Jersey Jack Pinball Recruiting Spooky Pinball Recruiting Dutch Pinball Recruiting Happy Birthday Wayne Lyons Hi and welcome to the Pinball Magazine and Pinball News monthly recap podcast discussing all the pinball industry news of the previous month in this case, the month of July. My name is Johnson Euston, and I'm joined here with... I'm Martin Mayer of Pinball News. I was going to say Pinball Magazine then, because you... Oh, you wish you were working for me. Oh, well, maybe one day. If I get a promotion. So, Pinball News, and yes, it's been... I was going to say it's been a quiet month, but there's been a lot going on, but there's no sort of big breaking stories. No, there's no big reveals, no new games or anything like that. But there's still a lot to report on, actually. Yeah, I think so. So, we're not wasting any more time. Let's get straight on with it, then. And start with the biggest company of them all, Stern. Right. From Elk Grove Village. And they've been very busy basically releasing new code for four different games and doing their social media stuff as well. Right. Sort of activities and things. so let's do the social media stuff we have a video released in the past month of Jeremy Packer (Zombie Yeti) aka Zombie Yeti and he's been talking about his career as an artist and then his move back into illustration having given that up for a long time and the point at which he started doing work for Stone Pimble starting with Ghostbusters and moving on to Prime as did Paul Iron Maiden and most recently Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Right. So he's showing some of his techniques and the equipment he uses and talking about his inspiration and the sort of requirements he had when he was doing the most recent game Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Right. Well, he recently also was a guest on the Super Awesome Pinball Show actually two episodes. It was a very lengthy interview. I haven't seen the video yet, but I look forward to diving into it. I think it was available for us current insiders, right? Originally, yeah, but now it's available for everyone. That tends to be the way with their stuff. So at least I was able to watch it, and I'm not tied up to it. Okay. And it seemed to be, it wasn't an incredibly in-depth interview or anything like the Super Awesome Pinball one was. But it's interesting enough, and of course it has the visuals, which are somewhat helpful for discussing art. Right. So that's Zombie Yeti, Jeremy Packer (Zombie Yeti), interviewed. Dwight Sullivan was also interviewed. He was interviewed as part of the virtual Southern Pride Game Room Expo. That show, of course, had to be cancelled, but they moved it online and did a bunch of social media things, interviews, panels, demonstrations, that kind of stuff. so you can watch Dwight Dwight is obviously a senior software engineer or coder or I don't know exactly what his title is but he's probably one of the most experienced along with Lonnie at writing game code so you can watch his interview on YouTube and on Southern Pride Game Room Expo Facebook page interestingly you can't find that on the show's website which is pretty much later on yeah well the show's website seems to be focusing more on the 2021 show now ok so there are details about what was going to happen in 2020 but no information about the virtual side of it so stick to well Facebook's probably the best way to go Southern Pride Game Room Expo right It's a piece of cake to see Dwight's interview. I still have to watch that as well. And so I'll definitely be looking that up. But it's always interesting to see what Dwight has to say. Although I do tend to think, and here we get to a personal opinion, the last time I saw Dwight talking about the code of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I got the idea that he's, as is very typical for a programmer, he's so deep into the game that he's making the game overly complex, it seems, to appeal to more players. well, I'm actually afraid that it might be actually steering people away from it because there's so much stuff going on and it's just becoming too difficult, especially with a team that appears to be rather easy to approach, so to speak, easy to walk up to. But that might just be my opinion and not worth anything else than just my two cents. I think that's a skill isn't it in writing software you have to do it on at least two levels if not more has to be instantly accessible to novice players or to people who don't want to spend a huge amount of time getting deep into the rules just want to have some fun but also have that depth in there for those people who buy the game for their own use and want to have some longevity in the gameplay and not get bored with it too quickly I think it's a separate skill or skill in itself to sort of be able as a programmer to sort of take a step back so you can sort of more have a helicopter view on what's going on with the game and then see whether it's appealing to everybody. And the last time, like I said, what I saw with Dwight, he was talking about all sorts of possibilities that you have within the code when you reach this and when you reach that, and then you can do this. And I'm like, I just want to flip the ball around and have some fun, and I don't want to be concerned. I mean, tournament players, I get that, but at this point we're talking about a new game, and I'm just like, give me something fun. Give me a fun objective to go for, and let me discover the game from there. So I was a bit overwhelmed. so to speak, with, well, obviously you have, I think it goes for any programmer or coder who is very into a game that is taking a few steps, or skipping a few steps compared to the audience watching, because he's already so deep into it. and that sort of okay that sort of triggered my earlier response it may be that there's already a good enjoyable fairly simplistic level of the game there which is great fun for casual players to play but not that interesting to talk about and what he's talking about are the much more esoteric bits that most people won't get to see on location but the homeowners would appreciate it as being there and would want to buy the game knowing that they won't get bored of it that quickly because they'll keep getting further and further into it and finding more and more features and knowing that they're there rather than thinking that that's all there is to the game is what you see initially and thinking it's quite a shallow game. Not necessarily a bad thing either, having a very shallow game, but it's not something that people tend to hold on to for the long term. We've seen that before on some of the games from various manufacturers who haven't had particularly deep rule sets, and those games tend to not stay in their collection for that long. Right. Well, that said, some of the great games, I'm thinking of Attack from Mars and The Addams Family and games like that, which were hugely popular and still are. They don't have anything like deep rule sets. Yeah, but they're still appealing. Yeah. Yeah, personally for me, that level of depth, for me as a, I'd say probably average player, I'm not a big tournament player, but as an average player, that's deep enough for me. It's still giving me the chance to, every few games, get to the wizard mode or whatever it is. without having the idea that there is a wizard mode that I'll never be able to get to. I understood. Yeah, I agree. As I said, those games are great fun to play as well and don't require you to spend 100 plus hours studying the rule sheet and practicing all these different features and modes and combining them and trying to get the best scoring opportunities. But there we go. We've got a bit sidetracked there. Anyway, and so let's just carry on with the more social media thing. And one of the longer-term things that Stern have been doing over the past many weeks has been their Stern Showdown, which has basically been a inverted quote battle to find the most popular or most voted for, shall we say, Stern pinball game. and it started with a whole bunch of games how many there were originally, maybe 32 or something like that and boiled it down to the final two all achieved by people voting or posting on social media channels I think both Facebook and Instagram yeah and the final two were Iron Maiden and Lord of the Rings yeah that's kind of surprising to me but okay yeah Yeah, well, Lord of the Rings was very popular at the time, a big seller for Scourge. Yeah, but I wouldn't consider it a top two game for them. And no offence, George Gomez, but at the time I found the game, especially in its audio implications, or the way it was used, very repetitive, and the ball times are extremely long. You can't use a game in tournaments because it will take forever. So I think, not taking away anything from that game, but I think Stern have produced better games since then. Especially in the past, I'd say, eight years, something like that. Yeah, I wonder if there's a certain amount of nostalgia there, because I think when Lord of the Rings came out at the time, it was almost like a groundbreaking game the way that it had the bow-rog and it had the ring in particular and the tricks that the ball could do to hold the ball in the ring and then throwing it backwards through the backboard and onto the ramp. Yeah, there were a lot of troubles with it, overheating and the octo's not working properly and the bow-rog as well. But, you know, at the time, it was a very fully featured game. And that basic layout went on to be very similar for, like, Batman as well. But that layout was already similar to things that we had seen in the 90s from another manufacturer. True. It was a bit like... Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to go into it too much. But, well, no, it won by votes, and so Iron Maiden actually won in the end. That was deemed the best-earned game. It won by 59% to 41% for the Lord of the Rings. So did we have the Iron Maiden army chiming in as well? Well, I don't know. Certainly we had that with Metallica, didn't we? Yeah, that was quite surprising that Metallica is actually not a finalist game. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe they found a way of discounting those votes. Yeah, and then still, I think if we're talking about the most successful games for sure, Metallica should definitely be one of that, because I think it's one of their longest running games ever. I'd say probably ACDC was probably the most successful game they've done in terms of units sold, but Metallica can't be that far behind. I probably wish they could have made some more limited editions of that beyond the two that they did. Yeah. So, congratulations to the team of Iron Maiden for winning the Stern Showdown, for whatever it was. Yeah, that's right. So, those were the kind of main... Oh, no. No, well, we've got all the comic con as well. I mean, because normally this month they would have Comic Con in San Diego. Right. But, of course, the current climate, that kind of thing, it can't take place. So it was, like many others, virtualized, as the Southern Pride Game Room Expo was. And Stern's participation was a live Q&A featuring Jack Danger, of course, about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And it was shown on his Deadflip stream on Twitch. So you'll be able to find that there and, I'm sure, on his YouTube channel as well. so that so not able to you know be there physically but but did it over the the internet as an online event as well so it's I can't remember exactly who their partners were was it Nuclear Blast yeah you can say it is yeah so I think that was done this year again you know with them they're normally on their fan I think at the show yeah so catch that out catch that check it out check it out catch it out you know you'll want to find out more about, even more, about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles than you got from listening or watching Zombie Yeti and Dwight talk about the game as well alright, and there was also something about an update to the Noteboard firmware yeah basically in July we had updates for four games which are Elvirus House of Horrors, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Stranger Things and and Jurassic Park, all of which include, as part of the update, an update to the node board firmware. So that in itself, I would say, is a good enough reason to update the software on those four games, if you've got any of them, or indeed all of them, because node boards have been a little bit, shall we say, temperamental, and liable to damage. So you want to update the foam on there to the latest version to increase the stability on them and keep them going as long as possible. You don't want to have to replace note boards unless you absolutely have to. And I'm sure putting the latest foam on there will help keep those running smoothly. I do have a question about that because I do remember at one of the previous EHE expos in London where just replacing or updating a game caused one of the games to burn out or blow up one of the note boards. So either they're rather fragile for being touched or whatever whenever a game is being updated. So I'm wondering how is new firmware going to protect them from any outside errors that might be occurring when you're updating a game, like accidentally touching something, making a short, and off you go. There's another board fight. Well, the firmware won't be able to protect against electrical shorts or interference, but if the cause of the board's failure in that case was due to it being sent some signals they didn't understand and something knocking on, then if you can update the firmware to deal with those cases or it gets sent messages or garbled messages that it can't deal with then it can deal with them in a much more no, either ignore them or deal with them in a more graceful way and not turn things on and off which shouldn't be turned on and off at the end of the day it's software that's driving the hardware so if the software, the firmware in this case can be made more bulletproof and deal with exceptions and unexpected circumstances, then that's a very good reason to update it. It could help it to avoid self-destruction. All this time we've been talking about, over the years, talking about whether people should be able to release custom versions of software for pinball games, and manufacturers classically say, where we don't want people writing codes going to lock a coil on and set fire to the game and we'll be held liable for that. Well, it's the same kind of thing. It's a node board, so they can improve the quality of the software, the firmware in this case, to prevent things like that happening and overloading bits either on the board itself or on the rest of the play field, then it's certainly worth updating the software to try and prevent that happening. Right, okay. So, well, you already mentioned the four games that received code updates. Do you want to briefly address what these code updates include? Yeah, we won't spend too long, because it's pretty boring if you haven't got any of them. So, Avarice House of Horrors, up to version 0.98, adds a couple of new dedicated characters called Doubleheader and Crown. Some more lighting effects, scoring changes, some audio clean-ups, new video and sound, and there's a couple of minor bug fixes in there as well. I think there's some new music in there as well. Yeah, all right, okay. That's good. Not sure that it's in that one. Is that clear? Yeah, well, I don't hear sound. Yeah, that's good. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, obviously it was beyond version one when it was released, thanks to the delay in actually releasing it. But that's in version 1.10 now. They've added a new final battle challenge that allows you to play the wizard mode as a separate thing. That's been done on other games, and it's now available on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as well as a lot of other adjustments to allow and disable that kind of feature and other features as well in the game, as well as setting default behaviours. It's got these game modes where you can do collaborative and team play and all that kind of stuff, and one versus three and three versus two, and three versus one. So that's all that can be said as default behaviour now for the game, along with the final battle challenges available. And there's some tweaks to Ninja Pizza multiball, the difficulty level of that, there's a default setting for that, and some scoring and mode tweaks, and oh, and some Shaker Motor effects as well, some more Shaker Motor effects that you can do. Speaking of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I understood that the game is now finally available in the UK and elsewhere in Europe as well. Yes indeed, yep. Have you seen them over here? Although interestingly, well I say interestingly, maybe it's not really a boring fact, but when the TV series was first released in the UK back in the, was it the 80s or 70s? the 80s. Would have been the 80s. If you're talking about the Crackdown series, yes. Yeah, they weren't allowed to call it Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Oh, what did they call it? Well, ninjas were seen as, you know, a bad thing at that time. People would go around killing others and basically murdering. Oh, but don't understand, don't think that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a kiddies theme or something. No, these are bad-ass dudes who are basically cheering on the bad guys. Oh, are you? Oh, okay. Right. They're ninjas. Yeah, well, that's the thing, you see. So they weren't allowed to call it that because it was aimed at children in the cartoon series and it was seen as, you know, corrupting, I guess. So it was actually called Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. Ha! Yeah. Yeah, odd, isn't it? But back in the days when this kind of... Yeah, right. There's rot in the entire city and we call them heroes? Well, I guess they were trying to rescue people. Isn't that the idea? Yeah, but in the meantime, causing so much inconvenience for others. I mean, all the damage they caused, that's hardly the behavior of a hero, I think. Well, it would seem more acceptable to call them that than ninjas. But I haven't heard anything more about that since, and such is the power of global licensing. I think that kind of title disappeared into the dust, and there have been ninjas ever since, and ninjas aren't seen as such a bad thing these days. No. Well, wait until they throw one of those metal dies, they just... Yes. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, so moving on. New code, Stranger Things next. 0.97, almost at one. Just a couple of minor... Well, a few minor changes there. A couple of the multiballs' behaviours have been changed. That is, send it back multiball and take the isolation to multiball. The way they work has changed slightly, as well as the scoring for them. And a couple of minor bug fixes as well in there. So, as I say, not a big deal, but worth having, obviously. And finally, Jurassic Park. That's up to version 1.02, which has added some extra rewards. an option that added the Escape Nublar challenge which is you know like the like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Final Battle Challenge where you just play the wizard mode as a standalone thing well now you can turn off the randomness on that if you particularly want to particularly if you're doing it as a sort of a tournament type game just play that that mode and remove all the randomness so it would be quite a short and quite a nice way to run a tournament just playing that one mode. It also has some new sound calls, some even more high school table entries and there was a bug in the code for the topper. That's the one that spells out Jurassic Park. I think that's the $600 topper? Yeah, that's it. Okay. Well, it lights up each letter for Jurassic Park and apparently if you had all 12 letters lit but didn't start the mode and depowered the game then when you repowered it you would never be able to restart that mode. So that's been fixed in Virtual 1.02. So, as I say, all those four have the new Nodeboard firmware as part of their update. So there you go. I think that pretty much wraps up our pinball news. Right, okay, so still to come, the news from Jersey Jack Pinball, Spooky Pinball, American Pinball, Multimorphic, Deep Blue Pinball, Home Pin, Dutch Pinball, and what have you. But let's continue with Jersey Jack Pinball. Yeah There was a The latest Jersey Jack Pimble Podcast interview Was released Just recently Yeah And this is Ken Cromwell's Podcast They're interviews Although I think they're not All going to be interviews But they tend to be Interviews And the most recent one They talked Or he talks To sculptor Peter Dorn Who makes Many of the models Used on the game Such as The Caribbean And yeah Smog and so he talks about the process of making those models and getting the authorization as well from the license stores and also talks to senior software developer Ted Estes about the process of basically the game development process from the very beginning, from the play field layout through to actually having a complete fully functional game. Right, okay. Well, speaking of seniors, I'm not sure exactly whether we addressed this in our previous podcast, because I think we had it before the news got public. I did address it in the Pimble Magazine newsletter, but did we already discuss Jim Petla being hired as chief operating officer at Jersey Jack Pimble? I'm pretty sure we did. Yeah, okay. Sorry, my memory sort of is a little bit hazy on that. it's already a month ago, you know. Yeah, I know. A lot happens in the pinball world in a month. But, yeah. So, yeah, I was just going to mention that when they first brought these pinball podcasts out, the Jersey Jack ones, they were called Behind the Backglass, I think. Yeah. That