Hello and welcome to episode 12 of the pinball studio podcast. I'm your host Sterling Martin and today I've got my good friend Robert Terry of Savannah, Georgia. He's a professor over at Georgia Southern, and we're going to learn how he found this crazy hobby we call pinball. But first off, let's talk about the sponsor. Old Town Pinball. Do you need a new or used pinball machine? Just visit Will's inventory list at oldtownpinball.com. Also, The Electric Playground. Does your game need a new topper? Just head over to their website, teppinball.com. And last but not least, Spooky Pinball. You need a creepy-ass game? Just head over to SpookyPinball.com. Anyway, welcome to the show, Robert. It's great to have you, man. Good to be here. Thank you very much. And Happy New Year to you. Yeah, Happy New Year to you. And yeah, I've been wanting to do this for a while. Me too. I've been thinking about what we're going to do, what we're going to talk about, because I'm a little more academic than some of the guests have been. So I've got three different ways I want to kind of talk about this journey. One that kind of parallels the way a lot of your other guests have been doing it and then kind of waxing a little bit to virtual pinball. And then finally talking about the academic turn and how pinball has kind of become both my hobby and, at least for a little while, hopefully maybe more than a little while, an academic interest of mine where I can bring my profession and my love of this game together and hopefully make a happiness out of that. without actually designing games or trying to enter the industry or anything like that because, you know, I'm just too old and I don't have what it takes to do that, I don't think. Well, anyway, yeah, let's start off with, I guess, your earliest memories of pinball. Where did all of this start? Well, like everybody else or most of the people that have been on this, those Gen X, because those Gen X memories, a lot of us are approaching pinball with nostalgia. And that's true for me as well, going back, you know, in the 1980s, late 70s, early 80s. My parents would take me and my brother. I was five. My brother was three. We'd go to the mall. They'd take us to the Aladdin's Castle, hand us each five bucks, and be like, here you go. And then they'd go off shopping because, you know, it was a very different era. That's kind of how it was for me. My mom would always drop me off at the arcade for hours, and, like, I just wouldn't see her for the rest of the day. Yeah, and they completely trusted that somehow we'd be completely safe. There'd be no white vans pulling up. No, nothing would happen. And, you know, there was some nefarious stuff in some of those arcades, not so much in Salt Lake City, Utah, which is where I was at the time. Right. But, you know, and at the time, pinball was in the back of the arcade. The video games were up front, and the video games were newer, and a lot of the pinball machines were dominated by the teenagers, and they were bigger, they were harder to look at. I was small. I was five, and my brother was three, and I was supposed to stay around my brother, so we stuck to mostly the arcades. And so pinball kind of at first was the alien thing in the back, that I didn't understand. But it was interesting. My dad and I had a kind of weird relationship. My dad passed over a decade ago. And we weren't always close, especially as a kid. He really didn't seem to know what to do with me a lot of the time. But secretly in his discussions, one thing he actually cared about was pinball. He actually loved pinball. He played pinball a lot in college, things like that. So occasionally when we'd talk about arcades, he'd mention, you know, like, what did you do today? What games did you play? if he asked, we'd start talking about Karate Champ or Gauntlet, or well, Gauntlet's later, but Pac-Man and Galaga and things like that, and he'd just glaze over because he had no interest in those. But he'd ask if we'd gone to any of those machines that were sitting in the back. And we hadn't, but it became this weird point of interest, and so much so that when my dad and I and my brother and family would go on road trips, if we ran into a pinball machine somewhere, that became the thing that we would stop and play. When my grandma, after we left Utah, we moved to Minnesota for a while, and pinball, I never saw pinball in Minnesota when I was there. But on one memorable occasion after my grandma passed, my mom must have guilted my dad into this because my grandma and I were fairly close. As much as it could be, and when she passed, it hit me pretty hard. He decided that he was going to take me on the road trip to go get his inheritance, the furniture that he was going to get from his mom, or things he was going to pick up. Right. And so we got in the U-Haul, and we drove all the way from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Salt Lake City. And somewhere along the way, we stopped at some restaurant, and they had Pinbot. And I don't know what it was with my dad and Pinbot, but that was the machine that he regarded more than any other as, like, the pinhole, you know, the ultimate thing. And it was fairly new at that time. Pinbot's in, what, 86? Yeah, something like that. I can't remember the exact date. I mean, it's a really important pinball in the history of pinball. It's the first machine that actually has all the people involved, not just the designers on the credits, because Python insisted on that. It's really where a lot of the, you own Grand Lizard, and you can look at Grand Lizard, and you can look at Pinbot, and you can see that a lot of the ideas they were thinking about were coming together. And in terms of a story, Pinbot is a really interesting machine because it does tell the kind of coherent tale of Pinbot traveling through the universe to the sun. and then, you know, through the solar system anyway into the sun and going with it. It's a kind of, you know, interesting machine. But for my dad, I don't know what about it was just a big deal. And it took him completely out of the show where he'd completely ignore arcade machines or whatever else. It'd just be a way to like, you know, here's some money, go over there. But when we stopped and we saw Pinbot, it was like we had like an hour at that place where we got behind our schedule on the road trip. But it became like this weird thing where my dad and I like bonded over an arcade game. That's cool. And it was, you know, I still had no idea what the hell I was doing with it. And, you know, I was definitely in that mode that most of us go in until we start realizing what the designers were actually after. It was just like, keep the ball alive. That is the only point. That is all you're doing. You have no idea. That's the only thing I thought pinball was for the longest time. Most people. I mean, most people do that. That's, you know, that is entirely it. and then you know so this took a you know i we came back from that trip and we stayed minnesota and i you know we ran into our kids but pinball really kind of faded in the you know in the late 80s it was really hard to find even though i know you're looking at the history i now know the space shuttle and other tables or and pinbot and others were were doing well and spreading but i just didn't encounter them wherever i was right but i did encounter the beginning of that virtualization of pinball. I know there were other games. There was that classic pinball arcade, or pinball, not arcade, but digital pinball or video pinball. The space one? Space something that came on I think it came on Windows 95. Oh, no, no. That one's later. That one's really interesting. There's an arcade machine called Video Pinball. We'll talk about Zanzibar later, but I've played it. And weirdly enough, it's part of Zanzibar's pinball tournament. Whenever they do pinball tournament, you have to play video pinball as well. It's not very good. The physics are weird. It's not a very good successful, very good emulation. I also had Wildfire. I don't know if you've ever seen that. It was a little Tandy toy where it had different LEDs for where the ball could possibly be. You played it and it would simulate the pinball going up these different red LED spots through it. Somehow I had one of those and I played the heck out of that. That's when I learned what a kicker was or other things like that. Because even though it wasn't physical, it was the idea of pinball. But anyway, so fast forward, 1990 Rare comes out with their first adaptation of pinball. They did two different ones for Nintendo Entertainment System. And the first one was pinball. And here I am, and I'm like, I get to pick one game. I think we weren't rich. We weren't wealthy at all. Our Nintendo Entertainment System was secondhand. My brother had saved up. it was my brother's because I've always been bad with money. I spend money like I'm an idiot, and my brother's always been the saving person, so it was his. It was his that we played with, but we got the option. We could get one used game each at this used game sale, and I chose Pinbot mostly because I remembered, like I wondered how the idea, maybe my dad would be interested if we had Pinbot. Because otherwise he was avoiding the Nintendo and, like, this is the dumbest thing that my kids are ever doing. You'd see us play it and be like, oh, it's rotting your brain. He was not a fan of video games at all, which we can talk about. Yeah, my parents were never big on it either. That's why I never had, like, the latest and greatest. It was always, like, secondhand. Like, I think Super Nintendo was coming out, and I got my first NES. Yeah, like a few months before. He's like, oh, you can take this to your son. Yeah, that was it. I mean, we bought ours from some guy that I think had discovered Wii just a little before that and suddenly was like, I have a better way to spend my money. And that was what he was doing. We lived in a trailer park. It wasn't exactly the opinion. The quality of neighbor wasn't super high as far as the social aspirations. So if they discovered girls or drugs, that usually got them out of video games. But I stayed addicted to video games throughout the whole thing. I've always been a video game player. But anyway, so we got Pinbot. And I know you've had Will mention this in the episode he did earlier where he talked about his experience with that. It's a weird game. I mean, Rare, you know, Rare, you know. They got sequels as well. Yeah. Well, the pinball game? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, Python, Python's an interesting developer. It got, you know, Bride, which is, you know, it's an interesting thing. I like Bride. I'm one of the few people that earnestly likes Bride. and even when I recognize what its design is meant to look like and what it's meant to be, and that Python, if you know the Zingy Bean story with Python Angelou, you know that definitely sex and pinball was something that he just couldn't escape. His whole life career, he just kept coming back to it, and Bride is definitely one of those. And Jackbot is a great illustration of how you can professionally re-theme something quickly. Because the new rule set and the DMV, Jackbot is actually fun, especially who liked Pinball. Oh, I like all of them, yeah. They're all fun to me. But the rare adaptation on Nintendo is not. It's Pinball-esque. It looks like the design, but the ball changes, it morphs. They've added a lot of video game elements to it. It's not Pinball. My dad was, at first he actually wasn't intrigued. He sat down. He's sitting there on my brother's bed and we're hooked up to Nintendo in my brother's room and he's playing for about five minutes and then the ball morphs into something and he literally throws the controller away. And it's like, this is not Pinball. And then it walked away. Anyway, so at that point, for me, pinball, we moved to Texas after Minnesota, and that was a giant culture Slash, and I moved to rural Texas. And so while we had a movie theater and we had a little bit of the movie theater overlap when pinball machines began to really enter to replace video games because video games are now the home systems, and pinball began to do well in movie theaters, especially during the 90s when they just had to get every movie theme following Adam's Family's success. You got so many that were just absolutely like, why is this movie a video game or a pinball machine? I mean, I own Demolition Man, but Demolition Man is not a very good movie, and it shouldn't have been a pinball table. Yeah, I think Data East was the one that was really picking up the better themes. They were getting Batman 89 or whatever, stuff like that. They made Simpsons and Back to the Future. Yeah, they definitely made some better calls in terms of adaptations. And everybody was like, they were trying to partner with, because they were in the movie, they were trying to partner with that energy the same way that Williams had succeeded with Adam's Family, and they were hoping they would get that. I mean, it's one of the best things about where we are right now that nobody's like, I have to have the summer blockbuster. They're like, no, I need to have the title that has survived 40 years. I need Jaws, or 50 years. I need like a 50th anniversary. And multiple generations of people know what the heck Jaws is and cares, or Godzilla or, you know, like we're in this great period right now where people are not looking for the current blockbuster. They're just looking for something that's going to resonate across generations. Yeah, it's timeless kind of. Definitely it'll time out. Some things do time out. Jaws will be around forever. My students have not seen Jaws yet. They know the theme and they know the idea. They know what it is. Yeah, but they don't. They know it from swimming and somebody made the Jaws noises and came after them, but they haven't seen the movie. Or if they have, they didn't really like it because it was slow. It's a beautiful movie. I know, but it's a generational thing. That happens. I mean, we go back and it's hard to be like, you know, Casablanca, such a wonderful. It's hard. Or The Graduates. Because Jaws was way before I was ever born. Yeah. My grandmother had a copy of it. So, like, it was like one of, like, five VHSs I could watch. So I'm