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Pinball Is Dying – Part 2: Bally/Williams

Silverball Chronicles·podcast_episode·2h 4m·analyzed·Jan 5, 2022
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.035

TL;DR

Williams' slot machine division and WPC-95 cost-cutting marked the late-90s pinball downturn.

Summary

David Dennis and Ron Hallett explore the late-1990s Williams pinball era in part two of their 'Pinball Is Dying' series. They discuss how Williams' entry into the slot machine market (WMS Gaming) drained resources from pinball, cost-cutting measures in the WPC-95 board redesign, and the emergence of new designer talent like Keith Johnson. The episode covers two landmark WPC-95 games: Congo and Attack from Mars.

Key Claims

  • Williams' entry into the spinning reel slot machine market in 1994 (via WMS Gaming) ultimately killed pinball by draining resources

    medium confidence · Pat Lawler quote that WMS Gaming 'saved gaming, but it certainly killed pinball'; IGT lawsuit settlement of ~$28.67 million in 1999 created financial strain

  • WPC-95 controller board introduced in late 1995 consolidated multiple boards and cut costs including back glass design, speaker panel material, and GI (general illumination) control strings

    high confidence · Detailed technical breakdown by Ron: eliminated two GI strings, changed back glass to integrated plastic tub, converted wooden speaker panel to plastic flip-down design, consolidated driver/CPU/sound/fliptronics/AV boards

  • Congo was originally planned as a bi-level playfield but was scrapped due to cost, leading to designer Lyman Sheets reassignment to Attack from Mars

    high confidence · Lyman Sheets confirmed this on Slam Tilt Podcast episode 100; David cites his own podcast coverage

  • Congo sold 2,129 units; Attack from Mars sold 3,450 units in December 1995

    high confidence · Direct production number citations during game reviews

  • Keith Johnson became critical to both Jersey Jack Pinball and Stern by architecting JJP's current system from scratch

    high confidence · Detailed career arc: discovered via IRC chat by Larry DeMar in 1997, worked on WMS Gaming slots, designed Lord of the Rings and Simpsons Pinball Party (White Star era), later became principal architect for JJP's custom OS/board/programming language

  • Attack from Mars was not originally inspired by the Tim Burton movie 'Mars Attacks!' but was designed first by Brian Eddy as a coincidence

    medium confidence · George Gomez statement cited; movie and game emerged within year of each other but design predated the film

  • Adam Ryan learned Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator fundamentals by osmosis from Earl Thomas (WMS Gaming) to create DMD art

    high confidence · Direct quote: 'just by sitting next to the guy, by osmosis, I learned pretty much the fundamentals'

Notable Quotes

  • “Pat Lawler would say that it saved gaming, but it certainly killed pinball.”

    David Dennis (paraphrasing Pat Lawler) @ ~12:00 — Core thesis claim that WMS Gaming division's success directly led to pinball division's decline

  • “The 90s saw the biggest leap in pinball mechanics and technology the hobby has ever seen. The dot matrix display and how Bally Williams leveraged it made the pins from the previous 10 years look like a horse and buggy.”

    David Dennis @ ~8:30 — Framing the era as historically significant despite industry contraction

  • “I definitely went through some pain in just wrapping my head around how to create the illusion of reality in motion using only three colors with 32 pixels high.”

    Adam Ryan (dot artist) @ ~26:00 — Explains technical constraints and artistic creativity of DMD era

  • “There were a couple of games which I was very frustrated with. They were a little more difficult. They had fallen way behind on their development cycle. They were forced upon us late. We were told to do it as fast as we could.”

    Adam Ryan @ ~31:00 — Evidence of production pressure and cost-cutting affecting game quality

  • “Congo is probably one of the best shooting games that's ever been made, my opinion.”

    Ron Hallett @ ~35:00 — Despite poor initial reception, Congo later became a tournament darling

  • “When you look at, like, Deadpool, I think his last real quality game that had some really fun funniness.”

    David Dennis @ ~58:00 — Brian Eddy's later Stern work contrasted with Attack from Mars camp humor aesthetic

Entities

Williams Gaming (WMS Gaming)companyPat LawlorpersonKeith JohnsonpersonLarry DeMarpersonDwight SullivanpersonAdam RyanpersonEarl Thomasperson

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Williams Gaming's entry into slot machine market in 1991-1994 and subsequent IGT patent litigation ($28.67M settlement in 1999) drained resources and attention from pinball division during critical development years

    high · Timeline correlation: WMS Gaming founded 1991, entered reel slot market 1994, lawsuit settled 1999; concurrent with Williams pinball staff layoffs and design consolidation beginning mid-90s

  • ?

    event_signal: Pinside Secret Santa gift exchange and This Week in Pinball Awards (Twippies) annual voting period occur during December holiday season

    high · Meta-discussion at episode opening: David and Ron appeal for Twippy votes, mention Secret Santa sign-ups on Pinside

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Attack from Mars' camp humor and accessible design philosophy ('explorers of all levels can navigate') contrasts with later Brian Eddy work; demonstrates design priorities shifting toward broader appeal despite production constraints

    medium · Congo flyer emphasizes 'accessible shots, obtainable awards, easily understood rules'; Doug Watson's comedic voice work and script; comparison to Deadpool's later quality humorous tone

  • $

    market_signal: 'Pinball Is Dying' series frames late-1990s Williams era as period of industry contraction despite technical/creative excellence; resource drain from gaming division, cost-cutting, and staff turnover created paradox of quality games in decline

    high · Series title and framing throughout; David's opening thesis about 90s 'biggest leap' followed by 'industry contracted'; contrast between Congo/AFM quality and 2,129/3,450 units sold (vs. pre-90s higher volumes implied)

  • ?

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.374

0:00
From unsolved mysteries to unexplained phenomena, from comedy gold to relationship fails, Amazon Music's got the most ad-free top podcasts, included with Prime. Because the only thing that should interrupt your listening is, well, nothing. Download the Amazon Music app today. The next two games here in a sec, I'm just going to fill this one out. And fill it out.
0:43
Yes, fill it out. Ouch. Like E.T. Ouch. Americans. Hello everyone, I'm David Dennis and this is Silver of All Chronicles. With me this month, like every month, is my co-host Ron, Secret Santa Hallet. What's up fella? Not much. How you doing? Very good, very good. You're in on the Pinside Secret Santa at this holiday Christmas season. Ah, what's that again? That's where you give away presents. You're a Secret Santa. You give presents. They send them in the mail. You get presents back. I say this podcast is our present. Oh, that's right. We have decided to release another episode here in the last part of 2021. Or is it 2020? I don't know. They all blend together. And we have decided, so if you wanted to hide from your family, you have something to do for a couple hours. So it's awards season. Awards season is upon us, Ron. The This Week in Pinball Awards, the yearly awards, the Twippies, are out for voting very shortly. So please remember us if we make it on the short list. Please, please remember us. So you're begging for Twippy votes. That's right. I will give up if I don't hear back from people for voting for us. So our podcast is ending if we don't get voted for. Is that what you're saying? That's exactly right. We should start a Patreon and ask for money or something. Yeah, well, we could do that, but Ron, I'd like to be a starving artist instead. We also have the Pinball Industry Awards. That's coming up as well. Sponsored, of course, by Flippin' Out Pinball and the Pinball Network. I've been working with our committee on that, and I have been very, very busy. So that's why we're a little bit late this month. and this episode might not be to the same exact masterful high standards as usual because I've been very, very busy in the month of December. And David does all the work, just to let you guys know.
3:21
Congo
game
Attack from Marsgame
Brian Eddyperson
Lyman Sheets Jr.person
IGT (International Game Technology)company
Kevin O'Connorperson
Vince Pontarelliperson
Bill Gruppperson
Dean Groverperson
Doug Watsonperson
Dan Fordenperson
Brian Morrisperson
John Trudeauperson
Stan Winstonperson
George Gomezperson
Slam Tilt Podcastorganization
Pinsideorganization

licensing_signal: Congo based on 1995 Michael Crichton film with Stan Winston creature effects approval; Attack from Mars sci-fi theme design predated Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! (1996) by coincidence according to George Gomez

medium · Congo: $50M budget film, $152M box office, 22% Rotten Tomatoes; Stan Winston provided custom gorilla approval/design; Attack from Mars: George Gomez states Brian Eddy designed concept before movie released

  • $

    market_signal: Congo initially poor-selling and stripped for parts due to bad movie reputation; later gained tournament popularity and secondary market value ('can't find one for less than your firstborn child')

    medium · Production: 2,129 units; David notes it 'didn't become a darling until later'; Ron confirms tournament resurgence pumped up value

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Lyman Sheets reassigned from Congo bi-level playfield project to Attack from Mars due to cost cuts, becoming programmer on the game

    high · Confirmed by Lyman Sheets on Slam Tilt Podcast episode 100; David cites his own prior podcast coverage

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Senior designers like Larry DeMar transitioned out of pinball into slots; new/junior designers and programmers (Sheets, Grover, Johnson) built late-WPC/WPC-95 games despite less experience

    high · David notes: 'We don't have those, you know, Larry DeMars that we once had just banging out amazing code, right? And Dean Grover...at this time he was new'; Kenya Johnson transition from independent/IRC to Williams; staff layoffs timing with lawsuit/WMS Gaming expansion

  • ?

    product_concern: WPC-95 cost-cutting consolidated circuit boards, eliminated GI control functionality, and removed cosmetic elements (Williams logos, wooden components); production pressure forced rush jobs on art assets

    high · Detailed technical changes: consolidated fliptronics/sound/AV boards; eliminated two GI strings; plastic tub design; Adam Ryan quote about being forced to do work 'as fast as we could' on games that 'fell way behind'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Keith Johnson discovered via IRC chat by Larry DeMar in 1997, transitioning from independent programming to Williams Gaming slots, then to pinball; became foundational to Jersey Jack Pinball's technical infrastructure

    high · Career arc documented: top-5 world player (Papa 3 qualifier 1993), IRC recruitment 1997, WMS Gaming work, Pinball 2000 involvement, JJP principal systems architect; described as designing JJP systems 'from scratch' including OS, boards, programming language

  • ?

    technology_signal: Deluxe Animation software (by Electronic Arts) standardized for DMD creation 1990-2000s; three-level pixel intensity (100%, 90%, 75%, 0%) enabled illusion of motion and depth on 128x30 pixel displays

    high · Adam Ryan quote on technical constraints; extended use ~20 years from early 90s to Wizard of Oz; HomePin still using DMD; technical specifications of pixel resolution and brightness levels

