But anyway, you know, while we're still on the topic of staff, Can you comment on why Josh Coogler is no longer with AP? He seemed to be one of the founding fathers of American Pinball, so to speak, and did a lot to get that company where it is today, but he's no longer with you. So I have it very simple. We're just going to say it like this. In March, American Pinball and Josh decided to part ways, and that's it. That's all I can talk, go into detail. Yes, he was one of the founding fathers. He will always be part of American Pinball. We have Houdini, we have Oktoberfest, we have Hot Wheels, we even have Legends of Valhalla. And Josh worked on lots of parts of those games. In fact, he coded all of Houdini. He worked with Joe Chilber with Oktoberfest and himself on that. Then they worked on Hot Wheels together. There's many things that Josh will always be part of American Pinball that will always be in his thing. But just in March, we decided to part ways, and that's what we're leaving it. Do you know if he's going to stay in pinball? Can you speak to that? I've heard already that he's working on some homebrew stuff, which he was originally a homebrewer. So, you know, hey, I'd love to see some stuff. I mean, he was very talented with some of the homebrew stuff that he had been working on. And, you know, he had a passion, right? Listen, the guy was doing homebrew stuff and then walked into the industry and basically coded Houdini in nine, ten months so they could make a course show. Four hours. I mean, really, he really worked, you know, he put in his life and things. And to this day, you know, he's always going to be the guy of Houdini, you know, and Oktoberfest is part of him as much as Hot Wheels. And he even helped Frank with the integration of Legends of Valhalla into the AP system. Okay. And then two other guys that also are part of the family, Michael Grant. I can't say, you know, can't not say that he wasn't part of the family. He was there. He put his time in with us, worked on sales, but he also helped with the code and just worked on the code with Frank on Legends of Valhalla, worked on finding the bugs and everything else. And then Steve, when he walked in, Bowden, he kind of just did the same thing. He took right over when Michael left and just kept working with Frank. And, you know, again, it's all part of that family. Does it hurt? Yes. Are we going to miss him? Sure. But we'll see him at shows, you know. But he will always be American pinball alumni. You know, what's cool about what you've just said is the fact that you've got all these different people and they all seem to love pinball so much that, I mean, you might have a guy there that just empties out the trash. He goes, hey, I got an idea for a multiball, and you have an open-door policy to take in all these suggestions and bounce them up and see if it'll work. Yeah, yeah, that's really cool because a lot of people are just like, you know, stay in your lane. You know, there seem to be no lanes at American Pinball, which is kind of cool because all these separate mines would make for one great machine. They're very dotted lines for the lanes. Yeah, yeah. We have some lanes, like you said, they're dotted, but the door is open, right? You know, creativity, you can't just keep it under a jar and keep it to two people because after a while it just doesn't work, right? So we have to open that up to everybody. Listen, I have the guy from the cabinets who have come up and he has said, you know, if you change this one shot, I think it's going to be good. We had people in the cabinet department taking bets how many Legends of Valhalla we would release and how many would sell within the first 24 hours. And there were people who were right on the number. Okay. And that was quite impressive because they're passionate about it, you know? And that's what makes it fun to run this company. Let's talk a little bit about some of the other company decisions that you guys have made just to kind of push a little bit more into where AP is heading. So in April, we learned that moving forward, you're still going to be producing all the games in your catalog, but you're making some changes to the deluxe versions of the game. So after your next run, all cabinet styles across your titles will be similar. They'll come with black side rails only and some changes to being made to the game toys. Can you tell us a little bit more about why you made those changes? Well, it's just financial. Listen, I have to keep looking at the bottom line. I don't want to keep raising prices on people. I want to give you a game that you're paying for, and I want you to feel good that you're paying a good price for it, okay? And, you know, when I have to go and have 200 side rails painted a special color just for Oktoberfest, because I don't have it in there, and now the price of that color has gone up, or it's not existent anymore, or there's this. There's reasons that we do it just for limited runs, right? There should be limited runs. So limited runs are always going to have the little extra, the stuff that we can do with, whereas the classic model will still have the, you know, the standard industry coin-op version of this game. Because listen, guys, you know, I know you're in the home sales world, right? I come from an industry where there was zero home sales. In fact, I was working for a company. We did $120 million a year, and not one of it was being sold to the home. The company literally had 21 game lines producing 21 different brands of games, doing somewhere close to 500 games a week, shipping all over the world, and not one was going to the home. And what happened when COVID hit, they literally had to shut and lock the doors because there was no orders coming in for the coin op industry. It almost killed them. And needless to say, the guy who ran and owned the company, a good friend, good mentor, Ralph Coppola, he saw, I don't know how he did it, but he saw to make a war chest. and that company, and I'm going to touch on this for a second because Ralph was the kind of guy that treated everybody, and it gives me the reason why I