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Millennium Moment- Pinball 2000

Silverball Chronicles·podcast_episode·1h 42m·analyzed·Aug 5, 2021
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.035

TL;DR

Pinball 2000 origins: Gomez & Lawler's secret skunkworks project that saved Williams pinball

Summary

Silver Ball Chronicles episode exploring Pinball 2000, Williams' late-1990s initiative to revitalize the struggling pinball industry. Hosts David Dennis and Ron Hallett discuss how George Gomez and Pat Lawler developed the technology in secret at Lawler's home workshop, using Pepper's Ghost illusion principles and 35mm slides projected via monitors to animate playfield elements. The project emerged from internal conflict at Williams over John Papaduke's expensive monitor-in-backglass vision, which senior designers feared would destroy the company.

Key Claims

  • Williams management (Neil Nicastro) called a 1998 staff meeting pressuring pinball division to improve or face shutdown

    high confidence · George Gomez quote about Nicastro's 'un-motivational' speech regarding business economics and spending vs. revenue

  • Pat Lawler and George Gomez developed Pinball 2000 secretly at Lawler's home workshop after work hours for approximately 1.5 months

    high confidence · Multiple direct quotes from George Gomez describing driving to Pat's house daily, working in the shop, Patricia Lawler making dinner

  • The technology used Pepper's Ghost illusion (mirror projection) combined with 35mm slides and a 19-inch monitor to project animated elements onto the playfield

    high confidence · Detailed technical description of foam core construction, 35mm slides from Johnny Mnemonic film work, and flashlight angle experiments

  • John Papaduke's original platform vision involved a 27-inch monitor in the backglass, which distributors feared would be compared to failed Baby Pac-Man

    high confidence · Pat Lawler quote about distributor memories of Baby Pac-Man; discussion of J-Pop's experimental project

  • George Gomez was simultaneously developing Monster Bash with strict 100% effort requirement from programmer Lyman Sheets, creating extreme schedule pressure

    high confidence · George's description of 5am-10am playfield work, then 10am-6pm with Lyman, then evening drive to Pat's shop until 11pm

  • Amiga computer failure during development caused loss of animation work that had to be recovered

    high confidence · Explicit mention of one Amiga dying and lost work requiring recovery efforts

  • Larry DeMar discovered the secret Pinball 2000 project and pressured them to bring it to Williams immediately

    medium confidence · Ron paraphrasing: 'Larry DeMar figured out what George and Pat were doing' and called demanding they bring it in

  • Pepper's Ghost illusion dates back to 16th century (circa 1584), popularized by John Henry Pepper in 1862

Notable Quotes

  • “The pinball company was kind of an albatross around the neck of the slot machine company.”

    George Gomez @ ~15:00 — Captures Williams' strategic shift away from pinball toward more profitable slot machines in the 1990s

  • “The pressure was really on, and I did not believe in John Papaduke, to his credit. He did a lot to try to get me enthused about this new version of pinball, but it wasn't for me.”

    George Gomez @ ~20:00 — Explains designer resistance to J-Pop's monitor-in-backglass approach

  • “We're never going to do this at Williams. The politics are going to prevent us from doing it here. I've got a full shop in my house. We should just go there and don't tell people we're doing this.”

    Pat Lawler @ ~35:00 — Decision point: Lawler recognizes internal politics require going black-ops skunkworks

  • “George came up with one of the ways to get it to work. It was marvelous.”

    Pat Lawler @ ~40:00 — References the Pepper's Ghost/mirror projection solution that became Pinball 2000

  • “The pressure was mounting and it was a hell of a time for me because I was working on Monster Bash and Lyman Sheets just wouldn't hear of anything but a hundred percent effort on the game.”

    George Gomez @ ~52:00 — Illustrates extreme personal stress from dual 16-hour daily commitments

  • “I'd relax on my drive out to the sticks. The drive was my decompression time.”

    George Gomez @ ~54:00 — Shows psychological toll and coping mechanism during high-pressure development

  • “Boys, these days, these are the economics of business. You have to recognize you're spending too much money and you're not making enough money out there on the street.”

    Neil Nicastro (quoted by George Gomez) @ ~27:00 — Management ultimatum that prompted Lawler/Gomez to develop alternative vision

Entities

George GomezpersonPat LawlerpersonJohn Papaduke (J-Pop)personNeil NicastropersonLarry DeMarpersonLyman SheetspersonChris ShipmanpersonKevin O'Connorperson

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Williams management (Nicastro) issued ultimatum in 1998 meeting that pinball division must prove viability or face shutdown; slot machine division was prioritized as 'sexier' and more profitable

    high · George Gomez quotes about management meeting and Nicastro's 'un-motivational' speech; quote: 'pinball company was an albatross around neck of slot machine company'

  • ?

    event_signal: Podcast celebrated 5-year milestone with five-year co-host (Ron Hallett) and Slam Tilt Podcast connection; engaged listener feedback and promoted cross-platform engagement

    high · Opening announcements of 5-year anniversary; reader feedback from Scott E. and Tom C.; promotion of Silverball Swag merchandise and streaming channels

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Experimental Pinball 2000 mock-up used foam core, 35mm slides from Johnny Mnemonic film work, flashlight angle experiments, and Amiga computers to prove Pepper's Ghost projection concept; iterative physical experimentation approach

    high · Detailed description of materials (foam core, car tint, 35mm slides); George Gomez flashlight angle demonstration proof-of-concept; mention of cannabilizing Amiga computers rather than building custom hardware

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Gomez/Lawler rejected Papaduke's expensive monitor-in-backglass approach as unsustainable and reminiscent of failed Baby Pac-Man/hybrid games; instead championed Pepper's Ghost mirror projection as elegant solution

    high · Direct comparison to Baby Pac-Man failure; Pat Lawler quote about distributor memories preventing that direction; George's skepticism of J-Pop's vision

  • $

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.312

0:00
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0:12
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1:08
The Pinball Network is online. Launching Silver Ball Chronicles. I can hear your fan, too. You don't hear any fan here. I have the air conditioning off. It's 80-something degrees. I'm sacrificing myself to get the best possible sound.
1:30
Hello everyone, I'm David Dennis and this is Silver Ball Chronicles. With me this month is my co-host, Ron, waxed and vaxxed Hallett. How you doing? I don't know about the wax, but yes, I am vaxxed. You are ready for a hot boy summer, my friend. Okay. How has everything been with you? Hot and rainy. Everybody loves to learn about the weather in our locations. They just, they love it. They love hearing it. We could just do a podcast on that. Podcast on weather. I'm sure that exists. Sure it is. Hey, congratulations on five years of podcasting with that fellow there, Bruce Nightingale, over there on Slam Tilt Podcast. Why, thank you. Five years is a big deal. Your podcast can now officially comment on pinball. Yes, we can. It's very exciting. So exciting. Halloween in Ultraman was just announced by Spooky Pinball. That. You're a big Halloween fan? Yeah, it's in my collection. I haven't seen it, so my wife and I sat down actually after. I know all about it. You haven't seen Halloween? No, I've heard all about it. I know all of the jokes and the memes and the such. And then we actually watched it. I'm like, wow, this is actually very, very good. And it's not like crazy and bloody and gory and whatever. It's just... No, that's the second one. It's very well done. Ladies and gentlemen, of course, you can join us over on facebook.com dot com slash silver ball chronicles to engage with us we love to see your comments we'd love to have you follow us that's where we spend a lot of time musing about the fun hobby that is pinball as well as you can leave us a review at this week in pinball.com and the twip pinball promoters database that's where twip has listed all of the streamers podcasters youtube channels etc And you can leave your comments up there and promote us, if you would prefer. That will make it a lot easier for other people to find us. Ron, they can also find you over on your streaming channel. And what's that? It's twitch.tv slash Slamtail Podcast. Yes, so that's where you can see the one and only Stu McVicker, who looks nothing like you. No. He's also the 1978 Playboy Launch Party Champion. Yep. They had launch parties then. So he is a big, big, big, big deal. So that's where you can get a proper lesson when it comes to your pinball machines. Now, don't you have a stream? I do. I'm over at twitch.tv slash silverballchronicles. Now, I'm not as regular as you with the streaming. You've got the fancy portable rig and tens of thousands of dollars of pinball machines. I've got Tron and The Simpsons, and I just sort of do it in my living room. usually i will do it around the time that the podcast comes out that way they can come in and chat about uh that month's topic so we're uh you know i'm really excited to do a lot of that stuff with people we have some feedback this month yes we do scott e says long time listener first time emailer love the show and the way the two of you present the history of this great hobby thanks for the amazing content uh scott also had a lot of really really good titles for some episodes which we probably won't use but i did enjoy them they were very good so thank you scott e and tom c also left us some feedback absolutely love listening and learning the history of the game and the hobby i enjoy so much the content is spot on and always super enjoyable please keep up the good work. Thank you so much, Tom. So we love to read out your comments and stuff when you send them over to us, guys. It really makes it worthwhile that we can do all of this, and people are enjoying that content.

high confidence · Historical reference with Wikipedia note; used in Disney's Haunted Mansion

  • Python Angelo claimed Capcom's Flipper Football had the projected ball technology first before it appeared at Williams

    low confidence · Python's claim quoted but no corroboration provided; hosts note Larry DeMar said 'it couldn't be done'

    • Patricia Lawlerperson
    Python Angeloperson
    Williams Electronics (WMS Industries)company
    Pinball 2000product
    Monster Bashproduct
    Silver Ball Chroniclesorganization
    Marvin Glasscompany
    Pepper's Ghostproduct
    Commodore Amigaproduct
    Johnny Mnemonicproduct

    market_signal: Late 1990s arcade industry in crisis: home video game consoles (N64) replaced arcade as social gathering place; Williams pinball sales declining; market demanded technological innovation or industry closure was imminent

    high · Hosts discuss shift from 'going out for entertainment' to 'consuming entertainment at home'; references to declining arcade traffic; management crisis meeting framed as survival decision

  • ?

    community_signal: Gomez/Lawler partnership represented alliance between veterans against internal politics; bypassed organizational structure through skunkworks model similar to Larry DeMar's historical Wrecking Ball strategy

    high · Pat Lawler quote: 'politics are going to prevent us from doing it here'; reference to 'old Larry DeMar strategy' with Wrecking Ball; secret development at home without telling management

