thanks for tuning into the loser kid pinball podcast i am josh roop with me my co-captain got larson and scott today is an awesome day i'm excited two games have released in the last like two months we got walking dead we got star wars fate of the empire both amazing games fall of the empire fall of him tomato tomato tomato what if you're gonna buy these games scott where are you getting them from you know zach and nicole at flipping out pinball um they helped us out we're great and i i just got a jazz 70 for my buddy so uh if you want to get it reach out to them they're always good help exactly and one more thing before we get to our guests if you see sitting next to me, I've got this beautiful Urshaker guitar that I had custom made from top to bottom from a gentleman called Daniel Clark with Sithar Guitars. Amazing, amazing quality. I can't wait to get, we're going to have Daniel on to talk more about it. Seriously, this guitar is amazing. If you like guitars and you like pinball machines, it's a no brainer. Process takes a little bit, so be comfortable with a little bit of a weight, but I promise you it is worth the wait. So if you want more information, hit us up. We'll send you in the right direction. Scott, will you introduce our guest for us today? We have legendary designer John Borg. Single-handedly, he's the one when we ask people who can design a pinball machine and assemble it from bolts to finished product. They always say John knows what he's doing. John's been in the industry literally for years, and he did double duty this year. coming out. Last year, he did the remaster of Metallica, and this year, he also has two that came out back-to-back. I have no idea how this guy did it because we have Fall of the Empire and we have The Walking Dead. So, John, we appreciate you squeezing us in because I think your snorkel is still below water right now. I'm out of game jail now. I'm off the line with the startup for The Walking Dead, and I figured I'd get in touch with you guys and come on the show i appreciate that man because we we've been working back and forth it seems like since september i know that we'd originally talked about doing an interview before anything was revealed it's just it's been chaos and like we'd said you'd listen to our episodes and stuff like that you're like it's true i've been i've been neck deep in work for months now and i guess really the question is how much time did you have from after finishing up metallica to starting star wars and well Metallica came out in October. We showed it at Expo. And then November passed, I was out on the line a little bit in November with Metallica. And then in December, I found out that I was going to be working on a Star Wars license, but I wasn't sure how much of the story I was going to get. So I started out with just a piece of one of the movies, and we were going to try to make a game out of that. turned out that they negotiated the whole trilogy. So I was able to use anything I wanted from all three movies. I was very happy about that. And then sometime in December, early January, I found out that they were going to remaster The Walking Dead. So I took both projects on at the same time. So everything I did, I did twice. I built two sets of prototypes. you know, two sets of licensing issues, you know, all the way through from the beginning to the end. It was, it was a lot of work and, and it was a lot of, you know, days and nights. I didn't even vacation last summer. So, you know, and then when we got to Expo, I thought, I'll get a little break right after Expo. And then, you know, so after Expo, you know, we launched Star Wars. So I was on the floor for that. And then I was also finishing up Walking dead. So, uh, so I'm just now out of game jail. Everybody last summer told me that they were, that by the time I got on vacation, I was going to be sitting in my backyard with my shorts and a t-shirt and sitting in a lawn chair with a drink, with an umbrella, with four inches of snow on top of it. We got our, we got our snow. We got 10 inches of snow. Oh, wow. We just, it was crazy. We just got dusted here, but yeah, it was a lot of work to, to, to get them both done. Um, and, And they're both beautiful games. I'm waiting for my Star Wars. It took me a while before I could even get some time to just go upstairs and order one. So I'm looking forward to getting that. I'm going to set that up. I'm setting up another little area in my basement for some more games because, like a lot of you guys, I'm running out of room. so uh so i've got a utility room in my basement that i've cleaned out and uh painted it satin black and put some really beautiful cracked ice looking tile on the floor so i made a little mini game room i'm gonna just put a few games a couple of my older games in there so here's the question when you have something like star wars okay this is a couple things this is an iconic title you know the star wars this is the one thing that people when they start getting into pinball They're like, oh, there's a Star Wars game. Well, OK, it's been done many ways by multiple. This is, I think, like the seventh version of a Star Wars game. And so, yes, when you approach the design on this, how do you say, OK, this is something that everybody knows, but I want to bring this sort of approach to it. So how do you