All right. We are back. Ladies and gentlemen, we are here at the Electric Backcast Studios in the new studio. The new studio. We keep moving to a new studio all the time. This is episode 33. Same coordinates, different studio. I'm going to write it down here with my nice pen. Your parents got me for Christmas. It's a very nice pen. I love it. I have to do the spiel. Okay, let's do it. From the low desert of the great American Southwest, the undefeated heavyweight, twippy champs of podcasting. You got two. No one has won more twippy awards as a team. Oh, okay. As a team. Awesome. No, for podcasting. Oh, even more specifically. Like Stern's won a ton as a team. Their names are Rachel and Kale. We have the most, actually across the board, not just like Academy Awards too, I think we're close to the top. We have two-thirds of the people who have won Podcaster of the Year. That's true. Let's talk about what's coming up in the back. Any new games? You're damn straight. Yes. Pokemon Pro is maybe already built, being built. And shipped. And I don't think I told you, but Mark got the request for a final payment for Beetlejuice. Holy crap. I think Beetlejuice and Pokemon are going to hit the floor at almost the same time, which is going to be fantastic for earnings experiments. Everybody line up. Yes. With your tokens, not just lines. We have the earnings report for January. Okay. And we have the mailbag. Yeah. We also have tournaments every Tuesday at 630. We just finished our finals. Yep. This was the first series of the year, 2026. Every six weeks we have a finals, and that's where the top 24 players from the past six weeks get together and find out who is the king or queen of the bat. You have some very cool badges everybody gets. What would you call those? Medals. Medals, like necklaces. for one. Like, you know, the necklaces they hand out at the Olympics. Yes. That kind of necklace. Okay. Should we go right into these questions? Yeah, let's do it. Let's start off with a buyer. Oh, I wanted to mention, okay, first of all, Marco Specialties. Oh, yeah. EBA 150. Yeah, if you make an order at Marco Specialties, team up with your friends if you need to get a whole bunch of stuff and get free shipping for any order over $150, including $150, use code EBA150 at checkout and you'll get free shipping. Yeah. And I wanted to bring this up to you. In the U.S. Thank you so much for that. And thank you, Marco Specialties. I wanted to bring this up. I just saw this this morning. I'm excited about this because I love this game. Everybody loves this game. Keith Elwin and Stern teamed up to make Jaws Pinball Machine. yeah you know about that part uh there are jaws quests and the jaws leaderboard for stern insider connected but look at this you get a feeding frenzy badge it looks like uh 10 million in the feeding frenzy okay jaws multiball too you get a badge oh look at that badge that looks like a sheriff i want to be the sheriff right search all you have to do is start search multiball Okay. Start JAWS Multiball 2. You get some badges. So go check that out. Log in. If you don't have an account, create one. Stern Insider Connected. That's a good time. Any arcade. Any arcade. Put a leaderboard up. It'll make you more money. I think we're ready to get into this. We're going to hold off on the earnings report until closer to the end. Okay. That's how you keep people in here to watch the commercials. We don't have any commercials. That's right. They're embedded. um this is from death keeper via discord and if you want to join our discord head over to electricbatarcade.com click the podcast link and there's a there's a massive link to join our discord so it's a lot of fun a bunch of people joined last night from the stream yeah oh i forgot to mention that if you want to see last night's stream it's on youtube right now yep you just uploaded it about 10 minutes ago yeah we stream it on twitch and then upload it to YouTube for archival purposes. It's a great learning tool. Yes. This is from Death Keeper via Discord. We're reaching deep into our magical mailbag for these messages. Death Keeper says, great podcast. You must have listened to the last podcast. I've gotten into the hobby and own three machines now. Dog soccer. What is that known as? World Cup soccer. Not to be confused with World Cup. Right. Or Striker Extreme. Or Striker Extreme. He has a dog soccer and two lethal weapon threes. And it says, comma, don't ask. Yeah, there's no need to have two of that game unless one's for parts. He said don't ask. Oh, I'm not asking. You got comments. I'm commenting. You got comments from Death Keeper. I want to spend a year building my personal collection and learning how to work and fix on machines while also picking up good deals to start a route or business one day down the line. A big hesitation I have is there are three big pinball businesses around me. The biggest, consisting of around 40 machines, go the coin drop route and usually charge $1 per play on moderns and 50 cents on old EMs. the other two are about 20 to 30th machines each and these go to pay one price all day route um that's like the free play model it's not what they call it it's not free play no well the games are on free play but you pay the enter the 10 bucks yeah or 20 bucks or what are you he's saying eight for one that's incredibly cheap yeah so one of these venues charges 12 for all day play and one charges eight bucks holy crap wow go go there i'm curious to what those machines look like that's that's it we're going to get into that right okay um and then what what does he say here um all day play for 12 seems like such a crazy good deal it is on modern sterns and at eight dollars makes me surprised they they're even profitable we're all surprised we'll talk about that yeah i've heard some places charge 15 to 20 for all day so these two prices are a great deal i think they're i've i've it averages around 15 to 20 is from what i understand talking to people yep 15 to 20 seems pretty standard for all day play wedgehead i don't know if they increased the price but i think when we talked to him there's around like 15 bucks i don't know off the top whatever it was it was a good deal um so death keeper his question is his or her i I don't know. Deathkeeper sounds like a good name for me. You would be Deathkeeper. Deathkeeper's question is, can you even compete in the market that flooded? Is it better to just try routing at random bars, bowling alleys, et cetera, perhaps even putting my machines in their business? Can you realistically run a business and compete with $8 to $12 all-day play any day they are open on a coin drop business? Or do you think