Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast, episode number nine. Today is Sunday, May 22nd. I'm Tony. And I'm Dennis. And we're going to be talking to you about pinball, video games, and tabletop. In this episode, we've actually got a couple of interviews for you, and I'll start with what I've been doing this week. I found out Netflix has pretty much all of the Ken Burns documentaries, so I've been watching some Ken Burns documentaries. I also watched Tommy Boy and Black Sheep, and those movies didn't age well. I mean, I remember them being a lot funnier than they are watching them again. I was never huge fans. I did like Tommy Boy a decent amount, but yeah, I guess I'm not too surprised that the Farley-Spade formula was, well, it was a formula. So you've seen one, you've kind of seen them all. Yeah, and of the two, Tommy Boy was the better, but it just wasn't nearly as good as I remembered. I also watched Groundhog's Day. Every time I watch it, that movie's better and better every time I watch it. Yes, it is excellent. Other than that, I've been in three online Star Realms tournaments in the last couple of weeks. I got badly beaten in one of them. I got not quite as badly beaten in the other, and the third one's ongoing, so we'll see. Well, good luck. Yeah, it's going great so far. We also had the pinball tournaments at Pizza West and a Ghostbusters launch party that we attended at the 403 Club. Yeah, we were both at both of those tournaments. I got spanked pretty handily at both of them. But I had a couple of really good games on Medieval Madness, which is great considering it's a game that I never used to like. and I just recently really started learning it and getting better at it just in time for it to leave the lineup. Somewhat unfortunate, though it sounds like it will still be on location in the area. It just won't be in any of our tournament rotations anymore. Medium of Madness took a while to grow on me as well. I always thought Attack from Mars was a better version of that game, and I think maybe it just has to do with the steepness of the ramps and such. But I've grown to appreciate a lot more actually having one of the remakes on location and getting to play it for as long as we have had it available. Yeah, and that's about all I've really been up to. I've been playing video games just kind of randomly by whatever in my Steam list catches my eye, but I haven't really sat down and put a lot of time into anything. Well, I have finally wrapped up Far Cry 4 in my video game play. Actually, I pushed at the end of this week, or this last week, I should say, to do it, so I could actually finally say I've finished it instead of constantly repeating that I'm still working on it. So I have started Witcher 3, which is a RPG I've been wanting to play for quite a while. I'm barely into it, though. I'm still in the tutorial phase, so there's nothing to discuss regarding it. I've heard Far Cry 4 was pretty good. It was. I did not play Far Cry 3, and I know Far Cry 3 is kind of renowned for having a really interesting sort of villain, and I got the impression, based off the comparisons, that Far Cry 4 kind of tried to do the same thing. and it's they have an interesting kind of charismatic sort of villain for far cry 4 but it's not like he's uh ever present in the dialogue maybe it's because i did a lot of the side quests while i was playing through until i did my final push so you know for a lot of the side quests you're not really hearing from him or on the radio or anything like that a weird game though constant eagle attacks on villagers i didn't know eagles were so dangerous but apparently apparently they are they're killers and you gotta watch out for them so yeah yeah that's that's exactly what they sound like they would just yell eagles watch out for the talons and it was it was i mean that and honey badgers were everywhere too so you just had to deal you had to deal honey badgers weren't as bad though because the eagles are hard to hit because they fly so i got through that uh only movie i've watched recently was i finally watched uh dwayne the rock johnson's uh blockbuster film san andreas which i just decided i was going to watch a disaster movie. I hadn't really watched one in quite a while, which I would describe as 2012 light. I don't know if you ever saw 2012. I saw 2012 and I thought 2012 was a wonderful disaster porn film that was otherwise had a terrible story, but it was great for just watching things get destroyed. Then you probably would enjoy San Andreas then. It is very similar. I would describe it as, I call it 2012 light because I don't think it's as ridiculous as 2012 was, but it's close. They got a number of scenes that are just, there's no way you would be able to survive this, but not as many scenes as 2012 did, where they're like dodging buildings in an airplane and things like that. They got some ridiculous helicopter scenes and a scene with boats trying to get over a crest of a wave and such. So, it scratches that just watch disaster itch, but it's not quite as far-fetched and the story's a little more down to earth. But I mean, we're talking, these are vagaries. This is not like an intellectual disaster movie or anything. It is very much in that Armageddon-esque vein, though better acted, I would say. But is it as tongue-in-cheek as The Core? No, no, it's played more straight-up serious. It's really, while they do have those sort of wide sort of panorama shots of disaster, The movie itself is very focused on The Rock and him trying to get – and he's a rescue chopper pilot, but the whole movie revolves around him trying to save his family specifically. So it's sort of a microcosm within the disaster. It's not trying to give you all these different families and all these different sort of thoughts going on at the same time. You just have those occasional sort of panorama shots of what's going on, but it's all very focused on just him, his wife, and his kids. So it's more narrow in scope. And then, as you noted, we did the two recent pinball tournaments. I did as well as you did at Pizza West yesterday, which wasn't great. I won my first round, though, so I'm always happy when I win at least a round. And I had a couple good games in my second round, won one game. And then the next one, I lost. We had a replay on a Ghostbusters, and I had my best tournament score on Ghostbusters ever. It just wasn't good enough. But I was very proud of how well I did, so I was glad with that score. And then I got eliminated the next game, just two games out, which was fine. I think the two people I lost to actually ended up getting in the top three of the tournament I saw. And then Ghostbusters, that actually went pretty well for me. It's not my highest rank I ever ended at a tournament, but in terms of IFPA, which for listeners, that's the International Flipper Pinball Association, they score all these events. It's the highest number of points I've ever earned. So in terms of challenge, it was the best I've done performance-wise. But I've actually – the highest I've ever placed in a tournament is third. I got fourth at that. So but there were you had to do a lot more rounds than in a normal in a normal monthly tournament we have in the Kansas City area. So that's pretty good for me. I really lucked out on a number of those number of those strikeout matches. But that's pretty much it. I do as well. But I mean, it does take it does take a bit of time. So you really have to start earlier in the day and it takes up just a very large chunk of time. So I'm glad they don't happen all the time. No, but I do enjoy them when they do happen. Well, with our intros out of the way, let's go ahead and transition into the pinball topic. First thing, and really the only main thing that's solely pinball that we're going to go over, is the results of our 1980s Pinball Machine Mania Tournament. So as we had announced during the last podcast, we were doing voting for almost two weeks. On round one, we have a 64-team bracket with 16 machines for each region. so four regions, and the regions are the manufacturers. So we had a Williams region, a Gottlieb region, a Bally region, and then another region, which represented four different manufacturers to make up the rest. Well, I have the results all tallied up and ready to go, and so the first thing I think we should do is just quickly hit what happened in round one. So I figured the best thing to do is I'll say what all won in each matchup, but we'll pay some particular attention to any upset situations. And I very simply defined an upset as any time a lower-seeded machine beat a higher-seeded machine, even if they were very close, like 9 versus 8 sort of thing. So let's start with the Williams region. There was only one upset, and it was a 9-seed versus an 8-seed. The 9-seed was Space Station, and it did end up beating the 8-seed F-14 Tomcat with 72.7% of the vote. So I'm surprised by how much it beat Tomcat. Yeah, I'm surprised. I thought that would be a really close fight because they're both really good tables. I was surprised to see Space Station go up that much. I was as well. I did vote for Space Station, but I just – because – and I noted in the last podcast, for me, F-14 Tomcat plays too fast. I feel like I don't ever have control on it, so I just enjoy playing Space Station more. But I was just – I mean, almost three-fourths of the vote went to Space Station, which I thought was surprising. Yeah. Other than that, it was all standard top seeds winning out. So Earthshaker did beat Grand Lizard. Taxi beat Space Shuttle. Cyclone beat Joust. Black Knight 2000 beat Black Knight. High Speed beat Sorcerer. Banzai Run beat Swords of Fury. And Pinbot beat Firepower. Firepower. Yeah, poor Firepower. So let's go on over to the Gottlieb region, which is one that you and I both didn't have a lot of knowledge on in terms of actually having played very many of these machines. Yeah, no, I've only played a couple of them. Yeah, I've tried to actually start researching some of these so I can understand them a little bit better so I can actually start. I actually didn't vote on a lot of these because I just I didn't know and I didn't have enough time dedicated to go and like look up tutorial videos or something so I could get some exposure. I don't know any place on location in the KC area that has Gottliebs from the 80s. I just I don't know of any. Yeah, I don't know either. So there were two upsets in the in the Gottlieb region. The number nine seed Arena beat the number eight seed The Amazing Spider-Man, but it only barely did it with fifty five point six percent of the vote. So it was close. And then this is probably the biggest upset in terms of seed comparison. But the 14 seed Genesis beat the three seed Big House. Again, it was close. Fifty five point six percent yet again. But I was just shocked that a 14 seed actually got out of the first round. Yeah, that really surprises me. I've not played Genesis, but I have played Big House. But it's a – I don't know if I've played Big House or not. I've played Genesis virtually. The only thing I remember about – really remember about