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The Super Awesome Pinball Show - S01 E19

The Super Awesome Pinball Show·podcast_episode·2h 31m·analyzed·Nov 22, 2020
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TL;DR

Matt Reisterer interview: sculptor/mod maker on design process, commercial work, studio growth.

Summary

Christopher Franchi and Dr. Pin interview Matt Reisterer of Back Alley Creations, a sculptor and pinball mod/parts manufacturer who has worked on designs for Jersey Jack, Spooky, American Pinball, Chicago Gaming, Highway, and others. Matt discusses his 13-year journey from hobbyist modder to full-time commercial designer, his process for creating playfield sculptures and toppers, his recent studio expansion, and his experience working with Slash on the Guns N' Roses game. The episode includes an opening correction about the Replay Effects Foundation closure.

Key Claims

  • Back Alley Creations has been operating since 2007 (13 years as of episode recording)

    high confidence · Matt states directly: 'We've been around since, let's see, 2007, so it's been 13 years now.'

  • Matt's house/studio was built in 2012 with shop comprising 52.11% of the structure

    high confidence · Matt: 'it's 2012 so eight years and we moved here because it was either get a shop or build a house... And eight years ago, we built our house and the shop occupied 52.11% of the house. And I know that number exactly because for my tax purposes.'

  • Back Alley Creations is adding 700 square feet of studio space with three separate rooms (casting, machine shop, paint room)

    high confidence · Matt: 'We added on 700 square feet, so it's three separate rooms. It'll be a casting room, a sanding, drilling, lathe, you know, machine shop area, and then the paint room'

  • Matt started pinball work around 13-14 years ago after Pirates of the Caribbean was released by Stern

    high confidence · Matt: 'I really got into it probably about 13, 14 years ago, and it was probably right around the time when Pirates of the Caribbean came out from a start.'

  • Matt has worked on commercial pinball games for Jersey Jack, Spooky, American Pinball, Chicago Gaming, Highway, and others

    high confidence · Matt lists: 'We've done Jersey. We've done Wizard Boss, Hobbit. We did a little work on the building on Dialed In. We did Pirates and Guns N' Roses. Spooky, what did we do? We did Rob Zombie, Dominoes, Jetsons, Alice Cooper, and Rick and Morty. American, we did Houdini and Oktoberfest. Then we did Highway with Aliens. And then with Chicago Gaming, we did work on Monster Bash and Medieval.'

  • Matt transitioned from independent modder to commercial designer around 2011-2012 when Jack Guarneri started Jersey Jack Pinball

    high confidence · Matt: 'I was able to make that transition from just being a modder to actually designing and making things for a game when Jack started Jersey Jack. So that would have been, I want to say it was like May of 2011, 2012, something like that... It's somewhere right around there is when we started designing Woz.'

Notable Quotes

  • “I owe Jack a big thank you... for getting me out and giving me that chance to show everybody what me and my team can do. You know, designing and making to not just be a mod maker, but to actually design the physical parts that are going in the game. Getting to see your name on a play field is something I never thought I'd get to see.”

    Matt Reisterer @ mid-episode — Reflects Matt's gratitude for his career transition from independent modder to commercial designer with Jersey Jack

  • “My signature means nothing to me. My word means more. So if I tell you I'm not going to do it, I'm not going to do it. I feel lucky still to work with these companies. I still want to have a future with these companies. And these guys I'm working with are my friends.”

    Matt Reisterer @ mid-episode — Describes Matt's philosophy on verbal contracts and gentleman's agreements with manufacturers

  • “When people say it can't be done, I like saying yes. I'm going to find a way. I never, ever like saying no.”

    Matt Reisterer @ mid-episode — Reflects Matt's professional attitude toward challenging deadlines and requests

  • “I really did even though it's one more of the recent ones um because i like doing skeletons i like doing an axle it's tiny I wish to God we could build bigger freaking things instead of here, Matt. I want you to sculpt this, and it's got to be three inches tall and have all this detail, but micro.”

    Matt Reisterer @ mid-episode — Expresses frustration with miniaturization requirements in commercial pinball design

  • “I gave me a whole new respect for the designers themselves... you start seeing all the reasons why. And it can be from a production standpoint, a longevity, it's on location. It can be somebody's personal preference. There's lots of different reasons.”

    Matt Reisterer @ mid-episode — Describes how working as commercial designer changed perspective on pinball game design constraints

  • “Slash knows him because Sweetwater, they play out there that you, you know, stuff with the guitars... He made the other guitar out to him and not to Aaron. It's the wrong name, you know. To not Aaron... So a little rubbing alcohol, remove that, and here you go, Aaron.”

Entities

Matt ReistererpersonBack Alley CreationscompanyChristopher FranchipersonDr. Pin / Christian LynepersonJack GuarneripersonJersey Jack PinballcompanySpooky PinballcompanyAmerican Pinballcompany

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Back Alley Creations expanding manufacturing capacity with 700 sq ft studio addition to handle growing commercial design workload while maintaining mod production

    high · Matt: 'We added on 700 square feet, so it's three separate rooms... So it allows me to get a lot of the things that aren't safe for my little guy to be around out of the house.'

  • ?

    community_signal: Slash (Guns N' Roses guitarist) actively participated in pinball game development and playtesting, demonstrating band member investment in final product

    high · Matt: 'Splash did come into town... he loves pinball, man... He would fly right over to the game and he'd start playing... he was constantly on the phone with Eric, so he was really, really involved.'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: The Hobbit game faced extensive revision cycles with Warner Brothers requiring multiple sculptural changes, particularly to Smaug design (originally planned as full mountain sculpture)

    high · Matt: 'Hobbit was the hardest time... as Smog started out, it was originally going to be a head in a mountain... that one, I would say, had the most revs to it... like, good Lord, can we just be done, pick this and finish?'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Commercial pinball designers operate within significant production budgeting and technical constraints that impact visual design; changes Matt's perspective on designer criticism

    high · Matt: 'I gave me a whole new respect for the designers themselves... It can be from a production standpoint, a longevity, it's on location. It can be somebody's personal preference. There's lots of different reasons.'

  • ?

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.454

0:00
100% free pinball songs! Absolutely no begging for Patreon donations! Right here on TWPY, Old Swippy Radio!
0:08
Sometimes we're funny, sometimes we talk! The following is an ad-hack radio production! Hey guys, this is Christopher French, and I just wanted to drop in a quick note. On our special report about the Replay Effects Foundation closing, I incorrectly said that Pintastic was closing and not Pinburg. It was not bad information, I just misspoke and I wanted to correct that. We love Gabe and his family and we love the Pintastic Show. So, just so you know, Pintastic is safe and sound and I apologize for the error. Now on with the show.
0:44
It's the Super Awesome Pinball Show. That's right, it's time for your favorite pinball show. We're your favorite hosts, pinball artist Christopher Branchi and Dr. Pinnacle Christian Lyne. Thank you.
1:28
accessories, LEDs, and much more. That's Cointaker.com. Also by BackGalleyCreations.com, makers of the most amazing pinball mods, Black Pearl Pinballs, and the Easy Slide Playfield Sports System. That's BackGalleyCreations.com.
1:43
Hello, all you pinball rock stars out there, and welcome to episode number 19 of the Super Awesome Pinball Show. I'm Christopher Franchi, and on today's show, we have an interview with the author of Stern's 30th Anniversary Coffee Table Book, Paper Flock, also known as Joe Rubenstein and Damien Guest. They'll share why it took so long and what's with that crazy shipping and what it was like making the book. We've got all the latest news and rumors, plus our past few weeks in pinball, all this and more, along with my highly sexual co-host, Dr. Pin, whose secret identity, known only to his parakeet, Charlie, is Christian Lange. Are you ready for this show, buddy? Oh, my God. This is a really interesting intro, man. Yes, I am ready. And I am psyched to bring on our co-host for this show. He is a sculptor extraordinaire and a mod maker, Matt Reisterer of Back Alley Creations. Sweet. Well, hey, do you have a little something we can play for Matt's intro? Yeah, yeah, sure, man. How about Elton John? Yeah, dude. He mentions being a sculptor. I was a sculptor, but then again, no. No, no, no, no. I think this is more Matt.

Matt works on 3-5 commercial games at any given time, allocating 70-80% of effort to mass production/design and 20-30% to mods

high confidence · Matt: 'Usually about three to five is the time where it is... It's usually about 70% to 80% mass production and design and development of new games, and about 20%, 30% to mods.'

  • Slash was involved in Guns N' Roses game development and visited Jersey Jack during production

    high confidence · Matt: 'Splash did come into town... I was refitting the axle skeleton on the play field... that was the day Splash was there. So I got to meet him, hang out and talk with him, and he loves pinball, man.'

  • Hobbit was the most challenging commercial project due to extensive revisions from Warner Brothers and design changes (Smaug head originally planned as full mountain sculpture)

    high confidence · Matt: 'Hobbit was the hardest time... as Smog started out, it was originally going to be a head in a mountain. The whole back was going to be a giant mountain... And then that stone was going to turn, and there was Smog's head... that one, I would say, had the most revs to it.'

    • Matt Reisterer @ late-episode — Anecdote about Slash signing a guitar with the wrong name; demonstrates good humor and problem-solving

    Chicago Gaming Company
    company
    Highway Pinballcompany
    Slashperson
    Ericperson
    Aaron Mobuperson
    Guns N' Roses Pinballgame
    Pirates of the Caribbeangame
    The Hobbitgame
    Monster Bashgame
    Replay Effects Foundationorganization
    Pintastic Showevent/organization
    The Super Awesome Pinball Showmedia

    personnel_signal: Matt Reisterer's career trajectory from independent modder (2007-2011) to commercial designer at Jersey Jack (2011-2012 onwards), representing talent development within the industry

    high · Matt: 'I was able to make that transition from just being a modder to actually designing and making things for a game when Jack started Jersey Jack. So that would have been, I want to say it was like May of 2011, 2012, something like that.'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Back Alley Creations planning to increase mod product output using expanded facilities and additional crew

    high · Matt: 'I'm hoping this coming year with the bigger shop to finally start pulling out those bins of all those mods that we've had for years. You know, sculpts and prototypes and just like, hey, finish this.'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Miniaturization requirements for pinball sculptures creating design constraints; Matt must create detailed pieces at 3-inch scale or smaller

    high · Matt: 'I wish to God we could build bigger freaking things instead of here, Matt. I want you to sculpt this, and it's got to be three inches tall and have all this detail, but micro.'