it forces people to open one to go all-day play as well? Let me summarize this. There are some businesses in this person's vicinity that have $8 to $12 all-day free play. That's what it sounds like. And this person wants to know if it's possible to compete with that by either opening their own all-day free play arcade or by routing machines in bars and other businesses. I would suggest that those two things are not the same. Those are not direct competitors. Having a couple of games in a bar is completely different than running an arcade. I would strongly, strongly recommend the former, especially if this is your entry into operating machines. Running an arcade is no joke. There's a lot of other business things that you have to take into consideration. It's a lot higher, just a much higher risk and investment to start it up. However, if you're going to spend a year acquiring some machines and working on them and learning some things about those machines, then I would say that you're much more likely to be ready to throw some three, four games in a bar. And the people that are going to play your games in a bar are not necessarily the same people that are going to go all day to a free play arcade. The people that I've seen that tend to gravitate towards all-day free play models are like big families, and there's a lot of action on those machines. They're going to require a lot more maintenance than people who are paying per game. There's a certain psychology that happens whenever you're dropping those coins that you're trying to make this game last. You as the player value the game higher than if it is on free play and you can just walk away from it. Oh, that wasn't very fun. Walk away. You're on ball one, ball two. We've all seen this. So I would suggest acquire machines, learn about said machines, operate them in somebody else's business. That's a good way to start. Start. I would start. I would start. That's the easiest way to start. That's the least amount of friction. Right. Wouldn't you say? Yeah. And costs. Right. You're going to need to be much more advanced in both your collecting and your repairing to open like a full on arcade. That's a lot more. One other thing, as far as competition with arcades, we have – you know, when I talk to people that are not from Arizona, a lot of them think we don't have competition because we have these gigantic tournaments. And they're thinking like, well, everybody in Arizona must go to your tournaments. That's not the case. There's more than one tournament per day. Right, but there are a ton of fabulous, fabulous pinball-centric arcades in Arizona, just in the Valley, in our area. And I don't consider any of them competition. I don't think, and we know all these owners, and I don't think they consider anybody competition because every, we've been to pinball-centric arcades across the nation, and every one is unique. Like, you know, I don't feel like any of them are competing with each other. I view it as like one large octopus type mass in the middle. The more there are, the further out the tentacles reach. And so if some people that go to an arcade that's maybe five miles to the east of us find out that they love pinball from somebody else's arcade, they're going to come over and check out ours and vice versa. So if you like the bigger your mass is, just like regular physics, the gravity, like more and more people are coming in towards that. And yeah. And more on this point of being unique. It is so easy to be unique in the pinball arcade space because you have a huge selection of machines to choose from. if you're just going to have you know like 12 sterns and then the other guy's going to have 12 sterns you're probably going to have the same 12 sterns you have to mix in some classics uh mix in some other brands and flavors and make sure your personal vibe shines through right right exactly exactly and make sure your games are well taken care of and try and help all the other arcades also keep their games well taken care of because one thing that we have noticed is if people go to a place, and not necessarily anything local, but if they go somewhere and have a poor experience with broken machines and all that, it turns them off, and then that's kind of a downfall of an entire pinball scene, right? Rising tide raises all boats. Right, and pinball people talk to each other. Yeah. And so once you're like, oh, you know, this and that didn't work on their machines, all their machines at least have one thing broken with them, that is going to spread and people are going to go to the place that has better operating machines, no matter what the cost. Agreed. There you go. I hope we answered your question, Death Keeper. If you have any more questions, just hang out on the Discord and ask us. This is from DaCheesecake. Pronounced like DaCheesecake. Yeah, on Discord. It's cool. is spelled d-a-c-h-e-z-k-a-k-e okay some people call me the cheesecake people call you all kind of things but here's the cheesecake uh if you were being tasked with rebuilding the bat from the ground up during the updates to the shopping center what arcade specific adjustments would you want for the space more generally if you were designing consulting for a new arcade of the same size, what sort of things would you like in the engineering and design of the space that aren't typical in a standard retail building? Power. That's it. Good power. That's the main thing. It's just having, well, and having your circuits distributed in a way that works for having lots of different machines. The way that standard retail spaces power is designed is that there's usually like they think like, oh, well, the wall outlets are going to need, you know, one circuit. The lighting is a different circuit. And there's not enough thought put into. I mean, nobody except an arcade and a few other types of businesses need the amount of power and circuits that an arcade needs. So that's the number one thing that you'll hear from all arcade owners is that they have to come in and add circuits to the wall. The other thing that I would do specifically for Electric Bat is that our middle room, which was our second expansion out of three, is slightly narrower than I would like. There's plenty of room during regular hours. You have machines on both sides for people who have not been there. But during tournaments that middle room just gets a little friendly no matter how you kind of pace everything Friendly is a really nice way of saying get a little crowded So I would like – think about how many people are going to be in your space, kind of peak operating hours designed for that. That was something – actually whenever – sorry, I see you're about to say something. No, I'll remember it. Okay. whenever we were building the big room um people tried to convince us to drop power into the center put machines all up and down the center we wouldn't there's no way we could do that you knew that i knew that at the time pinball swami predicted that we couldn't because people wanted us they were like oh look at all this room just fill it full of machines and you were like but what about the people where do you put the people machines are no good without the people the people are important oh that bird just caught my eye look at that we have we're out arizona we got the door open it's beautiful it's 75 degrees right now 75 and sunny um but you know i always feel like when when somebody asks this question they're expecting us to go oh i want the the tvs above each machine showing the play field um we're not we're not like into that you know that's funny you bring that up somebody came up to me the other night at a tournament um and was just talking to me that you know they went to one of the other places that does have the tvs above the games And this person was kind of new to pinball. And they're like, you know, I don't think I like that because this is somebody who's trying to learn how to play pinball. They don't necessarily want the entire bar as an audience to them, like double flipping, flailing, draining. Like that's an extra pressure. I never even thought about that aspect of it. Yeah. I mean, imagine you're learning a new skill. Do you want that to be broadcast while you're doing it? Like, oh, here's right. Look at look at Rachel. She clearly has no idea what's going on, and we can all have beers and watch her drain, drain, drain. For me, the one reason I don't like those monitors above the games, that's not a vintage feel. It's cool that you can see what's going on, especially in a tournament, but it doesn't have that vintage feel. When we were kids, we never went to an arcade and had a pinball machine set up with a monitor. My biggest issue with it, I have yet... Except for Dragon Slayer. That was cool. My biggest issue with it, I have yet to go to an arcade that has deployed that technique of putting the monitors above playfields where it looked good. They're always, you know, people are moving machines. So now the play field is out of frame. It gets out of focus. Sometimes they don't even work. Yeah, and you got like a couple of cameras off and then they got weird splashes. Right. Imagine if we had to maintain 62 monitors and cameras. 65. 65. No, I don't. No. We're not down with all that. Nope. But basically, you know, if we were building something from the ground up, I don't think we would do anything like extraordinary or revolutionary. We just need a room with good power. Room with good power. A bathroom. Yeah, another bathroom. I mean, just super basic things, not the things people are thinking of. But power is your primary concern. The Cheesecake has another question. When you update an older classic to use modern boards, what do you do, if anything, to the female connectors on the original wiring? What has the progression of the connectors and wire insulation quality in pinball been like? In your eyes, are things getting better or worse? And then in parentheses, you've mentioned recent issues with lighting-related connectors on JJPs and overall metal quality being worse. What do you want to tackle first, the connectors? Connectors. So like if I'm putting an Altec board in a bally, is what that's referring to, I redo the female connectors as well. And I will often redo the female connectors on classic games before, you know, even if I don't need to replace those boards. I don't replace those boards yet because those female connectors do get a little bit old. And, you know, I use the the Triforcon update. I update all of the the connectors and make that a little more crisp. I think that's worth doing. Thank you for doing that. It's not always like your arms get sore because, you know, I'm small. I'm like way up here trying to crimp everything and do it. So I kind of tackle it over a couple of days. Yeah. But yeah, I think that's definitely worth doing. It can it can really help out. You may think that you have a board issue, but it turns out you have a connector issue. So do that first. Yeah. Good. And on the JJP connector issue, all from Godfather, what was the first JJP we bought was Godfather, and then we had the, what's the blue one? Avatar. Elton John was between. Elton John, Avatar, and then what was the – We also had dialed in, but dialed in what – Not the ones we purchased. Oh. Did we have – Toy Story was there. What was the last – And we didn't get a – What was the most recent one? Harry Potter. Elton John. No, though, we had. Avatar. Avatar. Okay. Oh, that's right. Game Room Goodies let us borrow one. Mm-hmm. Okay. Every single one of those games, the consistent issue was the light boards having issues, getting locked on, not working, and then a big screen splashes up on the display saying – Red, big red. Like light board number five, something or other. It's been a consistent issue, and it's kind of made us drop JJPs. but jack of jersey jack pinball the jersey jack ralphie ralph even mentioned this on a podcast i can probably talk about publicly jack called ralph asking if he thought we would mind putting a harry potter in the electric back because he says he field tested he thinks he he thinks it could happen bring it let's do it i would love i want to i want to see it yeah and also if there are any issues i would love to help them work them out yes because we would like to have because machines from right across the manufacturing spectrum this light board we want them all to work for sure and this this light board issue with jjps it wasn't just us i've heard many operators talk about it uh jangus talks about it so it even happens overseas even in europe even in Europe. So that's the deal with that. When we talk about medical issues are abundant in the United States. Overall metal quality being worse, yes. It's either worse or the pinball industry doesn't spend the extra money to get good metal. It's certainly good metal got more expensive. Yes. And the only reason we know, I mean, we operate so many damn machines. metal is constantly snapping like on that mando uh neck yesterday i think we're tired of uh replacing that we're just gonna sell the whole machine because you want to buy a mandalorian yeah real cheap with a topper um yeah now they i don't know if the issue and you i mean you're not gonna get them to admit this i don't know if the issue is they don't want to spend money on the good