what's up guys and welcome back to the channel where i talk into everything pinball and we're going to be talking to brian allen a lot of you know him obviously by his artwork that you've seen on the things that he's done for pinball but he has done a lot more than that i mean there's a whole list i could go through but honestly i'm just going to put a link to his website down below for you to check out everything that he's done as far as like a title for you brian i mean like i've You've got illustrator, graphic designer, creative director, or like Flyland Designs. Does that be good enough for you out there? Correct me. Yeah, I usually – well, thanks for having me. I usually call myself an illustrator before a graphic designer. I probably put all those terms on my website just for SEO, but illustrator works. Flyland Designs is the name of my business. I came up with that in high school. I wish I didn't. it's not the best name in the world, but too late to change it. I wouldn't worry about it. I think your name is already going to carry enough weight, especially going forward and everything like that. So, I mean, obviously the catalyst for this interview is your recent art package for Funhaus, but I kind of wanted to get everybody a better idea of you because evidently when it comes to pinball, not a lot of people have had an interview or discussion with you. So I kind of want to give everybody a little bit of an idea more about you. And I've already told you earlier and guys, if it's not already going to be pretty present, I'm kind of a little fanboy of Brian. I mean, I'm wearing one of his shirts right now. Oh, I got the Aqua team. When I when I interviewed Pedretti earlier, I was wearing another one of your T-shirts. I went ahead and set these next to me right here. This is one I love that you did with the I saw the rope. Dr. Robotnik, I was like, I've got to have it. And then I bought three of these for my brothers and me and everything because we grew up playing Sonic the Hedgehog. So this is the thing that I also hate about you, Brian, is that you draw things and then you're like, hey, check out what I just did. And I'm like, damn it. Now I've got to buy a shirt of it or something or whatever. Got two kids to feed, man. I understand, but I mean, I guess I'm kind of curious, would would it be possible and i kind of hope you don't because then of course i'll have to buy it but have you ever thought about like tomb raider stuff is that ever crossed your mind how tomb raider uh i was really big into that game back in when it was on sega saturn uh back when it was just all polygons yeah uh yeah i did i'd do something with that i don't know i i gravitate more towards like the the generation before that retro games okay you know because i like taking things that uh were just pixels and then drawing them um uh drawing them as if they were modern you know there's a little more challenge to that you could take her from her typical polygons to something more of your style when it comes to drawing the female figure which i honestly really love the way you draw the female figure at kirby that's how i like my girls so it's like it's like so i'm like hey he draws them really nice so i again going back i mean i don't want to know all about in your entire childhood, but at some point you had to have been saying to yourself as you're drawing in school or whatever, like, you know what, maybe I could do something with this. Maybe I've got something here. What happened there? How did this go about? I came from a family of artists. So my grandmother and my uncle and even farther back, uh, we're all artists. Um, so for me growing up, like it was, it was never being an artist was never seen as like this crazy idea where you couldn't make a living and like, what do you, you know, what are you thinking? It was actually encouraged. Um, my brother Keith is also a really accomplished artist. He works at American Greetings and, um, him and I used to like just draw our own toys and draw our own action figures and stuff, like cut them out of cardboard. Uh, my, my mom, that would piss my mom off because she would actually buy real action figures and then we just wouldn't play with them. We'd go but make our own. Like looking through Nintendo Power and stuff and just drawing little Marios and Sonics and whatnot. Then in high school, I had a really influential art teacher who he pushed me to kind of just go all out and explore it. And he got me into a couple art competitions. And I did well there, which really surprised me because I was drawing like skulls and you know the the typical like Iron Maiden kind of stuff that you would draw in high school back then and that artwork went up against like beautiful pictures of flowers and vases or vases and stuff and I won and it was like that was the first time I realized like, well, maybe I can just draw skulls all day and still have a job. And anyway, so I graduated college in 2004, started working for a motorcycle graphics company called XGX. There, my boss was this incredible artist who used to work in the video game industry. and he taught me a lot. That was a great job too because I'm just drawing like dragons and and like those ladies that you mentioned, more skulls. Then got