Here we go. That's why I'm here. Well, Brian Johnson of ACDC, he was in this game? Yes, he did. The Brian Johnson. Yes. Yeah. He did Bone Busters, actually, which is another System ADB, which is kind of neat. Sound by David Zabriskie. And he did Tales of the Raven Knights, Scared Stiff, Bad Girls. and the epic Cactus Jacks. So, you know, it's a pretty good all-star team here. And Ed Robertson from the Bare Naked Ladies once called light camera action Wonka-esque, a unique machine and a quirky Gottlieb System 3 you'll really enjoy. See that, Marty and Teolis? We can get Ed Robertson on our podcast, too. So, you know, you're not the only big deal. My podcast mate Bruce, who hates most Gottliebs, he loves lights cameras. action. Yeah, it's quirky, it's unique. It's quirky, and it's also the build materials on that had to be quite large. If you look at that game, it has like a rotating ramp on the playfield. It just rotates into different positions. It has a the back box has back box animation. It has these huge like spotlights on the top. They're extremely bright because you're supposed to be under the spotlight because Lights, camera, action. Yeah, those floodlights are extremely bright. They wanted an inexpensive budget back box toy. And, of course, they've got the toy inside. But they figured, okay, how can we spruce that up a little bit? Well, let's throw on a topper. But it had to be super inexpensive, which was basically just lights. It was approved, says John Norris, because the cost was low. Surprise. And he doesn't know how he got the floodlights on there because those were actually quite expensive. Most of them are broken, I would say. Most of them were taken off because of ceiling heights. It's actually quite huge, right? Oh, it's very tall. That's the other thing. System 3 is always the exception when it comes to, will it fit in my car? Yeah. You'll see a lot of conversations like, I have this vehicle. Will this game fit? Well, what game is it? Is it a Williams game? Is it a Data East game? Oh, it's a Gottlieb System 3. You might have problems with the back box because it's small. Yeah, that's the one where you go, eh. Yeah. It had this really cool, like, a blue light and a red light, right, on the floodlights on the top, on this topper. And whenever the lights on the playfield would go out, the light of the opposite color would sort of create this weird ambiance. It would be a cool effect with, you know, the red on the playfield with the blue artwork, then the blue light with the red artwork. It was actually quite cool. This is sort of like Tron. Yes. You know, I have to bring that up every episode because it is the greatest game ever created. if you say so. All right. So the game is actually kind of really neat. You're a budding director. You're working sort of in a summer B-movie action flick, and you're under the heat of the spotlights. You're traveling around San Francisco. You're trying to wrap up the five big scenes from the movie, and you want to finish your blockbuster. Now, that sounds a bit silly, but this was actually the first game ever to feature modes. Really? It wasn't Adam's family? Take that, Pat Lawler, you f***ing... Wow. So, one guy that we're going to run into a lot in this episode, like non-stop in almost everything that we do, is John Norris. So I figure this is as good a time as any to jump into who is John Norris and talk about his background. Does that sound good? Sounds great. John Norris' first memory of pinball was his family traveling to the Santa Barbara Arcade. It was a flea market when he was around nine or ten. Arcades were really banned at the time, and this was a vacation town, so it had a lot of sort of tourists in and out, and it was the only place that he could access arcades outside of his county. His first job was at a high school bicycle shop where the owner would put pinball machines next to the candy machine. An old beat-up Gottlieb's sweetheart was a ten-year-old game at the time, and it appeared at the bike shop. That's when he started to search out his own machine in the 1970s, and he wanted one for his own house. He went to California State in 1981, working in art and photo at the time. The reason he focused on that is because he really wanted to get a job at Atari in California, which is, as you can remember from our first episode, is where Steve Ritchie ended up. He had a friend at Atari who said they were looking for talent, but he could never get him in to actually get an interview. He got a real job and started to work to be able to actually afford his own pinball collection. Having your own pinball collection in, like, the late 70s must have been a big deal, eh? Yeah, I would imagine that wasn't very common. Yeah, it's really, at the moment, it's more or less a home collector's hobby now. Back then, it was like they were in bowling alleys, and that was kind of like it. In the late 70s, he decided when he was collecting games that he really wanted to get to the