Sometimes we're funny, sometimes we suck. Proud to be Canada Free since 2019. Thank you. This program contains dirty potty mouth. Because we like to swear. Hey! The following is an anti-radio production. Please. Welcome to the super. Super Awesome Pinball Show. With your host, pinball artist, Christian Franchi. And doctoring himself, Christian Lyme. Sponsored by CornShaker.com Hey there, all you pinball rocksters out there. and welcome to the Super Awesome Pinball Show, episode number 26. My name is Christopher Franchi, and I'm here alongside with your other host, Dr. Pin himself, Christian Lime. Hey, we're back, risen from the grave, but only when there's a reason, a good reason to pick up the mic again, and we definitely have one, unrestricted access to the two primary players in the design team for the Mandalorian Pinball Machine from Stern, revealed today, Brian Eddy and Dwight Sullivan. So join us as we deep dive into the game with stories of how the game was developed, how they brought the Mandalorian to life, and what to expect when you finally get your hands on one. It's been a couple of months away from the mic, but it's good to be back. It's good to be talking to you, Chris. And I cannot wait to get Brian and Dwight on the horn here so we can pick their brain. Definitely happy to have you back, sir. And yeah, without further ado, let's get this thing rolling. All right, Brian. So we obviously want to focus primarily on your new game, but let's refresh our listeners' memory when it comes to your past and present in pinball. You were the lead designer on Medieval Madness, Attack from Mars, and Shadow. How does it feel to have your games routinely at the top of the list of the best pinball machines of all time? Well, obviously I love it, but it's crazy to think that 20-some years later that people are still playing these games and having a great time. I mean, that makes me feel great, that all these years that people have been enjoying the games. You know, that's one of my passions of why I do it, because I love people to get together and have fun playing these games. It's amazing. What's crazy to me is that the list is short, but it's just like a list of studs. It's like they're all awesome. It just makes me curious why you did stay in pinball. I mean, you know, because if you do something well, you know, just keep doing it. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think the reality is I kind of seen the writing on the wall a little bit about pinball at that time and the downfall of it. Williams was trying to figure out what to do next how to spark more interest in pinball and sales and that's what Pin 2000 came out of. I decided at some point in there to go with the video because I like games of all types so I love video games too just as much as pinball and decided to try making arcade games and then eventually console games and a whole bunch of stuff so I just wanted to expand and do other things I think at the time and I seen pinball having a rough time it's not like I wanted to leave it's because I love doing it. Pinballs are one of the funnest things to create because there's so many different things you get to do. Well, they always say never be the last to leave the party. I guess that was me. But pinballs have been having a resurgence for a while. What took you so long to come back? Yeah, it's just other ventures. I was off doing all sorts of stuff. Actually, we started a company with Joe Chemical called Spooky Cool and we were doing Facebook games and mobile games and we ended up getting bought by Zynga, so it was a whole startup thing that I was doing for a few years. So you were with Joe before he was at Zynga. You were actually his partner. Yeah, we were part of the startup. It was actually Joe and Larry and my company started it, and then he was one of the first employees. I worked for Zynga for a year. Yes, through Joe, probably. Yes. So looking back in the pinball, you know, your pinball world when you were making Medieval Madness and Attack from Mars, when they were released, were they lauded as the best games ever made, or did that reputation just develop over time? No, it definitely developed over time. I think the feedback that we got back then was far and few between. There were a few core fans that we were able to talk to in the Chicagoland area, or you had a friend across the way you could talk to about it, but we were nowhere near as connected as we are today, so we didn't get much feedback. The game would go out on test, we would go watch a game. We'd stand there and watch people play for all weekend and just to get a feedback of how they were doing, and if they were enjoying it, and if they were coming back to play another game. And so we spent a lot of time just getting feedback direct from the players back then. That's not so much the way it works nowadays, but that was our feedback. That's all we had. A game would go into production, they would get shipped off, and then maybe we'd hear some stuff on rec.games.pinball, the internet groups at the time, people talking about it back and forth, but there wasn't as much information as there is now. So, you know, for a game to even know if a game was that huge of a hit, besides the sales run and how many did we sell right at that moment, there was really not a great indicator of it. So I think it really did, like you said, it built over time. Your feedback now is almost like the fire hose has been opened and it's just blasting you. I mean, it went from zero feedback almost to more feedback than you would ever want. Yeah. So which do you prefer? I like feedback. I love hearing from people and their experiences, good and bad, right? There's always something good you can find, I think, of any pinball machines. And the great thing about it is there's so many different themes and styles that there's always something for somebody. And I don't expect everybody to love every game I do or anybody else does, but that's what's great about pinball. There's such a choice out there. After your time at Bally Williams and your current work with Stern, you spent some time working in video games and Zynga, as we talked about, but eventually you saw the light. You came back to where it all started. And I personally remember the excitement that the hobby felt when Stern put out the press release that you were coming back. Were you affected by that intense pressure and the expectations of the community, or were you just able to focus on making the best game possible? I guess it was always there in the back of your mind, right? This pressure, it's been 20 years, and those games have become such icons out there that people have certain expectations that you could probably never live up to. But my first game, I really tried to do a little bit of a homage to Medieval Man's Attack on Mars, was something that's completely new that you've never seen with a projector and things like that. You know, going forward, I'm mixing up a lot more than I did then. But I really wanted that feel, right? Nobody had seen a game like that in 20 years exactly like it. So it was kind of a conscious effort, the direction I took. That was definitely a question that's coming up that we were going to ask you. Because it seemed like it was. I mean, you perfectly married some really cool new and current features with the projector and the UV light, you know, reactive paint. but you also kept the fan layout and the, you know, everyone knows and loves from you from Attack from Mars and Medieval Madness and kind of married the two. Yeah, I really wanted that feel. So if you came up and played the game, it kind of felt a little bit like that but with these new and different things going on. So I was trying to do a little bit of a mix of both, some new and some feeling of nostalgia when you come back to play that, oh, hey, I kind of get this, right? Right. And still trying to keep it fresh with something new and different that you haven't seen in pinball before. I think the projector was something that no one expected. Did that take a long time to get in there? Were you feeling like that would eventually get cut, a la some of the things you tried for Attack from Mars and that sort of thing? Or how hard did you really push to get that? Yeah, pretty hard. It took a long time of actually sourcing probably 50 or 60 different projectors, finding one that would fit under there, one that was reliable enough and would last long enough to be in a pinball machine. and then just the sourcing, right, finding the different makers of them and the quality, the resolution, the color, and everything. I went through so many different projectors. And then, of course, the size, right? They were just getting to the point where you could fit them under the apron of the game there. And I found one that fit almost perfectly and was able to hide the magic, which is what I really wanted. I didn't want a big, giant projector sticking out so that you could see. It's just, where is that coming from? A lot of times when people walk up, they say, where is that coming from? So, yeah, and it took a lot of work from a lot of the people at Williams from, you know, purchasing to electrical to all the testing side that we did for longevity. Definitely a big team effort to make that work. How was it getting back to making pinball after joining Stern? Because we heard that you were back, and it seemed like a long time before we saw something from you. So was the transition smooth? Did you feel you had to take some rust off? Or, you know, was it any, you know, sort of changes in the industry that may have hindered you? or was it just fairly smooth and you took your time? No, it was fairly smooth. I think some of it was just learning the way CERN does things based upon my experience at Williams Bally and just the different ways that they're structured and the procedures that they have along the way. And some of the things I was doing was different than anything I'd done with the projector and UV incident. It took a lot of back and forth and trial and error to get those to work correctly. So I think it just was a little bit longer development as it's the first time coming on, coming back, and just ramping up. The one thing I will say, though, that goes along with that is that it did feel like coming home, though, because a lot of the people working at Stern I worked with in the past. So it felt like coming back to family. And I think that was one of the best things. Everybody at Stern is very passionate about what they do, and they're very helpful. So no resistance from anybody. Everybody was really happy that we're all still there making pinballs after all these years. So that was one of the best things about coming back is it was so comfortable. Yeah, one of the things we've seen just from interviewing so many people in pinball is that there is such an overlap for people who've worked at Bally and Williams and then went to do video games and then came back to pinball. I mean, that's a very common thread. We know why that was because of the downturn in pinball and that sort of thing. But it's cool that there's so many common names, even looking way back in the future, you know, seeing Joe Camenco and Gary Stern at Data East and so on and so forth. But when you were away from pinball for a while, did you think about pinball? Were you keeping tabs on pinball? Did you have a long list of things that you might want to implement into pinball machines when you came back, if you ever came back? Yeah, you know, I didn't know if I would ever come back. I always wanted to because my time in pinball was awesome. I loved, you know, from the programming to designing, all sides of it. It's just, like I said, they're really fun creations to make. So I was actually exactly what you said. I would keep a notebook, and I would always write down ideas, even though it's been 20 years since I made a pinball machine. I would still think of things that would be cool to interact with the ball or different things you could do with it and keep a list of these things. So how long is that book? Are you set for a couple decades? I mean, what are we looking at here? It's not quite that big, but it's definitely there for inspiration. Cool. Now, with your experience and your love for designing video games as well as pinball. As a designer for Stern, are you a little more hands-on than the other departments that it takes to create a pinball machine, or do you just kind of let the video guys go and do their thing? How do you work that out? Yeah, a little bit. It really depends on the team and the people that you're working with. Like, Dwight does an awesome job working with the video group and wrangling all those guys to create the scenes and the feel and the emotion that we want in them. so I kind of let him handle it on this project for the most part Lonnie and I kind of both worked with them a little bit more on the last project but Dwight's really good at that you know he's been doing it for years and I want him to really have ownership of it too and and make his mark on it because Dwight's a really creative guy and he adds a ton to it we just talked to Dwight we had a great time talking about the code for the games that guy sucks man I am never working with him again. That's right. No, you're nothing but good things to say about you. So we're really here to talk about your latest and greatest. The next new game from Stern Pinball, which you designed, and it comes with a megaton of a license, Star Wars The Mandalorian The Pinball Machine. So as a fan of the show personally and Star Wars in general, Mandalorian is an amazing license. And as far as I can tell, you've never really worked on a Star Wars pinball game in the past. Did you seek this license out or was it offered to you when you came to Stern? Yeah, you know, I totally would have loved to seeked it out. But George actually came to us, George Gomez, right when we finished up Stranger Things and said, hey, we got a chance to get this license. I was like, oh, my God, you got to get it. Right. It was like incredible. You know, I think Mandalorian is the best thing to come out of the Star Wars in decades. A long