🎵 Welcome everybody to the Head to Head Pinball Podcast. This is episode 106 and my name's Martin and with me... Joe. Joe, how are you? Good, how are you? Yeah, I'm not too bad. Have you been thinking to yourself, geez, wouldn't it be good to have the best of everything joining us this week? And by best of everything, I mean best player in the world, best designer? Oh, is that too early? Anyway... I don't know, might not be. might not be anyway joining us this week Keith Elwin so good to have you back man oh thank you thank you well i mean we'll go on to jurassic park i do want to talk about iron maiden first but are you starting to feel pressure that people are expecting great things from you no not at all um my design philosophy is i design what i want to play so if you like the games i like great we'll be on the same page if not well sorry well speaking of games that you like let's talk about iron maiden now you would have heard on the podcast a few months ago that i sold my iron maiden and i'm curious to know whether you thought a well don't care the machine has sold so much it really is insignificant or b well i like the game so i don't care whether you like it And the theme was a bit, mm-hmm, anyway. Or did you, you know, go into a fetal position in the corner and cry yourself thinking, why does he not like my work? Did you care? Does it matter? Little column A, little column B. Yeah, I'd be curious why you sold it, but I, you know, I'm not, you know, great. It's like, if you like the game, great. If not, everybody likes different things in pinball. That's what's so great about it. Yeah, I, look, I loved playing the game. just the music was doing my head in. Yeah. I mean, the music is great for pinball, but you're right. If you play a full-on game, it does wear on you. Yeah, I would say that's the only downside for the game for me as well. I'm not a big fan of the music either. So I solved that problem on Jurassic Park by making the outlines wider, so no more long games. It's true. I don't think I've ever lost the ball down the middle on Jurassic Park. Yeah, yeah, that's by design. So then talk about, we obviously had you on the show just as Iron Maiden had landed. Looking back now, what are your thoughts around the experience taking Archer to Iron Maiden, the success of Maiden, and then having to take the next step to the next game? It was, obviously it was a bit of a learning curve. So, you know, when you're doing your own homebrew, you're just doing whatever you want. your garage at your leisure uh you're not worried about licensors uh obviously since archer was a whitewood there was you know didn't have to deal with artist uh approvals and whatnot so that's actually the biggest learning curve there is that and coming to a company like stern then all of a sudden i got all these guys like what what do you want me to do and i was like ah what do you mean i'm used to doing everything myself so it's kind of weird for that you know hey i got this engineer Let me build you something. He was like, oh, you mean I don't have to do this myself? All right, cool. So it was like a big system shock working from a homebrew where you're doing literally everything to having a team of people to make your life easier. And so did you feel that you were losing some control by having other people do it? Oh, no. I thought it was great. I remember I talked to Scott Danesi about it one time. He's like, oh, you're so lucky you have people helping me. I had to do everything myself. And I was like, yeah, you know, most of Archer I did myself too. So, no, it's great. As long as everyone's on the same page, and our team is. So there's no fights, no arguing. It was just like, here's the vision. Let's lay it out. Everyone's like, cool, let's go. Do you have any, like, regrets from Iron Maiden or stuff that you wanted to do that you didn't get to do or lessons learned from that game and making that game or that you noticed by the game being out there for this long? I mean the only regret here's a funny story the plunger that everybody complains about was originally just supposed to shoot the skill shot target but the one, the white wood in our lab the auto launch would fling it around the orbit the whole time and then Rick Nagel who coded the game when he coded up trooper multiball there was actually a bug in there where this up post on the left stayed up when it was auto launching balls and so when you'd start Trooper it would launch three balls and then the drop of the up post and I was like wow that's really cool and he's like oh yeah oh I think that's actually a bug I was like no no we gotta keep this we gotta keep this they're like cool alright and so you know then that's a feature that everybody came to expect you know not realizing that the game was never designed to 100% plunge around that loop you know pretty much like all the other games with similar like Whirlwind and Ripley's you know it works sometimes sometimes it doesn't but everyone says well this is a feature now it's got to work so yeah that kind of bit me in the ass but uh other than that the game turned out as i pretty much as i wanted i obviously you know you're talking about me i complained about that but i was obviously maybe people would complain about it but only because when it actually does go all the way around like you're saying for triple multiball it's actually a really cool you know inverted commas which you can't see moment you know like there's so much that's going on you actually need to have those stop have a moment where something cool happens in the machine there's animation there's flashes all that kind of stuff you feel something so i kind of get i understand why people wanted that as well now on mine i had the option of letting it auto plunge or if i did a manual plunge the ball would always go around so for me it was just like well i'm gonna manual plunge because that is freaking cool even though it was possibly in your own your best interest to to let it miss so you could just start multiball straight away and stay in the rhythm. So, summary is, you ended up making something really cool. People want more of it. Credit goes to Rick Nagel for his bug on that one, because I probably never would have thought about that until I'd seen it. I was like, yeah, you guys, oh, that's pretty cool. We should just leave that. And then we added a super skill shot to go with it, and yeah, went downhill from there. Proves that there's still a random element even in design, as there is in playing. Yes, yes there is. and was there any truth into in the fact that you weren't overly pleased that people were letting the ball pass the upper flipper and not flipping oh no not at all um i do the same thing if they're i mean we are going to update maiden again i'm making some changes to make uh doing that i mean you can still do it but i'm trying to incentivize the mini loop there i think maybe that the score balancing right now doesn't do that enough right now. So next pass, we're going to really make that worth doing. Well, I guess anything that really is sideways action, that puts you in more danger. Admittedly, that particular loop shot isn't so dangerous if you miss, but it can sort of dribble out and go the right outline. So I think you're right. It's risk-reward. If you're going to incentivize people, well, if you want people to have more sideways action, then you're going to make it worth more, right? Yeah, yeah. So the incentive to shoot that shot above it, that target and a dead end, was you need that for your play field multiplier. So it's great. But if you're ignoring the loops entirely, yeah, I think we need to boost that a bit. So I don't know if you remember, when the game first came out, people were just shooting loops like crazy, and I'm sitting there watching these videos. I'm sitting there watching these videos, and I'm playing the one in my office. It's like, wow, I get like three in a row, and then the ball starts going so fast that I can't do it anymore. and so we actually probably nobody knows this but on the back of that game in the back panel there is a screw and what the screw does is it adjusts that loop speed so you can turn the screw in a little bit and it'll slow the ball down coming around that loop I never told anybody about this but this game's been out a while now the game's been out a while if you hit a couple loops and it starts screwing around too fast so you can adjust that screw to slow it down a little bit. Wow, that's clever. I'm trying to visualize what you actually mean by that, but is it something that is a screw that actually touches the ball, or does it screw in the lane itself and make it a little bit more narrow? I imagine it pushes on the rail. Yeah, it's a screw that pushes on this little finger of the rail on the junction there, and when it's sticking further out, the ball comes around slower. Okay. Well, there you go. Okay. That's interesting because I had heard that the reason you put the post on Jurassic Park under the flipper from the second best, Sharp Brother, was because you didn't like the fact that people weren't flipping on Iron Maiden. No, no. So the number one purpose of that post is to protect the flipper. the reason it's offset like it is is if a novice player lets the ball come down out of the pops and doesn't flip, it'll go straight down the middle. So the added benefit is, yeah, if you don't flip, it's going into the slingshot. So it was kind of a win-win. So then let's move on to Jurassic Park. And I'd said it, I think other people have said it, is that you had obviously a long time to get Iron Maiden right. and we refer to it as the difficult second album, you know, a music reference, right? And the thought being that for a debut album, usually a band has had years and years to get a collection of songs and just pick the best songs and therefore you've got your best album. Then the clock is ticking and you've now got to make a second album in a finite amount of time and that really shows the inherent skill that somebody's got. Now, obviously, cut to Jurassic Park. We've obviously, everybody's raved about it. They said it's fantastic, except for the fact that it hasn't got video assets or whatever. But you've obviously heard it all as well. But what was that like for you thinking, okay, I've nailed this, but now the clock's ticking. I've got, I think Gary said, there's about a 14, 15 month development cycle for a game. What was that like for you having to go, shit, I've got to follow this up and the pressure's on? I thrive under pressure. I don't know if you've noticed, but yeah, you're so vibrant and just, oh, on edge. On edge every day. Yeah, no, I love being under the gun. It's being bored, man, you know? I'd rather say, hey, we need a play field in, you know, three weeks. You know, we need a whitewood in three months or whatever. and I'd rather be under that gun and then sit there and lay something out and second-guess myself forever, which I kind of did on Archer. It was like, oh, this very target's cool, but it doesn't work very well. I was like, well, maybe I should do this. I messed with that thing forever trying to get it to work. And, you know, my original guess was not even to put it in the game, and I should have left it that way. So where was