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The Visible Pinball/Exhibits for Museums - Pinball Expo 2024 - Michael Schiess & Wade Krause

Pinball News (Pinball Expo 2024)·video·51m 30s·analyzed·Oct 18, 2024
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.033

TL;DR

Museum founders detail educational pinball exhibits and transparent machine builds; artist discusses custom game design evolution.

Summary

Michael Schiess and Wade Krause present the Visible Pinball project and their broader museum/exhibit work at Pinball Expo 2024. Schiess discusses founding a science education museum using pinball machines for 'stealth learning,' creating educational exhibits from pinball parts, and developing a fully transparent pinball machine (Surf Champ) to teach internal mechanics. Krause covers his evolution from reproduction backglass artist to full game designer, including collaborations with artist Dirty Donnie on custom pinball machines.

Key Claims

  • Michael Schiess worked at the Exploratorium fixing electromechanical exhibits before founding his pinball museum

    high confidence · Direct statement by Schiess in opening section about his background

  • The clear Surf Champ pinball machine was started in 2005-2006 and featured custom-routed clear playfield and cabinet

    high confidence · Schiess and Krause detail the prototype development timeline and routing process with Nathaniel Taylor

  • Wade Krause learned silk screening from supplies given by his artist grandmother in his early 20s

    high confidence · Direct statement by Krause: 'My grandmother was an artist, and she gave me a bunch of silk screening supplies'

  • The museum took pinball machines to San Francisco International Airport for over six months with daily setup/teardown

    high confidence · Schiess describes hauling eight machines daily from quarter-mile storage to exhibition column

  • Wade Krause created backglasses for a Metallica pinball game commissioned by James Hetfield

    high confidence · Krause describes Hetfield seeing the Helicopters game at a car show and commissioning a Metallica version

  • Schiess's brother Christian, a neon artist who helped build exhibits, passed away about a month before the Expo presentation

    high confidence · Schiess: 'unfortunately he just passed away about a month ago I almost didn't come to this show'

  • The museum traveled to Germany with 25+ machines, a dozen exhibits, and 10 murals for a six-month museum exhibition in Wolfsburg

    high confidence · Schiess describes the Fano museum trip and collaboration with German museum director who was a pinball enthusiast

  • Wade Krause was part of a reproduction backglass group called the 'Dirty Dozen' founded by Herb Silver in Los Angeles

    high confidence · Krause: 'I became part of this reproduction group of people called the dirty dozen which goes way back it was started by this guy herb Silver's out of Los Angeles'

Notable Quotes

  • “When you play, your mind opens up in such a way that the information just comes in and you don't even notice it. We started calling it stealth learning.”

    Michael Schiess@ 1:29 — Core educational philosophy behind the museum concept

  • “I was really paranoid that... some little carved their high score on the side of it... So I said, well, all right, we better make this thing so we can take it apart in case somebody comes along and decides to put their initials on the side of it.”

    Michael Schiess@ 22:55 — Explains decision to bolt rather than glue the transparent cabinet together for protection

  • “Wade did all the plastics on that using the same process. And they're all silkscreen too, like the original, which I think is great.”

    Michael Schiess@ 24:09 — Highlights Wade's technical expertise in reproduction playfield work

  • “I've noticed that they're not doing the playfield, which is the hardest part. They're making the cabinet clear, but they're using the original playfield. That's cheating.”

    Michael Schiess@ 23:57 — Indicates commercial interest in replicating the design and concern about IP/attribution

  • “I was always drawn to pinball art as a kid. And I grew up playing games in the 70s and got involved at a pretty young age making back glasses.”

    Wade Krause@ 30:15 — Personal motivation for entering pinball art field

  • “All the clouds light up separate from the lettering. The amplifiers eventually turn red when you get to the shaker motor mode... Their eyeballs and the letter M's and the flames coming off the amplifiers are all screened in metallic ink.”

Entities

Michael SchiesspersonWade KrausepersonChristian SchiesspersonMelissa SchiesspersonNathaniel TaylorpersonDick FalkerpersonDirty DonniepersonJames HetfieldpersonHerb Silverperson

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: Museum operates as non-profit with focus on public education, free-play access, school group outreach, and inclusive multi-generational gameplay experience

    high · Schiess describes all machines on free play, Girls Incorporated visits, school group outreach, reaching four generations of players

  • ?

    community_signal: Collaborative ecosystem of specialists supporting museum projects: ex-Exploratorium workers (Nathaniel Taylor, Dick Falker), longstanding collectors (Richard Conger), animation artists (Steve Fury), and technical specialists freely contributing expertise

    high · Multiple ex-Exploratorium collaborators on clear Surf Champ; Steve Fury provided high-res animation files pro-bono for non-profit; Conger collection contribution to SF Airport exhibit

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Schiess chose Gottlieb Surf Champ for clear machine specifically for artwork appropriateness ('artwork that isn't going to offend anybody') and game complexity suitable for educational display

    high · Schiess explains: 'I chose Surf Champ because it's one of the most advanced electromechanicals... it had to be a Gottlieb... Surf Champ I thought that was a great artwork'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Museum exhibits demonstrate art-and-science fusion inspired by Exploratorium model, using pinball mechanics to teach math (Galton Board/binomial theorem), physics (bumpers), and interactive learning

    high · Schiess describes exhibit rationale: 'stealth learning,' Galton Board teaching bell curve distribution, bumper mechanics visualization, kinetic sculpture design

  • ?

