Thanks for watching! Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast. I'm your host Alan, joined in the basement studio of my co-host. It's Alex, the water boy. How you doing? I'm doing pretty good, Alan. I'm doing great, you know, especially because I get to do a coffee plug. Even though we've hit, you know, like 103% of our goal for the Colorado fundraiser, we're still raising money. Shortly, we'll be announcing what the next goal is. It's something exciting, I think. But until then, you know, your motivation for donating to the show, besides supporting great podcasts on the air like this one, getting an invite to that very exclusive Discord server where we're always chopping it up, having a good time. All the real Wedgehead heads know that the episodes are only 10% of the full Wedgehead experience. The 90% happens in that Discord. And speaking of Discord, someone that you will see regularly in there is joining us on today's episode. It's our good friend, Greg Dunlap. Greg, how are you doing? I'm good, man. That Discord's a fucking menace. It's like, if you've got to do anything during the day, good luck. Jesus. 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 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 Carl Weathers 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 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 Bally 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 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 D. Ropp would work on one game, finish it, work on another 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 Granner as the sound guy yeah we had Chris Granner doing sounds we had John Youssi doing art you know myself and louis koziarz doing software and then John Krutsch 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 P. 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 Yousi? I believe it's John Yousi. Yeah, that's an interesting one for a Stern because it's like... It's unlicensed and it's... Jon 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 inlanes. 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 backbox 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 backbox 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 Balcer, released in 2003, allegedly sold about 5,900 units, programming by Keith P. 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 Ritchie 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 Ritchie'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. nascar will make it up there eventually in 2006 we get Steve Ritchie's world poker tour which is an underrated another Keith P. Johnson game 3 000 units and stern's reported best-selling game of this decade pirates of the caribbean at an estimated 6 000 units i put in the notes this is when i started playing pinball in portland on route and i remember playing these games brand new and in 2007, Pat Lawler, without his boys this time, at Pat Lawler Designs released Family Guy to estimated sales of 2,500 units. Steve Ritchie and Lyman Sheets make Spider-Man sell 3,700 units with another 500 Spider-Man black suit LEs. Spider-Man is ranked number 39 on the all-time pin slide list, another pretty highly rated game from this DMD sort of dark age, malaise era. But then they round that out when they sell about 1,000 units of Wheel of Fortune and famously never finished the code for it. At this point, all of these were contract designs. They didn't even have Borg working there? Was he there but just kind of like helping with other shit? I believe when I talked to John Borg at Chicago Expo, he informed me that he was laid off during this time. He wasn't there during this time. Because I was like, oh, you never got laid off. And he's like, no, I got laid off twice. And I was like, oh, really? Because I thought it was like he worked at Data East all the way through. And he's like, no, I was laid off twice. like once I think during this era and then once right before but he was quickly kind of rehired back before the run of like Iron Man and Avatar and Buck Hunter Did you omit anything or is that the full consistent run from 2003 to 2007 I'm just really surprised. There's like no games in there that I actually dislike strongly. No, that's the whole run. Like even the ones that aren't great in here. I'm like, that's pretty fun games. So like World Poker Tour and stuff. That's why I put it as hope for the future, because I want to ask Greg about it. did this feel different to you than the first couple of years of Stern? Did it feel like it was all coming together? Like as you're working there or as a pinball player in the pinball community, like Stern as a company was solidifying. And most importantly, it seemed like they were finally selling some real units. I mean, during that period, it's like, it was, it's hard for us because when I worked at PLD at first, I was, you know, we worked out of Pat's office. We weren't in Stern's like offices. We worked as a group off-site. And then even later than that on Ripley's and NASCAR, I, well, on some of Ripley's and NASCAR, I worked even off, I worked from home and basically did all the work remotely. And so we weren't really in tune with what was happening at the Stern facility. And so like I don't have a lot of insight into what was going on there. And, you know, some of these production numbers surprise even me. Like I had no idea that Pirates had sold, you know, as many as six thousand units. I will say definitely that it felt like everything was getting its groove. Like pinball was stable. Right. Yeah. I mean, it it also felt definitely say that my feeling during that time is a lot like my feeling during the later years of