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BDYETP 88: Avatar vs. X-Men | Interview with Josh Kugler of AP/Multimorphic

Bro, Do you Even Talk Pinball·podcast_episode·2h 19m·analyzed·Sep 15, 2024
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.035

TL;DR

Josh Kugler on AP's early games, design philosophy, and licensing strategy from homebrew to commercial pinball.

Summary

Josh Kugler, formerly of American Pinball and currently at Multimorphic, discusses his career trajectory from homebrew pinball to commercial game design. He details the rapid development of Houdini (AP's debut, 4 months from concept to prototype), the challenges of Hot Wheels licensing and COVID-impacted launch, and American Pinball's strategic pivot toward licensed themes to improve market appeal. The conversation covers design philosophy emphasizing balance between casual and competitive players, the Oktoberfest art direction misstep, and industry dynamics around theme selection and licensing costs.

Key Claims

  • Houdini went from concept to first prototype in approximately four months

    high confidence · Josh Kugler describing AP's first game development timeline: 'We did our first prototypes in about four months.'

  • Houdini is still by far the biggest seller among AP's three early games (Houdini, Oktoberfest, Hot Wheels)

    high confidence · Josh Kugler directly stating: 'I think Houdini is still by far the biggest seller. Oh, okay. In the AP games.'

  • Hot Wheels had a major COVID-impacted launch with a planned Texas reveal featuring two full life-size Hot Wheels cars that never happened

    high confidence · Josh Kugler: 'We were supposed to roll it out at Texas. COVID hit. We actually had a huge space plan for Texas. We were bringing in two of the full life-size Hot Wheels cars.'

  • The Houdini catapult/trunk mech was not fully tested before production—only wired with a power supply, and the first live test succeeded

    high confidence · Josh describing early testing: 'It was never fully assembled. It was never flipped. We put a few parts on to test some things, including the catapult. And I actually have a video clip someplace that I'll have to dig up of the first time we fired it.'

  • Hot Wheels required six different animators to create approximately 50% of the game's animations

    high confidence · Josh Kugler: 'still about 50% of the animations in the game were done by animators. We had six different animators work on that game.'

  • American Pinball decided to pursue licensed themes after Oktoberfest due to market resistance to unlicensed themes

    high confidence · Josh: 'The company was resistant to getting a license. Those licenses cost money. But we were pushing pretty hard on that because it was pretty clear we needed them. And we had slowly been wearing them down.'

  • Joe Balser pushed out John Papadiuk from Houdini design early in AP's history

    medium confidence · Josh explaining AP's founding dynamics: 'Joe had kind of pushed him off and had taken over Houdini... John's got all these things he's got to change, he's got to fix, and ultimately Joe basically pushed John out and took over on Houdini.'

Notable Quotes

  • “It was pretty incredible. So, like I said, I've been around pinball for 50 years I've been playing. It's a scary number to put out there.”

    Josh Kugler @ early in interview — Establishes his deep personal history with pinball as foundational to his design philosophy

  • “the designer doesn't necessarily, isn't necessarily the creative director for the game. He's necessarily the vision for the game. In the case of Joe, Joe likes to draw layouts and do play fields. He doesn't go beyond that.”

    Josh Kugler @ Houdini development section — Reveals key insight into American Pinball's design structure and Joe Balser's role specialization

  • “Balance. To me, that's the most important word in pinball. It's the most important word in life, really, is finding balance in your life.”

    Josh Kugler @ discussing Hot Wheels game balance — Core design philosophy articulation—balance between novice, enthusiast, and competitive play

  • “It would be nice if they would send me the residuals they owe me. That would be really nice. David Fitch, if you're watching, I've been asking you guys for help. Please pay me the residuals you owe me.”

    Josh Kugler @ Hot Wheels discussion — Public call-out of potential payment dispute with American Pinball leadership regarding royalties

  • “The company was resistant to getting a license. Those licenses cost money. But we were pushing pretty hard on that because it was pretty clear we needed them. And we had slowly been wearing them down.”

    Josh Kugler @ American Pinball licensing strategy — Reveals internal tensions at AP around financial investment in licensed IP as growth strategy

  • “Making sure it was actually true to Houdini and just not a magic-themed pin... the secret missions and those things are actually the monkey with the bandage where his testicles are. All that is real Houdini stuff.”

    Josh Kugler @ Houdini design authenticity — Shows commitment to historical accuracy in licensed/historical theme design

  • “Oktoberfest is not a game that's got a curve all the way to the right. It's got a curve that's maybe in the middle, maybe a little bit to the left, and that's a much higher bargain to get the sales.”

Entities

Josh KuglerpersonAmerican PinballcompanyMultimorphiccompanyJoe BalserpersonJohn PapadiukpersonRoger Sharpperson

Signals

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Josh Kugler transition from American Pinball to Multimorphic represents talent flow between manufacturers. His departure from AP appears voluntary and his current role at Multimorphic suggests company is building software/rules expertise.

    high · Podcast intro: 'Josh Kugler, formerly of American Pinball, currently of Multimorphic' and his current work on Princess Bride and other titles.

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Josh articulates 'balance' as central design principle—balancing needs of novice, enthusiast, and competitive players. Hot Wheels positioned as best execution of this philosophy at AP.

    high · Josh: 'To me, that's the most important word in pinball. It's the most important word in life, really, is finding balance in your life. But finding balance in pinball is really important.'

  • ?

    business_signal: American Pinball shifted from unlicensed themes (Houdini, Oktoberfest) to licensed themes (Hot Wheels) as strategic pivot to improve market appeal. Internal resistance to licensing costs gradually worn down by design team.

    high · Josh: 'The company was resistant to getting a license. Those licenses cost money. But we were pushing pretty hard on that because it was pretty clear we needed them. And we had slowly been wearing them down.'

  • ?

    product_concern: Oktoberfest suffered from unclear art direction concept ('Oktoberfest meets Mad Magazine meets Heavy Metal') that was abandoned mid-production. Post-reveal character redesigns (Inga) required to improve market perception.

    high · Josh describing the failed creative direction and subsequent art fixes: 'The original idea that Joe had was he wanted Oktoberfest meets Mad Magazine meets Heavy Metal. It's too many meetings... we ended up kind of with this disparate thing.'

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.420

0:00
All right, coming up on this episode of Bro, Do You Even Talk Pinball, we've got Josh Kuhler of Multimorphic and formerly American Pinball. We've got two new games that just got released. We've got Avatar and X-Men. We're going to talk about all that and more coming right up. Double Super Jackpot!
0:30
I need a roof I want a party I need a school I need a job I need my wife That's right And now, the Hall & Oates of Pinball Podcasting, Nick Lane and Kevin Manning of Buffalo Pinball. Whoop-boom-shakalaka!
0:59
Good morning. afternoon, evening, whatever time it is. It's Saturday, September 14th. This is Brody, Even Talk Pinball, episode 88. I'm Kevin. That's Nick. Nick, what's going on? What's going on, everybody? Happy to be here talking pinball. A lot of exciting things this week with two new pinball releases. So a lot to talk about, plus an interview. I'm pretty excited. Where would you rather be on a beautiful 80-degree September day in Buffalo, New York, than doing a podcast? You know what I mean? I'd rather be outside. Oh.
1:32
But you don't want an honest answer. Okay. This is the second best. The second best. I spent the morning outside watching my son, you know, draw in a soccer game at least. So, yeah, double overtime soccer game. It was pretty fun. I'm going outside later. It's all good. We have outside plans. But before that, let's thank our partners. Nick Lane, take it away. I can do that. So we've got pins. Let's start with the Premier Partners, the biggest supporters of the stream. We've got Penn Stadium Lights, Premier Partner for years and years, selling their lighting kits for pinball machines for inexplicably reasons. Even though we have more LEDs than ever in pinball machines, they are almost darker than ever. So pick up on Penn Stadium, especially the Neo Atom low-profile ones. I highly recommend. They use coupon code BUFFALO. You save 10%. We've got the other Premier Partner, Flip and Out Pinball. If you're looking to buy a pinball machine, either used or new, head over to FlipNOutPinball.com. Zach Menne will take care of you. Best service in the industry, hands down. We've got other partners that we want to thank. We've got Comet Pinball for your LED lighting needs. Titan Pinball for silicone rings. Pinball Life, a newer sponsor. They're actually doing the giveaway this month. We'll talk about that in a minute.

  • Oktoberfest's original art concept was 'Oktoberfest meets Mad Magazine meets Heavy Metal,' which caused creative direction problems

    high confidence · Josh describing the failed art direction: 'The original idea that Joe had was he wanted Oktoberfest meets Mad Magazine meets Heavy Metal. It's too many meetings.'

    • Kevin Manning (host, paraphrasing theme demand curve concept) @ Oktoberfest theme discussion — Industry framework for understanding theme appeal breadth and market difficulty

  • “It is my least favorite art package of the games I've been involved in by far. And what I find interesting is I'm actually, I'm not, I know other people who feel otherwise, who love the art package. I really question their artistic sense.”

    Josh Kugler @ Oktoberfest art critique — Shows designer's dissatisfaction with final art direction—candid criticism of Jeff Bush's execution on Oktoberfest

    • Houdini
    game
    Hot Wheelsgame
    Oktoberfestgame
    Princess Bridegame
    Legends of Alhawagame
    Jeff Bushperson
    Jim Thorntonperson
    David Fitchperson
    Scott Gulickperson
    Scott Deniseperson
    Kugler Family Pinballgame
    Eric Pripkeperson
    Mark Seidenperson
    Nick Laneperson
    Kevin Manningperson
    P-Rockproduct
    Mattelcompany
    ?

    industry_signal: Kevin Manning articulates theme appeal as a bell curve distribution—some themes have broad appeal, others (like Oktoberfest) have narrower appeal requiring exceptional gameplay to sell. Suggests industry-wide understanding of theme-dependent sales difficulty.

    high · Kevin's discussion of theme demand curve showing Oktoberfest positioned in middle-to-left, requiring higher play quality to overcome narrow appeal.

  • ?

    manufacturing_signal: Houdini went from concept to first prototype in ~4 months (November to March launch at Texas expo). Achieved through Joe Balser's industry relationships enabling rapid supplier access and part acquisition.

    high · Josh: 'We did our first prototypes in about four months... And a lot of it comes down to relationships. You know, Joe knew everybody. When it came to suppliers and vendors, he was just great.'

  • ?

    design_innovation: Houdini's trunk/catapult mechanism represents clever mechanical innovation—trunk opens AFTER ball is launched (not before) to improve accuracy and visual effect. Minimal pre-production testing (fired with just power supply).

    high · Josh: 'the very first one went right in... We actually don't even open the trunk until the ball is in the air... opening it after we threw actually made the accuracy even better.'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Josh Kugler publicly called out American Pinball leadership (David Fitch) on podcast for unpaid Hot Wheels residuals. Suggests potential labor/compensation issues at AP or informal agreements not honored.

    medium · Josh: 'It would be nice if they would send me the residuals they owe me. That would be really nice. David Fitch, if you're watching, I've been asking you guys for help. Please pay me the residuals you owe me.'

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Hot Wheels City YouTube series footage was not initially part of Hot Wheels deal but was discovered after licensing negotiation began. Mattel granted master copies of footage, significantly enhancing animation asset pool for game.

    high · Josh: 'Hot Wheels City thing wasn't even on our radar... a couple days later they come back. They go, yeah, we own that. You guys can use that. And they gave us all the master copies of the footage.'

  • ?

    product_launch: Hot Wheels had planned major Texas Pinball Expo reveal with two life-size Hot Wheels display cars. COVID-19 halted production and prevented grand launch. Game continued selling but lost significant market exposure and momentum.

    high · Josh: 'We were supposed to roll it out at Texas. COVID hit. We actually had a huge space plan for Texas. We were bringing in two of the full life-size Hot Wheels cars.'

  • ?

    community_signal: Josh Kugler's story exemplifies homebrew-to-commercial talent pipeline. Mentions second generation of designers (Mark Seiden) now transitioning from homebrew to commercial releases. Homebrew community viewed as vital innovation source.

    high · Josh: 'the homebrew actually allows people working in the industry now... we actually see now a second generation of those guys. Mark Seiden came out of homebrew. Really excited for him that his game has just finally been released.'