    • 3:00
    Yeah! All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show, Matt Reisterer from Back Alley Creations. Hey, buddy, how you doing? Hello, man. So, Matt, tell us about yourself, man. Well, I mean, I played pinball, you know, when I was a kid, you know, here and there and stuff. but I really got into it probably about 13, 14 years ago, and it was probably right around the time when Pirates of the Caribbean came out from a start. That was my first, like, new in box before I restored some, but that one kind of kicked it off for me as, you know, the first one to, you know, own, because I was such a huge Pirates fan. You actually started off by restoring games? Yeah, yeah. We started off doing things early on. I never really thought I'd be doing pinball. I always wanted to do special effects, movie props, things of that nature. So that's kind of where I always wanted to be, and I still get to dabble in it here and there. Before that, just had somebody's had a pinball, and they're, hey, can you paint this? Can you restore that? Yeah, sure, you know, I'll do that. And one thing kind of led to another, and it just kept growing and growing from there, which now has turned into a full-time job, and it's what I'm blessed to say I do for a living. Would you consider Pirates of the Year one of your favorite games, or what are your favorite games now that you're established in pinball and all that? What are your go-tos? My favorite game that I always loved the most was for two reasons. One is the theme, and the other one is just because it has a lot visually in it, and that was the Williams-Indiana Jones. Nice. That Mark did. I really like that game. One, I'm a huge Indiana Jones fan. But two, when we look at that game, it just has a lot in it. And I'm a visual guy. So, you know, when I look at games, I like to see lots in them. Because then I'm like, oh, I want to see what that does and that, rather than, you know, oh, the speed or the flow or the open. I just like lots of things in them. Yeah, me too. So tell us about Back Alley Creations in general. What is the company all about and what do you guys do? Well, we've been around since, let's see, 2007, so it's been 13 years now. We do pretty much anything as far as design work, sculpting, casting, molding, painting, mass production, any of those things for, you know, any of the people in the pinball industry. We've been blessed to work with pretty much all of them and still have a good reputation with them and working and still have work from them, so that's good. And then, like we were talking before, you know, I still love doing special effects. So if I get a call from a friend of Fred, you know, hey, can you help with this and do that? We love doing that. I still like to paint. And pretty much as long as it's got the word custom in it, I'd be up for it. You know, if somebody had the money and said, hey, I want to toilet out a solid gold, yeah, sure, man. As long as, you know, check clears before I go do it. Right. You got it. Now, when you say we, are you saying the royal we, like Jeff Lebowski we? Hi, the royal we.
    6:10
    Or is it just you? Or do you have staff come in when you've got to knock a bunch of stuff out? Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I do have staff. Actually, my go-to is actually my mom. And mom cranks things out. She really does. She's amazing at painting. She can cash. She can pour. She can deflash. She's serving.
    6:31
    You know, so she does a lot. And then after that, I have a bunch of, you know, my friends who I've done these things with for years now who come over depending on what the project is and they'll help tackle part of it. So it becomes my crew. And that's why a lot of times I refer to it as we because, yeah, in the beginning it was just me and it got extremely stressful. And I ended up getting sick over it and everything else. So I've been learning to delegate the work, let other people help and step in and do it and everything. and it's been growing and it's definitely you know a lot of these projects a lot of these games that we do is team that's cool that you get to work with your mom she fit right in i'll give her the example lay the paints down and she's like okay got it nice yeah it is it's family francie had told me that you had recently uh started a massive studio addition to your house like it yeah and you mentioned that work was picking up so from where you started where are you now like how how big of business is back alley let's see we've been in this house it's 2012 so eight years and we moved here because it was either get a shop or build a house that was big enough to you know have a shop attached to it you know have a couple rooms in the house dedicated to it have the basement for display arcade pinballs you know fun stuff but then at the garage where we can actually put the paint booth in you know the standers everything like that drill press lathe and so when we were looking at a shop, it just made more sense to, you know, build a bigger house and just do it that way because the rents for a building is through the roof, you know, and it'd be smarter just to apply it towards the shop. So we did that. And eight years ago, we built our house and the shop occupied 52.11% of the house. And I know that number exactly because for my tax purposes. Government do take a bite, don't you?
    8:24
    Right. So it got to the point where we were starting to get full, so we decided to add on to the back of the garage. We added on 700 square feet, so it's three separate rooms. It'll be a casting room, a sanding, drilling, lathe, you know, machine shop area, and then the paint room will be the third room that we have in there. So it allows me to get a lot of the things that aren't safe for my little guy to be around out of the house and still have the house studio for some things, but move the things that I don't want near him out there. Yeah, totally get it, man. It's a whole different kind of childproofing when you're in the mod industry, I guess. Definitely, yeah. It's one thing to accidentally pull a cord or something like that. It's another to pick up a gallon of resin and be, yeah. Right. I got you. The sad thing is our son drowned in latex, but the good news is I got a really nice mold of him. We can make another. Jesus. Yeah. Bad. Bad joke. Franchi. Oh, my God. That's scary. Yeah. That's the level of morbid humor that Franchi thrives on. So, yeah.
    9:27
    I can laugh at it still. It's one of those, you know, like everybody says, once you have kids, that's different, especially with him being so little. And, oh, God, dude, he's just so blasted cute. It scares me to think that thought. Absolutely. Well, let's talk business. Let's talk your mods. You're basically your process and all that. Did people bring you in and ask you for your thoughts on what you might be able to do to enhance a game or do they say we need something for this and once you begin that process how does it start do you sit down with a pencil and paper and sketch things out do you just start throwing clay together what do you do so it kind of depends on which game um i've had it both ways that's what he said some games it have been hey you know we're looking for you know the sculpture you got the whole back area, this is what we want. Like Alice Cooper with Spooky. Chuck pretty much said, hey, I want a castle. And I said, well, you know, like Wizard of Oz. And he goes, no, I want castle. Think whole game and graveyard and cemetery and rocks and stones and do your thing. And I got a play field, came home with it and started doing my thing because it was early enough in the design process that a lot of the things I was doing wouldn't affect any, you know, mechanisms or anything like that. But then there's other instances where, yeah, you're given an area of, hey, here's the area we need you to sculpt some, you know, this piece for here. And here's your mech that has to go around it, you know, sculpt around this and you need it to do all these different things. So once we get it figured out what we're doing, I use a couple different things. Actually, I really use anything and everything. You know, it could be a piece of foam that we'll just cut out. It could be just, you know, foam core, just the board. And we'll cut it, you know, fit it to size and, you know, get the dimension. And then from there, once we have the look of it, everything clears, you know, the play field going up and down and glass and any max ball traps, anything like that, then I'll take it and start sculpting it. And for that, we'll use, you know, wood, we'll use clay, we'll use wax. Sometimes I'll just cast a big old block of resin and I'll start carving it, you know, out of that. Just kind of all depends what the piece is, what I'm feeling. And, you know, from there, I make a couple different, you know, revs, fit it in, test for ball traps, which is always a big one, clearance. And then, you know, keep looking in mind the production side of it, which a lot of times we're lucky enough to be able to be in a position where we can do the mass production of that part. So then I'm thinking, okay, if I got to mold this, if I got to cast this, what's going to help keep the price down as far as speed and simplicity of how the piece is, you know, engineered to fit together. There's always budgets with games. So that's the main thing, getting that piece to fall within, you know, the budget that we're given, you know, as we're designing it, prepping that piece accordingly for whoever it's going to have to go to. so that, you know, they don't get the sample in the prototype and, hey, this don't fit, it's the wrong material, wrong durometer, wrong whatever. So, you know, then I hate those wrong durometers, damn it.
    12:31
    So, I mean, you're making these out of different materials. I mean, how do you ensure that it is durable? I mean, that it's going to withstand a pinball hitting it a million times. Do you test that stuff in shop? A lot of the material that we use has been the same stuff we've used for the past 13 years. So I'm extremely confident in that. There also is just simply the spec sheet that comes with the resin that we use. That tells you how far you can stretch the material, how far you can bend it, how much of an impact it can take until it's going to break. And from there, then there's just the different product lines. One could be, you know, more hard and rigid like rock.
    13:09
    Cool. All the way down to something that's flexible like foam, you know, and then finding the product that works for that one. If you've got something that's flexible or needs to be, you know, for a ball hit, you want to stick with something that's more of like a vinyl material, you know, to where it can take that impact, that flex, you know, right material for the right job. That makes sense. When you're looking at a game, you know, when you're working on something, you know, you just worked on some pieces for Guns N' Roses, you know what they're hiring you to do. Do you also sit there and look at that game and start thinking like, hmm, all right, here's what I'm going to do for them, and then here's the mods I'm going to do. Like, you spend that time, like, kind of bouncing out between what they're asking you to do and what you think you can do because you've got to beforehand look at what's going on. Beforehand, like, yeah. Surprisingly, no, I actually don't do that. I try to convince them to add more into it. So I pretty much give them all the ideas that I literally have, you know, at that moment or as we're designing months, weeks down the road, whatever. I'm like, oh, dude, I just thought of this. This would be cool. And sometimes it's like, yeah, make it. Other times it's like, no, man, our budget's spent. That's awesome. We can't put it in. You know, it could be, you know, simple like that because, like we said, games have budgets. But, yeah, sometimes I do have those ideas and, you know, we'll make products like Guns N' Roses. You know, the Lockdown Bar, that's a good example. We just released one as a mod. It's got the pistols on it and the one that we made for the CE that we produced for the CE, that one's just roses. The first sculpt I made was my mod with the guns on it, and the decision was made, hey, take the guns off, make it just roses, that's what we want on it. So, okay. At that point then, you know, that one was kind of still in, you know, my wheelhouse to do for me the way the contract was set up to where I could. So in that aspect, yes, I did have something ready, you know, for it and was able to do it. But a lot of times, I'll make a lot of prototypes and a lot of just designs, and they won't make the game. And I have all intentions of making them as a mod, but we just never get around to that happy balance of mass production versus mod work, which we're hoping to do with some added crew, added space and everything this coming year. To start doing more mods, get back to that, but still continue being able to do the mass production design work for companies. That's very interesting, though, because you said that in your contract you have that you can create your own mods for these games after the fact. So do you have that standard contract for all of these companies? And how often, when you're in the creative process, making a mod like the Guns N' Roses Lockdown Bar, where you have a great idea and they don't go with that idea, they might go with another that's also cool, do you go back and say, well, listen, if you're not going to use this, I'm going to sell it on my own site? I see a lot of times with that, it's not so much a contract as much as it's just a gentleman's agreement and verbal. I was raised that way. I'm still the handshake kind of guy. Right. My signature means nothing to me. My word means more. So if I tell you I'm not going to do it, I'm not going to do it. I feel lucky still to work with these companies. I still want to have a future with these companies. And these guys I'm working with are my friends. So I've yet to come across that million-dollar mod to where I'd say, hey, you know what? Screw you guys. I got to do it now. Hey, kids. It's time to use the F word. Fuck you!
    16:28
    I'd be like, well, here's a quarter of a million dollars for you to be happy. I'm going to make it because I'm rich. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, I like keeping it that way. I like the gentleman's agreement and stuff like that, the not knocking off what I did. Like I said, the Lockdown Bar just happened to be one. I've gotten a lot of people, again, going back to the Guns N' Roses thing, asking me about the skull with the roses. I do have other things that I made for Shooter Housing. I do have a skull. It works on all different games, but it's a skull. Am I going to make one that has a rose on it? No. I don't feel right doing that. I didn't ask them. I didn't bring it up with Eric or anybody over at Jersey. Hey, do you mind? I just don't feel right doing that. The other one was discussed previously. You obviously started off just making mods and all that. At what point in your career, you said you've been doing this for about 13 years, did you make the jump from doing it for yourself to actually hooking up with these companies and producing parts for their games to be included in the official game release? So, yeah, the mods we started in 2007 with Pirates, where we did the cannon and the black pearl pinballs. We started that. And with that, that's where I met Jack Guarneri from Jersey Jack. And we became friends, talked and everything like that. And I was able to make that transition from just being a modder to actually designing and making things for a game when Jack started Jersey Jack. So that would have been, I want to say it was like May of 2011, 2012, something like that. It's somewhere right around there is when we started designing Woz. And from there, I was able to get in. So I actually, and I always say this, I owe Jack a big thank you. And I thank him again now for getting me out and giving me that chance to show everybody what me and my team can do. You know, designing and making to not just be a mod maker, but to actually design the physical parts that are going in the game. Getting to see your name on a play field is something I never thought I'd get to see. it's really surreal it's really cool I definitely feel very blessed and I get to work with a lot of really knowledgeable people in the industry and I've been able to learn a lot just from them on how games work when I was a modder I'd sit here and you know it's really easy to look at somebody's game and these designers you know they put all their time and their passion and their effort into the games and people sit there and nitpick it oh this sucks you know and I gotta admit you know when I was Just doing mods before I actually got into the industry on this side of it, yeah, I was definitely one like that, saying that. Like, oh, how come you couldn't? And then you start seeing all the reasons why. And it can be from a production standpoint, a longevity, it's on location. It can be somebody's personal preference. There's lots of different reasons. And it gave me a whole new respect for the designers themselves. So how many commercial games have you been involved in now? Let's see. We've done Jersey. We've done Wizard Boss, Hobbit. We did a little work on the building on Dialed In. We did Pirates and Guns N' Roses. Spooky, what did we do? We did Rob Zombie, Dominoes, Jetsons, Alice Cooper, and Rick and Morty. American, we did Houdini and Oktoberfest. Then we did Highway with Aliens. And then with Chicago Gaming, we did work on Monster Bash and Medieval. You whore!
    19:55
    I try. And one day, maybe Stern on that list. Don't know. Wouldn't mind. But, yeah, I take it where I can get it, man. You know? Yeah, man. That's what she said.
    20:09
    You've got to take the work when you can get it, you know? And I do enjoy doing what I do. I really do. I know it sounds cheesy and one-lined and, you know, saying, oh, you're blessed to work with these people. Yeah, dude, I don't take it for granted, especially with, you know, family working for me, wife and kid i count my blessings that i get to do this i've had those office jobs never want to go back ever ever ever man it's always good when you love what you do so what are your favorite things that you've done for the companies that you've worked with and the mods that you've made you know maybe commercially we'll stick with that so what what are the favorite mods you've done and what's the hardest one that you did that just drove you insane i really did even though it's one more of the recent ones um because i like doing skeletons i like doing an axle it's tiny I wish to God we could build bigger freaking things instead of here, Matt. I want you to sculpt this, and it's got to be three inches tall and have all this detail, but micro. My eyes, I'll be blind in another five years. I have really thick Magoo glasses on. I'm blind. That's right. But, yeah, I like doing, you know, the skull. That was really, really fun doing that. So that probably would have been more of my recent one, probably one of my favorite ones just for painting. I love doing that medieval topper with the trolls on it and the king and the bird. I liked painting that. It's a style that I just like and enjoy. Which one gave me the hardest time? Yeah, it would definitely be Hobbit. Hobbit was the hardest time of just rev changes between what Warner Brothers was looking for and everything and what was going to fit in the game and how the game was designed and how it was changing. And, you know, as Smog started out, it was originally going to be a head in a mountain. The whole back was going to be a giant mountain. And then that stone was going to turn, and there was Smog's head. And when the show came, I said, we didn't have the mountain. I did not make that vacuum form. And so it was a head on a rock. And it was not perceived very well. I think a lot of people turned it into, like, a chicken or something like that in Photoshop. So those photos are still out there. And then it became the head that it is. And that one, I would say, had the most revs to it, you know, to where it was just like, good Lord, can we just be done, pick this and finish? You know, so that one, I would say, would be the one. That makes sense. Yeah. You know, as you know, as everybody knows, in my introduction to pinball was getting pulled in by Stern on Batman 66 at the zero hour. Yeah. So imagine Stern comes to you and says, we need a waist-up sculpt of Adam West as Batman, and we need it in two days. Can you get it done to your standards?
    22:48
