Fireside Chat with Bill Grupp

Pintastic Pinball & Game Room Expo·video·1h 14m·analyzed·Feb 7, 2025

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.030

TL;DR

Bill Grupp traces his pinball software career from Williams factory tester to Jersey Jack lead programmer.

Summary

Bill Grupp, a legendary Williams and Jersey Jack pinball software engineer, shares his career journey from factory QC tester in 1992 through his work on iconic games (Demolition Man, Corvette, Congo, Wonka, Guns N' Roses) to his current role at JJP. He discusses the technical architecture of pinball software, the evolution from Williams to modern development practices, and how version control and device drivers enable complex game behavior.

Key Claims

Williams was producing 160 Addams Family games per day during peak production
high confidence · Direct statement about QC testing workload; Grupp witnessed this firsthand as factory tester
Congo was one of the worst-selling Williams games with ~2,129 units built but only ~1,500 sold
high confidence · Grupp states this from production data; discusses failed Congo kit game conversion plan
Williams WPC system supported ~20 different printer types for operator audits and reporting
high confidence · Grupp describes German distributor using these printers for revenue tracking before USB era
Guns N' Roses multiball lamp effects are synchronized to individual beats of each song in real-time
high confidence · Grupp authored the lamp effect synchronization architecture; confirms 20 songs with beat-level sync
JJP moved factory from New Jersey to Chicago starting November 2019, completed during COVID-19
high confidence · Grupp was directly involved in factory setup and production line management during transition
Grupp ran the JJP production line for one year after factory move, training new supervisors
high confidence · Direct personal account of his role in factory operations post-relocation
Star Trek: The Next Generation had premature cable harness failures due to undersized wire gauge in design
medium confidence · Grupp accepts responsibility for wrong wire size as first cable engineering project
Larry DeMar's auto-percentage code is 'staggeringly big' and complex despite seeming simple in concept
medium confidence · Grupp discusses DeMar's replay/extra ball auto-adjustment system; acknowledges he hasn't fully studied it

Notable Quotes

“I'm sitting there looking at it and I'm thinking this looks exactly like my desk at home and it's just kind of one of those things where you go this is probably where I should be right”
Bill Grupp @ ~5:00 — Describes the moment he recognized Williams as the right career fit after seeing engineer Carrie Mick's disassembled computer setup
“it was 40 games on test at the same time just the noise that that makes and imagine 40 of those all in a row doing the same thing it was you know it was a fun place to be”
Bill Grupp @ ~7:00 — Captures the sensory experience of Williams factory QC work during Addams Family era
“there's at least 10 times more stuff behind the scenes going on that I had no idea was even there”
Bill Grupp @ ~48:00 — Reflects on discovering hidden complexity in WPC software architecture beyond visible gameplay
“Learn a Version Control System. I don't care what it is... it's the only way to keep yourself sane”
Bill Grupp @ ~85:00 — Direct advice to aspiring programmers; emphasizes version control as foundational practice
“if you have a light that gets going faster... that's probably about six lines of code right to just do the blinking part but then you end up with all the stuff that says how long do you want it to go... 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”
Bill Grupp @ ~60:00 — Breaks down complexity of seemingly simple lamp effects; illustrates design vs. implementation gap
“We use a version control system for our entire software development process and it's cloud-based so I check in my changes and all the other people on the team can download those changes”
Bill Grupp @ ~88:00 — Describes modern JJP development workflow during remote COVID work periods
“Dwight had written a Breakout game on the WPC system... and I actually wrote a Breakout game on the same system but instead of using the display I used the lamps... and that's when I met Larry”

Entities

Bill GrupppersonWilliamscompany Jersey Jack Pinballcompany Larry DeMarperson Pat Lawlorperson Dwight Sullivanperson