    • But you add all the charm. I add all the charm, but I don't do any of these show notes here with all the misspellings. That's right, that's right. So remember, of course, our Facebook page, facebook.com slash silverballchronicles, all chronicles if you want to check out all of my other correct spellings and musings you can swing on over we always like to put up a couple of really neat little things to chat about and last month ron we actually went a little bit further and posted a question as a follow-up to our last podcast which was your favorite system adb game and of course ron your sis your favorite system ADB game was, of course. I believe I said Genesis, but you told me I couldn't vote. Yeah. So that's okay, I guess. But it would be Genesis if you were allowed to vote, which you're not allowed to. Oh. Yeah. Of course, mine was Bad Girls. I thought Bad Girls was really great. And, of course, a huge shout-out to my first game, Tag Team. Super, super awesome. We had a lot of really awesome responses. We had a lot of great responses. Eric Wurtenberger, Chuck Wurt would crack out the Genesis he would say Genesis as well Albert Agar, formerly of the Pinball Nerds podcast tag team, big fan there Joe Cherovino, of course from the greater Toronto area he would say, of course, TX Sector Robo War Arena Genesis victory all have some of the best music and, to the best of his ability he doesn't know who is responsible for those sick jams Well, I'll tell you what. Through some of my research, Ron, I wasn't able to 100% confirm who actually did those bangin' hits. I think it was Rush. It was not Rush. I don't know why that's topical at the moment.
    5:13
    See, as a Canadian, right, like Rush is played all the time. So I'm kind of over it. I think the music was done on those System ADB games by Craig Bierwaltz. firewalls, although I can't 100% confirm that. So if anybody bumps into him or hears from him, give him an ask. Of course, another one, we've got Clark saying Genesis. Scott saying Victory. Mike Castleman, Genesis for me by a long shot. Joe Fox, Genesis. Tom Graff, RoboWar. Of course, he'd pick RoboWar. Who's Tom Graff? That's Neil Graff's dad, right? Yeah, that's right. So, yeah, thanks for engaging with us over on the Facebook. If you want to support the show, you can swing on over to silverballswag.com. We have our Silver Ball Chronicles shop over there. You can grab yourself a T-shirt, a mug, some stickers. We sold a couple stickers and a couple shirts, I think, last month. So I'll tell you what, they like us. They really like us. I have a little extra tidbit here. I think this was our Pinball 2000 episode where I could not remember the name of the main German distributor, the one that actually was interested in possibly buying the Williams pinball division when they shut down. Yes, and this was the distributor who's always sort of on the periphery, kind of poking, making things, they want to do certain things. They were the huge German distributor that bought like 70%, 80% of Williams games. Kudos to Tim Peters for this. He said that their name was Nova, and I believe that's correct. When I saw that, it's like, yeah, that sounds familiar. I believe that was their name, Nova. And they got that name, of course, from the famous German car, the Chevrolet Nova. Uh-huh. Okay. Wasn't that a show, Nova? Like some sci-fi thing? I don't know. I'm not a nerd, Ron. Oh. I think Leonard Nimoy might have hosted that. Ultimate nerdness. He was the guy that did that part of The Simpsons that one time, right? Very good. Yeah, he did In Search of, too. Well, Ron, the 90s saw the biggest leap in pinball mechanics and technology the hobby has ever seen. The dot matrix display and how Bally Williams leveraged it made the pins from the previous 10 years look like a horse and buggy. The purchase of Bally by Williams in the late 80s created a competitive shark tank, which forced designers and engineers to continuously one up each other. But as the 90s marched on and the industry contracted, designers left Bally Williams or they were moved on to other areas. Junior designers, programmers, and dot artists took their place and built some of the best machines Bally Williams had ever produced. But sadly, the sales numbers didn't show that. This month is part two of our Pinball is Dying series, Williams in the Late 90s. Ron, what do you remember about the late 90s arcade or pinball scene? I was kind of out of it by that point, to be honest. So you were in and then you were out. Well, I didn't really start playing pinball until I was in my 30s in the 2000s. So all this kind of happened. Yeah, I really wasn't around. All I remember in the late 90s was the one arcade that sort of survived across the street from the high school in my town. It was slowly going down. But the biggest thing that I remember at that time was seeing, of course, Star Trek The Next Generation, the machine there. But I spent most of my time on some of the arcade games because I could make my coin last longer. And The Next Generation probably didn't work. You're probably right.
    9:05
    Well, Williams, of course, was looking for other areas to continue to turn a profit by 1994. They were spending a lot of time looking around, and quite frankly, they were unhappy with the way that their pinball division was performing. So they entered into the real spinning slot machine market. So what's a spinning reel slot machine? It's like the one-arm bandit, right? That's what I think of. Yeah, you pull the arm down, and the three things spin, and if you get a line across, you win something. Yeah, so of course, it would say that the Williams slot division actually brought some healthier cash flow into the company. Pat Lawler would say that it saved gaming, but it certainly killed pinball. So what was WMS Gaming? Well, it was the manufacturer of slot machines and video lottery terminals, or VLTs they call them, I guess. And, of course, the software to help casinos manage their gaming operations. In 1991, WMS created a new division called Williams Gaming, and they entered the gaming and state video lottery markets, and they developed and released their first video lottery terminals in the Oregon market in 1992.
    10:22
    Williams brought in a gentleman named Earl Thomas, who worked in Las Vegas as a graphic designer to help them with their gaming art. And, of course, he was in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator Genius back when those technologies were just emerging. So he was huge when he helped out a lot of the dot guys when they made their DMD displays. So, of course, we're getting some cross-pollination because WMS Gaming is, in fact, helping a little bit on the other side, which is pinball. Adam Ryan, the aforementioned, one of the aforementioned dot guys, says, just by sitting next to the guy, by osmosis, I learned pretty much the fundamentals and how to think and create using those programs. I'm still using those same skills today. So Williams Gaming then entered the spinning reel slot machine, or reel spinning slot machine market in 1994. But this was the company's video game roots that ultimately would prove to be their strength. However, the gambling slot machine leader, a company called IGT, they were based in Las Vegas, filed a series of lawsuits against WMS for violating what they called the Tellens patent for virtual spinning reel technology. These lawsuits were settled out of court in 1999, so you can see that it took many years to solve this, and WMS agreed to pay IGT approximately $28.67 million. So you can see that there are some issues here. We're racking up legal fees. We're going to have to pay a bunch of money. So we're drawing a deeper picture here. So from our Pinball 2000 episode, kind of really the absolute end of Williams to today, you can see there's a lot of turmoil that's creating issues within Williams and ultimately would probably lead to the death of Pinball. The thing about IGT is they're pretty much a monopoly. I mean, if you went to Vegas, every single machine you saw there was going to be IGT. So they didn't want anyone else coming in on their market, I'm sure. Yeah. So when the lawsuit started to happen, about a year and a half or so, the layoffs at Williams started to appear. But, of course, WMS Gaming also gave us a couple of new names in the industry, some names which are legends today. That would be Keith Johnson. Who's Keith Johnson? He's a programmer. He's done a lot of really good games. He's kind of a big deal. So he was a top five player in the world. His first Papa was Papa 3 in 1993 in New York City, and he was the top qualifier for B Division. He qualified in A Division every Papa year until 2017. Oh, my goodness. He is so much better at pinball than me.
    13:06
    No wonder he can keep a ball alive forever on his games, because I can't. So he's, of course, a programmer for software. He did a lot of software education systems for financial people, colleges, that kind of stuff. So back in the 1990s, a lot of these sort of nerdy computer folk hung out on a program called IRC.
    13:28
    Do you remember IRC? I don't. It's something something chat, right? I thought you were a super nerd. I'm sorry. So IRC was basically a massive chat room to really just bring it down a level. It was a huge chat room. It was literally the dark web. So back in the mid-early 90s, this was the dark web. This is where everybody who generally knew how to do computer stuff would go and hang out. This is where you would pirate software. This is where you would chat with other computer programmers. And oddly enough, this is where Keith Johnson bumped into one Larry DeMar. Now, in 1997, Larry DeMar said he was looking for programmers for the slot machine division because that's where he was hanging out now. He was no longer in pinball. And at Expo that year, Keith chatted with Larry DeMar and Dwight Sullivan when they went to lunch. Keith then would leave his old job and he would start working in slots at Williams Gaming. and then eventually he would move into the pinball division where he worked on Pinball 2000. Of course, Keith loves pinball, and you can tell that because he's ended up being very, very important to both Stern and Jersey Jack Pinball. Isn't that right? That is right. I mean, the most important thing is he designed, as far as I know, he designed their, because they did everything from scratch. They didn't use any existing board sets or anything, so. Jersey Jack. So he was the main architect of their current system that they use, which had to be a ridiculous amount of work. Yeah, he went, like, right from board controllers, operating system, you know, programming language, the whole thing. He basically designed it all. In a fairly short amount of time. And it's worked out rather well, actually, for Jersey Jack. Yeah, except for the initial light boards they had and Wizard of Oz that had issues. I think once they were replaced, it's been pretty solid. Keith Johnson's, I think, biggest year was the year that he released both Lord of the Rings and The Simpsons Pinball Party, one right after another, two of the highest heralded games of the White Star era. So this is when we get into 1995.
    15:44
    Williams' controller board starts to come out with a new WPC-95 version towards the end of the year. Cost-cutting. What did they cost-cut, Ron? Let's see. So they changed, there's a bunch of things they changed. The back glass, or just trans light, the old system, most systems people know, you remove the thing and there's an insert panel that you can swing out. They made that all one unit, the tub, they called it. They had the glass and like a plastic tub that was attached to it with all the lights attached to it and a plug. Right, and each bulb would go in. And screw in a plastic clip. Again, cost savings. The speaker panel used to be wood. It made it plastic, and it actually, you could, it didn't take it out anymore. You could just flip it down. The board set, they just, they consolidated boards. I'm trying to remember exactly all the boards they consolidated. I think it was like, because WPC had the driver board, CPU board, sound board, fliptronics board, so I think they took, like, the fliptronics board and the sound board, oh, and the AV board, the video board. They put them all in the one board, and then they made updates to the driver board and the CPU board. I'm trying to remember if that pretty much stayed the same, but it was all consolidation, and they also lost some functionality because the old WPC system, they'd have five strings of GI that they could control, like DIM. They used Triax. Think of a dimmer switch on a light. That's literally what it is. Instead of a relay off and on, you could actually do different light intensities. And if you look at any pre-WPC95 game, the back box lighting, it dims and comes on just like the plate feel does. WPC95, they eliminated two of the GI strings. So the head light is always on. There's no effects at all. It's always on, which is kind of like CERN is now. I think that, like, the back box light is always on. So when we talk about sort of the WPC-95 games, though, a lot of them are games that have some pretty unique mechanical bits on them that are still heralded today as some of the most fun games. But you're saying a lot of the bits under there were actually cut out. Yeah, consolidation and cheapening out. Even basic things like the shooter rod housing that used to have a little Williams logo on it. And then they got rid of that. So it's just generic because it probably costs more money to stamp a Williams logo in there. Oh, interesting. Yeah, just look at any, like, WPC 95 game with a shoe rack. So they were looking not only at dollars but pennies. Yeah. It was a big time at this time. And in that period is when they laid off a lot of their design staff. Yeah. Well, one thing that they didn't cut, which I think is probably one of the strengths of this era, is the dot animation, the dot art of this time. And they would use software to make the dot art, which is actually designed by Electronic Arts. You've probably heard of them. It's called Deluxe Animation. And they used that software from 1990 till probably today. I have no idea. They used it in both Bally Williams Pinball and WMS. Of course, DMDs had 128 pixels wide by 30 tall. So each square is a pixel. And it had three levels of intensity or brightness. You'd have 100%, 90%, 75%, or 0%. And with that, you would kind of make different animations or images, and you could make them move across the screen or move or change just by changing the brightness and intensity of one of those square pixels. And they used it for 20 years. When you think about it, close to overall, between 91, or around that era when it started, to when Wizard of Oz came out, that's, yeah, that's about 20 years of dot matrix. That's longer than solid state, you know, just like the digital displays. And HomePin is still using DMD. Yeah. Adam Ryan says, I definitely went through some pain in just wrapping my head around how to create the illusion of reality in motion using only three colors with 32 pixels high. Of course, the artist would make all of the still images. They would sort of pass the frames over to the programmer. The programmer would take a look, give some feedback, send it back, do some more changes. and then they would sort of stick it into the system. So they still kept the DMD, and they still... I'll tell you what, during this era, the DMD colors... I'm sorry, the DMD art at this time really became very, very cool.
    20:21
