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Eric Meunier

Pintastic New England·video·55m 4s·analyzed·Jul 14, 2019
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.031

TL;DR

JJP designer Eric Meunier recounts Pirates of the Caribbean design journey from whitewood to production.

Summary

Eric Meunier, electrical engineer and game designer at Jersey Jack Pinball, discusses his journey from a family arcade route operation (Kingpin Games) in Wisconsin to designing Pirates of the Caribbean. He details the iterative whitewood design process, mechanical innovations (upper playfield, ship mech, compass system), licensing challenges with Disney (actor approvals, alcohol/violence restrictions), and his philosophy of designing games with serviceability in mind.

Key Claims

  • Eric Meunier's family started Kingpin Games in 1991/1992 after his parents bought a resort on Lake Wisconsin and began operating arcade machines

    high confidence · Eric Meunier speaking directly about his family history at the start of the interview

  • Eric started soldering and repairing games at age 7, working on Harry Williams arcade games

    high confidence · Eric Meunier describing his childhood work experience

  • Eric earned an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and a master's degree in mechanical engineering from University of Wisconsin Madison

    high confidence · Eric Meunier detailing his educational background

  • Eric joined Jersey Jack Pinball in 2013 as an electrical engineer to fix lighting issues on Wizard of Oz

    high confidence · Eric Meunier describing his first assignment at JJP

  • Pirates of the Caribbean has 63 coils, matching the Gottlieb EM era standard maximum

    high confidence · Eric Meunier stating this specific number during design discussion

  • Disney required approval from all 22 actors featured in Pirates for hand-painted artwork on the backglass

    high confidence · Eric Meunier explaining licensing approval process with Disney

  • Disney prohibited alcohol references and violent imagery (fists up), but approved weapons and treasure imagery instead

    high confidence · Eric Meunier describing specific Disney content restrictions and his negotiations

  • The upper playfield on Pirates is exactly 4.2 inches in height, a measurement Eric recalls calculating repeatedly

    high confidence · Eric Meunier discussing design constraints on the upper playfield

  • Eric originally had 14+ unique sculptures planned but was told to stop due to budget constraints (already hundreds of thousands over)

    high confidence · Eric Meunier explaining why the captain's wheel was cut from the game

Notable Quotes

  • “I was adamant that by the time I turned 18, because I had worked with my father, who was a workaholic, that I would never be in the industry again. I was done with the arcade industry.”

    Eric Meunier@ 2:45 — Shows his initial resistance to the arcade industry despite growing up in it, making his eventual return to pinball design more impactful

  • “I have been the guy at the arcade, at the bar, at 10 o'clock on a Friday night, and I don't have my tools and I only have a Phillips screwdriver, and why the hell did this designer put this thing under here?”

    Eric Meunier@ 5:17 — Articulates his design philosophy informed by real-world operator experience—serviceability is paramount

  • “I didn't have a half million dollar budget for just Johnny Depp, so we had to tweak the game and change the game in a different way to play.”

    Eric Meunier@ 18:45 — Reveals the significant cost of actor licensing and how it directly impacted game design decisions

  • “Guns and swords, okay. Rum and fists, bad. Yes, yes. That is per Mr. Mickey Mouse himself.”

    Eric Meunier@ 32:12 — Highlights the absurd nature of some Disney licensing restrictions—weapons approved, alcohol/violence references banned

  • “This is why I'm not an artist. This is why I'm a mechanical engineer and electrical engineer.”

    Eric Meunier@ 24:26 — Self-aware humor about his design strengths and limitations

  • “I design the different mechs to go in the game first, and then put the shots around those to make the shots work around the cool new toys.”

Entities

Eric MeunierpersonJersey Jack PinballcompanyPirates of the CaribbeangameKingpin GamescompanyWizard of OzgameThe HobbitgameJack Dangerperson

Signals

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Eric emphasizes designing for field serviceability based on his operator background, prioritizing ease of maintenance over manufacturing simplicity

    high · Repeated discussion of removable ship mechanism, accessible flipper adjustment, and clearance considerations for technician access

  • ?

    design_innovation: The apron compass system uses adaptive AI to learn player behavior and point to statistically optimal shots, described as a software milestone

    high · Eric details how programmer JT developed algorithm to analyze multiball qualification patterns and weight extra balls; compass learns during gameplay

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Disney imposed strict restrictions on violence (fists-up stance rejected), alcohol references (rum bottles), and required individual actor approvals for 22 cast members

    high · Detailed examples of rejected content (fists-up Tortuga, alcohol references), approved alternatives (blade-drawing pose, guns/treasures), and $100k Johnny Depp licensing quote

  • ?

    manufacturing_signal: Jersey Jack Pinball has in-house CNC robot, 3D printer, and fabrication shop allowing rapid iteration on whitewoods and molds without waiting for vendor turnaround

    high · Eric describes cutting playfields on robot, fabricating metal parts by hand, 3D printing test pieces, creating ramp molds (15-hour cut time) to test fit before vendor production

  • ?

    design_innovation: Pirates features a mini upper playfield with dual flippers and 4.2-inch clearance; tight mechanical constraints drove precision requirements