    Waist-up? Is he in costume? Yeah. Okay. Then I would say yes. I would find a way. When people say it can't be done, I like saying yes. I'm going to find a way. I never, ever like saying no. Can I have some free things? Don't say no now. It's not nice to say no. You don't want to say no. I know. Well, that's how I am. It's interesting the answer, though. Are you saying that, like, street clothes are more difficult to sculpt or likenesses without a mask on? Oh, yeah, dude, yeah. His face. Because, like, I can do some realism. You know, like when I'm drawing, like, on paper and everything. I mean, I started off my career early on working at a tattoo shop when I was 15 and worked there for about seven years, you know, tattooing and piercing. And so I was constantly drawing all day. Well, even before that. And realism was never my strong suit. I liked comic book and inanimate objects and, you know, things of that nature, which is why when I was saying with the costume, yeah, his costume is plain. You know, you don't have as many layers, but mainly the face. That was what I was getting at. Doing the face is a lot of work, man, and hair. It's interesting you say that, though, because I'm an artist as well, obviously, and I think that the challenge, if you have to draw Adam West where only his chin and mouth and eyes show, it's much more difficult to nail a likeness when you only have those two little areas to work with. See, mine looks at it different because I can focus on those two, and I'm not, like, looking for a place to start. Like, I see just that, like a character. You know, you get those, the characteristics of somebody that are popping out. Does he have a big nose? Does he have a broad chin, funny hair, big ears, whatever? And they cop out at you, so it's easy for me to focus on those things, you know, like when I'm looking at it. Well, the most recent game that you've worked on, I think, is Guns N' Roses, so I wanted to talk to you a little bit about that. Tell us about the process of working on GNR with Jersey Jack in terms of how early you were brought into the game, and were you at all exposed to the band? Did you work with them, and Slash in particular, on what he wanted in sculpts? Yeah, I got a call from Eric to come into the office to take a look at his new layout, and that's usually how it works. Come in, we look at the layouts and everything together. He tells me, you know, his ideas, what he was looking for in it, what he's looking for me to have sculpted. Like normal, I try to pitch and throw in anything that I can think of and, you know, kind of bounce some ideas around. And then from there, take it back and we start making sculpts, prototypes, mock-ups, maquettes, whatever needed to be on that one. Yeah, then, you know, you have a couple different whitewoods for it. I think it was after that, Splash did come into town. and if I remember correctly, I think it was the day I was fitting, yeah, I was fitting the axle skeleton on the play field, making sure all the skulls cleared because we had just added a switch up there. It had gotten adjusted, so I had to carve out some of the skulls to fit around the switch and everything where it was, and the skull for the shooter housing on the CE. I was refining that, making sure it mounted properly and everything cleared, and that was the day Splash was there. So I got to meet him, hang out and talk with him, and he loves pinball, man. I mean, he was definitely into the game. Like, you know, we'd have parts where we'd all sit down, we'd talk about the game, you know, here's what we're doing, animations, sound, everything like that, you know, it was a big group meeting. And then we'd kind of break away for a moment to, okay, hey, we're going to go take some photos. He would fly right over to the game and he'd start playing. You know, he's sitting there playing Pirates and playing Wonka and he truly does love pinball. And I was like, okay, you know, let's take some photos and go and do that, and then boom, he was right back out there doing it. So he's very passionate about it. You know, he would point out things, shots he would like. I know he was constantly on the phone with Eric, so he was really, really involved, you know, with Eric and everything on the design and everything like that and the team. But, yeah, I did get to meet him. It was really, really cool. Well, speaking of Slash, I was talking to Eric, and he said that I should ask you to tell us the story about getting Slash to sign a guitar for your friend. Oh, jeez.
    26:54
    So I had brought two guitars there and the skull. The skull was for Eddie because he had worked on the skull with me. One of the guitars was for me and my wife, and the other one was for my buddy Aaron, Aaron Mobu. He does things with me with the company. And I had told Slash I got the guitars, and I'm like, yeah, you know, my buddy hooked me up over at Sweetwater. He's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I know him, yeah. And I was simply just telling Splash that he hooked me up with the two guitars. Meaning, you know, I talked to him, told him you were coming. He knew I was working on it. Splash knows him because Sweetwater, they play out there that you, you know, stuff with the guitars. And so, yeah, I was just simply telling him. He made the other guitar out to him and not to Aaron. It's the wrong name, you know. To not Aaron. No. Wah.
    27:45
    Yeah. So, it was that. I didn't have the heart to say anything to him. like, ah, shit. So a little rubbing alcohol, remove that, and here you go, Aaron. It's got rock and roll slash hanging up on the wall, buddy. That's perfect. How many games are you working on at any given time? Usually about three to five is the time where it is. Yeah, yeah. And then just trying to filter in the mods and the mass production of them. What's the breakdown between your mod company, your online store, and what you do for the pinball companies? Time-wise, yeah, percentage of your time. It's usually about 70% to 80% mass production and design and development of new games, and about 20%, 30% to mods. Like I said, I'm hoping this coming year with the bigger shop to finally start pulling out those bins of all those mods that we've had for years. You know, sculpts and prototypes and just like, hey, finish this. I mean, we've got tons of stuff just sitting in big old storage bins that I've never finished, and I'd love to get it out there, especially when I end up seeing like, Other modders come out with things, you know, and a lot of times then, like I said, it's that play nice in the sandbox. A lot of times if I see that, I usually won't release mine unless it was something I already had done and was this far or ours are far enough difference. And then it's like, hey, just you guys go ahead and choose which one you like. You know, I try to be respectful, but, you know, I get it's the, you know, first come first serve kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, there are different iterations of a lot of different things, you know, different mods that many people do. a similar take on. Is it a competitive environment at all or are you just kind of like go with the flow? If someone's already been there, you just kind of don't tread on the same ground? I usually try doing it that way. Now, that being said, with all those things I got sitting there to pull out and finish and everything under the storage bins, some things are going to come out that other people have had just because I have them and they're already that far done so I'm going to put my version out there. If somebody likes it, awesome. Grab it. If you like the other guy, take his. I'd rather work with people and come up with cooler things than sit here and compete or try to be the only one or this and that. Speaking of competition, though, I'll step up and I'll say that you were robbed last year. CGC was robbed from the Topper Award. But that brings up an interesting question, though. For those who don't know, the Topper that Matt worked on for CGC for the remake of Medieval Madness lost out to the Topper from Black Knight. and I'm pretty sure it's only because it moved. Yeah, it was a pretty novel topper. So my question is, you know, with toppers coming in and being so important now and all this other stuff, are you looking forward, are you looking to add technology to what you do to make things, you know, more interactive or, you know, use things with lights and different things like that? Are you going to stick with what you know or, you know, what's your plan moving forward? A little bit of both. We're going to start introducing things with lights, And I know that's probably already a little far behind from where we should be, but I never understood the point of, you know, here's the mod. And then, well, here, I stuck an LED in it, and now it's worth $30 more. That LED was like 50 cents. Well, yeah, but it lights up now. So, you know, I still look at that as if I don't have the company, and I'm the person, you know, buying the thing. I'm going, why? Why would I, you know, it's just, you know, I'm trying to keep pricing better. But, yeah, everybody does. They really like things that light up. They do. And, I mean, that's cool. I don't feel everything should have a light in it. So we're going to add lights to some things. As far as toppers go, yeah, we have some toppers we're working on with Melissa from Cointaker. And, honestly, they'll probably be coming out either as a collaboration between the two of us or on her site and mine or promoting to hers. Melissa, she's one of our top distributors. She's awesome, amazing. We've done work with them for years. And she took over Laserific, which was my buddy Joe Case's company. And me and Joe used to do things together. Back early days, before there were like 50 different mod companies out there, it was just a handful of us. I would do 3D things. Joe would do laser things. Jose and Joe would do the graphics. I really liked working with Joe and making mods and toppers together. So I think what we're going to do is, yeah, we're going to do a bunch more with Cointaker. And, yes, make some toppers. Obviously, the things will be 3D sculpted. There will be some things laser. There will be lights in it. Just like everything else, we'll try to make some things really cool. Heck, we've got a Guns N' Roses topper that I've got sitting right next to me. Oh, yeah? Hopefully, I'll get to that thing. Like I said, we were talking about that. So what do you see as the future of pinball mods? I mean, there are so many mods out there right now. and obviously there's moving parts and bigger and better sculpts and that sort of thing. But if you could fantasize about what's coming down the road, what do you think would be the pinnacle of mods and where would you want the mod business to go? That's a darn good question. Where do I see it going? By what I'm seeing now is I'm seeing a progression between everybody the past couple years trying to 3D print everything into doing casted. They're either taking a 3D print and refining it and then making a mold of it and then casting it that way. I'm seeing a lot of different artists come in and everything. So I think you're going to see a lot more high-quality mods coming out there, whether it be a topper, something in the game, something on the outside, different innovations. I think people have no problem paying a premium for a product now by what I'm seeing out there from where some of these things are. As long as the quality is there, as long as it justifies it, they want that. Give them it, even if it is a limited. That's right. They want that. So I see it going more towards a quality, you know, kind of thing, which is really cool, you know. Right. No, I totally agree with you. Looking at some of the stuff that people are paying exorbitant amounts of money for, if you could come out with a product that was higher quality and, you know, give them more for the money, which I think there's plenty of room to do given the overhead that people are working with now, you could definitely make a mark. Oh, yeah. Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, there's a lot of people now in it. It used to be very small, and there's definitely a lot of people out there modding, and there are a lot of talented people out there making mods. We're sure you're going to continue to be at the forefront of what you do. I don't think there's any question that that's a fact, and we look forward to what you're coming out with in the future. In the meantime, we're going to move on to the news and what we've done in the past couple of weeks, and love you to take the ride with us and play third co-host. Cool. All right, let's talk about our past few weeks in pinball. DJ, take it away. The last few weeks of pinball So the last two weeks for me have been pretty crafty. My wife and I have sat down and we worked on the Guns N' Roses topper for our LE that we're waiting for. Which is super rad. I know, it's super freaking rad. We got a whole bunch of really nicely made instruments, including a drum set and three guitars. And then we put those on kind of like a concert stage with Slash's hat, a few roses around the hat. and then all of the albums from Guns N' Roses in the back kind of to show it off. And then we put two mini spotlights around the instrument. So it all came together really well. It looks totally badass. I hope it works well with the machine. I think it will because we did it to the same specs as our Wonka topper. So it should look pretty awesome, and I will definitely take some shots of that when we get the game and get to throw it up there. But outside of that, we had a Jurassic Park delivered, and we have been renting that for the last few weeks, and it is freaking awesome. It's one of the games that I've always wanted, and just to have it in my basement and to go down and be able to play whenever I want. Look at me, Damien. It's all for you.
    35:33
    And not worry about having to actually buy it is a huge win for me. So we've been playing the heck out of it. Right before we recorded, Francie, Sarah was down here with us, and she was playing, and she's getting more and more into it, which I think will hopefully improve my odds of buying it someday.
    35:49
    That and those blue slushies with the alcohol. Exactly. I see this fucking machine, and I'm set. I'm so drunk.
    36:00
    But, yeah, I was like, listen, Dave, I've got to go. I've got to go record the show. And she's like, no, you're not. I'm playing another game. She just kept hitting the start button. Just kidding. So I'll gladly postpone recording for Mrs. Kennedy. Nice, man. Nice. Those are the two biggest things I've done. I went out to the pinball gallery again with a few friends of mine, and we played some pinball. But, yeah, that's pretty much it. Nice. What have you been up to? Well, I've been doing a lot of prints, selling a lot of prints. I just had some of my artwork published in a book. I saw that. Which is always cool. It's a book called The Art of Pulp Horror, and it's by Stephen Jones. He's a guy from England, and they tracked me down through Facebook, and they said, hey, we love your creature from the Black Lagoon art. Can we put it in our book? And I said, do I get paid? And they said, sure, we'll give you $50. And I said, $50?
    36:47
    Hey, $50 is $50. But I don't have to sell anything. I just have to send the file over. It's good promotion. And just like the chiseler I am, I said, hey, you know, I just finished up this Salem's Lot poster. You want to take a look at that? And I sent it to them and said, oh, we'd like to put that in our book, too. Do I get another $50? No.
    37:06
    No. But, yeah, it's really cool. The Creature from the Black Lagoon got a full page, and the Salem's Lot one got like a page and a half. It like bleeds over into the second page. But because of the proportions, you know, it didn't take up two whole pages. It would have cut something off the top and the bottom. But, you know, it discusses how I made it, you know, what I used, and it's got my name in there and everything. So, very cool. Yeah, very cool. Did they interview you at all for that? Like, just to talk about it? No, they sort of sent me a questionnaire. And so, there's a narrative that goes through it that just talks about the art of the art. And then everything is just kind of labeled. Like, they put a little paragraph and a half or so for each entry into the book. And a lot of them are very small. So, I was very pleased that I got a full page on each of them. because a lot of the artwork in there they cut you know obviously they try to put a ton in there So there a lot of things that are smaller like three by five business card stuff but uh yeah so i was really excited about that and uh let see what else i released a 007 art print which was funny because i was ready to release it and then sean connery died and that's that's who's in the artwork i'm just like uh wow that's a bummer and now i feel bad because like here i'm ready to put this out and it's gonna look like i'm vulturing off of somebody's death so i figured You know what, the sooner I put it out, the better, because people are going to go, he didn't have time to draw that, you know, in the time that he died, so obviously he had it ready. Yeah, you would have been fine, though, because even if it took you time, it was a really nice tribute, which I thought was your original intention was to do a tribute to him in memoriam, but I guess it was a tribute, you know, in life before that. But still, it's an awesome poster. Yeah, it's a tribute to the best Bond as far as everybody's concerned, really. And I also revisited, you know, sometimes, like even with Creature from the Black Lagoon recently, I revisited it and said, you know, this never really came out how I wanted it. And so I did a whole new illustration of Linda Blair. The original Exorcist poster that I did, she was just kind of staring straight on, and she had this menacing grin. And the one thing that I felt the artwork always missed out on was the torture of the little girl behind the demon, you know. You don't feel anything for the girl. You just see this poster, and there's this creepy threat. and here's all the priests and the mom and everybody that's affected by it. So I tried to draw Reagan still creepy as shit, but having a little bit of that little girl trapped inside, you know, so she's not staring dead on. She's not maniacally smiling. She's got more of a puzzled look on her face. I mean, obviously the look of her with the glowing eyes and, you know, everything else, she looks creepy, but you can see more of that girl behind her. And I just changed the layout, and to me it's 20 times better than the one that I had done before. So that was really fun. So, yeah, I've got a lot of print stuff going on and still chugging away on the pinball projects that I can't talk about, but that's about it. Hey, Matt, what have you done for the past two weeks? Any pinball projects you can tell us about?
    39:59
    Little work on, yeah, no, I can't. So right now. You ask, then I think. I'm like, all right, we've got a thing here. and then I did some stuff and then I painted a thing how many games right now is it 3 to 5 like you were saying earlier that you're working on yeah 5 wow all games in progress that is very cool man do you own any of these games that you've done work for yeah yeah I actually I got a large collection now it's been 13-14 years that it's been brewing, but I got what do I got downstairs?
    40:40
    21? Good for you, man. All eras? Most of them are no, no, it would be a stern forward. I got a bag of tell. The airplane one. And then, yeah, a lot of games that we've worked on. I originally wanted to have one of each game that I worked on, and then it became impractical. At a room cost? Yeah, literally everything is like, wow, dude, Yeah, that sounds like a cool idea. It's just like every game designer.
    41:09
    I've asked a lot of them. A lot of them don't have all the games they've made. And they've all said the same in the beginning, like, yeah, I want to. And then you start looking at room and cost, and it's like, yeah, no, I don't want to. I got no complaints there because I have the four that I've done so far. Yeah, I mean, there are four rocking titles too, man. It's going to be harder, Chris. Oh, no, I've hit the ceiling because I can fit five games in my house, and I have five games in my house. Wait a minute. You got a bedroom? You have a basement? No, I don't have a basement. I have a condo. You could put one next to your bed on one side of the bed. Well, yeah. I could drag the Batman one into the Batman collection room. It should belong with the rest of them. Yeah, but then I'm busting everything up and I like them together. Whatever. We've talked about me already. Let's get on to the pinball in the news. All right. Well, now, pinball in the news with your super awesome Eyewitness News Group.
    42:05
    Don't fucking just read news off the internet, you fat piece of shit. All right, first up in the news, Joe Kamenko, personal friend of mine, auctioned off a Beatles pinball machine. It was a charity thing. Man, Broadway cares. It's a charity that I think works to help fight, you know, HIV and AIDS. They fundraise and do, you know, grants for research and that sort of thing. But as awesome as that is, he brought a ton of money, way more than anyone really expected for this machine. I think it was... Well, you thought $8,000 was pricey to begin with. Right. $30,000. It made it off. $30,000. $30K. Good for him. I know. I was really stoked to see that. It also comes with Pinball 101 Zoom lessons from Zach Sharp, so that probably sweetened the pot a little bit. But I thought that was really cool that Joe did that and that it made so much money. Yeah, definitely cool. And good cause. According to the information, that was Joe's personal game. But I would tend to think that Joe probably had more than one personal game.
    43:06
    Or he just sold the one that I'm supposed to pick. Sorry, you waited too long, asshole. And then next up, too, continue in the series of people getting things that I never get. You're so needy, Chris. You're so needy.
    43:21
    I saw this and I immediately thought, oh, my God, Chris is going to lose his mind because this is right up your freaking alley, man. I mean, you collect these things. It's cool, but you know what I thought of, actually, when I saw this? We should tell people because they're like, what the hell are you talking about? Somebody gave Jack Danger a custom Funko Pop of himself. But I'm going to tell you, I'm not jealous at all because I got a sweet talking bobblehead of me as Batman that you and your wife sent me. Do you still have that? We haven't talked about it in a long time, so I thought maybe it broke on the way home. I still have it. Okay. Why would I not still have it? Well, I've seen that enough in the can. No, I didn't know if it made the trip because that was actually the second one we got you. So just to bring everybody else in, when we saw Chris at TPF in 2018, right? Or was it 19? 19. We brought him a custom bobblehead that we had made that somebody sculpted. It was a website that basically you shoot them a picture, and then they sculpt out a bobblehead of that person. So we had Franchi in a Batman suit, and then there was a mini Barlow that was actually sculpted at the base. So it was pretty freaking cool. Yeah, it's very cool. I thought I posted a picture of it. I had to do a little touch-up because the picture you used, I had a dark beard, and I had since gone 90% gray in the beard. So I added a little bit of gray in the beard to make it more accurate so people didn't confuse me trying to look younger.
    44:36