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.154

0:00
Thanks for coming tonight. Michael Sheese, Wade Krause. So, thanks. Thank you. There was one third part, which is actually about pinball art, which Wade is going to do on the very last part. But first we're just going to talk about the museum and what we do and why we do it.
0:36
So the way the museum was formed was dealing with education using pinball. I used to work for the Exploratorium. I used to go around everywhere fixing electromechanical exhibits.
0:53
And the public was pretty brutal, so they beat the crap out of them. And I had to fix them. At that point, I had just gotten into pinball, and I realized, boy, people beat the crap out of these pinball machines, and they seem to survive the public abuse. So I got the idea it would probably be interesting to make science exhibits out of pinball parts that would be a little more hardy. So I started looking into some of the theories behind museums and came up with this, a bunch of nice quotes about playing and learning. When you play, your mind opens up in such a way that the information just comes in and you don't even notice it. We started calling it stealth learning. So it was a basic concept behind developing a pinball museum that would do more than just pinball, basically using pinball to educate.
1:54
So one thing that is great is it's fun also. So having worked at the Exploratorium, I would see a lot of patrons come through there and just bash the buttons, and they wouldn't really pick up any information. So when my wife Melissa and I founded the museum, we started having groups come in. I love this picture of the – this is Girls Incorporated come in. And they were just so energetic and so happy to be there and play these games. And they – look at all the history on the back glass, and they ask questions. This happens a lot at the museum. And then this other picture, Melissa's teaching these kids. She developed a way of getting them to, like, shoot the ball and then trace out the vector shots. So it's not real, you know, it's not atomic science or anything, but it's something that the kids get to take home. So we got really popular with a lot of the school groups. when we decided to paint the mural. I think Chris Rummel painted the Play and Learn mural, which is in the front of the museum. The other thing about our museum that's great is we encourage everybody to come in and play, and they're all on free play. So a lot of times you get the three generations. You get the grandfather, the father, and the kids. sometimes we've gotten actually four generations of people coming in to play our games that to me i just i love that just because it's it means it's continuing um we do a lot of outreach stuff so this the that other slide is that the berkeley uh boys what was that the berkeley boys school um which was actually co-ed so i don't know why they called it that but But anyway, I was setting up games and teaching kids how to set them up, how to work on them, and what pinball was all about. So that was kind of neat.

Wade Krause@ 37:27 — Demonstrates technical complexity and artistic detail in custom backglass work

Richard Conger
person
Valerie Congerperson
Steve Furyperson
Bill Nyeperson
Dan Kramerperson
Chris Coonsperson
Chris Rummelperson
The Exploratoriumorganization
Pinball Expo 2024event
San Francisco International Airportlocation
Fano Museum (Wolfsburg, Germany)location

event_signal: Museum's international reach extends to Europe; exhibited at Fano Museum in Wolfsburg, Germany for 6+ months with 25+ machines, demonstrating global interest in pinball history and education

high · Schiess describes Germany trip, museum director connection through Exploratorium, 25+ machines and 10 murals transported for 6-month exhibition

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Krause and Schiess's reproductions are licensed by Gottlieb for early 1960s games; licensing explicitly mentioned as requirement for reproduction work

    medium · Krause: 'These ones were done by somebody else... [Most of mine] were all like wood rails or early 60s games for him. They were all licensed by Gottlieb.'

  • $

    market_signal: Commercial interest in replicating clear pinball cabinet design; Schiess indicates copies appearing but notes copyists are cutting corners (using original playfield instead of custom clear one)

    medium · Schiess: 'I've noticed that they're not doing the playfield, which is the hardest part. They're making the cabinet clear, but they're using the original playfield. That's cheating.'

