And they saidٍ Can you even call your체적 chair ''jTik respand''? adı Star wars what it really is, 6 days from situation one, complete with top-notch ink stealings, more gum in the bucket, curveball in the forecast, and some flying sheep or sondern Christie'sville.com. And for some reason it was that album. So I don't know when that got released, but the first time I've listened to that album was two days ago. It was the songs of the innocents that they kind of gave you back in 2014. And I actually didn't mind it. There were some good songs on there, Raised by Wolves, I listened to it once in a while. And anyway, you're giving it to me for free, just like this podcast. Just take it. You don't like it, throw it out. But like I was gonna say, whether you like it or not, fuck it because you've got it. Have you been the last two weeks? Um, look, I've been very busy the last two weeks. I'm gonna probably leave it at that because I think by the time this airs or maybe a little bit after, people will know why I've been very busy. Jeff, how about you? I assume a Netflix special? What's going on? Correct. Oh. Absolutely, yeah. There's probably something about that, yeah. You know, I'd like to give you some great story that this and this has happened, but really not a lot. I mean, I delivered one of the reach arounds to one of our winners, and they're going to be joining us in the second half of the show. Who? Who could that be? How could that be? Exclusive. But before we get to that guest, we have our main guest, if you will. Most people in the industry really, really like this guy and his family and everything he's done in the pinball community. We're going to try to disprove all of that, but I don't think we'll be able to because he's a pretty stand up. He is Charlie Emery from Spooky Pinball, and he joins us right now. Hey, Charlie, how are you? Hello. Hello. Welcome from Benton, Wisconsin. How's everything over in Benton at the moment? Not really warm, sadly. Like we had one week where we got mid 60s about a month ago and we haven't seen it since. So good thing we work indoors. Now, I know that we're going to talk about a lot of things about you and Spooky, but just speaking of that, aren't you like moving or have you moved? Oh, okay. In a nutshell, we started in one room in the Benton Business Incubator eight years ago. And when we started building America's Most Haunted, we rented another room thinking, wow, this is as good as it'll ever get. Two years later we built our own 60 by 90 shop. A year after that we outgrew that, added a warehouse, and then this spring we bought a bigger building across the street and we thought this is two stories, it's bigger than our old shop by more than double the square footage, you know, when you count the up and down, and we've outgrown that. So we're adding on to it now. Bigger and better, but I guess that's the whole thing with the spooky factory. The games themselves, the number that have been sold, it just keeps growing and growing. And this once small company, it's not so small anymore. I mean, the expansions that you mentioned, but also the staff too. In the recent years, you've seen Eric Pripke come on board and Bowen Kerins helping with the rules. Bigger factory, does that mean more people, more machines per week? It absolutely does. Basically, when we moved into the new building, it had a lot of the equipment that we were already using anyway with a partner company, and we just kind of teamed up and bought that. And it greatly expanded our capability, but the building wasn't necessarily laid out the way we would have wanted for production, and we absolutely made it work on Rick and Morty. We're very proud of the fact that when we launched Rick and Morty, we told everybody 18 months to deliver all 750 games, which we, at that time, we had hoped we would sell, John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. We've gone over that this week. We just hired two more people. We hired an electronics engineer slash programmer, so we even have more help in that regard. We still have Eric on hand, kind of helping us out with some stuff, and we'll see where he wants to go in the future. He's only a few hours away from us, but obviously did a great job on Rick and Morty. Couldn't be happier with his performance. And yeah, man, it just keeps growing, and it's always been a steady, slow growth. We're very proud of that. The new expansion really is no different. We just decided if you're going to take the time and effort to train all these people, you better give them something to do. So obviously we plan on upping our numbers again on our next game launch. So really looking forward to that. Marty, he's going after the schools, what I'm hearing. You know, Alice Cooper had a song called School's Out. Benton, schools, not the number one employer. Lookout, Spooky's on their way, Marty. Well, we passed the bank, so... Well, so just on that, and I know you've talked about it before, but I would just love to hear your thoughts now that we're into, like, well into production of Rick and Morty. You limited it to 750 units, and a lot of people were like, why would you limit it? You would sell twice as many. Tell us why you wanted to keep it at 750. Uh, does anybody remember a few years ago when I said something like, uh, we never want to do more than 500 games in a year? I remember. Uh, Rick and Morty broke that, obviously. We thought, you know, and again at the time, the most games we'd ever built was 550 total nuclear annihilations, and so to jump up to 750 is, it's not a small feat. I mean, for a large company, it's nothing to add a couple hundred games, but for a company the size of ours and, you know, a town our size, it seemed a little daunting at the time. But, you know, it's great and it's wonderful that we've managed to gain some traction in the pinball world, but we've also managed to gain some traction locally. So it makes it easier to get good workers and get, you know, people that want to come in for the long haul and stick with you. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Knapp Arcade, Charlie, I think it is very flattering to be considered a solid, good employer in the area. I hope we can just keep that rolling and keep everybody employed. That is always the goal. Charlie, forget the expansion on your current facility. Go back to that school, make it part of a co-op program. Summer Spring We do and Rick and Morty is a natural draw obviously but everything we've ever done has kind of drawn kids towards us like you make toys and you know some of them have wound up working for us after high school you know most go off to college and do their thing and and some do that and still come back to us it's really kind of a neat process but you're not wrong yeah but what Marty was saying too about that number 750 which was once 500 and it was less even before that it just keeps growing and growing you sold out immediately with Rick and Morty when you You look on the secondary market and seeing Rick and Morty's being sold as you're still making them. Do you think, okay, we played it safe, we underestimated, it's going to happen anyway. What are your thoughts when you see the demand much bigger than the supply? It's a bit of a mixed, I do have mixed feelings on it. You know, and again, when we launched Rick and Morty, we knew it was going to do well because of the theme and because of Scott Danesi and because of everybody that was involved with it. But as a company, you don't imagine that you're going to sell 750 games in four hours. We weren't even entertaining that kind of idea. We were hoping that in the first two weeks, which was what the Fang Club was all about, it would give people an opportunity to get in and buy before the general public and kind of cater to the hardcore pinball fans a bit, give people a way to feel like they're part of the company or part of the family and make it something special. We had no idea that 750 people were going to join the fan club and just buy it all out. It was a ridiculously good problem to have, and I'm telling you, in the eight years that we've been in business, I've never experienced another day like that. And knock on wood, I hope we get to do something like that again here, maybe coming up soon, we'll see. But yeah, you feel like, yeah, you definitely left a little bit on the table, but at the At the same time, when the secondary market is strong for the game, it kind of gives buyers confidence going into your next title, which is pretty much just common sense for a business that's good for you going down the road. And again, when you make 750 games for the first time, you have to figure out how to do it. You have a pretty good indication of what's going to be expected after doing 500 or 550, but every bit of growth is always a little bit daunting. It's daunting, it's intimidating. The more mouths you have to feed, the harder you have to work, the better you need to be. And right now we're just doing everything we possibly can to make, just to make sure that our product going forward is the best it possibly can be and comparable to everyone else's, if not better. That's the goal. So, yeah, it's a tough road to hoe. I mean, you gotta be careful and, you know, we don't want to overreach. And at the same time, you know the old saying around here, you gotta make hay while the sun's shining, so we're doing everything we can to kind of keep that balance. So I'm gonna just go a weird sort of tangent here, but I'm gonna go almost like cinema, right? So we had the things that go bump in the night, the spooky pinball story, I don't know how many years ago that was. That seemed like maybe four years ago? Is that right? Yeah, it seems like a million miles away. Right, well it does seem like such a long way away and it's now a different world because really the story arc of that was pinball is really hard, it was challenging for you and it was a triumph at the end, you know, it's all great, it's fantastic. Cut to now four years later, what is it that you have actively done to keep the success of spooky pinball to now like cut to today, 750 machines been sold? How does that happen? Um... In ten words or less, please. Ten words or less. Um... Okay, you can expand. I think I can narrow it down to one. Um, honesty. We own up to our mistakes. We take what we do well, and we try to expand on that. No, you know, when we did the documentary, and again, it wasn't us that did it, it was some producers that had come to us, Dana and Joel Reeves, and I said no for like three I'm a fan of Pinball. I've been playing Pinball for like three months and then was glad that we did it after the fact. You know, it was kind of strange shooting that for like a year and having them follow you around and going to Lawrence's and everywhere you went, they went. And it was kind of, kind of strange. But yeah, it really only told kind of the beginning, which was the scariest time. Don't get me wrong. So I'm kind of glad that that's all documented and out there now. But since then, yeah, it's just been steady growth. Being honest with our customers. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. I certainly do not to watch, you know, people like Scott Danesi and Ben Hack and everybody that and then you know Jerry Sullenberg at Multimurfic when we need all these people have come into our lives at different points in time and we still all talk and communicate and everybody gets along and you know we're doing the absolute best we can with what we're given and and again trying to expand on what we do well and I just yeah I'm nervous and I'm excited for everybody to see what we're actually working on right now because I think you're We're really going to see all those little things I mentioned kind of come together and really take us to where we want to be as a company. So you sort of indicated it before, the sort of rumors are that we are going to see something in the next couple of months? Well, I don't want to put a specific date on it, but obviously spring, summer of this year, we're going to run out of Rick and Morty. So yeah, I guess we better have something else ready. Get something ready. We're going to keep everybody working. Yeah, we better have something in the pipeline. And of course we do. And it's the most complete team effort I think that Spooky Pinball has ever done. My fingerprints are on it, but I am certainly not the lead designer. And it's really kind of dumbfounding to see this thing come together the way it has. It is, I think it's a little bit unique. You know, in pinball, it's always there's one guy and everybody helps him. And in this case, It really wasn't the situation at all. It was everybody got their input and it wasn't the case of too many chefs spoiling the soup. It just kept getting better and things came and went and if it didn't work we threw it out and we... It was nice to actually have a little bit of breathing room. This is the first time that, you know, when Rick and Morty sold out in four hours, it bought us 18 months worth of work, guaranteed employment, and we'd never really had that before. So it gave us time as a team to kind of regroup, reorganize, and, you know, learn from our past successes and mistakes and make the best possible product ever. And I know Scott Danesi has mentioned a hundred times, you know, that my worst habit is I'd never say no to a designer. Like, I, you know, no, throw in whatever you want. We did that and then some in this game. And I really, really, really can't wait for people to see it because it's unique. It's different. It shoots smooth and beautiful. So, our games kind of have a reputation of being really tough. This might hurt that a little bit. It's a little bit easier to shoot, but man is it different. It's so unique, and I'm just, I'm really excited about it. Do we know the designer? You've met some of them. Okay. Yeah. Like I said, it's not necessarily one person. It's a complete team effort, which is, it's been a unique experience because we've never done things that way, and I'm not sure that anybody else has either. So I'm excited for people to see the results of that. Is this a hybrid with Chicago Gaming Company we're talking about? Oh no, no no no. This is an all spooky product. Yep, this is a completely different game. Yeah, no, we announced on our podcast several months ago, boy I don't know how long ago it actually was, but yeah, we get along very well with Doug Duba and everybody over at Chicago Gaming and we had a Ben Heck design that Ben kind of wanted to finish and we absolutely John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Knapp Arcade, It's good for all of us. It's good for pinball guys. Come on. Two pinball companies working together? Does anybody do that? Well, they do now. No, I'm really proud of that, you know. And that's, to me, the way it should be. This is a very small pond. We all know each other. If one company can help another or vice versa, you know, two companies helping each other grow, why not do it? And I'm very happy that we got Ben's game. We're, you know, he had some engineering help and stuff to finish up some things that we didn't have time to do while we were working on our game and he's kind of doing his own thing there and he gets a lot of creative freedom and, you know, Ben's a creative, strange individual. So, yeah, I think what he's doing is really, really cool and, you know, it's, timing's good, his game will come out a little bit later, ours will come out a little bit sooner and everybody's happy. So, yeah, I'm very happy about all that. When Spooky first came out, I mean obviously Spooky it's all about horror and horror themes and all that because that's your passion really is, you love horror and that's kind of how it started with the first couple of machines. Then you sort of branched out a bit, I mean obviously Total Nuclear Annihilation was a, let's call it a happy surprise, it just came to you, Scott said, can you make my machine or you probably said to him I want to make the machine and then it happened. It's really different to the