    I put some just for men on the bobblehead. There we go. Well, that's better. Yeah, I don't know who the dude is, but some guy made, like, a box and everything. It looks like one you'd buy in the store. It's very cool. And he's holding his little Chicago flipper in his hands, his logo for Deadflip. So, yeah. Very cool. Amazing. He gets a lot of cool stuff. Not to make you jealous, but he's always posting about all this stuff that his viewers send him. And it's pretty cool shit. Like, he gets beer. He gets gin. He gets stickers. I'm jealous. I'm still trying to find that goddamn gin that tastes like a great Popsicle. I'm on my second bottle, man. I'm on my second bottle. Oh, sure. Yeah, rub that in. Yeah, Jack gets prizes. You got all kinds of gin laying around. I got dick.
    45:16
    Yeah. Aw. Thanks. So next up in the news, This Week in Pinball has added a bunch of different features. They're not just resting on their laurels and having this week in pinball new stuff. Now they're adding a pinball university, which I thought was really cool because it's an area of pinball that we really need more of. It's such a complicated machine to begin with, just knowing how to fix anything, the basics. It's complicated knowing how to play a game because every game is, even though it has some unique features, there's so many different variables to every game you get. So this website is basically there to help teach you. So they have a beginners, they have an intermediate, and then they have an expert section. And in each section, they have videos and basically courses that people have put together to help teach you stuff. So in the beginner section, it's like, what are the different parts of a machine? And then in the intermediate, there was how to change out flippers and rebuild a flipper, which I thought was really cool because that's something I would love to know. So a very cool thing that hasn't been done before in one big group. You know, there's been lots of websites that have tried to do it, but no one has compiled it all. And I think that's what Jeff is trying to do. Yeah, it's cool. You get, you know, these different people's perspectives on how to do these things. And plus, you know, tapping all those different resources, you get a much more well-rounded total in, you know, everything you can look at, a better chance to find, you know, what you might need help in. You know, it's just growing right now. It's just starting. But just, you know, the concept alone, you can see where this can go even in a couple of months. You know, there's a pretty good database there of resources to help you do things. I would love to see him get, like, Marco and Papa and a bunch of other content creators contribute all their stuff so he can just get a giant, you know, collection of it all so that people can go to one spot. Oh, I'm contributing one. I'm writing it right now. It's called How to Throw Your Captain Fantastic Off the Roof.
    47:04
    I was excited, though, for a second there that you were actually doing something. I'm actually doing something. What do you got off your ass and quit eating? No, like teaching a freaking course, man. I would read that. And pinball. See, but the problem with that is if I taught like, you know, oh, yeah, I'm going to teach you how to do your own art for pinball machines. I'd put myself out of business. Uh-huh. You know? You have to have natural talent for that. Because, you know, unlike what some podcasters say, it's not just being able to draw. Like being able to design, especially a play field, is an art all itself. And you have to know, you have to understand pinball. And, you know, in a sense, every little area on that play field is a chance for you to market that feature. So it's not just drawing pretty pictures. You have to use graphics and you have to use, you know, a sensibility of how you're going to convey these things in a way that people can understand quickly and easily and at the blink of an eye. So it takes a lot more than just being able to be an artist. But, yeah, I certainly don't want to teach that to anyone because I've got enough competition already. So step off, bitches. Matt, what would you want to see? If there was something in pinball you don't know a lot about, you want to learn more about, what would that be? Probably board work. It's, you know, underneath the play field and on top of the play field, I'm pretty good at it. You know, I can restore it, make it look like a pretty paperweight that, you know, lights up. But when it goes to the boards, yeah, that's where it loses me, you know. I always hear this term cold solder joints. What does that mean? Cold as opposed to hot solder? It's a bad solder joint. It's not working. That means it's like brittle and cracked? Yes, that's cracked. So, yeah, basically you just re-solder it, and then there you go. It's good. Most of the time you just have to melt the solder that's on there so it reforms that seal. Yes, that's, yeah. And I mean, soldering, I got that done. I can do that. But, yeah, why and where it goes, I don't know. Right. Well, see there, so now somebody out there who's listening to this, you've got a contribution to make to This Week in Pinball. There it is. Writing your article about boards and soldering. How about digital pinball, Matt? Is that something that you're into at all? You know, I've played it a few times. It's kind of cool. You know, I like it. I like some of the cool things that you can do on digital that you can't, you know, like in real life. Like, you know, like a Jaws one or something, and, you know, Jaws is coming out, and he literally jumps off the play field and grabs this and then goes away and swims around. You can't do that, you know, unless you're going to put a real mini shark in the game, which would be awesome, but not practical. Baby shark doopity. oh dude I hear that so much nowadays my little dude he still loves that song it's so funny Matt there are certain things as a parent that just like you it's like nails on a chalkboard baby shark is one of them and he loves it still he points to the little you know I can't say the name on the wall because I got one of them sitting next to me and it'll light up with this blue circle and he points at it and he's like I'm like yeah I know you want to hear it Yes. Oh, my God. Well, the reason I brought up digital pinball is because This Week in Pinball also has an offshoot into the digital pinball realm now. So there's a guy named Chris Friedbiss, I think is how you say his last name. No, no. There's no D in there. And if you listen to his show, it's Chris Friedbiss, a.k.a. Shut Your Trap. I'm your host, Chris Friedbiss, a.k.a. Shut Your Trap. Is it really? I don't know what that is. Sorry, Chris. It drives me fucking nuts every time you say that because I don't know what. Is that a nickname, Shut Your Trap? What kind of nickname is that? Maybe it's his gaming handle or something. I don't know. It's about pinball. Whatever, whatever. Yeah. It's Freebus. Okay. So he runs the Blockade Pinball Podcast, and it's heavily about digital pinball. I don't know if it's all digital pinball, but he's going to do a full workup on the news related to digital pinball, which will be really cool because it's an offshoot of pinball that a lot of people don't necessarily know a ton about. So educating people about it and getting people into it I think will be cool. And there's a lot of products that are coming out lately, you know, hitting the market from, you know, cabinet, physical cabinet standpoint in Walmart and Amazon and all these things. Oh, yeah. One-up. What else do you call it? One-up and all this other stuff. Very true. The next news item kind of also relates to digital pinball in that I'm on a visual pinball Facebook page just to kind of see what's out there because it's interesting to me even though I don't have one. And there was a cool post that I saw from a guy named Dan Milano, who apparently is the showrunner for a Netflix TV show called Glitch Texts. And my kids actually watch this show and they love it. It's basically about video game glitches that come to the real world and these kids fight them. And it's a pretty cool show, but it was interesting and related to pinball because he was asking for people to actually make a virtual table related to his show. And because he's the show owner and the show runner, he basically said, I will give you guys all of the assets if you are interested and you want to make this to make it as cool as you can. So I thought that was really cool for someone who loves pinball to throw that out there. And I hope someone takes them up on it. Yeah, I've never thought about a virtual pin homebrew because it's usually, you know, someone gets a Harlem Globetrotters and, you know, rethemes it as something else. Right. But so this is interesting. And you'd think it'd be easier, too, because it's just, if you can do computer graphics, to just have to handle everything, you know, digitally and not have to build and make things and all that, you know, sanding down the play field and repainting it. And, you know, it just, digital seems a lot easier. Absolutely. But you need some time on your hands. Hopefully, yeah, hopefully somebody picks that up. It's not often somebody asks for a pinball machine, you know. So it's like you kind of almost want to, you know, accommodate them. You know, this guy from TV wants a pinball machine. Let's do it. Yes. especially a guy who has a pretty prominent show. I mean, this is a show that has, I think, two or three seasons now. Yeah, for people who don't know, because I've never heard of it, it's an animated show. It's a kid's show because you have a company to find little image here of these little robot-looking people. So it's a kid's show. But, yeah, very cool, very cool. Now, this next thing I do know about, Ray-Ban recently has a, I don't know if you guys have seen it. And, well, it's a pinball-themed commercial for Ray-Bans. Now, I don't recall seeing a Ray-Ban commercial often at all, so it's interesting that they finally pop out with one, and it's pinball-themed. So I guess the idea is they're playing a Dwight Sullivan game, and they get blinded.
    53:22
    It's a theater magic franchise. It's a theater magic. And Dwight loves his strobes. And so the girl puts on her Ray-Bans, which are not exactly official pin shades. That's right. They're just, I don't believe they're pinball sunglasses. They're just sunglasses that she apparently needs because the light show is so thrilling and exhilarating and in her face. But very cool. You know, just another way to get pinball out there. So I thought that was very cool. You saw the commercial? Yeah, I saw it. And once she puts the shades on, she starts blowing up the game. So instantly she gets multi-ball. Like there's literally sparks that are going off underneath the play field as she's playing. So, you know, clearly they're coming for the Pinshades market share with this thing. But it's cool that they did that. It's timely because we joked off the air that we were the only podcast that didn't get hooked up with a free pair of Pinshades. And a few nights ago, the owner of Pinshades actually reached out to us and sent us some pairs. And have you tried them on, Chris? I tried them on, but I tried them on my Munsters, which already has the non-glare glass. So, you know, I noticed a little bit of a difference, but not as much. I couldn't use it. Well, I'm just going to move over to another one. There are art prints laying all over the other games right now, so I can't get to them. But from the little I could tell, it was cool. Yeah, we each got two, and I'm going to, we're going to talk about this on the next show, but we're actually putting together, you and I are both going to put together our own little holiday stockings, and I'm going to include a pair of those, compliments of Pinshades, into the stocking, as well as a shit ton of other goodies. I feel I'm in competition with you to make a better stocking. No, dude, here's the thing. There's no way that I would ever beat you because unless I just put cash in there, you're going to have, like, sweet art prints, and you're going to have all the art that everybody wants. So there's no chance that I'm going to get a better stocking, but I'm still going to have cool shit in there. So I did actually use them today just to try them out down here in my pinball cave. And, dude, I was thinking that they were mostly for blinding lights and light shows to help dull that, and I'm sure they do that, but I didn't see a huge difference from that standpoint. It wasn't like the lights going off were any less awesome for me with these glasses on. But what was really cool is that every single game that I used the glasses on, it was like they were invisiglass. So it basically does take all of the glare off of the top of the glass and makes you just basically look like you're playing a game without any glass there. Yeah, they're like polarizing. If you took those same glasses fishing, it would eliminate the reflection of the sky off the surface of the water, and you can see fish in the water. Right, yeah. It's crazy. So, yeah, definitely. That's why I say Triangle Down the Munsters was the best game because it already has the InvisiGlass on it. Right. Well, thank you, Jockton, for sending that out, man. I really appreciate it. Very cool. See, there we go. I was bitching about not getting anything. And the guy says, right, he's listening. He's like, hey, fucker, I sent you something. What do you want, you greedy asshole? No, so, yeah, that was very cool. And, of course, we were going to share with our listeners. So, very cool. Topper Talk. Let's talk toppers. So, Mutant Ninja Turtle Topper. What do you think, man? What do I think? This came out, yeah. You know, I love me some Stern, but I'm afraid that they're starting to get cookie-cutter with this. They got the moving 3D thing in the middle, and then, like, the plexiglass characters, or, you know, the little plastic cutouts of the characters on the side. This has been, like, the third one that this has been, like, the same thing. So I'm getting concerned that they're going to lose their creative edge and not do a little more forward-thinking on this. But it's cool. Yeah. Matt, have you seen the topper, Matt? Yeah, yeah. I agree with Chris on it. You know, I like, you know, the eyeballs sculpted in there and stuff. I mean, definitely everything doesn't have to be sculpted, but, you know, the nice, happy medium. I'm not a fan of the logo being in the middle. It's removable. Is it? Okay, cool, perfect. That I didn't know. And it's just one of those, seeing as the back glass has it literally three inches below it, why have it on the top? The fact that it's removable, perfect, man. simple solution those who like it keep it hats off to you sir and that's the way you keep everybody happy right they were coming out with some really cool ones and this one looks like i don't know maybe some something happened and they couldn't go more with it i think it's cool though i do like it wouldn't mind one for mine it is crazy though you said they couldn't go like a little bit beyond because they had that really cool black knight topper and then they they kind of look like they almost have regressed a little bit in terms of the you know the build out of their toppers it's more of a, there's a lot of plastic there. There is a sculpt, but the wow factor of the black night topper, I think is missing a little bit. So I guess the big, the big sticking point here is, I think a lot of people would love to have this on their machine, but it's also a thousand dollars. So you're a perfect guy to talk to about this because if you had a thousand dollars, you're not going to make it for a thousand bucks. Let's say you have $600. Okay. So you have a $400 profit from everyone you sold. You could do some pretty awesome shit for $600. I would imagine. Yeah. Mass production, yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, would that be like the most incredible topper of life if you had that much money? Because you're a guy who could actually make that really pop. Yeah. I just, I mean, $1,000 topper, I never, ever thought we would see those days of it. Like, you know, what was it? Elvira, when that one finally came out. And I think, what's his face? Little Shop of Games. He posted it. It was $1,000. Everybody's like, oh, it's just a bookmark. There's no way it's $1,000. No way. And then you have $1,000. And it's like, okay, well, it's got to have a monitor in it. It's got to have a monitor in it. And I'm like, yeah, for $1,000, it better have a monitor. That's right. No, it's just a photo. Okay, well, what kind of photo? Oh, her eyes. Oh, okay.
    59:02
    Did you do anything else? What lights up? Okay. Anything else? No. It's limited. There's not a lot of them. Okay. I just, man, $1,000 is a lot, but they sold them. It did. It was still the demand. and people still like it. I just, you know, I mean, for me to shell out $1,000 on a topper, yeah, man, I mean, that thing better, it better stream match you, it's worth all of it. And I think that would take a lot. Outside of the scarcity of it, you know, I'm not seeing where that is going. And we had talked earlier about finding something in pinball where you could really take over and show that you could make a quality product that is going to sell for even the same amount of money, but could pack a lot more punch. And I think toppers are one area where you can make headway. Yeah, well, we have to give credit where credit is due. I believe Jeremy, Zombie Yeti, told us when he was on our show that his daughter did the artwork for this. Yes, he did. And the art is spectacular. I think it looks great. Yeah, the apple doesn't fall far from the Yeti, does it? You got some solid dad jokes this episode, Chris. I appreciate that.
    60:09
    So, yeah, I mean, the fact that she was involved is so cool because, you know, he did all the art, obviously, for the game, and then she did the topper work, and it looks so similar. You know, I'm impressed. I'm getting jealous. It was two different artists. Wow. No kidding. I'm getting jealous. Jeremy gets to work with his daughter, you know, and Matt gets to work with his mom, and I get to work with Barlow. Barlow just wants food. All he wants to do is distract me. He doesn't help me work at all. He's just the opposite. He's like, stop working and feed me and bring me outside and do things and rub my belly. Buy me toys. Little shit. so yeah now there's a new topper company out called elite pinball toppers and they have a hobbit uh you know i'm all for for new people coming in and doing new things and i've seen the video on this and it's it's a nice package and presentation everything like that but to me it's a it's just the screen that's duplicating it's like having you know like like what man was talking about earlier a topper with a logo and there's a logo right below on the back glass like now you've got a screen playing what's on the screen right below it. That's right. And I don't think anyone's having a problem seeing a Jersey Jack screen. I think it's cool to have a giant version of it on top of the machine. It's not a giant version. The screen is smaller than the one on the backboard. No, it's a bigger version of the book that's in the play field. Yes, yes. So there's a mini screen actually on the play field, and it's just mirroring what is on that. Who sculpted the book that's in the game? I did. Did you really? Oh, rip off, rip off. Uh-oh. Wow. So how close is it? I smiled. I mean, I honestly did. I did not take it ill. I just, I kind of laughed and went, okay. So somebody took the book, blew it up, put the bigger monitor with it, and there it is. Cool. I hate people. Yeah.
    61:58
    Does it look the same? I haven't really compared the two. Well, I mean, it's a book, dude. A book looks like a book. You've got a hardcover and pages. It's kind of like sculpting flowers, you know. Oh, your roses look like my roses. It's a sculpture of roses. Right. You know. Interesting. All right. Well, so was this something that, you know, kind of gave you a little jab or were you like, whatever, you know, run with it if it's something that people want to buy? No, let them run with it. No, I literally did not, you know, take any offense to it. I mean, like I said, you know, it's a book. It looks like, you know, it's casted, it's sculpted. So I got respect for that for sure because, you know, that's the way we do things. You know, nothing against the 3D printing. I just, you know, like doing it by hand. It looks like it's made good quality. You know, I was watching the video on it and stuff. I saw the wood crate that he puts them in. Very Chicago gaming, you know. Right. What that one reminded me of, how they package those over there. You know, so it's kind of cool with that and the wood grave, you know, burned in logo and stuff. So I thought he was, you know, showing value in the package and what the product was. You know, it's limited, you know, had a large price tag on it. But again, I don't know. I'm a fan of toppers. I just, the market and the cost of things going up and everything, but you're getting a monitor, you're getting a sculpture, you know, with it and everything. So I guess it's just the direction of where everything's going. You know, I miss the days where games used to cost less, I guess is what I'm saying. I know we all, man. don't we all? I'm kind of excited to see what they're doing next because this is just a blown-up version, as you said, of the one. Keep that like a game or something, ain't it? Yes. And that's a game that we both love, man. Yes. Indiana Jones, man, big, big fan. Yes. I do not have anything from my indie. I mean, I have my Fertility Idol and my little display case, but I don't know. I've always wanted to see a really wicked indie topper. I'm going to send you a picture of the one that my wife made for my indie. It's pretty badass. Yeah, but I am definitely looking forward to seeing what they come up with because there's no monitor in Indy. Unless they're just going to slave off the DMD or something, there's no assets there. So maybe they'll do something similar but have movie clips. Well, they're having two different versions come up. It says Elite Pinball Topper and Deluxe Pinball Topper for Indiana Jones. Oh. Ooh. See what the difference is there. No time for pro version, Dr. Jones. There's another bad joke for you, Christian. Thanks, buddy. Keep them coming. And the Hobbit Popper limited to 50 is not sold out yet, so it's still available. Well, next item on the news, it's kind of an ass burner. There's a new 25% import tax for European pinball buyers and distributors. Yeah, I mean, this is such an expensive toy to begin with, and then 25% on top of that just seems unbelievably restrictive. I mean, our hobby is expensive enough as it is. Well, yeah, the $7,000 game here is like $8,500, $9,000 there without the import tax. Right. I think we're still at 100%, right? Oh, my God, really? Yeah. Seriously, so if it's $7,000 here, it's $14,000 over there. Wow. I know gaming systems are really, you know, people get slaughtered on those, so I imagine it's the same. Yeah, that's horrible. Wow. Are there any buyers out there outside of this super rich that are still going to go new in box? And if this is going to have a huge impact on the used market, you know, having those prices shoot up because that will be, you know, the obtainable games in Europe. But hopefully this is something that's temporary. You know, we have a new regime coming in at some point in the U.S., so I don't know if any of these huge import taxes are going to be left in place or not. We'll see. Yeah, that's a big suck. Sorry, Europe. Yeah, I wonder how Stern and, you know, the other guys that do a lot of importing or exporting into Europe are going to handle this and how much it's going to affect their sales. Maybe in a few weeks we can find out.