like, oh, I guess it's Jaws again. Yeah, and that's, I mean, but Jaws, it does really well. And it's, you know, we'll talk about that in the, what I hope in the last part, like why these current adaptations are so much better than what happened in the 90s and, you know, before that. Anyway, so back to the story of Pinball. So, you know, I didn't see a ton of it other than the movie theaters. I played Adam's Family. I played a few of the games there. I didn't see a ton of it until, weirdly enough, I started hanging out at this pizza place, which insisted on having a pinball machine. I also got to remember, as a teenager, I worked at a pinball place that had a Terminator 2, and they, for some unknown reason, put it in the back of the dining area. So we had two video games. We had a Mortal Kombat. We had an NBA Jam right at the front, and that's the only thing people would ever play. But there was also a Terminator 2 in the back, hidden there, which the router guy had some of. put there and the only person who would ever play it was me and even then I still didn't figure out what it was. It was the first time I started to really begin to understand that there was a sequence and there were rules that was trying to hit objectives but I was still mostly about man, this game ends so fast and I never got those skills. I've heard lots of other people talk about how they reached that pinnacle point in their kid life where they got to play the EM so you could win infinite free games if you got good enough. That never happened for me. That was never Like, I was a terrible player. But then I started hanging out in my – somehow I started hanging out with a bunch of different people that we were just like – there was this good intersection in the middle of Richardson where there was this pizza place called Carmine's Pizza that did pizza better than most Texas pizza did at the time. Today, Texas pizza is awesome. Texas is – you know, anybody who's been to Frisco and gone to the Texas Pinball Festival, that area, like – Oh, it's all about the barbecue, though. Oh, it is all about the barbecue, but there's good everything. I mean, like, with the exception, you know, I just was there. I was just, part of my family lives in Frisco, so I was literally just there this last month. Awesome. And, you know, so, yeah, I definitely had the barbecue. Always got to stop and get some good barbecues. Lots of great choices. But there's also, you know, there's a large collection of basically everything else. My family's part Greek, so if you want some Greek food and you eat it in Texas, you let me know and I'll hook you up. But anyway, so that had, it had Revenge from Mars, the PIN2K game, the one that is pretty divisive, though not as divisive as Episode 1. And somehow I just love the heck out of it. I would play it every time we were there. I was really interested in the approach. I thought, you know, the idea of the holograms, like even though they weren't holograms, just the reflection of the monitor. And I knew it was based – at that point I was already starting to work in IT. I was working in computers. And so I knew it was based on a Cyrix chip. It basically was a PC attached to a monitor, which was doing it. It was cool. I liked the design, and I liked that. Even though I hadn't played Attack from Mars, so I didn't understand half the call-outs and references and things that I do now, the rare times that I encounter a revenge from Mars and I can get to it. But other than that, I really didn't see a lot of pinball until I left Texas again, when I went off to grad school. I went to the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky. And near Louisville, there's an area called Germantown, which is basically like old Louisville. It's like an old immigrant community, So there's lots of, there's Germantown and like Greentown in Detroit. And it's like wherever immigrant communities were, there's like a collection of shotgun houses and cheap things. But they're still surviving. They're still there. And two brothers, Antz and John, I think, they still own it. After 2008, after 2009, after the collapse, they bought this bar that had been in existence since the 1930s called Zanzibar. And they bought it and Antz just went nuts with like the 70s theme. like painted it exactly like it was in the 1970s. Like they wanted, they wanted their lives back. And so of course, going back to the seventies, pinball, you got to get pinball. The dance wasn't at first interested in new pinball. He was interested in classic pinball machines, but it, the bars and walking distance of the university of Louisville. And they also started hosting a trivia night on Sunday nights, which I got to tell you, if you, if you, I don't know if you hung around a bunch of academics, but we are, we are fiends for trivia. Like this is the, It was like, behold, our superpower actually matters to the masses now, especially when they didn't do athletics trivia. So we didn't actually know our sports stuff. We just had to know our comic books, our movies, our other, you know, like everything there. It's a really geeky trivia night. Right. I've done some trivia, but it was mainly like when I worked in bars and stuff, like in my early 20s, you know, they'd have it, you know, Thursday night trivia or whatever. Yeah, that's about it. It's fun. I mean, it was really fun, but it became really competitive with graduate students. Like, there was a team of professors, there was a team of graduate students, there was a team of that. That's cool. Like, we all would go there. And then, you know, before trivia and after trivia, there was pinball. And also arcade cabinets. They had a Tron arcade cabinet, which I just was obsessed with because I loved it. Oh, I'd still like to have one of those. I love, you know, I would tell people, I'd be like, let's go to Zanzibar. They've got a Tron cabinet. They'd look at me like, why? Yep. Sorry, my phone went off. Oh, it's okay, man. Hopefully it's not an important call. No, no. Go ahead with your story. All right. Well, hopefully, if I'm waxing too long, you let me know. No, you're good, man. Go ahead. But, you know, so there I started, you know, I started catching the bug a little bit. Because I would talk with ants. I would talk with other people there. And they were really, I started to see the more of pinball. I started to see the rules. Games like, they had Tommy. And I hate Tommy the movie. I hate it. Yeah, it does nothing for me. It makes me, it doesn't just do nothing for me. It's one of the few movies where I'm like, this movie must be unmovied. I need to stop. There's not enough drugs in the world. I love The Wall. I love other movies from that era. But Tommy, I'm sorry if you're listening and you're like, you just don't understand. I don't. I'm sorry. I don't get it. But the pinball machine is pretty good. And once I got past my distaste of the theme, I started to understand what that used to have done in terms of design. I can't remember who designed that pinball table. It's sad that I don't remember. Yeah, some of those designers, I don't think they did a whole lot of machines, but it may have been a... Shit, the name's escaping me. I can't think of his name. Damn it. Anyway, go ahead. But it's surprisingly deep. There's a lot going on there. There's a lot of the skill shots really hard. You get that parachute right. But that was the first time I really started paying them. They got whodunit. And then because I kept telling ants about it, you know what they got? Pinbot. and pinbot became like it's where the that my dad's obsession with pinbot that inherited to me became the bar's obsession with pinbot like pinbot became the longest like i think it was in ansel if you advance ever heard this episode i'll be like you're wrong there but i mean i like four years okay here's tommy it was joe joe kamikow so it is who i kind of thought it was what else did he do um he did a lot of games for daddy's but then he went on to like work for Stern, I believe, and I think he was, like, negotiating, like, the license deals and stuff. I think he's the one who got them, like, Beatles and stuff like that. Okay. But you'll see him talking a lot of the panels and stuff at, like, Pinball Expo. Okay. That makes sense. No, I mean, it's definitely interesting. I mean, it's an interesting adaptation, and there's more to think about there. But, you know, Whodunit, other games like that, like, really start, games that really started, like, the modes were really integral to what was going on. And then at the same time, and this is where, like, the second part of my journey to Pinball comes is the journey to virtual pinball. I start playing it at Zanzibar a lot. I start getting it. Then I also start looking on different social media to get a sense of it. Back then, Meetup was still a thing. You remember meetup.com? No. I've never heard of it. It was a thing. Not a big thing, but it was like their social events. This one guy in Louisville, Jason Cosman, is a really good dude and now works in the solar industry. I think he does a lot of different things. but he was a pinball nut and he wanted people to come play pinball at his house and I think in some ways he was starting to think like you did towards the pinball studio but just never, he wasn't in an area where you could build a steel building and be like there was more zoning, more control. There is here too. Okay. I'm glad you were able to get through that zoning because in part of Louisville I don't think they would have been there. But he had, you know, he had Adam's Family. He had Lord of the Rings. He had Tron. He had a lot of different games that, you know, I'd never seen before. And he started really talking about, so he posted on Meetup, and he's like, you know, anybody want to come play pinball? And I was like, why not? I'm going to go to a stranger's house and play pinball. You know, that and a bunch of other strangers went, and we did. And it was the first time I got around, like, pinball people. Like, I'd been around Ants as, like, his nostalgia for pinball and his love of pinball, but this was a bunch of people that just, like, were into pinball. Right. And were coming together and talking about it and wanted to do it. And they all didn't know each other. Like, very few people there knew it. But it started being kind of really interesting. So Dan Zabar did a screening of Tilt. Have you seen that documentary? Yeah, I've seen that one. Okay. They did a screening of that, and it was a real, you know, So it was the first time I watched in a bar a movie where people were talking about Pin 2K, because at that point, Ant had just bought an Episode 1 and was wanting people to understand the significance and value of Episode 1, even though we all hated Jar Jar. Everyone has always hated Jar Jar in that table. I've started to kind of like those older movies. I hated them when they came out. When Episode 1 and all that came out, I hated those movies. but I don't know, now they've been out a while, kind of started liking them. In a weird nostalgia sense? Yeah, yeah. Now you're like, this is weird. They're horrible, I mean, but. They're better than the new three. I like the first new one they came out with when they first brought it back, and then it just kind of went downhill for me. They didn't know what they were, anyway. We could have a whole Star Wars podcast, and there's been a million podcasts. Let's not have that discussion. Let's not do that. But anyway, it started me on a beginning in awareness of the pinball culture, the hobby as a culture. And so two things happened there. One, I watched Special When Lit. Have you seen that documentary? There's a podcast named that. I don't know if it's related or not. I'm bad about my podcast. I don't listen to a lot of podcasts. I've probably seen every documentary if it's been on YouTube. And it's pinball related. Yeah, it probably has been. There's one part where it's really kind of been Pinball in the decline. It's before the resurgence. So Steve Ritchie's at one point interviewed, and he talks about how Pinball was once a significant thing in our culture, but it's not anymore, which is interesting because he got his quasi super celebrity status, legend status. Please don't. I'm not saying anything negative about Steve Ritchie. Nobody listen. I'm not saying anything. I don't know the man. I don't know. King of flow. I'm not going to knock anything he's designed. Even No Fear. I like no fear. But anyway, you know, I watched that. That introduced me. One of the things it introduced me to the idea of Papa and Pinburgh and, like, beginning the sense of, like, oh, there's this whole, like, world of this. And so I, you know, I start really, like, I'm hanging out with Jason. I'm going back to more events. I'm searching Craigslist. Like, maybe there's a pinball machine that's cheap enough that a graduate student could afford it. And so, of course, what do I encounter? Grand Lizard for $450. About what year was this? This is 2010 or 11. Okay. Or 12, maybe 12. Right before all the games went crazy. Yeah, I mean, right when we're coming out of the Great Recession and they're starting to be interested, this time I'm picking it up from a scrapper who bought it off an operator. And, like, his son, well, he wasn't a scrapper, but he was retired and his son was a scrapper, which if you don't know what a scrapper is, they're people that drive around and collect metal and trash and, and, uh, you know, they resell that for money. Cause at that point, metal was, was valuable. And this is, this is rural Kentucky. So this is not alien concepts to people. If you, if those of you were like city dwellers, completely city dwellers, this type of stuff happens a lot. Uh, you know, people, people make a living a lot of different ways. Um, but anyway, so he, the scrapper convinced his dad, you know, this pinball machine you bought from your grandkids. Okay. But anyway, so I bought the machine, hauled it out of the basement, brought it with a friend of mine, stuck it in the back of my Ford Ranger, drove it into Louisville proper, threw it in my apartment, my converted Victorian second-floor apartment, which is crazy, getting it up there, into the steps, hauling it up there, setting up the table. Thank God I had a friend who was handy because otherwise it was all just