Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. Today is Sunday, October 7th. This is Episode 72. I'm Tony. And I'm Dennis. And we have a guest host with us once again. This time, though, an industry veteran. You may know him as the mastermind behind the rules and programming of Highway Pinball's Alien Pinball, and he is now in the software side for American Pinball. So, welcome to the show, Joe Schober. Hey, guys. Thanks a lot for having me. It's an honor. Yeah, we've been talking about doing this for quite a while, and summer's now finally passed. The leaves are well out here. They're still quite green and hot. Yeah, it was like 90 a couple days ago. Yeah, we have 80-something today. It's gorgeous. I love this time of year, so it's awesome. Well, before we actually have you introduce what's been going on with you and American Pinball, because that can be its own sort of discussion topic in a way, we'll go ahead and get our intros out of the way. So, Tony, last two weeks, what's been going on? People want to hear from you. I've been playing games and working, just like always. No, in all actuality, we actually had a test stream that I joined you on at Solid State Pinball on Friday night that I felt went really well, all in all. And we had a tournament at 403 Club last night, which I think that's all that needs to be said about that because it went so poorly for me. I didn't really do any better. Yeah, it was rough. It was bad. It was real bad. And otherwise It's been pretty normal I finally got back into Playing I started playing Diablo 3 again Because they started a new season And they had a new class type that they introduced Last year that I never played But otherwise it's just been My normal thing Work stuff, getting ready for snowplow time It's almost snowplow time supposedly I don't know, I haven't seen heavy snow around here For the last three years I know, but I still have to go on the on-call schedule to plow snow, which means I have to go do my snow plow training to make sure I haven't forgotten how to drive a truck. Yeah, I'm glad you'll remember because driving is critical. My mailbox thanks you because I've lost two of them already, but not to plows. Yeah. To drunks, but not to plows. See, that's the nice thing is they plow and say, well, if you hit a mailbox, just call on the radio and let us know the address that you destroyed the mailbox at. It's cool. Don't worry about it. Just keep going. Yeah. Well, it's going to happen. It's like a 15-minute thing. It's unavoidable. Yeah, yeah. Okay, well, you've hit most of the things I've been doing as well. The test stream, the 403. Only item I guess I'll go ahead and plug here, and I'll have a link in the show notes if anyone possibly cares, is Zach had me on to guest host episode 17 of the This Week in Pinball podcast. It was a disaster. He had a one-hour debate about The Hobbit, so I accommodated as best I could. But anyway, so if people care. It was very humorous. Market Trends is still in the show, so the show sucks. That's the moral. And unfortunately for you, Zach got the best line in the entire argument about The Hobbit. Did he? Yeah, he did. I don't think so. I do. Okay. You may be right then because I'm biased. He had the funniest line in the entire discussion. Oh, he probably didn't. It's okay. You can say what you want. Okay. So, Joe, those were our intros, but here you are. We're just outsiders sniping from the borders of this hobby. And here you are in the thick of it and in the thick of it for a few years. So I guess I don't know where I want to have you start with your intro. It's your intro, so I guess you can choose. But, I mean, I knew about you from Alien Pinball, which, as I've said on the show before, I'm not a fan of the layout of Alien. But I did like what you did with the rules. Thank you. And it's, I kind of, this is, you probably don't like this comparison, but you're going to be stuck with it because that's the one I'm going to use. That is, you're like the anti-Elwynn on the code approach after I experienced Iron Maiden, where with Elwynn, everything always advances something. But what I liked that you did with Alien is when you went into a mode, there were shots you weren't supposed to make and they were clearly articulated. And it's like, no, you can't just flay around and do what you want. Right. Here's what you're supposed to hit, and here's what you're not supposed to hit. And if you hit what you're not supposed to hit, bad things happen. Consequences. Consequences are a good thing. It's like life is a metaphor for life. Sure. Well, and with Alien, actually, there was a distinct philosophy behind the two movies. So you had Alien and Aliens, Alien being kind of more of the psycho thriller movie, if you will, versus Aliens, which was the more military shoot-em-up movie. and so I tried to keep that philosophy in the rule design there. So with Alien, it was more thoughtful. I mean, all the modes on the Alien side of things, you won't find every shot on the play field lit up. You have more precision shooting and you have more of the consequences like you just mentioned where certain shots actually harmed your progress. But if you compare that with the Aliens modes, those tended to be more spray and pray where everything was lit, less value per shot. But, you know, you could more spray and pray. That was just kind of the, you know, the blind, you know, marine, just, you know, pull out the gun and fire and hope something good happens. It's that philosophy, you know, in the game. So I tried to actually use that as an active game philosophy. And they gave more value when players were choosing which movie they wanted to play, which you chose at the start of the game. And, you know, if you felt like you're a good sharpshooter, you could choose to play Alien and get the more precision shooting and more points per shot. And if that wasn't up your alley, you just wanted everything to be lit. You choose Aliens, it's fewer points per shot. But, you know, pretty much everything's lit and there was less opportunity to hurt yourself. So, yeah, that was part of the whole idea of letting the player choose their path. Okay. important side note which is the better film Joe Alien or Aliens I'm going to have to stick with Alien it's the original we got everyone into that universe and I really appreciated kind of the you know like you said the psycho thriller element of it it's not just shooting in blood and guts we've seen that a million times it's more thoughtful it's more spooky and you know I'm always kind of a fan of the movie that defines the universe. Okay. You were so close to the right answer. Alien 3. The answer was Alien 3. Oh, wow. Hey, Alien 3 is better than Alien vs. Predator 2. Fair enough. But is it better than Alien Resurrection? No, it is not. Alien Resurrection has who else's name? Hellboy. Ron Perlman. Ron Perlman. There we go. Ron Perlman carries that film. Well, and then if you're going to go there, where do you put Prometheus and the Pellip? Oh, my God. Questions are supposed to be answered, and Pellip is answered nothing. I still put it above three. Yes. I don't know. I mean, I... It would have been better with Ron Perlman. Three is... All right. All right. It would have... Okay. Yeah. Prometheus is a better assembled movie. Yes. But there are some glaring character behavior flaws in Prometheus that do not exist in Alien 3, and that's what bothers me about Prometheus. Biologist who's afraid of biology. The geologist map cartographer who gets lost, even though he has a map. We're going down a path, a dark path, of which there is no return. Next time on the Eclectic Pop Culture Podcast. We've warned people before that we do like to talk about movies. Few tangents. Yeah. It happens. It happens around here. So, speaking of tangents, your life then took a tangent, and you were brought on to American Pinball. So tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, so it was very interesting. As you know, as you just said, Alien was the first game I coded, and when Highway Pinball sort of officially folded, I was shocked and honored, I guess, that within a few days I'd been contacted by several pinball companies asking if I was interested in doing software work for them, which I mean is an honor. I am not a Lyman or a Kiefer who has 20 years of super high regarded games under my belt. I'm just this guy who's done one game. So the fact that all these companies reached out to me and said, hey, would you be interested in working with us? For me, it was just an incredible honor because that means despite the chaos and swirl around Alien and the business, people must have seen the game and seen the code and liked it. That makes me feel good. And I really appreciated that. So, yeah, I talked to a few different companies. And long story short, ended up with American Pinball. They have a good team out there in the Chicago area. Nice guys, a good factory. I got the full tour as part of the interview process. So, yeah, I joined up with them for the game, which everyone now knows is Oktoberfest. I was actually there as part of the kickoff meeting when the play field was unveiled and everyone kind of got their marching orders for what to do to make the game happen so I've been in this one pretty early in the process had the opportunity in conjunction with Josh Kugler there at American to define all the rules of the game even got to the point of, you know, we were defining most of the inserts, you know, the lights in the game, what they actually were, which is, you know, it's just kind of cool. With Alien, the play field was pretty much done when I joined the team. So I was working within the framework that was handed to me. But with Oktoberfest, I've had more opportunity here to be involved earlier in the process, which has been really exciting and fun. and I'm pretty excited the layout is really interesting it's really distinct if you know Joe Balcer games at all it's hard to say he has any signature style from one game to the next, the playfields are all radically different and unique and I think that's certainly the case with Oktoberfest people are going to be seeing just elements that they haven't seen before and on the rule set side of things I think it's fair to say we're trying to take it in places people aren't expecting if you read some of the online forums about what people are expecting from Oktoberfest it's kind of limited it's just going to be chugging beer constantly or something like that And that's not the direction we're going. We're definitely embracing everything that is Oktoberfest. You know, it's really a festival. You know, it's a fall festival. That's what Oktoberfest essentially is. So there's lots of elements to any huge festival, and we're trying to incorporate them all in the game. And hopefully people love what we've done with it. Okay. Well, firstly, I want to say I'm glad to hear that