time. Yeah. And I was super stoked to be able to be part of it. So Stern teased the Mandalorian on Facebook way back in December of 20. They put up a Facebook post that said, who's ready to wrap up episode eight tonight? Hashtag pinball with a picture of the Mandalorian there. And you were clearly working on the game at that point. Were you involved in that tease at all? No, not at all. I didn't even know they put that up. So that's an awesome foreshadowing, I guess. Well, it set off a lot of people talking. They were like, oh, Mandalorian pinball's coming. I can't wait for that. Yeah. So I don't know. We had to keep it pretty quiet, I think, right up until we launched. Absolutely. That's difficult to do nowadays. Well, Brian, obviously you're a huge Star Wars fan. Did you dive deeply into the lore around the Mandalorian and the universe, or did you just focus on what's presented in the show? You know, it was a little bit of both. Obviously we focused what was on the show, because that's what we're making the game out of, so that was the core of everything. But as you dig into all that stuff, it kind of pulls in all these background stories of all the different characters and how they came about, and there's tons of stuff hidden in the Mandalorian, some not so hidden, some hidden, just throwbacks back to the series. And that stuff was great. Some of that stuff I didn't know. And there's so many little things hidden in the show. You watch the making of and stuff that you see how they intertwined it with everything in whole little pieces together from the past. So it was probably a little bit of both. I learned a bunch of things that I didn't know about the background of how it all came together. And that was really fun. It's a deep universe, that's for sure. Yeah, and there's so many fans out there for this title. and you can see that in the hype for this game that has been just off the charts. So, you know, do you watch that stuff from Pins and Facebook? And, you know, what do you think about the entire LE allotment being sold out long before the game was even shown and everyone basically losing their minds over this game before it was even revealed to the world? Yeah, you know, I watch a little bit on the side, but I don't focus on it. Because I think some of the stuff, right, obviously Pinside is full of good and bad and you try to take the good and not the bad from it. but it's difficult to focus on that at times and I think as designers and as creators, right, if you get too bogged down by that stuff, you kind of lose your path too. So while I keep kind of abreast of it and people at work, we all talk about some of this stuff when it comes up, if it's something that really pops up, that's important to see, especially when people post things like hey, I'm having a problem with this or hey, this is a cool idea if we did this, right? I love hearing that stuff because I certainly love getting feedback from the players too. And sometimes we integrate that stuff if it makes sense within the world of the game that we created. And I think great ideas come from everywhere. So I love hearing that feedback. But pin side's difficult. Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's definitely good and bad. I can see how you guys would have a hard time reading through those forums, but also want to because there are useful tidbits in there. Yeah, and like I said, it's, you know, there's so many choices in pinball out there that not everybody's going to love our machine. And that's okay. You know, that's the great thing about the whole hobby is that there's choices. If you like music games, gravitate toward music. If you like a certain theme, that's great. If you don't, that's fine. There's another one coming that will probably get you really excited. Yeah, absolutely. Brian, you've gotten two major licenses now at Stern, Stranger Things and now Mandalorian. The two of your games that are most well-known are original themes. Was the popularity of these licenses intimidating to work with? No, absolutely not. I had done The Shadow before and Indiana Jones, and I programmed in the past. So I've been involved in licenses most of my career. So I've worked with a lot of licensors and pretty much know how to my way around that world. So it wasn't intimidating at all. It was more exciting that, hey, I get to work on this license. It's funny, with Dwight, I was always a little jealous of Dwight back in the day when we were doing games because he got to do Star Trek, and I always wanted to do Star Trek because I was a big fan of that too back in the day. Anything sci-fi, I think. so to actually jump on Mandalorian, that's great. And Dwight, you know, he's done Star Wars games in the past too, so he's gotten a lot of exciting licenses, so it was great to work with him on it too because he has such a knowledge of all of Star Wars too. Yeah, he seems like a huge fan. We talked to him earlier. Yeah. So let's talk assets because that's kind of linked to licensing and asset integration into these machines is really an important factor to how the world of the license gets brought into the game. So it seems like you were able to get the rights to the characters' likenesses, the music, the film clips. Was there anything that you couldn't use? Yeah, we used pretty much everything Disney gave us. And it was great because we got just about every character, certainly any major character. And that doesn't always happen. It's not easy to do nowadays. Licensing has gotten really complicated. So we were extremely excited to be able to use just about everything we could from season one and season two. Yeah, we talked with Disney constantly. We had weekly meetings with them. They were a great partner in this. And, you know, obviously their knowledge of their brand and the universe is deeper than any of ours could be. So they contributed some great ideas to it, too. Right. Let's focus on what you do have. Do you have all the music of the series or just certain songs? Yeah, we have the title track, which is the song I think everybody knows. And it's such an inspiration to create the rest of the tunes that you can create that world and that feel just with that tune. How about the video assets? Are you given all of the seasons and just say, hey, take whatever you want? Or do they give you, say, you can focus on these parts of the series? It was a little bit of a mixture. We pretty much were able to choose what we wanted to within the characters we could use. So they were pretty open, which, you know, every license is different. Usually you don't even have that much ability to pull from. So we were super excited that we had the ability to do that because it adds so much to the game to relive those scenes. I mean, you guys have so much to work with. Does the scope of that make it more challenging to decide what to put into the game? I mean, you've got hours of footage. You've got, you know, the Shadow was only like a 90-minute movie, right? And I'm sure that was challenging. So now you've got two seasons of episodes to work with. It's challenging in the other way, like you were saying. You know, Shadow, you've got to try to pull every single line and bit that you could to make a full game out of. But on this one, of course, you know, we almost had too much content. But that made it great because we could pick the best moments, right? we didn't have to pick the small little ones we could pick the ones that were most memorable to people and recreate them so it was awesome that we had so much freedom to pull what we needed to make it into a pinball and the show obviously got the pinball really well because it has all these awesome action scenes and intensity and emotion going into them that it was an easy choice to pick but there were some battles between all of us and Ian's wife so we do this scene or that scene this one I think is more important, this one's cooler or so they fit pinball better. So we jumped back and forth on those. But I think what we settled on was a perfect mix. And the series itself is so perfect for pinball because every episode is unique, and it's almost like its own pinball mode. Yeah, absolutely. And we pulled something, I think, from just about every episode, you know, the big moments. And the ones that drove toward pinball, like you said, were just a natural fit. That's awesome. Getting Carl Carl Weathers or Greef Karga in the show to do the call-outs was a great choice. How was it working with him, and how was he used in the game? Yeah, it actually turned out great. We went back and forth on different people, who could be a narrator. It's a little hard in Star Wars and the Mandalorian universe, because even like the Mandalorian, you know, he doesn't have a lot of range or emotion. He's a pretty stoic character. So he wouldn't have necessarily been the great choice either. But Greef Karga, he's a great character, right? He's full of life, and he's a voice talent too. on the side. It's not just as an actor on the show. He knew how to do it well. We intertwined him with just about everything in the game. He does toss-outs. He does directions. He does congratulatory things. He does everything. He did a great job. We were very excited to be able to get him. He actually likes pinball, too. Oh, cool. Does he own games? I don't think he owns games, but he was very excited. He came back to us and said, I want a game. so some people don't care in some ways it's just a job but he really were Jon Favreau and Pedro Pascal involved in any way because Jon especially strikes me as someone who might be into pinball not directly that we know though we do know talking back and forth with Disney that they did go to him with some questions here and there so they are well aware of the pinball being made they were supportive of it so that was really cool alright so let's move on to game design because we've got a lot to get through so on the play field We have multiple ramps, a gravity-changing rotating upper mini playfield, Mando's ship, the Razorcrest, a Grogu toy on the top left, and a ton more. So there's so many cool features that could be added from the show, and this game is full of them. How do you make the choice of what to incorporate into the game when you're sitting down designing your Whitewood? Yeah, very difficult on this one, obviously, because there's so many great moments that you can pull from. But the other way I thought about it is I wanted to pull those key things that people, when you say Mandalorian, they would think of. and what emotionally would tie people to the game. And obviously there's Mando Mandalorian, which is the mini play field, and you've got to include Grover the Child, right? You can't not. He's like, you may have to be a bigger star in some ways of the show. So those are like two key elements that I wanted to make sure were represented in a big way on the play field. That's cool. Can you talk us through how you approached the design for the Mandalorian? What were your initial ideas for the game and maybe how it may have evolved from your starting point to where you ended up. Yeah, so I mean, I think the first thing that strikes a lot of people when they see the show for the first time is Grogu, right? So he was actually the first element that I wanted to work into it. And I wanted him big and large so that when you walked up to the game, you know, you've seen him and you knew him and there was that connection. And so I wanted a really good-looking sculpt on the game. So he was probably the first element. And I wanted to tie him in with the Force in a small way because he does have the powers and they don't go too deep into it, but obviously that's where it comes from. So I wanted to make sure he had his own little section of the play field. And then with Mando, the Mandalorian, and all the battles he's in, I wanted something that represented that frantic action that he gets into and somehow gets himself out of every time. And that's where kind of the mini play field came up and giving a huge variety. We can create any scene we want up there, recreate it, and plus of it moving and rotating and changing gravity and the difficulty of it as it gets more and more intense. I think it was a great balance for the battlefield of the Mandalorian. And then we have, of course, the Razor Crest, his ship, right, which is his home, his transportation, which unfortunately gets exploded at the end, but, you know. Spoiler alert. It happens. It's still a big part of the show, and we wanted to be able to represent that in some way, too. I mean, the ramps and the wire forms are out of control in this game. You've got a nice mix of plastic and metal. But the first thing I thought when I saw the game is that the ramp by Grogu is incredibly steep. How makeable is that? Yeah, it's very makeable. You can actually backflip it from the left flipper or the right flipper. Yeah. I actually sometimes prefer to use the left flipper because it's a little more controllable to get it up there. All right. So be honest with us. When you were designing the game, were you calling him Baby Yoda or Grogu? No, we felt that right away. Well, of course, we didn't know his name either until the second season. Right. We just called him Child. You were working on it when you found that out. I'm trying to put this in a timing perspective. So you started when season one had been out. Right. So all we had when we originally started was season one, of course, and then later on season two. But we planned for it. We knew it was coming. Disney was pretty tight about it. They wouldn't tell us practically anything about it. They didn't want any leaks. Just like the first season, nobody knew about the Child at the beginning, and it was a great surprise. and it worked well. They were obviously keeping some of the secrets on the second season. That's crazy, though, because you're designing this game, and you're also trying to watch every... I'm sure you were on the edge of your seat every episode trying to figure out what you could be watching and how incorporating. And I saw Luke ends up on a plastic by the sling, you know, on the slings. How much change did you go through on the