Episode 104 - John Borg: The Man Who Doesn't F*&k Around

Wedgehead Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 3m·analyzed·Nov 3, 2025

Buzzsprout-18101056

Analysis

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TL;DR

John Borg shares 37 years of pinball design stories from Premier Technology through Sega.

Summary

John Borg, legendary Stern/Data East pinball designer with a 37+ year career, recounts his journey from injection molding to creating iconic games like Star Wars, Tales from the Crypt, Guns N' Roses, and Apollo 13. He discusses his mechanical engineering contributions, collaborations with designers like Joe Kaminkow and Tim Seckel, celebrity interactions (Slash, Jim Lovell, Bill Paxton), and the evolution of pinball design from rolling gates to modern mechanisms.

Key Claims

Star Wars was Data East's biggest run of all time, selling over 10,000 copies in a three-month period
high confidence · Borg states directly: 'that ended up being our biggest run of all time. It did probably about 500 units more than Lethal Weapon 3 did. And uh, that was my first game, so I was really stoked that I you know, had a game that sold over 10,000 copies in a three-month period.'
Data East was manufacturing 200 games per day in a 30,000 square-foot building during Star Wars production
high confidence · Borg describes: 'We were making 200 games a day in a 30,000-foot building. It was it was ridiculous.'
Joe Kaminkow told Borg to convert his dinosaur game into Star Wars after learning Stephen Spielberg was making Jurassic Park
high confidence · Borg recounts: 'Joe comes in and he says, uh, "Stephen Spielberg is making a game called Jurassic Park. He goes, I really like to do that game myself, so I want you to change your dinosaur game into Star Wars."'
Hook sold significantly more units than prior Data East games (6,000-7,000 vs typical 3,000-4,000)
high confidence · Borg states: 'And when Hook came, I think we did probably about six or seven—it it just exploded.'
Axel Rose was difficult to work with during Guns N' Roses recording; only produced 4-5 usable speech lines from a 3-hour session
high confidence · Borg describes: 'I think I got about four or five speech lines out of that whole recording session for the game. I was like horrified.'
Borg attended the Frankenstein movie premiere in 1995 with Paul Ferris and encountered Danny DeVito
high confidence · Borg recalls: 'I was uh, in the washroom standing next to Danny DeVito looking down. You know, I'm like, "Oh my gosh! I didn't know! I didn't realize how short he was!"'
Jim Lovell played Apollo 13 pinball at his home years after it was delivered and wrote that he plays it regularly
high confidence · Borg states: 'she got a Polaroid of him. And he wrote on the Polaroid, "He says John, I love this game. I play it all the time." And that was like five or six years after we made the game.'

Notable Quotes

“I took the job in pinball because I knew it would be more fun and it has been. It's been great. It's been a glorious ride.”
John Borg @ ~0:45 — Establishes Borg's philosophy and passion for pinball work despite lower salary than alternative offers.
“We were making 200 games a day in a 30,000-foot building. It was it was ridiculous.”
John Borg @ ~8:30 — Captures the extraordinary production scale and intensity at Data East during Star Wars success.
“Good boy. Don't don't eat me.”
John Borg @ ~14:15 — Humorous recounting of a dangerous moment being pinned by Slash's cougar; demonstrates Borg's storytelling style.
“I have to take the DAT tape back with me to Chicago because we have to put it in the game as soon as we can.”
John Borg @ ~18:30 — Shows the operational pressure and urgency in getting Axel Rose's limited usable audio into Guns N' Roses production.
“If I fall asleep, I'm never going to make that flight.”
John Borg @ ~19:45 — Illustrates the exhausting realities of celebrity-collaboration work in the '90s pinball industry.
“I bumped into a couple of people um that were famous stars. I was just like, 'Wow! This is awesome!'”
John Borg @ ~21:00 — Captures Borg's genuine enthusiasm and awe at celebrity interactions during movie premiere experiences.
“He says John, I love this game. I play it all the time.”
Jim Lovell (via Polaroid message) @ ~27:15 — Validates the impact of Apollo 13 pinball on one of the game's celebrity subjects years after release.
“Why didn't you make it a regular-size game?”
Distributors (via Borg) @ ~32:45 — Shows market feedback that killed the Mini Viper prototype; illustrates the importance of standard cabinet sizing to the industry.

Entities

John Borgperson Joe KaminkowpersonData East PinballcompanyStar Warsgame Tales from the Cryptgame Apollo 13game

Signals

?
business_signal: Data East achieved extraordinary production capacity (200 games/day) during Star Wars peak, indicating market dominance and sustained demand for a single title.
high · Borg: 'We were making 200 games a day in a 30,000-foot building' and Star Wars sold '10,000 copies in a three-month period' — approximately 500 more units than prior best-seller Lethal Weapon 3.
?
community_signal: Borg's career demonstrates the importance of prestigious game licensing in Data East's commercial success; Star Wars became company's best-seller after being strategically prioritized.
high · Star Wars redirected from dinosaur concept; became '10,000+ copies in three months' — largest run; Hook followed with '6,000-7,000 units' vs prior 3,000-4,000.
?
design_innovation: Borg developed a dinosaur mechanism concept that was reused across multiple games (originally intended for unnamed game, then Frankenstein), indicating design modularity and mechanical reuse practices.
high · Borg: 'I had that mechanism that I had designed for the dinosaur game that I thought was going to be my first game. So I used that in the... Frankenstein game.'
?
design_philosophy: Borg pushed industry adoption of micro switches over traditional rolling gates with leaf switches, representing modernization of mechanical design standards.
high · Borg: 'I started to push that [micro switches]. Um, so um, so after I worked on Diamond Lady... I was like, why don't we use micro switches? You know, look at the ones that you know, Williams is using micro switches.'
?
licensing_signal: Arnold Schwarzenegger likeness approval process for Last Action Hero required significant backglass redesigns; final version featured extremely large head for arcade visibility.

