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Silverball Chronicles Ep 33: Joe Balcer - The King Of Clunk

The Pinball Network·video·1h 56m·analyzed·Oct 18, 2023
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TL;DR

Silver Ball Chronicles profiles Joe Balcer, 'King of Clunk,' tracing his path to legendary pinball design.

Summary

Silver Ball Chronicles Episode 33 explores the career and design philosophy of Joe Balcer, a legendary pinball designer known for his 'stop and go' mechanical layouts. The episode traces Balcer's journey from General Motors toolmaker through Midway/Bally, Data East, and Sega, discussing his early custom one-off machines (Aaron Spelling, Richie Rich) and breakthrough designs like Baywatch, Apollo 13, and others that established him as a master of complex mechanical construction.

Key Claims

  • Joe Balcer's early pinball interest came from making money on flipperless games as a teenager, not from gaming passion like other designers

    high confidence · Directly quoted from Joe Balcer's TopCast episode discussing his teenage years in Illinois playing for money at hotel games

  • Aaron Spelling commissioned a custom pinball machine (modified Lethal Weapon 3) with only one unit ever made, with Tori Spelling's voice as a feature

    high confidence · David Dennis and Ron Hallett discussing the Aaron Spelling custom machine; David confirmed he played it at Expo

  • Richie Rich pinball was created as a movie prop for the 1994 film starring Macaulay Culkin, with only one unit produced

    high confidence · Direct discussion of the 1994 Richie Rich film adaptation and its custom pinball machine; David confirmed playing it at Expo

  • Baywatch was Joe Balcer's first full-size pinball layout design assigned to him, featuring a four-flipper layout including a shark flipper

    high confidence · Joe Balcer quote: 'Baywatch was the first full-size pinball I was assigned to lay out, and we got to go a little crazy with that ladder ramp.'

  • Joe Balcer was personally involved in delivering an Apollo 13 game to Jim Lovell (actual Apollo 13 astronaut) and received a signed back glass

    high confidence · David Dennis: 'Joe was among a group of people from Sega who personally delivered a game to Jim Lovell, who was a crew member of Apollo 13'

  • Apollo 13 featured a 13-ball multiball with a complex dual-trough system (8-ball trough on left, 5-ball main trough) controlled by a diverter

    high confidence · Joe Balcer explaining the engineering: 'The main issue with the game was how do we load and reload pinballs and program it so that the game knows where the balls are at all times.'

  • Joe Balcer worked at Midway Manufacturing on games like Pac-Man, 8-Ball Deluxe, Granny and the Gators, Spy Hunter, and 8-Ball Champ

    high confidence · David Dennis historical narrative describing Joe's early Midway engineering roles

Notable Quotes

  • “Pinball for me started out as a little place to make a few bucks because it would pay us over the bar counter.”

    Joe Balcer @ ~12:45 — Reveals Joe's unique origin story—unlike most designers who grew up loving pinball, Joe was initially motivated by money, not passion

  • “I walked in, and there was a black sign with white letters, and it said, 'Midway Manufacturing welcomes Joe Balser.' I nearly fell down when I saw it.”

    Joe Balcer @ ~15:20 — Memorable first impression at Midway that left lasting impact 40+ years later; demonstrates the power of small welcoming gestures

  • “Baywatch was the first full-size pinball I was assigned to lay out, and we got to go a little crazy with that ladder ramp.”

    Joe Balcer @ ~47:30 — Joe's breakthrough moment designing his first full pinball from scratch; marks his transition to lead designer role

  • “Once you're going to work and it's fun, it's not work anymore. Wow! That's an awesome quote from Joe Balser.”

    David Dennis (quoting Joe Balcer) @ ~50:15 — Captures Joe's philosophy about finding joy in design work; elevated by David as exemplary of Joe's character

  • “The main issue with the game was how do we load and reload pinballs and program it so that the game knows where the balls are at all times.”

    Joe Balcer @ ~62:10 — Technical insight into the engineering challenge of Apollo 13's 13-ball multiball system

  • “Joe's not necessarily known as a high flow, quick ball movement kind of guy. His designs tend to be more stop and go or as some people like to call him, the King of Clunk.”

    David Dennis @ ~6:15 — Establishes Joe Balcer's design philosophy nickname and reputation—the episode's central theme

Entities

Joe BalcerpersonDavid DennispersonRon HallettpersonJoe KamenkowpersonSilver Ball ChroniclesorganizationSlam Tilt PodcastorganizationThe Pinball NetworkorganizationMidway ManufacturingcompanyData EastcompanySega Pinballcompany

Signals

  • ?

    event_signal: Pinball Expo historically served as venue for displaying rare and one-off machines; David Dennis played both custom movie prop machines there

    high · David Dennis: 'It was at Expo... They were spelling-themed... Yeah. It was Tommy... I played this one, too. What? It was that Expo one here.'

  • ?

    design_innovation: Baywatch introduced three-stage skill shot concept that anticipated complex multi-step ramp sequences seen in later designs like Houdini

    medium · Ron Hallett observation: 'The one skill shot when you hit it, it's like a three-stage thing, which when you think about Houdini, which we'll get to later, you can kind of see the beginnings of that'

  • ?

    design_innovation: Apollo 13's 13-ball multiball required sophisticated dual-trough system (8-ball trough + 5-ball main trough) with field diverter to manage ball loading without interrupting gameplay

    high · Joe Balcer technical explanation about engineering challenge of staging and programming 13 balls simultaneously with consistent reloading mechanism

  • ?

    design_innovation: Baywatch featured innovative shark flipper—a small cross-playfield flipper that became automatic once timing was mastered; four-flipper layout on standard width body

    high · Joe Balcer quote: 'we were messing with that area of the play field, and it ended up finding this small flipper that went right across the play field. Then we found that we could control it.'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Joe Balcer's signature design approach emphasizes 'stop and go' mechanical layouts with complex construction rather than high-flow ball movement; dubbed 'King of Clunk' by community

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.350

0:00
The Pinball Network is online. Launching Silver Ball Chronicles. Is this Mr. Ron Hallett? No, it's Mrs.
0:18
Oh! Hello! Hello, Mrs. Toadfire. Never seen it. And that sexy, sexy Pierce Brosnan. Mmm. Hello everyone, I'm David Dennis and this is Silver Ball Chronicles and with me is Ron Stomp. Hallett, how you doing? I'm doing just fantastic. Fantastic. You are living it up and mighty over in upstate New York, are you not? Beautiful upstate New York, yes. Coming off your big Stomp win. I didn't win, I didn't even play in it. Stomp, of course, being the slam-tilt-oh-my-pinball-tournament thing. Shouldn't it be stomped? Ah. We didn't think about it that hard.
1:37
Actually, a listener came up with the name, so. Very good. And it was the almighty tournament player of Joe Lemire who won the championship belt this year. Yeah, we had a belt. It was cool. Sponsored by your other podcast, the Slam Tilt Podcast. The Slam Tilt? podcast. Hosted by yourself and Bruce Nightingale. Nice to see we got that plug right out of the way. I'm sure Bruce will be happy. Yes. Anything planned? You've been doing anything? Planned is probably Expo. Yeah, that's exciting. There's some exciting stuff coming up at Expo, I think. Probably some pinball there and probably a tournament. I mean, it's pinball Expo. I sure hope there's pinball there. That would be pretty weird if there wasn't pinball there, but yeah. Ron, I just want to zip through her this morning, or this afternoon, or this evening, depending on when you're listening to us in the future. But we've sold out. We're over on Patreon. You can visit us at patreon.com slash silverballchronicles. I just want to have a wonderful shout out to Derek for joining us over on the Patreon. We love to have many people swinging in and out as possible. Come in for a few months. toss us a few dollars, put my kids through college, and then zip on out. So I just want to say thanks so much to Brian K., Carl Zed, and Dan J. for joining us over on our Patreon page. I can't remember who came on when, so I just want to say thank you so much, guys, for joining us. It really means a lot that you would support us over here on Silver Ball Chronicles. Woo-hoo! But I got to meet Derek and quite a few of our patrons over at Pintastic New England. Did you enjoy Pintastic New England? I liked the new location. Wonderful location. 60% less bed bugs. Yes. Oh, that's right. You were at both locations, so you got to see, yeah, the old hotel. It didn't smell like excrement like the old hotel did. That's always good. I got to play a lot of very, very fun games, games that I haven't had a whole lot of time with. I finally got to play quite a bit of Hobbit. Lots of things going on there. Wow, that ties into our subject.

  • Joe Balcer's philosophy is that once pinball work becomes fun, 'it's not work anymore'

    high confidence · Direct Joe Balcer quote from TopCast episode cited in show notes: 'Once you're going to work and it's fun, it's not work anymore.'

    • Baywatch
    game
    Apollo 13game
    Aaron Spellinggame
    Richie Richgame
    Marcus Rothkransperson
    Jim Lovellperson
    Aaron Spelling (producer)person
    John Borgperson
    Bruce Nightingaleperson
    Stomp Tournamentevent

    high · David Dennis introduction: 'Joe's not necessarily known as a high flow, quick ball movement kind of guy. His designs tend to be more stop and go or as some people like to call him, the King of Clunk.'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Joe Kamenkow as Data East engineering department head and Joe Balcer's primary mentor; responsible for hiring Balcer and fostering his design talent

    high · David Dennis: 'Joe Kamenkow had a real passion for what pinball design was about, and I was able to take all that in.'

  • ?

    announcement: Movie prop pinball machines created during 1990s for Hollywood films (Richie Rich 1994, Aaron Spelling era) as functional set pieces, now preserved in collector/event circulation

    high · David Dennis confirming he played both Aaron Spelling and Richie Rich machines at Pinball Expo; Richie Rich explicitly created as 1994 film prop

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Aaron Spelling widow commissioned custom pinball as gift for deceased producer; one-off machine with daughter Tori Spelling voice talent integration

    high · Joe Kamenkow approached team saying 'we just got a call from Miss Aaron Spelling, and she wanted a custom pinball machine for her husband, a man that has everything'

