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Episode 58 – George Gomez

Head2Head Pinball·podcast_episode·2h 53m·analyzed·Aug 27, 2018
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.035

TL;DR

George Gomez on Deadpool design, team process, and licensing complexity in modern pinball.

Summary

George Gomez discusses his design philosophy for Deadpool pinball, emphasizing simplicity and polish over complexity. He explains the design differences between Pro, Premium, and LE versions, details Stern's collaborative team process including daily "dailies" meetings, and reflects on how licensing complexity has evolved since the Pinball 2000 era. Gomez emphasizes creative freedom for designers while maintaining quality control and learning from past releases like Guardians of the Galaxy.

Key Claims

  • Deadpool Premium/LE stream scheduled for September 4th or 5th showing differences from Pro version

    high confidence · George Gomez: 'I think right now we have a stream scheduled... I believe it's September 5th So it's right around that day It's either September 4th or September 5th'

  • Drop targets on Premium slow the ball down and make gameplay less frantic compared to Pro's stand-up targets

    high confidence · Gomez: 'the drop targets, the two forebanks... they absorb a lot more energy, which is typically... fired right back at you because a stand-up target is essentially a vertical spring'

  • Premium LE features a shot on the left orbit that makes the game feel more 'flowy' and enables a six-shot combo

    high confidence · Gomez: 'The Premium LE have that really cool shot along the left orbit... I actually managed to put together six shots... which is kind of cool'

  • Gomez designed Deadpool with intentional simplicity, focusing on five core elements rather than 18 ambitious features

    high confidence · Gomez: 'I want simplicity and I want to polish the five cool things in the game... I'd like to build a game around five really cool things, not 18 that sound great'

  • Stern has daily team meetings called 'dailies' at 10 AM for months before shipping, involving all departments discussing game details

    high confidence · Gomez: 'every day, every morning at 10 o'clock, we have what's called dailies... every team in the building does this... the team meets around the game and plays the game together'

  • A fourth Deadpool topper character (not yet revealed) was recently hooked up and features backhanded compliments and selective callouts

    high confidence · Gomez: 'I just saw the fourth Wild Deadpool hooked up today... he's hilarious and it looks amazing... you may get some backhanded compliments'

  • Guardians of the Galaxy's poor reception was partially due to licensing issues outside development team control

    medium confidence · Gomez: 'a lot of that stuff was sort of outside of our control... there wasn't clarity in terms of what the rules are, you can get yourself in big trouble'

Notable Quotes

  • “I'm not going to do anything that complex. I'm going to try to keep the game very simple and I'm going to focus a lot on the shots.”

    George Gomez @ early in interview — Explains Deadpool's core design philosophy of restraint versus complexity

  • “If I set out to do that every time, I could do it... But I just don't approach my games that way.”

    George Gomez @ mid-interview — Addresses criticism about shot connectivity in his designs; clarifies intentional design choices

  • “The magic of it is to empower people to bring the vision to life.”

    George Gomez @ discussing designer freedom — Core statement on creative freedom philosophy as CCO at Stern

  • “I'd much rather go out fairly complete than absolutely not complete.”

    George Gomez @ discussing Deadpool development — Explains priority on shipping quality over feature completeness

  • “Pinball is a game, you know, is a medium within the realm of games... I want my pinball machine to stand out in a world of games.”

    George Gomez @ discussing Deadpool creation — Articulates philosophy of pinball as a distinct creative medium

  • “The dot matrix protected us from that era for a long time... no actor in the world was going to say, yeah, that's my likeness.”

    George Gomez @ discussing licensing evolution — Explains how video fidelity created licensing complications absent in earlier eras

  • “We have a wall that gets populated with three-by-five cards, and those cards all have a task on them.”

    George Gomez @ explaining dailies management — Details physical management system for tracking game development tasks

  • “I started out... trying to make it feel fast and connected... I just don't approach the design of the play field that way anymore.”

    George Gomez @ discussing design evolution — Shows evolution of design philosophy from early career to present

Entities

George GomezpersonMartinpersonRyan CpersonJack DangerpersonTanyapersonSteve RitchiepersonJoe DillonpersonDeadpoolgame

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: Stern using collaborative dailies process with cross-functional team input on all design decisions before shipping

    high · Gomez: 'every morning at 10 o'clock, we have what's called dailies... every team in the building does this... everybody is in the room... and everybody's playing this game'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Gomez defending his design approach against criticism about shot connectivity; clarifies it's intentional restraint not inability

    medium · Gomez: 'I don't... approach my games that way... If I set out to do that every time, I could do it... I just don't approach designing a game from that perspective'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Stern intentionally shifting toward simpler, more polished games with fewer but higher-quality features

    medium · Gomez: 'I want simplicity and I want to polish the five cool things in the game... I'd like to build a game around five really cool things, not 18'

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Marvel Comics licensing preferred over film for creative freedom; Gomez created entirely original Deadpool character for pinball

    high · Gomez: 'We created this entire character that was going to be essentially a foil within the game... that doesn't exist... in any Deadpool fiction anywhere. We just made that up'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Gomez managing new team members on Deadpool while maintaining core team consistency; rotating support staff between projects

    high · Gomez: 'The core team is essentially still fairly small... the support teams that grow, right? So they go from project to project to project'

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.521

0:00
Welcome everybody to the Head to Head Pinball Podcast. This is episode 58 and my name's Martin and with me... It's Ryan C. Our next guest, Marty, has been designing pinballs for close to 25 years. He is currently leading multiple groups at CERN and overseeing the games division while still designing games at the same time. Ladies and gentlemen, George Gomez. How you going, George? Hey guys. Hello everybody. thanks for joining us George and you know we've been getting a lot of Deadpool information at the moment I guess the first question I want to ask you is straight into it you know the Deadpool Alley and Premium Pinball Machines when are people going to get to see that as well because we saw the Pro Stream I think it looks great everyone wants to see how the Alley and the Premium you know differs in gameplay how close are we to that So I think right now we have a stream scheduled We have another Jack Danger stream scheduled I believe it's September 5th So it's right around that day It's either September 4th or September 5th I can't remember off the top of my head But it'll be very similar To what you saw with the Pro Except it's going to feature Clearly the premium LE so everybody will see, you know, how they differ. So you mentioned before in the Nature of this podcast that you think the premium now is probably a bit more accessible for not the average player, but, you know, the drop targets slow the ball down a little bit so it's a bit less frantic and random. Yeah, so definitely the action at the bottom of the play field feels a little different because the drop targets, the two forebanks, you know, the self-dead and pool, they absorb a lot more energy, which is typically just kind of, you know, fired right back at you because, you know, a stand-up target is essentially a vertical spring, you know, so it just basically pushes the ball back at speed. So definitely feel, they definitely feel different. I don't know that one feels better than the other. The Premium LE have that really cool shot along the left orbit, which I think people are going to really like. And I think that shot sort of makes the game feel more flowy, if you will, because you come around that orbit to the right flipper, and then it's pretty easy to hit the left ramp. and then if you're really good, you can come across and hit one of the other two shots. If you're really, really good, and I've done this, not that I'm very good, but I had a, you know, one day I was just kind of flipping the game without, you know, it never happens to me when I'm actually trying to play a game. It only ever happens to me when I'm just kind of flipping a game. But I actually managed to put together six shots, you know, a six-shot combo, which is kind of cool. And so that alone makes the two games feel somewhat different. Different, yeah. I hope you have a call-out, like a shadow, where someone says, oh, wow, six-way combo.

  • Deadpool's Deadpool character was entirely created for the pinball game, not adapted from existing source material

    high confidence · Gomez: 'We created this entire character... Luke, Deadpool shows up on the first page... not even all of the books... We just made that up'

    • Guardians of the Galaxy
    game
    Stern Pinballcompany
    Johnny Mnemonicgame
    Terminator 2game
    Monster Bashgame
    Lord of the Ringsgame
    Batmangame
    Iron Maidengame
    Medieval Madnessgame
    Doctor Whogame
    Corvettegame
    Revenge of Marsgame
    Williamscompany
    Tilt the Battle to Save Pinballproduct
  • ?

    announcement: Deadpool Premium/LE stream scheduled for September 4-5 to showcase gameplay differences from Pro version

    high · George Gomez confirmed: 'I think right now we have a stream scheduled... I believe it's September 5th'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Fourth Deadpool topper character in development with interactive callout mechanics

    high · Gomez: 'I just saw the fourth Wild Deadpool hooked up today... he's hilarious... you may get some backhanded compliments'

  • ?

    technology_signal: LCD/video medium created licensing complexity absent in dot matrix era; fidelity now triggers licensor approval concerns

    high · Gomez: 'the dot matrix protected us from that era for a long time... no actor in the world was going to say, yeah, that's my likeness... on your little game'

