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Tim Sexton

Pintastic New England·video·51m 30s·analyzed·Jul 20, 2019
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.032

TL;DR

Tim Sexton chronicles his path from pinball player to Stern software engineer and industry growth catalysts.

Summary

Tim Sexton presents his journey from casual pinball enthusiast to Stern Pinball software developer, tracing pinball industry history (1960-2000), his competitive rise, media involvement (streaming, tutorials, podcasts), and his February 2017 hire at Stern. He discusses the industry's decline post-1990s, resurgence through community engagement, and his role as lead developer on Black Knight alongside discussing Stern's expanded software team.

Key Claims

  • Bally and Williams closed their doors in 2000, leaving Stern as the only pinball manufacturer in the world for an extended period

    high confidence · Tim Sexton presentation on pinball industry history

  • Tim was hired at Stern Pinball starting February 2017 as a support software engineer

    high confidence · Tim Sexton, presentation timeline of career transition

  • Tim became lead developer on Black Knight, working with Steve Ritchie

    high confidence · Tim Sexton describing his role progression at Stern Pinball

  • Seven software developers worked on Black Knight: Tim Sexton, Corey (unknown last name), Wesley Chang, Brett Rubin, Mark Vitarelli, Lyman Sheets, and Tanya Klaes

    high confidence · Tim Sexton crediting team members on Black Knight development

  • Stern Pinball hired Rick Nagle and Brett Rubin as full-time software developers in 2016, expanding the software team significantly

    high confidence · Tim Sexton discussing State of the Union staffing announcement

  • Awesome Games Done Quick charity event in early 2017 (Pinball Done Quick side stream) raised over $2 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation

    high confidence · Tim Sexton describing his participation in the charity streaming event

  • Josh Sharp was recently hired as director of marketing at Stern Pinball when he met Tim in November 2016

    high confidence · Tim Sexton recounting the hiring process and connection through Josh Sharp

  • George Gomez (Tim's eventual boss) put out a message that Stern was looking for young, passionate software developers willing to relocate to Chicago

    high confidence · Tim Sexton explaining the hiring context and George Gomez's directive

Notable Quotes

  • “Pinball and video games for a really long time were not enemies. They were very much friends. They all grew up together in the 80s.”

    Tim Sexton@ 5:48 — Contextualizes pinball's decline not as competition with video games but as broader shift to home entertainment

  • “That means you can be good at pinball, which is something I didn't understand until I was 19 years old. And that was it. That's all it took for me to be completely sold.”

    Tim Sexton@ 10:11 — Pivotal moment of discovering pinball's competitive depth and skill-based nature

  • “I'll go home and watch these videos or check out this website, check out all these tutorials, check out all this stuff... And eventually I just started getting better and better and I was more comfortable with the games and I was diving in from day one.”

    Tim Sexton@ 11:46 — Demonstrates community support and accessibility of learning resources driving adoption

  • “This community of pinball streamers has grown very significantly to the point where you can pretty much turn on Twitch at any time of day and watch someone playing pinball.”

    Tim Sexton@ 21:24 — Signals growth in pinball media ecosystem and community engagement

  • “Making pinball machines is necessary for pinball to survive, but it also needs the enthusiasm of people talking about it and people sharing their experiences with pinball to bring even more people into pinball.”

    Tim Sexton@ 22:17 — Articulates the symbiotic relationship between manufacturing and community advocacy in pinball's sustainability

  • “We have recently staffed up a lot in software. There's two other full-time guys joined the company in 2016... And we have been able to staff up. You have recently seen releases of code, like there was more Guardians code, then there was KISS code and Aerosmith code.”

Entities

Tim SextonpersonStern PinballcompanyGeorge GomezpersonSteve RitchiepersonJosh SharppersonBrett RubinpersonRick NaglepersonTanya KlaespersonMark Vitarelliperson

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Stern Pinball under George Gomez's leadership actively recruiting young, passionate software developers from competitive player base to strengthen internal capability

    high · George Gomez 'put out the message that Stern Pinball is looking for some young people to get on board... if you know anyone who might be passionate, enthusiastic, willing to move to Chicago, and wants to work as a software developer in pinball'

  • ?

    community_signal: Pinball media ecosystem (streaming, podcasts, YouTube tutorials) has grown significantly as driver of community growth and industry awareness

    high · Tim notes 'This community of pinball streamers has grown very significantly to the point where you can pretty much turn on Twitch at any time of day and watch someone playing pinball' and emphasizes media's role in sustainability

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Pinball community sentiment is shifting positive due to increased accessibility (location growth, media exposure, competitive pathways), particularly among younger demographics

    high · Tim describes multiple growth vectors: younger competitors, expanding arcade locations, increased media coverage, and grassroots community tournaments supporting newcomer engagement

  • ?

    community_signal: Pinball arcades and locations (e.g., Pinball Gallery) are expanding and supporting community tournaments; bar/arcade venues increasingly adopting pinball as draw for customers

    high · Tim describes Pinball Gallery expanding from ~12 to 70+ machines and notes 'If you're in the bar industry to have pinball there, it brings people in. If you're in the family entertainment center, it can also help'

  • ?

