Barry Alper's death announced. Weird Al's Museum of Natural Hilarity launched. Texas Pinball Festival coming this month. Hi, my name is Jonathan Hewson. I'm the editor of Pinball Magazine, and I'm joined here with... I'm Martin Leib, and I'm the editor of Pinball News, and we are looking back on all the events in the pinball world in the month of February 2022. Yes, and unfortunately we're kicking off this episode with another sad story, the passing of pinball designer, veteran pinball designer, I should say, Barry Osler. Yes, a real legend in pinball design. Barry died this month Age 70 From complications from his treatment For bone cancer Which he'd had for quite a few years now Even more Shocking I suppose Given the fact that he Just very recently Taken up a new position At American Pinball As a game designer there I don't remember whether we discussed that last month I think the news No, just after our episode. So first he was announced to join American Pinball together with Barry Engler. And unfortunately, I don't think he even got started. No, it's a real tragedy. I mean, Barry's career speaks for itself pretty much. If you just look at the list of games that he designed and was involved in as well. Yes. As a designer, but also collaborating with other people. Right. And at many different companies as well. He was so prolific and such a speedy, reliable designer, but also such a modest guy. You know, he was, where there were always the sort of rock stars of the pinball design world, he was so humble and... Yeah, modest, I would say. Yeah. And it wasn't, it was almost, you know, just treated it as the regular day job. Yes. And I don't think he understood the passion that some people have with pinball. And I have to give him credit for being so modest. Obviously, some games he's been credited for designing, for example, Korgar as the first talking pinball. And then he would immediately take that down and say, like, well, that just happened to be available. and my game was the first of Gaddix. Yes, but of course it was more than just the fact it had the speech. It was also such a good game at the time. It played so well and the same thing with Space Shuttle, the game which many people will credit with saving the pinball industry at the time when it was dying a death and suffering from the video game boom. and it really, really brought the pinball back into the arcades. I certainly remember playing it when it came out, when it was, I don't know exactly the time it came out, but it was very soon after, and it was so different and so repeatable. You just wanted to keep playing it and achieve so much on it. So, yeah. And, of course, he designed many games up into the mid-'90s as well, in the more digital DMD era. Right. He was very loyal. He worked for Williams most of the time. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the sad things about his career, actually, is that once William closed the pinball division, he got a desk job somewhere. Yeah, he was working, I think, for, who was it? It wasn't for Betts. It was... One of those companies. Yeah. He didn't design anything, he was just doing paperwork. Yeah, well, he didn't design anything until he was brought back into it. Yeah, it was at Betson, I think, there was a purchasing manager there. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. And, well, we can talk about it for a long time, obviously. His games are very well liked. He was very quiet himself, unless he really got to know you, then he would open up, at least that's the feeling I get. Yeah, probably talking not about pinball either, They're talking about his other passions, you know, the cats that he loved. And he was a big gun fan as well. He enjoyed shooting. And we talked for hours about different types of guns that he enjoyed shooting and the benefits and, you know, how each one compares. So, yeah, I think he was kind of probably a bit bored talking about pinball because he talked about it so much to so many people. But we can get him on to some other subjects. that he was very keen to talk. Yes. Yes. I have to compliment you on the article that you wrote about his passing, which is available on pinballnews.com. Very, very in-depth. So I highly recommend, if you want, to learn a little bit more about who Barry Osler was. Thank you. It does sort of get me down a bit. I'm to write obituaries, effectively, or report on the deaths of so many people recently, you know, from Marco and Lyman and... Alan. Al, yeah, Al Shack, and now Barry. Yeah, well, let's hope it stops at four. Yeah, let's pray for that, yes. So, anyway, we did mention that Barry had just been appointed at American Pinball, and as you said, Barry Engler had also had his new position there announced in the same announcement from American Pimble. Which means he's back because he worked there before and now he's in a different position. Yes, very strange. He left to go to work for American, I suppose, Jersey Jack Pimble. He was working at American as a service manager before he went over to Jersey Jack in the same role and that was just a year ago and now he's back at American. So, yeah, congratulations to him. And he seems to be in charge of, he's a senior production manager now. Right. So that sounds like a step up from service manager. So it's not like he went back because the lunches are better at American. Well, maybe that's the case. I don't know. But, yeah, so I don't know what that means for Jersey Jet Pinball. and now they don't have that position filled. They do, but we don't know. Yeah, that's true. They might have had somebody lined up. But they have been advertising for people for quite some time, as we've reported in this pin cast. Well, ironically, Barry Engler is now advertising for people for American Pinball. Ah, right. Okay. Who's he? What position is that? I came across a listing on LinkedIn. basically saying American Pinball is looking for an experienced buyer for our Palatine, Illinois office. Sorry, not somebody to buy the office, but... Oh. Okay, so yeah, a parts or... yeah, a parts buyer then. Right, right. Okay. So, so I suppose that's basically the main news that we could find on American Pinball. And getting back to Barry Osler, what I'm curious about is Obviously he's leaving a legacy of games that we all know and love to play, but he's also leaving a number of designs on the table, of which for example Pinball Brothers have adapted the Queen design, and what's going to happen with that, and what's going to happen with the Deep Root designs that he did the last couple of years. Yeah, absolutely, because I don't think you said that after he left Williams, which was in mid to late, probably around 95, 96? Yeah, sort of after the June join, I suppose. Yeah. Although he was employed at various companies, I don't think we ever saw any of his designs go into production, or at least not in their entirety. I'm sure he had a hand in some of them, but at Highway Pinball. Sorry. I don't think he... Yeah, he got his games out. Well, Queen was supposed to be his first game, I suppose. But if I recall correctly, he designed it as a white body, and last year, when the prototype showed up, they turned it into a standard body. Yeah. I'm not sure how much of that was Barry's and how much of that was Dave Sanders' work. I think it's a joint project between the two of them They both contributed to that But I think at Deep Root Barry was He was designing his own games And I think he had quite a few designs ready to go Oh yeah, Food Truck We can't wait to play that Yeah, Food Truck Which is basically Diner 2.0 But Yeah, what we Is that what we expect it to be? Well, hopefully we'll get to see something of it We'll have more on that later in the Deep Root news But yeah What more can we say Other than rest in peace Barry And thanks for all the great games Yeah absolutely I second that Okay so on to more positive news And our second headline Of this month And it couldn't be a bigger contradiction I suppose That's right yes Now you and I were both involved In the launch of this We both had advance information so we could write our respective articles about it but it was the launch of the new P3 title from Multimorphic which is entitled Weird Owls Museum of Natural Hilarity and as with all P3 titles it's mostly the upper part of the playfield, the module which you purchase but this is Multimorphic's very first licensed title and it's uh well it's it's packed in every sense i think yeah it's it's a big license to begin with and of course uh some might be disappointed that it's not uh a big marvel superhero type of thing um but i think it's a perfect theme for the for p3 platform yeah and especially if you look what they did with it um this game is screaming fun in capital letters, I suppose. Yes. There's a joke there which I can't repeat on a family podcast like this. But yes, it's a long time since we've had a game which is actually funny. You know, I can't even think what the last one would be. Elvira comes to mind, although that was supposed to be funny, but when I played it, I didn't find it that funny To be honest That might have changed in the meantime with Code of Days Deadpool I did find funny True, yes That's a good call on that one Although I didn't Well, I always Kind of hoped it would have been the movie License rather than a cartoon But I think they did a great job with it But anyway, getting back to Weird Al's Museum of Natural Hilarity It's a Really packed playfield with so much in it. Do you want to take us through all the stuff that's actually on? Well, here comes a list. If you're not into lists, then this is your moment to get a coffee or something. So we're looking at three ramps, two ramp and transfer lifts, a spinning mechanical hamster wheel, rotating UHF camera with ball lock that locks up to three balls, an upper playfield, and I'm trying to think from the top of my head, you just have to look at the website, because it's too difficult to explain what's on there, it really is, it has three pop-up bumpers, and I was like, yeah, where did they put them? I originally thought there were only two, but I was corrected, and Stephen, Stephen Silver, who is the creative director for the game, corrected that and said, no, there are actually three in there. Yeah, and five receivers. Yes, so this is, whereas Stephen's previous game, Heist, added an upper right, am I wrong on this? Yeah, upper right. Yes, upper right. Yes, that's right. Now there's also an upper left flipper. There is. And there's a flipper on the upper playfield. Yes, a mini flipper on there. So, yeah, it's gone from basically a two-flipper game to a five-flipper game. Yeah, and I'm trying to think, when was the last time that we've seen a five-flipper game? Hmm. Or should I say four or more flippers? Yes. I don't want to go back to Humpty Dumpty. No, well, obviously you could go back to, like, Simpsons, Pinball Party, I think. Has that got five? What's that got? four. Maybe it's got four. Anyway. Do I run? Anyway, we could spend hours trying to think back. We can look it up. Indeed, but we now have one, anyway, which is this one, and unlike those games, this is, of course, a modular system. So you can buy the kit if you already own the P3 system. You can buy the Weird Al's Museum of Natural Charity kit which is a $3,000 purchase. It comes with this hugely packed playfield. It comes with cabinet art and I'm not sure it comes with the extra modules. The upper flipper and the... It will come with the cross-playfield ramp which is a part I think if you ordered, even if there's two models available, even if you ordered a standard model, all the flippers and etc. will be in there. If you don't have a game already, if you just buy the module because you already have the base platform, then you might have to... Actually, I'm not even sure whether you need to buy the actual left upper flipper. But either way, as you said, there is a limited edition upgrade, which is an additional $1,800. Well, there was a limited edition. Well, yes, indeed, because the sales for the Weird Al game started this morning at 9 o'clock Central Time in the US, and orders were taken by email. you had to send in your order by, or send an email stating you wish to buy either the standard or the limited edition version. Anything that was sent before 9am would be deleted. So at 9 o'clock sharp, there was a huge influx of emails into the Multimorphic inbox. And the good news is, as you just said, all the LE kits sold out. There were 227 available, and they've all gone. Or at least people have pledged to purchase them. If you sent an email, you would have got, or if you haven't got it yet, you'll get it very shortly, an email with an invoice from Multivolfic asking you to pay a £2,000 deposit to secure your game. If you don't do that within 24 hours, then basically your order is cancelled, and that game becomes available to people on the wait list, I guess. Yes. But that's one way to say happy birthday, Jerry Sellenberg. Yeah, it's a good birthday present for Jerry to sell out all those kits and make the launch of the new game a massive success. Right. And also congratulations to Jerry for coordinating the announcement of the game, Which for many came as a surprise And bam, weird L on the P3 Not many people saw that coming No, we knew there was a license title coming at some point But I don't think That license has been mooted As being a really good one That some pinball companies should pick up But I don't think anybody knew That it was actually about to happen Right, and one of the key things in that is that apparently nobody else went after it to discover that the license was no longer available. No, absolutely not. No, it was a big coup to get that, and of course it had a big buy-in from Al himself. Now, he was very deeply involved in the game and worked very closely with the team, his team, worked closely with the Multimorphic team. The team, we should mention, Matt Andrews was the artist on that game, did the cabinet and playfield art. Including the monitor. Yes, bearing in mind the playfield extends down into the digital part of it. In-game graphics were from Rory Sanuda And Stephen Silver Of course Stephen is also the creative director for the game Which basically is the designer and the head honcho Software was headed up by the Michael Ocean Yeah Along with Greg Goldey And of course Jerry himself Is very good on the code And TJ Weaver is the Multimorphic Mechanical Engineering Wizard And it certainly was a wizard In order to pack all that stuff into Such a small Relatively small part of the playfield But there's so much there And on several levels That it must have been a cab nightmare In order to do that So kudos to him for doing that And of course this is Again the first game I think For Multimorphic where Scott D'Anissi has been working on the sound. Yes. And you might think a Weird Al game would just be basically Weird Al's own call-outs and his music, but of course there's a huge amount more in the game, and sound effects and also some incidental music, which Scott composed and got cleared with the team. But it's also the first game where Bowen Kerins and Colin MacAlpine have been ruled as advisors. Yes. So they obviously input into that to make the game even more fun. Okay. Now, for our listeners, it's fun that we're discussing all this, but how about we get Stephen Silver, the creative director, and Michael Ocean in? Yes. So we can talk to them about this game. So we're joined now by the creative director, Stephen Silver, and the lead developer, Michael Ocean, for Multimorphic's amazing new Weird Owls Museum of Natural Hilarity, their latest game for the P3 pinball platform. That's not a tongue twister, I don't know what is. So welcome, Stephen, and welcome, Michael. Welcome, thanks for having us. Thank you very much. So it's been a very successful launch, I'd say, which was just a couple of days ago. How was it for you getting your game, find the outing to the public. Well, I can't speak for Michael, but I've been sitting for a year wanting to scream to the world that I've been working on a Weird Al fan, and it was really, really nice being able to finally get it out there and get seen. And it helped a little bit that, you know, you have a guy with five million followers go out there and share our videos, so it's been seen all over the world. Great. Which one of you is the bigger Weird Al fan? Oh, man. We've got to remember about that. It might be Michael. I might have bad on the Michael in that one, but I think we both consider ourselves kind of super fans. Yeah, absolutely. And you know what? I would give it to Steven, just because I think we're both fundamentally polite people. But yeah, we had a good time working on this game, for sure. Okay. For our listeners, just to clarify, Michael is the head of software involved in partly