gomez goes into Pat's office And says hey really be grateful if I can have this license And Pat could have just said no But Pat says you know what You're passionate about that And it's good it's really good It's your first game and you really need to make a splash There's going to be a second game So I'll make a deal with you You can do this one but I'm doing the next one That's pretty awesome that Pat Lawler would do that for George Gomez. Like, you'd be forever grateful, you know, for him to give you such a nod and some good advice. We talked often about the street gangs at Williams, and there were basically seven street gangs, seven design teams that would fight, and they had just these silly little turf wars. And George would often talk about that there were different pauper or vuck assemblies at Bally Williams. Vertical up kicker. Five different versions of the same thing. Because one design team wouldn't use another design team's version. Couldn't use Steve Ritchie's design for the Vuck. And you couldn't use Pat Lawler's version for the Vuck. You had to do your own. Which is such a waste of money. That's the same thing. Do you think Stern Pinball has different vertical up kickers? No. I don't think George would allow it. Yeah.
    67:09
    Yeah. Imagine every design team and some of the street gang controlled more territory than others. And of course, then there were also allegiances among street gangs. And at the time, it was like Pat Lawler had a lot of territory. Somebody like a Steve Ritchie has a lot of territory. So if you can kind of get in there good with somebody and create some common ground, that's going to go really well for the teams. So good for you, George Gomez. So Corvette. Let's dive into this. We're into pinball now, folks. We're an hour and a half in here. Corvette is a car collector, car race theme. It's from August of 1994. It is a Williams WPC-S board set. Sells 5,001 units. Art by Dan Hughes. Mechanics by Tom Copera.
    68:09
    Capera. Tom Capera. Good Lord. Tom, get a name. Music and sound by Paul... Hesht. Hesh. Hich. Hisht.
    68:22
    Heh. Software by Bill Uban and Bill Grupp. And Dots by Eugene Gere and Scott Shlomany. What is up with the names on this design team? This is specifically designed to make me seem like an idiot. Now, this was originally designed to be a wide-body super pin because they were really big at the time. This is when your Star Trek is coming out, your Indiana Jones. Demoman. Demoman, the greatest of the wide bodies. However, George Gomez says, in my opinion, wide bodies are inherently flawed. The kinetics are compromised. Shots outside the standard width are weak shots. You can rotate the entire flipper to help you out with that, but you compromise the shots in the center of the play field. All the wide bodies I play feel really soft on those outside shots and really unsatisfying. The reason the older ones from the 70s and before feel fine is because the nature of those old games was slower, and the ball was what we now call floaty. So when you look at the Paragons of the World and all those other games, this slow, lumbering movement of the ball was actually sort of the charm. It sounds like George has not played any of the old Stern Electronics wide bodies. Oh. Because there's nothing slow or floaty about any of them. And, ladies and gentlemen, if you're keeping track, Ron has once again pumped up the value of Stern Electronics Games. And hopefully not pissed George Gomez off. But you're wrong there, George. Sorry. Play some Cheetah and tell me it's slow. Ooh. Shots fired.
    70:07
    Shots fired. We are now looking at the Corvette Flyer, and let's see what wonderful quotes we have. Ah, this one's kind of weak. One great American legend deserves another Corvette.
    70:22
    There's a brand new dream machine on the loose in the streets. Corvette from Bali. Inspired by the sports car America has loved and lusted over for 40 years. Corvette is a tour de force for pinball and Corvette fans alike. Test drive it at the showroom dearest to you. But be prepared, you don't take this Corvette for a spin. It takes you. I hate to throw a little shade on Mr. Gomez, but Corvettes in the mid-80s to, you know, like 2000-ish were just god-awful ugly.
    71:02
    Oh, my God. They're cool now, I guess. But when you compare them to those 1950s and 60s Corvettes, the new Corvettes that sort of were redesigned in the 2008 era, 2006, and then now you've got the mid-engine Corvette, like they are something else. These old – but I mean let's face it. All of those kind of cars in the 90s kind of look like crap, right?