second season? Yeah, there was a good amount, but we planned for it. You know, we knew there was going to be characters, and working at Disney, they wouldn't tell us who the characters would be, but they said you know you might want to leave space for three characters up there so we kind of planned for it knowing that we'd have to do it kind of last minutes you know as soon as the episodes aired that's when we're able to find out about the characters in the story but we knew nothing practically before then and even in the last episode our disney rep didn know how it was ending they wouldn even tell him So they really kept it quiet You would think that if you knew I mean I already kind of spoiled it and it's obvious on the game that Luke Skywalker makes an appearance, but, you know, at that point, you're relatively far through the development of this game, and that's such a huge moment. Is there a mode that incorporates that appearance of Luke at the end of that last episode? There is a wizard mode that does include him. Is it the final wizard mode, the grand finale? It's not. This is the way, no. Okay. He's definitely included. That's cool. We're not the first people or the only people who seems like this game is perfect for magnets to show off the force powers. Did you toy with different ideas on how to do that, or did you always know that you wanted the playfield magnet that launched the ball down the rollovers? Yeah, you know, I definitely toyed with some things early on, different ways of doing it. but I really wanted to tie it specifically to Grogu, right, because that's the main force within the whole series. And something special that he does, and, you know, so tying it in with him, controlling the ball, and giving you a mystery award under his control, we thought was a really cool way of just tying it together with him. Any thought on adding a Johnny Mnemonic-style Grogu hand that lifts a dollar? That picks it up and moves it. Did you toy with that? Was that ever a thought? No, you know, we did toy with maybe making them animated at some point. But yeah, it's different in a pinball where that thing's got to live on location and last forever. It's not like the $60 Hasbro toy which is just in your house and you can work for a couple months and be fine. It's something that pinball has to be bulletproof. It's out on rough places and locations and you've got to make sure it works. So let's talk about another really cool feature of the game which is the rotating upper playfield. You've always brought kind of exciting and unique features to your games and you've done an upper play field before in the shadow that's really unlike any other upper play field that we've used, and you did it again on this game. How did you dream up the concept of a moving upper play field that kind of changed degree? Yeah, from the dark recesses of my mind, I think. I don't really know. I like the ability to affect the ball in different ways and had never seen something that used gravity to just change the play of the field, and I thought this would be a great way to do it. It's a great pacing thing, right? You can start it a little bit easier, and it gets harder and harder as it rotates. It's just a great match with pinball action. And as you get better, too, you can keep it going longer, so you actually learn as you're playing how to keep it alive, so it gets better and better as you play more and more. So I'm really happy the way it turned out, and I wanted it to be a quick action experience because I don't like mini-plays where you get stuck up there and you can't get down, or they slow down the gameplay or something. So this really was meant to be an action battle, just like you see in the show. You know, quick, get up there. Sometimes you can stay alive for a long time. Sometimes you only get a few hits and it's down. But the better you get, the longer you do stay. So it's a great balance. Yeah, I mean, upper plate fields are very polarizing. Some people love them, some people don't. And I think it's for exactly what you mentioned, that sometimes you get stuck up there too long, and it just takes you out of the flow of the game. But it sounds like you've taken that into account. Right. Yeah, I definitely thought of that. And then just the feel of the art. We've never played pinball unless you think back to Banzai Run, which was very vertical, of a changing, rotating gravity feel. It's definitely something different that you've never seen. I always try to do something that you've never seen before in a pinball. To me, that was always the fun as a kid as you're walking down the road with pinballs and you see something cool and it's like, oh, I've got to try that. I want to get up there and see what that does. When you blow up the Castle of Medieval Madness or the UFO, that is such a moment that it brings people to watch. You know, and I think a play field that is almost a game within a game, when it moves like that, I think that could do something similar. So that's cool. Yeah, and it's definitely a challenge for all skill levels. I think even as an average player, you can get up and you can get through a level or two. And as you learn more and more, or if you're a better player to start with, you may be able to jump in and, you know, get even farther right away. But it's definitely a learned experience. And that always feels good, right? You get up there, you start learning it, you start doing better and better. I like games that give you that challenge and let you grow. Yeah, with the rotating play field and all the other toys that you've got in Mandalorian and the projector that you've put into Stranger Things, you seem to be doing well overcoming the restrictions of the dreaded bomb. You've managed to stay under when designing the game. How tough has that been for you to do? Yeah, it's definitely a challenge. I mean, it was back in the day, too, on the other games, but it's always a challenge, right? You have so much bill of materials that you need to match. and it's how you mix up the parts and how you use it. We did a lot of clever things on this game to get as much as we could into it. So I'm really happy that we're able to get what we were able to. But it's always a challenge. But to me, part of that's kind of the fun, too, is because you do have to live within this box and create the coolest thing you can. So it does challenge you, and I think it does force you to be more creative than if you had endless choice and endless pride. Yeah, and in that regard, I remember hearing stories from George Gomez would tell us about these Toys R Us runs where they would go out and find all these little trinkets and things like that. Is the ship and the Grogu, are those sculpts original or were they taken from any of the Asbro toys or how did that work out? They're all original and Disney wants us to create original toys for the game too so we created their unique to the game. There's nothing else out there exactly like them and they helped in that process too to make sure that they were authentic and they looked right. The Razor Crest looks really really amazing for the size of the sculpt and the light of engines and stuff. So we're really happy with the way both of them turned out. Yeah, Hot Wheels quality. It's cool. I mean, you've said, speaking of Bill materials in the past, I mean, some of the most interesting interviews I've read that you have been involved in, you've talked about Attack from Mars and how the UFO was supposed to move to travel around the play field and that the aliens were initially supposed to collapse when they were hit. And a lot of this stuff was removed for reliability issues, but also bill of materials limitations. So how would you say that bill of materials restrictions have changed? Do you feel like you're tighter now than you were back then, or do you feel like it's all kind of the same? You know, it's similar in a lot of ways, but now we have different models to hit, too. So we have to balance the bill of material on not just one, but on multiples and make sure that we're keeping fun in all of them. And that part, I guess, is a little bit more of a challenge. How do you do that? I mean, the pro, premium, and LE are something you never had to deal with at Bally Williams, right? So how do you decide what to edit? Has that been really difficult for you? Because, you know, it's paring down versus just putting it all into one machine like you used to do. Right, and I think every designer treats it differently. But, you know, I like to start with the premium and all the pieces that go into it. But I'm always thinking along the way is, okay, well, how can I make sure that the pro is really cool too? So I have to think of them both at the same time or it just doesn't work for me because I want to make sure that both of them are just as fun. Some people like more toys, some like less, and it's really a choice. Usually when you start working down from the LE premium to the pro, the toys get the boot, but I have a feeling there's probably a mandate somewhere that says, do not take that Grogu out of that game for the pro. It sells the game. The ship's in the pro as well, isn't it? Yes, yes. I mean, those are iconic moments that I think everybody needs to experience. and when you walk up to it and you see it, it's like, oh yeah, that's Mandalorian. No. No, it's a big man. They're on the right-hand corner, Grogu and Razor Crest. Okay, so you're a gamer. You've mentioned that earlier. You like video games. You've worked on Mortal Kombat. You've done things like that. I did not work on MK. There's something on the internet that says I did. No shit. I mean, I know Ed Boon really well. He's a good friend, but I did not work on MK. That's so funny because that was all over some prior interviews that I read, or at least some descriptions of your work. It's in the scriptures. I think my trading card even says it. Somebody pulled it from some random website. I was also born in the 1800s. I don't know. It seems like everyone has learned. Mark Witterelli, a few other people who were at Williams have worked on Mortal Kombat. So I had a question later on actually saying, you know, since all of you guys are there, would you ever want to do a Mortal Kombat pinball machine? But I'm going to throw that out because it's... You can ask that question. That one's okay. Just don't say I worked on it. All right, so Mandalorian Digital Pinball Machine came out recently as well. Did you have any involvement in that, and did the design of that table have any influence on what you did for the game? No, I had zero knowledge that it was happening. I know the guys at Zen, but they weren't talking about anything either, and I first found out about a month ago or so that it was coming. I have VR and Oculus, too, and I love playing the VR stuff, too. It's one of the best ways to play virtual pinball, which is a far cry from real pinball, of course, but it's still an interesting experience, especially when you do things like Zen does where they mix it up with some digital elements. You can do a lot of fantasy things in video pinball that you can't really do in the real-life pinball. There are pluses and minuses. Have you played this one? I think Rogu is in his little floating contraption next to the pinball machine floating around as you play. There's some similar elements. There's an upper playfield-type thing, and there's a razor crest, and, you know, obviously some of the similar design features, which is why I asked. Yeah, I haven't played it yet, but I've seen some pictures and some short videos. It's, like, loaded up on my Oculus, but I'm crazy right now just trying to get this game done and out, so I haven't had time to play it, but hopefully soon. But I did see some pictures, and I've seen a mini-play from it. I think, oh, my God, how could we both have thought of a mini-play from it, right? But that's pretty cool. Those guys are great at what they do, too. So, Brian, a lot of people know that you're a legendary game designer, but maybe they don't know that you're heavily involved in programming games as well. Bride of Pinbot, Indiana Jones, Funhaus, and others. How heavily involved were you in the co-design for this game with Robert Blakeman? Yeah, definitely. Our program games were probably about eight years or so before I started designing them. So it was a lot of fun. I really liked programming them too. And on this game, you know, Dwight and I talked early on about the architecture of the rules and how we want it. And we talked constantly about the scenes and how to put them together. and we'd get the whole group together to talk about the rule sets and exactly what you're doing in them. So I was involved, but that's definitely Dwight's show too to run, right? And I have trust in Dwight. He's great at what he does to put it together. And then we implement things and we'll test them out and then we'll make tweaks and stuff. We go back and forth. So I'm involved, but not at the programming level. That's Dwight's game. Now, was it difficult for you to get back in the game as far as that's concerned considering your time at Valley Williams and how much that aspect of the game has changed over the years? Yeah, it is interesting. You know, like Shadow, I designed and programmed, and that was like a nightmare. It was an immense amount of work, but it was fun in the same vein. So it is always in the back of my mind, right? I think that way. I think like the programmers and the rule sets and that. So I think it makes it easier for me and Dwight to work together back and forth and talking about the rules. You know, the other thing that was really interesting with Dwight is I did grab the code and was looking through it just to see how things changed over the years. And Dwight's style is very much C++, which back in the day, all my stuff was assembly code, machine code. So it was a little bit different world, but I had programmed in C and stuff before, and he was walking me through it. And it's a great base that he has to make the whole game with using object-oriented programming and stuff, and it makes things so much easier. So I can see where everything is and