Genesis is it's one of those really, really 80s live photo backglasses that just stands out as borderline appalling. and by borderline, I mean not borderline. It's just appalling. Genesis, I think, if I were to describe it in a nutshell, is it's kind of a bride of Pinbot that didn't work out. It just, I don't think it, I didn't think it worked very well. I need to play it again. I haven't played it in months, but yeah. And I don't know anything about Big House. I actually didn't vote on this round, on Genesis versus Big House. I did not cast a vote myself, but anyway, that was an upset. But top seeds for the rest were Haunted House did beat Volcano, Devil's Dare beat Bonebusters Incorporated, Black Hole beat Bounty Hunter, Robo War beat Bad Girls, TX Sector beat Lights, Camera, Action, and Spirit beat Mars, God of War. So move into our third region, which is Bally. There were three upsets more than any other bracket. The nine seed Medusa beat the eight seed mouse and around with 63.6% of the vote. I agree with that. I just think Medusa is a better game, but I really like Medusa. I did as well. I contributed to that because of that victory. And it's interesting that this won't happen in our next bracket, but the nine seed won in all three of these first brackets that we've discussed of the regions that we've discussed. So just sort of an interesting. Of course, they were up against eight seed, so you did expect them to be close. But yeah, so there was that the 11 seed Skateball did beat the six seed Embryon with 77.8 percent. I think that's the largest margin of victory any upset had. I'm checking my math. Yeah, it was. And I was really surprised about that. Again, I don't have high familiarity with these games a lot. I've seen a lot of people wanting Embryon. So I was just I thought, wow, was Skateball that good? I think I don't know if I voted on this one or not. I can't remember. I don't think I did because it just – I think I played Embryon, but I don't think I played Skateball. Or maybe it's vice versa. I don't know. I probably played both and just don't remember very well. You mean you don't remember every machine you've ever played in your entire life? I should. Unfortunately, if I only get like one game on them, I just – they don't always – unless they blow me away, they just don't stick with me. So anyway, that was an upset. And then the third and final upset in the ballet region was the 12 seed eight ball deluxe limited edition beat the five seed Xenon 72.7% of the vote. That surprises me. It did not surprise me. I think that eight ball deluxe just is so much better gameplay than Xenon does. And the voters saw through the ugly limited edition nature of the LE version. And they said, no, Xenon's all she's all she's all prettied up. They dolled up her face, but that's all she's got going for her. So I probably shouldn't say that. I'm still trying to sell my Xenon. Which if you want a Xenon, there's a Xenon for sale. Just contact us at Eclectic Gamers. That's right. I'm still trying to sell the Xenon. But yeah, I just don't like the gameplay on Xenon. I think it's too stop and go for me. But top seeds for the rest were the winners. So Elvira and the Party Monsters did beat Strange Science. Fathom beat Fireball 2. Centaur beat Frontier. Flash Gordon beat Centaur 2, and 8-Ball Deluxe beat Fireball Classic. So finally was our other region, which for those that don't remember, the four manufacturers that were in the other region are Data East, Stern, Zocaria, and Game Plan. There were two upsets. The 10-seed Catacomb, which is a Stern title, beat the 7-seed Laser War, which is a Data East title, with 66.7% of the vote. and the 13 seed Robocop, which is a Data East title, beat the four seed Time Machine, which is also Data East with 55.6% of the vote. So that one was very close, but I don't know if that one, I haven't played Robocop. I don't know if it just won because it's Robocop or I thought it's been a while since I've read up on Robocop. I don't think they made a whole lot. So maybe it's low rated because a lot of people haven't really played it and that affected its seed, but it's actually a better game than where it seeds at. I don't know. top seeds for the rest were Sea Witch which is Stern beat Galaxy which is Stern Quicksilver which is Stern beat Torpedo Alley which is Data East Andromeda which is Game Plan beat Fight 2000 which is Stern Nineball which is Stern beat Big Game which is also Stern Stargazer which is Stern beat Lightning which is Stern and Farfalla which is Zocaria beat Monday Night Football which is Data East those were the results so this will be the round two matchups much much shorter bracket now that we eliminated half of these games out of it. We'll still be in the four regions, though. So in the Williams region, the number one seed Earthshaker will go up against the number nine seed Space Station. The number three seed Taxi will go against the number six seed Cyclone. The number two seed Black Knight 2000 will go against the number seven seed High Speed. That's going to be a tough one for me to decide on right there. I like both of those a lot. I haven't played High Speed, but maybe twice. So I'll think about it because I also don't like short, lasting upper playfields where you just sort of drain out of the upper play field right away. And Black Knight 2000, it's not as bad as Black Knight about that, but it's not an upper play field you actually stay up on all that much. I don't know. I haven't decided yet, but I do lean towards Black Knight 2000. Yeah. And then the final one will be the number four seed Banzai Run versus the number five seed Pinbot, which could be pretty rough. Yeah, it could be rough. I enjoy both those games. Mm-hmm. so Gottlieb region is going to be number one seed is Haunted House and that's going to face the number nine seed Arena number 14 seed Genesis gets to face off against the number six seed Devils Dare I guess we'll see if the ugly black back glass can continue to hold its own the number two seed Black Hole will be against the number seven seed Robo War and the number four seed TX Sector will be against the number five seed Spirit Bally's region will be the number one seed Elvira and the Party Monsters versus the number nine seed medusa that's gonna be really sad for medusa i like medusa but elvira and the party monsters is a classic yeah i don't you know they're medusa's about again as it often is medusa is a better looking game but elvira and the party monsters scratches that uh late 80s itch it's a lot more complicated rules now i think elvira's gonna have it pretty handily but we'll see uh number three seed fathom will be against the number 11 seed skateball The number two seed, Centaur, will be against the number seven seed, Flash Gordon. And, well, I think this one will be decisive. The number four seed, 8-Ball Deluxe, will be against the number 12 seed, 8-Ball Deluxe Limited Edition. I'm going to go out on a limb and say 8-Ball is going to win. You know, I think so too, but I bet you it doesn't get 100% of the vote. Nothing actually – nothing had 100% of the vote in the first round. Some games were close. Some had over 90, but nothing had 100. uh and so if you finally voted for effort if you vote for eight ball deluxe le over eight ball deluxe send me an email with your uh reasoning because i'd kind of like to hear it hey like you know what it could say that it's it's cheaper or maybe they like that weird little scoreboard box thing it sits on that has to appeal to someone someone in marketing came up with doing that for a game. And then I understand that they were left over and they just got used for pinball, but maybe there's some video game people that are like, you know what? That backbox is awesome. That's what the future was supposed to be when it was 1982. That's what they told us the future would look like. Sharp edges and obscenely bright red screens. So who knows? We'll see. Finally, our other region, which at this point, we actually do have all the manufacturers still in it, but there's only one game from each manufacturer except Stern, which occupies all the other slots. So the number one seed, which is Stern Sea Witch, will be against the number eight seed, which is Stern's Quicksilver. The number three seed, which is Game Plan's Andromeda, will be against the number six seed, Nine Ball, which is a Stern game. Number two seed is Star Gazer, which Stern will be against the number 10 seed, Catacomb, which is also Stern. And the The number 13 seed Robocop, which is Data East, will be against the number five seed Farfalla, which is Zacharia. 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 David Hankin. 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 David Hankin. 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 David Hankin 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. Both Mark Cuban and Robert Herjavec had pretty awesome things to say about the machine. They left a lot of that in the edit, which was really great for us. It's always nice to have endorsements of people like that, which is really great, especially Robert being a pinball guy. Oh, yeah. He had like 10, I think he said. Yeah, he had 10 machines. And he said, I got to tell you, it feels great. It feels better than my machines at home, which really floored me. You kind of go in there not knowing how they're going to react. And it kind of can make or break your business if you go in and they play it and they sit down and they say, oh, this is horrible. It's the worst thing I've ever played before. Then all of a sudden, you have no control over what they put on the air. And so it was a big risk going in there, honestly. It's a newer technology. We knew that they probably had never heard of anything like it. And we were really, really blessed that they gave us some great favor there and really surprised that Damon took a shot at us. You know, it was not the first shark that we would have thought that would have jumped on board. We kind of went in thinking that maybe Mark Cuban, being in the tech space, would be interested. And he almost pulled the trigger. You know, he was really close. So we went back and forth a little bit. and he just couldn't do it because of the software side of things that we weren't as heavily involved with. But Damon jumped out there and took a huge chance on us. And of course, you shake hands on a deal, and then afterwards, there's due diligence process that both sides get a chance to look over everything and make sure that it truly is a good fit. A lot of deals that get a handshake in the tank don't necessarily come to fruition afterwards, and we're really, really grateful to say that we did make a deal with Damon and he's been an awesome guy to work with. We met him out at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January and he took time and walked the show floor with us, spent a lot of time together and really got to know him well and he got to know us and I think since then we've been to his offices a few times in New York City and it's been the beginnings of a pretty great business relationship. Excellent. So since the episode