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Bonus Podcast: Interviews with Ed VanderVeen (Texas Pinball Festival) and Gerry Stellenberg (Multimorphic)

Pinball News & Pinball Magazine Pincast·podcast_episode·1h 24m·analyzed·Mar 21, 2019
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.027

TL;DR

TPF preview and Multimorphic in-house production facility tour with industry leaders.

Summary

Pinball News and Pinball Magazine conducted interviews at the Texas Pinball Festival with Ed VanderVeen (TPF co-organizer) and Gerry Stellenberg (Multimorphic founder). VanderVeen discussed record attendance (~485 games, 500 target), celebrity guests, tournament logistics, and the Texas Pinball Museum. Stellenberg detailed Multimorphic's transition from contract manufacturing to in-house production at their new 5,000 sq ft Round Rock facility, discussing assembly timelines, ethical hiring practices, and their platform-based game design philosophy.

Key Claims

  • Texas Pinball Festival will feature approximately 485 pinball machines (pushing 500), with ~85% privately owned collector machines

    high confidence · Ed VanderVeen directly stated numbers and percentages in interview

  • Multimorphic moved to in-house production 4 months prior to interview to avoid contract manufacturer inefficiencies and ethical labor issues

    high confidence · Gerry Stellenberg explained transition reasoning and timeline directly

  • Base P3 platform takes 4-5 man-days to build; simple playfields take ~2 hours, complex ones (Cosmic Kart Racing) take 14-15 hours

    high confidence · Gerry Stellenberg provided specific build time estimates

  • Multimorphic facility is 5,000 square feet in Round Rock, Texas

    high confidence · Gerry Stellenberg stated facility size and location

  • Texas Wizard tournament sold out in 30 minutes with 160 players; women's tournament and side tournaments added this year

    high confidence · Ed VanderVeen mentioned tournament expansion details

  • Vendor booth sizes reduced from 10x12 to 8x10 to better fit smaller vendors and accommodate show growth

    high confidence · Ed VanderVeen explained booth sizing changes

  • Gerry Stellenberg spends 30-40% of his time on logistics/vendor management rather than game design

    high confidence · Stellenberg directly stated time allocation challenge

  • Multimorphic designed the P3 platform from inception to support in-house, external, and customer-developed games

    high confidence · Gerry Stellenberg confirmed platform was designed around this multi-source paradigm

Notable Quotes

  • “This is the biggest Texas Pinball Festival we've had. Of course, I say that every year. And it's true. And it's true.”

    Ed VanderVeen @ early in interview — Reflects TPF's consistent growth trajectory and VanderVeen's enthusiasm

  • “I play zero pinball during the show. I do get to go enjoy the big smoke on Friday night.”

    Ed VanderVeen @ late in interview — Reveals VanderVeen's personal sacrifice and cigar hobby; sets tone for his dedication to the event

  • “I wouldn't feel right even paying a contract manufacturer to go hire 10 people to support a short burst of manufacturing and then tell them we're done, go fire your people or lay them off.”

    Gerry Stellenberg @ mid-interview — Demonstrates ethical motivation behind Multimorphic's manufacturing pivot

  • “Building pinball machines is only as complex as you allow it to be. And here we have very well-defined assembly instructions and drawings.”

    Gerry Stellenberg @ production discussion — Explains Multimorphic's philosophy on standardization and workforce training

  • “I would like for you to have a show entry. But if you're not interested in coming into the show, but you've got a giant garage full of parts... the swap meet is completely free.”

    Ed VanderVeen @ swap meet discussion — Shows TPF's accessibility and community-first approach

  • “Really my wife Kim and Paul McKinney, they're also organizers, and they play a big part. Kim is really the one that puts on the show.”

    Ed VanderVeen @ closing remarks — Acknowledges team effort; credits wife as operational backbone

  • “Logistical management unfortunately takes a good 30 to 40% of my time when I'd rather be working with the assemblers and working on designing new games.”

    Gerry Stellenberg @ late interview — Illustrates scaling challenges for small manufacturers

Entities

Ed VanderVeenpersonGerry StellenbergpersonTexas Pinball FestivaleventMultimorphiccompanyTexas Pinball Museumevent/venueKim VanderVeenpersonPaul McKinneypersonJonathan NewsonpersonMartin Ayerperson

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Multimorphic faces ongoing logistics burden: 30-40% of founder's time spent on vendor management, part quality issues, RMA processing, and overseas supply chain fallout (30% defect rates reported)

    high · Stellenberg stated time allocation explicitly and described recurring issues with part specifications and shipping damage from multiple vendors

  • ?

    business_signal: Multimorphic transitioned from contract manufacturing to in-house 5,000 sq ft facility to improve efficiency and control labor practices

    high · Gerry Stellenberg detailed 4-month operational shift, citing need for on-site oversight of complex manufacturing and ethical concerns about contract manufacturer labor practices

  • ?

    event_signal: TPF expanded offerings: added women's tournament, multiple side tournaments, increased celebrity guest attendance (Butch Patrick, Pat Priest, John Rhys-Davies, industry designers)

    high · VanderVeen detailed new tournament structure and confirmed attendance of major industry figures

  • ?

    community_signal: Texas Pinball Museum positioning as year-round venue with 26 playable machines and rotating loan inventory from collectors

    high · VanderVeen discussed museum setup, Saturday operations plan, and incoming games (Big Lebowski, Munsters, Oktoberfest)

  • ?

    community_signal: TPF demonstrates strong volunteer infrastructure with ~75 volunteers supporting setup, seminars, registration, door checks, and logistics across multiple departments

    high · VanderVeen acknowledged volunteers, cited Pam Heffron's seminar coordination, and noted crew for setup and registers

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.254

0:00
special bonus podcast interview with ed van der veen interview with jerry stellenberg hi and welcome to a special bonus podcast from texas leading up to the texas pinball festival which will start tomorrow my name is jonathan newson of pinball magazine i'm here with Martin Ayer from Pinball News. And as you might have guessed, we're in Texas for the Texas Pinball Festival. We got in a few days ahead, and we were in the fortunate position to meet with Ed Van Erveen, the co-organizer of the Texas Pinball Festival, do an interview with him. And after that, we were able to drive up to Round Rock and talk to Jerry Sullenberg of Multimorphic for an in-depth interview about the current situation with Multimorphic where they are basically building games in-house and no longer with a contract manufacturer and lots of other news. So you definitely want to stick around for that to listen to. Any comments from you? Yes, absolutely. We have a fortune to, as you said, speak to Ed and Kim from the Texas Pinball Festival and the Texas Pinball Museum, which we then went to visit. So you can look out for some reports from the museum as well as the show coming up very shortly. And as Jonathan said, now we're down in Red Rock. Round Rock. Red Rock is somewhere else. I keep calling it Red Rock.
1:47
Yes. So we went to see Jerry and see his facility and meet the team at Multimorphic. And, yeah, we had a good conversation, a discussion about his operation, his plans, why he's moved, what they're doing for the show and what their future plans are. So I think we, as with everyone, we always say, oh, it's going to be a little quick interview. We say it will be 10 minutes and Jerry, you know, half an hour or something. and then they always end up being about twice as long as that. I'll tell you, you've covered everything you want to ask. Right.
2:22
In regards to the interview with Jerry Stellenberg, it might be wise to probably browse to our respective websites, pinball-magazine.com and pinballnews.com, as we both took pictures of the new facility where Multimorphic is housed, so you can take a look at those pictures so you get an idea what the operation looks like. It's sort of like a small factory tour. Yeah, that's a good plan. And I'm sure there'll be lots more news from both of the interviewees over the next few days and weeks, during the show and after the show. Right, okay. So without further ado, let's head up our first interview with Ed Van Erving, co-organizer of the Texas Pinball Festival. We're here at the Texas Pinball Museum with the founder, Ed Van Erving, who is also a co-founder, but also the main guy running the Texas Pinball Festival, which is actually taking place this weekend. This weekend in Frisco, Texas. So, first of all, Ed, thank you very much for taking a little bit of time out of your very busy schedule because you're up over two years in everything. Very busy. Right. So, thanks for taking a couple of minutes for us. Sure. So what can you tell us about the upcoming weekend Texas Pinball Festival? This is probably going to be the biggest Texas Pinball Festival we've had. Of course, I say that every year. And it's true. So from, of course, the Munsters is a very big part of the show. Butch Patrick and Pat Priest are coming. We also have John Rhys-Davies from Indiana Jones, Lord of the Rings, and Sliders. Everyone keeps telling me he was in Sliders, which I've actually started to watch. It's actually a pretty entertaining show if you've ever watched it. I haven't, but... But all the pinball celebrities are coming.
Darren Kammerer
person
Chicago Gamingcompany
American Pinballcompany
Stern Pinballcompany
John Borgperson
Christopher Franchiperson
Steve Ritchieperson
Texas Wizardevent
P3 Platformproduct
Cosmic Kart Racinggame
Deep Rootcompany
Dutch Pinballcompany
Highway Pinballcompany
  • ?

