Dungeons and Dragons launched Interview with Gary Stern David Fixleaves American Pinball Hi, my name is Jonathan Houston, I'm the editor of Pinball Magazine and I'm joined by Hi, I'm Martin Eyre and I'm the editor of Pinball News And Jonathan and I are here to look back at all the exciting events that took place in the pinball world during the month of January 2025. Right. Well, we can say it must have been a rather exciting month. We had a new game released. We talked to several key figures in the pinball industry. And there's lots of other news. So let's just dive in. Yeah. Shall we? I'll start off with our first headline about, well, as we previewed in last month's Pincast, Stern Pinball launched their Dungeons & Dragons The Tyrant's Eye game. It premiered at the CES show in Las Vegas, as we predicted it would be. And then about a week later, the European premiere took place at the EAG Expo show in London. Pretty bold to tell. That's right, yeah. And we got a chance to play a pro and a premium model, which they had there on the Electrocoin stand, Electrocoin being the UK importers for some pinball games. Right. Along with that, along with those two games, they also had a John Wick, Venom, and Free Fighters, so five machines in total. But obviously a lot of the interest was on the Dungeons & Dragons game. and that's the first time that anybody there, apart from the CERN team, had actually seen it. And certainly the first time they got a chance to play it. Right. We got to play it too. Yeah. What was your thought about the game? Okay, so I'm trying to keep an open eye here, And let's assume that the game was running on software developed specifically for this show. With the intention of giving operators and distributors of pinball machines a look at the game. and not make it too difficult for them to get a good feeling about the game in the sense of being awarded a multiball without having to do hardly anything for it. Because in this game, on every game that I started, within 30 seconds, I think it's three shots to the target bank and then the right orbit, and it starts dragon multiball with like an endless ball saver dumping eight pinballs on the playfield and they keep coming and keep coming and keep coming. It's a time mode and when it ends, all balls drains, scores totalized and then your ball continues. Yes, but it's a bit weird, isn't it? It's almost like one of those special gameplay modes where you just play the multiball and that's it. It was so simple to start and it went on for so long. Right. So personally for me, the way I, and I may be very old school, I guess, but back in my day, you had to put an effort in to get to multiball. Yeah. If it's that easy, it's completely devaluated. Everybody gets it. So there's no advantage for you because the leveling playfield is completely even for everybody because everybody gets the multiball. It takes away the fun for me. Yeah, I really don't imagine the final game is going to be like that. There's obviously early code on it. But in fact we saw that there were some issues with the premium model of the game. Not at all, actually. Oh, okay. Well, I actually saw it on both then. The balls were getting stuck under the head of the dragon, because the dragon couldn't move around. Oh, I saw different issues. Oh, okay. Well, on the premium, the head would go down onto the playfield, and the balls would get stuck behind it, and the game basically got stuck at that point, because moving the dragon head was not part of the ball search. So the only way you could ever free the balls was to turn the game off and take the glass off. So that was a bit of a downer. But you saw other issues there. Well, at the end of... I arrived on the Wednesday late in the afternoon, and I noticed that one of the better tournament players in the UK, Greg Mott, I was explaining to someone at the stand, either Electrocoin or Stern, that some sensors were not picking up or detecting the ball where it should. And as a result, the game would not continue. Right. And I got the feeling that they were still looking into that on Thursday morning when I briefly attended the show to see if they could fix that problem. And I'm sure they reported it back and someone will have taken a look into that in the meantime. But, well, it's not a good sign of a show if people are, if players are noticing, like, this is not functioning correctly. Yeah. Well, let's just hope that it's just early versions of the code were in those games. And builds of the game as well. Yeah, potentially, if the switches weren't registering. but it could be the software just wasn't picking them up, rather than the actual switches not switching. Because I think it was on version 0.81 or 0.80. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, so it was a long way from finished. If you play a game less than two weeks after launch, chances are it's very premature code. Yes. Yeah, especially these days. But anyway, it certainly attracted a lot of attention to the Stern line-up of machines on the Electrocoin stand. And Dungeons & Dragons, the limited edition of that game, is currently on the production line at Stern, which is a change for them, because in the past they put the limited editions right at the end. Or, well, they did them after the pros and before the premiums. And this time they are putting the limited editions up front, which must mean that the game is mechanically, at least, complete. So there's no more development of the limited editions to be done. They're making them now. So does that perhaps suggest that they think the title is aimed more at collectors than operators? Because previously they'd always said they want to get the game out on location first, so operators can make their money on it before it ends up in the hands of, the limited editions end up in the hands of the collectors. But that's not the case here. So interesting change of strategy there. But nice to see the new title at the show anyway. And thanks to Stern for bringing over one of each model. And nice to get to play them. Right. And, well, CERN was, as always, represented with quite a delegation at the EAG Expo. Gary CERN was there, which is no surprise, I suppose. Seth Davis was also present. John Griskelia, Chief Financial Officer at CERN. Doug Skor was there. European Marketing Manager Lloyd Dorton was present as well at times. so quite a heavy delegation the only thing that I was going to say I was told in advance sorry for interrupting I was told in advance by by Zach Sharp that he would be there at the show but I didn't see him I don't know I thought I think Zach was going to CES and he would not be going to Europe but oh well what surprised me the show usually electrocoin has the latest flyers for stern pinballs as well but not this time in fact the only flyer they had was for a deadpool pro um quite an old game which wasn't even present in in their booth um was quite different actually at the retro special retro arcade specialist stand which had um a lot of flyers which they printed themselves um so if you're a flyer collector then um uh well you could uh collect away i would say yes well um to be fair i i was there um earlier than you on on the wednesday and there were some flyers around for games on the electric coin stand. Oh. So I guess they all got scooped up during the day and were replenished. No! Yeah, sorry about that. It's also worth mentioning that the ones that were on the electric coin stand were, I believe, the U.S. size, U.S. letter size flyers. Right. The ones that Retro Arcade Specialist printed were A4. Right. Yes. So there were potentially already two different versions of those flyers around. Right. Certainly for Dungeons & Dragons, and I guess for all the other titles that they had on their site as well. Yeah. Anyway. Right, so that's Dungeons & Dragons. We'll not say too much more about that at the moment because it's obviously fairly early on. But we hope if you are a laffy fan of the title, I don't think Jonathan or I have much interest in the actual Dungeons & Dragons game. Well, for me it's like an original theme. I have no idea what it's about. Yeah, same here. But you can kind of get the gist of it from the way the display is presented to you. Although, as I mentioned before, I'm not that keen on when it asks you to pick a character right at the very start, and you have no idea what any of that means unless you're quite experienced with the game and know what you're trying to achieve. It's just a basic, you know, pick one at random, really. Pick one you like the name of. Yeah. That's how it was to me. Well, it was less confusing than with Game of Thrones. Yeah, I mean, Star Wars as well. Yeah, exactly so. Anyway, if you're interested in finding out more about this Dungeons & Dragons pinball machine by Stern Pinball, there's an episode of the Stern Insiders Pinball Podcast dedicated to the making of Dungeons & Dragons, featuring the design team, Brian Eddy, Dwight Sullivan, and music producer Jerry Thompson. Yes. although you do need to be logged into your Insider connected account in order to access it. Otherwise, it will just take you to a login page, which even the links from Stern will do that. They don't take you directly to the relevant page. But it is quite detailed and pretty interesting as well. So they always make good videos of the making of their games. Speaking of which, there are actually two other new videos from Stern Pinball Available on their website and on their YouTube channel as well Giving a behind the scenes look at the making of the Metallica Remastered game And also the Uncanny X-Men title Right, so lots of videos from Stern this month Right, yeah, okay, very interesting And then, if you hadn't noticed, there was this Stern Pinball Cup, which was a sort of online tournament with different tasks that you had to complete. Yeah, collect points and move up rankings and tiers and that kind of stuff, and try different tracks every week. Well, and how did that pan out? Well, the people who were doing it seemed to enjoy it. I think, to me, as an outsider observer, it kind of fizzled out. After all the buzz about it, there was no social media information out there about what happened, who won anything, what they won, how they won, what the scores were. Maybe that's going to come at some point, but as far as I'm aware, it's all finished now. So it just kind of disappeared off the radar, which is a little bit disappointing. I was looking forward to seeing what it was like and hoping it spoke some interest in the next similar thing they set up. Right. So if you won or you know who did win, let us know, because we can't see anything, and it's not on their website or there haven't been any more social media posts about it since they announced they were into the final week, and that was a few weeks ago. Right. Okay. Oh, well. And then we have a treat for you. Oh, do we ever. It's the code, isn't it? It's the new code section. I know it is. Yes, that's right. You want to do the code first, and then I'll give the people a treat, okay? Oh, I thought that was the code. That was the treat. Okay. Well, all right. I'll just mention that there is a new Dungeons & Dragons code, although I doubt many people have actually got the game yet. But if you have, it has been on location. so there's a version 0.82 which came out on the 31st of January. Unfortunately, Stern didn't put any information on their website about what's in the update. And they haven't posted on social media about it either, so I don't know what the difference is. So I can't bring you that information. But I can tell you that Metallica Remastered also got new code, version 0.96. That was on the 13th of January, and that was quite a big update. I added this new concert experience setting where it basically shows you the videos of the band and there's minimal information on the screen. It gets rid of all the status information. It's just a line of scores and that's about it. That's all you can see. And obviously when you end the ball you get a lot more information up here, but during the game just the scores are on the screen. I've also added many more spinner sound options. You might remember that there was a bit of a fuss made about the spinner sound that they decided to use in that game, and a lot of people complained about it. Well, now you can choose from ten different spinner sounds. And they've also changed quite a few of the rules as well and added a new Super Pistons mode and fixed several bugs. So a big update for Metallica Remastered if you've got one of those. And that is the code for January. I am a little confused now, hearing what you say. I mean, there is this video that we just discussed, in which they discuss the making of Metallica Remastered. In the video, they clearly say, oh, we wanted to stay close to Lyman's code, and oh, it was so great and fantastic, and now we've changed quite a few of the rules. well we haven't changed that much they've added a lot on top already so it's more like the new features that they've added which are being changed and some sort of rebouncing of scores and things like that the basic concept hasn't changed that much so it's just the details because I think that's fair oh well anyway back to the treatise I was promising you oh yeah Give me a treat, give me a treat. Well, you were there already. We interviewed Gary Stern while he was visiting the UK for the EAG Expo in London. And Gary wasn't alone. But you'll figure out who he was with in this interview that we have right here for you right now. Hi, guys. Hi. Good to be here. So welcome, Gary Stern. Another year, another EAG Expo. Yes, along with Doug Skor, John Vescalia. We're sitting here talking to you two. We are. Yes, it's last year. We're great to have your time. Yeah. It was a very busy show for you. We've been busy, and we have an event tonight, and we were just about to go back and have a quick power nap when you guys caught us. Sorry to take that away from you. anyway so this year we decided to do it differently uh-huh what's cooking with gary okay so you you said earlier you wanted uh to uh know my uh secret recipe cooking cooking all right all right single guy live in downtown chicago i'm never a whole single guy no no i cook i'm but here's here's i was writing i'm writing a uh a cookbook it's called nuke cook you know the microwave new cook for single guys. So what you do is you take a bowl, okay? You put three frozen chicken legs in it. John can't eat it because he's vegan. You put three frozen chicken legs in it, put some seasoning, put a plate on top of it because once you put it in the microwave, if you don't put a plate on top of it, no, it'll explode and then you got to clean everything. So you put that in it, 12 minutes on high. After 12 minutes, it is cooked through. It is seasoned. The fat's down in the bottom. It's sort of like Jewish chicken in the pot. Now, if you want to get fancy, what you do is, before you put it in the microwave, three chicken legs, seasoning, a little wine. Now, I suggest white instead of red because the red will stain the bowl. It takes you a while to clean it. But plate on the top or else it's going to explode when you hit 12 minutes. Do you marinate it in the wine first? Just pour it in there. No, it's cooking in the microwave. It's going to bubble and everything. And so when you get done with this 12 minutes, it's sort of like poor man's cocoa van. Yeah. Okay? And this is John. John can cook. He used to cook before he became a vegan. He used to cook. He still cooks. He just cooks vegan. Yeah, I still cook. I cook with all that chicken in it. Well, the reason you do this microwave new cooking and everything is it's very fast. And it gives you time to go play pinball. I thought I tried to say that. I thought I tried to say that. Well, no, you can play pinball. You can play pinball today. Four games for Gary. Yeah, thank you very much. You can play pinball. Well, actually, we'll come back to that. You can play pinball while it's cooking, so you don't have to wait the 12 minutes. But if you figure four games for Gary, that's an average of three minutes a game. And the real average that we look for in street operation is three minutes a game. So that was very good. That's why I picked 12, so I could play four games. Is this serious enough? Oh, yeah, yeah. Thank you very much, Gary. We're a little punchy here. We look forward to seeing you probably at Pimbal Expo. Oh, yeah, Pimbal Expo, yes. It's a long way away. You have a lot of other chances between now and then. Yeah, well, we have... But this rounds it up for cooking with Gary. Yes, well, we have... It's still the main course. You know, there's so many things going on. Actually, you're going to tell us some things, but there's, you know, there's so many events. You know, we have our commercial show. ASI in Las Vegas. There's pinball at the beach. I'm doing pinball at the beach. I don't typically do Texas. I don't know if I will. All of this takes time away from me. I live in Vail and it takes time away from my snowboarding. I got here on Sunday which meant I left Denver on Saturday. I got here on Monday which means I left Denver on Sunday that's not how time flies when you're having fun and I did have fun that Sunday morning I went snowboarding before I got on the plane so there you go we weren't going to say that yeah we have to have some snow around here as well I don't know but snow around here is not fun it's miserable it is so earlier John Buscaglia was wondering how you get all this energy I think you should give John a snowboard I'm telling him The man is... No, no, no. No, I'm tired. You should watch me walking around. I walk around like an old man. I'm so tired. Shelly used to call me a very funny... I used to skip back to the show and say, Shelly, I don't get this guy. I can't keep up with him. Wait a minute. It's a battery. No, I'm not going to... No, no. That's not a good image. Not a good image. This is supposed to be a serious pinball conversation and we should all... We should all talk about that we have Dungeons and Dragons here, which is a super great title, and it has a dragon that is incredible. So tell us about the process by which you ended up with doing Dungeons and Dragons. I really can't. Not only because I tried to not give away any secrets, but I don't know. I mean, you must look at the market segments and say, we need a game that's going to appeal to this section. Well, actually, you know, what they... You've done bands, you've done movies, What they looked at is the strength of the titles. I can remember when Gary Gygax in Madison, Wisconsin, started a board game 50 years ago or so. I spoke to Gary at that time. It has just grown. It's a billion-dollar-a-year business. Now it belongs to Hasbro. It originally came out by TSR. And the breadth of people who know this and have played it and so forth. I mean, I knew people when I was young. They kept playing it. Young people played it. It's a huge franchise. Books, movies. There was recently a full length feature movie that... Neither of us have watched. Yeah, Hugh Grant and a whole bunch of people in it. Which wasn't as monster-y as this is, where you pick your character. It wasn't particularly monster-y. It's about dragons, right? It's about dragons, so... And dungeons. Yeah, well that's it. As is the game. the game. How's that not monstery? Well, okay, it wasn't. Some of the shorts, some of the other stuff that you can watch that are really, it's a good movie, that are really significantly animated. Oh, you