The Pinball Network is online. Launching Silver Ball Chronicles. Welcome back! Are you ready to hear more blood-curdling pinball stories? I know I am. Hello, everyone. I'm the man with two first names, David Dennis. This is J.B. Ball Chronicles. With me this month, like every month, is Ron. Where's the pin bar, Alex? Oh, God, where's the pin bar? I'm never going to let that lie down. Is the pin bar here? Will we be talking about the pin bar today? We will not be talking about the pin bar today. I will say from our last podcast, where we pontificated on either a successful launch or a crash and burn of Deep Root, we certainly know today that it was the latter. So what's up, fella? What have you been up to? Well, because of COVID, I haven't got to play any of the latest and greatest new games. No Avengers for me. No Guns N' Roses. No, there's another one. Or Rick and Morty. That was the other one I was thinking of. I haven't done anything, really. Because during show season, I would have got to play all those already. Yeah, I was looking forward to show season, all that fun stuff. But, of course, as always, we are crushed by the world in which we live. But I'll tell you what, to freshen things up here in the Dennis household, I've gone and I swapped out my Tron. So I put my Tron in my league downtown here, and my buddy swapped me out his Black Knight, his original 1980 Black Knight. It's been a lot of fun having that in the house and just hitting that start button over and over and over again. You're right, man. That is a great game. It's the best Black Knight. You can hear Steve Ritchie and whatever effects they did in his voice there. I am the Black Knight. It gets me every time where he laughs when you hit the Magna Save and you miss it and it hits that switch and goes down the left or right lane and he laughs at you. Isn't it great? It's mean. I think he's laughed at more people than any other pinball voice in history. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So there's been lots of updates in the hobby. Of course, there's millions of podcasts that we have out there with their opinions on how things are going. But, I mean, the biggest news here is your Star Wars comic pro with the R2-D2 topper. Yeah, I needed to keep up with you getting that Steve Ritchie game in your house. And doing multiple parts Steve Ritchie episodes, I had to get me a Steve Ritchie game. You had the craving. Oh, yeah. And you figured, why not get a game where you can not play? You know, I love Star Wars, but, man, it is really hard. It's awesome. Awesome. Zero regret. I literally love it more and more the more I play it. Because I'm newer to the hobby and because I have a small collection, if I brought something in like that, that's staying for a long, long, long, long time, right? And I don't know if I want to have friends come over and be like, oh, pinball, and then immediately just have their soul crushed and never want to play ever again. Oh, yeah, I wouldn't have them play that one. That wouldn't be a good idea. Because it's so hard. Yeah, but I'll tell you, when you come out of a multiball and you hit a – You lock the ball for hyperspace, and you see that one lit multiplier is on the wrong ramp, and you move it over, like, right before you hit it at 20x, and you get, like, a 560 million shot that you just hit. That's what I'm talking about. I have no idea what that means. Exactly. Exactly. I didn't know what that meant either. But now I own the game. Now I know exactly what that means. So watch out, all you IFPA players. Ron's coming for you. Wow. And he's picking Star Wars. I don't know. If you pick that in a tournament, because you could get it, especially if they have no ball saver on, you're going to get screwed. You're going to just not even be able to plunge. You're going to spend the whole time trying to plunge without drain. We've had a lot of engagement on our Facebook page. Swing on over to Facebook.com slash Silver Ball Chronicles to chat with us, add some comments, enjoy our musings. We've had a lot of engagement over there, and I'm going to read some of those comments as we go through today's podcast. Also, of course, ThisWeekInPinball.com has their TWIP, Pinball Promoters Database. That's where you can find all kinds of pinball content, including podcasts, Twitch streams, and YouTube channels. So you can go there, see it all in one place, and leave some comments. So please continue to jump over there, leave us a five-star review so others can find us. That way we can keep creating all this awesome pinball content and know that people out there are actually listening. So we got some great feedback from the Pinball Promoters database this month, Ron, and actually there's so much I only took a couple of comments just because we did get quite a few reviews this month and I don't want to drag this on forever. I love the username here. This is Carl Your Mama says, I love the Richie episode so much. These guys balanced humor and stories and kept it funny and fresh. Yeah, he spelled humor wrong. I know he spelled it right. Are you sure? He spelled it right, yes. You're spelling it the incorrect Canadian way and European way. The Queen's English. Yep. It's only the American way. Not that they're American English. They're only one way, and that's the American way. Where do you think these pinball machines are made? They're made in Chicago. USA, baby. Yeah. In addition to that, you know, you can't spell and you can't count because you're still counting down there, and it's been like a month. Ah. Very nice. You know, if someone listens to this like five years from now, they'll have no idea what that meant. Yeah, they could just go ahead and Google, you know, like October 2020 and they could figure it out. Or the 2000 election where I think it took a month to count them all up. No one brings that up at all. It's just like this one. You can always go back. He mentioned the Steve Ritchie episode. You can always go back in the Silver Ball Chronicles direct feed. So if you search for Silverbulk Chronicles on Apple Podcasts or Google Play or in your podcatcher of your choice, you can search and bring up all the old archived episodes without searching through the TPN feed itself with all of the other podcasts. I mean, no, clearly you would want to listen to all the other shows on TPN also because they are amazing. Yep. So much talent in one place. You've heard Puppet Pals, right? I have heard Puppet Pals. I don't know what I'm hearing when I hear it, but yes, I've heard Puppet Pals. Ben, Ben's a little bit like me. He left a comment on the Twit Promoters database, and he said, Being younger in the hobby, I enjoy learning the stories and the history of the good old days. Silver Ball Chronicles is an instant listen and a great show, so thank you so much, Ben. We also want to say thank you to Ryan Russell P., who also wrote some great reviews on there. They're just a bit long. I just want to keep chugging along here on the intro because I'm sure most people have already skipped ahead 10 minutes. T-shirts, of course. You can still get our T-shirts over at silverballswag.com, and you can choose the design of your choice of a mug or a shirt or a hoodie or whatever. If you look to support us, you don't want to send us a couple of dollars in an envelope or you'd just like to say thank you, you can do that by purchasing a shirt because Ron needs that ego boost because he just feels down. Well, I have one question. Do we have stickers? We do have stickers. We do have stickers there. There. You can stick them all over your laptops. All over your games. Put them right on the back glass. Cover up the art with our stickers. Yeah, well, I mean, if it were like Game of Thrones, that would work out really well. Or most Fever She Games after a certain year. so one thing that we always do like to do is get corrections and comments on our previous episode or episodes you can send that over to silverball chronicles at gmail.com so send those in we read every single one um we usually end up responding and we'll write back we'll bring it back up so we actually got a message from a fellow named bruce uh from slam tilt podcast he had a correction or actually not a correction I guess he had a help us understand one of the things that we were very confused about and it was the switching from the 44 bulbs to the triple 5 bulbs. I know if this is your first Silver Ball Chronicles episode you are just so excited to find out the answer. Yeah Bruce is so happy to give such technical information. People have fallen asleep already. Do you know the In 1981, 8-Ball Deluxe had only 44 bulbs. Basically, that means just the type of, it's a bayonet socket is what he's saying. And the 1982 8-Bucks, 8-Bucks, edit. The 1982 8-Ball Deluxe LE, which is the one in the smaller rapid-fire cabinet, has both styles. So it has bayonet sockets and it has 555, which are those twist sockets that all those 90s Williams games used. In 1984, the second run of 8-Ball Deluxe, not the LE, but the second run of the regular 8-Ball Deluxe, had 3 quarters 5-5-5 bulbs and 1 quarter 4-44 bulbs. I'm glad he saw fit to let us know all this wonderful information. There, and now, the world is whole. Yes. Here's a question. Why did they switch from 44s to triple 5s? It's easy, because it's on a board. It's just like a light board. Okay. You have a light board and a connector, and they're way easier to change. Rather than bending the thing down and screwing it in? Yeah. Well, you're used to Tron, so it had the stern one. But if you had any 90s Williams game, how easy is it to change a light bulb? You just twist, pull it out, put the new one in, twist it in, you're done. Yeah. It's even easier nowadays with modern sterns. You just don't replace them. Yeah, unless the whole board goes back, and then you've got to replace the node board, yeah. Nope, then you just sell it on and move on to the next one. So, Doug. Oh, I love this one. Yes, Doug. Doug emails us and says, whenever I see a podcast that shows it's two hours and 20 minutes when it pops up in my feed, there is no way I'm clicking the play button on that. Maybe I have a short attention span, but I don't think I'm alone here. See, the bad thing is he won't get to hear our answer. Oh, I know. So, see, the thing is, so I wrote Doug back, and I said, Doug, what is the perfect length for a pinball podcast? And he said about 45 minutes or an hour. So, what we're going to do here, Ron, this month, in 45 minutes to an hour, what we're going to do is we're going to say, you can pause the podcast. Okay? Then, seven days later, you can go back in and press play and then finish the rest of the podcast. Does that make sense? Yeah, but I think he wants them as separate files. Ooh, that's tough. Well, you're shit out of luck here, Doug. You're going to have to find another podcast. And a lot of different podcasts, too, because I think most of them are usually over an hour now. Ugh, man. What a life we live. Mm-hmm. Gene X, he had some great comments about our last podcast as well that he wrote in to silverballchronicles at gmail.com. He says, I totally remember Xenon the same way since I was kind of scared to play it as a little kid. At the laundromat I played at, I kept Tachita instead, and I still like it better. That's a wise decision. And have one. Also, David is wrong about Flash Gordon. That game is awesome. Nope. It's Trash Gordon. No, it's a good game. It's a good game. Grant King says, I absolutely loved the last episode. This was my era, which, of course, was the Bally 81 class of 81 we covered. I grew up with every machine that we discussed, and I love the informative detail of each machine. You guys are great, and I appreciate the effort you put into all the research. Well, maybe not, Ron. Oh. Oh. I just remember everything. That's about it. I'm not really researching. So that was great. We love those comments. Send those in to silverballchronicles at gmail.com. If it's a question, comment, concern, you know, something you'd like us to add, please go through. If you've got, you know, topics you'd like us to cover as well, you know, I'm always sort of topping up the topics that we have, filling out some research in here or there. If you've got something you'd like to toss in, please let us know. And we love to hear from everybody. It makes us feel like, you know, we're not sitting alone at home in our offices with a microphone talking to a person I've never met. That's right. We've never met. It's probably better that way. We have seen each other, at least through a Zoom call. That's true. Actually, no, you saw me. I didn't see you. Oh, was I not using the camera? No, I was using the camera. When you finished in the top six at the Expo Trivia, I know I had my camera on. Oh, that's right. Yes. By the way, finished top six in Expo Trivia. I finished second. Yeah, well, screw you. Well, I'm just saying this is an informative historical podcast showing we have real credentials here. That's right. We are actually a big deal. Now, Zach A.J., Zach from Slant Hills, he finished first. He always finishes first. It's amazing. So what are we talking about today? Well, let's jump into today's topic, okay? This is a good one. This is one that I thought, since we were kind of in the 80s, we've been in the 70s for a little while, it's time to bring it back, bring it into the 90s again. Let's get a little more sort of nostalgia. A little more grungier. Yeah, let's take off our shirts and tie them around our waist and be sad about our middle-class lifestyle. Yep, and have a lot of, like, really depressing songs. We usually wear one-word titles. The 90s. That's my era, baby. But yes, please continue. That was pretty good. John Borg, or as he's affectionately known in the