TOPCast 43: Jeff Powell

TOPCast - This Old Pinball·podcast_episode·1h 38m·analyzed·Jul 8, 2007

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.030

TL;DR

Jeff Powell discusses his radio background and pioneering pinball sound design at Capcom in the 1990s.

Summary

Jeff Powell, a former Chicago radio engineer and music composer, recounts his 20-year radio career and transition into pinball sound design at Capcom in 1994. He describes his early work on Pinball Magic, Breakshot, and Big Bang Bar, detailing the technical challenges of audio production for pinball hardware, the evolution from single to dual audio channels, and his approach to voice talent direction and sound file optimization.

Key Claims

Jeff Powell was hired at Capcom on July 11, 1994, as their sound engineer and music composer.
high confidence · Powell states directly: 'I was hired there on July 11th of 1994'
Pinball Magic was Powell's first pinball game ever and the first game Capcom released.
high confidence · Powell: 'Pinball Magic yeah that was their first game and they basically said do it right yeah it was my very first coin up game ever'
Breakshot operated on a single audio channel, requiring all sounds to be extremely compressed in duration.
high confidence · Powell: 'Breakshot which was a single channel game so that meant everything that played interrupted everything else' and 'the time I believe it was two minutes and 56 seconds of total audio in the break shot game'
Pinball is the most difficult audio production platform due to its speed, randomness, and interactive sound requirements.
high confidence · Powell: 'I still think pinball is the most difficult platform bar none to to produce interactive audio'
Powell spent 20 years in radio before transitioning to pinball sound design via a blind job advertisement.
high confidence · Powell describes his radio career from college graduation in 1974 through 1991, then states: 'a friend of a friend passed along a blind ad uh for a company looking for a music composer and sound engineer' leading to Capcom interview
Mark Richey conducted Powell's final interview and offered him the job at Capcom.
high confidence · Powell: 'I ended up interviewing at length with Mark Richie and he offered me the job'
Capcom initially debated using one audio channel with MIDI versus two audio channels, ultimately choosing two audio channels.
high confidence · Powell: 'Capcom was trying to decide whether they were going to go with a sound card that had one channel of audio and one channel of midi sounds' and later 'when they made the decision to go audio only'
Chris Grantor joined Powell on Pinball Magic to help with choreography and added sounds after hearing Powell's work.

Notable Quotes

“I still think pinball is the most difficult platform bar none to to produce interactive audio interactive meaning things that have to change on the fly even more so than console games”
Jeff Powell @ mid-interview — Core insight into pinball audio design complexity compared to other gaming platforms
“when they made the decision to go audio only eat all they had was only two channels and in the case of the break shot game we only had a single channel to work with”
Jeff Powell @ mid-interview — Explains technical constraints that shaped early Capcom pinball audio design
“the time I believe it was two minutes and 56 seconds of total audio in the break shot game and that was it”
Jeff Powell @ mid-interview — Demonstrates extreme compression required for single-channel Breakshot audio
“I'll read the line it's like here here's how I'm gonna read the line repeat after me and do it this way and some people are more tone tone deaf than others and they can't quite get the pitch right and I'll have to do it like 40 takes until I get them to say the line just right”
Jeff Powell @ late-interview — Illustrates hands-on voice direction approach for in-house talent at Capcom
“I had a rack with a number of rack modules and a keyboard I'm a keyboard person I wish I knew how to play guitar but I don't have the time or the patience to go back and learn it now”
Jeff Powell @ mid-interview — Reveals Powell's primary composing method and equipment preferences

Entities

Jeff PowellpersonMark RicheypersonChris GrantorpersonManny de la TarantypersonCapcom PinballcompanyIncredible TechnologiescompanyAnchor GamingcompanyPinball Magicgame Breakshotgame

Signals

?
design_philosophy: Powell describes his approach to writing game music: start with a main theme or opening piece, then develop hooks and variations rather than spending excessive time on demo material that won't make final cut. Adaptive approach based on game complexity and mode structure.
high · Powell states: 'I don't want to spend a whole lot of time developing one piece of music that the leader won't end up as a final in the game I you know it gets my ideas going and then I want to move on from there'
?
technology_signal: Capcom transitioned from debating single-channel audio + MIDI hybrid approach to dual audio-only channels for Pinball Magic and Breakshot. Single-channel constraint on Breakshot forced extreme audio compression and sequential playback (no overlapping sounds).
high · Powell details the evolution: 'when they made the decision to go audio only eat all they had was only two channels and in the case of the break shot game we only had a single channel' resulting in 2:56 total audio for entire game
?
manufacturing_signal: Pinball Magic required extensive reworking of audio elements due to EPROM chip space constraints. Only a few of Powell's composed magician themes made it into the final game due to storage limitations.
high · Powell: 'half of them never made it into the game because we didn't have enough room on the e-prom chips to fit all the stuff so only a few of the themes ultimately ended up in the game'
?
design_philosophy: Powell identifies pinball as the most challenging interactive audio platform due to speed, randomness, and multi-directional narrative branching (games where storyline can go 'one of seven different directions'). Contrasts with console games which, while having larger audio assets, have more predictable audio sequences.
high · Powell: 'pinball is the most difficult platform bar none to to produce interactive audio' and 'because pinball is so fast and so random and you have points where in some games the storyline can go one of seven different directions'

Topics

Pinball sound design and audio engineeringprimaryCapcom Pinball history and early 1990s gamesprimaryRadio broadcasting career and industryprimaryHardware constraints and technical limitations in pinballprimaryMusic composition and MIDI technologysecondaryVoice talent direction and recording techniquessecondaryInteractive audio design for real-time systemssecondaryCareer transition from radio to gaming industrysecondary

Sentiment

positive(0.78)— Powell expresses warmth and appreciation for his Capcom experience, though he conveys the challenges and stress of early pinball audio work. His tone is reflective and proud of accomplishments despite technical constraints. No negative sentiment toward manufacturers or colleagues.

