🎵 Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast. I'm your host, Alan, joined in the basement studio of my trusty co-host. It's Alex, the water boy. How you doing? I'm doing pretty good, Alan. Doing good every Monday. We're just the fucking... You're always so good. Yeah, I'm just always good. You know, these episodes come out on Mondays, but we record them on Mondays and Tuesdays always. And, you know, it's just a great start to the week for me as well as the listeners. and we just want to say we want to thank all of our loyal listeners who donated to our coffee account we are going to pintastic in april we will see the people out there but we will see the people we will we are the people we are men of the people and we are looking forward to seeing you all out there we're keeping the coffee account up because like we said when we first started it we're using these to fund trips to see people and scenes in different pinball locations across this country. So if you want to donate to our coffee account, it's ko-fi.com slash Wedgehead podcast. And when you send your donation, let us know where you want us to go. That's why we ended up in Boston. We got some people in Boston and from New England that wanted us to come out there, donate some money on our coffee account, tell us where you want to see us next, and we'll plan a trip out there. We'd love to meet you guys, play some pinball, share the love of the game. But today we got to get right to it, man, because we got a crazy episode today. Yeah, you got like a brand new game on the floor at Wedgehead today. We're here to talk about that right no we're here to talk about like something popular that like people like right no unfortunately we're not um no we're here to talk about good shit that the wedgehead pinball podcast loves talking this is what we're bringing you that other podcast i still want to talk about okay we're talking about gotlieb system three the end of an empire yep as many of our listeners probably already know by now i'm kind of a gotlieb guy alex is also a gotlieb guy both my bar and this podcast are winks to the colloquial nickname that was given to the single player em machines manufactured by gottlieb based on their iconic wedge-shaped heads yeah uh and they were for about 30 years the absolute best pinball manufacturer in the fucking business indisputably the best they were the kings and alex even he used to always hear me say that about ems and as he got more and more into ems and playing at wedgehead and then we went on that trip to past times i got it it's like when you played all the got leaps in a row going to past times was like they have everything organized by manufacturer they have them all kind of lined up not necessarily chronologically strictly but it's kind of like lumped by that so it's a really good like museum presentation of like the best of the best from all the manufacturers and you just realize naturally which row you end up spending all of your time in and you're like dude i've been standing in front of fucking Gottliebs for days. And that was their golden era, right? That was the EM era. That was when they were the kings of the industry. But much like every empire, eventually they all crumble. Yeah. Gottlieb went from having the best art, the best layouts, and the best reliability to maybe having the worst in all three of these categories by the end of their run in 96. Most of this had to do with falling behind on the technological sea change from the electromechanical to solid state electronics. During the late 1970s, they were the last of the manufacturers to do so, and their solid-state systems started out significantly underpowered and outclassed. This is something that happens in basically all tech industries. When someone's the best at something, they don't want to adopt the next thing. Everyone else was looking for a reason to jump ship from EMs because their EMs sucked compared to Gottlieb's. Gottlieb wanted to ride it out because they were the fucking kings. and so they're promising like this is a simpler system this is better there are games work better and everybody else meanwhile was already working on the next thing you see this everywhere you see it we're looking for a competitive advantage to be got leap yep and got leap was asleep at the wheel exactly you see it with like cameras with like companies refusing to give up on like uh film technology when they were good at it you see it with like like in the the biking industry right now shimano makes better shifters better analog shifters and tram and tram's the one that started jump into like the electronic shifting because you're like they're looking for something and now they will always be ahead in that side of the business gottlieb fell behind yep and that's actually a pretty big story and there's like a whole lot of fingers at that can be pointed to who and why gottlieb crumbled including some massive corporations like coca-cola and columbia pictures buying and selling the company and then passing around like a hot little potato But this isn't going to be that episode because I want to jump straight to the end of the story, the end of the empire, the end of Gottlieb. This episode is all about the System 3 era, which was, in fact, from 1989 to 1996. It was seven years of floundering yet another leap in pinball technologies and pretty much completely missing the pinball renaissance of the early 1990s completely. Yeah, being asleep at the wheel during, like, the golden age of pinball. and got leaves infamous system three era it's widely regarded by many pinheads as the worst era of pinball machines by any manufacturer ever and we always seem to find these games catching strays whenever we cover a die in the hill game by a different manufacturer they usually go well it's not as bad as the premiere games or these got leave games are the worst games ever but