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Episode 26 :: The Electric Bat Cast

Electric Bat Cast·podcast_episode·1h 7m·held·Jun 3, 2025
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.033

TL;DR

Electric Bat Cast ep26: Events, Q&A on arcade ops, pinball ball science, and the unglamorous side of running a pinball arcade.

Summary

Electric Bat Arcade hosts Kale Hernandez and Rachel Bess discuss upcoming events (Punk Rock Flea Swap, Tuesday League Finals, Walter's Fighting Tournament, Andy's Treasure Hunt), answer community questions about arcade operations, pinball maintenance, and aspirational arcade ownership. Topics include ball metallurgy, ideal machine counts, tournament revenue impact, and the hidden operational costs of running an arcade bar.

Key Claims

  • Chrome steel pinballs stick to magnets in Metallica Remastered due to iron content; cannot be replicated by buffing standard carbon steel balls

    high confidence · Rachel and Kale explain the chemistry: chrome steel balls contain more iron and are uniform throughout their core, unlike carbon steel balls with a hard candy shell exterior and different core material

  • Electric Bat Arcade's Tuesday League nights generate approximately 15% of monthly income; tournaments and events likely responsible for ~40% of income in indirect ways

    high confidence · Rachel provides direct data on league night revenue contribution and discusses indirect effects of tournaments on overall arcade earnings

  • 65 pinball machines is the current optimal number for Electric Bat without additional hires; 60-70 is the sweet spot for management without significant operational burden

    high confidence · Both Kale and Rachel agree 60-70 machines with 3-4 skilled technicians is sustainable; beyond that requires additional staff

  • Electric Bat Arcade operates 52 weeks per year with Tuesday League nights, never taking breaks since COVID began

    high confidence · Rachel explicitly states they have not had a Tuesday night off since COVID, with only ~3 days off per month total

  • Amber represented Arizona at a major tournament and advanced Kerry Wing to seven games, surprising skeptics

    medium confidence · Kale mentions Amber was sponsored by Electric Bat and Atomic Age Modern Pinball and performed better than expected against Kerry Wing

  • Standard pinball sourcing varies significantly in quality even within single shipments; some carbon steel balls arrive with mirror-like finishes

    high confidence · Kale describes receiving pallets of PB-116 balls with 'varying degrees of shininess' and references steel ball bearing manufacturing video

  • Starting an arcade can cost between $0 (small operator with borrowed space) to seven figures (ground-up build)

    high confidence · Kale notes startup costs vary dramatically depending on lease, location, and build-out; friends building from ground up spending 'one million and up'

Notable Quotes

  • “I warned you about this. And I knew better, but I thought that it would not happen immediately.”

    Rachel @ ~5:00 — Acknowledges mistake of placing chrome steel ball in Metallica with heavy magnets despite prior knowledge of magnetic attraction

  • “The reason that that doesn't work, you know, we're going to get people arguing with us. They're saying, no, it does work. I've put my balls in a tumbler and it came out shinier.”

    Kale @ ~8:30 — Anticipates community pushback on pinball ball maintenance myth; explains tumbler-polished balls only appear shinier due to surface wear

  • “Text is really the limiting factor for so many arcades. In a lot of arcades, it's the limiting factor and they don't know it.”

    Rachel @ ~23:00 — Identifies technician availability as critical bottleneck for arcade growth and sustainability; operators often don't realize this is their constraint

  • “If we could expand more, I mean, we're to the point now where we don't have any more room in the back for games. So we're maxed out on game space.”

    Kale @ ~21:00 — Physical space, not demand or revenue, is limiting further growth at Electric Bat

  • “Running a bar is not like running a lemonade stand times 10 with liquor. It's a whole different animal.”

    Rachel @ ~48:00 — Emphasizes the complexity of bar/arcade operations; warns aspiring owners that liquor business adds significant hidden operational burden

  • “We have not had a Tuesday night off. I'd have cancer to get a Tuesday night off.”

    Rachel @ ~42:00 — Illustrates the extreme commitment and burnout risk of running consistent tournament schedules; Rachel took time off only for cancer treatment

  • “There's the glamorous stuff, right? The glamorous stuff is what people are excited about... Then there is the stuff that is less fun, which is the insurance. Liquor license. Liquor license stuff, any kind of permitting.”

    Kale @ ~44:00 — Contrasts fantasy of owning arcade (game selection, decor) with unglamorous reality (permits, insurance, licensing)

Entities

Electric Bat ArcadeorganizationKale HernandezpersonRachel BesspersonJamie BurchillpersonMarco SpecialtiesorganizationGame Room GoodiesorganizationStern PinballorganizationSpooky Pinballorganization

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Staffing (technicians) is identified as critical limiting factor for arcade growth; management explicitly states 60-70 machines is maximum sustainable without additional hires

    high · Rachel: 'Text is really the limiting factor for so many arcades' and both agree 3-4 techs is optimal for 60-70 machines

  • ?

    business_signal: Tournament play and special events generate ~40% of arcade revenue indirectly by driving casual play and repeat visits, despite league nights alone being only 15% of monthly income

    high · Rachel provides data: 'Tuesday nights...probably make up 15% of our monthly income. But...those people are coming and practicing at other times...may be responsible for like 40% of the income in roundabout ways'

  • ?

    community_signal: Electric Bat Arcade operates consistent tournament schedule (52 weeks/year, never breaking Tuesday League) and plans multiple special events (Treasure Hunt, Finals, Fighting Tournament), indicating strong community investment and organized event strategy

    high · Rachel: 'We have not had a Tuesday night off since COVID' and hosts discuss multiple weekly events drawing large participation

  • ?

    community_signal: Competitive pinball players from Arizona (Amber) are sponsored/supported by arcade operators to travel to tournaments; women's tournament compensation improving over time

    medium · Kale mentions Electric Bat and Atomic Age Modern Pinball sponsored Amber's tournament travel costs

  • ?

    community_signal: Electric Bat Arcade relies on small core team (Kale, Rachel, 3 technicians) working extreme hours (only ~3 days off per month) to maintain tournament schedule and 65-machine operation