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Larry DeMar discovered Gomez/Lawler's secret project and accelerated timeline by demanding they bring prototype to Williams

    medium · Ron's paraphrase: 'Larry figured out what they were doing' and 'called them saying get this thing in here now'

  • ?

    product_strategy: George Gomez forced to work dual 16-hour daily schedule (5am-10am playfield work, 10am-6pm programming, evening drive to Pat's shop until 11pm) due to Lyman Sheets' 100% effort demand on Monster Bash

    high · Explicit timeline provided: Monster Bash development required exclusive Lyman Sheets time; Gomez drove to Pat's daily for Pinball 2000 work; described as 'hell' and 'making me crazy'

  • ?

    technology_signal: George Gomez skeptical of John Papaduke's monitor-in-backglass platform due to cost (described as 'astronomical') and distributor fear of Baby Pac-Man comparisons; believed it would 'cause a blow-up' and destroy company

    high · George Gomez TopCast quote: 'cost was astronomical...going to cause a blow-up for sure'; Pat Lawler: 'distributors have long memories' of Baby Pac-Man failure

  • ?

    technology_signal: Pinball 2000 represented paradigm shift from DMD-only displays to hybrid optical projection (Pepper's Ghost) combined with animated playfield elements, intended to compete with home video game consoles

    high · Extensive technical discussion of Pepper's Ghost, 35mm slides, mirrors, monitor angle experimentation; stated goal to attract console players to arcades