    And Adam would say that I don't know what kind of magic or voodoo they did, but it appeared on the depth of screen and choreography that they all wanted, and it looked great. So let's get into some games, Ron. People are very bored. We're, you know, 20 minutes in here, and they haven't heard a single thing about a game. But the WPC-95, the first game was Congo. Is a movie licensed theme? Sells 2,129 units. Art by Kevin O'Connor. Music and sound by Vince Pontarelli. Dots by Adam Rine. Software by Bill Grupp and Dean Grover. And you'll see a lot of these names are sort of new on the programming side, right? We don't have those, you know, Larry DeMars that we once had just banging out amazing code, right? And Dean Grover works for CERN. He did Beatles and I think all of their whole model pens. He's definitely the elder statesman now, but at this time he was new. Of course, this is the horrible movie Congo. You've seen Congo. I've never seen Congo. I saw Congo in the theater when I was like eight. I'll tell you, listening to the Tim Curry call-outs in the game, I want to see Congo in the movie. I mean, I don't know. I guess if you kind of go in expecting it not to be really great and just kind of have fun, it's pretty good. Of course, this is the 1995 science fiction action-adventure movie based on the Michael Crichton novel from 1980. Michael Crichton, of course, from Jurassic Park fame. So why wouldn't you go with another proven book to create an awesome smash hit? Of course, you'd bring in Steven Spielberg for this, wouldn't you? Sure. No, no, Steven Spielberg can't do this. Of course, you'd bring in the John Williams guy to have the masterpiece score that he provided for Jurassic Park 2. The John Williams guy.
    22:18
    Well, no, of course not. But I do remember this movie because it had Ernie Hudson in it. Ghostbusters. Of course. And the only reason I remembered that Ernie Hudson was in this movie is because when I remember seeing this movie, I remember going, that's the guy from Ghostbusters. And I don't think I've ever seen him in anything before or anything after.
    22:38
    Like, I don't know what Ernie Hudson has ever done, but I remember him in Ghostbusters. Well, he's in the new Ghostbusters, too. Oh, spoiler. Sorry.
    22:48
    So, of course, it had a $50 million budget back in 1995, which is a big deal. and it did $152 million in the box office. That's pretty good. It made money. It did its job. And it is a kind of fun movie. It is kind of fun. It had a 22% Rotten Tomatoes, so not very good. Generally, I try to avoid anything under 62.
    23:13
    I only have so many hours of life left. The Playfield on Congo, this is probably one of the best parts of the game, isn't it, Ron? It's a great game. It's probably one of the best shooting games that's ever been made, my opinion. I have played Congo. I played this at Cabin Fever in Toronto, and I was pleasantly surprised at how awesome this game is. And it wasn't even the first play field. They rejected the original one. Yes. There was a bit of a scramble. The whole story behind that, which you can also hear on my podcast, the Slam Tilt Podcast. Just thought I'd throw that shout out there. The Slam Tilt Podcast. Episode 100, Lyman Sheets, where he stated, which I didn't even know, that Congo, he was on Congo originally, Lyman Sheets. He was on the team, and the original play field was going to be bi-level. It was going to have two play fields. Interesting. And they just, for whatever reason, cost wasn't working, I don't know. They scrapped it, so he got reassigned to a game you may have heard of called Attack from Mars, and there you go. Of course, I had mentioned DOTS. Well, the art team were provided a lot of reference material, and, of course, Adam Ryan had to jump into the project and smash out those dots in record time. Adam says, there were a couple of games which I was very frustrated with. They were a little more difficult. They had fallen way behind on their development cycle. They were forced upon us late. We were told to do it as fast as we could. I don't think I did as good a job as I could have. Of course, this is where the cuts are beginning, right? So the cuts are getting, in fact, deeper at Bally Williams, and everybody, including all these guys, see the target.
    24:57
    You know, if somebody says get this done in a couple of months, you get it done in a couple of months because the ax has fallen all around you, right? And I just want to say I love Congo.
    25:07
    Congo is pretty amazing. And the thing is I never got to hear Congo until I actually played it at someone's house and didn't realize the absolutely incredible Tim Curry call-outs. Kudos to you, Tim Curry.
    25:19
    I think he was supposed to be from Romania in the movie. So he's got all these, like this accent. The hero graphics, what do they mean? It's just hilarious. I love it. Multi-ball call-outs are awesome. Multi-ball!
    25:36
    I love the flowy shots. It's a really great shooter. But I'll tell you what, it's got hippos, snakes, and killer apes. And that's just on the first ball. Yeah, we've got to read from the flyer. It also has Stan Winston in it. Yeah. Because, as the story goes, it has a gorilla underneath the playfield. Originally, the gorilla was supposed to, the original idea was he would actually come up onto the playfield and you would battle him, like he hit the ball back at you. That would have been cool. But he ended up underneath the playfield. John Trudeau, the designer, he just took his creature from the Black Lagoon, like the window, and turned it around the other way. But I guess Stan Winston must have had some kind of approval for the game. He didn't like the gorilla.
    26:27
    He's like, you're not doing it right. So he did the gorilla himself. Really? That's Stan Winston's gorilla you see underneath the play field. It does look very, very cool. Uncover valuable collections deep within Congo, trademark. It's time to journey into Congo, an adrenaline-pumping, action-packed pinball adventure based on the hit movie and best-selling novel by the author of Jurassic Park. Yeah, they're really playing up that Jurassic Park part.
    26:56
    Explorers of all levels can navigate through Congo with its accessible shots, obtainable awards, it would suck to have unobtainable awards in the game, and easily understood rules. Only the bravest survive the quest to collect the coveted diamonds by eluding poisonous snakes, escaping a threatening volcano, which is cool, and defeating a rare species of killer gorillas who guard the lost city of Zinge? Zink? Zinge. Congo is a non-sequential slithari. Players can follow the map, weaving through Congo, or handpick their favorite adventures. Yeah, very cool. So there's a couple things in here that it talks about. One of them is diamonds. What's the big deal about the diamonds? Well, I mean, in the movie, they're searching for diamonds in the Congo. But when it comes to the game, what is that? What is that all about? Collecting diamonds, it lights locks. It also gets you closer to diamond multiball. There's also a diamond hunt multiball. So like each shot has a diamond in front of it, and then you just sort of shoot the blinky shot. Yeah, it's not always lit. You've got to relight them as you go through. One of the cooler features in this, it has a – and it's actually on the flyer. As far as I know, this is the only game that ever used it. Bidirectional ball popper. It's a Vuk that basically can fire a ball two different directions. Ooh. And as soon as you see it underneath the play field, it's like, whoa, what's this thing? And I don't believe it was ever used anywhere else. Someone can correct me on that, but I don't think so. It's kind of in the center rear between the Volcano and the odd sort of ape-looking thing on the left side, right? I think so. Yeah. Let's talk about this Volcano shot here. So it has an epic shot that goes through three pop bumpers, up a fairly steep ramp, does a U-turn, and comes right back to the flip. As Keith Elwin said, that was his inspiration for the left ramp on Iron Maiden. Yeah, that is basically the other side of the Iron Maiden shot. And I'll tell you, for a player who's not particularly good, I love shooting between pop bumpers to ramps and stuff because the satisfaction that I get from that, the feeling of I made that really difficult shot is pretty great. But when it goes up this ramp and around this volcano, this sort of molded toy, it's even better. It's awesome. It's very, very, very cool.
    29:15
    It's got the third flipper, shoots into the target on the side, and it's also got that repeatable loop kind of Orby shot. It's a great game. I mean, the problem with this game is that it is after a very bad movie. And it was one of those games that was stripped for parts to help other games. like our next game we're going to talk about. It didn't become a darling until later. Let's just put it that way. Yeah. It became a tournament darling, which then sort of pumped up its value, and now you can't find one for less than your firstborn child. But we've got Attack from Mars. Which David didn't hear my story because he walked away, but Lyman ended up working on that because he got taken off of Congo. So, of course, Attack from Mars, the sci-fi theme from December of 95, sells 3,450 units. We're talking aliens, Martians, fantasy. It is awesome all around. Doug Watson on art, music and sound by Dan Forden, dots Adam Rine, Brian Morris, and software by the one Lyman Sheets Jr. Criminally low production number. Brutal. Somebody should remake this thing. Very funny. Doug Watson, of course, was the artist. he did the voice of the Martians and he wrote a lot of the lines of the script. I just like lines like if you have Martian attack late and the Martians they're vibrating and you miss one a certain way. It's like ah, miss me, miss me. I love that. What are the ones that the general says when you shoot the orbit? Well, there's also, he's just like damn, shoot those things or whatever it says. You're some ugly Martians. It's got some great call It very tongue It very fun It funny For some reason kind of fun funny and camp works really well in pinball And we see enough of it but we don see enough of it I think When you look at, like, Deadpool, I think his last real quality game that had some really fun funniness.
    31:23
    Yeah, it's amazing. And I have a Deadpool and an AFM, and they're right next to each other. Now, let's tie that in. And according to George Gomez, Attack from Mars was not originally inspired by the movie Mars Attacks. Did I do that right? No, that's right. Because if you ever see Mars Attacks and then you see Attack from Mars, it's like, oh, they just didn't want to pay for the theme, obviously. Yeah, well, apparently this is just happenstance. And according to Gomez, Brian Eddy had the concept long before the movie. And it is a mere coincidence that they emerged on the market within a year of each other. I'd buy that. I would certainly buy that as well. Now, this was designed, of course, by Brian Eddy. And why is Brian Eddy a big deal? Because he designed Attack from Mars and Shadow and Medieval Madness. Yeah. So I recently had somebody who listened to our latest podcast who was also at Pintastic, and they played some of the Shadow, and they were unimpressed. Oh, my. Shout out to Tom. Pentastic, which is a show in Massachusetts, if you're wondering what that means. Brian Eddy, he really probably made some of the biggest hits, cult classic hits of this era. And that raised him up very, very high in a strata of top ten designers who only really did three games. So what do we do? We bring him back at stern, and we give him some pretty cool licenses. He did Stranger Things, which, not so great at the beginning, but has certainly panned out to be better along the code lines, and Mandalorian, which is awesome. Stranger Things is excellent. So Stranger Things, a lot of people say that the shots are very similar to Attack from Mars. Is that true, Ron? Eh, they're similar. But it's different. It's different enough. There's only so many shots you can have on a play field, man. And if you're going for a fan sort of layout, you're kind of stuck. An attack from Mars. You got Tim Kitzrow again. The NBA Jam guy. From downtown! Oh, God, I love him. God, he's in so many good games. He's like everything. Wonderful. He's got an announcer voice. Only, only we could dream of.
    33:46
    Wonderful. This has a cow video mode. Of course it does. Brian Eddy was the guy that was into cows. He's the one who started the whole cow thing at Williams when he was a programmer. He would stick them in all the games he worked on. So now that he's designing a game, now it's just like there's a cow on the ramp, there's cows everywhere. Yeah, there's a cow being abducted by aliens on the ramp. Love the cows. So here's the thing. You know when you go to, like, your crazy uncle's place and his house is, like, all of the kitchen is decked out in John Deere green things and he's got the John Deere tractors on his bookshelf and stuff like that. Do you think if you go to Brian Eddy's place it's all, like, cow-themed?
    34:30
    Supposedly he had tons of cow stuff in his house, so I would believe it. That's a thing. The cow video mode, if you shoot the ball off the Big O' Beam ramp, the one on the left with the cow on it, If the cow moves, hit the launch button. Then when you get into the video mode, the spaceships will be replaced by cows. That's awesome. I don't think I've ever done that. I've seen people do that, but I've never done that myself. Destroy all the cows and you get to the mother cow. That's a good one. Yep. That's a good one. That's a good one, Brian Eddy. I'll forgive your creepy cow-themed kitchen for that. That's pretty funny. But Attack from Mars is like the ultimate fan layout game. It's the ultimate loop pass game. You can just loop past back and forth nonstop. Yeah, that's when you're getting into real pro stuff, when you can shoot in orbit and the ball. You can just lift your flipper. It taps that flipper and just catches it with the second one on the other side. That is some proper, proper playing, my friend. It also has a lot of red and orange in the cabinet, which means insto-fade. Insto-fade. Any type of light, it will fade badly. But remember, Attack from Mars is an unstoppable earnings invasion. Thrills, Big O' Bean turns animals into giants. Shocks, flying saucers wreak havoc. And terrors, an army of Martians attacks the Earth. Ooh, scary. Quivering. Mayhem, madness, and destruction were never so much fun. God, I love these flyers. Attack from Mars is a fun and entertaining to play. And it's open play field and easy to understand rules. I noticed whenever the games have a very open play field, they advertise how easy it is, especially operators, easily cleanable. But if it's like really complicated play field, they just don't say anything.
    36:19
    Yeah, it's like, shh, shh, don't say anything. You know, Whitewater, they were not saying, easy to clean.
    36:25
    It's a straightforward game that's fun for players of all skill levels. I completely agree. I disagree. I'm not very good at this game. Just hit the ship. over and over. That's the problem. So you shoot the ship in the middle, which is a lifting three bank and a dropping three bank in the middle of the playfield. Sort of like Tron, I guess. Or, you know, Black Knight 2000 had one. I shoot that thing and I am in immediate death. It is just terrifying. No, it's not. It's just right in the fire. Novice players are able to reach all the exciting game features while expert players can attempt to rule the universe. So does that mean I'm worse than a novice player? I guess so. Like, you can't blow up a single ship. I could blow up a single ship. That's basically it. That's it. That's all you need. It's a great experience. Yeah, but I want to
    37:09
