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Barry Oursler Saves Pinball

Silverball Chronicles·podcast_episode·1h 56m·analyzed·Jun 19, 2021
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.033

TL;DR

Barry Oursler and Space Shuttle's role in saving pinball during 1984 industry crisis.

Summary

Silver Ball Chronicles examines Barry Oursler's role in pinball's survival during the early 1980s crisis, focusing on Space Shuttle (1984) as a pivotal game. The hosts debate whether Space Shuttle 'saved pinball' or was merely the beneficiary of rising market trends, analyzing sales data showing Space Shuttle's exceptional 7,000-unit performance versus competitors selling 2,000-3,000 units. They explore the game's design, voice-over production challenges, and the collaborative team effort behind its success.

Key Claims

  • Williams leadership gave designers an ultimatum: they needed to sell at least 3,500 machines to keep the company running

    high confidence · Joe Kamenkow quote relayed by hosts; multiple sources confirm this pressure existed

  • Space Shuttle sold 7,000 units, roughly double any competing game at the time

    high confidence · Sales data presented throughout episode; corroborated by discussion of competitor sales (Firepower 2: 3,400, Sorcerer: 3,700)

  • Barry Oursler completely redesigned Space Shuttle's playfield when the original layout by Joe Kamenkow and Larry DeMar didn't work in testing

    high confidence · Direct Barry Oursler statement: 'Joe and Larry drew the playfield... but when they built the whitewood, they couldn't get it to work quite right... Barry had to redraw the whole game'

  • Eugene Jarvis was paid $50 per sound effect for Space Shuttle

    high confidence · Hosts cite Eugene Jarvis statement: '$50 a sound' payment structure

  • Eugene Jarvis mailed sound effect files physically to Chicago while doing his master's degree in California

    high confidence · Hosts explain: 'Eugene, who was doing the sound, would literally do the sound bits. He'd put it in an envelope, and he would mail it all the way to Chicago'

  • The Space Shuttle toy originated from Joe Kamenkow buying a foam toy from Toys R Us as a drawing reference for the back glass

    high confidence · Joe Kamenkow quote: 'I went to Toys R Us and picked up a foam toy to use for perspective. After I popped it on the playfield by the ramp at the back, it eventually became the toy'

  • Mark Springer embedded the date August 11, 1981 (his son's birth date) on Space Shuttle's artwork as A8W11S81

    high confidence · Hosts explain the hidden date reference: initials + birth date hidden in playfield artwork

  • Barry Oursler disputes the narrative that he alone 'saved pinball,' saying any successful game at that moment would have been called the savior

Notable Quotes

  • “Whatever game they put out and that game did well, then that game would have been called the game that saved pinball. Space Shuttle just happened to be the game they picked.”

    Barry Oursler @ ~44:30 — Direct refutation of the 'Space Shuttle saved pinball' narrative; Oursler's humble perspective on the game's success

  • “Williams needed a game that sold at least 3,500 machines to get things up and running. We told Mike, if he had to bet the future of his company on one game, Larry and I begged him to do Space Shuttle.”

    Joe Kamenkow @ ~15:00 — Establishes the existential stakes for Space Shuttle; explains why the game mattered to Williams' survival

  • “I went to Toys R Us and picked up a foam toy to use for perspective. After I popped it on the playfield by the ramp at the back, it eventually became the toy.”

    Joe Kamenkow @ ~52:15 — Reveals the accidental origins of Space Shuttle's centerpiece toy; exemplifies innovation through mistake

  • “Innovation in pinball always ends up just being a mistake.”

    David Dennis (host) @ ~52:45 — Meta-observation about pinball design philosophy; reflects on the Toys R Us toy anecdote

  • “Now, nothing is selling 7,000 units. I would like to think that Mandalorian would sell 7,000 units, but it's not, which is terrifying.”

    David Dennis (host) @ ~47:30 — Signals market contraction; positions Space Shuttle as industry anomaly even by modern resurgence standards

  • “The narrative I would more aspire to would be the one that this game kept the lights on in anticipation of things like High Speed, Pin Bot, those type of games that would really bring pinball back.”

    Ron Hallett @ ~35:00 — Proposes alternative narrative: Space Shuttle as bridge game, not ultimate savior

  • “There's something special about Space Shuttle. And let's just say in the current pinball market, as much as we think it's a resurgence of pinball, nothing is selling 7,000 units.”

    David Dennis (host) — Contextualizes Space Shuttle's exceptional performance; implies market fragmentation in modern era

Entities

Barry OurslerpersonSpace ShuttlegameJoe KamenkowpersonLarry DeMarpersonEugene JarvispersonMark SpringerpersonSteve Ritchieperson

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Williams facing existential threat in 1984 requiring single game to sell 3,500+ units or company would shut down

    high · Joe Kamenkow quote and repeated host references to leadership ultimatum

  • ?

    design_innovation: Space Shuttle's centerpiece toy originated accidentally from quick shopping trip to Toys R Us for art reference

    high · Joe Kamenkow: 'I went to Toys R Us and picked up a foam toy to use for perspective... it eventually became the toy'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Mark Springer's hidden son's birth date (A8W11S81) embedded in Space Shuttle artwork represents artist signature/Easter egg tradition in pinball design

    high · Direct confirmation of August 11, 1981 birth date hidden in playfield and back glass artwork elements

  • $

    market_signal: Debate over whether Space Shuttle 'saved pinball' vs. benefited from rising market; hosts propose middle-ground interpretation

    high · Multiple perspectives presented: Joe Kamenkow's 'savior' narrative, Steve Ritchie's 'beneficiary' view, Barry Oursler's humble refutation, Ron's 'bridge game' thesis

  • ?

    historical_signal: Steve Ritchie's dominant presence in pinball historical record due to extensive interviews/podcasts; other designers' contributions underrepresented

    high · David Dennis notes: 'Steve Ritchie bias in pinball' and that 'it's usually his narrative that ends up coming out'

  • $

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.352

0:00
Ever notice how ads always pop up at the worst moments when the killer's identity is about to be revealed? During that perfect meditation flow.
0:12
On Amazon Music, we believe in keeping you in the moment. That's why we've got millions of ad-free podcast episodes, so you can stay completely immersed in every story, every reveal, every breath. Download the Amazon Music app and start listening to your favorite podcasts ad-free, included with Prime.
0:37
The Pinball Network is online. Launching Silver Ball Chronicles. One, two, three. The Human Torch was denied a bank loan.
0:55
Hello everyone, I'm David Dennis and this is Silver Ball Chronicles. With me this month, like every month, is my co-hostess with the mostest, who can't stop being awesome, Ron Hallett. Hello. Your notes actually say who can't stop being awesome. I like that. You wrote that down. If I don't put it down, I forget to say it. That's the thing. But then how awesome am I if you could actually forget to say it? Well, that's the thing, is that you, you know. Anyhoo, what's up, fella? Not much. I see you've been doing a lot of stuff with the Rochester Pinball Collective, the RPC. Yep, the old RPC. and just biding my time waiting to record the next exciting episode of Silver Ball Chronicles. That is so much fun. You're setting up the streaming rig there, which you so wonderfully donated to the Rochester Pinball Collective. The same rig and cameras that I asked to buy, and you said I couldn't. I'm sorry. Well, you're close, right? You're just a little farther up. Yeah, we'd have to do all that shipping and all that stuff. But I did end up getting a lot of stuff sorted out anyway. I bought some used cameras on the old Facebook Marketplace, and I'm streaming on Twitch. So you can give us a follow on twitch.tv slash silverballchronicles. Usually I will stream around the time that we record, and then sometime around the time the episode is released, just to engage in the audience, chat about the episode, all of that stuff. I usually do Saturday mornings. The reason for that is that I'm usually in bed early because getting up early, staying up late with kids is literally my definition of health. So Saturday mornings when most people are asleep because they've been partying all Friday night. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. I get a lot of Australians. Oh, all right. Which is pretty wonderful, all those fellas out that way. The other thing is we've had probably one of the most exciting announcements, I think, in pinball in the last little while, and that is the Mandalorian by Stern Pinball. Not to sound like a shill, but man, oh, man, hook, line, and sinker love Mandalorian. I thought you were going to say it's all the money we made on merchandise. We have sold three shirts in the month of May, three shirts, my friend. I'm excited. I just saw that money coming in. It's like, damn, we're in the money now. I can pay for at least one entry of a tournament. There you go. And shout out to TurboGrafx7 for picking up one of those shirts over at twitch.tv slash TurboGrafx7, one of our TBN streamers, and I would say one of the best Gottlieb System 80 streamers out there. We're not doing LCD screens. We're doing cheesy 80s themes, and it's well worth it if you want something different. And he streams Friday nights, generally. Eastern time. Yeah. Swing on over to Facebook.com slash Silverball Chronicles. That's where we read all of your posts, and, of course, you'll see what we're doing. We post some photos from time to time, and I'm sure, Ron, once the world continues to open up here, we will be engaged a lot more in the community. I'd like to actually get to a show, which would be super. Yes. For those listening, we've never met. The two of us have never met. No, it is a blessing. Wow.

high confidence · Barry Oursler direct quote: 'that's what everyone was saying, but whatever game they put out and that game did well, then that game would have been called the game that saved pinball'

@ ~48:00
Williams
company
Silver Ball Chroniclesorganization
Rochester Pinball Collective (RPC)organization
Mark Ritchieperson
Firepower 2game
Sorcerergame
Pharaohgame
Defendergame
Ryan Kuiper (TurboGrafx7)person
David Dennisperson
Ron Hallettperson

market_signal: Modern pinball market fragmentation evident: no current game approaching 7,000 unit sales despite industry resurgence narrative

high · David Dennis: 'nothing is selling 7,000 units... which is terrifying' regarding Mandalorian sales outlook

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Eugene Jarvis burned out from video game work; took leave to pursue master's degree while still contributing remotely to Space Shuttle sound design

    high · Hosts note Jarvis was 'burned out from all the work in the vid kids venture' and decided to do master's in California while mailing sound files back

  • ?

    announcement: Episode focuses on historical Space Shuttle (1984) rather than new announcement; but mentions Mandalorian as current Stern release

    high · Hosts reference Mandalorian as recent Stern release and express concern it won't achieve 7,000 unit sales

