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Gary Stern & Jack Danger - Dutch Pinball Open Expo 2025 - Pinball News

Pinball News (Dutch Pinball Open Expo 2025)·video·1h 34m·analyzed·Nov 22, 2025
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.036

TL;DR

Stern leadership discusses company history, modern manufacturing, and product roadmap at Dutch Expo 2025

Summary

Gary Stern and Jack Danger presented at the Dutch Pinball Open Expo 2025, sharing Stern Pinball's history from Sam Stern's 1947 acquisition of Williams through modern operations, and discussing Jack's career trajectory from animator to Stern designer. Key business announcements include Costco entry-level pinball games (with Star Wars version forthcoming), Insider Connected's 400,000+ player base, and The Walking Dead Remastered release. Stern emphasized hand-built manufacturing at their 225,000 sq ft modern facility supporting 400+ employees and 3,000 supplier jobs.

Key Claims

  • Stern Pinball has made hundreds of thousands of pinball machines since 1986

    high confidence · Gary Stern stated this multiple times during the presentation as a company milestone

  • Insider Connected has over 400,000 players after 2.5 years of operation

    high confidence · Gary Stern announced this as a metric of community adoption of Stern's digital ecosystem

  • 40% of first-time pinball buyers in the US go on to buy additional machines

    medium confidence · Gary Stern cited this as justification for entry-level Costco games as growth driver; specific sourcing of statistic not provided

  • A Star Wars version of the Costco entry-level game is in development

    high confidence · Gary Stern stated: 'Now we're doing a Star Wars version for Costco'

  • Stern's modern factory facility is 225,000 square feet across two buildings, with 50,000 sq ft dedicated to woodworking

    high confidence · Gary Stern provided detailed facility statistics during factory overview section

  • Every Stern pinball machine is hand-assembled with no robotic mass production

    high confidence · Jack Danger emphasized: 'every one of those games out there has been built by hand...someone has, with their hand, screwed every screw'

  • The Walking Dead Remastered is based on the AMC television series from 2010 that ran 11 seasons with spinoffs in development

    high confidence · Gary Stern provided franchise history and noted comic book origins from 2003

  • The original Walking Dead game was designed by John Borg and Lyman Sheets on the SAM system 11 years ago

    high confidence · Gary Stern attributed original game design to John Borg with Lyman Sheets as programmer/rules designer

Notable Quotes

  • “To create compelling entertainment that inspires a lifetime love of games, sparks passion, forges friendships, and connects people everywhere through fun, innovative, technologically advanced pinball games and experiences.”

    Gary Stern @ ~5:15 — Stern Pinball's official corporate vision statement, read aloud to audience for emphasis

  • “I've been a pinball manufacturer since I was two. That makes it 78 years because I'm 80.”

    Gary Stern @ ~12:45 — Personal history establishing Gary's lifetime commitment to pinball industry; demonstrates continuity from his father Sam Stern's entry into the business

  • “if you give people a shitty place to work they'll do shitty work so we give them a really fine place to work”

    Gary Stern (quoting his father Sam) @ ~32:10 — Philosophy underlying Stern's modern factory investment and quality standards; attributed to Sam Stern

  • “pinball still today is still absolutely built by hand, and I think that's pretty special to see both firsthand or in a video like this”

    Jack Danger @ ~41:20 — Emphasizes hand-assembly as differentiator from mass-produced arcade/gaming products in modern manufacturing context

  • “We need more and more people involved in it because if you don't go bigger, you go smaller, and then you shrink.”

    Gary Stern @ ~20:35 — Core business rationale for entry-level Costco machines and community expansion initiatives

  • “George is really good at like melting plastics with heat guns and mixing up like baking powder and like super glue to make like this welding comp”

    Jack Danger @ ~15:45 — Anecdotal detail about George Gomez's prototyping methods; provides insight into designer craft and iteration processes at Stern

  • “They don't let me hold tools. I could get hurt.”

    Jack Danger @ ~17:20 — Humorous self-deprecation about Stern's division of labor between creative/design and manufacturing teams

Entities

Gary SternpersonJack DangerpersonSam SternpersonGeorge GomezpersonZach SharppersonRoger Sharpperson

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Stern Pinball expanding manufacturing scale and facility capacity; 225,000 sq ft operation with 400+ employees supporting 3,000 supplier jobs

    high · Detailed facility statistics provided; modern factory design representing major capital investment; emphasis on hand-assembly quality control across large-scale production

  • ?

    event_signal: Dutch Pinball Open Expo 2025 featured presentation by Stern leadership with playable game demos, factory tour video, and community engagement; positioned as major industry gathering

    high · Presentation included multiple references to first-time attendees, dealers, collectors, and competitive players; featured factory tour video and interactive Q&A with audience participation

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Insider Connected platform achieving significant adoption milestone (400,000+ players) after 2.5 years; indicating successful community-building through digital integration

    high · Gary Stern emphasized Insider Connected adoption as key metric; described as foundational to long-term community engagement strategy

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Stern emphasizes continuous quality inspection throughout assembly pipeline rather than end-of-line QC; modular task division supports consistency at scale

    high · Gary Stern stated: 'We don't inspect quality in at the end of the line...All along, we have special test fixtures and assembly fixtures and inspect all the way along'

  • $

    market_signal: Stern positioning Costco entry-level games as strategic growth mechanism; research indicates 40% of first-time buyers convert to multi-machine collectors

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.282

0:00
Okay. How many of you have been here to this show before? Let's try it a different way. How many of you are first-timers? Oh, that's really good. That's great. That's good. How many of you first-timers have bought your first pinball machine in the last year?
0:28
That's a couple. Okay. You've got to do better. Gary, we've got to figure that out. Yeah. Yeah, well, we may be standing anyway, so he's still working it through. So you're ready? Yep. Well, you're going to bring it over here now in front of us. Yeah, yeah. He's not ready. Well, the good thing is that we have plenty of time because our plane is not until Monday morning. True, and we're locking the doors until this is done, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. The course is not long enough, right?
1:03
See, I told you we were going to stand. This is going to be great. So the – what is that, Credo? What is the name of that thing? Our vision? The vision, thank you. It's off. Yeah, all right. All right, I want you – I've got to go to this. No, you've just got to move your business around. I move my dishes around? Move your dishes around. Oh, well, this doesn't work quite like I thought, but okay. You just need to be able to... Are we there? Does it work?
1:32
I told you we could also move everything. No, I love this. This is actually the whole seminar, I mean audience. It is watching us do this. Would you like us to get two bar stools? Just a little bit higher?

“We don't inspect quality in at the end of the line, at the end of the game. All along, we have special test fixtures and assembly fixtures and inspect all the way along.”

Gary Stern @ ~43:30 — Describes Stern's quality control philosophy emphasizing continuous inspection and modular task division for consistency

John Borg
person
Lyman Sheetsperson
Dave Petersonperson
Harry Williamsperson
Dave Eastperson
Eugene Jarvisperson
Stern Pinballcompany
Insider Connectedproduct
The Walking Dead Remasteredgame
Costco entry-level pinballproduct
Star Wars Costco gamegame
Judge Dreddgame
Lord of the Ringsgame
Foo Fightersgame
X-Mengame
Jurassic Park home gameproduct
Dutch Pinball Open Expo 2025event
Williams pinball companycompany

medium · Gary Stern cited: 'We find in our country that 40% of the people who buy their first game buy more games and so forth'; emphasized importance of 'entry drug' and broader community expansion

  • ?

    community_signal: Jack Danger transitioning from full-time design role to split marketing/design role; planning streaming content series documenting full game development process from conception to shipping

    high · Jack Danger described new role: 'stepping out of the designer's pit...moving into more of a marketing role...getting back into streaming...making games on my own schedule'; outlined planned video series showing 'whole game is made professionally front to back'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: George Gomez identified as Chief Creative Officer and mentor figure to younger designers; employs hands-on prototyping techniques for component development

    high · Jack Danger described Gomez's methods: 'George is really good at like melting plastics with heat guns and mixing up like baking powder and like super glue'; Gomez recruited Jack after evaluating homebrew project

  • ?

    announcement: Star Wars Costco entry-level pinball game officially announced as forthcoming release

    high · Gary Stern stated: 'Now we're doing a Star Wars version for Costco'; positioned as strategic growth product following Jurassic Park Costco success

  • ?

    product_concern: The Walking Dead Remastered LE unit stuck in customs during presentation, limiting physical demonstration; raised logistics/supply chain visibility

    high · Gary Stern stated: 'It's in customs somewhere. So unless we all go to Belgian customs, we're not going to get to see it'; substituted with pictures only

  • ?

    technology_signal: Insider Connected ecosystem advancing from initial launch to expanded feature roadmap; represents Stern's digital-first community strategy diverging from historical arcade-focused model

    medium · Gary Stern described 400,000+ player adoption as foundation for future community features; positioned as ongoing platform evolution and industry differentiator

