Yeah, you've got to turn notification sounds off, because otherwise it is very distracting. It's popping off lately. If you're someone like me where you've got opinions and they need to be heard, the Discord is tough, man, because I can't just like, what am I going to do? shut it down for half an hour and come back and i've missed and i'm i've missed all of the good conversation and i've you miss hearing alex say that adam's family is a six out of ten and that he doesn't get why people think it's good i think it's hilarious i've lost my ability to put my opinions out into the world which is really the whole reason that i've been put on this earth so that's what i was going to say it's it's hilarious how quickly you can like spin a conversation in there if you know the vocal opposition happens to be away from the keyboard and you're like right everybody agrees adam's family is bad right and we go we go with it and then somebody shows up 30 minutes later and like what the hell happened here what is wrong with you people this is sodom and gomorrah here dude like anyways thanks for having me welcome back greg today's episode we're going to talk about this At the time of recording in 2025, Stern Pinball is the world's largest and most popular pinball manufacturer. Their success today is admirable, with multiple competitors since joining the fray, and with many pinball fans considering their current Spike 2 run as their golden era. And for some folks, even the best era in all of pinball history. But at the turn of the century, well, they were still the world's largest and most popular pinball manufacturer. By default, yeah. with the difference being that back in 1999, WMS decided to close their pinball division, leaving Gary Stern running Sega's pinball division as the world's only pinball manufacturer into the new millennium. But Sega also desperately wanted out of the rapidly declining pinball business, and Gary successfully rounded up some investment capital and was able to purchase the Sega pinball division. He quickly rebranded it to Stern Pinball after himself and started out on the arduous path to save pinball. But he was in for an uphill battle as popularity of the game had crashed sharply in less than a decade. Arcades were closing and the home collector market of the modern era hadn't yet arrived. Operators were fleeing pinball rapidly during this time. So how would Gary weather the storm? Well, he would, of course, hire our guest on the show, Mr. Greg Dunlap, as its savior. Help come in and save pinball with him. Are you ready to talk about this era, Greg? Let's go. So I'm going to give a quick recap of Greg. He was previously, all the way back on episode 11, we covered your kind of pinball career. You started and worked at Williams in the slot department. You were working at Williams during the closure of the pinball division at this time. And then a couple years later, you ended up accepting a job offer from Pat Lawler to join PLD, which was Pat's consultant design company, Pat Lawler Design. and you worked as a dot matrix programmer on four pld games monopoly roller coaster tycoon ripley's believe it or not and nascar four bangers they are pretty good greg would say they're not but i enjoy all those games fucking lying dude technically i think it's six because there's also the grand prix uh version of nascar yep unique dots it did have unique dots because we had to change the types of cars for the f1 cars and uh also there was a redemption game in there Monopoly choo-choo something. It was a ticket spitter. Yeah, I saw that one too. Did it have a full DMD on it? Yeah. Nice. And we'll give a quick overview of another man, Gary Stern's background. You may have heard of him. He's a little less important than Greg, but, you know, we should mention the little guys here too. Every good story has a central protagonist, Greg Dunlap, our guest, and then, you know, auxiliary characters. Yeah. He was the son of Sam Stern, who was the former business partner of Harry Williams. Gary's dad, Sam, had bought the Chicago coin pinball division in the late 1970s, rebranded it as Stern Electronics, and they made some of the absolute best games of the early solid state era. Stern Electronics closed in 1985, although they stopped making pins in 1982, and Sam Stern died in 1984. So Gary briefly attempts to sell conversion kits for Old Valley and Stern pinball machines as a company he called Pinstar. Because this is right during the era of like, everything's crashing, panic. They're trying to make it, they're trying to do something cheap. Yes. So Gary made this, the famous one, of course, being Gamitron. Oh, so sick. In 1987, though, Gary partnered with Japanese video game developer Data East and created Data East Pinball. In 1994, Data East sells to another Japanese video game developer, Sega, and Gary Stern stays on board to run this company. But in 1999, and why we're going to talk about it on this episode, Sega wanted out, Gary rebranded Sega as Stern Pinball, of which it still is to this day. So we're going to start talking about this, and I labeled this as the dark age for pinball because there was a lot of uncertainty during this era. A lot of people that didn't know if pinball would make it past the year 2000, if it would be a thing that we're talking about in 2025. Yes, since the invention of pinball, this was the first time that we were down to a single manufacturer in business and things objectively never have been bleaker than this period yep things were never as perilous i guess you know yeah never in as much danger well we also had the internet at this time of which greg was on the