Topics

Career trajectory and early pinball entryprimaryMechanical design innovations (rolling gates, micro switches, motorized mechanisms)primaryCelebrity collaborations and licensing (Slash, Jim Lovell, Bill Paxton, Danny DeVito)primaryData East production scale and Star Wars dominanceprimaryGame design evolution from multi-ramp to single-level designssecondaryPinball industry history and designer lineage (Ray Tanzer, John Norris, Joe Kaminkow)secondaryPrototype and experimental designs (Mini Viper, Derby Days, Black Light Bowling)secondaryTournament play and competitive skillmentioned

Sentiment

positive(0.85)— Borg expresses deep satisfaction with his pinball career despite sacrifices; nostalgic and warm tone when recounting collaborations and celebrity interactions; some frustration expressed about Axel Rose and game production challenges, but overwhelmingly celebratory and grateful tone throughout.

Transcript

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sorry about that by luck um I was uh studying to be a mechanical engineer back in the 80s and I was studying also Plastics engineering I uh I ended up uh looking I was looking for a job I was working in a injection mold making company Machining injection molded peace Parts um for molds and I was looking for different work and I decided that I was going to take a look at the Chicago Tribune and I found a an ad that was about the size of a postage stamp and it said mechanical engineer needed with a phone number underneath it so I called the number I talked to a gentleman named Bob melesio and he uh invited me in for an interview I drive to this company and I'm sitting in the lobby waiting for somebody to come and get me and I'm looking around the perimeter of the room and there's pinball backlash it's going all the way around the lobby I'm like this is a pinball company I go how cool is that so I was offered a job as a Hydraulics engineer and then I was offered the job in pinball for $1,500 less a year and I took the job in pinball because I knew it would be more fun and it has been it's been great it's been a It's been a a glorious ride um uh I've had a lot of fun um it's been a lot of work a lot of sacrifice but uh you know when I come to this and I see everybody happy and everybody's happy with the game that we made um it's all it makes it all worth it it's awesome so when I started to work for Premier Technology uh a game called Arena was on the line that was designed by Ray tanzer and uh I just recently had the pleasure of uh I found an arena br sure in a folder at home I was digging through some things I took it to work and I had Ray tanzer sign it for me the other day um Ray tanzer uh he uh he put together the whole operation uh mapped out our new building what was going to go where um so Ray designed games he ran engineering for a while and now he is like a jack of all trades he does all kinds of things um Ray designed a lot of nice you know fun games in the in the 80s and uh you I learned from from Ry and Jon Norris and John trau and uh so I started to work at UH Premier Technology and the first game that I started to work on was a game called Victory which was a race rally game where you started the game and checkpoint one was lit and you had a hurry up you had to get to checkpoint one as fast as you could checkpoint two is next checkpoint three and you work your way through and try to finish the race as fast as you could and collect all the hurry up points you could and I thought it was really fun Jon Norris wrote the rules for it um after that I got to dig in a little deeper victory was part of the way done when I started to work on it um but I was making Rolland Gates which uh we actually don't we try to use optos now we're not using Rolland Gates so much anymore but the old Rolland Gates had a wire form and a bracket just like they do today but there was a spring that hung from the wireform that went down underneath the Playfield to a to a leaf switch so it was like you know you had to figure out all these different heights and stuff and tension on the spring and uh you know and I was like w why don't we use micro switches you know look at the ones that you know Williams is using micro switches and I start tried to push that um so um so after I worked on diamond lady with John John uh Norris um uh I worked on TX sector with uh with John trau and that one I got to start from the from the get-go so I I did the the Playfield layout for that um all the all the piece Parts I was the mechanical engineer at the time I wasn't doing any designing yet um so after that there was a game that came out called Robo war and Robo if you ever do you all remember a game called big house by Premier Technology well it started out uh big house was Robo War so if you look at the robo War backlash you see this purple building in the background this this really strange uh it looks like an auger screw it's this really strange screw looking shape and that building is in the in the artwork on the back lass so when Ray tanzer was working on what was supposed to be Robo War they decided to change it to big house we put some search lights in the game we made it a jailbreak theme so um uh later on we saved the artwork for robo Wars backl and cabinet and John trau made a game uh Robo War and if you look at that back glass that that auger screw that building is in is in the in the back glass um Ray took a shaft and molded this auger screw so what you did was you shot the ball it went up around a lane and it rested against the screw and there were two wires next to it and then as the screw rotated it pushed the ball up to an upper level and dropped it into a ramp um so that was that was a lot of fun to work on uh that was a really fun game and we all did the speech for the game too which was really interesting um let's see what do we have next I have to put glasses on so I can see here I used to pride myself on my vision but uh nowadays it's cheaters are everywhere uh game came out later in 88 called bad girls um followed by exal big house was also in in 89 uh then I worked on a game with Jon Norris called Hot Shots uh in 1989 which had it had eight drop Target or eight Targets on each side up the middle of the Playfield with a pop Bumper in the middle and you would complete all the targets and start a feature and then you then after you finished with that feature you complete all the targets again start feature two three and four um if you were able to get all eight drop targets down on one side hit any on the other side the game gave you 10 credits the knocker just started going Bam Bam Bam Bam Bam Bam Bam Bam very hard to do but it was possible and I had seen people actually achieve it uh very difficult with a pop uper in the middle keeping those you know trying to keep the ball away from the opposite side Hot Shots was a lot of fun to play um after that Ray tanzer did bone Busters which was in 1989 um uh I believe and probably correct um Jeff Busch who is an artist in the pinball industry he did the artwork for that um Connie Mitchell was our artist but cone farmed out some of his work to other artists uh to