    • 5:50
    So, of course, we've got t-shirts if you'd like to represent the Chronicles podcast. You can swing on over to silverballswag.com where you can check out hoodies and stickers and some other stuff over there. So please swing on over. Now, this brings us to my favorite preamble of the episode here, which is the corrections and comments. Ah, when we're wrong. Yes. This was a big catch by Ben C.
    6:21
    He says, Hi, Dave and Ron. During episode 15, Ron mentioned that Space Station may have been the first game with a secondary GI color string. He also misspelled color here. Nope, it's spelled right. Good job. No, it's got to have a U in the end. No, there's no U in color. Carry on. He says, Gottlieb slash Premier Tag Team had the feature a couple of years earlier where the red GI string was activated during multiball. Bulbs were covered in a red plastic tube, and on many of the games the red has just faded so it's barely noticeable. Thanks for another great episode. why was this such a big uh catch ron uh well i wasn't wrong i said i said may have been the yeah but see you're hedging you're hedging yeah well i always preface it because it's when you say something's the first almost certainly like this is the first game to use this toy there'll be some em from the 30s that used it first i mean almost always or they're like a foreign a european game that used it so i'll say it may have been the first game or as far as i know yeah good qualifier good good good yeah don't let that fence hit you and you know hurt your ass sitting up there cya cya premier tag team was my first pinball machine i actually don't mind tag team this is a very it's it's very underrated it's very good i really enjoyed that game is it the one that's got the guy uh the wrestlers with masks yes okay very good larry days are super awesome system adb very great game now it does it's got it's got a it's got a relay and it will switch from one from the gi to the red gi during the multi-ball as well as during the attract mode and it did have those plastic tubes here's a tip pull them out flip them over and put them back down because there's part of the tube that's inside the play field and it has never seen the light of day so it's still brand new on the other side so you're saying is you never corrected me even though you owned this game exactly very embarrassing super embarrassing i guess we'll jump into today's topic so i can yeah what are we talking about pinball uh ron was of course suffering in the late 1990s home video game consoles like the nintendo 64 were dominating households in the decades that preceded the 90s, people ate at home and went out for entertainment. Society was changing, where now they went out to eat and they consumed their entertainment at home. Going out and having a good time with your friends in the arcade was no longer the thing. Ron, what was this time like? Was it sad? I wasn't into pinball then. You weren't into the arcade scene in the 90s? Not in the late 90s. I was kind of out of it by then. I remember we had an arcade in my hometown in the Fredericton Mall, which is now turned into just your standard everyday strip mall. It's no longer like an indoor mall. And there was an arcade there, and I went from time to time when I was in town. I remember going, man, this is kind of neat. But it was not that busy. and then I see photos now that I've been in the hobby forever of pictures of you know in that early 90s or late 80s period or in the 70s and those places were packed like that was like the social gathering place for kids in high school and you know part of that is is sad right when you think about in the late 90s it was all dying so Williams needed to jump start its sales there's something needed to be done the excitement needed to be pumped back in premier Gottlieb was already gone. Data East was kind of doing their own thing, but now they were Sega, right? Capcom was gone. Pinball 2000 was the answer to that call. They needed something interesting. And you know what, if you're sitting at home playing video games, first thing that you want to do is to come to an arcade and play kind of a video game, but kind of pinball. That's what we're going to talk about this month. Pinball 2000. So what was going on at Williams in the mid to late 90s? Well, they were becoming a very successful slot machine company. Okay, so slot machines, okay, very close sort of cousin to pinball, right? It's a gambling type device. It's designed to rid you of your coins, isn't that correct? So I've got a great quote here from George Gomez. Now, we've drawn a lot of this episode from George Gomez and a couple of others who were very much involved in the Pinball 2000 adventure, if you'll call it that. And we've got some great quotes here. This one from George Gomez. The pinball company was kind of an albatross around the neck of the slot machine company. The slot machine company was the shiny new thing that showed enormous potential and was way sexier than the old junky pinball company. There's probably a lot of truth to that. Yeah, by this point, I think they'd already renamed the company as WMS Industries. Yeah, they had gone away from sort of Bally Williams Midway, right? That was sort of the gaming kind of thing. Now they were trying to be more fancy. Premier Gottlieb, they got into a lot of trouble with SMS, which was their sort of gambling machine, VLT system stuff. That's what really kind of drew the end in Premier Gottlieb. You can check that out in our Gottlieb System 3 episode, I think, way back, like episode 3. But there was rumblings of a new platform, right? They needed to do something to sort of reinvigorate the pinball and the way it's done. You know, like a DMD, right? Like, they needed to reinvigorate pinball. They had to, you know, they invented alphanumerics, they invented DMDs, and now they, what was the next thing? You know, there was rumblings of a new platform, and while George Gomez was working on Monster Bash, his last sort of DMD at Williams, he heard that John Papaduke was working on a Williams pinball platform that was different than the DMD program. So who's John Papaduke? That's a loaded question. Who at the time? Who was John Papaduke at the time without the last, say, six years? He was a Canadian designer. You should feel like a kinship. He's like a fellow Canadian. He started at Williams. His first game was World Cup soccer. That's a great game. And then he did a lot of – his games had very long, flowy plastic ramps. They all had a very similar feel. I would really describe him as whimsical. His designs are whimsical. Very whimsical. Yeah, I'll go with that. What was the other one? Tales of the Arabian Nights, Circus Voltaire. Yeah, very artistic designed games, right? They had lots of amazing art and interesting ramps that would go in different directions and stuff. He was all in about doing things very, very differently. And because of his, I guess, uniqueness, he's a younger designer as well. He's sort of an up-and-comer. He was given the task to come up with the new thing. Like, hey, John, you're a young guy. You're hip and with it. I used to be with it, but then they changed what it is, and now it scares me. But I'm going to let you get with it and design the new platform because he's cool. So there was a lot of pressure. So George Gomez would sort of describe this time. He would say, the pressure was really on, and I did not believe in John Papaduke, to his credit. He did a lot to try to get me enthused about this new version of pinball, but it wasn't for me. So his experimental project, and this has been said quite a few times in a few places, was basically a big 27-inch monitor in the back glass. It's hard to believe, Ron, but LCD flat screen monitors have not been around for very long.
    14:38
    Originally, they were big-ass monitors, right? Well, originally you had big CRT monitors, and you had plasma screens, and you had LCDs. Exactly. Like, these things are, like, he just took the back glass and stuck a computer monitor in it, right? And it's a big friggin' thing. This brings up memories of a thing that I've seen a few times and never played, thank God. And that's Baby Pac-Man, or there was another sort of similar game called Granny and the Gators. Don't forget Caveman. And Caveman, which I'm doing a System 80 episode, and Caveman's a System 80, so I got a little bit in there and further episode down the road. That is a flaming pile of garbage. Wow, such a pinging aid. Yep, yep. Send that hate mail over to silverballchronicles at gmail.com. But those games were epic flops. They did not, you know, they sold some units, but I think people bought them just because they didn't know what was going on and maybe they had a quota or something. But they did not go over well, and especially amongst designers around this time that could remember those games. You know, having just the screen and the back glass and a pinball machine in front of it was concerning to a lot of them. So George Gomez said, in terms of how it was being used, you needed to play it on the monitor and you played on the play field. That's the thing that bothered me. I was around at Midway when Bally was doing the baby Pac-Man stuff. I played all that stuff. I just didn't think much of it. Yeah, scary, scary stuff. Now, Pat Lawler would say that pinball distributors have long memories. Oh, I'm sorry, pinball distributors. Very good, very good. If we took a video monitor and put it in a pinball machine, they would immediately say, baby Pac-Man. We knew we couldn't do that. You've got the sort of the new kind of up and comer, the artistic guy. He's got this vision. We're putting a monitor in the back glass and we're going to, you know, graphics and screens. And that'll be the new DMD. And to give a background, he'd already experimented some with Circus Voltaire. You take in the DMD and they moved it down to the play field. So it was actually in the back of the play field. Yeah, it's under the glass. It's under the glass. Yeah, it was very, very different. And this whole Gomez-Lahler Pinball 2000, they knew that J-Pop's vision was going to be very, very expensive. You're going to have to buy these monitors. You're going to have to put them on there.
    17:13
    This just was not going to work. George would say in his TopCast interview that the cost was astronomical. I could not be convinced that his version was going to succeed. I thought to myself, this is going to cause a blow-up for sure. There's all this turmoil at Williams and these sort of more senior, middle-senior designers. They know things aren't good. The last thing they need is something that's going to explode, because that is going to be the end of the company. I find that particularly interesting, right? It's like they want things had to work out here, didn't they? The infamous management meeting. That's the title you have for the section. Yes. What was the infamous? What was the infamous management meeting? One day in 1998, Neil Nicastro called a staff meeting. OK, so let's start out with who is who is Neil Nicastro? He is the president of Williams. He's the boss. So he's the big he's the big guy. He's the big boss. The head. She's he's the guy that's making all the decisions. He's the guy that's saying, hey, slots are the future. You know, pinball is great, but let's figure it out, right? So George Gomez, he states, Neil de Castro, I used to call him the un-motivational speaker because of his method of motivation was basically very depressing. He said, boys, these days, these are the economics of business. You have to recognize you're spending too much money and you're not making enough money out there on the street. This company is a business, and business needs to succeed. You know, he was like subtle, like the sharpened edge of a guillotine. Ooh, there's some symbolism. Very good, George Gomez.
    18:51
    You're like a word master. So the meeting wasn't specifically about John Papadook, or J-Pop they call him, his project, but pinball in general. And the meeting just sort of came up that, hey, we need to save Williams Pinball. So there's rumblings that J-Pop is working on this sort of platform. Leadership is basically saying, hey guys, you need to get your shit together because this is not going well. And this makes quite a few of the people in the meeting uncomfortable because they know that they don't really believe in the vision which J-Pop is doing. You know, the writing was on the wall for Williams Pinball. You know, Pat Lawler was very concerned, and he said that the John Papaduke project may never actually come to fruition the way that they would use it to save the company. So the whole Pinball 2000 project and the idea to go in a different direction was created shortly after this meeting between Pat Lawler and George Gomez as they sort of walked out of the room together. Pat was very concerned that J-Pop's project wasn't going to see the light of day. Soon it would be exposed, he said, to the Emperor's new clothes and that management would pull the plug on the pinball division. The problem was that there was dissension in the ranks at Williams. All the engineering team was not firmly in the J-Pop project camp. and Ron if you are on a boat you all got to be rowing in the same direction and your engineers and design teams need to buy in and if you've got dissension amongst your teams and there's no buy-in it's destined to fail right out of the gate regardless of if it's a good idea or not and Nicastro noticed after the meeting and basically said to Pat Lawler and George Gomez and maybe a couple of others that they need to get with the program and they need to come up with a better idea or get the hell out. So what did they do? Well, George Gomez said, okay, I'm going to show you a better idea. So Pat and George basically said that if they could make something that was successful and made a bunch of monies, Williams wouldn't be able to shut down Pinball. They would have to stick with Pinball. If you made a good product, if they made something unique and interesting and fancy, There's nothing that they could do that you could prove it to the leadership team. Here's a bunch of money. We're going to put it on the table. And if you don't want that money, then you're crazy. They needed to come up with something to sell pinball machines. So what did they need to do, Ron? What were the things that they had to do with Pinball 2000? They got to get new people to play pinball. Yeah, the new people, they were all getting a console and hanging out at home.
    21:40