Transcript

whisper_import · $0.000

You're listening to Topcast, this old pinballs online radio. For more information visit them anytime, www.Marvin3M.com. Flash Topcast. Tonight on Topcast we've got a special guest that worked at Capcom as their sound engineer and sound man. He worked on such games as Pinwall Magic, Breakshot, Big Bang Bar, Airborne Invenders, Flipper Football, and then after Capcom Pinball he worked on Vacation America and also with incredible technologies and Mark Ritchie on the Orange County Chopper Video Pinball Project. So I'd like to welcome Jeff Powell to Topcast tonight to talk about his experiences working at Capcom as the sound engineer there and working on such games as Big Bang Bar. He's got some good stories to tell and we're going to give him a ring right now. Hello. Jeff? Yes. It's Joshua Clay. How you doing? So how long have you been doing this, Joshua Clay? Wait, who's interviewing you here? I was watching Larry King last night so I'm kind of in that mode. Remember I did 20 years of radio. Let's start at the beginning. I guess sound probably came before Pinball or did Pinball become before sound? Well, sound came in my childhood actually when I built my first little radio transmitter in sixth grade. I thought that same time was lost out to another guy in my class who got the lead role in Ikebod Crane's Legend of Sleepy Hollow which we did for the local or our sixth grade class did for the local radio station and I was relegated to the duties of croaking frogs and clinking glasses. So you were the rudimentary background rhythm sound guy? Yeah, that was, you know, when I look back I guess that was the ultimate start of my sound career. Obviously that was not a professional gig by any stretch. But I got into radio in college and got hooked and left electrical engineering for the radio and television program at the University of Illinois when they still had such a program in the college of communications and graduated out of there in 74. And by that time I had several years of on-air experience at WPGU and one of the other local stations down there in Champaign and basically stayed in radio for 20 years. I ultimately ended up at a number of Chicago stations. Radio was a very important part of my background and basically where I have learned to do a lot of stuff like music and sound effects. I had always wanted to mix music with media and at the time that I had landed in the Chicago market first at WDCB out of college and page I was starting to write tunes and pitching songs to publishers in Nashville. No major recordings but I certainly learned a lot by pounding the pavement on music row and learning how to write better song lyrics and write better commercial melodies, although it's pretty good writing melodies. WDCB then I finally got my first commercial radio gig in the city in Chicago and stayed there for another 10 years making rounds such stations as the old FM100, WOLAK ended up afternoons there for a while and a format change got shown the door and wound up at WOLS during the summer of 1989 while they were starting to get ready to change a format. I think in 1989 it went through three radio stations in four formats. It was quite a year for a people in terms of format changes in Chicago. Did you have a format that you liked? Yeah but I didn't get to do that format until the tail end of my radio career and that was at the Blaze where we were playing ACDC and Metallica and stuff like that. At FM100 I spent five years with elevator music even though we were the number three station in Chicago and I was doing morning drive for a couple years but I didn't get to play personality. It was quarter hour breaks and read the liner notes and do Carl Weathers and news and pretty much just be a voice that was just incidental to the music and I hated the music. I can hold Montevani strings and 101 strings and Jack Jones occasionally when they finally started adding some vocals in and you know it was a good gig as far as longevity at any one place. Radio is such a trenchant industry as many people who know and so the fact that I stayed there five years was pretty remarkable. Now is the voice you're talking to us as is it your radio voice as it may be? No no well sort of I guess I know if I'm talking like this. It depended on the station or is that if it was FM100 the next time you feel like dialing a friend dial FM100 and I always wanted to change this liner card you hear it in Chicago lands finest restaurants and I wanted to go you hear it in Chicago lands finest restrooms. I never had the guts to do it and then I finally ended up at the Blaze where it was Jeff with a chance 103 five to Blaze. So um but obviously I'm not going to talk to you like that because I'd lose my voice by the end of uh 10 minutes. Why do radio shifts are they generally four hours maybe six at the most? Let me tell you at a place like a top 40 station like WLS and when I was there they were in the midst of changing from music to all talk so it's kind of in that in-between mode and and um I was there strictly as a pinch hitter I had one weekend air shift in the rest of the time that I was there for the six months that I was there was to fill in for other guys who either out job hunting or for the end when they ended up loading people like John Landecker finally go and I also filled in two days when they finally let Fred Winston out of his contract um and I was just there to fill in place of music and read the commercials and do some light talk but nothing heavy duty which was just fine with me because I wasn't really cut out for talk radio I was more of a music jock uh at that time. Why does it take a certain personality for the talk? Even even a music jock when you're in the hot seat for five hours and you only have enough time during a three minute record to run down the hall and down the hall maybe way down the hall and and there are a lot of stories from the old days of people getting locked out of studios infected happened to an old friend of mine they forgot to tell him one night that they had changed the door code and they had dead air for quite a while when he couldn't get back into the studio but when you're in the hot seat it's you know and you're having to come up with stuff to talk about and be bright and cheery and you're like god I'd rather be home sleeping you know it's a it's a bit of work and it takes a lot out of you after five hours so it's it's uh gets to be rather physical at times because you're really having to work your brain plus you're working the phones and sometimes you know in a format where if you've got to record listeners and win contests and stuff and you're constantly going back and forth trying to find commercials out of the rack behind you first morning I filled in for Fred Winston and I looked at the log and it and I'd been on radio 15 years well we've almost 16 years by that point and I'd never seen a commercial log so black so so filled with commercials I as I did that morning and I was so glad that we had floods going on so there are news guys had more to talk about and this and that because the phone lines were lit with people wondering what the hell happened to Fred Winston and I'm just doing all I can to just keep up finding the damn commercials in the rack to play them in time and you know as ones running out and just finding the next one and slamming it in the machine fall of 1991 was last time I was ever on the air live uh in Chicago uh