English graduate students. And trust us, none of us are good with tools. You've seen me attempt to do anything. You know how bad I am. You aren't that bad. Oh, God. Well, anyway, I had one guy at least who was the friend I made at the laundromat who was good with tools. And he got the legs on before we dropped it. That was because we were trying to hold it. We didn't know the tricks or the balances. There were like two different people in a line of hold or something. No, we were holding it up, buddy. We were holding it up. English majors are not bodybuilders, with the exception of a few. But we were holding it up. He was putting on the legs. and we were putting them on in a sequence that didn't make it easy to keep holding it up, but we got it there, replaced the plasma. Jason came over and helped me replace the transistor We got it working got it functional and then I was game I was in the world of pinball But then you know this is the important part As you noticed prices went up Availability and stuff went up, but went down. Oh, it got crazy there for a minute. Yeah. So as a grad student, you don't make a lot of money. And so I was trying to figure out how can I get more pinball without the resources to do that? Because, you know, once again, as you've taught me this year, you can't just have one. Oh, it's impossible. I don't care what you say. Yeah, yeah. And so even though I had Grand Blizzard, even though it was completely impractical that I wanted, I still wanted to get in and out of the machine. I wanted to start collecting the Python designs, which is still kind of a quasi-gold mine. But I couldn't. And so I ran across an article on instructables.com where a person had talked about building their own virtual pinball cabinet. and so I followed those instructions complete with, since I didn't have any access to tools and was in an apartment, here I am on the porch in front of my Victorian apartment with a handsaw sawing wood into the shape of a pinball cabinet mounting PC hardware, which I knew from my first career in IT, I knew all about enough to do the PC part or the programming part and set up Visual Pinball 9 had my own copy of Lord of the Rings, my own thing, this little tiny dinky virtual pinball cabinet, but it allowed me to start doing lots of rules, which combined with Farsight's Pinball Arcade, you know, that I think for a lot of people, I think that the journey into pinball for a lot of millennials and younger Gen X and certainly, you know, it's sad for me, not Gen Alpha, because Farsight lost their licenses. And I don't think Zen's doing as good a job, Farsight did, of making it accessible and easy to get in there. They're doing a little better now, but, you know, Farsight really like curated the games and created a good sense of them. And it was great. I mean, I was sitting there in Zanzibar when they first came out, literally like the day it came out. I'm like, look at this. Someone just released this, like, emulation of pinball. Four tables I don't know anything about. Totan, Ripley's Believe It or Not, Black Hole, and Theater of Magic. You know, four great tables. And I bought Black Hole, and I'm sitting there going, this has nothing to do with the movie, because somehow I'm facing that obscure Disney film that I love and no one else does. but you know that from that I mean so sitting there on my phone so on tablets whatever else I mean that's how you you can learn a lot of the rules that's you get the sense the physics aren't always right but you can get a sense that's how you can learn how to spend that's how you can start really beginning to understand the design of it without spending a million dollars because you know for five bucks you got two tables that you could play for a month that it pasted out even today I'm locked into the android operating system I'll never switch to an iphone because I bought every single table Farsight ever did, and if I ever change off, I won't be able to download them again when I get a new phone. And so I even have to – because they're legacy now, you have to disable hardware acceleration in some aspects on an Android phone to keep them working. But that was a great way for me to get into it. I finished grad school, got my job as a professor at Armstrong State, which later consolidated with Georgia Southern, which is why I'm there now. at Armstrong Atlantic. Sorry, not Armstrong State, Armstrong Atlantic at that time. Came down here, sold my Grand Lizard because I couldn't move it, and it's still bouncing around in Louisville. I still actually vaguely know where it is at this time. One day I might want it back. Yeah, you need to try to get it back, man. Yeah, I mean, yours is still at $450? No, I sold it for $1,000. I replaced the plasma screens. I've done some other things. I took off the Mylar and fixed a lot of the paint and probably should have put the Mylar back on, but, you know, I was waxing. I didn't know. I was first pinball machine. There was no one there to guide me. I wish I could get the Mylar off on mine, but, you know, it's a gamble. Yeah, it was. I succeeded for the most part. Maybe if the person is listening, it's like, that's what happened to my Mylar. You know, I'm sorry. You know, I didn't know. I didn't know everything I was doing. I did the best I could. Anyway, so you got here, had no pinball, but then started doing the smart thing of I want to find pinball. I went to every bar near Armstrong State. Did you know about pinball maps? No. I heard of it, but I didn't think about that. Yeah. I just thought college bar pinball. There will be. And so I went to Tailgate on Abercorn, which isn't there anymore. That was replaced by coaches, and they had demolition there. And it wasn't in great shape. something was going wrong with the board so that it would reset while it was in play. But it had a phone number of the operator. I know who it is. I know you do. We're not going to talk about that. And I called him, and I said, hey, can I buy this pinball machine off of you? I know it's not being maintained super well. And they were like, no, just no. I did the same thing. I wanted Ghostbusters. Well, now I'm on the second one. But my first one, I called him up, and I was just like, hey, if you ever sell it, can you call me first or whatever? And he's like, I don't think you understand how much pinball machines cost. And I'm like, I have like eight of them. What are you doing? It was a weird conversation, though. The answer was no, though. Yeah, the answer was no. But the answer was no for me at first, though I ultimately did end up getting that. And I got it by an interesting way. No way. Yeah, I'll tell you. So I went to their store to talk about it. And at that time, they had Big Buck Hunter pinball, which they were willing to sell me. But I didn't. So you go, ooh. I'm like, this was the thing. That game's hard to find. Yeah, I guess. I know a guy that really wants one right now. Okay. I've never been a deer hunter. Oh, me either. I still want the game. Okay. So as a theme, that never appealed to me. And I wasn't like, this is one I want. But he said, okay, yeah. But, you know, we've got, if you want to play with some of our other pinball machines, we've got one over in Star Castle, which is now closed, but they're Roller Link, Laser Tag, and Arcade. And it was, you know, so I went and I had my stepkid at that time. My stepkid was, she was eight, I think, eight or nine. And she wanted to learn to roller skate. So I used that as an excuse. Sorry. Sorry, kiddo. I used that as an excuse to go check out the pinball machine. But so we went to Star Castle, got there, and do you know what machine they had? Adams? No. Medieval Madness. Oh, hell yeah. Before the recreation was available. Okay. And so I told them what they had. I emailed them. I took pictures of it. I linked them to Pinside. I'm like, this is currently the holy grail of pinball. Yeah. Very desirable. Very desirable. And then I connected them back to Ants in Louisville. And I said, Ants, there's one that they might be willing to sell it for a reasonable price. And so Ants reached out to them, and they had a conversation, and they sold it for far more than they thought it was worth. It's always a good feeling. And so that's when they decided to sell me Demolition Man kind of, I guess, as, oh, you did something for this, so they sold me Demolition Man. There you go. They sold me Demolition Man for a really good price. I'm not going to say how much because, you know, I think they're still in business. I don't know. Yeah, they are. Yeah. And it had some problems. It had corrosion on the board because nobody changed the batteries. Fortunately, I was able to clean it up, and it didn't continue to have problems. I don't know. I've sold it since. If the person who bought it from me has the… Oh, it definitely came back. I had it for a year and a half, and it didn't come back in that time. But, you know, it had buck problems. It had a bunch of other problems. It needed to be re-chromed, which I didn't do because that's a lot of money. But I fixed it. I LED'd it. I shopped it. I did a bunch of other things to it. I learned how to quasi-solder. Though, as we've talked about, my quasi-solders are actually cold solders and thus not solders. And so, but I did what I did. And then I sold that off because I needed to do some repairs on the house I bought. And I needed some cash. And I played the game pretty furiously for about a year or something. So it was kind of, you know, it was time to move on. Sold that off. Moved on. but at the same time, Farsight was getting near the end of creating pinball arcade. They just lost their licenses, but they had this partnership with an Australian company called Arcuda where they were going to release. The intention was to release like a cool, a really good virtual cabinet version of pinball arcade for PC. And for a whopping two months, it was available to buy. You had exactly two months to buy it. That was it. So what did I do? I bought it. And so then I updated my virtual PC with Arcuda. And that became the mechanism by which I could play pinball. I could play 78 different tables. You could use the Kinect video controller so that when you moved, it would retrack and it would be better than other things like that. And that became an obsession with me, leading into different virtual things. As Virtual Pinball X came out and then got better, I got into that. I got into a lot of the VPW, the Virtual Pinball Wizard team, which is the best for the virtual people. When they did Blood Machines and some of their other original tables and started doing basically the authoritative versions of lots of real tables, I got really into it. That became my way of doing it. And then at the same time, Pinball Palace in Brunswick opened up, and I made the drive down to go check it out. And so I met Kelly, I met Nick, and really started to come down there every few months in order to scratch that physical inch in order to do it. And that's kind of how I survived in pinball mode for a long time until last August or so. You know, virtual, I got more and more into virtual. I got virtual reality versions. I went to Cleveland Software and got their Pin One controller, which is a really cool box with real buttons and solo noise pressed when you feel it. And with VR, you can move around. And I was like, I've got it. I'm not going to have to spend thousands of dollars. I've got it. And then in August. It's sad to surprise you for a little while. Yeah, August. But it's methadone to the pinball hero. It's not enough, which unfortunately became real club. But when artists, when I, you know, you emailed me on Pinside at one point years ago, and I kind of ignored it. But then I was like, I was searching for pinball in Savannah on the map, on Google Maps. I just wanted to see. It wasn't even going on a pinball map. I was just looking at that. And, you know, Pinball Studio is on Google Maps. You're actually there. And I was like, what the hell is this? And so I looked you up on the website, and I looked you up on Facebook, and I saw you running an attorney that weekend, and I put in my name, and I showed up, and now I've become a regular sense. That's awesome, man. And then, you know, the main, you know, great community, you know, I love, you had that episode where you talked about what you wanted to do in terms of community, and I really, I've tried to contribute to that as well, because I think that was, that was what I encountered. Nobody was standoffish. People were really welcoming. they didn't know how much they didn't know how much I knew about pinball or not about pinball they didn't make assumptions if I asked questions they answered it was really good I played everything you'd had but I still don't know a lot of the string machines as well as I should because I can't emulate them many of them don't exist in an emulated format so I can't play them in virtual lands but that experience really kind of lured me in and then unfortunately led to you delivering Dungeons and Dragons to my house. When was that? Two months ago, three months ago, something like that. Yeah, where basically I got coming and playing at your place, it was being reintroduced to pure black, the best heroine, the stuff that what was that line from Pulp Fiction? I'll take that, you know, the something-something challenge any day of the week. Right. Yeah, but getting the real stuff, you know. It just didn't, the virtual didn't satisfy. Even when I'd load the virtual machines up to practice the machines like FHIR or Atlas Family that I didn't know really well that are definitely very well emulated. But even then, it just wasn't the same. Oh, I had a couple virtual machines, and, you know, I was thinking the same thing. I had Back to the Future already, but then I had a virtual machine. I'm like, I don't need any more pinball machines. Everything's in here. And then I played it for, like, I don't know, two months. Then I was like, this isn't enough. It isn't. No, I mean, even when you – I need the real game. I mean, VR is awesome. It's good for trying out games. I will say that. Yeah, it's good for trying out and learning the rules. Fighting rules. Yeah, it was nice when I had one Because there was a few games Like, oh, I've never played this I'd like to see what the gameplay is And then, oh, I