Thank you. You're listening to the K-Podcast. wizard amusement.com the site to visit for custom pinball shooter rods easy to install totally unique mention blockade podcast for 10 off your order wizard amusement.com sales restoration customization you are listening to the blockade podcast i am your host chris freebus aka shut your trap joining me as normal my co-host jared morgues good day everybody good day so uh we've we've had our first uh first major screw-ups with uh blab it wouldn't blab blip yeah first you know i I'm broadcasting for the first time with a webcam, and I tested it out the other day, just to make sure everything was cool. And as soon as I log in, no webcam. And I'm like, okay. And then we get that going, and all of a sudden, Jared can't hear people. And yeah, but here we are. We're up and running and hopefully with no problems. Hopefully. Hopefully, yeah. I was doing some tech fun yesterday, Jared. Oh, yeah, what happened? Well, I got a new TV, finally. Ooh, shiny new TV. Yeah, shiny. Which, of course, meant because previously what I had was a big giant projection CRT. Yeah, and so I had all my video components in a rack next to it. Well, flat screen TV needs to be set on top of something, so I had to buy a new TV holder. and that meant transferring all of the tech into the holder and of course now i'm also dealing with doing different kinds of cabling and everything else like that so it was a fun day of troubleshooting and rerouting and and doing all that jazz um sometimes but you know i find it amusing you can mount those things on the wall you know it's the easy that still wouldn't that wouldn't have solved any problems that wouldn't have solved a single one i did though oh man so So I'm at the store purchasing the TV, and this gal is buying also, and she's got a whole bunch of HDMI cables sitting on the countertop. Best buy, they're charging, what, $20, $30 per HDMI cable, right? Monster cables. Right, right. And I'm just kind of like shaking my head. Oh, that poor lady, she doesn't know about monoprice.com where you can get these cables for $2.99 for six-foot lengths. I mean, they're cheap, right? so anyway all of a sudden the floor manager comes walking up and he goes ma'am these cables aren't good enough for the TV you're buying these are much too crappy you need to get better cable I'm like oh no no no no and so the guy looks and he goes well what do I need and he goes you need that $60 cable over there oh my god the poor thing and she had four cables on the counter so now she's gonna have to buy four of these like major upsell i'm gonna let you finish like sales do but like no it's not how it works i mean i so want to just walk up to her and just be like monopress.com go here and you get all all the cables you want and i because i kind of felt like like i could get into an argument with these guys and be like it's digital. It doesn't matter. From one point to the other, but anyhow. In the days of the analog cables, good cables actually did make a difference. In the days of a digital cable, it either gets a signal or it doesn't. That's end of story. What you're now fighting over is how flexible is the cable. That's about the end of it. I kept my mouth shut because I was trying to get out of there quickly and with my TV intact. Not with a big boot through the middle of it. Anyway, people, do yourself a favor if you are ever buying hdmi cables especially now if you need other cables you can there's they sell plenty of them but this is not sponsored ad or anything monoprice.com just go there trust me if you need yeah if you need apple ipod cables or you know iphone cables you know headphones whatever cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap and it's good quality stuff too so Anyway, I just wanted to put that out there. Hey, Jared, I think we have a guest with us. We do have a guest today, which is pretty cool. We do have a guest. Another interview. Go figure. Yeah, so joining us today to talk all things Zen pinball is Bobby Larcher. Did I say that correctly, Bobby? You did. Good job. How about that? Those on various forums would probably know her better as Barbie Bob-omb. So welcome. Thank you. So, Barbie, excuse me, I'm going to go between Barbie and Bobby. I'm just going to tell you that in this matter. Either one, it doesn't matter. Either one. Well, it's funny because apparently in order to work in pinball, you have to have the name Bobby because we talk to Bobby up at Farsight all the time. You are the community manager for Zen Studios, correct? Yep, that's me. I do all the support, all the social media, all that fun stuff. other words you were surrounded in the dark pit of angry people sometimes yes how did you wind up becoming community manager for them um i actually knew mel my boss before i started working there uh he worked at a company that i worked at previously uh we ended up meeting up again and he was like hey we need help with community uh would you be interested so that's how it started almost four years ago. Wow. Four years. And is it just for Zen Pinball or is it for their other games too? Everything. Everything we have. Just me. Wow. That's a lot of coverage you've got to do there. That's pretty amazing. Out of curiosity, how many games are we basically talking about? We have Castle Storm on every platform. We have all of our pinball games on every platform. Kickbeat. We have Planet Minigolf, which was kind of before me but i still help out with that stuff um yeah quite a few things okay well what do you think's the the most i'll use the word onerous but you know what's the what's the hardest um uh game to support do you think uh hardest in terms of just community stuff or like tech support type stuff well let's call it a combination of both What do you think is the one that you get the most, I guess, support calls for? Definitely the mobile versions of the pinball games, like Zen Pinball on Android, Kindle, iOS. Yeah. It's usually easy fixes. It's like, oh, restart, re-download kind of thing. Sometimes way harder than that. Yeah. Yeah. I know you've got me on a couple of times where I've had some weird things happening on Android. So, yeah, I've appreciated your help whenever we've had a support issue. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you know that better than anyone. Oh, yeah. I've been hanging around in the Zen Android forum for a while now. I've seen all sorts of things come through there, like the migration over to Google Play Games and Swarm. That was interesting. Yeah. That's always fun, losing scores and achievements, and everyone's upset. But understandably so, though. Every migration's hard. But yeah, that went pretty well. Yeah, it wasn't too bad. So Zen Pinball turned out to be, that was my first pinball game on my PS3. I hadn't discovered the pinballer, well, Pinball Hall of Fame yet. And I don't even know how I wound up finding it, but it was when it first released with their first four tables on PlayStation, which was Tesla and Shaman, V12. and my big technical issue was, and this is again, new TV, I don't have this problem anymore, but it was, the game was I think in 720 progressive. My TV wouldn't display 720. It only did 480 or 1080i, and therefore it was letterboxing the table, therefore being playing with oval balls, and that was really quite annoying. And the funny thing was it was for all Zen games, because I think I downloaded Planet Minigolf just to see, and it was the exact same problem. And I contacted its customer support, and they were just kind of like, don't know what the problem is, and it's your TV. So that was one of the first things I did. It's your TV, get a new one. So that was one of the first things that I did. Yesterday, once I had the TV up, it was like, okay, let's see Zen. Let's make sure it works. Ed Boon, up it came. And then because it's a 3D TV, I got to look at it in 3D. I got to say, that is a world of difference on Zen tables. I mean, I think I threw up a Star Wars table and it was just like, wow, look at that. It's just so deep and things are going on. And yeah, it's very, very cool looking. Chris, speaking of 3D, there was at one point on Android, I think, and Bobby, you can probably confirm or deny how this might work. This is more of a bit of a tech question. So feel free to opt out. But at one point. Are you talking about when it was like in 3D for a certain sort of, I can't even remember what it was. I just remember you being like, it's in 3D for some reason. And it's really cool. It was awesome to see the 3D. It was choppy as anything, but I was actually playing through the choppiness because 3D. It was amazing. That's awesome. I actually had a tablet that you could actually plug into HDMI and actually have a direct connection, and that's the only reason why it worked. And it's one of those things. Now I've actually got a Shield tablet, which has basically got a PC processor in it. It'll be amazing to see what it would be like now with 3D support on the console. Sorry, not on console, on Android. Because it'd be able to do it, no problems at all. It'd be able to keep up with the current rate. But yeah, it'd be kind of cool to actually get that enabled on some of the Android builds again. I know it's probably not going to happen, but it would be cool. Yeah, I don't know what they're planning for 3D stuff as far as mobile goes. So that was kind of those, like, a fluke sort of thing. It was kind of a fluke. Yeah. I just went, oh. Isn't it in 3D on the 3DS? Yeah, it is. Okay. That one is, like, a totally different version. We had to, like, scale everything down because it's obviously a tiny screen. And it's not as good of a processor. So everything has to be basically redone for a 3DS. Yeah. That's a big challenge. no wonder uh no wonder it's like the things don't come over with 3ds that easily are there any other platforms like that that give you guys challenges as far as like having to do a lot of changes to the base sort of um uh code base yeah i would say nintendo platforms wii u and 3ds both are pretty rough yeah i don't know firsthand i'm just community but i know The team complains a lot. Yeah, right. Speaking of the team, what is the general size of the talent pool that they have? I should ask this first. Where is Zen based? Budapest. Budapest. Okay, thank you. So how many people do they have working over there specifically on pinball? But, I mean, in general, how big is the company? In general, it's about 80 people total now, I think. Wow. Yeah. I think when I first started there was like 40 or 50 so we've grown quite a bit as far as pinball I think about half of that is pinball wow okay that's a good decent sized number is do they have a like what would Zen say their flagship game is is it the pinball or is it something else oh yeah definitely pinball it is definitely pinball so that's pretty much where their efforts go first? Like I said, we have separate teams for separate teams. Kickbeat was probably five people. Then we switch people around a lot. Pinball is usually the priority. With a company's name like Zen, obviously they must have a philosophy. What is Zen's philosophy in terms of pinball? Thinking in terms of ball times and story modes versus just you know keeping the ball from draining oh uh mostly we want to tell a story okay that's really important to us um like if you've seen i'm sure you've played like a lot of the marvel stuff yeah yeah those usually go with an arc and you know it tells a lot of a lot of the story sorry i'm really echoey so i'm having a hard time talking oh that's okay um With the visual layout and with the lines we include, like, for example, on Infinity Gauntlet, we had, I think that was at the time, the one with the most unique lines. I think it had something like 130 something unique lines. Oh, wow. But we want to go beyond like simple just like score accumulation mechanics and actually craft, you know, thematic elements that drive the experience. So, you know, you had certain, again, on Infinity Gauntlet, we had different balls that did different things. So like something would happen and it would flip the table and that's the reality gem or whatever. And like certain things like that, we like adding, you know, not just lines and like little things happening on the table, but like big thematic elements make it extra cool, I think. That's it's interesting that you mentioned, especially with the Marvel tables, because in terms of a game like Infinity Gauntlet, after seeing some of the movies, all of a sudden it made sense. right like oh oh i get where they're going for it and and my score has improved it was it was the most bizarre thing that's what you know uh propelled me forward but you're right i mean i definitely get the stories in in all of these that's something i really yeah there's a lot of more obscure ones like dr strange i wasn't super familiar with but then once i started playing the table before it came out i was like whoa this is awesome i have to read all of this so i'm trying to go through and like read as much as I can, especially not that the movie is coming out, uh, but next year I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious to know if you guys get, um, an uptick then on some of those older tables that were done before the movies came out. Oh yeah, definitely. Um, we did Captain America quite a while ago, uh, before I started at Zen and when the, you know, Captain America and Avengers and all that, uh, all the, you know, newer movies started coming out, But we definitely had an increased interest in those when the movies came out. I'm curious about what the development time is on each of these tables. I mean maybe talk us from idea to design to build to release How long does it take Usually about a year from the time we decide we going to do a table to release That does include just like talking to the licensors and seeing, you know, what's going to happen, what they want to do, what they want to focus on, that sort of thing, how we're going to market it, all that stuff. As far as making the table from the time we actually start making it and designing it and everything it's usually six to nine months of that year wow so that kind of explains the polish so that pretty much then explains the polish on your guys's tables because yeah we definitely spend a lot of time on each one and make sure it's you know a unique experience and you know you'll see like different things like repeating from table to table like there's certain things we keep for every table um but like i said like there's there's totally