This episode of the Poor Man's Pinball Podcast is brought to you by Flip N Out Pinball. Zach and Nicole are the greatest distributors on planet Earth. If you want a new pinball game, you call them. If you want a used pinball game, you call them. You want accessories, you call them. Raw thrills, you call them. You want an Escalera, call somebody else. I'm still waiting on my fucking Escalera. definitely call them for your escalera finally finally finally my escalera is coming in a couple of weeks i got communication from the company themselves and it will be here by the end of march so thank you so much zach and nicole you guys are amazing friends of the show we love you guys so much thank you for everything that you do we are also brought to you by pinballprices.com Doc Finlay, I love you too man I love everything you do a friend of the show, tribe member of the Poor Man's Pinball Podcast, Doc Finlay he keeps you up to date on all the newest pinball insanity that's out there these prices are going nuts he is tracking all these sales and he is keeping it up to date pinballprices.com, one of our premier sponsors for the Poor Man's Pinball Podcast, thank you so much for what you do Doc, we are not sponsored by P3 Multimorphic, but I want to give them a special shout-out. They have a new game this week, Weird Al's Natural Museum of Hilarity. Stephen Silver, he's a tribe member. He is their new creative director. We love Stephen Silver. We love P3 Multimorphic. I'm excited to see what they can do. And now, on. Well, you can do anything, say, oh, well, Mama Lou, where'd you go? Oh, yeah! Welcome to 4 Minutes Pinball Podcast, episode 115. I have another great guest with me today. He is the man. He is the talk of the pinball town. He's a dad. He's a husband. He's an animator. He's a creative director for Multimorphic. He helped form and shape the new game, Weird Al's Museum of Natural Hilarity. He is tribe member number 40. And most importantly, he is a Walter Day Pinball Trading Card recipient. He has made commercials for the Houston Arcade Expo, among many other things. Lots of creative stuff. This man is awesome. Help me welcome to the show, Stephen Silver. Hey, buddy. Welcome to the show. What's up, buddy? Nice to be here. It's good, man. Good. I'm glad we could finally make this happen. for you guys listening at home I reached out to Stephen like instantly after the game was released and I said hey can we do this and he said no I'm going to do all the other important podcasts first and then I'm going to come on your show and I said that's how everyone does it so I love it that's not true it's not true at all we kid here at the four minutes pinball podcast but We're really excited to have Steven here today. It's been great watching the rollout of this game, which very shortly here we're going to get into it. But before we do that, Steven, you know, it's a tradition here in the Poor Man's Fiddle Mill podcast. What you drinking, buddy? I am drinking a delicious bottle of purified drinking water from Walmart. It's, you know, quite refreshing this evening. Well, that's that's poor man's style. You got it from Walmart. It was probably like 12 cents, right? Yeah. Oh, 12 cents. That's the good stuff. You know. I'm sorry. This is a great value brand. We don't quite have the nice Walmart brand. Fell off the back of a truck. Yeah, basically. Love it. Love it. Now I'm drinking. Tim Lee will be proud again. I'm in my, not my man cave, my little timeout cave here, my podcast cave, drinking some Fireball cinnamon whiskey and some Diet Pepsi. So this is a rock and roll. And you're a very Potter shack? Yep, yep. I'm in a timeout shack. So my wife loves it because she's like, you're going to be down there. I can't hear you. Perfect. So here we are. So, Stephen, before we get into the game and all this other great stuff that you've been doing, what have you been doing in your personal life? What kind of pinball stuff have you been doing that isn't related to Multimorphic? Oh, boy. uh well mostly i work from home so i don't get out a whole lot so mostly i just have been hanging out with the kids and and doing stuff like that i've occasionally been able to make it to a tournament or a get together here for the space city uh pinball league here in houston um we got a lot of good locations around town uh that that people connect with but other than that I've also been working with 86 Pixels. They released a mod for Tron. Excuse me. Sorry, I'll start over. I've been working lately with 86 Pixels. They did the pin vision mod for the Tron pinball machine that replaces a backboard with a screen, and we did a whole bunch of new animations for that. I do that and I do the commercials for the Houston Arcade Expo every year which if you haven't been to the Houston Arcade Expo I'd say it's probably one of the most fun shows I've ever been to it's basically just a giant party there's always bands there's always a lot of fun and rivalry everybody has a good time at the Houston Arcade Expo let's give them a plug when is that usually it's usually in November every year, late October, November of this year. I believe it's the 11th and 12th. Let me double check that. I'll have to see. But, yeah, it's a really great show, and we're always there with our games, and you've got a bunch of people. I've heard over and over and over from people that have finally come and checked it out and said, you know, this is just a laid-back, fun show, and they love it. How does it compare in size? scope to some of the other ones so it's a it's not as big of a show you know but it that's one of those things that i think makes it more fun and more laid back like you're not we've got plenty of seminars we got plenty of uh things like that going on but it's it's you know mostly a come and hang out and everybody has a good time kind of show you know you're not uh it's it you're not worried about all the other industry stuff that's going on so very very cool very cool um so it the 11th through the 13th of this year 11th through the 13th of November 20th anniversary show very cool very cool are you Stephen are you going to TPF yeah I'll be at TPF I think I've got a good reason to be there yeah yeah you do and we're going to talk about that real soon I'm Stephen's one of our tribe members I'm looking forward to are you a hugger I will hug I will hug I might be a hold on too tight for too long awkward hugger, but that's what you guys signed up for. You put me in the tribe. We're going to get on real well then, Stephen. I'm going to see you. I'm going to give you a big old hug. I'm excited to come down there and meet Dr. John, too. Dr. John's coming all the way from Australia. I saw that. Really excited. I know this is the boring tribe stuff that the rest of your listeners want to be a part of, but you can't. We'll talk more about that. But, you know, we're inducting more tribe members this year, so, you know, you might get your chance. But, yeah, really excited to go down to Texas. And, you know, let's just get right into it because I'm really excited to – I'm sure you're going to have several games there, multi-morphic games, correct? Yes. Yeah, we usually line up a big line of machines and have samplings of all the different games you can play on the system. Well, very cool. Well, let's just get right into this, Stephen. So the first thing I want to talk about, Stephen had mentioned something to me a couple weeks ago when we were talking about there's been a little bit of confusion about Multimorphic's name, right? Is that fair to say? Yeah, yeah, basically. I mean, the big deal is like a lot of people out there are confused about whether or not P3 is a company or multimorphic is a company. And I just said straight that the company is multimorphic. The product is the P3 pinball platform. Right. So when you discuss the multimorphic P3 is the thing that we make. OK, so if we're talking about the cabinet and the system itself, we can call that the P3. Yeah, yeah. And then the company itself is multimorphic. me okay okay so but if you come down to austin you look in the phone book for p3 you're not