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Pinball Is Dying: Williams In The Early 80s

Silverball Chronicles·podcast_episode·1h 53m·analyzed·Mar 14, 2021
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TL;DR

Barry Osler's pivotal role keeping Williams pinball alive during the early 1980s video game industry collapse.

Summary

Silver Ball Chronicles discusses Williams Pinball's early 1980s decline as video games rose in popularity, focusing on Barry Osler's critical role as the primary pinball designer who remained at Williams during massive industry contraction. The episode covers Osler's career trajectory from EM-era quality control to his first solid-state designs (Phoenix, Time Warp), his mentorship under Steve Kordick, and the cost-cutting measures Williams implemented as unit sales plummeted from 9,000-10,000 to 900 in just two years.

Key Claims

  • Pinball unit sales fell from 9,000-10,000 to 900 units in a two-year span in the early 1980s

    high confidence · David Dennis stating industry-wide sales collapse as context for Williams' struggle

  • Barry Osler designed 35 games for Williams between 1978 and 1996, selling nearly 140,000 collective units

    high confidence · David Dennis providing Osler's career statistics

  • Barry Osler was the only full-time designer who remained at Williams by 1982

    high confidence · David Dennis stating: 'Only one full-time designer really remained at Williams by 1982, and that was Barry Osler'

  • Phoenix sold 6,198 units in August 1978, Barry Osler's first design

    high confidence · David Dennis citing specific production numbers and release date

  • Steve Ritchie's Flash sold 19,000 units, significantly outperforming Osler's Phoenix

    high confidence · David Dennis comparing Flash sales to Phoenix: 'that would just destroy with 19,000 units'

  • Barry Osler started working at Williams two days after graduating high school in 1970, testing EM back box mechanicals

    high confidence · David Dennis: 'Right out of high school, into Williams, two days after graduating high school in 1970, Barry started out testing back boxes with EM mechanicals'

  • Time Warp featured banana flippers that sold 8,879 units in September 1979

    high confidence · David Dennis providing specific sales and release date for Time Warp

  • Banana flippers were carried over from Disco Fever inventory and Williams had leftover stock to use

    medium confidence · David Dennis: 'We've got a bunch of leftover banana flippers. We need you to use them'

Notable Quotes

  • “In the early 1980s, pinball was dying. Sales in pinballs fell from its peak to 9,000 or 10,000 units, to 900 units in the span of two years.”

    David Dennis @ early in episode — Establishes the industry crisis context that shapes the entire 1980s Williams narrative

  • “Only one full-time designer really remained at Williams by 1982, and that was Barry Osler.”

    David Dennis @ early segment — Underscores Osler's singular importance to Williams' survival during industry collapse

  • “The transition wasn't really hard as far as game design. It was trying to do repairs on it. I know basic electronics, but I can't really fix the circuit board or try to find out what the problem was.”

    Barry Osler (quoted by David Dennis) @ mid-episode EM-to-Solid State discussion — Illustrates the generational technology gap even for younger designers during the transition

  • “Barry Osler says they williams and the operators said that women really like the banana flippers because they could cradle the ball you could take back shots and other stuff with them management wanted them on there i didn't”

    Barry Osler (quoted by David Dennis) @ Time Warp segment — Reveals designer vs. management friction and period attitudes about gendered game accessibility

  • “In 2009, Barry was asked by Pinball Blog what his defining moment in pinball was. And Barry would say that it was seeing his first game roll off the assembly line.”

    David Dennis (reporting Osler interview) @ mid-episode career arc discussion — Captures Osler's emotional connection to game design and manufacturing reality

  • “It's like these 1950s guys that are like, how do we get the ladies to like the pinball? And even the quote itself, which I think is probably very accurate, right, as a quote, which is basically saying, like, the ladies who aren't very good at pinball like this kind of flipper because they can play better. Like, come on.”

    Ron Hallett @ banana flipper discussion — Contemporary critical reflection on period sexism in pinball marketing and design philosophy

Entities

Barry OslerpersonWilliams ElectronicscompanySteve RitchiepersonSteve KordickpersonPaul DeSaltpersonLarry DeMarpersonEugene Jarvisperson

Signals

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Barry Osler's defining career moment was seeing his first game (Phoenix) roll off the assembly line in 1978

    high · David Dennis: 'In 2009, Barry was asked by Pinball Blog...Barry would say that it was seeing his first game roll off the assembly line'

  • ?

    community_signal: Podcast hosts debate interpretations of early 1980s design decisions; note conflicting accounts from original designers (Ritchie, Osler, Gomez)

    medium · David Dennis: 'there are so many resources about this time because it was such an interesting time in pinball. A lot of those sources conflict'

  • ?

    industry_signal: Williams systematically removed expensive features (speech, multiball) from early 1980s games to survive industry downturn

    high · David Dennis: 'you go from games with speech and multiball and all these cool features, and now we've got to take the speech away because speech is expensive...they'll go from three-ball, multiball, maybe to two-ball'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Barry Osler objected to banana flipper design but management/operators insisted on them for perceived female player accessibility

    high · Barry Osler quote: 'management wanted them on there i didn't'; 'women really like the banana flippers because they could cradle the ball'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Barry Osler uniquely remained at Williams through entire crisis period (1970-1996), designing continuously while others departed

    high · David Dennis: 'Barry didn't even leave that building until 1996, which is amazing'; 'Barry became one of the staples of Williams' pinball design'

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.342

0:00
From unsolved mysteries to unexplained phenomena, from comedy gold to relationship fails, Amazon Music's got the most ad-free top podcasts, included with Prime. Because the only thing that should interrupt your listening is, well, nothing. Download the Amazon Music app today. The Pinball Network is online. Launching Silver Ball Chronicles.
0:36
Your temperature swing back yet? It was warm yesterday, and by warm, it was like 40. I think that's like minus 6 in normal temperatures, the correct format. Oh, the wrong format. I got you. Yes. The one the rest of the world uses correctly. Yeah, but we're America. We don't do that shit. Do what we want.
1:15
Hello everyone, I'm David Dennis and this is Silver Ball Chronicles. With me this month, like every month, is my co-hostess with the mostest, is Ron Ham Sandwich Hallett. How you doing, Ron? Howdy! What's up, fella? How are you enduring the cold? Uh, it's really not that... it's pretty normal here, you know, 20s, 10s. We use the Fahrenheit thing, so you're not used to that, but yeah. We are Celsius up here, so we are, you know, where zero is freezing. It was 40 degrees yesterday. It was quite warm. Yeah, if it was 40 degrees here, I would not have pants on, and it would be amazing. Wow. Yeah. You picked up a new game. Yes, I did. And it's been playing well, I hope. It's been playing tremendous. You've been streaming it on the Slam Tilt podcast streaming channel. Yes, I have. I've been thoroughly impressed with how much better you are at pinball than I am. I'm ashamed to say that on a machine like that, which is all flow, Attack from Mars, I brick like crazy. I don't get it. You can brick a lot. The ramps are not exactly wide on that game, especially the right ramp. Very, very good. I had a small freak out the other night when I was playing The Simpsons. By freak out, you mean you realized what a clunk fest it is and you didn't want to play it anymore. The character comic book guy, I picture that character as being Keith Johnson, the coder of the game when I play. And he's like mocking me the whole time. And it just starts to infuriate me after a while. So I had like a big freak out. I was super close to pretzel multiball. And, of course, I drained. I freaked out. I'm like, screw this. and I switched it over to five ball, which is basically a sin amongst pinball players.
Norm Clark
person
Constantino 'Connie' Mitchellperson
Janine Mitchellperson
Mark Ritchieperson
Mike Kubinperson
Edward Tomaszewskiperson
Tony Kramerperson
Phoenixgame
Time Warpgame
Flashgame
Disco Fevergame
David Dennisperson
Ron Hallettperson
Tim Sextonperson
Defendergame
Robotrongame
Pinball Blogorganization
King Video Designcompany
  • ?

    historical_signal: Hosts note conflicting accounts between original designers on historical details (e.g., banana flipper origin story)

    medium · David Dennis: 'Steve Ritchie might say something that conflicts with something Barry Osler would say...there's a lot of really cool little bits and pieces here'

  • ?

    industry_signal: Pinball unit sales collapsed from 9,000-10,000 to 900 units in two years during early 1980s as video games rose

    high · David Dennis: 'Sales in pinballs fell from its peak to 9,000 or 10,000 units, to 900 units in the span of two years'

  • $

    market_signal: Williams repurposed leftover banana flipper inventory from Disco Fever into Time Warp design, indicating cost constraints

    high · David Dennis: 'We've got a bunch of leftover banana flippers. We need you to use them' for Time Warp production

  • $

    market_signal: Flash (19,000 units) dramatically outsold Phoenix (6,198 units) despite both being released within year of each other, indicating Ritchie's superior market appeal

    high · David Dennis comparing sales: Phoenix '6,198 units, which is a pretty good seller'; Flash 'would just destroy with 19,000 units'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Top designers (Steve Ritchie, Larry DeMar, Eugene Jarvis) abandoned pinball to start video game companies, leaving only Barry Osler as full-time designer by 1982

    high · David Dennis: 'Only one full-time designer really remained at Williams by 1982, and that was Barry Osler'; 'Larry DeMar and Eugene Jarvis...had moved from pinball programming to create Defender...then creating their own company, VidKids'