    event_signal: Texas Pinball Festival achieving record scale with ~485 machines (target 500), requiring venue reconfiguration and logistical innovations

    high · Ed VanderVeen confirmed record numbers, described booth resizing (10x12 to 8x10), foyer expansion, and tournament space relocation

  • ?

    manufacturing_signal: Multimorphic P3 platform assembly shows specialized complexity: base platform 4-5 man-days, playfields 2-15 hours depending on design (simple vs. Cosmic Kart Racing's 14-15 hours)

    high · Gerry Stellenberg provided detailed build time breakdown attributing complexity to magnets, fan shrouds, and LED integration

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Multimorphic adopts deliberate slow-growth hiring strategy with emotional buy-in (stock options) to maintain quality and efficiency; avoids temp labor to preserve knowledge and care

    high · Stellenberg explained rationale for avoiding temp workers and contract labor, emphasizing employee equity and emotional investment

    • 4:16
    Steve Ritchie, Mark Ritchie, John Borg, Christopher Franchi, Barry Ousler. Yeah. Jonathan Joosten, Martin A. They're all coming. Yeah, all the big names. All the big names. Right. And you have a record number in games, I understand. We have broken the record. I don't know what that number is off the top of my head. It's $481, $485. We're pushing 500 pinball machines. And that's a huge accomplishment considering that almost all of the games, easily 85% of them are privately owned collector games that these people are bringing their games up here to show. A lot of them are buying them new so they can have that, but they're still going to share them with us over the weekend, and that is just an amazing thing. But even last year, the show seemed to be almost bursting at the seams, the amount of games and the amount of vendors and the seminar space. Have you got any room to actually expand the show anymore in the current venue? Well, one thing I noticed last year is not all the vendors, but some of the vendors.
    5:23
    A standard vendor's booth last year was 10 by 12. It almost seemed like it was too big for some of the vendors. You'd walk past and they'd have all this empty space behind them because they would push their tables up closer. And, of course, my wife, Kim, who helps run the show, she likes having these big, wide Texas-size aisles, which is great for people space. So this year we did create a lot of extra space. We did reduce the size of a standard booth to an 8 by 10. That seemed to be more fitting for a lot of the vendors. And the aisles are going to be just a little bit narrower in order to accommodate the growth. We're also pushing out into the foyer area or the outer hallway. the outer hallway you're going to see a lot of vendors out there as well oh that's great because that's uh there's an awful lot of foot traffic there well it's a lot easier to browse what people are selling there we also and then the other big thing is we moved the tournaments we have a series of side rooms that is a very large area it's actually a larger area that we uh than what we originally gave the tournament guys and so we moved the main tournaments into that area to give them a little more controlled access for the tournaments, and it was a little bit bigger space, and, of course, that freed up a whole lot of room on the main floor. Right, so the main floor is basically the whole room. It's all new design, yes. Wow, and it's all free play. Everything's on free play. It should be on free play. You pay your admission at the door, and you come in and play pretty much everything. I haven't had anybody tell me yet. Every once in a while you'll get a vendor that is trying to display a new product of some kind. So it's not really the logistics of letting people play it while they're trying to sell whatever mod they're trying to sell. But for the most part, as far as I know, everybody, all the games are going to be on free play. Right. So speaking of new product, any game reveals that are going to take place at the show?
    7:22
    I don't know. So you have all these palettes arriving today. with games on them. Yes, FedEx called yesterday with 37 of the games. And that's just kind of an odd feeling when someone calls and says, hey, I've got 37 pallets, and they're all brand-new pinball machines, and where do you want us to set these? And, of course, I'm not at the embassy, so we're trying to call the embassy. And the embassy has been really good about working with us, and we've been there long enough that they know what to do. They put them in storage and hold them for us until everyone can get there and set them up. But these are all not just Stern Games, but it's Chicago Gaming and American Pinball, and everybody is dropshipping the new games direct to the hotel. So it's worked out really well. But people often think if you have a show that size, you've maybe got the entire week to set it up. But that's not the case, is it? You don't even get into the hall until tomorrow, tomorrow being Thursday. Correct. Setup starts on Thursday. We will have access to a lot of it tonight just because, again, the hotel is real good about working with us.
    8:30
    But our contract, you have to get a contract years in advance. And so we didn't anticipate the show growing to the size that it's grown. Two years ago, we would have not known. So usually it sets up pretty smooth. Of course, Darren Kammerer is our main, he helps us set up the show. You have to bleep that? No, I don't. No, we don't. No, we don't bleep anything. In Europe, we don't have to bleep that. That's mild. You'll see that in some of the other stuff we're going to say. So, Darren Kammerer helps out the show, and he's done a great job with the logistics and with instructions. And I think people get it, you know, that everybody's trying to get set up. And so, of course, we always ask everybody to, you know, be patient, and we'll get you set up. And, you know, we're trying to get power, and the hotel's real good about, you know. The nice thing is that we've done this now in this location for four or five years now, so they get it. The hotel understands. All the past vendors, they know how it rolls, and so it'll set up and tear down extremely well. But every show is different in very many ways, I'm sure. It is. Every show, something changes a little bit, but for the better. I mean, we learn every year. We'll go, okay, well, last year that didn't work out so well, so we're going to do it this way, or we'll come up with a new way of getting people in and out. I think the biggest rule as far as setting up is the hotel just doesn't want people going through the glass doors, understandably, with their pinball machines. But it'll set up. It's going to happen whether we're ready or not. So we're rolling. Yeah, right. No stopping it. Right. So you've got the seminar program. You've got the swap meet on Saturday morning. The swap meet's going to be huge. Huge.
    10:08
    It always is. But even bigger this year, you think? I think it's going to be even bigger than this year. Because last year we had fun coming up with two trucks with blade fields. I don't know that they're going to do that. They might surprise us. But I had another gentleman, in fact, that reminds me, I need to call him back. A gentleman called me and said he had a big truckload of stuff he wanted to bring to the swap meet. Of course, that's the one thing a lot of people don't understand. The swap meet is completely free. So we don't charge anything for the swap meet. I would like for you to have a show entry. But if you're not interested in coming into the show, but you've got a giant garage full of parts. and you just need Well, if you sell that then you can pay admission to the show. Exactly. So if they want to come in and play but yeah, there's no cost to attend or sell or do any of that. You might contact the DFW Pinball and Arcade Club. They kind of coordinate that for us and supply coffee and donuts and yep, they're great. They help us out a lot. Right. And so there's a big tournament.
    11:07
    There's, I think, yeah, several tournaments. There's a big tournament. The Texas Wizard. We sold out in 30 minutes, the 160 players. I wish we could expand it, but just logistically we can't supply that many pinball machines at this point and the space and the time that it takes.
    11:26
    Maybe if we can expand the show to be more like Expo and be Wednesday through Sunday, or we could expand the tournament size, but as of right now it's... For a lot of people it's already sort of... What I noticed last year, we headed into the hotel on Thursday and the hotel was already pretty packed with people for Texas Pickle Festival even though the show didn't start for another day and a half we have need time to set up a lot of those people are vendors and exhibitors and they're setting their games up but as far as the tournaments goes yes the Wizards, the Bain tournament is sold out but we did add a women's tournament this year which was fairly well received and we added there's going to be a bunch of side tournaments as well. So Colin and Phil and a new guy, Dick Curtis, they're running the tournaments. It'll run great. And you've got your Safecracker games on the floor? I think we have three Safecrackers this year that will all be spitting out Texas Pinball Festival Safecracker tokens.
    12:28
    This is a big ah, but I did order new Safecracker tokens with the new official Texas Pinball Festival design on the back, but they didn't make it. So they're not minted yet.
    12:41
    Fortunately, it's going to be the same tokens as last year. Oh, well. Still cool. And a lot of people still don't have those yet. No, I haven't. I haven't got one yet. Yeah.
    12:51
    And you've got, well, seminars going on with the usual suspects, I would say. Yes. Some of the pinball industry discussing their... All the manufacturers will have some kind of a seminar. of course with the exception of Deep Root who isn't ready yet and of course Dutch Pinball and Highway Pinball is not coming sorry that was me but yes all of the other manufacturers will have a seminar of course the Twippy Awards are going to be Saturday night and what do you guys we'll kick off the show with our Pinball quiz you guys do lead off the show and I have new equipment for you if you want to use it I have new audio with wireless mics excellent whatever you give us we will use but yeah we're going to be there with a bunch of wonderful prizes so the entire happy hour bar will actually participate well we can try and get everybody on the upper floors you know around the turning outside try to get them to move around the building this time rather than just on the floor it will be on the left hand side of the building or the right hand side of the building that's going to be fun I look very much forward to this weekend I know it's going to be a very busy weekend for you do you get to enjoy the show at all? I play zero pinball during the show I do get to go enjoy the big smoke on Friday night so that's I always enjoy that I do take some time for that. Is it out on the patio? Out on the patio by the bar yes just being a cigar aficionado so I do enjoy that but otherwise I love the show just because I enjoy everybody else coming and having a good time and telling us what a good job we've done, and that's always nice. So I'll tell everybody right now, if you see me, please stop and say hello. If I'm short or I don't give you the attention that you feel you deserve, I apologize. I'm usually running around pretty busy with everybody else. So catch me at the Big Smoke or during breakdown is usually when I'm relaxing on Sunday. Yeah, which is usually when everybody's escaping. I don't want to help breaking down everything. They're pretty good. Everyone's really good about breaking down, too.