    • 1:48
    That's nice. Do you need us higher? Am I overshadowing Gary? Martin, are we okay? You're taking... Yeah, you're good? Well, then we're okay. Okay. Here we go. Our vision to create compelling – oh, sorry. Go for it. You go for it. Wait, wait. We all have to – we're going to ask you all – this is very important. We'll come back at the end and have a quiz about this, but this is our vision. So we are all – he asked if we're going to do this. Yes, we are. I'm going to ask you all to read this with us. So our vision, this is the Stern vision. To create compelling entertainment that inspires a lifetime love of games, sparks passion, forges friendships, and connects people everywhere through fun, innovative, technologically advanced pinball games and experiences. Well done, everybody.
    2:45
    There isn't a period on that. Is there more to this? Page two. Here we go. How do I go to page two? Use the arrow. This arrow? Ah, okay. So we're going to talk a little bit of history before we talk a little bit of games and what's going on at Stern.
    3:05
    Can you hear him okay? Yeah? Yeah. No, I think you don't even need a mic, dude. You're doing great. I usually don't use a mic, but, you know, it's okay. Testing? Testing, it works. All right. So I threw a couple of pictures here. That's my father, Sam Stern. Which one? In both cases, the guy on this side, okay? Because the other one, two people, are Sam and Harry Williams who work together. That happened to be taken at Stern Electronics, I believe, at the old Stern. But I was younger then. My father started as a game operator in Philadelphia.
    3:51
    We digress. His first games, he had two games, and he put them, they were countertops with push chutes, and he put them in a drugstore on the counter.
    4:03
    He came back the next day, and his games were behind the counter. Somebody else's games were there. He said, I don't want to be in this. And his friends who told him to put the games in there, who were two policemen, said, no, Sam, not there, over in that drugstore. So he puts his games over in that drugstore. Ten o'clock at night, the phone rings. One of his games is broken.
    4:26
    I am done with this business. He goes running down there. He's done with the business. It had pushed shoot, wouldn't push in because there was so much money inside the game that it was jammed. And so he wasn't done with the business. And that's how my family got into the pinball business. That's a great problem to have. Sam became a game operator and then a game distributor. a lot of distributors were operators became distributors in order to get games sooner and cheaper Can you describe really quick what is a push shoot game just for people that don't understand?
    4:59
    It's a game that you put the coins in a pusher it's like a laundromat in our country and you push it in and the coins go in and make a switch or make a mechanical thing to drop them because there was no electricity in these games in fact if you look at the museum's history panel up there. It's really very good. They've got a display here. I don't know if you saw it. Yeah, with all the push-button things that show the mechanics and stuff. But look at the history, the dates behind it. It has some very important dates. It's really very good. How many of you have been to the Dutch Pinball Museum?
    5:37
    Regularly. I like that. There's more people that have been to this event. That's awesome. Wait, wait. How many of you haven't been there? and are you how many of you that haven't been there are from Holland okay you haven't been there how many of you have been there who are not from Holland who are from other countries wow that's really have you been there I've been there different times different locations I haven't been to the new one no I signed Hulk Hogan's right breast. When was the new one?
    6:16
    I've been in the new one. Yeah. The one I went to was like a weird warehouse next to a river or something. Yeah, this was next to the river. Yeah.
    6:25
    Okay. Anyway, it's wonderful. It's really good. Back to where we are in history. Yes, continue. We're never going to get anywhere here. We do have a few things to tell you. Any event, Sam, in 1947, went to see his supplier, Harry Williams, in Chicago, kidding around, sat behind Harry's desk, put his feet up in the desk and said, why don't you sell me Williams pinball? And Harry said, I'll have to go up on my airplane, fly around for three hours, did that, came down and sold my father half of Williams. So I've been a pinball manufacturer since I was two. That makes it 78 years because I'm 80. And we still do it and been doing it for a long time and can't think anything else that I would want to do or that I'm qualified to do anymore. So we're going to let you hear why. Is it this button? Hit the right arrow. The right arrow. One, two, three. Jack's going to tell you how he got here.
    7:30
    Look at this jerk. Jack, you can read off of here. Oh, yeah, that makes way more sense. Yeah, but you – Hi, I'm Jack Danger, new to the pinball scene. And so, yeah, when I got started in pinball, I was an animator for almost 20 years at that point, doing commercials, music videos. I worked with the Wachowskis on Jupiter Ascending. They're most famously known for, like, The Matrix and stuff. but when one of the animators that worked in my co-op went to like Portland they're like they came back and go hey I discovered pinball like Portland has this big huge pinball scene Chicago really didn't even have much of a pinball scene like 15 years ago and he's like you got to check it out and we struggled to like go find some games and he went out and he bought a pinball machine and he came to me and he's like I don't have any room for this thing can I leave it here at the studio and I reluctantly agreed and when he wheeled this thing in, I was like, what the, this thing's freaking huge. It's just like a big box of lights. Like, I don't know what the hell to do with this thing. So we shoved it in a corner, plugged it in, played it for a little bit. It was Lord of the Rings, which obviously is a phenomenal game, but at the time I'm just like, I don't know what the hell this is, and okay, whatever.
    8:43
    Like a week and a half later, he shows up and he's like, hey, I bought another pinball machine. And I'm like, well, okay, if you don't have room for these things, please stop buying them because we can't keep filling up our place. and it was a Judge Dredd. And Judge Dredd, super game, like it's even bigger than this other one. So like, what the hell are you doing? And we lifted the head up on it. And I remember the first time we turned it on and hit start and like the humor that was coming out of this game and the way the shots were and just the presence of it with like the big planet that was like holding the balls. Something about that like really spoke to me. I was like, okay, this is cool. Like there's something about this game. Played it a little bit and went to the internet. I'm like, how do you beat, you know, Judge Dredd Pinball. Well, you can't beat a pinball machine. And that threw me into a frenzy of, like, well, that can't be right, and, like, digging down more and realizing, like, there's all these strategies and nuance to this one game. And I was like, well, let's check on this Lord of the Rings game. Come to find out everyone freaking loves this game, and, like, there's all these different rules and approaches to playing. And just learning the nuance of, even though there's only two buttons on this, like, there is a lot of strategy just behind, like, pushing a single button in. And I quickly became friends with Zach Sharp. I met him at a tournament. Him and his father, Roger, were there playing. I have no idea who the hell they were. And they were sort of like, hey, we can tell you're into this and there wasn't a big scene. And they're like, we'd love to show you how to play pinball. And Zach took me under his wing in a very karate kid style training montage. He taught me to play one-handed so that I would read the ball sooner. You can read where the ball is going to bounce. That's where the whole dead flip thing came from.
    10:26
    2014, I created a Twitch channel. Twitch was very new to me at the time, but we were recording ourselves playing pinball in order to get better at pinball. So everyone in the studio was trying to figure out why we sucked so bad, and we wanted to, like, slow it down to see what was going on. But by streaming on Twitch, we were building up an audience of people that were like, you could tell us in real time why we suck, and that was actually a lot of help. But we were also using the information that Zach Sharp gave us to relay that back to other people so that they could get better. And it just sort of took off from there. And I mean, Deadflip existed for like a little over 10 years before, you know, I had to slow things down to come work for Stern Pinball. But getting on to that in 2021, I shortly before that designed my own pinball machine. I don't know if any of you followed that journey. It was very painful. I didn't know anything I was doing. I relied heavily on other people that had made their own games, like Scott Denisey, Ed Owens. The list goes on and on, but every step of the way, someone would help me with, like, help me with the CNC, help me with the code, help me with the wiring. And when that game finally was flipping and in a cabinet, that's when George Gomez reached out and he's like, I've been following this journey, and this is what I wanted to see was this game being in a playable state. for you to prove to me that you have the, I guess, the willingness to see something like this through. And that's when he called me in, offered me a chance to, on a contract basis, design the Jurassic Park home game because Jurassic Park had, part of its deal, a home game in the whole mix of the licensing there.
    12:03
    Made that. It sold pretty well. And then we got that into Costco, and then it sold extremely well. But it was that game that convinced George that I could probably take on a cornerstone, and that's what led me to Foo Fighters and subsequently X-Men there. And that's my story. And also, now that I'm stepping out of the designer's pit, if you will, is it called a pit? The group of designers, I'm moving into more of a marketing role where I'm going to be getting back into streaming, but I'm not done designing because I will be making games on a, I guess my own schedule, if you will, showing how a whole game is made professionally front to back where I'll know I need a ramp on this left-hand side. And so one of the videos will be just me talking to the different designers on how they would prototype this specific ramp. George is really good at like melting plastics with heat guns and mixing up like baking powder and like super glue to make like this welding comp. It's insane. but like using foam core and all this other stuff. So down from like ramps to layout, to code, to wiring, to absolutely everything along the way. The idea is once we kicked this project off, you're going to know the theme right off the rip, and it's a licensed theme. You're going to see the layout right away. And then you just get to follow this journey of us executing the whole thing, where at the end of it, when the final video is released, there will be a full playable machine, arted, animation, code, you name it. You saw everyone that worked on it and everyone that could have worked on it and gave us some input. And then if the game doesn't suck, George will make some. Gary will make some by his own hands. I think he promised to screw some together for me. They don't let me hold tools. Okay, that's fair. I'm not allowed to hold tools. I could get hurt. Yeah, that's fair. But, yeah, I love designing. I don't want to stop designing. but I think we also recognized like my – I flourish better in front of a camera than locked in a room screwing things to wood. So, yeah, we'll see where this goes, and if it falls flat on its face, then I'll just go back in that room and make more pinball machines. He actually asked me for my offer. I almost took it without asking.
