I am a real American Wop 41 Hell yes brother I am a real American Watch out for Macho Man Fight for what's right Fight for your life Oh with that badass intro music Was there ever a time like the 80's For awesome movies For cocaine allegedly For Hulk Hogan's intro music This is WAP, We Are Pinball, episode number 41. A very special episode, not only with myself, Don, and Jengiz, but also Bug and Tussle here from Spooky Pinball. How you doing? How you guys doing? I actually heard there was a lot of cocaine involved in the early days of pinball. I mean, have you seen Future Spa? I mean, come on. Yeah. Yeah. Have you seen those shows, like those border security shows, where they're wiping down people's bags and chemically identifying them? We should do that with games from that era. I bet we'll come back with all kinds of crazy stuff. Some of the Pierce stuff is still baked into those cabinets. That could be what's missing from pinball today. I've mentioned it, but we're cowards and we won't try anything. We have energy drinks and we're like, we better cut it down. Yeah, I was going to say. I get to like two energy drinks a day and I'm like, listen, you've got to focus on your health, bro. Ghost glass? We've had yayo glass forever. We're already off the rails. Hi, Jacob. How are you doing? Yo, I'm doing perfect. I'm doing perfect. I'm so happy we have got Team Spooky on the show now, number 41. We wanted to do this earlier, but we're happy this is happening right now. So usually when we have guests over, we always say, who's your daddy and what does he do? So we know about Bug's dad and what he does. That's awesome. But Luke. Oh, boy. My dad doesn't do it. Well, he was probably pretty cool in the 80s, huh? He was a part of the 80s trend. Yeah, I was going to say, he was probably doing the cocaine in the 80s. If you see a guy rolling around between towns who kind of looks like Ted Nugent. Yeah. He rattle-canned Eat the Rich on his car at one point. Yeah. Rattle-canned. He did. He rattle-canned teeth on his car. Yeah, it's the whole thing, man. I grew up in the redneck world. Okay, okay. I just want to know, because we're sitting here. Buck, what's your dad's name? My dad? Yeah. Charlie. Yeah, in pinball he's Charlie, right? Charlie. So we're sitting here because of Charlie, right? I have got this T-shirt on because of Charlie, right? He started all this for maybe about 10 years ago. I just want to know when he came home late one day and said to you, to his sister, to his mom, I'm going to start a pinball company. I'm going to drop my job, everything, and I'm going to start building pinball machines. How did you react? I actually still remember the exact spot I was standing in in the living room. And I'm not making that up. And my response is not just made up to be funny. Like I remember where I was standing, where he was standing, the table next to me. He was on this really, really terrible throw rug that had like all these like raised 3D circles on it because he was trying to do this like 50s or 60s diner thing. Yeah, that thing lived in your house for a long time. Oh, it was a nightmare to vacuum it, too. It just was always covered in dog fur. We didn't even have, like, basic carpet maintenance down. And he was like, we should start a pinball company. And I was standing there with a bowl cut and some really crazy teeth. And I remember being like, yeah, because, like, I never disagreed with my dad on anything because I wanted just him to like me a lot. And I remember being like, yeah, I don't know. That sounds really hard and, like, probably not the best idea. I mean, things are pretty cool right now. I mean, we're eating SpaghettiOs like every day, but I was like, things are pretty great. Like, we got it made here. There's Godzilla on the TV. There's ramen and SpaghettiOs, like a lot of SpaghettiOs in the cupboard. All my stuff is here. I don't think this is necessary, man. You guys have joint custody. Everything's great. You and Mom are married. Yeah, right. So no one said no. You were like, okay, let's do it. It's a great idea. No, I thought it was a horrible idea. We all told him it was a horrible idea. His pinball friends told him it was a bad idea. His mom, my mom, me, the dog, the pet hermit crab. Yeah. Roll, roll. Nobody told him to do it, and that's what got him to say it. Yeah, that's why he was interested. I think I'll do it. Yeah, if everybody would have told him, that sounds like a great idea, he would have bailed instantly. He would have bailed for sure. Everyone was like, hey, dude, this is a terrible idea. He was like, say that again, please. Yeah. Unfortunately, none of that has gotten into my genetic habits, right? Nothing like an Emory. Yep. Did you always have pinball machines at home? I mean, did you grow up with pinball? There's a photo of me when I was barely able to stand, just figured out how to stand playing Firepower 2. That was the first game we had. There was this company nearby. I think it was called Rich and Junies, right? I'm not sure. It was something. They routed games to various areas in the area, but they didn't really know how to work on them so good. And Dad was very interested in learning how to work on them because he grew up loving pinball. So he would bring them to our house, fix them up, get them working, and it would just be like every single week there was another Addams Family, No Good Gophers, Dracula, T2. And they just were rotating through the house constantly, and he would fix them up. Well, they let him keep them once in a while, right? Well, so that was the thing was the payment, because this is back when Adam's family was two, three grand or something, probably even less. I remember he turned down like Dracula's for 2000 at this time. Like there's so many games he turned down for prices that he still is mad about. But after he would fix so many games, they would just be like, OK, yeah, you could just keep this T2 the next time it comes through. And so that's what we would do. And slowly the basement started filling up and he learned how to take really good care of the games and whatnot. and yeah after he started did you play them? oh yeah we played the daylights out of them I used to watch that pinball documentary pinball 101 I think Elwin made that didn't he? I don't know I can't remember I do remember the first time when we started playing at the shop your dad was like you need to watch this you'll be better immediately he wasn't wrong I used to watch that all the time and then I'd go out and try the flipper moves from it on games out downstairs and what not and if I had friends over we all played Elvira for reasons and yeah what so what were the how about you how was your situation did you grow up with pinball also or when did you stumble across pinball so i have a total kind of opposite story um okay i started out doing a lot of engineering stuff and uh competing in those type of events in high school with no idea that pinball even existed. Yeah, I was – yeah, you know, come to think of it, I am kind of the nerdier one in that aspect. But, no, I didn't do anything. I didn't even know pinball still existed. And then I got to be – right before I was about to graduate for high school, my grandma was the village clerk for Benton at the time, which happened to be the same building that the business incubator was in where Charlie started his company. So he started in this little business incubator unit. And so every day he would talk to my grandma. And obviously I always did a lot. Like I built a lot of projects. I did like Rube Goldberg machines that I competed with and stuff like that. And Chuck walked over to the office one day and he's like, yeah, I got this. Like this whole design is done, but I just need people to build it and, you know, this and that. And my grandma being like my biggest. You should talk to my grandson. Yeah, that's what it was, man. Good boy. She literally did. She literally did. She was like, oh, you need my grandson. He'll come in here. He'll fix that right. He'll get those things built like you wouldn't even believe. He's building the damn thing you've ever saw. He's an engineer. 