    • 2:50
    That's where you go for pinball parts. If you need pinball parts, you go to Pinball Life. You've got Playfield Protectors. That's playfield-protectors.com. I'm actually going to be making a purchase because we've got the private pinball club opening up soon. And they're going to have a bunch of classics games there, so we're going to need to protect it. So Playfield Protectors is where I go. Pinside.com, pinside.com. You can buy games, sell games, list your games for sale. There's a forum. You can rank games, give your opinion on it. I've actually got a game for sale right now. We'll talk about that later. And then Multimorphic, you've got Josh from Multimorphic to talk about their newest game, Princess Bride. Multimorphic maker of the P3. Check it out. Let's talk about our giveaway for this month.
    3:33
    Courtesy of our friends over at Pinball Life, this is the Brightline Synchronized Speaker Lighting System and Kenwood Speaker Upgrade Combo Pack for your Stern Spike II pinball machines. but it's for the spike twos that use the expression lighting system. So if you have a Led Zeppelin, Foo Fighters, Rush, or John Wick,
    3:56
    these are the speaker light kits for you. So, you know, if you have one of these machines, hashtag win in chat.
    4:05
    I'll just show a little bit of it here. What's cool is it, like, syncs up with the – I don't want to get Foo Fightered DMCA, But you can see how it, like, syncs up with the Hot Rails. It's really cool looking. So great value. Expression light, not Hot Rails. Oh, shoot. I said the wrong thing. Expression lighting. Hashtag wrong brand. Yeah. So they look cool. If you're looking for some speeder lights, you got a game with the expression lights, go ahead and grab yourself a set over at pinballlife.com. It's a $149.95 value. One of y'all is going to get a set for free. So thank you to Pinball Life for being our latest partner. U.S. shipping only. Yes. Good point. U.S. shipping only. So if you're international, sorry. Sorry. Just U.S. only this time. So thank you to Pinball Life. All right. Let's get right to our special guest.
    5:01
    You know him. You love him. It's Josh Kugler, formerly of American Pinball, currently of Multimorphic. You know him from such games as Houdini, Oktoberfest, Hot Wheels, most recently The Princess Bride.
    5:14
    Also one he's not listed for on Pinside, but Galactic Tank Force. We're going to talk about that a little bit later as well. Josh, welcome to the podcast. Hey, thanks for having me. So Josh reached out. He's a listener of the show. He said, you know, I've heard you guys talking. It'd be fun to talk about my history at American Pinball. Also, you know, we can come on and talk about some of the things we've been doing with Multimorphic and the difference between working there and working at Multimorphic, all of that fun stuff. So let's get into it. Josh, I know you started out in the homebrew scene, right? I remember a Kugler family pinball machine way back when. And talk to us a little bit about that. Yeah, that's how I got my start. I've been a pinball fan since I was a kid. I actually did my first pinball machine when I was little out of rubber bands and nails. and it had always been a dream to do pinball machines. And I was working in a high-tech company here in Chicago, and one of the guys on my team came in one day to show me the P-Rock. He had found it online, and he said, you should really do a real pinball machine. And the guys all knew I was into pinball because I brought machines to the office. I was trying to get all these young guys hooked on pinball. Hopefully a few of them are out there still playing today. But, you know, I discovered the P-Rock, and, you know, that just opened up the opportunity to be able to do what I always wanted to, which was to create my own pinball machine. The first one I created is called the Kugler Family Pinball. I'm actually looking at it. It's on that side of the room. Because I figured the best way to get my wife to buy into me spending hundreds, actually thousands of dollars and thousands of hours working on something, if it's about our family. So, you know, it was kind of a trick to do that. But I did that game. And in the process of that, you discovered the whole homebrew community. that existed. And it was really relatively small at that time compared to what it is today. It's incredible what's going on in the home group community today. The games that are being made, they make us early guys look bad to some degree, although they make me look bad. That makes some other guys who are okay. Just incredible what people are doing. But you know, that time it was Scott Denise with TNA. Eric Pripke had done Cactus Canyon and continued. The Bride of Pinball 2.0, which was the Dutch pinball guys who went on to do that. Wrath of Olympus was there that first time with my game, which was Scott Gulick's and Riot Pinball, who then did Legends of Alhawa, which I helped make that happen, which I'm very happy about.
    7:44
    And so, yeah, that homebrew actually allows people working in the industry now. And we actually see now a second generation of those guys. Mark Seiden came out of homebrew. Really excited for him that his game has just finally been released. And so that's great that we're continuing to see the homebrew guys. But I did my games, and ultimately that's where American Pinball found me. They were a new company. Joe Balser had been brought on basically to run things instead of John Papaduke. And they needed a software guy. Somebody pointed them in my direction. There really weren't a lot of people around to kind of know that. And they took a chance on me, and I was pretty gutsy on their part considering all I had ever done was a couple of custom games. And that's how I ended up there. So your first game with AP was Houdini, right? So we can take a look at some of the photos while you talk about that. So this was a game, I remember them saying this game went no way, they went like straight to production, right? Like how was that whole process? How did that all come about? It was pretty incredible. So, like I said, I've been around pinball for 50 years I've been playing. It's a scary number to put out there. And, you know, I do these homebrews. So I knew a lot, but I knew walking in the door that I really didn't know a lot about commercial pinball machines and development manufacturing. So I'm like, all right, just teach me, just educate me. At that point, the only person in the company is Joe Balser. You've got John Papaduke, who's back in the factory with two guys building Magikarp. At this point, Joe had kind of pushed him off and had taken over Houdini, and there was me. That was basically all we had when we started. Just the two of us. And he came into the office my first day, and he put up a CAD diagram of Houdini on the wall. It was like his first draft of it. And he's like, okay, there's going to be this stage because Houdini used to do his acts on a stage, and there'll be a target here that's the key target because he always used to hide keys. Like, okay, what else? He's like, I don't know. That's up to you. Go.
    9:47
    And that was sort of my first entry into, you know, the fact that, you know, the designer doesn't necessarily, isn't necessarily the creative director for the game. He's necessarily the vision for the game. In the case of Joe, Joe likes to draw layouts and do play fields. He doesn't go beyond that. And he relies on, you know, his meat to do that and to go make that happen. So then at that point, I spent the next two weeks just learning everything I could about Houdini. and studying that and then starting to put together the rules and starting to get the game up and running while Joe was furiously drawing mechs and all of that stuff. And he then brought in a guy named Joe Thornton, Jim Thornton, rather. Sorry, Jim Thornton, who had been with him at JJP when JDP was starting up. And, you know, Jim helped Joe really start to get things going. And we did our first prototypes in about four months. So when I came in and Joe said, we're going to show this game in Texas in March, and this was the week before Thanksgiving that I came on board, that we're going to show this in March. I thought he was crazy, but I'm like, well, he's Joe Balser. He's been doing this for 30 years. If he says we can do it, we can do it. And it's shocking to this day. And, you know, I talk to people all the time, people in the industry, and they just still can't quite figure out how we were able to do that. And a lot of it comes down to relationships. You know, Joe knew everybody. When it came to suppliers and vendors, he was just great at being able to get people in and get us parts and do things really quick. And it was quite the crazy ride from then until we showed it at TPA.
    11:31
    Yeah, that's amazing. One of the coolest mechs on that is the ball that gets launched back into the trunk, right? Like, did you guys know that was going to work? No, and we really didn't have a plan B. And we actually did. We always thought there was no whitewood. There sort of was a whitewood. It was never fully assembled. It was never flipped. We put a few parts on to test some things, including the catapult. And I actually have a video clip someplace that I'll have to dig up of the first time we fired it. It's not even wired up to the game. We're just with the power supply. We're just going to pulse it with the power supply, and we put it in, and we hit it. And the very first one went right in. and we just, you know, we were ecstatic because it was just like, oh, my God, it worked. And the consistency on it once we worked through some things is shockingly good considering, you know, how hard, you know, how far that ball gets thrown. What a lot of people don't realize is we actually don't even open the trunk until the ball is in the air.
    12:28
    When we originally promoted it, we opened it up first. There's actually a switch to make sure it's open. And I'm like, well, if it's not open, what are we going to do? We're still going to have to throw the ball anyway. So at some point I said, it's a lot cooler, and it's actually improved the accuracy of the catapult, because by not having it up when the catapult's firing, it doesn't impact the power. Oh, interesting. Because you're doing a pulse pattern to hold that up, and so actually opening it after we threw actually made the accuracy even better. But it's kind of cool that the ball goes in the air before it opens up. Yeah. Originally, Joseph's side originally said it was going to open this way, and just have the ball fly through. I'm like, no, no, no, no. You've got to make it look like the real trunk. And he's like, it'll be hard. I said, it's the same opening. And he's like, okay. Yeah.
    13:14
    He went through a few designs. Kevin, the thing that people, like, this is a tough game. Like, the shots are really tight. A lot of shots on it. Do you think that going from, you know, drawings to production, do you think that played into it at all?
    13:32
    I'm not sure. Oh, the fact that it was. The fact that the shots. change that. Joe had the opportunity to change that between Texas and production. We actually did make a few play field changes, and Joe could have made some changes to that. We talked about, I actually pushed on him a little bit to stretch, to bring the flat rail down a little bit to open it up. Joe was very interested. That's how he wanted it. That's how he liked it. And I think, you know, once you get the feel for the shots, you can make those shots. But I think in hindsight side for a new company, it's a very challenging layout where a more user-friendly layout, you know, for beginners and novices, by the way, dice for the first game versus one that, you know, beats you up. It's a game. You got to play a few games on to get warmed up to find the shots, and the shots are in a different place than on a lot of games. So, it's a different, it takes a little bit of an adjustment to find the shots on the game, but that's also typical of Joe Balser games, right? When you look at his games, the layouts are all over the place. They're all kind of different. He does some really quirky things. You look at Simpsons Pinball Party. You know, I remember the first time I played that, everybody's saying, it's the greatest game ever, greatest game ever. And I played it. I'm like, I don't get it. You know, it's okay. You know, the one ramp shot. And once you understood the rules, then it all came together. The pieces all fit. And I think that's very often true with Joe's games, that the layout isn't necessarily going to make you go, wow, I love this layout. It's the layout when you play it and you learn how to use it and work it with the rules in conjunction with that it really opens things up on a lot of his games.
    15:09
    Nice, nice. So from there, you kind of went, you had a few other games at AP. Next was Oktoberfest and then Hot Wheels. It feels like Hot Wheels is probably the biggest hit of the three of those. Would you agree?
    15:22
    Would you attribute that to it being a license? Well, actually, I think Houdini is still by far the biggest seller. Oh, okay. In the AP games. I think Hot Wheels, unfortunately, I didn't think it sold as well as it really could have, and I think it continues to sell because it is a really nice game. It is a much friendlier game relative to just the look of it when you step up to it. The shots are a little bit easier. It is a licensed theme. But in all of the games we've done, we really always strive for balance. To me, that's the most important word in pinball. It's the most important word in life, really, is finding balance in your life. But finding balance in pinball is really important. And balancing the needs of the novice, the enthusiasts, and the competitive players. And I think on Hot Wheels, we really got that balance. The best of the games we did. All of our games have that. But we really focused on making sure that we had really a lot of good stuff there for the novice that they could get to. There's some of that on Houdini, but you get a little frustrated, I think, before you get to that. So there was a lot I really was happy with on that game. And the license was really great. And, unfortunately, the rollout got impacted. We were supposed to roll it out at Texas. COVID hit. We actually had a huge space plan for Texas. We were bringing in two of the full life-size Hot Wheels cars. So we were really excited about that launch. And COVID hit. Production immediately came to a halt. and it really never got that great reveal. So people continue to discover the game. AP continues to sell it. It would be nice if they would send me the residuals they owe me. That would be really nice. David Fitch, if you're watching, I've been asking you guys for help. Please pay me the residuals you owe me.
    17:06
    But, you know, I loved Hot Wheels. One of the things about Hot Wheels was getting to work with Roger Sharp.
    17:12
    Roger Sharp, we had brought him in to do the license, and Roger was very much engaged in the process, kind of going over the rules with us, you know, philosophically talking about things. He was around a lot to play test with us. And that was a real blast working with him on that. And I learned a lot from him in that process as well. But the funny thing is when Roger negotiated the deal for us, he's the guy to go to for that, the Hot Wheels City YouTube series footage that we ended up using extensively in the game wasn't even on our radar. So it was after we started working on the game and we had a bunch of meetings with Mattel and went over stuff and we're going through the materials and there was stuff in there that they called Nemesis.
    17:56
    But it had to do with the creatures. And as we dug into that, it was actually Josh Sharp mentioned to Roger about, have you seen this Hot Wheel City thing? And we went and looked at this video series. And at first we're like, oh, it's kind of campy, it's kind of quirky. And then the more you watch it, the more you really like it. And so we said, Roger, can we use this? And he called up our contact at Mattel, and a couple days later they come back. They go, yeah, we own that. You guys can use that. And they gave us all the master copies of the footage. It was just like, you know, skies open from heaven. It was just going to have all that material to work with. But still about 50% of the animations in the game were done by animators. We had six different animators work on that game. and it goes to show you need a lot of resources on the animation side to do games these days. Josh, a couple questions. I mean, I'm curious to really dig into theme as it relates to American Pinball, especially what's going on now, but since we are talking Hot Wheels, what was the thinking in the early days? You know, Houdini was an original thing, but Houdini is known, and then we do October Festival. There are things that are kind of known in the public domain, and then you guys moved to a licensed theme.
    19:13
    Was that the plan all along? Why do these unlicensed themes in the beginning? Can you talk a little bit about kind of the thinking in the early days of American Pinball? Sure. So the Houdini really came about because of the J-Pop. It was going to do Houdini for AP. I don't know the exact details behind what that agreement was. Some talk was it was in exchange for them helping build Magic Girl, but he was going to be their guy. and start designing games for them, and Joe was going to come in to sort of run the operation. And when Joe came in and he looked at what was going on with John's stuff, he thought, like, John's got all these things he's got to change, he's got to fix, and ultimately Joe basically pushed John out and took over on Houdini. Because he said, this layout doesn't work, the shots go nowhere, John needs to finish Magic Girl, and eventually they parted ways with him. So we sort of inherited Houdini as a theme. I think the biggest difference from what John was working on and stuff was making sure it was actually true to Houdini and just not a magic-themed pin, which if you actually go look at his original Houdini, he had, you know, things on there that had nothing to do with Houdini. And I was very focused on making sure it was true to the mad. So even the stuff in there, like the secret missions and those things are actually the monkey with the bandage where his testicles are. All that is real Houdini stuff. It's not, you know, just made-up or magic stuff. So after Houdini, Joe wanted to do Oktoberfest. This had been his dream theme for, like, 20 years.
    20:45
    I think Striker Extreme was supposed to be Oktoberfest or something, and I might have that wrong. I forget the details. So he really wanted Oktoberfest, and he sort of said, this is what we're doing next. And that's how Oktoberfest got picked, and at that point the company was willing to go along with that. But his feeling was, you know, there's pinballs in every bar in the world, or it should be we'll get this in tons of bars.
    21:08
    So I've heard that before. It seems to be their marketing strategy going forward for every game. I've heard that before, you know. It was funny. I had this conversation one time with Roger about that, about, you know, car dealerships and pinball machines. And people bring that up, and he's like, it's been tried, and the car dealerships absolutely don't want them. The last thing they want is either a noise in the service area, or they don't want the kids distracted. Did they want their kids distracting mom and dad, so they closed the deal? So it's that people always talk about these things without recognizing there might be a reason people don't want that there. That's how we got Oktoberfest. So the company was resistant to getting a license. Those licenses cost money. But we were pushing pretty hard on that because it was pretty clear we needed them. And we had slowly been wearing them down. But what we started out hot was it was originally going to be something else.