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.165

0:00
Eric Meyers here to talk about his journey into the industry and what he's been working on without revealing anything about future titles as we usually expect. And Eric, I'd like to start out with a little bit of your history because I'm interested that from the first time I saw you talk at Pinball Expo, I guess it was, you were talking about how you were born into the business and you were running a route. So in the operator position there, you had our case. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? Yeah. So when I was three years old, my parents retired and bought a resort on Lake Wisconsin. My dad had been a mechanic, owned his own auto body repair shop, owned a car lot, owned a junkyard, worked with his hands his whole life, and was ready to retire. When he was 42, he had enough money put away. So we bought this resort on Lake Wisconsin, and my dad realized that he was bored out of his mind within the first two weeks. He couldn't stand not working, not being busy. So he went into the arcade that we had on the resort, which had about 15 games in it, started tinkering around, and he's like, okay, I understand the electronics. They're very similar to a car, similar voltages, similar mechanisms in some of this stuff. I understand solar noise in there. What time frame are we talking about? That was 1991, so 1992 or so.
1:45
And he bought the games in that arcade. And then within a year, he had 100 arcades in the Wisconsin Dells. And so he started Kingpin Games when I was three years old. And I never had a babysitter. So it was always with my parents. It was a family-run business. there were five of us my mom and dad my uncle my brother and myself and since the age of as long as I can remember I was always with them always helping and there were no idle hands right like you want to go to lunch well count the coins faster and we can go to lunch you know so I was counting coins and I was repairing games I think the first time I started soldering was when I was seven I was doing board repair on Williams games and and arcades so it was something that I've been doing since I was a wee lad I was adamant that by the time I turned 18 because I had worked with my father who was a workaholic that I would never be in the industry again I was done with the arcade industry I had put in too many 18-hour days. There are no child labor laws in the state of Wisconsin when it comes to your own child due to our... it's a farming state, right? So that's where the law sits, that's what the law that was used. So I'm like, okay, I'm done. I'm not doing arcade ever again. I went to school at the University of Wisconsin Madison. I got an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and continued to get a master's degree in mechanical engineering. And I still enjoyed pinball. I still enjoyed spending time with my family who were still in the business. They were still doing Kingpin games as a route operation. And we went to Midwest Gaming Classic in 2011 where Jack launched his company. He said he was bringing pinball back. He was doing this brand new pinball machine that's never been done before, all the bells and whistles, everything, and he sold me. So I gave Jack my resume and said, I think I could be a good fit at this new company.

  • The apron display compass system took programmer JT multiple sessions to develop the AI algorithm for choosing the most valuable shot

    high confidence · Eric Meunier describing the complexity and iterative development of the compass feature

    • Eric Meunier@ 12:06 — Explains his mech-first design approach, differentiating his process from some traditional game design methods

  • “So I hand painted it. Had my artist hand paint all the different actors' faces. And they said, 'Do you have any idea how much work this is going to be for us?'”

    Eric Meunier@ 28:09 — Shows willingness to push back on licensing requirements to achieve visual quality goals

  • “I have 22, I think, playfields on my wall in my office. So I try to surround myself with all sorts of different designers, people who have paved the road and done some really good stuff.”

    Eric Meunier@ 34:39 — Demonstrates his respect for pinball design history and ongoing inspiration from classic designers

    • Matt Reeser
    person
    Dave Linkperson
    Disneycompany
    JTperson
    Keithperson
    Joeperson
    Raymond Katzperson
    Gottliebcompany
    University of Wisconsin Madisonorganization
    Midwest Gaming Classicevent
    Pinball Expoevent
    Junkyardgame
    Williamscompany
    Bride of Pinbotgame
    Space Invadersgame
    Ted Estesperson
    The Mod Coupleperson

    high · Eric recounts calculating 4.2-inch height repeatedly, mounting flipper coils at 90-degree angle to avoid ball strikes, designing for rocking playfield motion

  • ?

    product_concern: Pirates of the Caribbean exceeded sculpture budget by hundreds of thousands of dollars, forcing cancellation of planned captain's wheel mechanism

    high · Eric states he was told to stop making sculptures after 14 unique ones, noting budget exceeded by 'hundreds of thousands of dollars'

  • ?

    design_innovation: Eric's design process prioritizes innovative toys and mechanisms first, then designs shots to work around them (inverted from some traditional methods)

    high · Explicit statement: 'I design the different mechs to go in the game first, and then put the shots around those'; examples with louie toy, treasure chest lock, fork mechanism

  • ?

    technology_signal: Modern JJP games approaching hardware limits in RAM usage for video processing due to 27-inch monitor and auxiliary screens, replacing older constraints (bit counting, coil limits)

    medium · Eric compares modern constraints to WPC-era limitations; notes games like Dialed not filling hard drive but taxing RAM for video work on multiple displays

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Jack Danger recruited Eric Meunier at Midwest Gaming Classic 2011 after seeing his resort operator background and technical skills

    high · Eric describes attending event in 2011, offering resume to Jack, being hired in 2013 just as Wizard of Oz was shipping

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Eric displays 22 playfields in his office from legendary designers to maintain inspiration and respect for pinball design heritage

    high · Eric specifically collects Space Invaders and Bride of Pinbot (childhood favorites), displays playfields from other designers on office wall

  • ?

    design_innovation: Pirates features a moving ship-in-bottle topper inspired by movie scenes, created by hand-modifying a model pirate ship using bandsaw

    high · Eric describes finding figurine, cutting it down, creating molds (15-hour CNC cut), hand-painting, testing iterations

  • ?