do the the packages for the art for the pinball games um let's see here Jeff did a beautiful job on bone Busters it was a really nice nice art package and when the art package came in one of the the our technical illustrator um George DeMar just looked at it and he goes it's definitely it's definitely uh not Connie's work Connie you know just doesn't look like Connie's art so um uh then I found out later that Jeff Busch did it and I worked with Jeff Busch at Stern Pinball and uh or Sega pinball at the time um let's see lights camera action was a game that uh that Jon Norris designed and I actually got my first patent on that game for a mechanical feature that I made and then after lights Camera Action I can't remember if there was anything else in 89 but after that we started making single level games with no ramps which I was really upset about but uh the first one came out it was a Trudeau game it was called Silver Slugger and it was really fun to score home runs and shoot those those shots into those ejects with the Spinners and and and collect home runs it was really fun game to play uh Vegas came after that then there was deadly weapon and title fight um after that I went over and I started working with uh Joe CCO uh Joe Baler had started working for stern um and I talked to Joe and I said do you have any more room over there and I sent a resume and and Joe Camco readit and he invited me in and I actually got the job but they didn't have anywhere to put me so I got to sit in Joe's office and I would listen to Joe talking on the phone to licensers and you know he'd call Up Hugh Hefner to say hi and stuff like that you know he he just he knew a lot of people and it was really fun it was very interesting to watch him work um and then it was very stressful when he would have when he would be sitting right here watching me draw and I I knew he was there but he didn't know I was there um the first thing that I was tasked to do when I started to work at Data East was to make a dinosaur that ate balls so I worked on this unit and I started to work on my first game after uh after I had uh got my first mechanical lead on the game hook uh Joe told me he goes I'm gonna let you try your hand so I started designing this dinosaur game that threw pinballs kind of like Frankenstein does and then it went back and forth and it had a magnet way in the back of its mouth and it would bend over and it would eat the ball off the Playfield the ball would get stuck on the magnet in the dinosaur's mouth um and it would move and pivot it and pivot and drop the ball into a hole uh where it would end up in a lock so I worked on this game and I was just starting to work on the Whitewood and build the game and Joe comes in and he says uh Steph Spielberg is making a game called Jurassic Park he goes I really like to do that game myself so I want you to change your dinosaur game into Star Wars and I was like what so I just stopped and and uh I I used very little of the layout the original layout out in the Star Wars layout but I I replaced the dinosaur mechanism with the Death Star and then I put a model of R2-D2 that jumped up and down and its head moved back and forth and the ball went underneath it uh and FedEd into the pow ppers and uh that ended up being our biggest run of all time it did probably about 500 units more than Lethal Weapon 3 did and uh that was my first game so I was really stoked that I you know had a game that sold over 10,000 copies in a 3mon period and we did that in a 30,000 30,000 square foot building um we had a company that worked with us called partech they made all of our mechanical assemblies and there were trucks coming into our dock all day long just a load of this a load of flippers a load of pop Pumpers and there were trying to just make your way around to just go out into the factory to go look at a station or mechanism that was being built was like it was you had to crawl over people practically it was the the place was there were so many people working in there and there was just so much going on we were making 200 games a day in a 30,000 foot building it was it was ridiculous um so let's see we so we start at Data East um when I started at Data East Simpsons was on the line and then shortly thereafter I started to work in a game called checkpoint which we turned into a a desert storm we just made a oneoff we we actually uh printed Playfield art on a piece of paper pasted it to a checkpoint play field that was a Whitewood and made a Desert Storm game so when you shot the ramp to see how fast you were going on checkpoint it told you how many miles per hour in in uh in Desert Storm it told you how many sorties per hour you were how many sorties they were sending so uh uh that was just a one-off but that was kind of fun because checkpoint was a really fun game I really enjoyed playing that um uh I did a little mechanical engineering on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Batman uh following following checkpoint uh did a little bit of work on Star Trek and then I got my first mechanical engineering lead on hook and I did that game with Tim Seckel um we took the hook license actually to get Jurassic Park so it was a twofer and they gave hook to Timmy and uh and we were probably selling three or 4,000 units of a game prior to that and when hook came I think we did probably about seven six or seven it it just exploded and do Matrix was making a big uh you know was was making its way into the industry and stuff like that and everybody was everybody was buying do Matrix Games and you know to replace their outdated alpha numeric games um but Hook was a lot of fun I actually went to a to a show and Tim Seckel and I played against Gil poock who was the president of uh Premier Technology and Jon Norris the premier game designer and Tim and I I just just took it to him we were we were playing hook in the finals and I was just on fire I just was just going back and forth shooting crck clock L uh ramps and and just and then Tim played really well too and we just we we beat nor Jon Norris is a really good pinball player it's like playing Keith um and uh so you know I thought well Timmy we're gonna get killed and we were were just both on fire and we won won the tournament um after hook we Lethal Weapon 3 I didn't have much to do with that because I was working on DD Star Wars at the time um when I made my first prototype we uh we took we we made the game but we didn't have any of the molded Parts in yet so I took a piece of plastic and I formed it into a half circle to make R2D2's body and we artist drew up a decal for me and I just pasted on it was paper um I went out and bought a a whiffle ball and I cut it in half to make R2D2's head and I took it up to the art department and let the the dot matrix guys uh Kurt and and Jack they they painted it up and they spray painted it silver and then they put the little blue windows in and we took that game and put it together and we took it and put it in a rock and roll McDonald's in downtown Chicago and the game was at quarter play was earning $500 a week it was just crushing and the game was just uh we left