3:13are and so you were you were playing those games and not noticing the manufacturer name like Stern Electronics I didn't really flight 2000 uh when I started to play in the in the big arcade Galaxy world I noticed that there was Gotti and there was and there was Bal and then there was Williams and that's when I started to know that there were different companies making them you know for um and uh luckily I got into one of them yeah so what was your first assignment once you got in uh when I started to work at UH Premier gotle in 1987 and the first game I worked on was Victory um I I'd never designed a game there but I I uh I worked on a lot of games did a lot of mechanical engineering for a lot for the guys there were three mechanical engineers and three designers there at the time so I was I was very busy um so I worked on Victory um I remember when I first started to work at Premiere they they tried using a back printed real heavy myar with an adhesive on it and they laminated it to the Playfield and they called it vitagraph so it was the first four-color process Playfield where everybody else was still screaming like diamond lady di Victory so they tested it on Hollywood Heat and it it worked worked great they had some play Fields made they sat around for a couple months and dried out real well then when they went into production with it the board has it's wood it has moisture in it and all the heat from that big Transformer in the cabinet would just rise and the moisture come up underneath the myar and we were getting bubbles all over so we were getting games Shi back from from Europe and we had to rebuild them and you know and then we eventually stopped vitra and we started screen printing them and and sending out re refurbished games with screen printed playfields uh didn't look near as pretty as the fourcc color art um but I remember thinking to myself how do they how do they make money how do they make money doing this you know you're make it's like making a car twice for somebody and uh and then we you know then we went back to screen printing and uh uh Diamond lady also started out with a Vitor graph Playfield um because they were they were locked into it at the time and then when they started seeing this is failing then they went to all screen printing um I worked on a couple other games there um I worked there in between 1987 and 1990 I worked on Victory Diamond lady um TX sector which was I was I did lead on that one um that was a really fun game I really enjoyed playing TX sector um the back glass was photorealistic when we first made it and then we made it look painterly it looks really blurry and kind of funny looking the original one was beautiful and when I saw what they did to it to make it look painterly I was like um any famous mechs that we would recognize from any of those Premier games that we yeah I did a I did a mechanism on lights camera action that was my my first patent um in the pinball industry I was 23 I think 23 years old uh when I got that patent and I made a section of Playfield that uh turned upside down and so there was like a little U-turn shot that fed a Flipper on one side and then when it flipped over to the other side there was a little plastic form ramp that you could take the ball up and get up onto the upper play field and play um so that was my that was my uh that was my first like wow this I can't believe I you know I got my first patent um uh I worked on big house and Robo war and if you look at a robo war game there's these funny looking buildings in the artwork on the back glass and one of them looks like a cork screw and it's purple in color oh oh yeah the purple cor now if you look at the the game big house there is a cork screw shaped purple mechanism that you shoot the ball into a shot and this thing turns and it lifts the ball up into another wire ramp up above um so big house was actually supposed to be Robo war and I'm not exactly sure I don't remember it's a hundred years ago I don't remember uh why they decided to theme that game big house um but I remember after we changed it to Big House I made these little Spotlight assemblies that you know search like like you'd see in a prison yard and these these three spotlights would just go back and forth when you started your multiball we ended up taking that out and made them stationary um uh I worked on a game called Hot Shots which I thought was really fun but at the time got Le had 20 volt 24 volt flippers and we had this big long shot to the right of the game that went up back through this big vacuum form ramp and came back around and the the the weaker uh powered flipper couldn't make that shot so we made this thing that had two like skateboard wheels that that spun and when you shot the ball around the corner it hit these this mechanism and it just launched the ball through the ramp but the skateboard wheels didn't last real long as soon as that skin started to break it left a little pile of of out you don't see very many of those around anymore um but that was a really fun game to play John Norris designed that he was he was a big rules guy and he uh uh he kind of really sparked my interest in game rules I remember when we started when we were working on victory victory was a game that you played you started out with checkpoint one and you had one shot to me and checkpoint two and checkpoint three and you had to get to all the way to the end and then John Norris implemented a countdown bonus in that which is the first time i' had ever seen that so you checkpoint one and all a sudden you see these points counting down counting down coun down oh I gotta make just made you uh a lot more tense about making the shot and a lot more pressure um I really enjoyed playing that game that was it was a lot of fun yeah was there anyone there uh influencing you based on what the other companies were doing because like the big house could have been U reacting to police force you know cartoony law enforcement kind of thing or any yeah no not not really so they would the ideas were just bubbling up internally yeah um the you know when D came on the scene at the same time I got into the industry you know I was really impressed with war and Secret Service um I even like torpedo alley which at the time people didn't think that was such a great game uh I think they do now um uh and you know I saw that they looked a lot like Williams um but goly just they had their own thing and their own art style and and they just they just stuck with that and and ran with it um but it was uh it was it was interesting