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The Early Years & More - Pinball Expo 2024 - John Borg

Pinball News (Pinball Expo 2024)·video·52m 56s·analyzed·Oct 18, 2024
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.033

TL;DR

John Borg shares 37-year pinball design career from Premier Tech through Data East, Sega to Stern.

Summary

John Borg, legendary Stern Pinball designer with 37+ years in the industry, recounts his career journey from joining Premier Technology in the 1980s through Data East, Sega Pinball, and beyond. He discusses early mechanical engineering work on games like Victory and TX Sector, breakthrough designs including Star Wars (his first game, selling 10,000+ units), Tales from the Crypt, Guns and Roses, and numerous other titles, sharing anecdotes about working with celebrities like Slash, Danny DeVito, and astronaut Jim Lovell.

Key Claims

  • Star Wars was Borg's first game design and became the biggest run of all time, selling over 10,000 copies in a three-month period

    high confidence · Direct speaker account of Data East production achievement; specific production metrics mentioned

  • Data East was manufacturing 200 games per day in a 30,000 square-foot building during Star Wars production

    high confidence · Direct personal account of manufacturing scale during Star Wars era

  • Borg received his first patent on a mechanical feature for the game Lights, Camera, Action

    high confidence · Speaker directly states patent achievement on this specific game

  • Joe Balser had started working for Stern before Borg joined Data East

    high confidence · Borg states 'Joe Balser had started working for Stern, and I talked to Joe' regarding transition to Data East

  • Borg was originally tasked to design a dinosaur mechanism for his first game at Data East, but was redirected to redesign it as Star Wars when Spielberg's Jurassic Park game deal was secured

    high confidence · Borg provides detailed account: 'joe comes in and he says steven spielberg is making a game called jurassic park... i want you to change your dinosaur game into star wars'

  • Hook was a major commercial success following its release, doing 6,000-7,000 units compared to prior games selling 3,000-4,000 units

    high confidence · Direct account: 'we were probably selling 3,000 or 4,000 units of a game prior to that, and when Hook came, I think we did probably about seven, six or seven'

  • Borg and Tim Seckle defeated John Norris and Gil Pollock in a Hook tournament final

    high confidence · Speaker recounts tournament victory: 'tim and i played against gil pollock who was the president of uh premier technology and john norris the premier game designer'

  • Borg's third game design was Guns and Roses, which involved visiting Slash's house post-1993 earthquake in California

    high confidence · Detailed personal anecdote about visiting Slash's home and interacting with his pet cougar Curtis

Notable Quotes

  • “I took the job in pinball because I knew it would be more fun. And it has been. It's been great. It's been a glorious ride.”

    John Borg@ 1:22 — Establishes Borg's career motivation and satisfaction; foundational to understanding his 37-year industry tenure

  • “We were making 200 games a day in a 30,000-square-foot building. It was ridiculous.”

    John Borg@ 11:33 — Underscores the scale and intensity of Data East's manufacturing capacity during the Star Wars era; key business metric

  • “I thought well I just laid there I didn't try to fight him or push him off or panic or anything I just laid there I'm like you know good boy don't don't eat me”

    John Borg@ 18:54 — Memorable personal anecdote demonstrating Borg's composure; illustrates celebrity/industry relationship-building during game development

  • “star wars at the time... we took the game and put it together and we took it and put it in a rock and roll McDonald's in downtown Chicago. And the game was at quarter play was earning $500 a week.”

    John Borg@ 14:41 — Demonstrates early commercial success metrics; early location testing methodology

  • “I have to take the dat tape back with me to Chicago because we have to put it in the game as soon as we can”

    John Borg@ 20:11 — Illustrates challenges of celebrity voice-over sessions and content licensing complexity during game development

  • “he came out, she was wearing curlers, getting ready for set. Um, she was still very cute, uh, even in curlers.”

    John Borg — Casual personal anecdote about meeting Helen Hunt during Twister filming; illustrates on-set collaborative process

Entities

John BorgpersonBob MalvasiopersonRay TanzerpersonJohn NorrispersonJohn TrudeaupersonJoe KamenkopersonJoe BalserpersonSlashperson

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Data East manufacturing capacity during Star Wars era: 200 games per day in 30,000 sq ft facility with constant truck deliveries of subassemblies from Par Tech

    high · Direct account: 'We were making 200 games a day in a 30,000-square-foot building. It was ridiculous. There were trucks coming into our dock all day long'

  • ?

    community_signal: Borg maintained personal relationships with astronaut Jim Lovell post-Apollo 13 game delivery; Lovell wrote personal note to Borg 5-6 years after game was made expressing continued enjoyment

    high · Borg recounts Lovell visit and later received Polaroid: 'he wrote on the Polaroid he says John I love this game I play it all the time and that was like five or six years after we made the game'

  • ?

    competitive_signal: Borg defeated John Norris and Gil Pollock in Hook tournament final with Tim Seckle; Norris described as 'a really good pinball player' comparable to 'playing keith'

    high · Borg recounts: 'tim and i played against gil pollock who was the president of uh premier technology and john norris the premier game designer... tim and i just just took it to him... we won that won the tournament'

  • ?

    competitive_signal: Hook represented a major commercial inflection point for Data East/Sega, jumping from 3,000-4,000 unit baseline to 6,000-7,000 units, driven partly by dot matrix display adoption trend

    high · Borg: 'we were probably selling 3,000 or 4,000 units of a game prior to that, and when Hook came, I think we did probably about seven, six or seven. It just exploded. And Dot Matrix was making a big way into the industry'

  • ?

