TOPCast 64: Pat Lawlor

Welcome to Topcast. Topcast is the this old pinball podcast for all things related to

pinball. Our emphasis is on interviewing pinball personalities, particularly those that work

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if you're using an iPod type MP3 device. Tonight on Topcast, we'll be talking with Pat

Lawler of Williams, Valley, and Stern. He is a game designer that started working in

the video game industry and later became a pinball designer at Williams. Pat designed

an amazing pinball machine starting with Banzai Run in 1988 and of course the Adams

family in 1992, which sold more games than any other model. Pat Lawler was one of the

co-designers of the pinball 2000 system. So now we're going to be talking with Pat Lawler

in part one of our interview. Pat, thanks for coming on Topcast with us tonight.

So let's start at the beginning. What was your first memory of pinball? How did you

get involved with it? Did you play pinball when you were a kid? Yes, the answer is yes.

Okay, now, do you remember the games you played or where you played? Yeah, there's a story

that I tell everybody which is, you know, I used to, on Saturday mornings, my dad who

was a salesman for Schlitz. I used to hop on his beer truck and I got to ride with him

on Saturdays and so while he was doing business, I was sitting in, you know, I was hanging

out in the bars with him and I was allowed to play the games. They give me dimes and I'd

sit there and play pinball machines. Were these like wedgehead type games or Williams

games do you remember any titles? They, you know, I don't remember any titles. The first

titles I remember were some of the games that I played in college. And in fact, we played

so much pinball. I had a pinball machine that I bought in college and I had sitting in

my, when I lived off campus my senior year, I had a game sitting in my kitchen that we

all sat there and played, which was a flipper cowboy. Okay, now, where did you go to school

and what is your major in? I went to school in Minnesota in a place called St. Mary's

College and I majored in communication arts. And what did you grow up, you know, when

you were doing the Schlitz beer truck runs, where was that? It was a suburb of Chicago.

It was one of the Northwest suburbs of Chicago. What was your degree in?

In our theater and radio and all kinds of good stuff like that.

And when you got out of college, did you, did you work in that area?

That's actually a pretty interesting thing. I got out of school and one of our first

jobs I had out of college was I went into radio and I did the disc jockey things and I got

tired of not the station that I worked for, the checks weren't always good on Friday.

So I kind of trained a tire of that gig and I ended up being a manager in a large auto

center. I was a manager in the shop, you know, making, it was a big, big auto center.

We had 24 bays and I would sit there and when people came in to get their cars fixed,

I, you know, I'd sell them stuff. I was basically a service manager.

Now when you were doing the radio station gig, what was the format and how long did you

do that for?

I did it for something like eight months. The format was really early, early the mid-70s,

late night FM and so, you know, a lot of grateful debt and all kinds of fun stuff that you

play on late night FM.

It actually sounds like a pretty fun job for something right out of school.

Yeah, it was, it was, there was nothing wrong with the job other than the checks weren't

any good. And I probably had the checks been good, I probably would have stuck with that

instead of going to work, going to work doing the other thing, but doing the other thing

the money was so good that it was, it was pretty hard to turn down.

Now how long did you do the service manager gig for?

Seven years.

Seven, and now what got you out of that?

What got me out of that was absolute and complete burnout of dealing with the American

public. It was an incredibly, it's an incredibly stressful job if you, if you have anything

to do with dealing with, customers are there wrong and then multiply that by the fact that

your job is working on their cars and you know that the American public is pretty certain

that everybody that touches their cars are correct.

So it's a tough environment to work in, but it was for me a great foundation in a bunch

of different things, one of which was dealing with other people and one of which was learning

how different, all the different people who worked for me because I was the manager had

different, different strong points and that, you know, that came back to play a lot

later when I was in the game business.

Now during this time where you, while you were doing the service manager gig, were you

playing pinball or thinking about pinball or was it just not even in your mind at this

point?

Yeah, we, we would go out like everybody else back then, we'd go out and hang out in

the bars and whatever games were there we'd play and throughout the 70s, I would sit

there and I would play pinball wherever we went.

The rest of the group would be standing there drinking, having a good time and I'd be

in a corner playing pinball somewhere.

And then near the end of that time was when, you know, the big run up and video happened

which was in 1980 and so I was like everybody else, I was happily sitting there playing

space invaders and Pac-Man.

Now what happened to the flipper cowboy from college?

It's like a blues brother joke.

When I got out of college I badly needed some stereo stuff and so I traded my flipper

cowboy to a guy who actually at the time was working for Sony and I got some stuff out

of him for the game.

Okay, so now seven years pass as the service manager and you're burned out from that gig,

now we'll now where to go.

Basically I went into hiding for three months and I refused to do anything.

I was terribly burned out.