  • ?

    community_signal: Wade Krause transition from reproduction backglass artist to full game designer/builder, collaborating with non-pinball artists (Dirty Donnie, James Hetfield commissions) to create crossover custom games

    high · Krause describes evolution: 'I'd already been making back glasses... so I said yeah sure let's do a game' with Dirty Donnie; subsequently brought in Hetfield for Metallica game

  • ?

    technology_signal: Krause's silk-screen and hand-cut film process for backglasses (using gelatin layers, hand-cutting, fluorescent pigments) contrasted with modern inkjet limitations; demonstrated through Metallica game with separate-lighting clouds, lettering, and metallic ink effects

    high · Krause discusses hand-cut film process, fluorescent pigments impossible with inkjet, metallic ink screening for Metallica amplifiers and eyeballs; notes modern games lack baffle boards for individual bulb isolation

  • ?

    technology_signal: Innovation in transparent/clear pinball machine design using custom-routed acrylic playfields and cabinets, representing new manufacturing approach for educational/artistic purposes

    high · Detailed description of clear Surf Champ build process, custom routing, clear playfield with silkscreen art underneath protective plastic coating

    • 4:06
    Most towns have prohibited pinball, and we were probably one of the first and one of the only ones to get invited to put pinballs at City Hall, which we did. we took him in there it was kind of funny because uh the city manager at the time who was kind of runs the town instead of the mayor the city manager has all the power we got to put in eight pinball machines and i actually put in one of the clear pinball machines i remember chris coons had to stuff these things into a really ancient elevator and some of them we had to take apart because they were too big, and take them up to the floor where the main entrance to the City Hall was. And people were blown away. When we first sent them up, there was a wedding happening, and they came out of the City Hall wedding, and they go, well, there's a pinball parlor at City Hall. So they were overjoyed. They dropped the going to the party and said, no, we're going to play pinball for a while here before we go celebrate. Great. We also took our little trailer, and Melissa's there in front of what we call the little juju. So that was a Spartan Manor, a 1947 Spartan Manor that we refitted with hydraulic feet. And we would take – some of you guys have probably seen this at some of the shows. We had about five to six pinball machines in a jukebox. It was just a way to – if you can't come to the pinball, we'll bring the pinball to you. So we'd haul that thing up, set it up, push a button, and it would level itself, and they'd be playing pinball. So we did a lot of events with that. The other big one we did was the San Francisco Airport Museum where they invited us to do a whole show. So we collaborated with Richard Conger, who has – I don't know if anybody knows that name, but he's pretty infamous for being the pinball amasser. He's got a huge collection, mainly starting with really early machines, which he contributed. This show was from Bagatelle to Twilight Zone, so we did the whole gamut of pre-flipper and flipper pinball.
    6:24
    That was at the San Francisco International Airport for six – I think more than six months. and we also every day I'd haul out eight pinball machines they had to store it was almost a quarter of a mile away in the international terminal I couldn't leave them there I had to haul them out every day and put them around this one of the columns there in front of the exhibition and they were on free play all these people would come you know they were waiting for their flight and they'd see free pinball and some of them had never even played. So we were there teaching them how to play. I noticed this one guy came in and he was there all day and I finally went up to him. I said, man, aren't you going to miss your flight? And he goes, oh, I'm not flying. I heard he had free pinball. And so I took part here. okay I really love it when I see a parent teaching their children how to play pinball so I love that one shot there and that's Richard Conger's wife Valerie and the jorts who are all involved in making that happen that was a pretty incredible show I really liked that one so then it got us into building exhibits So this, the big picture is called the Pin Bowl, and it was one of the first exhibits I built.
    8:01
    It was kind of following the lead of the Exploratorium where they combined art and science. So this is actually a kinetic sculpture. It's got neon rings that are triggered by the bumpers. I wish I had a video of it, but they're kind of hard to do on a PowerPoint. point, but basically three pinballs in there. Once you push the button to start it, they start bouncing around and they just continue. Every time they hit the red bumper, the red neon ring would light up and there was a green one and a blue one. It's chaos. It's pretty incredible and it was a real eye catcher. I never went to Burning Man, but I went to a lot of the staging grounds for Burning Man, and they would always go crazy for this one. At night, it was almost dangerous because the flashes of light were so intense that I was always afraid I was going to trigger an epileptic fit in somebody. The top one was a redesign of it, so we started making science exhibits that were made out of pinball parts and modified pinball legs and we made the cabinets ourselves and did the stenciling and I gotta say that was kind of the most fun part was doing the stencils on the cabinets because we come up with our own designs it's always fun then these are this is like an electromechanical music box and this next to the pin chimes is one of the favorite exhibits. People, kids just, you know, I guess they just love to push buttons. So when you push a button, basically just triggers one sequence of the solenoids hitting the toy piano, and it just does a scale, and it lights up the lights at the top. And on the back of it, it's a score motor. So you can see how the whole thing works. It's very simple. The other one's called a bumper box, and it basically was just to show people how bumpers work. There's two bumpers that just continuously push those balls up the hill. And then the one in the back is a slow motion bumper. So you can actually see the ring come down and hit the ball, push it away, and then it comes back up. It's just on a slow motion motor.