7,000 games later. I was like a high school kid, and I was bored. And I was planning on going into construction. I thought I was just going to be doing construction or pouring concrete my whole life, just some sort of very low, back-breaking labor. That's the dream. Yeah. And she calls me. Man, your body is built for doing stuff like that. Yeah, see, man, everyone thought it. Everyone was like, we know where this kid's headed. He's not going to college. Everyone's like, we know what this guy's going to do. He's going to carry heavy stuff around. I've seen this one. Yeah. So she calls me, and she's like, hey, you need to come in and see this guy. And, yeah, I walked in, and he was like, hey, you want this job for like $10 an hour? And I was like, yeah, I'll put them together for a while. I don't have anything else to do. And, yeah, I don't know. I just kind of slowly, I had no idea. I went in my first day, and I was like, he's like, okay. He had all these boxes of parts on the floor. Like the whole room was just his computer, and then he was just surrounded by this mountain of parts and, like, two tables and some screw bins. Wow. It was a weird plan. So you were there from the beginning? Oh, yeah. Yeah, pretty much. Wow, that's so cool. He started it, what did he say, like 12 months before that? Yeah. So he quit his job, and then he went, because he was like, we're never going to get this done. I'm tapping the table, messing up. But we're never going to get this done if I don't just go, like, full-time, 100% commit, which, I mean, respect him for that. He quit his job with no salary coming in. Genius. No money saved up. No savings account first. No savings account. Yeah, zero. I mean, this guy was like, he was, yeah, he ate ramen. Literally, he's the stereotypical ate ramen noodles every day. He would go over and get his one square of ramen noodles off the shelf and microwave them every day. And he was stoked when he got his special ramen microwaving bowl. Oh, those were so cool. Do you remember those? Yeah, yeah. I thought that was new. I really thought we were going places. I was like, wow, this pinball thing is really working out. Yeah. We have dedicated dishware. No, he was, like, running, like, banners and decals for the village. Even 3D printed parts. He did the police car decals. Yeah, yeah. For the first 12 months, he didn't sell anything. I mean, we were literally printing 3D printed parts for this company in Schultzburg, like, 10 minutes over. They paid the electricity bills for a little while. Yeah. And, like you said, banners, decals, any, like, small favor. Yeah, antennas plus. He was 3D printing stuff for them. He was just doing like any little thing he could do to get that minimum rent on his unit paid. Yeah. So from that time, how many years went past by before you bought Corvette cars? Well, Luke and I haven't bought any Corvettes. I don't have any Corvettes yet. That's been a huge disappointment, the transition. My grandma promised me Corvettes. She was like, you go in there and you build those machines and you'll have a Corvette before you know it. Get your wagon to this guy. Exactly. So your engineering skills, have you used them while building these machines? What have you done in there? Oh, yeah. So it didn't start out like that at all. It was like I started assembling them. My first day in there, I go in there, and that's when I found out Chuck was not the best teacher in the world either. Amen. You had been there, but were you there from the get-go also supporting your dad's business? He was there. Yeah, I just also had to go to elementary school. Yeah. So when I met you. I was a little preoccupied with that, but after, the bus would drop me off at the shop. He did, yeah. So you were 11, right? I think it was about 11 or 12, yeah. Well, you're seven years younger than me, and I was 18. Yeah, you would have been 11 or 12. Yeah. But, yeah, I walked in, and he's – first of all, I'm like, dude, there's pinball machines in here. Like, what's going on? Because he had a Terminator as well, T3 or something. Yeah, there was T3, and then I started cycling games through because I started fixing stuff up. Like, Guns N' Roses, Black Knight. But, anyway, I walked over, and he's like, okay, here's the play field. Here's, like, all these boxes. If you just look around, you'll find the parts in there somewhere. And I'm like, dude, I don't know what it – He's like, you know, you maybe put the auto launcher on or something. I'm like, I don't know what an auto launcher is, sir. So he goes over, he gets me this auto launcher, and he sets it down on this play field. And he's like, you just screw it in here, basically. And I was like, okay, you know, what are some common complications with installing these? What kind of fasteners do you use, everything like that? And he's like, oh, well, I thought that's what I hired you for. And that is when I stopped asking questions ever again. So the first game, which was called America's Most Haunted, right? Yep. Yeah. Is that a theme in U.S., or is it just something you came up with? No, that was totally original. They had all that part done. Yeah. The reality TV show ghost hunting shows were incredibly popular still at the time, and Ben and Dad were professionals at sitting around and making really dumb storylines and jokes about stuff, and then they ran with it. So cool. What theme was the first theme you bought? Rob Zombie. That was the next one. Any amount of money that Spooky Pinball made from America's Most Haunted, he immediately spent. We put it in Rob Zombie's pocket. Immediately. He was like, I don't know if this thing is going to last another year, so I better make sure I get to work with a man that I like first. But look at right now. But before we come to right now, one last question of the history. When did Chuck say, okay, I want to step back and let you guys take over. I want to drive Corvettes and you guys can work and give me the money. When did that happen? How did that happen? Oh, man. He didn't say it. But, yeah, it was not terribly long after Halloween because it sold pretty well. Because the whole time leading up to it, he was just like, we'll see what happens. Because nobody knew what was going to happen. And after Halloween sold, you know, on the first day, it still took us, I don't want to say dragging him out by the ankles. But a little bit of dragging out by the ankles. But as soon as he was out the door, he was like, oh, okay, I feel pretty good actually. Yeah, he was. So that's the funny part. He's like, he fought it and he fought it and he fought it tooth and nail. And then when he was actually, like, done, it was, like, two days, and he was like, oh, man, this is awesome. Yeah. He was like, wait a minute. There's not a concrete ball in my chest anymore. But, yeah, I still say it was the Christmas. What was the Christmas that he never came back? There was a Christmas he just didn't come back from. Yeah. I don't know if it was a Christmas. The Christmas he never came back from. Yeah. I mean, that