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.202

0:00
All right, what's up everybody? We're back. This is episode 26 of the Electric Backcast. How about that? And the only reason we're doing this is because Jamie Birchall keeps messaging me going, when are you guys going to drop a new backcast? And we're so far behind and we apologize. Yeah, we love doing it. It's just, man, we have a lot going on. You know, from selling a bar to moving around equipments and all kinds of stuff. We have a lot going on. A lot. But that means we have more stuff to talk to you guys about. Yes.
0:38
All right. Let's get right into it. Let's jump. Let's get right into it. Usually, we talk about what's coming up at the bat. Okay. And it's a great topic because we have so much coming up. We sure do. The Bat. That's short for the Electric Bat Arcade, if you don't know. And you're Kale, and I'm Rachel. Oh, we forgot to tell people. For any of you new folks out there, my name is Kale Hernandez. And I'm Rachel Bess. And we talk about pinball. We own and operate a pinball-centric arcade. Not just pinball machines. No, not at all. We have other stuff. We do. And if you want to get caught up on that, there's only 25 other episodes. You can get right through them real quick and have a good time and ask us some questions. What's coming up at the bat? Let me tell you what's coming up at the bat. First of all, Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. It's one of my favorite events. It's the Punk Rock Flea Swap. Yes, that's always super cool. They fill the arcade with the whole bar with all kinds of booths, with all kinds of punk rock paraphernalia. Right. Like clothing records, just hats, cool general patches for your jean jacket, ephemera. Yep. I don't know what that means, but I bet that's cool, too. Also, every Tuesday at 630 is Tuesday League Night. What's special about this Tuesday League Night is it's followed by the finals, which is we have that on Wednesday. This is the final week of this series. Right. We do a six-week series, rinse and repeat, never taking any kind of breaks. So Wednesday, the top 24 from the past six weeks, they battle it out. Right. And that starts at 6.30. What's cool about that is we stream it. Yeah. So you can watch it on Twitch. And you might be in the finals, so you might have to do double duty streaming and playing. We'll figure it out. I need to get somebody to help me commentate.

  • Liquor sourcing and supply chain issues significantly impact arcade bar operations (e.g., mezcal border delays, canning shortages)

    high confidence · Rachel discusses mezcal import delays of 6+ months, recent PBR shortages, and brewery decisions to stop canning due to margin pressure

  • “I would much rather have 20 machines and put them in a bar slash restaurant slash brewery whatever, and just maintain that. That's easy. Yeah. That's incredibly easy. It's all the other stuff that's hard.”

    Kale and Rachel @ ~50:00 — Core advice: machine selection/maintenance is straightforward; business operational burden (liquor, permits, staffing) is the true challenge

    • Yucca Taproomorganization
    Amberperson
    Kerry Wingperson
    John Schaapelperson
    Mark Pearsonperson
    Atomic Age Modern Pinballorganization
    Metallica Remasteredgame
    Dungeons and Dragonsgame
    Evil Deadgame
    Andyperson
    Laurenperson
    Guttergoolperson

    high · Rachel: 'if you and i ever want to have a day off we get maybe three days off a month' and notes absence was only for cancer treatment

  • $

    market_signal: Startup arcade costs range dramatically from low (operator model with borrowed space) to seven figures (ground-up build), creating significant barrier to entry for aspiring owners

    high · Kale notes friends 'currently building from the ground up...seven figures. Is that a million? That's millions'

  • ?

    product_concern: Chrome steel pinballs problematically attract to heavy magnets in Metallica Remastered; this is an inherent material property that cannot be replicated through polishing standard steel balls

    high · Rachel and Kale explain chrome steel contains more iron and uniform core composition, making buffing carbon steel an ineffective alternative

  • ?

    supply_chain_signal: Liquor sourcing faces ongoing challenges including border delays (mezcal 6+ months), canning shortages from breweries optimizing margins, and unpredictable supplier availability requiring contingency inventory

    high · Rachel: 'mezcal's not coming across the border right now' and 'some of the bottlers didn't have cans...they just stopped canning their beer'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Manufacturing variability in standard pinball sourcing results in inconsistent quality/shininess even within single shipments, affecting gameplay experience

    medium · Kale: 'there's just so many variables in manufacturing' and describes finding 'amazing mirror-like finish' standard balls in some shipments

