This show will most likely contain adult language, so put the brats to bed, grab a beer, and let's have a good time! The following is an ad-hoc radio production. The Super Awesome Pinball Show presents Frenchy's Fireside Chat. Hello everybody, this is your host Christopher Franchi and welcome to Fireside Chat, where I sit down with all of your favorite pinball heroes for an up-close and personal conversation where we learn less about the game and more about the person. So without further ado, let's get the show rolling. Today's guest on Franchise Fireside Chat is... Wait for it... George Gomez! After a successful career in toy design and then an illustrious career in video game design, George Gomez is now the Chief Creative Officer at Stern Pinball. Hello, George. How are you doing, sir? I'm good. Cristobal. My friend Cristobal. Cristobal. I'm also known as Christopher Franchi to some people. People like Todd Tucky call me Christopher Franchi. When you first started working for us, I don't know if the world knows this story, but when you first started working for us in the heat of battle about Batman, right? And, you know, I think I told the story on your show before, but, you know, I was unhappy with the stuff I was getting. Because of the no-guy's art? Right, right, right. And, you know, so I went, you know, it was an emergency, you know, Greg and I scrolling through the Internet. Greg finds your stuff, and, you know, we get you on board and everything else. And a couple of weeks later, your work is starting to circulate amongst the team. And Joe, Joe Kamikow, you know, some of the guys that were working on the project were guys that he had sort of roped into it. Yeah. Literally. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, Joe says, well, you know, so what are you doing? You don't like, you know, if you don't like this guy's stuff, what are you doing? And I said, well, we found this guy. He's amazing. And, you know, he's like, so, you know, he's got Batman and, you know, he's done Batman stuff and it's got a style and it's awesome. And so I sent him these pictures, you know, or images of some of the stuff you were working on. And he's like, oh, yeah, that's great. That's fantastic. He said, what's the guy famous? He says, Christopher Franchi. He said, okay. So next time I talked to Joe on the phone, Joe says to me, how's it going with that Franchetti guy? So I said, yeah, it's going great. And so, you know, I didn't bother correcting him, right? So it was like, I didn't think anything of it. I was like, I knew what he meant. Right. Right? I knew what he meant, right? So for the next, you know, some amount of time, you were Franchetti. It sounds like a fine Italian sports car, doesn't it? It does. It does. Dude, have you seen the new Franchetti? it's either that or uh it would be it would it would be an awesome uh restaurant right yeah let's go to franchetti's somebody sent me a picture of a deli in italy they're called franchise yeah yeah i think it would be a great great italian restaurant yeah i've heard the franchetti's but i didn't know that actually came from joe i thought it was just someone It came from Joe. He was like, you know, he was like, how's it going with Franchetti? For a minute there, you're like, hey, what project are we talking about? No, so I knew what he meant. You know, I was like, I got, you know, I got it. Oh, Joe, that's funny. Well, where are you? I'm in my studio here at home. What is that, like a wallpaper of a map or something? No, it's a painting. You know, my studio is right in my apartment. And so I have like a bench on one side, and then I have an old-school drawing table with some – it's actually got pinball history. This is a drawing table that belonged to Steve Ritchie. And when he left Williams, when we were both working there, and he left Williams to go to Atari because he thought pinball was dead, I said, hey, can I have that fancy – it's a really cool table because it has a motor in it, so it raises and lowers. And I said, can I have that awesome drawing table that you have that you got the company to spend a million dollars on? And, you know, typical Steve, he's like, I don't know what you can do with that thing. Hey, you guys are going out of business. Maybe you can sell it and feed your family. Right. Totally. Totally. So I took the fancy drawing table, right, and I got it. And so what I did is I totally redesigned it so that it has, it still goes up and down, but it's really cool because my monitor, my big, huge, you know, 32-inch monitor and everything is on an arm, and I can move it, I can move everything off the table and it functions as a real drawing table, which, you know, I still do a lot of sketching, right? So I can sketch on it or I can just throw my, you know, my keyboard and mouse on it, move the monitor forward and it works. like the, it doubles old school, new school, no matter what tools you're using. It's also got like my, like, for example, when I use my Wacom tablet, you know, it's, it's great because I don't have to, you know, I don't have to put the Wacom on a fancy stand or anything. I can just literally lay it on the surface of the drawing table and it works, you know, you know, it's, it's new school drawing on an old school drawing table. Yeah, the table works as your adjustable arm. Exactly, exactly, right so um and so um so that's you you you don't you can't quite see it uh it's i'll send you a better photo so just to kind of give this some color i'll send you some shots of the studio so you can see what's you know you can so when then when when people hear this they they can understand what what the deal is yeah um yeah you know let's let's let's go way back in the time machine to where you got your start and you were you were working on toys which i don't know if you know but that's actually my first love over pinball. I have a house full of toys. I think I'd heard that, and I think you told me that you've got an amazing collection of stuff. Yeah, so I'll tell you a little bit. I think some people have heard this story, some people have not. I'll tell you a little bit about it. So my degree is in industrial design, And so I, you know, an industrial designer is sort of like a cross between an artist and an engineer, right? And so you, you know, you worry about the aesthetics of things. What does something, you know, how a human interacts with a thing, you know? Like, so, you know, the guys that style cars are industrial designers. The guys that design, you know, your phone are industrial designers, right? The guys that gave it the form and the color and the shape and the texture, right? They're all about how does a human relate to something? What does it feel like to interact with it? You know, how do you, you know, what is it when you touch it? You know, what kind of feedback do you get and all of that, right? So when I was in school, I didn't know what I was going to design. And my school was very much a generalist school, meaning that, you know, we weren't graduating a lot of guys into the car business. We weren't graduating a lot of guys into the furniture business. We weren't. So guys were going all over the place. And my school portfolio was somewhat, you know, it was kind of like a conglomeration of the projects that I'd been assigned, you know, by my professors and stuff. And so there wasn't a thing that I felt was like super strong was going to get me a job. And I was very unhappy with my own portfolio, you know. I had a teacher that said you ought to go to work in an industry, in a place where you really like what they do because you're going to be better at designing it than if you're designing something you're not interested in. And let me frame this for you. I'm very old. I'm 65 years old. So it's 1977. I'm in school and I'm going to graduate in May of 78. And so I'm on my way around campus. I'm stopping at lunchtime or when I have a break, I'm stopping in the arcade, and I'm playing games in the arcade. And in 1977, video games didn't quite look like what you know today. They actually didn't. You know, even in 1980, they had made leaps and bounds from 1977. So, you know, stuff was black and white, and it was pretty crude. It was a big phone booth. yeah it was like you know it was it was just even it was not very you know it was not very compelling and I looked at the stuff that I was playing and I sort of had a bit of a light bulb moment in that out of ignorance I imagined that man these guys they really need help this is like this stuff is so bad I can help them so I took the summer after I graduated I took the summer off and I was still it was kind of an idea in the back of my head you know it just wasn't a real uh it didn't seem real um yeah you know you know I'd seen some games that said midway games and they said you know it's at Franklin Park Illinois and I was like wow there's that that's a company that's here you know um the outskirts of the city and so I sort of had filed all this away and I I took the summer off after I graduated and and in the in the fall I lived at home all through school and I'm the oldest of seven. So, and, you know, being at that age, right, whatever you are, 20 or 21 or something, right in that timeframe, the luxury accommodations in my parents' house was that I had the privilege to have my own bedroom. Right. All of my siblings had to share bedrooms, right. My two sisters had a bedroom together and then my brothers were spread out all over the house, you know, in their own bedrooms. And there's seven of us. And, you know, when I'm, I think when I was in my 20s, I think my youngest brother, I think he's 14 or 13 years younger than me. So you can imagine, you know, like the house had kids of every age, you know, going up. So it's a bit of a zoo. And my parents didn't go to college. My parents didn't graduate from college. And so I was like the first, you know, kid in college. And, you know, there was a lot of my mother felt like she had to do everything she could to, you know, enable me graduating. and, you know, being successful, right? So I had my own room. But why am I telling you all this? I went down a rabbit hole. So, yeah, so in September, you know, now I've graduated and everything. My mother starts poking around, you know, like, you know, you got to, you know, what are you going to do? You got to get a job, you know. And honestly, my vision on getting a job was as motivated by, you know, my mother, yeah, she wanted me to get a job. But I was really motivated by if I get a job, I might be able to get my own place. Right. You know, and get out of the house. So I started thinking, I started sort of revisiting that concept of, hey, those video game guys, they really need help. And so I talked to a headhunter, and this guy didn't really understand what I did. You know, he didn't understand what designer was, right? Yeah. And so I said to him, I said, hey, company called Midway Games, you know, they're in Franklin Park. And I'm like, you think you can get me an interview? And the guy said, sure, I can get you an interview. And, you know, I don't know at the time if he knew he could get me an interview or not. The guy calls me back and he says, you know, the guy that you got to talk to is traveling or something. So, you know, but I got you an interview. You know, I don't know what it was, a few weeks out. So I ran around the city with a Polaroid camera. I took pictures of a bunch of stuff in the arcades and then took a section of my portfolio and did a bunch of renderings of what I thought the game should be, you know. And I didn't know where the stuff started and stopped. So, you know, I did everything. I did stuff on the screen, stuff on the, you know, I did art on the sides. I did styling for the cabinets and the controls and all this kind of stuff. And that's how I got my job. But fast forward the story. I went into Midway. I got a job offer that spent the first few years of my career there, you know, basically styling controls and cabinets and stuff like that because they wouldn't let me near a game. Eventually, I got to do games and talked myself into that and got to do some games. So I was right out of college. I was at Midway for about seven years. I was working on coin-operated video games. You know, like those were the times when I did, you know, I worked on Tron and Spy Hunter and stuff like that. Tron was the game that I walked up to, I remember, and grabbing that joystick and just going, aww. I said, I don't care if this game sucks. I just want to use this joystick. Thank you. Yeah, that whole thing is a whole story in and of itself. But you were interested in the toy stuff, and I want to give you some color as to how I got into that business. While I was at Midway, Midway was approached by the company that I would eventually work for. It was a consulting firm. It was a consulting firm whose entire mission in life was to invent toys and license them to all the major toy companies, a company called Marvin Glass and Associates. They're famous because they invented the business of inventing toys as an independent inventor and licensing them for royalty. And they did, you know, I mean, the list of hits that they did is basically unbelievable. You know, it's like, you know, they did, you know, Mousetrap, Operation, Light Bright, you know, they did, you know, I mean, yeah, I mean, they just went on and on, right? They did Simon. They did, I mean, they just did so many things, right? So when they saw the video game thing happening, they decided that they wanted, they thought they could do, they could come up with game ideas. They had a relationship with Bally. They actually used to pitch pinball concepts. You know, they pitched, they would pitch a gimmick or a gadget, you know, and so there was a relationship there. And when, at that time, Midway was owned by Bally. So they approached Bally and Bally said, yeah, you got to go talk to the Midway guys. So I was a designer at Midway at the time, and I was starting to get some speed under me, meaning I was doing well. And the company asked me to help with some of the stuff that Marvin Glass was doing, so I got to know those guys a little bit. So here it is, fast forward 1984, there's been a video game crash. And I'm, you know, every six weeks my boss is coming to see me and saying, you know, I need some money out of your budget, which is a very horrible way of saying you need to lay someone off. And so, you know, I'm laying people off. And, you know, every time we do a layoff and then we come back and they throw a pizza party and say, okay, we're all good. We're lean. We're mean. Let's get back to it, you know. Is this all due to the home computer game system? Is that why the arcade system? So the crash happened because, first of all, I followed a boom, right? So from the late 70s to the early 80s, 84, there was a boom in the business, and it was an outrageous boom. And the problem with booms is that they bring a lot of people that aren't necessarily that skilled or that capable into the business, but they produce product, and they produce bad product, and bad product makes it into the mainstream. And the problem with bad product is that not only does it take dollars away from the good product, but it creates situations where people are unhappy with the product in general. So one of the things that happened is that there were tons of cartridges that were just crap games, and mom was paying $30 for them, and Johnny spent 15 minutes playing with the game and then wasn't interested. Mom said, no, no, no, not for $30, and so she took it back to the store. So there were big, huge, like the big box stores had big, huge discount bins of video games that nobody wanted. And eventually it led to a collapse, you know, in the business. You know, nobody wanted to do that stuff anymore. You know, people... Total burnout. Yeah. And so it was one thing led to another, kind of. And the crash affected everything. You know, it affected... There was a saturation of coin-operated product. The other thing that happens is that the manufacturers, when you gear up and you make, you know, $100,000 or something, you have scaled up to the point where anything less than that $100,000 is significant to your business, right? So it's kind of like you sold a game, it was, you know, it was super hit, it was a super hit, and you scaled up to make it, and now your next game was like a regular game, not a, you know, like, you know, five years before you would have killed for those numbers. And so there's actually a lot of lessons in this story that I'm telling you, you know, lessons that I teach in our current business every day. about the dangers of how to do certain things, but there was a crash. And when the crash happened, I decided the place had become a depressing place to be. I really didn't want to be there making video games in that environment anymore. And I decided... You weren't waiting around for your pizza party. I wasn't. You know, I wasn't. I said, at some point in time, it's going to be me. And to tell you the truth, I was feeling a little bit of burnout from just that environment. And I wanted to do something different. And I thought, you know, I have a skill set that crosses over into a bunch of different things. I had met the Marvin Glass guys. I knew their story. I knew sort of what they did and stuff. And I thought, I think I can be a toy designer. And so I called one of the partners. And, you know, he knew who I was, a guy named Howard Morrison, a great guy. And he said to me, well, you know, we're not in video games anymore. And I said, no, no, no, Hart, I don't want to do video games anymore. I want to do what you guys do. So he said, well, you know, he said, your timing might be good because we are redirecting the business back into our traditional core business, which is invention of traditional toys. And there's a new managing partner, and you need to come and interview with him and show him your stuff. So I went for an interview. They had a great studio. It was really awesome. It's very famous. It's also infamous. There was a, prior to my time, when I was in college, there was a guy that lost his mind and shot a bunch of people, shot and killed a bunch of people in the studio one day. He came to work with a gun, shot the place up. So the place is, it was infamous for that scenario, but it was, you know, it was a horrible thing. Sure. So here it is, you know, that was, I think that was in the early 70s. And so here I am 10 years later in 1984, I'm applying for a job, And so I went for an interview, and this guy was great. He's like, you know, his name is Harry Disco. And Harry, yeah, he's a great name. It's a great name. Mr. Disco. Mr. Disco, yeah, Harry Disco. And he was the managing partner at the time. He was a famous toy maker, by the way. He invented Rock'em Sock'em Robots. Nice. Right? And so, amongst many other things, but that's one of his claims to fame. and if you ever have you ever seen i don't know what they call the flat top you know flat top haircut right i've seen that sort of haircut yeah sure you know but think about the robots the rock'em stock'em robot dudes so you look look these guys up online right so you have like big chins and and they have like sort of a flat top haircut right brow yeah big brow and uh and and so i don't think it's an accident that harry sort of resembled the robots and I never resembled