different things for every single table we don't do templates we don't do skins that we just change the colors on or anything so everything is unique to that theme the thing i really like about a lot of the zen tables is how you play homage to some of the um pinball designers um that have gone before you like i'm thinking of on that we've been used doing the zen book club um here on blockade where we go through and which we're doing a wrap-up probably next week for the for the first time we need to whatever for that so what we do is um each month we pick a couple of zen tables and we play through them we actually like go through look at the guides um done by shiryuken to the chin and um he's got some great guides up there um and one of the ones that i've been playing recently is ghost rider and that's got that um sort of pin bots and jackpot style um uh spiral that you skill shot into and it's got the the jump ramps that a little bit like um no fear which should be coming out in pinball arcade next month um so it's it's these sort of game elements that um i think make people even though the tables have a very unique design um i think those sort of design elements make people more comfortable with the tables that you guys offer like touchstones that we can all attach to yeah yeah there's definitely um you know each designer we have I think right now we have six or more. I think probably more than that, actually, more like 10. But it depends on the designer. They definitely incorporate elements of their favorite real-life tables sometimes. So, you know, maybe they'll be obsessed with playing one table for a while and be like, you know, I want to do something like that in one of our tables. So, yeah, there are definitely real-life elements inspired in our tables. So, yeah, with all your table, I shouldn't say all, but the majority of your tables are licensed. How much input do the licensors have regarding the tables and what gets put on? Or is it do they kind of leave you up to your own devices? It depends. A lot of them actually are really into pinball. We found out, especially through doing the portal table, a lot of the guys at Valve are super, super into pinball. like a world champion kind of i can't tell you who it is but right all right okay yeah type of people yeah oh wow yeah some of them are super into it so they tend to you know want to have more input some of them stay back and go we trust you do you know do what you think is cool show us what you have we'll say yes or no kind of thing so it varies but most of the time they're pretty involved in what they want. I'm just, cause I'm curious in terms of like when the South park tables came out, they were miles above better than what Sega had put out. Cause Sega is just more when they put out the actual table, it was kind of like, it seemed like, Oh yeah, here's the things that you guys remember, you know, recognize and we'll just pull audio clips from the very shows and assemble it. Whereas the tables you guys put in, I would almost swear that Matt and Trey really got in there with you. I mean, obviously they recorded a whole bunch of new dialogue for it and everything and really put their input. I mean, it has just a pure South Park stamp on it. Oh, yeah, they were super involved. They wanted to make sure it was a certain way and everything was represented in a way that they liked. Like you said, there were lines, extra lines and stuff like that. Yeah, they were really involved in the process, which was awesome. And people really love those tables. So I think it was definitely worth, you know, working that closely with them. So with all these licenses, something that we're always debating when we talk about pinball arcade, it's, you know, they're always, oh, that's a licensed table. Are we going to be able to do it? Are we going to be able to not? You guys have managed to secure some pretty huge licenses and you've never once had to pass the cost on to the customers via Kickstarter or anything. I mean, your table prices are always the same on these. How have you managed to achieve this? It's a mystery to me. Well, we do a lot of the original stuff, so that helps us not have to charge quite as much on the licensed stuff. So keeping everything at an even price for as long as we've been putting it out definitely helps. You know, when you log on, you expect certain things to cost a certain price. We don't want to change that too much. you know we rarely change our prices the only time we've ever had anything like that was the Star Wars packs only had three tables instead of the four instead of the four but that was just because of the way we had the pack set up and it didn't really work the way we wanted with four so that was the only time we really it seemed like more because you had to pay 10 bucks for the three tables instead of the usual four but most of the time with Star Wars people are like we don't care we just want it so i don't think do you know you've been there for four years you you have to have been beforehand maybe you can answer this question but when you guys secured both marvel and star wars that was prior to disney purchasing those licenses right um now that disney has those licenses are you was disney helping to approach you know basically was that smooth easy transition kind of thing or was that something that now you have to go and re-license with them no it didn't really change much we still had our same uh because we did marvel first yeah um and we worked with them for a really long time they've always been really awesome with us um they were kind of our first big license so there are there are babies but um yeah with star wars like nothing's really changed we still have the same team uh over at lucas arts or lucasfilm or whatever wherever we work with um But yeah, we still have the same people. Nothing's really changed much since the Disney merger. I guess, if anything, it's kind of just opened us up to more options as far as other Disney stuff. So if we have more artists, that'd be much more accessible. This is just like pirates. I'm just saying there's going to be a new Pirates of the Caribbean movie coming out soon. Go figure. And I don't know. I think there's some Star Wars. Who knows? is there a frozen table in the works who knows yeah you know obviously yeah it would open up just a huge huge arena of tables you guys could do i mean it'd be unbelievable what uh where you could go with that um the reactions in blab for frozen is like no that was it no you know what it'd be it'd be a magnet on the flipper you know so we'd hold the ball and then all of a sudden let it go. It's like Waller game where they're like, don't shoot! Shoot! In this case, we'd be like, let it go! Please don't take any design cues from us. We have no idea. I'm writing an email to the team right now. Just don't. Something tells me that the ideas that they come up with for crazy stuff that goes on the table are not even remotely close to the lame levels that we could come up with. does does zen have a holy grail license um yes and no we've kind of already done it we had star wars as our holy grail for a really long time uh like i said we worked with marvel for so long they kind of gave us our our wings in a way it's kind of a dorky thing to say but yeah