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Ep 120: The Godfather of Modern Code, Larry DeMar

LoserKid Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 56m·analyzed·Oct 24, 2023
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TL;DR

Larry DeMar: From college coder to Williams legend who revolutionized pinball software and saved the industry.

Summary

Long-form interview with Larry DeMar, legendary Williams pinball programmer credited as the "godfather of modern code." DeMar traces his path from Chicago childhood through computer science studies to joining Williams in 1980, where he programmed foundational games like Black Knight, Funhouse, Twilight Zone, and High Speed. He discusses the transition from electromechanical to solid-state pinball, the creative culture at Williams under Mike Stroll and Ken Fedesna, his partnership with Eugene Jarvis on video games (Defender, Stargate, Robotron), and the technical innovations that saved pinball from near-extinction in the early 1980s, including the development of new operating systems, alphanumeric displays, and sampled music techniques.

Key Claims

  • Larry DeMar worked on Black Knight, Addams Family, Twilight Zone, Funhouse, Banzai Run, Space Shuttle, High Speed, and World Cup Soccer 94

    high confidence · Host lists these games as DeMar's work during introduction; DeMar confirms many during interview

  • DeMar works 70-80 hours per week on various projects

    high confidence · Host states this in introduction; DeMar confirms pattern has existed since his first year at Williams

  • DeMar joined Williams in January 1980 after initially taking a job at Bell Labs in September 1979

    high confidence · DeMar provides specific timeline: rejected Bell Labs offer after 4 months to join Williams

  • In his first year at Williams, DeMar programmed Las Vegas, Scorpion, designed a new pinball operating system, worked on Black Knight, Jungle Lord, and contributed to Defender

    high confidence · DeMar explicitly lists this work and notes 'in that one year, I did more things and more work...than any year I've worked in my career'

  • Black Knight was the first of two games DeMar worked on with Steve Ritchie

    high confidence · DeMar states 'Black Knight was after Firepower. That was the first of two games I worked on with Steve'

  • High Speed took approximately 1.5 years or longer to develop with Steve Ritchie

    high confidence · DeMar: 'That game we probably worked on a year and a half, maybe longer'

  • DeMar and Eugene Jarvis left Williams to start their own company due to lack of recognition as valuable talent and inadequate compensation

    high confidence · DeMar explains: 'game designers were not recognized as valuable talent...we're not being compensated as entrepreneurs'

  • Mike Stroll flew DeMar and Eugene Jarvis first class to New York to meet Luna Castro, who then agreed to let them develop games independently with Williams support

    high confidence · DeMar: 'Mike flew Eugene and I first class to New York...Luna Castro...said, if you're going to do this on your own, I want you doing it for me'

Notable Quotes

  • “He has been named the godfather of modern code by Josh Sharp, and I think it is very clear and evident when you hear it.”

    Host (podcast intro) @ Early intro — Establishes DeMar's industry reputation and the framing of the interview

  • “In that one year, I did more things and more work and more progress and more to show for it than any year I've worked in my career.”

    Larry DeMar @ Early interview, describing first year at Williams — Emphasizes the intensity and productivity of DeMar's early Williams career

  • “Game designers were not recognized as valuable talent...we're the make it or break it factor for, you know, millions or tens of millions of dollars of business and we're not being compensated as entrepreneurs.”

    Larry DeMar @ Mid-interview, explaining departure from Williams — Key motivation for DeMar and Jarvis's independent game development strategy

  • “If you're going to do this on your own, I want you doing it for me.”

    Luna Castro (relayed by DeMar) @ Mid-interview — Luna Castro's decision to support independent game development at Williams

  • “The only game you can have in six months is Super Defender.”

    Larry DeMar @ Mid-interview — Explains how Stargate was born from production line constraints

  • “One thing about the best designers, developers, producers, programmers, they are almost all perfectionists, but every one of them is insecure.”

    Larry DeMar @ Mid-interview, discussing designer psychology — Insight into the personality profile of legendary pinball designers

  • “We brainstormed over it and decided we would just put drums during the main play...during multiball, we took all of the dumb sounds and just made them a little boop, boop.”

    Larry DeMar @ Late interview, discussing High Speed sound design — Technical problem-solving for integrating sampled music into High Speed

  • “If I hadn't run into him and him being so proud to explain, you know, his cool technical trick, you know, we would have waited until probably Pinbot.”

Entities

Larry DeMarpersonSteve RitchiepersonEugene JarvispersonKen FedesnapersonMike StrollpersonLuna CastropersonBarry Oslerperson

Signals

  • ?

    historical_signal: Larry DeMar's foundational contributions to pinball software and operating systems established modern code practices that influenced generations of designers

    high · DeMar's work on Black Knight's multi-threaded OS, High Speed's alphanumeric displays and sampled music, and other innovations became standard industry practices

  • ?

    design_philosophy: DeMar articulates that legendary designers combine perfectionism with insecurity, causing delays but driving quality

    high · DeMar: 'One thing about the best designers...they are almost all perfectionists, but every one of them is insecure...This can cause great delay of time'

  • ?

    industry_signal: Early 1980s Williams had structural issues recognizing game designers as valuable entrepreneurial talent, leading to DeMar and Jarvis's departure and independent deal

    high · DeMar: 'Game designers were not recognized as valuable talent...we're the make it or break it factor...we're not being compensated as entrepreneurs'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Williams' production line constraints directly shaped game development pipeline; Space Shuttle was greenlit to keep factory workforce active

    high · DeMar: 'They needed to keep the people in the factory working and fluent at making games' and Luna Castro's 5,000-order ultimatum

  • ?

    business_signal: Pinball industry was near collapse in early 1980s (described as 'gutter') but revived through Space Shuttle's success (7,000 orders) and High Speed's cultural impact

    high · DeMar: 'Pinball was really in the gutter in 82, 83' and Luna Castro threatened shutdown; Space Shuttle received 7,000 orders and revived the industry

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.349

0:00
Thanks for tuning in to the Lisa Kipton Ball podcast. This is episode 120. I do not have Scott with me today because this is kind of a random episode, and I'll explain it here in a second. But before we get into that, I want to thank our sponsors for putting out pinball, Zach and Nicole Manny. They are awesome. If you're looking for great quality customer service, I highly recommend them and their team. They've done leaps and bounds for me and Scott. Labyrinth was just released. Zach is one of those dealers. So if you want to get Barrels of Fun's new game, Labyrinth, that stole Pinball Expo's 2023 and raised expectations.
0:39
Or Elton John from JJP, which is a beautiful game with it in its own right. We'll be talking about those games next episode. We'll be recording Thursday. But I wanted to hurry and get this episode out because this episode has been two and a half years in the making. Let me explain. I reached out to a couple friends in the pinball industry, two and a half years ago about a man that I kept seeing on Williams Games and who was kind of a permanent fixture in the Tilt, the Battlesave Pinball documentary. Larry DeMar has done some amazing things, and I just don't feel like he gets enough credit.
1:17
I've been messaging this man, and ever since he left pinball, he's started up his own companies. He's worked with other partners. This man is constantly working. And as you'll hear in this interview, he does roughly 70, 80 hours of work a week, easily, not including other responsibilities that he has to do. So it was hard to find some time to track this man down. But you know what? I messaged him that I was going to be in Chicago. I knew that's where he lived. And I said, hey, I'm going to be at Pinball Expo this year. I don't know if you'll be there, but it'd be nice to sit down and get that interview with you. And he said, you know what? Let's aim for Thursday and let's do it. So on Monday, this past week, the week before Expo started, messages to say, hey, we're so good to go for this Thursday. And he said, I'm really sorry, Josh, but my wife has tested positive for COVID. I won't be able to make it. And so I told him that's okay.

  • Stargate was created in response to Williams needing a game in 6 months, developed in DeMar and Jarvis's spare bedroom in DeMar's apartment

    high confidence · DeMar explains the origin of Stargate as Super Defender and development conditions

  • Luna Castro issued an ultimatum that Space Shuttle needed 5,000 orders or Williams would shut down the pinball division; the game received approximately 7,000 orders

    medium confidence · DeMar: 'Luna Castro had put down an ultimatum...you need to get 5,000 orders for the game or we're shutting the whole company down...I think they got 7,000 orders'

    • Larry DeMar @ Late interview, discussing Dave Thiel's influence — Highlights how industry collaboration and knowledge-sharing shaped innovation

    Mark Ritchie
    person
    Roger Sharpperson
    Dave Thielperson
    Bill Perodperson
    Joe Camencoperson
    Alvin Gottliebperson
    David Pooleperson
    Pat Lawlorperson
    Keith Elwinperson
    Williams Electronicscompany
    Bell Labscompany
    Gottliebcompany
    Ballycompany
    Big Kid'scompany
    Pinball Expoevent
    Black Knightgame
    High Speedgame
    Stargategame
  • ?

    design_innovation: High Speed pioneered sampled-note music technique in pinball (inspired by Dave Thiel's Gottlieb Rock), enabling rich soundscapes without expensive synthesizers

    high · DeMar: Dave Thiel 'sampled one note, a C, and then they played the C back at different speeds to make it other notes...they just had, you know, a 2K or a 4K sample'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Steve Ritchie and Eugene Jarvis's mentorship of young DeMar established a knowledge transfer that shaped his contributions to legendary games

    high · DeMar: 'They would become my mentors, and you just can't believe how lucky I was that I was shown the ropes and under the wing of these two brilliant, genius game designers'