in the rest of the time I've uh since then I've been doing uh jingles for a short time and then a friend of a friend passed along a blind ad uh for a company looking for a music composer and sound engineer and I think I still have that ad tucked away in a file somewhere and no indication of who the who this company was but two weeks later I'm walking in the door a capcom interviewing for a job and walked away with the job the job was uh yeah it was in Arlington Heights okay oddly enough in the building where I now work for incredible technologies so it was kind of a weird homecoming of sorts there but we'll get into that later so tell me about the capcom experience the capcom experience um I assume you never did any work for ballet or Williams or Gottlieb or any of the other pinball people no um I mean I was aware of machines but I really wasn't uh wasn't a fanatic pinball player through much of the 80s all of that passed me by because I was in radio I was where my I was in radio and I was trying to pitch tunes to publishers and artists and that's where my head was at the time and uh in the early 90s trying to expand my voiceover work until I had uh major jaw surgery and ended up spending most of a year doing speech rehab and uh that's that's tough but um once I got past that and uh was taking a look at where I stood as far as jingle production I was partnering with a guy Steve Weebie when I went through my speech rehab in 92 uh and early 93 I was really um having a lot of second thoughts about the jingle market because it was so fiercely competitive in Chicago and I was so underfunded in terms of my own keyboard equipment and software which really was terribly expensive at the time you know to buy a uh a one gig hard drive set you back about 1500 bucks at the time and uh we had no such things as DVD burners and things yet and so uh I you know and I was almost flat broke and so when this ad came through for a music composer I had done just enough industrial music and stuff and it put together a couple of music demos and I had learned how to do demos from all the voiceover stuff I had done in the past and and uh learning from uh some of the big name talent in Chicago and the way they had done their voiceover tapes and stuff so I learned to put together these three to five minute presentations that there were like non-stop music with you know short clips of all the stuff I had done and apparently that's what uh got me past the piles and piles of tapes that had come into the guys at Capcom and I and I really knew that you know I knew that they were probably gonna have all these piles because I had seen similar piles of tapes come into the publishers down in Nashville some of the guys showed me all these tapes that would come in from people you know all the wannabes and and I was very fortunate I'd been able to get in the door at a lot of places because I had you know enough stuff that was fairly credible um but it it's fairly competitive everywhere make this decision as to which way do I go send out this tape to this blind ad thought nothing of it it's like well it's gonna be another tape I won't hear from them and two weeks later I got a letterback saying well we'd like to interview you so I called him up and walked in and um interviewed with people like Python Anghelo Mark Ritchie ultimately I ended up interviewing at length with Mark Ritchie and he offered me the job and it's like great so because I couldn't use the job at that point I was almost flat broke and it offered me an abrupt left turn out of this uh midlife crisis I guess and I never looked back on on radio other than I've kept some of the voiceover clients that I've had the I still do Andreanifers radio TV commercials and like I said if I am I've done some car commercials from time to time and I have do some other voice stuff for non-commercial stuff telephone information providers whatnot uh on hold advertising uh the lady uh out of Indiana that I still do work for so uh you'll hear me on a lot of veterinarian you know background music uh messages and uh doctor's offices and stuff like that around the country but um um those are things I still do on the side uh because it you know keeps my hand in a variety of things and kind of keeps me fresh and it brings in fun money for all the expensive uh gear that I like to have in my studio but Capcom was a wonderful learning lab because suddenly I was thrown into something I had never experienced before and that was a manufacturing environment I had never produced audio for a manufacturing environment before so I had to learn all about how to create little short files here I'm used to doing radio commercials and lengthy tracks for slight tape presentations that was you know before video was big and uh you know full length tune demos you know fully produced uh 24 track tune demos for pitching to publishers and stuff and suddenly I had to create these little short audio files with everything trimmed off because we had to fit everything into teeny tiny spaces on the prompt chefs I'd never worked with that before wow what an experience I even had to learn how to burn the damn things right burn the the prompt chefs I'd never done that before and um and learning you know just about the whole process of building a a game a mechanical device that uh ultimately used audio within it and uh audio that had to be synchronized to uh dot ma- dot matrix screen and uh audio that responded to uh mechanical switches and things this is this is this is like wow this is great this is cool you know when they finally slapped on the art and stuff however it was a very scary experience also because might they threw me into the fire on pinball magic yeah that was their first game and they basically said do it right yeah it was my very first coin up game ever now I've encountering by the end of the summer I'll probably have completed a hundred such projects over the course of my sound design career but that was game number one manny de la Taranty who uh had done goofy hoops and had started out with their sound designer and later went on into programming um got me started and taught me a lot of things about how to do short files and and uh we were also a capcom was trying to decide whether they were going to go with a sound card that had one channel of audio and one channel of midi sounds and um so I was trying to learn how to develop sounds for the midi chip uh and at the same time start getting some play field sound effects into the uh in ball magic game and I got a couple of uh tunes going uh that first summer uh I was hired there on July 11th of 1994 and that summer I got one or two tunes uh uh developed before I traced off to the Philippines to get married in uh September of that year but uh so they they do that was on the right track with the music and stuff uh you know I kind of got off to a good start there but well just to slow you down a little what is the actual progression like say like for pinball magic I mean did you write the theme music did you uh do any of the voices or did you have to hire talent to do you know obviously you are hired some talent to do some of the voices did you record them all what was the whole assembly process to make the whole thing happen well pinball magic um I try to remember all the voices I know that we used Mark Ritchie's life truity as the central magician and I forget what her name was now and I don't remember how many other voices I I think I did a few