    • 4:01
    Well, Zoe, can I just ask things? So for this design, it is a Gomez design. Obviously, you know, we sort of saw some pictures early on, and there were some sort of things that you could recognise as your design, but I'm keen to ask you what you think are the attributes of a Gomez game. What do you like? And the reason why I sort of bring that up now is because we talked about flow,
    4:29
    and would you say your games are flow? Are they stop-start? Are they a thinking person's game? What would you say is a Gomez game? Well, it's interesting that you're asking me this question because before I listened to the Tanya interview with you guys, just to kind of try to get to know you guys, I listened to what you said about me a couple of episodes before when Deadpool had been announced and you were talking about.
    4:58
    And so it's always fascinating to me. Like the other day, I jumped in on one of the dealer live streams on my game. and of course no one knows I'm in the audience.
    5:13
    So it's really fascinating to me. Do we say good stuff, George? Of course we do. You know, I don't know. You said a couple of things that I thought, well, that's interesting. I mean, I guess I, you know, you didn't say anything bad. I just thought, I just sometimes I don't think of my stuff the way other people do. So if you've ever played a Johnny Mnemonic, which is a very fast game and you can connect the shots and, you know, I mean, I can do that in my sleep. It doesn't, it's like not really a challenge, even though everyone, like lately in listening to the kind of the critiques of my games, I think to myself, I said, you know, it's funny because I don't, like, I don't, If I set out to do that every time, I could do it. I mean, I know what it takes. I know what the shot entrances have to be. I know that I have to keep the ball on the ball guide using centrifugal force, which means I shape the ball guides a certain way. I know a lot about the dynamics of a ramp and things like that. So it's like if I set out to do that, and apparently I need to do more of it because it seems that people really respond to it when I do it, I just don't approach my games that way. I sort of approach them, you know, it's like everybody makes this black art. But once you know how to do it, it's not a black art. It's just, so I don't, I mean, if I wanted all my games to feel that way, I could make all my games feel that way. I just don't approach designing a game from that perspective. So I hear, you know, like, oh, you know, the smoothness of the Steve Ritchie game and stuff. Honestly, it's like once you know how to do that stuff, it's not like it's not rocket science to execute on that. It's just simply a, you know, it's the mechanics of implementing it. When you don't know how to do it and you're learning how to do it, then it's different, right? So I started out, like the games that influenced me as a pinball designer were games like Terminator 2. And some of Steve's stuff influenced me. And so when I first started designing a game, from my first game Corvette, which I don't know how many of those things are still around, so I don't know if anybody currently playing pinball ever plays one of those games. But, you know, I was trying to make it feel fast and connected, etc. and I carried that into my second pinball design, which was Johnny Mnemonic, and I think that I got pretty close with Johnny.
    8:04
    I just don't, you know, it's like I don't approach the design of the play field that way. First of all, I think that I don't like to repeat my stuff. You know, after doing so many games, there's certain things that are kind of a signature, and my bottoms don't, even the bottom of my game doesn't change that much because I just don't, it's kind of like the top of the game is so much more interesting to me that all those guys adding lanes at the bottom and sticking pop-up numbers in strange places and stuff, that just does nothing for me. So I don't, it's like Dennis continues to try to stick out lanes in between the flippers and stuff. I mean, it's like, you know, it's interesting-looking architecture, but it doesn't really, it's kind of like, at that particular moment in time, for all intents and purposes, the ball is out of play, and I'm not that interested in that dynamic. So I don't pay much attention. I mean, I've been using a very similar bottom for many, many years, and I focus a lot on the top of the game. I think you guys know that, you know, I was a toy inventor for some years in my career. Yeah, yeah. And I like to do toys. I enjoy, you know, that element of a pinball. I always, when you say, you know, my games, well, my games have always had, it's like some guys, you know, like Steve, you know, He's all about the shots, and he kind of crams the toy in there. And I kind of think that, you know, I start with what is that thematic thing that I'm going to play with, the toy in the architecture, and then I'm going to build stuff around it. What was that for Deadpool? Was that the Bash toy? Is that your original idea? Right, right. And so the bass toy, what's interesting about the bass toy is that I thought with Deadpool, there was an action that I spent so much time working on the turntable on Batman, and it occupied so much real estate. And at the end of the day, you know, it's like, I don't know that it was worth all of that real estate and effort to create that device. And so when I went to, you know, when I came to Deadpool, I thought, you know, I'm not going to do anything that complex. I'm going to do, I'm going to try to keep the game very simple and I'm going to focus a lot on the shots. And so that's what I did. And so I sort of, it wasn't so much that I built the game around Little Deadpool. I sort of built the game around the notion of I'm not going to do a giant thing that occupies half the play field. I also had flipped you know I'd flipped a lot you know I'd flipped Maiden and I thought you know you don't need you know I'd come off of that with the thought that yeah you know maybe I should just focus on some really core basic pinball things and I should focus on making the game entertaining in what it is and how it reacts to you and I'm not you know and so but if you look at all my games right you look at Monster Bash and clearly the toys had to come, you know, it's kind of like I built the entire game around the Frankenstein table and, you know, decided that I needed to add, you know, the shots around the Lord of the Rings, you know, it's all about the Balrog and the ring itself, right? And so... Do you think that's a new direction that Stern is kind of taking? I mean, I guess it's just kind of two games in a row that's more shot-focused than others, but, you know, me and Marty talk about it all the time where, you know, like if we were reviewing Iron Maiden, you know, and giving it a score out of 10, we don't do that kind of stuff, but if we were to do it and we say, you know, toys, you know, say we give it like a 5 out of 10, but then we're like, well, it doesn't matter, does it? Like, you know, if you were to grade a pinball machine like that, you couldn't give it 10 out of 10 for toys like you would like a Medieval Madness or a Monster Bash or a Doctor Who having this one really cool mech, but that doesn't necessarily make the game better. You could probably give it a 10 for not having a toy because it works because it doesn't have one. You're right. You're absolutely right. And I think that there isn't a thing, to answer your question, there isn't a thing here about going in that direction. The designers really do have a tremendous amount of freedom about the direction they take their games in. So you're going to see, you know, the third game this year that you'll see late in the year is very different in and of itself. Also very cool, but very different. All toys and no shots, right? No, it was just toys. No, I wouldn't say that.
    13:17
    I wouldn't say that. But I think that, you know, it's guys do what they want to do to some extent. I think that's the magic of it. The magic of it is to, you know, empower people to bring the vision to life. And that's really kind of... Well, that's really, really funny that you said that because I want to ask this question. And, you know, in preparation for this interview, I went back and I watched Tilt the Battle to Save Pinball, right? Yep, yep. Young George Gomez said that when management came down, you would say, you know, they would say, oh, change that to blue and say, you know, weigh in the truck. I think that's the... That's right. I remember that. Weigh in the truck and we'll take it into consideration. But you said that, you know, you guys had kind of really crazy creative freedom over your games and people were looking over your shoulder, but not necessarily influencing the design. So what's it like being on the flip side where you're the guy that kind of has to look over a designer's shoulder and, you know, do people at Stern have creative freedom over their games? Or is it a bit more, is it a bit different now because you're on the other end and you have to make sure that things follow a certain direction?
    14:38
    Well, so, you know, it's funny you said it. So the story that you're referencing, and then, by the way, that wait in the truck line is actually, even though I've used it a lot, it's really a Steve Ritchie line because the story is that Joe Dillon, the sales guy at Willie, approached him one day and he said, you know, Steve, I've got an idea for a pinball. and Steve turned around and said, Joe, I'm going to have to ask you to wait in the truck on this one.
    15:18
    Did he even get to tell him his design or was it just the way he said his name? And actually, Joe Dillon used to tell the story, you know, and it's a great one. You know, actually, at Willie we had a tremendous amount of freedom And, I mean, I'm trying to do here, I'm trying to do, you know, I lived the Willie experience and I've lived, you know, and I lived the Stern experience before I was in charge. And so I'm trying to create sort of the best of both worlds. I'm trying to bring things that worked from Willie and I'm trying to not bring the ones that I felt were detrimental, you know. So I think that I try to give them a lot of freedom. There are things that there are times every once in a while where I have to sort of say, you know, I don't think this is a good idea for this reason and that one. And, you know, I mean, I try to walk the talk. I try very, very hard to walk the talk. I've been saying for a long time that, you know, we get overly focused on complexity. and I'd like to build a game around five really cool things, not 18 that, you know, sound great and are very ambitious. It's a very ambitious project, but, you know, 12 of them are going to be half-baked, you know, because you just don't have the resources and time to focus on making them all amazing. And so you're going to end up shipping something that's kind of not there. and so I'm trying very hard to, when I do it, when I get an opportunity to do it, I'm trying to lead by example. I'm trying to say, you know what, I'm going to, and this one, I sort of really took that sort of to an extreme and said, you know, I want simplicity and I want to polish the five cool things in the game and that's sort of the direction I'm going in. Cool, okay. Yeah, and I guess when we first, when we interviewed Kate and I heard it previously, he was sort of saying, you know, games don't need to be so complex with all these different rules and objectives and, you know, 20 modes that all seem the same. Just make sure that what you've got there is memorable and, again, that lends itself to Deadpool as well, where, you know, you've got the, what is it, the three villains plus the quests that you've got, right? Yeah. And each one of those is distinctly different and memorable. Yeah, and we're trying, you know, you're going to see even more, I think you're going to see even more distinction and more polish in each one of those villains and the quests before this is all said and done. I think that right now we're working really hard to fix a bunch of the things that are not quite there yet. And we're very excited about the response that we've gotten to the game. And so there's a lot of internal motivation to make it even better because of the response that we've gotten. And so, you know, a lot of the things that I just saw, like, I just saw the fourth Wild Deadpool hooked up today. And you guys are going to love it, I think. I mean, it's just he's hilarious and it looks amazing and he does funny stuff. So what does he do? Give us an example of when he might pop up and say something. well I mean he's going to do the obvious when you're when you've had when you haven't had a good ball he might have something to say but when you've done something great you may get some backhanded compliments out of the deal you know it's not a stretch to imagine when it is that you're going to get interactions with him at the same time we don't want to kill the joke so he's not always going to be up there right you know he's not it's an easy joke to kill so yeah you know if you know we could bring him up every you know all the time and that that that gets old too so we have to we have to kind of walk that line um well that's up to Tanya right like uh like you can design as as good as you can but in the end the I guess the success moving forward of the of the pinball machine is in Tanya's hand because he's the one who has to balance all of that out. And as you said, it's a very fine line between being funny and being annoying.
    19:46
    Do you have much input in that? Yeah, so that's not really the way it works. So what I mean by that is that we make decisions as a team.
    19:58
    So we all get together and we all stand around the game and play. And even guys that are not, you know, like necessarily, you know, doing any kind of heavy lifting on the team have a voice about how things are presented. And at the end of the day, the decision-making process, when it comes down to a yes, we will or yes, we won't or no, we won't, it's my call. But, you know, everybody, we all, you know, we all do it together. You know, meaning that so as we get close to shipping a game, every day, every morning at 10 o'clock, we have what's called dailies. And this is not unique to my team. This is every team in the building does this. And so for a couple of months at 10 o'clock every day, the team meets around the game and plays the game together. and stuff goes on the whiteboard and stuff goes into our bug tracker, you know, our bug tracking system so that, and then bugs get assigned depending on, you know, who's going to tackle fixing that thing. But it's, and every detail gets talked about, you know, like when a speech call happens, what, you know, the timing of the choreography, the light shows, the rules, the rule progression, the mechanics, the kinetics, I mean, every single thing in the game, the art, the presentations, the animations, all that stuff gets talked about in depth by the team as a whole. And that means, when I mean the team as a whole, I'm talking, you know, the computer graphics art directors in the room, the pertinent artists might be called in for a particular thing, the mechanical engineers, everybody is in the room. And everybody's playing this game, and this happens every morning at 10 o'clock. How early on does it start, George? It starts a couple months out. It starts as we get to a point where there's enough content in the game. And when there's enough content in the game that the game can adequately be critiqued, we start doing it. And so, you know, we do it all the time. We did it for Maiden. We do it for every game. And really, what you see there is the other thing that happens is that it is the way that we drive games to the finish. So what that means is that we don't just talk about the stuff. All of the issues and tasks get assigned to somebody. They go into, I don't know if you've seen pictures of the studio, but we have a wall that gets populated with three-by-five cards, and those cards all have a task on them, and stuff comes on and off the wall. It's a management method for driving the thing to the end. And so, like, for example, there was a huge push to drive to the stream, right, to the live stream, you know, because, you know, we knew we were going to be public, and so we, you know, there was a lot of stuff getting fixed and a lot of stuff going in and a lot of, you know, just, and it's a frenzy of activity when a team is in that mode. And there's a lot of excitement around here, but it's also a lot of craziness. You know, there's a lot of late nights and a lot of weekends and a lot of ordering pizza and all that stuff, just because we got to get to the place, you know. Just on that stream as well, we got introduced to the new team, effectively, the team of Deadpool.
    23:42
    Yep. And I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but you had a lot of young guys in your team around you, right?
    23:50
    Yeah. My question to you is, what's it been like working with all this new talent? Because let's, I guess we can sort of touch on it briefly. You hadn't planned on making this pinball machine. You sort of had to take this project on out of necessity. You've now got this new team. What's that experience been like for you?
    24:10
    Well, you know what I mean? Okay, so a lot of the guys that you saw on the stream are guys that work on every game, meaning that, like the computer graphics guys, we don't have, you know, they basically move from team to team. So, like, right now, there's guys rolling off of Deadpool as most of the CG content for Deadpool has already been generated.
    24:35
    It may not be installed in the game, but it's kind of been done. And so there's three or four guys left on Deadpool, and the rest of the guys are moving on to the next project. So the core team, you know, the core team is essentially still fairly small. It's the support teams that grow, right? So they go from project to project to project.
    25:00
    So this, I mean, I've worked with Tanya for a long time in different roles, you know, And so he wasn't really new to me, and I sort of knew his work style. I didn't – the new interaction to me was the, okay, we're going to sit in a room and invent this game.
    25:23
    And he's pretty great, but if anything, I had to sort of, you know, kind of reduce it to reality. You know, like, look, this is – it's nice to dream about this, But the reality is that, you know, we're going to be able to get this much done. And, you know, I'd much rather go out fairly complete than absolutely not complete. So because you got a lot of stuff that's like, you know, if you went out and you had a lot of stuff that was like half broken, you know, you know, I don't know that we would have gotten the response that we got, you know. Well, you've seen that before.
    26:03
    Yes, I have. And I've lived it. Yeah, me and Marty were kind of talking about it. Well, we've talked about it almost this entire year, and the biggest example is Guardians of the Galaxy, where certain stuff was revealed last year, and it had such a kind of polarizing response that it almost not taints the game forever, but people aren't willing to let go of that. It takes a long time, where people will walk past a row of games if it's on-site at someone's house, like, ah, you know, this game, you know, it's this, it's that, and it's not until you might play it again, and it might take months of playing it again for you to change the thing in your mind because, you know, you can't like all two more machines. So, you know, how important is that to you now? You know, have you learned the lessons from the past that, you know, revealing something? So some of those things, by the way, like in the case of Guardians, a lot of that stuff was sort of outside of our control. And what I mean by that is that that was a very difficult licensing scenario. And the thing that I can't really get into to explain that is that sometimes there are decisions that we, as the development team, do not have control of. You know, it's like if someone owns a property and we're licensing that property and there isn't clarity in terms of what the rules are, you can get yourself in big trouble and then you have to recover from that trouble. And so if we learned anything, it wasn't that games shouldn't ship incomplete. We sort of knew that. what we learned is, boy, you got to dot all the T's and cross, you know, or I'm sorry, dot all the I's and cross all the T's before you set off down this path or this thing could blow up because, you know, people on the other end don't understand what it is that you're doing with the content and they absolutely won't let you do something with it. So it's, I mean, that's really, that's the challenge of the new world that we live in, especially with the introduction of the LCD, the fact that there are many, many, many issues with licenses where if I can replicate the content, the way the content is produced for the medium for which it is designed, for example, a film,
    28:50
