That is Lion Man that that is lion man for sure yeah neither are considered great games but she is credited with sound programming on these two games and then i saw that she didn't work in pinball again for 10 years so she was gone for a decade or at least maybe she was working at companies but she was more behind the scenes she didn't get a another credit like on the creative team until 1991 where she pops up again working for data east and the first credit she has is for animation programming for checkpoint which is the first game with a dmd screen which is the game that came out a few months before gilligan's island i was gonna say wait a second the game that zoe defended on this show as her die on this hell game and then christina was on a team of programmers for data east batman and her first solo credit is on data east star trek so she was not only on a team of programmers that got co-credits she also gets a solo credit which is extraordinarily rare i believe she's the only one that has this although hopefully we'll get to it later at the end of this episode But hopefully we got some women working in different pinball companies right now. And I can't imagine that they won't end up as the lead on a project here pretty soon. But yeah, that would be great to see. So you're saying as of now, only woman to get a solo credit as far as programming goes? Yeah. And she did that on. Yeah, she did that on Data East Star Trek. She also worked on Lethal Weapon 3, Rocky and Bullwinkle and Tales from the Crypt. Data East Star Trek is like the forgotten Star Trek. I think it's overshadowed by Next Gen and Stern Trek and even the Ballet Star Trek. But that's some trippy, very 90s art. I like the art on that game. I like that game. I was playing it when I was in Indiana at Wizard's World. And I was actually kind of sessioned it for a little bit because it was playing well. You know, like sometimes you don't see a game for a while. And then when you do, it's like busted and broke. I got on that game. I was like, this is playing zippy and fast. And like, I got I got kind of into it because I was like, man, I don't ever get to see this game. Like you said, it's kind of forgotten about the forgotten about Star Trek game. And there's fun rules like programming one just to reference back to your die on the hills again. Rocky and Bullwinkle, you and Ty, I think, discussed how there's a switch on the game that like notices when you death save or something. Yeah. So that's something that had to be intentionally programmed into it. So shout out Christina, Christina D'Onofrio and team for even thinking about that. Yeah, it was very cool. Yeah, I think she did some great work. And then we're going to talk about Shelly Sachs. She started as an executive assistant for Stern Electronics Pinball, which was the company started by Gary's dad, Sam Stern, back in the late 70s. She was a day one employee also alongside Joe Kamenkow for Gary Stern when he started Data East Pinball. I think most people were listeners to the show, but I'll reiterate. Gary's dad, Sam Stern, had his own company, Stern Electronics, which is why sometimes you'll go to an arcade and you'll see an old game called, I don't know, Stars, Meteor, Nineball, Big Game. Games like that, and you'll see the name Stern. You're like, oh, I didn't realize Stern was around that long. You're like, kind of, sort of. It was actually Gary's dad, so it's still sort of a family company. And Shelly Sachs worked for that company back then. They shuttered in the early 80s, I think in 83, I believe. And then later on in the late 80s, Gary gets together some investors and creates Data East Pinball. And she was a day one employee alongside Joe Kamenkow. So when they first started Data East Pinball, it was Gary Stern, Joe Kamenkow. Joe Kamenkow was the designer. Gary Stern was like the CEO and Shelly Sachs. And she was given the J-O-A-T moniker, the JOTE, which stood for Jack of All Trades. And that was on her business card until she retired at the end of 2022. Her many roles were said to include receptionist, purchasing manager, bookkeeper, traffic director, office and personnel manager, and administrative assistant. Gary Stern said about Shelly, without Shelly, there would be no Stern Pinball. Shelly embodied our company's entrepreneurial, get-it-done spirit. More importantly, she was one of my closest and dearest friends, and I will miss her. She died of cancer six months after retiring, having fought it for many years. She worked with Gary Stern for over 40 years, and she should probably be credited as the woman that saved pinball after Williams & Valley closed in 1999, and she kept it going with Gary and Stern Pinball up until 2022. too. That's fantastic. That is an OG pinball woman right there. She did it all. To hear Gary talk about Shelly so fondly is lovely. Gary is the type of, to hear Gary Stern talk, he's a salesman. He's always selling. It's always the newest game on the line. It's the best game we've ever