kind of do want to buy that game Yeah I was never thinking I want to buy that game I was thinking, I can avoid going into debt To buy that game But the new machines can't be emulated Because there is I mean, at best they can be a tribute And they're good ones Like the virtual pitbull ones that I've shown you The Iron Maiden version, they did a really great job But to do that, they had to recode everything. Right. They're just keeping the layout and then changing the game. Well, I mean, they spent hours. Like with the Batman 66 story, like when they developed the Batman 66 tribute table, the fishbowl, the guy who did it, like they had a real one and they had his. And they would literally lay the projection of his on top of the real one to see if the physics would match up, to like sit there and recreate. Like they're obsessed. They do a really good job. Does he want to recreate my homebrew once I'm done? Actually, I mean, on his excitement, he's doing the Matrix, right? Oh, that's cool. His fan is, you know, well, his Frogs project, we'll use the secret code name for the homebrew. I am really excited about your homebrew project. I've been trying to help and answer any questions. Anything I can, you know, I think I'm being credited as Technology Gopher, which is a good title. I like that title. It's fitting. But, you know, he's releasing Matrix as a physical machine, a fast pinball machine. and is a virtual pinball machine at the same time. Oh, very cool. So there's a lot of crossover. Pofus's Dark Chaos was done with a version of Mission Pinball Framework in case you ever wanted to create a real version of it. I would really like to find someone to turn my game into a virtual, like so everyone could experience it that's never going to see it, you know, once I'm done. You know, and maybe that can be part of the next part we want to talk about, which is where the intersection of my real work and pinball is coming, because, you know, that's one of the reasons I wanted to be on the podcast is that I think, you know, this is actually a really interesting time in the land of academia in terms of where pinball is. But for the longest time, pinball is definitely, you know, if it's in the cultural gutter, if people aren't paying a lot of attention in the broader culture, you know, I was watching, we were talking about this before we got in, I watched the documentary for Spooky, and he was, and Chris, Chris is his name? The bug's father? Oh, Charlie. Charlie. Yep. Why did I think Chris? See, this is how bad I am about knowing. Like, I can recognize his face, and I can recognize his voice from the podcast. Charlie Emery. Okay, Charlie Emery. But he was talking about how Squirrel and he were watching a TV show, and it started when in the TV show they were playing pinball, and she asked, what is this? And he's like, how could you not know what pinball is? And then he went, and then it is. I bring up pinball with my students a lot. This next week, I teach a class in digital storytelling, and we're going to be talking about ludic and narrative layers. I'm going to bring up Tales of the Arabian Nights. I'm going to show them a play of Tales of the Arabian Nights and talk about how that game tries to merge a narrative layer, the story of the Arabian Nights, with the ludic limits, the play limits of pinball in a really interesting way. It's pretty successful in a lot of aspects. and that last aspect is really where I'm going in the academic work as you mentioned in the beginning I'm a professor at Georgia Southern I teach in the English department which doesn't mean I'm all about grammar and mechanics all the time I fortunately get to teach a lot of weird, I like to call it the nerd studies part of our program, I get to teach the comic book class I'm one of the people who gets to teach digital storytelling which is our interactive fiction class it's where we teach coding to English majors and that's as scary as that sounds but we're trying. We teach them Twine and the Harlow syntax, which is, Twine itself is JavaScript, but Harlow is kind of like visual basic for applications, VBA more, more like Excel, like it's programming for Excel, but making a game out of that. But it's cool when it works, and it can do some really interesting things. It's been historically, it makes basically writing, like if you remember the old games, you're like Zork. Like, you wake up in a field. What do you do? What do you see? And they're kind of doing that. That and then visual novels, if you play Doki Doki Literature Club or Slay the Princess or any of the ones that have been kind of crossed. A lot of my students love visual novels. I teach a class on that, too. So, yeah, really dorky stuff. But at the same time, like, I've recently been finding ways to create an intersection between my love of pinball and what I'm doing professionally. I think it's really interesting for pinball as an industry. Because you think, you know, for those of you who are like, the academy is supposed to be about job training. We're supposed to do things like this. What I'm thinking about here matters. Because, like, Jack Danger's recent podcast, Jack Anything, where he was asked, you know, would you create an original theme? And players always say, you know, you ask people, like, what are you doing with an original theme? I like original themes. I want original themes. They do not work. There's a picture of one behind you. Yeah, poor, poor, yeah, he's pointing to a sign of galactic tank force, which I think fails not just because of his theme. I think it fails for a lot of other reasons. I have not played it. I'm always interested in it. Whenever, if I encounter one, I'm going to love to get a chance to see what's wrong with it. It just didn't work. It crashed, you know, it just wouldn't. I've heard now it does, but, you know, they went through so much trouble to get the game to work that I think by the time it did, you know, they were in the hole. Yeah, no, I mean, whatever's going on with American Pinball is a sad story because there's a lot of neat ideas there. I mean, I think Galactic Tank Force is a neat idea. I think Barry O's barbecue is what really just, that is not a theme that appeals to many. I mean, Galactic Tank Force is camping, kind of cool, but barbecue? And then they were trying to sell them to barbecue restaurants? Yeah, that, I mean, Barry O is, you know, for pinball people, is one of those revolutionary fundamental desires. But most people don't know who he is. You put his name on it, it's cool to us, but the average Joe that's going to walk by, they're going to be like, who the hell is Barry O? And why is there a barbecue pinball machine? Even on Pinside, when it launched, I saw people asking who's Barry O. It was very cheap, too. It was a downgrade in quality, I believe. No, I mean, there's not... Yeah, I've heard that a lot, too. There's not enough mechs. There's not enough feel to it. I mean, I actually think it's a fun game for what it is. And it does feel, even though I know Barry actually had very little to do with the design, there are aspects of it that feel like the better tables that he and Python did. And we all love those. I mean, Pinbot again is there again. Grand Lizard is there again. Taxi. All of those. That flow. I mean, before Steve Richards, the flow in a different way, but definitely one that we all really appreciate. You know, even when it didn't work, like, God, Bugs Bunny's birthday bash, even when it doesn't work entirely, there's still some neat ideas there that could work out. But, you know, yeah, definitely. But, you know, that question he brought up, it's not just that themes fail because of bad game design. They also fail because they have to be done right. I mean, it's one thing to bring a theme in, but if a theme isn't adapted in a way where you're harnessing all the things that you want from it, All the things, you know, for you, your story started with Back to the Future. And it started not because of your love of pinball. It started with your love of Back to the Future. Your love of Back to the Future was the bridge to pinball that then ignited. Oh, yeah. That's the only reason why I got it. Like, I had no interest in, like, really pinball. I just wanted the pinball. I was collecting Back to the Future shit. So I was like, oh, I've got to have the pinball machine. Yeah. And that's, you know, and that's what they're counting on. Well, you know, if somebody's walking by, they're going to put in some quarters and they're going to sit there. Back in the routing era. And you know in this it really would seeming started in the 70s and 80s, you know when really seeming got more complicated I mean right Roger Sharp has you know coin or coined or adapted the term worlds under glass It is pinball about talking about me looking at the art looking at the beauty looking what they're creating But the reality is those tables, you know, look back at Ali you look at Dolly you look at a lot of those They're they're shitty worlds there I mean in terms of like they visually they're looking good and they have a nod towards it but like that Valley Star Trek, have you played that? Yeah, it's more like late System 11 when it started becoming World Under Glass. In WPC, it's like, all right, now we got like mechs and, you know, cool things to look at. Well, they really start thinking about story, and that's, you know, especially Adam's Family. But yeah, the old Star Trek, like you were talking about, it's just like beep, beep, beep, like horrible noises and just... The labels are wrong. Like, I mean, there's, like, there's not, there's, the weapons are Star Wars weapons. Are they really? Yeah. Oh, okay. I've never noticed that. It's terrible. Like, it's like someone who had never actually watched Star Trek tried to make something that's Star Trek-y, and it has, like, the right characters, but the wrong words, and it doesn't. Oh, that's funny. And there's nothing that feels like Star Trek. And then in the 80s, they really tried, like, those video game ones, you know, like Space Invaders. Right. And games where they were, like, really trying to be, like, in Miss Pac, or Baby Pac-Man and Mr. and Mrs. Pac-Man, where they were, like, video games were the big thing, so they were trying to capture the love of video games and bring over. So that, which is a longstanding thing in pinball as well, where we transfer themes from games, other games, into pinball, like Strikes and Spares we've got, or 300, or what's the, all the poker ones. There's so many poker ones. Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's so many different ones where they bring, you know, this love of, you know, the more billiards and the endless billiards tables. bring that love of other game into pinball and work with it it's really interesting in so many different ways but it's also in terms of like you said in the 90's especially because Gilligan's Island is I think the first DMD game right? No Data East is the one who invented the whole DMD being in a pinball machine which was theirs I think was it Hook? No it was probably Simpsons? No, I can't remember. Right around that era, they put their first one in. But Gilligan's Island is Bally or Williams. Yeah, it was probably there first. Have you ever played Gilligan's Island? One time. And it was like rough. I've played it in emulation and physical. I've played it in emulation a lot. Really good versions of the emulation to get a sense of it. The thing about it is, while it looks Gilligan's Island-y, and the voices and characters, it doesn't feel like Gilligan's Island. I'm going to collect all these different things so I can shut down the volcano. It has a story and it has an objective, but it's a bad adaptation of a theme. Especially that era. All of us grew up with Gilligan's Island on reruns. You double-tap people that actually grew up while it was live and then grew up Gen X watching. It was a great theme to harness that nostalgia, which is super important. One of the big things that Pinball thrives on is harnessing nostalgia. Nostalgia is money. The nostalgia is always, you know, Gen X, we're trying to buy back our youth, you know, just like the boomers before us who were always buying the comic books and buying the howdy duties of their, you know, things like that. We're buying back our youth, but also, you know, differently. We're doing newer things. There's the one, the one on Nocate is Gen X and millennials and older millennials buying back. anyway, my point was that it really, Adam's Family is the first one, from Pat Lawler, I think, to really recognize, like, how to do seeming in a way where the story comes in, even though it's a kind of mismatch, like, you don't know what you're going to get out of the house when, you know, whenever it's lit, you don't know which mode it's going to launch, but when it's Mamushka, or whether it's, you know, Hit Cousin It, or whether it's, whatever, it feels like the story world of Adam's Family. And if you like Adam's Family, you like the pinball machine. Oh, absolutely. And that's awesome. And that's money. That's that. So when Jack Danger's like, people say they want original themes, but from a business perspective, you've got to do theming. Yeah, original themes. I feel like it's got to speak to you a little bit. We're like, barbecue I like to eat. But like Galactic Tank Force, well, space is cool. So at least that kind of taps into my interest slightly more than, say, barbecue. Yeah. So if they do original themes that way, I think it works better. When it does, though, you know, there's a lot of critiques of like, I know you love Foo Fighters. You own Foo Fighters L.A. I like Foo Fighters as a table. You know, Jack's taught a lot about how that was really like, think Scooby-Doo, but with the Foo Fighters. Right. So it's not really much of a, you know, it's a theme in a different way, but it's really not. It's kind of a day morning cartoon. Yeah. And it's a different thing, and it doesn't click. there are a lot of people that don't launch into that theme because they don't see that connection in a different way than like Metallica or ACDC or Rush or others like really build on like the band's legacy I guess maybe the part maybe the challenge is Foo Fighters really have that legacy in the same way like I guess the Mentos you couldn't do the