I got up one morning and I said, you know, what should be better be good if I got a job.

And so I went in the paper and there was an ad in the paper for computer programmers.

When I've been in college one of the things that was sort of a secondary pursuit at the

time was I had taken computer programming and I had taken it back when you had been

big decks of cards that you punched and you would go and you would learn how to program

in Fortranon machines that took up a whole room.

So I saw an ad in the paper for somebody who could program in a business environment

on one of these machines and it's like, well that looks like a pretty good interesting

way.

Maybe they'll hire me.

So I called, I got an interview and they said, you can program on this old machine

we've got and I said of course and they said, okay you're hired.

And I went to work there and I lasted there for about a year and this was in 7980 and I

kept getting calls every day from headhunters and the headhunters were basically trying

to move you into different jobs so they could make up bundle of cash on their end but

there was a huge need at that time.

There was a huge growth growing on in computer programming.

And finally I got me out of one of these guys and I said don't either to call me anymore

unless you can get me a job in video games because I've been out and you know I've been

out every night playing, playing Pac-Man, I've been out playing all these great games and

I said it should be neat if I could do that.

And at the time I also had one of the early Apple twos and I was sitting there programming

and I'm at it home.

And so the guy grumbled a little and he hung up and a month later he called me back and

said I've got you an interview, got a video game, a group that's associated with Balley

named Dognetting Associates and I went and interviewed with them and after three interviews

I got a job there.

Now when you were messed around on the Apple were you just doing basic or were you doing

165.02 at that point?

Both.

And were you any good at it?

That's debatable.

I was good enough that I was able to show the people that they've nutting the stuff that

I had done on the Apple and that was basically what got me the job.

Now were they at nutting were they having a hard time filling positions with you know with

this experience?

They were an interesting group.

They had gone through the very very earliest part of the video run up at that point.

They had had a small shakeout internally.

They were also the people, Dave nutting and his partner Dave Fredrickson were also the

people that had done Fort Balley, the Balley Arcade home system.

And so they were looking for people.

They had decided that programmers were one thing but what they really wanted was creative

people.

They were sort of a forward looking group.

While everybody else in the world was desperately just trying to hire programmers, they believed

that if they had creative people they could create you know they could build things that

were very sellable and made a lot of money.

And they were also forward looking enough that they had tools that other people didn't

have at that point.

They had made tools where you didn't have to be necessarily the top notch killer dog

programmer in the world.

They had sort of sort of separated it to a mid range kind of language thing that they

internally in a humorous sense called Veeja.

And which allowed you to very quickly manipulate animation on a TV screen.

And this was 1981.

And so you know they were doing some pretty bleeding edge kind of stuff that wasn't necessarily

you know just assembly programming.

And it was a really good environment to jump into and get to do things.

So basically they had set up kind of a flash if you want to put it in today's terms

kind of like a flash environment that somebody could come in without a ton of animation

experience but had a good creative touch and make something happen.

It was it.

That would be a crude approximation.

I mean you still had to know in a very real sense how to program in a somewhere you

had to know how to program in the Veeja was a form of fourth.

If for anybody who's out there who would remember a language called fourth which is an

extensible language that you basically create on your own building on top of other things

that the language has that are keywords.

And then they created an animation system with that.

And so you could sit there and you could very quickly have objects running around and

doing things.

So yeah what you just described was actually a pretty it would be a modern approximation

of what they were up to.

And in an amazing sense we programmed on the V80s on two megahertz V80s which were

pretty powerful chips at that time.

And we were able to get what we were doing running on those chips with this language base

which was pretty amazing accomplishment for 1981.

So was the hardware you were using like CPM machines, CADCPM machines or were they actually

like dedicated video game hardware with some sort of programming interface?

Completely dedicated.

Everything that was done there was built internally by Dave Notting Associates and designed by

them.

It was 100% designed to do video games.

And then the company designed their own development systems that sat next to it.

And we'd sit there and because there was really no such thing as PCs yet.

So you had to do your own development.

So basically you had one box that was running the V80 which had the development system on

it.

And then you had the game system which was the target which was the same exact system

that you could download and do.

Now what was your first job there?

I was programmer.

Yeah, no I mean what project?

I was sort of a guinea pig which was interesting.

They gave me a couple of things to model and hack and do.

One of them was a rather humorous thing where I put a giant spider web on a screen and

had a bunch of spiders running around on the spider web and your job was to get the

hell off the spider web.

But that was just a programming exercise to see how fast that they could push the language

what they were doing.

The first game that I worked on for them was a game called Demon's and that ended up

being called Demon's and Dragons.

Which was basically what all games were back then it was a 2D game.

There was a castle, there was a fair maiden in the center of the castle and there were

a whole bunch of evil bad guys trying to burn the castle to the ground.