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.159

0:00
I was studying to be a mechanical engineer back in the 80s, and I was studying also plastics engineering.
0:25
I ended up looking, I was looking for a job. I was working in an injection mold making company, machining injection molded piece parts for molds. And I was looking for different work, and I decided that I was going to take a look at the Chicago Tribune. And I found an ad that was about the size of a postage stamp. And it said, mechanical engineer needed with a phone number underneath it. So I called the number. I talked to a gentleman named Bob Malvasio and he invited me in for an interview. So I drive to this company and I'm sitting in the lobby waiting for somebody to come and get me. And I'm looking around the perimeter of the room and there's pinball back glass going all the way around the lobby. I'm like, this is a pinball company. I go, how cool is that? So I was offered a job as a hydraulics engineer. And then I was offered the job in pinball for fifteen hundred dollars less a year. and I took the job in pinball because I knew it would be more fun.
1:26
And it has been. It's been great. It's been a glorious ride. I've had a lot of fun. It's been a lot of work, a lot of sacrifice. But, you know, when I come to this and I see everybody happy and everybody's happy with the game that we made, it makes it all worth it. It's awesome. So when I started to work for Premier Technology, and a game called Arena was on the line that was designed by Ray Tanzer. And I just recently had the pleasure of, I found an Arena brochure in a folder at home and I was digging through some things. I took it to work and I had Ray Tanzer sign it for me the other day.
@ 26:55

  • “John I love this game I play it all the time”

    Jim Lovell (quoted by Borg)@ 26:03 — Demonstrates long-term satisfaction from prominent celebrity with game design; reinforces emotional impact of design work

  • “when I started to work on whitewood and build the game and joe comes in and he says um steven spielberg is making a game called jurassic park he goes i really like to do that game myself so i want you to change your dinosaur game into star wars”

    John Borg@ 10:05 — Critical turning point in Borg's career; explains origin of Star Wars design and its commercial success

    • Jim Lovellperson
    Paul Ferrisperson
    Tim Seckleperson
    Axel Roseperson
    Danny DeVitoperson
    Bill Paxtonperson
    Helen Huntperson
    Jeff Bushperson
    Gil Pollockperson
    Rob Hurtadoperson
    Premier Technologycompany
    Data Eastcompany
    Sega Pinballcompany
    Stern Pinballcompany
    Par Techcompany

    design_innovation: Tales from the Crypt featured motorized mirror assembly mechanism (tombstone) that was later reused on Tommy; represents Borg's signature mechanical engineering approach

    high · Borg states: 'Tales from the Crypt, we did Tommy, and we did Tommy with the motorized mirror assembly, which was the same mech that we used on Tales from the Crypt for the big tombstone'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Borg's early career was focused on mechanical innovation (roll-under gates to micro switches, motorized mechanisms, magnet-based ball control) representing evolution of playfield engineering practices from 1980s through 1990s

    high · Detailed accounts of mechanical feature patents, the dinosaur/Frankenstein throwing mechanism, magnet-based ball locks on Tales from the Crypt tombstone, and motorized mirror assembly innovations

  • ?

    community_signal: Borg's career trajectory shows progression from mechanical engineer to lead mechanical engineer to game designer; early work involved learning from established designers (Ray Tanzer, John Norris, John Trudeau) at Premier Technology

    high · Borg describes starting 'as a hydraulics engineer' then joining pinball, initially doing mechanical engineering on Victory and TX Sector before getting 'first mechanical lead on Hook' and first design on Star Wars

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Transition from Data East to Sega Pinball as official rebrand; Borg's first Sega game was Frankenstein (1995) utilizing previously designed dinosaur mechanism

    high · Borg states: 'we became Sega pinball and I had the first uh I had the first game the first Sega game uh which was Frankenstein in 95'

  • ?

    announcement: Star Wars was Borg's first game design at Data East, originally conceived as a dinosaur-themed machine but pivoted due to Spielberg's Jurassic Park deal; became massive commercial success with 10,000+ units in 3 months

    high · Borg recounts being told to 'change your dinosaur game into star wars' by Joe Kamenko; confirms 500 units more than Lethal Weapon 3; $500/week earning at test location

  • ?

    product_strategy: Experimental one-off games including Mini Viper (small-scale prototype), Derby Days, Roach Racers, and Blacklight Bowling were created but not advanced to production; Mini Viper reportedly sold for $20,000 on secondary market

    high · Borg discusses creating Mini Viper in 1996 as one-off with captive ball shifter; states 'I heard that game sold for like twenty thousand dollars'; discusses Blacklight Bowling's technical complexity and market viability concerns

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Multiple licensed IP titles integrated into Data East/Sega portfolio including movie properties (Jurassic Park, Hook, Batman Forever, Apollo 13, Twister) requiring on-set visits and celebrity voice recordings

    high · Borg discusses visiting Jurassic Park set, Hook filming location, Twister set in Oklahoma, and Frankenstein movie premiere; attended voice recording sessions with celebrities