the design is radically different. I actually once upon a time wrote a designer guide for This Week in Pinball, and I said Joe Balcer is eclectic and he does not have a defined style for layout. So I would look very stupid if that was not the case. Yeah, yeah. No, I actually saw that guide. That was an interesting guide you wrote. It was, I think, very correct. Yeah, there were a few things on retrospect. Of course, I started getting the feedback afterwards because it's hard to assume something so large. Like, what about the center post on the Kirk games? That was my favorite because it's like, that's a good point. I should have mentioned that. I should have mentioned that. So, okay, so you're going to include, it's not just going to be beer. There's going to be Lederhosen in it, too. We're going to be squared away. And polka music. Is it polka music that's associated? I don't know. I really don't know anything about Oktoberfest other than it's a festival. Music. Well, it's associated with music. People think, I think, polka is well-known, but certainly at the festival, it's all sorts of music. okay just saying excellent excellent so get yourself boxed in you know all right all right if you don't want to get out of the pokebox though there's there's certain people who i i can imagine would literally not want to own or buy the game uh or play the game if it was just poke music non-stop i can i can understand that i mean i like poke music in moderation i do most things in moderation is pretty good but but after after a while it's like i i need something else now thank you please exactly i think everyone does and if and if you go to oktoberfest it is not just wall-to-wall polka music so in terms of the of the software coding on oktoberfest are you and josh pretty much splitting the workload fairly equitably i wasn't sure based off of when you came on board if he was sort of taking lead on it and you were handling certain aspects of the programming or if it was sort of a balanced, like he's doing half of it and you're doing half of it? So actually, when I joined the team, which was back in late May, early June, I don't remember the exact date, call it the start of June, just for the sake of discussion. He was still, Josh was still involved in kind of getting Houdini wrapped up. He had a couple of major updates, He wanted to get out the door and such. So the first, I don't know, couple months, I don't know the exact dates here, but basically the first couple months I was pretty much solo on the actual coding of Oktoberfest. So I was doing all the work myself. We were communicating regularly, pretty much on a daily basis, to agree on the details of the rules. So basically the way I do game design, and I'll even say code design, this is how I've done my whole career, is I kind of need a roadmap. If I don't have a roadmap, I am just wandering aimlessly, and that's not good for anything. So essentially the first thing I did was wrote the entire rulebook to an absolutely nitpicky level of detail. um and so that's uh so if you don't know i'm a i'm a remote uh worker for american pinball there in the chicago area and i'm outside of washington dc uh so you know don't have the advantage of you know just going in the office and talking over the the water cooler um so like the the rule book that i wrote was done uh via google docs you know so uh you know josh could be monitoring or anyone in the company could be monitoring, you know, down to the character if they want, as I was working on the document. But yeah, I wrote up a rule book for the game that, you know, absolute nitpicky detail. And that's my personal guidebook. You know, if I need to know what to do next, I go to the rule book. I have all sorts of fancy color coding for what's been proposed, what's been rejected, what's been completed, et cetera, and it all gets nicely rainbow-colored that way. And I follow the guidebook of what we're going to be doing. And so in that sense, I wrote all the rules and started coding them. And then as Josh became available from his Houdini work, he's joined the fray now, And we're certainly now working in close conjunction. He's dedicated to Oktoberfest at this point, as am I. And we're pounding through it to make an awesome game. Excellent. Well, before we move into pinball news, I guess this will be, if there's anything else you wanted to say on Oktoberfest, if you want to leak the next five games from American Pinball, we're all ears. I feel no obligation. We would never ask such things. Yeah, sure. I'll skip that for now. but maybe I'll come back on the show later and talk about the next things. No, we're, I think, all pretty excited about it. Just yesterday I got a FaceTime video call from Josh while he was walking around the factory. Of course, yesterday was a Saturday, so those guys are busy over there. But he was walking around the factory showing me all the pieces of the games and all the games under construction and all, and it was really exciting to see everything coming together. So I think it's fun. It's just a fun game. It's a fun and joyful game, and I certainly hope everyone, when they see it in the coming weeks, feel the same way about it. But I would tell everyone, don't worry about your preconceptions of Oktoberfest. It's definitely an Oktoberfest game. It probably won't meet anyone's exact preconception, but I think everyone should have a lot of fun with it. All right. Excellent. Well, now let's move on to some new conceptions, pre or otherwise, and that would be the pinball news. And we're going to start with Monster Bash Remake. Yes, we all know what Monster Bash is. A-list Williams title, George Gomez design, da-da-da-da-da. All right. So there was a leak of the large DMD display and the topper, And then since then, Chicago Gaming Company has officially released photos of the LE topper, which I know I put in the little notes we share with. So Tony was able to see three of the band members and well lit and all of that. So, Joe, what are your thoughts on a Monster Bash remake? Do you like Monster Bash? I love Monster Bash. It's a great game. It's a great layout. And, you know, it's another one of those. actually, I think it's just a really fun game. You know, the humor in the game is fantastic. Just every little detail, and I think they did a great job of making it fun. It all supposed to be fun. You know, certainly that time of volumes, and almost that series of games, if you will, Attack from Mars, and Medieval Madness, and Monster Bash, they're fun! So yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I have no idea what the actual sales have been for the remake so far, but I expect, given what I've seen of Monster Bash prices, that this should do well. You know, I saw that Topper 2. One thing I have not heard, I haven't been aggressively following up on rumors, is the Topper animated in any way, or is it just plastic that'll light up? If it was animated, that would be freaking awesome. You know, if you're playing, you know, one of the monster modes, if it's Little Topper monster, you know, starts playing its instrument and dancing around, that would be freaking amazing. Yeah, I don't, I haven't, I haven't been following any of the threads discussing what's going on with Monster Bash. So I only saw this because it was showing up on Facebook. Sure. And my guess is based off of what they did with the attack from Mars Topper is, yes, I expect some aspect of it to be animated. Yeah. Right. One of the things I've wondered about is it seems like the green shot in the back is the moon. Does the Wolfman rise up, for example, because you don't see him in these shots. Right. He's a core member of the band. Yeah, something like that I could see. And then, yeah, the idea of the band members jiggling around when you maybe make their shot or once you've earned them. Right, right. Like the saucers on or the attack from Mars Topper with all of its motion and this and that. And I've liked what they've turned out with the attack from Mars LE. Everything about that I love. It's very well done. And we've had remakes. We've had both of their other remakes on location in the area here in Kansas City. And they've gone over very well. Fans of the originals seem to enjoy the remakes just fine. Mm-hmm. We'll have to see. Now, the other rumor that I've heard, and I have no idea if it's true or not, is that there's some way in Monster Bash Remake to have an alternate rule set. So I don't know what that would entail. I personally think, you know, I like Monster Bash's rule set, you know, as Lyman coded it at Williams. But, you know, if it's actually a true rumor, I'd be curious to know what they thought needed changing. What kind of enhancements are they actually doing? Yeah, I heard that as well, and I'm surprised also. If they remade Theater of Magic or something, I could see the idea. Cactus Canyon. Sure. Well, Cactus Canyon would be an obvious one because it's clearly incomplete. It's incomplete. But I named Theater because it's got a terrible exploit when it comes to tournament play. Monster Bash is a reasonable tournament game. It doesn't really need to be reworked. It feels complete. Right. You could argue it's an easy game to finish, but lots of games from the 90s were, quote, unquote, easy. Scared Stiff's easy to get to the wizard mode. Sure. It doesn't make it a bad game. Well, one of the wizard modes. Yeah, one of the wizard modes. Yeah, monster multiball, not spider multiball. That's tough. No, no, no, no. We have to have some limit. Absolutely. That's something for the good players. But, yeah, okay. So, yeah, it's interesting. So I'm glad that we're just finally seeing things come out. Because Tony and I went to Texas Pinball Festival back in March, and we thought we were going to get to see that. Sure. And they had that reveal. And it has been so – that's the reason why there's so much attention. That's why there was even second-guessing from the community about, oh, well, maybe Cactus Canyon is really the third game because they're trying to figure out what's taking so long. Yeah, and I still have no idea. And we may never know. Right. It's just weird. Yeah, it really is. I mean, of course, they have the play field already. So this has clearly been in the works for a long time. I don't know what they've been doing, but I'm looking forward to it. But speaking of rumors, next news item, one that I know I touched on with Zach on This Week in Pinball, was that it's going around that Jersey Jack Pinball is considering doing another edition of Wizard of Oz. This one purportedly called the Yellow Brick Road edition. I'm assuming it will involve the color yellow. Tony, do you have any thoughts? Their editions are just excuses to keep the machines on the line. Do you think it would sell, though? I mean, it's been out for like five years. They finally sold out of the the Ruby red edition So I mean it not like they