meant the movie. Yeah, the movie. No, the movie. No, the game's got all the features of it, and the guys who designed it, Brian Eddy and Dwight Sullivan, are just geeked out on Dungeons and Dragons, so it's got plenty for the real Dungeons and Dragons people and plenty for me. And was that you or me? Oh, I just made an automatic payment. I'm really happy that they told me that. But there's been a lot of really important pinball machines that have been similarly themed, shall we say. there was what an old Bally Dungeons and Dragons years and years ago okay Black Knight all the Black Knight series George's Lord of the Rings Medieval Madness for sure which was guess who designed that Ryan Eddy and this might be his finest work the the issue you have because it seems to me that there's... I talk to people who are playing the game or look at the game, and they go, either I'm super into Dungeons & Dragons and it's an ideal, perfect thing for me, or I have no interest in Dungeons & Dragons whatsoever and I'm not interested in the game. How do you square that circle of getting people who are not interested in Dungeons & Dragons or don't even know Dungeons & Dragons to be interested in playing the people? I haven't found quite as much of that as you're saying, but having played the game and not really being into Dungeons & Dragons and having had eight balls shot at me out of the mouth of a dragon, great spinning target, by the way, just for a casual player like me, it's just, you know, it's got, in the dragon itself, it is probably the most, we're filing some patents on the dragon, and the most, help me guys. Trademarks. No, it's a mechanic. Automatron, come on, what do you call it? I know a truncate. Yeah, it moves every way, it does everything, and so it's very, very cool. I wish they'd stop telling me that I paid my expense. That was my phone. I think I just received a payment. That was good. That was good. That was good. I like that. In any event, listen, the game's fun. The game's just fun. Now, you guys who are deep into rules and everything, you can judge better than me. One of the things, that game's going to change constantly because every week the dungeon area is renewed, will be renewed, and so it will change. You learn it one way. We have a lot of innovative features in the software for it. I mean to me I'm not a Dungeons and Dragons person I know nothing about the game therefore I'm one of those people who comes in and goes I don't know what Dungeons and Dragons is I don't know why I'm picking a character when I first start the game and why I should pick any one character over and along I'll pick the one with the city's name that's probably what I'll go for okay that's perfect that works that works not everybody loves Iron Maiden but everybody loves the game right I mean you don't necessarily have to be the fourth leg as Gary calls it, the affinity group, in order to... Sure. Yeah. But you might know some of them. Okay. Well, think of this as a dragon game. Yeah. And therefore it's fun, because dragon games were fun. I just listed a whole bunch of them, which may or may not have any... What was Black Knight? You know, where did that... There was no movie that came from or game again. We're still waiting for that movie to come out. Are you really? We're just franchising now. Okay, right. By the way, I'm going to franchise my chicken, too. Okay? There we are. Luke Chicken. Yeah. Luke Chicken. That's the book. That's the book. I'll give you guys, send you some autographed first editions. But to D&D? People know the knowledge of the title. Not the depth of the title, but just the title itself. It's part of it. Yeah. It's not how it works. Yeah, yeah. It has recognition. It has definite recognition. For me, I just walked up to it as an original theme. Yeah, perfect. And that's what I was trying to say. You just said that much better than I did. You know, I said, what's Black Knight? But you know, it's an original theme if you don't know it. And it's a great theme. Yeah, but you do need to appeal to the Dungeons & Dragons. Well, here's an interesting point. You know, I always talk about three legs of the stool. John's going to play it now. Three legs of the stool. You know, we have... Can we get the short version of that? Yeah, you are. Yeah, right. Yes, yeah. Pretty cool. Yeah, pretty sure. Rec Room Buyers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Operators are people playing on the street. Rec Room Buyers and Enthusiast Collectors. The fourth leg that we rarely get is the title collector. Not pinball collector, but the title collector. A person who's interested in black Beatles or Mustang or, you know, Elvira. That's true. You know, and we rarely get that. Here, we're told that from our dealers that maybe 25% of the LEs were purchased by, are being purchased by Dungeons and Dragons enthusiasts. We've always tried to get, we've tried for years, very little success. Maybe we've stopped trying principally. We've always tried, John's done a lot of work in different areas, to get that fourth leg, the person interested in the title, to buy the machine, to have it for home. Why is that so important? Yeah, we sell more games. Why is it so important? because those people may become part of our pinball community. Instead of being just in their geeky community, maybe they'll be in our geeky community too. There is an overlap. People who wouldn't otherwise buy pinball. Yes. Right. Because of the thing. Yes, and then they may become. We see that first-time buyers about, our dealers tell us about 40% of the first-time buyers, maybe 50%, buy another pinball machine. Because it comes. just have one pinball machine, you need another one. I think you need seven. Well, I'll tell you, you have two, you need another one, and another one. Yeah, yeah. That's how it is. I just put a, Kenny Exman in my apartment in Vail, and I have a two bedroom apartment, and so the second bedroom, shall we call it, has what once was a bunk bed, but now is, I guess, a trundle. It's a twin-size bed with another one underneath, and then it's got a queen-size bed in there. So, you know, you could snowboard or ski place. People can come stay in it. It had a dresser over here, which is now over there, so you can't open the closet because over here is the pinball machine. And you should have seen that. You should have seen four, you know, these guys bringing it down. four flights of narrow stairs to bring it down because my apartment goes floor to floor to floor to floor. At least it's down, it's not open up. Yeah, but it's going to be up one day. Because, no, the guys who brought it down work for my friend Dan Sunday, which is Alpine Vending there. And one day, he'll get a good price on it to operate it. And they'll have to take it out and bring the replacement in. And now you understand why Gary needs a microwave to cook because there's a filming machine in the kitchen presenting him for you. Well, listen, a lot of people have a lot, I mean, I'm happy to say, I just have the game in the bedroom, but a lot of people have a lot of games in their house and fill up the whole house and maybe even the kitchen. And the garage and the basement. Well, garages in America is something that people often, especially in warmer climates, don't use for cars. they use it my daughter's in la and the garage is certainly a okay yes she is okay thank you for asking so far so good um so far so good um she's near la near the airport uh which is her her work she's she's uh works in the tv and film industry she's a assistant director and her work got she was halfway to work on one day and they said they should have canceled it Well, they finally did, so she had to turn around. How are you going to get there? It seems real dangerous. Our friend Joe Kamenka, who you guys all know from pinball, he had an interest in a house in Malibu, and now he has an interest in a lot in Malibu. A piece of ground that burned to the ground. Burned to the ground. Yeah. Yeah. Did he buy that property? What he did is he invested, he bought an eighth interest in a house that a company keeps up and different people get to use. His son used to go there a lot for holidays. So, any event, it's gone. Terrible. Terrible. Well, what's much more terrible is, I mean, it's gone for him. He doesn't really need to live there. He doesn't have it. The people who actually live in places, Aaron, my daughter, She had some friends that moved. They had a, what do you call it when you have to leave? Evacuated. Yeah, evacuated. She went, they took their van and car and SUV to the YMCA, where there was lots of stuff piled up to give away to people who need stuff. so they were going to help transport and as it turned out Erin stayed and helped organize and she came back the next day and they gave her an orange shirt because leaders have to wear orange shirts. I said I'm not a leader yes you are. So she was there for a couple days organizing. She did the same thing and Katrina, she was down with Katrina so I was very proud of her doing that. It almost brought tears to me so we ought to go back and talk about pinball and I about that a little bit and then we're going to have to go because we're keeping this short as always yeah it's a little late now so we're at EAG that's the first European trade show of the year usually you meet with distributors and if I'm not mistaken you inform them about what's going to be happening the rest of the year from during pinball So we give them a lot of information. I'm not going to say what's happening all the rest of the year. But, you know, some of the things we talked about is that we wanted to reemphasize the one-year warranty that we have on our product. We always stood behind the games, but we thought we should emphasize it again. And so we've emphasized it a few times. we explained again that excepted all of this that's our president he was smart he already left well he's here and you won't be back here tomorrow he's got a he you can't tell me John has to leave tomorrow morning Doug and I are working tomorrow we have one meeting I know of probably two because we want to redo David there I'm somebody who's going to operate a lot of games and another thing we explained about putting certain titles in the vault which means that we're not going to make them probably for we are not going to make them for sure for two years and probably never again because most of those titles will the license will have expired and it's going to be an awful big demand to go back and buy a license again. But we are committed that we won't make them for at least two years, if ever again. And I think that that's important to understand the value of the games that are out there, that the lack of any confusion. we made it clear because people didn't hear everything. If we say that, sometimes they don't, you know, that we're putting something in the vault or it's Leia's call. Can I just ask you a question about that? Because one of the things, apart from the fact you're not going to be making it for at least two years, if ever, does that have a significant impact on current demand for that game? you know if you say okay we're not going to be making deadpool for two years is there suddenly a bit of a rush for people to buy deadpool from distributors maybe uh we just announced that maybe uh and the other hand some of them there aren't any to buy uh you know it's quite you know i can't tell you that there's stock of all these everywhere some of them they're not. I don't know, John, did you? It definitely increases the consumer demand and they want to buy this before, you know, they can wait. And like you said, some titles we have more of, some we have very few left. Or our customers, our dealers, you know, may have some or not. Yeah. And there is some in the world. Yeah. So that's a, your announcement of a vaulting of a title can actually be a positive effect in the short term. Yeah, and I think it also will solidify the value of that game in the secondary market because, you know... Do you care about that? Secondary market? Absolutely, we care about it. Keep an eye on what's happening, what's being offered on the second-hand market and prices are... John watches the costs on the second-hand market. We may do some, you know, some more structuring of it if we can in some way. Are we looking at the second-hand market? Because it's very important. It's just, you know, whether it's a car or John's Harley-Davidson motorcycle or my Harley-Davidson's, you know, the resale value of anything is important, and it's an important part for the operator of games, and it's an important part for the enthusiast and collector and homeowner that we say, you know, you're not going to lose a lot of money. I'm not going to tell you you're going to make money on every title. I think it was a little artificial during COVID and the shortage. The prices, you know, skyrocketed and people who were just, what do you call investors who buy? Speculators, thank you. God, I need so much help. This is the reason I had to quit practicing law. I can't remember the words anymore. As they get older, it gets harder. You don't see the speculators like they were. We've also changed, gone to rational, justifiable reasons for the quantity of LEs we make. this one's 740 because it's started in 1974. It's a self-evident number. I was worried you didn't mark it as a 50th anniversary. It's not exactly 50. It is 50. It's exactly 50. Yeah, it is exactly 50. Okay. I don't know. Missed opportunity. Well, you know, I'm not involved in all this and these guys are involved in some, not in all either. So, shh, it's next month. How many 50s can you have? No, we've just done a couple 50s. Okay, so getting back to the Stern Pinball plans for 2025, how many cornerstone games can we expect? The likelihood is three. that's our plan for the year is three plans change but I doubt it it should be three we found that to be the best model timing wise to do three one about this time of year with the show and the year starting and so forth one in mid late spring so that can be How can it in the summer? Well, it can beat the summer, shall we say. Summer for operations you want to I'm going to use America as my model. You want to set games before if you're lucky before Memorial Day which is the end of May certainly before July 4th nobody, no operator wants to drag a game into a summer location in the middle of August. And likewise shipping games here to Europe when certain countries people are just gone in the summer. You don't want to you'd like your games to get here in May, June mostly. And then fall is the time to restart again. Any thoughts? addition games that there might be? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. I'll give you the three cornerstones. I'm not going to give you any now. You can always ask. I answer. As we say in law, ask and not answer. Not ask and answer. Okay. Can I just ask you to have a little speculation at the moment about something which is going to be coming up and how it might impact on you. That would be with the new president and talk about tariffs on... Oh my God, you have more money. Have I gone old? Just talking about that. That is certainly a good question. What does that mean? You obviously consider this and look at ways of mitigating potential increases in cost that might happen. Not just for you, but for your district. We have had increases in costs for the last three years where we have not changed our price. The cost of things never go down. No, the cost of things don't go down. And our prices, our costs have increased. And yet, whether it be through efficiencies or through us eating it, we've held our price. I can't say how much longer we can do that. But we've held our price steady for about three years now for the pro premium and LE. As to tariffs that might affect things coming to us, you know, who knows? We really just don't know. It's a tariff, similarly, that would affect things leaving us going to the export markets. You know, we're watching it. We're watching it like any other business. Are you hearing about it on the news? Or just waiting to see what happens? I can't tell you that we have a plan yet. I will tell you a story, though. And then we really should go pretty soon. But years ago, you know, the euro came out at $1.17 when it originally started, what, 20 years ago. and it's fluctuated right now. It's about $1.02, $1.04 for the euro. English pound is better, but Robert Englunds created some of its own problems. There was one point where the euro came down to 87, 86 cents. and that was about 25 years ago or so, 20 years ago. And the Wall Street Journal was interviewing small businessmen like I was and the pinball company was smaller then. And so I'm interviewed by the Wall Street Journal and what our plans might be and we were looking to maybe building games in Europe or partially building them, sending kits and, you know, building them within the EU or maybe an Eastern bloc in those days. But I then responded to the interviewer. I said, but I'm told that the dollar and the euro may go back to parity, you know, one for one. But the article finished with quoting me, but if I knew what the dollar was going to do, so I wouldn't be making pinball machines. So, we don't, you know, we're watching like every other businessman, and we'll see. How much is real. Then we just, your view, and maybe John's as well, and Eden, and Doug too, about the current state of the pinball market, globally. You all look at, you all know what's going on the market, what the demand is like, what the resale market is like, what the battles are for licenses, that kind of thing. Is it tough to be in the pinball business now, or is it actually quite a good place to be? I will answer that with a yes and a no. Yes, it's tough. It's always been tough. The water's cold. Jump right in. Look at other companies trying to make pinball and we've been able to grow unlike anybody else has to good games, good designs, smart management and so forth so yeah it's tough and yes it's a good place to be because I love it, I love this business you have a very positive outlook on the future I do and John will tell you that Yeah, the market's a little tougher. There's inventory in the field. You know, it's a little more difficult in that respect. There's opportunities for buyers that may not have existed before. There's games to buy that won't be overbuilt that we know, like we vaulted these games. So, yes, we've taken some actions to control and influence the market. It's like our warranty, like our vaulting games, and like our listening to the market and not necessarily making a thousand of every LE. And, in fact, we recently started making the LEs first. Actually, I don't know how you guys all feel about that. That would be more interesting than how I feel about that. I think it makes sense. Yeah, I think the alley-buyers deserve that, personally. I paid a premium for it. I should get some... Interesting. Interesting. So the market, John, you want to add anything? When I was hired by Gary and the team, the reason I took this job, as much as I love Gary, is because of George Gomez. The guy is brilliant. He's built an amazing team. Yep, and I knew that I could sell his products and his vision It's just was an amazing product and honestly, it's been that easy and I used to work for tops It was a great product but nothing like what we put out and the games just keep getting better and better and better and better I mean when you actually do look at the Dungeons and Dragons play it's