    So they spoke about mirrors in the 1980s and how they could get animated targets on the play field. Pat Lawler would talk about that from time to time in a couple of his episodes. And so George was working on Monster Bash and Pat was working on his next game. And they just couldn't devote all this time, you know, during working hours to build their new Williams platform. So Pat Lawler tells George Gomez, we're never going to do this at Williams. The politics are going to prevent us from doing it here. I've got a full shot in my house. We should just go there and don't tell people we're doing this. We can do it and then bring it in. That's the old Larry DeMar strategy, right? With wrecking ball. From our Pat Lawler episode. Yes, check that out if you want to, if you don't know what that reference is. After work, George would drive to Pat's place every day for a month and a half. And Patricia, Pat's wife, would make them dinner. They'd go into the shop and make stuff. George had a bunch of Amigas and a 19-inch monitor. So they went to the store and bought some car tint. Car tint? What's car tint? Car tint. It's the stuff you put on your windows to make your car look cooler. Ah. Right. it's like the the film 3m film or whatever so what the hell's an amiga so what you you would know what an amiga is i don't know what amiga is i it's it's a really old i think it's like a an old like pc uh okay yeah amiga was a pc introduced by commodore yeah i totally didn't have to look that up so so pat had a bunch of old cabinets because you know one has a bunch of old cabinets just laying about. And he built a top box for the monitor. And then they sort of had an idea. Pat Lawler would say, George came up with one of the ways to get it to work. It was marvelous. I love that quote. I had to put that in for some reason. So they basically used foam core and they began to experiment with some 35 millimeter slides. And that was the ones that the film guys gave George when he was working on Johnny Mnemonic. And George took some comic books and made some back glass art. Oh, that reminds me, what's 35mm slides? I don't know. I know 35mm film. I thought you were old. I thought you were an old person. I was setting you up for an old person thing. Uh, okay. I think they still use 35mm film when they're not using digital. So the 35mm I can't believe I know this and you don't. C***. Okay. I should have gone with Bruce. Clue me in. So anyway, it's basically 35mm film, but it's cut out in little squares, and it's put in a little plastic thing. And it used to go in those old projector things that you would put down to show family pictures in. Know what I mean? I like your description of all these things. Very descriptive. You shine light through it, and then it projects an image. and the image would usually, people would use them for their family vacations and stuff and they would get their photos put onto a 35mm film with a little plastic cover and the plastic cover goes in the machine. You click the little button and it shoots the light and then on your wall it's your parents in Hawaii or something. So George Gomez said, I made this little mock-up and I took the slide and put it in the place of the monitor and I took a flashlight and shined it from above and it sort of proved that if you mess with this angle, you get this resultant angle on the image, and that was the mock-up. Marvelous. I love that word. I haven't used that word enough. And George Gomez would say that the artist Kevin O'Connor, during the Pinball 2000 project, showed me way back that I essentially had some identical idea as Pinball 2000. He brought it to me and said, you remember this? And I actually hadn't, but if you just put things in your mind and store them away for later, you never know when you're going to use them. 90s monitors were really, really heavy. And George would say that we struggled. We called it monitor weightlifting. We would pick this thing up, and then, you know, we'd experiment with the angle of the monitor while one guy is holding it up and the other guy is making markings with pencil. They really innovating here but the funny thing about pinball is that you would often innovate by just messing with things right like picking things up and moving it changing the angle and doing those things It very experimental And I think George Gomez probably got a lot of that from his time working at Marvin Glass But you would always cannibalize other things, right? You wouldn't, like, build your own monitor or you wouldn't, you know, build your own computer to do this. You would cannibalize something else for your proof of concept. So you remember those Amigas we were just talking about, right? Yes, I do. Well, one died, and they lost a bunch of their work. So they had to spend some time recovering it. And, of course, George hadn't done computer work for 10-plus years. And if you're thinking about the difference between a 1998 computer and a 1988 computer, things are totally different. So, of course, George had to relearn a bunch of stuff. And he finally got one of those Amigas back up and running with their information. Could you imagine the amount of stress that that would be? Yes, I can. During the day, they are working, doing games and building games. And then at night, they're lifting these heavy monitors and putting things together and trying to get the angle of these slides correct so it projects on the play field. And it's like all that craziness. And then this Amiga craps the bed. And all the work that you have and all the animations that you've been working on as a proof of concept are all just gone. So George Gomez says, the pressure was mounting and it was a hell of a time for me because I was working on Monster Bash and Lyman Sheets just wouldn't hear of anything but a hundred percent effort on the game so I had to give a hundred percent to Monster Bash and then fit this in on top of it it wasn't pretty for me it was making me crazy I relaxed on my drive out to the sticks oh yeah that's the one thing I believe Pat Lawler drives he's like way out in the country somewhere it's not like a short drive from Williams to Pat Lawler's house I believe but uh George says I'd relax on my drive out to the sticks The drive was my decompression time. George was working on Monster Bash, which I think is a really super fun game. And he had a scheduled around the time that the engineer was there. And his name was Chris Shipman. Chris would have to come in and work around Lyman Sheets hours because they had to optimize Lyman Sheets time on the machine to do his coding. So if the machine was down, get this, because they were moving a mech or a switch or changing something physical on the playfield. Lyman basically couldn't do anything. George and Chris Shipman would get to Williams at around 5 a.m. in the morning, and they would work on the playfield until 10 a.m., and then Lyman would roll into the office, and he would start doing his work with George until 6 p.m. Then George would drive to Pat Lawler's shop, which is in the God knows where, and he would just listen to music and drive too fast, and they would work till 11 o'clock and then drive home. Oh my God. That seems like hell. Doesn't it? Doesn't seem fun to me. Yeah. So the funny thing here also is it seems like Lyman is a slave driver when it comes to his games, eh? No comments. I mean, it's probably a good thing. I mean, I'm not slighting the guy by any means. I think it's probably a good thing that he's putting that much effort in. But you can see, man, it seems like Lyman is a serious dude when it comes to his programming. So it wasn't long until Larry DeMar figured out what George and Pat were doing. Things were really going to accelerate at Williams, so they needed to get it ready to present. Larry started pressing Pat and George and called them one day and said, I don't know where you are, but you need to get this thing in here now. Yeah, so the pressure's mounting at Williams, right? The writing is on the wall that sales are not good. Neil Nicastro has given some amazing unmotivational speeches. So using mirrors to project images is not really a new thing, right? So this is called, in some circles, the Pepper's Ghost illusion. And it's been around for decades. So are you familiar with this term? I am not familiar with Pepper's Ghost. So Pepper's Ghost, and I'll include a link to the Wikipedia page here in the show notes, this is named after John Henry Pepper, who began popularizing the effects in theaters in 1862. This launched a large-scale ghost stories theater craze. It's named after John Henry Pepper, but he didn't actually invent the effect. Some say that it goes back all the way to somewhere around 16th century, around 1584. Now, it's best known for its use at Disney World in the Haunted Mansion. Have you been to Disney World, Ron? I have not. Of course you haven't. Hey, I've been to Disneyland. Wait a minute. I've been to Disney World. Yeah, that's the one. Oh, crap. Never mind. Yes, I've been to Disney World. I haven't been to Disneyland. Yeah, so have you been on Haunted Mansion when you sit on the chair and it goes through and you see the ghosts? No. Did that still exist when I went? Is that still around? Oh, God. Anyway, it's one of my favorite Disney World rides ever. Well, there's a bunch of scenes in there where there's ghosts, and what they do is they use the Pepper's Ghost effect. Oh, were you on Tower of Terror at MGM Studios? Yes, I was. Okay, so, you know, you're on the car, right? You're on the car, and then you look out into the hallway, and then all of a sudden the hallway fades away, and the lights change, and there's a floating eye. Anyway, that's a Pepper's Ghost effect. So back in the day of Marvin Glass, they sold Bally a bunch of mirror technology when they used space invaders for their planet effects. Are you aware of that? Yes. Yeah, so that's a Pepper's Ghost style thing. This is kind of what I'm trying to do is where did this idea come from to do a projection on the play field? And this is where we're getting to here. I think there's somebody out there who actually thinks that he came up with it. Yes, Python Angelo. We know about Python. So Python said pinball 2000. Capcom's flipper football was supposed to be like that. When Capcom folded, the idea appeared at Williams. You couldn't tell the difference between the physical ball and the animated ball. Larry DeMar said it couldn't be done. He was a manipulator. Yes. And then there was a bunch of trash talk. That sounds very Python. Apparently, Python Angelo invented the idea for Pinball 2000. Well, basically, what they figured out with their experimenting, Ron, is that you could have a pinball machine with a tinted piece of glass and a monitor above it. And you could put things on the screen that would then reflect on the glass. So you could shoot an animated character or an animated character could taunt you or lights could flash that weren't actually physically on the play field. It's a kind of a neat concept. So we can all thank Python Angelo for inventing this and sending it over to Williams somehow. And Flipper Football was like 96. So that was a good two or three years before.
    33:08
    God bless them, eh? This is when they had to unveil Pinball 2000 to the leadership team. So senior management and the executive team came into the presentation room, and they had a big red cover on the pinball machine. Yeah, very fancy. Yeah, well, I mean, George and Pat, as you can remember from our George Gomez, his Pat Lawler episode, had seen Dave Nutting from Dave Nutting and Associates do his presentations at Midway back in the day. It was all flash. It was all presentation. It was fancy. It was all sizzle. And George knew that he needed to do that. We learned presentations from some of the masters, like Dave Nutting, playing the theme from 2001, bringing you into a dark room and sitting you down on a $1,000 Recaro seat out of his Ferrari and telling you a story before you begin to play the game. Pat and I both learned from Dave. We did a big presentation. You know, big. Really big. Larry DeMar, Neil Nicastro, Ken Fedesna, and a few others were in this small group. And I'll tell you, they went all in on this presentation. George Gomez would say that he saw a sparkle in people's eyes. He finally saw Nicastro get excited about something. People started picking up the phone and calling people. People started trickling into the room, and by the end of the day, Pat and George had repeated that presentation 50 times. George Gomez would say, it was something. This brings in another fellow who I've bumped into in one of these TopCast episodes that I've been listening to, and that's Adam Rine. And who was Adam Rine? He was a dot matrix guy. Yeah, so he did a lot of the dots sort of in that late 90s Williams era. and he would say, someone came into my office and said, Adam, you have got to come over here. So we went over to the Midway building. That's where they had hidden their first prototype. I walked into the room and they said, Adam, take a look at this. What do you think? And I was nuked by it. That's an interesting thing, but I got the quote here. I couldn't believe I was seeing that it actually worked. You could put a hologram on a play field and interact with it. there you go minds have been blown right i noticed like in williams everyone seemed to have their own office how awesome is that that was that was like the days before cubes yeah yeah nowadays you'd have a cubicle yeah we're all part of the cubicle farms the millennial cubicle firms so what did john papa do think about all this oh there's the thing okay so so j pop has been working on this sort of project he's kind of doing his own thing and he's doing it on company time and then out of nowhere, Gomez and Pat Lawler show up with his totally off-the-wall hair brain, totally different thing. Boy, that's got to feel bad. Well, back to Adam Rine. Adam says, we all went to lunch, and it was a very depressing lunch, actually, because John had put his heart and soul into the project. He went around the table asking us, what do you think of this new thing that George and Pat brought in? We all very reluctantly admitted that this hologram thing is just so cool. We had to go with this version. John's product was magnificent as well. That's, you know, that's gotta hurt man that's gotta hurt now george gomez of course how you know what what did he say you know he's the guy that sort of just just just peed in john's cornflakes here and he would say i felt bad for john because i kind of pulled the rug out from underneath him but i had to do what i believe in and pinball 2000 is what i believed in i know he was disappointed he worked really hard on what he was doing. He really poured himself into it. His idea didn't get picked. There was a little bit of bad blood there for a little bit. John's a professional, and I think that he handled it very well. I don't think he was really pleased with it. The guy came up to me shortly after that and said, you're right. This is way cooler. We've got to change the future of pinball. So that's, you know, that's gotta hurt. That's tough. That's pretty bad. Now the executives, of course, they're picking up the phone, they're calling the marketing team, you know, the project starts rolling, and the division was split into two. So they had some of the individuals working on the last DMD games off the line, and then they still, and then they had the other group that was working on pinball 2000 now of course we'll get into some of those other old the dmd games the last dmd games to come out but they started working on a super secret project so they had to they had to quarantine them isn't that right that is right the security and secrecy of this project was the thing of legend none of the other designers were allowed in the room larry damar was working on slots at the moment larry of course designed system 11 and wpc but they convinced them to work on the new system. Larry ended up working 80 to 100 hours a week on slots and Pinball 2000. Holy moly. So this is where we bump into somebody named Keith Johnson. Now he had joined Williams a couple of years prior to this, and he was roped into working on the Pinball 2000 project. Keith Johnson would say, I was in a subsection of engineering. It was a large secret. Only a dozen people were allowed in the room. In fact, Neil Nicastro, the CEO, wasn't even allowed in the room. He was quite frustrated one day that he wasn't allowed in. Like, they've seen the prototype, they kind of know what's going on, right? But when it actually comes to developing what will be manufactured and sent out into the world, that's kind of, now it's a super secret project, because they don't want other companies to figure out what they're doing, right? They don't want they don't want Sega to learn that they're doing this super secret project. So they're keeping it locked down pretty tight. So then they needed to staff up. Actually, before you get into that, Sega somehow figured it out anyway. Really? One of their games, I don't know if it was South Park, it was one of them. They did something on the DMD so you could only read it like on the glass of the game, you know, the way it reflects off the top glass. Something like We Know or something like that. Sneaky. If you know any details about that, send that in to silverballchronicles at gmail.com. Well, that detail is in the Tilt, the movie Tilt, the battle to save Pinball. Oh, very good. I have not seen Tilt, and I feel like I probably should have before I did this episode. You probably should have seen that, yeah.