    10:25
    The other big thing we did was Maker Faire. Maker Faire was, I think it started in 2007. At that point, I only had one exhibit, and so I took that.
    10:40
    Excuse me. And it was a big hit. I remember Don Hiley was there with a bunch of pinball machines, so I got to meet him. And I had this one little box that all it did was – I called it my self-playing pinball machine. And people basically would come up to go, why would you want a self-playing pinball machine? And I would always say, well, sometimes I have to work, I don't have time to play pinball, so I turn this on, then I come back later and see if I won. So that started us at the Maker Faire. So the Maker Faire, we started developing more exhibits, and the two here are the Galton Board and the Pinchime. So the Galton board, I don't know if anybody knows who Sir Francis Galton was. He was Darwin's cousin and he had similar theories and thoughts on evolution, etc. He came up with what was called the Quincox board. It's basically, Quincox is just a design. It is a, what's the best way to, it basically shows that your odds of, you know, when you're gambling and you have to run through all those pegs, it actually, if you've given enough samples, in other words, you fire enough balls up at the top and they trickle down, you get a ball, I'm sorry, a bell curve because of the distribution. It's called the binomial theorem. So it's actually teaching math. Now the kids, you know, haven't been around the museum, I realize They just like to do stuff, so they love to pull that plunger. I used to load it up with 100 balls, but that just got a little crazy with them. So I reduced it down to 50. Now, with 100 balls, it almost always would make that bell curve. With 50, you know, it's less sample, so it didn't work as well. But they got the idea. that so I made a couple of those and then a couple of these pin chimes the pin chime was based on something I saw at the Exploratorium but they just didn do it right They didn use bells or chimes They used hole saws because when you hit a hole saw, it makes a nice ding.
    13:05
    But I thought, wow, that's crazy. It's pinball. And so I made it magnetic and used wooden balls. And you can move these bells and chimes around, and set them up so you can make a little tune or just change the geometry. And this is probably the most played exhibit at our museum when we have it in the science room.
    13:33
    They just, you know, it doesn't have glass on it. It's very hands-on. And, yeah, they just play with that incessantly. It's pretty fun. And that led up to the big one, which was the visible pinball. And this is where Wade and I got involved.
    13:52
    I always wanted to do art pinball machines, but I'd never been able to pull that one off. But that's when I met Wade, who had just done a machine with another artist, and we'll talk about that later.
    14:07
    I presented the idea of making a totally clear pinball machine. So that's what we'll go into. So a lot of people said, well, this is why a transparent pen.
    14:25
    We wanted to make a device that you could easily teach and people could easily see what was going on inside a pinball machine. So making it clear was kind of a no-brainer. I had seen other examples that people had hacked a big hole in the side of the cabinet and put some plexiglass in there and a light bulb. And I thought, well, that's cool, but kind of unelegant.
    14:51
    So I thought, wow, what if he just made the whole thing clear? But I don't know how to do that. And so I got a hold of Wade and a few other people to help me build it.
    15:03
    But, yeah, there's reasons. One, I thought it would be a really cool looking piece to make a completely clear pinball. It was reminded of the clear radios and clear phones from the 70s. The other thing was, yeah, you wouldn't have to lift up the play field anymore to show people what was going on. I chose Surf Champ because it's one of the most advanced electromechanicals. want to do a computer one because frankly there's not much to see right but the electromechanical one has all the relays and everything uh surf champ's got a lot of features and it's one of my favorite games fun to play and uh i you know it's going into a museum so you want to choose artwork that isn't going to offend anybody so um so it had to be a gottlieb for one thing and Surf Champ I thought that was a great artwork so we put together a team of Nathaniel Taylor was the first person to do the routing on the play field and then Wade did all the CAD work on that one gave him a stripped down play field and then me, my brother Christian and Dick Falker all helped build these so I'm going to let you talk about this okay so is this on okay so I'd already been producing play fields and that's one of the reasons why Mike asked me to do it because he said I want to make this clear game but how could I make a clear play field and I said well I think I could do that for you and And so I started doing – I'm not going to get too ahead, but basically that's how I got involved. We met at one of the Pentagogo shows in Dixon, and I helped him through the process and also ended up doing some cabinet stuff for you as well, I believe, for the next generation of the game. So there we go. It's being cut.
    17:19
    Yeah. So this was at Nathaniel Taylor's shop. He was all set up to do routing. I don't think you were set up at that point. Not on my own machine. Yeah, not on your own machine. So we had the first prototype done with Nathaniel. This was back in 2005, 2006, I think we started on this project.
    17:41
    And he was an exploratorium, an ex-exploratorium worker that set up his own shop. So he had this beautiful router with a vacuum thing to hold it down. We did a plywood version first to make sure all the dimensions were correct, and then we went ahead and cut this clear one.
    18:04