    15:07
    But it's going to be a real cool event. Anybody that is in doubt, like, should I attend? Maybe if it's just a couple of hours drive for you, like, should I go? Yes, you should go. This is the event you don't want to miss out on. This is the Tex Pimple Festival. It's the biggest show in the world. In the world. Universe. Galaxy. In the galaxy. Yeah. But anyway, yeah. So I hope everybody comes. I do want to say one other thing is I know you did say, and I appreciate you saying I'm the face of the show, and I know I'm the one that most people know, but really my wife Kim and Paul McKinney, they're also organizers, and they play a big part. Kim is really the one that puts on the show. She's the one that makes it run so smoothly when you come to pick up your packets and your merchandise, and it's all there for you. And she works really hard making sure everybody has their badges and their wristbands and everything. And then Paul deals with the hotel and takes care of all those logistics, which is, I mean, that's a huge thing. So I couldn't do it without them. And all of our volunteers. Right. I was going to say, let's not forget about all the volunteers that are helping to run this show. You know, it really is a community show. And I say this whenever I do do a podcast. I know I sound like a broken record, but it really is one thing that I, you know, it's a community show. I mean, we couldn't do this without the collectors and the vendors and you guys and people that come and support the show and help put it on. It just wouldn't happen. Do you have any idea about the sort of number of people who are working at the show, who are volunteering to, you know, either technical or to guide people or working in the booths? Maybe not quite that many. 75, I mean, between, you know, the crew that helps set up the show, and we have, you know, Pam Heffron, who coordinates with all the seminar people, and you've met, or you've talked with Pam back and forth. There's a lot of logistics involved in that. And just the volunteers working the registers, and the door checkers, and people, you know, people getting games in and out. I mean, it's a huge, huge thing.
    17:14
    So all these people are giving their time, and so I think everybody who goes to the show should be appreciative of the time and effort they're contributing to making the show as fun as it can be. Absolutely. Please don't get frustrated with any of my volunteers. If you have an issue, come find me. I'll fix it. Excellent. Okay. Oh, one other thing. I think you're streaming the seminars this year. Is that the plan? That is always the plan. Sometimes it doesn't work out so well. We're at the mercy of the hotel's Wi-Fi, So they've told us it's going to be better. Worst case scenario is everything is going to be recorded for sure. Right. But, yes, we are going to do our best to stream all the seminars.
    17:58
    Richard and Howard Barnett, they do a great job of helping us with that and getting all the equipment set up. So we're going to try. But, obviously, if you want to take part in them and ask questions, you need to be there at the show in person. Absolutely. And why would you not want to? Why would you not want to be there? But, yeah, if we don't get it streamed live, I promise we'll get it to you as quickly as we can on YouTube or one of the channels. Okay. So, aside from the Texas Pinball Festival, well, we're doing this interview right here at the Texas Pinball Museum. Is there anything you quickly want to say about the museum? The Texas Pinball Museum, you know, you've got to walk through. Right now we're at 26 pinball machines. It's a cool little hangout. It started out when the Texas Pinball Festival wasn't going on. Kim and I and Paul have all these machines, and we needed a place to run the show prior to and store all the merchandise. And we had our personal collections that were just sitting in storage. So we said, well, let's find a place and see if people want to come play down here in Midlothian, Texas. That's where Kim and I live. So we set up a place, and it turned out pretty nice. I mean, I think it looks nice. It does. So we're open on Saturdays just because... Obviously not this weekend. Not this weekend. We are closed this weekend for the Texas Pinball Festival. But yeah, we figure we'll be open on Saturdays, see how it goes. We'll probably expand our hours into Friday night and maybe on Sunday as time goes on. We do have some cool games coming to the museum after the Texas Pinball Festival. We've got Big Lebowski is on loan to us from a gentleman named Mark Scott. He's going to loan us that for a few months. we're going to have a Munsters coming an Oktoberfest and some other new games some older games too, a Party Zone we've got a Party Zone I've got to put together Banzai Run you saw back there I'm working on so, yep come by the museum well, I think we'll wrap it up there thank you very much indeed Ed and best wishes for a fantastic show this weekend I doubt, there's only doubt that it will be wonderful because everybody who has been every previous year. He's always had a wonderful time, I'm sure. I hope so. We appreciate all the help. Right. Well, thank you, for having us, for coming on our podcast. Speaking of podcasts, weren't you supposed to be doing your own podcast at Top Line? Yeah, I don't know what happened. You know, it's coming. It's coming. The Super Duper Extra Awesome Pinball Podcast. Well, we look forward to that. I think we're going to win the Twippy Awards for Best Podcast for 2018. It's a shoo-in, isn't it? I bet we got some votes. I don't know, but I bet we got some votes. Anyway, but yep, I don't know, we'll get around to it. I'm busy. I've got things going on. Sure. Thank you very much. Thanks, guys. Yes, thanks to Ed for that interview. I hope you found it interesting.
    20:49
    Yes, he's going to be a very busy guy over the next few days and weeks, not only with the show and the museum, but also with his bid to be the mayor of Midlothian. Which we're not supposed to be mentioning. Okay then we won mention that Good that clear Right so without further ado let move on straight to Multimorphics Jerry Stellenberg founder of the company and still involved in every aspect of the company It's a very handsome guy, I would say, in the sense that he's involved with basically anything from cleaning the trash bin to designing games and everything to keep the company logistically moving forward.
    21:38
    Yeah, he's definitely on the rotor for cleaning the toilets, he told us, along with every other member of staff there. But it was interesting for me particularly to see Jerry this year in a very much more relaxed state than he had been in previous years. he wasn't in any way concerned about the reliability or the presentation they were going to be giving of their new four-way racing CCR game.
    22:05
    He's very happy with the way the company is and the way the product is. So he's a very laid-back guy at the moment, and it was nice to see him and the rest of the team, of course, also quite comfortable with what they're going to be showing. Right. So let's dive into what Jerry has to say.
    22:25
    I need to, I'm not sure whether I need to, but most of the questions in this interview were asked by Martin, and it was rather late, and the jet lag was kicking in rather heavy on my end, so I was present, but not at the moment. I think you're playing your role. You're here anyway in this interview with Jerry from Multimorphic. We're here at the Multimorphic Development and Production Facility here in Round Rock in Texas. And Jonathan and I are here with the head of Multimorphic, Jerry Stellenberg. Welcome, Jerry. Thank you. How are you doing, guys? Very good. And tell us about this place because we weren't actually expecting particularly to be here because we knew that in the past you had been manufacturing your games using contract manufacturers and yet here we are at a production facility for Multimorphic. So what's going on here and how long have you been here? Yeah, so we've made the change from contract manufacturing to our own production facility largely because we learned that in order for the production team at a contract manufacturer shop to be effective, building something as complex as a pinball machine with lots of different pieces and parts and part numbers and sub-assemblies and testing needs, that we essentially had to live there and do our jobs next to them.
    23:53
    And instead of living in somebody else's manufacturing place and working with their labor and paying markup for their labor, it's cheaper for us, it's more effective for us, it's more efficient of use of our time if we have our own spot. So we moved into this building about four months ago. It's a 5,000 square foot facility and we're looking to grow from a few machines a week to a good number of machines a week as we start pumping out P3s. But one of the key benefits of using a contract manufacturer would be that they don't have to be busy all the time building games for you. If you've got a burst of games, they can build them and then you're not paying them anymore. Whereas if you're here, you have to be building games all the time or building something or developing something all the time. Yeah, sure. There's the business side of the discussion and there's the ethical or moral part of the discussion. I wouldn't feel right even paying a contract manufacturer to go hire 10 people to support a short burst of manufacturing and then tell them we're done, go fire your people or lay them off. Some contract manufacturers have enough business where they can just reallocate those resources to somewhere else. But the one we were using didn't. They were a pretty small organization and brought in people just to build our pinball machines and our play fields.