Mentos video too many times yeah I get tired of the whole like that's kind of why I do like Foo Fighters more than other music pins like I don't want to see just a band playing on the screen. I kind of like that they wrote the original story. And at the same time, I like Foo Fighters music. I'm not a huge fan, but I like them. So I like the music. Now I like the story behind it. And I really like the layout. So it checks all the boxes for me. Yeah. I mean, I love the layout on that, the ludic layer of how it works. And I like the story, too. I like that it adds something to it. But I think for a lot of people, it was a theme in a different way. And that's always the challenge. Like, how are you going to do it? Like, how are you going to, like, Batman 66, masterful integration of theme, even though, like, we've talked about how the crane from The Dark Knight shows up in Batman 66 again. And it really doesn't make, like, it made very little sense as the crane, you know, because it was Dr. Crane. I've still never played the damn Dark Knight version. So like I only know the Batman 66 version The crane feels identical I think I didn play it I only played it a few times in real reality I've played it in virtual a bunch, but not – it's not one of those turn titles that really is going to be like, there's a reason why you don't – like, nobody's clamoring, like, we need Dark Knight remastered. Like, there isn't – Well, that was a hot theme back then. I know that movie did great, so. That movie did great, and it should have been. But again, it's actually a good example of where it's a theme that you should win easily. I mean, like, it's freaking Batman. How do you not win Batman in themes? But it somehow didn't. And so that's really where, that's what I'm interested now in terms of the academic work. I've got a chapter that has been accepted, so I'm working on it now. It'll come out sometime next year. In the new, there's going to be a new collection of 21st century adaptation theories, and I'm writing a chapter on pinball and adaptation. And I'm doing it as a close read on Brian Eddy's and Dwight Sullivan's Dungeons & Dragons, The Tyrant Side. Not only did I buy it, but it's because that game is really interesting in so many ways and adaptations. It's a game that's bringing the ludic, the gameplay of Dungeons & Dragons, and then also the story of parts of Forgotten Realms, part of different things, in a time where, like Dungeons & Dragons, I know you're not a super Dungeons & Dragons fan, and I'm actually not. I'm not but at the same time it's like a cool theme to me I like I don't know it speaks to me but I don't play Dungeons and Dragons like barbecue doesn't speak to me but Dungeons and Dragons sounds oh that's kind of cool Dungeons and Dragons but we're also like and I like nerdy things so I'm just like even though I don't play it's still a cool theme to me do you watch Critical Role or watch the shows that Amazon has made out of them I haven't no Okay. I mean, critical role, like, you know what that is, right? Yes. But, I mean, the fact that a bunch of voice actors can make a professional show, the fact that people will pay like $250 a seat to go watch them play Dungeons & Dragons in a theater. And it's like, why would, I would love if someone would pay me $250, just me, just, you know, to want to play Dungeons & Dragons. But, you know, these voice actors have managed to turn something that was profoundly personal into a media empire. You know, because now with the Mighty Nein and what's the other one that I'm forgetting, the original, Vox Machina, The Legend of Vox Machina, both those Amazon shows, they're great. I mean, they're doing for American animation what anime did. People are paying attention to adult American animation. It's not comedy or absurd. You know, it's not Aqua Teen Hunger Force or Arrow or other things like that, but like serious animation that's telling a story again in a really cool way. Like if you haven't watched them, they're top notch. They're really good quality. I'll have to check it out. But definitely, you know, and Matt Mercer, the main voice actor behind Critical Role is the Dungeon Master in Dungeons and Dragons, the Tyrant's Eye. Oh, very cool. Okay. But also, you know, like Kevin Smith is the, Kevin Smith. And now he's supposedly into pinball after this. That's crazy. That actually was a really, I mean, but that's a really cool thing. It's interesting that he wasn't, He didn't want his own table, though. He wanted Jaws, which is, you know, so they were asking him. Oh, I didn't notice. So, yeah, he didn't get the game that he worked on. No, they offered it to him. He's like, can I get Jaws instead? And so then he came up with Jaws, and he started making all these videos about how much he was loving Jaws. Because Jaws is timeless. It's not timeless. It's something that he highly resonates with as a movie maker, as a fan. It's a feeler. Yeah, it's classic feel, but it's also, you kept talking about how it's so 70s. But the interesting thing about Jaws is that it is not at all 70s. As a pinball machine, it is cutting edge. It is all the new tricks, all the new things pinball does. Just theme-wise. Theme-wise. 70s. But in a way, it's faster. It's more tightly edited. It's a different experience of Jaws than you could get in the film. And it's interesting in that way. So this is kind of what I'm exploring. I'm really interested in this new iteration of adaptation, like this way in which pinball is entering into a new way of storytelling that goes even beyond what was before. Because now the expectation is, I mean, before it was, I'm going to hook the passerby or I'm going to hook the person walking in arcades. But now that I've got my Dungeons & Dragons and it runs there, the amount of ads that tell me I should buy a machine and put one in my home while I've got a machine that's sitting in my home, you know, the expectation is home use. You know, like these machines are being sold now with much longer expectations of livelihoods and how they're going to intertwine with it. Though it's always interesting to look on Pennside and see that somebody's selling a machine with like, oh, you put in 20 plays and now you're passing on your... It blows my mind. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Canada... And then they're losing like 3K. I'm like, why don't you play it like 200 more times at least? Yeah, at least try to get a dollar a play so you get that out. But, yeah, and they're not even really letting the code mature. Because we have a different relationship. I mean, the idea of letting the code mature. Like no one in the 90s would have been like, Adam's family, let's let the code mature. Like the expectation was the machine you got was that was how the machine was always going to be. There would not be a machine like John Wick, which would evolve radically. I have not played enough of the new code to really understand it, but I knew that I didn't like the few times that I played it early on because I didn't feel very John Wick-y. See, I always really liked the shots in that game. It was just the code was confusing. I didn't know what was going on. But Will said it came around since they've started kind of finishing up the code. That episode encouraged me the last time I was down at the Pinball Palace to give it a play again, and I liked it a lot more. I don't know whether I was predisposed to liking it more because I heard the podcast talk about how I liked it more. I've heard a few people say they like it a lot more now. I wouldn't be against getting one for the right price. I do not have one to sell you, sir. But you know where you can find one? Old Town Pinball. Yes, they do. We guarantee you have one. Yes, have one. And we'll give you a great price on it and great service. So just a nod to the show's sponsor. So that's, you know, my journey to pinball right now is kind of like finding this intersection. I'm interested in all the things we're doing. I'm interested in your project, Frogs, because the question of, like, you know, I know how much you care about this theme. And if people don't know, that's, like, the code name for my homebrew project so we can talk about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and it's, you know, frogs are not iguanas. Just make sure there's a slight hint in that. But, you know, the thing it's coming from is a text that's really rich, and I know Sterling cares a lot about, and a lot of other people care a lot about. Yeah, the artist really is on board with this theme. Yeah, and the art will contribute, but it's also going to come down to the modes. It's going to come down to how you think about the flow, how you think about other things. I mean, I know you're borrowing a lot of design in other aspects, but there's going to be evolution in the way you think about the code. And I'm really interested, not just from like a friend perspective and also a part of the project, but an academic perspective. You know, thinking about how you're thinking about these rules, how that evolves, how that comes through. Because that's really the, you know, keeping the things that you love about that and making it part of this, I think is really exciting. Like I think it's, you know, it would be part of how it would make money. Because if it's done well, then people are going to care about it. I mean, like John Wick, unfortunately, I think is a really unfortunate example of how. It was just rushed out, I feel. Like if they would have taken their time on it and actually made it feel like you're playing in the movie. I mean, in the same way, I mean, it's so frustrating. I don't know. You know, I didn't follow enough of the no guns discussion. But, you know, for a film where firearms are such a central part. I would have done it if you couldn't have it. I mean, it's part of the movie, whether you like it or not. It's like, are you going to do Matrix about guns? No, you're not. Or Dirty Harry, the giant gun that's on the side there. They have adapted it. You either do it or you just don't. That's all. Yeah, no, I mean, it's not a family-friendly. John Wick is not. We need a family-friendly arcade. No, you don't. John Wick should not be. Those are all rated R, right? I'm pretty sure. I think they're all rated R. They should be. If they're not, they should be. but there are films that the violence is a big part of it I mean in the same way that the violence Godzilla is a very different type of violence but it's like having Godzilla without Kaiju fighting each other especially the Toho and that's very sci-fi it's violence but Godzilla doesn't exist for sure I don't think let's hope the secret secret hollow earth theory We can go down that conspiracy rabbit hole. Here we go. You know, but maybe, you know, but John Wick doesn't really exist. There is no person who could really kill people. Maybe there is someone out there who killed someone with pencils, but not the average person, which is why he's such a significant character. But, again, it's a theme that, like, there's parts of that that needed to resonate in order to get the audience to care with it, and I think those were missed. not just in a, there are other problems that I've heard parts of the Canadas podcast on this and others where they've really talked about why it doesn't work or didn't work and I think it works better now but a lot of that was just there were aspects of the theme that weren't there so coming around the circle The mix felt weird to they did the crate like that's the best thing you could have came up with? I kind of felt like that on James Vaughn too, though. We got the rocket. I'm like, James Vaughn has the coolest gadgets in the world. If you put a wiggling rocket, you could have done so many different things. And the car is there, but it's not used like it should have been. At least it's there. Odd choices. Yeah. I mean, again, but I think there's more of Vaughn, at least with the giant... Do you know what the code name for Vaughn was? No, I don't. Stick. Okay. Rockets, Thick I was like, come on, George Alright Definitely, yeah Some weird names I think people will figure out, when they figure out what Frog is They'll be like It'll make sense If you're a fan of the movie If not, you may not even see how that connects Yeah, I see how it connects But that's what I'm really interested in Seeing the choices that you make And others make In thinking about these things because it's fascinating to me to see that adaptation. So that's kind of where my pinball journey is right now, this glorious moment where I'm fortunate enough that I live in a weird profession where I can, in addition to teaching all the other things I can teach, I can pursue this as a kind of research interest and I get support for it. So if people have thoughts about that and they want to talk, docrob.work is my personal website. So if you want to reach out there, I occasionally check that email. but yeah I think that the ways in which the stories of pinball is telling its stories the way it's adapting stories the way it's thinking about stories is just awesome and really combining well with just excellent upgrades in terms of the material choices that pinball can do like the things that Jaws does and King Kong like I do not understand King Kong as a pinball game yet just because there's a million and one things going on with it that is not a knock to it I just haven't given the time to it but every time I look at it I'm just blown away. It's such a cool shooter. It's so unique. That's what I like about that game. It's not just two ramps and something in the center. It's got all kinds of crazy shots. That upper flipper is freaking awesome. All the different shots up there with it. Yeah, and they're not just there because they're cool. They're new ways of thinking about using the geometry, using that play, but it also tells part of the world of King Kong. It's the same way that the Jack Danger flip ramp in the back of X-Men that comes back there and drops in the danger room. That's weird. I can't think of a pinball machine that would have done a ramp that takes that intentional weirdness, but it somehow contributes to the feel of getting dropped in the danger room and you've got to do it. I know that there's controversy of the design and flow of Uncanny X-Men. I haven't played it