coding this game, along with a couple of others, if I'm not mistaken. And Stephen has the title of head creative or creative director, I would say. And so that gives people a perspective of what you are involved in. And what I'm curious about is you go for, at some point somebody says, like, maybe we should do a Weird Al game. or there's a list of possible upcoming games and Weird Al is on there. And at some point somebody says, let's go after that. And then you are able to get that license. And how was that process? And can you talk to us what happened after that? Yeah, well, from my perspective, after we were probably in the middle of the heist credit cycle, Me and Jerry are always talking about different possible games we could do. And, you know, we had brought up, I don't know if it was him or me, one of us had brought up how great a Weird Al pin would be. And, honestly, I just thought about, you know, the license itself and how difficult it would be. And I just thought there's no way we're ever going to get an owl. So I didn't even think about it. But then Jerry surprised us. He went out and did the late work and got what I think is one of the best pinball licenses we've had in a long time. I think Al is perfect for pinball, and I think that he allows so much fun, goofy nonsense on the play field that you can have, and so I'm really excited that he's able to get it. And how long ago was it that you actually started chasing that license, and at what point was it actually clearly secured and you could go ahead and start developing that game? We've been working on it for about a year, right, Michael? Yeah, I think that's about right. I mean, we've been working really, really hard, really quickly, which is easy to do when you're super passionate about it. But yeah, I think it's been close to a year, maybe even a little bit under. Very quick, actually, for a game. Obviously, there is different aspects, of course, to this game. There is an upper playthrough module that needs to be developed. You need to see, like, what else can we do? And in this case, there's five flippers on the game. I can see that's a mechanical engineering challenge as well. Five flippers, three pop bumpers, lots of stuff that I was really surprised. Like, wow, I wasn't expecting that much or such a packed upper play field, so to speak, on a multi-morphic game. And not that Heiss was, well, let's put it this way. Heiss was already impressive, and you guys really outdid yourself with this one. Yeah, I've said for a while, I'm really proud of the mechanical engineering abilities that Multimorphic has. Someday, I'm going to find some way to stump T.J. Wilson, our lead mechanical engineer. But so far, we haven't yet. We keep throwing ideas at him, and he keeps coming up with just amazing ways to integrate them and cram them all in a machine and make them fit. So as the creative director, do you have to do all the CAD work on that game and try and squeeze all those mechanisms in, or does TJ do that? Yeah, TJ does that. He's way smarter than me when it comes to that stuff. So we basically sit down as a team, and we're all pinball people. We're all passionate pinball people. Everybody's fighting for their ideas, and the best ideas come to the top. and then we put all those together in, like, a rough design. And, you know, presumably TJ's in that process too, and we find things that can work. And sometimes we go down a path not knowing if something's going to work, and he pulls it out and makes it happen. The spiral up ramp that we've got in that game is just an engineering marvel, I think, in that it's so satisfying to hit that shot. And that he pulled it off and was able to make that transition smooth is fantastic. Now, you're not all together in the same building. You're not all working shoulder to shoulder on this game. And remote working is a key part of many of our lives these days. How does the team collaborate in order to try out ideas and basically develop mechanisms and modes when you're all so disparate in terms of your locations? Lots of Zoom calls. Yeah, lots of Zoom calls, lots of messaging online. I mean, we had a very, very intensive few weeks where we were meeting for hours a day for almost a full month at the beginning of this process to just try to lock down everything we wanted. And to Stephen's point, lots and lots of very passionate discussions. And, you know, I for one know that I am hard to deal with at times because I won't back down from an idea that I think is good. and thankfully Steven is there to help me realize when those ideas aren't as good and have better ideas often. But yeah, I mean, we've done a lot of different video conferencing platforms. But, you know, I mean, this isn't Multimorphic's first game, right? They're already across the table. But it is Multimorphic's first licensed game. And in this case, you're working with an artist, I think, who has a catalog of 150-plus songs. and you guys are, like you said, super fans, so you have plenty of ideas, but there's only so much that you can put in the game. Yeah. How do you make decisions on, like, which direction to take and that's going to make it and that's unfortunately not going to make it? I think the first and foremost thing when we were looking through all of this catalog trying to find songs is, would this be a good pinball song, right? and also you're thinking about licensing, how hard it is to license different things. But we would go through, and that was the driving force between a lot of it. We wanted a big variety. We wanted stuff from every era that he's performed in and had records in, and we wanted just a wide variety of different things in there. And I'm really super happy with the song list that we came out with. I think there's not one of them I would swap out, and I think that they all make for really super fun modes and gameplay. And I'll say that I think Fun Zone, which is the one we used in the demo video, the trailer, is like the greatest pinball song of all time. It's just so upbeat, happy, and I just love that song. So you've got 17 tracks in there. Was that something you sort of negotiated to get that many, or was that just naturally how many you thought you would need in order to fill out the rule set? Well, we kept adding more and more songs until Jerry started to cry, and then we stopped. And then we only added two more after that. No, I mean, we wanted, I mean, obviously we would love to include every single thing in the catalog, right? There are a couple songs that we deeply, deeply loved and, you know, but had to acknowledge that they maybe wouldn't be perfect in pinball. And, you know, this number, I think, let us do everything we wanted to do. We knew ahead of time that everyone was going to have some song that they were missing. You know, and how can you not with Al's extensive catalog? But, you know, our hope is that everybody feels the same way we do, which is that, you know, they look at the track list, they experience the game, and they say, you know what, these songs are awesome, and it's okay that whatever that song is isn't there, because there's a lot here, there's a lot that is here, that's super, super fun. Right. Now, the P3 platform has a large LCD below the playfield, but not an LCD in the backbox. for many pinball enthusiasts familiar with music pins or celebrity-themed pins. They might be expecting music videos to be in the game, but in this case, it's absolutely not the case. Can you talk about that? Well, first, I'll correct you there, because we actually do have just a gorgeous screen in our backbox that we were able to put a lot of content on. uh so we've got excuse me i haven't seen a p3 in a while yeah we've got to get you on a p3 we've got to take yeah we uh yeah that was an upgraded package a while back and then jerry just made it standard um a couple cycles ago so so yeah my my joy is i get to develop video content and stuff for two screens in two different orientations my bad sorry about that no no problem uh but yeah i I mean, the, you know, your normal music jukebox pens, we all decided we just didn't want to do a jukebox pen. We just, or just the songs are kind of secondary to the world. And one thing that Scream gives us that, like Michael said earlier, is that instead of, you know, instead of like one painted playfield, we get to do 12 different environments, 12 different modes. You get to go into different environments. We change them as you go into each game. And once we signed on Matt Andrews as our artist, I realized right away that this was going to be an awesome-looking pin, both on the screen and on the art everywhere. And so every environment is this intricately painted, animated, brought-to-life environment that, you know, some of them are interacting with the balls, others aren't. But we've got just beautiful graphics for every different mode you're in, and that is a huge advantage. And I think that that plays better with the extremely wide variety of music that he has than picking a bunch of video clips from a bunch of disparate music videos that don't really fit together in any way. We could build this museum environment to create, contain all this insanity from all these different modes that we've got. Yeah, can we talk about that for a little moment? Because who came up with the whole idea of setting the game in a museum in order to showcase the music tracks, rather than, say, a more traditional, well, a concert environment or a jukebox-type game? We never, I don't think at any point in the development cycle that we consider the jukebox game or the concert environment. I think we, you know, as Al fans, right, I mean, his music is so all over the place and awesome and fun, and we wanted to try to find some unifying way to sort of put all these songs together. It was, like, funny and a real exploration for the player. Stephen, did you ultimately come up with the museum? We had a lot of ideas that we batted back and forth. Yeah, I'm trying to actually remember. It's something I think we all just kind of landed on. We tried a bunch of different things. We pitched a bunch of different ideas. I think, Michael, you had the idea of like a prop warehouse or something like that where you go in and do this other stuff. And then we came back around to this museum environment. And I won't take credit for the museum environment idea, but when we were pitching around ideas, I fell in love with the idea of this museum of natural hilarity. And me and Michael workshopped that to get to the right wording for that. But, you know, once we landed on it, it seemed perfect because you can have exhibit halls for each of these individual songs and you could go into the operating theater for Like a Surgeon or you could go to the sports field for Sports Song or go to the neighborhood for Weasel Stomping Day and things like that. You can just have – when we shot a couple weeks ago for the video, I just kept telling Rebecca from Flipstronic while she was playing, I was like, hey, go and try Weasel Stomping Day. And you just see her face light up and smile and laugh the whole way through in a way that just really told me, okay, we did this right. so were the songs chosen based on the halls that you created or were the halls created based on the songs you've chosen halls based on the songs we chose we chose the songs first and then we found we pulled out which ones we found to be multi-balls and then we found like pairings that kind of worked together for each of the halls and then named the halls after that yeah oh I'm sorry I didn't interrupt to the question about picking songs too. For every song that we picked, we had to also defend what we thought the mode would be like. So we were pitching these crazy ideas for what each of these modes would be based on these songs because we really wanted to make sure that we had cool and different gameplay for every one of these songs that we had in the game so we could imagine could we do justice to the song and come up with cool, funny, visually interesting things on the playfield for the players to shoot at and to experience while enjoying the music. So it was this very interrelated motivation to try to make sure that we were doing the songs justice and giving a good Alex fear. But can I just quickly interject before Johnson? He's raring to ask a question. You're saying you were pitching the ideas of what would happen with each song. Were you pitching that to the rest of the team, or were you pitching that to Al's team? No, once we pitched it to the team, and then we presented a package to Al's team that basically said, hey, this is, here's our, you know, we had gotten a license basically in place with Al's participation, and we pitched them the idea for all these songs, and then we went and got the rest of the license team once they signed off on that stuff to go get the rest of the songs. Right. Right. So what I was wondering, because from what you're just telling us, is that the concept of the game, the Museum of Natural Hilarity, isn't a concept that, well, it's a concept that you guys came up with. It's not something that's already something that Elle is doing. So was that difficult to pitch to them? And was there any feedback or suggestions? Or was it immediately approved? And did they just love it? yeah I mean from Jerry's the one that did most of the discussions with them about that but from my understanding of it the they absolutely love the concept when we pitched it to them and right now like the feedback from Alcee in the final game is that he was telling me personally when we were recording that him and his wife were just watching the video stuff and just laughing their heads off and so appreciating the care that we put into putting all these references in from his entire career and things like that. So, yeah, they did like the concept a lot. And it seemed like we all kind of agreed that it's the perfect encapsulation of all these disparate, weird songs from vastly different genres into one environment where we can explore and see these different things and have fun with it. And technically there is precedent for owl-themed museums. I think the coloring book has an owl museum, although it has a different name, and it's obviously conceptually different. So it's not completely out of nowhere. But our imagining of it is definitely a bit different. Yeah, I didn't get the coloring book, so I'm sorry. You're probably working your way up to it. But Albert was obviously heavily involved in the creation of the game because he spent so long recording over 2,000 sound calls for this. How did, well, who wrote the script for the game for him to record, and what was the recording the whole session like? Yeah, we basically, the way we typically do voice call script sessions is that we're like, okay, did everybody on the team that really is passionate about this. Come on, we're going to all get together and we're going to go through and pitch ideas and bring this stuff together. And I brought in a buddy of mine, Frank Serpest from Austin, who is the biggest OWL fan I know. And he came in and helped us out a lot on the call-outs. And we spent several weeks just getting all these things together. And then we had a massive amount of stuff to deliver to them. And so when I went into the recording session, I was like, well, we broke it up into two halves. It was like, this is a half we know we have to get, and this is a half where is the extras if we need to. And in the booth, I've never seen anybody that has come with that level of enthusiasm and that level of energy from the beginning to the end. I kept checking in on him, asking him if his voice was doing okay. And he's like, no, I'm going to hurt tomorrow, I know it, but I'm here as long as you need me to do. And he was just an awesome guy to work with I worked with a lot of voiceover people in my career in video and I never seen anybody that had that level of energy He was able to pick it up and he was able to like that bring back the exact way he sounded back in 1989 with some of these tell-offs. And it was absolutely amazing. And how long was the session? We spent about three hours in the booth. And if you know anything about voiceover work, it's hard. Voice over work for pinball was extremely hard because there's lots of yelling and screaming. And so I told my buddy, we spent three hours in there, and he's like, oh, my God, he's recorded for some pinball machines and stuff. And so, yeah, we got an enormous amount of stuff. And the main thing about it is that Al wanted everything to be perfect. So he would do five, six takes of everything and lots of different variations of things and just to make sure that we got it all perfectly. Okay, so if we're talking 2,000 voice calls, that's not like five takes of each and you're only using one, right? No. Five of each and you're using one, and