grassroots of pinball. There were no conventions at the time, so you had to search out specific collectors and distributors. He spent most of his time collecting wood rails, which I'm sure were super friggin' heavy. He worked at a place called Underwriters Laboratory, where he decided to actually make a game and put it on location for fun. It was Astern Stars, which he converted to a game called Tour de France. He added some step switches and some relays and a solid-state board set. So it was actually a hybrid of solid state and electromechanical. So he EM'd the solid state. Yeah. How amazing is that, that he would do that? Now, he would say in some interviews that he wanted a couple of the features and things like that that you couldn't get in the solid state board set at the time that were originally from EM. I don't get it, but I'll tell you what. It took me forever to learn how to solder one simple transistor. So having somebody actually modify a solid state machine that's actually really good in stars and put in EM parts and actually have it work and not burn down a building is pretty amazing, really. He had heard about this thing called Expo, which held its first event in 1985. I had the year right. Yes. Yeah, there you go. Ten points for Ron, everybody, if you're keeping track. He made a resume, and he had some big designs in his workbook that he had been working on. This, he saw as his opportunity to sort of get his resume directly into the hands of the manufacturer, shake their hand, say hello, introduce himself, as opposed to just send it in the mail. He didn't think he'd ever hear back from any of the companies. John says, my goal at the time was to get materials to build an emulator, so I could build a machine where I could just plug in parts and accessories to build the machine. I wanted to show off a bunch of play fields and then swap out play fields. This way I could show the manufacturers in the future a bunch of designs by shipping one machine to Chicago. He's ahead of his time. So 14 years before Williams did it with Finball 2000, like 30 years before Highway was going to do it with the Alien platform, and before Multimorphic did it. Yeah, Multimorphic, I would say, has perfected that. What you can see here is he's just looking for efficiency, right? He wants to be able to show, he doesn't want to just show people some stuff on paper. He wants to say, hey, here are three designs that I've done, but it would cost you a fortune to move three of these machines across the country and then three of them back from California to Chicago. It's a pretty smart idea. So this is like kind of back in those times. I guess it counts even today that the companies are always looking for sort of like a proof of concept, right? Being able to kind of come up with a design is one thing, but actually being able to put a machine together, tweak it, finagle it, that's really what some people would say is the standard, right? I don't want to hire you as a designer unless I know you can actually build something. Yeah, proof of concepts are, I mean, that's how Pat Waller got his job at Williams. That's how Keith Elwin got his job at Stern, just showing them, here's this machine I built. Someone looks at it like, wow, that's pretty impressive. Boom, you get hired. I would say designers, manufacturers, sort of the bigwigs, some bigwigs maybe more than others, they can sit back and say hey they get these simple little principles of pinball design that the average Joe just doesn get and they can sort of see those little details that proof of concept can show where some people don really have that I think that pretty cool At Pinball Expo John would meet Dale Pollack, and he would give him some of his information, but Dale would tell him that they actually didn't need any designers at the time. A month after Expo, Dale Pollack would call John and said they needed a sound programmer. John would say that he could learn to actually do sound, but he wanted to be a junior pinball designer. Three months after that, Dale would call again and wanted him to fly to Chicago for an actual in-person interview, and that's when he got the job as a junior designer. John Norris would move to Chicago with Gottlieb, but one of the most painful times of his life would mean that he would have to sell 10 to 15 of his pinball machines and only have to keep 10 of them to move from California all the way to Chicago. He more or less started to work as an apprentice on the line, making his own machine kind of on his part-time. The first person he would really help would be Joe Kamikow, who would eventually move to a company called Data East, which we'll get into in the future, and nowadays Kapow, working with Stern. And he would also work with John Trudeau, and they would spend most of the time sort of apprenticing with them, helping them build their machine, helping wire them up, and that was in 1986. It wasn't until 1988 that he became a full designer. That's where