    Dick Falker helped with doing the cabinet CAD work. He's another exploratorium. He's grabbing a lot of ex-exploratorium people for this. And he is a CAD programmer also. my brother Christian his shop I couldn't do it at my house because it was a little too messy he had a really nice clean shop he's a neon artist unfortunately he just passed away about a month ago I almost didn't come to this show because of that but I know you'd want us to be here and talk about this stuff he helped build all the exhibits that you've seen so far we built them in his shop And he's an incredible skilled craftsman.
    18:51
    So, yeah, we'd meet there and assemble the cabinets. And, yeah, that's me. That's the first clear one we did next to a regular surf champ. So there's a clear play field. What Wade did, do you want to talk about this? Oh, sure. So I just started this like I was going to make a play field. And since I'd already done the CAD work, I do the artwork around that. So I know it's going to match up just perfectly after cutting the prototypes that might give the thumbs up on the prototypes. So, yeah, I just redrew the art. And I was really only concerned about the black line. So I didn't spend a whole lot of time doing color trapping or anything like that because I knew I was just going to screen it in black. But that changed later when we did do a color version. So I had to kind of rework it a little bit.
    19:54
    Yeah, same thing with the back glass. Yeah. So we eventually did a translucent color play field and back glass.
    20:04
    Those were the two that we sold to the Exploratorium later. but the thing was amazing because wade's just incredible i don't know if everybody knows his playfield work and his back glass work and they're spot on they always line up everything because uh well he's good and also he knows what he's doing um so we eventually came up this was your idea you coming up with the different plastics that we used because we were screening the the artwork was being screened on the play field and it was wearing off so Wade came up with a great idea. Sure so I basically said I would just make it like a big gigantic play field plastic which is what they're now calling top coats or whatever hard tops so I did this a long time ago and I printed the artwork on the underside on a really slick like polycarbonate windshield type material and the ball just slides across it like glass and it never touches the art and since i made uh both pieces everything lined up just perfect all the slots and all the lamp holes and everything like that so yeah and the same was done with the translucent color ones in fact we did those first and then we went back and did a black and white one I think are you made a mylar for the black and white one that goes on top for the original one no the original was screened on top it was screened on top but then we switched to another one that was just clear and had the mylar yeah there's There's three variations. Yeah.
    21:59
    So – and making the cabinet, a lot of people are like, why didn't we just glue the thing together? I was really paranoid that – I remember taking – on our first show, I took my treasured 1936 Bally bumper that was pretty much brand new. It was confiscated in Oakland by the Oakland cops and brought to Alameda and given to Alameda cops. and these Alameda cops 80 years later sold it to me and it was perfect. I couldn't believe what condition it was in. So I took it to the first show and sure enough, some little carved their high score on the side of it.
    22:46
    Oh man, I was so, and he put his name in there and I was taking pictures. So I got a picture of it because, yeah, it was sad. So I said, well, all right, we better make this thing so we can take it apart in case somebody comes along and decides to put their initials on the side of it. So we actually drilled and tapped, and tapping plastic is pretty hard, but we managed to bolt the thing together. So in case somebody did destroy one side of it, I could take it apart. Also, if it got dropped or something, we wouldn't have to remake the whole cabinet because it's pretty expensive, the plastic, et cetera, and cutting it. But basically, we just duplicated every wooden part on the machine and hand-fitted everything, put it all together.
    23:34
    Here's the – yeah, just populated on both sides so you can see what it looks like. And I've seen, unfortunately, people are copying this. This is kind of one of our sources of bread and butter for our nonprofit, if we can sell these things.
    23:57
    But I've noticed that they're not doing the play field, which is the hardest part. They're making the cabinet clear, but they're using the original play field. That's cheating.
    24:09
    Wade did all the plastics on that using the same process. And they're all silkscreen too, like the original, which I think is great.
    24:21
    And then the finished piece started going around and making the circuits. This was at the Bedford Art Gallery. And these kids, you know, there's all this art around. The art patrons bring their kids, like, try and get them to appreciate art. They all made a beeline for the pinball machine. and this i love this little girl is is playing it where all the all the guys are watching it's pretty funny uh jim shelberg put us on the cover of ping game journal is he still here nope i saw it yeah he stepped out um which we we're real excited about that did that did the whole story about how we um how we built it um we took it to the aztec uh the Association of Science and Technology Centers down in LA and Bill Nye showed up and was playing it. That was, that really felt good seeing him playing that. He really got into it too.
    25:25
    What, I don't know if anybody's heard of Steve Fury, but Steve Fury has done these incredible animations of Gottlieb reset. They're computer animations demonstrating how the sequence works and the switches involved And I asked him I said wow this would be great because it a Gottlieb four player He showing the whole reset sequence Could I have a copy of that in high res? Because the one on the internet wasn't very high res. And he said, yeah, I have a high res. And yeah, you know, you're a non-profit. So he gave me the file and I built another little clear kiosk for it to go next to the clear pin. And it's great because you can see exactly, you know, if you don't understand it when you're pushing the button, you can watch this video and it's really clear.