aired, I don't know, again, because it's been only about a week as of this recording versus when that when that episode was on television. But I don't know if you have any analytics in terms of have you seen increased interest? I mean, it was a lot of exposure. So in terms of Web traffic to to your site sales themselves, I don't know if you have a sense of it yet or not. But I figured I should ask. Yeah, sure. No problem. You know, it's kind of crazy. We had a really big viewing party at our church, actually, and we had over 300 people there, and it was just awesome. And almost none of them knew the outcome. So when we shook hands on that deal at the very end, everybody really thought that I was going to go out without a deal. So there was just the loudest roar and cheer. It was just an awesome feeling. It was just really cool for everybody to finally see it. And it was weird for me to be able to say Damon's name finally. I've spent so long not being able to say anything. It was weird to be able to talk about that. I still catch myself wondering if it's okay for me to say anything. It's kind of crazy. We have had an insane amount of traffic to the site. I mean, it's pretty insane. Fortunately, we use Shopify for our website traffic, and it's funny. Shopify is the only host for websites that's never crashed during Shark Tank. They have a perfect record with the people that are on the show. So we were with them anyways just randomly, but one of the first things that Damon's team asked us is, who do you guys use for your web? They crash all the time if you're not using Shopify. Shopify kind of got the market cornered with allocating servers. So we were fortunate that our site was stable. It did just what it was supposed to do. It was a brand-new site for us. We had just launched it about two weeks before the show aired, and there was a lot of really crazy components to make the selection of all of our games. I mean, you can go on and you can choose the style of graphics you want. You can choose the color of hardware that we do. And there's just literally hundreds and hundreds of choices if you look at all the games combined. So we had to ask Shopify for some really special stuff, and they worked with us really well. We've had a ton of traffic. Our sales have gone up a lot. We have done quite a bit of sales since Friday night when we originally aired. and we're still getting, you know, we probably got two to three hundred emails within 24 hours of, you know, of the show airing and they're just still coming in. So we're spending a lot of time right now on emails. You know, this is a product that most people aren't just going to put in the shopping cart and buy. They ask a lot of questions. They want to be educated on how it works and how they can go get their games, whether it be the games we include or how they go get their own games on the main side of things. So it's an educational type product that we have to spend time with each customer. So over the next few weeks, we'll be doing a lot of that, but it's been great. Has there been one of the SKUs in particular that's been performing exceedingly well, or is it all pretty even across the various offerings that you have? Well, in the past, our bestseller, before the Vertigo came along, the Wizard was our bestseller. It is our most expensive, and I really never did know how that machine would do initially when we were building it, that we had so much time in building each one and a lot of additional parts and making it all work. And when we decided on a retail price for it, we weren't really sure because it's expensive. It's $8,000. That's a lot of money. And we were really surprised when we would start talking to people about our different machines. They would gravitate towards the Wizard, and it's just been a relatively easy sale on the side of once people are already looking at spending four or five or six thousand dollars on one of our machines they typically see the value and having all those extra features so it's been a great seller for us now you bring in the wizard or the vertigo and the new vertigo has exceeded our expectations like you know literally like i said it was a David Hankin drawing just a couple months ago no idea if it would be accepted in general if it was too off the wall if the vertical pinball play field was just way too unconventional. But I think that people are really loving the space saving factor and then all the other things that go along with it. And that machine is quickly becoming just one of our top performers by far. It's been pretty nuts. Vertigo, right now we can't make the Vertigo fast enough. It's pretty crazy. Wow. So in terms of future outlook here, what are your future plans? Are there any items, areas, shows you're planning to go to that you'd like to discuss with us? Is VP Cabs planning to expand its presence more? I mean, Texas was my first show to go to. Awesome. And you guys had an excellent location. It was really easy to find and really easy to see the vertical lineups there in particular because they're in that nice little circle and there are people on them all the time. So I was just sort of wondering in terms of future, either future products or more likely just sort of future outreach efforts and such that you all are planning to do to further expand. Yeah, sure. You know, we do a lot of trade shows, pinball and arcade shows mainly, and some home shows, but mostly pinball and arcade. Those have kind of been our way, our vehicle of getting our product out there to the community. more and more lately you start to see pinball shows as now like a family oriented show which is just phenomenal it's great to go to a show and see all those little stools carried around by the kids you know it's a it's you know pinball shows didn't used to be that way and it's just awesome to see the families getting involved so we've used those shows as our platform to kind of just it's an inexpensive way to market and get your product in people's faces most of the time people that buy our machines really want to try them out first, which is totally understandable. It's something that's not the norm in the pinball world. So we do a lot of shows. We do anywhere between 12 and 15 pinball shows a year. The Texas Pinball Festival is an awesome show. It's one of the best in the country for sure. You picked a good one to be your first pinball show. It's a great show. We have a new show that we have never been to before coming up in a few weeks. That's in Atlanta. The Southern Fried Game Room Expo will be there. We were doing Pentastic New Robert Englunds near the Boston area again this year. That is its second year. We were there last year for its first year. The show was a great show. So this year we decided to be the headline sponsor of the show. We basically are giving away two of our many pinball machines, all tricked out. The show's sponsors are giving those away as prizes for basically raffle entries for bringing a pinball machine, bringing an arcade game, and then some other stuff they've got going on. So we're really excited about that. That's going to be another huge show this year. It's a great family-oriented show. And then we'll have a presence at the Replay FX show in Pittsburgh. We do the York, Pennsylvania show. And then two weeks ago we were just at the Allentown Pin Fest show. Basically any show we can get to so far, Texas is as far west as we've gone, but we're really trying to reach out even further and get to the west coast as soon as we can as well. to just branch out further. So for any of the listeners that are actually interested in acquiring one of these cabinets, what options are there? I know you've got Pinball Star Amusements as a distributor, and then it looked like they can do the orders directly off the VP Cabs website, which is at virtualpinball.com. Are there any other venues that you would recommend? I don't know, like an in-person option for people or anything like that? Well, on the website, we do have a dealer locator page. We are, I think, a little over 20 or so dealers right now altogether. We've got some in Texas. We've got a lot through the Midwest. We have a lot of like billiard and home and leisure type stores that carry some of our products. Yeah, I think I saw you guys had Amini's, which is pretty big here in the Kansas City area. Yeah, Amini's is one of our first dealers. They came on board in 2014, and they have some beautiful showrooms. and it's a great place for us to be able to display our games that people can go check out and see. It works really well. Of course, you can call us and we can help you out with any questions or anything like that. I'm usually the one answering the phone as far as the sales side of things goes. And the website is a lot more informative now. We've really upgraded the website a lot. So it's got a lot of great info on the website. There's some videos. You can see the Vertigo in action. You can see a couple videos of the Wizard in action and how all the force feedback kind of works and how the Pinball FX2 games works. And then we have a new tab on our website, something kind of cool, new, exciting that we're working on with Damon is a coin-op version of the machine. We're working really hard on getting some licensing together and pushing to be able to make an actual redemption and or coin-op version of the virtual machine, which is kind of something we're really excited about. Oh, so operators could use it. That's the goal. We really feel like years ago, pinball was kind of totally removed from the Dave & Buster's and the Chuck E. Cheese and the big entertainment-type destinations. even lately they're starting to leave like even Disney's getting rid of their pinball machines and you're not seeing them as much anymore and a big part of that is it's just really hard to find technicians to service them especially in a location with as much traffic and as much wear and tear as they get our machines really solve that problem because there just really is no major moving parts in the machines so that they can work just like a video game would in a Dave and Buster's or Chuck E. Cheese but allow kids and families and people to play different type of pinball games. And it'll give the operator the option to change out the games or have the customer be able to choose for multiple games. So we're really excited to try to, you know, further develop that platform and try to get this out there in public places as well. Awesome. Well, you actually covered all the questions I had for you. So I just want to say thank you so much for coming on the Eclectic Gamers podcast and taking the time out of your very busy schedule to talk with me about all of this because it's fascinating. I think the listeners are really going to enjoy hearing about it. Awesome. Well, I really appreciate you guys having me on. I love talking about pinball and virtual pinball, and it's just great to have a new audience, and I appreciate you guys letting us come on. Well, that was my interview with Brad Baker, and I thank him again for sitting down with me and taking the time to chat. And so now you and I will have a