    21:54
    Joe came in to pitch what it was, and I wasn't crazy about it. And fortunately, we had started working with Roger, and the layout Joe was working on was kind of designed for a speed-themed game. So that worked really well when Roger was able to get us Hot Wheels. And then, obviously, my goal after that was that we would continue to get themes.
    22:15
    And we did have an agreement with McCash that when Hot Wheels sold a certain number, you know, he would fund the next license. But in between there is also when we decided to do Legends of Valhalla. So on that, Frank and Scott, I've known those guys for quite a few years. When they had done Raph, we went and took a look at it. Joe Balter and I went actually to Frank's house. We took a look at the game. And at that time, we felt that game wasn't a fit because it really was just slightly out of date, right? Everything had moved to, you know, LCD and RGB LED and a variety of those things. And so once they were willing to do that, which they really weren't, we didn't think that was a fit. We said, we're going to work on next. We'll see if that can work out. And so we knew Scott was working on Legends of El Havre. And when he was ready, I worked with him to get his game into American Pinball for us to do it. And partially because I knew we needed to have something to get on the line because our next game after Hot Meals wasn't going to be ready. Because we really weren't even working on anything specifically yet. Joe had been developing a play field with three different themes in mind that we were hoping to maybe get licenses for. and one of those was a licensed theme. But in the meantime, then, we were working to get Legends of Alhalla in the house. Was the company profitable in the early days? Like, were you selling enough Houdinis? Were you selling enough Oktoberfest? Were you selling, you know, like, were you guys making money and selling enough games to cover all the costs? I wasn't privy to the financials. You know, I know the basics of the bomb and the sales price. I will say that American Pinball runs very lean and very efficiently in that regard. It's a very thin design team. The factory runs very efficiently.
    24:05
    They're very, very good at sourcing as far as really working that. I don't think the company was necessarily making profit at that point, but I think there was probably enough money coming in at the moment that they were willing to continue to invest. They knew this wasn't going to be a, you're going to start making money after the first game, right? You're hoping, and up front, we all talked about that. You know, you're not, you have a lot of investment up front. You have to build out a factory.
    24:33
    So, you know, the question is, are you at least covering your game development costs in your game and then starting to apply towards those other things? So I think Cugini probably did a little, I think our sales were a little less than we had hoped for, but they weren't out of line with what we thought we would do on the first game. for that key is that obviously each game needs to grow beyond that. Yeah, no, I think when Houdini came out, you know, to me, American Pinball kind of came out of nowhere. It was impressive because so many people wanted to start a pinball company and it failed. So Houdini comes out, it works, it flips, people are buying it.
    25:06
    You know, not a major big hit by any stretch of the imagination, but you look at that and say, that's a good first showing, right? Like this company has potential, right? Let's see what else they're going to come out with. And, you know, if that trajectory had continued, we're talking about like close to 10 years now, right? When did Houdini come out? Was it 2016?
    25:25
    I think it was. 17. Okay. So, you know, we're close to eight, seven, eight years in. Like, I could see a trajectory where American Pinball, based on the initial game, was used in the same sentence as Stern or JJP, right? That was kind of the thinking at the time. Not in this game, but it's their first game and it's promising. Let's see what they come out in the next few titles. I think people had hope.
    25:54
    It's an absolutely beautiful game. It's loaded. It's far more loaded than most games today. Not that I want to say coil count matters because it doesn't, but it's truly a loaded game. It's beautiful. It was at a time where it was mostly translights. It was a real backlash.
    26:11
    It really is a beautiful game. It was a tremendous, you know, first effort, you know, no doubt. And then, you know, I think Oktoberfest, unfortunately, was not an optimal theme choice. You know, it's kind of a quirky theme, and, you know, a lot of people didn't like it at all. You know, there's a – I wonder if I have a graph of it. I always talk about a graph of theme demand. If you could picture a bell-shaped curve, you know, there's people at one end, which is, this could be the worst game in the world, and I'm still going to buy it, right? I'm a diehard fan. I'm a Thunderbirds fan, and it doesn't matter what this game is like. I'm going to own that game. And the other end of the spectrum on a theme are people who are like, it could be the greatest game in the world. There's no freaking way I'm having the Three Stooges in my house. And there's a curve shape there. And obviously when you have a theme, what you want to have is as many people towards that side of, I really want this game so that you have a good buying audience to start with and you have that buy. And Oktoberfest is not a game that's got a curve all the way to the right. It's got a curve that's maybe in the middle, maybe a little bit to the left, and that's a much higher bargain to get the sales, because now you've got to really wow people and blow them away to get them to buy this versus something else. So, you know, there's a lot of people. It's a tremendous game, Oktoberfest. It's a really unique layout. It's got a really interesting rule set that's very diverse with the signs, lots of different ways to play the game. Just when you think you have the game figured out, you realize you don't. It is my least favorite art package of the games I've been involved in by far.
    27:46
    And what I find interesting is I'm actually, I'm not, I know other people who feel otherwise, who love the art package. I really question their artistic sense. But what Jeff Bush did on Houdini I thought was phenomenal. I thought what he did on Hot Wheels was tremendous. And Oktoberfest was a game that lost its way. But you had a picture there, I think I saw it go by, that showed the original Inga from the game. Oh, is this the, let me see, this one maybe? Hang on. This guy? Yes, this is the original Inga. So what happens here, this is sometimes where a design team could lose its way. The original idea that Joe had was he wanted Oktoberfest meets Mad Magazine meets Heavy Metal. It's too many meetings. So that was sort of kind of what he had going on in his initial thought. And so when our artist Jeff first created Inga and Otto, it was with this Mad Magazine concept in mind. But then somehow as the rest of the art package came together and other stuff, he kind of forgot about that. And we ended up kind of with this disparate thing. A lot of people said, well, they didn't like Inga. They wanted a hot Inga. So ultimately we, you know, and this was after the game was first revealed We changed data, we went back and redid those pieces to make it appeal The other thing we heard early on, people did not like the hard music They wanted the Oompa music, which we had some of them in there And then what we ended up doing was putting a lot more of the Oompa music So our music guy wasn't happy having to recreate a bunch of stuff And we used some of the original music, but we adjusted it. And Otto is, you know, the other thing, Otto was supposed to be this angry bartender that was going to yell at the Patriots. And then we get Otto who's this big jolly smiling guy. Like, okay, that doesn't work. So Otto's a funny jolly guy. Which I think is better as it worked out. But it's a fun game. And it was a game that we do have in adult mode. So it was nice to be able to, you know, get some sexual innuendo in there and that type of thing. They did a seminar in Atlanta at Southern Pride Gaming. Towards the end of the summer, we played a game, and it was called Family Friendly or Not Family Friendly. And I played voice calls from the game for the audience to tell me if they thought that was family friendlier. And I would put it out there, and then I think I was doing this with Zach Manning, and I would make Zach predict what the audience would say. I actually got him to turn red a couple of times just from the lines, which just goes to show he's a weakling. But what was so funny is there were a couple of guys in the group that no matter what the line was, family's name.
    30:27
    It really depends on the family, Josh. I mean, my family, everything goes. Part of the seminar, I mentioned we were going to do this, and there were a man with like two young kids. They looked like they were 10 and 12 years old. So I said towards the end of the presentation, we're going to do this. We got to that point. I said, okay, we're going to do this. I'm going to play things that we don't think are family friendly. And he's like, that's fine. I'm like, all right, cool. It was a lot of fun. I was actually surprised at some things people felt both ways, things that I thought were totally fine, other people thought were, and vice versa. And it just goes to show you just never, you just never know.
    31:03
    All right, so I think we, this is a good progression. We've got two Legends of Ahala, kind of said the inception of it. How did that game do?
    31:13
    You know, when we first brought Legends in, the talk was this should be the idea we talked about this thing called the American Dream Walk, where we potentially find homebrew guys' games and do small boutique ones of them, where you're going to do 200 of this game to bring it to market.
    31:33
    That was sort of the original thought of it. When we were first talking to those guys and I was talking to ownership about it, that was sort of the plan.
    31:42
    When the game got rolled out, I think they then changed that to 300, and then instantly, because it sold out,
    31:50
    you know, there was a knee-jerk reaction. I think they changed it to like 400 or 500, and then that sort of killed it. So the whole idea was by making it this unique, limited, boutique run,
    32:02
    you know, I think that was the way to go, and I think that, I don't know what the total sales volume on that was. I think it was, you know, 200 or 300 did sell. I don't think they've ever done classics. I can't say for certain, you know, the plan was they were going to do classics and allegedly they were huge sales of classics. But, you know, I think, you know, first of all, the other big key thing in this business today is people change their minds very quickly, and you've got to get the games out the door fast. Once you announce the game and people are excited about it, but then six weeks later, months later, the next game comes out. Ooh, this new shiny item. You know, we lost a lot of Houdini, you know, sales allegedly because Pirates came out. Everybody's like, ooh, I want pirates, right? And then, you know, pirates was delayed, and that money moved to the next thing. And that's always a critical thing is getting the games out quicker. And one of the things that I have been pushing on for a long time is making sure we had 80 or 100 games in boxes before we had announced a game. Now, I will tell you, that is an extremely difficult thing to convince ownership of because it leads, you know, delaying revenue and having money out there longer. But I strongly believe that that's critical in sales. And one of the things they did do right initially on Legends of Alhambra was they had 25 games, and they got them out on location right away, which was great. But because of a bunch of issues, no more games came off the line for like two months or three months because there were some misunderstandings and mismanagement and et cetera, et cetera. And they realized, oh, these things actually were in order. And now, you know, if you don't have one part, games don't ship. Remember one point on pledges, and you'll hear this from every manufacturer who's had periods of time where this is the case, where there's just play fields everywhere. Play fields everywhere waiting on some part that you're delayed on.
    33:52
    And I'd say every company has this at one time or another. That's one of the things that makes pinball so difficult is, you know, there are so many parts and you have to have every single one of them. But I think that the – I think Frank and Scott were thrilled. I think it was really well received. I think it's a game that shoots absolutely beautifully.
    34:10
    And so I think it did what I think we had hoped it would do until they kind of changed the bar. All right, so we're at Legends of Valhalla. Next game, we're getting to my favorite game, Galactic Tank Force. This game is, I would say, use the word infamous. Again, right, like up to that game, I think people, you know, some people really like AP, some people are on the fence, right? Like, the game's been fine. I think this game was a real turning point and not for necessarily a good way. So I'd love to hear about your experience with the game. Like, how did this game come to be?
    34:50
    What was your perception during like the release of the game I going to shut up because I want to hear more about this So we had been working on Joe Joe had done a layout for the next game So while we were working on Legends, Joe had been doing a layout. Actually, we had three themes in mind for it, two which were licensed and one wasn't.
    35:12
    And then Mukesh relieved his nephew of his duties relative to running the company. and after some period of time they decided to bring in David Fix and the first thing David did was to get rid of Joe and then brought in Dennis. And when Dennis came in, he was getting ready to start to work on a new game, but he had also had this tank game that he had been working on for a few years that he showed David and said would you be interested in doing this game? I could sell this to the company and we could do this game. And I will say the original tank game, the original tank cabinet had these like six inch wide treads, which unfortunately got dropped at some point, which I thought were really cool and really neat. But so, actually Dennis brought in the game so that we could shoot it and we could play it. And so David was, I want to do this. At that point, I was continuing to push, we need to do a license. We just did Legends of Valhalla. We have to come back with another license game. And I said, we could look at doing, and maybe we should do this down the road. We really need to do a license game. And we actually had a meeting, it was David and I with Mukesh, his son Nirmal, and I think Art, who's the senior advisor to the company, was there to talk about what we were going to do. I'm pushing for the license, we need the license. David's like, I want to do Galactic Tank Force. And I always say what I think. I'm not a person who's just going to fall and lie. I think something's wrong, I'm going to say it's wrong. And I said, I don't think we should be doing Galactic Tank Force right now. I said, maybe down the road, I said, but it's not what operators want. It's not what new and box buyers want. It's not what we should be doing at this time. I said, creatively, it would be an absolute blast to work on, right? We're going to create a whole world. We're going to create a universe. I don't know if the live action was in the conversation at that point or not. That might have been later. I don't remember. But, you know, from a creative standpoint, absolutely. I love original themes, you know. So, you know, we have a blast, but I said, but putting my business hat on, this is not the game we should be doing. We need to go after a license. So, obviously, you know what happened coming out of that conversation. David said, I will have no problem selling this to operators. I will have no problem selling this to new inbox buyers. They were like, okay, great, then let's do that. And then I did pour, you know, my heart and soul, like I've done on every game, into Galactic Tank Force. And I will say it was a blast to work on that game. It was a lot of fun, you know, creating this whole new world. I mean, coming up with that, I mean, I know people think it's silly and fun, and I agree. You know, but it was what we felt was the best thing we could do with it. And, you know, the ice cream thing, you know, was we're sitting in Dennis' office. It was myself, Dennis, and Jack Hager, who was the creative director. And we were looking at the original back class that Dennis had done. And we're like, okay, so we're on this planet. It's like, no, we're on a moon orbiting a planet. Okay, so we're on this moon, and we have a flying saucer that is kidnapping a cow. Okay, so why are there cows on the moon? Within a couple of minutes, Jack's like, well, because there's a research station there, and they're researching because they're developing zero-gravity ice cream. And boom, from there it became, that's kind of where the whole ice cream thing came from, and then it kind of really ended up kind of flowing from there. and being done. At some point, I don't know where the live action thing came in, but again, that was an absolute blast to do. And I think it's a really fun game.
    38:53
    Chris Franchi's art package is absolutely incredible on it. The acting is beyond funny and cheesy if you like that sort of thing. But again, when I talk about that curve theme, right? So, okay, retro sci-fi theme, you know, that's going to be one of those people who are going to be like, yeah, maybe, maybe not. Now you have to like the humor of it. You have to like the campiness. You have to like the old-style layout, right, because the layout itself, I mean, when was the last time you saw a game that had seven inlets across the top, right? So very much a throwback layout feel, which kind of worked with the throwback retro sci-fi theme. My concern was that's not necessarily what people are buying today. And it's not about what I want. It's not about what David Fix likes or what Dennis Nordman likes. It's about the people who are opening their wallets and buying new box games. What is it that they want? Well, you've been proven 100% right. I'm looking at the owners of this game on Pimpside, and that's indicative of so much, right? But, like, that is the – up until that point, and we went to the catalog of American Pinball Games, So up until that point, that is the worst-selling American Pinball game with the exception of the next game that comes out, Barbecue, and we'll get there. But you're totally vindicated, right? You're totally right. This theme just did not land with people. Do you know why? I'm going to be honest, too. That was made even worse by when it was released. But unfortunately, if the game had come out six months earlier at Expo, and I don't know if there was any other new games at that time, it might have really had a chance to not do great, but do better because it could have had a lot of it's all the attention that people might've explored it. But when you compared it to all these other games that came out at the same time, that was just, I think really, really hurt any chance of that. Yeah. Do you know why Dave was so convinced he would, he could sell this game and it would work in this market?