    • 2:41
    A lot going on, guys. A lot going on. Yeah. And then Thursday is Walter's Fighting Tournament. Yeah. It's a kind of new thing. Mm-hmm. Video game stuff. Fighters. What examples you have? Like Street Fighter. Tekken 5. Uh-huh. There's Fate Unlimited. We have... That fighting game rotates. Japanese import type stuff, right? Yeah. And that's changed. that's going to be the first thursday of the month at 7 30 and this thursday is the first thursday of the month here we are um and i'm not done yet because saturday you're kidding we have andy's treasure hunt our friend andy if you if you listen to the podcast or watch the stream he makes the cool trophies for us yeah and he also makes a very cool game probably does it like once a year yeah he does it for his birthday it's a birthday bash and it's a it's a he has this uh whole treasure hunt this treasure map printed out and you you follow along and it tells you what game the games to play and depending depending on what happens in the game that's how you progress through this through the treasure map through the pirates it's an rpg it's like a pirate based rpg uh you have a treasure map and like you said you just depending on how you do on one game may send you to... It's going to direct how the rest of your quest goes. So he says this year he's incorporating some dice. It's going to be different than prior years, but there are, I think, the first 20 people to complete it will get treasure chests full of tokens and other prizes and stuff. So it's going to be a lot of fun. Saturday from... You can start any time as long... Between 1 and 5 p.m. That is really good stuff. Great stuff.
    4:38
    Also, let's talk about our sponsors before we get started. Okay. Marco's Specialties. Yeah. They're a shop, an online shop that sells everything pinball, right? It's a pinball bodega.
    4:52
    We love Marco's Specialties, and if you want to save some money on shipping at checkout, Type in EBA150, and you will get, what do you get? Do you know what you get? Free shipping for all orders over $150, hence the EBA150. Right. And if you don't have $150 worth of stuff you want, team up with a friend. Yeah. I can always find $150 worth of pinball stuff. Yeah, we have zero problems spending $150 on pinball parts. Also, Game Room Goodies. That's where we get all our games from. And that's where you can get your games from, too. Check them out, GameRoomGoodies.com, for all of your arcade needs. Best service in the biz. They have everything.
    5:40
    You name it. And if you don't see it on their website, ask them. They can probably find it for you. That's Game Room Goodies. And, of course, Stern Pinball's Insider Connected. And we're going to talk a little bit about Insider Connected when we talk about something that's in this room with us. But we'll save that for a little bit later. The elephant in the room. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
    6:02
    I'll tell you what. The most exciting thing, and what Jamie is waiting for, Jamie Burchill of the JBS show,
    6:10
    he's really excited about the earnings report because there's some interesting things going on. We had two Stern Dungeons and Dragons, two different ones, a pro and a premium, on the floor at the same time as Spooky Pinballs. What is that thing called? Evil Dead. I've never seen the movie. I don't have a connection with it, but the game's great. Yeah.
    6:34
    So there was a battle of these heavyweights, and Jamie cannot wait to hear what's going on. Okay. Can't wait to tell him. But he has to wait. But wait, there's more? But wait, there's more, because we're going to get into some mailbag stuff first. And then, you know, you've got to keep them. You've got to keep them waiting. You've got to tune them in. It's like a cliffhanger, right? Is that what that is? It's like the way they do it on social media now where they, like, make you watch, like, 20 seconds of something before you realize it isn't the thing that you want it. Right, right. Insurance. But then by that time, you've screwed your algorithm. Yeah, that's right. You have a lot of explaining to do. I click on the wrong thing. All the time. Often. You know, anytime you check my account, because I run the Electric Bat Instagram account, when you go to search, you're like, what have you been looking for? What is this? Yours is even weirder. That's the bad part. Yeah. Let's get into questions. Our good friend, Lauren, this is via Discord. And if you want to join our Discord, head over to electricbatarcade.com and go to the podcast tab. Yes. Click on that link. And there's a link, all kind of different ways to listen to the podcast. Also, there's a Discord link where you can join the Discord. Yeah. That's a lot of fun. Lauren Silverdong. Silverdog. Silverdog Productions. Different show. I don't know about Silverdong. That might be something else. But our friend Lauren has a cool question.
    8:06
    Would Rachel be willing to do a earnings top 10 for arcade machines, not including Buckhunter, of course, because we know that would be at the top.
    8:19
    Would you be willing to do that? Is there even a way to do that? It would take a lot of work, right? There is a way to do it. No, I am not willing to do it. There's not enough of the arcade games to really do that, and I can tell you how it's always going to be. The Redemption Machine is always at number one, so the cliffhanger is the Redemption Machine one. right uh big buck is always at number two then you are going to have uh waka japanese rhythm game looks like a washing machine that is always number three okay um and then some more rhythm games along with the fighting games and then down from there so basically those earnings don't ever change um it's a very consistent order so there is and there would be a lot of extra work for me so So, no. And it sounds like you answered his question. That's the order. So we can just clip that and then replay it every month like, you know, 10 to 1. That's good stuff.
    9:26
    All right. Moving right along. You know, we cannot have an electric Batcast without a question from Guttergool. and uh this is about the the the last uh bat cast where we talked about the balls in uh metallica remastered how they how they stuck together yeah so uh he said fantastic program hearing what an issue the shiny balls are because of the playing could you just super buff a normal ball to get the same effect or wouldn't that work uh just to give everybody the heads up if you didn't see the last episode uh we admitted to a huge mistake yeah it was an experiment well i thought we were going to go with we this was okay so now what kayla's trying to say is rachel really screwed up she knew better but still tried now why did you know better well people don't know what you did you put uh a silver jet yes marco specialties branded uh chrome steel ball in metallica into a game with heavy-duty magnets. Lots of magnets. Magnets, not maggots. Right. Yeah. And they stuck together, and it caused problems. Right. I warned you about this. And I knew better, but I thought that it would not happen immediately. And we went over all that in the last podcast. Jamie was hanging out with us. So basically he's saying, could you take your standard, your carbon steel ball, and just buff it to be as shiny as a chrome steel ball. But it's not that easy. The reason the chrome steel ball holds magnetic resonance is because of its makeup. And I think people have to look this up. I think because it contains more iron.
    11:22
    I wasn't prepared for the chemistry part of this, but I can just say if you were imagining, I mean, it's in the name, carbon steel and chromium whenever you think about chrome it's real shiny so you can't necessarily like buff one to be another one it just doesn't work that way that there's some alchemy that would be required 100 to make one equal the other they're not the same thing so they're not going to look the same and no amount of novice and buffing machines is going to get one to the other People do do that. And I don't, it doesn't, one is it doesn't work. Right. And if it worked for like a day, it's not going to last.
    12:04
    And the reason that that doesn't work, you know, we're going to get people arguing with us. They're saying, no, it does work. I've put my balls in a tumbler and it came out shinier. Yes, that's, that's true. But it's also funny. Yeah. the issue with your standard ball think of it as like an eminem you ever you ever bit into an eminem never the core it has like a hard candy shell an outer shell melts in your mouth not in your hand and then there's this core that's like black um you can see it when you when you cut a pinball in half right there's a huge difference a chrome steel ball is the same all the way through from the from the outer crust all the way to the the core right uh a standard pinball is not and that and that's why you don't want to throw them in a um what's it called tumbler tumbler because you're just wearing down that candy coating and soon you've got a super fine layer and so that ball is going to take damage even faster and and even i remember there's some old threads on pin side Some guy left them in there for too long, and it actually got to the core. So he had, like, black balls? It was rough and black and, yeah. Sounds like a terrible situation. But this is really interesting. Going along, you know, with what Gunnar Gull was asking, you know, at Marco's Specialties, when we would get a shipment of balls in, you're talking about pallets and pallets, tons. I don't know the exact number. I remember because the forklift would, like, start to. It would struggle. It would struggle lifting.