Signals

?
business_signal: Congo kit conversion game strategy was a major commercial failure, contributing to Williams business downturn circa 2000
high · Grupp: 'Congo was... the worst selling game that Williams had done like they built 2,000 or bought parts for 2000 and sold something like... 1,500... the kid game thing... doesn't quite make sense so again that was a big failure'
?
business_signal: Jersey Jack relocated manufacturing facility from New Jersey to Chicago starting November 2019, completed during COVID-19 pandemic
high · Grupp states: 'they had already been planning to move the factory from New Jersey to Chicago... that that had started in... November of 2020 or 2019' and describes managing 60,000 sq ft warehouse setup during lockdown
?
community_signal: Grupp participated in Williams engineer reunions and public speaking engagements at Pintastic Expo
high · Grupp mentions: 'I've seen you on stage with a team... these Williams reunions' and '2024 Pintastic appearance as first solo speaking engagement'
?
community_signal: Grupp and other Williams veterans actively mentor and educate next generation through public appearances and industry reunions
medium · Grupp makes first solo public speaking appearance at Pintastic; has participated in Williams reunion events with engineering teams
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design_philosophy: Guns N' Roses implemented beat-level lamp synchronization across all 20 songs, representing novel technical achievement in pinball display work
high · Grupp: 'the actions of the lamps are tightly sync to every single beat of the song and it's literally every single beat' and 'the full concert experience... was only possible because we got all the assets from the band... terabytes of concert video'

Topics

Williams factory history and production scale (1992-2000)primarySoftware architecture and device drivers in pinballprimaryVersion control and collaborative remote developmentprimaryJersey Jack factory relocation and operations managementprimaryLegendary engineers (Larry DeMar, Pat Lawlor, Ted Estes) and their impactsecondaryGame-specific technical achievements (Congo, Guns N' Roses multiball sync)secondaryCareer trajectory from electrical engineering to softwaresecondaryWPC system capabilities and hidden complexitymentioned

Sentiment

positive(0.82)— Grupp expresses enthusiasm and pride in his work across all eras; speaks fondly of colleagues and mentors; celebrates technical achievements and problem-solving. Some reflections on commercial failures (Congo, Phantom House) are matter-of-fact rather than negative. Generally celebratory tone about pinball engineering heritage.