horror brand. You've obviously had some other side ones like Domino's and Jetsons as well, but they're sort of commission games. Then we had Rick and Morty, which also isn't horror. I guess what I'm saying is, is horror still the overarching theme for Spooky? Yeah, absolutely. And you know, even with Rick and Morty, it's a science fiction... horror and science fiction to me, if you look at the... I'm sitting in my TV room right now. My shelves are loaded with horror and sci-fi. That's their first cousins, if not brothers. So to me that's all kind of one group because anything with aliens and monsters and all that stuff is just a blast to me. And Rick and Morty, honestly, the writing on that show is some of the best science fiction writing in the history of television in my opinion. Oh, hands down. Hands down. As funny as it is, it's just brilliantly written at the same time. So, but yeah, I mean, spooky pinball is there on purpose. It's in my soul. I mean, everything, our whole house is nothing but monster stuff from the basement all the way to the, you know, to the upstairs. So, that's never going to go away. And TNA even is a science fiction theme, you know. Well, I do agree about the science fiction and horror kind of being linked. They're cousins, if you will. But what I noticed with Rick and Morty and TNA was the humor in the games. And you might ask, well, where is it in TNA? That's when you see the mystery and things like Lion Man come up or just some of the different messages. There's tons of humor obviously in Rick and Morty. We don't see a lot of humor in pinball machines or certainly humor themed based pinball machines and I've always wondered why not. I think there's a huge, huge void in that. Does humor become stale? I don't know. You know, last time I played Attack from Mars, I still laughed at the callouts. Same with Medieval Madness and things like that. Deadpool's got some pretty good callouts. Of course, Rick and Morty's callouts are leaps and bounds of any I've ever heard. Humor seems to work for me. And, you know, here's the thing with Spooky. You've got a set amount of games, whether it's 750, maybe it's 1,000 for the next one. You don't have to sell thousands and thousands of them. You just have to, with the fan club and everything else, just sell the certain limited amount. And like you said, that also helps you propel for the next 18 months when you know you've got work. So can Spooky take a risk on something like that? As far as you mean doing something humorous? Can Spooky take risks on something that might not be horror or science? Maybe it's humor. Absolutely. And, and, oh man, I love the, how do I put this? The hardest I've ever made Rob Zombie laugh, we had a game backstage and he was at a, like a VIP meet and greet deal. And the game was being played by fans and Rob was taking pictures with people and he's like, I don't remember saying that. I'm like, you do know that there's like three lines of you saying Roadhouse dialogue in this game, right? And like his band just lost it. And then I look and Rob was kind of tilting his head back and he's just laughing and he's like, I was seriously just reading the script and just... But anyway, it was... the moment was hilarious. And we've always, even if the game didn't call for it, we've managed to slip a little humor in there. Alice Cooper definitely has a lot of little tongue-in-cheek kind of tales from the crypt humor. Rob Zombie is loaded with it. Sid Hegg's lines in there are hilarious. They're extremely vulgar, but they're funnier than hell. Charlie, there's nothing funny about necrophilia, alright? That is a serious, serious... Are you talking about Cold Ethel? Yes, Cold Ethel. I love the dead. There's a couple in there. I would like, uh, you know he runs around with a rag doll on stage while he's singing that? I honestly did have one customer kind of berate me over that. I've been an Alice Cooper fan my whole life, and I don't approve of necrophilia. And I'm like, he wrote that song in 1975. You've been a fan your whole life, you'd think you'd be used to that one by now. It's a joke. That tongue is firmly in cheek on that song. Oh my goodness. It's funny. So then, that was, for me I remember that was the first time we saw Bowen Kerins really put his stamp on a machine. We've seen it since. How does that for you, going from all hands on deck, it's you and what you've got to do, to now having to rely on other people to produce these machines? Define produce the machines. Well, get them, like, we're talking art, we're talking rules, code, mechanics, assembly, everything that goes into a pinball machine. Like really, it was you and, I don't know, a handful of people when you did America's Most Haunted. You've now got 30 people. How's that adjustment for you going from being in control to now having control through a lot of other people? You know, it's kind of funny because when you talk about rules and stuff, I personally have never really been in control of any of that. I always try to let the talent do what they do. Bowen kind of gave us the opportunity a bit to clean up a little bit, maybe pick up on some of the things that we were missing. But like on Rick and Morty, Eric definitely directed the code on that game. And yes, we all have our say and there were certain modes that I wanted and certain modes that everybody else on