metal or if just all metal is garbage nowadays but like i mean we have williams parts that are just kicking ass after decades and decades of use, and then, like, Stern stuff will just snap in half. My guess is that it's kind of a combination of those things. Like, you have your part suppliers that are making this style quantity of material, and this is the metal that is being sourced for that. You know, I should ask Gomez about that when we interviewed him on the roundtable. Let's send him an email. I mean, he would have insight on that. He's, you know, some of the games we're talking about that last and have incredible metal are, you know, he designed. Yeah, and I really think that just like the base level of metal just got crappier in the past few years. Especially when tariffs started. The tariffs. We noticed it when the tariffs happened. Many in 2016. At Marco Specialties. Yep. So I think that the base level, like regular metal, is of a certain quality, and you have to pay a specific premium and go through a bunch of hoops to get that upgraded metal. So I don't think it's necessarily somebody like cheaping out. It's somebody not going through like 15 extra hoops to make a difference for us who are going to notice it. Yeah, right. It's nothing nefarious by any means. Cool. Oh, we have another question from Deathkeeper. what makes a pin a tournament used pin this is a good question is there uh viability consistency requirements something beyond just getting the high score on any machine yes how do you run pinball tournaments so basically what makes a pin a a good pin for tournaments and then how do we run tournaments how you do that okay well first question a good pin for tournaments has to have code that works. You can't have unreliable code. If there's any chance that the code is going to cause the game to crash, just do weird stuff. For example, Galactic Tank Force. Galactic Tank Force was an example. Dune was an example. Looney Tunes, when we got that, was an example. We need code to be reliable. Any stern works. Even fresh out the box right off the line. Yeah, even if I have like 0.4 code, the game may not be there, but it's not going to crash. It's going to be the same for everybody. It's reliable, yep. That's really important. And I think the only games that we leave out of tournaments are for that reason because the code is weird. That's pretty much it for what game. It has to be a reliable game. So some of that may be on your side too, right? Like if you have – right now, Fishtails is in the back because we just kept having kind of a reset issue, not the normal reset issue. Anyway, we had some things with that particular copy of Fishtails. But, of course, everybody else's Fishtails are great. And ours will be fixed and back out soon. Yeah, and we don't mind games with balls stealing. That's not an issue. Yeah. We'll throw that in. If you can steal locks, that's fine. System 11s are good for that. All of that stuff. You just want it to be the same for everybody. How do you run tournaments? That's a big question. I'm not sure where to start with that. Some of the things that we specifically do to run tournaments that make them more enjoyable, and we've talked about this before, is that we have enough games that we have our games in banks of faster playing games and slower playing games. So every round of our tournament and we run our Tuesday Night League is a five round group match play. So you're going to play five different games with five different groups of people. And each round alternates between a fast playing bank and a slow playing bank. And that's because you don't want somebody to be playing firepower and someone to be playing jaws. and the firepower people have to wait an extra 35 minutes for the Jaws people to be finished. And that will happen. That will absolutely happen. So you really would like to have all of, I think, in a round for a match play style tournament, you want them to finish at about the same time. You want people to be having a similar experience, and they also probably want to go home and go to bed on time. So we've heard about some people's leagues and like, well, we don't know how, you know, how do we grow our league? You know, and you find out, well, their league night gets over at 1.30 in the morning on a Wednesday night. Well, nobody, like there's a very few dedicated pinball players that want to stay up that late. Nobody's going to come back. Our league Tuesday nights, it runs from 6.30 to about 9. You go home, you go to bed, go to work the next day. It's great. So I think valuing people's time is so important, and that maybe isn't like a technical answer to that. I think you can find – if you have specific technical, how do you run a knockout tournament? What do you do to submit to the IFPA? There's all kinds of different technical questions that I'm not going to cover the whole broad scope of running a tournament. But considering people's time and what you can do to make this enjoyable from start to finish, not a lot of like just sitting around, standing around. Yeah. And also we use MatchPlay. We do use MatchPlay. To run the tournaments and you should also. And if you're paid MatchPlay, it's worth it. Yeah, yeah. Give them some money. Give them some money, right? Yeah. I think we did it. Okay. Follow up if you have specific questions. If you haven't watched our streams, our tournament, our league night is six weeks. Six weeks long. And on that sixth week, after a regular Tuesday night, we do a finals. Yes. The Wednesday following that Tuesday. Rinse and repeat. Yep. And it's been working. Yeah, we found a combination that we think works. This is a question from our friend Pinball Hans. I love Hans. We love Hans. We love Hans. We'll see him. We always see him at Expo and what have you. he is you know he opened that hyper beer company in anaheim california yeah if you and he has he has more than just pinball machines so go go follow hyper beer company on instagram um he has a question if you're out there for indisc that's not that would be a good stop to make if oh absolutely go have a beer with hans um our wednesday league has 44 members and is growing that is fantastic there's a lot of people he just opened up this year that's a lot of people that's awesome uh anyway thanks again his question for the bat cast is streaming did you build your own rig or does it belong to one of your local members has streaming during league slash tournaments increased attendance um you should talk about this you want me to talk about that you're the stream guy i'm the stream guy i finally get to answer the question i'm an authority this is all kale i an authority