5:03but um So eventually um I met Chuck Blake who was head of the El electrical department at Williams um and I told him hey you know I'd be interested in a position in in engineering if one comes available um and um probably 6 months later he came down and he says well I think I've got something available for you and that was because all of the people that left to go to Capcom oh right so Capcom was starting up so python um your brother went to Capcom Mark Richie uh Mark codella was an electric engineer and Mark Johnson was a uh was the cable guy so I found a spot in the cable Department in electrical engineering um and that's you know that was my step into the door um says car guy on car guy yeah yeah I I like I like cars I I grew up working on cars um it's still a hobby of mine um I was um Pat Lawler is a big car guy too um so I've done a lot of car stuff with him I was his pit crew when he was racing cars so yeah uh the next slide I looked up I finally found the first game I remember ever playing 1973 was a A Williams Jubilee um it was in a bar a Pizza Pub in in uh town by our house I remember vividly playing that game it was kind of my start to pinball um so all right the next slide is the Midway one let's see if I miss anything here um yeah the famous entrance to 3 401 North California yeah um so I I think it's interesting just how many games in that short time I worked in the factory for just over a year I think it's interesting just how many games that are um you know the core of what we consider you know the big area for Williams I mean Adam's Family Getaway Black Rose Doctor Who Creature From A Black Lagoon fish tailes uh White waterer and Dracula those are all the games that I worked on in the factory testing those games and that was that was in like a year and a half period I mean all those games that's how many game teams they had at Williams That's How many games went through there at that time which to me was just amazing looking back on that yeah and and for those of you who were here last hour this is up against uh Tales from the Crypt and like that so A Lot fewer from the competition they they still made a lot of games too I mean compared to what we're doing now oh you know there were a you know we sold a lot more games back then we made a lot more games but um but it's again it's interest interesting for me to look back and see how many you know really big games came through in that time time that I just happen to walk in the door because I worked for a t agency so um and then um so in electri engineering um the first game that I did cables for was Star Trek next Generation Um so if if you've ever had a game where the the Canon harness breaks you can blame blame me for that that's that was my fault my fault I used the wrong size wire I should have used a you know a heavier gauge wire so I didn't know it's first game I did um uh same thing for Judge Dread and papey I did cables for those games um and um uh you know other odd jobs around the electrical engineering department but I started to meet some of the programmers um I met Dwight I met um Mike Boone I met um um uh who well what about Larry dear what I didn't meet him until a little later cuz he was uh at the time I started he was actually a contractor for Williams and he wasn't in the building all the time so he was in and out he worked out hours um so I didn't meet him right away um I met Ted right away Ted you know Ted was the head of the department teds yep um but so one day I'm talking to Dwight and you know I'm working on the cables for Star Trek and and I you know we're talking about what stuff is going on and he says you know have you ever thought about doing software well you know my whole life I figured I'd be doing some sort of electrical engineering type work he's like no you really should be doing software and and he was right he was right you know I realized quite quickly that that's where that's where the cool stuff was at Williams was doing software and so I started you know I set up one of the development kits that they used for we called it in hin um because it found bugs right um so but it was basically a back box that had all uh development stuff so you could load code into it and run code so I set that up on my desk um and then started learning how the software worked in Williams before I was even in the software department so um and that's that's when I started you know when I actually met Larry dear uh I wrote a um Dwight had written a Breakout game to play in one of in um is that Star Trek I think that was in Star Trek wasn't it was breakout in Star Trek do you remember I don't remember yeah but he'd written a Breakout game on the WPC system po yeah yeah it wasn't meant breakout although it's rumored to exist I think yeah it wasn't chcken out on doing it because it was a licensed Atari game right right oh I I think I could have beaten that I think there were some other brick chipping games before that that yeah but yeah so I actually wrote a Breakout game on the same system but instead of using the display I used the lamps you know the lamp Matrix so and that's that was something that Larry saw and it was really interesting because he never thought of doing that so that's when I met Larry yeah so um so did a bunch of games in software um uh Demolition Man was the first game I worked on um with Ted and he taught me a lot about how the system works and was a great teacher and just how to do