    • 2:08
    Ray Tanzer, he put together the whole operation, mapped out our new building, what was going to go where. so Ray designed games he ran engineering for a while and now he is like a jack of all trades he does all kinds of things Ray designed a lot of nice you know fun games in the in the 80s and I learned from from Ray and John Norris and John Trudeau and so I started to work at Premier Technology and the first game that I started to work on was a game called Victory which was a race rally game where you started the game and checkpoint one was lit and you had a hurry up you had to get to checkpoint one as fast as you could checkpoint two is next checkpoint three and you'd work your way through and try to finish the race as fast as you could and collect all the hurry up points you could and I thought it was really fun John Norris wrote the rules for it after that I got to dig in a little deeper victory was part of the way done when I started to work on it. But I was making roll under gates, which we actually don't, we try to use optos now. We're not using roll under gates so much anymore, but the old roll under gates had a wire form and a bracket just like they do today. But there was a spring that hung from the wire form that went down underneath the playfield to a, to a leaf switch. So it was like, you know, you had to figure out all these different heights and stuff and tension on the spring. And, you know, and I was like, wow, why don't we use micro switches? You know, look at the ones that, you know, Williams is using micro switches and I tried to push that.
    3:40
    So after I worked on Diamond Lady with John Norris, I worked on TX Sector with John Trudeau. And that one I got to start from the get-go. So I did the play field layout for that, all the piece parts. I was the mechanical engineer at the time. I wasn't doing any designing yet. So after that there was a game that came out called RoboWar. And RoboWar, if you ever, do you all remember a game called Big House by Premier Technology? Well, it started out, Big House was RoboWar. So if you look at the RoboWar back glass, you see this purple building in the background that's this really strange, it looks like an auger screw. It's this really strange screw-looking shape, and that building is in the artwork on the back glass. So when Ray Tanzer was working on what was supposed to be RoboWar, they decided to change it to Big House. We put some searchlights in the game. We made it a jailbreak theme.
    4:49
    So later on, we saved the artwork for RoboWar's back glass and cabinet, and John Trudeau made a game, RoboWar. Robo War, and if you look at that back glass, that auger screw, that building is in the back glass.
    5:07
    Ray took a shaft and molded this auger screw. So what you did was you shot the ball, it went up around a lane, and it rested against the screw, and there were two wires next to it. And then as the screw rotated, it pushed the ball up to an upper level and dropped it into a ramp.
    5:22
    So that was a lot of fun to work on. That was a really fun game. and we all did the speech for the game too, which was really interesting.
    5:31
    Let's see, what do we have next? I have to put glasses on so I can see here. I used to pride myself on my vision, but nowadays it's... Cheaters are everywhere.
    5:49
    Let's see here. a game came out later in 88 called bad girls um followed by excalibur big house was also in 89 uh then i worked on a game with john norris called hot shots uh in 1989 which had it had eight drop target or eight targets on each side up the middle of the playfield with a pop bumper in the middle and you would complete all the targets and start a feature and then you would and then after you're finished with that feature, you complete all the targets again, start feature two, three, and four.
    6:25
    If you were able to get all eight drop targets down on one side and not hit any on the other side, the game gave you ten credits. The knocker just started going bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Very hard to do, but it was possible, and I had seen people actually achieve it. Very difficult with a pop-upper in the middle, trying to keep the ball away from the opposite side.
    6:47
    Hot shots was a lot of fun to play. Um, after that Ray Tanzer did Bone Busters, which was in 1989. Um, uh, I believe, and I'm probably correct. Um, Jeff Bush, who is an artist in the pinball industry, he did the artwork for that. Um, Connie Mitchell was our artist, but Connie farmed out some of his work to other artists, uh, to do the packages for the art for the pinball games. Um, um, let's see here.
    7:19
    Jeff did a beautiful job on Bone Busters. It was a really nice, nice art package. And when the art package came in, one of the, our technical illustrator, George Demarukas, looked at it and he goes, it's definitely, it's definitely not Connie's work. Connie, you know, just doesn't look like Connie's art. So, and then I found out later that Jeff Bush did it. And I worked with Jeff Bush at Stern Pinball and, or Sega Pinball at the time. Let's see Lights, Camera, Action was a game that John Norris designed And I actually got my first patent on that game for a mechanical feature that I made And then after Lights, Camera, Action I can't remember if there was anything else in 89 But after that we started making single level games with no ramps Which I was really upset about But the first one came out and it was a Trudeau game It was called Silver Slugger And it was really fun to score home runs and shoot those shots into those ejects with the spinners and collect home runs. It was really a fun game to play. Vegas came after that. Then there was Deadly Weapon and Title Fight.
    8:29
    After that, I went over and I started working with Joe Kamenko. Joe Balser had started working for Stern,
    8:39
    and I talked to Joe and I said, Do you have any more room over there? and I sent a resume and Joe Kamenko read it and he invited me in and I actually got the job but they didn't have anywhere to put me so I got to sit in Joe's office and I would listen to Joe talking on the phone to licensors and you know he'd call up Hugh Hefner to say hi and stuff like that you know he just he knew a lot of people and it was really fun it was very interesting to watch him work and then it was very stressful when he would have when he would be sitting right here watching me draw and I knew he was there but he didn't know I was there and um the first thing that I was tasked to do when I started to work at Data East was to make a dinosaur that ate balls so I worked on this unit and I started to work on my first game after uh after I had uh got my first mechanical lead on the game hook uh Joe told me he goes I'm gonna let you try your hand so I started designing this dinosaur game that threw pinballs kind of like Frankenstein does and then it went back and forth and it had a magnet way in the back of its mouth and it would bend over and it would eat the ball off the play field the ball would get stuck on the magnet in the dinosaur's mouth and it would move and pivot it and pivot and drop the ball into a hole where it would end up in a lock so I worked on this game and I was just starting to work on the whitewood and build the game and joe comes in and he says um steven spielberg is making a game called jurassic park he goes i really like to do that game myself so i want you to change your dinosaur game into star wars and i was like what so i just stopped and and uh i i used very little of the layout the original layout in the star wars layout but i i replaced the dinosaur mechanism with the Bethstar and then I put in a model of R2-D2 that jumped up and down and its head moved back and forth and the ball went underneath it and fed it into the paw pumpers and that ended up being our biggest run of all time it did probably about 500 units more than Lethal Weapon 3 did and that was my first game so I was really stoked that I you know had a game that sold over 10,000 copies in a three-month period and we did that in a 30,000 square 30,000 square foot building we had a company that worked with us called par tech they made all of our mechanical assemblies and there were trucks coming into our dock all day long just a load of this a load of flippers a load of pop pumpers and there were trying to just make your way around to just go out into the factory to go look at a station or a mechanism that was being built was like it was you had to crawl over people practically it was the the place was there were so many people working in there and there was just so much going on. We were making 200 games a day in a 30,000-square-foot building. It was ridiculous.