    that the licensor may not want me to do that. They may not. There are many, many different tentacles to that problem. You know, like, you know, screenwriters deal, the actors themselves, approvals, the fact that, you know, it's it's I mean, it's really complex. It's a really complex business problem is what it is. It's not it's not a development problem. I mean, you know, some of the flexibility that we've had to, we've learned to be very flexible. If you look at the presentations on all our LCDs, since we induced that medium, you'll see that, you know, they're all very different, right? And so, and I think, and some of that is not just about being consistent to what the game is, but it's also what can we do and what do we have to work with? Do you draw any similarities between kind of what Stern is going through now to the whole Pinball 2000 era where, you know, before the Pinball 2000, you guys didn't have, like, video asset teams and stuff like that and didn't really start with us? Not really, because, and I'll tell you why. in the only challenge the challenge of the second Pinball 2000 the Star Wars themed game ran into more of that than I did when I did Revenge, right? When I did Revenge because the world of the Martians was a world that, you know that Brian had invented based on all of the every 50 sci-fi you know, Martian movie you've ever seen right he took bits and pieces from everything and compiled them into this thing there was a tremendous amount of freedom that the dot matrix because of the fact that you know like even when i digit even when we digitized film and and ran it on the dot matrix like transformers right it wasn't the fidelity was so bad that no actor was good you know no no actor in the world was going to say, yeah, that's my likeness, and, you know, I don't want it used on your little game, you know. And so I think that the dot matrix protected us from that era, from that for a long time. And then also I think that as a world, you know, we're probably 50 or 60 years into the sort of prevalence of licensing in terms of popular culture in the world, right? I mean, it's a machine, and it's a much more sophisticated machine today than it was, you know, even 25 years ago. And so when I was a toy inventor, you know, we invented new ideas and sold the concepts to all of the major toy companies. And in the world in which I was inventing in the early 80s,
    32:05
    there was still room for, you know, like, had I wanted to create my own action figure line, that was still a realm of possibilities. Today, there is no one going to invent a new action figure line. they may invent the gimmick that's going to be applied to a licensed action figure you know but it's going to be a licensed action figure it's going to come from Marvel it's going to come from Disney it's going to come from somebody Star Wars somebody thematically that's what it's going to be so the world of licensing today incredibly more complex and incredibly more sophisticated and so is that why I guess we make the assumption that it was much easier for you going with the comic book of Deadpool rather than the movie. Yeah, and not only easier, but you know it was going to be more fun because we were going to be able to weave our own story, weave our own world, choose the things we wanted to focus on from the universe of Deadpool as opposed to picking five or six significant plot points in the film and going down that path, right? So it's kind of... So the fact... Well, you're actually creating your own content and writing a new story, effectively. Right. I mean, Luke, Deadpool shows up on the first page of some of the books, not even all of the books. and he's on for one page. And so we created this entire character that was going to be essentially a foil within the game and all of the things that he would do. I mean, it's like I sat in a room and said, I said, you know what? He's going to be hit by every kind of ball you can imagine. I want him hit by, I want him, I want him knocked over by bowling balls. I want to hit him with a maze. I want to hit him with, you know, I want a wrecking ball to whack him. I want to catch a 90-mile-an-hour fastball. I mean, I wanted, you know, it's like basically destroy the character with, and that doesn't exist. And, you know, that's not in any Deadpool fiction anywhere. We just made that up, right? We have balls in our game. He should interact with the ball. We should, let's destroy him. So, I mean, you know, that's the beauty of a license and a licensor with a little bit of running room. that that means, what that means is I can take, you know, pinball's a medium, right? Just like oil painting is a medium within the, you know, within the realm of painting, right? Pinball is a game, you know, is a medium within the realm of games. So I'm going to, you know, an oil painting looks different than a watercolor, and it looks different than an ink sketch. And so I want my pinball machine to stand out in a world of games, all kinds of different games. and so I'm going to I want to, I want the freedom to exercise the media, right? Yeah.
    35:16
    George, did you have, I mean those two kind of unique features of Deadpool with that do you call it the right ram? What are you calling it internally where you shoot that kind of inner orbit that goes around?
    35:28
    What's the other name? We call it a katana ram. A katana ram, okay. Because it just beats the katana. Okay. It's kind of on the right and the left at the same time, right? You're confusing us, George. Yeah. So I think it was you guys that identified that those ramps are Batman ramps, and they are actually evolutions of the ramp on Batman.
    35:51
    The geometry is very similar, but they're way more polished than the one on Batman, meaning that there's some subtle but notable differences. The back wall is a little higher so that the ball never comes off a steel until it has to. And the roofs are modified and stuff like that. But it's a similar ramp. It was a very rigid structure.
    36:18
    It's thicker metal in Deadpool in order to transfer more energy. So it's not an off-the-shelf part like I was trying to give. They are identical, which is an economy in Deadpool, which is great, right? I mean, it's like, basically, it's like we bought twice as many, right? Because they are basically identical. The plastic roofs are different, but other than that, the ramps are identical. It is an evolution of the Batman design because the Batman design worked well, and I thought, well, I can make it even better. And so... So that ramp there, the katana ramp plus the lift ramp features on the Premium and LE,
    37:01
    have you been kind of like holding on to that design? Is that what designers do? Do they kind of think, like, as soon as your game is done, right, do you start thinking now, oh, it would be cool if my next game, I could somehow kind of get this feature in there? Or did you put pen to paper and think of it? No, that one was, I mean, that one was kind of, I'll tell you how it came about. It came about because I happened to have some Batman I sat down, when I sat down to kind of work on that play field, one of the things I always do is, so I work in lots of mediums simultaneously, so I'm like you know, I'm cutting stuff out of plastic, I'm sketching, and I'm in my CAD system, and I'm just kind of like going back and forth and in and out of different mediums all the time. And one of the things that I always do is I always put my standard bottom on a white wood with nothing on it, like literally nothing on it. It's just a white, just a complete open board. But the flippers work. And I'll take devices or things or ramps, et cetera, and I'll place them. I'll literally screw them to the playfield in different places and try different things and see what the shots. So I took two Batman ramps. And, you know, I originally started with the obvious, right? I'm going to use on the left side here as the left ramp, and I'm going to return it like this.
    38:22
    By the way, some of those, you know, everybody, like, people wonder, like, you know, what are all those curbs about on the ramp and stuff. They're basically when the ramp is super fast, I still want to give you, I still want to buy you some response time. And so the way I buy you response time is to increase the trajectory back to the flipper, right? I still want the ramp to feel like it's going 100 million miles an hour, but I want to give your eye some response time. And so that's what those curves in my ramps are about. You saw it in Monster Bash. You saw it in Lord of the Rings, those wireform ramps with the big curvy thing. I mean, the curvy thing looks cool, but it's not only about making it look cool. It's about giving you a chance to respond to a shot that's going really fast. So you're saying that that slows down the ball a little bit when you have curves?
    39:17
    It doesn't, I mean, it does slow it down because, you know, you're adding friction to it, but more than anything, just the fact that you've added to the trajectory, you know, you've added to the length of the ramp, you get to watch it. So you're ready for it when it's coming at you. Okay, yeah. As opposed to, you know, if I kept it straight, you know, I mean, not that you wouldn't see it, But when, especially that left ramp on Deadpool is like super fast, right? So I need to give you some kind of time to respond to it. The other question I've been asked a lot is why is the back ramp chrome and not powder coated like the rest of them? And the answer to that is the coefficient of friction of the powder coat is greater than that of the chrome. and I needed the chrome because it's a fairly shallow angle on the ramp, and so I didn't want to get chances with slowing the ball down some more.
    40:16
    So in that particular case, it's moving at a fairly slow pace across the ramp. So to get back to your question, that shot came about because I thought, you know, what, you know, how do I, the way I think about it is I could just, like some guys, it's kind of like the ramp is not, you know, it's, I don't know, they just want to get the ball back to the flipper, and they don't really care how they do it, and I don't really think that way. I think the ramp should be interesting. I think that all my ramps, you know, I mean, if you look at all my games, you know, even games that people don't like, like Avengers, I was trying to do I was trying to make interesting ramps I was trying to create and had I had more time I would have fixed that Black Widow ramp that everybody bitches about that's not true yeah I would have fixed that I totally would have fixed that but so the very first thing I did was I thought well you know what if I have an entrance to the ramp away from the ramp and what if I keep that make the ball travel across the open play field, right? And so because, you know, your first instinct when you're trying to solve the problem is you just put all kinds of aw guys there, and then it's just not as interesting and clearly not as challenging. There's a lot of tricky problems that I solved in that shot, which I don't really, like I don't want to give these secrets away to every other, you know, all the other guys, so I'm not going to talk about them. in detail, but there's a lot of science in that ramp, and I'm very happy with the things I had to overcome, you know, the fact I overcame a lot of really difficult problems to do it, you know. Well, I mean, you can't give away the secrets, but, I mean, how long did you spend kind of fine-tuning that to make, because I mean, I think every podcast... It's probably the thing I worked on the most in this game. I also, I don't know if you've seen the Snick Trot, the ricochet shot out of the ramp of that same bomb. So that was another really fun thing. And that one actually came together really fast. I just, you know, was trying to fill a hole and I pulled, put the target there and then we were shooting it. And I thought, hey, why don't I mess with the angle of the target? Maybe it'll go up. And the first time I did it, I was like, whoa, that's amazing. Can I repeat that? And then it was like, and then I'm running around the studio getting guys that like with precision shooting, you know, like Keith Owen and stuff. and say, come in here and shoot this thing. And it was like, first time, I was like, it's really early on the flipper. And boom, he did it. And I was like, oh, yeah, we've got to do this.
    43:05
    So when you did take on this project, and I know the first time I heard you say it was on Coast to Coast where you said you wanted to throw, you know, give everything to this machine. I did mention that before. You weren necessarily planning to be on this You also got your regular job where you are you know the lead of all those people How did you manage to be able to throw so much in this and balance out the job? You know what, I'll tell you. So, the first time I really did that was on Batman, to tell you the truth. I mean, Batman, you know, Batman and Deadpool has been having, you know, has been like having, you know, two jobs, you know, a job that I do during the day and a job that I do at night. So it's, it hasn't been pretty. And I don't, I mean, I don't, it's not a good way to live. You know, it's like, it's, I mean, it's, it's important to, you know, it was important to me to kind of not have any regrets. And I don't. I don't have any regrets. I put my heart and soul into it. I think that I hope it shows. I worked a lot of hours. And I worked fast. I worked a lot of weekends. I worked fast. I would come in very early so that there was no one here. And then I could get some stuff done, and then I would, when people start rolling in, I would back off, and then when people start going home, I would ramp it up again. And I also, you know, I mean, I had my number, you know, my number two guy, my executive producer, did it a lot of, took a lot of stuff off my plate, you know, so he covered a lot of meetings for me and sort of, you know, would come in, get, you know, ask me questions, get decisions, what do you want to do about this, So he would do that, and then he would run off and execute, which would free me to focus on Deadpool, you know. And so it was a lot of work. Yeah.
    45:19
    Yeah. Hey, Josh, the, you know, the Ali Timor machine, limited edition, you know, we saw with Iron Maiden and now with Deadpool that it comes with a shaker and the anti-reflective glass and the back glass as well, the mirrored kind of back glass effect. and the LE from Stern has kind of been changing non-stop over the last couple of years, but I guess this is two in a row where we've got something similar we can try and draw some conclusions off. So is that still like a floating feature list depending on the license and the bill of materials, or is that something that you're aiming for? No, that stuff is standard on all LEs now. It's been since Maiden. And the only time I remember, I think the only thing that was controversial for a little while was whether or not they were going to get the special shooter knobs from the accessory program. And I think it was decided that they're not.
    46:24
    And that was actually more of a functional thing than a money thing. you know like they don't fit they literally don't fit in the box with you know with the Jackie head you can't close the flap on the box so it was kind of like one of those things where you said okay you know so like I guess you could ship it in the cash box and have the guy install it but some of you know there was some you know the feeling was that you know what if they really want it they can buy it in the accessory program and But as far as all that list of stuff that's all going to be standard, you know, the art blades, unique art blades, unique armor. The sneakers. Yeah. I'll let some of them out. Yeah, but there's a lot more kind of stuff. The sneakers, the cool glass, all that stuff is standard LE, and every LE moving floor is going to get it. And how about the number of units? Because it's 500 and 500, two in a row. Can we draw anything from that, or is that also a slight number?
    47:30
    You know, I think it's a really good number, and I think that, I think it's a number that, so you have to remember that, you know, there aren't any, there's no manual on this stuff, you know, meaning that, you know, when we, I think, I forget what game it was. It might have been Metallic, I'm not sure. But on Metallic, I think we announced, I forget what it was, 500 LEs or something, And the sales guys just got, like, hammered for, you know, it's only 500, you know. And so it's gone up and down. It's like, you know, you have to remember that, like, our dealers and distributors see this stuff before you guys do. And so when they're early on, when they're looking at a game, sometimes they guess. They take guesses. and so for a long time we were trying to figure out what those numbers should be. I don't know that I can guarantee that all LEs moving forward are going to be 500, but it seems to be a good number that everybody seems, you know, after having gone through all sorts of iterations, you know, I forget how many, I forget what the Star Trek numbers were, but they were much higher, right? 599, 599.
    48:47
    That's the thing, I mean, Sorry, yeah, sorry, sorry, sorry. It's early, Marty, it's early. The thing, right, you want it to sell out, but you don't want it to sell out to the point where people are holding off and not buying other models and not fulfilling their demand. And from the outside in, it seems like the pro, premium, and LE kind of model might be the best to fulfill kind of as much of the market as you can. Do you think it's odd that no one is kind of copying Stern's model in that way, or do you think that it's the fact that only Stern can produce three different models because you guys have the volume to do that, and if you're doing, say, 500 units, you don't want to split it up into three different bunches? Yeah, so I can tell you what our thinking is on it, but I don't know, I'm not sure how the other guys make the decisions they make. I can tell you that our vision is, you know, I mean, so John Biscaglia, our chief revenue officer, the guy that all the sales and marketing reports up to, is a guy that came out of the collectibles business. He has a lot of experience with collectibles. You know, he worked at Topps, you know, the trading card company for many years. He was an executive, high-level executive there. and he knows a lot about the vision of what's collectible and what's not. And so I can tell you that he has a very distinct idea that there's a market for, there are some customers that relish the fact that, hey, I have number 53 and nobody else does, and I have to have the one with all the bells and whistles. the premium game is what we call the player's game and we say it's the player's game because you get all the play value of all of the games and yet you don't have to pay for stuff that you're not interested in and so it's a pretty sweet, you know, that particular model is sort of the sweet spot in terms of I want all the stuff but I don't really, I don't care if Gary Stern signs my collectivities, you know, and so, and I don't, you know, I, you know, I don't care if George Gomez signs it or whatever. So, you know, so, so that's that. And our, our pro is, you know, you have to understand the thing behind the pro, right? We, we are probably the only pinball company that still has a large presence in the commercial market. And the pro is bought in large quantities by commercial operations, commercial businesses, guys that operate pinball machines for a living. And the reason is, you know, it's good ROI. There isn't, if you do your job right, the game, it's a quick quarter. It is the kind of game that can exist in a location without sort of the extended gameplay of it's in your basement, and you're playing your machine every day for months and months and months, Whereas the pro is in situations like, you know, in a bar or in a bowling alley or a movie theater lobby where some percentage of the people that interact with it are either casual players that just want to have fun. They don't necessarily need to put their name on the high score table. They don't necessarily need to, you know, see everything in the game. And so the pro fills that role pretty well. You know, usually the pros, a lot of the pros have, I mean, you guys wouldn't know this because you don't measure it, but, you know, they typically have shorter ball times than the other games, which is... I measure it. I operate a couple of games, trying to make it as close to three minutes as possible. Right. So clearly, you know, you notice that, you know, when we started this discussion, and you guys were asking me about the bottom of the pro on Deadpool, definitely a meaner bottom than it is on the LEs and the premiums. Definitely. There's no question.
    53:20
    And so, you know, I think it's going to earn well. I think it's going to do well in location. So, I mean, that's general. That's sort of Rod Stross. That's our thinking, right? It's like the pro is the commercial game. most of our pros are sold you know I mean you know close to 50% of our business goes overseas into Western Europe and Australia and you know those guys I mean those markets buy a lot of pros because you know you can find them on the street being operated for money. So what do you reckon is the split between the home and the operator market now and how has that changed over time? Well we did you know we I think the home market is way greater than it's ever been. And I think we have different kinds of purchases, even to the home.
    54:18