made. Here's what you bought. Here's what you need to buy the next thing. So to hear him sort of turn that off and get personal about Shelly, I think it speaks a lot to what she brought to the table and the respect and esteem in which she was held by Gary and everyone else that worked with her. She was supposedly the glue that held the whole company together since the Data East days. Yeah. We wouldn't have Pinball Today without her and her hard work. Gary Stern himself said it. Wonderful remembrance of her. Next up, we have Karen Tribula. She worked at Williams from the late 1980s until well after they closed the pinball division because she then transferred from pinball into slot machines when Williams dropped the Williams pinball and became WMS and got into gaming. she created and compiled every manual for every williams game and these manuals are certainly the high watermark for pinball machine manuals i included that because i appreciate it as a pinball tech when i have to fix a game i am flipping through these manuals and the documentation that williams put into their manuals at the time are second to none and karen supposedly was the one that put together each and every one of these manuals for all these games and so i owe her a great debt and she helped save me a lot of frustration and helped me fix a lot of games so important like it's one of the first things to get deprioritized speaking from my professional experience but it is so important in order to have a happy user base and so to hear you extolling a pinball company for their manuals. That just says a lot about how good Karen's work must be. She killed it. I would, again, all of these women, if anyone has any contacts to any of these women, I've been trying on my own, but now as the podcast has grown and our reach has grown, maybe someone out there is listening that can put me in touch because I would love to talk to any of these women. Karen was on my short list when I started this because I admired the work she did on the manuals like i said i use them all the time like such a nerd i know such a good testament to her to her talent that you are gushing she's the best i mean those williams manuals are the best it's like everything else i'm flipping through and i'm just frustrated by because they're not as good but then we get to elaine johnson and phyllis rosenthal basically both of these women did similar jobs but for different companies elaine managed the bill of materials at williams during the 90s which essentially means every single part and piece for every single game down to the screws and nuts and figured out the bomb or build a materials cost of each game that the company made she had an encyclopedic knowledge of parts and she even gave all the pieces their own part numbers williams when they had part numbers for different pieces of the machines elaine was the one that created all that, ran the system of organization. And Phyllis basically did a similar role for Data East and Sega and now Start. That's one of those things you don't realize you need until you find out that's a real job and that it's super important. Yeah, essentially logistics, right? Like essentially it's how do we get all these thousands, tens of thousands of unique pieces into every machine and how do we categorize it? How do we organize it? How do we account for it? How do we make sure we always have enough of it at the time? Because all it takes is one piece to not complete a pinball machine. And in manufacturing business, when the line dies, your company dies. It's very, very expensive. So these roles that Elaine Johnson and Phyllis Rosenthal filled are, I would say, maybe more important than any of these other roles that we've ever even talked about. And they're probably the least known, but I wanted to give them a shout out here because I respect, that's a hell of a job. That is an unbelievable amount of work to be responsible for. These women did it and they did it well. I think it speaks that they chose these women to fulfill one of the most important positions in the entire company. I think it just goes to show that women can do amazing work in the field and have already and can continue to in the future. Yes, absolutely. And then I want to talk about some high-profile women operators, women that operate pinball machines. When I first started playing pinball, the three high-profile women operators that I knew of was Pinball Molly, Molly Atkinson, ran a spot called Pins and Needles in L.A., and then later 82 Arcade in L.A. Yeah, Pins and Needles was legendary when I started playing pinball. I heard about it immediately and was like, oh, there are other women who play pinball. this isn't something that is totally foreign so molly is 100 no g she is the coolest i love molly i've only gotten to interact with her a few different times at a few different shows and when she comes into portland to visit i think her sister who lives in town she'll stop by wedge yeah page yeah i love pinball