Transcript

youtube_auto_sub · $0.000

hello everybody we have uh a distinguished software engineer and that's a first for our show to have a guy who does software sometimes it's hard to understand how his work is manifest in the pinball machine so we're going to explore that and Bill I guess you have some uh some slides prepared for your explanation of your life your existence or whatever you're going to explain today I thought I would just talk about how I started and and some of the stuff that I've done cuz uh cuz I I've seen you I've seen you on stage with a team you know you have these Williams reunions or something like that and you're there um and this is your first time going solo I uh pretty much yeah pretty much no pressure no yeah no pressure you know we don't often get out in the bright lights it's kind of scary for us yeah but yeah yeah so um so um start on the next slide if you want but so um software engineer I went to college to be a software engineer um actually ended up with a degree that was half software half Hardware Computer Engineering they called it um I got out of school in 1991 it's forever ago now but um and it was a recession and I had a really hard time finding a job sent out lots of resumés had lots of interviews got rejected for almost everything and uh um including one of the interviews I had was with a guy named Carrie mic who was a Midway uh electrical engineer so so you were in the Chicago land area Chicago area yep Chicago area grew up grew up in Chicago so and I remember at that interview with Carrie and I teased him about this this past year at our reunion um that I was looking at his desk and he has a computer that is completely disassembled on his desk it is just you know power supply motherboard it's just the whole thing is all across it's all done but it's still working he's got his monitor there he's typing on his keyboard but it's just completely and I'm sitting there looking at it and I'm thinking this look looks exactly like my desk at home and it's just kind of one of those things where you go this is probably where I should be right um and so about eight weeks later I signed up with a temporary agency because I couldn't find a job anywhere else and the first place they stuck me was at Williams and I was working in the factory at Williams so that was 1992 um and what were your job duties it's um so it started off doing kind of odd stuff like I did a little bit of soldering in the line occasionally and and you know assembling stuff but but eventually ended up in the what was the quality control department they had a big push to try and improve the the quality of the games that were being made so quality control I was the last person to play the game before I went in a box um and um so you ended up you know testing the game sometimes had to fix things that weren't quite right um you know Adams Family they were building 160 Adams Family Games a day so they hit a lot of people they a lot of testers they had a lot of you know quality control people um and um so you know I'm in this Factory and it's you know again it's this felt like the place I should be just you know the the sounds the smell the the excitement of the games um you know when you have a you have 40 games on test at the same time just the noise that that makes and and if you know Adam's Family when you're playing the game you know making a jackpot and or a Super Jackpot the game just goes crazy the lights the sound imagine 40 of those all in a row doing the same thing it was it was you know it was a fun place to be is there anything you can say I found this bug in Adam's family or this problem you know it at that point I wasn't even thinking about software right I was I was focused more on just on on what was mechanically wrong with right switches the lamps the solenoids that's what you did as as a as a tester so um but as I'm working the Factory I I did whatever I could to try and meet the people from engineering because they would walk right by and all the people engineering I so you know every time I he got a chance I'd meet somebody occasionally I'd see Steve walk by and Steve Steve was a legendary for being the one who always cashed his paycheck on payday and so so the you know the goal was to try and get to the the the paycheck cashing place before Steve because they'd run out of money when they catch his Jack but um So eventually um I met Chuck Robert Blakeman 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 Ritchie 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 Boon 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 backbox 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 Geer 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 P. 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 Dorn 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 um uh I started working on Toy Story um and Joe Katz was the lead programmer um it was a really cool thing to work on um just because it was so again so Broad and the stuff you can include in that World um and um just getting into it and that's the time where I got sucked into running the factory and for a while I was like oh I could keep helping Jo on this and then I can go back and do the factory during the day and it it was too much so so I did a bunch of early stuff on Toy Story um you know the specifically the all the carnival games that you play um I set up the framework for that I wrote the first two games and then like I said I got sucked away and I couldn't do a lot of work on it so I I did come back after uh towards the end and do some more work um to help them finish it up but um yeah I don't feel like I can contributed as much on that game as I could have but I was doing other stuff so but and next um well I worked on Godfather um did some work on that a lot of the UI display was work I did uh to lay that out um uh I wrote