Harry. Oh, that's funny. Well, they say you always, you know, you tend to draw, you know, yourself, you know, sort of in a strange way. So that's probably how that's interesting. Yeah. So, yeah, so I, you know, so I go to work at this place, and I have about, you know, I have about, I had been at Midway about seven years. So I had about seven years experience. And I had gone straight from college to Midway, so I only know the Midway way. I don't know any other way. I mean, I know what I was taught in school, but I don't know the Midway way. I only know the Midway way. So I get there, and my first day. But, yeah, they had this super cool studio. The whole top of the studio was filled with real art. Like, you know, they had Chagalls and Niemanns and, I mean, all the stuff hanging in the studio. and they had a chef on staff in a private dining room, and the chef would make lunch every day for the partners in the firm and clients when clients came in. And they had a vision that they would pick up a client at the airport, and they had these marbling glass station wagons. Now, put this in context. I went to work there in 1984. The cars that they used to pick up the clients had car phones. now you know nobody had a car phone right i mean it's like 1984 these these dudes had car phones in the car in case the client needed to make the call right but but they were you know they had right right they um um they they would pick up you know but they would you know i mean that so the company had such a tremendous reputation and the company was was fairly small it was about roughly 30 designers, about 30 model makers, and we had amazing shops. And all the machine tools, like the lathes and the mills and stuff in the model shop were all painted, like, toy colors, you know. So you had these, like, big, giant Bridgeport milling machines that was painted bright yellow. Right next to it was, like, a, you know, a closet and lathe that was painted bright red. So it was a pretty awesome place. And the clientele that was, they didn't talk to, like, some, like, a middle manager at Mattel. They talked to the president of Mattel, right? Like the CEO of Mattel would fly in O'Hare, and they would pick him up in the car with the car in front, and they'd bring him back. And the whole notion of the dining room and the chef was that we control time. So we don't stand in line for restaurant reservations. We don't, would you like to eat at 1? Would you like to eat at 2? What time would you like to eat? So we totally controlled the day of presentations, everything about it. You know, and it was a very interesting place because if you needed to work in groups or you needed someone to tell you what to do, you would fail miserably. Because when you went to work, no one told you what to work on. So whatever you wanted to do that day, that's what you did. And if you did nothing for six months, eventually somebody would notice that you did nothing and you'd get fired. and if you needed if you were a guy that needed to work by you know on a project that somebody gave you you would fail miserably and they'd get rid of you so if you could be if you could be self-motivated and the other cool thing about so no one tells you what to work on and and that means that you can work on anything you want you could do if you if you have an idea for an outdoor water toy you can work on that if you have an idea for barbie's fashion runway you can work on that. If you want to make a board game, you can work on that. If you want to work on cars, you want to work on action figures, whatever it is you want to work on. Is this worth hiring right now? So I'll tell you a little bit about that place, the evolution of that place, the current derivative of that place. It still exists in Chicago. It's called Big Monster Toys. And they do exactly that, except that business has changed quite a bit, so they do a lot more development work than licensing of inventions, but they still do that. So, yeah, it was an awesome place. And I'll tell you something. You know, you've heard me say this before, right? I couldn't be doing the job I do now had I not been all the places I've been, right? Right, yeah. And I was only there, like, you know, I think four and a half, five years, something like that. And it was like my graduate school in design. I mean, it was an awesome place that taught me so much about so many things, whether it was about the notion of coming to work every day and being creatively, you know, productive, right? You know, like how do you, and they had, you know, I mean, so everybody thinks that a creative environment is like a very loose environment with no discipline, et cetera. At that place, it was the complete opposite, right? I had to be there. Now, I'm a young guy, right? At the time, I was single. You know, I'm living in the city. You know, the studio was in the city, in a very cool part of the city. And, you know, I'm out, you know, three nights a week. I'm out having a good time. and um had you got your apartment at this point no no no yeah no no no i'm yeah no i had my apartment yeah i had a roommate uh yeah a roommate we a buddy of mine was an architect and uh we we got you know we we had met in school and and and we had a we had a bachelor pad together but so but but the point i was gonna say is that so marvin glass you had to be there It was 7 in the morning, right? Oh. Yeah, 7 in the morning. And then at noon, they shut the lights off in the studio, and you had to go to lunch. You absolutely had to go to lunch. Or you could stay at your desk and eat, but you had to take basically an hour. You couldn't use any of the tools. You couldn't talk to anybody. You couldn't do anything. You had to stop. And then at 4 o'clock, you had to stop and go home. And you couldn't take work home. Nothing could leave the studio. We didn't work weekends. We didn't work Sundays. but you had to be there at 7 in the morning which is brutal when you're like out chasing girls on Thursday night well just being creative I mean that's the last thing I want to do at 7 in the morning is like oh sit down and come up with some neat ideas you know they believed that the way they taught me so much they believed that discipline was a way to be creative the notion of sort of when you work you work, when you don't you don't and being very productive about it. They taught me many things. They taught me that you've also heard me say the next great idea doesn't come from staring at your monitor, right? It doesn't come from sitting in your office thinking about it. It comes from getting your hands on something and starting to make it, even if you don't know where you're going. And by the way, I think that, like, I preach this in the studio all the time to my designers, right? It's like CAD's an amazing tool and Photoshop's an amazing tool. All those tools are amazing tools, right? But the cool stuff comes from grab some materials, grab some stuff, go in the shop, start messing around. I don't care what it is, with foam core, with plastic, with like go to the toy store, buy some toys, rip them apart, grab the stuff, you know, do a thing, make a thing. That's where the stuff comes from. That's where you will find that next amazing thing from messing around with something and turning it over and touching it and and trying things, and that's what they taught me. So, you know, I start there, and, you know, my first day of work, right, it was in a hip part of town, and, you know, I had this vision, you know, and so, you know, I'm like, you know, I'm all dressed up, you know, I got my cool sport coat, you know, and the partner that is like sort of, you know, getting me settled walks me down to the model shop, and I'm like, the perimeter of the model shop was ringed with offices. And he takes me into an office. There's another guy in the office. And I look down, and this guy is like, he's a big guy. He's wearing a lab coat, and he's got a grinder in his hand. And he's got a beard, and he's grinding plastic. And there is, like, plastic stuff everywhere, in the air, all over him, on his beard, in his hair. You know, it's, like, everywhere. And the office has these shelves, and all the shelves are filled with, like, half-broken prototypes of toy concepts. Can't even tell what they are. Some of them are decorated, some are not. And there's, like, shit everywhere. And there's another desk right next to him, and it's piled full of crap, you know. So this guy, he walks in there, and he says, George, this is Russell. Russell, this is George. And this guy says to me, he goes, Russell is one of our most productive, successful designers. And, you know, these guys, the thing about these guys, right from the partner that hired me all the way through, is they were really no bullshit guys. So the partner that hired me said to me, I don't know what I was making at the time, but he said to me, he goes, yeah, you know, this ballet company has overpaid you, Gomez. You're not worth this money. You're going to have to take a cut in pay to come to work here. I was like, ah, okay. You know, so I take a cut and pay. And he says to me, he goes, if you are successful, then this will mean nothing. We will bring your salary right back up. Like, you know, holy, I mean, these guys, they were all bigger than life, right? You know, I'm like, I'm 27 years old. I'm like, holy crap. What have I gotten myself into? You know? Right. So, you know, so I take a cut and pay. I go to work there. the other thing is you know the guy said to me he goes if you don't cut it in six months you're gone welcome just a little more pressure please right welcome so this guy watched me into this guy's office and this different partner and he says and he says to me uh listen you you got six months here and you know you're not at the bottom of the heap because you're not a guy out of school because they they love to hire guys out of school because they paid them nothing and then right away they could tell, is this guy any good? And if he was good, they elevated him. If he wasn't, they threw him out. And so this guy, he says, and he goes, so I was a bit of an experiment myself. Two women and another guy were sort of not right out of school. We were, you know, we were all sort of, I don't know, six, seven years into our careers. They had looked at their studio and they determined, hey, we got a lot of guys at the bottom. We got a few guys at the top. We got nobody in the middle. So we should bring in, we should try to find, you know, some guys that are, you know, a few years experience. They know their way around, but, you know, they won't know the business. We'll have to teach them the business, whatever. So my salary, even though I, even with the cut in pay, my salary was higher, you know, was substantially higher than the guys coming in out of school. So they weren't kidding around when they said, you know, hey, six months, you're not cutting it, you're out. Because you're, you know, you're more expensive than those guys. And as far as we're concerned, we're not sure you're any better. So, I mean, they were very, they were brutally honest that way, right? We got Chicago pizza on speed dial, so don't make me hit that button there. Right. So this guy, he says, Russell is one of our ace designers. This guy has placed more product this year than anyone else in the studio. So you have to learn from Russell. And he turns to Russell, he says, Russell, clean up this shit. Russell, he's like just annoyed that, you know, He's got to deal with the effing new guy, and he's like, who's going to share his office? And so he takes his hand, and he goes over to the desk that would become my desk, and he just takes his hand and he just sweeps everything on the desk onto the floor, and then he picks up the grinder and he goes back to working what he was working on. So you've got to share an office with the guy with the plastic bits everywhere? Yeah, and it's worse. He's like, you know, it's like, I can't tell. Is he pissed that I took the other desk that was like his, like, dumping ground? Yeah, right. So, you know, and then they walked me over, and the model makers, right, the model makers were an interesting cast, right? I mean, these guys are, like, super talented, right? So we went outside for nothing. We made 100% of everything, whether it was a doll and it needed, like, they wove the hair into the doll. They could decorate stuff. We could mold stuff inside. We could do anything. So depending on what stage we were presenting to a client, a client might see a very finished working model, or they might see something very rough depending on who the client was, depending on the concept, et cetera. But the model makers were amazing. We had some just crazy great sculptors. There's a sculptor in our business today, a friend of mine, a guy named Dave Link, who, him and I were there at the same time. And he's one of the most talented sculptors in the business. He's sculpted a bunch of stuff in pinball. And him and I cut our teeth at that place. And, you know, we gained a lot of respect for each other and the skill, the work, because we were both there. So this guy walks me back across the model shop to the office of the guy that ran the model shop. All the model makers reported to him. And this old German guy named Fritz. And Fritz opens up some drawers and he hands me a bunch of files. and some boxes of drill bits and some, like, sanding bits and stuff and a grinder. And so I say to him, no, you don't understand. I'm a designer. And he said, yeah, that's what you get. This is the designer stuff. I'm like, wait, I thought I was going to, like, don't I get some magic markers or something? So, you know, so I'm like, wow, okay, welcome to, you know. So right away I'm like, okay, I walk back to my office with Russell and the plastic. I'm looking at this beautiful sport coat that I bought. I was just thinking that I wore this for nothing. Like what the hell was I thinking, right? So, you know, day two I was a little bit more prepared. So the magic there was they licensed the ideas. No idea was pitched if it wasn't a working model. So what that means is that we did do drawings and renderings and stuff, but usually we did them to illustrate a line extension. Like, you know, the magic back in those days, the holy grail was to sell a toy company a line, you know, an entire toy line, right, as opposed to an item. And we placed a lot of items, right? There was a lot of items that, you know, a single, you know, sort of a plastic action toy or a one-off thing or whatever. So the concept was, look, don't wave your arms and tell me that you're going to design a truck that wouldn't it be cool if it walked on the ceiling. You have to make the thing walk on the ceiling. If you, you know, and we're going to have the president of Hasbro sitting in the conference room. You're going to put the device, you know, on the floor, and it's going to climb up the wall and walk on the ceiling. And if it doesn't do that, then we're not interested. In other words, no one's going to figure this out for you. You have to figure it out and, you know, don't make anything you don't have to make. So, for example, we would make a run at Toys R Us. We would buy a bunch of stuff. Like, you know, it's like if I needed a gear train for a truck because the feature I was showing off was something other than, you know, how the truck ran or whatever, then there was no reason to make a gear train from scratch. You just go steal one from a truck and you build it into your whatever it was. You know, you're making a vehicle that looks like a gorilla or something. You make all the stuff you do, but absolutely don't fabricate anything you don't have to fabricate. So we were constantly at the toy store buying Tamiya robots and stuff just to steal the shit out of them and to build whatever it is we were building. Don't they call that kit bashing? Yeah, a little bit of kit bashing. We did a lot of fabrication for custom cool stuff. And a lot of times we created characters and things. And so, you know, those would be a lot of times you couldn't tell them from the finished product until you took them apart. And then all the stuff inside was a conglomeration of things. And so the notion of don't sit at your desk, get your hands dirty, start making something is a thing they taught me. Right. And they taught me like iterate quickly because we don't have time for you. So at the end of my first year, I had placed nothing. I was I felt like completely inadequate. I thought I thought, man, I've placed nothing. And I've had a couple of people, like, take stuff back. Toy companies come in, and there was a clipboard, and it had all the dates on it, you know, like a big board full of clipboards. And so you'd go to the Mattel clipboard, and you'd write down, you know, you'd write down, I think I have a thing for Mattel. And then the partners would come down and review what you were doing. And they'd say, yeah, you know, maybe not Mattel. This is maybe for Hasbro. And so they would, you know, you'd put your name down on the Hasbro clipboard. And, you know, they're going to be here on, you know, May 5th. Okay, May 5th. So you put your name down, and then when the people came in, you'd have all your stuff ready, and then, you know, you went up and you pitched for the president of Hasbro, you know, and then the guy, you know, they would say, oh, that's interesting, whatever, or no, not for us. And then if they liked it, they would take it back, and they would go through their internal evaluation, right, their designers, their engineers, their marketing people, their testing people, depending on how interested they were, right? Sometimes, you know, the stuff would come back in a box broken, you know, Like we evaluated, yeah, not for us. Sometimes it would go through testing and it would fall out of testing or the moms wouldn't like it or God knows what, you know, safety testing or costing and what it costs too much. So it was a business where you had to be super generative. You had to be like constantly cranking stuff and you had to have really tough skin because the rejection rate was just brutal. I mean, it was just brutal. The business existed on. I mean, those guys, when I worked there, they had a royalty stream that was probably 35, 40 years old. And, I mean, they were still making Light Bright when I was there. They were still making operations. They were still making all this stuff that had built the studio. Every designer in the studio could have failed, and the company would have been the black because the royalties from old products continued to come in So they taught me The other thing they taught me was a professional doesn fall in love with his ideas a professional can deal with the fact that yeah maybe you know this is the wrong time for this we had a whole history of everybody had shelves in their office and the shelves are full of shit that you you came up with that nobody bought right and like it was very common for somebody you know three years after you did something all of a sudden like somebody you showed it again and to somebody else or whatever and I mean oh this is amazing we're taking this and they would do a deal on something that you came up with three years before because you know it's it's such a fashion business that and and people change times change things change and but you got to have tough skin because you're going to be