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.154

0:00
Thanks everyone for coming here today and I'd like to thank the fantastic staff for giving me this opportunity to do a presentation like this. Since Steve is not here, I will be taking questions and I can hear them myself, so it will be pretty smooth ultimately throughout the presentation. So this presentation is about my transition from doing pinball as hobby to doing pinball as a profession and what was involved in that and how I got here and what I'm going to do from here on out. So our overview for the presentation we're going to start with some backstory about where pinball has been for the past 50 years and what that means for the industry historically. And I'll talk about my competitive play and how I became a very talented competitive pinball player. I'll move over into the pinball media, like the podcast, the Twitch streams, and the different YouTube videos, and all that stuff, and how that helped get me more visible for my eventual transition into Stern Pinball. Then I'll pivot over to the start of my job at Stern, which started in February 2018. I've been there for about a year and a half, and since then I started as a support software engineer working on a couple games. Then I jumped over into the lead developer role on Black Knight working with Steve Ritchie. So it's been an interesting journey. And we've got more stuff to cover and some inside look at some things behind the scenes that no one's seen yet on Black Knight as well. So throughout the presentation, if you guys have any questions, please feel free to come up and use this microphone. And if you just stand at the microphone, If you have a question throughout the presentation, whatever, I'll let you know if it's okay to ask it. Your questions will help make the presentation much more interesting. We'll be able to dive into some more stuff that you guys are really interested about if I'm just gonna skim over it. So please feel free at any point to come up and ask questions.
2:14
So I'm gonna start with a little bit of backstory. This is a graph of the number of total pinball machines produced from 1960 to the year 2000. I got this data from the internet pinball database. Some user on tilt forums that I cannot remember the name of right now put this graph together. So what it shows is how strong pinball was from 1960 to the 1980s when there was this transition from the electromechanical style of pinball to the modern solid state style of pinball machines. And this is when programmers started to become necessary on pinball machines. 1975 was a key transition year when the games started to come with computers in them, which required people who knew how to do all the things pinball used to do in reels and relays and transition that into code or software. Now, pinball hasn't looked back. It's still developed the exact same way, just with all the latest and greatest technology, but there's still software guys working with the designers since that point in time. And as you can see, when that transition happened, it didn't slow down the growth of pinball. Pinball was actually doing very, very well in the late 70s into the early 80s. There was a big crash following that with the whole video game industry, but pinball was able to rebound and still, Williams and Bally were the leaders of the industry in the early 90s, and they were producing maybe about 100,000 games a year, which was incredible numbers.

Tim Sexton@ 28:25 — Documents Stern's investment in software capacity and resulting code update cadence improvements

  • “Everyone was really nice and they were telling me, I'll go home and watch these videos or check out this website... And you could download, I think I first downloaded like the Visual Pinball simulator.”

    Tim Sexton@ 11:22 — Shows how accessible digital pinball (Visual Pinball, Pinball Arcade) enabled skill development for new players

  • “The Pinball Gallery in Malvern, Pennsylvania... was a place that was in my hometown growing up... and at first when it opened up it was maybe a dozen machines. They've moved locations and expanded several times.”

    Tim Sexton@ 9:05 — Illustrates growth in commercial pinball locations and availability

    • Lyman Sheets
    person
    Wesley Changperson
    Black Knightgame
    Pinball Galleryorganization
    PAPAorganization
    Awesome Games Done Quickevent
    Pinball Done Quickevent
    Keith Ellinperson
    Zach Sharpeperson
    Jack Dangerperson
    Pinball Expoevent
    Internet Pinball Databaseorganization
    Williamscompany
    Ballycompany
    Gottliebcompany

    design_philosophy: Stern Pinball's approach to software development emphasizes collaboration across specialized roles (designers, software engineers, systems, producers) with internal knowledge-sharing culture

    medium · Tim states 'everyone's willing to share information. So it's been really nice at Stern Pinball' and lists diverse roles on Black Knight team (design, code, systems, producer)

  • ?

    event_signal: Awesome Games Done Quick charity streaming event in early 2017 (Pinball Done Quick side stream) raised $2M+ and exposed pinball to hundreds of thousands of viewers through Twitch

    high · Tim states 'All in all, this event raised over $2 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation' and describes exposure to 'tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people who were coming in the chat'

  • $

    market_signal: Pinball experiencing resurgence post-2010s with younger players entering competitive scene at increasing rates, reversing decades-long decline

    high · Tim observes 'I see younger and younger competitors every day at these pinball tournaments' and notes shift from 'oh, I haven't seen it for 20 years' comments to active location-based play

  • ?

    community_signal: Competitive pinball players from top-ranked scene (Lyman Sheets, Keith Ellin, Zach Sharpe) transitioned into Stern Pinball employment in technical and marketing roles

    high · Tim states 'I first met some of the best players, like Keith Ellin, Zach Sharpe, and Lyman Sheets, all of whom are now my coworkers' (met at 2015 Pinball Expo, all now at Stern)

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Tim Sexton hired at Stern Pinball in February 2017 from IBM as support software engineer, later promoted to lead developer on Black Knight

    high · Tim explicitly states 'February 2017, this is when it was announced that I started working at Stern Pinball' and outlines hiring process with Josh Sharp, George Gomez recruitment directive

  • ?

    product_strategy: Stern Pinball software team indicates ability to maintain regular code updates on existing titles and develop new games with improved feature parity following team expansion

    medium · Tim notes recent code releases on Guardians, KISS, Aerosmith and states 'we will get caught up with all the games that you guys want us to get caught up on very soon' and 'we'll be bringing all sorts of new things into our new games'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Stern Pinball significantly expanded software development team with new full-time hires (Rick Nagle, Brett Rubin, others joining 2016-2017), enabling more frequent code updates and improved game support

    high · Tim states 'we have recently staffed up a lot in software' and 'we have gotten a lot more time to bring some of these games up' with releases of Guardians, KISS, Aerosmith code following hires