    14:17
    I'm going to digress a little bit. All right. Give it to me. Two things. So you mentioned the Costco game. No, I didn't. Yes, you did. Okay. Yes. Then it went Costco and it sold well. Now we're doing a Star Wars version for Costco. And Costco is really important. It's a less expensive game. It's still a full play field. It's a little bit smaller. It's the entry-level drug, if you would. It's a way of introducing. You'll hear us talk about it, whether it's just in this talk or just in general, enlarging the community, getting new people into the community, you all helping people get in the community. and the like. And we really need to get more people for us for business, for you for the hobby. We need more and more people involved in it because if you don't go bigger, you go smaller, and then you shrink. And if we don't do that, well, we need games out where people see them. One of the places is Costco. We find that we're only in the U.S. with that right now, and we have some opportunity for the U.K. We look for other places to ultimately introduce pinball. With that, it's just one way to introduce pinball. We find that a lot of the people who look at these games, either they go to one of our dealers and buy a commercial game or they buy that, and then they go to the dealer and they get another game and another game. We find in our country that 40% of the people who buy their first game buy more games and so forth. They get the bug, and so it's an important entry drug. The other thing that I want to mention, as I digress, is you mentioned you were working on Matrix stuff for the movie. With the Wachowskis. They made the Matrix. I didn't work on that. No, no. I worked on one of their other movies. Oh, okay. Well, when you mentioned Matrix, and then you mentioned Lord of the Rings. So George designed Lord of the Rings. He wanted to do Matrix, and I thought, oh, this is cool because we've got a hot movie. we're going to have another movie come out right before the game and we'll be between the second and the third movie and i made george do lord of the rings i made him do it and it was actually a good choice because the second movie now now a cult classic at that time was not a cult classic it was not popular so george i made george do lord of the rings and it was absolutely fantastic then i could tell you the balrog story but i won't so let i can digress and do this whole thing Wasn't there like a wings thing situated in there or something? Oh, you weren't going to tell the story. Sorry. Okay. Yeah, you can keep moving.
    16:59
    Ah, okay. Now we're going to tell you who Stern Pinball is and was. In 1986, we started Stern Pinball in my basement. Do you have any pictures of, like, that dilapidated building you were in or anything? Did those exist? Oh, no. Okay. Well, you're in the second place. I'm jumping ahead. You're jumping ahead. All right. We started in my basement, and our investor was Dave East and Mr. Fukuda, so we took him out. We didn't have him in the basement. We had him upstairs at the dining room and laying everything out, and that's where we pitched him, not in the holes of the basement. It was Cameco, Shelly Sachs, who's since passed, and me. And, yes, we started in September. We moved into a 200,000-square-foot building, two little offices that we had to go get gas for the heater. And we took turns taking the garbage home. Wasn't the building condemned also? It was coming down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's because it's townhouses now. It's residential. Any event. And then we moved to Melrose Park the next year. And in March of 87, we had our first game, Laser War.
    18:18
    We went to the show. Remember, the commercial business then. There weren't a lot of hobbyists. And so we went to the show in New Orleans. We took eight games there. We put curtains around them. Some of the other people in the industry, just like you, got help doing things. Eugene Jarvis and I keep having trouble with the name in any event helped us they sort of took parts off of William's line and things like that and brought them to us so we were semi-legitimate and those eight games we were able to get four games out of them Laser War has three ejects, they're color coded and you know three targets for yellow, three targets for each color and you need to go in the eject but the balls weren't coming out of the eject. Luckily, software fixed it at the last minute, but Joe was going to put a screw in front of each eject, and the ball wouldn't fail to come out of the eject because it wouldn't be able to get in. That's how we did it. Anyhow, in 94, we sold the business to Sega, sold the company. The same company. The owner was Date East, a Japanese video game company. Sold it to Sega, same company, owner with Sega, changed its name to Sega Pinball, but same company underneath. And in 99, my group bought the company from Sega, same company, now belongs to Sphere Point, which is our company, our holding company. And we renamed it Stern Pinball, still the same company. We've been in business since 1987. In 2009, 2008 was the Lehman Brothers recession. Not easy in the business world. It was not easy in pinball world. And Dave Peterson joined us, and he's my partner, so I control 50%. He controls 50%. But it's still owned by the same company. I mean, it's still the same company. It's still the same company since 1987 making pinball machines. and this picture here is our new building. Has anyone been to this new building?
    20:40
    Yeah. Have you been on our tours, the Pinball Expo tour? Yeah. How many have been on Pinball Expo tour of any of them? Like on any Stern tour from Expo? Any Stern tour from Expo. We were last from Lund. Oh, you went to the Lund tour also? Okay, so we were in Melrose Park at one point, and then we moved. We started at 25, 25, no, 1990 Melrose. We moved to 21, 2050, 2040 Melrose, excuse me, Janus Avenue, and then we moved to Lunt.
    21:19
    And we started in 25,000 square foot, about 2,500 square meters. we moved to 40,000 square foot which is about 4,000 square meters and then to Lunt which was like 10,000 square meters 100,000 square foot plus now we're in two buildings but we are between the two buildings 225,000 square feet we need all that space the building has grown one building 50,000 is just woodworking and the main factory is a really modern factory. We'll show you something in a minute. This is a picture of the modern factory. At night, you can see that that's behind the windows.
    22:06
    The artwork was created to simulate pinball because it is pinball. And in front is the 8-foot pinball. I mean, watching that thing being installed was like a freaking field day. We were all just waiting for the news to show up to show a ball just rolling down the street. Yeah, it got away. It got away. Yeah.
    22:29
    But that's, you know, that's our, like, the bean is famous in downtown Chicago to have your picture taken with. And so this is our version of the bean. So it's because people used to come and take a picture in front of our funky stern sign. It was just horrible. But this is something good to take your picture in front of. This factory is unusual to me because I've been in plenty of pinball factories. This is the first one that I can say is really a modern, up-to-date factory. It's high ceilings, clean. This is a factory that an executive from Ford Motor Company or Hewlett Packard would come in and say, this is a proper factory. and my father used to say and pardon my vernacular he used to say if you give people a shitty place to work they'll do shitty work so we give them a really fine place to work I think next could be okay ah this is this is next In this over the years this Stern pinball Dades pinball Sega pinball the Stern pinball has made hundreds of thousands of games. We have. We've made hundreds of thousands of pinball machines. Most of them are still out there somewhere, somebody's house or what have you. Since 1986, we've been making pinball machines made hundreds of thousands. In prior companies, my father, Williams, and so forth, I probably participated in hundreds of thousands of other machines. But having said that, this company has made hundreds of thousands of machines. You all know that we'll talk more about Insider Connected, but just to give you the idea of the community we're trying to build, There's over 400,000 Insider Connected players today. And this all started two and a half years ago, something like that. So you guys have embraced Insider Connected, and we keep adding on it and so forth. We'll talk a little bit about it. But that's a lot of players that are participating. We're helping to build the community, and we think that's very, very important. so we have a blank this is the white screen this is the French, so about the screen I was going to explain to you what do you think this is? wait, what is this supposed to be? I don't know, but it's not moving there we go oh, it's a video let's play that video I told him to check that oh, you're not connected to the internet, Gary Ah, internet. Can you connect that to your phone?
    25:19
    You're doing it with your phone or my phone? I'm doing it with my phone. Okay, go ahead. We're well prepared. He and I have been goofing off. What can I tell you? No, I'm taking this very seriously, Gary. I appreciate it. Yeah, we're about to show you the Pinball Expo Tour that just went down. Yeah.
    25:37
    We tried the tour a little differently this year where we actually had people at stations to explain instead of the tour guide explaining everything. so thank you all for coming this is the house that you all built I think you're going to enjoy your tour you're going to get to see something that you don't get to see very often we grew because you guys liked our games and we designed better and better games Look around you, look at this amazingness, look at all these games, and then you're going to see the most amazing pinball factory in the world. I really like being able to see everything that is in production, you know, just seeing how everything is assembled. The wirings, wow, the wirings and how much wiring goes into these machines. A quarter mile? That's a lot. Yeah, that's a lot. This is pretty overwhelming when you walk in, it's like, oh it's super huge. From the outside it looks big, but nothing like from the inside. We've got here a dragon mech. Watch out. They get slid into a box from there and they pick them up and hopefully ship them off to you guys. I found it really interesting seeing behind the scenes, learning how a pinball machine is actually made. Every DD East game, Sega game, and Stern game has gone from this here machine, this very one. Like how many checks it has to go and how complex the actual structure is. I would recommend taking the tour, especially if you own pinball machines like we do. Even one that we just bought, Dungeons & Dragons, to see it there on the assembly line was unbelievable. They bring them to life. Like these play fields, it's like you're in the game. It's so amazing. Looking at all the other brands of pinballs, you know, Stern really kind of stands out. We came back just for the tour. We drove four and a half hours just for the actual tour. Come on in, folks.
