and then yeah he kind of got to a point when i was a teenager that he thought you know i'll be doing this long enough and i don't really want to keep doing the other jobs so he gave that up and retired and for about the last 20 years he's been just doing so as you branched into kiddie gambling machines um no redemption was never really that big for us we had some games like your stackers and your winner every time and those kind of games but not like the full-blown you know like ticket machines and stuff like that it was more just you know stuff that you could win some prizes he wasn't really big on skill testers like claw games and that maybe in the early days he had a couple but kind of moved away from that he's been more about the actual arcade machine so he had a lot of drivers and stuff he was buying Daytona new you know I remember when I was I think I was like eight years old on the driveway in that carport it was like a brand new Daytona twin driving game that costs like I don know I think back then they were about 35 40 grand or whatever they cost it was a crazy amount of money for the early to mid 90s every kid in the neighborhood was kind of running down the street to come to our house and and um yeah play the Daytona not even knew what it was because obviously kids in small country towns don't really go up to time zone and big arcades in Perth that often so hey brandy the kids just got a new playhouse cletus you are the most wonderful husband and son i ever had yeah it was a real um real treat so yeah he's had a lot of that stuff you know shooting games all the other different arcades but his passion and my passion and my brother's passion we're all kind of pinball mad that's that's kind of like the labor of love They don't make the money that they used to make. Everyone kind of knows that. Yeah, that's just what we enjoy doing more. Cool. So have you still got games at home with you and your new family? Yeah, I do. I've got a few here. I've got eight in the shed at the moment. Actually, I can see the CV behind you. I've got a Circus Voltaire in the shed. There's a Monsters LE in there. I've got Doctor Who, a Flash Gordon, Star Trek Next Generation, Twilight Zone that plays really well that I really enjoy playing. You're not a wide-body racist like a lot of pinballers? No, I don't really have a problem with wide bodies. I think some of them are really good games. I think, well, especially Twilight Zone and Star Trek, I think they're fantastic games. I do enjoy playing Roadshow. That's a bit of fun. The scene in Perth, not having got over there for pinball, only over there for conferences, is there a competition scene? Do you visit each other's houses often? What's the go? Are there barcades? We do have the occasional social kind of catch-up or like a not-so-serious competition at someone's house on their collection, but we don't do that very often. It's kind of someone, you know, offers it up. But we've set up like an association called WA Pinball in the last couple of years. That's on Facebook, characterised by our black swan, which is like the WA bird. Yeah, we run comps in a couple of different venues. So we've got a venue where we have about, I think at the moment there's about 30 pinball machines in Northbridge. So that's called Planet Royale, and the Arcadia section is called Barcadia. So everyone just in the pinball kind of community knows it as Barcadia. Yeah, we do competitions there once or twice a month. I'd like to do them more often, but it's a bit of a challenge at the moment. And we've got other competitions that are run by another guy named Roy. He's got about, I think, about a dozen pinballs at another location, at a virtual reality centre in Northbridge. Yeah, he has comps here once a month as well. and those are the two main locations where we have competitions but we're you know we're trying with WA Pinball we're trying to get more people involved and we're trying to get other locations to kind of volunteer their games or or if they've got games that are at the competition you know standard that can be played and not have too many complaints you know that's what we're trying to get involved. If you run a pinball competition you are going to get complaints. Hello, a wish to register incomplete hello miss what do you mean miss oh i'm sorry i overcooled yes yeah that is true and sometimes it's just the game's too hard the game's too easy this switch doesn't work um when you know and then you go and you hit the switch and it works but you know there's a lot of that kind of stuff that goes on but yeah when you've got when you've got quite a few like we do at barcadia you can always just like you know deactivate one and chuck something else in on the facebook group for pinball os wide and sell there seems to be a roaring trade and people buying and selling games in the Perth area? Is there a large collector base there? Yeah, it seems like there's a lot of dormant collectors that have games at home who either didn't know each other or somehow are now connecting a bit more. I don't know if it's because of the competitions or because of those Facebook pages, but yeah, there's a lot of people who are bopping games that aren't even advertised, so they'll just talk to each other at different events and stuff and they'll do deals. And then, yeah, on Facebook, there's a lot that are kind of being bought and sold. But like WA, for people that don't know, WA has like a large mining industry. And there are a lot of people that have a lot of disposable income, you know, and people that work away. And when they get home, they want to get back to their house and have their, you know, collection or their man cave. And some people into cars and some people into other things. And the ones that are into pinball, that's what they do. Do you get across the East Coast much? Yeah, I do. Obviously, the last couple of years have been a bit tougher, but, yeah, previously I would. Mainly for just, you know, events or sports or other things like that, not so much for pinball. I'm pretty new to the competitive scene. I didn't even know it was really a thing until only a few years ago. And I remember a few years ago when Neil McRae from England came up and punched me again because there's a competition at the big events. Whoever travels the furthest gets a prize. And whenever I go and Neil goes, Neil gets upset at me. because I'm further than England, and I thought, well, I've got this wrapped up, until a young woolly boy from Perth turns up to Indisc out of the blue and says hello. What made you come all the way over to Indisc when you weren't really aware of competitions? So I'd only been playing in competitions for a few months before that. So I kind of started around August, I think it was, in 2019, and that Indisc was in January 20. 