    • 3:52
    However, there was a slowdown sort of after the mid-'90s, and things really ground to a halt. Williamson Valley, who was the largest manufacturer, closed their doors in the year 2000, and at that point, Stern Pinball was the only pinball manufacturer remaining in the entire world. And it remained that way for a very long time, and sales of pinball during that time period hadn't seen any of those previous numbers. So what this means is for young people like myself, I was born in 1993. I'm not nearly as young as Ashton here, who was born within the past 12 years. But people like me, we didn't get the opportunity to experience pinball as much as people in the past did because it had disappeared. So if I'm born in 1993, by the time I'm 7, 8 years old, maybe I can finally see over the glass and know what I'm doing. There's not any pinball machines to play. Everything transitioned at that point over to home entertainment, home media. And it's often talked about that pinball was sort of replaced by home video games. But in my opinion, it's more just all home entertainment took away that need for people to go outside in the public and play these big commercial games like pinball, like these arcade games. everything was becoming smaller and more in the home. So a scene like this, this is a scene from Terminator where John Connor is in the arcade. The arcade's packed with people, they're all trying to play the new games. This was really the only place you had, unless you had an Atari, this was the only place to play the state of the art modern graphic arcade games and pinball machines. And as video games for a while got better,
    5:41
    the pinball arcades already existed. So video games were able to come in, and they were getting so popular that pinball was getting more popular. And they both worked together. So pinball and video games for a really long time were not enemies. They were very much friends. They all grew up together in the 80s. And the scene, though, to me of the packed arcade is completely unfamiliar to someone who grew up in the late 90s and early 2000s. These arcades kind of went away. Redemption arcades, they were here and there, and maybe they had one or two pinball machines, and maybe half of one was working, but you didn't have these big profitable arcades at that time period. And what a more familiar scene for me is, to me this is sort of the epitome of what the peak of home entertainment was. People were so sick of going and watching the movie theater on a big screen that they built movie theaters in their homes on a small screen. and it's these very barren home theater landscapes that kind of represent like probably the rock bottom of the pinball industry as well. Just no one wanted to go outside for some reason. They're all too afraid. They all wanted to stay at home, watch movies four months after they came out. It wasn't that fun. And this is not like someone putting pinball machines in their basement. These rooms were built in people's homes strictly to raise home values, strictly to prevent you from ever having to leave your house. I think we're starting to get away from that. We're starting to get into more situations where people want to socialize, they want to congregate. The bar and arcade scenes are growing a lot more. Young people are getting more into pinball at different locations that are popping up. I see younger and younger competitors every day at these pinball tournaments. Their parents are helping them in most cases get to all these events. I do see some optimism is that, you know, people don't want to just sit at home all day anymore. They want to meet people with their common interests. They want to play these games they can play in public.
    7:44
    So someone like me would think for a long time that this was pinball. And this is a digital version of pinball that shipped with the Windows operating system. And to be honest, until I was in my teens, I didn't play a physical pinball machine. This is what I thought pinball was for a really long time. My parents weren't into pinball. I mean, we knew about it through language, through, you know, they talk about pinball, you know, in sports. Oh, the ball, pinball between all those people. And you're kind of like, oh yeah, I kind of know what that thing is because of the computer. But it's a very different experience to get this 2D flat game. You don't really have the physical experience. And a lot of digital pinball is really not an adequate replacement for the real physical experience you get with a game like pinball. Sort of like how playing FIFA on your computer is not the same as playing soccer outside with your friends or on a team.
    8:38
    So it took me until I was in college to really start getting into the pinball scene. And I want to give a shout-out to the Pinball Gallery in Malvern, Pennsylvania. I know it's not too close from here, but it's a great location now with over 70 working pinball machines. I know the range-tilt guys go there all the time. and this was a place that was in my hometown growing up that I was able to get to and at first when it opened up it was maybe a dozen machines. They've moved locations and expanded several times since then but it was my first time ever in my entire life I'd ever seen multiple working pinball machines in one place and that's a huge difference in experience to actually see working pinball machines in the physical way, the way they're meant to be played by people who are enthusiastic about pinball and to want to keep it alive and to want to keep repairing the games.
    9:32
    And with this experience, walking into this pinball arcade, you're like, wow, these things are working. Oh, okay, I see how they work now. They've got these physical ways to move the ball and you have all these shots and there's big scoring opportunities and stuff. And what I noticed when I was there was they had some league standings posted on the wall. And that was sort of the moment. On my way to the bathroom, I just caught a glimpse of a spreadsheet on the wall. And I was going, what is that? And I saw it. I was like, oh, pinball league standings. I'm like, oh, that makes sense. I've heard of bowling leagues. I've played in different leagues. I've heard of League of Legends, but that's something else.
    10:09
    Pinball league standings, I was like, oh, this is really interesting. That means you can be good at pinball, which is something I didn't understand until I was 19 years old. And that was it. That's all it took for me to be completely sold. I'm like, OK, this is it. I'm signing up for a pinball machine. I'm going to learn how to be good at this game. I want to get these things called jackpots that I'm struggling to get. And I did wind up joining the summer pinball league at the Pinball Gallery in 2013. You can see my name up there getting three fourth places and a third place on a couple games. I didn't do too well. In fact, my first pinball tournament, there's me coming in dead last. So when I started pinball, this is 2013, June 2013, my first ever pinball tournament. I was not good at all. I was really terrible at it. But going back to the pinball gallery, everyone there was very supportive. I wanted some friends to help, to come with me, join me, to go to this pinball league. None of my friends wanted to go. So I just had to walk into this room filled with a bunch of strangers, middle-aged men I'd never talked to before, and go, hey, I'm a young kid trying to play pinball. Have you ever played pinball before? No. I don't know what I'm doing. But everyone was really nice and they were telling me, I'll go home and watch these videos or check out this website, check out all these tutorials, check out all this stuff. And you could download, I think I first downloaded like the visual pinball simulator, which I had to set up the visual pin name to get that to work. Then the pinball arcade came out, so I was able to download that app and play some of the new pinball machines. And eventually I just started getting better and better and I was more comfortable with the games and I was addicted from day one. So I was just diving into everything, watching some competitive tournament footage, watching, just playing the virtual games, going to the arcade as much as I could just to practice on those games once I read some rules sheets and stuff like that. There's just a lot of stuff to get into.
