From unsolved mysteries to unexplained phenomena, from comedy goal to relationship fails, Amazon Music's got the most ad-free top podcasts, included with Prime. Because the only thing that should interrupt your listening is, well, nothing. Download the Amazon Music app today. The Pinball Network is online. Launching Silver Ball Chronicles. Can you read a couple of those? I've got to make a T. Oh, okay. I thought you said make a P. Hello everyone, I'm David Dennis and this is Silver Ball Chronicles. With me is Ron LPGA Hallett. How you doing, Ron? LP, what? You're going golfing tomorrow. The Ladies Professional Golfers Association? Yes. Isn't that what you golf in? No, I don't golf in the L. I'm not a professional. Oh, you're more of an amateur. Very good. Very good. Scratch golfer? No. Good. Just like me. I hear you scratch a lot when you golf. That's what I hear. Yeah. I'm a terrible golfer. What I'm going to do this month, Ron, is I'm going to take as much time as possible to go through all of our updates and draw this out as long as I possibly can. Are you cool with that? I don't know what that means. Well, everybody who has a Patreon has to spend at least 10 to 20 minutes at the beginning of each episode talking about that Patreon. I do want to welcome Brian and the Kineticist who joined us in our Patreon over at patreon.com slash silverballchronicles. We sold out. We're all in this just for the money. That's everything that I'm doing. I recently spent all of that money on a Porsche so thank you so much for all of the love and attention that you feed Ron's ego with and you said Porsche, so you said it right so we know you actually bought it yes, exactly nothing has changed, podcast is always still free on our dedicated feed and the TPN feed, but if you want to get it ad free and a little bit early usually about a week early, swing on over to the Patreon. $3 a month just basically is a thank you. If you want to get the early access, that's $6 a month to become a premium crony. You can join us in our chat room. You can see pictures of my dog. We'll put some memes on there, all of that good stuff. Our top tier is the elitist crony. In to that Patreon for $20 a month, and after three months, you get a free t-shirt. That's it. Quick plug this month. Get through it. join the patreon or i'm gonna quit isn't that right ron uh then i'll have to get a different co-host i guess that's that's right so uh reviews and corrections so let me just jump into one of these reviews hans help me this is over on apple uh reviews i didn't see the thing is i don't usually go in there because i don't use an apple device but eventually i do and i bring up some wonderful uh review yeah is it it's not even itunes anymore isn't it like it's apple podcasts Now, they did away with the iTunes name. I wonder why. I don't know. I don't know. Branding. Well, Hans, help me, says, pinball history and a whole lot more. I've only listened to a couple of episodes and really enjoy this podcast a lot. It seems most pinball podcasts are all about the current news and machines, but this one deals with history and in-depth stories. I appreciate them going down rabbit holes, as this hobby has so many characters and fascinating stories. Keep it up, boys. Yeah, so we might have actually done this review previously in another episode. So if this has been repeated, I'm really sorry. But I saw this this morning. Yeah. So this one is from Tim27. Tim27 says, Grade school content. This may be the most annoying podcast I have ever heard. Constant Sulu and Beavis jokes. It's cringeworthy. They are a podcast root canal. Steer clear. Oh, I'm sorry. No, wait. Yeah, this is a review of Slantilk Podcast, your other podcast. Yes, yes. And they spelled Beavis wrong. I mean, they've lost all credibility with me as a reviewer at that point. Jeez. Oh, well. Boy, how did that get in there? Huh. And you can listen to that other podcast with Bruce Nightingale. Yeah. They have a much better review than that, actually. This is the worst one and the most funny one I can think of. Yes. We are active over on Facebook. That's facebook.com slash silverballchronicles. Leave us a five-star review wherever you found us on any podcatcher so more people can find our awesome pinball content. If you enjoy the show, don't want any big commitments and just want a shirt or a hoodie or a mug or a sticker, anything like that, your place to go is silverballswag.com. Do you have any comments or corrections from our last episode on Pinball's centenarian, Wayne Niance? I don't think we had any. No, no major corrections, but I did have a heck of a lot of fun recording that episode. Loads of fun. I learned some really cool stuff about Wayne Niance, who I didn't really know much about, except that he was really, really old. Do you know where you can send all those corrections? Where can I send those? You can send any corrections or comments over to silverballchronicles at gmail.com. We read every one, and we love to hear from you. And I'm sure David will put some kind of time code that tells you all the stuff you can skip at the beginning until we get to the actual subject at hand. In some podcatchers, it's really cool because you can actually hit the button and it'll jump right there. You don't even have to forward through it. In the Silverball Chronicles mailbag, we did have a couple of interesting emails this month. One from Mike. He says, hey there, I discovered your podcast a few months ago and I'm catching up on episodes by listening from the beginning. Unfortunately, that means I'll break even sometime next year. For all I know, Ron and Dave are no longer the hosts. Yeah, we still are. And the show is now a rewatch podcast of ALF. Wow, there's a dated 80s reference. Either way, as someone new to the hobby, this podcast has been amazing. Please keep up the good work or reunite as a host of this podcast, depending on what's going on in the present. David, what does ALF stand for? ALF? Oh, yeah, he's the cute little alien dude in the 80s. What does the ALF stand for? It stands for something. I have no idea. Alien life form. oh there you go holy frig totally uh ben m also sent us an email he said you missed two really important games with wayne nions the first one being knockout which is a great game i recall you mean knockout yeah what did i say knockout to knock out it's knock out boy that never gets it never gets old it never gets old and then uh coronation which wayne designed around the celebration of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth and her crowning. Wow. Very topical. Wow, that was like 53? Damn. Yeah. Wow. I can't believe you knew that. I think that's right. Our queen. I can't believe you knew the date of our queen's coronation. Over there is treason town, USA. Also, I just wanted to let everybody know that we've added all of our show notes to silverballchronicles.com. So if you check out there, there is a new link at the top of the page. You can review all of the sources for every single episode with direct links to those sources. And kudos to David Dennis for all the work, because he does it all. I'm a tool. I do nothing but talk. I'm a tool. I'm a tool. I just make comments and stuff. Commentary. Let's jump into today's topic. Gottlieb is viewed as the romantic electromechanical giant to many. The pinball machine atop the coin-op pedestal for all other manufacturers to reach for. But it was its god-tier status in the 1960s and early 70s which would ultimately lead to its epic cratering by the mid-1980s. What led Gottlieb to the Mylstar nosedive? Was it the lack of leadership? Was it corporate chaos? Was it the recession in the early 80s? or was it just a lack of creative freedom and a sense of adventure in their product? Well, join us this month as we talk about Pinball is Dying Part 4. What led Gottlieb to the Mylstar nosedive? And there's a lot of pinball dying. How long does it take for it to die? Part 4. But we're going to call it Mylstar. I've heard it called Mylstar. I'm not sure what the official pronunciation is, but I've always heard Mylstar. Yes, so we're going with Mylstar But please feel free to send your corrections To silverballchronicles at gmail.com And if you were a former Gottlieb employee We will say it however you say it was supposed to be said We've done a few Pinball of Dying episodes, Ron I think you're getting two here Yes Part 1 was episode 12, Williams in the early 80s They recovered Part 2, episode 18, Bally Williams in the 1990s They didn't recover Part 3, Episode 28, 1980's Bally Midway. They also didn't recover. This episode, I want to talk about all the compounding issues which led to the formation of Mylstar, its ultimate failure, and just about sort of Mylstar and its games in general. The fall from grace in Gottlieb was more than just what happened in 1983 and 84. it's it's a big big sort of issue at hand and i thought it deserved its own episode this episode will have a little bit less of the let's talk about the game stuff so if you're looking for more of that this is not the episode for you oh no flyers you've already started listening you can't turn it off now there's no possible possible way to stop a podcast so let's let's wind the clock back gotlieb in the end of the 70s right so they were going full tilt flat out apparently through all of the research i've done uh which is mostly just some quick google searches and being about as lazy as possible gotlieb was selling three machines to every other competitor combined