The Pinball Network is online. Launching Silver Ball Chronicles. Can you hear that talking in the background? I can't. Good. My wife is on the other side of the door talking to her mom. And when you're Latin and you talk to your mom, it's like a whole thing. Hello everyone, I'm David Dennis and this is Silver Ball Chronicles. With me this month, my co-host, who I haven't caused to leave in a fit of rage because of my massive off-air demands, Ron Hallett. Hello, Ron. What's up? Howdy. Things are good in upstate New York, I hope? Yes. Nice and sunny. Beautiful out here. Yes, you're quarantined up there with your good friend, Stu McVicker, so that must be difficult. Ah, yeah, kind of. I tolerate him, though. What have you been doing over the last month? What's going on in Ron world? Work, listening to more shows get canceled. Yeah. Realizing I'm probably not going to any pinball events this year. I've been to a weekly league at a friend's house. There's only been about six of us that have gone out to actually play. We're all wearing a mask. We're all sanitizing on and off games. It is very, very, very unusual. And we're just sort of playing just to keep ourselves from going crazy. and it's a weird time. We are lucky in my province. There's no cases in my area. There's only 24 cases in the whole province. Those are mostly way up north in a very rural community. So we're all taking a lot of precautions, but I would say we're probably one of the luckiest places really in the country. Anything exciting announced in the hobby recently or what? We've got some pretty cool stuff up here now. Oh, there's new games still coming out. The wheels are starting to start up again, which is really, really nice. We've had Ninja Turtles announced. Super excited for me. We've got a Hot Wheels announcement that just happened, and everybody's eagerly anticipating Jersey Jacks next release. So, you know, things are starting to open up again. There's lots of exciting stuff, but we don't want to talk about today, Pinball, right? We want to talk about yesteryear. That's what this podcast is about. And our listeners have spoken. They have. I have made a terrible mistake, and that mistake was letting the community decide what our topic would be. So, on our Facebook page, which is facebook.com slash silverballchronicles, we put up a poll from last month on the two topics that we could choose. Those topics were Gottlieb System 1 and Steve Ritchie Episode 2, The Mullet Years. It was a lot closer than I had expected. Did you think that these two topics would be basically 50-50 when we talked about this last month? Ah, probably more than you. There's a lot of Gottlieb love out there. Can't be a Steve Ritchie snob, you know. I do love a good Gottlieb, and Gottlieb System 1 is obviously an interesting topic, which is our topic today, but I was pretty sure everybody would go Steve Ritchie Episode 2 because that's where we're getting into, like, Black Knight and T2 and those kind of things. But I'm going to call out one person on our Facebook page here, and that's Edward Partridge from Australia. He did some significant lobbying on that Facebook page, and things dramatically turned, I would say, in the last 24 hours. Steve Ritchie was slightly ahead by two votes, and then all of a sudden I woke up the next morning, and I was flipping through the Facebook as I normally do, and huge jump in votes that night by about 10 votes, and they all went to Gottlieb System 1. So you can blame Australia for the topic today if you wanted the Steve Ritchie one. Well, they are in the future, so they already knew that Gottlieb won. I'm excited for this topic. We've got the research done. And if you really need Steve Ritchie, some Steve Ritchie thing, I'll give you one Steve Ritchie Gottlieb thing right now. Oh, here we go. One of Steve Ritchie's favorite Gottlieb games was Hollywood Heat. There you go. Well. You seem in shock. I don't know what to say. And that's seriously, you know, disappointing. Wow. Man, dissing poor Hollywood Heat. Or as I'm sure it was supposed to be in Miami Vice. I guess we should dive into a couple of the sort of housekeeping items. One of them is the This Week in Pinball, Pinball Promoters Database. And that's where you can leave all kinds of reviews and comments on podcasts, Twitch streams, and YouTube channels that are focused on pinball. You can go there to discover new podcasts and new Twitch streams. We would love for you to take a moment to just jump over there, give us a five-star review, leave some comments. My major goal with the Pinball Promoters database is to keep Silver Ball Chronicles above the Slam Tilt podcast, which is Ron's other podcast with Bruce. Classy. That is the only thing that matters. I don't care if we're on the third page, the fifth page. I don't care if we've got less than five stars. As long as we're ahead of Slam Tilt, that's all that matters. And we are not ahead of Slam Tilt, so I'm slightly disappointed in our relationship. Yeah. Yeah, this is a much more professional podcast. I would think this would be above Slam Tilt, honestly. We have a couple of comments from the Pinball Promoters database. If you want to jump in there, go ahead, Ron. This is from Joe C. Joe C. of Kid Rock fame. I thought he was no longer with us. but he's back from the grave, and he says that Ron Hallett Jr. has been documenting the growth of pinball for over a decade. He offers insightful firsthand accounts of the history of pinball that goes far back before the resurgence of pinball. I greatly appreciate the use of documented primary sources without relying on the perceived wisdom that may not be entirely historically accurate. His co-host, David, is obviously not as well-versed in pinball lore as Ron. In his attempts at adding humor often fall flat, in my honest opinion. But he does a yeoman's job of leading the show with a direct focus. He said something nice. This series is quickly becoming the definitive historical record of pinball's fascinating history and the people who made it what it is today. Yeah, that's a review. Yeah, and he spelled humor with a U, so he's probably Canadian. Yeah, I'm going to find you, Josie. So he likes the American, but not the Canadian. Hmm. Something up there. That's not you, is it? You didn't write that, did you? No, it's not me. I don't spell humor wrong. Oh, all right. So Sully D says, This is a great podcast for the true pinball nerd that enjoys learning more about the complicated dynamics and characters that created their favorite pinball machines. The co-host, David Dennis, is also the sexiest man alive. This is not his wife talking. So that's probably your wife talking. So that was my wife. She left us a review. Yes, she spelled favorite wrong, too. Yes. Because she's Canadian. I was thinking the other day, we are on the Pinball Network, and the Pinball Network is like a Canadian haven. Yeah, it's like we've got nothing else to do up here when the maple syrup isn't running. Well, you know, I got into my podcast feed, you know, which everyone should, of course, cheek plug there, the Pinball Network, and I just hear more instances of the word out than I ever remember hearing in my life. Here's a true story. When I was a little kid, I used to watch Nickelodeon, and they had the program You Can't Do That on television. Oh, my, that was a staple. Yep, and as a little kid, I was always confused why everyone said out on the show until years later I realized it was a Canadian show and they were all Canadian kids and that's why they said out. Like, oh, that's why that happened. I just thought they all had a stroke. Holy crap, we've got t-shirts. So we opened up our own Silverball Chronicles shop over at silverballswag.com. You can jump in. You can order yourself a Silverball Chronicles shirt. If you want to support the show, you know, we don't make a lot from a t-shirt. It's mostly to feed my ego. But the shirts are there. If you want to help us out a little bit by supporting the podcast, just simply pick up a shirt and wear it when you're oot and aboot. another thing that is pretty cool about that store... And if you look at our new shirt, it says Silver Ball Chronicles, David and Ron. Yeah. We actually have a special one that says, Ron and David, you know, the better one, me first. And if you get that one, you win the grand prize of a brand new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pinball machine. There you go. Which may or may not be a lie, but you'd have to buy a lot of shirts to find out if I'm telling the truth. That's true. And that special shirt is hidden within all the regular shirts. Mm-hmm. It's like, remember when they had the ivory soap that sunk? And if you got that one, you won some kind of prize. That's where I got the inspiration. Perfect. Perfect. Well, swing on over to silverballswag.com to check out the new Silverball Chronicles swag store. So let's just dive into the topic here, Ron, because I want to get this done. so I can go and enjoy the rest of my day. Gottlieb was a giant in the pinball industry. Some would say that they created some of the most fun electromechanical machines of the era. When the sea change of the solid state era appeared on the horizon, Gottlieb rose to the occasion, changed everything, and continued to dominate until today. They did? Oh, let me try that again. Gottlieb, the industry giant, began immediately to step on rakes and never fully recovered. And we are, of course, talking about Gottlieb System 1. The thing to remember, think about the plane back then, the plane of existence you have. It's the mid-70s. You have three, you have more than three, but you have three main pinball manufacturers. You have Gottlieb, you have Bally, and you have Williams, in that order. Gottlieb is king. They are truly the Cadillac of pinball. But it's about to change. Why don't you tell us about Gottlieb? Well, here, before we start talking about Gottlieb System 1, I'm going to need something to help you get through this. Hopefully it's not alcoholic. Oh, it's so good. So let's catch up on Gottlieb in the late 70s. So you had said that Gottlieb was the Cadillac of the pinball industry at the time. It was established by David Gottlieb in 1927 as D. Gottlieb & Co. and was based in Illinois. Would you say that Gottlieb really did dominate in the 60s and 70s? Were they the go-to brand back then? Most definitely. Most definitely. You just look at the numbers. Yeah, jump onto IPDB, take a look at some of the sales numbers. They're selling 3,000, 4,000 units regularly, and that's a lot of units at the time. Yeah, because they're making like 12 games a year sometimes. It's funny. You'll hear stories about those old, those first engineers and designers that really did pinball, like Wayne Nyans, Ed Krinsky, those guys. And they're just banging them out like on a weekly basis. It's crazy. It's like they couldn't keep up with demand, you know, and they had some really, you know, fun themes and interesting gameplay elements too. They were really innovators. And if you want to see some interesting stuff, just Google like Gottlieb Factory 70s. There's like pictures of the Gottlieb Factory from like the early 70s. And it literally seems too clean that they could actually be making pinball there. It's an absolutely incredible looking facility. They were the leader. When you're the king of the mountain, you have a different perspective than everybody else. The coin op and pinball industry is kind of interesting because it spends a lot of time focusing on operators and bar owners and distributors, right? They have a very tight-knit relationship because if you make a bunch of your distributors angry, you know, they may not support you and buy the units that they're going to sell to the bars and so on. So there's a lot of politics being played at that time. In the electromechanical era, it was Gottlieb that really dominated that sort of political atmosphere of keeping everybody kind of happy, continuing to make some minor innovations. Pinball machines hadn't really changed much in that dominant era, besides the flipper being started, the tilt bob by Harry Williams, and the mechanical score reel. You know, no real major shifts had kind of happened in that 60s and 70s era. Isn't that right? Yeah, I'd say so. Other than the flipper went from like a two-inch flipper to a three-inch flipper, so a little more skillful. You know, the price went up over time, but the basics of the pinball machine were pretty much the same for quite a while. So when we say electromechanical pinball machine, could you kind of like describe that a little bit for those that, you know, maybe more of a modern era pinball enthusiast that might know only maybe Spike and Sam systems? Well, unlike the current electronic games of today, there are no electronics. Everything runs up, there's a motor, and then there's tons and tons of relays, switches, stepper units, which is like a little, it's a circular with little contact points on it. There's score reels for your scoring. And basically everything runs on that logic. Like if these three switches are closed, then this thing goes. You know, if this is closed, you know, if this relay is in this position and this switch is in this position, then it can do this. You wouldn't have like the manual. Usually with those games, you get a large schematic that would have all the logic of the game. Yeah, and they're like stapled inside the cabinet usually. So if you look at it, it's what isn't working? Okay, what needs to be, what state does everything need to be for this thing to be working? Well, this relay needs to be in this position. These five switches need to be in these positions, and the motor needs to be here for this to work. Okay, which one of those is not right? That's how you would diagnose issues on an electromechanical game. Yeah, so those things, those computer boards, it was like a board with a bunch of relays and switches, and it's inside the bottom of the cabinet. So if you think of today, we have a board with diodes and resistors and transistors and IC chips and all that stuff. That didn't exist. It was a board, like a piece of wood, and that had a bunch of screwed-in moving pieces, actually moving pieces. Yep. And the other thing to remember is the whole reason the pinball machine is the shape it is, because you might think, well, why does the cabinet have to be so big when you think about it? Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, of course. Like nowadays, if you open up a cabinet on a new game, say you just got your new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and you lift up that play field, it's pretty much empty except for a speaker. Yeah, they don't even put the power supplies down there anymore. It's like, why does it have to be so big? Well, back then, it was completely full. If you lift the play field up on an old EM game, there's tons of stuff on the bottom of the play field. There's tons of stuff on the bottom of the game. Like you said, there's a whole wood panel that you can disconnect and remove that has all the logic of the game. Why is the backbox so big? Because we've got to put all the score reels, we've got to put all the steppers, we've got to put all the stuff in there. So it needs to be that big to fit everything in there. And that's how the basic size of the game that we know today was established. One thing that I find really neat when I look under an electromechanical machine, oddly enough, every time I look under an electromechanical machine, it's always a Gottlieb from this era. They have this massive rat's nest of cabling, similar, I guess, maybe to today. But it's all covered in, instead of sort of plastic covers on the wiring, it's all like a material. It's a fabric. Yeah, it's like a fabric. I mean, they take knob and tube out of houses because it's going to burn down your house. Yet this thing is just loaded with basically knob and tube cables. And it's funny, we talk about them being the Cadillac of the era. Just from a lot of people I know who work on a lot of these era games, almost all of them, to a man, actually says they prefer working on, like, a Williams game as opposed to a Gottlieb game. Because I guess with Gottlieb, they said their documentation, they would, like, use their own numbers for things, and they would be different than the other manufacturers, the way they did stuff. So it's harder to follow. I have a Spanish eyes, and that has, like, you have a manual, complete manual that shows every position of every stepper, like what's supposed to be. It's very detailed, and then it has the full schematic. From what I've been told, again, someone can correct us by sending an email to our email address at silverballchronicles at gmail.com. They can correct me. But I've been told that the Gottlieb manuals are not always that complete. A lot of them will just have a schematic. Just your basic stuff to get it done. It's not necessarily as clear. And I asked, like, well, why, if they were the Cadillac of the industry, why wouldn't they have, like, the best manuals? And one of the responses I got is, like, they didn't have to. They were the Cadillac of the industry. You were going to get a Gottlieb. I mean, at that point, most of the people that had a pinball machine were operators. They knew all of those machines. And if you knew a Gottlieb, you know, you knew a Gottlieb. Like, it just was, you know, one thing or the next, right? Now, the problem with those electromechanicals, you start getting to a certain level of complexity where you're just going to need too many relays, too many switches, too many steppers to do what you want to do. There's a limit to the logic that you can do with that equipment. Yeah, you sort of reach a peak. Like the ultimate peak, if you've ever seen like an old bingo, like electromechanical, they're kind of, they make a pinball look simple. the amount of logic that they have. And that's kind of the highest level of insanity that you can do at Electromechanical as far as the logic. So if we want to do more stuff and maybe do it cheaper, what do we do? Yeah, we're going to have to come up with something. Something's going to have to change in the industry. And that's sort of where we're leading to today. The 60s and 70s specifically were big for Gottlieb. They were completely the marketplace leader. and just sort of through my basic sort of looking through IPDB and a few other places, they really outsold Williams and Bally, usually three to one. And Bally and Williams, they had some very good games from time to time, right? There's a lot of really good electromechanical Williams and a lot of really great electromechanical Bally's. But, you know, those are the anomaly where Gottlieb is just a consistent market dominator. Yeah, Bally started cranking up, I'd say, in the mid-70s and they started going for licenses. It's funny that it's taken so long, and we continue to have issues with licensing in the industry. Ron, do you have a favorite 60s or 70s got VBM? Yes, I do. I have a couple. I like 2001, if you've ever seen that one. It's also known, I think, Dimension is the other version. No, I haven't seen that one. It's got, if you like drop targets, you're going to get your fill of drop targets. There's like a ton of drop targets. They're on both sides. And it's used as colors. Maybe because I like Countdown, too. I like something with colors. It has different colors for each set of the drop targets. If you knock them all down, the associated colored saucer will light up, and that's where you get your real points, and it's up at the top of the play field. It's super fun. I haven't played a lot of Gottlieb EMs. The one that sticks out for me is really Jungle Queen or Jungle Princess. Oh, is that the monkeys? It's got the monkey drop targets on the left and the right. then you collect your bonus on the top left side. I really, really, really like that one. I've also played a lot of Super Soccer from 1975 with the two spinners on the inside near the pop bumpers. Of those that stick out, I played Solar City too, which is that one that we spoke about last month where they recycled the design a million times and it's got the large bank of drop targets at the back. I don't know, Jungle Princess, Jungle Queen, right, is the four-player EM version. It's so interesting and strange, and it's got the four sets of flippers. It doesn't have that traditional Italian bottom in-lane, out-lane. It's got no slings on the inside. It's really neat, very cool. A lot of people speak very highly of abracadabra. Do you have any experience with that? A lot of these I haven't played. Well, a lot of these I probably played like once at a show, just to say I played everything. But I would say, the Gottliebs of that era, my favorites would be the 2001 Target Pool. Actually, Mini Pool, which is the same as Target Pool, different art. I actually like the Mini Pool a lot better. Both 2001 and Target Pool, Mini Pool are two-flipper games, or two-inch flipper games that have inlanes. Maybe that's why I like them. The bottom of them looks like a normal Italian bottom with two-inch flippers. They didn't actually make that many of those with the two-inch flippers. So you can do things like you can do a bounce pass. You can alley pass. You can do a lot of the skills that you can typically do on a newer game. You can do them on that game. Yeah, very cool. One of my friends here, he picked up a Synalong, which I had a lot more fun playing than I actually expected to. That's from the early 60s. No inlanes, so it's always moving. It's always fun. Very cool machine. So you can really see that their machines are still around today, and they're still very much fun to continue to play today. Another two I can think of, three-inch flipper games. Volley. I love Volley. Yeah, I've heard good things. And Far Out. Have you ever seen Far Out? Yeah, that one's got an amazing art package. Yeah, very, very cool. And because I really wanted to do the Steve Ritchie episode today, I made sure that we got a Steve Ritchie quote. So when he was a young pinball player in a local bowling alley at 10 years old, he was often playing pinball. One day, the service tech walked in to take a look at one of the machines, and he started chatting with Steve. Steve would then say that the guy looked at me and said, you know what? This is a gut leave, the Cadillac of the industry. Did they say that because they probably weighed as much as the Caddy? You know, yams are heavier than I realized when I got my Spanish eyes, which is a single-player EM. I figured, oh, no problem, and I went to lift the thing. It's like, ooh, oh, yeah, these are heavier. One of the, I guess, you know, mid-'70s, you know, early-'70s, things are starting to change at Gottlieb specifically. So in 1976, Alvin Gottlieb, son of David Gottlieb, who is the D in D. Gottlieb & Co., sold Gottlieb to Columbia Pictures, yes, the movie folk, And we'll go into more of that in another episode at some other time. But the leadership was more or less kept the same at Gottlieb at that time. The ownership changed, but the leadership within it, the Wayne Nyans, who's a legend in the industry, continued to stay around. Alvin continued to stay around. The guidance of the old Gottlieb in the 60s and early 70s is still there. just things and priorities are starting to change kind of at the higher-up ownership level. The competitors really started to change at this time, didn't they, Ron? We're starting to kind of get into that mid-'70s. Everybody's trying to kind of catch up a little bit. Yeah. Like I said, Bally starts to try to do some licensing, making games like Wizard, Captain Fantastic, trying to do that to boost sales, which if you look at the numbers, you can't argue. That definitely boosted sales. It's working. Then you have Atari, which basically tried to do everything different. They had all live bodies, so their games would look completely different than the competition. With their score displays on the apron, again, so it would look completely different than their competition. Yeah, when you're behind in the market, most companies know that you need to do something to jumpstart business. So you either compete on price. If you start competing on price, you start a race to the bottom. Who can make the cheapest pinball possible? who can take the most stuff out, who can just get it out the door. If you're not able to come up with some sort of other innovation, you have to invest in technology, you have to invest in talent. You're going to close your door if you don't do that. There's a great risk to doing things differently, and a great example of that, and you mentioned it a moment ago, was Atari. Well, they tried to do something totally different with their machines. Nolan says, I thought we could make a business, meaning pinball, but we could not do commodity pinball, one that looked like it was the same size. So we created Y-Bodies and these other various innovations, which allowed us to price them anywhere we wanted. Yeah, so that's a great example of doing something different. So he calls it commodity pinball, so he just didn't want to be like everybody else. He had to do something totally different. You know, that is an example of when things went, you know, bad, because we can see that Atari's pinballs, you know, they had maybe two good machines, both done by Steve Ritchie. They did some crazy stuff with, like, Hercules, boards in the bottom. It's just, things just didn't work. So you continually need to evolve your offering to consumers. So let's take a look at, like, McDonald's salads. You know, people all of a sudden are demanding changes in the market, and McDonald's starts making salads. Right? Do you think McDonald's wants to make salads? They want to make hamburgers? Great, with great seed meat. Yeah, like McDonald's needed to capture another part of the market because people were going to other fast food places because they had salads. So McDonald's creates salads to follow the market demand. And then when people end up coming to McDonald's and realize the salad sucks, they probably just go back to the burgers and fries anyway. But this is like pinball industry, right? They need to continue to move the market and Gottlieb has to follow where the market is going. Pinball decided to invest in solid state And when we say that word, it's like, what does that mean? What does solid state pinball mean? It just basically means all those reels All those relays, those stepper units All that stuff is going to be replaced Yeah, we're able to reduce cost, right? We can get rid of all that metal and all those bits We can reduce the cost by having a computer board Which is the future of the world It's funny because I'm in my mid-30s and I've never really known a non-solid state, I guess, world. I've always known the silicon processing microchip. You know, many companies in the 70s were working on creating these silicon processing chips and that was, you know, companies like Texas Instruments, Intel, Western Digital, I'm sorry, Western Design Center. You know, all of these companies are all starting to come up and the race around the world, particularly in the United States, was the microprocessor. It was all about sort of dominating the new world that was coming. Eventually, pinball would notice that quick computing in the microprocessor, as well as their ability to keep a memory, all of that stuff could be leveraged in pinball to help create efficiency. Pinball machines would be lighter. They wouldn't need those massive score reels anymore. They could have digital displays. They would require less tinkering, less adjustments, and hopefully they'd be cheaper and easier to manufacture, and that savings could be passed on to the distributors and the operators. This information, actually, we're going to go through. This is where we're going to get a bit nerdy. This is from an article written by Dennis Creasel. It had originally been put into This Week in Pinball, and it sort of breaks down the early solid-state by manufacturer, and we're going to make it a lot less boring and hopefully add some kind of fun commentary. so ron do you want to go through the chronological order of who's launching their solid state platform and who's following who and what's going on sure first out of the gate was bally the innovator the innovator and the thing to remember about bally is when they came up with their system they actually tried to patent not just their system but patent the actual idea of a solid state pinball machine they wanted to say if you've got a computer board in it you've got to pay us. He's got to pay us. Yep. It went to court and the judge did not agree. But I'm wondering what would have happened if the judge had decided the other way and everyone had to pay Bally if they wanted to make a solid state game. That would have been interesting. Man, so they went with a sort of a prototype approach. So what they did is they wanted to take an existing machine and try to make it work in solid state. That was in late 1974. They took a bow and arrow in 1974, and they decided to modify it. An interesting note, of course, is that the EM version of bow and arrow sold 7,630 units in November of 75. They just had a bunch of these laying around, I would assume, so that's why they chose this one. This was followed by one prototype flicker and one boomerang. Doug McDonald was a ballet engineer in the late 70s, and the boards for the machine were designed by Doug McDonald is a name that would pop up fairly often when it came to mechanics throughout the research. So certainly a very important engineer at Bally. And his initials, the letters D and B, are sort of like decibel, back-to-back dB. And you'll be able to actually see them on those prototype machines. They made 17 of the bow and arrow machines to try to get these to continue to work. They've got an understanding of, okay, how do we make a machine that we have work with these boards, right? So they're in the factory. They're all just trying to figure it out, which is pretty interesting. What did they end up eventually coming out with? Well, their system, I always get confused at what their actual system is called. It's like the Bally 17, the Bally 35, named after the CPU board. It