    39:39
    I'm just going to make it up as I go along. So they needed to staff up. So they brought in somebody named Graham West, and he did a lot of the graphics for the system, a lot of effects and lamp effects and things like that. They brought in Cameron Silver, who did game logic and a number of things around that, and Duncan Brown, who did a lot of the drivers and PCI stuff. What the hell is PCI stuff? The interface, I would assume. Like a PCI card, which 1990, yeah, I guess it probably still would have been that. Yeah, so they had a unified team and one unified goal. And George Gomez would say what Pinball 2000 did is it unified, what George Gomez says is that pinball 2000 unified the engineering department. So instead of seven, 10 man brain trusts, you now had a 70 man brain trust because everybody was thinking in the same direction. So they decided, how did they want to run this platform? Ron, what, what did they need to generate sort of the, you know, before they just had a CPU and a driver board and whatever, but now they got a monitor and everything, right? Like they got to do something different here. They decided to save time and cost to just use an off-the-shelf PC, PC motherboard. Picked it up and just went down to Radio Shack and picked up a PC. Yeah, basically it's just a PC motherboard. If I remember, just remember, it's a PC motherboard. There is a driver board, and there is the Prism card. Sounds fancy. Yeah. Yeah, so of course, at this time, it's really hard, I think, for young people to understand how rapidly computer technology was advancing in the late 90s and early 2000s. You know, now every year you get a new iPhone or a new Pixel phone or whatever, and, you know, you buy a laptop every couple of years and things are getting better and changing. But the pace, it doesn't seem quite as stark and fast as it was in the late 90s. One of the concerns among the engineering team was that because the hardware was evolving so fast, if Williams decided to, you know, do all the R&D in-house, they would have to absorb all of the cost in doing that. And if they just outsourced it to technology companies like Intel and Microsoft and all that other stuff, they could do the arms race and Williams could just sort of keep just updating the technology. Tom Uban, hopefully I'm saying that right, operating a software co-designer on Pinball 2000. He says, the whole idea was the new system had to be low cost. He knew it was going to have a CRT in it. We needed more horsepower to drive it. Whatever the current cheapest motherboard was at the time that fit our bill and had enough power. The whole motherboard thing costs $100 this month. It'll be some number of gigahertz in the next month. It'll be slightly faster, but they'll still be $100. We knew it would always cost the same. It would get faster, and it'd be pretty much compatible. We just had to write the software so it would drop onto each one. Yeah, it's actually a pretty smart strategy. And I also find it funny, though, now that pinball companies are still more or less designing their own boards and stuff. Well, depends. They're designing their own boards to a point. But, I mean, a lot of like Jersey Jack, they're just using, it's just like a motherboard with running Linux. So they're doing the same thing. A lot of the companies that are doing the same thing that Williams did, things like updating your game via like a thumb drive, functionality like that. Pinball 2000 did that like 15, 20 years before Stern did it. Yeah, I just find it interesting, though, that they're not just buying. I know this is simplistic or whatever, but just buying a Raspberry Pi or a motherboard from somebody and just throwing it in. Right. They've they've gone and redesigned Spike. They've gone and Spooky's now made their own stuff with Ben Heck. You know, you got P3 Rock with Multimorphic. They kind of, it's interesting that they just didn't go into this PC world. From a tech standpoint, it depends what it's for. I mean, Pinball 2000 still had a driver board that Williams made to actually fire all the coils and all that. The Brains was a, you know, off-the-shelf motherboard, but they still had to have some custom boards. One of the, I guess, let's go beyond boards. Let's go beyond the board set now. Now they have to go from dots to doing actual 3D animation. Dot matrix is pretty simple for the most part, right? You've got, you know, you've got squares. You've got to fill in the squares with various levels of brightness and shading. And then that creates images. Now it's not so easy to do that, but it's an easy concept. 3D animation, you know, we're getting into like Photoshop and all that other crazy stuff, right? Guys like Adam Rine had to sort of pivot and adjust. Yeah, Adam says, I was the animation coordinator for the whole department. As soon as the department was announced and approved and we got the go-ahead, I was asked if I could lead the team and do all the 3D video graphics. And I accepted. But I accepted at a time when I had no idea how to do 3D design. Talk about an extreme learning curve. The dot learning curve was nothing compared to this. Yeah, so Adam Rine, fake it till you make it. That's basically what he said right there.
    45:00
    Yeah. So, of course, you've got to develop the animation platform from the ground up, right? They are literally designing from the first thing. So they started using something that was called 3D Studio Max. I don't know what that is. But learning this whole new sort of out-of-the-box materials, that's what they started with. And that ended up in many long nights of trying to train yourself. And a lot of the animation team more or less wondered if it was really worth it to do all of this work and learning. So then they decided to pick up a few new folks to help them out. And this included somebody called Jack Layden, who was a dot guy from Data East from a way back. And he was currently working at Williams Gaming on the slot side. And he had some animation experience. There was also somebody named David Miller and Scott Sanders, who were both fresh out of school and they had been trained on 3D animation. So we're seeing a changing of the guard or a bringing in of a new group of animators, which is probably going to really help that. And those new guys suggested using something called Lightwave, which was easier to learn. Yeah, Adam called that a godsend, basically. I don't know what that is. I'm sure it's great. You probably don't even use it anymore. But the fact that they brought in, they're like, hey, why aren't you guys just using this new technology instead of this old one? And they did. now actually interestingly enough somebody else who pops up in here is greg freres who did some of the storyboards for the first pinball machine some of the key moments and animations and stuff like that for the first pinball 2000 machine yes not the first pinball machine ever yeah thank you thank you ron thank you for clearing that up no problem uh tom uban says we started working on the pinball 2000 platform we got a system out the door and effectively in 18 months a year and a half, which is pretty out of control. Really, I mean, think about how long that is. That's pretty nuts. If you told me that they developed the entire Pinball 2000 platform in 18 months, that is some serious time crunch, and everybody on those teams should be commended. Because what they did in such a short amount of time is shockingly impressive. So I guess we should get into what happened here, right? So yeah, what did they make? So their first super secret, top secret game was Revenge from Mars. Which wouldn't even be the most secret game. That would be the next one. So Revenge from Mars was manufactured in January of 1999. It sold 6,878 units. It is an alien Martian fantasy theme. It was designed by George Gomez. It had art by Greg Freres and John Yossi. It had dots and animation by that team I had mentioned, Adam Rine, Scott Shlomany, Jack Linden, Scott Sanders, and Dave Muller, Mechanics by Chris Shipman, Music and Sound by Dan Forden, and software by Lyman Sheets Jr., Dwight Sullivan, Keith P. Johnson, and Graham West. That is an all-star lineup of designers and programmers, is it not? And that is a lot of units, the most of any game they sold in quite some time. That is seriously impressive. So Pat Lawler would say it was awesome. It was a testament to a group of people trying to make something groundbreaking and they succeeded to build an all-new technology and game in 12 months. So let's describe what we're seeing here, okay? So we've got a regular sort of more or less looking sort of pinball cabinet on the bottom that has like a replaceable graphic on the side that you can move and take off and replace. And then we've got this really tall, chubby back box that's triple the size of a regular back box. You say it's triple the size? It's pretty big, eh? It's big. When they would ship the game, they would come in two boxes. The back glass is more or less a standard-looking back glass as you normally would see it, with amazing hand-drawn art, I think. The Revenge from Mars art is on point with Attack from Mars. Super cool. It's got this... So the monitor is not facing the player, Ron. It's pointing down, and it's behind the back glass, and it's pointing down onto the glass, so then it reflects on this very special, tinted, illuminated glass. The other thing with this platform was that you would be able to replace the glass, the playfield, and the side art, and it would be more or less modular, sort of like a multi-morphic system is today. And actually, after the second game, they were going to change that, so it was just going to be generic Pinball 2000 art. Yeah, so then they wouldn't even have to do that, just to make it even cheaper, which, you know, I guess not necessarily a bad thing. What was the catchphrase for Pinball 2000, Ron? pinball 2000 the new image in pinball oh very good very good and of course revenge from mars the invasion has begun yes it has it's it it it's pretty cool now it the the flyer on this pretty neat because they couldn't just show you the play field right they had to also show you the animation but they couldn't just show you one animation because you don't really get they gotta show you how it's changing on the play field right there's the aliens at the bar there's the aliens in front of the eiffel tower there's you know a ship kind of flying around it's got some really cool sort of text about pinball 2000 itself do you see anything in here that you think is oh to to make fun of no here we go the most engaging interactive and entertaining pinball machine of all time this of all time we're going right out with the first one they are right at the tip of the thing here the innovation of cpu controlled gameplay makes for a deeper more realistic storyline wow i'm not going to disagree with that one now the the flyer is also like seven pages long pinball will never be the same they they went all in on this strategy and of course a lot of that is the need to reinvigorate pinball, to really make something new and different and exciting. I think they did something pretty, pretty slick here with this machine. Now, of course we an audio medium It very difficult to describe what Revenge for Mars really looks like And it even harder to describe it unless you actually play it Because, of course, it is a bit of an experience because it's different than most pinball because of this animation. But let me tell you some of the cool features of this new game that we've put in just for the operator. Oh, please. Features such as, like on this one, the circuit board is actually in the body. because obviously you can't fit it in the head with that big monitor in there. Yeah, it's like a JJP kind of thing, right, where they got it in the bottom and people are like, oh, that's a stupid place to put it. We have LEDs for the fuses so you can see if they're blown. We have on-screen diagnostics years before any LCD game would come out where you could see a picture of the play field and you could see where the switches are as you're actuating them. Yeah, my favorite one is how that now we still have LCD screens at Stern and it still looks like a frigging DMD in the menu. That is true. Then we also had the play field, of course, is completely removable with just three or four connectors. And it has side rails that go all the way up and down. You can just slide the entire play field out of the game. Plus we have other exciting features such as two keys. You can have an operator key and a location key. so if you have the location key it allows you to take the glass off and you know fix stuck balls and stuff but you can't lift up the play field then the operator key lets you actually get into the coin box you know the coin door which