approach designing something? Well, actually, some of the things that I brought to the game were things that I did before. I definitely wanted to shoot and open up a Death Star and lock balls inside for a multiball. And then if you look at the game, the way the inserts, the large rectangle inserts for all the modes are, with all the characters on them, I used large rectangles, and I set the characters upright with a translucent area around them that was, you know, So the character that is screened over the insert has got a blocker behind it so light doesn't shine through it. But there's like a big halo around the character or, you know, parts of the insert light around the character. And that kind of came from the 92 Star Wars game. If you look at the two, you can definitely tell that, you know, that we borrowed that again. Wanted to blow off the Death Star. Wanted to do something with the AT-AT. I think if I didn't put the Sarlacc pit in the game, it probably would have been R2-D2 back there doing something, locking balls or, you know, moving kind of like the original game had. But I wanted to make the game mainly I wanted to make the game very approachable. You know, a lot of newbies will play it and, you know, they'll hit. This is the first game I think I've ever made where I could plunge the ball and I could probably hit every shot within the first 30 seconds. And if I can do that, you know, people are going to, when you're aiming at something, sometimes you miss and you hit the shot right next to it and you feel rewarded. You're not bricking off targets too much in the game. You're pretty much making shots. And that center shot up the middle, the hyperspace ramp, it's really fast, gets the ball right back to your flipper, and it's really easy to repeat over and over again. And people love that. I think that's what people liked about the first Star Wars game, is you could shoot that center ramp really easily, and you got to see it go around the loop and come back to your right flipper. And I think people really liked that. It was easy and it was rewarding. And somebody that doesn't play pinball, they're generally shooting up the middle and they would hit that ramp and they're feeling rewarded. Like, wow, I did something. Wow, I got to do that again. You know, wow, I can do it several times in a row. This is really cool. And the combos were great on the game too. You know, like when I plunge the ball, ball comes to the left flipper. I shoot it up the right ramp and it comes back and then I shoot the Death Star to get the thing open like right from the get-go but I just wanted to make the game really approachable for people and also the rules on the game are really deep for your hardcore players, there's a lot there Ray and Andrew crushed it, they really did a great job Do you feel like you kind of came full circle with your first game for Data East being Star Wars. And then 30 years later, it's Star Wars. 30 years later, I get to do it again. Yeah. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Is there anything that you wish that you'd done on the first one that you're like, I've got to do this in this one? Yeah, a real ad-at. I would have liked to put a real ad-at in the first one. I ran out of real estate. If we would have made it a wide body, I could have put a head and ad-at in the first one. The LE should have had foldable legs for the whole thing if you destroyed it the whole time. Oh, ad-at legs on the game. yeah that was so cool maybe maybe that's uh the accessories package you can buy add-out legs for the the machine there's a modder out there that's now going to take that idea and run with it you know it so you kind of talked about a little bit the designer process i know when people think of designer they just kind of think of the play field and you talked about like dealing with licenses what is kind of the typical process can you can you just kind of walk us through what a designer does when making a game? Everybody does it different. I've seen some guys that just sketch, you know, and just, you know, put a picture out there and hand it to a mechanical engineer and let them run with it. You know, like Dennis makes a quarter scale model of a game out of foam core and lays out shots and he does beautiful, he does a beautiful scale version, you know, downscaled version of the game. I start out right at CAD and I just start laying out line work. And then, you know, when I get done with it, it's all real. You know, I turn it over to a guy that does solid works and he just, you know, he does all the Z and extrudes all the parts and makes the model. You know, so it's all real. And I, you know, and I go after everything. I mean, all the access holes for all the drop wires, for all the switches and everything. I just – when I cut the thing loose to a mechanical engineer, I want him to have very few – find very few problems and just be able to just go after it, you know, get a prototype up real quick. So is it you that has to deal with the licensor or is it more of like a Gomez thing or a combination? Yeah, no, generally Jody, George, Seth, they'll deal with licensors mostly. Usually when we start a project, we'll get together. Like when we started Star Wars, we got together and we had a meeting with them. And it was the whole team, mechanical engineer, myself, the