industry, Borgi, entered the industry as a mechanical engineer building ramps. He then ended up being a designer on some of the best-remembered nostalgia pins of the 1990s. Borgi got every awesome license in the 1990s. In fact, the other designers at all of the other companies at the time likely described him as the annoying neighborhood kid who was the first to have a Tamagotchi, a Super Nintendo, who hung outside a Blockbuster after renting Mrs. Doubtfire, chatting on a really big brick cell phone, and showing off his snap bracelet. He probably was the envy of everyone. Morgie got to hang out with rock stars and movie stars. He was attacked by a cougar, like the animal Ron. He had access to movie scripts for unreleased films, which would later become generation-defining blockbusters. Yeah, that's actually an important little factoid. Back then, they would actually get the scripts while the movie was being made, and the games would come out at the same time as the movie. Now it's like the movie's got to be out, or maybe the first movie's out and was huge, and then the sequel's coming out before a game will come out. This month's topic, Borgie, living the 90s licensing dream. Just a couple quotes if you want to read those. Do I have to? I know he's our boss and all. If we don't read this, we're canceled. All right. Zach Manning says, Data East Jurassic Park was my first pinball machine and the beginning of my love for Borg designs. That title still holds a special place in my heart. Did that game have a topper? It did. Yeah, that explains it. Listener Billy Y.J. says, Got into the hobby in July 2018 and now have four machines, but I haven't played any of these. Well, thanks for the comment, Billy Y.J. He's one of them poor man pinball podcast followers. So that doesn't quite surprise me. Okay, I don't get it. He hasn't played any of what games? Any of the games we're about to talk about. Talk about, okay. Wow, okay. Let's go all the way back, kind of where he starts, kind of in the industry. And like everybody who's in the pinball industry, he played a bunch of pinball. Yes, John says, I was hooked on the old Stern game, Flight 2000. As a teenager, I was going to the arcades for Pac-Man and Space Invaders. I moved to pinball and played a lot of Genesis, Funhouse, and Cyclone. The one that sticks out there, Ron. Genesis. One of these things is not like the other. Genesis is okay. Genesis is a fun game, but it's one of those Gottlieb system. Yeah, but I refuse to bash Gottlieb. I love those pink ramps. Yeah, you can get them clearer, too, on the Internet, which makes the game better. John moved to college with a focus on manufacturer things like drafting, engineering, plastics, etc. Yeah, well, you can certainly see where plastics engineering, drafting, drawing, all of that stuff would come in handy in the pinball industry because it's still heavily mechanical. It's still very pen and paper at the time when it comes to designs and moldings and things. Very, very cool. John wanted to design injection mold machines and materials processing. So what does that sound like? He's making ramps. Sounds like he's making ramps. Now, I don't think he meant to make ramps, but that's more or less what he did. So 1987, while he was in college, he was looking for a job as a draftsman, or as we call it in 2020, a draftsperson. The ad. Wow. The ad in the paper for a company that was looking for some manufacturing support. John says, I ended up in the industry by accident. I discovered I was at Premier Technology when I arrived. I dropped my other job application in the hydraulics business. Hydraulics is dead. Right? So he just shows up and he's at Premiere. Sort of like, oh, why don't you come over here and do this job interview? And you walk in and you're in, like, a pinball factory. Wouldn't that be weird? It, like, just snuck up on you? Mm-hmm. Wow. That happened to, who did that happen to? Steve Kordek. I don't know if he'll ever get to the point where he, because his career was like 60 years. But he literally went in looking for a job, just ran into a random building, and it happened to be Genco. And it's like, oh, you're here for the position? Yeah, sure. Can you solder? He couldn't solder. Yeah, sure. And there you go. Make it till you make it, my friend. Yep. So that's when he entered, you know, basically the 1980s Gottlieb, right? So he mentioned he played a lot of Genesis. Well, this is the company that made Genesis. So working as a draftsman under Ray Tanzer and his design team, he also spent a little bit of time learning the ropes with John Trudeau, making Victory and sort of watching it as it was on the line. And, of course, you need to learn the ropes somehow. Borgi would say, the first game I had experience with was Diamond Lady with Jon Norris. John was making unique and different types of designs with fun ideas. Yes, Diamond Lady had a ball saver between the flippers that was a drop target. The whole industry kind of at this time was all like trying to make crazy ramps and weirder designs because they were trying to sort of boost creativity somehow to come up with the next great idea. Borg had good timing as the pinball was kind of in its mid to late 80s resurgence. So he had a lot of his creativity and more stuff on the games, if you will. Yeah, he kind of missed out on the downturn, and he was kind of getting in at the upswing. John Borg was laying ramps, switches, and sub-assemblies on the playfield for Diamond Lady with Jon Norris. And as we mentioned before, Jon Norris, you know, fantastic designer, fantastic jack-of-all-trades. I think a lot of those premier guys were very good mechanically with the engineering as well as the design and the code. They weren't siloed maybe as much as the Williams teams were, where each person was kind of the expert in their field. They had to be kind of good at everything. And if you're going to learn the ropes right out of the gate when you're sort of the most impressionable, Jon Norris is likely the person you want to work time with. You want to talk about some ramps? We're all about ramps. Well, ramps were a much bigger item now than in pinball before. By now, we mean the 80s. If Borg had a bunch of experience in college with plastics manipulations and manufacturing, which was a big asset for Gottlieb. So he's building ramps. John would say that the designer would say, I'd like the ramp to go from point A to point B and give it to the mechanical engineer. I'd use draft paper to design it out, give it to the molder who would then make the template for the three molds on the machine. John worked, of course, at Premier for about three years and really enjoyed his time there, but spent a lot of his time being the support person to the teams. And, of course, because of his molding experience in the background, he actually added, I would say, probably a lot of value. Now, patent fights in the industry, this is pretty common, do you think, was it, Ron? Very common. Yeah, do you think that they just filed patent lawsuits for fun or were they always poking at each other? It was very weird. There was an understanding, and most of the people at the companies all knew each other. I mean, it never looked like it turned out into an all-war of patents. Usually something would be agreed upon. We talked about things like in our Stern episode, how they just copied the Bally system. I mean, Data East just copied the Williams System 11 system. So there obviously could have been huge lawsuits if they wanted to take it that far. It's like a small pool, right? You don't want to pee in the pool. Okay. Certainly not. Certainly not. While he was at Premier, Borgi actually patented a playfield section that would flip and deliver a ball to the other side of the playfield. Now, it's difficult in an auditory medium to describe that, but it's basically like the Bride of Pinbot's face, where it would flip and the ball would kind of move from the top to the bottom. So Borgi, along with Premier, actually patented that. And of course, Williams would use that in Bride of Pinbot. I wonder if that was Lights, Camera, Action because it has that feature. There's a mini play field that flips. But I think you're right because he would have worked as a support person around that time. I'm looking up the Lights, Camera, Action. I'm just curious myself now. So I think that was late 80s. Yeah, 89. Yeah, and that would have been about the same time or right before. So it could have been. Yeah, okay. Yeah, so we're thinking that's probably right. If somebody knows if that's right, shoot us an email, silverballchronicles at gmail.com or our Facebook page, facebook.com slash silverballchronicles. So Gilbert Pollack, who was part of the management group at Premier Technologies, well, he called out Williams for the Bride of Pinbot patent infringement. So what did Williams get, or what did Premier get from Williams? Williams let him use the auto-percentaging patent. That sounds pretty good. That's a good tradeoff right there. You know, that's a pretty good tradeoff, right? Like, obviously, Williams was totally on the wrong side of that patent. And, of course, they knew that they could get in trouble. And Premier saw, you know, hey, there's something we could use, right? Because auto-percentaging, that's a big deal. For everybody, Ron, refresh us again what auto-percentaging was. First use in high speed. It's easier to describe what it was like before auto-replay percentage existed, which is just you set a high score in the settings on the game. And if you went over the high score, you got a free game. Well, the problem is if you put it in a location where a bunch of awesome players and they just get free games all day, or you set it too high and no one ever gets a free game and they get upset. So with high speed, Williams came up with a system where it would move the score required for a replay up or down depending on how many times it was hit. Auto replay percentaging. Operators loved that. Yeah, and something like that is a big, big deal, and likely because all of the manufacturers were using them. They had to pay Williams for that. And it's still in use to this day. Yeah. Ron, you love, we mentioned this in our Gottlieb System 3 zombie pinball podcast back in the archives, you love those Gottlieb System 3 flippers. By love, if you mean hate with a passion, yes. That's correct. Yes. That's what I meant. So Gottlieb, of course, in the System 80, 80B, 80C era, were running these, like, 40-volt flippers. I kind of like them. I like the way that they felt. They were really easy to, you know, clean and update and fix if they became issues. Mostly everybody else was using, like, 50-volt. These 40-volt sort of flippers didn't really have a lot of power, so they couldn't make any of these really cool, fancy ramps like they had at Williams and Bally. Isn't that right? It depended on the game and the condition of the game. But I have been to a lot of shows where you play things like Hollywood Heat or games with those steep plastic ramps and you can never make them. But you'll also notice in a lot of those sort of late 80s Gottliebs that the ramps are sort of like it goes up the ramp and then just kind of drops. Like there's no like return fan layout stuff. There's no loop-de-loops or anything fancy. You go up the ramp, and it just falls in a hole. It's very anticlimactic. It's just like, oh, I like it. You get body parts. We keep going back to Genesis. It's going to be like the all-Genesis episode. Poor Borg. We're sorry. Borgi actually designed these damn flippers with the 50-volt. Oh, my goodness. I mean, calling it the System 3 flipper is a bit of a misnomer, which Dennis Creso called me out on because they actually used them before just System 3. Yeah, they used them in like one or two games. So it was a bit of a catch-all, but those pointy-ass Gottlieb flippers that you could trap everything and everybody hates them, and the patron saint of pinball himself, Jon Norris, emailed us after our System 3 episode and said, you have his blessing to switch them to the Ballywilliams flippers if there's room under the playfield. So you have the blessing of the designer. When everybody, oh, Gottlieb is the worst. Well, you know what? You can blame John Borg for these freaking flippers. It's all his fault. Wow, I learn something new every day. So he wanted to make the flippers more like Daddy East and Williams, but he didn't want to infringe on the patents, which, of course, was a bit of an issue in the time. So he kind of had to come up with his own design, and that design ends up being what became these end-of-stroke flippers. I don't know why they couldn't have just changed the bats and just made the coils stronger. The actual mechs underneath there are really solid. I don't know why they had to change everything. You know, there's another thing, right? John Borg was a great mechanical engineer. You can see that in his designs, and we will continue to see that sort of through the podcast, that his focus on designing things a certain way, everything ends up being very solid and smart and well-engineered, And that comes from his mind. Around this time, Borgi starts to have a wandering eye in the industry, right? He's three years in. He's working at Premier, which is, you know, the Walmart or the Dollar Tree of pinball. They're number three. They're number three. Williams is number one. Data East at this point is probably number two. And Gottlieb is number three. So he starts having this wandering eye. So he applied for various positions at Williams, but Williams never called him back. Oh, that's sad. Data East, Data East caught Borg's eye. He would say their designs were cool. I applied to Data East. Gottlieb was more conservative. They had an idea on what a