that's one of the 2,000, right? Yeah. And the other four we don't count. No, we're not counting that. We're talking about over 2,000 call outs in the game entirely. Now, sometimes we'll have two or three takes of the same thing, but you get different deliveries in those things, right? him saying it. You enjoy screaming it and then the next time he's saying it in a more comical way, right? So you'll get a wide variety of owl speech when you play this game. Which is awesome for two reasons, right? Like, it's awesome because he gave you, you know, he gave us these different takes, but, you know, if you own this game, right, so you're playing it all the time, he keeps surprising you. He keeps surprising you when you get the different delivery and some of the lines are sort of similar and some of them are different And, I mean, you know, having put a lot of these, you know, when you do play testing and just sort of, I still laugh, right? And I hear these things and I'm just like, oh, my gosh. I was wondering, how can you stay serious in a recording session like that? Yeah, it was tough. But he's a consummate professional. He was able to get through the whole thing. the guy on the other end was cracking up a little bit. Yeah, no, it was a ton of fun getting through that recording session and everything. Even at the end, we made it to the very end, and I was like, hey, my lead programmer is a kid, a diehard Weird Al fan. Can you spend a little bit of extra time past the session just to record a message for us so we were able to get Michael's kid a nice little message from Al? Oh, wonderful. We can't spoil because my son still doesn't know about it. Don't let him answer this. Yeah, I won't. So here's a question that just comes up in my mind. Obviously, this is a game with music in it, licensed songs. With music, it's always difficult to have speech in music where there's also being sung. Or were you able to get partly instrumentals so that it becomes easier to add the voice calls during gameplay? Or am I getting too technical now? No, no, this is a good question, right? I mean, first of all, we have a lot of sound effects and other sort of incidental sounds that Scott worked on, Scott D'Amesi. And we had, I mean, of course, this is an important concern, right? We don't want to drown out the lyrics. It would just be weird if you heard voice calls on top of the lyrics excessively. Steven, I didn't mean to cut you off. Please jump in. Oh, yeah, no, and it's weird. You definitely don't want to be in a lyric version and then take the lyrics away and things like that. But when you get the tracks, you get the tracks as they were produced. We actually did spend a lot of time trying to decide which versions of which tracks we were going to use because there's a lot of different versions of different albums and things like that. But no, we made the choice consciously in the modes where we have more lyric-heavy songs to play it lighter on the call-outs during those, and then we get back and there's other places in the game where we're heavier on them. Okay. I mean, you guys are obviously so knowledgeable about how this game works, and for the rest of us, we haven't seen it, we haven't played it. So can we sort of just step back a little minute and just tell us briefly, you know, what the idea of the game is, what the player is supposed to do. They hit the start button. There's a museum. What's their aim in the game? So Al is the owner, curator of this museum of natural hilarity. You come in. He welcomes you with different welcomes every time. and you start off in the great hall, the lobby of the museum, and we've got five different halls that you can visit, right? There's different song modes in each one of those halls. So the goal is to make it through and visit all the halls and see everything there is to see in the museum. And so as you go around and you shoot different shots, you're selecting the different halls you want to go to, and you go into the ticket counter when you're ready. And if you're in the hall of health and medicine, then you've got a couple of songs up there that you can choose from. Germs are like a surgeon, right? And you play those modes, and when you get into the modes, you get up to a certain threshold of achievements that you want to do, and you can exit early if you want, or you can continue to play the mode further along to try to go and complete the song if you want to. But we let people exit early. There's an additional mode up in the cafeteria up on the mezzanine, the upper playfield section we've got where you can get in there and qualify my Bologna, which is one of my favorite modes in the game. And then you've got three stackable main multiballs in the game that you can get through and do in the game. Once you've visited at least one exhibit in all five halls, then you get access to the mini wizard mode, which is you make me, and then once you've done everything, you get to the final wizard mode, which is Running With Scissors, where we run through the entire museum again and experience everything in a much more chaotic fashion. Okay, thank you for that. And there are secondary objectives, and obviously there's a lot more we could say. Yeah. But yeah, that's the short version. That's pretty impressive, Stephen. That's all that. Yeah, yeah, bravo. So you were designing this game, and did you know from the very start, when you came to it, and this is for both of you, that there would be a standard edition and a limited edition. And did you know what the differences were going to be early on? We knew there was going to be a limited edition with this game. We also knew that there would absolutely not be any substantial differences in gameplay or play field or anything like that. We feel strongly that everybody in the P3 platform should have mostly the same experience with these things, but we wanted to make the limited edition special, and so we put a lot of effort into making that LE package, that LE kit, really shine. Right, and it's limited to 227 units. It's restricted. The 27 number of being significant in Weird Al land. Yeah, you will listen to his music And see his interviews and everything It's the number that pops up over and over and over again And we use it a lot in the game And it's definitely something that The Weird Al fans will appreciate Did you think that It's okay to keep the things like The animated topper For instance Purely for the LE kit Or there must have been a lot of Pressure to make that available to everybody as a purchasable add-on. Yeah, I mean, there's always discussions back and forth about what to include in the LA kit and what to include with the regular kit and everything. But at the end of the day, you know, these are all business decisions, and I think that journey made good trade-offs. And so I think that I'm really excited to get my LE and, you know, just play with that topper. We're extremely proud of that topper. TJ is Again I just think the guy is a genius He pulls off just miracle working With his mechanical creations That he comes up with and I cannot be more Proud and more happy about how Weird Al is up there playing the accordion And smiling at you and dancing around When you're playing this game I can honestly say when I first saw That before We got a Pre-release Look at the game and I saw that animated Topper, and that made me laugh out loud. There's not much in pinball that makes me laugh out loud like that does these days, because so many games seem to be serious, and I'm so glad this brings not just humour, but hilarity back to pinball. Right. So, speaking of hilarity, obviously there's a huge pinball catalogue of games that used voice calls, By any chance, did you try to sort of, well, let's say, pay homage to older games where they would take voice calls from a certain game that pinball people might recognize and throw them in there? We did. Maybe. There's a lot of stuff I had to explain in the booth. They're in there. Okay. Yeah, we had some of the voice call meetings. You know, Bowen was there, Bowen Kerins too, and he's also a Big Al fan. And I should say weird, big weird Al fan. He's not a fan of, he might be a fan of Big Al, I don't know who that is. But, you know, and we were talking about specific references and, yeah. I mean, we were then saying, okay, Stephen, good luck getting, you know, getting this specific weird, you know, I should say strange, you know, soundbite. But we, I mean, the sounds are, they will make you laugh. Martin, if you're looking for things that will make you laugh in your mall, these will make you laugh, for sure. And you will smirk when you hear the references. Right. And this game sounds amazing. Scott Bernice did an amazing job with the sound package and all his kooky sound effects and everything else and the sound design of everything that goes into it. I just, I can't not have a smile on my face when I listen to this and hear everything in the machine. I think it's important to sort of give due credit to all the work that Scott's put into this game, because a lot of people would just say, oh, it's a weird owl game. He just plays weird owl music. That's it. You know, what other sound work is needed on the game? But obviously, anybody who knows anything about pinball knows that there's a huge amount of sound that goes into producing a pinball machine. and there was incidental music as well from Scott in this game, isn't there? Yeah, Scott's written a couple of original tracks for this game that we had for a couple of situations and stuff like that. But, I mean, yeah, there's so much, like, sound design is so much more than just writing music. Like, if you even go back and look at TNA, right? TNA, yeah, it's got a killer soundtrack, but there's so much more sound in that game. Rick and Morty, there's so much more sound than just the music and things like that. And so, like, the music stands on its own and carries the game, but all the incidentals, all the extras around it that Scott put into this game are fabulous and really tie the game together and make it come alive and feel like a kind of place Al would want to hang out and invite you to. And presumably that incidental music had to be approved by Al for his team. Yep, yep, they approved it, and you know what, we didn't get any, we got it approved the first time. Okay, excellent. So, now Scott is obviously new to the Multimorphic team. He worked for Spooky earlier on. But also new to the Multimorphic team are Bo and Karens, who we just mentioned, and Colin MacAlpine, sorry, Colin MacAlpine, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, who, I assume, got in on this project while you guys were already working on it and had your own ideas. Can you tell a little bit about how that went? Was it a smooth integration? Did they come up with ideas that were a lot better than yours? Or did they come up with ideas that you shut down? Like, no, no, it's got to be like that. Or I don't know. Can you talk about that? Yeah, they came in mid-project, right? Because we had been working on it for a while. But they've both been excellent and amazing to work with. Such great ideas from both guys watching stuff and just giving us feedback on what we had already done. And everything we've done has been an improvement in the game going forward. So, yeah, so some ideas were like, well, that, you know, that doesn't work because of this thing that we're doing because we've got the fuller picture of everything. But most of them we were able to incorporate. And I really like where it's gotten some of the best progress we made in the game is just watching Colin sit on the game and play it and just tear the machine up and show us how everything's going through. And so that was extremely helpful in getting through the code. And, Michael, you want to expand on that? Yeah, I mean, the quality of the notes that we got both from Colin and Bowen have been really, really helpful, right? I mean, you know, really careful eye, really strong attention to detail, and, you know, things that ultimately have made the game better for sure. So I mean it would be much easier If we just said yeah no we're not doing any of that Sorry too late But I think the game improved as a result of us You know of us really Welcoming them onto the team And having their feedback integrated into the game for sure Right Like you said earlier Bowen helped us out a lot On the call out scripts too So he was integral in that Right well presumably by that stage You'd already got all your shots laid out And there weren't I mean the fact that they're world-class players didn't influence any of your shot design. No, they didn't, but Colin came in and played it really early on. That's the thing I'm always worried about with these new things. I'm worried about people getting in and the shot layout fun, but everybody that's gotten a chance to play the thing and actually flip the table have all come back and have been really positive about the shots and the flow and the layout. Right, now one of the sort of founding principles of the P3 was that the lower part of the playfield would be fixed and the upper part of the playfield would be this modular design Now, Stephen, you've been sort of gradually expanding on that and extending the playfield module First of all, with Heist, you added the crane that comes over the playfield and the upper flipper and in this game you've got the other upper flipper on the opposite side of the playfield and you've got the cross-playfield wireform which extends across the LCD. Have you got any plans in future games to gradually encroach further down the game with future designs to make more changes? Yeah, absolutely. Let me outline them all right now and spell the design out. Should we just send you the list of our features and the dates? While you're at it, can you also include future titles and themes and licenses and so on? Yeah, I think that's reasonable. Absolutely. I did a video a long time ago that was one of our first platform videos. It was actually before we had multiple modules besides Lexi. We had Lexi, we had Cannon Lagoon, and the video has, like, the Lexi module popping out and, like, a bunch of dummy modules that I had TJ work up. And in that video, we also had the side targets sliding out and other stuff sliding in, like, you know, pop bumpers floating over the screen and other stuff. So the idea that we could modify and improve on this lower play field section that with the stuff floating over the flippers has been a concept that's been there since day one. it's always been we can do pretty much whatever we want to do there we just have to rethink it, we have to re-engineer it and so that's where we were able to accomplish things like let's attack this from the crane from the backstage where we have the I think the widest selection of short shots of pinball and ice and then let's build these flipper modules in there that are backwards compatible with other games so when you pull them out, games that don't use a marked design for side flipper shots can still use those flippers as rails and things like that. So we've always had this in mind to be able to build upon that. But with these early games, definitely we're keeping in mind the speed of playfield swaps and stuff like that. And Scott's idea was actually the crossing wire form, and that's a tool-less installation process for a crossing wire form. You can take it out. It doesn't add much more time to a playfield swap when you add that wire form in. Right, so it just slots into the module, I guess, and secures on the right-hand side. Yep. Yep. Okay. Well, I mean, other changes you've made here. You've introduced the illuminated back panel, or the speaker panel, I should say. You've also changed the way that the scoops and the walls work, from solenoid-driven to motor-driven. Were those changes that were sort of been in the pipeline for a long time and just happened to coincide with the release of this game, or was this something which you wanted to put into the Weird Al game? Yeah, and we've been planning on the, I should say, Jerry's been planning on the illuminated speaker panel for a little while and the improvements to the wall scoop assembly back there. One thing about the motor-driven wall scoop assembly is that it's a lot nicer now if you need to level those walls and scoops from there. And it's really smooth to watch those things raise and lower. So, yeah, I'm excited to check it out. I know Michael can't wait to get his hands on an upgrade kit for his P3 and that wall scoop assembly. And then that's the other idea, too, is all of these improvements were made in the mind of, okay, we can also create a kit that we can sell to existing P3 owners in case they want to bring their P3s up to these new features. Is that going to make it more difficult from the software point of view, Michael, if you've