whole design team. But as we're going through approval process and whatnot, I'll usually hear from Jody will call up and say, this has got to change or the likeness of this person has to be altered. And he works all that out. How did that process kind of change since you had to juggle two games at once How did you survive that process you know two team meetings a week you know one on Thursday one on Friday I just kept pounding away You know I would work on one and then I you know get tired and then I would go and switch over to the other one. You know, and then, you know, to make a Sam game, you know, a spike game, there was a lot of work in that, just some of the standards that we have adopted. And, like, the back panel moves in a half an inch because the back panel is now a stiffener support for the play field. We used to put a wood rail there and put the back panel on the back of the playfield. So all the ramp trimming had to be redone. The wood rails that used to run up and down the sides of the playfields, those vinyl-coated wood rails, we don't use those anymore. It's a steel rail. So I couldn't have any cutouts where there'd be like GI lights or a rail maybe going right to the edge of the playfield. And I had that on Walking Dead in the upper right-hand corner. so I was able to massage that a little bit put a bigger radius on it open it up a little bit because that was kind of a hard shot so I worked on a lot of the geometry to pull all that stuff in and change all the ramps and then we did a lot of work on the game mechanically we simplified the prison door mechanism the linkage we simplified that and beefed it up a little bit the crossbow mechanism is driven with a cylindrical motor now instead of the little pear-shaped motor. The pear-shaped motors don't usually last as long as the cylindrical ones. They're a little more expensive, but, you know, the thing is going to work forever. And it has an encoder on it, so I can actually know exactly where the cannon is pointing. So that'll come into play later, but we're not going to talk about that today. Oh, dang, a little taste. I like that, though. Yeah. I'm just hoping what you can do is steal someone's crossbow and you can control it from somewhere else. That would be awesome. You can mess with our crossbow. Bluetooth to the game. Oh, yeah. But you are bringing this up, and so I want to bring this in. One of the big things, this is the first game that is really pushing all the things that Spike 3 does. and I know it still doesn't have everything, but what are some of the things that you were able to do with the spike three that you hadn't had in your toolbox before? Well, it's, it's faster and it's, it's more robust. It's a lot faster. That's probably a better question for, you know, for Guido or Ray Day. But the sound, the sound is just amazing. The sound system, I just love it. You know, when you buy the LE, you've got, you've got the four speakers in the speaker panel instead of two. And it just sounds great. Well, when I was showing people Star Wars at Expo, I was telling them, I go, if you buy one of these, I go, you know, you set the volume level at 32 and it sounds great. And I go, if you put it up to 55, all your neighbors are going to know you have one. They're all going to come over. So the biggest thing for me with the new system is the sound system. It's just beautiful. Well, and that bigger display, too. I mean, that looks great. Yeah. And the Walking Dead music, the soundtrack is it's always, you know, it's always been good. You know, a lot of a lot of really good levels of music. so one thing looking at your play field so help me help me distinguish when you're designing and you have to say okay i need to have an le premium play field and i have to have a pro version of this play field how do you decide what elements to put in to upscale and which ones you're like you know what we can we can really try to streamline it for the location which is you know what the pro is typically designed for yeah sometimes i you know sometimes i start out laying out the you know i start out with the pro um usually i i start and and put all the bells and whistles in and i look at the at you know uh the premium le price and i you know i look at the i look at the numbers and figure out what i'm going to have to do to make it a pro you know like in star wars i took the motor the motor out of the ad at um uh so the ad at the the pro star wars game is just it's upright and it stays that way it doesn't move um you got to just look at what you've got and you've got to look to you know to see where you have to get to uh you know to a pro budget so one question i had i know that a couple people have asked recently um sometimes the the death star rejects and whatnot are you guys working on a fix to remedy that or what's going on there Yeah, we have a kit. It's a simple bracket that mounts on the front of the Death Star ball lock trough, and it has a bigger opening in it, and it allows the ball to go in easier. And we just, while we were waiting for Walking Dead to come up, we made a bunch of Star Wars games last week or the week before, and we used this new bracket. And I went out and checked the games when they came up, and they shot like butter. And it's just a bracket that mounts to the front of the trough, and it has a bigger opening