    25:10
    So the ethical side of it or the compassionate side of it is the same for us. But yes, now we have to better manage our own growth and make sure we don't hire too many people too fast and make sure that we have enough business to keep them all busy, or else we'd have to do the same thing in layoff, and we don't want to have to do that.
    25:29
    Right. Is working with, like, temps an option? Or is working with pinball machines and temps not a good combination because people need to be really skilled in knowing what they should be doing? So in our experience, building pinball machines is only as complex as you allow it to be. And here we have very well-defined assembly instructions and drawings. And one of the reasons we're here sitting next to the assemblers is so that we can answer any questions and we can even help them work side by side with them, build along with them if we need additional manpower. but temp workers you usually pay some kind of a markup for use of the labor, use of the talent pool and it's just more effective for us to keep the growth slow and steady and hire a couple people at a time to learn what we're doing to feel like they're involved with the company to have some emotional buy-in to the equipment and the machines they're building that usually translates to them caring more and them being more careful. And then also when we have discussions about how efficient they are, how quickly they're building things, if they're emotionally tied to the success of the company, if they have stock options, for example, in the company, then they're more motivated to do a good job but do it efficiently.
    26:55
    So town laborers wouldn't have that. The people would just come in, do a job, get paid their 8 to 5 or 8 to 6 or whatever five days or weeks out of it and go home and not care.
    27:05
    Right. So what you're building is a pinfall platform, and that platform supports a number of different games, a number of different play fields or modules. How much of the time is spent in, or how much of the resources are spent in building kind of the base platform system, and how much is spent in building the individual play field modules and the components that go on to that, which are not unique to every game, but they're unique to every set of games. So you're asking about building or designing? Yeah, the building of them here, what goes on here. So the base P3, the physical platform that the upper playfields sit into, takes about four to five man-days' worth of time to build, whereas a playfield generally takes, a simple one like Cannon Lagoon takes about two hours, A more complex one like Lexi Lightspeed might take 9 or 10 hours. Cosmic Kart Racing, our third upper playfield module, our latest game release, takes a couple more hours than that. It's about a 14 to 15-hour build so far. Is that because of all the LED strips? It's because of the way we've got magnets and fan shrouds and LEDs working through them. It's just a very complex build with a lot of pieces that have to fit together in just the right way to make it all function. So we spend most of the time building platforms, and then when people order specific games, we can usually crank them out to order within a day or two. Right, okay, that's pretty responsive then, really. Right.
    28:45
    So this afternoon we basically got the factory to work. I have to say I was very impressed with how you detail of all of the different aspects that you're dealing with when it comes to running a company and facilitating production and so on, because everything is documented and that's a process which is also taking up a lot of time, I assume. sure as a small organization we're still i still consider us a startup we're we're wearing a lot of hats i'm some days i'm the team lead i'm the manager i'm watching the guys develop mechanical sub assemblies or helping the design team work through whatever design aspects in a new game they're working on i wear all those hats because i have to i own the company and i hire people to do specific other things, mechanical engineering or art development or whatever it is, assembly. I wind up managing logistics of purchasing parts and staging inventory and dealing with all the vendors and working through RMAs with the vendors. We get a lot of parts from a lot of different places, some in the U.S., some overseas, and there are issues with almost every shipment of parts from everybody. It doesn't matter where they're coming from, but it's a lot more of a logistical hassle when you're dealing with an overseas vendor and they have 30% fallout on their parts or they have a whole shipment of parts that for some reason it didn't meet your specs. What do you do about that? That's happened in the past. It happens fairly often that some percentage of an order is wrong or didn't meet specs or got damaged in shipping. They didn't package them well enough and they come and you have a bunch of sheet metal that's scratched or something like that. So the logistical management unfortunately takes a good 30 to 40% of my time when I'd rather be working with the assemblers and working on designing new games.
    30:53
    So you describe yourself as a startup, but you actually have quite a range of different sources for your games. You have in-house developed games, you have external company developed games, and even now your latest game, Hooping It Up, is actually a customer developed game. is this something which you foresaw when you started, and is it something which you're comfortable and happy with and want to expand the possible sources of your game designs?
    31:28
    Did we foresee it? Yes. In fact, we designed the company around that paradigm. The paradigm of the P3 is to be a platform machine in very much the same way that video game consoles turn video game stand-up arcades into a platform. computers are a platform, mobile phones are a platform where you buy the hardware once and then people develop apps for it and you can do a lot more things with it. That's what the P3 is intended to be. We developed, and I'm an engineer, I spend most of my time thinking about, when I'm really having fun, I'm thinking about low-level development of digital logic or how things can work together or low-level software development, all those things most people find very boring, and that's what I thrive on. So I came up with this concept for a pinball platform, a modular pinball platform.
    32:21
    That's the hardware side. We can swap in games and play fields and different modules, and the flipper assembly slides in and out, and we can change that up. But for the whole ecosystem to work, we needed a platform concept for developers as well. So we distribute, and we've been distributing it for a year or so now, a development kit, a software development kit for the P3, where people can download basically about 60% to 70% of the code that goes into any game is common. So they can download that from us, and they can go implement their, what we call the fun. They can go implement game-specific content on top of our libraries and turn that into a game or a game application. If they want to, they can go off and design a playfield module for a game as well, but they don't have to. They can make use of existing playfields and just design new software applications, which is what Greg did for Hooping It Up recently. Right. So tell us about that game. How did that come about, and how would people get it if they wanted it? Yeah, so Greg Goldie, the developer, he lives in Colorado. I met him at the Rocky Mountain show a couple of years ago. He was interested in the platform. He bought a P3 for himself. But he's now a retired software developer slash manager. He worked at Dish Network for a while, retired from there. And he's long been a pinball hobbyist, and he's built a couple of ground-up builds of, I believe it was Medieval Madness and Cactus Canyon, and he does a lot of refurbishing and repairing pinball machines. And he's always wanted to design his own game.
    33:58
    But to design your own or to build your own pinball machine, you've got to be an expert in a lot of different disciplines.
    34:04
    Specifically, there's hardware development and mechanical development, and then you need all the resources to put this thing together. So he liked the fact that this P3 platform was an already fully developed, mature platform onto which he could just implement his concept for what would be a fun game to play. And he did that. He took the Lexi Lightspeed Playfield that we use, that we've been distributing and selling since the beginning of the P3, and he implemented a basketball-themed game, who put it up on top of the platform. He did it for a lot of reasons, but he calls it a bucket list item. He always wanted to develop a game, and the P3 allowed him to do that.
    34:42
    So he developed the game. We were talking a lot about how he wanted to distribute it and whether or not he wanted to sell it or make it available for others, and he chose to offer it out as a free software update to all existing P3 owners. And would it be fair to say that everybody or nearly everybody would have the Lexi Lightspeed play field in their game if they have a P3? Yes, nearly everyone. People are given the choice when they buy a P3 what they want it to come with. Most people buy it with the Lexi Lightspeed and then playfield module and then add minigames to it or buy additional playfields. A lot of the early buyers got it with both Lexi Lightspeed and Cannon Lagoon. But a few didn't want Lexi. They wanted to put it on location or in an area that's frequented by kids or whatever, so they just bought it with the Cannon Lagoon playfield. So those people wouldn't be able to run Hooping it up. But everyone else... For everyone else, it's a free download. That's right. It's go to the Multimorphic website, add it to their cart at a cost of zero. They don't even need to add it to their cart. It's actually... Every user has an account on the site that lists all the software that their P3 can run. So they just have to log into their account, download the software, and install it. And it's been added to the list. It's already there. Right. So there's three different game modules right now for the game, but there's more games being developed for those three.
    36:08