    community_signal: Disney restrictions on alcohol/violence references led aftermarket modders (The Mod Couple) to create rum bottle modifications, showing community appetite for circumventing licensing constraints

    medium · Eric notes The Mod Couple 'I'm sure came out with it and put it on there. It looks good' regarding rum bottles

    • 4:01
    And I started working for Jack in 2013. I was brought on as an electrical engineer right when Waz was about to start shipping. And it was my job to fix the lights.
    4:17
    So that was fun. There was no one else in the company who did electronics. It was just me, kid, fresh out of school, no mentor, no anything. Like, hey, multi-million dollar company, no pressure, but fix that.
    4:30
    So long story short, that was my first assignment. And then continuing to evolve the electronics at JJP, I redesigned the lighting platform, going forward into Hobbit, and then dialed in, and then was given a shot to start doing game design for our fourth game. Now in that period leading up to when you had the design assignment, are there any bragging rights you have where your background fixing games and working in the street side of it informed what you did? Are there innovations that are there because of your background? Absolutely. One of the big things that I always try to do is make the game serviceable. I have been the guy at the arcade, at the bar, at 10 o'clock on a Friday night and I don't have my flashlight and I only have a Phillips screwdriver and why the hell did this designer put this thing under here I can't get to it. So that goes through my head when I design and I wanted to make things serviceable. I wanted to make it so that people could take things apart. So one of the big influences on the ship, the upper playfield on Pirates, is that I wanted it to be removable easily. So you can undo one screw behind the ship, pull out a cotter pin that attaches the motor, of course you have to undo all the electrical connections underneath, then you grab the ship, slide it backwards, and pull it off. And it comes off. So it was something that I had to fight with my mechanical engineer a lot. It'd be a lot easier if we could just do it this way. I know it would, but it'd be a lot harder to service in the field. So let's do it this way and we we worked it out. Okay and so you got your shot at designing and what let me let me start with for those of us who have seen the presentations from the old Williams Valley people they would talk about well we get a team together and we sit around with the big white pads and we write down every week like if it's a movie theme we think of all the stuff in the movie that we want to put in and we think of this particular thing in the movie could become this kind of a gadget so here's a mechanical guy would certainly take to that. Is that the process nowadays at JJP? More or less, but on a much smaller scale. So for Pirates, most of the design concept was just me in my office with a whiteboard and I would talk about my ideas with Keith or with Joe Katz and shoot ideas off of them, but for the most part it was me coming up with the concepts and then you know Keith would walk in and say I see you have a really cool rocking playfield why don't you put cannon on it like you can't put a kit oh yes yes we can so a lot of the stuff was done on a much smaller team for example like in the design process and the design phase didn't have mechanical engineers or electrical engineers on board talking it was basically me and the software team going through the different rules and watching the movies over and over again and in some of my pictures you'll see a couple of my whiteboards that are eight foot by six foot whiteboards that are completely full of all the different characters and props and scenes and everything there is to know about those movies. Yeah another thing I think is different is in the 90s or the late 80s when the modern sense of design teams was emerging I think that you have to have a software guy on a design team is the real first and foremost that one of the changes they would have that stage of okay we filled all these square feet of white paper with ideas now to make one game we have to take like a one-third of this and throw away the rest and with pirates it doesn't seem like that's the case maybe you threw away like one or two or you have a lot going on there there's absolutely a lot in the game there's not everything we want in the game i mean that's just part of the design right there's always stuff that gets left on the cutting room floor but with modern games having a computer, you know, we don't have to worry about individual bits. Like Ted Estes, who I work with, was telling me back in the WPC days he would have to worry about how many bits he was writing and actually do bit counting and you only have so much RAM that you can use, whereas now we have, you know, a 64 gigabyte hard drive. And it's gotten close actually with games like Dialed then not necessarily the hard drive filling up, but the amount of RAM we use in the video processing because we have so much video work in the 27 inch monitor and the auxiliary screens that we have.
    9:48
    That's starting to be where we're running into the hardware tolerances that we can use. Yeah, another, if you go back beyond that, there was you know power like they were counting coils total number of coils and lamps doing that I mean I'm counting counting but it's not stopping me from putting more in yeah there are 63 coils in the game that's the number and the The Gottlieb number was no more than 63 coils in the game.
    10:32
    Of course, that was the EM, so you made all those relay coils. Right, right. But as far as the lights go, I mean, there's, of course, things to consider, but we don't have a lamp matrix like the old days where we could only have 64 lamps or 63 lamps.
    10:50
    So it's something that is looked at, but it's not a design restraint these days. on our platform. Alright, now you have some slides here? Yeah, I have a bunch of pictures actually to go through on the making of. Let me see here, let me slide up.
    11:16
    My office for several weeks going through the different movies that were available. At that time, Pirates 5, Dead Men Tell No Tales hadn't yet come out.
    11:27