    65:49
    Speak in hand. And next up, Dutch Pinball gives an update on Pinside as to what's going on over there in Deutschland. Actually, Deutschland is Germany, isn't it? Mm-hmm. It would be Holland. See, why do you say, like, Holland, but it's Dutch Pinball? They're Dutch people, but they're from Holland, right? Isn't that how it works? Yeah, but why would you be Dutch from Holland? Why wouldn't you be Holland-ish? Holland-ays? Yeah. I don't know, man. Holland-ish.
    66:19
    I'm only kind of Holland-y. almond-ish. Oh, whatever. Anyway. Yeah, they're cranking out the big Lebowskis. They just moved into a new building that's five times the size of the current building that they had, and their goal is now 10 games a week, and they're going to be up and running December 1st with that. They're cranking, yeah, because they had a big challenge. They were only doing four games a week, so they've got like 2,500 total parts in this game, 650 of which have to be sourced by 70 different suppliers. It's a big undertaking, you know, Like we say, pinball is not easy, opposite of what some people think. But our finding out isn't true. So anyway, yeah, very cool that they're moving into a new building and they're going to up the output. Because what this means is right now they're putting out three games to new buyers and one game to the early achievers. So the more games they put out, the more they get those early achievers done, the more the regular games go out, the money comes in, and that is going to finance their future. because they've got like two games that they're getting ready for that they want to make as well. So as soon as they get Lebowski out of the way, they can move on to the new stuff. And, I mean, if it's anything like what they did with Lebowski, I'm very excited to see what they've got coming. Absolutely. Another thing you said that was really cool is that Cohen, their programmer, they hired back and he's working on some software updates for Lebowski. And he's also working on some future titles. So hopefully once they get these Lebowskis out, they'll be able to talk more about what's coming next. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, that's one of the problems people had with the game. They said it was a beautiful game, great theme integration, but the code was suffering. Well, it doesn't look like it's going to be suffering for much longer. So very cool. Very excited to see what's going on with Dutch. And hopefully people will give these guys a chance. They were kind of throwing them in with Highway, and I think they've proven that they're looking to make good on all of this stuff and score up with everybody. It was a rocky road, man. We didn't know if they were going to make it. And not only are they making it, but it looks like they're doing pretty well at this point. So we'll see. Matt, you had done some mods for Big Lebowski that are pretty cool. There's a bowling ball start button mod that I saw. Have you been into this game? Have you worked on the game at all? No, actually, I did not work on it. I talked to them early on in, like, design and stuff like that. I think they actually asked me about making the drink. And with them being, you know, obviously not next door and shipping and everything, I remember telling them, you know, hey, you can buy those glasses. You can fill them with this resin. You can do this, do this there. and that's pretty much, you know, how you make it. And we talked about a couple of things, but then after that, I think they ended up sourcing it locally just because of costs and everything like that for, like I said, shipping things in, importing and everything like that. But hey, that's a consultant credit. Yeah, well, I'll talk to anybody who will listen to me. I'm a talker. And then briefly, we have to talk about the fact that there is a new pinball machine from Stern and it is the Star Wars the Pin comic book edition. and this was I'm with Zeppelin who knows if Zeppelin is still coming too but this just kind of trickled out there was no fanfare at all with this release and I guess it is just a remake kind of of sorts of the game that's already been out there but the fact that there's a new model of it, a vault so to speak is pretty cool the art looks a bit different too I posted pictures because I discovered it in my comic or slimmer gift catalog that I get monthly and it's on their website You can go take a look at it. It's there to see. Yeah, people have been talking about this for a little bit, for like a week and a half or so. There were some other podcasts talking about it, but you, I guess, hadn't heard those, and you just found it randomly in the catalog? Yeah. That's funny, man. Yeah, there was. And it just hit me because I kind of digested the artwork, and I'm like, this is like shuffled around a little bit different on the play field mostly. And one thing I noticed that I don't know if I noticed it on the original version, but there's artwork on the apron. There's no frames to put cards on. The information's printed right on it, but it's like a big sticker of artwork that covers the entire apron. And as an artist, I love that. There's more canvas there. I think they should do that more often. It is really cool, actually. I didn't notice that before. I'm pulling up a picture of Star Wars the pin now just to see if that is something that they had on there. Let's see. No. No, I take that back. It did. There was some art, but it wasn't as cool. the stuff that they have on the new one. On the Photoshop-y version they had art on them? Yeah. Okay. This was on the Star Wars, the pin, no, not, I don't know if they had it on the regular Star Wars game. I don't think they did. Yeah, I didn't catch that on the first time around, though. But, yeah, that's cool. That's a little horrible. See, now, here's something to think about. You know, people are talking about all this shipping and whatnot. You know, Hammacher Schlemmer is a German company. If it's shipping from them, probably wouldn't be, because this shipping's 140 bucks. Can't see getting a pinball machine shipped to Germany or two here from my house in Michigan from Germany for $140. I don't know, man. They're getting some sweet deals.
    71:20
    It's a lot less than some books that we're going to talk about in this episode. So moving on, our buddy Ed has a TPF update that doesn't sound very promising. Yeah. Did you see that, Matt? I did. Yeah. It kind of sounded like he was covering his bases here, They're just saying that January 8th is the line in the sand of 2021 where they kind of have to know what's going to happen one way or another. And if January 8th is the cutoff, I just don't see it happening. January 5th. Is it January 5th? Yes. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. No, I don't know. We just went back. As of today, we went back into major lockdown again in Michigan where everything's closed. I don't even know if Barlow's Puppy Camp is going to be open. I might be able to drop them off tomorrow. They're going to be like, nope, can't take you. Sorry. I just went and did some major grocery shopping. And so, yeah, everything is spiking again, and, like, I don't see this being cleared up in a month and a half. Right. Yeah, so. Two years of no TPF. That's a bitter pill, man. Matt, have you gone to TPF the last few years? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I love it, man. It's a great show, and it's, hell, it's in March. It's cold and crappy out here in the Midwest, so you go there. It's beautiful. I mean, every time we've gone, just perfect weather. Show's great. It's big. Everybody's nice. It's just, it's great. I missed it for multiple reasons Yeah it's my favorite show And I never It's weird because I get invited to a lot of shows And of course when they say Hey you know free air travel and free hotel and all that I'll go So I've been to a lot of shows And every once in a while it kind of gets on you Like ah you know it seems like I just unpacked from the last one And I'm taking off for another one But I'm telling you man I didn't realize how much I would miss these things Until they get taken away You know it's been a year now And it's just like it feels like, you know, God, I haven't done the one. Like part of my chunk of my life has been removed. Yeah, man, for every hardcore pinhead, really. I mean, this is the best show by far, in my opinion. And I'm just happy that it's happening kind of in advance and they kind of see the writing on the wall so that they're not pouring money into posters and all the stuff they did last time that kind of came back to haunt them. Hopefully they can plan it a little bit better this time. Yeah, definitely. And last but not least, there is some rumors out there about the Pinball Brothers making a comeback. They continue to tease something new on their website, even though it's more, sorry, it's on their Facebook page. But since early October, they've kind of been popping up with little extremely cryptic images of various things. They appear to be just kind of images that are zoomed way in. And then they have like little question marks about what they could be. But they've been doing this for a long time now. And people on their website are kind of getting a little tired of it. And they're saying, there was a guy, John Doington, he wrote, okay, we get it. You know, going to have to unfollow whatever this is soon. And William Gunnett said, is this building to something? Because it's gotten old quickly.
    74:17
    Ian Haberman from the Poor Man's Pinball Podcast put up a bunch of things that said, like, yeah, woohoo, on the last post. And when the Pinball Brothers gave him thumbs up for those comments, he wrote, I was being sarcastic. it seems to me like they need to kind of come out with something else because this is just a little too vague at the moment but i'm excited to see what they're what they're coming with i don't know what's going on here one of the images looks like a muzzle flash from a machine gun then one of them looks like a close-up of ultra man's eye yes then there's that warning you know that black and yellow striped uh warning tape shit like yeah this is all like this tells you nothing there is nothing to go off and of course what they're going to do is like when and they reveal it there and go, see, now this is this. Yeah, but no one ever would have guessed the crappy little one thing that, you know, that's his kneecap. Oh, come on. I used to try and guess the color DMD hints for the next game, but they're so vague that, like, I just gave up, because it's not fun when you have no idea what it could possibly be. And it's kind of like this. But there's rumors that Alien might be coming out, and I know that they will be involved in that. So hopefully we'll hear from them soon if they're teasing it since October, maybe by the end of the year. Yeah. We know some people that are involved in the rumors of that as well. Matt, have you ever done any work for the Pinball Brothers in the past when they did their other games through Highway? Yeah I did stuff with Andrew and everything and some of the other ones that didn get made but we started on For Aliens what did we make We made the eggs for it I did the queen, the full-body one, which we ended up taking off and switching that to the monitor. She just was not in scale with the head next to it. I mean, pinball's never always in scale where you want it to be, but, yeah, it looked goofy to have the queen, like, literally could be eaten by the alien head that was eating the ball right next to it. Right, right. You know, so, yeah, it's, yeah, man, I'd be up for making more parts for that game and getting that phone call and going back with it. I have no objection to any of that. Cool. Sweet. Yeah, and there could be plenty of stuff that he can't stay.
    76:31
    Could be. I could say my pen cryptic just like their Facebook. I know what he pens. That's right. He just talked that way because he had too much rum before the interview. Wait a minute. That's Ultraman's kneecap. I know it. Yeah.
    76:49
    Well, at the end of the day, what they're doing on the Facebook, I just scrolled through it and looked at it. They're getting everybody to talk about it. I mean, you look and half those look spacey and alien-esque-like. I mean, one of them you see zoomed out of it, obviously. Yes. But at the end of the day, people are still talking about it, even if they're saying, oh, I'm going to stop following it. I'm sick of DMTs. Well, yeah. Nobody likes DMTs, you know. No, I totally hear you. And as you said, as I was zooming through that, I'm like, okay, this is space. This could definitely be alien. There was a few zoom-ins of what could be an egg or like a xenomorph of sorts. Well, and at the end of the day, we know the alien does exist. The question is, are they redoing it? You know, are they going to remake it? Are they coming out with it? Do they have more games? Are they going to release more? You know, time will tell, just like everybody's. But as long as everybody's talking and going forward, heck yeah, man. Yeah, man. No press is bad press. Exactly. So, yeah, there are a couple shout-outs that I wanted to throw out there. One is, of course, to Jeff Theolis and Pinball Profile. He put out a video a few weeks ago, I think, saying that he had hit the four-year mark for Pinball Profile. So that is freaking awesome. We were just hitting the one year mark for our show. And I know that he puts out probably, you know, eight times as many episodes as we do every year. So he's he's very prolific. He works really hard. So congrats, man, on hitting four years and for everything you do for the hobby. And then the second one I wanted to throw out was Sunshine Coast Pinball. It had some really cool art that they put on the side of their pinball location in. Yay, art. Yeah. I thought, Franchi, you would you would, you know, have something to say about this because the giant black knight on the side of this thing. Have you ever considered doing anything on that scale or would you ever want to? No. Yeah. No. No, not at all. I've seen what these guys go through and what they have to work with, and it's more math almost than it is anything else because you have to draw a grid and then you have these little printouts and it shows you what's on that square because you can't see. When you're standing a foot away from a wall that's like 30 feet long, you don't get the big picture. You can't sketch on a piece of paper where you can figure anything out. If you tried to paint something without using this technique and you backed up, he's like, you know, his head would be this size, but then he'd have eight long arms and you're like, oh, shit, you know. So, yeah, I do not envy the people that do this, but the people who did this one did a great job. It's really, you know, the colors really pop. You know, the colors are from the game. So, you know, they matched it up really well. I would love to have my art on a building, but I would love not to do it. Right. You know, let somebody, let the professionals, you know, So it's an art all its own. I say let the professionals, just like I don't want, you know, sign painters coming in and going, I'm going to do pinball art, you know, get out, let me handle that, but take my art and go paint this on a building. Definitely cool. This looks great, yeah. I don't know that it sucks people in for pinball because if you don't know who the Black Knight is, it's like, is that a Dungeons and Dragons store or, you know? Right. I think they should have put something like a ball, you know, pinball rolling around and some pop bumpers or something just to say pinball a little bit more. I mean, just from my standpoint as a professional artist, that's what I would have suggested. But nonetheless, it's still cool. Oh, man. And if you know pinball and you're walking by, you're going to geek out big time at that because it's a very recognizable thing if you were into the hobby. Yeah, I could see, like, you and Sarah walking down the sidewalk and you see that and you just don't even say anything. You just veer off. Oh, 100%. You're making your way to the door. Where are you going? You just point at the side of the wall and go, honey black guy when i was a kid in the i heard the ice cream man bells i just basically took a beeline to the ice cream man it didn't matter if they were like four blocks away and i if i had money or not it's just like it draws you in well of course every time i think of that now i think of heavy mercury ice cream one of the psych that's the news but dude thank you so much for coming on it was awesome yeah no thanks for having me guys this is fun have a good one see you bye thanks matt you too see ya bye see ya and we'll be back right after this commercial break with our interview with Joe Rubenstein and Damien Guess from Paper Flock. We'll be right back.
    81:01
    Guess what? I got a fever. I'm the only person. This is the Super Awesome Pinball Show. Oh, yeah! Super. Yeah.
    81:23
    This show is sponsored by Cointaker, distributor of brand new full-size authentic Stern pinball, Chicago gaming, raw thrills, arcade games, and much more. Also, a full line of dramatic pinball mods, LED flipper kits, speaker lights, custom laser LED toppers, playfield protectors, Valley Williams parts, pinball apparel, and much more. Get the latest releases and glam out your game room with Cointaker. Everything at your fingertips at Cointaker.com. Get your game on. It's Wildfire, an electronic pinball game that's pinball fun for most everyone. Hey, beat that score. Wildfire's three-speed ball light. Speed it up. Bumps off bumpers, flips off flippers. Flip too fast, you might lose it.
    82:07
    Wildfire keeps score for up to four players. Six pin-like batteries not included. Wildfire, it's pinball fun for most everyone. Bonus points. Wildfire, from Parker Brothers.
    82:19
    Hey, it isn't flip-flopping. That's right, Everett Wolfgang Musker. And you know what you're listening to? We said, visit the Super Awesome Pinball Show.
    82:31
    Now, back to our program. Well, it's about frickin' time. I am the God of Hellfire, and I bring you... The Super Awesome Pinball Show.
    82:42
    It's a cool show. I'm giving you a long look Every day, every day, every day Every day I write a book Damien Guest and Joseph Rubenstein have spent the last four years making a book that celebrates Stern Pinball's first 30 years as a pinball company. Along the way they've had both setbacks and successes and we want to dive into both as we welcome them onto this super awesome pinball show. Welcome gentlemen. Thank you for having us. Happy to be here. Welcome. Well, we got the introduction done. That's all we need, right? Thanks, guys. And we're out.
    83:32
    So let's start by having you guys tell us a little about yourselves and your backgrounds. I can do that super quick if you'd like. I can start. Still just some theme-y and gas. Oh. my background has been primarily in kind of printing and graphic design for the last 25 years and love pinball one of my uh one of my few hobbies that kind of has me uh i don't know has me stand in one place i'm a pretty energetic guy so i like to move around a lot and do things so yeah pinball is my one thing that i really do enjoy that kind of pulls all the stuff together But yeah, that's me. How long have you been into pinball and do you own games? Oh, I do indeed. Yeah, I own games. One of my earliest memories of pinball is my mom at the coin-op laundry. She's a single mom and my brother and I, raised by her, she'd take us to the laundry and fill our pockets, a bunch of quarters. Okay, go over there and do whatever you need to do. So pull up a little milk crate, play those games and, you know, theater magic. That was my game. That was the game that I really, really liked as a little kid. Yeah, I can remember pinball and the old arcades and the mall and everything like that. It was where you'd go to meet girls and hang out. Yeah, it was pretty cool. I've got fond memories of games, and I do own a few. I've got a small game room at my house and love kind of tricking them out with all the little upgrades and modifications. Great. Damien, you're...
    85:00
    You also, it's sort of like you have multiple brothers, and pinball kind of ties them all together, doesn't it? Oh, yeah. I have two stepbrothers that are, yeah, they're incredible pinball guys that play in league and do that in LA. And Joe's right. I mean, it is something in my family where there's, you know, my dad is a kid actually in England. He grew up on the shore there in England and would go to the old arcades and can remember playing the, you know, five cent kind of bumpy games and loved, loved, loved pinball. So my dad generationally got really excited when he saw me getting into pinball. And then Joe's right. I have brothers that have gotten into league and then, you know, have subsequently traveled around the country to go play in tournaments and stuff. So he's right. It's kind of a thing that ties our family together. There's a few brothers that aren't 100% in it like I am. But, you know, overall, yeah, we're a pinball family. Good call. Cool. How about you, Joe? What's your background in pinball? My background? The reason I got involved in this is really because of Damien.