    13:44
    And your standard, mostly we would get your standard pinball. PB-116. That's it. When we would go through, I mean, there's like tons and tons of balls.
    13:58
    There are varying degrees of shininess to these balls. We found some standard balls one time, like a bag of them.
    14:06
    That's all I saw. There's probably many boxes of them that had like this amazing mirror-like finish of a chrome steel ball. So there's just so many variables in manufacturing. And if you guys want to see something very cool, just go to YouTube and type in steel ball bearing manufacturing. And you can see the whole lapping process and how it all happens. And you can get in one shipment, you can get varying degrees of balls. And I think that's why when some people go, oh, these balls are better than these other balls. Because, I mean, these are just steel ball bearings. And just like anything else, there's varying degrees of quality even in one shipment. It's like going to the grocery store and getting an apple.
    14:56
    It's exactly like that. But the apple is bigger, right? And it's red. And you can eat it. I'm talking about quality. You get two Fuji apples from the same shipment. Yes. One may be better than the other. Same thing with this stuff. So you cannot. You can't do that in short. You can't reshine your balls. Right. Wouldn't you say that?
    15:20
    Yes. I do say that often. Let's move on to the next question. We have, this is from Mike Flanagan. Mike Flanagan actually visited us. He came out here. This was great. I hate to keep bringing up Jamie so much, but he came out with Jamie. I have to bring that up. You know, I really don't hate bringing up Jamie. I love it. Mike Flanagan has a question or questions for the Batcast. Perfect world. What would be the ideal number of games? Oh, this is good.
    15:50
    Ideal number of games in any scenario? Well, I'm not done yet. Oh, I got to wait. I just I had to interrupt myself because this is a good one because I think you're going to have fun with it. OK, because I don't know. I imagine that Yucca, it is dedicated by space available. Yucca is the bar we're connected to. Right. If anybody doesn't know. The people we pay our rent to. Yucca Taproom, yep. But if it was possible, would you like to grow? Do you imagine the additional games would add to earnings or just spread the same amount of quarters around? Finally, there might be interesting headaches of maintaining more games. That's 100%. Perhaps 60 to 70 games is the perfect size that is manageable without additional hires and help, etc. So I would say right now we past the like with the text that we have and the amount of time that we have We are working hard If we wanted to have an easier life then maybe 50 would be a better number But our tournaments are so large that we really need to have we have what 65 pins on the floor Yep.
    17:04
    So tournament-wise, if we put 80 pins on the floor, our tournaments would grow. I'm confident that if we had that room, the tournaments would be larger. Right. However, the overall play, not tournament time, I don't think would grow proportionally. So I don't know that that would be an overall benefit, except it'd be like super cool tournaments every Tuesday, which they already are.
    17:32
    So I kind of feel like where we are at right now, for me, is the perfect amount. If we could expand more, I mean, we're to the point now where we don't have any more room in the back for games. So we're maxed out on game space. Right. So I don't, man, I guess if I had more room, I'd actually like to have more room in the back, not on the floor. So that way we could cycle through more games. What do you think about that?
    18:04
    What's your answer to this question? How many games would you like to see at the bat? I think what we have now is the sweet spot unless we had more employees, specifically techs that knew how to repair the games.
    18:22
    Because anything past what we're doing now without more help, you end up like the Hall of Fame in Vegas, right? We try really hard to keep all of our games up all the time. you know so if you and i ever want to have a day off we get maybe three days off a month so um some people would say that that that's not enough yeah but we love doing it we love doing it we get to spend it i can't wait to go right now i know we're going after this and i'm i'm stoked to go we were there yesterday we'll be there tomorrow it's it's fun but i think they're yeah without more text. Text is really the limiting factor for so many arcades. In a lot of arcades, it's the limiting factor and they don't know it. People stop going to their arcades because the games are simple things like just on three legs and nobody does anything about it. And then it goes up from there and is worse. And we get a lot of compliments from our players when they play out, when they're going on vacation, visiting family, friends, wherever, and they go and find a local arcade, they really appreciate the amount of work that we put into it. And that, I think, is just key. And you have to be able to have the staff that can do that. 100%. And when you say we, it's not just us. It's also John Schaapel. And Mark Pearson. That's it. Yeah. For the tech-wise. Tech-wise. And they're all great techs. Amazing. Yeah. Nobody's like super gluing. Right, because so many people call themselves pinball techs and you're like... You've changed to rubber and maybe you've taken apart a flipper and then like... Right, right, right.
    20:08
    Cool. Did we answer that? I feel like we did. I think we are at the sweet spot right now. Yeah, I really do. This is the sweet spot. This can be handled with three people, three or four people. Yeah. 60 to 70 machines. Yeah.
    20:27
    Good. Three or four people that know what they're doing. I agree. Moving right along. J.C. Spites via Discord. You think that's John Spites? I think so. He has a good question for us.
    20:41
    Hey, y'all. Here's a question. This is his question. What percentage of revenue is tournament play versus casual play? Another way to ask it. How much does tournament play affect your overall earnings?
    20:59
    You have all the data on that. I do. But again, that's not direct data. I mean, I can tell you how within like, okay, so Tuesday nights, if there are four, we'll say it's a month that has four Tuesday nights.
    21:15
    Probably that's our league night. If we have four league nights, during those four league nights, that would probably make up 15% of our monthly income. Okay. But because we have those league nights, those people are coming and practicing at other times. I was just about to say, this is something we can't put the thumb on, right? Right. And so I would say the fact that we have such popular league nights and other tournaments as well, Chewy's All Classics, Bounty Knockout is a big hit.
    21:54
    Then it may be responsible for like 40% of the income in roundabout ways. Right. So having I think having events that people really, really look forward to is going to be very important to your bottom line. For sure. And we can see that like before finals, you have a lot of that. The top 24 people may be coming in a little bit earlier in the day, getting a little practice in. And also, before a new series, you'll see a lot of people come in and wanting to brush up. Sort of like whenever you get a new game in, right? It's just something that everybody's going to be coming in to play that new game, but they're kind of doing other stuff, too. So you always see a big boost in your overall earnings based on the event of a new game coming in. Yeah. Cool. There you have it. It's important. Thank you for your question. J.C. Spice, he's in the Discord. Yes. He's having a good time in the Discord.
    23:02
    We have a great question here from DanTheMan7962 via Discord. Question for the cast. Has there been any thoughts of having fundraising tournaments, especially to help offset travel costs for our AZ state champions or possibly having something for donations.
    23:28
    We haven't talked about this, but, like, my problem would be, like, what if somebody we didn't like won?
    23:38