    • 4:39
    A blessing. Okay, I don't know how to take that. And he's not that far away, really. I mean, as far as shows go. In the grand scheme of things, for me to sort of zip down, like, we're probably like six hours away, which is like no time. So what show would it be? Oh, it has to be Pentastic. Yeah, but I don't think I'll be able to get out of the country by Pentastic. Oh, I'm sorry. Canadian borders are still closed. I'm sorry. Yeah. So, but I guess we could figure something out. But I do certainly have to make my way over to level zero your arcade because you have a lot of games I've never played. Yeah. And you can show me a thing or two and maybe I can be a top 100 player. Why? I'm not.
    5:25
    I've never been top 100. I'm like top 1,000. that's the magic number for me there you go my magic number is top 10,000 there you go also this week in pinball if you swing on over to thisweekinpinball.com that's where you grab all of your pinball news that's where everybody in the hobby loves to congregate on Mondays that's where we get all of our information they help us out a little bit every month on the podcast but they also have a promoters database so on the top of the website if you click on the Pinball Promoters database, you can leave some feedback to the website. And we have a comment from John M. says, I really appreciate Dave and Ron's ability to piece together the history, manufacturers, designers, artists, the drama, the layoffs, and create the behind-the-scenes narrative of what happened in the past and how they relate to the modern industry. It lets us know that the industry is in a great place today. Sales, cash on hand, investors, homebuyers. but one slip-up or new technology to pull people away, i.e. video games, and it can all come crashing down again. Super interesting topics in history all told with plenty of passion and humor. Just go listen. Oh, he misspelled humor. No, he spelled it right. You sure? Isn't there supposed to be a U in there? No, there's, oh, U, U. Yeah, there's a U. Yeah, but like at the end. No, no, he spelled it correctly. Not the Canadian way.
    6:52
    Corrections and comments, my favorite part of the podcast, because we usually don't get a whole lot of corrections because, quite frankly, we're just that good. I guess another thing is that, of course, we're piecing this together from multiple sources. We're trying to build a narrative ourself. Naturally, these types of podcasts do indeed have errors and omissions and factual errors. But, quite frankly, I think that adds to the charm and the speculation of the episode. Isn't that right? Sure. Okay, so Vincent S. has a comment here, Ron. He says, guys, just sending a quick thanks for the excellent content. I'm old, approaching 50, and just got back into the hobby after owning one machine for a couple of years in the late 1990s. Raven. Oh, my. Pinheads laugh at it, but my friends at the time sure played the heck out of it and had a blast with it. Your pod hits the sweet spot for me. And thanks to you, I now have a pinstied wish list of about 50 machines. Oh, my goodness. Oh, I hope you're a multimillionaire. mostly 1980 through 2000 range in space for only two more machines probably a blessing final comment you have covered lots of excellent godly content but hope one of these episodes will do a System 80 special take care thanks again and keep it up oh there's a there's a minefield in there with the System 80 era and that minefield is JT so we got to figure out how to handle that Ron and I'm not sure how to do it But eventually we will get on to the topic of Gottlieb in the 1980s. Jason S. has a really cool little Easter egg that we didn't know about, George Gomez's Corvette. Yeah, I didn't know about this.
    8:36
    I guess if you look at the back glass of the Translight, there's an Easter egg. If you collect all the cards and essentially beat the game, the future C6, which I guess is a model like Corvette 6. Yeah, it's like the model of the C6, appears in the driver's visor in the back glass. Amazing game. You should love. Take care. Yeah, awesome. Thank you, Jason. Another thing that was really cool, and Ryan Kuiper, TurboGrafx-7, who we mentioned earlier, also mentioned that the Corvette engine in Corvette was the model of Corvette engine that was supposed to come out but was never actually released. So that little model is the model of the unreleased Corvette engine, which I thought was incredibly cool. Tons of fun. That is all of our feedback and corrections from this month. So let's jump into today's content. Let's bring it back to pinball. This episode ties in a little bit to episode 12, which is Pinball is Dying, Williams in the Early 80s. Now, pinball, of course, Ron, at this time was in a huge decline when we were going through that episode, wasn't it? It was. We left it in a really bad spot. Is it going to survive? Well, I know everybody's been hanging for a couple of weeks and probably like sweating bullets trying to figure out if they are indeed living in a fantasy world where pinball is not actually existing. But indeed, it did survive. And of course, it survived because Barry Ousler saved pinball. Barry Ousler, of course, was the major character in Pinball is Dying, Williams in the early 80s, who was really the only surviving full-time designer at Williams during this time and really spent a lot of that time trying to design something different and new which would inspire Pinball to once again rise like a phoenix. Phoenix was his first machine, by the way. Ah, that is true. It's also a very overused quote.
    10:51
    Ron, it's like the Phoenix. So do you think Ron Barry Ousler saved pinball? It was probably on its way up, but his timing was excellent, and the game was a huge seller. So, sure. So it was said in this time, in 1984, pinball was on the ropes and the next game in the line had to sell big time or Williams would shut down. Now, Barry said that they were given an ultimatum to sell machines by the leadership team at Williams. Barry says nothing was selling more than 2,000 games if you were lucky. That sounds pretty rough, and I think nowadays the majority of pinball manufacturers would kill to sell 2,000 games. They would. Some of the content that we got from this episode is from an interview with Joe Kamenkow on the Super Awesome Pinball Show, as well as Head to Head Pinball Podcast. I've included those in our show notes. I'll tell you, Joe is a sales guy. He's very relationship-based. He's very charming. I'm sure I would love to have a steak with Joe. He provides a lot of really cool quotes and content, but I think he lays it on a little bit thick about why this machine that we're coming up to was so important. Well, Joe said, Williams needed a game that sold at least 3,500 machines to get things up and running. We told Mike, that'd be Mike Stroll, if he had to bet the future of his company on one game, Larry and I begged him to do Space Shuttle. Nice name by Larry. That's Larry DeMar. Yes, that's correct. That's correct. So that, of course, brings us into my birth pin, the pin which was created in the month in which I was born. That is December of 1984. The space-themed space shuttle, which was a Williams System 9, it sells 7,000 units. Of course, the concept by Joe Kamenkow, Art by Mark Sprenger Sound, Eugene Jarvis and Bill Prod and the software by the returning Larry DeMar And I believe the story is they unveiled that at a show, industry show and if they couldn't sell, if they couldn't get a certain number of pre-orders then it was it, they were going to shut it down Wow, that's a lot of pressure That's how the story goes We'll get into how the story goes But as of right now, you know, the anticipation was that there is there's pressure on the team at Williams. They they need to sell machines. Right. We can't be selling like 800 machines anymore. We have a line of people that have been building machines. We were just selling 7000 machines not too long ago. Now we're selling 700 like this. We can't keep this up. And the narrative is that there is all of this pressure from the leadership team. This is where these two narratives come in. One of them is that this machine saves pinball and, you know, it changes the game. And it's like the invention of the DMD all of a sudden has completely changed everything. Or you had mentioned in previous episodes, now there's flippers and everything else is obsolete. There's kind of that narrative. And then there's the other narrative, which we'll get to in a moment. Do you agree with that, that this is a, you know, ground shaking game? The narrative I would more aspire to would be the one that this game kept the lights on in anticipation of things like high speed, pin bot, those type of games that would really bring pinball back. That's my opinion. Base Shuttle, Williams Flyer, says, The fastest way to make your earnings really take off. Love these flyers. They're so good. Do you know it has heat shield protection? The game has heat shield protection? Is that like clear coat? Yeah, I assume that's the kickback. Oh. I love the names they would have for these things. No, I think the heat shield is the thing in the middle that pops up. Oh, yeah, you're right. I forgot it had that. This machine is very unique in a couple of ways. One of them is that it is fairly basic in its layout. There's not a whole lot of crazy going on. But then all of a sudden there is the top right, where there are these sort of vacuum-formed plastic ramps and a space shuttle toy. It gets nuts kind of over there. And that's something we hadn't really seen before is, you know, we had bi-level games that had, you know, quote-unquote ramps to the upper play field or the top part of the play field. Well, here we've got ramps, you know, all of a sudden. Well, they have had ramps, but not, I mean, I don't think they ever had a huge toy sitting in the center of the game like this. It was very, very cool. And, of course, this is a space shuttle theme like the Space Shuttle Discovery. And although it is a quote-unquote license, you didn't actually need to license it because it is considered public domain. But they did reach out and get permission from NASA to use it. And the idea was to take the game, make a very simple multiball. You can get in a multiball without a whole lot of shenanigans. It's got a ramp, and they're going to bring back speech. That was really the core pieces. Yep. They brought back multiple. You have a toy. You have speech again. You have two- and three-ball multiball. Crazy talk. Mm-hmm. I've played a lot of Space Shuttle. I like it. I do not love it. But there is a series of people that I know that this is like one of the games that's like, oh, this is sticking in my collection forever. It's super fun unless you're in a tournament. Yes. I played it mostly in tournaments. Yeah, that's not a good place to play it because you're just going to shoot the three bank, which is in a very weird position, almost vertical to the player. There's a three bank and a spinner next to it, and you just shoot the three bank to increase the value of the spinner, hit spinner over and over, and never shoot anything else. The lanes at the top increase the bonus multiplier. But if you play it for fun, there's a lot of fun, and there's a killer sound package on the game. Absolutely wonderful. Now, this layout is pretty smart, if you ask me. You plunge up to the top. It goes all the way around into the orbit, into some left lanes, into three pop bumpers. It has six stand-ups. It's got stand-ups on the left and on the right, and it has these two capture holes behind them. So it's somewhat symmetrical, and then you get to those targets and the ramps, and the symmetry gets all thrown off. It's actually pretty cool. The biggest issue with this game is always flipper power, and the ramp in the middle of the play field, like the main ramp where you start your multiball, is always cracked. And the space shuttle toy itself is usually not in good shape either. Right. It's always, like, you know, brown from cigarettes. You hit the center ramp, and you'll see the whole thing, like, pop up in the air. It has a couple of, like, geometrical kind of issues with the design of the ramps and stuff, but yet it's very fun. And the spinner just goes forever. You hit that spinner, and it just goes and goes and goes and goes. I love the multiplier. It can go up to, what, 8x or whatever ridiculous thing it goes to. It's pretty cool. Now, the drop targets you had mentioned are sort of, you know, are angled in an odd position as sort of the left side of the entrance into the spinner. And that's because it's made to be sweepable. But I found it really hard to actually sweep that three bank. You can. I'm going to ask the question again.
    18:42
    Did Space Shuttle save pinball? So if Barry Ousler maybe didn't save pinball, did Space Shuttle save pinball, the team around him? According to Steve Ritchie, no. And everybody knows that Steve Ritchie is the dominant narrative almost all of the time. And that's because he's done a lot of written interviews. He's done a lot of podcasts and things like that. So there's a lot of sort of Steve Ritchie bias in pinball. And not that that's a bad thing, but it's usually his narrative that ends up coming out. But I've also teased out a few other bits and pieces here. And Steve Ritchie, you know, he would say that Space Shuttle came out, but it wasn't Space Shuttle being a savior. It was more or less the beneficiary of an already rising pinball manufacturing trend. Python Angelo, he would say something similar. But, of course, it's important to point out that Python Angelo had a falling out with Barry Osler and was not particularly positive about him later in his career. He had falling outs with many people.
    19:41