    26:21
    We eventually made three different versions of the clear pin. We made the translucent surf champ. And then I wanted to make a couple that had to do with the transition from electromechanical to computers. And I was looking for a machine that they did that with.
    26:47
    The one in the back, that's a Hollywood? What is that? It's the first one Bally used to go electronic. It was an electromechanical pinball machine called – no, Freedom was the first production one. But the prototype – Flickr, thank you. Yeah, it was a Hollywood-themed motion picture pinball. So that was the prototype that they developed the board set, and Bally adopted that. that the first game they made was they took a Bally Freedom and made that the first electronic or computer-controlled pinball machine.
    27:36
    The first solid-state machine was Spirit of 76 by Merco, but this was the first production. I mean, I'd like to say Merco, but Merco wasn't a computer game. It was actually all done with logic chips. So when you turn that thing on, it was ready to go. The Bally one, it had to boot up.
    28:00
    So we had an electromechanical one next to the electronic one just for comparison. And it's a pretty powerful exhibit because you really get to see the play field. The play is exactly the same. The artwork is pretty much the same on both of those machines. But the guts, it's just jaw-dropping when you look at it. And you go, oh, those boards in the head replaced all this stuff in the mechanical board and all the stuff in the head.
    28:31
    So it was pretty powerful. We also did – we do a lot of outreach stuff. This one was our furthest outreach. We went to Germany. My wife, Melissa, and I took over 25 machines and I think a dozen exhibits and 10 of our murals that the artists paint.
    28:57
    And it went to the Fano in Wolfsburg. And it was there for six months. Actually, I think it was a little more than six months. They hung on to it for a bit. And it was for their fifth year anniversary. the mentor for the museum did a lot of work with the Exploratorium a lot of the exhibits in that particular museum came from the Exploratorium and he happened to be a pinball fanatic and for the fifth anniversary he wanted pinball so he called us up and said what can you do So we did that along with four other artists that made pinball stuff, but we were the main ones with the – we brought all three versions of the clear pinball machines. And the Germans went pretty crazy for that.
    29:53
    So at this point, we're going to talk about pinball art. I'm going to let Wade take over. All right.
    30:04
    Hello, I'm Wade Krause, and most of you probably know me for doing reproduction play fields and back glasses.
    30:15
    So I'm just going to say that, you know, I was always drawn to pinball art as a kid. And I grew up playing games in the 70s and got involved at a pretty young age making back glasses. I was in my early 20s when I decided I wanted to do this. I had learned silk screening on my own. My grandmother was an artist, and she gave me a bunch of silk screening supplies that she used to use, and I kind of figured out how to do it. And I had already been collecting pinball machines, and I realized that back glasses were hard to come by. so I became part of this reproduction group of people called the dirty dozen which goes way back it was started by this guy herb Silver's out of Los Angeles and he was sort of local to me and I had done a glass and I told him I wanted to do glasses with him because he was already making reproduction glasses and he was all for it so I did that for I don't know quite a while most these These ones were done by somebody else. These are hanging in my office. These are some that I kept over the years. Most of the ones I did are long gone, but they were all like wood rails or early 60s games for him. They were all licensed by Gottlieb. Yeah. Anyways, here's part of the process. Again, I'm mostly a printer, so I'm doing some color separations there on a poster. That was what I used to do, a lot of posters and T-shirts and stuff like this. And you see the old school red thing right there? That's the way film used to be done. I did all my back glass work with that. That's like a gelatin on two layers. The red layer will peel off of a clear layer. You cut away the stuff that you don't want, and you peel it away. So that poster is going to be a solid color with a little white window in the middle, and then the black will go on top of it and I'm using the black line as a cutting guide all my back glasses were done that way all hand cut and to the right is a typical t-shirt press but I'm printing a little art toy this was a project I got involved with in the early 2000s and they were the carnival knockdown dolls they have the fur around them but we made them with different artists and over a over 100 artists got involved in that project and so right there i'm working with a guy named krk right and i'm doing his poster for his art show and then i'm also printing his circus punks so this is how i ended up meeting um dirty donnie he was involved in the circus punks process and uh he was one of the few people that he was one of the guys early on that did this and he called and he was he knew that i was into pinball and he was really into it also and he started name dropping pinball artists and uh so anyways our circus punk thing went well and he said hey you know i really want to do a game and i had already been making back glasses i'd already made play fields i'd already made plastics uh so i said yeah sure let's do let's start with just doing a glass so that was um this is this is kind of a different part but anyways first of all we just did a glass and we started with that just to see like how it would go and um this was an album cover he did this is a band called the helicopters and this was an album cover that he did and he thought it would make a really great transition to a back glass and I thought he was totally right