he would start with his first machine, Diamond Lady. Now, we're going to get into that during our System 80 podcast, which we'll get into in the future, but that's kind of where he sort of got his start in the industry. Diamond Lady is actually a pretty interesting game, and I think you see some of the elements of John Norris wanting to try different things, because in Diamond Lady, it has a ball saver in between the flippers, but it's not a post and it's an actual drop target. Oh, very cool. Which is interesting. Different ways of using the similar tools. It's like Scott Denisey is very good at that, using sort of the pieces that you currently have in a different way. After Lights, Camera, Action, which is sort of the first System 3 game, Gottlieb turned on a dime and they decided to go with a completely different business model with this new board set and their platform in general. That would be known as Gottlieb street-level games. What the hell is a street-level game, Ron? Street-level games, specifically, are meant to be cheaper. They're single-level, no ramps, no upper playfields. They're actually a little smaller because they didn't have to make the back of the cabinet so deep because there was no ramps. They were simpler from an operator perspective. There were supposed to be less issues with them that would require intervention, like stuck balls, broken mechs. and most importantly, they were cheaper. It was supposed to be cheaper for operators to buy. Like, you can get this game, it's going to cost you less, and that's the model they decided to go with. The only issue with that model, in my view, is at the time they came out with these, so you have Williams that's coming out with games like Earthshaker, Whirlwind, and they're coming out with games like Deadly Weapon and these street-level games. It was not a success. Yeah, it was. I understand what they were trying to do, It's almost like they wanted to say, hey, you remember how easy it was to fix those early solid state machines that earned money? And look how really complicated these new Williams machines are, right? They've got rotating this and pop up that. And eventually we're going to get into subways and all these other shenanigans. You know, hey, look at this thing. It's super cheap. It's super easy. You put it in your pizza place and somebody's still going to put quarters in it to kill some time. At this time, Premiere was not looking to be the number one pinball manufacturer. I would totally say that they were quite comfortable sort of just making some machines and doing okay. And they weren't trying to be king of the mountain. And street-level games were really meant to sort of dramatically change that scope of their operations. According to pinball designer John Trudeau, Premiere wanted to target a totally different market segment with street-level games. They wanted to really focus on that area instead of full-featured games. Actually, Midway in 1991 would make Harley-Davidson, which is sort of a similar sort of test of this kind of alternative market. According to John Norris, the pinball designer who worked on three street-level games and stayed with Premier all the way until the end of the company, he spoke about the failure of street-level, and he thought that it had two major reasons for that. One of them was that John felt that the major mistake was that Gottlieb went all in on street level. Like Trudeau, Norris noted the games were designed to appeal to a different market segment than normal, but maybe one or two of these machines a year alongside of a regular full-featured game would have been a better business decision. Do you think that that would have made sense? That makes sense. Yeah, so, I mean, you kind of every, you know, once a year, twice a year, you make one of these street level games, you mix it in with one of your regular brands. You know, they thought that, hey, we're going to go all in on this, and then we're going to be the only one making this type of game. But that's a pretty high-risk strategy. The other thing that John Norris would talk about was that Premier's distributors were not necessarily required to adhere to the MSRP. They could go over it. So Norris said many of the distributors actually tried to sell and did sell their street-level pins at the same price as a full-featured release. So they didn't necessarily sell them for less to get more of them out there and make it up in volume. They actually just tried to sell it for the regular price of what a Gottlieb would be and pocket the extra money themselves. So they sort of torpedoed their own sort of cow. That's a big ouch right there. You could say that they didn't sell particularly well. They only made six models, and we'll talk about how Gottlieb just turns out pinball machines at a nauseating rate. So turning out six machines is actually pretty impressive for the amount of time in the, you know, year and a half time period of those machines. The machines were