told no more than you're going to be told oh we love it you know in pinball we throw stuff out every once in a while every once in a great while we we start down a path and we throw stuff up but not anywhere near at the rate at which we threw stuff out there so at the end of my first year i was telling you i was beginning to say I felt like a failure. I placed nothing. I'd had a couple of nibbles on something and, and that was that, you know, my, I was still in the office with Russell and Russell and I had, you know, gotten to be closer, you know, meaning that, you know, he didn't hate me, didn't want to kill me every day. Um, and, uh, you know, it was kind of like when you had to share a room with your brother, you know, and, and you like prior to your brother being born, you, you didn't have to share a room with your brother. And then your brother's there and you're like, Hey, where's this guy taking up my space? You're ruining everything. Yeah. You're ruining everything. Mom didn't even want you. You apparently surpassed the six-month mark, though. I did. I surpassed the six-month mark. I did. No pizza party, so you're good. No, no. Yeah, yeah. So I was good. So at the end of the first year, I said to Russell, I said, man, I don't get it. I'm like, you're placing shirt left and right. I'm trying A. I'm trying B. I'm trying C. I can't place anything in my life to pin it on. Russell says to me, open up your project book. You had a notebook that you kept. And every time you came up with an idea, You had to put it down in the notebook, describe it, and then you had to find a partner, you know, one of the partners. And by the way, the partners were all designers. They had all come up in the business. And you had to find a partner that would sponsor you in this idea, meaning a partner would say, yeah, it's a good idea. You know, you should do that. So the partner would then issue you a project number, right? And it was just about, that was literally, it was about record keeping and about, you know, it was about the notion of if, God forbid, somebody comes back and says you stole our idea or something. There was some documentation, right? Yeah. So Russell says to me, open up your book. And I open up my book and he goes, how many projects you got in your book? And at the end of the year, I had, I don't know what I had. I had like 30 or something, you know. I said, I think I got 30 numbers. And he says, that's your problem. I'm like, what are you talking about? He says, look at my book. So I open up his book. Holy crap. He's got like 55 things in his book. So I look at it and I'm like, what are you talking about? He goes, dude, you got to average one a week. I don't give a shit if you spend three weeks on something and one day, on something. But at the end of the year, it's a numbers game. You got to have 52 things. You got to have one a week, man. And then of the one a week, they're going to take three and two are going to die. You know, two are going to like fall out of bed before they get to the Toys R Us. And then if you get one into Toys R Us, good luck. Because the world could kill it. Just because it's there doesn't mean it's going to be successful. So it's a really tough business. it's even tougher today because kids, they get into screens so fast, right? I mean, that hard plastic is just, like, almost unheard of. I hope, I pray, you know, that the pendulum swings back and that, you know, little kids will one day, again, care about Hot Wheels and Barbie and stuff like that because it's so tough. I mean, and all my inventor friends from that time are all crying the blues over iPads and iPhones and stuff because that's what happens. You know, the kids get into screens, and then nobody cares about, you know, building model kits or playing with your buddies with action figures or whatever, right? Right, yeah. I've got a niece. She's not really a niece. She's sort of an honorary niece, somebody I know, but she pays tons of attention to, you know, she's got her own little iPad and she watches all this stuff, but she watches these shows where they open toys and talk about it. Oh, yeah, like that kid that's, like, famous. He makes tons of money. What's his, I can't think. Ryan's World or something? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like, yeah. That's awesome, but it's, just look at the toy business today and look at, I mean, you know, look at poor Mattel. And just, I mean, just look at their performance. Oh, where the rest is gone. Yeah, I mean, it's hard. I wish those guys so much luck. I love, you know, I love that business. And I loved being in that business. I, if the firm had not broken up, which was one of the saddest experiences in my career, was the partners had, there was a dispute, they couldn't come to terms, and it broke up the firm. Eventually, the new firm that I was telling you about, Big Monster Toys, became a thing. But by then, I sort of moved on and back in coin op, and I had bad taste in my mouth about it. But I think back to those days, and they are some of the best professional days of my life. Because, you know, when I was, I felt, I'm very good at being self-sufficient. and I'm very good at working by myself, and I love the rhythm of that place, the feel of it. We use talcum powder as mold release in the mold, you know, when we vacuum form stuff. And I can, it's a bizarre, it's kind of like a thing that's ingrained in my brain. If I smell talcum powder, it takes me right back to that studio. It's like I could walk in the morning and, you know, it was in the air, right? And so, but I love that place. I love the work. I love the people. I've often said, you know, very few times in my career have I been surrounded by so many just kick-ass creatives. Like people that were, they were all different. They did lots of different things. You know, there were guys that loved to fool with electronics. And there were women there that were just amazing with like sewing things and soft, you know, soft goods, soft toys. there were guys that were like just animatronic kings. I mean, they could animate in mechanism. They could animate anything. And, you know, there was just such a collection of talent that was just... And the coolest thing about being surrounded by diverse talent is that you learn a lot of different things. You know, they may not be the thing you do, but, you know, like the thing you do is the thing you do, But just being exposed to somebody else's amazing energy and thought process and process is a thing that you'll take away. And, you know, you'll assimilate elements that fit what you do, right? And they will become yours. And so it was a tremendous, amazing place. There's a book, if you're interested, there's a book on Marvin Glass. and I will try to send you a link to it, but it's got every toy they ever made, and it's got a lot of behind-the-scenes. It's got pictures of the studio and the partners and a lot of the story, and so, yeah, it was a kick-ass place, and I would go, you know, I got to know a lot of people. You must have seen the Netflix show, right, on The Toys That Made Us or whatever it was called? Yeah, all of them. I've seen it more than once. All right, so whenever there are episodes based on toys from, like, 1984 to, like, 1988, 89, which is when I was there, I know all those people. Like, I literally met, had conversations. Not long ago, there was somebody interviewing me for a toy thing. So you asked, you know, like, what kind of stuff did I do. So I did all kinds of stuff. I mostly boy stuff because that's what I could relate to. So I did these trucks for Galoob called Crash and Bash, where you got these two little four-wheel drive trucks. You control one. I control one. They're in a little arena. And you smash them into each other, and parts come off the trucks. And there's a switch inside. When you get the last part off of the guy's truck, it shuts the truck off, and whoever's still running around is the winner. And it was really cool because the walls of the arena where Hot Wheels tracked sort of turned on its side, and it plugged into these little molded controllers, and you had a big shifter that you moved to drive the truck back and forth. And the coolest part was when the trucks, and I've got a TV commercial on this that's amazing. I'll send it to you so you can see it. It's actually on my Facebook page. If you could poke around in there, you'll see some of it. But the parts of the truck would, you know, they were big four-wheel drive like monster trucks. They were tiny, but they looked like monster trucks. And the four-wheel drive would like pro parts, you know, so you had like doors flying around, and you're like running over fenders. It was very cool. I think I had an SSP car like that once where you could jump a ramp, and it would hit the ground, and all these parts would fall off, and you'd just snap them back into place. Yeah, it was similar to that. I did an outdoor water toy for Tonica called Splash Darts. It was like, it's kind of like a reusable water balloon. So it was a foam dart with a soft absorbent tip and a skinned foam body. And then when you dipped it in water, the soft tip would absorb water, which would weight the thing perfectly. And you drew it through the air, and it flew like a dart. And then when it hit your body, the soft foam would compress and splash him. And so, you know, I did those. I did some stuff for the mask line, you know, some characters and stuff. So it's sort of like a robo or Transformers type of a thing? Yeah, it was vehicles with little guys inside. I did a line of wearables, like watches, cool, big, chunky watches that had little dudes inside. I did some, I did a couple, I did an action figure for the Rambo line. it was mostly what I did was a Calico was working on this line and it was to compete with G.I. Joe and they had determined that they were going to do a scale it was going to be a scale difference and they were going to theme it around Rambo and so it was much bigger than G.I. Joe at the time Joe was three and three quarters and these guys were bigger they were like a little bit bigger than He-Man actually but not quite as big as old G.I. Joe you know and so they got all the way they got to within three months of Toy Fair and they got the entire line designed, you get a guy in a blister pack and he comes with his weapons and all the guys are themed just like G.I. Joe just like little G.I. Joe so every guy is different, he's got a name he's got a thing that he does but they had no gimmick And at Glass, the whole thing was we don't try to sell styling. We sell styling sort of as an add-on to what you're doing because it's too easy to knock off styling. So everything had to be a patentable gimmick. Everything had to be a mechanical gimmick, something that we could really try to patent to protect it so that we could get royalties forever, right? Right. So that's why it was so important to make real working stuff as opposed to just a drawing of something. so the Coleco guys are they're coming up on Toy Fair and there's a marketing guy there and I can't think of his name now he's a really good guy but he was pretty high up in the company and he says you know I don't think this is cool enough and I know you guys are telling me this is cool enough but I don't get it you know I mean it's like it's just like Joe only a different scale your scale difference it's just not it's not enough and these guys are like dude Toy Fair is like you know whatever four months away what are you going to do now and this guy He says, yeah, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to call Marvin Glass. So he calls the studio, and he gets all the managing partners, and he says, Harry, I need your help. And he tells them, I'm going to Toy Fair with a toy line that does nothing. You can't change anything that's already been tooled, so whatever you do has to add on to what we've got. So Harry comes down. He grabs, like, you know, I don't know, a half a dozen of us that were typically working in boys' stuff, right? He pulls us into the room. He says, you guys got three weeks. They're going to send us every guy. They send us all these guys, you know, like the entire line of characters. And he says, you guys got to come up with something. And we're like, okay. So we had no choice. We had to come up with shit that was like, you know, it was like a backpack that you put on the guy that does something with a mechanical gimmick that, you know, transforms, shoots something, does something. Right. So we did all that. We did some vehicles for them that, you know, gave the toys more play value. um and so we just like so i did i did a couple of characters for that i did a i or a couple of weapons gimmicks for that i did a couple of vehicles for the voltron toy line i'm telling i'm talking about the stuff that actually made it out i did like a billion things that i did this really cool thing that i i can't believe it's like everybody looked at it everybody took it nobody bought it it was like i did this shark it was like a imagine like a four-foot mechanical shark that like rolled around on the floor and when you opened it up like he had all he so he looked like you ever see the the soriyama sexy robot renders right you know the chrome skin with the mechanical bits on the girl kind of thing right so this guy it was like imagine a mechanical shark with an articulated tail and you know like a drivetrain underneath the side you know the wing fins if you will i don't know what those things are called for real um but you know and and you You know, of course, it had the fin coming out of the water and everything. So he looked like a robot shark. And inside was a bunch of little dudes. Like he was like a big submarine, right, with like rockets and, you know, cranes and shit that came out of him. I already want one. Oh, my God. So his jaw, you know, his jaw would open and you could drive him around the floor and he would scoop up and grab like other stuff. Like they say in Jaws, he's a eating machine. You know, the tail wagged and, you know, it was awesome. And everybody took it. But the reality was it was, like, super expensive. You know, it was, like, really, you know, it would have been, like, a big, giant place, that kind of thing. But it was an awesome place. I loved it. And nowadays, you know, when I work on stuff, right, like, you know, I've helped a lot of the guys with their mechanisms and toys and things for the games, right? And when I've done that, I think that I, you know, I'm essentially channeling a lot of the experience from that time, right? Right, yeah. Like, you know, I helped the Jurassic Park guys with their dinosaur that eats things. And I, you know, I've helped Steve Ritchie with a bunch of different things over the years. And so, you know, I mean, it's like I think that, you know, even my own stuff, right, when I play with my own stuff, it's very influenced by the stuff that I was exposed to in those days. yeah well you know it's good that you you know you kind of put the role of a lint roller when you were there because you just kind of rubbed up against everybody and took a little part of that with you yeah i mean you know you know i don't think you can help but do that if you're you know when you're those guys it's it's kind of like it was great those first six months which which you know you can imagine were a bit stressful right because i thought i was going to get fired every day those first six months that that what that is is that's being thrown into the deep water surrounded by some really talented sharks, and you've got to figure out a way to keep up and do things that are as good as what they're doing. Otherwise, you're not going to stick around. That's a really good thing, right? And it's a really good thing to this day, right? If you're a young designer coming into pinball, you don't need to be in a garage by yourself. You need to be around the big guys that have done this a lot, that have really kicked ass at it, you know? Yeah. So you can do, so you can learn, so you can be, right? And whether you're an artist or a mechanical engineer or a software engineer, whatever it is, you have to be around guys that are at the top of their game if you want to, like, improve your game, you know? Right. That's for real. I mean, that's like, you know, I think that place taught me so much about just life in general, how you approach the notion of being creative every day and how to harness the work you do. And it taught me to have tough skin because you get a lot of rejection. So, you know, when Pinside beats me up, I'm like, you got nothing. So when you made the transition to Midway Williams, it was like around, what, 1994? Yeah, so what happened is, so in like 88 or 89, somewhere in there, the partners have a dispute that they can't come to terms and they have to break up the studio. And after the studio gets broken up, there's like all these upstarts of derivatives of the toy company guys used to call us broken glass. There's a lot of broken glass in Chicago now. Right. Because because there were all these different startups from the original studio. And and I had a bad taste in my mouth. It was an emotionally difficult thing for me to have a studio break up because I I really I love that place so much. And the fact that I didn't have initially when these upstarts like Big Monster Toys, when they started up, they were concerned about the amount of money that they were going to burn up until they got rolling. And so I was a guy that I was a fairly senior guy at the time. I wasn't at the top of the chain, but I was moving up and I had a big salary, bigger salary. And they decided, a lot of them decided that the partners in those different studios were going to be the driving force and that they were going to hire a lot of young guys. They were going to take a couple of experienced guys. And I didn't make it. And I, you know, I didn't get any invites. So I didn't get any invites. And I was like, I was very disappointed because I was doing well at the studio. And I had the arc of my life at the time. I mean, I just bought my first property. I was about to get married. I was getting, so the studio blew up in like April or something. I was getting married in May. and I had just signed on my first house and I had a new Corvette. So I'm like, wow, talk about just a change overnight. Bad timing. Yeah, overnight. Okay, I got a wedding to pay for. Holy crap, I just bought a house and oh my God, I got a Corvette. Car payment. Yeah, I got a car payment on this thing. So it was a disturbing time for me in so many ways. Just the emotion of this place I love being gone was disturbing. And so I really went into a funk. But I had a relationship with the guys that had run Midway from when I worked there. And they had a little company called Grand Products. They were starting out, and they were a contract manufacturer. They wanted to make their own games. But to make ends meet, they were doing a lot of contract work. And I started out working for them sort of as a consultant, doing some stuff to help them get some stuff done. And in the meantime, I also started picking up some work on my own. So I did some work for the guys that did the Battletech centers. I don't know if you've ever seen those. And so I did that. I was doing some work for Grand Products. And I started doing pinball features for Bill Pollack at Premier Pinball