some of the rules for that uh the um um uh what's the name of the one oh man is not working well who has a Godfather yeah no it's um compound multiball is the one I wrote um I really like that really like that feature of the Horseshoe uh um that the area came up with that and um difficult to make the um uh I should have included a picture of that that's that's a good one to talk about but the Horseshoe shot where you shoot in and then it catches the ball but you can hit the target and knock the ball back out that was really difficult to figure out how to actually keep track of the ball in that case because you could have you know you've locked a ball but then you can make a shot that actually kicks the ball back out and it's not really locked anymore because you push it back the that's a very similar problem to what the people from another company were talking about earlier today the uh bash locks yeah in the bar owler tribute game that same thing of you need to know that change of state yeah well and I mean the hard part is figureing out what you're going to do when that happens yeah right you can you can you can detect it you can see oh the ball went away but you got to decide what you're going to do does that does that mean you have to shoot it back in before you can start multiball does that mean um you know the that's maybe it's broken right right the ball just went away what can I do it's gone and is it on the Playfield or is it you know is it stuck somewhere else you don't know um plus and at the rules level that's what they were talking about this morning is um one player puts it in and all that yeah you know how you uh yeah how you account for all those different things that could happen we're we're a littlee on my slides here but uh so um so if we back up what is that we've got the fan slide already did that I'm I'm I'm on this one here there so okay okay um but um but yeah that that compound multiball that was a cool cool and interesting rule to write so plus there's a skill shot way to get into the compound and so that was that was fun to write um and then um I think we're up to elen John I think so so so what what are your points of Pride things that you really like that you were able to pull off well I I really like that the the whole package came together um and I I can't say enough about the team that worked on the game um you know Joe Katz is is the other programmer um that really helped me out with the rules and and I Joe again doesn't do a lot of speaking at at at seminars and stuff like that but he really is the he is the he's the core of of modern pinball software designed at our company I think wow and and very smart very very dedicated to making fun games um he's a really good player too really good so and and where where is Keith what's his Keith is my boss um but he really doesn't you know he really doesn't tell me how to do my job right we're it's a creative process he'll and and he'll you know he'll comment on on stuff we do and he doesn't tell me what to do other than work on this game so um and he's you know he's busy working on his own game too so um you know he he was lead programmer on Godfather and I you know um always going to him asking what did you want to do here what do you want how do you want this to work so yeah another very smart person yeah so um so overall package just amazing I think um the artwork the Playfield layout is amazing um fastest game we've ever done a jersey Jack by far um um the uh sound package um I mean it's Elon John's music um but I'm really proud of the way it sounds in our game um um so and I think it's fun to play but individual things one of the things I was really proud of is the display in the piano it's a neat feature um but um the part that I thought was interesting was it's it's 500 lights it's 500 LEDs and it runs off of our um lamp system right it it is no different than every other LED that's on the Playfield um you know it's driven by the same system if you you know if you tell it to turn on all the lights like when you go into diag you turn on the lights those lights in the panel come on right they're they're LED limbs um but one of the things that I wrote was a driver to be able to do all of our display system stuff on that piano so um I was about to ask somebody had to make that package right right because we have all these really cool tools for doing stuff on the display where you can you know we can do um we have fonts we can do text on the display we can um show movies we can show um Ste images we have all these tools for the big display um and I wrote a driver that does that for these lamps so it takes this array of lamps that's 57 by10 and treats it as an actual display like any other display in our system um so you can you know you can make foreground and background effects on it you can actually so there's actually times when you have two different things showing on the on that little display on the piano um so I was really happy with that the way that came out because it was a you know was a big chunk of work that took me I don't know probably took me close to a month to get it to work but once it was done all these other tools that I had in my pocket for doing you know the regular display work they all worked on that little thing full of lamps yeah and that display is a a key part of uh the players first impression when they walk up to the game so yeah yeah it it's it's funny because um those LEDs are actually so bright um that we had to turn them down when we when we first started doing it that that display it was literally like turn it down I can't see anything else right and when you say turn it down that's a software thing right yeah so so you're the one turning it down yes yes um but I was I was proud of that um but in terms of rules I was um uh I really like the way we did The Wizard mode uh the um um uh Milestones