old forums yeah so greg could go bully the people making these games well but there was there was a lot of pessimism and you can look back at those old forums and it's very interesting to read back through old internet shit is very funny i don't think those people understood that it was going to be around forever yeah they're being oh absolutely not so it's just so interesting like i always go back and it comes up a lot with like lord of the rings stuff and how negative people were about the peter jackson movies originally just funny to me sorry that's a tangent the start of the dark age here so it starts in 1999 where they switch over and first become stern until about 2002 so we're going to talk about this and the first four stern games were harley davidson in 99 striker extreme in 2000 sharky shootout in 2000 and high roller casino in 2001 those are the first four games they make which i find interesting as many of these games were unlicensed or kind of soft licensed yep which was a departure for gary and i found a bunch of numbers on pin side which was weird i don't know where they get these numbers their estimated production numbers yeah which they must have gleaned from somewhere for a while they were just straight up doing i think sequential serial numbers so you could get a pretty good idea if you could find an early in a late game you would have a ballpark okay because i believe that's how they were doing it this time as listeners of the show know, and we try to say all the time, pinball companies used to be publicly held companies, which means they used to have to release their production runs. Since this time period, pinball has always been private companies, so they do not release their sales numbers. Stern does not officially release their sales numbers, but we're going to go with what I've heard on some of these. And again, they aren't official, but the estimated runs for these games were all about 800 or less which is i'll say that i i'm not privy to those numbers but my gut tells me they're low those seem low it's gonna say i feel like i've seen more than 800 harley davidson's just by myself really i mean i don't think i i certainly don't think there are a lot of them i'm just having a hard time picturing how a company could stay in business with production numbers that's low that harley's also interesting because they did like four different art packages for it. So, might have been 800 in this first run. All these four are listed at about 800 or less. In 2001, they released three games, the first being NFL, which supposedly showed about 400 units, but who cares? Austin Powers, massive contemporary license, but underwhelming seller at, again, supposedly about 800. I can't believe these, because they're about as rare as Scenic Spooky. Yeah, that's what I kind of... And the other game, and which is what we're going to talk about here with Greg Dunlap, that Stern made in 2001 was a contract game made by Pat Lawler Design, of which Greg Dunlap was on the team. This game had a listed production of about 3,640 units, which if the other numbers are even in the ballpark of being right, and this number is in the ballpark, this would be a massive hit. Because the previous five games combined would have been an estimated production run of about 2,700. So if you guys did basically 1,000 more than that... I start believing this. these numbers are starting to check out to me and then i've they followed that up with george gomez's first contract game playboy in 2002 estimated 1400 units and the second pat lawler design game roller coaster tycoon in 2002 estimated at 1300 units but we got some questions for you greg about this early 99 to 2000 period for stern you know monopoly was the first game that you worked on and it was pat's first game for stern it was seemingly a success at that time did it feel that way for you guys as the team? I think it did. I mean, I think we set about to make a game kind of the way that Williams would have made a game. And obviously, we didn't have the resources and stuff like that. But I know that for me, I wanted us to bring a level of polish to the games that you didn't necessarily see. We had an advantage in that, like, we weren't necessarily, I won't say we weren't subject to the same timelines that Stern was. I mean, certainly, we had a deadline and we had to hit it. But a lot of people at Stern are always getting dragged into this game. Like, you know, Lonnie Ropp would work on one game, finish it, work on another game, finish it. We had a lot more leeway in from that perspective, and that gave us more ability to polish the games. And so one of the things that I did, for instance, when I started was that I really hated the fonts that they used on Stern games, on the Sega games and the Data East games, like if you've ever played one of those games and you get an extra ball or a special, there's this font and it's a serif font that goes the entire height of the screen and it flashes extra ball or special. And what it always said to me was they didn't have time to finish the effects for the game. Yeah, they're recycling assets. It's like when you buy like, it's the difference between buying a Ferrari and everything's bespoke and you go buy like a Ford GT and they're using like the door handles off of like a focus yeah and i wanted i wanted to never see that effect in a game again and so one of the things that i did was that i actually ported over all of the fonts from the williams games because they had spent a lot of time putting these fonts together and i have a background in design and photography and i knew something about typography and i