came out with a MPU board that was, MPU stands for, what does MPU stand for? Microprocessing unit? Yes. It is powered by a Motorola 6800 series chip, which is an 8-bit microprocessor. Yeah, so this is where we get nerdy. Things are going to get nerdy with Ron and I here, because we're going to talk about sort of chipsets and stuff. So if that's not your thing, go back to Episode 1 about Steve Ritchie. Well, in their most basic way I can break down a Valley Board set, you have an MPU, which is your main, the brain. I think it's the brain. It runs the game code. It does all the math. Yeah, it does all the math. They will have a solenoid driver board. It runs all the solenoids. Yeah, so the flippers, the kickouts, the drum carves. The score displays. Then they will have a lamp driver board Does all the lights Does all the lights And then they will have a rectifier board which is the thing that the transformer plugs into this board and this board provides the voltages for the whole system. Yeah, so clean power, voltages don't go up and down. And that's at the beginning. Later they would add things like, you know, they'd be auxiliary boards, if it has special features, sound board, a speech board, that kind of thing. Yeah. Bally decided to drive all their lamps and solenoids, So all of the light bulbs and all of the things that drive the flippers and the drop targets and stuff directly. So right from the thing, which is why you would have that driver board, rather than using a matrix. So what is a matrix? Matrix is a series of rows and columns. Yeah, so what does that mean? It means if you have, say, you have an 8x8 matrix and you want to fire something, It's at position, say, row two, column one. But it decreases the amount of transistors you need. So you don't need one for, let's say, if you have eight by eight, you don't need 64 transistors. You just need eight by eight. I had a system ADB Gottlieb. My stand-up targets weren't scoring. And after a bunch of troubleshooting, I traced it right back to the matrix and one specific chip and one specific leg of a chip. And that one leg on that one chip ran the scoring for that stand-up target. So that had to be replaced, that whole matrix of tracing things, computer boards. Beyond me, I'm not that kind of person. But I find it super cool that after being in the hobby a short period of time, I was like, oh, my God, that's how a chip works. That's how a matrix works. It was very cool. You know, Bally could control up to 60 lamps and 19 solenoids, 15 that were momentary and used and four that were continuous. This is a big deal. You could have 19 solenoids. So you could have 19 things. You could have drop target, you know, up. You could have two flippers. You could have four flippers. You could have a kick-out. You could have the out-hole has a solenoid, right? You've got, like, all of these options, right, of what you want to come up with. And the lamps. So these are like having playfield lamps underneath, right? Like, spinner is lit when the light is on. Yeah, 60 lamps. They'd be controlled lamps. So one that it can light to tell you to do things. GI, meaning general illumination, or lights that are just always on. Yeah. Okay, there you go. You've now proven Joe C. correct. Valley also used a 5x8 matrix for their switches, thereby allowing their system to use up to 40 switches on the playfield. And switches are the things that are telling the board where the ball is going and does things like scoring, right? So in lane, out lane, out hole, kick out, drop target, all of those things. They can have up to 40 different switches on the playfield. And at its least, a technical, that just means instead of 40 different things that need to register, you just have five by eight, and you just use the matrix. Like row two, column five. Okay, it's this switch. Yeah, so for their score displays, Bally took advantage of what's called gas plasma high voltage displays. Yep, and those solid state machines, actually the highest voltage thing in it are the score displays. That's why they will usually have some kind of warnings, cardboard over them, or just little things covering the pins that say, you know, high voltage, do not touch, because, yeah, you don't want to mess with those. Yeah, those are the ones where you don't go, ah! Those are the ones where you pee yourself, get knocked across the room, and clutch your chest. The original sort of first Bally solid-state machines used a chime box, actually. And they did that for a specific reason. Even though they're going with the solid-state and they're experimenting with it, They don't, they're not sure how the player base is going to take this. So they don't want to change too much. They want to keep something familiar. So a lot of these first initial solid state games would have chimes. Yeah, you don't want to follow the Atari, which was just too much. And they pretty much all did that, too. Bally did it, Williams did it, Stern did it. The first few games were going to have chimes in them. Something wonderful about a chime box. Williams went even further in their first full production solid state game, which I believe is Hot Tip, they actually have a reel, like a score reel, a little score reel in the cabinet. So it'll just turn so you'll get that real sound even though it's not doing it. It's like it's not even, it's just spins. It doesn't actually do anything with the score. It's just for sound just so you get that effect. That's amazing. They didn't know how people would respond to this. They could have totally said, like, where's my chimes? Where's my, I don't like this. Yeah, where's the, when you start it up, it goes click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. Where's that? Yep. We've gone through kind of, you know, a year and a half, maybe almost two years worth of sort of development and playing around. Their first Bally with a solid state board set in it was Fireball, and it sold 10,000 units, and it was a non-commercial home use model. Yep. I guarantee you had people hearing you say that, and they're like, no, Fireball came out way earlier. Like, he's not talking about that one. So they actually had a whole group of these home models Evil Knievel, a Captain Fantastic, a Galaxy Ranger And this weird fireball There was a, I think Texas Pinball Festival Or one of the shows where they had them all there in a row And they're small, they're smaller too They're physically smaller Yeah, going back to your comment of They didn't want to make everybody angry This was probably a really good way to maybe test the water right because it's not for commercial use it's kind of more for home use but immediately you can say people were like this is awesome yeah this is 10 000 units this would be the equivalent of like stern on their star wars home edition trying some new thing yeah never been there before just to see if it worked if people liked it in december of 1976 they saw 1500 units of freedom which was a previous em design so you can see that they're really wading into solid state sort of very cautiously. Right. It's taken them a year and a half of tinkering to kind of come up with the board sets and how things work. They've launched a home model. They kind of launched a small run of some previous EM machines. They're being very, very cautious. Do you want a really geeky little note on freedom? Do I? Here's a geeky note on freedom. If you remember from our stern podcast we did, on a stern, a classic stern, if you tilt before a single switch is hit, it doesn't count to tilt. Like the first switch hit can't be a tilt. So you can't tilt through on a stern. I think we covered that. But valleys don't have this. Like if you were to walk up to, say, a Harlem Globetrotters, ball one, and you tilted, and then you plunged the ball, you would start at ball two. Freedom works like a stern in that if the first switch hit is a tilt, They won't count the tilt. Interesting. They did it for freedom, and then they didn't do it for any other game for some reason. I don't know why. Probably because they could make more money if they tilted through. I guess so, but that's an interesting tidbit that they actually did do that with one of their first games, but then they just didn't do it again. In February 1977, so we're now into 1977, Their first production-run solid-state machine was Bally Knight Rider, a trucking theme with Orbit Spinners. Yeah! No? No. They sold 7,000 units, which was, of course, the solid-state version. It was also released in electromechanical. So they're running these, like, parallel kind of platforms, right? They've still got the EM version. They also have the solid-state version. and they don't want to make distributors or operators angry. You can choose which one you want. You know, we'll do a deep dive on Bally some other day and talk about Knight Rider. Orbit spinners, yeah. Yeah, pretty much most Ballys. Orbit spinners, yeah. They didn't change the designs a lot on these games in the air. Yeah, so that was followed by Ebro Knievel, which sold 14,000 units in February 77. And then the one that really matters, eight ball with the Fonz. I put that in air quotes. The highest selling pinball ever at 20,230 units was in June of 77. Yep. And you should see it. Bally's going for the licenses. Even when they don't pay for them. Yeah, exactly. So they have unlocked something with solid state technology, haven't they? Most definitely. So their last EM, so they shut off the EM production was June of 77. That was kickoff. They made a few EM bingos after that, but that doesn't really matter. You can see that, you know, they started tinkering in 74, late 74, 75. They kind of figure it out. 76, they're getting the groove. By 77, they've completely changed the business. They're no longer doing electromechanicals. Their business model has changed. So next up to the plate was our good old friend Stern Electronics. Why do you think that they were next? Because they just ripped off the Bally board set. Exactly. They reverse engineered it. I believe they did have to pay. They paid some kind of thing per game to Bally for this. They didn't get away with it entirely. Plus, they did change the CPU a bit, or MPU, sorry, over time. And they did kind of make it their own, but the basic crux of it is still the Bally board set. Yeah, and you can listen to the Stern Electronics episode. That was episode two. You can jump back into the archives to review that one. But their Stern M100 board was really sort of their kind of focus into that area. Stern released their first solid state game, get this, pinball, in September of 77, in both EM and solid state version. Yep, and I believe they just, they didn't do the multiple games with EM and solid state. As soon as they did pinball, it was off to the races. Everything was solid state from that point on. Yeah, they were 100% all in on Solid State because they could see the, I guess, the efficiency cost savings. Their Solid State sold 1,650 units, and the EM version sold 594 of pinball. And that was the Stern's last of four EM designs. They only did four. They followed that up with Stingray, and more importantly, six months after that, Starz. Yes! And again, they did the same thing with, they had the chime unit in them. The first four, I believe it was Pinball, Stingray, Stars, and memory lane all have the chime box. They didn't want to go crazy. So they started with an ownership change, as you can hear in our previous podcast, where they're moving from Chicago Coin into Stern. With that, they just sort of threw out the old business model, moved on to the new business model. Next following them was Williams. So their prototype started in May of 1976. And that would actually lead to what was sort of coined as the Williams System 3 board set, which would eventually launch into full production in September of 77. So everybody's sort of slightly, like, you know, four to six months behind Bally when it comes to actually launching into production. But they're all kind of tinkering with solid state all at the same time, which is pretty interesting. Williams Grand Prix was a big EM seller with Orbit Spitters. Yeah! And Williams would have approximately five modified Grand Prixs into solid state as prototypes. I assume, again, that they used Grand Prix because they just had a million of them lying around the office. Actually, it's often said that you couldn't throw a dead cat in Chicago without hitting a Williams Grand Prix. Oh, meow. So this sort of prototype board set is often kind of dubbed Williams System 1. You know, it didn't really go into production, but it was kind of the first solid-state iteration of that. Where do you think those System 1 prototype machines ended up? Well, according to IPDB, they spoke with Ken Fedesna, the executive VP and GM at Williams in 1988. They said that each member of the design team received one machine after they were brought back from test. Ooh, can you imagine? Someone has a Grand Prix System 1 somewhere. Can you imagine what a solid-state version of Grand Prix would be worth if it was one of these machines? For history purposes, I'd like to see it in a museum somewhere, if we had a pinball museum. Well, we have places called pinball museums, but like a museum museum. That would be pretty, pretty cool for sure. And somebody out there knows where that is. You're probably listening to this right now. So following that experiment, November of 1976, Williams then converted 10 Aztec machines into solid-state, which then was sort of dubbed System 2. And there was also a machine called Argosy in there somewhere. And IPDB isn't quite clear on the dates, which might be an error, but I'm not entirely sure and I'm not doing that much research for a podcast. You forgot to say Aztec also has an Orbit Spinner. Oh, Aztec. Orbit Spinners. Yeah. I think it's just one. I'm trying to remember off the top of my head. I love me some Orbit Spinners. The Williams board set. So let's just jump into some of the stats there. So the Bally system, the Stern system, basically the same thing. What does Williams do with their MPU board set? It also runs on a Motorola 6800 series 8-bit microprocessor. Yeah, same one as Bally, same one as Stern. System 3 relied on like a dip switch control setting thing. So what are like dip switches? Well, they used it on some of the games. But basically, Bally and, well, Stern, because they're ripping off Bally, they used all dip switches on the MPU board in the head. And they're just toggle switches, off or on. And basically, you use those to set the game settings. So you have to, the thing about it is you have to go into the head to do this, then you have to turn the game off, you set the settings to where you want everything, turn the game on, there you go. Williams, they used dip switches, but they also started using, where you could do it from the coin door, which if you're used to newer games, you know when you open a coin door, usually they have buttons in there and you can go into a menu and do things. Williams was actually the first to do that, as far as I know. And it was rudimentary, but eventually they would take most of the