sounds dramatic. No, it was Christmas Rick and Morty. The Christmas before the second summer of Rick and Morty build. he went to Christmas and I still say he never came back from Christmas. I don't know what broke him. At that point, pinball is really stressful too. You get beat up. You putting stuff out there that you love Especially Chuck You putting stuff out there that you love and things you care about and back in those days especially there was a lot of hate Yeah, there was a lot rougher on the internet side of things. Probably less people that protect you when people start jumping you and stuff. And Dad, I mean, the ongoing joke's always been that Spooky Pinball picks their themes from walking over to the movie shelf. Dad did. Yeah, he did. I mean, he outright did. That was... It's also too much. You can't run a pinball company by yourself. No, no. You can't do it. It's not humanly possible. I mean, Luke and I spread a lot between the two of us, and then spread even more across a few other people as well that really do a lot of the headlifting. And we have management people that do daily stuff. Yeah. And it's still like, some days it feels like we're still treading water. Oh, yeah, for sure. And he was taking all that on himself. And he took everything incredibly personally. Because. Well, he's trying to do shows, and he was trying to do service himself, too. He wasn't. Yeah, that was crazy. He wouldn't offload responsibilities. So, like, every responsibility that he ever offloaded was pretty much me or Bug forcibly ripping it from his hands. And being like, dude, you can't do all of them. Like, he was trying to do the tech support. He was trying to manage code. He was trying to manage licensing. The trailers. The game design. The shows. How about code? He was just trying to develop. He was trying to manage all of it. And it was like, dude, you can't. And, yeah, there's just a Christmas that he went to, and I still say he just never. So when I talk with other manufacturers, the leaders of other pinball companies, they all say, Cengiz, pinball is hard. It is. How do you feel? Is it true with Spooky also? Oh, I mean, we've aged. Bugs put on 30 years in, like, two. Yeah. My hair is getting thin. Yeah. I've done a few videos and clips recently where after I shot it, I was like, oh, boy. Look at the top of that. Well, you never feel totally secure either. It's always, I mean, every release has got to be a top release. We know how pinball is now too. It's like if you don't have the best game of the year, you have nothing it seems like almost. People forget fast. Yeah. If you don't have a banger or if the game is not ready with the code, if it's not licensed or approved, people, I mean, two, three weeks, it's done and gone. So, yeah. And it's not stuff that you always control either. Sometimes, like, so we can sit there and manage a programmer, but if they just don't have it in them, well, you can see any company that struggles with it. If you get a programmer that quits during a project or just starts sandbagging, you can't do anything about it. I mean, it's just, so managing a lot of the stuff. Come on, do programming. Yeah, it feels like that every day. The licensing is tough. I mean, we don't make those policies. They're, you know, judge, jury, executioner. I can't believe they can come in like halfway through a project and be like, oh, yeah, no, don't use that guy. And you're like, but the whole game's built off of these assets. No, we've had contracts where it says what we get in the contract, and then they're just like, yeah, well, you know, that's in there, but we're just not going to do that. That's still one of my favorite phone calls with a licensor ever was, hey, it says I get this many minutes of footage. Yeah, it also says I get final approval, so guess what? Yeah. Standing there with the phone. Like, you're like, oh. And, I mean, what are you going to do? Are you going to have a legal bet? Like, there's nothing. There's no upset. Like, you were mentioning, like, even if you take them to court to enforce the contract. The game doesn't exist now. Yeah, and no one else will ever work with you. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, no, it's stressful for sure. Like, there's just a lot of things we don't make the rules on, but you have to put your, I mean, you put 200% effort in to make sure you set every single thing up for success with five backup plans. That's where we are now is preparing a million backup plans for everything. Because, I mean, Luke and I at this point have been hit with about almost every type of thing that can get thrown your way over however long we've been doing it. And so we're just preparing backup plan after backup plan for every single thing. People say that to you, like, how did you get through this one or this one or deal with this or deal with this during COVID? And we're like, we've just had so many problems. We know how to deal with them. And it's funny when we work with people who aren't used to stuff like that coming out. And so this minor thing comes up where they're freaking out like, are you guys worried about that? This could be a huge issue across all the games. And we're like, this is Tuesday, brother. This is a small thing. I eat this for breakfast. Yeah. That's why I always laugh. One thing that I really respect about your company, how you handle this. Now you're saying you're aged, but I love that Spooky Team is a young team. You are present. You are online. You listen. and you listen to the community, you really listen to the content creators. If there is some critic out there, you take it to yourself. You don't just, you know, feel the defeat. You really come back again with a lot of force, and you just fix any issue, fix any negativity. Your team is such a strong team, and I really love it. I just want to know, because there are a lot of negativity in our beautiful hobby. So how do you guys, when you sit together there and there's something negative out there, how do you guys deal with it? We used to get pretty upset, honestly. I mean, well, anymore, I'm getting, we're getting fairly immune at this point. You can only hit someone so many times before they're just like. Well, and before, I think, early on, a lot of the negativity, you and I just agreed, oh, they're right. Yeah, so that's the hard part, too. It hurts when they're right. That's when it really sucks. Yeah, that sucks. When it gets to the point where they're really reaching for something, you're like, okay, we hear you. We're going to do what we can to adjust that and get that there for you. And there will always be some stuff, too. Like, we're never going to be 100% perfect. There's always going to be something we do. We've gotten pretty good at identifying what's real and what's not real. Even if we were perfect, someone's going to find something. Yeah. But, yeah, during some of the earlier days, it's like someone would say something, we're like, oh, man, they're right. Yeah. They'd be like, oh, no. I want to buy a spooky, but here's the ten reasons I won't. And Luke and I are, can we swear? Yeah. Luke and I are reading that like, shit, they are right. Oh, man. Those are pretty good reasons right there. We better get to work on those. I mean, yeah, we've always had lists. I've been big. I put it on the bathroom wall before. It's like these are all the things that people like feedback that we've gotten that's 100% true that we just have to get right. Sometimes there's hidden reasons why it can't get right. But most of the problems in pinball are solvable. They're just difficult, and you have to have creative solutions. And that's when I laugh when a lot of these companies come in, and they're like, we're going to do everything perfect. Everything that Stern's doing wrong, everything that JGP's doing wrong, we're going to do perfect on all of it. It's like, no, you're not. But, like, those guys have tons of talent, tons of resources, experienced people. If there's mistakes, there's usually a reason for it. I mean, it's just that hard to do. If someone could come in and make the perfect pinball product and just sweep everyone, it would have happened by now. That happened with Evil Dead. Come on. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. This is so epic. So how many times did you move buildings? So because when I talk with Don, he says that now, he says like last year you have to take playfields up the stairs and build something and take them down. Is all that over now? Yeah, so that's long gone. We're actually coming up on a year with a question. Have you noticed that Evil Dead has had 5,000 plays on multiple occasions without problems? Right. We're in a new factory, guys. We're in a new factory. It's a new process that we designed how we wanted it to be. Yeah. And that kind of helps with that. Yeah, we're actually coming up on a year now in this factory. And we spent, what, a year building it? A year designing it. Ready before we actually moved into it. And this is number three, right? Move number three now. Oh, more than that. More than that? Okay. We were in business incubator, expanded business incubator. We literally cut a hole through the wall and expanded our room. Yep. And then we moved. We built down the road, moved across the street, added on, built this place, moved in here. So six. Wow. Do you still have the old buildings? Do you use them? Or have you moved everything to one house now? Just one of them. We kept the most previous building. Well, two. Well, it's technically two down there. Yeah, it's technically like two. They're connected or whatever. Well, it's converted to a discotheque now. Yeah. We regret getting rid of the other one. We have three out of the four physical buildings that we've built. No, three out of five. So how is the quality control right now? I mean, what have you done that makes Evil Dead this amazing of a game that just holds up on all the locations? Nobody has nothing negative about Evil Dead. It's just what did you do compared to two years ago? It's so good. There's a lot of answers to that. Well, it started with more experienced design. So we know now how we can use parts. and we know how we can use parts and design things to last longer and be more robust. We're also just more experienced and intelligent about how we're implementing features into the game. And then, yeah, that follows with the factory, and then Bug is overseeing production, which is obviously huge. I am selling my soul creating those Evil Dead games every day. I spend a lot of time out there. When they do like photo ops, you know, and it's the designers on the line playing the game. That's bullshit. It's like, ha-ha, yeah, they do that for the first month or whatever. Bug legitimately plays for multiple, like two hours per every single Evil Dead that goes out the door. So it's like if you have an Evil Dead, he has played it for at least two hours. Physically himself in that chair. So Bug, let's be honest here. But when you play these games for two hours, how many faults do you find from the people that produces them? Do you get some of the games that are just perfect, or do you find something? You know, it depends on the day and the week and the this or that. Tech support Mike Tori is actually the person who, outside of the tech support, her primary job is get me perfect games to clear. Like when I get to the game, I start a timer, and I don't want to stop that timer. I literally pretend like we talked like, okay, Joel and Jared are streaming. We're pretending we're setting up for a stream. Yeah, flipping out streaming this right now. How is this going to go? And I start a timer, and I play. And if anything comes up, the timer gets stopped. We take the note down, and the timer gets reset. We fix the note, get back to it. So it's basically like you're pretending this game is being set up for a stream. Every game that goes out the door. And if you have one ball trap, one fault, one anything wrong during that, throw it out. It's not good enough to go out the door yet. Exactly. Exactly. And sometimes Mike Tori gets me a game. No notes. She really does. She's built so many. She's been with us for a long time. She's been with us over five years now. So she's gotten insanely adept at getting me really great stuff. But then other days, you know, it's pinball. Stuff is weird. And I might get a game that's just kind of funky with this or that or somebody overlooked something that isn't on a checklist or I noticed that this plastic protector wasn't peeled on the underside of this plastic that was buried underneath the cabin, and it's like, oh, crap. Take this thing back apart. Got to take this all apart. One of my favorites. And Luke plays them as well, right? Yeah. So does he play after or before you? He plays after me. He plays after you? After it goes through my marathon, my tour to France that I put every game through, I give it the seal of approval. I give it the sticker. And then we let it sit overnight, turned on again, And then the next morning when the boxing crew is ready to come around and take those games, Luke Peters hops on them and just throws another 15 minutes on each of them. That's been big as well. So from the time a cabinet gets done, a cabinet or play field gets done, the play field goes in the test rig and is turned on 24 hours a day, and the cabinet is plugged in and powered on 24 hours a day. That helped us start to find issues. Like you had a power supply issue. Now we usually find those because by the time a game goes out the door, it's been on for almost two weeks. So if a power supply or something or a PC is going to go, usually we're going to catch that before it goes out the door. I'd say 95% of the time. Yeah, most of the time. If it just goes for two weeks and then it decides to blow up, it's whatever. Yeah, that's when the customer is like, this is really surprising. We're like, yeah, it is. I'm surprised too, man. We can't believe that thing. Yeah. So the board system you're using right now, that's your own system, right? It's not a fast board, nothing like that. Correct. Okay. So that's another huge thing. We have an actual high-level, well, used to work for the U.S. military, board engineer doing our board engineering. He doesn't like when we say that. Yeah, I know. We still do it anyway. It's his qualification, though. Are you updating your system, or will it be the same as Evil Dead? It gets updated constantly. We're probably two revs just this year. Oh, yeah, just this year. The warden rev itself is on, like, 9, 10. Yeah. So every board problem or possible issue that we can hunt out, we're fixing actively now, which helps. We have an actual full-time board engineer in high-level one. So I think our board system is eventually going to be up there with the best in the industry, if not the best in the industry, just because of the continuous revision there. And they've come a long ways. I mean, if you compare our board in Scooby to where Evil Dead's is right now, It's not even close. Yeah. It's so much better. That's nice. That's nice. So my friends and I, when we play pinball, when we talk with each other, we dream about it's 2025. We have internet. We have cameras. We have everything ready to go. I love internet cameras. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The thing where most of us are wanting to implement in pinball machines is actually at the screen, have a little camera, like maybe JJP. and then go online. Your games can also go online, right? And make a system so I can play Evil Dead against someone else. Against Dom in Wisconsin. I will bury you. I don't know if we're not going to be the industry leader in that aspect. I don't think so. We've stayed a little old school. Is that a possibility in the future? Yes. Have you been thinking about stuff like that? We watched that. I watched that probably more closely than almost anything. I'm just curious to kind of see where this whole tech thing goes. We do have on our next game a first-time technology that hasn't been done in pinball. To my knowledge, I don't think it's been done in pinball. No. You know about it. I mean, technically. Tell me about it. I know all the pinball machines. No, it's like a part of our system. I guess it'll be part of our platform. I can't really say too much more about it right now. But, yeah, we do have that type of innovation that hasn't been done before coming. You're talking about that hand that reaches out of the coin door? Yeah, that one. You get a replay? So we're going to have probably our first couple releases into that more side of things coming up this year. I guess I was thinking about this. Like what frontier is left like in pinball that needs to be maximized that not currently taken advantage of Like when the last Stern DMD came out like that was the epitome of technological success And then Wizard of Oz came out with like a 1080p 55 screen It was like, oh, you can do this in pinball now. And now all of a sudden we have LCD screens. Like, is there something else that we treat as, like, you know, probably as good as it's ever going to get and then there's going to be some huge leap next? Well, you've got to be careful, too, because you don't – pinball is very specific to not being changed too much as well. You can change it too fast, too quickly. Yeah, if you change it too fast or there's certain core things that you just don't change or people are just going to really – You're not going to cut the cabinet in half to make it more streamlined? They are not going to like that. Call me. I will retell you. They're not going to like that. That's me teasing Chris Turner. I really like him. He's offered to help us and everything. But talking about innovation, you have done some stuff. You delivered this year a white-body game that was jam-packed for under $10,000. So you did something that no other company can deliver. So that is innovation. That is, you know, next step. You delivered one of the most amazing toppers in the history of pinball for like $1,400 or something. And we're going to do it again. That is taking it to the next step. So bravo. It's so cool that you have done it. But the next game, the next game. So before we talk about the next game, what number of production are you at right now with Evil Dead? Are you about to be done? About to be done? Oh, my gosh. I got a long weekend. You just gave me a stroke. No, I believe we've boxed somewhere between 370 to 380 is where we're sitting right now. we're producing just a tick under 100 games a month at the moment technically some months it's more than that there's weeks I throw extra things into the production line some months have 5 weeks too and that 100 games a month isn't 100 Evil Deads either because you've got the other games well right now it is he's got people coming in on Friday, we're 7 Looney Tunes behind right now, believe it or not we've sold all of our Looney Tunes stock, we rebuilt Looney Tunes stock like four times and we are completely out of Looney Tunes stock again and seven orders behind on fulfilling them, which will hopefully get remedied in the next few weeks. But yeah, he's got Looney Tunes being built on like Friday right now. I have a crew of a few guys that are savages that I bring on Fridays to just smash through those things. And yeah, we started off this summer with, okay, like we're going to expand Evil Dead production twice. I know that. Good thing I have a bunch of Looney Tunes in stock, a bunch of Scooby Doo, a bunch of TCM in stock. and then a few weeks into the summer all of that disappeared and I was like oh shit one outstanding TCM order as well yeah so we're oversold on we're oversold on our stock already so when you have full house in any given Friday how many people are there in there are you like 20 are you 50 how many employees when you have full house 40 between the two buildings in Benton between two buildings it's probably about 40 people now Yeah, probably – the whole company is probably 50 humans across the globe. I bet it's – yeah, maybe even a little bit more if you count, like, contractors and whatnot. Oh, yeah, because even artists. Artists, animators, musicians. Yeah. Figure 50 to 60 people trying to make the wheels turn here at Spooky Pinball. It's funny. We have, like, close to the same amount of people as we did, like, during Halloween production. Still a little bit less, but close to the same amount. and we are not building as many games a week as we did in Halloween because Evil Dead just has three to four times the amount of stuff in it. Sorry about that. What's great is that the profit margin didn't increase. Well, these guys, I joke about it all the time because I kept getting pushed and pushed and pushed. It was like even Ben Heck, he was always on me. He's like, you need more mechs in your game. You need more stuff. You've got to load these games up. He was just like, you're not doing enough. You're not doing enough. And I'm like, okay, okay, because that's how I am. Like, if they're pushing for it, I'm like, I'm going to try to make it happen. And Evil Dead was probably when I was getting the most push from the team in general, where they're like, this thing needs to be everything. And I'm like, okay, assholes. Like, I'll do it. I'll do it. I went on, like, a one-month bender, and I come back, and they're looking at it. Ben looks at it, and he's like, oh, I think you guys got to cut some stuff out of here. Yeah. No. Oh, no. Now every game design we do, Ben's like, you could take some of these targets out over here and there. We're like, nah. Once a month now, Ben texts me and he's like, you really need to scale back. I'm like, oh, yeah, you're feeling real like an asshole right now, aren't you? He's like, gosh. Guys, this is so awesome. I want to ask you about your – how you guys do it when you're designing a pinball machine. If you take a theme like, I don't know, Terminator, do you watch the movie like 200 times? and you two just sit down on a paper? Or how is your design going on from the get-go? Is it you two only, or how do you do it? It is all over the map. It depends on the project, too. Because there's certain projects each of us have special knowledge or attachment to. Like the next game, Bug really wanted to do the layout. But Evil Dead, yeah, it's kind of all over the place. During Evil Dead, everyone was busy for the most part. We had to get it done. So I just kind of went, I will just consume caffeine and go on two, three-week-long benders and just. Captain Insano shows no mercy. Yeah, just draw and draw and draw and draw a CAD. So that one kind of, that's how we did that one. But the next one, that one was mostly Corwin on the physical aspect. And the one after that was a conglomeration of the three of us. Yeah, the