molly pinball molly is so fucking rad just a total badass knows how to fix games knows how to play games loves pinball takes up space doesn't take shit from anybody just a badass. Yeah, absolutely. And then there was also, we were lucky enough in Portland when I was first getting into pinball in the late 2000s and early 2010s, there was Ricochet, which was Jerry Ellsworth and Trish Hess, and they were operating pins around Portland. And I remember playing a lot of their games on location. Do you remember the Ricochet girls? Oh, absolutely. I loved hanging out with Jerry and Trish. Also into roller derby, Jerry has created, I think, like video game consoles. She's an incredibly accomplished engineer. And I remember them specifically having locations that were cool. Like they were not just your generic dive bar with pinball machines. Like they had Voodoo Donuts had pinball machines at their Voodoo 2 location. They had a pinball machine or a record shop on Mississippi or Alberta or something. Like they had the cool spots that you could go to during the day and they had a really great variety of games it was awesome to be able to exist in the same community as them they were incredible i remember playing their games at voodoo too like you said because i i had a night job where i'd have to go work in a kitchen late at night so i was always seeking out places where i could play pinball during the day and so i go into that donut shop and play a lot of their games and they were always well maintained and always had a cool lineup of games and they've moved on to bigger and better things but man they were awesome and if they ever hear this episode i just want to thank them for helping get me into pinball i appreciate it me too and i hope that the machines that you are playing now are less sticky than the ones at future that's that's what it was they were very sticky yeah yep it wasn't it wasn't the ops fault like i'm sure they had to do more work than normal just keeping things not sticky because of all the kids and all the sugar and all the frying but we appreciated having a 24 basically spot to play pinball And then we have I would like to shout out Rachel Bess owner and operator of the Electric Bat Arcade in Tempe, Arizona. She's another badass longtime arcade game and pinball operator, owns a very cool arcade in Tempe. They also have one up in Flagstaff, second location. We were fortunate enough, they asked us to be a part of their panel that we gave at Expo on how to run a successful bar and arcade and uh yeah just total badass operator she's been on the show too yeah she's been on the show i had her and her husband kale on the show and they defended simbad as their die on the hill game and we talked about their arcade so if anyone wants to hear more about them you can go back in the archives and listen to those episodes i didn't know simbad needed defending anytime you mess with the flipper zoe people hate it that's that's what you that's what I realized. I had no idea. It's an awesome game. I love that game. Are people complaining about the solid state or the EM? We didn't differentiate because that was one of those games that was made in both, right? Yeah, I guess it's just the display that's different. The layout and everything is exactly the same. Whatever. I don't think Sinbad needs defending. Rachel and Kale, you have great taste. So tell me about some of these other female owner ops that you wrote in on this list here? Oh, yeah, absolutely. So as I have spread my wings and left Portland, I have had the pleasure of finding out about other places that, would you believe it, also have pinball. And two owner-operators that I specifically was thinking of when we were putting together this episode. One is Allison O'Neill, who's one of the team who runs Port City Pinball in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. They're hosting the upcoming Women's North American Championship and Women's World Championship. She also makes mods. She does pinball mods, 3D printing, etc. You can look up Minty's Mods, like what you put in Ice-T, Minty's Mods on Pinside. And then another up-and-coming location that is woman-owned and operated is Cary Hill out in Victoria, British Columbia, has Neon Ranch Pinball. And they're giving me very Wedgehead vibes if instead of alligators, you were into cats. That's how I see them from afar. So those are two other female owner-operators that are making huge contributions to the pinball scene. I need to get up to the Neon Ranch. It's been on my list since they opened last year. I've had some regulars go up and just talk about how incredible it is. An incredible lineup of games on Victoria Island in British Columbia, and it Seems to get bigger. I mean, they seem to keep adding games. They got a huge space, and it's awesome. It looks awesome. I can't wait to go. On Instagram, there's always like, hmm, what's in this box? What's this new game? And I never see anything leave. I know, right? Yeah, got to get