    T2 the ramps. Right? I want to shoot the ramp. They're pretty hard to T2. It's not like payback time. They're pretty narrow ramps. What you want to do is just see the little shot to the left of the ship? You want to hit that a lot. Then you just start... That's like the lock shot, right? Yeah, and then you can have fun. Yeah, I guess. I am a big sci-fi fan. I love sci-fi. I love camp. I love cheese. But for some reason, this game does not suck me in like it sucks people in. Maybe I don't have enough time on it, but I have played quite a bit. I've played quite a bit. But it doesn't, this isn't the game where I'm like, I've got to have one of these in my basement. This might be my last episode. I can't believe this. Wow. I'm serious, and I don't know what it is. Like, I would much rather play Medieval Madness than this. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. And it has nothing to do with the castle and more to do with all of the other bits. You're more Monty Python than you are sci-fi. I guess. I don't know. But shooting the scoop kind of bothers me in this game. And this one's pretty interesting as well because the pop bumpers in the back will feed into the scoop. And I don't know if maybe that's one thing that I don't like because I feel like I'm in the scoop all the time because I'm missing that ramp and I'm missing the number one target ramp for the Martians. or the I-Ramp, I get number one. Good Lord. I feel like I'm in the scoop all the time. Well, if you ever get to America, just come visit, and you can play my Attack from Mars. Your Attack from Mars. Well, it's an original, which is important. It needs to be an original, or it just doesn't play right. Because the flippers don't feel right. They don't. 100%. Look at me. I'm a top 100 player. No, I just played the original first. I'm sure if I played the remake first, then the originals wouldn't feel right. To be honest, I have only played the remake. There you go. Yeah. True story. That takes us to Tales of the Arabian Nights, Totan. Or Totan. This is the Mystic Fantasy theme, May of 96.
    39:12
    Sells 3,128 units, designed by John Papaduke. It has its art by Pat McMahon, music and sound Dave Zabriskie, Dot, Adam Ryan, Brian Morris, and software by Louis, or Louis, Cozzerish. Cozzeris. Cozzers, probably. Cozzers. You'd think we'd get this by now. No, that's our gimmick. We can't say people's names right. So, of course, Arabian Nights is the English name for the Arabic language collection of Middle Eastern folktales known as 1001 Nights. and I'm pretty sure that the genie in the bottle stuff comes from this. Yeah, if you think of like Aladdin, I think Aladdin is in there. I don't know for sure. I should have looked at it. You know, I think I've actually seen Aladdin. Oh, Aladdin is great. That's the one with Robin Williams in it, right? Yeah. Okay, I saw that one. Big time good. Probably why I watched it. But Adam Ryan says, I like that kind of theme. I like the Middle Eastern theme. A little more flair to the visuals. The music was very good in that game. I think it's just a pleasure. Papa Duke was just a great guy to work with. And you can see that when Adam Ryan has had a longer time to work on the dots, like he did in this game over Congo, there is a level of care that he had put into the dots on Tales of the Arabian Nights that he didn't necessarily have on Congo. Tales of the Arabian Nights is somewhat herald John Papa Duke's best or second best game certainly top three, and it is one that goes for a serious dollar on the secondary market before things went absolutely crazy. Eh, it's best game is this first. Yeah, World Cup Soccer? That's what most people say. Most people that know how to play pinball. As far as play field goes, though, if you want long, flowing plastic ramps and magnets, this is the game for you. This game is awesome. I love this game. I like Theater of Magic more when it comes to the actual gameplay, but this game has some flair and some pizzazz that few games today have, if any. This game is all about just whimsy and magic and flow and fun and the ball ending up and doing things that you didn't expect it to do. It suffers, though, on code. Is that right? I don't... I've never really played it that much. I know the tournament strategy is not that... It has that bug where you can get in, what, the final wizard mode and just keep it going forever if you do it right or something like that. Yeah, well, see, I can't even fill up all the lights on the bazaar, so... I'm not getting that far, Ron. Come on. I know that the lamp was overpowered. Like if you got into the, what, lightning lamp, especially if you're a multiball, you just hit the lamp over and over and over again, and then you end up winning. Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about Tales of the Arabian Nights. But we have to, of course, start with Your Wish is Granted. Let me guess, that's the flyer. Experience the seven tales of Arabian Nights. Battle the evil genie to rescue the princess. Spell G-E-N-I-E, or genie, to light locks and pinball wishes below the playfield in the bazaar that reappears to begin the three-ball multi-ball.
    42:43
    Spin Aladdin's lamp. Spin the magic lamp and watch the bonus grow. The bonus explodes into lightning crash when the blue lights lead the lamp are lit. Wow. Very good. It's exciting. It's very whimsical. And it has a story, too. You've got to rescue the princess. Yeah. So we're getting into something here that's another level, and this is what John Papaduke would do. We spoke about this a little bit in our Mechs That Made Us episode a couple episodes back. You can check that out at silverballchronicles.com. You can watch, sorry, you can listen to that there in the archives. Please go back and listen to older episodes, because we fill in a lot of the gaps you may have. John Papaduke would add a little level of pizzazz. It would bring in more than just sort of the rock music kind of thrill, cars, testosterone person, right? He tried to bring a level of sizzle to the stake. Sometimes that sizzle was all there was in his games, but this is certainly one that I think is a great package. It's a world under glass, a world of wonder. It's something else. I'll tell you, one of the neat bits is the plunge here, right? So you've got a skill shot that rotates between sort of like three baskets, and there's a stand-up target in each basket, and you kind of shoot the ball, and it lands in that, and then it hits the ramp, and then it comes down to your flipper. It's kind of neat, although it's kind of anticlimactic, right? Like it's not, I don't know, when you do it, it doesn't feel that great. It's your snake charmer. You've got to hit the right one or the snake bites you. Yeah, but it just, I don't know, it just doesn't, like the kinetic satisfaction, to use a cliche, just doesn't, it doesn't, I don't know. It's pretty much the same thing as World Cup soccer. Right. So he's kind of recycled it, made it maybe better than World Cup soccer, but at the same time, it just, I don't know, it's just not particularly fun. He definitely made crazier ramps than World Cup soccer. There wasn't enough plastic I need, even longer and just wavier, loopier ramps. And I'll tell you what, at least the skill shot is better than Guns N' Roses. Which one? So you've got to preface that now. The new one. Nobody talks about the old one. No one has the same name. Well, actually, you're wrong. The old one was called Guns and Roses. The new one's called, like, Guns and Roses, Not in This Lifetime, I believe, is the full title.
    45:06
    You need to give our listeners the right information. Let's talk about the ramps. So the ramps are pretty cool. So there's a ramp on the left side just after the orbit, and that ramp goes up and then kind of around in a... It's almost like a... What do I want to call that? Like a whirlwind or a whirlwind or a spiral? John Papaduke likes long plastic ramps, diverters, and magnets. And this has all of them. And I'll tell you what. That's what I love about pinball. I love diverters. There's not enough diverters in pinball nowadays. Ah, no wonder you love Congo. There's not enough kind of interesting ball movement beyond, you know, shooting up a ramp and having it come back to its place. I'll agree with you there. Come on, pinball manufacturers. We want our diverters. Bring them back. The best diverter we've seen, of course, is the new Godzilla by Keith Elwin. The whole building is a diverter, but that's only a higher model. But the fun thing about this game is you'll shoot up a ramp, and then you might just not make it. You might not make it up the ramp, but then the ball kind of goes back down the ramp and then into like a hole, and then it'll pop out somewhere else on the play field rather than back down the ramp. I hate going up a ramp and not making it and it coming right back at me. I understand that that's important, but having it go up and fall out somewhere interesting is cool too. It's got that cool ball saver thing, the spikes that come up out of the play field. Yeah, let's talk about that. The first time you see that, because you can't really tell it's there, and it comes up and saves your ball, it's cool. It's like a magnus save, right? So back when Steve Ritchie did it, they also did it, he did it in Theater of Magic, is that there's a magnet under the play field that goes to the out lanes that sticks in a magnet.
    46:48
    Well, Tales of the Arabian Nights literally have spikes that come up from the bottom on the left and right side, almost like a cage, right, that stops the ball. And then the cages come down, and then it goes in, mostly, into the in lanes. That is something else.
    47:05
    That is crazy talk nowadays. It has a really cool, like, genie bash toy in the back. So it's not a genie on a piece of plastic with targets in front of him that you hit. It's literally a molded plastic toy that you hit, and it bounces, and it has a switch under there, and you hit the genie himself. Super awesome. But let's talk about the magnet that sits in front of the genie. So a magnet in front of a bash toy is not something new, right, Ron? It is not. But what does this one do? It actually grabs it and then goes underneath the play field. Holy moly. It hits the magnet, the magnet holds the ball, and then the magnet goes under the play field, pulling the ball down, and then the magnet comes back up, and there's no ball. What Stern game uses the same mech? Like Led Zeppelin? No.
    47:56
    Oh, we're talking the premium Metallica. It literally is the same thing. It just has the hammer over it, so it gives a different effect. But it's literally the same thing. Yeah. Super, super awesome. The other thing is that it has this, the genie is throwing like a fireball, and the fireball itself is like a circular magnet, and he would use this previously in Theater of Magic. But this time it's vertical, and when the ball is going down the ramp on the left side, the magnet will engage and suck the ball inside of it, and then let the ball go, and it goes down a wire form across the play field to the other flipper. For those at home, you can always tell which games David really likes because they're the ones we spend more time on. Oh, man, I love this game. I really, really love it. Zach from Mars, can we just go on to the next game? Okay, I want to talk about Tales from the Arabian Nights. What do you think of the art package of this game? I like the play field art. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of busy. It's very busy. Like most Papaduke games, it's very busy, but it's very purple, very blue. The play field is also very busy. Sometimes the play field's busy to hide the fact there's not much on the play field. That is not the case here. There is so much going on in this game, it is something else. Now, of course, games at this time were designed to make money. They were on a production timeline, and they had to have above-average earnings. Success was determined on that. If you could get it out the door, you could make money, that was all that mattered. Well, John Papaduke or J-Pop didn't really fit well into that system. The system was designed to be quick and refined. And J-Pop was much more slower and calculated with his designs. He said he was broken down by the Williams team and built back up to withstand the stress and pressure at Bally Williams and the philosophy that came around that. Bally was softer when he worked there, but Williams, boy, they would tell you that your project sucked and you had to try harder. and it was really, really designed to try to get the best out of people. To clarify, John Pobeduk actually worked at Bally like in the mid-80s and then when Williams bought Bally, he didn't have a green card so he had to leave and then he came back later. So when he says Bally was softer, he means like the original Bally. He was the millennial of his time. He did not respond well to harassment. He didn't respond well to people, you know, yelling at him and telling him that they're the boss and this is how it gets done. He really struggled in that, let's say, shark tank. And oddly, though, once he left that shark tank, he couldn't get anything out the door. So I guess they all sort of brought the best out of each other. Well, J-Pop would say you take two days off and when you got back, your manager would say he needed to talk to you. What happened was while you were away, a group of people, other designers, management engineers, would look over your game and say, we don't like this on your game, and we'd like to change it. I was the new designer, and I had to deal with that. All the time he would leave, and he'd come back, and he'd have to take stuff out to clean something. There you go. Yes. So that is actually what he would talk about in this podcast. Now, I started listening to a podcast, Coast to Coast Pinball with Jay Pond. Ah, yes. Which is a very controversial episode of Coast to Coast. I found it and I started listening to it and I was doing all of my notes and stuff and then I went back to that exact same source about a month later and the episode is now gone so when it comes to a J-pop episode I'm having a difficult time finding primary sources from individuals who were there speaking at the time about certain things of the time so I'm going to have a difficult time make a deeper J-pop episode, especially when it comes to the Zidware stuff, which is probably why that episode is not online anymore. And I listened to it back in the day. There wasn't any earth-shattering things on there that I remember. Yeah. So if anybody happens to have that Coast to Coast episode saved somewhere, I would love to hear it because I can get some cool, cool stuff from it. Anywho, tying this back in, he really struggled. And I'll tell you what. One of the things that they had a significant issue with, particularly people like Steve Ritchie, who was always very good at giving his opinion, was the Genie lamp. Now, of course, this lamp is not something that J-Pop had invented. It was actually borrowed from an older electromechanical game, which had a similar spinning lamp. Actually, I'm sure several EMs have the spinning mech. But they didn't do it as pretty and beautiful as J-Pop. So the Tesseract on Transformers is not at the level of the lamp. Not unless you take that Christmas ornament and put it on there and it flashes. That was pretty cool. Plus it breaks a lot. I don't think I've seen the lamp one break. That's interesting. So J-Pop would also say, I would get feedback on the game. The rules are bad or this rule sucks. But at the time, it was the best game we could make from that time frame. The game worked really well, and it made upwards of $350 to $400 a day. I take that. Woo! That's a big deal, man. And that's like, we're talking, what, 50 cent plays back then? Yeah, it would have been 50 cent. Yeah. Whoa. That's a big deal. Let's get into another one here, Scared Stiff. This is the camp and horror theme. September of 96, sells 4,028 units. Art by Greg Freres. Music and Sound by Dave Zabriskie Dots, Adam Ryan, Brian Morris and Software by a gentleman named Cameron Silver from Australia G'day, Mike Let's put another shrimp on my barbie Oh my goodness My father loves this game This is, of course, this is the second Elvira game Elvira, of course, is the sexiest vamp this side of Transylvania she was a TV host from California where they watched a lot of campy and cheesy horror movies at late night she is certainly a cult character movie macabre or something like that the show she hosted it was sort of like a not funny mystery science theater she was funny she wouldn't insult breaks during the movie she would make little comments Yeah, it was like before the commercial or after the commercial, right? And she has a huge, huge following. I don't get it, but, of course, I didn't grow up in that time. So, you know, what do you do? You're not cool. We get it. I understand that. I fully embrace that I will never be as cool as somebody like Steve Ritchie. If Attack from Mars was too difficult for you, then Scared Stiff is your game. Anyone can get to the wizard mode in this game. Anyone. This game is a Dennis Nordman classic. Ah, the Nordman. It's so fun, it's scary. Is it? Scared stiff. Bally's new licensed pinball starring Elvira, the sexiest vamp to the side of Transylvania, will scare the quarters out of players everywhere. Yes. This is under the Bally name and not the Williams. It's a Williams game. It's just a name. This is sort of like what? Like, why do they just switch those around? Now, I've heard some of the designers talk about that. I think we talked about it. The Williams guys did not want to be anything but Williams. Yeah, and I think we talked about this enough. Or I heard it on a podcast somewhere. Like, if it was a sexier type title, it would be a Bally, because they were no... It's just like they have weird things like that. I mean, Des Norman was originally from Old Bally, so a lot of his games are Bally. Mm-hmm. You know, Elvira has the features that turn players on. You mean like the cabinet in the back, the box? The industry first interactive 3D back glass. It has a spider web in the back glass with a spider, and he spins, and you can control him. You can stop him, and he'll stop at various awards. Okay, okay, sort of like the mystery award, but instead of it just being on the DMD. It's kind of got an interactive thing. If you're good enough, you can pick exactly what you want. Ah, so it's not random. Nope, skill-based. Very cool. And the art on this game, fairly risque with the back glass, I got to say. Not offensive, but certainly risque. She has a lot of control over the way her character is presented. Greg Freres did the original Elvira and the Party Monsters art, so this game really ties in very well with the previous one. And it will also tie in very well to the next Elvira game. So I think this is a really, really cool design, really interesting mechs. It's all in. It's a really, really great package. Now, of course, we see the return of the Deadheads, right? The Deadheads.