And so I basically got that game done.

We made samples of the game and somewhere near the end of us making samples the beginning

of video collapse started happening.

Well 1982, 1983.

So I then was shifted to the industry does what it does best.

It went into retrenchment mode and the beginning of retrenchment mode.

They decided that they wanted a high tech shuffle alley.

And I shifted on to a project which was a shuffle alley with a puck that was a video

shuffle alley.

And it was called Tenpindalox.

Yeah, they came out by Valley Midway right?

Except that we were, it was done by Dave Nutting and you know we were part of their group

so we sold it to them.

The one who programmed that.

And it's entirety, you were the project manager sort of speak?

I met.

Were you the only guy that was working on it?

That's it.

Well there was actually, at that point we actually had someone, got that name of Scott Norris

who did the music and sounds because I didn't know what that thing about doing and music

and sounds on a computer.

But basically I did the whole thing.

And how was the, I mean did it earn well?

Did you get commission or were you just paid straight up pretty much at this point?

It did netting everybody was paid, was paid a very nice salary and there were bonuses

at the end of the year depending on how the company did.

Remember you're still somewhere in 1982 and 83 and there were tiny, tiny handful of

people in the world who had broken through the ceiling of demanding that they get a piece

of the action and those people are legendary.

And those are the people that you know that we all know their names.

You weren't one of these people demanding such at the time.

I would have been, I would have been tossed out on my ear.

Okay so now what happened after the 10 pin, Valley 10 pin sale?

Dave netting associate basically was the video collapse completely happened in 1983.

And for anybody who doesn't know what that means, it means that the industry went from

being this enormously, this enormous money making enterprise.

I mean there was just money being thrown at the video game companies.

No one can imagine how much money there was to being nothing almost overnight.

I mean the industry basically completely collapsed on itself.

Dave netting was shut down, it was closed and we were all basically sent out of work.

Now there was a person, there was a guy who at the time was one of the managers at Dave

netting and his name was Bob Agdon.

And he had started a video game, a small video game company that had,

that was doing home cartridges.

They did cartridges for machines like Activision, what was left of the Valley Arcade,

Coleco Vision, those kind of things.

And I ended up going to work for him for a year.

And so I then transitioned into that gig, that gig completely collapsed a year later,

where there was no money.

And I ended up sort of tossing around doing ad work in programming for various and sundry

people.

And finally at that point I ended up working with a person I had worked with at Dave

netting at a small company on the Western suburbs of Chicago called New

Vitech.

And what I ended up doing was I was programming modern pin shutters for Brunswick.

And if you can imagine a full size shuffle alley, you know, with a real bowling ball

and pins, I was able to set individual pins with the pin setter.

And so their dream was they were going to build games with these pin shutters.

And they were building modern bowling centers, you know, that he had microprocessors in

them and you know, could do all kinds of fun things.

And I ended up doing that for a year.

And that's, we finally get to the point where we're almost at pinball.

Now we get to the point where Pat talks about pinball and Pat's respect for Larry D'Amarr's

work in Williams high speed.

I ended up doing that for a year and there was a gentleman there who had worked for Williams

electronics and his name was Paul DeSault and Paul knew Larry D'Amarr and Paul got

Larry to come in and see if he wanted to be a hired programmer working on parts of

this Brunswick system.

And when Larry showed up, I introduced myself to him because he was one of my heroes.

And I said, you know, hey, you know, this is really cool to meet you because he had just

gotten done with Steve Richie doing high speed.

And I had gone, we had gone off every lunch from there and we were playing high speed

on lunch every day.

I mean, the whole world was playing high speed.

I was getting to meet the guy who had programmed it.

And I said, you know, this is really cool.

I've, you know, I worked in the game business.

You know, I've got this crazy idea for a pinball machine that has a vertical component

in its back glass and he basically said, let's go build it.

Wait, before we get too far into this, how did you know, I mean, did you know Larry because

of, you know, defender stargate type fame or did you know him just strictly from the

high speed stuff?

All of that.

How did you know it was Larry because it's, you know, you have to dig to get a name at

this point in time.

People aren't putting their names on, well, I guess Sterling was doing that a little bit.

But people weren't like even putting designer names on play fields.

Right.

Except that I had known, I had known of him and Eugene when they did, you know, stargate

and robotron because at the time I'd been in the business.

I had never met him, but I knew who they were.

I knew the names.

And then when I went to work at New Vitech, Paul Gassalc said, you know, Larry's the guy

who did, who did high speed.

And I said, oh, really, you know, I know, I know, I know, I know, Larry is, I've heard

of him.

And so that's how I knew who he was.

So when Larry said, let's build this, at this point, you were not with Williams.

You were basically going to just present this idea to them.