    We have a buyer that is hardcore. He buys everything we make. Or we have a buyer that maybe can't afford the space or the money, And so he expects the games to be, you know, to have high resale so that he can, you know, he can buy what he wants and flip it for the next thing that he wants and sort of, you know, not take a bath in it. And so there's, and then we have, you know, we have some, we're still growing the business from the stamp, you know, in a lot of, in every one of these demographics. but there's a guy who doesn't currently own a pinball machine, but maybe once played pinball, and now he's got a basement or a rec room, and he's decided that pinball machines are again in the visual mainstream, and so he's got to have one like the one he played in college or whatever. Yeah. So then can I just talk about the pin? Because that's, I guess, another... Well, it's dedicated. It's really not for the operator at all. I'm keen to know whether you're seeing that as being a successful venture for Stern to do that home-only addition or model. Right. So, you know, that's – so we are – we consider, like, the efforts that you've seen from us in that direction, and we consider them R&D, meaning that it's a code that we're still trying to crack, like we cracked the ProPremium Ali code back in 2009. You know, we sort of feel strongly that there's a market for that type of a device, and we're going to continue to explore it. And as a matter of fact, you know, I mean, we're exploring it now. You guys don't know this, but we're exploring it now, right? We know now. market. It's a, yeah, I mean, everybody says, I want a failure. Well, no, it wasn't a failure. We intended to make, you know, a very small quantity of Spider-Man and we wanted, you know, we wanted the dealers to interact with it. We wanted to see how it sold. We wanted to understand who the buyer was. We wanted to understand what the white glove service issues are. We wanted to understand what the financing issues are. We wanted to understand the issue of it on a showroom floor where you can still buy a $1,500 fishtails or you can buy a brand new Deadpool and here's this device, right? So it's sort of in between them in price. And what are the things, you know, what are the issues? We also wanted to push the envelope in terms of, you know, how do you make something that really approximates a consumer product because our you know what even our current games that go into the home uh they're really commercial products and it's in their commercial products and it's a double-edged sword right it's a it's um the good news is they're very rugged the bad news is they're not finished like your bmw because they didn't come from there. And so in order to make them, in order to achieve that level of fit and finish that we have in the rest of the commercial, the rest of the consumer products that you interact with, we have to select different materials, create more sophisticated processes, and in some cases, it may even cost more money, you know, so it's like, so, so I hope, did that make sense? I mean, did you understand what I'm saying? I mean, it's like... And I can also see that from the, from the original ones, and I think that they were the ones that you designed being... I did them all. I did, I did the current one too. I mean, I did the Spidey myself.
    58:20
    So, and I did, I did the Spidey based, you know, I did the, I did the Spidey based on the first batch, where people perceived those as toys. Well, the one thing that no one knew is that we were also fighting a weight constraint because they wanted those things to ship at a particular weight so that certain retailers like Amazon and stuff could carry them and easily deliver them to your house. so um and that's the reason why you know everybody everybody gave me all kinds of shit about the back box on that first set of all that stuff but it was like it really was like it was like okay i've got this much money i've got i've got this weight constraint you know it's like freaking you know it's like it's like making you know it's like making a space capsule you can't just you know you know it's you can't just make it weigh whatever it needs to you know you have to like well that's the hard thing right like back in in you know i'm going back to you Williams in the 90s, I mean, they put all their eggs in one basket with PIM 2000.
    59:25
    And, you know, maybe in retrospect, it would have been a bit different if you could kind of co... Do that at the same time as still producing the WPC95 era games and kind of try and transition it in. Is that what you think you have the luxury of doing now, where you guys can say, okay, well, let's try a super rally. We're going to put more money and more effort into it and see how the market responds.
    59:53
    Now you're beginning to understand how we think. Seriously, now you're beginning to understand. That's a very intelligent comment that nobody else has hit on. Everybody thinks, you guys are a bunch of assholes. Why don't you just make pinball machines? we are trying to make pinball machines we're trying to be all things pinball we want to own everything pinball we want to have a footprint if it's pinball we want to have a footprint there we want our accessory program, we want a real parts program where you can buy parts online and stuff, we want all these things we're also a self-funded company what that means is that the business of the company pays for all of these R&D, it pays for the day-to-day business operations. So it is the reason that many of the things that you see are the way that they are because we are self-funded.
    60:57
    It's like our economy is very similar to your personal economy. If this much money is coming in, then you can do these things. If this much money is not coming in, then you cannot do those things, right? How do you ensure that, like, going back to the 90s one more time, I promise this might be my last question on the 90s and trying to draw comparisons from it.
    61:20
    You know, people kind of said that Williams became a victim of their own success and maybe it was just the market dictating what was popular and it was a downward trend in, like, a wave. You know, they rode the wave and the wave went down. How do you ensure that Stern doesn't, I guess, fall victim to the same thing where the games are all good, but that means that you're kind of competing against yourselves in the market?
    61:47
    Well, I think we, you know, I mean, already we compete against ourselves in the market because we have such a large portion of the market, right? So we have close to 98%, if not more, of the world market in pinball. So what does that mean? It means that when we introduce a game, it steps on our last game. We continue to make it over time, But we are competing with ourselves. And so especially if you create – when we create a really broad market appeal game, we're competing with ourselves more than ever because then people aren't making a decision based on I'm an Iron Maiden fan or I'm not. You know, everybody's got to have it, right? So in those situations, we are most definitely competing with ourselves. So the difference between us and Williams, Williams was a publicly held company with a huge war chest. And when you have, I think that one of the things that they ran into is the notion that at the end of the day, they weren't a pinball company, they were a business. And they, more than ever, really, their thinking was, when you're in business, if you spend $50 million and you expect a $100 million return on that $50, then it doesn't matter to you what the product is. You just want, and so, you know, at one point in time, the executive management running the company said, you know what, the issue is this $30 million that we're going to spend on the pinball division or whatever to make, you know, to make $10 million, we could probably spend that $30 million in the slot machine business, and the return would be much greater than $10 million. So, yes, I know that you guys love your little pinball company, but the reality is that we're a business and we're in the business of growing. In our case, we don't have anything else. We are a pinball company. We don't have a slot machine company. We don't have anything else. We want to be all things pinball. We think here, we think we're building a lifestyle brand, and we think that we're expanding into many different areas all related to pinball, whether it's tournaments and accessories and virtual and all that stuff. But at the end of the day, it's driven by our core business is introduce pro premiums, LEs for three titles every year. Everything else is, you know, you've seen some of our private label stuff, right, like Supreme. Well, that's why I was talking about the pin before, because I was going to say that from the original two to Spider-Man, Spider-Man became really, and I played it last year for the first time, And I played it and I went, well, that's actually more than just a home game. It actually is a real game. And then you were able to explore that. I know you had to modify it to Supreme. I'm curious about that Supreme. Was that, I mean, because you said you're a lifestyle brand, and right there you've got a lifestyle brand with a lifestyle product. How did that originate going to Supreme?
    65:10
    Yeah, Supreme is, so we, you know, you're going to see a lot more sort of what we call private label business.
    65:18
    And that's companies that, you know, that approach us and say, hey, we want to, you know, we want, this machine is essentially a walking, talking advertisement for our brand, and it's pretty cool, so we want one. Supreme is, you know, I mean, their whole thing is they have their fingers on the pulse of pop culture, And they pretty much, I mean, they're about being a brand.
    65:48
    I mean, that's, you know, they are who they are. And they approached us and said, you know, we want to do, you know, we think that it would be really cool for, you know, a Supreme Pinball. And so we sort of, you know, we thought, you know, let's jump at the opportunity. It's a different kind of exposure for us. and you know I mean it was a very small number of machines like a hundred machines or something but so it so clearly it wasn't like about like you know making bazillions of dollars but it was about that that's a cool space that's a different space than the one we currently operate in it was very you know it was it it was interesting to me to watch the reaction like from the pin site crowd. They didn't get it.
    66:42
    Yeah. It's funny. It was like, they didn't get it. And I was like, of course they didn't get it. No, because that machine was not aimed at them. And I guess the response to everybody, everybody was saying, well, people are silly because they're going to pay all this money for a pinball machine. Well, it's a supreme pinball machine. I mean, that's the value of that particular brand. If they can sell a crowbar. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's funny about that. So there's one on the street being operated right up, right near Pinball Headquarters or Supreme Headquarters in New York, right? And I got to tell you, that thing makes more money. I mean, it's like, you know, and it's in the classic, like, it's in the classic, you know, it's this little New York bar with craft beers and you know I mean that's what I'm trying to know about you no no it's the Max Beer it's not such a they may have one too I don't know if they do they may have one too but the one I'm referring to is like it's kind of like I've randomly gone in that place and I mean randomly like you know I go in there and like three weeks later at a different time of day, I'm in there. And every time I'm in there, that thing's being played. So I think, and yet there's a bunch of them in people's houses, and there may be some that are like a trophy. They don't even get played. They're just kind of like sitting in the corner. I think most of them are trophies. Seeing the price that they go for, I don't think the people that are buying them are playing them. Although I just got, the service guys just came to see me. there's a guy that he's playing it so much that he's there's a there's a rubber that's like sort of stretched really tight a little bit tighter than i would have liked but but i just had no choice uh i don't know i don't know how familiar you are with that game but there's there's that you know that passive ball lock that i created like uh just okay so right above that passive ball lock there's a second switch so you can actually lock two balls there if you're you know and it's a very random, you know, like nothing you can do other than nudge the machine will get you a lock. And it's not like a shot you can make, et cetera. But anyway, so I needed to be really tight to the switch so the rubber stretched a little too tight. And service guys just came to me and said, this guy has broken two of these rubbers in two months. And I was like, that means that guy is playing the crap out of that machine. Send him a bag of 100 rubbers. So then going back, did Supreme approach you or did Stern approach Supreme, do you know?
    69:25
    I think Supreme approached us. Okay. To do those, you know, kind of collaborations in the future, and as you said, you're not making a boatload of money, it's more about exposure and testing new markets and things like that. So does it need to be a re-theme for that to happen? Like we saw it with Pabst Cancrusher, you know, Supreme. So the reality is it almost does have to be, and the reason is that you know how much effort it takes to do something from scratch. And so the nice thing is that right now, you know, I've got like a couple of platforms that people can go to. They want something really old school with reels, they'll go into a variation of Wonelly, and eventually we'll refresh these playfields. It doesn't mean that everyone that's going to come through the door is going to get a Supreme Playfield. that probably not. Actually, you're probably never going to see that playfield on something else. Would you ever go back as far as Stern Electronics back in the early 80s or late 70s where you say, okay, well, here's a Quicksilver playfield? Do you still have those designs in your war chest that you can bring out? Yeah, I think that's entirely valid. And who knows? You might actually see something like that. Okay. Will we see a George Gomez design again? You're going to see a heavily George Gomez-influenced design actually very soon.
    70:54
    George, it's funny you said that you don't get to design very often, and you're designing people on machine zones. That's right. Well, yeah, early next year you may see something that I influence heavily. Okay. You know, I mean, it's like, yeah, so I, you know, you guys don't really know me, but I like to work. I mean, I, you know, I work a lot. And I have, so I mean, that's probably, you know, that's probably how it is that I can manage to pull some of these things off, is I really enjoy the work and I do a lot of it, you know. And so have you therefore really relished the opportunity to just be full lead designer for Deadpool? Loved it. Loved it. I mean, we genuinely had, I mean, if it doesn't come across when you see the stuff, I mean, we genuinely had fun making the game. And that's a lot different than, you know, when you're just kind of, I don't know, When the team doesn't gel or circumstances are difficult, for whatever reason, if you have members of the team not getting along or whatever that is,
    72:16
    that wasn't the case on Deadpool. We actually had a lot of fun amongst the team making the game. And I hope it shows. Yeah, but did you know that it was going to be well-received? I mean, you've worked on a long time. You've got a good team. Before the reveal, were you nervous at all, or did you think, no, this is absolutely going to... It's hard to say. I was nervous. I definitely was nervous. I was nervous because, I mean, I think there's so much, sometimes there's so much negativity, you know, and you know just sort of like the world just wants to hate you know and so I didn't know what you know I didn't know how it was going to be I mean I knew the game was fun clearly because we're playing the game and I can also tell because it's the difference between a game that you have to ask people to play and a game that you have to tell people to get off of so you can work on it so I mean that you know that when I saw people just flipping the game because they wanted to flip the game, I was like, okay, I think they're seeking here.
    73:34
    Pinball people are passionate, right? I mean, the certain amount of hate, I guess, equates to how passionate everyone is about the hobby that they love. And if there wasn't the hate, it's probably because people, I guess, well, I mean, either because they got some light bulb that went off in their head, like, I'm going to enjoy life now and not hate too many things, but I don't think you can do that collectively as a pinball community, so I think it's more to do with them just being absolutely obsessed with pinball and wanting the best out of the game. You touched on something just a second ago about how different everyone is in the team and you might not get along. So you're managing artists, designers, and coders, and obviously there's engineers and a million other different people involved in the team, but if you divide it up into those three cores, those are three vastly different kind of people, like an artist and a coder. Don't think on the same level of existence, right?
    74:33
    Right. Yep. Yep. So how do you make sure that the artist is agreeing with what the coder is agreeing with? And do you have to put out little fires here and there to make sure everyone's getting along? Or do you find that everyone... I put out little flyers constantly.
    74:52
    Yeah, it's one of them. It is actually one of the most difficult things that I do is, you know, preserve harmony and sort of refocus teams to move forward and all that. I mean, it's a very hard thing to do. there's, from my perspective, it's probably, you know, I mean, I do, my work is, some amount of my work is, you know, strategic in nature. It's kind of fun, you know, to, you know, sit in a room and sort of, you know, envision the arc of the company, right? The future business arc of the company where things we want to do, things we want to go, things. and some amount of my day is transactional, right? It's just about fixing problems. You know, the line's got this problem. We've got this shortage from this vendor. We've got these quality issues. We've got this thing. You know, it's like, so some of that is just, so, you know, there's the strategic, there's the transactional. Some of it is administrative. Just, I mean, you can't, you know, you can't have a development group studio as large as mine and not have to deal with a bunch of, you know, this guy needs to go on vacation. that guy's wife is having a baby. There's all sorts of day-to-day life things that become just administrative things. And some amount of it is leadership. And leadership is an interesting word because it sounds very glamorous, but leadership is taking, you know, getting down in the weeds with these guys and saying, you know, guys, come on, we've got to make some decisions here to move this product forward or to get this thing to the church on time or you two guys need to get in a room. I mean, a lot of what I do is, you know, get two guys to talk. We kind of called that out sort of early on when we started the podcast over a year ago. It was a conversation I was having with Ryan about that. It's something that we really don't understand is that you've actually got humans in the mix here and humans are random, humans are emotional and there's got to be this whole layer of management of that and it's probably the first time we've heard somebody actually reference that And so I've actually got people that I need to manage and people have problems and people just do different things. Yep. It's a big, big part of my job is just sort of getting these guys. And some of the decisions about who works with who and who will work with who and all that stuff.
    77:27
    George, you know, artists, co-designers, we're just talking about. So I'm not going to ask which one is more important, but hypothetically, if one person from one of those groups, like a coder or a designer or an artist, was to magically kind of disappear and you needed to replace him, which one of those three do you think requires the most amount of time to mature? Do you think it's a coder? They might take like five years to understand the business, or to be able to rehire? Well, you know, we have, so the most difficult thing, the single biggest, the toughest thing to essentially find is not someone who is technically competent.
    78:21
    We have, by the way, we have lots of different kinds of coders in the building. We have not every coder is what, you know, what the pinball business imagines, meaning that, you know, a guy that works on the rules or the choreography of a game, right? So we have guys that can't do that, but yet they're coders, and they are absolutely, from a performance standpoint, they are absolutely on top of their game in terms of the technology. They understand how to manipulate technology. They understand how to write code to execute things, et cetera. but maybe they work on tools or maybe they work on performance issues for the display or maybe they work on system level things.
    79:11
    And so those guys, they have a general understanding of the game and what the requirements are but they're not the guys that are going to evolve a game progression.
    79:24
    So we have all kinds of different levels but the hardest thing to get are essentially game guys, guys that it doesn't matter whether you're a designer or,
    79:34
