You're listening to Topcast, this old pinballs online radio. For more information visit them anytime, www.Marvin3M.com. Flash Topcast. Tonight on Topcast we've got a William Soundman. Somebody that did the sound on many of William's games from 1986 up to about 1995. Then he moved over to Capcom and was head of the Sound Department at Capcom Pinball. Then he went to incredible technologies, worked there, and finally ended up working at Stern Pinball, doing a lot of their machines including Simpsons, Pinball Party, Terminator 3, Lord of the Rings, and many of their other pinball games. Alright, I'd like to welcome Chris Granger to Topcast tonight. Again, Chris worked at Williams from 1986 up to about 1995. He did a lot of their popular games including Pinball, F14 Tomcat, Fire, Cyclone, Taxi, Urshaker, Elvira and the Party Monsters, Fun House, Terminator 2, The Adams Family, Fish Tales, Whitewater, Twilight Zone, Indiana Jones, Red and Ted Roadshow. You can see he just keeps going on and on, the number of incredible Williams pinball games that he did the sound on. So we're going to give Chris a call right now and see how he developed the sound on these incredible pinball games. Hi, Joshua Clay, how are you? Hey, Chris, do you got a sec? Yep. So what is your first relationship with pinball? I mean, were you a pinball player or anything or were you a musician and then you became a pinball player? I played pinball in late in high school and then extensively early in college. I went away to college in 1976 at the University of Illinois in Urbana and just living in the dorm that I lived in. I played a ton of pinball the first couple of years that I was in college. I played a lot of pinball and they were games where the games from Gottlieb in the early mid-70s like Abercadabra and surf champ. Those were my two favorites. That was my first real kind of an intimate experience with pinball and Captain Stamphastic was from that time frame. I think BDO was from that time frame. The game was in the game room with my dorm and that's where I mostly played. This was really the four video games all together. It was 1976, 1977, 1978. I played a lot then in 1979. I really got serious about space invaders. I dropped 500 dollars on a space invaders game and just at the point where I was routinely bumping up my own high score on that particular machine, asteroids came out and I just sort of like detected a pattern and I stopped playing games. I just said, you know what I'm not doing this. I'm not blowing all this money. So at that point, that was 1979. I basically stopped playing games all together. And then in the meantime, I was studying music and studying composition at the university. And the University of Illinois is a big computer music and electronic music about kind of a place. And so I was working in that community and doing that kind of work. And really not by any kind of design at all, I wasn't thinking this way in any way. But it turns out that the kind of really very open-ended and kind of a on-guard composition that was being taught and promoted in Urbana at that time was just the kind of work that was just perfect for electronic types bleep. Taking bleeps and bloops to the next level. So that's essentially what I was doing. And I actually had a demo reel that I had from, that was sort of a kooky little kind of a throwaway composition that I had written. That when I reestablished contact with the games community in 84, thinking of moving to Chicago and looking for a gig and hooking up with the Northwestern Computer Music People, I ended up applying actually at Myelstar, which was what Gottlieb had become. That Dave Zabriskie, who was working there at the time, and applied for a job there. And that little goofy composition was my demo reel. And they freaked and they just went, oh my god, this is perfect. This is exactly what we want. When can you start? So I had a job offer from them. And before I was able to actually execute that job offer, Myelstar put on a hiring freeze, and they had to withdraw the offer. So I was working as a programmer at that time in Champaign, Urbana, and that was working out okay. But I, you know, there was a pretty strong personal reasons that we had to want to move back to Chicago anyway, by family at that time. So we were looking and we were looking up here and why I was in the midst of looking for a new job up here. Myelstar listed their freeze and said, you know, we had, basically we had somebody, we lost a person under the terms of the freeze, we can replace that person. So if you'd like your job, the job that we offered you, it's still available to you. And I decided not to take it at the time, which turned out to be a 342 at this move, because six months later they shut that factory down. So that was probably a pretty smart move. And I worked as a computer consultant up here from 84 to 86 before I had the opportunity to come along at Williams. And so it was in mid-86, March, April of 86, that I actually moved over to Williams and started working with the original, you know, the first game that went out of the Williams shop with Yamaha, synthesizer hardware was my first game, it was Road King. So that was where that started. And I was working with another guy there by the name of Bill Parod, who is still a, you know, a neighbor and acquaintance in Evanston. And there's a fabulous programmer and a very interesting guy with regard to sound. He wrote most of the software and I ended up writing most of the music. And both of us designed a lot of sounds and kind of worked on putting the packages together ourselves, you know, collaboratively for the first few games. He ended up leaving about a year and a half after that. And at that point, you know, the system software was pretty much written in place. And we just kind of did maintenance work on that software really until, well, I'm going to say, 91, 92 before the original DCS ideas started to really emerge. So when you were doing the sound, you mentioned the Yamaha sound chip. I mean, how did they choose this chip and how do you write for a particular chip? Well, to be honest, I didn't choose it. It was hardware that was chosen really at that time. It was a chip that produced a certain number of synthetic tones all at the same time and could be treated as a synthesizer that was sufficiently programmable so that you could say, I want one, you know, I could make eight noises at a time, basically, with the hardware that chip had that capabilities. So one of those voices or instruments turned out to be a phase and one turned out to be a kind of a guitar sound and I'd use a couple to do a piano sound. And basically, we build a small little rock band or something like that out of what this chip was capable of doing, right? And a bill for odd with my help developed a, a music writing operating system that allowed us to write music scripts and sound effects scripts in a sort of a macro assembly language. And that's essentially what we did. It wasn't a MIDI system or anything like that. It was basically writing a macro assembler, directives to play a note and then to stop playing and to play another one and to play a different pitch for a different duration and having to coordinate eight of those things running at the same time and if they got out of sync, you'd hear it right away and you'd have to go and fix your scripts. That was that kind of thing. We