need to make a thousand of them if they make a hundred or hundred of them and then they just box them up and have them set there so when somebody wants a new in-box machine, they ship the new in-box machine out. But don't you think the line should be busy making pirates? I mean, Stern's line can handle a whole bunch of machines. I'm sure Jersey Jack's line can handle building more than just one machine at a time. I'm sure they can handle having a second machine on the line. I don't disagree with you. My issue is that wouldn't it make more sense to have two Pirates games on the line than one Wizard of Oz and one Pirates? Unless what you're telling me, Tony, is that there is no demand for Pirates. Is that what you're telling me? I can't get behind that. I know there's plenty of demand for Pirates. I know there's still people waiting for theirs. But again, this is just a rumor. This isn't that they're actually building it right now. And there's no way to know. While it's a rumor, it doesn't mean it's on the line now they could just be waiting and throw and to throw it on the line once pirates production slows down well if i remember right yeah if i remember right uh jack said that's uh i think the quote was something along the lines of he gets a call every day from someone who wants to buy wizard of oz and he said it was their their most popular game um so uh you know i certainly wouldn't be surprised you know i think one interesting aspect uh when you have these different machines that don't change the gameplay, but they're different themes, whether it's Yellow Brick Road or Ruby Red or whatever, is you're going to have a certain number of customers who are super fans of the theme, who maybe just get enamored of a particular, you know, particular styling, particular special edition of the machine, and actually decide they want to buy. Even if they have one in their basement already, they might be like, oh, Yellow Brick Road, that looks awesome. I really want that one. buy the machine, and then, you know, go ahead and flip their existing game. You know, you can put that in. Or it could be the insane guy who has to have everything. So they just, they've got. They could be, sure. Maybe. I guess they're trying to do head-to-head tournaments. Yeah. I'm sure there's one guy out there who exists like that, who's willing to do that. Oh, sure. Although, you know, at, you know, what, $8,000, $9,000 a pop, that's a pricey endeavor. But, yeah, there's always someone. Can you imagine just having like Four or five different Wizard of Oz's Just in a row It sounds awful It'd be so weird but I mean There are people out there who own like three of the same car In different colors because they like all three colors If you can do that with If you can do that with a McLaren Or a Ferrari you can do that with a pinball machine Sounds made up I don't believe it I don't believe it happens with cars either I've decided that that's a lie and I don't want it spread. But from a manufacturing point of view, assume there is a market like that who either wants to collect them all or where certain people are enamored with a particular theme. I mean, do you do the Tin Man edition and the Lion edition and so forth? Whatever, I don't know. But those changes are easy to make. They're not, I assume, they're not changing the playfield layout. they're not changing the rules, maybe you have just some modest changes to audio visuals in the game, like just a different title screen in the attract mode or something like that, but nothing radical. That's the sort of thing that would be pretty easy to have an art team, for example, just a person or two go off, make these other additions, and, you know, if their line is set up to be able to just slipstream, oh, you know, here's the plastics for the Yellow Brick Road Edition, just put those on instead of the standard edition plastics, sure, generate a market that way. I'm guessing, you know, you can make something out of that. You know, I do give them a tip of the hat if they don't change gameplay in any way because that's always been a little bit of a pet peeve of mine with Stern's model or the actual gameplay changes between models. That's a frustration for me as well. Speaking of Stern, they have a rumor as well. We can't leave them out of the mix. This is all rumors. There is no real news. Everything is rumors. I apologize, but I couldn't make the news happen. Even Oktoberfest is a rumor. Yes, right. They say it's not going to be exactly like Houdini. Hey, did you hear that Houdini has tight shots? I've heard that Houdini has tight shots. I never heard that, really. Oh, okay. Well, that's the rumor. Tight but findable. That's the rumor. Okay. I'll have to check that out. Fascinating. Fascinating. So in the case of Stern, I have no idea about the rumor of the shots. The rumor is that Munsters, which most people have expected to be the next game and to come out at the end of this year, has been flipped. And instead, Beatles will come out first and then Munsters. Joe, is it a big deal which one comes out first? Not for me, no The people who care about the timing Everyone's all worked up either way I'm sure it'll cause another thousand message thread one way or the other But if the rumors are to be believed Both games are coming down the road And whether you wait six months or twelve months for it Isn't a big deal to me So you're not a mega fan of either of those particular franchises? I'm not. You know, with Munsters, honestly, I barely ever watched it. I'm passing familiarity with it, but it's nothing that's, you know, doing anything for me. With the Beatles, I mean, you know, I like Beatles music. It's great and all. I think personally I'm kind of just done with the band themes. there have been so many of those over the past 10 years or so I'd like to move on but if you're going to pick a band it's hard to find one more iconic than the Beatles again I think that's a great way to tap a market of people who are hyper collectors I know for a fact there's a number of people like that in Beatlemania land so if you can get people who don't even care about pinball to throw down a few thousand dollars for a game. He had more power to him. I have a co-worker. He's in another division, but I talked to him, and he doesn't care about pinball at all in any way, shape, or form. But he's an enormous Iron Maiden fan, and so is his wife. And they have a fund set aside specifically to get an Iron Maiden machine that they're building up so they can get an Iron Maiden machine. Yeah, and how many stories are there of that? You just happen to know someone at work, right? There's probably people in every other office who have the same attitude, whether it's Iron Maiden or ACDC or whatever. In that sense, it's an awesome model. Yeah, I mean, that's the power of licensing. I think that's probably the greatest contribution that Data East ever ended up making. And some people may feel it's a double-edged sword in a way. But, I mean, at the time it was, hey, this will get – operators will like this. It will get coin dropped. that first quarter will fall in because that's Jurassic Park. That's Last Action Hero. They weren't all winners, but you would just go with all these themes. And now with the home collector market, people often have that nostalgic tie or they just identify really strongly with, oh, I really like Game of Thrones as a show or as a book, so I want that game. And it's very powerful. But with the rumors of, I mean, everyone's assuming from the head-to-head pinball interview with Joe Kamikow that the license he said that he had to spend a million dollars for was the Beatles license. There's never been that sort of money thrown at a license for pinball before. To me, that's kind of scary because that's going to have to be modernized somehow on the sales. Yeah, if it's actually a million dollars, it's hard to imagine how that gets split up amongst the typical number of runs of games. That's a huge whack to the bill of materials. Does that mean the play field becomes more simple, just to offset the cost of the license? I don't know. Maybe they actually think they'll sell 20,000 units of the machine. I don't know. One of the rumors I've heard is the idea of, like they did with the Super LE with Batman 66, but like a Super Duper LE, where you say, well, there are going to be 10 of them, and they're 50 grand. And the truth of the matter is, with the Beatles, you could do that. I guess. I full-on think you could do that. The only bands I think are big enough in the world that you could do that and get by with it are The Beatles and... Journey. Elvis. Elvis and Baby Queen. Yeah. Although Elvis actually got done already, which is interesting, and I'm sure that was not a million-dollar license. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, no, I don't think... Obviously, since they've done it before, I don't think it would require... But I could see you maybe saying, I mean, there are a lot of people who are. You're right. There are a lot of fans. I think those are the only bands I can think that are big enough that they could pull off something like that and have it be realistically done. Justin Bieber. The Biebs, man. The Beyonce. The problem is they're all still young. Well, Beyonce. Yeah. There we go. Beyonce. You got to put a ring on it multiball. Yeah. Yeah. That's one of her songs, right? I don't know. I don't know. Probably. Yeah, sure. Why not? If it made money, it was one. Beyonce's behind everything profitable in music. Would the Translight for the LE Be that really bad still frame From the Super Bowl Where she's all looking weird I don't remember that Are you guys then arguing Just keep the band thing rolling indefinitely I think it's It's got to be coming to an end I would think it would be coming to an end Because I don't In my opinion I'm not a big enough I like music but I don't love music. I like listening to music. I'm super eclectic, but at no point is it like a, oh yeah, no, I love this one band so much that I have to have it. And while we've gotten some really good players out of the band games, like ACDC, I love ACDC. It's one of my favorite modern games. But at the same time, there's a lot of them out there that it's just like, okay, yeah, I'll play it, but I don't, it's not the game where I'm going to walk in and if there's three games, I'm going to go, oh, I'm going to go drop all my money in that one machine. Right. Yeah. For me, I'm not a fan of banned themes on a licensing level. There aren't very many that would ever appeal to me just because of the theme. But there aren't really – well, there are themes where I'll go, I think licensed themes are the smart move. I think it's a smart play because of what it can do for sales. I personally am really only interested in how the game plays by and large. So as long as the theme isn't offensive to me, I would be happy to consider any particular theme. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I'm with you. But you don't care about the art. Yeah, Iron Maiden I couldn't care less about as the band, but the game's fantastic. And I've known, yeah, there are a number of people I've known who want that game or have bought that game because they like Elwynn's layout. It's not that some of them hate the issue is that they really hate Iron Maiden. And then it comes into, well, can I go in with my editing software and change the music out so I don't have to listen to it sort of thing. But they want the game. They want the rules. And some of them will just stomach it and turn the volume down to one. So just so next news item, Deep Root. Jeff, with This Week in Pinball, got to tour their facility down in Texas. I do have a link in the show notes to Jeff's write-up on that for anyone who wants to read about his visit. But a few highlights from it. He confirmed that it is, quote-unquote, real pinball, physical pinball. And some other tidbits, they are working to secure licenses. A popular 80s license is confirmed to have been secured, though they didn't indicate which one. Fall guy. Fall guy. Airwolf. and manufacturing equipment is not yet all in place yet. So I know it may not have been Deep Root's opinion, but I got the sense it was Jeff's opinion that he's not sure whether or not they will actually be able to be producing games on the line, so to speak, as of TPF, which has been the sort of official goal, TPF 2019. I don't know if you want to reveal who all ever reached out to you, Joe, but I was wondering, was Deep Root one of the companies that approached you after Highway? I won't list any of the specifics who reached out one way or the other I'll keep away from that but they're an interesting company I only speculated on it because they've scooped up so much talent Steven Bowden's with them doing rule design obviously they've got four major veteran designers from the old days, Bally Williams and Premier and it's, I mean, everything they've done has been to show signs that they're serious and they've got cash behind them, which is what I think is making it very interesting to people like us versus some of these other companies which have had ideas and often great ideas, but when it came to the production side, it always seems like they run out of money. Sort of like what we're witnessing with Dutch Pinball right now. It's just like there's not enough money to, they can't do a lawsuit and keep producing. They probably couldn't have kept producing even if there was no lawsuit. So it's very concerning to people, especially because all that was on the pre-order model. Deep Roots making these motions that there is no pre-order money expected for them. There's not going to be these big delays when you order the game. They're saying the right things, broadly speaking. So, I mean, do you have any sense as to what – everything that I'm always seeing, though, is that there's something different. It's real physical pinball, but something different. I don't know if you had any thoughts on what might be the different thing that we're expecting. We had Robert Mueller on back in February, and at that point he had noted at the end of the interview that he thought P3 was too far towards virtual pinball. So from then I've always, in my mind, known real pinball for him means something more physical than what Jerry has done with Multimorphic. But he's doing something different, obviously. yeah you know uh jeff and his uh this week in pinball uh report did say something if i remember right that maybe the head was non-traditional yes he had wording along those lines so you know that certainly gets your brain tickling wondering if it's uh you know pulling back the the pinball 2000 model you know where there's some some sort of projector uh over part of the play field that can do some virtual imaging. I was always personally kind of a fan of the Pinball 2000 concept. I think a lot of people poo-pooed it ahead of time when we only saw two games. I was always pretty excited about the possibilities of what could have been done as the designers became more comfortable and more innovative with the technology. But of course, we didn't really get to see that. So I guess that's a possibility. Yeah, I don't know. You know, the one thing that really raises my eyebrows with Deep Root is, you know, their title selection, at least what's been rumored or semi-confirmed or whatever. You know, it's kind of an eclectic mix of titles that already have a lot of baggage around, you know, J-pop and that whole thing, combined with something like Fire and Brimstone, which, you know, I find a very interesting choice of title. Certainly a well-known theme But you have the risk of Getting some people Riled up And having other side problems with that So I don't know It's certainly one of the more interesting Stories to monitor In pinball Yeah, we've been keeping an eye on it As has the entire community Because it is interesting And I know that they I think Robert came out on Pinside a while ago and had noted he had talked to Pinball Brothers about getting Queen, which, oh, that's a fun aside, fun for me, maybe not fun for you, Joe, but I'll ask you about it. Do you have any sense, do you think Pinball Brothers is actually going to try and produce pins or what? Yeah, I mean, certainly, you know, it's been rumored that they're looking at producing Queen or some other title down the road. They're still on the This Week in Pinball list of manufacturers, which is now, I don't know, what, four or five screens long? You scroll through it, it's amazing. I scroll past it. I can't read it. It's like Phoenix Pinball and the Goblin game that keeps renaming, it seems, every two weeks. I know that's wrong. I know they renamed once. I'm being unfair. But they don't listen, so it'll be okay. They won't get too mad. Last news item, actually, is what Tony mentioned back in the intro, and that's KC Game Con. Yep. So that is an eSports convention that we have here in Kansas City. And for those that are pinball fans and don't know anything about video games, eSports is competitive video games. But they did invite pinball to participate this year. So Carrie Wing, who is one of the top players in the world of pinball and is a Kansas City area player, she has taken the lead on organizing this event. And so on December 1st, there is going to be a pinball tournament that is going to take place all day at the KC Game Con. And the reason why it's newsworthy, besides the fact that we haven't had a quote unquote major event style like this for years now, we've been talking behind the scenes. Kansas City players have been talking about trying to put together another show, which I don't think has happened since I first got started in the hobby. and Tony and I were approached and asked if we would actually live stream and commentate the event given our vast knowledge of all pinball rules and all pinball players. And I'm being facetious, Joe. We don't know any of that. It's terrifying. So we're going to do our best. And that's why on Friday earlier we went over and we did a full hookup to run through what we were planning to do. And actually, the test went very well. So technologically, I think we're in a good place. Intellectually, we'll have to see. Yeah, we'll have to see. I'm very much going to – my plan is currently to funnel my inner John Madden and just go with the obvious and color commentary type stuff. In order to win, you've got to score points. Thank you, John Madden. And you need a telestrator. Don't forget the telestrator. Everybody wants the telestrator. It's a big pain with the software. Here's a pop bumper. If you look here, I got a little design. The pop bumper looks kind of like this. When the ball hits it, it goes ba-dang, and it's hitting the ball flying off in another direction. Careful not to stretch into Dick Vitale there. I think you're walking the line between the two. Anyway, we have a link in the show notes to the Facebook page for KC Game Con Pinball Championship for anyone who's interested in attending. If you just want to watch it, it will be streamed on our Twitch channel. We do have one, and it's linked in the program notes. I've now put those in on our show notes. There's always stuff related to just us at the bottom, so you can find that there. It'll be on the new one. So anyway, as I noted, Joe, we really had to reach to make news. So we're done with news. So we're going to talk about something fun. Not that the news isn't fun, but this will be more fun, especially for you, because we're going to talk about pinball leagues. and you are heavily involved in pinball leagues. So tell me why. Why should we care about pinball leagues, Joe? They are the gateway drug to competitive pinball. And unlike other kinds of drugs, this is something you want to get addicted to. So, I mean, we keep trying to grow the player base of pinball and certainly competitive pinball is a big part of that. but if you have something like you know what's the major tournament right you have something like pinberg which we got sold out in 30 seconds i think it was this year something like that you know that's overwhelming for people new to the the hobby new to the sport right you're not going to sit there and hit refresh at 11 a.m on whatever day and pay hundreds of dollars for the the show tickets and then hundreds of dollars in transportation and hotel room and all that No, that's just not going to happen. But what does happen with people all the time, we see in our local community, machines get set up in a bar or a restaurant or an arcade or a pool hall or whatever it is. And certainly people who are into pinball immediately congregate to those machines and start playing. And maybe they form a league or whatever. But then you have the casual players that people are like, hey, yeah, I like pinball, but, you know, whatever. You want to get those people into the community because it really does, for many people, not everyone, it really turns into kind of an addiction. You understand, oh, there's more to pinball than just not training. There's rules to the game. Oh, there's strategy to the rules of the game. You have to do things in this order or this timing or you want to do this but not that, whatever it is, right? Not the stuff we know. I'm preaching the choir. Sorry about that. but it's important to get new players engaged with that stuff. And, you know, there's, there's different ways to do it. You see local tournaments popping up left and right. The growth of the Whopper leader board over the past few years, certainly attest to that. I just think leagues are a really great way to get new people in. That's not, that's intimidating. It's not like this is the big local tournament and all the big players are coming. It's a league. We hang out. We're going to have some beers. We're going to play some