things in their christ grantor christ grantor came on board a little later on and added some things and I'll talk about that experience a little later on here but man he had taught me to you know write a piece of theme music first uh a general piece of music out of which would come the the main mode music and stuff like that uh and then the other themes would come later he had written one uh theme for one of the magicians which uh we ended up oh yeah actually I think wrote two pieces one didn't get into the other piece I had to rewrite because we discovered it was a way too close to the Batman theme oh we ended up rewriting that uh piece but I learned later that skipped the process of writing a main theme or full length main theme anyway I have a main theme sure but um you know a game like Big Bang Bar had so many different modes uh that um one theme just wasn't gonna do it for that kind of game so what do you do just write write maybe a couple hooks and then move everything around the hooks um and I think every project is a little different uh but a project and I'm thinking even more recently the orange county chopper's video pinball at credible technologies um you know I just kind of launched in with the first theme knowing that this game's gonna spread out and go variety of places and with its modes and depths and and in a game like that we had three virtual playfields so each play field had to have a whole different theme so I just didn't even worry about one main theme I just launched in the first theme that I think this is gonna be the opening theme ultimately uh uh that was the case but I tried out to spin my wheels too much I don't want to spend a whole lot of time developing one piece of music that the leader won't end up as a final in the game I you know it gets my ideas going and then I want to move on from there I want to you know produce a piece that I know is gonna go in the game and then move on to the next piece is gonna go in the game rather than uh develop something that ultimately will end up just as a demo piece well how do you write this I mean are you writing this on uh on a keyboard on a guitar are you doing this on a midi system how does this ultimately start out well the capcom days I was working on a Mac quadro six fifty I had studio vision as a midi and audio program at the time now I had that was another thing I had to learn to work with the Mac because I was a PC person up to that point and I had worked primarily with cakewalk and a couple of other programs but I had a rack with a number of rack modules and a keyboard I'm a keyboard person I wish I knew how to play guitar but I don't have the time or the patience to go back and learn it now I think I sometimes will start with a rhythm oftentimes with the melody first and work down from there and then fill in the arrangement because of the the various magicians I came up with the themes for all the different magicians and half of them never made it into the game because we didn't have enough room on the e-prom chips to fit all the stuff so only a few of the themes ultimately ended up in the game so it was sound digitizer is a midi eyes well starts a midi or a lot of my stuff does in midi in fact I 90% of the work I do is midi based to start but midi is merely you know midi is musical instrument digital interface and it is like the old player piano the midi data is like the holes on a player piano roll where the notes are stored which notes are played and as that roll plays it plays the piano right and a midi keyboard is like the piano the midi data is like the player piano roll and the computer that stores that data is like part of the player piano roll so that's kind of the analogy that I draw is midi is like a player piano of sorts yeah and depending on the computer that interprets the midi midi data it'll sound different based on different midi computers well depends on the instrument that you know is playing back that data if you're playing off a sound blaster sound card that's got a you know set of a midi instruments on it as opposed to say an older Roland card or Yamaha card yeah they've they're instruments they're they all stick pretty much the old Roland standard Roland was one of the early players in midi and set up the standard that everybody the general midi standard that everybody still holds to today to some degree but yeah the instruments do sound a little different but then you've got all of these rack modules over the years I've got a bunch of them here at home that probably should go on e-bay because they sit dark now but you know like the Alisa's D4 and the all kinds of old Roland boxes the U220 and the the JV 1080 and and the 5050 an older percussion which I probably won't sell from emu and I'm on the wave station and I've I've got an old D50 and a core gamma one and all these old keyboards and rack modules that I used to use in orchestral boxes that I had you know the emu virtual so I did and there was I have a lot of things here that I did not have when I started a capcom I had a JD 990 that was a Roland box and a wave station rack unit and a Kurt Swale 2000 K 2000 rack mount unit and then I had a midi keyboard controller made by Fitar and I think that was about it from my initial lineup and then oh and then I had a sample cell card from digit design and sample cell was the first sampler I ever used and so I was able to play all of that stuff out of studio vision and then we record back the finals into sound designer 2 which was the 4Runner 2 the current Pro Tools software and this is all done on the Mac yeah yeah that was all done on the Mac on the PC side it was starting to learn how to use sound forge which I still use today although I have to say in a sidebar the Sony has a little work to do on cleaning up the erratic behavior of sound forge 9 but I'll stop there they've added some wonderful things to that program but they've also tweaked and mucked and I've got a lot of people upset including myself right now some things aren't working quite the way they were in that program but it remains my my mains with Army knife as far as soundfile editing and manipulating effects and stuff like that you know midi starts with the midi data and it plays midi instruments and the audio output of those various rack mounts keyboards and nowadays virtual software synthesizers all of that gets recorded into an audio recording program somewhere and so audio is audio and midi is midi and they're they're two separate things and in fact if you look in my studio or any audio studio you'll have three sets of cabling one for power one for midi and another set of cables for audio and I have miles and miles and miles of cable I exaggerate a little bit but probably a mile of cable in my little studio at home and for audio power and midi. So on the cap counter comes soundboard then there's a midi channel and then there's a digitized audio channel then the digitized audio is for voice right well yeah I did have a I did have a little mixboard come to think of it I had a Mackie mixer 1604 was the original 1604 line they've now gone through a couple of major reincarnations of that board and the version three is a wonderful little field mixer I have one of those but what but the advantage to the midi is that the sound files are very very small compared to like digitized sound data right problem with the midi and this is going back to the decision that Capcom was trying to make between using a a sound card that