chat, Tony. What did you think of the discussion that we had with Brad? I enjoyed it. But I remember looking at the VP Cab stuff when we were in Texas, and while I didn't play any of them, they all looked really nice. And I really, really liked the Vertigo space-saving little main cabinet super cabs, and I'm pretty happy with it. I think it sounds like they're going to go places. Yeah, I wanted to emphasize the Vertigo with my discussions with him because I also remember those from Texas. and I did not play them either. I actually, I have a main cabinet that I built and then my dad and I built a virtual pinball cabinet as a separate project. So I actually already have those things. I did not know at Texas that the Vertigo was also a main cabinet. I thought it was just a digital pinball cabinet. So I didn't find out till after the fact that it was a two-in-one combo. But what caught my eye anyway was the fact that it took up so little floor space. Yeah, it's really tall, but just in terms of space, and that's always the big frustration for me, especially with pinball, is if you've got limited space, it is a big pain to try and have much in the way of games, especially if you want them all in the same room. Just because a lot of houses are not laid out in a convenient way to really be, oh, yeah, you wanted to have an arcade with really long tables. Here you go. Here's a house that works for that. Yeah, at my place, I could get – I've kind of mapped it out and walked around. I could get two, maybe three machines if I kicked everybody out of where my computers are set up, but that's it. It'd still be a pretty tight squeeze with more than one or two in there. So something like the Vertigo with such a small footprint would actually work pretty well in a situation like mine. Yeah, and I have a rec room that I turned into a game room a while ago because it wasn't being used for anything else. And it's very long, but it's also very narrow. So while I have a really long wall where I line up my pinball machines, I can't line up pinball machines on the other side. There would be no space to actually be able to do that. It's hard enough to walk around right now when somebody's playing a machine to get out behind them. It's incredibly narrow. I was like, I don't know, maybe houses in the early 80s, they thought everyone wanted to have single lane bowling alleys downstairs because I swear it's long enough to do that. But but it is not wide. So anyway, the virtual pinball cabinets, I always think are really cool. Hybrid technology, hybrid of video game technology. And in the case of their their ultimate model that they that he spoke about that Brad spoke about and like the version that I put together for my own home use, you can emulate a lot of the physical nature of the traditional pinball experience. And that's where the force feedback comes into play. So as Brad noted, they put in solenoids, which are a major feature of pinball machines. Those are what move the flippers and all of that stuff. And so you can actually still use solenoids in a digital one. Even though they don't need the solenoid to work, you can get that force feedback. I used contactors in mine, which kind of offer the same sort of clicky effect. The shaker motor that he puts in, you need shaker motors. The LED light show, because normally there are flashers and stuff to let you know when the ball is going to come out of the right hole, so you know where to look after it's gone through a subway system. So it's never identical in the sense that it'll never be physical pinball. But for a lot of people, I think it's an excellent way to get a really good pinball experience. I try not to use the word virtual versus real, and sometimes I do, but it's really virtual versus physical in my view because pinball is a set of rules. It's the idea of flippers with a ball that you keep in play and try and accomplish objectives. That it uses physical physics or digital physics is just a condition. It doesn't – I mean it would be like if you took a pinball machine and you were to play it on the moon, it would operate differently, but it would still be pinball. The big problem, though, that I think exists with pinball on a digital front is in that normal experience, your TV is sort of sideways. You don't get to see the full length of a pinball field easily because TVs aren't designed, monitors aren't designed for you just to flip them 90 degrees and play. And these cabinets solve that problem. And when games like Pinball FX2 put in cabinet support for products like VP Cabs, you actually get – it's so much more enjoyable to play that way. I think it would shock people just how much easier it is to actually follow the ball and stuff because, as I noted in the interview, I play zoomed out, way out, because I don't – I can't stand to have the camera pan. It just irks me. So – but what I'm watching is the ball the size of a BB, and it's really hard to follow. Whereas if you play physical pinball, you know, pinball is actually a fairly sizable object. It's you might lose it in the strobing psychedelic flashes that they do to screw you up. But yeah, but it's not that the ball's too small. That's never been the problem. So so that's something that I really like that. I think that cabinet experience is very ideal to deliver. What did you think about the part where Brad went in about their work on a coin op virtual pinball? Now, that really interested me. I don't know why I never thought about it as something you could do. I just never thought of it going out virtual, but I can see where it would solve so many problems for operators because it would let you have multiple games. It would let you have, you know, like the new interesting stuff, like the stuff the Zen people have put out with all the things going on that cannot be done on a physical table. It can only be done in a virtual table. It would let you put those games out there. And the difference in maintenance. I mean, there would be so much less maintenance on it. I just had never thought of it. I think it's a brilliant idea. And if they can get it working out, I think it might be something you'll see a lot of in the future. Yeah. What I also think one of the neat things about it is when you've got like that arcade environment where, you know, they they complained about the need for technicians. And as we see when we go to our monthly pinball tournaments, there is work being done all the time on these machines. They go down all the time. I have a lineup of five games. I only have four in the game room. I am tinkering on the pinball machines all the time and I have less than half a dozen and I'm not playing them constantly. It's just it's pinball. It's physical. They're going to be things that go wrong. But what you can do is besides that, with a digital cabinet, you can have a location that might be like pinball doesn't make enough money. I don't really want to have to dedicate 200 square feet to several pinball machines. one cabinet with a bunch of games on it, though, gets around that where people could drop in their 75 cents for example or dollar and then cycle and choose which pinball game they want to play and then get to play that game The operator makes money They avoid all that breakdown scenario and you are able to contain like in a main cabinet you're able to contain a whole lot of different tables all in one holder so that it's not like, well, okay, I really like Game of Thrones, but I want the new Ghostbusters, and I better get a Hobbit as well, and that's always going to be the challenge for physical pinball because And all of a sudden you consumed all the space because you needed three separate cabinets. So in a way, it gets at that notion of kind of what highway pinball supports with the playfield drop in that their full throttle will allow for their alien pinball. Or going further, like the P3 system, those are obviously physical solutions for physical pinball, which will appeal to purists, definitely. But I'm very curious about whether or not the casual sort of arcade audience would embrace the idea of digital pinball in coin op. I think it could work. There are a lot of people, I think more than maybe the physical pinball sort of – the pinsiders, I'll describe them as. I think pinsiders kind of think everyone who likes pinball got acquainted with it because they played it physically. I had a little bit of background in terms of physical pinball, but not much. Almost all of my pinball growing up was actually playing it digital. And so that's what I remember. I love the idea of physical pinball, but because of that, I don't have this deep-seated bias against digital pinball. I still actually put in more hours on digital pinball than I do physically because I can – you can load it up on a phone. You can load it up on a tablet. You can load it up on a console. I don't have to go downstairs when I'm tired of standing after two hours. I can sit on my butt and keep playing digital pinball, and I don't feel weird like I'm cheating sitting in the chair there. Not that I can nudge at all when I'm in a chair anyway. So it solves all that. So that's why I think there's potential. I find myself playing lunch break a lot and this and that. I'll knock out some games at my lunch and such. I wonder how the licensing of older tables like Pinball Arcade's licensing has done, how that would work for a coin-op virtual pinball cab setup. I don't know. That's something I'm sure they've got smart people and lawyers looking at, but it's just a curiosity that I was thinking about. Yeah, I don't know either. And honestly, it may be best for them. Again, this is that's their field. That's Brad's area to figure out. It may be best for them to stick with something that's sort of digital space only like Zen and not go the pinball arcade route. I would love to have pinball arcade in my virtual cabinet because my the thing I like to do digitally the most is to learn the rules of the physical games so that I can go to a tournament and not be blind on an older machine. So I'll have some experience. I mean, it's not going to play identical. You know, anyone who's used Visual Pinball version nine knows the physics are not at all real world physics. But the rules are still there because you're using ROMs that are that are the same software. So that's that's very helpful to me to just get down. So I don't feel like, OK, I don't know. You know, like when I went up to the the Batman Begins or whatever, whichever the dark night table that they have at our Pizza West location, I'd never played it before. The first time I had to play it in a tournament, I had one game before that and I didn't know what to shoot for. And so you got the little card there that you can read to give you some tips. But I would have been more comfortable had I actually practiced it virtually first. So that's what I like about Pinball Arcade. but if you just go and say okay well you know you got all that weird licensing there because those are the physical machines and they're giving digital rights and what are the rules on that you skip all that and just turn to zen like what vp cabs is putting