    12:11
    And at the time I was going to school up at Penn State. So only in the summertime, I was really able to get to this really nice pinball location, the pinball gallery in Downingtown. when I was at school, I did find in this place, this was a record store and hookah lounge called Chronic Town. And they didn't serve any alcohol because, you know, drinking age is 21, they gotta find something else that could sell to college kids. So it's music and hookah, and then a few pinball machines there. So some of the first games I played on were Twilight Zone, Lord of the Rings, Transformers and Wizard of Oz Those are my first pinball machines I played and learned And eventually I started talking to the owner there because he noticed me playing pinball all day He was into pinball, obviously, so that's why he has the games out there. He goes, oh, you're into pinball? I'm like, oh yeah, I'm really into pinball. Would you want to have a tournament here? He goes, yeah, sure. You can promote it, do everything, and then we'll put the games on free play for the tournament. And so we did that and he reached out to some people in the State College area, the Center County, Pennsylvania area. It's pretty much just Penn State and the economy that is based around Penn State. Not a big area, but we put out in the local newspaper, actually two different articles that covered the tournament to help promote it. I think maybe a dozen people showed up, but still it was cool. I got photographs of me playing Day to East Star Wars. My buddy Jerry, the only other student who played pinball in that tournament was photographed playing Lord of the Rings. Jerry's now a very successful speed runner. He has a channel called Jer Pro and he sort of hung off the pinball for a while to focus on his Sonic stories, world records and other video game accomplishments he holds right now. But the two of us plus some of the other people in the local community held a tournament. And it was great. We met a bunch of people who were like, oh, you know, pinball, I haven't played pinball since the 90s. And that's kind of the common story you were hearing back then. It was, oh, I didn't even know there was pinball. I haven't seen it for 20 years. And these things, I think now it's probably, for many of us in this room, we've played pinball long enough that we know, like, yeah, this thing is growing. There's a lot more places, a lot more people putting games on location. There's these models at work. If you're in the bar industry to have pinball there, it brings people in. If you're in the family entertainment center, it can also help because, you know, maybe dad wants to play pinball while kids want to play some of the other new games. Even if the new game is really an old game like Space Invaders, but it's blown up on a big size. There's a lot more going on in the pinball and just gaming industry in general and coin-op. Following my first dive into pinball, I got the opportunity to visit the PAPA facility. Unfortunately, now the PAPA facility is not open, but they do run the ReplayFX show and pinball tournament every year. This place, if you've never been, was awesome. Four hundred amazing condition, perfect working pinball machines. Competitors from around the world would come flying in every year to compete for like a $7,000 top prize. And there's tons of videos from the PAPA facility as well. There's different tutorial videos, different gameplay videos. This stuff was what really hooked me when I first started playing pinball into, okay, this is what pinball could be. This could be this really cool, high-skill game, you know, just like any other sport. So I was really interested, and I just happened to be in Pittsburgh, on this week of August. I lived in the Philly area, not the Pittsburgh area. And I was just meeting some friends from a previous hobby I was involved with. We all kind of met up in Pittsburgh. It was the closest area between the East Coast and the Midwest where all of us could meet. And we knew one guy there. And I'm like, hey guys, there's this pinball thing. It's like every game is like 50 cents. You know what, come check it out. And then we spent like three days there in a row just playing all these pinball machines. and I tried to qualify for the C division in that tournament and I came in something like 90th place. So once again, I was not good at pinball for a really long time.
    16:35
    As I met more people in pinball and I started to get a little more ambitious with it, I first decided to fly out to a pinball tournament. I finally thought in 2015, October 2015, like I think I'm good enough to fly to a tournament and compete and that I won't completely lose all my money. So I flew out to the Expo tournament in the Chicago area with my friend Greg Pavarelli, who's playing in the tournament right now. He was too busy to come to this seminar and see me.
    17:05
    And the two of us, we competed in the tournament, and we did all right. I think I came up in, like, 36th place, but that was the first time I ever competed head-to-head with some of the best players, like Keith Ellin, Zach Schar, and Lyman Sheets, all of whom are now my coworkers, so it was nice to be able to meet some of those really high-level players, who have been around pinball for a really long time because they have so much knowledge and so much passion for the game and they're really eager and enthusiastic to share it. And there is a really big difference between competing in the different types of tournaments there are. The small tournaments that I was playing on a monthly basis at the pinball gallery were not like this 150 player tournament in Chicago where you've just got a super high level of competition, you've got 20 hours to qualify and people are using all 20 of those hours to stand in line and wait. It's really a different level of passion at these high level tournaments. And my advice would be, if anyone plays in those small time tournaments and is worried about the big tournaments, the one you should go to before you put it off is Pinbird. It's a thousand player match play competition and every single person who goes to that tournament goes, this is the most fun thing ever. I want to do this again for the rest of my life. And sometimes people can, sometimes people can't. But there's a really dedicated tournament there. You're playing 40 different games, lots of different people there. You'll meet a lot of friends. You'll see them next year, you'll see them the year after that. That's the best experience. And that'll get you into like, what the big competitive pinball scene's all about and why it's so addicting for people to go spend $1,000 to fly somewhere for a weekend and play pinball for the whole entire weekend and not do anything else.
    18:52