pinball machine was, and that was it. Joe and the guys were more daring and loose. I went to talk to Joe Kamenkow, who hired me. So John would start at Data East, the same job he had at Gottlieb. He was a drafts person and, of course, did a lot of planning, a lot of ramp work, and mechanical engineering. Daddy East, of course, didn't have enough room because they were run on a shoestring budget, so he actually shared office space with Mr. Cam and Cow. He was in the same office on the other side of the desk. Sort of like a buddy cop movie. Oh, I thought you were mentioning Lethal Weapon 3. Borg and Ketchum. Yeah, it totally could be like a buddy cop movie. Joe Kaminkow was going to license a secret dinosaur game. Joe wanted John to design a dinosaur that would eat a ball. Give you a guess on what game that was. On his desk, he started working on this mech. John would say, I put a magnet in its mouth, and it would move over and it would deposit it in another area. It also had arms that could grab and move. Those arms that, of course, grabbed the ball were eventually used in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Yes. You hear a story about that. They had the arms, and it worked great. Then they put the playfield glass on and realized that it just hit the glass every time, because they had never tested it with the glass in the game. Whoops. Details. Just details. Don't worry, guys. It'll get costed out anyway. It didn't. It didn't. While working on the dinosaur game, John learned that Joe took the hook license to ensure he could get the upcoming Jurassic Park license. Now, of course, they wouldn't get the license for Robin Williams himself because, you know, Robin Williams is awesome and expensive. And they ended up using just a generic Peter Pan. And Borg would actually say that he was surprised that it turned out as well as it did. Is Dustin Hoffman in it I think he in it I trying to think of the actual the day to use game whether he made it in the game I think he in there He was in Waterworld wasn he Dustin no Dustin Hoffman Dustin Hoffman in Waterworld No, he was thinking of Kevin Costner. And who was the bad guy in Waterworld? Dennis Hopper. Oh, sorry. Got them mixed up. But I'm just saying, in the actual game, I think he's actually in the game, like the artwork. He's working on all this stuff on his desk, but that's not his first game. as the mechanical engineer, when you go into IPDB, you've got to be careful with John Borg, especially in his early career. Because he's attached to a lot of these Data East games, even though he was not the designer. Like, he might have designed one of the mechs, and IPDB has attached him as a designer. So you've got to be a little careful. But the first machine that was 100% his was Star Wars. Wow. Talk about hitting the ground running. Your best licenses you could possibly get. Sci-fi theme, of course. October 1992. This was a Data East MPU-004. Sold 10,400 units. We're talking, like, the level here of a Steve Ritchie on his first game. Design, of course, John Borg. Marcus Rothkins, which was his first art package. Sound and music by Brian Schmidt. And software by Neil Falconer and Lottie Ropp. Think about this. I think it's the highest production game that Dead East ever did. Someone can correct me on that, but I thought it was number one. So let's start with Star Wars in general. Okay. So this is early 90s. This is before your prequel trilogy. That's the trilogy of my childhood. Thank you for that, George Lucas. It's before all the things that ruined Star Wars occurred. All the Disney stuff. The original trilogy. Okay. So let's focus on that. Let's just bring in a little context here of how big this license is at the time. Of course, it's huge now, but at the time, the original trilogy drew $1.8 billion box office, collective box office. It was a massive franchise at the time for Data East. Of course, in 2020, this is the fifth grossing media franchise of all time. It's huge, but at the time, $1.8 billion box office collectively is astronomical in the early 90s. It's Rotten Tomatoes scores So the original Star Wars Episode 4 Is a 92% Empire Strikes Back 94% Totally agree with that Return of the Jedi 82% I agree, wow, I agree with all those Actually In exactly that order He actually, for the design of this machine He repurposed What was his Jurassic Park playfield So while working on the T-Rex John started working on Star Wars. John says, when I started my first game, Star Wars, it was actually Jurassic Park, where the Death Star was where the dinosaur was. Yeah, that seems very Dad East, right? Where I feel like they've got all these playfields just in a bin, and then they just sort of, like, print the artwork on the play field. Like, you can just switch everything. Just, oh, nope, that's not Ninja Turtles. Now it's Avengers. I thought the artwork on this Star Wars is actually pretty good. Yeah, it's not too bad. It's not too shabby. Yeah. Borgi would say that he's most proud of Star Wars, and that it's his favorite game back in the day. The, of course, iconic Jurassic Park arch, which is on the later Jurassic Park game, that was turned into where R2-D2 is sitting. One thing that I find pretty neat about that R2-D2 toy is that it actually moved left and right, as well as up and down. But, of course, that was costed out to use only one coil. Now, this is the second time I've brought up the term costed out. So what's cost-cutting when it comes to building pinball machines, Ron? Well, you have a BOM, a BOM, which is a bill of materials that you would need to build your game to. You can't go over the bill of materials. If you do, you're going to get stuff cut. And the bill of materials is per game. and takes into account things like licensing. That's why it tends to be when you have a huge license that might cost a ton, there might be less on the game because of it, because it costed more for the license per game, etc. It's during Star Wars. Okay, okay. Such wrong opinions on a history-based show. But Borg says, at that age, we were always costed. We'd build a machine and try to make it fit the budget. Usually $50 would make all the difference. Imagine that, it'd be $50 off And you'd have to take like three coils And then you'd be back on budget But the impact is sort of the gameplay How cool would it be to see R2-D2 Under the glass turning left and right And kind of like moving his little legs Like that's just awesome Overall though it still looks It's going up and down the way it did It looked pretty darn cool Yeah, I mean I would I haven't played a daddy Star Wars They tend to be That kind of machine where they are bought and kept in a basement forever and nobody ever sees it and stuff. Because it's Star Wars, right? Yeah, but it has the Death Star. It has your moving R2-D2. It has the launcher. It's one of those you reach down and you shift it. It's got a button on the side to fire. They weren't messing around. Now, Lucasfilm, of course, run at the time by George Lucas. Lucasfilm now is owned by Disney. they actually got to meet George Lucas, which is, you know, pretty cool considering, right? Like, especially for nerdy folk, you know, George Lucas is like one of these like icons, right? Especially when it's called Skywalker Ranch, his house. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't get any cooler than that. And I think when you go in through the gates, the first thing you see is like a Yoda, that statue. You know, what more can I say? George Lucas is like, it's like a nerd god, right? You're at the Skywalker Ranch. What do you think that guy's like when he's getting pitched all this stuff? George Lucas, just with interviews I've seen with him, he's probably bored. Do you think he's wearing that really itchy lumberjack shirt that he's always wearing? Always wearing. I wonder if his dog Indiana was there. He's like Steve Ritchie's always wearing, like, the black turtleneck. I could see that. Well, George Lucas, I mean, he's got the beard. Love that beard. I wish I could have a beard like that But sadly I'm that Anglo-Saxon European descent Where I was clean shaven all the time Because we were gentlemen I'm Italian so no Definitely not a gentleman So John Borg would say That George Lucas Was very easy going About it He wasn't jumping up or down When he left his people told us he had a great reaction George really liked the game. It's like, oh, he wasn't super excited, but you could tell the people in the room were like, oh my God, did you see how excited he was? Probably if he didn't like it, he would have been pissed. That's how they know. He wasn't pissed, so he must have loved it. Another cool bit about Star Wars with Data East is a gentleman named Fred Young. We'll get into him a little more down the line here on this podcast, But this was one of the, I would say, best jobs that Fred Young did when it came to voice work. Shoot the Death Star! Jurassic Park was the next one up, wasn't it? So this is a fantasy dinosaur theme. This is April 93, so you can see the turnover is pretty quick here with machines. This is the Data East in what we know as the Saga version 3. 9,008 units Designed by John Borg, Joe Kamenkow And Ed Kubela Who was originally from Gameplan So there's like a bit of a collaboration here on this machine Once again Art by Marcus Roth Rothkrant Rothkrant I'm thinking it's Ed Sabula Not Kabula I could be wrong there And I know it's definitely Sega, not Saga Ah Sound and music by Brian Schmidt, which is not Brian Schmidt is written here. Ex-Williams employee. Yes, and John Williams did the music on this machine as well, which is a big get for Daddy East. Wow, that John Williams would come in and do the sound. I'm guessing that it's probably just the music they lifted. Yeah, but you can dream. I can dream. And Neil Falconer, Lonnie Ropp, and John Carpenter, who I don't think is the director, did the software. No, no. The thing is, so he got Star Wars, and his next game is Jurassic Park. Wow. That is crazy. That is crazy. You know, that is, and this is like his first three all-in designs, too, right? Like, he's not getting Diamond Lady, or he's not getting Black Knight. He's getting like the biggest movie franchise probably of my childhood. Data East, they had it going on. I mean, Williams, you get Congo and Shadow. Here at Data East, we get Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Batman. Stuff is getting weird. It's getting weird in the industry now. Branding and licensing is way ahead of where it was really in the early 80s from our previous podcast. It's still branding, but now we're getting into some serious stuff here. This is the 1993 film based on the novel of the same name by Michael Crichton. Steven Spielberg had learned about this novel somewhere around 1989, and he purchased the rights for the movie for $1.5 million, regardless of if they made the movie or not. And Crichton also was able to finagle his way into getting a percentage of the movie's gross earnings. Good move. Such a good move. I mean, my goodness. This is when Spielberg was like, everything he touched has turned to gold. Now, the film had a budget of $63 million back in 1993. So what I've done is I've thrown that into an inflation calculator. That's about $100 million adjusted per inflation. So that's a healthy budget when it comes to movies. Around that time, you know, like a $20 million budget was a big deal. The box office was a billion dollars in 1993 dollars. That's 1.6 billion adjusted for inflation. That is astronomically huge. It's so funny. At this time, Ron, it seems like the big hits were like the biggest just smashes ever, where sort of every other movie was just kind of a regular movie. Fun fact, I still have never seen it. You've never seen Jurassic Park? I've never seen Jurassic Park. Wow. So, in our previous podcast, I said I didn't see Flash Gordon, and you were upset about that. Yeah, I was. And you haven't seen Jurassic Park, probably one of the greatest movies of my childhood. I'm sorry. Why do you hate my childhood, Ron? I'm just not really into the dinosaur thing. Raptors? No, I'm more of a Godzilla type guy. So I think I will be satisfied soon. What about like Australian hunter guys with like folksy accents that hunt things? I'm good. Rotten Tomatoes likes it, though. 91% on Rotten Tomatoes. 