in it. The only thing is you have to take off the plastics around it to get to the mounting screws to mount it. But once you put that thing in, it shoots like butter. Awesome. I don't know if that kit is available yet, but I know it's going to be. If it's not already, it's going to be in the next few days. It's coming. Awesome. I know a lot of people, I've got one friend that loves He loves your new Star Wars, he loves all your games I don't know if you know Tim Lee, but he's a Borg fan Oh yeah, yeah Tim is an awesome dude and he's always bragging to me About his favorite game of all time Is The Walking Dead And he just absolutely loves Star Wars And he owns both games now And it's just, he's like, you gotta ask He's like I turned to him when I was like, dude, I need all the questions Because I know you know these games Inside and out but yeah i guess that was just he wanted to know too if you have a tip to best utilize the jedi magnet too at the bottom uh when the ball drains let's say the ball drains out yeah a lot of people have asked me about this so when the ball drains out the left side and you got the jedi safe lit um or the you know the four safe um right before the ball hits that little bracket that you see sticking out by the out hole right as it right about as it goes gets to that bracket you hit that button and it'll fling it right up the out lane on the right side into the shooter lane now if the ball drains out the right side and it comes by if you hit the button it'll actually force the ball into the out hole you got to let it go past the magnet and it hits that rail that metal rail the flat rail that guides it in from from the left side let it bounce off that and it'll bounce up toward the magnet. When it's on its way up toward the magnet, you hit the button and it'll throw it back up in between the flippers. So it's pretty interesting. If you spell Jedi all the way, when you keep shooting the spinners and you spell Jedi all the way, it'll actually stop the ball and bring it to a halt and then it'll throw it up between the flippers. But it's actually more fun when you've got the J, the E, and the D lit and use just the force save, not the Jedi ball save. So there's a difference between the two. You know, some people, you know, they get you have to get the J, you have to get the J and E to light it. And then you get the D. It gives you another try. Because sometimes if you hit the button and your timing is off and say the ball rolls up the right out lane a little bit and it comes back, let it bounce off that rail and gives you a second try. So you hit the button again. And as the ball's going back up toward that magnet again, it'll it'll fling it right between the flippers. um it's it's definitely a lot of fun uh when you learn how to use it um especially when you're on ball three and you're getting ready to start multiball or something like that and and you save your ball and you're just like yes um it's a lot of fun i know that's one of the cool parts in the trailer i'm always watching that i was like dang that's so cool to watch just go past yoda right up into the shooter lane oh yeah Mike Vinikour and i were talking about that he he said He reminded me of Goldeneye, James Bond Goldeneye, back in the 90s. Back in the day, yeah. It had a standard four-lane bottom, and the flippers are right in the middle of the game. Where this game, you've got a five-lane bottom, so the flippers are offset. Looking at it, I was like, well, I'm going to be able to save it going this way, but the other way isn't going to work. And, and then, so when I was, when I was exercising it and playing with it, there were a few times where the ball, I'd hit the button and I, you know, the timing would be, you know, just right on. And, and the ball would go flinging up the right out lane and it would go up, up the out lane and almost get out in between the rubbers that are there. And I thought, wow, that's cool. So I just took and I cut a piece of the ball guide wire off and allowed it to just go up the right out lane and go right into the into the shooter lane. And, you know, it worked great. And I was like, you know, so I started showing the guys. I'm like, look at this. This is really cool. You know, and, you know, like for save. So it worked out really great. So we took something from an old game and we made it even better. You know, it's very skillful and it's a lot of fun. very rewarding when you save your ball. Yeah, when I started working on Star Wars, I had the ad at, I had him, he was set back a little farther than he is in the production game. And he, when you hit him, I had a target right up where his legs were, and you shot the target, and then he would lean over and expose his head to the play field, and there was an opto out in front of him, and he actually shot it in the head. And so I made the model without the guns on the front. And and Disney said, you got it. You got to put the guns on. So I thought those things are going to break off and they're going to be you know, they're going to be on the play field and people are going to be screaming. So so we we just had the thing. I just I moved it. I moved it forward and I just had the thing lean down and lean over a target. And George is looking at he was kind of worried that the ball may still hit the thing in the head. You