    71:29
    Like flip-up headlights? Come on. the the the lights of the future are going to be flip up headlights come on god the 90s were horrible strong take now there are some really really cool parts of corvette now this is a three flipper game you've got a flipper on the left side two flippers on the bottom you sort of collect various corvettes from different eras in the middle of the playfield but it has this drag strip on the right side where the ball plunger area is. With two cars, you can race. How does that work? I've never played Corvette. If I remember, there's a race mode and you flip the buttons, the flipper buttons as fast as you can and try to beat the other car. It's like a drag race. Yeah, because Corvettes can't turn. It's all about just straight line. Because if you turn, you probably die like most American cars. Wow. Hot take number two. Okay, this also has one of the neatest sort of designed mechs, which is this motor mech. And this is a big deal by the design team. Can you explain that? It goes back and forth at different varying speeds. It's fully controlled. It's not like a – how can I explain it? It's not like the ship in Pirates of the Caribbean where it sort of goes clink, clink, clink, clink, clink. Like, it shakes like a motor kind of shakes. It's neat. I think it is a motor. Yeah, pop the ball into the LT5 engine. Keep it rocking inside for a higher jackpot total. Yeah, when you hit it in there at the beginning of multi-ball, like, you hit the flippers like crazy. And you can rev it. Yep, you can rev it up. Oh, it's cool. I mean, it's not like a bash toy kind of thing, and it's not like a crate on theater of magic that's rotating and moving, but it's shaken. The balls are kind of in there. It's very thematically appropriate. It's super cool. The game is very flowy. Yes. This is, again, right out of the gate. George Gomez loves to get that ball flowing around the play field, nice wide open ramps. It's not about jamming 1,000 shots in there. George has not made it a secret. Steve Ritchie was one of his favorite designers he owned like a T2 forever he probably still owns that T2 so he was into the he was going to go with the flow thing right out of the gate it's a cool pin I think I haven't played one, these are hard to come by in my area then how do you know it's good if you haven't played it? no well I played it on Pinball Arcade it doesn't count I totally agree that's why I know when you play it You're kind of like, okay, I like the way the ball is moving and a few things. I liked it and was kind of told I'm not supposed to like it for some reason. Really? I guess this is one of those games that, I don't know. Oh, that sucks. Like, really? I thought it shot good. It's got like the secret skill shot where you've got to put like a flipper code in to activate it, which I thought was just weird why you would do that in that fashion. I'm not talking like secret skill shot like, you know, you have to short plunge and trap up and then hit something. I'm talking like you literally have to put a flipper coat in before every ball. Now, this machine did have some cost cutting on it. It originally had a four-way shifter, which when – so the plunger at the time, the big gimmick at the time after Terminator 2 was to have a plunger that wasn't just pulling it back and letting it go. You had to have something on there, a gun handle, a shifter, something. So George had designed a four-way shifter, and when he was finalizing the playfield, so at the time you're looking for places the ball can get trapped, so you're putting things into design and the mock-ups, a Bally Williams executive came by and he told George that he was $60 over his bill of materials or BOM, and George had to scramble to find something to remove, and the shifter ended up falling to the wayside. Now, what I find pretty interesting about that is that the plunger had a bunch of software that was created by the software team for different modes and things you could do with the up, down, left, right of the shifter. And the hours that they sunk into designing that software completely wasted just to cost out $60. So I'm sure that sticks with George nowadays. Now, there's a lot of women on this pinball machine, and myself as a self-professed feminist, I find that it's not quite as bad as a lot of the pins of the time when it came to characterization of females. But there's some interesting story about the woman on the playfield and in the DMD. Yeah, the woman looking back at you from the playfield and the woman doing the French speech is the same woman. It was the woman that George was dating at the time. He says she was an international flight attendant and she came in to do the speech to add a woman from around the world flavor to the game. Yeah. Well, OK. While she was there, someone from the art department used her image in the Corvette on the playfield. Yeah. So the woman sitting in the middle of the playfield looking back from the convertible Corvette in the driver's position is a former girlfriend of George Gomez. And I'm sure George Gomez's current wife loves the fact that that happened. And she was a brunette, but it was determined by the art department that brunettes just didn't get as much mileage as blondes. Yeah, direct quote. That's rude. I know. So let's all remember now that, you know, at the time, you know, it was a different world. So within