    40:55
    No, I'm really not sure. I think it's just his confidence and his ability to sell and market. And, again, games like that in the 90s, right, we all loved the unlicensed themes, but, you know, the market's kind of moved away from that. We've seen that pretty consistently in the last five, six, seven years, that the unlicensed themes and original themes just don't register with buyers. And it's understandable. You know, again, go back to that curve, right? You want to sell a game that people right away are interested in because they're attached to the theme. Look at George. like people were chomping at the bit to see Jaws. They wanted to like it. And I was very anxious to see Jaws because of the, you know, I was working on Princess Bride at the time. I knew Jaws was coming out. And, you know, Jaws is an interesting movie to turn into a pinball machine because you're not going to tell the story of Jaws. The movie itself has a lot of dead time and dialogue separated by these incredible moments. And I was curious to see how the team did it. And I wasn't surprised that they figured out a way to really leverage what they had and create a really interesting game. Unlike Princess Bride, where when we looked at it, it's like, oh, my God, we absolutely should tell the whole story and take you through the story. Because the movie is nonstop from start to finish. But, again, so when you're looking at themes, yeah, you want that interest up front. You want people like, I'm interested in this because I have an attachment to the theme. Nobody has an attachment to Galactic Tank Force. That is for sure. So the other thing, I don't have a ton of experience on American Pinball games just because I don't have access to them. I know, and you're extremely critical of them. I am, I know. It is 100% true. I'm going to give you some grief for a minute. It's one of the first times I watched your show you guys have done. It might have just been first impressions of Houdini, or maybe it was a review. And you said, I finally got to play Houdini, and it was a terrible environment. I really couldn't hear the game. And then three minutes later, he said, the sound package really needs work.
    43:03
    And I understand, you know, it's very hard. New games come out. People need to talk about them. That's obviously not the way to experience a game. So I figured I had to give you a little grief. And I will tell you, obviously, all my games, there are people who love the games I've done. There's people who despise the games I've done. I've heard a lot of critics. And I always just think about the Anton Ego speech in Ratatouille, where he talks about that writing and reading negative criticism is fun. And it is. And that's why we have podcasters, and that's why I think it's fun to criticize things, even though the criticism is far less effort and interesting at the work being criticized. But anyhow, we'll take a little brief. But the – where I was – that's totally fair. And where I was going with that is that the general sentiment was the games are well-made, right? Like, good product, robust, durable, mechs are good, all that good stuff. Not hurt any really criticism of code or software, so that's all good. When Galactic Tiddy first came out, me and Kevin got to play it early on. There was some units at the Ohio Pin Brew Fest, and those games were a mess, right? Like, they were always being worked on. The play field was always up in the air. I played a lot of games on it. It just never worked right. What happened, right? Like what happened with the quality of American pinball machines in that game? Obviously, I wasn't there at the time. But what I can tell you what happened previously when a new game was going out the door. First off, Joe Balzer would spend those first two, three, four weeks when those first 25, 30 games were being made. And he personally checked over every single game.
    44:48
    And typically, I played almost every one of those games before they left. and then any time Joe would find something not right on the game, he'd go back to whatever station that was, and he, and I'm going to say this nicely, he would show the person how to do it correctly.
    45:05
    And Joe's not the nicest guy at times, so trust me, people did not want to have to be told twice once they got it wrong. And so Joe was really responsible for the quality of the games in American Pinball. From the moment of design, he was always incredibly focused on quality. It led to a lot of battles with ownership because, obviously, Joe always wanted to spend money on quality things, and there were battles. So everybody was also very smart about where to spend that money. But that was a big part of it.
    45:34
    Secondarily, we had an excellent, excellent final test guy, his name is George, who I know left AAP, I think, before Galactic Tank Force for some very good reasons. he was an excellent final test guy. He was really good about knowing when to come get Joe or get to me when something didn't make sense. And he really was critical in that. Barry Engler was around a lot at that time in both service and in production with somebody else who was always one of those guys in the final test, going over games, making sure they were taken care of. And there's one guy who I think is still there, which is Deepak, who was the final place play field tester. But I don't know if he's still there or not. But it was really Joe and George and a few others who really ensured that quality, both from design all the way through manufacturing. We also had a tremendous service. Barry Engler was a tremendous service guy when he was doing service. Dave Brennan, who came along after him, also really good. I was actually very worried when Barry left and Dave came on board because I felt that was such a strength of the company, the service. and Dave was tremendous at that. And since Dave left, I don't think the service has been anywhere where it's been, and it saddens me to see that there are the quality issues that are out there. And, you know, I get emails probably twice a week from people looking for help on their games.
    47:06
    You know, I spent a good chunk of last week and two weekends emailing with somebody back and forth, trying to troubleshoot to get their game up and running for that. You know, while it's not my job or my responsibility to take care of AP's customers, when it's a game I did, if I could help somebody, both just as a member of this community and getting that game, I'm happy to do that when I can, help those people get up and running.
    47:32
    And, you know, hopefully they have Lloyd on board now, but he's remote, and his hands are probably somewhat tied. but hopefully as he gets up to speed, that will help because people who own games deserve to get some.
    47:44
    It's too bad because everything you're saying makes sense. Again, if I could tell you one thing about American Pinball years ago, it's they make good quality games. They're robust. They hold up. So it's sad to see that that was such a turn, but from what you described, it's kind of understandable to see why it is like that. So I think that they're putting out games right now that they're not doing licensed teams that people want. The quality has gone downhill. And it's being shown in just the numbers that I see on Pinside in terms of the owners of it. So that was the last game that you worked on. And then did you – you left before it launched or did you leave after it launched? No, I left – Galactic came first. I spent about a year on it. It came out a year after I was left. I was surprised it actually took that much longer because it was fully coded. But the assets were taking a very long time. We had just finished the filming of the actors maybe in November, December. Maybe it took us until January. So it was a month or two before we parted ways that we had done that. And I think that was a blast working with the actors. Jack Hager and I did the script. We did the directing. So, yeah, my quality acting is so bad because I shouldn't be directing stuff. But, hey, Jack and I did our best with that. And we had a lot of fun with it. I think the actors did a tremendous job.
    49:05
    You know, Jeff Hoover, who plays Professor Plotnick, the guy had me rolling in the floor the whole time. The guy was a blast. He had a great time.
    49:14
    Just the whole cast was great to work with, and that was a lot of fun. But there was a lot of disagreement between Jack and Dennis on that game. And there was stuff that Jack was putting in the script that Dennis said, and I would tell Dennis, don't worry about it. You know, I'm the editor, right? Don't worry about it. It's not going to get in the game. yeah, Jack put that in there. He's having his fun. It's not pinball-y. I understand it and vice versa because eventually you shoot all this stuff and then you decide what's good. And my concern what happened after I left was that kind of control. I'm not sure what happened there. I think Jack was kind of driving things and I'm not sure how that all came together with how that was working out because that was going to be a critical part to make that work. And I'm not sure how well they did that. I really haven't played the game just a couple of times since it came out, because I may have played in an environment where I could at least hear it. There's something weird, and you've got to get the treble turned down on the game. I hope they fix that. It's just a screeching sound. And I think that was the other disappointing thing, was just the way the game was rolled out at TPF. It did not make a great first impression. Again, at that time, with all those other games, that really hurt the game. And even before that had come out, I had said to Dennis and Joe Schober, because we had already started working on Dennis' next game, which is a phenomenal late. I was really excited about that game. But I knew even at the time I left, I said to those guys, Dennis' game's not going to be the next one after Galactic Tank Force. The Barry game is going to go next because it's going to take a lot less development to get it out. And they're going to need to get it out because Galactic Tank Force just isn't going to have the sales that they need.
    50:59
    And that's exactly what happened. And then, you know, the Barry game, that was unfortunate to see how that got revealed, because they got almost no reveal, but sort of they went the opposite from Galactic Tank Force and they should have had a better reveal. And, you know, the original concept out there, and I think David might have actually talked about this at some point. From the early days of AP, we would get people coming to us looking to do small run custom games. Or if somebody had a license, they were interested in licensing to us for something we looked at. So you're not doing a thousand of, I'm just going to make up a random name, Marvin Gaye, right? A Motown performer. You're not going to sell a thousand of that, but maybe you could do 200 or something like that. So we had talked about having a more basic layout that we could easily re-themed. And when Barry came on board with a few times David listened to me, that's what he asked Barry to do, to create a more basic game that we could easily re-theme. And then, you know, tragically, you know, Barry passed. I was actually really looking forward to working with him. You know, Barry passed, and that's when David decided to make it Barry's Barbecue. And what I would have really liked to have seen them do is to release the identical game as something else at the same time with a more popular alternative theme, right? Because the Barry Ousler fans, if you're a Barry Ousler fan, it's an incredible game. It really captures a lot of his stuff. Steve Bowden poured his heart and soul into the rules and trying to create a tribute to Barry.
    52:37
    But obviously, a lot of people don't even know who Barry is. And I would have loved to have seen them release it at the same time as something else to explain what that was and to justify it to get the game better. So I guess it begs the question, Dave thought, look, we're going to do Galactic Tank Force. Yeah, yeah, yeah, people, I can sell this. I can make this work. We're not going to do a licensed theme. It just totally fails. I mean, there's no way around it. It did not work. Why then double down and do arguably an even worse theme, Barrio's Barbecue Challenge? Do you round for any of that? Do you have any insight into why they would just double down and not say, whoa, whoa, whoa, guys, you know what? We've got to get a win here.
    53:21
    Maybe we can do an unlicensed theme here and there. We'll sprinkle in. But let's get a win. Let's get something that somebody can't help themselves. They're going to hear the theme, and they just hit that order button and get their credit card out, kind of like what with Labyrinth happened, right? So Labyrinth, new pinball company, unknown, never shipped a game before. People just ordered it because they can't help themselves. Why not do that? I mean, those guys did a tremendous job. I actually talked to them about doing some work for them at one point. So I knew for a long time that game was underway, and they did a great job of keeping that under wraps. But it's a great team. And you have guys who've been through the startup thing before, so they really understood a lot of the mistakes not to make, and they did a great job of being in production. The production guys, the guy formerly from AP, Paul Solis. obviously they have Eric Kripke on board who had been with Spooky so he's got that experience, David had obviously been at Spooky, so they had a lot of experience there and they really knew to take their time I actually had a conversation with David leading up to TPF and he called me up and he goes, how do you know if your game is ready to show? and I said, David if you're calling to ask me that question you're not ready yet and they didn't show it and they waited six months and they blew everybody away and it was tremendous and they did a tremendous job for that, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they do next. But as we talked about earlier, the marketplace has spoken. They want licensed teams, and I know AP allegedly has two licenses they're working on, right? Everybody's talking about Cuphead as being potentially one of those licenses, and I will tell you that when I first heard of Cuphead, I never heard of it, and I thought, okay, you know, I'm in my 60s. I'm an old guy. You know, maybe this is some young, hip thing. I don't keep up on all the latest trends. So I asked my daughter, who's in her 20s, and her boyfriend, who's a gamer, and they didn't really know Cuphead either. So I was like, okay, I don't know about it. And I checked out to an incredible art style. I can see the appeal. And I played the Cuphead EM Ombre game, which is just spectacular. I don't know if you've ever seen it. It is just beautiful and really well done. And if AP is doing that, then hopefully they can match what that individual did. and just really did a wonderful job. And being an EM really obviously fits that theme really well. But, you know, hopefully we're going to, you know, hopefully they are going to finally shift to some licensed teams. Hopefully they realize that. I think the other thing that disappointed me on Galactic Tank Force, I kept telling them, Dennis and David, a hundred of the tank cap, maybe 200. I said, a lot of people aren't going to want it. It doesn't fit in their lineup. They're not going to want to open and close it. And for some reason, they decided it was, what, 200 signature and 400 or 500 limited.
    56:09
    It's 700 limited? That doesn't make it limited. So I thought that really hurt. And they were making those first. And then for people who weren't getting the deluxe, which is what more people wanted, I think that hurt their sales, right, because nobody was getting their deluxe. Those were delayed. And again, the longer it takes, people shift their money elsewhere. And I think I probably heard Galactic Tank Force sales that their focus was getting the tank cabinet versions out first.
    56:41
    All right. So, Nick, any other thoughts on AP? What do you want to – No, I appreciate – I mean, I'll let you guys move on to the Princess Bride. And let's – Josh, anything else about AP? Yeah, I just – the people there, you know, Ryan, I know they said that the next game has been delayed. which I'm assuming is Ryan McQuaid's game. I'm really looking forward to seeing that. I'm hoping Ryan has some success. He's been there, I think, three years now, you know, waiting to get his chance up at the plate.
    57:11
    He's probably more excited. He just got his game out, which is great. But hopefully Ryan and the game will get out, and I think it's Steve or Joe Schoper on the rules on that game. So I'm hoping we'll get to see it.
    57:24
    Those guys have been working hard. There's a lot of great people working there, Ryan and Sophia. So, you know, Ryan, who's the mechanical engineer there, he's probably the most important person in that place. And, you know, people don't always think about the mechanical engineers, but she's the one who really helps help you get games to there. She's got tremendous experience in the industry and has done a great job of teaching others. So I wish those folks there the best of luck and hopefully it succeeds. APU just was part of this AIMTRON IPO. I think that creates a lot of question marks about that future. The Bassani family still owns like 70%, but, you know, the pinball division is going to have to produce from your public company or it's not going to be there. So hopefully they find some success. All pinball is good pinball. Well, let's talk about good stuff. Absolutely. We can agree to disagree on all pinball is good pinball. Okay, that's true.
    58:22
    I will say that. I said to Joe Chevrolet, what's the worst pinball machine you've ever played? And he refused to give me an answer because he said all pinball is good. And I'm like, no, I'm not buying that. He could be a politician. I'm not completely buying that. I will say there's only, I think, one game I've ever walked away from without finish.
    58:42
    And that was Thunderbirds. And because you can get into a situation where your game doesn't end, right? Because if you lock a ball and then drain a ball, the lock ball gets put back into play. And it becomes easy to lock a ball. So you can't get your game to end at some point. This sounds like the, what's that, the third circle of hell?
    59:02
    Yeah, it's like torture, if you ask me. All right, so let's take it. So now you're working with Multimorphic. Your latest game is The Princess Bride. You're the lead software developer on that game. Talk to me about your transition between American Pinball and Multimorphic. How did you get on board over there? and what's the process been like moving to the P3 and multimorphic?
    59:30