just phenomenal You know, it's shooting eight fire pinballs out at you and the architecture on it's just it's spectacular We just surpassed a thousand Stern Army members. We've just surpassed thousands of launch parties all over the world. We're growing our insider connected pro operators at a rate that we've never seen before. We're partnering with the AMOA and Bob Burnham, the president, who's a great friend of ours and a great supporter of Stern. and the amount of operators that are now operating pinball within the traditional community is not just growing, that it's growing rapidly, but what we're also seeing is we're incentivizing our pinball enthusiasts to become operators, which they have. And the one thing, when I was at Topps, people would absolutely say, I'm getting out of the hobby. I done I didn you know this case of cards didn have any of what I want I not spending any money on it because it wasn about the fun aspect of building the community and playing the game and all the camaraderie It was really just a gambling play where, you know, you're hoping to get that big hit card. And that wears off pretty quickly. But I've never, ever, ever once heard somebody say to me, oh, man, I'm done with pinball. It's boring. I don't want to play. I'm out of here. I'm out of the community. I've never seen a person leave the community. So all the things that Gary has invested in, all the things that we've done as a team to build out this community, it just continues to get bigger and bigger and bigger. Consumer patterns are changing, and they'll always change. They spawn economies, they spawn wars, they spawn fires, whatever. People can become nervous at times, and they can become, you know, very aggressive in their purchasing patterns at times. And right now, we are definitely in a little bit of a conservative period. but the one thing I can say is that when you look at Timbal as a whole, as a community it's bigger than it's ever been and it's continuing to grow rapidly which is why you guys are still so passionate about what you do. You have not since I mentioned Jonathan 13 years ago lost one ounce of your passion and that's what makes this community special. Honestly it's just amazing. So I'm encouraged. One thing on this line that I want to leave you all with community has grown and we need to help it grow more. Certainly you talk about games in the market and so forth and the bigger the community, the more trading, the more room, so forth. When your friends come play pinball, they see pinball, now they understand that pinball still exists? Yes, it does still exist. Maybe they want to buy a pinball, but making a big investment like in a pinball machine can be scary. And they don't know where to go or they don't know what to do or who's going to take care of the game. They need a Sherpa, somebody to help them, somebody to lead them through. And what enthusiasts can do to grow the market is when their friends are interested, help them, guide them, tell them where they can go buy it, not to worry about it. Here's how you can get a service or I'll take care of it or I'll help you service it or this or that. take, I mean, you know, this is a big expenditure and you take the fear out and then we can grow the market. So you need to be sure of this. And with that we should go to our next thing. Thank you all very much. You can stop the mic. Thank you very much. Thank you Gary. Thank you Doug. Thank you guys. you guys. I really appreciate it, John. Well, thank you very much to Gary, Doug, and John for taking time out from their busy schedule at the EHE show to sit down with us and give us their take on the state of pinball at the moment and stern pinball in particular. Yeah, it will be a lot more difficult, I guess, next year to get them for an interview because every year we take away their nap time at the end of the day before they go to their dinner appointments. Well, yeah, and also Gary will have to come up with some new recipes for us. Yeah, definitely. Oh, we've got a scoop here. Yeah, every year. Okay, Gary's latest recipe. Okay. What's cooking with Gary? Oh, I like it. To be continued. Right. Well, let us continue then with our next company and our third headline, which was about what's been going on at American Pinball. And, well, not to put too fine a point on it, David Fix has left his position there as Executive Vice President. Well, not only Fix, quite a lot of people, actually. Yes, that's right. Yeah, in fact, by the time he left, there were not many people left at the company. Steven Bowden, Ryan McQuaid, Sophia Orion, Jack Haeger and others had all been laid off before Christmas although some we hear may have found employment in other companies in which case good luck to them although I suspect they probably have a non-compete clause so that means holiday time Yeah, not the best time of year to be out and about. If you like winter sports, I'm sure you can entertain yourself. I'm sure, yes. So that was, I'm not sure whether it was a total surprise, but I think the state of the company and the way that David left the company did come as a surprise. and we will explore more of that a little bit later in the in the pin cast because as we said in our headline we we are going to be talking to David well we didn't say that in our headline but we're telling you now we have David Fix exclusive and he's not as you know David well there's basically no stopping the man so you're looking at one hour and 16 minutes of David Fitch explaining what went on at American Pimble resulting in his contract not being renewed whether that was his choice or not his choice but he will discuss everything about that not to preempt what he has to say too much, but it gives us a lot of the behind-the-scenes information about the way the company has been run ever since it started pretty much, and where the company, where the people running the company now are hoping to take it. So, there's a lot of interesting historical information as well. So, we'll come back to that later on in this pincast and as you said it's a detailed interview with a lot of things to cover so we're going to do that towards the end rather than put it in here because we have a lot to cover we need to recover from Gary and his recipes well yes, that's right I want my new chicken at least I would do if I had chicken one of the things that hasn't happened at American Playball yet is the announcement of Game 7. Rumour to be Cuphead. Rumour to be Cuphead, yeah. Wherefore, this game is still being developed, but it's apparently otherwise complete and ready to go. But the company has been advertising for production line, final testing and support service staff along with an electrical engineer position, but whether that's happening or not is a bit unclear from our perspective and from what we know about what's going on at American Pimple. Right. So, we're not expecting Game 7 to go into production or even to be released any time in the immediate future, but, you know, you never quite know, do you, with that company, exactly when they're going to do things. Well, they have contracts too to respect with licensors and so on, so. They do indeed. But then again, but they also need the people to build the game. Yes, that's right, yes, you're quite right. Which at the moment, well, as of recently, they didn't have those people, and whether they've actually managed to take on some, we don't know. But it is understood that, as you will hear from David, that Robert Englunds are looking towards contract manufacturing, other companies' designs, rather than creating their own. So this could be the final game that American Pinball develop, by themselves, I should say. They do have a series of potential designs that they could develop, if they chose, but they don't have any design staff or mechanical engineers or anybody else left at the company to make the games. No R&D at all? No. No. No. So it's a real shame because we know there are some good titles there and some good designs from some talented designers, and we'd like to see them. So hopefully they don't get lost. However, in the meantime, American Pinball have told their distributors that they're doing a small run of 100 Galactic Tank Force Classic Edition games. Now, the Classic Edition is a new base level, which is apparently missing quite a few features from the upper models, but not features which impact on gameplay. That was the original intention, so there were no art blades on the game, or a backbox lighting, a shaker motor, a knocker, or magic glass on the game. And the robot mechanism which moves up and down the spaceship will be shown on the screen, not on the play field. But apparently there's also been, according to what the distributors have been told, the swinging UFO stand-up target has now been made into a stationary target. That is something that impacts on the gameplay slightly. This new low-end model is supposed to be priced at US$7,995, which is quite a bit below their standard price for the Deluxe Edition. But kits will be available to upgrade the game. I put most of those things I just mentioned back in it for around about US$1,000. That's the intention. Of course, they have to have the staff there to build the games and to quality control them and order the parts and do the quality testing and the goods receiving stuff for all that as well. And, of course, ship the games as well. Right now, they don't even have the staff to put the kits together. No. No. No, so although that's being told to distributors, that there will be 100 games made, there's no clear indication that they have the capability of doing that at the moment. But, oh well. And then there's a rumor about a new Galactic Tank Force code coming from ex-employees. Actually David Hicks is going to address that as well. that software update will fix a bunch of bugs and add a scorebit integration as well. Yeah, this is quite significant, I thought. Putting scorebit into an American pinball game for the first time. And unfortunately, it could also be the last time. Yeah. Which would, unless people go back and rewrite older games code to retrofit it. But I think that's quite unlikely. But you never know. There's enough dedication or maybe even there's some funding, if they do like a GoFundMe to pay software developers to add it in. It could happen. Let's see what happens with Graphic Tank Force Code first. Right. Oh, well, anyway, lots more about American Pinball will be addressed by David Fix at the end of this show. The interview is an hour and 16 minutes long, so if you rewind to the end and then skip back an hour and 16 minutes, you're right at the start of it. Right. But, of course, you want to listen to all the other news that we've got from the rest of the pinball companies first, I'm sure. So let's get on and do exactly that and move on to our next company. Which is Jersey Jack Pinball. Hey. Elk Grove Village, Chicago area still. Currently on the line and shipping to U.S. buyers is Avatar, the Battle for Pandora, the collector's edition. Yes, it's the top-end model. Yes, it's being shipped and been manufactured and shipped right now. So good news if you were one of the lucky buyers to get those. as I understand it there's still some collector's editions available with distributors if you missed out and are actually getting one now right so well I have a feeling this could be another sleeper game in a sense like you know with Elton John and the themes are completely opposite I would almost say but Elton John everybody at first was like, eh. And then they played it and they were like, whoa! Yeah, I think it was the theme which put a lot of people off the open, John. If you're not a fan of the music, then you tend to almost dismiss the game out of hand. But as you say, when people play it, their minds are changed completely. Yeah, well, I certainly enjoyed playing Avatar, the few games that I had on it. There's plenty to see. Well, I didn't get to really experience was the UV lighting effects, but that's just because of the ambient light that was in the area where I was playing it, so I'd like to see more of that. Right, okay. Anyway, so just as we were about to record this episode, the Jersey Jack Pimble announced a $2,001 off Toy Story 4 Limited Edition, bringing it down from $12,000 to just $9,999. And that also includes a free bonus flat plastic illuminated topper. Yeah. They've run a number of price promotions over the past months, including, you know, roundabout Thanksgiving. And I don't think they've won a Black Friday or not, but I think there was a holiday one, was there? Yeah. Those are roses? Yeah, and even the Elton John, I think, had 1,000 off the standard limited edition model as well at one point. But, yes, Toy Story 4, if you were thinking of getting one of those, now's a good time. It brings it down just below 10,000, and you get the free topper with it. So, not a bad deal. Yeah. And then, of course, there's new code. Martin, tell me all about it. Well, we were just talking about Avatar, and I'm pleased to say that version 1.0 is now available for Avatar. That's right. Everything that's going to go in the game should be in this code. And it adds the ICU Final Wizard mode, as well as adding a bunch of different presets for various difficulty levels, lots of display, sound, and lamp effects, a few bug fixes for the rules, scoring. There was an issue with the track mode lighting as well on some machines. That should be fixed in version 1.0, available from the 16th of January. So you've probably got it already by now, if you're lucky enough to own an Avatar machine. So from now on, it'll be enhancements and bug fixes, rather than adding any major new rules, I think. Yeah, well done to Jersey Jack. That's pretty early, I guess, in the pinball world these days, to get the fully featured code out on a new title. Right. In, what, three months, I suppose? Yeah, yeah, it's pretty quick indeed. And speaking of quick, a rumor on the street is we might actually see a new Jersey Jack pinball title already in a few months, hopefully debuting at the Texas Pinball Festival. Hmm, that'll be interesting. I wonder which one that's going to be. Not which Texas Dream Festival, which title. They've certainly been teasing one particular title, but they've been teasing that for over a year. Right. So, it may or may not be. Yeah, exactly. Oh, well, that's supposedly to be an Eric Meunier game. Hmm. We hope they can pull it off. I'm sure they can. Yeah, so... Right. That's just Wayne and C. And that rounds it up for George and Jake. Okay, let's move on to our next company, and let's... Oh, I don't know. Let's do Pedretti Gaming, or Pedretti Pinball, if you like, based in Italy. I was just there. Well, Italy is not so much Pedretti. Sorry. I wasn't nearby, but that's close enough. Oh, I thought you were going to give us the inside scoop. Okay. Well, let me tell everybody Everybody, what's been going on there? Because just now we were talking about rumours and expectations that American Pym were going to be adding Scorpid integration into Galactic Tank Force in a new upcoming code release. Well, guess what? Pedretti are too. Yes, they are integrating Scorpid into their Funhouse remake title. Oh, I thought they were integrating it in Galactic Tank Force 2. Is it Galactic Tank Force 2? Oh, have I just walked out the door? No. Funhouse Remake will be getting Scorbit. It will be free to use as most built-in Scorbit integrations are. But it will require a new software update which was supposed to be out by the end of January according to Pedretti but hasn't at the time of recording been released just yet, but hopefully should be out very, very soon. So if you are one of those lucky people who have a Funhouse remake, you will get Scorebit integration added for free. So, very nice feature to have, and that will record all your scores and achievements, and you'll be able to access all that information online, and with whatever other features the Scorebit team are going to be adding in the future and I would hazard a guess and say that any future remakes that Pedretti Gaming are going to be making will also feature Scorpion integration. Oooh. Okay, well that's good to know. So in the meantime at Pedretti they have been building funhouse remakes and shipping them to the US. It's going to be interesting times to see what happens with importing duties and what have you being announced and negotiated. Yes, we'll get into that a little bit later when we move on to more general stuff. But yes, as you say, timely move to get a whole bunch of, a whole container full of Funhouse remakes sent over to the US just in case. also there was a post on Facebook by a game artist on Funhouse Remake, Brian Allen showing how he gave his father a Funhouse Remake machine for a Christmas present so a very generous gesture there from Brian he probably had no more room in the house or something like that well apparently his father was the one who got Brian interested in pinball in the first place so it only seemed fitting that that Brian's first full game design could be enjoyed by his father. So congratulations to Mr. Alan Sr. Right. Okay. And that rounds it up for Pedretti Pinball. But we also have Pinball Brothers closely collaborating with Pedretti Pinball. No hardware news from them, But there is a code update for Queen. Well, it's only a very minor one. Last month they brought out version 2.1F, which did add a whole bunch of new things into the game, new rules and lighting effects. But unfortunately it also introduced a potential game reset issue on certain machines. Well, this new update, which is version 2.1G, which came out on the 23rd, hopefully fixes that problem. And that's all it does. There are no other additions to the game. So if you haven't had these problems, then maybe you don't want to bother, but it's probably worth updating anyway to version 2.1 on the Queen game. Well, I had none of these problems, so I also don't have a Queen game. Well, then you probably won't want to install the software. Oh, well. Hmm. Okay. Well, while we're over in Europe, let's talk about a more local company to you, and slightly more local to me, and that's Dutch Pinball and Dutch Pinball Exclusive. And what they've been doing, because we know that the Alice's Adventure in Wonderland game is going to be coming from Dutch Pinball Exclusive, Well, Renz, who's their social media guy, he showed a picture on Pinside of the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland cabinet, showing how it will have some recessed areas where the inner cabinet artwork will go, you know, the art blade things. And because they're recessed, that will hopefully prevent any damage being caused to the artwork when you raise and lower the playfield, which has been a problem with other artwork that's just on the side of a normal cabinet. So obviously they've been thinking about how to address that, and because they're making their cabinets specifically for the houses of entry in Wunderland Game, they can route these inset pieces into the inner sides and solve the problem. So, nice job. this just reminds me of Blackwater 100, Dennis Nordman game, that also has artwork on the inside of the cabinet, but they sold it in a completely different way. Basically, the placement is inside a box of some sort, with the the decals on it, so that, because Dennis was afraid that if you would open the playfield and slide it up and down, it would hurt the artwork. Yes. Very different solution to the same problem, but, oh well, well done by Dutch Pimble, I would say. It's very easy to see where the decals are supposed to be going, and I'm sure it will work because obviously the playfield is resting against the inside of the cabinet and which is well the decal is probably not as thick as the area cut out no that's right it will be slightly recessed so it shouldn't be a problem but they have been showing lots of pictures of the production of various parts for alice's adventures in wonderland including the playfields and the sculpts and the cabinet artwork. Apparently, from the pictures you can see the playfields have been digitally printed. Some people thought they were going to be Marc Silk screened, but apparently not. They are digitally printed, as is the cabinet artwork, of course, as well. So, interesting information available there. Right. And one other slight item of news, this time from Dutch Pimple Non-Exclusive. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, basically on January 1st, the Facebook channel of Dutch Pimple shared a photo of Barry Hoobin, Barry Houben, who is one of their assembly line workers, and not just any assembly line worker, but Barry has been in charge of the bowling alley mechanism, which goes below the playfield. He built most of them himself, and how fitting it is that he just finished the very last one for the current final production for The Big Lebowski. So, technically, you could say, the last game is currently being in production, if not finished already. And after that they will be moving the production line to basically Alice's. Yeah, and then whatever else, whatever their next title is going to be, their next pure Dutch pinball title. Right. Now, I have no news on that, but there is some news going around. It was sort of confirmed to me that Dutch Pinball is looking and actively talking to pinball manufacturers in America to see whether they can sort out manufacturing of an upcoming title in the U.S., possibly to avoid import tariffs and what have you, but also shipping costs and what have you. Now, a couple of months ago, we already reported that Barry Driessen was spotted visiting Stern Pinball, which is rather unusual, but I guess in the light of this news, I guess that sort of makes sense. the question is whether Stern would be interested in building games for a competing company well you'd never say never but I'd be very surprised if they did well given that they did that once for Chicago Gaming yeah with Medieval Methods and it turned out to be disastrous yeah so that's with the production team just down the on the other side of Chicago. But on the other side of the world, or 4,000 miles away, even harder. In theory, the concept of this is, well, I can understand that you would say like, hey, can we source this out to another company? Well, Dutch people already have plenty of experience with sourcing out and finding out how much difficult it is. I mean, I'm going to say it very boldly, I suppose. Sorry. A pinball machine is not an IKEA design. It's not like, here's the manual, this is how you put it together, and what can go wrong? Well, with a pinball machine, a lot can go wrong. So that's the difference between an IKEA cupboard and a pinball machine. you have to be on site to make sure everything goes right and that you don't run into any problems. Yes, and you have to do a lot of testing as well, even with the finished product, even if it's been made according to all the instructions that you've provided, you still end up with finding things which have been done wrong. and this takes us back to what the American pinball owners are proposing with contract manufacturing. So in theory, Barry could knock on their door, but then again, you can sort out a project, but if you sort it out to a company that has no staff to build them, then what's going to happen? Yeah, absolutely. but they would need to have their operation up and running and prove themselves capable of making games first before you want to entrust them with making machines go into customers. Right. Yeah. Oh, well, anyway, so that's... Well, it's an interesting note. So there's confirmation that Dusty Pimble is looking around to do that, whether they actually will remains to be seen. Yeah. And, of course, if we hear anything about it, you'll hear it too. Okay, so let's move back to the U.S. and move up to Wisconsin and Spooky Pinball, who have been celebrating their 12th birthday. Right. Congratulations. Yes, that's right. Wow. I remember when Charlie announced his initial plans 12 years ago. So that means Jersey Jack people celebrated their 15th. Was it 15th? Okay. Well, I think Jack started the company January 1st of 2000. 2000. Yeah, that's right, yeah. That's right, he was announced, I think he announced it, didn't he, on the spooky, well, on Charlie's podcast. Exactly, full circle. So two companies with celebrations in order. Congrats for both. Yeah, happy birthday. And also Spooky have started shipping now their latest title, which is Evil Dead. They plan to have 20 games shipped by the middle of the week we're in now, so probably around about now by the time you're listening to this. And they are also sending four Evil Dead machines down to Florida for the very first Pinball at the Beach show, which takes place in about, well, less than a week's time now. Yeah, next weekend. Yeah, that's right. So if you want to have a chance to go and play Evil Dead and there's none on location and you haven't received one yet, then Pinball at the Beach is your place to go and go and enjoy it, although I suspect there'll be a bit of a line down there. Well, I expect it to be sold out because it's limited to 1,000. It's an ease only. I don't think it is sold out at the moment. I was just looking earlier today. Certainly didn't suggest that it was. I mean, the accommodation, yes, because there aren't that many rooms and they sold out a long time ago. But it would still allow you to buy tickets for the whole weekend. I had no idea. Now I need to do plane tickets. Right, yes. that would certainly help with your enjoyment of the show otherwise only other news we've got from speaking at the moment is there's a more new code from them, this time it's for Looney Tunes which came out on the new code came out on the 10th of January and added the new Duck Amok Wizard Mode as well as some new secret combos new attract mode music and some additional checks to prevent some of the bugs which had been previously noted, and a whole bunch of extra bug fixes, which people may not have noticed, but they hopefully won't now. So that was Looney Tunes, only Looney Tunes, not the companion title, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which came out at the same time. So there are different coding teams on those, and of course very different gameplay on those. Right, so And last but not least To close it off for Spooky Pinball Kerry Hardy recorded a new factory tour video Hosted by Corwin (Bug) Emery Who is currently running the show So if you go on YouTube And you look up Kerry Hardy's channel It's easy to find And enjoy A little look inside the Spooky Pinball facility Yes, they're all new Freaky Pinball is an expanded one. Yeah, exactly. Enjoy. Okay, let's now move to Multimorphic down in Texas. And they have some news as well this month. They have started a new 2025 P3 customer referral program. A what? A customer, I'm not sure what they're referring to the customers as, but they're referring to them. No, it's good news because any registered P3 owner who refers a new buyer to Multimorphic subsequently goes on to complete their purchase of a P3 with an installed game kit that referrer will receive 1,000 US dollars in Multimorphic store credit which they can use towards buying add-ons or new game kits or just software as well. Further, to help entice new buyers, they will also get a discount of $1,000 on the price of their machine and an additional 10% of each further game kit that they purchase at the same time. So some good sale and bargains to be had there. So $1,000 for the person who refers the buyer, $1,000 off the price, and an extra 10% off extra modules and game kits for the buyer. But what if I don't have any friends? What do you mean, what if? Well, I mean, if nobody can refer to me, and then I'm missing out on all these bonuses. Yes, and so is the buyer. So it's probably worth hooking up with somebody if you don't know who they are, if they're looking to buy a P3. Because they will get a thousand off and you'll get a thousand. So it works for everyone. Wow, I'm just going to get so much referral because every thousand, oh man, I'm going to make so much money. Yeah, exactly. The machine will pay for itself. Exactly. If I have eight friends referring to me, it's free. Apparently you don't have to buy it directly from Multimorphic. They're also offering this discount to buyers through their distributors as well. No end date is defined for this program, but they say it's subject to be terminated at any time. with extreme... Right. Yeah, that's right. One second before you get your referral. Oh, that's just okay. Like, yeah. However, any in-process referral where you've already got the referral email will be on it, even if they cut the program short. So anyway, so if you are thinking of, or you know somebody who's thinking of buying a P3, with a game kit, then it's time to do it. One of their great games, of course, is the Scott and Isi Design Final Resistance. And there was a new code for that, which fixes not having the wave number on the high scores, adds new preemptive strike sound effects from Scott, adds a new high score table for Battle Wave 1, lots of gameplay options added. One thing that really interested me, I don't think I've ever seen this before on any of the software updates, it says there is better support for colourblind players. You'd be surprised how many there are. I know. I know. I'm surprised we've never seen this before. There's a lot of people who have red-green differentiation issues. They can't see whether something is red or green, and obviously it's a bit of a problem with traffic lights, but that's why they're in the order that they are. But this new software says that the ground control will flash twice as fast when it's green compared to when it's red. So if you can't tell the difference between them by colour, you can by the speed at which it flashes. So that seems like a really good idea, and I'd like to see that adopted by other companies as well. They'll actually support for people with those colorblind issues. But this version of the code also has new lighting effects for the speaker lights, lots of settings, controls for how the game plays, and a couple of bugs fixed. So, you know, quite a big update for Final Resistance. This version 1.2.0.2 came out the 20th of January. And that's the new code update news from Multimorphic and basically all the news from Multimorphic for this month. Right. Okay. But let's stay in Texas for a little bit and move down a little bit more south to Barrels of Fun, who are in Houston. they have a sort of alliance I would say with Pimble Armour who were in business probably a decade ago offering all sorts of products to prevent or to pack your Pimble Machine property prevent it from being damaged And, well, these pinball armor is now in stock at the Barrels of Fun store, which I believe is Collect Fun. With a K. With a K. Yeah. And, well, it's been described as the only one machine protection for your pinball transportation needs. And I guess that sums it up pretty nicely. Yeah, it's very high quality protection. And it's nice to see it making a return. And Barrels of Fun are leading the charge in selling that now. So good for them. There's a nice little sideline as well. Right. And Barrels of Fun also have a new distributor covering the United Arab Emirates. and the name of that distributor actually quite surprised me which is Chills Amusements based in Dubai and they apparently already sell Stern Pimble, Jersey Jack Pimble, Padretti and Pimble Brothers machines I had no idea if Trent made the jump to United Arab Emirates but apparently he did Well, I tried looking up and see if there's any relationship between Tilt Amusements in Dubai and Tilt Amusements in the US. I couldn't see any obvious link between the two. So, I'm not, it may just be they're the same name. I wouldn't necessarily say that that was one of Trent's businesses. Okay, it might be. Is the logo the same? No, I don't think so. No. And the fact that they sell all these other companies' products as well made me wonder. Because I don't think Tilted Music is in the US to sell all these other companies' products. Well, they do sell certain. They certainly sell certain and lots of them. But not J.J.P. or Podresi or Pimple Brothers machines like the Dubai business does. Right Oh well It could have been But apparently It's just a name Yeah Okay Interesting And best of luck to Barrels of Fun With their new distributor over there And hopefully It will sell a lot of games for them Yep And So let's move on to our next company Which Let's get a home pin Based in Taiwan I was going to Turner first Because it's still in Texas Oh, okay. Yeah, well, we were in UAE, but okay, let's go to Turner, because obviously there's a lot of news from there. Yeah, absolutely. That was worth it. Yes, well done. There is one little bit of news. Yeah. Kerry Hardy made a video about visiting the Turner facility about two months ago, which I'd say is recommended to check out. You get a look behind the scenes on the build of Ninja Eclipse. And, of course, Chris Turner is there to answer any questions Kerry may have had after a six-hour drive. Poor guy. It's a top blog Yeah That's basically all the news From Turner Pinball Actually from two months ago They're still cranking out These 100 Ninja Eclipse Ninja Eclipse games And hopefully we'll We'll run into Chris At the Texas Pinball Festival In March Yeah, I don't know when they Plan, if they plan to announce a second title any time soon. But it would certainly be interesting. It was a good way to start the company by limiting it to 100 machines. It gave them a lot of valuable insights into how to make pinball at scale. And I dare say the next title will benefit from that enormously. But let's go back to where I was dragging us just now, which was over to Taiwan for HomePin. because their current title, The Blues Brothers, that was available at the EAG Expo show and was featured on the Retro Arcade Specialist stand. Yes. And I think it's fair to say it surprised quite a few people by being better than they expected and certainly better than Home Pin's previous titles. I bet it was a surprise it was there in the first place as well. Well, I think it had been trailed. It was hoping to be there, but it only just arrived in time for the show. It was flown in by retro arcade specialists, so well done to them for getting it there. Now, Homepin themselves have said that they are producing a second small run, in their words, of the Blues Brothers machines. We don't quite know how small the small run is, but the previous picture suggested the first small run There might have only been up to about six machines. But I guess they're making them as demand comes in. They are cutting their own playfields in their wood shop and then sending them off to be printed and clear-coated. Right. But they certainly have the control over the cutting of the wood. And if you remember, it wasn't that long ago that they had that typhoon. that blew through and destroyed their woodworking shop. Right, yes. So it's good to see they're back cutting playfields again. Yes. Now, getting back to that Blues Brothers game on the show, did you play it? Yes, I did, yes. What did you think? Well, I agree. It was certainly a lot better than... It was probably better than I was expecting, given previous titles, because Final Attack and Thunderbirds. and it had some difficult shots, I thought. And you had to work for the multiball in that game. That was a bit of a contrast to Dungeons & Dragons and made it all the more rewarding when you did get it. Yes, absolutely. It was a game I kept pushing start over and over again. And once I figured out how to get the multiball, I was actually able to get, I think, both of the multiples in the game going. It was a very satisfying game to play, I have to say. Yes, you have to bear in mind that this is the game that has the open source software on it that's still being developed. so it's up to the owners and the community to develop it further if they want to add more to what's already there so it certainly has potential Oh definitely, the only thing I would have wished for, for that game is basically with the layout that it currently has which is rather wide open but there are several spots where you're basically, where the ball is bouncing around and just hitting metal rails, it would, in my opinion, have benefited the game if there would be a standard target there. So the ball doesn't bounce up to the metal rail but to a target because that gives programmers the option to do something with that. Yes, good point. Yes. And I think there's two or three spots in that game that could easily be covered by a target. Other than that, I had surprisingly a lot of fun playing it And like you said, it's not easy to get to multiball But when you do, it really gives that satisfaction And you get to hear the music on that game as well Because it was pressed up reasonably loud So that was good Okay, so that's I think all the news we have for Home Pin and so I guess we should probably hop back to the US and Chicago Gaming who are busy building Pulp Fiction machines and at the beginning of this month they announced that they had just made their 300th limited edition machine out of the limited run of 1,000. So on the basis of that they said that they are projecting the remainder of the LE run will take them through to April. So, after which, maybe, they're going to start doing these Medieval Madness remakes, which they announced so long ago and haven't actually got around to making yet. But for now, they're busy building limited edition Pulp Fiction machines. Okay, cool. So, then, our favourite company in Canada, well, not really, but still, Pinball Adventures no news from them they ran it up very quickly back in Europe we have Hexa Pinball in France apparently the latest Hexa Pinball team member in the spotlight in their social media has been Sébastien Muller who craves the rules and the light shows you have to look him up on on Facebook a heck of a pinball Facebook and there's a link there I believe yeah it's a bit weird because I've been doing this series of spotlighting various members of the development team all the members of the development team and I went to their website to find these articles and they're not linked as far as I can see anywhere so the only way you can find them is to go through their Facebook page and And they don't publish a huge amount on Facebook, so it's very easy to find all the different team members and you can see their background and what they've been doing in the game. So that's the way to go. Okay. Well, thanks for that. Then we have Vector Pinball in Australia. Well, last month we had some news from them about their Hold'em game, but no news, no development this month. Okay. Okay. Tegas Fibble, also in Australia. Yeah, well, they don't really exist anymore. I could find no news about the liquidation of assets from them this month, so I haven't got anything to bring you at the moment. Okay, well, that's fine. So then we have Bitconic