the context of the time, Laurie the brunette wouldn't have sold apparently as many machines as Laurie the blonde. Pretty sad. But anyway, beyond that, I think that's a cool little Easter egg. The team is always a major factor when you're designing a pinball machine. When it comes to, you know, the dots, the engineering, the programming itself, and the designer. When all of those elements come together, they can create one heck of a pinball machine. And George always makes sure that he gives credit where credit is due. George says, mentioned that Tom Capera was on the pinball show interviews from TPN episode one. It was hosted by Matt Morrison. I'll include that in the show notes. He talks a lot about Corvette. Now, we often talk about sort of various Easter eggs within the pinball machines, specifically the ones that were programmed in this Bally Williams midway 90s era. and one of the tracks is called the Holstein track. And of course, Holstein is a breed of cow. And when you start the catch me if you can sequence, a car with one of four women drives up on the screen. But at rare occasions, a cow will drive up in the car instead with text that says moo at the bottom of the screen. Kind of neat. Now, if you look at the pinball compendium, there is an awesome photo of George Gomez and the design team with the pinball machine at Chicago Expo with some models And you can just see that they are so proud of that machine and good for them What's next, Ron? What smash hit did George Gomez pull out after Corvette? Well, Williams got the Johnny Mnemonic license. Ooh. This exciting new film featuring Keanu Reeves. Yes, sci-fi movie theme, August of 1995. It's a WPCS again. Sells 2,756 units. Ouch. Art by John Yausey. Mechanics, again, by Tom Capera. Music and sound by Dave Zabriskie. Software by Bill Uban. Dots by Adam Rine and Brian Morris. See, there's some decent names on there. I got that one. There's Brian Morris. George Gomez. You spelled his name wrong. No, it's his brain, Morris. Oh, God. Although that's probably, I wouldn't be surprised if that's an IPDB that way, because I've seen some of the stuff. George would say that the initial idea for this pin was actually Mortal Kombat. Which would make sense, because that's a Midway game. George would say at the time I was just starting out at Williams and I asked Ed Boon if he would mind and he said he had no issues with that I had a vision that I could do justice to the game and you could work through a series of challenge ladders to face the uber boss plus they had Steve Ritchie there fight vitality flawless victory we had mentioned the intense competition at williams of course right so george says steve richie got wind of it and he said he wanted to do it before i asked oh my that along with the marketing guys saying that they felt that the two audiences pinheads and fighting game folks didn't really cross over pretty much killed it man that said johnny mnemonic was a from scratch design none of the stuff i was working on for mortal combat transferred over mortal combat was killed by Steve Ritchie. Play better. And after the Mortal Kombat concept was killed, George wanted to do Alien based on the, actually Aliens, based on the second film. Yeah. So at the time there was an awesome toy line and a lot of new Aliens that were being molded with a lot of color translucent plastics. And George thought he could do something similar and introduce some cool illumination into the Aliens to create features on the play field. George would say that he was also fascinated by the final scene of the film, where all hell broke loose in the facility, of course it was going to self-destruct. Ripley has to get out of there with the little girl, and the alien queen is in the way. With that female computer voice doing that countdown, it had a lot of potential to create gameplay tension from that scene. Of course, it had been several years since the Aliens film had been released, and Williams felt that it wasn't really relevant anymore. Yeah, would have been like eight or nine years. Aliens was 86, so yeah. So management guys pushed George towards Johnny Mnemonic. Yeah. Neil de Castro, who was the CEO of Williams, approached George when he heard that George wanted to do Aliens and told him that Sony was going to spend $20 million in advertising for the Johnny Mnemonic film, and Keanu Reeves was coming off a big hit with Speed. This was something. So we talked about how cool Tron was, right, and how it was like you were inside of a computer. Well, Johnny Mnemonic was kind of like what the Internet was going to be like in the future, right? So when you've got kind of a cool concept like that, plus you've got somebody like Keanu Reeves, and Speed was awesome. Speed was a big hit, yes. Speed 2, not so much. Speed, awesome. The pinball machine was also actually featured in Cigar Aficionado magazine from the fall of 1996. Six. You mean aficionado? Aficionado? Yeah. When it's your second pinball design, Ron, and the CEO of the company comes to you and says, Hey, the theme that you're doing isn't going to do well. Here is a massive license with Keanu Reeves. You're going to follow that suggestion if you like it or not. Isn't that right? Mm-hmm. And I didn't realize Johnny Mnemonic's based on a book. Yeah, it's based on a series of books. Mm-hmm. By William Gibson. It seemed cool and edgy in light of the rise of the