was the kind of branding that was used, but that seems to have disappeared now, and they seem to just be called the Jersey Jack Pinball Podcast. Okay. I don't look at the site where all the podcasts are hosted and that name doesn't seem to appear anymore. Okay. Oh well. Just a minor little thing to pick up on. We were wondering whether they were up and running yet. No, exactly where they were with the manufacturing. Well, there was basically I've explained to the listeners currently Jersey Jack Pimble posted on social media that they are recruiting for a lot of new employees for their Elk Grove production facility, including production managers, quality control inspectors, quality control specialists, production group leaders, assemblers, product support supervisors, product support technicians, logistics specialists, inventory clerks, and stock chasers. Yes, I'm reading that from a piece of paper. You just make me laugh the idea of a stock chaser There somebody running around the factory trying to chase Stop Stop Stop Yeah but So with them looking for so many different people so to speak that made me wonder whether they were already in production. Because it could be that if you don't have these people, then we could already be building games. So I briefly checked with Jack Warnieri of Jersey Jack Pinball, and he basically briefly confirmed, yes, they are already manufacturing games in the Elk Grove Village facility. Because previously I think we'd seen that they were shipping games from there, but we weren't clear whether they'd actually been built at that facility or whether they'd been built back in Jersey. Lakewood. Yes. Yeah, Lakewood. Yeah. And then shipped up along with all the other inventory. No, they are. They are building games, so good news there. It doesn't say how many games they are building, but they are building games, so that's a good thing. No, so going back to that list of jobs, if you or anyone you know might be interested in applying for any of those, then get in contact with Jersey Jack Pinball. It says pinball experience is preferred, which is a good thing, but not necessarily always. Some of those quality control specialists might actually be better to have experience in a different but related field. They could bring that experience into the pinball realm. But also, interestingly, and almost inevitably given the location, it says it's also preferred if you are bilingual in Spanish as well. So does that mean you have to speak two times of Spanish? Yes, that's right. Yeah, it doesn't say English as a requirement, so just the bilingual in Spanish. So, yeah, get in touch with Jersey Jack Pinball, if you or anyone you know perhaps is getting involved in building pinball machines. There's quite a lot of different roles there as well. So the only position that surprises me, if not listed, is test players. I bet there's no shortage of those. Right. But interestingly, it's the test player position that usually results, or in the past resulted, in those type of people becoming pinball designers in the end. Yes, that's true. Yeah, but they tend to be the, well, I say always tournament players as well, but quite a lot of those have been snapped up by other companies already, haven't they? Some of the top players. So maybe they're... these days they seem to want to do a lot all companies I think seem to want to do all their quality control and testing in-house rather than put them out on location and do the sort of location reports like they used to do when there were multiple companies. But even in the 60s I mean we just mentioned Jim Petler I remember from interviewing Jim Petler for Pimble Magazine number 3 that he explained that he started out as a tester internally at Badgley, where he basically had to play the game as many times as he could and write down for each game the score and how long he was playing, how long each ball time was and so on. They used that internally to sort of tweak the game before it went out on location to be placed at a test centre to see how it performed. Right. Okay, so that would have been in, what, in the 60s? Yes, yes, yes. So, I'm guessing at that time they were putting out, badly, they were putting out, I don't know, four or five different models a year? Probably more. Yeah? Okay, so say one every two months. these days someone like Jack Pimple is currently putting out a game every 18 months to 2 years in some cases so you'd be doing a lot of testing of the same game if you were playing that one game continuously for 18 months well it's not available for 18 months obviously you can only play it once it's completely developed and it's not like the game is developed in 2 days and then you can playing for 18 months. No, but you could also keep playing it after it's been released in order to apply that experience to updates. So, yeah, an average time between games of say a year, I don't think you could usefully keep somebody who's purely a pinball tester employed for that time. So, maybe better to get other people in the factory to do it. Yeah, on the other hand, you don't want people being too experienced in pinball because it still has to be appealing to novice players Absolutely I guess that comes back to what Stern do, try to get everybody to play the game and give their feedback to it and those people who only have a passing interest in the game, in as much as they work in a pinball factory, they might not be interested in playing pinball normally but they can give their feedback Right And also you talk about talking to Jack just now and he's confirmed about building games. Jack's also been busy on social media wishing a certain Mr. Slash a very happy birthday. Slash, of course, famous from his position in Guns N' Roses. Yeah, he's that drummer, isn't he? Oh, yes, I'm not. I can't remember exactly what he does. Something musical-ish. No, I think he's their lead guitarist. He is, and a hugely talented guitarist at that as well. and seemingly a much larger than life character as well and of course Slash is known as an avid pinball collector and he even helped in the design of the Data East Guns N' Roses game back in the day yes and rumour has it that he's very much involved in the upcoming release from Jersey Jack Pinball as well but they haven't confirmed what their next title is. But at least it's involved, and I'm pretty sure it's going to be something like Hello Kitty or something. Yeah, well, that's obviously his passion. But we'll see when they finally do announce it. They did say, and this was in part of Ken's Pinball podcast, when they were talking about the release strategy. Well, it wasn't really much of a release strategy. where these strategies seem to consist of them only announcing the game when they've actually got some units ready to sell. Right. Which is a well-known strategy that they've been trying to aim for ever since they started, pretty much. I'm sure someday they'll get there. Yeah. Well, now they are manufacturing, but they've got all these jobs to fill. Maybe they need to get that done before they're in a position to produce the game in any sort of large quantities. I'd rather see them have some quality inspectors and so on before they start shipping games, because I'd rather have games being inspected properly. You know, and... It would be interesting to know whether all these positions existed when they were in Lakewood, or whether these are the new positions. Well, I don't know. Maybe they added some extra positions that they realized they needed, but couldn't fill when they were down there, and maybe they can now. Right, okay. Well, again, if you're interested in working in pinball and you're in the Chicago or Elk Grove Village area, here's your chance. But there's more opportunities to work in pinball if you're not in that area. And that brings me to Spooky Pinball. Yes, indeed. They are also recruiting, as we see in our headlines. They're a little more vague as to exactly what they're looking for, but they're looking for people to work in their tech department. So if pinball technology, I guess we're talking about software and hardware design, is that something that you're interested in or would like to be interested in, then give Spooky Pinball a call. I don't know if you're in Wisconsin. Yeah, my question. Why do you say that? There's a lot of people working from home these days, and given how Jersey Jack Pinball operated from two different facilities for a long time, with their technical department and software up in Vincentville. And Jean-Paul de Wynne operating from the Netherlands with all the animations and so on. Yeah, distance working is a thing. So that might be something. Even before it was a thing before Corona, Jersey Jack was already doing that. Yeah, that's right. You could sort of say that Jersey Jack made that popular before Corona did. Yeah, although of course one of the motivations or justifications for moving the manufacturing up to Elk Grove was to bring the whole team together into one place and it would be more effective and efficient rather than working remotely in different locations. Yeah, but seriously I don't see the entire Jersey Jack team moving to the Netherlands just so they can be with John Paul. I really don't see that happen. well maybe not until they start transatlantic flights on a regular basis again but if you want to see if you want to work for spooky either in uh in wisconsin or uh or up or like to propose any other plan give them a call on 815-541-0054 hold on can you repeat that was a little bit too quick for me i need to make a call Call now, 815-541-0054, any time between 7am and 5pm central, on the 8th of Friday. Wow. Yeah, 5, 7am, getting early. If you're looking at long day times, 7am to 5pm, basically, that's a very long time to be working. 10 hour days. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, okay, so if that's what you're looking at at Spooky Pinball and you'd love to be involved in Pinball, then give them a call. Or you can email them at service at spookypinball.com. Right. That's more convenient. So we were earlier, before we started recording this podcast, we were talking off air, and we were wondering how far along production of Rick and Morty currently is at Spooky Pinball, And I think we sort of understood from a report on Pinsight that currently games in the 130s are being delivered to people, to customers. Yes. Okay, so that's still over 600 games for Spooky Pinball to build. But obviously, well, there's the coronavirus. They had to move facilities. And they need more people as well. Yeah, exactly. So we reckon they're probably building around about 150 or so on the production line or coming up to that very soon. Right, right. So I'm going to, from Spooky Climber, I'm going to briefly jump ahead to Chicago Gaming, for which we actually don't have any news to report. That was quick, then. Yeah, okay, but I'm still wondering, of course, it has been announced that Spooky Primo and Chicago Gaming are working together on a title, which has been designed by Ben Egg. Did you come across any news regarding that or whether that's their next title or whether it's going to be after another what you call it, remake title any news on that? I haven't heard anything about it remember, is that the one that Christopher Franchi is doing the artwork for? I suppose it is with Christopher Franchi being hired by Chicago Gaming. What I understood was that the Ben Heck title is a game they already designed, but they're applying a different theme to it, a licensed theme, in this case. So, yeah, I was just wondering, okay, since there is a connection between Spooky and Chicago Gaming, I figured I'd tie the two together. But, yeah, well, we haven't got any other news from Chicago Gaming this month, so, no, basically I haven't heard anything more about the progress of that game, but it's going to be a Chicago game, built game, isn't it? Yeah. Because of you all by speaking. So it's probably going to overlap the Rick and Morty production. At least I would have thought so. Yeah. Okay. Well, then, moving on to American Pinball. Hmm. Yeah. Well, obviously, Hot Wheels is their hot game. I would say. I was hoping you would make a pun on that. Sorry. Sorry, Stu, you're... No, that's okay. That's very clever of you, yeah. So that's why we get along so well. Yeah. So Hot Wheels, yes. I noticed there were a lot of Hot Wheels pinball strings. Yeah, there's been a lot of it around about. To pertinently to this, really, individually, because, you know, they're all over the place and some of them are archived and some are only live. But yeah If you wanted to learn about Hot Wheels The game and How to play it I would recommend Having a look on YouTube for Hot Wheels Pinball And I'm sure there will be a whole bunch of Recordings of people playing games To be honest I find Many of them quite Not Hot Wheels in particular but Watching people play pinball I find them quite frustrating and tedious in some cases because you're wanting them to do various things and they don't do that, they do what they want to do and sometimes you're getting into it, the ball drains and because they're live there's no editing of what you're seeing it doesn't just take out all the boring bits where you have a house ball or the ball you don't actually advance the rules very much on a particular ball so maybe the edited versions are a better way to go on that. Even so, going back to Hot Wheels, there's a lot out there if that's what you want to see. Talking of Hot Wheels as well, over in Germany, Pimble Universe, who are an American pimble distributor for Europe, I think, not just for Germany, they cover a large area, they have put together in their showroom, I think it's the one in Bund, a really, really great looking Hot Wheels display in their showroom with tracks, Hot Wheels tracks and a big backdrop and a poster all around the game to make it into almost like a Hot Wheels shrine they're not they're not reticent at putting together a big promotion for their new games and they've pretty excelled themselves I think with the Hot Wheels exhibition they have in their showroom. So if you want to have a chance to go and play Wiggles and you're anywhere near their showroom in Bund, in Germany, certainly worth popping on and having a look and checking out the game. Right. I think you need to make an appointment if you want to drive up there, but still, that shouldn't be a problem. Yeah. I'm sure it's easier to make an appointment to go anywhere, don't you? Yeah. But no, Pimple Universe is a great company for pinball, I would say. I mean, for those not aware of what pinball universe is, I think I wrote about them in Pinball Magazine, number four or five, one of those two. But their showroom basically is nothing like I had seen before. It's almost like walking into a car dealership with these large shows. Yeah. and really exhibiting the pinball games in such a fashion. Obviously, they held tournaments over there as well. And basically, they completely reinvented the way pinballs are being sold in Germany and abroad, I would say. And very successfully. Yeah. And so, obviously, we wish them the best of luck. It's very interesting to see what they are doing with American Pinball Hot Wheels. And the fact that they put up such a display sort of tells me that they are very confident that it's a good game as well. Yeah, I think it was so well, I guess. It's so impressive that all their facilities, but particularly their original place, just to walk into the warehouse there and see racks and racks and racks of new in-box games up on the shelves, several layers high, and two deep as well, two boxes deep, and they've probably got more new in-box games there than they have in the Stern factory. There's just so many, and it's an incredible sight. And they sell them, which is the other thing. All those games are being sold. Yeah, and they have a very good... It created a market. Right, and they have a very good quality control service as well. I mean, whenever games are coming in, each game is inspected before it goes to the customer. And they also develop their own playfield protectors for different titles, which you can purchase. I think they're like something around $120 or something like that. in that range, $150, I don't know exactly, but in that range, which are plastic playfield protectors that you can easily apply to your playfield, but they're not adhesive or like a decal. You can just put them on. And especially with playfields tending to dimple a lot, such a plastic protector or a playfield protector is highly recommended recommend is in order to make sure that your playfield stays in good condition. Obviously it will help, will save you a lot of money if you ever plan on reselling your game or selling your game basically because the better your playfield is looking the more money you can get for it. Yeah I have a playfield protector of the same type not from People Universe but from another company on my getaway which I just powered up for the first time for probably a year just the other day and played the game and I noticed it was a bit dirty so I just put a cloth over it, not even a wet cloth, just a dry cloth and over the place it picked up a whole load of dirt and the whole thing looked bright and shiny again almost immediately. So it's great for cleaning and, as you say, it protects the playfield underneath as well. And it was a bit of a pain to put on the first time because you have to take a lot of the playfield components off. But once you've done that, then you're pretty much set for the life of the game. And I think the dirt doesn't seem to get underneath them like you think it might. And it doesn't affect the ball. In fact, if anything, it makes the ball roll even more smoothly because you've got no insert edges or dimples or race inserts or anything like that on the playbook anymore. It just flows very smoothly. It's got this protector. Right. Well, I don't mind giving Simple Universe a plug because I think they'd be of great service to people. They also sort of look at new games when they first come out and see if there's something they think that needs to be added to the game that wasn't factually installed to make it bulletproof. they'll build it themselves and they store it. Yeah, a good example would be the Ghostbusters kit that they did, which has a flying post in between the flippers, because the flipper gap is so big, so you might be able to save a couple of straight down the middle balls. Yeah, absolutely. So anyway, Hemingway and Lewis, great job for them with the Hot Wheels display. and still on this topic of American Pinball I noticed that a place called Terrorist.TV you might have mentioned this last time briefly but we didn't give the details of it but it allows you to play American Pinball's Oktoberfest a real physical Oktoberfest game over the internet yeah well they did that previously with a certain Batman game and now they basically change the game into a American Pinball's Oktoberfest. But right now we have a tournament running on that game. The top ten people, the top ten scores, I should say, between now and October 28th, so August 28th, I should say, in October, August 28th, so basically over the next four weeks. The top ten scorers there will receive Oktoberfest-themed prizes. Ooh! So, If you want to go and check it out, it's www.sargot.tv. That's OK. In these times, it's probably the safest way to play tournaments anyway. Yeah, absolutely. I would guess that a fast internet connection and a short ping time would be very helpful in those cases. So probably not going via VPN or anything like that. and go and give it a go. I registered earlier and thought I would try and play again. It said I was third in line in the queue to play and showed me a picture of the Octroverfest playfield in track mode, but I couldn't see anybody else playing it, so I don't know quite what's going on there. I might give it a go later and see if it's working the way it's probably going to. I was too busy seeing other people playing it, but I didn't. Yeah. I didn't see a number three go down in all the time I was waiting, which was probably about 20 minutes. I think if I played three normal games, that system wasn't really quite right. Right, okay. Well, it's still interesting to see these type of developments around being able to play an actual pinball game online, and not in a virtual way but actually a physical pinball game playing online. Yeah, when we started the Resolve video, introductory video, we registered the tip. Basically, it takes probably three to five games to actually get used to it, which I mean, I honestly mean the delay to be pressing the keyboard button and the tip is actually amazing. So, let's say you have to anticipate it and you take that number of games to learn how much anticipation it means putting in order to make the shots. So, it's fun, it's stupid again, it's been lots of things that are done online, and it's kind of just a way of doing that online. Right. So, I'm making a brief note for later on, but that doesn't matter. Let's move on to Ultimorphic, the tech-based company owned by Gerry Stellenberg, who recently revealed Heist, as their latest game. Much acclaimed or a praised game, I have to say. It's very I would almost say 90s-like type of game, which is a compliment. And so what's the news there? Well, Heist game has a software update, unsurprisingly. It's now version 0.82. We spoke last time about the intent to add Bluetooth and USB headphone support to the game and that is now included in this new update. It also adds player profile support which is something that MotiMoki had for other games as well. Which is a nice feature that allows you to kind of log in when you are playing the game and it then loads your personal preference settings, so you can have the game set up the way you like it for playing at home. Maybe some people want extra balls on, so you might have a kid setting it