we we got popular with marvel and everybody loved that so we were like if we can ever do star wars that's like our are totally our holy grail so yeah you know our team is super into star wars um like i said they're based out of budapest so they actually do uh star wars like fan fiction videos in hungarian that's how hardcore they are i haven't actually seen them vitamins so that would be kind of amusing and just hearing it in hungarian don't know what made the force be with you sound like there but uh that'd be kind of kind of amusing no i was just curious too because um i mean obviously just uh ink to deal with fox that's why we have the balls of fury pack um with what is it archer and family guy american dad and bobbis burgers um interestingly enough the art style on them is jared pointed it out it really lends itself well to pinball just that cel-shaded look shaded yeah i really love the look of them yeah that one those ones and the south park i think really like did huge like they look amazing i think those are my the cartoon ones are my favorite ones i it's just they're gorgeous it worked out so well i i'm really happy with the way they turned out i know a lot of people are kind of wishy-washy on the whole uh seth mcfarlane licenses but i think they turned out great i'm really happy with them i think um from my perspective it's um i haven't actually got the packs i'll own up and i haven't actually bought the packs yet i think it's because i just don't have i don't watch the shows and i'm just wondering what do you think for those people who maybe aren't that into the seth mcfarlane sort of work what do you think the games offer um for those people who aren't like diehard fans i don't think you have to be diehard to be into them uh there's i mean i watch a lot of family guy and american dad and stuff but there's a couple references in there i was like what is this from so i actually went and found them and was like oh i get it that's funny but yeah you don't have to be super hardcore and do it i think they're enjoyable without really knowing the material and it kind of goes back to what I was saying about how the more obscure licenses with Marvel, it just kind of makes you go oh, what is this? I still have no clue who Moon Knight is but I enjoy the table all the same. Definitely, right? It just makes me more curious than anything going what is up with this guy? I don't get this. Go try to do this mode. Let's switch the whole ground and see what happens. Moon Knight was before my time but apparently they were like you want to do Moon Knight? Really? We're like, please? Can we? like there must be so much more scope in the marvel universe for tables and themes and stuff it's just such a massive universe to actually pick from theme wise oh yeah i'm sure you guys have got no problems with running out of tables or themes or other things you can do with that license so it's uh pretty good from that perspective for sure yeah lots to pick from uh like i said when When they were talking about doing Moon Knight, they were like, you can pick anything and you pick Moon Knight. What the heck? We're like, we like Moon Knight. I'm going to go to the messages that we've been accumulating during this whole thing. And I'm just going to kind of throw this out. Do you have to know, is Pinball FX 3 in the works? Yes, no. And how many more can we expect in the Pinball FX 2 lineup? Yeah, we're definitely working on the next iteration of our pinball games. I don't know what we've decided as far as the title or whatever, but yeah, we're working on it. We're definitely going to keep supporting Pinball FX 2 until that happens, which I think we'll probably even support it until after, just because people aren't going to want to buy it again and again, which means we'll probably also have imports depending on the platform. So we're definitely going to try to avoid any repurchasing as far as new, you know, new versions of the game, new platforms, stuff like that. Like when PS4 came out, we wanted everything to be, you know, transferable from PS3 and Vita. So we did that. But yeah, we'll definitely try to do that as, as much as we possibly can. Yeah. I mean, I've noticed that the way Zen treats their customers, they've always been exceedingly generous. It seems with, you know, console migration. I mean, to me, the customer loyalty for them seems one of the primary things. I mean, they've never been hesitant. When PS3 or PS4 was coming out, it was real soon we heard an announcement from Zen saying, oh, yeah, and you'll be able to migrate over, no problem, no additional cost to it. Yeah, it's super important to us. Like I said, nobody likes to rebuy the same stuff over and over again, especially if you get rid of your PS3 or you get rid of your Xbox 360. You still want to keep all that stuff, even if you don't have it hooked up. So it's really important to us to keep that stuff going, new platforms and new versions of the game and stuff like that. Anywhere the platform allows, we'll definitely do it. That's awesome. I love to hear that. What was the other question here in the peanut gallery I was looking for? Ah, there's a tournament button on the PC version, but there were just two in the past. Is this more or less a dead feature? how often do you guys run tournaments on the PC? Oh, that's my fault. Just getting busy. And, you know, if people aren't requesting something, it tends to get pushed back. So I'm always talking to our community. Like Jared knows this. He's on the forums. I'm on there pretty much every day. But yeah, if people aren't requesting it, I tend to assume that they're not interested. And that's something I have to set up with the team and schedule it out and, you know, plan the prizes and all that stuff. So yeah, that's my fault. It's not a dead feature. We just have been super busy this year with other things and lots of support issues. So hopefully those are calming down for the year. But yeah, we definitely need to do more tournaments for sure. One of our forum members who has helped us with our Zen Pinball book club, which is PinballWiz45B, he actually won the Portal tournament and got the prize. He did? Yeah. To which he says a very big thank you. But go ahead, Jared. One thing I was wondering about, I remember seeing the release of the eSports version on, was it iOS, Bobby? Yeah. Can you tell us more about that? Because I know that eSports is becoming more and more of a thing now. and I'm just wondering if that product or that offering will actually move open to other geographies or other platforms. I think it's only iOS at the moment, right? Yeah, it's iOS right now. We definitely want to do more with it. It just kind of depends on how well it does on iOS. We have a pretty big community on iOS and Android, so what we'd like to do is do it on Android, or sorry do it on Android and then you know if it takes off we love to do it on console if possible I not sure what the rules are as far as like if it considered gambling or whatever since you do put in money or you know fake currency or whatever But, yeah, if that took off on mobile, we'd definitely look into it more. I'm forming a league. Pinball Wiz is on my team. I'm joining that league too. I called it. I called it. Shocker. Do you guys develop for each