    So let's go back to the numbers. So in Episode 12, we talked about Pharaoh, the bi-level game, selling 2,500 units. We've got Barakora, which is a very cool game. It sells 2,350 units. Cosmic Gunfight, which is an awesome game, but they didn't make very many, 1,008 units. Warlock sells 412 units. Defender sells 3,069. Time Fantasy sells $608 We are in a bad, bad way here Firepower 2 comes out This is not Steve Ritchie taking Firepower and making it again This is a gentleman named Mark Ritchie Who probably knows Steve Ritchie Because they're brothers This was a multi-ball game and it had a pretty cool ramp So it sells 3,400 units in early 1984. So we see a jump there, right? Laser Q. Which is Alien Poker. A better version of Alien Poker. It's Alien Poker without speech, though. Oh, didn't know that. Look at the play sales. They're almost the same. Well, we'll get into that when we get into a Mark Ritchie episode. Laser Q, 2,800 units. Laser Q had a really strange extra ball ball saver feature, so it had a bit of a gimmick. Then we get into Space Shuttle. It sells 7,000 units, so we can see that, there is something special about this game. There was one before that. There's Starlight, which had like 100. It had a really, really low production number. Then we get into Sorcerer. This is Mark Ritchie's second game. It sells 3,700 units, and it has voice and multiball. So we can see that, yes, the trend did start moving upward, but there is an anomaly. Space Shuttle has, like, double everybody else. So there's something special there. Did bringing back the voice and the multiball save pinball, maybe? I don't know if it saved it, but it was nice having it back after it had been there so prominently and just four years earlier. So they removed it because it's super expensive to do that stuff, right? The speech was really expensive, especially the way Williams did it. Because they had the individual words on the chips, and like one word equaled, I don't know, 50 bucks, or whatever, some like insane dollar amount for every new word you wanted to put in the game. Yeah, and it's not because you've got to pay somebody to say the word. No, it's actually the chip. The technology, yes. Yeah, I think they used those Yamaha chips probably back then. And, you know, speech in board technology was pretty novel. It was very fancy and expensive. When you look at those numbers, do you think maybe Mark Ritchie saved pinball? Oh, Firepower 2? I mean, it was a sequel off a very well-known game. I'm sure that didn't hurt. Sorcerer sells 3,700. I played a lot of Sorcerer. It was okay. It's got eyes in the back panel. Let's tie it back then. What does Barry Ousler say? Does he think he saved pinball? Does he have the Joe Kamenkow quote that we needed to save pinball on his wall, and then below it he has a picture of the game that he designed? Does he think he saved pinball? Well, for the man himself, Barry says, that's what everyone was saying, but whatever game they put out and that game did well, then that game would have been called the game that saved pinball. Space Traveler just happened to be the game they picked. I can't say what the other games would have done, but I'm glad it worked. At least we got another 10 or 12 years out of Williams. Barry Ousler, ever so humble. He does not have that written on his wall in fancy lettering, but he saved pinball. But I will say, again, there's the two narratives, right? The one is that Barry Ousler and the team and everybody saved pinball, and without that, they'd be dead. And then there's the other narrative, which is, nah, it didn't matter what came out. You know, whatever machine happened to be at that time, it would have done well. You know, it's somewhere in the middle, right? Barry's being overly humble. You know, Joe and those guys are being maybe a little too salesy. I think we're in the middle here somewhere, which is, you know, 7,000 units among a group of 3,000 unit sellers is, you know, more than just, well, if it wasn't Space Shuttle, if they had released Sorcerer earlier or some other game, it would have done well. No, there's something special about Space Shuttle. And let's just say in the current pinball market, as much as we think it's a resurgence of pinball, nothing is selling 7,000 units. Yeah. You know, I would like to think that Mandalorian would sell 7,000 units, but it's not, which is terrifying that Space Shuttle, a game with literally a spinner and a toy in the middle of the playfield, is selling 7,000 units. Whole different market. Whole different world nowadays. There's a lot of talk about who actually designed the playfield on Space Shuttle. Barry Alster would say that Joe and Larry, which I assume Joe Kamikawa and Larry DeMar, drew the playfield and had the idea for the machine, but when they built the whitewood, they couldn't get it to work quite right. So like Barracora, Barry had to redraw the whole game. He made a whole different playfield layout. It was very different from the original layout, very similar to Bericora. So usually, you know, Barry's like the ultimate master of taking something that's got a bit of a vision but no real direction and then really finishing it and making it work well the way it does. And the geometry, I think, does work really, really well in this game. Eugene Jarvis was, of course, burned out from all the work in the vid kids venture. And when you're working sort of in this time, I think you really start to understand the idea of a small team creating video games in this time. There's not hundreds of people. There's like four. And he decided to go to California to do his master's. His master's degree. Eugene Jarvis, of course, from California doing his master's, did the sound effects, which I think are very, very cool. Yeah. How did he do that? He didn't have email then. Yeah. So this is totally weird. Okay. Imagine this, that you could just do this work remotely, right? We're all working from home for the most part, or have been, and we just email the files back and forth. That didn't happen at this time. Eugene, who was doing the sound, would literally do the sound bits. He'd put it in an envelope, and he would mail it all the way to Chicago. Imagine that. Now, I bet you he was pretty incentivized to do a lot of that work, don't you think? I think so. at least according to your notes that I'm looking at. Yeah, so Eugene Jarvis would say that he helped with the first basic design, and it was $50 a sound. So he would get paid $50 a sound by Williams. So he would program that for an hour, and bam, $50. So he would just bang that out as best he could. When you're doing a voice, they're bringing voice back, who do they need to do voice? You just have Steve Ritchie do it. Steve Ritchie's not working there, right? You just can't knock on his office and bring him in. Isn't he off doing his King video designs or something?
    26:43
    Well, he had Devastator, but I think that had already gone belly up at that point. He was very close to coming back anyway. The thing about that game that always drives me nuts to this day is either he was too close to the mic or they didn't have a pop guard. Whenever he says the P sound, it really gets too loud. Exit, pilot, one, like, oh, every time I hear that. Oh, yeah. My OCD goes off. It's like, oh, where was the pop card? But the thing is, though, you know, now the speakers are so old in those cabinets that you just sort of chalk it up to the speakers being crap. Nah, it always sounded like that. Yeah. They say that this was the first production solid state game with a toy, but it wasn't necessarily the first pinball game with a toy, was it? No, and even that, I'm sure people would say that's not true and have like 30 other examples. I could name an example of like the One Valley game with the Balligator. You know, we have the gator comes out. The nippet? Yeah. The original design, it wasn't like just a metal thing. It was an actual molded like alligator head of some of the earlier ones. So is that a toy? That kind of looks like a toy, doesn't it? I'm sure you had European games that had different toys. I could think of at least some of Zachariah games. that had stuff like that on it. One thing that I always say is the Italians are always light years ahead of everybody else when it comes to innovation. You're damn right we are. You're damn right. Joe Kamenkow again. He would talk about how this toy actually came about. So Mark Springer was having issues drawing the fire in the back of the shuttle for the back glass. So Joe says, I went to Toys R Us and picked up a foam toy to use for perspective. After I popped it on the playfield by the ramp at the back, it eventually became the toy. How cool is that? Innovation in pinball always ends up just being a mistake. I think one of my favorite bits about the art, always the little bits. We've mentioned this in the high-speed playfield, where if you look on the top of those cars, you can see 8, 11, 81. And you can see those same numbers on top of the, what are they, like little transport things driving around the space shuttle. And it's A8W11S81. What is that? That's a date. August 11th, 1981. So is this Mark Springer password to all of his banking information No that would be Joshua No this was the birth date of his son Ah very cool The initials and birth date of his son How neat is that to have your initials on one of the coolest games out there? You know, I always thought it was neat. It was the name of the space shuttle. Ooh, what's the name of the space shuttle? I don't have that in my notes here. Really? You don't have that? Defender.
    29:40
    So cool. Call back to the video game, well, and Pinball Machine that hardly anyone's played. Probably mostly the video game. That was the call back, too.
    29:51
    Yeah, I bet. So, you know, the theme of this show is pumping up TurboGrafx-7 streaming and Ryan Kuiper and Dave Brennan. Dave Brennan. So let's continue on with a quote from Ryan Kuiper on Space Shuttle. He said, Space Shuttle had an amazing group of people working on the game, besides Barry Asler. There was Eugene Jarvis doing sounds and Larry DeMar doing the code. One of the things I enjoy most about the game is the use of the insert matrix near the flippers. Seeing the numbers count down in the inserts is a very cool use of the inserts. Yeah, so why don't you describe what he's talking about there. There's basically a huge grid right above your flippers, and it's literally like a grid. They have a ton of inserts, which on most space shuttles, it's completely worn to the wood and looks horrible. Always a mess. Always. But it counts up the bonus with the grid, plus it has those multiplier inserts. Go 2X, 3X, 4X, 5X, 6X, 7X. It's, like, insane. And it takes forever to count the bonus down, which is awesome. Yeah. It does. Now, the inserts will actually, like, spell things. They spell space shuttle. Oh, that's not very fancy. Oh.
    31:05
    Hey, they advertised it in their flyer showing how it could do letters. Yeah, so that was a big deal. What most people do is they take out the regular light bulbs and they put in those awesome pink LEDs. No, that's not awesome at all.
    31:20
    It's horrible. It's absolutely horrible. The interesting thing, it's got the little guy that pops up in between the flippers to save your ball, which is a throwback to, like, that's a mech that was used on a ton of EMs, early solid state games. It's like a ball save without putting another ball into the shooter lane, right? It just sits there. And as of this recording, I think the last game to use that would be Family Guy. Oh, yeah, that's right. Very cool. I said it because, you know, 30 years from now when you listen back to these shows, I'm sure there will be others. You'll be like, hey, Keith Elwin has one of those. That would be cool. Yeah, get on that very target first, man. Get me a very target. None of this other crap. Anyhoo. So if we move on sort of next in, you know, Barry Ousler's adventure here, he gets into Comet. Comet is a world under glass where it is a theme park, basically. This was covered in our Python Angelo episode. So if you want to jump back and review that in greater detail, please listen to our batshit crazy, the Python Angelo story in the archives. You swore. Barry would say about Comet, working with Python was an experience. Python is a great guy. He's a little strange, but he's really good and he's really talented. He knows what he's doing. With Comet, we just let him go run wild with it. This was one of the first games that men and women played, young and old. Most of the other designers were building more tough guy, macho stuff. I was trying to make something more universal that more people could enjoy. See, that is something that's very interesting about Barry. The Ousler is he's looking to build accessibility across ages and genders where most of the designers double down on the existing market. It's very smart with Barry Ousler. He should be very proud to have that type of vision. And I would highly recommend our Python episode if you want to know more about some of the Barry games. We're not going to mention because it's in the other episode. Yeah, we didn't want to double count. Yeah, we don't want to double dip. Yeah, like, I mean, I got to, you know, we don't want to. We're not slackers. So then next they did Grand Lizard. Of course, that's with Python Angelo again. This was considered a fill-the-line game to keep things rolling around. Basically took Solar Fire, which is in one of our previous episodes, where they talk about the design, and they made it onto a regular single-level game rather than the bi-level game. And just added a molded lizard-based tongue thing. Yeah, yeah, like a lizard that was left out in the sun too long. So then they got into Pinbot, which, again, one of my favorite Python Angelo-inspired games, and one of my favorite Ousler games as well. Now, one thing that we did forget to mention was Joe Jost in the Python episode, and Barry had some great insight into working with Joe. Barry says, I had a lot of help with the mechanical devices, the visor, target bank, and the spiral skill shot from Joe Jost. He was the best mechanical engineer I ever worked with. And you are a huge fan of Joe. Joe was a designer at Stern Electronics and did a lot of their later games, like Quicksilver, Dragon Fist, Catacomb. Actually, by the end, he was kind of one of their only designers. Yeah, exactly. And then he moved into engineering. Yeah, I always thought that was weird. He went to Williams, and he just never designed any games again. He was just a mechanical engineer. This brings us to a game which we hadn't covered before, and that was Fire! which is fire themed. Yeah. It's June from 1987. It's a Williams System 11A. So we've got a new board set. It sells 7,697 units. Mark Sprenger again on art, music and sound by Chris Granter, Brian Schmidt, and Rich Carstens. Rich Carstens. Software by Dan Lee. So there's a couple of things here I want to talk before we deep dive here. One of them is Williams System 11A. There was 9, and then there was 11. Right. Which was like High Speed, Pinbot.
    35:32