I I think I thought there were some games that that we had had produced there that the art could have been allowed better I think there were a lot of different artists um Connie Mitchell was the the art director and he farmed a lot of the art out to different artists so it was always different um I remember uh Jeff Bush who uh he did the Houdini game um he did the game called bone Busters that Premier Technology made and you know that was a really nice nice art package you know it was kind of strange with you know was it was the cabin it was pink yeah you know um and it had skulls all over it and uh uh you know we even put a great big skull up on top of the back box that moved back and forth we call them old One Eye yeah now I remember that being the feature game one year at pinball Expo the year it came out and uh I think part of the motivation in probably including the pink color was that they were trying to say all right we're not just doing single level games look we'll actually have a big bomb like the other companies yeah most most cabinets are black and when people oper games they wanted them to stay decent looking and clean so if you had a white cabinet you know it was it was going to get it was going to get beat up on out out in the wild yeah so that that game was kind of shocking like Premier is doing all this you know the topper and all you know that cost money yeah we thought premere was making cheap games and yeah um Glenn Anderson was a BAL engineer and I don't know the scope of his work I don't know how long he was in the business but he he was retire ired and he actually came and designed that mechanism for us so we bought this great big skull and we had like 15 fixtures you put the jaw on it you drill the holes and do this and do that and um it was quite quite an assembly okay so it's not just the materials but actually all the different labor steps that used up yeah well all right are we ready to move on to your next gig after we're going to start talking about Data East um when I started to work at Data East in 1990 I worked on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles um which I just recently got to do again the second time um but I just had small tasks on that game I worked on checkpoint and um Batman and Star Trek and then I got my first uh I got my first mechanical lead um on Steven Spielberg's hook and I worked with Tim seel on that game and that game we had just dot matrix had was in probably three or four models at that time and hook exploded I mean hook hook sold more copies than Batman and Star Trek did which was pretty amazing and the game was really good um but I didn't think the title was all that strong and then after that cam Co started Me on he said Johnny goes I want you to start thinking about dinosaurs make a dinosaur eat a ball and I'm like okay now I'm working in Joe cam CO's office he made room for me in his office I had a big six foot drafting table and his desk was behind me and I I remember this was always behind he'd be looking down watching what I'm doing I drew this I took a Godzilla model and I sketched it and then I made the I made Godzilla throw pinballs which you saw later in Fr in Mary Shell's Frankenstein um I made it move back and forth and then I made it bend over and eat the ball and but there I didn't make the jaw move to close on the ball to hold it I put a very small magnet way in the back of its mouth so it drew the ball up to the the magnet and then I made him and then he would lift back up and he would move over to the side and he spit it into a into a pit like thing uhhuh so then one day Joe came up to me and he said my friend spe my uh my my he knew Steven Spielberg of course he did and of course he he knew everybody and he he uh he said my my friend Steven Spielberg is making a game about dinosaurs and he goes I would really like to do it and that was pretty far along on this game he goes I want you to take and change your game into Star Wars and I'm like wow what but then I thought Star Wars okay um so I took the dinosaur out I put the Death Star in place of it and I revamped some of the shots uh and then I made the big R2-D2 model that went over on the other side got a game up real quick we uh we printed the Playfield and then Marcus rothr was the artist on that game he painted he he airbrushed that back glass in 3 days we told them what we wanted I drew my stick figures and and it was and it came in a few days later I was just blown away I loved the art um it was really nicely done um uh Carrie fiser was unhappy with her her likeness in the back glass she was laying down kind of seductively and uh so we had to put her in a in a sitting squatting position with her chain going to Jabba um the uh I have a copy uh that I actually framed it's in my office at work of the original um and it's the only one it's and it's not even a translate it's actually a it's a big printed photograph um so I kept that and I pulled that out of a box a few months ago when we moved into our new building and I'm like I'm going to frame this and put it in my office yeah so I'm getting the general impression here this is a pretty fast cycle now we were being told you know Williams people were coming up on stage at the pinball Expo and they're saying things like uh we have a one-year design cycle so if you want to do four games a year you have four complete design teams and uh they were throwing around numbers like development cost of a million per game at that time uh what what are you allowed to say about the data East practices in the 934 I think it cost more more than a million to make a game today yeah more today now yes um uh they had really good teams back then and they were a much bigger company um we were a very small company it was uh Joe Camco and Joe Baler were a team designing games and then I was by myself and I did all my own mechanical engineering too so when you design a game and then you have to go and pick all the part numbers and do all the detail drawings um and then this was this was mechanical drafting this is a drafting board I had a I had a great big drafting board and a big electric eraser and if I wanted to move a ramp say I laid out a game and I'm like oh well you know what I want to move this ramp over like an eighth of an inch I would take and lay a piece of Vellum over the top of it retrace the ramp erase it off the original drawing and then put it underneath and square it up and line move it over and then redraw it um we used to have people uh that made the plates that go in that big pants presser that