dip switches off their MPU board and everything would be through the coin door. So if you have like a firepower and you need to change the setting, open the coin door and change the setting. Yeah, pretty innovative. It has an advantage over having to open up the backbox. Williams also did this on their video games. Most of the video game members, like, say, Bally, Bally Midway, their video games would usually have disk switches. So you'd have to open the back of the game up to change switches to do different things. The Williams, they used the same similar system. You just open the coin door. You could use the joysticks and the buttons from the game and go into a menu and change stuff. Yeah, they're using the same processing unit, but they're sort of leveraging it in a slightly different manner, which is pretty interesting. So their driver board, it handled the lamps in an 8x8 matrix, which was 64 controllable lamps total. And the switches were also an 8x8 matrix, which was 64 possible switches. That's a powerhouse compared to the Bally system. That's a lot of switches. Yeah, they're able to kind of do a lot of things if they want to. So William's solenoid approach was also a little bit different with the System 3 driver board. they could control 21 solenoids, and that's three more than Bally. So the first two Williams System 3 games still, again, use chimes for sounds. They would then eventually move into the separate soundboard, but again, they don't want to upset the apple cart too much. For the displays, Williams' approach was similar to Bally. They used the six-digit score display driven by high-voltage gas plasma technology. What was their first game, Ron, out of the gate? I'm looking at your notes here, and I was right. I said it was hot tip, and I was right. The first production run solid-state machine. It has the chimes in it and a score reel in the body. They sold 4,903 units, and the EM version of that also 1,300 units. So they're, again, straddling dual platforms, right? They still have that EM because they don't want to kind of go too fast. They've still got a solid-state machine, which they can see is selling, you know, three to one the amount of units that are coming out of the door there, right? Like, you know, you can see that the market has responded and basically said, ooh, solid-state, right? Yeah, and I'm trying to think. I think their second game was World Cup, which does have sound without the chime unit. So they kind of, they went for the sound quickly. Yeah, so by mid-1977, Williams completely stopped manufacturing EM machines because the solid-state sales just continued to climb. The last EM that they would make would be Lucky 7, 67 units in November of 77. So you can see that EM sales just fell off a cliff almost immediately. Now, our listeners are probably saying, isn't this about Gottlieb? Yeah, well, we've got to add context. We have to add what is going on in the industry. Isn't this supposed to be a Gottlieb System 1 podcast? I'm sure somebody is saying out there. It's probably you, Josie. so Gottlieb well they didn't develop their own board set they didn't have any prototype machines they didn't take a you know a bow and arrow or a grand prix and try to change them over how did they manage their transition let's call it to solid state run well it's said that Gottlieb had trouble developing in-house so they contracted an outside firm to help Rockwell International was levers to design and build a solid state board set. Today's business world, we call this outsourcing. In America, we call it outsourcing. That's right. Gottlieb is a pinball company, not a computer board set company. So why would a pinball company make computer board sets, right? Well, Rockwell International was known for a lot of things back in the day, from springs and axles to household small appliance manufacturing. They did defense contracts in the Second World War with the P-51 Mustang, and later on missiles. They were a big-time manufacturer of technology back in the day. So who are you going to outsource this to? You're going to outsource it to somebody big that knows what they're doing, right? That's kind of the philosophy of the leadership team at Gottlieb. Like, I don't know how to do this. Let somebody else do it. Yeah, but see, they're engineers. They're not pinball people, and they're making a pinball solid-state platform, which is a problem. That creates some inefficiencies. You don't have coworkers in the same building sort of working on the system together. You don't have, you know, pinball people making a solid-state platform. You have engineers making a board, and that's going to cause a lot of weird things. So, you know, Ron, you're in IT. I'm sure you know what project requirements and project scope is, right? Sure I do. I have to do up a document that has the requirements. This is what I require this software or this whatever to do. And here's the scope. It's to make an EM pinball machine into a solid-state pinball machine. So anything that sort of falls out of that scope, anything that I forget to put into my project requirements gets missed. Well, the other manufacturers with their prototypes in-house, they're able to sort of work together collaboratively, where this is like in a different building in a different state halfway across the country. Basically, Gottlieb said, take this EM machine and make it solid state. And the design team at Rockwell did exactly that, didn't they? They did. So let's go into the Gottlieb board stats. Yeah, the MPU for the Gottlieb System 1 uses the Rockwell PPS4-1, a 4-bit processor. That's not an 8-bit like the Motorola. Nope. They use their own chip, not the industry leader Motorola. Of course Rockwell is going to use their own chip. They're making the thing, right? Gottlieb went with a 5x8 switch matrix for 40 maximum switches. The system was limited to controlling 36 lamps maximum, about 30 fewer than Balli or Williams. Right out of the gate, processing power is half. The switch matrix is basically half, you know. And it's heavily customized. They would have, and someone can correct me here, but I believe on those boards they have, it's like a spider chip. Yeah. Like on, say you have a, I'll just pick a Williams game. Say you have a hot tip. You know, on the MPU board there's going to be a chip or chips that have the game code on it. But what Gottlieb did, or Rockwell did, they had a, it's called a spider chip, that's in all the games, and it has basic code on it, stuff that's going to be the same across all games. Like all games are going to have an out-hole kicker, you know, things like that. They would have it on the spider chip, and then there would be another chip with the game code. These spider chips are, like, completely obsolete. Like, if they go bad, you're screwed. There's nothing you can do. And I think they're, like, you can't even get the code off of them or something. How about solenoid driver was also limited. So how many solenoids could they run? Eight. That's ridiculous. Again, they asked Rockwell to make this EM work on solid state, and that's what they did. So they got eight solenoids. Why would you need more? And that's the major issue. As you see, as we continue to go over this, the other manufacturers were more like, what can we do with this new platform? How can we make the games more insane, do more stuff? Gottlieb was like, how do we get this EM game to work on solid state? Yeah, so if you took away one solenoid for the knocker, one for the out-hole, and three for chimes, you've got three solenoids to drive playfield functions like drop targets. that's shenanigans now flippers and pops they bypassed the driver board they operated more like an am machine which you alluded to a moment ago and well how does it work out for them right they're obviously behind they've stepped on their first rake already so they released their first solid state machine cleopatra in december of 77 so literally the last one out the door selling 7,300 units. That's proof that they are still the kings of pinball and everything worked out perfect. Still a lot of games. Yeah. Proof, like, they sold more than everybody else on their first solid-state machine. Yep. Right out of the gate. Everything works out fine. Just wrap it up, Ron. We're done the podcast. Nah, it didn't really work out that way. Ugh. So, Gottlieb starts to smash their sales numbers. So Gottlieb made 16 System 1 machines from 1977 to 1980. The highest seller was Sinbad, the second System 1 released with 12,000 units. Gangbusters. Yeah. If we look at this from Gottlieb's viewpoint here, in the EM days, they're selling 3,000 units, and that is a smash. That is three to one, pretty much what everybody else is doing on a regular basis. And they start selling 12,000 units. They had some of the highest sales ever with System 1. 13 out of the 16 machines sold had more than 6,000 units. Yeah, for all the grief that people give them for the old System 1 platform, if you actually look at the sales numbers, they sold a ton of games. That's a dream compared to the EMs which they were producing. Well, Bally made eight machines with its first board set, which includes the highest-selling pinball machine of all time, 8-Ball, with 20,230 units. Five of the eight sold over 10,000 units. Yeah, it was like, whoa. Well, Williams sold five System 3 machines and only sold an average of 4,700 units. So Williams isn't doing that great, are they? Yeah, but their System 4 board set had four games, one of which was Steve Ritchie's Flash in 1979 that sold 19,505 units. They also had Gorgar in Firepower with Speech. They also sold a ton of games. Then in System 7, Steve Ritchie, the first System 7 game that sold 13,075 units. Okay, calm down here. You're ruining my point. My point is that Gottlieb is killing it, and you've just gone and ruined it for everybody. They're third, but they're a strong third. We're not trying to say, like, we're not going to say, like, it ruined their whole, I mean, they were around, let's face it, they're around another 20 plus years after this. And they made a lot of good games. They made a lot of games, period. But the thing is, they were the Cadillac. They were number one. And by the end of this, they were three. They kept the same platform, really, from the beginning of solid state, really, until the System 80 systems of 1980. And Williams continues to refine their system, right? They go System 6, System 7, or they go from System... They're just weird. Yeah, they go System 3, System 4, then System 5 might have been like a Puck Bowler or a Pigeon Bat. I always get confused. There's like one game that's a System 5, then System 6, which is Firepower, and then System 7, which is Black Knight. Yeah, so they're refining, right? They're tweaking, they're updating, they're continuing to innovate, where Gottlieb is like, no, no, no, we're good. you know, this is what it is. This is an EM machine and this is it. And Bally was refining. Bally was refining, right. Upgrading their MPU board and adding more things, speech board. They were also refining their system. Do you think it's because Gottlieb had blinders on or do you think it's because maybe the leadership, because they were the old guard, if you will, couldn't push forward with it? It has to start with the leadership. They were too slow to get into it. They probably needed better personnel or personnel. I mean, you have Williams were hiring guys like, you know, guys like Larry DeMar, Eugene Jarvis, these kids out of college, programmers, getting them in there and working on these systems. The grandfathers of solid state code. Yeah. Gottlieb was just, they were just too hesitant. It comes down to the leadership, sadly, in my opinion, that they just were too cautious. They were too slow. They didn't want to course correct after a little bit. But again, and we spoke about this at the beginning of the pod, you know, there's leadership changes at the ownership level, right? Like the company itself was being sold and new managers were coming in and making decisions. And so, you know, the whole company is shifting and it's sad, really. You know, Gottlieb also, because they're running these parallel systems of electromechanical and solid state at the same time, You know, they have that massive operator distribution network, right? So if you're sitting down with your operators and your distributors and they're saying, like, well, I don't know how to fix a solid state machine. I just want an EM. You know, stop changing things. So they would continue to make both. You know, rather than upsetting the operators, you know, they just continued to run two of each. And their last EM machine was made in 1979, and they were still doing runs of like three to 500 units. I mean, it must be horrible running an assembly line with two types of technology. We're not talking like different art packages. We're talking about like different internals entirely. What were some of the issues with System 1, Ron? Like what were some of the things that were like off-putting? For me, it would be more just things like the sound, when they actually started using sound. Oh, the sound. If you listen to their sound, put it next to a flash or even a Gorgar or something with the background sound. Can you do an impression of a Gottlieb System 1 soundboard? Although, along with Countdown, it works really well. Oh, God. It's just, it's something else. Like, when they, you know, they didn't go with chimes, right? They were like, nope, we're getting rid of Chimes, we're going. Well, Williams was like, they just did it, like the one game, and then nope, we're going, all that would sound. It's bad. I mean, I actually think a lot of their play, the thing about Gottlieb, their playfields I always thought were cool. They were different. They weren't the same. Like I mentioned before, a lot of the Valley games are hard to tell apart. You have orbit spinners that go up to a saucer and drop targets below. They used that so many times. Very similar designs. If you see something like Sinbad, Joker Poker, none of these games are symmetric. Their best game countdown probably was symmetric, but because of the limitations they had, they really couldn't get too complicated with the rule sets on these things. There's not much they could do. It was like basically, you know, drop targets equal this. Saucer collect bonus. very Target awesome. Like, they were still very EME in design, right? Like, when you're getting into things like flash and firepower and... Yeah, there's no flash lamps, there's no cool continuous backgrounds down, there's no insane lighting effects that are going on in these games. There's no trying-to-be-repeatable loops, there's no cross-the-playfield plunges, right? It's up to the top, bouncing some bumpers down into the, you know, the lanes, the rollover lanes, into some sort of pop bumper. Can we, oh, God, can we also talk about the shittiest spinner of all time? Oh, the spinner. The funny thing is they had good flippers. They had great drop targets. They had the best drop targets. The best drop. The best drop targets. They had their cool little roto targets. They had their very targets. They were their own thing. but man they started using those plastic spinners and they're awful they spin two or three times you're lucky stern nailed it with the spinners like they understood that people go a** for spinners and gottlieb it's it's like here's another rake let's go it's like it's like psycho bob from the simpsons right he just keeps stepping on rakes and stepping on rakes just repeatedly like why would you take the spinner that you had in em and just have this crappy plastic thing. Now, can you modify a System 1 to have... I've seen people do it. I think it depends where it's mounted and how it's mounted. I've seen for example I seen a Sinbad with a regular spinner on it All right so let jump into some of the machines specifically So let kind of go through the list of machines I got the list up. And one thing you'll notice, if you look at the System Ones, you'll see that probably because of the Columbia Purchase, Columbia purchasing them, we now have some licenses. Yeah. The first game itself, Sinbad, was actually a license. Cleopatra. Was Cleopatra a license? I thought that was a generic. It was the first game. Oh, I'm sorry. You're right. You corrected me. You should leave that in. Yeah, take that, Josie. So for the second game, Sinbad, that was a license off those series. There was a series of Sinbad movies they made in the 70s. Yeah, he was a big property because he was foreign and mysterious. Yeah, Close Encounters, Charlie Vangels, The Incredible Hulk, Buck Rogers. Yeah. So they started getting some licenses. Things are changing in the industry. So one thing that's kind of interesting about Cleopatra, their first machine is from December of 77. 