platform individually, or do you kind of have a core system that you develop on and then port everything over? It kind of varies. So, like I said, with Wii U and 3DS, we have to spend a lot more time on those. So it just depends on the platform. PC is fairly decent to work on console since we've been doing it for so long is pretty good we've gotten our releases down to a science on mobile so those are usually pretty smooth with the exception of like a few minor issues we've had but other than that we've gotten it down it's pretty good right now I'm going to kind of ask about the lighting on Zen Tables have you ever thought of have they thought about putting in more dynamic style lighting because right now although there is a lot of lighting going on it's a fairly bright table and you might say in a fairly bright room there's not a lot of shadowing or anything else like that is that something that maybe could be coming in the future or is the look of zen the way that we're going to keep staying no it's pretty likely that we'll do it in the next iteration of our pinball game so So, yeah, it's definitely something the team wants to do. I'm not sure if it was just a memory issue or, you know, technical issue that we had with the previous versions or if it just wasn't something they, you know, made a priority. But, yeah, it's definitely something we're considering for the next game. That'll be fun to see. um i having come off the playstation 3 and then migrating over to the pc where i now have most of the tables um one of the things that i'm missing is that on the ps3 we are able to do head-to-head competition and on the pc we cannot um do you have any idea why that was at a ps3 only thing i don't know if it was on xbox or not but where you were able to set you know score goals or stuff like that you could play in real time and see the other person's progress happening against your own. Right. We left that out, actually, because nobody used it. So we had a tiny percentage of people actually using the head-to-head multiplayer, so we left it out because it didn't seem like people were interested, and now that it's gone, people are like, where did it go? So definitely something to think about for future games, but I'm not sure if that's something they're going to put in, But I've definitely been letting the team know that people really, really want it back. Yeah, it's not something that I used all the time, but it was also one of those just it was a unique way of playing the tables differently than what you were used to. And it actually inspired helped inspire me to come up with. We do a pinball tournament every month with the pinball arcade games. and realizing how much fun it is to actually compete against somebody right then in real time. We used to also do something we called racing, which was we would pick a table and say, OK, you have five minutes. Come back in five minutes. Tell us what your score is. And that was directly taken off of what I used to do with the Zen 2 on PS3. Awesome. Yeah, that's kind of what we do with the eSports app. It's like you either get one ball or you get a certain amount of time or certain parameters that John Youssi who gets the highest score in a certain amount of time or with one ball or whatever. That's cool. It's fun. It just changes the way you play pinball. It changes your entire strategy set. So yeah, it's a great way to play. Yeah, it's funny because when I did do the migration from PS3 to Steam, the thing that really got me was you guys went and did a humble bundle sale. And then also on steam, you've never been shy about putting the tables on sale. I'm just kind of curious. Is this a case of you trying to get as big of a customer base as possible and hoping that once you've hooked them, they'll keep buying? Or is it after a certain amount of time, you're just kind of like, ah, let's discount it, you know, for, for temporarily. I don't know. I usually it's the very most recent table that doesn't get the sale, but everything else, I mean, you know, You'll do flash sales of 50% off, 75% off. It's crazy. Yeah, I think it's pretty obvious. A big reason why we do that, we're pretty aggressive about sales because we're really proud of our game and we really want more people to play it. A big part of why our CEO started the company was to get kids involved in pinball because it's kind of a dying, well, not now, but at the time it was kind of dying out. You can't really find real life pinball tables out in the wild. Uh, so they really wanted to, you know, keep that going. And by doing sales, that kind of helps a little bit. It helps a lot of it. Cause I wouldn't have had it on the PC if, uh, if it wasn't for those, um, you know, again, because I, I, I don't know, I have probably 12 or 16 tables on the PS3 and it was that case of, Oh God, do I really want to rebuy? Um, you know, don't know but that made it very very easy yeah it's not hard when you can go you know get 20 tables for like 10 bucks on a humble that's exactly what happened i was like yeah okay take my money yeah exactly and the thing i love about like the humble bundle sales is even if you wind up uh having duplicate tables well then you gift them to other people i mean it's a really great way of spreading it around and being like, yeah, check this out. Yeah, we definitely love participating in sales and especially Humble Bundle. Like you said, you can get so many tables for so cheap and help out charity. Even if you have duplicates, you can just give them away and get more people interested and then they're like, hey, what is this? I've had a lot of people come into the forums saying, oh, hey, somebody gifted this to me and now I'm hooked. That's right. It's pretty obvious. With the latest table releases, I've kind of noticed that they've been moving away from the absolute total fantasy elements like I think Infinity Gauntlet is really very heavily fantasy to builds that could almost be actual real tables. I'm just kind of curious, is there any consideration, much like what Pro Pinball has done with their full throttle table, of making actual physical tables out of some of the stuff you've done? What's really most important to us is creating tables that not just take advantage of our physics model that we've been honing for quite a while now, but also take advantage of the fact that we're creating a digital pinball table with mini games and stuff that you just can't do on real pinball tables. So we want to keep it so that it feels like the real thing but without getting too bogged down in the physical side. So one example is a skill shot in our family guide table. If you do it just right, you can hit Peter, the 3D model of Peter with the ball, resulting in a skill shot and a pretty funny animation. We love what we do on the digital side, but when it comes to realistic stuff, the physics are pretty much the only part of that. OK. I mean, again, I just noticed I think it was I'm not sure which table. It was one of the very recent ones, though, that even the stand-up targets that would move side to side on the play field, there was now a little trough that you can see. So it was like there's a lot of thought in terms of, well, if this were a real table, yes, this is logically where it would come up, not just things magically