    And I wasn't able to see it until just a couple weeks before it came out. They really clamped down on it. But they did give me a self-destructing script. I'm not kidding. They said, Inspector Gadget, you get this for three days, and then it automatically deletes off your hard drive. Okay, cool. So I read the script and took a whole bunch of notes and went through the different scenes of the movie and tried to incorporate something big from each movie. When I'm designing a game, one of the things that I enjoy when I play pinball are the new and innovative mechanisms and toys. So I design the different mechs to go in the game first, and then put the shots around those to make the shots work around the cool new toys. So I started with the design of the upper playfield. I know I wanted an upper playfield that had two flippers. I was going to rock back and forth. So the design restraints there were the footprint. You need a gap between the flippers that's just so big, and you need the mechanisms that actually are the flipper bases. So that playfield literally cannot be any smaller, otherwise it physically wouldn't work with mini flippers. So building it out from there, how it goes, and then all the different mechanisms that hooked up to it and things like that. The toy came first, and then I made the shots work, like the loop underneath it and the big orbit around the outside.
    12:53
    those came next. So the fired upon ship and stuff was over on another shot and the treasure chest, I really wanted a physical ball locks that go right up the middle. And again, that's my design process starting with the big toys and then making the shots work around it. So we can see the iterations as I went through here. So now I've got pictures. There's me approximately three years ago with the first white wood I cut of pirates. So now we're gonna go through a whole bunch of pictures. These are in no particular order but I'll try to give a couple comments on each of them. So the The Whitewood design process I have a shop in our facility in Chicago where I can cut a play field on a robot that I program and then I fabricate by hand all the different metal parts So these are all hand-fabricated flat rails that I made myself, that I welded, put together, get the game built up on a rotisserie, I wired it myself, and then got the thing starting to work. This is my very first attempt at making a plastic ramp. So cutting it and then using a special form of really nasty chemicals that make your face bleed if you don't use them right to melt the edges of the ramp together and hold them. And that's the very first maelstrom ramp that I put on my whitewood.
    14:31
    Can't have enough clamps. What kind of plastic is that? That is some PETG for the first mock-ups. So that, again, I always look at old games for inspiration, and the fork mech, I was playing Junkyard, and I saw the dog mech. I'm like, all right, I've got to use that, because I want a shot through the middle, but I also want to lock a ball up into the back of the treasure chest. So I looked at the fork mech and pulled a little wolverine scene here and
    15:09
    That's how we came up with getting the treasure chest to work. This is my first Wire form so again made it all by hand welded the copper together Soldered the copper together to make it work built some molds to hold it. Oh
    15:25
    There's my son This was right at Expo time 2017 when we launched the IELT in So there's the first white wood, got it shooting, got it playing. You can see there's a lot of work. You can start to see what's over there. Still very rough, but kind of the big concepts. And now this is where other people start to come and look at the game and say, you know, let's see this picture. Are you crazy trying to have a wire form go up and over your upper play field? That's insane. you know our vendors can't make something that precise well I made it in the back come on clearly I can do it they could do it right but so things you know other people start to comment I'm not in my own bubble anymore designing get input input from other people that have been in the industry for a while that know games that know vendors that know how things get made so we refine the process and and keep refining the process
    16:27
    So I got some of my whiteboards with comments on there from all the different movies, the different scenes, the different characters. Again, this is a massive whiteboard behind my desk.
    16:39
    Different parts. This is the scoop that feeds onto the upper playfield. There's so much that you have to consider when designing a game, making sure that the ball has clearance, making sure there's tolerance built in for the different parts. Not every vendor is going to make every part exactly the same and exactly to spec, so we need to have a little bit of tolerance acceptance in there. There we go, there's a good one. This is why, so I think personally, I think that's a pretty good piece of art, but there's a reason why I can do mechanics and electronics and I can program a little bit, I absolutely can't do art. So that's my first pirate there. Lots of concepts for toys, you know drawing stuff on the white board always helps. There's the first concept for wizard modes and how they're gonna come together and how they're gonna be programmed in. We also have the first concept for like the star map and how we're gonna do the displays. There is when I had the inspiration for making one of the hardest shots in pinball, the extra ball shot on pirates. Like yeah I've got one shot through the pop bumpers for the right orbit, maybe I can make another one for the extra ball, which turned out to be pretty fun. High risk, high reward. Starting to do labeling of the different inserts, what I think all their names should be, and again this one of the parts that people may know about or may not know about is how interactions with licensors work. So we have a big concept ready to go, we're gonna use these scenes, we're gonna lay out the inserts to have those scenes described, and then the licensor says, no you can't actually use Johnny Depp in the game, you can't use the scenes of him. If you'd like to, we contacted his agent and he'd like $100,000 per movie to use in your game. So I didn't have a half million dollar budget for just Johnny Depp so we had to tweak the game and change the game into different way to play. Early concepts for the triple spinning disc, the different words that we would put on there to provide the different awards which is now a digital display on the back glass. Under side of a closer to production play field, these are more inserts, starting get rules fleshed out inserts put in again all made by hand I put in the inserts pounded them in glued them in clear coat of the plate field and then just checking different shots seeing how things feel seeing how things work
    19:35