    11:40
    So let's see. So we started Data East. When I started at Data East, Simpsons was on the line, and then shortly thereafter I started to work on a game called Checkpoint, which we turned into a desert storm. We just made a one-off. We actually printed playfield art on a piece of paper, pasted it to a checkpoint play field that was a whitewood and made a desert storm game so when you shot the ramp to see how fast you were going on checkpoint it told you how many miles per hour and in uh in desert storm it told you how many sorties per hour you were how many sorties they were sending so uh that was just a one-off but that was kind of fun because checkpoint was a really fun game i really enjoyed playing that um i did a little mechanical engineering on teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Batman following Checkpoint. Did a little bit of work on Star Trek, and then I got my first mechanical engineering lead on Hook, and I did that game with Tim Seckle.
    12:41
    We took the Hook license, actually, to get Jurassic Park, so it was a twofer. And they gave Hook to Timmy, and we were probably selling 3,000 or 4,000 units of a game prior to that, and when Hook came, I think we did probably about seven, six or seven. It just exploded. And Dot Matrix was making a big, you know, was making its way into the industry and stuff like that. And everybody was buying Dot Matrix games and you know to replace their outdated alphanumeric games But but hook was a lot of fun i actually went to a to a show and tim seckle and i played against gil pollock who was the president of uh premier technology and john norris the premier game designer and tim and i just just took it to him we were playing hook in the finals and i was just on fire i just was just going back and forth shooting clock lamps and and just and then tim played really well too and we just we we beat nor john norris is a really good pinball player it's like playing keith um and uh so you know i thought well timmy we're gonna get killed and we were just both on fire and we won that won the tournament um after hook we did lethal weapon three i didn't have much to do with that because I was working on D.A.D.E. Star Wars at the time. When I made my first prototype, we took, we made the game, but we didn't have any of the molded parts in yet. So I took a piece of plastic and I formed it into a half circle to make R2-D2's body. And the artist drew up a decal for me and I just pasted it on. It was paper. I went out and bought a wiffle ball and I cut it in half to make R2-D2's head. And I took it up to the art department and let the dot matrix guys, Kurt and Jack, they painted it up and they spray painted it silver and then they put the little blue windows in. And we took that game and put it together and we took it and put it in a rock and roll McDonald's in downtown Chicago. And the game was at quarter play was earning $500 a week. It was just crushing. And the game was just, we left it there for quite a while and it had wear on it by the time we went and picked it up. It was, and then we went into production with it. We were making 200 games a day. And then the market started to fall off a little bit after that. We, following Star Wars, Tim Seckle and Norm Wors worked on Rocky and Bullwinkle together.
    15:14
    Then Jurassic Park came in 93. Last Action Hero also came in 93. And we had a design for Last Action Hero and we ended up changing it a little bit. we changed the back glass like three times and the final version was arnold schwarzenegger had about this big because they want it really large so they could see it you could see it across a you could see it across an arcade um nobody really wanted to take nobody wanted to be named as the designer of that game because so many people worked on it um so we put lyman sheets name as the game designer for Last Action Hero. Tales from the Crypt was my second game. That was a lot of fun to work with. John Kassir was just great. He ad-libbed. We sent him a speech script and he ad-libbed and just said all different kinds of crazy things that we ended up using. I still talk to him to this day. He's a really nice guy. He says anytime we're ready to vault Tales from the Crypt. He says he's going to buy one. After Tales from the Crypt, we did Tommy, and we did Tommy with the motorized mirror assembly, which was the same mech that we used on Tales from the Crypt for the big tombstone. Tommy was very popular.
    16:37
    Following that, I got my third game in, which was Guns and Roses. I had a lot of fun working on that game slash is a very personable very very nice guy um uh i went to i went to slash's house in 93 after the big earthquake happened and i walked into his house and he it was it was just pretty extravagant a lot of big glass pane windows on the walls um with uh it looked like a zoo you He had logs and plants and stuff and these things, and he had a 25-foot bow constrictor in one of them. He had a poisonous snake room that he said that he didn't go into very much, and he had somebody come and take care of that for him. And then all of a sudden I'm standing there in his living room, and I'm looking at his games. He's got games spread around all over his house. And his pet, his name is Curtis. It's a six-month-old cougar just comes walking out into the room. and I'm like, holy moly, he's got a mountain lion for a pet. You know, I'm like, this is amazing. I'm like, oh my God.
    17:46
    So I was with Joe Kamiko and we went to Slash's house and after the earthquake, there were still, there were cracks in the walls and it was, you know, there was a lot of damage that you could tell. But when that earthquake happened, a lot of that glass broke and a lot of those snakes got free and his wife was running around the house looking underneath furniture for her cats because she had like five or six cats. And I'm like, those are food. Get out of there. Get out of the house. Who knows what's going to come crawling out. So Curtis, he took a shining to me, and he was rubbing up against me like a house cat. And he was my best buddy for a while, and I was petting him. And I'm like, wow, I'm petting a mountain lion. This is totally awesome. So he laid down on the floor next to me, and he rolled over on his back. His legs are out like this, like a dog. And I reached down, and I started rubbing his belly. don't ever rub a cougar's belly because about a second or two later this big paw that's about three times the size of my hand came up and just went wham and it hit me in the head and it knocked me over and I fell on my back and I was looking up and when I looked up Curtis was on top of me with his neck or his his mouth around my neck and I thought well I just laid there I didn't try to fight him or push him off or panic or anything I just laid there I'm like you know good boy don't don't eat me and i figured it was either going to be over in a couple seconds or i