knew what that brought to a level of polish and communication in the games and the fonts were very readable like fat letters and stuff like that. And so I brought all of those fonts over and we used them and then they were available for all of the games that came after us. I can't remember how many people use them and stuff like that. But like for me, that was like one of the things where it's like I wanted to make games the level of craftsmanship that they again, this isn't anything on them. They didn't have time to do it, but I wanted to bring that forward. When we first brought a monopoly over to Sega, one of the things that Lonnie said to me was he's like, it's so cool because you can tell what mode is running from the other room because they all have different music cues right and that's like another example of the kind of thing that like you know we had the time to put that level of polish into it and i think it showed and i think people responded to it like i remember when we brought chris graner as the sound guy yeah we had chris graner doing sounds we had john yousey doing art you know myself and louis koziarz doing software and then john crutch doing mechanical engineering and so it was like a williams team and i remember when we took it to the first show to premiere it and kevin martin came up to me and he said it's amazing you made a williams game at sega and i thought that was really great yeah that's a pretty big compliment and it does definitely feel like a marketed improvement from over the first like five games first five games at stern are definitely you're like they were just trying to get some shit out the door there's definitely some fun to be had in them i don't mean to be overly negative on those titles specifically but they feel like a different company than this moving forward yeah i'll say i I think High Roller Casino in particular is an underrated game. I think that was the first game that Keith Johnson did at Stern, and I think that game is actually pretty fun. Yeah, it's also got a really nice art package on it. Yeah. Is that John Yossi? I believe it's John Yossi. Yeah, that's an interesting one for a Stern because it's like... It's unlicensed and it's... John Norris' last layout until this Merlin's Arcade came out. That's an interesting game. We did a Die on this Hill episode about that for any of our listeners that haven't gone and listened to that go back because we talk about it in more detail. But we're here to talk about Greg Dunlap games, right? Yeah. Well, we're here to I want to ask you on the show because you've told me repeatedly in our private messages that and this isn't a secret, but Gary Stern was incredibly cheap, famously cheap. And you always told me that you're like, yeah, he was always so cheap. And I usually would say something to you. I was like yeah but didn he have to be Didn he have to be to survive Can you elaborate on that or what you can say on the show and what measures that Gary took to save money during this fledgling time for pinball And could you describe your initial impressions of working with Gary at that time in 2001 and how it was different from when you all when all you guys worked at Williams? And did you have health insurance in this period? I will. No, I'm sure I would say that to you in conversation that we have casually. I think that you are correct that Gary was as cheap as he had to be at the time. I will say that the one thing that I think that we mostly reacted to in working with Gary is that Gary was pushing for a level of standardization in the games as a cost cutting measure that nobody at Williams was used to. because, you know, I'm sure you've heard people talking about how at Williams, Steve Ritchie had his own way of putting parts together and he liked his, you know, set of parts and his way of drawing the bottom of a playfield. And Pat had his own way and George had his own way. And they all had their own little things that they did on playfields. Like Pat always used red flipper rubbers with white playfield rubbers. Right. And when we went to Gary and said we wanted red and white and he told us no and we were like what what the hell and he was like no all the games are using black rubbers and we were like verklempt we were like beside ourselves you know because we were used to like making the game exactly how we wanted it and gary was running a business and i think that is a real difference that actually in the now looking back i credit gary with a lot like i actually used this example. I gave a presentation at the job that I worked at several years ago about how we could benefit from standardization versus writing bespoke software all the time using Stern as an example of how they did that. And I do think it was absolutely necessary and the right choice for them, even though it kind of hurt us as, you know, people who were trying to make this thing in the exact method of our vision. It was hard to react to that at the time, but looking back, you know, and there were little things like they pulled the, they pulled the slam tilt switch out of games. And I would be like, you know, is that 25 cents a game really going to make a difference? And I think that over the, you know, 40,000 games that have been produced since then, yeah, it makes a difference. And, you know, I remember reading an article once about how United Airlines started cutting lines into six pieces instead of four on flights, and it saved them like $750,000 a year, you know. And I think that he was very tight with money, but at the same time, you're right, he had to be. And I think that a lot of the things that he did continue on