appearing. Like back in the day, if you played a Rome, all of a sudden a ramp would magically, you know. Materialize. Materialize and glow across the screen. You know, oh, that's where the ball was going to go. Oh, I didn't know that until I actually hit it there. You know, so that's why I was kind of curious, because there seems to be much more of a push to make it look like a physical table would actually be. Yeah. And it kind of depends on the designer. Like I said, we have quite a few different designers that have favorite things that they like and certain features that they want to include on a table, you know, just to see what it's like. see how the players like it and stuff like that. So it does vary, but yeah, we have been kind of moving towards that, the whole realistic thing, kind of, in a way. Kind of. Except the 3D models like jumping all over the place. So do you take a, does Zen in general take offense when people, amongst our pinball community, we hear it a lot where they'll say, oh, Zen is more of a video game rather than a pinball game. And I'm always of the opinion, well, if it's flippers in a ball and it's all going down towards the center it's pinball i mean that's to me but you know the very definition physics uh well unless the physics are you know just you know underwater floaty um it's it's still it you know the ball is rolling on a flat surface coming at you it's pinball but a lot of people get distracted by all the the the digital goings on almost on the outskirts of the table but from what you're saying though that's kind of what zen is embracing going like yeah no this is this is us this is what separates us you know from a physical table oh yeah definitely i mean we don't call it pinball effects for no reason uh there's definitely you know additional yeah there's additional stuff on there but kind of at the same time most of our tables uh without the 3d models flying all over the place uh could probably be made into a real table which i think is cool i mean you wouldn't have you know infinity gauntlet flipping upside down, but the basic layout of the table is fairly realistic. They hang you upside down. Here, play it now! You just drop it. Welcome to our skydiving table. Is there any idea that has just been too crazy for even you guys to implement? No, I don't think so. A lot of people are like, oh, you should do this crazy thing, and we're like, okay, sure. We'll give it a go. That sounds awesome. Let's do that. Usually those too crazy ideas get put into mini games. Like the Star Wars tables have little like shooter mini games or like speeder bike mini games, stuff like that. Okay. And I think that's, I always looked at those as those are more video mode. Right. What would have appeared on a DMD screen more or less. It actually has the, still the, the weight of a ball bouncing around. I'd love to see, just personally I'd love to see coming back into some of the designs for those designers who are like true pinball fans love to see things like old school EM things like roto targets and stuff like that coming back in somewhere in the game in fact some games do sort of some games I think what one was it the name escapes me but it does sort of have a roto target style mechanism I'm sure some of the guys in the chat will be able to confirm which one that is but yeah it's always like you know just uh king of people when saying king of diamonds that type of thing um but yeah that those sort of you know pinball mechanical things um i don't know maybe it's um not the right fit for zen but they're really fun to interact with on the table um so you know something good and solid to hit when you're actually shooting around is it's kind of really satisfying so yeah um i like that sort of thing when i see those sort of things in zen tables it goes oh yeah cool i can bash away at that and it's really yeah bobby do you have what's your favorite what's my favorite table it would have to be it's probably going to have to be one of the the star wars ones i think it might be the i always forget the name of it it's one with the in it that just comes out the middle of the play field episode five yeah yeah that one it's it's really fun to play that one. I love the flow. I love the way you interact with all the toys in the middle. It's just really fun. My personal has always been Iron Man. Really? Yeah, interestingly enough, right? That's the most hated table. Yeah, people hate that one. It's hard. It's a brutal table. I've only ever seen the middle of the table open up with the big beastie coming out of it once, and I had no idea what to do and immediately drained them all. And I was like, oh, crap, it's going to take me forever to get back to this. But there's something about it that I just like going back to over and over again. It's really kind of interesting. The other table that I like Wolverine a lot, and I think that was the first Zen table that I felt was very close to what could have been a realistic table. And then I do like Super League football. and I think that's my just the oddball scoring. I could care less about what the actual score is. I'm concerned about winning the match. That's all I care about. That's another really popular one as well. I know Xenia says that he loves the Zen football table and I must admit tossing it between the two, the Zen football is something about that table as well. It reminds me of World Cup Soccer 94 a little bit but it's still got the variety and the challenge of both score end goals it's yeah it's really good the way they've done that one so yeah that's another favorite of mine too i know what is it uh uh fear uh fear itself that's also a really fun one um just a unique table uh just in terms of each time you knock down one of the or start one of the modes and what there's like seven of them it's a completely different way of what you have to shoot and what the goals are so it's definitely one of those tables where you need to know your routes and know your angles on and so that one's a lot of fun too um i haven't played much other than the demos of the new ones because wait for that steam sale um i can't we don't get demo previews on android so i just have to look at the the video that's right jared had commented that plants versus zombies is not available on android is that a licensing issue that it was only available on certain platforms or um i can't remember i think so uh i know we definitely tried to get it out on mobile but i don't remember what went wrong with it i think it was a licensing thing i'd have to look through my email but yeah unfortunately we can't do that one on mobile which is really really crappy because that's totally a favorite everybody's been asking for it so it's funny because that's one of those that i didn't i didn't particularly enjoy the first time i played it and then I went over to a friend's house and he had a 3d TV and I saw it in 3d and my jaw dropped it was it was a completely different table for me um suddenly I recognized what I was supposed to do and where everything was and you know just the space was incredible I think that's also the first time that I thought about the dynamic lighting of how it would help some of these tables because some of them are so colorful and have so much going on that you start