works, and it's funny, looking at the code, I can even see, oh wait yeah that's how we did it back then you know i can find oh well there's the light tables oh well there's how you do a show right so it was it was kind of cool nostalgic but i wish i had more time to like help contribute for dwight but it's just you're pulled in so many directions as design that it's hard to like be able to focus on it but maybe in the future do you feel like code has changed for the i mean obviously every every programming language as you get further you know into the recent times has gotten more user-friendly so do you see that there are areas now that you're like, wow, I really wish that I had that when I was doing my games and programming my games? Or is it similar enough that it's not a huge leap? You know, from a high level, from an architectural standpoint, it's similar. But from an organization of how it's put together in C++, object-oriented classes and all sorts of stuff, it's way better, I think, because you're not writing things 50 times, you're not debugging things 50 times, right? You're writing one class to control something, and you can modify it in a lot of different ways. So I think that is a big improvement from what we did. But I did love working in assembly code. After you do a couple of games, you get this big library of stuff, and you get so used to the knowledge of all about how you can do things, that you can put together things just as fast, I think. Cool. Yeah, I took a Fortran course in college. Oh, that's all you need to know. You should be programming pinballs. Right. I made a tic-tac-toe game in Fortran. It took me like a month. So I have no idea how people program pinball machines. Yeah, I definitely appreciate Dwight after looking through the code. And, you know, it's a monster, right? Games are big. Games are bigger now than they were back then, too. With all the different modes and even just different play modes, they're just bigger games. So many games going to the home, more depth. So I think he needed that boost and that ease of programming in order to even get that much content in the time that we have. And speaking of Dwight, now would be a great time to bring Dwight in to discuss some of the code of the game. Dwight? Hey, guys. How are you, sir? As handsome as you are, you don't need to add your camera on. I'm looking on your walls for your next poster. Yeah, look for posters. Oh, damn it. Oh, no. There it is. There's a clue right there. I think the next game is called Insolation. You can see Mandalorian running in the corner back there. There's a Star Wars there. What is going on, Dwight? Yeah, no, I like seeing you guys. I'm turning my camera back on. It is like we're here. Here we go. Hi, Dwight. Hey, Chris. How's it going? All right. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me. So good to have you, man. And we want to really pick your brain about the game and ask you a few things about the code specifically, because I know that's kind of your realm of expertise. So this is the second Stern Star Wars game that you've coded. Are you a huge fan of the franchise? Of Star Wars? Yeah. I'm a founding member of the Church of Star Wars. So, like, I was there in 1977. I watched Star Wars in the theater nine times before I left the theater. Well, like the last couple, like the last two times, well, one was in a drive-thru, and two of the last three were in a second-run theater. But it, like, ran forever. So, like, I kept saying, hey, you know, mom, dad, aunt, uncle, you know, somebody, take me to go see Star Wars. And I saw it a whole bunch of times. Has that love persisted? Have you seen every, obviously you've seen every movie, right? But did you go see it multiple times? No, yeah, yeah. Every time, like when the new trilogy came out, I would go get tickets in advance the moment they came with them, they went on sale, and I would buy. So I would buy. So like it's going to open on Friday, but Thursday night you can go. And they kept creeping back the hour, right? So like at Thursday at 6 p.m. in the evening, you can buy tickets, right? So I would go and I would get Thursday tickets, and then I would get Friday tickets, and then I'd get Saturday tickets, and then Sunday tickets. And, like, Stern would take everybody out to go see the movie. So, like, I would often see the movie three times within a 24-hour period. Oh, my God. Well, I understand why you're involved with this game, because The Mandalorian is in your wheelhouse. No, I love Mandalorian. Like, I love it for the same reason everybody else does. Like, going into it, I was, so when I first heard about it, before I even knew I was doing the show, I was wanting, like, a dark, seedy underbelly of the Star Wars universe. and then when I saw the first episode I'm like oh well that's not what they're going for they're aiming for more mainstream Disney you know and then so I was a smidgen disappointed but then you see all that cool action with him in the bar and then the Ravnet coming up out of the ice and all of the great humor I was sold and then every single episode was great and then we couldn't wait for the second season and yeah totally agree So Dwight you and Brian both worked at Williams in the 1990s but even though you worked on Revenge from Mars, the sequel to one of his games. I don't think you've ever worked together on a game. Is that true? Yeah, that's completely true. And I'd forgotten about Revenge from Mars. So I count Revenge from Mars as like a game that I had creative input on. And it's one of my major projects that I've done in, you know, in like the hundred years I've been working in pinball. But Revenge from Mars was, you know, was me and Lyman and Keith P. Johnson. And the three of us each sort of split that game up software-wise. And to me, the dad of the project was George Gomez. George Gomez was the designer of the game. It's the sequel to the hit game from Lyman and Brian, right? So Lyman and Brian made Attack from Mars, and then Brian was mostly a consultant, like an executive producer of Revenge from Mars, and didn't have day-to-day kind of creativity, at least at my level. I think he met with George as often as they needed to, and they went over what they wanted to, but then when things filtered down to me. I didn't have much interaction with Brian at all. I completely forgot that Brian, that he's attached to that game. Of course he is, because he did Attack from Mars. So how was it finally getting to do a game together? It's great. I love working with Brian. So every designer, every person you work with on every team brings strengths and weaknesses to a project, and Brian brings a lot of strengths to the project. We worked for a smidgen on Pool Sharks. So Pool Sharks was Brian's I think his first game. Yeah, it was. how to get in this business was on pool starts with Brian. Brian has a lot of programming experience himself. How closely did you guys work together on this game, on the rules? He didn't do any programming on the game. Okay. But we collaborated quite a bit. Like, we collaborated on every part of the game. So, I mean, in my mind, you know, I draw the line at anything that's not tangible is sort of my domain. Right. And if it's, you know, and if you can touch it, it would be Brian's domain. And he had every input on what we did. We, like, threw things against a whiteboard and we drew, you know, and we, you know, met, you know, over the drawings and we laid out the, you know, the framework of the game together. And the same with the toys and the same with, you know, the same with, you know, the layout of the game. I had input on it, but, you know, it was ultimately his design. So when you're given a license as amazing as The Mandalorian, how do you approach the rules and objectives? I mean, do you go linear and story-based? Do you go mode-based or something completely different? And also, how do you do it in a way that does justice to the show that so many people love? I mean, that's a big undertaking for you. So that's a great question. And there's lots of little questions in there. And basically, you're wanting the process of how we take on any game, you know, even if it's, you know, especially one as magnanimous as, you know, as Star Wars, right? Right. Because you're always going to piss some people off. I always started at, like, well, who is the player? And then I go from there. And Mandalorian was kind of easy. Like, of course, the player is the Mandalorian, right? So you push start, and the player is the Mandalorian, and he's going to then try and do things that, you know, like, you know, I mean, the player is going to try and do things that Mando had to do in the show. And then I'm like, well, what did, you know, like, in a nutshell, what does Mando do in the show? Well, he's always broke. His ship is always needing repairs. He's needing equipment. He's, you know, he's trying to scrounge together some Beskar, you know, and he's constantly going on these missions. and the game kind of wrote itself at that point. That's a great point. Yeah, so we made a game where you're going on missions and those are modes, and slightly more interesting and bigger modes are multiballs, and then even bigger, more interesting modes, like some of the really watershed moments in the show became wizard modes, or just an episode like the prison episode where they're on the prison ship, we turned that into a wizard mode because that was sort of self-contained But it was just so big. Like, often we would take an episode and we would split it into, like, maybe two modes. Or the interesting part of the episode only was, like, 15 minutes of footage. And we would go, well, that's a mission. That's just a mode, right? But, like, the prisoner episode where they got to the ship and then they worked their way through. And then the guys all turned on Mando. Do you guys remember the prison episode? Absolutely. So that became a wizard mode. So we were constantly going through all the episodes and figuring out, well, what goes where? What's going to become a mission? What's, you know, a mode? What's going to become a multiball? What's going to become a wizard mode? And then we have this new thing in the game called Encounters, where we have a whole set of rules. Like, you have to complete three encounters to get to the final, final wizard mode. And all the encounters are done on the mini playfield. And so we had to work out, well, what's fun about the mini playfield? And what parts of the episodes and the story would fit there? This is a long answer. Is this the right answer? It's good. It's leading into things we're going to ask you about later. So you're kind of answering multiple questions. But speaking of the mini play field and what you're playing there, we did want to ask you about that. So this is kind of a natural transition. Right. So then the other thing that I thought of is, well, I really like giving the player choices. And in the beginning, we had three different areas where we were going to give you choices. I wanted to bring back a game mechanic that I did in Game of Thrones because it just seemed to fit. It was really natural. Like, you gather Beskar, and then you turn it into pinball things, you know, or armor and equipment and weapons, because the Mandalorian is always with weapons. So, like, you push start, and you have a flamethrower, and then you gather Beskar, and then you can go to the foundry and trade the Beskar for a rifle or for whistling birds and stuff like that. So, you know, we just made all this into the game, and it just, you know, it kind of wrote itself, like I said. So let's talk about modes, because it seems like there are a lot of mini-modes, all under different names, like Missions, Encounters, Hunter Modes, and Random Ambushes. So let's tackle each one briefly, if you're up to that. Yeah. On Missions, there are five missions, and they started at the scoop after hitting the left and right ramps. What can you tell us about the kind of objectives you're going to be going for here? You know, there's three different objectives in the game. There's missions, multi-balls, and encounters. And the first third, you know, the basic third is modes, which we call missions. And they were smaller things in the game. So, like, one of our missions is the very first episode is Mando arrives at the sort of western town. And our cut screen at the beginning of the episode is him kind of crawling on the ground on the hill with a spyglass, looking down at the town, trying to figure out what's going on. And that's where we see IG-11 for the first time. So we took each of the little pieces of story that would fit nicely in a mode and turned it into a mode. When you're in these modes, are they quick, you know, shoot this and that modes, or are they more fleshed out? No, so, right, great question, because we have modes like missions, and then we have more smaller things like ambush, and, well, ambush turned out to be a wizard mode, but anyway, we'll get to that in a minute. So there are different sizes. Our regular mode is like 30 or 40 seconds on the clock, and you have to complete a series of goals, you know, that sort of fit with the story that we're doing. So, like, you have to kill all the guys on the roof, and then you have to get the big gun, right? And then you have to shoot some more guys and then get into the door. And then, you know, at the end of the mode, we see the cut screen of the door falls down and IG-11 and Mandor there, you know, as silhouettes. Cool. And then at the very end, it's the child, Grogu, with Mando, kind of a silhouette of the two of them together. Powerful ending to the first episode, right? Yeah, so that's sort of the difference between a regular mission and a mini-mission is it has more story. Right. All right, well, let's talk about encounters because you touched on that briefly, but it's an interesting thing, and I really want to know about the upper play field because it seems like it plays a relatively big role in this game. So you hit the left ramp, it sounds like, twice to activate the upper playfield. The first time around. The first time. Okay, drops the ball into the upper