7,300 units. This is their first solid-state machine designed by Ed Krinsky, who's an absolute legend in the industry, and art by Gordon Morison. That's the other thing I guess we should mention with Gottlieb. Gottlieb had definitely, I believe this is from within the company, They believed in more family-friendly art. Yeah. You're not going to see, like, a Paragon-like back glass. You're not going to see, like, a Gorgar back glass on a Gottlieb of this era. Yeah, this sort of transitional period, they want to keep things, you know, the Cleopatra back glass is obviously, you know, focused on, you know, boys and adolescent, you know, men. Like, it's obviously that way, but it's not stern sexy. It's not Paragon. It's not like Future Spa or any of those insane Christensen-like art. Yeah, what's particularly kind of interesting about this is that originally it was designed to have a metal cabinet. So they wanted to have a metal cabinet rather than your sort of traditional wood cabinet. But it ended up being, you know, very noisy. I think it was Doc's, Roman F. Doc Garbark. Oh, God, there's no way that's how his name is. Garbark? Probably saying that wrong. head of mechanical engineering at Gottlieb, idea to use the metal cabinet, but it had many drawbacks. It was noisy, hard to assemble, and needed more room than we had available to do the assembly. Yeah, so you can see that already they're sort of tossing out kind of new ideas because, you know, sometimes they're just not that great. I haven't played a Cleopatra. I've seen them for sale. It's an interesting sort of design and game. It's very EM-oriented. Oh, yes. Um, in the, it's very symmetrical. It is symmetrical. It is symmetrical. You know, is there anything you want to say about that? It's pretty boring. Wow. Have you played one? How can you make such assumptions if you haven't played the game? I mean, if you looked at a countdown, does it look exciting? I don't know. Not really. I'm trying to defend Gottlieb here. I'm of the opinion you got to play the game. Okay. Well, when I see one, I'll play one, and then I'll let you know. But it doesn't strike me right out of the gate as something that I want to put my nickel in. But their next game, Sinbad. Now we're talking. So Sinbad, this is one that I have played, and I did really enjoy. Sinbad, to me, when it comes to System 1 games, and I'm sure we'll get disagreements. Disagreements, of course, can be sent to silverballchronicles at gmail.com. But I see Sinbad as one of the big three of System 1 games. And we'll get to the other two, but this is the first of the big three. It's awesome. It's got the scissor flippers. You can scissor yourself on both sides. Love it. Love it. No slings. So the danger isn't left or right from the slings. The danger is two flippers stacked on top of each other, and then when they lift up, there's a huge gap where the ball goes right through and into the out hole. And it has one of the great, like we said, they couldn't do super complicated things with the rule set, but this one little thing they did, and they did it again with Countdown, is one of my favorite rules, and that is the multiplier is based off the bank you have completed. Very good. 2x, you have to hit the one bank. 3x, you have to hit the two bank. 4x, you have to hit the, you get the idea. And once you get all the banks of targets, if you get them all, you get the 5x. And it's all bonus. What's so cool about this game is the way that the drop targets are aligned. So there's like an orbit on the left that goes all the way back up to your lanes, your roll-through lanes on the top into the pops. But it's got like this one drop target kind of in the middle, just kind of like where a post would be nowadays. It's a drop target. or I guess, you know, that would be a stand-up target in sort of modern stern language, but it's a drop, and then there's a space, like there's like a gap of about two drop target widths, and you can shoot up into the pops, but then you've kind of got four drop targets on a slight angle to the left of the pop bumper. Then if you go back down to the middle field, you've got two drop targets, and then that crappy spinner, and then you've got three drop targets. It's such a really kind of neat layout of the way it's kind of sitting. And it comes with graphics from the Columbia Pictures spectacular spin bad in the eye of the tiger. As it says in their flyer, I'm looking at their flyer right now. The one thing we didn't mention, one of the things that is completely different in the Gottlieb than Williams or Bally, their score displays. Oh, of course. They're not using the high voltage plasma displays. Using those blue displays, which I always thought looked better. I always love the look of those displays. The art on this is very cool. It's very sort of whimsical. There's like a beast man sitting down there. You know, there's Sinbad with his curved blade and his turban. And I'm assuming this is all in the movie. I guess so. The only thing I know about Sinbad is that he had a sword and he was Middle Eastern. I thought it was, you know, I think that this is a really kind of a unique, cool game through and through. The sound, I think, lets it down, right? I think if this had chimes. It does have chimes. There's versions of it with chimes. Oh. Well, that's another thing with Gottlieb. They had, yeah, there's versions of this with chimes. There's versions of this with the sound. Oh, yeah. There you go. Oh, then they followed it with one home run after another home run. Joker, poker. Again, 9,000 units. I mean, these are consistent high units here. If you were selling 3,000 units and then right out of the gate you're selling triple that, you're like, oh, man, this worked. Who cares what everybody else is doing? Exactly. That's why I think that the leadership then kind of had the blinders on, that sales have gone through the roof. But if you're looking at the competitors, theirs haven't just gone through the roof. They are, like, in a totally different stratosphere at this point. This was also designed by Ed Krinsky. art again by Gordon Morison and he did a lot of the art during this period you could tell because he used a lot of the same kind of purples and blues and everything sort of flowed together it was very cool. Masterpiece. I have not played a Joker poker and I'm ashamed to say that. If you play a Joker poker and actually if you play any of the big three what I call the big three games I'm mentioning I'm going to say something that's a little different than what I usually say. I know they're solid states, but put them on five ball. Joker Poker is designed to be a five ball game. If you look at the center of the play field, you will see there's just five different rows. It's for the five balls. It's supposed to be a five ball game. On the flyer, a bright new snappy playing card game from the experts of player appeal. Gottlieb Rockwell. Solid state system is now universally accepted as the most reliable, refined, and easy-to-maintain electronic pinball controller available. Some of that might be kind of correct. I mean, it was probably reliable. It was so uncomplicated, it probably didn't break often. In combination with instant visual attraction of the electric blue digital score displays and superb, fascinating playboard action, Joker Poker is your key to record high profits. I love these flyers. Holy moly. I love these flyers. Like, I want this game now. God, I want one of these. I can't wait to just leave it in my living room and have electrically high profits. Card games were a whole thing, right? It's like a whole sub-genre. Staple of pinball. That and pool. Yeah. Space. So it's like, I don't know if it's because, you know, nowadays it seems like all the popular pinball machines are bands and comic books and superheroes and things because that's what we grew up as or what we grew up on. It's like poker and cards and pool was kind of like what the kids of the 60s grew up on, right? Like usually you were at home with the family playing cards on a Sunday or something. And if you were out, you were playing pool somewhere. Where's the darts game then? Was there a darts pinball machine? I'm trying to think off the top of my head So if you know that one, send that over to Silverball I'm trying to think of a darts related one I bet you that's a winner Sure So the interesting piece about Joker Poker Is that it's playfield layout Is again, series of drop targets The best drop targets In the universe Ever Whatever patent they had on that must have been rock solid Because they were awesome They were thin, though. They did break often, but, I mean, you can get – the thing is about this, it's a Gottlieb, so you can always get the drop targets at Pinball Resource. Yes, exactly. Remember from our previous podcast, the exclusive providers of parts for Gottlieb. Now, something pretty interesting about this, you've got a 10-card, two jacks, and three queens. those are in the exact same position as Zinbads, except turned to the left on an edge. Yeah, they are. No wonder it's so good. And it's got a five bank on the upper left, but further up. But it has four extra targets, though. Down on the bottom, right? Yeah. So the funny thing is, when you flip open that cabinet, there is one huge drop target bank in the middle of this machine. because what they did is they just put one huge bank that did the ten, the jacks, and the queens, and then they just sort of left two spaces in the middle. Yep. So then you could use one solenoid to run that one bank. So you can see that they're trying to kind of come up with ways around their shortcomings, right? Yep, and eventually they would do things like they would run coils using lamp drivers, like another mini board, and yeah. Anyway, it's very cool. It's very cool. I would love to give this a go. Haven't, but I would love to give it a go. So next we have, there's not that many of these folks, so this won't take too long. Yeah. Close Encounters of the Third. Yeah. Which is based on the movie, and I'm like, like if Bally did this, it would have probably at least had Richard Richard Dreyfuss on the back last somewhere, But this game, it's got the alien who's at the end of the movie for, like... Seconds. What? 20 seconds where you get to actually see him? The, like, sick man guy? And he is the main, like, graphic on the play field. Now, this was Columbia Pictures' movie. Yep. This is how they're able to now leverage that relationship with the higher-ups in the industry. and it is no more apparent than when you look at the flyer for this game. I saw the front of the flyer. It says, you were dazzled by it on the screen. Now... And then you flip it over. Very dramatic. D. Gottlieb & Company adapts the spectacular graphics and sounds of Columbia Pictures' Close Encounters of the Third Kind to a brilliant smash hit four-player pinball game. A new adaption of Gottlieb's exclusive Roto-Target presents an irresistible challenge to every player. So one thing that I find interesting here, Ron, that it says, adapt the spectacular graphics and sound of Columbia Pictures' Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Now, John Williams, of course, did the score. Yeah, that's not in this game. So one would say that there was that tone that they played from the desert to the ship in space so they could communicate, right? Actually, is that even in the game? No, well, wait a second. I don't think it's in the game. What you're saying is that's all bullshit. When you start it, it doesn't go... Yeah, and it just makes the same noises as the other games, right? Da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da. It has a rototarget, which... Let's talk about the rototarget. I assume Gottlieb had patents on the rototarget and the very target, because they're not in any other games. So what is a roto, and why is it awesome? It is awesome. It is great. It's a series of targets that are in a circle that spin. So you can only see, like, three of them at a time on the play field. And that's in the top right. Yeah, on Close Encounters, it's on the top right. So it's got these three targets. There's one in the middle, and then you hit it, and it spins. Or you hit a switch, and it spins. And the values are different, depending on which ones are in there. It's very cool. It's very cool. It is very cool. And it has a left orbit spinner. Which is a total... Total waste. Piece of crap. Oh, it's a plastic spinner. See, that would be a good one to replace because it's in the orbit. So you could probably get it going really good. And when you get that lit for 1,000 and you could rip that spinner, nope. Not happening. You're not ripping it. You're getting two spits. And it's not even going to make a... It's not even going to make that, you know, when you spin it and you hit it on an EM or something with chimes, you get that feedback, it's going to go through and you're going to get denet, denet, denet. But again, very bright, colorful art package. Super cool. It actually has Devil's Tower on the play field from the movie, and it's got the alien who is in the movie, like I said, for maybe 10 seconds, but if you remember, it's like, yeah, that's him. The back glass is spectacular. It's so cool. Back glass has the ship with all the scientists. It's got these purples, these blues. Yeah. But it just falls flat. This is Ed Krinsky again. This guy's just banging out designs left and