was a cool little feature they put a lot of stuff in there for the operators in mind one of the biggest things and and we talked about this in our got lieb episodes previous was that they always bang the drum of being like really reliable and simple and not having like a lot of complicated stuff. Hey, Pinheads. I just wanted to let you know that when I'm not making cheesy jokes to make Ron laugh, I'm David, the financial advice guy. At Dennis Financial, our advisors strive to provide a return on life for our clients, not just a return on investment. The value of advice is something that we take seriously. A valuable financial advisor doesn't just provide investment and insurance advice. That's because an advisor takes the time to gather intimate knowledge about their primary client, understand their personal preferences, recognize their fears and hopes, and gain knowledge about their client's errors before providing financial advice. If you're looking for a more human dimension to your financial advice, Dennis Financial Inc. has you covered with advisors licensed in most Canadian provinces. We're also doing secure online meetings to engage with clients who need advice but don't necessarily want to wear pants or leave their house. Contact me via email at david at dennisfinancial.net for a free rate quote and a copy of our value of advice ebook or check out dennisfinancial.ca. Insurance solutions provided by Dennis Financial Inc., Canadian residents only. They knew, I would say, right out of the gate, as soon as you brought something that looked like this, operators would be like, oh my God, this thing is going to be impossible to fix. So the more you talk about the ease of service and saving you time and saving you money and the advanced technology is actually easier and more efficient than the old technology, that's a good thing. You can have an extra play field in the shop. Yeah, just in case. You could update the code first time. You could just update the code with a laptop with a, I think it was a parallel port or serial port, one or the other, to connect into it to update the code. Isn't that awesome? I'm sure operators back then probably didn't update the code either, just like they don't now. But this was a big deal. I mean, they went all out to try to make it serviceable, to try to get the operators in. they made a whole like video to show that all the cool features of the new platform the only thing about it is it does take longer to set up because if you got one of these if you got one of these new you got two boxes and you had to take everything out you had to get like a second person to get the top on because it's heavy it's a monitor it's a crt monitor so you got to get the thing on top and get the bolts through it to get it in place now i had also heard that once you had sort of had it it was out of the box you set it up it was really difficult to like move around you couldn't just sort of fold it and put it on a dolly and single person it out of a bar it's heavy so you're putting you know now you've made now you've made it so the operator you know is going to need two people to move their machine around instead of just one so now you've increased their cost but i guess the other side of that coin is well you just leave the machine there and you just swap the play field in the art one person can do that but i i don't know if people really took advantage of that yeah you know the key to all of this was the illusion this pepper's ghost illusion and you had to avoid the edges of the monitor right so it was the first piece of software that they did and it was a lot of trial and error because this is the first you know revenge for Mars machine was the first machine that they had, and most of the stuff ended up kind of in the middle of the play field. So they had to kind of work around that. Of course, they needed more time for experimentation of what they could do with this effect, and George figured some of the other designers like Pat Lawler, who had a game in the works, and John Papaduke and others would spend that time that they had developed in development on their projects to experiment more with this effect. Lyman Sheets, of course, would ask Larry DeMar if he could move Keith Johnson into the Revenge for Mars project, and they needed more programmers to get it done on the tight timeline, so there wasn't really much time for experimentation. This was also the last machine under the Bally name. So, have you seen the Midway's Symposium 1999 YouTube video, where they had the launch of Pinball 2000. I don't know if I saw the video. No, actually, I don't think I've seen it. If it was George and Larry DeMar giving a speech, I did not see that. I will throw that in the show notes, Ron, and I know that you check all of my links and you make sure I put everything in my show notes and you will enjoy this. So you can see the excitement on George Gomez's face and Pat Lawler's face when they're talking about this new platform and the potential. You can see the excitement that they have because they have taken this thing, you know, from an Amiga in a garage to actually a fun game. And they sold 6,878 units in 1999. Which was the most games they had sold since World Cup Soccer in 1994, which sold 8,734 units. 1994 was the last time they sold anything remotely close to 6,000. And the next game that would ever sell as many units as Revenge for Mars is 2003's Lord of the Rings with about probably 5,000 units. Probably? You have confirmation on this? I don't know. I think that was in somebody's podcast. I think it was like 5,000. It was either Lord of the Rings. It could have been one of the six or seven runs of Simpsons Pinball Party or one of the five runs or so of ACDC. The last 10,000 unit seller, I think, was Star Trek, right? That is correct. Next gen. So we popped a number here, right? Something was exciting about this, and people were excited, and they bought in. Because it's got the modular cabinet. You can swap the things out. It's this cool effect. And you have played Revenge from Mars. Yes, I have. I would say it was probably more the cool effect than the modular that made it sell that many. So what, well, I figured they would probably buy into the first unit because then they know they could just swap things out. So it's less risk. What did you think of Revenge for Mars? I liked it better than the second one, which we'll get into. But it's fun. It's a fun game. I mean, most of it is hitting the middle. A lot of hitting the middle. Was, is Attack for Mars sort of hit the middle as well? Uh, not, I mean, the ship is in the middle. I'm not a very good player. I just, I end up shooting for that. is probably something I shouldn't do, right? It depends. But as far as Revenge from Mars, according to George Gomez, when he originally came up with the first white one for it, he said it was one of the flowiest, fastest games he had ever designed. But when they actually integrated it, like made it into the Pinball 2000 platform, and they made the center so it has like a ramp thing that comes up so the ball goes in airborne so they can show all the animations, it slowed it down a lot. So it never flowed as much as it did before the screen was added.
    61:02
    Okay. And the thing about Pinball 2000, when you look at it, you assume the play field is smaller just because of the way it looks, the cabinet. It is very weird that way, yeah. It's a bit of an optical illusion where it seems really shallow. And it is not. The play field in there is the same size as the other Williams play fields. So here's some interesting little Easter eggs. Now, Joe Dillon, he was a legendary Williams salesperson, and he passed away around this time. And as a tribute to Joe, they added him to the game. So when George came into the business, the ultimate compliment was to call somebody a coin man. If you were a coin man, you were an important person, and that was a huge compliment. And George, according to George, Joe was most definitely a coin man. So then they started working on the double super secret project. And what was the double super secret project? The wonderful Star Wars prequel movies, specifically the first one, The Phantom Menace. Now, I know that is not a very good Star Wars movie.
    62:21
    It is very obvious it's probably the worst movie. However, it's Star Wars. It doesn't matter. It's Star Wars. Not only, Ron, was it Star Wars. It was the prequel movie. It was, oh my God, we are going to learn about Anakin Skywalker. and we are going to learn about the Jedi and the Clone Wars and all that stuff they talked about in the other movies that happened before. And imaginations ran wild. This is also the era where they got to read the script before the movie was out. Oh, that's crazy. That is crazy. They never do that now. But yes. The hype around Star Wars coming back into theaters that wasn't just the original trilogy was massive. I remember one of the very first websites I ever visited, like on an actual web browser with the internet that you could see pictures and stuff on a dial-up modem was StarWars.com. And they had some photos from the set, and I almost died. It looked amazing. This was a big deal. So they were like, oh, my God, we have the Star Wars license to make a pinball machine. This is the biggest get we've ever had, ever. And everybody was trying to hitch their wagon to the Star Wars license. Not only that, with Pinball 2000, you can use the video assets. Oh my goodness. So Larry DeMar sectioned off part of the pinball engineering department and created a bunch of locked doors. There were only 19 people that had signed non-disclosure agreements with Lucasfilm that were allowed in those rooms. In fact, there was a chemical waste cabinet with a lock in it within this area. This was a super crazy huge cabinet. It was made of metal, and it had all of Lucasfilm's secrets, the documents, the style guides, the CD-ROMs, and there were only 19 people that had access to that area. That's crazy talk. This is like government secrets kind of stuff going on here. It's Star Wars. So they sent a Lucasfilm rep, and she reviewed the game very critically. She saved most of her comments, though, for the backless, Kevin O'Connor's backless. She said he had not made the pod race large enough on the backless. She wanted it bigger, but it was pretty much too late at that point. So they basically kind of talked her out of it, and she eventually signed off on it. Star Wars is like a whole zeitgeist thing now. It's a big deal, right? Like two years ago, I went to Galaxy's Edge at Disney World and I built a lightsaber with my oldest daughter and I got a baby Yoda looking at me right now. I've got Star Wars Lego and like Star Wars is huge now. And it was big at the time, but it was still sort of like, oh, my God. Well, at the time, it hadn't been destroyed by Disney yet. So, well, yeah, George Lucas was about to destroy it. Yeah, but at least it was at least it was George Lucas. So who designed that game? Who designed this new Star Wars game, which was technically called Star Wars Episode I? So Star Wars Episode I was designed, concept and designed by John Papaduke. It was manufactured in June of 1999. It sells 3,525 units. Art by Kevin O'Connor, Paul Barker and Dave Muller. Dots and animation. by Alan Cruz and Jack Linden. Mechanics by Bob Brown and Jack Scallion? Or Scallon. Scallon? Man, their names got harder as the years went on. Maybe that's why they went out of business. Their names were too complicated.
    66:32
    Neil de Castro is like, what happened to all the Italians? Who are all these people now? What's with all these crazy names? I need easier to pronounce names. I'm shutting down the pinball. Who let the Ukrainians in here? Oh, my. Eric Pribzy. Priby. Pryb. Prizb. Prizby. It's probably Prizby. Software by Cameron Silver and Duncan Brown. By the way, if you swing over to silverballswag.com, check out the Silverball Chronicles area, you can get a shirt that says Silverball Chronicles with David and Ron. mispronouncing names since 2020. That's true. It's our top seller shirt. Did I tell you Duncan Brown's the guy I bought my Stargazer from? No. Yes, I did. That's cool.
    67:22
    So the guy who designed Star Wars Episode 1 is the same guy who six months before that basically had his project hijacked by George Gomez and Pat Lawler. And John Papaduke, of course, had a vision to show you the movie on the back box just like Pinball 2000. So John Papaduke had this vision that it would show you a movie in the back box. There'd be video playing in his original back box. Well, Pinball 2000 sort of took that concept and flipped it, and now it's projecting on the play field. Instead, John did not take the extra time that he had to experiment with this Pepper's Ghost effect. So remember, you have to keep the animations off the edge of the screen, and you can move things around top to bottom of the monitor, left to right, and angles. Well, John didn't take the extra time to experiment like George had hoped. George would say, I guess you could politely say, hey, John, try to avoid the edges of the monitor, or do you really need to keep going into this movie over and over and over? But J-Pop was the designer. Yeah, so you can see that George already sees a bit of concern here. J-Pop's original image, his original vision, is sort of skewing what he's designing, and it may not go well. We'll get into that in a minute. Adam Ryan, we got a lot of quotes from Adam. He says Lucasfilm both helped and hindered the project. So this was hysterical that we actually received some CD-ROMs from ILM. Industrial Light and Magic, who was the animation studio that did the movie. And we were just like little kids, real excited. Wow, ILM graphics. Well, guess what? They purposefully ruined the models, the 3D models. They gave us damaged and corrupted models so that we would not reverse engineer what they did and help their competitors.
    69:27