in already and say okay you guys are making digital only tables you know they're digital from scratch from you guys let's just do this coin op and we pay a license for your stuff it's all kind of clean because it's already a video game space sort of concept. And then also that way the machine isn't seen as a, I guess, I don't know if threat's the right word, but it doesn't come across as a threat to physical pinball because Ms. Explosion Man ain't ever going to be a physical machine. That's just going to live in the virtual space as it should. So maybe that's the way you go with on location as maybe it doesn't do pinball arcade. Maybe it's just things like Zen, video game versions only. That would make sense. That would make sense. It's just one of those things. I know, I mean, a lot of people, there's a lot of old classic games that people love, but they're rare and they're hard to find. And I can see where it would be interesting to people. But as for an on-location thing, I can definitely see we're just going with something a bit easier to deal licensing-wise. It's going to be the way to go. We'll just have to see what they decide, I guess. Right. And I think as the VP Cab site notes and stuff, I mean, they'll help you out with – The rules are, you know, if you're doing home use stuff, there are different rules than what they can sell already installed on the machine. So if you want to have old experiences, there are fan developed tables that are trying to be those old classic tables. And then the rights are different where you as a home user want to start putting stuff on just for your own use. And so there are options for people who want to do that with the old tables. But yeah, I think the coin-off side might just stay cleaner where the licensing is easier because it's only working in the digital space. But it's just a guess. But we wish Brad all the best. And thanks again so much for interviewing with us. And it's so good to hear that things have been going so well since the Shark Tank episode aired. But let's go ahead and transition formally now to our secondary topic, which is video games. We really only have one video game item we wanted to discuss. Tony, you get full credit for this because you actually picked up first that the announcement hit for Civilization VI. Yeah, I am an old school Civ addict. I won't say I'm so old school. I didn't start with Civ. I actually started with Civ II, but I've played every Civilization game since II, and it is very much a case of one more turn with me. I will just play and play and play and play and play and play. I've got hundreds and hundreds of hours into every one of the Civ games so with 6, I'm interested in 6 when the announcement came I know there's not been a lot of changes announced but Civ never has a whole bunch of major changes as far as I'm concerned it plays about the same and I think it is still the king of the 4X's type gameplay I mean, nobody beats Civ at what it does I do like that the screenshots that came out with it. They just released three screenshots initially, and it has kind of a cartoony look, but I like they set it up so you can see the wonders on the map now, so you don't have to delve deep into the cities to find out which city has wonders that you want, so you want to take it and which cities don't. And they're also making some adjustments to how the armies work. they started with I think it was with 5 it might have been 4 but I think it was 5 where they had only one unit per tile so you couldn't stack massive armies anymore yeah it was 5 and they're still they're expanding on that one unit per tile design where it's still you can only have one unit per tile but you can now take support units and embed them with your tile so you can support an anti-tank support with your infantry so your infantry have some better anti-tank power or you can put a warrior with your settlers so you so it moves as a single unit and stuff like that and you can also put together two units of the same to form a more powerful unit um i like that because that was one of the big things that well i had no problems with the change to the one unit per tile, it made it a lot harder to support your army because you couldn't have a lot of, you know, artillery and anti-aircraft and this and that around as you moved in and out. So I'm looking forward to that. Yeah, I've been a player of Civilization for a long time. I did start with the first Civilization. I don't know if I actually have the most time in that version, but it feels like it was the case. And Civilization is always the first game that comes to mind for me when I think of turn-based strategy. It's gone through a lot of growth. It's always sort of kept the same basic concepts, but it's gone through a lot of very healthy evolution, I think, over the years. You and I actually played quite a bit of Civilization 4. I've played more Civ 4 than I have Civ 5, in fact. And I don't know if I played much Civ 2 and... I know I didn't play much Civ 2 and 3. I can't even remember if I played Civilization 2 or not. I think I did, but it all kind of blends because there are so many spin-off sort of versions of Civilization, and Alpha Centauri kind of blends in that, too. When you go back, they all kind of blend in, but yeah, we had a year-long play-by-email game of Civ 4. I think that's the only Civ that had the play-by-email option where you just emailed the save back and forth to each other for the turn. Yeah, very tedious. You know, nowadays I would definitely – oh, it was a lot of fun. But nowadays that would be sort of something where they would keep track of it in an online server somewhere instead of having to do – you know, the just tedious part was having to do the email and such. Yeah, and set it up. But it worked out pretty well. Like I said, it was enjoyable. I quite liked it. But I put a lot of Civ IV time in. I've got over 200 hours into Civ V. I don't know if I had more time than that in Civ IV, probably, because by the time Civ V came out, I had all the family stuff to deal with, so I didn't have quite the play time I used to. But I always loved the Civilization games. Yeah, I played Civ IV a lot more than V. I just started playing a lot of other game types when V came out. I did get it, though, and VI will be on my list to be a Steam purchase for me. probably be waiting for a decent sale on it in my case again, but I always have respect for the Civilization games. I'm just kind of wondering who's going to, now that Leonard Nimoy is dead, who's going to do all the voicing for all the science trees? Did he do the voicing in 5? I know he did 4. I think 5 was somebody else. In 5, I probably muted it because I didn't want to hear it. It didn't matter anymore. But, yeah, I'm going to pick it up. It's on my must-own list of stuff that's coming out. I mean, the only other thing on that list right now, something that I'm going to get, is Overwatch. I'm going to buy Overwatch. Oh, have you decided to? Okay. I'm going to. I'm not pre-ordering it. I'm not going to get it immediately, but I am going to end up getting it, I know. Because every once in a while I sit down at the computer and it's like, what do I want to play? And it's like, I want to play Overwatch. I can't play Overwatch. well it sounded like you were very much leaning that way as of our last podcast I myself their beta did a very good job of locking it in it was I don't know I could not sit down and tell you why I enjoy that game as much as I do or I could tell you but it doesn't really explain it's like I like the balance of the characters and how each character is this and that it's just something about that game just makes you want to play more. At least it made me want to play more. It's not a game where I could, where I would sit down, I played and I quit and be like, okay, I might play that again some later. It was, I played, it's like, oh, look, I've been playing for three and a half hours and I have to go to sleep so I can go to work in the morning. And I haven't had a game do that to me in a while. Well, it's got an addictive quality to it. And that's, and that's really all it takes. I did enjoy what I saw with it, but especially with now that I've started Witcher, I, I don't know how long I'm going to be playing i have a fear i shouldn't say fear because i'm hoping i really like it but i have a fear that witcher 3 is going to take me longer than far cry 4 i've read that witcher 3 is long like fallout 4 long so i'll probably be working away at that for a while and i still have another game i got back at christmas that i haven't started so that's going to be i just i try not to let the backlog of ownership be too too much so i just i generally just don't buy when i start to have a pile of things to do. And I've just been working since the fall, just not working hard enough because I've been playing more pinball than I used to. And that just takes up time. So it's all a sacrifice. Yeah, it's terrible. It's so terrible. Do I play pinball or do I play video games? I just don't know. It's a hard life. I live a hard life. It's a hard knock life for you. Just for me. Yep. Well, speaking of hard knocks, let's switch to the third topic. That was a weird transition. I don't know why I said it that way. Yeah, I don't know. That transition, that one just kind of bounced. Because tables are hard and we knock on wood. There you go. Boom. Tabletop. Okay. Tabletop. All right. And you've got something to introduce for us on that, don't you? Yes, I do. Last episode, we spent a decent amount of time talking about the Kickstarter for the Threadbearers RPG. And I sat down last week and interviewed Stephanie Bryant, the creator of Threadbare, and we are going to go ahead and play that now for you guys. This is an interview on the Eclectic Gamers podcast. I'm talking with Stephanie Bryant, creator of the Threadbare RPG that we spoke about last episode. How are you doing today, Stephanie? Great. Thanks for having me on the show. Well, it's nice to have you. Well, why don't you tell me a little bit about Threadbare? I know when I found it before our last episode, I was super excited because the really, really evil part of me just had this mental image of post-apocalyptic toy story in my head the second I read the description. That's really not far off, although I'll give the elevator pitch. Threadbare is a game where you play a broken toy in a broken world. It's post-apocalyptic. There are no humans left. and the main action in the game is things break you repair them or you upgrade them sometimes your repairs make them different sometimes better and that is like the the main thing that you do and you build relationships and friendships and so forth it's a very low combat game in most variations of the like the tone of the game the GM can't present a conflict that you can't talk to. So if I'm the GM, I can't have a pack of wild dogs show up to tear you apart. You have to be able to somehow reason with them or reason with somebody who's controlling them or somehow get around that without getting into a fistfight. It uses the Apocalypse World base engine, does it not? Yes, it