    • 3:10
    I was just freaking, and then I played worse for about five games. I played worse than I had been on three balls. So then I just got just infuriated, and I just, I went, and I don't know, I watched like Parks and Recreation or something. Okay. So that's what I've been doing for the most part. I would love to buy a pinball machine, but things are a bit too crazy for me out there when it comes to pricing as well as the wait time for anything new in box. And, of course, as people know, I have two daughters, both of them under six, and they are f***ing expensive, these kids. What store did you pick them up in? You have to.
    3:45
    They eat, like, so much. Thank God I don't have boys. Oh, it must be horrible feeding those things. Yeah, I grocery shop, like, every two weeks. So our social media update, of course, we launched silverballchronicles.com, So you could swing over there. We've got our catalog that we've worked out. So you can go and you can listen to all of our back episodes. As well as, Ron, I'm working on a super secret project on transcripts. So Ryan C., formerly of Head to Head Pinball Podcast and currently of Jesse J.'s Pinball Adventures on the Pinball Network, gave me a suggestion that I use some software and do a few transcripts for the show. So if you're looking for sort of the history or you wanted to reference this podcast in the future, we'll be able to have some of our transcripts on there. Of course, I have a real life and a real job, so I'm not like putting in a lot of focus in on those transcripts, but they are underway and we're working on them. So that's going to be up at silverballchronicles.com. As always, Ron, you can engage with us at facebook.com slash silverballchronicles. That's where we do a lot of our chit-chatting. And as you know, we have sold out to ThisWeekInPinball.com. It's one of the sponsors. Swing on over to Patreon.com slash TWIP. They kick back a little bit of their revenue from their Patreon to those pinball hobbyists that are listed on the Pinball Promoters database. So if you jump over there, give us a five-star review. It doesn't mean we get paid any more or any less from the Patreon. It's just so others can find us when they're looking around. So one of the things we love to do, Ron, is recognize everybody who has some comments about the show. So we're going to read a few out here. The first one is from Facebook. It's from Chris K. I'm home, locked down, and I don't get to play pinball very much recently since I sold my only pinball machine. And I rarely play on location now. But when I'm feeling down, I turn on Silver Ball Chronicles to cheer me up. You guys truly are the second best pinball podcast. Well, thank you so much, Chris K., for that feedback on Facebook. Chad H. says, Gentlemen, I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoy your podcast. It just gets better with every episode. Your chemistry is fantastic, and you are by far the podcast that I most look forward to seeing pop up in my feed. The work and research that you guys are putting into this podcast is remarkable and very much appreciated. As a relative newcomer to the hobby, less than five years, I am learning so much about the people who helped create the pinball machines that I love and the people who helped to mold the hobby. Thanks a bunch, Chad. That was sent in to silverballchronicles at gmail.com. And as always, we try to respond when we can to all those emails. But, you know, I got to tell you, Ron, the last episode on Dwight Sullivan, which I didn't think was that good at all, has got the most engagement from the community into the inbox and on Facebook. So you have poor taste. I must. I mean, I like Dwight Sullivan. I like his code. I thought it was one of our weaker episodes. I mean, it wasn't as good as that Stern Electronics episode. I mean, come on. Well, it was far too short to be at our highest level. I mean. Of course. We've got to record for at least three hours. So, you know, thank you so much for all the feedback on that episode, everybody. And just putting it out there, David Dennis is the one doing all the research. Not the lazy slacker Ron here. Yeah, yeah. You just make me sound professional and well-polished. Oh. Pat M says, just want to say love your podcast. I'm very interested about the past of Williams Pinball. Keep up the good work. So this was a funny one because our topic today is actually the past in Williams Pinball. So that was very well sent into our email there, patm at silverballchronicles at gmail.com. So we're going to talk about Harry Williams and when he started his own company? No, no, I don't know who that is. You don't know who Harry Williams is? Nope. Hold on, we need to take this offline while I smack him around a bit. Isn't he the guy that stole all the ideas from David Gottlieb? No.
    8:06
    So, guys, T-shirts, right? So if you want to help support the show and your chest is very cold during these winter months, you may want to swing over to silverballswag.com. We've got a couple of new designs. Some of them that are a little more sort of traditional kind of shirts as opposed to colorful and blingy. So please swing on over there and support the show. We have mugs. And we have mugs. Do you drink coffee? No, you're not a coffee person. No, but I do like mugs. Yeah, the person with the best mugs, I think, on the Internet, when it comes to the pinball Internet, is definitely Christopher Franchi. He posts his mugs up from time to time on Facebook, and they always crack me up. That's not fair. He's a professional artist. Yeah, that's true. Come on. He knows. He's got the taste. The artistic flair. So we didn't get any corrections this month. But, you know, if you want to send us some corrections for this episode, you can send them to silverballchronicles at gmail.com. But hopefully there won't be any. I don't know. This one's a risky topic. And I think there's going to be a lot of opinions on this episode. Oh. Actually, there'll probably be a lot of corrections because of the era. There's lots of people who are around, so they will probably be correcting us left and right. Yes, and the other thing I think about 1980s Williams is that there are so many resources about this time because it was such an interesting time in pinball. A lot of those sources conflict. So Steve Ritchie might say something that conflicts with something Barry Osler would say, and Barry Osler might say something that conflicts with somebody like a George Gomez. So there's a lot of really cool little bits and pieces here. I can vouch for that. I had banana flipper questions, and I talked to Barry Osler himself, and he said something opposite of what I'd heard in another place. So there's where we're going to get into that in a few minutes. But let's just jump into the topic this month. In the early 1980s, pinball was dying. Sales in pinballs fell from its peak to 9,000 or 10,000 units, to 900 units in the span of two years. Video games were on an upward trend, and this is where the coin-op industry began to focus its dollars. Larry DeMar and Eugene Jarvis had moved from pinball programming to create Defender at Williams, then creating their own company, VidKids, to create classics like Robotron and Stargate. Even Steve Ritchie, the king of flow and the pinball master, had moved on to create his own video game company, King Video Design. Larry DeMar and Eugene Jarvis were smart cookies. Because they did Defender, and then they realized no one else in the company could do video games, so they left, created their own company, and then came back to Williams and said, Hey, you should hire us to make your video games. We know your board set, because we did it. Paul DeSalt rose in the programming ranks to become the go-to programming lead on almost all of the pinball machines in the early 1980s at Williams. Other programmers would only last one title and then move on somewhere else. Only one full-time designer really remained at Williams by 1982, and that was Barry Osler. To help fill in the production line, some of the designers from the late 70s reappeared, like Stern Electronics' Mike Kubin, who popped in for one design. Edward Tomaszewski only lasted three titles. Williams, Tony Kramer, gave it another kick at the can, and even newcomer Mark Ritchie would only start designing by late 1983. Our topic today, Ron, Pinball is Dying Part 1. Williams in the early 80s. A lot of the early 80s Williams games are quite interesting.
    12:00
    As far as like rules, especially when they start cutting back on costs, because you're getting pounded by video games and everything else. They started putting some interesting things in some of these games, rules-wise. Yeah, they were looking for some sort of differentiating factor. And if you go back into the archives, check out our Gottlieb System 1 Stepping on Rakes podcast. This is sort of happening in parallel, where there's this shift into solid state. And now that the industry is more or less into the solid state era, they're kind of trying to figure out what to do. Then by the time they sort of figure out what they can do with this type of stuff, they start tumbling down a hill like a rock. Cost-cutting. So you go from games with speech and multiball and all these cool features, and now we've got to take the speech away because speech is expensive, one of the more expensive things. That's why a lot of these early 80s Williams games do not talk anymore. They'll go from three-ball, multiball, maybe to two-ball,
    12:53
    where you can cut costs while you can, where you can. Yeah, so let's dive in. And I mentioned Barry Ousler, and he is really one of the primary focuses of today's podcast. Of course, he was one of the designers who kept Williams alive, and he worked through a lot of these tough times. Barry designed 35 games for Williams between 1978 and 1996, and he sold almost 140,000 collective units. Working with one employer for over 20 years is quite an accomplishment. I mean, nowadays, that just doesn't happen. You're mostly at one employer for five years and move on. So that's quite the feat.
    13:36
    Barry would ride the ups and downs of the entire pinball industry from the beginning of the solid state era to the early 80s decline to the late 80s resurgence to the 1990s heyday. So he's seen a lot. And that's even more impressive that he's lasted all that time. So right from high school, he graduated and he started working at Williams. Barry didn't even leave that building until 1996, which is amazing. In fact, Barry dodged many of the bullets when it came to staff cuts. And because of his long tenure, Barry became one of the staples of Williams' pinball design. So much like Steve Ritchie, Pat Lawler, if you look at all of the Williams pinball games, there is a clear fingerprint for Barry Ousler across a lot of those eras. Some say Barry even saved pinball when it was at its lowest point in the mid-1980s, but we'll get to that in another podcast.
    14:37
    So what do you think of Barry Ousler kind of as a whole, right, his whole career? What are your thoughts on him? Longevity. He said he was the only one that was there the whole time. Everyone else left or came back or didn't come back. He was the only one there throughout the entire run,
    14:56
    from solace day to kind of the mid-'90s kind of downturn of Williams pinball. It's like he just loved what he did so much that it didn't matter what was going on. He just sort of kept on trucking. Things are going down or video's rolling up, and some people are like, I've got to get out of here. I've got to get on video. and Barry's like, ah, you know, building pinball. I'm having a great time. I also think of holes in insane toys. I know that sounds weird, but he liked his holes. Oh. Like in Dirty Harry, he's got the hole there.
    15:27
    Wrong podcast. But he has those in a lot of his games, and the cool toys, like something like Doctor Who, that thing, that huge mechanical monstrosity, triple-level device in the back of that game. You must make sure you have the coin door open before servicing or whatever, just as it shocks you. Barry was so good at mixing sort of having fun, exciting shots, but also crazy, amazing toys. It was sort of like a very good mixture of a Pat Lawler and a Steve Ritchie. He fit like right in the middle, right? Like, his vision for the quote-unquote world under glass always ended up working out in a positive way. Mike McCoo would say, Barry Ousler equals brutal outlands. I'd agree with that. It was never down the middle with Barry. It was always out the left side. Except Dirty Harry, actually. I hardly ever drain on that.
    16:30
    Well, most of the other games, yes. I mean, you are in the top 1,000. Yes. Yes, of course. You're so good, Ron. You can get further in one ball on Star Wars than I can with the glass off. Unfortunately, no one else wants to play the Star Wars but me. That's the problem. Yeah. So let's roll back way before the 80s. So, you know, let's get into Barry's beginning.
    16:55
    Of course, like all people in the pinball industry, Barry used to play pinball all the time. but of course it was illegal in Chicago, so he would play on vacation, which is a common theme we've heard across almost all of these designers. And if you're on vacation in Ohio, the one thing that you do, seek out pinball. Barry's father worked quality control at Williams at the same time. He worked in the prototype room. Right out of high school, into Williams, two days after graduating high school in 1970, Barry started out testing back boxes with EM mechanicals. So what would you test in an EM back box, Ron? What was the thing? Reels. Right, so the little things that click, right? The little things that click. Oh, man, some EM people are really upset right now. Yes.
    17:46