    So when AP said they no longer needed my services, I got a phone call from a couple of different companies, but I was looking very specifically for part-time contract basis. I wanted greater flexibility. I joked about this. I had sent a note to Keith Johnson because they were looking, And I just said, yeah, I'm available. I said, but I want to be Joe Shover. And what I meant by that is Joe, who does work for AP, also does work for Pinball Brothers and possibly some others, he's an independent guy. He sleeps in. He works strange hours. He's around when you need him. Takes long vacations. I'm like, that's what I want. I want that independence. I wasn't necessarily looking for a nine-to-five job. And there are a couple of things to look at. I just talked to the Barrels of Fun. So they already had Eric Kripke on board doing the game code. They wanted me to help on the back end. I wasn't as interested in that, but I was very intrigued by Multimorphic for a couple of reasons. One, I've always been a fan of the platform, but I was very interested in learning the platform because it would open up a variety of opportunities. I could do games with them. I could do games on my own. I could do software-only games. So I was very interested in learning the platform. And when I first talked to Jerry about it, it actually came on initially. I was in a support role on the game. Greg Goldie was going to be the lead on the game. And then a couple of months in, Greg had to step aside, and then I stepped up. And, you know, that was a critical thing for the success of the project. Greg had done other games on the platform. So just having him for those first couple of months, you know, getting me up to speed and established on the platform is really what allowed me, really allowed Jerry to feel comfortable to say, hey, Josh, can you take over for Greg and run with this? And so, you know, that really helped me get up to speed. because it's a very different platform to work on. You know, the biggest difference, obviously, is you're working with this very large display that the player is seeing all of the time. And what's funny is that when you're working on a game, whether it was any game I've worked on, and you're working in a simulator, you're basically looking at the display while you're hitting keys and watching scoring happen or other little notes. And all the time you're doing that, you're thinking about the fact The player is never going to be looking at these things, right? The spectators are. And when you're working on a multi-morphic game and you're spending all this time on the presentation of the game, it is for the player. And so I absolutely loved about working on this was knowing all of that effort really is benefiting the player.
    62:09
    But it was very interesting having worked first with Joe Balzer and then with Dennis Norton to be working with a new team. And with Joe, on the first three games, pretty much, he would go off and he would do the layout, and he would come back and he would present it and get feedback and then make some changes. At Multimorphic, the approach was very, very different. We had a fairly large group of people at the start, and we did some brainstorming. And the first thing we did, everybody went and watched the movie again. Obviously, everybody on the project had already seen the movie. We watched it again. And I think Steve Showier, who was our resident Princess Bride expert, he's probably seen it 200 times by now over the course of the project. We all went and watched the movie again. And then we all put together a couple of pages of notes for our ideas for the game that we then shared.
    63:01
    And it was very interesting. There are certain ideas that show up, like, on everybody's list and then a lot of different ideas. And recently, I actually went back and looked at all of our original notes from the game. And I went back and I looked at mine, and I'm like, almost everything I put in there made it in the game. And I went and looked at Jerry's list. Pretty much everything he said made it in the game, and some of it was the same things I said. And then I went and looked at Colin's list, and, you know, 80% of what he put in there was in the game. Then I went and looked at one other person, I'm not going to say his name, and, like, nothing he brought up made it into the game. I was kind of really surprised, but it's just taking like a very philosophical, different approach to the game where most of us took the hero journeys approach, that we're going to go on this journey with the hero. So the bulk of the team was very much on that same page.
    63:54
    And I have to laugh because I think when we did the first stream, somebody made the comment about the one-handed play and would say, yeah, Josh Fugler, he likes to do that kind of stuff with the flipper. And I just broke up hysterically laughing. And the reason I broke up laughing was, first and foremost, when Houdini came out, I was reading something where somebody was saying, oh, Joe Balzer likes to do crazy stuff with the flippers. Where it was really Keith Johnson on Simpsons Pinball Party. And in this case on The Prince of France, to be honest, I think at least four people in their notes said we should play one-handed for the Battle of Steel.
    64:28
    So just one of a lot of ideas that people had in common in putting it together. But so after we brainstormed all of these ideas, part of that is, well, what do we want to have on the play field? And we talked through that a bunch of times. I actually have it sitting on the floor in a million pieces. At one point, I took all the various ideas people had, and I did a cardboard mock-up. It was one of the things I took away from my time working with Dennis Nordman to really kind of see the three-dimensionals of it and kind of went through it with the team and talked about which of these kind of elements work and which of these kind of elements don't. and then based on that, Jerry and TJ went into the actual play field design and started to develop the mechs. So I really liked on this project the – I mean, those things were very heavily integrated where we spent so much time on the philosophy, the rules, and the concepts before the layout was really done and the elements were really done. And obviously, looking at it, you knew we needed to have the Cliffs of Insanity. It's such an incredible thing. And the idea, I'm not sure whose idea, the ball going up the cliffs were. And I'm sure everyone looked at the notes. I'm betting multiple people talked about, you know, to do that kind of thing. And when TJ did the first version of it, he posted a video of it, I was blown away. But, first of all, he came up with the design incredibly quick. The inside of it is just really cool with the way he does the gearing to get the ball to come around the arc and then get knocked off at the top.
    65:59
    It's truly tremendous, and I have great insight into it because I've had to do some tweaks to mine over time since I had the very original one that he did in my game. We obviously wanted the castle in there. Miracle Max's hut we thought was a really important piece. I think in the early version we had a tree that the ball could go into for Pit of Despair, but given the way the rules evolved, it makes sense to have that on the play field. We thought Max's hut was a better fit. And ultimately, I added the Mystery Award to Max's Hut to give Max's Hut more purpose than the other places we were using it in the game.
    66:35
    But, you know, when you look at the play field, I absolutely love, and this is the first time Multimorphic has done this, putting decals on the metal ramps. And I think it just looks spectacular. Yeah, it's super shiny. So I got mine earlier this week, and I've been playing the heck out of it. It's great. I put some impressions on pin side. And I think one of the things that you need to be applauded for, and the whole team over there needs to be applauded for, is that this game is shipping with 1.0 code. This is a feature-complete, full-experience pinball machine. It's not, you know, sneak preview code that maybe will get there eventually. Like, you're going to get the full, like, vision of the team in this machine as it stands. Yeah, there might be tweaks and things along the way. and you've said that you're, you know, if people experience things or, like, have questions about things, you're open to feedback. But all the major features in this game are here, right? Right. 1.0.1 is underway. You know, we've got some tweaks going, just some scoring tweaks. You know, I think Steve Showyer found a new bug the other day. You know, we know as people start to play it, so we're going to find stuff. Because even in testing in the last few weeks, Jerry found something I think a week ago. It's like, okay, how have none of us ever hit this before? But, okay, because it was a particular, you know, these six things had to all happen for this issue to reveal itself. So, you know, my guess is we're going to see, you know, I'm expecting some of those kind of bugs. But Jerry was pushing hard. He really wants it to be a 1.0 release. We actually talked about it about two weeks ago. He goes, okay, is this a .99 or is this a 1.0? And I said, okay, I said, what are we missing? He said, it's not that we're missing anything. Everything's here. I said, it's our first release. It's complete. You can get to the final wizard mode. You can get to the game end credits. And I said, everything is here. So let's call it 1.0. There's no reason not to.
    68:32
    And at AP, I never used that type of version. I always did just release state, release states, to get out of the whole, is it finished or is it not? But the fact that it has all the wizard modes and stuff, yeah, I'm very happy calling it 1.0. Yeah, well, that's one of the things, too. It's like, you know, these numbers don't really mean anything, right? You can put whatever number. You can make it version 8,000 if you wanted, you know. But people go, oh, .92, so it's 92% done. It doesn't work that way. But, you know, I think the fact that everything's in there that we want to have in there is why we said we can call this 1.0, even though I know there'll be some tweaks. You know, now that Colin is taking a closer look at some things, there was actually a stream, a secret stream. a week or two ago,
    69:19
    the local Chimes and Bells down in Austin was having their monthly league, and Jerry went over there with a Princess Bride. I'm not sure if they actually used it for league play or not. Maybe they did. And there was somebody who reported it or streamed it for us. So we were able to watch gameplay, which was really helpful to both see things that didn't make sense to players as well as picking out some stuff. And then Colin, just a couple of weeks before that, had spent six hours playing the game. It was one of the first times he had played in quite a lot. Spent six hours, recorded the entire thing and then gave me a list like this of things And then he and I spent the next two weeks arguing over stuff But you know then he got to watch this stream and I got another long list of things from him. And, you know, and some of it is like, no, that's something we changed, or, yeah, that's right, or that's not possible. Or sometimes it's like he puts items in there like, oh, I really love this. And I'm like, oh, cool, I can cross that one out. I really love this. yeah, the player got screwed on this, but it's good. I'm like, okay. He says it's good.
    70:24
    And it was fun working with Colin. One of the things I've learned over the course of the games is it's good to have a mutant on the team. And I use the term mutant affectionately for people like Colin and, you know, Keith Elwin and Josh Sharp. And these guys who play at another level, they're not human. And they are mutants because there's no other explanation for that. They can play pinball as well as they do. I watched Colin on this stream, and I'm just like, what the hell? You know, he's like, okay, you need to do this sequence. And they just do it like it's nothing. It's very scary at times watching them play. But what's nice about having a mutant on the team is twofold. One is they can help make sure there are no scoring loopholes or exploits that could be taken advantage because they're typically going to find that. And also make sure that we have some of those scoring elements that those competitive players want. And I talked about that balance earlier. You want the things for the novices. You want those things for the competitive players. And then the enthusiasts, which is the big bunch, you want those things for there. And having somebody like Kyle Lonson really helps make sure there are scoring things. And in the course of development, there was one day we took one of those features sort of out because we felt it was just going to be way too confusing for everybody else. You've probably already played the mode. It's storm the castle. Yeah. Storm the castle. The walls are moving up, going across. And after you've made a certain number of shots, you need to hit the left ramp, which is the castle shot. And in the original rules, the scoops would keep going, so you could continue to build and collect points, which those competitive people like to do. The problem is with those that are moving up and down all the time, you're not going to realize that the shot you really need to make right now is the left ramp to complete the moat. And we felt that, you know, that was going to be way too confusing and even hard for people to remember. So in that case, we decided, you know, we're just going to take that out. Once you light the final shot, you have that. And I kind of felt bad when we did that a little bit because I knew Colin likes to have those capabilities. And there was some other similar feature we were looking at. I'm like, no, we're not taking that out. I said, when you took out one of Colin's things today, I'm not taking out another. And because you want to have those types of scoring elements in there, as long as it doesn't, again, distract or cause confusion for 95% of the other players who are playing the game. Yeah, that's one of the things as I've been playing it, I can feel Colin's influence on some of the scoring things. And like, yeah, you can complete the modes or just like, even if you fail out of the modes, you can keep making the progress. But if you complete the modes, that's where, like, the big scoring opportunities are. Right, completing modes. And it's pretty critical to the complete modes if you want to get to the final wizard mode. Because to get to four white horses, you have to collect four character segments per character. So everybody who's got a princess bride coming, I will not be insulted or offended if you go into settings and change that from four to three. Okay? Just do yourself a favor. Just make it three. We added that as an adjustment that's probably for most people maybe where you want to start to, you know, complete characters and hopefully get to four horses. So to get to four horses, you have to get a certain number of segments for each character, and you get that by completing modes. Each mode in the game, or almost every mode, Cliffs of Insanity does not. That might be the only one. All the other modes are associated with one, two, or three of the characters, and completing that mode gives you progress towards that character.
    74:08
    To get to the mini wizard modes, however, you don't need to complete the modes. You only need to play them. So what we wanted to make sure is that most players, once you get warmed up and get familiar with the game, you should be able to get to mini wizard modes. If you focus on one of the three regions, Florin, Yildir, or Castle, you need to play the three modes to then unlock the mini wizard. And we felt, you know, that was, I felt, a really good level to make it accessible. Basically, I start one per ball, right? And, you know, that's a reasonable expectation, I think, for most players to be able to get to the mini wizard mode. So you could say I want to get to Fire Swamp, which is the mini wizard mode in Gilder. Miracle Max is the mini wizard mode in Florin. Or to the pain, which is the mini wizard mode at the castle. So all of those, I think, are very attainable if you say, I'm going to go after one particular region.
    75:04
    Now, one of the interesting things that we got into early on in the discussion was around, it's a story. You know, it's a book. There are chapters. You know, should we have the player go in order? And obviously the answer to that is no. We're not going to force the player to go, you know, through the book in order. This isn't Roadshow. Not going to be.
    75:24
    But we decided early on, again, I'm not sure whose idea this was. although I know Colin is an extremely vocal supporter of it, is what we call the narrative streak, where you can choose to play the story in order. And if you do so, each mode you complete in order, there's a narrative bonus which gives you 10, 20, 30, 40, 50% it grows. Of that mode scoring as a bonus at the end of ball, it's also multiplied by the bonus multiplier. So if you can string together a few modes together and complete them in order, this can be a very, very lucrative thing. And I think Colin recently cheated to do it. He admitted he cheated, but played it all the way through, and the bonus was obviously massive. So it does allow that, and you can do a streak. You don't have to start at the beginning. You can do a streak through any section of the book. And when you look at the table of contents of the book, that gives it to you in the narrative order, which does require you to move across the regions. in order to go in narrative order. Because as the story goes, the story goes from Florent to Gilder and then to the Florent, and then the third region, we call it, is Castle.
    76:38
    I actually had a laugh because I was looking back at some paperwork, and early on the regions were very different. They were kind of confusing. I said, where do these things take place in the story? And Steve Shoyer is the expert. I named the modes. I goes, that's Florent, that's Gilder. Well, that's good. we'll just move these two modes here and here and call them that and made a lot more sense. And there's a lot of that that evolves over the course of the game as you do things. Some of the notes in the last list that I have are wording changes or things like that. And now that people are looking at it for the hundredth time, now suddenly they go, oh, we should tweak this word. Oh, man. Now I'm going to, I want to go fire mine up and try to start playing it in order. See if I can beat that. I like that it makes you move around, too, because if you focus on the mini wizard modes, you're kind of like drilling deep on one area of the play field. Or you can move around, right? One of the late ads we did to the game, I think it was must have been after TPF, was we want to make sure that we're giving the cliffs mech its due without overusing it, right? So we're trying to do that right balance. We want people to get to see it. You don't want to overdo it. And I brought up in one of the meetings that in Shrieking Eels, the very last shot is Fezzik pulling Buttercup out of the water. And that shot was already the cliff shot, but it was what we called the cliff's hole, where it goes in the hole. So why don't we make it the cliff's magnet and raise the ball up and give the cliff some action? And Jerry was like, yeah, yeah, let's do that. I'd like to see that extra action. And as I thought of it, I said, well, you know, after Shrinking Eels, the very next thing narratively is Cliffs of Insanity, which obviously takes place there. So we decided to link the two. So if you do start with Shrinking Eels and you haven't yet played Cliffs of Insanity, if you successfully complete it, it will immediately start Cliffs of Insanity, even if it wasn't qualified. To, you know, basically assist you in that narrative, to immediately take you to that second mode. And then obviously from there, after Cliffs of Insanity, you're able to choose from one of the three battles, which among the modes are the most lucrative scoring ones. because each of the battles you have the ability to use an as-you-wish, which you earn via the skill shot sequence, to turn the battle into a two-ball multiball, which immediately doubles the scoring. And if you are able to complete it, you end up with a victory lapse, a two-ball multiball victory lapse for at least 45 seconds. It lets you just beef up points. And all battles, when you complete them, whether as-you-wish or not, are always followed by a Humperdinck hurry-up. If you remember in the movie, after each battle, Humperdinck and Count Rugen and their troop come along, and Humperdinck assesses what happened in that situation. So each of the battles follows. There's a Humperdinck hurry-up. You have 10 seconds to hit one of the right-side targets, and it starts at either 10% or 20% of what you scored on that boat, and it's a hurry-up counting down, but it includes your victory laps. So as you wish, completing a victory lapse can be incredibly lucrative, but it is incredibly difficult. Yeah, because in the modes, if you do the two-ball, multi-ball, if you drain down to one ball, it ends your mode too, right? So there's the risk.