going to find it you'll find it you'll find a multimorphic thing coming to the shop and from what i've been hearing for the last several years people will sometimes call it the p3 multimorphic right yeah yeah sometimes people will do that and like it's mostly just uh just uh we're getting a lot more attention now the video was shared by it's been seen by like half a million people out there. It's funny when you get a guy with five million followers out there, you get really good at social media, suddenly you get a lot of exposure. So just decided to take this moment to correct the record on that and just let people know the right way. Okay. So all you people out there, if you want any hope or chance at all of being a tribe member, you need to call the company Multimorphic and the game P3. You hear that? Okay. leveraging the tribe yes yes i'm hoping i'm hoping that i'll get some people on board but but no matter what you call it it's really effing cool right yeah i love this thing it's it's actually i mean it's different right like people are used to pinball being one thing and it's only been one thing for a real long time and this is something that's built around the idea of people all of us are pinball fans and we love physical pinball that's why physical pinball is the is the most important part of this entire system, but we're also leveraging other technologies that allow us to do a lot of really awesome things in this system that you couldn't do in any other pinball system. And of all the machines I've ever owned, this is my favorite. And I'm always finding new stuff to explore on it. And it helps that I get to tinker with it and make new games for it. Oh, very cool. Have you designed any, like, mini games from the ground up for that yet or not? No, no. When it comes to programming, I am what you'd call a certified dum-dum. I don't know anything about – I mean, I know I can get into Unity and mess around and simulate the game and everything. But I rely on a team of people that are way, way smarter than me to actually pull this stuff off. I'll give ideas. I keep throwing out ideas for minigames to the people who look back at me with this face that says, you know, you're just giving us more work. But we got some ideas for some interesting minigames. Every time you design a new play field, you think of fun minigames that would work with it. Sure. We'll see more coming along. I'm going to trademark the certified dum-dum. Certified dum-dum? Yes, I think that's great. It fits in really well here because when it comes to restoring pinball machines, I'm a certified dum-dum. Nice. I'll make you a franchisee. I love it. I love it. We'll have certified dum-dums across the country. OK, no, that's great. So what I want to do today, Stephen, is, you know, tell me a little bit about the process of making Weird Al. So, you know, the things I want to know, and I think our listeners do, too, you know, like, first of all, when did you acquire this license? How long has this thing been in the works? So we got the license. We got the rights to everything locked up. I want to say we got everything locked out almost a year ago. So, like, we basically hit the ground running, like, about a year ago. Holy shit. Only a year ago? Yeah, about a year ago on this machine. We had a two-year development cycle on Heist. We had a one-year development cycle on Weird Al. But it's something that, you know, as Heist did better, we were able to better fund the company and better move forward. And I think it shows from what we've been able to put into this game. But we basically focused on it real heavily. We have a bunch of dedicated people. it really helps that the people we have on the team, a bunch of us are Weird Al super fans or consider ourselves super fans. And so it's real easy to really plug away on something that you're really passionate about. I mean, you want to do justice to the theme and do a really good job with it. Now, did you guys talk, you know, I know Weird Al, you know, worked with you guys directly, but when you were getting the license, do you talk to Weird Al or do you talk to his people? Oh, no, he's got people, right? And it's not just him. And like, I have to defer some on the licensing stuff, because the person who handles all the licensing stuff, of course, is Jerry. Like his company is his name in line. But yeah, you have to work with Jerry, you have to work with Al's people, you have to work with the various music studios and everybody that has rights to all the music. So it is a complicated license to get because there's, you know, there's a lot of entities you got to go through. I wasn't sure we were going to be able to do it. It's probably a daunting, I know it was a daunting task to go through and secure everything that we needed to secure for the game. And I've always wondered why nobody made a run at a Weird Al license before. And I could see, like, there's a couple of reasons, I think, why it's a difficult one to approach. But I was blown away when Jerry was able to secure all the songs that we wanted to do and get us up on the ground and start running. So we were extremely happy with the list of songs we got. No, and it's a good list. And if you go to, what is the website, Stephen? Multimorphic.com. Okay, there you go, Multimorphic.com. um they have that you know you can go look at the entire list and it's what 15 songs 17 songs we got 17 songs okay see see i i did some fact checking today boys and girls yeah it's amazing um so 17 songs and and you got um some stuff from like uhf and i'm sure like al doesn't own the rights to that right like you had to go to the studio probably yeah i mean well we got the saw on UHF when we got, you know, we got, oh, you know, a bunch of, we can make a bunch of references in there and stuff like that. So, but I mean, there's a lot of things in there, you know, that when it, yeah, like I said, we just had to go to a lot of different entities when it came to licensing stuff. So, and from there, I just got to defer to Jerry. So, was Weird Al, like, really high up on the hit list for licenses, or did you try to get other licenses as well, or how did that, what was the difference? Yeah, we've talked about a bunch of licenses. We've talked about a bunch of different things, but we always had Weird Al really high up. I know a lot of people are, you know, people, there's Weird Al, this is what I describe Al. Like, everybody likes Weird Al. Nobody hates Weird Al. At worst, people are indifferent to Weird Al, right? Because they were like, yeah, I liked him when he was a kid. But, you know, they really haven't, they haven't paid attention to him too much since then. But the dude has, he's a musical genius. who's had five Grammys in four different decades. You talk about somebody who's continued to be relevant over time, time and time again. His last album in 2014 went number one, right? Like he was tearing it up and doing a bunch of stuff. We grabbed a bunch of stuff from that album because I love that album. And the people who dig deeper, there's a lot of people that only know him for his parodies. And they might say, oh, he's just a food parody or whatever. But the more you go deeper on his catalog, you find so much great stuff in there. And I know, I'll say this, there's a lot of people that only know him for the parodies that are going to become much bigger Weird Al fans from this game. Very cool. Very cool. So tell me a little about Al, because you've obviously met him now, right? Yeah, I worked with him on the voice call-outs when we did that. I was able to direct him in the booth. And he's got a reputation from everybody in the music industry, everybody in Hollywood that works with him as being, like, one of the most genuine people. Like, somehow he went out there into Hollywood and the West, and it didn't ruin him. He didn't get a big head or anything. And that's 100% true. He is the most genuine person. And I done a lot of voice recording in my career I done quite a bit of pinball voice recording now with a couple of games under my belt Voice recording is incredibly difficult People think that voice