at the time. And so I had a bunch of design work. I was just doing all this consulting work for everybody. Eventually, the Grand Products guys offered me a job, and I took it. And I was a creative director there for some years. They did a lot of novelty stuff, and they would take a lot of Japanese video games, bring them over. And really what it was, the Japanese video game thing was I was mostly converting games for manufacturing in the States. So it was really kind of – it was boring work. It paid well in terms of the Japanese work. But I did a lot of novelty games. I did a novelty game that people talk about to this day called Hawk Avenger. It was a sort of an updated take on the old Whirly Bird games from when we were kids, you know, with the helicopter physically moving around in a cabinet. If you tell me that you can share images and stuff, I'll send you images to all this stuff. Yeah, so people can see what I'm talking about. And then it was during that time while I was working at Grand and doing a lot of weird, different stuff, I mean, like all over the map, I was showing product to the Williams guys. And one day I got lucky and I was showing a game. I was the designer on a game for somebody, you know, somebody else. And that company was pitching the game to Williams. So I was in the pitch. And I knew the guy who was running engineering at Williams, Kenny Fedesna, who managed me all the years that I worked as a designer. And he's the guy that, I mean, he really enabled all of the, you know, all the famous Williams designers that you know. and Kenny, this amazing guy and a really great guy. And Kenny, it was Kenny and Neil McCaster, the CEO. And they were there to see this other guy's game that I had worked on. And then Kenny said to me, he goes, hey, George, you have some of that stuff you've been showing me. Can we show Neil? I said, sure, sure. So I had a back room full of shit that I had shown those guys that they never took. They always looked at it and said it was great, but they never took anything. And so, you know, I get it like they look at a bunch of my stuff and then they say goodbye. They buy me lunch, and off they go. The next day I get a call from Kenny's secretary. She says, hey, he wants to have lunch with you. And I was like, okay, so go to lunch with Ken. And he said, hey, so here's the problem. The problem is you're showing us ideas that, you know, and we think they're great, but our designers have their own ideas. They want to do their own thing. We're never going to buy anything. But what we would like is, you know, why don't you, you know, come to work for us as a designer? So that was the beginning. And initially, because I had a lot of novelty game experience, they said, why don't you work on novelty games? And eventually, if there's an opportunity, we'll get you into pinball. And I said, okay. It was a great time in my life, or a great time for a change in my life, I should say, because the work at Grand was not that interesting to me anymore. And it was paying the bills, but just barely. So it wasn't paying very well, and I was constantly working. and honestly, the fact that I was constantly working had a lot to do with, at the time, the failure of my marriage because I told you that when Glass was ending, I was getting married and now here it is, 93, my marriage is pretty much on the rocks because I'm working all the time and I'm not making that much money. I'm just working my ass off and now here comes Kenny Cadesna and he says to me, hey, you're going to have support and people and a team and projects and a salary and you're going to get royalties on the work you do And I was like, wow, okay. So it was kind of like my divorce ended and my time at Williams began. And so in the beginning it was a little rough at Williams, you know, but I'll tell you that the Marvin Glass experience, the notion of swimming with sharks, really helped me navigate my first days at Williams, you know, because I had the office across the hall from Steve Ritchie, okay. And so now I had heard all these horror stories, right. I'd heard, like, you know, I'd heard, oh, man, Steve Ritchie. And I was like, oh, dude. And so somebody said to me, you know, so what do you think? And I said, I don't know, but my office is, like, across the hall from that guy you guys are talking about all the time. And so, you know, I'm like, so for, like, you know, for, like, three days, I'm, like, sneaking in and out of my office. I don't want to be noticed, right? Right. I don't want him to notice me, you know. I'm, like, walking around, and then one day I'm, like, halfway to the end of the corridor, and I hear, hey, hey, hey, new guy. New guy. Yeah. I'm like, oh, crap. So Steve. Yeah. Oh, crap. Oh, no. What now? Right? And right about there, we're going to take a quick commercial break, and we'll be back with the rest of the story right after this. We'll be right back. This show is sponsored by Cointaker, distributor of brand new full-size authentic Stern pinball, Chicago games, raw frills, arcade games, and much more. Also, a full line of dramatic pinball mods, LED flipper kits, speaker lights, custom laser LED toppers, playfield protectors, Valley Williams Park, pinball apparel, and much more. Get the latest releases and glam out your game room with Cointaker. Everything at your fingertips at Cointaker.com. Now, back to our program. Oh, crap. Oh, no. What now? Right? So, hey, I'm Steve Ritchie. You know, he's bigger than life, right? So, he's in my face with the whole, hey, I'm Steve Ritchie. Hey, you know me? I'm Steve Ritchie. I'm the king. I'm the king of pinball. Are you into the pinball? He was like, oh, no, you're an all-in-one guy. All-in-one guy. Right? It's just like, so he says, hey, come see my new game. He drags me into Dwight Sullivan's office, right? Yeah. And Dwight is, like, working on Star Trek The Next Generation. That was the game they were working on at the time. And, you know, Steve drags me in there, and Dwight is like, get the hell out of my office. What are you guys doing here? He's like, you know, he's like busy working. He's got his head in his monitor. And, you know, Steve is like doing his Steve thing, you know, with the game. He's been all loud. Yeah. I don't know. You know, it's like I honestly don't know either of these guys at this point. And Dwight basically kicks us out of his office screaming and yelling, get the hell out of my office. You know, those guys, you know, that game at that particular moment in time, that game was like way behind. Those guys are like under mega pressure. Right. Yeah. And to the point that when it went to the trade show, I think they both got fired at the trade show and then, like, rehired a couple hours later. There was some drama with some, you know, I don't know what it was. Something in the game wasn't working there at the trade show. And, you know, it's my first trade show with a company. And I'm like, I don't like. This is one of those stories where they had to put a cassette deck inside the cabinet to make the voices come out or something. I mean, it was like one of those. It was like, I don't even remember what the heck, what was wrong, but it was like there was some big drama, and I think Kenny Fadezza fired both of them. And then he hired them two hours later. It was like one of those things where everybody was like, you know. So you could have turned the tables on them. Hey, new guy, come over here. No, it was like, you know, the thing about being a new guy is that you get stuck with the shit no matter what, right? So I think my first new guy show with Williams, And, you know, Williams was like the industry, you know, powerhouse at the time, right? It's like they were like we are now, right? And so they did nothing small, right? So like when Williams went to a trade show, there would be like 10, 15 Bally Pimma machines and 15 Williams Pimma machines in a booth the size of, you know, half the floor of the show, you know, with like, you know, clowns and, you know, explosions. and, you know, like, motorcycles driving around in the ball. Yeah, it was, like, insane, right? It was, like, so that same show where Dwight got fired, I had a level every pinball machine. I'm on, like, I'm, like, hey, new guy. I'm, like, on a floor, leveling pinball machines, you know? Oh, God. So the transition from the novelty to pinball was an interesting one. At the same time, you know, this was that drama time where Capcom had come to town to try to build a pinball company. And they had raided Willie, and they took Mark Ritchie, and they took a bunch of guys that had gone there, right? I don't think anyone at Williams had really realized that they were going to have a hole in their schedule that they were going to have to fill. So, like, you know, Ken comes into my office one day and he says, could you spend, like, 20% of your time thinking about pinball? Sure, sure. And, you know, like, three weeks later, he comes to my office and he says, could you spend 40% of your time thinking about pinball? Yeah, yeah, no problem. you know and I was like one day he comes screaming could you stop what you're doing and start making a pinball machine okay he says go see Roger Sharp go get a license come back with an idea oh my god that's how I got into pinball it's like I had gone there with the notion that oh these things are pretty cool and it would be nice to make this you know at the time it was like a $33.95 for a brand new windscreen pinball machine You know, I thought, well, that's a lot of toy, right? That's like, you know, the notion of building a, you know, pinball machine was exciting to me from the standpoint of how fun it would be to design one. It was not because I was like a great pinball player or I was like super fascinated with pinball. I just thought, wow, this would be really awesome to design. No, no. You know, after I did it, it clearly had gotten my blood, right? Or I still wouldn't be doing it. Yeah. Well, I think that if your first game was Corvette, it might have been, according to the lineup of cars behind your head, that was your idea for the license to go after? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I went to see Roger. So Roger was interesting. He was like sort of the sommelier of ideas, right? You know, the sommelier is the guy that talks to you about wine, right? You know, when you're in a fancy restaurant. Yes. Right. And, you know, the guy comes to your table and describes the wines to you. Roger was like the sommelier of licensing, right? So Roger would say, there's this license, and, you know, hey, it's got Harrison Ford, and, you know, they're going to put $100 million into this, and, you know, $20 million of that is advertising, and, you know, it's got, you know, he would just lay this whole story out, and then he says, or you could do this. I mean, it was like, so you get like this, you get like the entire, he was like a walking, what was the, I forget what, you know, the Hollywood movie business magazine. Variety. Yeah, he had, like, everything. He knew who's doing what with who, who the director was, and who composed the music. And so, you know, I'm listening to all this stuff and all the upcoming things, and I just thought off the top of my head, I'm thinking, I should do something I know. And so I still managed, by the way, you know, through all my trials and tribulations, I managed to hang on to the house and the Corvette and pay for my wedding. you know 10 years later I don't have the marriage but I got the Corvette so right so I said to uh I or five years later so I said to I said to Roger I said Roger um I think I want to do Corvette you give me a Corvette license and Roger says to me yeah there's a slight problem and I said what's that he goes oh there's another designer that's already asked for that so I'm like what and he goes mm-hmm yeah so I'm thinking uh who's the designer and he says I think about a little bit I think about it, because I knew Pat was into Corvettes because he had a couple of them. And I was like, oh, Pat's got Corvette. So Roger says to me, he goes, hey, you know, it doesn't hurt to ask. Why don't you go up and ask them if it's okay? So I go see Pat. I said, hey, so I'm thinking about doing Corvette. And Pat and I actually knew each other from when I was at Midway Games right out of college working on video games. Pat was at one of the captive Midway R&D groups called Dave Nutting and Associates. And him and I had met in those times because we were roughly, you know, he's a little older than me, but we were roughly the same age. And we would go to the company. Whenever we went to a trade show, the company would do like sort of a recap with the designers and engineers after the show. And they would order food. They'd get a big fancy hotel room and everybody would go around the room and talk about what they saw that they liked. And so I knew Pat from those days. So I went to see Pat and I said, honestly, Pat and Steve were both mentors and incredibly supportive once I did get into pinball. So I said to Pat, I said, hey, you know, I didn't know you had Corvette. And I went down and asked Roger and he said you had dibs on it. And Pat was, you know, was gracious. He said, you know what? It's your first game. It's really important that it be something that you're into so that you do a good job. And he said, go ahead and do it. He said, I'll tell you what. He said, I got dibs on the next one. And I said, OK, all right. So I went back down to Roger and I said, hey, I talked to Lawler and he's good with me doing Corvette. So, you know, can you go get me the license? And so I did. And there was a new Corvette that was coming out and they were building the National Corvette Museum at the time. And it was going to be debuted. It was going to, the National Corvette Museum was going to open to the public right around the time that the pinball machine had to be done. And so it became sort of a race to the finish line, get the game done. And so, you know, and the rest is history. It was my first game. I didn't know what the hell I was doing. And I think at the time it was considered a really solid rookie effort. You know, there was a lot of people that were very complimentary and stuff. And we took it to the grand opening National Corvette Museum. We had a huge response there. A lot of guys, you know, Corvette guys, hardcore Corvette guys with collections and the money to have them all had to have one, you know. So we sold a lot into a market that the company hadn't really explored much at the time. So, yeah, that was... But, you know, say what you will about Corvette as a playing game. I think visually, I think it sort of set the mark for your style visually, you know, because when you look at it, it looks George Gomez. And you can, you know, all the little... Yeah, the wrist rack and stuff. Yeah, that's what I like about it. The engine, yeah. Yeah, I never like, no one's ever asked me, I guess, but I never really said I really had a favorite designer. And I never really thought about it. But when I think about it now, I think if anybody, you know, would take that spot, it would be you because. Well, thank you so much. That's a huge compliment coming from you. You know, I respect your eyes. So, I mean, I think that that's a huge compliment. I had no idea. Yeah, well, because that's what I look for, you know, in pinball is like, you know, I want it to be an experience. I want it to be fun. Yeah, I love that. I love the stuff you did with the, I'm getting ahead of myself. One of my five questions for Chris Ranchi was, where'd you find all that cool stuff you did to your Beatles game? That's like, you know, I need all that stuff for my Beatles game. Should I answer it now or wait until later? It's up to you. Well, you know what? Well, let's save it for later. Okay. So you've got Corvette, you know, under your belt. And then you start going through Johnny Mnemonic, which there's a hilarious story you tell in your previous episode. So I'll link that in this episode so people can go listen to that. No, you know what? I'll touch base on it. I'll touch it up. Yeah, the Johnny Mnemonic thing. So it's interesting because I answered a Johnny question today randomly. There's a bunch of forums that I kind of lurk in just to see, you know, what people are doing with the games or et cetera. So I got served up this question about, you know, what about, you know, does anyone know why, you know, there's a crazy Bob's in NBA Fastbreak? And so there were all these responses from people to this guy who's got a fast break. And the responses were like, oh, Crazy Bob's is kind of like the cows at Midway. He shows up in a lot of things. And, you know, he's enjoying them all. And he's even in a dialed in, I think. And so he's been in a lot of things. And I think there's like Bob's Bunker in, I want to say, Whirlwind or something like that, you know, or Earthshaker. I can't remember. So there's Bob's, Crazy Bob's. And so the reality is that William Gibson, the writer, you know, who created John and Monick, super talented guy, love his stuff. And if you, I'll tell you what, if you want to talk about a visionary, this guy, he was creating a visual construct of what the internet would be like in 1983. Okay. So you got to kind of like say, holy crap, you know, like a lot of the stuff he wrote So you ask yourself, did the stuff take on the form that it currently has because of him, or did he pre-vis the stuff, you know? Right. It's really hard to tell, yeah. So William Gibson writes the story, and in the story there's Crazy Bob's Computer Shop, which is, I think, a little bit of, did you ever see those guys that, like in New York, there were those giant super electronic stores? Uh-huh. You know, they were like, and they always had ads where the guy talked like at a million miles an hour. Right, yeah. Kind of crazy bobs. And, you know, like, we got all your VHS needs, you know, all that kind of stuff. And so. And all the brands were like, sort of like, you know, Panasonic. Like, it's kind of familiar, but kind of not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he puts the crazy bobs in the story, which also made it into the film, et cetera. So when the time came, I thought, oh, this is perfect. I have an eject hole. I want to shoot the ball in there and have you collect different things, right, that would help you as you go through the game, right? And, you know, like gadgets and that kind of thing, right? And by the way, you know, it's become sort of a cliche. It's what I do with an eject in a game. You know, it's like you go there, you collect the stuff you need and et cetera. So, yeah, so I put Crazy Bob's in. And it was a bit of a coincidence that there were, you know, I think other Bobs in prior to Crazy Bobs, because Crazy Bobs actually is in Johnny Monick. I mean, the fiction, you know, not before the Pinball Machine. So the Pinball Machine just basically gave it a form. And I wanted to bring in the whole New York Superstore thing into the character. So, you know, when you're going to Crazy Bobs and Johnny Monick, you can tell that he's speaking at a million miles an hour, telling you what you got. And then of course in Fastbreak I had a similar scenario, right? And then so I made it instead of Crazy Bob electronic store it was you know Crazy Bob concession stand at the arena So this guy he looking at his fast break and he goes