got to support both motor-driven wall scoops and solenoid-driven wall scoops and potentially future changes as well? The design of the platform is such that code compatibility is preserved on both. so owners will just download you know they'll just download some new packages which can now be done over Wi-Fi so you don't need to mess around with USB and you'll have support for both and from a software perspective we can support them both there's just some really cool tricks that you can do with solenoid driven scoops or rather the servo driven scoops rather than the solenoid driven scoops that should be pretty fun I can't say anything else I have a special interest in that assembly Software wise I do have a question Currently the Weird Al game Has five exhibit halls Each using two songs And then there's multiple songs in the game But in theory There's nothing stopping you guys From further developing the game and adding more exhibit halls if you would like to. Is there any chance of that, or is this like the license is this, this is what we got, and we're not going to expand on that? I would never say never, but all future related expansions and stuff like that are something that would be in Jerry's camp to answer. Okay, fair enough. I mean, given the nature of the P3, and the fact that it uses, well, underlying is kind of like the P-Rock or P3-Rock system. Is it something which homeowners could modify? Is that a concern that when you're going for a license that you have to make sure that people can't put their own songs into it, that they can't change any of the display graphics? Because it is a moderately open platform, isn't it? Yeah, but we don't, we're not giving anyone the ability to change the songs that are in the game that's been approved, right? So, you know, you can load other games onto this physical module, but, you know, you can't change the software for this, you know, this specific experience that's been created. Can you write your own game for this module? Yes, you can. Like, the software developers can come up and write their own games. If you want it distributed to other P3 owners, you would submit it to Jerry to go through the P3 store and all that. And so we do have an approval process through that. But, yeah, we will have, like, our third-party games on here. I mean, our first-party mini-games and stuff on here as well. But, I mean, obviously we wouldn't approve of any games that were violating, you know, music licenses or anything of the sort. We wouldn't allow those to be distributed through the channels. And I will say, to my credit, to Greg Goldey's credit, to Jerry's credit, I think it would be pretty hard to quickly throw together your own version of this game just to add your own songs to it. Sure. But we've seen that the upper plate of modules have been reused in numerous other titles. That's kind of the point of it. the modularity of it. Would any games that people write for this module have to be cleared with Al's team? Well, I can't get into the specifics of the license agreement, but no, the deal is that if you're writing software for any of our modules, you'd go through Multimorphic and their approval process. Right. Yeah. Okay. But we're not, I don't believe we're going to be stuck in a situation where we're not going to bother Mr. Alfred Yankovic with a ton of requests for software. We're just not going to let anything happen that would possibly denigrate his imagery. Okay. Obviously, the reaction on this game has been amazing. do you think this is going to be sort of a breakthrough game that's going to sway people who have been on the fence about whether the P3 is a put it in massive quotes, real pinball and have held off from buying it up until now, do you think this is the one that's going to sway them into their first module and buying the P3 platform I'll say this. Everybody should try to get their hands on a P3 and play it and experience it, right? There's nothing much I can do about the moving goalposts. It's like you see, you know, people said, oh, Heist is amazing. We need one more game or whatever. And I'm just saying, like, just find this out. Seek this out. We'll be at TPS. Come play it. See it for yourself. This play field is a ton of fun. I think a lot of people are going to play it. They're really going to love it. And we have really, really high customer satisfaction in the hobby. We've got the best – we've got a two-year factory warranty, really great customer service. People – Jerry likes to call it the best customer loyalty program in all of pinball because not only do we want you to love the current game you buy, but we want you to keep being customers and keep your games forever and keep buying stuff, and we keep putting stuff out to make the platform better and better and better. Every single new release that comes out, even if it's not something that you're super into, increases the value of the platform for every person that owns it and every new customer. So, like, you know, when I got my game, we had, like, eight games on the platform. We're now up to 15 games total on the platform, and it just keeps, that's in like two and a half years maybe. And so it's just going to keep getting better over time. So people, it's been difficult. The hobby is so different and so new that a lot of people look at it and they can't wrap their heads around it and everything, but sit down, grab one, get a chance to flip it, flip this play field, try to flip heists, go back and play some head-to-head games on CCR and find the Lexi Lightspeed. all these games are super fantastic. I love having them all in my house. I love the ability to stuff these out. And I think people are really going to take to it when they finally get to see it. Michael, how about you? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I know a lot of people who aren't pinball people, and when they play the P3, they are blown away, and they absolutely love it. And, you know, I know a lot of pinball people who also love it. And we also know, you know, there are some people who, you know, it is, as Steven said, just sort of too different. And, you know, I think they sort of maybe shut themselves down from the experience and really don't let themselves enjoy it. But, yeah, we heard this a lot with Heist, right? We heard a lot of people on Heist were just like, oh, wow, like I didn't know the P3 was capable of this. Let's see what the next game is. And, you know, this game is the kitchen sink, right? We've thrown everything into this game. This game has five flippers. It has a real mechanical hamster wheel mech. It has a spiral loop. I mean, it has... Lift wraps. What? The two lift wraps. The two lift wraps, yeah. An adorable little UHF camera that holds physical ball locks. There's everything in this play field. And, you know, I think it would be hard to not play this game and smile and to enjoy just how much real pinball it is. And so, you know, it's true that we're not giving you that, you know, that full piece of painted wood. We're giving you a portion of painted Matt Andrews wood and then another portion of a screen that has been painted by Matt Andrews 14 times over as we change what mode you're in. I think truly that this is a crazy experience that you couldn't do on a traditional machine. And I think what we bring to the table, I think people are really going to enjoy it. And I do think this is going to be the game that turns a lot of people. We're already seeing some folks. We'll know what happens, and I guess by the time people hear this, we'll know a bit more. Because we're talking now. Am I allowed to say when we're talking? Yeah. Well, we're talking right before the ordering process has gone live. We're talking the evening before the ordering process will go live. So by the time this airs, it actually will have gone live, but we won't have your responses to it. Although I do imagine that you guys are anticipating what the response will be. As far as responses go, the best compliment I saw on, you know, this video, the video has been seen by hundreds of thousands of people thanks to, you know, social media is easy when you can get a guy with five million followers to share your stuff. but just tons and tons of comments online everything the best one i saw is that you could tell that this game was made by weird al fans and that's the best compliment you can pay me on this game we really really wanted to do him justice and i think if you're a weird al fan you are going to love what you see in this game and if you're not aware it's well i don't think there's such thing as not a weird al fan i think everybody likes the guy right but we're going to make some fans out of people who come in here that aren't familiar with anything beyond his main parodies and stuff like that and we're going to see how much of a musical genius this guy is and how much fun the world of Al is so I'm excited about getting people to play this game and other companies who do a lot of licensing have found it to be stressful at times you haven't found that this hasn't put you off doing a future license? Oh man, I think we've been spoiled. I got to do basically whatever I wanted on us. The whole team got to play around and create this whole world and create exactly the game we wanted to do. And then we go into this license and we found Al and his Manager J partnership that was really amazing and great and they were fantastic to work with and the feedback was always great and And I think we, you know, I would definitely, if doing licenses is like this, like, yeah, let's keep going. Not so great news, but doing licenses like this is probably not how many have experienced it. So, I'm just, well, it can be a pain, but in this case, it wasn't. There must be other licenses around where it's also very easy or a very pleasant collaboration with the licensor. Well, I should clarify, Jerry is the person who had to go and get the licensing for everybody. I'm sure he worked really, really hard to secure all the rights for everything that we needed in this game. And so to say it was easy to get everything licensed is not necessarily a true statement. But I just say working through it once we've got the rights to use everything, it was an incredible joy. And it's been the highlight of my career working specifically on this property since it means so much to me. Well, it's going to be hugely beneficial to have somebody, the subject of the license, so supportive of what you're doing. Yes, definitely. Yeah, there's nothing cooler than an email that says, you know, hey, love what you've done from a hero of yours since childhood. That hits you pretty strong. Which actually makes me wonder, is Weird Al a pinball person? I don't expect him to have a game room with tons of games, but... He'll have one now. Right. Okay, so, yeah, what I'm curious about, and then we're sort of looking into the future, obviously, like you said, you've been spoiled with this license. So what's next? Because there's got to be more games. No, I think we're done, right? Michael, I think we've done everything we're going to do, right? But yeah, my schedule is about to get really clear as a result of this conversation. Right, right, right, right, right. Now, yeah, there are things... Did this game raise the bar, so to speak? Because people are going to expect the next game to be on the same level as this one, I suppose. At least I can imagine people thinking like, Whoa, you can't wait for you guys to lift the curtain on the next game to see what you come up with next. Good. Yeah, but, see, I'm going to expect our game to outdo this game, right? Like, we just always in our games, we're always trying to make improvements and stuff and make them all stand on their own and everything. So we're definitely, there's a push, and everybody working on the team, they always do the absolute best work, and I think it comes through in the games that we put out. Well, thank you. That's what we want. you want everyone to be excited for our next game. We're excited for our next game. We're excited for this game. We're excited for all the games, right? I mean, this is a platform where you want to really enjoy the platform by having all the modules, right? You don't have to think, oh, shucks, I just bought this game, and now this is coming out. Now what am I going to sell? I mean, you're just adding it to your collection. Awesome. Well, thank you very much indeed to Stephen and Michael for joining us on the Spincast. It's been illuminating, and congratulations again on the launch of the game, and good luck tomorrow when sales go live. Thanks so much, and when you guys get the DPF, try to get the super-duper skill shot. It's amazing. Thank you both. And there you have it. Michael Osten and Stephen Silver of Multimorphic discussing basically everything that had to do with the Weird Al's Museum of Natural Hilarity and how that came to be. Yeah, I don't think there's any more we can add to it, really. We heard from the guys themselves. They are the ones who built it, or part of the team who built it. And congratulations again, as we said, on not only creating a great game, but also selling so many on the day of its launch, or the day which the orders opened up. Right. So, congrats to the entire team, and Jerry for his birthday as well. Okay. Well, I don't think we have anything more from the Multimorphic team. They've been busy enough doing that launch. Yeah, I have a feeling that their booth at the Texas Pinball Festival later this month will be packed as well. Yes, as packed as the game, yes. Right, so moving on to, well, let's first make an announcement. This interview with Michael and Stephen, we recorded last night before sales went live. We recorded another interview as well Which will be at the end of this podcast Where we are talking to Ed Van Der Veen Who is one of the co-organizers of the Texas Pinball Festival Yep, and we are both hoping to be there We haven't actually booked our flights yet But we are intending to be there, put it that way Yes, we're just waiting for prices to drop Yes, we've been waiting a while but we'll get on to that later anyway. And if anything drops, then rather the price is going to drop. Yes, that's the only thing we want to drop. So moving on to Stern Pinball, and it's been an interesting month for them. Probably the most interesting feature is an email that they sent out to their distributors. and we've reported in the past how there have been big back orders of games or backlog in producing games by the over 5,000 games waiting to be built. Right. Which is partly due to supply chain issues that have been plaguing the industry, especially last year, probably even longer. Yeah, I think since 2020 it's been going on and it continues. it's easing slightly but I don't think it's nowhere near back to where it was and not only with supply is actually getting the parts but also the prices of them and the price to ship them is a big problem now in all industries as we've seen but so anyway Sterna are hoping to address this by cutting back on the release of or the number of new games they're going to announce This year So they can catch up on producing Games they've already announced Yes, and that goes back as far as Deadpool If I'm not mistaken Yeah, I mean people have been waiting Over a year, if not 18 months For orders that they put in And it's Yeah, well I think it's very good that people Are prepared to wait that long For their game For Stern I think this is something That they had to address Because at some point people are just going to say like forget it, I'll just get another game. They might get it from the competition and that's exactly what Gary was always afraid of. That people can only spend their money once, although that's not entirely true because plenty of people have enough money to buy multiple games a year. But if they can't deliver the games, at some point people are going to bail. Yes, and of course it opens the market up to other companies to get involved. You know, if people have got money burning a hole in their pocket and they're desperate to spend it, and nobody can, or none of the existing companies can actually supply games to them, then it's a perfect opportunity for a startup company to come along who actually can produce games. Right. Now, we're still waiting for that to happen, but, well, that's not a nice joke, joke, but in all fairness none of the startup companies can produce the amount, the number of games that Stern is able to produce. No, but they don't need to probably, if they're a startup company they can start relatively small, but they can sell everything, you know, we just seen today with multi-morphic sales, you know, they announce a game and it sells out, and that seems to be the case with every new launch doesn't it everything sells out almost immediately well that that that