on this particular subset of running a pit you You put in the hours We built our own stream Rig Rig. The whole rig. It takes a lot. I still am working on it, perfecting it after a while of doing it. The funny thing is I think like a lot of people, we started streaming during COVID because everybody stuck at home. And we had three little web cameras and and that's how we started our Twitch channel. And people got into it and liked it. And we were like freaking out when four people were watching us. We have seven people. We're hanging out with like seven people today. We and then when we hosted the Arizona State Championship, we were like, we need to up our game. So we reached out to a lot of people in streaming, Backhand Pinball, Mark Pattenod, Carl, Tom Graff, Matthew, Rowbottom. We got information from all, Jamie, Virtual, right? Jamie Virtual, JBS show on YouTube. uh we reached out to all of them took all of their knowledge and help and and expertise built a mobile rig that is a wireless rig and it man it is expensive it takes a lot the learning curve is steep setting everything up properly um but do uh i think it's worth it oh no no i i was like while i was looking at this question has it increased attendance i don't know it's kind of like the old thing in advertising you know when you spend money on a billboard or well you spend how do you know if it works yeah how do you there's no analytics you know um has it increased attendance i don't know but it's fun it's super fun fun yeah i would say that more more people know about electric vats so maybe if they're because of the stream maybe if they're coming to Arizona because it's 75 degrees in February, they're like, well, hey, we should stop by the bat. We'd see that a lot. Yeah. I don't know. We don't stream during, you know, league night. We can't. It's too many people. There's no room. We only do our finals. But what I have noticed is like, so all of, you know, of course, the finals are only the top 24 players. So, of course, you know, you have a hundred and something other people sitting at home. they all tune in and watch yeah and it kind of keeps the excitement going yeah like oh i want to i want to work hard and eventually get in the finals or just watching the technique of of these players a lot of new players are like oh cool a lot some people don't even know you can nudge yeah a machine i think you have to explain that just about every stream like what did they just do one thing that i think that streaming does much like this podcast is it really um broadens the our community because people even if you live in minnesota if you tune into the stream and you're you know you can be chatting with you and surge yeah um it really feels like oh we know we know him and then when we come to visit or they come to visit like it's it's a friendship building thing for sure i mean i think it's really fun right builds builds great community this podcast did more for that than really streaming streaming work too but so so many people uh you know they they travel to the arcade because they've watched the podcast and they they get to know us through here and get to know our personalities so they feel like they know us and and they come out to the arcade from all over the world actually to hang out that that's cool this will build attendance like just getting your personality out there you don't you don't have to have a podcast especially Hans because he's got such a great personality. He does, and he makes great videos on Instagram, Facebook. We need more Hans. He's doing the right thing. Yeah. And it's like actually getting your personality out there, I think that builds attendance more than anything. You don't have to spend $3,000 to $5,000 on streaming equipment. You'll lose so much hair over it. Yeah. Just make videos with your phone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just have a good time with it. But we love streaming. The fans love the streaming. You and Serge are very good at it. You guys are fantastic. Yeah, I love being in the commentary booth with Serge. It's a lot of fun. Thank you, Hans. I hope to see you soon. It wouldn't be an electric backcast without a question from Gutter Ghoul via Discord. Rachel needs to look into those Jell-O color injectors. You have some. I have some. You've actually done it. Yep. And they were cool. For people that don't know what that's referring to, I make like a thousand Jell-O shots a month for the bat bar. And the Jell-O shot injector thing didn't work out the first time. It looked cool. It looked cool. He's saying you could add roses or fishes or anything inside. You actually did do some rose stuff. Yeah, I did it. He's curious how the MIT hunt went. If people don't know, Rachel is – you actually won one year. What is it called, the MIT Mystery Hunt? It is called the MIT Mystery Hunt. The team I'm on is called Death and Mayhem. And this year we did not win. We did very well. I don't want to try and explain what the Mystery Hunt is here. It's crazy. Imagine the most difficult puzzle, figuring, detective, writing code. It's a lot. And there's thousands of them. Our team is well over 100 people. I don't know. It's big. It's complicated. It's a lot of fun if you like staying up for days doing really, really hard things. when Rachel does this mystery hunt, she's on her laptop for almost like 24 hours. I wake up and she's already on her laptop. She shows me some of these puzzles. They're not like your regular things you find in the back. It's not Sudoku. It's worth a Google. What I thought was interesting, this was the first year there was a disclaimer to please don't use AI to try to solve any of the puzzles. Yeah, and most of them were written with that in mind, knowing it gets harder and harder. If you win, your reward is that you are writing next year's hunt. And the people that wrote this year's hunt, you just have to write things in a way that AI is not going to be able to solve any part of that. And that's a puzzle in itself. There's another question. I don't know what's in the pinball audits, but I'm going to list some interesting things that would be cool to know. Now, of course, you don't have the pinball machines to check the audits, but I'm going to run through these bullet points and just have you guess what you think on some of these. Okay. What is the longest playing game in the bat? You want me to go? I think it's probably Godzilla or Batman 66. I was going to say Godzilla. Yeah. What is the shortest playing game? Depends on the day, but probably Strikes and Spares. Depends how the plans are aligned. Yeah. It depends, you know, right now. Charlie's Angels. Oh, Charlie's