    80:00
    Right. So there's some interesting strategy, and I'm sure Colin and I will have further debates on this. We've had some already. But there are some interesting strategies, and I think this is how Jerry discovered a bug a couple of weeks ago with by testing some of this out, where you can play it not as you wish the first time. It's get close to the end. Then come back to it. Pick up where you left off because pretty much every mode will pick up where you left off with some adjustments in a couple of cases. Now play as you wish when you're close to the finishing of the mode to get into the victory laps and go forward from there. So there's some interesting strategy around you might kind of play those things. and you can always go back to a mode, and if you return to the mode, you don't break your narrative streak. Once I go play some other mode, that then ends the narrative streak. So once you complete a mode, you have to play that next mode and complete it to keep your streak on. The important thing to note is if you get into another region and you don't want to play that region, if you just hold both flippers in, it'll take you back out of mode selection. You'll need to re-qualify. Right. So that way, if you really want to go for a narrative streak, you accidentally start to move the wrong place. You don't have to start that. Nice. Yeah, that answers one of the questions we had in chat. Wondering, you know, if you if you play in a mode and don't finish it, what do you can you go back and complete it? And the answer is yes. I said in every mode we maintain state where you do not do that for the features. So in addition to the modes, the main shots in the game are all mapped to a different feature. There's Buttercup, Dread Pirate Roberts, Rhyme Time, which is Fezzik. You start Rhyme Time as you make the shots. You hear him making the rhymes from that scene in the movie.
    81:51
    There's Rugen Ramps, and then Inconceivable Loops, which is the side loop, where you'll get inconceivable calls which award you various things, including fit of despair, which we'll talk about in a minute. So the features take X number of shots to start, and then they're lit for 20 seconds with a progressive scoring. And then in each case, if you get a certain number of shots, you earn an award, which is a boost for one of the modes. So almost most of this, five or six modes have the ability that are tied to a feature that will boost the scoring in that mode. So, again, for those mutant types or just the competitive players, there's some strategy around making sure you collect those features before you start those modes to get that incremental score. One of the features, which is crossing swords, which is the four stand-up targets, then lights the captive ball where you want to pound the captive ball. It's actually a decrementing progressive, but each hit increases the next mode you play by 10%. So if you can hit that four or five times in that 20 seconds, whatever mode you play next is increased by 50% score. So you can stack a little bit of these types of multipliers for those who are people who are playing for score. First off, somebody who's typically more playing for the journey than for score, unless I'm competing in that.
    83:22
    Yeah, for sure. It's been a fun game. We've really enjoyed it. My wife, it's one of her favorite movies of all times, and rarely will she play pinball with me, but I got her to play pinball with me for Princess Bride. My son and I have been playing, and, you know, we got it Wednesday, and he was spotting me while I was playing, and I was spotting him while I was playing, and we were figuring out the rules together, like, oh, what does this mean in the storybook and things like that. so it's been a great we've been having a great time with it anything else you want to tell us about the game we're actually going to have uh we have a stream with colin coming up uh where i'm going to play the game and colin's going to be on skype or on zoom to uh talk through the rules and things like that um so you'll get to get a little more in depth with the game with us here on buffalo pinball but is there one to make sure i'll have to tune in to make sure colin gets it right yeah Yeah, that's right. You can hang a chat and correct him. But, yeah, what's, like, your favorite thing on there? What's one thing we should know about it before you go?
    84:22
    I'm not sure what my favorite thing is on there. I love Guide My Sword because I think this is true of a lot of the modes. One of the things when I took a step back and looked at what we had done at one point was, you know, to me it's always really important that every mode feels different, right? I don't want a game where it's ramp, ramp, ramp, or this, this, this, where there's really variety. And that's one of the nice things about the PS3 platform is because of the scoops and the ball detection, it lets you do some interesting things. So I was really pleased when I went back and looked at how we were able to leverage the different aspects of the physical machine and the story to make the different modes feel unique. But, you know, Guide My Sword is one of those that is played just inside the walls, and really the shots are the side targets.
    85:14
    But there's just a feel to that. The music is actually very complex. Remember the scene in the movie, he's trying to communicate with his father during that mode, and I really felt that that really brought that scene together really well.
    85:33
    Buttercup's nightmare, and early on it was one of those scenes where I'm like, how do you turn this into a mode? I don't know who came up with this.
    85:42
    I'm going to say Colin, but it may not have been Colin. It could have been Jerry. It could have been somebody else. So Buttercup's nightmare is no-hold flippers because that's a nightmare.
    85:52
    And so you have no-hold flipper. It's a multi-ball, and you have to survive 45 seconds. You cannot drain either ball.
    86:02
    And that is a nightmare, and I think that really was a way to take sort of this interesting low-key scene, but at the same time make it incredibly intense. So I really like the way that particular mode came together. Some advice on that mode, what you really want to do is have one of the multi-balls one shot away from starting. Start Buttercup's Nightmare has a fairly long ball save of about 20 seconds. It's pretty generous. And then as you get close to the end of that ball save, start one of the multi-balls, so you get that ball save and the multi-ball, and you have much greater success in completing that vote. So, you know, when you can do that, you can do that. Another little tidbit as you start to play,
    86:46
    the castle is where Prepare to Die multiball is started. So it is possible at times to start the multiball at the same time you start a mode.
    86:56
    When you're in the book selecting your mode, on the left-hand side, if you see Rugen's six-fingered glove, it's there to remind you that the multiball is also going to start. So you can selectively choose which is your preferred mode for stacking on there. Yeah, because there are some modes that make more sense to stack up like that. So I like that it gives you that feedback. They all sort of work, but there's pros and cons to each as to whether or not you want it stacked. What was funny was Steve Scherrier the other day messaged me. He goes, you know, I went to do this. He goes, it would be nice if there was a way to know that the multiball was starting. And I'm like, Steve, it's on the page. Oh, I didn't notice it. I said, yeah, it's not super, super obvious. Once you know it's there, you'll recognize it. If you're thinking about, oh, is the multi-ball starting, you'll know the look. So, you know, it's there for that. So, this is another tidbit for you. One other tidbit of note was from when we were doing that one stream. Rebecca was playing. and she had gotten a couple of tilt warnings. So I'm like yelling at the screen. First of all, it was a recording of it. It wasn't even live, but I'm still yelling at the screen for her to shoot Miracle Max is hot because if you have Mystery Award and you use some of your tilt warnings, she'll give them back to you.
    88:19
    And that's something else, you know, that I've learned over time. Competitive players really like when you give their tilt warnings back. So that was one of the things I added as a gift there. So you only get it if you've used your tilt warnings. and we do have the tilt warnings displayed in the outline area for those who really work their machines hard and typically mutes do that. Yeah, I'm one of those mutes. I got my tilt warnings back the other day and I felt really good, so thank you for that. She was very excited when it happened. She did it and she goes, I like all my warnings back. Nick, any parting questions for Josh here before we wrap things up? No, I just appreciate your time, Josh. I saw a lot of positive comments in the chat. A lot of people appreciate this. So, fantastic job. Thanks for the overview and thanks for the insight into what goes on behind the scenes. Thanks. It was great to come on. I'm very excited about Princess Bride. I'm thrilled that the games are starting to ship. As Jerry said, that shipping speed will move up dramatically. I've been seeing photos of the play fields in production. I think there are a couple of things that just wanted to tweak at the end to make sure they were right before they started releasing games. And, you know, that's one of the things I just absolutely love about Jerry, and I've known him a pretty long time, is his commitment to the product, to a quality product, to delivering games that are fun to play.
    89:45
    You know, he's tremendously hands-on and hands-off at the same time in how the game is approached. I mean, there are months on end where he, you know, pop in once a week just to see what's going on, and then gets more engaged on things as we go as we're testing. You know, but the commitment to quality, we had a little bit of delay at one point on our project because TJ was pulled off working on the play field to work on the quality project. And, you know, I was – everybody was 100% supportive of that. You know, take that audit. What are the things they had learned from the issues with the games? Let's correct those things. I haven't had time to install all of the items. I installed just the power supply online because I was having some issues.
    90:27
    But, you know, I haven't installed that kit yet. And, you know, that shows that commitment to his product. And, you know, that's partly because it's a platform. And as I think you mentioned, you have the new back box displayed to put together. I don't think it's as hard as you think. I know Steve Schoyer did it in a day. I think that's what he said. She was probably going to message me and go, no, Josh, it was a week. It was a day or two because he stopped testing for a day. I'm like, well, why aren't you testing? He goes, well, building my back box. I'm like, dude, you've got to be testing. I got you your play field early so you could be testing.
    91:02
    But, you know, so I enjoy that. The team at Multimorphic, Stephen Silver, who was the creative director on the game, had a lot of fun working with Stephen. He may not say the same thing about me because I could be a royal pain in his ass because I'm always needing stuff from Steven, right? He's doing all the video clips. He's Rory who does all the animations and graphics. Rory, too, probably gets fed up with me chasing after them. It was funny. I took a three-week vacation at one point during the project, and I'm sure those guys were so happy that I was gone for three weeks, not to be like every weekly on the call saying, when am I getting this? When am I getting this? And, you know, so I did work like one day during the three weeks. So they sent me a bunch of stuff, and the one day I worked, I put it all in because I was all ready for them. Like, okay, I need more. And I think they were happy with that. But, you know, it was really great working with both of them. They're both so creative, such great artistic talent. And you can see their work when you're looking at the display, you know, they're going with the indicators, the various elements. Really, Stephen did a great job of editing scenes from the movie to create the things we did. At one point, you probably play Battle of Wits at this point. We were working on Battle of Wits, and Stephen messaged this man. He goes, I'm having a really hard time getting this thing down to 45 seconds. And I'm like, well, how long is the scene, the whole scene? He goes, it's 92 seconds. I said, fine, give me 92 seconds. I said, we'll change the rules. We'll change the rules. I said, we can't pay Vizzini's incredible speech. I said, what are you going to cut out of there and not have people be pissed off at us for it? He's like, fine. So, you know, we made it 90 seconds. We adjusted the rules a little bit to make it very tough enough. No, so it's maybe a lot more time than you need. That's okay. So nobody's going to complain that we're giving them too much time. And I said, so, you know, let's change that because, you know, you really wanted to make sure those elements are there. There are five, six, 700, you know, clips, scenes, between the video clips and the audio clips in the game. You'll have a hard time finding a voice call that you like from the movie that's not in there. If you do, let me know, and then we'll see if we can squeeze it in there somewhere. We've been adding a few extra ones of late that, you know, we didn't get this one in there, but we worked really hard. A lot of that goes to Stephen's hard work on all of that. Awesome. Well, thanks, Josh. I appreciate your time.
    93:30
    One more thing. I don't remember Paul's last name. It's in the credits. Paul Ferrer, maybe, who did the music. Mark Knopfler obviously did a lot of the music, but then Paul obviously took that music and orchestrated it and recreated it for use in the game, because every mode he created music either based on Mark Knopfler's music or original music in the style of the film for all of these modes. And they're all designed specifically for the mode. We have four or five of the modes in the game are very timed modes. they match, but throughout and really, you know, the sound is such an incredibly important part of the game. Matt currently did sound effects for Paul. Again, I don't remember his last name. I apologize to Paul. Just a tremendous job with the music when you listen to it. He really captures the film and really created some great stuff. DJ from Multimorphics in chat, he let us know it's Paul Ferrer that did the music. So, thanks DJ and thank you, Paul.
    94:32
    Yeah. All right. Well, we can talk all day about Princess Bride. I'm sure we'll talk more. You're going to see more about it on Buffalo Pinball when we do our stream with Colin McAlpine. Josh, thanks so much for your time. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Yeah, and if they want to learn more about the game, they go to Multimorphic.com and you can check it all out there.
    94:52
    All right. Thanks, Josh. Take care. All right, Nick. We have some other games to talk about, don't we? It's a true story. All right. So let's get to it. It's the latest pinball news. Let's have our friend Tim Kistro lead us in properly. Here's the tip. It's the latest pinball news. Show hunt. It's on fire.
    95:12
    All right. So in addition to, you know, Princess Bride shipping out this month, we have the launch of two new brand-new games. We're going to start with the one that launched first. It's the Uncanny X-Men from Stern Pinball.
    95:27
    Ironically, the two games announced this month. I don't know if it's ironic. It's probably not ironic, but coincidentally, whatever.
    95:35
    They're both games that CERN already did. So they did an X-Men game in, like, 2010-ish, 2011-ish, in that area. They're back with the Uncanny X-Men.
    95:47
    It's, you know, based on the comic books. Let's see. I didn't write down all the details, but it's Jack Danger Design, Zombie Yeti Art. You got the three models, like usual. Ways and Chen is on rules right so the pro premium in LE like usual it's got some of the key features are the sentinel mech that pops up out of the play field on the LE there's like the hands that interact with the ramps and trap the ball it's got the danger room is a thing out of the X-Men series. I'm trying to find a good picture of it here. It's in the lower left area of the playfield. There we go.
    96:41
    Where it's very much if you've played Gottlieb's Gold Wings, everybody's beloved game, Gottlieb Gold Wings, it's pretty much that area of the playfield from Gold Wings. And then it's got a lot of crossover ramp and playfield shot, so you shoot the left side of the playfield, it turns around, crosses over the playfield, and comes back around on the other side of the playfield. We saw, I watched a little bit of the stream that was on the Stern YouTube channel, and they had a disclaimer on the stream saying it was early access code or sneak preview code, something like that. It looked very bare-bones rules-wise. Kind of the reception on this game has been it went from everybody was very excited when Stern did a good job with their promo video. It showed off the game very well. And then they saw it actually being played and streamed and a lot of the excitement, a lot of the air left the room because it was like, oh, the animations are not great. The call-outs are not great. The rules are very bare-bones. So this is, again, one of those games where it's like, okay, Stern, let's launch a game like 007 with preview code, and then maybe in two years it's going to end up being something, right? So, Nick, what are your initial thoughts on this game? Yeah, so this game does not resonate with me whatsoever. I question why they're doing another X-Men game. Somebody really likes X-Men over there. Maybe it's George. Fine.
    98:13