acting is very easy but your voice gets worn out really quick Voice acting for pinball is incredibly difficult because so much of it is screaming and like being really ecstatic and over the top and everything. I had Al in the booth for three hours, and he had the most energy and enthusiasm of anybody I've ever recorded with, and he had the best attitude of all. He was basically like, hey, I'll go as long as you need. If we need to go longer, no problem. I kept checking in on his voice to make sure he was okay, and he's like, oh, I'm going to hurt tomorrow, definitely. But, no, we've got this. Let's keep going. And so we had a really good time in that recording session, and we've got over 2,000 call-outs in this game. and they are always making me smile every time I hear them. And I hear something else that I forgot we recorded in the simulation as well. Absolutely incredible. I am so looking forward to this game because, as I've stated before, I am a big Weird Al fan. And kind of like you said, you know, it's like I'm not really listening to him much today. But, you know, just as a kid and stuff, listening to him and just enjoying his music and just, you know, it's great. I just think this whole thing is great for you guys and for everybody involved. Yeah, and I think it hits the nostalgia button for a lot of people, but also the thing is that this kind of gives you the idea of the timeless nature of this. I hear from so many people that are buying this game that their kids love Al. Like, their kids are just blown away. This is the one thing that the one pin their sons or daughters have asked them to buy and stuff like that. It tells you the kind of longevity this guy's career has had and how much of an impact he has out there. So, like, it is a widely appealing thing. I knew that all of us Owl fans were out there, were legion, and you just see just how big of a response it's had over the Internet in total and how big the response has been, even within the pinball community. You know, there's a normal amount of skepticism with stuff people do, but just so many Weird Al fans coming out of the woodwork and people actually being really blown away by it. And so the best compliment I got online was seeing somebody say that they can tell that this game was made by Weird Al fans. And I'm like, OK, that's good. We did this. We did this license right. So I'm going to go out on a limb here. And by the way, folks, I don't know the answer to this, but I'm guessing right now. Has this game already sold more than Heist? Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely. But here's the thing. here's the thing that people don't understand about the p3 right every person that's bought weird al is a potential heist customer if they are not already a heist customer they're a potential lexy customer there's a potential oh kind of like car p3 customer in the future right why don't you explain that to people who might be living under a rock yeah i know it's just that the the the p3 platform is a multi-game platform if you think what a nintendo is or a playstation is You buy an expensive system up front, but then all your games purchases, you buy all the expensive parts once, and then you can get new software, new hardware on a regular basis. We shipped the first P3, I believe, in 2018, I believe. I might be wrong. It might have been 2017 or 2018. But there's been five physical playfields since then released, and there are a total of 15 games available now on the system that you can go through. So you've got one play field in there. You can swap between four, five, six different software games that you can play on them, and then you can swap out the whole back play field, pop in another one, have a whole new playing experience on this one game system and uh because of the modular the modularity of the system it allows us to do a bunch of things and we're just doing them in different ways and we've got this ball tracking interactive screen on the lower two-thirds of the play field that allows us to do things in pinball that nobody's ever been able to do and i find it to be just a tremendous playground to play around and when we're we're coming up with ideas for modes that you quite frankly just couldn't do with a painted piece of wood with blinking lights underneath it, you know? So I'm extremely excited for people to get their hands on this game in particular and see what we've been able to do with the system with this. Well, I mean, that answers my next question about the reception, but I really wanted to nail that home because, yeah, I thought for sure, I'm like, this thing's going to be their biggest seller to date, obviously. It's their first license. Yeah, licenses are magic, aren't they? Yeah, pretty much. But it took all of one or two weeks, and you have now sold more units than you did when ICE came out. Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, like, that's with any of these individual things, right? Like, this was always going to be a big seller. This has been, you know, the company has been a bootstrap company that's been done the right way in the industry. there's whenever anybody who's ever given us a dime has received a product for their money right anybody who's ever given us yes anybody who gave us pre-order money money the pre-order money was used to build the machines not to fund the development of the product right jerry has been had been adamantly against those kind of business practices since day one and we've seen a lot of businesses come and go that have adopted those other practices and have used customer money to try to fund the other apps actions of the company and it hasn't turned out well for anybody with us it's mean it's been a slow burn it's been a a vision that's taken a long time to come to fruition but now you have the full vision of the system you've got a system with when you buy into it once you've got a catalog of 15 games you can go back and get five of those games are third-party developed games that you can go get from third-party developers there are more third-party developers out there now building games for this system because it's their entry into the pinball market where they could not before there was no way to do it unless they won the lottery and became a pinball designer with one of the major manufacturers right we're seeing a lot of ideas that are done by people that are trying new things in pinball Some are hits, some are misses, but they're all fun, different ways of playing that are coming around thanks to this platform. And so now it's the best time to come out with our big license theme that really starts to get the system out there, get people interested in it. And then every person that buys in sees the overall value and how, especially in today's pinball pricing hobby, it's very competitive against everything else that's out there. Because, you know, you're paying on average close to what the other full featured machines are. And your next games are way, way cheaper than full games that come out. And the biggest thing about this system, I can say, is because we've got this big interactive screen that you go on, we can get into storytelling that you can't do on other machines, right? We can take you in this immersive environment and change your environment that you're in, in every mode, and change what you're seeing in every aspect of gameplay. and that's one thing we have probably one of the uh i'm pretty proud of the narrative game we wrote with heist that allows you to play through this entire narrative thing that isn't doesn't feel linear in fashion it's not a if you still have your choose your own adventure way to get to the past and a lot of different ways to do it and we do a lot of incredible fun narrative stuff in in now in this goofy environment of this this uh museum that people are able to explore so i you You know, I know I'm a fan of the platform itself, even though I've been working with it forever. I've been a fan of it since the first time I saw it back in 2013 when it was just a white box that had no art and no real software on it or anything else like that. I