    • 4:03
    It does. Oh, my goodness. Well, nothing has changed with the podcast. It's still free. You can still see it here on our dedicated feed and the TPN feed. But if you're interested in supporting, just swing on over to patreon.com slash silverballchronicles. Not a big commitment, $3 a month just to say thanks, $6 a month gets you the premium crony level with private Discord chat room, early access to the podcast, and you can actually have some comments and votes on various topics. And you get a sticker after three months. The top tier or the elitist cronies, boy oh boy, for $20 a month you can get a free shirt after three months. If you just want to engage with us, send us a message or chat, comment on some of our postings, you can do that over at Facebook.com slash SilverBallChronicles. As well, we always remind you, Ron, leave us a how many star review? Five stars. Thank you. Any less than five stars and you're dead to Ron. Ron, we've got some reviews over at This Week in Pinball's promoter database. The first one is from, oh, God, Svirker. That's a cool one. Svirker. Yeah, I think he's missing an umlaut in there. It's a good one nonetheless.
    5:22
    Yes, Verker says, I love your podcast, The Silver Ball Chronicles. Bought one of your mugs today. Ooh, we have mugs. We do, and they are hottest seller. Wow. Oh, God. That's Silver Ball swag. All the way to Sweden. Your podcast is a great spurt to learn all kinds of things history-related and pinball. The dynamic between the two hosts, David and Ron, is great, especially Ron. It doesn't say that part. I love the way they interact and how they, mostly Dave, mispronounces most of the names and all the bickering about the Canadian-American stuff, gags, and jokes. I hate that part. I find that kind of thing hilarious. Yes, I find it hilarious, too, when he misspells words and adds extra vowels and spells check weird, things like that. Let's see. The show is a nice mix of history full of tons of anecdotes, obscure facts, and humor that keeps the show going. Keep up the good work, guys. He spelled tons correctly. Good for you, Spurker. Oh, is that how they spell it in Canada, too? That's how they spell it. That's a metric ton. Oh, well, that's okay. Did I say Spurton right? I think I said that right. I think so. That's a good word of the podcast. Spurton. How about this one from Mike? Mike, we've got another one.
    6:45
    Wow, look at all these stars. So many stars. They're just falling out of my hand. My other podcast never gets this many stars. Damn. I've been listening my way through past episodes and having a great time. As someone new to the hobby, this podcast is deep in my interest, and I've learned so many things that I wouldn't have otherwise. The episodes take a lot longer for me to get through than others, because I'm constantly stopping to look up the games mentioned so I have a frame of reference. Don't do that while you're driving. Yeah, I was going to say, hopefully he's not driving when he's doing it. Sure, occasionally one of the host inserts extra U's into words where they shouldn't be, but no one's perfect.
    7:22
    Keep up the great work. I've got to preview these before I ask you to read them. Isn't it great? They just love making fun of Canadians.
    7:31
    How about over at Apple Podcasts? Somebody left us a review at Apple Podcasts. Really? Wow. It's Mope. Mope? Let's see. It says, great overview of popular points in pinball history. Just enough information to keep me interested. Not overloaded with random details. Keep up the great work. I will listen to all of your episodes. Yeah, be careful. The first couple are pretty rocky. You know, is there a single podcast that doesn't say that?
    8:00
    I want to see a podcast that's been around 100 episodes. Yes, listen to our first episodes. There's some of our best work. They're the better ones. We went downhill after that.
    8:13
    And you cronies out there, you can let us know whether you want to be called cronies or cronies. This is cronies. That's it. We're not getting your name into more of this, Ron. Okay. If you enjoy the show, you can also swing on over to silverballswag.com. Thanks so much to Will Otting. Everybody knows him from TWIP. He does a lot of fantastic work for all of the content creators out there who want to have a silver ball swag store. He does all of the work, sends you all the shirts and does all that stuff, and then he throws us a kickback. We have no real corrections or comments from our previous episode.
    8:54
    We're on a roll here. I don't know if it's because people hate us and they don't want to send us messages or hate you and don't want to send us messages. Or no one's listening, so that's something to correct. There could be nobody listening. We could just be talking to ourselves here. Well, our episode topic today is an interesting one. Joe Balser is a name that some people know and some people don't. Joe spent his early beginnings at Sega Pinball, then Stern Pinball, basically helped start Jersey Jack Pinball. He left Jersey Jack Pinball. and then he started up another company called American Pinball. Joe has been around. He's worked for many bosses in many companies and he's made some pretty memorable layouts. Joe's not necessarily known as a high flow, quick ball movement kind of guy. His designs tend to be more stop and go or as some people like to call him, the King of Clunk. Oh. This month, Joe Balser, the King of Clunk. That's not very nice. The King of Clunk. What? His shots are kind of clunky. Hey, there's always Baywatch. Everybody always does that. They're like, yeah, but what about Baywatch? Okay, okay. What about Godzilla? Super flow in that one. Wasn't that Keith Elwin? No. The original Godzilla. The one based off the horrifically bad 1998 film. Oh, we'll get to that. Ooh. Well, let's wind it back. Let's talk about Joe's early life. Joe grew up in Cicero, Illinois, the town of Cicero, Illinois, known for nothing.
    10:37
    You ever heard of that town? And you might be saying it wrong. Who knows? Yeah. If it's like weird upstate towns where Cairo, it's spelled Cairo, but it's Cairo. It's stuff you would never know unless you were from there. Yeah, totally. So he might have completely butchered that. Now, Joe wasn't a big pinball person when he was younger. In fact, he wasn't even a video game person when he was younger. Usually that's where a lot of the designers and programmers and stuff kind of get their start. When they're a kid, they like to play a little pinball or video games. Joe was just another kid hanging around the neighborhoods of Illinois, you know, as a young scrapper. He played a lot of sports, and he wasn't really into gaming at all as a kid. There was one time where Joe would stop into a hotel, and they had a restaurant in that hotel, and they had some flipperless games, and he'd play for 10 cents at a time. But this wasn't until he was a teenager. Then he learned that he could make money on a flipperless game. Joe says, I put $1 in that game, which was 10 games, and he would win games. Then he'd walk up to the bar and say, hey, I got 100 games up there. They'd say, okay, and then they'd hit a little button under the bar that would click down to zero, and the bartender would give you the money that you want. Pinball for me started out as a little place to make a few bucks because it would pay us over the bar counter. Wait a second. That sounds like gambling.
    12:06
    No, it's just a payoff. You earn those. Oh, my goodness. Okay, so here's Joe Ball. So all, every, this is why Joe Ballster is awesome. every other designer that we've ever been. It's like, oh, I love the game, and it was fun, and whatever. And Joe's like, I can make money on this.
    12:24
    Right? This is awesome. Okay. At 19, Joe got a job at General Motors as a toolmaker and a modelmaker, and they called him the setup man. So what's like a toolmaker or a modelmaker, Ron? I assume he made tools that they used to make cars? Yeah, basically, right? He's not making a wrench exactly, but he's making like a jig or some sort of measurement piece and things like that. When you're redesigning, changing cars, things like that, you know, like the wheel moves. You've got to change the way the arch is. You've got to have a tool to do that. It's a pretty highly skilled and fancy kind of job. Well, sadly, Joe was laid off, and he began to work as a part-time mechanic for more job stability. One day, one of his customers said he had a nephew who was looking for a few guys in a tool room, and Joe, having tool-making experience, was interested. So he went to go see about the job.
    13:26
    Joe travels out to a place called Midway Manufacturing in Franklin Park, Illinois. Joe says, this big white building, it has a Pac-Man up front, and it says, Home of Pac-Man. I had heard of Pac-Man. I knew what it was. I never really played it. I walked in, and there was a black sign with white letters, and it said, Midway Manufacturing welcomes Joe Balser. I nearly fell down when I saw it. Wow. How cool is that? This is actually something, Ron, we do for all of my clientele here. Everybody has a welcome sign when they arrive. And the impact of that sign to make them feel like they're recognized and welcome is a big deal. And you can see the impression that it left on Joe Balser because this was, what, like 40 years ago? And he still remembers this story. Joe walked through the building with Kenny Addison to the tool room. They were running flat out with Pac-Man and 8-Ball Deluxe. He was hired and joined Midway. There you go. So I think it was, what was it, the George Gomez episode where George was talking about he was walking into Midway. In one end was, like, raw materials, and out the other end were Pac-Man machines and how busy it was. So it must have been a really crazy first impression when you walk through a factory like that, especially in those days. Joe has moved into engineering and worked with Claude Fernandez on test fixtures for games like Granny and the Gators. Oh, God. What? So it's Joe Balzer's fault. He had a great time learning on the job and working on X's and O's, Spy Hunter, and 8-Ball Champ, to name a few. Yeah, some cool games in there, but this is kind of that weird, you know, Bally Midway kind of. Yeah, yeah, I count one good game, 8-Ball Champ. Right, like it's like they're really kind of on that part thing. But after spending that much time there, Joe really did catch that pinball bug. He kind of understood why it was fun and interesting and all the exciting bits and pieces that made pinball pinball.
    15:27
    Joe was an engineer. He began working with various companies in the 1980s, and it was tough getting started because, as I mentioned, this is that weird time at Bally. There were a bunch of layoffs in 1982 in which Joe was caught up on. However, he was a bit lucky because he did end up getting a job at WICO, and he helped build the game Aftor. Ah, Aftor. You remember Aftor? I remember Aftor. I think that might be first alphanumeric display. First alphanumeric display game. And metal back box, which Stern does now. They were just early. That's what they say in the financial business. Oh, they were just early. Their call was just early. But really, Aftabur was the only thing that WICO made of any notable... They made parts. That was their one game. Exactly, exactly. Joe spent time at Valley Midway, WICO, and even Premier Technology, which was formerly Milestar, and which was formerly Gottlieb. Then came the big hire. Joe says, I was hired at Data East. Joe Kamenkow brought me in. My career kind of started out with Data East, where I really got into it. I'm glad that Joe brought me in. Data East, of course, was a lot less corporate and structured than those other companies he had been at, WICO aside. But if you looked at Midway, Premier, they were much more sort of stuffy, I think, more corporate, where Data East was tight. They were tight on timelines. They had shoestring budgets. And people wore a lot of hats at Data East. So let's get into some of the games that Joe finally started working on, the more notable ones. So the first one is one where there's one unit.
    17:16
    That's right. Aaron Spelling. The showmaker, the guy who did Love Bone and Fantasy Island and all those shows. Yeah, the TV producer thing. Yeah. This is designed by Ed Sabula, Joe Kamenkow, Joe Balzer, and Lonnie Ropp. mechanics by Joe Balser, John Lind and John Borg, art by Mark Rothkrans. You can remember him from Jurassic Park and the nubby fingers of Nedry.
    17:50
    Yes, that's the greatest thing that Marcus did for pinball. Music and sound by Brian Schmidt and software by Lonnie Ropp. So the theme you had touched on this is based on Aaron Spelling. Now, he was the American television film producer, really got his big start in the 1970s, but went all the way through into the 1990s. And really, there has been no bigger TV producer in history. He did shows like Charlie's Angels, The Love Boat, and Dynasty, which were huge. Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, Seventh Heaven, and Charmed. everything Aaron's spelling touch basically turned to gold in that period. Well, Joe Bolster says, I remember Joe Kamikow was running our engineering department. He called everybody together and said, we just got a call from Miss Aaron Spelling, and she wanted a custom pinball machine for her husband, a man that has everything. Apparently Kamikow threw a number out there. I don't know what the number might have been, but it was pretty large, and she said, who do I write the check to? Holy moly. So money is no object. That's right. And the worst part is I think if you throw out a number and somebody bites in sales, your number was too low. Yeah.
    19:04
    Unless they counteroffer, you have offered too low. But I bet you it was a pretty nutty number. For one machine, basically what they did is they modified Lethal Weapon 3 from 1992. Mostly cosmetic, but they changed, I think, a couple of targets. and they added a picture of Tori Spelling, who was the daughter of Aaron Spelling. And when you hit a specific target, she would say, I love you, Daddy. Yes. I played this game. You've played this game? Yes. There's only one of them? Yes. Oh, do tell. It was at Expo. How did they get it? I mean, when I played it, I just looked at, oh, it's Lethal Weapon 3.
    19:48