    They were 11. Then you go to 11A, then there's 11B, then there's 11C. So what does A add to System 11? Oh, man, you're trying to remember. I'm trying to remember. I know A still has the special solenoids so you can, like, lock on swings and pop-upers and burn-up coils and stuff. They haven't got rid of that yet. It literally just gets more complicated and add more and more stuff. They just add, like, more little boards to do things. Well, they'd have, like, a soundboard, but they eventually, they'd have stuff on a soundboard, but they'd also have it on the combined CPU driver board, and then they slowly moved more of the sound stuff to its own soundboard over time. Little things would change here and there. So we've also got a couple of names on here. One of them is the legend himself, Chris Granner, Brian Schmidt, and Dan Lee, who is a new name here in software. Fire. One of the games that I first played was Fire. It needed a flipper rebuild like you would not imagine. It has very, very steep ramps. It was horrific. It was so bad, it has tainted my understanding of this game. So I've never played it in a quality format. One of my best friends, this is his favorite game. We would go a place, and if they had a fire there, he would just sit there and play fire and ignore all other games. It was crazy. So if you go over to the twitch.tv slash fliptronics, they have in their archive some fire gameplay. Is it fliptronics or fliptronic? Oh, it's flip-tronic. I'm saving you here getting yelled at by our fellow Pinball Network people. It's Jordan. Heck of a job, you know, fixing and tweaking and things. And it looks like so much fun when it's not in a massive amount of disrepair. So this is a game that now we're moving into games with stories, right? This is post high speed system 11 where you're chased in a car, police car chase, run in the red light. Now we're getting into something now that is a story and it's objective based rather than, you know, shoot around the play field and try to get your multiplier. You got to put out fires. Got to put out fires. That's why it's called fire. Yeah. A big part of this is the cow. We've talked about this a bunch of times. Yep, and this cow that's in fire is not related to the cows that would come up later. Right. The cows that came later were because Brian Eddy has a thing for cows, so he would start putting them in all his games, and then everyone else just followed his lead, so there ended up being a cow in, like, every Williams game. Yeah, so he's sort of like a furry, right? Oh, man. So the cow in fire is meant to be the cow that tipped over. Was it Mrs. O'Leary? Mrs. O'Leary's cow that tipped over the lantern and started the fire, the Great Chicago Fire. So one of the largest pieces of Chicago history is the Great Chicago Fire from October 8th to 10th in 1871. The fire began in a neighborhood in the southwest corner of the city. This was after a long period of hot, dry, windy conditions. And, of course, in that time, wooden construction was prevalent in a lot of major cities. This massive fire killed approximately 300 people and destroyed 3.3 square miles, or 9 square kilometers, of the city. And left more than 100,000 residents homeless. That is really devastating. So let's make a game about it. Yeah! So this is, of course, you mentioned Mrs. O'Leary's cow. So I did a little bit of nerding here. So Mrs. O'Leary's cow is Catherine O'Leary. And she's... O'Leary.
    39:38
    Catherine O'Leary. I'm Irish, too. So you've got to say the Irish names right. March from 1827 was when she was born. And she died in July of 1895. She was an Irish immigrant living in Chicago, Illinois, who had become famous when it was alleged that her cow started the Great Chicago Fire in 1871. Here we go. We'll get into this. So, after the Great Chicago Fire, the now defunct Chicago Republican newspaper reporter, Michael Ahern, published a claim that the fire was started when a cow kicked over a lantern when it was being milked. The owner was not named, but it was later where Catherine O'Leary was outed because it started in her family barn. Now, this was an anti-Irish narrative, because at the time, the Irish were often scapegoated for how bad things happened in the United States. So if you're blaming other types of immigrants nowadays for the state of the world, just remember, the Irish were once scapegoated as well. Mrs. O'Leary, of course, would testify that she was in bed when the fire began and not milking her cow, and she does not know how it started. And in 1893, the newspaper which originally published the story had admitted that the entire story was made up. Well, how about that? Great press there. Good job. You know, how does Mrs. O'Leary's cow tie into the game? Well, in fact, there is a cow that moos, and the moo is also heard when you're putting your coin in the coin slot, which is kind of fun. The game also has a bell. I love games with bells. And it has one of the coolest little toys ever. I don't know if you'd call it a toy. But it's got these, it's got this thing that turns, so it looks like fire. I don't think I've ever seen it used in any other game either. It's like the only time I remember seeing that thing. Yeah, it's like a cylinder, and it turns, and it's like it's flickering. Underneath the play field, and it literally looks like fire. As the fire intensifies, sort of the flickering intensifies. Very, very cool. Now, this game also has no pops. Nope. What's going on with that? You've got to have three pop bumpers. If you don't have three pop bumpers, somewhere in the top left or top right, the game is not pinball. Isn't that correct? No, no. Williams, they let them do what they wanted. I know. Crazy concept. Although, somehow, we're able to get two pop bumpers and a kicker sling thing with Stranger Things. Brian Eddy gets to not put three pop bumpers. Yeah, I don't think that's an edict anymore at Stern. That was an edict from Gary, but at least in multiple interviews with the designers, they have said that, no, that's not a thing anymore. Basically, if they keep it under the bill of materials, they can do what they want. Yeah, so Barry would say that you've got to fight fires, and the fires spread all over the play field, and he didn't have a way to use the pops, and he didn't have enough room for the pop bumpers to have the theme work. Adam Ryan, who is a famous Williams dot matrix artist from the 1990s, he has some input on pop bumpers. He says pop bumpers have been around since 1948, and they just did something. You know, flippers, pop bumpers, and slingshots. Every game has to have that. There you go. It's not pinball. So the ramps on this game, this is interesting, right? So this is kind of before, you know, return to the flipper ramps were a thing. This is where we're still trying to figure out how ramps work and what we should be doing with them. But the ramps just kind of go up, and then they kind of hit. It's got one in the middle, and then it's got two kind of returns symmetrically on the left and the right. Yep, and they hit a target when you get up to the top. And they are steep. They are super steep. And the flippers, to be aligned properly, they have to face down quite a bit. Yeah, you've got to get a real good snap or you're not making it. And if it comes down that middle ramp, it's going right down the middle. Now, this is where we get into the concept of an LE, or a limited edition. The Champagne Edition from October of 1987 sells 273 units. This game was such a great game, such a great seller, so unique. They made 273 extra units. It had an oak cabinet, fancy, and gold fittings. Yeah, gold color, like brass. And it had rotating cylinders in the back glass. Yes. If I were ever to own a fire, it would only be a champagne edition. Wow. Because the cylinders in the back glass are tremendous. It literally looks like your system 11A board is on fire in the head. That's what it looks like. It looks that good.
    44:34
    That's fairly par for the course for a lot of these games. That could happen sometime, yeah. Those poor GI connectors bursting into flames. It's hard to describe the effect, but it's like if you're looking at a grill or a barbecue, the little waviness over it, you can't see through it.
    44:50
    That's what it looks like. It's a very cool optical illusion. And they have two of those cylinders in the head, and they rotate, and it looks awesome. So why did they build this special limited edition? Because some of the fancier restaurant trendy places wanted a brass machine, oak-type look.
    45:07
    Yeah. Yeah, those, you know, you want to go into Vesely's, you know, veal on, you know, this fancy restaurant. It's very trendy, and you need a fancy-looking machine.
    45:19
    So we've got building Easter eggs. Yeah, the buildings. It has all these molded plastic buildings that always break all over the place. There's a lot of stuff that breaks in this game. So on the left and the right, they've got, like, it's, like, large, big plastic things that are covering, like, you know, a ball lock or a, you know, drop target or a stand-up target, and they all have unique names. There's Ousler's Arcade, which is kind of interesting because I don't think in the 1800s they had arcades. They had Kenny's Soup Kitchen, the Back Alley Stalloon, Springer's First National Bank, the AMS Warehouse, and the WMS Harness Shop. Yeah, so there's some cool stuff in there. And I will say, the Champagne Edition, other interesting notes, the lockdown bar has like these, it's brass. It's like brass color, but it's got like bolts in it. It's kind of weird. And the oak cabinets, some of them came with decals, some came without decals. So there's some fires, it's just like an oak cabinet. There's others that just have the basic fire graphic slapped on it on a decal. Very, very cool. I know way too much about fire. So, Ron's looking for a fire, folks. So if you've got a nice-looking fire. Champagne edition only. That's right. This brings us into the next release in December of 1987 by Barry Osler. That's Space Station. This is Outer Space Theme. This is a System 11B. It sells 3,804. We've got art by Tim Elliott. Now, there's a new name. He did, like, Road Kings and Valley Game Show, and he did a lot of Alvin G. Their art in the 1990s. Ooh, Road Kings. Awesome.
    47:04
    Music and sound, Brian Schmidt. Of course, he would do a lot of Daddy East work and some of the Stern stuff. Now we've also got Ed Boon on software. And everybody, you know, every time I see Ed Boon's name, he's the guy or one of the guys that created Mortal Kombat. Yeah, he's the Mortal Kombat guy. People forget about the pinball part. That's so awesome. I believe he's the voice of Rudy, too, if I recall. Oh, that's so cool. So, Space Station.
    47:33
    Now, it seems to be a thing where Barry Oster will release a space-themed game in December. He wanted to do a sequel to Space Shuttle, because Space Shuttle was awesome, and it saved pinball. And they wanted to do space. And at this time, they were building the International Space Station, which was a big deal and was quite popular among the nerd community. Isn't that right, Ron? Uh, sure.
    47:58
    Oh, you're such a nerd. Have you played Space Station? Of course you've played Space Station. Of course I've played Space Station. Have I played a game? Come on. So Space Station is one of those games that I played a lot of when I first got into pinball because I had a friend of mine on Prince Edward Island, shout out to Sean, who had a Space Station. I should have bought it when he sold it, but I didn't. When you first get into pinball, you probably don't even remember this time, But you're playing games and you don't understand games. You just sort of cut, you're flipping, you're playing and you know, you're like, oh, you shoot the ramp and you got to get the multipliers. Like you understand the basics, but you don't understand maybe why the ball moves around or interacts with things. And I found that Space Station was really, really hard and I couldn't keep the ball alive quite like I could on other machines. And that came down to one thing that I didn't realize until months and months later was that this game does not have an Italian bottom. It does not. Ron, what is an Italian bottom? Basically, two in lanes, or, well, in lanes, flippers, out lanes. This doesn't have in lanes. Yeah, the balls kind of go, there's the out lanes that go down into the terrain. There's nothing you can do to really save it besides nudging. There's the inside lanes that come right down into the flippers really nice and easy. You can cradle the ball, or you can post pass it over, or you can keep the momentum to the other flipper. And then you have the slings above it. This game is very much a throwback to all of those other, you know, old school 60s style pinballs where the flippers are right on the slingshots. So there's no way that you can just sort of easily hold up the flipper and catch the ball. Dennis Creasel has a fantastic article about this. I will include that in the show notes if I remember, because sometimes I forget to put things in the show notes. That area is super, super fast and dangerous. I have to say, this is probably the only pinball machine that has ever used the word rendezvous in it. Oh, there you go. There's a piece of trivia. Because it's the full title. It's Space Station Pinball Rendezvous. And the first time I ever saw it, I'm there like, is it a French game? What's that word? I didn't realize that was rendezvous or that's how it was spelled. Yeah. It doesn't. Yeah, you haven't Americanized your spelling there. No. The other interesting thing, I always see this game as almost a twin with another game, which will be like, what? I see this as F-14 Tomcat's twin. What? Do you know why? Why? F-14 Tomcat on the speaker panel, it says, Williams Pinball, number one in the world. Oh, yes. Space Station, it says, Williams Pinball, number one in all worlds. It's basically a callback to F-14. So cool. I always like that. It's a good one. That's a good one. And to tie it back to Thief Richie again, of course, he did the male voice in the game. I think this is a great game. I'm very sad that I didn't buy this when I possibly had a chance because it's unique. It's very different. And, of course, it is a rendezvous with Pinball Destiny. And I believe, if I'm not mistaken, it has a very unique, it has multiple GI strings, different colors. Yeah, it does. It's so cool. Which I don't know if that had been done yet. So years before you had color-changing lights and stuff, So they had to have entire GI strings that were just one color, and then they would change that, yeah. You'd go into condition green, so you'd build up your multiball. When you went into multiball, it would go to condition green, and it would have the light bulbs with the little colored condoms on them, and it would all turn green. Would have been better if it was purple, but... Well, the funny thing is the first times I played it, I thought it was like some kind of mod someone put in with LEDs or something, and I said, hey, this is actually a good mod. Yeah. It's like, no, that's actually, that's how it comes. I think it would be so much cooler if it was conditioned red, though, instead of green. Don't forget the rotating who's my Bobby that goes around. That doesn't really, well, actually, it diverts it in different directions. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So let's, I'll paint you a word picture here. You can always tell the games that David really likes because he gets way more into explaining them. It's so exciting. So you plunge the ball, and you don't just sort of plunge the ball into the orbit, which is kind of the thing nowadays, other than an Elwynn game, but it has a ramp, a ball guide or habit trail. It's a habit trail, a very long habit trail. So cool. It goes up and across the play field, but it doesn't get in your way. Like it doesn't bother your vision very much. And then it has like an upper play field that has roll-through lanes and then a little hole, and it just goes right into the pop bumpers. So at the top, you can increase your multipliers. It also has some drop targets. Everybody loves drop targets. If you shoot the far left orbit, it'll go all the way around and into a vertical up kicker, which will then pop it back into the upper play field. It has a ramp diverter space station. So this is both the coolest and saddest part of this entire game. So there's a drop target in front of a ramp, and you shoot it up, and in there it diverts the ball across the play field on a little habit trail and then into a capture hole. And then you can capture the ball that goes around the other side into the vertical up kicker, and then it diverts it again into another staging area for your condition green. And this little space station rotates to move the diverter on the ramp. But this sad, sad little toy is like the most just boring, unimaginative, ugly space station, isn't it? That spins. Yeah, but the toy itself is like... It also has a ton of flashers because this is System 11, and that's required. And it also has bonus time. Bonus time is awesome. So when you drain your last ball, depending on how much bonus time you've built up, you get to play some more. And I think in tournaments that's included Because I don't think you can turn it off So you get So you could be behind somebody But maybe you can catch them with your bonus time Yeah, that's dirty Oh, that's fun Does that count in tournaments? I believe so Most of the ones I've could Because it's What are you supposed to do? Just not plunge? Because it'll just sit there So now it originally had a second drop target To protect the vertical up kicker section in the back of the space station. It was removed due to cost. There's a photo of that on IPDB if you want to check that out. This is an interesting sort of time in space flight history when this pin was being developed. So space was a really big thing at the time, right? The space shuttle program, putting stuff into the space shuttle, the Canada arm taking that stuff out and building the International Space Station. It was quite an amazing time. When I was starting in my elementary school years, this was a big, big, big deal. And right around the time that this game was in development, one of NASA's most fatal incidents happened. Artist Tim Elliott, the real Space Shuttle Challenger, blew up right in front of me, January 1986, when I was illustrating the shuttle for the game. I was the only one in the art room at the time and had the TV on. It was terrible and ironic at the same time. I was actually painting the small shuttle on the right of the back glass when it happened. Wow, that's intense. So this was a ground-shaking event around spaceflight at the time, and Tim Elliott telling IPDB that story, that's a big deal. So this is where we get into another string of games where Barry Oser works very closely with Python Angelo. Cyclone, Police Force, and Bad Cats. God, I hate police force. Oh. Barry says, Python. Oh, wait a minute. I think his name's spelled wrong. Oh, it is.
    56:26
    Barry says, Python was wild to work with. We'd be working on a project together, and he disappeared for a week, two weeks at a time. He always had some big story when he got back. It was all safari with National Geographic, whatever he'd come up with. He got it done. He worked better under pressure. That would drive management crazy. Oh, could you imagine how horrible? He's like the guy on the group project that just, like, disappears and then shows up at the last minute and does a bunch of work. God, that's annoying.
    56:54
    Barry, of course, was a guy who was always utilized to keep the line going. He was always the individual that finished up projects, kept people in line. And it was said that, of course, he could get a play field together in a month. And I would liken this to the Williams version of John Norris at Gottlieb, who was just a brilliant engineer and workhorse. This brings us to a very odd game. This is Harley-Davidson, which is a motorbike license theme from February of 1991. This is a Williams WPC, but of course this is under the Midway name. It's 2,187 units. Mark Sprenger again on art, music, and sound by Dan Forden, of course, doing Attack from Mars. And let's say Dan Forden is also a legend like Chris Graner. And software by Jim Stompolis. I got that one right. He did Mousin' Around. Yeah. The greatest music ever. This was the last Bally Alpha Nuveric game. And it was originally designed to be a trial game similar to Gottlieb's street-level games, which we covered in Zombie Pinball, Gottlieb's System 3 in the archives. Ken Fedesna would say, Yeah, these System 11 games, they've got the speech, they've got some crazy mechs that are now being made with ball diverters, and they've got metal ramps or plastic ramps, and the costs are continuing to escalate Gottlieb is really the only person in that era who is you know very price sensitive They trying to keep their things priced lower
    58:46
    And, you know, Ken Fedesna and the team at Williams have seen, okay, well, we need to sort of fill the gap somewhere. We need to make things a little bit easier. Now, the original title for this game was Poker Night, and it was a theme that was centered around, of course, playing poker and eating pizza. But reportedly one target was required to answer a phone. Huh. That is very similar to a game that Barry would do. Yeah, answer the phone. Hmm. Barry was a big poker night person with a lot of the other programmers and designers at Bally Williams. And in fact, I have been told that Dwight Sullivan is among that group of players. And they still, from time to time, play poker. Live to ride. Ride to Live, Harley Davidson. It says something like that. Right before multi-ball starts, it says, Harley Davidson is a lifestyle brand. People have zero bad to say about Barry Osler. That's why everybody loves to play poker with him. They love to collaborate on his games. When you look at the names of all of the people that he works with, you know, they're all high caliber. They all, you know, put out an amazing product. And a lot of that comes from what Steve Ritchie calls the dad, the person who kind of corrals everybody together and brings in their information, you know, feedback, design elements, and they really push a lot of those pieces. Sophia Ryan was on the super awesome pinball show. I will include that in the show notes. This is the first time I had ever heard of this individual. I have this thing. Do you know what recency bias is, Ron?
    60:32
    Recency or regency? Recency. Recency bias is that if you hear something, you know, recently, odds are you will be biased towards, you know, understanding or using that content. And because I consume a lot of podcasts when I'm driving or making, you know, supper or something like that, you know, I tend to bring up some of those things. Now, of course, it's a lot harder to get podcasts from the 1980s or the 90s because they didn't exist. So when somebody like Sophia Ryan is on the Super Awesome Pinball Show, which is a very, you know, new podcast, you know, I tend to absorb that information a little bit more. Maybe I'm including this because I heard it recently and it is a new interview, but I think the quality of it still stands up. And that is that nobody has anything bad to say about Barry Osler. And Sophia Ryan is a mechanical engineer. She was a mechanical engineer at Williams, and she's currently a mechanical engineer at American Pinball. Barry's a great man. He came up with a concept, an idea. Both of us would just sit down and talk about this, and I would sketch it out or lay it out, and he would make corrections, and it was always a success. Barry was just a really great friend. He was so easygoing and understanding. He would never feel offended with anyone disagreeing with him, and I learned a lot from him. Yeah, his collaborative approach on his pinball machines, from everybody from his electrical engineers or mechanical engineers or designers or programmers. He always brought the best out of individuals, something he should always be proud of. This brings us into Hurricane. That was in our Python Angelo episode, another theme park game in his theme park trilogy. The next one, which is a big, big game, Doctor Who. Ah, great. What are we going to talk about? Yeah. Oh, I'm not going to include that in this episode. Oh. Yeah. And the reason for that is that we're building out another episode, and I want to include it in that one. Speaking again of recency bias, there is some fantastic Sophia Ryan commentary to fill out the Doctor Who section, because she is the creator of that amazing meat-slicing mech. Let's get into one that we can really talk about here, though, and that is Bram Stoker's Dracula. This is a vampire licensed movie theme. April of 1993.
    63:00
    It sells 6,801 units. It is a Fliptronics II WPC Williams board set. Mark Springer on art, music and sound by Paul Hirsch, who did Creature, Black Rose, and Scared Stiff. There's no R in his name.
    63:18
    And Williams WPC is fine. Fliptronics 2 is just the flipper board set. Oh. Software by Bill Fultzenroeder. So it's Paul Heitz? Heich? Paul. Music and sound by Paul Heich. It's a very German name. Now, Bram Stokers, this is one heck of a movie. It's something else. You've seen this movie. No. You haven't seen it? Oh, my God. You don't ever see any of these movies that we talk about. What do you watch? What media do you consume? The parts of the movie I actually saw were in the pinball trailer for this game. They showed scenes from the movie. That's about all I remember. Do you watch movies? I watch movies. I just didn't watch this one. You don't watch Marvel movies? You don't watch the Star Wars stuff? I've watched the Star Wars trilogy. It's great. Trilogies? No, no, just the one. the only one that exists in my world. What about Rogue One? I watched the scene that everyone told me to watch where Vader kicks ass at the end.
    64:26
    This 1992 American gothic horror film directed and produced by Francis Ford Coppola, who's best known as being the uncle to Nicolas Cage, is based on the 1897 novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. So, in Francis Ford Coppola, he's not famous for being Ty Shire's brother? He's not famous for directing the Godfather trilogy? Nope. No.
    64:57
    Okay. Yep. Nicolas Cage's uncle. Now, of course, this movie stars Gary Oldman as Dracula. Winona Ryder, who is not a good actress. Not in this one, no. Anthony Hopkins, an amazing legend. and, of course, Keanu Reeves, where he's in so deep over his head, you can't even see him. And I got that just from the trailers that they showed for the pinball thing. It's something else. Take me away from all this death. Like, oh, God, that's pretty bad. Whoa.
    65:30
    Did he actually do that? No. So, of course, funny enough, this film grossed $215 million against a production budget of $40 million. It was nominated for four Academy Awards, none of them for acting by Winona Ryder or Keanu Reeves. And it was, of course, a winner of three Academy Awards for best costume, absolutely, best sound editing, 100%, and best makeup, because it was something else. Boy, the casting was bad. Just to underline how bad that was, there are these Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves plastics on the play field. These prototype plastics on the slingshots show Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder characters. And according to Barry Ousler, these plastics were removed prior to production because the actors, or probably only Winona Ryder, would not sign the release for their images. The funny thing is, when you look at the slings, you can see the holes where they're supposed to mount. They never change that. And if after the fact, if back in the day you bought a plastic set for Dracula from Williams, those plastics were included. They were included in the set. Oops. So I had them in mine when I owned mine because you had to. So Winona Ryder, if you're listening to the podcast today. Well, the funny thing is, if you play Stranger Things, Winona Ryder is right on the slingshot. And I always wondered if that was a callback. Like, we've got to put her on the slingshot. Yeah. Like she was supposed to be in Dracula. She's in the flyer, though, of course. Yeah, well, you can't edit that. You know, it's a game you can really sink your teeth into.
    67:20