the very target? Was that where the jackpot shot was? Where the super jackpot shot is, yeah. the ball kept hanging up in there if anyone had played the game at Expo last year can attest to that so we just took the tilt off just shake it out of there yeah I never get to play it as Archer sadly which much like you that would have been my preferred theme as well oh yeah and the show you know I stopped watching the show because it got kind of bad but this last season was actually pretty good so now I'm into it again it's good to hear I watched it Archer and I like it I love the, the, obviously the dirty sense of humor. It's, it's very Australian type humor, but really, is it that popular a thing though? Oh no. Oh God, no. No, I don't like popular themes. You know, I, I like obscure. Give me obscure any day of the week. Sweet, sweet cricket. Would you have thought that Iron Maiden was a bit obscure when you were doing it? Um, I think so. Nobody else wanted to touch it. Um, the sweetener popper saying you'd get zombie yeti if you take this license and i was like oh hell yeah sign me up okay so that that would make it easy so then so then the the jurassic park design did you know like when when they've said okay you're on jurassic park or did they actually say right just start getting some ideas down on paper and we will give you a theme at some stage or did you know that it was going to be Jurassic Park right from the outset? I was told it was going to be Jurassic Park. There's a little bit of history with this title, and basically I ended up doing it. I wasn't originally supposed to do it, but then I ended up taking it, and so I had really nothing planned out for it. So it really was kind of a quick-to-whitewood stage game that I didn't really get the plan out for too much. Now, my next title, I've known about it for three months, so this one I'm having a little more time to plan out. But like I said, that can also bite you in the ass, so we'll see. At what stage did you think to yourself, you know what, I'm going to pay a little bit of homage to the original Jurassic Park, which on record you said shoots like garbage. Not your exact words, but you said that it shoots terribly. but you've then decided to obviously put a lot in the game that reminds and and i think so freaking cool like the fact that you've called it try ball is just hilarious right but so was that always on the outset you're like yeah i'm gonna do a bit of a nod to this yes so there's a joke around the office after tim sexson had a little medical issue we started calling him try ball timmy and and i was like hey oh yeah this game's gonna have try ball and uh so it kind of worked out perfectly that the original did have it. But yeah, definitely. The original game I used to play a lot, but it is so clunky. And I just... Oh, man, he's got that repeating loop shot that doesn't work. It just doesn't work. If you can repeat that, good luck to you. Yeah, I remember, because I used to own one, and I took the glass off. I played the game for two years before I realized it had a three-way combo in it, because it was just so impossible to shoot that orbit and shoot a couple clean shots with that upper flipper. But, you know, the rules weren't bad for his time. I used to play it. The T-Regs is cool the first couple times, but then, you know, during a game. Takes forever. Yeah. During a game, yeah, it's just whatever. It is what it is. But I guess originally, you know, talking to the designers, it was like, yeah, I was supposed to follow the ball around, but there was a patent on a funhouse, so we couldn't do it. So now it just randomly moves around. so it's like make sure that we did this for this version of the game it's like well since that patent's expired this t-rex is absolutely going to follow the path of the ball so uh that's the nice thing about patents expiring i mean it's better than lost world right oh last world best video mode ever what is i have not played that yeah it was a better say because i've not played that in years because obviously it's a it's a it's a steaming pile what was the video mode in lost world so there's dinosaur jaws and your guy's swinging on a vine and you just hit the the start or the uh launch button and it is so framey that you can't possibly time it so he either gets through the jaws or he gets eaten because i remember is that just how terrible the voice acting is which was actually goldblum but i had no idea that at the time which was like when you get into that mode, and it's just like, shoot the spinners! Over and over and over again. I will say, the first time you see the snagger works, it's like, hey, that's pretty cool. Yeah, it's cool, and then the only copy I played on, they had to disable it because it just stopped working. Yeah, it just stopped working. Yeah, but yeah, that game was, and I hate those plastic stand-up targets that don't seem to register most of the time. Oh yeah, and they just fly the ball back at you. Yeah. And they break very Yeah, they used this on South Park, too. Man, I couldn't stand those things. Oh, yeah, South Park. Yeah, they used them on a lot of those games. Yeah, the Sega, they had a special deal on those. Because as an operator, they were easy to change, I give them that. But then the plugs would fall out, they would break in half. Oh, those things were a nightmare. Well, they were good on Godzilla. I was about to say, we've established that Sega machines are garbage. Except for the fact that, Keith, you really like Godzilla for some reason. Why? it's just simple fun I mean there's like nothing Godzilla and Lost in Space both games you're just what are you doing well there's multiballs that's all you do there's no modes there's nothing it's just you're playing for these multiballs and there's just something about you know the simplicity of some of these games and I would never own either of those games but if I come across on my location I'm definitely dropping quarters in those you pick Godzilla a lot in tournaments because nobody knows how to play Yeah, and Starship Troopers isn't that bad and Baywatch is pretty good when it has strong flippers Starship Troopers I actually really like I think there's some clever rules just using that mini flipper and getting double credit on the bug kills and holding up the big right flipper and using the mini flipper to shoot it in a hole It's got some interesting stuff to it You can drop catch with the little flipper, you can get control and get the traps. He's well on it. I don't know, I like it. Okay, here's a trivia for you guys. What am I listening to? Okay, here's a trivia for you guys. That bug mech that goes back and forth. Guess what that was recycled as. Bug mech? Which one's that? There's a stand-up target that goes back and forth in the left corner. And every time you hit it, it goes further back. Yeah, and then that's how you start the main multiball. Yeah. What was that recycled and used for? um hmm in obviously in a recent game um probably seven or eight years after that game I've got to look at this bloody screenshot to know what you're talking about I'm going to feel like an idiot when you say it yeah see this is the advantage of working in the industry man you find out these secrets I don't even know which shot you're talking about it's the one it's the only if you're looking at pictures it's the one that has the actual bug the plastic on it or model and it's right underneath it. So you hit a target and you just keep hitting it and eventually it moves back to a hole and that's how you start the main multiball. Oh, okay. No idea. All right, it's Elvis. Oh. The Elvis mech that goes back and forth was a recycled Starship Troopers mech. Oh, I see what you mean. I would have never guessed that one. Because I was thinking I saw a target you hit or something and well, then you never see Elvis's. The only place I've seen one is at the Sanctum. I haven't even seen one anywhere else. Yeah, I discovered that and was like, whoa, that's pretty cool. Very clever. So, obviously, you didn't recycle anything on Jurassic Park. No? No, I don't think so. But you've obviously... I guess the closest thing you could possibly say would be the in-lane up post from Cactus Canyon, but... Yeah, true. we were joking before saying the amp suit from Avatar which you would agree with me is one of the best games ever wouldn't you Keith? I definitely would not agree with that but oh damn this interview is over so yeah so I designed the LE first which is those two targets and a target in the back and an up post back there so that's actually one of the main differences on the premium LE of Jurassic Park is say you're in Raptor multiball, when you hit the three stand-up targets surrounding that back shot, it lights the up post to come up and hold that ball during Raptor multiball for double scoring. And then while it's held back there, you can hit the post as a Newton ball and smack the ball into the Raptor target for a jackpot. So it's definitely got some coolness added to the amp suit, which I think was an uptown bank and a couple of targets and a magnet, if I believe, right? Yeah, correct. And what it is, because, you know, it's obviously it's so close to the flipper that, you know, you could say that it's a dangerous shot. And we were sort of talking before about, you know, obviously the loop shot and the sideways action. Like there's just things on a machine you would not shoot because you know that you're putting yourself into constant danger. However, that Raptor pit, for some reason, is so enticing, even though you know it's dangerous and you shouldn't do it. You can't help but want to shoot there because cool stuff happens there, right? Yeah, so it's actually, I think it's less dangerous on a pro than it is a premium LE because when the ball's locked behind the gate there and you're bashing on the gate, it comes back at you faster, but the good news is you kind of know where it's going. Whereas when you're shooting those three angular targets, you kind of have no idea where it's going. But if you shoot it all the way through, then it kind of dribbles out in the left there down the control room lane. Yeah, and when seeing the difference of premium and the LE when it was announced, and then also seeing it at Pimberg, I have always said that I think that the main attraction of the premium is the Raptor Pit upgrade. Oh, absolutely. I think that that's way better than the Dinosaur. Not that the dinosaur is bad, but the way that that now changes and alters the way you play, I think, is awesome. Yeah, yeah. I definitely spent a lot of time in that raptor pit. I really like the way the premium LE all comes together with the gate that raises and closes the up post and the back which acts as a lock So I think yeah I was really happy how that came out Now, do you get double hits if you hit the center target? Like when you're building it, is it kind of like Sparky or the Amp Suit, where if you hit the center, you get double hits versus the side targets, or is it all relative? Well, what it does is it spots your current set. So once you knock down the gate, then you have to go through red, yellow, and green sets. But now on factor default, it starts at green. So that's one set of targets, or it's one hit to the back