    57:16
    You got all the different heads, which was hilarious comments. Yeah, they were all like off color. I think Badhead is Steve Ritchie. good head, and she says, my favorite. Oh, my. The interesting thing about this is in the back, there's like this molded plastic sort of stack of heads called the dead heads in the back corner. Originally, in the original design, there was actually an upper playfield back there, and that was cut out because of cost cutting. There was other cost cutting just from this. We're looking at the flyer picture. There's cost cutting. I think, let me see if I remember some of them. I think there was LEDs in the dead heads that were removed, but you can put them back. Like the eyes. If you look at the flippers in the flyer, you see the bony fingers over the flipper bats. That wasn't done in production. That was removed. That's cost-cutting. Now, it's a mod, and everyone has put it in their scared stiff to the point where you just think that's how it came, but that's not how it came originally. Yeah. There's also the coffin lock on the left side, where players lock three balls and unleash a monster. It's multi-ball. And Tim Kitts throw his back again as the generic Dracula sounding guy. This thief in the coffin. Oh, that's me. And he kills it. He's in the latest Elvira game also. Yeah, this has to be the peak of what he did when it comes to it. Because this is right up his alley, and you can tell he's having a time. Hey, Pinheads. I just wanted to let you know that when I'm not doing this podcast and making bad jokes, I'm Dave, the financial guy. At Dennis Financial, our advisors strive to provide a return on life for our clients, not just a return on investment. The value of advice is something that we take very seriously. A valuable advisor doesn't just provide investment advice. They share wisdom, and this is where the true value of an advisor emerges. Don't take my word for it. Just listen to Ron Sterling, an average Canadian. Yay. If you're in Canada, Dennis Financial is for you. If you're looking for a more human dimension to your financial advice, Dennis Financial, Inc. has you covered with advisors licensed in most Canadian provinces. We're also doing secure online video meetings. Contact me via email at david at dennisfinancial.net for a free rate quote and a copy of our value of advice e-book, or check out dennisfinancial.ca. Insurance solutions provided by Dennis Financial, Inc., Canadian residents only. Greg Ferrer says, Cassandra, Cassandra Peterson, was an amazing celebrity. Wonderful to work with. Easygoing and receptive to ideas. Cassandra signed a whitewood of scare stiff. Somewhere there is a whitewood with Cassandra's signature in red on the bottom right. Ooh, bet you that's worth a penny. Because my goodness, even Stern can sell theirs with a piece of her couch, or a couch, signed by her for 20 grand. Now, of course, there was a serious false start with this project. They were very much overwhelmed at the time at Bally Williams, but they did eventually get started. The idea was, let's put something in the back box, and that certainly became a big home run, and that's where the spider came from. Smarkey, who is Cassandra Peter's husband, is on the back glass as a tribute to him. Well, husband at the time. Husband at the time. He has passed away.
    60:34
    I think so. They got divorced. I didn't think he died. Oh, maybe they did. All right. Well, anyway, he's dead.
    60:40
    Wow. Now, the mini play field I had mentioned earlier was actually in the shape of a spider. And there were a bunch of spiders that were made to stick to that. But when it was cost cut, they just took the spiders and stuck them around on the play field in places. The dead heads were originally behind the box on the left side. But when that play field was removed, they needed to fill the spot. and that's where they moved everything in. In fact, some of the spiders were actually replaced with frogs. And there's a frog mode. What's in the frog mode? Is that fun? That's where you splatter the frogs or whatever. There's the frogs on the slings that go up when you hit the slings or whatever. No, you hit a post and a frog comes up. It's been a while since I played Scared Smith. It's sort of like they're leapers. Leapers, that's it. Leapers. Leaper mania or something like that it's called. Yeah, it's a cool game. I kind of like this game. It's kind of fun. It's not one that I can have in my living room because of the sort of risque nature. Shooting the box is pretty cool. You want to talk about that? It's the crate. Yeah, the crate. I'm sorry. Oh, God. I was doing a mix of box and a crate. That's what it's called in the game. Terror in the crate. Terror from the crate. What's the difference between a box and a crate, anyway?
    61:52
    I think a crate is more like made out of wood. And a box is like cardboard. At least that's what I kind of think. So the size has nothing to do with it. I don't think so. So you could have a small crate. Yes, you could have a small crate. And basically, you just... You pound on the crate until you break through it. Yeah, and then it kind of opens, and then you shoot into it? It doesn't open. Like you hit it and it lets the ball go into it Yeah that cool Yep It a cool little toy And it got these eyes on the top of the box Yes Right And as you shoot the box it lights up a set of the two eyes And then when you light them all up, then you can get it. Because you're waking up the terror in the crate. Then he's going to grab you. Now, if John Papaduke loves ramps, I mean, the king of ramps has to be the Nordman. Got the bony beast ramp. Is that a double entendre? I don't know. Well, you know what it is, is the stiff-o-meter with the different levels of stiffness. How stiff can you get? Yes. Dennis Nordman would actually be canned from Bally Williams during this time, and he would, right when it was about to go into production, was out the door. Very, very sad to see Dennis Nordman go. Yeah, John Trudeau would say, you come into the office one day and your pass wouldn't work. It was that cold. The pass could have been green, but it came up red. I thought something screwed up and someone came out the door and I came in. I went to my room and Larry came by and said, we got to talk. That was it. Me, Barry Osler, and Dennis Nordman, gone. And the exact same day, all of them gone. Three of the best sort of interesting designers out the door. And Steve Ritchie was gone at this point also. He had gone over to, I think, their video game division. He might have even went to Atari, which I think Williams bought at the time. And we've got George Gomez who's left, who's a young guy in his 30s at the time. Well, he's left, as in he's still there. Right. It's like, no, he didn't leave.
    63:47
    But all these fellas, all these top sort of designers are all out the door now, and they've sort of left the youth in place. You've got Brian Eddy, you've got George Gomez. Who's the other guy? Papa Duke. J-Pop. Now, Greg Ferreres, he would say it was a shock when Dennis was let go. while working on Scared Stiff, I lost a lot of sleep over that. So you could see that losing somebody like Dennis, and Dennis and Greg worked really closely together back in their ballet days, right? They were hand in hand when it came to the art of their games. And, you know, that's tough to see your friend go like that. How about Barry Ousler? He was there since the 70s. Barry Ousler, of course, was the staple and the one who basically kept the lights on and produced pins when there was nobody else there except for the janitor. Barry said, I didn't see it coming. I saw dozens of layoffs over my time. They hit me like a brick. Dwight Sullivan would finish up Junkyard with the engineering team, which is what Barry Hauser was working with at the time. Now, there are still pins being made, though, at this time, and that brings us to NBA Fastbreak, which is the sports basketball theme.
    64:55
    March of 97, sells 4,414 units. That's actually pretty decent. Yeah. Art by Kevin O'Connor. Mechanics by Tom Capera. Designed by George Gomez. Music by Kevin Quinn. Dots by Adam Ryan. And software by Bill Uband. So this, this is a game that is a little bit different than most. Oh, yeah. Do you know your 90s NBA trivia? I don't know any NBA trivia. Because it will give you an advantage on this game when you play the trivia video mode. There's a trivia video mode? Yeah. Do you know this is the only authentic NBA licensed pinball? The only authentic one? Yep. So Hoops is not NBA? No. From Gottlieb? Nope. And Jordan is not in this game. He would have been a separate license. Of course not. He was his own thing. He was the shill of his day. Real NBA scoring. Well, that doesn't make sense. It does. There's baskets, and when you get a basket, it's two points. When you make a three-pointer, it's three points. How do you get three points? It's a three-pointer. You make a long-distance shot. 4-3, 4-3, 4-3. It's got a cool back box toy, flipper. You can make more baskets. You can set it to regular scoring if basketball scoring is just too crazy for you. It's too crazy for you. Like you can't do the math? You know, only Bally can put the NBA spin on pin. Huh? The NBA spin on pin. I don't. Only Bally can put the NBA spin on pin. Somebody reached out to us and said that we need to do a collective episode on our favorite and most unfavorite of our flyers. Yeah, that one is just weird. I mean, Bally Williams, theirs are just bad. The Gottlieb ones were fun, but these are bad. Well, I think the Gottlieb ones had to make the game sound better than they might actually be. NBA shot clock. Just like real NBA game action. It's not real NBA. It's pinball. No, it's got a basket. It's got defenders. You pass the ball. Can we talk about how the basket looks like a toilet? A Canadian toilet or something? I don't know. Too many metal toilets like this. No, but it's got the shot clock in the back, and then it's got the thing in the front. It just doesn't look. Okay, okay. For the overhead shot, yeah, it kind of looks like a toilet. It looks toilety. Now, this is George Gomez's follow-up from Corvette. No, it wouldn't be Corvette, because he did Corvette. He did Johnny Mnemonic. I mean, Johnny, wouldn't it? Yeah. This will be the follow-up from Johnny. You know, he worked really well with Tom Capera. Yeah, he was his main engineer guy. And he works at Stern now, Tom Capera. This game, although odd and different, is actually quite cool. So the object is basically to shoot up the middle into the basket, right? Well, it's to score baskets a variety of ways. But it also has a fan layout, and it's got three ramps. It's got return ramps. It's got an orbit shot. It's got a bunch of vertical up kickers. And it has a moving shot block guy in the middle. It's sort of like if you've seen the Dracula toy in Monster Bash. But this one is designed to move left to right and cover up the basket for various shots. And it has an action button. Ooh.
    68:23
    It basically just says, I think, shoot. You hit it to shoot the ball. And it has a lot of vertical up-kickers where you can move from one vertical up-kicker to another to move, like, to pass your shot. It's a very confusing game. They're ejects. A vertical up-kicker, I think, is, you know, it goes directly up. These are just like ejects. It's like the, it would be like, well, you're a Papaduke guy, Circus Voltaire, you know, the lot of stuff on the left where it flips the ball from one saucer to another. The jugglers. Yeah, the jugglers. It's literally the same thing. Now, it also has a mechanical back box feature, which looks to be like the trend nowadays. Yep.
    69:02
    That back box animation consists of a flipper in the lower right part of the back box and a basket on the far left. The game controls the back box flipper sometimes when you score points. So, for instance, after you set up an amount of pop bumper hits during multiball and during the Egyptian soda and hot dog mediums. I love that, Egyptian soda. I don't even know what that means, but it sounds great. I want a band called Egyptian Soda. Yeah, yeah. Now, the exception is pizza power shot modes. Now, in this mode, the player tries to score as many points as possible in the back box basket. The number of points depends on the amount shown on the screen. And the voice work, Tim Kitts' row again. Kills it. He kills it. Because he did NBA Jam. That's his thing. He's the NBA Jam guy. So he knows what's expected of him on this game. 4-3, 4-3, 4-2-3, 4-3. That's when you're in the back box and you keep shooting. Yeah, it's so cool. So cool. You forgot the coolest part. What's that? You can link them. Oh, my goodness, the linking. The linking. This is something else here. Yep. You can link the machines so you can play against each other, which I've done a few times. I've gone to a couple of trails where they've actually had them linked. You literally just play a regular game, but, like, you pick a team, and the person you're linked with, they pick their team, and then you can see how many points they've scored, and they can see how many points you've scored. So it's not really head-to-head more than you're just trying to score more baskets in there. George Gomez did an interview with This Week in Pinball back in September of 2019 where he talked about his idea for a game called Armed and Dangerous. Armed and Dangerous was an experiment which was a non-pinball game which went through three or four iterations. It was basically a tank battlefield kind of theme where balls would continuously feed to the flippers in rapid succession and you would shoot at tanks on the playfield. Now, this is very much like Rapid Fire back in the day. And Hyperball from Williams. Yeah, exactly. Hyperball first. Mm-hmm. So part of that was that he thought it would be cool to link games together to play against each other. And that would eventually become the software or the idea for the software for NBA Fastbreak. Tom says, part of what I did when I was writing that software is write some linking code that let two games link up. That's the code that I used in NBA in order to do the Link NBA game. Very, very cool. Of course, Armed and Dangerous would not ever come to existence, but at least some of those ideas that Gomez thought up when he was either in the shower or on the can would eventually make it into a pinball game. The other thing that I find super cool about this game... The cool 90s music? It's got great... It's so 90s. We can certainly tell the games that Ron really likes. Because he wants to talk all about the games that Ron likes. He doesn't want to talk about Tales of the Arabian Nights. I talked about it.