2020. Yeah. I went over, what kind of led up to that was I went over for Marty's competition, comp the silver ball in melbourne i think that was in the october in your 19 so i just kind of discovered this world of competitive pinball thought this is great you know it's something that i'm really into and i didn't realize that so many other people that actually play this competitively and you know that can only be you know more fun the more challenging that you you find the competition so i went over to melbourne silver ball and i really enjoyed it i took the old man to that and um enjoyed the kind of show side of it as well there were a lot of games there that were just, you know, being displayed and people could play and obviously the competition was happening. I wasn't aware of at this point that, you know, larger competitions do tend to go for a long time. So it was funny because I actually booked our flights back to Perth on the Sunday night when the finals were on. And that's a huge mistake, as you know. So I haven't done that again. Yeah, I didn't end up making it. I got to like the quarterfinals, I think, of that one, the Melbourne Silver Bowl. And that was like the first big competition I went to. luckily I did bomb out because if I had gotten to the semifinals I would have had to like push our flight back or something so after that I had a bit of a taste and I thought oh you know it'd be really cool um I had some time off work as well I thought it'd be really cool to go over to one of the bigger ones in America and I found out about Indies and I've been watching a few YouTube videos because you know Carl and I are really good at recording and all their streaming that's really high quality so I thought oh you know Indies sounds great and the old man have been telling me for years about a place in California that had you know hundreds of games in this small town you know inland from LA so I thought oh you know you know I'll go check that out that that can only be good fun so yeah it was kind of like a last minute thing booked flights I think a week before and then just jumped over there and I thought oh yeah I can you know I can do this I can go and play against the world's best players you know what could go wrong well yeah so it was just kind of like a learning experience um I really wanted to see the actual museum itself I'm glad I went now since it's closed. Because it ain't no more. But you can be modest. You only played for a couple of months, and then you decided to go in the high stakes, which is, what, $50 an entry? Yeah, so they do something at Indisc where it's like $50 a card for high stakes. And I think the main comp, the open, is like $20 a card. But there was a thing where you pay $100 and you get, I think, like $120, $130 worth of cards across the classics, the main and the high stakes. So I thought, oh, I'll just do that. And I ended up going through quite a few cards for the main, and I wasn't really getting anywhere. I wasn't used to the card format. I'd never done it before. And I just kept finding, as a lot of people do, that, you know, you have a few go-to games that you feel good on, and I'd get three or four on the card that are really good scores, and then, like, one or two of them would destroy the card for me. So this happened for days, you know, and the cut line kept getting, you know the scores getting better and better as they go and so I got like I think right at the end of qualifying for the high stakes I thought I'm just gonna I've got a card here you know I'm gonna give up on the open I'm just gonna chuck in a card for the high stakes and see how I go and I think it was that attitude of not really caring so much anymore because I was really nervous and um you know the pressure of the competition and stuff and and you just keep trying to play the same games over and over and I think the change helped so I walked over to the high stakes bank and i just i think it was like nearly midnight and they were closing for that night and it was on the the last night before the finals and i just put in a couple of scores and i got really good scores and a couple of the machines in the high stakes uh bank and remember there's only seven machines and the card was four so you know you have to play four out of the seven um and i got two good scores and then the next day when i came in in the morning because the indisc it goes for like 14 hours a day i came in and i managed to get a couple of like decent scores on the other two machines as well and i think i qualified ninth so and they got more people in the high stakes than what they were thinking they were going to so i think initially they were expecting the finals to be eight or twelve people or something like that but they end up being 16 so once i got my card in at ninth i thought gee i might actually i might actually make this so um yeah i ended up qualifying ninth and getting into the finals how'd you go first round first round so uh finishing ninth so it was one eight nine sixteen was my group play number one yeah and number one was augustine yes trump yes number eight was johnny modica oh dear um so he i played so in the lead up this is probably going back a couple of days but in the lead up to in this i actually landed on a tuesday i think it was and i literally got a hire car i'd just flown close to 24 hours to get to LA because I flew through your neck of the woods I flew through Brisbane so I was nearly five hours to Brisbane and then I was at the airport there for a couple of hours and then it was what is it 12 13 hours to LA so I'm completely erect and