pinball and have some fun. You know, we have different divisions. You don't have to worry about, you know, if you're competing against the best players. And it gives people an out, you know. A certain number of people won't like it for whatever reason, and they can just kind of flitter away, and the commitment level is usually pretty low. Yeah, you're right. I've been involved with pinball leagues for a long time. The league I'm in in the Washington, D.C. area is the Free State Pinball Association, FSPA, which has been running continuously since 1995. Wow. Is that the longest running league? If it's not the longest, it's certainly in the top couple, I think. Since no one is here to fact-check me, I'll say yes, we're the longest running league. Good. We like hard takes. Good job. Yeah, yeah. So what's your league structure, if you don't mind me asking? Tony and I actually don't play in league. We occasionally have one. They're in the area. There was one this summer. And I think the league people, they're always trying different things, trying to find ways to get it to grow to more people. So I'd like to hear from successful leagues to know what you all are doing. We had Bowen on last year, and that's what he focused on, what the New Robert Englunds Pinball League does. which was interesting, but we never tried that particular approach. So what does Free State do? So one of the things that relatively uncommon about our format is we insist on participation So there a lot of leagues out there that um you kind of show up when you do show up and you don't show up when you don't show up and whatever. And that's all fine. Uh, the thing we never liked about that was if you compete against someone who's only participating half the time or a third of the time, it's, it's kind of just cheesy to even compare your scores. You know, it doesn't make sense. So in FSPA, we do require that players participate every week of the season. Now, if you're not, we understand people can't literally be there every week. So we have the ability, you can record preplays ahead of time on all the machines at the location. And then if you're absent for whatever reason, whether that's vacation, illness, stuck in traffic, those preplays just automatically kick in on your behalf. but it's a skill-based grouping. So I'm going to give some kind of comparisons here to what I know other leagues do because I work with hundreds of leagues in concert with Papa running a league management software. So in FSPA, we're skill-based grouping. So at the start of the season, we seed everyone based on their skill level. So the top-ranked person will be the top seed of group one, and it goes down to however many groups you need for the league size. Each week you only compete against your group mates, of course. It's a match play format. If you win your group, you bubble up one group. If you lose your group, you bubble down a group. So at the end of every week, there's this kind of big swapping of players throughout the whole league. and what that does is it kind of naturally bubbles everyone to players of similar skill. But since people are moving every week, you're not just playing the same people week after week after week. There's this big shuffle that happens, and you're still playing people of similar skill. Our seasons are 10 weeks of regular season play, and then approximately half of people make the playoffs, which is the 11th week, and we do playoffs for cash and prizes and trophies. And that lets us have three seasons a year, about a four-week break roughly between seasons. It gives people a little bit of a chance not to get burnt out, although we will run some one-off tournaments in the offseason for people who want to get burnt out, I guess. But yeah, a lot of people kind of appreciate getting a little bit of a break, and we throw a party during the off-season just to celebrate. That's paid for out of the league dues, and everyone seems to enjoy getting together. Now, with FSPA, unlike some leagues, we have, oh, my God, where are we at now, five or six separate leagues all running under the FSPA banner. So all those leagues are independent. They run on different days. So some people play in two leagues or three leagues. Most people just play in one or whatever. the end of season party then becomes really nice because we get everyone together and people in the different leagues and different locations can mingle and get together and talk and play games and have a good time for an afternoon. How do you promote all this? Is it just word of mouth? Yeah, it's a lot of word of mouth. At this point, if you search Virginia pinball or Maryland pinball, Uh, you know, we're generally in the top couple hits on, on Google for people who do that, uh, at the locations we put up flyers. Um, some of our locations have been absolutely wonderful with us. One of our locations, uh, is kind of a brew pub restaurant. Every little David Hankin holder, they put a little flyer basically, you know, on the David Hankin holder for our league, which when we walked in and saw that, it's like, oh my God, you people are so wonderful. Thank you. So it's, yeah, some of it is word of mouth, you know, social media presence, all the usual suspects. It's growing. It can be hard. I mean, there's no question about it. You know, one of the things I hear from new leagues, you know, who reach out to me and say, hey, I'm thinking of starting a league. Can you help me? Is, well, I've only heard from 10 people. And I'm like, great. You have 10 people. You can have three groups, which is fine. That's enough spread of people. Start with 10 people. You'll pick up people during the season. They'll have word of mouth. Just seeing people at a location who are obviously competing, because everyone knows it's kind of an interesting phenomenon. Even people who aren't familiar kind of look and say, oh, you guys are doing some sort of competition thing. I don't know what that vibe is that we give off, that, oh, you're the competitor people. But, yeah, you just kind of naturally draw people in. Don't be afraid of having a small league to start. You've got to start somewhere and just take that first step. And the other nice thing about starting with a smaller league is it's less intimidating for the person who's running it. There's some leagues that actually start off with like 40, 50 people or something, and the league director is kind of going crazy because, like, oh, my God, how do I group people? How do I do scoring? it's too much to handle, which it kind of is if you go from zero to 50 people overnight. You know, sure, start with a dozen people. You can get in the flow of it as a league director as well as the players. So, yeah, don't be afraid. There's no bad outcome, right? I mean, the worst possible outcome is even if the league totally fails, you all played some pinball for a while and had a good time. That's not a terrible thing. I've got a couple real quick questions just on this. is since you're running different groups, and I didn't hear, I didn't know if you mentioned, just how big of a league are you talking about in your currently in? So for us, like you said, we have like five different leagues under the FSPA banner. So this season our league size is, I think, the smallest is about 14-15, and the largest is 45, something like that. That's a pretty good spread. Yeah, across the leagues, I think we have maybe 150 players this season. And they run at different locations? Does one league run at one location all the time, or does it rotate locations every week? Every league kind of just rotates around? No, each league is dedicated to a particular location and a particular day of week. So on Tuesdays at 8 p.m., we play at this specific bar, and on Wednesdays at 8 p.m., we play at this specific volleyball arena, et cetera. So, you know, players can choose kind of philosophically some we shy away from rotating locations. It's kind of confusing the players. You know, they may forget or lose track of where to show up to on each different meter or whatever. We also shy away and we and we suggest people don't do home leagues if they can possibly avoid it. you don't get that the passers-by seeing you there's a lot of concern of people don't like to put their address on the internet and just have random people show up at their house, I get that, that makes sense you don't have to worry about what happens if the league the homeowner gets sick or something, you just cancel league I guess, oh well, there's a lot of issues around home-based leagues some places you just can't avoid it but But, yeah, I'd definitely say if anyone is interested in starting a league, try to find a location. And if you don't have an existing location, it's a great opportunity. If you've got a couple machines or you can get a couple friends together to each volunteer a game to put on location, find a bar or restaurant that's willing to work with you and start your own location. Grow the scene a little bit. Now, you mentioned involved with the league work and also with Papa that you've done some software. related to this, which, given your background, is, I suppose, no way surprising. But could you talk a little bit about the software? Yeah. You know, it's funny. It started as something just for our league, for the FSPA. And then a couple other leagues approached us and said, hey, you know, we saw what you were doing. We saw your website, and we like your rules. Can we get in on it? and foolish me at the original time I hadn't planned that far ahead. I just did software for us. But I was like, well, you know, if you're running the same rules, then all sure, no problem. You know, just set up a different URL for your league and off you go. And then there were more, and then there were more, and then there were more. And it started going out of control. I had to end up redoing the software from scratch because it was completely not prepared for that level of growth. and then at some point along the line I partnered up with the fine folks at Papa I had talks with Mark Steinman there he wanted as part of just Papa's general educational outreach I guess of all things pinball he wanted to have support for leagues to you know one stop shopping where you can come and get software and get it set up and get rules and guidance and all so if you go to league.papa.org you can I have my very cheesy little intro page and a sign up form for people and I've worked with I'm going to guess conservatively probably 300 different leagues around the world and our software is hosting about 130 of those right now so there's a lot of leagues and I invite people we don't charge anything for it Papa provides the hosting as part of their sponsorship so the web hosting is covered we do not charge a dime for any of it whether or not you want to use the software don't hesitate to reach out to me if you're starting a league or if you have a league but you're