    Eventually, as I continued to practice, continued to compete, I started to have some real success in tournaments. Here I am, this is the first circuit event I ever won. This is the Flippers OBX tournament. I believe it's also a Stern Pro Circuit event this year. It usually takes place in early November when there's not a lot of people renting beach houses. You can get a really nice deal on a beach house and play in an awesome pinball tournament. That's my recommendation for this tournament. I'm playing with some very strong competitors here, like Steve Bowden, Jason Werdrick, Levi Neyman, Alexander Kashmarsky, Trent Augenstein, and this was a really strong field, and this was my first big victory, so this probably helped for the future for me to get some more credibility and recognition as my pinball rank was improving, that I kind of knew what I was doing, and I knew a lot about pinball, which has helped me now to get the job here at Stern. So, in addition to all the competition stuff, I also started making some tutorial videos. I'll play this one now. Multiplier is about to expire, I believe. Oh, no, it's team. No, my god, dude! I never seen that one get jammed. Put that. So, bought some camera equipment to start streaming pinball. We were there with Steve Keeler at Rock Fantasy. Steph was there with me playing the brand new Star Wars game two years ago. Pintastic actually had one of the first Star Wars games. It was the first time I ever played it here at this show two years ago. And so the streaming thing was just sort of another opportunity to share what I had learned and to have a lot more fun with a different format of playing pinball where you could share it with other people online, try to bring some more people into it, to it and just get some, you know, recordings of all your footage so you can practice and learn from that. All in all, to buy the streaming equipment for me was about $300 for all the cameras and equipment and other stands and everything and the USB stuff I hooked up. If you guys know Jack Danger of Dead Flip, he's got a great resource on his page of what to buy to get into streaming. If you have the computer for it, that's the biggest expense, then you probably would be surprised by how little additional expense it is to actually start pinball streaming. And this community of pinball streamers has grown very significantly to the point where you can pretty much turn on Twitch at any time of day and watch someone playing pinball. The list of streaming channels right now is really huge. And this really does have a big impact on helping grow pinball. Anywhere there's exposure, any time someone could just happen to stumble upon pinball. They might have that same experience. Oh my God, there's a cat out there. I haven't seen it 20 years ago, haven't thought about it much, but here it is back, where is this place? Middletown, New York, oh, I could go up there and maybe they'll come to your favorite pinball arcade and meet you.
    21:58
    And in addition to this stuff, I was also on the different podcasts. Those are very popular as well. All the pinball media really does help promote pinball throughout the year. We make pinball machines at Stern and you know, that making pinball machines is necessary for pinball to survive, but it also needs the enthusiasm of people talking about it and people sharing their experiences with pinball to bring even more people into pinball. That's my opinion at least.
    22:32
    Sorry about this. Okay. So one major event that got a lot of exposure for pinball that I participated in in early 2017 was the Awesome Games Done Quick charity event. This charity event is a seven day long speed running showcase where the people who can beat video games the fastest all come together to show off their skills and how fast they are. As part of this event, we were the official side stream of the event called Pinball Done Quick, which meant for that same seven days, we would come up with ways to beat pinball machines the fastest. And when we got bored of that, then we'd keep playing pinball machines because all the awesome games that Quick Event has, 150 different people playing in it, we only had seven or eight of us. So it's always good to have more people here because Austin and I at the night shift would see just how much we could blow up a game like Star Trek. So I'll play this video here. Let's go. See, he's doing the strategy I was, like, picking on him about the whole week. He got to warp 9.1, which doubles his score, doubles the play feel for a certain period of time.
    23:44
    Look at all this. Whoa! Clip that. That needs to be highlighted. Clip it. I passed him in one shot.
    23:57
    Look at this, man. This is like the replay. So this event was a lot of fun. All in all, this event raised over $2 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. So this was really awesome thing to be part of, awesome way to expose pinball to tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people who were coming in the chat all week going, oh, pinball, that's pretty cool. Where can I play pinball? And we'd engage with them on the chat and they'd go, oh, that's great, that's awesome. So exposing pinball to people, it's still very necessary, but it's really rewarding to do so in any capacity. So a big shout out to anyone who helps doing that, either by running a location or doing a pinball podcast, doing a pinball stream, every part of that really does help our whole hobby grow even more and more and bring more great people in. And you might get noticed and be able to join the industry or even develop your own custom game. All that stuff's really great and helps the whole entire pinball community.
    25:06
    After this, oh this is okay, but I started making some YouTube videos as well to also help people with some of the more basics like the tutorials and everything. This is still an area I think other people could get into as well. I brought this really nice DSLR camera to get some of you. Hey guys, I'm Tim Ballas, and today I'm going to be doing a comprehensive overview on how to aim correctly in pinball. There's a lot of tutorials about how to aim, but they pretty much only cover the basics. You shoot the ball earlier on the flipper you shoot the shot earlier or a backhand You shoot later on the flipper you shoot later or a forehand but i going to use some key concepts here to help you improve your aim so yeah just more pinball media this is all like really good exposure for pinball that my point i probably made this point enough so i'm going to move on are there any questions so far I really like it. Well, I have a random question.
    26:10