Internet. Yes, the information superhighway, as it was referred to at the time, Ron. Oh, God, that's right. Yeah, another overused term. Yes, it was during a time when hardly any companies had external email, and very few people even had home Internet, let alone a personal email or even their own website. and we have our own website silverballchronicles.com that might be the best segue you've ever done thank you it's hard to kind of remember this time unless you were there and it's even harder to remember this time if you weren't there but what the brilliant quote right there thank you shirt worthy now the idea was that The internet was still developing in the mid to late 90s where people were like, okay, well, what are we going to use it for? So the idea of buying things on the internet like an Amazon or a search engine or Facebook or social media in general, nobody had even imagined that at the time. Johnny Mnemonic was like, okay, what is that future going to look like? And that was what kind of made it cool. anything with computers it's it's cutting edge right remember that movie uh the net no by with uh sandra bullock where it was all about like identity theft and stealing people's data and changing their criminal records no she was in speed it was not a good movie but it's kind of fun it's on disney plus so like tron in the 1980s what was it like inside the computer johnny mnemonic was like what is the internet going to be and that was kind of the concept And 320 gig was going to be just a ton of space.
    85:57
    Yes. Now, the film, of course, was conceptually cutting edge. And apparently, even William Gibson has one of these Johnny Mnemonic pinball machines. So this is one of my favorite, favorite pinball stories. Oh, the story, yeah. Which I've titled here in the show notes, Panic of the Theme. So, based in 2021, Keanu Reeves plays Johnny, who is a mnemonic courier who has a cybernetic brain implant designed to transport sensitive information. He lives in a dystopian cyberpunk world, which became very popular after Blade Runner. the world is run by a bunch of mega corporations and of course the japanese yukuza because that's a thing so uh yada yada yada ice tea is in the movie dolph lundgren is in this movie he is cool this is his last movie until expendables 2 by the way oh man does he say i must break you at any point in the movie in 1995 the film is directed by robert longo this is his first motion picture oh red flag he had previously directed tales from the crypt episodes in 1993 and this movie was the end of his film directing career it had a 26 million dollar budget in 1995 and a $52.4 million box office. It holds a 12% Rotten Tomatoes. Keanu Reeves narrowly lost a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actor of the Year. He lost to Pauly Shore for Jury Duty. I never even heard of that movie. I like how you wrote it as Pauly Shore. Yeah. And then, again, back to what we were saying before, the way the licenses were different. Like they had the script, so they're working off of what the movie's supposed to be, so they haven't seen the movie. You know, this stuff's being made at the same time the movie's being made. So George Gomez says, I didn't get a movie screening until it was too late. By the time they were really deep into development of the game, George finally gets to see the movie, a screening of the movie, and he calls back to the office in Chicago right after seeing the film. He goes to the first pay phone because they didn't have cell phones. So he basically says, can we get out of this movie? It's that bad. Can we get out of this license? He didn't wait till like later on or Monday. No, he left the theater, got on a pay phone and calls the office. Can we get out of this? It's bad. George Gomez would say, I should have known something was up because they made us sign something that said we couldn't change our minds about anything if they screened the movie for us. so even the people that hid the movie knew they had a steaming pile and they didn't want to let williams out of this but there is one good thing that came from that steaming pile and that's the game yes so this is most well known for this very cool uh glove mech in the back can you explain what i mean by the glove mech well it is actually it's a magnet with a a molded glove piece over the top of it because i guess there's a glove in the movie i've still i've never seen yeah it's something to do with being inside of the internet you got this it's it's like a nintendo power glove this glove can move forward and back and left and right and it sucks the ball up into a magnet and you can move the ball to a grid on the upper right hand side of the plate fill so the ball falls in like a like a like a vertical up kicker and it gets popped up into the glove and the glove catches it. It fires it up, yep, right into the glove. And then it moves over, and you can drop it on a series of nine switches or something. Some of my more hardcore pinheads have told me it's just working on it. It's one of the coolest and most complicated mechs out there, the Johnny Mnemonic glove. So we can thank Tom for that one. Heck of an innovation. Now, of course, Johnny Mnemonic is the ultimate mind game. Don't know what that means. I love Johnny Mnemonic, hence the reason I own one. Yes. Gigabytes is equal to gigabucks. Whoa. That is what the flyer says. Wow. Woo!