    86:01
    but my dad and I used to play pinball when I was really young and then I didn't play it for a long time and then maybe 10 years ago I started getting back into it and we bought a Game of Thrones machine when Game of Thrones came out and we were really into the show and it's been a bonding thing between me and my girlfriend and a lot of my friends and when we could go out we used to go out a lot. One of the few places we would go out a lot was to go play pinball. Prior to doing this project for Stern Pinball, have you guys worked together on any other book projects or individually? No, we came together 100% over this project. Actually, Joe lived above my brother in downtown LA. So with his skill set being in video production and prior having done some really successful Kickstarter ventures, when my brother shared with Joe that I was doing this, I believe that's how we kind of made the connection. And then I met with Joe a couple of times when we talked over the project and decided to jump off the cliff together. Now, is that how Paper Flock started or was Paper Flock something that you had already kind of created and had done something with before this? Good question. No, Paper Flock was made to do this project. All right. Did you guys have like a list of ideas and you narrowed it down to the pinball book or was it just let's do a pinball book. Yeah, no, I had actually decided to do the book, or at least I thought in my mind, you know, I was very idealistic at that point. I'm like, I met Jody Dankberg at a CES conference in Las Vegas. I just had a pass. I was there with a friend who was working and wanted to go see their booth because I'd seen it on Instagram or Facebook or something and said, hey, I'm going to go check out this booth, walked over, ended up having some light conversation with people and then kind of honed in on Jody Dankberg because of his title with his licensing. I am King Shit of Buck Mountain.
    87:58
    And I was like, hey, so you do the pinball. At that time, I was looking to kind of try to do a little bit more merchandise with new clients. So I saw Stern as maybe a potential in my day job to, you know, work with them on merchandise stuff, like T-shirts and physically printed posters and those kinds of things. So I thought I was doing that, and it ended up kind of being, wow, so there's no books like this, and I just wanted to make a book. So Joe helped me get that turned into a reality. That's cool. I mean, I guess you kind of answered why Stern was your initial choice, but at any point did you think about maybe doing a more all-encompassing book of the pinball world, or was it always just we want to focus on Stern? Yeah, focus on Stern, I think, primarily because of the energy around Stern at that time. the resurgence of pinball seemed so much kind of like squarely in, you know, a lot of efforts that I saw Stern doing. And they had this long, beautiful history. And we're obviously still here so that, you know, we can still talk to them and kind of collect all the stuff. So it felt the most viable to me, I guess. Yeah. And I think at the time, it was like Stern was the last of the bigger companies that had come, you know, from previous generations. And there were a few smaller startups, but even Jersey Jack seemed really small at the time when we first started this project. Yeah, for sure. And if you're going to, you know, write a book on someone, you need to have, you know, some history there, right? Yeah, you got it. So what was Stern's reaction when you came to them and talked to, say, Jody about the book idea when you originally presented it? It was kind of like the secondary thing. It was a personal thing. Obviously, the professional pursuit was like, wow, this is Stern Pinball. They don't have, you know, a single vendor for doing that kind of stuff. So it just felt like that was my primary responsibility was like, hey, maybe I can get these guys to do all their printing with us. And in the process of going to Chicago and kind of presenting like a traveling salesman kind of would, that was my first decision to kind of go there and see them. And then I can tell you after being at the factory, I had been there one time prior for a Chicago pinball factory tour. And that's where it also hit me, I was like, man, they're not pushing people through a gift shop here at the end. You know, there wasn't an opportunity to buy a bunch of cool merchandise or cool swag. And I thought that that was kind of a missed opportunity. So Jody and I set out on that. And then while being there and just surrounded by all the personalities and getting to actually see the game development process and see the way it was done, it just it started to kind of hit me that like, oh, there's, you know, a personal and a professional play here. And they were very open to it. When I first brought it up to Jody, he was like, that sounds like a really, really, really cool idea. And we just kind of pursued it very lightheartedly from there. And it slowly but surely kept getting footing. And we just made it happen. So they were really open to it at first. Maybe not Gary Stern. Gary Stern was like, have you made a book? Do you write books? Have you ever done this before? One of those kinds of things. They're like, no, Gary, I've never made a book. I've never done any of these things. He's like, why the hell would I let you write my book? Oh, well, I'm just going to try really hard, and I love what I'm doing, and it would be a labor of love. He kind of, all right, go for it. It's a valid point that he makes because you guys, you know, that's a big amount of access that they gave you with all the interviews and the access to everything that they had. So they really put a lot of faith in you. Was that intimidating? It was a little bit. And Joe, I can be honest, Joe is my business partner. Joe would make asks of things and help kind of push us down the path and get access to things that it was a tall ask man and they handled it with a lot of grace because we did go back and keep asking for more and need to be there and you know getting in the way and those kinds of things so it definitely was it was handled really gracefully. They let us take over entire rooms to shoot all the interviews on video so that we could do updates along the way and they would just let us into their sort of attic room where all the blueprints and archive stuff was, and we could just go through all that crazy stuff. They probably should have had somebody monitoring us. They made us find the non-competes and non-disclosures. So at that point, you know, we knew that they were trusting us, and we trusted them to, you know, to give us the time to kind of do this. And Joe's right. We had, you know, kind of unfettered access to anything and everything. And even to the point that when we got past the physical dusty boxes of things, you know, I ended up getting access to their backup servers and just bringing in hard drives and staying there, no joke, until like, you know, 1 o'clock in the morning, just going through thousands of folders trying to find things. So, yeah, there's a great history there of stuff, but it was kind of daunting. I think after I pulled from their hard drives, I had over 100,000 files to sort through. So I can remember at one point doing those file search, and I was like, okay, what's on this hard drive? Let's see what I'm doing. And it was like 100 and some thousand things. And I was like, what have I done?
    93:01
    And when you guys set out to do a book, you wanted to do the 30th anniversary of Stern. Was it always intended to be a game-by-game type book? And if so, was there any point during the process that you said, we made a mistake, maybe we should have just made a nice book about the 30th anniversary of Stern? Yeah. So when we first started, you know, Jody and people there told us, oh, yeah, there are these essentially historians who have, you know, thousands and thousands of 35-millimeter slides that they've taken over decades, you know, documenting these machines, the events, the whole thing. And it turns out that the slides and negatives were, and we found this out after the Kickstarter completed, by the way. They were like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We talked to him. He said, yeah, you can use my photos. The fee would be this. And we agreed to it. And then after the Kickstarter ended, I was like, okay, well, you want to box up all the photos and send them to me? Should I fly out? Like, how do we get this going, right? And he's like, oh, yeah, well, I think we have to send them to somebody who repairs negatives and slides. And I was like, why? Well, because they all went through not one but two different floods in my basement. No.
    94:18
    Can't wait to get my hand on those after. So they were stuck. So I had them send me some cell phone pictures of it. And they were all, like, stuck inside their plastic sleeves. It will never come out. without being completely destroyed. So when we started, we had this idea that there was going to be images of every machine, many images of every machine from every angle we could possibly want. That's kind of what we were being told. And that Stern had documentation of the machines also for their flyers. It turns out Stern's images are all like 400 pixels tall, and they don't have the negatives anymore. So they do have pictures of all the machines, but they're all like completely unusable. for the book, right? Nothing that could print. Nothing that was print-worthy. So everything they had initially thought that you could use, 0% of it was usable? 0%. You get nothing! You lose! Good day, sir! Zero. Did you get your slide feedback? We never paid them. So we were in this position where we were like, well, we want to document these games properly, and we want to document all of them. Let's see how long it's going to take for us to go to these different pinball museums, fly around the country, bring a photographer, bring these huge lighting setups and a couple of people and move these machines around so they're isolated and photograph them, which takes like an hour and a half per machine. I don't know, Damien, you want to talk about that part? Yeah, I mean, it's definitely it's a full on process. I mean, depending on what you're doing, you obviously have to carry the machine or move the machine, obviously on rollers. You guys know all that stuff with carts. Anybody who loves pinball knows that it's a physically difficult sport to kind of just get into when you're moving things around. So we had the task of moving all the machines into place, and it definitely takes. I would say that we got it down when we were really in rhythm with like three or four people, two people going and getting games, lining them up. We'd put them on sliders and then roll them or slide them rather into the kind of like the backdrop, which is just a huge piece of white paper rolls down. You'd put them on little furniture sliders. You'd slide the 300-pound monster into place. You'd do a front shot, side shot. We had to get keys to every single game, obviously, to take the glass out, to put the lock bars back on so you didn't end up with reflection. And then you had to bring in a ladder, step up the ladder, do the shot down to get the play field from overhead. And then you'd do the left, right sides, and maybe like two dozen detail shots. So I think we got it down at the end, and we're really cruising to being able to do two machines in about an hour. But it was starting to get to that point where you'd limit the amount of detail shots you were doing, because you're like, oh, my God, we've got to get to these other 30 machines, and they're going to turn the lights off in two hours. When you think about how to photograph a pinball machine, because I come from a photography background, it's like you're photographing an object that mirrors on six sides. You know what I mean? Like, how do you photograph something with a strobe light? Don't get the strobe light in it. Don't get the camera in it. Don't get yourself in it. You know what I mean? They're quite hard to photograph in a really dynamically, photographically strong way. And that's why most of these books, trust me, we bought every book that we could on pinball that had photos of a pinball machine in it. We just went on eBay, went on Amazon, went everywhere we could and bought every single one of them before we started this process. And they're all snapshots. They're all like flash photography. Yeah, somebody went into a pinball hall with usually a 35-millimeter film camera with a flash stuck on the top of it, and that's not at all what we did. We set up like six lights and huge backgrounds, pulled the glass out, you know, altered the machines. You know, we had to bring the back glass forward 15 degrees so you could photograph the entire machine. Like every single machine was done, and we had to learn how to do those because you can't go, hey, hey, how do you photograph a pinball machine? Nobody has that documentation out there, right? So we had to learn the hard way the first few times and get it wrong and then go back and reshoot those machines again. And, like, it's a long and difficult process that basically nobody else has done. Yeah, it's very hard. We're the makers of the pinball machines. So were you at one specific location, or how many places did you have to travel to get all these games? Ultimately, I ended up visiting not only the biggest of the big collections that I think, if you love pinball, you know about. There's the Banning Pinball Museum, which is just an incredible collection. And we gained access, like unprecedented access. They gave us the keys and essentially just dropped us off at 8 in the morning and said, we'll see you tonight at 6 or 7 when we come back to get the keys. So, yeah, we did that. Robert Burke, who has an incredible collection, Burke Enterprises, he helped us out a lot. Video Amusement in San Francisco was able to find a handful of games. Vintage Arcade Superstore in Glendale, California, he was able to find us a few of the games. And then we traveled to Vegas for the Pinball Hall of Fame. Vegas, baby, Vegas!
    99:30
    So those were the largest, you know, kind of places that we went to collect all of the games. And some of them being warehouses, some of them being people's homes, their personal homes, where they'd invite us into their basements or garages to shoot. But, yeah, it was a collection of about seven, seven different locations. I have to think with what you thought was going to be this, you know, treasure trove of media, you know, basically laid out and like, okay, let's just organize this and get it going. Having that taken away and realizing you're starting from square one and you have to photograph everything, that's going to set back all of your timelines and blow your deadline. And if you thought you were originally going to be able to, you know, bring this book out in a year and it's taken as long as it has i'm kind of curious why you never really conveyed the setback to all the kickstarter people so they perhaps would be a little more understanding on why it took the time that it did to get the book together sorry to interrupt but in your answer can you tell us when you thought initially it would come out yeah i mean as far as what do you mean as far as how long we thought it was going to take us yeah what was your estimate of time i think we well we started in the october during the chicago pinball uh expo that's when we launched the Kickstarter, and then we essentially had it close out just before Christmas, if I recall correctly. So, you know, you're talking October to December, or right there at the end of 2016. And I think we told people that it was going to take us about six months to pull all this together and produce a book. Does that sound right, Joe? It was something like that. I think so. Yeah. Yeah, it was something in that ballpark. We thought that it would take us maybe, you know, half of the year or something into the next calendar year. So that obviously ended up being 2017. And yeah, I think that we thought, obviously, with what Joe shared before, that it was going to be a much easier path. And then to your prior question, I don't think I ever answered it. I mean, there were definitely multiple points along that very, you know, kind of discovery phase portion of this in the beginning when we realized we'd have to figure it out, that it was pretty daunting you know i mean a how do you go find all the games b are they in any condition that you can actually feel good about taking these photographs and how do you get access to it you know how do you get the people to let you in so there are definitely times that you're like what have we done like what we do you bail do you just quit and as far as communicating that i don't know exactly why that didn't get communicated initially i don't think we thought it was as dire a kind of situation to be honest we did communicate it i don't think that we said it in such dire terms yeah there was an update about the photo resource being not usable and stuff like that but i think i don't think it's a particularly memorable thing we posted 50 plus updates right yeah so and at the time when we posted it we didn't know like oh this is going to take three more years or whatever so what was that biggest delay was it the photos or were there other other major hurdles that took the three additional years that you weren't factoring in? I mean, so many hurdles.
    102:28
    There was many months at a time where Stern just wouldn't call us back. You know, we said we had all this great access, and that's true, but we didn't have it 100% of the time. And it wasn't all in a row. It was definitely not all in a row, yeah. Yeah, so there was times where we were like, okay, we need to come in and do X, Y, and Z, and then we just wouldn't, like, no response for six months, you know, that kind of thing. So there was a lot of time lost for various things. And, you know, this obviously isn't a full-time job for either one of us. So we both had full-time jobs along the way also. And I think the biggest problem that we had with the Kickstarter community or the pinball community with this project, you know, granted it took a long time, but is that when we went through our backers, something like 60 or 70% of them, this was their first time they backed a Kickstarter project. And, you know, it's not like pre-ordering a book or pre-ordering a product from an established company. We're building the company. We're two guys, you know, doing the best we can with full-time jobs. Kickstarter is kind of like you're on the journey with all the bumps and everything, but it was a little bit, you know, aggressive out of the gate. So we didn't post as much about the difficulties we had because there was a lot of, I think, misunderstanding about that and concern that we were going to steal their money and never make a book and things like that. So, you know, we had to moderate how open we were with some of that communication, unfortunately, because, you know, there was a lot of tension and other things going on. But I think a big part of that is a lot of these people had just never gone through the Kickstarter process before, which is you run into delays. You know, some Kickstarter projects are very late and some are only a little late, you know, and those are the two options. And some of them never get done. And some of them never get done at all. To that same effect of, you know, like, hey, what took so long? I can definitely speak to the, you know, kind of the awareness that kind of came to me at a couple of times when it was, man, I was a lot of the creative drive for this. And I had, I just had a personal kind of expectation myself in setting out to this, not only to honor, you know, Stern and especially like Gary and his legacy and what he's done and create something that I personally would be really, really appreciate and really enjoy. And therefore, to me, it needed a lot of depth. It needed a lot of detail. And I wanted to cover, Joe and I wanted to cover the primary pieces of this, the story being one. And then the documentation of all the games did become, you know, for me, a very, you know, kind of very important mission in this was I got 91 games. I have to go find these 91 games to document them because Stern hasn't even done this. No one has done this. It made it feel like I'm doing something for the first time and it has never been done. And there's that feeling of like, oh, yeah, I'm going to be the first. And then that realization of like, oh, this is Everest, man. Like there's training for this. You have to be willing to sacrifice your weekends, your weeks. You have to spend hours on the phone. You have to schedule a document. You have to do a lot of the work just to get the opportunity. And then when you go there, you're shooting thousands of photographs. And then all of those photographs obviously needed to be color corrected. Every single photo got cut out, retouched. We did a lot of work post on almost every photo we shot. And then marrying all of that together when I realized I couldn't just make, you know, 250 pages. We'd already set out, by the way, to say we're making a 200 plus page book. So when our assets started dwindling, but our aspirations were to make like this really, really great book, it was kind of a normaling of the two. And it was like, OK, yeah, this is really going to be this is going to be difficult, you know. And I think never giving up was more important than the time. I just wanted to succeed. Yeah. I mean, how did you justify that? Because you were saying, you know, as your as your resources started to dwindle and I assume some of those are financial. You guys are starting off with a set number of dollars that were given to you by Kickstarters. How do you say, okay, not only are we not going to do what we did initially, but we're going to build on that and continue to make this book even better with finite resources?
    106:57