    27:53
    Thank you all for coming and joining us. We're really happy to have you here, and I hope you have a good time.
    28:04
    doing that with his hand. That ball is actually a lot cooler to take pictures in front of instead of that corporate stern thing that we had. It belonged to the landlord. Yeah, it was awful, but people took so many pictures with that thing. Yeah, yeah. You know, you looked at that, you could see that factory. There's about 400, over 400 people in that building every day.
    28:26
    We support a lot of people. You support a lot of people. There's probably 3,000 people working as suppliers. Part of their job is supplying us. There's probably equal or more on the other side selling the games. It's part of capitalism. It's a big part of why we can exist because we're in a bigger scale, and it's taking care of all those people. A cool thing about that factory, though, by the way, and what's cool about giving a tour of this is, It's cool to show that, like, every one of those games out there has been built by hand. Like, someone has, with their hand, screwed every screw, installed every ball guide, every pinball machine has been built by hand. You'll see a majority of the soldering people are, like, everything is just meticulously gone down the line. We don't have any giant robots putting stuff together. So everything has been, and I can't think of any game that has been mass produced by just robots. So like pinball still today is still absolutely built by hand, and I think that's pretty special to see both firsthand or in a video like this. Built by hand but in an organized progressive line. If you're making a few games, everybody has to do a lot of different parts and has to get them right and remembering. If you're making a lot of games, then everyone has a smaller job, a smaller task in the assembly area. so that they can learn it better, do it better, and make a better quality game. You don't inspect quality in at the end of the line, at the end of the game. All along, we have special test fixtures and assembly fixtures and inspect all the way along. And by dividing it into smaller portions and having a higher volume, we can make a better quality game. And I think you'll probably confirm that with the advances we've made, electronics, testing, and everything else, that these people in that factory are doing a very good job. We're going to talk a little bit about The Walking Dead Remastered.
    30:42
    A little bit. We've got a lot of stuff here. We put together stuff. He and I put together stuff. Have you guys been able to see the – there's two of them on the floor. Have you guys got a chance to play them or see them at all? Yeah? Heck yeah. I believe everything's at free play here, right? Like you just walk up? Yeah. You have to give me a dollar to play the game, but you have to – yeah, okay. I was trying to work that out too, but they didn't have enough American currency. I only take American currency. Yeah, yeah. There's two premium versions out there. We had an LE coming here, which we wanted you to see. will see some pictures of it because it's spectacular.
    31:25
    And I'll explain why it's so special, or Jack will. But it's in customs somewhere. So unless we all go to Belgian customs, we're not going to get to see it. Yeah, it's a little hung up right now.
    31:43
    It's based on the AMC's television show from 2010 that ran 11 seasons. They're doing more spinoffs from it. It comes from a comic book, a famous comic book in 2003.
    32:02
    A lot of spinoffs. I'm going to go through some of this because you've seen the game. The franchise has had $2 billion in revenue, so it's a big franchise, very well known. and we made the first game on the SAM system 11 years ago, John Borg. And Lyman Sheets was the, they say, programmer, the rules designer, and a lot of the genius of this game and the genius we're going to add into this game is Lyman Sheets. So it's been a favorite all along, and these two guys did a wonderful job with it.
    32:46
    We're going to show you maybe a gameplay video. We'll see how it went. Okay. Yeah, there we go. What do we have to do? You do not have permission to be this way. I don't have the access. What? I don't have the access. What are you kidding? Hit escape. What? Be careful what you pull up on your browser. What? I don't have access. Yeah, here, try this. If you hit this button here and then you click this button here and it says no access. And then you have to imagine a pinball machine being played. Oh, this is... We didn't give him access, huh?
    33:19
    Should have sent it from my computer. So if you play The Walking Dead... That's not going to work either. If you've recorded your own video, please send it to me so we can play it. Let's see if it works or not.
    33:37
    Do not have permission. Thank you, Gary. I don't know how to do that. Are you kidding? It worked on my computer. Where's your computer? Right here. We don't want to hook your computer up to a monitor, Gary. That's dangerous. Yeah. Okay. Anyway. All right. We're not going to show you the video of it. So just pretend that you've seen the video and go play the game. It's amazing. It's a very great, great presentation that we've done here, you know. It is amazing. It's a great game. You've seen the – you haven't seen – this is the mirrored back glass of the game, which you haven't seen because that game's in customs. Yeah. And this is all the artwork that's on the game with different sides of it and so forth. It's really spectacular. So an interesting note about the color composition that we chose here with the stark warm and cold feeling there actually comes from marketing materials that they gave us that they were using to highlight all of the series and spinoffs. Oh, you have a photo of it. How about it?
    34:42
    No, no. This is the marketing material. Is this just one of them? I thought there was another. No, I only put the one in there. Okay, there's more. But yeah, a lot of their marketing material right now is this high-contrast, warm-to-cold feeling going on.
    34:58
    And yeah, like you can see here, there's like how many spin-offs? Like six? Yeah, six spin-offs. The Walking Dead universe. But yeah, that's where we got the inspiration to work on. You can see, doot, doot, doot. That's the noise you make when you switch between slides. But yeah, the likenesses we got on this are top-notch. um they're the le is really cool with the uh the armor we're able to show a picture oh you got that all right i'll let you continue talking you get this we'll get to that because the le is what i wanted to show you um here you go ahead keep going cabinet art by fantasy and horror illustrator robert lasky 3d motion graphic sequence by so what's cool about the animation on this is we this is a it's a remaster right so we can't we don't want to divert too far away from like what you people loved about the game so what we did is we took the dots and we reimagined them with like 3d like more updated graphical effects and we kept it in that sort of dmd letterbox style there are full frame effects that happen in the game but we like to keep a lot of that same uh format that was there and what's cool with the execution of it, we have a video coming out soon that the animation team is putting out where they show how they actually matched and recreated a lot of that. So they built a lot of like 3D puppets to get this motion and then they took this cool painterly effect of like the drawings of each character and they were able to like mesh that character to the skeleton so it actually brings that animation to life based off of Gary's phone ringing. Who's Joanna? We're doing a presentation right now. Can I call you later? Goodbye. Goodbye. Thank you, Joanna. So, yeah, look out for that video soon. It'll be great. Yeah, new full-screen graphics, as I said. Playfield sculpts we've added more sculpts we've even uh like upped sort of the quality of the sculpts that were on there if you look really closely at the are you able to get a picture of the this guy yeah right so what's cool about this is we made him grosser uh you know there's like pussy areas of his is that a word um and then like uh we gave him 3d sculpted guts so when his body flies back you can see his intestines, and also this sculpt now is coil-triggered, so we can make him shake and get angry, and you can see the GI tract of this poor gentleman.
    37:38
    And along with the faces that are on the slingshots, we matched that sort of like stark contrast of cold to warm to give it the sort of like it's being lit from the side vibe.
    37:50
    The fish tank, if you'll remember, the original Walking Dead had a fish tank topper. This also, I think this fish tank was in the original premium. Does anyone remember? Yes, I'm getting nods. Yes. And again, we just took all the sculpts we could find and tried to just bring them, like elevate them a little bit and make them a little creepier, a little grosser. And this is no exception. Do we have, I just want to look at this really,
    38:19
    okay, I don't want to look at anything anymore. All right. So I guess that's it for The Walking dead make sure you go play and do we have we're doing this well yeah you're doing it well prepare you can't just leave me out here man i need my i don't know i was looking for something that's i can't find it okay it's on you go for it let's let's throw it to gary stir you got you got really anyhow um you want to do this or am i doing this um i think i'll let you do it okay so spike three These, Walking Dead has spike three, and, you know, spike to spike two to spike three, scalable and improved and so forth. The processor in this is a Raspberry Pi, actually, which is what's, why do they call it that? I'm sure you guys know. Why is it called Raspberry Pi? Is that just the name?
    39:18
    Okay, yeah, cool. Oh, yeah, all right, yeah. Okay, that's good. We'll take it. We're done. We learned something. So any event, it's a much improved system. It will improve with what we're doing it over time, substantially increased power, processing power. It has a bigger display, 18 versus 15-inch display, and with better graphics in that display. and in doing that, we were able to keep the back glass the same size, and that's very important to us. We believe that pinball machines should have a back glass as part of the look of it. Yeah, bud. So we're committed to keeping a back glass. So we were able to do that. Somehow, George and his guys mechanically engineered this so that we could have a bigger screen and still keep the same back glass size without enlarging the back box. So, you know, it's still the same. It'll look the same next to your games and so forth. Better audio, more networking and power handling.
    40:33