up there. But to end this episode, we got to talk about some of the next generation, some of these new people in the industry kind of finding seats at the table. The first one we have, Elizabeth Gieske. like a goose except multiple more than one goose all right elizabeth gieski she's software developer at stern pinball worked on games like jaws did she work on the new dungeons and dragons i thought i saw her in the room when they were announcing that game so i'm assuming she's a part of that team i loved listening to her commentary at um was it at expo in october when jaws was in the stern pro circuit or something but just hearing the level of detail that she could share about what the game is thinking about what information is being taken into consideration at every point in time it's really a different skill set that is so important to have is being able to think through all of those mechanical and computer issues that are going to clash together and she's the person that i think of that i think we're going to see her as the lead on a game soon it's i would love to see that. I think that's a very good guess to bet on. I would bet that that's what we're going to see and hopefully it's happening soon. She's clearly a pinball person, very passionate about pinball and has already worked on some awesome games there. So at some point, I imagine she'll be leading her own team and we'll get to talk about her and her accomplishments in the future. The other woman that's hired by Stern was Taylor Bancroft, who was hired as a technical producer for Insider Connected, found a little script from a press release that Stern gave in 2022 and said that Taylor is responsible for coordinating and managing developmental efforts for Insider Connected, acting as a liaison between internal and external development teams. She works closely with engineering, product management, sales, and marketing teams coordinating the development, design, and execution of the new feature request. That's a lot of words. It sounds like she does a little bit of everything for Insider Connected. Sounds like she kind of runs that? Yeah, that's basically my job, except she gets to do it for pinball, and I'm really jealous. Well, if anyone's listening, Zoe would. Oh, no, I just got a new job. I don't want to move somewhere else. But what Taylor does is so important because you have, for something like Insider Connected, you've got to think about the needs of the operator, the needs of the home owner, the needs of an arcade player, and make sure that you have features that are easy to use, that are things that people would actually want to use the app for. So I can imagine that making everyone understand all these different stakeholders that don't always have the same wants and needs is extremely difficult. And the couple of times that I've met Taylor, she has been a joy to be around. I know a lot of players get a hell of a lot of enjoyment out of Insider Connected. And I will say as an operator, I am so very grateful for the automatic code updates. you're one the shining star of insider connector i keep saying it on the show because i kind of as cool as all the other stuff is and that's great because a lot of people are super into it and they love collecting the badges and allow stern to do all this cool stuff from the very get-go man updating code when you have a bunch of machines all over town and stern drops new code updates every week or something it was a pain in the ass like and the fact that now it does it automatically i always feel like they're they always kind of like yada yada yada about it and i'm like you guys gotta take credit for i get that they think it's not exciting and maybe it's not sexy but like it's fucking cool it's awesome new code is so sexy new code is very sexy i remember when the pinball map used to have comments being like don't play this whatever it hasn't been updated since it was released like exactly to come here and play it exactly like they put all this work into updating the code but then operators wouldn't update it because also it was kind of a pain in the ass and they fix that with insider and then you have a lot of new players that get addicted to it and are always logging in it causes them to come out and play more pinball and so i love what they're doing over there with the insider connected program and taylor's a huge part of that uh we also have danny peck who is a fellow women's world champion and is working at Spooky for rules design consultant. Yeah, that's someone you absolutely want giving you input on the rules. She's incredibly knowledgeable and puts it out on the play field, so to speak. I believe she does some streaming of their games as well. I'm thankful that I didn't have to play her on Bugs Bunny in the last Women's World Championship. I lost anyway, but I would have lost more embarrassingly if we had to play a Spooky game. Yeah, for sure. And then we have Crystal Gemnich, production and development at Jersey Jack