    Are you going to trade shows on behalf of Stern, and how do you like that? I have gone to a few trade shows on behalf of Stern, not as many as my colleague Steve here, but we do go to the Midwest Gaming Classic show in Milwaukee. That's an easy drive for us. It's an hour and a half away. and Chicago Expo and things like that. But so for the general coin op trade shows, I have not been to any of those yet. But some of the other- We're not really invited. They used to be invited, you know, but they don't invite us anymore. It's a salesman thing. Yeah, Steve knows better than us. We do have a big sales team at Stern and they often go to all these shows and they're all always trying to make deals with licensing, with other partners that can help us. They make deals with private label guys Supreme and everything. So they're doing all that fun stuff. We get locked in a box until the Make a Pinball Machine Network, but no, it's fine. So February 2017, this is when it was announced that I started working at Stern. And I wanted to point out here, this is our shout out to the Stern of the Union announcement. We recently staffed up a lot in software. There's two other full-time guys joined the company in 2016. Rick Nagle, who you may know as the lead software developer on Iron Maiden. And he's also helped with the monsters in a support role, and he's doing other stuff now at work. And also Brett Rubin, who I've worked with on three games in a row now. And he brought a lot of experience from the game industry himself into these different aspects that we were lacking. And he's worked with me on Iron Maiden, Deadpool, and also Black Knight. and it's been a treat to work with him. In total, all the software developers who worked on Black Knight, that'd be myself, Corey's stuff, Wason Chang, Brent Rubin, Mark Bittarelli, Lyman Sheets helped a bit on getting some of the first white wood stuff set up for me and also assisting throughout the project. And also Tanya Klyce helps. So we've got like seven guys in the office and everyone's willing to share information. So it's been really nice at CERN that we've been able to staff up. You've recently seen releases of code, like there was more Guardians code, then there was KISS code and Aerosmith code. We've gotten a lot more time to bring some of these games up and we will get caught up with all the games that you guys want us to get caught up on very soon. And we'll be bringing all sorts of new things into our new games. So our software is, in general, has gotten a lot more comfortable. We've got more teams, more extensions. So it's been very good there. And so the process of getting the job at Stern, I'll go back to that. So in November, 2016, I was playing at the 24 hour battle tournament at the Sanctum in Connecticut, their open Mondays, that location. And Zach Sharp was there. Zach Sharp had recently been hired as the director of marketing at Stern Pinball. He was also a top ranked pinball player. And we were talking, we were playing in a group. There was some downtime and I was like, yeah, you know, I'm probably gonna start looking for a new job, see what other opportunities are out there. I was at IBM and Poughkeepsie, and I wasn't sure if Poughkeepsie was really the home for me for the long term. And he goes, oh, that's interesting. What do you do? And I said, oh, I'm a software developer. He's like, oh, okay, that's cool. And that was it. I didn't think anything of it. But it just so happened that George Gomez, who is my boss and Steve's boss, had just put out the message that Stern Pinball is looking for some young people to get on board to help out.
    29:57
    He's like, if you know anyone who might be passionate, enthusiastic, willing to move to Chicago, and wants to work as a software developer in pinball, let me know. So then a week or two goes by, and Zach says, hey, do you have a resume or anything you can send over this way? I said, yeah, I can get one to you. What do you need it? You wanted this after? He was like, yeah, sure, that's fine. So I got my resume all polished up, added a bunch more of the pinball stuff I had worked on, and I sent it over to Zach. And about a week later, I got an email from Stern, and they said they wanted to have a phone interview with me. So I had a phone interview with Dwight Sullivan and Mark Vitarelli, our systems guy, Tanya Klaes, Mark Wehna, our executive producer. I didn't really know many of these guys at the time, but now I work with them every day. And they just asked me a few questions about pinball, what I thought was fun, what I didn't think was fun. They asked me, what do you not like about a recent Spirit Kid ball game? Which was a pretty tough question to ask, but I answered it. And they said, okay, that's great. Would you be able to come out to Chicago for an interview? So I said, yeah, sure. And I flew out to Chicago for an interview a couple weeks after that. And George Gomez met me, he brought me through the factory, and he said, we're gonna talk to you, we're gonna talk to some other software guys, to see how they like you and the team and see what's going on. So I had a long interview with Mark Guidarelli, long interview with Tanya Fleiss. I had interviews with Steve Ritchie, Keith Elwin, Lani Roth, Lyman Sheets, Dwight Sullivan.
    31:28
    Said hello to me, but he said he was so busy working with Star Wars at the time that he moved back and he was working on Star Wars. So yeah, question? What was your answer to that question? Which question? What is the shot that you didn't like? Oh, what was- that you didn't like on the game? I said I didn't like on Aerosmith how, once the modes are over, you don't really get anything special from beating them. They just sort of end. And I suggested putting some sort of scoop award out there to give you an extra incentive to collect the mode faster. That was my answer. And the process was very long. It took the entire day. I showed up wearing a suit. Steve said I looked like a dork. And... Not necessary. Yeah, it was unnecessary. But I was very excited. And at the end of the day, they decided to give me the job offer to come in as an entry-level or a mid-level software engineer to support some of the existing games. And I said, you know, I want to be a lead software developer. I think I've got a lot of familiarity with Pinball. I know a lot about it. And they said, well, we'll see. We'll see. So moving forward, here's a little Easter egg. I contacted the Stern Facebook page in 2014 to see if they would hire me. Again, very eager. And I got a response to email George Gomez, who did not reply to the email. I heard nothing. Trying to get him 2015, also nothing. There's a bunch of lies, that's why. There's no lies. You lied on your resume.
    33:03
    No, I just blew you off. Yeah, it's fine. Stern's been doing a lot better recently. At the end of the year, you've seen 25% growth over the year. When the business does better, what I've learned is we're able to bring more people in, get more people making games, get the game's quality better at its win. We have more people buying the games, more sources of revenue in the company, and the company's able to reinvest and bring in people. I think that's why everyone should be optimistic about the future of Pinball now is that we are reinvesting in the future at Stern with people like myself, Keith Owen, and other people we haven't hired yet who will eventually carry the company to its next level. So I moved to Chicago and this is what it looks like. Just kidding, this is what it looks like. It's a frozen 25 below zero temperatures. I don't know what's going on with that city, but it's cold.
    34:07
    But living there has been great. It's been a comfortable commute for me. I live in the city. I commute to Elk Grove Village, where the Stern facility is. Highly recommend to everyone, if you can, to go visit the Stern Pinball Factory. If you want to contact Zach Sharp, zach.sharp at sternpinball.com. If you happen to be in the area, he can set up a tour with you. And it's really awesome to see, you know, The 350 people we have working at Stern every day, and this 110,000 square foot facility putting these games together, and how much work goes into it. And we really appreciate everyone at Stern, at least from our side of the design, everyone working on the live, some of those people have been there a long, long time. Their expertise and their skill to get all those games made is great.
    34:56
    So a brief overview of what I've done at Stern. I started working on Iron Maiden as a support guy, and they tossed me a few light shows and some speech integration to throw in. It was something to get me up to speed.