had one audio channel that we would have used for speech and certain sound effects and a midi channel that would have been used for just music the problem with that is that when they decided to go with two audio channels only I went yay now we can make this sound like AM radio and somebody looked at me and said well I am radio isn't that great a quality I said wait a minute if I can do everything in audio that means I can process all of this audio and punch it up and make it sound much bigger and fuller and livelier than I could ever do with a midi instrument in other words one of the things I really learned how to use was a compressor and that's what makes everything bigger and it takes me back to radio because if you stop and think if if if you've known somebody you've talked to in person and that person you hear them on the radio they sound different and it's because radio compresses the hell out of everything everything is loud as the engineers can make it because you want to be the loudest thing in the dial and so everything's run through limiters and compressed and that's what fattens up a lot of the sound yeah when I when I was a kid that and playing playing guitar my one of my main tools was an MXR DynaComp which was a compressor I always thought it made a lot more intense and a lot more bold oh yeah and so it is a must in a sound engineers toolkit as far as the mastering process goes and I hadn't really learned to use that too much in my jingle days I was working with other engineers and they would end up doing that in the studio but and and as far as radio stuff we never used it on on the commercial stuff because the stuff that went out on the air got compressed in the final stage so we never had to do it there but now suddenly I'm thrust into a the arena where I had to master everything I did and when they made the decision to go audio only eat all they had was only two channels and in the case of the break shot game we only had a single channel to work with and we'll get to those challenges in a moment also I keep putting all these things up for a moment hopefully we can remember to tie these threads up but two channels two channels of audio allowed me to do much punchy or things and then a single channel of audio and MIDI and I ended up working with such a system later after the Capcom experience when I went to work on slot machines at anchor they had they had such a beast yeah and it was like oh gosh so Capcom did did use the two audio channels and and didn't do any MIDI channel pinball magic went out with two audio channels and break shot which was the game one of the games right behind that they they did airborne Chris Granar had come on board to help me finish up the choreography and add a few sounds on pinball magic when when we first got an introduce and after you listen to what I had done in the game he said well you know you've done 90 percent of the game already I was still kind of looking over my shoulder because I was still kind of shaky on choreography pinball is not an easy platform and to this day I still think pinball is the most difficult platform bar none to to produce interactive audio interactive meaning things that have to change on the fly even more so than console games much as I would love to do console games and write great thematic orchestral scores and stuff and I haven't been able to break over into that yet but I and yes the the sheer number of files that go into a console game and you know the amount of music it's much larger but I think in terms of designing for interactivity because pinball is so fast and so random and you have points where in some games the storyline can go one of seven different directions sometimes and you have to make this thing happen all with a seamless wall of sound kind of I kind of take the full specter approach and all the old wall of sound idea from the 60s and my other matras everything is loud as possible so I you know I was kind of looking over my shoulder thinking am I making the grade here and I don't know if I'm quite getting this choreography right on pinball magic and Chris came along and helped me shore up some of the final details on it and once we got through that project they let me fly solo on break shot which was a single channel game so that meant everything that played interrupted everything else so there could be no overlap no there there no and anything that played cut off whatever was playing before that's a trip so I had to learn how to I had to learn how to tighten up speeches squeaky tight as I could make it shave off the ends you know the tails of speech files and then do a slight time compression on every speech file 20 to seven to get to ring out an extra 20 to 70 milliseconds of time out of each speech file because when we got done with that game and I ended up the time I believe it was two minutes and 56 seconds of total audio in the break shot game and that was it so they did it was that like a cost cutting thing they used a different soundboard to save some money I think it was the same soundboard they were just cutting costs everywhere else in the game somebody told me later that the out we the game was capable of playing two channels gosh that's a 20 to fail question I think it had to do with the the chip and the way we loaded stuff and we're only they were only allowing us to play one one channel out of that so that was it and and then and I started work on big bang bar right after that big bang bar was the third game I worked on well now before we get the big bang bar on break shot there was some pretty sexy speech going on in break shot right yeah yeah um a list of a straw I I'd listen to her in the office and I felt she was an natural for that and then Chris Granger did the male voice in that game and I I played the part of the moose bulldoom rubber the old the rocking bullwinkle stick how do you find voice talent for for these games I mean yeah you know how do you get these people well we could have hired them through agencies and pinball magic we didn't hire anyone from the outside from the outside world I generally I like to try and use people from the office but a lot of times that fails miserably in games that you've you've heard countless games where you can't understand the speech or somebody's you know really stiff or whatever in some games companies will pay an exorbitant amount of higher and outside talent through an agency to you know do sound alike you know characters stuff like that Fred young I used to know Fred downtown he's he's done a lot of pinball games for people where he's done the Star Wars Star Trek characters and stuff like that we were not doing licensed themes and so I felt well here's a chance to get some people in the office actually in the game although it's a lot more work and I really have to direct them kind of Suzuki method where I'll read the line it's like here here's how I'm gonna read the line repeat after me and do it this way and some people are more tone tone deaf than others and they can't quite get the pitch right and I'll have to do it like 40 takes until I get them to say the line just right and sometimes even then I'll maybe take a piece of a phrase from this take and a piece of a phrase from that take and put those pieces together to get what I want but I am the editing king so I'll modest the aside so it's a little more work but that way I get the people I work with involved in the game more and that's kind of fun but you know