does. It's two six-sided dice plus your modifier. Yeah, I've played a lot of Apocalypse World. I really like it. I like the narrative play, and I like how you're setting it up so it's not just going to be a, oh, you have to fight it out now. You can talk. You can play. It's more about the people and the interactions. I like the narrative play style. Exactly. I do, too. It's where I live creatively in terms of gaming these days, which is not to say that I can't be a killer GM. It's just that the part that I enjoy the most is, you know, we've come up with a clever solution or we've come up with a way to convince somebody to help us rather than harm us. Yeah, I've kind of moved more into that narrative kind of style myself over the years from the crunchy beginnings. Now, what brought about Threadbare originally? Where did you originally come up with the idea? So several years ago, I wrote and published a comic book for knitters called Hand Knit Heroes. And we only got four issues out, but I wrote scripts for eight issues total. Issue number eight had the heroes going into this sort of underworld afterlife kind of space. And I wanted that to be different and strange. And I also wanted it to be sort of knitterly. and when I wrote that script there was this, there was like a war between the hard plastic toys and the soft sided toys and so it was like the mechas versus the softies and there was kind of this, there was a lot of conflict and so forth and a few years ago, like four years ago, I started thinking of that setting and I kind of liked it I dig that, it's, the aesthetic is stitch punk, this kind of broken and put together and maker space kind of hacked together ideas. And I started to kind of think about that in terms of, well, what if I made a game about that? And I started putting things together. I started out with the mecha and softies actually being separate factions and being very hostile towards each other. in the course of playtesting we found out that the mechas and softies really didn't have uh any sort of like reason to be in conflict just the world itself um the way that it seems to present itself there isn't a resource that they could fight over and so there isn't really any any teeth in that um in that conflict so i got rid of it and made them like they're just different types of toy and it ended up being a little softer and a little bit more fun. Well, that sounds good. Now, how did the Socks come into it? Originally, the Socks were an NPC class. They were not a playable character format, and they were enslaved by the Softies. So they were like these unfilled Softies, and the Softies were very patrician about it. You know, they were really just taking care of these poor sort of weaker class of creature. And they were they were, quote, helping them. And of course, this is a much darker tone to the game than what eventually happened. Well, during playtesting, you know, I'm like, hey, let's play my game, you know. And one of my friends says, OK, can I be a sock? And I was like, oh, man, James, they're they're they're weaker than everybody. They have like like half the stats. Are you sure? He's like, yes, yes, I am. And so I, you know, came up with a few mechanics for him to play a sock. And it turned out that by himself, socks, terrible. They're like, like they had, they had fewer of everything. And they even had sort of like a maximum number. Like there was advancement you could add to your, to your stats. But socks, they capped out much earlier than anybody else could. And so they were always weaker. But if you got them in pairs and if you like power played for certain benefits that relied on being paired up and relied on your ability to talk to other socks, they could just destroy everything. I mean, they were they were extremely efficient once they were paired up. And so I kind of liked that. And that's why one of the one of the benefits of being a sock is that any time you when you help somebody else, there's a little bonus. Anytime you help another sock, the bonus is much higher. I like that. The pair of socks is always stronger than a single sock. I like that a lot. And I saw when I was going through the rules after I got access to them, that you do the almost kind of hive mindy with some of the mecca, if you like little army men, everything runs its parts, so you can be just like a squad of little army men. Yes. It's called Bunch of Little Guys. It's a form of his character form. So you are basically a squad of army men. You might be the you might be the barrel of monkeys. You could be like just a jumble of Lego minifigs. One of the forms that I hasn't been released yet, but I'm I'm considering and I'm kind of working on is building blocks. So it's not like you're a bunch of Legos. It's like the minifigs specifically. But, yeah, you're a bunch of little, very similar toys. I've got a bag of plastic dinosaurs that work for this. I've got probably 300 miniatures from the Reaper bones line. They're all unpainted, so they're pretty much all alike. Oh, that sounds like my model collection. It's like 90% unpainted. It's like, oh, that's cool. I can't wait to paint that up five years later. It's still unpainted. Still unpainted. I've got like buckets of those at this point so you know I'm like okay well so you could take those you could take like a jumble of those and make that your character if you wanted and they have sort of it's a little bit like a hive mind you could have maybe a lieutenant or something if you wanted and they they can one of their you know special features is that when they roll a six it's like one of their guys got lost doing a recon so So they get a little extra information, but of course they lost one of their guys. And that means that they're down at hit point, essentially. So it's kind of like the parts on the arms, legs, heads, whatever, on all the other toys. That's how they lose as the group. They lose, oh, we lost Billy. Right, exactly. Our mindspeeper's down. Yeah, and I don't know if you covered that in your last podcast, but one of the unique features of Threadbare is that your hit points are extremely concrete. So if you take a hit, if you lose something, if you, like, lose a hit, quote, a hit point, unlike in other games where it's like, oh, it's kind of like an abstraction of damage and luck, and, you know, you might not actually be bleeding, you know, that kind of thing. Now, if you take damage in Threadbare, it means you have physically lost the ability to use that part. Either it fell off or it broke beyond immediate repair or immediate use, or we lost Billy, we lost one of our guys. And that makes Threadbare rather interesting because when you go to repair that part, you could end up upgrading it to the point where it now has a new move. It might be something different. You might have replaced an arm with, like, the crane off of a broken toy or a non-toy or something like that. So you can, like, you can really, like, play with that. And, of course, since threadbare characters don't die, you can lose pretty much everything and just be, like, a ball of stuffing floating along. and I love this image because of course then you would just be picking stuff up as like that's how you are repairing yourself kind of like a Katamari Damacy you know like just picking up like paper clips and whatever is around like the I saw the little short story thing on your website where it was the dump truck with the baby doll head looking to replace a broken wheel yes yes exactly That came out of a friend of mine wanted to play a rag doll who was really good at repairing people and repairing toys. And her currency was secrets. So if you came to her for a repair, you better have a secret to trade. It was very kind of dark and a little bit sneaky of her. I like how it seems like this game can really run the gamut from something that's fun and nice and this and that or it can get pretty seriously dark if the GMM players really want it to go that way if you're willing to take it dark with the damage system it seems like you could get into some serious body horror type stuff and that is actually one of the that is probably the big content note there's a lot of things in this game that stay light or they can stay light. But body horror and, you know, like you've lost a part, you gained a part, you're stitched back together. If that's a thing that wigs you out, this is not the game for you because that is pretty much one of the core mechanics of the game. And that's up front. It's practically on the tin because I just, you know, like for me, I understand content warnings. I understand triggers. I don't want somebody to get into playing this game and then simply say, oh my god, I can't possibly literally lose my arm. That's terrible. And so I like to make that content visible. I can understand that because I can see that. It's pretty obvious looking at your art, which I love the art, by the way. the bear with the purple eye patch replacement part of his thing I love all that art the art was done by Emily Block a few years ago when this was a much more violent game actually one of the because it's been the combat has been taken almost completely out the art is one of the things that I'm funding with the Kickstarter is we going to have all new art and it going to be a new artist because Emily not available But it still have that sort of feel of like that stitched together you know kind of punk feel to it Yeah but I love that art too Yeah, it was the first thing that caught me when I saw it. I was going through the, I was going through you with Kickstarter, oh, you might like this, looking for stuff like I normally do. And it caught my eye. I'm like, ooh, this looks fun. because like I said earlier, my very first thought was, okay, this is, this seems like post-apocalyptic toy story. I just, cause I mean with the, all the, uh, uh, the different toys and this and that. And yeah, it's, and then even then working with the, uh, the whole, even without combat, the friendship and the working together for stuff, it's just, it just seems like a great game if you play it right. I mean, I've got two little girls and it seems like something they'd like to play with toys and oh, their toys are real and this and that. And how old are they? I've got an 8-year-old and a 4-year-old. So the 4-year-old's a little young, but the 8-year-old's getting right into that group. Yeah, and one of the things that I found is that 8 is about the youngest age that appreciates this game because much younger than that, and they do not need rules to roleplay. Little kids don't need rules and books to roleplay. They roleplay already. They're just fine telling stories with their toys without having Fredbear. for their parents today. But yeah, like... We got old, so now we have to have rules to make sure we can have fun when we play. It's terrible. Relearning how to play, how to play make-believe, it's bizarre. Well, if I just took my models and played around on the table, everybody would look at me weird, but if I have the rulebook saying that, oh, you're playing a game, that's completely fine. Yeah, right. So what you need to do is put the