    I know. So I'm flipping through the stuff here on IPDB, and sometimes I don't go quick enough to get it away from Ron. It has one heck of a flyer because the pin itself is inside of a coffin, you know, like Dracula. Yeah. This has one of the coolest pinball events in all of pinball. Wow. And that's Myst Multiball. So I take it you like it. Oh. The first time I saw that, I just, that feeling the first time you see like magic, that is exactly how I felt when I saw mist multiball. So what's mist multiball? Mist multiball is where the ball basically travels across the play field on a magnet. And with light underneath it that nobody notices. It's actually a light bulb. The little green mist is actually like it's translucent. It's like an insert. And there's a light underneath it. which I never even realized until I looked at the back. Like, there's a light there? Didn't really notice that. Like, it's a heck of a thing. So the ball travels from left to right, and it kind of wiggles across, like, this green mist that's in the art. Because I guess in the movie he turns into green mist at some point. The other interesting thing is because they did that, they had to cut the play field all the way across. So they had to add extra stabilizers to it. So if you lift the play field up, it's heavier than average play field because it has iron supports going down the sides. So the play field doesn't snap in half. Yeah, that would not go well. So V. Orion says, the idea to carry the ball across the play field was a Barry Osler idea. And he laid out the pattern where he wanted the ball to be carried. So we used the screw machine from some previous game. And then we designed all the housings and how the ball with the magnet would be carried across the play field. So can you explain the mech? I don't think people understand how complicated that is underneath that playfield. It's big. There's a track that goes from one end of the playfield to the other. It's like a giant drill bit. Yes, it literally is a giant drill bit. And it spins, and then the magnet goes across, and it's a whole mech in itself. It's got the magnet. It's got a light on it. It goes all the way across. Then there's the optos above the playfield. To tell the ball. There's an opto-beam that goes all the way across that has to be aligned properly because it will detect when the ball goes off of the beam so it knows, like, okay, you knocked the ball off. So nowadays, you know, if you start a multiball, it's like you shoot the ball onto the magnet core and it just sits there. And then you get another ball, and if you hit the ball off of the magnet core, you know, your multiball starts. This thing is literally moving across the play field from left to right. Yeah, when it loads it into a pocket on the right, so the actual shooter lane, it pops up. Like the part that is a little flap, and it pops up so you can shoot it into the pocket, then it lowers down. Is it a mechanical nightmare to work on? It's extremely complicated, that whole section, because they're still using the older trough, and the code is very buggy. It's built, Foots and Rooter, I believe, did the code, and he may or may not have left to go to Capcom after this. I think it's just version 1.0. But it has lots of bugs where it will forget where the balls are. You'll be a multi-ball, and the ball will just be sitting. You're going to get a single-ball multi-ball because the ball is still sitting in the shooter lane, and it doesn't launch it. That's like a tournament rule on Dracula. If you see it in there, you have to hit the button so it launches that you can't leave it in there. Yeah, this game was the topic of a very epic sort of world championship match. Isn't that right? So, yes, it was in the finals of the IFPA World Championships. It was the final game of the series, Daniele Acciari versus Johannes Ostermeyer. And Daniele got billions ahead. And Johannes did nothing on ball one and two. And then on ball three, he did the thing, which we didn't talk about that. The whole gimmick of this game, other than the missed multi-ball, was that multi-multi-ball. and three different multi-balls, and you try to get them all running at the same time. Stack them. You stack them. And if you can do that, you can catch up to anyone, which Johannes did, and he won the world championship on Dracula. This machine is not the first game to have a moving magnet with ball. That was Sega Enterprises 1973. I just thought I'd point that out so we don't get any angry emails. I'm sure people will be like, you forgot about Sega Enterprises.
    72:09
    Yeah, take that, Bruce Nightingale. Well, there'll probably be someone who'll say, you forgot about this 1956 game that does it, because there probably is one. Yeah, take that, Slam Tilt Zack. So there's a couple of things here that I want to talk about, sort of beyond the coolness of the game. itself. One of them is the Ron Jeremy Coffin. Wow, there's a name I thought I would never hear on a pinball podcast, but yes. Barry Oster originally wanted this sort of coffin physical ball lock where when the multi-ball would start, he would rise up from the casket. And to be truthful, the first time I ever saw this game was actually at the first pinball show I ever went to, Allentown, 2004. This was the game you could win. And when I saw it, when I saw the coffin, I thought, oh, he must move. I just figured he does something. It's just sort of before the era of when things kind of moved, like characters moved, a la Monster Bash. It looks bad. And that's why I call it the Ron Jeremy thing. It just looks horrible. It doesn't look like him in the movie. Noted adult film star for those who don't know who that is. Yeah, it's just bad. But there is a mod, mod makers out there that 3D print like a really cool cover. So just go ahead and buy that because this looks just horrible. Looks very bad. The other thing is, and this is where this critique will start with Barry Osler, that it has the Barry Osler ramp, where it's like this long sort of lumbering left or right ramp with a diverter on it. And this is a ramp which will appear quite a few times across multiple games kind of from now on out. Isn't that right? Yeah, I think it's pretty very similar with the diverter on the ramp. I like it. Yeah, instead of on the left, it's on the right. A couple of other little bits here on this game is there are a lot of molded plastics on the left and right. Very nice. Very nice machine. It's very, very hard because it also has lightning flippers. Yep, it is extremely difficult.
    74:22
    I had mine for the longest time, and my father was quite upset when I sold it. Now, this game is what they would originally call a C or D level Bally Williams. Isn't that right? It wasn't, like, Attack from Mars level, if that's what you mean. Yeah, so most of the time, like, these were bargain basement Bally Williams. Not anymore. Well, actually, most Williams games of this era are not bargain-based things. No more, right? Like, originally, you could get one of these pretty cheap. No more. These now are very pricey machines. And that's because it has a level of charm and magic, quote-unquote, pinball magic, that we don't have anymore. And the other issue with the game is, with a lot of the games that have the red silk screening on the cabinet, it just fades badly. So if you can find a non-faded one, that's a premium. It also had, I know it's a popular subject at the time of recording this, play field issues. Dracula actually had a play field issue in that. During the production run, there was two companies that did play fields for this game. They had Langsmith and Sun.
    75:30
    The Langsmith play fields suffered from planking issues, which, of course, is what I had. Yeah, that's where you see, like, the grain of the book. You can see the grain, yeah. That's the other question, like, oh, which play field? I'll lift it up. I want to see the marking on it. Is it a Langsmith or a Stahn? Oh, it's a Stahn. Good. In the market today, I don't think you have the ability to actually do that. It's like, do you want to buy it or not? Because somebody else will. Yeah.
    75:56
    Now, on episode 35 of TopCast, Barry Ouser would say that the original license for this machine was Alien 3, and the game was all done and all laid out, but then the producers decided to rewrite the whole movie. Interesting. So they scrapped it. I wonder what that play field looked like. Here's a game, the next one here for Barry Osler,
    76:25
    where during our Python Angelo episode, we got a lot of messages and emails afterwards. And the commentary was, how did you cover Python? But you didn't talk about Popeye Saves the Earth. Well, the reason I left that out is because I wanted to include it in the Barry Osler episode. Because Barry Osler does not have much controversy. Right? He's very straightforward, very easygoing. Everybody loves him. So I needed some controversy for this episode and some drama. And how do you do that? You bring in Python Angelo. So Popeye Saves the Earth is a space cartoon licensed movie theme. It is from February of 1994. It is a William WPC DCS system. It sells 4,217 units. Art by Python, Angelo, and John Yosey with some input with Pat McMahon. Music and sound by Paul Hitch. And software by Mike Boone. Interesting that Python would always say he wouldn't do licensed themes for art, yet he did Bugs Bunny and he did Popeye. So I guess if it was a cartoon, like a famous cartoon, he would do it. Python Angelo would say in a lot of his interviews that the reason he chose to do Bugs Bunny and the reason he chose to do Popeye were that they were such an integral part of his youth and it was exciting to work with such a magnificent property. Yeah, I think he just wanted to draw them, like the honor of actually getting to draw that. Exactly, exactly. It's sort of like Zombie Yeti doing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. You knew that that was something special for him. So Barry Oster says about the game, it was strange. The game took a lot of ribbing over the years. It sold big in France and Germany. Popeye had been around for 70 years. Management loved Python. He could do no wrong with them. If he said he wanted to do something, they let him do it. So Sophia Ryan says on Python, she said, I was really amazed with his artwork. It was incredible to every detail, always adding and changing. But it never looked right to him. But it looked good to us. She spoke very fondly of Python. and I think a lot of people do in general, but he was nutty. That's for sure. So Pato's idea was that he drew a cruise ship, sort of like Noah's Ark, and he wanted to save animals and he wanted it to be like, you know, oncology and greenhouse gases and nature and stuff like that. He wanted to save the animals from greenhouse gases. I mean, he wrote a whole story. I think it's on IPDB. It's on IPDB. It's epic. He's ahead of his time. And it was not like Pinbot, where he just sort of drew the Pinbot and said, oh, he's a Pinbot. And there's a pinball machine, and you're one with the machine. It is a whole, whew, it is intense. Now, they would go from planet to planet on this game, save animals and stuff. In those notes that you spoke to a moment ago, that there's this old typewriter-style written story, that's been scanned into there. There's an alternative planet, which is unisex, or it says hyphen gay. Then it says, Jeremy, explore this one. Like, what is, like... We can't do justice to it here. You need to go there and read the whole story. He had a whole backstory to this game. It's really off the wall. Python would leave Williams for Capcom, and Mark Ritchie and Bill Fultzenroeder and Chris Granner would also go with him. Yeah, Capcom rated Williams right around the end of this project. Sophia Ryan would say that Python was a really good friend of mine, and it's really sad that he's no longer with us. I had a lot of fun with him. He was entertaining. He made me laugh. His procrastination was always saying, well, we'll do this later. We'll do it later. I mean, we're family. We would go after work and celebrate all of our different projects. We'll get into Python Angelo and Capcom in a future episode. But this was the part of his career where he was very erratic and very strange. How was Popeye received, Ron? Uh-huh.
    80:36
    Is it one of the greatest, Bally Williams, the greatest widebodyism Mr. Zach Many would lead you to believe? I think a lot of people used it for parts. Really? Why is that? It was not popular here. Let's just put it that way. It's not a great game. No, and Steve Ritchie really thinks it caused problems. Steve Ritchie on the Loser Kid Pinball podcast, he says, Star Trek The Next Generation was the last five-digit game ever that sold 10,000-plus anywhere in the world. It all died after Popeye came out. We had contracts with distributors when Popeye came out, and they were pissed at us. They had to buy so many of them. Our whole distributorship structure changed after that. I'm not going to dump it all on Popeye, but it had a lot to do with it. It's funny. He says, I don't want to dump it all on Popeye, but you just did. What I gather from this is distributors had certain allocation numbers, right? You had to order X amount of units, regardless of if you had somebody that could sell them or not. And that structure really challenged them because you've got a turd like Popeye, and they're required to buy units, and they can't sell them. So then they have to eat that cost for a very, very long time. and that probably didn't help in this time when we sort of start that tumble down the hill. What do you think Barry's thoughts were of the machine? Barry says, Management wanted me to do another game with Python to try and capture the magic we have with the previous collaborations. I wasn't too happy with the theme or the drawings that it created. It was another scenario where the artwork was done first. I reluctantly agreed due to pressure from above. I think it's one of my two least favorite games that I designed, the other being Bad Cats. Ooh. Oh, meow, meow, meow, meow.
    82:23
    Bad cats. So, you know, Python gets to go do, I think, probably a really great follow-up game. You know, he's kind of had a difficult time with that whole Popeye experience, maybe not all bought into the game itself. And he jumps into Dirty Harry, which is a licensed police movie theme. That's from March of 1995. It is a Williams WPC-DCS, sells 4,217 units, art by Kevin O'Connor and Pat McMahon, music and sound by Vince Pontarelli, who did Congo and Judge Dredd and Monster Bash, and software by Craig Stilla. S-Y-L-L-A. Yeah. So if you can pronounce that, send us an email at silverballchroniclesgmail.com. Barry was a big Dirty Harry and Clint Eastwood fan. and he watched all of the movies multiple times in preparation to design this pin. Now, it was not designed on one specific Dirty Harry movie. It was based on the character of Dirty Harry, who was portrayed by Clint Eastwood in multiple movies. Although it does have Scorpio in it from the first one. They decided to go with a younger Clint Eastwood, because by this time, starting to look like an old Warren baseball mitt. Well, he was 65 at the time this game was made, yeah. Clint, at the time, was filming Bridges of Madison County, and the sound team actually went to the set to record all of the call-outs for this game. Which I'm amazed they got him to do call-outs. Isn't that, like, he was not a small actor, especially at this time. He's Academy Award winning, like, about as big a star as you can be, and he actually did call-outs. We didn't even mention on Dracula, they got Gary Oldman, the star of the movie, to actually do all the custom call-outs, which, that's amazing to me. Yeah, you wouldn't be able to get him to do that now. But, I mean, we didn't even talk about how awesome the call-outs are in there. You know, 30 million!
    84:23
    But the call-outs in this are not quite as exciting. No, not at all. Now, these are probably amongst the laziest of call-outs I've ever heard. This is probably worse than Stranger Things.
    84:35