a job at a book cover company but by 2012 I had enough of my own clients that I was able to break off and work independently as an illustrator. And that's what I've been doing ever since. And eventually my wife quit her job to work with me to just help support. And if you've ever ordered anything from me like you have, she is most likely the one who packed it up and shipped it out to you. All right. Yeah. So since 2012, you said you've been, this has been your priority. This is your career going forward and everything so you your portfolio like i said guys i'm going to put a link in the description for you to check out everything that he's done that he's got up there on the side a lot of it is for sale and he has a lot of things for when it comes to t-shirts like if you're aqua teen hunger force i saw this and i was like damn it i sent it to my friend and he's like i want one too and i was like all right i'll get you one of them so but he's done a wide variety of things and I see that you do have a large spectrum of things that you've drawn. It doesn't seem like, you know, this is, like you said, I'm going to just draw only skulls. You know, you've done a variety of things with t-shirts and promos for other kinds of shows that you're like a freelancer, correct? So if somebody wanted work done, they could contact you via the website and you would. For sure. And yeah, that's half of my income is from freelance and the other half is from products that I make and sell. And I think my earlier jobs, like the one at the book cover company, that really like instilled in me the freelance spirit of basically creating things for a customer as fast as I can and at the highest quality I can. So I've done, yeah, I do love to draw skulls, but I've also done children's books and I've done logos and you know I will do I will draw whatever interests me and whatever is needed and I love doing that because it keeps everything fresh and it just feels like every day is different and I don't I don't know year to year what I'm going to be involved in pinball probably being the perfect example because 10 years ago I had no idea that that would become such a big part of my business. Yeah. So how did that come about? You're doing your thing, you're doing promos, you're doing freelancer stuff, and all of a sudden now you're dabbling into the pinball. So how did that come about? That came about when Andrew Highway hired me to do the limited edition pinball back glass for Alien. So when he reached out to me, I had no idea about like the state of his company or any of that. Kind of turns out that when he hired me to do that two weeks after I finished like his whole company went bankrupt I pieced together now he probably was hiring me to do that to like kind of maybe as like a Hail Mary to try to get more deposits or something I don know But anyway, after that experience, a lot of people in the pinball community wanted a print of it and they wanted a back glass of it. And so I own the rights to that artwork, so I made them a copy. And then after that, people started requesting different pinball items. And me always being like an arcade and pinball fan because I grew up in the 80s. So I was just like, this is the perfect time, the peak of that era, I think. And it just it just sort of one thing led to another. And then I got the license through Planetary Pinball to remake the old Williams and Bally back glasses. And I think I think now we've done almost 13 of them or maybe even more. What was your first one? Was it a AFM or Attack from Mars? It was Monster Bash, actually. A friend of mine suggested I did that. And so after Monster Bash, then people would say, I do one for Attack from Mars. And it just led to Cactus Canyon, which is probably our most popular. And then the most recent one we did was No Good Gophers. And I don't know which one I'm going to work on next. well what's funny is that whenever i sold or traded my cactus canyon in yeah part of the trade was the brian out artwork came with it it was he's like he's like he's like well the brian art's gonna be on there right i'm like yeah i'll leave it on there he's like okay so that was one of the things that it's a little bit of a selling point for people i mean like for me then i even said it in my review it's like the art package for cactus canyon it looked like it was a mixed bag and and whereas what you do with with your back glass and everything it uh i think it definitely brought it up a notch and the art blades obviously helped that as well and that's what i liked about your art packages for the williams games is that you still have what it used to be but you've kind of like just improved upon that and added your own little touch to it and everything and so when i i think i didn't really notice it so much on monster bash because that was a game that I don't care for. I suck at it, so I don't like it. But whenever you got out Attack from Mars, that's when I was like, who did this? I was like, because I really enjoyed that art package because it was a game that I really enjoyed. And so from there, it was a matter of just like, you know, starting to see you post other things and other items for different games and different pinball-related content and everything. And so