know, like if it deflects and, you know, bounces and it hits the target and it goes up a little bit or something, it may catch the head. So he took the model and he took the front plate where the neck was mounted and he made it pivot. So when the thing comes down, its chin kind of hits a bracket and it lifts up to kind of get the ball or the head a little further out of harm's way. And that worked out great. it would have been fun to bash the thing in the head, but I didn't want it to fall apart either. Yeah, I don't blame you. I can imagine a lot of headless ad-ats out on location with that sort of trauma. Yeah, you know, when I made Metallica, you know, my snake lost teeth. Yeah. So I didn't want to lose my head in this one. Yeah. But, yeah, so and then even like, you know, But hitting the adept in the head also puts a little bit of a jolt on the linkage and it a pear motor that drives that thing So I was a little bit worried about that too So I was told once a long time ago it's better to make a good game that works great than a great game that works good. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. I noticed a lot of wire forms in here. So tell me about your philosophy on wire forms because, yes, it's cool to look at the ball, travel around a wire form, but there is a purpose to designing the speed at which it's coming off the wire form or the kinesthetics of it. So can you tell me why you chose the way you did on these wire forms? Plastic ramps get scratched and they look dull after a while. I like the wire ramp look and you can see through and you can see all the artwork behind it. You can see through a plastic ramp too, but I definitely wouldn't have made all the ramps steel. But I do like wire ramps. Remember Tales from the Crypt? Yep. That thing had wire ramps all over it. But yeah, I like wire ramps. so i noticed that on star wars and also on walking dead that you guys are using two new artists are these specific to the licensors or is this guys that you found important no yeah uh vince uh vince prost worked on the star wars game and uh he also did dungeons and dragons for us okay so we have used vince before um and i met him a couple of times uh the new artist Robert Lasky. He is a fabulous illustrator and he, I never did get to meet him. But his work is amazing. I mean, he just, he nailed those images. Rick couldn't look more like Rick and Michonne looks fabulous on the cabinet, you know, slicing the zombie's head off. I was actually kind of a little worried that it was a a little too scary, a little too, you know, the opposite side of the cabinet on the LE has got the arrow in the zombie's head. Yeah. And Daryl's chasing it down. It's beautiful, though. He really did a really nice job. So this is a classic game that is, now, it's known for a couple of things. It's known for having a brutal layout. It's known for having epic rules and for being a game that typically favors the high-end tournament-level player. So when you approach a game like this, I'm a little curious, what was the thought process of how can we make this the remastered version of Walking Dead like you did with Metallica? well if you play an old metallica and then you play a new metallica you can definitely tell that the new metallica is a lot friendlier you get a lot more ball saves you know there aren't specials in the outlands anymore they're they're they're saved um bit feature uh in the outlands on walking dead is going to save your ball for you and the bit bonus that you achieve when you drain is just going to be just kind of an underlying thing that you just collect. So I'm just going to give you the ball back more. We're going to, you know, ball saves going into multiball will last a little longer. We're going to make it play longer. It doesn't seem on the new version, it doesn't seem to be like when it comes out of the pops, you know, it doesn't, it's not going down the drain as much. It's kicking off the post a little bit more. It's going to be a little friendlier than the old version. Nice. And I do like the coil that you put in with the wall walker. So it actually looks like it's... Yeah, he's moving. Yeah, because when you spell well, the lights just stream back and forth. And I wanted to make him move and you know provide some feedback metallica was amazing already and you guys enhance that um ray dated a fantastic job do you plan on doing any enhancements to the walking dead rules and whatnot as well um you know uh the one thing that i thought was just impossibly hard except for maybe keith and ray uh in the game was getting the last man standing and having to collect 115 zombie kills. We're going to add a couple of things that you'll collect along the way. So after you get 30 or, you know, some number we'll have to determine what that is exactly. But we're going to give you some like, almost like, I want to say mini wizard modes along the way. So when you get to 30, you'll get something cool. And you get to 60, you'll get something cool. And you can still work your way, you know, all the way up to a hundred and something and get to last man standing. I want to make it easier to collect kills so you can boost those numbers up faster too. So we're going to do a lot of code enhancements, and we'll probably be working on it. We'll probably be working on the code for another