Well, actually, it was stranger than that.

We basically went and we built a, we built a complete, Larry said, if we're going to

do this, we're going to build a complete working model and we're going to show it to him

and sell it to him.

And which worked out okay because I have a complete, which shop here.

Right back then, I had a much smaller version of what I have now.

But I was capable, I was completely capable of building things.

And I said, okay, cool, you know, you know how to like make it, make it go once I build

it.

And he said, yeah.

And I said, okay, so, so I, we started out off here in the, I live, I live 65 miles North

west of Chicago, which is way out in the country compared, Larry at the time lived in the

middle of the city.

And so, for the first part of the project, I'd be building, I'd be designing the playfield

and wiring it.

And I built the cabinet and I built the back box and I built the back playfield.

And he'd be, he'd be coming out here every couple of days.

And he'd be selling things like, I don't know, the jet pumpers don't look like they're

in a good place.

And I didn't know about this.

And then I'd tear the thing apart and two days later, I'd have it rebuilt and he'd come

back and go, that's much cooler.

You know, look at that.

This is really fun.

And then when we got it to that point, we picked the whole thing up and basically we took

it into the city where he had a studio apartment that was underneath his regular condo.

And we took it in there and then we worked on it until we showed it to Williams there.

Now at this time it wasn't called Bonse.

I run it was what wrecking ball or something.

Is that what it was wrecking ball?

Wrecking ball, right?

Right.

Yeah, because I saw a picture of a much different Larry in front of wrecking ball and it was

kind of interesting looking.

Yeah.

Well, it was kind of strange.

You know, we had this great concept.

It was fun to play with it.

You know, nothing at that point was set in stone other than this is a cool concept.

You know, Williams, how about if you, you know, we got it to the point where we could

demonstrate it basically, where we could demonstrate that the concept was a viable concept.

But it wasn't really a playable game per se.

It was playable.

You know, Larry went, you know, he programmed it to the point where you could stand there,

you could press start.

It played music, you'd flip at it.

It would, you know, it would make sound.

It would play.

It had rules in it.

You could pick the ball would get picked up and take into the upper play field.

You could flip it up there.

Now using, I imagine using like Williams system 11 hardware that Larry had gotten from

work, right?

Actually, he didn't get it from work.

What he did was, he went to a distributor.

And they had, they had a whole bunch of different games.

And he picked up a hot pinball machine brand new in the box.

We brought it back and we completely stripped it.

What was the game?

I'm trying to think of the name of it.

Wait, wait, let me guess.

Game.

What were King's?

What were King's?

God, what happened?

King's brand new in the box.

I took, took all of the pinball components out of it and remounted them all in, in wrecking

ball.

And then Larry took the boards out of it and made it all go.

Now you're building play fields in your home shop?

Yes.

So how are you handling inserts or aren't you worrying about that stuff at this point?

Well, the inserts, I would sit there and I would hand cut the cutouts for the inserts.

At the time I basically did it in a really, I mean crude fashion.

I would sit there and I'd mark around the insert with a pencil.

And then I'd cut out the, cut out the shape and then I'd sit there and glue the insert

into the wood.

And I did that for the whole play field.

Now, inserts came from Larry, you know, new Steve Kloodak and he asked him very nicely,

could we get a couple of handfuls of inserts and Steve Kloodak said, turn, no problem,

here's some boxes of stuff.

And did anybody of Williams other than Larry and maybe Kloodak know what you guys were doing?

Yes.

The guy at the time who was head of engineering's name was Ken Fidesna and Ken also knew what

we were up to.

In everybody was okay?

Sure that we were doing anything that was, you know, was going to be worth anything, but

then again Larry already had a reputation that preceded him and so when Larry said, this

is an interesting idea.

I think you guys ought to pay attention.

They were, you know, they said, okay, we think this is an interesting idea.

We better pay attention.

Yeah, Larry kind of had this reputation with the Whisk his thing where he would develop

games on the side and then sell it to Williams.

So is this was just kind of an extension of that?

Yes.

And he was one of the few people that could actually get away with that, right?

Yes.

So that presented no problems, obviously for you because you weren't on the inside,

but Williams was totally okay with this whole concept.

Well, they did, they didn't know anything about the game yet.

They didn't know what we were doing.

They didn't know, you know, we didn't tell them what, you know, what the concept was.

We just, you know, we just explained, oh, you know, we need a couple of inserts for something

we're doing.

And they were fine.

I mean, what's it going to cost them $3 worth of plastic?

And so it was, you know, and Larry was involved.

So it's no big deal, you know, you know, you know, somebody of that caliber comes up

to me right now and says, could I have $3 worth of plastic?

I'm going to hand it to him.

It, you know, it would make no sense to say no.