    there was the first I think I concepted and actually got it in the game the apron display having the display right there by your hands being able to see it without having to take your eyes off the flippers, something that I wanted to do. The inspiration being Jack's magical compass. I wanted there to be something that could always point the most valuable shot in the game because that's what Jack's compass does. It always points at his heart's desire. So the complexity in the programming in just that asset of the game took JT, who's one of my programmers, several sessions to work through. He would get something working, you know, and then it would just fly off the handle and go somewhere else. But now the code is in there where it will learn through the course of how you play your game what it thinks is going to be the most valuable. So if you have multiball one qualified and multiball three qualified and statistically you've been better at playing multiball three, the compass is going to point at shoot the maelstrom ramp to start multiball three because that's what's going to be the most valuable thing. Extra balls are weighted a lot heavier, you know, and extra balls work a lot more than nearly anything else in the game, so when that's qualified the compass will point over there. It's a very cool, very cool system. I think it's one of the milestones of pinball software, really. Yeah, yeah, it's a really fun little thing to do. More concepting of different features. This was the trunk in the treasure chest was originally concepted to be a wire form and then realized just how crazy complex that wire form is to make so we made it out of steel instead but one of the cool tools I have in my shop is a 3d printer so I could 3d print this thing see how it looks and then you know not want to get punched in the face by my wire vendor so I threw that out and tried something different. Looking at clearances underneath a white wood you know it seeing how much room I have that's the cannon that fires the ball across this is from underneath the black pearl basically the camera is sitting in the right orbit you can see the inner loop you can see the magnet you can see the height I have underneath the the cannon back there another just design constraint I had on that up a play field is I needed to have ample room underneath for the ball when the playfield pitches to the left and right. The exact height of that upper playfield is 4.2 inches, and I think I'll remember that my entire life because of how many times I calculated to make sure, you know, playfield thickness, mech depth, how deep the flippers go. I actually had to mount my flipper coils at 90-degree difference than what they're normally mounted at because otherwise the lugs would stick down and hit the balls. Which would cause a short circuit and blow up your game. So those are turned 90 degrees so they don't get hit by the pinball Now how how would you say the camera fills in for? Like why not why is SolidWorks unable to give you that it is it is Excuse me for the most part I design in 2d and then export it to SolidWorks for my mechanical engineers but having it you know I do the math and do the math and do the math again to make sure everything's right and then just for sanity's sake check it. So this is like you the player and former operator? Yes making sure it's there aren't ball traps making sure people can get under there and service things if they need to you know you can there's enough clearance where you unpin the motor you could flip the boat off to the right and work on something over here flip it off to the left to work on something over here. You can adjust. One of the other things that I wanted to have was being able to adjust your flipper mechs without having to take that other play field off. So I put the mechs in there so you can actually get at them with your allen from either side and by being able to pull I offered enough height in there that you could tip the play field if you pull out the cotter pin for the motor to get in there easier to adjust that way. More height checking. This is inside the magnet area, the chapter start area. There's my first mini playfield. Set and ready to go to Matt Reeser so he can start sculpting up the big pretty ship. I often times take pictures of things that I need to fix the game and this was one of the posts needed to be moved I think the one there right next to the pop-up needed to be moved you know a sixteenth of an inch because the rubber was hitting the ring
    24:20
    let's see that was my first concept for how to do the back glass how to do the treasure map again this is why I'm not an artist this is why I'm a mechanical engineer and electrical engineer but that's kind of how we wanted to do it we We wanted to have movie one off to the left, right? The boat, the black pearl, and then movie two, movie three, movie four, movie five. And we evolved to what you see over on the game, which is the treasure ship and the movies. But this was the first kind of mock-up we had in my office. Here's another cool thing that I got to make in our office with my fancy robot. I made ramp molds. So I made a ramp mold for my subway here. and I had this is not production molding by any means it's very foggy when it gets pulled but I was able to test fit things like the subway which I pulled there and then cut out with you know a bandsaw and screw it onto the game makes things a lot faster if I need to modify something if I need to change something instead of sending it out to a vendor waiting six weeks for it to come back realizing that I screwed up again then then make a new one but here I could make something literally in a matter of hours. I have all the tools there to fabricate pretty much everything I need in a white wood. Checking all sorts of different things. There was my getup for when I was machining the MDF for my ramp molds because MDF has formaldehyde in it which is not fun to breathe.
    25:59
    There we go, more whitewood action. This was me fine-tuning the inner loop shot. I spent about a week on just a piece of wood that had the flipper wired up to it and the three flat rails that make up that inner loop shot, and I kept tweaking and tweaking and tweaking until I got the shot to feel smooth and feel perfect.
    26:24
    Alright, I think this is the first shot of a lit whitewood. I take a lot of pictures for people like Matt, who doesn't work directly in our office. Matt Reese, the sculptor. He can have a concept of where things can go. This was to show Tortuga Tom, who sits there on the middle pop bumper. He doesn't have a lot of room. He can't have his arms out like this, because then he'll run into the wire form. I'll show you a picture of how he originally looked, which was with his dukes up, and then and tell you the story of why I couldn't do that.
    27:05
    So here I have some first mock-ups from the second sculptor who came in to work on the project, Dave Link, who's been doing work forever in pinball. Well known name in the industry. He really knocked these sculpts out of the park, so he did about half the game, and Matt did about half the game. So Dave gave me some foam core mock-ups of the ship of the treasure chest and then of the other ship as well We had grave concerns of going to Disney with these mock because they not quite to scale That treasure chest is not this shape. It's that color, it's that kind of art, but it's oblong, it's stretched out so that it could fit over a three-ball lock. We were very concerned because of how tight they had the reins on all of the actor stuff. You know, I had to fight for a very long time with a lot of people up the chain in order to be able to hand paint the actors. Because they said, no, we have a style guide. You will absolutely use our style guide. And if you deviate from that, you're in big trouble. Well, whatever. I'm not too worried about getting in trouble. So I hand painted it, had my artist hand paint all the different actors' faces. And they said, do you have any idea how much work this is going to be for us? We have to go to every individual actor and get approval for this entire thing. I'm like, yes, you do. that's your job. This is what makes pinball look good. I don't want to just have a Photoshop collage of poor lighting, different images put together. You know, it needs to look like a good cohesive piece of artwork. So they did, and all 22 actors that are in the game signed off on the piece of art.