    90:31
    Oh, my goodness. That's a good one, Williams. This is, I'm not going to say probably, this is George Gomez's most flowy game he has ever made. This thing has flow for days. I think even Steve Ritchie would have played this and said, damn, you might have outflowed me. The spinner shot is a big deal in this game, if I recall, right? It has some kind of lopsided rules, you would say, that are almost to a broken level, where the spinner trumps everything else in the game. So in like a tournament situation, if the spinner is working good, that's all you're going to go for. Okay. Plus the spinner, mechanically, it frequently has issues. It's a custom spinner. It's round instead of square or rectangular. and it frequently has an issue after it gets bashed a while. It will actually go to a state where it will be like horizontal, so you can't hit it. Okay, it sort of gets stuck up there like Led Zeppelin style. I've gone through two spinners now with the thing. So eventually I got a junkyard spinner in there now, and it seems to be working much better. And this game is wide open. It is a fan layout, so the shots are lined left to right. It has the payback time. They call it Yakuza Strike, but it's basically payback time. It's the same thing. Or you repeat the left, right, left, right. Left and right ramps, and it will start the... And they are wide open. There is tons of room to shoot those ramps. This game flows like no other. Now, this is where we first see Crazy Bob's. Now, Crazy Bob is the owner of the computer shop, which is the Mystery Shot, Mystery Award Scoop Saucer. Isn't that correct? That's correct. It also gives you, like, the grid has different awards for all nine spots of the grid. and when you hit it in there, it'll tell you what one of them is. So it will reveal them. Also, the first time you go to lock a ball, it will quickly rotate what all the spaces are on the grid. And it's hard for me to – you have to really pay attention and watch closely, but it will quickly tell you what each space is. Crazy Bob's as well will make another appearance in Jersey Jacks Dialed In. Yes, it does. Kind of neat little bit there. This game also, I am a huge fan, and I don't think pinball uses them enough anymore, of diverters. So how does a diverter work, Ron? It diverts the ball. So you can hit the same shot, but it can go one of a couple of different places. And this actually has two diverters on the top. So when you hit an orbit in certain shots, it can go three different ways. Very cool. It is an awesome design. It's such a shame that it is such a turd of a license.
    93:12
    Well, you remember, a lot of the cool stuff on that game is because of the license. That's why there's a glove there. The grid, amazingly, is super serviceable. It's very easy to remove. I was surprised looking at it. Some serious engineering there. Yeah, three screws, the whole top plastic ramp part comes off. Then you just use a couple screws, connector, just pops right out. Super easy. You don't want to take the grid apart, though. If you just look at the parts diagram for it, it's like in five levels of crap on that thing. If it works, leave it alone. Yeah, don't touch it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. The other thing about Johnny Mnemonic is it's got the horrible fade issues because it's primarily red. If you look at the back glass where it says Johnny Mnemonic, it's got a red border on it. That's what the cabinet's supposed to look like, but they almost always look orange or almost yellow. Mine's like yellow. oh, it's so faded. Yeah, if it sat in the sun, that was... We're looking at pictures at it right now. He's saying, yeah, that's a heavily faded. Mine's even worse than that one. So now we're looking at a non-faded one. Ooh, night and day, man. Yeah, reds just fade bad. Crazy. Now, of course, this was the time where arcades were a big deal, and these machines were in and out of arcades and in the sun and out of the sun. Shout out to Kerry Hardy from the Kerry Hardy YouTube channel, recently trended on Pinside. He is refurbishing a Johnny Mnemonic, so I'm interested to watch that YouTube series. So shout out to Kerry. There's, of course, some Easter eggs in this game. Starting the game just before midnight enables Midnight Madness.
