The Pinball Network is online. Launching Silver Ball Chronicles. You don't know who Macho is, do you? I do not know who Macho is. It's so brilliant. The little jokes, if you're paying attention, they are quick. Yeah, because I figured you would have had a better Macho than that. Just pretend you're on a toilet. Hello out there, everybody. This is David Dennis. This is the Pinball Chronicles, and with me is my charming and good-looking co-host, Ron Hotpants Hallett. How you doing, Bala? I'm doing just fine. Yeah, things are good in upstate New York? They're boring. Yeah, I bet. It's a boring time for everybody now, but I'm sure all your other podcasts are riddled with discussions of what's going on in the world today, and we're going to try to keep it a little more light and something to help you sort of get away. But, Ron, you've spent a lot of time tweaking, fixing some of your machines the last little while. Just the stars and LEDing out some games. That's about it. Yeah, when you put in your LEDs, are you the kind of guy that goes with the sunlight, or are you looking to get as much purple and red in there as possible? Warm white. Yeah, there you go. That's what I use. Any sales coming up? Anything coming in or out of level zero? Not really. It's sort of a volatile market right now, let's just say. Now is the time to sort of take a wait-and-see approach, I would say, but I am in the market for a pin, although I don't know if I'll be buying one under the current circumstances. Mario World. Mario World, yes. Everybody loves Mario. I've certainly been playing a little more of my PlayStation, trying to keep my kids from driving me completely insane, and working from home. Tons of fun. Ron, I guess we'll start out with our sponsor this month. This episode is brought to you by Stern Star Wars. Stern Star Wars. It's Star Wars. stop your damn complaining. Exactly. You can complain about the movies, though. Well, the new ones, because they suck really bad. Let's jump into some feedback from our last episode. So, for everybody who tunes in, this is our third month jumping into this. Last month, we did classic Stern, Stern Electronics, not the modern Stern, of course. And we always get some feedback. We love some feedback. K-Dawg says that he's listened to all the episodes so far. the two-person chemistry between myself and you, Ron, really draws him in. Is that his real name, K-Dawg? Probably. I mean, he might have those parents, right? It's better than having an umlaut in your name, I guess. I want to say thanks, actually. Gary, one of our listeners, sent over a really great article about Steve Kirk from Pin Game Journal back in the 70s and 80s. That's an article we will be using in the future when we do something around sort of probably Python Anghelo or the downturns in the 80s, that kind of stuff. And it's entitled The Creative Crisis in Pinball. Very good article. Also, besides feedback, we always love corrections. And as you know, we take all of our corrections in our mailbag, which is silverballchronicles at gmail.com. So shoot us an email, and we read every single one. We often try to respond to every single one. We'll collect little bits and pieces from there. One of the corrections here was actually a big one, and it came in from Coin Op Carnival, which is a shameless plug. Have you seen a copy of Coin Op Carnival? I have one sitting right next to me on my table, so yes. Yeah, what is that? What is Coin Op Carnival? It's primarily EM-based, but it has really cool illustrations in it. And it was runner-up for publication of the year this year at the Twiffies. should have won, in my humble opinion. I think it's a great one. I haven't been to a show yet, and if there's one there, I will certainly pick up a copy of it. But the feedback we were given was about our Chicago coin conversation we had, which was the predecessor to Stern. We said in there that Chicago coin made bingo pinballs, which was actually a bit of a catch-all. We just sort of said bingo. But the correction comes, and it's actually that Chicago Coin never made bingo pinballs. They made flipperless games between 51 and 81 in the U.S., and still manufactured a lot of those in some other countries. They were typified as a bingo card on the back glass. Chicago Coin did make some gambling pinballs, but their participation was fairly limited, and coincided with the participation of most other manufacturers, including Gottlieb. It seems that you likely lumped some of these gambling games in as bingos, which is exactly right. There's a lot of alternate coin op games that were really the focus of Chicago Coin, and they were really on the ground floor in pin games, and they never really got away. They never really caught a lot of fire that way, and they actually shared a factory with Gottlieb at one point. So that's kind of a really cool, interesting fact. David M., actually, he wanted to make a small correction, and that was that when I said Gary Cokie, it's actually a soft C, and it's Co-C. So there you go, everybody. Now you know his real name. Also a great resource, this is from David M. as well, is Tim Arnold wrote what he called an epic corporate history of Williams, Sam Stern, and all the parties involved, which ran in Pin Game Journal No. 105. I don't have any access to Pin Game Journal if you know any resources or places like that please let Ron and I know because we would love to add those to our reviews that being said there are a billion sources out there we're only two people it takes a lot to do a lot of research the more research the better of course the sharper that knife will get the better the historical perspective will be but we're really trying to collect as much as we can and as best as we can. Dave has been to, I believe, every expo, all 27, 8 of them, I don't remember, 30. I've lost track of how many there's been. Actually, I'm way off on that. What am I saying? The first one was in 85, so he's been to every one of them. His license plate actually says pinball, like not misspelled and not like a one for an I or anything. No, actually pinball. Wow. So you know he's hardcore. And Tim Arnold, he used to go to Expo, and he used to give a lot of seminars or talks there until he couldn't do it anymore because of his Las Vegas Pinball Museum that he used to have there full-time. I think one of the coolest things about Expo, as well as the hobby in general, is the access that we have to the content creators, to the designers, to the programmers. They love to come and chat and host seminars at big events, and there's a really cool wealth of knowledge. And a lot of the resources that we're using, Ron, we're watching old interviews from Expo, things like that. You can catch them on YouTube and things. But really, it's kind of cool for us to just try to collate everything together. Our previous episodes have all been about the early solid-state area. This is really sort of in the 70s and the 80s, where the industry went through a lot of large shifts. Nowadays, we call that disruption. That's sort of the exit of electromechanical pinball machines with the reels and knobs and switches in the cabinet, to really moving into the watershed moment, which is solid state and computer boards. That has been sort of the focus so far in the first two episodes. I kind of wanted to take a bit of a jump in this episode, Ron. I wanted to kind of move us into sort of a more of a modern era, more DMD focused and things like that. But I didn't want to go with something easy to do and something exciting like Bally Williams or something like today's Modern Stern or Jersey Jack. I didn't want that much pizzazz. I wanted to go with something a little bit different. Some companies excelled in the new market when they moved from electromechanical into solid state. Some fell almost immediately, and they disappeared right away. Well, Gottlieb, they basically became zombies. They just refused to die. On and on and on and on they walked, hanging in there somehow by a thread. So today, we're going to review the final years in an episode that we call Zombie Pinball, Gottlieb, and the System 3 Era. Ron, what the heck happened to Gottlieb after the 1970s? Pain. Pain. Very good. Yeah, that's it. With no capitals, just pain with three dots. The thing about Gottlieb, and as we're going to see, they had a very stable existence from when they were founded up to about the mid-70s. And then their ownership kind of bounced around quite a bit for the next 10 years or so. Yeah, it really was an odd thing. My first game was a System ADB. My second game was a System ADB. And the reason for that was they are dirt cheap. They didn't work, so I was able to pick them up, took a little bit of finagling, and I was able to actually get them running, which is sort of why they were my first machines. Then I immediately sold them because I realized they weren't really that great. One thing that's very cool about the System 3 era is sort of how robust that era was, how sort of it seemed like they were kind of getting their groove back. They moved into licensing. We'll dive into a bunch of that stuff. listener Scott Charles said that Gottlieb System 3 was better than you thought, but worse than you hoped. Would you say that that sums it up? Yeah, I'd say that sums it up. I want to talk a little bit about sort of the struggling ownership of Gottlieb, and I want to detail that really deep maybe in another episode. We'll actually go into sort of all of that stuff. I'm just going to give a quick high-level summary. you know what we're talking about today is is actually what we would call premier or premier gottlieb so when we say gottlieb today please don't send us an angry email that says well it was actually premier that owned it because yes it was premier but that gottlieb name is kind of where the history comes from and where it's where uh it they would start using that branding again throughout this era. Yeah, the name is still on a large percentage of the games. They usually say, like, Gottlieb, and then it would say the premier name in technology. Yeah, it's like they had originally gotten rid of Gottlieb completely, went into chess premier. Then people didn't know who that was. So then it was like the premier name in pinball was Gottlieb. Then they really went whole hog right in to Gottlieb in sort of the System 3 era. It's like they sort of, I don't know, it's very weird. We'll get into that. So Gottlieb was actually D. Gottlieb & Co., founded in 1927 out of Chicago. It was really the champion in the 60s and 70s. When it came to electromechanicals, we would joke that it was the Cadillac of the industry back then. It was taken over by Alvin Gottlieb, who was the son of David Gottlieb or D. Gottlieb in the 1970s, where after a tenure there, Alvin actually sold Gottlieb to Columbia Pictures in 1976. Columbia Pictures would then sell that division over to Coca-Cola in 1983, where it would be named Milstar Electronics. Coca-Cola closed that division down in 1984, and a management group purchased Mylstar. They would eventually sort of remove the premier name, start using the Gottlieb name a little bit more, kind of as we had mentioned a few moments ago. Why should we start at System 3, Ron? Why do you think that that's a good spot to start? Oh, I was going to say, because that's the name of our episode. Is it the beginning of the end, do you think? It's not the beginning of the end. It's the beginning of their foray into eventually the DMD era and newer technology and just keeping up with the other manufacturers. It sort of seemed like they limped around a lot, right? Well, the thing about Gottlieb is their system one was just glorified, get an EM game running on solid state technology. They didn't really take advantage of features. They did not go into it with the gusto of, say, Bally Williams. The other companies did. And they got put way behind because of that. System 80, when it came out, actually, I have a couple of friends of mine that actually say that that platform itself, wasn't a bad platform and actually had a little more horsepower to it than some of the other platforms, the Bally Williams. They just had very poor programming, basically. They just did not make it. They weren't able to leverage it. They were not able to leverage it. So when we start to get into the late 80s, you have the other manufacturers. Well, Bally at this point, it's already gotten bought by Williams. Williams is in their System 11 platform. Data East is in their rip-off of System 11 platform. Totally different. So, Gottlieb has had the System 80 platform now for many years. They've gone from 80 to 80A to 80B, but we're talking, is it like eight or nine years? Yeah, they had it for an extended period. They