saw what Jerry made and I was like, this is what I want to be involved in. No, that's great. And I think you hit it right on the head because I've been saying this too, that, you know, a couple of years ago, this game was much more expensive than everything else, right? No matter how you slice it. But now as pinball prices continue to increase, and really you guys have, you know, you increased this one a little bit because of the license, but nothing crazy. It was like 200 bucks or something, right? Yeah, it was not much over the previous. In pinball terms, by the way, $200 is nothing. so yeah um we've got we've got like several third-party games that are under 200 bucks that you can get that are whole different play feel entirely different play gameplay experiences that you get like five games on the system for less than a topper and most of these things so we've got a ton of stuff in there that's that uh really it takes the existing play field makes it play completely different so how many how many games total uh 15 total on the system there's five What would be the cost of that if you bought everything? Oh, shoot. Well, it's tough to go in and put, like me, I don't know the exact price of what everything is. But we've broken down the pricing now to where, you know, some people will come in and they want to get the base system for development of their pre-sear module that you want to do. or they want to get a second system that they can swap cabinets between. So we've got the base system that's 8300 that doesn't have any modules in it. And then you decide what module you want with that. The cheapest module is $1,500. That's Canada Lagoon. The most expensive is OWL, which is $3,000, right? Okay. So call it $11,000 to get started. Yeah, $11,000 gets you into the system. But then after that, every other game that you want to do is $3,000 or less, right? And then you – and these are whole new modules, like – and impressive modules, too. Lexi has an eight-ball physical ball lock. Heist has the – Crane. Pitball Industry Award-winning crane, like, and then Owl has a ton of stuff on it, the hamster wheel. We've got two lift ramps. We've got – we'll get into the details of it later, but we just got – we got five flippers in this game, a ton of stuff in this game that makes it a ton of fun to shoot. Wait, wait, did you say five flippers? We got five flippers in this game, yes, sir. Wait, what? Yeah. Where did I miss a flipper? What do you got there? You got the two main flippers. Yep. And then you got the... And then you know where the highest flipper is, the upper flipper. Yeah, yeah, the one on the right, right? Right. We got another one on the left now. Okay. So now the system has two of those, and then we've got one on the upper playfield, a little mini flipper on the upper playfield. Holy crap. Five flippers. Okay. Yep. well boys and girls i'm gonna go out and order me a multi-perfect system um no go play it come play it no i'm going to i've i've played like one or two games over the last several years and i'll be honest you know i i poo-pooed on it when it when it came out because what did i play i think I played um you probably had Lexi early on yeah I might have played Lexi or Cannon Lagoon and I was like yeah this is fun but you know I just it didn't it didn't draw me in like you know because I'm a die-hard pinball guy right but then um you know heist comes out and I'm just like this looks really effing cool and I didn't get to play heist by the way um and now Weird Al comes out and I'm a Weird Al fan and I see what's on that module and I'm like, and listen to me, I got all the words right. I'm looking at this module and it's great. I mean, there's so many shots. You got the silly hamster wheel, which is awesome. Yeah, I love that. I love the little Harvey hamster wheel. Awesome. You know, I love fun, silly things like that. So for me, like I said, I'm a cartoon fan. I'm a Weird Al fan, so, like, I'm looking at some of these animations, and it just, it speaks to me, so, so very, very good job, very well done, you guys might have sold me a freaking P3. yeah well that's the thing is like you know and if you ever ever buy the the p3 community is uh really great like the people who buy into the system and get the system it's like something clicks and they're like oh okay now i understand right it's hard to wrap your head around it at the time like how much variety people come in they think oh well everything has to feel the same we'll have two different games on the same play field that will sound and play completely different right like sorcerer's apprentice plays way different than than cosmic kart racing right but you could also do incredible stuff on cosmic kart racing like the head-to-head gameplay is i still say that playing cosmic kart racing in my house during the pandemic against other people on the internet and my person is like the most fun i've ever had playing pinball it's so much shit talking and and uh and trying to play lawyer ball and to screw the other person over so they don't win if you can't win and stuff like that is great um so like i said there's just a ton of variety of the system people have the problem is we've been showing it for a really long time so people have come in and seen it at all various stages of development in early stages before the concept was complete played early versions of lexi that were software incomplete or they played a mini game on it at a show because quite frankly the lines are always really long to play them at shows and sometimes they they get on a machine that may have something uh that's a simpler game or something on there then um they're full featured games but i just say like go and seek one out and give it a chance and and and really flip it around and play it and forget everything anybody else has told you about you know whether or not it's it's real it's real pinball it's real physical ball rolling around around a real physical screen a real physical play field we've got so much packed into this this upper third of weird owl that i think it rivals any other production game uh made in the last 15 years right with the amount of stuff we have packed in there so i would say give it a shot and see all the stuff that we're able to do and i'll also say i think multimorphic has some of the best engineering in the industry because some of the stuff that like pj is able to do on these games mechanically are just wonders to me There's so much stuff that's so cool. And the ramp on the right side can send the ball in six different directions, depending on the burner setup. And we've got like a two-way lift ramp that can lift up and then send the ball back down the ramp to the end lane on the right-hand side. And there's just a ton of stuff in this game to play around with. Speaking of all that and all that great stuff that we can see, Are there any streams yet that you know of? Yeah, we're going to have one on the 19th with Buffalo Pinball. Okay. Okay, 19th, Buffalo Pinball. And do you have a time on that? Yeah, that'll be 8 p.m. Central time. Okay, very cool. Which will be Central Daylight Time by that time, which it switches the week before. Oh, got it. Yeah, so March 19th, Buffalo Pinball. Very cool. So right now you can kind of just see the little teaser video, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay. And when do they anticipate shipping these? We've got our first batches that we're getting in the last parts for. They should be shipping in the first half of this year, the first ones coming out. And then we've given everybody who's ordered their timeframes for when they can get them. You know, we had a big backlog originally, and then it grew with this game. And so all of that is all the timelines are based on, you know, when we can get parts in and how fast we can get parts in in those regards. So everybody, I think the way Jerry did it was extremely fair with basically telling everybody when, you know, we give you your, you know, you give your deposit. And when you get your estimated delivery time, you can cancel at no charge and get your money back at that point. And, you