were basically writing writing music in a text editor in a sample language, is essentially what we were doing. So there was no keyboard hooked up to any hardware whatsoever. Everything was just... Not really. I mean, I had a keyboard in my office that I could use to demo stuff, but it would be noodling around. I actually wrote on manuscript paper and frankly, to this day, I continued to write on manuscript paper. It's the traditional way to do it and oftentimes it's the easiest and the most effective way to get your idea down so that you remember what it is. You'd write the music on manuscript paper, but then essentially what you do is then have to transform this from the notes on the manuscript paper to actually writing it in a program. That's right. I have to type it in, note by note. That's exactly right. And like a particular... What determined a note in this macro assembler? How did you do that? There was a syntax of the language that we would use, the syntax of the macro language would be, you'd say, notes, and then you'd say a pitch, an indicator pitch in some way, C4 or something like that. And then you'd comma, and then you'd say a duration. And that would be a note. The next line would be the next note, or would be a rest, or would be some other kind of directive, like a slur or a volume change, or a voice or patch change. All those things had their own syntax. Similar, in concept to MIDI, because there's a note directive in MIDI just like we were using. The syntax we were using was proprietary. We made a home-brew version of that process. That's pretty much how we did it. I got pretty good at basically touch-composing, how you touch type, if you're looking at something and you're typing it in. I'd be looking at the manuscript page and typing those directives. I got pretty fast to typing them out. It's a text editing stuff. You're cutting in paste and then using whatever tricks you can to do it as quickly as possible. Basically, you're sitting there typing notes in. We're control structures that allow us to do loops. We had variables that we could change. We could do some basic sort of simple programming tricks to cause different things to happen programmatically. Those things ended up being the main tool in our sound effects toolbox. We would do these elaborate things where we'd have just dozens and hundreds of notes that would fire off in the space of a second or two in a very complicated pattern that would kind of evolve. We got pretty good at shaping those things to produce those very graceful sound effects that we made through the games from 86 to 93. Was the duration of that system. We got quite a bit of mileage as you may remember. Got quite a bit of mileage out of that Yamaha chip. That Yamaha chip existed from 1986 with the road kings. You're saying all the way up to like Twilight Zone. Twilight Zone was the last one that I did. You're right. Yeah, why water was the year before I paused? Yeah, because Indiana Jones was the first game to use the DCS sound system. And then you're saying everything changed with that? Well, yeah, that was a completely new hardware base and the method of making sound and making music really evolved into the way that sound and music is made today. Instead of having eight synthetic voices that you had to combine into a piece of music and transcribe having the synthesizer actually perform the music. With DCS, you can take music or sounds from any source at all, whether it's a licensed arosmeth tune or something that I composed in my own studio and recorded and then take that recording and place it on one of however many available tracks there are within the system. And the DCS system would play that system back like a multi-channel tape deck. Basically, a multi-channel interactive playback device. So this Yamaha chip basically lasted like seven or eight years. Isn't that like a long time for a sound platform to be used in like this environment? That's certainly what we thought. Yes, we thought we should have upgraded much sooner than in fact, but it was what it was. It was a system that they had sunk. One of the things about Pinball that doesn't have very many parallels in the computer game world is that it does have a kind of an odd parallel. But the statement is simply that hardware costs a lot of money to develop. Hardware manufacturers, especially ones that were manufacturing essentially an item by hand. Okay? Pinball is largely assembled by hand and that's still true today. People who have that kind of mentality about hardware, their big expense is design costs. And so designing a new circuit board, that's an expensive proposition. And they basically want to use a piece of hardware for as long as they can to get the mileage out of it. So that was, there were various iterative upgrades and versions and things like that. But the basic design really just underwent very minor modifications from 86 to 93. Well, let's take two extremes. Let's take Pinbot, for example, in Adams family. So you got Pinbot came out in 86 and you got Adams family that came out in 92. And they both use the same Yamaha synthesizer chip. But they sound dramatically different. I mean, when people will say, I'm not a big fan of system 11 games and people will say why? And I'm like, man, because it sounds like a system 11 game. But when WPC came around, it's like the sound seemed so much more involved, but you're saying that it really wasn't. The WPC really wasn't incremental change. The biggest change that happened with WPC is that the amount of RAM, okay? They're not a memory that we had on board, increased by a pretty significant way. And that allowed us to start bringing more elements of live sound and recorded sound into the soundtracks. So technologically, the capability was there back in Rook King's days or Pinbot days. But what was actually delivered was, I think we had one 256K RAM chip available on the Pinbot Rook King system. And I guess there were two. Not bloody much memory for compressed speech or actual recorded sound effects. So all of the sound effects for those games were synthesized. System 11 sounds, those algorithmic sounds, the gyros and all those fabulous cutlaric and a whole bunch of guys back in the late 70s and early 80s had developed all these algorithms for the system 11 system. For a guy like me, an avant-garde composer, I just thought those things were awesome and totally cool. And still to this day, those algorithms are wild and willy. They produce very kind of the expressive ranges is still pretty limited. And that's what you were just expressing there. So you're saying, largely, it was a difference in how much RAM you had to work with. That's really what an amount of two. By the time we got to WPC, the System 11 system, and a lot of those really graceful and elegant, but very limited, tall electronic sounds, those things went away. I thought, when you said Pinbot, I kind of had to smile a little bit because I think the Pinbot represented the absolute pinnacle of the marriage between the Yamaha system and the System 11 system. The System 11 system, remember that, that goes back to what space shuttle or something like that. I can't remember. High speed, actually, high speed was the game before road kings. High speed was the first system 11. They already added. High speed was the first game that attached a separate piece of hardware to the System 11 sound system. The System 