this is like a got leave game they like to like lump that shit in i mean the stink of this era is so bad that many people forever associate got leave as synonymous with bad and they talk about them as a joke company which is honestly it's sad because it's not true for decades they were the kings of the industry like we said and even in their decline there were some very talented individuals that were working at the company and some of these games are actually very fun so this week's episode is an ode to these games and the talented individuals that worked on them under crazy time crunches yeah so that's what we're going to talk about yeah system threes you might be wondering what's a system three or how can i tell which games are system threes well there's one defining feature that already sets the tone for this era and that is the pointy boy flippers these flippers that so this in the system three era right at the beginning of this gotlieb redesigned their flippers and they got a very uh like conical shape to them they're they're fat at the base and they're extra pointy at the tip they're flipper shaped but they're exaggerated on both ends. Yeah. Right. They're like exactly what you think of a modern flipper. They're just exaggerated. They're fatter at the base and they're even skinnier and pointier at the tip. Yeah. Like most pinball flippers like look like fingers where they're like slightly narrower at the tip. These look like triangles. Yeah. They're very unusual and they're universally hated pretty much. And all the system three games have these flippers. Yep. Yeah. They started putting them on games right before they switched over to system three. The first game with these flippers is bone busters oh that's a great game which was the last system adb which is the gottlieb system right before it but every single one of these games has these pointy boy flippers these system three flippers and there's they've got a few reason why they're weird right like in the first like we're talking about it's the shape and what's also interesting is john borg actually was the one responsible for them he designed them in his short time as a mechanical engineer and draftsman at Gottlieb. I love that fact because John Borg worked for Gottlieb for a very short period before jumping ship to Data East, and he left a permanent impact that everyone hates. It almost looks like intentional sabotage. Yeah, double agent. It's just genuinely hilarious. And you have to imagine he didn't go out of his way. He was just tasked with making these new flippers or whatever. I highly doubt he's like, I'm going to make these things bad, and then we're going to go get a job with Gary Sturd at Taddy East. It's pretty funny that he just like, he's like, I got leap. His one project, make the worst flippers of all time and then leave the company. Leave before the fallout happens. These flippers are also weird from a mechanical standpoint because the bats remained a two piece assembly. They have like a metal stem and a metal base. And then they have like a plastic shoe that grooves onto it. Yeah. It's hard to really understand that until you've seen them popped apart versus a modern flipper. But a modern flipper has like a shaft that's press fit into a solid one piece like plastic head. And that started in the 80s by other manufacturers. And by the time that the 90s come around in the bulk of this system three era, all the other manufacturers were doing single piece units. This was done the old EM style way. If you see old pinball machines and they draw a little hole at the base of the flipper, that's because they used to screw the plastic piece onto the base of the flipper. Flippers don't have that anymore. They haven't had it for 30 or 40 years. But Gottlieb kept them. Again, just sort of like when they fumbled the launch from electromechanical to the solid state era. Then when they do this again, they fling into old ways. And it's kind of endearing. It's sad when you know how the story ends. but it's kind of endearing to be like, man, they just like wanted to go back so bad. Yeah. Also, what's weird about these flippers is right around the same time, like the first game came out in 89, the first System 3 game, they never made the move into what we call solid state flippers, which means electronically controlled, which means that the full voltage runs to the flipper button, the flipper buttons. So it, you know, the power gets to those flippers. It's the old way of doing it. And every manufacturer, Data East was the first one, and then Williams quickly copied it. It's, again, it's the old style of doing it. It has more contact points, which leads to more chances for the signal to get weakened or the power to get weakened. Yeah, and the switches get corroded, and they make worse contact. They cause greater resistance. It's probably the reason why a lot of the System 3s you, you know, the listener has played, feel like they have really bad flippers. is because they've got really dirty contacts that make things just a little bit laggier and a lot weaker. Yep. And these things can feel like shit when they're, like, not cleaned up and playing nice. Yeah, and they can work very well if they are. But, again, this is the old way of doing it. There's a reason why everyone switched. There's a reason why today nobody would ever do this. Nobody would ever run 48 volts, like, through the flipper button switches. Like, it would never happen anymore. But Gottlieb, and it shouldn't have been happening at this era either, but Gottlieb kept doing it. But Gottlieb didn't. And the last thing about the flippers, right, is they have a very long throw in the plunger and coil stop. And what that means is when you activate the flipper, when it's energized or held up, the angle of it is extremely steep and, like, exaggerated. And people call these trap-all flippers because it basically