kind of losing where the levels uh you know the various levels are um right but we also found it really funny with the Excalibur table because we all think that the new Stern Game of Thrones table just basically ripped that one off It virtually the same layout I haven't played that one yet, so I can't comment, but dang. Yeah, no, because Excalibur's been out for, what, two years, maybe? Maybe longer? It's pretty old. It's actually much older than the mobile release. Okay, but somebody threw up a side-by-side picture and it was just like, ooh. Okay. Interesting. So flattering. Wonder what Hungarian copyright laws are like. Because I think one just got violated. I know I have a personal request. I was going to say, I have a personal request for tables that I would like to see come to Zen. Okay. I want Cowboy Bebop and I want Ghost in the Shell. Oh, dang. And both of them, you know, Japanese anime, and they damn well better have the music from them, but I think they would be, just based off the animated tables you guys have been putting out, that's just my personal wish list. Okay. You know, maybe an Akira table where everything just turns to ooze. That'd be awesome, too. We get a lot of anime requests, actually. Imagine getting Akira. That would be such a massive license. There's so many. That's such a cult hit out there. That would be pretty huge. One of the other questions that was... Well, like I said, The wizard mode of that would just involve, you know, all the ramps turning into tentacles and the whole thing just like turning into a pile of gooey, bloody mush. Again, no idea is too crazy, right? Nope. So, yeah, one of the questions coming in was how, why don't we see any of some of the FX1 tables on Steam? Again, was that some sort of licensing thing? Because some of them suck. The interesting thing, they're super old, and we'd have to totally remake them. They were built on old tech, and we do everything from the ground up. So everything we have, we've made ourselves. We haven't bought elsewhere. So we'd have to totally redo those tables for Steam if we ever wanted to add them there. I've seen some of those initial tables, too. and obviously you guys your your art ability has gotten so so much better um just in terms of being able to see what the heck is going on right because i want to say it was the um i want to say it's the ninja gaten table it was out on ps3 and it was just basically a whole lot of red and it was really tough to figure out what the heck was going on yeah um hey one thing i remember observing when I was on Android and I think it was one of the tables in the Star Wars collection they one of the that particular designer who worked on the table implemented the realistic slingshots where it actually had pretty good power in them and they really flung the ball around almost like a like a real scare quotes real table so is that I think at the time the designer said Hey, thanks for calling. I'm trying to get the other designers to do the same thing. Is there – when a designer, I guess, tunes the table, it's really up to them how they tune it, or is there like a baseline set of requirements that makes it like a baseline Zen set and then the designer can go in and tweak a few other things? How does that work? Nope, it's totally up to the designer. So if they want really strong slingshots, you get really strong slingshots um and you've probably seen on the forums people will complain about certain things and they'll be like oh okay we'll go back and change it if everybody totally hates it okay so um i mean certain things we don't go back and change a whole table just because somebody's like it's too green or something but yeah for the most part it's up to the designer i know at the time too well that's if you play because i still have uh uh zen and then zen 2 on ps3 and if you play under that physics model that was under the initial zen release and then play those same tables under pinball or zen 2 or pinball effects 2 it's remarkable the difference in feel of what happens and you can tell where the where the effort was you know put into so it is interesting um how there can be a different approach to to the same table basically uh let's see what oh yeah that was the that question hey gang in the forum if you have any other questions throw them up rather quickly because I think our time here is just about over and we'll be happy to pass those questions along is there anything I know is there any surprises that you can maybe hint at coming our way that we can come to expect in the coming months oh geez I can't give anything specific but we do have some old licenses coming back and some new licenses coming in. We have some original stuff. So you name it, we're doing it. Lots of I saw our timeline for the next couple of years. It's going to be crazy. A couple of years. I like the sound of that. What is your typical release? Are you guys on a about three times a year you do a release or four times a year? What is your the basic goal? It depends. This year I think we did, how many have we done so far? I think originally our plan was 12 this year, but I think it got bumped down to 10. I'd have to go back and look through our calendar. But then you just bundle them in packs is basically how that works. Yeah. Okay. It usually averages out to about one a month. you know here here's a question uh from casena i'm still never gonna pronounce that correctly dude sorry um one of the things he still finds difficult is understanding the rules of each table um there's explanations offline but it would be cool to have them in the game are there any plans of maybe doing that man we already talked about um steve's guides his the community guides that he writes are just amazing. It would be so, so cool to have a feature where we could just include his guide in the table guide itself in the game. So I'm not sure if that's something they're thinking of, but I will definitely pass along the suggestion. I think, I don't know if people like Kay does it now. I know that on some tables, I know on Twilight Zone, there were like 700 pages of rules when they had to do it. So there's definitely an overhead to doing it. But I think because of the way you, the way Zen designs the tables, there's probably, because you're not having to sort of reverse engineer the rules, you know them from the outset. There is an opportunity there, I think, to actually make it embedded. But yeah, a little bit easier than trying to have to rewrite the rules, like essentially trying to find them, which is a real drag. I'm sure that the guys are going, ugh. and it's also kind of we don't want to give away everything about the table right up front yeah so we like people to kind of figure it out on their own and explore it a little bit um you know when you play a game and like the tutorial is like being way too draggy and like yeah saying everything you need to do it's like okay i know how to shoot come on but yeah so it's kind of hard to toe the line between not enough and too much information so that's probably a good point to to make there too bobby is the fact that while fast side are actually releasing tables that you know already out in the market and have been in a lot of cases for about 20 years and there's heaps of information out there it's