selling one three to one ratio that's pretty big deal ron gottlieb were the champs the gold standard in fact we had previously mentioned that Steve Ritchie as a young pinball player at a local bowling alley he was around probably 10 years of age yeah he walked in one day and he saw the tech there working on the machines and the tech told him you know what this is a gottlieb the Cadillac of the industry. And then he did this thing. He did like, put his hand on it and tapped it like twice. And then Steve Ritchie said, play better. No, he probably didn't say that. And then he smiled and like his teeth were like, ding, because they were so shiny. Well, because of this, because of their good build quality being the Cadillac, because of the size of their industry, the company was going through a rapid expansion. And this really peaked out in the 1970s. Wayne Neyens and Harry Mabs couldn't keep up with demand for all of these new designs. So they brought in a new designer by the name of Ed Krinsky in 1965. And he was a, air quotes here, folk, younger guy. And he was able to learn from Wayne and Harry Mabs. he was the third person to keep up with those designs. Gottlieb's leadership at the time knew that they had a serious issue and the company had to start its generational transition. Wayne Nyhan said, we needed new designers. In the old days, nobody designed anything. Everyone copied everyone else. Then we got into more complex games and then we got into designing. Harry Mavs was our designer and he was getting old. I was there and I was getting older. And we got Krinsky and well, he started getting old too. The leadership of Gottlieb is very much aware of the situation they're in. The business is getting more complex, right? So Ron, a lot of the critiques of Wayne Nyans and the guys in that generation were that they would just move the drop targets to the other side of the play field and it would be a totally different game. Well, eventually that, people start demanding more and demanding more and more complexity and less of a, what do they call that, a mirrored or asymmetrical play field or a symmetrical play field, right? So they didn't want any of that stuff. Here's a really cool quote from John Osborne just about how crazy it was with the age of all of the employees at Gottlieb. Yeah, John said, when I passed my 10-year anniversary, there was nothing, no acknowledgement at all. At the 25-year parties, they would ask everybody to stand up who had been there 25 years, and over half the room would stand up. Everybody there had been there since the beginning. Gottlieb had grown together. They had grown as a company. And because of that, it was very obvious that everybody there was getting very long in the tooth. That comes with strengths and weaknesses. The strengths are they know how to do their job in and out. But they've also got, you know, they run into that phenomenon. I'm sure a lot of employees know what that is, which is this is the way we've always done it. And you kind of have a hard time thinking, quote unquote, outside of the box, even though I hate that term. Well, Ed Krinsky, this is somebody who is really, really difficult to find information about. In fact, I also had been asked by somebody to do some specific research on Ed Krinsky because they heard through the rumor mill that Ed Krinsky wasn't a real person, but actually three or four people that just used the name Ed Krinsky. Oh, conspiracy. What did you find out? I found out that Ed Krinsky was three different people. No, I didn't. Well, he was a gentleman, and he served in the U.S. Navy during the Second World War. As most of the designers and engineers of this era, they had spent a lot of the 1940s supporting the war effort or fighting in the war effort, as most of North America and Europe did. Ed Krinsky started in the industry in 1956 with a company called Keeney. Keeney was short for J.H. Keeney and Company Incorporated and operated from 1934 to 1964. He was focused on the rising popularity of jute boxes in America at the time, specifically those wall style ones that you would see in diners. Yeah. Wall boxes. Right. You'd stick them in and you you and your gal would sit down and put in a dime into the machine and you'd listen to. I need an old name. Yeah, are you Newsreel Guy again? Ah, Newsreel Guy. So World War II would bring wall boxes to a halt. When they reopened after the war, they expanded into electromechanical devices, including things called uprights. We would call uprights nowadays basically slot machines. They got into flipperless games, one balls and eventually a few pinball games. They also dabbled in some computing systems for the U.S. government. Computing systems, right. A computer that took up an entire room, probably. Right. It was basically a room size calculator. Krinsky, now he would work on the gambling devices and it said in the Pinball Compendium which is this phenomenal resource that I use for a lot of my research and cross-referencing because it has a lot of wonderful primary sources the first Pinball Compendium is 1930 to the 1960s the author, Michael Shalhoub he would say that the laws that were changed in the early 1960s against gambling devices made it hard for Keeney to continue its product line, specifically the upright machines. After Ed testified in several trials about these devices. Yes, he left Keeney and began working for Gottlieb. Gottlieb was a company known for enshrining gambling machines and not wanting to be dirty gambling mafiosa stuff. Enshrining? I don't know what that means. Basically, they didn't like gambling devices. Neither did Williams. Bally, on the other hand, hmm, hmm. Krinsky, he would refer to the Eastland Bill from October of 62. That was what outlawed the interstate transportation of gambling devices, and we spoke about that in another podcast. Krinsky implied, undoubtedly, Keeney was hit hard by this new legislation, as was Bally, you just mentioned that, and they only stayed afloat for about a year or so. because they started selling more items in the UK. But unfortunately, their business model, built primarily around uprights, didn't survive, and they would ultimately close their doors. Ed's last game at Keeney was Arrowhead, but little was known about its sales or production numbers, because at the time, there was quite a bit of chaos at Keeney, and as they began to collapse. You're well aware of Keeney's Arrowhead, Ron? Not really, no. No, neither am I. You can search it on the IPDB. It's good. As mentioned, enjoyed Gottlieb in 65, and he immediately made how many games? Seven games. Five months. Five months. Isn't that insane? Yes, it is. He's just like, I'll just show up here and draw a couple things. Seven games. I'm going to go. See you later, guys. I'll be back in a month. His first games were Dodge City, which is a cowboy theme, and Bank-A-Ball, another pool theme, selling a combined 6,575 units. Just showed up. He's phoning it in. 6,575 units. Wow. What was Ed like? He was on the quiet side and had his own design room in the back of Engineering at Gottlieb, which he would close up and work quietly. Wayne Nyhan says, Ed never associated with anybody. He was a loner. He was quiet and he never liked to play pinball machines, which is very odd. He didn't play for amusement. you could never expect to meet a nicer guy than ed krinsky that's why we can't find anything about ed krinsky he was just a quiet guy so weird he didn't play any games he didn't it's like it was like his job his job is to design games but you never play pinball machines it's so weird yeah he's like he's like here's a design pass it on to the next person i think what did he how to play whitewoods i mean did he just make him and say like yeah i'm sure it's good yeah well you know what he probably played it twice but it's not like he would go to a bar and play or he'd hang it with the the staff and play he just made games it was a job to him and what's crazy about that is that quote-unquote job to him ed would design 220 games over his career at gottlieb many of which were actually reused a second time when they went into solid state and they ran into trouble in the 1980s so his popular designs were so big they reused them again in solid state a guy who probably only played all of those games like 300 times. Somewhere in 1984, Ed Krinsky would leave Mylstar on a sour note. The family-run Gottlieb company was no more after years of change, and Ed's job was no longer fun, and it was no longer about entertainment. It was solely about heartless corporate profit. So Ed would leave. Ed was from the old school, and he certainly didn't like where pinball was heading in 1984. Oh, we got Pinball Hall of Fame 2003. Ah, the year before I started going. So I would have missed this one. Let's see. Michael Shalhoub, author of the Pinball Compendium and an article from Pinball News 2004 wrote okay I assume this was Michael Shalhoub was asked to present Ed Krinsky with his induction into the Pinball Hall of Fame This was a great honor for me as the majority of the games I played growing up were his designs I had organized Ed family to be there supporting this true legend as he is recovering from two strokes and two heart attacks. Ed had no idea what was going on. As far as he was concerned, it was late and he wanted to go home. So there I was doing a presentation for another great in the industry. I started by telling people that very few realize that Ed Krinsky designed more games than any other designer. He