enough to feel one way or another about it other than I just love X-Men as a theme. I had that game right when it came out The design is so unique I really do like it It was having a lot of trouble with the shots and stuff Not being completed by the auto launcher and stuff That's why I had to get rid of it Just because of like tournaments people You know oh it screwed me It did this and it did that It's like just wasn't quite working out for tournaments But I do think there was some fixes That came out that made it a lot You know fixed a lot of those things I just think a lot of this gets rushed out where it's like if you all really would have refined this for another two or three months, I probably wouldn't have had as many design issues. Yeah, I mean, that's a big question in terms of... I think it just needed a little bit more tweaking, and then, you know, it would have worked. I mean, it's hard to understand what's driving Stern's time to market, especially... Why do they need four or five different games a year? Like, you don't need, you know, they got to make money and got to keep things on the line, but it's more than what the community is asking for. And, you know, I'm not an economic person, but you're looking at the sales rates for secondary market right now, that almost every new game is stocked afterwards. Well, I mean, I used to buy, like, literally every Stern, have my launch party, whether I'd keep it or not, or keep it for six months would be a different story. But now it's just exhausting. Like, I can't keep up with how many games they're putting out. When I started the whole buying every game, they were doing two games a year. Yeah. And most bars and arcades could somehow make that work and, you know, figure out how to pay for them. But four or five games a year, every arcade can't afford to buy your four or five games. Then two from barrels, one from spooky, you know. We don't have $10 million to spend a year. And not an unlimited number of people who are interested. I think Cern's too large for the clientele that's buying this. Yeah, it's possible there might be a market correction in the near future. Okay, so now we're back. We took a little break there. But we were talking about too many pinball machines and too many different things going through and the difficulty of the market absorbing and where things are. And that may be, we might look at a market correction. We might look at other things like that. But one of the things I think that, I don't want to spend too much time going about it. I'm not a pinball economist. There we go. I speak English. But, you know, talking about adaptation and things that we're doing. We were talking about Project Frogs, and we were talking about different aspects there. We were talking about modes. And, you know, it's easy to say, Sterling, that modes are rules. And I'm not saying that because they are. But the Mamushka, okay, so the rules of the Mamushka mode in Adam's family are hit a switch, get 100,000 points. Right. Is that all Mamushka is? No. I mean, what Mamushka is one of those moments that for people who watch the movie and like saw that moment where Gomez and his brother, like this is the first time that Fester like really starts thinking that he's actually maybe an Adams or start entertaining the idea that he could not be pretend like I'm not saying this is the greatest cinematic masterpiece ever. But it's a really important moment in the film. It's a moment where the mamushka dance is there. And seeing the two little DMD animations of Vester and Gomez doing the mamushka dance, like hearing the, hey, hey, hey. On some ways, it should be really obnoxious and annoying. And I'm sure some people have been like, if I hear the mamushka one more time, I'm going to go crazy. But it's also really exciting when you play it for the first time. If you hit mamushka mode and you get it, you're not only getting a ton of points, but you're getting to participate in that part of the movie. Like, and that's the coolness of good adaptation. Like, you know, think about one of the things I've really been thinking a lot about when I'm looking at Dungeons & Dragons and Pirates Eye. You know, obviously, this is something that Dwight Sullivan, the programmer, and Brian Eddy have been playing with, this idea of permanence, like the idea of continuity between plays. They did it with Venom, and they're certainly doing it here with Pirates Eye. But that's not it. It's not just that you're going up and they're incorporating role-playing game aspects. They're also really thinking about a lot of different things. Like some of the modes in the game are really interesting in terms of you're stealthy. You're supposed to stealth. And that means don't hit the slingshots. Because every time you hit a slingshot, the stealth bar goes up. The breaking stealth bar goes up until it goes away. Then you end up in a combat situation. And on some modes, it's not a big deal. It's like, okay, you ended up in combat. Now you've got to kill a kobold. And that just means, okay, I have to hit two red shots. It's nothing. On others, it means like, okay, now I have to fight the entire frigging army. And this one mode would have been a hell of a lot easier if I had just successfully snuck past by hitting five white shots in a row without hitting the slingshots. And it works because they design, Brian Eddy's design of the table allows you to make that many shots and flow around the entire table, if you do it well, without actually hitting the slingshots, which is not the same for every pinball table. Not every pinball table will do it. And it still tracks you. The moment you hit that one slingshot, you know the slingshot's going to hit another slingshot, and it's going to go through. And it makes it so much worse. The rule is it's just five slingshots hit, break stealth. But as a player, you actually are like, I'm going to break stealth. You're not breaking stealth. You're not in the dungeon. You're not trying to sneak past the guard so you can go save the king. but it changes it. It changes that moment of the pinball game so that it is much more than just the rules. And that's like what I'm... So you're talking about a moment? A moment, you know, that... That's usually what people would tell you that part of a game is. Like, that's a moment. That's a moment, yeah. I mean, people say that in different ways. They talk about flow. We talk about flow a lot. in academia, I don't, you know, there's a specific theorist named Csikszentmihalyi, which is ridiculously, when spelled out, you don't know how it comes to that, but I just remember, Csikszentmihalyi, ek, and that's, you know, but he's the guy who introduced this idea of flow, like the idea of, like, when you're in something, it just goes right, and that, you know, that's that shot of, like, of Deadpool in the katana shot, like, when you, you, it's such a tight and horrible shot to hit that, to hit the, lock the ball for the, that it's completely insane that the locking shot is, and I can't think of another pinball where the lock the ball shot is, you have to hit it away from the target you want to hit it to. It's going to route around, come back up, and go through. But if you do it three times in a row, it feels so good. I find it kind of interesting, like all these pinball companies, the coders, we call them coders, coders, coders. Yeah. they're also writing all the rules. So to work for these companies, it sounds like you've got to be able to come up with a good rule set as well as know how to code a pinball machine. It's like two duties almost. I find that kind of crazy. So you could be an awesome coder and just not be good at storytelling and you would be probably not a good coder, as they call them. I find it kind of funny as like the title is Coder. No, I mean, I think that's really good. I mean, that's, oh, his name, the poor programmer, Coder, also great pinball champion, committed suicide. Oh, yeah. Name. Oh, gosh. Now you put me on the spot. Oh, man. It starts with L. Oh, Lyman F. Sheats Jr.. Lyman F. Sheats Jr.. There we go. Lyman's, you know, and Monster Bash has that famous, the famous mode that you can hit. If you hit the damn scoop too many times in a row, you get Lyman's Lament. Like, have you ever got it? Sorry. I was drinking. All right. That's good. But, yeah, Lyman's the man. If you hit it too many times, it's weird because it's the coding moment where he's like, okay, the damn rules require that we do this, that they can hit the scoop, and they can get these nearly infinite repeatable things. But at one point, Lyman's going to complain as a programmer to you. They are making the rules, but it's that combination. I mean, I'm sure George Gomez was sitting there thinking about this, and Lyman's like, okay, I can execute that for you. but one of the things that was great about those games you know, Attack from Mars Medieval Madness and Monster Bash, those Lyman Seats games were that he and Brian Eddy especially started with Attack from Mars they resisted modes at the time that every game in the world had borrowed Pat Lawler and had modes paused the game, switched the role sets entirely and were through it and modes are great, I mean they are but the interesting thing about Attack from Mars and Medieval Madness they're both with handshape, they're both rapid, but they're very similar physical games. But it's that you hit this three times, then you begin this mode, but it never pauses. It flows into it. And so you're right. I mean, that's like, Lyman Sheets was thinking as a coder, but also as a rule designer and working with the designers at the time. It's that combination. Yeah, they've got to be really creative as well as good at coding a machine. It's crazy. Because it's programming come to life. Two jobs to me. Well, it's two jobs, but also, I mean, it's thinking about how that code is there. I mean, there's one part in Special One Lit, which is an interesting documentary, but they've got a programmer who's playing Mario Andretti's pinball game, which is not one of my favorites. But he's sitting there talking about this is like seeing a program. I'm a programmer. I love pinball because it's like seeing a program, and it really is. I'm not a very good programmer. I'm a pretty crafty. That's why I'm an English professor who teaches English majors how to code rather than a computer science major who's teaching computer science people how to code. Because I can do procedural stuff. I can generate what we call computational thinking so that people go from no knowledge to thinking about, like, how a program actually works. But pinball is, like, a really exciting way to see your program come to life because those rules are not abstract. Like, you really, like, even if it's just, like, hit the target three times in a row, X happens. like that X happens and then is that meaningful to the player? Is that event something that happens for it? The other game that I bought that has shown up in this podcast and was apologized for but we're restoring right now. Sterling is mostly restoring because he's been a remarkably generous human being, is Millionaire. A game that is not beloved. That game is fun. It's fun at work. And I'm hoping we'll get to play it. I'll get to play it now that it's working again. It's like the people that complain about Spy Hunter. I mean, I feel like these might be the games that don't get fixed up. So when you do play them, they're usually like just, you know, the whole play field is just fucked. So you play it and then you're like, this game sucks. Like the other Spy Hunter I've played, it's like probably one of the worst condition games I've ever seen on route. So I don't know if that sometimes plays into it. Like the operator's more worried about taking care of his Adam's family, and that's always perfect, but some of these other games don't get the love. But it's a fun, cool game. It's got some cool little things going on for it. It's interesting in terms of, you know, I played the digital version of it, so I've got a sense of that. But, you know, the idea of keeping in continuous multiball, this was a really interesting idea for 1986, 77, the idea of like every time you get multiball, you must relock the targets within 12 seconds to begin another multiball mode, and that's how you increase the jackpots. Like, that's a really weird idea for 1987. Spy Hunter, you know, that's a great adaptation because it's a popular video game, and they try to capitalize on that and be like, okay, how can we use the art and the assets? And, you know, it doesn't quite work in some ways, but it also does. Like, when it's dialed in right, like yours, when you could, I agree with you, When I played, I've only played virtual. I've never encountered it. Yours is the only one I've ever seen in reality. But when I played virtual, I was like, I don't understand this. And I don't think I ever, I think I played like three times of it, even though my cost was zero. I just like the weird layouts. There's so many classic games where there's like an orbit, a buck, one spinner, three pop bumpers. And like that kind of gets boring to me. Yeah. You know, where I like the one single pop bumper in a super dangerous spot and all these weird rollovers you got to hit. and a spinner going into another Valkyrie. It's a weird layout. It really is, but it's also that lane of hitting them. You know what those are, right, from the Spy Hunter game? Yeah. That was something that was weird enough. How do we take this thing that you're supposed to get the defenses in Spy Hunter and then make them part of the pinball game? It's a weird way of doing it, but it also kind of works. It does feel exciting to gather those lights together and because the game is so rewarding in bonus, in rewarding you for gathering, like it feels different. And it's an interesting, I can think they were thinking in terms of like, in the video game, your highest score comes from having a long run. And that was, I think, something they were trying to bring over to the pinball game, but it's so different than many other pinball games, which isn't really, you know, in that kind of same sequence, same way of like persistence is what matters the most. And then especially with it, you know, I don't know how that translates to the double left outlanes of doom, but I agree with you. It's really interesting. But millionaires, it's an interesting theme or adaptation in different ways because it's like literally trying to pluck a moment out of American history, this weird moment before the savings and loan crash of 87, before Black Monday, before things went to crap when we had Wall Street with Gordon Gekko saying, Greek is good, and people weren't looking at Gordon Gekko and thinking, what a terrible person. They were looking, going, Gordon Gekko is someone I want to build my life on. And, you know, they did that. Or we had Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous before we had Cribs, where people were like, yeah, I want the money. And then here's this pinball game where Williams is like, we're going to capture that. Well, what year did that game come out? 87, right before. 