not really happy with it you want to explore new ideas I love talking with people I'm probably a little bit crazy but I spend many hours each week just talking with different leagues about, you know, how they can shift their format around or do scorekeeping or how to grow or how to address different rulings. You know, whatever it is, I just get a kick about talking about this stuff. I get a kick out of growing the league community worldwide because, like I said, I really think it's a gateway drug to competitive pinball, and I want to see more people playing competitive pinball. So let's make this happen. I'm happy to help in any little way I can. Okay. And we're going to have a link in our show notes to your Papa League software so people can go check that out by just clicking beneath the notes section of our podcast. Yep, cool. So, Tony. And one other question is I know me and Dennis, when we do run, when there are leagues running in the Kansas City area, me and Dennis tend not to participate, not from lack of interest, but from the realities of times. Because when you're talking about a league that starts at 8 or 9 p.m. on a weeknight and I wake up at 3 a.m. to go to work, it kind of turns into a no-go. And I know Dennis is a long commuter to go to work, so he has the same problem. He has to wake up extremely early to do a long commute for work. So have you found any issues with that or any answers or thoughts on how to deal with a league? I mean, I know most leagues tend to be afternoon or evening, weeknight things. But do some places run like a weekend league or this or that? Because I know we run a lot of weekend tournaments. We've got like two of them a month in this area. Yep. So, yeah, no, we actually, yeah, we historically were always kind of, you know, weekdays at 7 or 8 p.m. We started a few years ago a league Sundays at 4.30 in the afternoon, which I was a little concerned about that time that, you know, people would be, you know, either watching football in the fall or caught up with dinner plans or whatever. But it's actually been very successful. It's been a great time for people. But yeah, play with it. You're absolutely right. There are certain people who, like you said, have to be at work at five in the morning. And so the idea of playing league from eight to ten on a work night is just kind of a no-go. And, you know, it's a tough balance. And to some extent, even things like your community's traffic patterns matter. Like in the D.C. area, traffic is a complete nightmare. The beltway around town is usually just, you know, a wall of metal, you know, even at 7 o'clock at night, you know. So for us, it was kind of we had to push the start time for most of our leagues a little bit later, because otherwise people just wouldn't be able to get there from work. Other towns maybe don't have that bad of a traffic problem. And, yeah, maybe you can start at 7 o'clock or 6.30 or whatever. You play with it. You survey your community, see what days and what times work. We've been a little hesitant to do Fridays and Saturdays. We figure Friday night people tend to kickback and go visit the bar or watch a movie with the family, whatever. And Saturdays, oh my goodness, I don't know about you guys, but our local calendar of pinball events, I think every Saturday is taken through the year 2021 or something. It's crazy. Yeah, it's bad here too. Yeah, well, it's great. It's bad, like, too. Yeah, but as far as having a league to contend with that, we figure that's not a great idea. So we've definitely been avoiding Saturday for leagues. Okay. Yeah, play with it. Find a day and a time that will work for your community. Now, there are even some leagues that I've worked with. This is hard to make happen, but where each of the groups is kind of a self-forming, self-regulating sort of situation. So where you publish up on the Internet somewhere, hey, this week group one is Dennis and Tony and Joe, and it's up to the three of us to, you know, figure out a day in time we can all make it happen and then go to the league location, play our assigned games or whatever. There's some downsides to that, one of which is if you don't have a tournament director who's on site, for one thing, I think you don't get whopper points, if I remember the rules correctly. But, you know, it can be a little difficult to adjudicate, you know, any issues if you do it that way. But if that's your only choice for whatever reason, go for it. Again, it's all about the people having fun. Don't worry too much, especially as a league is forming. Don't worry too much about the Whoppers if that's a problem. Don't worry too much about having 20 machines to play. If you have three games to play, you have three games to play. Just make it happen. Okay. Well, we've got another topic. You suggested this one, Joe, and I think it's really interesting, and that is about programming. It's about balance, the balance between having highly strategic games versus games that are more of that shot making style or pure flow. And as a bit of a lead in, this is very, very timely. There's another podcast focused more on video games, but it's called Gaming on 10 Minutes a Week. And they actually, on a recent episode, had a discussion about modern pinball and what they don't like about modern pinball. and one of the hosts noted and he's a big electromechanical fan said as a far extreme now i'm putting words in his mouth so apologies to nick if i if i get it wrong but it was essentially that if you had to code that's the problem coding and pinball machines is bad that if you can't spell it out and have the scoring on the play field clear to the player you've already messed up. And so I thought, that's really interesting. We're having a coder come on. So let's talk about this because I think people fall in all sorts of different lines. So it's your suggestion. So Joe, what do you think? What's the struggle with the balance between having high strategy, high thought process games versus just that, you know, the fun of shooting the table like in ye old days? Yeah, I mean, I've obviously been thinking about this a lot more in the past, well, the past few months, in the past couple years, and it's something I've been just constantly juggling in my mind, right? So take a look at something like the Pinside, you know, top 50, top 100 list, whatever. it's interesting to see the blend of games that's up there so if I remember right I don't have the screen in front of me but I think maybe Attack from Mars or Medieval Madness I think is holding like the number one number two positions and it's actually kind of hard to say that those are deeply strategic games certainly by today's standards ever since the world's let Keith P. Johnson lose to do rule sets. The definition of strategic got totally rewritten. Those aren't deeply strategic games. You kind of shoot them. You have to do a couple things in the right order if you want to maximize your points or stack a multiball or something. But for the most part, you shoot the game and you have fun with it. But then there are the more strategic games. And, you know, I'm good friends with Keith P. Johnson, so don't let it sound like I'm ragging on him. But, you know, his games are incredibly strategic and complicated and not immediately understandable, always, what you need to do to do things. But from a long-term player or homeowner point of view, that really keeps it interesting because there's always something new you haven't seen the game do. or you can focus just on specific things, like how many people have gotten pretzel multiball on Simpsons Pinball Party, how many people even know there is such a thing as pretzel multiball on Simpsons Pinball Party. So you can actually make a new game for yourself just by focusing on one of the intricacies of the rule sets that you maybe didn't know about or didn't focus before. So in my mind, the real issue, and I guess I'm saying this as a pinball designer right now, is you want to accommodate both sets of people. There are some people who have no interest in learning the rules of the game to any nuanced detail. They just want it to be fun to shoot, pleasing ball paths, pleasing geometry of the game. And when you make those shots, you want cool audiovisual response or using your theory that it should be like an EM game. Well, if you're not coding it, maybe there's not even an audiovisual response, right? It just goes ding. I don't know. But then you're balancing that with the long-term appeal of the game. Is this something you're going to get bored of down the road? So, yeah, actually, when I mentioned the topic, I was hoping to hear some thoughts from you guys as well about do you enjoy taking the time to learn the detailed rules of the game? Is that something you find engaging? You find it more like doing schoolwork and it's just a hassle and you want no part of that? You just want to flip? What are your guys' thoughts on that balance? I think that I really like it when a machine is, it has something where if you jump in and without knowing anything, you can still feel accomplished when there's obvious and easy enough targets that you still feel accomplished. But like you said on the board, I think it's very easy to get bored of it after a while. So if you can find a game that's got just a nice balance where there's a couple things that are easy, they feel good, and for someone just walking up to it, they have fun with it, while still also having some deep enough stuff without destroying its ability to be a good tournament game, without destroying its ability to be well played would be an amazing balance that would just make for like a perfect setup to a game. Right. You know, for me, and I'm going to say something that for some will be quite the insult or whatever, but TNA, you know, total nuclear annihilation right now is very popular in the community, very popular amongst some homeowners. Tony loves it. Be careful, Joe. I know. Like I said, I knew I'd be insulting some people here. For me, while I appreciate and I give Scott Danesi tons of props for what he did, it's just too much on the simple side. You hit the little tic-tac-toe board, and then you hit the scoop, and then you hit an orbit, and then you hit a target. And then, okay, great, I did that. Now what? Well, you do the same thing again. And then you do the same thing again. Right. You know, it's, yeah, you can throw multiball locks in the mix, which, you know, from a geometry point of view, that kind of bothers me, too, because the tic-tac-toe board is here and the lock is, you know, half an inch to the right of there. So all your shots are kind of aimed at the same place, certainly in the opening stretch of the game. For me personally, it's just too simple. It's, you know, I play it. It's like, that's fun. And I have a couple games. I'm like, okay, I don't feel any need to do that again for a while. But a lot of people