    They were spelling-themed. Wow. Yeah. Imagine. Well, this was one of those all-hands-on-deck games. This is where everybody had to get on it and get it done. Joe Balser would say that that's where I got my opportunity to learn design. Joe Kamenkow had a real passion for what pinball design was about, and I was able to take all that in. Very, very, very cool. But this brought in the next amazing game. I never thought about that, the fact that if it was Aaron Spellings, how did I play it? Did you just lend it out, or did they just help it after a certain point? Like, we don't want this anymore. So Richie Rich was the next game. That's from 94. There was only one unit of that. Yeah, that was a Tommy. Same group. Same group of folk working on it. And it was actually made as a movie prop. So it wasn't made specifically for an individual. It was made for a prop in a movie. Now, Richie Rich is based on the comic book character of the same name, created by Alfred Harvey and Warren Kramer. The pinball machine was used in the 1994 movie Richie Rich, and that starred the Home Alone kid, Macaulay Culkin. I saw this movie when I was a kid. I thought it was pretty fun. Richie Rich Jr. I'm sorry, Richard Richie Rich Jr. is the world's richest boy. He lives in Chicago, and he has billionaire parents of Richard Sr. and Regina. Under the care of his loyal butler, Herbert Cadbury, scientist Professor Keenbean, and his dog named Dollar, Ritchie enjoys a luxurious but lonely life. Now, the joke kind of in the comic strips and the movie is that Ritchie is so wealthy that he can kind of have anything, and he can have a one-of-a-kind pinball machine themed around himself. It's sort of like that professional wrestler Matt Hardy with his custom pin, the quest for gold. But this was a custom pin in the 1990s, which is like a really big deal back then. Well, Joe Balser says it was just a new artwork package, and we played with the rules a little bit and made these people happy. And that's kind of how it came about. Some of the things I've noticed when looking at the pictures on IPDB, the card at the bottom that tells you how much to play, like a dollar per game, it says a million dollars per play. Yeah, it does. It has all gold ramps, because gold is fancy. It has on the back glass a photo of his mom, his dad, his butler, his dog, and the Data East logo. How authentic is that? Right? Because it's like literally like a pinball machine that you would see in an arcade in the early 90s. Awesome. And the cabinet is designed, it sort of is colored, and it looks sort of like white and gold marble. Kind of looks like something out of the washroom at Mar-a-Lago. Or a bathroom for those Americans. And, yes, I played this one, too. What? It was that Expo one here. What is going on? I've got to get to Expo. They used to have these things at Pinball Expo. Yes, Richie Rich. And, yes, it's million play, all gold. Yeah. It was Tommy. Yeah, it was basically a multi-ball and the Tommy Ramp rule. Mm-hmm. They pretty much just slapped some art on it. Well, good for them because it made them some money. But what was Joe's first designed game? A home run, in my opinion. Baywatch. Man, oh, man. Okay, home run. I haven't played Baywatch, but I have heard good things. It is excellent. So the theme. This is based on Baywatch. Hasselhoff. Yeah. Very big show. This debuted really in... 1989. It debuted in 89? Yep. And it ran all the way to 99. Yep. That's insanity. It was on NBC. It was a big, big deal, this show. Basically, it was around David Hasselhoff, who everybody remembers from Knight Rider. This was his next big thing. Yeah, which is quite a bit later. Actually, if it started in 89, it wasn't that much later. And don't forget Baywatch Knights. That didn't last very long. Yeah. So basically, in a nutshell, David Hasselhoff is like the lead lifeguard with all these lifeguards. They're hanging out at a beach in California. People are drowning. And then various ladies run across the beach to save other people. There's, like, love interests and things like that. It was actually canceled after its first season. But because of syndication and popularity, it came back. And you mentioned Baywatch Nights from 95 to 97. And it was actually a feature film adaptation in 2017. Baywatch was kind of a big cultural thing. Didn't do it for me, but a lot of people liked it. Did I go through who designed it? No. No, I didn't. Okay, well, the game itself, that's from February of 95. We don't know how many units were produced. It was designed by Joe Balzer and Joe Kamenkow. The Joes. Art by Marcus Rothkans and Jeff Kranz. Kranz? Roth Kranz? Well, he's got a KR there. Yeah, and Jeff Bush. And he did a lot, Jeff Bush did a lot of those Sega games as well, So not so much the Data East games, but the Sega games later on. Music and sound by Brian Schmidt. Software by Neil Faulkner, Lonnie Robin, Oren Day. Let's jump into the flyer, because I think the flyer says it all here, Ron. Oh, we love reading flyers here.
    25:26
    We've got something that's going to make some waves. Yes! Yeah, Baywatch. Loving the puns. Featuring custom speech by the man himself, David Hasselhoff. Yeah. David Hasselhoff. God, he's gorgeous. The Hoff. It's a pretty straightforward game when it comes to just sort of looking at it. But one thing that does really stick out is that extra large DMD. Yes, can it display increased earnings? We think so.
    25:58
    Of course it can. But it's got, like, pictures of the Hoff carrying, like, a person out of the water as the jackpot. It's got Pamela Anderson kind of fixing her hair when there's a 50 million, right? Like, it's, you know, we're playing up a bit of the sex appeal here on this thing. The side art, that's where they really, let's say, play up the sexuality of the pin. Isn't that right? You mean the butts? The butts. One of them there has got a little bit of moose knuckle.
    26:34
    No? I don't know what that means. Yeah. Is that like a Canadian term? It sounds like it with moose. It is. It is the Canadian thing. Joe Balter says, Baywatch was the first full-size pinball I was assigned to lay out, and we got to go a little crazy with that ladder ramp. Misdirection with the ball. It just felt like a good layout. Then watching it being built and come up to speed and everything working. Imagine that feeling, that first pin on the line coming together. It is packed, gang. It is packed. Do you want to talk about the layout just a little bit here? It's awesome. It's a three-flipper layout, correct? So it's got the side ramp that everybody loves. It's got a lot of stuff in there. It's got a lot of stuff. The one skill shot when you hit it, it's like a three-stage thing, which when you think about Houdini, which we'll get to later, you can kind of see the beginnings of that. Like it goes to one place, fires it to another place, and fires it around to like an upper flipper, like a multi-stage thing. Lots of stand-ups. He loves his stand-ups, the skinny stand-ups, tons of those. The shark flipper. You've got to love the shark flipper. Big time. Now, there's a watchtower lock, which is the left ramp. Yep. Right way in the back on the left side. You kind of shoot the ball up the ramp, and then it kind of gets locked up inside there, and then it'll pop it out down to a habit trail on the other side. Oh, no, it's a four-flipper game, isn't it? You forgot the shark flipper. That's right, the shark flipper. It's a four-flipper game. And the thing is, it's so packed, I always thought this was a wide body. Until I saw, like, wait a minute, it's not a wide body? I don't know how he got away with it. But how about that, let's talk about that shark flipper then. Oh, you mean, you mean thing flipper? Yeah. Well, Joe says, we were messing with that area of the play field, and it ended up finding this small flipper that went right across the play field. Then we found that we could control it. Once we started to get the timing, it just became this automatic flip. Where that came from, I don't know. Yeah, that idea, I think, probably came from Adam's family. Yes, Stingflipper, Adam's family. From their competitor. Yes, they did a lot of that. It's fine. I don't know where that idea came from. It's not famous in any way. I would rather play Baywatch than Adam's family. Oh, my goodness. Yes, it shoots better. That's a hot one, folks. Come in hot. I find it more fun. Now, Joe had a lot of passion on his first game, And he would say that I had three or four guys working with me at the time to do some of the mechanics and things But that first layout those first lines and circles that turn into pinball that was an amazing feeling for me It got me at that point It started to be a lot of fun. Once you're going to work and it's fun, it's not work anymore. Wow! That's an awesome quote from Joe Balser. I had to put that in there because it speaks to him as a person and his passion for pinball. And that comes, of course, from his TopCast episode, which is in the show notes. Well worth the listen, because it's giving context at that time, it's not giving foresight. It's very cool. Really like that. But that brings him into Apollo 13, right? Apollo 13, yes. That's it? You just say Apollo 13, yes? It's no Baywatch. Baywatch is like my favorite Sega game. We talked a little bit about Apollo 13 on our first John Borg episode because John did a lot of the mechanics on the play field. Apollo 13 is based on the film Apollo 13, which was from 1995. It was a docudrama directed by Ron Howard, starred Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton. Or was it Bill Pullman? Oh, Bill Paxton. They both look exactly the same. Yeah, Ed Harris and Gary Sinise. It was a great, I thought it was a really good film. I really kind of enjoyed this film. I didn't see it. $52 million budget, $355 million. Is that the Houston We Have a Problem movie? Houston We Have a Problem. Okay, okay, yeah. That's where that theme came from. So now when people go, Houston, we have a problem, that's literally where this came from. Well, it came from the actual event where they said it, but the movie made that popular, that line. Amazing story. Joe was among a group of people from Sega who personally delivered a game to Jim Lovell, who was a crew member of Apollo 13. Oh. Joe had his own Apollo 13 back glass and Saturn V rocket signed by Jim Lovell. Imagine. Wow. The movie made a ton of money. Like $50 million, and it made $350 million. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, and back then, you know, when you've got hundreds of million dollar movies, it was a big deal. It's over two and a half hours long. Jeff Bush, yeah, it is a long movie. Jeff Bush, though, he was really great when it came to the art of this pin. I think it looks really wonderful. Some of the little neat little bits in the art is that Joe Balzer's name is on the name tag of the main astronaut on the back glass. I thought it says Rec Lab. It does say Rec Lab, but that's Balzer back glass. Oh. Ah, now I get it. Isn't that cool? This is why people tune in to Silver Ball Chronicles. Because they want to hear about 13-ball multiballs. Because they get to get all these little Easter eggs and silliness, you know? Rec Lab. On that back glass, why is there a main astronaut with Rec Lab written on him? You mean as opposed to showing his face? Yeah. Yeah, it's Tom Hanks, but he's in the suit. But why isn't Tom Hanks' face on there? because we can't show him. He didn't want to be on a pinball machine, but Gary Sinise is on there. I thought we had one of the other people that actually didn't get their permission to be on there. I think it might have been, I'm trying to remember which one of them. And when they showed him the game, he was like, oh, great, look, I'm on a pinball machine. Was that Lieutenant Diane? Because Lieutenant Diane is on there. He's wearing a tie.
    32:50
    Yeah, I think it might have been this game. Or maybe I'm thinking of another game. Actually, I think I think of another game.
    32:56
    So the 13-ball multiball, you hinted on that. Now, how did they actually get that to work? I mean, you talk about, oh, 13-ball multiball, that's cool. But how does it actually work from an engineering standpoint? Well, according to Joel Bolzer, it was amazing to be able to stage that many pinballs and control it. The main issue with the game was how do we load and reload pinballs and program it so that the game knows where the balls are at all times. When we came up with the eight-ball trough up in the left corner, and we had five down in the main trough, it was a matter of how to get them there.
    33:28
    It was a matter of how to get them there without interrupting gameplay to try to load. We had basically a diverter at the top of the play field that would either load balls into the eight-ball trough or let the balls go back into play on the top lanes. Once we got that down and it was consistent, then it was off to the races. We could make this happen. So there's an actual ball trough up there. Yeah. Just like under the bottom of the front of the play field. And they redo this for Indiana Jones, the second one. Cool. This one also has the extra large DMD. And that's the smaller one. No? And that's the smaller one. Sega was using the, what, 192 by 64 super large displays, but then they went back, Apollo 13, they went back to the regular size DMD. I guess between the 13 ball multi-ball, it's like, we don't need a big display in this one. It was the cost, I would say, right? It probably was the cost. So how did Apollo 13 do when it was released? Well, Joe says, we brought Apollo to one of the arcades that we were working with as a test location. I'll never forget, we were sitting there, we put the game up, and this woman and her son walked up to the game to play it.
    34:37
    We set it on the 13-ball multiball so it was just one shot away. And when she hit the shot, and eight balls dumped on top of the five balls that were already there, it was total chaos. There was no controlling that. It's just flipping away, flailing away as much as you can to keep the ball from draining. She let out a scream and her son started crying. You knew you had something special when that happened. Wow, it made a kid cry. Made a kid cry. Wow, I kind of like the game more now. It was so scary, right? It was like, ah, what's going on? That's amazing. It is. That's a great story. It is a gimmick. If you ever actually play it, like, there's so many balls, the flippers are weighed down by them. You can't keep the flippers up. It basically, you just lift the flipper, and it moves the balls enough to drain.
    35:22
    It is cool, though. I mean, it's tough to have something like that and not have it be cool. Space Jam. This is the licensed Looney Tunes basketball theme from December of 1996.
    35:36
    It's done by the Joes. Joe Balser, Joe Cam and Cow, Mechanics, Joe Balser, Art, Jeff Bush, Morgan Weisley, he does the back last, Westling, Weisling, and Mark Reines, Cabinet and some of the production elements. Doss by Jack Linden, Music and Sound, Brian Schmidt, Lonnie Ropp, and Oren Day on software. Well, this theme, let's talk about this theme. Another movie I haven't seen. You haven't seen Space Jam? You want to hear a funny story? Sure.
    36:16
    Michael Jordan tried to act? Let me take you back. The year is 1996. This American live-action animated sports film starring Bugs Bunny and Michael Jordan, where Michael Jordan gets sucked into the world of the Looney Tunes and is brought on the Looney Tunes basketball team to help save the Looney Tunes world. You're in a theater.
    36:48
    It's 1996. You're eating popcorn. David Dennis is on his first date when he was in grade six. The lady Melanie was there, and I held her hand. It was so scary. So scary, Ron. You're right, this is scary.
    37:09