treat everybody like family, okay? Ralph would walk the line every morning and talk to people when he was in the building. He would go up to people that had been here 20 years and ask how their kids are doing. He knew people by name. He knew what they were doing. He knew their kids when they were going to college. He would actually give out little gifts when their kids graduated from college. He helped families. He was the kind of guy that gave back because you were working for him. That meant a lot to him. And he gave back to his employees very heavily. So when this happened, he had a war chest. And, you know, some hard decisions had to be made, and they had to make them. And then there were some more hard decisions that had to be made. But, listen, they kept a hundred people core on the payroll, paying them for almost a year and a half through COVID and took care of these people and made sure that they were there. And to this day, all those people are still there, and a bunch of people have gone back. I mean, when I took the job at American, they told me, Fixer, and that's what my nickname was there at the company, you always have family here. And if it doesn't work out at AP and things go wrong, you always have a job here. We love you. And we're so proud of you. and Americans are going to be so lucky to get you and you're going to do some hard numbers for them. You're going to have to do a lot of work like you usually do, but you can do this. And at the end of the day, they just, you know, to this day I still talk to some of the guys all the time and the owners at the trade shows always say, hey, you want to go out for drinks or something? You know, it's just kind of, it's just great to have that backing. But that's the core that I brought to America. And, you know, those employees, you know, Everybody who works for me, I see them just like Ralph did. They're family. So that's a key point. You had mentioned at one point that American Pinball was also thinking about selling game add-ons that would physically mod your game on the play field. It might change gameplay in a new and fun way. Where are you with that, and can you tell us more about what that might mean? So we still are working on that. So there are going to be some company mods that will be coming out. We talked, Ryan, about a couple ideas. You know what it is? It's timing. It's everything that hits you. Trust me, all those mods that I have in my mind that we've already shared as a group, they're on the back burner. It's just one of those things you've got to turn it up. But it's tough when you're running a company and all of a sudden all the stuff hits the fan at once and you're trying to scramble to get your lines back up and running and doing this. So sometimes some of the mods hold off. Now, we do have one that is very far along. It's an upgrade for Oktoberfest. It will be coming out shortly. It's going to help reliability of the game, okay? So, and there are two other ones that we're looking at. Of course, one for Houdini, which I had already consulted Josh about, and he's like, yeah, that'll work great before he left. And there's other mods that we're working on also, maybe for Hot Wheels. and just, you know, there's little things that, you know, will improve the gameplay or change it a little bit, gives people a little bit more of that wow factor, and then they can just, you know, add on to their game and change it. So it's kind of a neat little thing that we're looking at doing. Well, it's the part of the interview that people are probably most interested in, and let's talk future American pinball titles. So it seems like you guys have a lot in the works over there, and you've talked on this show about your goal of getting two titles released in a year. Can you comment on what your current release schedule goals are? and where you are in the process of achieving those? Well, as soon as Chris Franchi gets done, gets his work done, then we should be able to... No, no, Chris is not my hold-up. Chris has never been my hold-up. Chris is my sounding board half the time. So, listen, we'd love to come out with more games. You know, I mean, I wanted to have two games this year, right? Hey, listen, Stern pulled their production. They didn't even come out with one in the spring. We're trying to catch up. I'm happy to say that I signed off yesterday on the third line being installed at American Pinball. So now we're not going to have just one line, two lines. We're going to have a third line. So, you know, I'm going to be able to pump out a lot more games. The cabinet changes that we talked about a minute ago before I got on my soapbox and what it's all about, that's another reason that we wanted to streamline things, you know, so that we have all the parts. You know, I'm not waiting for legs. I'm not working with side rails or lockdown bars that are in a certain color. I'm not waiting for a cabinet that's this, this, this cabinet, and that's that cabinet. You know, so it's one of those things that we're just trying to streamline it to the manufacturability of getting games pumped out on a continuous basis. So I'm not running and stopping, running and stopping, running and stopping. And trust me, everybody wants games. I'm happy to say that we announced the kind of like the final run of the trim package of Oktoberfest and sold it out. That was gone. we're going to announce that also with Houdini down the road probably in two months and you know I already have some of the distributors are like you know if you're going to do this again then let us know because we're just going to do this we're just going to buy them out right now so Houdini is already kind of partially done that way Legends of Valhalla is just flying out the door as fast as we can make them one thing I want to talk about because everybody asks me this question and I just want to touch base on it for two seconds Everybody asks me, when are we going to hear about Legends of Ahala Classic? And that's the number one question. And probably one on your list, but I'm going to check it out for you now. Legends of Ahala Classic will come out once Legends