Now, was Williams doing this with anybody else?

I mean, were there any other designers or potential designers that were doing similar products

on the side?

No.

Okay.

No.

This was a, this was a, you know, and I wasn't a pinball, you know, I wasn't known as a pinball

designer then.

I mean, Larry was taking it on state that I was showing him, you know, that I could do this.

And so, you know, I had been in the business, but had I ever done a pinball machine?

The answer was no.

Look about the music.

How did Larry just handle all the music, too?

Yeah, he did all of that and to be perfectly honest, I don't even remember what was in the

game at that point.

I don't remember what was in Reckon Ball.

And you don't have the original Reckon Ball or any of the parts or any of the software?

We gave, we basically, I basically gave Reckon Ball away.

To one of the, one of the collectors.

The problem was at the time I didn't have, I didn't have a lot of room in the house.

I had a barn and it had been sitting in my barn for three or four years.

After we had gotten done with it and it was slowly being eaten away and I went, you know,

one of the collectors I knew said, oh man, I'd love to have that and I said, fine, it's yours.

Okay.

Now this was what, 85, 86 when this was all going on?

Yeah, it was, no, it was about 87.

Okay.

Now, Bob's they weren't officially come out to mid 88.

So was this, did it take a year to sound the idea to Williams?

What happened was we had a, we had a showing where,

Ken Ferdinand, Ken Ferdinand, near the Castro and Steve Richie were invited to come see what we had built.

And they came and they played the game.

And when they got all done, they said, thank you very much.

We all, you know, sat around and had a drink.

And they left.

And at that point, Larry went into negotiations with them as to, would you like to buy the concept and have us come and build a real one?

And it took about six months after they saw the game as I remember, it might have been a shorter time,

but I think it was, it was like four months, something like that.

After they saw it, where they came to an agreement on a negotiation to do that.

And then I went to work internally at Williams.

I got an office there and I sat down at a drawing board and proceeded to draw Binds I Run.

Larry had an office crush for me and he, as the model shot, built what I did, you know, what I did.

And then we acquired Williams gave us a guy who at the time was brand new on the floor to be a mechanical engineer.

He hadn't been a mechanical engineer up on the floor.

He'd been in incoming inspection. His name was John Crutch.

And so we went to work doing that.

You went from a guy that was running a service department at an auto center to more or less this creative pinball guy

in a really fairly short span.

And you really didn't have a history of this creative thing other than what you did in school and a little bit of the DJ thing.

It's kind of amazing that you know, you made this transition.

Yeah, interestingly, I sort of spent my whole life growing up designing games and, and, you know, being a game geek, which I suppose served me well later in life.

But you really didn't really, I mean, what you told me earlier, I didn't get the game geek feeling from you at all.

I mean, yeah, you played some pinball, you played some video games, but everybody was playing pinball and everybody was playing video games at this time.

I mean, were you doing something differently than everybody else?

I guess not.

Yeah, because I mean, everybody was, you know, that time, I mean, this was all new.

I mean, you know, and like you said, 1980, when the video creating a game thing came, I think I mean, you got extremely lucky being, you know, with that, with the job with nothing.

But yeah, everybody was playing in that.

So I mean, you really, you had a little luck going with you.

And then you combined that with your style to really kind of pull this all off, which is really interesting.

I was sort of, there was one other thing I did in there, which, you know, sort of gives you an idea where I was though, 80.

In 1978, 1979, when the very first home, what they were called home computers, but they were just micro computers were available.

I ran out and spent the, on godly sum of $600 to buy a machine called, you know, Hyal Scientific, which was one of the, they came out somewhere around the same time as an ambulance.

They were 6502 based.

And so I was sitting in my, in my house at the time in the suburbs of Chicago, programming on a machine and people were looking at me going, are you crazy?

Why did you spend all this money on this little computer? It's a complete waste of money.

But, but it gives you an idea of what I, you know, sort of what I was interested in.

Now, in back in your earlier days, like in college or in high school, were you into sports at all or anything like that, what were your hobbies?

You know, my hobbies were always, you know, building and, you know, I was like the quintessential geek. I, you know, I had, I had my own model railroad and I, you know, I could sit there.

I learned how to do woodworking from my father.

You know, I was a, you know, it was a very hands on kind of thing. If you wanted, my idea of building fun wasn't going out and buying toys, it was building your own.

And so, you know, in high school, I was like a lot of other high school kids except that I was, I was in a college prep school, but I took drafting.

So, you know, when I went away to college to do theatrical design, I already had the drafting background, something that most of the kids at the time didn't have.

When I got to doing pinball machines, I had the drafting background.

And so, you know, I'm a big believer that things that you think might be a complete waste of time that you're learning right now, someday will, will serve you well.

And it's, it's sort of turned out that way.