reminds me of one comment regarding the multi-morphic thing um especially now that we know that the the 227 limited edition units sold out it made me wonder is that is are the multi-morphic limited edition units now the new toppers where people just buy the units just so so they have it and they can flip it for more money. Yes, and of course it is a topper as well. That what you get in the Limb Edition kit You do get the animated topper So yeah could well be although I suspect the market is probably a bit smaller for those people with a number of P3 units out there It's got to be, you know, probably less than 1,000, I would guess. But they did sell 227 kits in one day, and those are limited edition ones, and presumably a significant number of standards as well. And quite a few of those will probably be entire new games, which will be the base unit with the module and the LE kit as well. So, sorry for drifting off. That was my biggest one. We're back on, back to Stern anyway. So, basically the announcement is, whereas Stern usually is announcing a game in April, August and December, the April game is going to be skipped. Rush was announced in December, but it's still counting as the first game that they took into production this year, which basically means that we have to wait until August for a new title to be announced. Right. And then there'll be one announced in December, but not produced until January next year, I guess. I suppose they're still building the August title back then. Yeah. And there's conflicting rumors about which title it is. Venom is rumored to be an upcoming title. James Bond is. And apparently it could be that the April game is not going to be the August game, but that the April game by me might be released later, and the August game remains the August game. So they've sort of flipped the upcoming title. Yeah, quite right. I guess if it is the James Bond one that we're talking about, which I think we know exists, then that was, I believe that was Steve Ritchie's final design, which has since been redesigned, probably by George Gomez. That is, in every sense, a timeless title. There's no imperative to get it out in time for all to tie in with a movie release. Especially not since after the last one. Yes, quite. I don't think we might see a James Bond movie anytime soon. Well, that movie was actually finished two years before it was released. So it was just waiting for cinemas to reopen, and movie theatres to actually be able to screen it. So it's been a while, but we haven't even had an announcement of who the next James Bond's going to be yet. So maybe when that happens, that'll be a good time to bring out the game. Right. So anyway, no new game from Stern until August, but you might get your Deadpool or other title finally being produced. Yeah, and the announcement did say only two Cornerstone titles this year. That doesn't imply there won't be any other studio or home editions which will come out. Okay, which might be easier to build Or could be designed around The parts that they do have available Yes, so And then, well, there's some technical news That I'd like you to handle Oh, okay Yeah, well, Stern's We've mentioned, obviously, Stern's Insider connected system And that's That's been recognised by the Innovation and Tech Today as a top 50 most innovative product. Okay, so that's innovation and tech today. I'm sure you're all avid readers of INTT. Well, it's... I never miss an issue. Exactly. Well, for those who have been missing out up to now, it's one of the leading publishers of content on innovation, technology and the sciences, apparently. And they announced the winners of their top 50 most innovative products and Stern were in that list of top 50. Right. I'm always curious whether this organization or this publisher discovered that themselves or whether Stern could simply apply and as long as there are no more than 50 entries, then you're in there. Well, yeah, I wouldn't like to diminish their achievement, but we do get, even at our little pinball club, we get quite regular mailings saying we have been considered for an award for the most innovative business, or even in areas in which we're not participating, like transport awards, we get nominated for that. But I'm sure this is a worthy award. Anyway, congratulations to them on being recognized. And it is an innovative feature. Oh, yeah, absolutely. So, I'll take the next one. As you might remember, during Pitbull Expo last year, Jack Danger had a stage where he was doing interviews with, as we now can say... Sorry. Oh, colleagues. You're not sounding too good there, Jonathan. Are you suffering? Yeah, I am. Oh, dear. Okay. I'm a bit fluish, if you couldn't hear by my voice. Yeah, okay. I do feel better, but please carry on. Yeah, so anyway, Jack had this stage where he did interviews with what are now his colleagues, most of them like George Gomez, Greg Freres, John Borg, the women of Hot Nudge were also on there. And Stern have This month or last month Started publishing These recordings On their Facebook channel So you can watch the interviews That Jack or the talks that they had On there Which are quite entertaining I would say Yes, I haven't watched them Myself, but I guess they're being quite Laid back And not so Formal, shall we put it that way given it's drinks with Jack sessions so anyway so if you want to get that on the Facebook page you say yes they're on the Facebook page and probably also Instagram but I haven't checked I thought they'd be on their YouTube channel as well probably if not yet then soon and speaking of the Stern team this week that we're doing this recording is the week where the London show, the EAG International Expo, is held. It's normally held in January, but due to COVID it was deferred or delayed until March. So it's the 2nd to the 4th of March, which is, well, tomorrow. No, it's the 1st. Is it? Yes. Oh, okay. I beg your pardon. I am looking at my dark mic. the time and date on my computer, and it says it's the 1st, and I was thinking, oh, it's the 1st, so it must be tomorrow, which is the 2nd. Well, in fact, it's already gone past midnight here, so it is actually the 1st day. So, yeah, that's your right. The 1st and 3rd of March, and Stern are sending quite a team to the show. Quite a delegation, yes. They send out a mailing as well, indicating that Stern's new president Seth David will be giving Stern Insider Connected presentations at both the Tuesday and the Wednesday of the show and he's accompanied with Gary Stern Doc Score and Waysan Cheng where I'd say that Waysan was kind of a surprise to me Well, he's the lead developer, I think, of the Insider Connected. So that makes sense. Okay. Yeah. So if you're going to the EAT show in London at the Excel Centre in Docklands, stop by the Electrocoin booth, which is where Stern will be. That's Electrocoin being the Stern distributors for the UK. And you can catch Gary, Seth, Doug, and Wason there and watch the presentation about Insider Connected. Yeah, and I'm pretty sure that they want you to get your phone out and register right away. Yes, if you haven't already. Yes. Well, then there's the obligatory section of new code, which I leave up to you. Well, I'm going to skip through this because there's so much of it. In fact, there's been updates for monsters, There's two updates for Monsters, from version 1.20 to 1.21. There we go. Rush, of course, is the current game on the line, or the current latest title. That's had two updates, which is not really surprising, from 0.88 and 0.89. Godzilla, previous games, has also got an update from 0.91. Star Wars, interesting, that's had an update. the first update for 14 months, which added the Insider Connected stuff to it. I think people were waiting for that, and I think that was a licensing thing, because part of the Insider Connected is to add the achievements, which need to be approved by the licensor. So there were 62 of those added in, along with a couple of fixes and a few additional setting changes. So version 1.21 for Star Wars, and Jurassic Park Home Edition as well. add a little tweak with some rebalance scoring, a few bug fixes, and a new dead flip skill shot, of course, being a Jack Danger design. There's the tie-in there. Right. OK. I think it does. Yes. So if you're going to EAG, do give my regards to Gary and the team. Yes, we will miss you. Unfortunately, you won't be there this year. Yes. But we have other plans together Before too much longer And we'll talk about those a bit later Right, so moving across the block Yeah From Stern, Jersey Jack Pinball Yeah They've been producing Some sort of extra add-ons Really for their Mainly for the Guns N' Roses game You could buy a Six piece platinum record Decal set for your spinning disc if you own a Guns N' Roses. For a mere $39, you can get six record-shaped decals, which are officially licensed, and represent the albums Appetite for Destruction, Lies, Use Your Illusion 1 and 2, Spaghetti Instant, and Chinese Democracy. And if you want to get those, you can go to their webshop, which is at pinballwizard.com, and you can order them there. Yes, remember, $39 for your details. Right, okay. And I missed it, but apparently there were some promotional Guns N' Roses main playfields available to purchase in the same Pimble Wizard store for $299. Yes, which I quickly thought out. just me thinking promotional would probably mean second, as in quality grade, so there must be a stretch on there somewhere, or dimple, or whatever, I don't know. Yes, I was surprised there wasn't a whole slew of sarcastic comments about all the playfields being second, or something about the promotional nature and playfield quality. But $299 seemed a pretty good deal anyway for it, and at the time of purchasing, you could automatically sign up to have it signed by Eric Meunier. Right. Which is a nice feature, you know, and unfortunately, it was only available in the US, and even more unfortunately, it's all sold out, so you can't get it anyway. Right. So we'll see these pop up for a thousand bucks somewhere. Yes, probably not as promotional, probably as full replacement playfields. Yes. Right, okay. And then, well, there is some conflicting rumours about the upcoming next title for Jersey Jack Pinball, which has been rumoured to be Toy Story, although that has never been officially confirmed, but I don't think it's that much of a secret anyway. No, I don't think... is things are never confirmed until they actually are announced, are they? True, true. So the rumor is on the one hand that Jersey Jack might reveal the game at the Texas Pimple Show, and the conflicting rumor is that they might not. Well, I think we can guarantee one of those two will happen. Yeah. So remember where you heard it from? But sorry, it appears that the production of Guns N' Roses is coming to an end, which is on the early side, I would expect, as I do recall an email from last year where they scheduled production of Guns N' Roses to be until the early summer, if I'm not mistaken. In my book, that's not early March. No. No, but yes, Yes, it's been a long time since we've been able to announce or talk about a new Jersey Jack pinball title. So obviously Guns N' Roses have been a huge seller for them. So very successful in that regard. Probably their biggest seller, probably overtaking Wizard of Oz, I would have thought, by now. So it's long overdue. And I think it may have even taken them by surprise how successful it was. and they've got a number of designers there and they've got a number of designs and they can't sit on them forever. They need to get them out into the market. Yeah. Yeah. And we know that the title you spoke about just now, Toy Story, we think that's been done and dusted for a long time. The good news on that is that software-wise it should be completely ironed out, I would say. Yeah, it would be great if they could actually release a fully fleshed out game with feature complete software in it. Yes, and well, we'll just have to wait and see. Obviously, it would be great if it would be at Texas, but we don't know how ready JJP is to take the game into production. And what their strategy is, once they announce the game officially, whether they want to be able to have hundreds or, I don't know, maybe a thousand games ready to ship. That's just a number I pulled up from the top of my head. We both remember Jack saying that he will not announce new games until he has units to ship. So if that is going to be the case for Toy Story as well, Then they might Do some pre-production I suppose before they announce the game So that they have you on the ship Yeah well we understand that Jack Granieri Will be at the Texas Pinball Festival And he's giving a talk there I don't know if there's anybody else From the Jersey Jack Pinball team scheduled To talk there, I don't think so But you never know, you never know who's going to turn up To that seminar do you? I would actually be surprised if Eric Meunier isn't there. Yes. Yes. Or, of course, it would be Steve Ritchie. I mean, Steve Ritchie is always there. Yeah. Well, Steve Ritchie is announced as a guest. Yeah. And I think there's a seminar with Jack and Steve. That's going to be awesome. And I think it will be streamed live, but we'll talk about that a bit more later anyway. Right. Yep. Okay. So that's about all the new things we've signed for Jersey Jack Pinwall. Moving across the globe, we've talked about the Home Pin Factory in Taiwan, where they are working on the This is Spinal Tap pinball, and there's some news on that. Yeah, towards the end of the month there was more, but earlier on there were lots of pictures from Mike Kalinowski of various assemblies being produced for the game. This is Final Chat. But they didn't sort of explain what they were or how they were going to fit into the game or anything like that. One of the mechanisms being built is a new three-bank drop-target assembly, which is all made out of stainless steel parts, including the springs, and looks pretty impressive. But drop target assemblies are generally quite nice looking devices I think from a mechanical point of view And a three bank drop target, we think TAP Would be good to spell that out Now, Highway Entertainment posted a couple of things actually They've announced their Australian agent who will be distributors for the games in Australia. We won't go through who they all are because it's a pretty small... Well, OK, let's do it. So all pinball and Playwell Games in Queensland, Pinball Spare Parts Australia, who I think we know well as a parts supplier. They're a distributor for the game in Victoria. and Highway Entertainment themselves are in New South Wales. Right. But also they've been, Highway, I think, are behind a new website that's been set up, which you saw, Jonathan. I didn't spot that. Yeah, I spotted that. It's finaltappinball.com where it basically says that HomePin opened up pre-orders for the game. The website says Well, first of all It's not a very professional looking website It's really going back to Welcome to 1998 The first days of internet, it reminds me of Yeah, I was a bit shocked Because it actually got quite a few Spelling errors on it Including spelling the game wrong Which would be one of the biggest sins You'd think If you send in an inquiry which should be an inquiry on there, with an E rather than an I. Is that Australian spelling? No, I don't think so. It could be American, but also it says subject, Spinal Tap Pinball Machine Inquiry, is what it filled in, and it spells tap with two P's, which is a bit weird. But anyway. Well, this is tap pinball, so the second P is for pinball. Ah, okay. I suppose Yes Let's go with that But yes, if you want to send an inquiry about the game You can go through spinalchatpinball.com Spelt properly, Spinal Chat with one P But there are some details about what's in the game Which I don't think we've seen published anywhere else before It says it includes a 27 inch back glass LCD monitor Which I think is the same size as the Dirty Jack Pinball one Also has a traditional DMD display Has stainless steel ramps A quick release Steel metal lock down bar Which I think we have spoken about before As an upgrade from the plastic one That was on Thunderbird's game It has original Spinal tap sound tracks Whatever that means Cut video scenes From the original movie Reptile models of famous Tap guitars and also lifetime PCB support for the boards. For the boards. Okay. So, yeah. So the site doesn't look that impressive, but at least we have a date. We do. The only thing worrying is that it's a pre-order system, and we have seen that go wrong a couple of times. Yeah. Marketing-wise, I don't think it's the smartest thing to do. Let's put it like that. Well, this is... I'm not sure whether this pre-order and... I'm not sure we actually mentioned it. It says the game will be available from