in Spain. Yeah, again, no news, which is odd, because we know they building the Tokyo Perfect Drift game developed by Antonio Quetzal But they don seem to be pushing that very much don't seem to be advertising it very widely or promoting it being out on location anywhere. So we don't know where all these games are going that they're building. No, if anybody knows, Martin and I both have email addresses, This is editor at and then our respective, well, websites. Yeah. And use or... If anybody wants to ship us a game, I'm sure we can provide an address to send it. Yeah, definitely. Mm-hmm. Okay, then we have Wonderland Amusements. Now, just to recap there, Wonderland Amusements is this new company who are also developing an Alice in Wonderland-themed game. theirs is called Alice Goes to Underland and it's an 80% scale 80% pool size pinball machine and with the target to bring the game in for retail at under 1000 US dollars when they actually get to launch it so the news we have this month is that they have announced they're going to be doing a Kickstarter in order to promote and sell their game. And it's going to be launching in March. And in order to find full details of the Kickstarter, go to kickstarter.com, search for Wonderland Amusement or Wonderland Pinball, and there you can find all the details about the game that are available at the moment. The Kickstarter hasn't launched yet, as I say. It will start in March. at which point the tiers that are available for bonus extras that can be done by paying more towards Kickstarter will be announced. But at the moment, that's where you will find probably the most detailed information about the game. Even just today, there's an update there to the Backgrouse artwork, or Transvite artwork, which made a slight adjustment to some of the characters on it. Very slight. I had to put them side by side to actually see the difference. But, yeah, definitely they were listening to feedback from their first showing of the Backgrass artwork and made a couple of changes, so that's good. That's artwork from the game artist, who is Carlos Mendoza III. and the Wonderland amusement team apparently went to Hong Kong where they saw prototype 2.0 of the game. That's where it's been built, or will be built. It has a new playfield layout with Carlos' playfield artwork on it, which is the first time they had seen the actual playfield artwork on the new layout. has the new backbox artwork and has a first version of the gameplay rules. And if you go to their Kickstarter page, as I just mentioned, you will be able to see a video that they made showing some basic gameplay. And that's also on Wonderland Amusement's social media feed if you follow them on Facebook or anywhere else. So exciting things happening with Wonderland Amusement and next month should see the start of their Kickstarter. Okay, well, we'll keep an eye on that. And then we have a whole bunch of other companies that we have absolutely no news from. So we'll just quickly summarize them as no news from Cardona Pinball, Tilt Bob, STR Pinball in Spain, Quetzal Pinball also in Spain, and, well, Circus Maximus. Yes, unfortunately, nothing going on there from any of those companies. perhaps we'll have to go through and maybe thin out a couple of these because I don't think we've had any use from many of them for a couple of years. Right, so, yeah. Oh, well, anyway, and then there is the other news section. Oh, now we're getting serious. Yes, well, we mentioned before about the EAG Expo show in London where you flew over and I took the train in. so there the pinball was consisted of the Stern's five games on the Electrocoin stand which we already mentioned we also mentioned Retro Arcade Specialists who had the Blues Brothers game there but they also had Labyrinth from Battles of Fun and Abba Machine from Pinball Brothers as well as Hot Wheels and Hingini games from American Pinball those were the new games they had they also had some used games they had a Pulp Fiction from Chicago Gaming, as well as Guardians of the Galaxy and James Bond 007 from Stern. So a nice lineup of machines for people to play there. And finally, there was another machine. It was a Led Zeppelin game from Stern that was on a company called ASK, or A-S-K, Global Solutions Stand. It was being used to demonstrate how people can make credit card payments using this company's card reader and software, back-end software, using Pay for the Games with their regular credit card rather than using any of the proprietary systems where you need to purchase credits or download a special app or any of that kind of stuff. So you could literally just go and put your Visa or your MasterCard straight on the card reader and pay for a game. And interestingly, there was a couple of these card readers on the stone pinball games that were on the Electrocoin stand. So, yeah, so that may indicate that they're getting a bit more traction, or might in the UK at least, which is, to me, a good thing, because we don't like having obstacles put in our way when we're trying to buy a game of pinball. You just want to be able to walk up, tap your card or your phone, or whatever on it, and buy credits and play. You don't have to download some specialist app, which is only ever used for buying pinball games, well, credits. Right. Yeah. Right. So, and as you may have noticed, no Jersey Jack games on the EAG show. Neither was Jack Wannieri present, and that had everything to do with pinball heaven not having a stand this year due to a family expansion situation, if I'm right. That's a good way of putting it, yes. Yeah, we were expecting, well, a month ago we were expecting People Heaven to be there with Jack and some other games that they have because they are distributors for other companies too. And you may remember the last time we spoke to Jack, we said we'll see you in London in January. Well, unfortunately it didn't come to pass. So Jack didn't come to London, and as you said, there were no Jersey Jack games represented at the show, which was a shame when so many other companies were. Right. Oh, well, I just figured I'd mention it. It's not always about what was the act, but also about what wasn't. Good point. Yeah. Right, so we've talked on to other news. Unfortunately, we've got some very bad news to impart, which relates to the death of famous voice actor in pinball, Fred Young. who's very prolific. He's credited for voice work in 27 pinball games for Data Reads, Sega, Alvin G, and Stern. He started in the industry in 1990 when he was actually a recording studio doing some advertising voiceovers and left his demo tape there, and it was picked up by Joe Kamikow from Data East and he was asked to come in and do some voices for various games. And his first recording session, he came in and did four games all in one session. That was back in the days when I guess the games were a lot simpler in software terms and probably in number of call-outs and assets. and say we should do them all in one go. And since then he's worked on loads and loads of different titles. Last game he worked on, I think, The Walking Dead, 2015. But he's one of those people, he turned up at Pinball Expo, I can't remember when that was. It might even have been 2006. Well, that's the last time I think he spoke, 2016. He might have actually been at the industry, one of the first shows. And you'd often see him there, about most years he would have been at Bimble X. Always so full of life, so keen to do voice, do imitations of characters, recall plays always full of jokes a real larger than life character and he did do a seminar at the 2024 Pinball Expo which we have on audio on Pinball News so you can listen to Fred there and he was also inducted into the Pinball Expo Hall of Fame last year as well and a video of that is available on the Pinball News website as well and on the YouTube channel. But there's an article anyway on Pinball News about Fred's passing which links directly to all those so you can read all about his history and be a real gap in Pinball Expo to go and not see Fred there this next time. So thanks for everything you did for us Fred and you're always a very talented and entertaining guy and we will miss you. yes we will may he rest in peace it was always as I said on my Facebook page it was always fun joking around with Fred so and I did frequently whenever I ran into him he didn't have a chance really he found us didn't he yeah but his work lives on and will for a long time yes ok then we have Trait Terrace on the U.S. imports from Canada, Mexico, and China. This is something you really sank your teeth into. Well, it's a developing story as we're recording this because just a couple of days ago, President Trump announced 25% tariffs on all products from Canada and Mexico and 10% tariffs, additional 10% tariffs on products from China. but even as we were making the notes for this particular PIN cast, news came through to say that the tariffs on Mexican goods had been delayed for 30 days following talks and then literally as I was just sat down to record this, news came through that the 25% tariffs on Canada, on Canadian goods, has also been deferred for 30 days. so where that will go I don't know you can see the tactics at play here you know you threaten all this stuff and you negotiated some kind of deal we hope that this won't happen but he's also threatened tariffs on European Union products too and that might be a little bit harder to negotiate away given the nature of the opinion being made up of so many different countries who have to agree. But the upshot of all this, if it goes ahead, is it's going to be more expensive to buy pinball machines, it's going to be more expensive to make pinball machines. So if the Canadian ones went ahead, tariffs went ahead, then that will obviously impact what companies are, if pinball adventures make any gains and sell them to the US, then they'd be 25% more expensive. But there are other companies in Canada like Classic Playfield Reproductions up in Nova Scotia, making great playfields and plastics and backglasses. Now their stuff, when they sell it in America, will suddenly go up 25% in price. And there's a company called Ace Scrim Studios who make those little electromechanical pinball clocks that use score reels. they're based in Canada as well and they put a notice on their website saying that they would be subject to this and they'd have to raise their prices by offering a 12% discount code as some kind of middle way so the price would only go up half as much immediately but anyway, that's gone away for the moment but it's something that we have to keep an eye on and of course the China thing hasn't gone away and yet, and there's a lot of stuff in pinball machines that comes from China. So that means that computing parts, power supplies, speakers, any parts, plastic parts, moulds and things like that, and toys that come from China will now cost pinball manufacturers 10% more than they did before. and as you will have heard in our talk with Stern, when we were talking to John Buscaria and Gary Stern, talking about prices of pinball machines and the fact that they haven't gone up for some time and they're wondering how long they'll be able to hold that for. Well, maybe this will be the thing that will force prices to go higher. Right. I know. But, yes, I say, at the moment, the EU is probably the next market to be targeted, and there are obviously European manufacturers, Pedretti, Pimble Brothers, Dutch Pimble, all manufacturing in Europe, who sell most of their games to the US. So if they put a 25% price increase on that, it's going to make them very uncompetitive. And that takes us back to what you were talking about earlier with Dutch pinball exploring manufacturing and contact manufacturing within the U.S. Right. Well, at this point it would almost seem almost logical if European pimple manufacturers, let's say Dutch and Pimple Brothers slash Pedretti and maybe Hexa and who else is interested in manufacturing pimple machines in the US to combine forces and see what they can come up with altogether. Yeah, it would make a lot more sense for Patrici and Pimple Brothers because they're already in a business relationship through the Euro Pimple Corp. So they have a common manufacturing hub in Italy. so they have experience of doing that so maybe not so difficult for them to set up something in the US if these tariffs turn out to be an ongoing thing. But even so, as you said, when you talk about Dutch and their next title, if they can save on the shipping costs of having to transport everything across the Atlantic and go through all the customs and inspections and payments that they have to do in order to bring stuff into the U.S., that would certainly be a big saving for them if they can ensure that the quality is there. Right. Oh, well, we'll see how it goes. And you're right, this is a continuing story. It looks like basically every 30 days new negotiations are in order to avoid tariffs being applied. Yeah, there's a lot changing, so all we can do is keep an eye on it, and hopefully, by the time we get to next month's Pincast, we'll have more news on what's happening. But right now, who knows what's going to happen. Right. Oh, well. So then, well, oh, my God. The Deep Root Saga. Yes, I was just saying, who knows what's going to happen. Yes, well, there's only a little bit of news in the ongoing story of Deep Root and criminal and civil prosecutions against the former head of Deep Root, Robert Mueller. He apparently now has a new defence lawyer because he hasn't got any money and can't afford to buy one or pay for one himself. so one's been appointed to him and so he's been granted additional time with his new lawyer to get across the case and potentially negotiate a plea deal in the criminal trial. So now, it was going to be until January 21st but now it's been pushed back to April 28th this year, 2025. We should remember, of course, that the financial penalties in the Security and Exchange Commission, SEC's civil case, which have already been admitted to, but the levels of which haven't been set, that's also been put on hold now that this criminal prosecution has begun. So that hasn't gone anywhere either. So basically nothing is happening in any of this until May, really, now, at least, or the end of April. Okay, well Yeah, so We won't have to cover it next month Right, okay So, well, thanks for that summary So, then Well, we mentioned it already Earlier in the show The Pinball at the Beach show Is the first edition It's taking place February 7th To 9th At the Tradewinds Island Grand St. Pete Beach in Florida. Yeah, very first one, run by Ed and Kim Van Der Veen. Yeah, who have plenty of experience organizing the Texas Pinball Festival. But as they moved to Florida, they're now giving it a shot over there. And they did a very good job on getting pinball celebrities attending, or pinball industry celebrities or personalities. I think there's nobody left in the current creative department. Everybody is going to Florida for the next weekend, so it should be quite a party I suppose. Yeah, the Carl Weathers should be nice. Forecast 22 centigrade to 23 centigrade in the day and 17 at night. So nice to be sitting outside both day and night by the looks of it. And no heavy rains or storms forecast. Oh, no cyclopes or... No, no tropical storms, nothing like that coming through. Well, we have nice pinball events here in Europe as well, and there is one which I would like to mention now. I think it deserves a little attention, and that is the European Pinball Championship 2025. Yes. And that will take place in Austria, in the city of Vukla Brok you can mispronounce that in English oh I will main organizer is Stefan Riegler who we know from RS Pinball and he was a distributor for almost any brand in pinball and well he rented this ice hockey Hall, the Riva Halla Ice Sports in Foklerbrock and he's organizing this event with help from several pinball clubs from the Austrian area. And there is a website, but it's probably easy to Google, just Google European Pinball Championship 2025 and it will probably take you there. apparently it's a very interesting tournament with a lot of whopper points to be earned aside from that there are also side tournaments announced of which I think the most interesting one is a Jersey Jack pinball tournament every Jersey Jack pinball title ever made will be present and the winner of the tournament wins a new Jersey Jack pinball machine Wow, that's a great prize. But the EPC this year is more than just tournaments. It's also going to be like an Exway-type event with seminars and vendors being there too. So there are quite a few people coming over, I think, for the event in the industry. I'm sure, is Gary Stone coming over? I think he probably is. could be I think Jack could be coming over as well yes I heard Dave is coming over from Barrels of Fun Pedretti Pinball is coming over Melvin from Dutch Pinball Exclusive is coming over there will be a Bridal Pinball 2.0 a Lebowski and an Alice's Ascent to the Wonderland game I believe also in regards to term pinball, every Spike 2 game with an LCD will be on the floor as well. Wow. Okay, amazing. So, yes, if you haven't already checked it out, as you say, you can search out EPC 2025 pinball, and you will get all the details. I don't, I think registration hasn't opened yet. No, I think that will take place on February the 23rd. if I'm not mistaken. Right, okay. I think there's qualification for certain players from each country, but there's also public open entries as well, which you'll be able to buy. So anybody can take part in any of these tournaments. Although there is one other tournament, which I don't quite know what it is. It's called a company tournament, and I think it's for local businesses who are not really pinball, but just want to have a bit of fun in a sort of head-to-head challenge against other local businesses. So that's quite fun. But it's going to be over multi-days. I think it's like from Wednesday through to Sunday. Right. And it's going right up to the wire on Sunday as well. I think the JDP one, I think, finishes till about 11 o'clock or midnight on Sunday. Probably. I think they will change that later on the website. but there's quite a bit of info on the website so do check that out and of course do support Stefan Riegler and his business there's several hotels actually also to be found on the website of the EPC in the nearby area you may need a car to get around but oh well you can get there by public transport as well yeah it's going to be a big event so look forward to seeing that later in the year So, I think that pretty much wraps it up for our pinball industry news so far. This look back at January 25th. But we, of course, now take you to our special interview with the former executive vice president of American Pinball. That's David Fix. Who we've spoken to many times in the past in his role at the company. but this time we're talking to him when he's no longer at the company. So we have a lot of questions about what happened, why the company got into the condition that it is, the situation it is, what happened to David himself and what the owner's plans are for the future of the company and what else is going on there. So we'll hand it over to David. Hey, Martin. Hello, Jonathan. How are you guys? I'm very good, thank you. Thank you. Now, we reported on your departure from the company, and in the statement you said that they hadn't, or your contracts had not been renewed. This was the second