I'm going to raise fans to a bonsai rush.

Okay, so now when you started the bonsai run thing at Williams, when you had your own desk, you're right across the hall from Larry.

Were you at this point now an actual Williams employee?

Yes.

Okay, and was...

That's an interesting subject.

The answer is, I wasn't a real Williams employee, I was a, I was like all of the quote game designers.

We were all, we were all employees with contracts, which made us very strange employees.

Okay, let's put this way.

We were employees with extended benefits.

Was this a good thing or a bad thing?

It was a good thing.

It was a spectacular thing.

Why because you got better benefits than everybody?

Well, you basically negotiated the contracts.

And so, yes, the benefits were much bigger than most people that, you know, that had, you know, that were a normal nine to five employees.

So now how did bonsai run come from wrecking ball?

Why did it change to this motorcycle theme?

It became bonsai run.

We were really fishing around for a theme.

And I would be on my way to work every morning in my car and I would, you know, I'd be trying to think, what can this game be?

What can this game be? What can this game be?

And then one day, one of the guys who had seen the game who was at the time head of the art department's name was Mark Springer.

And Mark came in to Larry and he'd done a bunch of, he'd done a bunch of ruffs.

And he said, hey, look, look, this game would be really cool if you turned it into a motorcycle game.

And so, I looked at it and went, this looks pretty cool.

And so, they showed it to me and I went, you know, I, you know, I certainly can't come up with anything better at this point.

Sounds good to me. And so, it became bonsai run.

What was the original wrecking ball theme?

Internally, nobody liked it. Nobody liked the construction theme.

They all pupuited.

And so, you know, the way that the way that things got done at Williams was if you, you know, if you were a very, very powerful game designer, which I wasn't, you could convince anybody of anything.

You know, Steve Richie could convince anybody that he was going to do the coolest thing in the world and they just let him do it.

But I wasn't that far yet. And so, you know, I wasn't in a position to convince anybody of anything.

And, you know, as a group, people were meeting going, what do you think of this? What do you think of this?

And so, basically, when they came up with the bonsai run thing, they said, great, go do it.

You know, and that, you know, that was sort of a subtle agreement that that was acceptable.

Now, how hard was it to make this transition from video games to pinball? Did you find this thing as a new pinball designer and easy transition?

The answer is it was an easy transition with more work than you can possibly imagine.

And I had played so much pinball when I was in college all the way through the 70s, all the way through the beginning of the 80s, that playing pinball wasn't a problem.

Okay, there was no problem with, and there was no problem with me sitting down and understanding how a machine was built.

I picked all of that up in a really short amount of time.

The hard part is like any other discipline. You have to be willing to put in all the time it takes to start to understand the nuances of why something's good and why something's bad and why a shot is good and why a shot is bad and why is this clunky and why is it, you know, whatever.

And it wasn't just me doing this alone. I mean, Larry Demar was, would come in and he'd stand there and he'd go, you know, this thing over here just doesn't feel right. You need to do something to fix this.

Okay, and Larry is very good at instilling in people that if you put in, you know, which I already did, but, you know, if you put in the work and you are talented, you will learn what it takes to do this thing.

And so, you know, it was because of my background in building things and in doing mechanical things and then, you know, all this other stuff and how much can I play.

The actual function of, you know, actually, how do I go from point A to point B? The learning curve was an enormous, but the amount of work was tremendous.

Because, you know, until you've done something, you're once, you know, you don't know what it is you don't know.

Did you have any mentors at the time at Williams? I mean, was, you know, was there any guys that were taking you under your wing or was this all you and Larry were doing this all kind of see of your pants?

That was it. The basic feeling, and this isn't being unkind, the basic feeling internally at Williams about our project was that we were a joke.

The basic feeling was that this thing that we had designed was going to be an arbitrage and why did they waste money on building it?

And so, you know, the feeling was stay away from the toxic new guy. He doesn't know what he's doing. He's going to, you know, he'll be gone soon.

Is, you know, talking to Gomez, he talked about at Williams, the game designers were extremely competitive that it was like a, like almost a gang, a bunch of separate gangs that there was in certain amount of internal rift.

Is that, did you get that feeling at this time too?

No, I wasn't smart enough to understand that that's totally what was going on.

My feeling at the time was I had been given a once in a lifetime opportunity to show somebody that I could do something really cool.

And I was going to be darn sure I didn't waste that once in a lifetime opportunity.

Well, you didn't waste it. But on the other hand, when the game went to market that only sold 17, 150 units, which was probably low even at that, well certainly at that time.

How, how did, how was the final project accepted by you, as you saw it, you know, by the company and by the public?

Interestingly, one of the, one of the, one of the reasons that Bones I was brought internally was even back then the industry was casting around for a way to increase the price of pinball, increase the price per play of their games with the players.