up, that makes the extra balls a bit easier, or makes some of the other features more available. Yeah, I think it also had to do with, since the Multimorphic Games has three buttons on the side of the cabinet, and Heist is using an upper flipper as well, and one of the profile settings would be that you could determine whether you want the upper flipper to be operated on a separate button or on the same flipper button. Those are the type of settings that you can store in your profile, I suppose. Yeah, good call. I mean, you could do it also, if you want to play one-handed as well, you we can use just one side of the game to draw all three of the buttons if that's what we want. Yeah. But not... Well, there's still room to hold a drink. Yeah, absolutely. It could be an accessibility thing as well. If somebody might have broken your arm or have a disdain, there's got to be a use in that. We could actually do separate tournaments like that. You know, just... Yeah. break someone's arm and then you let them play pinball with the other arm and see how well they are doing. Let's see how dedicated you are to the pinball courts. We'll have somebody break it for you, you'll take part in the tournament. But one of the other interesting features which I don't think I've seen anywhere else, maybe another unique multimorphic one, is that it allows you to save and restore a game part way through. so if you're doing particularly well getting really close towards the wizard mode you can play the game and then take a break and then come back later and pick up from where you left off and I guess if at that point you you know you drag on as immediately you could recall the game again and try and have another go So it's like space-based in video games. Right. So, but you still start with three balls, or do you pick up with the remaining balls that you had left? I think you pick up exactly where you were when you started the game, so how many you have left. that's how many you have right so it's not like that shot of the other game no it's not just you're going to be launching to the wizard ball with the wizarding ball get one shot away with the new ball again it might actually be possible to hack the same game state normally that's what you want to do right it also allows the logging and also the player profile. It's something which is added in 0.82 as is cooperative and team play, which is something which has been... Well, they've had this for a long time, what is more difficult, so something which is now embraced with Team Ninja Turtles. And, of course, as is always the case, a few color fixes and a couple of tweaks to some of the game rules. So as highest version of 0.82, Right, but there must be more news to report from Multimorphy. Oh, there's much more. Yeah, they're always very busy over there with developing stuff. So, why else are they there? Well, apart from being like with Hot Wheels, there have been loads of streams of ice games, maybe you can find those all over the place as well. We'll go into too many details on that. If you want to see a game in action, there's no shortage of feeds and recordings of those. but also going back to the previous title, Cosmic Cart Racing. Yeah, Cosmic Cart Racing. That, with the fantastic LED lights on all the ramps and pipes and things, that now has a whole new set of artwork for it, for the cabinet, for the backbox, for the back glass, and for the apron. and these have all been done by Jackson Gee and very nice, very much in keeping with the theme of the game and they are available to buy from the Multimorphic store or multimorphic.com they, as with all the artwork pieces for the P3, they're all magnetic so they can be removed and if you put a different module in you can change the side art over as well and the back art on the apron are. So they are available to buy, and the magnetic set costs, well, they're actually available either as a bundle, which is $300 for all the pieces, $250 if you don't want the new translight, or you can buy a camera size for $100 each, backbox size for $30 each, the apron, which is also magnetic, $25 and $50 for the translight. So I'd say for that, the $300 bundle is probably the best deal there. It makes it easy to buy a whole lot. But go look at the Multimorphic store and see if you like the artwork and what you can get over from all the time we have. Right, and speaking of special deals with Multimorphic, they have an introduction-y offer for Heist, a special launch offer which has been extended as far as I understand it's still applicable so if you're interested in buying Heist at a discounted price then now's the time to ask and not only that you can also buy I think you can buy all the games at a discounted price I think they were doing was it £9.95 for Heist and well P3 with Heist and I think £15.995 for all the games and all the modules in they currently have not in perfect shape there will be more titles coming out in the future but all the modules are available now I think that are available as well right ok, very good so I was looking at the new Cosmic Card racing artwork very nice, indeed it has a bit of character to the game which is always nice gives you more of the race feel instead of just an anonymous colored card. Yeah, it always helps if you see your opponents and you know who they are. Right. If that face has three eyes. Indeed, yeah. Right, okay, well, so far, well, I guess that rounds it up for Multimorphic. um yes and then uh well that means that we're going to talk about deep root pinball um um there's not much news to report on deep root pinball at least they didn't uh announce anything themselves but um there was a rumor uh or well i wouldn't call it a rumor someone informed me that he was told that Deep Root, and I should probably quote this, that Deep Root Pinball did not intend to sell internationally at this time, which is a rather interesting comment. But being good reporters as we are, I fact-checked this with Robert Mueller of Deep Root Pinball, the owner of the company. And basically, I'll basically read his response. To be honest, I have no idea where you heard that. The only thing that I've said is that we want to focus on the U.S. market while we build relationships with distributors overseas who we will have to rely on for import-export tax issues, etc. In fact, we have spent a lot of engineering time trying to make our machines work globally. So if you hear a rumor that Deep Root is not planning on selling internationally, it's basically not true. They are, which is not only good news for people in Europe and Australia, I suppose. But based on historic pinball sales, I think it's a necessity because historically, usually about 40-50% of pinball sales, the games are sold outside of the US, which is quite a big revenue for any pinball company, I suppose. Yeah, well, it's understandable that they don't have necessarily any relationship to the type of distributors outside the US because they're just going to say, well, what product have you got? at the moment, they haven't got any product to sell. So once they do have something to sell, then maybe they'll be easier to tell who's going to sell them. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, it's quite right. Those students will handle all the importation and the taxation issues and customs and duty and all that stuff that has to be done in order to get games into the country. and that's going to depend on a lot of factors what's in the game, what the cost of the game is so well, it's turning to the US market Debris could probably do that themselves to a large degree I think actually the plan is that they are not planning to use any distributors in the US well that's fine as far as it goes because then you have the business issues What happens if the game goes wrong? Who's going to come out and fix it? Is somebody going to come out and say they're going to fix it? Or a team going to build up their own network and people will repair it? Maybe the players are so good that they don't need any repairs. Well, they're going to change the way the table is built and works. Maybe they won't have an issue, but it will be the first time in the history of the game. Is that the case? Well, then it's about time that somebody made that change. In that would be huge innovation. I think we all look forward to that. So we'll see when that happens. So while we're talking about, well, I guess you can call it still startup companies. We still have a company that's trying to start up basically from every location that they move to. No pun intended. But, okay, so we're talking about HomePin, who are currently based in Taiwan. And, well, you're digging into that. And so what did you find out? Well, according to Mike Kronowski, who is with HomePin pretty much, they still got a lot of work to do. As you said in the last podcast, when they moved over from China to Taiwan, they discovered that there is 110 volts in Taiwan compared to the 220 volts used in China and that became a bit of a problem for their equipment. Some things are fine. Anything that uses a switching power supply tends to be okay with anything from about 90 volts up to 300 volts. But anything which is AC driven, like a motor, that tends to have more problems, particularly the frequency changes. so rather than for a voltage change you can always use a step down transformer or a step up transformer but if you need to change frequency it becomes a lot more complicated so I know that they've had to actually re-wind some of the windings on motors on various equipment that they use in order to work on the different voltage and different frequencies so that's been a bit of a pain But in the meantime, they haven't been sticking their foot in their toes for that to happen. As we also said last time, they've been picking up the office with intubations to try and reduce the heat from the sun as it beats down on the external wall. I think they've done that now and might seem very happy with the much cooler environment in which they're working. They've been buying some new prototyping equipment to replace some of the large units that they had in China. the new stuff is smaller, the migrations will be fine for the intended use they're going to have in prototyping items in Taiwan. And they have actually been producing stuff, they've been building lots of replacement PCBs for Williams games, which includes octodriver boards for 3, 7 and 16 octodrivers. I don't know what this is, I don't know what to say, but okay. 3, 7 and 16 octodriver boards. And also the Atatron mast road board, which is a highly-volume device which tends to burn up a bit every now and again. So you can get replacement for those, probably. Although, you know, it's almost these days with the technology moved up the way it is, you could just put an LED blaster in there, he says, to replace the tube, the username tube, which doesn't require a high voltage offering. So anyway, I'll be surprised if I'm getting bought out