contract that you had, as I understand. Your first contract was for one year, and you had a three-year extension to that. So after four years at the company, your contract was not renewed any further. So can you tell us a little bit about how that came about? Was that something which was expected, shall we say? And what else was going on at the company around the same time, which may have impacted on the state of the business at the time? So, first of all, was this something which was not expected or was this something which you saw coming? Did not see it coming. So, and it's kind of crazy to me. So, yeah, we started out with the three-year and it was literally December the Losers Kid podcast. as crazy as it sounds at the end of the Losers Kids podcast I was actually getting phone calls and text messages from Ryan McQuaid and a few other people over there who had just been laid off at the time at the finishing of the thing and then I had to go downstairs from when I was doing the podcast at Amtron and go into a corporate meeting with Mukesh Panermal who have all of a sudden decided to change course, as it were, which surprised me because game seven that we had was nearing completion. I mean, in all intents and purposes, we were waiting, right? We were waiting for ordering of parts, and they had stalled it a little bit, but we didn't know why. And then they just said, nope, we're no longer going to do any more R&D. We're just going to be a contract manufacturer, which surprised me a little bit. Seeing to be a contract manufacturer, you need the employees that you kind of just let go. So, not only that, I think even if you're a contract manufacturer, with such projects, as always, things happening along the way that you need R&D to step in to make sure that you have a smooth production process. Correct. Correct. Well, not only that, you think about it, you need a mechanical engineer, somebody who's going to check all the specs, check everything that's coming in. You have a quality engineer who does that. but you have people who look at materials, and also the team usually goes down and sits there and lives on the line and goes through the games, right? They live. So we were gearing ourselves up. End of September, beginning of October, we had all the major distributors in. they got to see it Mr. Martin got to play game 7 as well and Martin unfortunately can't talk about it in any detail but the only thing I will share with him is that I remember reminding Martin many times that he had an appointment and he said right I gotta get out of here but he said but one more game one more game he just kept he was he was tied in really deep on the game and the rule set and what was going on and then joining himself that he kept i can i play one more martin you can play as much as you want just forever you have a flight or something you get to get to it today um can i take you back a little bit on that because um one of the things i think was important to understand is something you mentioned just now when you started talking about this was that you were told that people were being laid off at the company key members including ryan um people assume that you were the one laying them off whereas i don't think people understand exactly what the structure or the responsibilities are from what was your role and also what was being done to run the company by Mukesh and by Nermal from Ametron. So could you sort of break that down a little bit? Because people just assumed that you were EVP, all the decisions were yours. No, I wish. Kind of... all right, to, I used this analogy before, and it's kind of an analogy that's an American analogy, it's called an absentee landlord, and an absentee landlord is a kind of a person who, they own the building, they run the things, they're there, but they're not there, right, they're just, you're the tenant, you're doing your thing, you're trying to get permission from them all the time, and sometimes you do stuff, and then they come in, and they, well, we don't know if we like it this way. Let's see, and then maybe we'll change things. So what happened here was is that Nermal and Mukesh are basically running finance, and they're the upper management. They're above me. They're the bosses. So I report directly to Nermal and to Mukesh. And for the most times, how it would work is if I said something and Nermal said something, I mean, the two of us would propose it to Mukesh, and the two would kind of, you know, two against one kind of thing. You know what I'm saying? It would be a three-way. But it's always kind of a battle on a lot of stuff. Same thing with me. If I was talking to Mukesh about something, I had to convince Nirmal. That kind of thing sometimes would work that way. They basically came up to themselves, the two of them, saying, okay, we're going to try this a little different. and catch basically thought normal into it in doing just contract manufacturing. So what happened was, yes, I'm kind of Ryan's boss, but there's a boss above me, and if they want to get rid of somebody, they can do that. You know, it's like, you know, sometimes. And then they call you in and go, by the way, we're making some changes. This is what's going to happen. So that happened on that day that we did the Loser Kid podcast in December. And then... That was right before Christmas, right? Yeah. Yeah, so Ryan Benjamin, who was our project manager, and Zofia, who was our mechanical engineer, all three of them were laid off, as it were. And then, of course, I was like, well, what's the situation? Where are we going with this? And then, of course, I asked the question. I said, well, you know, what's the long-term aspect with me and the rest of the team, right? And they said, well, we'll get back to you. that. And that was on Thursday. And then Friday, I kind of worked through the day. And, you know, you're missing half your R&D staff. You're missing some of your people. And it's kind of like a gut punch. We worked through the day. And then I'm trying to remember what day that was. I don't think it was the 13th. But I remember on Friday the 13th, great day, Friday the 13th was when I got called in and they said that your contract is finished as of now. We may want to start negotiating for a new contract for you to do other things for us, not managing the pinball aspect and so forth. And there was another couple of employees that were there at the company still. And I said, what is their long-term aspects? You know, what's your plan for them? One of them, and I don't want to name them right off the bat, but the poor guy, he was moving to Atlanta. He was going to be buying a house and everything. And they really were about ready just to cut ties with this person right there and then before he bought a new house in Atlanta. His wife had gotten a great job, you know, that kind of thing. and I really said, listen, let's not really do this to this person. Keep them on because he's going to be buying a house in about three days. You know, he's closing on a house. You cut ties with him. Everything's going to fall through. It's not going to be good. And they agreed. They said, well, we'll keep them on. That's fine. We'll keep them on until, you know, January or something. That's okay. He's still there. So it's like, okay. He survived January then. He survived January, yes. But it was the time that they had talked to me, that they wanted to do something. But what really hurt us all is that on the Friday the 13th when they called me in, the entire Inktron office was having their end-of-year holiday party, as it were. and he's handing out, you know, things to people, presents and bonuses. And meanwhile, at pinball, he's handing out pink slips. So it was just kind of upsetting to a lot of people. We thought as a group, let's just regroup and let's just get through the holiday, you know, that kind of thing. You know, even though we were sucker punched, as it were, let's just regroup, be professional about this, and let's see what they're going to offer, right? So they wanted to do some kind of contract with Ryan. They kind of told me at the end they were going to talk to Ryan about a contract. So I said, Ryan, okay, but you need to work with them on that. Zofia, they wanted to talk to, you know, Benjamin, they wanted to talk to. And I said, okay, everybody's on their own kind of thing, just like I'm on my own here. But as things have progressed since then, I don't know if the situation has gone any better. I know Zofia took another job. She's now working for another pinball manufacturer. So way to go, Zofia. That'll be disclosed at some other point in time. Jack Haeger also is working at another pinball manufacturer. So there you go. So there's a lot of stuff. I also met and talked to Steven Bowden. Steve and I are still good friends. We live 10 minutes away. We do a lunch. And that's kind of the interesting thing is that the team together still is communicating and sitting down and talking. We can't go into details about what we're doing, but one of the things that Steve and I and Ryan kind of pushed for a little bit, and it's kind of exciting for us, you know, in January, a few years back, we lost a good friend by the name of Lyman F. Sheats Jr.. and Lyman did something in the industry that was never heard of. And so Steve, myself, I proposed to Steve and Ryan to do something during the month of January, and we did it. Okay, so I hosted here at my house. I have a galactic tank force down in the basement. I hosted at the house, having Steve and Ryan come over a couple days out of the week. I throw food in the oven or I make something up, And then we literally poured over the code on Galactic Tank Force. The reason we did this is because we knew quietly that InDisc wanted to use Galactic Tank Force in the tournament. And the code had never been, you know, finished and done correctly. So we spent a good period of time. Now, I have to remind myself that there was a very pivotal person also sitting in Robert Englunds by the name of Rob Cutter. Rob I met at the great Pinball UK show, and Rob and I sat and he talked, and I got him involved with Casey, and he had been doing a lot of testing with the code. So Rob Cutter, since August when I was in London with you, Martin, at the show, had been working on new code, new versions of this game with Casey. Well, so Steve, myself, and Ryan, we started pouring over all the code as well. We started doing that in January. And we're not getting paid by America whatsoever. But we are finishing the code because we love the game. And not only that, it kind of pays homage to a good friend like mine in chief, which is interesting. Anybody who has a limited or signature edition of Galactic Tank Force, if you look on the side, there's homage to LFS on there. He's on all our games. So we stuck that in there a long time ago. I had Franchi put that in. but we wanted to finish the code right we wanted to get it to a point and so great things at Indus the game ran beautifully the code was on there there's some tweaks that are being done we also had at that point in time been working with Scorbit Jay and Scorbit and so the new version will have Scorbit on it with badges and a lot of things that were never flushed out now are flushed out. Okay? So we're very excited about the new code coming out shortly. Literally, probably, I don't know, week, two weeks. I think it's getting some more beta testing. Casey's been doing some stuff. Casey's also come over to the house, which also answers the question a lot of people, I know it was all over Pinside and so forth, that David Fix doesn't own any American pinball games. I do. I do. most of them are in New York the Galactic Tank Force is the only one here in the basement and I brought that in just at the end of the year right, I bought it in January, end of December actually after the 13th there's a whole story behind that which I can't get into right now but at some point I will disclose a little bit more about the way E-Trime does their financing and you know I had to take a game which I wanted to take one anyway because I like Galactic Tank Force I like all our games I like Berries, I like Legends of Ahala I own a Hot Wheels they're out on location making money I have lots and lots of more questions go ahead one of the first ones just to carry on from what you were talking about how is that code that you and Ryan and Steve and Casey and Rob, I guess, have been working on, how is that going to be released? Is it an official American Pinball update that's going to come through Angel? Because Casey still works for American Pinball. He's still there. So we kind of, you know, a programmer sits there in front of the game and he's doing a million things, right? And he's trying to do this. With us, it was like, okay, we'll put three of us in front of the game, and we can go through and find little things, you know, like little bugs. Like the lights aren't turning. This lock isn't working right. This was a code. This was a bug this way. You know, the game's in multiball, and it goes into a different multiball, and it shoots out an extra ball when it's not supposed to. You know, little bugs like that. You know, it takes time to flush that out, and it takes a lot of us sitting there playing the game and making sure that it's reacting correctly and writing down the bugs or grabbing the code real quick by throwing a thumb drive in there and giving it. So Casey's the one who still works for American. He'll be releasing that code through the official American Pinball channel, and everybody else will see that. So it will be available. Okay, well, that was game five. Yes. So what about game seven? what's going to happen as far as you know what's going to happen with that game is it going to actually be launched or is it now something which we'll never see the light of day oh god I pray we see the light of day that is such a beautiful game I have to say that in my I've already told ownership of American Pinball when the game comes out I want my copy I'll pay for it that kind of thing probably should get one And Ryan, the same thing. Everybody on board who's played that game wants it. American Pinball, what I've heard is that they are still planning to release that game. When that is and when they do it, that's a different story. So, you know, step back, Martin. I worked on a lot of projects at American Pinball, a lot of things to help the company out a lot. the Aura Lighting in the backbox, the Universal backbox kit, the Aura Lighting Universal Kit for all games along the side rails. You know, there was Galactic Tank Force Classic Edition, which I had just finished at the end of December, just before I left. Basically, we moved some key points that were, let's say, very costly, but didn't interact with the ball. But following the correct procedure, and this is a key thing, I needed to have the Galactic Tank Force team, a.k.a. Paul Reno and Dennis Norbin, come in. So I was going to have Paul come down in January to review the game. They need to sign off that they're okay with the classic version of GTF. So that was in the works. Now, have they signed off on it? I have heard not, not yet. So there's a little controversy going on there between Paul Reno and Dennis and American Pinball, which I'm staying out of. But for the most part, I know that I had put together something that Paul had mentioned to me. we had many conversations about making a classic version of GTF a little bit more affordable. Yes, there's been an announcement that there would be a small run of 100 of the classic edition, and what would be taken out of it, which I think also included taking out the swinging UFO target. Correct. Which does impact on gameplay. Right, but that was not in my version of the game. so swinging target is in my classic version which was agreed upon by paul but i don't know if according to what i talked to paul uh later this earlier this week about the classic version he's like they have not proposed anything they have not signed we have not signed anything about it yet so we haven't seen it and uh he wants to go down and see it and he's got to sign off on it to make sure it's exactly right. But Paul and Dennis, both of them, are in the same court that that swinging target needs to still be in the game. So that was in the game. It's a continuous virtual ball lock. So the whole locking mechanism along the top was removed. The robot was removed. So he doesn't come up and down. Again, those pieces kind of and kind of not play a factor. The virtual ball lock is with the locking mechanism on top. When you put it in tournament play, which was at an Indus, it never locked them up there, right? It just shot them straight down. So to have it where it just kicks it out into the pop bumpers, it kind of works. So there's a bunch of little things like that that was taken into consideration while working on the classic version of that game. But according to what I've heard, nobody's signed off on it yet. So I know they made the announcement, but I think they put the cart before the horse. And we'll see what happens. I mean, listen, I like Galactic Tank Force. And that new code that Casey and I were working on with the team would work in the classic, right? So it's a different way of things working on it. Right. So now I'm going to be the bad cop over here. Sure. Obviously, well, you get called in and you just find out that some members of your team have already been laid off. I can imagine if you're being told like, this and this is going on and we want to do things differently. that must be based on upper management not being happy with the results the company has brought them over the past couple of months, years, I don't know. Is there a point in time where you can say like, okay, maybe we took a wrong direction with such and such game or we should have taken a different direction on such and such projects and everything would have been steered in a different direction and we would be in a different position now. Okay. It's a good question, Jonathan. You're not the bad cop. You're just the observer kind of thing. So was there a wrong direction? Well, here's the thing. When we came out of COVID, we were selling games. Okay. We were selling games, and we kept selling games. Unfortunately, you have games that hit the market. The market is on a bubble, and all the distributors are saying this, that we have the biggest bubble in the history, right? Stern isn't selling his games like they're supposed to be. You know, JJP are having issues. Chicago Gaming was late with their, you know. I mean, there's a lot going on in the industry, and there's a lot of gains in that mix, right? And I'm just looking at this, and it's just, unfortunately, sales kind of took a back seat. Now, according to the numbers that American, we were still well within the tolerance levels that we had been. okay so 2024 finished decent uh was it like 2023 no 2023 we were in the black 2024 we were in the red but not even as bad as it was before i started working for the company i can't go into great detail on that. But what has happened is that after 2023, Mukesh was like trying to figure a way, and in his mind he wanted to sell the company. But when you think about it, selling the company leads a lot of openings, right? And also the new board system. We had to bring a new board system on board. So we tried to get that done. That was and understand that they did not calculate the cost on the new board system very well. They paid more than they were supposed to, but they got