I don't know much about basketball, but who's Crazy Bob? That was the question of the internet, right? And he's right. There's a Crazy Bob's and Pat Lawler's dialed in and there's a Crazy Bob's. I think Pat had Bob's Bunker in one of the Carl Weathers games. And, you know, I think there were other Bobs to be had in the Williams fiction. So, you know, Johnny Monk, I love the fiction. And originally my second game was going to be Aliens. I thought it was – I wanted to do Aliens. I wanted – and this is after the second Sigourney Weaver, the second Sigourney Weaver Aliens movie, you know, where, you know, the character – She goes to the planet where Newt is and all that. Yeah. Right, right. rescue his little girl and stuff yeah with the you know the space marines and the hall of my guards right yeah and the cameron version yeah yeah it's awesome so at the time there was a toy line there was an aliens toy line that was really cool it was and i don't remember who made it um was it kenner yeah okay and they had a lot of um they had a lot of color plastic molded transparent parts like translucent parts is that is that right yeah yeah especially the green goo They had all of these translucent parts, and so I was really excited about doing sort of an original, you know, aliens thing. I wanted to riff on things like the, you know, the final scene is pretty intense, right? She's got to rescue the little girl. They've got to get off the planet. She's got to get past the alien queen. The facility has started to self-destruct, right? And it's got the voice, you know, like counting the female computer voice counting down the destruction of the planet, right? And she's got to get off the planet. And she's got to get past some number of aliens and stuff. And it's like counting it down. So I want to do this aliens thing. And everybody's like, no, you got to do a film. You got to do a film because we get so much drag, you know, so much traction out of the advertising for the films and the license, et cetera. And at the time, Roger was pitching all kinds of stuff to me, and he had pitched Johnny Mnemonic. And I said, well, I know this. And you have to put this in the context of the time. Keanu Reeves was coming off of Speed, and Speed was a huge hit. Very successful. Nobody, you know, Speed really, for all intents and purposes, a B-movie. It wasn't a triple action, a triple A blockbuster or anything like that. It was just, you know. B-movie with A-stars, yeah. Right. And so, you know, I think it was, was it Cedric Bullock that was in that movie? I can't remember. Yeah. Yeah. Kevin Spacey, wasn't he in that? I can't remember. Yeah, was he the bad guy? Yeah. Yeah. So, anyway, big success. And Keanu's coming off of that. He's going to go do Johnny Mnemonic. And I actually had read the short story. I was totally familiar with Johnny Mnemonic. I loved, because I loved William Gibson. And there was a lot of interesting stuff in Gibson's fiction, you know, and so much of it. I mean, you know, the notion of, you know, your entire, all your wealth, all your knowledge is in a slab of black plastic that you carry around. And, you know, this has everything in it. The notion of, you know, the internet with constructs and corporations vying for talent that, you know, they would like literally have, you know, like ninja strike teams that would steal your best people, right? Like right now there'd be, you know, there would be a ninja strike team looking to, you know, embed, you know, like all my designers would have a chip embedded in them. that if they went to work for another company, they, you know, we'd set the chip off. They would die, right? Sorry, Steve. So, you know, it was like, all this stuff and Johnny, in William Gibson's, you know, mind, was like, that was crazy, all this great stuff. But so, I was familiar with the fiction. And, but I wasn't that, I thought, yeah, I don't know, you know, I really want to do this aliens thing. And then one day, Neil de Castro, the CEO of the company, comes down to see me. And I'm like, you know, I'm not, you know, I'm not used to the CEO coming down to talk to me. Right. Well, I shouldn't say that. Now I'm very used to it. The CEO is in my office all the time. Right. One Mr. Dairy Stern, right? Sure. Right? But different times, right? I was a young guy. I wasn't a young guy because I'd been in business for a long time, but I was mid-career or something. So Neil MacArthur comes down and he says, look, you really got to do this. Sony Pictures is going to put a crap load of money on here into this advertising, Keanu Reeves, hot star. And he said, you know, I mean, and the reality was, if you take a look at this, you go, okay, when we did that game, the company didn't even have internet access outside of the company. We had like an intranet with like some sort of P-mail system where I could send Steve Ritchie an email, but I couldn't send, I couldn't have sent you an email, right? It was like somebody outside the company, I couldn't send an email. Email was like inside the company. no one was browsing the internet on their, you know, like on their computers or anything. So the notion of a film about the internet, this coming, you know, this hip coming thing was the website, the Johnny Mnemonic website. I'll never forget this. I'm in Larry DeMar's office. Larry comes to see me and he goes, so Larry, you know, because he was sort of the internal bleeding edge of technology guy, was the only guy in the building that had like an internet address that went outside the building, right? He had access to the real internet, right? And so Larry calls me in his office, and we stood there like a couple of idiots looking at the Johnny Mnemonic website, and we were like all excited. This was like the film, you know, when the film was going to, you know, they had in anticipation of the release of the film, they had created a website for the film. And we're sitting there going like, wow, look at this. And we're like, wow, this is like, oh, man. And it was actually comparable to, like, what the special features used to be on DVDs. Like, you could read the script or cast bios. Right, right. Exactly. That's what it was. A couple of photos and a trailer and everything. A little music. Yeah, a little music. So, yeah. So Neil says, you know, and I'm thinking, okay, you know, I probably should do this. I mean, it's important enough that they send the CEO down here to tell me to do it. So I probably should do it. So I took it. And right away I knew what to do. I knew, oh, the data glove is going to be a thing. I had the data glove concept and the notion of the little matrix that dumped the balls out into the multiball. I wanted to play tic-tac-toe with that thing. All of that stuff came to me right away. I was very influenced by one of the games that I first played a lot of pinball on was Terminator 2, and I loved the way it shot. I was very influenced by the flow of Terminator 2. I tried very much to replicate it in terms of how Johnny felt. And Johnny, to this day, is like, I mean, go shoot a recently waxed Johnny with a decent play field, and the speed will just, like, bury you. So, but it's, you know, I love the way it shoots. And I was very influenced by the final mode in Aliens 2. So, Power Down, the top of the game mode in Johnny, is exactly that. I got Rachel Davies, who was one of the salespeople at Williams, and she's British. She's from the Isle of Wight, and she had this great accent, British accent. And so I got Rachel down into the recording studio, and Rachel did the whole, like, you know, 30 seconds to power down, you know. And the power down thing is, basically, it's a spinning place game. You know, it's like areas of the play field. Actually, I saw something similar in Scott Danesi's game, right, where I had areas of the play field that would go dark unless I kept them alive by shooting them, right? Right. And then when everything went dark, the flippers die and, you know, the game blows up. And so very controversial at the time. Everybody was like, the whole flippers dying thing, everybody was like, I'm not sure about that, you know. You can't kill the flippers, you know. I think I've broken every you can't do that. You know, I had in NBA Fastbreak, they beat the shit out of me for basketball scoring, you know. As a matter of fact, they made me ship the game. They made me ship the game with two modes of scoring. So you can actually play, you know, if you set a fast break, I have no idea why you would do this because basketball scores in one, twos, and threes. And that seemed obvious to me, you know. but it was like all the you know the pinball wizards at Williams everybody was walking around the floor the second floor on product development where we all worked it was like this fucking guy is a novelty guy you know it's like it's a novelty game that NBA fast break that's not a pinball machine so yeah we should fire him he's a novelty guy he's a novelty guy just not just fire him so it was horrible it was horrible so yeah So I've broken that rule. I broke the rule about the flippers. You know, I'm just a mess. Yeah. But moving your way through Williams Midway, I mean, if you consider, you know, your Corvette Johnny Mnemonic, NBA Fastbreak, Monster Bash, Ribbons from Mars, there's no downward slope there. It's just continuing to go up as far as design goes. Well, I mean, I'm glad you say that. I'm happy that you say that. I'll tell you some, you know, I'll throw some cold water on that. At the time, no, at the time, you know, Johnny was not, it's interesting that today Johnny has a following. And Johnny, you know, people fight over Johnny's today. But at the time, I don't, you know, it didn't do very well. I think people didn't think that much of it. When I did NBA Fast Break, NBA Fast Break had a lot of, like, sort of innovative stuff in it, right? The scoring system, the fact that you could link two of those games. If you ever have an opportunity to play two linked games in linked mode, it's really fun. I mean, you know what? There was about a couple years ago, there was a resurgence of people at barcades and hardcore pinball locations getting two fast breaks and linking them. And I guarantee you, if you go to any locations that got linked fast breaks and people are on the game, there's a crowd around those people. Guarantee it. You know, when I think about that, it's kind of like our business sometimes beats the creativity out of you. You know, they want you to fit into a box. They really want you to make another one of, right? And every once in a while, you know what? I'm a guy I don't like to make another one of. I like to make something different. I want to make something new. I know it doesn't feel like anything you know, but from my perspective, I'm going to die happy knowing that I made a bunch of shit that didn't feel like stuff you knew. And so I don't do it all the time. Sometimes I get caught up in the nonsense, and I make you another of. But I'm not ashamed of Johnny's. I'm not ashamed of NBA Fast Brace. And I don't care that in their day, somebody preferred theater magic, you know? I mean, it's like, I don't care. I did what I did. I still, to this day, I do what I do, you know? And I, you know, I'm not arrogant enough to not pay attention to what people say. You can put all the naysayers to shame because your next game was Monster Bash, which is arguably one of the best games ever made. Yeah, and, you know, Bash, you know, I'm proud of Bash. I mean, look, to this day, I love Bash. I think... It's amazing. I really like that a lot of the work, eventually people began, you know, appreciated Johnny. Eventually people, you know, appreciated NBA Fast Break, right? And, you know, this guy that I was talking to today, he said to me, he goes, man, this is NBA Fast Break. The guy that asked the question about Crazy Bob's. Yeah. When I replied to him, I private messaged him on Messenger because we weren't friends. And so I sent him a message and said, hey, here's the answer to your question. And the guy was thrilled that I reached out to him. And he said to me, dude, he says, I don't even like basketball. And I love this game. He says, I don't know anything about basketball, but I love this game. And I was like, that's great. I mean, that's phenomenal. So that stuff, you know, I love that stuff. I think it's great. It's a great compliment that somebody, you know, somebody's chosen, you know, like games like Bash that were underserved in terms of the numbers that were made. I'm glad that Doug and those guys resurrected it. It's given a generation of people that didn't experience the game another crack at it. Yeah, it only made a little over 3,000 Monster Bash when it first came out. I honestly don't even know, but if you look up on the internet... Well, I'm trying to act like I know all the numbers, but I'm staring at the page right now. Okay, yeah. Something like, I don't know, 3,361 games? I don't know, I'm guessing. and I also I couldn't tell you the number you tell me that's the number that's the number but I think that there's no question that that's a solid game and you know I think I'm proud of all that stuff I think that every time you do one as you know you learn something and you know you learn things and you go on to the next one and when it's all said and done I'm fortunate I'm blessed to have a couple of ones that are considered special in my portfolio, right? I got a Lord of the Rings. I got a Monster Bash. I got a Deadpool. I think that I got a Batman. You know, I think that some people are lucky to have one. I'm really lucky to have a few. And so, yeah, I'm blessed. I'm blessed, you know? Yeah. Well, you know, you had a great run there at Williams and then Williams takes a dump. And I got to tell you, You were talking earlier about how bad you had felt when you got let go at the toy company. Yep. And I don't think that was an isolated situation as far as, how do I say this? From an outsider looking in, I saw a video of a seminar of you, I believe it was at Chicago Expo in 99. Oh, yeah. And you were talking about the demise of Williams. And you were, if you didn't come right up to it, there might have been a couple of tears shed on that stage. And I mean, it's tough to watch. And I think that just goes to show the person that you are and what you put into what you do. Because everybody always says if one person in this industry really can just be the word passion, it's George Gomez. You know what? I think we're fortunate there's a lot of people that bring a lot of passion to this. It's the reason that the fan base is as passionate as it is, too, right? I tell people all the time, I can guarantee you that I didn't work any less hard, that I didn't put as much of myself in the ones you hate as in the ones you love. I'm all in all the time. If I'm doing it, if I'm going to put my name on it, I'm all in. And sometimes I get it right. Sometimes I get it wrong. And that's the nature of the beast. I think that you got to bring it or don't do it. I mean, you got to bring it. And some of the guys that work for me are very much like that. That's why they work for me. I see them. They're different than me. And I want them to be different than me. but the common thing that we have is they bring it, you know, they really do. And so that 99 thing was tough. It was like, it was very similar. And you're right, man. You know, I can't believe you made that connection because that's a connection that's in my head and nobody knows because I haven't talked too much about the demise of Marvin Glass and how emotionally it affected me. But the Williams thing was very similar. Similar in that you're in a place you love with people that you've grown to really love and doing a thing that you really love. And then one day it's gone. And you're like, I'll tell you that the next nine years of my life at Midway, because I got very lucky and my friend Mark Kamel, I stumbled into him in the hallway on a day when I was there to do a bunch of exit interview kind of stuff from Williams, from the demise of Williams. And Mark offered me a job on the video game side, working on Xbox and PlayStation and stuff. And I spent the next nine years of my life doing that. And it was during that time that I was also approached by Gary to design stuff on the side for him. And it was during that time that I did, you know, I was working. My full-time gig was at Midway. My weekend gig was basically working. Whenever I didn't have crunch time related to the games I was working on at Midway, I was fooling around with pinball for Gary. And, you know, it was during that time that I did Dark Knight, Sopranos, Lord of the Rings, you know, Playboy. All those games were done sort of on the side for Gary during that time. And, of course, I knew Gary because, you know, Gary's an industry icon, so I knew who he was, but I didn't really know Gary. And I knew Ray Tanzer. Ray Tanzer was the designer at Premier when I told you I was doing, like, pinball features for Premier. And I think Johnny Board was over there too. And so I knew Ray, and Ray was running engineering at Stern at the time, and Ray called me up and he said, hey would you would you consider doing games on the side I went to see Kenny Fedesna and I said Kent you care if I do this and Kent said no we're not in that business anymore you know you can do whatever you want and with that stuff he said don't let it get in the way your your midway work and I said no I mean come on it's a pinball machine I you know I'm going to do it on the side it's very different work and that's what I did and um so it was you know I was lucky to have that opportunity by the way because midway could be all consuming um so I don't know what you know about that business, but those teams are enormous, right? Their console game teams are enormous. And so I was managing one of those teams and the cycles for their games were roughly two years. And that second year, right before you launch, you know, was the six months before you launch are brutal. You're like living there. The company's ordering dinner in the studio every night. You are working Saturdays, you are working Sundays, you roll in at 10 o'clock and you work till midnight, if not longer. Sleep on your desk. Oh, my God. So I had a relationship with the NBA, licensing guy at the NBA, became a very good friend of mine, Greg Lassen, a great licensing guy. And Greg was the licensing guy on NBA Fastbreak. And so I had a relationship with Greg from NBA Fastbreak. And so the next nine years of my career, I worked on the NBA license for the NBA franchise for Midway Games called NBA Ballers, which was really Mark Trammell's baby. And so I worked in support of that team. Basically, I was the executive producer. I ran the team. And Mark did the creative. And I think that over the course of that time, you know, my relationship with the NBA and Greg Lassen and stuff got a lot of things done. And it was a different time in my career. I was getting a lot of my, you know, sort of my hands, my need to create things with my hands was happening in the games I was making for Gary. And I was learning a lot about managing a very large software effort. I was learning a lot about, you know, how modern video games are made, you know, what it is to make cinematics for a game, what it is to do animations for a game, what it is to do motion capture, how the soft tab tools work, you