following game is probably the most team-oriented game we've done. Yeah, it was mostly just you, me, and Luke Peters. We got in a room, and we just started screwing ball guides down to a play field. We don't really keep good track of this stuff because we just don't care about who had what idea. Yeah, we don't get, like, super... We're not attached to the whole credits thing. That's actually, in Halloween, that's why the game design was labeled Chorus Barloff because Luke and I were, especially at that time, incredibly anti-slapping names on certain things. Because people get so carried away with it. Yeah. Everyone makes lists, too. One of the things I really like to do is I bring in people, even like Don, and I'll be like, okay, we're going to do this. And he'll have a list of things like these are the must-haves. And then I'll look at kind of everyone's list. And you look for the overlap, too. If you get things that are must-have for five people and every list has that as a high item on the list, it's like, okay, we definitely need to have this in the game. Yeah, Don. So it sounds like the upcoming game is designed by Buck and engineered by Luke or – Yeah, I do all the drawing regardless of if I'm doing design. He does the actual work part of the design. I just stand there and have ideas. He points at stuff and he's like, do this. Yeah. Luke does the hard part. We did a game recently where I spent like three months just visualizing it in my head, and I was drawing it out in CAD and everything, and I thought I had this layout, just this most cracked layout ever. It was like, this is amazing, all the shots flow into all of them, and it's so cool. And then I brought Bug in, and he looked at it in the office for like seven minutes, and he's like, yeah, this can't feed here. This is wrong. This doesn't work here. This sucks. I'm such an asshole is what he's trying to say. And I'm like, I'm looking at it. And again, this is where we have that different attitude because I looked at it and I could have been like, no, I worked on this for months. I'm so right and everything. And I'm like visualizing what he's telling me to adjust. And I'm like, shit. He is so right. Well, the biggest thing you and I figured out, no one person should have complete creative control over anything because it's just it gets out of hand. Like nobody can actually keep anything on the wheels enough by themselves. No, no. neither of us can be left to our own devices for too long if I try to make a game completely by myself it will have some fundamental flaws that are just unreconcilable it's a team effort right? so when you design do you have a maximum bill of material where when you reach it we're done every time we sure have a spreadsheet like that we screw ourselves over so bad because we'll send the whole thing in for approval from licensor, and they're like, yep, that's great, that's the game. And we go, okay, we better check and see how much this costs us to build now. And then we find out if we're making any pesos that year. Yeah, I was talking to a person in the industry about that once, and I was like, yeah, we were going to do this, but I really just want to do this. And you know what, we might not make too much money on that, but it's fine. I don't care about money. I don't, for what we get to do for me to like people whine, oh, I need to have this license or this to have the passion to work on it. Or, you know, you need to make X amount of dollars. It's like, if you can't come in here and have fun doing what you're doing, making pinball machines, you like go do something else. It's just, you can't have everything. So the, the money aspect. That's that plumber concrete. Yeah, that's me. That he brings to the table. I was like, I told him, I'm like, well, I don't really care about money. Like, as long as I got the stuff that I want, I don't care too much. And he's like, well, I kind of do. I'm like, oh, well, I don't know. You have to remind me who that is after we're done with the interview. Yeah, someone was talking to you. I mean, us from the outside, we feel like when you release a game, it has to work. It has to sell. It has to give to, you know, give you some money at the bottom of the list. If a big company wants to come in and invest in your company, how will you guys react? Will you pump in money and have investors in it? Or are you like, no, this is for the family? I have a story for that one. Okay, let me hear. This, like, agency that buys companies or whatever reached out to us. Oh, yeah. And they emailed me and they were like, hey, like we – they like buy – they help very wealthy people buy more companies eventually. And they reached out to us. And Morgan passed it over to me. I messaged the guy back. I was like, okay, like we can have a meeting or whatever and like I'll have a number prepared or whatever. And he was like, okay, great. And we sat down. You were like just to let you know. I was like just to let you know it's going to be above this amount. And he was like, okay, yeah, yeah. I'll put the meeting together. And they hooked up a Zoom meeting for me and this guy, and we got in there. Hello, hello, cordial, whatever, five minutes of blabber. And he's like, okay, so, like, how much does this spring in this year, this much, blah, blah, blah? And he's like, what is the selling price? And I told him he couldn't get out of that meeting fast enough because the number was such an F you number. I'm like, as soon as I said the number, I saw him sit up straight and grab his mouse. and start hovering for the end meeting button like we're getting out of here. I mean, don't get me wrong. We are not motivated by money. I plan. We sound dumber than we are. We are very financially intelligent, I guess. We have a lot of things going, a lot of plans. Obviously, being in this for 10 years and starting with $0, we understand the finances of pinball very, very deeply. and we set ourselves up to be successful for a long time here and be a secure stable company and everything yeah but at the same time I say I'll tell like you're gonna have to you would have to really pay me out of this job yeah you'd have to really force me I hope to someday I know there's the potential that pinball could kind of go out of style you know maybe 25 years from now Maybe none of us will be around. I don't know. We do plan accordingly for that. But if I can be an old geezer still just making pinball machines with my friends, that's what I'll do. That's kind of all we are really going for at this point. I'm planning for success and failure. I mean, the way you expand your factories or company or what's it called, you do it in a very intelligent way. You're not just – because some people would say, oh, we have 500 Evil Dead games we have sold. So let's just build more, have a second or third line that just manufactures, but that will cost a lot of more money. So it feels like you sit down and talk about all of this, which is great because the last thing we want is you guys to go under. No, we probably come off. I guess maybe Don has seen the other side of it a little bit too. But we probably come off as like we're always goofing around and happy and go lucky and everything. I've seen a lot of sides of you. Especially my bare backside. And Don shares everything with me, so be careful. We are very serious financially about the security of the companies and things that we do there. That's nice. We tend to not bite off more than we can chew either. and I think that's pretty pivotal. That's the proper thing to do. Absolutely. So, Luke, when are you going