rulebook out there, and then they'll just play with the models anyway. Now for the big question is, which of the character types is your favorite? Oh, wow. You know, we already talked about Bunch of Little Guys. I really like them because they're different. I love how the carnival toy plays. Not a lot of people take it because it's a little weird. In fact, it specifically says you're weird because the carnival toy is like that gigantic stuffed animal. Or sometimes, you know, the carnival prize is not even an animal. I mean, it's like it's a baseball bat. It's a gigantic stuffed baseball bat. Why? I don't know, but that's what it's about. So there's, and the carnival toy is, they're just enthusiastically strange, you know, And they're also rather fragile because those toys are very cheaply made. And so the carnival toy or the carnival prize will be big and weird. And when they take damage, like their stuffing starts falling and like the beanbags start falling out of them and stuff. And so like one of their one of their abilities is that they like they don't get lost. You know, when they roll a six or less, they start, you know, they lose a part. they start, the stuffing falls out, but it's like a breadcrumb trail to them. So they're Leslie. So they can always find the way. It's like, oh, I was that way. You can see my pieces. Exactly. So I kind of like that. The socks, you know, there's, right now there's three forms for the sock. And one is the athletic sock, which I think is kind of cool. There's the hand-knit wool sock, which of course, as a knitter, for me, that is, you know, that is just golden. But I think my favorite is probably the Christmas sock because it's Christmas stocking. And they don't actually have a pair, right? They don't have a Christmas stocking. They're just a single. There's just one. And when people play that, frequently they have to address whether they actually believe that they have a mate or not. and one of my friends played, one of our best friends, played a Christmas stocking who she believed that Mr. Left was out there. She was Miss Right and she believed that Mr. Left was out there for her. It was very sweet and she was cute. Kind of Gene Cleaver type of character. So every time the party would get into an internal argument and she'd be like, well, I don't think that's very nice. That seems – Very much the old school. Yeah. Prim and proper. Very prim, very proper, you know, and she's looking for that one, you know. Well, that's great. That sounds awesome. I know I was personally – I play a lot of tabletop games, so I've got a lot of little models. So the ideas of the group of guys, the bunch of guys with all my little models being real, really, I liked that one a lot. Yeah, yeah. That one's a favorite. A lot of people gravitate to that one. And batteries not included is a really fun one. That's where you have some sort of electronic gimmick. And it's come up a few times in, like, the Q&As and stuff, whether or not if your electronic gimmick is, like, do you need batteries to then, walk. I mean, the teddy bear doesn't need a battery to walk. And of course, no. I mean, your electronic gimmick might be that you walk, but that doesn't mean that you have to have a battery to do it. It might just be like, okay, to do the electronic part of the walking, sure. But if you just want to, you know, trundle along, that's fine. And it's sort of a weird, like... So, like, if your eyes light up and you've got lots of flashies and doodads and little whirly gigs, you need the battery for those, but just for the general walking and stuff, you don't. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Like, basic things that all toys can do, you know, walking, talking, proceed in the world, those don't go away, even if you lose a part, or even if you lose, or even if you, you know, your batteries ran down, or anything like that. And that's an interesting thing about Threadbearer. Like, I mentioned that you can be just like a ball of stuffing that's all that's left, that ball of stuffing can still see the world just as well as the, you know, the thing that has, you know, 5,000 eyes. It's just sort of like, it's a little, that's the part that's abstract. You know, your hit points aren't abstract, but the rest of your, like, existence, your body, your mind. It's like a Tonka truck doesn't have eyes, but it can see. Exactly. So it doesn't have a mouth, but it can talk. Now, I did see on the thing that you can do some stuff like if you get apart from something else, you do personality adjustment type stuff. How does that work? That was actually, so, gosh, I'm not sure where you found that because that's been taken out. Has that been taken out? Okay. That was, well, I was, where was it? Oh, that was in the story on the webpage. It mentioned the truck was worried about it. That's what it was. I need to edit that. So it used to be that there was sort of a, what we call an insanity mechanic in game design, which is that you have a degenerative mental state. And a lot of times that's something like, oh, like in Call of Cthulhu, you have to have a sanity track or you might have stability, something like that. and it's problematic for a lot of people for a lot of reasons I used to have that in Threadbare and I have discovered that I don't the way that the game is now four years after I started writing it is so different and so much less grim I don't need that it works just fine without it so now if you want to make some part of your personality as part of your character sheet, as one of your character parts. You can, but you don't have to. So you could damage like your favorite color, your concept of a favorite color. That could get, that could be a part that gets damaged. Or you could just say, eh, you know what? Don't worry about it. I, I, I want my, my mind to be unassailable. Great. No problem and then and then that just that's just never part of your story um nice yeah i'd wondered about that because i was like man that seems like a really hard mechanic to work in without a without having someone who's really into role-playing something or really strong into it it seems like it would require a really strong player and a strong gm to make work well yeah and it didn't it didn't work well even in in design and even with um i mean i wrote the game and every time i ran it, that mechanic, if it came up, it didn't play particularly strongly. And about most of the time, we just ignored it. And I would ask people later, did you miss that? And I think I only had one person who had ever really wanted to play that. And that was just because they're the kind of player who's like, oh, yeah, like if there's an insanity mechanic, I just want to try it out. And she was disappointed because she had tried it out and she made her dice roll. And she's like, Like, can I just voluntarily fail it? I want to see how this works. So, yeah, there's... It's really interesting to try to put that into a game and then find out that it doesn't... It just doesn't work in this one. Well, that's why you playtest. That's what the playtesting is for. That's what four years of playtesting did, yes. Well, it seems like it's gone pretty well. I was looking at the thing, and it looked like you crossed your original goal on day one? Yeah. We funded in the first day. We funded our first stretch goal, I don't know, like two days later, three days later. And then we just, as of last night, we funded our second stretch goal, which is an adventure where it's called Boogie Fever, I think, and the characters are building, in some form or another, the best dance troupe that they can, because there's a dance competition coming up. And so it's basically moving towards the thrust of the adventure is there's a big dance-off coming up, and that's going to be the big, like the quote, fight scene, is the dance sequence. So I like that. It's a dance-off. It's a dance-off. That's how I handle combat. Combat is done through a montage in this game. So it's resolved in less than five minutes, and you ask the players, like, what is considered winning to you, and how do you do that, and how did you get damaged? Because you always get damaged if you get into combat. How did you get damaged in the process? And then that happens. It's just, there's no dice rolled at all. It's just like, okay. You just tell your story, your individual stories about what it was that happened during the time? Yeah, you tell your story, and you always win. The players always win the fight. Well, it's not really about the fight. Yeah, you haven't set it up to be about the fight. The fight means you've done something wrong if you got to that point. It's not necessarily done something wrong. It's just like, look, this is going to be a climactic scene, and the story ends in a way that is not the story we want to tell with Threadbearer, if they always lose. So, you know, and most of the time when you're playing a role-playing game, you win the fight. You know, you pull out all the stops if you have to, but you win the fight. So that's kind of why it's like, okay, how did you win the fight? Now, in some cases, players may say, look, our version of winning this fight is losing because it's important to us that this thing happen. And that's going to work best if we lost the fight or appear to lose the fight. It's like, OK, so you actually like in terms of the combat or whatever it is you lose, but you get whatever it is that you were trying to get. okay, that's a win. It's the player's definition of a win, not necessarily what their characters thought was a win. Because it's about the narrative primarily. Exactly. Again, it's narrative control that goes into the player's hands. Which is awesome. It's one of the reasons I love the whole Apocalypse World, Dungeon World type games. Me too. I have to say, I backed this pretty much as soon as I found it. The description of this game is just wonderfully fun. Well, thank you for joining us. Would you like to tell our listeners anything else before we go? When you back the game, you immediately get access to the beta playtest documents and a demo kit. So you can back this game for a dollar and start playing in less than an hour, which I think is really fun and a good selling point. And we'll have links to the Kickstarter on the show notes. We had them on the last show notes, and I think they're on the Twitter and everything else. I've sent them out their last episode. Awesome. And if any of your listeners are interested in knitting and making and things like that, some of our future stretch goals include tutorials for making your own threadbare character and, like, you know, crochet tutorials and things like that. But there's also – I'm just going to throw this out there. There's also a very high-level backing tier where I will make a handmade toy, like a handmade soft animal or something like that, for people who back at that tier, or a pair of socks. So there's a little handmade component in here that is available. That's definitely something where I could see it's a good thing to have that as a limited set, or else you could be a very, very busy person. Yeah, no, that one