was going to live to tell the tale so i'm glad i'm here to tell the tale um slash was awesome axel was kind of rough to work with he showed up i flew to california to record speech from them mike clink who was the producer of their uh of their music he was going to handle the recording session. So Axel went to the wrong recording session on the opposite side of town. He showed up a couple hours late. He arrived, he was angry. He was going to leave, slash walked outside to talk to him and tried to, tried to, you know, calm him down. He came back in. He went into the recording session and he was going, jackpot, jackpot, jackpot. I'm like, you know, gosh, can we put a little more on your Axel Rose? You know, he goes, everybody get out. So they threw us all out. So it was just Mike and Axel in the room for about three hours. And when he finished, I think I got about four or five speech lines out of that whole recording session for the game. I was like horrified. I told Mike, I go, I have to take the dat tape back with me to Chicago because we have to put it in the game as soon as we can. He says, well, I have to edit this tape because I can't let you take this. I can't let you take this tape. He was talking about all kinds of stuff. And so I had to wait a few hours. So now when I walk outside of this recording studio, I had a limousine that was going to pick me up and take me back to my hotel, but it was gone.
    20:35
    So I'm out in the middle of California in L.A., don't know how I'm going to get anywhere. Slash goes, oh, I'll give you a ride back to your hotel. So I went back to my hotel, and instead of taking a nap for about an hour and hopping on a plane a couple hours later, I just got in a taxi cab and went straight to the airport. I'm like, if I fall asleep, I'm never going to make that flight. so we were up all night um guns and roses was a really fun project to work on uh i really really enjoyed working with that and slash came out to uh to data east at the time and and he walked around all night um we were working on a we were working on guns and roses and we were also working on a video game at the time and uh and we were walking around and slash had a bottle of jack Daniels and he was passing it around to everybody and so programmer Neil Falconer ended up with that bottle and when he left when he left when he left Data East he gave me that bottle so I have the DNA in case we ever need to clone a slash bottles empty though unfortunately Maverick came in 94 and let's see then we became we became Sega pinball and I had the first uh I had the first game the first Sega game uh which was Frankenstein in 95 um that was a lot of fun to work on because I had that mechanism that I had designed for the dinosaur game that I thought was going to be my first game so I used that in the in the uh the Frankenstein game so I made the character throw pinballs and the original version the unit turned back and forth so I could and it had a servo motor that ran the that moved the head back and forth so I could turn the whole mechanism and then I could make the head look back this way and then I could straighten him out and I could make him look all over and make the body turn too but we ended up taking the motorized portion of the rotating the whole unit out and we just left the head move and just let him throw the balls and that's how that ended up, uh, but that was a fun game to work on. I got to go to the movie premiere. I went with Paul Ferris. We went out to California. We went and had killer shrimp. If you're ever in California and you find a killer shrimp, go stop there and have a bowl of shrimp. It's delicious. Um, so we went to the, we went to the movie premiere and, uh, I, I was like, I was, uh, in the washroom standing next to Danny DeVito looking down, you know, I'm like, Oh my gosh, I didn't know. I didn't realize how short he was. I bumped into a couple of people that were famous stars and I was just like wow this is awesome I had such a good time so Paul and I leave the leave the show we go back to the we go back to the hotel and we're gonna go and we're gonna we're gonna go hop on a bus and we took our rental car back we're gonna hop on a bus back to the airport we got there at the end of the night so we're standing on one side of the building the bus comes in it goes around and it goes back out that was the last bus of the night so we found a ride to the airport we were late for our flight and we slept on our travel bags in the airport overnight that was fun paul every time i see paul he goes remember we get stuck in the airport overnight and i'm like ah um but that was that was a that was a fun game to make um uh i never pictured robert de niro being being the creature frankenstein Monster. But it was a good movie. It wasn't the feel-good movie of the year, but it was fun, and it was fun to do that game. Batman Forever came after that. I did a little bit of work on that with Paul Leslie. That was Paul Leslie's first game design. Paul later on left and went off to do work in the gaming industry. Then we did Baywatch in 95, and then Joe Balser and I collaborated together and worked on Apollo 13. Joe designed the play field and I designed the rocket and the moon with the magnet that would lock the ball. So we both worked on that one together. That was a lot of fun. I enjoyed working on that game. I'm a space nut. I love NASA. When I was a kid watching Apollo 13 come back, I was just glued, riveted to the TV. and then Apollo 13 after we finished the game we actually got to go and deliver a game to Jim Lovell's house so we're on the way up there with the game there was probably five or six of us we took a bunch of back glasses for him to sign for us and we carried the game into his basement and set it up for him and while we were on the way up there I was teasing the guys that he's got a bunch of moon dust in the basement you know and he's wearing a suit when we get there he's jumping around because he never got to walk on the moon poor guy but he was really nice really nice man we and we enjoyed his company and we showed him how to play the game and gave him all the tips so he could he could uh you know so he would he played the game and he actually wasn't a pinball player but he actually shot really well for you know being a first time but being a first time player he was not flipping both flippers at the same time he was actually you know he coming to the right i'm hitting the right button um he played pretty well and uh a couple years later I knew a gal that did makeup for people that were in film and she got to work on him when he was doing a he was doing some kind of a documentary or something like that and she got a Polaroid of him and he wrote on the Polaroid he says John I love this game I play it all the time and that was like five or six years after we made the game so that was a lot of fun to work on Goldeneye came shortly thereafter. I didn't have much to do with that. That was a Ward-Pemberton game And then in 96 I made the game Twister I got to go to Oklahoma and I got to see some of the filming being done which was really cool They driving down the street in a pickup truck with a great big fan in the back and these people are throwing garbage and stuff and all kinds of debris into the fan, you know. And Bill and Helen are following in the pickup truck. When I first got there, I met Bill and Bill took us over to meet Helen Hunt. And he goes up and he walks up and he bangs on her trailer door and she goes, who is it? And he goes, it's me, Bill. The pinball guys are here. And she came out, she was wearing curlers, getting ready for set. Um, she was still very cute, uh, even in curlers. Um, but we met her briefly, but we walked around with Bill all day and he recorded speech for, uh, he recorded speech for Twister and he also recorded some speech for Apollo 13 for us on the same day. And we did it in a kindergarten classroom and we were sitting on these chairs that were about this high off the ground.