  • ?

    technology_signal: DeMar designed a new Williams pinball operating system to support multi-threaded programming, enabling complex features like timed shots and mystery timers

    high · DeMar: 'The new operating system in Black Knight supported multi-threaded programming...we had mystery shot timers, we had time drop targets, we had a timed bonus round'

  • ?

    community_signal: High Speed's cultural impact influenced next-generation players including Pat Lawlor and continues to inspire modern designers like Keith Elwin

    high · Host: 'Pat Lawler came along...he played high speed a lot and loved it' and DeMar mentions meeting Keith Elwin at Pinball Expo on Godzilla

  • ?

    content_signal: This interview represents significant long-form documentation of pinball history from a foundational designer; 2.5-year effort to secure suggests recognition of DeMar's importance

    high · Host: 'This episode has been two and a half years in the making' and was prioritized despite no YouTube recording due to equipment constraints

    • 2:07
    We'll figure out another time. And I thought that would be the end of that. But as experts showed up, I got a message from Larry saying that he would be making it Saturday and that his wife was no longer had COVID and he tested negative for five plus days. And so I said, well, let's go ahead and do that interview. I was actually in the middle of Pinball Olympics, so I dropped everything,
    2:30
    told Scott Demise and Banger J, sorry, I got to get out of here, and I zipped it right back to Pinball Expo, thanks to Joe Engelberth, and it's his brother Jared. And so I got back, I sat down with this man. You're going to hear in this interview a lot of the games he's already, that he has worked on. I mean, there's too much of a coincidence for me that he's worked on some of the best games that have ever been revered.
    2:56
    I'm going to spill them right now. I know I'm going to spill them again here in a second. But you've got Black Knight. You've got Adam's Family. You've got Twilight Zone, Funhouse, Banzai Run. He was one of the ones that kind of helped with Space Shuttle. You're going to hear all this. It's amazing that this man has, I felt like, helped kept pinball alive during the 80s and 90s and was a pivotal instrument in helping pinball evolve over the years. He has been named the godfather of modern code by Josh Sharp, and I think it is very clear and evident when you hear it. Like I said, the reason this is a special episode, I had none of my recording equipment with me. So your YouTube video is not going to be there for Larry, but I do. I'm still doing an intro video, obviously, for YouTube. I appreciate those that are doing this, watching it here. And so without further ado, Larry DeMar. I am super giddy because the man that I'm sitting with today is an absolute legend. Josh Sharp has named him the godfather of modern code. if you're looking for a commonality between Twilight Zone, Addams Family, Funhaus, Black Knight, High Speed, World Cup Soccer 94. This man is the man. I've got Larry DeMar with me. How you doing, Larry? I'm doing great. Well, that list of games from memory is pretty good. They are memorable games. They're fantastic. I mean, all these games have such an impact on pinball history, and it's amazing that you had your hand in all this. What brought you to Williams back in the 80s? My story starts much further back. I grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, and my parents were good friends with Alvin Gottlieb and his family. And so I started playing pinball machines in his basement and in my best friend's basement. My best friend had a Cinderella, and in Alvin's basement, we played a game with a very target. I can't remember the – oh, no, it was a Roto Spinner, not a very target. Okay.
    5:07
    And I just loved every excuse. Pinball was illegal in Chicago, and so we were playing pitch and bat games and bowlers and things like that. But getting to play pinball machines was unusual and a treat at the time. And I took that right, you know, my whole life, looking for pinballs where I could find them. And then when I went to college, I spent a lot of time in the game room or playing the pinballs that were right in the basement of my dorm.
    5:38
    That's awesome. so um going back to 1970 probably 1978 i was a junior or a senior in college and bally's eight ball came out um and it was one of the first electronic games you know we first had a night rider um but when eight ball came out we we played it a lot i was a pretty good pinball player. And in that particular game, you collect the balls around the playfield and build up the rack of balls. And when you fill up the rack of balls, it lights the super bonus light, which represents all the points for a rack. And then you start lighting a second rack.
    6:27
    And when you fill up that second rack, the software clears it. And so your bonus actually goes down on that ball or the next ball because instead of getting, you know, one rack and 14 balls, one rack and 13 balls, you get one rack and zero balls where you're trying to refill the rack that it stole from you. And I was bitching about this, you know, late one night when we were playing, maybe a little alcohol induced.
    6:59
    And somebody said to me, could you do any better? And I was studying computer science at the time. And the next day I sent letters to Williams, Bailey, and Gottlieb, all of which I had toured in Chicago maybe a year or two earlier.
    7:17
    And long story short, Gottlieb and Bailey never returned my letter. We reached out to Gottlieb later and it never reached him. and somebody screened it for him, even though it was personally addressed to Alvin Gottlieb. And from Williams, David Poole called me back, called me in for an interview.
    7:46
    And my hometown was Chicago, so it was interesting to come back from Boston to Chicago. But at the same time, I interviewed at Bell Labs, which was kind of like the Google of the time. Okay, if you were in tech, right now if you're in tech, you know, and you're getting your degree, it would be really cool to go work at a place like Google or Facebook or, you know, any of the really super tech giants. And Bell Labs was the Google of the time.
    8:18
    And so Bell Labs, where I had interviewed also in Chicago, had made me an offer that had me working two days a week, going to school for my master's three days a week, paying me for five days of work and tuition.
    8:34
    And Williams offered me a little less money and wanted me to come and work for five days. So I took the job at Bell in, that would be September of 79.
    8:48
    And four months into it, I, actually not four months in, right around the time I took the job and Williams had offered me the job, Ken Fedesna at Williams, and Ken is a legend, really the point person of all the greatness that happened at Williams, along with Mike Stroll, who really had the philosophy of we're going to find really great people. We're going to empower them to do what they do. we're going to hold our nose and ears a lot from the process and kind of keep our hands off.
    9:33
    And that was Mike Stroll. He was the president at the time and really set the stage for all the greatness of Williams Valley Midway for the 80s and 90s. And Ken Fedesna was the point person who ran the preschool, which was all of the people that I worked with making games. And he snuck me into the AMOA show in the fall of 79, right when I took the job at Bell. And I just couldn't get the game thing out of my head. And a few months after working at Bell, I called Ken back, said, do you still have a position open? And literally in January of 1980, they were just starting to put together the Defender team to make Williams' first video game. And so I joined Williams, and literally upon arriving at Williams, I meet Steve Ritchie and Eugene Jervis.
    10:50
    And they would become my mentors, and you just can't believe how lucky I was that I was shown the ropes and under the wing of these two brilliant, genius game designers. And I walked into Williams in the middle of a bit of a revolution.
    11:16
    Mike and Ken and Dave Poole, Paul DeSalt was there, Chuck Blyke, And they were all creating the new Solid State Pinball, which they kind of did in a skunk works off site and then came in and started taking over the operation. And they had to work with a lot of guys, Steve Kordak at the top, who had been in the industry for 50 years. and a team of people that made games with relays, designing very high-tech electromechanical systems to make these games work.
    11:59
    And Steve and Eugene were trying to really move the envelope really quickly, which in that time frame had culminated in firepower, which went from kind of a, you know, more of a static experience to more of a here's what we're doing over a progression and then adding the excitement of multiball, which hadn't been seen, and really the first time of really jazzing up the sound and speech in a very quantum leap over Phoenix and Flash, which were the stepping stones, into let's use technology to be a little crazy and more exciting.
    12:55
    And just to kind of paint the scene of this rivalry between the old guard and the new guard, when they first added sounds to the games. The pinball machines before Solid State were all chimes. And all the early Solid State games were done with chime units, and they made chimes like pinballs, Knight Rider and Evil Knievel and on the Williams side, Grand Prix and Hot Tip. All those early games had chime units. and I think Phoenix might have been the first game with a sound system.
    13:39
    And when it was designed, everybody was internally had a big war over, no, we can't take the chimes out or no one will play it. It's not pinball.
    13:49
    And they ended up not only putting the chime unit in to the early games that had sound, They actually sent all communication to the soundboard through the solenoids that rang the chimes so that the system could always throw a switch and use chimes because everyone was going to hate the new sounds. And in the early games, they also put a score motor that just turned around when something would happen just to let you feel the vibration of the old motor that was in the old games.
    14:31
    So not only did Steve and Eugene become my mentor, but they were looking at a strong recruit for their side of this new revolution that was taking place in pinball. Is that kind of where high speed starts to come in? Because that seems to be really where the table started to turn with all that. You know, there were some really momentous building block steps. Like I said, I really put Phoenix as the first step, then maybe Flash, then Gorgar, then Firepower, and High Speed would be the next quantum step in that ladder of great capability being added onto what preceded it. and actually, I probably missed Black Knight in that sequence. Yeah, Black Knight, yeah. Between, I guess Black Knight was after Firepower. That was the first of two games I worked on with Steve.
    15:41
    And when I got to Williams, I was working as an employee of Williams for one year. Okay. In that one year, I did more things and more work and more progress and more to show for it than any year I've worked in my career.
    15:59
    I'm always working like a dog, okay? I work until it's time to go to bed or time for some obligation. But in that one year, I programmed Scorpion with my – actually, my first game was Las Vegas with Roger Sharp and Steve Epstein. Okay. That would have been great. Okay. And I entered the business as a new programmer in pinball.
    16:32
    And Roger Sharp, I had his book. Okay. You know, the movie of the man who saved Pinball, I had his book and had read all about this journey.