    You know what I'm saying? I'm kidding. I mean, it's possible. Anything's possible. We can talk about when Amber went to represent Arizona. As far as I know, two arcades helped her out. We gave her some money. And Bob and Amanda from Atomic, Age Modern Pinball, they gave her some money to help her out with the cost of that. She's young and she had to take off work. And so we gave her some money to help out. And she did a great job. Man, she blew it up. Yeah. Taking Kerry Wing to seven games. Nobody expected that. We did. We believe in her. We did. Nobody else did. So, I mean, yeah, I would just rather just give her the money. And we did not give John Trouble the money, although I guess we do in another way. Yeah, we give him plenty of money. We give him money every two weeks. because for just regular Arizona State, he got four figures. I don't remember what it was, but he got over $1,000 in prize money, and that helped offset that cost. So that was kind of already built in there. And I know the women's side is doing more to, as the years progress, they're doing more to help make that more financially doable. fantastic rewarding good deal i hope we answered your question dan the man if not just stop me in the arcade next time you're there i'm going to talk about this a little bit more because we do get hit up from time to time the fundraising fundraising stuff because go with it as a small business owner and this is not just us but small business owners i'm sure of all types because you're connected to the community when there are issues in the community you're the people that often get people go to to do these sorts of fundraisers right we get hit up a lot like a lot to do fundraising for stuff and i you know i there's a lot of causes that you and i care about a lot and would love to do agriculture agriculture it's really i love agriculture um we can't do fundraisers for everything would put us out of business really really quickly like these this is how we pay our bills is having right and how we employ people so i mean there's other we um it's just something that we financially can't do as much as you know in an ideal world i would love to be able to to have this whole thing be a charitable event but and and also uh there was a question i can't remember if it was the last backcast or the one before that where somebody was talking about tournament fatigue and they were just talking about the way we don't ever stop yeah like we are our weekly it's tuesday we never stop it's you know 50 how many weeks or 52 52 weeks a year and we've been doing ever since ever since covid we have not had a tuesday night you I'd have cancer to get a Tuesday night off. So I got two weeks off for that. And you took over from this. Me and John ran it. You and John ran it. Yeah, we did it up. So if everybody was doing fundraisers all the time, because a lot of times organizations will see the tournaments and how exciting they are and how many people show up, and they're like, oh, this would be a great way to raise money. But you want to talk about fatigue. you know on top of our already busy schedule uh you know and people have to show up to that you know you know 100 people showing up every week you know they're not always going to show up just because of of some good cause yeah yeah i mean you're right yeah you're gonna that's it there's too much pinball that potentially there would be right now just the right amount um let's go on to Jojo Dojo. We follow him on Instagram. This is via Discord. Question for the cast. What are some of the starting necessities for opening a pinball arcade? Things like startup costs, how many machines, and maybe some pitfalls to look out for. Love the content y'all bring to this hobby. Thank you so much, Jojo. Yeah, Jojo Dojo. Now this is, We could almost have an hour-long podcast just about this. We probably should because we get the email regularly. Like really break it down. There's the glamorous stuff, right? The glamorous stuff is what people are excited about and like, let me choose which machines I'm going to get because that's exciting. That's fun. Paint colors. Paint colors is fun. Yeah, decor in general is, you know, all of that stuff is fun, whatever money system you're going to use. So token machines or whatever system, getting all the things you need for that, that's the obvious exciting stuff whenever you think, when you're daydreaming about opening an arcade. Then there is the stuff that is less fun, which is the insurance.
    29:05
    Liquor license. Liquor license stuff, any kind of permitting anything for any kind of paperwork. All the backside paperwork stuff costs a lot of money depending on where you are and depending on the space and how much, like if you need to do construction, you need a permit for something.
    29:27
    That takes a lot of time and money that's very, very unglamorous. That's the dark and dirty side of running any business. then your costs for just making sure that you have enough of whatever supplies you're going through. So whether that's food and liquor, cleaning supplies, toilet paper, soap.
    29:57
    You are running a business from the top down. Now, this is why I think we've always pushed for, if you do want to open an arcade, start out with some type of partnership with an established business. Yes. A bar, a brewery. What else? Really anything. I mean, a library. It could be a photo mat. Yeah. Like just some. A laundromat. Yeah. A laundromat makes sense. Yeah. A photo mat, maybe not so much. Although. We do go to one. um but like some stuff that we have to do we have to keep a gallon of every paint color around but specifically the bathroom and the exterior for covering up graffiti which i do one of us does at least once a week right um we keep a supply of bathroom mirrors on hand because i have to swap those out regularly because people carve them up and um so there's just kind of everything that you have right you need to have more of and a place to put it right and and also people don't i mean you're going to need some type of liquor license to pull this off to pull off a successful arcade um even if it's just beer and wine yeah which i think i think it will save you a little money yeah that would be the way i would go if you and i were just doing it on our own which i'm not sure i love having someone else to do that right but we have a full bar and i don't think we didn't know this until we had a bar how hard it is to order liquor um liquor and beer uh they don't just always have everything you need right so yeah that's a great point yeah um i spend over an hour a day just making sure our tiny little bat bar has the the money the proper you know fives ones whatever all of the all of the alcohol and supplies that it has that it's clean all of that but we have cases of liquor in the back because sometimes you order um you order mezcal and then you realize oh mezcal's not coming across the border right now right so i hope you have a lot because it could be six months before we can get that to you and that's an extreme case but it is something that we've been dealing with a lot and then you know last week pbr didn't come in because they didn't have it to put on the truck i mean there's all these like weird things you just you you think of like i'm going to the grocery store to get these things and it is not that at all right like you you call in and and order your cases of stuff and just hope that it shows up that it shows up and wasn't there like a couple of weeks ago or probably a couple of months ago at this point they like some some of the bottlers didn't have cans yeah some of the some of the cans because of i don't know why if it had to do with import stuff metal stuff i have no idea why but a lot of the breweries were only doing kegs because that their margin was better on kegs so they just stopped canning their beer, and then you couldn't get the canned stuff. So all of those kinds of things you need to be prepared for. And depending on how much your business, like running a bar is not like running a lemonade stand times 10 with liquor. It's a whole different animal.
    33:27
    And let's absolutely partner with somebody that knows what they're doing, because starting two new businesses together is much harder than having two people each starting one business where they each know what going on I would much rather have 20 machines and put them in a bar slash restaurant slash brewery whatever, and just maintain that. That's easy. Yeah. That's incredibly easy. It's all the other stuff that's hard. Yeah. I always would like to make the recommendation that you start as a homeowner and you get into these machines and you fixed them many times before. So you're comfortable around the machines. Then you put them out in public as an operator in somebody else's space, but not in an arcade. You're just operating. You just have a couple machines somewhere. Right. So you can get your foot in, see what that's like. Then if you're super into it, then maybe step it up to an arcade like what we are attached to a brewery or bar or something. For sure, for sure. And like a specific question Jojo asks is startup costs. It depends on how big you want to be. Are you taking on a lease? Are you leasing an area from a brewery?
    34:49
    I mean, it's just, it could be. It could be very cheap. And then we have friends who are currently building from the ground up that I'm sure it's, I mean, seven figures. Is that a million? That's millions. A million and up. That's between one million and nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine. That is. That is fascinating.
    35:09
    Yeah, so there's a lot going on. Maybe we'll do a whole episode and break it down and feel like this is what you need. But it still wouldn't cover everything because we're still finding things daily. Holy crap, I didn't know this was a thing. Now this is something we need to deal with, whether it has something to do with the city or a specific liquor distributor. It's a never-ending adventure. We thought this air conditioner was going to be $10,000. It turns out it's $40,000. Surprise. Yeah, that's amazing. After two years of waiting to get an AC, it went from $7,000 to $40,000. Yeah. Good stuff.
    35:45
    I think that covers it. The answer is just like, we have no idea. We don't know what it takes. We're still finding out every day. Yeah, we're still finding out, and we're just crossing our fingers that it goes well.
    36:00