91% on Rotten Tomatoes. So we're talking, like, movies that are actually not just good, but are astronomically high on the scale, right? Anything over 90, in my opinion, is probably a pretty friggin' awesome movie. If you know of any movies that are a 90-plus on Rotten Tomatoes that's actually very bad, I would love to know. Shoot us an email, silverballchronicles at gmail.com. So the movie scripts, you talked about this a little bit in our introduction. Basically, you would get a script, you'd get a presentation or some rough cut clips from the movie, and then you would then sort of design your pin around that. That's a pretty crazy thing to think that you're getting a pinball company out of Chicago that's, you know, assigned part of the Data East empire, and you're getting scripts to Steven Spielberg movies before they're released. And you don't even know if the movie's going to be a hit. But as you said, at that point, if Spielberg's directing, it's probably going to be a hit. Thank God they didn't get AI, right? Well, that was a pretty good movie. Yeah, the Schindler's List pin, not so much. No. Do you remember that T-Rex toy we talked about earlier? Yeah, the one with the arms and the magnet mouth. That sounds familiar. The magnet mouth. So Borg was behind with trying to get the T-Rex toy fully working. It broke switches in the beginning, and so they ended up having an external company actually redesign the production T-Rex. Yeah, so they had to get it finished. They had to get it in the box. And I mean, I'm sure that I'm sure that, you know The guts of it was there Sort of everything they needed They just needed somebody to actually finish and refine it And yeah, so that came from One of Borgi's interviews, which I found pretty interesting That they didn't do it in-house The other thing about Jurassic Park, it had the smart missile Oh yeah It's got the gun down on the bottom With the little button So the smart missile was Joe Kamikow's idea And it scores all the playfield features When you hit it So, okay, I've played Jurassic Park a few times. I played it sort of earlier in my pinball, you know, endeavors, and I didn't quite get how the smart missile worked. So it takes all the shots, not just one shot, right? It takes whatever you need. And mostly it's usually used, if you start multiball on that, during multiball you want to spell chaos. so if you start multiball and you still have your smart missile you have a guaranteed chaos because once the ball drains and you're out of multiball like before it registers before it goes into the trough you hit smart missile and it will give you all the chaos letters and starts chaos multiball ah yes ok I see that's very good so it's usually disabled in tournaments for that reason it was a neat little feature and they did use it in the sequel I think Lost World has it also. Very cool, very cool. And that ties in, of course, to Keith Elwin's Stern redesign as well, right? So it has the smart missile feature, although it's not the same. You actually shoot the ball on that one. And it does have chaos letters, just like the original. Now, IPDB would also say that apparently the smart missile was a homage to the Defender video game. Okay. Interesting. One thing to hear is that this game has what I would like to call the Whirlwind controversy. Are you familiar with what I'm talking about here? That it looks a little like Whirlwind? It looks a lot like Whirlwind. That it's got those two scoops in front of the pop bumpers on the left side. It's got an upper flipper kind of going in. Instead of to a ramp, it's more to an orbit. Some similarities there. I wouldn't say that it's identical, but there is some similarities. What do you think of the art? So we talked about Marcus in his first pin, which was actually pretty good with Star Wars. It fits very well. This looks very, very similar. It's got that kind of lines drawn in there. I think the art is okay. I know there's the issue with, was it Nedry is the guy's name? Yeah. What show is he in? Was it Third Rock from the Sun? Seinfeld. Oh, my God. Was any Third Rock from the Sun, too, though? That was a long time ago. I'm sorry. I didn't watch either show, actually, but I guess his fingers are, like, messed up. Yeah, he's got nubs. He looks like he was eating some candy bars and he just went too deep. Oh, he ate his own fingers? That's what it looks like. That is not a fat joke, by the way. I would say it's okay. The dinosaurs are okay. the style is strange, in my opinion, on the play field. It's got these, like, instead of shading or dots, it's got these weird lines instead. It's very much his style. And as you, I think, move through his list of games at Data East, they all look very samey. Well, we were talking about Patton's before. Yes. And I know back in the day when they had Jurassic Park on test, they actually had Williams went in there and covertly filmed it because they believed it was using their ball-sensing technology that, like, Funhaus used when Rudy, his eyes follow the ball around. Oh, yes. Yeah. If you watch the dinosaur, he kind of follows it around a little bit, and they were looking at that. Speaking of other bits and pieces here, this game has a thing called Tri-Ball. And what is Tri-Ball, Ron? It's basically multiball, but they call it Tri-Ball. Because you can't use the name. Yes, that's because of a game called Lethal Weapon 3, one of my favorite Data East games. Oh, ruined it for everybody, didn't it? Well, they called it multiball in that game, but then they also had little digs at Williams, like if you were in the video mode where you got to shoot different characters, Like you shoot the bad guys but don't shoot the innocents But one of the things that would pop up would be a cow And if you shot that you got points Little digs like that Williams didn't really appreciate that So that was the We don't want to get sued so we're going to change the name Little rivalry There Little back and forth IPDB will list Last Action Hero As a game that John Borg Was involved in And I just want to point out that he did the crane, basically. When you dig a little bit deeper in IPDB, there are some of the time things like this pop up. And in an interview, John said that he didn't really want any credit for this game. Even though he designed the coolest thing in it. The crane is so awesome. Very, very cool. You shoot up a ramp around the orb and it goes into a vertical up kicker up onto the crane. The crane will then move it and drop it over into a lock. Very cool. You notice very rarely are cranes used in pinball where they're not cool. Yeah. Can't think of a bad one. Well, is Junkyard a crane? Kind of. It's got a wrecking ball. But even that's cool. I think it is. Yeah, it's kind of cool. So the next game he did was another license. Tales from the Crypt. I mean, Tales from the Crypt. When I was a kid, you know, in 1993, I'm like, what, 6, 7, 8? Wow, I'm feeling old. Jeez, yeah. I just remember the Crypt Keeper, and I just thought he was the coolest thing. It was so cool. It was so creepy. So this is like a fantasy horror license theme. This is November of 93, so we had one game earlier in 93. He's got a second game later in 93, which is, we're talking like Gottlieb cycles here. This is a Data East in what would become Sega version 3 board set. It's 4,500 units, so we've slipped considerably here. We've got Markus Rothkranz and Kurt Andersen on art. Sound and music by Brian Schmidt. And software by Neil Falconer. Kristina Donofrio. Donofrio, I'm guessing. Just being Italian, I would think Donofrio. That's a bad one. Hey, that was a bad one. I had to sound that out phonetically, and it was still really wrong. And John Carpenter, of course, taking a time off of directing. Now, Dion LeBlanc would say on our Facebook page that I love Tales from the Crypt. I agree. And I agree as well. Next to Lethal Weapon 3, it's probably my favorite, Data East. It's very similar play field. And it's got a lot of stuff going on. I like this action hero, and I also like this one. It's a very similar play field to Tommy. It's like Tommy reversed, and instead of the mirror, it's the tombstone. But it has the Crypt Keeper. I am the Crypt Keeper Welcome to the Crypt I have a bone to pick with you That was very good How can you not like that? Love Tales from the Crypt Now the HBO TV series So in Canada we didn't have HBO But I had one of these C-band satellite dish systems When I was younger That would literally move and point into the sky And these things were great And we got HBO Because that was a big deal Now, this is based on the EC Comics series of the same name. And each episode was sort of a self-contained kind of tongue-in-cheek, pun-filled horror, like, adventure, I guess. But R-rated. It was on HBO. So that meant that it was free from all censorship. It had more creative freedom. You could have graphic violence and sexual activity and nudity and drugs and the whole thing. And, man, they went for it, didn't they? They had all kinds of guest stars, too. Like, I remember the one with, oh, what's his name, Don Rickles in it, where he's a, oh, what is he? He's like a puppeteer, but he has to retire, and it turns out the puppet's actually his conjoined twin. It's part of his hand. Oh, my gosh. I think it was Bob Goldwhite in it, too. Yeah, yeah. I just remember that one. If you check out the Wikipedia, like, it's got, like, There's people like Brad Pitt, Dan Aykroyd, Iggy Pop Slash, who's very topical at the moment in pinball, Michael J. Fox, Tom Hanks. We're not talking, like, B-list, like, actors, right? We're talking, like, some proper actors and entertainers on here. So, I mean, how was the show? I mean, I saw a couple episodes, but, I mean, I'm talking, like, 25, 30 years ago, right? It depends on the episode. It's all episodic. Okay, it's kind of hit and miss? Yeah. It's, yeah, it's episodic. So, like, I remember the one, Don Rickles' one I just said because I thought it was awesome. But I'm sure there's ones that maybe weren't as awesome or ones that were even better. Yeah. Rotten Tomatoes gives it an 82%. That's respectable for a TV series. Yeah. The design. There's some really cool design elements on this machine, and I wanted to bring out a couple of them. One of them is the 180 ramp. So if you've seen Jurassic Park by Stern, it's got two of these ramps that you shoot up and it flips over backwards. Very similar to the one on the Munsters as well, also by John Borg. He put a 180 ramp in this thing, and that's kind of like the first time that's been done. And it works so well. I like the targets that are eyeballs. So instead of just stand-up targets with like a circle, they're like a half a sphere. So they look like little eyeballs. So cool. So fun. Yeah, and then they repurposed the mirror mech from Tommy and made it a tombstone. And it has a lot of modes. It's got like seven or eight modes of things to do, which is really, really cool. And you had mentioned the Crypt Keeper call-outs. So that's John Kasser, the actual Crypt Keeper guy. Yep. He came in, and it is something else. Yeah, Ms. Borg said, he took our speech list and took it to another level. One of the other bits that's pretty cool is like the – In this era of pinball, you couldn't just have a plunger anymore, right? Oh, no. You had to have a gimmick. In the first two board games, we have the Star Wars with the handle. You can move the thing up and down. It's got a little trigger on the side. With Jurassic Park, you had a trigger, but with the smart missile button on top. And then on this game, Tales from the Crypt, you have a door knocker. Yeah, it's like a big handle you would see on, like, a mansion. and it's so cool. So this is pretty weird. I heard John Borg talk about this in one of his interviews. I think it was a TopCast interview, and that'll be in the show notes along with all the other stuff we've got here. And the handle itself was actually a Kwikset-branded handle like you would have in the door of an actual home, and they got it from Home Depot. So if the handle, John says, if the handle breaks, you could literally go down to a hardware store and fix it. The tongue mechanism that's there. So they ended up using those handles and then made the outside sculpture out of like an ejection mold. And then they sort of stuck it on the mechanism. Yeah, John Borg said we were buying quick set locks and tossing the door handles into the dumpster out back. The dumpster was full of genuine quick set handles. I feel like Gary Stern missed an opportunity there. Like, if Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace were like a thing, I feel like nowadays Stern would probably put those online to try to sell them. Well, it seems like back then they had stuff on the game that would be considered a mod now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, check out my door knocker mod on my Tales from the Crypt. It's like, oh no, that was actually factory. Really? John also mentioned in this interview that he wanted to do a mystery door feature where you use the flippers to choose a door, and then you use the door handle to actually open the door. But they just didn't code it in, which was super, super cool. So there's a bit of a mini thing in there where you choose a door, but it just goes through automatically, right? Yeah. I might be thinking of the skill shot because they have guillotines, and they rotate, and you hit the right one, and the guy's head gets cut off. There was a backbox topper with lights. So in the original production machine, so if you've got an earlier production machine of Tales of the Crypt, there are five green inserts on the top of the backbox. And originally there were supposed to be some GI and flasher lights in the head of the pin machine, in the pinball machine, that would then flash on a topper that was on the top. But... Cost it out. At the end of the game, it says, in loving memory of William Gaines. He was the publisher of the Tales from the Crypt comic series. He also did Tales from the Crypt, and there was another one. There was another big one. There was another big one. There was like a couple of them with the comic series. And he also might be known as the founder of Mad Magazine. Oh, yeah, that's right. And he died June 1993 at the age of 70. Yeah, just before this pin was released. So there's a little bit of him in every one of those games. And the art works here, right? Like the lines, the things, it works really well here. It's got these creepy ladies, which I think are just hilarious. On the play field, there's like these bikini ladies, but they've got the Crypt Keeper's face, which, you know, works really well for pinball, right? There's a workout guy. So there's a guy who's all buff and working out and hard-bodied, but he's got the Crypt Keeper's face. The spinner, Ron, has a guy laying on a stretching table. And as you flip him, it sort of looks like he's getting stretched a little bit. The rack. That's right, the rack. Oh, yeah. It is just really cool. It's kind of fun. it fits that stuff because it's this morbid kind of horror face melting thing. So if you've got somebody with nubby fingers like Newman, it'll work more in this bin because that's the way it is. We're just going