right. Gordon Morison on art again. Some people like this game. Awesome. It's a cool game. You know, I'm disappointed in the spinner, like I think probably everybody else is, but I think it's a very cool game. And you can see, again, sales numbers do not lie. It's got almost 10,000 units, 50 short of 10,000. And I'm sure having close encounters on it helped. So they followed that up. So they've gone 12,000 units, 9,200 units, 9,900 units. Killing it. Dragon, 6,500 units. Their next one is Dragon. Still, again, if Stern were selling 6,000 plus currently with every game, I'm sure they would be super happy. Yeah. Gary Stern would be just, he would buy another Harley. He'd be so happy. Now, I really like Dragon. because I love very targets. Very targets are awesome. What's a very target? A very target is when you hit it, it goes back to various distances. So if you barely touch it, it'll go back to, like, one position. If you crush it, it'll go all the way back to the last position. And as you said, there must have been some sort of patent that got Leaphead because they were the only ones that had these very targets. which must have expired because I believe there's one on Ripley's. The thing that's kind of cool about Dragon, besides the art is stunning, are these two very targets that are really, really close to the flippers, but they're not symmetrical. One's a bit lower on the right side. The one on the left side is up a little bit higher, and you can kind of hit that target, and it clicks back, and the further you go back, kind of the more points you get. A lot of these games at this time, you know, focused on bonus, and specifically at Gottlieb, focused on bonus multipliers. It was all about lighting the target, maxing your bonus, cashing out your bonus. Again, the one thing that really lets this machine down is an awesome spinner, which didn't lead into the pops, so you could get a good rip on it, but it just doesn't spin. Our listeners are probably like, we get it, the spinner sucks. Stop saying it. Yeah. Do you want to talk about the Backlass? Backlass is an attractive woman riding a dragon. It's a little more racy. It's still, for the time this is toned down, but yes. It's like a red-haired woman in a bikini riding a dragon, right? It's a very empowered woman, which is really cool, because it's not like Paragon with the woman who's, you know, slave Leia being saved by a man. Or Gargar. Or Gargar, for that matter. This is a strong, powerful woman riding a dragon. It's so cool. One thing I noticed from the flyers is they don't call it artwork. It's called graphics. Startling. Beauty and the Beast graphics. Graphics. It's a cool game. I would probably own one of these if I could find one. Oh. I saw one because I love fairy targets, right? They add such an odd complexity to the shots, and there's this risk-reward with vary targets, because they're very dangerous, and these ones are really, really close. Do you think we will see a game in the next five years with a vary target on it? Oh, we have to. We have? Oh, wow. He's saying it. Originally, Keith Elwin's Iron Maiden had a vary target that they took out, right? When it was Archer, it had a vary target, yes. And he took it out because he couldn't, where it was, in sort of up underneath the ramp, kind of at the top of Iron Maiden. They said it was really unreliable. They would get balls stuck in it. Well, we have Jersey Jack. We have Deep Root. If anyone, Deep Root might do it. They're trying to be different. I think Keith Elwin wants a very target, and he just needs to find the right game, the right theme, and the place to put it. I really do. David Dennis wants a very target. You heard it here. He's demanding a very target. Instant sale. Instant sale. That's it. You can put me down for the LE and the $600 top. It would be the worst name ever. He doesn't care if he has a very target. He's all set. Ed Krinsky again. Right? Does anybody else work there? Charlie's Angels was the next game based off of the TV show. There was actually EM ones produced, which are super rare. This was, yes, based on Charlie's Angels. But what's particularly interesting there is that Charlie's Angels was not a Columbia Pictures. It was Aaron Spelling, wasn't it? It was on ABC. Aaron Spelling. Yeah, so it was done by Aaron Spelling and ABC. So it wasn't a Columbia Pictures property. What's interesting there is you can see that there's a bit of a relationship being built with Gottlieb via Columbia Pictures. They're getting some doors open for those kind of things at a different level, I would say, than sort of the other manufacturers because they kind of had this referral arrangement where somebody could, you know, hey, come over here and check out the pinball division that we have, right? So it's a bit cool that they were able to do that. And now that I'm thinking about this, is this the first Gottlieb that actually has likenesses of real people on it as opposed to, like, Close Encounters just had an alien on it. It didn't have Richard Richard Dreyfuss or anything on it. Even the Sinbad, it's just got the character Sinbad, which really looks generic more than anything else. This has the actual actresses on the game. Yeah. They probably did not get a cent for it, because no one got a cent back then. They just would stick people on the stuff. Charlie's Angels was huge, wasn't it? Like, it was not... When I was a kid, it was more in the reruns, because I was a kid of the 80s and 90s, and I knew what Charlie's Angels was, to the point of nowadays people still do the sort of the pose, right, the Charlie's Angels pose in, you know, funny pictures that you might take. It was such a huge pop culture icon at the time. I'm pretty sure everybody had a Farrah Fawcett, you know, poster in their room. She's not on the game, though. She already left. No, they're using the other three. Well, no, the other two with the other third one. I can't remember who replaced her with which one. I'm not super familiar with the show, but I remember she laughed and was replaced. It's not designed by Ed Krinsky. It sold 7,600 units. It was designed by Alan Edwell, and its art was done by Gordon Morison again. But his strength is certainly not photorealism. The back glass is creepy. It kind of looks like him, I guess. It's just not quite right. Certainly not Christopher Franchi. This is more like didn't quite come out the way that you wanted it to. Again, opinions by David Dess. I think the coolest part of this machine is the fact that it is the Charlie's Angels license. It doesn't have your traditional sling on the bottom right. It's got like this weird bar sling. When it goes out the out lane, you kind of got to nudge it to make sure that it goes into the flipper and not down the drain. It has a Farrah Fawcett sort of knockoff in a bikini kind of on the bottom. It's not really Farrah Fawcett, but you could tell that people could draw their own conclusion that that's exactly who that is. No Tom Bosley either. No spinner. They just went all drop targets and theme. You played one? Yes. The one I played played very easy. We were on it forever. Is it a meh machine? I'd have to play maybe. I like to play multiple examples before I make an opinion. When you have a machine that's a bit meh, you got to bring the old Krinsky back. Get all, get in here, Ed. We need you to bang out another awesome machine. So he starts out. He goes, let's do solar ride. 8,800 units. Again, good seller. Killing it. And it's like a, it's a woman from space because she's got a space suit. She's riding some sort of alien robot horse thing on the back glass, which is cool, I guess. Apparently, by what Gottlieb says here, that it's loaded with exciting features to stimulate repeat play. Solar Ride brings back the split flipper with the scissor on the side. So you lift up that left side, it's going down the drain in between those things. It has no kicker on the left side or no sling. It does on the right side. Its play field is wide open. which is very cool. It's a bit of a different sort of take. Everything so far has kind of had a bit of a crowded midfield. Drop targets on the left. One thing that I don't think we do enough in in pinball, in modern pinball, is the gate or the lane to get you back into the shooter lane. Right? Steve Ritchie's done that probably the most in the last, you know, in the sort of modern era. I love getting back into that shooter lane. I feel like that is like a huge reward for some reason. And this has it. I remember playing it at Pinberg. Ooh, this seems like a deadly, deadly tournament machine. It was. I was not a fan. It killed me. You didn't have a good time. It has a really cool capture saucer, which is really neat, but it's very dangerous. I had a bad time. That's the problem with tournaments. They poison your view of games. After seeing how Pinbot is played in tournaments, where you just shoot it up and get it into the shooter lane, That game is totally ruined for me. In the shooter lane. So you shoot up the left side of pinbot, it goes into the pins, and then you can get it kind of to go back into the shooter lane and increase your multiplier. Not every time. So, I mean, this is a cool machine. It's, you know, it's sold a lot of units. There's probably a lot out there. But, again, it's crippled by that horrible sound board, or lack thereof. Just the bad sound. Really bad sound. They pretty much all have bad sound. But sometimes the bad sound is good. Yes. So when I said the big three, we did the first two, Sinbad and Joker Poker, saved the best for last. Countdown. It's got terrible sound, but it's perfect for the game. I usually don't like symmetrical games. This game's symmetrical, and it doesn't matter. It's that good. It's such a cool game. Ed Krinsky again. The two-player EM version of this was 1979's Spacewalk. It has a very similar backlash to 1971's Astro. Oh, yeah. This, it's Backglass, again, done by Gordon Morison. It's got those blues, the reds in it. But it's like a space fellow, and he's in his space suit inside of his spaceship. He's got his tubes all hooked up, he's got knobs and switches, and he's flying a spaceship. And it's like he's daydreaming, and out the window is like this woman who's got stars and sparkle. It's a space babe who somehow does not suffocate out in the vacuum of space. That's right. She's out in space with no space suit. Just, yeah. In space, nobody can hear you scream, super space spectacular. That's what the thing says here. Now, explain the rules to this because it is very, it's one of those super easy to understand, impossible to master. Four drop target banks. Each are a different color. Each correspond to a multiplier. So to get that multiplier, you have to get that bank. But if you get, for example, 3X is yellow. If you hit yellow, you get the yellow bank down. You don't get 3X because you've got to get the 2X also. Yeah, you've got to do it in order. You've got to do it in order. You don't have to hit them in order necessarily. And I know a lot of really good countdown players, which I'm not one of. This is one of those few games that I absolutely love, but I always suck horribly at. Usually you like games when you're better at them. This one, I can never, ever play this well. But I've been told to go for the two bottom banks continuously. Ah. I've been told that's the secret to more consistent scoring. Now, this has one pop bumper in the middle at the top and a scoop above that. In this day, in this era, it was very common to have sort of bonus collect games, right? Build your bonus, collect your bonus. So you want to max out your multiplier, and then you want to put the ball up to the top and into the saucer to collect the bonus. I agree. Yeah, or a heat train. Most of the time, to get up there, you mentioned this with Bally's, you kind of go up the orbit into the scoop. Well, this game, it's not that easy to get back up there. No, it requires skill. You actually have to hit it up in the corners and use the mini flippers to try to get it up there. What a concept. Because it's got that frigging pop bumper right in the middle. So you can't kind of, you know, you might be able to squeak it by, but it's not going to happen from the bottom of the play field. And you have the awesome Gottlieb drop targets, so you don't have to worry about any bricking, which you would not want in this game. The first time I played a countdown was in Quebec City. I was up there for a business conference, and my wife was with me, and I said, hey, let's go. I found this place on the Pinside map. Let's go play some pinball. I went over, and there was a countdown. I'm like, oh, I've never played a system one at the time. I had never played one. So I get on that, and I played that so much. I was like, those stupid green targets. Let me get those green targets. And it's got the center post in the middle that lulls you into this false sense of security where, oh, I can bounce it off the post and back onto the flippers, but it just never seems to hit the post correctly. Yeah, unless you're a Pinberg, which they remove the post. I don't know why. But the way that it counts down that bonus, and you can build that bonus up, And it just goes, do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. You know how I keep saying we hate those sounds? Well, this is the exception. It fits this perfectly. I don't know why it's so gratifying to hear that noise with those targets, with the flippers. There's something special about this game. And you can't quite put your finger on it, but I think that's why it's amazing. Yeah, it's one of only two Gottliebs in my must-have-some-day list. I would definitely have a countdown. So if you've got a countdown in Canada that you're willing to get rid of, let me know. Let me know. And being there's 9,000 plus of them, there's a lot of them out there. There you go. Ed Krinsky, back at bat. Good job, Ed. Pinball Pool. He's just designing things in his sleep. So Pinball Pool is actually a bit of a modern version of the four-player Hotshot EM from 1973. Oh, is it? A lot of people will recognize Hotshot Pinball Arcade for your PlayStation or Xbox or on Steam. And it was designed by Ed Krinsky and art by Gordon Morison. And it's going to be sort of updated and modernized into Pinball Pool. This machine is likely most notable for its back glass. Oh, yeah. It's like a robot playing pool with this woman in short shorts, and it's weird. It is weird. I had an opportunity to buy one of these. My wife vetoed me. Oh, my. Because of the backlash. She did not think. I have two young girls who are under five and my wife, and it wasn't necessarily the atmosphere that we wanted to bring into the living room. So pretty much all ballys are out. Yeah. That's kind of what's going to happen. There's going to be no Paragon in this house. Its concept is, again, another one of these easy to understand, difficult to master. So on the left side and the right side are pool balls, drop targets, two target banks. And you knock those down, and you get a pool ball in the middle. And in the middle of the play field, there's a captive ball, and you hit the captive ball for