    That was my first date. Space Jam, 1996. They don't have that theater anymore. It was so long ago they tore that theater down.
    37:19
    Anyway, there was also a sequel called Space Jam A New Legacy, which starred LeBron James. It was not as good. It was missing the charm. It also didn't have Bill Murray.
    37:30
    Bill Murray played a cameo, and it was amazing. What did Joe Balzer think about the theme? Well, he said, Joe Camecow was setting up all of our licenses. He talked about this movie coming out called Space Jam. We didn't know anything about it. But once we got in seeing parts of the movie and reading what it was going to be all about, we were thinking it was going to be a really cool basketball-themed game. Of course it's going to be a really cool basketball-themed game, Joe. That's what the movie's about. Well, the cool thing is they actually got to read scripts and do this stuff before the movie came out. No one does that anymore. No one gets any of that stuff anymore. They have to do it after the movie's out now.
    38:09
    We've mentioned this a few times, but I don't think people appreciate it. They're getting scripts. It hasn't been made yet. Could you imagine somebody just reading through some of the new Marvel scripts? Like Terminator 2, they recorded Arnold on set. As they were filming the movie, you do not get that access anymore. I think I've only played this a few times.
    38:33
    I can't really make an opinion. Other than it's got, when Sega started using the curved back box, the showcase back box. Well, according to the flyer, this must have been the first one because it says featuring new Sega showcase back box. I like this. I love the Looney Tunes. I absolutely love the Looney Tunes. Everything to do about the Looney Tunes. When I was a kid, I watched them. I still watch them with my kids today, all the vintage ones. They are the best. It's so awesome. So much better than Disney and, you know, just saying. This machine really appeals to me from a theme standpoint. And I really love this movie. It's a very fun movie. I love Michael Jordan, who doesn't. Well, did you know this game is custom speech by Michael Jordan and stadium announcer Ray Clay and many of your Looney Tunes favorites? We won't say who actually does the voices for them, including Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and Tweety. I hate Tweety. I love Tweety. I hate Tweety. I wish Sylvester would eat him.
    39:40
    That's the thing. Yes. The funny thing is, when you think about it, you have Williams. They had fast break. NBA best break.
    39:51
    And they have all the players except Jordan. Yeah, how true is that? So Jordan's like, no, I'm having my own game. Yeah, he gets his because he's Michael Jordan. I'm Michael Jordan. I'm bigger than the game. I get my own game. Awesome skill shot into the hoop. It's got the ball lock basketball. It has the most amazing backboard magnet catching thing onto a ramp. So it's like a jump ramp, and then there's a magnet on the backboard that catches it and then drops it into a hoop. Which they would redo with NBA. Yeah, this is awesome. It's an awesome game. It's got a lot of drop targets, though. You want to talk about the drop targets? Drop targets? You mean stand-up targets? It's got a lot of stand-up targets. That's what Joe's known for.
    40:34
    Joe Balser said, if we could use drop targets as a designer everywhere, I think I would, just because of the mechanical aspect of drop targets. It comes down to space and cost. The stand-up target serves its purpose. You're going to hit the target. You're going to score. It's not dropping out of your way, which I'd love to see more of, but you start getting into four or five or six bank drop targets, and you're going into a nice chunk of change on your bill of materials, which takes away from something else in the game. I'd rather have more targets to shoot at than not. That would be a good way to put it. I mean, his point is that it just costs too much money to do drop targets, and this is something that a theme that comes up time and time again over and over and over is that is it just these mechanics are expensive, and do you want a cool toy or more rings, or do you want drop targets? Data East worked with Michael Jordan's people, because he has people, and they actually presented the game to Michael at the Make-A-Wish Foundation, where all the design team got to meet Michael Jordan and Patrick Ewing. But mostly people were there to see Michael Jordan. Joe Balser would say, I never thought that I would be that connected. It was just fun being part of pinball and being a part of all these different events because of the games that you did. That's cool. Well, if you want a bigger license than Michael Jordan. Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition. So you remember the Special Edition trilogies, Ron?
    42:01
    Oh, yes. Yes, I do. Yeah, it's a Star Wars theme. It's from March of 97. We don't know how many units were made. It was made by the Joes. Joe Balser, Joe Kamenkow. I didn't realize this was timed with that until just now. Really? And 97 is when they re-released them in theaters, but they were all the horrific special editions with all the changed crap. Yeah. So there's some changed crap I'm okay with. Some of it, not so much. Nope. Don't change any of it. It's perfect. No need to change it. It's George Lucas' vision, man. It's his movie. He can do whatever he wants to. He can sell it to Disney and run it into the ground. He can do whatever he wants. So let's jump into the flyer here. Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough.
    42:48
    Oh, it says that. Okay, that's pretty good. That's pretty good. Featuring the exclusive Sega Showcase back box and hand settings with this optional 3D back glass. A pinball industry first, which it probably doesn't. If you have the lenticular back glass on that, you have the fancy version. Wow. You've got to relive the magic with a whole new generation. Yes. Ron, I saw A New Hope special edition in the theater three times.
    43:19
    I pity you. I did, and I loved every minute of it. I saw it once, the new edition. That was a big deal for me because I'd never seen the original Star Wars in the theater because I was like three. Yeah. I'd only seen, I saw Empire and Return of the Jedi. So I was so psyched about seeing Star Wars. And then right before I walk into theater, I hear people talking about it. Yeah, they put some new stuff in it. And then there's like this wave thing that comes out of the Death Star when it blows up now. And I'm like, what? What are they talking about? And then I watched with horror as they ruined my movie. This was when computers were a big thing, much more of a thing when it came to film. And George Lucas revisited his original trilogy, made some tweaks, some of them very good, in my opinion. Like what? So, for example, in The Empire Strikes Back, they took out a lot of those black lines that were around the green screen stuff when they're in the snow speeder scene. So much better. Because back in the day, you were in a green screen. You had these thick black lines around kind of the image and then the actual, like, prop or something. It looked terrible. Some of that stuff. They cleaned up some of the strings that you would see or some of the weird colors. Not strings, I'm joking, but there's colors and things. I thought they did really, really well. Well, you know, the Force is strong with this one. Watch out. Blasts from turbolasers will divert balls from the ramp into the X-wing cannon or the left in lane. That's cool. I'm not going to lie. It's this thing on the ramp. It goes up, and then it has these turbolasers that move in and out. It has a really cool X-wing fighter thing on the left ramp where it's basically the crossbow from The Walking Dead or the cannon from T2. It shoots across the playfield into a bunch of TIE fighters. It has the Sarlacc pit on the right side, I think, right? Not the Sarlacc pit, from The Empire Strikes Back, where they freeze them. The carbonite chamber. The hole's a bit too big, I think. Well, Joe Valser says, on the visual side, the game really came together nicely. We had a couple of really neat toys on it. It worked out to make a fun game. Licensed games were all we were doing then. We got a lot of content with licensed themes. But then there are walls up around you, too. You have to do things the right way to get them approved. Star Wars Trilogy being this whole Star Wars thing, you really had to do things right for them. Yeah, and they talked about this a lot in The Phantom Menace, right, where they really struggled with the licensor. Well, I'm sure they had something similar here. One thing that they didn't struggle with was the god-awful art. You mean the sections art? It's like every different section. I like the one with the 20 TIE Fighters all in one small area. So the bottom third, okay, it's got like Vader in the middle, and it's got the characters. That's cool. And then once you get above the bottom third, it just is a frigging train wreck of a mess. It's all purple and yellows and oranges. They do have Vader. Big Vader. That's always good. That's the best part. But it just falls apart a little bit. So did you know there was a collector's edition of this game? No, I didn't. I didn't know this. Oren Day once stated that Neiman Marcus, the high-end retailer, sold a collector's edition of this Star Wars trilogy in their fall catalog of 1997. Can't find any pictures or anything about that. But apparently it was in this fall catalog. So if you've got one of those and you're listening to this, send us an email, silverballchronicles at gmail.com.
    46:58
    What about this one? Starship Troopers. Huh? Another movie I haven't seen. That one I actually want to see. Starship Troopers? I watched it again recently for some reason. It's directed by the guy who did Robocop, so. And you can certainly tell.
    47:15
    This is from December of 1997. It's a space movie theme. It's done by the Joes, Joe Balzer, Joe Kamenkow. Art by Morgan Weisling, I think. Weisling, music by Brian Schmidt, software by Ian Faulkner, Oren Day. This is based on the film. So Starship Troopers, I remember this in 1997 when it came out, when I was in middle school. And it was very, like, controversial, I guess, around that time because it was designed by or it was directed by Paul Verhoeven. He did Robocop. I think he did Fatal Attraction.
    47:57
    I think he did. Did he do Total Recall 2? He did a lot of good movies. Yeah, but they're like, his movies are really like weird and over the top and like hyper violent. But they also have this odd social commentary. So basically, Starship Troopers is, you know, the world is being invaded, was attacked by a bunch of bug-like creatures. Humans have gone into space to destroy these bugs. And it's a very fascist kind of society, and they're all fighting against things. But it's like the acting is kind of iffy, and everything is like really over the top. But if you took RoboCop and turned it up just a little bit, which is kind of hard because RoboCop is pretty crazy as it is, and put it in space, that's basically where this is. But it was targeted sort of towards teenagers because they're young kids, and there's Denise Richards, who was big at the time, and Casper Van Dien, and early Neil Patrick Harris. Super cool. It's kind of a neat movie, but I watched it again, and I'm like, geez, this movie is much worse than I remember. It had a $100 million budget. It did $121 million at the box office, so pretty much a flop. It's a cult film now, though. Yeah, it's one of those cult kind of films, but even to me, it's still not a good cult film. I don't know. I don't get it. If you get it, silverballchronicles at gmail.com. Well, the toys. The toys. Joe Bulser says, I think the industry looks for custom toys now. Back then, we would work with toy manufacturers. We would get catalogs or samples of everything that was coming out for Starship Troopers or whatever. We would have a relationship with the toy manufacturers, and we would get all the samples and try to adapt them to the game. Starship Troopers is a real good example of that because there are a lot of toys there. But these were not custom toys. We bought them in bulk, and we fit them to the mechanisms. Starship Troopers was just a lot of ready-made toys that we built into the game. Let's just put it that way. Yeah, so what he's saying is... They got off-the-shelf toys and put it in the game. Which they did that a lot. That really didn't... They did that all the way up until the mid-2000s. Yeah, they did that in The Simpsons. I mean, Ironmonger is a toy that they cut the feet off of and put in for Iron Man. And the movie flopped, so I guarantee they had a lot of these extra toys just laying around. But it's not a bad game. It's got a cool double flipper thing on the right side with two flipper buttons. So this is like one of those games. This is one of the ones where, like, Sega daddies, where people are like, this is actually like a really good game. And a lot of that comes from the design and the rules, right? Like, together they come together quite well. My podcast mate on the Swipe Toe Podcast, Bruce, he loves this game. Huh. The thing is, I like it. You can hold the right flipper up, the main flipper, so then it falls onto the little mini flipper. Use the second button and then hit that and it will, if it's adjusted right, it will almost go, always go into the saucer. And the upper left, that's hard to hit. So then there's like a bash toy that like rises up in front of the ramp.
    51:02
    He's like the brain bug, which is like the smart bug of some sort. It's kind of neat. It's kind of a neat game. The art is a friggin' mess. It's terrible. Like, we joke about Daddy East and Sega art, but this is on a whole other level of terrible. Your comments to David Dennis can be sent to silverballchronicles at gmail.com. Even the art on the flyer is terrible. Oh, I wonder if they trademarked this. New tri-flipper action. Tri-flipper. I don't see the little register trademark symbol next to it. So I think it's time to trademark that sucker right there. Do you want to know more? Another high-action, high-powered, adrenaline-pumping pinball from the team that brought you Space Jam and the Star Wars Special Edition. Yeah. The adrenaline-pumping Space Jam. Be a trooper.
    52:02
    Moving live fire warrior bug assault battle simulator. Come on, you apes. You want to live forever? That must be in the movie somewhere. It does, yeah. So I'm going to say that the game does very much feel and look like the actual movie. Like, you know what I mean? Like, it is over the top. It's silly. There's a lot of the toys and the whole thing. It has family adjustments. I take it that means like a family mode of some kind. What does that mean? The swearing bit? Less blood or something? Less swearing. So the movie was quite over the top. Well, this brings us to, and you had mentioned it before, Godzilla. The licensed radioactive monster theme, 1998.