11 pinball system was a 6800, a motorway of 6800, CPU, and another 6800, making sound. The 1,600 ran all the game logic and then the second one ran the sound system. It could only make one sound at a time. When you go back and listen to a space shuttle or a sorcerer of those games from like 82, 83, those games, both of those things had a kind of a space shuttle. I'll see if I can imitate space shuttle for you. I can only do this with my right hand, but this is what space shuttle sounded like all the time in the background. It would go, and it was just a loop like that. It just ran the whole time. And then whenever you would hit a target, there would be a target sound. Whenever you, you know, one of the 15 speed calls or whatever, that would go out. That would stop it. Or when one of those other goofy sort of algorithm, if you hit a ramp, it would go up a ramp and go, you know, or some kind of goofy thing like that. Whatever kind of thing it did, all those things were happening what we call monophonically, you know, one sound at a time and that background, you know, drone would get supplanted, right? And then when the four rounds sound was done, that that background would be restored and would keep running. So it was always sound being made, but just one sound at a time, okay? So high-speed innovation was introducing a second piece of hardware that played music. And, you know, during single ball play and high speed, you have this drum track that was playing. And that would be all that would be going on. And then when you hit multiple, you got the big, you know, you got the big door, door, door, door, door, door, door, door, door, door, door, you know, that wonderful rock and thing. And that was a single guitar track and a single drum, like a one-handed drummer and a single guitar note at a time. And that was what that whole, you know, that was high speed. That was the music for high speed. That was the first music in Pongongan. That was the first actual music. The Yamaha board that I described, the thing that they put into road kings, that was the first game after high speed to have that second board. And it was the first game, you know, basically the Yamaha system replaced that, you know, that outboard little guitar and drum synthesizer or playback unit that they, it was basically like a two-voice sample. Once one voice was used for drums and one was used for a guitar sample. And they, you know, it was, in fact, it was Bill Parod who, it was Steve Ritchie, the designer who wrote the song and wrote it on a guitar. But it was Bill Parod who, you know, who programmed that system and executed the, you know, executed the script that played those notes. And like I said, they only used it for that one game. That was the only game that ever used that board. The Yamaha board came along and supplied it with road kings and, you know, kind of went from there. Now, how hard was it to, I'm sorry, how hard was it to implement speech? It was speech like overlaid on top of the music because it was a separate, you know, you have the separate soundboard, but you had it on the system 11. You also had sound right on the CPU board too or speech, I should say, right on the CPU board. Exactly, exactly correct. The system 11 system implemented a very ancient, it was like literally 1948 compression technology made by a company called Harris. The algorithm, it was like an old, you know, military codec that they used. And that Harris hardware was the ancillary process on the, on the system 11 board. So it was still the case that you had to feed that hardware bit by bit. And, you know, the little 6800 that was designed, you know, that was tasked to play sound, was unable to do that and do any other sound at the same time. So that 6800 was out there feeding this little Harris chip making the speech, you know, digging stuff off a ramp and feeding it to the Harris for decoding and how it would come from the speaker. But that was part of the monophonic system 11 sound system. So when both with high speed and with road kings pinbot era, stuff, the system 11 board was responsible both for the system 11 sounds and then also the speech was coming from that board too. The big innovation with WPC, I mean, you know, it's not really much of an innovation, but they just combined the sound functions all onto one piece of hardware. Okay, so the, you know, and all they did was they took the, you know, that Harris circuitry from the system 11 board and plopped it down onto the Yamaha sound board and and and tasked the the 1609 chip that was used on the Yamaha board with, you know, with driving that CVSD part as well, that Harris part, you know, that was WPC's big, you know, sort of, if you want to call innovation, that was where that came along. There were a couple of sort of interim steps towards that process in the games, which were the ones that were the Joker's era and the, right, Joker's had a stereo game, the first stereo game by Williams. Well, I, it wasn't really stereo. They were, you know, they were separate, you know, it wasn't stereo at all. It was true channel mono is what it was. You know, they, you know, joke Dylan called it stereo. They got a little extra marketing push out of it, but it wasn't stereo at all. But, you know, so those games were sort of the, those are the kind of interim games. It was Fun House actually that was the first game that used the, you know, to use the real WPC hardware that was, you know, the big step up and ram and that was really, you know, at that point, you know, when you're talking Fun House Terminator 2, Adams, they'll certainly Adams, but I was going to, you know, include, you know, the other games that were made then. Yeah, Fish Tales. Bright of, Bright of Pindot was, you know, was a fabulous example. And, you know, there's a couple of other, there was a mouse mouse and a round, there was another one. All those games, including, of course, you know, you know, from, from my book, you know, Adams and then Fish Tales. That's my, that's, that's, you know, been my favorite for a long time. And, and then Whitewater. You know, those were the games that, that, you know, that really made WPC shine. I don't, you notice that I don't include Twilight in that list. Not the Twilight wasn't a very cool, sound-a-game, but you got to understand that Twilight was intended to be the first DCF game. And we have developed, you know, like 98% of the entire package for the DCF system. So all of that music that you heard had been composed for a much higher fidelity synthesizer system. Basically, I wrote all that stuff in my studio with real guitars and real synthesizers and, you know, with a real recording technology. And, and, you know, digitized all of it and it was being played back in a much, much, you know, I mean, DCF is a big step forward, right? In terms of, of, of sound fidelity. And, and, you know, that whole soundtrack exists in a, you know, in a, in a completely other form, right? But then it turns out that the hardware wasn't ready. The DCF's hardware wasn't ready. And they had to totally pull back and they said, you know, what we need you to go back and re-engineer this system. You know, re-engineer this soundtrack for the WPC system. So then you had to go back and, and, and, and, we spent about three weeks of, you know, just doing nothing but recoding all that music and all those sound effects for, or the WPC system. They, the