software in general um and you know I knew what to do um but the style of things were kind of the stuff I learned from okay let's let's pause there a moment because yesterday we had Demolition Man under the rig so world champion Eric Stone could show somebody uh how to exploit the game you know what's uh the right way to play it and so forth um is there anything that you felt really good about in particular the particular coding or oh well I mean it was my my first introduction to doing the the display effects doing the graphics work for uh pinball machine um and that was really exciting because you got to work with the artist the dot matrix artist U Eugene gear and Scott Sani were um Scott was amazing he could just come up with stuff so fast it he was he would out strip me my days where I'd say you know I need this and this and this and he come back okay here you go I'm like I didn't even started on the first first thing I asked for and he he was just amazing um so and and it had some really good stuff because it had you know it was a movie and there was lotch of good flips like the start of multiball where you see the helicopter flying in over the mountains and stuff and they translated really well to orange dots and part of that's Scott and part of that's just because the way the movie was you know like the car the car crash scene where the car is flying into the billboard and stuff it's you know um stuff you can do in low resolution dots right um but the one I really remember having fun doing was the um the um this one of the multiball starts where I I did this really cool lamp effect where it's these little explosions that go off over the play field and it's just a really cool buildup thing that I thought was really interesting and fun it's still fun to see that when people play the game well it's here at the show so you can try it out yeah yeah so um the next one I worked on was Corvette uh with Tom euan U and Tom was a new program Grammer um uh at Williams but he started about the same time I did um so we got to work on that together and same thing he he you know I did most of the display work and he did most of the rules programming uh we kind of learned stuff together and he still a really good friend of mine so y there's a Corvette here also y yep um dirty hary uh was a project that a lot of people worked on because it was not managed very well um so it was one of those where everybody had to jump in and try and get it back on track um another place where you know Larry was was helpful in making that happen and and also um um very um very um appreciative of the work I did on it he made it clear that he saw that I had you know really contributed to that project and got it back so um uh and then um uh a couple other little projects in the middle but Congo was the last game I did last pinball game I did at Williams uh and I was lucky enough to be the lead programmer uh and work with Dean Grover um who passed away last year but um that was a lot of fun that was a really long project um not many people know but that started as a two-level Playfield there was a uh upper level Playfield that was cut out of the same board um and um and the gorilla that's down below originally was motorized so it would raise up out of the Playfield in the center um but it was you know decided that that design was not any fun so basically wiped away and they started Fresh So a very long project but um now you mentioned that uh you would be doing a lot of display effects and uh other people doing rules of when it comes to driving a mechanism is that considered a display effect would that be in your we would we would call it a device driver so you you start off with something that's you know like a like like The Claw on Demolition Man right that's that's a device we we would write a device driver for that um you know a code that just determines what that thing does and then you would tell it you know go to this position so that you know the the user of that doesn't have to figure out you know do I have to go 25 steps or 35 steps now you write a device driver that does that work for you and you can tell at a higher level what you want it to Doh and and maybe in some cases query where is the arm or whatever and like that right yeah or is it broken right right that's you know can you do anything with it that's that's one of the first questions you ask yeah and uh I guess since we've mentioned Larry so much uh he's he's a real pioneer in compensating for broken stuff yes uh how how was that helpful to you like do you remember anything from those days of I I remember when I first started looking at the software at Williams at the time I was amazed at how much there was I mean you you playing the game you see the high level of the lights and the sounds and the display but there was I would say there's at least 10 times more stuff behind the scenes going on that I had no idea was even there um you know things that um you know even today I I don't think people don't even know about U that the wp system WPC system supported something like 20 different printers that were used by uh operators to download the audits um the our distributor in Germany um fanatical about keeping track this is long before USB yeah yeah seral Cal printers um so every printer used a different cable a different interface somewhere parallel somewhere serial um but the distributor in Germany was fanatical about keeping track of how much the