    94:48
    So during Midnight Madness, each shot you make shows a message on the display, like bang or zap, crash, and also a moo. And, of course, sometimes a do. Well, doho. Doho. That's Dorothy Ho. That was the Scott Salasel. I can't say his last name. The Dot Matrix guys. That was his wife. Oh. That's the Doho you see in a lot of the games. He hides it in there. Super cool. The eighth Crazy Bob Award is $900 million, and there's a cow with sunglasses on the display. And if you shoot enough combos with the outer loops, you'll get a skull. From No Fear, right? Yeah. Now, the power down mode. This is when people talk about besides the shots, this is the thing that really drives them to this pin. It's called the power down final mode. And when I was on stream, I had power down lit on ball two, and I never got it, and I rage tilted. So if you want to see some entertainment. Swing on over to the. The Slam Tilt Podcast Twitch stream. I did not highlight it. I don't want it to stay there. I was too angry. yeah i uh i got to the point where i almost uh i almost sold simpsons i was so mad so but george gomez says i ended up doing my own take on the countdown tension from the alien idea so see the alien idea made its way back and johnny with the power down final mode it's basically a spinning plates game where you need to stay alive by maintaining areas of the play field keeping them energized as time is running out and the computer voice is counting it down it begins slowly and builds a lot of tension and it is cool as hell and when uh when you get to the top of the power down mode score oh that's right yes dmd animation is the mcp cone from the movie tron spinning and saying that you are the master of power down using steve richie's enhanced voice that's true i forgot about that tying it in one would say that george gomez really missed the boat when it came to designing it. Williams. Yeah, it came in a little late. Williams was really starting its decline and it was coming off the Bally Williams heydays of about five years earlier when they were going through that 90s pinball explosion. George Gomez is almost like, he's like the anti-Eugene Jarvis who was always at the right place at the right time. George always ends up sort of being at the wrong place. Well, George says, it was an uphill battle all the time while I was there. We lived with the specter of death right around the corner. In terms of the business, it was just a shitty time. We couldn't replicate 1992. So, but you got to be positive. And George would say it was fun. I mean, in spite of the hell that we were in, it was fun. It was competitive and it was energetic. There was so much energy in that building. You just can't imagine. In the engineering department, there was an adventure every day. I mean, at three o'clock in the afternoon, Steve Ritchie would just shut his door and play Led Zeppelin on his guitar for an hour as loud as the amplifier would go. Hmm.
    97:50
    Foreshadowing. We'd have shouting matches in the hallway over something. But the passion that these people brought to making the product was incredibly intense. That's cool stuff. Now, of course, Williams would die, right? Well, they would do Pinball 2000, which George Gomez was probably more involved with than anyone else. But that is another story. Of course. We'll go into the end of Williams. We'll go into the Pinball 2000 story in another episode in which I'm working. But this is where George would end up at somewhere. He would end up at Stern. He would do a Playboy game. And Gomez was not really at Stern at the time. He was working contract. I think he was at Midway. I think when Williams won, I think he went to Midway, and he was there, the video game division, until they went bye-bye. So George Gomez recently did an interview with IndieGamerChick at ThePinballChick.com.
