And I believe that came out, I think that's 2005, right? Yeah. I should know, considering it's Pat Lawler's, you know. Best game. You're on the record. Yeah, it's the best game Pat Lawler's ever made. Well, I do think, to get this back on track, I do think that Keith Ellens actually got in a couple games now that we could be pretty much considered soft licenses here. Oh, okay. So the first is Jurassic Park. Now, Alex talks about this all the time. Yeah. Which is why we started stringing this episode along. And it's like, but essentially, like, if you look at Stern's Jurassic Park, it's essentially the name, the logo, the song, and the Nedry character. And that's it. Yeah. That's like literally all they got. It's like literally the logo, the name, the song. And Nedry. Yeah, Newman. It's kind of funny. there's really no storyline at all that directly links to any of the movies or the book or anything it's just a generic dinosaur island but for some reason nobody questions it like it feels like an authentic jurassic park it's not like when you play it it's not like oh it's not like playing like a gottlieb you know how they did the parody games back in the days like gold wings is top gun it doesn't feel like you're playing a parody because they got the song and they have the logo and frankly that's all apparently you need for something to feel like jurassic park it's interesting yeah because there's no main actor likenesses aside from nedry and they don't even get the jeep dude they had to gimmick the jeep they did have to give me that's pretty whack honestly it's always funny because people are like nobody cares and when i saw that game the first time i'm like what is that like they didn't even get an explorer in here come on guys i'm like the worst complaining about little nitpicky shit like that you're a car guy but that's why i was so hyped on 007 i'm like oh they got the db5 i'm like this is cool as hell dude jurassic park is kind of like dinosaur island like we said but with a famous name and logo and the super famous musical score by john williams and since all the dinosaurs from the movie are actually just based on dinosaurs wow they are there's no i have to pay for the likeness of the thing there's no ip for betraying certain dinosaur species unlike if you were doing something like the xenomorph from alien the hr geiger designed alien forms from the alien movies like that's that's a unique character t-rexes are t-rexes t-rexes are public domain they're old enough yeah they're i think they're a little bit old enough they don't get the likeness rights you don't get the royalties anymore their estate isn't settling yeah and that's one that people were pissed at first myself kind of included the game is you know well you might be hearing this for the first time but that game's pretty highly regarded yeah it's it's always in the top five pin side list it jumps around a little bit but it is considered to be one of the best games of all time despite them not securing a lot more of the assets that would have made this game feel more representative of the classic movies or even books i think that's why it's so funny people still are like well when any time a rumor comes up or a game is announced they're like well they better have this and this and that and this or the game's just not gonna have a chance and you're like how many times do we have to teach you this lesson old man yeah exactly like how many times Does Elwynn need to make a game with nothing in it that's on your checklist and still sell a shit ton of units? Now, here's the thing. It's like what's very interesting is that the difference is most apparent in Jaws, which is another Keith Elwynn game based upon another iconic Steven Spielberg movie. In that game, Stern actually does get lots of movie clips, actor likenesses, audio call-outs and stuff. The storyline is much more synced to the movies, although it does stray a bit, too. Yeah, you can't really keep a game one-to-one to the movie. But all the big strokes, like the broad strokes are there. And so it's interesting that you're like, these are both really highly regarded games. They're both Steven Spielberg movies. Stern made both of them. Keith Owen designed both of them. And yet they kind of handle, one is a very clear licensed theme. The other one is like, it's licensed, but barely. It's a soft license. Yeah. It's a soft license. It's a soft license, dude. I think that really does a good job of illustrating, like, if you go see a Jaws and then the Jurassic Park, you see what we're talking about between, like, a real, a full-bodied license and a soft license. I think when people consider their dream theme, whatever, when they're thinking about, like, I would love to see this made, they're imagining Jaws execution. Nobody's hoping that they make their dream theme and it comes out with, like, Jurassic Park where they get one character, the name, and the song. They want all of the character call outs because that's what their imagination. They've got a small little I'm just reading Alan's show notes here. He says you have a little pea sized brain and you can only think within the context of that movie. And you see the movie and you go, oh, when the Goonies come out, I want that to be a multi ball. That's not how it works in reality. Sometimes it doesn't matter what's happening. You're playing pinball. It's funny how you end up liking both. you end up liking jaws game than jurassic park does it have anything to do with the assets they acquired no like whether one's better than the other it doesn't no one's sitting here arguing like well jaws is the better game because they have the clip of the guy crushing the fucking can of beer but even though they have the the clip the shark doesn't eat the ball so oh that does okay you're right that negates it in the movie the shark eats the ball so you know what i mean the next sub-genre of soft the license that's we're moving into i see but like the organization here the soft license band pins okay so we did a whole episode about band pins and we actually discussed three band pins in particular that felt different than the others one of our criticisms in that band pin episode is that sometimes the storyline feels kind of stupid like you're just gonna like collect the band members get drumsticks hit the jukebox to pick a new song yeah go on tour yeah and so that it feels dumb can't go on any more tours alan these three games told different narrative stories than the more common ones of the grandpa band themes so stern made two of these the first being iron maiden another keith ellen game which has a bunch of licensed classic iron maiden songs but it's actually based on a much lesser known mobile video game called Legacy of the Beast. I knew, okay, I had heard