Williams, which is like, if anything went wrong, it was going to be a really big problem. Like if they put out a game and it was a dog and it sold 500 units, then they were going to be in a really tough place. But that never happened. And so, you know, it felt like pinball was cruising around. Games were coming out. As you all say, I don't think there's a particular terrible game in this bunch. There are games that I like more and less than other games, but they're, you know, all of these games are solid and I played the hell out of all of them. And so it definitely felt like, you know, things were at least at the very least stable. And I want to talk to you about this era, because I think one name really jumps out in this era. And it's your friend's lead pinball programmer, Keith P. Johnson, who also worked at Williams and Slots with you at the same time. Or, you know, maybe not together, but you guys worked in the same department at the same time and was getting his chance to kind of spread his wings during this time period. And his work on Simpsons Pinball Party and Lord of the Rings in particular basically reinvented, I think, what the next generation of pinball would become and what we've seen since as far as like modern games and what people love about modern games with very deep rule sets, with layers of accessible and non-accessible wizard modes. It all started back then. As a pinball nerd, what was your feeling about the depth being offered by Keith during this period? I really liked it. Like when I look back at those games and, you know, we can bring World Poker Tour and High Roller Casino into this conversation as well. I thought that he was definitely bringing the sort of tournament player rules nerd into the games. And so like me and Keith first worked together at Williams on slot machines and he brought slot machine math into High Roller Casino just because he could. And he actually made a math spreadsheet with all of how the slot machine would lay out, just like we would for a real slot machine. And he was a big poker fan. We used to play poker a lot online together. And I know he was a huge Simpsons fan and a huge Lord of the Rings fan. And I think a lot of that came out in those games, because I think particularly in Simpsons and Lord of the Rings, the theme integration is really, really incredible on those games. And I thought that the rule sets that he did in particular, I really love the Lord of the Rings rule set and the way that you can pull different strategies together at different times and weird things like the Gala Multiball, where your scores are either half or 1.5x, I think it is, and stuff like that is really, really interesting. I will say that I think that one of the things that was good is that they had, because of the technology at the time, there was a limited amount of space with which to do rules. And I think famously, Keith on Simpsons Pinball Party used every single bit on every single ROM that was in that game, both the display and the code ROMs. I think that a lot of people, when they talk about art, they talk about how constraints bring creativity, right? And I think that constraint is one of the things that made Keith think about things in a way that how can we make this work and make it fit? And I think that's something that's been lost now on the modern games that we're seeing, you know, not just at Stern, but at JJP, where they have taken that where, you know, not just Keith, but other many other designers have taken the gem of an idea that started with those deep rule sets and removed the constraints. And now we're in a way in a way different place and rules and pinball, which is probably a whole different conversation. It is interesting because that's something that I've heard Gomez bring up multiple times now in different interviews and stuff of having a smaller sandbox makes you more creative or whatever. And that's part of why he wants all his new designers to start with a home pin layout. Part of why they keep some specific restrictions in place regarding like the bill of materials on all sterns. It is interesting, though, that you bring up they don't really apply that logic to the rules at all. They let people go fucking buck wild with rules now. There's nothing that seems to hold them back because if a game sells well, they seem to just continually support it until the designer is satisfied. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The programmers are. I highly suspect we're going to have more to say on this topic soon. Yeah. We will discuss this more in the future. This period of time is often derided for the art packages, like I mentioned, because this is the, you know, the Photoshop photo collages became the norm. I'm assuming this was like a cost cutting method for Gary. But what was your feeling about the switch? I'll be honest. I don't really know. So one of the things, let me get a little deep in the weeds on playfield production processes and printing processes for a second. One of the things that happened at Data East in, I think it was around Apollo 13, is that they switched from using a screened color process to a four color process. And what that means is that in a screened color process, every color that's on a playfield has its own screen and they're laid on top of each other. and each screen represents like a yellow or an orange or a green or whatever yeah and a playfield might have like eight colors on it which means you would use eight screens and they would go on in a specific order and black would always be last and that's very different than how like if you look at a magazine what they use is what's called a four color process and what