game's earned how long the ball time was how much multiball people got they wanted to know everything and so I mean nobody knows today but if you have the printer kit installed in the game and you have one of their printers you just walk up plug in the printer and it dumps all that out automatically and um to me and then you mentioned the the compensation stuff but the other thing that Larry worked on was the um Auto percentag which John talked about the patent for auto percentag things like replay and extra ball are Auto percentage would automatically adjust for the particular location how much free play it gives out um the code for that staggeringly big um you know you think oh that sounds really simple no that's it's complicated to make it work right um and not you know overcompensate not give away too much free games as you're trying to get the system up to spe so um you know the like I said just the amount of stuff that was in the game behind the scenes to me was staggering I I I never would have imagined before walking in the door how much was in those games so um how big is the code to like a a flashing light effect where the flashes get closer and closer together is that uh a lot of code or so so if you wanted to I mean ignoring the code that makes the you know the low-level code that where you actually have to turn on somewhere you have to turn on a switch somewhere you have to turn on a transistor that makes the light come on and it's a little more complicated because most of our most games have a matrix so you've got a a row and a column you have to turn on to get one light to come out ignoring that if you wanted to have a light that gets going faster um that's probably about six lines of code right to just to do the blinking part right but then you end up with you know all the stuff that says how long do you want it to go right how fast do you want it to go at its fastest right how fast you want it to go at its slowest right and each increment either you have to figure out how much to increment or you have a table that says when you're at this blink this fast the next step like this fast so so yeah the at the lowest level probably about six to eight lines of code but probably more like half a page to get the whole thing to do that lamp okay and that half a page is something that the the rules guy would then be able to just think in terms of what the user is experiencing that it's a total of 10 seconds of faster and faster and it's this fast at the beginning this fast at the end right okay well that gives us uh some some beginning insight into easy versus hard and uh uh where are we on your person yeah let's finish this up so after Congo Congo was the I think it was the worst selling game that Williams had done like they they built 2,000 or bought parts for 2000 and sold something like yeah it says 2129 on IP yeah well I think they really sold like 1,500 and they planned on doing all these kit games for Congo and that was a huge failure and so they yeah I forgot about that yeah yeah um I the kid game thing sounds really good but when you think it through you have to take a good game that's you know either somehow not earning money anymore or has to be worth less than the game that you're going to put in it and destroy it right okay I'm going to take my no fear and turn that into a Congo and that just doesn't quite make sense so again that was a big failure so downturn in business for Williams and they're looking for anything else to to uh make money so that's when they got into slot machines and I ended up doing a game called Phantom house which was a kind of like a slot machine but not um it wasn't really gambling um and then they only sold 50 of those so didn't sell very well um and then um when pin 2000 and the rest of pinball shut down I was given the option of working in slot machines or going home so I worked on slot machines so does that mean you know a lot about how to uh get people all excited so they keep pumping money in I do I do uh we we call that um random positive reinforcement mhm um that's yeah there's a whole psychology of how you um get people addicted to things so um and I mean we can we can talk about that in terms of pinball too right pinball pinball pinball is by definition random so the random part's already there what's important is giving the reward for things that happen that are good right so that's you know we I don't have to put random in pinball you get that anyway that's Steve's job um but I have to give the reward for doing something good in pinball and that's what gets people excited about playing the game again and you get that one little hook because wow that was cool I want to do it again yeah or um I I think of uh combos also where uh you can do this shot and feel good you can do that shot and feel good but to do this shot and set right up and do that shot uh and of course Demolition Man is like the ultimate right right do 10 combos in a row and it's you know there's there's a cool sound effect when you get I think the seventh or eighth combo and and the lights keep getting bigger and bigger yeah it's the reward that you have to work on in pinball mhm so um and then uh um eventually uh the slot machine thing kind of lost its luster for me and I went to work for Cisco um Cisco Systems not the food company router company um Cisco yeah um and uh did that for about seven years then I got laid out from laid off from there um I was working