know, of course, some people came in and they thought it was too long and they pulled out. But most people are on board for the ride. And we are getting these things out as quickly as we possibly can to get this in everybody's hands as quick as we can. And you can order them through some distributors and directly from Multimorphic, correct? Yeah, absolutely. We got a distributor page on our Web page and you can order from Multimorphic as well. OK, OK, very cool. But you guys are anticipating by summer a lot of these games are going to be rolling out, right? Yeah, some people are going to have them in their hands by the summer, definitely. Okay, okay. And I mean do you guys anticipate by the end of this year at least being caught up with the crazy demand Or what are you guys thinking about that No we basically have orders we got everybody who pre the game we basically got our production queue built out until the beginning of next year at this point okay so pretty much like everyone else for the next seven eight months or whatever you're going to be just working on them yeah basically yeah and it's it's entirely supply chain issues for everybody. We're not immune from those as well. No, certainly not. It's just insane. I don't have to mess with any of that stuff because like I said, I'm the resident dum-dum that nobody trusts about stuff. I just come up and try to make things pretty and make the game make sense and put it together. Were you guys overwhelmed with the orders? Were you guys surprised? How did that feel the first week or so? I felt like I felt like this game was going to do well but I was nervous right like I'm not a person who ever is overconfident about anything and so when we had the day one sellout of the it was like a big I was like okay this is vindication I feel like people see the see that we handled this well and we made something really special with this so that was really nice to see but the good thing about it is that we've got CSE that's available still it's the same game and you can come and play it at the Texas Pinball Festival and if you like it you can jump in line on the queue and get yours rolling off as soon as we can now I think this has already been stated but if you didn't get in on the LE order you could not get that topper is that correct? yeah the topper is an LE exclusive yeah that's a shame i know i get it but we want to do something special for the and like that that's we're extremely proud of the copper you know and uh but it's it's a cool thing that we wanted to reserve for the the the le package that we put together now you you maybe don't want to answer this on air and i understand after you guys got the reception you did did you guys wish you had a few more alleys to sell no we picked a good number the 227 is 27 is a special number it's like the owl lore or whatever he's used it over and over again and we we targeted that number for a you know for those le kits and we felt pretty good and strong about it and so i it's one of those things that you know like sure i mean there's to me it seems weird like when And people, when you go out and you sell like 1,000 of something and you call it an NLE or whatnot, it doesn't make any sense to me. This seems like it's a truly limited run. It's a truly limited special set of machines. I feel pretty good about that number that we picked. No, when you sell 1,000 of them, it's called the E-edition, as in addition. No, I totally agree with that. I think it's great. I also think it's great that, you know, because you were talking about other companies in the past and how some of their business practices weren't exactly spectacular. You know, there's been companies in the past that have known to make, you know, I won't name names, but they, you know, said, oh, we're going to make more LEs now, right? Yeah. And you guys could easily have done that, but you decided not to. No, no. Like I said, this is like, you know, everything's been handled above board. Like I said, Jerry's been real communicative to people. If people were in line already for P3s, then their orders could be because you don't choose your module until it shifts. Those people were in line for OWL, right? But everybody else, it was basically like when we had a deadline of 9 a.m. on the day, and you had the email in, and we basically took the orders in order, and we didn't vary from that. We had lots of people coming in and asking for special favors, like put me at the front of the line and all that other stuff. Everything was communicated to everybody. And, you know, now there's obviously some people that tried to go real fast and then they got long lead times. But that's just the result of, you know, where we are in the industry right now. So my Jerry has been, like I said, he's been real above board with everybody. And that's the way he's always run the company and has been real honest about everything. And that's one reason why I've always been real proud to work with his company in particular. Now, for the listeners who maybe want to order this awesome P3 system, can you get a P3 with a different module sooner? So the P3s themselves, no, they're back order right now. Like if you owned a P3 and you wanted to get a different module, then we've got some different modules built. We've got parts for different modules. So those could probably be because we've got two different lines. We've got lines building modules and lines building the P3s, right? But the P3s right now are backordered for a while. So then it's mostly due to the demand of Al. Okay. So basically whatever the Al people are waiting for, if you wanted to order a P3 today, you'd still have to wait. Yeah, you've got to wait. But like I said, we're real upfront about how long it takes. And if somebody's ordering today, they're probably wanting the newest, latest, and greatest game anyways. So they're probably wanting that also. Yep. But I'm just thinking, you know, I mean, there's, you know, if there's people thinking about jumping in, they might say, well, if I can, you know, or maybe even buy a used P3 and then start, you know, then order your module or something. Right. That's possible too. I mean, if people, I do know people that because we updated some things about the system, there's the wall scoop assembly now is a motor driven instead of a solenoid driven. So it's a lot smoother motion on that. and there's this lit backbox display that we can – the speaker panel is illuminated with artwork that you can swap out for different games. And, you know, there's the system improvements and stuff. So some people I know that have a P3 and they're like, okay, I'm selling my existing P3. I'm going to buy a new one. So, yeah, definitely if you can pick up a used P3 out there, then that's a good idea. You can get into the system. if we've got games in stock or that modules would probably come faster for some of our back catalog and things but you know if you want the now module it's basically you know it's everybody's in line for those right now sure sure well no that's that's awesome I'm really excited for you I'm excited for the company you know this is what I mean I'm sure you've been listening because I know everyone listens to our podcast. Everyone. The whole world, except my wife. Hey, can you get me Drew's autograph? For years, we were just saying, you guys need this license theme, and now here it is. Lo and behold, us armchair quarterbacks were correct, right? This theme has opened up Pandora's box for you guys in a great way. Yeah. So, I mean, there's a couple ways to look at it, right? Like, let's say we went back in time and we did the license team as game number one, right? Plus a bootstrap company, right, that's needing to fund these things. If you're going to take the money for the license, that money has to come out somewhere else. So you wouldn't have gotten a play field like Al. You wouldn't have gotten something along those lines. And people's first introduction to the system would have been this very different looking system with a license on it instead of what it is now, which is a very feature-rich system that's