    Yeah, I mean, we had to really plan really, really well and do our best to not waste any money. And both of us, especially Damien, lost money on it, basically. We put our own dollars in to make it happen. Right. Yeah, there's just no way out, man. You just don't let the dream die, kind of. And it's like, whatever you have put into it, you do it. And especially when you've gotten so far along, like maybe we had at that time, you know, like certain pieces of this or the story part was going really well, or I finally got this cool box of stuff from John Borg or somebody would bring something to the table just when your spirits were feeling like they were being, you know, just kind of exhausted. You know, it's like, oh, man, Joe Camico sent this new box of things. Like, or, again, you know, somebody would do something. Greg Ferris would have something for the need. And it just, there were always these little things that just kind of kept pushing you. But there were some, there were definitely some dark, dark times of like, okay, here's the credit card. Let's just keep paying for it. Or, hey, this thing didn't work. Let's redo it. Yep, just a lot of personal expectation not to, you know, not to do this anything but the best. As you guys said that you had wonderful access to Stern and also the big names that are at Stern. You had interviews with Gary Stern, Steve Ritchie, George Gomez, John Borg. How long were these interviews? How long did you sit down with each of these people? Did you get the time that you wanted? And at the same time, was there anything interesting that you discovered that really surprised you during these interviews that you can share with us? I'll take the first part, which is they actually let us interview just about everybody twice. when Damien and I went out there the first time it was before the Kickstarter launched and we sat down and Damien did the interviews and I ran the camera and we sort of asked all of those names that you mentioned about their personal experiences with pinball and sort of general not real like point by point story of certain pinball but sort of their involvement in the pinball world and those interviews were probably about half an hour each And then after the Kickstarter was over, we hired the writer, Zach, and we flew Zach down from Canada, and Damian and I flew over. And then we took over a much larger room, set up more cameras and more light, and did more like hour-long, really as long as they needed to be, interviews with everybody over again. And this time, Zach ran the interviews and really asked point-by-point questions. and he had done research so that he could, you know, kind of know the narrative along the way and try and fit each person's story into sort of a puzzle piece that made sense together with the narrative he was building. So those interviews were much more extensive. Now, in the process, you know, everyone knows you obviously would have interviewed John Trudeau at the time, who was a game designer at Stern. But he's since run into some creepy trouble, shall we say, in prison time. Are his contributions still in the book? And if so, was there any discussion with Stern about possibly removing those parts? There were some parts removed, not a whole lot. He's still in the book. Obviously, the games that he designed are still in the book, and he's still part of the story. But there was some things removed at the request of Stern. So, like, the unnecessary colorful parts may be taken out just so the basic technical information is provided? Yeah, just the more personal, you know, his more personal. Yeah. So, John, what do you do on the weekend? Well, I edit. Yeah, that. Edit.
    110:22
    Edit. Cut. Edit. The book and this interview. So, outside of that, what was your favorite interview to do? George Coleman. Are you feeding us? That's my guess. There wasn't Chuck Trudeau. Chuck Trudeau does give a good interview. What was your favorite, Damien? I think, I mean, personally, I mean, and I know that I heard it, but, I mean, I think George is incredible to listen to. I think he's incredibly well-spoken. He's very eloquent. He's got such depth in his accomplishments in the industry, as well as just his personal passion comes through. But I get that from all of those guys in different ways. But I love George's interview, and I love Borg's interview, too, man. I vibe well with John, and he tells a good story, and he's been around for a lot of them. Yeah, John Borg was great. I think my favorite might than Steve Ritchie just because he just does not give a fuck.
    111:21
    He's very candid, that's for sure. And that's kind of the, you know, as an interviewer, that's kind of the interviewee that you hope for, you know, is the person who just will put it out there and, you know, do Terminator impressions and just does not care. Yes. So in all of your research and your interviews and whatever, Or can you guys boil it down to, you know, one or two things that really stood out that you never knew about Stern that really blew your mind or you found very interesting? I mean, just the fact that they've made all these incredible games. And when you think about it in terms of, like, number, I guess, like, in my mind, I'm like, man, I'm a pinball manufacturer. Like, what do you mean you don't have one of every game you've made? You don't have one of every game you've made? Like, come on. That was probably my, like, aha moment there, you know. Right?
    112:10
    What about you, Joe? I think it's something I didn't know about. You know, even after doing research before going over, I didn't really know about Shelly and how integral she was. Shelly Sachs? Yeah, Shelly Sachs. Throughout the whole life of the business from basically day one, I think, she was there. And so we interviewed her also, and a lot of her interview felt like a different point of view to me. because, you know, I think Gary and the designers, they sort of see it from one angle, but Shelley Sacks is sort of the, like, unspoken hero behind the scenes that you don't really hear from but is always there making the machine run. That's really beautiful, Joe. I'm happy you said that because she was just so graceful through this whole process. And, yeah, she's amazing. The unsung hero. I wanted to talk, I mean, obviously we really want to focus on the content of the book, But some of the other things that we wanted to touch on briefly were some of the stretch goals that you guys had on your Kickstarter initially and some of the unique ideas that you had just from the pro premium LE version of the book ideas. But a lot of the stuff that you had in your stretch goals, like, you know, some full color fold outs. You had a translucent pages to reveal how a play field is populated layer by layer. You had some pins in there and a zombie yeti art print. All of that is really cool. And even though you didn make those stretch goals it sounds like you still tried to pursue all of those things Is that right Yeah obviously We were excited about all of those ideas and we wanted to do all of them and it became you know how much is this going to cost and what is the practicality of it, and all that kind of thing. So some of them, like the pinball play field, transparent images, were beyond our scope, unfortunately. Everything else, we tried to find a way to... Why don't you get out the charge card for that, you cheap bastards?
    114:02
    My charge card doesn't go that high. Yeah, exactly. So did you complete all the other ones, though? Is the Zombie Yeti art print coming with it and the pins and all that stuff, or is that additional? They're available for people to add as add-ons through the backer kit system, but, you know, they're not automatic. Got it. Talk to us about Slash's involvement, because that was kind of a really unique thing about this book, is that you had different tiers, and one of the special editions was Slash, and you had the Slash edition of the book. How did you guys get him involved in the process? Yeah, so one of my friends, Mandy, is just part of that world.
    114:46
    And we were just trying to think of who we could get, you know, bring in that maybe non-pinball people would have heard of and things like that. and kind of honed in on Slash being the sort of most celebrity-oriented person that also was just super, super passionate about pinball and even went as far as help design a game. And, yeah, so our friend Mandy put us in touch with him, and we sent him over a proposal for him to write the foreword and do a Slash version of the book, and he was excited to do it. Slash! he's just this um you know you picture this like guy where you can't see his eyes he's like you know sort of like belting out these crazy electric guitar melodies in in in this guitar hero fashion but his office is like full of dinosaur sculptures and pinball machines and spaceships and he's the biggest nerd basically right and he just was really excited to be involved and pretty much just happy to be involved all the way through to the end when we showed him the book and he just uh you know he was in a meeting with somebody else talking about he has a movie making company a production company and he was in a meeting with somebody else came out to see the book and bent probably 20 30 minutes with me looking at the book and letting his people at the meeting just wait for him while he checked out the pinball book because he was so excited to hold it and see it. That's what she said!
    116:25
    Yeah, he was just a great guy all the way through. I gotta think the timing of that was most unfortunate with Jersey Jack releasing their Guns N' Roses right at the time that you guys said, hey guys, the books are ready. Oh my god. We got the Slash edition. Oh, oh. Gary's probably like, god damn it. There was a little of that. It was dark.
    116:47
    There was a moment like that. But I sent an email over that was like, you know, from my point of view, this shows that Flash isn't on one team or the other. He's just a general fan of all things pinball. And putting this out at the same time is kind of an endorsement of that fact. He's not playing for one side or the other. You know, like he took an opportunity because why not? Sure. But, you know, I think he's still a big fan of Stern. And I know for a fact because he owns all the new Stern Pinball games. Not all of them, but a lot of the new Stern Pinball games. So I know he's a fan of all the games. I was very happy to see it. I was talking with you guys when this first kicked off, and we were talking about me doing the cover of the Slash book, and somehow that fell apart. I don't know what happened, but my memory is so poor these days that, you know, somehow that broke down. I don't know what happened. But I was very happy to see that when I saw the artwork for the book, that it was the little sketch that I sent you guys. Like, here's my idea for a book cover. And so somebody actually executed that idea. So I still feel like I was a little part of that. Like, you know, it was my design. It wasn't my artwork, but it was my design. So I feel good about that. That's nice. That was definitely your, that was the inspiration, 100%. You nailed it with that sketch for sure. Now, did Slash do the foreword for all of the books, or was it just the Slash edition that he was involved in? He's in all of the books. Oh, cool. Yeah, the only thing different about the four books is literally just the dust jackets. This edition is all the same book, just the four different jackets. But the innards are all the same. So that means if I say I feel I need a Slash dust jacket because it was my idea, I can then get that, put it on my book, and then go, I got the Slash edition. Right? No?
    118:28
    I think that can work. I think that works. We don't have any extras. Shut up, kid. The only difference is the Slash editions are signed by Slash. So if you did that, you'd have to fake a signature or something. Right. Well, obviously the last thing you guys wanted to do was, you know, have more work to deal with. But at any point, did you think just because of the timeline that it took for you guys to actually come to fruition on this book that you might want to add in the games that had come out after the 30th anniversary? Or is that just too much to even think about? It wasn't in the contract. And as this got more, you know, got further and further along, it was like, hey, let's just get done what we agreed to get done. So it really stopped just before, it stopped right at the right time, where they were comfortable, we were comfortable, it was supposed to be a manageable chunk of games, and yeah, those other games, I mean, did not obviously get added. So we had thought about it, but at that time it would have been kind of starting back up the whole process of content creation when really we went through the whole process of shooting the entire factory, getting the story written, getting all the archival and historical photographs together, and then doing all the individual game shots as well as coordinating all of those images. So to kind of turn that back up and go back to the starting line just didn't feel very viable. Yeah. I've worked on several documentaries, films, and you always have to pick that date at which the story ends. And sometimes it seems arbitrary, but if you don't pick a date where the story ends, then it never finishes. You know what I mean? because they're going to just keep making games. So if we keep adding the new game, by the time we've finished adding the last games, they'll have new games for us to add. And they'll just never end. When you're crafting this kind of project, you always have to, that's our end date. It's hard, but you have to stick to it. How many games are included in the book? 91. 91? Okay. All the games that actually made it to the factory production line. There are games that did not, obviously, that we saw and found in the archives, but games that were produced. Sure. And of the 91, what was the most difficult to track down, and what's the story behind that? I love it, man. It came down to, of all the games, the very last game that I needed to find was the NBA game and the NFL game that were both made during the Stern era, like the modern Stern era. NFL and NBA. I could not find those games anywhere. They were not on location. They were in none of those larger collections that I mentioned before. So that was the last two holdouts. Wow. Yeah, and I did end up, I mean, just for, this is no exaggeration, I drove from L.A. to San Francisco to go to Video Amusement in the Bay Area just to shoot those two games, NBA and NFL. They had them both. Nice. They had them both. Yeah, and that's a coin operator. So, I mean, he puts games on location. and yeah he was he gave us access to his warehouse it was uh 34 35 degrees in december no no heat in there and he's like have a nice day it was like oh boy here we go and and plus he was like yeah i think nfl's back there and it was like you know a row of like 40 pinball machines to get to it you're like oh my god what have i done to myself well guys at the end of all of this, you know, it's obviously been a lot of hard work and you have a 250 page book where you started off thinking it would just be 200, covering 30 years, you did 91 games. How are you feeling about the end result? I'm personally incredibly happy with this. I mean, I put hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours into this and this for me fulfills what I set out to do. I really believe that when people get this book or get to see it, that they'll see the time, they'll see the attention to detail, the labor of love that went into this, and just how much we both really love the game and everybody who's made it to keep it alive. So yeah, I think we're stoked. We love it. Did you get to play a lot of these games as you were photographing them and all that? Because I'm just curious, of all these Stern games, what ended up being your favorite since you got such a chance to be exposed to pretty much every Stern title? If we had honestly played every game or tried to play every game, this would have taken another year. We did not allow ourselves to play the games. We plugged them in strictly to get a lighted version of the play field and then a non-lighted version. And again, taking every single game, getting its location, taking off the lock bar, taking out the glass, putting it back in, dusting them down, wiping every machine down because they're not all kept beautiful. I think my favorite Old game, though, I really got to enjoy Phantom of the Opera. I did play that because I hadn't played that game a lot. And the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game is actually kind of a cool game as well. So I played a few, but I kept it limited and just kept working. The last point we really, I mean, we want to talk about a couple more things, but the biggest thing that we wanted to just touch on because it's the, you know, the topic du jour is all the shipping stuff that's been going on. So, you know, you guys have finally reached the end of the tunnel. and now the last, of course, bit of drama is that the shipping costs that were quoted in the initial Kickstarter have gotten dramatically bigger. And I know you, on Pinside or on some of your updates, I think it said that that's partly because the dimensions of the book have changed and that sort of thing. But people have pointed out that some people are paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars to get these books shipped out to them. Can you guys touch on that? Why the change? What happened? Yeah, I'll tackle that. I don't think anyone's paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars. If you got a jacket, a printer, the poster strips in a separate tube, the book, the T-shirt, and all that kind of stuff, and you're shipping it to, you know, Checklist of Bakia, then your shipping might be $120 or something like that. But basically, what was supposed to originally happen was, you know, four years ago, Backerkit had a system for doing the distribution. We just get all the product to Backerkit, and Backerkit handles not only the charging of the money, but also the actual shipping. And since COVID, their system is no longer in place. So our distribution plan went out the window. Like everything else in this project, you know, there was something completely different that we had to deal with. And a lot of people have said, oh, why don't you send it for $5 via media mail? But the deal is we made 500 of these books for 444 people, and some of those 444 people ordered 10 books. So there's not really extra books out there. And if we sent a whole bunch of stuff via media mail for $5 and it didn't get there, we don't have anything to replace it with, you know? So we have to treat these things like these sort of one-of-a-kind art pieces that they are. So from that point of view is where we started our shipping adventure. And what we decided was we were going to pick the cheapest thing that we could do both domestically and internationally. Medium mail doesn't go international. That we could also insure and also track and also get a signature confirmation if we wanted to. So we said, what's the cheapest way to do that? And it was a priority mail for a flat rate large box because the book just won't fit into the medium box. And you can look up the prices of what USPS flat rate. You know, we added a few bucks for, you know, bubble wrap, mailer, and other things that we want to protect the book with. But really, the prices of our shipping are pretty much the prices on USPS.com. And I posted, hey, here's all the shipping for all the different countries. And you're welcome to compare because, you know, we just don't want to ship out 400, 500 of these things and 100 of them get lost. And we just say, well, we don't have anything to replace them with. And there's no hope of redoing a reprint for 100 books. Right. Now, I know I read one Pinside post. I believe it was a guy from England said that his bill was $600 just for the shipping. That's not accurate at all.
    126:44