had designed over 220 games. So at this time in 2003, Ed's health is failing. He's been retired for many years. And quite frankly, it's not that big a deal to him. He's getting the pinball expo, Hall of Fame induction. There's somebody up there talking about how great he is. There's all these people about how much they love his designs and how much happiness he gave them. and he's not that interested. There could be reasons for that, right? It could be that he's a terrible person. It could be that he's older and he's not feeling well. It could be that maybe Ed suffers from a lot of social anxiety. Either way, I still think it's pretty amazing that this guy made so many games enjoyed by so many people and he's just sort of like, meh. You know what I mean? Ed would pass away in November of 2004, the following year, from pneumonia as a result of late-stage lung cancer. Now, let's go back. Let's wind that back now that we've cleaned up who Ed Krinsky is. Now, there was this concern over this generational change at Gottlieb. Gottlieb's leadership, who noticed that they needed to bring in another generation of designers and engineers, they also started to need things called a programmer. So when they would move into solid state, they would need programmers as well. One day, the Gottlieb plant superintendent became very ill and went home. In fact, Wayne Nyhan said he was so ill he didn't return to work. The chief engineer of the plant was moved to the new superintendent role, leaving a space for chief engineer. Wayne would move into that designing role and became the head of engineering. This is the time that he was finishing off Ron's favorite game, Paul Bunyan. Paul Bunyan's good. I played that after our episode on there. I was pointing to it. Hey, that's from our episode. Check it out. Paul Bunyan. That's Way9's last game. And? That's good. It's good. It's good. That's it. It became obvious that there was a gap growing within the corporate structure, that they were missing this younger group of designers and engineers to help them with their production, and design, but it's more than just sort of throw somebody in and get them to build something because the older generation from the 30s and 40s had sort of grown up in engineering and designing. Now you needed to bring somebody in who came from university or from a specific skill and then train them how you do things. So it's kind of the other direction, the other way around. So Wayne Nyans would say, We figured we needed another designer to study. with Krinsky, someone to come up behind him. Then here comes Johnny. Just as we're talking about it, we get a letter. We knew we had to bring in some young kid who can learn the business and become a designer and be a free thinker. Break them in here. And that Johnny was John Osborne. John Osborne. We touched on him a few times in our System 80 episode because he worked a lot at Gottlieb there. But I was able to get some really cool sources with John. So I'm going to add a little more context to him here in this episode. He was sending letters to Bally and Williams and Gottlieb asking about employment since he was just getting ready to graduate from university. John had been sending various letters to Wayne Nyans for quite a few months. He was asking him about design. He was asking him about the hobby. He was showing him pictures of his collection of wood rails. And he would ask Wayne for advice on repairing some items. They basically became pen pals. You remember Pen Pals, Ron? Sure. Back when you had your quill? Yeah, when I had my quill. You'd dip your quill in your inkwell and you'd design something and then you would give it to the Kingsman and he would ride his horse out about and drop off the letter. And then he would sing Louie Louie, Kingsman, get it? Where was John Osborne from? Why was he sending letters instead of just picking up the phone and calling? He was from Fresno, California. which is pretty far away from Chicago, Illinois. John can remember his father holding him up to the glass on a pinball machine and watching the ball fall down the play field. His father had a pre-flipper game called Bally Vogue. He attended Fresno University and took engineering. His senior project was building a pinball game. He called it Southpaw because the plunger was on the left side. He had also amassed quite a collection of wood rail and EM games. He didn't hear from Bally. Williams told him to talk to the local distributor, and Wayne replied with a letter requesting an interview. This included airfare, hotel, and transportation. Isn't that amazing? You're pen pals with the Wayne Nions and you're asking them all these questions and you sort of get blown off by Bally and Williams tells you to go talk to the local distro because they don't have time for you. And then Wayne says, hey, we'll fly you all the way here. We'll put you in a hotel and we'll get you to and from the interview. You know, nowadays, getting airfare anywhere is like even in your own job is almost impossible, especially since the whole post-COVID Skype stuff that we do now. What John Osborne would say, this was new territory for me. I asked my mother. She said, for beginning engineer, I should ask for maybe 10K a year. My school counselor in Fresno said, oh, you'll never get that. Maybe 8,500 if you're lucky. I thought, all I can do is say no. So when we had our meeting, I said, I'm thinking around 10K. And Wayne said, well, we started engineers at 10.4. Wow, this was my kind of company. It's very similar to when I graduated university. I did my financial licenses, and then I did an interview. And they offered me, I think it was $45,000 Canadian. And I was like, I totally bluffed. I'm like, wow, okay, that sounds great. And then I left the meeting room, and I'm like, holy crap. that's the most money i could have possibly imagined oh man when you're a kid right it's so funny to think of that 45 000 canadian is what 200 american or something yeah it's about that once once you switch but it's two it's 200 plus six ah yes yes when john arrived in chicago wayne picked him up at the hotel and drove him to steven's steakhouse for just a brief chat and supper. I'm sorry, you guys might call that dinner. On the East Coast, we call it supper. The following day, they went for the formal interview at the Gottlieb plant. In an interview with John Osborne, chatting with Wayne Nyans, that's in the show notes. You can see those show notes at silverballchronicles.com or in the description on Facebook. I've included a link to the John Osborne and Wayne Nyan's chat on YouTube. One of the questions they asked John, which I thought was kind of an odd question, but actually made a lot of sense, was, are you colorblind? Why would they ask that, Ron? Because you need to see the colors on the wires. Oh my goodness, of course. You got to know the color. At first you'd be like, well, that's kind of a weird question, but it actually makes a lot of sense. It's almost as weird as your spelling of colors. never gets old the queen's i guarantee you gotley didn't spell it like that so john osborne started at gotlebe in 1972 and his first project was to rewrite the gotlebe service manual he sat in wayne nyan's office with a typewriter he built lightbox test fixtures and then took over the responsibilities of modifying games for the foreign markets after a few years john ended up in the engineering department building the whitewoods cabling and writing the schematics for the games. He worked very closely with Ed Krinsky. Yeah, they make them work hard. They're giving them all that stuff. Here, make the manuals. Here, build this white wood. Here, do this. And he's making $10,400 American in the 1960s, or 72, and he's loving it. I'd be like, when can I design a game? When can I design a game? Wouldn't it be great if you shot this target and it started a two-times multiplier and then you touched the lockdown button? Yeah, okay. John would say, Ed would bring a game into the playing room and we'd play it, do all the wiring and paperwork, and then we'd decide if we need to change this feature or that a little bit. I'd say, this is a great game, but it's a little dull over there. How about we put a kick target or something? And Ed would say, yeah, go ahead and do it. And I would. There you go. Ed Krinsky, right? The ultimate delegator. I'd be like, I'd get co-design credit, right? That's what I'd be saying. And he'd be like, no. And then he'd go to his room and just close the door and design 12 games at lunch. Well, how busy was Gottlieb at the time, David? This is cool. This is cool. I really loved all. This is the stuff that I love. Wayne Nyans would say, we were going gangbusters with all the games in that era. We had three factories going. We had hundreds of people working. We had maybe four to 500 games a day going. Wow. Now that's one game every 15 to 20 seconds. It was fantastic. It was just a madhouse. You'll never see that kind of stuff again. No one's making 400 to 500 games a day anymore. So like what, Stern probably makes 400 or 500 a week? I'm trying to remember. They gave away, they said before, like when they're going good, how many a day they can make. Is that probably high? Yeah, probably. Even that would be high. Four or 500 a week is probably high. For example, in 1975, Gottlieb sold 46,139 units. Holy moly. Atlantis sells 2,225. Super Soccer, which I've played a lot of and is a frigging awesome game, 7,130 units. Unfortunately, the sequel, Soccer, was not quite as big a seller. Only 2,900. That's because it wasn't super. it's just regular soccer that's the problem el dorado sells 2 875 units uh another big one which i haven't played but i hear is an awesome game is fast draw with 8 045 really haven't played that one i haven't played that one and that's a pretty popular that's the one i think texas used to use as their logo it's got the guy shooting the gun on it it's also Ed Robertson like favorite game of all time. The Canadian Connection. Very good. Very good, yes. Pin Up sells 715 units. That's a bad one. Quick Draw, which is, I think, the four-player version of Fast Draw, is 2,660. Spin Out, which I think is a cool game, is 2,850. 