of Ahala Deluxe Limited is done. I am giving the people who ponyed up and said, listen, I want the Deluxe Limited Edition. I'm buying it. You guys get the first rights. Okay. When that is done, then I will bring out the classic and let that be available for it. So because you, the consumer, the pinball wanted it so much, you get the game first, all right, because you said yes. And I'm going to honor that. And then I'm going to bring out the classic. And then that will be open for everybody. And trust me, the line of people who want classics already, it's staggering because the number, you know, I know there's another podcaster who is saying, nobody wants Legends of Valhalla. And I will tell you right now that I have close to double the original release amount of the deluxes with people who have already kind of said, yes, let me know when the classic is available. So that's just, you know, hard numbers that we're excited about. I'm happy that, you know, Scott developed a great game with Frank. But overall, I want to make sure that the guy who put in the money, he said, I want that deluxe. Those 500 customers, they'll get them first. Then we'll bring out the classics for the rest of the people because they put their time in. And guess what? We're going to do that again with the next release. We'll have a deluxe limited edition. We'll bring it out. It'll be those people who get it first. Then we'll bring out the other game, the classics. Oh, you're going to want that deluxe one. Oh, yes. Yeah, you are. And I'm going to tell you, Chris Franchi did some beautiful art. It is complete Franchi art from top to the bottom. And trust me, Chris is the one who's like, damn it, now I've got to find a new spot to put this game because I'm loving this thing. This has got so much in here, and I'm just loving every piece of it. It's funny that you say that because I remember when I was working on the art, it wasn't until I was about halfway through that you felt you were getting a Franchi, quote-unquote, art package. So I was concerned that, like, for the first half, you were like, when's he going to step it up? This isn't quite up to snuff here. Like, what's going on? No, no, no, no, no. You've got to remember, I can't beat you down at the beginning. I've got to let you get enough into it, then beat you down a little bit. You know, because if I beat you down too early, then you're going to walk away. All right, so can you guys give us some hints as to when we might see this? You will see this in 2022. All right. And here's the thing, guys. Timing, manufacturability, and other things. Listen, I really want to get the Legends of Valhalla out first, the deluxe models before releasing another game to everybody. Then bring the classic out. That will be on the third line. Because, you know, the people who support American Pinball, we support them. And I think I said this on another podcast and a couple other things. I don't know if you guys know this. I think I said this also to Texas, that all the deluxe models are getting Art Blades that are done free of charge. We're going to be signing those out. They're going to be added to all the deluxe models. The people who already got deluxe models, make sure you register your game. I signed off yesterday on the artwork and the printing. We got part of them in. We don't have enough yet, but we're going to be starting shipping some of those out to the people who registered their game. And that's a free upgrade from us at American Pinball. Thank you very much for your support and your allegiance and staying with us. I'm happy to say that, you know, I have been looking at Pinside and all the other marketplaces. I do not see anybody selling their Legends of Valhalla to us. Once they get it, they're like, wow, I did not know that this was going to, this is a sleeper. Texas was blown away by it. Everybody in Texas just loved it. We had people lining up, up and down. Even Franchi came over and looked at it a couple times, played a few games. Well, I played it at the shop. Yeah, I know you played it at the shop. Well, I mean, Mrs. Pinn, who's not on this show, she played it at the shop. And I love it because there was this debate about one of the side shots, one of the orbits. And Mrs. Pinn hit it three times in a row without beating the pass. And a couple other people were complaining about the shot. And when I saw her hit it three times in a row, I'm like, we're done. Yeah, she loved it. I mean, when we went in, it was kind of like a magical Willy Wonka behind the curtain moments where we finally got to see what actually happens in the super secret room at a pinball company. And I was blown away. You guys had a really cool setup in there, and it was just so neat to see the original game that was made on the homebrew side and then what American Pinball had done to enhance it even further. And even though it wasn't completely finished when we were there, you could really see where it was headed, and it was almost done. That was amazing. Super fun to play. Thank you again for giving us that access. You're welcome. And I know your daughter's had some fun with that too. Yep. And thanks for bringing the candy. That always helps keep everybody happy in the factory. Ryan, when you see this guy, make sure you bring his candy. The perks of living in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Yeah. The home of chocolate. So, Ryan, I'll definitely have some for you. He brings me Fireball when he sees me. Oh, I want some of that too. You got it. Chocolate and Fireball. Fireball the candy or Fireball the drink? The drink. Ah, the official drink of pinball. That's right. Well, speaking of new games, AP is one of few companies that is still putting a lot of weight behind unlicensed games. Besides Hot Wheels, every title so far has been unlicensed. Where do you see the ratio between unlicensed versus licensed themes going moving forward in the future? Because I know a lot about the licensed ones, but I don't know about the unlicensed ones. Well, except for the one. But I'm not going to say any more than that. Very good. I'm glad that you figured that out.