I used fluorescent pigments that cannot be done with an inkjet process this is all silk screened by hand by me and so anyways we did enough glasses to sell some and that kind of sort of self-funded the project so here I am doing a stencil test for the cabinet and the cabinet was super beat up and then around there are cabinets that i built from scratch for another art project that i'll get to later so that's the way the glass illuminates right there he left that stuff up to me he always i've done at least four back glasses for him that are here and he always leaves the lighting part up to me and that's my favorite part that's something you don't get anymore on modern games they're just lit up by one big thing they don't have baffle boards to isolate the bulbs all the stars twinkle in this thing i really like the flashing bulbs and then there's the cabinet painted after you know doing the stencil tests and then i just built the game and go ahead and and uh so i thought you know this is so cool and it's and donnie's not known in the pinball world at this point but he's known in like the hot rod circuit he's known in rock and roll and stuff like that so what we did was um we would take this game besides pinball shows we would take it to other events and um he was like at some kind of trade show for clothing he took the game there and then one of the go ahead and advance it um this ended it ended up at a film festival out in texas they they shipped the game out there and this is where i'm at right now there's a movie about me um wade krauss pinball artist you can look it up on it's online they were showing it at this event so they wanted to bring the the game out and then one of the things we took it to was a car show and uh donnie's really known in the hot rod world so that eventually led to go ahead and do the next screen at the car show james hetfield from Metallica was there and he already knew Donnie. Donnie had done work for the band and he saw the helicopters and started asking me about it. And I said, yeah, we could, we could do one for you. And he was all for it. So, um, I'll pull up the, this back glass so you can see that. This is the Metallica game you want. And if you look at it, how it lights up, all the clouds light up separate from the lettering. The amplifiers eventually turn red when you get to the shaker motor mode. It sounds like the crowd is roaring.
    37:31
    Their eyeballs and the letter M's and the flames coming off the amplifiers are all screened in metallic ink. Again, something you can't really do with an inkjet process. This is, again, all hand-soaked screen with the proper masking layer. the way they used to do them.
    37:59
    Yeah, this is my friend Dan. That's Dan Kramer who used to work at Atari. He's local to me. He helped do the build on this game.
    38:10
    He's a longtime pinball collector. He's been out to Expo a number of times. He's helped us at the museum fix that French game. Yeah, he worked on the rally game. Nobody can fix that but Dan. Go ahead and go forward. This is the back glass during the process Then Donnie came up with this play field which is just stunning in person It all done again he all into hot rods and just like the helicopters he started with a metal flake surface You know, you shoot all this glitter stuff on there, and you bury it in clear coat, and you've got to level it out, and then you start painting on top of that, and it just really sparkles when you see it. It's so pretty. And then he's an expert pen striper, So he does a bunch of that kind of stuff on the game. Same with the helicopters. And go ahead. And here's the crew. This is how I met Tanya Kleiss. Right over there. Tanya, big programmer at Stern, if you don't know him. Awesome guy. uh it just it was just so coincidental i i called mike he mike knew a guy i'd seen a someone do tweaking on a an earth shaker and they happen to work at the exploratorium and mike goes well that guy doesn't do that anymore he's not going to help you and uh i'm saying that's kind of why i got an earth shaker but but i know somebody who else who might do it this guy who comes to the museum he just loves pinball and he's a programmer and so i called tanya and right from the beginning he was in so uh here we are uh i brought brought the game back up to alameda and then we're then here it is finished this is the the crew that's tanya my and myself dirty donnie's kneeling down and that's james hepfield when we gave the game to james and he was just thrilled with it it was at their studio they were actually having a rehearsal that day just interject the person at the exploratorium who had programmed a an earth shaker it's now in our warehouse it it actually was here at the expo one year it's called go girl Go Girl was this rethemed reprogrammed Earthshaker just like Wade and Dirty Donnie did that was you stepped into these high heels to play it and you played it and earn your makeup and then it would take a picture of you and you could put a wig on try on different wigs it's pretty neat alright so So James Hetfield was so excited about that game that it wasn't long before he said he wanted another one.
    41:32
    So again, a bunch of fluorescent colors. This game has never been seen. Well, I take that back. He loaned it to Donnie for an art show that happened in Santa Monica. I was there. Again, lights up. Really, really cool. And that area where the woman is by the fire, that's all done with twinkle bulbs and all the sky. You can see how many stars there are. That's all isolated from the lettering. So this crazy back panel that I made, which you'll see in a minute.
    42:07
    It's all pocketed out to isolate the bulbs. That's Donnie. That's our friend Greg Ong. He did some machining on it. He made some custom pistons. This is an Elvira in the Party Monsters. So instead of boogeyman, we put pistons in there firing out of an engine. Greg made those on a lathe. They looked really great. So that's myself and Donnie and Tanya again, the same team of people.
    42:43
    Yeah, that's how it lights up. This is just a mock-up in the computer. It's really – it's a lot brighter when it's doing it in person. When I saw it, I couldn't believe the bonfire that we have a detail of had twinkle lights behind it. So it really looked like this bonfire happening. It was probably the coolest thing I've ever seen. It just random, you know, it doesn't go completely black. Yeah.