through our show notes here, folks, and here's something that's quite topical. Yeah, that sounds familiar. Guns and Roses. The original GNR. This is the music licensed theme from June of 94. Data East Sega version 3 board set. 3,000 units, so we're still slipping a bit more here. The design, this is a very collaborative game with John Borg, Joe Kamenkow, Lyman Sheets Jr. That's an interesting name. And, of course, Slash. Marcus Rothkrans, again on art. Sound and Music, Brian Schmidt, and Guns N' Roses, and software by your favorite coder, Lonnie Roth, Orin Day, and Lyman Sheets Jr. Slash involvement, very much like today's jersey, Jackpin, Slash was very much involved in licensing this game to Data East. Yeah, according to the story, he wanted a Guns N' Roses. game. So Joe Kamenkow decided to humor him like he'd listened to his pitch, but he had no intentions of making a gun to Rosa's pinball machine. And then when Slash arrived, he had to walk through the factory to get to where their offices were. So when he walked through the factory, people did what they probably usually do around Slash, like, holy shit, Slash. So you can have your, he's giving autographs and he just, the commotion that was caused, Joe Kaminkow just completely changed his mind at that point. He's like, there's no way we can't make a Guns N' Roses pinball machine. Yeah, and at that time, we're talking like peak, peak, peak, right? Like, I mean, they're big now. In 93, they were, yeah, they were still more, I would say, in the relevant phase of their career. Yeah, they're not in that sort of dad rock, fade in, you know, maybe some new people find us thing. This is the, you know, this is big deal, big, big time. one thing apparently that Slash really really really really really wanted was some sort of snake pit because he's a thing that way and he wanted a little bit of help with the artistic direction so he spent a couple of weeks with the design team working with them by the sounds of it he had some involvement but he wasn't greatly involved I think the involvement that he probably had with Eric Minier in Jersey Jack is probably much bigger than what he actually did with Data East Yeah he would attend they would have the meetings the regular meetings for the game and he would attend those And as Lyman Sheets said, that was one of his jobs. He had to go out and get the booze for Slash, so be ready for him when he arrived. Nice. Yeah. See, the crazy thing is now when you see, like, could you imagine these guys working with Slash at the peak? And you got Eric Minier dealing with him now, and he's, like, older. You know, he's still cool. Like, I don't like Guns N' Roses at all. Oh, my. I really, really don't. But Slash is something else, right? Like, he is his own, you know, phenomenon. and he might not be drinking the Jack on a Tuesday anymore. He's still very cool. There's a secret song in this game that is only available on this game. It's called Ain't Going Down, and it's heard on the Data East pinball machine. It is an unreleased song by Guns N' Roses. So that's crazy. What's even crazier is they got Axl to do actual speech for it. Yeah. And this is before Cheeseburger, Axl. Very nice. This is thin axle. And the other thing is the snake pit, that was the name of Slash group. Slash Snake Pit. Oh, I get it. Mm-hmm. I get it. So John Bork says, the second time we met with Slash, we went to his house in L.A. It was right after the earthquake in 1993. Slash had a pet cougar the size of a German shepherd. It was walking like a house cat around the house. It rubbed me and wanted to be pet. It laid down and I rubbed its belly. Don't rub a cougar's belly. It grabbed me, flipped me over, and has jaws right on my neck. Joe yells and slash yelled at the cat, get off, like you would do a dog, and the cat just got off of me. I was in a little bit of shock at the time. That's insane. I've never been attacked by a real cougar like the animal. And, you know, that's crazy. First of all, of course a rock star has a cougar, right, like in his mansion. Yeah, you can't have a normal pet. Right. Now, something tells me that Eric Minier, you know, probably didn't see Slash. He probably saw Slash with, like, a lady cougar, not, like, an animal cougar. Things have totally changed, I think, nowadays compared to the way they were back then with these crazy sort of, you know, early 90s, late 80s rock stars. That's a pretty nuts story. That's an awesome story. Here's John Borg, a guy who kind of went to drafting college, knows how to do injection molding machines and stuff like that. All of a sudden, he's at frigging Axel's house. I'm sorry. He's at Slash house being attacked by a cougar. That's an awesome story. I mean, yeah, he didn't outrun the police in a Porsche, but got attacked by a frigging cougar in Slash house. That's so much cooler than just calling him on Skype when he's on tour. So this is a wide body at Daddy's. They didn't do many of them. They did not. John says it was a narrow game, and we made it a wide body. Williams had come out with Twilight Zone, and we wanted to try a wide body. We followed the competition. So we added the snake ramp and extra lanes. Now, we spoke about building materials. The bill of materials did not increase with the size of the machine. So you're spending more on the size of the machine. what they did is they just made sure their money went a little further, which basically meant they just put less in it. Some of the machines in the production run actually had a headphone jack located at the front of the cabinet, which I didn't even know until I started researching that. It actually had two shooters. It had the regular shooter on the right, and it had the Rose shooter on the left side. Yeah, sort of like... Funhaus. Funhaus, yeah, exactly. Yeah, two different coils were used for the auto launch. apparently in the first production runs, the first part of the production run, the auto launcher wouldn't get the ball up the launch ramp, and sometimes it would have to give it a good couple of kicks before it made its all the way up. Let me correct myself before someone corrects me. Yes, it didn't have two shooters. It had the Rose shooter on the left. On the right was actually a gun. Oh, cool. Because someone's going to get me on that one, so I have to correct myself. That's right. That's crazy. Are we 45 minutes in yet? Why? Because we've got to tell everybody to pause this and then restart it next. Oh, we passed that a long time ago. Man, we screwed that up. If no one could tell, we had a five-hour delay because my power got knocked out. Right in the middle of Star Wars. I think someone knocked out the shield generator on Endor and knocked out my power, so we had to get that repaired. Yeah, I'm so sorry, Doug. We really let you down again two weeks in a row. There's always next month. Now, there was going to be a shot specific to the band members, which then would lock a ball on a wire form, but that was cost to do. Which is interesting, because on the newer Guns N' Roses, there was a shot for each band member. Oh, and there's a lock at the top. And interesting thing, according to Slash, the thing he liked about the game was you had to assemble the band to get them on stage, which knowing how notorious Guns N' Roses was for being late and having trouble getting everyone on stage, he thought that was quite funny. And the other interesting thing is this game ended up in litigation. What? Yes, Sam Gilbey Clark, who was the guitarist for Guns N' Roses, Well, he got fired, I don't remember, fired, quit, whatever, around the time when this game was made. He's in the game. So he sued because he didn't get his consent to be in the game. Wow. So every time you lock a ball and it says Sam Gilbey, like, Sam Gilbey didn't approve of that. I'm suing. You should feel bad about yourself when you're in that game. He didn't get his cut. Now, GNR was done in four months. Usually it's four to six months, which is still really short. So this thing was like slapped together and out the door pretty quick. Can you tell? I haven't played a Guns N' Roses. It's got a ton of stuff on it. It's got the Guns N' Roses. It's got those cool ramps. The GNR ramps. They're kind of cool. It's kind of gimmicky. I don't really like it, but it's cool. It's a one-shot thing, getting all the band members together, but the multiball is cool. Another one was Data East Multistage Multiballs, where you start the regular multiball, and then if you hit both ramps, It begins Paradise City multiball, where all the balls come out. Is that like a Lonnie D. Ropp thing, do you think? I'm sure it was Lyman. I think Lyman probably came in at the end and he made all the good parts. No comment. You know, one day we're going to have to do an episode on Lonnie D. Ropp. You have to take all these insults back. That's right. Actually, I have nothing against Lonnie. Richie Rich was the next machine that he worked on, and this was actually just a movie prop. for the movie Richie Rich with Macaulay Culkin. And it was used in the movie where they played it. And it was actually just Tommy that had been re-skinned to Richie Rich. But it actually played. It had some rules. It had a multiball. It was a pinball machine. So you can see pictures of that on IPDB if you really care. Yeah, Daddy's did a few of those. They had the Aaron Spelling game. They had the Michael Jordan game, which I think were both Lethal Weapon 3 re-themes. Yeah, because they just had a lot of those parts laying around because Lethal Weapon 3 wasn't very good. No, the opposite. They made a ton of them. So what was Borg's next game? The next game that Borg spent a lot of... Now, he would say that he spent a lot of time working with everybody else and working on a lot of their projects but the next full game he worked on was Frankenstein. And it's a Monsters Horror Movie License theme. It's January of 95. It's a Data East Sega version 3B. 3,000 units. So, man, we're really, each machine is selling less and less as we move deeper into the 90s here. Art by Paul Faris. There's a new artist. Brian Schmidt and Lonnie D. Ropp and Lyman Sheets on code. And by new artist, Paul Faris, we mean old artist, new to us in Verdata East here. Yeah. So this film, man, I think I remember seeing this maybe once. It's one of those like... Is it one of Robert De Niro is the monster? Yeah. The creation. It's got Helen Bonham Carter. It's got John Cleese in it from 1994. it's one of these more kind of artsy horror kind of movies. It's based on Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, yes, from the year 1818, Frankenstein. So the original writing of Frankenstein. And it is considered to be the most accurate portrayal of the novel of any film that has ever been done. it had a $45 million budget so that's $76 million in today's dollars so let's tie that back let's tie that back to the last time we talked about big budget movies it had a $100 million budget for Jurassic Park they had a $100 million budget in today's dollars in Jurassic Park and there you can see that you've got Robert De Niro and a bunch of guys in here and this movie is still only $76 million. It did $112 million in the box office, which is $178 million. That is a far cry from, like, a billion dollars. Not cutting Mados doesn't like it. 38%. Ooh. They went a little too artsy, I would say. That's what happens, man. So you can see, okay, oh my goodness, this is a whole thing now. What is also very interesting about Frankenstein is that Sega produced this game. This was no longer Data East at the time. Now it had become Sega. Now, Sega had produced Pinball as Sega Enterprises Limited from 1971 to 1978 with some classics like Nothing. Oh, that's not true. Their Spanish affiliate was Segusa. Yeah. And they did games like Prospector. Yeah, I guess. We'll get into that some other time. Prospector's pretty good. Data East and Sega had this interesting relationship. So the cost of using all of these high-profile licenses was catching up to Data East. And you can see that they've spent a lot of money on a lot of these licenses, and then that's where you get into some of these choices you have to make, right? So if you look at Williams at the time, that sort of Bally Williams era, and everybody fawns over Bally Williams mechanics, and there was so much in the game and magnets and the ball would hit a, you know, I'm thinking a theater of magic where the ball is hitting a crate, the crate rotates, and then it goes in the thing and behind it and then there's a magnet on it and it's like diverters and stuff's getting, you know, crazy over there. And you go to Data East and things are a little like they're cool, but they're like they're kind of ho-hum, right? but instead of theater of magic we're talking jurassic park right like we've got some themes dinosaur toys not ho-hum it eats your ball yeah but but it's it well let's go beyond that then and let's move into like lethal weapon three well let's go back to last action hero with the crane super cool toy yeah it's okay i'm hurting your argument here you're you're you're winning and I don't like losing this argument. But I will say Data East definitely went for much higher profile licensing. And the code wasn't there. They had this sort of Gottlieb issue where the code was kind of there, and it was like copy-paste, and then they changed a few things and moved on to the next. Data East did have a thing where at least some of the games and music sounded almost the same from title to title. It's like they would find an annoying noise from the movie and just put it on a spinner It was awesome Thanks, Dead East Anywho, the cost of those licenses really started to catch up with them and Williams was able to spend all that time on code, on innovation, on manufacturing