    52:48
    Joe's, Joe Balser and Cam and Cal. It's basically the same team that did the last one. This is based on the film Godzilla. As a huge Godzilla fan myself, watching that movie is painful. I remember seeing this film once and being like, eh, it wasn't that great. It did have a decent cast. Matthew Broderick, Jay Leno. It did serve one purpose. A lot of people don't realize they think Godzilla movies, they just think of all the campy 60s, 70s Godzilla movies. They were making them in the 90s. And they're some of the best Godzilla movies they ever made. In the 90s? And then they cut it off because even Toho wanted to have an American-made Godzilla to see what the U.S., the premier filmmakers of the universe could do with their property. So they kind of ended their 90s series, and then we made this horrible film. Yeah, well, TriStar had announced that it planned on making a trilogy of Godzilla films. But this was the only one that made it. Because this movie was so bad. The guy who did the movie didn't even like Godzilla. That's the fun thing. But because this movie was so bad, we got the Toho Millennium series, where they brought Godzilla back. It's like, you guys totally F this up. So we're just going to make our own Godzilla movies again. I mean, it had a budget of about $130, $150 million, and it did $380 million in the box office. So it made money. I don't care. It's terrible. Terrible. I just remember at the end that Godzilla laid eggs in Madison Square Garden. I just remember they're chasing him, and he's running away, and then they lose him in New York City. We lost him. Where did he go? Really? How do you lose Godzilla? How did he go? That's so stupid. He was more dinosaur-y. Yes. I do remember that as opposed to Godzilla lizard-like thing. The game, on the other hand. Super mega awesome, I guess. I like the game. Never played it. It has all these different multiballs. I'm trying to remember what they were all called. They all have specific names. 45 years of Godzilla history. We're going to take a big steaming dump on.
    54:56
    Now, the one thing about this game is, though, that it only has one ramp. It looks like it has a lot of stuff in it when it really doesn't. It doesn't have stuff that really interacts in any way. So we're in 97 now. I'm sorry, we're in 98 now. And this is where we are on almost a full death row. Yeah, they're hurting. Everyone's hurting. Joe would say that we went into the mindset on Godzilla to make more of a street-friendly game where you didn't have a lot of mechs on it or a lot of things to fail or to maintain. It turned out to be a pretty good shooting game. I do get a lot of good comments on Godzilla. And here we are 20 years later, and people still enjoy shooting Godzilla. It was made more for a downsized game, even though it looked loaded. So they were able to make it, they put some stuff in there, but that stuff doesn't actually move and do anything. Yeah, it's got a cool Godzilla head. Yeah, and that toy is really nice. It sits up there really, really well. And it's got the big green ramp. It just sort of like loops around right to left.
    55:52
    It's kind of weird. Or, I'm sorry, it left, and then it kind of zigzags back. Well, it's got monster ramps. It says so. Yeah, but it's only one ramp. Feel the rumble. That must have a shaker motor in it. Joe says the movie didn't do all that great. So a lot of the times the game doesn't do the numbers you thought it was. You thought it would because the movie didn't do the numbers you thought it would. So Godzilla might be a good example of that. Yeah, I was trying to tell you it flopped. I don't care how much money it made. It was not liked at all. You can tell how good a movie is by, like, the second weekend. because the first people from the first weekend will go back to school or work or with their friends and be like, you have to see this movie. And then people in the second week will go to see even more maybe than the first week or at least remain the same. When that second week just falls off a cliff, you know you're in trouble. And that's very much what happened to Godzilla. Go watch it if you want to waste a couple hours of your life. Matthew Broderick's pretty good, though. What about South Park, though? That's a killer theme. That was a killer theme. February of 99. This is a big deal. Now, I remember, again, I was in middle school during this time. This is really at the beginning of South Park. I think they were probably two seasons in. Yeah, they were early into it. IPDB says that there's 2,200 units sold of this. I don't know how they know that. This is Joe Kamenkow, Joe Balzer again. Art by David Link and Jason Dominick. Music and sound by Kyle Johnson. Software, Neil Faulkner, Oren Day, and Lonnie Robb. Rob. So these guys, there's some new names on here. You can tell by the art, super, super good. This is based on South Park, the animated film from was it Cartoon Network? No, the animated show. Right, I'm sorry, the animated show. I don't think the movie was out yet. It was created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and it was developed for Comedy Central. It stars three kids, Stan, Kyle, Eric, and Kenny, and they live in a small town in Colorado. You all know what South Park is. If you're listening to this and you don't know what South Park is, you might as well watch it. You can skip the first couple of seasons because they're not really that great. They're more vulgar. When they get into sort of that middle seasons kind of somewhere around like post it really takes off with social commentary and some amazing characters that you always remember Hey you guys I Gary Ham Big fan of South Park. Didn't quite get it when I was younger, but now that I'm older, I definitely, definitely get it. This game was a struggle to make. Gary Stern did not want to make South Park. It was difficult because it's cartoons. It's vulgar. Joe Balzer wanted a toilet on the playfield. That was pretty hard to get by Gary Stern. Not a fan of the poop jokes, I think. Not just the toilet, but a literal piece of a turd comes out of the toilet. Mr. Hankey. They had a hard time with the Simpsons. Simpsons was very, like, ooh, risque.
    58:57
    And then you moved into, how do you up the Simpsons? You up the Simpsons with South Park. And then how do you up sort of the Simpsons and South Park? Well, you try Family Guy. Then you move on to the next level is Rick and Morty. Things are escalating quite a bit here over the 90s. Well, there was some really cool bits and pieces about South Park. Joe Balser would say, we had a blast putting South Park together. There are these parts in the game that are right over the line. It's the first and more likely the last game to have a talking poop on the playfield.
    59:32
    So Mr. Hankey pops out of the playfield. Yes, he does. One thing I do want to talk about, Ron, brown inserts. Yeah, if you're going to have poo, you need some brown inserts, don't you? So they had to go to a plastic provider and ask specifically for brown inserts. They don't just make brown inserts. You know what I mean? Like the red or green or blue or purple. Apparently this really confused the plastic provider, but they were able to get them their brown inserts. They had to custom make the brown inserts. so the flyer here how are they promoting this game on the flyer it's pretty weak honestly they just got just stock stuff from the show but then it says safe home adjustments i guess that means you can change stuff so it's safe for the home yeah a little less risque but i mean custom speech just for this game hilarious soundtrack and lots of fun multi-ball play. I like the topper. Topper's great. It's Cartman and then it has the disclaimer. Yeah, which it says, like, this game should not be played by anyone. Yeah, yeah. This game still earns on location. Sega's, and Data East in general, sort of that reiteration before Stern today, probably their best earning game of all time. Trey Parker, Matt Stone,
    60:54
    Custom Speech, and Isaac Hayes' Custom Speech. So much fun. Now, the operator and the owner can change it to a G rating, a TV-14 rating, or a TVMA for adults. So that's what they're talking about on the thing there by adding that adult mode. Now, around this time, Williams was working on Pinball 2000. South Park came out around Pinball 2000, and they thought, Joe Balser thought, they did a hell of a job with Pinball 2000. It was quite brilliant, in fact. So what they did is they would always check PlayMeter, and they would check CoinOp magazine. Now, these were industry magazines that had sales numbers and things like that in it. Well, it says CoinOp magazines, CoinOp magazine, so like any CoinOp magazine. Right, exactly. So they would look for these sales numbers and game ratings and reviews, because that's kind of what you would do before the Internet times. You know, you would go out hunting, and you'd bring home the PlayMeter magazine, and you'd sit at home and start a fire in your living room. And South Park came out as number one. And Sega was the small guy. So to say the least, Joe Balzer and the team were really, really happy that they were to outshoot something as cool and new as Pinball 2000. And I'm sure Joe Kamikawa will remind you of this. Every opportunity, over and over. It will be on his tombstone. Remember that time we killed Williams. We beat Williams. We're still around. They're not. We win.
    62:26
    Striker Extreme was the next game. Now, this was the Stern Pinball Inc. game, and it's not licensed. Yeah, it was the first Stern game. And they make it known. Everything's Stern. I think the guy's wearing a Stern shirt. Lots of Stern.
    62:46
    Okay. All right. Where do I start? The top here? Yes. Okay. Becoming a pro crony is the perfect way to say thanks, and it starts at $3 a buck. Want to get early access to episodes before everyone else? Have a strange love for stickers? Do you know what a Discord is? Interested in having your comments and questions take priority on our episodes? Jump on. Wait a minute. Is this on twice? Idiot. Oh, boy. You get what you pay for, I guess. All right. Hold on. Jump on. It's $6 a month premium crony. Want all the other perks and a shirt after three months? Join us at $20 a month as an Ellie Litas crony. Wow.
    63:24
    Can I have my money now? We spoke about this game in a Keith P. Johnson episode because this was Keith's first game at Stern. So you can find out all about it there. But it was originally called Soccer Explosion 2000. And you thought Soccer Extreme or Striker Extreme was a bad name. Soccer Explosion 2000 is even worse. This is around that era where everything was like 2000 and millennia. Because we're getting close to the millennium. I like Striker Extreme name. I like that name. You like that name? I like that name. This is the first newly designed pinball machine under the Stern Pinball Inc. banner. Joe had no idea, but he originally designed it to be a theme of Oktoberfest.
    64:12
    Joe had the game fully laid out, ready to go. Gary Stern came to him in a meeting one day and said, Joe, we really need you to make a soccer theme. because one thing that Americans love is soccer. We do? No, they just needed to make a soccer team. Oh, okay. So Joe added some elements to change the theme from Oktoberfest to Striker Extreme. Yeah, the soccer goalie was originally the Oktoberfest bar. Oh, well, we'll get to that in a little while. No. How about the next one, High Roller Casino? I've played High Roller Casino.
    64:45
    It's okay. Sorry. It's got that weird early stern thing. It's very weird. We don't know how many units. This was from January of 2001. This is designed by John Norris, Joe Balser, and Keith Johnson. Art by Kevin O'Connor and John Yausey. Music and sound by Kyle Johnson. Software, Lonnie Romp, Dwight Sullivan, Keith P. Johnson. It was designed by John Norris until he left. Right. So this is a John Norris game and basically finished up by Joe Balser. And Joe Balser says, When John left, the game was slated to be one of the next games up for production. When we looked at it in engineering, there were issues with the layout mechanically, the way the ball flowed, the way things were working on the initial layout. We saw some issues as a group and said, you know what? Let's clean it up for production. And that's pretty much what my job was. Ouch. He kind of craps on it there, doesn't he? What, saying it didn't really work? Yeah. He was like, eh, it's not really that good of a game, so we just cleaned it up for production. Now, I would be interested to know how much of that is spin and how much of that is actually. You always have to clean a game up for production, right? That's not unusual that you have to, oh, let's make this target a little smaller or this one a little bigger or whatever. But, I mean, that sounds like there's a little bit of shade being thrown there. What do you think?
    65:58
    Soccer's not really a thing in the States, but the NFL is. That's one thing I know. They rethemed Striker Extreme to be NFL. And you can pick your own team. Okay, so that's basically what it is. That's from November of 2001. This is where we get into what really matters, though. Oh, boy. The Simpsons pinball party. February of 2003 based on the famous Licensed Simpsons cartoon Joe Balser Keith P. Johnson on design Art by Kevin O'Connor and Margaret Hudson Music and sound Chris Granner Software Keith P. Johnson We spoke about this game at length in our Keith Johnson episode so you're going to want to go over there to get a real deep dive but I want to get some stuff here from Joe's perspective because as much as this is Keith's baby, it's also Joe's baby. This is where I would bring in Joe as a bit of the king of clunk, because this is a clunky game, but it is fun nonetheless. What about the theme? What does he think about the theme? Let's start there. Well, Joe says, we really spent a good amount of time on trying to get the elements right. We had to have the couch to have the beginning of every episode where you go into the house and end up on the couch. We had to have itchy and scratchy in there. The cookie mark. Keith Johnson was a huge Simpsons guy. He had a lot that he wanted to put in the game. Again, there you go. Again, Joe is giving all the credit to Keith. Just like how on Lord of the Rings, a lot of the credit from George Gomez goes to Keith. This was Keith's vision, and it was Joe working with him that brought it all together. And I would say in a very, very game. Very good game. Would you say that the Simpsons is the ultimate clunker?
    67:34