it was one of those where certain games obviously need an improvement. And so I'm definitely glad that you're into the pinball genre now creating stuff. And as you've been here longer, you started with like Translites and then you started doing Art Blaze. And it wasn't until Theater of Magic that you actually did cabinet decals, correct? Yeah. And I've only done that. And then I did one for No Good Gophers. and I also have one for virtual pinball machines that has like all the Williams characters on it that I was pretty happy with um cabinet wraps I don't know how many more of those I'll do to be honest because they uh they're time consuming and they're not you can't store them they're hard to store and then the demand is just not there compared to the the other items so most of this pinball stuff I'm doing like in my spare time between freelance projects and I don't have a lot of spare time so I have to like I have to choose very carefully on what I spend the time on you know um especially now that I'm I'm traveling more and going to more conventions and festivals and such to sell my artwork and that takes a big chunk of time I mean I've joked around with you about it you're talking about what you know machine you're gonna do next I got world cup soccer back here that back glass is it needs it yeah and the problem with that and the problem with that and a lot of them like twilight zone and adam's family they have a third party involved in the licensing so i can't do them without getting uh either getting their permission or sending them money and um i have asked a few i i shouldn't i won't give names but there have been some companies I've reached out to and the money that they want just for the privilege of redrawing their art and then selling it is insane substantial yeah it's just like it's not it's like yeah like you could but you'd have to like mark up the price and people aren't going to pay that kind of money especially for people kind of thing and it's like so going from doing the cabinets for like theater magic and the no good gophers now with fun house this is your very first full-blown art package for a machine correct so you've got back glass uh yeah and i have done i have designed a few but they those projects were canceled and they'll never see the light of day so this is the first one that i've done and it's come to market yeah yeah so i i've often joked i could probably fill an arcade with the amount of canceled projects I've been a part of. But I don't know what that says about me. I don't know. Maybe I'm cursed. Hopefully not. But like, yeah, so the break of the curse, not just the back glass or the cabinet artwork. And then you have the speaker cabinet art package. I'm guessing you did that as well. Playfield and even the plastics for the game, correct? Yep. everything. My goodness. Yeah, the classics were fun. Because that's what my next question was, is that, you know, as you've progressed and done more, it's like, where do you feel like, you know, it was a learning curve for you kind of thing? So the learning curve always comes from, believe it or not, it's actually harder, in my opinion to remake something than to just make something new like as if this was if this was an original theme um remaking all this stuff for funhouse was very challenging because all of these artists who did these early Williams Bally games were like in my opinion like the top of their game i mean these are masterpieces so i have to figure out how can I modernize it, but not change it so much that it's going to turn people off. But then if I don't change it enough, then I'm just going to be copying it. So that was one of the most challenging parts, especially with the backlash, because Pedretti wanted it to be similar in terms of the layout. We had to have Rudy's face in the middle and and and etc um so that to me that's the most challenging part because i'm trying to draw characters but i'm sort of like uh nailed down into what position they could be in especially in a backlash because the lights are in predetermined spaces yeah um and that in all my remakes before I even start drawing I make sure uh that I watch videos on where the flashes are and stuff like that because I don't I don't want to draw something in an awkward I don't want like someone's crotch to light up you know yeah so so that's always a challenge um and then uh but everything else on this funhouse thing was just um just a lot of fun they were super easy to work with. They kind of let me roll with it. I tried to add a little creepiness here and there because that's just sort of my thing. Rudy's always been creepy to me anyway, so you add him to it. Yeah I think fun house I mean the whole idea to me anyway like a fun house is creepy like especially when you a little kid and you go into a hall of mirrors or there usually a haunted house inside of a fun house is creepy like especially when you a little kid you go into a hall of mirrors or there usually a haunted house inside of a fun house so to me it always been kind of weird and off-putting and um that's what i like to explore yeah i mean it's one of those where like i always joke about i was like i was like i don't know how brian allen walks because he's got to have massive balls