few months yet. You also took the – you're upgrading the DMD to the LCD, and I will say – That was a lot of work in itself, just getting the look and feel correct and getting licensing to approve it. We tried to mock a lot of the old display effects, and they came out really nice. It looks really good. I mean, I bought a Walking Dead last summer. I bought a Walking Dead Premium with very low plays on it with a color DMD. and the new display work when i look even the color dmd looks really nice but when i look at the new display work i'm just like well there's hands down um it's it's gorgeous speaking of the new display work and whatnot is there going to be any show clips in there and also the other question i oh go ahead no no show clips okay and then the other question i had too is it looks like because i know that uh you guys have upgraded a lot of the scenes from the original walking dead uh dmd stuff and put them into the new game is it still the same uh display size that you've stuck on the new screen and kind of filled around it uh are you talking about dmd effects that you're still seeing you were still seeing in the game or correct yeah so like you know from from walking dead the dmd it uh it looks like in the new trailer you guys have kind of refreshed those and made them look better for the new game is it still the is it still the dmd size on the new screen or did you fill out the whole screen with the whole no we filled the whole screen oh yeah yeah nice um yeah i know when when uh when we first went out i think there were still a couple of uh dmd effects still in the game uh but that that's all that's all gone now um yeah they're full screen full screen renderings nice did you have to rework any of the modes so for example on star wars or sorry not star wars spider-man you guys had when you did the ultimate version they actually like some of the modes were renamed even though the the gameplay was pretty much the same are any modes renamed or they all going to be if you know the walking dead rules you're going to walk up yeah the modes are all the modes are all named the same we just changed the icons on the mode inserts. But the modes are all still going to play the way they did. And they'll be enhanced too. And the voice work? Any more callouts? Any new things going on? Yeah. Right now, the voice work that's in the game is just what we recorded from Merle 10, 12 years ago. But we've got... I wrote scripts for uh, Michonne, Daryl, Maggie, Carol, T-Dog. Um, some of the characters I only pulled like maybe five to 10 lines from, um, but you know, like the main characters like Rick and Carl and Daryl, and, you know, I pulled a lot of lines and, and, you know, dug up all the timestamps and gave all that stuff to Jerry and he, uh, and he, he, he captured it all. So that's going to be, will be populated and start to appear in the game too. So when we start getting updates, it's, it's going to get, it's going to get really full. You know, it's, it's going to be, it's going to be great when it's by the time it's all completely finished. What has been kind of, I know you've had a lot of chaos going on with all this, but what's been your favorite process of, of making these two games? My favorite process? Sorry, favorite part of the process, I guess. Oh, I was going to say, I was going to have a favorite part. It's not finishing. Favorite part of the process. I love sitting down and doing the layout work in the beginning. You know, it's just it's a lot of work. It's a lot of time. And I love to just sit and, you know, dig. And sometimes I'll go to work and I'll come home and I'll eat dinner and I'll be, you know, sitting around, do something for a couple hours. And then I'm right back at it again, you know, and I'll draw it up two or three o'clock in the morning sometimes. So I'm really getting into it. But yeah, the drawing and then building the first one, you know, building the first the first whitewood up and shooting the ball around. And usually I don't even have flippers at that time. And I'm I'm very good at holding the flipper with my thumb and flicking the ball and making making shots. You know, so I'm playing the ball with no power as soon as I get the thing built. nice um one thing that people pointed out you opted to go with regular rollovers instead of star rollovers on on your new walking dead what made you decide to do that um uh historically the star rollovers have always had problems with the tooling and flash on the inserted part that's in the play field um uh and sometimes they would get stuck um the button is a little nicer it's got a nice ring around it with uh rgb in it um and then the nice thing about the new one is um if you want to replace the ones in your old game they're you all you do that's swap you don't even have to change a connector oh wow it's it's a reverse compatible or yes uh-huh backward compatible. Yeah, that's right. Okay. Yeah. And they're very, they're very sensitive. I mean, you, uh, you know, they're, you, you, you, you touch them and you push them with your finger and they're, they're really super light actuating. Um, and they work, they work well. Did you have to do anything for the play field? Or I guess the real question is, what did you have to do for the play field to retool it for this? Yeah. For, for spike and this version of the