    Absolutely tired of comic book games. Again, somebody strikes against this game personally for me in terms of why I would not be interested in it. And then you have the zombie yeti art, which I cannot, I'm to the point where I cannot absolutely stand it. I think it's just terrible. He's a very talented artist, very detailed. It's beautiful in some ways. It just does not work on a pinball machine. I've seen this game, I've seen this picture so many times. I just watched the video. I just cannot make out the shots in the game or what even is even going on in the game. It's kind of like you have the art, there's so much thrown in there that it's like you just, It's like I almost see, like, my brain sees, like, nothing because I can't pick up on one individual thing without having, like, an ADHD nightmare panic attack. Sorry, Zombie Eddie. Again, you're incredibly talented. I feel like you just got to dial it back. But whatever. People like this. I know some people are in my camp. I do. God bless all of you guys who see it like I do. I showed Martha this, and she's just like, whoa, this is way too much, way too busy. See, the art kills it.
    99:16
    And then, God, I don't know what to say, Kev. I think that the layout's really interesting, right? And I love seeing a unique layout. The question is, does it work? But points for having a unique and interesting layout automatically at the gate. To me, that's the best potential thing about this game. I watched the stream. The sound is pretty terrible. The call-outs, as typical on these comic book games they do, are terrible and cheesy. You know, like you've got the X-Men that they did, I think, in 20—I think it was 2012.
    99:45
    And then they did Avengers. and then they got Venom, and, yeah, these, like, they did the Avengers twice. Call-outs are bad on both of those. Call-outs are bad on the original X-Men. Call-outs are bad on this X-Men. Like, I don't know. I don't know, man. The presentation is important, as we're going to talk about in Avatar.
    100:11
    And then you see, like, the LCD animations on the screen, and I get it. It's like, okay, this is a comic book thing, so this is going to be more static. it's just not impressive, right? Like, I think Stern just is pretty weak in their LCD game. And as I was saying with Pulp Fiction, you know, Pulp Fiction doesn't have an LCD, and I don't miss it. But when you do have an LCD there, we're going to pick it apart.
    100:36
    And, yeah, I don't think that this game has a lot going for it in terms of a first impression, right? Like, I could play it. I could fall in love with it. I can override my biases against comic book themes and the art and all that. A great game is a great game. But this looks like your typical game where you pick a mode to do, you play the mode, you hear the call a million times, and that's it. It's very paint-by-numbers. So nothing out of the gate that's very interesting. My money is very safe when it comes to this game as of right now.
    101:10
    Yeah, I think that's it. I will say something nice. I thought that the trailer that they did was impressive and definitely got my attention.
    101:19
    Yeah, it absolutely did. Everybody had their cash ready. They were ready to go all in on this. A lot of people did. And then, you know, that stream just was terrible. Yeah, it was not a good reflection on the game. Let me give a pro tip. I mean, Cern, like I hope you guys learn from this. You need to do a prerecorded stream if you're going to do it, at least initially.
    101:42
    You need to explain. I think you need to briefly explain high level what's going on in the game, get people hyped, and then take your best gameplay footage and show some of the game. But, you know, I get having fun. You know, God knows Martha puts on a costume and has fun. They make costumes on. It just wasn't good. Like, you guys, I guarantee it hurt sales. Yeah. Guarantee it hurt sales. You had the sales of those people who can't help themselves, and then those same people watched the stream and canceled. Yeah.
    102:12
    That's pretty much what Keith Elwin did with Jaws, right? They did that, like, 10- or 20-minute video of Keith. And Keith is not, like, a super hype kind of guy, but he's an amazing player, and he could show off the game. So they did a prerecorded edited video of him showing some gameplay on the video and on the game, and I think that's fine, right? Yeah. Yeah, and that wasn't, I mean, to be fair, people weren't praising that. I don't think that got people too hyped about that game. So, I don't know, something to work on over there. But what also blows my mind is that this is yet another game from Stern, as you mentioned this, Kevin, where the code is in its infancy. Like, what's going on over there? You guys have, like, an army of people.
    102:51
    Why are we getting these bare-bone coded games? You have to wonder if it's because John Wick was such a flop that they were like, we've got to get the production line up and running, let's get this game out.
    103:03
    Maybe, but they're on their time frame of releasing three Cornerstone games a year, right? So what game came out prior to WIC?
    103:14
    God, I can't. It was Jaws. Oh, yeah, Jaws. I own that game. All right. So Jaws came out at the end of the year, and then WIC, and now this game. So they're on kind of like their time frame. It makes sense. I just, I don't know. The way the market is, man, you've got to come out of the gate strong. You've got to have good code. Otherwise, good luck. Good luck. You're going to hurt yourself. And I think buyer confidence is just plummeting. People are going to think twice before they hit the buy button on an LE when you're out of the gate losing like $3,000 in some cases. So, that's my thought. It's a tough sell. Yeah. Especially when you've got a game like the New Jersey Jags Avatar, following a week or so later, and by all accounts has been very well received.
    104:09
    So this was another game that was like, oh, man, we already have one of these. Although there have been many instances of redoing themes in pinball. Pirates of the Caribbean from Jersey Jag being one of them and became one of our favorite games of all time. So there's no saying you can't retread a theme. And if, you know, in the case of Avatar, there's a whole second movie that they could pull content from with the new pirates. They had all of the movies in there. So there are reasons to revisit themes. And like Josh was saying it like you know that curve of you know what games are what licenses are going to fall more towards the let me open up my wallet and buy versus you know maybe not You know and is Avatar one of those themes Maybe it one of these weird licenses where the movies make tons of money some of the biggest box office grossing movies of all times but you don't see people buying a lot of Avatar merch or anything like that the way they do Marvel or Star Wars or anything like that you know it's funny Kevin I was going to say the same exact thing I love where you're going with that You're 100% right, I was thinking that too I was going to say, have you ever met somebody Who's a big Avatar fan? No, I don't think you have Not like Star Wars, right? But they posted the trailer To the Avatar Facebook page And there's like 50 million people Who like the Avatar Facebook page There are some But you don't see people just Randomly wearing Avatar gear You know, either you wear a Star Wars shirt Or something like that but I think it does make a good template for a pinball machine, right? It's like, you know, there's a story you can follow along, and, you know, obviously they have the cool visuals from the movie. That's what everybody loves about those movies. You know, it's like, you know, they're a visual spectacle, and I think it's a good match, especially for JJP. Their machines are visual spectacles, especially with the lighting, and I really like what they've been doing with what they've shown so far of the lighting, the UV effects that they have. So, I don't know. It seems like a good match for them.
    106:23
    They put out a really good 18-20 minute video with the design team talking about all the different features of the game. It has an incredible topper on the CE, which I'm sure Gorin will be excited about. We do have a new topper talk. It's not about the Avatar topper. Sorry. Maybe next month. But yeah, it's It's a great-looking game designed by Mark Seiden, the arcade on Twitch. So if you don't know Mark, he's an old-school Twitch guy. We used to hang out in each other's chats, and he built his whole Metroid pinball machine live on Twitch, and he would code and just spend all hours of the night. Super talented, super smart person. Very happy for him. I can't wait to play this game. I already told him I challenged him to a battle at Expo.
    107:15
    But, yeah, it seems to be selling well. They had a media day the other day, which actually was yesterday. They invited us to go, but unfortunately, you know, our lives have been insane. We haven't been able to, like, get out to as much stuff. So you'll get Avatar here eventually, but we were not able to go out to JJP. I appreciate the invite out to that at least.
    107:37
    It's got a new pinball artist. You know, we were talking about art on X-Men. Nick, what do you think of the art on this one? It looks fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. Let me show the whole play field. Yeah, let me scroll down to the play field and not make it. I didn't analyze it in great detail, so I want to see it again just because I want to refine that. It looks great.
    108:01
    This might be like the maximum amount of detail you want on a pinball machine, right? There is an art to the art.
    108:09
    If Zombie Yeti did this, he would have taken this in double the amount of detail. But, yeah, I can see this. I can make out the shots fairly well. It might even be pushing too, like getting close to that line of too busy. I think it just gets up right to it and knows when to stop is the way I would say it. But it looks great. It's really good. It's neat. So we didn't mention it's got two lower play fields, which it hasn't. Actually, I guess technically three because there's a ball lock under the play field too. But two where it's interactive, ball interactive lower play fields. We've got the scoop ramp, which I don't totally understand without having played it myself, but they talked about it in the promo video. That sounds really cool. Tons of shots. It's somewhat reminiscent of what I remember of Mark's Metroid layout. I remember the upper flipper up there. And, yeah, I'm really excited to try this out. The display work, as you've come to expect from J.J.P., looks amazing, as always. really cool layout of the information man I don't know I was not at all like I was like eh Avatar whatever but you know maybe someday on this game I do like me some JJPs and I'm super excited to try out Mark's game so maybe down the line we're at the point where thankfully we're like you don't have to buy a game without playing it first so I'm going to play a game I'm going to see if I like it and if I like it, I'm going to buy it. It's beautiful. It's a beautiful place we're at. And maybe I can even buy one used and get it for a little bit less.
    109:52
    We're in a time where buying a new game could be like a multi-thousand dollar loss potentially depending on the game you want to sell to make room for it. If your game room's full and you have to sell something, it's like alright, I need to spend all this money and also maybe lose two or three thousand dollars on this game that I bought a couple years ago so I think I'm just being a lot a little more cautious about the things I'm buying because I have had a lot of folks say oh you buy a lot of the JJP stuff yeah you're getting this and I was like I'd love to I'm not I don't have unlimited funds here I'm just an average like I'm not a rich guy unfortunately I wish I was where I could just throw all that money out and buy whatever and not care, but yeah, Avatar is a maybe for me.
    110:38
    Yeah, Avatar, when I heard it, it was like my money's safe. I'm not interested in a theme. I couldn't even make it through the first Avatar movie. I had to turn it off. It just wasn't doing it for me. And then I see the trailer and the 18-minute video presentation on it reveal. Just absolutely amazing. I mean, that was so well done. The passion behind this. The lighting is unbelievable. It left a very, very positive impression. But here's the deal.
    111:09
    Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. This is a Keith Johnson game. So I've got two JJP games. Both games of his are uncoded. Love the JJP guys. Keith Johnson is probably my favorite rules designer, period. Love his games. However, my Pirates, which is six years old, is still incomplete. It doesn't have the final wizard mode in it. My Godfather, which is a year and a half old, which I bought like a month after it came out. Stupid me. Thinking that maybe they'll finish this game. Still incomplete. The wizard mode's in the game, but it has a bug that's preventing it from accessing it. It doesn't stop the timers on it. So there's a terrible track record going on with games that Keith is coding. I think Guns N' Roses is complete, but I know some people are not happy with the code. It needs some work. But why, to JJP, love you guys, but why on earth would I pay $12,500 for another game where your team doesn't finish the rules on it? And it's heartbreaking because you guys, everything you do is amazing. You guys are the gold standard of pinball machine design, especially in presentation. You guys crush it. so why is something so simple as just finishing the game so hard and plus this is the crazy thing you guys release games where your code is way ahead of stern's i mean the game is like pretty much done you're at like the one yard line and then you don't cross it that is really odd whereas like stern will eventually cross it after like two years maybe even maybe maybe two years is too much a year, year and a half. So, again, I can't, on principle, buy another J.J.P. game from this team until you go back and finish the other games that I've spent money on. Now, I might be in danger of becoming a hypocrite if this team makes my dream team and I can't help myself, get my wallet out, but that's not the case in this scenario. So, no matter how good this game is, I'm not touching it until it's – I'm not even going to think about touching it until it's done.
    113:17
    That's another fair assessment as well. It's like, you got to finish your games. These are very expensive things. So, and, you know, I've gotten to the point where, oh, what Nick's dream theme is? In chat, BorgDog's asking. I appreciate it. It's Hall & Oates, right? That's Nick's dream theme? I would do Hall & Oates. I don't know what my esoteric dream themes are. I would buy an indie game. I wish J.J.P. would do Indiana Jones and do it right. Yeah, that'd be good. We're due for a better one.
    113:47
    But, yeah. Yeah. anyways yeah game looks great looking forward to playing it maybe get it down the line please finish it there you go alright what else do we have news wise a few other quick items Spooky Pinball is moving again I'm like this company has moved more than any other company I've ever known but they're relocating their manufacturing again they're showing out some of their new test rigs, things like that. They did a stream of the move. There they are in front of their new location. So congrats, Boogie, on your new spot over there.
    114:28
    I threw this one in for Nick Lane. Nick. That's like half the town in that picture. It is, isn't it? Nick, are you excited for our first look at Sushi Madness from Pinball Adventures?
    114:40
    Oh, my God. Here it is. So they were doing that Elements game. How do they still exist? They took that Elements game, too. It was a TPF, and it was a hot mess. So, like, you know what? Let's do another game. That one's going so well. So, it used to be Sushi Mania. Now it's Sushi Madness.
    114:58
    And some close-up pictures of the play field. So, there you go. Nobody wants this game. Don't bother. Oh, it looks terrible. Yep. But thanks for the content. One thing that is really cool is the new Jaws code update. I played this at your house that has the new Jaws the Revenge mini challenge mode. You've played this more than I. Tell us a little bit about this. Yeah, this was a surprise, quite the surprise. So it's kind of a mode that you can play when you start the game. You hold down, like, the left flipper, and you can select different alternative versions of a game or certain modes of a game. Well, this was added, and it's an 8-bit Nintendo-style presentation where you're the shark, and you play it like an old-school video game in that there's levels that you go through. You have a health meter. It starts out where each shot will put you kind of like in a different lane in the water as a shark, and in those lanes are swimmers. And when you get into a lane where there's swimmers, you mash the button to chomp them and eat them, which is pretty cool. You drain, you lose some health. once there's like a timer to do that part and then once the timer's up you go into this battle phase where there's a boat that's trying to kill you the boat's attaching barrels to you which kind of nerfs the shark eventually will get your health down if you don't hit a shot that gives you more health or you don't hit enough shots to kill the boat if you lose your health then you go to ball two and then ball three if you defeat the boat then you go to level two and you do it all over again, and then I think in between level two and three, there's this pick the picture where the shark is and not the swimmer, kind of little mini-game video mode within this thing. So it was a surprise. It's cool.
    116:51
    To me, it's a novelty. I just don't know how much I'm going to be playing this. It's fun. You kind of play it a few times. Maybe you get addicted and play more, but But, you know, I think what's interesting is just how much work they put into this for something that is more of a gimmick and novelty. And a very well done gimmick and novelty.
    117:14
    Right? Like, but it's kind of weird, man. It's like, wow, there's so much in this game. They put in so much in this game. And then you see these other games from Stern that just don't have any code in it. It's very, very weird. It's got more code than John Wick in this mini mode. Yeah, that was the joke, right? That has more code than probably John Wick does. Yeah. We played those after we streamed Punny Factory, the other PF, Pulp Fiction, at your house. And then went and got burgers, and then we came back and we played those. And I had a blast with it. I could see what you're saying. Like, after you play it a few times, you're probably okay. Yeah. It's one of those things where, like, every once in a while, you'll probably fire it up and play through it. But it's pretty long. I thought it was going to be a one-ball thing, but it's three balls and there's lots of ball saves, and so you're playing it for a long time if you're playing it.
    118:07
    Yeah, even just the regular Jaws is getting a long playing, and again, the more I play Jaws, it just reinforces how much I hate victory laps in a game that's already long.
    118:17