makes it super easy to trap and hold a ball. Yep. That's my biggest gripe is that it's just like you can catch anything on these flippers. It's so easy to stop the ball. So if you're playing with somebody that regularly traps to make shots, they can just stop the game anytime they want on these things. And that really is... The other things you can work around, it's like the design is whatever. It's off-putting for some reason. The two pieces is strange, but doesn't affect me. The not being solid state sucks if they're not maintained, but it's not a huge deal if they're playing well. But this one actually is my gripe. There are certain things, like some people put Williams mechs on these instead. Steve Young at the Pinball Resource sells different length of coil stops so the throw of the flipper is impeded earlier, which means it doesn't rise as much. That's pretty cool. I didn't know you could just do that. Yeah. None of these are great solutions because even the ones with what Steve Young sells, I've tried to use them before and it just causes the flippers. Even after I rebuilt them with all new parts with those, I would get one of them would stick with it. And no matter what I could do with the new stop, it just didn't work as well. And I had to add extra return springs. And we're getting into a technical side of this. But also these games were designed with these flippers. And there's something to be said about just like leaving what was designed with the game. You know, it's like the games as it is. Play it as it is. I mean, this is how these games were developed. They were developed to play with these flippers. So play it as it lies. Yeah. There were some other technological advancements in the System 3 era. It was designed and engineered by John Burrus. John had started back at Gottlieb in the late or the early 1970s in an engineering role under the legendary pinball designer Ed Krinsky. He eventually made a few games on his own as a lead designer, most notably games like Black Hole, Buck Rogers, Mars God of War. He then transitioned into a lead software programmer during the mid 80s for Gottlieb. And he did most of the programming on the Trudeau games, including Waterboys Rock. Nice. and on tag team which we have on the floor at wedgehead so he transitioned into being a software guy so he's kind of just like doing everything at gollib foreshadowing here we're gonna see a lot of that in this company it's everyone's wearing multiple hats and everyone's helping each other out on crazy deadlines yep but in between programming the system 80 and system 80 b games the predecessors to the system 3 as we discussed john was working on the architecture for the system 3 platform so for anybody that's listening is like what is a system what are we talking about we should probably just briefly say like whenever we like classify games by systems like this we're referring to the board set that the game uses which will be like common for a run of games so it's like system 80s were designed in 1980 in that get that board set in some variation lasted all the way up through 89 yeah when the system 3 came out yeah and so it's like all of these games kind of share these common parts when you design a new system it's a big um overhead task for the company like it's a big investment of time and you're kind of stuck with it for a while yeah it's just like in video games when they come out with a new console right like you have the playstation 1 you have the playstation 2 the 3 the 4 the 5 right like and they come out staggered over a period of time and everything's on that one platform all the games that get made are for that one platform and every time you adjust the platform you're adding more functionality to it yeah and they did add quite a bit of functionality oh yeah the system 3 coming from the system 80 which was a fucking piecemeal nightmare that had been upgraded many times yeah so they increased the lamp and switch drivers and capacity which just means that the games can have more controlled lights more inserts and have more targets and switches and gimmicks and things they went from 64 lamp drivers to 96 so they're almost hitting triple digit number of the lamps significantly better they also fixed a big problem in the system 80 era which is called edge connectors and they looked like like if you look at an old video game cartridge like an old sega genesis cartridge and you looked at the edges they would have those connections and they would have like a plastic connector that would clip on it looked like that like little gold contacts the gold contacts on the pcb itself which is not a good idea because there's no way to replace that it's prone to like cracking yeah it's just like you're like oh that whole board can be shot and no other manufacturers did it like that gotley was the only one and surprise surprise basically not repairable or not easily repairable without hacks yeah and uh it's it's just not good so they changed that they moved away from those yeah they also improved the grounding from the factory and they worked on their voltage flow issues which the like i mentioned earlier the system 80 is a whole bunch of boards and they all had different they didn't have a common ground reference in them which created a lot of issues it's it's a common problem and so they address that with this one still has ground issues they're just much better you know we didn't get rid of all of the ground no i mean it wouldn't be a godly if there wasn't some ground issue you got a system three you're gonna want to do the ground mods still still but you know it's better it's way more reliable yeah they also have better menus audits and adjustment settings this is kind of the time when all these games get much better at this uh and gottlieb was one of the they weren't left behind it's not as robust as the williams or even the data east