    because, I mean, there's lots of guys that can, you know, that know how to, you know, they know their way around the shop, they know their way around CAD, they know their way around the technology, but related to, you know, they're not walking, you know, they're not just walking around where they understand the comprehensive evolution through a game or the notion of designing a toy and the kinetics of a play field and the things that make a pinball machine a pinball machine. So I think game guys, if you fall in that category, that's the toughest thing to grow. Not everyone will grow into one. Who are your game guys at the moment? Keith Allen, I'm guessing, fits into that category. Yeah, Keith Allen. I mean, clearly my designers, you know, my designers are in that category. Some of my veteran software engineers, you know, the line and sheets, Lonnie Rops of the world, Dwight Sullivan is a great one. You know, those are game guys. They're through and through. They think about the game in comprehensive terms, right? Tim Sexton, my new software engineer, came out of, you know, playing pinball as a hobbyist. And so he has a really good understanding of the game. You know, I think guys like Tanya spend a lot of time contributing at the systems level. And so, you know, this was his first trip in the chair as, you know, as the lead software engineer. And so the great thing about him is that he's a very mature individual from the standpoint that he understands that he doesn't think of himself as a guy that has to have every answer. He thinks of himself as a guy that needs to be able to find all the answers, but he doesn't have to have them himself. And so when he doesn't, he can ask a question of someone who might have a vision, and he knows how to, you know, he makes an intelligent choice about going in that direction or not. or he bounces it around a bunch of us, and we collectively make a choice, right? And so, you know, interestingly enough, Rick Nagel, the lead software engineer on Keith's team, is not a pinball guy, did not come. I mean, he's becoming a pinball guy every day by being here and working on the games. But, you know, here's an incredibly well-received game, and yet it was his first time in that seat. He had, you know, like 17 years of video game experience, so, you know, he's not alien to games, but he was new to pinball, and I felt that, you know, putting him with Keith, who has a very, you know, comprehensive knowledge of pinball, was not that much of a risk because Keith could execute on, I'm sorry, a rip could execute on Keith's vision. Okay.
    82:36
    Cool. I didn't expect that answer. I never thought of it that way, that there's an internal term, like the game guys, people that understand the overall arc of the pinball machine and can see the vision. But yeah, I guess that makes sense. Kind of semi-related, but I want to talk about Batman 66. You touched on it before. So I guess there is this And it is in the community that You know, Lyman's a guy And he's obviously been working on turning Batman 66 into a masterpiece Is that something that you're kind of acutely aware of And therefore trying to bring more people into that kind of I guess becoming a bit of a superstar Like Lyman has become in that coding world? Well, I think that So, first of all, you know, I mean, I've been around guys like that for a very long time, right? I mean, there was a period of time, you know, I mean, at Williams Electronics, we had a bunch of guys that, you know, I mean, you know, if you look at games like, you know, Funhaus and the Adams family, right? And, you know, you can't, I mean, it's like, you know, Larry DeMar, who used to be my boss, right? I mean, he was a game guy through and through, right? And he was, you know, he was a guy that, so I mean, this is not, you know, a new concept of, you know, a guy who is manipulating the software who is also, you know, a good, a strong player who has a vision for what this thing should be. So I think that, and we've not, I mean, you know, I mean, I have no, I mean, I don't, I have no shortage of them. I mean, Dwight Sullivan is, you know, look at the number of games that he's done. Look at the games he's, you know, look at the games he's done with Steve. I think him and Steve together have probably sold like, you know, I don't know, 60,000, 70,000 pinball machines in their careers collectively. Right.
    84:45
    As the, you know, as the design duo of Dwight and Steve. Right. So I think that I don't, you know, I don't care who you are. Everything isn't, you know, 100% of the time you're not going to get it right. And it's just the nature of doing work, right? So everybody gets to, you know, everybody gets to, if you're not making mistakes, it's because you're not doing anything, right? But my vision is to grow the studio from the standpoint of I want game guys through and through. I want game guys in every position because I think that's what's going to make – that's what's going to deliver great games. I mean, I have game guys that are mechanical engineers, right? And they play the game just like a software engineer would. they understand the game and they focus on their piece of their contribution to making the games right it's not a it's not the notion of treating a game that way is not unique to the software discipline I guess is what I was trying to convey and so just really then on Batman 66 I think the latest we had was 0.93 and I think very soon you're going to see 9-4 and we have a list of all the stuff that has to be finished and he's not doing anything except diligently working on that stuff to get to a feature complete he's got a very clear vision in his head about he's said it many times that he wants to you know, he wants to feel like he wants the game to feel like when he came home from school and he watched you know those Batman episodes back in the day And so he really done a tremendous job of sort of preserving or if you will adapting the episodes to the notion of this Tamama Shane, right? And, you know, he's going to do it justice, I think. Well, you said at TPS that you really wanted this to be a machine that you'd want to have at home. Has it already reached that? For me, it has. You know, for me, it has. I mean, he's going to do all the minor villains justice, but at the level at which I play, you know, the game is on and off now. but I mean he's going to do all those minor villains justice and he's going to deliver on that and so I think that I mean the only reason I don't own one is because they've been they literally every time they fire up the assembly line to make them somebody else was somebody on the outside has their name on a game, but eventually it will. And the same thing with Lyman. I mean, they were scheduled to make his game and my game a couple of weeks ago, and there was demand from a customer, and so we always give up, you know, we'll always give it up for our customers. So we essentially let, you know, it's like, hey, next time they run them. So that's kind of, but yes, I'm definitely going to own it. And so speaking of then designers, developers, Brian Eddy is now joining the team.
    88:39
    Yep. How did that come about? Like, I mean, how was it that was the right time to get him back to pinball?
    88:46
    Well, it's a combination of things. I mean, so I want, you know, I want top talent, right? I mean, I want every guy in the studio to be top talent. And it was the right opportunity because I had the need to go get another designer.
    89:09
    And at the same time, his life, you know, he was at a point in his life where he wanted to come back and do pinball. And so it was the right, but him and I, you know, him and I were old friends and we'd been talking for a long time. And so it was just a matter of, you know, we got to get his life schedule and our needs in this thing, you know, kind of aligned. And that's really what happened.
    89:39
    I mean, for someone like Brian, who kind of was responsible for, you know, three kind of very well-received in the pinball community games, but not necessarily sales-wise.
    89:51
    Is there a period where he needs to kind of like relearn what he was doing back in the day by maybe working on another game that might be kind of incomplete or work with someone, or does he go straight into designing his new game? No, he's working on designing his new game, and I trust him.
    90:13
    Him and I have been in a lot of places. We were at Midway leading video game teams for a while, so I have a lot of trust in Brian. I think if he's learning anything, he's learning what the market is today, what the business is today, because the business is a lot different than it was when he was making the deal and I was making Monster Bash. It was like, you know, that was a very different market.
    90:38
    And the requirements were very different. Unless he's learning things like, you know, how do you do this pro-premier-leaf thing? Man, that's not fair.
    90:47
    So there is that, right? I mean, so I think that, but I think that, but in terms of the creative and stuff, I have a lot of faith in him. You know, I mean, he was, yeah, he's always had a really good game sense. Does he ever desire to work with Lyman Sheets again? Because, I mean, those two kind of massive games. I mean, I think eventually you'll see those guys together. I think at some point, you know, you'll see those guys together. Yeah. Okay. Cool. I know you can't give away too much information. I mean, that's another thing I want to kind of touch on. I mean, I'm not sure what it was like, you know, in the 90s and the early 2000s. But, you know, right now, it seems like in the industry, it's very hard to keep a secret about, you know, which game is coming and which game isn't. Like, you know, you recently touched on Godzilla and there's also Alvira, which, you know, Stern have usually never commented on games that aren't kind of already available to sell. But, you know, your hand might have been forced because of other situations. So do you find that possibly, you know, detrimental to sales for people to know the next possible six games that are coming through? Like, do you like the element of surprise in your marketing strategy?
    92:06
    Yeah, I think so. A lot of people don't understand what that's about. So I'll tell you a little bit about it.
    92:15
    So some of it is that, like all companies, we, you know, we have marketing rollout plans for every product. And that means that the products need to be presented to – remember that we don't sell direct to the customer. We sell through a dealer and distributor network. And they have to do some amount of planning to expect the product, learn how to sell the product, et cetera. So it's a variety of different things. some of the, you know, some of the concerns about secrecy are about, I mean, here today, they're less about competition. Back in the day, they were more about that. You know, back in the Willie days, they were more about not tipping your hand at what you were doing because of the competition. Nowadays, that's less significant because we have such a large piece of the market. But I think it's more about the sales and marketing guys want to have, you know, they want the roll-up plan to occur as a plan, not haphazardly. And it also impacts the game that you're selling. So if you're selling this game and you're going to introduce another game, you may slow the sales of the current game. You may, you may not, you know, depending on how that game is received. But it's when we sell a game, remember that we're not just selling the game. we're supporting the entire dealer and distributor network to help them move the product through. And so we have to be, and part of providing that support is essentially when this is the title we're selling, this is the only title we're selling. We're not, you know, we may be backfilling other titles that are in demand, but they're not titles that are going to impact.
    94:08
    Everyone always gravitates to the brand new shiny thing. And so the introduction or the premature introduction of a title may have some influence on the current title. In the case of the Deadpool League, it didn't really matter much, but it was very far ahead of the launch.
    94:28
    And, you know, it really just created, you know, everybody as I think you guys were the ones that said, you know, this game is just going to be filler or whatever. and so that particularly didn't have that much impact. So what we're hearing is you're saying, thank you for us having really low expectations.
    94:51
    But I also think that it's because... So I did the Stern Factory Tour recently and I guess it's probably because of the size that you are. You've built in some sort of flexibility in relation to what's on the line and how quickly you can go between different titles. Is that why? No, that's unique to us, and that's actually an asset.
    95:19
    Something I didn't touch on is that there are contractual issues with the licensor relative to, and that's also a big deal. some licensors some of those contracts some of that relationship how you handle that relationship is they expect you to act professionally and to act as you plan together meaning that when we have a meeting with a licensor they understand when we expect to release the title when we expect to announce the title in some cases they're actually helping us with the announcements and things and so So, you know, that, so I think that most of the things that you refer to, the early leaking of games and stuff, what that does is it actually impacts a bunch of business things more so than the development teams or the day-to-day operations of making the game. The thing that you were just talking about is something that's very unique to us in that we have a tremendous amount of capacity to be flexible as a manufacturing company.
    96:35
    And so it's not unlike, it's not unusual to have two different games running on the assembly lines and have two additional games being staged to follow those games. And so, like right now, we're, you know, there's, I think there's some, there might be Metallica's on one of the lines and Deadpool's on the other line, you know. So, and that's a, you know, I mean, that's a feat. I mean, the notion of not only, I mean, if you think about this, this is the thing that none of the other guys have figured out, right? It's like you need to manage your cash flow, you need to manage your inventory, and you need to, that material control, the notion of I spend a million dollars on parts, I have to get those parts in, I have to effectively execute on getting those parts through my building and out the door is a finished game in order to recover my million dollars, right? That's the thing. They don't know how to do it yet. Well, at the same time, you also have to have your next kind of game waiting in the wings, right? Yeah, I don't even know. I said yet, but I'm not sure they'll ever figure it out. But that's a big deal. That's like our entire business runs around the notion of material control. It's because it's manufacturing, right? And that is the nature of manufacturing. And if you talk to anyone who mass produces anything, and they're going to tell you that. They're going to tell you that if you're not paying attention to that side of the nuts and bolts, you know, you don't stand a prayer. I mean... How does Stern grow then? How does Stern grow from, I mean, you kind of talk about your window of opportunity and you want to do three games a year. So how does Stern grow without, Is there room to make four new games a year, or do you tap it at three and say, let's try and tap into different markets with the higher-end stuff and the boutique brands and stuff like that?
    98:37
    I think growth is an easy thing to accommodate for us because we have the infrastructure in place to do it. So, um, but this growth come from, from making more games that, that you, you know, selling more of what you're producing or selling more titles, right? It's a combination of things. It's like, first of all, we, um, we approach, we approach every segment of the business as essentially a profit center, meaning that, that all of the, all of the different elements of the business have to do what they said they were going to do in their business plan. And that means that the key executives running that particular element of business have to plan adequately and have to execute on those plans in order to make the business successful. The overarching answer to your question is we are growing every element of the pinball business. So we are growing the traditional, you know, the number of gains that we make to satisfy those three, you know, those three titles a year is increasing every year. But there are other elements of the business that also help sustain that and grow it. If we manage to crack the code on the consumer business, that will be a business that will have to stand on its own, will grow the overall fortunes of the company. but it will also have to answer to the same set of performance criteria that I answer to now relative to those three titles, that the manufacturing guys answer to relative to their day rates, that the guy that runs the accessories program answers to, that the guy that runs the virtual side answers to. You know what I mean? So everybody has to deliver on the things that, as a company, we've agreed on. I'm going to contribute X amount of dollars to the bottom line. Well, I have to deliver on that. And every piece, every segment of the business that's considered a contributing profit center has to do that. So, what I'm hearing from you, you've got a really, really deep understanding of the Stern business beyond just designing a pinball machine. It's my job. I'm a senior level executive running the company, so it's like a yes, you know me as a pinball designer, but I'm an executive vice president, chief creative officer. I mean, they hold me accountable for the performance of my business center, which is the century product developer. So, would you want to run the company one day? That's an interesting question. I don't know.
    101:34
    Well, I don't know. Why not? You know, it's an interesting question. You know, I know a lot about my piece of it.
    101:43
    It sounds like your piece of it is, well, I mean, we don't know because we're just sitting here on our computers, but it sounds like your piece of it is pretty complete. Like, you understand how the whole business runs? Yeah. Yeah, I have an understanding of the business.
    102:04
    I think that, you know, I'm not sure. I mean, it's an interesting question. I don't know. Maybe in some future. I don't know. Okay.
    102:19
    You obviously have any position you're in, right? Like with designing as well. Yeah, and it sounds like your role is varied and fulfilling. I don't know, it just came to my mind because I think a lot of people would see you as the design guy. You're now head of design and development.
    102:38
    But to have that kind of, you've touched on a couple of things, commercial awareness, production awareness, leadership awareness. It's a bit of a triple threat when it comes to management. Yeah, you know, somebody has to, I think that, I like to think I'm good at what I do, and I'm very, right now, I mean, I have my hands full doing what I do. so it's interesting you know you asked about the game right and the reason the game is so much fun to do is beyond the fact that it's fun to do games is because it's a very it's a very different set of skills than all of the you know remember I talked about you know some portion of my job is strategy, strategy is fun but some portion of my job is transactional meaning that you know I come to work and there's a line of manufacturing guys standing outside my office with a problem, and I have to help them solve their problem, right? So the days here are very full. And I think that maybe one day I will miss this, but sometimes I think to myself, man, I tell you what, I just, I touch a lot of stuff, you know. I mean, it's like I touch a lot of different elements of the company, areas of the company.
    104:13
    I deal, sometimes I, you know, I have to deal with sales and marketing issues. Sometimes I deal with manufacturing issues. Sometimes a lot of my day is dealt with. I deal with product development issues and manufacturing issues. I don't know a lot about, you know, we have really good finance people. I don't know a lot about their world other than the high, you know, sort of high concept what they do in terms of managing the cash and stuff. But the nuts and bolts of accounting are not my strength. And I think a lot of chief executives have way more understanding of that than I do. Okay. Because there's more facets than we know. Yeah. George, it's been amazing talking to you. I mean, we've gone for almost two hours, and it seems like five minutes. And it's funny because you've been around for so long that, you know, we could go for another two or three hours just talking about pinball, and we didn't even touch on all your previous designs. And, you know, I've got questions here about crazy bobs. I just watched Journey to Money for the first time. And it's just like a wealth of, I guess, knowledge. And, yeah, we just want to thank you for coming on the show to kind of get a, you know. It's been fun. But anytime you want to do it, you know, we can do it. For sure. That's awesome. Great. Maybe, well, you kind of hinted that maybe next year you've influenced design. So whenever you want to come on, we'll see then. Yep. All right, George. All right, guys. Thanks a lot. See you, man. Bye.
    105:47