just kept kind of tacking stuff on to kind of get it to limp a little further. Which you will see when we talk about other manufacturers. It's the same. They'll start with a basic system. As they want to add more features, they'll keep putting more things in it until it just gets so complicated they have to just re-engineer it. It's happened with Williams. It happened with even CERN. If you look at modern CERNs, when they were on their SAN system and they started to do the LED thing, they started putting more stuff in there, and then you see all these auxiliary boards in your game, and it just gets more and more complicated, and then they just went with a new system. Yeah, you got to sort of take a look back. And really, it was November in 1990 when Williams really took that first major step, that real dive into the deep end, and they launched their Williams pinball controller, WPC system. Isn't that right? That is correct. Basically, because System 11 got way too complicated. Right. So everybody's running into the same issue of sort of complexity and adding bits and pieces. WPC was a huge step forward, wasn't it? For Williams, you'd have to know System 11 to know how much better it was. Because System 11, they would use things like multiplexing. They used the same transistors to run flashers and run coils. And they basically just got rid of all that. With WPC, you have dedicated transistors for the coils, dedicated transistors for the flashers. It was a much more robust system and actually less complicated. If you open up the backbox of a WPC game and compare it to, especially a later System 11 game, there's way less crap in there. Yeah, and that's evolution as it goes. I would say that System 3 was sort of like the realization of like, oh, we better figure something out here because the competition is seriously changing the way they are. The premier team, Gottlieb, they had contacted the designer, John Burris, who had done Bounty Hunter, Rack Em Up. He actually had done the black hole conversion prototype of the actual machine for System 80. He was the brains behind System 3, a system that John Trudeau would call a killer platform with a great MPU system. They really were forced to modernize, is what he would say. Another comment here of System 3. This is from Jon Norris, and his name is going to come up a lot, as you will see. Jon Norris says it was night and day from System 80, a catch-up. System 80 didn't have enough memory or drivers. The memory was very bad. The memory had to keep track of only basic things. We even wanted the machine to call into a computer program and record a report to your game. Error alerts and broken parts. No one wanted to do that. Yeah, wow, that's some pretty forward-thinking stuff for the late 80s and early 90s, right? Like being able to call in with some sort of modem-like system. They were really thinking, mind the cliche, outside the box, right? I would say so. The other thing that was really cool is Jon Norris brings up a lot of really kind of these interesting bits. One of them was automatic skill detection, and that's really that the game looks at the skill of the player. So it knew that the player was flipping the flippers at the same time. If they catch the ball and stop the ball movement on the flipper, it would know. It would give players more time to complete the various tasks that they would. So it was able to figure out if you were a good player or a poor player, and then it would allow the system to adjust to that skill level so it wouldn't beat you too bad, nor would it make the game too easy. That would also breathe life into a lot of the catch-up features from the System 3 era, which I'm sure you're going to get into when we get a little further on. Ah, we love the catch-up features. Tournament players love those, too. Yeah, the god-awful flippers is what I remember. these horrible flippers. I've only played a few System 3s, but when I do, they just feel weird. Can you describe some of why that is? Well, I believe they started with the terrible flippers even before System 3. I think, like, I'm trying to remember what game it was, but I recall right before System 3, they started with these wonderful flippers. The sad thing is they had one of the better flippers, in my opinion, beforehand. I love those System 80 flippers. They were beautiful. They had a tried and true flippers, and it was like 10 years. They had cool little features like the flipper bats themselves were designed in a way. It's hard to explain. Let's see. So if you're rebuilding flippers and you put a flipper bat in, you don't want it to bind against the bushing. Yes. And you have to adjust it. Like if you're doing, say, a Williams game, you've got to adjust it a little bit so it doesn't bind. And the godly flippers, the bats, actually came designed so you couldn't, so they were automatically adjust for you. So you couldn't, they wouldn't bind. They made it easy to adjust. Yeah, I changed the flippers in my System 80 for the first game I ever had, and I had not a single issue, and they felt better than when I had got the game. And they had, I think they had dual bushings, like, on the actual flipper plate. So everything was just very tight, very, it just. It was like one screw if you had to replace the bat itself. A very good system. Yeah. And then we went to the flippers that most people hate. They went to a flipper bat that was more like, say, the Williams flipper bat, just the skinnier flippers, except they were even a different shape than the other manufacturers. Yeah, they were like the shape of a slice of cheese. Yeah. It felt as squishy as that. And they had the top part that screwed in, and it went to a much cheaper plate that would break. And they would put Gottlieb, they wrote Gottlieb on it just in case you forgot. And the biggest issue is just the flipper travel. They got to the point where you can trap anything on these System 3 games because of these flippers. Do you think that was the design, like they wanted to make it easier to trap? You know, it probably was, but in hindsight, it just, it really hurt a lot of these games, in my opinion. It just made them way, way too easy. Like you could literally lift up the flipper. It could come down the lane and just stop. Stop. It's horrible. Yeah. Like, I mean, yes, you know, for a novice, you're like, oh, I can control the ball. But there's like a happy medium to that, right? You don't want to make it too easy. You don't want to make it too hard. So here's a quick tip. If you have your System 3 game and you want a little less flipper travel, the easiest way is you just get a hold of Pinball Resource, which we'll be talking about them at the end of the program. But Steve Young at Pinball Resource, He sells, basically, their System 1 coil stops, but they have, I think, an extra screw hole in them, so they will fit in a System 3 plate, and the coil stops are much longer. So it travels a little less? It travels way less, yeah. Okay. That is the most inexpensive, easiest way to do it. You just replace the coil stop. Now, I've heard some people will actually take Williams flipper mechanics. I know someone who did that, yeah. How does that work? You just put the whole Williams, the plate, all the parts in there. The only issue is space because the Williams plates are a little bigger. So you may have issues getting it to fit. So you kind of got to be choosy of what machine. You just can't just take any machine. Yeah, that's why it may be better just to do the coil stop thing because that way you can keep everything else. Sometimes simpler is better. Yeah, and it works. But I believe you need, well, as we will find out later, if you want certain Gottlieb parts or just about any Gottlieb parts, specific Gottlieb part, you need to go to Pinball Resource and Steve Young. Yeah, certainly not our sponsor this week, which is Stern Star Wars, but Pinball Resource will pop up quite a bit, I would say specifically in the end here when we talk about what has happened to Gottlieb. That takes us into the first System 3. So they were developing this System 3. Lights, Camera, Action Stats. That's Lights, Camera, Action. It's a movie show business theme. 1989 in December. It's a standard body. They sold 1,700 units. It's designed by Jon Norris, somebody who's going to, again, pop up quite a bit here. He did a lot of System 80Bs from the late 80s and a lot, a lot of the System 3s. Software by John Burris, who did Black Hole, Buck Rogers, Raven, the Epic Raven, and TX Sector, which is actually quite good. That's sort of John Burris designing the System 3 board set, as well as the rule set around that. And artwork by the Constantinos, Janine and... By the Mitchells. The Mitchells. 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 Dave 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 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 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 backbox has backbox 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 backbox 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 Jon 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 backbox because it's small. Yeah, that's the one where you go, eh. Yeah. 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. 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 Jon Norris. So I figure this is as good a time as any to jump into who is Jon Norris and talk about his background. Does that sound good? Sounds great. Jon 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 playfields and then swap out playfields. 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. Jon 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 Jon 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 Jon 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 Jon 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 P. 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 backbox. We also installed four secondary scoring displays in the backbox to tally up the punches thrown per player for more competitive play. Ooh, sounds exciting. Well, Keith P. 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. Jon 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 Jon 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 very goofy. 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 Jon Norris, he says, Ray Tanzer 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. He's working at Gottlieb early, early, early. And we'll talk about that maybe in a Daddy East episode. But he designs this game. He gets angry. He doesn't like working at Gottlieb, and he leaves. So they take his game. They just sort of throw it on the wall, the quote-unquote the wall. And every time somebody needs, like, a pop bumper, they kind of go over and unscrew it. And then, like, put it on their machine and just test it around. They are so desperate to course correct because of this street-level mess that they're just like, Wait, what do we got? And Ray Tanzer's like, well, we got this guy over here who's got this game that we can buy called Cassius Jax. We can just buy that and throw our name on it. And I got this old Cam and Cow thing over here. I'll just put some paint on it and make it look good. They're all just kind of running around to try to find anything to get on the line. Crazy. Class of 1812 is kind of neat because it's the only game that I can think of that has a beating heart and chattering teeth, right? That is correct. It also carries one of the higher prices on Pinside for this era, especially for a Gottlieb. Why do you think that is? I don't know. Is that the one that has the chicken? Yes, it is. Maybe that's it. People love chickens. This episode has now peaked. Brought to you by Ron Hallett. David Moore did the art. And there's a quote here that he says, My all-time favorite pinball artworks was what I did with Gottlieb's Class of 1812. The game's theme and ideas were always determined by the bosses through discussion with the engineering department. They would tell me what they wanted to see, and I would make the sketches and the marker comps for their approval and their revisions, and then the artwork was processed. It was just fun to make. Jon Norris would say, and this is very cool, Yeah, we considered calling it Monster Mash and licensing it. It was deemed too much, but it was like $3,000, which was super cheap. It was management's decision. They were just getting into licensing and didn't know what was expensive or not. It was a learning curve for everyone. which is funny because probably seven years later when Williams did Monster Bash, that was supposed to be Monster Mash, and they tried to license it, and they thought it was too expensive. So I wonder if Gottlieb asking for it back then, and then seven years later another pinball manufacturer asked for it, maybe they thought, oh, this must be a hot property. We've got to ask for even more this time. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Now, if you can imagine $3,000 for the license, you probably get the song along with that. I think the class of 1812, if it was Monster Mash, would have sold so much more than if it was what it became. But they definitely wouldn't have had the singing chicken. Well, yeah, you're probably right. Yeah, it's better off with the singing chicken. Their next game was Surf and Safari. So let's Surf and Statfari here. I'm still doing it. I'm never giving up. No, I see that. You started to just not even acknowledge it anymore, which means that it's really good. Surf and Safari. I feel like Creso with the market trends at this point. Yeah, so again, another Jon Norris game. Very cool. It's like this surfer theme, like spring break kind of thing. It is actually a license. Yeah, it's a license, but it's like... They licensed the song. And truth be told, this is one of my favorite got leaves of that era. I love Surfing Safari. This is... Is it the rules? What is this? Well, it is a frequently used game at the old Papa tournaments. They would use this all the time. Because all they had to do with the rules is just disable the skill shot. Because the skill shot has those wonderful random awards, and one of them is a catch-up one. Catch up to your opponent. That's not fair. So you can't have that. But all they had to do was just disable the skill shot. The rest of it was just left as is. It plays great. It's got this horrible toy in the middle in front of some bash target or in front of a couple of target. It's not whatever he's supposed to be. He looks like a hugging turd. It's horrible. But it has palm trees, which were actually Steve Kirk idea. Very cool. And I did not even know it used – Surf at Safari is a song by the Beach Boys. I did not even know that was in the game because I had never heard this game until this year. Somebody I know bought it, and we played it, and I got to hear the sound for this game for the first time ever, and it's awesome. And I didn't realize, like, wait a minute, this is playing the actual song, Surf and Safari, so they must have paid licensing for this. That's so unlike Gottlieb. This is the first game that was actually designed from scratch. So the previous games we sort of talked about were like, oh my god, we need to make a game really quickly and let's just slap something together with what we've got. This is the one that actually took them the longest to actually build from nothing to something. And they still did it in six months, which is just a crazy amount of turnaround. So you could say that it was certainly tweaked more than like a Cactus Jacks or a Class of 1812. So it had sort of a little more love, if you will. But that being said, right, you're looking at Williams and they're doing turnaround in 12 months for game design, and they're doing it in half the amount of time. Now, they did license the songs, but it wasn't actually like a Beach Boys license. It was just the song, and then they named it after the song, and then people sort of can just draw the line that it's kind of the same thing. Now, it's got some awesome marketing bits and pieces here. These Gottlieb guys are all in on their marketing posters and branding. Boom, crash, flash, tickle Rodney the gator. Okay, so that's supposed to be an alligator. Yeah, and watch him glow. Watch him glow. Take the plunge slowly into mystery score. Watch the girls and the nine-digit score displays for hundreds of millions. It's just brutal. These are great. Double everything. Hit the pipeline and spell double for massive fun all around. So they didn't pay the Beach Boys? Did the Beach Boys not own their own song? I'm not entirely sure. It's not like it kind of sounds like Surf and So Far. It is the actual song. Note for note, Surf and Safari. By the interview with Jon Norris was that they licensed a song or two, but they weren't actually doing game licenses. So they just sort of, it's not like a Beach Boys game. Yeah, they just licensed a song from the Beach Boys. Okay. Yeah, so it's pretty funny that way. I wonder if any of the former Beach Boys have the game. That would be a good question. That would be interesting. Does Brian Wilson have a Surf and Safari in his house? You can send that in to silverballchronicles at gmail.com. What actually happened to the real Gottlieb at this time? So in the 90s, the real Gottlieb, Alvin G. Gottlieb, right? They were still around. Yes. And we're going to go into much more sort of about that in the future. But, you know, some of the bits about them were that, so you've got premier Gottlieb-making games, but then all of a sudden you've got sort of Michael and Alvin Gottlieb creating their own company, like, the actual Gottliebs from the 70s are actually making games at the same time. They weren't able to, allowed to use the Gottlieb name, so they had to kind of come up with Alvin G and Co., which is similar to D Gottlieb and Co. Yeah. So, they're playing some kind of fun games there, but they actually tried to share a factory with Premier. So, they had a working relationship, which is really weird. Now, they would make a couple of games. Really, their highlights were Punchy the Clown. We'll get into that some other time. That's terrifying. Al's Garage Band goes on World Tour, which was their biggest seller, which only sold 1,000. They kind of had this really cool soccer game as well called, like, Soccer. Well, they had Pistol Poker, and then they had that other one. What was it? Something Castle. Was it Magic Castle? so you can see that there's like this weird thing happening in the pinball market where you've got Daddy East now it's Williams Bally Midway you've got AA Gottlieb and Co all of a sudden there's all these people just coming into the woodwork making pinball stuff so you can see there's just a saturation in the pinball market there's lots going on it's being reinvigorated, it's becoming hot again And that's creating like this really weird mess in the pinball industry in the mid-90s now. So then what happens all of a sudden? Correction, not Magic Castle. I was thinking of the Zachariah. Mystery Castle. There. So if you've opened up a window to send in some corrections, you've now wasted that time sending that email in because Ron has corrected himself. I, on the other hand, do not correct myself. I leave that up to Ron or it just never happens. really Gottlieb starts making a big shift into DMD, right? The whole industry has all of a sudden discovered the dot matrix display, which is a huge moment in pinball at the time. Gottlieb could have been the first company to use a DMD. The company that sort of developed that technology and was able to develop and adapt it to sort of a pinball style machine, they originally went to Gottlieb first, but they actually would give them, if you decided to go with this company with DMD, you would get the exclusive rights for 12 months to have DMD in your machine. Then after that, it could go to any manufacturer. So what did Gottlieb do? They turned them down. Of course. Why would you want to innovate and make money? You know who didn't turn them down? Williams didn't. Yeah. So then Williams jumps in, and Gottlieb has to wait 12 months before they're able to actually make one. If that's true, how come Tata East had them? So they had it in that checkpoint, right? Yeah, they actually had the first one. They had the mini DMD. Yeah, you might get some questions on that one. The first one designed with a DMD was T2. The first one released with it was, friggin' Gilligan's Island. They're not like the full size. Oh, Lethal Weapon 3 has a DMD, and that's from 92. So maybe that could be true. Well, I'll be Hornswoggle. Because I think Hook has the small, it has the mini DMV. It's the same one that's like in Checkpoint. I think Star Trek does too. So if you've got a little further clarity on how that works, please send us an email in at silverballchronicles at gmail.com. Unless I'm right, then you can just send something over with PayPal as a thank you. One of the reasons that Gottlieb turned that down was that it meant more people, more staff. You had to bring in another person to make the dots. You had to bring another person in to program. They just didn't want to get into that at that time. Jon Norris would actually say it probably added about $150 per game. And the staff, well, that would be added to the cost as well. It was also a noisy unit, and it added a lot of cost above and beyond programming. They just really weren't in it for that at the moment. I mean, you can create a pretty basic DMD system with not, like, a lot of shenanigans on it. But, I mean, really, did you want Gottlieb to be the first one to use that kind of technology anyway? Like, really? The track record speaks for itself. That's all I'll say. When DMD started up, that was like 50 cents a play started coming around a lot more because it increased the retail price, the MSRP, of the pinball machines because there was nobody that was going to just eat the cost of putting this DMD in. They were going to make sure that that flowed through, as they say, to the consumer. What was the first Gottlieb D&D game? The wonderful Super Mario Brothers. It's a me, the Mario stats. I'll just let you marinate on that one. This is a video game theme surprise. April 1992. It's a standard body. It sold 4,200 units. So it sold a lot of units. And again, artwork by Constantino and Jeanine Mitchell, David Moore. Software by Alan Edwell and Rand Paulin. So very cool little game here. Everybody... So you mean licensing may increase sales? It's almost like people realize this. If I put a license on it, people will play it. And not only is it a license, it's like a proper license, right? Now when we look at this, we're like, why isn't everybody making Nintendo or video games pinball machines, right? Like, for some reason, this Super Mario Brothers is, like, iconic in pinball. It's not a great game, but yet it's still iconic. Oh, it surely is not a great game. And it has a really big dot matrix display, slightly larger than the Williams one. No, it's the same size. Is it? It's just the picture looks it. It makes it look bigger. It's the same size. Crazy. There was nothing hotter at the time than the Mario Brothers. This was back when I was fairly young. And, man, Mario was all in. So is Mario riding Rodney? He looks like the same, you know, he's from Surf and Safari. He's made another appearance. Exactly. It's like some of the art is just, you can tell it's on brand, but it looks like crap. Yeah, John says it took Data East to force Williams and us into getting licenses. Joe Cam and Cal have been doing it for years. It was obvious where it became keeping up with the Joneses or whatever. Positive and negative, you give up creativity and some control. The licensed people have control over the whole thing. Every time we had to work on the art, we had to submit it to Nintendo. If the game sells more and earns more, that's okay, but it may not. They had to go back and forth with that kind of art. They're like, I don't know, his eyes are not crossed enough. Like, it's just, like, they didn't make him chubby enough. I don't know, he doesn't quite look plumbery enough. Plumbery? It's very odd. Yeah, it's very odd. But, I mean, I guess it's a time, right? He's like 8-bit or 16-bit Mario, right? Like, he's all blocks and stuff. So I guess you kind of don't really know, more or less, kind of what he really, really looks like. Except for maybe the boxes or whatever that they had. But it's got a warp pipe, which is pretty cool. That's exciting. Huh? I've played this. So have I. And you know what? It roped me in. Because it's like, oh, it's Mario. And you go and you put in your 50 cents or whatever and you play it. And then you're immediately disappointed. And you like well I just move on to the next But I can see where kids or whatever would be like oh it Mario And then they play it and they flip it around and they drain and then they put in more money Is Super Mario too easy Again, it's system three flippers. You strap everything. If I remember, it was what you hit. You hit a left ramp and then another shot just continuously and that's all you do the entire game. And again, suffers from this mystery award stuff. So Terry, an operator from New Robert Englunds, says, Dave and Ron, I love the show. I won't give you both any dumb nicknames. Thank you for that, Terry. Mario Brothers still earns. Everyone has to play it at least once when they see it. So, I mean, there you go, right? Sales numbers don't lie. And