    16:44
    And, you know, I was starstruck to have, you know, Steve Ritchie and Eugene Jarvis, you know, okay, they're this gruff guy that, you know, designed games. And Eugene, I thought, was really kind of a nerdy guy and had no understanding of what an amazing, amazing creator and inventor he was.
    17:11
    But all of a sudden, you know, hearing you're going to meet Roger Sharp, and he and Steve have drawn a game on a napkin.
    17:21
    Barry Osler drew it out, and they wanted me to be the programmer of this game. and so Roger and Steve were both in New York City at the time and they visit Chicago on a weekend and the place is closed and I come in on the weekend and spend time going over the game and talking about rules and the like and then for lunch we went out to Chicago Game Company which was a local arcade on Western Avenue where we often tested games and we played some pinball there and I was a really good pinball player in the time and I'm still a pretty good pinball player today. And I, of course, wanted to impress Roger and I couldn't hit anything but a rubber post on any ball of any game that I played with him that day.
    18:15
    I remember specifically we were playing big game in Cheetah, the two games from Stern at the time that were the medium-sized wide bodies.
    18:27
    And they were putting the games through their paces, and I literally could not hit a shot in five or six games that we played.
    18:42
    And so Roger, along the way, not only came to know my pinball playing abilities, but he and I played as a doubles team in the early IFPA tournaments and did really, really well.
    18:58
    So that was it. So Las Vegas was developed a little bit and was put on the shelf. It was resurrected as Jet Orbit, and the names were based on a three bank of drop targets on the left, five bank of drop targets on the right, Las Vegas, Jet, Orbit.
    19:24
    And finally, what is produced is Barracora, which put two R's on the third target to make the nine letters go on the eight targets, which always struck me as crazy because they just could have spelled Barracora with one R. Yes.
    19:41
    And it eventually came out several years after I first started on that game. And then I did Scorpion, which was the second multiball game after Firepower on a wide body with a mediocre playfield layout. And I got to tinker with some multitasking ideas that Eugene didn't do in Firepower that I thought we could.
    20:11
    We were always talking about multitasking where different processes could do different things. And so I played with some of them on Scorpion.
    20:22
    And after having done a full game, it was time to revamp the whole Williams operating system. It had been done a couple of years earlier, and pinball was evolving, and it really needed more capabilities.
    20:39
    And it was a project that I talked about with Ken and Steve, but I didn't know at the time, but the management wasn't sure they should trust the guy that just got out of school and had no experience to try and develop a new system, which at the time you had to design it, develop it, and burn it into ROMs in mass quantities, and it couldn't change from game to game. Things couldn't be added and bugs couldn't be fixed because e-coms were too expensive at the time. and so after doing the the first game successfully which also let me learn every nook and cranny of the old system they let me do the new system and so all at once and steve tagged me as programmer for black knight and i was helping eugene get the whole video game thing started so all at once i I was working in two buildings on the new operating system on the Black Knight pinball machine and on early work on the software that would be the base system for Defender.
    21:52
    And Steve is a perfectionist and generally takes several iterations of Whitewoods to develop a game. and so his time between his Whitewood passes on his game gave me a lot of time to work on the new pinball system and on the defender stuff. And so in the first year I did Whitewoods of Las Vegas, Scorpion, the new pinball operating system, Black Knight, Jungle Lord, some base work on Defender's operating system, some in-between work to develop for enemy development on Defender, and the crunch work before the show to put it in a track mode high score table and lead the technical team to get chips burnt so we could put them in the games at the show at AMOA. No wonder you work 70, 80 hours. You've been doing this since you got out of the gate. So that was it.
    23:00
    And following the success we had with Defender, Williams opened up a bigger engineering facility on Kedzie Avenue, about a mile and a half from the California facility. It was the pinball factory where we all worked.
    23:19
    And it moved all the video game development there. and they hired a bunch of programmers, they built out a bunch of little tiny offices and they had a terrible HVAC system that caused us to all have to keep our doors open and some of us, and I was the worst violator, blasting a radio while I worked because this was before AirPods and great use of headphones were a thing.
    23:52
    And between the HVAC and the noise, Eugene and I, who had talked about leaving to start our own company, okay, just one day had had enough working at this new building that we said, let's give it a try. and so we walked into Mike Stroll who was the president of the company and said to him we're leaving what would you mean you're leaving we're going to go off and try and make games on our own part of it actually most of it was just that the game designers were not recognized as valuable talent.
    24:40
    And even though Mike had, you know, paid more than other companies, we were the make it or break it factor for, you know, millions or tens of millions of dollars of business and we're not being compensated as entrepreneurs and so we decided we would go out on our own, make gains, and then license them to companies that would buy them from us. Okay.
    25:13
    And Mike said, Mike tried to talk us out of it. There were some financial offers at the time, and we had kind of decided, we kind of decided this is what we were going to do. And Mike was, before you do anything, I want you to come to New York with me and let's talk about this some more. and he flew Eugene and I first class to New York, and we met with Luna Castro, who was the chairman of the company at the time and controlled the company.
    25:49
    And he and Mike at the end of the day said, if you're going to do this on your own, I want you doing it for me. and so we made a deal to go on our own and have Williams support us with some of the tech they gave us an advance against royalties on our games and made a royalty deal that we liked the one we would have made with any company and they said they wanted another game in six months and that was key because a production line had been ramped up for Defenders and they needed to keep the people in the factory working and fluent at making games and my response was the only game you can have in six months is Super Defender.
    26:40
    And so that is how Stargate was born. And so they lent us the development systems were $30,000, $40,000 computers called Exercisers made by Motorola.
    26:57
    And these, they let us use, even though there were two of us programming the game, they let us use one. We had a deadline of six months to have the game done. And so Eugene and I worked around the clock in the spare bedroom of my apartment,
    27:12
    and we created Stargate in six months, after which we got our own facility. came up with a cheaper, better technology for doing the development and did Robotron and Blaster as vid kits.
    27:33
    And so that was the early days. And video, after getting my big start in pinball, which is my bigger passion, Video really took over And then in 83 In 83 the Which crashed first, the home games or the I want to say home games did Okay, there was a home game crash In one order, one year after the other, the home games crashed and the video games crashed and I was looking for my next gig at the time. Eugene left Big Kids, left Chicago, moved back to California, got his master's at Stanford.
    28:25
    And I was pittering around with some ideas to try to do on my own a home version of Wheel of Fortune for the computers that were out there. and Joe Camenco was at Williams trying to get his way into engineering. He was with the sales department, and the engineering group didn't really want him working with them. And he conned me into coming back with him and trying to make a pinball machine with him And it really kind of a landmark point because Joe went to NASA and got the license for Space Shuttle Okay. Okay, and he talked to Barry and got Barry to pull out a bunch of play fields, and Joe and I went in and we looked at a bunch of his old games. Barry Osler, such a nice guy, and he was so prolific. Okay. The bigger, you know, celebrity designers in the business, you know, did a game a year when they were good and sometimes a game every two years when it was taking longer, either because it was such a spectacular set of things they were doing or just because things were going slowly for different reasons. or writer's block. I've seen writer's block where they're working on something and it's just not looking like they want it to be in there. One thing about the best designers, developers, producers, programmers, they are almost all perfectionists, but every one of them is insecure.
    30:17
    And so there is a fear at all times that there's not enough, It's not good enough. It's not going to be, you know, just loved and revered. It's only going to be good. Yeah.
    30:31
    And so that causes, that causes, that can cause great delay of time when these people, you know, aren't sure and don't feel it when they're doing it. The super mega designers that we all know and love would have a rate of putting out games of one a year or maybe one every two years if things didn't go well.
    31:06
    And this is due to this perfectionism married with insecurity. and Barry was a prolific playfield production machine. Okay. Okay, he could draw a new complete playfield every week and some of them, you know, some of them were magnificent, you know, just the most amazing games ever and some of them were less magnificent. and in this process he had a pile of drawings that were just things that he drew that never that nothing ever happened nothing was ever done with them and joe and i met with barry and he started pulling out all his old play fields and he kind of you know and joe was was kind of being the point person and Joe had no experience making pinball machines.
    32:06
    He had done some video game design for Williams out of his studio in Atlanta before joining the company and he kind of was looking at things and we'll take this out of this game and the top of this one and the bottom of that one and we'll put it together and we'll make a space shuttle game and he sold it to the powers that be and I agreed to come in four days a week to program it.
    32:33
    And so that's what got me from doing video games, you know, back into the pinball circuit. And I did work on that game, and pinball was really in the gutter in 82, 83, and this was in 1984. and the company was only a pinball company at this time. They were done with video games. Video games, maybe not. Maybe they were working on Star Rider.
    33:10
    Star Rider was their Laserdisc game. Laserdisc kind of finished off video games where video games were waning. Laserdisc was this shiny thing. Dragon's Lair was a monster hit and other games had some success to a lesser extent and Williams put all of their video resources into Star Rider. They had kept pinball on the back burner with a small team making a very small number of games but they kept all the know-how and all of the muscle memory of making them and producing them alive, you know, in 82 and 83.