87 is also the Savings and Loan Crash. Well, I'm just thinking about, like, all the mechs and stuff they had. A lot of games of that era didn have like a ramp that shot a ball off and it escaping me The roulette table like in the play field It got a lot of cool shit going on really It's surprising. You know, and that's no other machine in Williams did that, which is why I'm so, what I bought it, like, the main thing that sold me to buy it was, even though there's a lot of unknown and new and exciting electrical strategies that we learned from when we got in it. The whole wiring harness caught on fire. Yes. Yes. It did not burn down the pinball studio. The pinball studio is still standing. It was already burned up. It was already burned up, but you knew. But, you know, not only did it count, which might have been a bridge rectifier problem. We learned that from Josh that it could have been, you know, it could have been something else. And it could have been actual failures of 11. But then the things that the person did to try to remedy that. Oh, man, twisting wires together and, like, running new wires. And I don't even know what he was doing. No, I'm so glad that we were able to find a harness from a pin bot to bring us back all the way to pin bot again. Here we are all those years later, and pin bot once again is crucial to my pinball journey. But that machine, it's interesting. And that spinner is the only one that Williams ever did like that. That was a Gottlieb kind of thing. Oh, I thought you were talking about the spinner someone put in. No, no. The spinner that someone put in is just someone not. A Black Knight spinner. A Black Knight spinner. Dude, it's so much fun. I hope you leave it there. If it doesn't ruin the rules, I will leave the spinner. Because I agree with you. Spinners have a lot more fun than a gate. And if it just makes the flasher go up, but if it increases the points, then it has to go because it's ruining the game. Yeah. But that's a whole deal. But it's an interesting and productive way of thinking about pinball. to wonder, okay, what were they doing when they were trying to capture this feeling, this aspect of a, this moment that isn't the moment of, you know, I know you're using moment in the, like a moment of play, but also that moment that intersects between, I love this text, I love this story, I love this film, I love this feeling, and I want it here too. You know, like strikes and spares, like there, in no way is it a strike, but somehow when you get that one shot, it's supposed to be a strike, it does kind of feel like I got strike. It has an aspect of that. There's that moment. Joker Poker. I do not love Joker Poker as a game, but getting a full house in Joker Poker is not easy. It feels good. Or Joker's weird multiball in it. These are weird moments, but when they capture the feeling of it, they work. When they don't, we end up with Galactic Tank Force. We end up with a game where it's supposed to be fun, and that whole quasi-Golden Age science fiction stuff that a lot of people really love or would be into the campy aspect, but apparently, you know, I haven't got to play it, so I only take everybody else's word for it, but you've described to me how miserable of an experience, a pinball experience it is. Galactic Team Force, I think they were almost there, and they just, if the game would have worked, and I think they took the campiness a hair too far in the video. Okay. I think it was so close to being a really big hit, and they just screwed it up. I mean, Hot Wheels is probably their best game, right? American Pinball, generally considered. Yeah. I mean, it's a really fun game, and it's accessible. It's easy to get multiball. It's easy to get something going on. I don't think the whole world makes a lot of sense in terms of the story world of how it connects to Hot Wheels. A lot of the time, the dinosaurs and gorilla. The way I look at it is, say Stern's last 10 years Stern's worst over the last 10 years is better than Hot Wheels That's how I look at it So while it may be their best, it's still just not quite checking all the boxes Then you've got this weird shit going on like you're talking about Or the Oktoberfest less, you know, and a Oktoberfest should, how, how is drinking and partying a theme that somehow ends up being a game that isn't fun at all to play? Um, maybe someone out there is going to tell me. I know people that like the theme of the game. I like the theme. I like the idea. I've never enjoyed the play of the game. Same. And that, you know, I would, I was very inclined when someone said, Hey, we've made an Oktoberfest pinball machine. I was like, I'm going to check this out. This sounds weird. because I love, you know, like, I'm very excited that people are telling, that we're hearing that, I haven't got to play it yet, and I'm really excited that Pinball Palace is going to get one, supposedly, with the Winchester Mystery House. Yeah, that'd be a cool one. That is such a weird theme, but also a cool theme. Like, if you've been to the Winchester House, or you know the story, even if you haven't been, if you just know that story, like, that's a good example of how you don't necessarily have to buy a really expensive IP to have a theme that matters to people. See, it spoke to me, too. I didn't even know what the Winchester Mystery House was at all. This game dropped. I was like, what the hell is a Winchester Mystery House? But anyway, I watched, there's a movie out there. It's not 100% accurate, but you get the idea and the gist of it. But I like spooky themes, like not spooky pinball, but like creepy ghost stories. And I think that's what it really appealed to a lot of people. A lot more people like this spookier type theme than I think a lot of the manufacturers realize. Well, other than Spoon, of course. Thern every time. I mean, Monsters. I mean, people may not love the gameplay. They love the theme. Yeah. Stranger Things, the same thing. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, Stranger Things is a great example, actually, because that actually mostly does work as a theme, though it has kind of like a flowy attack from Mars, you know, hit the three shots in each lane and build the mode. It actually works. You know, very Lime and Sheets style code model to it. Was that before he passed or after he passed? I can't remember. What? Stranger Things. I know he was working with Stern, but I don't remember whether. Yeah, he didn't do that game. Okay. I don't know. Yeah, I think it's Dwight, if I remember right. Yeah, Dwight Sullivan. Okay. Yeah, I need to know this stuff better. I know some of the names, but not all the names are attached. But Dwight Sullivan's a really interesting guy. I love, in Special One Lit, they use him as this poor example. He's trying to explain pirates of the Caribbean on the stern table. He's trying to explain the multi-jackpot mode, that you can get the Tortuga multiball, and then you can start hitting the ships. If you lock the ball in the Tortuga, if you lock multiple balls there, then you've got multiball going on, but you don't have to worry about the extra balls, so you just hammer that way at the ships. and it's really rewarding and he's trying to explain this in a way and it just falls completely flat because the audience is like the assumption is this is just esoteric and weird but he will nerd out he comes on my buddy's stream every once in a while one of his games launches that he did the code on uh flipping out uh my buddy joel's stream but he'll he'll nerd out on one of those telling you all the rules and how to play the game but it was also i mean it's but it's also a good, yeah, he gets the rules, but he also kind of understands, like, the excitement of what that's supposed to be. Oh, yeah, absolutely. That feeling of, that's, you know, and I think that's really triumphant in Dungeons & Dragons The Tyrant's Eye. I really think that he and Eddie have done the best I've seen in this kind of combination of storytelling and design and layout. I'm really interested to see where code goes when it moves to code complete. See what they build on and what they do, but it's, right now, I still love my machine very much. And I'm really excited about the academic project I'm getting to do with it. So I don't know if I've wandered enough now to fill the time. What's your favorite adaptation, Sterling? What is the one that, like, if you had no other choice? I'm sorry for the cam there, guys. Oh, you're good. Man, Stranger Things, really. Like, that's probably one of my favorite games. just, like, I love the theme and I love the way that they've incorporated it into that game. It just feels like I'm in the Stranger Things world. Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. There's other ones too, but I really do like Stranger Things. I feel like I'm there. Yeah, and it's a great choice in terms of I mean, the show itself was trying to summon that weird nostalgia for the not being the 80s itself, but the nostalgia of the 80s, the kids advocates that, you know, this is highly related to Project Frogs as well. This world of, you know, back when kids, same with Goonies. That's why it spoke to me. It's like, I remember riding on my bicycle and like with all my friends and going on these adventures and all that. Not quite the adventures they went on, but, you know, the same. It brings back my childhood. So that's why it really speaks to me, I guess, too. No, I mean, well, Gen X and Genials, the older millennials that grew alongside us, I mean, that's the aspect of like, you know, that's what Goonies is all about. The adult world is out of tilt. It's screwed up. But kids can save it via our agency, our choices, our adventures. I would disappear for like 14 hours. My mother would not know where I was and I'd come home and it wouldn't be a big deal at all. No, same. Absolutely. Same for me. I would bike literally miles alongside roads that today, like if I watch myself as a kid and I'd be driving out, I'd be like, kid, why are you riding on the road? It's completely unsafe. I used to cross country when we lived in Minnesota and I was more athletic I did cross country skiing and I cross country skied for like 12 hours I'd get out there at like 7am and I'd get done at like 7pm and they'd pick me up at the starting spot and they had no idea where I'd been the entire rest of the time you know out when in the winter when there's still predatory stuff out there and I'm out in the middle of the woods I'm going quiet it's crazy to think that No cell phones back then. No cell phones. No Matthew. I think that's what ruined it, man. Everyone's got a cell phone, and if you don't respond, it's like, oh, my God, is my child in trouble? Yeah. No, I mean, but taking away agency. It's interesting to watch. I mean, on Reddit, it always shows up. They'll be, ask Reddit, be like, do the kids of the 80s really have this much freedom? Hell, yeah. Hell, yeah. I just had to show up for dinner. Like, all right, dinner's at this time. You need to be home. Dark o'clock. We all got to be home at dark o'clock. And that's one of the things that pinball has been tapping into, this kind of going back and looking at these games where people talk about themes that are undone or not done enough, like Back to the Future, hoping there would be a new version of that, or Lost Boys, or talk about spooky things. Horror movies of the 80s were all about the kids on adventures doing things like that, and they really inclined well. I mean, heck, I'd even like to see a Flight of the Navigator pinball machine. Some of those Disney adventures from the 80s when there was kids on their own. Oh, there's so many good themes from like that era of the 80s and 90s that they need to really make a pinball machine of. I really don't understand revisiting these themes so quickly, like what Stern's doing with Metallica and all that. I'm like, there's so many good themes they all still have not done. Why are you all not going after this? And I understand trying to get more people in the hobby, do newer things, but you really got to think about who's buying these at the end of the day. You got to cater to them more than, unfortunately. Well, yeah. Who's going to buy it? Who has $7,000 of disposable income to buy it? You're spooky really. It's usually not a 12-year-old. No, but they want to. And the thing is, if they did a better job of promoting people like the other Sterling, getting out there, they're doing some of that already. Yeah. Kineticist has a new article about him. But you're bringing in the younger generation of stars and players. I think they can achieve some of that without worrying about themes that are as relevant. Though the rumored Pokemon theme, you and I have talked individually about how to do okay. I've talked to a lot of people that are 50s, 60s age, and they could care less about the theme. It's usually more of like people late 30s to like, you know, mid 20s. Like that's what it seems like it's catering to. And some of them are starting to buy pinball machines, but a lot of them still aren't quite there. I feel like it might be a little early, wait another five, ten years, where they're now 40, 50 years old, you know, and buying pinball machines. Those spooky risks a lot with Rick and Morty, which is targeting even a younger demographic. I do know some older people that would watch that show. I remember people complaining, like, I've been aged out. They're targeting me with this obscure cartoon. And I was