know, things like, you know, polygonal tools. And I have to say that, you know, and it was that time that I met Ernst, who currently runs my video graphics group, right? And, you know, it was learning how to do all that stuff that, again, you know, when you talk about how can I do the job I do today, well, it's very informed by all the places I've been and all the, you know, all the things I've done. So managing a large software group, well, guess what? I've got a large software group now that does things. I've got a computer graphics group that generates computer graphics. I know that. I know a lot about the licensing business because I did a lot of licensing work over the years with the brand, you know, to sort of preserve, extend, maintain the NBA brand. So I think that all those experiences are what sort of prepare you for. My friend Eugene Jarvis, you know, the famous game designer, said to me one day I was having a tough day at CERN early in my tenure there. And I happened to be having lunch with him that day. And I said, Gino, I'm like, man, this is hard. And this is like hard. And he said to me, he gave me a piece of sort of inspirational, like kind of, he said to me, you are uniquely prepared to be the guy in your seat right now. And he said, no one else can do what you're doing because the combination of things is what's going to allow you to be successful in this. And this was like 11 years ago or something, right? Yeah. So, you know, at the beginning of my time, right, when I walk into Stern Pinball and there's like nine guys in product development and I got business strategy guys going, yeah, we need pro premium and Ali. And we got like, you know, two code bases, you know, two playfields and all this peripheral stuff. And I'm like, I'm like, oh, my God, I'm going to lose my freaking mind. I was like, wait, wait, time out. Have you been in my studio? Because, I mean, like, what, where, if he, you know, it's like when you were a kid and, you know, you and what hundred guys are going to take me, right? Right. I'm like, look at my head count. All right, seriously. But, you know, Jarvis is a really smart guy. Yeah. And we, you know, we call him Eugenius, right? Like, freaking Eugenius, man. He was right. He said, yeah, chill out. Hang in there. You know, like, he's very laid back, and he's like, yeah, dude, you're, like, uniquely prepared to be here right now, and nobody else can do this. Just, like, chill out, you know. Do what you do. Now, was this after Lord of the Rings? Was Batman, the first Batman, the Dark Knight Batman, your first game as a, you know, working for Stern Proper? No, no, no. My first game for Stern Proper was actually Transformers. Okay, the next one. Okay. Yeah, it was like, so Batman came out in 07 or 08, and the company, you know, the crash of 08 almost killed Stern and definitely killed Midway. So I found myself out of work in December of 08, economic crisis, right, with the collapse, right? Excuse me, the Lehman Brothers, you know, crisis, right? Black Monday, what do they call that? Black Monday or something? Yeah, I mean, it was like, so the company was already, you know, was already hurting for some other reasons. And in December, pretty much became official that I didn't have a job. So, and I had called Gary. I said, Gary, what's going on? He's like, no, no. He said, we're in the same place. We are, we'll be lucky to get through this. So it wasn't until 2010 that Gary started talking to me again about, you know, hey, Gary said to me, I've got a partner. And it looks like, you know, it looks like we're going to, you know, we're going to be okay. We're starting up. It's very small. And, you know, we got to grow. Just like poor John Borg over here doing everything. Right. Well, no, so it was like, so I said, at the time, I had taken a job at Incredible Technologies to save my ass. So in 2009, so, okay, so 08, the business crashes. I'm out of a job in December. I decide that, very unlike me, I decide that I'm going to try to have a normal holiday with my family, but I am going to compress. I'm going to start, like, you know, like really paying attention to my expenses and compressing everything. and, you know, put my, you know, health club membership goes on hold, you know, try to, because I don't know where the next, you know, I don't know what's in front of me, right? So, and the world, right, the world seems to be exploding. So I'm like, I'm kind of like looking at my expenses and just different things. I'm like, okay, I got to get my shit together. So I start, I start doing that. And at the same time, I start beating the bushes for work, right? So I'm calling everybody I know. It was like, you know, like, hey, you got anything? You got anything? you know and I called my friends at Incredible Technologies and they were they said yeah you know we're we're trying to do this slot machine thing and we could use some work different things so I start as a consultant and eventually they offered me a job it was great um I went to work for them in in 09 I think it was 09 and and so um I start working for them and uh it was you know I worked for them for about a year and a half and um and you know great fantastic people great studio um and and I have a lot of friends from that experience uh super creative and I'm you know they've had explosive success and I'm very happy for them that they did. And sometimes, you know, I think the good people in this business always figure it out. And so I'm over there and Gary calls me and he says, you know, I'm getting the band back together. And I said, so we start talking. And at first I wasn't sure. I was like, yeah, you know, I'm okay here. You know, this is a new thing for me and I'm learning it. But Gary's pretty persistent sometimes, and he was, no, no, you got to meet Dave, you got to come out, you got to have dinner. So eventually I decided, yeah, I probably, you know, I thought, I was intrigued by the notion of building something, and very intrigued by that. And so I said to, you know, I said to them, guys, I have a commitment here, and I can't leave for some amount of time because of the commitment. And they said, well, then start doing whatever you're doing. And so I liked a kid that I was like a, you know, I was like a gang leader running a gang from prison. So, you know, Gary and Steve had not had a pretty parting when things got rough. Steve was a consultant of the company. And when things got rough, they had not parted in great ways. And so my first job was to sort of try to bridge that relationship. and Gary, you know, because Gary said, you know, what do you think you're going to need? And I said, well, look, I can't be there for so long. So you've got to get a designer. I think it starts with let's get a designer, and then I'll eventually show up. And so I called Steve, I called Gary, you know. I did a little bridging, and everything came out, and then Steve got there a couple months before me, and actually probably six months before me, and started work. in case people are wondering we're talking about Steve Ritchie so I mean I started kind of the path right and then but it was you have to think back to the fact that I walked in the door and you know here's these you know whatever it was I think it was like nine guys in product development and you know today I've got 50 and a bunch of consultants on the outside and so it's been a journey it's been a journey I think back to that day in 2011 when Jarvis said to me, nah, chill out, man. You're right where you need to be. Oh, man. You're at Stern now. We know everything that you've done, but let's talk about some of the stuff about Stern. Just to give you an example of what I'm curious about knowing, just remember, Joe Kamenko will not listen to this interview because I'll tell him not to. Okay. What were your initial thoughts when it was presented to everyone that the way people are going to get a super limited Batman 66 as if they send in a video begging for one. Did you think that was a good idea? It was very inspired by what Ford was doing with their GT, the Ford GT. You know, they made a decision that they were going to have a limited number of cars. There was going to be more demand for the cars than they could fulfill. And that the reality is that the people that had the strongest relationships with the company that were true fans. You know, the guys that bled blue, Ford blue, were the guys that should have access to this very limited, very special thing. And so they, and they did the same thing, right? I should say we did the same thing. They asked people who wanted a GT, you know, send me a video, tell us why you deserve to be one of the guys. You know, Joe's got one, by the way. You know, Joe's got, you know, whatever. The Ford, yeah. And he had us send in a video. So the idea came from that, the notion of, okay, friends of the company and people that truly wanted it. I mean, that's the genesis of it. And what I think, I thought, wow, $15,000 for film auction? You guys sure about that? I mean, that's what I thought. And, right? You're sure about that? Yeah. Yeah, I was like, no, I'm just like, you know, you're talking about a lot of games, and yeah. I think the problem I had with it was that the majority of the videos that I saw were not people like myself that were standing in the middle of a room full of Batman merchandise going, you know, I spend my day in here. You had people going, look at all these machines, and they're all top-notch, and they're all this and that, and I got a ton of money, so I deserve one. That's more what I thought, which I thought was kind of sad. Okay, so there's a lot of things coming to play, right? Like, for example, A, yes, people need to be able to afford that, right? I mean, at the end of the day, $15,000 for a pinball machine, you've got to have that disposable income. You know, it's funny because, you know, my friend Tom Capera and I I talk about this all the time. I say, you know, should I upgrade my Porsche to that? And he says to me, he goes, you know what the problem with that is? The problem with that is that I know your nature, and you're going to be freaked out driving that down the street. You're going to be like out of your freaking mind, afraid that somebody's going to hurt it, damage it, et cetera. And he said to me, he goes, I've always wondered what kind of disposable income does it take to not worry about driving something that expensive down the road? So the notion of disposable income is what it takes to own a $15,000 pinball machine, right? You know, I mean, it's not to say that somebody couldn't stretch or figure it out, but I'm saying that it's strictly a toy, and it's a very expensive toy. And so you need to come to grips with that. You know what we had? So some of the people that own them are longtime friends of the company. You know, like, for example, some of our vendors, right, own them. And some of our vendors, we almost didn't have to reach out. They reached out to us. They said, I've been supplying parts on the president's special company. I own this company. I've been supplying parts to you guys for so many years, and I really want that Batman machine. Okay. You know, that's a guy that would get it just because there's that company relationship, right? Yeah, right. Our good friend at Ed Robertson, right? You know, he buys a lot of machines. You know, he said, hey, can I have one? So there's a lot of that. And the notion of the videos was put together because there's a bunch of people that maybe we don't know who they are, right? But they've been longtime loyal friends or fans or, you know, people with big collections or clearly a big customer. Like any business, you know, if you're a special customer, we have to recognize that you're a special customer, right? We're very fortunate. We have a community of people that can send you a long list of people that must have every LE. I mean, there's loyalty in I buy every one, right? You can't say no to those people exactly. I mean, you just have to say, wow, I respect your loyalty, and we love you, that you continue to buy them, and you want a special one, yes, we can help you. That's just business, right? It's normal, and it's respect for your customer, right? Yeah. There's a couple other things. I know a lot of people were bent out of shape about trying to be told what to do after the fact. Like, if you have this, you can't resell it. Yeah, again, that Ford thing was exactly the same way. You can't resell it. Honestly, I don't know. So much of that came from that watching Ford do it. We had a relationship with those guys from the Mustang project, and so we were very aware of kind of how they do things and what they were thinking and stuff. We have a lot of respect for them, by the way, because of the way they ran their company, et cetera. You're dealing with two different crowds as far as the retail base goes when you've got millionaires who can drop $350,000 on a collectible car and people in pinball who are – There's a lot of people in pinball who can't really afford it, but really try. So there's a big difference there. The way to think about this is, first of all, we made different price points. You could still get a Batman game for a more reasonable price. In my personal economy, I buy the things that I can afford. I try not to buy things that I can't afford. I really want the new Porsche GT3. I can't get on the list. I haven't bought enough Porsches in my life to get on the list. So I say to myself, yeah, there's other Porsches in the line. and I'm going to buy one of the other ones. Well, let's see if we can put some rumors to rest about Stern. Yeah. Is there truly a stockpile of WWE gold armor laying around there that you guys just can't wait to find a game to use it on? There's definitely some, yeah. I don't know how many there are, but there's some gold armor for sure left over. I think you guys should build an indoor sort of shed up against the wall, like in the back where you keep all the games once they're boxed up. somewhere where you got a little bit of breathing space. Yeah. And then spray paint, usually stenciled words with spray paint on there, WWE Gold Armor Vault. And then walk people through that when they do the tours. That's the WWE Gold Armor right over there. I didn't even know. Honestly, this is the first I've heard that there was any kind of a thing about WWE Gold Armor. Yeah. It's kind of simmered down over the years, but it's been going. All right. Another exciting thing to talk about. Yeah. Toppers. Uh-huh. Now, I don't have a long history in this business. You know, like you guys brought me in in 16. But the market for toppers is drastically changed in five years. Yeah. To the point where you guys sell out. Oh, yeah. We sell out. But so one of the things that we're trying to do with stuff that is out of stock is we, you know, if we're going to make it again, we're trying to inform you that we're going to make it again. Just because so, yeah, we've been selling out. When we sell out, it's because we don't have a feel for how something's going to be received. Mm-hmm. Right. So you can say to yourself, this is an expensive topper. So we do the calculus in our heads, or I don't, but the sales guys look into, we have a history of selling toppers at this price, and this is what we've seen. Maybe this is not, it's a big nut to swallow for somebody. So let's be careful with how this is ordered, right? So then now the audience surprises us and the thing sells out in an hour. Then you're like, oh, I guess we guessed that wrong. And then we'll order again. But the notion of reorders, the problem with reorders is that the topper line is not sitting on its hands. So when the planning is done, the topper line is full the entire year. What that means is if you said the number was 800 toppers and, you know, then when that 800 toppers is over, then you're going to start making another whatever number of toppers. Right. So now you're going into a full year of planning and you're saying, oh, guys, you've got to sneak in another 500 toppers. So what happens? Well, at the end of the year, some topper's going to fall off or somewhere, you know, the logistics of it enter the picture. So it's not that we don't want to make them. Okay, you've got to get the parts back in. Then you've got to figure out how to make them. Right now, the issues, by the way, are, you know, COVID has complicated the world in a variety of different issues, right? We face the same shortages that the rest of manufacturing is facing, right? So there are chip shortages, LCD shortages. The price of stainless steel has gone way up, stuff like that, right? So now the good thing is we have really good planners, right? So, like, there's a bunch of guys that are, like, the unsung heroes of the business that nobody ever talks about. Nobody knows they exist. And those guys, you know, six months ago were understanding that there were going to be some of these shortages. And the company was doing things proactively to try to, you know, shore that up. Like, you know, okay, so there's going to be this shortage. So, you know, go buy this stuff right now. Get it in-house because there's going to be this shortage. And in some cases, we got it covered. In other cases, it's a little harder. The other issues with COVID, right? It's no secret that we were shut down for some amount of time. And that created a backlog of orders. the good news is we continue to make stuff people want so new orders come in all the time so you know we're doing everything we can but you you have um limited capacity to make up two and a half months of shutdown so well on top of that you've you've still got games rolling out all the time that require these things so if you're making a topper for a new game i mean there's this look there's a bunch of people right now clamoring over mandalorian right they haven't even seen it and there's like tons of orders for mandalorian and so you go okay we got to get ready going to make some Mandalorians. But there's still demand for Led Zeppelins and all kinds of other stuff, right? So you say, we're doing the best we can. We are growing the company. We're growing manufacturing. We're growing every area of the company to try to meet these demands. We are also facing the shortages that the rest of the world is. When I read that Ford's going to shut down plants because they can't get chips, I say to myself, wow, it's a good thing we bought those chips when we did. But at some point in time, even that supply could run short and let's hope that, you know, there's more chips to backfill it. So the magic of our company is everybody focuses on my group, right? The successes that we've had in product development and creating product people want. But there's the real magic is that it's okay to create product people want. That's number one. But now you got to figure out how are you going to make that product? How are you going to deliver it? You know, how are you going to procure the parts that require it, et cetera. The unsung heroes, the people in the back that, you know, my manufacturing facility, my procurement people, you know, my planners, my, you know, all of that, right? You know, I mean, come on, without those guys, we couldn't do any of this stuff. Right. You know, my assembly lines, they switch out product in such a way that it amazes even me. And I've been in manufacturing my entire