the team wanted and we just let everybody kind of pick in shoes and I've been lucky enough to kind of get to talk to Justin Roiland quite a bit and he loves the game and asks me questions and, hey, have you thought about adding this mode? And helped us like even on the latest code update We got Moon Men in there. And Jemaine was super agreeable to get the song in the pinball machine just to have it in the pinball machine. Little things like that. But realistically across the board, even when it's Scott Danesi or if it was Ben Heck in the early days or now even with CGC and stuff like that, it's a little bit of all of us. It's our animator David Van Es. It's Scott Danesi. It's Eric. It's Bowen. It's me. It's Phasma. I'm a, it's my son, Bug, who's honestly still the best pinball player we have, so he kinda knows what he likes to see as far as a rule set goes, and maybe he'll push it a little harder than I will, because I'm not as good a player, so he'll wanna see a little bit more depth here and there and things like that, but it really is a team effort across the board, and I've never, I'm just not that guy to micromanage people and say, no, no, no, can't do that, you know, we sink or swim together as a team, and the best ideas win out, and it's always been that way, I really hope it always stays that way. You mentioned Justin Roiland had some ideas and obviously he's a fan of this. But for you to put in different modes and maybe get different assets, it's not just Justin you're dealing with, it's probably not even Dan Harmon. It's likely Warner Brothers. Are they very receptive to changes or is that kind of every time you want to do a change you kind of have to go back to the drawing board and renegotiate? They definitely see everything we do. There's nothing in the game that in the early days of just us and Adult Swim, things might have been, for lack of a better term, a little easier. They had a little bit more trust and we did have a little bit more creative freedom in that regard. With Warner Brothers, it's definitely a process. Every single thing gets shown, everything gets reviewed, everything gets approved. Sometimes things that are in the show get frowned upon even by the executives because is her free kiss against the right to register in with one of late night France and get it off with a deal with license you got always get everything he looked like to see andаласьi으로 the justin ro blueprint is creating pounds and and and harlem b motherfucking up but not almost record that so okay where they were really want we were in the little bits and uh... together those guys and see if it helps but sometimes it does sometimes it doesn't and and I understand all of it it a little bit different right now because like in the video game world there are rating systems and in pinball there really aren So some of the studios kind of struggle with that a little bit and how to handle it They don't understand that games have an adult mode that can be turned off and on so you have to kind of explain that process and when things will be allowed to be said. If you've heard any of the Scary Terry dialogue obviously he says the B word a lot. It's kind of his whole, you know, parody of that 80s horror icon with the knives for fingers that they don't talk about and what he did. So, yeah, I mean, little things like that will kind of get... it draws a little bit of a red flag sometimes with the studios because they don't understand that you can turn that off and on and bounce it back and forth. And is it in the home environment? Is it an arcade? Is it... it's a bit of a challenge, but yeah, we get through it. Was there anything that you really, really wanted in the machine that got knocked back? Um, yeah, a little bit on the wizard mode. Uh, we had a concept that I don't really want to throw it out there because I'm afraid people will be like, oh my god, that would have been either good or terrible. I don't know what people's reactions are going to be sometimes. But the studio just felt that it didn't kind of fit into the world, so to speak, of Rick and Morty, which we thought was odd because, I mean, he literally turned into a pickle. And what we had wasn't any crazier than that. So, but yeah, and there's little things like that here and there, but you pick your battles. And you know, the important part is at the end of the day, the game, I think, is coming out absolutely fantastic. I love the modes that are in it. We couldn't have asked for much more asset wise. And we have all the videos. We have custom speech from Justin Roiland. We've got speech from Dan Harmon and now Jemaine Clement. And I mean, it's so good. I'm just really, really thrilled with it. And I hope we can kind of keep that role going. You know, we actually had Rob Zombie and Sherry Moon and Sid Haig. We had Alice Cooper. We have Justin Roiland doing the voices of Rick and Morty. And we kind of pride ourselves on the fact that we're getting the actual people that have created this world that we wanted to be a part of and make games for and been able to get them in the games for the true fans to, you know, not have to listen to us play. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Knapp Arcade, Bally Williams, Straight Down the Middle, Bally Williams, I don't know how much you go on Pinside and read the forums and take everything with a grain of salt, but they can be pretty vicious on Pinside and on the forums. What kind of interaction do you have with the fans or do you kind of just leave it at bay and go, you know, I only care about the customers, people behind keyboards, eh, they can say what they want. You know, it's, it's, there's a lot to be learned from Pinside and I think at this point in time, and we've had our ups and downs in there as well. www.willywonka.com The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. You kind of take for granted because pinball parts are pinball parts and they've been around for a long time and none of us are really re-engineering, you know, like a flipper or a slingshot. Things that are just super common, but at the same time there are tolerances and little things we can do better to make it a better experience for our customers. And like I said, we want to be as good as everyone else, if not better, so we kind of take the noise with a grain of salt when required. But at the same time, if you're deaf to it, to me, you're doing yourself a disservice because you can learn from it. And we definitely put an emphasis on trying to do that. Every game we've done has gotten better. And now, you know, like I said, our focus is to just take all that knowledge and we had the time and we had a little bit of money to kind of re-look at some things and re-engineer some things and just do things a little bit differently and a little bit better. And yeah, I can't fault anyone on PIMSIDE for speaking up if it actually helps us make a better product. And that's what we're aiming to do. The fact that you do acknowledge this, the fact that you do go on and respond to some of these concerns, speaks to, again, that honesty, that one-word example that you gave earlier. It's, we admit our mistakes, we learn from them, we fix them. I believe that was the case in point with early Rick and Mortys that went out. There were some adjustments that were made from the manufacturing side to maybe adjust the upper left shot or things like that. Is that accurate to say? Yeah, absolutely. The whole thing with like, I know what shot you're talking about, like the inner loop, the kind of, you know, upper right flipper to the left. It was one of those things that we had played that thing on so many different variants of the white wood and it was never an issue. And when we made that final printed, clear-coated, everything polished, the speed picked up and that shot got harder and it began to, you know, you get a little bit of rattle and stuff. And it was, I think I've heard Scott actually say this publicly so I don't feel like I'm throwing him under the bus, which I would never do because we love Scott. He had that rail completely locked down in multiple locations and it actually took like loosening it up a little bit to give that shot a little bit of forgiveness and it's really been fine ever since. But yeah, it's little things like that that you can learn from getting those games out there and seeing that people are struggling with it. And you know, sometimes it's just you're bricking the shot and the game's not easy and other times there is something you can learn from it. So, you know, to me, it's, you'd have to be a bit mad to ignore it all and just say, ah, everything's fine. If you do that, then you're in trouble. We do have our moments where you get a little frustrated and think, you know, why are people focusing on this one little thing that doesn't really affect anything? But if it's important to them, then it should be important to the manufacturer because once you stop listening to your customers, then to me, you're already lost. So I guess being able to make adjustments, you would have to do a lot of that throughout the whitewood phase as well. What I'm kind of curious to know, again, you now being this, let's call it a big manufacturer now, right? I would say you're not boutique anymore. Do you see yourself still as boutique or not? You know, it's still, from the inside, it still feels boutique because I know we don't have some of the resources that the bigger companies have. But when you start looking at the numbers, I don't think it is anymore. No, I don't think so. But it's really leading on to the fact that you are creating and designing games and then obviously you've got to manufacture them. But what about the parts themselves? Do you rely on, you know, the likes of pinball or are you now building your own parts as well? It's kind of a mixture of both. It's the high school shop class doing it, let's be honest. It's like, yes, everything's being made at the Benton High School. No, it really is a mixture. We are the, as far as I know, the most self-contained pinball company on earth. We literally print our own playfields, backglass, plastics. We laser cut our plastics. We have our own CNCs. We have our own thermal press. We make our own ramp molds. We pull our own ramps. We cut our own ramps. We do our own powder coating. We have our own powder coat oven. We have, I mean, it's ridiculous the amount of work we do in house. And even our metal. I mean, all our ball guides and stuff is, you know, it's a team owned thing. It's one of my workers who's incredibly ambitious early, early on, we were kind of struggling to get consistent quality on our metal and he's like, let me take it over. I'll buy a laser. So he bought a metal laser and