    Yes, you can send your pitchforks and fires to silverballchronicles at gmail.com. Stepper units, things like that. And we probably should mention that Barry is a Chicago native, so he was local. They have all of those physical, big, moving pieces inside the head, right? Nowadays, it's like a board and an LCD screen, or, you know, in the 90s, it was a board and a couple of, you know, ribbon cables to a DMD. You know, back then, like, there was actually, like, big friggin' mechanics in there. And so he basically spent all of that time testing right when he first joined Williams, testing the back box mechanicals to make sure that when they went out on into the world that they were working well. So on evenings and weekends, Barry would moonlight as a repair person for pinball machines for local operators. I assume, Ron, you don't make a bunch of money on the floor and helping the engineers so you can make a little bit of that side hustle, the kids call it nowadays. out and about working on the very machines that you're building. That is a smart idea. You know, it's very possible. I have a Spanish eyes from 1972. Who knows? Barry might have worked on the Spanish eyes in my house. Wow. He might have did some QC on that. Who knows? That's right. They call that the Ausler stank. Okay. So Barry worked two and a half years on the factory floor there doing quality control and working up. That's when he moved into engineering, and he worked with the fellow named Norm Clark and somebody we've heard quite a bit, Steve Kordick. They were doing designs, and, of course, he helped them out on sort of managing those designs and building up the Whitewoods and working with those senior designers. Now, that's pretty awesome, right? To be working, like, could you imagine going to Stern today and working with Steve Ritchie on building his Whitewoods? That would be just awesome. Yeah, Steve Kordick was Barry Osler's mentor.
    19:44
    I believe Steve Kordick, he had three or four games at his house, and they were all Barry Osler games. So this is where you learn to read schematics, right, which is its own adventure, I'll tell you, as a person who's not mechanically inclined. And when I sort of learned to read some schematics, it was like, oh, my God, this is like a whole other world, and I've unlocked, like, a special power. The EM schematics are fun. Yeah, see, I haven't even looked at those. I have no, no, no.
    20:14
    It took me long enough to friggin' figure out, you know, the start button on a, you know, an old Gottlieb. So I don't need to even look at a stepper unit.
    20:25
    So this is pre-Solid State. He's working there during the EM era. And it must have been difficult when they started transitioning from that EM to Solid State era, Specifically for these older designers, EM was a totally different animal. We had mentioned in our Steve Ritchie episode that this is when they started to sort of look for these new designers, these younger sort of fellows that maybe didn't have the bad habits or had a different vision or could use their mind in a different way. And this is where they started to look for new designers to come into Williams. and you can really see that time that changed when it comes to design, can't you, Ron? So Barry Osler says, The transition wasn't really hard as far as game design. It was trying to do repairs on it. I know basic electronics, but I can't really fix the circuit board or try to find out what the problem was. I'd know how to change a part, but I wouldn't know how to troubleshoot it. Mechanical games I could go through blindfolded. He's the person at the factory working with the senior designers, and even Barry, the young gun, is struggling with how to actually troubleshoot issues. And imagine spending, like, your whole, like, 30-year career in an EM world where not only could you troubleshoot and fix things blindfolded, like Steve Kornick, for example, but you could also build a machine blindfolded. Well, Barry can't do either of those in this era, and he has only been in the industry for a few years. So Barry did his own design, and Cordick said, go ahead and do a Whitewood. The design went on to become Phoenix. Yes, Phoenix. Put a bizarre back last. Yes, so this is a fantasy bird theme.
    22:19
    August of 1978, 6,198 units, which is a pretty good seller by today's standards. That is a very good seller. Design, of course, by Barry Ousler. Art by Constantino and Janine Mitchell. I recently heard... Was it Janine or Jeannie? So they didn't call him Constantino. They called him Connie. Oh, yeah, they always call him Connie. Yeah, so I heard them talking about this on another podcast. And I'm like, who is that? And then I realized who it was. And Paul DeSault with Sound and Software.
    22:53
    So in 2009, Barry was asked by Pinball Blog in 2009 what his defining moment in pinball was. And Barry would say that it was seeing his first game roll off the assembly line. That was certainly one of the highlights of his career. And that has to be an amazing feeling. I would agree. You've played some Phoenix. I have not played Phoenix. Oh, I've played a lot of Phoenix. You've played a lot of Phoenix. So it has a center drop bank, which is a big deal. This is what has come up a couple times in a couple of different interviews, podcasts, old written documents, that for some reason Barry and the like were super proud of the center drop target rule. Barry would say they, Cordick and Clark, really liked the drop bank rule. We worked on making scoring. Once you knocked the targets down, you couldn't get them back up until you went over the rollover lanes. They liked the tunnel shot. It was different. here's the new person coming in with some newer ideas and the accordix and clarks of the world are like yeah that's pretty cool that's kind of unique you know that's phoenix intensifies competition and fun for sizzling profits oh i love these uh flyers sizzling profits yeah that back glass with the weird birdman thing it's like he's like x-rayed connie mitchell did some weird back. There's some really weird. And we're not talking like Bally 1981 weird. But you know, if you stop and like, what the heck is that? Hey, you've won. I have to play this game now. It's so weird looking. How about Light Diffuse with Phoenix. 25 cents is the profit way. So this is the time when you're moving sort of from EM 10 cent games into quarter games. And you need something cool and fancy to get that extra 15 cents. And I'll tell you what, Phoenix was the one. I love the lady on the flyer here. She's got these, like, puffy 70s pants. Oh, yeah, and heels. Like, brown, leathery heels. Pants are, like, super high on the waist. Great hair. Great hair, though. Super, super cool. I think by looking at Phoenix, I would put a quarter in Phoenix. You know what I mean? Like, I would at least give it a go. it's drawn me in by its look because it's got this super cool like bonus countdown thing and of course it's got Orbit Spinner yeah and fire lots of fire Barry Barry's got a lot of fire in a lot of his careers and this is where it started so the tunnel that they're speaking to is on the left side so there's drop bank on the left and on the right a four target drop bank On the left side, that's where that tunnel is. And there's the plastic kind of covers it over, and you kind of get in that tunnel and go all the way up and hit the target in the back. That looks like a fun shot. Fun shot. So the Birdman. Do you want to talk a little bit about the Birdman back last? He's a dude who's like ripped, but he has like the claw legs, you know, like a bird. And he's got a bird's head, but he has hair. It's very bizarre. And kind of like hands. It's kind of like hands and muscles.
    26:13
    The two ladies in the front, of course, are like, oh, Birdman. There's a third one off to the side doing a bizarre split thing. Looks like she's on a pommel horse or something. Pommel horse. That's what it looks like. And then there's other birds and, yeah. There's a whole lot going on. He's Birdman, all right. Yeah, the ladies love the Birdman.
    26:34
    It's weird. It's very cool. I, you know, again, it's drawn me in. I think it's done what it's needed to do. And I think it was probably a pretty successful pin, considering it sold 6,000, almost 7,000 units. That's a good seller. You know what I mean? Like, that's a good seller, especially at that time, right? Williams was kind of doing that hot tip. They were late to implementing the technology in comparison to somebody like Bally, who really just right out of the gate were like, oh, yeah, this is what we do. and you could see that it took a little bit of time for Williams to figure out what to actually do. I don't know. That's more of an opinion. I would say the first couple of the Williams games that were solid state, they put the chimes in and even like a ticker thing so it would sound like the reels just to try not to alienate their audience. They want to do it carefully, right? You don't want to go all in. But they dropped all that within a year or two, and they're doing full all-out awesome sound packages, et cetera. Now, the game right after Phoenix was from the new guy at Williams, one of the other new designers they're bringing in to sort of refresh the design team. And that's, of course, Steve Ritchie's Flash. And that would just destroy with 19,000 units. So, I mean, when we go, eh, 6,000 is pretty good. You know, 6 is not 19. No. It's a big deal. So then they crack out Barry again. They're like, Barry, do your magic. We've got a bunch of leftover banana flippers. We need you to use them. So that's when they do time warp. So what are banana flippers? Oh, God. Banana flippers. There's no explanation. They literally are curved. They're curved flippers. They literally look like a banana. So they named them banana flippers and they were used on Disco Fever They must have had a lot of stock left over And I don know why Disco Fever sold quite well so they must have They must have bought a lot of those Thought that was going to be the next thing was going to be Banana Flippers It was 78 where Disco Fever came out. This is September of 79. Time Warp sells 8,879 units.
    28:47
    Constantino and Janine do the art, again, software Paul DeSalt. So it's the same team. tell you what if stern came out with a game with banana flippers and it sold like almost 10 000 units nowadays friggin every game would have banana flippers barry osler says they williams and the operators said that women really like the banana flippers because they could cradle the ball you could take back shots and other stuff with them management wanted them on there i didn't i could confirm he didn't want them on there because he told me he didn't want them on there The funny thing is, if you put regular flippers on it, it shoots really good. Yeah. The programmer for Stern, Tim Sexton, owned a Time War for a few years. This is funny, right? It's like these 1950s guys that are like, how do we get the ladies to like the pinball? And even the quote itself, which I think is probably very accurate, right, as a quote, which is basically saying, like, the ladies who aren't very good at pinball like this kind of flipper because they can play better. Like, come on. Like, that is so demeaning, right? Like, ugh. It's 1979, man. Yeah. Right. It's like, oh, they're so dainty. They can't flip like a man. It's like, oh, it makes me so mad when I hear that stuff. So it's got some decent shots, this game. but it's difficult to sort of aim the shots because we're all so used to it like a regular style flipper.
    30:20
    These shots are nowhere where they usually are, like not even remotely close. It was designed for regular flippers. So if you have this game, just put regular flippers on it. It'll play good. And just remember, William's Time Warp, the profit time bomb. Oh, my goodness. You could do a whole podcast on just these awesome flyer things. where the future and the past collide. The action is unreal.
    30:48
    Love it. It's like, nothing like over-promise and under-deliver. You know what I mean? They sold so many of these. You see these all the time for sale, which is just a travesty. Oh, I disagree. There we go. There's a picture of it with regular flippers. It's got five pop bumpers. Take that, Pat Lawler. Take that. We got multiple banks, drop targets, nice orbit shot up top. Very close. Those drop targets, there's a set of three on the left. There's a set of five kind of in the center. Very close to you. Super close to the flipper. So that's, you know, that's got some serious action. And, man, it's got some hungry outlanes, especially the one on the right. Because there's like an orbit with a gate on it. and that just wants to go right into the top of that sling and out the right outline. Very cool game. It's very EM-inspired, I would say. What do you think about the colors in the back glass here? What's going on here? What's the story? The back glass?
    31:58
    I'm thinking more about the nudity on the back glass. Oh, my. Time Warp, I think, might well, excluding European games, because they, God knows what they did. They put anything on the game when it comes to nudity. But they have the Da Vinci's dude. What was it called? Oh, you got it right here. Vitruvian Man?
    32:18
    Is that what it's called? I probably said that wrong. Maybe the only depiction of male nudity from a penval machine manufacturer. Yes, he is nude. Like the one where the naked guy is doing the jumping jacks. Full frontal. It is right on the back glass. But it's art. It's classical art. It's one of those deals you never notice it until someone brings it up, and then you can't unsee it. It's like right there in your face. And I'll tell you what. You thought some of Dave Christensen's ballet art, it was very cold where people were when that was drawn. Well, I'll tell you what. Da Vinci made that one. It was a chilly day. I was in the pool.
    32:58
    That's time warp. So it's got like different eras of time And then some weird guy in the middle Who looks like he's from Monty Python He's sleepy He's very sleepy He looks like a stone Yeah, he looks like he's in Holy Grail And he's stone He's like, where's the Where's the grail, dude? Man, where's the Doritos, man? It's got dinosaurs I mean, it's a time warp You're going through time And this is like that pre-Jurassic Park dinosaurs, so they all look weirdly cartoony. And they're always green. Always green. Yeah, because everybody knew that dinosaurs were green, right? They did. And the dude from the back glass is also in the center of the play field. Yep. Less stone-looking, but more gropey-looking. He's got his big hands coming at you. Oh, God, I didn't even notice the hands, yeah. And he's there, he's just like, hey there, let me give you a hug. I wonder if he's like the Time Lord or something. I don't know. Wait a minute. Time Lord. This is a pre-Doctor Who right here. I'll tell you what, man. You could have worked at Williams. Let's go back to banana flippers here for a second. Oh, no. Let's not say we did. So who thought of banana flippers, right? Whose idea was banana flippers? Well, I couldn't through all my research. I looked in the Pinball Compendium. I looked on various blogs and interviews, and nobody would say that it was their idea. nor would anybody remember whose idea it was. So my assumption is that it was just such a bad idea, nobody wanted ownership, and everybody just wanted to forget about it. And then people brought it up in the 1990s at, like, conventions or shows or expos, and they're like, you know what, I haven't thought about those crappy things in 30 years. I can't remember.