    No, because the upper play field is good. The upper play field is phenomenal. The ramp around the bar, the Duffman ramp, I really like that. The orbits are pretty good. It's just kind of the center middle. It gets a little stop-and-go clunky there. Don't forget the Krusty Spinner. Oh, yeah, the Krusty Spinner's awesome. But that left side ramp is terrible. This is not, and I repeat, not the side ramps of Joe Balser's first game. No. At all. No, this is not a Baywatch side ramp. I didn't even know there was a side ramp. You just hit it and it kind of disappears if it actually works. Oh, gosh. But Joe says, it's one of my favorite games I ever got to put together. You know how good a game is when you shoot the white wood and it's fun. That's a big tell from the design side. No art, no sound, no light shows. You're just shooting a ball around on a white wood. I just felt that, and so did a lot of guys in engineering, that this was going to be a good one, and it just got better. I mean, it's a fun layout. It's just clunky. That's the thing, right? Everybody thinks clunky is like this negative thing. They're going to be like, oh, Joe Balser, the king of clunk. Dave is throwing some shade here. Trust me. Not every game has to be flowy. and this and that to be a fun and good game. The Simpsons is an example of that. The Simpsons is probably one of the greatest games ever made, but it is clunky nonetheless. But it was around this time that Joe actually leaves pinball. The Simpsons was 90, about 95% done when Joe decided to move on from Stern Pinball. He went out and started a company that was still in coin-op, but it was away from pinball. Did a lot of, like, redemption game stuff. You want to say it? No. There may have been other reasons he stepped away from pinball. Joe had some personal issues that he wanted to take care of, and he decided the best thing to do was to take some time away. Which we will not get into here. So it was a few years, and Joe ended up coming back to pinball. Well, he had heard that there was this company coming around, started by Jack Guarneri, who is known as Jersey Jack. And that's where we get into Jersey Jack Pinball, the pinball company. Joe says, Jack had been in touch with me, and I was one of his first hires to come over and start Jersey Jack Pinball with him. One night we went to dinner with a couple others and had been with the company since the beginning. Jack said he had a surprise for me that night. We're sitting there just before dinner, and I turn around, and there's Keith Johnson. Jack was putting together what he thought was the best team. Jack knew the success of Simpsons. There were some hugs, and here we were, again going to do something great. If we were sitting down, you and I, and said, Ron, I got a surprise for you. I'd run. And you turned around and you saw Keith Johnson, how would you react? I'd be like, I hope you're not mad about our episode.
    70:39
    I love Keith Johnson. I think Keith Johnson is an amazing guy. And trust me, at this time, if you're telling me that you're getting the band back together that made probably one of the best games ever in the Simpsons pinball party, like, come on. And it was Wizard of Oz that would come out of this. Now, there's probably somewhere around, what, like 3,000-ish units? There's a lot. There's a lot of them. They made so many runs of this game. There's a lot of them. So we had talked in the Keith Johnson episode about, like, how this game was not necessarily made for me, was not necessarily made for location. I did play it on my way down to Pentastic this year in a bar called Arcadia in Portland, Maine. Definitely go to this bar. It is awesome. I spent a good deal of time playing it there. And you know what? You do kind of got to get into it a little more as opposed to kind of just flipping it in a really loud room at a convention. Awesome. This is April of 2013. So it's been quite a few years since Joe has released a design. Art by Jerry Vanderselt, Greg Ferreres, and Matt Reister. Sorry, Matt. Reister. Reisterer. Music and sound by Chris Granner and Rob Berry. Oh, yeah. You get Chris Granner and Rob Berry. And I get Jerry Van De Selten. Okay. Animation by Jean-Paul DeWin. Jean-Paul. Say it like that. Software by Keith Johnson. Jean-Paul DeWin. And Ted Estes, Alex Levy, Joe Katz, and J.T. Harkey. Yeah. I get the hard names. Good stuff. Anyway, Wizard of Oz. Come on. We all know Wizard of Oz. It's the show. Dorothy, the dog, the witch. The movie. Yes. Guy behind a screen. Wizard of Oz was never going to be a small game. Jack wanted bigger. He wanted better. He wanted packed. He wanted lots of code. He wanted an LCD screen. Jack threw it all on the table. Yeah, Joe Bolster says, pretty much everything we did, I spent time trying to talk him down. Do we really want to have a game with an upper play field as our first game? No, we want a game with two upper play fields. We want to go LED display. How big is the biggest one we can fit? What about RGB LED lighting? Yeah, let's put that in there. How about RGB LED GI? There were no limits. I think that's why they, like, lost a ton of money and almost went bankrupt after two games. Yeah, I think that's why Jack had to sell some of his company to somebody else. Yes. But. I do appreciate the attitude, though. But this game is one of the games in the Pinball Awards Hall of Fame voted by just a regular community. because people understand that this game changed the industry. It really, really did. And it's fun. It's cool. It's unique. Jersey Jack doesn't really make games like this anymore, sadly. Yes, they do. All their games are packed. Come on. It's not like this. The thing is, they might have had the RGB idea first, but because it took two years to make the game, I think ACDC beat it with RGB lighting. Yeah. But it was so different. It had so much more in it. And it did change the game, also in pricing. Yeah, which itself is still too low. But, like, the play field. So if you look at the play field and the way it's structured, it's not particularly flowy. No, no. So, for example, let's break down the play field in general. It's a wide body. So wide bodies tend to be floaty in general. The reason they went wide body is because you could fit more crap on the play field. The bottom third, it has like this weird kind of out-laned state fair pop bumper thing, and that was designed by Nordman. And it's kind of like a minigame to save your ball, which is really cool. There's the Toto rollovers on the outside, which is another minigame. Then it's fairly kind of standard, but there's lots packed in there, And because there's lots packed in, specifically on the left side of the play field, it's hard to get the ball kind of moving and flowing back to the flippers. There is the main one ramp in the middle. You shoot that, and it kind of flows around through, what is it, like Munchkin Town, Munchkinville, Munchkinburg. This game was built to be the anti-Stern because Jersey Jack, with Pinball Sales, his other company, was the top Stern distributor. And he didn't like their direction. They went with the stripped-down games. So his whole gimmick was, we're going to have just everything in this thing. And this is probably why you see Stern not having any mega-dealers anymore. Dealers tend to be big, but not mega-dealers. The thing is, I mean, even things like all the sculpts in the game are custom. There's nothing off a store rack in this game. Yeah. The pop-upers have trees that are holding apples, my favorite part of the game. I bring that up every time, but I just think it's the cutest thing. How would you like it if someone took an apple off you?
    75:52
    Love that stuff. I will say both upper play fields play great. Hey, Pinheads. I just wanted to let you know that when I'm not doing this podcast and making bad jokes, I'm Dave the Financial Guy. At Dennis Financial, our advisors strive to provide a return on life for our clients, not just a return on investment. The value of advice is something that we take very seriously. A valuable advisor doesn't just provide investment advice. They share wisdom, and this is where the true value of an advisor emerges. Don't take my word for it. Just listen to Ron Sterling, an average Canadian. Yay. If you're in Canada, Dennis Financial is for you. If you're looking for a more human dimension to your financial advice, Dennis Financial, Inc. has you covered with advisors licensed in most Canadian provinces. We're also doing secure online video meetings. Contact me via email at david at dennisfinancial.net for a free rate quote and a copy of our value of advice e-book, or check out dennisfinancial.ca. Insurance solutions provided by Dennis Financial, Inc., Canadian residents only. And those are, again, all kind of the hands of Joe Balser, right? But it's clunky. But it's not a bad game because it's clunky. Flowy games, I think, probably do better on location and are much more forgiving because you can kind of pick it up and be like, I'm a pinball superstar. This one, you've got to be a good pinball player to really get a lot out of it. And that's okay. Yeah, I know people will play this forever. I never could. This game would destroy me. Yeah, it's because you've got to stop it and hold it and be precise with your shots and things like that. When it comes to adding a little more open play field, that's where we get into The Hobbit. This is the licensed fantasy film theme from April of 2013. Wonderful, wonderful game. It's Joe Balser, Jean-Paul DeWin, Eric Minier on mechanics, and he's somebody that will pop up way in the future. music by Two Steps From Hell.
    77:56
    It's a private production music company. They actually did really well, considering. They're no Chris Granner or a David Thiel, but they still feel pretty good. Still pretty good. Software, Keith Johnson, Ted Estes, Alex Levy, Joe Katz, J.T. Harkley. Very, very cool. They did make a lot of changes to the style in this game. So, for example, on The Hobbit, they went in a bit of a different direction than they had with Wizard of Oz. They went for something with a little more open playfield and a lot less clunky. But because it's a wide body, the ball does lumber around, doesn't it? Is that a good way to put it? Just kind of lazily makes its way around the playfield? The drop targets are weird. It's so loud. The drop targets are weird. Now, these are all individually controlled drop targets, So it's not just the bank. It's like each one can come up and down. So that means each one needs a coil. It's got four of these playfield troll-style pop-ups, which I think are actually very cool. I really kind of like those. So you roll through an in-lane, and it pops up a certain troll. It's kind of like a hurry-up. It's really neat. Stern's version of a hurry-up is like, shoot this ramp or shoot this target, where Jersey Jack was like, no, no, no, each one is going to have a pop-up, and each one is going to be a hurry-up. It's very cool. It tends to end up in a bunch of multi-balls at the same time, which is a bit unfortunate. But the play field itself is kind of neat. What do you think? Just the layout. Let's talk about the Joe Ballser stuff.
    79:28
    It's there. Okay. So the upper flipper. People complain about the upper right flipper that shoots into the dwarf drop targets over by Smaug. I know someone on a forum, their forum name was Hobbit's Upper Flipper or something. I thought that was one of the greatest names ever. Yeah, pretty useless guy. Pretty useless on the forums. Well, speaking of upper flippers, according to Joe Balzer, he says, we changed the game and got rid of the upper left flipper. So it's supposed to have four flippers. It would have two upper flippers that are completely different. One thing that I thought of that never made it into programming was if you use the flippers like two different sorts, because the game is all about different sorts. If you made that shot, the kill shot, from the upper right flipper, it would be worth big money compared to if you just made the shot when you weren't qualified. It had more meaning in my head than how it came out as a final product. I guess that's probably the best way to put it. You can see that it just didn't come together. Whatever they had planned for that flipper just didn't come together. So, I mean, as much as it is kind of useless and a waste of build of materials, I mean, I get it. Hobbit has clunk, but it's a different kind of clunk. Is that fair? Yeah, I guess you could say that. I mean, it's got smog. He's cool. I like the ramps in the middle. It's kind of neat how it works. It's kind of, I wish one of the ramps was more to the right and maybe forward. I wish there was maybe another ramp instead of two vertical up kickers on either side. Like, there's some things that I would change, but it's fine, and it's unique and different, which is Joe's kind of call sign. All of his play fields are, like, different. And it's heavy. It's ridiculously heavy, because all those troll mechs it has, so heavy. Brutal. It's a good thing they didn't put that other flipper in there, you literally would need a forklift. Joe would leave Jersey Jack right around the release of this game, and he became a plant manager at an assembly plant completely outside of the coin-op industry. Joe would once again take some time away from pinball, but he would eventually be lured back. This is where I think we get into the part of Joe Balser that few people really know about. This is the bread and butter, Ron. Mm-hmm. Well, what does Joe say? Joe says, I always had the bug to get back, and I had an opportunity with this new company called American Pinball to finish a project. Yeah, so American Pinball is this company that kind of came up out of nowhere. They all kind of wanted to, everybody for some reason had noticed that pinball was on an upswing, and some people wanted to get in on that upswing. So American Pinball is a company located in the Chicago metropolitan area, which is, of course, the pinball capital of the world. American Pinball is a company whose sole mission is to provide the highest quality pinball machines in the world. Everything they do at American Pinball is done with their customer in mind and to produce a product that the customer will fall in love with and enjoy for a lifetime. And this may or may not be from their website. This is right from the corporate website. The American Pinball team has been listening to the pinball community and is driven to design pinball machines that appeal to the collector, the pinball player, and the commercial operator. Everybody with a heartbeat, I guess is what they mean there. American Pinball prides themselves in delivering a quality product that can meet the demand and expectations of their clients. Wow.
    82:58