    35:10
    Throughout this time, I was talking with Keith Elwin Moore. Keith's a quiet guy. I hadn't talked to him too much outside of working at Stern, but he's very knowledgeable at pinball, and he does the rules to his own games.
    35:22
    We talked about, he was like, it would be nice if this happened, and I was like, maybe I can figure that out. I would ask Rick, the lead programmer, he might have to give this a shot. He was like, yeah, sure, if you want to do that, put it in. Let me know if you want me to review the code. And so I was able to put a few rules in, a few other stuff. And I was doing well, and the project was in great shape. And the next project coming up was Deadpool. And Tanya placed it in the driver's seat of Deadpool. And that had a much longer way to go until release, which means there's more work to do. And so Tanya and I had talked at work too, and he's like, you want to come on board on Deadpool? And I was like, yeah, sure. What are you thinking about the rules? He's like, I kind of got this general overview, but I need someone to help me with it. And so Tanya and I worked together very well on that project to drill it out into the different rule sets and the different paths in that game. And I had helped implement parts of those, like the team up system and some of the major battle modes. And we worked with another guy to develop this whole fighting engine in the game. We were communicating between the rules on the shots to trigger the fighting game events. It was really a fun project to work on. A lot of stuff hooked up in there. That game recently, I heard really great things about it. And Tonya's been working hard on it to get the code to 1.0 and put everything he wanted in the game. And so they're out here today. There's a beautiful premium in the vendor area if you want to check that game out. The game was awesome, a lot of fun to work on. And during this project, Steve was working away on Black Knight and he was looking for a lead software guy because he worked with Dwight on the past few games and Dwight was working on Munsters and the timeframe worked out that he needed someone else. And so Steve said, I'll give the kid a shot.
    37:13
    I think, do you regret that decision, Steve? You were forced on me. I was forced on you. No, he wasn't. I picked him. He's got a lot of energy. He's done a great job on Black Knight. like a style and he listens to me sometimes.
    37:31
    Yeah, so we worked on Black Knight Sword of Rage and this is what it was. It starts with just the title. It was just, we're gonna make another Black Knight game. And Steve had a lot of work put into it on all those different ideas and different mechs he wanted in the game and different shots. And I joined on board and we talked about what we were doing. We talked with our artist, Kevin O'Connor about what he had created for the game And we started working on it. Your question? Yeah, how do you go about choosing which game will be chosen for a production run? Like which title? Yeah, like which concept you're going to go with. That's a very involved process. It involves pretty much everyone in development. For the most part, we're working on licensed games. So we need the relationships with the licensors. And then from those games, the design team has input on what games they would like to make. Our sales teams have input on what games they think would be the biggest hits And they would work the best in their schedule And so we all come up with what we all think is the best And then projects eventually get chosen as a whole effort between George, our guys, our executive team. And then we work them out in the schedule. And that's how we decide what games we're working on next. So it could be any number of things that go into it, timing-wise. And when you do that, do you actually have a production run in mind, how many you're going to actually create for something like that? Because I'm sure it varies from one project to another. So with our extern, we will build as many games as there's demand for. And so at Stern Pinball, we've made vault editions of games, which are games that have ended their production run. And we renew our licensing agreement, and we make a new set of games because the demand's so high for those games. So we don't target fixed numbers. We'll anticipate certain amounts of game sales based on everything going into it. But we always will make games when there's demand for them. We'll keep making those if we can. Thank you. More questions? Yeah, actually, because it actually ties into the first question. You mentioned how everything so far has been always a license. Everything's always tied into something. And even Black Knight, I guess, technically was a license because you guys had to work that out with William, whoever owns the Williams rights now. Do you ever see a time when Stern might actually come up with an original, like back in the old days where they'll let a guy like Steve where she put an idea, an original idea out, or does it have to be tied in? Oh, we have done this recently with Woe Nelly. That was a completely original property there. It was based on classic design, but it was a completely different thing. And we always talk about what's the best thing to do because our goal is to get pinball in front of the most people, sell the most games, get people the happiest with the games. The possibility of doing the original game is obvious there. It's just a question of is the demand there? Because even in our previous seminar, we saw really licensed games that people were working with, because that's sort of become what people expect in pinball now, is you work with a license and a concept. I think for that reason, there's so many strong licenses out there, we're going to default to those. But it doesn't mean we can't do something like a World Rally. or even this was a license game so I'm not going to say it wasn't even less popular licenses or something like that. It's always possible. The business about this being a license, this is a license with, it's from a good friend. It's from Matt Cristiano and Rick Hartley and they trust us to make a good game and I'm gonna, you know, we are gonna. gonna and it's like this is the closest thing I could get to an original theme and how it should be acceptable to management and so this is this is where it's at and we try to choose licenses I mean we do it scientifically if I'm gonna be working on a game I have to love it that's the first thing we have learned already a long time ago the designers working on a game that he doesn't love it's not going to be everything it could be that's the first The second thing is science. You look at popularity of songs. If you want to do a band or just movies or anything you want to do, I'm sorry. I don't want to steal your time. But I just want to tell people what we go through to get that license. A lot of it is political, but not always. And it's like if you've got the goods on a good title that you really believe would be popular to 70% or 80% And if you look at ACDC, ACDC has listeners from seven years old on their little cell phones and iPods, all the way up to guys my age and older, okay, in their 70s. That's a big old demographic. They almost can't live. And with their record sales, we chose the ones that sold the most. And also, that was a great license because we didn't get, the guy said, do what you want. Don't mention Von Scott. That's it. Okay.
    43:00