if we if we if time was a consideration which it didn't seem to be so much in my world in Capcom till till crunch time at the end and then yeah I was always praying for slippage and some of the other departments but I didn't have to worry so much about time and getting the speech together early on in the games and I didn't have to worry about sounding like some character in a movie or something like that so I could rely more on the the office talent and direct them and and in the case of flipper football we actually got about 150 of the people from the office in the warehouse and the manufacturing area out onto the back loading dock for a two hour shouting match where I had them shouting and singing various chants and we ended up mixing that into soccer crowd sound effects to get the the game so I had about 150 people from the office come out and help me on that game which was a lot of fun now one thing that people constantly ask is like I you know they want to change the sounds and their pinball machine and their basement is that possible at all or is that just like unbelievable amount of work and time and energy you mean actually sticking their own music and stuff yeah or their own voice that would take probably reprogramming I think that's a Tony to fail question I think or Bill foot's and writer you know foot's you know when everything's burned into an e-prom chip it's it's pretty much cast and stone whereas the newer console games you know software today allows and Microsoft of course encourages it which is why they don't want to pay bands anything for royalties to be in their games which I think is not good for musicians but nonetheless you know when you got console games with software designed to allow you to stick in your own music that's one thing but electro mechanical games with e-proms you know things were programmed in you'd have to be a programmer I think to be able to make your own changes so you wouldn't even be able to do that no I I'm not a programmer so I would I wouldn't and besides which I've got better things to do you did it once you don't need to do it twice no I mean I you know I I designed a game how I I think it should be or where wherever the inspiration of the day took me or where the game designer wanted it to go ask for something specific or however the talent I was working with the speech talent did something you know there's a lot of experimentation as far as doing the music and sound effects and stuff and we stick things in and try and see if it works and a lot of days it's magical and some days something's just like God that really sucks we got it you know take that out but you know it's much like building a whitewood you know you can draw it and think you've got all the mechanical stuff happening on on your drawing and then when you go to stick those things in gosh you know you end up putting up a lot of screw holes because things just didn't work so trial and error and when when a game finally goes out the door and everything's pretty cohesive it's in my mind it's the best I felt I could do at the time now big bang bar came around again would I do it the same way probably not but it's like a lot of artists who come back it's like Leila you know it's it didn't get re-recorded the same way the second time around so whatever it was at that time it was the best we felt we could do and if you know everybody liked it that way and great but you know if somebody wants to change something well I think in a pinball game you'd have to be a programmer to change the chip or add some component that would allow you to you know when something fired off something allow you to play it off in an additional audio component that you stick in the game or something but well tell me about big bang bar okay well let's start with the sound how did you write the you know the bass music for it and the whole progression through the you know the soundtrack and everything you had to go through and and of course all this the sexy girl talk who are they and where they come from yeah yeah everybody wants to know about the tube dancer um all right backing up I know when Rob Morrison started working on that game and he was a big fan of filter and so he had me pull out a filter to and I can't remember the name of it but I can certainly remember how the two you know Lee were yelling screaming on the on the record on this tune and so we stuck that in just as a placeholder for oh it was in there for several weeks and I remember that Stan Foucault the artist the main artist on the project went through quite a number of different drawings and and it started as a very serious tone and ultimately became very whimsical on him and and it was really fun to watch Stan's drawing Stan's a great artist I really enjoyed working with him and I would love to work with him again someday I ran into him a couple years ago at pinball x-bone and was kind of a pretty neat reunion of sorts but when it started to take on the whimsical tone it's like yes this this is great I started to think back to and I'm gonna start showing my age here but I was I was a child of the 60s you know grew up in the late 50s and 60s and I started thinking back to old tv shows like lost in space and twilight zone and men into space and my favorite martian and stuff like that and all the in the jetsons and I started thinking spoofs on old 60s sci fi that's that's where the music should go and so that's exactly what I did and I had all these wonderful samples and things and instruments that would produce some of these wonderful things that the Kurzweil k 2000 was kind of a you know it's a synthesizer and sampler and I was able to get some unique effects out of that the JD 990 I was also working with the Yamaha TG 500 which had just come out a couple years before that the synthesizer you know rack module and they had some interesting effects on there I started writing tunes that were more kind of spoofs on 1960s science fiction and and so you know when you first fire up the game the shooter grew in the main play tune that's that was that's kind of the where you know once I did those tunes that was the direction now you said that today you might change some things what did what did you mean by that well I you know I have a whole different set of tools software synthesizers are different there's there's a much much greater palette of special sound effects and things that I and synthesizers that that do all kinds of unique and weird and fun things that it would probably take on a very different sound now because of the technology you know where technology is gone but I would probably still do a very spoofy very campy theme if if the art stayed the same but you know we all we draw from personal experiences and this was 11 years ago looking at my speech list which was the last thing I did July 9th of 1996 of the date on this list well tell me more about the women big bang bar the women well let's see we had for the longest time I kept remembering eight characters in this game actually there is a ninth which I had forgotten about when I interviewed with Michael Shalube when he was writing his book there is a ninth character who has one line and that is Denise Walner who was our dot matrix she was in charge of the dot matrix art staff and I had her come in and scream at the top of her lungs the looped in space line in the game guys who must have done that maybe 20 times and finally got to take that I liked there are eight main characters