    27:21
    I guess when they filmed there, they took over this whole area, this whole town. And so the school was theirs and all the buildings were theirs to do with what they needed and store things in. It was very, very neat walking around those sets. I had a really good time doing that. Also in 96, I created Mini Viper, which was a small-scale cabinet and small-scale back box. didn't look anything like the production Viper did but we made a one-off I heard that game sold for like twenty thousand dollars and it ended up overseas and it came back and it kind of bounced around a little bit but we just made one a cute little game it had a captive ball shifter in the middle and it had a real Viper cast iron Viper car that headlights lit up and it was a cute little game we took it to a show and all of our distributors said why didn't you make it a regular size game. So we ended up scrapping that and later on Rob Hurtado made the production version of Viper. Independence Day came in 96. Space Jam came in 96. I didn't have much to do with either of those. I was busy working on a game called Derby Days and Roach Racers, if any of you are familiar with those looks like a pinball machine uh longer play field uh no legs cabinet was looked like a pinball cabinet but it went all the way down to the ground and it was a redemption game and what you did was you had two giant flippers on the bottom and a bunch of pop bumpers and targets and you would play this game and try to advance your depending on which game you're playing advance your horse or your roach um we named one of the roaches in the road tracers game harry gary and we made this little cartoon roach character and put Gary's hair on him, and it was just adorable. It was really cool. We made a couple of those, and we didn't go into production with those, and then I was also working on an old-time bowling game, like the old bowlers from the 50s, and we themed it Blacklight Bowling, and we made this crazy-looking alien creature that was the bowler. So the ball would come down, and it would feed over to a magnet, and then you could turn the guy left or right, and then the hand was up behind the ball, and the ball just sat on a little permanent magnet on this disc. And then when you hit the button, the hand would swat the ball, and it would go down, and it would knock the pins away. The pins were all stuck to the play field with magnets, but as soon as you broke the pin free, there was a counterweight behind that would pull down, and it would pull the pin up and score a switch when it got all the way up to the top out of view.
    30:08
    We had splattered blacklight paint all over the inside of the game and put a couple of big blacklights on either side of it. We made that, and then we never went into production with that game either. It was a lot of fun to make. I wish I had one.
    30:23
    But it would take a while to play 10 frames on this game. So they were like, how are we going to price this? Are we going to let them play a quarter and let them play three frames? No, they're going to want to play a whole game. It's going to take long. They were worried about how the game would earn, but we went to the trouble of making it, and we took it to a couple of shows, and they just decided that that wasn't in shipping. The game was huge, and it was heavy.
    30:51
    But we didn't end up making that game, but it was a lot of fun to work on, And it was a, the mechanism for the, for the pin setter was, it was really, really cool. That was a really good project.
    31:06
    97, we came out with Trilogy, Star Wars Trilogy. And then in 97, after Trilogy, I did a little bit of work on Trilogy. I did the X-Wing that fired the ball. It's like a, like a ball cannon.
    31:20
    97, second half of the year, I made Jurassic Park Lost World. whoo i'm really surprised um yeah that that little that little snagger um when i when i read the script they they talked about this truck that's chasing this dinosaur down in a field and it's running and they're chasing after it had this great big thing that came off the top of the truck and and it shocked the dinosaur so that they could then subdue it and and you know and take it and carted away um and it sounded really cool when i read the script but when they they didn't film it very well um they showed it for like two seconds in the movie and i was like that's it i'm like ah um so but uh they wanted to do something besides putting a ball-eating dinosaur in that game so i came up with that mechanism for the snap we called it it was called the snagger in the movie um that was a lot of fun to work on let's see what else do we have here lost in space came in 1988 uh sharky shootout came in 98 um sharky shootout was uh originally designed game called golden cue that john norris designed and they ordered parts for maybe 500 games i believe at the time and then they decided that they didn't want to make it that way they wanted to revamp it and try to make it a little more robust and and put a little more features in it and I I thought okay so Gary comes up into my office and he's got this drop target bank with trip coils two gold ramps um uh gold wire form ramps and he puts this pile of parts on my desk and he says make a game out of this and I'm like ah so I took the the eight ball assembly on the golden cue game had a ramp that fed into it and then it would go through and there was a little paddle in there that would allow it to divert to the right side and I wanted to make it like a magic eight ball so I I had to take these original parts and I had to make fixtures to for production to modify these existing parts that we already had and I added a motor to the bottom and then I put a blue vacuum form ball inside the eight ball and put a little window and the eight ball so we could spin this thing inside and then light it up and it would look like a magic eight ball was giving you a feature or a point value or something like that and that was kind of cool and that was fun to work on um the uh the game after sharkies was godzilla in 98 that was a joe balser game uh south park came in 99 and then i did harley davidson in 99 and I believe Harley Davidson was originally a Data East game and I think after we became Sega and we made it later we had to rerun the Backglass with the new logo on it.
    34:20
    Let's see. Then we are now Stern Pinball. The first Stern Pinball game I did was Austin Powers in 2000.
    34:30
    Then I took a hiatus for seven years. I came back in 2007 to do the Indiana Jones license. When I came back to Stern in 2007, they told me that they were bringing me back on a contract basis to do a Led Zeppelin pinball machine. So I was like, yeah, I'm on board for that. When do I start? So I worked on it. I came in, and I was a contractor at the time. And then after I was there for about two or three weeks, I was there every day. and Ray Tanzer came up to me and says, hey, do you want to just be permanent? And I said, sure. So then they gave me permanent employment again.
    35:10
    And so I just kept picking away and picking away. And so Indiana Jones came. Lonnie Rott programmed with me.
    35:28
    That was a fun game to work on. I really loved the Ark of the Covenant, and it was cool to load the balls into the Ark prematurely to the ball play and have an eight-ball game.
    35:42
    So you put all your balls in the game, and when you fired up the game, the game would automatically load balls into the Ark, and then the remaining five balls in the trough were the ones that you played with until you opened up the Ark for multi-ball.
    35:56