to be able to do what he does with these old licenses there's not a lot of people that would go, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to take Tales of the Arabian Nights. I'm going to take Theater of Magic. I'm going to take this game, and I'm going to change what it used to be, and I'm like, I would never do that, especially knowing a lot of people and how they are in this hobby, and even still to this day, there's people, I get comments or see them on Pennside or whatever that still, you know, they like things to be original, so that's the good thing about what they've done with this game is that they still give people the option if they don't particularly like the Brian Allen art style or whatever they can still have the original it's their form and everything right yeah I see those comments too and I completely understand them the only reason I'm doing this is because of requests I mean I have enough people requesting that I do it and then when I do do it there's enough of them that support it and buy it and so I keep doing it uh if if that wasn't there i wouldn't be doing it yeah um you know i i'd be i'd be drawing something else but the the pinball community has just been so supportive of me it's it's incredible um it really the only i also do a lot of disc golf artwork yeah that's sort of uh that's an example of another community that has just been incredibly supportive and just collects like everything i do and it's just uh i i don't think i ever would have foresaw that happening 10 years ago so i'm just really grateful for that it's it's like i'm looking at it and i and that's the thing about your art is that if people study it they're going to find all kinds of little easter eggs that that you've hidden throughout stuff. And some things that people pinpoint out, and I'm kind of curious about it too, is that you tend to hide characters from other Williams products in your art package. So what's up with that? Well, some of it is just trying to think of how to fill the space, right? But then I love the idea of Williams having a mythology to it, Kind of the way like like McDonald's has these characters and they all hang out right and they're like like it or an expanded universe kind of thing So even though those games like a drew doctor dude in in funhouse, you know, those games Have nothing to do with each other but I just I think enough time has passed that it's just really fun to mash those characters together and and make them look like one big family. Yeah, just like you said, you're drawing the universe and the characters within it kind of thing. I totally get that, and that's why one of your mashups, I think it was the first one you did, I was like, oh man, I love it. Because if you look at it, obviously you can recognize the characters. You're like, oh, that's from this game, that's from this game, that's from this game, and it's not identical to the original, but it's similar enough to where you can definitely recognize it and you're paying homage to it by not causing insults, in my opinion or not. Like I said, I'm going to fanboy out because I already enjoy your stuff. But it's always nice to look through and see the little Easter eggs and everything. So in the back glass right now, I'm just kind of going through it. I'm like, I'm pretty sure that's Twilight Zone and some of these are a little pixelated, so it's a little hard for me to pinpoint out. write a pin bot up there I'm seeing that pin bot in the back corner back there yeah so that's what I like about it if you study them you're going to find the little things that you just put a little time and effort into yeah and I admire that era where the artists were able to just like create these new characters from nothing and that's harder to do now since most pinball games like need to have an IP attached uh so i i just think that must have been such an exciting time to to basically just be given a theme and like now we have to just create these these characters from scratch and they they created some amazing ones especially like like i love the the older era games as well um which had a lot of like weird sci-fi fantasy uh elements to them too it's like so like how how do you begin something like this do you start with the cabinet do you start with the play field what do you like for you what's your method i guess when you go through something like this i like to start with the back glass uh because it kind of sets the tone for everything else um and lately i've just been doing the play field last because it's to me it's the most complicated and challenging part of it so i saved that for last because by then we kind of like know what characters are going to be featured and and whatnot um i'm working on i'm working on something now that's just going to be a one-off but it's a original property like not an ip and like i think it i'm really excited about it because like because they're letting me just go nuts it's going to be i i won't i won't say too much about it but it's going to be like a science fiction fantasy kind of space thing and uh it's uh i love i love it so far um but i'm doing that as well like doing the back glass first and then moving on to the play field okay so it sounds like you definitely like the