    34:43
    Mike Stroll, the president of Williams at the time, he may have pressed for the curved flippers, but, of course, that was not like him to force a feature, especially if it was controversial. He gave the designers maximum freedom when it came to designing the games, so it was maybe the designer who came up with banana flippers. Now, Steve Ritchie would make comments saying things like, Mike could play very, very well, and he was always deeply involved in the engineering aspect at Williams, so it might have been his idea, but we can't really figure out whose idea it was. But I'll tell you, I'll ask you now, Ron. Do you think banana flippers were worth it? I think they were like, yeah, those are revolutionary. I don't think they were worth it, but I don't think they, I mean, you have Disco Fever sold a ton and Time Warp sold like 8,000, so they didn't really hurt the sales, did they? Crazy. Good old Steve Ritchie says, I adopted a philosophy about flipper placement after first observing pinball play in the early 70s at Atari. Games that had odd flipper placements generally did not make as much money as games that had more normal arrangements. There are exceptions, including Captain Fantastic, but even there, the basic two lowest flippers are in a very normal position. And if anyone knows about weird flipper positioning, it's those Atari games. They were a mess. Now we're going to get into, I would say, probably one of Barry Osler's best-known games, and that's Gorgar, December of 1979. This is like a fantasy Dungeons & Dragons Satan theme. Yeah, I always took it as just Satan, the devil. It's a Williams System 6. So it's a System 6 like, say, well, Firepower would be. It's 14,000 units, which is huge. That's huge. That is a massive, massive selling unit. And this must have been just, he must have been over the moon, Barry. Like, art by the Mitchells again. Sound, Eugene Jarvis this time did Sound, who's a newcomer to Williams, and the other bits of the software by Paul DeSalt. So we can see here that Barry has his go-to team, which is pretty interesting when it comes to this stuff. Dan Barlow from Facebook says, Gorgar was kind of scary when I played it as a kid in the 1970s. The heartbeat sound effect added to the overall feel of the game. It ended up becoming my first pin. Gorgar was one of the first pinball machines I remember as a little kid. It was one of the games that was in the tavern my father would go to. They usually only have one pinball machine there, and they'd have it there for a while and switch it out. Gorgar was one of the ones that was there the longest. And you had the same reaction as Dan? I love the back glass. I think that's Connie Mitchell's best back glass. Wow. It's freaking Satan. Fire and stuff. I mean, how could you not like Satan? Yeah. And the heartbeat thing. The sound on that thing is incredible. Flash was the first game with that dynamic background sound, and that was why it sold so many units, right? It hit this drone, and as you dropped the targets down and got more points, sort of the tension built and that drone got more high pitched and more exciting. A lot of people have played Meteor. Meteor's got that dynamic background sound. Well, Gorgar went a step further and really killed it when it came to its dynamic background sound. So rather than a tone or a noise or this just droning on and on and on and on where the pitch got higher, it was like a heartbeat. Yep. And that heartbeat got faster and faster and faster. And it was as close to a heartbeat as you could get, I would say, in that era when it came to sound. And man, oh man, it was Eugene Jarvis that just killed it with this machine. This was, of course, as you had mentioned, the first game with speech. And I'm sure many people are very disappointed to hear that Disco Fever in 1978 was the first Williams game engineered with speech. And in fact, a talking prototype was presented at the AMOA show in Chicago that year. Yeah, they did that stuff a lot. Bally had a Lost World that they put like a tape deck or something in so it would have speech.
    39:03
    So it looked like it was the first because they knew Gorgar was coming. They manufacture, they do all kinds of stuff like that. So Eugene Jarvis did the effects here, but he didn't do the rules programming of the game. And this was mostly because he was still working with Steve Ritchie to finish Firepower. Because there was no other programmers that would work with Steve Ritchie, Eugene straddled both projects. We've heard that before.
    39:31
    Korgar was the first production game with speech and was first shown at the AMOA Expo, held November 8th through the 11th, 1979. Barry Ousler says, at the AMOA show, it was so loud that Sam Stern came over to tell us to turn it down because no one could hear his games.
    39:47
    That's an awesome, awesome quote. That is awesome. Turn it down, you young whippersnapper. You're impeding our sales over here. We're trying to sell mammary lame. Barry assumed that the sales were mostly due to the sound system and the speech they designed. Yeah, I mean, that's got to draw you in, right? Like, if everything else there is just sort of making like, or boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, at Gottlieb, and then you hear this thing. Not only did it have an amazing background sound, but it talked. It said words in English that you could understand. It had seven words, and the way Williams would do it, they would just record the individual words and then just slice them together. So it would never sound completely smooth. Yeah, he didn't say sentences. No. It wasn't like Bally with full sentences, but they had the seven words were beat, you, Gorgar, speaks, hurt, me, and got.
    40:45
    So you hear things like me, hurt, Gorgar, speaks, me, got, you. It's antiquated, but at the same time, you're like, man, that's kind of cool. I always wondered who did the voice. I could never find who did the voice. I asked Steve Ritchie, and he couldn't remember. He thought they might have hired someone, like a voice actor. Yeah, now the Amusement Review, a magazine back in the day, in its January and February number 198, the talking feature, they said, was actually optional and cost $70 more to the operator. But the majority of the units was ordered with the sound package, so they just decided to make everyone with the sound package. Yeah, I've never seen it, because the speech is a second board that's connected to the soundboard, I think with a ribbon cable. I'm trying to remember off the top of my head, or just the connector. But it's like a little separate mini board, so they'd have to literally not have the mini board in there if they were going to not give them the speech. Because, of course, this was a new technology, there was a little bit of a bug in the first ROM code. So a ROM is like the chip that plugs into the board that sort of tells one part of the machine or the other what to do. If you inserted coins after the speech, it would work. But if you were putting coins in during the speech, it would get all confused. Yeah, I remember seeing the sticker on some of the games. It was like a picture of Satan. And he says, wait until I stop talking before inserting coins. It was so polite, Satan.
    42:14
    There was a record, for those who don't remember those, it would come with a little, like a 45 of just him talking. Weird. It was like the original Deadpool. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was basically the same thing they did for Deadpool. They did for Gorgar, but with an album. So how would you describe that back glass, Ron? One of the great back glasses. I mean, I'm still confused, though, if... So you've got the Satan guy. Basically, you have an altar with a woman on it, wearing next to nothing, of course, because 70s and all, you know. So then we have Gorgar, and then we have these other dudes. One is, like, picking up the girl. I can't figure out if he's saving her or if he's one of Gorgar's minions. He must be saving her because there's the other guy in the background who's, like, fighting. He's running with a sword. It's just like the Paragon backless I was always confused about. Is the dude, like, attacking the woman or saving her? I never could figure that out. Or is he riding the lion or is he attacking the lion? This is similar. I'm just trying to figure out exactly what's going on in this backless. The detail in the back glass is quite impressive because this is before they're doing that sort of bally, four-layer sort of screen printing back glasses. This is all like lines, right? Like this is some pretty impressive lines. The back glass is good. Look at the play field. Yeah. So let's talk about the play field a little bit here. So the lower play field, that traditional kind of Italian bottom play field, it's got the guy who looks like he's fighting Gorgar. And the lady is like, no, please save me because I'm a stereotype of a woman. And then there's another guy in the background who's fighting. Now, this is an awesome, awesome, you know, lower play field design. There's a lot of detail going on. There's a ton of detail. It's super impressive. Lots of fire so you know it's good. Yeah. So then kind of halfway up the play field, you've got your stand-up targets, and then you've got a capture hole on the left, which is really cool. And then a set of offset drop targets, a set of three.
    44:25
    And then you've got an orbit spinner. Yeah. But this orbit spinner isn't really the best of orbit spinners, right? It's kind of a clunky. That's good. It's good when I play it. Well, it's because, you know, you're the top 1,000 player here. I'm talking about playing other people's games, but yeah. It has a weird spinner rule where the bonus has to be at a certain level between so-and-so and so-and-so, and then it's lit. So once you go above that bonus level, it turns off. Yeah, the upper play field, this is where it gets exciting, okay? So there's Gore set a three bank drop targets on the left, and Gar is an offset target kind of in the middle, lower middle of the play field. But in the back, there's a snake pit. So what's so cool about this snake? It has a magnet and it stops the ball dead and then flashes. Well, they didn't have, I don't think it's a flasher. Or just they blink the light bulb and it's like, me hurt, me got you. Great effect. I would say the worst part and the most disappointing thing about Gorgar is, well, the fact that it's Satan. And I mean, that's not going to fly in my house, sadly. But this is before firepower. and Firepower had two amazing things about it. One of them was multiball, but the really amazing thing was lane change at the top. So when you shoot that orbit spinner or you get up into the pops in Gorgar and you roll over the lane in the top, you can't switch the ABC lanes. You're one of those whiny type players, huh? I am indeed. So you get it up there and you're like, you gotta, you know, you gotta nudge it, nudge it and not tilt and you gotta get it up there again. and it's like, oh, God! Isn't it great how that's the way it was and then they added lane change and now in 2021, we have a game like Avengers where you have the in-lane lights that you can't move. They're not controlled and you have to hit things to move them. I love it. Or you have games with skill shots with the light you can't move so you have to actually try to get it in the right lane using nudging and skill. What a surprise. What do you think about the promotional poster? Now, if you go onto the Internet Pinball Database at ipdb.org, you can look at all this stuff. Those links are in the show notes. I'm thinking they hired a model for this one. She's wearing a fur top, but the top is missing the middle part. Yes, it is. As well as the sides where the legs are. I'm not entirely sure how that... It stays on? I'm sure there's tape or something, but what does that have to do with pinball? She's the woman from the back west. That's what I was assuming. And we keep calling him Satan. I mean, his name is Gorgar.
    47:11
    That's his name. Enter the lair of Gorgar, only if you dare, because that rhymes. Make Gorgar cry out. Challenge the snake hole. Ooh, that's weird. Escape from the monster's clutches. Do you know, when it comes to pinball profit, Gorgar speaks of monster earnings. Oh, God. Williams. I love it. So cheesy. It's like watching a television newscast here. I mean, if any of the manufacturers listen to this podcast, which I'm sure, of course, they do. They want to learn about history. We need cool flyers again with just really cheesy quotes on them. Please. Yeah. Bring it back. Please. So where do you think the design concept came from making a, you know, a monster fire Satan-y thing? Well, Barry would say the design was the artist's decision. He said the team wanted something different. It wasn't supposed to be demonic, but at the time, Dungeons and Dragons were coming out. We wanted to cash in on that with the hero saving the woman from the beast. I guess that answers my question. So he is supposed to be saving her. Hmm. Gorgar and his stance were inspired by an illustration called The Underworld by Boris... Palejo? Yeah, there you go. Oh, okay. Link in the show notes. Yeah, so check that out. It's very cool, because if you see this picture, oh, it is clearly a rip-off. Because we always joke about Stern ripping off or looking for, quote-unquote, inspiration from other designers. Well, this did very similar and very close. But it's, you know, it's a lot of people talk about Gorgar as it would have done even better if it wasn't sort of the way it was. What, Satan? Yeah, George Gomez would say that, right? George Gomez worked on a game called Satan's Hall. In the South, it would have been. It probably didn't sell well. So imagine how many more units it would have been if he were blue instead of red. Well, did you know German metal band Halloween's 1985 album Walls of Jericho included a track titled Gorgar that symbolized the machine as a form of gambling addiction? Barry, after this massive hit, he figured, how do I humble myself? And he said, let's do laser ball. Well, they had to do wide bodies. This is when Williams was on their whole wide body kick. And by wide bodies, really wide bodies. This was, and I've seen a lot of these laser balls around, and I don't know why I see so many of these. Because they made a lot of them. And people just want to get rid of them, I guess. I don't know. It's outer space fantasy theme. Sells 4,500 units. This is a Williams System 6. This is, as you said, wide body. Again, the Mitchell's on art. Sound and software by Eugene Jarvis.
    50:03