    It's got the built-in antenna, whatever. Oh, for the Wi-Fi? Yeah. Yep. it's got the quieter power supply with a quieter fan and you know with more coming of course there's more coming well let me talk about the more coming if I could we have wireless headphone capabilities so you're going to be able to listen to your game just directly off of that through some like bluetooth or whatever it'll be called bluetooth when we get the license yeah we gotta clear that we can't call it bluetooth yet it is bluetooth but the thing that I was most excited by was from a streaming standpoint, it's always been a nightmare to try to tap into that screen, tap into the audio to get that into, for some of you streamers out there or people that ingest any sort of streaming content. Now for anybody, there's going to be an HDMI port on Spike 3 boards that you just put an HDMI cable in and through that will come your video and audio directly into whatever capture device you have. So if you just want a big monitor on the screen, yeah, I appreciate you. A big monitor on the screen. I know a lot of bars like to have, you know, larger displays so, like, people standing a little further away can see what's going on. You can hear what's going on. I remember when I first dreamt up the idea of, like, capturing the screen and audio for streaming our lead. What is Guido's title? Whatever. Mark Guidarelli, who's in charge of a lot of the hardware stuff, said, You are the only person on the planet that is ever going to need this. Why are you wasting your time with that? And then fast forward to, like, there are just hundreds of pinball streamers out there now. And the people are using this content for all sorts of stuff. We ingest it to, like, see what's wrong with games if there's, like, bugs and stuff like that. But for anyone at home, if you're looking to, like, you know, just get a better audiovisual experience out of the game into something else, it's literally just an HDMI cable. So with some of the statistics, again, it's a Raspberry Pi compute module, four times the performance to compute and for video processing so we can do better video with it, two times the memory, three times faster, higher quality, and he's just talking about the video decoding and playback. The 18.5-inch screen, 35% larger, 125% more pixels than on the smaller screen, and true color depth enables 256 times as many colors. I don't think that means anything to anybody.
    43:13
    Okay. And then the better audio with two times, you know, twice the wattage. Mid-range speaker. They're better speakers and additional separate tweeter in the limited edition and getting the wireless headphones. There's also one other cool thing about Spike 3 that they worked on is, so if you have Spike 2 games, and I think Spike 1 games this works on also,
    43:38
    there's the question of longevity, like what if my board fries and you're on to Spike 3 and my Spike 1 crapped out and what do I do? My game's just ruined at this point. Spike 3 has been made backwards compatible. so that you can take a Spike 3 system and put it in your Spike 2 game. And what that means is you can also bring over that larger screen to your Spike 2 game. You can bring over those enhanced audio things into your Spike 2 game. I don't believe it's something that we're necessarily promoting, but it is a thing that… It's not trivial yet. It's not trivial to do these things, but it does mean that once we get this all sorted, that your Spike 1 and Spike 2 games have a lifespan beyond just those boards. You've got to figure out the software conversion. That's a big thing because that's what we learned. I don't have to figure it out.
    44:35
    Well, certainly I'm not going to. Okay. Well, someone's going to figure it out, and it's going to be great. Don't worry.
    44:41
    This is all more about the system repeating the same stuff we've been talking about. I called attention to a couple things here.
    44:51
    Speaker light format, this whole new speakers you'll see on the game. Unfortunately, we don't have, Customs has the game I wanted to show you.
    45:02
    And I think that that's most of the stuff we need to talk about with this. So let's talk about something else. We're going to talk about the cabinet that's in that game. Both the premium and the LE have a redesigned cabinet. It's a modular cabinet.
    45:24
    It's held together with brackets and as strong as could be and with a better panel material for better decals. If you were to get a scratched cabinet and a damaged cabinet, instead of having to get a whole new replacement cabinet, you might be able to just get one of the panels and replace it. Most important to me is that where the armor is, the armor, we sometimes have expression lights. and that's only if we have routed the cabinet to put them in. This whole new assembly means that you can have accessories of expression lights on the inside and also on the outside. Inside and outside can be fitted on any cabinet without us having to route it. Every cabinet, pro, premium, and LE will be able to have those. And that armor actually attaches differently too. It's built so it just sort of slides in, and then you can just secure it down versus the screws that went directly into the wood to hold the armor in. So, again, I wish that customs hadn't kept their game. We'll yell at them. It's fine. Yeah.
    46:51
    This in fact is the limited edition and you see that it got expression lights inside and out on it and that that system that we talking about The premium doesn't have it. You can add it with black. You don't get this artwork, this armor with it. You'd be with black armor. We're going to work on when the accessories will be available for that. But that's the limited edition. oh here's the play field um you can tell them something yeah yeah i'll talk a little bit on this so uh john much john borg much like what he did with metallica when we went to remaster this game he went back to the drawing board and wanted to like read all the information on what people had as problems on the previous title so that he can remedy some of the on the remaster here So some geometry was tweaked a little bit. Notoriously, I think that left lift ramp wasn't always the smoothest on the Walking Dead premium, so he made that a priority. Again, with how the cell doors open, we were getting some false, if not incomplete readings off of the star rollovers we had. So we worked on a button rollover system, which is like, you know, instead of going from a tiny pinpoint of reading on a switch, we actually have like a whole almost inch there that the ball can roll over. So you're not going to miss it. And it's got a cool light around it to let you know that you hit it. It's so much better that they added an extra one onto the game. Exactly. Yeah. We added an extra switch just where the ball rolls out into play too. So we can read that. Other things like more accuracy and granularity on the crossbow. so we can actually aim that at things instead of it just swinging out. And a whole litany of things that he did to really smooth this out. I know the pop bumper notoriously, the top left pop bumper used to have a very exposed screw that we would just screw into the play field to stop balls from getting stuck there, fix the doors. So a number of things went into this to make this game a lot more durable, a lot more reliable, and a lot smoother than the previous title. And I think it turned out pretty well. Some of the things we're still adding into it. We are just finishing the software that emulates the original game, and then we start putting in some more stuff that Lyman had in mind and that we've had in mind. The crossbow will be activated more granularly. That's not completely in there yet. but there's more and more coming in this. How many of you played the game?
    49:41
    Like the original Walking Dead. Yeah. All right. How many played the ones here? Oh, boy, I wish we had the video. Well, there's only two, so. I know. All right. Well, so we've added RGB inserts. We talked about the crossbow.
    49:59
    Is it nice? I'll do that. Here's the new fish tank. and the eliminated zombie heads on the slingshots there we've got the well walker animates now it's not just hanging there he has a coil underneath him so we can actually make him look like he's doing stuff the bicycle girl left ramp returns to the right flipper to reveal the bicycle girl bash toy cell block C Again, we've improved the mechanical, the doors on it, the mechanism. What did I do?
    50:39
    The rollover button we've talked about, and we've added one more here that wasn't there before, which is used in the software. And then it has the magnet there. Okay, what else we got? yeah it's again like we wanted to stay true to the layout here but we had to just clean up a lot of the things that we read or understood were problems or issues if you will with the the original game so these are still basically the same uh features but redone uh the uh fish tank the fish tank up here uh three bank uh drop targets here the whale walker Magnet,
    51:28
    Well Walker, Bash Toy, Walker Bash Toy, so forth. Lots in it. We retained the key gameplay from the original Walking Dead experience. It has new AV, new call-outs by Merle and...
    51:46
    Michonne. I'm having trouble reading. Yeah, it's all good. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Then we've already talked about the crossbow. There's a new well walker kill mini wizard mode. So that brings it closer to you rather than have to play. So maybe I could get it. Maybe not. Maybe not. And so there's other game tweaks and so forth.
    52:12
    There's the normal stuff of a limited edition, five, five hundred games in it. But all the normal, the mirrored back glass, the expression light systems are on it. That's not normal.
    52:33
    Shaker motor, anti-reflective glass. Yeah, game sign and so forth. I'm seeing if there's something here.
    52:41
    Yeah, the shaker motor on this one comes with it. All right. A whole list of features. The only thing really here. We're not reading this. Jack is now going to read the features to you.
    52:55
    Yeah. Again, the rollover button is mentioned in here. That's the one I always try and call out. This is the premium back glass. Again, this is the game you see right here. This is the artwork on the whole cabinet. This is how we show the license or the artwork without this particular background. but with a back glass and the cabinet art.
    53:19
    And so this is the premium edition is the whole game. And this is a summary, so I'm not going to go through that because we've just done this stuff. And some of the fine print, we haven't changed our pricing. And we're starting to ship in November. And the premium will start shipping in late November. Heck, yeah. Yeah. So now let's talk about all access. Jack, I'm going to let you do all. OK. Yeah. Hey, all access membership. So has anyone in here been a member of all access already? OK, so you guys are grandfathered into the previous price point. So, you know, just to like say thank you for supporting this as we got this rolling. But there's a lot of cool things that come with this. Home leaderboards being, like, I think the best bang for your buck. Like, in my mind, the reason to join this, right? To have your own leaderboard system for all your games in your house, in your club, in your wherever you have it. So if you're not, like, a pro-certified, like, bar or arcade or whatever, you could still have these cool things that are populating for people to chase down.