    The thing is, what did you want him to say? He doesn't talk, like he doesn't get excited. I mean, what did he want him to sound like? He was a super jackpot. He sounded like Clint Eastwood. Yeah. You know, sadly enough, they might be lazy, but they are Dirty Harry. Yep. Like, it is on brand. Yep. I never had issues with the gods. Now, Dirty Harry has a couple of things here. One of them is it has the Terminator 2 ACDC cannon thing, but done a little bit differently. Yeah, it's a magnum. It's a Magnum Punk. And it also has the Magnum Shooter Handle. It's a Magnum Shooter Handle Punk. Which, when Williams did this, they didn't use no cheap plastic. It's like metal. It's like you could hurt someone with that thing. If you run into it, you're going to hurt yourself. Yeah, there's a rage tilt help there, that's for sure. Yeah, and I'm a fan. I own one. Yes. This has that Bram Stoker's Dracula ramp on the right side this time, where it's kind of a lumbering left. One of the hardest ramps to hit. That thing is hard. It's got a very, very sharp turn. It's tough to get up there. But it has, if you shoot that, it's got a diverter. It has a really cool feature called ricochet.
    85:57
    I think it's ultra ricochet and then mega ricochet or something. It has an awesome third flipper ramp, which is almost impossible to miss. And it has, they got a little smarter. They have the stand-ups throughout the play field that are custom. They're meant to look like targets, like target practice. Yeah, like those cop movies where they would shoot the bad guys. But, like, in the center one, instead of a plastic over it, it's metal. So at least they got a little smart there because that definitely would have broke. But the one thing they didn't get smart is they have one of those on the left side, and his shoulder always gets ripped off, like on every Dirty Harry. It is an Acme warehouse toy or mold, which is super cool with a vertical up kicker behind it onto the ramp. There's diverters just everywhere. Just diverters here, diverters there. It is something else. It's got the hole. Barry Oster likes his holes. He has Dirty Harry.
    86:57
    I mean, whodunit. He likes the hole. this suffered from some cost cutting it originally had a couple of items and and they're still in the software that's the thing that throws me that they didn't bother to take them out so i wonder if they even cut that short at some point there was originally supposed to be a drop target in front of the warehouse and that was okay it was going to be a single drop target kind of like but no fair house. It would be controllable. You could raise up and lower down by itself. It has a controllable gate. There's two gates on the top. One is controlled. The other one isn't. Originally, they were both supposed to be controlled, and they're still in the software. If you go into the software in the solenoid test, they're there. It'll say, like, right control gate, left control gate, drop target up, drop target down. So it's like they just pulled it just to sort of save money. I mean but I wondering what the original rules like for the warehouse were going to be if the target was there and especially the extra the gate the control of the gate up there What were they going to do with that that they changed Control gates are just cool. But we'll never know. We'll never, ever know. Ever.
    88:12
    That being said, Dirty Harry, it is a direct hit. Oh, reading the flyer again, I see. Yes. Set your sights on a winner. Get it? Sights? Set your sights on a winner, punk. yeah very cool yeah it also uses the um what do they call the 545 blinking bulbs that you can't get anymore uses them in the head yes for the bullet holes which are weird that my one issue with the game it has these bullet holes in the uh trans light they're actual holes in the trans light so you can see through to the lighting in the back box the problem is one of the bullet holes. They put it... Williams had a standard location where they would put the sticker on the insert panel that said, like, high voltage behind here. Be careful. And they put the bullet hole right where that was. So when you look through the hole, you just see that stupid label. So on mine, I literally, I took the label off and moved it. So I don't see that. So you didn't just take it off completely. You had to move it because you're such an... Yeah, I mean, I couldn't just take it off. So I literally re-glued it into a different location. Wow. So this, of course, has some amazing dot animation by Scotch Slomany and Adam Ryan, Brian Morris. This is when we get into the era where the dots are awesome. Oh, yeah, and the original dots were going to be much gorier, but they were cut. And for the life of me, I can't find the damn website where it is. I've seen them before. It was like a multi-ball intro where it shows them, like, shooting people and stuff. Like, ooh, man, that's kind of violent. And they cut it. Yeah, after Dirty Harry, we jump into Whodunit. We covered that under the Dwight episode. This brings us to a fairly controversial game. I said before that I wanted to bring Python Angelo into here to create some controversy. Well, he's no longer at Williams, but yet there's still some controversy around Jackbot. That is the sci-fi robot gambling theme. It is from October of 1995. It is a Williams WPCS, sells 2,428 units, art by John Yosey and Doug Watson, music by John Hay, and software by Larry DeMar and Louis Cossiers.
    90:33
    Now, they needed a game quickly to fill the line, and of course, Barry is your call-up for the fill-the-line games. So what they did is they took Pinbot, and they updated it with a DMD and some new code and some more reliable mechanics, and it took them three months to get this game out the door rather than the usual 12 to 18 months. Barry is credited for the design, but admits that he didn't have really much to do with Jackbot. You've played a lot of Jackbot. This is a tournament darling, is it not? 100% tournament darling. All the tournament players love this game. You guys love that cliche of risk-reward. Oh, it is totally risk-reward. Yep. The distributors weren't very happy with it, though. Now, JackBot, it's within everyone's reach. It's a sure bet. Now, why was this, you know, clearly kind of, you know, gambling incentive, risk-reward, kind of press-your-luck game not that big? Well, the distributors were upset because they saw the same play field. It's like it's PinBot. and they were like, never send me the same playfield again. Ooh, it made them angry because I already had a pinbot. I don't need a pinbot with a DMD. And it was like, don't start this, right? Like, don't just start taking the old playfields and change them around with a DMD, right? I want new games, not old games. Which is a shame because it was really cool what they did with the game. The idea from William's standpoint, you take a proven winner, a proven play field that sold well over 10,000 units, and just update it with modern rules, and you have Jackpot. Now, Python Angelo would have a serious issue with this game, and that's because Pinbot, the Pinbot franchise, is something that he dreamed up, drew, you know, birthed into the world. And now Williams is building that game again, the third one in the series without him. You know, he took it pretty hard. John Yelsey said that Python left the project in mid-design, so John and Doug Watson finished the game. So Python was gone from Williams at the point that the game came out. Yeah, he had very minimal involvement. Yeah, and Python said this about Barry Ossor. He said, Barry was in need of ideas. It was a mix of Pinbot and Jokers. Barry, you make the best designs with Python. Go make your own. Your biggest success was pea soup, shrimp pizza, and apple strudel with vanilla ice cream. You put that in a bowl and mixed them together. Barry and Lawler didn't have anything to mix and create until Eugene and I was there. Okay, is this from TopCast? Yes, it is. Yes, that sounds like the, again, I highly recommend the Python TopCast if you just want to hear him just go off on multiple people. And some of them are just weird, like Steve Ritchie, he's a genius, he's great. Pat Waller, I hate him, he's terrible. It's like, what? Harry Williams is a genius. Oh, Harry Williams is the king, the ultimate genius. What was the book that he wanted everybody to read? Oh, The Foundry? Yeah, he tells everybody to read this book over and over and over again. The reason I take this quote out is, at this time, Python is basically saying, in a roundabout way, that Barry couldn't do anything on his own. He wasn't creative enough to mix things together. He needed somebody else to do it for him, which I completely disagree with. If we take a look at Doctor Who, Dirty Harry, all of these games where Python was nowhere to be seen. Dracula. Right. Like, totally wrong. But you can see that obviously Python was very bothered by the fact that they were taking his created intellectual property, which he didn't own, by the way. Well, the company always owns it. That's just the way it goes. You know, I like Jackbot. It's okay. The thing is I haven't played enough of it to really understand it. I kind of prefer Pinbot because I can understand it. I never could understand the whole button, the cheat button. Yeah. Like when you're supposed to hit it, when you're not supposed to hit it. Like do you keep pushing your lock and collecting the bomb or the water or something? Yeah. I think there's a button on the right side that actually flashes intermittently. You hit it to cheat or get things. I never could understand exactly when you're supposed to do it. Other than like when I watch people play it, they always are hitting that thing. So I'm guessing just hit it all the time. All the time. Now, Jack Danger did a lot of videos when he had a jackpot, and I watched quite a bit of that. And, man, he figured it out because he had some scores that just make my brain hurt. Well, his name is Jack, and it's jackpot, so it's kind of unfair advantage. It's a game. Yeah. Thanks for that, Ron.
    95:34
    So let's get into Barry's last Valley Williams, and that was Junkyard. And this is a fantasy sanitary landfill theme.
    95:47
    That's just so made up. It's a fantasy landfill game. Oh, come on. Sanitary landfill. Yes, because when I think of junkyard, sanitary is the first thing. I think it's the sanity, actually, what I'm looking at. Yeah, that's true. It is. December of 1996. Of course, Barry Osler being the December guy when it comes to games. It is a 95 WPC Williams. Sells 3,013 units. Art by Pat McMahon, Linda Deal, and Paul Barker. Sound by, oh my God, these guys. Kurt Goebel. G-O-E-B-E-L. Come on, get a name. Software by Larry DeMar and Louis Cozars.
    96:31
    There's the guy whose name is two first names. That's right. And Dots by Adam Ryan, of course, probably some of the best Dots I think he's ever done is on Junkyard. And aside from maybe the later George Gomez games. You know what I really like about Junkyard? It uses a better version of the spinner that's on Johnny Mnemonic. So when your Johnny Mnemonic spinner breaks multiple times and you can't get it anymore, you can still get a Junkyard spinner, and it works in a Johnny Mnemonic. There you go. This is the best part of that game. Well, it's in the shooter lane, too, which is weird. But, yes. Yeah, it's like outland spinners. How have we not done outland spinners yet? Get on that. So it was decided that Dwight and Barry would work together again because Whodunit was such a great collaboration. But this time, instead of Dwight taking the lead, Barry would take the lead on the project. Barry thought, wouldn't it be cool to have a bunch of iconic old parts from other pinball games and stick them together in a junkyard? So, for example, you know, you might have the electric chair from Adam's family. Yeah, you might have the electric chair from Adam's family laying in the background. Or you'd have the gun from Dirty Harry on the side. Or you would have a bunch of old coffins from Bram Stoker's Dracula. See, that would have been cool if they could have actually got that in the game. See, that would have been really, really cool. Now, after Barry and Dwight had started to think about that. It's like it ain't going to fit. It's not going to fit. and then they just changed it to sort of an actual kind of junkyard with fridges and cars and toilets. And it's an unusual game outside of the theme itself. When they thought about this junkyard theme, that's kind of not enough, right? They needed to expand it. You needed a goal or something, right? You just can't say it's a junkyard and shoot the ball around. You've got to have a story. So Adam Ryan says... The dot guy. He says, someone had come up with a theme, like you're trying to free some people from a junkyard, but that was it. So I walked into Dwight's office and said, there's really nothing here in the game to make me want to win it. It's just collecting junk. So he said, all right, Adam, I'm going on vacation for two weeks. When I get back, I want a theme, and left. Yeah, it's very Dwight, isn't it? You know, the dot guy, Adam Ryan, is the person who more or less came up with the theme of the game. So when Dwight got back, Adam gave him a theme. And that's essentially what's in the game right now. Adam was super shocked that Dwight liked the theme, and he was very pleased with the way the game came out. So what is the object of Junkyard? I have no idea. I've only played it a few times. There's junk, and there's a dog that chases you in a video mode. It's just that good.
    99:16