one concession that we had was that we, um, was that they dramatically increased the amount of RAM on the, on the soundboard for, for, for Twilight Zone. And they allowed us to digitize, you know, a lot of the sound effects that we were intending to use. We were able to, to, to just drop in as samples and, and, you know, pretty much playing back as they were. But the music was all, you know, was a, the music was just, you know, I, I will never be able to listen to Twilight Zone and, and, and not remember what those two were supposed to sound like and really what it amounts to. So that's, that's just a, you know, I've had people tell me that, that, that's, that's, that's, you know, their favorite of my work is that, is that game. And, and, you know, I mean, it's good music and stuff. Uh, but I just will never be able to, you know, that's, that's my own, you know, sort of, you know, personal history that I'm baggots that I'm carrying around, you know, what I'm saying. Did you save the DCS version of Twilight Zone and ever like after the fact, plug it into an Indiana Jones or later DCS sound card and, and plug it into Twilight Zone, just to see how it all worked out, implemented into the game. There, there really was no way to do that. I mean, you know, there were, there were, yeah, I guess there were prototypes, you know, that the original whiteboard cabinet or something that Larry DeMar, that lived in Larry DeMar's office, you know, you might have been able to do that with, with, with that cabinet. But, um, you know, by and large, there was no, there was no real way to do that. Um, so, uh, so, so you didn't save the code. You know, it's just that, you know, I mean, that stuff's on tape, you know, I've got that stuff on tape somewhere, you know, it's all, it's all around, uh, you know, some buried in buried in some, you know, box of data, so whatever. But, um, uh, yeah, so that, that was, that was Twilight Zone. But so I don't, I don't necessarily include that in that, in that list, but, you know, rightfully, I guess it would be there. And, and, uh, you know, all those, all those games, you know, um, you know, uh, for me, I guess that period of time was certainly my most productive and, and, you know, the place where I probably did the best work that I, you know, that I did in the industry, I would say it's safe to say that, you know, um, the curve was, was just at the right place and, um, you know, everything was really, you know, it was really right to, to do really good work in that, in that regard, it was, you know, um, you, you, you probably remember that, that right about the time that, that DCS came out and, you know, we had a couple, a couple of games in the DCS world that still, you know, that still sold really well, but that was the beginning of the end of the, of the, of the pinball peak, you know, and, uh, uh, you know, Adam Stanley was a 22,000, you know, game run and, uh, fish tail sold something like 14.5 and Terminator sold 16.5 and, and how, uh, um, you know, Twilight Zone was at 16, you know, and a half or something like that. Um, but the, the, uh, you know, after that, the curb dropped off, you know, I get away, fell off the pace a little bit and, uh, start right next generation and started to fall off the pace and after that, you know, we just never, you know, those, those huge numbers of manufactured games just started to drop and, um, uh, you know, things started to really tighten up in the development, uh, department, the engineering department really started to, to, to struggle then and, um, uh, and, and, and, you know, frankly, that was, that was kind of the beginning of the end for me, you know, back in like 94, you know, end of, end of, you know, mid, early mid 94 and in the 95 and I ended up leaving, leaving Williams, you know, as part of the kind of, you know, feeling like a kind of a, gets you to almost call it like a crisis of faith or something like that in, in terms of, of, you know, what we were doing artistically and, uh, um, you know, and frankly, economically as well, you know, we had, had this great run and, you know, we'd all made a lot of money and, uh, all of a sudden we weren't making money like that anymore and, and a lot of the, the, the ways that thing were going, um, you know, weren't being supported by the economics anymore and, and, you know, started to be a real struggle. Um, and my, I ultimately kind of, you know, I, I thought, well, gee, I need to do something transformative here and have the opportunity with Capcom and, and decided to, to make a jump, you know, to be honest, they were, they offered me a lot of money to go and, and I took the money. Um, you know, I, I, I, I can't say it was a mistake to do that, uh, because the people that I met at Capcom, you know, continue, you know, they're, they're people that I met there that continue to be some of my best friends and colleagues and, and, uh, you know, I'm, I'm not at all sorry exactly that I, that I did that. Although, you know, there were a lot of problems over there, but, um, you know, that was the decision that I made at the time and, you know, I, I, I can't, you know, I have, I had pretty good reasons for doing it at the time I, I, I can't say I wouldn't make the same decision, you know, decision again. Did you have a hand in all the machines or just, all the Capcom machines are just pinball magic? Well, I was running the, I, I ran the Sound Department there. So I was, you know, I, I had management duties as well as, as, as, you know, sound creation duties. Um, the games that I kind of, you know, more single hand, you know, I, pinball magic was, was, was mostly done when I got there. Um, I, the kinds of things that I did that had to do with choreography and adding a few, you know, big sound effects and things like that for the sound system. But really that was, you know, that was, that was 90 percent Jeff, 90, maybe 95 percent Jeff Powell's work on the pinball magic. And, um, you know, we, we added the speech stuff I had a fair amount to do with that. And, uh, like I say, a number of sound effects that I added, but, um, you know, Jeff, that, that, that really was, was Jeff's, Jeff's package as much as anybody. Um, and, and how was Capcom's hardware compared to Williams, W's, you know, uh, digitally compressed sound system? Oh, that, uh, that, um, Capcom's, Capcom, the, the basic, the Capcom sound hardware was a two-voice, uh, uh, recording and playback device, right? So I had a fair amount of RAM, um, you know, maybe a comparable amount of RAM to DCS at that time. DCS at that point had become a four or five channel system. So we were able to just make more sounds at once. Uh, the fact that in Capcom land, we went down to two, you know, dramatically changed the, the, the, the density of the sound that came out of the game. But at the same time, it also made the whole thing kind of work in a more consistent and, uh, um, you know, there was a kind of a clarity about those, about those games that, um, you know, there's a certain that, you know, that, that was pretty attractive. Also, the, uh, the actual, um, um, uh, uh, encoding and decoding of sound, the compression itself was a much less, um, you know, what they call lossy compression system. It was, it was basically, it was, it was an impact, uh, system was, uh, uh, it was the original impact, uh, audio, codec. And, um, I forgot, I think it was a Toshiba