And when we tested Bones I run, we put it out on play. It had 50 cent play. At the time all the games were a quarter.

And in our test locations, we were able to show that the game would make somewhat more money at 50 cent play than it would make it a quarter.

And the whole idea was the game cost more than a regular pinball machine, but it also earned earned a little more. But it didn't earn enough more.

And so when the game came out, the operators looked at it and said, wow, it looks like twice as much work for me. There's two, two play fields there.

And, you know, it sure, you know, it sure is a, it sure is fun. But, you know, we don't, we're not quite sure what we ought to do with this.

You know, it, you know, it, it, you know, it was what it was. But, you know, I, I'm not sure there's, there's playing the game, you know, 20 years later.

There, there's only a few things based on what I knew, you know, what I know now that I, you know, didn't know them, that I would have changed about bonds I run and they're very minor.

You know, and I think for what, you know, for what we tried to do and what we tried to accomplish, I think it turned out okay.

No, I think it turned out great. But since you brought it up, what were the things that you felt should be changed now that, you know, with this added knowledge you have of 20 years experience?

They're really, they're really minor things. The thing is like, at the time I wasn't smart enough because I, you know, we did bonds I run internally and basically in nine months.

And I was learning, I was, I was learning all these little nuances that you needed to know how to, you know, to whatever.

And one of the nuances that you learn is a, is a pinball designer is, you, you make sure that the, the game is adjustable when it goes out on test so that you can start to tweak the ball time so that you can start to tweak game time and make people feel like they are getting their money's worth out of the game.

And that's, that's a, you know, that's a fine line balancing act that you learn with, with time. I didn't know enough at that time to do things like make the outling post-adjustable.

Okay, that the game, if you look at a bonds, I run the outling post aren't adjustable. And no one would ever do that now. Okay, no one would ever try and, you know, and do that kind of thing.

Why didn't Larry mention that to you?

But we didn't, you know, I didn't, I didn't know any better. And so the game had a, had a, had a pretty low get, you know, ball time normally.

Which everybody was really thrilled about because it made a lot of money, you know, per minute. But, you know, I just, I just didn't, you know, at the time that was something I didn't, I didn't know any better.

And, you know, by the time I built it, Shaker, I figured it out. You know, I figured out that, you know, the first thing you do is you, you design much more defensively in how the timing of the game is set up.

And so, you know, those are tricks that you start to learn as a pinball game designer as time goes on.

Now, internally, you said that you, that the other people that were working there felt that you were kind of, you know, the toxic new guy.

But now that the bonsai run project is finished, did that attitude towards you change? I mean, it must change to some degree because you got the other Shaker project.

Right. Well, the people who felt that way would have been the other people in engineering, but not the people, not the guy in charge, luckily.

Um, Ken Fidazna, when I finished bonsai run, we sat down and we talked. And he said, you did a fine job of, you know, of, of taking a project that we had no idea whether you could really do.

And you basically showed us you can build pinball machines. And we would love to have you stay.

And so I thank him very much and we came to an agreement on a contract for a few years. And then I, I headed off and, you know, for the first time I sort of went to work on my, you know,

you know, a normal pinball machine that I dreamed up the title and the team and all of that stuff. And I went to, you know, I went to work.

And once again, I did something so crazy that they were all standing there shaking their head going, oh my God, what's he doing now?

You're saying that Earth Shaker was in their eyes, another crazy design?

Oh, yeah. I mean, to make up, to actually go to the trouble of making a pinball machine shake, you know, that was, you know, people in the halls would stand there and stare and go, you know, you're crazy.

You can't do that. And I stand there and I'm looking, I've learned this great thing and all the time I've been in games, all the way in from video games, all the way until now, which is, and this is true.

When somebody is standing there saying, you can't do that, it should be a little red flag that goes on in your brain that says, well, then I darn well should.

And so when somebody comes up with a crazy idea that sounds so outrageous that you just, you know, who would have a dream of such a thing? Maybe you better try it.

And I've learned that over and over and over, both things I've done and that other people have done and, you know, it's just, it's just true.

If you're going to catch the public's attention, you know, go, you know, go just shake them hard, show them something they've never seen before.

And, you know, that was both times I run into a shaker.

Well, I know one guy that certainly caught the risk of that whole thing and it was something that wasn't even at Williams and that was Joe Camico.

I mean, when he was at Dade East because, man, he loved your shaker motor idea. He must have put it in every game in 1992 and 1993 that Dade East made.

Right. Yeah, they, sadly, out of all the things that we patented at Williams and we patented everything just because it was a corporate policy.

It was one of the things we should have done and we never did and it ended up getting picked up and shoved into every Dade East game that was made for, you know, for five years.