    72:22
    Over the years, Adam Ryan has popped into a lot of these games here that we're talking about. This guy is banging out dots left and right. And over the 26 years that he worked for Bally Williams in the 90s and then freelance at Pat Lawler Designs in the 2000s, He did NBA, Totan, Junkyard, Venture Mars, Ripley's, NASCAR. I want to give a little bit of background on Adam. He attended Northern Illinois University where he studied illustration. He says that he only had one Macintosh. He says there was only one Macintosh computer in the whole school, and everybody had to share it and learn. The professors said that they wouldn't see a computer for another four or five years once you exited university and got into the field when you were working. Wow, was he certainly wrong. Ron, when you got out of university, immediately the computer was super important, especially in that late 80s, early 90s transition. Now, this is certainly when Photoshop burst into the commercial scene. Now, while at Williams Gaming, Adam and the other co-workers would sneak over to the pinball division, and they would play pinball. Now, pinball, of course, was on the second floor of the California Avenue building. Midway was on the first floor, and they would often spend some time kind of going from one building across the alley into the other. This is where Adam got to work on his first game after sort of, you know, making some connections over on the pinball division, and that was with Corvette. He would, of course, do that with George Gomez and come on at the end of the project and do a lot of the shoot again and replay animations. That's where he really learned a lot of those bits and pieces.
    74:14
    Now, the NBA fast break dots. You know, there's over 140 different portraits when you start with that. As for the NBA game itself, which Adam, he had to move from the images to actual dots. So they were given images by the NBA, and he had to change those images into dots, which must have been super, super difficult. Mm-hmm.
    74:41
    Adam says, I was not given all the reference material. I had to go surf the web to find some of these rookies who became starters, and there were no photos of them on the web. I had to go to the research magazines or find action shots of them and try to make them look like portraits. It was a complete nightmare. Yeah, so they told them, you have to use our specific reference materials, but then the stuff in the game didn't have all those specific reference materials. That's kind of annoying. It's also got a really cool topper if you're all into toppers. It's kind of got like this marquee thing that kind of goes around the outside. I guess it's kind of cool. I don't get toppers, but whatever. NBA Fast Break, baby. It's got all the team names on them.
    75:20
    That's kind of fun. It's got some Easter eggs. Crazy Bob's is back. Yes, Crazy Bob, and you'll remember Crazy Bob from Johnny Numak, as well as in the future, Crazy Bob will be in Dialed In. He's in other games. Dialed In. Yeah, Crazy Bob gets around. Now, of course, he was the hot dog vendor. Where else would Crazy Bob be? I don't know, but he's got Chili on there. Chili Dogs, that's a crazy hot dog. NBA Fast Break is one of the games with Midnight Madness. So what's Midnight Madness? If you're playing the game and it hits midnight, something happens. Would you say madness happens? Could be, depending on the game. Yeah, so during this round, a cow actually might appear on the display in Midnight Madness. Because that's a joke. That's a thing. Speaking of madness, here we go. Oh, God, this will be another half hour on this game. Medieval Madness. Medieval Madness, yes. The knockoff Monty Python medieval castle attack theme, June of 97, designed by Brian Eddy. It sells 4,016 units, not very many. So, you know, if somebody would remake that, it would probably go well. That joke is already losing its seat. Art by John Yossi, Greg Freras. Dots and animation by Adam Ryan and Brian Morris. The mechanics was done by Robert Frizzell, and music, sound, Dan Forden. Software by one Lyman F. Sheets, Jr. This was the pin side number one pin forever, which is a big, big feat to do, to be a game so old competing with sort of those modern sterns, dealing with the sterns that are existing nowadays. At the time of this recording, Medieval Madness is actually behind Heist by Multimorphic. And Godzilla. Sorry, I had to put that in there, because that has a lot of people pretty ruffled in the feathers. Hey, shout out to Multimorphic. Good for you.
    77:33
    Sandbag in the top 100. Now, this is an amazing game. I love this game. I don't know what it is about this game.
    77:44
    I think it's just that it's the all-in, all-package. It's good. I mean, it's almost as good as Attack from Mars. Behold the renaissance of pinball.
    77:53
    Medieval madness. Defeat the king and his men to stop the madness and restore order to this great land. Mm-hmm. You've got to destroy the yonder castle.
    78:07
    You've got to battle two wretched trolls. Oh, the trolls. Love the trolls. Love them. Yeah. So this machine is best known for the huge castle in the back corner, and you can bash it in multiple states. Basically, the drawbridge is up, and you can hit it, and then the drawbridge lowers, and then there's like a gate behind it, and you hit the gate a couple of times, and then the gate lifts up, and then you can shoot into the castle, And then the castle kind of collapses and shakes and rattles and then comes back together. And then you kind of go to the next castle attack. And each castle is a different bad guy that you're debating. Who has amazing call-outs. Wonderful, wonderful call-outs. And there's also like a catapult mini ramp on the left side of the door. So if you happen to miss sort of the entranceway to the castle, There's like this swinging sort of breakaway catapult smashing into the castle part, which is cool. Catapult? It's just like a door. You mean the lock? Well, it's like a door, but it's supposed to be like you're shooting your catapult and the ball goes through the wall.
    79:11
    That's going to be confusing when you mention the actual catapult that's on the left side. Right. So the shot furthest to the left, all the way over to the left, just above the tip of the sling is like a saucer. It goes into the saucer, and then it shoots the ball kind of somewhat vertically into a wire form, which then goes around the corner in behind. It's literally a catapult mech. And you can pick what object you throw, which I love. Yeah. So we're talking basketballs, a cow, surprise. Bowling ball, my favorite, the cat. The cat. You can make the cat go, wham, and it throws it through the air. Like there's a skull. This game, it just makes me smile. It's so much fun. this stellar all around. It's a fairly easy shooter. The ramps are pretty wide open. Most of the shots are pretty wide open. Again, it's not the absolute perfection of a fan layout, but it's basically a fan layout. You know what I mean? It's not Attack from Mars perfection, but it is still pretty amazing nonetheless. So we talked about the trolls just briefly. So what do they do? They pop up. Literally from the bottom of the play field, they just pop up.
    80:23
    And you hit them and they say all kinds of funny things. So if you brick too many shots, and by bricking I mean you're not shooting the ramps or you're not shooting the castle, these dudes pop up and then they block basically two major shots. And you've got to shoot them in the face to lower them down a couple of times. And you don't just shoot like a target in front of them again, right? You smash the bash toy, the actual face of the dude. And they're pretty detailed little sculpts. Pretty cool. When I first saw this game in person, I saw the original sort of Williams version, and the first thing I said was, can I see under the playfield? To my friend who showed me, showed out to Pete, and I was like, man, I got to see how the subway works and how the, you know, when you're shooting the castle, where does the ball go in and around? Well, it's sort of designed as like a moat, right? Like literally there's a subway, a piece of plastic moves left or right on the play field. So anytime the ball goes into the castle or in front of the castle, into the moat, it falls into this subway and then over and back around, kind of around to the orbit, and it pops back up. It's so cool because it's just interesting to see that and how the trolls work. So nerdy.
    81:41
    I thought the troll popped up as a Merlin award. I think when you hit it in the Merlin's saucer there. Yeah, but that's how they pop up. So you build them up from the bricking, I think, and then it goes into Merlin.
    81:54
    Well, Adam Ryan, the .matrix artist, says, I remember that the team sat in a room. We were going to bring the Attack from Mars team back together. We knew what pressure we were under. Everyone wanted Brian Eddy to make another Attack from Mars. He even shared that pressure with us that we really needed to do Attack from Mars, but better. How are we supposed to top that? Yeah, well, you top it with the theme. because, man, the funniness and camp of this theme takes Medieval Madness to a level that Attack from Mars was not part of. Like, Attack from Mars was funny, and it had some great quotes, but the silliness went up a notch, and it worked so well. Well, Adam also says, We started working on the game, and it ended up being like a Monty Python ripoff. It was going to be in that vein. The idea was going to be storming the castle. In fact, it took months to name that game. We still have a page of about 50 names where we were bouncing around. None of them seem to stick. Yeah, so Doug Watson was out. He was around this time. He was part of another large layoff round at Bally Williams. And, of course, 50% of the engineers went at that time. That's when John Yousey was brought in to replace Doug on the art package. So that's why there is a split art package group here. And you can certainly see on the back glass, that's John Yossi through and through, right? It's got that soft cartoon look that Yossi is best known for. But I'll tell you, when you look at some of the silly and fun details of that back glass, you can tell that John Yossi was in his wheelhouse. We've got a cow on the left side being raised in the air by Merlin. You've got damsels in distress coming out of their towers. There's one lady in armor and high boots down in the moat.
    83:48
    You've got spray paint going up. The king is a queen. Yeah, that's censored now. Yeah, that wouldn't go out. No, there are several items censored on this class at this point. It's certainly an interesting game. one of the fun parts about this and it's very subtle but i think it's very neat is when you're shooting the dragon ramp which is the ramp on the right side you shoot up that ramp and then it sort of returns back to your uh to your right flipper after you shoot that shot so many times a diverter opens up and then you'll shoot up the ramp and it'll go right into what like the damsel in distress spire of the castle, I guess. And it's fun because you don't expect the ball to do that, right? It goes up and around and up and around and up and around. And then all of a sudden it goes straight through and you're like, oh, where did it go? Ooh, diverter. Diverter. Loving it. Get on those diverters. Jack Danger, I'm talking to you. Now, I mean, come on. Let's talk about something pretty cool here. One of the damsels in distress is actually Tina Fey. Even I know who that is. Tina Fey.
    85:04
    This is back in her, like, pre-SNL days when she's sort of just struggling to make ends meet. She's the voice in Medieval Madness of, what's her name? One of the local comedy troupe, Chicago comedy troupe that she was in. That's who they got to do all these different voices, a lot of them. Right. Now, she did sort of the opera singer princess and the Cockney talking princess. Greg Ferris was the voice of the jousting announcer and one of the trolls, while Francois de Grimm, who was one of the castle kings or princes or something. The guys you're being, Francois de Grimm. Yeah, and he was Vince Pontarelli. So it's fun that all these different characters, all these different people get to come together and be part of medieval madness as well. Yeah, because Greg Ferris was the jousting announcer. He's also the main announcer in No Fear, which always threw me because it's the same exact voice. It's like, wait a minute. Yeah, you know, you're a guy.
    86:05
    I'm expecting to tell me, you know, some of the No Fear stuff. Totally. Now, of course, this game was the first remake by Chicago Gaming Company in 2015 when they made Medieval Madness the standard edition and then the limited edition. This game, of course, was heralded as the greatest pinball machine of all time, of course, until Multimorphic took the number two spot with Heist and Godzilla with the number one spot.
    86:39
    And this had to be remade by a company, and they went all in and worked actually with Stern to develop that first remake.
    86:50
    And it sold like hotcakes. Some of them were actually built there. I remember going on the factory tour one year, and there were Medieval Madness on the production floor. Like, what? What are they doing here? They would move on to other remake titles, and we'll talk about that in a little while. But then again, in 2019, 2020, Chicago Gaming would actually go back and revisit Medieval Madness and make a Royale edition, which had a really kind of neat sculpted topper and a new, larger DMD. With upgraded graphics. I mean, this machine is one of the most heralded games of all time, and you can tell why. It's a lot of fun. What are some of the critiques of this game, Ron? Well, even when I got back into the hobby, like 20 years ago, this was a super expensive game, like $3K or something. Like, oh, my God. Yeah, you were paying new in box prices. Oh, my God. I mean, it's funny. It's a very funny game. It doesn't take itself too seriously. It shoots very nice. It's very accessible for new players. Old players kind of remember what it was like when they first play it, because at one time they were a new player and this was a great game. Yeah, it's a good go. The second Chicago Gaming Company remake was, of course, Attack from Mars, which went a little step further, had the XL-colored high-res or, you know, DMD display, as well as had a really cool topper. And then all of a sudden that became sort of their thing at Chicago Gaming. So, Ron, around this time, of course, there is some rumblings of a new platform and secret project over at Bally Williams that would eventually become the Pinball 2000 system. But, of course, during that time, we're going to get one of the best games, but with the lowest production amounts, and that's Monster Bash. Do you have some wonderful feelings about Monster Bash? It's fun. I like it. Yeah, so we're in July of 1998. We're selling 3,361 units. This is a horror sort of licensed theme, designed by George Gomez, as art by Kevin O'Connor, dots by Adam Rines, because all he's doing is dots, mechanics by Chris Shipman and Robert Frizzle. We've got sound and music by Vince Pontarelli, and software by Lyman F. Sheets. This, of course, is after the Universal Monsters. this is Dracula the creature from the Black Lagoon the bride of Frankenstein, Frankenstein this is kind of what we got, a jumble of all of them together in a wonderful fan layout shots left to right and a fun semi-original campy theme so what is the object of Monster Bash? to get the band back together but that doesn't make any sense what do you mean? they're a band So you're getting the band back together. You get them back together by hitting their shots. So like the mummy, he's in a band with... Yeah, they're all in the same band. They all play different instruments.