to this day and were things that were really good ideas from a business standpoint. Yeah, it seems very distinctly. It's not necessarily like Gary, not necessarily being cheap. It's just the approach of like artistry in pinball in wanting to have your specific vision realized exactly how it is in your head versus just being a businessman. Well, the thing about Williams, too, and Greg can speak to this, but just as a person that works on Williams games a lot like Williams games would have different in lanes. like it would be the same shape but one would be plastic and one would be metal and then one would be like triple sec and then the the vertical up kicker mechs would all be different with different kind of plunger assemblies and you're like this shouldn't be different yeah like this is like dumb shit to be different about they were getting cute with it dude and gary just didn't want any of that bullshit no no more bullshit no more bullshit and i feel like i can just like can relate to that like having to make decisions where with wedgehead and just like having to go through covid and us starting without with not enough money in a competitive market and then just trying to be like i just want to bring pinball it's like i never have enough money to do the things i want to do right like i don't like i just don't like so it's like how can i do you know more with less i think gary stern proved it during this era and i just think it's really interesting. But that being said, Pat Lawler in his TopCast interview and subsequently since in certain Expo speeches always seemed like he had somewhat of a contentious relationship with Gary Stern. I want to know if you want to spill some tea or anything you could tell us on the show. Why do you think that was or anything that you can relay to us? God forbid, I would never speak for Pat. I actually didn't see much of it beyond what I just described. Gary was a businessman who drove a hard bargain. I remember we had a conversation once about how we wanted to all get games for the people on the design team, right? Like five people. And Gary was absolutely adamant that that would not happen. I, you know, again, and I was really disappointed. This was my first game. I wanted a game, you know, and he's like, you can, and he was like, you can buy one for cost. And, you know, I remember talking to Gary about it and him saying, look, I understand what you're saying, but you're talking about X amount of dollars that's coming off my balance sheet. And I don't have it. That was disappointing for me, but I think that if there was, I didn't see that level of contentiousness between Gary and Pat. And if it were, I would imagine it was more about the kind of stuff that we were just talking about, where it's like there was a way that Pat wanted to do things and it wasn't going to work in this new context. Yeah. It seems like Pat was sort of fundamentally at odds about the creative process of how games should be built and why and chafed at some of the uh hard decisions that it sounded like gary had to put in line i think pat was used to being a rock star you know rock star designer that got to do whatever he wanted at williams more or less and suddenly he's running into a very tight budget yeah and so it's a very different approach it's just it's funny because i mean there's been a lot of guys that want to bring that artistry i mean there's been one guy that wants to bring that artistry into pinball manufacturing and has tried a few times and uh like when you try to do that it doesn't really work that well yeah i mean i think the difference is like pat definitely knew how to like pat knew what he was doing in the he could engineer shit on his own in his garage to a certain extent when you're talking about like slam tilt switches specifically you're like how does it matter man you're like raise the price of the game by a quarter no one will give a shit you're like well we can't do that we can't do any of that and you're like okay i can see that thing about when they moved the switch to the back the power switch to the back box it was the same thing they were saving money on wire yeah and um you know it's just like stuff like that oh that shit drives me crazy too alan is one of the guys always complaining on the internet i hate it no dude i'll i don't give a shit dude i'll tag stern in a post every time i go to plug my soldering iron in i go why is the service outlet in the back box this is fucking useless well you don't it's useless back here dude you don't need a soldering iron that often on a stern yeah you don't have have a power a strip in your game come on man well i just love i love whenever i'm like i could sit here and alex has a couple spooky games and i could be like oh you know spooky has a service outlet in their game it's like that's because you need it in a spooky you don't need one in a stern you do dude the scoop switches you need it for all the scoop switch breaks that you fucking have on all the stern games those trough plugs around the tron era that that you had to like hard solder the uh the wires on there because they kept falling off yep so i believe you know all jokes aside like i do believe personally that gary stern is actually the guy who saved pinball despite that being the title of the movie based upon roger sharp what do you think when you hear that statement do you agree or disagree with it well first of all i think that over the years there have been many people who say pinball because pinball has certainly had its ups and downs over the years but you know I certainly think that, you know, as we're probably going to talk about in