    28:45
    Again, test fitting more of the sculpture design on the upper play field that the Poseidons that are in the back of the Black Pearl. Again, this is another piece where I was concerned they were going to be upset about it, but they only really seemed concerned about the actor assets. The back of the Black Pearl, actually, we took the back of it, cut it in half, and then swapped the two pieces. Normally the Black Pearl on the back is arced in the middle, but we had it arc up on the outsides because I wanted a shot for the pinball. And they said, looks great you know just don't touch Johnny Depp's face okay
    29:32
    what's the difference there we go so there's Tortuga Tom in his first iteration and Tortuga Tom has his dukes up because he's ready to brawl he's in Tortuga and Disney said no no no you cannot have a guy standing there like because he looks like he's ready to fight. And we don't condone violence.
    29:54
    Okay, you guys have watched the movies, right? Right, right. So instead, I had to change the sculpture, which is in the game over there, you can get a closer look. I don't know if I have a look of the sculpture itself on the pictures here, but the final sculpture that they approved is a guy standing there he's drawing a blade, right, and he's got six inches of the steel showing. That was approved. That didn't condone violence, but the guy with his dukes up, that condoned violence, that was a no-no in the Disney game. Right, yeah.
    30:36
    And then this was something else that I originally concepted and had in the game. I'm pretty sure some people in the aftermarket have since put it in the game but Disney again said you know no no no you can't have alcohol references in this game again have you watched the movie do you know who your main character is and the fact that he's drunk the entire time yes but it's a pinball machine it shouldn't have references to alcohol and violence okay Was there a discussion about the age demographic of pinball players versus who's allowed to see them? There absolutely was. And the people in, right, so the movies are rated PG, right? And the people in Disney, I could not convince them that this game is something that adults buy and allow their children to play if they want to. There is not a child who is going to spend $12,500 on a pinball machine and see a rum bottle and then go and drink his mom's stash. I couldn't get that through their head and wound up losing that fight. I was not able to put the rum bottles on my game, but I'm pretty sure Mod Couple, I think, came out with it and put it on there. It looks good.
    31:57
    More sculptures and test fitting of those big sculptures. So what did you put in place of the rum bottles? In the rum bottles on top of that pop bumper, there are guns and treasures.
    32:10
    So again, they approved that. So guns and swords, okay. Rum and fists, bad. Yes, yes. That is per Mr. Mickey Mouse himself.
    32:24
    Some other concepts in here that we see. How the ship is going to move when it's impacted by the ball. making sure I have clearance for the ramp and all that good stuff.
    32:36
    You can see one of the sculptures that I left on the cutting room floor was the captain's wheel here. So I originally had that covering there, but I already had 14 unique sculptures in the game, and I was told I was already over my budget by hundreds of thousands of dollars, so stop making sculptures. Okay, so I stopped.
    33:00
    Again, test fits for a sculptor who's not on site, making sure things look good and fit good. These are pictures that I used for the inspiration for coloring on the Dauntless. And just how it looks, all the different cannon ports, which you can see on the games now. Let's see here. Ah.
    33:43
    So here is the inspiration for the ship in the bottle. I found this little figurine called Pirate Ship.
    33:51
    And I really wanted to have... So watching the fourth movie and a little bit in the fifth movie, when the black pearl is stuck inside a bottle, right? And Jack's looking at it, and the ship is moving and rocking. I'm like, okay, that has to be part of the game. That has to be the topper, a moving ship inside a bottle. And how do I make that happen? So I found a model of a pirate ship and started taking it to the bandsaw. And we'll see the different iterations of that topper through some of these pictures here. That was my first test print of pre-production art for the prototype games, and I still have that play field on my wall, along with a couple others. My collection has grown since then. I have 22, I think, play fields on my wall in my office. So I try to surround myself with all sorts of different designers, people who've paved the road and done some really good stuff. First two games I ever played as a kid were Black Knight 2000 and Bride of Pinbot. We had those games in my house when I was a kid so I needed to find those play fields, put them up on my wall.
    35:06
    Let's see here. This is the mold. I think this took 15 hours to cut. This is the mold for the bottle. I'm going through it and there we go. I did a pull on it so you can see how it would turn out. Painted Tortuga Tom, there you go, withdrawing the blade. Disney signed off on that without hesitation.
    35:33