it done, right? So that was also not handled by me. That was handled by the team in India. So there's a lot of stuff that transpires, right? Now, I know people are going to say that barbecue was not for selling beasts. right We sold more barbecue than we did Hot Wheels the first year So that will give you a clue that Barbecue did do numbers Barbecue was going to be doing better numbers coming up in 2025 because it was also a white label game. And I can't go into details on that, but there was a lot of things. Yeah, we talked about that before. Yeah, there was a lot of positive things. I mean, you were talking about about a couple hundred white label games that were coming out per title. So, you know, that would have given us the numbers for the parts, right? And you're right, we did talk about that before. But that's just like kind of the craziness that we're going through, right? So I know you have other questions, so I'll let you guys. I want to also say one thing, that when I made the announcements, and thank you, Mark, for posting that, I want to say thank you to all the thousands of people. uh give me well wishes you know uh on uh facebook or even um private messaging uh emails uh phone calls uh it's literally been like every day and this this thing has been ringing off the hook of people going hey what happened you know i i hope you're doing good uh we loved everything you did keep working keep trying and i have thousands from around the globe right i know There's a bunch of people out there who vilify me and make me sound like I'm the death of American pinball, but I'm the one that gave it the most of its life over the last four years. And when they pulled the plug, I am just a guy who was spinning plates and trying to make sure everything got in the right order. And I think Lloyd from S&S Billiards said it the best. Lloyd's a great technician, great guy, great friend. he said that my job was basically getting everybody to row the boat in the same direction I'm the cheerleader trying to get everybody rowing the boat not only that getting people in the office to row the oars right so when I started there there was uh let's see Mattesh and Josh Cooler and then I brought in Sophia, Jack, Dennis, Ryan, Casey, Steve, you know, Jessica, Bobby, a bunch of people in the back, right? A lot of people just, we brought in this entire team, Benjamin. And then slowly, they just got rid of the entire team. That's almost the way it was when we left. And right now, we have Casey Casey Butler, who is a programmer, and Mitesh. and Jessica, who is doing art for American Pimple right now. So that's kind of the whole team. That's it over at American Pimple right now. It's kind of bleak. Right. Well, one of the things which you mentioned at the time and something I spoke to you about in the past as well is whether the impact or whether there would be an impact on American Pinball from the IPO of the Indian branch of Amtron because American Pinball was included in the financials for that IPO and also it changed fundamentally, it seemed to me, the structure of the company in that when American People was set up, it was kind of Duval's baby. He was sort of bankrolled by McKesh. Yep. And then Duval kind of moved out of the picture and it became more McKesh and Nirmal who were running the show from the Antoine side of things. And then the IPO happened, and that, to me, seemed like Mukesh didn't really have the time or the willingness to keep his eye on what was going on at American Pinball anymore, and sort of let that almost entirely over to Nermal. and I suppose the sort of level of support for Reagan Pimple seemed to take a bit of a dive at that point. Is that, I mean, this is from an outsider's point of view and making a whole bunch of assumptions on what was going on in the back of the Amtron mind. Are you able to comment on whether any of that is actually the way you felt it was happening? Well, Martin, you hit the nail on the head. So let's, and Jonathan just kind of answers your other question. So there's a lot of moving gears, right? You know, what led to the demise, right? Or not demise, but the changing of direction. So think about this. In June of 2024, Imtron India went on the IPO of India. before that in 2023 I met with Mukesh at least once a month in 2023 once a month or twice a month sometimes Nirmal was literally next to me in an office the entire time so the two of us were literally running American Pinball Mukesh would go over to Intron, handle all that stuff, come back you know we worked next door to each other literally like Jonathan and you are right now. And that was a daily basis. And then Mukesh would come in and have that, you know, once a week, twice every two weeks kind of meeting with the two of us. And that's what the core was from 21 through 23. 24, the IPO came about. Mukesh had to go to India to get the IPO finished. to help that get it on the IPO. At which point, Normal was needed over at Amtron Corporate. So my neighbor, who I was working with on a daily basis, disappeared in the middle of probably around April, end of March and April. And I would see him once every two, three months. Mukashi I didn't see. I saw him in July. And then again, I saw him again at the end of September. and then I saw him one more time. I never saw him in November. I saw him in December. So the thing is with the IPO is that Ameson is making a ton of money off of the IPO, right? It's on the stock exchange. It's got this big beast behind it and it's requiring the most attention from cash. So he is spending his time there and he has to report to the stockholders and the rest of the board and everybody else. Meanwhile, Amtron Corporate needed somebody at the helm, so Nermal is now over there. So they were, I want to say that their idea of going to a contract manufacturing for just American pinball is so that they can literally have it, like, basically just sit there. When they need to focus their attention, they can put a little time in, get it to pump out whatever, have a skeleton crew pump out games, and then just continue to do it. And then if a new game comes along or some contract manufacturing job comes along, they can give it a little life and then go back, right? They're basically cutting out the whole R&D. Because, you know, and it's sad. I had many distributors. I had one distributor in person a good friend who is a great distributor he came in and he sat and he had been with us on all game 7 going through this and I said you need to talk to McKeach so finally I got him to go in to talk to McKeach about game 7 and he's like man this is it and McKeach he says did you see it and McKeach says I haven't seen anything I haven't played it I don't know anything about game 7 I don't have time that kind of thing and I think the distributor said it the best when we walked away he's kind of done with this he's checking out completely even though game 7 is probably the one game that would save the company well actually wouldn't save the company but put a big chunk of money back in the company because of the license and understand that when I started there and I've said this before that we were withheld getting a license right away. I had to sell so many Hot Wheels and it took another year to even get close to that number of selling those Hot Wheels. So then we were allowed to get a license. Then we played the whole licensing game, what are we going to get? And then we lost the license that we were going to get to another manufacturer. And then we finally got a different license and we got that in and we were so excited. And GameStop, I have to say, is probably Ryan's game. And I've said this before and I'll say it again. I told Ryan he's being spoiled to death because the interaction with a licensor has never been this great. The licensors are huge pinball fans, great people. I don't know many licensors that would literally have weekly, not once, but twice or three times a week meetings with the entire team. since the beginning. Flew out, played the prototypes, played all the games, and literally put this game together. And it's a great game. But I want you guys to ask more questions, so go ahead, Mark. Well, I have one for you. Or Jonathan. Well, actually, this is a positive one. Sticking with the situation that America wants to be a contract manufacturer, what is keeping you from forming your own R&D department or company, whatever you want to call it, with Ryan and Steve and a couple of other people and say like, hey, we got the licensor on board on this game. We want to finish it. You do that sort of in-house and you come with something that American can contract manufacture. Is that an option? Yes. That is an option. There's been many other little options that are available in that, and I can't go into detail, but that is an ongoing conversation amongst the entire team at American, or that was at American. It doesn't seem that big a surprise, I suppose, in a way that they'd want to have American as a contract manufacturer, because that is pretty much what Ametron does, isn't it? They are. They do contract manufacturer boards and electronic systems for other customers. But on that point, or on a related point, I suppose, do you think that Ametron would be open to another company buying out or buying American Fimball from them? and getting that completely off their books. Yep. And do you know if anyone's been in discussion with them about that? Yes, but I can't go into detail. Yes, you do know? There have been other people who have been in conversations. And I think what the key thing, the downside, and I say the downside that's really hurt, is that the team no longer works there. having the team together, having the team employed, makes it much more than just parts of anything. You know, it's kind of like you have, and I kind of try to share these things with Lukasz, is that you fire the entire kitchen staff, and all you've got left is the ingredients. Okay, the cooks are the staff, right? They're the ones who know how to bring all this together in a flavorful thing that will sell. You get rid of the staff. I mean, hello. You've got parts. Are you going to throw parts on a game? Oh, this is the greatest game ever. You know, here it is. It's a wooden box. It's got two flippers and, you know. Does it have anything else? No, it's a brick fest. So they weren't trying to sell the company before they laid everybody off then? there was um i don't want to go into too much detail on this but let's just say there was a price tag that was just unrealistic at that point in time and now with everybody gone i think for me uh the price tag has come down but still uh it's it's it's a conversation that like I said, it's kind of interesting that people are just, how is that going to work out? But like I said, I can't go into more detail on that, but, you know, it's just, again, where are we? Now, one of the biggest questions that I've gotten, and I want to answer a question before you guys even ask it, is if I buy an American Pinball game, what's my support going to be like? Well, here's the thing. American Pinball uses all a very specific manufacturer's part. And I can't go into detail who that was, but let's just say they were industry standards from the 1980s through the 90s until they closed in the 2000s. So we use their parts. Okay, so you can take basically any of the parts that you may find at these manufacturers and throw them in the American Pinball game and get them up and running. Okay. The boards, all right, are very robust, and they're still supporting code. So, and the computers are also stuff that we just did. Casey's already been working on the new code for the new computer, which is backwards compatible. They have it. The code will be on there, and people can start, you know, getting the new computers if there's a problem with the computer. But most of the computers are still running without a problem. The biggest hiccup on most of the computers that I know that a lot of people have called and asked to try to install the new version or something on an older Houdini, blah, blah, blah, can't figure out why this is having a problem, the batteries dead. Change out the CMOS battery so that the code can update itself correctly. I mean, so the games were built to last, right? I still have Hot Wheels out on location. It's still making money. I still have Legends of the Hollow out on location. I have Galactic in my bag. I mean, I took a Galactic, right, and cashed in on something they owed me. So Galactic's sitting in the basement here. I love the game. I've been a great player. I'm more upset about Game 7 because I don't want to see it go that way. But it could be a big bang bar. Yeah, it could have maybe just a few copies that ever were made. Highly collectible. Absolutely fun game. But in that regard, American, of course, well, facilitated Ryan designing the game and so on, and I suppose the IP must be with American in this case. but there's a licensor that wants that game out if an American doesn't want to build it would you be able to or would someone be able to shop it around and see if another people manufacturer might be interested oh absolutely but American has a time frame that they have to do it they have the license they're dealing with the licensor and right now they're saying that they're going to build the game So, hey, I hope so. I want to see it done. You know, it's a great game. Okay, so that then raises the other question. Right now, this is a minimalistic company, so to speak, in terms of employees. Even if they built a game, how are they going to promote it? And if you don't have anybody to do that and get games out, Jonathan these are questions I've asked them and they were like well we'll just do it I'm like how not only that how are you going to build it I mean I don't want to go into too much detail on this I got to be careful what I got to say but yes all those are very direct and questions that have been raised to them and they need to answer those questions before they announce and release the game. And also, remember, you pointed out, it's a licensor, right? So the licensor has been in bed with us the entire time. They have seen the game. They know what we have together. They know they're ready to say, yes, this is the game we want out, but they've got to sign off on it. And American has to get to the finish line and say, okay, this is the game. You guys sign off on it, you know. And the licensure is willing to probably fly in to see the golden sample, work with everybody, and start some sort of marketing campaign. I think that's what they were kind of, I think Mukesh and Nirmal were basically saying is that when they're ready, they're going to spin it up, right? They're going to probably bring in a couple people who, you know, podcasters and, you know, raise little flags and go, hey, it's done. It's here. It's amazing. I hope sooner than later because and to be the game that we left it with, right? I hate to see the cost monster come in and chop out stuff. But the licensure has to agree that they want that out. So it's kind of an interesting thing. To that point, let me just step back for Martin to understand something, because he raised the question about for sale. Licenses are only owned by the company while they're there. If they sell it, any of the licenses that American had have to be relicensed again. in order to put the company together. So you've got to go through, even though they buy the company, let's say somebody buys American, Game 7 is a licensed company. They have to go to the licensor, get a new license in order to release the game. So the license is with American. It's not with Ametron? Correct. Ametron? Well, yeah. It's with American, but under Ametron Finances, because Ametron was running the finances, And that is all part of the contract that has to go across. And if it's sold, just like when Deep Root was sold, right, all those licenses were up in the air again. Okay? They had to go get, you know, you had to go get that license again. That's why there's a bunch of games that switched from what Deep Root had and now are with different companies. And, you know, it's because they had to get the licenses again. They're only entitled to the owner and the finances that were proposed at the time. I mean, there's a whole bunch of more stuff than you can go deep in on that, but I already see Martin's eyes glazing over. No, no, I'm just thinking that we've talked quite a lot about Game 5 and about Game 7. What else was in the pipeline? What other little projects were coming up in American? because we've seen quite a lot of things that you, as a team, have been working on which haven't seen the light of day yet. And we're wondering whether they ever will. And was anything sort of poised to be released when basically the shutters came down and there was no more development and no more production going on? So what I was told was the production shutters are still open. whatever is getting cranked out is getting cranked out. Okay. The new development shutter is, you know, like the classic that was done by me before I left and a few other things that were done by some other teams. But there was, you are absolutely correct, there was a pipeline, a huge pipeline. There were white label games. There were projects. of projects, there was game 8, there was game 9, there was even a game 10 already talking over with licenses. All of those have literally been chopped off, as it were. Kind of sitting in limbo. Okay. I wasn't necessarily thinking about full games. I was thinking about little side projects, because we've seen add-ons to games which which could have come to market. Fairly simply, you would have thought, but it was about the timing and manufacturing capability of those. Absolutely. There was a thing for game three, and you know what I'm talking about. And there was a game for game one. Yes, that's right. Yeah, there was prizes for game one. That one I worked on a lot, but then I had to leave it to the coders, which when you have a small coding team, it's tough to have the people spending time on that and then this. So Game 1's small project got put on hold. It may come out. Now, listen, guys, I mean, the reason I'm staying a little vague on this is because it can still come out, which you and I both know that it's Game 1's company mod or factory mod came out, which was backwards compatible, which was amazing. It would change the entire gameplay of Game 1, right? It would make Game 1 very interesting to all the players, right? Then Game 3 was what everybody had been screaming about. that was going to come out in another version of that game but also again backwards compatible we also talk about toppers right there were toppers developed for game 3 there were toppers in the works for game 7 game 6 so all those were in work, negotiations and I mean I'm talking about some gorgeous toppers right I'm talking about a topper that was more interactive than anything that you've ever seen before and I was excited about it because this is something that I brought from ice because I've seen toppers at ice and I've seen toppers from other companies and I'm not talking about just having you know a static thing in a flash of light I'm talking about something that's going to tell the world what's going on in the game on the topper and very casino-like, very kind of attention in the arcade. That was all in development. Small team, right? In fact, the backbox or a lighting kit, the universal kit, was something that we were working on, right? Because