part that we used to implement it. It was pretty expensive. It was $10 at Chip and each chip would only make sound one, you know, like I say, one, one sound at a time. But it was, it was reasonably, you know, reasonably intelligible and reasonably queer, much more so, in my opinion, than the DCS system, the early DCS stuff, we really pushed the envelope on how, you know, I'm just on, um, uh, you know, we allowed ourselves to get very lossy with the sound. And those first few games, you know, have a kind of a brittle quality to it. And if you listen carefully, you know, you can really hear at the ends of sounds, you know, you can hear the little wobbly and then the workly things that go on that, you know, that indicate that it's being compressed or, you know, um, re, you know, decoded. Are you saying that, that the DCS stuff was largely over compressed? Is that what you mean? Yeah, because we're trying to get as much, we're trying to get as many, you know, we basically work with them. And this is always true, you know, or that have been true for many years. You know, you're, you're, you're trading off sound quality for sound quantity. And, you know, when the designer says, oh, we need a sound there, you know, what do you say? Well, I guess, you know, we'll try and find something to go in there. And, and with DCS, it started to be, well, you know, we've got, we've got this much memory and, and, you know, our aggregate, uh, you know, uh, uh, you know, uh, uh, uh, you know, a number of bytes per sound that we, that we have or the number of bytes per second of material is this. So, you know, what do you want me to take out here? And they said, well, I don't want you to take anything out. Just, just get more, you know, more seconds per, per byte or whatever, right? And, and that, that's, that's the quality knob. And, and so we ended up in many cases, we ended up turning that knob down pretty far just to get something in every slot, you know. And, you know, it was really at that point that we started to say, wow, we, you know, uh, this is, this is how we trade, and this is how we do these trade offs. And, um, you know, eventually, you know, when RAM got cheap and we were able to put more RAM into the games, uh, you know, that started to become less of an issue, but, you know, I mean, that continues to be a problem for, you know, for play stations and, and Xboxes and everything else that, that, that, that, you know, dedicated piece of hardware like that. Feudersystems and pulling stuff off of hard drives and stuff like that, that, that stops being so much from a problem. And, and most of your games, you know, your Xbox three games, your, your Xbox 360 games and your PS3 games, those, those things are, are cramming massive quantities of, of sound in the games and the, you know, the, the, the sizes of projects are, have just, you know, exploded, not just obviously for, you know, for, for programmers and artists as well, but, you know, get, every bit as much for sound too, you know, um, but that kind of day, you know, when we were first getting that stuff going at 93, 94, 95, you know, there just wasn't a lot of RAM around, you know, so, uh, we, yeah, we, we cranked a bit right down pretty far and, and I think you can really hear that. The Capcom system didn't have that knob, frankly, it was a little bit rate, single compression solution that, you know, it was just what it was, it wasn't great, but it was, you know, on average, it was pretty good. It was, you know, Jeff Powell used to say that it was about the quality of AM radio in terms of bandwidth and stuff like that. So, you know, and, you know, one of the things that I really want to stress Joshua Clay in, in, in, in all of this is that the fidelity of any given system to my mind is, is less important to the quality of the soundtrack, of the overall soundtrack, than the gracefulness of the choreography and the, and the attention to detail that you're able to bring. And, you know, it's my opinion that, that, you know, if you listen to a game for about a minute, you have, have, you know, you've been, you're, your brain has properly been invited into the sound world that that game presents to you. And, if it presents a consistent, you know, face and, and, and, you know, all of those old games do, that turns out to be an adequate, you know, level of information to pass from the game to the, to the listener and to the, to the player. And, and it's a, it's a, it's a compelling experience. It always was a compelling experience. You know, when you, when you, like pull out one of those old, um, name games or something like that and you, you play like, you know, joust or something like that on name, um, you know, you listen to those sounds and you just go, oh my god, this is a disaster. God, listen to that. Oh, it's horrible. It's horrible. The 30 seconds later, you're, you're remembering the game. You're flapping your, you know, your bouncing around. Here comes the tarot act of, you know, those things are, they, and, and, and, and, and, and, and you respond to those things the way that you did when you played that game in 1982. And, and, and you just do, your brain makes those adjustments even today where, you know, we've got five dot once, you know, five dot once surround games going on and fabulous fidelity and incredible attention to detail, you know, as much attention to detail as, as any movie soundtrack gets, you know, are going into games these days. It's, it's, it's phenomenal. It's great. But it doesn't diminish the, the work that was done on those old games, you know, and when you go and play those old games, you know, you're able to, you're, you're just as able today as to have a compelling experience as you were when those games came out. That's, that's, you know, that's, that's my opinion. So now when you say, you're, you're talking about RAM all the time, what you really mean is E-Prom space, the ROM space that, that you can store these sounds in. RAM it is, it was E-Prom, you're absolutely correct. Okay. I, I just want to make that clear that, that, you know, from System 11, you, you had a limited number of E-Proms, and then when you went to WPC, those jumped up, you know, you had larger E-Proms and more of them, and then when you went to DCS digitally, compressed sound, that then the E-Proms got even larger, and there was even more of them. That's exactly correct. That's, that's, you're, you're, you're absolutely right. I just wanted to make it clear for when people, I knew what you were talking about, but I just wanted, because ultimately what's in the E-Proms ends up in RAM. So it's just, you know, I just got to make it clear so people understand. Yeah, the, the people who are going to be concerned on that level, yeah, specifically the hardware, we're, we're, we're E-Proms that we were using, you're absolutely correct. Now how was it working with, you know, at, at Capcom working with, you know, with Python and Mark Ritchie and, and the designers? Well, you know, all those guys, I, you know, I'd really worked with all those guys before, and, and so I, you know, I knew how they worked, and I knew, I knew kind of what they were, what they were after a little bit. You know, to be honest, the, the, the, the failure at Capcom, you know, was certainly related to the fact that the industry itself was in, was in a decline at that point in their timing was just spectacularly