it there for quite a while and it it it had wear on it by the time we went and picked it up it was um um and then we went into production with it we were making 200 games a day and uh and then the market started to fall off a little bit after that we U following Star Wars uh Tim seele and Norm mors worked on Rocky and bunkle together um then Jurassic Park came in 93 uh Last Action Hero also came in 93 and we had a design for Last Action Hero and we ended up changing it a little bit uh we changed the back last like three times and the final version was of Arnold Schwarz nerhe head about this big because they want it really large they could see it you could see it across you could see it across an arcade um nobody really wanted to take nobody wanted to be named as the designer of that game because so many people worked on it um so we put lime and sheets name as the as the game designer for for for Last Action Hero um Tales from the Crypt was my second game um that was a lot of fun to work with John casir was just great he ad lived uh we sent him a speech script and he ad lived and just said all different kinds of crazy things uh that we ended up using um I still talk I still talked to him this day to this day he was uh he's a really nice guy um he uh he says anytime we're ready to Vault uh tals from the Crypt he says he's he's going to buy one um after Tales from the CP we did Tommy and we did the we did Tommy with the uh the motor Iz mirror assembly which was the same Mech that we used on Tales from the CP for the big Tombstone um Tommy was very popular um following that I got my third game in which was Guns and Roses I uh I had a lot of fun working on that game slash is a very personable very very nice guy um uh I went to I went to Slash house in 93 after the big earthquake happened and I walked into his house and he was it was just pretty extravagant a lot of big glass pane windows on the walls um with uh it looked like a zoo you know he had logs and plants and stuff and these things and you know he had a 25 foot bow constrictor in one of them you know he had a poisonous snake room that he said that he didn't go into very much he had somebody come and take care of that for him and then all of a sudden I'm standing there in his living room and I'm looking at his games he's got games spread around all over house and a uh his his pet um his name is Curtis it's a six-month-old cougar just comes walking out into the room and I'm like holy moly he's got a mountain line for a pet and I'm like this is amazing like oh my God so I was with Joe Camco and we went to Slash house and after the earthquake there were still there were cracks in the walls and um it was it was you know there was a lot of damage that you could tell but when that earthquake happened happened a lot of that glass broke and a lot of those snakes got free and his wife was running around the house looking underneath furniture for her cats because she had like five or six cats and I'm like those are food you get get out of there get out of the house you know who knows what's what's going to come crawling out so Curtis uh he he took a shining to me and he was rubbing up against me like a house cat and uh he was my best buddy for a while and I was petting him and I'm like wow I'm petting a mountain line this is totally awesome so he laid down on the floor next to me and he rolled over on his back legs are out like this like a dog and I reached down and I started rubbing his belly don't ever rub a Cooper's belly because uh about a second or two later this big paw that's about three times the size of my hand came up and just went w bam and it hit me in the head and it knocked me over and I fell on my back and I was looking up and when I looked up Curtis was on top of me with his neck or his his mouth around my neck and I thought well just laid there I didn't try to fight him or push him off or Panic or anything I just laid there I'm like good boy don't don't eat me and I figured it was either going to be over in a couple seconds or I was going to live to tell the tale so I'm glad I'm here to tell the tale um slash was awesome Axel was kind of rough to work with he showed up I flew to California to record speech from them Mike clink who was the producer of their uh of their music he was going to handle the recording session so Axel uh went to the wrong recording session on the opposite side of town he showed up a couple hours late he arrived he was angry he was going to leave slash walked outside to talk to him and tried to tried to you know calm him down he came back in uh he went into the recording session and he was going jackpot jackpot jackpot I'm like you know gosh can we put a little more find you're Axel Rose you know he goes everybody get out so they threw us all out so it was just Mike and axel in the room for about three hours and when he finished I think I got about four or five speech lines out of that whole recording session for the game I was like horrified I told Mike I go I have to take the DAT tape back with me to Chicago because we have to put it in the game as soon as we can he says well I have to edit this tape he goes I can't let you take this I can't let you take this tape he was talking about all kinds of stuff and so I had to wait a few hours so now when I walk outside this recording studio I had a limousine that was going to pick me up and take me back to my hotel but it was gone so um it's I'm I'm out in the middle of California in La don't know how I'm going to get anywhere slash goes oh I'll give you a ride back to your hotel so I went back to my hotel and instead of taking a nap for about an hour and hopping on a plane a couple hours later I just got in a taxi cab and went straight to the airport I'm like if I fall asleep I'm never going to make that flight so we were up all night um Guns and Roses was a really fun project to work on uh I really really enjoyed working with that and slash came out to uh to Data East at the time and and he walked around all night um we were working on a we were working on guns and roses and we were also working on a video game at the time and uh and we were walking around and slash had a bottle of Jack Daniels and he was passing it around to everybody and so uh programmer Neil Falconer ended up with that bottle and when he left when he left um when he left Data East he gave me that bottle so I have the DNA in case we ever need to clone a slash bottle empty though unfortunately um Maverick came in 94 and let's see then we became we became Sega pinball and I had the first uh I had the first game the first Sega game uh which was Frankenstein in '95 um that was a lot of fun to work on cuz I had that mechanism that I had designed for the dinosaur game that I thought was going to be my first game so I used that in the in the uh the Frankenstein game so I made the character throw pinballs and uh the original version the unit turned back and forth so I could and it had a a Servo motor that ran the that moved the head back and forth so I could turn the whole mechanism and then I could make the head look back this way and then I could straighten him