    You know what it takes? A good attitude. It takes a great attitude. It takes a fantastic attitude. You have to have a great attitude to do this stuff. And you have to be willing to just roll with it, right? Because there's a lot of stuff that I would be bald if I had a different type of personality, just ripping my hair out over a lot of these things. Yep. But it is super fun most of the time. And I wish that I could answer that question more specifically with actual numbers, but they are so variable based on your situation, your location.
    36:33
    There's just too many things. I can only tell you how much pinball parts and machines cost. But I would say that having a backup supply of pinball parts is a very important part of your startup costs. Always have everything you need, common parts in bulk so that you can fix things immediately and never have to wait for shipping. In our workshop, we have an obscene amount of spare parts. We are Marco Specialties West. Yep. We have a huge, thousands and thousands of dollars worth of parts.
    37:07
    Great. Fantastic. Thank you for your question, JoJo. Reach out to us with some other stuff because we really enjoyed answering this one. We're moving on to Pig Corn. Via Discord. Many of us dream. This is kind of similar. Many of us dream of owning and opening an arcade.
    37:28
    I learned in life, everyone envies what you have, but nobody envies your journey. So question, what advice would you give those that want to open an arcade? In my head, I am waiting on the perfect time, space, location, but maybe I should just jump in. Advice. This piggybacks off the... Pig-corny-backs. Yep. That was good.
    38:00
    I think this just goes with anything. When you're waiting for the perfect time, you will wait your whole life. Yeah, you'll be 50 years old and realize you never had that baby you wanted or something. If it's something you really want to do and you're passionate about it, just do it. Right? Right. It's like journaling. You know, when you're journaling, some people... Do you keep a journal? I don't keep a journal. I don't feel like I need to, but some people love doing it. Yeah. And they don't know how to start. It starts with a sentence. Oh. Right? Wow. You like that? It's deep.
    38:39
    A house is one brick. So you got a second one. You got to add a second one and then another one. I see what you're saying. It's baby steps. Got it. Right? Just do it. Yeah, just do it. Because if you're waiting for the right time, you know, is there really a right time? Hell no. There's no right time. No, whenever I started the arcade was not the right time. Right. When we opened up Flagstaff, that was certainly not the right time because they shut us down the day we opened for COVID. Yeah, COVID shut that down. So, yeah, you just got to go with what you feel. If it feels right, you know, you're always going to be a little bit nervous. nervous but but and here's the worst thing like what if you're not successful so what right you learn something it's better to regret something you have done than to regret something you haven't done bam i'm gonna put a pen in it write that down was that was that an orbital song and or one of those i don't know i don't know uh yeah but that's just just do it yeah right yeah absolutely just do it just make it happen just be aware of all the things that we said in the last 10 minutes keep that in in mind so be prepared and maybe start small and grow bigger it's much easier than to jump all in um right you know right right all right moving right along we're going to matt w via email this this is a long one but uh i feel i think we've talked about this in the past but but i think it's a good idea to to revisit it because people might be buying you know some used stern machines and run into the same issue oh um this is somewhat insider baseball question but my question is in regards to a stern spike to flipper assemblies recently i had a screw snap off in my aiq that's a avengers infinity quest thank you uh when changing the coil stop. This caused a huge headache as the coil stop wouldn't sit with just one screw. This was a 2020 build at Stern. My Jurassic Park Pro built in 2023 has sturdy black Allen wrench bolts in the coil stop instead of the silver ones. And then he goes on, as you can imagine, you have to drill that out. Describing the horrible process of what happens. The thing that I watch you do whenever this, when we learned the hard way. Certainly. This was a real problem with the stern, the screws they were using on their coil stops. It's no longer a problem as our friend, who was that? Matt W. said, now they're putting these hardened, the black screws with the Allen head on there. They got a bad batch of screws. And as you can imagine, if you're stern, you're not just going down to Ace Hardware and buying 100 screws. They probably got thousands of these screws, and they were just garbage.
    41:39
    And they would – we were used to it. So when a game would come in, we would immediately change all of them because they would shear off. Yes. And quickly. Yeah. Like after, you know, 100 plays, your game is just – remember it happened to, like, Led Zeppelin. and and i mean it happened after like two days and gary was gary just happened to be at the arcade he was like why is this off why is this off well because your screws are snapping in half and it is a pain in the butt what you have to do is is well if you can get a hold of that screw you can remove the base plate and remove it from the back with vice grips or something yeah yeah if you can get a hold of it with vice grips sometimes you can't and you have to drill through and re-tap and then re-tap the base plate and that's what our friend here had to do so if you do buy a u stern check and see if it still has those silver i can't it was was it a phillips i can't even remember what i thought no no it was a hex it was hex yeah but it was um it was silver in color it was silver in color uh replace those with a hardened screw it doesn't take much money, you know, walk down to Ace Hardware. Yeah, you can go down to Ace Hardware and buy four of them, and it's no big deal. It'll cost you. Yeah, and if you're not sure, just take one of those screws out, walk down there. They have a thread checker, and you can figure out the thread pitch and all that good stuff, and then just buy a handful of these hardened Allen head screws. And we haven't seen that problem in many games. It's gone, yeah. It's no longer an issue, but you're right. for somebody buying a used game. This is a simple thing, simple and inexpensive. And the cool thing about it is once you're doing this, it's giving you an opportunity because you're going to take the coil stop off, replacing these, or you can. You could do it one at a time, but why not take the coil stop off, have a look at it. Does it look good or is it beat to heck? Is it time to do a rebuild? Maybe switch the coil stop while you're at it. Bam, there you go. Cool. So I don't want anybody else to have to deal with that, So hopefully everybody's listening. Everyone. And if you have some friends that are buying some U-Sterns, let them know. Yeah. Clip this. Send it to them. Send it.
    43:57
    And we have the final question. Before we get into the earnings report. Oh, I almost forgot. We had an earnings report. And it's me. This is the best part. This is actually what everybody's waiting for, you know. They're fast forwarding through the important bits. Yeah. They're champing at the bit. Champing. Is it champing or chomping? Well, in English, the correct word is champing, but chomping has become colloquially correct. That is, I love the way our language, our world, our lives are always evolving. It would be not as fun if it wasn't. That's correct. And thank you for reminding us of that. I am chomping at the bit to read this question. This is from Quarters SLC on Instagram. That's another arcade.
    44:49
    So I just had a long disagreement with a friend who's a competitive player who thought there were special flipper rubbers that the big tournaments use to make their games harder. I told him that they use natural rubbers, which is what we have on our games. He couldn't be convinced. I blamed tight, rebuilt flippers and sports psychology for the perceived difference in bounce and feel.
    45:15
    He finally conceded that the material is the same, but that there must be some other difference. So, Cale, as a former Marco employee or Rachel, as a tech or competitive player, are you aware of any differences between natural rubbers by source? Feel free to use this on the Batcast if you think it's an interesting question. Love the bat. Thanks. It is an interesting question. That's why I'm reading it right now. I think this is great.
    45:43