collecting Milestones to get to final tour um because it it really to me really like that theme of um well for if if you haven't have you Haven played the game so you collect Milestones throughout the game to qualify final tour um and there's 10 different milestones in the game and you get them the easiest one to get is by getting combos um so the first Milestone you can get from getting a combo um but there's harder ones um making a Super Jackpot is another one um and you can qualify final tour with four Milestones It's relatively easy to do um but if you can get more Milestones the final tour is worth significantly more points signicantly more you know features become enabled in that mode so I really like that easy to learn difficult to master theme so um want to give any shoutouts to people you've worked with over the years inspiring or it would be a long list Larry deire great great inspiration U great great boss to work for very cre creative very talented person uh I've talked about Ted Ted was a great manager and I learned a lot from him still good friend of mine um Tom yuban U was a you know very talented programmer before he did anything with games um still is today um good friend of mine how about uh sound guys you like working with oh I mean mechanical engineers Chris Granner John Haye um some of the you know um from the old days um still talk to them once in a while um some of the people at Williams or not Williams at Jersey Jack have been really good we have a new one uh Pierce coar he's did the Elton John game he's really good um I never worked I've never worked with um Dave theel he was he was not not in our company but um the cost was really good on G&R um I'm trying to think of so many other people um Eddy Hicks was the mechanical engineer for Congo he's still a good friend of mine I just saw him in Milwaukee last weekend he's working for stern so um really brought uh Williams into the AutoCAD era and when he started there people were still drawing on paper and he really helped to get them up to speed on what you should be doing in AutoCAD so that's 30 years ago now so yeah but it um I think it's interesting for the people who think about uh Boutique pinball companies and uh it's just so different that at a place like Williams you still got Steve cordak there and and there's a lot of institutional knowledge as the cliche goes that is directed toward uh being better at the old methods and somebody has to say it's to go to AutoCAD or I mean when when I started at Williams they were still drawing on paper or Vellum um still had a huge blueprint room or if you wanted to make a change to a drawing you have to go down and check out the drawing and you'd make your changes and then you get them approved by the by the head of mechanical engineering and then they put it back in the blueprint room yeah that's and it's not that long ago right that was that was the way everybody worked so so I got to see them you know switch to you know AutoCAD or you know the electronic drawing archive and yeah yeah pretty interesting all right let's see we could is a burning question in the audience someone who's been really waiting to ask a question all right I have a comment comment Bill's awesome he uh you know we we find bugs there weren't very many to find and when he did find them they were proba kind of lazy and work around them and stuff but Bill finds them and fixes them and you know was like kind of like a jack of all trades he's he's uh he worked in the factory while I started um he was still working running the factory okay uh at Jersey Jack while I was just starting on elen John and so I mean I got to get them a play field they can't have it immediately but you know we had regular talk talks about everything that I'm putting on the Playfield I I you know I let them know everything I want to do and uh and it's like they have things they want to do too and so many awesome I don't know uh teamwork Connections in this game and uh with really good and easy to work with people who aren't egomaniacs I myself s accepted yeah I'm not I I said out in the hall if you want to keep going I've got plenty more real programming stuff we can talk about if you want to keep going but and then we're getting close to the 5:00 hour but yeah up to you well let's see let's take that other question and see what talk about the GNR being the unique step into integrating software and lights and music because of the uniqueness of the Masters how does that compare to the El John because when I as you say you listen to the John okay so for the recording the question is uh is is there something at at the level of the technical techical difficulty that you did for G&R that is uh equally difficult thing that you did for Elton John well I mean it's really easy I use that same system from GNR in Elton chn so the same system it um we made a few changes to it but they're not in the way the system works yeah but his hands are not just in the beat with the music you're playing in between too which is really impressive yeah uh again the answer there is I wrote that system for G&R I used that same system in Elton John so you had the masters from Elton John to be able to yeah do that down to the not to the beat yeah um so it's the same system um that we use for G&R um that and then I had to write drivers to extend that for doing like he said the hands Elton John and his head um but it's just an extension of that same system where you you know on this beat or on this many seconds into the song do this action and so for the hands it's literally recorded what what actions to do with each hand for each you know each beat of each song and well what kind of time interval we talking tens of milliseconds for that or hundreds Mill millisecond millisecond yeah millisecond for most of that stuff is enough I mean the the fire time for those hands are 8 8 