got all these additional games where you can start seeing the value immediately, where if I buy this game without, that's not the end of the story. I've also got access to this entire back library of other stuff that I can get at any time that I want to expand this library and to still create value for this investment that I bought in this game. and you know it's it's one of those things where like i i like to tell us for when i picked up my p3 and brought it home at the time there was eight games available on the system and in the couple of short years since then now we're up to 15 games and a bunch of those are brand new third-party games that other people have done and uh you know this is this one game that i bought that keeps bringing new content and new stuff into my house for way, way, way less than it would be cost to go buy. Brand new machines, it's not taking up new space in my house anywhere else besides, you know, putting new modules underneath my other games that get played less and less. So it's a – I think the way that we've done it where we've built up these other things – I mean, the one thing that we always face is the goalpost shifting where it's like when heist was released one thing i heard is like wow this looks really cool if they just got one more game then they didn't be sold and that you know funny thing now is like if they got like five more licenses i would be involved you can always yeah move that goalpost but uh it's a pretty compelling argument right now and especially with pinball prices where it is right now it's it's something that i think like every game room eventually would would really benefit it from having one of these in them. No, I totally agree, but I'm glad you brought that up about one game and then five games and different licenses. So, you know, I don't want to steal the thunder from, I'm going to say it again. I've got to keep saying it, so I've got it. Weird Al's Museum of Natural Hilarity. I know we're goofing up those words too, right? Yeah, what's really funny is the intense arguments about what the acronym should be. Oh, yes. What would it be? Wham and yeah, that doesn't even, no. I like to say that with Heist, I picked a game name that was completely incompatible with acronym and with Weird Al, I picked the most ridiculous acronym, which is Wham-Own. Yeah. That is great. So like I said, without stealing the thunder, what is next for P3? Are you guys going to be releasing a game a year now, do you think? Or two games a year? What's the plan? Let me just outline the entire future trajectory of the company real quick. No, honestly, I can't honestly tell you how long the next game will take. And all of that stuff, I will say that we do have very cool stuff planned. Do you guys have more licenses, I'm assuming? I will say that we have very cool stuff planned without giving anything away. He just winked at me, folks. Yes, extremely cool stuff that we're really excited about. And like I said, you know, I did Heist, and I was like, wow, I really feel proud of that. And, you know, what are we ever going to do to top that? And then we did Weird Al, and I'm just blown away at the talent of this team to put together something this batshit crazy and fun. Well, and I will give you guys credit, too, speaking of heist. Like, you know, from heist to Weird Al, that was a pretty short turnaround time, right? Yeah, yeah. We spent, like, I spent another six months or so. We needed to finish up the wizard mode, which is a very, very, it's like a whole other game in heist once you get to the wizard mode. Because you play through six more new complete modes, stages to get through that wizard mode. and uh so we had to spend some more time developing that and then we basically dove headfirst into uh this game once we finally got the license to it all locked up and so it's been about a year in development yeah no it's it's very cool and like you said you know at least you know once again for the naysayers at least you know multimorphic they you know they deliver on their promises right you make games you you get them out the door and you get them to the customers. Yep. People who have ever given us money, they've gotten a product from it. And you know, we, we've, and this is the one thing, you know, that Jerry talked about that we have like the best customer loyalty program in the entire industry. Right. Because everybody else's business model is basically built around, you know, sell your game. And then in the future, you're going to sell that game to pay for the next game or whatever else to get rid of them and everything. And we're like, basically like, Hey, We want this thing that you bought to continue to increase in value and become better and better over time. We've done a bunch of free updates. There's been a bunch of stuff like the Twitch Connect features, the USB Bluetooth headphone support, the online head-to-head get racing. Cosmic Kart Racing Career Mode was a completely free, entirely new gameplay system that was built for Cosmic Kart Racing. these these things have been continually hitting the the the multi-morphic discord once i realized that it had been a month without us announcing a new thing and they were kind of worried about us to check in on us to see how we were doing because we were had been on that pace for like about once a month or so there had been something new that had uh come out for the system and so So I love that. I love that, you know, we keep delivering this stuff and making it better. And I'm the kind of person that doesn't like to sell it. I don't want to get rid of my stuff. And so I love having this thing that keeps getting better and better with time. No, very exciting. And everything, once again, you guys are doing there, I'm excited to see it. And once again, I'm really excited to see you in person at TPF. And I want to flip this game. Like I said, there's nothing more that I want to do down at TPF than to play some Weird Al. So when you step up to this game, what I want you to do is I want you to launch the ball, and I want you to try to get the super-duper skill shot. Super-duper skill shot. Of course that's what it's called. That makes sense. Weird Al. Yeah. So the skill shot is we've got – I don't know if anybody's ever done this before. Probably. Somebody did it in the 30s. Nicholas Baldridge is listening to this show and screaming his head off that some of them try to take credit for or whatever but we've got a spiral ramp that goes up up the play field right you shoot up a spiral and that spiral leads to our mezzanine area well actually it could lead to a bunch of different things because in our accordion bridge up there we've got a diverter that can send the ball all towards the different directions but it comes up to the the cafeteria area and if you if you hit a cafeteria loop and then immediately shoot it into the camera lock across the play field all the way over to our physical camera lock uh you get the super duper skill shot and like every time that's been made it's like the most satisfying thing in the world it's just like i just love watching people hit that and just just throwing their hands up in the air and celebrating because it's so so much fun to hit that oh that's awesome that is that just sounds exciting but uh yeah like i said i cannot wait and i think everyone should um so um so you're obviously going to be with uh multimorphic here and you're just going to continue chugging along right supporting the game making new games and pretty much i've been doing that and and uh doing my my freelance stuff i teach on the side do it all i'm just busy all the time so you're you're a world-renowned pinball creator what are you doing with these odd jobs Oh, man. Who's getting rich in pinball? But I love doing it, and I love this other stuff, and I've just got, you know, I teach at a technical college here on the weekend or one day a week, and then I've got my freelance animation stuff. I've always had my foot in a lot of different things. Jesus, what are you not good at, Stephen? Oh, there's so many things. If we want, I could go get my wife out of