    Yes. They're both right. Right? Well, there is that. It's natural rubber. But it's not just natural rubber. They're not all the same. Right. The natural rubber is not, you know, it's not equal. Right. There are all kinds of the colors make a difference. Definitely. But what your friend is talking about here, there's a specific HAP rubber. They're all red. They're red. And they're bouncier. They make the games harder to play. I didn't even know about this until we went to the Starfighters. What's their big tournament called? Starfighters Pinball Festival. SPF. On the last Starfighters, the SPF Pinball Festival, they used these rubbers across all of the games. And I was like, what's going on? What's the deal with this? And it makes the game, well, those rubbers are more bouncy, so it makes the game a little more difficult to play. A little more out of control. Yeah, you try to trap the ball, it bounces into the slingshot, you know, blah, blah, blah. But the big dogs had no problem playing with it, you know. Is that you? Are you the big dogs here? No, I'm far from the big dogs. You're a medium dog in the pinball world. You know, Ray Day, Walt Wood, all those boys, they had no problems playing these games. I don't think there's anything. You probably have to put Vaseline on the play field to throw them off. But other players who were coming in from out of town, they even knew the part number. No kidding. I can't even remember her name. There was a woman playing because somebody was like, what's up with these rubbers? and she said, oh, that's HAP number blah, blah, blah.
    47:27
    Yeah, they're using them on all the machines right now. So it's a known thing. I'm sure if you search Pinside or just ask some more people, they'll tell you exactly which rubbers. I don't care about the part number because I'm never going to use them. I was about to say I'm going to pick some up and put it on a game because I want to see what it's like. Yeah, we'll have to ask. I mean, side by side. For sure. Put one on the left, put one on the right. Whoa, we really throw people off. I mean, not just for us, just as an expert, not like leave it that way. Yes. So to answer your questions, quarters, SLC, there is a known hop rubber that makes it harder to play. Super bouncy, I guess. Yeah, super bouncy thing. And so that is true. There is something like that that some big tournaments use.
    48:14
    Fascinating. Yeah. Did you know about all that? I only learned about that at the same time you did. How about that? I still haven't ordered any, but I want to because I want to experiment with it and see what that actually feels like and also how it performs over time. I have the idea in my head that it would probably not be as abrasion resistant just because I feel like kind of the bouncier something is, maybe it's going to get worn faster. Yeah, certainly. and there you have it that's really cool I'm going to find that out yeah let's order a couple see what it's like the people that aren't the tournament players at Electric Pad that aren't listening to this podcast will be surprised I want to talk a little bit about this machine that's sitting in front of us oh okay it's the dragon in the room it is the dragon in the room uh i know you've talked about it for so long um the dungeons and dragons pinball machine the tyrant's eye tyrant's eye this was somewhat of the grail machine that you didn't know you wanted yeah yes i think that's a apt description right and so people who have listened to the podcast know that we bought two of them because we wanted to have one in the arcade and one at home and And we'll get into more into that during the earnings report, because I think that's an important bullet point. Yes. With the earnings. But I don't know. This is going to be a surprise for me. Yeah. And Jamie, he's waiting for it. But so we finally brought a one of the Dungeons and Dragons, the Tyrant's Eye home. We did. And it took a lot longer than what we expected. It did, because people were still playing both. The plan was to get the pro first, then when the premium comes in, take the pro home. But people were playing both of them. A lot. We could not. Couldn't take it home. It didn't make sense. Because I think the aspect of where you log in and you build up your what do you call it Your party Party All of the characters in your party Yes and build up So many people wanted to do that at the same time People kept playing these games But finally just because we actually kind of ran out of room because there more games coming it was time to bring it home Yes. And we finally have a pinball machine at the house, and we've been having a blast. Yes. What I really love is the home. What is it? Home team. Yeah. How cool is that? I, we, we've never used it before because we've never had any reason. Well, you know, we can't with a, with a pro account, you can't use it. Oh, right. Yeah. Well, I mean, it wouldn't make any sense to have it that way at the arcade. Certainly. Anybody could just play as us. So we set up home team here. What fun. Yeah. We don't have to look for our phone or have our watch on. We, we just, we program it to where our accounts are in there and you just go with it. You're not like logging into my account, are you? The reason that you have all those red areas on your map has absolutely nothing to do with me getting up earlier than you. Right. But it's kind of cool because I'm sure a lot of you people that have Stern machines at home, you're already used to this. Yeah. And you're like, why are they so excited? This has been around for a while. It's been around, guys. First time. First time we've checked it out. We're new here. And we love it. Yes. It's so cool. We love that home team stuff. You want to talk about which dragon is sitting over there? Or who has the GC? no i didn't ask that um we brought the the premium home we did do it do we get into why um yeah there's a few reasons there's a couple of reasons one is because um we asked people which one do you enjoy playing more yeah surprisingly we had a lot of people say the pro yes and we didn't know why until we got this machine home yes it had uh the feed going around from the right orbit to the left flipper was not exactly uh adjusted right so you know the ball would hit the rubber like 15 of the time the ball would hit the rubber and send it to the right flipper or down the middle which i never experienced playing in the arcade and i didn't have anyone explicitly say this is happening right look at it right and i don't know if if they did and i just didn't hear or whatever i'm sorry but um all it took you know just unscrew phillips head screwdriver move it three sixty fourths of an inch and now the ball guide move the ball guide sorry the ball guide um on the left side of the orbit and it's a absolutely perfect smooth feed right now right and and this that was one reason and uh our friend uh brian eddie made it very easy yeah there's a hole in the plastic you can you can do it you don't have to take off too many things you just need a phillips screwdriver and you can adjust that ball guide now we're getting a consistent feed to the left flipper which is beautiful feed yeah the most beautiful feed which i think is how the game is supposed to play i don't know but it plays much better this way it is yeah so now i think probably people are going to want us to bring we might swap them out in the future um and then there's just been every once in a while during the tournament like the the ball feed to the dragon i just don't i'm anticipating that someday maybe they're not being that working properly and i don't right so basically like in a tournament if a ball gets trapped inside the dragon like during a multi-ball right that's an issue with tournament play right and there's a like the the pro is gonna i know the pro is going to be easier to operate over time um and i think that they're both equally as fun and i was surprised to hear 100 so many players say that they preferred the pro and that's not unusual we have lots of players including us that prefer the pro of avengers prefer the pro of black knight sort of age right there are many games where the jaws a lot of people will prefer the pro um you know personal choice yeah but and and most importantly uh basically all the shots are the same yes besides the uh the dry the dungeon the dungeon uh scoop right the disappearing scoop thing uh yeah so it's uh you're not losing on any gameplay but now at home i have an eight ball multi-ball that's right and we're having we're having a bunch of fun with this uh um all the all the folks over at stern did a great job we're having a lot of fun still exploring well i haven't beat the game yet yeah as far you know there's there's two more characters coming so that's going to be a lot of fun but um we love that home team stuff yeah we do yeah i'm excited stern insider connected good job um i see you i'm reaching down for something oh you don't need your laptop you just need i just have this piece of paper I have my laptop down here, but I'm using paper. I have to take a sip of my coffee. Ladies and gentlemen, the reason everybody is here, I'm sorry to keep you waiting for so long. For a whole month. This is the earnings report, and which month is this earnings report for? This is for April. So I haven't even done the inputting of the May numbers, but we'll have a podcast soon that will have the May numbers. So this is April that we're talking about. So we'll start at number 10. Same as March, Black Knight Sword of Rage. Okay.
    56:19
    Number nine, Stranger Things. Number eight, Big Buck took a dive. Sorry, Big Buck. Did I say Big Book? I'm thinking about books. One thing about Big Buck, Hunter, I brought this up. I think we were at a crawfish boil. We were at a crawfish boil. And I was asking people, should we connect it? Put it online. Yeah, because you can connect it and there's like leaderboards and I think some other perks. If anybody out there has done that with their big buck hunter, write into us. Let us know. Yeah. Did it make a difference? Yeah.
    56:57