the freedom to do what you want like you know you know what go buck wild show us what you got versus you know restrictions in place you can't do this we got to have this and stuff like that well yeah because i think with the freelance side of things that i do i face a lot of restrictions and like um occasionally i'll work with bigger companies that have brand requirements and whatnot uh so when working on whenever i get the chance to have more freedom i think any artist would prefer that yeah but i can definitely work within restrictions um and some some ips have like crazy restrictions and then others have none uh lately i've been doing a lot of gig posters for bands um like i just did a couple for primus and that's an example of a band that like billy they let me get some crazy looking stuff i mean yeah the weirder the better yeah and um you know i i've done some stuff for Metallica and their restrictions were much, much harder than, than that. So you never, you never know what you're doing. And I think that can go to the, to the way of the person that's in, you know, the license or whatever. I think they, if they were to let you just do what you want, I think that they don't know what you could be capable of doing until they see it. Like, holy crap. I didn't think about how awesome this would be, but you know, kind of thing. So I, It sucks that sometimes you're limited before you can really show them like, hey, you know, I know this is do you ever do that where you're like, you know, this is what you wanted. But I just wanted to I kind of sketch this a little bit of rough draft to give you an idea of what other things we could do kind of thing. Yeah, absolutely. And I didn't do that as much when I was younger and greener. But like eventually I realized that that's actually an important part of my job. Right. Like when often when people are asking me to draw something, especially if it's not an experienced art director, they may not they may not even know what they want, but they feel like they're required to tell me, you know, so they're often relieved when I can step in and say, OK, I drew I sketched your idea, which I think is fine. but here's something else which I think might work just as good or better and that often works. Or, honestly too, I think it's my responsibility if someone suggests something that I just know from experience is not gonna work, I need you know an artist needs to speak up and tell them Yeah So it like man I looking at the play field I like and so that why I keep looking on the off the screen for people that are going what Carrie looking at I'm like, I'm scrolling through the pictures of this game. Cause I really wish that I had some better pictures of the art blades. I, that's one thing I do not have, but one of the first, I can send you some later. I should have sent you. Okay. Yeah. Cause that's basically the only pictures that I don't really have of what all you got unless I zoom in. And even then it's, it's kind of blurred out, but you know, so whenever I got in the NDA with Pedretti and he sent me the pictures of the LE cabinet, I was like, Oh shit. I was like, I was like, I gotta, I gotta get ahold of Brian right now. So it was definitely cure. I'm glad that you finally got your shot to show the world a full art package. And out of curiosity, you don't have to tell me who, but are you possibly in cahoots with another manufacturer in the future for a game? Well, with Pedretti, we were discussing another one. And then I mentioned the one-off one, which is not with the manufacturer. Okay. Yeah. And then I'm working on a homebrew for someone as well. Okay. I'm going to be starting that. But I guess you would call the one-off a homebrew. I hesitate to call it a home brew because I think it's actually going to be manufactured in a way that I think is going to make it pretty high quality. Okay. But anyway, yeah, that is it. No, I reach out to the pinball companies regularly. They know who I am and they know I'd love to work with them. gotten close a few times, a few things fell apart. But I'm busy enough with my other clients and the other things I do that I don't get too hung up on it. Yeah. Like if it happens, it happens kind of thing, you know? Yeah, if there's a product out there that's right for me, then I hope they'll give me a shot. And that's the trouble too, is it, a lot of the things coming out lately have been uh like john wick is a good example right like the art i am not the artist for john wick like i do more cartoony and comic book style stuff so my style is is just not right for it so even if a pinball company thought that i was qualified to do a machine like the style has to be just right and uh you know there's not and i think that's probably what it is you know they're they're just looking for the right theme or property that would fit into what they have seen in your you know your portfolio at this point in time like you know who would do this theme really good you know stuff like so but yeah definitely even if you were to only do like pedretti remakes and stuff like that knowing and seeing what you've done on the game so far it's like i'm totally behind if any of the games that are going to be coming in the future are ones that you're able to do