    34:00
    But it was not a business, and they weren't going to make money in video games. and Firepower 2 done by Mark Ritchie just before this period had shown some spark of more interest and more game sales.
    34:25
    And by the time we were heading to the show in 84 with Space Shuttle, we didn't know it, but Luna Castro had put down an ultimatum. you need to get 5,000 orders for the game or we're shutting the whole company down.
    34:42
    And so this game went to the show. I think they got 7,000 orders. The game, you know, was a hit. And then it was followed very quickly by Comet, a brilliant Barry Osler, Python, Bill Fuchsenreiter game.
    34:59
    And then we, Steve, I came and worked with Steve on High Speed, and that followed Comet. So that really was sort of an exponential or hockey stick type of curve from going out of business to pinball is really something again. Well, and I've kind of followed some of the stuff you did in the past too, and it seemed like high speed was kind of the catalyst for more people getting into pinball. I know a lot of people, if I remember correctly, that's kind of how Pat Lawler came along too is he played high speed a lot and loved it. And I know that even like Keith Owen nowadays, that's one of his games he attributes like high speed just captures you and captures the imagination, but it also was just such a fast and furious game. It kind of turned pinball on its head at that point. And so I guess the question I'm asking is, did you see that coming with high speed? Because like you said, pinball was dying, and all of a sudden it just was an uptick. So how do you guys use that momentum to your advantage?
    36:06
    It's a combination of a lot of things. It's really interesting you mentioned Keith Elwin because you and I just met on the expo floor at Keith Elwin's Masterpiece Godzilla. Yeah. And so my hat's off to him for creating that game. What a wonderful, wonderful game. it was the convergence of a whole bunch of things at once that was also benefited from the amount of time Steve spent perfecting that game. That game we probably worked on a year and a half, maybe longer. and we were adding on to the things that we had done in the previous several games, starting with Black Knight. The new operating system in Black Knight supported multi-threaded programming, so the biggest thing we could gain out of that was all kinds of use of time. and we had mystery shot timers, we had time drop targets, we had a timed bonus round at the end of the game.
    37:33
    And when it came time for high speed, we first, over a giant, giant internal fight, ended up getting the alphanumeric displays on the game. Okay, that was the first Williams pinball that had the alphanumeric displays.
    37:55
    Gottlieb actually beat us with those on a couple of games earlier. And Gottlieb, while we were working on high speed, developed a game called Rock. and rock had rock and roll instead of a synthesized space age sound going in the background. They actually were playing music. Okay.
    38:24
    And the master of the music was Dave Thiel, who I revere. Yes. and I ran into him somewhere while we were working at high speed, and he explained how they did it without having the processing power and memory that was needed to really do music in Timbox. And he said, you know, they sampled one note, a C, and then they played the C back at different speeds to make it other notes. So they just had, you know We're not talking megabytes, we're talking kilobytes We're talking about, you know, a 2K or a 4K sample Which filled an EEPROM or two And we only had two or three EEPROMs in the game They sampled one note and then used software to make it play music And I come back into Williams And I talk to Bill Perod Who worked with Eugene Jarvis on the sound for High Speed And talk to Steve about it And we decided we're going to do that, too.
    39:34
    And the note that got sampled was Steve bringing in his guitar. Steve Rich is a great guitar player. Yeah. And he composed the music, the theme that played during High Street Multiball. Do-dee-doo-doo-doo. Do-dee-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo. He composed that whole riff and played it on his guitar. but he played one note for Bill Perod and Bill Perod played the exact game that David Thiel had done in rock, which if I hadn't run into him and him being so proud to explain, you know, his cool technical trick, you know, we would have waited until probably Pinbot, which finally had a Yamaha synthesizer. Yeah. was the first game where we actually put a synthesizer in a game, hired our first musician to do sound.
    40:31
    Eugene was an ad hoc musician. He played keyboard with Steve Ritchie, who played the electric guitar. Mark Ritchie played the bass guitar, and they had a band that played in Steve's basement or in the big kid's office until our landlord said that couldn't go any longer.
    40:56
    So Bill sampled the notes. Steve composed the music. We laid it into the game, and it was a cacophony because I had already done the entire game with sound calls and choreographed sound, and we were near the end of the game. I mean, this wasn't like we had planned to do high speed with music in it.
    41:23
    And so we brainstormed over it and decided we would just put drums during the main play. And Bill Pratt sampled a cymbal hit and he sampled a drum hit. And he again, you know, created some drum riffs. and that was the background of the game so that all the sounds that were already done and sounded good could play over the drums and not clash with the music.
    41:52
    And then during multivolve, we took all of the dumb sounds and just made them a little boop, boop. We took and dumbed them down so that the music could play and the sounds, except for award sounds, wouldn't be clashing with the music. It was interesting. I'm watching Steve's Elton John today at Expo, which you can't get to play because there's a line of ten people at each of the three games here. But I'm watching the game, and they keep ducking the music to let you hear a sound or hear a voice cue. Yeah. And so you've got these wonderful Elton John tunes playing, and they keep ducking down. And so they're solving the same problem in a different manner, which it works. It works, but it's kind of like, you know, writing graffiti on a Picasso. To me, hearing Elton John's music keep getting ducked to let the game do what it has to in communicating sound or instructions. Yeah. So We got the alphanumeric displays in high speed We at the end get sound Which again is Just works great And I got to tell the alphanumeric Story a little bit first Yeah go for it I've told this many times and I'm sure it's out there But I envy what I am seeing at Expo right now because they are building these games with no expenses spared and then selling them with a real profit margin for buyers in their homes that want these as trophies, collectible trophies that they love.
    43:47
    We were in a business where the games were bought by people that had to put them on a location and get quarters put in them and make a profit. And the price that we could charge was really limited to around $2,000.
    44:07
    And we couldn't raise the price because we put something cool in a game. That's what the market would pay.
    44:15
    And it went up at the very end, into the 2000s. But probably during the time of high speed, it was like 1895 was what we sold a high speed for. Wow. And putting in these alphanumeric displays, which Steve, you know, Steve, like, we got to have these. Yeah. And we got the company that made the displays. It was Cherry and Displays Inc. were the two display companies. We got them to make prototypes, and they were going to add, you know, I don't know, maybe $50, maybe $75, $100. I don't remember what it was at the time, but they were going to add a significant cost. that we really weren't in a good position to pass on.
    45:00
    There were three or four pinball companies at the time. They were all high volume, very competitive, and if you raised your price, you pushed a lot of business to the other company.
    45:15
    So Steve and I are lobbying for it, and I've got them in the game in a prototype, and I'm doing all kinds of different effects and showing how we would put the initials of the players. And I dreamed up a feature to make the displays worthwhile. I said, you know, we're going to put a jackpot in the game, and we're going to show with the word jackpot the jackpot growing. And we'd do it during multiball, and it would be progressive where it would build and build, and whoever hit the jackpot, which was going to be a really hard thing to do, would collect it all and it would reset.
    45:54
    And so we've mocked it up, we're showing this, and to management it was insurmountable to add this much cost to the games. And there's a whole story that the designers can tell you about taking drop targets out and taking mechanisms out. and it just wasn't solvable. And the mechanism story is fun because drop targets are very expensive and our drop targets for a while were very unreliable. Yeah. So they always got pulled out at the 11th hour starting with Firepower, where Firepower was a drop target game. It played so much better with drop targets. and because of cost and mostly because of reliability, Mike Stroll broke Steve and Eugene's heart at the 11th hour turning them into touch targets, into bullseyes.
    46:57
    And later on, designers would all put drop targets in their prototypes, okay, not because they ever planned to use them, but as a way when they were told their games were too expensive, of, okay, I'll take my drop targets out.
    47:13
    And I think it's still happening to this day, but not to the point where you see these modern games are beautiful, they are built up, and they are shoveling money into them for a market that wants it and will pay for it. and the side effect is it's created a real margin. Instead of making a few hundred dollars or three, four hundred dollars on a game, they're making thousands for each game with the markup, and that allows them to start and stop the lines and just make as many as people want whenever they want them. We have this whole problem that the line could never stop because we'd have to lay off everybody, and we would lose ability and know-how. Yes.
    48:09
    So we are in the office that Stephen and I are working on with Ken Fedesna. We're showing a demo, and he's like, that's all wonderful. We can't afford them for the games.
    48:24
    And it went back and forth, and I got really angry, and literally I was standing on one side of the high-speed prototype and Ken was on the other side, and I pushed the game over, which would have, you know, knocked him to the floor or whatever, but he caught it and stood it back up. It also might have set the game development back for two or three months if that thing fell and went to splinters. like many things in life we ended up with a compromise we put the alphanumerics on the top two displays left the cheaper numeric displays on the bottom two and that's how peace was made between the factions it let us do a whole test and setting system where you could see the settings in the game you just have to go to a manual number three is number of balls Number four is your tilt warnings. Number five, maximum credits.
    49:27
    And so this brought in a whole new era there. But it let us communicate the features. It let us put in things like this jackpot feature in a discernible way.
    49:39