out and I could make him look all over and make the body turn too but we ended up taking the motorized por of the rotating the whole unit out and we just left the head move and just let him throw the balls and that's how that ended up uh but that was a fun game to work on I got to go to the movie premiere I went with Paul Faris we went out to California we went and had Killer Shrimp if you're ever in California and you find a Killer Shrimp go stop there and have a bowl of shrimp it's delicious um so we went to the we went to the movie premiere and uh I I was like I was uh in the washroom standing next to Danny DeVito looking down you know I'm like oh my gosh I didn't know I didn't realize how short he was um I bumped into a couple of people um that were famous stars I was just like wow this is awesome I had such a good time so Paul and I leave the leave the show um we go back to the we go back to the hotel and we're going to go and we're going to we're going to go hop on a bus and uh we took our rental car back we're going to hop on a bus back to the airport we got there at the end of the night so we're standing on one side of the building the bus comes in it goes around and it goes back out that was the last bus of the night so we found a ride to the airport we were late for our flight and we slept on our travel bags in the Airport overnight that was fun Paul every time I see Paul he goes remember when we get stuck in the Airport overnight I'm like ah um but that was that was a that was a fun game to make um uh I never pictured Robert daero being being the creature Frankenstein monster um but uh but it was a it was a good movie it wasn't the Feelgood movie of the year but it was fun and it was fun to do that game um Batman Forever Came after that I did a little bit of work on that with Paul Leslie that was Paul Leslie's first game design um Paul later on left and went off to do work in the the gaming industry um then we did Baywatch in 95 and then uh Joe Baler and I collaborated together and worked on Apollo 13 um Jo designed the Playfield and I designed the rocket and the and the the moon with the magnet uh that would lock the ball um so we both worked on that one together that was a lot of fun I enjoyed working on that game I'm a space nut I love NASA um when I was a kid watching uh you know Apollo 13 uh come back I was just glued riveted to the TV um and then Apollo 13 after we finished the game we actually got to go and deliver a game to Jim L's house so we're on the way up there with the game there was probably five or six of us uh we took a bunch of back glasses for him to signed for us and we carried the game into his basement and set it up for him and while we were on the way up there I was teasing the guys that he's got a bunch of moondust in the basement you know and he's wearing his suit and we get there and he's jumping around because he never got to walk on the moon poor guy um but he was really nice really nice really nice man we we enjoyed his company and we showed him how to play the game gave him all the tips so he could he could uh you know so he would he played the game and he actually wasn't a pinball player but he actually shot really well for you know being a first time but being a firsttime player he was not flipping both flippers at the same time he was actually you know he coming to the right I'm hitting the right button um he played pretty well and uh a couple years later I knew a a gal that did makeup for people that were uh in film and she got to work on him when he was doing a uh he was doing some kind of a documentary or something like that and she got a Polaroid of him and he wrote on the Polaroid he says John I love this game I play it all the time and that was like five or six years after we made the game so that was a lot of fun to work on um gold and ey came shortly thereafter I didn't have much to do with that that was a ward pton game and then in 96 I made the game twister um I got to go to Oklahoma and I got to see some of the filming being done which was really cool they're driving down the street in a pickup truck with a great big fan in the back and these people are throwing garbage and stuff and all kinds of debris into the fan you know and Bill and Helen are following in the pickup truck um when I first got there I met Bill and Bill took us over to meet Helen Hunt and he goes up and he walks and he bangs on her tra trailer door and she goes who is it and he goes it's me Bill the pinball guys are here and she came out she was wearing curlers getting ready for a set um she was still very cute uh even in curers um but we met her briefly but we walked around with Bill all day and he recorded speech for uh he recorded speech for twister and he also recorded some speech for Apollo 13 for us on the same day and we did it in a kindergarten classroom and we were sitting on these chairs that were about this high off the ground I guess when they filmed there they took over this whole area this whole town and uh so the school was their and all the buildings were were Theirs to you know do with what they needed and store things in uh it was very very neat walking around those sets I had a really good time doing that um also in 96 I created mini Viper which was a small scale cabinet and small scale backbox uh didn't look anything like the production Viper did but we made a oneoff I heard that game sold for like $20,000 and it ended up overseas and it came back and it kind of bounced around a little bit um but we just made one uh cute little game it had a captive ball shifter in the middle and it had a real Viper cast iron Viper car that headlights lit up and it was a cute little game we took it to a show and all of our Distributors said why didn't you make it a regular size game so we we ended up scrapping that and uh and later on Rob herado um made the the production version of Viper um Independence Day came in 96 Space Jam came in 996 I didn't have much to do with either of those uh I was busy working on a game called Derby days and roach Racers if any of you are familiar with those looks like a pinball machine uh longer Playfield uh no legs cabinet was looked like a pinball cabinet but it went all the way down to the ground and it was a Redemption game and what you did was you had two giant flippers on the bottom and a bunch of Pop bumpers and targets and you would play this game and try to advance your depending on which game you're playing Advance your horse or your roach um we named one of the roaches in the roach racers game Harry Gary and we made it we we made this little roach cartoon roach character and put Gary's hair on them and it was just adorable it was it was really cool um we made a couple of those and we didn't go into production with those and then I was also working on a an old uh an oldtime uh bowling game um like the old Bowlers from like the you know the ' 50s and uh we themed it black light bowling and we made this crazy looking alien creature that was the bowler so the ball would come down and it would feed over to a magnet and then you could turn the guy left or right and then the hand was up behind the