    Now, this is, people are like, oh, you know, we don't have enough bowling themes anymore in pinball. Well, I'll tell you what, back then, bowling-themed pinball machines were all the rage. And this was originally called Williams Lanes, and it was, in fact, a bowling theme. And originally, the people featured in the game, so the art in the game, were people who worked at Williams. And you can actually see some of that prototype in the IPDB website. So you can see the pre-production back glass. There's like a Burt Reynolds-y looking fella. That's who I thought it was. It's Mike Stroll. Oh, my God, Mike Stroll. He looks like Burt Reynolds. Mike Stroll, the company president, looked like Burt Reynolds. With two models, Nancy Rudd and Nancy Tritt. The dark-haired man on the left of the back glass is Connie Mitchell. The green shirt person, the green shirt man on the right is the engineering manager. Chuck Bleach. The red shirt man on the right is Tony Ramuni, who looks creepy.
    51:16
    So it was Williams Lane. It had like a pre-production. Everything was ready to go, and it was bowling themed. It was called Williams Lane's. Let's go for something different. So Connie pushed for Laserball, which is lasers in the future thing.
    51:35
    Oh. What? Well, if you look at the play field, so if you look at this game, in the middle... Bowling pins. Yes, they're still there. So you can see that it was, in fact, bowling theme. This also has this odd lady's makeup that was very reminiscent of this time. It was like this futuristic makeup thing around the eyes, and it was like colors and wings and things.
    52:09
    I don't know. This game, it looks like it was changed at the last minute, and it really does come across. It does come across in its design as well as its art, where it's just like, hey, quick, get something out. Fill the line. Well, especially since the same woman is on the game ten times, they just printed her over and over and over again.
    52:34
    Did you know that laser ball turns cosmic energy into cash? Oh, no. That's a bad one. Extra flipper for extra scoring.
    52:44
    Front-end programming ease. That's interesting. That basically just means you open a coin door and you can change the settings. Streak through the stars. Activate the force field. It's actually in quotes, so it's like, activate the force field. Trademarked. Laser beams radiate high scoring power. Oh, super good, super good. It's, I don't know, it's kind of neat. Doesn't do it for me. You know, I don't think I'd put a quarter in this. Oh, you should put a quarter in everything. Give it a try.
    53:17
    And then play Stellar Wars instead, if you need to play the ultra-wide body. Yeah, Orbit Spinners, yeah. So it's got me there. If you can make it up there, so far. Got a lot of drop targets, that's cool. Everybody loves drop targets, except for CERN. But those pop-upers look familiar, those pop-upper caps. Very cool. It's a neat little, you know, it's okay, I guess. I mean, if it's, I think the coolest feature, because you've got to fill in sort of the bottom of the playfield. Again, Barry was, I guess, pretty good at trying to keep that sort of traditional bottom of the playfield. But on the left and on the right, it's got these, like, capture holes on the outside of the outlanes, which is kind of neat. and it kind of kicks it back up sort of into the middle, into the play field, which is kind of cool. It's kind of different.
    54:04
    But it's a bit of a mess, if you ask me. Such an opinion for a game he's never played. Exactly. Fail. Eugene Jarvis, of course. This was his first game where he did everything besides just the sound. This is where he did all the rules and all that stuff. And he fit a lot of stuff into such a small sound chip when it came to that System 6 chipset. So he had made synthetic chimes, actually. Eugene said, this was a management decision. It was like management would say, oh, my God, those sounds are strange. People want their chimes. Yeah, Eugene was all about those sort of strange sounds, right? Like sometimes they're like, let's just, now that we've done something really cool, let's kind of go back to basics, chill it out a little bit. You know, Flash has the same thing. So I think they're talking about on the System 6 sound boards, they have like a, actually I think it's System 4 has them too. There's like a little toggle switch. You can toggle between the regular sound package and like the much simpler sound package. It kind of gets more sort of basic and less I didn't even know this existed because I never heard a game on the simpler sound package. Yeah, so this is, we've had a dip in sales now, right? We've had that crazy peak of kind of Gorgar, Flash, like 4,500 units, Stellar Wars selling 5,500 So you can see there's a bit of a dip in sales here over this peak. That's when we get into July of 1980 with Scorpion, which is another super wide body. Fantasy theme, sells 2,000 units. The Mitchells, it's only Constantino, Connie this time with Tony Ramuni,
    55:40
    and software and sound by Larry DeMar, who's a new team member here swinging in. So Scorpion, this is the second wide body that Larry, that Barry, this is the second wide body that Barry has done, and we've mentioned this a few times in the past that Atari had started making wide body machines. That's all they made. All the other manufacturers were super concerned that maybe they were on to the next big thing, that they didn't want to miss out, so they started making wide bodies, but then they quickly realized they weren't fun. It depends, it depends. Such a blanket statement. Barry Osler says, I was just trying to make another follow-up to the last widebody I made. I was just trying to do some other unusual stuff. Atari was doing things like Middle Earth or something at the time. We were just trying to come up with a similar theme. The only reason I came up with this is that someone else was doing it, and we didn't want to be left in the dust if they take off. Atari was doing nothing but widebodies. If you don't do one and they take off, you'll be the last one. So there you go. They had to do something, so they're like, let's try, let's give her a go. Scorpion is a fun game. I always liked Scorpion. Scorpion is actually the name there a big lizard Loch Ness monster looking thing in it so you figure oh that Scorpion but it not it actually the name of the ship that going after the lizard thing It like a two creature but the name of the ship is actually Scorpion Yeah, it's almost like a cigar boat, right, you'd see in, like, Miami. It's kind of cool, but the colors are all weird, right? They're weird. It's got the purple sky, then the green character and the blue at the bottom. What did the buyer say for this one? Two-headed earnings or something like that, I was going to say. Let's see here.
    57:27
    Time. Time always precious seconds. Seconds that call for supreme strategy. Seconds that can mean the ultimate victory or devastating defeat. Come aboard the Scorpion. There's no time to lose. And the reason that's all worded that way, this game had a unique feature. This is all Larry DeMar. When you start multiball, a timer will start that counts how long you were in multiball. And the longer you can be in multiball, the more points you get at the end of the ball.
    58:05
    Wow. So you're thinking, like, okay, I'll just trap then. When you trap, the timer stops. That's why it's really neat programming for 1980. Larry DeMar. He was able to put something in there. So if you don't see switch hits happening and you're just trying to hold the ball, the timer will stop. Because the first time I ever played this game and saw that, it's like, oh, I'll just hold the ball, right? And it'll just keep going up. Like, nope. Barry, again, makes that more or less traditional bottom of the play field. Now, the slings are much wider apart, but he does have that in-lane, out-lane traditional kind of flowing into the flippers from the outside. But, man, that is one heck of a trip from that out-lane all the way down in there. That is like, you better stop and have a beer when that ball's coming. And the upper left, I think, is his first go-around with a design element he'd use again and again. It looks a little familiar.
    59:00
    He plays Solar Fire, which we'll get to later. Grand Lizard. It's like a little part in the upper part of the play field. So in this case, it's not even like an upper play field. It's just the upper part of the play field. And you've got two flippers, and you just shoot at drop targets. And there's a really cool spinner on the left, which probably has to be the worst orbit spinner of all time. Oh. Except for those System 1 Gottliebs, I guess. But this little design element he will reuse.
    59:27
    I think, you know, if you think of the Steve Ritchie sort of upper, you know, loop shot, you know, the Barry Ousler upper part play field is kind of his thing for a little while. I mean, of course, it wasn't like that in the 90s, but his earlier career, he's used that quite a few times.
    59:45
    It's a neat little game. You know, I would probably play it. I guess. I really like cigar boats. So, cigar boat theme. Hey, guys. As a quick heads up, I wanted to let you know that in my real life, I'm David the Advice Guy. At Dennis Financial, we aren't investment advisors or insurance agents. I always thought that sounded terrible. We want to provide you with sound financial advice. In fact, we want to provide you with investment and insurance advice for life. We take that honor very seriously. Do you know individuals who receive financial advice for 10 years have two times the financial assets of unadvised individuals? For example, you've got mortgage insurance at the bank, right? Well, did you know a 40-year-old non-smoker can save $30 a month every month for 20 years just from shopping around for a more competitive rate? Now, just imagine what a pinhead like you could do with that extra money. Toppers and shooter rods, anyone? If you're looking for a more human dimension to your financial advice, Dennis Financial Inc. has you covered with advisors licensing most Canadian provinces. Contact them via email at david at dennisfinancial.net for a free rate quote and a copy of our value of advice e-book, or check out dennisfinancial.ca. Insurance solutions provided by Dennis Financial Inc., Canadian residents only. Now, the next game, you know, this is where we're getting into some strange things. This is Algar. Oh, man. Was this Barry? Was this a Barry game? This was a game by Tony Kramer, and it's a fantasy monster theme. It's September of 1980. It's a Williams 6A. It's a thing.
    61:33
    349 units, and it is a wide body. Well-deserved. The Mitchells doing the art sound by Christina D'Onofrio, Paul DeSalt on software. This was originally started by Claude Fernandes, who you will remember from Blackout, as well as switching teams over to Bally to make Flash Gordon and stealing Steve Ritchie's ideas. For Steve Ritchie. We're not saying that he did. Yes, right. And, of course, then this was passed off to Tony Kramer, who is another sort of Williams guy who pops up from time to time in the early solid state era, who just kind of swings in and does a design and swings out. Why do I bring Algar up? Well, I mean, it was the next one in production. The other thing is it's got very low production numbers, which makes it kind of neat. It's one of only two System 6A games. Yes. So it has seven-digit displays, even though it's a System 6 game. And it has one of the, and I probably should say Alien Poker is the other one, in case people are shouting right now. What's the other one? It has a back class that is the original Lion Man, I guess you could say. This was the original Lion Man. And actually, he's part of the Gar family. And the joke around Williams was that this was Al, who was Gore's brother. So you had Al, Gar, and Gore-Gar were brothers. Al, because Al was such a failure, the entire Gar family just died.
    63:04
    That was the joke around with the Williams factory at the time. This is one of the few games that I just hate. Oh, my goodness. That's a hot take. But it's got two spinners. It's got two spinners. My podcast mate, Bruce, from our Swamp Till podcast. There, I did my plug. He likes this game for some reason. I don't know why. It has the little space on the right end lane just like Future Spa does. Right into the drain. Right into the drain, but Future Spa is a much better game. Yeah, it's got no Italian bottom. It's got the flipper that's right on the sling. And then next to that is literally like a switch in a hole that's just right down the end lane. And it's got this, I don't even know how you explain it. I think there's a term for it, but you hit like a captive ball and it knocks another ball back and it's like a grid. I think they use the same thing on, what was it, Big Bang Bar has like the same thing. It's got a couple of neat design elements. One of them is that there's a three bank drop target, three drop target bank. To the right of that, there's like a 90 degree sort of turn. And then that kind of goes across the play field and down the left side. And then that acts as sort of the left in lane, which is really weird. You've got to look at the pictures to actually do this. And I know we're an auditory medium, and we spend a lot of time talking about how stuff is. But I'm trying to paint your word picture here, folks. Calm down. What does the flyer for this say? Don't buy it? I don't have a flyer for this one. Exactly. It was so bad they didn't even print flyers.
    64:42