Pinball. I believe she also worked at Marco before that and Logan Arcade before that. Is that correct? That's my understanding of Crystal's lineage and legacy. Yeah, so I believe she was a tech at Logan Arcade, famous, awesome arcade in Chicago, and then was working at Marco, the biggest pinball parts supplier in the world, and then now works in production and development at Jersey Jack Pinball. Shout out to Marco for hiring a lot of great pinball women. And in addition to Crystal, you've got Kim Martinez, who's a fellow IFBA director. You've got Emoto Harney. Like, they have a good team, and it's not all just a bunch of dudes. That's true. We had the Marco folks come into Wedgehead when they were here for the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. Yeah, in October this last year. And a bunch of women on that crew, seemingly essential on their road crew, working hard, doing the Lord's work here in pinball. like making sure everyone gets fresh pinball parts for our machines that break all the time. So very important part of the industry is replacement parts. And then we have Jess DiNardo, who works production, is on the line at Barrels of Fun Pinball, working on the Labyrinth machine. She was a member of the Bells and Chimes here in Portland. Founder. Founder of the Portland Bells and Chimes, in fact. Good friend. I've known Jess for a long time. we did two episodes with Jess. She defended bad cats on the show as her die on this hill game. Good choice. Yeah, and good choice. And yeah, I hope she's doing well down there in Houston. Then we have Leah Foskey, who is the artist for Jersey Jack Pinball's newest game, Avatar. And you said she's also doing the art for the Pintastic posters, t-shirts, glasses this year. Yes, since you and Alex have raised your money, you can come buy Leah Foskey's art yourself by buying Pentastic merch when you come out here in April. Yeah, we'll be out there in April for anyone listening. We did reach our financing goals. I want to give everyone a thank you for helping fund our trip out to Pentastic. I'm excited to meet all my friends on the East Coast, all of our loyal listeners. I'm going to get one of these t-shirts with Leah Faske's art on it. And then the last one I wrote down here, I want to give a shout out. I want to give a shout out to a Lauren Gray, host of the Backbox Pinball podcast, which was a podcast solely focused on interesting interviews with women in pinball. They haven't uploaded a new episode in about two years, but they did upload regularly for about four years, and they have an impressive back catalog that has over 100 episodes that anyone interested in hearing a lot more about women in pinball should go and check out. And I suggest maybe you start with episode 21 because it features another interview with Zoe Vrabel here. If you're not tired of my voice already, listen to episode 21, Backbox Pinball Podcast, Incredible Pod. So many more women out there to cover if and when they decide that that's something they want to do in the future. I would hope so, but I will include a link in the show notes for all the listeners if you want to click on that and find your way and listen to some of those back episodes. But as you can tell by this episode, pinball's always been shaped and molded by some very talented and dedicated women working in the industry. We hope that this episode has helped to shine some much-needed light on their contributions to the history of the game. They've been vital to the growth and proliferation of pinball, but oftentimes their accomplishments go unrecognized. Besides the many big name women who I'm sure that we forgot, I'm very sorry. I tried to do my best. There are many, many more women who work in the factories, and they have for decades. Stern employs many women on the assembly line floor in very key roles to help manufacture their games. And I'm sure that the other companies do as well. They are the unsung heroes that actually build the games that we all play and enjoy. And pinball is at its best when we have the talents of women working within it. And we hope that we get to see even more women involved in prominent positions in pinball companies in the near future. Because pinball is a game for everyone. And the future growth of the hobby will need their skills and talents. We hope that this very special episode of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast, at the end of it, I want to just encourage you all to go out and play some pinball on location. Seek out some of the games that we mentioned in particular, if you can find them near you. But even if you can't find a Xenon, or a Margaret Hudson game, or a game engineered by Sylvia Bill Ryan, There are women behind the scenes who help make all of these games that you're playing possible. And next week, Zoe will be back on the show to talk about some of the history and the current state of women's competitive pinball scene. So until next time, good luck. Don't suck. Good luck on suck.