ball and the ball just sat on a little permanent magnet on this disc and then when you hit the button the hand would SWAT the ball and it would go down and it would knock the pins away the pins were all stuck to the Playfield with magnets but as soon as you broke the pin free there was a counterweight behind that would pull down it would pull the pin up and score a switch when it got all the way up to the top out of view um we had black light splattered black light paint all over the inside of the game and put a couple of big black lights on either side of it um we made that and then we never we never went into production with that game either it was a lot of fun to make um I wish I had one um but it was uh it t would take a while to play 10 frames on this game so they were like how are we going to price this are we going to let them play a quarter and let let them play three frames now they're going to want to play a whole game you know it's going to take long they were worried about how the game would earn but uh we went to the trouble of making it and and we we took it to a couple of shows and and they just decided that it just that wasn't in shipping it that the game was huge and it was Heavy um but we we didn't end up making that game but it was a lot of fun to work on and it was a the the mechanism for the for the pinsetter was it was really really cool um that was a really good project um 97 we came out with Trilogy Star Wars Trilogy and then in 97 after Trilogy I did a little bit of work on Trilogy I did the X-Wing that fired the ball it's like a like a ball cannon um uh 97 second half of the year uh I made uh Jurassic Park Lost World woo I'm really surprised um yeah that that little that little snagger um when I when I read the script they they talked about this truck that's chasing this dinosaur down in a field and it's running and they're chasing after it had this great big thing that came off the top of the truck and and it shocked the dinosaur so that they could then subdue it and and you know and take it and card it away um and it sounded really cool when I read the script but when they they didn't film it very very well um they showed it for like two seconds in the movie and I was like that's it I'm like ah um so but uh they wanted to do something besides putting a ball eating dinosaur in that game so I so I came up with that mechanism for the snag we called it it's was called the snagger in the movie um that was a lot of fun to work on let's see what else do we have here Lost in Space came in 1988 uh shark shootout came in 98 um Sharky shootout was uh originally designed game called Golden q that Jon Norris designed and they ordered parts for maybe 500 games I believe at the time and then they decided that they didn't want to make it that way they wanted to revamp it and try to make it a little more uh robust and and put a little more more features in it and I I thought okay so Gary comes up into my office and he's got this drop Target bank with trip coils two gold ramps um uh gold wire form ramps and he puts this pile of Parts on my desk and he says make a game out of this and I'm like so I took the the eightball assembly on the golden Q game had a ramp that fed into it and then it would go through and there was a little paddle in there that would allow it to divert to the right side and I wanted to make it like a magic eightball so I I had to take these original parts and had to make fixtures to um for production to modify these existing parts that we already had and I added a motor to the bottom and then I put a blue vacuum form ball inside the eightball and put a little window in the eightball so we could spin this thing inside and then light it up and it would look like a magic eightball was giving you a feature uh or a point value or something like that and that was kind of cool and that was fun to work on um the uh the game after sharies was Godzilla in 98 that was a Joe baller game uh South Park came in 99 and then I did Harley-Davidson in 99 um and I believe Harley-Davidson was originally a day to East game and I think after we became Sega and we made it later um we had to rerun the backlash with the new logo on it um let's see then we are now we are now Stern Pinball um the first or the F the first Stern Pinball game I did was Austin Powers in 2000 then I took a Hiatus for seven years I came back in 2007 to do the Indiana Jones license um when I came back to stern in 2007 they told me that they were bringing me back on a contract basis to do a lead Zeppelin pinball machine so I was like yeah I'm on board for that when do I start so I worked on it I came in and I was uh I was a contractor at the time and then after I was there for about two or three weeks I was there every day and uh Ray tanzer came up to me and says hey do you want to just be permanent you know and I said sure you know so then they gave me Permanent employment again and uh uh you know so I I um uh I just you know kept kept picking away and picking away and uh so IND Indiana Jones came um uh Lonnie rap programmed with me um that was a fun game to work on I I really loved the Arc of the Covenant and uh it was it was cool to load the balls into the ark prematurely to the ball play and have a you know and have an eightball it was an eightball game um so you put all your balls in the game and when you fired up the game the game would automatically load balls into the arc and then the remaining five balls in the trough were the ones that you played with until you opened up the arc for multiball um NBA came in 2009 NBA was originally intended to be a uh a game that we were going to just sell into China um and so Ry and Gary were looking at it and trying to figure out what they wanted to do with it they wanted to do a uh kind of a strip down version an inexpensive version of Space Jam so then they decided they were going to make it a production game so I wanted to add some things to it so I I added a an opening in the middle of the Playfield that the ball would fall into and then I placed a kicker at an angle so it fired the ball out of the hole at an angle and flew through the air and I was able to catch it on a magnet on the backboard um uh where you made your baskets in the game and I was like okay so I have this ramp here on the left that I can shoot baskets with and I've got this hole in the middle and I'm like I wonder if I can do something in the orbit and I I put an upost in on the ramp and it pushed up a piece of spring steel and gave the ball just enough momentum to get up near the basket where the magnet would attract it sucked to the backboard droing through the net and I figured I got three ways to get to the basket now and then we just finished the game and uh and it it turned out really nice um it was uh and it didn't feel so much like a strip down version of Space Jam it was just with the with the extra ways of getting the ball into the basket and stuff it was really a lot of fun um Big Buck Hunter came in 2010 uh I worked on Big Buck Hunter for quite a while we we at that that time we weren't molding as many toys we we purchased toys for that game so we