menus they were still kind of behind on these but you do have adjustment settings and you do have menus and things that are good for an operator and operating these games on routes they also probably most importantly they have more drive capacity for solenoids is famously their system 80 they only allowed their main driver board only allowed to power nine solenoids and system three could by default have 32 it's a lot they make good use of this as we'll get into later again like solenoids for anyone that's maybe new to pinball or is new to this terminology anything that moves anything in a pinball machine there are some motors sometimes but almost always it's driven by a solenoid we call them coils that term is interchangeable but basically so flippers pop bumpers anything that moves drop target banks like mechs any mech of any type a kicker an out hole a saucer a vuk you know a little guy riding a jet ski that bobs around every one of those needs its own coil so system 80 only allowed for nine and the funny thing about that is that's why they had to keep adding auxiliary boards because their main system could only power nine so if they had a need for 10 or 12 or whatever they would just piggyback another small board and they did it and it just became a fucking mess so they beefed it up so that standard they could have 32 which is a big big improvement yeah that's like 32 is plenty that is uh they were shooting for the moon without yeah no it's awesome here's a big part too is like during this era the 90s games the late 80s through the 90s the other manufacturers well because daddy's kind of just copied what williams was doing famously they kind have stole their board set they used to mount double a alkaline batteries like onto the cpu board and those would over time stay in there just like batteries left in an old flashlight or an old game boy or something and you forget about then they leak and they corrode and they cause fucking problems gotley was using lithium coin style batteries and this made them extremely reliable and way less likely to leak and damage the boards this is actually a good instance of technology that they implemented that's way better than their competitors it's way better than what williams and daddy east were doing and even their previous system system 80 that gets a lot of shit and had a lot of problems they had rechargeable kind of nicad batteries and even those were better than the alkaline double a batteries used by everyone else because those leaked less no godly you know they don't fuck around they're making robust systems here and the last thing we got to talk about as far as like just the technology of the system before we get to the games is they have a lot more memory which allowed for more sounds sound sampling and greater music as well as the ability to code deeper rule sets this is immediately noticeable in their first system three game lights camera action it was released in december 1989 so we'll just call it kind of early 1990 when the game is first out on the street lights camera action is actually the first game with modes a lot of people think it's adam's family and it kind of is like adam's family is sort of the first modern quote-unquote you know now it's now it seems quaint but like you know it has clear modes and it has a path to a wizard mode you complete enough modes you get to a wizard mode right like larry damari gets all the glory for his work on that and rightfully so but john norris and his game lights camera action was actually the first and that was a gottlieb game that was a system 3 game it was the first system 3 game and it had adam's family beat by two full years golly i mean dude they kind of killed it with the system three system three is actually pretty good other than the flippers that's the kind of the funny part is that it's like the thing that you actually interact with the ball with and that you use all the time they kind of like fucked up that part yeah which is unfortunate because even the flippers they had before the fat boy flippers of the system 80 yeah famously extremely reliable like kind of indestructible they not super powerful They not super powerful is the problem It because they were running their flippers on 24 volts instead of 48 volts So when they jumped up the voltage, the flippers got stronger. Yeah, and they just fucking butchered them at the same time. Speaking of weird Gottlieb quirks, what are some other goofy shit Gottliebs cooked up in this era? So here's the thing. We talked about the system overall, but if you play Gottliebs, they play weird. We're talking about solid-state Gottliebs, from the System 1 to the System 80 to this System 3. But as an operator, they're also weird. Just weird shit. The way they do shit is weird. One of the big things is they screen-printed the entire underneath of the play fields with all the part numbers. It's very cool. And things like coil numbers, fuses, et cetera, right where all the parts are mounted. Fucking awesome. Honestly, this is the best feature that nobody has copied, and it's an awesome idea and should come back. It's so much easier to know what the fuck you're looking at and what it's supposed to be than having to pull your manual out, which may or may not be in the game 30 years later, or you have to go online to find a PDF for. Having it screen printed underneath the playfield, genius. Yeah. They also still used open stack relays, and Alex is a mechanical engineer, so he could probably describe a relay for the listener. But this is hilarious because even in the 90s, they were using what they would have been using in the EM era over 20 years before. Everyone, all the other manufacturers had switched over at that point for good reason. They had switched over like 20 years before. Why are they even using relays to drive stuff on here? I really want to go look at one now. That's very bizarre.