it's still to this day it earns, right? People will tell you that Super Mario Brothers earns and South Park earns still to this day. Yep. So how do you follow up a great seller like Super Mario Brothers? Well, you make it again, but smaller, with Super Mario Brothers Mushroom Kingdom. What the hell is that, Ron? It's a little mini pinball machine. It's tiny. It actually came with two sets of legs. So like an adult-sized set of legs and a children's set of legs. I've only seen the children. Really? Yeah. So you've got to play it on your knees. Yep. So, I mean, once again, we can see that Gottlieb is certainly behind the eight ball here. Ooh. Yeah, speaking of 8-Ball, it's time for the Q-Ball stats of Q-Ball Wizard, which is a billiards theme. It's October 1992. It's a standard body. It sold 5,700 units. Yeah, which at that time... How? Oh, that... How? How? Yeah. Same art team, same software, and designed by Jon Norris. The guy is a machine. That's all he does is just pump out playfields. Yes, originally it was a street-level game, but it was changed into a regular pinball, adding the ramp and the cue ball. Yeah, so this is one that he sort of had parked off to the side, and he just sort of was like, oh, I could throw a ramp in there, and there you go, done. Like the slacker's guide to building pinball from Gottlieb in the 1990s. Right? It's great. This was Gottlieb Premier's best-selling game ever. This was the game. Wasn't Mario, wasn't any of the licensed themes like Barbed Wire or Brooks and Dunn? We're talking cue ball wizard, an unbranded hillbilly redneck pool theme. With some of the worst, it has a call-out. Some of the call-outs in the game are supposed to be Clint Eastwood or Clint Eastwood-like, and they're so bad. like, that's a really bad shot. What kind of shot is that? It's like, uh... I think it was obvious that Gottlieb did not believe in hiring professional voice talent. So I think they would just use people, whoever the programmer was, or maybe people in the factory, just to have them do voices. So would you say that the impersonation of Clint Eastwood in this game for the voice is better or worse than the old man in Jersey Jack's Wonka. I'm not familiar with the old man in Jersey Jack's Wonka. You don't know the old man? I have never played the game in an environment where I could actually hear all the call-outs. We'll put up a poll somewhere, I don't know, on the internet and you tell us which one's better or worse. I'm not going to really put up a poll. That's a waste of time. No, don't do that. Jon Norris said, this game has this really kind of unique upper play field, right? What's unique, all right. It has a pool cue, which is the stick you hit the ball with, and an eight ball up there that hits some targets. But then on the lower play field, it's got this floating bar, if you will, and inside is a cue ball, right, like the white ball that you hit. And you can hit that with your pinball, and it bounces around inside of this thing. So according to Jon Norris, he says, I really had to fight to keep the pool ball in the game. At first, upper management told me that the pool ball needed to be endurance tested. So he set up a tech fixture that shot a ball with our strongest kicker coil into the ball from three inches away. After three million hits, the test fixture gave out, and the ball was still intact. Yes, well, we all know if this was probably a Williams test fixture, it probably would have lasted a little bit longer, right? Ooh, hey, you know, okay, to be honest, The System 3s, they're built pretty damn good. Godleaf was good at the construction. If you actually look at their Macs, if you look at their Macs, something like System 3, I didn't know this until recently. In a System 3 game, like, all the coils are fused. Like, they each have their own fuse. They're not, like, bunched up. So just to say their construction is good, I mean, the system is a good, reliable system. It's just the – and the playfields. Everyone always says, like, we want more innovative playfields. It's like, you got them. They were called Gottlieb, but you didn't like them. Yeah, I mean, they're really designed for, like, they're not designed for this hardcore game player. They're designed for the pick them up, flip them, you know, turn it over 18 months, sell it, buy another one, right? Like, it's a different business model than a Williams, right? Like, Williams was like, let's throw everything in there, let's pop a huge number, but where are both of those companies now? So Gottlieb and Williams both out at the same time, right? Well, Gottlieb also wasn't into fixing any software issues, but we'll get into that. So Jon Norris also says, upper management still wanted to pull ball out. I got them to agree to make two sets of rules, one with the ball and one without. We would test the two versions side by side. The winner will be determined by the cash box. We ran out of time to do the test since the game needed to be at the AMOA show. We placed the machines on the AMOA show floor, one set without the ball, one set with the ball. I was told that all the games have been converted to having the pool ball in. Exactly. So one would say that it was so popular with this silly pool ball in it that you hit with the ball, it out-earned on the show floor, and then they immediately called up John and said, all right, you win. Like, what an odd thing. Like, it seemed like it was like this huge fight. How much is it to put this ball in the game that it is such a make-or-break situation? It's so weird. It definitely makes the game stand out When you see that thing in there It's like ooh I wonder can you hit that thing I gotta try this out And then you do and it moves around And then it kind of comes back into the middle And for as much as I bash it it does have one of the Coolest call outs The rowdy ramp round I think every game should have a rowdy ramp round It just makes you feel good Yep whenever you hear that it's like Rowdy ramp round Yeah Oh my god It's like the ultimate jackpot thing. So it's like the play field is sort of like those old pool themes. Playing pool was like a thing with pinball machines. It's because these things are in pool halls, right? Is that why? Pools and cards. Yeah. So they only have like the one ramp on the side that goes to that upper play field thing. You can almost tell. You can see the street level version of it. And then the ramp put on top of it. Yeah. with a bunch of just random targets in the back. Yeah, but it's funny that they could just sort of turn that around and it be the biggest seller just like, bam, right through the gate. I have no explanation. It's funny. Like, everything about Premier Gottlieb is like, what the hell? It's not a license, unlike their next game. Yeah, so the tale of the tape, the Street Fighter stats. Video game fighting theme, it's from October 92. Standard body, it says 5,550. This is a group, actually, that put this one together. Jon Norris, Ray Tanzer, Mike Vettros, and Bill Parker. Same art team, and ran Pollen as software. This was a big license at the time, right? Like, Street Fighter II was a huge hit. It was massive. Jon Norris would say that they actually took this license away from Data East, which I'm sure for them was a huge coup. John thought that maybe it was actually a thumb in the nose from Capcom Video. Well, Data East actually had a video game department as well. So maybe there was like a little bit of a we don't want a competitor to have the pinball version of our machine. But that was not much in video game at that sort of moment in time that was bigger than Street Fighter 2. Maybe Mortal Kombat? Wouldn't have been out yet or would have just been out. What about that Terminator 2 shooting game? That was huge. Yeah, but that was a year before. I played a lot of that T2 game. A lot of that. And Street Fighter has progressive multiball. Yeah, so what's progressive multiball? Is that like a multiball that is gender neutral? No, it's just multiball that keeps track of where you were. Okay, so if you drain and you go back into multiball, it remembers how many jackpots you had, right? Or if you were doing a series of things you had to do, it would remember where you were. Very cool, very cool. And this is one of these innovations that Jon Norris, Ray Tanzer would often talk about, where the System 3 board was actually pretty smart with the way it was able to sort of come up with these uses, or that they could program these uses into them. Although I would argue, if you're using that concept, that it remembers where you were in the multiball, something like, say, F-14 Tomcat does the same thing. It remembers how many safe landings you had, so the next time you get into multiball, because I think it's every three safe landings is a jackpot, it would remember that. So if you want to be picky, as I'm sure people listening might be picky, wait a minute, there's some multiballs that keep track of where you were before, but they were probably considering it like it's a multi-stage multiball with different tasks in it that will keep track of where you are. I'm guessing that's what they meant by it. Very cool. Street Fighter was cool. It's got that cool car in the bottom a little bit, right, where you can bash the car that's always broken. Street Fighter is terrible. It is a terrible game. It's terrible. But as far as Gottlieb is concerned, it's the second greatest game, right? Yeah, of course, when it comes to sales numbers. Yeah, I mean. It's got a cool, like, corkscrew ramp thing, which is kind of neat. It kind of goes up the ramp and down, like, a wire form. That's kind of cool. It's got two ramps. I played one once, and, man, those flippers just trap everything. It's just like a baby's first drop catch. It's amazing. It kills it. The next one that we're going to talk about here, the second best knockoff to Caddyshack, Teed Off, right? Yep. After Ron bashing all these games, he will totally put over Teed Off. I love Teed Off. This is the one we're going to dive into now. This is an obvious knockoff of Caddyshack, which is one of my favorite comedies of all time. It sells 3,500 units. This is from May of 93. In other words, before No Good Gophers. so take that Williams yeah Pat Lawler what separates this one from the Williams game is the amazing topper that this game has it's like a gopher in a bubble JL Green was a marketing person at Gottlieb and he was all in on the gopher on top and it was an expensive unit as Jon Norris would say I recall that there was a lot of opposition to the unit because of its cost the money could have been spent on a license or something on the playfield. I actually agree. It's a full, like, stuffed gopher. It has a motor in it, and he moves. Yeah, super cool. And he'll move during the game, and he'll move while it's just in a track mode, which could freak you out if you don't realize it moves, because you'll just hear, and the thing starts moving. Whoa. It may be one of the tallest back boxes. It's like they got one of those novelty club covers and just sort of stuck it on there. I love it. If our listeners want to tell us what is the tallest backbox with the topper, I'd be curious, because this has to be up there. I mean, I know you have things like the Dungeons & Dragons, which had the ridiculously large topper. Heavy Metal Meltdown had a whole boom box thing on it. Then you have, like, we place camera action. But this thing is so tall. Yeah, it's not wide, like the length of the thing. It's, like, straight up. And it's in a System 3 backbox, which are already taller than the other manufacturer's back boxes. but I have a purely high ceiling in my basement. I think even I, it still would be too tall with the topper. It's a neat little game. And, again, I love Caddyshack, so you can, you know, if you don't want to spend money on a theme, how do you knock a theme off? Well, you create a golf theme with a gopher. There you go. And everybody's going to go, oh, it's like Caddyshack. That's close enough, right? But it's not Caddyshack. It's got so many cool features in there. It's got the ridiculous topper, but it has a roulette wheel underneath the play field. It has just a very unique play field with a cool multiball rule set where you're trying to go through the holes, one through nine, then you lock a ball. Then you can do, and this is a cool feature. I don't know if anyone else did this. Golly did it, I think, in more than one game where you lock the first ball, then you plunge. If you can plunge a saucer, then it'll give you a third ball. If you can't plunge it, then it's a two-ball multiball. So you, with your skill, decide whether it's a two-ball or a three-ball multiball. So this is like the predecessor to the