the, putting the kids to sleep. She could talk for the next 30 minutes about all the stuff. Yeah, no, never, never get the wives in on that conversation. That'll never end well. Will you, will you raise a glass with me at PPF? Yeah, definitely. Okay. Maybe a Mountain Dew or something. Whatever. That's perfect. I love it. Stephen Silver thank you so much for all your insights is there anything else you want to plug in anything else you want to talk about well I mean there's some development things that I think are kind of interesting we had a couple of like that spiral up ramp that's one of those things like you've got an idea of something that sounds cool but you don't know if it's going to work because you have to have everything working right from a transition from a regular ramp to a wire form ramp to pull off this spiral. So like one thing that we had on there is we actually designed in like a magnet accelerator on that ramp when we started and because we we weren sure if it was going to make it every time we wanted something that would is that like the the getaway thing is that what they're talking about yeah so we've got something like if you've ever played cosmic car racing cosmic car racing has it on the right ramp where we've got three magnets in a row where if you hit the ramp uh the magnets will accelerate up the ramp and you can actually catch the ball and lock them on the different magnets between them right and we've actually got a magnet accelerator splasher burger on the right far right ramp that can catch the ball and we can we can launch the ball to it and drop it do a bunch of stuff but we've put an accelerator on the um on this spiral but it was just clear from the shot one because again there's a lot of stuff about the geometry and how the ball's changing directions and whether or not it'll have enough stuff. And I was like thinking, man, it's really close to that upper flipper. I think we can do it. And me, I mean, I'm the resident dum-dum, so I don't know anything about the math behind it or anything. Certified dum-dum, Stephen? Yeah, certified dum-dum, yeah. But we got it in there the first time we started flipping it. It was just clear we didn't have that magnet hooked up, and this thing was just flying up that spiral. And it's only gotten better with time. Like now the production models are even smoother than the pre-production models that we had. So I'm really happy. That was the easiest thing to cost cut on this game the whole time. Just like, yeah, okay, let's get rid of that. Let's keep all the other cool shit and make it happen. And that's one thing about developing these games that I've been, you know, really lucky on is that we've really focused on just, like I said, throwing everything we can at these games to make them as fun and interesting as possible. and that, you know, I don't see how my crane and heist would have gotten past the bomb in other situations, right, or the stuff. And so we've, you know, we were able to do just so much in this game. And I'm really proud of everybody on the team. TJ Weaver is my mechanical engineer, and he's just brilliant, I think. Michael Ocean and Greg Goldey have been killing it on software. Greg worked with me a lot on Heist, and Michael Ocean has been just huge for this game because he's also a Weird Al Mega fan and has basically given us a ton of the great ideas we had in this game. And Jerry has come in, and Jerry does really excellent light shows and a lot of the other stuff with that. And so, yeah, the team has just been killing it on this game. And Rory Cernuda has been helping me out on the graphics this time because it's a different type of game. Like, Heist was basically a bunch of video animations that I did. I did all the animations, basically, in Heist, almost all the way through. But this one, we're doing it differently. We're doing half, like, Unity animations and world building. And so I'm physically animating a bunch of the stuff. but then Rory's coming in and doing the other half. So just real proud of how the game looks. And then Scott Benisi came in and started working on the sound package. And the one thing we said is we always said Scott was doing audio and everybody interpreted is saying he's doing music and everything. And he has written music for this game, but there's so much that goes into an audio package that you don't beyond music. And this game sounds awesome. Like every time I hear all the sound effects and everything that Scott's put in and how it feels. It is just goofy, silly fun from the time you press the start button. I think he did an excellent job on it. How did Scott and Nisi get hooked up with this project? Scott has been like Michael Ocean and Scott and Nisi, these guys, they call themselves Jerry's Kids. All these people around the pinball hobby came in to the hobby because they all got tied into P-Rock Project. and doing stuff, Michael Ocean wrote Skeleton Game, which was the backbone for so many different games that were built. Like TNA was built off of Skeleton Game, and a bunch of American pinball stuff may have been built off of Skeleton Game. But it was basically this low-level system that all these games were built off of. And Scott came in and has been working with Jerry for years on his homebrew projects and all sorts of other stuff. They've all been friends for a long time and everything. and Scott finished up his stuff with Spooky and was just talking with Jerry and Jerry convinced him to come on over and start working on this stuff and he's been awesome to work with. The dude is brilliant. He's got a ton of great ideas and I'm always like cracking up. He's sending sound samples over and stuff like that. We're looking at them in the game and seeing how it all has come together. Oh, that's great. That is awesome. And I'm so glad that you gave the shout-outs to all those people because, you know, it's just like any pinball game where it's always like, you know, we know the designer maybe or, you know, everyone knows who Gary Stern is. But, you know, there's so many people that work at these companies. Yeah. Well, and also, last thing, and I can't believe I missed it, Matt Andrews was our artist. Matt Andrews was the artist on TNA. He did an excellent job. But Matt Andrews has done a ton of art in the pinball world that just never got seen. a lot of like early J-pop stuff, a lot of stuff, but he's an extremely talented artist. And I think like, I love the art packages we have on this game so much. And he did everything that we've got on the game and we use the same assets in the game on the screen. So it's these awesome, like animated painted worlds that you're going into whenever you're visiting all these exhibits in the museum and experiencing all these songs with his stuff. And so I got to give Matt a shout out. And I'm really, really glad that a lot more people are getting to see the full range of Matt Andrews' work. He does such an excellent job. Very cool. Anyone else you want to thank or give a shout out to so we don't forget? Bowen and Colin were great helping us out on rules and giving us feedback on it and are still helping us evolve it as we're going along. and I had a couple of people, Frank Surpass and Will Bales, were two Weird Al super fans we reached out to. Frank was my buddy from college. He's the biggest Weird Al fan I know. And I was like, I need you to come in and help me with these call-out scripts and everything else. And we ended up with so many of them that we've got probably the most call-outs in the game ever by a single answer. And Frank played a big role in that. So I was pretty happy about that. very cool very cool well this has been awesome Steven I want to thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing everything about the P3 system from Multimorphic Pinball excellent no this like I said this was great and once again looking forward to seeing you in a couple weeks here and no it's been great man yeah hopefully I'll be the guy in the Hawaiian shirt if I can figure out how to find one. The guy in the Hawaiian shirt. How's the Carl Weathers down by you guys now? Oh, it