    54:33
    Free discounted shipping. Oh, on things from the shop. Listen, I know what I'm talking about. Trust me. We're good. The showing up in gold on the leaderboards, both when you log in, your account is going to look different. And also on the leaderboards themselves, you'll have a highlight of a gold ring there. There is, oh, you'll have an all-access little badge at the bottom there, too. Pretty cool. You also get a free once-a-year tour of Stern. So do they just, like, reach out to us whenever? We're setting up a sign-up thing for it. They're just working on that now. they should have it operative. I just heard something. I think that in the first quarter. But what's cool about this, and I'll get to you in a second, the cool thing about having a tour outside of like the expo tour is you'll get a lot more information from just one-on-one with a person walking around the factory, especially the factory that isn't set up in a way where like trying to run groups of people through something. Like you get to have a more intimate experience with us explaining what's going on. Maybe we'll hand you some parts to look at, you know, things that we couldn't do if there's like thousands of people coming through the building at one time. So that should be pretty rad. All right, why don't you hit the right arrow for me? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I was going to say something. Say something, Gary. Something, something.
    55:55
    The, you know, the leaderboard at home is really, as Jack said, you know, the really, the most important, not the most important, but really important. It took us a while to get all this done because of all the cloud that's needed. For when all of you got leaderboards, it takes a lot more cloud. Computing, space, all that stuff. We had to make sure that was rock solid. So that's what took us. We knew we wanted to do it. It took us a while to get there.
    56:25
    Home leaderboards. Like Gary. Oh, really? Yes. Going back here. Oops. Here we go. Oh, really? That's great. Yeah, it was free within.
    56:49
    That works for toppers? Yeah, no, the top. Oh, not the whole topper. Okay. I was like. I'm going to buy a bunch of toppers.
    57:02
    That's cool, though. Free in the continental U.S., a discounted rate, which I can't quote to you right now, but you're correct in bringing it up, a discounted rate for outside of the United States, outside of the continental United States. Thank you very much. We treat Hawaii the same as Holland in that respect.
    57:23
    They've got to make a discount rate. Okay. Okay, so leaderboards. Just quickly, you can put it on your own TV or on your phone. So there's all kinds of variety of how you're going to be able to treat your leaderboards. But you can see here in this picture somebody's home leaderboard. What do you mean somebody? George's. Well, I don't know if that is George in particular. I don't know if George has any other leaders. That may or may not be his, so there we go. So, see, again, that's on the Georgia's TV. Or actually, is that Georgia's TV? I don't know. John Wick Home Leaderboard. Yep, there we go. All right.
    58:04
    So this is cool, right? So some of you may have seen on social media a lot of people sharing photos of themselves next to games because they got a badge on Insider Connected because of this. So what we're doing is weekly we're going to have everyone play. well all of you are going to submit a photo all of you that want to help submit a photo along with your score to a game that you played and we're going to cover every single Spike 2 title we've made and we're going to choose randomly a handful of people to highlight and they will get their own badge with their username and their photo and stuff like that attached to it as a score that the rest of the world has to try to take down and when someone gets that badge your whoever's score that was their name is attached to that so it just like lives forever as this cool insider connected badge and we're going to be doing this for quite some time and once a week how many spike two games are there he's in a conversation 32 is it 32 you're right jack it's 32 so there's going to be 32 different badges um with your ic name on it and uh we're already sharing the first week's worth of them and it's really cool to see the excitement of like, I can't believe they picked my score for this. I submitted one for Beatles that was absolutely atrocious, and I think they told me to not submit any more scores. But it's a really cool initiative that we're running, hopefully to get more people engaged in submitting some scores. But it also is lending itself to trying to get the community to recognize each other a little bit more, because like Fart King, if that's your username, you don't know who that is, but they're probably doing really good in your arcade, and now you can actually see who they are and try to communicate better with that person if you choose to. But, yeah, hopefully we get a lot of scores going. I know this is a very ambitious project because we need a lot of community engagement to make sure this thing goes off, but so far we've had no shortage on people submitting scores and stuff like that, so thank you very much. I should submit so everybody could get that. You should. Yeah, let's write the Gary badge. Yeah, that's it. You get three points on that goal. So for Valentine's Day, we had a badge. But you had to play with somebody else. And I was by myself in Vail, so I didn't have anybody to play with. I didn't realize that I could have been the second player and got the badge. I can't get the badge. I didn't get the badge. But we do have a badge for here. True. Don't tell people how to game the system, Gary. We have a badge for here. for the show, don't we? We do have a badge for here, yeah. We have the badge for the show. So by logging into Insider and playing here, you will get a badge for attending the DPO and competing in a game of pinball.
    60:56
    All right, what is next? Okay, next we're going to talk about, you're going to keep talking about. Oh, jeez. All right, together.
    61:05
    Wait, we're not going to recite this, are we? Yeah, yeah, no, we don't have to do this. But it's together we built, together, you and us, We built more of the community, and it's because you guys have adapted. Adopted. Thank you. This is why I had to quit law.
    61:26
    And so this allows – but the other thing that this does, that Insider Connected does – I'm not reading their stuff. It gives direct communication. That's one word they have here. It gives a two-way street. We can see what you're doing. We can see when you're playing. We know when the most players, what kind of locations players are at. We can see what's working on the game, what isn't working.
    61:53
    And you, likewise, will be able to communicate with us. And so we're going to sometimes communicate directly with her. Often, though, we get all kinds of – the thing about, you know, connectivity is data. There's so much data, and we can find what you all like. There's so much data. We can't analyze it all. We're starting to, but we can't get it all analyzed. So this is, you know, we're just starting on this. There's just so much more to do. And with the 400,000 of you all that are connected, that means that we can all make better games and have better gameplay.
    62:33
    Absolutely. Anything you want to add to that? I'm hoping for some, like, visualized analytics on, like, what my gameplay is like. I know it's a conversation we're having internally, but I think it would be cool for you to request like, hey, I've been playing The Mandalorian for a month. Can you please send me some like graphs and statistics? And they can be like, you love to make this shot from the right flipper 300 times or you're hitting this target way too much or, you know, stuff that you can read that maybe can help adapt your gameplay style because you're recognizing what the game's recognizing. And yeah, data. Okay, now we're going to talk about what I'm going to call the elephant in the room. We do not have Star Wars for Europe, which you all know. Yeah. We're all disappointed in that.
    63:25
    The Disney group has divided the territories up so that we were able to – originally we didn't have part of like Australia. We were able to get it. We still hope someday that maybe we'll be able to get Europe into the market for this. But our current size, our current business, our growth in the business in Europe in particular, has not generated enough for the Europe group of business. Disney want us to do this.
    64:01
    Europe's our biggest opportunity. And we've had a market study that says that this is a great opportunity. There's over 500 million people in the European area. That's about 50% more than we have in America. So what we've done erroneously is we've been heavily focused, concentrating on North America, and we haven't concentrated enough on the European and the Middle East community, particularly European community. We've given it a short shift, if you would. We're changing that. And we now, we're committed to building and rebuilding the business in Europe. We're committed to having this be the biggest growth market because we've had much more growth in North America and not much growth here. So John Vescalia is moving to Amsterdam, and he's going to lead Lloyd and Doug and other staff. Doug Scorer, who's in the U.S. This is a picture of John. that you picked up. That picture is like 20 years old. Yeah, but he's been responsible. He's been with us since 2012 as our EVP and Chief Revenue Officer in charge of sales and marketing.
    65:36
    He developed a lot of the things that we do in North America that helped us grow. He developed the Stern Army. How many of you know what the Stern Army is, know about it? Okay, so a lot of you know about it. How many of you know of any location that has Stern Army in it?
    65:53
    A few of you, a few of you. Oh, the Dutch Tribal Museum? Yeah, yeah, yeah, there you go. Okay, so, oh, you got it. You got it? Oh, fire mine up. We're going to show you the video afterwards. Anyway, it's just a little, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Any event, so John's going to come here.
    66:13
    He did our dealer development. He did social media, added videos. I mean, when he came in 2012, we didn't have any of that for North America. And so he's the one who's – we've committed to this, to the market. We've committed to have somebody in addition to Lloyd. Lloyd's been great. but we're committed to have a top executive here to drive the market.
    66:41
    And so we see this as a great growth opportunity. We learned our lesson, so to speak, and we're moving forward. A little more on John's background. He came from Topps. He was a couple decades. Topps is a trading card company. And what made that so attractive is that they do collectibles, and our LEs are collectibles. And, you know, when we were starting to develop the LEs more in 2012, you know, he was the right person to come join us for that. As we were shifting from being a commercial company, my partner and I realized that we wanted to shift from being largely a commercial company to being more of a consumer company, you know, a retail consumer company. John's other criteria is that he's got a master's degree from the University of Georgia. Pin Game Journal, thank you, made him an industry superstar in 2012. Martin, that's you.