in the game there's Ray the bartender the doorman the waitress the two aliens the female patron the DJ and of course the tube dancer which I had forgotten till I pulled out this list today out of my box my old box of calf com files and stuff we had named her moaning Lisa that's what I have on my sound sheet moaning Lisa Mary Kinnahenn with her name she had originally worked from Mark Ritchie as his assistant and we pulled her in or I pulled her into the studio or Astrid to come in I like run on the hologram her say Mary I asked her if she would be interested in doing this and mentioned who are there there may be some slightly suggestive lines which she which she have any problems doing that because we all knew that she was she seemed to be a rather conservative person but you know she had she had this voice that I kept thinking you know I got to use her somewhere in this game even though again she's not a trained voice talent by any way we did hire one person from the outside her name was Anita and she did the she did the waitress the the Jewish sounding you know gum chewing waitress who goes you at the end when the alien does his gack splat at the end right the splat on the on the match yeah on the match I was looking at the sound list I think I called that file gack splat so she did all those lines Anita did all the waitress lines but Mary did the tube dancer and I told the guys on the design staff particularly Mark Ritchie I said this has got to be a closed door session it's just going to be Mary and me in the studio I don't want any interruption on this one I don't want people hanging around because I wanted her to get into the character without being distracted or guys you know making snide remarks and then I would never get anything out of her and it took a lot of coaxing to kind of get her into it and I don't know how many takes we did I don't have the original audio traction that all those things ended up on M.O. discs that probably got tossed out somewhere a capcom what why didn't you just go to the local strip club and get a dancer I I don't know Mary was definitely not that kind of person but I was able to but she had the type of voice where I was able to coax her into it and the other thing that was kind of fun with that is that the ooze and the Oz and the music came off of a track off of one of the Hollywood edge sound libraries there was a track on there with a female having an orgasm and I was able to pull the ooze and you know the mones off of that and put them into the rhythm of the music and after EQing and doing some processing to Mary's voice as they want to make the two sound very much alike so a lot of people have gone that's all the same person right I said no I don't know who the person is who did the the ooze and the Oz and the that I used in the tune that was on that was stock library stuff that I had manipulated a little bit cut up and edited and processed a little and I was able to EQ and and and get them to sound very much alike so um Mary heard herself like a week or two later in the game she walked into an office where we were playing in the game somebody got into the mode and she just turned bright red it was like it was like oh hi and but um to this day she remains one of the most popular characters in that game so whether she knows it or not huh I don't I don't know if she knows it or not but um you know people ask me about the tube dancer all the time um we did have one other female in the game and her name was Grace and I can never remember her last name I know that Steve Sabota I think had it on his website when he was running that contest uh your so-go and about naming the characters in the game and um it was it was some long Polish name and she had an Eastern European accent it was just I always was attracted to her accent and I thought and I got to use her in a game and she had a nice sounding voice but again she was not a trained voice actor and I really had to work the Suzuki method on her and but um well what's the Suzuki method? Suzuki method in uh it's often used with violin students where the teacher will uh play something and then uh the student is supposed to imitate the the teacher and that's the Suzuki method it's like do what I do or you know play it like I play it and so I'll read a line you know and uh you get a little gravel in the voice that we call it vocal fry you know that's sultry oh you know I I like to fly big rockets was one of the lines that I had Grace do and uh it took her a long time to get get the right sultry sound I was looking for but she finally nailed one and uh I think that's uh I think I did hear that in the game recently when I got the play on one of the reproductions uh down on playfield recently that uh Gene Cunningham and uh built okay we're going to take a little break from talking with Jeff Powell and we backed after this message the pin game journal is a proud sponsor of Topcast it covers pinball like no other publication can the pin game journal is America's only pinball publication whether you're looking for new games or the classics reports on industry shows or collector expos insights on a game you want or features to help you fix the game you've got pin game journals for you their website is at pingamejournal.com all right we're back with Jeff Powell from Capcom pinball it was some more of his stories okay there's more stories from Big Bang Bar one of the other you know the rate of our tender was certainly a central uh character in the game and four weeks guys have been saying you know we we got to put Davy Jones Davy Jones was the head of our security at Capcom he was he was the he was kind of a a portly uh gentleman who um lived in the back office by the uh the entrance to the plant where we all walked in and uh when when you talk to him he sounded a bit like Ray Charles and he had this infectious laughter he was just a funny guy really enjoyed talking with him uh and that's why everybody wanted to have Davy in one of our games and when when we finally got to the whimsical turn in the art that Stan was developing for the game when we knew it was going to take on a more comical aspect uh that's when I started thinking all right Davy Jones should be the uh Ray the bartender and uh I this must have been a weekend I did this with him I I guess because I recall nobody being around in the building and it had it have been on like kind of Saturday we put him in uh what's called a whisper room and that was our our sound booth that we used for recording voice stuff and uh uh again the Suzuki method I talked about earlier I'd be kind of like throwing my arms in the air you know to uh show more uh animation to his delivery and uh by the time we got to lines like shake it baby shake it baby I had him jumping up and down on the chair and it was so funny I wish I had a videotape of it it was just like it just had this memory of going uh just let it fly baby and and gosh what were some of the other lines lines like if you're willing to pay I'm willing to pour and uh gosh what are some of the other lines uh come on drink up let's go baby let's go uh that was in the um that was like hurry up modes and gosh what were some of the other lines I was I played two characters in that game I did the door man um what are you waiting for and and uh you know Ray wants to see you at the bar and I actually then pitched me down just a little bit um you know player one is that your beater getting towed and other stuff