raptor. Oh, nice. But to light your 2x scoring, though, you have to hit those three individual stand-ups. So that's what actually controls and what lights your playfield 2x? Not your playfield X, but there's a raptor 2x jackpot during raptor multiball. If you hit those three targets and then hit the back target, it'll start it. It's a little less obvious on a pro because it doesn't actually lock the ball. It's virtual. But, yeah, in the premium L.E., that ball will lock back there behind the up post. Very cool. And in multiplayer, it's there for all players, right? Yes, yeah. There's compensation if somebody has a ball locked and someone else steps up to it. It knows. Right, okay. Yeah, okay. So then, thinking about the rules framework overall, when we spoke to you about Iron Maiden, you'd said the inspiration was Walking Dead, effectively. Yes. And you said it, so no take-backs. So was there inspiration for this, or did you just go, I'm now going to just try something completely off my mind? Boy, where did I get the inspiration? I'm not sure, actually. This map system, well, the first toy I actually designed in the game was the truck. The thing that changes states left to right. And I was like, I should design a rule around this. And so I started thinking, you know, you're in a truck, you're navigating a roadshow, but roadshow is so linear. It's like, okay, well, instead of modes, it'll just be basically the paddocks are just objectives. You're completing a set of objectives and you're climbing the ladder. Now, which rung of the ladder you take kind of depends on which way the truck is facing. So you can take the easy path. You can take the outside paddocks and get to the visitor center quicker. But the perks aren't as good, and you're going to lose out on a huge multiball, King of the Island. You're going to lose out on double super spinner, and the T-Rex will award an extra ball when we're all said and done. So you definitely have incentive to cut through the dangerous paddocks. and most importantly that you can unlike roadshow you can skillfully make your decision you're not relying on the stand-up targets random pop-ups yeah no that's why when that's funny um one of our programmers wasting came to me he's like i don't know about your idea of this map system it's so linear and i was like these aren't modes these that stop thinking them as modes they're not modes they're just objectives you know think of it as iron maiden the power features yeah you hit them as you go along. You don't spend the entire game focusing on that. You can if you want, but it's just supposed to be something that's going on in the background. The main theme. Since we're on the topic of the truck, I noticed that since Pinberg, that now the production copies now have a post behind the captive ball that comes default. Yeah, the pros were always going to get that. Those games at Pinberg were prototypes. Personally, I don't like the post in there, but obviously it's needed because we saw quite a few balls get hung up in there. You know, it's something we've known about. Obviously, that's why it was already dimpled for a post there. But it's kind of cool when you hit the Newton ball and it bounces through the area there in the truck. It was kind of a cool little thing, but it's not worth getting the ball stuck in service calls, obviously. And on the local copy that we had, now what we've actually seen a few times is that you can get the ball wedged between the post and the truck that you have to actually open the glass to go in there and get it. It happened once when we were playing it on stream on Sunday. Which is pretty insane that a ball can get up there. Are you talking about underneath the truck directly? Yeah, it was wedged between the ball. I don't know how that happened. I don't know either. We actually modified the bracket so that can't happen anymore. But yeah, we were just like, how does that happen? And if there's a place for a ball to get stuck, it'll find a way. Trust me. Well, and so this was the... I said this when we were talking about the premium LE that's got... We'll talk about the T-Rex, because I would argue I think that is just... I don't think that's the best mech in the game. But if it's grabbing the ball and... Is it randomly spitting the ball out, or is it only going to certain areas? Because if it's spitting the ball, then you've got to test for all the different places it can go to. Yeah, it depends what the T-Rex is doing. So the one where it's the most wild and crazy is the mode T-Rex Rampage. That's where it's going to – I mean, there's settings in there to kind of narrow down where we throw it. So it defaults. Right now it just defaults to throwing it in the pop bumpers. It'll throw it at the truck once in a while. We're kind of avoiding anything on the left side of the play field because there's just really nothing over there. It's just plastics. So we're trying to pretty much narrow it a little pie-shaped wedge where it can throw it. That's interesting because I noticed on the left side where it is that it actually has holes in it, a la, you know, like Rescue 911 for presumably where it was going to actually go in there. So I was like, oh, it's going to go in there. Yeah, definitely planned to drop or throw it over in that direction, but right now it's not implemented. So then talk to me about where, not the inspiration of T-Rex came from, because Obvi has come from the original, but what made you decide or whose decision was it to say, you know what, we're going to do a big, fuck-off animatronic T-Rex here rather than just this T-Rex that drops a ball? And was it like, we've got to do better than what people have seen before? Yeah, so when I first started the project, Gary and George, oh, it's got to have a T-Rex, got to have a T-Rex. I was like, all right, all right. So I designed the play field, and I was like, oh, you know, I'll stick a T-Rex in the upper left corner somewhere. And then got the layout all done. I was like, wow, this thing shoots great. Oh, yeah, I still got to put a T-Rex in there somewhere. So I got with my engineer, Harrison, and we looked at the old Data East one. He's like, oh, yeah, it looks like a drinking bird. And I was like, yep, exactly. And he's, oh, yeah, I can do way better than that. so we came up with a couple iterations and George was like nah nah I've got to do more than that so I said screw it I told Harrison my engineer just design the most expensive T-Rex you can and that way we've done our job and they can pull out whatever they want so that's what he did he comes back the sales team saw it and they're like that's Stan that's awesome that's amazing and we're like oh alright cool well our job's done so but did anybody look at it and say yeah but the cost no because once they saw what it did they're like oh yeah that's that's got to stay so uh you know we you know toy around just having a t-rex looks the ball having a t-rex just eats the ball but once you see the dual stepper motor um movement and the jaw and everything kind of working together it's um it's you know it's impressive yeah the sneaky part of that area that I think just looks amazing or really cool touch is the fencing with the, you know, the broken fence and around it, which is just a really cool, subtle, obviously didn't have to do touch, but it really brings that area together with looking really cool. Yeah. So once we got done and we got the T-Rex spoken out there and I was like, you know, he should be framed somehow. So, you know, I watched the movie a couple of times. It was like, Oh yeah, this fence that he busts through that, that frames them perfectly. So, uh, we, you know, tried a couple different things. We had a kind of a nylon rope in there, but it looked like rope and not wire. So we actually tried some cable, some bare wire cable. I was like, yep, that looks pretty close. Let's roll with this. And that was actually a lot more expensive to do than you would think. I think once you've spent a lot of money on an animatronic T-Rex, I don't think it's too much to ask for a little bit of wiring around. Yeah, that's a very labor-intensive, those poles with the wires, because they're pretty much a sandwich of five plastics and a couple brackets. So, yeah, I really like how it came out. And you can tell that they're all done individually because none of them look the same. This is true. You can bend yours to any way you like. No two games are alike. So then thinking about the layout itself, what was going through your mind when you're putting that layout which we sort of said has some familiarity but not like it is actually quite an innovative layout so it killed me to put an upper right flipper in this game because i wanted to do something so different from maiden but as i was going along i was like this game really needs an upper flipper because i really wanted to do that half pipe side ramp and so i was like well how am i going to feed this flipper and it just occurred to me that one's really the only ramp i can think of that feeds an upper flipper and i'm sure there's others but the one i think of that comes to mind is indy 500 but that thing just kind of drops it kind of in the area and it's just like that's not very satisfying so i kind of racked my brain how can i make this you know flow kind of like the warp ramp but not copy the warp ramp so i came up with my own little uh reverse helix ramp on top of itself and that was one of the first prototype uh parts we got in and harris and i put that in the game it was like well i hope this works first time we shot it we're like oh god yes perfect and so then i moved you know to get some difference from maiden i moved the upper right flipper it's further inwards and a little further back so it shouldn't feel quite the same at that upper loop. If you've shot that upper loop, that thing whips around there so fast. And I was thinking about, I better lower the flipper power. So I did that. And it was like, after playing it so fast for so long, the shooting it slow is like, you know what? I like this better fast because you can shoot this loop. You got to be on your toes to combo into that, the tower ramp. So I actually put a rule in there to if you combo those two together, you get a little tower bonus. I think it triples the value of the tower. Yeah, at least for me personally. The speed of that shot makes it almost easier to hit that. Yeah, I remember when the game was in early Whitewood form, John Borg came to me. He's like, I hit that combo with that loop, that ramp. That's so satisfying. I was like, yeah, thanks. That's exactly why I left that flipper power the way it is. It's just you don't have time to think. You just flip. And then when it works, you're just like, yes. Yeah, thinking and flipping is a bad combination a lot of times. And then the right orbit that sometimes orbits upon itself, originally I was trying to design that so it hit the truck, but we couldn't really get that to work, and then we were flipping it. I was like, you know what, you can actually shoot this and then shoot it back through the same loop, which is something that's never been done. So we actually then tweaked the loop to actually hit kind of halfway up on that flipper. And obviously it's going to depend on game