we kept saying this was a problem. I proposed the numbers to Nermal. Nermal saw it, said go for it, and we did. Wasn't that hard to build that? Um, but, again, right now, where is it with the marketing and so forth? Um, game one. I'm trying to remember if there was something for game two. I can't remember if there was. I know Josh Coogler built a factory mod for game two, and it was great. Loved it. Supported it. Everybody could do it. It was the little Otto eating and, you know, drinking beer and eating a pretzel. That was a cute little, great little add-on for Oktoberfest. Josh. Okay, this is great talking about things that could have been, but what about things that still could be? I mean, what's in the future for David Fix himself? Good question. So in a week's time, I will have just finished my 60 days. I have another 30 days on my non-compete, which is a 90-day. And then David Fix can go just about anywhere, right? Resumes may go out. I'll knock on the doors. and we'll find out, right? There's been, you know, it's not like I haven't had discussions with many of the other manufacturers. But right now I'm just kind of leaving it open. And I'm also talking to somebody who was kind of interested in buying an American pinball at one point. So that's still in the air. I feel like I'm juggling. Right now David is enjoying spending some time with the team. playing the game downstairs, the galactic tank force, and going through the code. One of the things that we will, that was very good, we're very excited about, and we're just finishing up some stuff on that, was something that I worked on while here at the house. And we'll go into a little bit more detail soon. So we got some of it working. But in-disc, this is a key point, in-disc. American Pinball had a problem for the longest times where the flippers would get weak over so many hours of play. And I know this after I left them. This had been an ongoing discussion, a literally discussion that Steve Ballard and myself had been beating on since the Beast in Buffalo. because Steve and I went over to the Beast in Buffalo, and we had berries there, we had other games, and we had seen this flipper issue with the coils. And Steve and I had been talking about this. Casey got involved. We brought in a bunch of other people. I have literally beat on people through the industry, trying to pick brains and so forth, and then literally sitting down trying to figure out the best course. Well, I'm happy to say that we got an answer, and it worked really, really good at INDISC. The coil, and we'll be releasing that a little bit later about how to have a very strong coil. Now, granted, we had fans on the games at the Beast. There were also fans on the game at INDISC. But the difference was there was a different coil, a different flipper coil, a different way that we put it together. which we're at in disc, and we will give everybody that information at some point, which I was pouring through a ton of data. I mean, it's almost a show in itself of what I tore through because, remember, guys, I got pinballs downstairs. I've been doing this for many years, operating, playing with games, and understanding the fundamentals of how boards work and different systems, right? So you have companies like Stern who have been doing their flipper control since Daddy East days, okay, with the one-wound coil. And Mark knows what I'm talking about. And they've perfected that over the last 30, 40 years, right, to a two-wound coil with microseconds pulsating and what they can do to keep the coils running and keeping them cool. We took a coil from a manufacturer, and we kind of put it with a board system that wasn't designed for that coil, and we tried to put it together, and unfortunately we found some errors, right? So we'll be putting together a little spreadsheet, and I will definitely give Martin all the information on that at some point, and it will be through Pinball News and probably on American Pinball's thing. And you guys got to understand something. The team at American Pinball was always passionate about the company. I haven't taken a paycheck from American Pinball since December 13th. But yet I'm still passionate about what we worked on and wanted to make sure that people are excited and happy to have the product that we put out. And we were very passionate about that. So it's just one of those things that we kind of stay behind our stuff and work through some stuff. And it's actually been great for me to work through this coil issue because I actually had time to focus, right? I spent two and a half days, and then I called Jim Belcido up and said, Jim, I'm going to send you this documentation that's very, very rough. Do this, this, and this. Here's what you need to follow. Do this and put it in there, and you should be fine. And he did, and the coils ran beautifully through in this. So we were excited about that. Great. I'll probably just ask you one further question then, if that's okay. And it's a hugely hypothetical one, so let's have a bit of fun with it. Can you see yourself ever back at American Pinball? So the entire team and I have come to the same conclusion that, yes, we could see ourselves all back at American Pinball only under new ownership. So the idea of, you know, Mukesh and Nirmal owning the company and we working for them would probably be a no. Maybe some contract work, possibly, but come on we gotta be realistic here we all live a life we've been doing a lot of stuff here you know I mean it galls me that you know McKesh would say oh you're my friend and this is what we do you know you're my friend and your buddy and so forth but what he did to me and did to the team at American a friend doesn't do that and most of the team are all on board with me on that, saying that they love what they did. They love working with me. I love working with them. I've said it many times. I go into battle with these people. The problem was the ownership was not having our back, nor did they actually pay attention enough and handcuffed me where they could and really caused some problems. And, I mean, I know that there's a lot of people out there who have heard stories about the finance department, right? I had no control over the finance department. I had no control over it. I literally went to battle, you know, and that's not my job, right? My job wasn't to go and sit in the finance department and yell and scream and say, why are you not paying these people? That's not my job. My job is, okay, here's what we're doing. You budget this. This is what you agreed upon. this is what we need to pay the people, right? Why am I here having this, you know, 20, 30, 45-minute conversation on people that I know in the industry, people, friends that I know, and I'm battling them to do what they agree to do. And unfortunately, that's just, I don't know, the cultural thing or mentality. It just upsets us in depth. However, I've been enjoying the last couple of weeks, just working on the projects with the team. Yeah. Jonathan, any last questions? Well, it's sort of a tricky one to ask, Hearing you talk about the financial department restricting you or restricting the people working there, earlier you mentioned that at the date when people were laid off, other people in Amtron got bonuses for results achieved. should you be raising the question, or should we be raising the question, okay, what should have been done differently, or how should the results have been different in order to get a green flag and do whatever you want as long as you're selling games? Because with all the projects going on and everything's fine, and oh, it could have been this, it could have been that, But somewhere along the way, something happened, and the results were not what people were, apparently in financial departments, were expecting. You could say that. So here's the other thing. having a full-time financial person, a CFO, full-time, is what was the biggest hiccup in this entire thing. Having a financial team is probably the biggest hiccup in this whole thing. Listen, at ICE, at other companies that I've worked with, there are people who sit there and look at the numbers and go, yes. Okay, this is what we have coming in. This is what's going out. This is what we receive. They give you reports. They give you information. They tell you things. You literally give them, you know, okay, here's the sales report for this week. We have 30 games that were sold this week, 20 from the week before, 10 the week before that, right, and then 30 the week before that. and there's a container getting ready to be shipped out. We're going to be shipping a container out, and we're going to be selling this. You know, people say that, you know, American didn't sell any games in June, July, August. We sold games. They were very low numbers. They were not zeros, okay? There were containers that left. But a finance team is somebody who sits there and says, listen, this is what you have, this is what we budget, this is what we do. the team that I had the finance team were always like you give the money they just put it just spend it did they spend it in the right spot did they allocate it right did they put it to where it was supposed to be I can't answer that but I will tell you right now in my, looking at the numbers or if I got to look at the numbers I would say they didn't they did not budget They did not do the finance. They had one person who kind of was like, I have money, I pay. What do we got left? I don't know. I just paid off stuff. So, I mean, going forward, you know, accountability on the finance. I mean, from 2023, January of 2023, I had a two-and-a-half-hour argument with Mukash saying that I need a CFO and a finance team to literally live and be part of American Pinball. Not only that, I need somebody who's doing the payroll and all the rest of the stuff so that we know where we sit. don't come to me six months or a year later going, you got us all this money, but we spent all this money this way, and we don't know what we do with it all. A finance team's CFO is somebody who sits there and has meetings with everybody and knows and keeps track and understands where we are, not going in blind and going, oh, by the way, we just paid this. and I'm like, is that really my bill? It's not, but you're paying, okay, whatever. So there's a lot there, and I can't go into more detail than that, and I probably said too much as it is. Well, we thank you for your insight. Yes. Yes. Yes. Going out and building pinball machines is easy. Anybody can do it. Ask anybody. I was going to ask you if you had any closing thoughts, and I was thinking that probably is it. No. No, it's not easy. Trust me, it takes a lot. They had a good idea how to build machines when I walked in the door back in 2020. December 2020. 2021 was a telling year where we changed an awful lot. 2022, we changed an awful lot again and brought in the team that needed people. Also, you know, to structure it correctly. I said this to the rest of the team. I wish I had the structure that a lot of other manufacturers have because it's a walk in the park. It wasn't walking apart for ICE. It was walking apart for a lot of other people. But the problem was is that you have to have it structured where you have buckets, you have things set out, you know what you're going to do, and it's not this, you know, fly-by-night kind of thing. It's done completely different, and that's why in 2020, January of 2023, I had that argument. and not only that, having a purchase department that's in the United States. I mean, granted, yes, it's great you have a purchasing department in India, but when they need to talk to somebody in the United States and they don't speak English, why am I jumping on the phone trying to explain to the Indian department what the English person is trying to say to them about getting parts of them? And then, okay, we're going to bring somebody else that speaks Indian here to do that. And again, I know globalization, but guys, the right structure for the company is what would make this company great. And we didn't have, in 2023, the structure that I had started building, we were doing very good in 22. 23, we did, you know, 21, we did great. 22, we did even better, right? Built up this structure in 23, we lost some key people. and the cashier's like, no, we're going to switch some stuff around. Okay, and when we switched that around, unfortunately, it wasn't the right structure. And unfortunately, I was dealing with a house car because my arm tied got in my back, going, no, you need to use this. And I'm like, well, I'm glad it's only costing you X, but why are we doing it this way? So there's a lot going on. One really final question then from me. If American Pinball becomes a contract manufacturer, do you think there is the business out there for them to make a success of it? If they had the personnel, yes. But they need the personnel. Somebody else's game. the personnel that they needed was the personnel they don't longer have I mean you remember let's just use a hypothetical Jonathan your favorite guy is over in over in the Netherlands right they want to build a game in the United States yes they know how to build games in the US right do you have an engineer an American Pimble right now they can take and source all the parts stateside source everything that's going to put together source it all together and build it to your specifications and remember we're talking about a pinball machine we're talking about quite a few thousand pieces of pieces of products, interactions wiring lighting, power everything that's done by the R&D department so yes they could follow what was set but what if something comes up what if something comes up, right? Who's going to sign off on that? The guys over in the Netherlands, they're going to have to send somebody over here and physically go through every game and sign off that these are correctly made. So think about that cost. Yes, you're getting them made in the United States. But yes, you've also got to spend time for somebody to come over here and babysit them and make sure that everything that they build is to your specs. because when it's put in the box and stripped out, what do you end up with? Magic Girl? Right. So that's telling right there, right? So you need to have the personnel, the people who are sitting there who know how to build the games, the engineers that know what they're talking about and can interact with the team wherever they are building the games. and I know that, you know, a bunch of people are going to say, hey, they have teams. Yeah, they have teams in India that are going to interact with you in the Netherlands to tell what's being done in the United States. Yeah, we're globalized. Thanks. You going to tell me something's not getting lost in translation? Be a headache. Okay, so let me rephrase Martin's question a little bit. American Pinball or Aimfront to be exact is theoretically looking to sell American Pinball but without any staff it will reduce the price tremendously I mean basically it's just a bunch of manufacturing equipment and some parts in stock. Nothing more. Nothing more. IP. Right. So. There is own IP, right? So Houdini, Oktoberfest, varies. Right. So in theory, okay, you're no longer there, Ryan's no longer there, Steve's no longer there, and Sophia's no longer there, Jack's no longer there, Benjamin. Right, right. Okay. But in theory, okay, if you could persuade an investor for you to put your team together, if he wants to be in pinball and give you free reign to continue what American pinball doesn't support no more, so to speak, you could be back in business. Absolutely. And I wouldn't want free reign. I would want that person to be part of the team. I would want them to be part and parcel that they understand what we're doing. I'm not looking for a blank check. Never have been. In fact, I never wanted a blank check from Mukesh. I never wanted one from Normal. In fact, I ran everything by them. And whatever we got done, they okayed. Okay? What they didn't okay, sat there. Right? Like Martin would say, the one project that we were doing for the very first game. Right? That one's still sitting there. the one for the third game. It kind of sat in there. They loved the idea. They wanted to do it. They wanted to spin it one more time. But it got held. Okay, so they didn't want to do that. We're in an industry right now where, you know, things are changing. You know, you got to adapt. And I think that I didn't want to blank check then. I don't want to blank check now. Anybody who wants to buy it, the clock is ticking. So if you want to buy American Pinball, reach out to Incom, talk to them. You can hire Ryan. You can hire Steve. You can hire a lot of these people who are already still are there in the background waiting for their 90-day kind of thing to end, right? Once it ends, you know, it's like a clock. he started the clock on a timer and when the clock rings okay time is over and the likelihood of getting the team together to finish or to do the next thing or whatever the other stuff was in the pipeline it started so if you want to do it it's not like you can go and say oh I'm going to buy American a year from now great I don't know I mean who knows Dave Fix is at this company Ryan's at that company Steve's at this company they're all over at this company they've been there for a year what are you buying? buying parts ok like I said if well if you would some investor want to buy American Pinball start inviting Start talking to people, I would say, because like in a year time, everybody will be working somewhere else. Absolutely. Yeah. And Jonathan, since December 13th, I have been. Okay. I've talked to a lot. But I can't go into details on that because there's a lot of NDAs on that stuff. But at this point in time, American Females is an asshole. Okay. Well, we look forward to talking to you in probably, I don't know, a month or two when that back clock of the 90 days has run out and you'll be able to tell us a little bit more about what your plans are and maybe a little bit more about what has been going on, what happened in the last few days or last few weeks of American Pinball. But thank you very much indeed, David Fix. We wish you the best, and we look forward to seeing what's in your future and in the future of American Pinball and all the very talented people who were working there. Absolutely. Thank you, Martin. Thank you, Jonathan. Hey, guys, take care of yourselves, and we'll see you at the next shows. And we'll definitely be talking. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, David. Bye. Well, thank you very much, David Fix, former vice president of American Pimble. Best of luck in your future endeavors. I have a feeling we'll be talking to him shortly. Yes, I'm sure we'll be catching up and finding out what's going on. That story will go and run, as they say. So anyway, we won't because I think we've wrapped up all our pin cast for January 2025. Right. So we'll be back at the start of March with our next pin cast, looking back at all the amazing events in the pinball world throughout this exciting month of February. So until then, from me, Martin Eyre for Pinball News. And me, my name is Jonathan Houston. I'm the editor of Pinball Magazine. We hope you have a fantastic February. Yeah. And we look forward to joining you again next month for the next edition of the Pimble Industry News Pincast, the Pincast, the industry listens to. They do. And appears on. So until the next one, bye for now. Bye.