an LED alternative. Well, maybe that's one of the things that Mike could get into, and I can see there being a market for those. Yeah. And there's obviously been an audio amplifier board, and and high voltage repair boards which piggyback on top of the existing high voltage section of the power drive board. And also some of the chemicals. So if you're in the market for any of those, I don't know exactly who homepins sell through, but I think they sell direct. No, I think they have several different universities that are representing them. Well, as you know, those products are being reproduced and improved in many ways, with the devices on the boards being much more resilient and handling high power more than some of the ordinary devices were. So they're being made by HomePit. They're not making pitballs yet, they're not producing China Zombies for their new place in Taiwan, but hopefully not too much longer, and then developing future games as well. But they are obviously building boards and getting the place ready. Right, okay. So then from Taiwan, it's geographically quite a big step, but then still in the same area, to head down to Australia for Pegaspinball. Sadly, no news. No, no news. Yeah, last month they said that it would be about three more weeks before they would have some news to report, but those three weeks have passed and we didn't see any news. Well, there's news. There's another video saying that they'll have some news in a few more weeks. So it's been There were Virtually Daily updates on YouTube For a long time And on their website But there haven't been any more videos released for three months Yeah, it's all due to the coronavirus Of course Although I don't know how that affects Hengis Because I had the feeling that it was mostly Damien working by himself I think so, yeah Supplies not available anymore or I don't know hopefully it's not a bad use we have had this before we had a sort of hiatus in these these videos being released and they used that briefly and said everything's fine but no explanation but I think there's a possibility I invest in these for how they can be more and get their chaos going up and running and being ready to manufacture basically yeah okay So, while we're travelling the globe, let's keep it a little bit more local, in this case, for me. I was able to actually visit the factory of Dutch Pinball. Really? Yeah, I planned a little weekend with my girlfriend in the south of the Netherlands, and while driving up there, we came past Roermond, where Dutch Pinball is located. Originally we planned to visit them on a Friday afternoon as we were doing a long weekend in the south. Eventually it turned out to be we were scheduled and we visited them on the Tuesday afternoon following that weekend on the way back home. And I had a very nice talk with Barry, the owner of Dutch Pinball. was also there and obviously I had a look around, there's currently still five people working at Dutch Pinball building the Big Lebowski but they are looking to expand and that's no secret as far as I'm allowed to share that and by expanding that means that they are looking to hire more people in order to speed up production but they're also looking into moving to a larger facility. And Barry and Guus are currently actually looking at various locations and when I visited them, they just had taken a look at a facility that is seven times the size of what they are currently using. And well, that's one of the locations that they are considering. So if they would be able to move to such location, which obviously depends on a lot of factors. But that means that there's lots of room to grow for them. Right. And, of course, the social distancing as well, I would guess. Is that still a thing in the Netherlands? Yes, it is. And we might actually be looking at a second wave of coronavirus. the number of people being, how do you say, where the disease is, well, I wouldn't say infected, I would say where the disease is diagnosed has gone up, but also that's partly because the number of tests being held have been increased as well. So there might be a relation there as well. but so far Dutch Pinball well they have been able to work through the coronavirus as there are only five people and they're able to distance themselves from each other within the factory that they currently have so far Dutch Pinball continues to build the game during the holiday season which is now in the Netherlands although some of their employees will obviously take some time off for a little holiday. But those who are still there will continue to keep on building games. Right. So no definite details on where they're going to go, when they're going to go, but they are certainly looking to get more employees working to speed up the building process, aren't they? Yes. And so if you're in Europe, more specifically the Netherlands or Germany, or maybe even Belgium, and you're interested in working in pinball, Dutch pinball might be a party that you want to talk to. Tri-lingual would be an advantage. I suppose tri-lingual would be an advantage, because obviously Dutch pinball is in the south of the Netherlands, it's close to Belgium, which is... In Belgium they speak Flemish, which is sort of a variation of Dutch, but they also speak French. And in Germany they speak German. Right. And it changes in English. Right. So Quartalingual would be very much preferred. And Arizona? With Dutch, working at Dutch Bimbel, I suppose that speaking the Dutch language would also be recommended. although you could probably skip that and English would do so so it would be interesting I asked Barry if there is any time frame on when he plans to move and obviously he doesn't want to commit himself to any timeline so my guess is I think it's safe to say before the end of the year we might see them move and maybe be up and running maybe sooner we don't know but for now let's aim for end of 2020 well that's good the faster they can crank games out the sooner the achievers can get their games so the more people they get there the the faster the games will be produced and of course they'll have to have an eye on future titles which is the current title, but they're certainly working on games, well, at least game 2, and all these sort of things that you can't do without. Oh, absolutely. Oh, if you knew what I knew. No, yeah, but aside from the company planning to move, I have to say that I was very impressed with how tight the factory was looking. And this was when everybody was working there. Obviously, some workstations were, because people are working there, it's not as clean as if they would have emptied the place for a photo shoot and tidied up everything. But still, I was very impressed with how they organized the whole selection of parts and the workstations and everything that you have to build the game. It's a very compact area, so to speak, but very efficiently making use of the available space that they have. So I was impressed, you know, and obviously I'm very happy to see that Dutch Pinball is doing so well as they are doing as a year ago. We could only hope. in fact it was exactly one year ago that um we got the light at the end of the tunnel and look with where we are now so um but then you have to know the entire history of dutch people to know what i'm talking about i'm not going to repeat that but since they basically started manufacturing in-house um they have been uh well setting up their factory and started delivering games so Yeah, and Barry is doing what he promised he would do. So you have to take that off to him for that. Oh, yeah, absolutely. So I guess that, well, moving on to pinball companies, well, there are circus messengers who are working on the remake of Kingpin and, well, further down the road, possibly the Python's Pinball Circus. but I don't think there's any news to report from them. No, news tends to come around shows and having shows, so no news at the moment. It's always going to be a long process, and it's just been longer now, so we'll see if we hear anything more about ping-pong, and that's going to be the next case you said. Yes, it is rather interesting. I have been working on Pimble Magazine number 6 which is dealing with or discussing the entire career of Python Anghelo who designed Pimble Circus and he was also at Capcom when Kingpin was designed and I came across one of the I came across a quote of Python where he basically said that if it takes longer than six to nine months to design a game or take it into production, then you better stop because it's going to be a disaster if it takes any longer than that. Which, well, there might be some truth to that, but if you look at the time it's taking Circus Maximus to get things going, then if Python is correct, I'm not sure whether that's a good sign. Well, I think you could probably say 69 months is doing the game from scratch, indicative of the fact that there are some basic underlying problems with the game to start with, which you could have spent a lot of time trying to patch, whereas a game which is intrinsically a good, solid game, and only requires a little bit of, I don't know, teamwork around the edges, but development to add more fun into it shouldn't take much longer than that. We've seen difficult games come out in the past and it's been fairly obvious that they were difficult in their development and they tend not to be the ones which are the most fun to play. Although I don't agree with a lot of what Python says, I think I'd agree with him on that point. Right, OK. So I guess that rounds things up for Circus Maximus. We hope to report news from them anytime soon. Hopefully, the development of Kingpin will continue in the meantime, and I'm sure it will, but they've just not been very vocal about it. That's okay. Well, usually we don't talk much about shows, but since you already mentioned the Southern Fright Gaming Expo taking place in a virtual way, any other show news? Yeah, the Northwest Pinball Arcade Show is one I've been to a good few times, and that was also cancelled, of course. And they held a Northwest Pinball Summer Camp, which was a series of online events, which was spread across basically Zoom, Facebook Live, and Twitch live streams as well. But I'm trying to think exactly where you'd be able to find that for, find the details of that but if you go to Facebook and so yeah yeah search for Northwest Pinball Summer Camp I think you'll find the details there because they're all held in different places there doesn't seem to be a single unifying site where you can click on links to get to all of them there's like an image and so that will give you the links to all those events that are all pinball related as part of the Northwest Pinball Summer Camp Right, and also Smith, all of it, so what the name is? They were kind of, they were like panel things, they were not quite the Southern Pride Game Room Expo really, but probably, you know, being from the North West, also a little more, how should we