    How did that go for you? Right. Because I think it's like 40 bucks a month. So that's going to eat into your coin drop. Is it worth it? Is it not? I don't know. Maybe we'll try and let people know. Yeah, if we try. But if you've done it, please write in. Let us know. What are the advantages? Yeah. And when I say took a dive, I mean it went from third to eighth. It's still top ten. It's still doing great. Number seven, Pulp Fiction. Number six, same as March, Jaws. Number five, same as March, Metallica.
    57:29
    Here and here. This is where we get into the interesting stuff. You can see it in my face. You're going too fast for me. Okay. I'm sorry. I'll slow it down. Slow it down. Number four, Dungeons & Dragons Pro. Okay. Number three, Godzilla. Okay. Number two, Dungeons & Dragons Premium. Wow. Number one, Evil Dead. Unbelievable. So, we had two Dungeons and Dragons, and April was the first month that we had the premium, or the first full month that we had the premium. I think there was like two days in March.
    58:09
    So, Evil Dead beat out Dungeons and Dragons. And it even beat it out if you combined the coin drop between number two and number four, which is both Dungeons and Dragons.
    58:25
    Dollars-wise, Evil Dead won. Wow. It was very, very close. Evil Dead is on straight dollar play. D&D is on three for two.
    58:36
    D&D got more plays combined. So more people played D&D. Right. we got more dollars from evil dead very interesting so now i'm interested to see because as we know the first month anything is out you always get that just massive bump everybody wants to try it so now over time we've taken the premium home so now it's just going to be evil dead versus dnd um let's see how that goes and and our numbers for last month are going to reflect that for the most part because we took home dnd i don't know there's like maybe four days left in the month or something so we have almost a full month of data that i haven't even looked at yet so i don't know the answer to that and i'm really interested to see how how the how it maintains right right so still we have not had we are happy to report we haven't had issues with Evil Dead, we had one very bizarre thing where a ball ended up in the cabinet.
    59:43
    It seems to be a freak. Yeah, it's got thousands of plays on it. And one time a ball ended up in the cabinet. We have no idea where it fell through. It's a very easy fix. You pick the ball up and you put it back in and it never happened again. Yeah.
    60:03
    So that and D&D all still performing very, very well, maintenance-wise. Yeah. We haven't had any issues with either of those games. The only thing that we've had on the new Sterns, for some reason, sometimes the ball is, like, jammed together at the trough entrance, and we've seen that with Metallica, and we've seen it with D&D. Okay. I don't know why that happens. It hasn't happened in a while, though. Maybe they're like broken in or something and the hole's bigger. I don't know. It happened on Metallica like two weeks ago. Okay. So it's still happening. That's kind of weird. Every once in a while. Yeah. You mentioned Pulp Fiction. Yes. Oh. What number was that? Pulp Fiction was number seven last month. Still in the top ten. People are loving playing that. The reason I'm bringing this up, we just got a very cool topper from Electric Playground. Yes. How cool is this thing? It's very cool, and it was cooler than I thought it was going to be. Right. I was working on something else while you installed it, so I looked at it when it was on the desk. I'm like, oh, okay. I think a ball is going to go through this thing. Right. I had kind of seen it online, but a surprising amount of stuff does not really reach my brain that we see pinball related. Yeah. There's a lot of it. So you had put it on. You're like, Rachel, come out here and check this out. it was very cool right and during as an attract you can turn it off we left it on where it'll like do gunshot stuff and right i was working on a game and that kind of shocked me when it was like bam bam i love it i turned that all the way up yeah it was good it's very cool has two speakers on either side yeah and it has the gunshots going off and uh everybody will be very happy to know the gun does eat the ball right the gun eats the ball that's a plus yeah um the key really the coolest thing about this topper first of all it's very well made um and i don't know how they figured out how to do all this stuff but it is just it is amazing the way it integrates with everything going on in the game you told me how it turns how it knows when to turn on and off it has some some It has optical sensors that you told me were, you mounted those by one of the PCBs so that when the PCB had power, an LED on the PCB triggered an optical sensor that told the topper to turn on or to do something in the game. So that's how it knows, like, in certain modes to fire. Right. Because this certain opto. It's very cool. Right. Man.
    62:45
    That's thoughtful. It is. And we got one of the, we got our Pulp Fiction from Zach. Yeah. And we're like, we're flipping out pinball. We told, like, I want one of the first ones off the line. I don't care about coin door. So we have the, like, the commercial coin door. Yeah, we don't have the other topper. Yes, we don't have the other topper. And that's where I was getting to. Yeah. Like, so there are tons of these Pulp Fiction machines without the topper. The topper, I think, is with the Bad Motherfucker Edition. That's right. Is that what they call it? I think so. And this is the Double Tap Edition. Okay. The interesting thing about this Double Tap Edition, which has the electric playground topper, they're only making 300 of them. And you know there are more than 300 Pulp Fictions out there without toppers. Oh, okay. So this is something you need to jump on. I didn't realize it was limited like that. It is. And it comes with a very cool badge. we have number 13. Thank you, Electric Playground, for sending us number 13. We appreciate that. So it's a really cool thing. And I noticed, you know, with the earnings report, I'm wondering if this is going to make it earn a little bit more because I noticed as soon as I installed it, everybody wanted to check it out. Yeah. Pulp Fiction, I mean, it's a popular game anyway, but yes, I think it's bringing back like casuals that maybe didn't notice it, notice the gunshots going on on that side of the room and like oh what was that maybe i should go and what i loved is everybody's playing it uh because they want to see the gun go off and the little ball go from uh one barrel to the other barrel of the gun and um so but but then they miss it i go oh it just happened but they miss it like oh no so i gotta play it again to see it happen so i know it's it's it's boosting earnings somewhat okay yeah well that's i'm i'm Very interested to know. Yeah. So that went in maybe like a week ago. Uh-huh. Okay. Yeah. So we'll see it in this month's earnings, but it won't really be reflected in the May earnings. That's right. Okay. Cool. Well, thank you so much for the earnings report. You're very welcome. I'm sure we are going to make Jamie's day. This whole thing has just been a podcast with Jamie. He keeps messaging me.
    65:05
    Also, I'd like to congratulate Ken Cromwell, our friend formerly of Jersey Jack. Oh, I thought you were going to end the sentence there. Ken, who's our friend, formerly. Oh, no, no, no. Formerly of Jersey Jack, our friend Ken. He moved on. We were just talking about Zach at Flippin' Out. He is staying in the pinball industry. He's going to work with Zach. That's so cool. How cool is that? So congratulations, Ken Cromwell. Yeah, congrats. Isn't that cool? We will miss talking to you about Jersey Jack things, and we'll look forward to talking to you about other pinball things. We might have to get Halo from him. Yeah. If that's really a thing, I don't know. That's a rumor I'm hearing. We're hearing whispers. Oh, psst, say hello. Cool. Well, I think that's a wrap. Thank you for joining me in my studio here. And I think it's probably time to head to the arcade. Let's do it. All right. The bats are out. Bats are out. We're sitting a little bit further away, so it's harder to do the bat handshake. There we go. Second try. All right. Thank you all for joining us.
    66:13
    If you want to know what's going on at the Electric Bat Arcade, you can check our Facebook page, Instagram. Join the Discord. Go to electricbatarcade.com. Click the podcast link, and then there's a link to join the Discord right there. Also, ask us some more questions. Get on the Discord. Also, electricbatarcade at gmail.com. Send us questions there. Send us questions to the Discord. If you've asked us a question and we've accidentally overlooked it, feel free to send it again. It happens. That's not going to bother us. Ask the same question over again. If you asked a question last year, just rephrase it to where we don't recognize it. Then we'll ask it again. Because you're probably going to get a different answer because things are always changing.
    67:00
    There's no right or wrong. The only constant. All right. Thank you for joining us. You guys have an absolutely wonderful week. And go out there. Use the Pinball Map app. Find pinball machines around you and put some quarters in this thing. Keep this sport and hobby alive. Help us all out. Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us, and we will see you soon. All right. Bye-bye now. Bye.