Angels. That's, yeah. Boom. Yeah. stern game that has the least amount of insider sign-ins man i don't think that exists because like the people that sign in sign in yeah right it's gonna be the same across the board unless it's a tournament but like yeah maybe aerosmith if people are in the insider connected they sign in and actually it would not be aerosmith because there aren't a lot of aerosmiths on location so when people play it, they do usually sign in so they can get those achievements. Right. And I have seen, you know, the Insider Connected, sometimes it's not always connected. And you get that, like, oh, it didn't log in sign. Yeah. There are people that will move to another game because it didn't log in. And then I teach them. And sometimes you get – I did that yesterday. Did you see that group that was like, hey, why won't Metallica Remastered log in? I just restarted it. I remind them, hey, this is just a big computer, and I showed them where the on-off button is, and they can restart it if I'm not around. Game that goes into ball search the most. That's a funny one. Oh, man. I feel like I have a definite answer for this, and I can't even think of it. You got an answer for that? Ball search. Jeez. That's going to be a game that gets a lot of stuck balls or something. I don't have an answer for that. I don't have it. Next. Okay. Ratio of plays during league night versus best other performing day or against the week if no other day comes close. Does that mean games people play by force versus games people play by choice? I think it does. Aerosmith. Okay. Yeah, that's a good one. Johnny Mnemonic. Yeah. Congo. Oh, yeah. That's a great game. I love, yeah, but. Game that has the most multiplayer plays on it. Better with friends. Black Knight Sword of Rage. And any classic. But I don't have data for classics like that. Also maybe like Scooby-Doo or Looney Tunes. Scooby-Doo. Or Evil Dead. Yeah. Because I noticed like when casuals show up. Like people who are like, oh, I didn't even know pinball was still a thing. A lot of people go to Scooby-Doo. I think because it's big and wide and green. And you can be a different guy. So people will play again and be like, oh, this time I'm Velma. Games with the longest time between plays. That's kind of the same question as by force or by choice. Okay, next question. best performing game during the day 6 a.m to 6 p.m and best performing game from 6 p.m to 6 a.m so what's a better morning game versus a better night game the daytime players that we have right now prefer star wars foo fighters jaws those are our three biggest played games during the daytime. And Godzilla, if you're getting into the afternoon, people that get off work around 2, 3 o'clock, there's a lot of Godzilla folks in that crowd. Nighttime, I think you see a lot more Evil Dead, Metallica. What else you got? Nighttime, you see the old dudes come in and sit on the classics. 8-Ball. Good luck getting on 8-Ball. between the hours of 10 p.m. and 11.30 p.m. Yep. That's funny. I like that question. And the final question, game that has the longest duration between switch hits, people stopping and catching their breath or reading the rules. Or just flailing. I would say like the latest dirt on the floor. Yeah, because nobody knows what to do yet. Because people are trying to figure out what to do. Yeah. Yeah, because that dude. And, you know, I love when I see people I've never seen before and they're getting in the pinball and they have the ball trapped up and they're they're down like reading the rules card yeah like i was like oh these people that means they're getting into it like now they're hooked so for you when you are playing a new game how often do you read the rule card zero i thought you were going to say that i never read the rules card i learned from other people yeah and that's just not because you're lazy it's just the way you learn I mean, maybe. Maybe it is. But I mean, just because you are a person that learns by communicating, I will read the card, but I'm only going to try and see like one thing on there. Multiball, for example. I'm not going to, or if it's a classic, like where's my bonus multiplier? some people that you know and then there's the surge who are if they read the rule card that's almost like cheating for them because they just want to look at the play field and um divine how it all works but some people like he i imagine is one of the people that can just or tie can look at the rule card and automatically just digest everything on it like okay i have a great understanding of the entirety of this game yep yep i just hang out with friends and they go hey you should really do this before you do that. And I'm like, oh, okay, thanks. And it kind of works. Yeah, it kind of works. Yeah. Um, can you believe we just went through all those questions? Oh, that's wow. We all caught up. Are you ready for your part? Oh, okay. Yeah. Um, before we go into our part, I just want, um, Abe flips. Oh yeah. He, he sent me a link and it was like a month or two ago and I just hadn't had a time to watch his new movie and I sat down with you and watched it. Yeah. You're like, Hey, come watch this with me. Holy crap. I thought we were going to be watching like Space Odyssey or something, but it was eight flips. This is hands down the best introduction to pinball skills, flipping skills, nudging skills that exists. And here's something that's – yes, yes, I agree wholeheartedly. The camera is – the shots are very clear and it's the same like across the video. So it's not like weird streaming style stuff. It's very clear what they are showing you. And everything that's not the pinball machine or the player's hands in a top-down view is blacked out. So there's not like a lot of distraction. Jeff Teolis does a fantastic job narrating it. He's reading a script. So it's very clear. There's no extraneous information. And this is all stuff that in theory I know. And I even like know kind of how to do, but just watching every single thing broken down so specifically made me think about it in ways that I haven't before. And I found myself at League on Tuesday night implementing a lot more like alley passes. it's not that I was never aware of it. I just didn't do them as much as I should. And also it was successful. So it was like, oh, this is cool. So yeah, I didn't expect, I didn't know anything about this beforehand I think most people did Somehow I didn And I was so impressed I thought it was because we all seen tutorial stuff This is not that The production quality is hands down second to none It is a great thing. And if you want to check this out, go to abflips.com. I think it costs