    Are you also working on a fourth game? Can you talk about that? We call it Quattro because it's the fourth game. So, no, we're keeping everything secret until we're ready to release the game. Okay. So, you're working on a game that you can't confirm that you're working on? I can confirm we have a whole team of people working on it, actually. And this is the first game, this fourth game. So the P3 is kind of my baby. It's this concept I came up with and helped develop it from the ground up. And I've been a part of the design teams for all of our games so far. Lexi Lightspeed, Cannon Lagoon, Cosmic Heart Racing. All the play fields. Most of the minigames, not all the minigames, but most of the minigames. But this fourth game is one that I've completely removed myself from the design team. I helped get this platform off the ground and I still have ideas for games I want to see developed but I want people to I want other people on the team to have a chance to put their vision into the machine and the fourth machine is not going to be something that's trying out a ton of new ideas and implementing new weird hardware and trying to do software in a different way than people are used to that's what I like to do but that's not necessarily what all pinball community guys... So it's more evolutionary rather than revolutionary. This fourth game will be a traditional style pinball game. And you said you're not going to announce it until it's ready to ship. Once people have seen it, they can order it from you and get it in short order. That's correct. I don't want to show off the game and then have it take three or four or five months for people to receive there. So the day we announce it, we will have Playfields ready to ship. would the day that you announce it still be in 2019? I don't know, if it's ready in 2019 it will be announced in 2019 if it's not it won't be one of the things that you are going to be showing in 2019 though is at the Texas Pinball Festival you'll be showing your four way cosmic kart racing head to head battle and I think that's the first time that anybody would have seen it almost, sorry, we've seen it in the factory, but a couple of weeks after you've managed to do that, it'll be at the show. So do you want to tell us a little bit about how that works and also how that varies from what we might have seen before with the single player or the two player versions? Yeah, so the multi-machine gaming concept has been something we've wanted to explore for a while. We've been showing off a game called Heads Up, a two machine multiplayer thing the last couple of years at TPF, Texas Pinball Festival. And it's almost been universally loved. People walk up to this game and it allows you to play against your friend and you can battle, shoot the good shots and you get points, shoot the bad shots, your ball goes to the other player and two people and two machines having a lot of fun. That was actually a test software application to make sure that we had the infrastructure in place to handle a broader scale multi-machine game, which is what Cosmic Cart Racing is. Cosmic kart racing is what you think of when you're thinking about kart-style racing games. It's a bunch of vehicles on a track playing power-ups against each other and trying to proceed and win the race. I'm trying to win a few in a row and show your friends that you're consistently better than them and all that stuff. That's what racing is. Racing only works if you're playing against people at the same time. You need the bragging rights to say. in pinball on the jump yeah and in pinball traditionally when you play a multiplayer game you take a turn at the machine and then you lose the ball and switch off and then another person but you can't race against people that way no so Cosmic Heart Racing has a mode where you can play a four player iterative game like that where you race a heat and if you win the heat you can move on and then someone else will race and if they win the heat they move on but you're not competing directly against them this multiplayer is truly simultaneous multiplayer It's four people, up to four people, each on their own machine, all connected together, all racing against each other. The person who hits the shots the best, the fastest, or plays the best power-ups is going to win the race. Of course, you're showing it with all four machines connected to the same network. Right. But presumably these can be in different locations connected by the Internet. That's right. So the video game linguistics is LAN play versus WAN play. So local area network is what we're showing at TPF. And we're currently developing the servers, the external Internet servers, to matchmake, to allow people on multiple machines anywhere in the world to connect to each other and play. So they will need to connect back to your server somewhere for all the data to be shared between the machines? Yes, to a public multi-morphic server, yes. Right, okay. So, but, okay, if... I mean, even if you have a game in one room and another game in the second room, how do you know other people are ready to play or compete with you? So we have what's called a networking lobby. And a lot of online video games have something similar where you tell your machine you want to play against people in the world on the Internet. And you can either set up and host a race or you can join an existing race. So you basically configure your machine the way you want, and then it talks to the server. the server sends you a list of, if you want to join an existing race, the server will send you a list of available races. It'll show up on your screen, and with the flipper buttons, you can scroll down the list and select which game you want to join. You'll hit the start button or the launch button, and it'll join an existing race, and then that will basically tell your P3 to talk to that person's P3, and it'll then act just like you were in the same room, and it connect you and let you play I presume there a lot more sort of behind the scenes and people will really imagine first of all because you have to be able to control who you can join for races who can join your races You don't want to just make your machine available to everyone necessarily. You might have a friend list.
    42:29
    And, of course, what's the window between you just started a race and somebody wants to join, they have to then wait until the race is finished and join the next one. So these are common problems or common things people consider in multiplayer video games. It's not a new problem we had to solve. It's new for pinball. That's correct. But the P3 is built on a software engine called the Unity game engine, which is heavily used for video games, but commonly for multiplayer networked video games, games that were written for existing video game consoles or for mobile phone platforms or those kind of things. So there's infrastructure in an engine like that to handle the multi-machine connectivity.
    43:16
    Unity actually has their own matchmaking service, which they charge a fee for, and it can get pretty expensive depending on your structure. But our needs are very simple at this point, so we're implementing our own matchmaking server and we'll allow people to connect that way. And for people who are going to the Texas show this weekend, what else are they going to be able to see on the Multimorphic stand? Yeah, so we'll have the four-machine CCR setup, Cosmic Kart Racing setup. We'll have two machines with the Cannon Lagoon playfield, probably split in time between Cannon Lagoon and Grand Slam Rally, and then we'll switch it over to our two-game heads-up thing, which people really seem to enjoy at these shows. We'll have a seventh machine there. that'll be set up with the Lexi Lightspeed play field and most of the time it'll be Lexi Lightspeed but we'll also switch it over to the new Hoopin' It Up game so people can experience that new game so you mentioned not being a part of the creative team for the fourth game but could it be in the future that once that game is out there that you might get an itch and you're like you know what, I'm going to reprogram the whole thing and just do what I think I can do with this play field? Or are you way too busy to even consider that?
    44:36
    Yeah, there's lots of things that go through probably every pinball fan's head or mind when they see a play field, and they either connect with or don't connect to the rules.
    44:46
    While I'm not directly involved in the creative team, I am managing the creative team for the game. I'm making sure they're on schedule. So I'm making sure they're creating a game that I think will relate to people and pinball hobbyists and that will sell well. So I do have some input into the direction of the game. I'm just not making the little choices or the decisions about characters and how the rules play out and those kind of things. But the neat thing about the P3 is because we have this developer's kit, anybody can rewrite rules for existing play fields. yes I probably will want to rewrite rules for every plaything we have but like you said I likely won't have the time to do that but the other important part about it is to make a fun immersive pinball experience it takes a lot more than just one person usually I mean there are outliers, the Scott Denise's of the world who make games that everyone seems to universally love and he did most of that by himself with a little bit of help from the community but pretty much by himself. That's a rarity. When you have a big LCD screen like we do in the P3 and you have this engine that you need to fill with content to make the experience immersive, it requires usually a lot of people and a lot of money. So it's not just something that I would jump on haphazardly and try to spit out a new rule set for a game without thinking through a well-structured game design. If someone did have the passion and maybe the support from their colleagues and friends and decided they wanted to take an existing play field that you already have for the P3 and build a new game, but they don't have a P3 themselves,
    46:34
    would they need to buy one in order to do it? Or could they do it all in software and then at the very end find out exactly how it plays? They can and people have developed entire P3 games without a machine. In fact, I got an email. It's been about a year from a developer who was out in Australia who heard about the P3 and wanted to develop a game. I sent him the development kit nine or ten months ago. Didn't hear from him for a long time. And literally three months ago, he emails me. He said, hey, my game's ready.
    47:12