    And it really was a huge step. High speed really is said to be the first game where you were playing through a story. Yeah. and getting those displays in there really helped us tell the story and tell you what was going on. Yeah.
    49:59
    So that's the other big feature. Firepower started. The feature was multiball. starting in Scorpion and then Black Knight,
    50:20
    it's let's make multiball an opportunity. Let's not just put the balls out there and have you hit things. Let's have you make it an opportunity. In Black Knight, it was double and triple scoring. In Scorpion, it was however long you kept them in play, you got a bonus and could let extra ball in special. and then Black Knight it was do a very difficult feat while all these balls are kind of messing you up and you'll be really rewarded. And that has been the foundation of game design since 1986. The games that, you know, I just got done playing Godzilla and I, you know, made lock shots for a multiball which goes all the way back to firepower or to games like Fireball and Wiggler and 4 Million D.C. back in the 70s. Lock balls and then start multiball. And then shoot shots for jackpots while you've got the three balls in place. So that's kind of, you know, a thing that started with high speed and moved forward, and then the whole storytelling aspect.
    51:39
    Um, so that's, that's amazing. And sorry, that's my mind's reeling because there's a ton of information. It's amazing. Um, so I'm trying to think, I don't know the timeline super well between high speed. And then I know that Pat Lawler came in kind of the late eighties, but if I understand correctly, didn't you kind of bring him in and work after hours with him on Bonsai Run to kind of, I know that you had some way of bringing him in. I just don't know what the time is from high speed to then.
    52:14
    Those are all relevant to the story. Okay. After high speed finished, I was a little burnt out. I was in there as a contractor. I never went back to work for Williams. I did space shuttle and high speed on contract. I was a little burnt out. and sort of, you know, not doing a lot. Steve had me penciled in for his next game, which at the time was called F-111.
    52:48
    And Paul DeSalle was the software manager at Williams. He programmed games like Phoenix, like Blackout, like Alien Poker. and he was my first boss. He was running the software department. I worked for him.
    53:09
    And he had left Williams after everything was dying in the early 80s and was working in a company called Nuvitec and Nuvitec was developing a bowling system, a new high-tech cutting-edge bowling system for Brunswick that actually operated the pin setters and had the computer displays and kept score. This was the first system that showed graphics and animations for when you did things that were successful.
    53:47
    Pat Lawler was programming the pin setter. Pat had come from Dave Nutting, where he had worked on some of the Bally video games, the midway video games of the early 80s.
    54:02
    Richard and Elaine Ditton, who later did Golden Tee Golf, created incredible technologies and have now gone on to be, you know, a major force in the slot machine industry. They were working on the game programming of the system, Paul was managing the whole product, and they needed help with the operating system in this platform. And he brought me in for a two-month project to come in and rewrite the operating system for this system. So I met Pat, Richard, and Elaine all working under Paul at NuvaTech. Okay.
    54:57
    And Pat tells the stories how we used to go out to lunch every day and play high speed. Okay. And he had a thing for pinball and had designed an early prototype for a game that was going to be called Reckon Ball. Okay. out in his barn out in Marengo, Illinois. Pat was on a farm.
    55:24
    He's not a farmer, but he and his wife Patricia live on five acres, I think it is, out in Marengo, Illinois.
    55:35
    And he had come up with the idea for a vertical play field to go along with a horizontal play field and he had designed the bottom play field and put a couple flippers on the top play field and had a concept of how he would connect them. And he brought me out there and said, I want to show you something, and he showed it to me. And I thought it was interesting enough and a cool enough idea that I decided, let's get together, Let's get a patent on this new revolutionary thing that's going to be the new pinball blockbuster. We know how that played out.
    56:20
    And let's make the game and then see if we can sell it to Williams. Yeah. So I am in awe at all of the home development resources and that in 2023, you can buy all the parts and buy an electronic system with a complete software package, okay, and make your own pinball machine. And lots of people are doing it, and it's incredible.
    56:51
    Back in that day, there was nothing. and so not only did to do this did we need to get the existing Williams Electronics boards which I knew a couple things about to develop a program for we bought a road kings new in the box so we could get the the hardware boards and so we could get a whole harness it wasn't for our game but it was a whole harness with all the wire colors in it that we could use to try and wire up our prototype game.
    57:33
    And then I'm trying to think what happened in the development arena. I think I talked to Williams, and they lent me a debugger board, and I interfaced it to a PC and wrote the software to make the board integrate to what was a PC. Williams was using a VAC 750 at the time to develop their games And so Pat and I you know Pat finished his job at NuvaTech finished his bowling pin setter, left NuvaTech, and we worked for probably nine months, maybe 12 months on this. in a studio apartment that I rented when Eugene and I closed VidKit.
    58:35
    Eugene and I did Robotron and Blaster in an office on Halstead Street in Chicago. When Eugene went back to college, I took the stuff that I wanted to still be able to use to do development work and didn't have room for it in my apartment, so I rented a two-bedroom apartment on the 12th floor. I rented a studio apartment on the 9th floor and had a little workshop there. And so Pat and I built Banzai, built Reckon Ball, which was the prototype, in that apartment. And once we got it completed, we brought in the executives from Williams. Larry Thrasher had been brought in as president of the company at the time. he came from the automotive business and Larry and Neil Nicastro and Ken Fedesna and Joe Dillon and I think Eugene and Steve all you know from Williams came out to take a look at Wrecking Ball and they made it be able to license it from us and we came in house to do the game which would be Banzai Run based on that game and Ken would later tell me that he had no interest in buying that game and didn't really care whether Williams made that game or not, but that he bought the game to get me back inside the company. Oh, really? So that was a pretty cool thing to hear. That's right. We made Banzai Run. I'm proud of the game. I love the game. It was commercially okay and far short of any expectations that anyone had for the game. And there was never a second one. And our patent, halfway through its life, we decided not to renew it because there was going to be no economic value to it.
    60:34
    But now I am back inside California Avedo. So they invited Pat to work at Williams after the game, and he signed a contract and worked on Earthshaker and then Whirlwind. And at the same time, I took the task of rewriting a whole new operating system for the next generation.
    61:03
    And so during the year and a half that Pat did those games, I did the new operating system and we got together to do Funhaus as the first game on the new platform and by the way I love your shirt for those that aren't here with me you've got a Funhaus it is just a picture of Funhaus from collar to belly button it is amazing I want to point out because this is one game that is kind of attributed as the first game with modes it didn't really have like a wizard mode but you work with these you go kind of through the tasks to get the frenzy. And was that always kind of the goal, was trying to start making modes, or was it just kind of like an aha moment as you're making Funhaus? It kind of falls back to a few games before where they started doing random feature awards.
    61:55
    Earthshaker, I think, had one. I know Whirlwind. Whirlwind definitely had one with somebody that sounded like Pat Bertram, the guy from Green Acres and, well, looky here.
    62:10
    And so we were sort of in a setup which was actually, back it up to Space Shuttle. Okay. Back it up to Space Shuttle. Space Shuttle, we had, you spelled out S-H-U-T-T-L-E on the six stand-up targets and the drop target in the middle.
    62:39
    And you won an award, which was a special and extra ball, lots of points, less, less, less, less points.
    62:48
    And then that feature got changed by a very hard-to-make shot so that once it was set, you could work on it. and in Space Shuttle, if you got to the last ball and you were having a really pathetic game, I would randomly like the extra ball for the feature. I think every ball, it picked a random, it would go toot, toot, toot, toot, toot, toot, toot, and it would go boom, boom, boom for extra ball. Now, our German distributor, Nova Operati, run by a guy that really was critical to the successor, Williams, his name's Hans Rosenzweig, and he died recently.
    63:39
    But he would handicap our games, and when he loved the game, okay, he would write a big order. the line would start producing for Germany while they're testing here to get our less aggressive distributors to take quantities of the games.
    64:00
    And so the factory would run making these games and we had to, six weeks from the end of production at whatever rate we're going, we had to either buy more parts or decide production was over. And Hans And if he loved the game, he would always speculate on the games. Our local distributors were not as aggressive. They felt that, you know, if they ordered too many, they're going to get stuck with them, and they're going to lose money closing them out. And closing out tends to lead to a downtrend as your customers now stop buying from you, forcing you to close out the next model. Yeah. So it was a bad word in the business.
    64:49
    Hans embraced that extra ball feature that after Space Shuttle, every game had to have it where it would, you know, give the lesser player more time. And it was a battle we fought in pinball because of the replay. because of the replay that a good player could play forever and not pay. We were always trying to balance making the game enough there, but not let the good player be able to run with it. And replay boost eventually conquered the big player where the replay score would start going up.
    65:35
    But until we started using that mechanism, oh, by the way, Alpha numeric displays can now let you change the replay score in the computer, not the operator. And Steve and I developed automatic replay percentage on high speed,
    65:51
    which the game would set the replay based on the overall quality of the players. but back to Hans and the extra ball they were called pity extra balls and it also every game starting with Earthshaker or Whirlwind had to have a randomized feature that could deliver that which became lovingly inside the company called Stupid German feature, such as what's your, you know, which whole, which shot is your stupid German feature? Yeah. Um, but, um, Funhaus's stupid German feature was a mystery mirror. Okay. And, um, I don't think we ever let the extra ball on it, by the way. I don't think you did either. Yeah, I was, every other one after it did.