ball hanging on a magnet thing. Get the ball off the magnet and you get three balls. No. Yeah, I guess so. I guess so. I know what you're saying. But this one, it has a bunch of modes, which are little golf balls that go across. And honestly, it suffers from the usual Gottlieb software issues in that you don't really play any of the modes half the time because they're really not worth near as much as the multiball is. You want to get in the multiball and get supers. And then you want to get to the wizard modes. And that's the game. It's got some great art. Oh, good art. It has the issue with the flippers where you can trap everything under the sun. If you can fix that. And it has one of the features I really like. It's called skins. And, again, they feature a lot of money in this game, between the topper, the roulette wheel. The actual apron has lighting in it for the skins. So you can see. And Jon Norris liked to do this. This was one of his things. He liked a progressive thing that would cross over games. So on the apron, there's skins and gopher. I think the gopher one was something that held across games. The skins one, there's a mode in there called skins, and you try to spell skins. And an exclamation point, it actually counts as a letter. If you spell it, then you get to make a decision. And the decision is, do you want to double your score? Do you want to try to double your score, yes or no? So as Jon Norris said, I did the rule set for this game. I really like the enhanced double or nothing feature. The player would wager entire score on the success of a timed round. If the player was unsuccessful, their score would go to zero, but they have the opportunity to recover the score by completing a feature. So in skins, you spell it. It gives you the decision. And what you want to do, you want to hold that until later in the game when you have, like, you could have, say, I have three billion. Like, I've had a killer game, and I decide, go for it. So double or nothing. Double or nothing, and you say, go for it. It will give you a random shot on the play field, and you have, like, five, ten seconds to hit it. If you don't hit it, your score goes to zero. If you hit it, my score would go to like six billion. So that's how you would get just obscene high scores on the game. I saw Jack Danger play this one time on his Twitch stream at Deadflip. He actually lost a three billion score. And just the reaction was priceless. Just priceless. I think he didn't realize it actually went to zero. Yeah. People don't realize, like, oh, wait a minute. They actually meant my score would go to zero. I would lose everything. You're kidding. Yeah. And the thing is about Gottlieb, unlike the other manufacturers, Gottlieb did not believe in grace periods. When their timers end, they end. That's it. You don't know grace period. See, Lyman saves my skin nonstop with grace periods all the time. Well, they were doing it before Lyman was there, but, yeah. But Lyman is known for his extremely long grace periods. Yeah. So Ron Hallett from the Slam Tilt podcast wrote in and said, one of my favorite System 3s. Look at that. Did I? I think I, yeah. You sent that to me in a text. Yeah. I love that game. That and Surf and Safari would probably be the two system threes I would consider owning. I know people are saying, not Stargate? No, not Stargate. Next up was Wipeout. Now, Wipeout was October 93. Ray Tanzer, so kind of offsetting each other. It sells $21.50. Rand Pollen on Dotson Animation. The Mitchells once again. David Moore on Art again. And, you know, they're just turning them out, turning them out, turning them out. It's amazing. Wipeout is like a snowboarding extreme sports thing, which was all the rage in the mid to late 90s. It captures the thrills, chills, and spills of skiing and pinball. And it has the Path of Adventure in it. Ooh. Before the Path of Adventure existed. That sounds like a lot of fun. Mm-hmm. Except I don't believe you can control it. No, no. It's up on the top left side of the playfield. Sorry, the top right. The top right of the playfield. You kind of go up there, and it's very much that Lord of the Rings. Well, actually, it rocks back and forth. Oh, very cool. See, I've never even seen one of these. It rocks back and forth. This is before the Path of Adventure. So they were, again... Williams. You know what I mean? They just can't come up with their own original idea. A little head of Williams with some playfield innovation. Williams just made it so you could control it. In this game, there's a ski lift. You go up, and it's supposed to be you're at the top, and you're going to ski down, and it will rock back and forth to simulate you're going down the hill. You're skiing down the hill. They didn't lack imagination at Godley. Yeah. The funny thing about this is, and we found a little bug with this game, where if you had balls locked and the game ended, it would release the balls, and it would go down that speed. It would go down the path of adventure. It took so long to go down, the game would actually go into a ball search. Ooh. After the game is over. Like, no balls found because it took so long to clear the balls out. But, yeah, we're looking at the pictures here. There's a working ski lift that actually moves also. Cool. Golly did a lot of weird, cool stuff with the ball. It's like if they had, again, you know, instead of six months or eight months to get a game out, if they had 10 or 12, like, what could they have really, really done? They had better programming, more time to fix scoring imbalances, which they had a lot of. After this is a really cool story type game and not what it actually is or the story of the game. It's actually how this game came to be. And we're talking about gladiators. Gladiators. It's like Roman Empire fighting thing. But according to what you sent me, that's not what it was supposed to be. No. According to Jon Norris, he says originally it was to be the Legend of Zelda. Gottlieb's license with Nintendo also gave us a third title. I chose Zelda because it was a popular Nintendo title. Entire layout was completed with this theme in mind. Then, marketing decided that an upcoming television series called American Gladiators would be a better choice. So we abandoned the Zelda theme and changed the game. American Gladiators was absolutely amazing, wasn't it, Ron? It was a great choice. It was a huge hit. Well, according to your show notes, it wasn't, but it actually was. It was on forever. That was a big one. At least in this country, American Gladiators was... If you ask someone what American Gladiators is, they're going to know what it is. As opposed to if you ask them what Roller Games is, they probably would have no idea what that is. Yeah, totally. Now, a month or two later, the TV series came out and it bombed. No, it didn't. Oh, okay. It didn't bomb. How could it bomb? It was on for like five to ten years. Well, this is a quote from John. Oh, I'm sorry, John. Oh, I'm correcting Jon Norris. I apologize, John. So, as John says, a month or two later, the TV series came out and bombed. Now management decided to simply change the art to gladiators. This entire process was a disaster. We did not have the luxury of having a year to develop each title. We typically had 8 to 12 weeks for each game. Well, the final art was better than I thought it would be. Yeah, so one of his favorite games he ever made, he says, of various sources, and it was fun, but it really, really suffered. And one of those was a massive scoring exploit on one of the ramps. You had alluded to this sort of previously, is how Gottlieb sort of struggles with code imbalances and fixing code. Yep, they wouldn't let him fix the code issue, even though, according to John, it was two lines of code that would have taken to fix that exploit. Yeah, so it really ruined the game for some. Now, it had a lot of fun shots. It was very flowy. Some would say John's most flowy game. It was a lot of fun. It just, the theme is a turd. Super cool shots. And it's got this one just brutal exploit. On the ramp. When I did my sort of searching through, Gottlieb would do this. So nowadays, everything is like super secret with pinball machines, right? Nobody ever releases anything. They all sort of keep it on the down low, and then all of a sudden it shows up on the internet, or it shows up somewhere, then the photos come, and it's on order, it's pre-ordered, it's out the door. Back in the day, they would put them on location, they'd sort of test them out a little bit, they'd fix it, tweak anything, and then they would release it. Because back then you didn't have to worry about people posting things on the Internet, because if somebody saw something in Chicago, it would be very, very few people in New York or California or down south in the U.S. that would actually see the machine, right? It would just never happen. If they put a game on location, let's say like Gladiator, people are playing it, you know, they're checking the mechs to make sure things aren't breaking in the plastics and stuff. The code seems to be fine. If they didn't catch it, if the programmer and the designer didn't catch an issue with the code, like a great example is Gladiator. It went into production like that, and that was it. There were no revisions. You were done. Done. And what I'll say, this era, around this time, Gladiator teed off. If you want to see a really cool little video, just open up your browser, go to Google and search for, I think it's Chicago Slices Gottlieb. Yeah, I'll include it in our show notes as well. Gottlieb. And you will get a tour by Jon Norris himself, Which is funny because they start to go through the factory a bit, but then obviously they don't want him in the factory. So they end up in the break room at Gottlieb, and Jon Norris just explains a couple of the games to the guy. But you can see Jon Norris doing things like alley passing and tap passing and all kinds of stuff. This was like in the early 90s. He is like a proper player, they say. Yeah, so it's a very cool video. Highly recommend it. Another fun story, sort of, at this time. And you can see that there's like this, in the industry at the time, there's almost like this rivalry, a friendly rivalry, if you will, between the manufacturers, right? They all generally probably go to lunch together and see each other and have beers at the expos and things like that. So it's funny to see them sort of poking around at each other. And this is a prime example of that. And this is a game called World Challenge Soccer. That sounds familiar, yeah. No, not the awesome game by John Papadiuk. This one is the Jon Norris masterpiece called World Challenge Soccer. Well, according to John, six months before the World Cup, this would be 1994, we went for the license. And we learned Williams already had it. Yeah, so what they did is they decided to just say, ah, screw them. We'll make our own soccer game anyway. And we won't call it World Cup because they beat us to the license. We'll just call it World Challenge Soccer. Yep, so he took Car Hop, the street-level game Car Hop. He added a couple wire ramps, and they were going to originally produce 1,200, but they actually upped production because of demand. Yeah, so they're like, oh, well, what is the one strategic advantage that Gottlieb has over Williams? I know. We can release a game in six weeks. So they find out that Williams has the World Cup license. They go, we're going to make our own soccer game around the same time. We're going to capitalize on the same market. We're going to build it faster. It's probably going to be cheaper, and we're going to get it to market faster. And that's just exactly what they did. So they have a gap in their line, in their production line. They need something to fill it, and they just jam this in. And I played this game for the first time last year. Is it better or worse than World Cup Soccer? Oh, it's not even in World Cup Soccer's league. It's not even in the same dimension, no. Brutal. Brutal. But it's funny that they're just like, well, this is what we're going to do, and then they do it. It's just funny, right? It's just silly. Follow that up with kind of a really unique game with probably one of the coolest 90s toys. Coolest toy. Which is Rescue 911, and that's based on the Rescue 911 TV series. Hosted by William Shatner, fellow Canadian. Yeah, so this is the ABC docudrama, which aired from 89 to 96. That's not seven years. Wow. It was hosted by the Shat, William Shatner, and it had these, like, reenactments of emergencies that were involved 911 calls. It was rated really, really high for this kind of type of show. Another one at the time was like Unsolved Mysteries, right? Unsolved Mysteries. Love