300, which is a bowling game, that sells 7,925 units, which I don't get, but I guess. It's got those two cool spinners in the middle, so I think that's probably it. Oh, it's got the backbox animation with balls. Right, the same thing as Super Soccer. And it's got cool R's. It's a world under glass. I'm a sucker for all backbox animation. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Tiger sells 1,100 units. Top Score sells 3,200 units. Another one that people talk about pretty big is Abracadabra, 2018. Based on the Steve Miller song. Actually, it's not. Gold Strike sells $675, and Lucky Strike, $1,014. So they are just banging out. And that's just 1975. Killing it. That's not 74, 76. That's not 65. That is just one year. And people are going nuts about how big Godzilla is selling. So let's talk about a crazy example of the gangbusters. Yeah, we mentioned this on our last episode. The Spirit of 76. This is a history patriotic theme from December of 1975. Sells 10,569 units. Designed by Ed Krinsky and the art by Gordon Morison. Listen, so 1976 was the United States Bicentennial. So what does that mean, Ronnie? Bicentennial. That means we were 200 years old. America was 200 years old. Yeah! What does Wayne say? Wayne says, in about 72 or 73, I got thinking about this thing, the Bicentennial. It's going to be a big deal in this country. Everything's going to be red, white, and blue. There are going to be flags all over. The United States Bicentennial was a series of celebrations and observances during the mid-70s that paid tribute to the historical events leading up to the creation of the United States of America as an independent republic breaking away from Robert Englunds. It was a central event in the memory of the American Revolution. The Bicentennial culminated on Sunday, July 4, 1976, with the 200th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence by the founding father delegates of the Second Continental Congress. You got that? America. The grand celebration of treason against the queen. Well, it was actually, it was king then, yeah. Get your history. Which king? George? It was George the something. I think the third or something like that. Probably. It's a good name. George is a good name. It's a good strong name. Oh, no. You got trivia for me? Oh, God. I've got the bicentennial trivia from a Canadian to an American. Are you ready for this, Ron? I'm ready. Who was the president of the United States during the 1976 events? Well, let's see. Carter was elected in 76, but didn't start until January 77, so it had to be Ford. That's correct. Gerald Ford. NASA unveiled the first space shuttle, which they were planning on calling the Constitution for the Bicentennial. But it was named after what fictional TV space company? Enterprise. That's right. which famous boxing movie? Rocky. Multiple references. Ah, damn it. This didn't go well. All right, here's a better one then. I've also included true or false questions. The Bicentennial Wagon Train Pilgrimage began a journey from Blaine, Washington in June of 1975 and concluded at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania on July 4th, 1976 where 13 people died of dysentery on the Oregon Trail leg of the Tritts. That sounds really, sure, true. That is indeed false. Damn. No one died? Nobody died of dysentery on the Oregon Trail. Which popular American Bob hosted the Bicentennial Star-Spangled Spectacular on NBC? Has to be Bob Hope. There you go. That is. It was not Bob Newhart. I know that. Which of the following was a photographic essay created by the National Film Board of Canada and presented to libraries across the United States? Was it A, Between Friends, Entend-Mis? Was it, We Stand Together, Nous Sommes Solidaires? Or was it C, The Western Partnership, Tabernak Esti? Or was it D, have some poutine? Exactly. Which one of it was? I'll say we stand together. No. It was indeed between friends. Oh, God, we're friends? Well, you know, there was a wager. I think we talked about this in the last episode. Wayne Nyans tells of the story back when Spirit of 76 was being produced, and he and a few colleagues were enjoying an after-dinner conversation with Judd Weinberg, the president of D Gottlieb & Company. And Wayne said there was probably five or six of us sitting around the table discussing Spirit of 76 and how many we're going to build. Okay, we had to start ordering materials, and we had to get going on that. So it goes around the table. I don't say anything. Judd said, Wayne, what do you say? Why are you so quiet? You're never quiet. I said, if I told you how many games we're going to build, you wouldn't believe it. All you'd do is laugh. Judd says, come on. So Wayne said, 10,000, and everybody laughed. There you go. They didn't think they could crack 10,000 production units. Well, Wayne's colleagues thought they were only going to sell maybe 2,500 or 3,000 games. So you got to go and order the wire. You got to go and order the reels and the glass and all that stuff. So if you're ordering 2,500, it's totally different than if you're ordering 10,000, right? Okay. All right. Where do I start? The top here? Yes. Okay. Becoming a pro crony is the perfect way to say thanks, and it starts at $3 a month. Want to get early access to episodes before everyone else? Have a strange love for stickers? Do you know what a Discord is? Interested in having your comments and questions take priority on our episodes? Jump on. Wait a minute. This is on twice. Idiot. Oh, boy. You get what you pay for, I guess. All right. Hold on. Jump on. It's $6 a month. Premium crony. Want all the other perks and a shirt after three months? Join us at 20 bucks a month as an L.E. leadist crony. Wow. Can I have my money now? Judd promised that if it went as high as 10,000 that he would personally deliver number 10,000 to Wayne's door. Well, true to his word, Judd delivered Wayne number 10,000, which was produced. And it was the only game that Wayne Nyans would own, which I find really weird. But there you go. This game is now at the Pacific Pinball Museum. Wayne was the only person who believed in the power of America. So how was Judd as a leader? You refer to Judd, and Judd was, what was his name? Judd Weinberg. Judd Weinberg. George Moten, Moenten. Motenen. Moten-ten. Wow, that is, yeah. There's multiple Ts in there. There you go. Too many Ts. George M. George M. Pinball artists around these times would tell Roger Sharp in his original recorded pinball tapes, Judd will tell you what he wants and bother the hell out of you until he gets it. But he was not a bad guy to deal with. Firm, and he would nag you. That's basically what I get from that. Well, this is when we get into a significant watershed moment in the life of D. Gottlieb and co. Upheaval. Upheaval! In 1976, Alvin Gottlieb, son of David Gottlieb, the D and D Gottlieb and Company, sold Gottlieb to Columbia Pictures, the movie production company. I've done a lot of research, and I can't find the reason why Alvin sold D Gottlieb. Which is what I was going to ask. Yeah, you're killing it. You're selling games all over the place. This is like before Solid State, before they kind of started to go downhill. Yeah, this is when they're peaked. This is the peak. I'm sure it was a pretty good time to catch him. I can think of one reason, but I couldn't confirm it. Okay. They gave him a crap load of money. Yeah. Because they were the number one pinball company in the world at the time. So, I mean, if anybody has a primary source, and the primary source is Alvin or somebody close to Alvin specifically saying why, that would be the best thing I could do. Because I'm not going to put some speculation in here, even though we just did that. Because it's like 40 years of the same family owning it. And then he'd just decide, like, now we're going to sell. We're out of here. Now, Alvin actually did a lot of work with David Gottlieb. He was the salesy guy and the regional kind of person that would travel around to the distributors. So it's not like he was just new or he didn't care about the company. There was a reason why. I can't find a solid reason why, but let's just go with money. That's what I would think. Well, the leadership was basically the company was pretty much kept intact. Yeah, which is pretty great. So, I mean, it's different ownership, but the company more or less stays the same. Yeah. If you look at the material from the time, like manuals and stuff, the only difference was there's now a Columbia Pictures logo on them. Other than that, everything looked exactly the same. You would answer to a giant corporate structure rather than a member of the Gottlieb family, so there's that bit to it. In this time, John Osborne would release his first game, which was Gridiron, a football theme from 1977. It sells 1,025 units. It's designed by John Osborne