because i think you're definitely going to pay homage to it as well as you know just give us something a little different and the same process of it kind of thing but uh yeah i mean i'm just i'm still just going through the pictures just enjoying the colors on it and the play field and stuff i i cannot wait to actually see it in person to see exactly how it looks and everything yeah i can't wait to see it in person myself i have i have not you know uh but i thought that the pictures and the videos they took for launch were great i was really impressed with the the way they handled all that um and yeah i hope it's being well received and it does well for them i hope yeah so when it comes to powder coating is that a decision that's any way or shape or form on you as well like you have like recommendations like hey you might want to go with the blue or you might want to go with a yellow or red or is that just on them no they didn't ask me about that okay yeah i don't know if they did they already make that decision oh the blue looks fine to me i just didn't know if it's one of those things where they happen to just reach out to you like oh you know with my color palette you know it would probably go well with this particular color or something like that yeah no i didn't that might have been the guys who printed the the playfield maybe not sure okay but uh yeah i mean as far as like questions on the art and everything i mean so did pedretti reach out to you or did you reach out to him i mean how did the whole relationship even form um i did something well yeah yeah i'm not sure i'm not sure how many details i can i'll just say yeah yeah they did reach out to me okay yeah that's that's all i needed right there like who reached out to who kind of thing it was a little more it was a little more complicated than that but um yeah yes yeah i mean it it makes sense because then they see uh that you do what you do with the remakes and they're doing remakes so it's like hey let's reach out to him kind of thing and uh i forgot when it was but i did mention him uh you to him uh but it was i forgot even when it was and what it was about it's been a while but i'm around anytime i can i'm like you know like i said i i got something else i got to reach out to somebody after i get off the interview and talk to him be like have you called him yet please no problem no problem man i i just enjoy what you do and keep doing more of it just not as much of stuff that i have to buy save me on my wallet a little bit but uh instead of like hey look what i drew great until a tomb raider right yeah oh man but uh yeah i mean as far as like anything else i mean like i said the purpose of this was to mainly get you know more information about you as an artist so that way people just kind of get to know you in this hobby as well as showing off you know what you've done for this game and uh kind of give people more info on going to your website and they can get your stuff there so even all the previous games that you've done for like williams that's all available on your website still yes okay i didn't know there's a time window like i can only sell them for this long so that's like i guess you got a license locked in for yeah yeah there's no limit to that um but we whenever we do a new one we put out only a certain number of the acrylic back glasses so like attack from Mars was limited to only 125 of them and once those are gone they're gone but then we sell them as trans lights during and after that so a lot of a lot of the titles have sold out for the back glasses we only have a few that haven't yet which is which is amazing to me this is incredible but yeah we'll keep selling them until people stop buying them I guess one more question on this that was any of your do you have any art in the the video assets at all animation oh no no I didn't I wasn't involved with that I'm not sure if they they may have just used pieces from the funhouse 2.0 kit okay I didn't know if you might have had any kind of thing that they're going to add to the code on that or potentially or whatever. So that was just kind of curious. I just wanted to see if that was in there or not. They did have my layered file. So I guess it's possible that maybe they're going to take my art and, you know, cut it up and animate it. Perhaps that would be neat to see. All right, man. Yeah. I mean, thanks for coming on here. I mean, as like I said, I'm going to put a link to your website in the description down below. If there's any other kind of information that you want to plug right now, go right ahead. Well, yeah, if you just want to visit my website, flylanddesigns.com, come out and see me at Chicago Expo. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not good at plugging things. I know. That's fine. Just like people want to meet you and buy your stuff in person to get your autograph on something. They know that you're going to be at this coming expo, right? That's what you said? yeah I'll that's in October and yeah those guys are great to me so I'll keep coming until they tell me to stop all right so that's good to hear all right guys we're gonna wrap this episode up with Brian Allen uh I hope you enjoyed the show peace out everybody yeah great talking to you see