    So, Ryan, that was George Gomez. And you know what? We learned a lot, didn't we? Yeah, we did. He really opened up. And I'm glad that we got him on our show. You know, like a tick. That's another one off the list. It was a massive tick. And I kind of guess I really liked that he was very candid. Like, we pretty much asked every question, and he answered them all, and he was very open. There was a lot of new information there. You really sort of got, I guess, a bit of an insight into Stern and how they operate and what their business model is like and their production schedules. Yeah, it was pretty cool. the bit that kind of stood out the most to me, like overall, and it wasn't one single thing he said. I know it wasn't one single thing he said. He said, like, we want to be all things pinball.
    106:37
    So it kind of proves that, like, they're in the best position because of their manufacturing facility and because of their employees. They can experiment.
    106:46
    Yes, but they also can let other people experiment, is what I'm trying to get at, right? Because they are, they do do little experiments, and the worst of them don't. the best experiment for them is for someone else to release a pinball machine that works, like TNA, for example, or whatever, like say Mafia, say that sells really well. I'm just hypotheticals, right? They can enter that space, and they don't need to spend the R&D money necessarily if somebody enters a new space they didn't think about.
    107:16
    But they will be in the best position to capitalize on it because of their manufacturing facility. unless it's some revolutionary thing if Deep Root is doing some like insane thing that nobody saw coming. But if it requires them to change the tooling around of something, then they can be there, right? And they can ship more games than anyone else. Yeah, absolutely. You're right. They are just in absolutely the best position to go, you know what, it's working. Quickly get into action. And 12 months later, you've got a pinball machine in production.
    107:43
    Yeah. Or maybe eight. But anyway. Yeah, very good. So thank you, George, for coming on. That was awesome.
    107:50
    What else do we have news this week, Marnie? Well, we have news that there's another person, well, I guess, I don't know whether you'd say they're going to Deep Root, but Paul Farris, legendary artist, pinball artist, is joining the Deep Root team. Yep, Dennis Nordman announced it on Pinside, and I guess on Facebook as well, and I don't think Dennis has ever worked with him before, but he's worked on such games as Center, What else, Marnie? Paragon.
    108:22
    Yeah. Lots of the hole is somewhere. We probably could just IPDB this, but, you know, he's got a distinct hand-drawn art style. So, you know, with Dennis saying that, you know, ultimately it's a dream theme that he's creating for pinball, he's sort of saying that Paul Barris really is the guy to do the art for it. Yeah, can't wait to see what Dennis comes up with because, yeah.
    108:54
    Dream theme, the original theme, he hasn't been able to do it for the last, you know, 10 plus years anywhere since he left Williams. So let's see what he comes up with. Yeah. What else we got? We got Pinball Magazine number five is finally in production. Jonathan Houston joined us, geez, I think it was a couple of months ago at least and talked about him kind of finalising the interview with Wayne Nines.
    109:17
    How many pages is it, Marty? Did he announce how many pages it was, or is that still a mystery? That's still a bit of a mystery, I think. Yeah.
    109:25
    I think there's a competition on Facebook. I think it's the most pages out of any book that he's ever done.
    109:33
    So, yeah, it includes stories about Scott D'Anessi, Jack Danger, Randy Peck. I don't know who those people are. It's an interview on Doug Sikor before he left CGC. Yeah, Gary Stern. He discusses Stern Pinball's current business model. Well, sorry. We got the scoop on that. We got the scoop a while ago. Yeah, we did. So Mike Pupo from Flipper Fidelity, he discusses upgrading speakers in your pinball machine. Cool. Talking about interviews, there is a podcast we've mentioned before called the Special When Lit Podcast. They have a huge Steve Ritchie interview coming up. They went there in person to the CERN factory and interviewed him, and that is coming up. I think they release on Thursday, Australian time, so I guess that's like Wednesday night in the U.S. So I will link their Facebook or podcast garden page and have a listen to that. That's a very big interview. Steve doesn't often talk to podcasters and stuff because, you know, he's got some hearing problems and this and that, but they went there in person. So, yeah, I did talk to Ken a little bit about it, and he was very happy with the interview. So we look forward to talking about that next week. Yeah, looking forward to it.
    110:52
    Elvira? Yeah. I don't get these show notes sometimes, but Elvira. So Elvira is coming out. When do we know Elvira is going to come out? What's the schedule? We don't know. What I was just thinking is that, you know, I thought it would be cool for people to email in, this is the email of the week kind of thing, right? Yeah, that's it, go. Email in and try and guess what the next Alvira game is going to be called. The first one was Alvira and the Party Monsters. The next one was Skedstiff. Let's pretend this one is called Alvira and Zard. For the purposes of this email, otherwise it'll just be a dreadful segment, fairly. So I just write an email and with the title of Alvira and the subject line is alvira and the dot, dot, dot, and you give us what you think would be... What do you think it's going to be called? I don't... This is not a bit. I don't have any funny lines or one-liners or anything. I want people to come up with the content. So alvira and the something. And don't try and make it like alvira and the monster party something. Just funny stuff. Just make it funny. Just be funny. And I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll sweeten the deal, Ryan. Yes? we'll do a random draw for anybody that writes in and I'll send you a packet of critical hit cards. Can you hear this?
    112:20
    That was the cards in my hand, just so you know. Sure. It wasn't anything else. And so, Ryan. Yes? There was a leak this week.
    112:30
    It's one of these things where, you know what, sometimes art gets leaked and it gets around And so we saw on Pinside this week and then subsequent forums everywhere, a couple of pictures of monsters.
    112:47
    It really was just the cabinet art, right? Yes, cabinet art. And I think these are old pictures. They are old pictures. Everyone's had them for ages. They're subject to change, so don't get excited about anything because things could change. I mean, it could be exactly the same, but the Ali has, I think, one of the nicest kind of art packages around. And I asked someone what they thought of it after today's leaks, and they didn't like it at all. Yeah. Because I think it's the best ever, you know, because I think if you had an Ali, that's like, wow, that's so different, and that's just like so classic, and the brass kind of trim on it, especially the door, if they did that, would be amazing. Some people were like, oh, I don't like that it's black and white. So I don't know. I mean, look, you know, it was doing the rounds at Pemburg. There you go. I've said it, and people were talking about it, and it was kind of like that. There was a lot of people that were saying, no, don't like the LE, and some people were saying, I really like the LE because that's really unique, and it sort of gives it this really sort of classy look. Well, we're not really classy people, Ryan. No, I would buy it, basically. You're not a classy person, Ryan. is what I was really saying. That was a subtext about it. I'm the least classy person ever, but I like classy looking stuff.
    114:06
    This is one thing I want to talk about quickly. A lot of people on Pinside are saying this is an intentional leak by Stern to stop the sales of Monster Bash. That's rubbish. It's not only that it's not, Marty. It actually got me angry. And this is my problem in life, is that I get angry when I try to convince someone that something isn't the way it is, and I'm absolutely wasting my time. Some people can't be convinced, right? I get it. But, okay, the reason why is, as you said, these pictures have been floating around for ages. Hundreds of people had them at Pimberg, and it existed months before that, okay? So you're telling me that hundreds of people had it, and it just happens to leak out at this particular moment, and that was on purpose by Stern, by the PR guy, Zach Sharp, who just had a kid. Congratulations, Zach. Oh, congratulations, man. He concocted that. He's just like, all right, I'm going to have a kid, and a week later, that's the perfect time, guys. Yeah, because we're going to stick it to CGC. Like, they wouldn't care. Come on. It's so dumb. It's so effing dumb. It got me so angry. And it's just like, like people are writing these fucking conspiracy theories on Pinside, and everyone's uprooting it. Like, yes, it's too much of a coincidence. So I'm just like, fuck it. If you want to be dumb, just be fucking dumb. Yeah, I know. And then people were trying to say a particular person that had leaked it. He didn't. It's been around for ages, guys. It's just one of those things that just got into their hands. It was Stern gave it to him on purpose so that he could be like the pretend bad guy. Oh, come on, guys. The problem with conspiracy theories is that the more you tell someone that it's not a conspiracy theory, the more it makes them believe it's a conspiracy theory. What would you know? Yeah, come on, guys. Just, I don't know, just wait. It's coming. We all know it's Munsters, right? You don't need to see the art now. Just, I don't know, wait. I mean, look, I get excited like everybody else, right? I get excited. I want to see what it looks like. And, you know, as I said, when I heard that these were leaked on Pinside, I went, oh, my God, oh, my God, I've got to go in there. Is it going to be the play field? And it wasn't. It was the cabinet art. And I went, oh, well, I've seen those before. They look great. Nothing more. So I'm like everybody where, you know, I'm kind of excited about what's coming because it is pinball and we really get excited about pinball. We just really do. But sometimes we've just got to wait in the truck.
    116:37
    See what I did there? See how I did that? It came eventually. Yeah, it's not the play field. I mean, you know, she's Deadpool, you know, the entire play field league, so we knew what that was going to look like. and I think that's worse of a leak because people make judgments on this shirt's not going to work and this is that and it's there and it's that. What can you say about the art? Either you like it or you don't, but actually, what am I saying? I mean, most people are buying on art anyway, right? Well, they are,
    117:07
    but I think what you're saying is they're buying on an image. They're buying on a picture and usually that picture has the layout at least and I know you can't really tell what a game looks like until you play it, but a layout gives you some sort of indication. And I've talked about it.
    117:29
    Familiarity is something that people sort of like. But it's never been the be-all and end-all. One of the examples I'll give is Ghostbusters. Ghostbusters got absolute rave reviews based on the pictures and then people played it and went, OK, that's not quite right.
    117:50
    People saw, what was it, Walking Dead. Similar sort of thing. They went, the art looks great, but the prize, it's not so great. Game of Thrones, that looks terrible, but it played great. So you can never really tell until you actually play it. Yeah. So what you can tell from this is that whoever the artist is, and it looks like Frenchy, because that's his kind of style. It looks amazing.
    118:19
    One of Stern's best assets, I think, in terms of art. But, I mean, that's the art leaked. I mean, I don't think anything else is going to leak. I mean, there are, I believe, some more pictures than I remember of the play field of art and stuff, but you're not getting anything that you really haven't seen. So hopefully that's it until it actually comes out. Well, the only other point I just want to make is that and look, it's only my opinion so, I think a lot of people I've spoken to agree with me in that Deadpool, from the leaked image to what it is now, has really turned people around and a lot of people want that machine now and the parallel I'm drawing here is, people have been quite a little bit cool on the Munsters things, you've got some, there are some pockets of massive fans that are looking forward to it. For the most part, people are sort of going, I don't really get the theme. But you whack a fantastic art package and a great layout on it. That'll redeem that machine for sure. Yeah, and we think that Munsters is next. And George kind of hinted when I asked him, is this the new route that CERN are taking where, you know, maybe less on the play field, toys-wise, but more shots and more flow? And he kind of said, you know, I think you're going to be surprised with our next game. So, you know, it's a very small kind of response that you can draw off that. But, you know, if what he's saying fits into that, then Munsters might have a lot of necks, a lot of toys. I mean, you know, there's rumors here and there. But you know what? Let Deadpool have its time in the sun, and maybe we can talk some Munsters rumors closer to Expo. I'll be real for sure. Yeah.
    120:00
    Anyway, I'm talking about Deadpool as well. I mean, it has been getting around. I mean, it's funny that it's just everywhere now in the U.S. and Canada.
    120:11
    Not in Australia. There's not going to be any in Australia for a while. But people are being asked, talking to people who have reviewed it, I'm not sure what's – usually it's like, you know, Ghostbusters. Oh, yeah, it's brutal. Ball jumps over the lane. Star Wars. You know, like a lot of people, like 80% of people will have roughly the same opinion. With Deadpool, it's complete opposite. that there's people that are saying it plays clunky. There's people that are saying that it's the best George Gamers design ever in terms of flow. And remember, he did Lord of the Rings and Monster Bash. There's people that are saying it plays too long. There's people that are saying it plays too short. There's people saying it's brutal, too easy. It's deep. It's not deep. I've heard everything. So I don't know what to think about this machine. I'm just going to have to play it. But as I said, it's still a while away.
    121:00
    How can a game be all those things, Marnie? probably because it's just not a conventional layout. So it's not going to behave the way that people expect is probably my only take from that. The clunky one was the one that caught me the most. I mean, people saying that the rules aren't deep now doesn't surprise me. No, that's... They haven't finished the rules yet. The brutal and too easy, that can be changed with Outlane, so I don't care about that. But, yeah, the clunky one is the only one where I think it didn't look clunky at all on the stream. So I think it's just up to the operator or whoever played that game to set it up similar to how Stern set it up. And George hinted that it likes to be played fast. So I'm guessing that was jacked up at, like, seven and a half degrees instead of six and a half. And maybe the flipper power turned up. I don't know. But I guess it's just a matter of mucking around for settings on that one. And so CGC, Ryan, that's who they are.
    122:11
    They've asked people to test their machine. What could they possibly need to test, Ryan? I had this conversation during the week, and someone said to me, well, what are they going to be able to change? Like, if there's something fundamentally wrong, I don't understand what they're trying to gain by getting people to test it unless they just want people to come and play it, the word gets out that it's great and it builds a bit of hype.
    122:40
    Yeah, it's weird because this is not a new game. It's not Stern saying, hey, we've got game number seven this year coming out. Come and play it. Everyone goes crazy.
    122:49
    Everyone knows what to kind of expect. Saying that, I mean, it was last week or the week before that I said every time I go up to Attack on Mars Remake, I'm blown away because I keep on forgetting how different it looks and feels to the original, which I have at home. So I guess it's probably just some wow factor. But I did try and get someone to make some comments about it, but everyone signed an NDA and he was a little bit shy, and I respect that. I don't think we're going to get the modified code. And I don't mean – what I heard, and it was never going to be modified code in the sense of press this button, it's original code, press this button and it's a completely different game.
    123:31
    My... The rumor that I got was it was a slightly different code. And the person I talked to said that they didn't notice anything different, but maybe they missed that.
    123:42
    So, anyway, it's an interesting thing. Speaking of new games, have you noticed that there's now some videos up there of the Mafia pinball? Yes, I watched less than five minutes of the stream and I can confirm that it is better than Thunderbirds.
    124:03
    Without playing Thunderbirds. Without playing Thunderbirds, you can just tell. It didn't look that bad, but that was literally less than five minutes. I'm not sure if it just gets super repetitive after that. I did notice a lot of the same call-outs in that five-minute period. Yeah. But... I think the thing I was surprised about was I was expecting it to be like a really snappy game, but it's not. but it's actually sort of like an EM that's got really weak flippers and the whole bumpers are really weak. But I think it's intentional. It was at a show. No, no, no. I actually think that's intentional. I think that's the style that they've gone for is sort of like an EM, sort of a Gottlieb of the time where, you know, you could get the ball up the top, but it wasn't really all that often. It wasn't like, let's say, a Williams of the time where they had those really powerful flippers. It was more like a Gottlieb that, you know, had sort of pop-upers that were sort of a bit limp. That's nigger than my review of the game is saying that you're comparing it to a Gottlieb with weak flippers. Well, what I'm actually really comparing it to is an EM Gottlieb. And EM Gottliebs had weak flippers. They weren't about all-out power. That was sort of Williams of the time. They were the ones that had the really strong flippers. because Gottliebs were just, you know, like that. Were you playing pinball machines in the 70s? Yes, I was. How old are you? Fuck, mate.
    125:34
    Okay, I don't know. I thought you might just be talking about playing the EMs now, but, you know, I was about to say, maybe they're just weak now because people don't really be able to flip them. No. I don't know. I started playing pinball on EMs. There's my age. What age did you first play pinball? Do you know that? Like, what year, sorry? Do you know the year? No, I'm not going to tell you, but it was, I would say, 74, 75? Fuck, I was minus 10 years old.
    126:05
    It's well established. I'm old, right? There you go. Talking about EMs that aren't EMs that actually sold States of the Chimes, Dr. John and Emily, Dr. John is in Australia, in Queensland, and he picked up my SARS-CoV-2 machine. He has a show on YouTube where he first has his daughter, who's very good at pinball. She's 15 now. She's very good. Yep. And he hasn't done a video since February. And Dr. John said he has been enjoying Playing My Stars, and I can take it whenever I want. But, you know, I said, enjoy it, play it. You know, you pick it up for me. Without you, I wouldn't have got it. And I said, please make a Dr. John and Emily video on it. So I will link that in the show notes.
    126:47
    It's a pretty brutal game. The reason why I'm mentioning this is I pretty much want Ron and Bruce to watch it. Okay, it's only half an hour. And just email me or Dr. John and leave them everything that's wrong with it. Yeah, there's a lot. And how it can play better. And Dr. John's going to fix all of it for me. Thank you, Dr. John. He can fix sunken inserts?
    127:11
    Does it have sunken inserts? I don't know. Maybe. He doesn't. All I noticed was about three or four lights that were intermittent, but, you know, Ron and Bruce are, like, insanely obsessed with this game, so they will tell him how to dial it in. Yeah, it's not a great game. It looks quite fun, Marty. Okay, cool.
    127:31
    How's your Quicksilver going? Shut the fuck up. How's your Meteor? Stop asking me this. Oh, freaking... This is... Look. Oh, Ryan. I have time. Someone gave me a free Dirty Harry. Why would I be my garage fixing machine if I can play Dirty Harry? But this is the problem. If these games were so good, you would be saying, Dirty Harry, you can sit in the corner. I've got these games that are just... I'm obsessed with... I don't... I go through phases. I don't want to work on pinball machines at the moment. No, I know. But, okay. How often do you play Sea Witch?
    128:11