about like 50 bucks. I think it's 40 euros. So that's like 47 USD. 100% worth it. 100% worth it. And this is really great. Like if you have a friend who wants to get into pinball, hook them up with this. Yeah. It's a good Christmas present, birthday present type thing. What do you get your pinball friend who has everything? Yeah. I'm always checking out on Reddit r slash pinball. I've seen more new people coming into it, making posts about I didn't even know nudging was a thing or allowed. and like this this movie explains everything and it's not like you know nudge when the ball does this do that i mean it's very specific if the ball is doing this then hit it like and it'll do a little slow-mo and it's so specific about you know 20 different types of nudges and when to use them and what's effective what's not uh do do this not this incredible i like the ones where they lifted the play field so you it was a top-down view of the tilt bob of what's happening and you know whenever you're doing the like a quick right left um shove versus just all the different things there's some great all the things are great yeah all the things are fantastic kudos abe flips yeah we like you that was really cool yes thank you for hooking up with us up with that video we are enjoying watching it and we're going to go back and watch it some more i'm going to be a better player. I'm going to get into finals this next time. What are we getting into right here? Oh, you want to do the earnings report? Let's do the earnings report because after this I have to get on an interview with Christopher Franchi. You're a busy guy. I know. The Roundtable is interviewing Christopher Franchi about all he does. I think he's a pinball artist. And that may be out before this. Who knows? All right. Let's start with number 10. So this is the earnings report for January. January. January. Hit me. What's the number 10 spot? Pulp Fiction. Still earning strong. Number nine, Dungeons and Dragons. Still a strong earner. Very good. Number eight, Evil Dead. And that is almost tied with number nine and number seven, which is Big Buck Hunter Reloaded. The video game. Shooting game. Yep. Number six, King Kong. Ooh. Number five, Stranger Things. Still enjoying the big bump from the new season of the show. Is that what's up? Yes. Because I remember, I think I recall a few months ago, it was like way down toward the bottom, right? Yes. This shows so much the importance of good IP. Yeah. Last night during finals, some people came in and I was explaining to them which games were being used. They were saying, what can I play? And I said, anything in these other two rooms is completely open. You don't even have to think about it. They said, oh, thank God Stranger Things is available. I'm like, I've never seen these people before, but they were so like, I've got to play Stranger Things. It's a great game. Great game. Earning well. Number four, Godzilla. Wow. Okay. That's interesting. It is interesting. Number three is Jaws. Oh, Jaws out-earned Godzilla. Jaws out-earned Godzilla. Was there anything new? Was there a code update? I can't remember. Well, this month we've got the – This month with all the Insider Connected stuff, it's going to crush. It is going to crush. But depending on whenever we get Pokemon and Beetlejuice, like how is this all going to affect the other thing? You know what I really wish? And when we were at Stern talking to Seth and the boys and, you know, they had a whole group of operators there giving them insight on their opinions on things. The one thing I asked for was the ability to put the like, you know, right now the worldwide leader board for JAWS is up. The ability to put that up on a screen. Yeah. People would freak out about that. People would freak out about that. Come on, guys. Let's make it happen. Yeah. A verified score. So verified scores on a screen. Absolutely. Number two. I think I know what this is. What should I guess? Yes. Star Wars. It is. It is. You know, you know, what's cool about Star Wars? You actually halfway through it, you came in and helped me out because you were so interested in the project. we both installed the Death Star fix. And that's very cool. When we were taking everything apart, we noticed how out of alignment the ramp It was more than an eighth of an inch not in alignment with the hole in the Death Star. Right. So there's a ramp in front of the Death Star and then and then there's a door that drops once you qualify the death star lock and then there's the death star well our ramp well actually maybe the death star was off i don't know but the ramp was not lined up even close with the death star i sent the photo to stern and they were like yeah we're aware that's an issue but we've never seen one that bad yeah you know and i was like well don't they use a template to to drill these holes it's like yeah they use a template they don't always drill them properly well and even still you've done that thing where if you're like you may be moving a lane guide or something you loosen the screw move it tighten the screw the screw is still in the same hole but there's that tiny bit of play in the actual uh bracket right so we're talking about a game of millimeters it is nanometers yeah or eighths of an inches so what rachel and i did was we took that whole ramp off filled in the holes drilled new holes and now it's like perfectly lined up with the death star and the reason i'm bringing this up if you are going through all the trouble adding this death star fix you got to take off so much stuff anyway you have to take off so much stuff see if you can move your ramp around a little bit see if it's not lined up perfectly uh so a little pro tip people love when they walk in the arcade and they see somebody with a drill a brand new play field a brand new game that really freaks people out yeah There was some pinball collectors that were like, I can't believe y'all do that. Why not? You want the game to play nice or do you want to look at it? This is a commercial piece of machinery. Come on, guys. Yeah. Play better. And there was a huge jump between Jaws and Star Wars. There's a 30% higher. Somebody is always on Star Wars. I know. People love this game. We empty out that coin box frequently. It is mind-blowing. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So are we moving on to number one? We're moving on to number one. I think I know what this is. How can it not be this? It's Papa Shot. Papa Shot. Papa Shot Elite. How close is Star Wars to Papa Shot in earnings? This month, they are about 20% different. So again, it's a very significant jump. Like one – first, Papa Shot is earning 20 percent more than Star Wars and Star Wars is earning 25 percent more than Jaws. Down – then it's like 10 percent and then it gets down to like 5 percent and much, much less. So there is a big difference at the top. But I also did another interesting comparison because I wanted to see how Star Wars is earned in its first three months compared to a couple other games that we had recently. I didn't think it was fair to compare games from like two years ago or even a year and a half ago just because the arcade itself has grown. So I wanted these numbers to be kind of apples to apples comparisons. So the first three months of earnings, first three full months of earnings, the very top two earners. Actually, I'll start. I did a list of four. So we've got a third place, a second place and a two tied for first place. What do you think the fourth place is? And what is this? These are games that we've gotten in the last year. Oh New games obviously I'll tell you Not X-Men I started after that So King Kong I was about to say King Kong Because that was after X-Men right And I didn't compare anything Prior to this So King Kong Then Slightly better than that Or you know somewhat better than that star wars okay and that's almost it's very very close to our top two which are evil dead and dungeons and dragons those two earned a lot their first three months um but star wars is right up there with it even though star wars is consistently in second place. It's a very good earner overall, which I think we're letting people know because we're emptying out the coin box so much. But I just think it's interesting to have that comparison because we have the Papa Shot doing so much better. And again, it's one basketball game versus 65 pinball machines. If you have a bunch of pinball machines, diversify, get a basketball game get a shooter get a redemption yeah they they pay the bills well they they pay the bills but they also get you you know they get a mixed group of people all excited about going to your location yeah because some people are going to prefer that one thing some people are going to prefer another thing and you want uh you want to have something for everybody one thing i've heard you mention you're surprised we're starting to see 20 bills in the pop a shot I didn't even know the bill acceptor took 20s until I opened it up, and I was like, there's several 20s and 10s, and who's dropping 20? There's not like a – you don't get like 25 games for $20. It's a straight dollar. But people are like, I love – and I think what's going on there is there's the virtual league that Papa Shot has set up. So you have teams of four people all playing their league games and like, OK, let's drop some 20s and get some practice games, get our league games in. Right. There are there are people we don't know in in a team that comes to the electric bat and plays. That's like the coolest thing. They start showing. I mean, we've gotten to know them. Yeah, but like they showed up like, hey, we're the we're the basketball team. And I was like, whoa, OK, we didn't even know like you guys existed. They found us on the internet, maybe on the Pop-A-Shot site. I'm not exactly sure, but they wanted to play Pop-A-Shot, and so they found that we had one. And that's where I love the Pop-A-Shot, Pop-A-Shot the company, not the game. They are very into building a culture, building a community. They're going to say building a cult. Same thing, right? Yeah. Yeah. So congratulations to Pop-A-Shot. And you know where people can get a Pop-A-Shot? Marco Specialties. You know what? I bet they could use that free shipping code. Oh, my God. I don't think it will apply to that. Try EBA 150 at checkout. Let us know what happens. Yeah. Actually, they prefer if you do want to pop a shot because it's a different arrangement that you go through sales at marcospecialties.com. But they might take $10 off your shipping. But they also – yeah, yeah, yeah. Mention us and they will also deliver and set up the game. this is huge because it it takes ikea on steroids it takes a while it's but it's more well built than ikea but it's the same process yeah uh right right it's all it's all flat it's all flat packed and all that stuff um yeah so get in touch with them if you would like a pop of shot they're gonna hook you up yeah man can't say enough nice things anything else going on uh shoot man i think you're about to interview franchi do you want to be on the interview with franchi i think you should be i was gonna make some candles today i saw you got candle making stuff and soap making stuff is there a crossover do people do the same thing well i think i think you can i don't know man both involve fire you know it's the nice Carl Weathers outside you just like you kind of want to do like crafty stuff stuff like kind of mindless crafty stuff. Put a podcast like, say, this one on and go build some things. Last week I made macarons. Right, right. Okay, well, let's get it going. Everybody stay tuned. All of you local folks, we should have a Pokemon soon. Our friend Zach over at Flip N Out Pinball is going to hook us up. Yes, and Beetlejuice. And we'll have Beetlejuice. That's going to be a lot of fun. A lot of A lot of great games coming out. Yeah. This year, I think this is going to be one of the biggest years for pinball. People will remember 2026. People will not forget it. It's going to be a lot of fun, I tell you that. Fantastic. Pokemon's going to be amazing. I've never seen so much positivity around a game in a while. It's a lot of fun, which, you know, we can all learn about Pokemon. Yep, yep. And hopefully we'll see the actual reveal trailer soon and not just leaks. You know, we want to hear it from George. We want to hear it from Jack. We want to hear from whoever's working on the code, whoever it may be. We don't know yet. We don't know. But, yeah, we're excited about Pokemon. This is going to be a lot of fun. And thank you for Zach for taking care of us and making sure we get our copy. Quickly. Quickly. Cool. I think that's it. I'm going to go. I think I need to take a shower before I interview Franchi because you want to have a good look. Don't you think? What am I? You're dressing up for Franchi but not me? You already took a shower. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us. We're going to go do some stuff, make some candles, interview Franchi. Have a good time. Have a great day, everybody. Catch the Franchi interview probably tomorrow on JBS Pinball on YouTube. Jamie and Retro Ralph are going to be joining me for that. Okay, I think we're ready to go. All right, bats out. What do you think? The bats are out. All right, we'll see you guys next time. Peace.