    67:01
    I was always, you know, holding the line of trying not to shoot in the games. Got it. And so that brings us to grace period, right? Yeah. I invented the grace period on a shot where when a shot is lit and you shoot it while it's lit, If the light happens to go out, okay, you're still going to get credit for that shot. When you turn the light out, you set a timer. Even though the light's not on, if the timer's still running, okay, you get credit for it.
    67:39
    And the first free ball because you didn't do anything was flight insurance. No, actually. Flight insurance was the first bozo, we're going to not let your ball in because you were bad.
    67:59
    And F-14 only did it on the third ball if you were having a bad game, kind of like the lighting the extra ball on the third ball. Yeah.
    68:12
    And, you know, it worked okay on F-14. and somewhere some of the programmers started doing that on every ball of every game. If we had a bad ball, we're going to give it back to you.
    68:26
    That didn't help the bad players very much, but it helped the good players when they had a bad ball, and they got to have three good balls per game instead of three balls however they went. And I was on the this is ruining pinball side of it because I was always, we're trying to make a game for everybody. We're trying to walk the line where we put it right where it needs to be. And this really messed it up. And it caused the psychology of everybody wanted to blame the game for everything. So anytime the game did something bad to you, it said, no, no, you can have the ball back. And the second revision of F-14, when Yagov would kick it right through the flippers, it would give the ball back. The same thing. The game did something, and maybe you weren't up to it. And our games evolved from electromechanical games where you played a ball for 20 to 30 seconds to where you're playing balls for minutes. Okay, and we can only raise our price Which is where this story started By making them make more money In a location taking quarters Yeah And as the game time goes up The amount in the cash box goes down So I'm trying to walk the line And Adam's family had no ball saver I think they put one in Adam's family, gold Okay Twilight Zone had no ball saver and by World Cup, which was the next game I worked on, you had to have a ball saver. I lost the war. Which is funny because, like, you look at Adam's family and Twilight Zone, like, Twilight, the first thing that comes to mind is, like, you're not safe whatsoever. On the first plunge, you either shoot it into the pops or it comes right to your flipper, whereas World Cup, it's coming right to your flipper regardless on the plunge. So that's kind of funny. It should have almost been reversed, but, yeah. Well, it wasn't thought out in those terms. I, you know, part of the let everybody do their thing at Williams, for better or worse, there weren't strictly imposed standards, okay? If I was running engineering in the early 90s, I probably would have made standards of what we needed to do. The better part is people do better stuff when they're not constrained and they can dream up other things. The bad part is we had a faction at Williams that, you know, wanted to protect the player from everything, which sadly I started.
    71:23
    Space shuttle, you roll halfway up the ramp and come down, it pops the pose to keep the ball from going down the middle. Yeah. So that started a terrible trend of game designers don't have to fix things that make their games play badly. We'll fix it in software. Okay. All right. And every game today is fixing every unfair thing and giving you balls back because, you know, we're kind and gentle in pinball. and in somebody's basement, we don't care how many minutes you sit on the machine. Yeah. Okay. It's totally changed. And it's really funny because I play some of these new games and I can't play them. I knew every game and I was good at every game and I learned every game. And it dawned on me these aren't three-minute experiences. These games are not designed to be three-minute experiences that are good, medium, or bad. and extend to five, six, eight, ten minutes when you rack it. Yep.
    72:32
    And so there's been this incredible evolution over the years into the, you know, what we need to make people love them in their homes.
    72:45
    And all this kindler, gentler stuff is okay because replays, you know, if they're there or not, they're not costing anybody anything. And time on device isn't a thing. and these guys have figured out how to get margin, which didn't exist in my day and caused all kinds of things that we had to do that we don't have to do now and are a great reason that these games are so amazingly amazing and wonderful.
    73:17
    So you touched on a game that is iconic in its own right, Adam's Family. that was the first game, if I remember correctly, actually had modes that led to a wizard mode to tour the mansion. Where did that all come about, and would you ever expected it to have made, you know, it's like 22,000, 23,000 units with gold? Like, was the hype real there, or was it just like, we're making this because that's what we've been told to do?
    73:45
    It's great to look at, to dissect that. We were Williams, okay, and Williams kicked ass, okay, and drove Valley down to very low levels and drove Gottlieb down to very low levels and then resulted in Valley abandoning the business and letting our management buy the pinball and video game units of Bally for less than the parts they had in inventory. So when Williams bought Bally, all they had to do was make enough gains to liquidate the parts into pinball machines, and they had Bally for free. Wow. but Valley at the time we bought them was a second tier pinball company we we were we were all over them you know with our run in the early 90s that we're talking about you know we we we kind of buried them and they came in and and we some of the Valley engineering team came in Jim Patley came in with the purchase, which was awesome. Jim is a great designer. He brought a lot of know-how. And later on, they moved me up into management, and Jim was my right-hand man. He was out there doing it all, and I worked with him to run the division.
    75:30
    The valley crew that they brought in did some valley titles, moved all the hardware, and Neil decided it was time to rebuild the Valley brand.
    75:46
    And so Pat, we licensed Adam's family. Roger Sharp got the license for us. Pat, you're going to do the game and you're going to do it under the Valley banner. And I'm telling you, this was a black, dark day in the life of the Adam's family design team because we really, I will tell you, we thought if we do the best game we've ever done, it'll probably sell 10,000 units. Yeah. Okay.
    76:17
    Because you just, we just can't get that much mileage with the game with the Ballymonica on it. Okay. Yeah. Pat created Thing, which was, you know, great thing in the bookcase.
    76:37
    You know, the bookcase came right out of the movie. The Thing is so elemental to Adam's family that it had to be there.
    76:48
    And we were working on the game with a set of rules. and like high speed, as we were working, we could not get the game to have the right balance and mix of everything. And high speed went through this stage where Steve and I were yelling at each other and not talking to each other. and, you know, we had some executive therapists come work with us to keep things on track and we eventually got there.
    77:26
    And Adam's family was the same way. And Adam's family had an early milestone of having a showable game ready for the premiere of the movie, which was in Los Angeles. Okay. and we had gotten to the game to this point where we had a full game, full art, everything on it, and the rules and software were okay.
    77:53
    They were, you know, and they were fine to bring it to a movie premiere and show people for the first time. Yeah. But we didn't, Thing was in the game way too much, And it just was a long, slow mechanism. And we just didn't have it. And Roger Sharp will tell you the story because Roger, you know, was the licensing guy who got the license and was a point person.
    78:22
    And we went to L.A. We were on the Rick Dees radio show from 6 to 10 in the morning. And Hammer was there, M.C. Hammer, who did the Addams Family theme. And he was, you know, he was there, and it was a great brush with greatness.
    78:42
    And we showed the game there. And, again, it was, you know, we weren't going to fulfill the 10,000 game prophecy.
    78:53
    And we just kept working at it. And, again, there was a lot of friction. There was a lot of friction. and there was a lot of friction between the designers and the programmers often, often, just because partially the designers grew out of being the producers. You know, video games have a producer. There's a programmer, there's an artist, there's whatever. The designers were the, created the design and the ideas and were the producer. They had the view and were in control of everything that happened. Okay.
    79:35
    And the programmers, you know, pre-Eugene, actually pre-Randy Pfeiffer. Randy Pfeiffer did the first Williams system and did Flash. Okay.
    79:47
    And he was a guy, you know, that was going to do more and different because the realm of what was being done wasn't known when Randy did Flash or when Eugene did Firepower or when I did High Speed.
    80:08
    And so there was friction between Pat and I at that time, and Pat and I had less friction than other design teams. And we did four consecutive – for me it was four consecutive games with Pat. although he did two between Banzai Run and Funhouse.
    80:30
    But we were just struggling, and we just kept on moving the pieces and moving the pieces and finally, you know, created a great game.
    80:41
    But it was – we were saddled with a belly. We had a game that just wasn't cutting it maybe a month before it had to be finished. and the rest is history after we worked it out. And, again, once we started putting it out and it was making $400 a week in 1980, no, 92, and eighth week, ninth week, tenth week, eleventh week, it's making $400 a week at a particular arcade.
    81:16
    Boy, we knew we were on to something. But, you know, this was – the players weren't letting it go at the level that they would. They were contending to be on the machine. Yeah. And, you know, it got near the record, and our friend Hans Rosenzweig in Germany went and bought enough games to get from whatever they had sold to be just one over the record of eight ball, which was 20,230. Okay. And so the original run was 20,231, and then there were 1,000 gold games made.
    82:00
    Like a lot of games, both runs could have run longer, but we had the six-week rule. Yeah. And the gold was one of the first times the six-week rule was ever broken, where they restarted a game to make 1,000 games,
    82:17
    was the glimpse of what they're all doing now, where we'll make a nicer game, and it was really just superficially nicer.
    82:29
    And we'll charge more money, and we'll put numbered plates on it and make a big deal out of it. So that was that. That's awesome. And then you guys then went into Twilight Zone, which was a great follow-up to Adam's family.
    82:46
    I guess, how did that one come about? All right. What did I say at the top of this? Designers are insecure? Yes. Pat felt he needed some new innovation, and that innovation for Twilight Zone,
    83:03
    initially before the other things like the gumball machine and the Powerball, that innovation was we're going to make the games bigger. You know, it's not going to be that wide body size. It's going to be a size in between, which was, I think, with Big Game and Cheetah, the CERN game. No, Big Game was big. It was Cheetah that went to the Twilight Zone size. Big Game was Big Game. Yeah.