love TNA. It sounds like you're saying, Tony, you love TNA. I do. I've loved it since I played the Whitewood. But I do completely understand where you're coming from, that it is not a game that necessarily has the same kind of depth that you'd see out of a – Dennis' personal favorite game, The Hobbit. Oh, that is not true at all. You're right, it doesn't have the same depth. Right. Hobbit is the worst game Jersey Jack ever made. And I can see where, especially in a home use, and that's one thing that as it's coming from, that's not my experience because I don't have that kind of play. We don't have one on location, so I haven't played it a ton. I've only played it at very special occasions, you know, when we've been in Texas and stuff like that. is my only chances to get to flip it. So I don't ever have the chance for that burnout to really settle in. And I can see where actually owning it and actually having it on location a lot, that could be an issue. So that makes complete sense to me. I like Total Nuclear Annihilation. I agree completely, though, that there's only one right way to play it. Yes. And that's the problem I do have with it. It get your multiball destroy your reactor That the right way to play it All other ways to play it are wrong There only one right way Bowen showed us the right way to play the game The reason why I think Total Nuclear Annihilation is fun and why it so popular is that it brutal and that modern games are too easy And I agree that modern games, by and large, feel like they have gotten a little bit on the easy side. My biggest gripe about Iron Maiden is that I hate it in tournaments because even I can play it for 10 minutes on three balls. That's too long. And I may still be in the mindset of a game for location. And Tony and I mostly play on location. I have a few games. My newest game is Star Trek, but everything else is early 90s or earlier. So for me, I'm used to and enjoy playing games that have rules. And I like, so I'll pivot on it and I'll say, I want there to be more than one thing to do so I can entertain myself. But I generally don't lean towards it being a 30-minute journey. Like, I do really like Lord of the Rings and what Kiefer did with it. I really respect it a lot. Love it. But, like, everything coming out of JJP right now is like that. And maybe it's okay for one manufacturer that puts out a game a year to do that, but I wouldn't like it if everyone did that. I lean more towards falling into that Lyman Sheets style of code category where assuming you have a decent layout he gives you some easy things that are obvious that you go for like hey look you can bash this well walker and you're going to get a multiball but if you want to take some high risks there's some big points really complicated scoring strategies but you won't have fun it won't be bad for you if you don't know about that you'll still have fun playing But he's got stuff in there for the hardcore tournament A-grade players. That's what I like to see. Yeah. Yeah, I'm with you. I completely agree. I think Lyman does a fantastic job with that balance between the obvious goals and then the, you know, kind of the subtle hidden strategies. And, you know, I think it shows because, again, if you like look at the pin side top 100 as a reference, a lot of those titles at the top of the leaderboard are Lyman Sheets code. games. I don't think that's a coincidence. Yeah, and I mean, there's something to be said about taking a game which, well, I'm meh on the theme, Metallica. You have something like, okay, well, for a starting player, they see and get a very rewarding visceral reaction when they shoot Sparky. Shooting the snake is obvious and harder, so if you want to start a game more intermediate, but then the advanced techniques of activating Crank It Up and applying all of that, things I still don't fully understand as I found out yesterday losing because I didn't make one shot on on the game it's got a lot of depth to that and I just in terms of the programmers we've seen a lot of content out of I think Lyman's sort of at the top and Kiefer's approach is also very very popular but he does you know he has got like lots and lots of depth he likes to let you stack your multi balls it's just a very different style and he seems to program more towards journey style pins where it's like you're going on an adventure and there's a lot of things. But for me, the problem with it isn't the code. It's that the games are playing so long that it feels almost like a chore. I'd rather just play Iron Man sort of thing. But that's personal preference. Yeah, it's pretty interesting in that way. And another game that I really enjoy shooting and has almost no rules whatsoever to speak of is Demoman. that's I think an example where the layout is super fun to shoot all the combos flow but you certainly could not say there's any deep strategy to it maybe a little bit more so yeah really? yeah really okay any wide body has anything even relating towards good is something it's because it's a standard body that you don't have to play on the wide part that's what makes it so good well I'm supposed to say that Alien is the best wide body I ever made right maybe I don't know it's the best coded wide body no one's going to say that shallow yeah but go on for me the nice thing about Demoman is not that the rules are so deep but that the ball is constantly going on a different path the layout is such that you're not just shooting up the middle constantly or you're not just shooting you know a scoop constantly or whatever it's the ball swishes this way and that way and the other way and and so you know you're engaging all three flippers all the time and and uh the ball's going on crazy paths and that's just really fun to shoot now do you feel that that applies to a game like and i've loaded up the pin side top 100 here so for those listening since it changes so you know doesn't change as dramatically as it used to but just running through it real quick so people know of our snapshot in time when we recorded this It's number one, Attack from Mars Two, Medieval Madness Three, Iron Maiden Four, Twilight Zone Five, Monster Bash Six, Lord of the Rings Seven, Metallica Eight, Dialed In Nine, ACDC And ten is Addams Family So you take a game, a number one game Like Attack from Mars Which is my favorite game from the 90s It's the best game of all time Okay, well And so what do you think in terms of that? I mean, it is just a fan layout Yeah So what makes it work, Joe, in your opinion? That's something I constantly wonder about. It's certainly not a deep strategic game. It's fun to shoot. It was one of the first of the fan layouts. Really smooth shots, good humor. And like you said, there's obvious stuff to do. You want to hit the big flying saucer in the middle, and pretty quickly the force field thing moves down. And I think for new players, just that is kind of cool. They weren't expecting the thing to move down into the play field. And it's obvious you shoot the center for a while and eventually you blow up the spaceship, and that's awesome. I think for more advanced players who are into pinball, it's a great balance. There is a little bit of strategy, like trying to go for the billion-point title annihilation, That's a challenging thing to do when you have to kind of plan it or stacking Martian attack in a multiball with Total Nuclear Annihilation or with regular multiball. So I think it really just gets that perfect balance. There is strategy to be had if you want to maximize your points in a competitive setting. But if you don't care about that, you're going to have a great time shooting the shots. It'll say funny things. Lights will flash. She'll get points that feel in accordance with how well you shot. It's a beautiful balance of a game. And it's friendly. One thing I find really interesting about a couple of those games, the ball never comes out somewhere you didn't expect. You don't really shoot the ball and then have it half the play field away because it went through some subway or something, which, again, for new players I think is an important thing because although it can be cool and some games really use that in an interesting way, it's really confusing and you're just trying to figure out where the ball is and suddenly it's three feet away and you don't know why or how or whatever. Attack from Mars, I think prior to that there were more subways than games. Star Trek before that, right, TNG? But the ball basically always comes out from where you shot it, even if you hit the saucer or the lock or whatever. It just pops out from basically right there. So the player is never confused about where it's coming from. yeah it's well balanced but you know in the course of designing or thinking about rule design I pulled up exactly the list you just read off and what I find really interesting is in that list it kind of covers all the bases right I mean I would argue that Attack from Mars and Medieval Madness are rules wise pretty simple games but then you have Lord of the Rings there in the top ten which is not very simple It's a Kiefer game. Iron Maiden, I like seeing at the top of that list. I think it's a great game, and Keith Ellen did a great job with the design and balance of that one. But it covers all the bases in that top ten of deeper games versus just good shooters. Yeah, I guess my general nutshell thing about rules that appeal to me is the best packages, regardless of depth, are do they incentivize you to shoot the entire playfield? Yes, absolutely. I completely agree with them. And so that's really what I look at because, I mean, for example, well, overall, Tony mentioned wide-bodies because I'm not a wide-body fan, but a very popular one for a lot of reasons, I think, is Paragon, but Paragon is a lopsided game. My problem with it is that you really are only shooting one side of that playfield, If you know what you're doing, you really only want to shoot one side. You can respect it for making you learn how to post pass, but it's not a well-integrated concept on the rules side of it. Whereas a fairly unpopular game, also a fairly not experienced game, was Steve Ritchie's second game, Atari's Superman, where you have to actually shoot the entire play field to spell Superman. There's no other way to do it. You can't spot letters in it. So it at least makes you shoot that layout. It's not the best layout he ever did, but it makes you shoot it. Right. And yeah, I completely agree with you. That's something I focused on both with Alien and now with Oktoberfest. As far as the rules, I hate it when there are shots that no one ever wants to shoot. You know, if you know the game, and yeah, that's been a key focus of mine, is that every shot in the game has a valuable purpose to it. And there are different paths to doing good scoring. You don't have to just do the one thing. Good. Oktoberfest confirmed. Makes you shoot