    I haven't got to play it that much. I mean, most of the time I play it, I just hit the crane. Oh, my God. Remember, it's the meanest game in the whole darn town. Oh, that's so bad. And it's got, like, just the cutest dog. It's got a bulldog in there, and it doesn't look anywhere near as mean as the one in the game does. This is, like, this cute little puppy with this, like, he's got a spike on his name. Oh, God bless him. It's not hard to play in the yard. I like when they take these pictures for the flyers, and they got it, like, with a fence around it. It's like, man, that would be cool if that actually looked like that. This also features Crazy Bob's cosmic salvage. Crazy Bob makes another appearance here after the Johnny Mnemonic Crazy Bob's gimmick came along. And I always thought the guy in the back was the same guy that was in Mousing Around. Oh, yeah. Kind of looks like him. The art guy in the back there. The guy that's trying to catch the mice. Those darn mice. Of course, this was done by the voiceover artist by Mr. Boom Shakalaka, Tim Kitzrow. Love Tim. He's still doing voices to this day, like in the new Elvira pen. Yeah, which I think he just, he killed it. Killed it. This is an unusual game because in the middle, it's got like these stand-up targets and a crane mech. And again, that appearance of that Barry Osler left looping kind of ramp with diverter on it. Something, of course, we would see often. The super engineer, Zofia Ryan, was moved from this game. And she didn't get to finish Junkyard, but she did do a couple of other mechanical bits on there. One of them is the doghouse plunge. So instead of just having a regular plunge, you plunge the ball into a doghouse and the dog itself moves. Here's some trivia. This is the first pin with a toilet on the playfield. So with an actual toilet as opposed to... Not one like you could use. No, no, no. I mean like Lethal Weapon 3 has a toilet on the playfield. It literally has a mode called toilet. This is when you shoot the ball into the toilet. Okay. So first with a physical toilet. Yeah, physical toilet. Not a picture of a toilet. Like, this is proper toilet here. Proper toilet. Yeah, this is one level from real toilet. I can't think of anything earlier that had a toilet. And it's got a crane mech. And we know pinball and cranes go together. Just like, they just go together. Yeah, it's like peanut butter and chocolate. Okay, I'll give you that, yeah. I mean, there's so many games with cranes. This is a cool crane mech. It's no Batman 66, but we're also talking like 25, 30 years ago. Well, yeah. Barry Osler would say about the crane that originally he had a steel cable on that design. After a short time, the cable would fray and it would eventually break. It was changed to a chain and the mechanical arm would move up and down. The original had a pulley with a ball on a cable. Also, the original game had a magnet underneath the crane ball to sort of be able to catch a ball and move that crane magnet, move that crane ball around.
    102:42
    In fact, some of the prototypes actually have that neck in them. So Barry would also tell IPDB that the magnet under the play field was there to stop the ball from swinging when the cable was there so that you could set up the ball for another shot. I guess it doesn't swing as much with the chain, So the magnet was removed. It is actually the theme, is it not? Like, it looks like a friggin' junkyard. Like, stuff is all over the place. It's not very cohesive. And the DMV stuff is cool, because there's just callbacks to so many games. The art's a bit of a mess. Like, I mean, its theme is perfect. I don't particularly like the look of it, but it is what it is. And the devil's in it for some reason. Why not? Oh, just saying. He's the actual character in the game. At this time, Williams was really in cut mode. So this is like that 95, 96, 97 era where, you know, the hammer was starting to drop at Williams. Many people were being cut from the company or moved into different departments. And that must have been a very difficult environment. Sophia Ryan would say, I did some of the wireframes and the dog that pops up. I was proud of the design. The crane was not finished because I was moved to gaming. I was no longer on any pinball projects. So I started the game, but then worked with Brent Cornell on finishing the game. So you can see that people were being cut, moved around. I think you can see that in this game, that some of the cohesive nature that Barry Oser would usually build around his games is kind of lost a little bit on Junkyard. John Trudeau would say, you come in your office one day and your pass won't work. It was that cold. The past should have been green, but it came up red. I thought somebody screwed up, and someone came out to the door and let me in. I went to my room, and Larry DeMar said, we got to talk. That was it. Me, Barry Ousler, and Dennis Nordman, gone. Yeah, so he's working in the middle of this project, Barry Ousler, and then one day, three of the sort of designers there are gone. You know, why is that shocking to me? One of them is Dennis Nordman came in sort of in that Bally Midway acquisition. John Trudeau had left Gottlieb and came in sort of, you know, 92.
    104:59
    Barry Oster was an institution. He was there at the beginning of solid state. He was there working on the EMs at Williams. Like, he was the heart and soul of Williams, and he's just sort of lumped up. It was interesting that they did that, because when Stern did all their layoffs in 2008, I mean, who they kept, they had Borg, you know, who had been at Data East. They kept Lyman Sheets. Data East, and they kept Lonnie, Rob, Data East. Like they kept all their people. Anyone who had been, the people who had been at Williams before all got canned. Yeah, that's something else. As Alvia Ryan says, so what happened with the pinball division, there was a huge layoff, and I think only a few people were left. I think two teams were left, but for my team, Barry and the programmers and others, they all had to leave. You know, that's a big hit where, you know, you've literally built a company, right? Like you were there during that massive ramp up in the 80s. You were the person that carried Williams during the darkest times. Then you're there building some of the most amazing mechanical masterpieces. Maybe not the best licenses, but definitely the greatest games. And then you're just out. That's rough. So why didn't Barry work for Stern? You know, around this time, right, when we're in the downturn of pinball, especially sort of that Sega to Stern transition. Stern didn't really want, you know, full-time overhead with designers. They more or less wanted to work under contract. So you'd build a design, and they would just pay you for the design under contract, and they would take care of the rest. Steve Ritchie and Pat Lawler worked under sort of that early 2000s structure at Stern. Yeah, they all had their own company. was Steve Ritchie Productions, and Pat Lawler's was just PLD, Pat Lawler Design. So Barry Ousler would say, if Pat Lawler and Steve Ritchie didn't design a game, or they didn't make a game, they don't get any money. I don't know what they did in between. So, of course, Barry is looking for stability. And if you're doing sort of freelance contract pinball design for Stern, who is literally the only survivor after 2000, that's tough. So what did he do for 20-plus years, Ron? Well, he went to work for Benson. Benson is a distributor, one of the biggest ones in the country. I think still. He was a purchasing manager. So, you know, sadly, Barry was laid off, and he began to work for a company called EcoSure, which is a division of Ecolab, a worldwide company. They're mostly involved in food safety, sort of like the safety food health department. And, of course, he did mostly administrative work there, which is mind-blowing that somebody who spent their whole life doing engineering stuff would end up administration, but that's how it goes sometimes. When you need health insurance and you need, you know, a steady paycheck, you do what you got to do. In 2013, Barry's wife Donna fell ill with kidney failure, and in 2014, Barry developed bone marrow cancer. And, of course, we don't have this in Canada, but in the United States, Sometimes you don't have medical coverage, and Barry and Donna found it very difficult paying their medical bills. So they reached out to the pinball community who raised $33,000 for the Ouslers on GoFundMe. Yeah, we actually had a benefit tournament in Rochester during that time. For a Canadian, it's really difficult for me to comprehend that, but I am so glad that the community as a whole was able to sort of stand up and help somebody like the Ouslers. Sadly, though, in August of 2015, Donna did pass away. Both her and Barry were married for 41 years. I'm moving into my eighth year of marriage, and sometimes it feels like 41.
    109:00
    Barry would say, I want to tell everyone who helped in the past and who are helping now, thank you. Every one of you has touched our lives in some way. We really appreciate all the help we have been given by our family, friends, and the pinball community. I'm really going to miss my best friend and the love of my life. We forget about the people sometimes in pinball. We spend a lot of time on forums, on podcasts, yacking amongst friends, and being mad and upset about designs and why doesn't Baby Yoda move and all of that stuff, but we forget that there's people behind that. And I hope podcasts like this can help really bring out the individuals that are there. What's Barry doing now? He eventually, he was at Highway Pinball briefly and designed what was supposed to be Queen, which Highway went under, so that never came out. But the design is still out there. Highway was eventually, the assets were purchased by Pinball Brothers, Deep Root Pinball, when they started up, they attempted to buy, they wanted that design. They wanted the Queen design, and Pinball Brothers wouldn't sell it to them. So maybe there will be a Barry Ousler Queen game at some point in the future. You never know. Barry Ousler is currently a designer at Deep Root Pinball in Texas, and of course he is designing pinball machines again. Barry has come back to the community, come back to the family, which I think everybody is excited about, and my only hope is that Deep Root gets everything together and actually releases some of these pins. Now, This Week in Pinball, a sponsor of the show, actually did a deep dive back in 2020 with the launch of Raza and the beginning of that whole level of shenanigans, and they released some of the game titles in which Barry is working on. Well, what's Raza stand for? Oh, I'm sorry. Retro Atomic Zombie Adventure Land. We get in our acronyms sometimes and forget that person. It's like, Raza, that's a weird title. Is that some kind of, like, android creature? The whole Deep Root thing is a whole thing. We'll save that for its own episode when I'll hopefully have something to talk about. But Barry Osler is apparently working on a game called Food Truck. The Who, based on the band, a gladiator pin, and a to-be-named black hole revisited machine, which has one of the craziest mechs pinball has ever seen. So we look forward to that. As the only person that I know in the pinball industry, Barry Osler is also one of those people that came down with COVID-19 in 2020, but he did recover after a brief hospitalization. So, Barry, keep it up. We want to see some designs. Now, Ron, we're coming to the end of the episode.
    112:00
    Barry has left, and he hasn't designed a production game really since Junkyard. He is one of the highest-selling pinball designers of all time. He's somebody who doesn't just design a playfield, but he designs a unique, mechanically engineered, wonderful world under glass. His designs are unique, and they have given thousands of people a lot of fun throughout his career. Do you have anything you would like to add about Barry Osler in our Barry Osler Saves Pinball episode? It just seems weird a guy that would have had that much success that no one has a bad thing to say about. It's gone so long without a game, especially in this current market. You think like Jersey Jack couldn't have hired him. or but I mean, well, he tried it highway and that that just didn't work out. I think it probably comes down to just just manufacturing in general, right? Like the thing we didn't mention is he he is a native Chicagoan. We probably mentioned that in the first episode, but he he moved to Texas to go to Deep Root. Gosh, I just did Texas barbecue would be reason to go alone. Oh, I don't really eat barbecue. Oh, my God. You don't watch movies. You don't eat barbecue. You don't drink coffee. Sorry. Barbecue is like, eh, not my thing. Coffee makes me ill. I do watch movies. I watch movies at a point in my life. I just don't watch many movies anymore. Sue me. I watched Mandalorian. Hey, I know what that is. Give me some credit. You didn't just watch the last part of it when somebody shows up with a lightsaber?
    113:36
    Well, actually, yeah, I did. Just because. I didn't get to season two yet, and I couldn't escape that clip. Sorry. Thanks for joining me again, Ron, this month. Hopefully we will jump back in next month with another fascinating, amazing topic. Any clues? No. Zero clues. I'm as clueless as you listeners are. I have no idea what we're doing. Or you'll give me one of three different things. Okay. Which one? Don't know. So I've got a bunch of mostly completed show notes for a couple of things. They're all, unfortunately, heavily weighted in the Bally Williams era. And I want to try to find maybe something else to mix that up. Okay. We might end up being somewhere in the 90s for a few episodes. College System 80.
    114:31
    And as always, you can send your comments, questions, corrections, and concerns to philandolchromicles at gmail.com. We look forward to all your messages, and we read every one. Please subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or your favorite podcast. Your favorite social media. Turn on automatic downloads so you don't miss a single episode. Remember to leave us a five-star review wherever you found us or on this week's InBall Promoter Database. That way more people can find us. Want to support the podcast and need a new shirt? Swing on over to civilballswag.com and pick up a Civil Ball Chronicles t-shirt to help us keep the lights on.
    115:10
    Thank you. Every little thing I think about you, every little thing. Oh, no, sorry. No, that's a no. No? No, we're done. That's it. I quit.
    115:53
    Yeah, I think I'm going to pick golf balls or something. That sounds like fun. I'm going to go to Home Depot and probably get paint for my deck. That doesn't sound like fun. No, this is what you do when you're married. Go to Home Depot and Costco. So Joe says, Williams needed a game that sold at least 3,500. That doesn't sound as good when I say that. Williams needed a game that sold at least 3,500 machines to get. It actually doesn't sound good either. I'll say 3,500. All right.
    116:22
    Hold on. Give me one second. Ooh, squeaky door. It's supposed to be the new spooky horror theme. So fancy. So you guys are out and about without masks now, eh?
    116:37
    We're out and about. Yes, without masks. I love when I go open the browser and it updates itself. Say hello to a new Firefox. It looks the same as the old Firefox. You still use that? What is this, 2001? Well, it's the old Firefox.
    116:56
    Well, I went through your notes trying to de-Candidify it. It's like paycheck, you know, spelling it correctly. Yeah, did you like that? That's a good one. That one really throws people for a loop. Yeah. It's like two words instead of one word. Check with a Q. There's no Q? Not just a Q. U-E? No, no, no, no.