professional career. and the fact that you can have Led Zeppelin running down one line, Guardians of the Galaxy running down the other line, and we haven't made Guardians of the Galaxy for like six months or eight, a year or something, and now it's back on, and they've figured this out, and guess what, next week it going to be Deadpool on the Guardians line and it going to be Mandalorian on the Led Zeppelin line so it like you know they just got done running a bunch of Jurassic parks So that is amazing that you can switch out work cells that the supervisors on the floor can, you know, re-educate their people quickly to, okay, we're building guardians mechs and yeah, we haven't done this for a while. Okay, let's look at the work instructions. Let's, you know, let's look at the samples. Let's sit with the mechanical engineering team and review the assembly process, they repopulate the work cells with new tools, new fixtures. That's amazing. That's just like, you know, and it's never enough. Everybody says, oh, you guys, you know, I've been waiting for my game for a year. I hate that you've been waiting for your game for a year. I'm doing everything I can to get it to you. Back to the toppers thing. You've also got a limited amount of resources as far as people are going to put this thing together. Do you stop a line that's manufacturing $10,000 pinball machines to put together $500 toppers? So the topper line, so here's the deal. The topper line is unique. It does toppers. It doesn't do – it does toppers. It does certain sub-assemblies. It does accessories. It does not do pinball machines. So from that perspective, we don't have an issue. But now parts, like let's say you originally manufactured 800 toppers for the Munsters. Okay. And now you want to rerun it, which you have the right to do because as far as I know, you've never said any of these are limited edition, you know. So that's a good question. That's actually a very good question. it's very dependent on where I am in the contract with the licensor for that property. So we just had a situation where we had to extend a license in order to make more toppers. Yeah. So what that means is that, you know, say a game was made a while ago, and the licensing contract for that game is coming to an end. If you don't extend the contract, you can't sell toppers. Or anything, for that matter, right? Right, right. What topper was it? Is that secret? I'd love to tell you a secret, but it's more I'm 65 years old and I don't remember. Fair enough. It might have been Guardians, to tell you the truth. I'm not sure. The man for the Guardians copper? That was my idea. Yes, and there is the man for the Guardians copper, yes. You guys ever going to remake the Batman? Well, I guess you can't, can you? The one that you and I did, the cockpit one? We'd love to make the cockpit again. And the issue with the cockpit might be sort of that contract also. I'm not sure. That'd be a good one. Yeah. You know, I don't know why, but when I got my Beatles and my Munsters, I did not get toppers. Now, I'm hooked up on the Beatles because somebody brought one into a coin taker. So, Chris over at Coin Taker said, I can take the topper off here and get it over to you. Okay. But Munsters, no such luck. So, if you ever want to put another Munsters topper, you know, give me a call. You know, all that stuff, one of the great things about our business is that the back catalog is so strong. The issue is that the back catalog is strong when there's demand for things. And so if there's a lot of guys asking for Monster Stoppers, we'll figure out a way to make Monster Stoppers. If there isn't a lot of guys asking for Monster Stoppers, then we probably won't. You know, so that's the magic of the back catalog. It's kind of like you say, you know, I mean, I love it when games go back on. And if you look at some of the games that we've had on numerous times, right, It's almost everything, almost everything. It's like just sort of like they have a life, they go on. At some point in time, we say it's more trouble than it's worth, but it takes a long time for it to get to that point. I think the two choppers I hear most about as far as people wanting them and then looking at what they're going for is Batman and Kiss. Like Kiss choppers are going for like $2,000 on eBay. Yeah, I've seen some crazy Batman numbers too, right? And we talk about it. I talk about it with the sales guys all the time. I was like, look at this. These people, somebody wants $5,000 for a Batman topper. That's crazy. I was like, maybe we should make some Batman toppers. Yeah, well, no kidding. No kidding. I know. Yeah. That's nuts. I want to talk about something, but I want you to distance yourself away from Stern and have a discussion as an engineer, as a pinball designer, as a pinball insider, and the person with your history. Yeah. What can we do about playfields? The guys over at Haggis come up with this polycarbonate topper that's not wood. So my question is, is there resistance from the rest of the pinball community because they don't consider that to be traditional pinball, that a ball's rolling around on something other than wood? Because it seems like there's more and more people coming out going, my shit's chipping, this is denting, I got orange peel all over the place. You know, I don't want you to tell me what's... No, no, no, I'll be honest with you. You know I always am. We'll be right back. This show is sponsored by Cointaker, distributor of brand new full-size authentic Stern pinball, Chicago gaming, raw thrills, arcade games, and much more. Also, a full line of dramatic pinball mods, LED flipper kits, speaker lights, custom laser LED toppers, playfield protectors, Valley Williams parts, pinball apparel, and much more. Get the latest releases and glam out your game room with Cointaker. Everything at your fingertips at Cointaker.com. Now, back to our program. Okay, so let's talk about the notion of polycarbonate or something else on the play field. The biggest single thing is the coefficient of friction between the ball and the plastic is different than it is between the ball and the hard coat. Now, you could take a piece of polycarbonate and hard coat it with the same material that is used to hard coat the wood, and you'd have the same coefficient of friction, in which case the ball would behave pretty much as it does. Now, you have other things you have to take care of. That polycarbonate, no matter what it is, has some thickness. And so you now need to accommodate the position of things like drop or stand-up targets or drop targets, et cetera, relative to the additional thickness, right? So you can make it work, those guys in Europe that put the plastic on the playfields, which, by the way, I think is absolutely atrocious. But, I mean, it's like we spend so much time trying to make a pinball machine feel the way it does, shoot the way it does. Right. And then these guys come and they add a sixteenth of an inch, and everybody says, oh, yeah, it's just a couple of millimeters. I know, but the position of your drop target or stand-up target or ramp flap, whatever, relative to the – you didn't move the target up, so the ball is hitting the target at a different place, different height, right? And you haven't even done anything about the coefficient of friction because nobody's coding those things. So the ball – on the plastic, the ball tends to slide as opposed to roll on certain shots. When it skips, forget about it. When it skips, it's a wild-ass ball. It's just, you know, forget about it. So that's the issue with the polycarbonate solution. I've said it a million times. I'm going to say it again. You give me the opportunity to talk about it. The single biggest thing, Russian birch, Finland birch, core material in a pinball machine play field hasn't changed. And we still use it. There's different, this guy uses nine layer, that guy uses seven layer, that guy uses 12 layer, whatever it is. But it's Finland birch or Russian birch or something very, very similar. The material selection is made because it's incredibly dense material. So when you, it's the densest plywood material around. So meaning that when you machine into it, you're not going to find voids. When you run a screw into it in some random place, you're not going to find a void. It has great, you know, great pull-out strength in terms of the fasteners. You know, it has in everyone's situation, if you're making a real pinball play field, it's got a maple top and a maple bottom that some of it gets machined away when you smooth the playfield, sand it away when you smooth the playfield after putting the inserts in it. So, you know, you reduce it, right? So maybe it starts out 60,000 of an inch. Maybe it ends up, you know, 40,000 of an inch or 30,000 of an inch, depending on how many times the board made it through the, you know. Because sometimes, do we rework boards? Yes, we rework boards. Everyone in the pinball business has reworked boards since the beginning of time, meaning that you've got a $200 green playfield and you damage it in process, you know you're going to try to save it so the overall thickness of the material by design is intended to survive a couple of reworks so that means sanding it down clean and starting over that's what that means okay so with with the with the finishing operations so when we talk about the this business of the dimples the business of the dimples is because we have gone to multiple clear coats and the clear coats have a super high gloss level, much more so than pinball playfields have ever had. So in my house, I have my old Williams Monster Bash and all my old games from back in the day. I have my new games. I can tell you that my old games have dents just like my new games have, but the dents are substantially less visible, substantially less obvious. And I'll tell you that, let's talk about orange peel. I'll tell you that some of my old Williams, my collection of old Williams games from left to right, you'd find lots of variations in the cracks on the surface, in the business of orange peel. And so in the old days, old days, I'd say the 90s, a pinball machine was primarily designed as a commercial product. It was operated on the street by operators for money. And no one paid any attention to the things that the current owner community pays attention to. Because the reality is that you're looking at a product that was designed for a commercial environment. You've taken, you've done certain things to it. Like, you know, now we're used to these super high gloss hardcoats. Who can look at a pinball machine without them, you know? So. Well, they weren't even, even back in the 90s, they weren't even built to last more than a couple of years. Right. And, you know, pre-hardcoat, it's interesting. And pre-hard coat, go to any pinball museum, you'll find lots of old pinball machines that are worn through down to the wood, right? Mm-hmm, yeah. Now, I'll tell you this. You could take a chip play field today, and while the wood will get dirty, nothing's going to happen to it. I mean, if it's a chip in the middle of the play field, it'll definitely affect your ball roll. But honestly, you must have seen, like, I've shown lots of seminars. I've shown like the life test on playfields and I've shown these black playfields from all the steel that comes off the guides right um you know right those things they'll play for for a you know I want to say forever forever is a long time but they'll play for for your lifetime that's for sure you know I think that are we looking at other materials we are we're looking at all kinds of other materials I'll say I'll say the biggest single biggest reason to look at other materials is not so much the surface finish you guys pay attention to. The single biggest reason to look at alternative materials is the warping issue. So the warping issue is a piece of wood is unpredictably affected by the moisture contents of the environment, whether it's super dry, whether it's super wet, whatever it is. And that is a bigger problem because in the winter, we throw away a lot of material. I mean a lot of material. And a lot of times you have situations where it made it through my assembly line with no problem. It made it through final test. The final test guys, they know a warp playfield from a non-warp playfield. They're not going to let a warp playfield go out. But I don't know what's happening to that game when it's in the box where it's going wherever it goes. So if a game sits in a container or it goes to a container or it sees all kinds of temperature changes in the container and it arrives at a customer and the customer says this playfield's warped, and it's like, you know, and then they say, you know, how could they ship this to me? This is unbelievable. They ship me this for a play film. It's like, dude, I guarantee you the play film was straight when it left here, right? It's like I don't have any control of what the shipping company did with moisture or temperature or airplanes or ships or whatever the hell it is that this thing traveled on to get to where you're going, you know? So alternative materials, we are absolutely looking at it, and we're looking at all kinds of stuff. Well, haven't the, like even the clear coat, like over the years, hasn't that changed where people like, and I don't know who the. Mostly it's changed. People like that are saying you can't put these kind of formaldehyde in this and that. That has affected it. But the biggest single problem is been brought in by the notion of multiple, you know, multiple hardcoats, right? Yeah. So this multiple hardcoat thing, it's interesting because it actually originated with, like, It was kind of like with the differentiation in price points and products and the notion of trying to give somebody more, a better thing. At a time when we hadn't really thought of all the different widgets, gadgets, et cetera, we say, well, you know, if one heart goes good, then two is better. And so, you know, it came from there. And then the next thing was, you know, how do you make it shinier? And so that's really the biggest thing. In terms of actually wearing through it to the point where it's going to impact gameplay, boy, that's hard to imagine. Yeah. Hard to imagine. So do you think all the orange peeling and all that that happens is basically contained within the hard coat? And it's not damaging the wood at all? Orange peel is for sure a hard coat issue. I mean, orange peel is a term that comes from the paint industry. So orange peel is essentially, yeah, orange peel has nothing to do with the quantity of the wood. The checking in the wood, which is a completely different thing, right, when you look across. And again, it's also more prevalent because the shinier the hard coat is, the more every imperfection in the surface. Below the hard coat is, you know, like the dimples and the checking. All of that stuff becomes more obvious. And again, you know, the checking, it's like it's a piece of wood. So no two of them are alike. No two of them are alike. The hard maple veneers, which go on the top and the bottom of the plywood core, I mean, it comes off a tree. You know, and not only does it come off a tree, it's like sometimes they're spliced together because, you know, there aren't a lot of trees that are, you know, that the width of a pinball playfield. So you have, you know, sometimes it's not uncommon to splice them together. Now, we have specifications that go to the vendors about how the splicing can happen, about what's acceptable on the bottom versus the top. We have specifications about the core material. We have all this stuff. And look, we've done, everybody keeps telling me the wood's softer. That's bullshit. I will show people the laboratory tests that show, you know what? We've scientifically loaded the wood. The wood's no softer. So it's like, you know, you're denting the heart. Are you denting the wood? You're denting the wood. But you're also denting 40,000s of clear coat, of super shiny clear coat, which will follow the dimple in the wood, right? That hard coat would, you know, we take a pinball. The dimple task is basically you take a 24-inch tube that is slightly larger than the diameter of a pinball and we drop a pinball down the thing, and it will dent the wood. And when it's hard coated, it will be visible. So the problem is then if you did the poly but you clear-coated it, you'd be back to square one. It's still going to dimple. No, no, well, yeah, if you dimple it that hard. No, because the substrate, the polycarbonate is pretty tough. So you may not dimple as much as you do with the wood, but you're going to have to control the dimensions. Once you have the polycarbonate laminated to the plywood, or if you don't laminate it, if you float it, you still have to machine away the equivalent thickness of the polycarbonate from the plywood substrate so that you end up with dimensionally. Look, you have things like pop bumpers are assembled from both sides of the playfield. If you don't account for that, you're not going to deal with the relative dimensions of things. So the same thing with the ball relative to the center of a drop target or a stand-up target is going to be higher. It's going to be higher than it is on the same thing with a slingshot, the same thing with anything. I mean, stuff's not designed that way. So I don't know what to say. I think that I'll tell you what. It's not bullshit. It's science. Look, the softer material will always yield. That's like basic engineering. The softer material will always yield. You have a steel ball. you have a piece of wood which is the softer material if you don't know i'll tell you right now it's the wood the wood is softer than the seal what's going to yield the wood's going to yield yes the plastic is softer than the seal what's going to yield the plastic is going to yield it doesn't it everything in the world everything in in our within within our physical universe, the harder material will always yield the softer material. It's science. It's, you know, it just, so I think, what can I tell you? I can tell you that I'm aware that you guys don't like it, and I'm doing all kinds of materials research to come up with an alternative material that might work. When you're in the world of woods, I can't afford to take you to exotic woods that are even harder than hard maple. Do those exist? They do. Guess what? The hardest woods on the planet are softer than a piece of steel. So they're going to yield anyway. They're just going to yield less. And you can't afford them. You know, you can't afford them. I'm sensitive to the notion of what we're asking you to pay for a pinball machine. So you know what I tell people? You know, we are our own customer, right? So it's like everybody in my studio that's into pinball buys with their own money, buys our pinball machines. I have a bunch. Everybody, you know, all my developers, all my designers have pinball machines. They buy them. They have to pay for them. They don't pay what you pay. They get a special price from the company because the company tries not to make money on them. So we get a deal on those. But the reality is that we're buying the pinball machines. We're playing the pinball machines. I'm playing my pinball machines. I am denting my pinball machines. I am breaking my pinball machines. I am repairing my pinball machines. I am living with my pinball