    90:09
    Very cool. Very fun concept. And, of course, everybody would remember the song Monster Mash. Yeah, they tried to get the license for that. What was the guy's name? Boris Petnoff, I think, was his name. And he thought the song was worth more than Williams thought it was worth. George Gomez says, I wanted to use the Monster Mash song from the 60s as the theme for Monster Bash, but when the owner of the rights to the song wanted too much money, I made Mash into Bash and never looked back. The reality is we didn't miss it. Adam Ryan would actually say that he thought they were going to charge $20,000 to use the song for a pinball game. That was certainly a bit much, and of course you hear it every year at Halloween. So, I mean, the guy's obviously making a bunch of money. What does he need some money for on a pinball machine? But George says he doesn't miss it very much, so I guess we're good with that. George Gomez would say that his favorite game, I don't know if it's currently his favorite game, but back in the day, his favorite game was T2, which was a standard, let's say, the first of the most perfect fan layouts of shots left to right. wonderful positions. Well, George wanted to make his own homage to that, and that became Monster Bash. I wonder if Deadpool is George's favorite game now. Uh, probably. Who did I say? I know what I was thinking of. Bobby Pickett was the guy's name. Bobby Pickett. Don't write in. If you've already opened up your email and sent it, knock on wood. I think that's probably from a cartoon or something.
    91:45
    Wasn't he like Boris and Natasha? I think so. That's who it is. Yes, from a Procky and Bullwinkle. See, still a pinball connection. Always keeping the pinball. It's not a good one, though. Gomez would also say that Monster Bash was one of those magical moments in developing a product. The sun and the moon, all the stars, they lined up, and in terms of quality and enthusiasm, all the people who worked on the product went above and beyond. Vince Pontarelli's audio package. This is a, we've talked about, you know, Attack from Mars. We've talked about Medieval Madness. Scared Stiff has a great audio package.
    92:27
    You know, this one I think is better because it's got a lot of these just campy, fun bits around those characters themselves. My favorite call-out in pinball history is when the vampire, of course, Dracula, when you shoot his shot, he goes, blah. Blah, blah.
    92:48
    Well, even now it just cracks me up. What are their instruments? Oh, so, you know, I think the creature's on drums. Nope, wrong already. The creature is the saxophonist. Frankenstein is, let's see, he's the keyboardist. I think Wolfman's on the drums.
    93:07
    Mummy is the bass player. Bride is the singer. And Dracula is the guitarist. Oh, so cool. Yeah, the Wolfman. Of course the Wolfman would be a drummer. Of course. Of course What is Frankenstein He plays keyboards Yeah Because he got his hands out straight Yeah he got his hands out straight already so he just goes doot doot doot See this is what I mean I freaking love this game. I'm just talking about it on a podcast here alone by myself in my office on a Saturday, and it's cracking me up. The monsters of the rock. Let's rock. What I really enjoy about the Frankenstein mech, so let's talk about that. There's a motorized two-target bank, and it will go under the play field, and then up will come off of basically a table is Frankenstein, and then you bash his toes or his feet with the ball, and then he'll flip up, and then you can shoot up a ramp, a short little ramp that goes into the ramp that's always there from the right-hand shot. It's a very unique sort of multi-stage toy. Something like that we don't certainly see a lot of nowadays.
    94:25
    This also has the ramp that George Gomez is sort of known for, I guess, where the ball kind of comes up a wire form ramp where the wire forms are directly in the play field. He would use this again in Lord of the Rings. So who the heck is Chris Shipman? So he's the mechanical engineer, and when you look at a lot of the mechanics on here, there's some pretty cool stuff. We're not talking Tom Capera right now. No, George's usual guy. So Chris Shipman, he was actually Mark Ritchie's mechanical engineer at Capcom. So when Capcom pinball started up, Chris Shipman popped in, and when Capcom was going down the crapper, George Gomez reached out to Mark and asked him if there were any good mechanical engineers at Capcom, and that's how Chris got his job at Bally Williams. and his first game was Monster Bash because Tom Capera was doing something else. So how do you design around a theme like this? This is a pretty deep theme, right? Like you've got sort of the campiness and stuff, but the theme itself, you've got some kind of iconic characters. How do you make a play field that is good enough for the universal monsters? Well, George Gomez says, Up until the 80s, it used to be that the designer created a game and the artist dressed it. I've never worked that way on a product. I believe that integrating the theme is pivotal, because the idea is to immerse the player in the world of the theme's fiction, and everything in the game should do that. This game totally does that.
    96:00
    I think a lot of designers, especially nowadays, just bang out play fields left and right, and then they sort of put the theme around it, right? They're like, we'll change this Bash toy from, you know, this toy to this toy, and it's a completely different theme. George, you can tell when he designs his games, you know, you look at Deadpool, you look at Monster Bash, you look at NBA Fast Break, right? Like, you couldn't just slap different art on it and it'd be a different game. It's very good that way.
    96:32
    Now, the scoring approach is kind of interesting, right? So this is a Lyman game. Lyman Sheets is like a god amongst pinball-playing enthusiasts. I think he's okay. I enjoy his code. I'm not good enough to know the difference really between him and Dwight Sullivan, but a lot of people hold him up really, really high. What is so interesting about the code in this game? It's trying to get the band together. That's the whole concept of the game. You're trying to assemble the band to play your gig. and each different band member is a shot. So you fill up the shots, you got like a mosh pit. And what he did is you can assemble all the monsters, that's Monster Bash, but if you can get all their instruments, then you get Monsters of Rock, which is like the uber wizard mode. Yeah, sort of like a mini wizard mode. That's the uber, it's kind of like, it's the dinosaurs conquer the earth in Jurassic Park. It's like the, like one way you start everything and you get one wizard mode. The other one is you actually get all their instruments, so you've finished all their stuff. Then you get Monsters of Rock, which, of course, is worth more. Yeah. This is a great game all around. Lyman also integrated the Phantom Flip. This, I think, is where he spent most of his time in the development cycle, was on doing the Phantom Flip. How does that work? The game flips itself and tries to make a shot. Does it work? Not optimally most of the time. That's why it's usually disabled in any kind of tournament scenario. So it's sort of like the thing flips, right, but much more advanced. Well, as George Gomez says, Lyman owes me big time because the number of sensor and array configurations that he made me screw into that white wood, it was never ending. He'd say, okay, now I want a proximity sensor here and two IR sensors over here. Then I want to roll over switch and three proximity sensors. He was just making me crazy. I'd say, we've got to build a game. He'd say, but it's got to be cool.
    98:35
    How well is that, right? The mad scientist that is Lyman Sheets. When it works, it's cool because it literally flips itself and makes the shot. What I find so cool about George Gomez is all of the things that he has given to pinball and continues to give to pinball. So, for example, he's building Monster Bash with the mad scientist Lyman Sheets, But at the same time, he's working on that super secret project with Pat Lawler. Now, George had to schedule around the engineer, Chris Shipman, and George's usual engineer, Tom Capero, was working on his own game. So Chris and George would have to work around Lyman Sheets' hours because they had to optimize everything to maximize Lyman's time. If a machine was down for two hours while they were screwing in some mechanisms or changing some sensors, doing some testing or shooting it, that is two hours that Lyman couldn't work with it. There was only one Whitewood, and it would sit in Lyman's office. Shipman used to come in at around 5 a.m. with George, and they would work on the game until 10. That's when Lyman's sheets would roll in from 10 o'clock, and he would be back on his computer doing all the play field stuff, and they would start working on the game. Now, George kept his regular hours when he was doing all of this stuff, but they were crazy hours because after his day was done, George would jump into his Porsche. He would drive all the way into the middle of nowhere to see Pat Lawler, and they would work on Pinball 2000 in Pat's famous home workshop. This guy has done a lot for pinball.
    100:27
    And you can learn about Pinball 2000. by listening to the Silver Ball Chronicles Pinball 2000 episode. Swing on over to silverballchronicles.com to check out the archive. Feel free to download and listen to all of our old and past episodes, most of them where I'm much funnier than Ron. Says you. Now, this is a flow beast, right? That's very flowy. Very flowy. George likes flow. He really, this is where he really, I think, got into, you know, he did a lot of flow in Johnny Mnemonic, but there's a little clunk in there. No, there's no clunk of Johnny Mnemonic. You've got to call the glove a clunk. And Corvette is super flowy, too. You're not going to get me on that one. You suck. You can't flow more than Johnny Mnemonic. That thing is one of the flowiest things ever made. But George says, to me, flow is not strictly about a series of smooth shots, although clearly they're the most obvious component of it. There's an intensity that occurs when one shot sets up another shot or a possible transition in the midst of accomplishing a greater game goal, like a hurry-up or a scoring frenzy. The feedback the game gives you with sounds as you complete consecutive shots is vital to enhancing that feeling. It's about getting the player so intensely focused on making the subsequent shot to continue the combination that it becomes all-consuming. Man, I have never heard of anybody describe Flo any better than that. Even the king of Flo himself can't describe Flo like that. I agree. That's Flo.
    101:51
    And no, Steve Ritchie does not talk like that in real life. Just in games. In a nutshell, what do you think of Monster Bash? Why don't you have one of these in your collection? Too easy. Really? It gets somewhat repetitive. Same reason I wouldn't have Scared Stiff, because you can get to the wizard mode on ball one a lot of times. Needs a little harder. A little harder. This is more of a game for me. And also, at the time, even back in the day, 10, 15 years ago, Monster Bash was extremely expensive. They didn't make a lot of these. No. And a lot of them didn't survive as well, you know, the arcade circuit. The ones that did, they went for high, high-value numbers. And that's why Chicago Gaming pulled this one out for their third remake. Monster Bash, Attack from Mars, Medieval Madness, they were the games that everyone, all those other games we mentioned from the era, they ripped all the parts off of that to save these games. Yeah, Monster Bash is still a top ten game on the pin side. Well, probably Tales from Arabian Nights is another one. But, like, NBA Jam, Congo, they just, they rip those games apart to get parts for the other games. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I'll tell you, this is a great game. This is a wonderful game. If you're like me, you're a pretty good player, but, you know, you're not killing it. You know, you're not getting to big wizard modes. If you struggle a little bit with Jurassic Park, you know, you're getting maybe to the T-Rex paddock. you know, this is more your style of game. Monster Bash. And you'll enjoy it. You really will. My friend Pete picked one of these up, the Chicago Gaming SE remakes, and I have not been up to his place since he purchased that because of the whole world ending thing. And I really look forward to playing a lot of this game when I have a chance. All these games we went through, are there any real bombs? There really isn't. No. See, even though pinball's dying, it's not like they're making terrible games. But that's where I opened it up, right? These new designers are coming in with some cool new ideas, new sort of ways of doing things and mechanics. They're not getting those 10,000 unit sales numbers, which is a shame. But that brings us to the last DMD game Williams Valley ever produced. Cactus Canyon. That's right. The date of manufacture is October of 1998. People will say, but that's not the last game that Bally Williams ever made. Well, it's the last DMD Bally Williams ever made. This sells 903 units.
    104:39