    43:12
    That was pretty amazing. So anyways, again, the idea was to get these games into areas that are not normally, you know, not just pinball venues. And so this was shown at an art gallery. and this is some close up details of that game yeah it's totally custom it's the whole game and again Tanya did a lot of sound effects and voice writing and stuff like that which oh I should also mention that James Hetfield did a lot of voice overs for these games which was really awesome didn't expect that so before before I even got that far into the whole thing I did another art game because of the helicopters I got asked to do get involved through this gallery with a San Francisco artist named William Wiley William T Wiley and he's kind of an old older guy and uh i didn't know anything about him really and the the weird thing was like they never let me talk directly to him like i had to do all the communication through this gallery like he was some kind of guarded shielded dude and they didn't always relay the information correctly because the first thing he submitted was a watercolor painting and pencils and i go well i go okay uh so then i did a back glass print of that watercolor painting which was all spot on and then when they saw they go uh you did a great job but it doesn't look like pinball art i'm like of course it doesn't look like pinball art i told you to think of a coloring book not a watercolor yeah so anyways they had to kind of backpedal and then tell him to redo everything and all of a sudden this was cutting into a deadline because now he's reworking his stuff so anyways on this project i printed the back glass the playfields the plastics i built the cabinets from scratch those were those cabinets you saw earlier they were painted by somebody else his name slips my mind I actually never met him and this this is Jim Dietrich who did the building on it I didn't have time to even think about that this this came out we made one machine but I made enough parts for 10 machines and the the idea was going to be done as a limited edition so they took the first one and it sold to the San Jose Museum of Art for a lot of money and then they used that as a way to upsell the next one and uh and then they used that to upsell the next three you know I was there I went with Jim Dietrich to the San Jose Art Museum and we set it up and they have a curator team come in like three or four very wealthy people they come in and look at all the art because this wasn't the only art being presented and at the end of that we actually had left at that point packed it up and we're driving home and he got the call that that was the only art piece that they picked out was to buy was was pinball machine wow yeah i didn't know that so anyways it turns out that uh this game did travel it ended up at the whitney museum and it also ended up at the smithsonian and that is the first pinball machine to ever be in the smithsonian yeah thank you it's because of him not because of me so he's kind of famous just saying um So this led to some other customs that I did with a guy named David Bach out of Pittsburgh. He had a thing called Tilt Warning, and David ran the Papa warehouse for years, did the tournaments and all that stuff. But he's not doing it anymore. He's living in L.A., and this is one of the last things I did with him. I did another game called Eagle Mansion, a mind expansion with an artist named Soviet. it and this one was I did fail and another artist named bast for a pop-up art show that happened in Miami the entire show was all custom machines but I only worked on the pinball end of it so Dave did the building I did all the printing play fields were hand-painted by the artists and then they toured this show into different cities around the world and then like they they gutted everything and redid it again as a new show so like all this stuff doesn't even exist anymore and uh i spent a lot of money just to just to have a pop-up event where you just come and play games for free but uh they're they're very well known and it's the thing was called the deluxe flux you can look that up and it's it's now a location in new york and all the stuff in there's all their work and their their custom pieces so that's kind of the end of it there's a happy way there's a happy way I'm like I'm in my in my zone right there in my shop and that was a long time ago you're still happy usually okay so thank you so much yeah
    49:04
    So I think we were going to take questions, but we got our time cut a little short, so we were going to give that up to the – can we do some – If anybody has questions, that's fine.
    49:16
    Anybody have questions? Yeah. Building exhibits, you know, building exhibits of the Exploratorium. And the other thing was I try to avoid math as much as possible. So I said, you know, what do they use, three-quarters? That's what I'm going to use, three-quarters.
    49:45
    You know, the thing weighs about 400 pounds. It's a whopper. So a lot of people said, why don't you make it out of, you know, half inch or less? And, you know, the reason was I'd have to change everything, you know, and the play field had to be that you know and they're you know they they've held up really well yeah
    50:18
    currently I am kind of on a hiatus right now doing a lot of stuff with my family and I'm trying to kind of fix I had a batch of play fields that went bad because the wood so I'm kind of slowly chipping away at fixing those and getting them sent out but coming up next is going to be countdown most likely had a guy from Canada supply some art and inserts and everything in the cutting file I ran a test and printed out film and it looks like it's gonna work it's my first time actually collaborating with somebody on a play field so if it all goes well he wants to keep giving me files and then have me do the production but I'm kind of looking for a different wood source right now so might have found one today no that's good okay all right thanks everybody thank you so much
    51:27
    you