bad. But even, you know, even, even, I, you know, I think that they probably could have survived had they not spent so much money early on in such an elaborate way. And they really did, you know, the way that I've always described is that they threw the party before they built the product. There will never again be a facility as elegant and well equipped to manufacture pinball games as that facility. You know, it was just, it was, it was unbelievably up to date, you know, built by, with Japanese money, by, by people who understood manufacturing in a very, very clear way, you know, all of that stuff was just, you know, absolutely top shelf. But, you know, given the legal problems that they have, they, they, they struggled to, you know, Williams's, you know, lawsuit against them and, and preventing, you know, essentially preventing a lot of the work that, you know, that the, the ex-Williams designers had, had done there early on kind of forced them onto these, onto these tracks that, you know, essentially required them to hold their breath for a couple of years. So all that stuff was going on and that was certainly a legitimate problem. But, you know, by the time you got to, what do you mean by the law? So what law suits was Williams bringing against Capcom? Well, Williams, Williams sued Capcom details of which I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to reconstruct exactly, but Williams sued Capcom for patent infringement on, on a number of different different patents. I'm afraid you're going to have to check in with, with, with Python, or Bill puts them in a, or Mark Ritchie to, to get those details, but there were, there was extensive litigation that was going on as early as 1993 and extending all the way into 19, you know, the end of 1996. And by the time that had happened, by the time, by the time actually, frankly, by the time I got there in 1995, you know, uh, uh, uh, Tujimoto and the, and the Capcom, uh, you know, corporate people had sunk, you know, tens of millions of dollars into this, into this operation, and they still didn't have a game to show. Now, you know, they were, they weren't, they weren't really practicing any kind of like, you know, they were really in startup mode at that point, and, and they, and, and money, they had plenty of money, Capcom had a lot of money at that point, and, and, um, you know, they paid their bills on time, and they had tremendous relationships with their suppliers. You know, they had, they had, um, you know, parts suppliers in the shop helping the engineers design, design the games and design the components, because, you know, they knew they were going to get paid right on the spot, and that was really happening, you know, I mean, they would pay, they would, they were paying cash. They were paying, you know, they were paying, you know, they were paying right away, they were paying on receipt of it, of invoices. And then all of a sudden, in June or July of 1995, that stopped being the case, when they started to pull back and say, you know, what this is costing us way too much, we've got to reign this spending in, and, uh, one of the ways they did it was to implement a much less lenient Ryan Policky towards the suppliers, and that support dried up, and suppliers turned from, you know, from collaborators to adversaries, and, um, you know, and, and a lot of bad feelings erupted as a result of, of a very, kind of a parsimonious, in my opinion, parsimonious, uh, cash management strategy. Now, you know, that was, that was the view from the sound department, right? And the details to support that are, are, are all anecdotal, and, um, you know, I, I go way out on a limb, and, you know, somebody from the, from the accounting department of that, of that time would probably be able to come back with, with chapter and verse on how that wasn't true, maybe, but that, that was, that was very much the perception in the shop that, that, you know, all of a sudden our suppliers just were saying, you know, to the engineers, guys, you know, you're not paying our bills, we can't, you know, we can't support you in a way that we can support it. So, that was a big loss, but the, you know, the fact of the matter was that, um, you know, it was a, it was a, it was a, it was a, it was a, it was a pretty good party that was going on in a capcom, and they were spending a lot of money, and, um, uh, you know, and, and it took them, you know, every bit of three, three, you know, basically three full years to, uh, get the first product, you know, the first pinball product out there, and, you know, they did a lot of, of, of tremendous innovation. There was a, just, you know, there was, there was, you know, pinball magic was a, you know, that was a very strong piece, and, um, uh, unfortunately, it got released really at, uh, you know, at a time where the market had significantly declined, you know, and, and, uh, you know, I, I, you know, did they sell three thousand of those things that they sell, you know, maybe, maybe thirty three hundred three. According to the internet pinball database, they only sold twelve hundred. Okay, I'll, you know, I'll buy that, um, and they probably lost money on every game, because of what they, you know, of how much the, uh, you know, the actual bill of materials ended up in, um, so, you know, it was a, uh, uh, you know, it was a, it was a dicey situation, they had put a lot of money into this very slick hardware, you know, the Soundboard was a great example. They, they, you know, that Soundboard cost them something like a hundred and twenty dollars in parts, and, you know, that's about thirty dollars more expensive than the DCS board was at the time. Um, so, you know, I, I, I, I, make those kinds of decisions, you know, really using Cadillac components and, um, you know, buying solutions that were embedded in Silicon, rather than, you know, finding, finding some cheap ways around those problems, or, or just, you know, having a more modest goal in mind, um, you know, set them back in terms of bill, bill materials, you know, like I said, they were, they, you know, the, the games were too expensive to manufacture, too expensive to buy the parts for, and even with the most, you know, the most sophisticated and modern, you know, manufacturing techniques that were available at the time, uh, they were still, um, you know, they were, they were losing money on those games. So, um, so, you know, it really was a kind of a doomed effort in that regard, and, and, and, and that, um, that realization, you know, really permeated everything that was happening at Capcom, um, had already been permeating it for, you know, for a, for a while when I got there, um, you know, the big push to get that first game out, um, you know, we, we had a lot of euphoria over that game, and we still enjoy that game a lot, um, uh, but, uh, you know, the economic something that were just never really there, and, uh, and eventually, you know, I mean, when the money dries up, then, you know, then you're kind of done, and it took, you know, took another year for us to, to, to realize that it was done, but, you know, we were, it was, it was, it was not a, um, it was not a pretty picture, really, you know, from the beginning, and, and by, you know, mid 1996, everybody was just kind of sitting around going, okay, do we look for another job? Do we wait for a severance package? What do we do here, you