So we will have a link in our show notes. We'll put a link up on Facebook as well for people to be able to go and do a little Google survey. No sign in required. And as few of these are left, it's going to take less than a minute for people to go vote. So we encourage you to go and vote. With that said, we've got a transitional topic here. It's sort of a pinball topic. It's also sort of a video game topic. It's all a matter of perspective. And so from my perspective, it's both topics. But I sat down and had an interview with Brad Baker, who is the founder of VP Cabs. They build virtual pinball cabinets. And they were recently on an episode of the ABC TV show Shark Tank. So I wanted to get with Brad and talk with him about what VP Cabs does, what it was like to be on the show, what their future plans are. And so let's go ahead and roll that interview, and then Tony and I, we're going to talk about what was said. Well, everyone, I'd like to introduce Brad Baker, the founder of VP Cabs, to the show. Brad, welcome to the Eclectic Gamers podcast. Thanks for having me. This is awesome, guys. Well, our podcast, we deal with three topics overall, pinball, video games, and tabletop. And you're very interesting because the concept behind VP Cabs really spans two of those three categories, which is very rare for us. Our markets normally very distinct when we transition from topic to topic. But because of that, there are probably a number of listeners who aren't really familiar with what a virtual pinball cabinet even is. So could you give maybe a brief explanation about what your company does and exactly what virtual pinball is, especially in a cabinet sort of sense? Sure. So basically what we do is we take a traditional size pinball cabinet and we make our own pinball cabinets now. But originally, we were taking old pinball cabinets that weren't working anymore. They were abandoned. And we were replacing the play field and the guts with LCD or LED displays to simulate classic pinball games. And then the new Zen Pinball FX2 games, we'd run it off of like a high-end Windows gaming computer, put in buttons and controllers for the buttons and a real coin door and all that fun stuff. basically allow you to emulate or simulate pinball games in a real life-size pinball cabinet, but without all the moving parts of traditional pinball and the ability to play lots of games in one machine. And I've been over to your website, which for our listeners, if anyone wants to go and visit, it's virtualpinball.com. And I've seen you have a number of different products. You're not just doing one particular cabinet size. One of the items I remember actually seeing this year at the Texas Pinball Festival, which I thought was really intriguing, was your Vertigo line because its footprint is so small. So I was just sort of wondering in terms of the various cabinet models that you currently have, sir, what are the various target audiences for those, for the Vertigo and the more traditional models? And I know you have like a mini cabinet as well. So you really have a number of different options for people to choose from. Yeah, we have four overall SKUs in our lineup. We have some variables in each one. There's some add-ons and things that you can change around. You mentioned our Vertigo. If you saw it at Texas, that was kind of the Vertigo's debut. Just about three weeks before Texas, I actually drew the Vertigo on a napkin. It had been in my head for a while. And my favorite part about this business is the creative side. I really like to design things. And I don't know how to write CAD programs, so I called my buddy Greg Butcher, who is a CAD programmer, and he's done all of our cabinet designs for us. And I said, dude, this thing is stuck in my head. It's been in my head for a while. I drew it on a napkin. Can you draw this thing in CAD for me so we can cut it on our CNC machine? And I just want to see if it's going to really play like I think it will, if people are going to like it. So we cut it. Everybody around the shop liked it. We threw a few together and decided that we were going to take a bunch to Texas. So just in a couple weeks' time, we went from literally a napkin drawing to a finished product that people were pretty much loving at Texas. It was kind of the hit of the show for us. So – and you mentioned the size. I think that was one big thing for the Vertigo. It's 20 inches wide and 25 inches deep. It is tall. It's 76 inches tall. But what's unique about it is it has a somewhat vertical playfield. It is tilted back a little bit further than an average arcade game playfield would be. It also has a DMD display, secondary display, above the play field, so you can play a pinball game like Pinball FX2 and still see the DMD above it. But also you can download any of your favorite vertical MAME titles because it has a joystick and trackball and buttons, and you can play all your classic arcade MAME games that you like to play. And then, you know, we've got our Mini, which is a two-thirds scale traditional-looking pinball cabinet. It also has three screens, a play field, a back glass, and a DMD, so you can simulate all the different visuals on a traditional pinball cabinet. And then we have our Wizard, which is our flagship model. It is our top-of-the-line model. It's got all the solenoids and shaker motor. It's got a replay knocker. It has a working plunger. It has an analog nudge sensor. It's like an accelerometer that allows you to shake and tilt the machine. And it's got RGB LED lights right above the play field that actually are set off to what the original game would have wanted. If you're playing a classic game like Adam's Family or something like that, the lights will flash when they were supposed to flash from the original game. It's all ROM controlled and works really cool. So that's our flagship model. And then just one step below that, we have another full-size model. That's the Classic. and the classic is everything that the wizard is just without the force feedback and the solenoids and the shaker and the plunger and the analog nudging it allows someone to get into a full size virtual pinball cabinet at a reduced price same quality gameplay same quality screens and all that just without the force feedback what are the playfield screen sizes on on those units So on our Wizard and our Classic, the main play field is a 40-inch diagonal display, and they're mounted kind of vertically in the cabinet there. The back glass display in the full size is a 32-inch, and then our DMD display is actually a 15.6-inch display. It's a full-color display, very similar to what the color DMD people use for their displays when you're swapping out your display in your traditional pinball cabinet. All right. So and then so all the SKUs except the Vertigo are the sort of the they're the virtual pinball cabinet exclusively. And then the Vertigo is sort of is a main combo style. Yeah exactly And you know what is kind of cool about the Vertigo is you know there a lot of guys out there that make even commercially that make MAME cabinets that are horizontal And they have four players and hundreds of buttons and spinners and everything and they awesome I mean they play 30,000 or 40,000 of any emulated game you can imagine. But when you