    NBA came in 2009. mba was originally intended to be a a game that we were going to just sell into china um and so ray and gary were looking at it and trying to figure out what they wanted to do with it they wanted to do a kind of a stripped down version an inexpensive version of space jam so then they decided they were going to make it a production game so i wanted to add some things to it so i i added a an opening in the middle of the play field that the ball would fall into and then I placed a kicker at an angle so it fired the ball out of the hole at an angle and it flew through the air and I was able to catch it on a magnet on the backboard where you made your baskets in the game and I was like okay so I have this ramp here on the left that I can shoot baskets with and I've got this hole in the middle and I'm like I wonder if I can do something in the orbit and I put an up post in on the ramp and it pushed up a piece of spring steel and gave the ball just enough momentum to get up near the basket where the magnet would attract it it sucked to the backboard and it would drop it through the net and I figured I got three ways to get to the basket now and then we just finished the game and uh and it it turned out really nice um it was uh and it didn't feel so much like a stripped down version of space jam it was just with the with the extra ways of getting the ball into the basket and stuff it was really a lot of fun um big buck hunter came in 2010 uh I worked on big buck hunter for quite a while we we at that time we weren't molding as many toys we we purchased toys for that game so we found a a deer that was looking to to the right and it was a very nice model and then we found a better one looking to the left and I'm like oh I'd really rather use that one so I actually took and flipped the whole game I mirrored the whole game and made adjustments here and there to get this one particular plastic toy to work with the game so that as it was coming down the play field at an angle it was looking at you instead of away from you um that was a fun game to work on i worked on that game for a long time and that's when everything got pretty quiet or at stern you know i'd walk in the morning and i hear a screw gun go off every five minutes you know it's like and then silence and then i walk down the halls um i would walk down the halls at work and i would i would say hello and i would hear hello hello hello hello it was a pretty scary time um i call it the dark days um so in 2010 after big buck we we made avatar and that was when we made our first what we called a premium game which is like our le today um and i just introduced a couple new features that weren't on the pro to that and we made 400 400 premiums of avatar i believe and we were at that number for a couple of models until we got a little braver and went up to 500 and you know and today we're at a thousand or 500 um uh so when when i worked on the avatar le i'm like uh i didn't want to change too much of the play field and make it a totally different game but i wanted to introduce a white ball so in order to be able to detect that white ball coming out of the trough i put a couple of pieces of sheet metal where the ball rests on the shooter lane switch so if a metal ball came out there it landed on those two metal rails and it made a contact like a switch but if the ceramic ball came out it saw the shooter switch but it didn't see the other switch and I knew it was the ceramic ball and we would do a double scoring thing with that. That a game that I don have in my collection that I would like and if I was going to get one I would definitely want to get the LE premium version of that game after that that when things started opening up and we started bringing people back to Stern to work when we did Tron in 2011 I loved the movie I love the game I've been hearing a lot of people saying that we're gonna vault that game you know or you should vault that game so I told everybody to just keep writing and you write to Seth Davis at Stern pinball dot com you know we want to try and then at the webinar yesterday I heard a couple people clamoring for a remake of Walking Dead so I'd really like to do that too and that was also a Sam game that would have there'd be a lot of work to convert it over to spike but I think it would be worth doing so we'll see what happens in the future kiss I worked on in 2015 and at the same time we were working on uh steve was working on game of thrones and he'd been at it for about a year i started on kiss in right around christmas time that year and uh they came up to me and they told me that they were going to push kiss in front of game of thrones and i'm like okay uh that's january february march april we ordered parts for production and in may we were building kiss in the new building on Lunt Avenue.
    41:04
    That was about the scariest thing I think I ever did because I had all these roto-molded parts out. And when you roto-mold parts, back in the day when we did it the way we did it then, we would make a mold and we would make a casting of the piece part and it would be up about 5% or 10% because when you go and make tooling off of that part, it shrinks. the part will actually shrink. And then when you mold it, and then the part comes out of the mold, it shrinks a little bit. So you have to kind of calculate the size of the part and the shrinkage. I had bad dreams that the ball was going to kick up and come out of Gene's mouth and it was going to get stuck. Like the hole wasn't going to be big enough or it was going to shrink up too much. So all the molded parts for that game came right at the end. And that was pretty frightening, but it all went to plan. It all worked. um 17 i i started to work on aerosmith which was the first game with the lcd uh we pushed batman we pushed batman in front of it um because uh we wanted to make sure um we wanted to make sure that we could have the show before before he had passed away um so we we flip-flopped those two games which was actually good for me because that gives a lot more time to work on the uh on the new video um uh the new the new videos for the game the first lcd video i saw uh we did a we did a version of jackie talking but we put uh the voice of sparky from metallica to it you know and just had like a little 20 or 30 second video um but that was really exciting i love the lcd there's there i can display so much more information and let you know where you are with different features in the game um the graphics are unbelievable um sorry um and uh yeah the graphics in the in the game are beautiful but it takes a whole lot of people to put all that content together we have a lot of graphic artists now or when we were in dot matrix world we had three guys that did the work um so uh aerosmith was a lot of fun to work on i wish we would have got speech from steven tyler we had it scheduled and he was coming into town to do a show and he was going to record it and he looked at the script and he saw five or six hundred lines that i had written and he says i can't not he wouldn't be able to do the concert after he did that that speech session so and as we know steven tyler is having issues with his voice and Aerosmith could possibly be done.
    43:43
    That's another game that would be interesting to vault and go back and do some additions to. 2017 also was when Guardians of the Galaxy came.
    43:56
    I worked on that game for about three months before I even knew what the title was. And when I finally found out what the title was, I had this play field drawn with the ramps on the right and the left and some mechanisms on it. and all of a sudden I'm like, I find out it's Guardians of the Galaxy. I'm like, oh, this is beautiful. I had this big area in the middle that I left for some kind of a toy, and I'm like, that's where Groot's going to live.
    44:20