May. But I'm not sure whether the pre-ordering is through Highway Games or whether it's through Homepin themselves. So I would assume it's actually through Highway. So in which case it's probably only for Australia. But other distributors are available, so contact them, contact your local one, and if you're interested in getting a This Is Spinal Tap pinball, or indeed finding out more about when they might actually have it available. Right, and of course, home pin products are distributed elsewhere in the world as well, so it's not just limited to Australia. Oh no, definitely not, no. make a wide range of other products as well, apart from the games themselves. Right. Okay. Okay, so, yeah, normally while we're in the neighborhood, yeah sorry, I'm screwing up the order, but, like a spinball, yeah, Australia, supposed to be working on the Fathom Revisited, no news. No, no, yeah, because, yeah, Yeah, normally we, you know, Damien's been very proactive in producing lots of updates in the past. So we have had quite a few periods where, you know, it's gone quiet or it's gone dark and we haven't heard anything for a long time. And we're in one of those at the moment. So hopefully that just means that they're busy, you know, getting their heads down and building lots of fathom revisited games. Right, yeah. Otherwise, it'll be a news topic for the coming months, I suppose. Yeah, you know, predictably, there are plenty of people with theories about exactly why, conspiracy theories, shall I say, about why we haven't heard anything about it, and natives are getting restless because they haven't heard updates on them. But other people have sent emails to Damien to ask him what's going on, and they've got prompt replies with the information they've asked for. So he's just talking to the buyers and not publishing. Maybe we should. We'll send them an email and see what's going on. Right, okay. Back to the order that we had in mind, DeepRoot Pinball. Yeah, well obviously not a huge amount of news coming out of DeepRoot, because they don't really exist anymore as a company. They're obviously filing for bankruptcy, and there is an auction of the contents of what was the, I hesitate to call it a factory, but they're offices, which we spoke about last month as being organised. But it's certainly going to be a few weeks away, and I don't think there's actually been a date set when that auction's going to take place. So if we do find out what it is, we'll obviously let you know as soon as possible. So you can get in there and bid for carpet tiles or the notice board off the wall with the production schedule. Right. Well, that's going to be collectible. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Everything will be. Yeah, quite right. But hopefully there'll be some good stuff in there as well, maybe in some prototype or sample games. Right. Because nobody knows where those went. Well, someone knows where they went, but we don't. True, true. Okay, well, so no news there So let's head up to Scandinavia and the Pinball Brothers Obviously producing Alien And the LV version Yes Yep, so busy doing that and sending them all over the world They haven't been saying very much about what they've been up to but they did say that they were planning to have what they call their own little alien invasion at the Texas Pinball Festival. So it's not clear if anyone from Pinball Brothers will be there, or if it will be a distributor who will be representing them. But if you wanted to play the limited version of the game and haven't done so up till now, it looks like they will have some available for you to play at Texas. Right. That's about it, really. I can't really say anything more about what's going on with the Pinball Brothers because they've been very quiet and just getting their heads down, building games. Well, that's one thing. Somebody needs to do it, so... Yes. Not very exciting or fashionable, but it's what the business is all about. Right. Okay. Yeah, then moving on to, I suppose, Spooky Pinball. Yeah. Any news there? Well, I think I already covered it in my newsletter, but they celebrated a big milestone, being that they completed 100 games start to finish in three weeks' time. And that was already at the beginning of February, I should say. But 100 games in three weeks, that's quite impressive, I suppose. there's plenty of other companies that don't build that many yeah that's 33 a week that's pretty good going I'd say and just in they also are releasing new game code for Halloween and Ultraman and what they did was they streamed the new code with all the new full screen clips animation, new user interface, new modes and much more on their YouTube channel. So if you're interested in seeing what the game currently plays like then look up Spooky Pinball on YouTube and you'll find it soon enough I suppose. Excellent, well that's good to see that they're adding new stuff to the game still. They've been building it for a while so it's nice that the game's being given, No, it's been given the attention it deserves. Right. And it's also making me wonder, like, if they're building 100 games in three weeks, could we see a new spooky game this year? Yeah, you'd think so, wouldn't you? If they can keep that rate up. And we don't know how many orders there were in total, do we, for Halloween and Ultraman? I think, I'm not sure whether both were limited, but I don't remember. I think they were, yeah, because they sold out very quickly, didn't they, both of them? Yes. So that number is, I suppose it's fixed. So then it's just doing the math of how many did they build and when do we get to see another game. Well, it sounds like it should be announcing something else fairly soon. So maybe at the, if not there, then maybe at the Midwest Gaming Classic, which is a bit nearer to them and more their local show. Right. That would make sense. Okay, so I think that's all the news we have From Suki Pinball Let's go Sort of partner in crime They are collaborating On a game together Which has not been Released, but it has been announced That they are collaborating Chicago Gaming Yes Who basically indicated on Facebook That they were having Supply chain issues which were delaying the building of Cactus Canyon remakes. They did ship a number of special edition models, but the limited editions seemed delayed. They basically said thank you to everybody for their patience as we're dealing with some supply chain issues for Cactus Canyon. They announced that the special edition started shipping, and they will be showcasing places where you can go play Cactus Canyon Special Edition. as soon as they know where they are open, on locations open to the public, while they continue to manufacture more games. That's about everything that they posted. That's a shame, and I hope they are able to overcome those supply chain issues and get those games and the limited edition ones out to the buyers, because it looks like it's a great game with some interesting new additions. so well I know it is I've played it but and from that point of view I think it's good that more people get to play and people who bought it get their games because I think people are getting a little bit fed up waiting all the time but unfortunately everyone's suffering as we said for the same supply chain issues so you can't just sort of leap from one manufacturer to another one to get your game sooner It's interesting to see how each manufacturer is dealing with it in their own way. Yes, and whether they admit to having supply chain issues or not. Right. So, well, on to our next favorite manufacturer, Pinball Adventures. We are working on the Punny Factory game, which, well, we're waiting for progress. And I did see a short video on Instagram showing the completed Bunny Factory game with a tagline on it saying that they are starting bug testing on the game, which is interesting because I figured once the design is complete there should be a prototype which already has been bug tested and what have you, but apparently that's this one. Yeah, it was just in a track mode there was no actual gameplay as far as I could see on that video so yeah, a bit surprising that they're still at that stage, but it's been a long journey to even get this far, hasn't it? I'm hoping that once they've got the Bunny Factory finished, it won't take that long for subsequent titles to come out because this has taken years and years. Right. Let's hope it gets to release them before they run out of money. Yeah, yeah. Doesn't seem to be a concern at the moment. Anyway, so that's been all Ventures will obviously keep you updated if there's any any further development on the Puny Factory or any of the future titles that they have in the pipeline. It would be nice if the Puny Factory game and other titles would be present at the Texas show. Well, yeah, we don't know. We'll have to wait to see what's going to turn up there. Right. Probably better to get to the... it's a long way from Vancouver down to Texas so yeah maybe Midwest Gaming Classic is a bit of a nearer show for them or the Northwest Pinball Show in Tacoma. Yeah absolutely. Just over the border. Okay well in terms of manufacturers there's one left that is very near to me, literally, which is a Dutch pinball. I texted with the owner very recently this afternoon and asked whether there was any news. He quickly came back to me and said, well, it's basically just the usual. We're building games, we're expanding slowly, and the power supply seems to be okay. Oh, okay, that's good news. That is good news. And, well, there's still a lot of people waiting for their game. I I did see some comments that it appears that these so-called early achievers, which are people who paid in full years ago and are still waiting for their game, were promised that the games would be built and one out of four built games would go to an early achiever. but apparently it seems to look like, and I'm not saying this is true, but some people get the impression that there's more games being built for new customers and pay more money for the game, and that the Audio Achiever games are not at a 1 to 4 ratio being built. But they're still building games, they're still in business, so hopefully they get to deliver the Audio Achiever games. I may be imagining this, but I thought I saw some news from Dutch Pinball, or at least from, it might have been from Cointaker, saying that there was a new batch of Brider Pinbot 2.0 kits available. Did you see that? Yes, well, I didn't see it from Cointaker, but I did see Stefan Riedler pointing that out. He's the distributor for Australia. Australia. for Austria, that he had some new Bride of Pinbot kits come in as well. It might seem news, but I think Barry announced a new run of this Bride of Pinbot kit to distributors, and I think it was limited to like 50 units or so, which I recall from previous conversations, and they saw that rather quickly. Right. Okay, good. So there was no need to advertise them heavily for Dutch Bingle. No, good. Okay. They're still making those as well alongside the full, the big Lebowski games. Yes. So, like I said, they're busy expanding slowly. I'd rather see them expand more quicker, but oh well, we'll see. Yes, and someone else who is expanding is Marcus Specialty. and so some good news from them that they are looking for an entry-level software developer. They put an advert out saying that Microsoft Specialties, a 30-person family of nerds, they call themselves, seeks an entry-level software developer with technical chops and an eye for process. This is their Lexington, South Carolina facility and the salaries seem to be $55,000 to $70,000 plus benefits and a training stipend. So good money there to be had if you fancy either getting into pinball or expanding your pinball skills with market specialties in Lexington, South Carolina. I'm not sure whether you have to be a good pinball or a skilled pinball player to rather have a good programmer. Yeah. Talks about parts and inventory and sales and the database and stock control, rather than actually making games. Right. Or is it? Maybe we have a new manufacturer in the making, and that's the first leak. In the meantime, I did get a message from our good friend. Oh, yes, of course. How could we forget? Yes. Yeah. I'm sorry, Jerry. I talked to him this afternoon. He had some news that he would like to share with us. Yeah. So I said, well, we're recording tonight. Why don't you come on our podcast? Which he agreed to, but he just sent me this recorded message, which I'll just play right now. Let's see what it says. Okay. Hi guys, your podcast is particularly interesting this month But as one of you isn't sounding too well I won't be joining you because I don't want to catch anything Bye for now Well that's very wise I think You can obviously hear that you're suffering a little bit there Jonathan And he needs to keep his health up Right, I didn't Well, I may have caught something I didn't know I was that contagious that it would reach over the phone. Well, it's best not to take any chances, really. You know, he carries, you know, he's getting on a bit. And we all have to, as indeed we all are, and we have to take special measures. And we wouldn't want to hear him give us the latest news through a mask or anything like that. We had that before. Well, he's a wise guy to take precautions. So I guess we'll catch up with him next month then. Oh, well. So sorry about that. But we do have another guest. We do. We mentioned it enough times in this particular pin cast, but the Texas Pinball Festival is, of course, coming up later this month, towards the end of this month, in fact. And we both intend to be there. and we will be hosting our regular So You Think You Know Pinball Prize Quiz, which is free to enter, and we end up giving away an awful lot of very nice prizes to people who are able to get the correct answers to our quiz questions. Yes, usually sponsored by most of the pinball manufacturers. Yes, and parts suppliers as well, who are very generous in donating prizes for it. We're not entirely sure exactly when it is. I think we were originally down to do it on Saturday evening about 6 o but traditionally we done it on a Friday evening but we relaxed about it we'll do it whenever it fits into Ed's schedule of events but to find out more about that the best thing to do is to speak to Ed himself so let's give Ed a call and he can tell us all about what's going on at this year's Texas Bimbo Festival. Hello, Ed. Hi, guys. How's everybody? We're doing great. Yeah. How about you? We haven't heard from you in two years. Well, I've been spending a lot of time, well, like everybody else. We're all at home and we're going to the beach or bouncing back and forth between Texas and Florida. But now we have a show to do, thank goodness. So that's all we've been doing for the last couple of months now is getting ready for this big show that everybody's excited about. Yeah, just for the people who are new to our podcast or pin cast, sorry, and haven't been aware, the Texas Pinball Festival is one of the biggest and probably, well, definitely one of the best pinball shows in the U.S., I will say. But two years ago, just before it was about to happen, you had to cancel. And then the year after, you knew a little bit more up front, but you had to cancel again. Right. In 2021, we still weren't allowed. You know, there was too many people that were still on lockdown and not able to travel. So we just couldn't do it in 2021. It would have just been local people. So we wanted you guys and everybody from North and from Europe to be able to come to the show. So we just rolled it one more year. But it looks like everything is open now. I think most countries have relaxed their travel restrictions. Yeah. It sounds like everybody's coming. The main thing is the U.S. allows us in. I think last time we were allowed to leave the country, but we couldn't have entered the United States. But now, yeah, now it's a lot more relaxed. And that kind of sums up the show, doesn't it? It's going to be a lot more relaxed. Everyone's going to be able to finally get their fill of a pinball that they've been waiting two years for. I think everybody's going to love the show. We have a lot planned. All the manufacturers are going to be there. And I'm really hoping, well, it's going to be a big show. Nobody's canceled. Everybody's planning on being there So we can go through What do you want to talk about? Well, you seem to have a A huge list of special guests At the show I mean, I wouldn't ask you to name them all Because you're bound to miss somebody off But Who are the highlights In your mind Of who's going to be at this year's Texas Pinball Festival? Well, obviously Like the big celebrity guests This is something we started way back When we first had Elvira come to the show and it worked out so well. We've tried