while they spent a lot of their time on these big budget themes and those themes did produce sales. Like, let's not sweep that under the carpet. People bought and played a lot of these games because of the themes, and they sold because of the themes, and they got quarters because of the themes. So Data East's parent company decided to sell the factory and the assets to another Japanese game company called Sega, who then created Sega Pinball. Everybody remember Sega from the home console Genesis? Sega. Sonic. Sonic. the Hedgehog. I played some Sonic the Hedgehog this week actually on the old PlayStation 4. This, we'll get into a whole Data East episode some other time, kind of the creation of Data East and all of that stuff, but they were a video game company out of Japan and they had their own pinball division. That didn't work out and it was costing a lot of money. I'm sure they were making money, but they probably weren't making a lot of money in comparison to what they thought they should be making when you looked at it. Especially by the mid-90s. Especially, and you can see... Oh, it is starting to take the downturn. All those numbers that we're talking about all starting to come down, right? Like, Star Wars at 10,000 units, and now we're down to like 3,000 units. So, this was the first fully made in-house Sega game. Monster. So, this is the original Jurassic Park, or part of the original Jurassic Park dinosaur design, as mentioned previously. Originally, it had a head motor and a body motor, which moved around. It was costed out. Oh, man. Take a drink, everybody. It was costed out. They were also worried about ball hang-ups and moving. I would be more worried, I think, probably about the ball hang-ups and stuff like that. That's a, I mean, when you look at it, it's kind of a neat mech. It looks silly, but it is kind of neat the way it works. Oh, it's very neat. And that comes from John Borg and the way John Borg designed things, right? He was a mechanical engineer, right? He loved that kind of stuff. And all of his games, especially in Data East, all had that kind of stuff, which was cool. It has an awesome backlash. It has an awesome, awesome, awesome backlash. Paul Faris, he is so good when it comes to portrait styles and paint. If you go to a show where Paul Faris is at, odds are he might actually bring the original canvas painting that he drew for this. Probably the best part of the game. Frankenstein has the extra-large DMD. Yeah, 192 by 64 pixels. Oh, the HD of its time. It costs $60 more than the standard DMD. It's funny when you put it in dollar amount, right? Yeah, you could have spent that on a Mac, possibly. Who knows? But they did look cool. They did look very cool. What they're trying to do is they're trying to stand out a little bit, right? They're trying to differentiate themselves to look a little bit different than everybody else. One way they did that was this extra-large DMD. Not a bad idea, really. One of the other changes is instead of the DE on the flippers, now it has Sonic the Hedgehog on the flippers. That was very cool when I read that. So like on the left side, so instead of saying like Gottlieb or Williams have the little W, it's got a Sonic. That's a cool little feature. Sonic also appeared on the DMD as well. So it would say Sega. One thing that's a bit interesting is that the Sonic is actually the monster. So he's got stitches kind of like the Frankenstein monster on the DMD. So it's not just Sonic as he normally was on all the other games. He had like stitches in his face. It was very cool. Nice detail. That was something that was really funny that would come out with Sega is all these kind of interesting little details. Now, it also had a six-player display code prototype, which was used as a proof of concept where you could play six players instead of just four. That wasn't actually released until the smash hit Baywatch. Great game. Yeah, we call that moose knuckle up here in Canada. Another way they wanted to differentiate themselves, Ron, was that you could choose your music when you played the game. So you put your quarters in, you hit your start button, and then you could choose the left flipper or the right flipper. Left Flipper is film soundtrack, so if you wanted to be fully immersed in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, you'd choose the left. And if you wanted Edgar Winter's Frankenstein theme, you chose the right flipper. I would choose the right flipper. Yeah, I probably would, too. Oh, yeah. Let's talk about Fred Young for a minute. I said we'd get to him. He had a lot to do with this game. and I think probably added the best parts of this game. You know Fred Young. You've met him. Oh, I've met him. He would come to Expo every year. Fred Young might not be somebody that sort of our listeners know, especially if they're younger to pinball or newer to pinball, but he's definitely somebody you've heard. He started doing different voices at the age of seven following a tonsillectomy operation, and he began mimicking Huckleberry Hound's voice while watching the TV show. Eric, can you do a Huckleberry Hound? Ah, which one is he again? Oh, boy. That's the Hanna-Barbera ones. I'm more into the classic, like, Looney Tunes, 40s, 50s, shorts era. I didn't watch a lot of those other ones. Yogi Berra and all that stuff, I didn't watch. Yeah. In high school, he used to copy his teachers and answer questions using their voice. This led to Sesame Street characters and then, of course, Star Wars. He actually did Star Wars voices in the movies and sort of those background voices. In 1970, he took a job at an insurance company after impressing them with his telephone voice. And this led him to being spotted and invited to join a radio show. Then after that, a lot of other offers for using voice work started to flow in. Fred first got involved in pinball when he was doing some recordings for an all-state insurance ad in Chicago. He got a call from a recording studio saying that a company wanted him to voice a pinball machine after hearing his demo tape. Not knowing anything about pinball, he thought it sounded like fun. He ended up meeting Gene Roddenberry, Joe Kamenkow, and Brian Schmidt when they were working on 1991's Data East Star Trek 25th Anniversary. How cool is that? He got to meet Gene Roddenberry. He went on to do a game after that, of course, being Star Wars, which we mentioned. He did the voices for Back to the Future. He did that really crappy game, Lethal Weapon. Hey! He actually is Joe Pesci's voice. Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. Joe Pesci didn't even do that. Fred did that. That is pretty cool. He did the voices for Maverick. He did Frankenstein. He did Sharky's Shootout, the ultimate classic. and Harley Davidson, and of course, he even did Stern's Pirates of the Caribbean. He's very good at pirates. I think the pirate voices are very good in that game. Another really kind of cool little Easter egg here. Under the apron, there's a little Frankenstein pinball machine with J. Borg written on it. That stands for John Borg. I think so. Twister was up next. Wait a minute, he got to do Twister? Yeah. Does he do any movies that don't make tons of money? I'm telling you, man, he is living the licensing dream. I literally didn't realize he did this many huge licenses. Like, Frankenstein still made money, as much as he kind of panned it there. But all these other movies, these are blockbuster movies. Yeah, Twister was a disaster movie, license theme. This is April of 96. This is a Sega Stern White Star system. What's interesting here is all of a sudden, we don't know how many units they're selling. It's designed by John Borg, art by Paul Faris Sound and music, Brian Schmidt And software by Lonnie Ropp and Orin Day I like how whenever it says Lonnie Ropp, you write Looney Yeah Is that a currency? It's a currency in Canada, right? That's right It would auto-correct to that, I think You're using Canadian word Yeah, Canadian word A friend of the pod, Edward Partridge from Down Under, he would say, Twister, meh. Thanks for the feedback, Edward. I figured he didn't like it. Guess not. The film, now this depicts a group of storm chasers researching tornadoes during a severe outbreak in Oklahoma. This stars Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton. The legendary Bill Paxton, yes. Wait, that isn't Bill Pullman, is it? No, no, Bill Paxton. I love Bill Paxton. He's a Terminator. He got killed by a Terminator, a Predator, and an alien. He has a great distinction. Although he's never really shown getting killed by the Terminator, so I dispute that. The movie had a $90 million budget, $138 million in today's dollars. Wait, hold on a second. Hold on a second. Wasn't he also in Spaceballs? Bill Paxton? Bill Paxton? No. Oh, no, that was Bill Pullman. If you're talking about the... Yeah, it was Independence Day. It was Independence Day. No, that's not Bill... No, that's the other guy. Yes, the guy that... They look exactly the same. No, they don't. So this had a $90 million budget, adjusted for inflation, so $138 million, which is kind of crazy. So if you think we're in 1996, it's been three years later, this is around Jurassic Park budget levels. and it had some serious special effects. Oh, yeah. And it did $490 million in the box office. That's $750 million with inflation. That's huge. What I remember about this movie was the Dodge truck. This is when Dodge changed their look of their trucks from that kind of old square 80s truck to like a kind of a rounded, cooler, 90s, you know, things are changing and becoming cool. And that truck just gets the crap kicked out of it the whole movie. And I remember that truck a lot because all of a sudden they just appeared everywhere here in my province. It also lost the Oscar for Best Visual Effects to Independence Day, starring Bill Paxton. No. Rotten Tomatoes doesn't like it, though. 53%. Rotten Tomatoes does not like this movie. And to be honest, I saw this movie in the theater, and I thought it was awesome. I was also, like, 11. So I haven't seen it since then, although I would love to see it again to actually see if it holds up. Did the special effects hold up? Because Jurassic Park special effects. They were good. They were good. At the very beginning when the guy gets sucked out of the storm cellar into the... Oh, no. Spoilers. Spoilers. Come on. Well, the design itself, Twister came up quick, and they didn't have much time to make changes once the first whitewood was complete. So John got a patent on the magnetic spinning disc, which he has used a few times since. Just a few. Just a couple. This spinning disc, kind of like Whirlwind, then had a magnet in the middle so it would stick to it while it would spin. And this is like, this is almost like Steve Ritchie's left side ramp, right? Like, this has been used quite a few times. It's a very, very big John Borg signature. Yeah, X-Men, Turtles, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He's used it quite a few times. Yeah, yeah. So he got to see, again, movie stars. the film at the time when they were doing the shooting they had rented an old school and they were prepping for shooting at the school and then they go out and do the shooting and then they go back and when John Borg and the group actually entered the cafeteria of this school which where most of the movie stars were just hanging out Bill Paxson was singing Pinball Wizard on the other side of the room Bill took them over to Helen Hunt's trailer and they just had a good chit-chat. Apparently, John Borg would say, Paxton was super friendly, which is awesome. That is just awesome. Helen Hunt at the time was a big deal. I'm trying to think there was, Philip Seymour Hoffman was in that, I think, also. I think it was the story that he, they didn't have his consent for him to be on the back glass and they didn't realize that until they actually already had it ready for production. Oh no. But then when Hoffman saw it, he thought it was, like, the coolest thing ever, that he was not a pinball machine. So they dodged the bullet. Yeah, they're like, yeah, cool. Now we've got some cows in this game. Interesting. You can get cow multiball by shooting the orbit nine times, and that gives you five ball multiball. Cow multiball. Which, it's from the movie, because there's a cow that gets sucked in, you know, by the twister. The spoiler. But I wonder if that's like almost a mini-dig on Williams with their cows. It's probably both. This is an odd one, okay? So doing the research, this one popped up a couple times. It's called Mini Viper. It's a car license game. It was June of 96. It's a Sega Stern White Star. They have really, they kind of had like one unit. It's designed by John Borg, art by Jeff Busch, sound, Brian Schmidt again, and software by Orin Day. This was originally a concept to have a modern game in a 1950s cabinet. So operators were often complaining to the manufacturers that the games were getting too big. So think about the System 3 Gottliebs were just with these massive heads. And they had these smaller areas they couldn't fill in their arcades because these pins were just getting big. So they came up with this idea to make a small game. So it's basically their answer to Safecracker. Yeah. So John says, we built this game and took it to the AOMA show. Customers said, how come you didn't make it normal size? Yeah, perfect. So they tell them, hey, you should make a small one. And then it shows up, and they're like, hey, that's a great game. Why didn't you make it the regular size? It's like, thanks, man. We'll just run through that one. The Lost World Jurassic Park. Dinosaur movie theme Juna 97 Sega Stern White Star We don't know how many units were made Art by Morgan Riesling Doesn't have