load a classic arcade game on them, like Galaga or Donkey Kong or Pac-Man, anything like that, it shrinks it down to a really small portion of the display because the display is horizontal. When you can turn the display vertical, you can play those classic arcade games more in a native format and get a nice, awesome image. Our Vertigo has a 32-inch display, and it's like right there up in your face. It just so happens that that same vertical display allows you to play all of your favorite pinball games too, and it just looks gorgeous on all the Zen Pinball FX2 games, just pretty phenomenal on the 1080p display in there. Yeah, and I think for a lot of people, a lot of video game people who have played virtual pinball, say, on a PlayStation or Xbox or on their computer, the biggest thing that I've noticed different that you really get with cabinet models is the fact that you're working with a play field that is vertically oriented screen. So you don't have – there's just so much compression on the sides like when you're normally in pinball FX2. You don't see much of the play field. A lot of the camera angles are actually set up. You can either zoom all the way out and the ball just looks like a teeny little dot, which is what I do. or you can keep it so that the camera is constantly panning. That isn't what naturally you're doing. Normally, you just move your eyes. So what I've always found really fascinating about the cabinet style and what I like about them is that you actually get a full experience like you're actually looking at a real physical pinball table and you're not dealing with the graphical limitations that you normally have because everything is sort of landscape style on normal monitors and televisions. Yeah, absolutely. And kind of how that came about too is like in early 2013, we contacted Zen. It was still just kind of a concept. I wasn't building very many machines at the time. I still was running my other business full-time, and my brother owns a couple large arcades here in Cincinnati, and he kind of got the bug in me to build one of these machines for him. So we started bugging Zen, who makes Pinball FX2, and telling them how awesome it would be if they could do some sort of vertical cabinet support for us. because their games look so good on the display. It took a while, but they actually invited us to the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con. We were in Microsoft's main booth there, and it was kind of the debut of vertical Zen virtual pinball games. And it was just a huge hit at the show. All the Microsoft people loved it. They actually ordered one for us to take to their Redmond headquarters that I got to deliver and set up personally, which was really awesome. They planted it right by a big Halo statue and just need to do stuff like that. So that's kind of how that all came about, and since then we've really worked closely with Zen to further the cabinet support with the ability to relocate the DMD display, which came about a year ago, and now back glass support where back glass images can load for each game. So it's really coming along pretty awesome. On your force feedback model, does the pinball effects too support the force feedback, or is that just the classic style like the visual pinball? Currently, that is just the classic style like the visual pinball. Zen does have one of our wizard machines in their possession that we are working with them on, working on all those features. And it's definitely a goal on both sides to have that part of the cabinet support as well. That will really add that final piece to the awesomeness of their games to be able to get the clicks and knocks and the lights and shakes and everything. That will be really, really nice. Yeah. So as a lot of people probably know, especially if they think they've heard VP Cabs recently, you were on a very recent episode of Shark Tank that aired. And spoilers for anyone who hasn't seen the episode. If they haven't yet, they should have. So too bad. One of the one of the sharks, Damon John, famous for the FUBU clothing line, did appear to reach a deal with you on the show. So I wanted to go ahead and delve into the episode a little bit on that because I know people have questions about what goes on behind the scenes on TV shows and all that. Sure, sure. You're a big star now. Yeah, I don't know about that. So given all of that, given what we got to see on the show, I guess just sort of first off, what was it like being on Shark Tank? I mean was it – I'm sure it was stressful, but just in terms of the approach, how they – what they edit sort of thing, that part. We really just see you walk out, give the initial pitch. They get to interact with the product. Then they sit down, and then they say what they like or don't like about the proposals. Sure, sure. And, you know, we originally applied to be on the show two years ago, and we got a call back. But we didn't make it very far in the selection process. And then this past summer, we got a call from the producers asking us if we would be interested in applying again, that they had been following us and thought that we'd be a good fit for the show. So we thought, well, if they're calling us, then that must be a good sign. So we went through the application process again, which is a pretty long and kind of grueling process. I mean it's not for the faint of heart. I think they really want to see how serious you are about your business and being on the show. There's a lot involved. A lot of it is kind of like sworn to secrecy kind of stuff, nothing strange or anything, But I think just in general, TV shows have a lot of things that they don't like to be public knowledge. So we made it through the first few rounds and kept going further and further in the selection process and finally got the call that we were going to be on. So that was really exciting. We taped the show last fall and like towards the end of fall. So there has been quite a long wait that we've been keeping a lot of things secret, and that was really tough. That was probably one of the hardest things. I wondered when they actually did the taping because I didn't think I saw any of the Vertigo in the lineup that they had in front of them. Yeah, that would have been awesome to have the Vertigo there. I think it would have piqued a lot more interest. Even without the Vertigo being on there, a lot of people hit our site and our social media, and we really featured the Vertigo heavily. And it's been a really big hit for us, the Vertigo has, and it would have been great to have it on. But yeah, the Vertigo didn't really come into fruition until like early March, end of February. So many months after we actually recorded the show. So obviously we've got quite a stretch since you actually did the recording to now. So it hasn't been as short of notice as everyone who watched might instinctively think. How has it been going working with Damon on this? It's been really great. You know, I mean, we were in the tank for probably, you know, a little more than an hour. And, of course, they edit it down to the 12 to 15-minute spot there. So not everything that you say and do gets put on the air, but I really felt like they did a great job showing the sharks running up to play our machines.