cabinet and because i know with metallica you did some some minor tweaks to get that thing going but was there anything that you had to do to retweak this all the all the light boards and everything just converting an uh you know an old game to spike spike three um all the light boards have to be redone um uh you know and then you know when you remaking a game you starting with some of the things that you keeping from your original model And then you changing a ton of stuff And it's, it's, it's, it's all, it's, it's 90% as hard as doing a full game from scratch. There's just, it's a ton of work. Um, I don't know if you said, but who's doing code on this one? Uh, Guido. Awesome. Do you guys know Mark? Do you guys know Guido? Yeah. Oh, he's great. yeah he's one of the funnest guys to talk to at a uh at a convention yeah he has stories he has a lot of stories yeah he's great so a lot of times um we know that as the designer you're also dealing with all the accessories and everything like that and so i'm assuming this is even more challenging you have parallel things and i would say notoriously something like lucasfilms has been very guarded about how they want their product presented. And we know how long it took for the original R2D2 topper to get approved. And so how are you working through that for these two projects simultaneously? Mine is just about finished. You're not going to wait a year for the topper. It's coming. We've got to get to a point where toppers have to release with games. Yeah. You know, I think some people buy a game if they have the game sitting for a year, you know, and then they're going to they're like, oh, well, that topper is available now. But I want to buy that next game instead of the topper. It's easier to sell a product in your hand. And we're trying to get getting closer. I mean, Metallica's topper came out right away after the game released. So both these toppers, the one for Walking Dead and the one for Star Wars, they are stunning. Just like, wow. Really, really happy with both of them. Can you upgrade the Walking Dead to the light bars also for the premium? Yes. I'm sorry, not the light bars. Are you talking about the expression lights? Yeah, I'm talking the expression lighting. Oh, yeah, and it's really easy to do. The trim comes with the lights and everything, and all you do is just pop it on the cabinet and bolt it down. It's much easier to add to a premium than it is on the Spike 2 system. Oh, nice. I guess one question I have is on Star Wars and on Walking Dead, you have like helmets and heads. Where did that concept come from and what made you decide to put like – Well, the heads came from Walking Dead. But, yeah, Star Wars, I knew I wanted to do Darth Vader, and it ended up being a scoop, and Darth Vader was going to give you things and start modes. And I wanted to dress it up, and being that that scoop is so low in the play field, close to the flippers, I couldn't put a figure in, so I just molded his head. And then the Stormtrooper head, we already had tooling for that one, and I had a target over on the other side that was for the Stormtrooper. I'm like, well, I'm just going to take this old shooter and I'm going to, you know, I'll just instead of filling it because that was the shooter not for the old Star Wars game. I didn't put the insert in it and I just put holes in the bottom of it and attach it to the plastic and put a light bulb up in it so it would light up. So that's how the heads got there on Star Wars. Okay, but I'm noticing a theme. And covered heads seem to be in your last three games. So you have Metallica. Let's see. My next game might have a head in it too. One. Yeah, I think I have a head in my next model that's coming. Okay. Yeah. You're already working on your next game. Shouldn't you be taking a vacation? I should. And I'm going to take some time off here over Christmas, in between Christmas and New Year's. But I just started pounding away right away because I definitely want to make sure that I have some time for a vacation this summer. Don't you have to work on two games simultaneously? Isn't that in your contract? Like you have to release two games a year? Oh, no. It's been that way for a lot of years, but it's not in the contract. So, but, yeah, I'll probably pick up two. I think I'm picking up two this year. nice what is the take-home message that you want people to know about this game is like you know what this is why this game is awesome um i think the thing that uh raises the hair on the back of my neck the most when i play that game is when i go into multi death star multiball and i shoot those jackpot shots um uh and i get through the the 14 shots and sometimes you'll hit a shot and and you'll have like a multiplier that you'll get rewarded two shots for the one shot. But when you get to 14 and then you blast the Death Star and it opens up and you make that shot and then the game just goes dead and everything turns, you know, all the balls drain, flippers quit, and you're like, whoa, what happened? You know, and then all of a sudden you see the explosion in the screen. I just love that. You know, when you get there, you know, and it's pretty hard to start the multiball, But when you get there and you get to that, that's a lot of fun. Awesome. Same question on Walking Dead. The only thing that I regret