a bit, there was a time when I did not think that pinball was going to make it and Gary made it happen. And I think that's kind of incredible for sure. Yeah, I'm not sure looking at the way any other pinball company has been run historically that any other pinball company CEO would have. I don't think it's like, oh, if so-and-so was in Gary's position, he would have been able to do just as good. I think Gary was the right guy for the job. that's how i feel but when we spoke yeah i agree when we spoke to roger sharp he told us that um i don't need to laugh we love roger he was great on the show but he told us that he was in serious talks to buy the pinball assets from williams and carry on with some investors and he was very confident that he would have been not only able to keep pinball alive but he said to us that if he would have been given the opportunity to do so he thinks that he would have actually accelerated the resurgence that we are seeing right now. What do you think about that statement? I don't doubt it. Roger is obviously an extremely smart individual who understands pinball and understands the pinball business extremely well. I think that the problem, and you know, when you look at what happened to the assets of Williams, there are a lot of people with a lot of opinions about how, what happened and why. My feeling has always been that the ownership at Williams was not willing to sell the assets to anybody who would actually be successful with them. What they didn't want was their stockholders to see that somebody else had taken what they failed at and made it work. And so while what Roger says may well be true, I don't think that regardless of what he would have put together, it would have mattered. There's a reason he sold all that stuff to Gene Cunningham. It's because Gene Cunningham was never going to make anything of it. That's one guy's opinion. That's a good point. That's something I never really thought about, but it makes a lot of sense well roger says that in an old documentary i tilt battle to save pinball documentary he says basically he's like yeah i don't know how it would sit with them to see somebody do it take it and run with it that kind of makes sense yeah i just think it's interesting because i think i agree with like i would have loved to have seen kind of roger if he would have gone over to capcom at the time when he would have or if he would have been able to go over to Gottlieb premiere, maybe we could have seen some of him like more in charge because in our interviews with him about the 90s episodes, he always felt like he was underutilized, like he could have brought more to the whole process rather than just being, you know, like a marketing guy and a licensing guy. I think he was personally just what I know of him. It's like he had a lot of experience and a lot of knowledge that i don't think i mean he made big contributions to the hobby for sure obviously but i wish he had been given one of those roles given that opportunity well and i think he would have got brooks and dunn across the finish line most importantly if he had taken over gottlieb now we're going to get into the next kind of mini era here it's the years 2003 to 2007 kind of the hope for the future era of stern pinball and pinball in general because that are, again, the only manufacturers still. This is the period where Stern Pinball moves heavily into full Photoshop and photo collage art packages. But it is also where they make some of their best-selling and most highly regarded games of this kind of malaise era. Simpsons Pinball Party was a contract designed by Joe Balser, released in 2003, allegedly sold about 5,900 units, programming by Keith Johnson, ranks number 34 all-time on the pin side list. Steve Ritchie returns to pinball at this time. really good ranking for a dmd game yeah and from an era where everyone thinks that this era of game sucks yeah right like the general pin side and the general pinhead perception of these games is that they're not very good outside of a couple of these yeah but steve richie returns to pinball contract designs terminator 3 in 2003 with an alleged production run of 2500 units george gomez is the contract designer for lord of the rings which pin side list at 5100 units they later made another 500 or so le's this is the highest ranked game of this era sits at number 14 all time and in 2004 stern released steve richie's second game back with elvis poorly sold about 3500 units pat lawler design releases ripley's believe it or not sells 2700 units ripley's also sits inside the top 100 list at 94 and this is the highest rated game that greg worked on taking a quick break before we go to the rest of these games released during this era. Do you feel that Ripley's is the best game that you worked on, Greg? Huh, that's an interesting question. I don't, personally. I think that as an overall package, NASCAR is probably the best game, but I think that Roller Coaster has the most fun playfield to shoot. 2005 marks the release of Portland's favorite pinball machine, the Sopranos, which sells 3,500 units. All of which are now in Portland. Yeah, and they're all in Portland. Yeah, and then also in 2005, Greg and his assistants released NASCAR and sold 3,500 units or so. It's a game that I'm definitely... Alan put in the notes here, Alex still pretends he's going to buy one of these one day. I'm going to own a NASCAR. That's what you keep... You've been saying the entire time we've done this podcast, and you never... You make a move to go buy a whodunit. I've only bought like five games since we started the podcast, okay? Five games that aren't NASCAR.