that is is you've got four screens and they combine together to make an infinite number of colors and and it has to do with the way that the screens are laid out. If you look at them closely, you can see like the individual little dots and stuff like that. Around, I think, Apollo 13, Data East moved to a four-color process on their playfields. And that was cheaper for them, obviously, because screens are expensive to burn and the artwork is more expensive to create when you're doing the spot color process. But it also allowed them to do the photorealistic playfields that you see. Like if you look at like Attack from Mars versus Apollo 13, The style is very different because you can do photorealistic with a four-color process, and you cannot do it with a spot color process. I think that one of the things that happened is because they could do photorealistic processes, they did. Now, as far as the Photoshop photo collages and stuff like that, I don't have a lot of insight into how that all came together. But I will say that at PLD, we continued to do art as if we were using spot color processes. And so if you look at like Monopoly and Rollercoaster Tycoon and NASCAR, like the playfields look like old Williams playfields. They're created using the four color process, but they are but they were created with a vision as if they were done using the spot color process. And they look that way. And it was interesting because before this episode, I was looking at, like, you know, for instance, Monopoly against Austin Powers. Right. The difference is vast. Right. Yeah. I don't know if Austin Powers play field was any less effort than Monopoly's play field was to create because I don't know what the process was going on over there. But the printing process is part of that equation. I was definitely doing graphic design work in high school at this time. So I remember using Photoshop at this time. So I remember this. What I think it was is probably the automated tools that make cutting things out and stuff like that. Right. Were like I remember having to trace with a lasso tool. Sure. Images and stuff and get very granular. So it actually did take quite a bit of time back then. But what I think it was is probably it just sped up the approval process with licensors just from talking to other current day artists. And they speak to me about their frustrations with wanting to paint and wanting to illustrate things. And the licensor goes, yeah, why don't you just use the photographs we gave you? They use the photographs because, you know, that looks like the app, you know, and like yours looks a little bit different. We can run it up the ladder to them, but we don't think they're going to like it. So why don't you just use the photos? I mean, I think most pinheads at the time, one hated it. Did they? That's what I was going to ask. Greg, when you were seeing these games coming out, were you just like, God, these look like shit compared to what we were doing at PLD? You know, like I was thinking, I was looking at Lord of the Rings earlier today, and I think that play field looks really nice. It's different. It's darker. It doesn't have that pop that like when you look at like Monopoly or NASCAR have, because Those are all just like bright colors, dark black outlines around the text, you know, like very classic Williams 90s pinball style. I don't think that means it's bad. And probably for a lot of, you know, people walking up to that game, it's probably more attractive to them from a theme standpoint, like non pinball people. And, you know, I'll also say that the advantage we had is if you look at the themes that we did at PLD, we never had to deal with that kind of stuff with the licensors. You know, like you look at we never used anything that had a person's image in it because we had these very broad themes that never that never really integrated a realistic representation. You might have been gone by then or it might have been handled entirely by Stern. But what about Dale Jr., the L.E. version of NASCAR? Oh, that's a good question. I don't think anything changed except for the back glass for that. It's got a whole play field. It looks really, really bad compared to the normal NASCAR. It's upsetting. I do not remember that at all. And, you know, I had forgotten that it happened before you just reminded me. Well, the dots stayed the same, so you didn't have to worry about it. Right, sure. I think it's always interesting because it's like a lot of people just lambast this era of art entirely. And like one of my first games was the Lord of the Rings. And I didn't realize when I bought it that people like thought that game was ugly. I got it and I was like, it looks of the era. it looks like a movie poster from that era so to me i'm like that's what it should look like to be fair i think the printing quality of that era is horrendous and doesn't do it any favors that's true i had like it's low res and it's really bad i had a uniquely good play field which was funny because when i bought it the guy was like oh yeah if you ever go to sell this make sure you list it as like a no red eye play field he's like people really will like notice that there's no red bleeding into Frodo's eyes. I think also like Lord of the Rings is probably one of the better, one of the better ones. But like, look at Spider-Man, dude, it doesn't look good. World Poker Tour is not Photoshop collage. And it's, yeah. And it's arguably the worst of all of these games we just talked about. Yeah. That theme was going to be rough. World Poker Tour is particularly terrible. Yeah. I'm sorry to, we've, again, that's a tough one. I don't want to ever insult people's work, but