and art by Gordon Morison. Wayne basically came to John and asked him to make a two version of Wayne 1973 pro football Oh yeah flyer flyer flyer It the one that like green It's very green. It's a world under glass. Yep, it's got a football field on the play field. It's a tough-hitting, action-filled new game. And it's very green. It's very green. Very green. The cool part about gridiron is that the ball doesn't have a plunger. It comes out of the center, right? It comes out of the center, and it just shoots out of the trough, which is different, very different, very cool. It also has an amazing spinner right in the middle that's just juicy. And it has two vary targets, one on the left and one on the right. Love me a vary target. Everybody knows that, right? Absolutely. You know I love a vary target. It also has four flippers at the bottom in a scissor flipper format. What do I mean by that? If you lift the flippers up, the ball can go in between them. Yeah, so it adds a little layer of scary. This was also branded as 50 Years of Gottlieb with a Columbia Pictures industry company down in the bottom corner of the flyer. It's a fun game. It's a good one, but it only sold 1,000 units. the next game that, uh, John Osborne would do shortly thereafter, the next shortly thereafter, uh, the next, the following year was Poseidon and hit the deck, which were basically the same game. Poseidon is very much a, uh, nautical theme with a, uh, you know, the, the God of, of water, but it also had like card playing theme to it. and it had a very attractive lady sitting on a boat with a dude. They're playing cards. It's really an odd. I have no idea what's going on there. But again, another really kind of cool play field. And the art is stunning. Gordon Morison art, absolutely stunning. It was from August of 78. It sold 531 and 375 units. It used black score reels with red lettering. Yeah, to try to simulate digital scoring. In the interview, he said it wasn't designed to, like, trick anybody. They just thought they would do it because it just kind of looked nicer, and it wouldn't stick out amongst all of the new solid-state machines that were being developed by the other manufacturers. Yeah, and that's the issue. All the other manufacturers are making solid-state games, and they're still doing EMs. They're still kind of struggling there. The next two games that John Osborne would do, it was Blue Note or Rockstar, the two-player or four-player game. I'm sorry, one-player or two-player game. It is from December of 78. It is 229 units and 268 units designed by John Osborne and Gordon Morison as art. It appears as though, because at this time they're still doing a lot, a lot of great designs with Krinsky and some of the other team there at Gottlieb. John Osborne tends to appear as though he is like a fill the line kind of designer, wouldn't you say? Well, they're having other games like Countdown that are selling a ton, Sinbad. Yeah, so it's not like they're suffering. As we said in our Gottlieb episode, one of our many Gottlieb episodes, when they first got into Solid State, as much as everyone says they were behind, their first Solid State games did sell well. Like in the late 70s, they made a ton of them. They had a gap in the line and they needed somebody to fill it, and that ended up being John Osborne. The Rockstar game, I think, is one of his most unique, and it's a super interesting game in general. It's a musical kind of Rockstar theme, as you can imagine, although it's very Beatles, 1970s-esque backlash. It's just gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous. The play field is really unique. And why do I say that it's really unique? Offset flippers. Offset flippers. No out lane or in lane on the left side of the play field. This might have been the inspiration for Halloween. Yeah. That left side instead of hedges are all stand-ups just all the way up the left side. That's very Halloween-like. And they are Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti, Do. All stand-up targets. It's got five pop bumpers, two spinners on the right side. It's weird, but it's unique. You've got to give them that. They've got a guy with a trumpet because I know when I think rock star, trumpet is like the first instrument I think of. Maybe if it was Chicago. Chicago, the band Chicago? Yeah, band Chicago. I love bands named after cities. Boston. Europe. That's not a city, Ron. That's a country, yeah. God, you're American. Oh. John said, they just decided they didn't want these particular designs. I didn't design that often because I had other things to do. I was not solely a designer. Yeah, so there he was. He was the fill-the-line designer. And they were, again, quirky, weird designs. I think the best one is the gridiron design, personally. This is the time where the microprocessor becomes the buzzword, right? So many companies in the 1970s were working on creating silicon processing chips, Texas Instruments, Intel, Western Design Center, to name a few. The race, especially in the United States, was around the microprocessor. eventually the pinball eventually pinball would notice this sort of quick computing of the microprocessor and the ability to use uh memory and remember uh states of targets or locations and they would leverage that for pinball which they could do with pinball but it would take a ton of relays stepper units it was just a pain in the butt to do it terrible terrible but now you could do it with a board. With a board. They would be much lighter than the massive score reels and back boxes as well, and they would require less tinkering to adjust the switches. They'd hopefully be cheaper and easier to manufacture. First in was Bally, then Stern, then Williams, and lastly, Gottlieb. And to be fair, Stern just ripped off Bally. So Gottlieb would stumble into solid state. That was very much the focus on our episode System 1, Stepping on Rakes, as well as the sort of the reinvention of solid state in System 80. That is a couple of episodes in our archives. You can see those at SilverballChronicles.com or back in your podcatcher feed in the dedicated Silverball Chronicles feed. So why was Gottlieb last to the punch, Ron? According to Wayne Nions, he says, I was part of the problem of Gottlieb going downhill. I always blamed myself as part of it. As a chief engineer, my time was taken up almost 100% with what was going on in the factory. Traveling to work out issues like getting enough wire. So I didn't see the electronics come in. Williams were the early guys. Bally were making all these electronics, fooling around with electronics and getting their systems ready. We didn't know. I blame myself for not seeing it soon enough and hiring enough people. Yeah, they were too big to move quickly because they are making 45,000 games a year, right? They have problems like, can I get enough legs for the pinball machines? They are focused primarily on that. They are so big, they can't just, they call it nowadays the pivot, right? They can't change. They can't move. Ah, yes, pivot. Yes, everybody loves a good buzzword. They were too successful and they were too big to change enough. And this is where the spiral started. Well, they would bring in Rockwell Industries and an individual named Alan Edwell. He would work on Gottlieb's behalf with Rockwell Industries for the express purpose of building and designing their solid state system. Wayne would say, Gottlieb went to a third party to design the solid state, but that's why we went downhill. We got started and brought in Rockwell. They made it for us. It wasn't the best system in the world, so we were kind of behind the eight ball. We never did catch up. I think Gottlieb was downhill from then on. It was quite sobering in the interview with Wayne Nyans where he takes a lot of – he takes it kind of hard of the loss of Gottlieb because he was there. He helped build the company. It was his company. And he takes a lot of responsibility, and I think he feels a lot of shame in the downward spiral of Gottlieb and the death of System 1. And he might have been part of the problem, but I don't think he was entirely the problem. So I don't think he should be as hard on himself as he is. So I'd like everybody to go check out Episode 5, Stepping on Rakes, Gottlieb System 1. And Episode 19, 80's Cheese Done Right, Gottlieb System 80B. Episode 25, Playing Ketchup, Gottlieb System 80. those have lots of more detail on the rockwell relationship and the struggles that they had to return to greatness and then rockwell later went into music and did the song somebody's watching me anyone get that at all probably not no no rockwell he was barry gordy's son yes so he had that hit song that he had michael jackson do the part that anyone remembers from it somebody's watching me. Okay, you can edit that. So Gottlieb also moved into video at this time because that was sort of a big sort of growth area in the early 80s. They would make Q-Bert as their biggest hit and Mach 3. And Dennis Nordman started working at Gottlieb, and he was there for a cup of coffee. Yeah, Dennis says, I think I was there for a year, year and a half. I didn't do pinball games there. I submitted ideas for video games. My game was their second Laserdisc game. And then I wrote the script and built some models and things. That was it? Q-Bert is a good game. Q-Bert is awesome. And it has a pinball element. Ah, this one I know because you asked me this last time. I know. Let's see. It is a knocker. Very good. Yes. When he