your eight ball. In the original Hot Shot game, there was a scoop in the middle, which added a little bit of complexity. I think the captive ball is actually much cooler It more visually appealing Plus you get that feedback when you hit the ball right away David Dennis the pinball pool expert You know way more about this game than I do F*** you, C. It's a very, very neat game. Exactly the same sort of basic rule set as all of the other games. Build up your bonus, get up that multiplier, shoot some drop targets, have a couple beers, and enjoy yourself. Like, we're, you know, around this time, right, this game is coming out in June of 1979. What other games are coming out in 1979? Flash, Gorgar, I know I keep saying those, but... You know, you put Gorgar next to this. Gorgar friggin' talks, man. Yeah. And this one's sort of like, shoot the balls, collect your bonus. Right? There's no, shoot the orbit, you know, light the pit with the snake and the magnet. Like, you can see that, okay, they started out out of the gate really quick. everybody else sort of waded in fairly quick and then all of a sudden they're like on this hockey stick, right? They're just Williams and Bally are just on this upward swing like you would not believe around this time. Gottlieb is selling more than they ever have, but they're quickly falling behind. I guess it would be more apparent when you have the games next to each other. Oh, could you imagine putting them together, you'd just be like and just hearing them. You hear like the background sound of Flash or the heartbeat in Gorgar and then the Gottlieb, you hear nothing. But... That would be pretty sad. Gottlieb would go with Totem next, Ed Krinsky, Gordon Morison. We'll file this one under sort of racially insensitive, maybe. Yeah, Native American themed. Yeah. Although, not... Not... There have been way worse. There have been way, way worse. But it's, you know, probably wouldn't swing that nowadays. It was a decent looking game. It was kind of cool because it had three lanes on the left. So it had an out lane and two inlanes on the left, and they shifted everything over to the right. And it had offset flippers, which I'm sure people love that. I don't think you notice it right away. You'd probably notice it after you put your nickel in and started to play. But the left flipper is a little bit lower than the right flipper, and the right flipper doesn't have an in lane. So it's a challenge to play, right? You're on a bit of a type rope when you're down with that. This is where they had something that they called Selectable Multi-Mode Sound. And Totem was the first game with futuristic sounds. Listen, news sounds around town. Musical sounds, futuristic sounds. And now Gottlieb's Totem can bring them to you. Gottlieb's Selectable Multi-Mode Sound. What does that mean? It was not very good. See, I should know what that means. I wonder if it's an operator's selectable thing. Yeah. It probably is. It was like they could tell they were behind. They were behind. So now we're going to have music. So now we're going to try to pretend that we have something, and we're just going to slap something together and try to brand it really well. I don't know. Totem was all right. It sold 6,000 units. So it's the worst seller so far. You know, we're looking at 7,000, 9,000, 6,000, you know, 8,000. Now we're back to 66. Ooh, things are getting a little, you know, things are changing, right? Mm-hmm. So what do they do? Super wide body. Not super, super wide, but almost super wide. Let's see. It's not super duper, but just super. Yeah. It's wide. It's a pretty wide body. I think we were talking this before we went on air. Godly did, they would have the wide body, like Haunted House, Black Hole. That was kind of a wide, it was wide body. It was wider. Then they had games like Genie, like Roller Disco. They're even wider. Then they had games like Star Race and Circus, and they are even wider. It's like, oh, the more stuff on there to do, or the more things on there to make it look like there's more to do. Genie's play feels pretty packed. But Genie is cool. There's somebody in town that owns one in their private collection. I haven't been over to play it because the world ended, but I did play one also at my friends on Prince Edward Island, Sean, and his Genie is just gorgeous. Very, very nice machine. It's kind of interesting because on the top left, it has like a mini play field, like a mini upper play field. It's not bi-level, so it's not above. It's just sort of up in the corner, its own sort of isolated area that has some rollovers, too many flippers, and a row of drops. And it adds some kind of interesting play that you get up there, because then it'll kind of roll down the left side into some rollovers and a pop, just kind of like you would have at the top of the play field, but it's kind of in the middle on the left, which then leads to in lane, out lane, and then down to your flipper. And it's got like this sorcerer looking wizard fellow down there. It has this just this gorgeous genie character who has like that 1970s fit tummy, you know, body, which is wow. You could tell it was marketed towards like teenage boys. Even in the sales flyer is very apparent. Yeah. Yeah. You would never get away with this now. Yeah. It's the picture of the genie. Like, it's really super sexist. It's really demeaning. It's horrible. But you could, you know, in the context of the time, you can understand what they're doing. There's so much to do on it. But what's the strategy when you play genie? What do you do? If you're playing, you want to hit the four bank when it's lit to increase the multiplier. That's all I know. Every so many hits of different things will light the four bank to increase the multiplier, and then you just have to hit one of the targets, and it'll increase the multiplier. It's got rollovers, star rollovers on the way up into the top play field. It's got everything. It's kind of satisfying. If you shoot from that bottom right side, it goes up, and it rolls over those three rollovers and hits the drop targets on the top. It's got the very Paragon-like left area with the death pop bumper. Yeah, oh, instant death right into the outline. If you see one of these, definitely give it a go, And you're probably going to see a lot of them because it sold 6,800 units. And hopefully the flippers can make it up to the top of that massive play field. Yeah, you're probably going to have to do a flipper rebuild, right? Because if you still have those original 1970s flippers, it's not happening. Their flippers were still good at this point, but if they're that old, yeah, you'd need a rebuild. One of my favorite Gottliebs of this time. I haven't played one, so I'm just going on visual and theme alone. Oh, you've never played one? The Incredible Hulk. The Incredible Hulk, yes. It's very green. October 1979, it sold 6,150 units. So sales are tapering off here in the late 70s, right? Yes, they are. It's very obvious, right, that the competitors are way ahead, And the purchases of distributors and operators, their money is going into what's making them money. And what's making them money is Steve Ritchie, it's Williams, and it's definitely Bally. Yes, it's incredible. Incredible action, incredible sound, incredible reliability. Hulk has some of the most annoying sounds I've ever heard on a game. So it's so funny that I would say incredible sound. The sound is incredible. Yeah, yeah. It's actually the same sound as Genie, but in Genie it works better. This, it's just, it doesn't fit anything. One thing that's interesting about the sales pitches, and we've seen this in the last couple of flyers, we've only kind of talked about it a little bit, their primary focus is reliability. They are trying to beat the reliability drum, because when you look at the competitors, and they've got magnets in them now all of a sudden, and sound boards in them. Well, this has a sound board in it, too, to be fair. But I know what they're saying. The other complicated games, they have more crap that can break. Ours are reliable. We're tanks. And they did have very good hardware, Gottlieb. They weren't just tooting their horn there. If you ever look at these, these are solidly built machines, as opposed to, like, an old Stern. Sorry, Stern. I mean, that was the thing. But, of course, the competitors knew you've got maybe 12 months to earn on that machine, and then you've got to sell it and get rid of it. So it doesn't matter if it's reliable as long as it lasts 12 months. But, like, things like that Genie we looked at, it has this cool, like, when you lift the play field up, you know how it has a prop arm? It actually had a prop. It was like an H. Like, it was a prop on both sides to keep the play field up. Stuff like that they did. They did very solid construction. The Hulk's international appeal will earn you instant and continuous high profits in all locations. Thrilling playboard action carries ball repeatedly to the top of the play area. Yeah, all new spotting feature can advance bonus multiplier. Yeah, you have to go through the lane that's lit, which just moves around. What's kind of neat about this game is it's got these kickers down where the slings are. Yes, they do. Think Banzai Run, like the one on the left there. It's the same thing. So it doesn't have those regular, you know, slings where it comes down and bounces off. It kind of falls into a hole and then gets shot up the play field, which I assume is Hulk punching something. You know, I never thought of that, but that's probably what it's supposed to be. The one is supposed to, like, go up the spinner, but it's that terrible plastic spinner again, so it might spin twice and just dribble down. And then the other one, it usually will go up near the drop target area. Now, the strategy for this game, rules were not the strong suit here. The strategy here was bonus. It's all about bonus. Get that multiplier up and get that bonus. Can you explain what shatzing is? And that's not after Taco Bell. Also known as an alley pass. So the ball is rolling down. See, we'll do it from a trap. You have a ball trap. You release the flipper. It rolls down. You wait until the ball gets to the very, very tip of the flipper, the last possible second, and you flip, and it goes over to the other side. And it rolls up the in lane. Mm-hmm. hits the switch and comes back down. The strategy for this game is to just keep juggling the ball up and down the in lane, left to right, and max out that bonus and just let the ball drain. If you want to play it, it's kind of fun, but if you want to have a high score, it's totally broken. But man, that art package is stellar. Yes, it is. So good. So good. Do you remember the TV show The Incredible Hulk? I do. Did you watch it every Saturday morning? With my cousin. Oh, shout out to Ron's cousin. I think it was, I'm trying to remember the, what day was that on? Because there was a bunch of other shows that were on, like, Friday, Saturday, period. There was Hulk, there was Fantasy Island. Me and my cousin, we would watch. November 77 to May of 82. Yeah, I think we used to watch Hulk and then maybe Dukes of Hazzard. Yeah, can't watch Dukes of Hazzard anymore. Yes, CBS. That's correct. So it would have been Hulk, followed by Deuce of Hazzard, followed by Dallas, followed by Falcon Crest. Yowzers. There you go. See, I watched this in rerun, like I did most of these old shows. And every episode was like, the Hulk would roll, or Bruce Banner would roll into town, and there'd be some sort of issue in this town. And Bruce Banner would try to be the nice guy and fix whatever that was. But then the Hulk would come out and he would get in trouble with the police or smash things or get chased around or the bad guy would find out who he was. Then he would eventually solve the problem and then he would just pack up his bag and hitchhike to the next town. Right? Wasn't that like every episode? Yeah, pretty much. So in Canada, we had this show called The Littlest Hobo, which was a dog. Did you get The Littlest Hobo in upstate New York? Never heard of that. Oh, so it was this dog. and this dog would just roll into town on the back of a train and he would solve a crime or help out a sick child and then he would just get on the road and go on to the next thing or he'd get into a hay truck and the hay truck would take him to the next town and he'd solve a crime or something. This is a big show. Every Canadian that's listening now knows The Littlest Hobo and I guarantee they have that Littlest Hobo song playing in their head right now. The Hulk is basically a cooler version of The Littlest Hobo. The game does not play the Hulk theme. The game does not play the Hulk theme. It does not play the piano thing at the end. No. God, I still remember that. So beautiful. He just wants to be everybody's friend. Hey, Lou Ferrigno found the perfect role for himself. And Lurch did the narration. You didn't know that. Oh, no, I didn't. Ted Cassidy. And then Lou Ferrigno was the Hulk, right? The bodybuilder guy. Yeah. That was a big show. It was a big get, this license. But it wasn't a Columbia Pictures license. This is an NBC Universal license. Again, those relationships with Columbia Pictures are paying dividends, even though they may not be Columbia Pictures. The art on the side has got the Hulk, and he's got his fist, and it's purple. The back glass is good. Show them transforming. Yeah, but it blinks. It's got those blinker bulbs. Yeah, it's definitely based more on the comic book than the actual show. Yeah, but they're taking advantage of sort of its proximity. Yes. Speaking of licenses, their next game will also be a license. Yes. Our producer, our producer-seducer, Dennis Creasel, has one of these. He will stream it from time to time on the Eclectic Gamers podcast streaming channel. And that game is from deep in space, from tomorrow, from Gottlieb. Could it be? It's the immortal Buck Rogers. My brother, when I was younger, was a huge Buck Rogers fan. Massive. Beady, beady, beady, Buck. I remember that guy, the little robot dude. Twinkie. Yes. He's in the game. I think he's right on the play field. He's on the bottom somewhere, I think. We're just looking at some of the photos here. Oh, in the middle. One of the bummers of this game. So it is a very target in the middle between the lanes. So at the top of the lanes, you've got B-U-C-K for Buck. and there's two of them, two on the left, two on the right, and in the middle there's a very target. And, Ron, as you know, I love me a very target. But it has a captive ball, and you hit the captive ball, and then that hits the very target. But you've got to have some really heavy, powerful flippers, and you've really got to hit that ball to actually get that target to move, which is a bit of a bummer because it doesn't quite work. Yeah, I won't say anything about the playfield Because I don't want to anger our producer Yeah, well, you might get fired And I'll end up with somebody like Bruce Nightingale on this freaking show Wow So on the left side of the playfield It's got two sets of drop targets And then a space which goes