playfield. On the pro, you've got one flipper. On the premium and the LE, you've got two, and it kind of rotates. What are you doing up there? I know there's lots of targets. Are you trying to hit all of the targets, and are you trying to hit them all in different ways in different modes? That's a great question. We did lots of experimenting with what can we do on that playfield because we wanted to maximize the differences between it and sort of a static play field that, you know, like we've seen a dozen times on different games. What's really cool about it is it can be flatter than the play field you're playing on, right? So it can be more flat like the ball is just you know kind of takes its time coming back to the flipper And then it can be all the way 65 degrees you know like Banzai Run almost Right And everything in between. So what's really fun about it, what we decided to do, and I'm not going to give it all away, but when you first play your first encounters, you know, so story-wise, it's like we took the, like he's trying to get the Jawas and he's trying to, you know, get back on top of the Jawa ship. because there's short little scenes with him climbing. He's doing like the Batman climb up the sand crawler, right? So because when you're on the mini play field, everything's happening really fast. The ball goes up, hits a target, comes back, and half a second has gone by. So everything that's happening needs to be kind of frenetic. And so we pick scenes and story from the game, from the show, that made sense in that thing. But you're wanting to know more about the fun of this little mini play field. and the fun of the mini play field is we give you this little sort of short little kind of goal like in the beginning it's just you have to hit two targets right so you hit two targets and then that takes you to a bonus level and then the next time around so each encounter is three levels so like you're fighting the Jawas across the entire encounter but it's broken up into three parts right and then so for the first one you have to hit two targets and then you get a bonus level then four targets and then a bonus level and then six targets and then a bonus level. And the bonus level... Sorry to interrupt. Does that all happen at once? Are you playing or do you have to restart the encounter to get to phase two? No, it all just keeps going on. It's all, like, ongoing. So you shoot the left ramp and that lights your encounters. And then you shoot the left ramp again. And then from then on, if you're in an encounter, the ball will divert to the mini play field. Okay. Right? And then until you complete the encounter. And completing the encounter is completing three levels. and each level is some little objective that you have to get through to get to the bonus level. And the bonus level is where the points are. And what's fun about the bonus level is, so like I start you off slightly tilted, like slightly more tilted than the play field, than your normal play field is, but still pretty easy. And you hit two targets and then the bonus level then instantly goes flat and then is constantly moving. So like you're constantly moving and trying to hit these two purple lights because the targets on the mini-play field are RGB. So they're like yellow, like static flashing two lights, and then you complete them, and then it's two purple lights moving back and forth. And you have like 10 seconds to hit the two purple lights as many times as you can, and then I'm going to kill your flippers. And like Carl Carl Weathers, you know, at the end, Carl Carl Weathers goes five, four, three, but most of the time, you're off before then. But, you know, like the bonus levels are where the points are and the fun because, like, the whole thing is moving. So it goes really, really, really flat, and it's easy to hit the purple targets, and then it starts getting steeper, steeper, steeper, steeper, and then it's more difficult, and then it goes back shallow again. And that's where the fun of the game really is. It's trying to complete very simple objectives while the play field is moving on you. Do you make those objectives easier in the pro? Because it seems like you're limited a little bit more with a static environment. So the pro is not as fun, but it's still pretty fun. So, you know, so on the Pro, we're also going to, you know, we're going to do slightly different tricks with the lights. But, you know, and I'm still going to kill your flipper if you keep the ball alive too much. But you can, so it's much more tricky on the Pro because I can't make it really, really steep on you. So we're experimenting with, like, I'm going to change the flipper power, you know, to simulate the steepness. Huh. So it might be a very different experience on the Pro then. It is a very different experience than the pro. I'm currently working on it right now, but I think we've really got something. What's really fun about it is there's a small amount of objective, and then you get to this bonus level, and then you're like, oh, in the bonus level I'm going to try and do as much as I can, and the timer times down on you. So you still have all that urgency and Carl Carl Weathers counting and stuff. So I think the pro is still pretty fun. Does Carl Carl Weathers ever appear in a Star Spangled Top hat on this game? Five times. Excellent. Okay. All right, moving on to the hunter modes. There are three stand-up targets on the left of the play field. Yep. Completing these lights a hunter mode at the return lane. We don't see what the hunter mode entails or how many there are. Can you tell us more on that? So there's three main goals of the game. There's missions and counters and multiballs. But then there's all these side things to do. There's lots of breaths to the game. So you can walk up, push start, and aim and head for the end of the game by playing those three areas and getting through the wizard modes and getting to the end of the game. or working your way toward it. That can be a goal of yours. But along the way, you're not going to earn as much Beskar. You're only going to make progress in points. The main ways to get Beskar are from hunter modes or scope. So you can take on these little hunter missions to try to get lots of Beskar to then turn the Beskar into stuff in the foundry like equipment or extra balls or playful multipliers and stuff like that. So that's the main goal of the hunter missions. You complete the three bank, and then one of your two return lanes light, and you can toggle it back and forth with the flippers. And then the next time the ball goes down a blinking return lane, the opposite orbit will start flashing, and it has a hunter light in it as well. So the opposite orbit will start flashing. You shoot the orbit, and then that, of course, brings you back around close to that same flipper. Now your objective to complete the hunter mission is to shoot the opposite orbit, but the ramp will light so that, you know, to build your best car. So you can shoot the ramp over and over again if you want to, but it'll also feed the flipper you need to to complete the mode. I don't know if I'm explaining that well. Yeah, sure. Is it risk-reward in the sense that if you drain out at that point, you lose your best car? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you have to complete it. So it's basically, I mean, it's really, I'm explaining it way too complicated. It's basically just the mode starts from going down a return lane, and then you have to complete two orbits to complete it. Okay. Right? And there's three different themes for it. Like, the first one is you're getting the Mithral guy from the blue face guy from the bar. You know, so like the start scene, the start scene is those guys are trying to pick a fight with him, and then, you know, then he's fighting with them is the second scene, and then the completion scene is, you know, you see the puck with the rotating head on it, and the Mithril guy is talking to you, and he's like, I can bring you in cold or I can bring you in warm. Do you see Moult at the end? He hasn't Moulted or evacuated since the Solfax, right? Yeah, we don't have that line in that scene. That, of course, is going to come in a different part of the game. Right, so that's an example of one of the 300 missions Like getting the dragon, that's another one So it's times in the show when he was actually just doing things for money Right, and that's, you know So then in the game, you're doing those for Beskar We decided not to have multiple types of money So we were going to have like Imperial Credits and Beskar And at some point you could trade Imperial Credits for Beskar And that all became really complicated So we thought we'd just keep it simple And like everything you do gives you Beskar And then you can trade Beskar for stuff We'll be right back guess what I got a fever and the only prescription is the super awesome pinball show oh yeah super this show is sponsored by coin taker distributor of brand new full size authentic stern pinball Chicago Gaming, Raw Thrills Arcade Games, and much more. Also, a full line of dramatic pinball mods, LED flipper kits, speaker lights, custom laser LED toppers, playfield protectors, Valley Williams parts, pinball apparel, and much more. Get the latest releases and glam out your game room with Cointaker. Everything at your fingertips at Cointaker.com. Get your pinball. Hi, this is Gary Stern, and you're listening to the Super Awesome Pinball Show. I was busy making pinball history while these two idiots We're still sitting in high chairs with our SpaghettiOs all over their faces. Now, back to our program. Well, it's about frickin' time. I am the God of Hellfire, and I bring you... The Super Awesome Pinball Show. It's a cool show. All right, we're going to rapid fire through a couple more things. So let's talk about ambush. So it looks like these can happen any time, similar to the Upside Down in Stranger Things, and you have to take a few shots to complete them. How often are you going to be ambushed, and does that occur during modes, during a multiball? Will that kind of pull you from the experience at all? No, it will not happen during modes and multiballs. I don't know what, so I guess I'm not that familiar with Upside Down. It's more like Escape from Boba Fett in Star Wars. Okay. You know, so it's not completely random. It's not completely out of left field. I mean, it's not at all. You're going to, you know, so you're going to advance toward it by shooting this, you know, you shoot this little U-turn on the right-hand side, and then on the premium and the LE, a scoop will come down, and then you shoot the scoop, and you complete that little sequence of two shots, and that will advance you one space towards, you know, being ambushed. The reason that I say that it's going to come out of nowhere is because you can advance it, you know, So you need like five of those. You need five of those little two-shot sequences to get you to light ambush. But the reason I say it's going to come out of nowhere is because you can advance it during a mission, during a multiball, during whatever you're doing. And then you might have it lit, but it won't start until you're not doing anything else. That makes sense. So then when you're not doing anything else, the right ramp is lit for ambush, and if you shoot the right ramp, you're then ambushed. And now the game is sort of a little mini wizard mode, And I say that because it takes over the whole play field, and you can't do anything else while you're doing ambush. Okay. And then ambush has a very simple set of rules. There's a hurry up going down on the scoop, and if you shoot the scoop, then you lock in that hurry up value, and you can collect it on the ramp. But instead of collecting it on the ramp, you can shoot any of the other shots, which will then take you back to the hurry up, and the hurry up has lots of other shots lit, which then can build the value. So it can be two little simple shots, and then you're out of ambush, and you're moving on with the game. or it can be just, you know, as many shots as you want. You can just keep it going forever if you wanted to. Keep building the value, building the value until some maximum, and then decide to collect it on the right ramp, all the while risking draining the ball and not getting anything. All right, cool. All right, on to everyone's favorite feature, multiball. It looks like there are three of them, and they're all started the same way by shooting the swing pendulum under the razor crest and then shooting the center ramp. It can't be that easy, though, can it? Because six shots total to start all three multi-balls. It's not that easy. It's like four shots for the first one, and then there's more shots for each one after that. So it's at least 20 shots. And what are the first four shots you have to do? Because the way it's described in the rules that we've read is that you hit the pendulum, then you hit the center ramp, and you're done. No, no, no. So the ball goes through the pendulum and goes onto the center ramp. So shooting the pendulum and shooting the center ramp is the same thing. I see. So you have to shoot that shot four times to light the multiball, or maybe it's three. The first one's three. So it's three times, and then the fourth one, the ball will stop on the center ramp and start, you know, like Ice Spider multiball or Pirate Attack multiball or, God, there's so many modes in this game. I'm sorry, Jetpack, correct. Jetpack, yeah. Can you tell us about the multiball objectives? So each one's different. There's three multiballs, and they're all different. They're all like, so like Jetpack is all about, it's the end of the eighth episode of the first season when Mandalorian first gets his jetpack, Moff Gideon is attacking them with a TIE fighter. So he flies up and attacks, like a guy in a jetpack attacks a TIE fighter. And so the multiball is about grapple-hooking the TIE fighter, climbing on board the TIE fighter, putting bombs on the TIE fighter, which includes the mini playfield. So you're doing that as much as you can. And then whenever you get down to one ball, super jackpot lights, and the