    No. I promise there's nobody over like $120 or $130. If you send me that person's information, I will tell you what their actual shipping is because zero people have $600 shipping. Zero people have $600 shipping. All I would know was a pin-side handle. That wouldn't help you. It doesn't have people's actual names on it. Yeah. If they want to write in to me and say, hey, my shipping is $600, maybe there's some weird glitch. You know, unless the backer kit system screwed it up royally, there's nobody that has anything that high. Nowhere near it. Anything else that you guys could potentially do? Because I know that, I'm sure you've racked your brains, and we're not going to break through any ground you haven't already treaded on, but have you toyed with the idea of digital editions for people who don't want the physical copy because they just can't afford the shipping, or any other ways to get around those high fees? Yeah, the way around it is you can ask for a refund. We didn't want to go that route, but we are honoring them, And it seems like for every person that wants a refund, we now have a waiting list of people who want an opportunity to get the book that didn't join in on the Kickstarter. So actually, for every person that's asked for a refund, we've gotten somebody else who was excited to get the book that never got a chance to sign up for the Kickstarter. So they're rare. Like I said, there's 500 of them. There's 444 backers. Many of the backers got multiple books. And they're a rare commodity. And I honestly think the book is worth more than the $55 that we charged. If it was at Barnes & Noble or something, it'd be $75 or more. And I think, especially this edition of the book, we're not going to do a reprint of this exact edition of 500. You know, if we do get distributed or do a reprint down the road, they're going to be different. You know, there'll be changes to the book. So I believe that this version will be worth more money down the road, just like a lot of things of rarity are. and I think it'll be worth it to pay the shipping. There are a lot of expensive toys in this hobby that people are absolutely willing to pay for and all sorts of expensive mods and that sort of thing. So I'm sure there's going to be a buyer base, especially if it's limited. But one of the things that people look at and they say, you know, if this is going to be limited, then it's worth the investment. But if these guys go out and they print, you know, a bunch of books, even if it's slightly different, it may not be worth as much. Ideally, what would you guys want to do? Would you want to go out and if you could mass produce this with a major publisher? Yeah, that's our first goal. And I think that's best for us and best for the community is basically that we sell or license the IP to a major company who does this all the time, right? Because we like being involved in the IP and I think Damien especially is really good at doing a lot of the IP stuff, but it's never been fun for us to deal with any of the logistics, right? And so a much better situation for everybody involved, including us and including the end user, is for a publishing company to be in charge of all the logistics and the printing and the distribution and all the stuff that is difficult that people don't really want to do. And that just wasn't going to happen before the Kickstarter, right? But now that we've produced, hopefully, an interesting book and shown that there is at least some interest in it, hopefully we can take it to the distributor and say, listen, we did a Kickstarter. We ran 500 books. We sold out completely. And this is the quality level. And, you know, please take this on as our distribution partner. To make everybody happy, just do the publisher version as a soft cover only. And then you avoid all of that. And then you'll sell more, too. Yeah. I was just going to ask that, too, from the standpoint, because, I mean, what is it about, like, I mean, this edition has so many unique things to it that would never be pushed into the other thing, i.e. there's a two-page spread of everyone's Kickstarter backer handle, so, like, individuals are listed by name in this book. you know, there's that acknowledgement page. And then just the detail, like there's a blind deboss of the logo on the cover. We did a soft touch. I used, well, Joe and I used like premium, premium paper on all these things. I just, I think that this in itself is just such a high version. And as Joe said, so limited. What would the fear be of another hard copy book? I guess just because it's the same content made available to everybody. Yeah, you've got to put it in pinball perspective. Because this is a book, but it's in the pinball world. And, you know, let's put a pinball machine as the analogy. If you get a Jersey Jack, you know, Wizard of Oz machine, the people who went in on those initially were really stoked that they had the limited versions of the, you know, collector's edition and model of that. And then there have been multiple iterations ever since then where there's been just minor, you know, minor changes, maybe trim color, that sort of thing. But it's essentially the same game. So the people who bought those limited editions felt like they might have, you know, not gotten quite the limited access to that game that they thought they had. And for some people in pinball, that's really important. I think that what Damien is saying is that the way that we printed this book, not just the small trim things, but the way that the thickness of the pages, it's a collector edition, small run print book. And if this was reprinted by a major publisher, they would not do a small run sort of art book the way that we have printed it. the actual materials will be completely different, whether the cover is hard or not. And to be honest, that's not going to be up to us as IP providers. You know what I mean? We're going to say, here's the IP. They're going to say, here's the money. And then they're going to do whatever they want with it, right? And what they want is probably going to be pretty drastically different from what we put out, both in material and maybe even in content. You know, like they could have somebody go through and rearrange chapters and do a lot of the graphic design over or, you know, whatever they want at that point. it'll be up to them. And I guarantee they're not going to just say, oh, yeah, finished. It's perfect the way it is. We're going to send it off to printer. And we're going to use the same printer you used, right? Like, it's just not going to happen. I've got the solution. You can make the mass production book no photos. Oh, no, we can't do it. Can't do it. Make all the photos black and white.
    132:59
    Black and white. Oh, no. It's the newsprint edition. Right. In the book world, the first edition of any book, it does hold, you know, a lot more value than stuff printing. So I get that. I was just going to say, too, with the signatures, I think for Joe and I, it also dawned on us when he's in Los Angeles with Flash signing, you know, these books and even sitting around the table and getting John Borg and getting Gary Stern and getting Steve Ritchie and George Gomez to sign all of these books. If you have one of these books with signatures, for sure, there's no question, like in 2020, there is no other opportunity to get any of these individual signatures. You know, we haven't seen them. They're not out. There are no mass gatherings. So, you know, just to get Slash's signature on there and these guys' signatures, any of those, I think they're going to end up being pretty collectible just for that fact alone because of the year that this actually ended up, you know, kind of coming to fruition. Yeah, right. You know, I'm glad you brought that up because I wanted to ask. Originally, this book was promoted as including John Trudeau's signature, which is obviously not going to be in there. Was anything put in his place or was his signature just minused out of the selection? Yeah, minused out. Well, I know you guys are both really happy with the end result and you're getting a lot of things filled together like the pins and other extras. But obviously, you're hesitant about giving us timelines at this point. But do you think people will have these books by Christmas or what do you think in terms of when people actually get their hands on them? Yeah. So we have some production stuff left to do. I'm talking to China every single night at 2 in the morning about getting pins made. That's the only place you can get pins made, you know, for people who say, oh, get them made here. And so some of those items are going to take a little bit longer, but the single books, we're hoping to start shipping soon in the next couple weeks. So people that have just single books, especially in the United States, hopefully, you know, as soon as we humanly can, we will start shipping them. And those are done, actually, physically finished and in a warehouse. Sitting on a pallet, all the signatures are done. As far as the books, everything's done. You know, we didn't make T-shirts because we didn't know what people's sizes were, and we still don't know what about 28%, about 80% of the people have finished, completed their FACRCIT survey process. But there's still about 20% who, for whatever reason, you know, their email addresses have changed or whatever it is, and we haven't been able to get in touch with them. But we're reaching out to everybody individually. We're doing everything we can so that we can get those extra rewards created and packaged and ready to ship. We want to ship this out as soon as possible, and we're doing everything we can to make that happen. So if you're one of those people who donated or pledged and have not filled out their backer kit survey, fill it out. I've filled mine out.
    135:45
    I'm just waiting. Thank you. So looking back on the ups and downs of the creation of this book, guys, has it made you hesitant to take on a project like this again, or are you still invested in Kickstarter as a way to do this stuff? I've used Kickstarter a bunch, and I think it's a great platform when your audience sort of knows what to expect from the process. So would we do another pinball book through Kickstarter? Maybe not, but would I use Kickstarter for if I came up with a fancy new blender or something, then definitely yeah what about another book in general just not pinball i mean oh yeah this was your first book so was it a good enough experience that you you're you guys are interested in doing more books maybe on different topics ask us again after we go through the publishing process okay yeah we're not done yet basically you know for us the journey doesn't end until this thing this project has a destination you know a final destination and uh so yeah so we're still on the journey? I would say that for me, I mean, Joe really partnered with me to handle and manage that business side of the Kickstarter. And, you know, for me, that experience was, I think it's an incredibly powerful community and I love the software. I love the way it works. So, you know, I think that what we would do, or at least what I would do in this is if I ever embark on something like this again, I think there would be a lot more of that due diligence upfront just to make sure that what I know I need or what I think I will need is there and that I have it in my hands and that it's tangible. I think that would be the process, you know, for me at this point. But, you know, just a great amount of just appreciation for the patience and the support and the, yeah, the time to do this. Because, you know, I mean, when it comes out the way that it does, it feels like all of that was worth it and not giving up and, you know, sleepless nights and, financially just paying for it every way that you have to to get it done, I would definitely do another book. I enjoyed the process a lot, and I love every pixel I put in here. I think Joe and I would love to say that that's somewhere in the future, but we're really, really set and focused on making sure that these books get to everybody first before we think about anything else in the future. That makes sense. Damien, do you feel like there's a lot of uncharted territory for pinball books that you'd like to do, or would you move on to a different topic? Oh, no. I personally, I see opportunity here. I mean, even with some of those stretch goals that you mentioned early on, I mean, you did mention fold-outs. There are no fold-outs in this book. I did not get a chance to do fold-outs. I didn't have content to kind of pull that off in a way that would have not unfairly kind of made one game stand out over another. So, you know, that, the overlays, I mean, I still think the idea of doing a transparent kind of, you know, reveal, if you will, of taking part a game. I think that could be really beautiful. It would be an incredibly complicated piece. But yeah, I mean, just that alone, if you were to dissect some pinball tables in that way, I think could be really cool. So yeah, there's options. There's definitely tons. Yeah. I mean, this book, a lot of the people that are getting the book probably know most of this term story, and some of it probably hearsay is incorrect. And hopefully, the book will set some of that correct but the story a lot of the story is the stern story that everybody knows a significant portion of and we felt like we needed to do that to reach the broadest audience every two-year period through this could have its own book you know what i mean like there's there's a huge depth of information that that is out there about this stuff um and is all pretty fascinating. So, yeah, there's sort of an infinite amount of depth and information, especially if you get into all the other companies and what was going on at the time and early video games and things like that. It's unending. You could write hundreds of books about the subject. From the inside looking out, being that I've taken part in four of these games so far for Stern and working on them, I could say that you guys could do, like, I'm sure you've seen those books, you know, The Art of Hellboy or The Art of This Movie or That Movie, and it's a book. I'm sorry to cut you off. Yeah, I agree. You've seen these books where, you know, they take a movie and break it down and show you how they made it. Because I've been a part of these games, I can honestly say that you could, you know, maybe not, you know, a 200-page book, but, you know, a good 7,500-page book on the making of each game because of what goes into it and the changes. You guys mentioned overlays. I know for a fact that it would be great to have an overlay section where you see, here's the playfield schematic as it first started. And for the Beatles, I changed all the inserts just to suit the artwork. So I got the layout from George, and I said, well, you've got the whole center clustered with all of these inserts. Can we do this? Well, show me what you mean. And I just Photoshopped it and moved everything around. I said, how about this? He says, okay. And if you do all those overlays that show all the changes and how they happen, And even on, like, the Beatles, you know, taking the original Sea Witch game and going, okay, here's how the game changed, and here's the inserts, and here's how the inserts changed. And, you know, there's a lot of interesting things you could do to do with, you know, the making of a book. And like I said, it would be a smaller page run, but something like that would be very cool to start a library on, you know, where you've got, like, the making of all these different games. You know, it's something to think about. I feel the exact same way, and one of the challenges was the older games, there just wasn't, And you'll see in the book when you guys get them, you know, the early pages, the early games, there's not as much content. There's just not as much historical content to work with. So you worked more with the photos as we got into the newer games. And we can still be in the factory where the original like molds and the, hey, I just carved this to try this. We just 3D printed this to see if it's going to work. I love that whole process. And the dev space at Stern is just a treasure chest of these things. Everyone has their little office or their shelf. I mean, you go into George's office and you see the motors, the first mechanisms, the sketches, the prototypes that they've made. So I follow you 100%. I think with the newer games, and especially if that were to happen soon, you've got all the prototypes for Deadpool. You've got all the stuff that, you know, Keith's used for making the new Jurassic Park or Iron Maiden or, you know, even the new, you know, Avengers game. Like, all that stuff is sitting there right now. And if you don't capture it, it's going to get lost again. Sure. Maybe start with the first game after, you know, the 30th anniversary. You know, don't backdread, but start where you left off right after Batman. And, you know, start. We leave off at Aerosmith just before Star Trek or Star Wars. Star Wars was the next one. Game. Yeah, the book, sorry, the book ends at Aerosmith. Is it? Because I thought Aerosmith came out before Batman. No, we got it at the end. It's because that was the, yeah, during 2016 when we were having the big tour of the factory, they had the Batman 66 games out. And then that whole 30-year anniversary party was with Adam West and the Batmobile. They had the Ghostbusters machine there and all that. But that was it in the next one. That was the next, like, legit Stern game that had the new screens and everything in it. Okay. All right. Well, I have the question of all questions. I figure, you know, it's time to end the interview. We saved the golden question for last. We need to know, will there be a $1,000 topper eventually made available to install on the top of this book?
    143:28
    Maybe 8, 10, 12 months down the road. We should definitely think about that, yeah. That's a whole unexplored area for you guys.
    143:39
    Booktoppers. I'm into it. All right, guys. Well, we thank you for taking your time to sit down with us and talk. And, Damian, I'm glad you're feeling better. Again, I can't wait to see the book. I wish we could have it in our hands when we're talking so I could praise your work, but we're going to have to save that for maybe a follow-up interview down the road. Yeah, really looking forward to seeing it. Can't wait. Stay healthy, happy holidays, and maybe we'll talk down the road. but thanks again for taking your time. You guys are amazing, Matt. Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much, guys. All the best. Bye-bye. All right, so that does it for another show. We want to thank Matt Reisterer from Bat Alley Creations for co-hosting. Also, thanks to Joe and Damien from Paper Plot for the interview. That was great, very informative. If you guys recall, that show we did a special Halloween contest where we asked you to name a movie that was in the clip that we played. Kristen, do you want to tell people who won? Yeah, sure. So I was following our e-mail chain after that episode went out, And it was unbelievable how quickly some people got an email back to us. But there was one guy who actually got it first, and that person was Antonio Reduzco. I don't know. I probably completely butchered that name. No! This dude got us an email probably an hour after we released the three-hour episode. So I don't know how he did it, but... You cheated. You lied. Good for him, man. He got the question right. and everybody who wrote us an email knew exactly what this was. There were no wrong answers. We got probably 25 to 30 responses. I apologize for not writing to everyone, but Chris, it was definitely not overly tricky because everybody knew it, and congratulations to Antonio. We will be sending you a pretty awesome prize. Chris, why don't you tell him what he's going to get, although I think he already knows. That's right, Christian.
    145:26
    Yeah, he has won a signed Halloween movie poster print by yours truly, as well as some other bonus prints I'm going to throw in and a super awesome swag pack. Nice. Which is full of super awesome pinball show goodies and niceties. So congratulations, Antonio. Yes, the movie, by the way, was Friday the 13th.
    145:46
    We've got a dance cut. Congratulations, Antonio, and please send us your address and we will get that stuff out to you ASAP. And just to tease you for the next episode, we have a killer contest coming out for the holidays that we will tell you all about on the next episode. Well, not only that, Christian, but people may not know this, but our next episode is our first anniversary show. Oh, my God, is that right? Is this a full year out? It will be a full year out. And what I'm going to say here is that this show is going to be something the entire pinball hobby will be talking about for sure, something that will blow part of your skull right off of your head. Oh, fuck, I can't wait. Yes, I'm trying to line it up so that we can do it for the next show, and it's 90% a done deal, but there's just a 10% there that it might tip into the show following, but I'm really trying to get it for the anniversary show. But this will be the podcast people talk about for 2020. We have about three people on the hook to come on the show that are going to be phenomenal interviews, so I'm really excited to see what you have lined up for this. Yes, definitely ending the year with a bang and celebrating the anniversary in styles. So that's it, number 19 in the can. Everybody stay safe, be smart, play pinball, and kiss my grits. Thanks, everybody. See you next episode. Cheers. It's super awesome.
    147:04
    Pinball show. And it's super awesome. I just thought you should know. Tickets are fresh. And Dr. K. I'm getting my precious. And go to bed Super awesome If you'd like to drop us a line or ask a question, we can be reached at superawesomepinball at gmail.com. Questions or comments may be read on the air. The original content of this podcast is copyright 2020 ASAP Radio Productions.
    147:43
    The commentary and opinions shared by the cast and guests do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the sponsors, Cointaker, Chicago Gaming Company, and Back Alley Creations. Their sponsorships of this show only serve to add to their continuing support of the pinball community. Because we're going to be legendary. We're going to get their attention.
    148:02
    We're going to be legendary. It's about to be legendary. Okay, okay. Show's over, folks. Bye-bye. Hey, your fucking chalupa sucks, dude. Now it's time for some funny bloopers.
    148:23
    All right, so quick break. Okay. Okay, Matt, I wanted to say a huge thank you, dude, for sending anything over our way. I certainly didn't want anything as a freebie, and I want to send you some cash in return. No, no, dude. Like I said, talking about the company and promoting, it's promotion. I do want your address, though, because I do want to send you some stuff, you know, just as a thank you at the very least. Oh, yeah. You just want me to text it over to you? Yeah, man. Shoot me your address. Okay. Thank you for what? What are you getting now, you bastard? You're sent to. Don't even worry about it. We're going to get Frenchie all jealous and stuff. People send him shit all the time, and nobody sends me anything. Did you got everything for monsters, or did you need that? Hey, don't answer for me. I didn't get everything. I thought you sent you stuff. I purchased things. Yeah, I tried giving them to you, and you yelled at me. I'm not a freeloader like Christian is.
    149:14
    Alexa, turn off Terminator 2. There we go Rich man problems Yeah, turn off my pinball machine computer thing When I'm on the phone, it's a bad habit It's very hard for me to sit still Lay down, open up Facebook, find a picture of me sprawled out on a couch naked and relax Just stare at the photo and relax Oh no Let me just take a quick leak and then I will freshen up my drink and I'll be right back Okay If I was a sculptor, but then again, no. Or a man who makes potions in a traveling show.
    149:59
    No, it's not much, but it's the best I can do. My gift is my song and this one's for you. And you can tell everybody This is your song It may be quite simple but Now that it's done I hope you don't mind That I put down in the world How wonderful it is When you're in the woods.
    150:50
    Thank you. Thank you very much. That's Christian getting a drink. I'm going to guess it has lots of alcohol in it. Let's hope he doesn't get hammered again like he did on the last show. Is that enough for you?
    151:19
    It was very satisfying.