    Try it out on the machine and let me know what needs to be fixed. the P3 development kit is a software infrastructure it's a software framework built around Unity but Unity has a simulation environment in it that we've added context for we've added the pinball interface to it so people can fully develop a game and simulate it by clicking buttons on their computer so while they don't have the physical ball rolling around the play field, they can mimic that with the mouse on their screen, they can hit keyboard keys to represent switch events where the ball rolls through an orbit or over a ramp or whatever, and they can fully simulate the process. So it's much easier to develop a game and to debug it with a machine, but you don't need it. Does it go as far as any help with the hardware layout? You know, they're telling me like if you shoot this round, then this switch will close and that switch will close, that one on the entry, that one on the exit, confirming you made the ramp, or is it all literally, you know, here's a switch closure that says the entry, here's a switch closure that says the exit, and they happen to be associated with that ramp. You know, there's no, you take the ball, roll it around with your mouse up the ramp, and this switch closes, and then that switch closes. Right, no, we're not currently doing anything with physics in the simulation engine, and we're not doing anything with pre-simulated timing. And what I mean by that is, if you wanted to mimic a ball going around a ramp, you would have to hit the keyboard button at the entry point, wait, whatever, half a second later, hit another button at the exit point. Or you can take advantage of the existing module drivers. That's what we call the software layer that handles the logic for how a playfield module works. Right, yes. And what that does is it handles the logic for what happens when the entry switch is hit and then the exit switch is hit. And then it sends you a higher level event saying, you made the ramp. Right. And then your code can just look for that event called ramp make event or whatever it happens to be called and write your reaction to that. Score points or play an animation. And you update that every time a new play field is produced. That's correct. And we do that because there are other games that we develop for the same playfields. We have games like Barnyard and Rocks and Lexi Lightspeed Secret Agent Showdown, mini-games we call them, that are software applications that work with existing hardware. A game like Barnyard works with the Lexi Lightspeed playfield and the Cannon Lagoon playfield, and it will soon work with the Cosmic Car Racing playfield because we handle a lot of the low-level details about the shots of the play field in private code, in code that we wrote to describe how the play field should work. So the app developer just says, hey, if I ever get an event about a ramp,
    50:15
    I'm going to score this point or flip this animal around in the case of a barnyard. If the ball goes into a hole ever on any play field, then I'll do this. so people can just tie into the code we've developed for the hardware.
    50:29
    Okay. So over the past four months, you've been setting up this new facility. Obviously, you've been developing the whole P3 concept for the past six, almost seven years.
    50:46
    But now that you've got things rolling over here, Does it mean that as busy as you are with the logistic end of things sort of in place and taken care of, does it mean that you get to spend more time on designing or programming or more of the fun stuff instead of the stuff that needs to be done to make sure that everybody can do their job? I hope the answer to that someday is yes, but no, we're not even close to that now. What I said before about me handling all the day-to-day stuff to let the experts do the expert things, that's how it is. I fill orders. I pack packages and send them off and handle all the interfacing to the shipping companies.
    51:34
    There's a lot to do to run a pinball organization. These aren't software applications that you program and then make it downloadable online, and that's all your company's doing. This is a very complex product with so many moving parts, literally and figuratively. The business has so many moving parts as well. And in order for us to survive as an unfunded, basically a bootstrapped company with a very limited staff, I have to do a lot of the stuff to offload and allow my team to be successful, to be effective. and I don't like doing a lot of it but it has to be done so I do it so since you've moved in here in four months you're obviously set up to build games and modules or play fields but this isn't how it's going to end the layout of the building isn't how it's going to ultimately be what changes are you going to be making over the next year or so as far as the production flow of games and playfields goes from the parts and the pre-assembled elements to producing a finished game or a finished playfield that goes out the door to the customer? Yeah, so we moved in here and had to get started building playfields and machines pretty quickly, so the floor isn't set up as we'd like it yet. Right now we just have a couple of tables where people that are building the actual playfields and structure of the machine, they all work on workstations. But the P3 is different than a traditional machine. So you can't really compare us to a company like Stern or Jersey Jag or somebody who has a long assembly line of roller tables where a playfield rolls through and somebody puts this wire assembly on and then somebody puts a ramp on or whatever. The P3 is modular. So we develop or we assemble all of the individual sub-assemblies, like the wall and scoop assembly or a flipper assembly or the vertical up kicker or ball trough assembly. All these things are assembled on a table. There are part shelves against the wall. The incoming parts are received in inventory and inspected and then inventoryed basically against the wall. Somebody stages the parts from the inventory into a workstation. That workstation generally has a table where there's an assembler running through the work instructions, grabbing parts out of the part bins and assembling them to the instructions. Right now that's just a couple of tables, but our future plans as we grow our volumes and fully finish our move into this building, we'll have six or seven work cells is what we call them where people are building sub-assemblies. All these sub-assemblies will get staged in unit test areas just beyond that, so that all the assemblies are known to be working before they're gone and put into a machine. Beyond the test assembly or the test tables will be a final assembly section where cabinets meet all the playfield parts. Everything gets assembled into a cabinet.
    54:47
    Now it looks like a pinball machine, and we go to a final testing area where things are quality controlled. People inspect them and people playtest them, and then they basically work their way towards the shipping door and they get into a box and palletized and then out to a shipping truck. And the games will always leave the factory here or the manufacturing facility. As a complete game, it'll have a playfield installed in it, always. Today, yes. Today, every machine we ship has a playfield. We envision a day where somebody has a P3 and six or seven play fields, and they want to play more than one at once, or they want to have a party and be able to set up multiple machines with multiple play fields. And we're not going to force them to buy a machine with another play field. So at some point, we'll probably offer a base platform without a play field. But today, our customer base and our game library isn't big enough to need that. And you have got to the point where all the pre-orders have been fulfilled. Yes. so everyone who bought before they could actually pick it up had their machines that's right, we had a bunch of people order day one when we announced machines and it took us a few years to get them their games we didn't spend any of their money though we shipped their machines we had more people pre-order Cosmic Cart Racing all of those machines and all of those playfields have shipped so we currently owe nobody anything everything we build moving forward will be to fill new orders well it's very impressive at least I was very impressed seeing what you set up with so much eye for detail having seen other operations work I might get the impression that some of them work with a little bit of less detail than the way you structured things over here is that something that you notice as well? And is that,
    56:54
    how do you feel about that? If something like that occurred to you as well? So, I mean, some startups in all industries, I'm familiar with the electronics and like networking equipment industries. There are startups where you just ignore process and you ignore all the logistics and you just get people in a room and make stuff. You write software, you design hardware, you build stuff. make a call to a vendor, get some stuff in, assemble it, and ship it out. That's fine in the very short term for a very small organization with very few customers. But if you want to be able to grow and expand and ship products to thousands of customers, as we do as a pinball manufacturer, you have to have the infrastructure in place to support that. If we didn't do that today, then we'd get six months or a year down the road. We'd have more customers wanting machines, and we wouldn't know if we have the right parts to assemble them because we wouldn't have the logistics figured out. Or we'd get to a point where we're screwed because we have a machine 90% together, and we realize, oh, crap, we don't have enough pieces of flipper plastic to put the flipper assembly together. So all of that has to be in place in order to grow. There are some business owners who start their company with the sole purpose to sell a machine or to sell their business. and they take a lot of shortcuts when they do that. If the end goal is I want to sell my company in five years, I'm not going to spend the time making the company structured so that it could last 10 or 15 or 20 years. But if you do set up a company to last 20 years and somebody comes in five years later and wants to buy you out, cool, it doesn't matter. You're helping that company out and if they don't do that, you're structured to keep running. If you set up your company to sell in five years and no one comes in five years to buy you, and you've got to try to grow your business beyond that, you've kind of shot yourself in the foot. So we've structured the business in a way that should allow us to grow smoothly for years. That's for many years, not for years. For a long time. Right. And how much of the sort of stock control and inventory and bill of materials as well has been helped by the fact that you do have a base platform and for every single machine that you send out everything except for the upper playfield module is hardware identical so if you're going to build a game you know what's going to go into that game in its entirety with the exception of the upper playfield which could be built separately. That's got to be a much easier way, not that it's easy because making pinball is hard as we know. But that must make things easier in terms of stock control and parts control. It's not like, well, this bit is slightly different from on this game than it was on the previous game, so that's going to be another part number.