to 10 milliseconds so you can't do them any faster than that anyway and so so you have to give the fire signal 8 to 10 milliseconds ahead of when it's actually going to happen and have that come out when the music yeah it's you don't have to be that close for those hands it's it's you know the you can't quite perceive that um but once you but you have that lag that once you tell it to fire you can't do it again yeah because you won't see it you had to you know you have already down you have to have that time for it to go down the time for it to come back up um so yeah about millisecond accuracy is enough for stuff like that so but is that I I literally just copied that system in and use that same thing it's not the same with the videos though the video no no that's another interesting uh interesting thing so we did that really well synced video on G&R where the video is synced up to the the live concert footage on Elton and and there's a lot lot behind this but the real answer is the Lor asked that we not sync up video to his current concert video um and um if you can do this experiment at home but it works really well at G&R um where you have you know if you've seen GNR and concert they sound almost like they do on the albums they really work to keep that same Studio sound um Axel is not quite what he was in the 80s but um but he tries he really you know really tries and and and um but on Elton John if you've everever been to Elton any Elton John fans here been to his concerts um he has really changed the way he sings those songs from the 70s and 80s and I don't you know I'm sure part of it is his you know his voice has changed a little bit but I think especially listening to him in concert I think his I think his um I think his view of those songs the meaning of those songs has changed for him over time and he sings Them differently um and if you try and sync up the studio Master songs to his current concert later it looks wrong it just does not work um and and so they asked us not specifically not to sync up those songs that we licensed with the videos from his concert tour so we do have video of his concerts in the game uh and It's featured on the on the topper quite a bit um but it's not synced up beat for beat with the studio Master songs other questions over here what like languages are using what programming languages this this was actually something on my list to talk about um so it at Jersey Jack we use Visual Studio C++ um it runs on Linux on the actual game but we do all our development on Windows because the debugging tools are better um but um I would not recommend that right uh use what you have I you know it doesn't matter if you want to write in Python if you want write in Assembly Language right we wrote we had to write in Assembly Language at Williams Because the processor was so slow at the time and our our memory was so limited we had to write an assembly language and we we were literally counting the cycles for each routine we had this little uh the 6809 had this little scorecard that shows for every instruction that you did how long it took and we would be counting Cycles because it was that critical that you know um you didn't overrun your Loop and and and run out of time um but today you know we're a thousand times faster CPU rates um so you know use whatever you have um you know um the the tools of gotten so much better the process is so much faster you don't have to concentrate on that stuff as much um I I like I like an objectoriented system for some things works great for modes you think of a mode you can write a base class for what the mode does and each of the different flavors of the modes is a deriv class right um but um don't focus on what language you use focus on writing the rules and figure out how to do them in the language you're using people well there's a lot of um there's a lot of um history in the in the software we use that dates back before I started at Williams um they had when I started Williams they had at least 10 years of development on their system um and it it had gone through a couple revisions but this was um this is what Larry dear did when he started at Williams he was you know contracted to create a new development system for Williams um and the the system he created was I think it's amazing still is to this day um but very well-developed multiball handling system um you know the keeping track of the balls that are locked the balls that are in the trough keeping track of the balls that are in play very well-developed system um and you know by the time I got there they had already been through so many issues that they had fixed that that system was very stable very reliable very understandable um and the system that they use at Jersey Jack is is modeled after that system um but not written in assembly it's all written in C++ um and went through its same you know trials and tribulations and failures um long before I got there there so again that system now is you know 10 years in is very reliable very stable very welldeveloped um and and you can do things like you know easily do things like the um won Vader lockup where you have you you just you know locking balls that get lost to another player is an easy thing to do in that system now because it's so welld developed and and they've been through those problems and know how to do that um I can add to that too that um over at Stern Pinball uh in the mids lman sheets started working there and uh Jim schelberg and I were able to interview him about what he was doing it it was all low-level stuff that the other programmers would use but it was like over a year of people saying well what's lime doing we don't see anything from him well you know when when the new system came out then it was probably people like you or or your equivalent at Stern Pinball would say this is great we we're so much more flexible