the whole play field. Exactly, yeah. Good, good. Inside scoop. Breaking news. That's what we're here for. All right. Well, we only have one last topic left, Joe. Are you ready to play 20 questions? Oh, sure. I'll give it a whirl. Okay. Well, for those who don't know, and in case you didn't know, it's very straightforward. You can ask me a series of yes or no questions. It will be about a pinball machine. It will be a pinball machine you have played. I stalked you and made sure you played it before. Uh-oh. And it's closed book, but after the 15th question, so for questions 16 through 20, you may use IPDB, PennSide, whatever search tools you want. So it's open book for the last five. So we give you every advantage, at least after the first 15 questions. And I'll keep track. I'll let you know every five questions where we're at so you can be aware. But anyway, I have the game here, and you may start asking your questions to figure out what it is whenever you are set. Okay. Is it a dot matrix game? No. Is it a solid state game? Define that because I think you're using it more explicitly than I normally do, which is just anything with computer chips in it. Ah, okay. Is it in the computerized but pre-DMD era? Yes. Okay. Is it a Williams? Yes. Is it a Lawler game? No. Is it a Steve Ritchie game? No. That was question five. so we're in the solid state era um and you said it was a williams i did say that yes let's see here what are you gonna pull out that he knew i played so i'm trying to cheat a little bit on what games would you know i've played um i'm very clever so be careful Does it have multiple? Yes Does it have more than two flippers? No Is it from 85 to 89? No Is it from 80 to 85? No 1990? No That's question 10 this is harder than I would have thought good I designed it to be tricky yes or maybe I just suck at 20 questions it's not a dog matrix game my big mistake here is I should have been taking notes when I asked questions and I did not well let's see I'll help you out as best I can then on that let's see so you know you asked if it was Williams and I confirm that you've asked if it was anywhere from I think combining all your questions 1980 to 1990 those are all no you asked if it was Steve Ritchie that's a no you asked if it's got multiball that's a yes you've asked if it's got more than two flippers that's a no I think that catches you up is it prior to 1980? No Okay, so it's after 1990 Then we've established In a limited range of games You would think But it's not Lawler, so it's not Funhouse It's not Earthshaker But it's after 1990 But prior to 1992 This should be super easy How many games did Williams make in that time? All of them They made all the games. They made all the games. Good thing I didn't go with Premiere. Yes, then the fuse in my head would completely blow up. Oh, my God, I suck at this. Is it card-themed? Is it, like, gambling-themed? No, it is not. It is not gambling-themed. Wow. I'm sure your listeners are thoroughly enjoying the sound of silence. It gets all edited out. It's going to sound like you are just awesome at popping off the questions. This is nothing compared to like me. I'm super slow when it comes to this. I'd say you could think about other play field features, other designers, artists that were involved, software. Yeah. Yeah, I'm just trying to home in on the roughly two-year stretch there, what it has to be if it's not a dot matrix game and it's post-1990. It's not Steve Ritchie and it's not Lawler. It's not going to be Mousin Around because that's Bally. Well, I do need to clarify that normally we treat Bally Williams all as Williams. because it's all the same company. Oh, so does that mean it could be a Bally game as well as a Williams game? It could be. Now, if you want to clarify it, you can ask if it's the Bally subsidiary or the Williams subsidiary. I'm sorry. I just assumed it as your question is WMS. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, it's ambiguous. Okay, well, then I will ask, is it a Bally-badged game? No. I love baiting that out of you yeah, it's a good way to make me use up a question so it's a Williams-patched game you know, I've heard this segment on your guys' show before and it seems easy and then when you come to do it, it's like, oh, no, that's actually not easy at all it's that pressure it is you know it's funny you say it's that pressure i've actually been on a on a game show before and i i managed to blow a trivial like mathematics question which you know under any other circumstance would have been a no-brainer but there is something about that pressure being under the spotlight that uh makes your brain work differently i still remember when i took my gre and i blanked on how to figure the area of a triangle right because all i had done in college Which was statistics. I hadn't thought about geometry in years. And as soon as I was out of there, I was like, oh, my God. I knew I'd gotten it wrong, too. But if anyone asked you at a party if you could calculate it, you would just rattle it off and it would be no problem at all. That's just how I impress everyone at parties. It says something about the kind of parties you go to. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with that. All right. So back to our challenge here. You have done 13 questions. We have a early 90s game, not by Richie, not by Lawler. Two flippers. It is Williams-badged, and it was not a gambling theme, we decided. And I believe, I don't think I asked, does it have multiple? You did ask that already, and I said yes, it does. It does have multiple. Yes. Who are the other designers at the time? Is it a Python game? Yes. Wow. Okay. The post-1990 Python game. I'm one away from the IPTV. That's right. You just have to do one more and then it will all be open to you. And you're going to be so mad. I will. I know. I'm going to look at that and I'm going to be like, how the heck did I possibly screw that up? I'm so proud of myself right now. You have chosen well, definitely. This is a challenge. I rechose two times because I was going through it. It's like, no, I just thought you're too clever. I had to figure out a way. No, you did a great job. Also, a Python game from the early 90s has multiball but not dot matrix. Yeah, but I kind of want to do this legit, because I'm guessing once we pull up IPDP, it'll be obvious and I'll hit myself, but I'd rather do it legit. But it's not Whirlwind, because it's not a Warware game, even though I believe Python was involved in Whirlwind. I'm really going to smack myself when the answer comes out. Maybe not. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you'll be like, oh, I forgot about it. Yeah. No, I never knew about that. I played it, but I never knew about it. Yeah, no, obviously that's the case because it's not something that's leaping to mind right now. Is it Bugs Bunny? No, it is not. That is question 15, so now as of question 16, you may use IPDB. Hmm. Do I want to do that? Yeah, I should probably do that. I won't be here all day. Let's see. No one's ever failed. So you want to make sure you don't not get it. Oh, is it Bride of Pinmont? Yes, it is Bride of Pinmont. 16th question. Yep, right. I'm going to smack my head here. Did you think it was before 1990? Was that the issue? Or did you just not contemplate it? I think it mostly escaped me. I knew it was around 1990, so I figured it was right in that ballpark. Yeah, Bride of Pinmont. Okay, no, very well done. That's a good one to pick for the game. So I'm curious now, what were the other couple of choices you thought of and rejected? Well, in terms of why I chose that particular one, I saw, just so you know where I got it from, I saw you discussing an issue with it on Tilt Forums. It came up as a point of discussion. and in terms of what I considered for other games that I'd seen you talk about, I had contemplated doing Whirlwind and I also was very tempted to do Roadshow. The problem is you own both of them, or at least did, and I was worried that, unfortunately, most of the stuff I found that you ever talked about were games you owned and I really wanted a game you didn't own. So I didn't see Bride on your list. Correct. Maybe that would give me... You're absolutely right. I thought maybe that'd buy me a question or two more. It did. No, that was a good, tricky one. Yeah, for whatever reason, my brain was not getting in sync with that one, even though it should have. So nicely done. So for the listeners, the answer was The Machine Bride of Pinbot. It was a February 1991 release. Williams-branded WMS game was designed by Python Anghelo and John Trudeau. Art was done by John Yousi and Python Anghelo. It has a two-ball multiball in it. It's a two-flipper game. A lot of people are familiar with the rotating head for the ball lock, so it's pretty iconic. It's also, in my view, pretty not fun, given the billion-point shot. But you can always get the conversion kit. You can get the conversion kit, which is cool. The other thing you can actually do is it is possible to set, to basically disable the billion-point shot. If you have access to the adjustments of the game, Someone was excited to have options where you can set the percentages for the Big Wheel Awards. So you can set the percentage for the billion point shot down to, I don't think you can go to zero, but you can set it to 1%. And then you can set its timer to like one second and effectively disable it, which can be a little bit annoying if it actually happens to give that award because you're one second and times out and you never have a chance at it. But other than that, it does do quite a bit to balance out the scoring of the game. We use it in one of our leagues, and it's actually a pretty effective game for them. Oh, okay, cool. Yeah, I do remember hearing about that. Yeah, it's still not a great game in the sense that you're kind of just doing the one thing all the time, trying to get into the multiball, but it's usable. And as an interesting side note, a lot of people think it's a System 11. It is not. It is a WPC game, just like Funhaus is a WPC game. I think a lot of people see that it's alphanumeric and they think it's still System 11, but it is more advanced than that. Yeah. Well, that was the show. So, Joe, we want to thank you for coming on. Thank you so much. Yeah, it's been a ton of fun talking with you guys. We have a link to American Pinball in the show notes. So people, if you want to know more about American Pinball and the pinball machines that they're manufacturing, go ahead and check them out. As a reminder, you can always reach out to us At eclecticgamerspodcast.gmail.com Or on facebook.com Slash eclecticgamerspodcast We're on Instagram and Twitter As eclectic underscore gamers And that is where we are on Twitch also Which we've been spending a lot more time lately That's right, so until next time I'm Dennis, I'm Tony And that's Joe I'm Joe, play more pinball everyone