    That's where the magic happens. it was in the end of 2016 when the team at American Pinball kind of decided to wade in. So if we actually go into what American Pinball is, it really is a small pinball manufacturer, and it was launched in 2015 by Davil Vasani. He really stepped in to rescue John Papaduke over his whole Zidware implosion. They would start to work with Papaduke on Houdini on a concept pinball machine. The pinball trends at the time were really starting on the upswing. You picked the wrong guy, though. Did he ever? Yes. Let's talk about that a little bit. So we talked about John Papaduke and American Pinball and Houdini in our John Papaduke episode, but let's go through just kind of a brief refresher here. basically there was an original Houdini and John Papaduke ran into some problems with his company Zidware and to generate some money and to help manufacture his Magic Girl pinball machine Papaduke started working with American Pinball when the John Papaduke American Pinball relationship collapsed it was Joe Balser who was brought in to try to salvage John Papaduke's design on Houdini and make it profitable. Joe said, I came to find out they had a big black cloud over their head early on. There was a lot of issues working with John Papaduke, trying to get his game out to customers. Once I found out a lot of the history of that, there was only one way to go. Start over with American Pinball with a game quickly, something that people enjoy. Basically, they're like, hey, Joe Balser, you're a great pinball designer. You've got some experience with Jersey Jack helping them start up a pinball company. We were working with John Papaduke, and it has gone very poorly. Can you come in here, try to salvage this product? Joe Balser sits back and goes, oh, my God, this is crap. We've got to start all over again. Yeah, Joe said there was a layout for Houdini, but honestly, the shots didn't go anywhere. It was more kind of put together for more of a show-me type of thing, for the artwork, not for an actual mechanical working game. Ownership insisted on bringing it to a show. The wheels kind of were falling off because people were looking at the play field and knowing it wasn't really a completed play field. I remember that. Yeah, one show they brought it to. They had it behind ropes and stuff so you couldn't get too close to it because they knew it didn't work. Go in and look at the sources on our website for the John Papaduke episode. There's where you've got links to the old Houdini images. And you can find those at silverballchronicles.com. You know what the crazy thing is? after this whole thing with Papa Duke, he still got hired by Deep Root. Still got hired by Deep Root. It's amazing. Joe had met with American pinball owners, and they wanted to start all over again. He said he could save them money on tooling by using the same ramps, but he wanted to staff up to get Houdini out of the door from November and get it ready to show at the Texas Pinball Festival the following March. Ron, that's a five-month turnaround. That's for a brand new design. Yep. Manufacture the game, staff up. The ownership actually told Joe that there must be something wrong with him because there's no way they could do it in five months. Joe would say we had a factory with no line. We had no employees. That was a pretty aggressive thing to say. I mean, we are building everything, but we don't have a line. We didn't have a lot of things set up. We didn't have a front office, no procurement. Nothing was there. We have seen over the last few years companies taking two, three, four, five years to get that game to market. I mean, his other company, Jersey Jack, they took, I think, about two years. Two years. And they stumbled along the way. Like, Joe is basically saying, no, we're getting everything up. I don't think he gets a lot of credit for this. Joe Balzer is only seen as the guy who made the games at American Pinball, which are okay, and the guy who did the Simpsons Pinball already. he does not get enough credit for being really the man that brought API of American pinball to what it is today And I hope that this episode you know even though his designs are clunky he gets some credit because he deserves it It was really really difficult to get talent at this time I don't think people understand that. If you're going to get engineers or production managers or programmers, I mean, everyone is at Stern that you'd want, and everybody who's not at Stern who you'd want is at Jersey Jack. All these companies have been together for 15, 20 years, big companies, and they're just going to start out of nowhere. Well, one of the names that they brought in was a guy named Josh Kugler. Josh says, He called in the favors. Well, Texas Pinball Festival 2016 rolled around and Houdini was revealed. Yeah, I remember that. Here's a funny story. Three Houdinis arrive at Texas Pinball Festival. They had tons and tons of extra parts, right, because you're scared that stuff's going to break. You want to get it fixed. They forgot pinballs. They didn't bring any pinballs. So they literally had to rush over and buy them from Marco's Specialties. Yeah, Marco's booth. I was there for that. That was fun. It's charming. It's endearing. They played, though. All the games played fine. They didn't completely fall apart. They didn't need the parts. American Pinball told customers they were going to ship in 2017, and on December 30, 2017, they shipped three Houdini pinball machines. I mean, that's stretching it a little bit, you know? Yeah, I remember. It's like, well, we got them out. We got them out. You know, you got two days. You got three machines out for two days. But, you know, good for them. You know, it's nice. They did it. They struggled a bit, but they did it. It's pretty impressive. Now, Houdini, Master of Mystery, that, of course, came out in December of 17, but really 2018. We don't know how many units were made. It's designed by Joe Balser. Art by Jeff Bush and Matt Risterer. Animation by Ish Ranis.
    89:30
    Music and sound by Matt Kern and software by Josh Kugler. I've played, I wouldn't say a lot of Houdini. I've played Houdini a few times. It's okay. The theme. Well, it's an unlicensed theme, but it's based on basically some open intellectual property. It's named after Harry Houdini. Harry Houdini, or Eric Weiss from 1874 to 1926, was a Hungarian-American scape artist, illusionist, and stunt performer. He did a lot of really cool magic-y stuff back in the day. So what they did is they basically took all of his famous magic-y stuff and made each one of those kind of a mode around the game, which I think is actually quite ingenious, because you don't have to pay for a license, and you can kind of do what you want. So it's licensed-ish theme. Yeah, the custom back box with the weird, like, curvy shape. Yeah, the art's pretty good. I mean, it's not as cool as J-Pop's original sort of art, but it's cool. I kind of like it. Yeah, but this game actually works. The one thing, though, about this game is that it is clunky. It's really hard to shoot. It's really tight shots. Why did they change the art package? Why didn't they just keep the art package? Well, Josh Kugler said, from my perspective, I think it was important to really separate it from John. Obviously, he was pretty toxic at that point. Joe was making changes to the play field. The art was going to require some changes. It was more about wanting to ensure that this Houdini was our Houdini. Clean slate. Now, people talk about the tightness on this game as tight but findable. Would you agree? It's tight. Yeah. It rattles around a lot of those shots. But it has, when I was talking about Baywatch, the multi-stage skill shot thing, this has that in the coolest feature, which is the trunk. Oh, so cool. You shoot the ball, it goes into like a saucer, ejects it over to the left side of the play field, which it goes into a catapult, and then it fires it into a trunk. And it goes from literally like the bottom left flipper all the way to the back corner. Like 20 inches? It's impressive. It is super cool. And it pretty much, every time I tried it, it actually worked. So that's always a good thing. It's pretty impressive. The issue is, though, that there are so many shots and they're so tight that the rails on the machine are not like your regular kind of metal rails you see in Stern. They're like literally metal, like, walls because it needs to be that thin to fit all of the shots in. It's got some subway shots in there and stuff. What does Joe Balzer say about the tight shots? Well, he says Houdini had this thing about tight shots. A couple of tight shots. all of them being tight shots. Tight shots are not bad shots. A tight shot is a very meaningful shot. When you make it, it feels good. You know what I mean? I know you think it's tight shots, but then the next guy you see playing, it hits it three or four times in a row. You know what? It's not that tight. You're just having a bad day. What do you think? He's saying play better. I like it. Play better. Well, can you imagine Houdini with tighter shots? Well, it originally had them. That's right. Joe Balser would say early on it had about half-inch targets. I changed them all through a suggestion by one of my good friends. We picked an eighth of an inch of all of the shots. Every shot that had anything to do with a narrow target at each side. The shots grew. They didn't get tighter. So they took an eighth of an inch off the targets. Yeah. He has his own custom stand-up set or even narrower so he can put more of them in. Just make one less shot. Just one. God, it's clunky. I wish this game was a little better. Also, the animations are pretty crap. Wow, such opinions. We're here about history, not opinions. It's all opinions.
    93:37
    Well, Josh Coogler says, it only amazes me more to look back at what we accomplished from, like, November 15th to March 20th when we showed it at Texas. It's just mind-boggling to me still. What I know now is that we actually were able to do that and pull it off and have that game where it was at that point in time. A lot of that was Joe knowing how to get things done quickly, who to call, and where to get the right help. Joe deserves the credit. And I think we're giving him some of that credit. I think if you want a game that looks pretty but may not work, John Papaduke is your guy. If you want a game that actually can get built and will get built, Joe Pulser is your guy. Yeah, that's right. But it's going to be clunky.
    94:18
    That's fine. It doesn't mean it's not fun. I think Houdini is lots of fun. I have lots of fun playing Houdini. But it is a challenging game. You've got to be good. Well, Joe's thoughts on design philosophy. Joe says, my main objective as the layout designer of a game is to do the best I can to make the ball move and make the shots work to the best of my ability to fit with the game rules themselves. When it comes down to a crew designing a game, I feel much more comfortable. Not necessarily as a delegator, but you have your job to do, so do it. The artist has his job to do, the sound guy, the mechanical guys, everyone has a job to do. If you let people do their job, the final product will come out beyond your expectations. Go get crazy. That's what pinball has developed into these days. I just had a little tear. Just give me a second, Ron. Go crazy. That's the Joe Ball-Serve thing. Go get crazy. Pinball developed into those days. So go get crazy. So that proves Prince is the next game coming out.
    95:15
    Well, if you want to talk about going crazy, I guess we've got to talk about Oktoberfest. Remember, he wanted to do Oktoberfest. That's what Striker Extreme was originally going to be. Yep. Now he finally got to do it. It's the Amusement Park Harvest Festival theme based around Oktoberfest from over there in the Germanys. From March of 2019, this is the first launch of American Pinball of which I was in the hobby. It's your same crew working on design and stuff, but software we've added a fellow named Joe Schrober. There's no R. Schober. Joe Schober. You know what I think of when I think of Oktoberfest? A monkey. No.
    95:59
    I think of the movie Pink Panther Strikes Again. Oh, no. One of my favorites. You ever see that one? No, no, I didn't. Inspector Clouseau, all that. Well, there's a scene where all the assassins are trying to kill him in Oktoberfest. So he's at Oktoberfest, and all the assassins are trying to kill him, and it's hilarious. Highly recommend it. The Pink Panther Strikes Again. There you go. If you need movie recommendations, Ron is your guy because he's seen all the good movies, you know, 30 years ago. No, that was more like 50 years ago, bro. So what about the theme? Is it a good theme? Some people say that this is the worst theme in pinball history. I disagree. It's not great, but I think it's cool. Well, Joe says everybody wasn't on board. But once we got everyone to understand that it's more like this big, gigantic family party that happens all around the world, people bought in. There's an aha moment on every idea. No matter what it is. But when it comes down to game theme, you need that. Yeah. Is it a good theme? I mean, it is a party, and there is beer. I mean, if it had, like, a beer sign on the back box or something, that would have been big. I think it's a good theme. I don't think it's a great theme. So here's the thing. People talk about theme-selling pinball machines. They are 100% right about theme-selling pinball machines. If your objective is to sell 5,000 machines, you buy the Star Wars license. If your objective is to sell 500, choose whatever the heck you want. We all assume everybody wants to sell 5,000 machines. Well, that might not be the case. Spooky doesn't. They say that straight out. Yeah. They literally say, we don't want to be the big guy. We only sell this much, and we move on to the next game. And their themes are usually pretty good. Yes, he's taken aback. I just blew away his logic completely. It did, however, have a very rocky beginning, did it not, Oktoberfest? It took a lot of crap in the beginning. It had the offensive monkey pick. So the monkey, this offensive monkey. So on the original back glass, there was two frow lines on there. And you can see this over at IPDB. And they're waiting to get into the Oktoberfest beer garden festival thing. And the monkey is groping them. And the monkey's got one hand on a butt and one hand, like, up a skirt. Which the monkey, I think, was supposed to be, he was going to be like their, they were going to have him in the yard of all their games. Yeah, he was like a mascot. He was going to be kind of the American pinball mascot. The funny thing is, this was at Expo, and no one noticed this. But when somebody noticed, then, oh, my. Later on, yeah, then it hit the fan. Oh, my goodness. And, I mean, it is, it was a poor choice to do. I mean, you can have the monkey flirting with the ladies, but to be sexually assaulting them. Now, there was also another prototype backlash.
    98:38
    And that one is Otto, who is the sort of the American, who is the Oktoberfest beer guy. He's holding a stein in his left hand, and Inga, who is the Fraulein, is empty-handed. It also had a prototype cabinet where each side of the cabinet just has the name Oktoberfest, partially obscured by Otto and Inga. However, in the final production, Backglass, Otto was holding the stein in his right hand, Inga is holding a string of festival carnival tickets in her right, and the production cabinet has Oktoberfest fully visible. So you could tell they kind of struggled out of the gate a little bit to kind of, oh, the prototypes, we've got to figure that out. This kind of underlines a lot of issues when it comes to pinball companies, when they launch things that aren't quite ready for production, just to kind of tease people to show them what we're doing. Yeah, well, one of the worst of that was Jersey Jack, because they would always take two years plus per game, so they would have early prototype versions of shows. and we mentioned The Hobbit earlier. When they had that at Expo, everyone hated the art. It just got panned. And it wasn't bad art. It wasn't that bad, but they literally redid the entire art package because of the feedback they got at that show. Now, this is a three-flipper game.