    Yeah. I think I really start to dislike pinball games where you're trapped in something that doesn't actually progress the game along, and it traps you there numerous times. Right, so multi-balls could do that. but certainly victory laps are guilty of that. I don't know. We'll go off. I want to do like a top ten things we don't like in pinball rules kind of countdown. Yeah. Nice. One of these days. Yeah, the one mode in Godzilla is like that where you're like shooting all the shots from left to right, and if you shoot, you'll get an extra ball, but it's like, oh, my God, I don't want to do this for the next like five minutes. Dude, I'm glad you brought that up. I hate that mode. I dread getting into it. I don't want to do it. The ball saves on, so even when you drain it, so I was like, no, no, you're not going anywhere, pal. You're going to play this for a couple minutes at least. Okay, at least. You better play it. You better enjoy it because you're stuck in it. That's right. And you're not going to guess what? You can't progress on anything else in the game. How do you like that? Do what we want you to do. That's that same team, and that team likes to do it. And you couple that with scenes you can't skip, and Jaws is better. And it's just like, man, I'm going to sell those games. I swear to God, they're just starting to drive me nuts.
    119:32
    You know what game is awesome? Godfather. I've been playing that game more. Even though 10 minutes ago I'm trashing it for missing the code. It is like the perfect game in terms of it's brutal. It can be long if you play it, and you have optionality in how you play it, and you're always making progress. That game is so good. That's why you're going to buy another Keith Johnson game eventually.
    119:54
    Oh, God. Maybe never unless he finishes his games and unless he makes a dream that I just psychologically can't help. Get your wallet out of the game. We've all got them. We're all going to be guilty of something like that. All right. Here's another quick one.
    120:13
    More teasers. It's the Allison Wendland game from Dutch Pinball. They've been teasing a lot of this. It's got this little spinning out lane thing where you can save your ball. This feels very J-pop-ish. You can see some of the work here from Leora. Art of Pinball. He does amazing work.
    120:32
    You can see some of the detail on there. This was another shot they showed of a werewolf. Oh, Jabberwocky. Sorry.
    120:42
    Again, incredible detail in this. But, you know, we'll see. How long are they going to, like, roll out these teasers until we actually see a game? Like, J.J.P. at least was like, yeah, we're going to tease this for a while. And then, okay, next Thursday we're going to give you the full reveal, and then the game's going to go on sale there. We have no idea with Alice in Wonderland. What we're seeing looks great. Is it going to be any good? We'll see. Is it going to take them 10 years to build them? We don't know. Will you get your money taken and stolen? Maybe. It's possible. But there you go. Dutch pinball. Alice in Wonderland. Proceed with caution.
    121:23
    Oh, here's one. I don't think you've heard about this. Nick, the thing everybody is really hyped on right now is pinball machines being made in Australia. So here's another one for you. It's Vector Pinball. They're making pinball machines. Okay.
    121:42
    Peter Brock. God, how many games are they making? You get the Marlboro Man. Oh, shit. There's a marble racing game. Like a stock car? Yeah. Oh, wow. Now we're talking. Let me grab my wallet. You get your wallet out? Okay. Oh, yeah. All right. They got that. They got Holden Heritage. What is this? Oh, okay. I might grab a pack of some Reds and just light it up and play at the same time. Does it come up in the last train? Exactly. Like old school pinball. You got your little spot on the lockdown bar to hold your cigarette while you play. Yeah, the good old days. Yeah, the old days when we killed ourselves slowly with cigarettes. This one, 8-Ball Fury actually looks pretty cool. This is a homebrew game that they're bringing to production.
    122:36
    I guess they've been in pinball manufacturing stuff for a while. I don't really know a whole lot about them, but this looks kind of cool. Art is whatever, but... Doesn't it look like the Gottlieb game kind of? some things maybe not I haven't seen it for a while no the Capcom game oh I didn't see it yeah I haven't seen it it's probably not it looks like the is it the one you have 8 ball champ break shot thank you Dunnethpin enchant thank you what's the one you have though Nick 8 ball champ it reminds me of that with the it's got some of that which is cool like it's a throwback to a lot of those games yeah you can see a little break shot action in the middle here. Could be fun.
    123:25
    Wildcat from chat says, quote, it looks like a Windows 98 shareware pinball game but in real life. I agree. The art style makes it look like that. It's really terrible. It totally does. What's funny is I remember seeing a really cool translate that I think I can't remember the artist. One of the well-known pinball artists had done a translate for one of the prototypes. I don't know if that's going to transition over to this or not, but okay, if you're looking to spend more money for an Australian pinball machine, here's an option. What could go wrong, friends? What could go wrong? Alright, I got one mod you don't need for, we still don't have a proper intro for this segment, but I saw this and I was like, we definitely don't need that. This is a microphone shooter rod. Okay, I forget, I think this person posted in Pinball Enthusiast, so they brought this on themselves. it literally like okay let me switch over here so look at this it looks like he just like took this I'm going to take this off of my microphone it looks like he just like took an actual microphone and stuck it onto a shooter rod that's like a great thing you know there is something about how far a shooter rod should stick out okay Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, so you don't fucking ram into it and knock it off.
    124:52
    I've never understood the shooter rod thing. I just really, I've never, never have changed my shooter rod for a custom one. That's fine. Some look okay, but wow. Yeah. And you're totally going to run into that and snap it off.
    125:06
    It's like when you, I had a, which was the gun? Oh, it was Dirty Harry. I had a Dirty Harry, and I ran into that thing once with my leg, and it's like brutal. I immediately put it farthest to the right against the wall, so I would never do that again. That mic has to stick out farther than any of those. Oh, totally. Yeah, and if there's no support there, it's just going to toll it. So it's going to break.
    125:31
    Oh, Jesus. This is pretty bad. All right. I had to bring that to everybody, though. There you go. That's the mod you don't need. Nick Lane, you want to do some game room updates?
    125:42
    Yeah. Yeah, go first. I've got nothing. We've just been working on bringing the club to the finish line. It's getting painted right now. I'm hoping to open up by the end of the year now. So you know how it goes.
    125:58
    Yeah, again, if you're interested in being a member of the club, learning more, feel free to reach out to me at buffalopinball at gmail.com. Shout-out to, and I'm sorry if I'm getting this person's name incorrectly, but John Lignos, a listener, is interested in the club, will become a member. he donated the paint for the club. So what a hero. So paint's going up. It's starting to look great. Really excited for that. Yeah.
    126:24
    I think Matt told me about that. I was like, that's incredible. So thank you. Thank you so much for that.
    126:30
    Appreciate the feedback and the donation there. For me, I've been doing a lot. I was like, man, I've been doing a lot with my game. So I got my Princess Bride module, like Josh and I were talking about earlier. I've been playing that a bunch since it arrived on Wednesday. I'll be streaming that. It was originally going to be Monday, but I have another dead obligation that night, so it might be Tuesday night. If Colin can do it then, we'll follow the Buffalo Pinball social media, and we'll post around there when that's ready. But it's going to be a stream of the gameplay along with Colin McAlpine, who did a lot of the rules on the game via Skype slash Zoom, talking about the rules and helping us through that. I got some new drained artwork for my drained pinball module for the P3.
    127:22
    We got the speaker panel art and the front cabinet art. So the new thing, one of the latest things they've added to the P3 is the art that you can actually swap out on the front of the cabinet. So I'm going to install. I got the system core art package for my game. I put that on and I got the system core front, but I'm going to install the T-nuts so you can just screw on different art. So thanks to Nick Baldridge for the sweet drained art. It looks really good. Check that out at drainedpinball.com if you want to grab some for yours. And the big thing I did to my P3 was that I swapped the entire back box. So they have a upgrade kit for the earlier P3s where you can take the old back box off, transfer the guts over, and then put the new P3 back box on. So it gives you the lit speaker panel under the display on the back box, and it also gives you the speaker lights and things like that. So it looks really cool. I was back and forth on it because it was $1,000. I was like, yeah, do I want to spend $1,000 on that? And I was like, well, I really like my P3. I want it to be as cool as it can. So I was like, what the hell? I was originally like, well, I'll just get it, And then I'll, it'll be like a winter project. I'll install it over the winter. And then I was like, ah, I should probably just do this. So I ended up going up, going ahead and doing it. It took me, I did it over the course of two days.
    128:51
    I started it one night after work and then finished it the second night. And then my son helped me get the backpacks on and we just, you know, screwed it in place and off we went. So that was, that was cool. I love the way it looks. The speaker lights are really cool. So I really appreciate that Multimorphic gives owners the ability to upgrade that way. So just shout-outs to them for that.
    129:16
    What else? Oh, then the ever-growing list of things that I've had to do on my Alien. I had to swap out all the flipper bushings on it because the flipper bushings they had were, like, a little too long. and they would also get like rough so the flippers would stick so the recommended fix is just swap them with uh belly williams flipper bushing so i did that cheap fix just annoying to have to do it um but it's playing nice now uh yeah i'm still really liking that game despite all the uh the work that i've had to do on it and one last thing i wanted to give a shout out so nate shivers if you remember from coast to coast pinball um he's one of the og pinball podcasters. He gave us a shout out on the Wormhole podcast. So check out the Wormhole Pinball podcast, Nate Shivers' episode. It was a really good one. Especially if you've been in the pinball scene since the early 2010s. I'm sure you still listen to Nate. It was good to hear from him again. And he said he enjoys the show still. So I appreciate him tuning in and giving us a shout out. I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah, the one pinball podcast I really listened to back in the day was his podcast. So it's nice to see things come full circle. It's kind of, we listen to him, and it's nice that he's finding some entertainment value by listening to us. It was really nice of him. By the way, I just found out yesterday I'm going to be going to Amsterdam for work mid-October.
    130:47
    If you're listening, Nate, maybe we'll meet up. Which also means Kevin and I probably will not be going to Expo now just because I've got so much travel coming up.
    130:57
    I'm rooming up with Digital Jedi, so we'll have fun on your behalf at Expo, and I'll give everybody high fives for you. Thank you. All right. If you haven't yet, be sure to type hashtag win in chat. We're going to pull our winner of the Pinball Life Brightline Synchronized Speaker Lighting System and Kenwood Speaker Upgrade Combo Pack from Pinball Life.
    131:21
    So we've got 44 total entries right now from 37 people. Remember, if you subscribe to the channel, you get double the entries. So two X entries for subscribers. Thank you very much for supporting the show. I did have somebody kindly reach out to me. We were going back and forth, a listener of the podcast, and said, hey, is there any way we can support you? Because I love the way you do. And I said, yep. Subscribing on Twitch is a great way to do it. If you just want a recurring thing you don't have to think about. There's also a thing happening right now. It's September. It's a promotion they run every September. So if you've never subscribed to the channel before, before the end of the month, you can do so and bank a bunch of months for 30% off. We still get the same cut. Twitch just takes less of a cut. So if you want to support the channel, that's a good way to do it. You can also just send a cash donation to PayPal. TalkPanball at gmail.com. Or no, BuffaloPanball at gmail.com for the PayPal. So thank you for everybody who supports the channel and for all of y'all who are getting in on the winning entry. All right. So we're up to 47 total entries, 40 unique entries. We're going to pick our winner for the Pinball Life Blitzspeaker Kit. It is Wildcat.
    132:40
    Wildcat's not in the U.S., though. Wildcat. Wildcat, do you have somebody in the U.S. we can ship it to?
    132:45
    Or how do you want to do this? I know. Inevitably. when we do a drawing like this, it's always going to go international. So we'll wait for Wildcat to, uh, to chime in. If not, we'll pick another winner. He does. Okay. We're going to, all right. All right. We're going to, we're going to, he's going to accept that. Congratulations, Wildcat. We will get that, uh, shipped out to you from pinball life. Thanks again to pinball life for that, uh, prize to give away. Don't go anywhere though. We have a brand new episode of Gorin's topper talk. Whoa. It's coming.
    133:26
    Don't forget, you can go to buffalopinball.com if you want a Buffalo Pinball t-shirt. Other cool stuff, stickers, cups, mugs. You can follow us on all our social media channels if you're watching live. It's at the bottom of the screen. But we're Buffalo Pinball on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Discord.
    133:47
    What else? Talkpinball at gmail.com if you want to give us some feedback. You can review us on your social media platform of choice, your podcast. Catcher, wherever you listen to us, appreciate a review. Listen, don't be stingy with the subscribes and thumbs up on YouTube.
    134:02
    Let's see. Just hit that, tickle that thumbs up. Yeah. It doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt, yeah. You can put trolly comments in the chat to get the engagement up. We don't care.
    134:13
    We get those. It's fine. Sometimes I respond to them. Sometimes, most of the time, I don't. Occasionally, I'm like, screw it. I'm going to reply. Maybe you'll be that person that gets the reply from me. It's nice to see when Kevin gets fired up for once when I'm on the other side of this. It was good as well. I just like taking a nap, and I woke up, and that was like the first thing I saw. I'm like, screw this guy. Oh, by the way, by the speaking of trolly comments on our YouTube channel, I'm just delaying Gordon's moment. Yeah.
    134:42
    I am selling my Rush. I've made the commitment. It's up on Pinside. Let's get that thing sold because I'm going to buy a John Wick Pro. Let's make this happen. Let's make it happen. I'm getting that garbage game.
    134:56
    Let's go. But I got to sell it before it kind of starts snowing in Buffalo. So that's like my cutoff. So let's go. Let's go. If you got a nice pro, you want to trade it for cash or rush, come on, hit me up. Let's do this. Let's get a WIC pro, and then I can show that guy what's up. I'm the dummy that bought a pro, too. I'm the dummy. See? That's right. You really showed him. I want this unfinished trash heap. Bring it.
    135:23
    Amazing. All right. I think that'll do it. Thanks again for another amazing month of Talk Fanball. Don't forget to tune in when I do the Princess Bride stream. Set your notifications when we go live, and we'll look forward to sharing that with everybody.
    135:38
    In the meantime, enjoy Topper Talk, Episode 24. Goodbye, Nick. We'll see you next time. Where's my Topper Talk button?
    135:49
    It's Topper Talk with Goran right now. Let's all have some fun. This is about plastic on top of your pin. Go and buy one now. There's a topper here and a topper there. Here a topper, there a topper, everywhere a topper. It's critical to the gameplay experience. You must buy one now. It's your monthly bill of toppers right now. Topper Talk with Goran. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Topper Talk with Goren. The part of the podcast where Kevin and Nick give me about three to five minutes to talk about everything happening in the very active and profitable topper community. Now, for today's episode, we'll be talking about the new Jaws topper from Stern Pinball. So let's head into the office and we'll talk about that now.
    136:36
    Okay, so here we are in the office. So let's dive into the Jaws topper. So this is the Jaws pinball topper from Stern Pinball. I think they call it the Amity Island Billboard Topper. It is $999, and as you could have guessed from the title, it is the Amity Island Billboard.
    136:56
    It's static. It has light shows, but it has no moving parts to it, which I think is shown by the price. Typically, currently in the stern topper market, toppers with motors are typically in that $1,500 to $2,000 range. I do miss the days of the Black Knight topper when that was under $1,000. What a steal that was.
    137:20
    But the topper has a neat lenticular effect that has a help shark pop up, depending on how you're looking at it. And then the billboard is backlit with some other lighting as well around the trees and the plastics on the back panel of the topper as well. It's $999, which is pretty expensive. It does look nice up there. But the one thing that it does have going for it is that you actually get an exclusive topper mode unlocked with this. It's called The Shark is Broken. I think it's like a minigame, essentially. And when Jaws was being filmed, the shark was always broken. It was a very temperamental shark. So Stern made a mode just based off of that where the game is now functioning and you need to get it back to 100%. It looks pretty fun. So in that $999, you're essentially paying for that other DLC. With that said, we don't know if Stern will release that to other people in the future. The other thing is, the one thing I like about this topper is that it doesn't mirror the artwork from the back glass or the title from the back glass directly up on top of the topper, although now that I look at it, I do see the billboard right here in the back glass. And then also, you have the billboard on the game as well. So you do have, I guess, three billboards now if you have this topper all showing the same thing. Like I said, I do like that it doesn't just have the Jaws font and Jaws logo right there up top, like you see with other games, like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles topper. Here's a quick little video of the topper doing its thing. You can see the lenticular effect in action. They should show that in a second. And the backlighting. and there's some of the light show and yeah that's about it for this topper it does look nice up there it's pretty expensive but I do like how it looks thank you so much for tuning into this episode of topper talk with Goran tune in to the next podcast for another episode and as always get out there and buy a topper thank you for coming to my topper talk
    139:31
    All right, Kev. See ya.