is limited to, I think, three toys and three pairs of socks. Because my big thing as a knitter is that I really don't knit for money, and I've had a lot of people ask me to. And I'm just like, no, I knit out of love. And so this is a very big stretch for me to offer my knitting for money, but I think it's for a good cause. It's a creative project. It's something that is collaborative and fun. Well, I'm glad to hear that. And congratulations on hitting your goal. Thank you. Thank you very much. And thank you so much for having me on the podcast, Tony. I really appreciate it. Well, thank you for joining us. It's been wonderful having you. Well, once again, I'd like to thank Stephanie Bryant for her time and talk to us about Threadbare. I really like this game the more, even after talking to her, I like it even more than I did before. and I've actually started having ideas pop into my head that I've been writing down in my Game Master's notebook. But I'm definitely very interested in this game. What did you think, Dennis? Well, it was fascinating. I had no idea until Stephanie really explained it just how much time would be spent on something like this, just refining the rules of the game as she would constantly sort of alpha playing it over and over. I suppose I should have. I'm not a developer, but I've heard a lot on the video game side of those development cycles and the need for balance and all of that. But, I mean, it's obvious that she has poured a tremendous amount of effort to get this right. And I think the support that we've been seeing for the Threadbare RPG is sort of bearing that out. I was, you know, when you announced the game on the last podcast, I was excited at the idea of the toy parts kind of infecting the personality of the primary character. But hearing Stephanie explain why that ended up changing makes a lot of sense to me. And she did note that one can still play that way if we wanted to. So I'm safe no matter what. So if I want crazy Barbie girl infecting my Stay Puft Marshmallow guy, it's going to happen. Yeah, that's one of the great things about the narrative style games is you can do stuff like that, and it's fine. It's not like it's going to have some big crunchy effect. I know you and I, our primary game together has always been D&D, which is a very crunchy game. but with the more narrative games you can play stuff like that and it deals more towards your actual role playing and less towards just rolling dice and being wandering murder hobos yeah and well i i understood like the concept that a game like this especially with the parts construction that goes on in threadbare for fixed sorry i'll use air quotes you can't see my air quotes because we're on audio but i'm doing them uh fixed hit points uh makes a lot of sense given the nature the gameplay, but I actually have absolutely no experience in tabletop with narrative RPGing, where there's always an option to talk and you don't, you know, so to me, it's, this is, I am way out of my depth. I've never played a game like it. Yeah. I, um, didn't start playing really narratives or RPGs until a few years ago. I actually saw several people playing Apocalypse World on Twitch, and from there I got into a Dungeon World game at a CantCon at one time, which is basically just – actually, it wasn't CantCon. I think it was Recruits, which is basically just a version of Apocalypse World. Apocalypse World is, as you – it's a very kind of Fallout-y post-Apocalypse thing where Dungeon World uses the similar rule set, but it plays in your more standard high fantasy type thing. And I've played a couple other games that tend to be more narratively driven, like Fate. Fate is really popular. I've played two Fate games, and I haven't decided yet if I really like Fate or not, because it uses, you roll dice, but the dice is that don't have numbers. They just have positives and negatives and blanks, and you're trying to rile a certain number of positives to try and get over a certain threshold. It's kind of weird, but it's more narratively driven while still having a chunk of crunch compared to like the Apocalypse World type games. Yeah, I think I know you and Stephanie brought up Apocalypse World as I guess that Threadbearer sort of modeled on it in terms of the, does it use a die-sick setup? Yeah, it's a die-sick setup. There's a lot of games that use the Apocalypse World engine is basically what it's considered, like the Unreal Engine in video games that uses what it is. You have stats, and based upon your stats, you have modifiers, which is very standard RPG. But in this case, every roll in the game is 2D6 plus your modifier, and your modifier is only ever going to be like two or three at the max. so you're never going to get a roll higher than like 15. So that's what you, and that's like a perfect roll. And the way the game is is on a six or less, something bad happens. On a six to ten or a six to nine, something not, what you want to do happens, but it's not perfect, something's a little wrong, or a six to something, and then like a 12 and above. I'd have to look at the numbers again to be sure on them. But basically it's just a graduated. It's like the GM decides what happens, and it could be bad or it could be just eh, but it's definitely not what you wanted. Or what you wanted to do happens, but there's a penalty. Or hey, perfect, you did it. Because everything's designed around the narrative. because the roles are just there to give you a little structure and a little direction. And so you can't just go, yeah, I win and have it actually happen. So it lets you it gives you kind of plot hooks that work into it. Sort of what Stephanie was emphasizing about how we as as mere adults need rules to help keep us are so that we know how to play. Exactly. It's exactly like that. We have to have something. We can't just sit down and play. I mean, we can't just. Not me. I'm boring. I mean, we could, but I don't know. I mean, some people do, but I remember even back in high school and such. Like, I know when I played Battletech, the Battletech RPG, we played pretty fast and loose with the rules in high school. I mean, we used them more as guidelines than anything else. Not like when we played D&D when we went pretty hardcore with the rules. That's right. You better not break my D&D rules. but uh with these more narrative games and it's the reason i like these narrative games is it can be more about it's not about going well you didn't min max your character so we don't really want to play with you because you're not as good of a murder hobo as you could be because none of that matters because you get to concentrate more on who your character is are you a you're you're some poor schmuck who started life as uh your dad dropped you off with your grandfather who was a drunken trapper and you learned from a young age to to trap and and hunt with a bow and this and that and after grandpa died you decided to go see the world you can concentrate on that and it would be okay for your stats or and your skills to be based around what a trapper would have as opposed to be, well, I trapped for all these years and I came out and I'm a specialized orc-killing super soldier. I mean, you don't have to do stuff like that. You can concentrate on your character as your character. That's a good point. I forgot about the min-maxing and how it's like, I'm a healer. Well, are you a dwarven healer? No. Well, why didn't you go for the wisdom modifier? You're apparently a loser healer because you didn't min-max it right. And that all depends upon who you play with anyway. even in crunchy games there's a lot of people who prefer more role playing and less super min maxing but there's always some people who that's all it is it's just how they play i find it to be a more i mean it's fun i'm not saying anything bad about it i'd sit down and play dnd or pathfinder or something like it or be or battle tech again tomorrow without a problem i I just find that I kind of, as I've gotten older, I care more about my character and their backstory and who they are and what their goals are than when I was younger. And it was just like, I'm Gunther the Dorf Warrior, and my goal is to be awesome. Well, sure. But I think it fits with the same thing that we, and when we, especially in our intros, we often bring up movies because we both, while we're not podcasting movies, we do both really get into them. and how when we were younger, when we were teenagers, spectacle was everything. CG effects were everything. And while we're at the point now where we still like to see that sort of spectacle, the awesomeness of destruction. I don't want anybody to think that I don't like spectacle. Trust me, Tony loves spectacle, guys. Don't be fooled. Okay, I'm the refined one. He is the brute. That's my role. I'm the brute. You're a thug. You're the thug. I'm always the thug. You know, I play the Thug character an awful lot, I have to admit. That is very true. That's my go-to archetype is the Thug-style character. Well, and mine's the healer. So, I mean, that's just kind of the niche I ended up falling in. It's like, do I actually go around, like, doctoring people up in real life? No. Well, I don't really. I'm not actually the dumb guy who is forced to carry the basket because otherwise I just run out of its protective embrace to smash stuff. Remind me, in some podcasts, we need to go over the basket. We need to go over the basket. People will want to know what that word even is. That's a good point. We should probably see about getting some others in to talk with us, because that was, I have to admit, that was a great game. And I couldn't tell you the story behind that game, but I just remember how much fun we had playing that game. Oh, yes. Very much so. So and anyway, Tony, awesome interview with Stephanie. Well, thank you. It's fascinating to hear about Threadpair RPG with such detail from the creator. Yeah, I really enjoyed talking to her. It was a great interview and it was a lot of fun. Well, that really is our show for the day. So as a reminder to folks who are listening, please vote in round two of our 1980s Pinball Machine Mania tournament. And if you want to reach out to the show, we've got a number of ways you can do it. You can email us. Our email address is eclecticgamerspodcast at gmail.com. We are also on facebook.com slash eclecticgamerspodcast. I believe, Tony, you've got us set up with Twitter. Yep, we're on Twitter. We're eclectic underscore gamers, and I check it at least every day once. I know I don't do as hardcore Twitter as some people out there who post 500,000 times in a day, but I check it. Yeah, and I try and check the email account every weekday. I usually am in there at least every weekday. Also, please, if you are enjoying the show, give us a rating and review on either iTunes or Stitcher. It does help people find the podcast who are looking for this sort of topic. And so we need that recognition, and we greatly appreciate it when you give it to us. And that's pretty much it. So I will say goodbye for now. We will probably be back in another two weeks like we normally do. Thank you and enjoy your weeks.