Silver Slugger from 1990, Vegas from 1990, Deadly Weapon from 1990, Title Fight from 1990, 1991's Car Hop, and the final game, probably the best one, would be Hoops. Not probably. In 1991. Not probably. It is the best one. 100%? Yep. But let's see, from my memory, Silver Slugger actually has a pretty nice flowy play field. It's actually fun to shoot. Unfortunately, the entire game is just mysteries. You, like, hit it in a saucer and wait for a mystery award. And you just do that over and over and over. It's like space robots playing baseball. And it's got, like, this humongous insert. That's what I remember about it. And I think it's in the upper right-hand corner. We got it up. We're looking at it right now. But I actually found it very fun to shoot. But again, as we're going to see with a lot of these Gottliebs, a lot of them are fun to shoot, but the rules may not be stellar. It's the hamstring, really. Let's just say that. The hamstring is my favorite pork string, by the way. Deadly Weapon is one that I see come up all the time in Canada. I don't know if they sold a million of these up here, but for some reason, Deadly Weapon from 1990, which is totally different and not remotely in any way the same as Lethal Weapon, which is a popular movie series, at the time. And a killer Data East game. It just, uh, oh god. So, it, uh, it's a pretty neat game as well. Again, really kind of a neat design. One thing that I think that they really got very well with these street level games is spinners. The spinner that Gottlieb had designed, man oh man, those were awesome spinners at the time. Yeah, they had long since ditched the horrible plastic spinners they were trying. God, what did they do that for? Uh, well, at least they ditched them, and we got some good spinners. Yeah. Deadly Weapon had this pop bumper down sort of by the flippers. Not like Rick and Morty cool. It was, like, really annoying. Out of the way, it had this really strange guide rail right into the flipper. It's an odd, odd game. And at this time, they were all about that third flipper, too, right? They just wanted third flippers everywhere on these Gottliebs. Well, we have no ramps. Yeah, you've got to create something. You've got to create something. Left or right movement. I got a couple of cool quotes here, actually. On Deadly Weapon, Keith Johnson, who some would say is stack-a-mode, multiball, everything-is-lit, greatest programmer of all time, had some really cool quotes about some of the street-level games. Keith says, I have a lot of respect for the Gottlieb street-level games because those games have a lot of very interesting shots. Deadly Weapon is not very sought-after, but the shots are unique, interesting, and offer a lot of different things. Thanks for correcting that, because I actually wrote lethal weapon in the show notes here. I know. Title Fight, Ray Tanzer would say that he really enjoyed working on the Title Fight game. The new special mechanism features were the player interactive boxing characters in the back box. We also installed four secondary scoring displays in the back box to tally up the punches thrown per player for more competitive play. Ooh, sounds exciting. Well, Keith Johnson says on Title Fight, Title Fight has an interesting play field. Sure, they may not be a good tournament game, but things can be learned from them. The rules are more complex than those types of playfields generally require. Now, Dennis Creasel from the Collected Gamers podcast and our producer here on the Pinball Network has a fantastic article on the Gottlieb street-level games, and I'm going to include that in our show notes that you can click on there. One of the bits in there are sales volumes of all the major manufacturers from 1989, 1990, and 1991. So it breaks it down, Williams, Midway, Data East, and Premier. And you can really see the sales volumes there. Williams, 1989, is selling 18,000 units, which is significantly lower than, of course, we talked about back in our first episode, where one game alone, like Flash, was selling 19,000. In 1990, they're selling 29,000, almost 30,000 machines. Williams in 1991 is selling 23,300 units. At the same time, when Premier says, hey, let's go all in on this street-level strategy and try to corner this unique market, they were third in sales volume in 1989, and that was when they were moving from System 80C, probably at that time. They were moving into System 3. They had Lights, Camera, Action. They had Bone Busters, Hot Shots, and Big House. They sold 8,000 units that year, putting them in third place just ahead of Data East and behind Midway in sales. The following year, in 1990, they were dead last by half. They were only selling 5,400 units that year. The closest one was Midway selling 10,000 units, Data East selling 11. They really discovered, I would say, immediately and extra quick. Everybody increased their sales except for them. They actually decreased their sales significantly. Yeah, it's even worse