    So who was Tony Kramer? So we've brought him up a couple of times. And I think this is a great opportunity to bring up somebody else who swung in and out of Williams while it was dying in the early 80s. Who's Tony Kramer? Tony Kramer was nicknamed Colonel Nutsy after his wristwatch had stopped working intermittently for the last time. He screamed some profanity and threw the watch as hard as he could at a plaster wall in Williams' engineering. So he was a bit of a character, I guess, was the best way to say it. Steve Ritchie says, the watch flew apart in 100 pieces and we all laughed so hard, Tony included. He was nuts. He could create pinball designs faster than anyone else at Williams. Tony was a great guy who made the best of a life through a tough childhood and a love for Steve Kordak, who mentored him as a game designer and treated him like his son. So he was well, you could tell by this quote, he was well-liked. He was a good dude despite a tough childhood, which I couldn't find any information on, but we'll take his word on it. A lot of people said that Algar failed because of Black Knight. Black Knight was about to come out. It was the big smash that would be another Ritchie title. Well, do you think that that was the reason that Algar failed? No, I have to agree with Steve Ritchie. He says, I think Al was just a dud of a game. There you go. So it's just a bit of a dud. You know, it's kind of a crappy game. So because it didn't sell at all and it was kind of crappy, they just killed it and moved on to the next thing. So Tony would actually pass away in 1992 after he was struck by a car in front of a Chicago bar, the bar where he, along with Steve Ritchie and many of the other folks in pinball at the time, would often hang out. His death was a tragic one and one where those in the industry who knew him took it quite hard. And Steve Ritchie would say that he actually very much misses Tony Kramer. So, you know, that would, I would say, speak volumes in how good a person Tony was. All right. So this is where we get into the battle of the bi-levels, I like to call it. So you've got Black Knight that comes out and completely changes the game. Then you've got Bally's Flash Gordon. And now everything's got to be a bi-level. And then it's like, oh, my God, wide bodies. Everything's got to be a wide body. And it's like, oh, my God, everything's going to be a bi-level. So it's funny how the industry is that way. If you want to learn more about Black Knight and bi-levels and things like that and sort of the development, you can check out our Steve Ritchie episode, which was the pilot episode, or you can check out our Bally 1981 episode if you want to talk about Flash Gordon. We've talked about those before, so now we're going to dive into Jungle Lord, which is Barry Ousler's bi-level game. It is a fantasy theme from February of 81. It is a Williams System 7. It sells 6,000 units, so sales have picked back up again. It is a bi-level, sort of narrow, standard body game. The Mitchells on art and sound and software by Larry DeMar. This is a cool game. Now, it has MagnaSaves on the outside, right, which is an innovation that Steve Ritchie had in his Black Knight game. Yeah, but it's done better. It's done so much better. Basically, it doesn't just stay on. like you tap the thing and it just you just get it out of the out lane it pulses it. So you can kind of flick it back into play or you can kind of hold it to really kind of grab it from going out of the out lane this is a unique art package for a few reasons. There was that movie at the time like Blue Lagoon wasn't that a movie? That was a movie with Brooke Shields and whoever the guy was Brooke Shields was also in the Pinball movie so So there's a pinball connection. Yes, exactly, exactly. Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins. This movie, it was from 1980. It has an 8 on Rotten Tomatoes, which is probably one of the worst scores I've ever seen. Oh, so you're not 8 out of 10, just like 8 out of what? 8 out of 100. Wow, okay. Anyway, it was like these young kids that get stuck on an island, right? Yeah, yeah. Scroll down. He's on Wikipedia right now. here's the important thing budget 4.5 million box office 58.8 million sorry rotten tomatoes oh yeah it made money don't matter these two these two you know young people that get stuck on an island they fall in love it's like a love story it's i remember it was it was widely panned in a lot of movies like airplane and a bunch it was really like a big deal and this is very much the same kind of thing right there there's a man and a woman on the back glass and she's not wearing any clothes, and he's not wearing any clothes, and they're, like, hugging, and it's romantic. And then there's, like, two tigers on the left and on the right, because tigers are in the jungle, I guess. I took it more to be just Tarzan. Really? You know, this is, no, I got a Blue Lagoon vibe from this. Okay. Yeah. The worst part, though, about these poor tigers is it looks like I drew them. Like, they look horrible. It's like you drew something and then you left it in the sun and it sort of melted a little bit. It was... I feel really bad for the Mitchells because this one just did not pan out the way it should have.
    69:59
    This was, of course, Jungle Lord crowns you king of the pinball jungle. Yep, I will say this right now. This is the best bi-level game. Wow. Black Knight's the best playing. Oh, of course. But this is the best overall. Over the Christmas holidays, I borrowed a Black Knight from my buddy. And I'll tell you what, man, it is a great shooter. It is so much fun going in and around. But the rules are kind of lacking, I think. The rules are not lacking with Jungle Lord. Okay, so can you give us kind of an overview? I know you're not the rules guy, but can you give us like a little overview? Well, if you open up that flyer, page three again, it tells you all you need to know.
    70:42
    That's exciting. Five bank, double trouble. Ooh. Double scoring. Can you say multipliers? You know, everyone wants to know the play field multiplier. There it is. Multi-ball, trademarked, of course, by Williams. First single ball double scoring. Wow. A bonus multiplier that goes up to 10x. A drain shield. Basically a ball saver. That's the first drain shield, by the way. Well, yes, the first drain shield. I love what they, because we made up the term. Magna save returns, the more correct implementation where we just pulse, and you have to earn your pulses. It's pretty cool. I have played Jungle Lord. I kind of like Jungle Lord. A friend of mine was asking me, like, hey, you know, there's a Jungle Lord for sale. What do you think? And I'm like, ah, it's all right, I guess. If you can get by the fact that it's like Blue Lagoon and the tigers look like they're melted. But you spoke a couple of moments ago about the sort of the Barry Ousler drop targets with flippers at the bottom. And this, I think, perfects it when it comes to where it should be and how it should be. It shouldn't be kind of up in the corner of the playfield. It should be like an upper playfield. The whole upper playfield is awesome. It has a little bagatelle thing on the side with a buzzer. The game has a buzzer. So if you go through the lane you don't want to, it buzzers at you. I love it. Thank you, Phil.
    72:10
    Brutal. It's nothing like harassing you. I love it. The more harassment, the better. We need more harassing games.
    72:19
    It's the art on the play field is much better than the art on the back glass, in my opinion. It's much more like they're fighting off snakes at the bottom, and there's this cool kind of sword, kind of Black Knight-esque sword in the middle. super neat that way it seems like quite the effort to work on one of these bi-level games right if you get if you got to get up under there is it a lot of work it seems difficult uh it'd be more difficult than a valley because williams actually would cut them from two different sheets of plywood as opposed to valley you just used what basically took a regular play field and just would chop it and then put the one part on top and the other part in the bottom like you can go under the upper play field on these. So you have to, I think my original Black Knight has some kind of connector, though. So you can, it's still a pain to loosen everything and get the upper play field up. But you can remove it. Yeah, so the bagatelle on the left side is kind of an interesting feature. It's basically you lock a ball in the kicker on the right side, right? And then it, sort of the idea is the ball is shrunk. It does a cool light show and it fires the little ball, it's a small ball, and then a Bagatelle, and you're trying to get all four lanes. You go through a lane you already went through, you get the buzzer sound. Now, it's got a lot of plastic on here. There is a lot of plastics on this entire machine, which is really impressive, because nowadays it's like they try to minimize the amount of plastic. All these games. Black Knight has a ton of plastics on it, because you've got the two play fields, so it's like you can put more plastics. It's a cool little game. Would you buy one? What would you pay for one of these? You say it's the best buy-level game. Oh, I don't know. $1,500. Okay. Maybe I'd go up to $2,000. It was really nice. It was a nice one? Okay. Really nice one. I mean, it's, and they made a ton of them, and they're usually not that expensive. Of course, I shouldn't say that, because now they will be, but they're usually reasonably priced. I know. And that's mostly reasonably priced because of the fact that it looks like it's creepy Tarzan. Like, my wife, when she first played this, she saw this, and she was like, oh, that's a really fun game. She's like, but I'd have to, like, knit little sweaters and stick it on the back last to cover up the nipples. And it's the one with the two different color cabinet also. Okay, yeah, because usually they were all black, right? And they just sort of stencil something on them. Well, no, they were, well, they were originally whatever color they were. This actually has two different versions. There's an earlier version and a later version. I'm trying to remember which one. It was red and blue. I don't remember which one was the, whatever the one you see the most of, that's the one that was the second one. Yeah, I think it's the blue one. The one that I've seen the most is the blue one. So that brings us to sort of the next bi-level game, and that was Pharaoh. By Tony Kramer. By Tony Kramer again. This is May of 1981. It is an Egyptian theme. Sells 2,500 units. It's the Williams System 7. This does the art by Seamus McLaughlin and sound by Tony Kolarik. Kotlerik? Kotlerik. Oh, my God. We're sorry. Software by Chris Omarzu. Who the heck are these people? Like, this seems like a fill-the-line game if I've ever seen one, right? It was like an eclectic random group of people, and ones we don't normally see. It has the largest upper playfield of the William's bi-levels. I don't really like the Bagatelle thing in Jungle Lord. Like, the rules might be better or whatever, but I think this is kind of the most fun one. because it's got these, like, looping capture areas, which are really cool. That's why I love pinball, because of the opinions. You see, to me, this is the least fun. Really? Oh, yeah. Well, it's got three drop targets. It's got kind of a looping capture. It's got two up kicker, two... Crank up the sound on this one and tell me you're not going to want to kill someone soon. Okay, so that's... Rah! Rah! And it's background noise. I went to a pinball show once. Actually, no, it was multiple times. Pacific Pinball Expo would always have a pharaoh there, and they would crank it up for some reason, and that's all you would hear in the one section of the floor. What's the other thing it says? Cobras. Yeah, that's it. Cobras. Yeah, that's it. You hear that on stream from time to time, and you're like, what is going on over there? Okay, well, I think it has some pretty cool art. It's got, like, the pharaoh in the lower play field. It's kind of neat. The back glass is really cool. So it's got like the Pharaoh, he's riding the horse, and he's got like a lady next to him. The horse... They have weird hair. They have like afros or something. It's weird. The horses are very oddly designed. It's very strange looking hair.
    77:11
    If you look carefully, you could probably see something in there like lady duff. But I mean, it's top. and then here's like the bottom. Oh, yeah, okay. Ah, yes. Wow, you know, I never saw that all these years. It's pretty wild little backlash. And it's really good with the theme. I mean, it has, the music is, you know, da-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na, like you would expect it to be. Yep. Everything matches the theme. Would you say it's a world under glass? No, I wouldn't, but you can say that. Okay. Most overused terms. Cliche.
    77:52
    Mm-hmm. Yeah, so, I mean, it's kind of a cool game. It's cool. It's kind of cool. But you see, when we get to the next, you have Black Knight, three-ball, multi-ball, speech. Then you have Jungle Lord. Jungle Lord, you have multi-ball, you have speech, you have Bagatelle, you have all this stuff going on. Pharaoh, you got the multi-ball and speech. But when we get to the next one, no more speech. Too expensive. Then we get into Barry. I think Barry's best layout. That's a controversial comment. Solar fire. And it's wrong, but yes. Solar fire. It's a sci-fi theme. June of 81. System 7 Williams. It sells 782 units. Oof. Hard one to come by. It is a bi-level standard body. The Mitchells on art again. They're just machines. Sound and Software by Ed Sochi. Of course, video is really, really taking off at the moment. When we're talking June of 81, like really taking off. Defender is out now. It is selling like gangbusters. We got Defender. We got Pac-Man is out. Donkey Kong is out. Selling 4,000 units, I would say, between 1981 and 1984 was pretty, pretty hard stuff to do. and you can see here that this just this fell right off like right off you go from 13 000 units like 12 months before to like less than a thousand which is pretty crazy and i think solar fire is super cool personally i i think this is a great game i've never played one it could probably be the worst game ever but when i look at this i'm like man this is this looks cool it looks like They've refined by level. Why should I buy this? What does the flyer say? Do I have profits out of this world? Oh, here you go. Here you go. Sizzling play. Hot profits. Suddenly, a terrifying explosion rips through the sun and raging fires burn out of control. The red-hot solar fire spawned a demonic breed of alien, a breed never before known to man. Your mission, to fight off the alien menace and extinguish the fires that feed their powers. Wow. I didn't know that was the whole. I had no idea that was the. I am hook, line, and sinker. Wow, I've totally changed my mind now. Yeah, you have the flash bank, the black hole, the alien eject, the solar target, the solar gun.
    80:27
    The solar gun. The solar gun is funny. The solar gun is actually a doodle, which Williams had, I don't think they patented it, but they were known for their, they've had several doodle bug games where they had a doodle bug, love bug, dipsy doodle, and they used what they call the doodle, which is just a ball with a magnet, and the magnet would pulse, and the ball would go up and down in a little space. A lot of people will know that from Fireball 2. Fireball 2 has it, which that's why I don't think Williams patented it, because it's in a ballet game. But this, I think, was the last time that Williams used it. Now, this is, again, a bi-level game. On the top, it has that drop targets in front of the flippers. I think the reason that this game draws me in is the theme is pretty cool, but I think it's the fact that there's only two exits to the upper play field. So I feel like I'll spend more time up there and get my money's worth in comparison to something like Black Knight, where you're kind of on the edge all the time. Now, if you look at the upper playfield in Solar Fire and say, you know, I think I've seen that before. You did. It's Grand Lizard.