like, for the kids, Rick and Morty is not an obscure cartoon. Well, it's like SpongeBob would be another one. Doesn't appeal to me, but I think it's getting to that age where it would appeal to some people that are starting to buy machines. It would. And there's a BPW, the Virtual Pinball Wizards, has a really good VR SpongeBob game. And it's actually a lot of fun, and that matches the theme well. But, yeah, I feel like they're just a little early. I think once that whole age group is hitting 40, then it's like, all right, it's time to run this. This is nostalgic to them now. Yeah, yeah. But nostalgia is a really interesting adaptation. It isn't just nostalgia. I mean, that's one of the things. It's like nostalgia is a kind of poison pill. Like it's this longing for the thing that you're sure was better than it was, but if it's done wrong, you know, the same way. Sometimes you come back and you're like, this movie really has not aged well. I don't love this as much as I thought I did. But in the pinball form, you should love it. Like, Jaws is a great example of its nostalgia, and maybe the version of Jaws that you encounter in the pinball machine is better than the version of Jaws that you'd watch again now. If you were watching the movie for the first time, you probably would not love Jaws as much as you did when you saw it as a kid. Yeah, I like it because it's a part of my childhood. So, yeah, if I saw it today, I don't know if it would connect with me. No, it wouldn't be a blockbuster in the same way. It wouldn't create the blockbuster like it did. But the Jaws version that's in the pinball, it's Jaws the good parts. It's Jaws the exciting parts. It's Jaws the, you know, and more. It's part of the, you know, there's no shark hunt in the movie. There's no like, oh, we've got to bounce you out on the Mako or the bounce, you know. But there is a bounce. But in the pinball game, there is. And it's part of that story world in a way that really like, I dig that part. Like, I dig like, I'm going to hit the spinner 500 times to get this shark. Not that many. but you know what I mean. But the idea of that blend between the weirdness of the pinball world and the story world works. I think why Jaws resonates with so many people. Not just because it's a theme, but also it's a theme done really well. Otherwise it's just you're like, oh god, homepins, Spinal Tap. Oh, like wrong company to make the game. It doesn't matter how many. I mean, that's a classic too, but they destroyed it. Well, I mean, it doesn't matter how many times who goes to 11 on a pinball table if you don't make that theme meaningful. Yeah. If you don't make it. And at Home Pin, there's a lot of reasons to dislike it. The guy just doesn't want to listen to anybody. He just thinks everyone's wrong. He's right. He's not selling to pinball people. These games aren't for you. I'm like, well, that's who buys them. Yeah. Or who recommends them. They're the tastemakers. Right. And his idea that he's going to bypass the tastemakers is contrary. It's never going to work. It's hard enough to make a pinball company successful, and not catering to who your main audience is makes zero sense. Yeah, absolutely. Especially when you're choosing themes that should not. I'm like, Spinal Tap is a theme that is right in there. Spinal Tap and Blues Brothers, if done right, would have sold fine. Yeah, I think they would have too. But they're examples of using nostalgia to try to make something, but not adapting it in a way that makes it. So I guess the question I'm really interested in right now is, what does good adaptation look like? How is that achieved between the programmer, the artist, and how does that really create? Everyone's just got to be a team and work together and not just. Yeah, definitely a team that's really building on that same vision and needs to think about the time. And cares about the theme. Like, if you don't care about the theme, I don't know if you should really be on the project. Yeah, I would agree. If you can't bring a passion for what are the moments that exist already and how do you make those moments shared so that they come into the game? That's what I'm really interested in. And that's what I'm hoping that I can learn more about by being part of this project or at least talking with you about the project and looking at it. Looking at the whole homebrew world. I mean, it's exciting. Like what? God, I'm going to get this name wrong. But Polowski Pinball, the guy who's making Pinball Designer that you and I both have. But, I mean, his idea of really enabling people to make homebrews. Oh, it's a wonderful idea. And I hope it turns into something that's successful one day. I don't think it's quite ready, but he's got something going on for sure. He's good. But that question of how people make the theme that they love, the theme that they, you know, this text, this story, this film, this bit, this music, this whatever, that they're like, this is what I want to share with the world via. pinball and I'm going to spend $7,000 to $8,000 in hours CAD designing it and making it happen. It's so exciting that homebrew exists in that way because not everybody wants to enter the industry. Not everybody wants to. They want to make this theme exist. Oh, and the homebrew scene is freaking growing. I think the first time I went to a pinball show, there was like three, maybe two, and now you're going to them, there's 10, 15 homebrews. And you hear about them all over the place. I don't go to those shows. I'm going to try. I'm going to try to go to Southern Pride. That's my goal this year is to get out of my show and go and get amongst the crowds. But you hear, like, Big Trouble in Little China. I've heard so much about Big Trouble in Little China as homebrew, and I love Big Trouble in Little China. And so to hear, like, how, like, and what really excites me when I hear that is not people like, it's a great pinball machine, but it's a great Big Trouble in Little China pinball machine. Well, he did. I'm not copying what he did. I'm kind of doing it different. He did a lot of it on his own, but he did, you know, resource to some of the different things. You know, he's got call outs by a guy that was really in the movie and then he's got, you know, artists that are pinball artists. So, you know, he made more of a professional project. Yeah, but he did it with a real eye towards what he loved about that. Because it can be, I mean, let's face it, I love Stern's Star Trek table. Oh, one of my favorites. I owned it twice. I'm going to own it a third time. I absolutely love it. I dig it. I play it in virtual all the time. Going back and adding more voiceover by Carl Irvin should have been an awesome idea, but I can't be alone in thinking that those new lines hit flat in comparison to the bits from the movie. Right. And he was like, so it's not enough just to be like, yeah, we got the guy who did the voiceover. See, Star Trek, I don't care about that theme at all. Never was a fan, but I love that game. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. I was never a Star Trek fan. That's probably why it's Star Trek The Next Generation. Even though it's a wonderful game, you know, I traded it for Ghostbusters. Ghostbusters is my childhood. Star Trek, I'm like, yeah, it's whatever. Okay. Yeah. Good game, though. No, I mean, I agree. I love Star Trek. and I love the new Star Trek movies. In fact, when it came out, I was telling people, they should make this next one, the new Star Trek movies. And people were like, they already are, you idiot, because I wasn't paying attention to the news. But how well it uses aspects of the first two movies, the first two movies, good. It feels right. And Richie's flow design basically refined from Star Trek The Next Generation. and took away the wide body, which was good. It turned out that that table needed to be less wide body to be faster and have better flow. But that warp shot, like just hitting that warp shot over and over and over again. It shoots good on the stern. I have trouble hitting that ramp on Star Trek The Next Generation. Oh, yeah, but on the stern it – Oh, it blows. I can hit it. Yeah, and it feels so good when you do. When you get to warp four and you're like, I got extra ball. It's just a great feeling. but it's a really good design and a really good flow and it's just an example of but my point originally is it's not just the assets it's got to have whoever was coaching Carl Urban through you got to get back in character I love Carl Urban you are a fantastic actor be in everything but he just didn't that day that they were doing the voiceovers he was not Scotty from the movie in the way he delivered the lines. Have you heard, there's a recording where they're doing the call-outs for Jaws, and they got Richard Dreyfuss in the recording studio. It is hilarious. No, I haven't. Because I heard, I saw this video before I played the game, and I was like, the call-outs are going to be horrific. Because he's a really old guy now, and he's sitting there, he's like, jackpot, double jackpot. Hell, he didn't even have that much. It was just more like jackpot. But for some reason or another, it works with Jaws. And, like, I'm not really picturing him as Hooper in the game. I'm like, he's just this guy that does the call-outs. But it really is Hooper, so, you know. Yeah. But in, like, they sounded horrible, but it worked out with the game. The same thing with Evil Dead. A lot of people were saying Bruce Campbell call-outs were, like, flat. But after I played it, it kind of worked. I have. But they were a little. As much as I love Evil Dead, I do. I have never got the chance to play that machine. I joined here before you got it. Oh, I know. Because the value is so high, nobody's willing to, like, I mean, there are some. I need to travel. I've looked on Pinball Map. I see that there are some out there. There's a guy that's got one, like, two miles down the road. You need to introduce me to the guy that's got one. I'm not going to walk out of the door like, by the way, Sterling, you've got an evil dad. Can you let me in? I'm this guy. Yeah, he would be like, who the hell is this guy? Yeah, yeah. So if you want to open that door for me, Sterling, I'll walk on in. but you better introduce me first. And I know someone in Brunswick with that has one, but he won't open it. It's a cinnamon box. That makes me so sad. You're listening. Open it. Open it. I know it's an asset, but it's also a game. Open it. It feels like something that has to be experienced. Oh, I regret selling mine, honestly. I wish I still had it. But at the time, I was like, man, these are worth a lot, and I can get two games for one. And I was like, all right, no brainer. I'm not knocking your decision it makes sense, I wasn't here at the time and I missed out on that but from what I've heard one of the things I love about all Spooky's designs is that clearly they love all of these they love everything they've ever adapted even somehow Domino's even the Jetsons I played the Jetsons for the first time last December and I was like I do not like this game, but I can tell that they liked the Jetsons and I haven't played Scooby-Doo, but you told me that I should avoid playing Scooby-Doo? I mean, I love the Scooby-Doo theme. And the game's fine. It's just me personally, the upper play field, most people are going to tell you the same. It's covering half the play field. So when I shoot the ball, it hits the halfway point on the play field, and I have no idea where it just went. And it's just odd when playing it. That feels, yeah. So definitely, so an adaptation where maybe the ludic part, that game part. And they know it too, you know, but that's where they were as a company at that point. They were taking risk, and it's good that they took risk because, I mean, they got things like Evil Dead and Beetlejuice out of it, so. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to when you acquire Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice is not being sold unless it goes to like 25 grand. Then I'm like, all right, sold. But otherwise, it is a thing. But it's a theme you love, and everything about it, all of the things that Spooky has done. Spooky is all about making these themes lovable. Watching the Spooky documentary and watching them talk about Rob Zombie, the first time it was really their design decisions, not Ben Heck's decisions, and not knocking Ben Heck, because I like America's Most Haunted. I think America's Most Haunted is fun. I think there's a lot that really works in it in terms of its theme and that. But watching the way that they talk about the choices they were making in Rob Zombie, like I don't I played I played Rob Zombie once now or twice in December in Garland, Texas. But I don't know enough about the Rob Zombie films to understand the theme, but I could tell it was made with love. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I played it one time at TPF. It was cool. But I'd like to get some more time on it as well. If we ever go to Texas together I will always be at Texas Well I missed last year for the first time And I was so mad I was like never again I'm always going that's the show I really enjoy Everyone keeps telling me to go to Expo But Texas Like people used to say oh it's overcrowded And there's tons of people it really isn't Like you know I don't feel like it's overcrowded And I just like that part of Texas You like Presco I don't really care for Chicago as much, but yeah, I like Frisco. Okay. Well, wherever you go, I know a lot of areas around Frisco. We got all the barbecue places all mapped out. All the barbecue places. I'll also point out all the Greek places. Maybe the Greek barbecue places are such a big place. But anyway, yeah, I think we're wandering around now. Well, thanks, man. It's been fun. Yeah, I appreciate you coming on the show. Anything else you wanted to touch on? No, I just wanted to see, hopefully this has made a connection between academic work, passion for pinball, and passion for games. And I'm interested, if anybody has thoughts, hear this episode, reach out, docrob.work. I'm happy to talk about your thoughts and your experiences with pinball, maybe incorporate it into my own work. Awesome, man. Well, it was fun. Until next time, I'll see you later. Thank you. Thank you.