falls off, it just hits. That's awesome. It's so good. And it's such a great game. David Thiel did the sound. Q-Bert is amazing. And when he talks. It was so good, they made the pinball machine for it. While Gottlieb was struggling to adapt in the solid state era, they were taking that sort of EM-style game, and they were just making it into solid state. And then they started moving into actual solid state pinball by System 80. So here's an example that John Osborne says that the struggle was real when they switched over from EM to solid state. John says, when we went to solid state, that changed everything. The way the games were built, we had to lay out the play field in the same way, but now because these cables had Molex connectors on them, the factory really couldn't do that. We couldn't handle it. We had to program the thing. When I plugged a game in the first time, it never worked. There was always something not working. Then we had to build it. This big ship is trying to turn, and now they have to train all of their staff on Molex connectors. They have to train the poor guy doing the Whitewoods, John Osborne. You know, people don't understand how to change the relays and all of that stuff because there aren't any relays anymore. It's all programming. The very way Gottlieb was set up from design to factory was to build EM machines, score motors, reels, switches. Everything on a massive scale had to be redesigned, and processes had to be recreated. The struggle became real, and that's when we get into the System 80 transition. Gottlieb continued to fall behind. Wayne Neyens and Judd Weinberg resigned the same day. However, Wayne stayed on as a consultant until 1983. In fact, we want to provide you with investment and insurance advice for life, and we take that honor very seriously. Do you know individuals who receive financial advice for 10 years have two times the financial assets of unadvised individuals? For example, we've got mortgage insurance at the bank, right? Well, did you know a 40-year-old non-smoker can save $30 a month every month for 20 years just from shopping around for a more competitive rate? Now just imagine what a pinhead like you could do with that extra money. Toppers and shooter rods, anyone? 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. 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. So who would take over for those two? Well, a gentleman named Bob Bloom took over as president of the company, and he quickly earned the nickname Bloom Doggle, like boondoggle or making a mess of things. He was certainly among the old guard at Columbia Pictures. You know who took over Wayne's position? Dick Finger. Wait, that's his name? That is his name, Dick Finger. Why wouldn't he go by Richard? I don't know. Why would he go by Dick? Well, according to John Osborne, Dick didn't stay too terribly long at Gottlieb. He was a nice guy, sincere and willing to learn, but he hadn't been in the industry. It was just strange to have these people directing us that really had no background in pinball. Ooh, red alert, red alert. Yeah, this resulted in creating a bunch of remakes of Ed Krinsky's design, such as Super Orbit, which was a redesign of 1971's Orbit, and Royal Flush Deluxe, which was a New Solid State example of 1976's Royal Flush. John Osborne said, They kept telling us to keep designing. The factory was starting to get empty, and there weren't as many people there now. I remember they began using the cabling department as a storage room for games. But they just said, keep going. There's still a market out there. The first pre-Mylstar game. So this is Amazon Hunt, your favorite kind of hunt. Isn't that right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Besides Space Hunt. Yeah. Fantasy Jungle theme, September of 1983. Standard body. It's a System 80A game. 1,515 units. Ed Krinsky design. Art by Larry Day, who is totally always skipped over when it comes to pinball art. He is amazing. Love me some Larry Day. Software is uncredited. It was probably Alan Edwell. Take a look at this flyer. Doesn't this look amazing? It's a jungle of fun. Roaring lions and trumpeting elephants? That's what it says. That's what they make with their nose. Yeah, exactly. Yes. Welcome, players, to Amazon Hunt, the latest in Gottlieb's series of economically priced convertible pinball games. What does that mean? That means you could just swap them out. It has great play, solid long-term earnings, and Gottlieb's renowned reliability. Book passage to the jungle of fun. I don't know if I do. It does look cool. It's all right. Looks good. It doesn't have regular slings, which is kind of fun, right? It's got just roll-throughs at the bottom, which is kind of neat. Very, very fun. um some of the things when they were transferring though into this era were that they didn't have before you know now we're getting into ball-to-ball memory when it comes to system 80 prior to that they didn't have that in solid state em so sales are declining things are spiraling keep it going but it's the turmoil at the top of the company that's really the big issue it was during this time that coca-cola acquired columbia pictures on june 22nd 1982 now coke didn't buy gottlieb mind you they bought the company that owned gottlieb they just kind of ended up with gottlieb but what they really wanted was columbia pictures now a company who is struggling to learn pinball was just purchased by another company who didn't know anything about pinball and then the process has started all over again with learning how to build and manufacture. John Osborne says, one day they said, okay, everyone into the lunchroom. They got the whole plant in there at the time. They can now get the whole plant into one lunchroom. We're thinking, oh, this is it. This is it. Bob Loon gets up and says, you know, we're poised for a great future. We're a new company now. We have so much confidence that we're renaming the company. It's not going to be called Gottlieb. It's going to be called Mylstar. Yeah, rebranded. Now, that's weird. Why did Coca-Cola change the name from Gottlieb? Well, according to Michael Shalob in his book, The Pinball Compendium, now this is the 1982 to the present version, Coca-Cola sent a letter to all of its operators indicating that it wanted to invoke an organization developing exciting new products to meet tomorrow's entertainment needs. And the name Mylstar was chosen after much research. Yeah, they thought it sounded newer. Mylstar, the wave of the future. Yes, star, space. According to John Trudeau, Ed Krinsky asked the vice president of the company who was announcing the name change to the employees, Why hasn't all the research into this great new name come up with the fact that Mylstar, pronounced backwards, says rat slime? No, it does. Yes, it does. Look at that. Mm-hmm. It's spelled with a Y instead of an I. That's fancy. Coca-Cola decided to rename and to transfer Gottlieb into this new Coca-Cola subsidiary called Mylstar Electronics. Subsidiary. What did I say? I don't know what you said. That's subsidiary. Subsidiary. Subsidiary. Subsidiary. You said it right that time, Rick. That's great. Thank you. The exact date of this change is not particularly clear, but it appears to be somewhere around like September of 83. And this is where Amazon Hunt was being produced. And then in November of 83, when the next game was produced, Coca-Cola had a bunch of other departments. One of them called RAF Star and another department called Ray Star. Ah, that's where they got it. Ah, the research. Hmm. Well, John Osborne says, we came along with the Columbia sale, and they called us Mylstar. We called it Nostar because any of us who knew the company's history knew that any time a company changes their name, that's the kiss of death. Now, there was a massive sign outside on the Gottlieb factory, and it was like lights and sheet metal and all this stuff. and it was Gottlieb, right? This huge sign up on the factory. And the Coke people showed up and they started taking it down and they had to break it into a bunch of pieces and they were going to toss it into a dumpster. Apparently, John Osborne snagged this sign and took it home in his small car in the two or three pieces. And it took him that many trips to take it to his home. And then he rebuilt it in his home. Eventually, John would sell this giant sign on eBay to a Canadian collector. I wonder where that sign is today. Ooh, is it in your house? It's not. Oh. Mylstar did not just create pinball machines, but they also wanted to make more arcade games. Apparently, the management at Mylstar wanted to be a video game company. Well, John Trudeau says, when the video craze came to be, the Mylstar management wanted to kill the pinball product totally. That's why the name of the company was changed when Coca-Cola bought Columbia Pictures. They wanted to be known as a video game company. If that could have put more hits on the street from the video end, it would have happened. They were able to make those amazing games that Dennis Nordman was designing. Maybe they would have actually killed pinball entirely. Yeah, but video games died around this time. It was sort of like a crappy time in general, and that's the 83-84 recession. Things were not great for Gottlieb in 1982, But in 1983-84, it got much, much worse. And we talk about that in our previous episodes. But in 1983-84, a large-scale recession hit the industry. It commonly referred to as the video game crash of 83 But this was also