that. So they would air one right after the other, I remember, in the early 90s. And this was like must-watch TV for at least two seasons because they were on. It was like primetime. It wasn't news. It wasn't Dallas. You know what I mean? It was like this kind of reenactment thing. And it was telling stories about, you know, heroes and the first responders and things who are... And this is a really kind of a cool story, how this machine sort of came about. Well, this was designed by Bill Parker, and this was his first design. And he actually built the prototype for this game in his apartment. Now, he's an interesting character because he knew Python Anghelo at Williams actually really, really well. And he asked him for a lot of help and support. And Python said... Should I do the Python voice? Oh, of course. Oh, God. The Rescue 911 was not what Bill had in his department when he built it. I'll help you build it as long as Williams has first kick in the can. Williams let me use the parts. Bill Parker is running lights on the side of the cabinet. A big helicopter with magnets dropping balls. Out of the box thinking. Larry DeMar and Steve Ritchie saw it when they brought it in. They were threatened and killed the game at Williams. Got leave hire, Bill Parker. That is so, that is so something that Python Angela would say. that they were intimidated and they killed it. Yeah, so we're going to jump into Python Anghelo on his own dedicated podcast. We're going to call it Bat Shit Crazy, the Python Anghelo story. But the helicopter toy is extremely cool. But the issue is it is so overused. Every time you hit it there, it does the same thing. It takes forever for it to actually do its thing. It grabs the ball. It has a helicopter basically on like a crane thing. And if the blades on the helicopter actually move, and then the whole helicopter moves all the way up to the top left-hand of the play field and drops the ball. But, like, it does it every time, and you have to sit there and wait for it. It's not a good game. It's almost like it would have been cooler if it was a reward, right? Like, that was the reward or something. Like, I made the helicopter pick up the ball and move. Yeah. It becomes like a, oh, we put the toy in, we better damn well use it. I think I used this story before, but when they originally had Adam's family on test, they made a modification to one of the toys and how frequently it was used. What toy do you think that would be? Hand? Yeah, thing. Thing. It was overused, so they dialed it back. So it would have more of an effect. Yeah, then you get into this sort of iron monger thing, right, where the frigging iron monger is up all the time, and you're shooting it all the time, and it's just like, go away, let me play the game. It's the same thing with this frigging helicopter, right? It's just coming in, it's picking a ball up, it's dropping it off. It's coming over, picking a ball up, dropping it off. It's like, man, stop it. The iron monger is way more awesome, though. You can hit it. Imagine if you could hit it. Imagine if it took the ball, and while it was moving, you could hit the ball off of the helicopter. Oh, yeah. There you go. And then the helicopter does a similar crash sequence to, like, the Vengeance ship in Star Trek. Oh, that would be awesome. You hit the ball off of the magnet, and instead of a two-ball multiball, you get a three-ball multiball. Blew your mind. Yeah. Ah. So good. Why aren't we making pinball machines? Because that would probably cost $10,000 per game. I guess. Could use lasers, maybe. They already did that. Anywho, if we move on to the next one, Freddy, Nightmare on Elm Street. I have only played this once. There was nothing more terrifying when I was younger than friggin' Freddy and the Elm Street movies. For some reason, they scared the crap out of me. Welcome to prime time! Oh, no, I won't say the full line, but... But I'll tell ya, Freddy's Nightmare on Elm Street, it oozed the Nightmare on Elm Street theme. It looks good. It was Nightmare on Elm Street. The colors, the creepy face on the playfield of Freddy, the glove hand, even the side art on the cabinet just screamed the theme of Nightmare on Elm Street. Which is weird, because Godley was kind of known for being more family-friendly, to accompany with their themes. Yeah, they were casual kind of things. Yeah, so this is kind of weird that they would have done this license. And the actual Freddy Krueger did the voice stuff. Oh, Robert Englunds, Ungland, whatever his name is. Yeah, they didn't go and they didn't get a knockoff. Wow. It was an odd bit in this time era, right? It's not a knockoff. It's a theme. It's horror theme. It's not class of 1812 silly horror. It's cool. I mean, it's not a great game, but it's cool. So Ray Tanzer on Elm Street said, My career as a pinball game designer has allowed me to create some games that offer the players new features. I enjoyed designing this game as I felt it was enjoyed by the novice and the pro player. I loved the claw ball save. I loved the flipper glove and Freddy's head. Super cool. Although the face, you know, as realistic as it was, the head on the play field, it was just creepy. Isn't that the point? Yeah, but it doesn't look like him and it doesn't look really bad. It's like in the middle. It's like, ugh. Even this creeps me out. Like, something about Freddy. I can't remember. There was one of the movies, there was somebody in a basement, and he came down. That's all of them. Oh, my God. Every single one. Even to this day, just thinking about it creeps me out. Then the best one, Shaq Attack. I don't know if I've ever played Shaq Attack. I've heard I shouldn't. Yeah, so, I mean, I guess we could call it the Shad Attack. EA was actually the licensor for Shaq, which is pretty interesting. and just like how they this time they were doing NBA at Williams NBA Fast Break right NBA Fast Break NBA is another game yeah another great one hey I like it I the only one so NBA Fast Break is coming so they not trying to make another basketball game at the time just to sort of capitalize on it But Jon Norris, he hates this game. He hates this game like you would not believe. He hates the art. He thinks it has the worst back glass he's ever had on any one of his games. And this is a guy who had back glasses from the System ADP era. The earlier backlash of Shaq was actually him breaking the backboard, but that was rejected by the licensors. Why? That sounds super cool. They wanted Shaq big and huge, and he's on the play field, and he's super tall and towering over everybody. They actually forced Jon Norris to have the coach. Have you heard the coach in this game before? I've never played this game. So the coach is sort of like your announcer guy. Shoot for this and get that. It's like the NBA Jam guy, except bad, I'm guessing. It was so bad, in fact, and Jon Norris hated it so much that he actually had the coder have a way to turn the coach off in the code. Now, it was shipped with it on because it had to be, but you could turn it off. And every time he ever sees anybody ever who has or mentions this game, he tells them to turn the coach off. He hates it so much. You can see that there's obviously some stress here between the management, the design teams. You know, things are starting to kind of get weird at Premier Gottlieb. I will say, as much as I put down some of these games, I recommend everyone go play these and make up your own mind. Yeah, that's true. They are fun. My Gottlieb experience, there's a show called California Extreme, and they would have, this was probably 10 years ago, they would have, they were like half video games, half pinball. And the pinballs, it was tough to get on them because they were just to be the lions for all these games. and they were all like Attack from Mars, Medieval Madness, your classic Williams games. And then there would be this row of Gottliebs with games like Gladiators and Shack Attack, etc. And there's no line. So that's where I got to play all these games. I'm glad I did. So give them a try, no matter how much we say they may suck. Who knows? You might think Q-Ball Wizard is the greatest game ever made. You might. You might play Shack Attack and say, man, you know what? I remember Shack. And this game is too much fun. and this would fit right into my Shaquille O'Neal-themed bar in my basement. Or you might go in and you might say, hey, you know what? This Operation Thunder is so good, and it matches the theme of my bathroom. It would fit right in. Well, isn't Operation Thunder when you run out of gas? So it might fit with your bathroom. I think you run out of fuel and you die. I think that's another one of those, not three balls a game, but time-based. Not time-based, but I think you've got to keep your fuel up or your crash or something like that. Maybe Shaq attack isn't your thing. Maybe you're more into baseball. Yeah. So you're going to play some Frank Thomas. Frank Thomas is big hurt. And the funny thing is, when Gottlieb went out of business, I believe it came out that he actually never got paid. Shaq did, but Frank Thomas did not. During this time, we're getting into this, like, tumultuous period, right? Like, this is like they really peaked at Q-bar wizard, street fighter, kind of wipeout. They kind of, they're a little bit coming down. Then that Rescue 911, right? And then they get sort of Stargate, Freddy, Shack Attack, and then it just, it's off a cliff. Yeah, Waterworld, Mario Andretti. This is, we're getting into the dry period here, folks. So let's get to, let's say, the high point that some tournament players and some collectors would say of the System 3 era, which is the Gottlieb System 3 masterpiece, Stargate. Remember to shoot the pyramid, okay, Ron? Shoot the pyramid. Yeah. So it's movie space theme based on the Stargate movie. It's a standard body, 3,600 units, Jon Norris, Ray Tanzer design, again, the Mitchells and David Moore on art, and Alan Edwell on software. And the interesting thing is it's kind of like a lot of today's licenses in that they got the license for the movie. They have the likenesses of the actors, including Kurt Russell. He's on the play field. But they have no actual call-outs or anyone from the movie. It's just some dude doing the call-outs. It was probably the programmer or someone who just worked at Gottlieb. Somebody's brother. It's like the same voice. Hit the pyramid. Hit the pyramid. I remember seeing Stargate years and years ago. I've never seen it. I remember seeing it. I don't remember it because I remember it not being a great movie. And it's not like a not great movie that you kind of watch just because you do. Right? It didn't fall into one of those sort of genres. I remember it had the Crying Game dude in it. That was like the only other thing he was in, other than the Crying Game. It had a budget of $55 million in 1994, and it had a box office of $200 million, which is actually pretty solid. That's very solid. That's a good gift for Gottlieb. Yeah. Like, it's, you know, look up the Wikipedia page. It wasn't a great movie. It wasn't a bad movie. It's one of those, it's like that sci-fi era in that time was so dominated by sort of Star Trek-esque sci-fi that it was really hard to make something really different and not just seem like too weird. The game is good. You would approve? It's probably one of their better games. Typical good play feel. It's got those sarcophagus things that whenever they pop up, it's got the super cool, I mean, The pyramid thing, when it opens up and the thing comes out and starts moving back and forth, that's pretty damn cool. When it opens up, what are you supposed to do? Oh, I don't know. You shoot the pyramid. Oh, okay. Actually, it has modes you want to play. That's a wizard mode. Third flipper. Tutorials out there. Yeah, it's got a side flipper shot. Got a diverter. Yeah. It's not bad. It's not bad at all. Keith Elwin, more diverters, please. it's got this call out that tells you to shoot the pyramid and it happens a lot, right? It happens a lot. Shoot the pyramid! Is it like the hurry one from that stern? Hurry, hurry, hurry No, it's not as annoying as that. I've never played, see the thing is they sold a lot but not a lot a lot of these, right? So I don't see them around very often. I'd love to give it a flip. It seems pretty cool. The left side of the play field seems kind of neat, right? It's fairly close and in your face. It's got some kind of unique shots. Side flipper to a ramp. Gotta love that. Art's kind of cool, right? It's very spacey. Yeah, and the white targets, if you're looking at them, to the right of the pyramid and the one on the left, those actually lift up. Those are mechs. It's a cool little, you know, as long