say, I can't think of a good way of describing it, but there were things like, they also had yoga sessions and things like that in there, so it was more mindful, shall we say, than just purely about pinball. It was an eclectic mix of pinball-related events. So go and have a look and check it out for yourself. Yeah, I'll take it to a fancy. Obviously, at the time, they were all interactive events, but a lot of them will be equally useful as recorded ones as well. I'll talk to you about that. And then I think it might have been last weekend, actually, in Switzerland there was a pinball tournament you don't hear many of those taking place but certainly not in Europe and the pinball alps took place in Switzerland 2,000 metres up a mountain yeah which is as good a place as any to hold a tournament yeah and if you're already short-bred because of coronavirus then moving up in the mountains with even less air well that's a good way to die well it's I think it's a kind of test to see whether you in good enough health to play in the tournament if you survive then you are So it was held at a middle chairlift station on a mountain It was, yeah, it looked a beautiful venue and some big names were at the event, some European big names and it was Daniel Acciari who won the tournament with Michael Trepp in second place. And if you want to see some of the gameplay, you can just hop over to Jim and Dina's pinball stream, which is JDL underscore pinball on Twitch, and you can see streams for quite a lot of the games there as well as the final. Right. And you can guarantee some top-level play. Right. And so in number of participants, was it a success or, I mean... That is one fact I've been trying to find out the details of, and I haven't seen listed anywhere, because previously you'd be able to go to the IFPA website and look at the results on there, because they're not taking any submissions at the moment, so you can't see exactly who was on there. It's only the top four were listed on the Facebook page, and there's nothing on the website about it. So I don't exactly know how many people took place, but I would also I think congratulations to Dina who ended up in fourth place as well so she was in the semi-finals there and always made it into the finals so congratulations to her on that performance I think she was very happy with that and anyway it's hdl underscore pinball on twitch and watch it all back for yourself and pinball helps is the name of the tournament right and I think there was also the euro pinball helps.com if I'm not mistaken so yeah Yeah. Then, well, we had a fourth headline, and let's dive into that right now. It was just two days ago that pinball designer Wayne Lyons, who his entire career is featured in Pinball Magazine No. 5, which I highly recommend you read, because it covers over 180 different pinball machines designed by Wayne, he celebrated his 102nd birthday last Wednesday. Fantastic. Congratulations. Huge congratulations to Wayne on that. Well, in honor of his birthday, I figured it was a good reason to give him a call. And I was able to record that call. So let's hear how my conversation with Wayne went on his birthday. Okay. Hello. Hello, Wayne. Yeah. This is Jonathan from Pinball Magazine in the Netherlands. Oh, Jonathan! How are you doing? I'm doing great. I wanted to wish you a very happy 102nd birthday. Oh, wow. You remembered. I remember, oh yeah, and I'm very curious. First of all, I'm very happy that you're still with us, especially in these corona times. How are you doing? well hanging in you know doing the best I can with with this clonus thing I keep it pretty even but I don't I don't go out much at all of course I can't go out much anymore I can't I don't like to drive anymore if I can help it I do drive though but I shouldn't but I do but I drive very carefully ok I got Will here who is on the phone? Jonathan you know Will don't you? yeah I do I know I do he's been here an hour or two a couple hours and he's going to leave here in another few minutes so we're just having a little snack tea here before I throw him out the door he's got to get home tonight so he'll be leaving shortly here right but but I'm sure glad you called and I appreciate that call you know and the thought behind it It's great. And, you know, that book you made was fabulous, absolutely fabulous. Thank you. I keep it on my table, and I look at it frequently, and anyone that comes has to look at that book. It's fabulous. Thank you. So any new developments, or are you, like you said, hanging in there? No, no developments at all. I thought you were going to get back into pimple design. Oh, no. You know, I do think about it, but I can't do that. I'm lucky to get up in the morning and make breakfast. That's about the extent of my efforts today. And try to keep from falling. I've fallen a couple of times and I'm pretty well banged up. But I'm going to try to behave myself and stay out of trouble. Nothing but trouble, you know. Right, right. I try to do too many things. I shouldn't do them. Yeah. As you may recall, I was planning to visit you in March and I'm very sorry that I was not able to do so due to the coronavirus. Well, it's not going to last forever. Hopefully not. I hope. Hopefully not. It's hard on us, but it's hard on the children, too. Yeah. It's hard on everybody, but I worry about the children and the schools. You know, they're not getting their proper education. at your age I would be more concerned about yourself well I'm not now anymore I'm too old to worry about myself the only thing I worry about is getting out of bed in the morning I get up every morning and get dressed I always get dressed before I eat breakfast I make a nice breakfast I always start out with that because it makes the day right breakfast makes the day and I have a good breakfast every morning and I eat pretty good but not as much as the kind of food I should eat probably but I well you're doing something right because you're still with us oh yeah I guess so I guess so but I don't know I'll hang in there just keep in touch with me when you get a chance you want to call or somebody to talk I'd love to talk to you sure, no problem good I wish you a very pleasant continuation of your birthday the 102nd you're officially now the oldest living pinball designer ever, I think Yeah, that's for sure. So. Well, Will took a picture of that gadget. Had the 100 on it, remember? Yeah. And now 102. So he took a picture of 102. And I'm sure he'll put it out on the Internet as soon as he gets home. Right. I'm sure he'll send it to me. He's been emailing about visiting you. So I look forward to seeing those photos. All right. I want to make sure he has it. So, listen, you take care of him and give me a call when you can. Sure. Thank you very much and have a good day. Thank you, and you too. Yeah, you have it. Wayne Nye is 102 years old. Still in reasonable condition, considering he's... He's thriving as well. Yeah. Yeah. I suppose he should be warning people when he goes out to drive yeah make sure you have somebody walking in front of you with a red flag or something like that so during the call I got the name of the person visiting Wayne not correct but that was Will White and I haven't received the photos yet but as soon as I do I will include them in the Pinball Magazine newsletter which will go out in a few days and well we were of course planning to go and visit Wayne, weren't we, and Will in fact, back in March back in March after the Texas Pinball Festival part of our road trip on the way up to Midwest Gaming Classic, we were going to be calling in to Wayne's place and having lunch there with him and Will along with Gary as well, and sadly that never came to happen, never came to pass this time so well, I don't know whether it will be possible to do it next year but fingers crossed let's see what the situation is then yeah, speaking of Gary I still am expecting Gary to give us a call, he usually does and I'm surprised he hasn't called us so far yet but I think he's a little bit worried about this virus thing, he's a bit vulnerable about that you know, he's being very careful about where he goes out well at his age I can I definitely understand that, you know. He has to wear a mask, a face mask, as most of us do now in the UK as we go out. So, you know, it's a worry. Maybe he has other things on his mind. But hopefully you'll call him. Yeah, okay. Well, hopefully still to come, Gary Flower on the phone. I do think that he has some interesting news with us to share. But, well, getting back to Wayne, yes, I'm happy to hear that he's still around. hanging in there and but it's also a bit depressing I mean if the biggest accomplishment of your day is getting up in the morning not sure where he's enjoying every part of the day as much as I would hope he would well it could be tough particularly if he can't really go out anywhere either or have people come round to visit him due to the the virus has to isolate in a way. Just because of that, I'm sure there'll be, like us, plenty of other people who'd like to come and say, oh, Will was there though, wasn't he? Yeah, exactly. He was staying, I think, wasn't he? No, no, William was kicking him out. He was about to kick him out, so to speak. And Will had a long drive back home, so I think he only stayed there for a couple of hours. And hopefully that was in all the social distancing. Yeah. So anyway, so 102, and I mentioned it in my call, but I think that makes Wayne the longest living pinball designer ever. I'm trying to remember. I think Steve Kornak was also past 100, but I don't think he made it until 102. No, I don't think so, no. So... I think you're right, yeah. So not only is Wayne the longest living pinball designer and the oldest, but, well, like I said, he's still alive. And I think... Is he still alive? Is he still alive? Sorry? Is he the most prolific designer? Is he the one who produced the most games? I think so. Well, he was definitely involved in the most games, in the sense that he had like 159 designs of his own listed on IPDB. There were a couple of games that never made it on IPDB because they were never commercially produced. They were just prototypes, and Wayne threw them out because it was rubbish. but don't forget that after his career in pinball design he became chief engineer at Godlieb which basically meant that he was overseeing the production of all the games being designed after that including the hundreds of games that Trinsky designed so in that sense Wayne is definitely the most prolific pinball designer of all time and still with us a true record breaker and as well for those listening who have Wayne's contact info as you might have heard on his phone call he loves being reached out to so if you are already acquainted with Wayne and you have some spare time do give him a call because it really makes his day yeah, great that's always nice so, that's 102nd birthday of Wayne congratulations to him as we said before now moving