like that and then uh I also played alien two I kept thinking it was alien one but when I pull out the script today and I realized which lines were which it's like oh yeah okay I did things like let's scan for babes and um looks like an asteroid to me she's got more likes in a lunar lander and uh oh yeah one of my favorites look at the planets on that load of boomba stuff like that and then I would you know I I would pitch I I recorded it in a higher voice and then ran it through a ring modulator to get the effect on me and then Frank panthic did alien one all the way at the DJ um Darryl Williams uh came from the video site street fighter alpha it's like come on Jeff name here so Darryl was working with that stuff and he did our uh DJ with the on the in the dot matrix screen uh we did a tilt upward on the DJ and and he's got an afro from here to way out of space you know right it's kind of funny to look at it's pretty good and then what was the other that was pretty much it eight characters it was Ray the door man the waitress the aliens one and two the female patron the DJ the tube dancer and then that one line from Denise Walner the looped in space which uh that was an aim I came up with um they were trying to figure out what the name this one mode um it was like a random mode and I forgot what the skill shot I I believe it involved loop shots and uh nobody was coming up with a name and you know in my usual sick radio joke style I just said oh a looped in space you know and Ray kind of looked at me like yeah well they thought about it a while I think Rob Morrison was like kind of so so on it nobody could come up with another name for it so it finally stuck he'll looped in space so that was my one contribution to naming modes in the game well it sounds like it was a good product that's all you had a lot of fun with Big Bang Bar yeah a lot of I had a ball with that game joyed working with the whole team on it and then and uh Paul Mazur and the rest of the art guys did such a great job on the art it was such a departure from the usual heavy reds and blacks you know with with the blues and greens of you know a little more pastel and just the the fun nature of the game um I just wish it could have gone to manufacturing when it was supposed to have but uh I'm happy to see reproductions out there and and you know more people being able to enjoy that game and and it certainly came to a surprise to me when Steve's boat of called me up last year you're in a half ago and and said do you know you have a fan club out there that's like what? like cheese such a surprise I had no idea that a game that never got manufactured initially would generate the buzz that it has and again I think partly because it didn't get manufactured right yeah what led to the hype and the buzz and the interest in the game no it's a good it's a really good game I mean I mean it's still there's only 180 you know less than 185 of them out there so there's still or believe me there's still a good buzz yeah I was getting one of the guys talk I guess the other guy at cutting hands places and saying you know the cutting any of those left he said now somebody just bought the last one for 12 grand I was like oh a little too rich for my blood you know some guys buy games and I put all my money into musical instruments and audio gear and I've got thousands and thousands and thousands of stock library sound effects that I've acquired over the years probably close to 40 thousand sound effects in my collections of libraries so that's that's what I've been collecting is because that's you know those are my tools what do you know about Williams trying to acquire Big Bang Bar all I know is from Python who said yeah Williams bought it up and then they dumpstered the whole thing and it's like okay Python tends to exaggerate and change the facts a lot I think and one never knows what's truth and what's fiction yeah it was supposed to be a filler game right before 2000 and they thought well we need a game we need a game now we need a game that's done so they they brought Big Bang Bar at least I don't know about Kingpin in house and they thought it would be easy to modify the Capcom design to to Williams hardware and it turned out it really wasn't and they kind of gave up it was taking too much energy you know and now you just taught me a thing today yeah I hadn't heard all that part of it but that doesn't surprise me because yeah essentially we'd become two different worlds and even though with a lot of ex-Williams people designing stuff but they kind of went in a direction they had wanted to go that Williams wouldn't go although our audio I think was quite a bit inferior well they had basically rewrite all the software do redo everything in Williams on the Williams hardware system because you know they weren't going to sell Capcom boards in a Williams game and it just got to be to the point where I think it was more work than it was to actually design a game so that's why cactus Canyon came out instead of you know them trying to adopt either one of these games well and Tom Capira mentioned I think yeah cactus Canyon they even had to cut that one short right he needed a few more weeks and they told him that you don't have anymore weeks because they were getting ready to in fact I guess they even cut off the production run on that one to get the 2000 series out right what did you think of the Gene Cunningham reissue project it plays pretty well I score very terribly on it but because it's a pretty fast game or at least you know Rob Rob Sabaski his game he's got a set pretty good tilt and it's a fast game but were you happy that that project finally finally came to light? yeah ultimately I know there was some mixed feelings I think part of it because Gene had contacted too many people from the original design staff about it I think Rob Morrison was head I think he had mixed feelings about it but I don't know I'm glad that a few more people get to enjoy what we had done and I certainly hope that perhaps one of those units someday we'll find its way into the pinball hall of fame so even more people can go out and play on it at some point right huh I mean I'm all for entertaining people and I don't want to keep these things bottled up that's why I was really disappointed when incredible technologies decided not to produce you know manufacture the Orange County choppers video pinball that Mark Ritchie had worked so hard on and we managed to get it completed but again there's another one several people it's been several years working on that game and then only six units went out to test you know they're sitting in the warehouse now and what was the problem there that they didn't want to bring that to market cost you know Elaine looked at the cost of the manufacturer limited run and decided no just too costly to do it's like oh okay gosh I hope one of those will find its way to a museum someday also but I don't know what Elaine's plans are now how was it working for Python how was it working with Python yeah let me do my favorite imitation this was early in the pinball magic game he comes by my office door people who know Python know that he's a very animated person he kind of fails his arm he talks with his hands a lot and you know he's either Transylvanian and just very flamboyant and his eyes just very big like horses eyes you know and he's dancing outside of my office going Jeff you've got to vibrate the covenant more like okay I guess that