still working with Ted and Tom euan they worked at Cisco with me um and then um I was hired by Larry dear again to work for his company and he was doing slot machines again so slot machines for I did that for about another 10 years wow so and then back at Jersey Jack in 2019 and and who brought you into Jersey Jack what somebody Pat Lawler Pat Lawler okay um he uh he had taken over engineering at some point uh I don't know all the history how that came about um but I had talked to him and I said you know I'm looking for a job and interested I had a couple other options um but I was really interested in working in pinball again and so I talked to him and he couple of months went by and he says I think I finally figured out how to you know make space in the budget yeah well now there's a lot of EX Williams people there but which ones were already there when you got in uh well Keith Keith Johnson was the head of the department um and uh Ted sdes was there in software uh all the other software people were were um never at Williams they were they're younger Williams didn't exist when they were there um there were a few other people in mechanical that had worked at Williams um not all of them on slot on pinball some had work on slot machines um Peter Dorne worked at Williams uh did a lot of the top boxes for slot machines um uh Hernando Fado was um one of the um he did a lot of work to set up the factory mechanical engineering work uh I remember working with him at the factory um so he was there he since retired um let's see who else was there that when I started uh purchasing people there were uh Ron Summers from was in purchasing in Williams and he was working at Jersey Jack when I started there so there were quite a few mhm so they're all crammed in this little tiny building yeah so so you're so I think we're up to a slide for oh that was the recruitment there yeah yeah so um so Jersey Jack I started off uh you know doing software we worked on Wonka um and then uh we were working on G&R and then Co hit and uh I don't know how people know but during this time they had already been planning to move the factory from New Jersey to Chicago uh that that had started in I think maybe November of 2020 or 2019 2019 and then Co hit in March of 2020 and we were already moving the factory we couldn't stop that um so but but before that uh there was a like a development team office in the Chicago land so that's what you started with yes they so the in ing it always been in uh the Chicago area and it was in Bensonville uh it was a small 5,000 ft office um and all the development works there mechanical software um were all done in that office um the the sound people and artwork were outside they were contractors that worked outside in office but um and so Duncan and I started about the same time at at Jersey Jack Duncan Brown Duncan Brown and Moler was another guy that came from Larry's company who's an artist tell all these guys we want them to come here for our seminar pram in the future I that'd be awesome um but um so you built a factory there or I got I got asked by I got asked by Pat Waller if I would help set up the new Factory that at that time it was kind of still secret they weren't telling a lot of people they were going to move to Chicago and so he you know he picked a few people to help him without making a bunch of noise he asked me to help him with that and so I researched all the stuff for getting the factory set up a company to do all the conveyor work a company to set up the warehouse we figured out how to lay out the factory into a you know a what we remembered as a as a pinball Factory um so I helped them with that um all through Co it was it was me and one other guy in this 60,000 ft warehouse and we're putting tape on the floor to figure out how to and then I actually ended up running the production line for a year after that too we hired all the supervisors and trained them how to build these games because nobody moved from New Jersey and we had to hire all new people so so I ran the production line for a year and then I finally found somebody who was much better at it than me and hired him and then I went back to doing software so so that's my story so I right I threw this picture in just because we have a lot of fans at Jersey Jack okay okay sorry I couldn't resist um so the first game at jjp with your uh software involvement is Wonka then yep yeah and they were in the middle of that game when I got there um there was still a lot of work to do but they had been working on it for a while mhm um so any particularly glamorous work that you got to do for art um well I think it's glamorous but I don't know other people but I did a lot of the work for the woner Vader multiball rule uh wrote some of the rules for that did most of the display work for it lamp effects for that um I thought that was a really cool feature where the ball you lock the ball and it stays across games and stuff um and the Gob stopper I you know Ted wrote the device driver for the Gob stop St ER to make it open and close and I made the rule where we you know you lock the balls in the Gob stopper um and then I wrote the um uh Pure Imagination wizard mode for that game too so um okay and then G&R is next on the list G&R G&R um so this was Co right we you know we saw the storm coming um not knowing exactly what it meant but I clearly remember the like two days before St Patrick's Day 2020 we rented a truck and we