    Wow. So you get all of this fancy animation from literally the industry leader in computer animation. And because it's proprietary, they don't want you to just take that CD-ROM and sell it to somebody. So here are the graphics, but you're going to have to figure it out on your own. So the animation team spent weeks repairing the models to use in Pinball 2000. And it was said that Williams spent the most money ever on a license for Star Wars Episode I. And after giving them all that money, they were given locked assets. And they had to spend more money in research and development in their animation teams to fix those corrupted assets. So they had six guys at Williams fixing the assets of a $2 billion company, Industrial Light and Magic. Work that Williams had paid for. Brutal. Did Jar Jar Binks kill Williams, Pinball? So what's Jar Jar Binks? What's he all about? Maybe we should explain that. Boy, you sound angry. Sure, I will. it was a character that uh lucas really wanted to plug as in the movie as like the main character or the main comic relief but he was terrible and no one liked him oh it was bad so bad like it's so bad but unfortunately because the movie's not even out yet williams doesn't even know this and they see like this this is the one of the main characters of this new star wars movie this jar jar binks so they made sure they put plenty of them on the game so the so the so the team the The Williams team sees the style guide from Lucasfilm, and there's charts and demographic breakdowns and characters. And each character was supposed to skew towards a certain market segment. And this right here is exactly why Star Wars went off the rails on Episode I. Because the entire thing was designed around merchandise and demographics and people. So, for example, according to the style guide, the battle droids were designed to appeal to young males. Princess Amidala was to appeal to young females and old females. And Jar Jar Binks was supposed to, based on their research, to appeal to everyone. Males and females and young and old. and he was like, everybody is going to love this guy. Me so stupid. Oh, God. It's so, he's so bad. He's so bad. Like, in the movie, he actually farts. They have fart jokes, and it's like, this is Star Wars. What?
    72:15
    It's so bad. And he had this horrible accent, and he was always just in the way. He was supposed to be funny. Supposed to be funny. Honestly, the movie would be better if he was not in it. Adam Ryan would tell the rest of the group at Williams that Lucasfilm was either exactly right or exactly wrong. And which one was he, Ron? Lucasfilm was dead wrong. Yeah, and they course corrected in the next movie, but we'll not talk about that. It was still, oh God. So there's this hype built around Star Wars, and it's coming back into theaters. And this is like, this is when I was in early high school, right? Like, Star Wars is coming into the theater, and Star Wars is a big part of my life when I was a kid, and not maybe as much as you, but certainly your generation. It was a big deal, and oh my god, this is my Star Wars. And I saw it, and I almost died. And I think Jar Jar Binks basically killed Williams Pinball. I don't think so, but okay. He is right on the side, Art. George Gomez was quite upset at what happened with Star Wars, the pinball machine. And he called it a step back in terms of interactivity with the Pinball 2000 platform. George says, I was horrified every time I saw the edges of the monitor. In Revenge for Mars, I fought to preserve the illusion by parking a Martian on a lane and hitting them with a ball and exploding them. You don't preserve the illusion by going edge to edge with a pink color and playing a movie in front of it. With all due respect to the guys that worked on the game, it was like I shoot the ball around and then you play me a movie. The gameplay is predicated on interactivity. Watching movies is a passive event. Star Wars, to me, was lacking in interactivity. What is he talking about here when he's talking about you're shooting around and then you watch a movie and then you're shooting around and you watch a movie? Well, I'm guessing he didn't like the second Indiana Jones pinball machine because that's pretty much what you did. You hit a shot and watched the movie. The problem here was that originally J-Pop had this image of you would watch something on the back box, right? Like the DMD. And then you would go back to the play field. Well, he's kind of done that, but now it's playing on the play field glass instead of on the monitor on the back box. So one day George was in the room doing some play testing on Star Wars. And Neil Nicastro entered the room and walked up behind George and was watching him play. Neil began praising the game and talking about how excited it was and how this was the next game that was coming out and they were going to hit it out of the park and it was all this exciting rah rah rah stuff so imagine George Gomez has been working on this big project that he's so proud of and that now you're looking at something that is just horrible you know the boss does not want this to see this succeed right like brutal that's no you're making insinuations there so george said that they pulled a rabbit out of their hat and he was sure that neil nicastro was disappointed that they did such a good job and all of the praise during this time was fake gomez thought star wars was horrible and this guy wanted it to fail by praising it i'm the official george gomez voiceover guy you are George Gomez this month. George says he was gushing enthusiasm for the Star Wars game. I was thinking, how can he say this? I was distraught. I walked out of the room and didn't say a word to him. And he thought I disrespected him. Six months later, Neil said, there was that one time you just had me in there and you walked out without saying a word. I told him I couldn't believe what you were telling me. You're telling me that you thought this is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and I'm sitting here just disgusted with the thing I'm playing. Wow. I take it George was not a fan of this game. It He is not holding his punches. He's not pulling any punches.
    76:20
    George is not pulling any punches. So what do you think of Star Wars? We seem to be bashing it quite a bit.
    76:27
    They expected to sell 15,000 Star Wars Episode I's, and they sold 3,525 units. So I think that tells you right there. I've played quite a bit of Episode 1 because it was in my League and then we stopped We stopped putting it in a league We're just like Can we just not ever play this And it was decided very quickly That we will never play Star Wars Episode 1 in our league anymore Well they brought Star Wars It had some cool things it has a lightsaber Which the Stern Star Wars didn't have Has a cool lightsaber which you would think Star Wars Would have I did like it has spinners. They're actually video spinners. They're not physically there. They're reflected on the screen. I thought that was a pretty cool little effect.
    77:18
    Yes. Wow. Poor Star Wars. The other issue is they wanted the games to be interchangeable yet with Revenge from Mars you had the launch was just a button. It didn't have a plunger. You just hit the button. But then when Star Wars, Papa Duke always has to use the shooter, the same shooter with the knob. He used this in all his games. So he had to use that. So even if you wanted to do a swap, it would take longer because you had to take out the button and put the shooter in. Gosh.
    77:54
    What a train wreck Adam Ryan The opinion of Star Wars is reflected by David Dennis and not entirely of Ron Hallett
    78:05
    Ron, I am a huge Star Wars fan. I am a huge Star Trek fan. I love my sci-fi, especially those old school sci-fis, and I wouldn't own this game. I'd own every other Star Wars game but this. Wow. So Adam Ryan says, when Star Wars did not make its numbers, it did not sell well in non-English speaking countries like Germany, France, which is where we used to sell most of our pinball games. We kind of knew the axe was falling. So Williams had increased the price of Episode 1 by $500, which resulted in a bunch of canceled orders. Wow, only $500? They do that all the time now? Yeah, they call that a Keith Elwin game. Oh, all right. So we're looking at the flyer now. So not the totally dump on the poor game. Every journey has a beginning. Shoot and destroy the attacking battle droids from the cockpit of a Naboo fighter during hangar escape. I didn't like how like everything was droids all of a sudden. It's like we couldn't kill actual humans in the movie. So everyone was a droid. Right. But that was the thing. You couldn't kill people. So this flyer is not bad. It's Star Wars. There's not much to make fun of on this thing. Like, it was obviously designed and controlled by Lucasfilm, because there's nothing in here that's embarrassing. Challenging, adventurous, and visually captivating. Star Wars Episode I Pinball is more than a struggle between good and evil. It's an epic in the making. Like, that just, that seems like a copywriter from Star Wars actually wrote that. They did have Darth Maul. Darth Maul was awesome. Wasn't he awesome? Darth Maul and a young Obi-Wan was the best part of the movie. Darth Maul was so awesome. Still, he's still awesome. Double-ended lightsaber man, when they're doing that duel of fates, the three of them are fighting. Well, you know, he gets killed, and then I was told he's not dead. And I'm like, how is he not dead? No, he's not. How is he not dead? I don't know. I guess they just glue your legs back on? I mean, they literally had to re- Like when he gets cut in half, the original cut didn't show him in half. And they redid this special effect because it's like, oh, it's not obvious enough he's dead. So they redid it to make sure you knew he was dead. But now he's back. Yeah, all those other, so the people that are, the kids that are younger than me, they all watched the Clone Wars animated show. And it's supposed to be pretty good. I haven't watched a lot of that. And I guess he comes back in that thing. Spoiler alert, but come on, man, it's been 10 years. So I guess he comes back in that. There's a whole story there. We're getting way off here on the Star Wars. I apologize for the Star Wars. In my world, there's only three Star Wars movies, so I'm all set. Pat Lawler is working on a game at this time, and it's called Wizard Blocks. Now, it was never produced. It was on the Pinball 2000 platform. It has basically the whole same team except a Rob Berry does music and sound. And it was a magical theme. So Adam Ryan would say that the very minute we finished Star Wars Episode I, the whole team jumped on wizard blocks and we were working hard on it. I think we all saw the writing on the wall at that point. So this is where they're scrambling to get wizard blocks done. And George, he thought wizard blocks was actually very, very good. Pat was beginning to use the system like they had envisioned with minimum amount of edge-to-edge images, and he was really trying to take advantage of the Pepper's Ghost style illusion. You must look beyond the trick of the mirror and really build it into the game. Once you get the player to forget about the mirror, the trick, and think about the gameplay and code, you are made. Once the player loves the game, the shots, the humor of the characters, they will forget about the hologram and love the game for what it is, entertainment. Yeah, they want you to be immersed in it, right? They don't want you to be thinking about, oh, look, it's on the screen. They want you to look beyond that. And apparently, you know, Wizard Blocks was achieving that. Now, how far did they get on that project?
    82:15
    Well, have you ever played Wizard Blocks? No. Does it exist? I played it. Yes, it definitely exists. Really? Do you want to expand on that? You can see where they were going with it, and it would have been very cool. Man, that makes me mad. I'm sorry. Yeah, they had like, you know, there's blocks, but there's a lot of small little graphics that are all throughout that you can interact with. I think it's more along the lines of what they're, it's not just hitting it up the middle over and over again. It's not just shoot something and watch a Star Wars clip. It's not just shoot up the middle. It's not watch a clip. It's more, you can tell, it's more along the lines of where they were going to go. More interaction, if you will. Yeah, so Pat Lawler, of course, is very meticulous when he designs his games. and he was thinking about all the different modes and what you could be doing in those modes and it definitely doesn't show Pat doesn't show his hand until he's ready so you can put all this stuff together with all brand new dots in two or three days if he changes his mind but in 3D this became a problem because you had to design like human models or creatures and he would throw a whole mode out and he would change his mind and then you'd have to start from scratch again. So there was a little bit of back and forth because as you experiment and you learn these things, that's what Pat and that's what George had envisioned was experimentation. Although that experimentation was difficult to do. So there was apparently there was a, you would challenge wizards to fights. And there was a young boy wizard and an Egyptian goddess. and there was a character called the Underground Terror, which was sort of like a Green Gremlin frog thing. Apparently, they were also working on a game called Playboy. Yes, they were. Based on the magazine. Now, they got as far as doing a couple of ramps and throwing in some Whitewoods stuff. You can see some of that on IPDB. I can include a link in the show notes with some of that, and you've got animated Playboy targets and stuff. So if you're thinking stranger things, the way that that sort of projector under the apron lights up the spinner and lights up the drop targets on the premium model, this platform of Pinball 2000 was basically doing that in early 2000s technology. So George would say someone wanted to do Playboy really bad, And we had a vision for how the game would be driven. And it was a whole photo shoot concept. You know, you had the shutter sound from the camera in the game. And I think it would be enormous for Pinball 2000. And it would have been a monster seller. But of course, George himself would later do a Stern Playboy game. I mean, I guess the sky's the limit when it comes to video and the theme of Playboy. So this brings us to the infamous Expo seminar. You have seen this. I have seen this. It's very depressing. I have included it in the show notes. You can watch along on the YouTube. And George gives a passionate and emotional speech at Expo in 1999 where he's promoting Star Wars, a game he doesn't believe in, and Revenge for Mars and this new platform. But you can tell that something's up, right? Oh, you can definitely tell something's up. The weird thing is watching it now, this is from the 1999 Chicago Pinball Expo. in one of the seminar rooms and being in this hobby as long as I have, I recognized a lot of the people in the room, like people who are still into pinball today. It's like, wow, they were actually there. But, yeah, you can tell he starts to lose it at several points, and he knows what's coming. Yeah, it's very weird. I mean, in retrospect, you can understand. And Pat Lawler's in there too. He's in the audience watching it. He's there also. So George would say, yeah, I knew. A little bird in the executive suite basically said to me, you guys are done. I couldn't tell anyone. I just thought, I can't. It's kind of like my heart's broken. I can't break their hearts, too. It was hard. I purposely stayed away for the next day, kind of rolled in really late. all the way there i'm driving and thinking what am i going to find when i get there it was a very depressing time it was really disheartening so he knew the hammer was coming a lot of people crap on neil nicastro oh a lot of people yes