    It's a cowboy American Wild West theme. It's designed by Tom Capera, Matt Corrale. Art by John Yosey. Adam Ryan and Jim Raff on dots and animation. Louie Toy on mechanics. Boy, that's a fortunate last name. Music by Rob Berry. And, of course, he did the sound. This production was cut short again because of Pinball 2000, as well as it didn't really shoot the lights out. It wasn't really cut short that much, though. The actual plan was for 925 games, and they did 903. So they just threw the last 22. Don't bother. This was another one of those games that went for high, high dollar on the secondary market because it was sort of seen as like the last magical game that they did, right? The Pinball 2000 crash. The last regular pinball machine. All the magic. It was the last game with magic, Ron. Now, the major piece to this was that it had unfinished code, code which to this day still is unfinished, except for some hobbyists who've made their own updated code. Chicago Gaming did finish some of it. It actually has a match sequence now. Oh. I've seen it. I've seen the new one in action. What do you think? So this is Chicago Gaming. We mentioned that before they made all these other remakes. Their latest remake is Cactus Canyon. and they've touched up some of the code, but then they're going to have an extra code package you can buy for an as-yet-undisclosed price. That will be from Lyman Sheets and Josh Sharp. Josh Sharp's finished, like, number two in a lot of majors, right? You see that guy? I think he's a playtester. Lyman writes the code, he playtests it. It's got a topper. That's pretty cool. It's basically a guy drawing guns on you because it's the West. It makes sense. This was a difficult game for a lot of people to play. If you were able to find one of these, it was like, oh, wow, I've got to play Cadiz Canyon. There's only 904 of them or whatever. I think Chicago Gaming is probably going to sell more than 900 already. Yes, I think so. So they've sold more of these games than Valley Williams. It's got the Williams humor in it, that's for sure. Excellent voice work. I mean, it's got guns in it, man. Guns right on the apron. And it really hadn't been, I mean, what was the last Western-themed pinball machine? Well, it was the, remember we talked about. The one with Roger Sharp on it? Yeah, Sharpshooter? Sharpshooter. Or Sharpshooter 2? Yeah. When was that? That was like 88? We went through all these Gottliebs. I mean, there's got to be at least one Gottlieb. Well, there was the Sharpshooter and Gottlieb. Or not Sharpshooter, but Bounty Hunter. Oh, yeah. That's like mid-80s. They also had Cactus Jacks, which, I don't know. That wasn't really Western, but it had cactuses. It had a cactus. That's one out of five things that you need to be, you know, Wild West-y. But the great story about Cactus Canyon was just literally, we need to fill the line with something until we start pinball 2000. What you all got. Yeah, and that's where, because George is too tired, he's doing his monster bash. So Tom Capera and Matt Correal, I'm going to say that's how I say his name, they had already kind of started working on a game on their own time. So when it came time to show off their games, they were the only ones that actually had a working whitewood like here. And they're like, oh, man, okay, you guys get the job. And it became Texas Canyon. Very, very cool. And because it was the fill the line, let's get something out the door, let's keep everything running until Pinball 2000 gets up, that's where a lot of the issues from this appear, right? There were a lot of unfinished mechanics that were cut from the game, as well as, of course, we had mentioned the unfinished code. Adam Ryan would say that Cactus Canyon was the very last dot game. We were being pushed really hard, especially myself, to leave the dots behind and to get on to Pinball 2000. Basically, my time was cut short learning the 3D design for Pinball 2000 and working with George Gomez. Myself and Jim Rapp were both pulled away from the project too soon. You can tell, right? The other thing is there's a couple of mechanics that were pulled out. So originally, in the play field, there was supposed to be saloon doors that you would sort of shoot through, and they were sort of, you know, gates or whatever. Yeah, it was like medieval magic. You hit it, and it opens, and then you hit the head. They cut that because they thought it was like you had a bash toy in front of a bash toy. So why do you need that? So they cut that out. Right. So cool. That would have gone in front of, what is it, Bad Bart, I think, right? Bionic Bart. I love Bart. Then there's also another mechanic that was removed, which was over by the mountain and the mine, I think. It was supposed to move a different way or up and down or something. And the center ramp changed several times. Originally, it was going to be like two ramps, like a diverter thing. Come on, diverters, man. I'm sorry. They took the diverter out. No. But they kept these stupid guns on the inside. The guns are awesome. I mean, it's a friggin' Western theme. You need to have the six shooters on the bottom. Everybody knows about the up post in the in lanes on Jurassic Park. Well, this was a game that had originally on the left and right side for the gun fight. So the object was that you would shoot the in lanes and the ball would be held there until you were ready to pull your gun. The ball would come down. The ball. Bull. The ball would come down the in lanes. And the thing would pop up, stop the ball, and there was four drop targets.
    110:36
    And it's like, draw. And they'd come up and down. They were all individually controlled, up and down. And they would come up and down, come up and down. And it would finally say, draw. And one of the four would come up, and you had to hit it. It was neat. Now, I have actually played a Cactus Canyon, an original Cactus Canyon. Oh, my. For a guy who hasn't played a whole lot of games. He plays some rare ones. I played a lot of really, like, odd and rare games. It's very unusual. Well, Canada is very odd and usual. That's right. Odd and unusual. I couldn't even say that right. Well, that's okay. We have a better education system up here. That is true. The plunge is really cool because you plunge up and you go into, like, a whirlpool kind of saucer thing, which is really neat. I often wonder if they just repurposed that from Whitewater. Like, if it's the exact same thing. Yeah. They probably did if they were cost-cutting. The other thing is, I can tell that the code is unfinished in this game, because I played it the second time I flipped this game. I actually flipped it until I basically made it right to the wizard mode on ball three. And as mentioned before, not really the greatest of players. All the shots are wide open, like super wide open. It's impossible to miss them. You just keep shooting each shot over and over and over again until you fill it up. And then you're into the wizard mode. And I GC'd this game from this owner who had a very fancy private collection, and I had no idea what I was even really doing. So hopefully we can get some better code in the future. Yeah, the match sequence was just a placeholder. It wasn't even, like, it would just come up with the match, the number, with no real animation, nothing.
    112:25
    And in the flyer, Cactus Canyon, it says, The West has never been this wild. You rode into Cactus Canyon a stranger. I should do this in a southern accent, right, if it's the old way. You rode into Cactus Canyon a stranger. But you can use your skills to become marshal of this little town and need a taiman. There's plenty of cleaning up to do here. And Mayor Cleetum, he has a name, Mayor Cleetum. Mayor Cleetum hopes you're just the buckaroo to do it. But earning your badge won't be easy. You'll have to do something about the stampage that charge through the town from time to time, trampling everything in their path. Those gunslinging outlaws, the Bart brothers, are itching to challenge you to a showdown. You just might find yourself staring them down at the old corral, so you better have a quick draw. And pretty Miss Polly is bound to be tied up in some perilous predicament, so it'll be up to you to save her. You've got to be prepared for anything in a town like this, But if you're up to the challenge, you can hit the mother load here in Cactus Canyon. So reach for your revolver and get ready to shoot because the West has never been this wild. Ugh, brutal. I'll tell you, it's a cool game. It's a cool game. Doesn't particularly do it for me. I think I'd rather have an Attack from Mars, Monster Bash.
    113:48
    You know, those are the games I think I'd rather have. Medieval Madness for sure. Hence the reason Chicago Gaming did all those first. Exactly. Now, would I have much rather Chicago Gaming done a Theater of Magic and fixed some of the issues with its code? Absolutely. Tales of the Arabian Nights, 100%. But, you know, there are a lot of people that really, really love this game. I'm surprised they did Cactus Canyon before either Tales or what's the other Papaduke one? Theater of Magic. Yeah, surprising, isn't it? I thought they would get, theater magic I thought would get done first. Well, around this time, Ron, we're on the home stretch, but this is when things start to get really rough. And do you sell the Williams pinball division or do you close it down? Well, Pat Lawler would go on the record as saying on an old TopCast episode that they had to either sell it or they could write down $12 million. so they could, somebody out there would have to buy the Williams pinball division for $12 million or they could use it as basically an accounting practice where you write it off, you get a loss, and then you can offset gains elsewhere. Well, nobody is going to pay $12 million for a pinball company in 2000. So that's when they decided to just write it off and send it out the door. Gomez says, shut down the spigot down to a trickle in particular business is not necessarily explosive. Don't lop it off. It's kind of like, let's get rid of it and move on. To me, that says you don't want to be in the business. You want to be in a different business. Well, what's wrong with your coin business? There was a bunch of money made when the video game company spun off, and that's what this was about. It was about how much money can we make? We're in the middle, the business of making a profit today, and f**k everything else. So that's when Williams shuts down. And Lawler would say, when they fired us, for me personally, it was like a giant weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Not that I didn't want the company to succeed, but going to work every day with a sense of dread was horrible. They feel like the axe is right there, right? Any day they're going to come in and get axed. And then when it finally does, it's like, finally, done. I can move on. Now, of course, do you think that Neil Nicastro killed the Bally Williams business? The president of Williams? Did he kill it? Well, he kind of shut it down. But George says, Neil is either Darth Vader or the nicest guy. Neil wasn't out to get us or anything like that. But I think that his methods were not particularly supportive. But he did give us a shot, and we did take a shot. So perhaps he did support us. Yeah, so a lot of people would have a lot of commentary on, well why didn't they keep running D&D business and Pinball 2000 go back to our Pinball 2000 episode and we talk about that and why they wouldn't have run those two parallel things but it was certainly a different kind of fight and struggle there were so many resources at this corporation but for some reason they weren't pulling in the same direction as management and it came down to business and sadly that was the end And, in fact, the passion and the creativity that was created at Williams at the time has actually built Chicago Gaming Company to a higher level because they're making, remaking those games. Their entire pinball business model has basically been built on making remakes of those games. So that's pretty nuts. But where did some of the people go that were still at Williams at this time? Well, Greg Frera says, when Williams closed, I went to Midway and did art directing on touchscreen, Xbox, and PlayStation games. It took two to three years to develop a game there versus 12 months on a pinball machine. I was a fish out of water. Imagine you're working in a high-pressure, get-it-out-the-door, you know, business model, and now they're like, just take 12 months.
    117:51
    That's pretty crazy. You know, lots of these guys, they would go off. Some of them would start to work for Sega, which would become Stern. Some of them would take time to do independent contracting for a few years before they would end up at Stern. You know, the industry itself was in a lot of flux. In fact, Greg Ferreira has ended up in Stern, and now he is the director of their art team there. One thing that people always talk about in the Bally-Williams era was the magic. The magic of Bally-Williams, right? Like, oh, Stern, they stripped everything out. You know, those games are no good. I want the world under glass that was in Bally Williams, right? I need a new Bally Williams. Jersey Jack is supposed to be the new Bally Williams.
    118:38
    Well, George Gomez says, I have yet to run across that combination of personalities, that combination of talent. I mean, when I worked at Marvin Glass, there was an incredible amount of talent in that place. In a lot of ways, Williams reminded me of that. There was a tremendous amount of talent, the most talented guys I've ever worked with. We're talking engineers, artists, designers, animation teams. Of course, that interview might have been 10 years ago. I ask him that now. Yeah. These Stern guys are the most talented. The biggest pieces to that puzzle is that all of those cylinders were firing at the same time. Like, you look at somebody like Papa Duke, J-Pop, right? He really struggled after he got out of the Bally Williams team because he didn't have his engineers. He didn't have his famous artists. He couldn't get the stake to back up the sizzle, right? You look at, you know, Jersey Jack, right? They have all this stuff in their machines, right? They went with wide bodies. They jammed everything in you possibly imagined into the game. They almost went bankrupt. They had to have financial backing come in and save them. But there's still something that's kind of missing. There's some kind of – they're just missing the salt and pepper on there, right? There's just something missing. You can't quite put your finger on it. So you can't ever recreate Bally Williams. And I wish that we, as a hobby, would just move on to the new games and the new manufacturers that are rising up. I'd move on.
    120:07
    Here's one last quote from Greg Ferreres. He says, life at Bally, I made lifelong friends. We kept up with each other. Wow, it was good at Bally. I can't say enough good things about everyone I've worked with. There you go. What an awesome team. Ron, what was your favorite game we talked about this week besides Attack from Mars? Attack from Mars. Oh, crap.
    120:31
    Monster Bash. I'll go with that. Yeah, it's a good one. That's a good one. I'd love to have a Monster Bash. I think that would fit really well in sort of my collection. I just have my Tron, but I think it would fit really well. It goes, my family would really love it. It's my wife's favorite game. Did you know your Tron's worth $100,000 now? You should really sell it. Yeah, well, unless... I think I'll be buried in my tron, actually.
    120:54
    Will that puck be playing at your funeral and stuff? That will, yeah. The grid. Wonderful. Thank you, everybody, for joining us this month on Silver Ball Chronicles. I'm David Dennis, and, of course, thank you, Ron, for being a part of this amazing adventure. Oh, yeah.
    121:19
    As always, you can send your comments, questions, corrections, and concerns to FibberballChronicles at gmail.com. We look forward to all the messages, and we read every one. Please subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or your favorite podcatcher. Turn on automatic downloads so you don't miss a single episode. Remember to leave us a five-star review. That way, more people can find us. Do you want to support the podcast and need a new t-shirt? Of course you do. swing on over to silverballswag.com and pick up a Silver Ball Chronicles t-shirt all proceeds go to Ron Hallett because David Dennis didn't want the PayPal account
    122:17
    See, I got the, because I'm old, I have the bifocal thing on them. Like, my distance is fine, but when I'm, like, in front of the computer or trying to read from my phone, it's pain in the ass. Like some of these flyers you're reading, like I can't read. What are you talking about? Yeah, back in my day. Yeah.
    122:54
    Sorry. You there? I got a T. Oh. I decided that was a prime opportunity to escape and get T. Oh. Because you were rambling. Oh.
    123:03
    Good stuff. Continue. Oh, you're done. Oh, that was it. That was it. You're done? I didn't hear any of it. I assume it was pretty good. It was good. I'll hear it later when I edit. Mm-hmm. Two-minute warning. I'm going to go and see if I can get into this stupid tournament. I will be back. Do you want to go now? Yeah, I'm going now. Okay. I've got two minutes here. I've got to get in front of my – I'm using the better PC for that. All right.
    123:30
    Oh, the life of a tournament player. Chasing the Whopper dragon. I guess I'm going to go pee then. And that's where the spider came from Spider Well I said spider but I didn't write spider No you said spire Did I say spire? Yeah you did I'll listen to that back if that's wrong Yeah, yeah And what was Trudeau working on? I don't know if he was working on anything He was just there, just hanging out Coming in, eating a sandwich, leaving You gotta be prepared for anything in a town like this But if you're up to the challenge You can hit the mom Oh, fuck the throat has survived lots of warm water and four lozenges I've sucked down here oh my what are you doing sneaking up on me good lord jeez my dad was behind me scared the crap out of me