    67:51
    No. No? Oh, no. Oh, it was Pin Game, not Pin. It's pin game journal. It's pin game, not pin game. Okay. Wrong one. Well, Martin, you've got to do something for him. You have to fix that now. Pinball Hall of Fame in 2024. You can't let Gary be a liar. You've got to fix it. Yeah, you've got to fix that. You've got to make me right. So that's what we're doing. And in that, we're going to ask you a couple things. We're going to ask you where you buy your games, how was the buying experience. I've talked to a few of you. in particular where you service the games how we can improve our performance here where do you play games and a lot of I've known this before but you guys have confirmed that there are many many clubs that you all have we need games on the street we need games where people can play them either on the street or in your clubs if we don't have people playing games we won't enlarge the community they can't discover them if they're not out in the wild. That's right. Yeah. And we don't have games out in the wild or in your clubs, which we'll consider wild. I hope they're wild. You have a wild time in them. If we don't have games, they won't be topical. They won't be current. They'll be just old games, old stuff. We want young people. We want more people to be involved. And that's why I've been asking a lot of you, and he's been asking you. We've asked you about your participation in clubs and leagues and FEC or street locations and about the IFPA. Over the next day, I'll be asking a few more. I've got little notes written all over this that I can't read and nobody else can. Of course you can. Shelly could read them, but she's passed away. So we're going to discover more, and we're going to do more here. And in doing that, we need input from you. We also need you to be a Sherpa. What does that mean?
    69:51
    What does that mean? I'm going to explain that. Thanks, Gary. If you're climbing Mount Himalayas, you get a Sherpa. You get a guy that helps you there. When somebody wants to buy a game, you know, when you get your friends, They come play at your club or they come play at your home, and maybe they like the idea, but they're scared to buy that first game. It is scary. Because, you know, they're not cheap. You know, they're scared. You need to help them. Hold their hand. Tell them it's all right. You're not going to get it. It's not a bad thing. You're going to get, you know, they got value. They going to work You not going to have it break and I tell you where you going to get it fixed and all that You need to help other people become part of our club part of our community Now we can talk about what we really want to talk about. It's like 6.15, Gary. All right, here's the three games I made. Thanks for playing them.
    70:49
    I'm not going to belabor this too long, but I just wanted to jump into this really quick. Up here you can see sort of my trajectory as a pinball designer. And I am not up here if it wasn't for all of you that watched my content and a lot of people that helped me make games. And then that was recognized by the companies that actually make pinball machines. And I've gotten a lot of people that come up to me anywhere I go, and more notably here at this event, asking how they can get into designing pinball machines or how do you get your foot in the door. because it is sort of a job where, like, not many people have had this job, right? And it's not easy to get into. And the thing that people, when you play pinball long enough, you have your own ideas of, like, what you want to make and how you want to make them. And a lot of people can have ideas. You can write them down all day and stuff like that. But a good click representation here of, like, this was X-Men, right? So on the left, this was me with just a piece of wood and a bunch of found metal and literally like mountains of painter's tape and paper and plastic and stuff to build a functioning white wood. I was able to get some power to some flippers to shoot some stuff. Here you just see the natural progression of like what I did to like working with an engineer to the final product. But all this to say, like, if you're looking to get into this, into designing, the most attractive thing you can do to get your foot in the door or even a conversation started is build something. All right. If you don't know how to, there's amazing communities out there that are willing to help you. It's a community that helped me greatly get to this point. In fact, on Jurassic Park Home in the credits, I think a lot of people, maybe I shouldn't have, inside of there. And this is a community thing, and if you want to make a game, just go out and make one. Find some plywood. There's so much information on the Internet now. And as I spoke to before, the series I'm doing where I'm going to be talking to all the different people involved in making a pinball machine,
    72:58
    the process of making that video series is also going to be sort of taking some of the technical snafus out of it so you can get right to the creative part and start making stuff. because at the end of the day, if we don't have people wanting to make games or people continuing to make games, there's not going to be games to make. So I encourage you all, if you want to make a game, it's obviously not cheap to get started, but there's a lot of great resources out there to start doing it. And if you want an audience with someone like Gary or George or any of the other companies around here, your best resume is a flipping piece of wood that you can show that you've dedicated yourself to making. So I hope someone in here continues that journey. Go make something cool, and hopefully we see it in a few years. You guys are giggling. You're making a game? You better. Damn it. All right. Somebody better do it.
    73:52
    Heck yeah. Oh, dude. Yeah, so if you haven't seen in the homebrew area here, there's some incredible games, a lot of content creators that have been recording themselves building their games. there's also some games that have been traveling around I don't know if any of you went to Chicago Pinball Expo this year so the homebrew area this year was out of control, it was humongous and what's wild is some of those games look like they were purchased like they were so polished and fresh and new but there was also some very rough games there that even though they didn't have that spit and polish that some of them had they were still very fun to play and again that's where a lot of the great designers came from is the homebrew section of the world. He's arguing with me that it didn't happen, but like Pat Lawler showed up with a variation of Bonsai Run or Keith Elwin, right, with Iron Maiden. Definitely Keith Elwin. Mark from Seiden, Mark Seiden showed up. Ryan McQuaid, dude, you were on it, man. And what's wild is, like, again, when homebrew games were being made, the resources were very slim, but nowadays it is everywhere. There's, like, board systems. There are people with the information you need. And even Keith Elwin came up to me after walking around the homebrew area, and he's like, we are lucky we came out with our games when we did to get jobs because we can't hold a candle to some of the stuff that people are doing now. So get out there, make some games, help keep this going, and heck, yeah. Now we're going to play some Walking Dead videos, I think. No, we're not. Okay.
    75:36
    Continue. Okay, okay, okay, okay. Well, we're going to move on to questions. Does anyone have any questions?
    75:43
    No, I can hear you. First of all, Gary, Jack, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having us. I love you.
    75:54
    Okay, all right, got it. Damn it, never mind. Next. So, what we're talking about, we need to make the community bigger and we need to have more machines. So, I'm new to the community. I don't want to buy machines. It's bloody hard to buy machines. It's almost, it's not impossible, but it's hard. That's right. First of all, you start off with, you have the website, there's a price limit. You find out the price in Europe is completely different. That already is a little bit weird. Then you have to find out the actual distributor. Then you find out the distributor says, I have no idea when these machines are coming. I think the issue is actually that we want, like, the only way to get more machines here and more people playing is to get more machines here. I'm not sure how you guys see that, but it feels like there's a little bit of a supply issue getting them here because I think there's enough people who want to play. So you're saying there's a difficulty in purchasing that's causing the hang-up? The purchasing experience is not good.
    76:51
    And I certainly hear you. And as I said, in Europe, we want to have a rebirth. We want to make that purchasing experience much better. That's part of what we're going to look at. You mentioned the confusion of the prices when you look at the prices because of your VAT and whatever else and costs coming here and the pricing systems here with the various people selling games. This is all stuff we're looking at.
    77:26
    And I totally hear what you say. It's hard to buy a game. And that's actually, it's too hard to buy a game in America, and here we just make it that much harder. There's all kinds of things that we consider for a solution. We're just starting on trying to fix things.
    77:52
    So, yeah, totally agree with you. Yeah, awesome. Thank you. Also, your note says dead two feet mouse. I can't read what you're writing here at all. Oh, you got it. Are we actually going to play that video? How did you get it? All right, more questions. Let's go with you first. Yeah, do questions first. We need Roger Sharp here. We have too many laws against people. You need Roger Sharp here. There are too many laws against pinball. Well, actually, I'm not familiar with all the laws against pinball, so I'd like to know more about that. Is that the reason? And I'm a little myopic to the laws in Europe. Is that why there's so many clubs here, because there's laws against having them on location? No, no. It's a taxes thing? Okay. Say that again. The taxes are the reason why there aren't so many games on location, and it's more of a club-based system. Yeah, part of that is true, and the other part of it is that many operators – one operate gambling equipment, and a lot of Europe has gambling and certainly makes more money. So pinball – Don't talk about coin pushers like that. Pinball and location, when you have one game, it's okay. You need to have, you know, we say three or four games in order to have competition and both have the variety and draw the enthusiasts and what have you.
    79:13
    So part of it is just to get those locations. Now, we were looking at Pinball Locator. The pinball map. There are locations. Some of them, just some location had 135 machines listed in it. which is probably Freddy's or something like that in Germany. But there are game locations that have multiple games. And we are going to find those locations,
    79:41