than it appears because, remember, Midway is Valley, and they're owned by Williams. So when we say 29,000 plus 10,000, yeah, it's like almost 40,000 games to 5,000 games. Yeah, we're talking like Dr. Dude, Game Show, Pool Sharks. Radical. Yeah, radical. Like, one of those four games is decent. The rest of them are just like, eeeh, what a burn. But they're just destroying by double Premiere at the time with this new strategy of street-level games. I think immediately they notice, oh my god, we've made a mistake. And by 1991, they've released two of the street-level games, and then they move into these newer System 3 games. We'll talk about those in a couple of minutes. Brutal. Now, do you think street level killed Gottlieb? It did not kill Gottlieb, especially when they were around for another five years afterwards. So this huge mistake that they made really didn't kill them? No. John Norris, he would indicate that street level was the worst for Premier than what they did before, but it didn't sink the company, and that the numbers recovered significantly once they abandoned this experiment. What was the first machine that they did when they got back to regular pinball machines, Ron? Cactus Jacks. The epic Cactus Jacks. If you love games with dancing cacti, This one's for you. this is your game. This is it. It doesn't get any better than this. Mm-hmm. Now, do you think that this is on the Chicago Gaming remake list? No. Why not? I don't think there's a single Gottlieb on this Chicago Gaming remake list. That's right. So what Gottlieb did for Cactus Jacks, They bought a game from an outside contractor that made the play field, and the game actually had data esports in it. So they had to rip all that out, godly-buffy it. Is that even a word? Well, that just means dumb down the rules. Oh, so John Norris says, we finished that game in six to seven weeks. Most games were eight to ten weeks. We didn't have a lot of time to build games. The player doesn't care how long you take. They care about the game's fun. But we were at a huge disadvantage with Williams. Williams had a year or more to make games. That was the difference of making a TV show or making a movie. Can you imagine pumping out a game every eight to ten weeks? No, I can't. No wonder these were often seen as games that were a little bit short. Well, remember, it certainly did the same thing after the great crash of 2008, 2009, where they were cranking out games. I mean, some of them were like Iron Man, but also a lot of them were like NBA, Big Buck Hunter, etc. Ooh, poor Big Buck Hunter. And they didn't get a lot of time to work on them either. Yeah, Cactus Jacks. It's like this cartoony, children-y thing with sex appeal. It's very weird. It's very goofy. It's like about a watermelon farm or something. There's lots of different fruit items. Yes, you throw watermelons, you throw things. Yep. Cactus Jacks. Yeehaw, let's party. That's the catch line. Sizzling country music. Add the fruit multiplier by completing the drop targets. Go for the big thorny surprise. Let's have a boot stomping good time. Good time. Oh, my gosh. It's kind of fun. It's goofy. Yeah, I mean, if you take it for what it is, right? It's a bit silly. It's kind of fun. It's silly. If you're looking for a deep rule set and something that's, you know, I think what's really cool about Gottlieb, that system ADB era, and some of the System 3 era is like this 80s, 90s cheesy silliness that they had going on. Like it just, it's got its own sort of fun nostalgia, right? To be fair, all the other manufacturers are similar. Think of a game like Roller Games. That's 80s cheese personified. F-14 Tomcat, you know, the Russians versus the U.S., all that stuff. I would say one of the neatest System 3 games was the class of 1812. The stats of 1812 were that it is a sort of humor, horror, supernatural theme. That came out in August 91. It was a standard body that was 1,668 units. Now, this is interesting. Designed by Ray Tanzer and Joe Kamenkow. How is that possible? He's at Data East. he's actually one of the big-time super players at Data East at the time, right? So if you go into IPDB, you look up his information, and he's got this one weird gap where he co-designs a game at Gottlieb in the early 90s with Ray Tanzer. It's an odd little bit. Why does he have this one random game? Well, this is one of the neatest stories, I think, that I found when it comes to Gottlieb at the time. Yeah, per John Norris, he says, Ray Tancer just went over to the rack and grabbed something to make. You might say, what does that mean? Well, there was an old rack that they would have at Gottlieb where uncompleted games went. When a game was killed or not made, it would just go on the rack, and people would use it to take parts off. Ray grabbed it and finished it. It was originally a game that Joe Kamenkow started called 9-1-1 Carrera. Joe's a car guy. I think he's been a car guy for years. He's got an original Batmobile from the 1966 show.