found a a deer that was looking to to the right and it was a very nice model then we found a better one looking to the left and I like boy I'd really rather use that one so I actually took and flipped the whole game I I mirrored the whole game and made adjustments here and there to get this one particular plastic toy to work with the game so that as it was coming down the Playfield at an angle it was looking at you instead of away from you um that was a fun game to work on worked on that game for a long time and that's when everything got pretty quiet over its turn you know I'd walk in in the morning and I hear a screw gun go off every five minutes you know it's like and then silence and then I walk down the Halls um I would walk down the Halls at work and I would I would say hello and I would hear hello hello hello hello it was a pretty scary time um I call it the dark days um so in 2010 after big buck we we made Avatar and that was when we made our first what we called the premium game which is like our LA today um and I just introduced a couple new features that weren't on the pro to that and we made 400 400 premiums of Avatar I believe and we were at that number for a couple of models until we got a little braver and went up to 500 and you know and today we're at a00 TH or 500 um uh so when when I worked on the Avatar Le I'm like uh I didn't want to change too much of the Playfield and make it a totally different game but I wanted to introduce a white ball so in order to be able to detect that white ball coming out of the trough I put a couple of pieces of sheet metal where the ball rests on the shooter Lane switch so if a metal ball came out there it landed on those two metal rails and it made a contact like a switch but if the ceramic ball came out saw the shooter switch but it didn't see the other switch and I knew it was the ceramic ball and we would do a double scoring thing with that um that's a game that I don't have in my collection that I would like and if I was going to get one I would definitely want to get the Le premium version of that game um after that that's when things started opening up and we started bringing people back to stern to work uh when we did Tron in 2011 um I love the movie um I love the game um I've been hearing a lot of people saying that we're going to Vault that game you know or you should Vault that game um so I told everybody to just keep writing and uh you write to Seth Davis at ster pinball.com you know we want try um and then at the webinar yesterday I heard a couple people clamoring uh for a remake of uh Walking Dead so i' I'd really like to do that too and that was also a Sam game that would have there would be a lot of work to convert it over to spike but uh I think it would be worth doing um so we'll see what happens in the future uh kiss I worked on in 2015 and at the same time we were working on uh Steve was working on Game of Thrones and he'd been out it for about a year I started on kiss in right around Christmas time that year and uh they came up to me and they told me that they were going to push kiss in front of Game of Thrones and I'm like okay uh January February March April we ordered parts for production and in may we were building kiss in the new building on Lunt Avenue um that was about the scariest thing I think I ever did because I was had all these rotal molded Parts out and when you rotal mold Parts back in the day when we did it the way we did then we would make a a mold and we would uh make a make a casting of the piece part and it would be up about five or 10% because when you go and make tooling off of that part it uh it shrinks the the it actually the part will actually shrink and then when you mold it and then the part comes out of the mold it shrinks a little bit so you have to kind of calculate the size of the part and the shrinkage I had bad dreams that that the ball was going to kick up and come out of Jean's mouth and it was going to get stuck like it wasn't going to wasn't the hole wasn't going to be big enough or it was going to shrink up too much um so all the all the molded parts for that that game came right at the end and uh that was pretty frightening but it all went to plan it all worked um um 177 I I started to work on Aerosmith which was the first game with the LCD uh we pushed Batman we pushed Batman in front of it um because uh we wanted to make sure um we wanted to make sure that we could have the show before before he had passed away um so we we flip-flopped those two games which was actually good for me because that gave us a lot more time to work on the uh on the new video um uh the the new videos for the game the first LCD video I saw uh we did a we did a version of Jackie talking but we put uh the voice of Sparky from Metallica to it you know and just had like a little 20 or 30 second video um but that was really exciting uh I love the LCD there's there I can display so much more information and let you know where you are with different features in the game um the graphics are unbelievable um sorry um and uh yeah the graphics in the in the game are beautiful but it takes a whole lot of people to put all that content together we have a lot of graphic artists now or when we were in do Matrix world we had three guys that did the work um so uh Aerosmith was a lot of fun to work on I wish we would have got speech from Stephen Tyler we had it scheduled and he was coming into town to do a show and he was going to record it and looked at the script and he saw five or six hundred lines that I had written and he says I canot he wouldn't be able to do the concert after he did that that speech session so and as we know stepen Tyler is having issues with his voice and Aerosmith could possibly be done um that's another game that would be interesting to Vault would go back and uh you know and do some additions to um 2017 also uh was when Guardians of the Galaxy came um I worked on that game for about three months before I even knew what the title was and when I finally found out what the title was I uh I had this Playfield drawn with the ramps on the right and left and and some some mechanisms on it and all of a sudden I'm like I find out it's Guardians the Galaxy I'm like oh this is beautiful I had this big area in the middle that I left for some kind of a toy and I'm like that's where groot's going to live um at I was offered the Iron Maiden license at the time and I'm not an Iron Maiden fan I like them but I'm not crazy about him I uh Guardians of the Galaxy could have been Iron Maiden with a big Eddie in the middle which would have been probably really cool um but Keith Keith took the uh the Iron Maiden license and just crushed it he did a great job um it's a really fun game to play um but I was a big Guardians fan I really loved the first movie I was you know and and the the model that we made for Groot was just gorgeous um uh when my model maker finished it I went over to his house to look at it I was like oh holy moly thing is gorgeous um had a lot of fun working on that monsters came in 2019 I worked on that with Dwight and uh Elliot um Elliott was the mechanical engineer on