on to some of the other news there's two years ago it was two years ago in July actually Pinball News ran an article from my colleague Mick Brown about the exhibition that was being hosted at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland that exhibition is called Part of the Machine Rock and Pinball and it's all about literally what it says the collaboration between rock music and pinball and the way that various bands and performers have appeared in pinball games throughout the year and the synergy between between rock and roll and pinball, you know, the way they're both there, seen as sort of modern pop culture icons and also corruptors of youth, I suppose, as well, would be a good way of putting it. But that exhibition ran in Cleveland through to spring of last year, after which it was going on the road, and it opens, it's opened already actually, in Saratoga Springs in New York State. So that's in the Universal Preservation Hall, and that runs until September the 26th. So if you want to get through there, get to the Saratoga Springs, you can get tickets. They're $20 each for adults, $10 for students. But given this social distancing and capacity limits, there's a maximum of 20 people allowed into the exhibition at any one time so you have to book and booking gets you a 90 minute time slot to visit the exhibition and play the games they have set up there there are quite a lot of games I believe and hopefully we get a report about that as well fairly soon on People News a good friend of mine Eric is planning up there and check some pictures and let us know how the reciting of the exhibition is from Cleveland to Saratoga Springs. Right. So, rock and roll, all the same exhibition, on the road, parts of the machine, rock and pinball in Saratoga Springs. Hmm. Okay, well, the spinning can't fly to the US from Europe right now, else I would definitely be the first person seeing it, so... Yeah. Me too, it's killing us, but... Yeah. Do what you can do. Okay, in a way, it's not killing us, so that's good. Speaking of exhibitions, I received an email from I think it was Dan at the Museum Mechanique in San Francisco I think we've both been at the Museum Mechanique in San Francisco and the Corona situation is not doing the museum any favors and therefore they started a GoFundMe campaign to support the museum. If you go to their website, which is musimechanique.com, and mechanique is spelled the French way with Q-U-E dot com, then there's a pop-up that will ask if you want to support them. and if you didn't know already or if you haven't supported them then please do because it's a wonderful place to visit if you're in San Francisco. It certainly is. Yeah, and lots of great old pinball, but not only pinball, but really old, any mechanical coin-op devices that you can sort of think of you'll find there. Yeah, and there's dioramas, pianolas, all kinds of demonstration devices. There's sort of 14-telling booths, crane simulators. It was amazing. And so you actually look at the mechanical functionality of these games. They are a marvel, really. Oh, yeah, they're amazing. You really wonder, like, how did they ever figure that out? Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I agree. definitely worth supporting either by visiting yourself. I don't know whether they're open at the moment. Right. I know California's had a bit of a resurgence and there's been some lockdowns, but either way, if you can't visit, then please make a donation. Well, what's also interesting, and maybe someone can fill me in on that, not that long ago, I think it was last month or six, seven weeks ago, I recall there was a huge fire on Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. Oh, that's right. And I was wondering whether the museum mechanic was affected by that. I tried emailing back to Dan, but for some odd reason that email bounced, and I haven't heard back from him. So if anybody can let me know, I don't think it wasn't mentioned in the original email that I received from the museum mechanic that the museum was affected by the fire, but... I think at the time I checked, and I think I saw a post saying that the museum wasn't affected. Okay. That's a vague recollection, so some confirmation will certainly be welcome there. Right, okay. So if you want to support Museum Mechanics, go to their website, which is fine also, if you just Google it, and support them by making a donation. Excellent. Yeah. Our only other news item is something which I wanted to raise, and it's something which I've experienced myself a while ago, but it seems to be becoming a lot more prevalent now. With all the pinball streams that we've been talking about and recordings being on YouTube and so on, and a lot of the games that are being featured being licensed and featuring black music. Yeah, that's right, licensed music. There's been an issue with YouTube or Twitch or other hosting companies taking down some of these streams and recordings because they contain copyrighted music, which is correct, they do contain copyright, but it's copyrighted to be used in the game. And I had a similar thing, I don't know, probably about three years ago, I think it was, when I was at the Pinball Expo, and I was doing a walk around the showroom there, and that was a year when Dutch Pinball, as we mentioned earlier, had the big Levowski game set up. They had a very impressive stand. I think they had three machines there, and a big banner, and obviously the rugs. It was a big push for them to sell the game, and they turned up reasonably loud and so I was hovering around there trying to get some good shots of the game and in the background I think it was playing the Bob Dylan music that was featured in the actual game. I think this was before they were discovered they weren't actually allowed to use the piano. Yeah, they eventually replaced the original songs with instrumental versions that were basically very well-done cover versions. Yeah. Yeah, so this was the original that was being played, and I think it was like a 30-minute video walking around, and there was probably 20 seconds of ambient sound of Bob Dylan music, and that was enough for YouTube to take the entire thing down and say it was a copyright infringement. Right. Of course, all this stuff's done automatically these days. there's algorithms that run through the audio and check for matches. But that's happening to an awful lot of people now, and it's something we're going to see a lot in the future. I think if you're uploading stuff to YouTube as a, not live, but as a pre-record, I think you have to be very careful to make sure you take out or blank any audio that might be seen as a copyright infringement. Because otherwise you might find that you're out there promoting your clips and posting them everywhere, and then all of a sudden they're not there anymore. Yeah, I was aware that, well, Jack Danger basically lost six years of streaming because it was all taken down because of music being in the background from the game. And that's, well, protected, so to speak. And there is this, I'm not sure whether it's a new company, but I think it's called like DMCA, who are very actively basically shutting down streams and what have you. I think it's a law. It's the Digital Music Copyright Act, I think. Yeah, whatever. It gives them the right to do that. But also you have to be so careful with not only the clips being taken down, but also counts of a strike against your account. And after so many strikes, they're liable to close your account. So, you know, you might have a whole bunch of clips up there you didn't know anything about, but... And they all taken down. If you upload one more, that might be the one that takes you over the limit on the number of strikes you're allowed to have. And you get your entire account with YouTube or Twitch. I'm still curious how that relates to how many people you draw into the channel. I can imagine that if you draw a lot of people, they might be far more willing to let things slide a little bit than if you're not drawing anybody in. Yeah, probably. Yeah, who's making money for them? Yes. But anyway, just something to be aware of. And in the end, I had to re-render the clip and blank out the audio from that section of the expo walk-around and put a little message on the screen explaining why. But it's extra work. I think that's being done automatically now, right? Oh, yeah, absolutely. These algorithms are checking through and just automatically flagging it up and taking it offline for you. Right. Or muting certain parts of your video. Oh, they do that. That's okay. but obviously it depends whether that also gets in a strike against your account. Hmm, right, okay. Well, you mentioned in the end, and of course in the end, or at the end in this case, well, you probably hear it from the noise in the back, my phone is ringing, and And Gary Flower is calling in. He's in. Great. So, usually, well, without risking him not coming on the show, let's see what he has to say. Yeah. Right. Hello, Gary. Hello. Gary. Sorry, Gary. Gary? I don't know. Gary, we can't hear what you're saying. I think you should probably take your mask off. If you have a mask on, take it off. It sounds like you're talking through a pillow. Right, exactly, yeah. I don't understand the word he's saying. We'll get back to him next time and find out what all the compelling news is and we'll bring that to you as soon as we possibly can. Right, yeah, okay. In the meantime, stay healthy, Gary. Yeah. So keep the mask on. Don't let them call us. Exactly, yeah. Oh, well, I guess that rounds it up for this episode of the Pimble Magazine and Pimble News podcast. Thank you for being with us. We hope you enjoyed it. And as always, if you wish to read a sort of summary of the news of the past month, which in this case was July 2020, make sure you subscribe to the Pinball Magazine newsletter, which is completely free, by the way, and that gives you a monthly update at the beginning of each month on the pinball industry news. and everything else around it that we find interesting. Fantastic. Yeah. So we'll be back next month to look back at August 2020. Right. And all the events that are going to happen there. As we always say, even the quietest months, they seem like they're quiet, but we talk about them and a whole bunch of new interesting bits and pieces come out. So we never quite know what we're going to say or what we're going to be talking about. But there's always something to talk about in the pinball industry, and that's why we're here, to bring you up to date. Yeah. So we hope you enjoyed this episode, and we look forward to coming back to you next month. Until then, from myself, Martin, and from my colleague, Jonathan, we wish you a very happy August, and we'll see you at the end of it, when we can look back again at the month in the pinball business. Okay. So enjoy the summer and stay healthy and until next month. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.