    I was offered the Iron Maiden license at the time, and I'm not an Iron Maiden fan. I like them, but I'm not crazy about them.
    44:29
    Guardians of the Galaxy could have been Iron Maiden with a big Eddie in the middle, which would have been probably really cool. but Keith took the Iron Maiden license and just crushed it. He did a great job. It's a really fun game to play.
    44:44
    But I was a big Guardians fan. I really loved the first movie. And the model that we made for Groot was just gorgeous.
    44:54
    When my model maker finished it and I went over to his house to look at it, I was like, holy moly, the thing is gorgeous.
    45:02
    Had a lot of fun working on that. Munsters came in 2019. I worked on that with Dwight and Elliot. Elliot was the mechanical engineer on the game. He had just designed his first game, John Wick. Elliot is a young guy in his early 30s, very talented. So you'll be seeing a lot more coming from him in the future. He's very, very good engineer. Elliot and Dwight and I also worked on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in 2020 and then uh and then i did rush in 2022 um rush is one of the games that i have in my basement that's next to my metallica that's bolted to the floor forever um i had to i had to have an le there was no substitute i would i i could have taken a premium but i i'm like i really really want an le really bad because i just love the artwork and uh got to work with a new artist on that game and he did a really nice job with it. I remember when I designed the, I was looking at custom armor and I did one with a Rush logo and I did a couple different ones and I'm like, I'm going to make this thing look like a guitar. So I drew it out and I'm like, these are going to be the open areas and we'll put a little backdrop behind it with some art on it.
    46:16
    And I called it Guitarmer. And I remember when we got the first pieces in, I was holding it and I was standing there like I was playing and somebody shot a picture of me and I saw it pop up online somewhere, board playing with a guitarmer.
    46:32
    And just recently we just released Metallica Remastered and got a great response from everybody on that.
    46:43
    Really, really super happy with the outcome and the way the game looks. In a couple months I'll tell you the one thing that I took off it that was kind of cool. but we added a lot of stuff to that game and and Sparky with the with the UV he's got UV screened on his chest and we we put UV ink in his eyes his nostril cavities and on his teeth and when he lights up and we're still working on light shows for that too the bright light comes on and then we're going to let the the UV light you know kind of pulse on and off to make it look like he's glowing from within um the the metallica logo that we added to the back panel looks really nice and that way when you're playing and i would play the game and i would shoot the ramps and i knew i had a couple more letters to go to finish metallica but now i can just actually see it i don't have to look up at the display to see where i'm at because when that ball comes around that ramp and i'm setting up for the next one i don't have time to look up so it was really nice to get that in there um the hammer mechanism never had a key or it never had a uh it never had a light associated with the ball uh lock being lit so i put a uv inside the hammer and it casts light down on the play field so i have a i was talking with greg about it and i go let's put a padlock and some chains going around the hole where the ball gets pulled down and then i go and then we We can UV screen a key next to it, so you don't see the key in the artwork. You just see it when it comes on, so you know your lock is lit.
    48:16
    Added skulls to the slingshots. Did a lot of software changes. Added a couple of rules for the two new albums that weren't released when we made the game in 2013. So we incorporated inserts into the play field for those.
    48:37
    I thank Jody today for getting James Hetfield to participate in our trailer. That was really awesome. I wasn't expecting it. I didn't even know that they had done that.
    48:51
    But that was a really fun game to work on and go back and work on something that was already fun and just pimp it out and just add things to it and make it more fun. There's a feature in the Metallica game that's not there yet. it's called blackened and so when you're playing the game and you get a multi-ball if you get sparky you'll collect james as the band member and then when you shoot the snake and you start the snake multi-ball you'll collect kirk and when you get all four of the band members the scoop lights on the right i added more lights by the scoop lights blackened and when you shoot in there sparky comes into view when you see the throw switch on the wall and he goes and he looks at the switch and he looks at you and then his eyes get all crazy like he's nuts and then he flips you the bird and then he throws the switch and then he looks back at the camera like this and then you see four silhouettes of the band members with the caps on their heads and they're all going so we get the sparky gets back at the band he gets to shock the band so that's going to be really fun so uh i was i looked at the display effect for that and we have a new young graphic artist his name is Patrick and I walked by his desk and I heard that he was working on that feature so I was stood behind him and I was watching it and then he saw me watching and he started it over and I saw it from the get-go and I was like I was laughing so hard I was crying I was like wow this is awesome and I go but you got to give me a family you got to give me a family mode for that you know he can't give him you know the bird has got to go away you got to do this you know um so i really and i really enjoyed uh it was a lot of fun it was almost as much work recreating the new metallica as it was the old one and i think i spent about the same amount of time on it um going back and keeping all the geometry as it was um a lot of things change like if you pull uh like the big orbit flat rail that goes around the back of the game we we don't put mounting feet on the radiuses anymore because it's hard to do uh we've got different ways and different um standards that we're using now so i had to kind of make i had to pull all the the old stuff out and put all the new standards in um there's a few of the rails and stuff in the game uh shot lanes and stuff that are that are that is exactly the same as the old game but there was a lot of work and pulling all the gi in the back panel on the game used to mount on the back of the playfield now it mounts on top of the playfield and acts as like a stiffener to keep the game from you know keep the playfield straight so i had to pull the ramps back both a half an inch so they're a little shorter but you can't even tell by looking at them and they still shoot exactly the same and feel the same. I put chrome wire ramps on it. I was going to put chrome wire ramps on the original game, but the powder coating was a little less expensive at the time. So this game's got chrome ramps. It was just, it was so much fun to work on something, you know, and add to something that was already really, really good. I really enjoyed it a lot. So, and I'm sure you will all, when you get a chance to play it, we're going to have a couple of them here on Saturday. So it'll, they'll be here Saturday and we're bringing an LE and a premium. The line's going to be long. I put the posts up so we can try to get people through the line as quick as possible. But it'll be here and it's, it's definitely a sight to see. There's a lot of stuff in the artwork to look at. And then the next game after that, can't tell you yet.
    52:41
    I think that's all I have. Yeah.