setup, But, yeah, if you do that, if you shoot the right loop and then hit the upper flipper and it goes right back through the left loop, that's an amazing feeling. Yeah, you can actually drop catch it. Yeah, you can drop catch it. If it comes fast enough, you can hold it up and it'll do another loop. Yeah, it's very interesting. So I actually had an up post up there to feed the pops. I was like, well, you know, when will I hold this up and when will I let it go through? And it's like, oh, I'll just do it based on the direction of the truck. so if the truck's facing to the right uh it'll go to the pops but if it's facing to the left it'll uh orbit through and then give you a chance to uh to shoot it on the fly wow i i was trying to figure out when it went into the pop bumper because sometimes you hit the o it go in the pop dump bumpers sometimes it wouldn't now that now very clever so so what part of the layout was sort of really challenging to get right. And I say that, like, I know that as a reference, when we're talking to George Gomez about Deadpool, he was talking about that ramp that fades from the right to the left. He's just spent ages trying to get that right. Yeah, I was there. Was there any part of your layout for Jurassic Park where it just wasn't doing what you had to do and you really had to just work at it to get it right? The most challenging part was the smart missile shot. I really, really wanted that because I had this dedicated up post for shooting this. And so I was like, man, the only way I can do this is if I make the right orbit a really tight shot. And so I did that. I tried it. Everyone who shot it loved it. He's like, that's a really satisfying shot. And I was like, well, what about the right orbit? And he's like, that's a hard shot. But, man, when you hit it, it feels really good. And I was like, yeah, I agree. It's a tough shot. But when you do hit it, it's so satisfying. So I just left the geometry the way it was and no regrets. yeah joe certainly not complained about that right orbit every single week i oh the o one is like not really the one i have struggled with actually the one i was playing it um last sunday i had a lot of issues hitting the actually starting multiball i would get to multiball and then actually getting that through the pop shot to start it via chaos was uh was much more challenging for me i eventually warmed up to it. With the truck blocking your shot or no? Either or. Actually, the few times I would hit it, it would actually be with the truck blocking it. Yeah, if you look at that and you're like, there's no way you can fit a ball through there, but it works. Yeah, it's... And to have that be the money shot that then opens the door for your big scoring opportunity in Chaos is really cool. And then I actually had this weird situation where I drained out of Chaos with a ball in the pop bumpers, and I was like, hopefully I'll get enough pops. I didn't, but I got a super while I was in there, and then I got back to Chaos, and it went into plunging tons of balls, and all the letters were lit. I'm like, wait, was this Chaos? And then eventually I was like, oh, wait, this is the second stage of Chaos. But it got there in the grace period, practically. So I never actually saw the transition. So then it just started, and I was like, what the hell is going on? What is this part? Yeah, one thing I really wanted to do on this game, and this is a direct tribute to the original, was the three-stage multiball they had on that thing. I was like, this is amazing. You're never going to get, very rarely, you're going to get all the way through it. But just the fact that you get through the easy part, okay, rather than restarting the easy part, let's have another level, let's have another stage. And it's like, well, most people are never going to get through this. But, you know, there's the carrot. If I get through this, is it going to restart or is there going to be another stage? So both Raptor and Chaos Multiball in this game have three stages to them. Obviously, like you said, just getting to the second stage of Chaos is very difficult, but that's a total carrot for you to keep playing that Multiball and not just say, well, if I get this jackpot, it's just going to reset, and the job is going to reset. So I think pretty much any from a novice player to an expert player can appreciate that more than just a repeating Multiball. Yeah. The idea to have the progress – so does it hold progress in Raptor too? Raptor does not hold progress. You've got to do that all in one shot because Raptor is worth a lot more than Chaos. Oh, interesting. So Chaos I hold. You hit – the truck direction will light up either the left side Spanish shots or the right side Spanish shots. And you have to hit X amount of jackpots to light your Chaos jackpot, which I had a letter. and now whatever that letter jackpot you cash out, that gets banked on that letter. So when you get through all those jackpots, C-H-A-O-S, each one of those values is banked for stage two. In stage two, all you're doing is shooting the chaos letters and collecting that value again what they were when you hit the target. So if you, usually because you have to hit so many jackpots towards the end, the O and the S are worth $40-50 million by the time you get to stage 2. Yeah, it's very cool. That's like Kobayashi almost, where it's like how much do you want to build to then hopefully have the ability to cash it later, whether you get there or not. Now, strategically, my favorite multivolume game is King of the Island, which you get for capturing the Spinosaurus. So how that works is you have X amount of switch hits, and then all the RGB arrows light for a 1X jackpot. So now you shoot whichever one you want to shoot. Okay, now that jackpot's locked in at that value for the rest of the multiball. But you've got to relight it. So you hit X, I think it's 20 switch hits, and then it relights all the other arrows for a 2X jackpot. So then you shoot that jackpot. It locks that in. Plus you have to reshoot your 1X before, and then you go back to the switch hit collection. So the strategy of this multiball is putting the jackpots you're going to have to shoot a lot, which are the 1x, 2x, 3x, the ones you get early on easy shots. If you screw up and put it on the side ramp or, God forbid, the O shot, you're not going to get very far in this multiball. So strategically, I really like that multiball. Joe, I'm sure when you get there, you'll agree. Yeah, that sounds awesome. Now that's a carrot that I'm going to be purposely trying to chase. Like I said, don't just screw up and just shoot. Well, I'm just going to shoot this 1x jackpot over here because every time you want to boost all the multipliers, you've got to reshoot that same shot. So, yeah, don't do that. And that's roughly by staying left on the map? No, that's for capturing the Spinosaurus. Is he on the left track or the right track? There's three carnivores in the middle, which are the super predators. Those are the ones that give you the most perks and awards. He is the third one. Oh, okay. So he is two stops away from the visitor center. Oh, yeah, I can see it. And one thing that you did on Iron Maiden, I know you said it was deliberate, is that you made sure that a lot of the inserts were labelled on the playfield so people can actually look at the playfield to know what they need to do and what they need to hit and what those shots actually do, which you've done again. Does that sort of, in a way, almost limit you to how the code evolves because the layout's there, the labels are there, it's only got to be one way? So what really bummed me out on this game is, so they have all these motors for the T-Rex. They use lamp drives. So we had to give up like a dozen lamp drives right off the bat, and I really wanted the T-Rex spell out to be on the play field, but we just couldn't swing that. But I think I got pretty much everything labeled I wanted to do. It would have been nice to have an extra set of just dinosaur inserts so they're not using these arrows. So we had to kind of think, well, we'll just use color codes on the RGB arrows to represent the dinosaur. And if it's lit for something else, then we'll toggle between the colors. And a code update's just come out. What have you added to the game in that code update? So what we're really focusing on now is getting everything polished and instructional text, which was really lacking on the initial release and the games that were on Pinberg. That takes quite a bit of time to set up that text. And so Rick spent probably a good week getting a bunch of instructional text in there. We also defaulted the Feed T-Rex as the very first T-Rex mode, kind of the Bozo Award. So you hit the Jeep three times, and it'll just automatically go into the Feed T-Rex hurry-up. And the way that works is you can shoot the left ramp and cash that in right away, or you can shoot the other orange shots and build that up higher, because whatever the T-Rex feed value you capture, that is your base jackpot. So it's a bozo multiball, but if you play it right, not only can you build the jackpot really high before you start it, but if you shoot the jackpots from left to right, that'll also, I believe, double the remaining jackpots. So you'll see one red flashing arrow, which is something we added in the latest code because the faster flashing wasn't very obvious. So that was something we added. Lots of new call-outs, lots of new sounds, just a lot of new shaker. Tim Sexton came over to our project and knocked out a bunch of shaker code for us. So all these videos with the T-Rex stomping around now have choreographed shaker code. Each game should come with Zach Sharp chasing you during that mode in a T-Rex uniform. Yes, that would be amazing. Yeah, because I had noticed that I originally thought that the T-Rex was completely random, but then someone pointed out to me which nobody else knew, is that once you've lit T-Rex, it actually puts the name of the mode underneath it, and then you can hit the jeep to cycle that name. And I was like, oh, jeez. Because I I comment, I'm like, we haven't seen the multiball. The multiball just hasn't come up. So in tournament mode, it works just as you're used to. You can select which mode you want, but in standard mode, the feed T-Rex will always be first. Yeah, I think that's good for casual players, just getting them to something that they can see. Yeah, the two Z-shots in the game are the truck and the left ramp. Like I said, I added enough carrots for the expert player that it's just not something you're going to blow off, because if you do it right, it's worth a lot of points. hmm those those goats are very filling well so then let's talk about animation and it's been obviously we mentioned before a bit of a point of contention people sort of up in arms that there's not um video footage from the movie and you know before it was revealed we i had said it we both sort of said it would be kind of cool but we've sort of seen the animation and come to the conclusion that it's actually probably better because you now get to tell the story as you're going along the game as opposed to you know watching sort of clips from the movie that are out of sequence anyway so it actually makes you feel like