    have them be, see if we can make them Stern Army locations, at least the commercial, you know, the games without too many, get the Stern Army involved and get promotions that we help with involved. But John wants to look to find the locations with the most games. He right now has all the locations. We can tell him where the locations are that have Insider Connected Pro,
    80:09
    games that our operators have on location. And he's going to start looking at those. Excellent. Thank you. Yes. Thanks so much for your excellent work. Thank you. Yeah, there was a lot of trial and error that went into that, and every designer, again, is different in how they approach designing games. I design digitally first, so I'm not throwing away tons of material, wood, and time, so I can manipulate stuff. So what I'll do is I'll design something digitally. Once it works 100% here, I know it's going to work like 75% of the way like in real life. And then once I get it on wood and start manipulating it there and working closely with my engineer, that's how we can get the ball to actually do some stuff. Like that, a couple of those shots, the shot at the top left that turns around and then goes back up in a ramp, and then the shot that like cuts across the play field and back below the flippers, both of those shots I've had people come up to me when they saw my white wood before they flipped it. They're like, none of this shit's going to work. What are you talking about? And they'll throw a ball at it, and it didn't do anything. I'm like, you've got to just flip it. And you flip it, and it does it. And they're like, fluke. Shoot it again. Shoot up here, and it starts working. And when I design, like George likes to start with a giant toy and then make shots around it. I'm quite the contrary. I want the ball to do a bunch of wild stuff, and then I'll try to make mechanisms that work within those spaces that I had. So it was a fun journey. I know Gary played the crap out of that game when it was in its Whitewood stage. Which one? X-Men. He has some novel shots in his stuff. No, he really does. Some say, that did what? You know, you watch it. I remember you shot it, and you'd shoot it again, and you'd go, I don't know what the hell just happened. You've got to, like, shoot it for me and then explain it. Because I think you're having trouble just tracking what the hell the ball was doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.
    82:16
    Other questions? Thank you. Anybody else got – there we go. Yeah, one quick question. A question about licensing. Yeah. So I'm a huge Godzilla fan. Yeah. I have a license for Toho Godzilla. Once you get the license for one Toho Godzilla pinball machine, can you make multiple Toho Godzilla? Like completely different, unique layouts and stuff? Different monsters. Different – First, it's what's economic – what makes – yeah, they've certainly let us submit a whole new title to them within the timeframe. They probably would go along with it, but you want to go on to another title at some point. There's costs involved with doing a whole new game, so forth.
    83:00
    So I don't know if it's practical or not practical. And every licensor is different. Licensing is difficult, difficult at best. For example, if you have kind of like one pinball machine, like would one option be, if you have this license, to charge people a little bit more to include the extra content for that machine? Because literally at that point it would just be videos. Well, to that extent we're doing that now. We constantly make new code available for our games and add things to them. We also changed the game not only by adding new software to the game, but by having accessories like toppers that have rules associated with them, and by Insider Connected, because there's rules in the game that only work with Insider Connected. And as that keeps developing, there'll be more new rules in that respect. The idea, you know, there used to be the old days of pinball, the old days, you know, 15 years ago, 10 years ago. You wanted to finish the software and ship the game. You're in commercial business. Now, coming from learning from the video game business, one of the things that one wants to do is to continue to upgrade and to have new rules so that the game is freshened. It's freshening. I think the greatest example could be Dungeons & Dragons. It will continue to have code and updates and all that stuff. So there's so much more that we can do. Connectivity, here I go. Every product to have a future has to have connectivity.
    84:54
    I start my car with my phone. when I look at the hot spots available at my apartment in Vail. Number one is Xfinity, my hot spot. Number two is my neighbor's washer dryer. Samsung dryer is number two. Why anybody needs their dryer? My dryer messages me all the time, actually. Yeah, he does. It legitimately does. Let me know what's going on. Yeah. But everything's got to be connected. And there's so much more you can do with connectivity and including changing the game with the rules and some video or whatever it might be. You also brought up something with code. What's interesting is games 10 years ago compared to now, we're almost creating an entire video game that has to live inside of this pinball machine. And with like as screens got better, now we have all these 3D graphics and interactive like things that are happening on the screen. So it's not just like this light is lit for 100 points and hit it. Like there's so much that goes into it. And with the titles that we come out with, we're sort of like creating a whole new video game every single time a machine gets released. The game is still under the glass. It's a ball and bat game. It's still a ball and bat game. It's whether it be or a ball and foot game. It's like football. yet it's also a video game and instead of a joystick and buttons you got flippers and pop bumpers and targets and what have you it's the same type of thing yes I think that really hinges on what the development team wanted with that game. So that's not to say that can't happen, but it's really up to Dwight and his team on like how far they want to take that.
    87:11
    As long as we're still under that licensing timeframe, we could submit whatever we want. But again, it comes down to time and resources and stuff to, yeah. And voice actors is important, but also every licensure is different. So some licensures will get back to us in a day. Some take a month and like, you know, the second you say yes to that license, that clock is ticking. So we try to get as much as we can to get to a 1.0, and then everything beyond that is just like fun. Yeah, absolutely.
    87:40
    Any other questions? Oh, God, do this. Yeah. Oh, wait, got a question. One more time. Yeah. Foo Fighters is done. but if for some reason we find time or we're granted time we have a a laundry list of things we want to put in that game some of it sort of half exists in there but it's like secretly locked away um but if tanya and ray day and i find a moment to hit that there there's a lot of cool stuff left to unlock in that game like the game's great but again like that that project everyone was in love with everything that was happening we just started dumping stuff inside of that game so um if we ever find extra time and money we will see what happens
    88:37
    if there's no more questions oh there is Oh, like tournament software built into the games? That is something we are definitely working on, but we don't have it available yet.
    89:11
    We've got a whiteboard full of big ticket items we want to address, and tournament software is definitely one of those.
    89:18
    I can't give you a time frame on it, but it is being worked on. This is where the game sets itself up.
    89:25
    No, this is where... Yeah, sure. Yeah, sort of. Okay. All right, go ahead. Do this. All right, now watch this. Maybe.
    89:36
    Yeah, but you don't have any sound. I'm here with you today, a technologically advanced version of one of the most beloved pinball games of all time, The Walking Dead. One of the most popular entertainment franchises in the world, AMC's The Walking Dead has captivated global audiences since its television premiere in 2010. The hit TV series, spin-off shows, video games, merchandise, and more have reshaped the modern landscape of horror storytelling. Powered by Stern's new Spike 3 technology platform, we're bringing back to life the walking dead for a new generation of pinball players. Players will experience an epic journey through the legendary moments from the series as they fight to survive the apocalypse. Extra care and attention to detail have gone into every facet of the Walking Dead Remastered, honoring the original masterpiece by John Borg and Lyman F. Sheets Jr. The game includes an updated version of the revolutionary ruleset that introduced a new mode structure and risk-reward elements that have stood the test of time. The Spike 3 technology platform includes a larger 18.5-inch Full HD display with true color depth, along with a more powerful processor and a new high fidelity immersive audio system. Players will experience completely overhauled 3D rendered graphics and custom animations that pay homage to the dot matrix display from the original game. Spike 3 Electronics features more efficient power handling, improved wi-fi support and wireless headphone capabilities. This release will introduce a new modular cabinet lighting system designed to allow for internal and external expression lighting on all versions of the game. And now I'll hand it over to legendary game designer John Borg to give you an up-close look at the modern interpretation of the original masterpiece. I'm John Borg, lead game designer of The Walking Dead Remastered. Immerse yourself in a completely redesigned universe of The Walking Dead with all new upgrades, visuals, sounds, and mechanical enhancements. The game features custom audio call-outs from Merle and Michonne. You gonna help me kill these things or what? No one who comes here leaves. While remastering The Walking Dead, we decided that we wanted to make the well zombie move with the solenoid instead of just it moving when you strike it with the ball. We added zombie heads to the slingshots and additional RGB lighting to several of the inserts on the playfield.
    92:19
    He's not getting up after that shot. Can't fish these full of heads. We updated the functionality of the crossbow with an encoder.
    92:30
    Shoot the crossbow! I need you strong. Handsome devil, ain't it? We also updated and redesigned the rollover playfield buttons.
    92:45
    Oh, ain't that special. We have updated the art package with hand-drawn artwork by fantasy and horror illustrator Robert Lasky. Yeah? The LE features illustrated side armor with laser-cut bullets. We want our weapons.
    93:00
    All right, you're going to have to kill five at a time to get through this. We having fun yet? Fight the dead, fear the living. The Walking Dead Remastered, available at sternpinball.com. Your skills, a whole new beginning.
    93:22
    Thanks for nothing, customs. So, yeah, we have two of these on the floor if you want to go jam on it.
    93:29
    There's probably going to be a line, so muscle your way in there and, you know, go tell us what you think about it. You have anything else to add, Gary? no any other questions we're all done thank you for entertaining us for an hour and a half guys we appreciate it we're going to be here all day tomorrow also so if you have any other questions please come find us