I hope that guy was in a rush. the last thing about this kind of great run of games from 2003 to 2007 is i remember again like i i said this this is when i got into pinball so i was i was locked in i was online i was on the forums like i was talking to other pinball players like so i remember this era very well and kind of really fondly because i liked a lot of these games but i know that gary caught a lot of flack from the pinball nerds by buying toys off the shelves to put into the games back then which i personally find hilarious nowadays when the same pin side dorks that used to roast gary for doing this now rush out to stuff their games with all sorts of cornball shit either store-bought or 3d printed and i want to ask you greg was gary just a trendsetter like i mean clearly it was it was a clever way to like get some sculpts into a game where it wouldn't already have it but now with the mod community like it's hard not to see like it's crazy to to see the turnaround of public opinion on this yeah i never really thought about that but it is kind of i'm sure that the mod community would say that you know their artisan creations are much different than buying a toy off the shelf at walmart but i would disagree greg i've seen these and uh i would i would disagree i actually think uh you know buying toys from mattel was probably better a lot of the mods are just like toys from walmart but now with like a standoff hot glued to the back of them yeah but i was gonna say or a little lcd screen in them or something yep exactly this all completely checks out with what greg was talking about and gary trying to reutilize assets wherever he could oh yeah and like standardizing everything and you're like why would we make a new model of a car well that's a bad example because i'm pretty sure the car is a bespoke car on nascar but you're like why would we make a model of a car when there's a better model of a car than we'd be able to do and it's widely available we don't have to pay for tooling yeah i think gary and tooling is expensive tooling's ludicrous i have a buddy that's a materials engineer and i he's thrown numbers at me and I can't even, I don't want to quote them because it's like absolutely absurd. You're like paying like 50 grand for like a three inch by three inch mold. Yeah. If you want to make one. Yeah. It's, it's, it's just bizarre. Well, now we get into the era of the financial crisis and the recession. So we talking about 2008 to 2011 So 2008 starts off you know strong relatively the same uh as the year before right with indiana jones selling only about 2500 units but and batman dark knight selling 3500 units they re-theme family guy and sell it as shrek and only sell about 600 units the chuck cheese license you know the chuck cheese demanded those tracks uh i also heard that jersey jack had kind of demanded it as well. I think I've heard so many rumors about this. I'm a big Shrek guy, you know, obviously. Everybody knows that about me. Everybody knows I'm into Shrek. He's got the flyer in a frame on his wall in the basement studio. I've heard that Pat didn't like that his play field was only being used for an adult theme, and Greg might have insight just into Pat's personality here. But I heard that Pat didn't like that he designed a play field and it was only being used for an adult, not family-friendly theme in Family Guy, and he specifically wanted to use it for a family-friendly theme as well. Does that make sense? I don't know anything about that. Certainly, it does jibe with what I know about Pat and his attitude towards licenses and how he thought of pinball as a family activity that kids should be able to enjoy, but I can't speak to that specifically. I don't know. Okay, if that matches with this character, that's as much as I could expect to get from you, because I know you weren't involved with this, obviously. But it's just, that's an interesting one to me, because I've also heard the rumor that Jersey Jack wanted them. And I've also heard the rumor that Chuck E. Cheese wanted a Shrek pinball machine. And I've seen people say online, like, the vast majority of Shreks went to Chuck E. Cheese locations. That part I do know. Which is fucking funny. Yeah, you would always see them in a Chuck E. Cheese. And even when I was using the pinball map not long after this period, you would see Chuck E. Cheese locations while they were still around. They would have like a Shrek. If anyone's listening to this and they own a Shrek, go swab under the side rails, under the lockdown bar, and go test that. Confirm if it's Chuck E. Cheese grease. It's funny because the only Shrek I've ever seen was at Ground Control. And it's still there at Ground Control. Yeah, they released him from the basement. but also so pat's last game for for stern is csi and it sells about a thousand units he's not famously not very happy with how this game turned out but we'll we don't need to get into that too much but uh this is you know it is the financial crisis in the recession of 20 2008 so supposedly almost everyone on the create or not supposedly almost everyone on the creative teams are laid off at this time or their contracts are not extended further john borg and Lonnie D. Ropp who both worked with gary since the data east days i think were actually laid off but they they come back very early on and lyman sheets and tom copra a mechanical engineer also seemed to be the only ones working on games during this period into 2009 and 2010 because in 2009 Steve Ritchie's 24 which would have been developed the year before, sells 1,200 units. And this is considered the last fully featured game that Stern would make for a while. It's