they don't really hide it did do you did neil nicastro want pinball to die well george gomez says neil is either darth vader or the nicest guy. Neil wasn't out to get us or anything like that. I think that his methods were not particularly supportive, but he did give us a shot and we did take a shot. So perhaps he did support us. Yeah, it's really hard to sort of figure out what his angle was, right? Like, I don't think he set them up to fail. Like, he just wouldn't have given them a chance, right? Why would you spend the time and money and effort in late 98, 99 on this entire platform if you're just going to kill it anyway? right like you just from the get-go you just would have said nope get out the door right or keep on trucking here's another question that i that i'm going to ask you ron and and you are a pinball connoisseur you you know you like your early solid states you you know you like your system 11s you've you've seen the you know and played a lot of pinball machines you've seen a lot of the growth since you know 2004 there's been a lot of things going on is pinball 2000 pinball. Eh, it's pinball enough. I think it's pinball. I mean, I kind of like the idea of this animation effect. I think that they were getting there. I don't think they were there. I would have liked to have seen what they would have done in the next few games. So Pat Lawler would say, I'm sure when someone put flippers on a machine, like Humpty Dumpty, someone said, that's not a pinball machine. And when they went from electromechanical to solid state, people said, oh, that's not pinball. and then when they went to a dot matrix in a machine i know someone said that isn't pinball it has a video in it wow that's really well said pat lawler so tip of the hat to you sir you know when people say oh well now there's an lcd screen in the thing all the magic has gone from the playfield it's now in the it's now in the back box that's not pinball right like it's the same thing now should they have gone all in on pinball 2000 like they had when they did pinball 2000 they just stopped making DMD games 100% right out of the gate. Do you think that was a mistake? Well, I've heard stories that eventually the plan was to have two lines, but I've never heard that, but I've never seen any proof of that, obviously. Yeah, so like in our Gottlieb System 3 episode, we talked about Gottlieb street-level games, where their street-level experiment was smaller games, no ramps, less stuff on the playfield, you know you know smaller size and they didn't just have that line plus their regular you know size pinball machines they went all in on that strategy and it's almost like williams did the same thing they basically shut down the dmd stuff after cactus canyon and they just went all in on pinball 2000 and they probably should have kept you know a wpc and a pinball 2000 like two lines They basically made the exact same mistake as Gottlieb. And, I mean, come on. Williams was not Gottlieb. George Gomez says, I feel like it's that, you know, that thing like the cow says, and you pull the string and it says something. They still have those? Chazoo!
    90:27
    That's a European cow. George says, my vision was that this was another product line. Maybe you have one that misses, but that's not the way management saw it. I mean, why wouldn't you have two differently priced product lines? We were very afraid of Pinball 2000. We thought we have to go in this direction to make the economics work. The notion that we were ignorant to this is just plain wrong. We weren't ignorant to it. That's the part that nobody talks about. You know it's insulting. Yeah. So George is basically saying like, hey, guys, this was not street level. Like this was not we got rid of DMD. We canceled it all and we went all in to pinball 2000. Like we're not ignorant to it. That's don't insult me, which is a good way to put it. He's basically saying the only way that we could make this work money-wise is we had to plow the money into it, and then eventually we would go back into a two-method strategy. That's basically what I see there. Imagine what could have been, though, right? Like, you know, they had done so many more things if they had been given a chance and they had gotten – they were getting better. You know, this Wizard Block stuff apparently was getting there. It's just nobody was really talking about the designing process of pinball that platforms evolve, right? Like as games evolved, the use of the DMD, the understanding of the DMD got better. It didn't just start being amazing and was always amazing. And the systems would have got better and the systems would have evolved. The competition, the Shark Tank of Williams, all of that would have pushed the platform and made it better. well williams would shut down and that never happened the the uh day of reckoning and we've talked about this quite a few times and we'll continue to talk about sort of the end of days at williams you know we we keep bumping into it in various ways yep october october 25th which would have been right after expo so basically that that speech that george gomez did it in the seminars that Monday when everyone went back to work they found out Adam Ryan says by the time I showed up at work that day the internet had been shut down and the network had been unplugged there was supposed to be a meeting at noon that day company-wide we all knew what was about to happen they brought us into the cafeteria and they told us what we all knew pinball had been losing money like an open wound and they can no longer justify to their shareholders why we even exist. That's a bummer. Mass firing, eh? That's a bad one. They didn't even get the separate thing. So they were all going to get some severance. You know, they all had, you know, some sort of understanding of where they would go based on their tenure. A lot of the artists, a lot of the programmers were going to be interviewed at Midway Games. They had to be interviewed for the company they already worked for. Yes, which is super insulting. Yep. Then the question is, do you go for the interview? And Adam Ryan interviewed with Midway, and he would eventually hook up in their sports department, and he started working on red card soccer. That's exciting. George Gomez says, professionally, it was one of the most rewarding times in my career because I led the creative on that and the amount of energy and talent that was brought to bear. It's exciting, right? It was an exciting project. And Adam Ryan would say that he was happy that they at least got the shot to do it. They gave them the money to recreate something with George Gomez and Pat Lawler with their amazing idea. And it was inspired by John Papaduke's designs. It was something else, one level further. And I believe this was right after Expo. And Expo that year, I believe Williams was the factory tour. So everyone got to go through and see the factory like on its, you know, right before. And they even did a thing where Steve Kordick, who had worked there since like 1960. so he was going to retire obviously at this point and they took a picture of him with a Star Wars Episode 1 as like with a caption like the last one off the line like the final game. That's depressing that's depressing. Now you said there was a Pinball 2000 documentary which unfortunately I couldn't find a copy of it so I couldn't watch it which probably would have helped a lot during this episode but yes it's called Tilt the Battle to Save Pinball. Was that accurate? What do you think? You've seen Tilt. You've now heard this podcast. Did I do a better job? It's, well, clearly, I mean, because you're you, and yes. Thank you. That means a lot, Ron. It's basically the same. Honestly, the DVD, the movie's good. What I found more interesting, because I'm geeky, were all the extra features. The extra features, it has the speech from Expo. It has the video that they sent to all the operators about this new, exciting Pinball 2000 system and how you set the game up and how cool it is. That's where I got all the information about the operator key and all the cool functions of this wonderful new system. I geeked out on that. I like the tech video. And they had a bunch of extras with George Gomez where he shows how he came up with Revenge for Mars and all that stuff. Did they have an alternative audio commentary with Pat Lawler talking about the documentary? I don't think so. That would be amazing. So George Gomez would say, just a couple of things I take issue with on the documentary. Pretty much you end up interviewing 20 people about an event, and you're going to get 20 different opinions. I think for the most part, it was on the money. So that's pretty good. So if you've seen that, he says it's pretty close. And you say that this is better than that documentary. So then George Gomez would say that this podcast is better than that documentary. And thus, this is much more complete than that. The interesting thing to me about Pinball 2000 is that Williams did to the rights. They basically made sure no one else could buy them so it would die, which I always thought was just that was kind of weird. Would Pinball 2000 work today if somebody wanted to do it? Seems like a good idea, right? Like, I mean, you saw it had potential. It's called Multimorphic. Yeah, well, there's a shift to home sales now, right? Like Pinball 2000 isn't really a home game thing. It's not quite the same. You know, you're getting into now people are swapping out monitors for LCD monitors to make them lighter and, you know, there's a PC in it with parts from 1999. And, like, stuff is totally different. And you need the special glass. You can't just put regular glass. And it's heavy and it's annoying. You know, like, I don't know if that would work. Well, Tom Uban would say that the patent rights for Pinball 2000 are spread across multiple different people in corporations. And if someone wanted to do Pinball 2000 today, I think it would be nearly impossible. Yeah, I think there was even, I don't remember if it was Roger Sharp or there were other groups. They wanted to try to continue on the Pinball 2000 idea, but Williams would not sell the rights. They would not allow it.
    97:43
    It's like they just wanted it to die. That's so, you know, that's really, really interesting. That they would, you know, is that like a Neil Nicastro thing now? I don't know. That may be in the movie. I'm trying to remember the old memory of mine but I'm pretty sure that someone tried to get the rights to the technology and they were like, no. I was like, really? It's like, you're not going to use it. You're not making pinball machines anymore.
    98:12
    That's crazy talk. That's crazy talk. So where do you think the original prototypes are? I know that George Gomez doesn't know. Yes, that's all I know as well. I'm sure they're in somebody's private collection somewhere. Somebody had sent us an email not too long ago that they had the original Wrecking Ball. A friend of theirs had it in their collection. So likely there's one of those machines sitting around somewhere in the original prototype phase. Very possible. So do you have any final thoughts on Pinball 2000, Ron? It was a cool idea. I would have liked to have seen it. I would have liked to have seen it a few more games in once they got the kinks worked out. It was really cool. You know, as crappy as Star Wars Episode I is...
    98:52
    Again, David Dennis opinion. it's it it was still very cool it's still very cool as long as you just don't know what's going on and you just sort of shoot around it's it's pretty cool i haven't played revenge for mario and that's the better one it's much funnier yeah it's it's quite funny and that's like you fight every i think you fight abraham lincoln or something and they do back on lincoln they do the mortal combat finish him finish him uh well i guess this is kind of a pinball 2000 story have you ever seen the play field for wizard blocks well take a look at the play field for wizard blocks bring it up right now and look at the center of the play field and you tell me where you've seen that before on a most much more recent game these dots looking at like shooting dots look something like um something like dialed in yep that's exactly what they are so when i we when i played the original dialed in prototype when it was unveiled by jersey jacket expo and they took the blanket off the thing and you see it and it's like first thing that popped in my head was wizard blocks he reused it he reused his dots from wizard blocks so i always think it dialed in is almost like it's kind of carry on wizard blocks in some weird way well ron that's it for this month we've covered pinball 2000 thank you everybody for listening to us this is 16 episodes 16 months in the making wow and just think of the the amazing innovations at pinball 2000 that it took so many more years to do upgradable code they were doing in 99 i think what the first will you that first stern game to do that was uh i think world poker tour that was the first sam game so it took that was like 2005 so what is that i mean how i'll that's five years six years yeah so they were they were ahead of the game if you will
    101:06
    Pre-recorded outro. Oh, I'm not supposed to read that part. I'm sorry. As always, you can send your comments, questions, corrections, and concerns to civilballchronicles at gmail.com. We look forward to all the messages and we read every one. Do we actually read every one? I don't think so. Please subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or your favorite podcatcher. Turn on an automatic download so you don't miss a single episode. Remember to leave us a five-star review wherever you found us or on this week in Pinball's promoted database. That way more people can find us. Want to support the podcast but need a new t-shirt? Swing on over to Silver Ball Swag and pick up a Silver Ball Chronicles t-shirt to help us keep the lights on. Thank you, Stewie. No problem.
    102:03
    We'll be right back. Consoles. Late 90s. You'll want to say late 90s. It was definitely not suffering in the early 90s. And the decades that pre- And in the- In the decade that precede- Sorry.
    102:53
    We needed more house- House? House power? Roused hour. No. I wonder if there's beer on the sun. One of my favorite lines ever. we need i'm sorry when i think of canada i think of that movie so we may have talked her out of it i guess so we might have talked her out of it or maybe he put a globe okay i i i give up you want to do that one to show you the movie on the back box just like pinball 2000 wait so john that wasn't right neil is neither darth vader or the nicest guy either or either sorry oh you corrected me haha i win you win you gotta clip that one there was another one that you screwed up earlier and i just let you run with it i just made it better here in your head i have narrow ear canals I can hear in my head, but that's okay because Ron has narrow ear canals. Okay, Zach. Hey.