    Even before you had Dirty Harry. I'm also unsatisfied with how it plays. Everything works on it, but I need it to play. You know. No. Hey, when I fix certain things on Sea Witch, I spent like a week non-stop playing it, like two hours a day. That was for a week, and then what happened after? Marty, ask me when the last time I played Star Trek. The last time I played Star Trek is when I got to Enterprise and Mok, and I haven't switched on since. What I'm hearing, and what the listeners are hearing, you've got to hear. I am fucking aware. Why do you think I'm putting them on site? Okay? Make some money, but I'm not playing yet. Holy shit. I am aware. And yet, I still have one spot free. What do you want, Marty? You want the quick spill?
    128:56
    What do you want? Tell me what you want. Let's move it on. What do you want, Marty? Don't be a bitch. Come on, what do you want? I don't know. What have you got that I would want? Oh, Simpson's not partying. I don't have that It's out making money I'm saying I don't know Lord of the Rings Yeah Lord of the Rings I'd love Lord of the Rings Come and get it Alright Done You heard it Right here I'm not delivering it to you guys Come and get it I'll pick it up Easy Thanks Andy Done I'm Andy's sexmobile Oh god So Brian You know we've been doing this podcast For some time and I feel it's getting, you know, a little bit stale. Sure, we're getting the best people in the industry on week after week, but, you know, the stuff after it's getting a little bit stale. I think it's time that we introduced a new segment. It's time for the best segment in pinball podcasting ever, Social Media Watch, where Ryan and Marty... That's it. I know. Ryan and Marty scour Instagram Twitter and Facebook for you and give you the best of the best stories so you don have to waste your life on social media Social media watch social media watch
    130:19
    That's the best intro ever. I didn't mean, I know, that was just, yeah, anyway, okay. First story, Marty. Hex. Who is Hex, Marty? Hex is, so there's actually a video, I don't even know whether it's still on, but a long-standing TV show called Good Game. and it's a video game show. It goes for about half an hour and they talk about video games pretty much and sort of consoles, old games, you know.
    130:53
    This is a long story, Marty. She's a good-looking female that's into video games. That's all you need to say. Insanely. She's like the Jack Danger of video games. She really is. So her name's Stephanie Bendixson and she goes by the name Hex and she's also my bit of a crush on her. So many people are in love with her, Marty. I really do. Anyway. She's just amazing. She just comes across so nice. Anyway. She's nice. So she came down to Melbourne and did a bit of a, sort of a tour of some of the hidden bars and sort of gaming sort of barcades and all that kind of stuff. And she played your machine. Yeah. She went to Pinball Paradise in the city where I've got some of my machines, and she pretended she didn't know where the door was, and she went in, and she saw all the machines there. And which machine did she go to, Marty? She went to the one that blinded her the most, I would say. Exactly. You can see in the video, there's all these dark machines, and then there's this sun in the corner. My Game of Thrones. Do you know why it's so bright, Marty? Because I don't know how to use pin stadiums, and you've left it like, I don't know what's happened, but it's on maximum settings. with some blind your fucking eye settings or burn your retina settings. And I probably should tone it down a little bit, but I don't know how to sync it to my phone. You've got to help me out with that. Oh, I can help you out there. I'm going to ask you to say goodbye. Anyway, we're just saying this so you can link it in the show notes. More important news, okay, on social media. Keith Alwyn, okay, the guy always in sandals. This broke the internet. In sandals and fucking shorts. Jeans shorts, jorts. Jorts. Yeah. He was wearing a suit, Marty. What's going on? Well, you say that. We did see this picture of Keith Irwin in a suit, but I like to think that because we only really saw waist up, he's still wearing shorts. I don't want him to change and shatter the illusion. He's wearing shorts for sure. And sandals.
    132:56
    Why was Keith wearing a suit? We will never know. We will never know, but thank you for making our day, Keith.
    133:05
    Made my week. Okay, Vox. Vox is like some social media, I think it's like part of the Lifehacker group. Anyway, they post videos on YouTube and social media and this clip got almost a million hits and it was about pinball isn't as random as it seems. It was actually a very well-produced video. Yeah, it was. Yep. The only thing that I kind of laughed at is they called a scoop. I mean, they got everything right, right? It's very, very uncommon for that to happen. But they called a scoop a shoot. And I just want to call that from now on. I want to point to people and say,
    133:42
    shoot the shoot. Shoot the shoot. Shoot. Shoot the shoot. Like, what? Shoot the shoot. Let's get this trending.
    133:51
    Hashtag shoot the shoot. Shoot the shoot. I'm not going to call the episode George Graham's interview. It's just going to be hashtag shoot the shoot. Shoot the shoot.
    133:58
    without money. Well, so we also saw on the Spooky page that Charlie and the Spooky crew, they've actually shipped three Houdini machines to Europe. And this is what he said. So why would three of these be in our games at the Spooky Pinball World Headquarters? Because it can help us, them, and a guy in Europe get games to customers. Said it before, we'll say it again, helping each other is how it should be. Not just in daily life, but business as well. I wonder if there's going to be a Toopy Award this year. Your business is going to go down.
    134:33
    Come on. Nice guys don't do that. I wonder if there's going to be a Toopy Award for the nicest guy in Pimble. Yep. And just give it to Charlie every single year. Yep, absolutely. People will be like, hey, excuse me, I'm nice too. Like, no, you're nice, but you're not Charlie Emery nice.
    134:51
    What else? We talked about it before. We talked about it before, but Zach Sharp, congratulations, had a baby this week. So, well done.
    135:00
    Congratulations, your penis works. That's what it means you have a baby. That means they're still operational. So, well done. You can still breed. Well done.
    135:12
    Jeff from the Pinball Podcast posted a picture that russax is a thing in Australia and the US, but he found moose sax. So, I'm not sure if they're real, but they seem a lot larger than kangaroos are. Well, you'd expect them to be. Yeah. And the last story to cap off this amazing new segment that we will probably scat next week.
    135:39
    Steve Bowden. Yeah. I think he's actually now moved, hasn't he? He's actually moved to Texas, and I think he's left. His gear is on its way, but he still hasn't done something right.
    135:58
    He won a Game of Thrones premium a couple of years ago and he still hasn't unboxed it and he's now probably paying a moving company to move it on the other side of the country. Steve, open it or sell it. Just do what Raven Davidson does. He sold his WWE heli before he even got it. For 500 bucks. Five, yeah.
    136:19
    Just stick it on a boat over to Australia. We'll take it. We'll talk to you. Marty will take it. He loves Game of Thrones. I do. Oh, I really do love Game of Thrones. I think that... I've said it before. I just think that maturity... Love Steve Ritchie. I do. I wish I could interview him one day. Well, now you're going to have to wait a very long time because they apparently ask every single question. Every question. Okay.
    136:42
    That's it. Time for Flames up 100, Marty. Yep. Can I just say, that was an amazing segment. I hope I never have to do that again. It's just It's a way for us To Just mention All the little shitty stories Yeah So guys Just put all your stuff On Facebook We'll just compile it All into that section There's a way You can get your name Into this podcast It was literally Keith Ellin in a suit I was just like How can I bring this up There's no other way For me to bring it up You literally said to me Well boy And you're going I'm just doing this As an excuse to mention That Keith Ellin was in a suit And I went okay Well let's put some other stuff In there Hilarious Spam us up 100 Marty How did you go? Yeah. Well, yeah. Mark Ritchie. That still makes me laugh. I think I managed to get 44% of the vote purely because of my Mark Ritchie chant. Otherwise, it would have been 10%. Dino's just a really, it's an okay game, but it's just, it's just a game. I remember playing it a lot when it came out. And I never really loved it. Have you played it since, Marnie? Surely you've played it since. Yeah, I have. And, you know, I sort of said it in my argument. People sort of always compare that to Taxi because they actually do have quite a similar layout.
    138:08
    I'd rather play Taxi over Dyna. Okay. So you had Indy 500 with 56% of the vote. It's easily the better game. I agree even though I know nothing about Dynum okay it just once again proves that we're just doing this for shits and giggles and the debating has absolutely nothing to do with the phone yeah so I've you know we're almost going to get to the final act I think we've done probably about maybe 60 or 70 of them really? okay yeah well we have an option we can either just call it quits when we get to that or we can then say all the winners go into a group of 50 and then in a group of 25. Or we can just reshuffle them and just say they can be paired up differently. Oh, we're just going to do this forever, are we, mate? Yeah, of course. A lot of people told me that they like this segment, so why not? All right. Let's do this.
    139:05
    Please generate a number from 0 to 100. All right. 51. Ripley's Leave It or Not. I know so much about that game. Keep going down. Yeah, you've never played it.
    139:24
    Please generate a number for Zero to 100. Coming right up. 55. Stern, Pirates of the Caribbean. Okay.
    139:39
    Cool. For everyone listening and seeing that took one go, So, this has been about 15 minutes. I'm very tired after that. We definitely need to find a better way to do it. Okay.
    139:51
    Ripley's Believe It or Not. What can I say? Released in March 2004. This was Pat Lawler's design. So, he had a little break from Williams and he was contracted to CERN and he brought out this brilliant design. He's got his legendary scoop that you shoot the ball into and you can select your, you know, given your missions, you travel all around the world.
    140:11
    Great trust satisfaction. It's a Pat Lawler design. What do you want to know about Pat Lawler? I want to know how it plays, Ryan.
    140:18
    Like every Pat Lawler game, you've got a shot down the side to hit a side ramp, and you've got two flippers, and all the shots are where they're meant to be. Is that how you felt when you played it? I have actually played this game, Arnie. I know you think I haven't played it. I have played it. It's one of Mrs. Pinn's favourite machines, and that is enough to get you vote. Ripley's Believe It or Not. Believe It or Not is going to kick my ass.
    140:39
    Okay. Okay? All right. So let's talk Pirates of the Caribbean. So it's probably one of these underrated games where, you know, Dennis Nordman designed. We spoke to him about it. He's an amazing guy. The nicest person in pinball. So you need to give it a vote just for Dennis Nordman. Nicest guy.
    141:02
    But the layout, the layout is actually really great. It's got some really satisfying shots. It's got the ramp that goes up into the, you know, the disc that spins around to get you to a two-year multi-ball.
    141:17
    It's got the reverse ramp that comes back to the right flipper. It's got a really interesting skill shot section up the top. But really, it's just got the best toy in pinball ever. That ship, yes, Ryan, it's better than the castle in Medieval Madness. that ship in Pirates of the Caribbean is just such a wow factor. It just, you know, rocks back and forth. It goes up and it sinks. It's an amazing game. I really like the rules as well. Not too complicated. Easy to stack multiballs. Great sound as well. I think this is a great game. I'd own this.
    142:01
    That's really funny. on the pin side page for Ripley's Believe It or Not the game quote is looks like a bad slot machine what? that's not a game quote?
    142:15
    does that get said in the game or is that someone's opinion on the game it looks like a bad slot machine I'm so confused Marty if Pirates of the Caribbean was so good you would have bought it when I linked you to one that was like a thousand dollars underneath the market value in Australia but you didn't buy it because guess what? Pirates of the Caribbean is an absolute smoothest.
    142:38
    It's like the most yellow on a playfield, second only probably to Game of Thrones. Yes, the ship is cool, but it's not cool when you're hitting it over and over and over again. And what did you say the other day when you were playing it with me, Marty? If you don't remember the rules, Marty, you hit the ship and you hit Tortuga. That's the fucking game, okay? That is the game. It's just you just stack those two multiballs, and what I said to you is tournament players hate this because there is a one compass award, the max jackpot value, and you only have one chance to get that. And if you get it and you drain, that's it. And there's no risk of war because you don't really get to choose the compass award. It gets given to you randomly, I believe. So you have one ball to jack your scrap and pipe to the Caribbean, and everything else is a slog. the ball is very soft start I don't hate the game but what did I get the other day mate I got 250 million on that game and it took 25 minutes and I was bored shitless by the time I was finished it's not exciting at all it's a very pretty almost I wouldn't call it a turd but it's borderline if you really do want to talk about turds just please forward about 5 minutes if you can So I have played And Shane as well Please don't miss him I've played Ripley's Believe It or Not So much And I've never enjoyed it And I think it Yes it is a patlola And maybe it is because I don't like patlolas But it's just got really awkward shots They don't flow well You never feel satisfied it's got really stupid rules it's got that very target please people it was never used again because it is such a terrible mech to have in a game it was used on a sense cracker which you said was awesome one week ago yeah but that was before this I said after Ryan are you not even listening to me I'm not listening no but the thing that really is the most annoying thing about this game is the sound. And Ryan, you are a sound guy. This game, you would toss this out into the street based on the sound alone. The freaking idle noises, the penguins. Oh my God. It is excruciating to listen to. It is just an abomination of sound is all it is. So it's a terrible game. just hate us. Who did the art for Ripley's? That, that's... I didn't even get to talk about that. The three by three grid, the ABC123, it's got like arrows pointing to it, like,
    145:33
    oh, but hey, art's not important, it's about... No, sound is, and sound is awful, and rules, rules are really good as well, and the rules on this are terrible. Absolutely terrible. I still think I'm in for the chance. Possibly But honestly guys If anybody has ever turned this machine on And listened to it It is so painful It is just awful Ryan Awful And you're a sound guy I'm telling you now If someone said Here you go Ryan You can have this machine for free Forever Don't even pay me a dollar You would not take it after playing one game okay no one I know has a Ripley so I guess that says something but I mean also only one person I know has a Aston Pirates anyway that's Llamasup100 we will put that on Facebook on Wednesday or Tuesday if in the US and you can vote for who had the best argument but no one cares about that it's just they're voting for their favorite machine so okay Marty How far are we in? Almost three hours. Yep. Time for us to talk about this week in pinball. Let's talk about our week in pinball. So, we did something. We did a couple of things together. The first thing that we did together was we went to your tournament.
    147:02
    Yep. My Pinball Paradise Progressive Strikes. I think it's called Fair Strikes now. Shit Strikes, I called it. Oh, fuck off, Marty. Shit Strikes. Okay. Let me tell the story because Marty's going to warp it into something else. No, I'm not. I'm just going to tell the truth of what actually happened. Go for it. Go, Marty. No, no, thanks.
    147:19
    So, Ryan decided to go with this terrible format called Shit Strikes, and I got absolutely diddled as a result. How's that work? And how do you get diddled, Marty? By losing twice in a row? Yeah, I won like ten times in a row, and then lost twice, and I was out.
    147:39
    Shit for half a time, Marty. Shit for half a time. Marty came first four out of five times, okay, in a four-person group very well, okay. But then he came in a four-person group. He came last on Spider-Man, which gave him three strikes. And then he versed me in an elimination. We were both on three strikes each, I believe. Or maybe I was on four, you were on three. And we played Creature from the Black Lagoon, which is absolutely brutal. Oh, it's a tight game. It's kind of like a floaty game with the tightest slingshots ever. Like, you breathe on it and it'll go off. Yeah. I managed to get Movie Car and rack up at least 70 or so million. Marty, you never kind of got anything started. No, because I couldn't find that center shot. Yeah. And if you can't find the center shot, you're screwed. You're also trying to trap up. You're kind of, like, flailing because it's so hard to control the ball when it's floating. But I eliminated you. It was the first time I've finished higher in a competition than you in, I don't know, a couple of months.
    148:42
    And, yeah, I played Stacey in the finals. And it was quite funny because you had left by then. But I said, do you want to just agree to play in a certain game, Stacey? And I believe that's within the IPA rules, as long as we both agree on it. And he said, no, no, just generate, you know, just not Star Wars. I'm like, well, I'm not taking out Star Wars, so let's just generate. a new game, and it was Star Wars.
    149:09
    So, what happened? Well, yeah, I won. I mean, there's not a really close story. So, you won your own tournament, really? I won my own tournament. It's a pretty poor form. Well, it's not poor form, because I won a $100 bar tab, and I can scout everyone, like, unlimited drinks and beer. Anyway. It was a good start. Like Sullivan, Marty, he has the ability, more than anyone, to get my heart racing when I don't want to have my heart racing. Like, I want to play calmly, and when I'm playing Star Wars, like, I was in Destroy the Death Star, and I was just fucking, like, the sounds and the light show and everything, it worked for me, okay? And I complained about it a million times before with Dwight Sullivan, like, flashing lights in your face, this, this, and that. On Star Wars, it just worked, and there's a point where I drained in Destroy the Death Star, without destroying it. And I looked up, and I just... The TIE Fighter hurry-up was going on the entire time. I didn't know because it was so frantic. And it was a thumbs-up to Dwight Sullivan for getting me in there. And it happens on Getaway as well. I was in Getaway in my first game. I got into Redline Mania, and I just got so excited. I just was floating around.
    150:21
    No one else in pinball can get me more excited when I'm playing and not make me play well because of the sounds and the energy in the light show than to myself. Well, and I thought you should mention Star Wars because, you know, I did actually have, you know, quite a few games and there was only really a couple that stood out. Obviously, you know, the Spider-Man one stood out because I just had a really, really bad game and people cheered when I lost. Good one, guys. Well done.
    150:51
    And Star Wars was the other one because I do not like that game. Yeah. I mean, that's not like some crazy opinion or anything. No, I'm saying... But it's got nothing to do with the art. Like, people talk about the art. It's just one of these games where it's probably too fast for its own good.
    151:13
    That's what makes it so exciting, Marty. You're like on the edge of death every single moment. Yeah, I know. But that doesn't make it a fun game. it's just one of those things I've won now three competitions ever and two of them were on Star Wars the final game was on Star Wars so I feel like it's almost not my go-to game because if I played Jordan Treadway he would have just not let me it's just everyone's got to play it as well and it was the pros, so the pros faster it's just a brutal game I mean there's some satisfying shots there as well but But, you know, just in that constant peril that you're feeling when you play that game, it's hard to really sort of just enjoy it. Probably as a home game, I'd probably enjoy it more. I do say that a bit. But if I had time with it where I could really get into the feel of it, as opposed to going up onto it cold, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, all this stuff happens, you know, the shootout from that right scoop is just brutal. And if it's not timed right, it can go straight down the middle. And this one was just hitting the tip of the flipper. Yeah. So you've just got to be, you've literally got to be on edge the whole time you're playing that game. So you're probably right. Add the music and the light show, it's going to bring up the adrenaline. But maybe you don't. Like, you know, watch Keith Allen or Steve Bowden or someone play their game. Like, it's all controlled. Like, the sound makes it feel like the modes are timed, but unless I'm mistaken, they're not timed. You have as long as you want to finish the modes. It's not like Game of Thrones. Right. Right? But it makes you feel that way because it's like, the music makes you shout, it's quick before this expires. But it doesn't. So anyway, yeah, that'll be happening again in a month's time. The turnout was fairly good.