to marry Morgan? Oh, no. I should have told her this is a question I didn't want. We got into the question part. All right. That was a great way to kick it off. Dude, I get it from all sides. I'm just going to have to give in to the peer pressure at some point or something. People are going to be like, why did you get married? I'm like, everyone yelled at me. He's going to propose to me just to confuse her. Yeah. People from Denmark are asking me that question, so come on, let's go. Speaking of the last names, I guess that would be funny. If you get married and you should take your significant other's last name, that would be funny. Yeah, so my plan is my significant other's last name is actually Morgan. Yes. Oh. So I thought it would be super funny if when we get married I take her last name so it would be Corwin Morgan. And at some point I'd like to become a captain. Yeah, and he brought that up at Thanksgiving once, and that was a bad idea. Oh, dude, my grandma did not find that joke funny in the slightest. I mean, arms got crossed, stared at me. Well, I guess if you just don't want to be an Emory anymore, then that's fine. I was like, oh, boy, that was the wrong joke to me. She was so mad. Nobody spoke for the rest of Thanksgiving. I was pretty quiet after that. He just dropped a bomb. It's like we're all laughing. We're like, would it be funny if you were Corwin Morgan? And she was like. Grandma, shut that down. Yeah, she was like, not only would that not be funny, But I want to play a game. I want to play a game with you guys. I want to hear your currently top five favorite pinball machines We going to start with number five Buck you going to say your game and then Luke And Don and I we going to say the winners Okay Like three-minute games. Any games of all time. Any games of all time. Yeah, yeah. Not only spooky. Come on. Just all the games. No, that's – Buck, number five game in your top five favorite list. Future Spa. Oh, God. Oh, yeah. Future Spa. Oh, nice. That already gets my vote. How about you, Luke? Top five. Number five. Number five. I don't know if mine will be in order necessarily. Right. Probably Pirates of the Caribbean would be one of them. I think that would kind of change. The Stern one or the J.J.P. one? The Stern one I like. Oh, man, I almost like to play that more. The ship is cool. But, yeah. I would say the Jersey Jack one just because for me, from the engineering aspect, I think that one kind of changed. That one in Wizard of Oz kind of changed what pinball was at the time. I'll give them that. J.J.P. can clip that for their – Yeah. So a $26,000 Pirates of the Caribbean versus a Future Spa. Yeah. Future Spa has TNA, so. I like both games. I like both games. And when you play multiplayer, Future Spa is so much more fun, man. Really, really. But alone, I would say Pirates. I love the Pirates theme. Could you guys be interested in making something with Pirates theme? Oh, you're talking his language now. We haven't gotten to what my number one is yet. His favorite thing on Earth is the Pirates genre. I mean, we've gone to shows before, and we listened to 15 hours straight of Pirates stories. Just recording history. Pirates is my favorite thing in the planet. What's a Pirates favorite letter? you think it'd be r but tis the c that they so which one is the winner future spa is wider i think so i'll give the nod there i love them both for different reasons yeah yeah cool okay but number four haunted house oh he's like the theme there have you owned a haunted house I will never forgive my father for selling haunted house when I was like I'm sure he did it to pay some bills here at the time now that I think about the timing of when he sold it no no no no no no you wanna hear why he did it because it was gotlip system 80 that was broken all the time all the time that's funny cause he's Bugs been looking for a haunted house for a while and every time I send them one, it's like sold as is, completely broken. Yeah, completely broken. A lot of times the head's not even attached to the body. Or it's like the most beautiful thing ever, but they want $7,000 or $8,000. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay, haunted house. How about you, Luke? Number four. I'll go with the stereotypical one next, just the plain old-fashioned number one of all time, Medieval Madness. Okay. I like that. Mechanically, I like it. It just makes sense. They're really weird games against each other. Yeah. let's see a perpetually broken Godly Godly that never works I'm not even telling you my favorite game it's a very cozy game to play I understand about that just trying to win the game I don't want to go first anymore he's just on the top 10 list man sorry we're not competitive at all oh geez okay this one is Luke's Not even a thought. He didn't even hear me out on my side. Oh, that's too funny. Gosh, I got to think of what else I like. Yeah. Okay, okay, block number three. This is your favorite pinball machine, man. Number three. Top three gets really tricky, man. Yeah. Monster Bash. Okay, all right. Oh, that's a great pick. Oh, Luke, you're going to lose this one. Yeah. Attack from Mars. I was going to actually, so I can go with this one because it's not our design. It's partially our design. But I was going to go with Rick and Morty because, again, I think it was transformative. But that one was transformative in a theme aspect, I think. It's funny. Yeah. So, I mean, speech-wise, probably some of the best speech of all time, if not the best speech of all time. Hilarious. The actual creator of the show comes in, did all the lines that were written, plus made hours of his own content. I think that one was transformative in a theme aspect because it wasn't the type of theme other companies have done, and it was just so well executed on that one. I mean, it wasn't a 70s rock band. Yeah, exactly. And it came at a time when it was getting really – the themes were getting stale in the industry. And Rick and Morty was, like, at the top peak of popularity too then. The timing is still the most incredible thing they ever pulled off in the history of Spruce Heat. It was the timing of when they put out Rick and Morty. And they reached out to us, didn't they? Didn't Rick and Morty reach out to us? I'm pretty sure they did. I'm not sure. I don't know. I'm 89.4% positive. That's okay. Just a side note. Just a side note, if the community contacted you and said, guys, we want to pay $11,500 if you want to build 500 Rick and Mortys, would you do it? No. See, that's where I just don't care about money. We have like morals and stuff. I've tried. I ask them every week. He does. He talked to me this morning. The first thing he said to me was like, are you guys going to do 1,000 more arcade editions of Evil Dead? I was like, no. The chrome wire form, it'll be completely different. No, I don't know. I'd like to be the only pinball company out there that's ever been able to be morally sound on not. It just seems like if you wake up and don't unload an entire handgun into your foot. Yeah, just don't shoot yourself in the foot every day when you're running a pinball company. It helps with running your company. It happens so often, too. I know. It's really tempting, I guess, for people. It's just like – Man, people start a pinball company and they're like, how can I get to prison the fastest? Yeah. They're just speed running prison. It's like, what are you doing? I want to steal money, but I want to do it in the most complicated way possible. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. Not that much. Why did you have to involve pinball in your Ponzi scheme? What were you doing? It's like – But when you guys released Evil Dead, what's the car, Delta 88? It's called Delta 88, right? The yellow car. Yeah. When you released it, Don and I actually talked about you guys should make 88 extra Evil Deads for like $15,000 with that car at the left ramp entrance, something like that. Is that completely out of the table? No. I mean I've pitched like the SLE idea. We've talked about it. We haven't done it. I don't know. I don't know what I think of. If you would love to have that car in there, or the car could come up from the play field, and you bash the trunk so it opens. I think it gets completely destroyed in Army of Darkness, right? Yeah, and they drop it at the end of 2 as well. I'm definitely interested in doing a sub-100 unit version of the game that is just the most insane decked out thing we could do. I'm definitely interested in doing it. I've pitched it. I mean, we throw the idea around. I've thrown the idea around to Don. He knows. You have to do it. There are these – You have to. You have to do it. Click this. We'll put this in the trailer. You have to. There are these big whales out there that want very limited games. Yes, and I get – If you do 88, Delta 88 versions with the Delta topper, everything, it will sell out in an instant. So do it. I get emails from guys that are like, hey, dude, I don't care what it costs. It could be $20. We don't care. Make me the coolest version of this that you can possibly dream of. Yes. We may do it at some point. We'll see. I don't know. Meet your fans where they're at. Yeah, I was going to say, let the people – they can debate this. Yeah. Whoever listens to the show, they can throw their thoughts out there and see what they say. So, yeah, I think it's cool. That's cool. You're open for the idea. Yeah. I love it. Yeah. So I hope you listen to some of the WAP shows. I often say, why does Team Spooky not build two games a year or release two games a year? Have you thought about this? Is the future like that? Is it one game only or, you know, this summer you could release the next game and build, you know, 400 of the Evil Dead and 400 of the next game, mix it up. How are the plans? Should we talk about it here or should we talk over to Patreon? Because I have some juicy questions. When are you bumping up to two games? Is the next game under $10,000? Is the next game white body? How many flippers? What are you using? How many games do you work on? I love it. How many games do you work on? He's got all this stuff. I think we can answer all those. He did work. I think we're good, actually. I think we're firmly in Patreon territory at this point. It's been one hour. I was going to stop at 40 and just put everything else in there. So let it go, man. Let it fly. You can just keep rolling. Okay. Okay. So, okay. Cool. So first question. I love your excitement, by the way. I really do appreciate it. I really appreciate your excitement more than I hope you realize. It's awesome. I'm loving this, absolutely. But wait, I have one thing I have to just put in here. 30-second clip, okay? Because I really feel bad about this thing I did towards Luke, actually, because of the speech barrier. so Luke when we talk at the early stages you wrote to me I respect the way you carry yourself and I didn't understand what that meant so I was like okay so next day I was talking with my bro and I said I talk with Spooky Luke and he said that he respects the way I carry myself and then my bro he was like he's right he's right we all love you the way you are And I was like, I still don't know what this means. What? Is something with carrying? I didn't understand. No, no. This is like Luke looks like he could carry himself too. Luke told me I like to hold myself. He's like, if you were here, Luke, I would hold you. I would carry you. I would carry you. Elton, please explain. And then he gave me a perfect explanation. And I was like, whoa, thank you, buddy. I mean, that's so sweet to say something like that. Now I understand, and I apologize the way I responded. But right now, thank you. I don't know what you guys are doing. I don't know what you responded. Fuck you. I don't know. You must not have been too bad because I don't remember it. No, I like you guys. Because when it comes to the pimp, there's certain people that I just like their attitude and the way they go about things. Yeah, that's so cool. And I'm also sorry because I'm always after you to design Arnold themes. Like, give me Terminator, give me Conan. I'm like the biggest Arnold fan you've ever talked to. I love him. I love everything he does. I've got to admit, we're pretty. I love you, buddy. We're pretty jealous. Oh my God, I have to say one more thing. We're going to talk about this, but one more thing. I'm watching a lot of pinball. He's always like this. Listen to this. This is heartwarming. This is not just excitement. I watch a lot of YouTube stuff with pinball, but one video that gave me the biggest impact was a video from Buck and his dad because I love motorcycles, beautiful women, pinball machines, a lot of stuff. But my biggest passion is movies. Yeah. I love movies. I'm a movie geek. And when I heard that Buck, you know, grew up with his dad watching these old crazy movies, I was like, this is so heartwarming. This is so cool. So there's a video out there where Buck and his dad sits down and talks about videos. And you can see on the background, you can see posters. You can see movie DVDs. I don't know if VHS cassettes. it was it was so good i had sex for so long time okay and we took a shower i was just dried up okay and she went to sleep and it was like so tired i was just laying there on the sofa okay i was so tired and this show came up it was so freaking good. I felt like I was sitting there with Bug and Chuck who were watching movies. That was so dry. That doesn't sound like Bug. Bug has sex for so short time. I have time for all these movies. I can verify that. I have proof. Wow. I don't know what to answer first. There's a lot. The whole situation, it was just so... Can we get this woman on the podcast? We want to talk to her. We want to ask questions to her. Oh, man, oh, man, oh, man. We'll call it Life Beneath Cengiz. Yeah. You guys' Patreon shows are way wilder than I remember. I listen to all of them. They're not all like this. And can you believe it keeps going from there? We couldn't fit it all into one WAP episode. We tried. It was physically impossible squeezing out the sides like an overloaded tin of tuna. So the rest of it, the second portion, the second helping, over there at patreon.com backslash wearepinball. Go ahead and join if you haven't. Five bucks. You've got that through the couch cushions right now. If you'd enjoyed the show while you were on your morning commute or cruising the couch or playing in the arcade or whatever it is that you do, go check it out, man. For only five bucks, continue with the conversation over there. It gets absolutely wild. Everybody else that's already a member, we thank you so much. If you've got suggestions for the show, heck, if you want to give us a topic or an idea, send us some questions. We are pinball69 at gmail.com. It's a way to get at me and Jay, guys, any time, day or night, baby. We go right back to you. You want to order a t-shirt? That's the email you use. $25 shipped freaking worldwide. Well, there's no boundaries around this, man. We are pinball. We are on it. Take care of yourself and each other. I'm going to go to the Patreon. I'm going to listen to that again, dude. It was nuts.