know, at, um, you know, you ask me what games I specifically, I, my, my, uh, um, the two things that were completely on my, on my plate to do were airborne, and then, uh, the game that, that, you know, that only, that only the prototypes were ever made, which was Kingpin, those were, those are the two games that I, you know, that I was responsible for the soundtrack for. Did you have anything to do with the Ziggy Bingney project? No, no, no, not at all. No, did you see it? Um, yeah, I saw it, why would, I, I saw some of the drawings and stuff like that, um, there was a, um, you know, there's a pretty strong sense, uh, you know, that was, that was, that was, you know, obviously, it was a pretty controversial project, um, and, uh, and I guess that, uh, you know, that the, the, the, the, the faction, uh, Capcom, who thought that it was, you know, completely inappropriate thing to put out there as a pinlock game, uh, you know, I suppose you could call it, you could call that faction the Poods, you know, because it's a Pood's position to take, but, um, you know, I guess I have to count myself amongst those, those people I just thought, you know, you know, what, who's gonna buy this game, you know, and, you know, these days we're in a completely different place, right? You know, we're in a place where games don't have to be out in the, uh, you know, don't have to be out on location to make money. They can go into people's basements, you know, and, uh, people, you know, there are, there are collectors and, and, and, you know, there's sufficient interest in the game, you know, in and of its own self that, you know, that you could maybe get away with a game like that at this, in this time, but, you know, what's, uh, you know, the economics of it in 1996, you know, seems, you know, we were just kind of scratching our heads. And, you know, I mean, people scratched our heads, you know, people scratched their heads about Rudy, right? And that was, that was a huge hit, you know, and people scratched their heads about pinball 2000, and that ended up, you know, being the last gas, right? So, you know, you never know about an innovation, you never know about, you know, something that's different from the way that we've always done, and Zingy Bing, he certainly was different from the way that we always done. You know, so, um, you know, there was, you know, Python was not a shy guy, you know, and he, he, he had a, uh, you know, an artistic temperament that, you know, that, that produced some fabulous innovations in pitball, you know, I mean, you know, pinballed to this day is still, you know, one of my, you know, I, I think, you know, for the time, you know, looked at for what it was when it was, you know, still has to be listed right up there with, you know, with, with some of the most innovative thinking in pitball. Um, and, uh, I'm talking about, you know, in terms of conceptually, and, and, you know, what is the, you know, what is the, sort of the message and the artistic message that's, that's being put out here, what kind of an experience are we trying to give people? And, um, you know, pinball was pretty, pretty awesome. Well, before we start talking about Stern and how you got there, what, what, what was your, like your favorite system 11 game that you worked on or your favorite experience? I know you had a, you, you probably worked directly with El Vira and, and maybe some of the people from Adams family, right? Taxi. Taxi. Taxi. Taxi was your favorite? Taxi is absolutely my favorite game. Why? Um, why? That's another Python influence. It is, it is another Python game. I, you know, I, I, I guess taxi is, you know, the, the, my, my, um, my love of taxi. And by the way, I gotta tell you that, that, you know, I, I still own several pinball games, but they're all kind of on loan except my taxi. My taxi is still in the basement. And I, and I do, and I do have a Maryland taxi prototype. Um, but, uh, uh, taxi is, uh, taxi was a game that started life as, um, as a, as a game that was going to be about Grand Prix racing, which I thought was a pretty cool idea. And it was really Python's ideas that, to scrap the whole racecar thing and, and go with a, you know, and go with this, with this kind of goofy, you know, off beat theme, right? And, um, uh, there was something about it when, when, when they first presented, you know, when Mark and Python sat me down and said, okay, it's not going to be super Grand Prix anymore. It's going to be taxi and, and I just want to block. And they explained the whole thing to me about the passengers and picking up passengers and earning toward a jackpot. And, you know, and, and I just, you know, I looked at this, you know, that the whitewood was done. You know, the figure eight ramps were already there. And so you would, you would look at it, what sure looked like a racetrack to me, you know, but, um, and I just sat there and looked at it and, and they had pictures of the characters on the walls and I just, you know, and I just started laughing. And I just said, you know, this is, this is crazy. But it might just be, you know, crazy enough to work. And I did, you know, we just had so much fun making that game. It was, you know, doing those characters and doing the voices and some of the characters that didn't make the cut, um, uh, uh, we, you know, we just had a blast. The main theme, um, I don't know what you remember it, but it's the best thing I ever wrote. It is the best thing I ever wrote. Huh. Now, what characters didn't make the taxi theme? Um, the only one that I did that, that, that, um, that comes to mind was a character. There was a, um, actually there were two. One of them was, was one that we never really came up with a satisfactory name for and that's kind of, that's partly why. But that game came out in mid 1988 and the movie of the year, but the previous year was Tootsie. And so one of the characters was going to be something, you know, was, was basically a takeoff on, on Tootsie and we were, and we were doing a thing where basically we're, I'm going to step away from my, from my phone just a little bit to do this for you, but it basically was sort of like a, you know, taxi taxi taxi. You know, and it was that kind of, that, that kind of thing that, that, that we were trying to get across. And we thought it was hilarious and it was, it worked pretty well for a while, but you know, there weren't enough slots in the game for it and, you know, it just, it just didn't make the cut. Um, that was one and then there was a, you know, I, I, we haven't talked about this, but I, I spent, when I was a kid, I lived in India for six years and, and, and one of the things that you, you know, you'll see through many, many of my games all through the years is, uh, this fellow who does it actually very nice, you need an accent. And that is something that we all just tried to, you know, get into the games and, and one of the characters, we, you know, sort of spoke with an Indian accent. So, uh, again, it was, wasn't something that, you know, just, just didn't rise to the level of, of necessity, I guess you could call it and, and probably just as well, you know, these days, you think, twice about stuff like that. But, um, so, uh, those, those are the two that I can think of that didn't, that didn't make the cut, but, uh, you know, Gorbi was just great, you know, Steve Ritchie did that voice and, you know, Pindot