Right. And in fact, it's, you know, still being done and some of their stuff.

So you didn't, it kind of seemed goofy that you come up with this crazy idea and you didn't fill out the patent paperwork.

Well, it was up to the company at the time. I didn't have anything to do with it and they just, you know, they just at the time didn't see it as something they needed to do.

Now, I, I nurse shaker the, the building that, you know, the, the, the earth shaker institute that goes up and down.

What brought that on as a, as a toy to add to? I mean, and ultimately ended up not really being in anything other than the sample machines.

I mean, how did you feel about that?

Um, okay. We, I had gotten done with, you know, with doing that, you know, I was really into, I had seen, and I'll be perfectly frank with you.

I had seen how Steve Richie had done high speed and high speed. And I said this publicly in talks that I've given to people.

High speed is a watershed game in the history of pinball. And the reason that high speed is a watershed game in the history of pinball is because the game tells a story.

Up until that time, there was no pinball machine that had ever been made, that went to the trouble of taking you from point A to point B to point C, telling you a story as you went.

And then at the end, playing out that story in spectacular fashion, it was, it was a little bit like that, you know, he had taken a video game and brought it along into pinball.

And so, you know, in high speed, it's a simple story. Run the light and get away. The police will chase you, you know. But it told the story.

That's a watershed game in the history of pinball. The game tells a story. And I also realized that theme was everything. Okay. It wasn't, that wasn't the case back then. But, but in my mind, theme was very, very important.

Theme wasn't something you threw away. And remember, these were original themes we were doing. And so, when I went to pick the themes from my games, I made sure that they were themes in Earthshaker and in Rural Wind. And in Funhouse, you know, there were all themes that everyday people in their everyday lives were familiar with.

And you could twist the theme just enough that they look at it. They instantly knew what was going on and they wanted to play with the game.

So, I mean Williams was not really doing licensing. But I mean other companies obviously did in the past, you know, starting with, you know, as early as the EM era with wizard.

What, I mean, what was your, you're feeling about, you know, themes that were, or based on, you know, a commercial entity, you know, you know, a, you know, a license theme. And, and, you know, because obviously you didn't use any of that until Adams family.

Was that just because Williams wasn't pushing that or because you just didn't feel that was the way to go?

We internally at Williams at that time, Williams, the Williams designers were very proud people. They still are.

And they were very proud of the fact that their games were original themes, that they had, that they had concocted those games on their own and they had cooked them up and they hadn't licensed them.

And they, you know, they brought them from nothing to being something. They had thought them up themselves and, and there they were, they were, we were, we, we, everyone of the game designers, there was very proud of that fact.

And what happened was our friends at Data East were licensing everything. They were sitting there and they were starting to license the world.

And we looked around and we said, you know, if, maybe if, you know, maybe if we had taken, you know, maybe if we had taken Rudy and instead of, you know, in front house and instead of it being Rudy, it had been Barth Simpson.

You know, maybe we, instead of selling 11,000 of them, we would have sold 20,000 of them.

And so, you know, the point wasn't lost. Now there was a whole huge amount of discussion internally. Should we license games? Shouldn't we license games?

If we license games, what should, you know, what should be the boundaries of what we license?

And, you know, these were things that, you know, weren't, you know, to the credit of Williams management, they weren't first on the game designers by management.

You know, there were discussions carried out. There were suggestions made, but nobody forced the game designers to do any theme that they didn't want to do.

That was a big tenet there of being a game designer. You were in charge of your own theme. You were in charge of your own destiny. You know, you had to get them to agree with what you were doing.

You had to prove to them that what you were doing was a good idea, but they weren't going to stand in your way if you could make a case that what you were building was interesting and they could sell.

Adam's family happened because of a lunch I had with Ken Fadezna.

And I was basically negotiating a new contract at that point. I had gone to lunch with Ken. Ken had said, hey, you know, there's these people in Hollywood who are doing an Adam's family movie.

And it's just, you know, it sounds like, you know, you ought to do a haunted house kind of thing or whatever. And would you be interested in Adam's family? Well, golly, Adam's family was one of my favorite TV shows when I was a kid.

Okay, it fits my personality perfectly. The whole family is warped. And so, you know, I said, wow, that's great. I ran down to Roger Sherp's office and I said, what's the deal with this Adam's family movie? And he said, well, it's already been dumped by one studio. It's being picked up by another studio.

But I make a couple of calls and see what's happening. And so we worked through it and I ended up licensing Adam's family. If the movie was going to be good, better and different, we just, you know, I was doing it because I love the TV show.

Yeah, because really the one of the, you know, kind of first licenses was kind of L. Vira and the party monsters. And that really was kind of a combination of an original theme and a license combined almost.