sucks right now. Kevin from Buffalo has been looking at the Carl Weathers going, this is not cool, guys. I'm coming to Texas to get away from this. No shit, because that's the thing. We haven't had a lot of snow, which is great, so it's been mild that way, but today it's like 33 degrees, the wind's whipping around, and it feels like it's 20 degrees, and it sucks, and I'm like, oh, I'm going to Texas in two weeks. This is awesome. Yeah, you know, well, hopefully we'll quit acting like we're some other state by then. We'll get back to our normal, hot all the time nature. Please do. And, yeah, so, like I said, I'll be flying in Thursday for all you gents and ladies. I will be staying with my cousin that night, but Friday during the day I'm coming to TPF, and I'm spending the night there Friday and Saturday as well. so Friday bring in your cousin no no no so my cousin and her husband live in they live about 20 minutes from Frisco uh-huh so um you know I only see her like once a year so I'm gonna fly in they're gonna pick me up we're gonna go have dinner whatever we're gonna I'm gonna spend the night with them and then Friday I'm gonna come and hang out with everyone so I gotcha yeah don't want your cousin to see your real friend yeah yeah well that's a good idea good plan Friday night and Saturday night I'm staying with some tribe members because I just booked these tickets like two weeks ago yeah I heard you you talked simply out of it but you stole his tickets exactly so I booked the plane ticket and I'm like there's no way I'm getting a hotel because it's all booked obviously so no I got some tribe members that offered to have me stay and then my wife says do they know that you snore and I'm like they will yeah jerry discovered my snoring at the last uh at the last cpf i'm glad i got the invite back this time you know i have a uh one of my old bosses years ago we'd we go to these conventions and stuff and sometimes i'd bunk with him and and he would say he who falls asleep first sleeps best yeah basically i said don't worry i only snore when i get really super tired it's Not like this convention where I'm on my feet and walking around crazy for 15 hours a day is not going to make me super tired. So you're good. Yeah. And for me, it's, you know, if I have too much to drink, which who knows what's going to happen. But, no, I think it's going to be great. And the Twippies are going to be fun. And, you know, what do you want to see there that's not multi-morphic related? Oh, let's see. That guy has that elf homebrews. Oh, yeah. I saw that. Homebrews. That looks really cool. Yeah, like all the homebrews are cool and the other stuff. I mean, but, like, I think most everybody else is, from what I heard, like, all the rest of the new machines, there's not anything else that's really going to be new there. But I always say, like, it's kind of tough to play these new machines at a big show like TPF because there's a line and then you've got to wait and everything. But like I said, if you come by and you see a line on the machine, just keep coming back and checking because, you know, people, they'll free up at some point. You'll be able to play them. Sure. Sure. No, very cool. All right. Well, we're, we're at about an hour here, Steven. So, Oh, well, you know, like I said, we, we were getting away from the two hour episodes. We don't want to talk about like, uh, like snacks or anything for the next. Yeah. What was, what did Zach always say? Oh, they're talking about what they saw on TV last night. but what the segment was yeah what did you watch on tv last week so no it's it's been good this this new format like i said it's been great once again guys if you want to send feedback form is pinball gmail.com text me 414-828-3739 i do appreciate the feedback i'll be once again doing more of these shows doing solo shows so i'll be giving those shout outs i'm thinking about a couple new tribe members for April here, so send me your why you should be a tribe member. And Stephen Silver and I will go through those and laugh at you and tell you why you can't be a tribe member. I'm just kidding. I was going to say, if you get any feedback, only share the good feedback for me because I'm a friar. I don't want to... No, no, guys, send me some feedback. Tell me how Stephen Silver was. I think he did great this episode. I'm really glad that we got to work more about Multimorphic because it has been a slug for you guys, right? Yeah, it's been a long... It's been a long journey, but yeah, like I said, I think we've done things the right way, and we're proud of the stuff that we've done. And I'm responsible for part of two games on the system. I have a system that has like 15 games. There's so many people involved in this system that have been working their butts off for years and years and years, and it's nice to see us finally have this thing that gets this wide recognition. Well, I'm excited to see you guys finally compete with the big dogs, right? Because now you guys had one of your first, it's a day one sellout, which is amazing. It's got to feel great. Yeah, and like I said, it's still, like I said, we'll build off this game. The next game, we'll build up its ball base even more after that. And like I said, as this system starts growing with it being a platform, you know, it starts to feed itself over time. More people see it as an attractive. I've heard a ton of people reaching out, being interested in developing third-party games for the platform now because they see the wider acceptance of it and everything. So that's what I'm super excited about. I love seeing third-party games being made on these things and people doing all sorts of cool stuff with it. And Nicholas Baldridge is just a machine, man. That guy has been cranking out tons and tons of games for the system. And some of them, like I said, are reasons people have bought the system. I've heard multiple people say, like, oh, man, I played Ranger into Ruins and I had to have this system because it's definitely something I love so much. So it's just awesome. And I can't wait to see the rest of the stuff. I see these guys in the Discord talking about their games that they're making and building. And so there's a ton of cool stuff coming. and if you want to know more there's a there's a P3 discord you can join where everybody in there is cool don't join if you're a dick we're all cool people and so but everybody having a good time and you know sharing information so if you're interested in developing a game there's tons of people in there that all have experience working with Unity and working with this system and they love helping out other people all trying to go on the same journey well if you guys have the Futurama license I will buy it day one alright I will tell I will tell Jerry we have one sale can I reserve that spot now officially on the 4 minutes football podcast episode 115 Drew is reserving his first spot for Futurama first spot for Futurama I will have to I will ask Jerry what our what our Ryan Policky is Okay, well you tell them You get Futurama, I will buy the first one off the line Nice Alright, I'll let them know Alright Steven, well thank you so much for your time Thank you for joining us here On the 4-Minute Football Podcast Thank you for being an awesome friend Go, go, Johnny, go, go, Johnny B. Go. There she was, just a-walkin' down the street, singin' Do-a-di-di-di-di-dum-di-di-do. Slappin' her fingers and jumpin' her feet, singin' Do-a-di-di-di-di-dum-di-di-do. She looked good, she looked fine, she looked good, she looked fine, And I nearly lost my mind I love that curly water Oh, Boston, you're my home It's the Honky Tonk Woman Give me, give me, give me The Honky Tonk Blue All right. Girl, I want to be with you all of the time All day and all of the night All day and all of the night All day and all of the night This indecision bugging me You don't want me, set me free Exactly whom I'm supposed to be Which clothes even fit me Come on and let me know You like cool little should I blow Let me go on Like a blister in the sun Let me go on Big hands I know you're the one Thank you.