as you didn't get through Shoot the Pyramid. There are modes that require you to do things other than Shoot the Pyramid, I can tell you that. That's good. That's good. Now, this is one that's on my list. I want to see it. At about this time, Premier is trying to diversify their portfolio. They're trying to sort of get into some different markets, right? They're trying to boost their bottom line. They're trying to do what Williams did, except Williams did it much earlier. Williams got into the slot machine business, and it took a while for them to get in because it takes forever to get approved. And at the time Williams got into it, I think it was the main ones were IGT and Williams were the ones making the slot machines. And IGT had the majority of them. And Williams had some pretty big cash flows in the early 90s. They're selling tens of thousands of units. You look at something like the Addams Family, Terminator 2. These games are selling a lot. So they're making margins, and they've got good cash flows in the company. So Premier's like, well, we've got to get in on this cash cow, which is gambling. And they purchased a company called SMS, which made lottery terminals. And unfortunately, I can't look up what SMS stands for. I wasn't able to find that. If you know, shoot us an email at silverballchronicles at gmail.com. They made poker video lottery terminals, or VLTs, and they would put them in bars or pubs. They're fairly large in Atlantic Canada. We have them quite a few places. And this is sort of your new slot machine stuff, new, different, kind of more innovative games. And they bought this company in the expectation that they would then sort of have a pinball division for kiddie gambling or whatever, and then you would have your actual gambling thing in casinos and bars and restaurants. But they didn't just have a bunch of cash on hand. So what they did is they took out a bunch of business loans. And this will come into play a little bit later. But you just can't buy this company and then there you go, put it into a bar, right? You got to go state by state in the United States and province by province in Canada, and you have to get a license for every single one. And each one has different rules, like how many times you can win, how many is your maximum bet, you know, how much is the payout, how often is the pay, all this stuff. You get into some issues, and this is kind of where the issues start with Premiere. Well, then they jump into Waterworld, probably the greatest movie to ever involve jet skis and wave runners. And a guy with gills. I didn't see this movie. I have not seen the movie. I have seen things about the movie. I know Dennis Hopper is a bad guy. I remember that they used to talk about how expensive it was. This movie was like one of the most expensive movies ever made. It has a really cool mech on the back, which is like a rotating waterfall thing, ball lock. I honestly don't think I've ever played a Waterworld, because the times I've seen one, they've been broken. It's because they got played so much, because Waterworld is such an awesome movie. Hey, at the time, I'm sure they got the license while the movie was in development, and it just seemed like a good idea. That must be the worst feeling, isn't it? I mean, you have, what's the name of the movie, right? What's it, Kevin Costner? Yes. It was his project, and his last project was Dances with Wool, so if I hear Kevin Costner's making this new movie, I'm in. Dive in. Sorry about the pun. Yeah, it was bad. Unfortunately, the movie sunk. Oh, there you go. You like that? Two in a row. You know, this is the gamble I think that you've got when it comes to licensing, is that often you're getting into licenses at this time before the movie came out, so you're not sure if the movie is any good. There is an amazing George Gomez story about Johnny Mnemonic. Johnny Mnemonic. They had this game. They got the license. They built this very, very cool pinball machine, one of George's fans. And George Gomez got to a point. It's like, okay, we're to the point where we've got to start putting some stuff from the movie in here. We've got to see the movie. So he went to a screening, saw the movie. I mean, as soon as the screening was over, got on a pay phone, called back and said, can we get out of this? This is the worst movie I've ever seen. Poor guy. Good game, though. But that's it. You know, you've got a good game. You put a lot of time and effort into it. You don't want to see your games suck because of the license, and sure enough. But that's Wives. We're talking about Gottlieb. Yeah. This is par for the course. So you had a story about Waterworld for Mr. Tanzer. Oh, yes. Basically, according to Jon Norris, he said, management clustered the game by $200 to $300. They took out two to four mechs off the game and put them on Ray Tanzer's chair. When Ray returned from vacation, he knew the game that was on the line wasn't his. How tough is that, eh? Things are, like, the wheels are starting to come off, right? Things are not good. I wonder what was supposed to be on there originally. It seemed pretty packed in that picture. To today's standards, it's pretty packed, right? It should have been an LE. Yeah. So it's funny to see now that, you know, they took some stuff off. So, I mean, Jon Norris, if you're listening, you can email us at silverballchronicles at gmail.com. It's kind of funny how they were so reluctant to get into licensing, but by the end, if you look at their last games, like Rescue 911, Freddy, Shack Attack, Stargate, Frank Thomas, They did have Strikes and Spares, which was a redemption game. Waterworld, Mario Andretti. So that's a game. Yeah, that's a game. It's got a little thing that circles around 360, like a race car that goes around. It's a game. I've played it. Again, interesting play field. Rules maybe not the best. I mean, I guess Mario Andretti was a big thing at the time. I mean, he's no Schumacher, right? He's no Ants and Senna, right? He was well-known. I mean, he was probably still one of the most well-known indie drivers, indie car drivers. This is like if you take Hot Wheels from American Pinball, it has that spinning car. It looks just like it. That's what I thought of when I saw it. It's got two cars in the middle. Yeah, I thought of Mario Andretti. Then they did their final game, Barbed Wire. Oh, my God, Barbed Wire. So I remember Barbed Wire, and the only reason I remember that is because of the lead actress. Pamela Anderson, who was Canadian, who was the biggest, biggest star at the time. She was featured in Playboy. She was like a sex symbol. She was on Baywatch. She married Tommy from Motley Crue. You know, she was the first celebrity sex tape. It was like she was a brand in herself, and she was everywhere. Everybody knew her, and everybody made jokes, and everybody. It was crazy. For some reason, she gets into acting, and I'll use that lightly. This movie was for May of 1996. This was her vehicle. This was the thing to make her a star, barbed wire. It cost $9 million to make this movie, and the box office was $3.8 million. Do you know why it hurts me specifically? Why? A non-pinball-related thing. When barbed wire was made, barbed wire was made through Gramercy Pictures. I think that's what they were called. who also, at the same time, had Mystery Science Theater the movie. Oh, yes. So the two movies were ready to come out, and they just, I guess, probably because they didn't have a lot of money, they had to decide which one to do the wide distribution to. You know, to actually release it to all the theaters. They chose Barbed Wire. Wow. Pamela Anderson won the worst new star, the Golden Raspberry Award in 1996. This movie has a 28% Rotten Tomatoes approval rating. Roger Ebert would point out that the film's plot was identical to that of Casablanca. And the game wasn't that much better. You wonder at that point how much it was costed out of it. Oh, my gosh. Could you imagine? It's a whole thing. You know, when you get to this point where it's like the pinball companies are just sort of doing whatever they can and things are just kind of coming together and you know you're at the end and the writing's on the wall. It's just, it's tough to comment it because you know there's guys like Ray Tanzer. You know there's guys like Jon Norris. They're putting a lot of effort. They're putting a lot of heart and soul into these things. And for us to kind of just crap on it, it's not fair, right? But my God. I played the game. It may be fair in this case. But they made 1,000 of them. Isn't that crazy? They still made more of these than they did. Still made 1,000. And they still went on to their next game. They started development of their next game. Yeah, which, thank God they didn't make it, because I... Oh, you never know. Brooks and Dunn. Brooks and Dunn would have been their next game. Another license. They had done a basic play field. It was going to have a jukebox on the play field. I have actually played it, the prototype. Wow. But, I mean, the software was so not even barely started. It was just a play field. It was just flipping a play field. There was one time I was driving through Ontario, and I saw a Brooks and Dunn tour bus, and I was like, huh, look at that. And that was it. So it's the last I ever thought about Brooks and Dunn. Yeah. I mean, the play field, the art, all that stuff was done. So this was actually, oddly enough, this wasn't just designed by Jon Norris and Ray Tanzer. There was a new fella called Tim Seckel. He would say, I designed the game with rules, and actually the program was never actually completed by Bob Wilson and John Burris. The play field was complete when Gottlieb closed, but the software wasn't. So that's the end. You know, they went out on a high note. Brooks and Dunn, Barbed Wire, Mario Andretti. But they gave us Teed Off and Surf and Safari. Yeah, that's right. It was worth it. The unsung heroes. Plus, they could have had Zelda. You know what I mean? Like, that was a, yeah, I actually didn't know that. That was a major mistake, because Zelda, that would have been a good license. That would have sold, that would have sold more. That could have got Mario numbers in sales, I think. Yeah, I would agree with that. Now, when we come sort of to the end of Gottlieb, there's some pretty interesting bits in here. Now, Jon Norris, he had a home without a basement. And as a person like you that has a basement filled with pinball machines, you realize that if you're a collector like somebody like a Jon Norris was, not having a basement is a big deal. Yeah, my previous place I lived in did not have a basement. So I am well aware. Yeah, so it was time for him to buy a new home, and he wanted one with a big basement. And Jon Norris is not a risk taker. He was taking a risk with building a new home, one with a nice big basement for his pinball collection. So he asked management about the current layoffs that were happening at Gottlieb at around this time. And they said they weren't having any issues. They were actually in secret talks with Sega to buy them out. And they figured that that would save Gottlieb, but that deal would fall through. So John moves into his house, and ten days later, his company announces they're in financial difficulty. And then six weeks after that, they would go and close the doors. So they basically bring everybody into the lunchroom at Gottlieb, and they hand everyone pink slaps out. And they let everyone know that the business was closing and they had to go. And there was a guard to lead them back to their office, take their personal things, put it in a box, and then go home. So John at the time was actually working on, like, league software, so things like handicaps, tracking of leagues to be able to help out operators operators with tournaments and things like that. And all of his research and all of his information was all left on his company computer, so he couldn't even take that with him. At first, everybody sort of assumed that they would get some financial backing. Somebody would swoop in and buy Gottlieb. But those discussions certainly didn't go anywhere. They didn't bear any fruit. Then everything went to auction. And that's when they knew that it was over, that it was truly over, was when everything with Gottlieb went to auction. Can you believe that in their peak years in the 1990s, that Premiere actually had sales of $30 million. And now, five years later, they're out. They're gone. Yep, that's the way it goes. Where did the bleeding start? What happened? The industry itself was bleeding by the mid-'90s, going into the late-'90s. Everybody was focused on these gambling machines. So it was really the issues with SMS, the decline in pinball and