we have that puts all the little dink marks in the Playfield where all the parts are going to be located we used to have uh Joe Baler used to do it at at gly when I started working there and uh and we had a guy named Glenn ritma that worked on it uh he he made the plates at day to East and he would take a piece of blue steel that was the size of the Playfield and uh and he would put this bluing dye on it and he would actually scribe and Trace and and reduplicate the the the the vellum drawing on a plate and then he would go around drill all the holes and pin it up and then one day Joe Baler and I I I was making I was working my first game on CAD at Data East was Tales from the Crypt so when it came time to spot the Playfield I just took my drawing which we used to spot through the drawing the Vellum drawing to make the the first prototype um I uh I just uh we we took that plan I I because because I was working on CAD so I could turn off all the layers of all the parts and just leave all those spotting marks that were on the bottom and then I could do the same thing on the top and we sent it out had a piece had an NC machine just go and pop all the holes in and uh it cost us about 100 bucks and I was like you know wow this is the way to go you know so so then our you know this this guy Glenn that was making these plates that was his job he also made fixturing so he got to do more work on the fixtures and and he got you know he got that area stronger in the company and uh but he didn't have to sit and make those plates because that was very timec consuming to you know to relay out a Playfield on on steel a lot of those uh the public documentation of those games says it was done by design team number 28 what does that mean I thought that was really interesting because I when I was working at Gatti I saw that on one of the first games and I thought they have 28 design teams we have three I'm like wow that was just something camoo threw in there yeah so I don't know I don't know if there's any other story that you were sometimes on Design Team 2 I was design I came in when I came in I was design team 29 yeah SOLO design team yeah well um someday we got to get Joe camoo here himself and you know really get into yeah Joe is Joe's really great he's an extremely smart and well-spoken man he he just I would listen to him give seminars and I would go to licensing meetings with him we'd fly to California and go talk to somebody about you know whatever we were going to be working on and he just never says the word um or anything he just he just gets right to the point boom boom boom boom boom uh he uh has a tell Communications background um that's what he studied in school you know so he was at one time I think he was planning on being a weatherman or something like that and uh but he just loved the game industry yeah not just the articulation but also um in presenting hook he would say you know it's got this 360 degree ramp and you know like that's that was a great Innovation that uh you know he would just radiate this enthusiasm um I would like to ask a little bit about how that worked behind the scenes because in those same presentations and this is getting into the Sega pinball era but that just in that early to mid 90s he would often say something like uh oh my game development team basically is uh they're working 80 hour weeks and they're trying so hard to get things done I I made the 100 hour club uh when we were making hook we had is issues with the display crashing and we had 20 or 30 games out on the floor that were being played by we and we had the people playing them and we were sitting behind them watching them just like trying to figure out what was making it crash um I don't even remember if the programmer found some some bug or something eventually but um so we had to stop production I mean we're ready we were making games we had games all over the factory and we were only in 30,000 square foot building at the time and now sometimes if we if there are some parts missing we we line up play fields down a down an aisle waiting for the par and I think there was I've seen more playfields lined up than the size of that other Factory could fit so so so the uh 100 hour weeks is a real thing then 100 hour yeah the 100 hour club we called it so but yeah we worked a lot um uh I I have a a snapshot of Tim CLE and Joe Baler and I building a d Star Wars at like 4 o'clock in the morning um and we were really crispy the next day you know we all went home and you know but this is like couple couple hour nap couple shows com couple hour nap back to work you know and uh um but it was it was fun it was fun it wasn't uh it wasn't you know there were times where I was like boy I wish I could be out you know fishing or doing something else right now but you know we were having fun and and we just did whatever we had to do to make it work yeah it's like that book uh the soul of a new machine which describes the creation of the data General mv8000 at first 32bit uh super mini computer which was about five miles away from here where that whole thing took place and they you know they've got to show it at a certain deadline and they just have to keep putting in the hours and uh do do you remember any time when you just had to blow off steam in some way or conked out or anything oh I ConEd out a lot um we did have weekends sometimes we didn't get to use them but uh that was when I when I got my my rest MH so all right and anything in in that dat Easter mention um when we did the Star Wars game um I missed my 10-year High School reunion because I had to fly out to uh California to Skywalker Ranch to present the game to George Lucas that was amazing trip so we get to Skywalker branch and we're in this room and the game arrived we set it up um we had lunch and they told us that the chickens the chicken that we had was walking around that morning you because they they grow and do everything there um uh so George Lucas walked in and Joe started up the game and started showing it to him and he was playing it he was like oh you know the Death Star he got the Death Star open and he goes he goes he hit a backhand you know George of course didn't know what a backhand was so he was just flipping and he eventually got the thing in there and saw the the big display effect the intro to the multiball and uh you know and he was like he wasn't very he wasn't like jumping up and down or excited or anything he walked out and his his people came in and they told us that they'd never they hadn't seen him that excited in months and I was