the game he had just uh designed his first game John Wick um Elliot is a young guy in his early 30s uh very talented um so you'll be seeing a lot more coming from him in the future he's he's very very good engineer um Elliot Dwight and I also worked on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in 2020 and then uh and then I did Rush in 2022 um Rush is one of the games that I have in my basement that's next to my Metallica that's bolted to the floor forever um I had to I had to have an Le there was no substitute I I I could have taken a premium but I I'm like I really really want an Le really bad because I just love the artwork and uh got to work with a new artist on that game and and he did a really nice job with it um I remember when I designed the I was I was looking at custom armor and I did one with a a rush logo and I did a couple different ones and I'm like I'm going to make this thing look like a guitar so I drew it out and like these are going to be the open areas and we'll put a little backdrop behind it with some art on it um and I called it guiter and I remember when we got the first pieces in I was holding it and I was standing there like I was playing and somebody shot a picture of me and I I saw it pop up online somewhere bored playing with a guiter um and then uh and just recently we just released the Metallica remastered um and uh got a great response from everybody on that um really really super happy with the with the outcome and the way the game looks um in a couple months I'll tell you the one thing that I took off at that was kind of cool uh but we added a lot of stuff to that game and Sparky with the with the UV he's got UV screened on his chest uh and we we put UV ink in his eyes his nostril cavities and on his teeth and when he lights up um and we're still working on light shows for that too the bright light comes on and then we're going to let the the the UV light you know kind of pulse on and off to make it look like he's glowing from within um the the Metallica logo that we added to the back panel looks really nice and that way when you're playing and you I would play the game and I would shoot the ramps and I knew I had a couple more letters to go to finish Metallica but now I can just actually see it I don't have to look up at the display to see where I'm at because when that ball comes around that ramp and I'm setting up for the next one I don't have time to look up so it was really nice to get that in there um the hammer mechanism never had a key or it never had a uh it never had a light associated with the ball uh lock being lit so I put a UV inside the hammer and It cast light down on the Playfield so I have a I was talking with Greg about it and I go let's put a padlock and some chains going around the hall where the ball gets pulled down and then I go and then we can we can UV screen a key next to it so you don't see the key in the artwork you just see it when it comes on so you know your lock is lit um added skulls to the uh to the slingshots did a lot of software changes added a couple of rules for the uh the two new albums that had uh that weren't released when we made the game in 2013 so we incorporated inserts into the Playfield for those um uh we had a I I I thank Jody today for getting James hfield to participate in our in our trailer um that was really awesome uh I wasn't expecting it I didn't even know that they had that they had done that um but that was a really fun game to work on and go back and work on something that was already fun and and just and just you know and pimp it out and just you know just add things to it and make it more fun um there's a feature in the Metallica game that's not there yet it's called blackened and so when you're playing the game and you get a multiball if you get Sparky you'll collect James as the band member and then when you shoot the snake and you start the snake multiball you'll collect Kirk and when you get all four of the band members the scoop lights on the right I added more lights by the scoop lights blackened and when you shoot in there Sparky comes into view when you see the throw switch on the wall and he goes he looks at the switch and he looks at you and then his eyes get all crazy like he's nuts and then he flips you the bird and then he throws the switch and then he looks back at the camera like this and then you see four silhouettes of the band members with the caps on their heads and they're all going so we get to Sparky gets back at the band he gets to shock the band so that's going to be really fun so uh I was I looked at the display effect for that and we have a a new Young graphic artist his name is padrick and I walked by his desk and I heard that he was working on that feature so I stood behind him and I was watching it and then then he saw me watching and he started it over and I saw it from the get-go and I was like I was laughing so hard I was crying I was like wow this is awesome and I go but you got to give me a family you got to give me a family mode for that you know he can't give them you know the bird has got to go away you got to do this you know um so I really I really enjoyed uh it was a lot of fun it was almost as much work recreating the new Metallica as it was the old one and I think I spent about the same amount of time on it um going back and keeping all the geometry as it was um uh lot of things change like if you pull U like the big orbit flat rail that goes around the back back the game we we don't put mounting feet on the radiuses anymore because it's hard to do uh we've got different ways and different um standards that we're using now so I had to kind of make I had to pull all the the old stuff out and put all the new standards in um there's a few of the rails and stuff in the game uh shot lanes and stuff that are that are exactly the same as the old game um but there was a lot of working uh pulling all the GI in the back panel on the game used to mount on the back of the Playfield now it mounts on top of the Playfield and acts as like a stiffener to keep the game from you keep the Playfield straight um so I had to pull the ramps back both a half an inch so they're a little shorter but you can't even tell by looking at them um and they still shoot exactly the same and feel the same um I put chrome wire ramps on it I was going to put chrome wire ramps on the original game but uh the powder coating was a little more less expensive at the time so this game's got Chrome ramps um it was a it was just it was so much fun to work on on something you know and add to something that was already really really good I really enjoyed it a lot so and I'm sure you will all when you get a chance to play it uh we're going to have a couple of them here on Saturday so it'll they'll be here Saturday and uh we're bringing an ell and a premium the line's going to be long I put the post up so we can try to get people through the line as quick as possible um but it'll be here and uh it's it's definitely a sight to see there's a lot of stuff in the artwork to look at and then the next game after that can't tell you yet I think that's all I have yeah