arcades. You compound that with this SMS video lottery terminals stuff. So Premier Technology, when they bought SMS, they wanted to get into this sort of hot alternate market. And video and gaming lottery terminals were really the way to do it. So in 1996, they only had one or two jurisdictions in which they could sell these gaming machines. But they took out all these loans to buy this company. So they're servicing the debt. They're paying off the loans. So they're trying to make money from the pinball side to pay the loans and everything else on the video lottery terminal side, which is still losing money. And then you compound the decline in arcades and sales in general in the late 90s. You know, the debt service payments are what really killed the cash flow and really killed Gottlieb. So you can see Williams basically gives up on pinball, though she's still more or less making money for them. And they just say, screw it or we're not going to make pinball. We're just going to go into gambling. And then you have Gottlieb on the other side that's basically it's the gambling that kills the only part of the company that makes money. So what does Premier do? What do they do? Do they just go bust? It's interesting that Premier actually didn't file for bankruptcy. So they just didn't get out? No, they stole off all their assets for the benefit of the creditors. So this is the smart business move. Even in death, they live on. Actually, there's a piece of Gottlieb that lives on and is in every new Stern game that you play. Oh, what's that? Actually, every Stern game that you play. The Gottlieb had, it might have been an older Gottlieb, but they had a pin press. It's the thing that presses in the play field where all the screws are supposed to go, little pile of holes. Okay. And Stern bought that, like, at an auction. Oh, very cool. And it sits in their factory, and every single play field of every game they have ever made has gone through that press. Is that the thing they call the pants press? That's the pants press. Yes. Yep. No way. Pants pressed many times, but the cool thing is every play field they've done. Yeah, so next time that you're in Chicago, you go through the Stern factory, you could be like, oh my God, that's the press that pressed the play field for barbed wire. I think that might have been even older. Maybe if somebody knows, they can email us at silverballchronicles.gmail.com. Yeah, we'd love to know. So have you heard of Gottlieb Development LLC? No. Well, they are the owner of the trademarks Gottlieb, D. Gottlieb & Company, and Premier. Let's see. All their associated property, including, but not limited to, I feel like I'm reading a legal document, artwork, trade dress and designs, all pertain to Gottlieb Pinball products, collectively the Gottlieb marks. Yeah. So if you Google Gottlieb Development, it comes up to this website. So it's like a company that owns all of the rights, all of the intellectual property and all that stuff. And then what they do is they just license it out to people. So you can see now, you can go into Pinball Arcade, for example, uses a lot of these intellectual property things. So since acquiring Premier Technology in 1996, this Gottlieb development has continued the Gottlieb tradition, as it says on the website, which goes through mostly of the licensing of what they call the Gottlieb marks, which is really weird. I guess that's some sort of legal thing. I'm not a licensing guru. What do you do with all these old parts? Like, they literally have a factory of parts, right? Or head. They entered into a licensing agreement with Steve Young of the Pinball Resource in Poughkeepsie, New York, only like an hour and a half from me. So I hear if you call Steve Young at Pinball Resource for anything Gottlieb related, he will know exactly what you need and what you need. But my God, you better have that part number. You better have a part number. If you don't have that part number, Steve Young will find you and murder you in the middle of the night. Maybe not. Well, maybe. But he will have the part or know that it's not made anymore or tell you what you can use in its place. Yeah, like he has everything that you would ever need. He has all these, so, you know, we'll talk about this maybe when it comes to Capcom and a few other things, is when these companies go under, like there were, you know, massive collectors or operators or these folk that had money on side were like, oh, I'll just buy all of it in bulk, right? Godly is unique in that if you go to, say, IPDB, like we mention all the time, the Internet Pinball Database, and you want to, say, download a manual for your Addams Family, it's right on there. It's just a PDF. Download it. But say I want a manual for my teed off. It's not on there. It's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. And I don't know if they still have this, but they used to actually have a link, and if you clicked on it, you got the legal notice that they received from Gottlieb Development to them telling them they had to pull all the manuals off because they used to have them on there. So if you want to download one of those ROMs, you know, that they never updated, they're not on IPDB either. You have to get those from Steve Young. That's right. Mm-hmm. So, very tight-fisted as compared to pretty much anyone else. Like, you want a Stern, an old Stern manual, a Data East manual, Sega, you can get all those. Well, they are enforcing their rights, as they should. Exactly. And one thing that that does do, in all honesty, is make sure that the quality is up to their standard, right? It's not all, everything isn't all scanned. And I originally, on my Raven that I had, was my first pinball machine. I actually got a repro manual directly from Pinball Resource, and it came, like, perfect. It was amazing, right? It wasn't, like, half photocopied. Things were blurry and missing. It was, like, an actual proper thing, and those standards are pretty important. Not to advertise people, but when it comes to manuals, his manuals, especially for, like, the Williams games, your 90s Williams games, I like them better than the original manuals because his are spiral bound. Yeah, perfect. The originals were not, so they're actually easier to turn and go through. Tell me, what happened to Ray Tanzer and Jon Norris? Because, man, they pretty much designed everything that we just went through. Ray Tanzer, this guy is a bit of an anomaly. It's really hard to find information on him. He hasn't done a whole lot of interviews like a lot of other folks. He hasn't really been, you know, on various platforms. or if he has, it's fairly difficult to actually find. So Ray joined Sega Pinball in 1996 to head up their mechanical engineering division because he was really the mechanics guy. He really enjoyed that, I would say, and did an amazing job in a lot of his games. Now, he stayed with Sega until it became Stern in 1999, all the way up until 2008. That's when he joined Namco. I'm wondering if that's when Stern had their, when they fired everybody. The culling of the herd. And so Ray returned to Stern actually not too long ago with helping them move from their old operations facility, their own old manufacturing facility, to their new larger premises, where he's also managed the expansion of that facility. So he's at Stern, as far as I know. A lot of the people who left Stern when they did their right-sizing, I'm doing air quotes, end up coming back. Yeah, and at that time, it's not any hard feelings. It's the necessity of a manufacturer. You know, the largest financial crisis of all time, right? And it worked out, so. Yeah, it certainly did. Now, Jon Norris, he also went to Sega. He was hired as a quality control person, and he really worked a lot in the engineering department. Now, at Sega, he worked on a unique concept. It's sort of like the pinball version of Golden Teeth, the online leaderboards and things like that. That was kind of what he was working on. Now, Stern canceled that project because they were worried about people cheating online and winning prizes. Instead of winning cash prizes, maybe you would invite people to a regional tournament, things like that. He really kind of had these really cool and unique ideas that just sort of didn't come out. And it's funny that we've become full circle. Now it's some years later, and there's talk on the horizon of the online connectivity of pinball, which is pretty cool. So he was at Stern, and he actually left in a bit of a row. He would be working in the factory, and a lot of the workers would smoke. Gary Stern didn't want people to take smoke breaks because then they weren't working or on the line, so he let them smoke at their desks and in the factory. Jon Norris has asthma and quite a few breathing issues, and due to some health problems, he decided to leave, or as he put it, I thought I left on good terms, but I've tried to make a game for them in recent years to no avail. Maybe he didn't leave on such good terms, but he's actually at Deep Root Pinball now, out of Texas. Jon Norris, he's amazing. The guy is just a brainiac. He thinks of the most intricate ways for the ball to interact with play field and still be a fun shooter that can be played by someone who has never played pinball before or for the advanced players. What do you think Jon Norris has been working on down in Deep Root? Well, according to Robert, we had Hot Wheels, and John came up with an amazing design. I wish American Pinball the best for stealing that away. Oh, my. The silver lining of it is I know a license that is harder to get than Harry Potter that we're going after now that would be perfect for this layout intended for Hot Wheels. Yeah, so that came from the recent episode of Canada's Pinball Podcast, and it's just sort of by fate that they sort of brought up Jon Norris and what he's been working on right before we recorded, so I wanted to toss that in. So there's something, you know, Jon Norris is still out there, and now it seems like, you know, it's been four years since Deep Root has done anything, so he's certainly had more than eight months to build a game this time. Yeah, I believe he left Chicago. He lives in Vegas now, I believe. Ooh. So if he's doing designs, he's doing it remotely. So, Ron, that brings us to the end of the pod. And, you know, it finally looks like somebody took old Gottlieb out back and put it down like old Yeller. But what are your final thoughts on the death of Gottlieb, zombie pinball, and the System 3 era? They're not dead. They'll live on forever. Yeah, just literally like a zombie. They just will not go away. They were, if you wanted, different playfields. If you wanted something that was different, You had Gottlieb. Yeah, it was very brain-off pinball. If you just wanted to step up and shoot and flip the ball and see it do a couple of cool things. If you wanted to playfields that were different. Yeah. If everyone complains about cookie-cutter playfields, they're all the same. All the games are the same. Gottliebs were not the same. Now, you may not have liked their software, but they gave you some interesting shooting games. and I advise no matter what I say about Shaq Attack or Frank Thomas or some of these games, you should play them and make your own opinions I flip them all the time like I said, my first game was a Raven, like come on that is not a great game, but I had a lot of fun right? it's alright, you know what I mean I had a lot of fun, I shot the thing now, I mean come on, it's not Whirlwind, right? it's not Black Knight Certainly not Batman 66, but it's, you know, for what it is, it is a lot of fun. I had a lot of enjoyment. I learned to tinker. You know, they fit within the market of pinball. Not everything can be a mech-crazy, perfect rules game. And it is what it is, and they are a lot of fun. They really are. And I'm really looking forward to what Jon Norris has with two years now to create these games. Yeah, so this is pretty cool to see. and it would be a shame if nothing comes out considering what's going on now. So that's the end of that. What do you want to do for our next episode, Ron? For our next episode, we'll give you a little clue on what it might be. And as always, you can send your comments, questions, corrections, and concerns to silverballchronicles at gmail.com. We look forward to all the messages that we read every one. And please subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Play, or your favorite podcaster. and turn on automatic downloads so you don't miss a single episode. Remember to leave us a five-star review wherever you can tell others find us. Oh, yeah, I said that. Yes, I said Pat Lawler. I f***ing hate Pat Lawler. Steve Ritchie, he was great.