a shame they only sold 1,200 of those things because it features what my wife Megan referred to as the coolest toy of all time. With the sniper coming out of the building. Sniper popping out of the building and just kind of like jiggling around. I was dying when we saw that. Man, it's a good toy. Yeah, but 2009 was rough because they only released Steve Richards 24, sells 1,200 units. They also released a reworked version of the Sega game Space Jam, but as NBA, supposedly sold less than 300 units. They stripped like half of the game out of it. Yeah, they stripped all the cool parts out of it. I mean, it's still kind of fun because it's like so minimal for a modern game that it's like it's pretty fast and stuff. That's an interesting one to me. It's the worst Stern game. It is the worst Stern game. It's worse than South Park? Oh, to South Park to Sega. South Park to Sega. South Park with Sega. Okay, okay. Okay, but backs against the wall in the beginning of 2010. The team of John Borg, Lonnie D. Ropp, and Lyman Sheets crank out Big Buck Hunter, Iron Man, and Avatar back-to-back-to-back on very short turnarounds. They were the only team at Stern, so they had to work on it. It was, I personally enjoy all these games, and Iron Man is still my favorite Stern game of all time. It's actually even rated pretty highly on Pinside, number 58 all time. Avatar and Buckhunter are split as to their popularity amongst pinheads, but I still think it's super impressive considering the circumstances. And this just reminded me of when we did the Gottlieb System 3 era and how it was just... You kind of just marveled that they were able to get anything out. Yeah, because it was the same team over and over and over and over and over again. And they were working on like three month turnarounds, which is insane for quote unquote modern games. John Borg was just fucking working his ass off trying to finance another retro BMX or whatever he's into. But 2011, I wrote, I think it's the time secured some investors actually found this in the pinball magazine where it actually happened in 2009. So in 2009, Stern secured some investors. They come in and kind of save the company or keep the company going. So you're saying that these anonymous rich guys are the guys? They're not anonymous. These are the guys that save pinball, though? They helped come in at a bleak moment. In 2011, they made Rolling Stones, which I write yikes in this outline. Again, I'd rather play NBA than Rolling Stones, to be honest. But Borg, Lonnie, and Lyman run it back again in 2011 with Tron Legacy, which I think is another one of their best games ever, currently ranked number 38. George Gomez returned with Transformers in 2011, the same year. But more importantly, he entered his current role of Executive Vice President, Chief Creative Officer. shortly thereafter Steve Ritchie returns to make games like ACDC, Stern Trek, Game of Thrones and Greg Freres was hired to be the art director and he was able to successfully bring back hand illustrated art packages over the 2010s Stern grew into what it has become today they survived the extinction event of pinball Gary Stern and everyone else who worked in pinball truly saved pinball during these dark ages of the 2000s And I just have a couple of final thoughts and questions I wanted to ask Greg while we had him about this era. But one of the rumors I had always heard on the forums around this time, there was a lot of chatter that my favorite Stern game of all time, which was Iron Man. If they didn't sell at least a thousand units of Iron Man, that Stern would have supposedly closed down, closed down forever. What are your recollections, Greg? Does your insider access with knowledge align with that? I heard similar statements regarding Monopoly during that real early part of the decade. Are any of those true? I will say for Monopoly, I never heard anything about us having a, you know, a minimum, you know, a goal of saving the company. And if we didn't sell a certain number of games, we were all screwed. I don't have any recollection of that. That doesn't mean it wasn't happening. I'm just if it did, it didn't surface to me. And in the later years, I don't remember hearing numbers like that. But this is this is to me the real dark ages, because this is to me when people would come to me and say, hey, what do you think is going to happen with pinball? And I would say, I think we're done. And I didn't see any way out because it was very, very clear that, you know, things were very desperate. And especially when you look at that, like, you know, where you run CSI into 24 into NBA, you know, that that that like period was like I was like, these games are obvious. It felt very much like the end of Premiere, as you're saying, you know, the games are very rushed. They're throwing anything at the wall they can to stay afloat. And I thought I really thought pinball was going to be over. I was I was very, very convinced that it was going to be done. It's you know, I was reflecting on this earlier today. It's incredible that we've gotten back to where we are, given where we were at in 2008. Yeah. It's incredible that I think you basically, 10 years apart, you have the big fear in 99 is, oh, this is it. We're cooked. This is over. Williams can't make it work. Arcades are done. You know, it's done. It won't happen. And then you kind of get this sort of middle period, you know, from really good games, some really good games that even pinheads today still really like and admire. And then and then by the end of the decade, it's right back to like, oh, shit. This one had, you know, a fine, you know, like a financial crisis and a major recession in