    99:59
    You know what? I think this is probably a fun game, but it runs into a couple of those Joe Balzer issues. One of them is a third flipper that can't quite make a side ramp, which is in a weird location. It has what I call the Steve Ritchie shot, the high-speed shot, where you can hit left orbit, comes around to the upper flipper, and you're supposed to hit the side ramp, except you can never hit the side ramp. It even has a magnet in front of it to stop it, to give you a nice clean feed, and I could still never hit this thing. I played this at a show. We had like four of us on it, and the only thing we were trying to do, like, okay, someone needs to hit the side ramp. No one can hit it. Yeah, and that's a shame because so they even went through programming changes to increase the power. They did that on the bottom right flipper because the left ramp is hard to make. So at certain points, they will increase the power on the lower right flipper so you can actually make the super steep left ramp. Yeah, the game kind of runs into a couple of almost crippling issues. It's still fun. It's very good. The games that are made now have addressed a lot of these issues. They've changed coils. They've done some things. Even though they had these problems when they kind of first got out of the way, they're not problems now. So if you want a better one, get a later build. But what does Joe say about the sales of this game? He says, that's a fully loaded model. That is a company we agreed on moving forward. I don't think it hit the right market at the time. I don't think it was pushed in the right direction at the right time. I think it's still open for that game to move. It still has legs to move. Josh and Joe did an incredible job. Joe there being Joe Schober. Yeah. Not himself. He's not talking about himself in the third person. That'd be weird. Yeah, it would be weird. But this game is, if you look at Houdini, Houdini's got some cool stuff. But this thing is loaded. It's loaded. It's got a beer barrel ball lock mech, which I think is awesome. A cool habit trail thing that reminds me of Roller Coaster Tycoon. Yeah, what an awesome habit trail off the corkscrew. When I played it, that's what everyone wanted to do. They wanted to hit that and see that. Right. But it's like impossible to hit the damn thing. Or it was. And, you know, it's got a flip up ramp and it's got bumper cars on the top of the pop bumpers that are custom molded. And lots of standoffs. Lots of standoffs. Millions of standoffs. Like it's not a, it's great. It's pretty cool. It's lots of fun, but it's not, it's not a knockout theme. It's not a knockout design. It is a bit clunky still.
    102:34
    Give a shot. Throw your quarters in. It's fun. You'll have fun. Trust me. Give everything a shot. Yeah. You'll have fun when you play this game. Oh, now we go to my favorite. Your favorite Hot Wheels. My favorite American game, yes. It's the toy race car play game theme from June of 2020. Joe Balser on design. Art by Jeff Bush. Animation by Ish Reynos. Music and sound by Matt Kern. Software by Josh Kugler and Joe Schober.
    103:05
    What about this for a theme, huh? Hot Wheels. Everybody had Hot Wheels. Joe says, we were looking to do a driving theme, and once we started to talk with Roger Sharp, we found out that the Hot Wheels license was available. We moved in that direction. We wanted to do a license theme with a better price point. You get a win-win to the customer and to the end user. A game that plays well, make it a good shooter, keep it more of a non-clutter play field not a super lot going on so this is going to be a scaled back game which it is right so they put in so much stuff into oktoberfest and it didn't pay off they're going to put less in hot wheels and hope it pays off i literally have a hot wheels car in front of me on my desk and i said mattel was awesome to deal with they also provided a cool youtube show called hot wheel city for the animations which is great multiple companies that pursued the Hot Wheels license. One apparently was Teeproot Pinball. Oh, gross. One of the best things about it is that YouTube show. It has the robot chicken animation and it's hilarious. It's so good and they integrated it well and it's fun.
    104:15
    Unfortunately the lack of toys kind of makes for a bit of a boring game. Nah, I like it. Also the sound can be a bit annoying. Nope, wrong. When you brick a shot into one of those targets, you get this, like, ding, ding, like you're crossing a full-service gas station thing, and just hearing the ding, ding, ding, ding, like, over and over and over again, drives me nutty. It really does. So in here, we don't have a big ball lock mech. We don't have a whole lot of stuff. We have red line. But we do have a lot, yeah. So why don't you talk about red line there? There's these stand-ups. You hit them enough times it goes into red line mode where the whole game goes dead and everything turns red. So the main toy of the game are offset stand-up targets. It's kind of boring. Yeah. It's fun. There's no physical ball lock. It's fun. There's no loop-de-loop. I like it. I feel like you could almost put this theme on any – I feel like this play field was pretty much like you could put anything on it, unfortunately. It's funny. You remove all the toys and all that stuff and make it shoot better, and I immediately like it more. Okay. It's just a taste thing. I really think in this case. This is not a clunky game. This is a flow game. I saw a shot good. Joe can do it. The shot's not too tight. Not a bunch of stuff in there that makes the ball just kind of clunk around. One thing we didn't really mention, I think one of the reasons they were able to get games like Houdini, when they did that in five months, unlike at Jersey Jack where they just started from scratch with everything,
    105:48
    at American Pinball they use the P-Rock. Yeah. board set so they didn't have to screw with just creating a whole new framework they didn't have to reinvent the wheel they just had to build all the other stuff but at least they didn't have to worry about that part the the game itself you know joe took a very uh group approach to the layout he added more of the play feel elements then he'd consult the rest of the engineering team and the programming people and change the layout a little bit but unfortunately i feel like this was a bit of an over correction from the two previous games which were particularly expensive it didn't really sell gangbusters. Nah, you're wrong. The other issue that this has is that it was released kind of secretly to a test group at a convention at a New Orleans... Yeah, like a non-pinball thing. Yeah, and then unfortunately what happened was people with their potato cameras leaked some of these images and people were like really kind of let down because what they saw was just like pixelated yuck. Yeah, but they were supposed to have the big reveal at Texas Pinball Festival. Yeah, in 2020. Yeah, so you know what happened there, this little thing called COVID. Yeah, this was the first launched pandemic pinball machine. Yeah. Josh Coogler says, Joe was most upset about TPF being canceled because I know he was so excited that the presence we were going to have there. We had plans for two full-size Hot Wheels cars there. I think it was Rip Rod and Bone Crusher, these full-size cars. Those are Hot Wheels originals. Yeah, they had this huge launch. They were like, here we are. We're moving into a theme. More than any other game, I think, the pandemic hurt Hot Wheels. I totally agree. And there was a lot of marketing staff who they did, too, on it. They did a lot of things that kind of really hurt it. They did a stream, and the stream had, because, of course, they can't reveal it in person because it's a pandemic, right? We're literally separated, and everybody's working from home. So they did an online stream on Twitch, and it didn't go particularly well because they had internet issues and things were up and down. And, of course, you couldn't stand next to each other because Chicago made everybody stay in separate rooms. So they had audio issues. So the initial first impression really cut the legs out from under Hot Wheels. I have a friend of mine here in the province that has a Hot Wheels. I've played it quite a few times. I really like it. It's not, I wish it had a little more. I wish it had like a really cool physical ball lock. I think that would really like make the game just like one step up. Because I feel like it's a lot of money for kind of not much. The digging annoys me. Other than that, great game. So it was around this time that we heard that American Pinball was starting to lock down various themes. And you could have seen these back in the day from trademark filings. Some of those trademark filings were Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes, which I think is actually a really good theme, Valkyries, and Poker Run, which is like a car kind of theme. Yeah, that confused me. Yeah, I heard it was a car thing. Like, doesn't it have something to do with poker? Yeah, so what it is is it's sort of like Cannonball Run. Oh, so it's Jackie Chan in it? That would be awesome. God. What? You drive from location to location, and you get a poker card, and then at the end, whoever has the best poker card wins the poker run. It's kind of cool. Did you know Cannonball Run 2, it was Jackie Chan and Richard Keel in one of the cards? There was a second one? There was the second one. I love Cannonball Run. But I mean, just that visual, Richard Keel and Jackie Chan. So Joe was let go, unfortunately, from American Pinball. This was when David Fix was brought in. You want to do it? That's right, baby. He was brought in, the American dream of American Pinball. David Fix, baby. So who is David Fix? David Fix is a guy from Buffalo who worked for ICE. You know ICE? No. They make like the Czechs hockey games. Oh, right. Basically, he was in gaming for years and years and years with ICE. Very cool. David Fix is also one of the people with Pinball Expo. Yes, he's one of the main organizers of Pinball Expo. Yeah, so there's been a regime change at American Pinball, And part of that change in the leadership, Joe left. He would actually go for a cup of coffee to a company called Home Pin. And I think it was only a virtual cup of coffee because I don't think they actually met. No. I think he probably wanted someone to get a lineup and make it so they could actually build games, which, who better than Joe Bolster? He did it twice. Exactly. It did not happen. It did not pan out. Currently, Joe Balser sitting on the sidelines of pinball design and pinball. It's sad to hear. How would you wrap up Joe Balser's career in pinball, Ron? He was a guy that got games made. He got games out the door. He made companies. Set up lines, had all the contacts in manufacturing to get the stuff actually built. That's his superpower. You know, building pinballs really hard, he was a guy that could actually do it. Joe Balser was not a perfect individual, just like everybody else. I'm perfect. Everybody except Ron. Thank you. Okay. And we have to say that Joe has worked his way through his career. He's given us a lot of happiness. I think what people need to remember about Joe is that this guy built companies. and he doesn't get any credit for that, especially American pinball. He basically gets crap for the design of Houdini and some of his clunkiness, but he's much more than that. How about this awesome quote that I got from Joe Balser? Joe says, I just picked up a Space Jam recently. I only have four games in my collection. I've had many more games at one time in my life, but you go through a couple of divorces and a few pinball machines kind of disappear.
    112:01
    Oh, and make sure you go out and play some Baywatch. I'll just say. And the Simpsons pinball party. I mean, I don't want to play it, but everyone else loves it, so. Play Houdini. It's fun. It's a good game. Play Hot Wheels. Bye-bye.
    112:21
    As always, you can send your comments, questions, and corrections to civilballchronicles at gmail.com, baby. Very good. We look forward to all of your messages. and we read every one of them. Please subscribe to our Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, or your favorite podcast show. Turn on the automatic download so you don't miss a single episode. Remember to leave us a five-star review. That way more people can find us. Join us on Patreon to support the show. Become a pro-crony. It's the perfect way to say thanks when it starts at $3 a month. Want to get the early access to the episodes before everyone else? Have a strange love for Twitter? Do you know what Discord is? jump up to our $6 a month premium cronies. Want all the other perks and a shirt after three months? I know I love shirts. Join us at $20 a month, and you can be an elitist crony. Maybe you just want a T-shirt, baby. I understand. Swing on over to silverballswag.com. Get your Silverball Chronicles T-shirt that says, Son of a plumber, baby. That's right. Then you can defeat the destiny of Ric Flair, who's trying to destroy pinball for everyone.
    113:28
    I'm just looking for the people that left so I can say, how do I figure out notifications? Oh, no. Your wife canceled her membership. She did. She's dead to me. Wow. You should mention that. My own wife canceled her membership. Your podcast sucks. Beep.
    114:46
    During our episode on... So we spoke about Apollo 13 on our first episode of... What the f*** is his name?
    115:09
    We've had too many episodes. See, we're already forgetting. Oh, my God. What episode did we talk about that on?
    115:16
    Time for another team. My throat is just killing me here. I'm having throat pain. We'll be right there, Mr. Dennis. But once we got in seeing parts of the movie and reading what it was going to be about, We thought it's going to be... Just get the last sentence. No, no, no. I'm doing this, damn it.
    115:50
    You with your washrooms, your tea. You spelled check wrong in this. I had to fix that. I thought you changed that. I'm like, I don't spell check that way. No, I spelled it the proper way. The way we... No, you C-H-E-Q-E check. No, no one spelled it that way. Not here. What's a check? I looked at that. I'm like, Jesus, I didn't... Why did I spell it that way? I saw somewhere someone mentioned a rubber check, and I'm like, what the hell is that? I had to look that up. It means bounce check. Like, I've never heard that term.
    116:17
    You've never heard that before? Rubber check. Huh. Weird. Said we had a surprise for me. Oh. A lot of fucking clicks there. All right. From the top.