culmination of the things you did during the multiball builds how much your super jackpot is worth. That's very cool. So, there's a fair number of rollovers in this game. There's five of them to spell child. What's cool about this pin, though, is that completing them doesn't just give you a bonus X. It gives you a random award, at least. So the D in child doesn't have a rollover. Okay. Alright, so there's four. Quick editor's note. At this point, Dwight and I are showing off our Grogu action figures on the webcam, and Christian has none. Wah, wah. Who's got a Grogu but me? This is the one from the game. Oh, nice. That's cool. So it's not just a standard bonus sex. You have random awards, including Outland Ball Save called Heal, but it didn't really list off any of the other options that you might get from rolling over those. Right, so there's a feature called Child, And Child is lit by shooting the orbits. And so you light Child, and then on the premium in the LE, shooting the orbit again will then – it's a mystery feature. So the ball is diverted to the magnet and then held by the magnet. And then you see a cut screen of the Child in the cockpit playing with the ball. And then the ball on the magnet starts doing wild things, you know, in that little area, you know, using the force. So the child uses the force, moves the ball around, and then at some point he lets it go, and it will randomly then go out one of the five exits. And on the screen, each exit had a different value to it. So C was bonus modifiers, and maybe H was force heal, and so on. So each of the letters has a different award that you can get, and then depending on where it exits, that's the award you get. So it's sort of a physical, mechanical mystery award. You can also get scope awards by shooting the blue arrow on the play field and then following that up with a shot to the flashing blue arrow when the ball returns to the left return lane. It says that there are three possible awards for doing that. What are they, and are they random? Wow, that's a good question. So... Another quick editor's note. If you're wondering why people are chuckling right now, stick around to the very, very end of the show, and you'll find out why. Just remember what you just heard. earlier I was talking about how there's breath in the game and scope is another one of those little features scope is basically just like a one shot little mini mode and there's three different themes to it there's you know different times in the show when somebody was looking through a scope and then took a shot and blew something up right so it's the same exact thing that the player is doing once scope is lit the return lane is blinking there's two lights on the left return lane one for scope and one for hunter missions so when the blue scope light is blinking and the ball goes down the left return lane you have like one shot to shoot one of three different objectives you know three different little arrow blue arrows that are that are one is on the right ramp one is on the target between the right ramp and the right scoop and one is on the right scoop so there's three arrows all kind of in a row and they're all blinking at you in the beginning and when you shoot one of the three you get one of you know you get the award associated with it it's three different awards so scope is another way to get best car one gives you lots of best cars and lights foundry for you so then you can just go pick anything you want in the foundry. One just gives you two items, two pieces of equipment, and one gives you lots of points. The right shot gives you lots of points. Cool. And what's kind of cool about it is, if you, you know, like you shot the right ramp and you collect points, now that you're next time doing it, you can't just keep milking that for points. That shot goes out and you have to do the other two before you can then, on your fourth try, get points again if you want to. I was just thinking that might be a good tournament strategy, but you just blew it out of the water. That's my top. That's a great answer. Yeah. Thanks. So, Dwight, it wouldn't be a Dwight Sullivan rule set without some multiplier action. But it looks like there's a ceiling to that on this game with a max of 5x play field. So did you try to strike a balance between adding them but not going as multiplier crazy as, like, Stern's Star Wars in 2017? Star Wars? Right. That was my thing on that Star Wars. Well, it was one of several things. But I try to do bonus multiplier or play field multipliers differently on every game. Like on Turtles it was different, on Monsters it was different, and on Star Wars it was different. And on this game, the new cool idea I have for play code multipliers is to have three different flavors of them. One, you know, and like Scope gives you one, Hunters give you one, and completing the Boba Fett two bank, you know, gives you one. So each one gives you plus one X multiplier. So, you know, it's really super simple to, you walk up, you push start. if you complete that two bank, you know, the two bank, you're up, you know, now all your scores are 2x, but it's hiding out on you, so you have to keep hitting that two bank to reset the timers. Interesting. So you can complete the two bank, you can then do scope, you know, and no matter which one of the three you completed, you now have another plus 1x, so now you have, you know, your 3x play field, and if you then do a hunter mission while those other two haven't timed out, You now have all three of them flashing, and all three of them flashing gives you plus 5x. So they're all timed, though, and they're all on their own individual timers. They don't reset if you... No, they're on their own individual timers, but hitting the two bank will reset the timers. All right. There are three mini wizard modes, precious cargo, you have what I want, and I like the odds. Can you tell us about the unique gameplay experiences that you might get in these modes? Yeah, another great question. Holy crap. So, first of all... Again, when it comes to, hey, that's a great question, stick around to the very, very end of the show and find out why. First of all, I don't call them mini wizard modes. I think they're full-blown wizard modes. What I call a mini wizard mode is like ambush. They're wizard modes because you have to have a qualifier to get to them. That's what I think makes a wizard mode. And another thing that makes a wizard mode, a wizard mode is take over the whole game, and you're playing that thing. It doesn't usually stack with anything else. You know, you're in the wizard mode, and there's some number of gauntlets that you have to complete to get through it or to get to the cool points or to get to the victory laps or the super jackpots or whatever it is. So just there's that little, I don't call them any wizard modes. You have what I want is the wizard mode that I've written. So I have a team of people working with me. I have Corey Stoop, Dean Grover, and Mike Kizzevitz all helping me write the code on this game. and I've split up the three wizard modes, you know, amongst the three of us, or, well, three of us. So I'm working on You Have What I Want, so of course it's the best. Of course. You Have What I Want, because I wrote all the encounters, and you have to complete the three encounters, the three levels of all three encounters to get to the You Have What I Want. And You Have What I Want involves the mini play field again. So what's really, really, really cool, and I'm going to give you guys a scoop, and Mike Vinikour came up with this, so I have to give credit to Mike Vinikour. So wizard modes today in modern pinball often have phases. Like they have like a chunk of things that, you know, a set of goals you have to complete, and then you move on to the next phase, and then a new set of goals. And they're like a series of modes almost. Some of them are multiball, some of them are one-ball play. You can break lots of rules. Like you can turn off the flippers and drain all the balls but one, stuff like that. And we do that in a lot of our wizard modes. And You Have What I Want is like that. So You Have What I Want is, of course, you know, if you've seen the seasons, it's, you know, Mandalorian coming back after the child once Moff Gideon has taken it from him. It's like, you have what I want, you have no idea how valuable he is to me, and I'm coming to get him. And that's what this Wizard Mode is about. But the really cool thing that Mike Vinikour, I'll get back to that, is, so the first phase, I wanted it to be single ball play. It's a really, really simple part of the phase. It's just, and thematically, it's just them in the shuttle trying to get on board the light cruiser, if you remember the episode. And so it's just one ball play, and, you know, you just have to complete, like, four shots, and the fourth shot is shooting the ball up the left ramp and feeding, you know, feeding the mini play field, but I'll stop it. I'll stop at the ball, you know, in the diverter, in the phase, start the next phase, and then begin the next phase on the mini play field. That was the idea. That's cool. But along when we were developing the game, one of the ideas that we had was we want each of the three areas to be, the wizard mode begins the same way that you start at the other things. So like missions, to start a mission, you shoot both ramps and then the left scoop. So to start the mission wizard mode, you shoot both ramps. You complete the five missions, shoot both ramps, and then shoot the scoop. To start the encounters, you shoot the left ramp, and then eventually I grab a hold of the ball, and I say, well, now you're going to play an encounter. Well, so to start the wizard mode on the encounters, you have what I want. It's the same way. I want you to shoot the left ramp. So the problem is I didn't want to do the mini play field until the second phase of the wizard mode. But you shoot the left ramp, I grab a hold of the ball, and now if I let go of the ball, it's going to go to the mini play field, and then that's sort of awkward. So the brilliant idea that Mike came up with is, you know, tilt the play field all the way up, flip the left flipper, and hold it up softwareically. That's a term we made up in Turtles. Softwareically flip the left flipper, right, and then keep it held the whole time you're playing phase one. So flip the flipper, let the ball go from the diverter, the ball then will fall into the flipper and be trapped. Kick a new ball out from the trough, play the first phase with that new ball, and then when you finish the fourth shot of the new phase, you'll shoot the left ramp, I'll grab it on the diverter, and then phase one will end, phase two will begin, I'll let that ball go, and now you're playing multiball on the mini-playfield. That's cool. That's very clever. Yeah, that is clever. MXV, good ideas. Yep, yep. All right. Well, I'm very excited to talk about the co-op play because on Turtles, that was one of my favorite parts of the game. And it sounds like you're bringing it back to The Mandalorian. Absolutely. Is it played in a similar way? Are you just both working towards the same objectives or have you somehow mixed it up? So it's a little bit different. In my mind, co-op should do slightly more than just share scores. It should share progress. So we do. We share progress and we share scores. So you punch up a four-player game. Everyone's in co-op. Every score everybody gets is shared by everybody else. If I complete a mission, everybody else completes that mission. If I complete a multiball, everybody else completes that multiball. But then once you get to the wizard modes and then the final wizard mode, this is the way, none of that is shared anymore because I want each person to experience that on their own. I don't want Dad to get up and play through a cool wizard mode and then rob that of the kids or whatever, whoever is playing with them. So the shared progress is only up until you get to the wizard modes. And then once the wizard mode is lit, everyone gets to play it. But the new thing in this game is everyone shares a pool of Beskar. So if everyone collects Beskar, it all goes into the same pool. Everyone spends it. Well, doesn't spend it. Trades it in the foundry, you know, with the armorer, right? Trades it in the foundry with the armorer for stuff that they want. So the dad could go earn lots of Beskar, but then the kid could come up and spend it if they want to. Not spend it, but trade it. Does everyone get the benefit of spending the Beskar, or is it just that individual? Oh, no. No, the group, whoever spends it gets the benefit. Oh, wow. Okay. So, you know, you talk about it amongst the group. Like, you know, like, why don't you do that? Or you should get that, and then I'll do this, and so on, right? Okay. So one of the ways we're sort of enhancing the paths of the game is through the equipment. So in the Foundry, there's, well, there's like five pieces of equipment, but the jetpack enhances encounters. It's going to level out the playing field on you. So, like, even if you're really straight, if you push in, if you have the jetpack, and you hit the action button, it'll level the playing field and make it flat. Oh, cool. Right? The long rifle is going to give you add a ball during a multiball. Right? So you can get the long rifle, you can go start a multiball, and then when you're about to drain out your last ball, you can hit the button and you'll get back at least one of the balls that were draining. That's cool. And then Whistling Birds is like a smart bomb in missions. In missions, you can hit the Whistling Birds, the Whistling Birds all come out and knock out all of your shots for you. Wow. Those are neat. And all sound really helpful, actually. Yeah. So that's probably worth it. Yep. So the co-op team can go, hey, I'm going to be working on missions, so I'm going to spend some of this right now and get the whistling birds and get us all through several of the missions or at least one more. Cool. All right, we've got to wrap this up, so we've got time for one more. And we would be remorse if we didn't ask because we need to know about Impossible