    And we did. Yeah, I was just going to say, from a player's standpoint, if it's a fun game, it doesn't really matter if there's a license or not. And if the license winds up getting more casual people to play it, so much the better. It is true, but management prefers licenses because they tend to attract people. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Just for the reason of, oh, now it's the man for Lunkle. Oh, I love that show. I have to have it. That's not a good example.
    43:33
    All right, I'm going to stop interrupting Tim's seminar. All right, thanks, Steve. Thank you. So I think I'm low on time here. Are you going to cut me off in a few minutes? Or do I have a little more time? A little more time. Okay. Let's go. So I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the unseen stuff really quickly on Black Knight. So this is something no one's seen before. These are some of the concept art paintings for two of the monsters in Black Knight. These were done by a member of our graphics team named Deny, Kenny Mathana. He prefers to just go by Deny. And he just paints in black and white here these different monster concepts, and he puts them in front of us to talk about which ones are going to go in the game. And so on the left you have the Hydra heads, the individual Hydra heads in the water, And then you have the different versions that could have been the rock monster. All of these could have been characters in the game, but we had to focus on just one. And once we did, we got the characteristics, the ones we wanted.
    44:38
    We got some storyboards of them in the game here. So this is some of the rock monsters, or the fire elementals attacks in the game. We called them the Magma Beasts, that's what it was. And we had another artist, Josh Clay, who was the lead motion graphics artist in the game, put together these storyboards.
    44:58
    And this eventually became a 3D animation. Danai built up all these guys in 3D, painted really nice with reference to scale and everything. And this was a really good overview of what's the vibe of this game. This wound up being some of the stuff I sent to Scott Ian, who wound up doing the music on the game, along with Brendan Small. Because they're like, okay, this is the level, it's called the fire level. And he's like, well, what's in the fire level? I'm like, this guy. He's like, okay, I can make a song about this guy. So that was sort of how the process went for us. And while we had these concepts, it got everyone on the art team familiar with what the look of the characters would be. Now with all the characters that Kevin O'Connor created, like the Black Knight, like all the skeletons, skeletons. We also took those guys as the concept art, even though it was the finish art, and we put it in the game. Yes. I was just wondering how, like, who chose Scott Ian? Was Scott Ian, like, is he a pinball enthusiast or a friend from Jet Clock, right? Right. And, like, how were they involved? Because there were, you know, all the internet rumors. First, it was, like, Kerry King was doing the guitar work, and then was this a... I was just wondering how Scott Ian became involved. I'm Scott Ian and I play in Anthrax and I play in The Damn Things. I play in Motor Sister, I play in S.O.D., I play with Pearl. I play lots of guitars.
    46:24
    I am the Black Knight. Ah! A good friend of mine who works at Stern Pinball thought it would be a cool idea to have a super metal soundtrack. for the new Black Knight machine. I got the email asking if I would want to be involved. And as a lover of pinball, I thought it would be a great crossover, playing pinball with thrash metal behind it. It just sounded like a lot of fun to me. My inspiration for the music was the Black Knight. It was the character. Stern would send me over photographs and little videos of what they were doing with the machine and the artwork. And I just kind of started imagining this Black Knight character and the different situations he gets himself into throughout the course of the game. And that was the inspiration. Some of the creatures like the sandworms or the hell hand or it was all that kind of stuff that inspired the actual riffs. My favorite track is the one that comes to mind first is March of the Sandworm because it's just it's so huge. it sounds like these leviathan type creatures oh man i can love the fight can i swear i love the final product look at this thing it's so badass the attitude of the game and the attitude of the music go hand in hand i've always been a pinball guy over a video game guy i've never been a video game guy at all it's always been about pinball for me it's just something that's been a part of my life for so long black knight kicks ass it's uh it is a it is a very aggressive intense game So on Black Knight, Steve had done the music with Dan Fornan and Brian Schmidt on Black Knight 2000. They created some awesome music. And we were looking for someone who was available. Only Steve was available, because the two guys weren't available. We wanted someone to bring the soundtrack up. And our director of licensing, Jody Dankberg, said he knew someone. And he said, if you think you would use Scott Yeh from Anthrax, he's a huge pinball enthusiast, Brandon Small as well as a pinball enthusiast that he's worked with us before on other games. And he said, yeah, sure, I think so. And we gave him a call, Joey and myself, when he was in Arkansas playing on this tour with Slayer and all these other bands. And we said, do you have any free time available? He said, I should be free in about January or February. Can you not get a whole game soundtrack in that time He's like, yeah, I think so. So it was a really long wait for us. But then he got back from his tour, and one day he submitted his version, the new version of the Black Knight 2000 main theme. And we all listened to it in the office. That was probably one of the best days I've ever had at Sturdy Pitbull. It's just like, this is right for the game. This is awesome. And the vibe solidified too, with what we were doing on the art side. You know, all the fire and the burning castle and all the brutality and the heavy metal. It's a very heavy metal pinball machine. It is. And I mean, you just put out Iron Maiden last year. I was like, this is the most metal game. But wait a minute, you did Iron Maiden too. But they're both great.
    49:40
    Other games are namby-pamby. Yeah. All right. So wrapping it up here, some 3D concepts of skeletons.
    49:51
    Steve created all these skeletons with their different goofy names. It was Mason, Spirit, Bernie, which is the Ed Robertson character. Edgy, and Butcher. Those are the five skeletons up there. They have some small roles in the games and a little bit of speech.
    50:09
    I'll show you just two videos real quick of one other thing we do on the art team. This is what we call an animatic. This takes our storyboards and turns it into something we can stub in the game to check out timings and everything. Here's the black and white replay animatic. It's no sound, sorry. The sound's separate.
    50:32
    So that's how we get the timing and kind of like, this is what we're going to make in 3D for the game. And then from there I go like, oh, it's two seconds too long. And they go, really? I go, yeah. So let me chop it down two seconds and we make our final version.
    50:49
    So that's some behind the scenes of the development process of the LCD games and what we do for those.
    50:55
    That's all I have actually. Are there any other questions before I get kicked out? You'll be back. I'll be back. Tomorrow. Yes, I will. With Steve.
    51:14
    Alright, thank you everyone. you