    81:39
    It's almost the exact same upper part of the playfield in Grand Lizard is literally a copy of this. It was too good not to use it. It was too good not to use it again. I mean, it only sold like, it sold less than a thousand units. Nobody saw it anyway, right? It's the same loop, targets, same spot. And there's so many drop targets. There's three offsets on the bottom and three on the left side. Then up at the top of the upper play field, there's like another three targets on the left, and there's four in the front. Drop targets as far as the eye can see. It's got cool sound. No speech, though. We had to cut that so it doesn't talk.
    82:17
    You can't hear the aliens that you're battling. Yes, you just have to imagine them. Now, when you look at the back glass, something really strikes me there. It's red? Well, it's red, but when you look at those machines, when you look at the ships, it's totally a ripoff of Battlestar Galactica and the Cylons. They're Cylon ships from the original Battlestar Galactica back in the 70s. Totally a ripoff of that. The other interesting thing is it actually has a flasher. It actually might have more than one behind the back glass. One of the first games I can remember that actually had that. So when there's an explosion, you get a flasher going off in the back box. It looks cool. This is what the power of theme does to me. And this is why Stern is so successful. If you put a Jungle Lord and a Solar Fire next to each other, I am all in on Solar Fire. I would be like, man, this is right up my... It could be a crappy game. So if we swap them, so Solar Fire became Jungle Lord. So now the Bagatelle is like the solar gun. That is in my living room. Oh, okay. Wow. super important with the thing I'm telling you it's exactly how it goes and I'm sure it's probably still like this era of pinball is very different than today's era of pinball like even sort of crappy pinball back then is still pretty fun all of the games of the era are mostly like do the thing and if you ever play this in a tournament just go to the top and shoot those drop targets over and over and over so we're moving this is where pinball is dying now oh it's hurting We're getting pounded by the video games. Yeah, this is Barracora. We're talking September of 81. We're moving into the fall here. It's a sci-fi theme. It's a Williams System 7. Sells 2,350 units. We're back to the standard bodies. The design here, Roger Sharp, Steve Epstein, and Barry Osler. Art by Doug Watson. Sound and software by Ed Sochi. We spoke about a fellow named H.R. Geiger back when we spoke about space invaders from Bali in our Class of 81 podcast. He was a Swiss artist, very popular in the mid-70s, and he was really the inspiration for the design style of the movie Alien. The back glass of this game is clearly his painting called Lee 1. If you look at that painting, it is the Barakora back glass. So that's where that inspiration comes from. I could say inspiration. I could say completely ripped off. Ah, tomato, tomato. Well, this Doug Watson, the artist, remember he's the one who did Quicksilver, which is almost a direct copy of a heavy metal magazine cover. pretty popular in the pinball world to sort of take a look at what's cool and what's different and what's out there. And this is a prime example of that. And that's H.R. Geiger was quite the nut if you look at him. He's worth a googling, folks. He's totally worth a googling. Don't do it late at night when you had you know an antipesto because you probably have weird nightmares There a couple of really interesting bits and pieces here about Barracora So I mean of course Doug drew the predatory fish morphing model with sort of like landscape of teeth, and he called this female character Barracuda. And he presented this drawing to Mike Strahl, who was, of course, the president of Williams, who liked the art but felt that Barracuda kind of had a negative connotation. Why? Is it because of the heart song? I guess. You mean the best song ever written? Whoa. Okay. Take that, Imagine by John Lennon. Okay. Mike, he and a few other people sort of kind of started kicking around alternate names during a meeting. That's when Doug Watson suggested Barracora as the woman's name, and Mike thought that that was great. He loved it. So Doug decided to then discreetly put a bunch of naked barracoras on the playfield. So if you look at the playfield in a couple of different spots, that's when now the character, of course, is less sort of human and more alien. So he pushed that bar and made sort of a naked alien fish lady. Remember, if it's not skin, it's fine. Exactly. I think we went through that in the Stern episode with Viper. You can do the nudity as long as it's metal. Exactly. So there's a couple of different names in here. A couple of names I don't think anybody has ever heard in the pinball hobby. I don't think anybody who's ever listened to this pinball podcast today has ever heard of a man named Roger Sharp. So who is Roger Sharp for those who have been under a rock since the 1970s? He's the man who saved pinball. Yeah, thank you for that. He's a magazine writer for GQ. He also wrote a book about pinball called, I believe, Pinball. He's got probably the greatest mustache in pinball. Could we all agree on that? It's up there, yeah. I'd say so. I mean, you got David Vicks. He's probably got the second best mustache in pinball. And Roger was basically the main licensing guy for Williams, I think, starting in around the mid-'80s through the 90s. Yeah, when licensing started to become the thing. And he's still doing licensing for pinballs to this day. Roger's a pretty great guy. He was recently on the last couple of episodes of the Super Awesome Pinball Show with Christopher Fanchi and Christian Line, who, of course, were nominated for a Pinball Industry Award this year. Part of that is because of some of their really great interviews. You can catch that on episode 23 and episode 25. Super great conversationalist. Now, there's also another name here. This is one that people may not know quite as well as Roger Sharp, and that's Steve Epstein. And who is he? Well, if you're in the Northeast, you know who Steve Epstein is. And he ran the Broadway Arcade in New York City for years and years and years. He's a co-founder of Papa, and he recently passed away, unfortunately, during this whole COVID thing. If you are a survivor of cancer or somebody who has had cancer that has affected your life, swing on over to Silver Ball Swag, and you can get a Flippin' Off Cancer shirt, which goes towards cancer research. And that, of course, how Steve had passed away very quickly. Originally, and this is according to Roger Sharp from an episode of Pinball Profile, hosted by Jeff Teolis. That is in the episode link is in our show notes. Originally, this game was designed by Roger Sharp, Steve Epstein, and it was Las Vegas. It had a roulette wheel under the playfield, and Roger and Steve worked on the ideas and the rules, and then they passed it off to Williams. Now, there's a great little write-up about Barracora in the Pinball Compendium book, which you can find on Amazon, where Roger, as he normally does, writes a very long blurb when asked a very simple question. God bless him. And he basically talks about how at this time, Williams was sort of looking for people to kind of do some designs, and they had approached Roger a few times because he was very much part of the pinball, the founder of the pinball media, if you will. And, of course, he approached Steve, and they said, okay, well, let's kind of have some fun and make a design. And Roger would pop up quite a few times for companies like Gameplan even doing designs. Isn't that right? That's correct. The layout wasn't as good as Roger and Steve kind of wanted. They needed some tweaks. So it was Barry who helped them out on that design. A few months later, they would return to Williams and see their basic playfield layout, but a completely different game. It was no longer Las Vegas. It had become Barracora. Barry would say that the layout wasn't really that good. According to Barry, there were a lot of changes from the early design that Roger and Steve put together. But they're still giving design credit because a lot of the rules and a lot of it is still their machine. Now it is a favorite, especially in the tournament scene. Everyone loves them, Barracora. Now why is it a tournament scene favorite? Well, the rules. It has like the one feature that Roger really wanted to put in there that is in there is the double lanes. Like it has a set of lanes on top, and it has the inserts above them. but then it has another set of inserts, and you can move the lights. One row is moved by the right flipper, the other row is moved by the left flipper. Oh, okay. Which I really can't think of any other games that do that. So one increases one thing, and the other increases another thing. It's also got a really cool orbit that goes up where you spell Barakora. And it has their control drop targets, too, so like the memory drop targets. Yeah, very Stern-esque influence there. Which is always cool. It's got a really cool art package. It's got a wonderful Orbit spinner. Yeah. Man, you love Orbit spinners. It's great. So good. It's a very kind of cool theme and game. It's unique. I've never played one. I have a friend of mine. He loves this game. Like, he just, if he could find one of these, it is in his collection, and it's never going away, which I find quite interesting.
    91:48
    You can tell that pinball is hurting. So the lane change thing I was talking about, they actually trademarked it. It's called multi-lane change. Wow. I wonder if that's still copyrighted. If you try to use that, you get sued. Williams, they were all about their trademarks. They were like the deep root of their time. If they came up with a term, they trademarked that so fast. Yeah, multiball forever. That's why none of the other companies had multiball. You just got multiple balls, but it wasn't called multiball. We're seeing a significant change in the language of their marketing. This one is sad in the way that it is marketed. It's affordable, reliable, and fully loaded. The 1982 Williams. So it doesn't say, like, there's no, like, go fishing for profits because it's a fish or anything. It's, yeah. It's like, hey, this won't break, and it's cheap, and it's got lots of stuff in it. Single, simple, single-level playfield design. Reliable. It's a bit of a bummer, but that is the world in which we're living. Pinball is dying. No speech. Too expensive. All right, should we get into this? This is a pretty sad time here in 1982. Pinball is struggling. Everybody is, all the money is going into video. All these new cool themes like your Robotrons and, you know, Stargate. And Atari is dominating with really fun things like Missile Command. and they're so much cheaper to operate. You just plug them in and they go. That's basically it. That's when Steve Ritchie's Hyperball kind of comes out. It's like a video game pinball machine. So immediately all of the other manufacturers just freak out. And, of course, like Widebodies, Buy Levels, and now shooty pinball-y games, every manufacturer's got to do one. Yeah, they had the, Bally had the Pac-Man game that was part pinball, part video. Even Gottlieb had Caveman. Oh, I played that. That is the worst thing I've, oh my God, that is so bad. Don't even remind me. Wow. Violent reaction there. Oh my God, it's so bad. If you see that machine, even if it's in like a bar, just like burn it and run. Wow. Trust me. The opinions expressed by David Dennis are not necessarily those. So that's when Spellbinder came out. Now, this was never released. This is a machine that Barry worked on, and it was basically Barry's version of Hyperball. So I'll mention it. I don't have anything on it, but it was in there. Then there's Cosmic Gunfight. This is now we're into the summer of 1982. It's a sci-fi theme. It's a System 7. It sells 1,000 units. Doug Watson and Larry Day, who I think is a fantastic pinball artist, sound and software by a new fellow, Bill Futsenruder. It's new to Williams, but not new, because we talked about him on the Stern episode. He was at Stern originally. Cosmic Gunfight, the 25-cent solution. Oh, come on, there's got to be better flyer material than that. Cosmic Gunfight has everything you want in a pinball and less. I assume they're talking about the price. I guess so. Hold on here. So it's got on the flyer, it goes the everything. So Cosmic Gunfight is not only has all the features proven to be the strongest with multi-lane change, multi-ball, bonus multiplier, extra ball. It also introduces a brand new attraction, cosmic ball, making all the ABC lights towards cosmic ball for 30 to 99 seconds of unlimited balls after the last regular ball. Time is added by completing the three bank or by extending multi-ball play. And during Cosmic Ball, making each three bank in sequence scores a special. And then it goes dot, dot, dot, and less. Cosmic Gunfight is the 25 cent solution for the pinball playing pures. And for those locations that require a variety of games, less complicated, easier to understand. Its simplicity makes it a surefire winner. Affordable to buy and to play, Cosmic Gunfight is priced for profit. They are panicking. Yeah, they used the multi-lane change again, but they did it different than in Barracora. They actually have two sets of lanes on the right and left, and you control the lanes on the right with the right flipper and the left with the left flipper, which is cool. It's kind of neat. It's got two sets of lanes. It's got a grid. It's got the upper lanes on the left side, and it's got upper lanes on the right side, but they don't sort of connect. Oh, and a two-ball multi-ball. It's got a cool little art package. It's like spacemen riding horses. Yeah, cowboys in space riding mechanical space horses. Now, originally this was called Dragonfly, which was a spacey dragonfly man theme. The art didn't test well, and if you look at it, yeah, yeah, no.
    96:49