is, remember when the prison doors open and you see the zombie walking along the fence and he exposes himself and he gets clubbed with the crowbar? Yeah. That was me back 12, 13 years ago. Yeah. The new artwork for that doesn't look like me. so that was the bummer about it but prison multiball I love doing that I love shooting the crossbow and I love shooting bicycle girl those growls and moans that she makes you know that's a lot of fun so that's three things that I love about Walking Dead and then I love the Walking Dead topper too please tell me your head is the severed head on the topper i mean it has to be it has to be the john borg zombie severed head it's it's yeah it might well you know what i mean maybe after you know several years of being a zombie uh one of one of the one of the three or maybe two of the three could possibly be me okay has it been kind of a trip down nostalgia lane going back through making a new walking Dead and Santa Monica? Oh, yeah. When that show came out, you know, I remember AMC, they put a timer up on the screen. It would say, like, two days, three hours, and 20 minutes until The Walking Dead. You know, and they always had this timer. They were showing this timer on the screen when The Walking Dead was going to air. And I was sitting in front of the TV probably 20 or 30 minutes before the first episode aired, and I just loved it. The first season was just amazing. The first four seasons were just unbelievable. I loved it. I couldn't get enough of it. Is Negan in this one, in the remastered? No. Yeah, it's still the first four seasons. We didn't add any of the following seasons. Okay. Yeah. Ain't nothing wrong with that. Well, you know what? The one part that I remember when they got to Terminus and they all had their heads leaned over into that stainless steel trough and they were going to make food out of them. Yeah. I didn't want anything like that in the game. A little too over the top. But yeah, the scenes that we picked. You know, in the beginning when I first started working on the game, I intended on using some of the movie footage. And I actually scripted all of it and got timestamps for all the stuff that was said. And, you know, this is where the scene starts and this is where the scene ends. And I broke all the modes down. there just wasn't enough there wasn't enough footage there to to do it and then that's when we decided we're like we're gonna we're gonna make the game with we're gonna re we're gonna recreate and and better the original display effects um you know like when you kill a zombie you see a few zombies and they're wandering out you know they're just kind of like waddling out in a field and then you make one of the kill shots and you see the thing go and it falls and back when we were doing dots there were probably like maybe 10 dots that made those little characters they were kind of campy and fun in dot matrix but they're definitely more realistic and very cool looking now Chuck and his team they all did a great job well awesome Borg we really appreciate you coming on do you think there's anything that we just haven't covered that you've got to know this about Star Wars or Walking Dead wow that's a tough one uh i mean i'll answer that when we do the next show okay sounds good to me if you want people getting a hold of you what's what's the best way if you don't want them you can just tell them now oh uh i'm on facebook and messenger and cool yeah people people i haven't been on facebook in a while so i got a lot of friend requests that i haven't had a chance to go through um so uh i met some people at the influencer party when we did uh star when we did to follow the empire yeah and uh and i had a few people you know that i asked like are we friends on facebook and they'd say no and i said well send me a friend request and i haven't i've got to look and look at them i've got a whole bunch i have i just haven't had time to well now you have time i guess internet all that much facebook now it's time to sit in your backyard with with four inches snow on top of you there's just snow on my umbrella i'm like yeah i want a picture of you in your bermuda shorts and your uh and your uh in my lawn in my lawn chair yeah In your lawn chair. With my snow shovel sitting right next to me. And your sunglasses and your beach hat. That's what I need. Well, we appreciate you coming on. If you want to get a hold of us. Yeah, for sure. We've done this two or three times now, and every time you come on, dude, it's just awesome. It's just great catching up. Yeah, it was nice. It was nice. I met you guys' influencer party last year. I can't remember which one, which game we were showing. Yeah, I got a picture of us by Metallica. Yeah, I was sporting my Loser Kid t-shirt at work the other day. Oh, nice. Did you see this one? This is Loser Kid in Metallica font. See? Oh, cool. I didn't know about those. Nice. Awesome. Well, if you want to get a hold of us, we are Loser Kid Pinball Podcast at gmail.com. You can get a hold of us on all the socials at Loser Kid Pinball. If you like the shirts that Scott and I are wearing, hit us up on serverballswag.com slash loserkid. Other than that, I think that does it for us tonight, Scott. You want to give us the last word? You're awesome. Thanks. Thanks, John. Absolutely buy a pinball for Christmas. Yes. .