    153:04
    I just want to see, there's now two machines downstairs that we're going to use, so I want to see how many people I can kind of get there. And it is in the cities. That's obviously a plus for some people because they finish work and they get there. It's also a negative for people that are traveling in from the suburbs that don't want to kind of drive into the city right after peak hour traffic.
    153:22
    But yeah, I'll be looking to kind of give some incentives to get people to come down. I'll be probably having a chat to you since you're an expert on that money. Oh, okay. We're all trapped if you think that.
    153:35
    But I'll be listening. Yeah, Guardians of the Galaxy, we played it last night at the next news house, the LE. So I came late and you guys are just pumping just massive, massive scores. I know. And so this is the first time I've played Guardians of the Galaxy In a long time Like really a long time And so it's now Like I haven't played really any of the major code updates That have happened So you know things like Finishing a mode and get level 2 modes I'd never seen before Cherry Bomb Multiball I'd never seen before Yep I really like it now Really like it I think that I mean you know you and I we did speak about it on the night and I said to you oh my god this game is great and we both agreed except for the sound the bubbly bobo stuff is just laughable I mean we laugh every time we hear it it's weird as well because sometimes when you finish your ball if the guy's in the middle of saying something he'll just keep on talking into the next person's ball it's like shut up now you're no longer relevant because the next person's playing it's so weird the animations on the screen are a bit weird as well with the way that they I don't know, I'm not sure if I like it or I don't like it but sometimes you get like a, you know something happens in a pinball machine and then something else happens and overtakes that animation and that sounds in Guardians of the Galaxy if there's a lot of things stacked up animations wise and you say you finish a mode but like right before that you got a jackpot, you did this and you did that it'll wait until like the animations are over and it'll say oh hey just finished the mode like 20 seconds late. Well, didn't you have the ball go into the scoop or the shoot, we're now calling it, and you had to wait like, I don't know, it was almost like 30 seconds to a minute for it to just go through all these animations before it spat the ball out. I think I was in multi-ball so a lot of stuff was happening, but yeah, you get it in there and the end result, if the mystery is lit, is you're always going to get out of all. But before it did that, it had to give me extra ball, it had to award me the jackpot, but it had to do a bunch of stuff. And it just, it was the longest, I'm sure I can find it on the stream and link it, but it was the longest time. And then it just kind of shoots out really quickly. I know. Again, on the edge of the flipper.
    155:52
    It needs that last couple of percent, but it's really damn good. It's really damn good, isn't it? Yeah, I hope that last percent comes. I mean, it's not mind-blowingly good, like... No, but you understand now what the purpose of this machine is. Before it was you either do Groot, you either do Orb, and you do some modes and you bring them in. But now you've actually got purpose to all of it, and there's a couple of different strategies that you can now use to get through it. Yep. I didn't go for Orb once. I'm not sure if I'd play that way in a competition, because Orb is good cheek points, but if you have a good ball one and you finish a couple of modes, then that's worth way more than Orb, I think, because that carries on for the second and third ball.
    156:41
    So I don't know. I wouldn't say no to one, but I don't think it's some kind of masterpiece. It still feels a little bit samey. I don't know why. It doesn't feel radical-like. Yeah, I know what you mean. The ramps themselves, they're not on the regular part of the flipper. Let's compare it to... Well, the two games that we've compared it to, Metallica mainly and Iron Man to some degree.
    157:11
    They're not hard to hit. They're fine. No, it's not that they're hard to hit. It's just that they aren't on the same part of the flipper that you would shoot those other games. So it does feel different. And the shots are actually really quite satisfying. In particular, the right ramp, when you nail that, it feels really good. I don't feel those shots are satisfying. I think the Orbis is satisfying because it comes... you know, on Metallica, it only orbits around when you hit a ramp force. You have to hit the orbit in a combo. So it kind of, like, always denies you a straight orbit shot, unless you're in, I guess, Lady Justice as well.
    157:48
    So, I mean, that fuel shot is the biggest one for me, where it just doesn't make anywhere near the same sound as fuel on Metallica. And it's just crazy how... But, you know, George Gomez said he knows how to... if a game is good when he flips the whitewood, I think Scott Dinesy said it as well, I would never ever be able to tell if a whitewood is good without the sound. Yeah, okay. The shots would be nothing to him. Yeah, and look, I think the other thing you were saying, like the orbits are really satisfying. They've got a really good spinner sound as well.
    158:20
    I don't like it. Okay, well. But you know you've hit it. Like, it's really pronounced. So it's going to stand out. I feel like I like usually high-pitched... Well, no, I like the ACDC one that's like... How does it go?
    158:38
    It's like... Yeah. But, you know... I feel like I'm right back in there now, yeah. You know what? Okay.
    158:48
    This isn't done often, but... Actually, I don't even know what game it's done in, but in TNA, every time you hit 50 spinner hits, I think I've talked about this before, it'll go into super spinner but that'll usually happen in like mid rip right so you're ripping the spinner and it's making this cool sound and then the sound changes halfway through to a high pitched sound and he's like yeah bitch super spinner but super spinner in every other game you have to hit a bunch of targets first so when you hit the spinner it's already like it's making that cool sound or the different sounds from the get go so I feel like that's something that people could definitely copy because people like to draw from TNA.
    159:32
    Anyway. Fair enough. What else do you have to do this week, Marnie? Not a lot, Pimble. Why? It's probably the only thing, a very quick point. I am still researching my streaming setup for Flipout at the end of the year. I just wanted to give a big shout-out to Carl D'Angelo, of course, who's going to be the expert in this field. And I reached out to him during the week, and he's given me a lot of advice. So, really appreciate it. Thank you, Carl. Okay. I played a lot of Daldian this week, and I saw Showdown for the first time. It wasn't me playing. It was Niva playing and going to Showdown.
    160:07
    I kind of wish I didn't see it because, you know, I wish it was me getting into it and not someone else. He had modified the settings for his dad's visiting, and he wanted him to enjoy pinball, so he kind of made it a lot easier. You know, like, it's like four sim cards to begin with. And he said, do you want to play, like, normal settings, or do you want to just give it a go on this? It's like, ah, we'll give it a go on this. And then you go into Showdown, it's like, ah, I really wish I kind of didn't see the Wizard Mode in that way.
    160:34
    I've now seen Darlene Wizard Mode, Marty, and I don't know, I almost like Darlene less. Not the way it shoots or anything, but... No, but you've now seen the end, right? Yeah, and it just didn't feel like as epic as... Well, that was like last night when we were playing Guardians of the Galaxy, so we were at the friend of the show, Anthony, his place, and he got so close to getting the wizard mode, like really close. And you were kind of like, well, it's kind of good that you didn't, otherwise if you did, you'd have to get rid of the machine. It almost is that once you've completed it, unless, you know, some games do have that, I want to do that again. If it's really that difficult to get, if you get it once, you're going to be like, I'm never going to get that again, move it on. It's kind of like Lost in the Zone, that competition that they got, like, did 1.8 billion on TZs and then I got lost in the zone, which, don't laugh at me guys, like, I've never, I'm pretty sure I've never gotten lost in the zone in my house because my machine is just set up way harder than it is. So, I got there and then I finished it and then it just started again. I was like, huh, like, where's the, what do they call it in video games? Like, Game Plus? When you finish a game and it's like Game Plus, you start it again but it's a lot different. Yeah, in pinball it's just game. It is, and just repeat it again. Yeah, so there's nothing more to do, really. Maybe there is, I don't know. I just kind of kept on getting into multiple ones. Well, okay, you know what? I actually just think that you have just hit on something that I think would be really interesting. So what we know with a lot of these games is that they make the wizard mode really difficult to get to. So maybe we could have it that the wizard mode isn't so difficult to get to. I'm not saying make it really easy, But once you've done that, it then gives you enhanced versions of the rules that you've got. That's TNA, baby. That's TNA times nine. Nine different versions, right? Well, it's not. I mean, the game is pretty much over when you do the first thing. It doesn't really get that much harder. It's just the game plus. But that's not actually Wizard Mode. That's actually just shooting a reactor. Wizard Mode is getting to reactor nine, right? Yeah, but you're doing the exact same thing over and over again. No, I know. That's what I'm talking about, right? Game plus doesn't change. I don't know, I usually don't play video games either when I finish them, but isn't Game Plus just a slightly harder version of what's already in there? Yeah, sometimes it is. Sometimes there are some, you know, maybe they've unlocked different weapons or something that's different, but, you know, you could do that. I guess you could start again, and rather than it being three shots to start a mode, it's four shots. Yeah, I know what you mean, but I think it's one of those things where the wizard mode just seem so unattainable for a lot of people. And, you know, I also streamed Wizard of Oz during the week, speaking of which. And, you know, even just getting to kill the witch, if you miss it, it's a grind to get back to then. And then you've got so much more, right? Just that game would be just probably a little bit more attainable. That's one of eight things, though, Marty. And you've probably got to kill the witch a couple of times if you want to get to the end. Indiana Jones, Marty. Indiana Jones Williams, Williams version. When I finished that and got the billion point shot, one billion, the thing goes massive, you know, crazy.
    163:54
    It is pretty much exactly the same the second time around, except, you know, the idle, the idle video modes, where you burn your cues wisely? That is a lot faster. Right, okay. I did that, I remember I did that mode first. I was like, holy shit, this is Game Plus. This is like, every mode is going to be harder and different. This is so cool. and that was it. That was the only one? I'm pretty sure that's the only one. They just sped it up and then everything else is the same. I'm like, holy shit, guys.
    164:20
    Yeah, that was 1993. Anyway, we could just have a big long discussion. We won't now about, you know, wizard modes and which ones are easy, which ones difficult. You know what? I'm going to research that and we're going to have a big discussion about wizard modes at a later stage. Or we can just tell people to email in and let us know the best game plus. After you finish a wizard mode, which game makes it more enjoyable the second time around. Let's open it up even further. Write to us and tell us what you think is your favourite wizard mode, and then tell us what is. And I'm not going to give any cards away for this one. Well, maybe I will. Depends on what comes through. But then after, yeah, after you've finished wizard mode, what games are still satisfying post-wizard mode? Do you know what, though, Marty? I mean, like, the answer is not to make it... I don't know. I think the answer is not to make it easy. It's just to make it unobtainable, like, you know, Iron Maiden and Lord of the Rings and Wizard of Oz and Hobbit. Yeah. I guess the Hobbit kind of has that. Well, it's just playing all the modes. You need to do well or anything in it, do you? Yeah. Anyway.
    165:32
    I probably played about an hour of Dirty Harry. Okay. Bit bored of it already. Did you get to the Wizard mode? No. I'm not Wizard Mode. Something's wrong with you, Marty. Something has fundamentally changed with the way I play pinball. I just want to flip and have fun. I'd rather play Demolition Man. Why would I want to play Teddy Harry and get to Wizard Mode when I can just play Demolition Man and just have fun playing a two-minute game? Yeah, cool. I get it. All right, so we head to the extensive mailbag.
    166:03
    My voice really hurts, Marty, so this is all you. My voice really hurts. Well, you know, it's interesting. I think you've mentioned before how I think sometimes it takes a while for people to actually listen to our entire podcast and get to the end. So this week, again, we actually got a lot of messages about the best and worst toys or mechs in games.
    166:24
    So the first one comes from Rob Miller. Hello, Rob. Lots of great things. Talks about how amazing we are and we're the most popular podcast with the most downloads. You know, all that kind of stuff that he says. he says in terms of best worst toys or mechs I mentioned in the podcast a few of my thoughts he said Beth I would have to agree with the castle and medieval madness for a couple of reasons number one any kid or newbie that plays mine thinks it's super cool and draws them into the game and two when I built my medieval madness some of the shafts were unavailable for the gearbox of the drawbridge motor and the way it was assembled was not really clear so it took a fair bit of head scratching and trial and error and had to make a few bits up. But it's worked perfectly since and completed it, so a fair bit of personal satisfaction.
    167:12
    He also says, Honourable mention, maybe I'm being a bit of a devil's advocate, but I really like the Johnny Mnemonic glove. Not the glove on its own, but how it ties in with the game. Firstly, I'm not sure if you're aware of how the awards for the Matrix work, but I reckon this is one of the best risk-reward strategy toys out there. And that's kind of what I was saying to you, is that you sort of get hints on the Matrix and which ones you should put your balls in to be able to then boost the game when you go into multi-ball, all that kind of stuff.
    167:39
    Oh, my. Lots of information there. So we're going to take that. We're not going to be able to read this out, but basically what he's saying is that it's probably underrated, and once you understand that glove and how strategic it is, it really does make the game more enjoyable. And the other one, he actually said the most overrated toy is The Thing in Atoms.
    168:04
    Don't say that. I've got Atoms coming in like two weeks. I know. And I kind of don't agree with that either, Rob. I think that The Thing Hand in the Atoms is fantastic, and I never get sick of it.
    168:17
    It's what made my kids... I still haven't told her, V, that we're getting an Atoms family. And it's when I was playing it on the Pimble Arcades. Is Pimble Arcades still around? No, it's gone now, isn't it? Yeah, it's still around. Okay. Yep. When the hand came out, and this is not even in real life, she just freaked out, and I don't know why. I think it's because she thinks there's probably a person sitting inside the pinball machine that's grabbing the ball.
    168:42
    She really freaked him out. So I can't wait for her to see that in real life and see if they enjoy it. Cool. And so another one, DS Nadine put on a message on our website. It said, Best toy for me is Koss the glove you just made fun of because it's not only impressive the first time you see it, but it also adds a lot of strategy to the game, especially in multiplayer, grabbing the most valuable bonuses and set jackpot locations.
    169:08
    Not as well knitted to the rules, but extremely satisfying is Dern, Star Trek's Vengeance with its drop target, the magnet and back kick combo. You really feel you're battling it. Both games always make me smile. Would you buy a JM, Marty, a Johnny Humanik?
    169:25
    Yeah, I might do. Yeah? Let's do it. Let's find you one. Yeah, let's go with Johnny Mnemonic. Yeah, I think so. I really like the flow of that game. He's very fast.
    169:36
    You know what? I'd want to know more. And I think it's probably a good bang-for-buck game. All right, if you have a Johnny Mnemonic, contact us at head2headpimple.com and just give us a really good prize and money will bite off you. You'll be super famous. Yep, there you go. Very, very famous. I'll call you out. Another one was best. This is from Paul Higginbotham. The best is the Terminator 2 canon. The fact that it's been copied so many times is testament to its brilliance And nailing the super jackpot with it is one of the best in pinball I do really like the canon in T2, I've got to admit And I also agree with his worst Stern kiss the Gene Simmons head Is it really a toy? Yeah, of course it's a toy Yeah, I guess the balls We said a toy or slash mech Yeah, yeah It is It's the hidden spin disc Yeah That's right If it's not set up and you can't get set up so it actually just keeps spitting down the middle, even when there's a ball save, it still just sort of throws you a bit. So, yeah, I kind of agree with that.
    170:40
    Okay. And another one was, this is from Joe Lemire. He says, the best toy is the ring on Lord of the Rings, and the worst, the car on Batman Dark Knight. What do you think? I haven't played Batman Dark Knight enough I don't know what the car is oh ok so it's really bad wait is this the ramp that goes up and down yes and it's got a car that sort of brings the ball down it kind of doesn't work and you can kind of tell why they got rid of that when they made Batman um 66 so um but yeah I think the ring on Lord of the Rings is actually very cool you know sort of when it grabs it and then sort of moves it around the back and then around that little squiggly ramp. I think it's very cool. It does not work. It's one of those next... Even my one, sometimes it goes to kind of suck it, but it depends on... I actually don't even know if it's levitating or if it's just resting on the bottom and sliding it back and forth, if the magnet's just pulsing a little bit. I don't actually know. I've never bothered to check it out because mine's always kind of worked, but every once in a while it will just drop the ball down instead of slacking it through. Yeah, it just makes it fun. There you go. another one we've got Anthony Peters he says old listener here need a help letting all the pinball fans out there know about the new YouTube channel this is called Reflective Yak sorry there's so much more we can talk about it there's an episode there with our monthly Canberra competition we're going to link it in the show notes Reflective Yak and I love right at the end it says PS why Reflective Yak? because every other bloody single name in the world was already taken.
    172:24
    We know all about that when we were trying to think of a name for the podcast. Did we? We went through the whole list and like, ah, no, it kind of doesn't fit. That's taken. Yeah, fair enough. All but most of the good names are taken. Just think, so long ago, so many downloads ago.
    172:41
    Oh, God, money. Millions. Billions. Are we done? Surely we're done. This is going to be a long episode, guys. thank you very much for sticking out to the end I'm tired but I mean we've only done an hour and two things today I can't imagine us doing a super long interview like all in a row now because we'd be I mean we're doing one episode a week for you guys but it's two for us because we have to pretty much record two different times right one for the interview edit it twice sure yeah the editing that I've been doing is very taxing on my social life awesome well thank you everybody don't forget to get in touch with us by emailing us at head2headpinball at gmail.com go to our Facebook page, go to Twitter go to Instagram just say hi cool, thanks everyone, we'll see you again next week, see you later bye