up into the orbit Up to the top lanes And then two sets of drop targets On the left side of the playfield It's got another set of drop targets It's a cool kind of layout, but it just doesn't execute. It's not quite right. In your opinion, I could think it's the greatest game ever. I don't, but who was Buck Rogers again? I'm trying to remember who played him. I'm thinking Lee Majors, but that's the fall guy. Also the $6 million man. That's right, he played both of them. I don't know who Buck was. I know who Doug Dodgers in the 24th and a half century was. Gil Gerard. No idea who that is. Yeah. You know, Buck Rogers is the cool... It's back glass is the most notable part of that game. It's not very empowered to women. No. It has Buck Rogers, Gil Sherrard, with a woman who I don't remember from the show, honestly. Is she a prisoner? She's something. Because he's kind of got her arm behind her back. Yeah, he looks like he's captured her in some way. And it's like in a gold slave bikini thing, and she's got some serious makeup going on and some sort of hat with horns, or maybe those are her horns. Yeah, maybe I'll have to take back what I said about Gottlieb and its safe artwork. Yeah, you can tell that there's been a shift or a change in their style. This is Gordon Morison, right? The same guy that's done all the other designs. It's designed by John Burris, and you'll remember him from our previous Gottlieb episode. What do you say about that? That's, you know, in the context of its time, you can understand it. Nowadays, it's pretty racy. One that's interesting is there's a hidden set of names within the bathing suit. Yeah, there's a hidden name in our top section. It says Sue. Sue, top section. That's a very good way to put it. So whoever Sue is, we're not sure. So if you get up in there real close, get up real close to that back glass and look at the top part, you'll see Sue written in the art, which is kind of neat. No idea who that is. Couldn't find any data about that. Speaking of that, if Jon Norris is listening, I have a question for him. And it's pertaining to names on games. The patron saint of pinball. There's several of the Outleaf games that have a Steffi name on them. The Car Hop, it's the Waitress. It's in at least two other games. And I have someone who's very curious on who that is, because I can't find it anywhere, that information. So this fills 7,400 units, so its sales are back up slightly by about 1,000 units. Thanks to the license, probably. It's definitely the license, the brand. Buck Rogers was really big at the time, right? So wasn't it around that time they had... They had a lot of... They had Battlestar Galactica. Yeah, they had Battlestar Galactica at the time. So space is kind of a thing. Star Trek. You know, Star Wars has taken over the world. Space things are cool. You know, the art probably drove sales as well. So Godley, for their next game, decides to go wide again. Things fell off a cliff here. This thing's filled 2,400 units. We're talking about roller disco. And why they're doing disco in 1980. Disco's on the upswing, man. No, it's not. It's quite the opposite at this point. Disco is the future. Bonnie M is just killing it. This game is a mess. It's huge. I've never seen one of these. Oh, I've seen them. The art is like they're on LSD. The art is very busy. Gordon Morison. his cartoon-esque designs of figures is much cooler than his photorealistic attempts let's put it that way what does the flyer say for this one i'm curious how they were selling this one gotley why should i get this game pinball roller skating disco gotley's newest y body brings today's hottest pastimes together oh my god Ooh. Because remember, there was another roller skating movie that came out the previous year. Actually, no, that year. It's called Xanadu. That didn't do well either. Do you think it's because it's a bunch of old dudes, old white dudes, that are running Gottlieb that they thought that that was cool? They were a few years behind. I mean, 1977, 78, that would have made sense. Like, you've got guys like Larry DeMar, Eugene Jarvis, and Steve Ritchie. Like, those guys are, like, young and hip and cool and rock and roll and drinking beers and going to clubs. And then you got, like, Wayne Neyens and Ed Krinsky. Wow. Putting them down. I wouldn't say that's putting them down. The opinions expressed are by David Dennis and not by his co-host, Ron Allen. They're just not as hip and with it. You know, they used to be with it. But then they changed what it was. The playfield is so wide. Like I said, it's not even the widest they did. But unlike Genie, which had a lot of different sections with a lot of different stuff, this is almost a symmetrical playfield. Oh, God, it has the Space Invaders pop bumper thing going on up top. Yeah. And it's got the sucker shot in the middle where it's like, hey, shoot these targets. And they're positioned right to the outlanes. So the first in lane, it goes right down to a top flipper, and then there's an out lane, and then that out lane goes down and there's a post where you can bounce it, and it can go into another in lane and down to the bottom flipper, or down the drain. So this is a very nudgy kind of out lane style at the bottom, but the art is awesome. It's probably the second coolest one of this era, in my opinion. I like the colors, the purples, the pinks. It's very cool. It's very trendy, right? You can tell that Gordon Morison was hip. He knew what was cool. It's not genie. But it's not genie. No. But it is cool. The back glass is a bit of a letdown. What? It's got, isn't the one person green? That's the part I don't understand. There's two women on there, and one of them is actually green. That's what LSD does to you, my friend. No, she's not green. Blue. It probably started out as green and has now faded to blue. Yeah. It's kind of cool. It's kind of a cool machine. Kind of see, we're kind of petering out here at the end of this era. It sold 2,400 units. That is a train wreck. But we have a recovery game, kind of. Torch. Torch. Oh, Torch. So this game was originally called Decathlon prior to production. It's basically like an Olympics kind of thing where there's all these different international flags throughout the back glass, and there's a woman that looks like she's running a decathlon. I don't know, she's got the Olympic flame without... Yeah, and if you were in America, there's probably one team you wouldn't have wanted to make a game based off of in 1980. Yes. And that would be the Olympics that we didn't go to. What's interesting here is they actually, in the original sort of pre-production game and the one they used for all the flyers, they actually have the East German flag, which they then changed in the production model. Oh, that was kind of like the bad Germany. Kind of like North Korea is the bad Korea, that kind of thing. So during the Cold War, Germany was split into two. There was good Germany and bad Germany. Separated by the wall. And in the flyer, when you look at the flyer on IPDB, in the picture in the top left, there is the East German flag. Somebody made the decision to take that off of production. I haven't played this. Have you played this? Probably. It was that memorable, eh? Like, that's a drop target down in the bottom really close. No inlanes. It's a hold on to your hat kind of game. Actually, it looks like they took close encounters, moved the roto target to the other side. Yeah, there's a gate back into the shooter lane. Gotta love those. Again, build your bonus, get your bonus multiplier. There's a dude running in the middle of the playfield. It's really, you can see what they were going for, but it's not going to work. Yeah, but again, nothing super innovative on the play field going on. No, it's like they're just limping along. You can tell that they fall back on drop targets. Like, give them drop targets. We have the best drop targets. They're reliable. They're easy to change. People love drop targets, which they do. Actually, I don't know if they're easy to change. I've heard different views on that. I changed mine. I thought they were fairly easy. Oh, in that case, they've got to be easy. Yeah, I have no idea what I'm doing, and I could change them. When I look at those like Williams Early Williams ones They terrify me to think about changing those Oh like a horseshoe target You don't want to change those Yeah you just burn the machine So then we get to our last System 1 game Where Gottlieb decides to try something Yeah I don't know if they were trying to try something here Or they didn't care So at this time And we'll get into this on another pod Surprise Take a drink If you're playing the drinking game with us here On another podcast we're going to go into the System 80 era of Gottlieb. And this is kind of like they're starting that transition or head started that transition kind of around 1980. They're going to change the platform. They've realized that they need better sound. They need more switches. They need more lamps. They got to catch up. And in my opinion, I think they probably just had a bunch of parts laying around for System 1 and they just needed to get something out the door to get rid of those parts. And I think Asteroid Annie is where that came from. It wouldn't be the first time that happened. Bally did that with Spectrum. Puffed over parts, so they just did Spectrum. And what's the significant thing about this game is it's a single player. Yeah, which we haven't really seen since the Wedgehead era, really. It's designed by John Burris. Sold 2011, or, ooh, that's totally wrong, 211 units. Gordon Morison doing the art again. It was card game poker playing card game aliens with Annie. It's Asteroid Annie and the aliens. Like, what else can you say? It's got a really kind of cool backlash with, you know, the aliens playing cards with Annie. Very reminiscent of Alien Poker to me. Yeah, it is kind of like Alien Poker, isn't it? It's collecting cards at the bottom. The art is very unique, very off the wall. It's got lots of blues. It's very black. It's got two pop bumpers that are on top of each other, so not left to right, but on top. And it's got two sets of drop targets with cards on the left and then the right, but kind of up a bit. It's got that crappy spinner to kind of a mini orbit or a mini rail that goes back up to the top lanes. I think I would really like to play this game. it looks kind of, it looks different. It looks kind of unique, which I think is because it wasn't designed by Ed Grinsky. I only played it at Pinburgh. What did you think? I can't remember. I don't think I did well on it. So do you think that that tainted your liking of it? Not that I didn't play well, but that I only played it once. Ah, okay. Now, unfortunately with Pinburgh, when they have stuff in the tournament area, you can't really play it between rounds or anything. So I didn't get to play it again, unfortunately. They got the parts out the door. They're moving on to System 80. And, I mean, I guess we can wrap it up. We've gone through those games. And, you know, Gottlieb was too late to move into solid state. They were too hands-off in its development. They were too slow to refine the platform. And then they were just too far behind to really recover the footing that they had 10 years prior. Thank goodness they moved to the saving grace, the System 80. It's better than System 1. The System 80 put them right back on top. Not really. But I have heard from people who are a lot more technical than me that System 80, if it was used correctly, it could have been better. I.e., there's actually a lot of horsepower to the system. They just didn't really maybe have personnel to take advantage of it. That's this person's opinion, but I thought that was interesting. I really like the System 80 era, and that cheesy 80s that they really get into, those non-licensed licenses, I think kind of add to its charm. it's not overly complex and complicated and it's kind of fun so I look forward to doing that pod in the future but there's a lot of good System 80 games not just the ones everyone knows you know like Black Hole and but that but games like Timeline it's a really cool game games like Spirit which hardly anyone's played but that's awesome yeah they get they really go through a change so that's it that's our topic for Gottlieb System 1 this month is there anything else you want to add Ron? My throat is so tired I have a sore throat folks I apologize Guys, I'm fading as the episode sucking out lozenges here. Our episode topic for next month. You going to do a poll? I'm not going to do a poll. Oh. We're going to do Steve Ritchie, The Mullet Years, the Steve Ritchie number two in the saga. I would do my Steve Ritchie voice, but I can't. That's okay. We'll save your voice up for next month. So there you go, folks. If you're looking forward to the Steve Ritchie podcast, that's next month. If you have a topic you'd like us to cover, I've put something up on our Facebook page over at facebook.com slash silverballchronicles. Just leave a comment as to what you'd like us to cover. So far, a few people have mentioned that they would like us to cover some of those little-known pinball companies. Ah, Zachariah. That's actually the main one I think of. They had a ton of games. Hankin for our Australian listeners. Yeah, so we'll take a look at a couple of those. and I do have a few others in the pipeline. I've been working on a Dwight Sullivan episode. It's called Blinded by the Light. It's Dwight Sullivan, Mr. Multiplier, or if you've got a better name, leave a comment on our Facebook page for the Dwight Sullivan first episode. I recently picked up a Simpsons pinball party, which I'm actually enjoying quite a bit. Still in the honeymoon phase, but makes me want to do a Keith P. Johnson episode, who I would, you know, if Larry DeMar and Eugene Jarvis are the grandfathers of modern code design and Dwight Sullivan would probably be the father of modern code design, then I'd probably say Keith P. Johnson's the crazy uncle of pinball design. So I look forward to diving into a couple of those topics. I'd call him, like, Mr. Stack. If you ain't stacking, you ain't playing pinball. Keith P. Johnson likes it deep. Oh. Hey, I'll try this one here. My throat is failing me. As always, you can send your comments, questions, corrections, and concerns to silverballchronicles at gmail.com. We look forward to all the messages, and we read every one, even if they're from your wife. Please subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or your favorite podcatcher. Turn on automatic downloads so you don't miss this single episode. Remember to leave us a five-star review on the This Week in Pinball's promoted database. That way, more people can find us. Oh, what was that? David is telling me I need to plug Super Bowl Swag ok so let's go to SuperBowlSwag.com and look for our t-shirts Who was that? Who was that, Joe? Joe C. Kid Rock guy came back from the grave. Joe C. Oh, maybe. What was that? I'm Joe to the C, yo. I got more game than Coleco. I'm a freak and I'm sick. Three foot nine with a ten foot... Oh, yeah. Oh, my God.