not really like there's any spoilers that they need to keep but you're essentially releasing brand new unique products to the market and it yeah like having a walkthrough like release with the game kind of probably defeats the purpose of the enjoyment so i get i get that yeah yeah and especially with how we release it alongside like movies and stuff like When we did Ultron, we had to try really hard not to throw in any big spoilers, either in the table guide or the table itself, and just ruin it for everyone. Yeah, true. Yeah, that must be really hard balancing it. Yeah. I was going to say, I think my problem with understanding the rules of the table always came down to the fact that instructions would be being given on the DMD screen, but the ball was still rolling around. so it was it was one thing that williams was really good about understanding in terms of capture the ball let the information come out on the on the screen and then release the ball so you can you know go ahead and do what you need to be doing um that was always probably the most difficult thing for me in understanding any of the tables because like wait i haven't captured the ball i'm trying to read the dmd i don't know what to do you know and then you lose the ball yeah and something that has yeah and something that has gotten a lot better too with the more recent tables again is just the insert lighting. What's glowing, what's telling you to shoot here, has gotten a lot better than as opposed to, I mean, I still cannot make heads or tails out of Tesla. I have no idea. I don't think you ever will if you haven't by now. I certainly can't. I have no clue what you're even remotely trying to do, how to move a little gauge, nothing because I'm like, I don't see a blinking light. I see many blinking lights, but nothing that's screaming at me, you know, for what to do. So I think, again, your designers have gotten much better at understanding that, how to approach, you know, it's lessons that obviously, you know, pinball manufacturers had learned over the course of, you know, 40, 50 years, and you're squeezing into a real quick time window for learning. And it's amazing what has come out. How many tables you up to oh geez um past 60 i think wow that's incredible yeah i think on mobile uh we just released the 55th one so we've got to be past 60 total as far as like all the old tables go wow well since we're going to be picking our next uh zen book uh club tables uh probably in our next podcast next week. Bobby, maybe you can suggest three tables for us to focus on and we'll let you be the one that picks them for us. Oh, dang. So long as we own them. That's the caveat. We don't own them, we're going to have to go with something else. Yeah, you'll have to let me know what you've already done and I'll help suggest. We've only done so far, I'm playing Super League, Jared is playing Ghost Rider, and Kai, who's not with us today, he was playing Fantastic Four. Nice. Have you guys done Epic Quest yet? No, but I do have that. I do too. I love that one. That's my first suggestion. Okay. Epic Quest. Epic Quest and then you guys don't have the new tables yet? I'm missing the last eight. Oh, dang. You're behind. I am behind. Me too. Well, there wasn't a Steam Summer Sale. No, I haven't played South Park, I mean, other than the demo. I do have South Park. You should do South Park. You should get it. Email me and I'll give you a code. You have to do South Park. The super sweet table is super sweet. It's super sweet. I've mentioned it. I'm a camera assistant for motion picture industry. And one of my very, very first jobs, and I did it as a freebie, was for South Park. And it was filming the Mr. Hankey commercial from the very first season. Oh my goodness. Oh, really? yeah so i go way back with them there you go that's something mr hanky is probably my favorite part of the table the poop ball table it's great the three brown boys yeah they didn't tell me it was gonna happen and i was playing it i was laughing so i was crying i just went oh my goodness it's like this it's like the stern south park table but way way better like i said even with the demo that I played, it was immediately I was just like, oh my god, that Sega one just sucks. I don't need to play that one ever again. I'm really looking forward to again, I haven't purchased it. I think that was when my purchasing had stopped was the Deadpool table. Just the little I played of the demo, I've been cracking up at it, and especially now seeing that the movie's coming out. I mean, obviously yours isn't rated R, but it's still good enough. edgy for a Zen table, I think. It is. Yeah, definitely. It's a fun table to play. Well, Bobby, I think that we've pretty much covered everything I can think of regarding Zen so far. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for coming in and talking to us. Yeah, totally. Sorry I was such a pain in the butt to try to schedule. No worries. And please, anytime if you want to pop in and give us some updates on what's going on with Zen, don't hesitate to ask. We'll log you in and promote the hell out of it. Oh, thanks. We have tons of new stuff coming, so once we announce it, anytime. Okay, that has been Bobby Lorcher, also known as Barbie Babam. You can follow her at Twitter at Barbie Babam. And while I'm mentioning Twitter, we'll go ahead and follow Jared Morgs at Jared Morgs and myself at Shut Your Traps. Or you can follow the podcast itself at Blockade. We will be returning next week, probably with regular scheduled programming, which means none of you will download. Oh, we've got two weeks of interviews. Give us more. Well, you know, if you know anybody over at Stern, send them our way. Yeah, totally. Because then we'll ask them about the Stern pinball app, and they'll shut up and not talk to us. Any other business you want to cover, Jared? Nothing at my end. It's now like about quarter to eight, so I should probably do some work. You should go to work. That would be a good thing. Yes. I always forget about that, that him being on the opposite side of the world and in the future. It's Monday for him and Sunday for us. Boo. Boo indeed, yeah. He's rather chipper for being here early on a Monday morning. Yeah, six o'clock in the morning on the dot is when I get into the office. I can do these recordings because I'm dedicated. alrighty well again I'd like to thank Bobby for coming on with us Jared for being there Bonso for who the hell knows where he is but he should have been here um I have been shut your traps aka Chris Frevis we will talk to you all again next week bye bye welcome to the billionaires club wizard amusement dot com The West Coast leader in classic pinball. Makers of custom pinball shooter rods to buyer specifications. Swap out your standard ball plunger with something themed to your specific table. Installs in less than five minutes with no custom tools. Even if you don't own a table, looks great as a pinball memento to admire. Prices start at $39, but mention Blockhead Podcast and receive 10% off your order. WizardAmusement.com. Sales, restoration, customization. remember to leave a review on itunes or any podcasting channel blockade is distributed through we can't improve unless you tell us how until next time remember do not worry be happy