loaded up all of the Prototype games for G&R and took them to everybody's house so we could keep working CU we you know we didn't know we were going to like get shut down for two days or two weeks or six months we didn't know so packed them all up so we're all working in our homes on the game and and you know trying to divide up the work and we had all these songs we ended up dividing up all the songs and and you each person took like four or five songs to get through all 20 of them so um and in that game I wrote the um the um the structure for the way the lamp effects for the songs work so you know every song has its own lamp effect I wrote the structure that let let you sync up the lamp effects to the part of the song you're at and then I believe we've had uh Eric talk about how proud he is of the musical uh yeah you know he being a musician himself and and such yeah um but that was that was something I don't think they had ever done before where the you know the um the actions of the lamps are tightly sync to every single beat of the song and and it's literally every single beat yeah like gly Brock did a Cheesy version of that you if you played gly Brock you would know what was intended yeah but doing it yeah you know Eric's way is and Eric's dream was the you know the full concert experience um when when you played the game and and um that was only possible because we got all the assets from the from the band we got terabytes of of concert video we got the you know the actual Studio Masters um uh for the songs um and um I said it was an immense amount of work and the only reason we were able to get through it is because it was Co and we had nothing else to do but work on that game so right so how does that uh how does that work in practice as far you know your your house developing your code and you just up upload it somewhere and you get other people's code like their releases 0.98 0.99 that kind of release well we can mean we can talk a little about you know real programming stuff but if you're an aspiring new programmer uh learn Version Control uh learn a Version Control System I don't care what it is um but it's it is the only way to keep yourself sane uh it gives you the ability to um back up and say well that didn't work so good I'm going to go back a couple days and and see you know either see what I did wrong or start again and see how I can do it better um Lear a version version control system uh get you know gets free it works great you've never heard of it look it up um but we use a version version control system for our entire software um development process um and it's it's you know it's cloud-based so I I check in my changes um and and all the other people on the team can download those changes just by checking them out um and it doesn't so they can back up your stuff if if you broke oh there's a there's a thing called blame in the system we use where you can literally just tag is you know this is the person who broke everything yes yes um but like like you said if if something gets broken you can back up and just undo those changes and figure out why it was broken or just leave that stuff out yeah um but and it doesn't open okay job some some things are better it does an okay job of merging changes together if two people are working on the same piece of code you have to merge the two together so they work and sometimes you can automate that like if you're working one person is working at the top one person working at the bottom you can usually automate merging those together if they're working the same you know same function or they're adding to a list of options and they separate options yeah right um and it you know it's not without its pitfalls because you you you know you make make a change to let's let's say I change you know how many um how many pages there are in some sort of story but the guy who's writing the thing that shows those pages on the screen if he doesn't know about it then you're going to you're probably going to have a bug because you're going to have one page that you can't show somehow or something like that um so again working working with in teams on the same um same area of code is is inherently dangerous but but the tools help a lot so any other uh Recollections of Guns and Roses of successes or compromises or well successes I think one of the biggest successes in that game is um the way the music the you know the studio Master recordings are synced up to the video right the the the videos are all from their current concert tour or the current at the time time and the the recordings are all from their album releases which were you know 15 20 years ago being you know before their concert tour that worked really well for them and that studio stuff was probably a lot more precisely produced and oh yeah controlled yeah yeah um and part of that is part of that is um you know JP uh dwin in the Netherlands doing the you know he's working with I think he worked with his brother to do that um where they're going through and listening to the music and adjusting the the cuts for each scene of the concert footage to make it line up um and part of it is the work that I did to make sure that the sound stays in sync with the video that you know if you're if you're 18 seconds into the music track you need to be 18 seconds into the video track and and so I'm pretty proud of the way that came out that works really well in that game all right and Toy Story 4