    And that one. Alright, they pushed back a little bit on this ship and I had to add some things, tweak some things on the model, get an angel in there in front for the figurehead, get a little lantern on the back, this is again for the topper, and get Jack's flag on there because they needed to have Jack's flag on top of the black pearl. I think I took a lot of these pictures so that I could submit them to Disney for final sculpture approval. That's why we have so many different angles of the Devil's Triangle. And the treasure chests, 3D printed. Lots and lots and lots of details that all had to be considered going through the game. This was on my whiteboard for I think the four weeks leading up to Expo. This is all the code that I said we need to have in the game when we reveal it. It needs to be playable, it needs to have all this stuff ready to go. Yes, at least four. Yeah, I think we wound up going there with all 22 characters. The star field. And again, this is something I said, okay, we'll have 72 individually controlled lights in the star field and let's see how it looks. And it is absolutely blinding to the player. So I had to change the plastic and change how the lights were mounted on there to make them not blinding. So the plastic is different now, it doesn't shine right in your face, and you can still see the constellations that are formed. Again, more submissions for Disney. And this is one of the surreal moments for me as a game designer growing up seeing all of the names on the play fields. And now getting to see my name and the name of my coworkers here is pretty cool. Very cool. Some assembly drawings. I don't know what that was for. Probably something that I blew up when I was wiring in the white wood. So there are 3,169 parts in Pirates of the Caribbean, and I know every one of them. And I took pictures of how they all move and interact and work with each other. Mock-up of the topper, how we got that all working. You know, again, 3D printing some stuff, test fitting, taking it to a bandsaw and changing it all, and then changing it all again. It's a very iterative process.
    38:54
    There it is, isn't she beautiful? That was the first paint job on the black pearl. and Changed that back to black and said right now this one looks too much like the the Flying Dutchman, the paint that was on it. so change those this is me testing different lighting concepts to make the playfield light up better
    39:35
    all right final sculptures in the game and then the CE Probably enough pictures. There we go. There's the last one. Won the total award. We have 15 minutes left. Maybe if you go a little long. It's all your lunch, you know, because the next seminar is at 12 o'clock. If anyone has any burning questions, if you could line up that microphone up there.
    40:22
    That is up. Yeah, so thanks for giving this. This is fantastic. I was wondering if you could share with us some thoughts about the genesis, the development and changes to the three disc spinning system. It really drew me to the game at the very beginning. I thought it was great. Yeah, it's not a sore subject at all. I might talk about it. Right.
    40:44
    That was one of the things where shooting for the moon. I wanted to put in something that had never been seen before and it was a mech that I designed with Dan Malter, my mechanical engineer. And we got down the road and we kept tweaking and changing and tweaking and we had it what we thought was working at Expo. And as we kept moving and we went to the next show and the next show we were seeing that they were deteriorating more and more over time. And I fought time and time again and I pushed and I pushed and I pushed and eventually I was told the game will not ship if that in there What do you really want Do you want the game to go out at all or do you want the game to not go out? So the decision had to be made and I believe in retrospect it was the right one because the mech wasn't reliable enough at the time. You know by the time we got to Texas the mechs were coming apart and I would rebuild them like every night after the show closed down and then you know it's not a viable part and then putting back on my operator hat am I going to be want to serving this servicing this thing every other day for these different parts that are coming apart so the decision was made that it had to be pulled out and we shipped without it so it's there's some software in there too right because I noticed I did see it at Expo that reveal and I probably Keith who said that when you see the wording on there you could make some nonsensical wording but it knows all three and will never make a nonsensical combination yes right right so the mech had six optos and it had nine RGB LEDs and three motors and like ten stabilizer pins and I mean parts list on that thing alone was like over 150 parts.
    42:53
    Right. And it worked. The software knew and the software would line up add extra ball or award three X play field and stuff like that. And the optos were in there to know when the disc was going to stop and stop it on a dime and make it work. But I guarantee I'm not the only designer who has a box full of parts that were pulled out of the game at the last minute. Most of them just don't show the game first.
    43:24
    That's a change in the industry, I guess. Any other questions before we have... Okay, one more. Yeah, I was wondering about the MDF setup for vacuforming. Is there a really decent way to smooth things out? I mean, I noticed even in your pictures there's a lot of ridging. Right. Is there a good way... I mean, I'm kind of trying to get into some vacuforming myself and I just can't get the thing smooth. Right, so there are a couple of methods that you could use. I mean, one is make it out of hardwood instead. Right, you start with MDF, cut it, make sure it's the right shape, and then you cut it out of a hardwood. The other one, which you could sand your part for hours and hours and hours, and then put lacquer on it. You keep it in spec at that point, it's almost impossible. Right, so for me it was, is the shape right and good and then I get production tooling made.
    44:25
    Alright, you wanna walk over to the game? Sure, I can try to do a, I've got a, let's start with this picture actually here, I can put this one up.
    44:36
    I was gonna do a crazy deep dive on the rules. Wow, that's completely invisible. So we've got another code update that's gonna be coming soon. I think .99 is out there right now. 1.0 is gonna happen. I've seen the Final Wizard mode. I haven't shot the Final Wizard mode, but I've seen it, it's there. But we've made some changes to some of the character stuff. And this is a list of characters, and I just wanna read off some of the tweets. Butch, is this online? Will it be online? It will be, I don't know if it is yet. But one of the things that has bothered me and the rest of the design team, and I have it on here in front of me, is that Weatherby Swan wasn't really usable in a one player game. Why would we ever play him? Because he's only for non-plundering. But we've done some stuff to him to change him so he's usable in a one player game. For example, all multi balls are gonna score 25% more as Weatherby Swan. Once per ball, you pardon the last ball to drain that would end a multi ball. So if you get down to one ball, Weatherby's Swan is gonna pardon that last ball and bring it back. So it'll restart the first multi-ball you play every ball.
    45:50