started doing some forming and metalwork and that's expanded to several employees and bringing that in house and it's been anything that we really needed that we were struggling to find we've managed to find somebody that can either partner with us locally to get that stuff made like for example thicker metals and stuff like that we we can only do so much with what we have we can do ball guides and aprons and side rails and all that kind of stuff but thicker metals we've got a partner company now in Hazel Green Wisconsin and which is a town of twelve hundred people two miles away that can help us with that kind of stuff um it's it but it really does take a small army of people to do everything that is required and pinball life has always been a big part of that I don't think that's a big secret Terry has several employees that do nothing but assemble parts for Spooky Pinball. So many of those little jobs that we've kind of farmed to local help has turned into two, three, four people doing whatever it takes to make stuff for us. We're making our own habitrails locally now. Just hired a young man basically and set him up with a small business just doing nothing but fabricating habitrails. So, Rick and Morty doesn't have any so I guess I just gave that away that there's some habitrails that I can't... Whoa! Exclusive! So yeah, I mean, it's all a process for sure, and you need to keep those good working relationships, and there's, you know, little things we've done with CGC and vice versa that they've kind of helped us with some stuff that we felt we could get better, and they had more sources and access, so, you know, using that, and still have a wonderful relationship with everyone at Pinball Life, and hope that never goes away, and, you know, some things it's worth reinventing, And other things, just if it isn't broke, don't fix it. So that's kind of always been our motto is, you know, you take the clear path to get to the finish line, which is not always easy. But yeah, I mean, we depend on a lot of different people to do this. And I'm just glad that we do have a lot of really good partners. Well, I think you said I'm sure you said this before. It might have actually been in the video, but I think what you kind of said was, and I am paraphrasing here, But it was effectively because you are in a small town and people care, that's kind of really been a really good success factor for your business. And I sort of extrapolate that now to when you're saying there's somebody that's now set up their business just to make something for you. And, you know, there's a town of 200 people that have now set up this, three people doing it. I think you're in a fortuitous situation because of the size of the areas around you. What you're doing means so much more to these people because they are of a smaller scale. Would you agree with that? Absolutely, I would. And nothing makes me feel better. Like, for example, one employee we had, we hired him straight out of high school. He worked for us for a couple of years, was a tremendous worker. And one day he comes up to me and he's like, I'd kind of like to go do my own thing. If I did, would maybe you feed me a few jobs? We had a product that he could absolutely help us with and for sure I'm going to encourage that. And he was making like some metal art and powder coating it and doing all these kind of really neat things for other industries outside of pinball and I would lay out files for him and stuff. And now that kid is providing a ton of product to us and he's got two of his friends helping him full time. So to see little side projects like that kind of grow and expand and it also gives me something that I don't have to worry about. P internal and everything else in our area that really does kinda grow your reputation and give you a little bit of a... it's a nice little boost in your community for sure. And to see what it's done for Benton really makes me happy. Like I pull into the shop in the morning and that parking lot is overflowing and there's cars on the street and I'm thinking, how did we get here? You know, it's just... it never ceases to amaze me and I never take a moment of that for granted. That is not how I thought the story was going to end about that kid who decided to leave and they've never found the body. No, no, no, we still see his body several times a week. He drops off some stuff and, how you doing? And, you know, grabs a check and takes the next batch and off he goes. And it's just, it's a good thing. Congratulations, by the way, a few more Twippies for spooky pinball just recently. And I got to tell you the one that I really liked, I knew you'd get call outs. I mean, that was a given. In a tough field too, I might add. But when you add what Justin did, it's just off the charts. I mean, you can't compete with that. But the one I really liked was the topper. You know why? Because it was free. Pookie said, here, you get a free topper. Not a thousand dollars. I'm glad you won the Twippy for that. Thank you. And that was all KT. That was her. You know, and it's kind of funny, and I don't like to poke fun at anybody, but there had been some really goofy, expensive toppers coming out. And my wife's like, I know what we should do. We should get everybody a free one. And I'm like, what are you crazy? That's going to be... Wait a minute. Yeah, we can do that.