you in jurassic park as opposed to watching a movie did you know right from the outset that video assets assets weren't going to be there so you've done it this way i mean honestly i hate interactive dvd player pinball i will never never do a game like that unless i have so many assets that i can do great things like on batman It works for Batman because you've got hundreds of episodes, but taking one movie and watching the same five minutes worth of footage over and over and over. So are you saying you don't like Indiana Jones? Yeah. So I am probably one of the few game designers, I mean, I guess Eric and Scott, but also grew up playing video games. I grew up playing video games, so I'm used to having a story attached to these games I play. and I kind of want to bring that same feel to pinball. It's like when you say you buy a licensed video game, you're not just sitting there watching clips from a movie. You're reliving a new experience with these characters you know. And so that's how I went about trying to design this. I mean, I would have liked to have got a couple of the actors, sure, but it just didn't work out. So we kind of rewrote some of the things around what we had to work with. And our animation team really kicked it up a notch on this one. Yeah, I think that this direction was much better. And like you mentioned about the video game, when I first saw the footage of it, it immediately reminded me of when I was younger, like the very first Jurassic Park sit-down shooter game where you were in the Jeep and just go around. I'm like, this very much looks like what I remember from playing the game. Yeah, exactly. So when I first found out I was doing this with no assets, I went to Logan Arcade and I played that. And I was like, oh yeah, this is a fun game. They don't need the assets to this. And so, you know, the great thing about doing your own story is nobody knows how this game ends. You know, if it was based on the movie, you're like, okay, so, yeah, the T-Rex grabs the Raptor. Okay, the game's over. But Escape Nublar is, you know, nobody even knows what that is, how it happens, or what happens if you fail. It's going to be unlike any wizard mode to date. So I'll be pretty excited. It's actually not in the game yet. We're still working on it, but hopefully very soon. And then we'll see what the reaction is. Ooh, that's big. Do you have pressure to have to put new things into a game? No, not at all. Like I said, I put in what I want to put in. It's like, hey, it would be cool to have this. The Chase T-Rex scene was probably my favorite mode to do on this game. It was like, oh, so I got this truck. Let's pretend like this is your shifter, and then all these other shots are you hitting the accelerator, and we can put this all together in a nice cohesive package. and so I worked with the animators and they were like, oh yeah, we can do all these different angles of the T-Rex kind of chomping at you and really I had a lot of fun working with them on this project. Yeah, they did a great job, especially with the T-Rex scenes. There was the one, I believe, that I forgot what mode it is, but the one where the T-Rex comes through the fence and tips over the car and roars at it. I remember the first time I saw that, I'm like oh shit, that is a great animation. Yeah, our animation guy and I, when he was working on that, he was like, hey, check this out, what do you think? And he was just tweaking that thing for a week, and I was like, it looks amazing, you know, it's good. He's like, well, what if I move the camera over here? He's like, oh man, this thing's awesome, nobody's going to complain. So, yeah, that was a great scene. I think it's the first animation that I think I've seen, not sort of dissing the previous titles, but ultimately I think the previous titles have been they have been cartoons as opposed to CGI, but I think the first bit of animation we saw was, you know, the goat scene as it was about to be eaten. That was put up on Facebook. And I remember looking at it thinking, is this actually from the movie? I don't remember this exact scene. And I read the text and it said it's animated. I went, are you fucking kidding me? This detail that's gone into the animation is, it's like, it's current generation. Like, it's not like you've just done simple animations. you've done really full animation on this. PS1 port. Yeah, actually, if you go back and play the Raw Thrills shooter game, and you look at that and you're like, huh, yeah, I think we did one up on them. Sorry, Josh. Yeah, I think you did. But I was kind of looking at it going, this is too much. Like, did you actually need to go this detailed for a pinball machine? But you have. Yeah, I think, yeah, we got a lot of flack for the animations on Maiden, and it's just, you know, those guys wanted to, you know, they wanted to have my back, and I appreciate it. They just killed it on this one. What was wrong with the animations on Iron Maiden? They were awesome. Well, I agree. Not everyone agrees, but to each their own. If there's something to complain about, we will complain. There's no pleasing everyone. Exactly. So what do you then think has been, take the video out, what do you think has been the biggest criticism that you've heard from Jurassic Park, and what's your response to it? You know what? Actually, the biggest compliment, it's probably not meant as a compliment, is when people play for the first time and they say, the shots aren't where you think they are. And to that I say, amen. That's exactly what I'm trying to do. If I walk up to a game for the first time and all the shots are exactly where I expect them to, I have nothing to learn. It's just like, yeah, I've played this. So my goal is to make a game where it's like, oh, here's the right loop on Jurassic Park. Like, it's weird at a weird angle, and it's hard to shoot, but, man, it feels good to hit it. Yeah. So that is probably the biggest thing I hear is that people are like, yeah, the shots are tight, but after a couple games, I can find them. And I've watched a couple streams of the first couple games. People were just bricking shots. And then after, like, the third or fourth game, they're hitting four- or five-way combos. So it's like, yeah, it's a learning process, and that's what I want to impart. because when I grew up playing pinball, the layouts were just so different from each other. There was never a game that was like, oh, yeah, these are the same shots as this game. These are different. And, you know, George and I both, you know, sat down when he was doing Deadpool. He's like, I want to do this cool shot that feeds it sideways to a ramp just because it's never been done before. And this could be something new and cool. And it's just like, yeah, yeah, I agreed with him. And I said, you know, that's funny you brought that up because we worked on that together. He had me because I guess I'm the most accurate player here so he had me sitting there shooting that thing for like two days straight with a camera rolling so we can get the angles just right so uh yeah it's fun and exciting to put shots that have never been done in a game so we'll see how long i can do that if you've got a machine that's just full of easy shots that gets boring really quickly and another example i'll give where i think it's it's genius is you know the the s shot the the right shot which goes onto the the reverse ramp what i like about that is you can hit that shot and it will go up there but it won't quite make it and come down and then you've got to adjust and absolutely nail that shot so i know it's sort of what you've said before about you know shots that change state now that's in a way it's kind of changing state because it's also the the plunge shot as well but i kind of like the fact that you're not just repeating shots all the time all the same you've got to adjust on the fly and they do different things depending on how well you've hit the shot. Yeah, actually, I forgot about that shot. Yeah, that was a shot that early on I wanted to try to do, and I worked a lot with my engineer to try, you know, how can we share the plunger lane with this shot so we can open up all this extra real estate? Because I don't think Stern has ever done any kind of plunge directly to the flipper before, so this is new territory for us. So we tried a few different things, and I think we got it nailed down there. Yeah, I think that those type of shots are super satisfying. I mean, like you mentioned with the Deadpool shot. Like, I can't really think of another shot of recent memory that's as satisfying as that shot. Because even if you hit it perfect, it still barely crests around, seemingly, barely crests around that turn. And you just feel like, you're just like, oh, yeah! And it's just, it's so satisfying. I remember when George was designing that right orbit on the game. is like, oh, people are going to hate this right orbit. It sucks. He's like, you should do something else here. And George is like, no, no, no, it's fine. But now my favorite thing to do in that game now is shoot that right orbit and then combo right into that ramp. I'm so glad he left that in there. Didn't listen to me. Ninja time. So when you're designing a machine, do you have almost like templates to work from or do you have to design every single element like ramps and orbits? Like, do you get like a standard layout that says, okay, this is what the shape of a bare play field looks like, and I add things on? Or do you actually have to design things like ramps even down to the angles of them? Or – because I just – most people don't know the design process. Or do you have templates of ramps that you go, okay, I'm going to put this ramp there. Now I'm going to move the wire form around. There's no ramp templates. Obviously, we have templates of the footprints of the flippers, the slingshots, all the standard mechanical parts. When it comes to ramps, basically, I just draw a line, and I'll add curves. I'll have the line curve around. It'll be my center line, and then I'll hand it off to the engineer, and he'll build a wire form around the center line I've drawn. For the ramp entrances, I will do those myself. I'll figure out the geometry for the ramp entrance. But yeah, the ramps are all custom for the game. There's no template for the ramps. And you do everything in SolidWorks, right? Some SolidWorks, some AutoCAD. Oh, interesting. Yeah, those are the softwares that I use. I can picture that would be very fun to... Because there's a lot of elements that go into playfield design you don't think about. I have to give the artist a 2D layout of where he can draw and where he can't draw, so that's much easier to do in AutoCAD than SolidWorks. because I could just port it right over to Illustrator. Yeah, that makes sense. But do you also have to be designing what's under the play field as well? Or do you have an engineering team that go, okay, he's got this crazy layout, shit, now we've got to make this stuff work. Yeah, I mean, the T-Rex was a great example. He's like, T-Rex not only grabs the ball off the play field, but can drop it on the ramp or throw it. And then my engineer will look at me like I'm crazy, and then he'll come back two days later, I think we can do this. so yeah okay um and you're also working with i believe the the person that did all the art this is their first machine is that right johnny crap yes yeah and what was that like because he's obviously going to learn the art of pinball design right yeah he's french canadian so he's got the best jokes uh no um he is i don't get that he was here one time i told him a joke and he just kind of looked at me and was like, oh, okay. He's a friend of Jeremy's Zombie Yeti, and he really helped him along with the art package. I think he did a really good job. It's painful when these images leak of these low-res oversaturated JPEGs, and there was, oh, artwork's terrible. I'm looking at it in person, and he's like, no, it really pops, I swear to God. I can't officially say anything like that on a leak, But, yeah, no, he did. I've had a lot of people come up to me and replay. He's like, wow, that premium artwork is stunning in person. I was like, cool, yeah, don't tell me. Tell the artist. Yeah, we know. Whenever we see images, you're seeing a static image, and people are sort of zooming in. They're doing all that kind of stuff. They're seeing the wrong stuff, right? So it's not until you actually see the machine in person that you really know whether it's going to pop. A screen grab from a PowerPoint presentation of a JPEG, reduced quality. Yeah, you get a basic idea of the layout, but don't judge the art until you see it in person. Yeah, or the gameplay. People need to stop doing that. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And how much further do you think you've got to go before we get to 1.0 code? Oh, come on. Kill me. I'm asking that because I'm just wanting to... Oh, of course I'm going to ask this question. Keith's been on this show before. he knows the kind of questions we're going to ask. But I guess what I'm trying to think of is, have you got so much more to put in, or is it still now just tightening the rules, balancing the scoring, doing choreography, that kind of stuff? There are definitely more rules going into the game. As far as ETA, I'm not sure, because the last thing we want to do is rush out a release, and then have to do a couple of bug fix releases to follow it. So we got burned by that on Maiden a couple of times. We're like, all right, here's kind of a small release. I was like, well, you know, now this doesn't work. So then we have to do another release, and it's just more trouble in this for us. So our goal in this game was to have all the upfront stuff in the game and as bug-free as possible. That way the casual player can play. They're not going to know about any of the mini wizard modes, wizard modes, whatnot. and then for the long development we'll start getting the wizard modes in and we stuck to that plan and I think this is the plan to do rather than Maiden where we just kind of jammed everything in there and then put the instructional text and all the bells and whistles in later. I think this is a better approach. Definitely. And right now we've got the game kind of artificially hard I think there's only one extra ball you can get right now but when we're said and done there'll be more extra balls. It'll play it pretty much has the same number of rules as Maiden. This game is a little drainier, so it might be a little harder to get to the end, but we'll see. We'll make some adjustments as we go. I think that's definitely the way to go, and people need to just deal with it. My favorite question is, what version is the code at? You realize that's just a number. It doesn't mean anything. We're at 8.87. That doesn't mean there's 80% of the things in the game. It just means, you know, let's just say, hey, guys, pick a number. Okay. So. Well, look, it makes no difference to me. Like, I get my machine in November. We're going to be past 1.0 code by then. So I get to play it when it's all fully fleshed out anyway. Yeah, there you go. See, that's the problem, though. Then you're going to like, oh, there's no code updates coming. Well, well. No, no. There's something to be said about the slow release. And then we can get public feedback. I love the slow release. Yeah, exactly. Public feedback changed things. People don't like this. Everyone was saying the multiballs are too hard, so we implemented the Bozo T-Rex multiball, and I've gotten a lot of positive feedback on that so far, so it looks like that was a good decision. Yeah, we spent a good part of the last episode just talking about that, how much better it is to slow drip and to be able to experience the evolution of a game, and it's like getting downloadable content and every few weeks or every month you get a new game that you get to rediscover all over again. It's so much better. Yeah. Like I said, I'm a player. I'm a player. I know what I like, and that's kind of what, you know, I had Walking Dead in its first release. I was like, oh, this game's cool. You know, the code's okay. And then Lyman hit that huge release, and then I was hooked. Yeah. This game was awesome. And then every update he did after that was just icing on the cake, and I think that's still to my day my favorite game. You played it until you broke it. Yes, and then I played it some more. Yeah. So when it comes to code, how do you guys, or do you personally view 1.0? Is that just feature complete, and then everything's in the game, and then after that point it's all polish? Or is it just really not that, like, does the number really mean anything at that point? Once you hit 1.0, does that have a certain significance to it? The 1.0 is just, you know, it's feature complete. That doesn't mean there's not more stuff coming. I mean, look at Deadpool. That hit 1.0, and then more stuff kept coming in, more stuff kept getting better and better. So 1.0 doesn't mean we're done with it. It just means it's feature-complete to our satisfaction. Perfect. That's what I thought. Now, obviously, Iron Maiden has come out, and it's a really good balance between the home game, but also has become a player's choice in tournament. I mean, obviously, it's a simple statement to say, Well, that's from Keith Elwin, who's, you know, greatest of all time. There you go. I've said it. Whatever. You know, we're done with it, Keith. Sure, you're the best. Whatever. But do you again think about that with Jurassic Park saying, I need to make this a great home game and I need to make this a tournament game as well? Yes. Obviously, there's the balance between a location game and a good tournament game and a good home game. So that's a tough balance because, I mean, nobody does a better alignment of taking a game and make it easily approachable. Yet someone like me was like, well, keep pushing start and keep getting further into it. So it's a definite dance. And, yeah, I'll wake up in the middle of the night thinking about this stuff sometimes. It's no joke. So I guess time will tell. Do you think it's tournament ready right now with the latest code? people are going to be able to at least make it in a competitive scene? I would say no, because we haven't fully balanced the modes. I don't even know if the tournament setting does, honestly. We'll have something in for the launch parties, but as of right now, I probably would not. Fair enough. So, don't put in your tournaments, guys, is what I'm hearing. I was curious that when... Let's jump back for a second. With all of the upkick ramps, was there a specific game that you loved that ramp like an upkick ramp that you just love shooting and you're like I gotta get that into my game like I'm sure it's not Junkyard but a similar game yeah I was playing Tales from the Crypt a couple years ago and I was like god that's such a cool ramp and then when Borgi was working on Munsters he was kind of screwing around with ramps and I was like you know you should bring back that U-turn ramp that you did on Tellson to Craft. He's like, oh, yeah, that's a good idea. Then I was like, damn it, I wanted to do that. But he designed his pretty differently, so I didn't feel bad. Mine are pretty straight up. Half pipes for his is pretty angled and long. Yeah, that came out wrong. Yeah. Anyway. No take backs. That was my inspiration. I think those type of ramps are really cool. They also seem to transfer. They're satisfying to hit, and they also seem to transfer speed better. Yeah, that's what my... I was looking at side ramps for this game, and I was like, I really want to do a U-turn ramp there. We screwed around with it for a while until we got it pretty smooth. I'm happy the way it came out. I was a little scared there for a bit because our first couple of prototypes were really clanky. I was like, I can't do that. And then we found just the right geometry to make it work. So I was really relieved. I was scared there for a minute. It all works out in the end. Because there would have been no other thing we could have done there because we needed that space for the T-Rex. So I was like, I want to put a ramp, but it can't interfere with the T-Rex. So I was like, well, perfect spot for a U-turn ramp. And so what's the title of your next machine? No. Expendables? Oh, thank God you didn't say Golden Girls. That joke's so old. What happened to My Little Pony? yes as well so i'm not the one working on that one that seems like a timmy timmy yeah tim sexson's hard to work on that one it would absolutely have to be so you know the the trade-off from where you've moved to chicago obviously no mountains it's still you've obviously made the right decision and clearly you're loving designing pinball machine yeah best job in the world man so so well done obviously I was saying last week that I just came back from the Brisbane Masters and the two things people were talking about was code and what's next for Stern. We've only just released Jurassic Park. We still don't even have it in Australia and people are still asking what's next. I think that's just the nature of it. It's the culture of the new. It happens in every industry. If you remember the dark days where Stern was the only company and there were two releases a year, you're lucky. So if you didn't like the current release he's like well there's always a one uh in six months so it's not a bad thing no i don't think it's a bad thing at all um and you know we've got a lot of choice obviously outside of stern as well um stern clearly sort of leading and nailing it with each release but i don't know we just get it we're getting excited about it the more that there is choice the more options there are the more excited people are getting and obviously there's more people in the hobby today than there was even five or six years ago. Yeah, it's like not every game is for everybody. So I see the feedback, oh, I don't want it, it doesn't have the assets, it doesn't have the actors. It's like, okay, that's fine. There's plenty of other games out there. I don't get offended by that. I make the game I want to play with what I have to work with. If that's not your cup of tea, fine. There's plenty of other games out there. There's tons of designers games all through the 70s and 80s that I didn't like, but I'm not and I sit there and complain about it. It's just, yeah, I just, you know, it is what it is. Different strokes, different folks. Exactly. And talking about games that you design what you want to play, when you were talking about you weren't sure about that upper flipper on the right, I was a little surprised to hear that, because I can't picture you really making a game that didn't have an upper flipper, because it seems that you really... It's not that I didn't want an upper flipper. It's like I wanted it in a completely different spot than Maiden. and it is I think it's three inches higher and about an inch and a half further to the left I just didn't want it to feel familiar like oh this is the exact same loop shot as Maiden so that's why I was a little nervous about that but what I ended up doing was swapping the U-turn ramp and the loop so it feels nothing like Maiden. Do you picture yourself ever making a game without an upper flipper? Yeah if I ever get bored of three and four flipper games I suppose. And upper right or upper left, like, does it matter? Because I think I find I think it probably because most people are right that the upper right feels more satisfying but there great games with upper left flippers as well Well, sounds like I need to deprogram you and make one on the upper left. No. I'm just saying, you do you, Keith. Like, whatever is going to make you make a good game. Upper right flipper, Marty. Time to give you one on the upper left. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's all I'm saying. I'm saying you've got options. only two, but you know. How about a bidirectional flipper in the middle? Oh, there you go. The bottom buttons go in either direction? Yeah, like a perba, but with a flipper. Oh. That's actually really clever. How did you do that with one neck? A long time ago, but it was too much of a nightmare to implement. Yeah, that'd be hard to do with different coils that go in different directions. Yeah, it would never line up straight. It's a cool idea on paper. If we ever do a video pin, I'll do that. Okay. Okay, so let's move on to Pimberg. So as we sort of said before, you know, spoiler for those people that haven't worked it out yet, you know, you won Pimberg again. We're all a bit bored of that, Keith, if we're really honest. I was voting for everybody else. I spent the entire time rooting for you. I'm one of those people. I just want to see you win as much as you can because that produces the best pinball to watch. so I'm it's true I'm all into just seeing you crush everybody or whoever I just want to see the best pinball and when you're winning I don't think that visually there's much more enjoyable pinball to watch than that when you're on it's just magic it's funny every time I win a major tournament it's like yeah you know I should cherish this because who knows how long I can keep doing that and I've been saying that for about 20 years now so I guess I'll just keep enjoying it Well, I can. Well, wasn't it a couple of years ago where you had sort of really dialed back the amount of tournaments that you were in? And I've got to say, from my perspective, I was thinking, oh, we'll probably see him sort of drop down in the rankings, you know, because it just hasn't happened because you might be doing less tournaments, but you're still winning them. And it doesn't matter. He could be ranked 500. It doesn't matter. He'll still show up whenever he wants to play. yeah I chasing a whopper dragon is something that never really interested me because I've been playing long before that it wasn't really never my motivation I just enjoy doing it but you know traveling and using all your vacation time to go to pinball tournaments especially when you know you work in the pinball industry it's just kind of like you know I think I want to use my vacation for actual vacation now and then so I've dialed back the smaller shows correct? Yeah because I heard you talking on the Loser Kid podcast about, I believe, what you were talking about. Like, yeah, I haven't really been playing much. I'm going to go flip around on location, get ready for Pinberg, knock off the rust, and then you just see that. And then after the first day, you're in first by a large margin, and I was behind you because it was obviously the shirt because both of us were wearing head-to-head shirts. And then to hear you say that and then still just play as well as you did, me personally for a person who got into the hobby way late in life I've only been playing for under 10 years at this point seeing how you can still compete at that level and not be playing that often and being later in the career it makes me still feel eventually I can get I can do well in the hobby yeah it's like golf you'll be 70 years old out there on a golf course you'll be the same for pinball. He's 70 years old, flipping around and having a good time. And by the way, there was a Loser Kid hat that brought me luck, not the head-to-head shirt. I'm still waiting for it in the mail. It hasn't come yet. You guys want to hear something stupid? They sent my girlfriend one in New York and she's like, oh look, I got my Loser Kid hat and the package had been ripped open. Somebody had taken it off her porch, stole the Loser Kid hat out of it, and put the box back on the porch. If you want to see someone in New York wearing a Loser Kid hat, Kind of a small... Say small? We know where it came from. Jesus. Bloody hell. Jeez. People suck. So there you go. All right. Well, congratulations on another sterling victory. The thing that I think people are now expecting from you is not that you're going to win, as I said. We're all expecting that. But we're all expecting the moment. You remember? The moment last year, was it Harlem Globetrotters, where you had that moment where the crowd just went, oh my God, did he just do that? And this year, I think the moment was when you had two balls trapped up on the right and then managed to just nudge one of them over by nudging the machine. We're all looking at this going. Oh, pro football, that was one. Yeah. Yes. Those upper flippers in that game are completely useless, so it was all about getting them to the lower flippers. and I noticed that. It happened. I trapped that one at a time. I was like, oh, it looks like I can nudge that over. So I tried, but I didn't do it hard enough and then it never fully went back all the way to the right. I was like, well, I'll try that again later and then the opportunity presented itself and not only did it work, but then I nailed that spinner. So, yes, that was a good feeling. But that's what we're expecting now. It's like, when are we going to have the Keith moment and you did not disappoint this year. So, thank you. I feel like you were doing that. That's just the proud placing. I was more proud of my, well, what was that dumb EM? The one where you had to knock down the four drops for double bonus, but one of them was behind the pop bumper, so you need to bank it. I'd actually never attempted the shot before, but I got it first try. So I think last year, for me, that was the moment, not the Harlem one. Yeah, I mean, like when I was watching you, the things that stand out when I watch you, at least on this year's finals, is watching you on Tomcat and just how, which I have not been able to unwire my brain to be able to play this way but your ability and your choices when it comes to you don't slap save you only flip with one flipper and then throw it towards the opposite flipper into a safe controlled environment that doesn't throw the ball back into play and then immediately you lose it like it tends to do every time I do slap saves but getting to the place where you're comfortable just doing that one single flip and then being fine with whatever happens after that to then get control and take another shot with it. There was like three or four in a row that you could just hear the crowd, and it was just like, wow. I just can't get myself to do that, and I don't know how, because I learned from watching back, that wasn't really a thing when I was learning five or six years ago that it was always the double flip to try and save it, but now it's turned into this single flip and to get your brain to unlearn that is just, I don't know how to do it. It was a really good secret maneuver I had once, and then Bowen at some broadcast said, Keith is the only one I know that actually does this. And then it was broadcast, and now everybody's doing it. And I was like, ah, that was my secret. Have you found that just doing that play is the same, you can do it in the same situations as a slap save, or is it? Yes, yes. It's like, why slap the ball out of control of the middle when you can just slap one flipper towards the opposite in lane and just come to a trap? I learned that way back in the day in ballet because they had those big fat flippers, which were terrible at saving. But that's one thing they were good at was knocking the ball kind of towards the other in lane. So that's kind of where I picked that up on in the 80s. And I've always had that move. I don't think it even has a name, but yeah, it's very useful. Yeah, the benefits of doing that are just unmeasurable, because half the time you make a slap save, it goes up, it hits something dangerous, and then you look up and you're dead. And right after just being like, I always say that every good save deserves a quick death, because that always seems that way it works. But when you do it, it's just like boom, and you're just like, man, you play like six balls sometimes on a game just because you can do that. or six balls worth. Yeah, it's... Man, I don't want to advertise it because no one's going to do it. Well, you can know how to do it and just not do it because it's hard. We're going to link it to a video of showing people, so, you know, bad luck. It's done. Well, we've all got to try and beat Keith. That's just, you know, the fastest of all time. There it is. So, speaking of rules, I don't know, that's not even a good segue at all, But let's do Joe and Keith tip the top 100, all right? So you would have heard this. I'm going to do a random number, 1 to 100 for Pinside. Now, what I want to do, I want Joe to tell me what his rules are. And then see if I'm right. He's going to tell me what's really right. Joe to do it, and I'll agree or disagree. How's that? Yeah, correct. Yeah, sounds good. Please give me a good game. I don't know. We'll see how we go. Here we go. Hey, Google, pick a number between 1 and 100. Sure. 29. 