    83:32
    And so, you know, he did that. and all of a sudden we're back in the margin. You know, if you make a game with two more square feet, you're going to shovel two more square feet of stuff on the game. And so we went to work on that project.
    83:54
    It's a game. It's the most frustrating pinball machine I ever worked on, not because it was difficult, although it was, and there are modes where you can trick the game into thinking there's a power ball there when it's not.
    84:12
    But because we could not get the left side drain, we had the bumpers in the drain on the left side, we could not get that to work right. It was either too liberal, we closed it off. We closed it off when we initially did it, and the good players, you know, were destroying it top to bottom. And we opened it up and tried to adjust it, and Pat tried to put rubber here and there and everywhere. And when it was opened up, it was a really mean, vicious game.
    84:52
    And for great pinballers, finding that balance. Twilight Zone to make money in an arcade or a bar was not a great pinball.
    85:03
    But to the collecting community, it shows when you take a shovel and set shoveling components and features and things into a game that, boy, are they going to want to have that game. And it's a glimpse at where we are now.
    85:27
    But, you know, I had one of every one of my games. When I downsized, I got rid of some of them. And then when I moved to an apartment, I got rid of almost all the rest of them. And I did not hug Twilight Zone out the door. it is so revered in this community and it's a game that I just you know I just am so frustrated we could never get it right it was it wasn't what it was supposed to be better than Adam's Friends and it was again we couldn't get it where it made a lot of money and that was our job Not to make collectors go, we love your game. Our job was to make games that make lots of money and sell lots of games. Which is funny because some people revere Twilight Zone way above Atoms. And it just, between that and it sold 15,000 units. It was very, very respectable. And again, the last couple thousand were overshoot because of the hype, which were maybe not closed out but squeezed out slowly and painfully because the market didn't want them.
    86:50
    And I'm approached by collectors who talk about Twilight Zone and want me to sign a flyer or their lower arch or their back glass.
    87:01
    But I don say to a single one of them that you know I glad you love it I happy to support you in it but I just cringe every time I think about that game
    87:16
    So after Twilight, you kind of stopped. So at least on Pinside, it said that you did World Cup soccer and you did jackpot, and that was kind of the last couple games you did for Williams Valley. And then what did your role transition to while you were there? Okay. World Cup was a game being developed by John Papaduke.
    87:38
    I think Jack Scalin did the mechanicals on it. Matt Correal was the programmer. And I think Kevin O'Connor did the art. Yep.
    87:50
    That was a team that I was not a part of. Okay. and they had a working whitewood, and John Papadude's father got deathly ill, and John left the project and the company to tend to his father.
    88:15
    And so Matt asked if I would, you know, come in and help him with the software, and if I could, you know, help, you know, work the rules of the game.
    88:29
    And I sort of came in, you know, Jim Patla, again, was there, so he was probably the game design lead on it as far as making, doing all the things a game designer has to do to work with the mechanical guys, get the parts made, get it through the system, publish the drawings.
    88:56
    And I kind of came in as lead programmer working with Matt and co-designer, where John had a great layout. Okay. I didn't change a thing in the layout except that the ramp that came around from the lock mechanism had a plastic ramp that went behind the flippers and came back and dumped the ball by the right flipper. I think it comes out on the left flipper. Is it kind of like on Blackwater 500? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And the ramp was positioned so that when you try to reach in to lift up the lower arch to lift up the play field, you got this plastic ramp and had to worry about breaking it. Yeah.
    89:54
    And so the only change that Jim and I made to the play field was just cutting the ramp and delivering it to the left flipper. and then we took some of the rules that he had in there and Matt and I really created mostly a new set of rules I think we kept the multi-ball rules which it locked the balls up in the ramp on the left side and then it would like final draw to start multi-ball and then it would start multi-ball and I don't remember if they had an objective or not.
    90:38
    Shoot ramp, then shoot goal. Those are the rules. That's what you did. I'm not sure what John had there. Okay.
    90:49
    But we ended, and we made everything being about hitting the ball and the goal and getting excited. World Cup is the game. When anyone says I want to put a pinball in my basement, I tell them find an old World Cup. That's the game I would recommend. And I had two or three of them, and they are still in my friend's basements because that is such an instant gratification game. You know, you're flipping the balls without skill, and they're going up the middle mostly. And it's scoring goals, and the crowd's cheering, and the announcer's announcing. Tim Kittsrow did an amazing job on vocals on that And we worked with Tim on those vocals And he was amazing And I'm really, really sad I ran into him at an event somewhere recently And introduced myself You know, Larry DeMaria, I work with him on World He doesn't even remember working on that game Really? He does not remember working on that game You know, of course legendary for the Midway Sports Games.
    92:01
    But he does not remember and he did, he killed it. He killed it and then again Matt and I had to do magic to make it sound like an announcer and not sound like Max Headroom.
    92:17
    Which is kind of what happens when you start just firing off speech calls. But It was a great team effort.
    92:28
    And, yeah, Kevin did the back glass. It's beautiful. We made Striker, their mascot, into a star, which FIFA didn't do. Yeah. Was it FIFA? FIFA. FIFA didn't make Striker into a star. They created him. They gave us all of the material ahead of the World Cup. as far as a style guide. We used him. He was lovable, huggable, and it's really funny that he was not a brand. He was not relevant. Nobody would associate looking at that image with World Cup soccer.
    93:11
    But the exact antithesis of Twilight Zone, it didn't have the commercial success of some of the biggest games, but I love how that game came out.
    93:27
    And again, I can't take anything away from John. It's his masterpiece, but I got to paint a few breaststrokes in there as we went through it. And it's a great game. I still own that game. When you talk about friends having that still in their basement, my wife's like, you're never getting rid of that game. I think it does everything for not only the beginner, but it also does it for the expert. It's a deep, challenging game And it's got the perfect wizard mode I love that, going up against Germany and finally And then dumping all the balls on and just attacking and attacking There's no other wizard mode like it and it's amazing Now, if anybody knows and has the home ROMs Which certainly you can find, they're out there if you push and hold the buy-in button when you start, any time during the game, you push and hold the buy-in button, it will go into the wizard mode. Oh, really? I didn't know that. Yeah. You have to have the home runs. Do you have the home runs? I don't think I do.
    94:34
    I'm going to have to find them. I might know a guy. But with the home runs installed, you can push and hold the buy-in button. Same thing for Twilight Zones, Lost in the Zone. same thing for Adam's family Tour of the Mansion I didn't know any of this, this is the first time I've ever heard this I've been doing this for a decade I made home rems for all these games and it wasn't for wide distribution and we didn't early on there was no free information exchange over the internet although there was RGP on Usenet it was a Usenet group that had a lot of us interact and ended up recruiting people into our companies.
    95:20
    Duncan Brown came to us definitely, you know, through the Usenet group. Kevin Martin. Okay. Kevin Martin, when Kevin was on RGP, he was an RGP busybody. He literally responded to every post anybody made and lowered the quality of that group by three runs.
    95:56
    He ended up working at Data East as a result of a Data East pinball and confessed that his behavior was solely to get the job in the business. So We exchange stuff like that But I'm sure the home runs for all those games Are out there And they should each Have a start the wizard mode By holding the button And they all clear your scores At the end of the wizard modes So that it doesn't get you Anywhere for high score Purposes That's awesome That's a tidbit for your listeners That's great that's great so so when what ended up happening because you were still at Williams until they closed the doors correct um ish let's say that okay okay let's say that I actually left uh Labor Day and they closed on October 25th so you were there pretty much up to the end we're talking days a couple of months um so what did your role become after Jackbott were you kind of Just overseeing people?
    97:05
    Actually, before Jackpot, I was put as director of engineering. So I had everybody doing work on pinball, mechanical, sound, electrical, game design, software, the quality control, the manuals the technical writing was all one group under me and Jim Patler was at my side running that group.
    97:40
    The game Jackpot came to be because we hit a point where there was going to be a perceived hole in production. It's a recurring theme. no fear was delayed and no fear was going to miss its targeted date and three or four months Jim was waving red flags that we have to do something to fill the hole in production and so I suggested well there's two things one is we had a hole in production two we were losing our audience Okay, the games had and were evolving And were so involved that the beginner players were totally not staying or playing And so we needed a new game My concept was, let's take an old The only thing we can make in time, kind of like Super Defender The only thing we can make in three or four months is a game that's done. So let's reskin a game, and I pick Pinbot, which would become Jackbot, with the notion is it's got this bank of five targets in the middle, and a flailing player is going to just hit them. And as long as I make good stuff happen up the middle, maybe I can get newer people to hang on to the game. Yeah. and so the jackpot rules were so much kinder and gentler. Any five shots on either bank would give you the five entire columns to open the visor, let you shoot up the middle to start multiball.
    99:31