to have some kind of a celebrity guest connected to pinball. This is our 2020 guest, Sylvester McCoy, who most people know him as the seventh Doctor, Doctor Who. He also played Radagast the Brown from the Hobbit movies. So he has agreed to, you know, he was supposed to come in 2020 when that got canceled, and he's stuck with us, so he's going to come back for 2022. I've talked to his agent pretty regularly. He's currently filming that new Rob Zombie Munsters reboot. He's got a role in that. But they've said they've worked it around so he can come to Texas. So he's excited about coming. Okay, that's very cool. Yeah. And, you know, he's a lot of fun if you've never met him. I mean, we're going to have a full-sized artist and some of the Doctor Who stuff and obviously some Doctor Who pinball machines that are there. But in the pinball world, we've got Greg Perez coming. He did the artwork for the 2022 show. So, you know, those of you that have seen it, that was done by Greg Perez. Mike Vinaker from Stern Pinball. Scott Denisey. Of course, Steve Ritchie is coming. It wouldn't be the Texas Pinball Festival without Steve Ritchie there. Mark Ritchie's coming. Jack Guarnieri. Christopher Perenchi. Of course, if you can't tell, I'm just reading the list off the website right now. That way I don't miss anybody. Yeah, Jerry Thompson. Jerry Thompson. uh carrie hardy of course you two fellas yep you're a special guest thank you thank you for having us absolutely i can't wait to see y'all john borg john borg uh just contacted us gosh just a few weeks ago right before uh well right when i announced him that he was coming you know Gerry Stellenberg's gonna be there uh for the first time randy martinez he is the artist for the Mandalorian and Stern comic book edition Star Wars pins. Right. He's really excited about coming. Yeah, well, you have no clue what's coming for him. No, yeah, he's going to do... You're going to spoil him right away. Any other pinball show he's going to do after that, he's going to be, I have something like Texas. That's true. Of course, Spooky Pinball's coming, and our latest announcements for Jack Danger and Emoto, they're the Twippy hosts this year, so So that's... And of course, you have the Twippy Awards, too. Yes, and the Twippy Awards are going to be live at the Texas Pinball Festival, so we're really looking forward to that. That's always a lot of fun. Yes, I remember last time that I walked in there and won a Twippy, actually. It was that easy. Well, it wasn't that easy, but I remember just coming out of a restaurant, and I think the happy hour was before that. So I was kind of in a happy place, I would say. And then I won a trippy. But, okay, let's not focus on me, but I remember that very vividly. It was a very fun moment for myself. But I thought they did a really good job having it live. You know, I was really nervous that that first year that we did it live at the Texas Pinball Festival, but, you know, they pulled it off and it came out really well. Oh, absolutely no complaints. It's a compliment to Jeff and his team. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, I can tell you this year they're really pulling out all the stops. I mean, they've got – the production is going to be so much better, so much – I mean, it's going to be – I mean, the way they talk, it's going to be like watching the Academy Awards on television or something, the stuff that got planned. Right. I mean, it sounds like you're going to have a huge show there. How are the ticket sales going and what sort of feedback are you getting about how many people are going to be there as guests? It's been very well. I mean, people are buying tickets. They're buying wristbands. Of course, everybody from 2020 that were held over with us, they're going to be there. But ticket sales have been good. normally we print about 1,200 name badges I think we're up to over 2,000 now so most of them are of course a lot of them are from the holdover for 2020 but yeah so we're going to have that's just for prepaid people with of course VIPs you guys all of our special guests I mean that's a whole bunch of people Well, that's not all just paid tickets. I mean, that's all the vendors and all of their crew and all the names that we get. But ticket sales have been good. I think we're going to make it. I was a little nervous there at the beginning, you know, getting all the bills paid, but I think we're going to be okay. Great. Now, this is held at the Embassy Suites Hotel and the Tristan Convention Center. Okay. You do have the run of the hotel and the convention center, it seems. Now, every year I kind of hear someone saying We are looking at going to somewhere bigger Or looking for an alternative venue What's the state with that at the moment? Is the show tied in to that location for beyond this year? I think we do have a 2023 contract But here's the thing I get this a lot And I am not we love the embassy and the city of Frisco and they love having us there but they're right as the show grows we need more space or I need to do a better job of doing the floor plan to allow more space but you know so this is kind of what I need I need a obviously we need a large convention center I like having a hotel attached to it I need lots of hotels surrounding it for you know overflow people You know, that Stonebriar Mall is right across the street, and there's lots of places to go eat. So I need shopping. I need, you know, all of those things for so when people come and they bring their significant others who maybe are not such into pinball, they have things they can go do or just things for people to go do. As much as I would like to say everybody's going to spend the entire weekend in the game room, they want to get out and go do other things. They want to go eat dinner. They want to go see. They want to go to Six Flags. They want to go to the National Video Game Museum, which is just a few miles away. And then there's other little things like carpeting. I like having carpeting in the main hall. I mean, my goodness, your feet are already tired. So somebody find me a venue that's bigger than the embassy that has all of those things and checks all those boxes, and we'll talk about it. And, of course, it has to be in Texas. So people always talk, well, let's go to one of the casinos in Oklahoma. But, like, well, it's not the Texas Pinball Festival anymore. Right. So no imminent plans to move to another location, which, personally, I love where you are at the moment. I think it ticks so many boxes. Yeah, absolutely. Yes, it does. It's something for everybody. It's close to other things to do. So, I mean, other than, yeah, we need more space, and we're going to do a better job on the floor plan. And I think we get kind of, you know, I like the way we normally do our floor plan and where it flows and with all the pipe and drape. And it's kind of a maze as you walk through. But that takes up a lot of space. So we may have to do some redesigning and, you know, make it more shopping. I call it shopping aisles. But just so we have more people space and we can get more machines in and more vendors. Well, speaking of vendors, I'm looking at the list. And from the top of my head, I tend to say, like, this is the biggest list of vendors that I've seen so far. And you've already had a lot of vendors in previous editions. We've had some new sign-ups. Yeah, we're full on vendor space. I mean, well, you know, I say that we're full on vendor space. And, you know, when I look at my diagram of the floor plan, we're full-on vendors because I'm assuming that we're going to have exhibitor games fill in all the rest of the spaces. So people still are signing up their exhibitor games. So exhibitors, get your game signed up for me. I'll throw that out there. But, yeah, we haven't had any vendors cancel with the exception of just one or two. We had one vendor cancel just because they couldn't get parts and materials. They just didn't have anything to sell. They were sold out, and they didn't have any inventory. Of course, I'm trying to think off the top of my head who else isn't coming. Nope, none of the super big ones. We've had some smaller ones back out, but so far everybody's coming. Well, you always sort of expanded in recent years into the corridor outside. You've had quite a lot of vendor stands out there. They can't all fit into the hall. There were so many of them. But talking of the main hall, one of the, I think, one of the differentiating features of your show, which I know is something that's been worked on long and hard by the team, is the load-in and the load-out process for the machines. And it's almost balletic in its choreography, the way it's all organized. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Well, that's probably the hardest part of that venue. As much as once the show set up, how great the embassy and the Frisco Convention Center is, it does kind of suck that there's only one load-in door. Now, a lot of people don't know there is a dock on another corner of the building. So if you had a big truck that you could back up like a loading dock, there is another way to get in. But most people have the ground. They do the ground level. so it will be I don't know if you watched Kerry Hardy's video it's kind of a comical I thought it was kind of funny but he's right you load it, you back your stuff up you get your game out, you put it in there will be a bunch of different aisles they'll tell you where to drop your stuff and then move your car so the next person can back up their trailer and get their stuff unloaded it's pretty involved Yeah, it's involved, but I think they've kind of got it down. It's taken a lot. Of course, we've been doing this a number of years, and every year we improve on it. So hopefully it'll go just as smoothly as it did, as it has in years past. I think it goes pretty smoothly. I think so. Yeah, all the games are checked in, so you have a list of every machine that should be in the hall, which is impressive. Kim and Robert Harris have done a great job. They've created a little – and it's all Internet-based. As people show up, the volunteers hit the loading dock with their little iPads, and you give them your name. They can pull you up. They know exactly what you're supposed to be bringing. If you've made changes or bringing a different title, if you signed up an Addams Family and for whatever reason you had to change it to a Circus Voltaire, they can make that change right there at the back door just to try to keep our gain list correct. I know, Martin, you usually go around and do an actual count. Of course, Kim likes that you do that because she likes looking at your list compared to what we actually had signed up just to see what the differences are. Don, I was going to take the shortcut this time and just use your list. You can do that too, but changes are always made. It's pinball. Changes are always made last minute. Right. But anyways, people, if they check in, they can get them checked in. They can get them over to the registration area so they can pick up their packets, pick up their swag bags, get their badges and their wristbands. So hopefully it's a smooth process. Right. I'm looking at the game list for the upcoming show. I also see some classic arcades, actually more than just a few. Yep. That's getting more popular, too. That's coming back. Let me switch over to the game list. I haven't actually looked at it in a long time. Oh, my goodness. This is long. Oh, yeah, the classic arcades. Look at that. Yeah, there's a lot of classic arcade games coming. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah. From a haute cuisine point of view, is the food truck court coming back? Yes. I know. Isn't that crazy? Everybody loves the food trucks. so as far as I know the food trucks they don't coordinate that with us they coordinate that with the hotel and the convention center and the fiscal visitor center the food truck people they don't contact me and say hey can I come be a food truck vendor they do that through the hotel because they know what they're doing so yes but the food truck should be there of course the hotel will have their concessions And, of course, there's just tons of dining options surrounding the hotel and the mall across the street and everything. Nobody's going to go hungry. Of course, heartache barbecue, I hear that a lot. Yeah, we're going to mention that. Yeah, it's been two years or, well, I just need some heartache. I can't help it. Say that again. I'm sure it has several meanings but we'll stick to the cleaner version the thing is brisket is not that very well known here in the Netherlands so whenever I get to Texas brisket is on my menu sure and a hard-aid is probably the best place to get it yeah well to the embassy now now that's a very controversial topic when you start talking about barbecue and Texas because everybody has their favorites. But, yes, in the Frisco area, I'm sure other people will chime in. Once they hear this, you'll get messages of other places to go. But HeartAid does seem to be the fan favorite where everybody likes to go. Yeah. Yeah, I was very disappointed I had to miss HeartAid for two years. And I hope I'm not saying anything inappropriate, no pun intended whatsoever. Oh, so many jokes. So many jokes, I know. If only he knew. Yeah, that's what happens when English is not your native language. So, fine. Right, so for all those people who are now desperate to come and were sort of on the fence before and now know that it's going to be full on on the 25th or 27th of this month, well, of March, anyway. Rob was there. By the time this goes out, it'll probably be March. But, yes. So if they want to find out more information and buy tickets, is it too late to pre-register for tickets? Is it buy tickets on the door now? Or what's the situation? Well, day-only tickets are available at the door. So some people, you know, they're not going to spend three days. They just come. So you can buy a day pass at the show. If you want to buy a weekend pass, now, of course, like you said, And by the time this airs, weekend passes are on sale now at the discounted price, but the price is going to go up to full price on March 1st. Ah, right. So you can still get a weekend pass online. I think we'll leave the store open probably until March 10th, March 15th. At some point, we have to shut it all down to start packing things up and getting ready to go. So, yeah, but if you buy your ticket online, you know, you'll get the wristband, you'll get the printed badge that everybody seems to like. And so if that's something that you care about, otherwise you can just show up at the door and buy a weekend pass too. That'll be fine. Right, okay. You do always have exhibitors bringing games in. Are you still looking for games for people to bring in games? We will never turn away games. Now, of course, like I said, I'd have to go ask Kim. Of course, I'm looking at the list here to ask how many actually these games are for exhibitors. Now, you can look at the list and see a lot of them are American pinball. They're going to go in vendor booths. American Pinball is bringing a ton of stuff. Of course, Marco Specialties and Fun Super Stores are going to bring a bunch of sterns. So those will all go in vendor booths. But the actual exhibitors, the people that bring in a game and get a free weekend pass and a swag bag, I don't have to see what the actual number is. But I won't turn those away. We'll find a place for them if we get to open up side rooms or something like that. But we've never gotten to a point where we just didn't have any room. We'll rearrange the floor plan on the fly if we have to to make it all fit. Right. Okay. So if people want to show off their game, because that's something that's really a Texas Pinball Festival thing. People really showing off The games that they Refurbished And modded And repainted And God knows what they did to it But There's So many Games that look better than when they came out Of the box originally at the Texas show That's really amazing So if people wanted a show of their game And possibly win a best in show award for that. I suppose they should go to TexasPinball.com and get in contact with you guys. Well, they should. Of course, it always sounds like a big infomercial, but really the website is the key. I mean, it's anything you ever want to know. If you're thinking about bringing a game, there's a whole page about being an exhibitor and what all that entails, but the best in show is a big deal. We're very lucky that people bring the most beautiful, restored pinball machines you'll see, and this year we're going to have a lot of the new homebrew. Homebrewing seems to be the big hot thing right now. Everybody's making these custom games thanks to the customized boards and displays and stuff that people can buy. So there's a