the US. So it had like an economic event tied to it. That's the sad part about pinball is that it's always being dictated by outside forces. It's not for lack of talent or passion or work. It's just like what else is going on in the world will dictate it. And a lot of businesses are like that. That's not unique to pinball, certainly. but yeah yeah i'm working water and business is always good greg the people are thirsty dude people are always thirsty for more water electricity sewer yeah always going to be a place for that air yeah i mean personally you know i i will say you know iron man is such a good fucking game it saved the company that's so that's how i choose to believe it but uh and it's still the best fucking game they've ever made really big buck hunter dude well i like i like buck hunter and i like avatar like but to me iron man like not even joking is still my favorite stern game it's not even close like every time i play that game i'm just like this is exactly what i want a pinball machine to be it's a fucking mutt dude you want to talk ugly games iron man bad again the play field's awful but it's that era glass is the worst but it's just like this just close-up of just like it's bad it's not good but it's again that's how i feel like when i look at lord of the rings i'm like this isn't that good this isn't good oh it's like it's infinitely better it's because you love lord of the rings you're a nerd i i like cool guys lord of the rings if you gave me lord of the rings and it was just like a close-up of like frodo's back and not a single other thing on the back glass i would be like that is fucking embarrassing and that's what i mean he gets the suit he's in the suit it's better than having the actors on the fucking back glass i'd rather have robert downey jr and iron man all right well and the final thing is like this is the only era of pinball where there is only one pinball manufacturer for better and for worse what do you greg think the enduring legacy of these games are this era of stern where they're the only manufacturer i think a lot of this was them trying to find their way, you know, because they had always been seen as sort of the little brother to Williams, right? We're suddenly the top dog. And I think it was a place that they weren't really used to. And they were figuring out their own, you know, sort of vision of what they wanted the company to be. And we're starting to be successful at that. And then when 2008 comes along, they're struggling to stay alive again. And I think that when we look at these games and, you know, there's a lot of games on here I don't like. And, you know, but then we get to like Tron, ACDC, and that's where, you know, at the time I was like, okay, things are maybe starting to turn around a bit. But I think that what we see is a very savvy businessman doing anything he can to keep things alive. And I don't think he, you know, again, I am one guy who had a very limited time in the industry and is friends, you know, with a lot of the people, particularly the people who worked in software at this time. And so I don't want to speak for anyone. But when I look at it, I feel like, you know, Gary at the time, if it would have been so easy for him to say, screw it and let's just walk away. Right. Because it's like we can't do this anymore. It's not going to work. And he didn't. And I think that's kind of incredible, honestly, because nobody I don't think if you if you looked at any, quote unquote, businessman who wasn't a pinball person, they would have been like, screw this, you know? Yeah. And it doesn't make sense. You're all fired. I'm getting I'm getting out while I still can. Right. I think it's a testament to Gary's dedication to pinball. And, you know, lots of people have lots of opinions about Gary. But I think that Gary loves pinball. And that's the only reason that pinball is alive today. And I think it's very hard to argue against that. Yeah, I agree. Well said, Greg. Yeah, I agree. And for everyone listening. This has been another episode. This is an episode I've wanted to do for a long time. Like I said, this is when I got into pinball. These games were brand new. I remember playing them on location around Portland. And I suggest to all the listeners out there, wherever you are, use the pinball map. Try and find some of these 2,000 sterns and go out and play them and check them out. There are some that you've probably seen, some that you've probably heard of, Some that you probably haven't, but there's a lot of really, really good games here made by very talented individuals under kind of duress in a rudderless ship in the ocean of pinball. Whereas, like, I really do think that it's not discussed enough how crazy it is that Stern is still here and making games and is making games so successfully that there's like 12 other tiny, many like little barnacles on the fucking side of the Stern whale. You know what I mean? Like, it's insane and it's really impressive. And I do think Gary needs to get more credit for it. It needs to be discussed more often because now everyone sees him and they're like, oh, I like the cute drawings that they ship the games with of Gary or like the little Easter eggs of him on the playfields. I think that's what he wants, though. Which, well, Gary's always the best game we've ever made is the game that's on the line right now. He's the ultimate salesman, which I will always respect Gary Stern for saving pinball. But for everyone listening, I want to thank Greg, our guest, once again for joining us on the show. But go out and play some pinball on location. Play some of these Stern games. And until next time, good luck. Don't suck. you