Play. What does this entail and whose evil idea was this? It's my evil idea. Pinball is not hard enough, Dwight. You've got to make pinball possible. No, so this is going to make pinball fun, because it's the game kind of fighting you back. So it sets the game to very hard, but I think most people aren't going to care about that. I mean, unless you're a really good player, like, really good players will be affected by very hard, and then that's sort of cool all on its own. It becomes sort of this tournament thing. But, like, just the average players, you know, So what more fun about it than the very hard is the fact that you can trap up for very long on the flipper So there two meters So if you pick impossible play two meters show up on the screen just above the scores one for the left flipper and one for the right flipper. And when you press in the button, the meter turns red and starts draining. And then when you let the button go, it turns back blue and fills back up again. And it takes twice as long to fill up as it does to drain. So it traps up and that flipper dies. Is there any salvaging that, or is the bar not going to fill up? You're done. Well, you've got to let the button go. You've got to let the button go, and like a quarter of a second later, you'll start to get back some meter, and then you can flip it again. And maybe, depending on how you timed it, but if you let it all the way drain and die, you're gone. But a second before it drains on you, you get a warning. So I have red GI on half the play field, and on both halves of the play field. so you get like a like a like a operation you ever play operation where you you touch the side it goes right so there's a sound a buzzer sound that sounds at the one second mark so at the one second mark if you know the flipper's gonna die on you the whole side of the play field flashes red and it goes you know and if you still hang on well it's gonna die on you but that tells you stop hanging on let go of the flipper and then flip the ball I see a lot of potential for tournament painful tournament play with that mode equipped. Yeah, I think it's going to be like dollar play. It'll be fun dollar play and just good fun in the basement. I think, you know, like when you have a bunch of buddies over and you're playing some pinball, I think, you know, you don't want serious games that go on for three hours. You want, you know, you want like, hey, let's go play a couple games of Impossible Play and see who can do better. And I think it's more in that kind of spirit than it is, like everything's going to be very hard. Like there's no ball save. There's no, you know, like all of the rules are going to be set to very hard. But nothing's going to be like, like lots and lots of chopping wood. It's still going to be fun. It's just going to be, you know, more difficult at every little turn. All of the timers will be tightened up a little bit. It sounds like a lot of fun. Yeah. It sounds like a lot of fun, but I'm surprised because I heard Impossible Play was when you entered that mode, the play field flipped over and turned into Captain Fantastic. Chris hates that game. He has a hard time. And then the ball just drains. He kicks his ass. Well, Dwight, thanks so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. congratulations on the new game. It sounds awesome. We can't wait to play it. Work well done as usual. Thank you. Thanks a lot for coming on, Dwight. We've been hoping to get you on. I didn't get you on the part, Chris, but you might have been my second pick. I appreciate that. I appreciate that. Hope to be back soon. Yes, indeed. Alright, Dwight. Thank you so much, man. I'm glad I could help. I'm going to go back to work now. We'll talk soon. Alright. Later, guys. Alright, so let's move on from programming and talk a little bit about art. And I will pass the baton over to you, Chris. I will take that baton. Thank you, sir. The art looks great on this game, on all three models. It was done by Randy Martinez, who was the same artist who did the Star Wars comic edition. Did you choose Randy to be involved in this game, or did Disney have something to say about that, or how did that work out? It's a little bit of all, right? Greg Ferrer is our director. He matches games and styles with artists, and I think he was a great fit. I really like the style that he put together. It's not quite the comic, but it's in that vein. and it really matches the feel of the show while being completely unique. So I think he did an amazing job pulling all those elements together and giving it the look that it has. Yeah, you have to really zoom in on it to appreciate the style. There's one close-up of the back glass, and I think in that image you can really see the style of the art shine through more than some of the pictures where it's pulled back further and you kind of lose some of those details. And there's a lot of characters on the game, right? There's a lot in the back glass, on the cabinets, on the play field, everywhere. So, you know, he had a field day creating all the characters. I know he loves working on it. He's a big Star Wars fan. He's done Star Wars things in the past. So he was a great fit. How much input did you have in terms of saying, hey, you know, I'd really like to have this on the side of the cabinets? Or was that all pretty much an artist-based decision? No, it was a little bit of a mixture. We gave Randy a lot of leeway, but we also got feedback from Disney, you know, Dwight, me, everybody kind of chimed in. And we picked what would be the most impressive thing to put on the side of the cabinets. We wanted big scenes that you could see across the room. What characters did we want to include in the backless? And what was the theme of the pro and the premium and the LE? So it was a lot of input from different areas. But Randy's the guy who kind of pulled it together and made it cool. Especially like the LE, I really love the backless. You probably can't really appreciate it as much in the videos or the pictures that you've seen because you don't see the mirror reflecting images. And it's got a huge mirrored surface. to kind of mimic his helmet and the Beskar and the shininess and stuff. And it really looks amazing with the side armor and everything in person. Cool. Now, what's your favorite art package? Would it be the LE? You know, it's tough. I think ultimately probably the LE just because of the whole Beskar look and the package together. But then I look at each of the other ones and the characters and all the different variety that we got in each of them. They're all great. It's really hard to pick. It's like picking a favorite child. Gotcha. So, you know, with the reveal, we saw some cool accessories that are coming to the game, like the side art blades and the Razor Crest control knob shooter. But one of the coolest additions, in my opinion, is the Ambin rifle side armor. I've never seen anything like this. You usually see, like, laser-etched side armor. But this mounts, like, a freaking rifle on the side of your machine, and it's a really cool, like, space rifle. So were you involved in any of that decision process? Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. We had a number of meetings of, you know, what would fit that form factor on the side. And, you know, it actually, I think that was an input that Disney gave us, right? That was one of their ideas that, well, hey, what about using this? So we tried a couple different ways of doing it and concepts, and it was a perfect fit. And it's so iconic to man. It just looks so badass. Yeah, exactly. And when we seen that, we're like, oh, my God, yeah, that's it. So we're done. Well, the hottest accessory in pinball right now, speaking of accessories, by far is the topper. There are some toppers that are selling for ridiculous prices, upwards of $2,000, $3,000 at the moment on the secondary market. We don't see any clue to there being a topper for this game. Can you give us any idea as to when we might see it and what it might look like? I can say nothing, nothing. Oh, no, I was afraid that answer was coming. Actually, all I can say is it's going to be an awesome topper. All right, so it really is. You're going to love it. Wait, are we doing a topper? I'm not supposed to. I don't know if I'm supposed to say that. I didn't say that, so nobody heard that. The Stranger Things topper just came out. So we hang out. It won't be that long. Don't worry. I'm putting 20 down that there's a Groku involved in this topper somehow. In my mind, I see a Mando helmet or I see a floating. No one has ever done the magnets where you have something floating above something else. So if you have Baby Yoda and his little carrier thing floating above the machine, that would be so badass. But I guess we'll have to wait and see. We'll have to wait and see it go back and forth across the top of the egg thing. As he eats frogs up there. Yeah, essentially, toppers vary widely on games and the complexity and stuff, from Black Knight's moving knight helmet, which was really cool, I thought, to just display a panoramic display of characters and stuff. So I try to like to do something that's interesting, that's different that you haven't seen. So hopefully you'll agree. So you're involved in the topper creation and kind of like what's going to be up there as opposed to the artist doing it. Okay, cool. I'm looking forward to it. All right, so another accessory that I think people were hoping to see make an appearance was the expression lighting system from Led Zeppelin. And was it a conscious decision not to put that in this game due to the bill of materials, or was it never really considered? Never really considered on this one, yeah, because it was in development. It was a game before us, so we didn't know how it would be received. And it is an additional cost. Would people like it? Would they not like it? Right. So we didn't really think of it as an option for our game. Okay. Maybe down the line, other games, you know, it's an option, but not really for us. Yeah. Is the verdict in at Stern as far as that's concerned? Are they going to be using that in the future? Do you know? I know they're talking about it a lot because there's been a lot of good buzz about it. That's awesome. Yeah, and it's such a great way to incorporate lighting into the game, and it really does make a difference. It does. It really stands out. Yeah. Well, one thing that pinheads have been waiting, I don't want to say patiently for, some patiently, some impatiently, for Stern to reveal is the long-rubric internet integration into the machine. Is there any internet compatibility with the Mandalorian? and if so, what can we expect? Yeah, good question. You'd have to ask George that one to get the full answer, but initially on launch there won't be. Okay, that's a good answer. It's kind of a non-answer and an answer all in the same time. And I just talked to George two days ago. Dang it. We've asked him this before, and he's been coy about it, but he's definitely told us that it's coming. It's a matter of which game. I'm super excited about Connectivity. I think it's really going to open up the world and change a lot of things. So it's going to be really cool. You and Chris have both had firsthand into social media space games and connected games in that sense. And pinball is just starting to kind of breach into that world with scorebit integration and that sort of thing. So it'll be really cool to see what Stern has, because George told us when we asked him this question that it's something that none of the other companies are doing. So I'm very excited to see what that is. And all the cool things that we've already thought up, there's probably going to be like 50 more cool things once it's out in the wild. Right. It just opens up the world even bigger. Cool. And it's great to see pinball finally get on Wi-Fi, given my slow-run. Yeah, I mean, the cable. Got Wi-Fi, you know. My fridge has Wi-Fi. Yeah, the fridge has Wi-Fi. My milk is still good, right? Right. So your games are full of humor and Easter eggs, whether it's in the art or the call-outs. Are there any secrets or Easter eggs in The Mandalorian that you're willing to tell us about? Absolutely none that I'm willing to tell you. Okay. How about a few things? They've been out for a while, right? There may be a few, right? But, you know, it is Disney. They keep it pretty tight-fixed on their license, too. It's not back in the day when we were doing original themes. We could do a lot of that stuff, and we had a lot of fun. No Doho's, no frogs in minecarts, and that sort of thing. Is there anything you put into a game that no one has ever found? Oh, yeah. Oh, really? Can you tell us the game? Yeah, no. Is it like on the ramps? Tell all Expo, maybe. I mean, you answered that very quickly. So it sounds like there's maybe more than one game where there's stuff in there. That's cool. All right. Well, hopefully we'll find out what that is. We had fun with the code back then. Well, you've had Bond working on this game for the past year and a half or so. How long has it been? 14, 15 months? Yeah, around there. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit with some miscellaneous stuff that we've been dying to talk to you about. We wanted to have you on just to pick your brain, so we edited down a few questions that I think were a little bit more high-yield. So original themes are a hot topic among pinheads because everyone asks for a new and fresh idea, but don't always follow through with their dollars. So your games, Medieval Madness and Attack from Mars in particular, are kind of highlighted as the examples of original themes that can work. Do you think that's still true these days, or do you think the times have changed and that license themes are pretty much how it's going to be if you want a really commercially successful game? Yeah, good question. Obviously something dear to my heart, too, is original themes. And, you know, I like doing both. I really do because, you know, with a license, you get a lot of wealth of cool things that you can dive into, and it brings the team together. Everybody understands that when you're creating something completely original, you kind of got to get people to understand what that vision is to create. but then you have that leeway and that freedom to do almost anything you want right uh so would uh original license work i think it's you touched upon it exactly right the the few that have tried you know people all say original is original and then somebody comes out with one and nothing happens and that's the hard part right now is it you know licenses everybody understands they they they get and there's attachments to them right away so it's a little easier to get out in the world and the market when you're making games and you need to sell them right away. So I would love, of course, to do an original at some point. Don't know if that's in the cards, you know, but if it ever does, you know, I would love to do it. Right. There's certain ways of doing them, I think, that are more wide appeal than some of the things I've done in the past that would have way more success. Well, I mean, when you made your Attack on Mars and Medieval, I mean, those were, they were original licenses that hearkened to popular properties, right? So it wasn't the boodles, but it was close enough to some. Mars attacks. What are you talking about? What are you saying? What is that? Holy grail. That was funny. When Attack from Mars came out, it was like the perfect storm. and we had no idea that the summer movie season would have all these sci-fi alien movies. I think Independence Day or something else came out. Some other movie came out at the same time. It's like all of a sudden it was the summer of all the alien things. That's cool. We slid right into that. But, yeah, original themes are fun. Well, maybe someday. Well, you know, remakes of popular machines are big business these days. They seem to be following the same trend as Hollywood. It's like we'll go with something safe rather than risk something original. So how do you feel about your games being remade by CGC, and were you involved in any way? Those bastards didn't involve me at all. No. Did they make big money? Let me just call Doug Duber right now. Brian Eddy says, meet me in behind the scenes. I've been waiting for my game to show up, and I'm still waiting. So how was that for you? Were you looking and seeing these games selling out, you know, and being remade of titles that you were directly involved in. Yeah, it's a love-hate relationship, I think, because I love the fact that there's more games out there for people to enjoy after 20 years. And the prices are getting ridiculous, right, of the originals. So it's great that more people can enjoy it, but I didn't have anything to do with them either, so it's just cool to see that they're out in the wild. Would you have wanted anything to do with the remakes? Well, the way they did them, There wasn't a whole lot to be involved in, I guess. So they pretty much recreated the games, and the color got matrixes and toppers and stuff. Yeah. How would you feel about doing a sequel? I mean, I know AFM technically has one, but maybe an Attack from Mars 2 or Medieval Madness 2 or something that you've been worked on in the past. Indiana Jones has a huge following at Williams. Doing something similar. Yeah, I'm always up for any license. I think you can make a cool pinball out of just about anything. but I also like original themes so original things doing something new some of these would the sequel be well received? maybe, maybe not, could we do one? absolutely, would it be fun? yeah, probably yeah, yeah that's cool, Indiana Jones is one of my all time favorite games and it continues to be reinvented there's another movie coming shortly a major AAA video game coming out soon Would you want to try another shot at that game? Yeah, Indiana Jones was really fun. I loved working on that. The theme was so rich, and we had all three movies back then, and all the characters and all the speech to be able to integrate into that and make it feel like you're actually there part of the movie. So, you know, with special effects the way they are now and all that they can do with the CG and stuff, it would be a great remake, and, yeah, it would be a lot of fun to do. First thing you say, that Indiana Jones is one of your favorite games. Have you sold any games recently? I did, I did. I sold it. but I had it for many years. I know, I know. See, now my questions are going to be all the good ones. I'm going to send you a picture of the topper that my wife made for that game. It was really insane. It was like sand with Indiana Jones and like a bed of walking through nails with snakes and the ark, and there was a map on the back. It was really, really cool. I'll send you a picture. It is really cool, all the modding that goes on out there, though. I mean, I really become passionate about it. George Gomez is nuts for my Beatles. I actually, he told me that I had to take photos, like a top-down topographic map of the back end of my Beatles and highlight where everything is in position, how I put it there, and where I got it, because he wants to recreate it exactly. That's hilarious. Cool. Oh, man. So, you know, what would you say are the biggest differences that you found in making pinball games now versus the past, you know, and is there anything that you think was better in the past or, you know, anything that's better now? Yeah, good question. There's probably a couple of things that stand out. One, I think, is that so many games go into the home now. Back when I was making before, like 99% went on location. People just didn't buy new games to put at home very often. So we made games specifically for locations to make money, and I was very focused on that, keeping the ball time at a good amount and making sure that the fun's right there when you step up and you start playing. And so that's still kind of part of me, right, is that I want the operators to make money too because it brings in new players and we want that too. So I'm really conscious of that when I'm making a game. But now we have this whole home market that is buying games directly and they want deeper games and they want more things to keep it interesting over time, even more so than some of the games from the 90s. So that's definitely different. So along with the three different models, right, tying all those pieces together and making something that everybody can enjoy. Somebody in the arcade can just walk up, play it, and have something cool happen and feel good. And the guy who's had it at home for six months still finding something new or getting into a faraway wizard mode or something. And to me, that's the best of both worlds, you know, from a player's standpoint, is that if you can have fun just walking up to the machine for the first time and keep it fun for six months, you know, that's a keeper for sure. The games you've designed and built in the past were, they kind of fell under the rule of these are mostly going to go out in location and we don't intend for them to last very long. Now with the prolification of people putting these games in their basement, do you design them any differently to last longer? You know, are any of your design rules sort of changed in order to adapt to that market? Yeah, definitely. I think you just, you want more depth to the games than some of the games from the 90s. But you still want that core loop of fun that happens. You know, the core things that you do and try to, the goals that you're trying to attain, that still needs to be there. There just needs to be more content to keep it interesting. So in my view, if you go down one path, I'm going to play, let's say, the Encounter playfield, the mini playfield. I want to keep playing that. That's all I'm going to do this game. I'm going to play that style this time. Or, you know, I'm going to keep shooting the child or the Razor Crest multiballs, right? I'm going to keep doing those. or I'm going to mix it up. I'm going to do a little bit of everything. You want that depth and that interest to be there no matter how you play it and for there always to be goals that are hard to achieve. So that maybe in the first three months I never get to the second wizard mode or I never get to the final one for six, seven months or maybe never. It's always a goal out there. So you want things a little farther out because you're playing Supreme and play as much as you want to get better at it faster. So it's that balance And it's a tough balance for any game to strike is for a person to walk up and have fun right away, plus to keep that longevity without it getting all confusing and hard to understand. So I always strive for that balance. Yeah, now that's gameplay. Now, if people don't know, the designer's also responsible for what's underneath the playfield as much as what's on top of it. Are the games built any differently to last longer, so to speak? Yeah, you know, Tom Capero's a mechanical guy, and he's amazing. he's definitely a genius when it comes to this stuff he has so much experience that he's done an amazing job with the mechanisms some of the core things are very similar to what they were in the 90s you know that part of all of Game Devon hasn't changed tremendously, we still use coils you know, what's changed I think is the electronics and the control we have more control over the devices than we did probably back in the day, just because there's more options too with separate motors and servos and just the DC power system gives us more control over everything that's in there and that opens up some more avenues that we probably didn't have back in the day too and it makes them more reliable, it makes them simpler, the ability to just take a playfield out after unplugging a couple cables is like that just blew my mind too, it's like wow this is awesome right, we couldn't do that before so there's huge benefits to the way the architecture of electronics is done but the pure mechanicals you know that's pinball it's it's there well brian you you have been incredibly generous with your time and thank you so much for joining us giving us a scoop on what looks to be like another incredible eddie game and and uh stern game i i think this is going to do very well based on just the initial you know hype that everyone has had over this game and today when it was revealed i've seen a lot of positive reactions so i think it's gonna do good things for stern and for Brian Eddy great thanks for having me guys and i hope everybody goes out plays the game has fun Yeah, hey, send us your feedback, send your comments. I'm always reading, listening, love to hear from people. Maybe we'll actually get some shows starting again, and we can actually go out and play some games with people. So that would be great. Definitely thanks for having me. Awesome, man. Thank you so much. Well, if you stuck around this long, you're in for a bonus treat. The folks over at Stern Pinball have provided us with a team-signed Mandalorian Translight to give away to one of you fine listeners that have made it this far. All you have to do is answer a simple trivia question, and that is, when Dwight was talking about the multipliers he developed, he said there are blank different flavors. How many different flavors did he say? Drop us a line at superawesomepinball at gmail.com. In the subject, put Mandalorian contest, and then put your answer. We will select one winner from all correct answers, and you will receive your translate direct from the fine people at Stern Pinball. And, of course, thanks to Stern Pinball for sponsoring this contest. Please get your answers in by May 23rd. That would be the deadline. Good luck all you pinball people You! Alright well that does it for our Mandalorian special For the super awesome pinball show Ryan Eddy was incredibly awesome We've been dying to get him on the show And this was a really good reason to do it Thank you so much Ryan for your time Dwight Sullivan, incredibly great to talk to him as well Just scratched the surface of what the code had to offer But I think it was a really good introduction to the game And it's just really good man It's good to get back with you and talk some pinball Back in the saddle again Or something like that Yes, good to have you back. And, you know, for those who don't know, we will be back, but we are going to pick and choose hard times. We don't have any regular schedule. We're just going to keep it fun. We're going to keep it interesting. And most of all, we're going to keep it important. We don't want to just pass on the news and the same things every other podcast does. So we're going to come back for unique situations and different things. Christian is going to join me on some fireside chats in the future. So we'll be together and things will be fun. So thanks for joining us. Thanks to Dwight and thanks to Brian. And thank you to everyone who voted for us for the Twippies. Twippy, Twippy, Twippy. Because it's been a minute since we've been on the podcast. I have my twippy flack right over my bar. Really nice to know that people have enjoyed listening to our show, and we're looking forward to bringing you some more content in the future. Most definitely. Truly appreciate it. All right, so on behalf of my handsome co-host, Dr. Penn, Kristen Lohan, this is Christopher Franchise signing off. We will see you next time. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. We'll see you next time. How about a nice, fine blooper? Here, here, here, here. Oh, by the way, after this, if you could say, wow, that's a great question, that would really help me out. All right, all right. You've got to stroke Franchisee. He's got them all. I worked with Chris before. I know how to do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're running out of time. You're so much fun to pick on. It's so easy. because I'm extremely tender and sensitive. You are. You are. And I don't... It's horrible. I kind of regret that part of it. I don't mean to hurt your feelings. I really don't want to. It's all in good fun. Oh, no. I know. I'm good. I'm good. Okay. All right. You're... Never mind. Question every time, Chris. I haven't got all day to try and think of the words, so we're just moving on.