a recession across the entire economy And it started in the 1980s and it was a rough go Do you remember the 1980s recession Ron Uh, I was a kid. Yeah, you don't, but it sucked. But there were more management changes. You can't have consistency with management constantly changing. Soon as somebody learns how they're doing the job or makes their mistakes, you're there out, and now you've got to bring somebody else in who's got to make all those mistakes So soon Bob Loon was replaced by a guy whose initials were also BB, Boyd Brown, who was a nice man and a fan of gaming, but he took time to get up to speed. Then a gentleman named Al Gabroius took over engineering. Mylstar was banging out a bunch of different prototypes during this era, but they never made it to approval and full production. Six Mylstar games ultimately survived through the internal process and were built and sold through distributors. The first game, rack them up. Great game. This is a billiards theme from November of 83. It's a System 80A. It's 1,515 units. John Burris is the designer with David Moore. He did loads, loads of the Premier Games art and software by John Burris as well. Take a look at this flyer. Rack them up. Oh, that's not very fancy. No, it's not. It's a very pared-down flyer. For something that's supposed to be so exciting, the flyers are not. What do you think of this logo of Mylstar Electronics, Inc.? It's an M with a star above it. Yeah, it don't look good. It's very yellow. There's no ramps or anything on this game. It's got in lane on the left side with no sling and then a sling and an in lane on the other side. It's got a bunch of drop targets. It's actually kind of looking fun. I've never played this. It's a great game. Rack them up. It has crazy background sound. You'll hear it over everything. Yeah, they got that weird during this time. It's very billiards theme, right? You collect all the different balls. Yeah, collect the balls. You can change which balls are lit on the drop targets by hitting the spinner. How do you light the spinner? You can light the spinner on the target on the left. when it's lit for light spinner. You hit the target and it lights the spinner for one rip. Get one rip at a time. One rip. Yeah, and you want to get all the pool balls, etc. Typical stuff. It's got a playfield multiplier. I'm sorry, a bonus multiplier. I like it. Me likey rack them up. Would you have that in your game room? I don't. Would you though? If I had more room, it's cheap. I mean, you could probably get that pretty cheap. Yeah, there you go. It's a cool game. It's a good one. There's only 1,000 units out there, 1,500. So there's probably not very many left around in the world. Which is weird because I've seen a lot of them. Yeah. I guess it's probably because it's a good one. Yeah, it's a good one. One that did not sell very well was Ready Aim Fire. This was everybody's favorite theme carnival. It's November of 83. It sells 390 units. This is designed by Xing Lam, who I've struggled to find information on Xing Lam. If you know anything about Shing Lam, send me an email, silverballchronicles at gmail.com. Art by David Moore as well. What's going on here, Ron? Ready, aim, fire. It is interesting that even though Mylstar is the company, they still kept the Gottlieb logo. These all say still on them, a Gottlieb pinball game. And if you look at the Mylstar games, they still say Gottlieb on them. Yeah, it's like they were half committed. Everybody remembers Shing Lam from Going Nuts. Oh, he did that one too? With the million pop bumpers in it. He likes pop bumpers because there's five on this one, it looks like. Yeah, and they're in weird locations on this one as well. And the art is, yeah, colorful. It's cool. Actually, I kind of like it, but it is kind of dumb. Step right up for the game of skill that's old-time conifer flavor. Ready, aim, fire. Bring the irresistible sights and sounds of the carnival to your game location with Ready, Aim, Fire. Call your Mylstar distributor for more details. Yeah, really, really, really weird. It doesn't, I mean, I guess. Give one a play if you see it. It's really unusual. Give every game a play when you see it, folks. Yeah, absolutely. Well worth the quarter. Around this time, it becomes very apparent that things are not going well to the leadership of Mylstar. As things struggle, they start making job cuts. And John Osborne was let go right around this time. And, like, let's face it, John Osborne's designs were actually coming along really, really well at this time. He's doing, like, Haunted House, which is previous to this. You know, he's really starting to come into his own as a designer. but he's also, I would say, a critical background figure when it comes to designing and getting games ready. But they start making job cuts. And John Osborne says, I'll never forget when I got laid off. I was packing all my stuff up. Ed Krinsky came in and says, they're letting the wrong people go. I'll never forget when he said that. He was the nicest man. The previous generation of leadership, or the previous, previous generation, Wayne Nyans, Judd, they realized, hey, we need this generational transition. We need to bring in these new guys, get them trained, get them, you know, this now the current leadership is like Ed Krinsky sells machines, John Osborne doesn't get rid of John Osborne. Now you got Ed Krinsky. And as we mentioned in his bio at the beginning of this episode, eventually he would quit. So in full panic mode, the game they release is Jax to Open. This is the card game, May of 84, sells 2,350 units, designed by Ed Krinsky, art by David Moore. This is a remake of 1971's Jack's Open. Yep. This game, this game is awesome. I've played a lot of this game. It's so much fun. But it's really f***ing hard. Deal yourself a winner with Gottlieb's new pinball poker. First, score an open hand of pair of jacks by hitting the drop targets. Then, keep improving your hand until you reach the top, a royal flush. Every royal flush helps build huge scoring bonuses plus specials. It's easy to learn but challenging to play. The winning formula for every location. Combining classic playfield with contemporary electronics and packaging. Jax to open is another winner in Gottlieb's line of economically priced pinballs. Call your distributor today. So what we're seeing here is we're reusing a design that was proven years ago, because that's probably what distributors asked for. They said, remember Jax open? That was an awesome game. Make that again. So then they made a solid state version of it with higher scoring potential, and they're keeping it low priced because they are in a recession. Things are terrible. They need quick, dirty, and cheap. This game is awesome. Have you played this? Yes. Yeah. So it's got drop targets in the front. It's got ace, a couple of kings, some queens, some jacks, and tens. And you basically have to shoot two jacks and then three queens and then three queens and two kings, and they reset all the time. It's great. It's so hard. But the hardest part of this, Ron, is that the bottom of the inlanes is open. Yep. So if you try to trap and catch that ball, it goes up the in lane and down through the hole into the out lane. Yes, it does. What do you think? Is it a winner? You like it. You don't like it? Oh, now I feel bad. I didn't say I didn't like it. It's just, it's not the best Mylstar game. That's coming up. This was when they started testing alphanumeric displays. Now, these were displays that would do letters and numbers. And John Trudeau would tell IPDB that Jax Open served as a test platform for the first alphanumeric displays, although they first appeared actually in production in Premier's 1985 Chicago Cubs triple play. John Trudeau said, we actually made 10 complete jacks to open games with alphanumeric displays and a new back glass, having new art to fit the openings for those digital displays. I wonder where those games have ended up because they are rare. John Trudeau said there was some management concern that it wouldn't make any difference in the cash box. There really was no way to tell how much the game would have made without it at the same location, i.e. alphanumeric displays. But we did get some positive feedback because of the initials entering capability it now had. Players in general liked the displayed messages, too. Oh, very cool. Always good to put your name in. They also had smaller coin doors at this time. So the coin doors, because they were made of metal, also kind of got a little smaller. So they could kind of cut the cost a little bit. Yeah, it depended. Some would have the smaller ones. Some would have the bigger ones, even in the same models. Yeah, and it was like the silver Gottlieb one that everybody knows, and then there was like the weird sort of tiny black one. And it looks terrible with this tiny black one, by the way. Ugh, grody. And now the next game, the best Mylstar game ever made, Alien Star. Alien Star. This masterpiece. It is a pretty awesome game. I've played yours when I was down to level zero. I absolutely, totally love this game. a game that was underrated for a very long time and then all of a sudden randomly went through the roof for pricing yep because it was shown at pinberg and they saw it in a tournament and said oh my god this thing's awesome and then yeah then everyone great theme great sound do the thing is pretty it's a do the thing game and it had two different coin doors i have the wider one yeah the better one friend