I left on a Tuesday morning and I got to LA on a Tuesday night because of the time difference and that yeah I got in a hire car drove three hours in LA traffic to Riverside it's about one kilometer yeah yeah that's right it wasn't that far um it was not that far at all i thought gee this la traffic is definitely not what i'm used to in perth and then i got to riverside there's a place called riverside game lab which is a cool place got a mix of pinballs and arcades and stuff and i just rocked up there because i heard that there was like a lead-up tournament and i thought if i can make it i'll get there i think i got there 15 minutes before they closed entries to the tournament after driving three hours and flying for nearly you know nearly 24 hours or whatever it was so I'm pretty wrecked at this point I think I just I thought I'll just give it a go and that and the funny part was was that it was a flip frenzy and it was like a top four finals and I made the finals of that I think I qualified I think it was like second or something but and I surprised myself but then Johnny was in my group so it was kind of ironic that then when I got into the high stakes finals in disc I played Johnny again but by then I'd been having a few chats with him and you know getting to know the rules a lot of games that I didn't really know I didn't realize how many games are used in those competitions in america that we don't have in perth or in other parts of australia because we do get a lot of the same here um with the older games but yeah so then johnny was in my group again at indisc i thought oh here we go so then when i got into that group at indisc it was trent and johnny and jim belsito yes so he i think he scraped in and finished 16th and i heard about him i thought gee he a good player and i think some of the games in the high bank were actually his Yeah nearly all of them were his yeah Yeah so then we played the first game and it was actually one of the ones that I played in my card, and it was Stargazer, Stern Stargazer. And I like the older games. I guess that comes from playing a lot of older games when I was little. Yeah, I just had a really cracking game, and, yeah, I think that was one of Jim's games, and I think the score, I think it was about 3 million, which was it was the highest score of the weekend i'm pretty sure that whole weekend in this and it was a good time to do it too i think about two million and one ball and i thought yeah this is not bad i'm going okay here so i picked up uh picked up the four points there and then obviously trent was he was choosing the games i think the next two games were the two that i hadn't played and yeah so then that was another lesson i learned in this so there was the card lesson and then And there was the play every game in the bank. Because Indies is not like other tournaments where I think you get practice. It's literally, there was no like 30-second practice before you play. It was just you walk up and you plunge and you go. Yeah, I played, I think, High Roller Casino, which is like an early 2000s stern from memory. And I don't think we ever owned one of those. So I don't think I ever played one literally ever in my life. So I played that and did not do well at all. And then the next one was a Grand Lizard. Oh, the old Grand Lizard. It's a System 11, I think. Yeah, with the play field and the drops up the top. Yep. Yeah, keep it up the top or else you're dead type thing. Played that and did not do well on that either. So I ended up going first, fourth, fourth and got knocked down. So it was 4-0-0 points. Still a great experience. And playing with those guys, it's great to watch and appreciate just how skillful they are. Oh, amazing players and learning a lot of skills that, yeah, I didn't have at that time. Definitely some good lessons there. I came 11th and then I think looking back on it, I think the top 10, I think every player in the top 10 was in the top 50. So I thought, gee, that's a pretty good effort. That's a very good effort. I'm telling you. And are you coming over for the Brisbane Masters? I am. I am. I've managed to get some flights, get a hall pass to go. So you're going to face the world number one who's coming over, of course, Esha Lefkoff. We've got him coming back, so you'll get to play him and see There you go against him. We all enjoy a good game against Escher. I heard that, I think it was Escher and Colin Urban came over a couple of years ago for Brisbane and really dominated. They took home every first and second, apart from one flip frenzy that PJ won. But they took home all the prize money otherwise. They just kept battling it out who was coming first and who was coming second. And, of course, we had Bo and Keren here who took third. Oh, wow. Just in case. So this year we've got, we have got Colin. and we've got Esha and we've got Steve Bowden coming over. So that'll probably be first and second wrapped up in all the comps again. Yeah, I really enjoy Stephen at the major competitions because I really love his commentary. I think he's so – his knowledge of the rules is fantastic, and he explains the games in a way that I think anyone can understand. So I really do – when I'm watching, for example, the recent world championships and stuff, he was on the stream for a while talking. I really enjoy it when he gets on there. So I'll probably pick his brain in Brisbane a bit. And they're always willing to share. They're very good. They're very good sharing knowledge of the games, especially if you haven't played them before. Yeah, the top players generally are, in my experience. That's why I brought up Johnny Modica. He was very helpful. I'd just won a game on Stargazer. We're in the high-stakes finals. It's kind of everybody's really competitive and wants to win, but I'm standing in front of High Roller Casino saying, hey, Johnny, what do I do? And he was actually telling me, you know, you've got to do this and you've got to do that. So, yeah, I really appreciated that. I think that's really good for the competitive community that people have that attitude. Tell us a little bit more about your tastes in life, especially being way over there in an almost foreign country in WA.