was an obvious one and the whole Maryland thing was, you know, it was what it was or Maryland or Lola or whatever you want to call it, you know, by the time we got it done. And, um, uh, Santa Claus was a, was a fun one and, and, uh, um, yeah, it was just, uh, yeah, it was, uh, you know, all those characters, you know, we had a lot of fun with the characters and, we had a lot of fun with the, with the rules and, um, uh, uh, uh, and, and again, like I say, that the, the music, you know, basically, you know, at the time, my favorite artist was Little Feet and, uh, and Mark basically said, go, go write me a Little Feet too. And so that was really where I was at, um, you know, musically and, and, uh, and it's just a, it's a, it's, you know, the factory when, when, when, when that game was on the line and, you know, we would go home at, you know, seven o'clock eight o'clock at night or whatever, um, and, and listening to 50 taxis being burned in and that factory all playing that song. I mean, you just can't even believe how awesome and how wonderful the factory sounded. While that game was being manufactured, this factory sounded, that was as good as the factory ever sounded, was, was one that came with being manufactured. So, you know, it's a sentimental thing with me because I like that kind of music, um, the most, uh, but, uh, you know, that's, that's really the, you know, that's the one at the short of it. That was my favorite, you know, I mean, it's a, it's a nice playfield, a cool playfield, but, um, uh, you know, the rules are what they are and and stuff, you know, they're, it's a, it's a much simpler game than, you know, than some of the later ones, but, um, still have a, just a real soft spot in my heart. Okay, we're going to take a break talking with Chris Granger, the soundman at Williams Capcom and Stern Pinball and we'll be right back after this message. Deep in the forest of eastern Canada, you will find something, well, ground breaking and something that's very, very pinball, but something that's really, really small. Oh, presenting classic playfield reproductions. Oh, two guys in their basement. We've got the passion, we've got the gear and we've got the quality, doing our very best to remake classic and more modern pinball replacement parts. Classic playfield reproductions. Playfields, back glasses, plastic sets. On the web at classicplayfields.com. All right, we're back with Chris Granger, the soundman for Williams Capcom and Stern Pinball. Did you get to work with any of the, you know, the license theme personalities, you know, like Elvira or Arnold Schwarzenegger for Terminator 2 or any of the Adams family cast? We did. We, um, I met her name is Cassandra Peterson, is who Elvira actually is and I went to LA. Had a couple of great sessions with her and she was really easy and fun to work with. I really enjoyed it. I declined to actually meet with us. It's a pretty funny story and not sure what the, you know, what the rating on this interview is, but we had to, we had to go some to get him to even get in front of any kind of a microphone at all and he didn't agree ever to record for us with us. But basically the soundtrack for the original Terminator 2 game was made in his trailer while he was on the set of Terminator 2. And Lee Orwa, the, the sound recordist for the movie, actually conducted the session. You know, he worked from our script and, you know, he was Terminator. So it wasn't like we had to worry too much about it, especially or anything like that. But, you know, he went through and read all of our stuff and we got everything there and, and, you know, and they did a great job. They caught a bunch of, you know, they caught a truck driving by and made him report a couple of lines of stuff and, you know, they, they were very careful and professional about it. We got a great, great, you know, recording out of it. But at the end of the session, you know, Lee Orwa goes to him anything else and he could hear Arnold kind of change character and he goes, yeah, fuck you asshole. And of course, that was so first, you know, he didn't even say it in character, you know, he, he just said it, you know, and it was pretty clear that he'd never wanted to do this project and, um, uh, and was, you know, it was kind of pissed off about this. And, you know, I basically just felt personally addressed by that line. And we just, I mean, we just all went, yes, yes. You know, it was one of the great moments in the involved development history for Hit the World to throw that in. Of course, it was the first thing that went into, you know, that went into the game, you know, and there's a, you know, of course, there are a powerful roms out there that have, you know, that have that phrase in it that you can get, you know, for the, uh, the possible responses random feature, you know, if you get nothing, that's what it says, you know. So, so why didn't that actually end up in the actual final roms, you know? Well, like I said, Pinball was all, you know, Pinball always had a bad, uh, you know, had a bad reputation in the community, right? Even in Chicago where, you know, where it's manufactured, and a lot of people were employed by that business, you know, the feeling was that it was, you know, there was somehow immoral or, or, you know, like it was, it was kind of equated with gambling devices. And of course, there, you know, they're then gambling, you know, on games and stuff like that. So, so that had a bad reputation and had to live that reputation down every day. So, the idea that we would put a, you know, cursing into a game like that, that was just, you know, I was completely, you know, there was no way, there was just, you know, no way at all. Um, you know, for our basements, absolutely, you know, my games, no question about it. But, you know, not for, not for public release. No, you know, there's, you know, there's no such thing, you know, the sopranos, I guess, was the first game that actually had a kind of an R, you know, had a setting that was R, right? So, um, so we did, you know, come to that thinking later on, and, you know, and, you know, give Python some credit for, for, you know, pushing that envelope with Ebingy, you know, 10 years before. So, um, but yeah, yeah, 1991, no way. You know, that was not going to happen. We were writing a, a crest of success at that point, you know, we sold, you know, we sold 16,700, you know, uh, terminator twos. And, uh, you know, I, you know, who knows what the movie, we, you know, I mean, it's a, it's, you know, it's the signature line, right? But, um, you know, the movie people probably wouldn't have cared much, but, you know, the pinball, convocacy, never would have bought it. Red and Ted Roach show. There was, um, you know, the, the, the country star, the singer for that. How hard was it to implement her songs into that theme, into that pinball system, into the DCS system? Well, she only had the one, um, she only had the one, uh, uh, song that was, you know, that every little thing song that was, uh, that was actually in the game. Uh, the rest of it was just, you know, it was just speech kind of like any other project. She was, she was great curling Carter's, right? And, uh, you know, she did a great job, but, uh, really only had the one song. Um, and, uh, you know, uh, that dropped in, um, uh, you know, if that, that pretty much dropped in as a, as like an extended, um,