29 is... Oh, my God. Wow. The Hobbit. Oh, God. Whatever Joe says, I agree with. Wow. What are the odds of that? That's funny. We've literally, every episode that Joe's been on, nearly every week I've rubbished The Hobbit. That's ironic. This might be actually the one game on here I might know more than Keith on. I know that game not at all. So I'll just agree with whatever Joe says and that's easy. Alright, let's see here. Granted that most of my knowledge is when I owned the game, not when I know that I know a gist of the things that have changed, so that's going to be more on memory than actual gameplay. I haven't been and we have to spend a lot of time on it with the new code. But, all right, here we go. So mainly for me, when you're starting the game, the skill shot that I choose to go with is the lock skill shot because simply getting lighting locks is a very important part to the game. And it's always points anyway, really. No, and one thing that, I mean, if you really feel like chasing the skill shot, if you leave it on whatever the skill shot comes up on and you hit that skill shot, it will cycle. And if you don't move it on subsequent balls, if you hit it, it's worth more for not moving it. If that happens to come up, the other skill charts are not that big of a deal. But as you soft plunge, you try to get as many of the lock targets as you can. And then after that, pretty much your first goal in the game for me is going for the lock rollovers because it's twofold. It's lighting your smog locks, which is the big multiball in the game, which also is used to parlay into all of everything else because, like a lot of Jersey Jack games, everything is stackable in this. So if you light your lock, another feature that unlocks when you light your locks is that now your locks are going to turn gold, I believe, and now subsequent completions of locks will actually light mode locks on the orbits, which can be used to pretty much what it sounds like. It turns your modes into multiballs. So as long as you don't cash out the smog lock, whenever a smog lock is lit and you complete lock, it will light the orbits for more multiball locks. You can lock three balls, so you can get to a four-ball multiball for the modes, which can be super important for scoring big because even if you get into any of the main multiballs it then can be used if you then start a mode within those as a big restart to then throw another four balls into play so that's like the main thing you're going to be chasing for the most part to get to big points in the game besides that whenever you go through the four inlanes it'll pop up a beast if you hit all four of the beasts down that'll get you into a multiball which is super important in new code is that when you get into that multiball mostly that multiball is not worth too much and it's kind of a nuisance and gets in the way of doing any of the other stuff in the game that once you light your super you can actually hit the action button to kill the multiball and end it so they go away so you can play the rest of the game which in the earlier code was super aggravating because you'd be in smog or playing a mode and they're constantly popping up and getting in the way and ruining all your shots. So that's a nice thing that they added, that you could just say, I'm done with this, and then it just ends the multiballs. You can continue doing whatever you're doing. Learning anything so far, Keith? What? Huh? Is it just that this game really doesn't come up in tournament play? Oh, me? I don't know. I just don't play it. since I stopped playing in so many tournaments if I don't go learn a game just to learn it if I don't have fun playing it I won't play it we've said that it's not fun it's not Thunderbirds or anything but I just don't be like that nothing is Thunderbirds how dare you I love cheesy movies I'll watch Mystery Science Theater and Rift Tracks and everything. Thunderbirds to me is like the pinball equivalent of that. Just like, what were they thinking? Ugh. I don't care what you put Lord of the Rings on that game and it's still the worst game ever made. Yeah. It means nothing with that, with how terrible that thing should be. No. It is terrible. So. Um, let's do another game. I want to do another game that Keith knows. What do you reckon? Yeah, that's more interesting. Plus, nobody wants to know how to play The Hobbit. I learned that while owning the game that people just be like, I don't like it. Well, but it's, I don't like it. Okay, fine. All right. Here we go. We'll try another one. Hey, Google, pick a number between 1 and 100. Sure. I hope it's Iron Maiden. 54. Oh, my goodness. How about between 1 and 10? X-Men. X-Men. All right. X-Men. Now, that's an interesting one. I like X-Men. What do you reckon? I think Keith likes I like X-Men, yeah. X-Men 2. Yeah. Okay. So what are we doing with X-Men? I, I've, I've, it's really, X-Men came out just before I got right back into pinball. So I really missed X-Men and everyone told me that it used to be everywhere. Like people got sick of it because it was everywhere. And then years later they did that code update that apparently, you know, like transformed the game, whatever. but I've completely missed X-Men and therefore I really don't know how to play it. It's not that complicated. I mean, there's really important nuances that are really helpful in tournament play but I mean, it's not a super complicated game. So the first thing you're going to do, obviously you don't want to hard plunge. That's the most important thing. Do not hard plunge because obviously most times in tournament it doesn't have a ball save or posts so it's super dangerous. So you want a soft plunge. if the ball saves on take a shot with that flipper try and get the storm ramp and if not try and knock it off so you can get control on the bottom flipper from this point there's really two ways you can go about this my original way of going about this strategy is I would keep putting it in the scoop to spot blackbird letters, or inlanes or whatever like that, and the second completion would light your villain, so I put it in the scoop, try and catch it backhanded or however the means that I would do so, get it back in there, light villain, get into a villain, probably sentinels, and then go for wolverine to play those two together. That is always seemingly the main... your main starting point of what you want to do. That's what I used to do, and then I found out about if you go for the Hellfire Club or the Brotherhood targets, that after I think there are five shots each or so, and pretty much if you go for those, that also lights your villain. It also lights one of your villain multiballs, but most importantly, which is huge, is that it'll light your villain if you go in there and play your villain, and you do not pick that multiball of whichever targets you decide to go for. If you don't pick that multiball and pick a different villain, once you drop out of that and your villain's over, you only have to hit whichever bank you picked once to relight your villain for the next villain. So it gives you this nice opportunity because the villain modes are probably the biggest scoring opportunity in the game, and it gives you the safety of just one shot, and you can get back in a villain. And then also you can do this in ball one, ball two, and then still have the ability come ball three to just have a quick multiball that you can get to. You can write your villain, go in there, and actually play the villain multiball of whichever one you happen to light, which is good points. So I now do it that way because of those exact reasons. But outside of starting there and doing the Wolverine stack with a villain, once you get past that, the main strategy is trying to lighten play your X-Men because they're worth a good amount. If you complete them, they're worth bonus X, which in this game, bonus can be worth a lot. And they also light your X-Men in the middle, which becomes super important to get to one of the other big scoring opportunities in the game, which is Magneto Multiball. And Magneto Multiball by itself, if you start it without playing any X-Men, is worth nothing. Which is 50k per shot, which is not even worth bothering. But if you... And it's a big deal to get into it. It's not like it's easy multiball. This is the one where you've got to lock four balls, right? Yes, you can lock four balls or you can lock some balls and then keep pounding Magneto and you hit him an X amount of times and then it'll just start the multiball at whatever your lock value is. There's a way you can cheapen it that way. And with Magneto, one important thing to know is that it's one of these weird... I guess it is a bug, is that if locks are set to virtual, when you light your locks, it'll light locks on the right orbit phoenix shot and the left shot where Rogue is, and those will be lit for locks, but actually up the middle is also lit for lock, even though the light is not flashing, which is super useful if you happen to be able to hit that shot. So that's a good thing to know in tournaments, because most of the time in tournaments, it is on virtual locks. So up the middle tends to be an easier shot than either of those other two. So, yeah. So, Keith, what do you do? His strategy is spot on, but if I'm playing for fun, I just shoot for combos between Cyclops and Storm. Back and forth, back and forth. How's that fun? It's fun. But then you have to listen to Storm, which is some of the worst combos ever. Do you not fear me? Am I not beautiful? Shut up! If you had the LE, that is, you had the ramp, dumped the ball down the middle. Down the middle, yeah. I remember that. I told him about that, is that when this thing first came out, the LE version, every time you would start Iceman, the second shot would always put it down the middle, 100% of the time, because it started, and then the next shot, once it registered the switch at the top, it'd start moving the ramp, and then you're dead. Yep. So good. so would you pick this in a tournament i definitely would i would because uh i used to play it a lot i used to own one and a lot of people don't don't know the uh intricacies as well as joe so now i know not to pick it against him but yes i would and one thing i i think is it i big for me is i think um like the other games in this generation specifically, I feel that the pros are better than the illies. Agreed. I think that the pro version of X-Men, the pro version of Avengers, the pro version of Transformers, which is all this trilogy that happened in this range, the pros are better versions of the games. Oddly enough, in my opinion. I agree. I've always found this layout, and you guys are obviously better players than me, I've always found this layout to be in some ways predictable but in other ways uncontrollable. So I wouldn't pick it because I don't like the layout. But is that what you're factoring in when you're picking a machine? Like you're driving the bus and you've got to pick a machine. Do you think about layout or do you just like, oh, I'm so good at all the layouts, it's now just about rules? And do you also then factor in whether other people aren't so good at these things? Oh, we always think about stuff like that. It's like if a player's playing out of control, you're going to take him to the game with a bunch of sucker shots. So at least I do. Yeah, this game has a lot of sucker shots. This game is if you can't find the shots on this, you're dead. You're dead, yes. It's like the Party Zone Papa is notorious for this. If you can't find the no way out or way out, whatever that shot is, that's the only way you're getting points on that game. What is it, way out of control or something? Yeah, way out of control. That shot, it's worth a million plus every time you shoot it. well you can spend like five minutes trying to set up a multiball area we can shoot that four or five times and then win the game can't get the same amount of points yeah same amount of points which of the I don't know if you saw it back in in in desk Jim had had used it and he put a mod in it so that every time you shot that there was a something he attached to the ramp that would chuck it into the pops which was a brilliant idea on that game to stop a