yeah so much is already packaged up for us yeah for so it's but um but on the other side of that I'm going to be the one who tries to exploit you know all of the all of the corner cases for that system I'm going to find some something or you know hey I want to do this and like like one of the things I really like to do in in the games that I work on is have somewhere when you're in multiball to put the balls drives me crazy you've got six you know let's Name six you have four balls in the Playfield you can't make any shots right these balls are all on your way so one of the things and it's I I've done in a in most of the games at Jersey Jack I didn't do it in Elton but um cson Rose is a great example where you can you lock a ball in the guitar in multiball um and and they stay up there for 20 seconds or something like that and if you can get all of them up there we give you a jackpot for that um but that's one of the things I it's kind of like a signature thing I like to do but get get a place to put the balls we you're multiball well they had never done that at Jersey Jack that was one of the things that was on the list of don't ever lock balls while you're in multiball I'm like but I want to do that I want to so but I was able to figure that out and now it's it's easy to do that because the the issues that we um you know encountered in trying to make that work have been fixed and so you well this is what you have to do if you want to lock balls and melt ball and it works and you have to handle all those stupid cases like if somebody tilts when there's a ball up there or when somebody you know um you know somebody drains at the same time a new ball is being served you know stuff like that bad switches to always have to deal with bad switches yeah other question lock for a while it out rock you multiball locked for like 15 seconds if you have four balls going on you get it in there kind of hangs on to it for a bit well tell you a secret we aren't actually locking the balls we're just waiting we're waiting to give them back for a bit but they're not locked there if you you know they will all come back at some point yeah yeah yeah so okay another question here how much work uh was involved in the news code update for Guns and Roses um guns and& Rose's code update is it a big update how how recently are we talking that so I've been working on i' I've been doing this work this is this is because Elton John is you know trailing off so I've been actually doing all that work um I have um promised that it would be about um I think I promised it would be about two man months worth of work so it's going to be twice that so um I I it um it is not a significant update in there's there's not a bunch of new rules are going to show up but I've went back and gone through all of the um all of the songs the scoring for the songs um to get them better balanced with the rest of the game I've gone through all of the album modes um and tried to make sure well first of all make sure they're fun cuz I those were you know those were at the end of the project they didn't get as much love as they should have so try to make sure they're all fun have you played in the betas yet that are out I have yeah okay um same thing for um SL solo uh spent quite a bit of time again trying to make sure that's fun and the scoring is appropriate um and then I went through the list I mean uh list of things that people had complained about on the game that you know um uh having the option to not start a song If you your ball falls in the scoop yeah right yeah that's yeah um so that's that's in there right now you can turn that on that's it's off by default um but if you want to enable that you can it's in the beta right now um same things uh I had many people saying that the you know on their game the ball rolls out of the guitar lock and goes right between the flippers um so you can turn on a ball saber for that now that's again I'll play default but if if your game does that so um so significant amount of work um but I you know there's not going to be a lot of new features it's more fixing the imbalance issues and adding things that people have asked for that would you know make their game more fun so and hopefully by the end of June there'll be a real release out everybody can get so any implications for tournament play on that um that's a good question um other than the scoring changes probably not um because the um tournament play should already be doing you know taking the randomness out between players right so probably not big changes other than the scoring um it may change the path people take because um you know like SL solo now is a little more lucrative but you heard it here first yeah and if you're not on the you know if you're interested in suggesting ideas you know get on the beta Channel and and let me know that's that's what I'm doing right now so all right last call for questions oh okay how much work are you putting into it before you ever see anything on a play field um you know I imagine most of it gets kind of written in there but the first time it's put all together you know what does that you guys okay is this is a programmer's point of view you're talking about so so the you're finally putting some of your game specific code on the Playfield that you've gotten this I mean this depends a lot on the particular project and a lot on the game designer too um Steve will give us a Playfield very early that is almost useless in terms of the final outcome of the game right it it will have you know it um it will have a few of the devices and it'll have you know some of the shots um but will look nothing like the final the final game I um somewhere I probably have a picture of the first Whitewood for Elton John and it's it's really it's got the orbits and it's got um the side ramp shot on it and then it's got like 40 different inserts