    Gold scores 100 points in bonus instead of just 25 points for each piece collected. But Weatherby cannot participate in any pirating activities at all. So no plundering and no Tortuga. So there's gives and takes for all of the players, all of the characters. Jack Sparrow we wanted to beef up a little bit so we have progressive stacked multi-ball scoring for every multi-ball you stack on to the current multi-ball you're playing get an extra 10 percent multiplier to all the scoring so you could have 50 percent more points if for everything if you're playing all six multi balls at once. For Karina Smith, who has more time all the time, she is the... she navigates by the stars, right? So her new ability is the constellation that you usually have to read from the star map is always lit for her. It's always on the shot, whereas normally you'd only see that when you shoot into the center chapter start area. Some of the other things that I had to fight for slash against, and I'll show a video as to why one of the things we did, we changed Norrington and Barbossa a little bit who kind of have similar powers, spotting if you need to make a jackpot shot as Barbossa and you hit the stand-up target next to it you're still awarded the points for the jackpots and the points for the super jackpots, but Barbossa will no longer count those super jackpots toward your wizard modes. So the main strategy there was crank up your wizard modes multipliers as Barbossa and then blow it up. And I'll have a video here that that Carl D'Angelo recorded that shows how he blew up the game by playing as Barbossa. A couple other quick ones, Norrington near misses for characters no longer add gold because I was finding that I could start Tortuga multiball all the time as Norrington because I was just flailing at shots and gold would fly everywhere because I would get spotted characters. And then Pintel and Rigetti each had some ARG Frenzy stuff to help them out because they're pirates. So Pintel, ARG Frenzy double scoring and Rigetti, ARG Frenzy is easier to start so instead of it being like the third or fourth pirate lane award now it's just available right away. Alright, so let's watch this little video of Carl who is one of the best players in the known world... blowing up my game. I think we have audio. I'll just go for this. If I hit the six or four, I do. If I don't, play from there. Once I'm in the wizard mode, it's do not betray the compass. So I pay attention to the compass and tell me which shot I need to make. It's very fast. You can fail very quickly. Okay, so we're at 4x. Not the best.
    49:14
    I have to be faster. That's the other issue here. That timer is only 30 seconds. Go, go, go, make it. Alright. So this will light my shot x.
    49:26
    What shot do I need? Oh, I can't. Sorry. Alright, got my shot x lit. So I'll go for a 6x. So I'm at a massive shot. There we go. 21 million.
    49:40
    21.6 million for one shot. Right. So he had to really play with his Pirate Lane Awards to get those all stacked together and ready to go. He had Playfield Multiplier running. He lined up his Pirate Lane Awards to start Shot Multiplier. Hit them correctly. Had his Wizard Mode running. And really had the Wizard Mode scoring cranked up because he was playing as Barbossa. that he kept getting super jackpot awards for earlier playing the movie five multi-ball and then, yeah, got it perfect. So he had 21.6 million on one shot. He had three million going into that shot. So it's, I mean, obviously he stacked it together very well and did the right things. So one of the reasons that we've nerfed Barbosa a little bit. I'm a proponent of single points, not this phony zero of multiplying everything by 10.
    50:41
    There was internal debate, I suppose, or Pat Lawler wants to multiply by 10? Well, we still have single points on all of our games. On Pirates, you can get ones and twos and things like that. It's just when you start to multiply and really blow things out. We do the real math. So he just had a really good score lined up. It was pretty cool. How much more time do we have?
    51:08
    Not much. Five to ten minutes? Five to ten minutes. Anything you want to point out specifically? No, it was more to go really deep into the game. One of the big things that I would just like to point out is your pirate lanes are extremely important. And try to use them as much as possible. If people haven't seen the rules flowchart that we have, let's see if I can bring that over.
    51:36
    Where's my mouse? There's a rules flowchart for pirates. There we go. It kinda has all the walkthroughs of how things actually work. So how to start a wizard mode, for example. You have to play all five chapters. Each movie has its own skull shot on the play field. Something I didn't know when I went into the design is there's a unique skull for each movie. So I put each skull on the play field representing the five different movie shots. You shoot a skull shot, it qualifies a chapter up in the chapter start area. You play that chapter, win, lose, or what have you, you still are awarded for completing that chapter. You do all five chapters in one movie, you've qualified that movie's multiball, played all five chapters, played the multiball, you get to play the wizard mode. Do that for all five movies, play all five wizard modes, and then you get to play Break the Curse.
    52:36
    So, there is a crazy amount of depth in the game. I mean, I know I say five chapters for each movie, but we actually have about 20 for each movie built into the game. And we randomly select five for each movie at the beginning of each game. and that's where that crazy number came from, the 3.25 sextillion different combinations of gameplay. Those chapters are randomly selected at the beginning of the game. If every person on planet Earth played Pirates 10 times a day for the next thousand years, no one will ever play the same game. And that's not even taking into account the characters. You could choose a different character, right? So multiply that by 22. What were you gonna say about the pirate lanes? Pirate lanes. there are a lot of awards in the pirate lanes. Some of the deeper stuff, and we purposefully put some of the more contrived or harder to understand rules deep into the pirate lanes because we knew casual players would not likely encounter those. So things like Liar's Dice, which is a real game. You can play Liar's Dice on your phone. It's like the fifth pirate lane award that you can earn. We did that so that we wouldn't confuse casual players. So going through, setting up your pirate lane awards, there's lots of stuff buried in there and you know I think the pirate lanes alone have more code than most normal human games so it's it's crazy it's wild yeah and we've got lots of walkthrough videos on how to play I've streamed Pirates a dozen or so times from my office with Joe and with Keith so you can look at those videos for how to play some more in-depth tutorial stuff and then we probably will yeah they're fun they're a lot of fun to do so 63 sextillion videos yeah it might take a while so anyone else have any questions for me all right well cool we will have more with the whole Jersey Jack team 6 30 p.m. here with free pizza but we can applaud Eric now