credited sound and music Which I find interesting But you know I'm probably going to say Brian Schmidt because that's like The only one that works there apparently For sound and music And software by Orin Day and Neil Falconer Did you see this movie? I didn't see the first one, so yeah. But the film was the highly anticipated follow-up to the smash hit Jurassic Park, directed by Steven Spielberg. The 1997 film is based on the book Lost World Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton, which was specifically written because of the success of the first film and for the sole purpose of being the base of this sequel film. How awesome is it that you're like, well, that movie was really good. I better write another book so I can sell that so I can write another movie. If you remember, Michael Crichton got a percentage of the growth, so he probably made so much money, he felt this was the least he could do. Yeah, I mean, you've got to help him out a little bit, right? This had a $73 million budget, $110 million. Now, but we're also like five years out, right? So we've had five years plus a little bit of inflation, so we're getting a little bit higher budget. It's still higher with a $618 million box office, just under a billion dollars. So another just amazing piece of work. I thought the movie was good. So Borgi received the script and reviewed it, and he was super excited to do another Jurassic Park since the original movie was such a hit. And then he saw the movie And he was a little bit let down I have no frame of reference Yeah, Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 53 I think that's probably a bit low It's not that bad It's not Jurassic Park at 91 That's an all-time great movie But what kind of weird and interesting Is that the movie Has a scene where they kind of like hunting down the dinosaurs And it like a Humvee and the guy kind of goes out and it picks up the dinosaur and sticks it in a cage and puts it on its back. It was called the Snagger or the Snagger Truck in the script. John said that he read that in the script. He said that would be a very cool toy where it could go and pick up the ball and whatever. And sadly, he did all the design work, put it in the game, and then the final movie basically cut out the snagger and you just sort of see it in the background. That's a bummer. But that's kind of what happens when you get the preview copy, right? The thing is, that toy, I played many Lost Worlds. I think I played one where the toy worked. Oops. It also has an egg toy, which is like, it opens up and kind of like, and then inside is like a little dinosaur. When the Sager actually works, it is damn cool. It's a cool little toy. But it hardly ever works, and that's the problem with it. It's sad that it's kind of small and situated where it's at, because you can't really see it really, really well in comparison to the egg. It would be cooler if it was maybe larger and more prominent, but that's being a bit picky. So the art, ooh, I complained a lot about the Jurassic Park art to begin with, but this one's even worse. It's like, this is when we're getting into the Photoshop era, right, where people have learned, oh, my God, you can just get these stock photos and just drag and drop and throw in some colors. But it's got like this weird hue, switch of colors from the bottom. It's like reds and oranges and then kind of moves up the play field. It looks, oh, my God. And the logos, the insert writing, it's just, oh, God, it's bad. It's bad. Oh, I don't even want to talk about it. Can we just move on? We can move on. The thing is, other than that driving game, that small game there, has Borg done a non-licensed game? No. That he's designed? Interesting. He's got a couple coming up here maybe But we'll talk about that in a second So let's move on to a really good movie Lost in Space Oh, f*** it Never seen it Yeah It's a sci-fi licensed movie theme It's May of 98 I've heard of the show That's the one with the Warning, warning Danger Will Robinson robot Exactly Sega Stern, White Star Is he in the movie? Kind of It's got 600 units How do you think we know that? John said it on the podcast Uh-oh so it did not sell very good did not sell very well art by question mark I don't know who that would be Brian Schmidt, Orin Day, Neil Falconer again on software so the film this is 1998 sci-fi film directed by Stephen Hopkins based on the 1960s TV show of the same name the series was then also inspired by the 1812 novel, The Swiss Family Robinson. Basically, this stars Joey from Friends, Gary Oldman, and Heather Graham. The idea is, like the Swiss Family Robinson before, where they get shipwrecked, and they gotta live somewhere, the Robinson family goes into space to go to a nearby star system to begin colonization of new planets because the Earth is dying. Wow, that's hitting home. Their ship is thrown off course because of an evil saboteur, and they try to find their way home. Man, I loved the original Lost in Space. The black and white Lost in Space. I watched that almost every morning before school on, well, it was Nick at Night, but we were just playing reruns, I guess. And it was so great. You didn't see the original show? I've seen clips from the original show. I feel like that's right up your alley. Because it's old? Space nerd theme. Right? You're like me. You like sci-fi stuff. That's an all-time classic. I guess I lose my nerd card sometimes, you know. Yeah. I haven't watched Doctor Who either. I mean, that means I'm a small fella. Yeah, I haven't watched Doctor Who either. because I'm not all about the British and their teeth. $80 million budget. So it had a $120 million budget. This is a big, big, big budget. It did a box office of $136 million, or in today's dollars, $205 million. That's a train wreck. Yeah. That's really bad. It made like $80 million? Yeah. Yeah. Oh. By today's, yeah. And Rotten Tomatoes doesn't like it either, 28%. 28%. I did see this movie. I think I saw it on VHS. And if you don't know what that is, just Google it. And I think it was back in the day when you go to Blockbuster or whatever and you pick up a movie. I'm pretty sure I did that. And I saw it with a buddy. And we are just looking at each other and going, oh, my God, this is bad. And that's when you're a kid and, like, you know, oh, God, it was really, really, really bad. Really bad. The acting was bad. The directing was bad. The story was bad. They redesigned the robot, right? It was bad. Well, when they got the script, they were really excited. After leaving the theater, they slowed down their effort on the pen. They moved on to the next project. Yeah, so this game actually pretty much has uncomplete code. And you can see that they put a lot of effort into it, and then it just doesn't go anywhere. And you can totally tell that. This is when we start getting into another sort of shift in the pinball industry. It's 1999. Williams has bailed on pinball, and they've moved directly to WMS Gaming and their gambling devices. Pinball 2000 has kind of done its, you know, out of the gate and died. You know, Williams is out. Gottlieb is out. You've got Sega left. And quite frankly, they weren't really the, you know, killing it here with sales numbers by what we can tell. Later that year in 1999, seeing the collapse of pinball and arcade gaming in general, they decided to sell their pinball division. The president of the division at the time was Gary Stern, and of course he had been running the company since Data East was created in 1986. And he stepped up to take a huge risk and buy a pinball company, which is basically run on a shoestring budget, with all the other big manufacturers like Williams, Gottlieb, again, all forced or quit out of the business. I don't think Gary gets enough credit for taking the risk that he did in that time and buying the company. That being said, I bet you he got a manufacturing plant, facilities, tools, all that stuff. He probably got it cheap. Yeah, it was all the same stuff they had. They never moved. Yeah. So Daddy East probably spent a boatload of money to start the company up, you know, tool everything. Then they sold it, you know, probably at a loss or whatever they could get to Sega. And then Sega's like, I need to get the hell out of here and get whatever I can. And they probably sold it to Gary. Granted, he probably didn't get it dirt cheap, but he probably got a pretty good deal on buying an entire manufacturing company. Thank you, Gary. Company which was then formed as the Stern Pinball Incorporated, which all of us know today. And it's based in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. The sole survivor. Yeah, because Sega just could have said, well, screw it. We're out of here, and then shut that down and move on, right? They pretty much did. Yeah. Motorcycle brand license theme from 1999. It's a Sega Stern White Star. Sells about 6,000 to 7,000 units. That's a guesstimation from John. Designed by John Borg and Lonnie Roth, spelled correctly. I don't know who did the art. and the music and sound done by Kyle Johnson, who did Alvin G's sound and music and early Sterns. This is kind of where he's done software by Lonnie. 100% first Stern game. All the others were sort of like Sega holdovers. We'll talk about them some other time, kind of at our maybe beginning Stern episode or something like that. And Gary was so proud of the title that Stern reran this title a couple of times. Ron, Gary Stern is quite the Harley guy. So if you're looking to suck up to Gary Stern, you want to make sure that you buy a Harley and drive it around so he sees you on it. Ride to live, live to ride, Harley Davidson. Actually, I think that's the William Harley Davidson game. So, Harley-Davidson, you know, it's a lifestyle brand. Did you know that? Yes, I do know that. So, along with Indian, Harley was one of the only survivors of the Great Depression in, you know, motorcycles. And they worked for years to become what they became today. Today they are a $5.7 billion annual revenue company, and they have $10 billion in assets. They are a monster. They have T-shirts. They have the hog branding. They're just iconic. They've got this America image, even though a lot of their motorcycles are slowly being made overseas, like Brazil and India, while they're closing plants in the United States, but they've got an America image. You can't go wrong with a license like that, could you? It's not the first Harley Davidson. I said Williams did one. Williams did one under the, I think it was under the Bally label, but it was Williams. Yeah, so they actually ran that game twice. Then they made changes on the third run, different changes like that. So it was originally on the front of this, in the middle of the play field, it's got like a Harley motorcycle. And you shoot the targets, and then it does like a wheelie, which is super, super cool. So originally it had a much smaller bike. It had six pop bumpers, and it had crisscross ramps, kind of like a taxi. The bike toy is really the major focus here. You've played one of these, right? Oh, yes. You hit it enough times and then it actually comes up. You can hit them all underneath it. Yeah, the wheelie bike was actually John's idea, and he found this toy at Target. So what we've discovered here is when John Borg has to make a game, he just wanders around hardware stores and toy stores and then just makes a game. He tinkered with the model. So he bought the toy, he tinkered with it, and he created a simple motor assembly, which would go inside the bike, which would then make it do a wheelie. On the rerun, when they reran him, Stern found a larger bike model, like a large touring bike, like a fat boy. John was laid off from Stern by the time the second and third runs happened. John didn't like the rerun machines as much. He would actually say that the third edition art package was a bit meh. Now, the first two runs, the rider on the middle of the playfield, if you get right down in there, you look really, really close. It's actually a woman behind the face shield, not a man. So Borgi was quite happy about that. He estimates about 6,000, 7,000 games were actually sold. And, you know, that's big time at the time, right? So if we think about kind of the Sega games that had been, you know, coming out at the time, you know, we're certainly not selling, you know, 5,000 units, let alone six or seven. Now, this is where we get into Dennis Creasel's favorite game. I think he cried for four days when he sold this machine. Sharky's Shootout. It's a pool billiards semi-licensed theme. This was made in September of 2000. It's a Sega White Star. We don't know how many units were sold. Designed by John Borg and Lonnie D. Ropp, as well as some input from Jon Norris. Artwork by John Yousi. Music and sound by Kyle Johnson. And software by Dwight Sullivan. Oh my goodness, there's this guy. and Keith P. Johnson and Lonnie D. Ropp. So this is the first game that John and Dwight would work on, and they wouldn't work together again until the Monsters, and most recently, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Have you ever played Sharkies? Oh, yeah. It's kind of fun, eh? It's like an eight-ball deluxe. I played the original version, which was called Golden Cue. Yes. It was designed by Jon Norris. They end up with Sega. They end up not using it. and they just did a slight redesign and changed the theme and it became Sharky's Shootout. The original one had Kelly Packard, I guess, was on Baywatch. I never watched Baywatch. But I guess she was on Baywatch, so she was on Golden Cue, and I played that also somewhere. I think the Museum of Pinball in Banning, California, has this. Very cool. Very cool. So around that time, sort of Jon Norris had a falling out with Stern and he left. He's