on it he's just testing out what the inserts look like and how to make them into shapes that are interesting for the artwork um so um on you know on other games the first whitew I saw was almost a complete Game Eric is masterful at creating um Parts with the 3D printer so he can you know he will create ramps and mechs and everything on the 3D printer and you can you know you can do more in terms of what the rules for the end game will look like on something like that um but in in in you know in the real world those things get destroyed very quickly because they're not able to stand up to the ball so it's different different for every every yeah we had another question further back there um this is just more like a general thing I mean compared to the other like Jersey Jack games this game feels like it has like really strong flippers um and I was wondering if there was any sort of like thought process behind that flipper strengthen Elton John well really good like can I answer a piece of that please do when I first was you know interviewing for uh for uh Jersey Jack pinwall I had to meet our the chairman of the board I guess you call him I said I want to go there but flippers got to be fixed and I I have nothing to do with fixing them nothing but they did fix them and uh okay Wells Rose has benefited from that I'm pretty sure Steve's contribution was to say it's going to be fixed and Steve says it's going to be fixed someone else fix basic requirement and they didn't you know they didn't work as well as they needed to that's what I think so you spin well no I I can tell you the entire story of of how we got to Steve's game but the truth is this it's this is very subjective um because mean the games from Wizard of Oz up through um G&R all use the same Electronics they they are unchanged and there was not a time when I worked at Jersey Jack that we considered the flippers to be broken um the strength of the flippers and they're totally adjustable right you you can turn up the power on all the flippers on every game that we've done um the the strength of flippers has chosen in the games in all the games including El and John to be able to make the shots that are in that game and you have to you have to account for the Aging of The Flipper Max right they all the flippers will weaken as the coil sleeve starts to wear and it's the um you know the The Flipper mechanism pivot Points start to wear so you have to you plan for some of that so you go a little over and Beyond what you think is a good setting for the strength um when we got to Toy Story Pat had this idea for doing this jump um like no good Gophers right and we you know we were having problems getting that jump to make a consistent shot right um so Pat ended up with um a stronger flipper coil than he had ever used before for just the left flipper um and it's I mean it's the equivalent of the blue flipper coils from Williams which is the one Steve always uses right um but it was a new one for Jersey deck they had never used a a blue flipper coil from Williams they had used orange and yellow um mostly orange for the bottom flippers yellow would be for the upper Playfield stuff like that so um so for Toy Story we made a change to the driver board to make the power to the flipper coils more consistent um larger capacitors there's larger traces on the board there's better heat dissipation on that aisle board and that was all for Toy Story and all we did is we made that change and that became our new IO board for all of our games Toy Story started with that board and every game godfather has had board Elton has had board so when Steve came in Steve already had the benefit of that board and the blue flipper coils which he had already been using at Williams right yeah so that's the combination you see in Elton John right now is the Steve Ritchie flipper coils and the board that was made for Toy Story which is now our standard board so again what I could see outside before I knew anything about Jersey Jack was basically what everybody was complaining about too yeah it's cool that it got fixed so okay another one back so so that wasn't so the mechanism is it's yeah yeah okay the way it's driven no question there is that difference electrical the flipper link is the same the the the Bell crank is the same we didn't you we didn't change any of that stuff so yeah I was just curious because they do feel different than like to Guns and Roses uhhuh they they do um but again we you know before Toy Story we never considered the games to be broken I mean I agree yeah I I agree they they feel different than other games and it's very subjective but um but the I I think the the settings for those games made it easier to make some of the shots and if you turn up the power some of the shots especially the outside shots gets much more difficult so designing to that Playfield right same thing we did on Steve's game we we played with the settings for the power on his game to make all the shots the easiest to make within that range so okay I'm going to take the last question um so you guys have this uh new Young designer from New Robert Englunds are you working with him um honestly I've been too busy to really work with him um and go out to lunch with him quite often he was was he was here a minute ago he here a minute ago waited until he I have not um had the opportunity to work on any of his game yet um I just honestly been too busy I was on Elon John and now I've been working on the guns and& roses stuff so um I've got to play his his game he's working on quite a bit um but not had to not had the opportunity to work with him yet so okay well you know we do a show every year I will Reserve judgment for yes all right well thanks for this extended interview you're welcome so thanks for having me and and I hope uh this is giving you more insight to what these software guys do all day