machines. I hope to own my pinball machines forever. so I don't know what you know you know is it a problem that we should aspire to fix yes it's a problem we should aspire to fix but you know play your pinball machines and enjoy them that's what they're for you know Steve Ritchie says it all the time and I think I think he's right if you want your pinball machine to be perfect and and and stay the way stay that way it's it's it's just like your car if you don't want the tires to wear out leave in the garage you leave in the garage and polish it because when you drive it on the street stuff's going to hit your car a bug's going to hit your windshield the guy in front of you is going to kick up a license plate and it's going to cut your paint you're going to wear out your tires, you're going to wear out your brakes yes, you're going to wear out your pinball machine yes, I know they're expensive the bitch next to you in the Target parking lot is going to fling her door open and dent your ass yeah, that's right speaking of wood now you've got a brand new game out But wood prices have skyrocketed. Nobody seems to really know why, but you've got a lot of wood in a pinball game. Yeah, so has steel. Yeah, yeah. And so are we going to see anything reflected in the price? Maybe, maybe. But, you know, I mean, you may, but I don't, you know, I'm not entirely sure how much of that's going to get passed on. I mean, yeah, it's a problem. It's a COVID problem for sure. There's a lot of, it's the same, it's very similar to the shortage problem. In some cases, it has to do with mills shutting down. In other cases, it has to do with not only mills shutting down, but the pipeline of material that exists through dealers and distributors of those products, not basically emptying out. And then when those industries manage to start up again, they have the same problem we have where you have a backlog of orders. You're trying to fill them. I've heard the prices of a sheet of plywood have gone from like $14 to like $85. Yeah, so what are we doing? So we look at alternative materials. In some cases, you can afford to make, and I'm saying alternative materials in everything, so we look at everything, and in some cases we say, yeah, this you could make out of that, but that you could never change. If the price goes up, does that affect the bomb on a game? Of course. Because you're spending $200 more on wood now, so you've got less to play with on the play field. Yes, it does. And so, you know, I mean, we may not make that. You know, that's not the choice we may make. You know, we might, some of it we might pass on. Some of it we might, you know, make other adjustments. You know, there's, I think, yes, it affects the bomb. I mean, it's like the definitely, definitely. Okay. When are you going to come out with your sketchbook? Oh, man, that's a tough one. The book of sketchbook, you know, like now you could go two ways. You could make a book that just showed a lot of the stuff in your sketchbooks or you could do like one of those recreation things where like it looks like you're getting a sketchbook that's all like taped up and old and crappy and feel like a reproduction. You know, I'll tell you, I think it's a good idea. I'm just so busy with stuff, you know, with real life that I don't have a lot of time for stuff like that. Why don't you put it into the hands of someone who could do it for you? Maybe, could do that, maybe. Work with you, you know, not for you. You're going to have to explain a lot. No, I get it, yeah, I get it, yeah, yeah. Something to think about. It is something to think about, no doubt. All right, let's get into the Fast Franchise Five. And now the guest turns the tables on the host and fires off five questions that Franchise has to answer. In a portion of the show we like to call the Fast Franchise Five. All right. Fire away, sir. Fast Franchise Five. What did you do before you did pinball? Oh, boy. Lots of stuff. I kind of took the same route you did as far as playing like that lint roller where you pick up a little bit along the way and it brought you to where you are. I worked for a couple of screen printers as a designer, as an artist. So I had done everything from like bar mitzvah t-shirts to like shirts for the Red Wings. Here's a bit of ranchy trivia. I worked for the company that invented the tuxedo t-shirt. Wow. Wow. so if you go on ebay and you find one of those t-shirts that looks like the batman yeah yeah from 1989 i did that they won't try to get a batman license in 89 when the first movie came out and uh they said no we're all set and so they're like unless you have something unique to offer and the owner said well we do the tuxedo t-shirt so how about if we do a shirt that looks like you're wearing the costume. And they said, okay. That was their end. So I did that in a Joker shirt, yeah. Fantastic. Oh, man, I worked for a company that designed interiors for drugstores and grocery stores. So I did departmental graphics and aisle signs and cashier lights, all of that sort of stuff. I even did a stint for about six months at a tool and dye shop where I went around with this power vac and sucked out the coolant tanks on, you know, lathes and all these sort of things that were water-cooled. It was a bad, it was a dark time in my life. And it was a long time ago, but yeah, I did that. Oh, man. I worked for a hockey autograph company where my responsibility was to photograph all of the products and make them look fancy for a website, which also did auctions on NHL.com And created products, such as, like, replica tickets and different unique things that we could have players sign other than the typical hockey puck or hockey stick or jersey or whatever. So that was fun. Did that for about five years. Talk to me about the, like, the Batman work that caught our eye. Right. What all was that for? That was all freelance work. Okay. I did some Batman artwork just for the love of Batman. Okay. You know, when I had time, rarely have time to do something. I'm sure you can appreciate that. You rarely have time to do something for yourself. Right. Because you have to not only have the time, but you have to be in the mood to draw. You know, when you draw for a living, you don't want to be drawing all the time, even though that's what I'm doing. Totally get it. So I drew some Batman stuff and just it kind of floated out there. And a model kit company called me up and wanted me to design. They had just gotten a license for the TV show, the Batman TV show. and they wanted me to do paintings for each of the box lids for each of the characters. I did, like, Batman Robin, Batgirl, and all four of the major villains. So I did those. That caught the eye of Warner Brothers, who contacted me to do the Blu-ray slash DVD box for the animated movie that Adam West and Burt Ward lent their voices for. It was a Batman 66 animated movie. Yep. So I did that. And shortly after that is when I got the call from Greg Ferrer. Got it. He had seen my work on Google. That's right. Because by then it was everywhere. People weren't really doing that. There was a ton of people who loved it, but not a ton of people who were drawing stuff. So my stuff just kind of, you know, when you type 66 Batman on Google, my artwork was already at the top of the page. Got it. Just out of luck. You know, I don't know how to manipulate, you know, algorithms and all that. You know, people know how to do that stuff. I had no idea. Just out of luck, that's where it ended up. Fantastic. That's very cool. Yeah. Imagine, you never know where things are going to go, right? I worked at a menu company, too. Worked at a menu company for four years. Which brings me to my next question. Yeah. What's your favorite item over at your restaurant, Frenchettis? Frenchettis. What's your favorite menu item over at Frenchettis? Next time I'm at Frenchettis, I'm going to say the owners recommended this. The gnocchi. Gnocchi. Gnocchi. Only because you like to say it. Gnocchi. Gnocchi. Frenchettis gnocchi is spectacular. It looks more like ganucci, but it's like this little round dumpling kind of pasta thing. I kind of like the way it just kind of rolls off the tongue. Franchetti's gnocchi. Now I want some. Recommended by the owner, Cristobal. Cristobal Franchetti. Franchetti. All right, so there you go. Two down. All right, all right, all right. Who is L.A. Weir? On my email. Now, why you... Yeah. What, did you spend two minutes writing these questions? No. I know. I just, I guess I've always wondered. L.A. Weir. Okay. L.A. Weir is the initials, well, the first two initials and last name of one of my best friends, Laura Weir. Her and Greg Weir, married couple, friends of mine that I've worked for for the past eight years. Okay. They own a bunch of businesses. So, I was like doing graphic design. I see. Cupcake shop, record company. Okay. for things I'm going to buy. You can't blame me for wondering that because I get emails from L.A. Weir. Yeah, I kept it because it was just the only one, you know, because my Gmail, like that's where I set up all my eBay and Amazon and all that. So that gets bombarded with garbage like daily. And I don't want to deal with that. So I just kept the other one. So yeah, people always like, what's L.A. Weir? Yeah, inquiring minds want to know. So there you go. hi Laura. Shout out to Laura. Where did you find all those amazing Beatles widgets that you decorated your game with? Your game looks amazing by the way. It's the best looking Beatles game and I want to do that to mine. So you're going to have to send me the list of where do I buy all that crap. Okay. Well you're going to have luck in some areas. And you've got to send me a map. Oh the map. Oh yeah. I want the French Eddie way. The French Eddie style. Well French Eddie went to Amazon and eBay. And what I did was I bought two, I bought a replica McCartney bass. It's about $60. Wow. And well, cause it's big and it's nice, you know, it's probably about 10 inches long. Oh my God. And then I got a John Lennon Rickenbacker guitar. Holy smokes. You have, you have more money in that game than the game costs. I don't know. Well, yes, you know, 50, 60 bucks. I'm like, it was like a hundred bucks, I think for the two of them. The bobble heads that I just got are cake decorations that I'm pretty damn sure are reproductions because they're all over eBay. Even though nobody's saying they're reproductions. So you can pick up a set for about $30, $40. Okay. The base of them are hollow. So what I had to do was I got those super extra heavy-duty sticky tabs, two-way spongy tape tabs. Yep. Yep. And I just peeled and stick. Stack, stack, stack, stack. You got to send me like a top view picture, you know, a photo of your play field with all the stuff. And then I'll ask you like where, you know, what all that, you know, where do I go to get all that stuff if I can't find it on eBay? Well, you know, the rest of it is they're just Christmas ornaments. The record player and the little toy guitars. Have you published pictures of that to the internet or to the pinball internet? Because, I mean, it looks amazing. I put pictures of it recently, actually, on the Super Awesome Pinball Show page. Okay. But that only reaches a couple thousand people. Looks very cool. Looks very cool. Thank you. All right. So moving on, the Fancy Franchi Franchetti 5. Can we get more Fs in there? Ladies and gentlemen, the fabulous Fancy Franchetti. Ladies and gentlemen, the fancy, fabulous Franchi Franchetti 5. What is your favorite bet gadget? Ooh, from the TV show? No, from the dude that made, like, how many? 250 bat gadgets? Bat gadget editions? The drawings I had to do? Yeah. I think my favorite one. Was it 250? I forget what the number was. Oh, God. No, it wasn't that many. It was like 125. 125? 120, 125. My favorite one was the alphabet soup rearranger, where it took the noodles and told you what it was supposed to be spelling out something. There was some great stuff, man. It was like the bat thermal underwear. Yeah. Well, you know, some of that stuff was really fun because. Some of that was from the show. Yeah. This is what I did. This was my process. I went through and I drew everything they showed on the show. Yeah. Then I had to go back. I love the pills. Right? Yeah. The costumes. The costumes in the pill or whatever. But there was like the pills and like one was the bottom, you know, was like white. the bottom and the end. I think one was blue and yellow and the other was red and green. It was like Batman and Robin. So once I went through all the and drew all the gadgets they showed on the show, I then had to go back through and create gadgets that they mentioned. That's right. Because once their budget got cut, they couldn't whip out the bad boomerang retractor gear. They just mentioned, well, I'll go get it. and, you know, so I had to use that sensibility of, like, you know, how they designed things back then and then designed something else. I love your illustration style, like, really lent itself to those gadgets, right? They looked amazing, right? Like, I have somewhere, like, the proof sheet, right, with all of them, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I do. I have a – Greg got me, like, the, you know, the proof sheet where they're all laid out and everything, and it's – I said, one day I'm going to frame it. The day before I frame it, I'm going to send it to you to get a fabulous, fancy. A French city signature. A Frenchy, French city signature. You know, I can do you one better. Have you ever seen the art blades? No, I don't know that I have. I designed art blades that were just a collage of the games. Oh, I have seen those. Yes. Yes. Greg, for whatever reason, Greg was like, no, we're good with what we got. And I'm like, dude, man, these are gold. I'm telling you. He's like, no. All right. I printed them for myself. Oh, man. I just think the guy that printed yours printed some for me. I'll send you. Send me a picture. Send me a picture. I'll send you the art files. I vaguely remember. I vaguely remember. I do vaguely remember Greg showing something to me about this. But I don't. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, that would be. I mean, we might buy those from you. Oh, you should. I've had so many requests. We might buy those from you. and then make them. I mean, that's crazy. I'll tell the art guys and say, hey, we can throw some cash at Fancy Pranchetti and we can make these, all right? Yeah, I got it. That's awesome, actually. That's awesome. All right, so I got, are you done? You got more? Oh, yeah. We haven't done five. Have we done five? No. I got, what'd you do before pinball? Where'd you find all those cool Beatles things? Who is LA Weir? What's your favorite bag gadget? That's four. All right, you've got one more. I got one more. Fire away. Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, if you've joined the show a little late, we are at one of the most pivotal moments in the show where we learn something. This is a segment called the Fancy Fabulous Franchi Franchetti Five. Let's get that right, okay? My friend, what is your favorite Batman episode? Oh, boy. This is going to disappoint you, actually. Oh, boy. Well, I have two that I can't pick from. Can I have two? All right. You can have two. One has got to be Surf's Up, Joker's Down, Batman and Joker having a surf off. I mean, come on. You're right. So there's that one. Oh, man. But another one I love. Do you think they had jumped the shark by that point? I think they must have. That shark had jumped long before that. I think so. What's funny is that when the show was on, you know, I was like, whatever, 10 years old, right? Yeah. And we didn't have the opportunities we have now where you can watch something anytime, right? Right. So it was literally a thing where I had to do my homework or my mother wouldn't let me watch the show. And sometimes, for whatever reason, whether there was a family thing going on or I didn't get my homework done or whatever, I had scouts that night or whatever it was, I didn't get to see the show. And it was a horrible thing because the next day at school, all the kids are talking about the show. Right. So you're like, you know, you totally missed the show. you can't see the show you can't stream it like you can now you can't even you can't even there's no you know reruns what the hell you mean they didn't show up for years right right right so there's no home video no home video right there are episodes which i've never seen you know i've never seen i was like i like like you know i i think i saw most of them but there are episodes and so you're telling me now that i should remember that he whipped out the can of bad shark repellent i don't remember that why did you i can't believe you didn't buy the blu-ray set i have a blu-ray set i have it i just haven't it's like and we went uh lineman and i went through a lot of the blu-rays um and and he was anal about you know he went through like everything putting stuff in i didn't i went through some of them i was like yeah and it's like no who's got time to watch this stuff again right right yeah it was a commitment to get through it all it was a commitment it is definitely a commitment so my second episode or i should say second but tied with first is the black widow episode oh yeah when they get stuck to the big web and those little spiders are crawling up for sure it's like right out of that's not right out of james you know james bond had that tarantula yeah yeah right yeah so yeah somebody picked up on that and said okay we're gonna have them in the web and there's spiders crawling towards them And the henchmen, like the henchmen all had names of spiders in the crib. The rat man. Yeah, remember? The guy that had trapdoor on his shirt actually came out of a little trapdoor on his hands and knees. Right. Right. So that, you know, just the way they drove the motorcycle up into that part of the house and it flipped open and they went down the stairs. Those are my two favorite episodes, I gotta say. All right. All right. Well, now the world knows. Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for listening to the fabulous, fancy, Frenchy French Eddie 5. Great. Nice job. All right. Hi, my brother. I hope you have much success with this. I can't imagine who wants to listen to me dribble on for two hours. You better go to like 16 episodes. Yeah, we started 4.30 to 8.30. That's four hours. Holy smokes. Oh, man. so I appreciate you taking the time alright man, take it easy George adios, bye well that's going to do it for the very first episode of Franchise Fireside Chat very special thanks goes out to my pal Mr. George Gomez, we had a hell of a lot of fun and we hope you did too, if you'd like to email us you can reach us at superawesomepinball at gmail.com and stick around the Super Awesome Pinball Facebook page because we've got a brand new show coming up the exciting in-depth game reveal of Star Wars Mandalorian Pinball Machine by Stern, featuring the triumphant return of my buddy Dr. Pin, Kristen Lein, and the creative team behind the Mandalorian Pin at Stern. Stay tuned for that, and we will see you guys in the pop bumpers. The original content of this show is copyright 2021 As Hat Radio Productions. Proud to be Canada Free. What are you going to pick on me? I didn't do anything. I didn't do anything but win four Twippies. Twippy, Twippy, Twippy.