of mine has the skinnier one which he would say is better because there's more cabinet art yeah june of 84 sells 1065 units this is designed by john trudeau and art by larry day and it's unique for a couple reasons there's something with the something with the ground that like this one's actually grounded right or something when none of the other games are and this is all those system 80s really struggled from that and we talked about how gottlieb would never have any like they would never have updates to their code ever except in very specific instances like uh things would explode well no things like was it james bond had the time played format which did which bombed horribly so they came out with a non-time version well alien star had a bug and they actually had a a fix a rom fix version beautiful beautiful the art on this is awesome it's like a space guy and a cape but it's not highly detailed right it's like just the outline of him and it's space behind him or her it's awesome and it's extremely simple they could not have cost a lot of it it's a lot to make the game because there's there's no drop targets just stand-ups only three pop-uppers spinner had to be super cheap to make the game that's been and this and they've moved to the to the to the metal wide spinner instead of that crappy plastic one they had oh well they did that in system 80 they had the better spinner pinball 1984 journey to an alien to an alien star okay so alien star is a location wow i didn't know that i thought it was a person journey to an alien star for a pinball battle in space multiball skill shots and plenty of fast action bring this fantasy world alive for your players. So yeah, it had multiball. Ooh. Big deal. Big deal. And the art is just so awesome. Tons of fun. So the idea of this game is that you want to complete Alien on the stand-ups on the right, and that lights your lock on the left on a capture saucer, right? Yeah, but you want to lock in the lock at a higher value. You got 2x, was it 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, what is it again? Is it just... I'm trying to think if it skips one. 2x, 3x, and 5x. 2, 3, 5? Yeah, 2-3-5. 2X, 3X, and 5X. You want it at 5X. If you lock a ball at 5X, then everything in multiball is worth 5X. So if you hit a spinner, if you hit a lit spinner, which is worth $10,000 a spin, it's now $50,000 a spin, and your score will go from nothing to insane. So you change the multiplier on the scoop on the left side by shooting the spinner itself. So you can actually spin it too far and go from the 5 back to the 2. Yep. So it's very nuanced that way. And then how do you release the ball? You just plunge a new ball. As soon as it hits a switch, it will release. Two ball, multiball. Now that ball comes down and it bounces off the top of the left sling. Not on the left sling, not into the flipper, but onto the top of that sling. So you've got to be on the ball. On the ball. because you got to be careful because it might go to the out lane it might go down the drain it might go into the other sling so you got to be you got to be on it uh this is a pretty amazing game i would totally have one of these in a heartbeat and they're way overpriced at this point way over especially they were overpriced prior to covid so now it's yes worse yes i blame pinberg beautiful game tons of fun do the thing very cool and when i was at level zero we were playing uh we were practicing before we started to stream i beat you on this game i don't i don't recall that i don't recall one of the greatest accomplishments of my entire life it's going in my autobiography chapter 37 the time i beat ron at alien star the last game that mile star would do was the games. The games. Which is an odd theme. Odd enough. August of 84 sells 1,788,768. It's sports and Olympic theme. Yeah, you think it's weird? I mean, it's 1984, the year of the Olympics. The MSRP of this game, 1,495 dollars. 1,500 bucks, yeah. 1,500 dollars. But, I mean, but this is the 1980s and the mid-84s. It's actually a lot of money. That is a lot of money. People don't really realize that, oh, wow, that is, of course, because there's been frigging 40 years of inflation. And this was the last machine produced by Mylstar before they were purchased by Premier. Premier Electronics. Now, this was a management group that was led by Gilbert G. Pollack. They would purchase the Mylstar pinball assets in October of 1984, and they would continue to manufacture pinball machines under a new name for the company called Premier Technology. Now, Premier Technology in the 1990s would then revert back to the Gottlieb name. They were still called Premier. A Premier name in pinball, but Gottlieb was prominently on all the games. John Trudeau would say the reformation of Gottlieb into Premier was due to the efforts of Mondial Distributing and Gil Pollack, a former Gottlieb VP. They made the deal to get the pinball assets away from Coca-Cola and made into Premier Technology. If you want to learn more about Gil Pollack and his involvement, you want to listen to 80s Cheese Done Right because he was the guy at Gottlieb that I think really made a lot of fun in that era before they got into the 1990s Reformation. And that was sort of in the post-Mylstar era. Well, why wasn't Alvin Gottlieb involved in the purchase or any Gottliebs for that matter? Yeah. Why were they totally not interested at all? Well, John Trudeau would say, as I understand the Coca-Cola Mylstar pinball asset buyout situation, Alvin Gottlieb declined to be involved at that time. A few years later, Alvin's son, Michael, convinced Alvin to try again, and they created Alvin G & Co., which was a new pinball manufacturer. But he couldn't use his own name. He couldn't use the Gottlieb name. Amazing. So Gil Pollack, along with the Fezjan family, which was the Mondale Corporation owners, they were the principal reasons that the pinball production even got a second chance to succeed. John Trudeau said, also, without the core of people that came over to Premiere from Gottlieb, engineering and manufacturing, there would have not been any success either. We all worked as a team to get Premiere running. Long hours and a love of the game kept it going. Through the suffering that happened through that sort of recessionary Mylstar era, it brought those teams together stronger. And when they were purchased by Premier, they went above and beyond to keep that family business together, to build it again and to make it something special. And they did an OK job. They never really caught up to Williams, but it was 10 years more of games, which is a good thing. Ten years of awesome, awesome games. Well, Ron, that is the end of our episode today. Pinball is Dying, Part 4, The Mylstar Death Spiral. That's not the title, I hope. It sounded fun. I've changed the name a few times. But what do you think? What happened here? Corporations that don't know anything about pinball getting involved. And then thank God at the end, people actually do know pinball, get involved and buy it back and save it. It's a wonderful story, but it's also a story that's kind of sad. I think you can make a good movie about that. They're the Cadillacs of the industry, and then they just go downhill. Corporations ruin everything, but then saviors come in and buy it, and everyone's happy. And then you do the epilogue at the bottom. Premier would make games for another 10 years. Yes. Gil Pollack would spend a lot of time on photorealistic backglasses in the 1980s. That people love. I would say it's a pretty amazing story and one that needed to be told. And I'm glad that we were able to do that here in this episode. Alien Star, let's call a spade a spade, the best game in that era. Is there anything else that deserves a really good shout out? Play them all. Every game deserves to be played, even like Ready, Aim, Fire. Play them all. play all the games don't be a snob they're all absolutely don't be a bally snob williams snob don't be a snob play everything i i could tell you like when i would go to uh california extreme and i couldn't get on any games because it was so crowded there'd be like a row of got leaves that no one would be on and that's where i discovered all these amazing got leaves because i wasn't a snob remember that do we get over here oh yes again yes uh okay oh it's the same thing is he sitting on your lap am i am i sitting on your lap wrong sorry let's see as always you can send your comments questions corrections and concerns to civilballchronicles at gmail.com We look forward to all your messages and we read every one. Please subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcatcher. Favorite still spelled wrong. Turn on automatic download so you don't miss a single episode. Remember to leave us a five star review so that way more people can find us. Join us on Patreon to support the show. Maybe you just want a shirt. I understand. That's all I want. Swing over to SilverBallSwag.com and pick up a Silver Ball Chronicles t-shirt. Yeah, with nothing like about the size of a, you know, a three hole punch. You know what I mean? Like not very big at all. I just I just saw that on my desk and that's what I thought of. John can remember his father holding him up to the class. Oh, glass. OK, hold on. So the United States Bicentennial was a series of celebrations and observations in the... Observances. What did I say? Observations. Observations. I observed that you screwed up. Also, just as an aside, Tabernak SD means goddammit in French.