now working at Deep Root, which he mentioned in the podcast around God Leave and System 3. Now, he's working on an eight ball deluxe style kind of game at Deep Root. And it's like a medieval 1980s theme. and it's not, it's said in some of the Deep Root package that it's not kind of traditional. If I were a betting man, I would look at Golden Q, and then I would extrapolate that to today. I would add a pin bar, and then I think we've got something here. So Golden Q was designed by Sega Pinball and Incredible Technologies, who you will know from the Golden Tee golf games. So like Golden Tee, the game was designed to be linked with other games and play in tournaments across the country to win prizes awarded for high scores. So it had goal-oriented play. A player must complete tasks, a checklist, and then the game ends. So the faster you complete the checklist, think of like a Jurassic Park speed run. Like I said, I think there's something here. If you look at Deep Root, Jon Norris, 8-Ball Deluxe, I think Jon Norris was working on something here that wasn't a regular pinball machine. And I think that that's what's... I think something like that is going to be what's coming with Deep Root. So keep your eyes peeled for maybe if that comes out. What do you think, Ron? We'll see. We'll see what happens. Okay, let's get back to Sharky's because this is not a... This is a John Borg podcast. So Gary basically gave John Borg all the parts, the ramps, the drops, the eight ball deluxe assembly, some diverters, and just basically said, like, here, just make a game, right? And that's what came out of this, Sharky Shootout. I haven't played Sharky Shootout, but I have played eight ball deluxe. And I don't know what it is about that side flipper shot into those stand-up drop bank. It's so fun. It just drives me crazy. So when you think of like Bad Girls, which is the mirror version, you can't go wrong with that layout, can you? And Sharky's Shootout is a licensed game. It has Jeanette Lee as a well-known pool player. Ran the backless. Super cool. Super cool. Now, they have her likeness, and it's a cool theme, but it's not like a theme or it's not her game. It's kind of cool how they did that. They kind of made it theme-y, but not so much. It's kind of cool. This is one where I'm excited to talk about this one. Austin Powers. Of course, it's a movie licensed from September of 2000. It's a Sega Stern White Star. We don't know how many units were sold. John Borg, Lonnie Roth. Not sure who did the R's music. The sound here was Kyle Johnson, and software by Lonnie Ropp and Keith P. Johnson. So the second game with Keith P. Johnson working on it. Now this film, we're following the same thing here. This is the spy action comedy film series starring Mike Myers, the Canadian icon, the number two to Ed Robertson number one. And also, Ed, you know, send us an email, Ed. Send Canadian email. Send us an email. Come on. I'm Canadian. He is. I mean, he's the real deal. He's the real deal Canadian, too. I mean, even as everything's spelled wrong in the Canadian way on these show notes. Elizabeth Hurley, she's in that. She was fantastic. Heather Graham, she was in The Spy Who Shagged Me. Seth Green, just amazing. and Vern Troyer, who was Mini-Me. So, did you see these movies? Saw the first two. First two were great. I actually saw Goldmember just popped up, the third movie on Netflix this past week, and I'm like, you know what? I'm going to watch that. I remember seeing it at the time when Goldmember came out, and I was a bit disappointed. I feel like they recycled a lot of the jokes from this Bioshagme, But seeing it now, you know, we got like 20 years, 15 years on it. It's so great. I love these movies so much. If you're going back into that sort of catalog, Stern, and you're looking for, you know, movies or things you want to redo again, like Ninja Turtles or Jurassic Park, I'm telling you, Austin Powers. Oh, so good. so the pin was released right after the second installment of the series the spy who shagged me which is a spoof on the spy who loved me the james bond movie it had a 33 million dollar budget which was 48 million dollars in today's dollars it had a 312 million dollar box office so we break down the rotten tomatoes the international Man of Mystery, which is the first movie, 71%. I would totally agree. Spy Who Shagged Me, 52%. And Goldmember, which would then be released in 2002, is 54%. I kind of disagree with the second two. I thought the Spy Who Shagged Me was just a riot. Oh, so good. John Borg would actually call this game his baby. He loved making this game. John said it was the second layout for the game. The original was three flipper like Jurassic Park and shooting across to the time machine. A similar spinner to Twister with a mini-me head and mouth. Borg loved mini-me. John says a magnet would make the ball jump and the ball would hit him in the mouth and he's spinning and says when mini-me was in trouble. He didn't talk, he would just say and it was so entertaining. It may have been cut as a cost issue, but we didn't get that far into the design. Yeah, how cool would that be? So the idea was that it's like the ball would kind of hit him, and it would magnet to his mouth, and he would spin around in a circle. That sounds kind of fun. It's actually not a bad game, and it probably has the most stuff that was used in other games of any game I can think of. Yeah, yeah. It has the toilet, which they actually recycled from South Park. So it has the toy, the Dr. Evil toy that pops up, and they just repurposed that with a different model, the figurine on it for Ironmonger. It has the time machine thing. They repurposed that to be the ring, the Lord of the Rings. Then it had the crossbow, I guess you could say, which was repurposed as the crossbow in Walking Dead. So they got a lot of mileage out of the mechs in that. This is a great game. It's very fanny in its layout. Oh, very fanny. It's got the John Borg scoop in there. which usually has just an astronomical amount of wear. Ugh. You see those online? Keep a lookout on that. But it's a pretty cool, it's a great little game. Now, the voices, of course, that's one of the biggest parts of these movies, right? And John would say that they always had problems with Mike Myers, that he was, like, unobtainable. And John wasn't sure if this was because, like, Mike Myers was difficult to get along with, or at the time, you know, he was going through some things in his life. So there is no custom speech by Myers. All of it was lifted from the movie. And this would happen again in the Shrek game because Mike Myers just might not have time for pinball people. So Robert Mooney on Facebook says, I have Austin Powers gold number one. Got a new inbox from a friend who was a retired distributor. It's supposedly Mike Myers' machine and he never bothered to pick it up, so Sir and Sir sold it. has a special film star difficulty setting that isn't on the regular games. I suspect that mode is really just the easy setting. I mean, if you want to say Mike Myers, you know... Maybe he just doesn't like pinball. You ever think of that? Yeah, I mean, that could be part of it. I mean, it sounds like maybe he was not all that to be super involved in or wasn't overly interested. He has better things to do. Yeah, I mean, that kind of hurts our pinball egos, right? That kind of makes us sad. The only person that they could do custom speech Was the actress Mindy Sterling who did Frau Farbisna Who of course was the founder Of the militant wing of the Salvation Army And Dr. Evil's lover It also has the coolest spinner of all time The Mini-Me spinner Mini-Me spinner Almost everyone I've ever seen His feet are broken off but it's still cool Here's an interesting little fact about that Mini-Me spinner That is the first Production used optical spinner Things you know. I assume you're shocked. I think I've heard that before. Yeah, because Mini-Me is so heavy, right, to swing, they couldn't put the switch because they wouldn't get it. It would be like a Gottlieb System 1 spinner. So they needed to put an optical switch in there so he could spin a little more. So they knew what they could expect from the first movie. That was out on video. And, I mean, you could generally see where they were going to go with the second film. The Spire Shag Me was just awesome. Just awesome. So, you know, he goes back in time. And John, along with the engineers there, designed this spinning ring disc thing that would hold the ball and then drop it down a ramp in the back. And that was repurposed, like you had mentioned earlier, for Lord of the Rings. So everybody's like, oh, that's so cool, the Lord of the Rings thing. Oh, my goodness, it's never been done before. It's like, well, it was. It was. Austin Power did it all first. That should be the quote. Whatever it is, Austin Powers did it first. Exactly. So this is around 2000. Things are chugging along, and John is laid off from Stern. He starts his own business for seven years. He does slots. He does redemption games with Bryan Hansen, who was formerly from Capcom. Actually, interesting enough, he went on to design kitchen equipment for McDonald's for a company called H&K. H&K, as you might know, also do hospital equipment. So Borg kind of, you know, that's it. He's done. We've never heard from him again. Came in, he had some of the best licenses ever, and that's it. He'll be back. That's the end of the episode this month. John Borg spent the 1990s making pinball machines for that decade's largest franchises and that decade's biggest letdowns. he had an opportunity that many of the designers at the time would probably kill for. There were high highs and there were low lows through John Borg's design career. But I can tell you it probably didn't matter to John because Borg had fun. John would eventually return to Stern Pinball in 2008 when he would start, I would say, his best run of his career, developing his own unique style and brand of pinball design. I would even say that that run, which is still going on today, is probably one of the best of any designers ever to come into pinball. Says the guy who has Tron. Says the guy who has Tron. I love me some Borg-y I have a Borg game What do you think I have? What's my Borg? What's your Borg game? That's my Borg game It's none of the ones we mentioned So it's from You don't have The Walking Dead No And you don't have a Metallica I know I do have a Metallica Oh, there you go Ding, ding, ding You got that for the Lyman Code And the Playfield We're going to talk about Metallica in the next John Borg episode Oh my Metallica, Metallica, Metallica Love Metallica Oh you also have an Iron Man Oh crap that's right I have multiple Borg designs I forgot he did And you finished second Expo Trivia I'm so good at trivia I don't even know my own games It's not like I just played that game Today Wow What are your thoughts on Borg's live-in-the-90s-licensed dream, his first part of his career? A lot of cool toys, which only makes sense from where he came from. You do want me to do my Hulk Hogan impersonation that is supposed to be Robert Mueller. That's great. All right, brother. As always, you can send your comments, questions, corrections, and concerns to silverballchronicles.com, dude. We look forward to all the messages, and we read every one, brother. Please subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or your favorite podcaster, dude. Turn on automatic download so you don't miss a single episode. Remember to leave us a five-star review. That way, more people can find us, brother. Want to support the podcast and need a new shirt? Swing on over to Silver Ball Swag and pick up the Silver Ball Chronicles t-shirt. You can also pick up our new Pin Bar t-shirt. I can't wait for the Pin Bar. the pin bar here is going to be great but you know what's as cool as the pin bar is definitely the Silver Ball Chronicles t-shirt you definitely want one of those so if we ever have pin ball shows again I might see someone wearing those I think that's going to turn out really well. I think this is going to be a good episode. Well, you know, brother, especially if you leave a lot of the bloopers in there or put them at the end of the show, dude, but that's going to be like more editing for you. I'm far too lazy for that. Oh, there was lots of good material in there. It was Bill Pullman, wasn't it? You went to Bill Pullman thing. The funny thing is, I literally only know him as the guy from Spaceballs and the guy from Independence Day. It's like the president from Independence Day was in Spaceballs. I can't believe Bill Paxton's no longer with us. That sucks. Yeah. Yeah. Thank God we didn't lose Bill Pullman, though. The guy that was in Spaceballs is the guy that was in Independence Day. That way I can tell you. But that's not Bill Paxton. Bill Paxton was in Terminator. He's the guy with the mohawk at the beginning of the movie, which I didn't realize until years later. I'm like, yeah, that's Bill Paxton. No, honestly, Google Bill Paxton, Bill Pullman. Put the pictures up next to each other, and you're going to be like, Who the fuck? Which one is which? I could switch them and you wouldn't even know. I would know. Madam President, the sale at Dimmer Mattress has been extended. Walk with me. We need to get the word out. Reports are still showing the more you buy, the more you save. In English, that's $100 off every $1,000 you spend. And, Dr. Storrs, check out the Consumer Reports Recommended Doctor's Choice Plus and save $100. Check out the Colorado Queen for only $199.99. Financing. We've got 60 months no interest and free shipping. Now we're talking. This is an all-hands-on-deck scenario, people. But hurry, the extended President's Day Super Sale at Denver Mattress ends soon.