    98:50
    George was asked that since he is so involved in much of our childhoods and always so good at remaining under the radar, indie gamer chick said that george is very much a low-key legend and george said wow well legend anywhere near my name seems like you're talking about somebody else i've been really fortunate and i've designed coin op vids toys novel games pinball and even xbox and playstation games i'm just happy to have been able to do what i've wanted to do at a variety of different companies with super talented people all around me george's career certainly crosses a lot of generations A lot of what he brought to the table was significantly enhanced by the careers that he had even before pinball, with his design of theme, toys, engineering. You know, George brought a lot of different perspectives and had an amazing career even before his pinball designing career, and then eventually where he is today. Even in his current position, he will pitch in with making mechs work on certain games. He's developed mechs that are on other designers' games. One thing that I found super interesting is this time last year in 2020, when most of Chicago was locked down, George would often post on social media him working at his home studio where he's designing mechs and toys and ramps. He just loves to do what he loves to do. Now, of course, George would go on to design some amazing games at Williams, like Monster Bash, one of the greatest pinball machines of all time at Stern with Lord of the Rings, and of course now, Deadpool. I love Deadpool. George says, I'm fortunate that I have a few games in my portfolio that are considered significant to the genre. Certainly Monster Bash and Lord of the Rings are in that group. I think Deadpool will be in that group one day. I agree. Ron, any final thoughts on George Gomez? We forgot to do Monster Bash. Oh, don't you worry. I'm going to throw Monster Bash in another episode. Oh, okay. because I know we're going to get letters on that one. Ooh. I love how I say letters like anyone does letters. Yeah, because people still send letters. God, you're old. Wow. Thanks. Now, Ron, our listeners will know that we don't give them everything they want. We stretch it out.
    101:11
    We make them crave it, and Monster Bash is something that they're going to have to crave. Okay, okay, to be fair here. David Dennis is the guy that makes you want it, not me. He tells me before we go on the air what we're doing. Yeah, that's right. I'm the bad cop. Yep, you're the bad cop. I'm the good cop. I asked David this week, like, what are we doing? It's like, yeah, one of these. Like, okay. No way to prepare. So I have to just pull this stuff out of my, yeah. This might be the most swearing ever, but we were quoting people, so it's okay. That's right. All beeped out. Ron, if you wanted to sum up George Gomez's sort of early career and his first games at Williams, what would you say? Very – lots of innovation. Very creative. Yeah, very creative. Very good way to put it. Toys, flow, ramps, memories of a lot of stuff. We're talking Satan's Hollow. We're talking Tron, Spy Hunter, some of the most iconic early really cool video games. and then some very underrated original pinball machines. And we didn't go on to, they also did Discs of Tron, which took it to a whole new level. There was a cabinet version, but then there was the environmental version, fully immersed. You'd stand in the thing, fully surrounded. It had stereo sound and crazy blacklight and just insane. Yeah. Could have used some lasers, but, you know, we won't hold that against them. Well, Ron, that's it for this month. we're going to dive into next month we're going to do a revisit of somebody it will be barry oustler saves pinball ah so you're gonna give up what the episode is already excellent gonna drive up the numbers for the next episode all the way up to 100 all the way up to 102 or 111 yeah yeah and as always you can send your comments questions corrections and concerns his favorable quote was at gmail.com. We look forward to all the messages and we read every one. Please subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or your favorite podcatcher.
    103:23
    By the way, you can be playing the music over when I'm talking. You know, you know. People should hear me and not the music. Just saying. Whatever. Turn on automatic downloads so you get this single episode. Remember to leave us a five-star review. That way more people can find us. Want to support the podcast and meet a new chef? Swing on over to Superbowlswag.com and pick up a Superbowl Chronicles t-shirt. We're really big in New Zealand. Yes, we are.
    104:10
    Here, I'll do one for Teolis. This is for you, Jeff Teolis. Been a long time, been a long time, been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time. All right, f*** that one up.
    105:10
    That's great I guess it wasn't meant to be You guys are awesome I've named my kids Silverball Chronicles We call them Kron Yeah, there we go I got another coffee and a water Coffee and water Do you put the water in the coffee to dilute it? No, no, I make the coffee And I drink that, and I drink the water And then I immediately have to pee Nice Cut that out, I sound stupid now I did toys for five years. I love Marvin Glass, who was a tremendous experience. Let me try that again. Totally. Slow down, Ron. Use the force. Use the Schwartz.