    60:00
    And on that particular point, has the platform changed much over the moment when you first produced the very first game, game number one, to what you're producing now?
    60:15
    So, So actually, the fact that we have a common platform doesn't really change how we would work if we had multiple different full machines. Because in our mind, every part of the machine is an assembly. The phrase we usually use is sub-assembly. A sub-assembly has a bill of materials, it has assembly instructions, it has test instructions, and it has a final part number. so all we're doing whether it's an entire machine that's custom unique or whether it's a base platform or whether it's an upper playfield module all these things are assemblies they all have a bill of materials that bill materials may be made up of multiple other sub assemblies but everything is defined in a document that describes exactly what goes into it so if you if you want just view them all as separate products and you're developing a product and at the end of developing a flipper assembly product, it goes to a place where that product is combined with another product and they get assembled together. The logistics is the same in both cases.
    61:23
    And the second point is, is the base P3 platform that you're producing now the same as the original one, the first one that went out the door? We've actually had very few changes to the base platform. We have a couple ideas to cost reduce certain assemblies moving forward so that we can sustain better growth or quicker growth and work better with our margins. But the platform itself has had no major changes. It's had a couple of minor things like we changed the structure of the rear support brace so it's more likely to survive a heavy shipping, a heavy vibration during shipping without bolts breaking or getting sheared off or something. The P3 is a heavy machine, so it's got a lot of support structure that a couple of early shipments had some issues. We've changed a couple of plastics on the Lexi Lightspeed playfield because we had to keep balls out of areas where balls would get stuck. We've changed a couple of wiring harnesses like in the wall scoop assembly because we learned after they run on location for six or seven months, they could start to rub against a couple of brackets and maybe break. So we've changed a bunch of minor things, but all those changes get rolled into what we call engineering change orders. so it's a technical term for we make an engineering change that feeds back through the system we update our bombs, we update our assembly instructions we update our test instructions so that all future games have those changes What about things like adding a backbox monitor how does that fit in with previous purchasers who bought game before that was available Yeah, the backbox monitor is something we've always wanted to do but we needed to get a machine out so we didn't get that dynamic backbox display in until recently But that thing is backwards compatible, so all existing P3 owners can purchase a P3 Backbox Display Kit.
    63:24
    It ships with a couple of mounting brackets that get screwed into the existing back box and we have full instructions and pictures for doing that And then the new display literally just replaces the Translate in an existing game But it's not a requirement in a game. It's an additional bonus feature. Right. So the P3, as most people know, has a large LCD in the play field, which is where most people are looking while they're playing. but there are a couple reasons people like to add this back box display. One is when you're having parties or other people over, it's much easier to watch the progress you're making in a game by looking up high instead of trying to look over your shoulder on what you're doing on the play field.
    64:09
    And also, when you change games in a P3, if you're playing Lexi Lightspeed and you want to play a game of rocks or something, if the machine has the Lexi Lightspeed Translate in the back box and you play Rocks, it still looks like Lexi Lightspeed at the top. So with the dynamic display in there, when you change games, the LCD content changes to represent the game you're playing, which makes it a more connected experience.
    64:34
    All right. So you've been almost running this concept for seven years. We briefly mentioned the upcoming fourth game, which is more of, like you said, a traditional type of gameplay, with the platform being as innovative as it is, what type of games would you like to see being developed in the future that will represent the P3 or that you hope will be catching on with people? I mean, if we look at the history of pinball, we come from the EM days with very simple games, which are easy to understand and slow ball movement. We have come to very fast and deep games. And there's a lot of various types of games in between. So is there any preference that you're like, well, this platform might really like it to go into this direction or that direction? And how do you envision that if it's something that you can discuss? Yeah, that's a deep question because there's a lot to talk about there. But with the one caveat that I love the fact that we've developed a platform to allow other people to implement whatever type of games they want to implement. so whatever I say here if somebody wants to go implement a simple children's game or a super deep complex pinhead game because that's what they like then that's fantastic I personally am a big fan of games from the late 80s early 90s I got into pinball in college and the games that were out around then were Theater of Magic, Attack from Mars Whitewater, those kind of games and I still relate to them the best. I think they were... The rules depth was perfect. It's complex enough that it provides a challenge and there are different strategies you can use to play the game. But they're not so deep that you kind of lose focus on what you're doing because you're trying to navigate a bunch of rules that all either tie together or don't tie together in weird ways. I'm not a big fan of the newer games that have you selecting which way you want to play it before you hit the start button and put heavy focus on playfield multipliers and hitting shots within certain timing to take advantage of scoring bonuses, with the caveat that certain hurry-ups are a lot of fun. But playfield multipliers that expire over time, and if you hit a sequence of shots, that sets up a multiplier for another shot, none of that interests me. That's all too complex, and people don't understand that. And people walking up to a game in an arcade, they shouldn't have to understand any of that. So I like to implement, and I'd like to see my team implement, rules that are deep enough to be interesting, but not so overwhelmingly deep that they take away some of the fun factor. I personally play Attack from Mars, and I've ruled the universe, I think I'm up to 91 times, and I still can't wait to hit the start button again, because something about the game is fun. as opposed to other games that are so deep that I beat them once. I get to the end of a game, and I never want to go through that long slog again because it's just tiresome. I like games that are a 10 or 15-minute game. You're close to the end of it. You've experienced a lot of it. You've maybe lost a ball or two, but it's given you enough to do, and it's given you enough immersion and enough audio and visual feedback that you're excited about hitting that next shot because you know the payoff for hitting that one shot is going to be really cool.
    68:35
    If somebody had developed a game, be it a super complex game or a relatively simple one, or even something which is kind of almost a work in progress or something that would spur other people on to finish it, how would they get that published and available to everybody who has a P3? other certain quality thresholds certain technical requirements they have to meet in order for it to be available on everybody's page to download so pinball is a little different than like a computer system where you don't have to worry too much about somebody writing bad code and blowing something up but if somebody writes a P3 game and accidentally locks on a coil and it starts a fire in somebody's house there's a lot of potential danger to just running random people's code. So our process for allowing people to release games is to sign up on our site as a developer. Once they're approved as a developer, they can send us their concepts for the games or not. They can allow us to see their progress through the development of the game or not. We have a lot of experience and can help them through various stumbling blocks and technical details and all that stuff. But eventually they get to the end of their development. They have a game that they're excited to distribute. They can build it and download it, or not download it, they have it, build it and install it on their own P3 and test it as much as they want. They can play it as much as they want. But if they want to distribute it, then they have to submit it to us for testing to make sure it meets all of our release qualifications and make sure it doesn't lock on coils or it is a playable game. And then we will link it to our website and allow it to be sold to other people. But it has to be in a finished state, I guess. You don't want people to say, okay, I've written the game up to this point. I kind of can't work out how to finish this.
    70:45
    Any ideas? Anybody want to take this on? Here it is. Download it. Right. So we as a company have some quality metrics that we want all games to meet. Some of that is level of completion. Some of it is content. We don't want certain types of content, adult-oriented content, for example, to just be easily distributed on the P3. If people want to develop that kind of thing and we can qualify it as a certain type of game, then that's something we'll explore. but in the short term, as we get started as a company, we want the machines to be generally family-friendly. We don't want to have offensive games. We don't want to have things that will turn people off of the platform. And every game that's on the system has to be downloaded through the multimorphic, I don't want to call it a web store or app store, but a game store. Yeah, in a sense, the Apple App Store is kind of a good metaphor for what we're doing. We want to make sure that the games people have access to are properly tested and released in a state that we're proud of them. So how would that work if someone is actually designing his own playfield module as well? Because if it's just code for an existing playfield, then they can send that over and you can test that here in a game. but if you don't have that playfield module then that's more difficult it's more difficult but if they want to sell a game with a playfield it's got to be manufactured anyway so at some point someone has to validate that it meets the mechanical constraints of the system it fits, it's electrically it connects the right way it talks to things properly it talks to the driver board so the point is that they're going to have to send us a version of that playfield to test anyway before it can be released. Right.