    And then we built a game around it, around gambling, And it was a real interesting segue because I started using gambling probability math concepts in the features that were gambling features and in Casino Run, which was the wizard mode of the game. Well, it was one of the wizard modes of the game. Again, Casino Run was four features completed to get Casino Run. So it was not Tour the Mansion or Lost in the Zone or Final Mansion. Regular people with a good game could get the casino run. And then there was Megavisor, which was the real wizard future in jackpots. And I would work all day in my management role. And then at 6 o'clock, everyone went home. And I worked from 6 till 12, 1, 2, whatever, programming jackpot. Um, and, uh, you know, we did the game. I, I, it's a game I like, I'm happy with, um, didn't sell a lot of games and, uh, you know, we were, we were clearly in that period, clearly in that period of declining sales where, you know, World Cup, I think was probably 7,000 or 8,000. Jackpot was, you know, 3,000 or 4,000. No Fear was about the same. And it went down from there.
    101:07
    So I don't know if it achieved the objective of getting weaker players to want to play pinball, but it was a game that was really liked by the really good players for the difficult side of the game.
    101:28
    Especially those super jackpots, too, and some of the quirkiness a little bit to the rules of locking certain balls a certain way and getting double jackpots and super jackpots. Yeah. And, again, I'm a player, so, you know, a lot of the things we come up with, you do something cool and don't get rewarded, you go, oh, well, let's reward that. Yeah. and so features like that come about that way.
    101:59
    So what made you decide, you know, there was, I know when Williams closed, it kind of was like resetting the clock. They kind of said, hey, if you want to work in slots, you're going to have to start back at square one with us. I know Stern was kind of taking their pick of the crop. What made you decide to just not keep going with pinball?
    102:20
    it really turned out to be um what happened when they closed pinball um from 1996 to 98 i was working over slots and pinball and i was learning how to make cool slot machines with some of the old pinball guys who you know we we laid off people we downsized. So some of the people that were doing pinballs in my department, we moved over and they were working, making new kinds of slots.
    103:03
    And in night, so, so I, I, I had a background in slots in 99 when they fired everybody from pinball. Okay. They fired all these guys that were brilliantly talented people like Scott Slomiani, Duncan Brown, Al Thomas, Ben Gomez.
    103:28
    And I couldn't ever hire them to work for me because of non-solicitation agreements that I had as a manager of the company. Okay, so under no circumstances could I try and go do what Eugene and I did. with the people that were working for him.
    103:49
    And so Al, of course, Al Thomas, I could do another podcast twice as long talking about Al Thomas. He's brilliant. He's crazy.
    104:02
    He's a great guy. And he was all over me, you know, we got to start a company. Because Al was working, Al was still in gaming, as was Ben, but, you know, he saw that he had worked with Scott and Duncan on gaming projects and felt, you know, they could all do it. Come on, let's all start a company. And so, you know, I looked around. They're really pinball.
    104:40
    Williams pinball was done. I believe Stern was not going to last real long in the way Williams had met its demise. And so I didn't think there was a future in pinball. And Gary Stern Pinball was on life support for a lot of years before anybody could conclude, you know, this is solid and this is a business. Yeah. And I always, my vision is the best thing that happened to Gary Stern was Jersey Jack. Because Jack decided we're going to shovel all the stuff in the machine and charge a high price. while Gary was still in the no-profit margin mode.
    105:29
    And once Stern changed to the Jersey Jack model, everyone in pinball starts making money now. So I did not expect Stern to survive.
    105:45
    Williams had asked me to go interview with the gaming department, and I ended up following the Al Thomas route and LED Gaming was started with myself, Scott, and Duncan and Al and Ben decided not to join the group after all once we got it started and each of them came to join the company once we were on our way in making games. So we had the five of us at one point as Al had envisioned. And then one by one, Ben and Al went back to the mothership working for WMS Gaming, and we went in a different way.
    106:32
    So obviously things have changed. It's been 20-plus years since you've been in the industry and whatnot.
    106:39
    Do you, seeing everything, I mean, like you said, we started this out by you were playing Godzilla, Keith's masterpiece, and seeing where pinball has come from, is there a part of you that wants to get back in it? Do you feel like you've said everything that needs to be said for pinball? I feel like you're a very great asset to the industry, and I know a lot of people say that. I don't know if you'll say it about yourself, but I'll say it for you.
    107:04
    Would you ever take another opportunity to work on a pinball project? That's a question for another time. I started another company during COVID called OddsWorks, and we are supplying content to the online slot machine industry. It's legal in six states in the U.S., and we set up a company to deliver games like my studio with Scott and Duncan were making into those states for online gaming, and it has become a significant endeavor. we are doing great but it is taking up so much time that um that there's no time to think about pinball and when when you're developing a game it's it's to do it well it's almost all immersive um when i went into management at williams there was a vision that i was going to help people and add special sauce to the games.
    108:15
    And I was never, I sprinkled a little bit of dust here and there, but I never was able to have that effect to really improve games with what I could think of or develop because I wasn't immersed into it.
    108:33
    I was, you know, I had 100 people working for me and eight projects at a time. going on, all right, and there really wasn't the just ruminating and thinking and going over and over and over.
    108:50
    And, you know, for me, half of the best ideas and features came when I woke up from a dream or were in the shower, okay, and that only happens when you're immersed in something. So there's no chance now, and probably as my company gets on its feet to not need me as much as it does,
    109:19
    I think the same problem comes to getting involved in pinball. I don't have the hours to put into it that will result in really cool stuff. okay and I think trying to to say go go to a pinball company once or twice a week and you know um do it and the other thing that I learned that I've been learning the hard way because I I'm a good pinball player and most of the games that are being made today I can't play very well. Well, we were designing games for a three-minute experience, and you know, in three minutes, not much happens in these games. There's too many building blocks everywhere to do 25 things that even my mind locked into the games isn't there right now.
    110:27
    And so I enjoy watching them. I enjoy seeing them. I'm hoping maybe one day I'll get to have the time to enjoy playing them again. I have fun with the 90s games.
    110:43
    I have fun playing some of these games some of the time, but it's going to stretch. Well, and before we start talking, you said you've downsized your collection What's the one game you've got in your collection?
    110:58
    My collection, well, I've got a couple dozen at friends' houses Okay One game in my apartment is Adam's Family Gold No. 2 And then I have a main cabinet And our grandkids play the main cabinet more than the Adams family But it is great to see at Expo all the new young people playing pinball because that wasn't happening five, six years ago. I know. It's crazy. They just did the Stern Pro Circuit on Tuesday night, and it was Escher versus Jared, and Escher's 20 and Jared's 19, and it's like, where are these kids coming from? But it's awesome to see this passion and this love, and they're playing at such a high level too. We saw Josh and Zach Sharpe. playing when they weren't good and could barely see over the glass.
    111:55
    And it was the first IFPA tournament, which I think front house was around 1990, maybe 91, where all of a sudden Josh could play pinball. He didn't win anything or place or anything in that tournament, but I saw him have a comeback ball, you know, of 10 minutes on a game that it's like, okay, okay, here's somebody you've got to watch.
    112:30
    These kids are amazing. They are. Escher, I mean, what the hell? What the hell? That's great. I think you've summed it up perfectly for a lot of us, whether you're competing or not against them. That's perfectly put. Absolutely incredible. Well, I want to thank you, Larry. I know this has been at least a year in the making having you come on. I really appreciate you taking time. I know you're busy, super scheduled, or your schedule is super busy, but I really do thank you for coming on. Guy, last thoughts before I shut off the recording? No, thank you, Josh. this was a lot more fun than I expected it to be so thanks for staying on me to do it definitely, well like I said, thank you so much holy crap, that was almost two hours long it was amazing every second of it I know the sound's a little raw, I do apologize like I said, I was recording this off my phone via Zencaster in some corner at Expo as people were moving around so you heard some coughing you heard some people talk in the background I like his natural ambiance I guess it is what it is me. I'm just fooling myself. But overall, I love the interview. There are some names in here I wanted to point out. Steve Kordek, he was instrumental in the 60s and 70s. Some of his games are the most beloved that are out there, Stars and Nineball. Steve Epstein, you know, God rest his soul, he just passed away this last couple of years. And he was very pivotal in all this as well. Also with bringing pinball to New York for the Broadway Arcade.
    114:11
    He was a close friend of Roger Sharpe's. I assume you know who Roger Sharpe is. We talked about Roger, Keith Elwin. It's amazing how a lot of these people tie together and you can kind of see the evolution of pinball. It was kind of cool to hear him talk about the old guard moving into the new guard because now they're kind of the old guard and we have the new guard. That's Keith Elwin, Eric Beignere, Scott Denise, all these wonderful people and the future of pinball listening, talking about Escher Leskov I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I had it was definitely worth the two and a half year wait for those that want our regular show we will be back, we are aiming for this Thursday to record and Scott will be back with me we're going to talk everything pinball expo I know you're wanting to hear about everything that happened there but I'm going to hold off until then I want to thank you if you want to get a hold of us at Loser Kid Pinball for our socials, for Facebook, Instagram for TikTok, Twitch, YouTube all those Twitter, X, whatever if you would like to email us we are Loser Kid Pinball Podcast at gmail.com I want to thank those that came up and talked to me on Expo and just said how much our content means to them sometimes it kind of gets flung out to the internet. I see the numbers, but sometimes we don't get feedback. And honestly, lately, we've been receiving a lot of feedback and I want to thank you guys for that. And gals, we have an amazing amount of women that listen to the show and I want to thank them personally because you women are helping progress pinball and evolve it. And it's amazing. It truly is. I love to see that pinball is such a diverse group of people that have come together for such a wonderful little niche thing. Like I said, thanks again for tuning in.