lot of the homebrew games that are going to be coming. And, yeah, we have a huge collector community that loves showing off their games, and I know a lot of people are getting ready to win that plaque and that ribbon at the show. Now, what are the other regular events you have? right at the very end of the show, along with the Best in Show Awards, is you always have a raffle for a brand-new pinball machine. Is that happening again this year? It is. Of course, it's a carryover from 2020. Jersey Jack Pinball made us a great deal on a Willy Wonka pinball machine. Of course, we didn't get to give it away, so it's been sitting at Jersey Jack Pinball for the last two years. But we've talked to them, and it's boxed and ready to go, and they're going to be sending it along with a bunch of Guns N' Roses down to the show. This year's, well, it's the same as 2020. It's going to benefit the National Video Game Museum, which is just down the street, which is a great place if you've never checked it out. It's neat. It's more home console games and classic arcade games, but it's a lot of fun. And people that come to the show, they get in for half price. They show me a wristband and they'll let you in for half price. There's something else to do while you're at the show. But, yes, we'll be raffling off a brand-new Jersey Jack pinball, Willy Wonka pinball machine. Wow. That will have appreciated in value in the two years since. Probably so. Rather than with everything else. Right. So, well, speaking of events at the show, at previous shows, there used to be seminars. Now, the show is not that known like other shows for their seminars, but are you doing seminars this year as well? Absolutely. Yeah. Well, we always, you know, you're right. It's not really a, I don't have multiple rooms with multiple seminars, but we do try to have something happening for most of the time. So I've got the list here in front of me of what I have so far, and I can run down it real quick if you like, or we'll have it up on the website here probably in the next day or so. But I can tell you, so on Friday. Scoops. People, these are scoops because they're not on the website yet. It's not on the website. So on Friday at – oh, I didn't even put the times down here. So I didn't write the times down. So Miracle Playfields is going to have a seminar. They've titled it The Forgotten Tales. I guess he's got something really cool he wants to show people. Fast Pinball is going to be doing a seminar. Of course, Jersey Jack Pinball will be doing a seminar with Jack Guarnieri and Steve Ritchie. And, of course, Friday night will be the TPF Big Smoke for those of you that are taking the cigars. That will be out by the Cypress Bar. Saturday. It is. And it's a lot of fun. I mean, a lot of people. I'm surprised how many people show up to that thing. You know, that's just something silly that my friend and I started doing years ago, and it just grew and grew and grew. And so now it's a thing. Of course, Saturday is the swap meet. I will go to ask about that next, so thank you for confirming that. Yeah, there will be the swap meet. We've got a seminar called How to Find, Buy, and Own Your First Pinball Machine. That will be by Nick Greenup. Probably 20 years too late for me. Well, you know what, you say that, but do you know how many emails I get right before the show from people that says, Hey, we're brand new. We're super excited. This is going to be our first Texas Pinball Festival. Can you help me? And, of course, I'm so busy trying to get ready for the show, but I think there's so many new people that are getting into the hobby, whether you like that or not. But anyway, so that's going to be one of the seminars. I think that will be a good one. American Pinball will be doing something. I've got one called Restoration and Rethink. with Ken Head and Jeff Miller from Pinball Pimp. Multimorphic will be doing a seminar. Scorbit will be doing something. There's this little one called So You Think You Know Pinball with Jonathan Juicen and Martin A. I hear that sucks. It's such so bad. I've had you all doing it now. How many years have you all had to do it? I don't count. Are we in the bar doing that again? I think so. I think people enjoy that, don't you all? Oh, well, we certainly enjoy it in the bar. Yeah, it's happy hour. It's happy hour, happy hour at the embassy. Now, I'm going to tell people. Free drinks, free juice. Well, see, that's just it. I don't know that the embassy, we haven't confirmed that, of course. That's not anything that's in the contract. That's just something the embassy has done for years and years and years. I don't know if they're still doing it or not. I can't imagine they're not going to do that, but we'll see. If not, there's going to be a lot of people at the Texas Pinball Festival. Well, we'll sort it out when we're there because we have an extra day this time because previously we've always been on Friday. We've got Saturday, so we've got an extra day to sort out the PA. There you go. We're no longer opening the show. I can change it back. We'll talk about it. I mean, until I actually get the programs printed and the banners printed with the show schedules, I can change all this. I can change it all around. Of course, there's going to be an autograph session on Saturday as well. And then, of course, the big one is the Twippy Awards. We'll consume the rest of the whole evening. And then, of course, Sunday, the only thing I have scheduled is the awards ceremony and the raffle drawing on Sunday at the close of the show. Right. So I do have a couple of spots available. If I can find something to fill those that I think would be a good one, then we'll do that. But otherwise, you know, I think it'll be a pretty good lineup and give people something to do. Yeah. Sounds like a very impressive list of seminars and talks. We look forward to that. And I'll be there, of course, to report on them and photograph them. Are they going to go online? Do you know? This is probably a level of detail you may not know at the moment. But will they be available? Streaming it? Streaming the seminars? Streaming or recorded? I think so. I think we have a – our guys try to set up a stream to the Texas Pinball Twitch channel. There's going to be so many people in there streaming these things. I can't imagine you'll find a place. Of course, the only ones that I haven't – and I'm sure it will be confirmed by the time this airs, of course. I haven't heard back from Chicago Gaming. They're coming to the show, but they haven't confirmed whether or not they want to do a seminar. And, of course, Stern Pinballs. I can't imagine Stern not doing a seminar, but they just haven't confirmed with me what they want to do. Sure, of course. They'll be at the show in full force. I'm just waiting on some details, and it'll all get sorted out here in the next week or so. Excellent. So keep an eye on the website, then, for the list of events. That's it. And, you know, of course, Facebook is – I don't have as much information on Facebook as we put on the website, but, you know, I try to keep up with the social media. Right. And one other thing that is always an issue, I think, when people want to come to the show is that the hotel is so popular and the show is so popular that all the rooms sell out in almost the blink of an eye. So I guess it's still the case that there are no rooms available at the embassy suite or at least in your allocation of rooms. Well, you're right. But I always tell people that you have to keep checking back because when the hotel goes, when the rooms go on sale, and that's another thing that people don't quite understand. I don't – the Texas Pinball Festival, all we do is contract with the hotel for the convention center, and we guarantee that we're going to sell – they're going to book so many rooms. We don't book the rooms ourselves. All we can tell the hotel is turn the rooms, turn the block on, or turn the block off. But the hotel sells out within minutes. I think a lot of people, they're not even sure if they're going to come to the show, but they snag a room. And then they release it later. So the rooms do come available from time to time at the embassy. And I don't know if the best way is to call them or just keep checking their website. But they do pop up from time to time, or you'll see people posting on the different pin side and Facebook groups. Yeah, it's like, hey, I can't make it. Does anybody want my room? You'll see those kind of posts. But the other thing I try to stress to people is I don't know if they just don't look at the map or stuff, but there are so many hotels that are literally, I mean, they're literally across the street. You do not have to have a car. You don't have to have, I mean, it's where you walk out the doors, you cross the street, and you're at your hotel. And there are several new hotels that are, and they're all kind of surround the mall that's right across the street. So there's plenty of rooms for people to stay at. But I get it. People want to stay at the hosting hotel. You know, they want to stay at the embassy. I don't remember the stories from previous years. And they were quite hilarious of what happens once the show is sort of done. But the people are still hanging out. Hanging out, drinking. Sure. Having fun. Sure. Well, there's nothing. You can still do that if you're not staying at the embassy. You can go still. Go to the Cypress Bar. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You can still do all that stuff. or some of the things that go on, you probably just follow a group up to their room. But anyway, it's just a great show to meet new people and interact with people. And before you know it, you're invited to a party and someone you just met half an hour ago in his room and you get in there and there's 30 people and having a blast, you know. So I love that kind of stuff, yeah. One of these days I'll get to go to some of those parties. I don't want to go to those parties. I hear about them. I hear about them all the time, and I get invited to them, but I'm so busy. And by the time the show is done, I'm just ready to go to bed and do it all over again. Yeah, head off to Florida and spend a few weeks soaking up the sun. Just on the point of parties and things like that, there are no sort of COVID restrictions in force, are there? in the show or in the hotel or in any sort of enclosed areas? Not as today. There are no mandates in place in the state of Texas for Collin County or the city of Frisco. Now, of course, I encourage everybody to do what feels right for them. If you want to wear a mask, by all means, you can do so. Nobody's going to say a word to you about it. And, of course, we've been giving out hand sanitizer long before any of this happened. And we've always encouraged people to, you know, wash your hands and, you know, of course, because you're touching a pinball machine. But no, there are currently no restrictions in place, not by us, not by the embassy. That's, you know, that's not my place. I just want to make sure people coming, they don't turn up if a mask is needed and bring one. and there's still no limit on the number of games that you can put in a hotel room fit as many in there as you want to Jonathan if you can get them in the elevator get them past the hotel checkout or the hotel check-in I guess we'll find a way yeah you can always dress them up with something else I'm surprised y'all didn't bring up the breakfast at the embassy that they offer every day yeah well it's a great breakfast that's a very good reason to get up early if it wasn't for the swap meet already. But, no, that's absolutely a valid point that you bring up. Well, do you make it to the swap meet or do you guys stay up too late? We stay up too late and still we make it to the swap meet. Yeah, thank you very much. I'll go and watch the pictures and grab any bargains that are going out there because there's always some good deals to be had. And when those trailers turn up and they crack open the back and everybody swarms around like bees around a honeypot, just to see what's in there. It's always a good thing. The only problem right now is, and we've had that problem in the past, but I suppose it's only getting bigger, being in from Europe is very difficult to bring home again. it doesn't fit in the overhead department in the planes and they really don't like you walking on board with the back boxes and that kind of stuff so that's a bit of an issue because I always enjoy the swap meets and it pains me to see like oh I'd like to buy that and I can't because I can't take it with me well now parts and stuff I think you could take with you but even a pinball machine, if you were ever at a place where you could find somebody to help you ship internationally, I would think the Texas Pinball Festival would be good. Oh, yeah. There's so many vendors and so many other manufacturers all there, and they all ship internationally. You would think they know how to do it. So I bet you can find somebody to help you. Buying a game cheap and then shipping it doesn't mean that it's still cheap. Yeah, the shipping part kind of kills it for everybody. Yeah. But, no, absolutely, the swap meet is great. I've done some great deals in there. So I'm looking forward to being there again. Yeah. And I've got some – and I still have – and you probably don't remember, Jonathan, but I have – you bought a book or something. Not the magazines, but you actually bought a book. And I bet it's been two and a half, three years. You had it shipped to me so I could give it to you at the Texas Pinball Festival. And I still have it. It's still in the package. I was just looking at it the other day. so I need to remember it'll be the one thing I forget to bring to the show well if you bring it to the show it will be like a present to myself because I don't remember what it was I've never opened it either so it's addressed to you I remember you telling me about it anyway we'll get it sorted out yeah excellent great having you on the show yeah we're looking forward to the upcoming show it sounds like it's going to be a killer edition I hope so, fellas. I'm so ready to make all these people whole that have just held with us and that have saved the show, really. I mean, so I just want to get everybody a good pinball show and get through it. I'm sure you will. And the action starts at 5 p.m. on Friday, March 26th. Is that correct? That is correct. And runs through till Sunday, 2.30, where you do the closing ceremony. Correct. If you want more details, texaspinball.com is the website to go to. And thank you very much indeed, Ed, Ed van der Veen, for telling us all about this year's show. And we look forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks' time. Thanks for having me on, guys. And there you have it, Ed van der Veen of the Texas Pinball Festival, co-organizer together with Kim and Paul, pulling off a tremendous task. But we're so looking forward to going there. Yeah, absolutely. It's an amazing show, and as you heard, it's going to be even bigger this year, and there's a lot of excitement about it, and we're excited just talking about it. Right. Well, that rounds it up for this month. In case you're attending the Texas Pinball Festival, and in case we are, we are looking forward to seeing you there. Yes, and if you're going to the EAG International Expo the next day or so, I'll be there on Wednesday. So if you're there on Wednesday, I hope to see you there. Right. I will not be there on either Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. I blame ticket prices, which is ridiculous, because in January it could fly over $5, seriously, $5 for a return ticket. and now it's just out of my budget, sorry. Yeah, it's a relatively small show, so you wouldn't want to, in terms of pinball. That's part of the consideration. I was told up front that Electrocoin would be the only distributor present with a couple of Stern games. None of the other distributors are present. So as much as I like to catch up with Doc's core, Gary Stern, and introduce myself to Seth Davis, I really hope they make it to the taxi show so we can do the formalities there. Yeah, I'm sure they will. So we won't see you, or I won't see you there, but we will hopefully see you or speak to you again next month when we'll be looking back at all the events that took place in March 2020, including, hopefully, the Texas Pinball Festival. And who knows what will come from that and around that time, what new games are going to be announced. So it's going to be an exciting month. We're looking forward to it. And we'll be back at the end of March or the start of April to bring you all the news. Right. So that's it from me. My name is Jonathan. I'm the editor of Pinball Magazine. Bye-bye. And from me, Martin, editor of Pinball News, goodbye and see you next month.