    72:48
    If someone is developing a third-party play field, that might also indicate they might be doing manufacturing of those play fields themselves, or is it something that you'd like to keep under control by yourself? Yeah, no, that's fine. As long as the play field is validated by us to work in the system, anybody can manufacture it. We don't care about that. However, we have a lot of resources and a lot of experience now building play fields and working with the vendors to make the things that a play field will need. I should say that the development kit that we distribute isn't just a software development kit. It has the full mechanical specs for play field designs as well as the electrical specs. All of our machines use our P3 rock boards, our PD16 driver boards, our Switch 16 switch boards. These are boards that the pinball industry has grown to use almost as a standard for new pinball machine development. And interfacing to those boards simply requires a couple of connections back to our main wiring harness. And we document and we distribute drawings for all of the connections that people need to do. So the point is it's not super hard to get the information to be able to develop a play field. And, in fact, there are multiple people doing it, one who has a P3 and at least one who doesn't have a P3 so far. And they will have to submit them to us for validation. but yeah all right so um for all those people in um either developing games or possibly interested in developing games um currently the p3 the upper third of the playfield is sort of like the module that's interchangeable but what if someone wants to do a a playfield with a third flipper sure um somewhere in the middle. Is that possible? Because that will require a lot more changes to the platform to make that work. Yeah, not really a lot. We've designed the system to be modular. The flip assembly comes out, you can stick in a completely different type of activation device or something. The side targets that we currently have slide in and out of the machine. There's one cable that connects them. anybody can design pretty much anything they want that can float over the surface of the playfield and the way it floats over the surface of the playfield is it slides into our side rails and this is extruded aluminum pieces that are mechanically set up to allow people to put in there the caveat is if they make use of our our system our base p3 system that has a driver board to drive the flippers and a couple more driver boards to drive the wall scoops and other things if they make use if they're replacing existing assemblies they can make use of those driver boards then great but if they want to develop a flipper assembly that has five flippers on it and they need a lot more coils and a lot more slingshot switches or whatever they want to do then they have to provide the driver boards to drive those right so generally speaking custom side target assemblies or custom flipper assemblies that somebody will develop will need to tie back in electronically to their playfield module because that's why you're changing out the module. You want a new flipper assembly because you want it to work with your playfield module. So you put a driver board on your playfield module that ties to the new flipper assembly and that all works well together.
    76:25
    Does that make sense? That was complex. It makes sense, yes. So, what would happen, well, so you went with outsourcing the manufacturing of playfield or games basically. You're now doing that in-house because it turns out to be that, well, basically you were spending the same time with your contract manufacturer and you might as well do it yourself. time and more money right but um is that what you foresee that the company will be doing or could it be that if you hit a have a hit game and you need to crank out 500 games or a thousand games that you're like oh this is way too much we better call someone who would be able to do this for us in in uh or is that a scenario not something that you're considering or you know i mean we're looking into the future and we don't know what the future will bring but what is such a situation would occur yeah it's a great problem to have to solve if we have to expand our manufacturing the volume the good thing about structuring the business like we have for long-term growth is that we have everything in place to be able to hand it off to somebody else to build the product. Not only to build it, but to order the parts for it. They can look at our bill of materials, and they can get all the vendor part numbers and everything else from that bill of materials, make the call, get the parts in, and bill it to our assembly structure. So while it's more efficient and less expensive for us to build everything in-house now, and we learned that the hard way by trying it the other way,
    78:14
    it's a very simple matter to make a phone call to another contract manufacturer and say, hey, we need help building this. Here's the build materials. Here's the assembly instruction. Here's the test instructions. Build it. We know that if we're going to do that, we're going to have to babysit that process too. It'll probably require us to hire a couple people to manage the outsourced assembly, but growing pains and good problems to solve. So because we've been so structured, because we have the logistics so well defined, outsourcing that again, if we need to, is certainly possible. Okay.
    78:51
    Right. Well, thank you very much indeed, Jerry. I'm sure everybody who's going to the Texas Pinball Festival this weekend will look forward to playing all the various versions and play fields and games that we have with the P3 on the multimorphic stand. Yeah. Right. What other shows will you be attending this year, 2019? Do you already know? We don't know. In fact, we made a pretty significant statement a while back where we decided we're not doing any more shows except for the Texas Pin the Wall Festival and the Houston Arcade Expo because they're local shows. We're such a small company that it's a huge expense and a huge time sink to pack up a bunch of machines and take them out to shows and take our engineering staff and go to support the shows. So we're better suited leveraging our distribution network and our customers as arms of the company to help get the word out to help show the machine. We're better suited to stay back and keep cranking out machines and keep developing new products. Right. So you won't be doing seminars at other shows then? Or you just won't be taking machines or having them extend? I'm open to doing seminars or attending shows as a guest or something. We won't likely be setting up a booth, bringing machines to demo new games at shows outside of Texas. Okay. All right. So all the more reason for people to visit the Texas Film Festival this weekend in Frisco, Lexington, Dallas. Yeah, definitely come out there. I'll be there. I'll be in the booth most of the weekend. And this machine is unique. It's progressive. It's evolutionary for sure, if not revolutionary. And it opens people's minds to what's possible. I get people walking up to me all day at every show we go to with ideas about how we can make it better or themes we should do or new sub-assemblies we should make or whatever and I love those conversations so anyone listening with ideas let's chat about them it's fun for me to see where people would take this platform if given the opportunity right so on a final note and extra motivation for people to come to the Texas Pinball Festival Martin and I will be hosting our so you think you know pinball quiz and we're actually a few of the prizes will be P3 Lexi Lightspeed Rejected Playfield White Boots so to speak which are of no use at all but still it's a fun item to win absolutely it's something you just won't find anywhere else exactly so it's a very unique piece just to put on your wall or whatever but at least something cool so come to the Texas Pinball Festival participate in our so you think you know pinball quiz and who knows you might be having a Lexi Lightspeed playfield module hang on your wall soon enough so it's Friday night at 6 o'clock right to the Texas show right so So thank you, Jerry, for your time, hospitality, factory tour, everything. Of course. Anytime. Thanks for joining us here on this special podcast interview. Yeah, I appreciate you having me. Always fun to talk. Okay. Well, thank you very much. Thanks, guys. Okay, there you have it. Jerry Stellenberg from Multimorphic, who will be one of the exhibitors at the Texas Pinball Festival, which starts tomorrow, March 22, 2019. It's the entire weekend, three days. at the Embassy Suites in Frisco, Dallas, I really suggest if you have the possibility to come over, you really should. And don't forget, of course, if you do come over, Jonathan and I are doing our So You Think You Know pinball quiz at 6 p.m. on Friday evening in the bar area during happy hour. So definitely come along for that. And we've got some special prizes, including some that we picked up from Multimorphic just yesterday. Yeah, exactly. We got a few P3 Lexi Lightspeed rejected playfields because they were slightly warped, so they couldn't be used in the game. And basically we asked, well, if you're not planning to do anything with them, can we give them away? And they said, sure, take them. Yeah, and they're sort of, I won't say the one of a kind because we've got several of them, but they are unique pieces you won't find anywhere else. and parts of pinball history. You know, the first modular pinball game, and there's the play field for you, which you can win as a prize in our quiz if your pinball knowledge is up to scratch. Right. And there will be other prizes by Stern Pinball, Jersey Jack Pinball, American Pinball, I assume. Spooky Pinball is sponsoring as well. So thanks to all our sponsors to allow us to do another edition of this So You Think, you know, pinball pop quiz. That's the one. Yeah. So thanks for listening for now. We might be back during the Texas Pinball Festival with another bonus podcast. But since the Texas Pinball Festival is very hectic, there's no guarantees. We'll be looking out to record interviews, and they will be done on our regular podcast, which should be the first week of April. Yes. So until then, from Jonathan and myself here in Texas, we will say goodbye. Okay. Thanks for listening and see you in Texas.