    It's a whole thing. You can see that on IPDB. It's like a man who's also a dragonfly for arms, like those see-through insect arms. He's purple. He's got like a huge bush. No comment. So you can see why they changed it. And I think they changed it. I think the theme they went with is actually very cool. Oh, I love it. It's got four pop bumpers, which is kind of neat. The only issue is in tournament play, I hate to keep saying that, it's right orbit. That's all. You don't shoot anything else. You just shoot the right orbit. Yeah. It suffers from a lot of the games at this time where it's like, not only does it do the thing, it's like there's literally only one thing. I'm not a tournament player, but I play in small tournaments locally, and that's mostly because I want to meet people and I want to play pinball on machines that I don't normally get to play on and that usually goes with the tournament crowd. But I'll tell you, once you sort of learn some of the things about these games that you love, it completely ruins them. It can. Because you get on there and you're like, oh, I'm flipping the ball and I'm getting the extra ball and I'm doing this and you're like, oh, I can never really get anywhere with the bonus multiplier. And then somebody goes, oh yeah, just shoot the right orbit all day and you'll get like five billion. And you're like, oh man. You've ruined it for me. Come on, Ron. But I love the art in this game. Cowboys in space. Yeah, if you can get, like, a back glass and just put it on your wall, you know, that's where it's at. Barry says the art department submitted the cosmic gunfight artwork. I had to make a few revisions to the title and to the theme with the play field. In the end, it worked out pretty well. I guess we were the first cowboys and aliens. So then they moved on October of 82. So even now you can see that there's a huge space in between their releases, too, right? Like they're not releasing on a monthly or bimonthly schedule. There's more space in here. They went with a game called Warlock. Love Warlock. The reason I bring this one up, again, sci-fi theme. I'm all in, right?
    98:43
    369 units. It's by Mike Cuban, Seamus McLaughlin on art, sound and software by Cary Kolker. It has some of the worst art I have ever seen, which is why I wanted to make sure I included it, as well as this machine is pretty much a direct ripoff of Blackout. Oh, it's a direct copy of Blackout, yep. Slight modifications, but it's Blackout with a better rule set. You can't rip off Claude Fernandez.
    99:11
    That's Claude Fernandez's gimmick is ripping people off. You can't rip him off. The basic rules are you have the three spinners, and then you have three drop target banks. Each is associated with the spinner. That's buy it. So if you hit the bank down, it increases the value of that spinner. And the whole game is just hitting spinners. It's awesome. It's got the cool William sound and everything else. I am a fan. So, Mike, Seamus McLaughlin would say, in the back glass, there are two faces that are, it's really kind of creepy, down on the bottom right in the clouds. Those faces are the face of himself and the designer, Mike Cuban. Mike Cubbin. Cuban. Mike Cuban. So this is, again, that's similar rules to Meteor, right, where you're kind of building, you're hitting drop targets and you're building up those spinners. So you can certainly see the influence that Mike would bring from Stern into Williams. Speaking of Stern, where was Stern in 1982? Stern Electronics. Not in a good place. Basically dead, right? Yeah, it was probably Orbiter One action going on, and yeah. So that's why we're seeing this sort of the Stern designers, you know, jumping ship. That's why Mike is here. Video is just on a tear. So what do you got to do? You got to do video game tie-ins, right? Of course you do. You got to cash in on the branding. and Defender just killed it for Williams. So in December of 1982, the sci-fi theme Williams System 7 came out, selling 369 units designed by Joe Cannon Cow, the Mitchells on art, and Cary Culker on sound and software. And of course, it's not a good game. No, I disagree. Disagree completely. If you can find one that actually works, that's the one problem. That's the first problem. It took me playing several of them before I found one. It was a pintastic that actually everything worked on it. It has all the defender sounds in it, so it just sounds great immediately. So you got that taken care of. It has a cool lock shot, which you can only hit from the upper flipper. It has, I think, I don't know, at least five single drop targets that pop up all around the play field. Think like Cactus Canyon. And it's just super cool. And it's, like, complicated. There's a smart bomb, I think, on it. I think it has an extra button on the side, and you hit, like, just like on the game. You hit, you know, smart bomb. Joe Kamenkow would say that the smart bomb in Jurassic Park, the down to east, was directly inspired by the smart bomb from Defender. The other thing about this game, I know it's got some extra complexity in it, because I remember when they were coming out with new boards to replace, like, your old Williams boards, like aftermarket stuff. you'd always had Hyper Ball and Defender listed as, like, special configuration. So there's special stuff going on with that game. Yeah, so what has Landers Pod, Smart Bombs, Mutants, Swarmers, and player after player after player lining up to take the challenge? Defender, of course. So what's interesting about Defender is that it has this very familiar back box that everybody had back then. Yeah, it's the Hyperball back box. Oh, the Hyperball back box. They had a ton of those. So because of the Hyperball game, which was Steve Ritchie's gun shooting game, had this weird thing. They thought they were going to sell 40,000 of these units. They had, like, so many extras. So because you've got all of these things, you've got to put them in a pin, right? It's almost like a DMD back box, but the DMD is like this weird cover where a DMD would be. It's very oddly shaped. Yeah, but it has like a panel, like a speaker panel. There was a game called Rat Race, which was a big novelty craze at the time that Barry Oster worked on. It was a cornic concept. There was the head-to-head Joust game that sold 400 units in April. Great game. That's another great game. If you can find one working.
    103:25
    Again, I've seen them at shows, and they usually will not last until the end of the show before they break. But I'd say out of all of the head-to-head, because there's been a lot of head-to-head pinball concepts through the years, that the Joust one was the best. Right. Yep, and it has a completely different rule set for single-ball play, for single-player play. It's another cool thing it does. But if you want to talk cost-cutting, let's get to Time Fantasy. There was the three-pack, right? So the three pack of games that were marketed together were Warlock, Defender, and Time Fantasy. And Time Fantasy was good old-fashioned pinball at a good old-fashioned price, which just sounds horrible. Surrealistic fantasy theme in a kaleidoscope of colors. It looks like someone was stoned when they made it. It's like a little frog man. It's a snail. Get it right. It's a snail. We call it snail. But the snail's got legs and arms. Yep. It's a snail, though. Simplicity of play attracts players of all skill levels. Simplicity of play field assures reliable operation. Yeah. That's basically saying there is nothing in this game. There is nothing in that game. If you want a laugh, I won't bore you with it here, but download the manual for this and look at the solenoid table where it has the, I don't know, 22 possible solenoids you could have on their system. And the total amount of solenoids on this game, you have three pop bumpers. I'm not going to include the flippers because they're always there. Three pop bumpers, the two slings, and the out-of-hole kicker. That's it. Oh, my God. That's it. There's nothing else in here. This is like a System 1 Gottlieb, it's no bad. But it has a quirky little fun to it because it has something that I don't think any other game had. The whole object, when you play this, well, at least in a tournament, so there's a little tunnel. If you remember Phoenix, the little house or tunnel there, it's on the left, and it has a strobing, it has four inserts that say time, T-I-M-E, and it strobes, and you want to hit the target when one of them is lit, and you get it. And if you can spell time, it will start a, I think it's like a 30-second ball saver. Okay. And the whole game is you want to do that, start it, and then drain. And then plunge up to the top lanes. There's five lanes, and you want to get those lanes. And they're controllable. So you want to complete the lanes as many times as you can during the 30 seconds and continually drain over and over and over. And that's the game. At least when you play in the tournament, that's the game. And we affectionately call it snail time. That's when you get the ball saver. It's called snail time. It's got all these, like, mushrooms. Yep. And, like, rainbows. Yeah. It is as cost-cut as you could possibly be. Like, it is something else. Yeah. The snail dude is on the plastic, and he's, like, standing with these crazy eyes. Yeah, because he's stoned. Oh, man. It even says psychedelic right in the thing, man. No wonder parents thought that, like, these were the corruptors of youth. But this game was very popular among parents. That's the funny thing. Because it's like a cartoon or something? No, because it was in your notes and I read that part.
    106:51
    Great quote by Ed Sochi, the programmer. Testing was interesting and showed us something we didn't expect. The game was played by an older audience. We were told their parents were playing the game while their children were playing all the ticket vending machines. Wow, even then. It tested well in the family centers, but it didn't do so well in locations for hardcore gamers. I do remember that there was an earnings report showing the game made over $500 for a week on one location. However, it just wasn't mainstream and didn't perform well in all locations. So then there was a bunch of canceled projects between 83 and 84. Pinball's dead. Williams is dead. You have Guardian, Starfighter, Starlight, which they actually made $100 of. And, of course, because I'm me, I have played it. It's okay.
    107:34
    It also forced me to make a correction. Oh, my. I have to make a correction. I ask this question all the time. It's one of the trivia questions that I always ask, too. Name the three Williams System 9 games, which that's just the board set it used. System 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. We've been going over. We're on System 7 right now. And the answer is always Space Shuttle, Sorcerer, and Comet. However, Starlight, even though they only made 100 of them, there are System 9 Starlights. huh so i guess i have to amend that question because it was a production game and they did make them it wasn't like they were only prototypes they did make some that were system nine it's like a wizard theme thing i remember it has a ton of rollovers in the middle of the playfield if i remember it has the laser balls rollovers in the same spot yeah they're the bowling pins but it has an orbit spinner so you would like yes it's all i need and it's really it's super they started going the stern route too where the playfield i mean the cabinet doesn't even have game related artwork it literally just has the williams w on it that's when you know it starts to get bad when we're not even going to bother with custom yeah we're using all those leftover cabinets now we're not even putting a decal or a piece of metal on the on the bottom it's just a blank by this time 1984 the video game market is collapsing everything everything is collapsing this could be the end whatever will happen pinball's dead Williams is dead and every company was struggling to survive in the industry sales fell off the cliff for years after a massive expansion as we mentioned before you're selling things like Black Knight with 13,000 units and now you're cancelling projects because you can't even sell 1,000 units pinball is laying off everyone and it's becoming all too common that the pinball industry just starts spiraling pinball machines began having less and less innovation, as well as less and less of the innovations of past years. Investment in people and technologies all but stopped in pinball. Ron, can anything save pinball? Well, Barry Adelsler will have something to say about that. He's going to make a game that's going to keep the lights on, that's going to set the stage for the next resurgence of pinball, starting in the mid-'80s. but that story is for another time. That's right. That's the end of our podcast of Pinball is Dying Part 1, Williams in the early 80s. There's a lot of cool games in there, even those stripped-down ones. A lot of them are still fun to play. I think they were doing better than a lot of manufacturers as far as some of the stuff they were doing. Let's put it that way. Diamonds in the rough there, but even the rough itself, It's very shiny and pretty. Barracora. I mean, there's some good games in there. But Pinball's dead. No, it will never be this game. It will.
    110:37
    Stewie. Stewie, can you come over here? Hey, what? Okay. Oh, all right. Oh, I've got to read this again. Hey, Joey, if you could send your comments, questions, corrections, and concerns to silverballprodigals at gmail.com. We look forward to all your messages, and we read every one. Please subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or your favorite podcatcher. Turn on automatic downloads so you don't miss a single episode. Remember to leave a five-star review wherever you find us on this week in pinball promoted day-to-day. That way more people can find us. Do you want to support the podcast and need a new t-shirt? Of course you do. Click on over to silverballswag.com and pick up a Silver Balls relative t-shirt to help us keep the lights on. Back to you, Ron. Thanks, Derek.
    111:24
    Thank you. Okay, any housekeeping or anything you want to bring up? Want me to bring up in the middle? No housekeeping or housekeeping either.
    112:24
    It just never gets f***ing funny. No, no. It never gets old at all. Oh, funny. You said it. Yeah. William Tomaszowski only lasted three titles. This is Edward.
    112:41
    Oh. It'll just make more blips and bloops. Blips and bloops. Just simpler sounds. Man, that didn't come off. Let me try again. Well, Tony Kramer was nicknamed Colonel Nutsy after the wristwatch.
    113:00
    Tony Kramer was nicknamed Colonel Nutsy after his rich watch. Rich watch? Can you read this? The red hot solar fires span a demonic bread of alien bread. No, breed, dumbass.
    113:18
    I want to think of something good to say here. First up, we're not scripted at all. Oh, okay, I got it. Okay.
    113:28
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