that they used assets from a cell phone game. I didn't realize it's like, that's like where it's all pulling from. Yeah, and it actually centers on a storyline set around an original Iron Maiden universe where all the different versions of their iconic mascot, Eddie, are vying to collect all of his soul shards to save his soul against countless different enemies, including the devil himself. This makes the pinball machine Iron Maiden way cooler than if it was just concert footage of the band and if the modes were just to change the jukebox or go on tour or any of that stupid shit. Yeah, and they didn't have to pay for a video of like those old men playing their songs that you like. Rat. The devil is public domain. Yeah, again, licensing, right. He didn't snap those up. You think he would with all of his lawyers, but he just, you know, slips through the cracks. The other one that people do talk about more often because of how it was executed is Foo Fighters. Yep. In a similar way, Foo Fighters foregoes the normal band as a theme cliché. It reimagines the band members as old Saturday morning cartoon characters in a battle against alien invaders. So they kind of built the entire theme of the game based off of the name of the band, Foo Fighters, which was UFO Fighters, whatever is their thing. So it feels like Foo Fighters music with a mashup of Scooby-Doo and Attack from Mars. Again, this is one that we think elevates the game a lot. That was an example. When they announced Foo Fighters as a theme, I'm like, what the fuck are they going to do with Foo Fighters? They have no iconic images. They have no characters. I did not know how they were going to execute that at all. And that thing is like one of my favorite, like, well-done band pins possible. It's so much fun. Contrast that with Led Zeppelin, KISS, ACDC, any of those. Yeah. And how different it feels because it has like a narrative storyline. Well, you know I like Led Zeppelin, right? It's the game that saved my marriage. But it is a bummer because it's like when I think of like I was I like all those games that we just listed for Led Zeppelin, Kiss, ACDC. I like all those games. Those are all fun games. The themes are stupid. The themes are done poorly. Like it's weird. And if you don't like the band, it's hard to be like, oh, well, but the game kind of rips. It's a hard, you know, like it's weird. It's hard to separate the like the pin from the artist on those ones because the entire thing is just the artist. It's just like when I'm playing Foo Fighters, even though it's always playing a Foo Fighters song while I'm playing it, I feel like I'm playing like a goofy alien invasion game. Yeah. Which is fun because it gives structure and a storyline. Yeah. To the game, which I think is helpful in a modern game where you have modes and wizard modes and shit. When you're trying to get me to like do a bunch of stuff, it's nice when it like makes sense. Yeah. And it isn't just like, oh, you like complete hell's bells to get to Thunderstruck Wizard. And you're like, what the fuck is this? Exactly. Get some VIP passes, dude. Yeah. It's like, what the fuck? But like, what else are you going to do? Which is crazy because ACDC would have been I feel like a fairly easy one to build a whole theme or whatever But the last example of this what is it Spooky also did this with Alice Cooper Nightmare Castle Y bitches think we weren going to talk about Spooky You think we weren't going to talk about it? We mentioned it. The band pin is actually Alex brought up. He's like, yeah, actually, you forgot this game. Well, so we're bringing it up now. So Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle, and I think to a lesser extent Rob Zombie 2, Alice Cooper has its own kind of dungeon crawl and a haunted castle storyline. I haven't spent a ton of time on either, but I appreciate that they actually have like unique storylines. It's not just like what we said backstage passes, you know, I go to the fuck. Got to get us to the fucking show, dude. I have no personal experience with Alice Cooper's music or him outside of like him being in Wayne's World, which is pretty good. Like I kind of know a couple songs and now I know they're Alice Cooper songs because of the pin. But I don't think I would have been able to name any. but i'm like that theme is cool it's got cool art it's a got a cool like they did a good job like integrating the castle like it looks very it looks like a castle yeah fucking rad it's got cool rules bone karen's did a good job with those rules they'd be fools to let go of that talent and uh it's a cool game it's it's well done i like seeing band games like that and then we get to spike to marvel themes oh i say spike to for the listener if you're listening spike to just means the current operating system that stern has been on since what 2016 before that like 2014 aerosmith came out aerosmith was the first one it's anything that has an lcd screen in the back glass so the more i think about it it sort of makes sense to me that stern makes a lot of what i'm calling air quotes here generic marvel themed games because they used to make before this they used to make games like spider-man iron man and the original gomez avengers that were tied to the movies that were based on comic book characters that were made around the same times as the games they were making three banger games but recently they have seemingly chosen to make them based off of the comic book characters themselves and i think they're probably doing it for the same reasons that we talked about less licenses to secure and more freedom in the storylines that's it right like comic book superheroes are always in new and different storylines so it seems like a natural once they have the relationship with marvel and once marvel already has given their vote of confidence to the new stern art director jeremy packer aka zombie yeti so it's like once they have that relationship they're like well if they want to make another spider-man or incredible hulk game or whatever kind of trust them we could just do it yeah it doesn't have to be like oh now we need the actor licenses that that played this character we need Captain America we need the actor that played him we need Thor and then we need that Chris and then we need the other Chris that played the other guy you know it's like they don't need all that shit you know what I mean like they can make the iconic character and they can make their own game so I think even these kind of Marvel games make a lot more sense now too because it fits well because yeah that's how it goes and especially like within the world of comic books like comic fans are not opposed to kind of like one-off stories and like unique timelines there's always if you go if you multiverse dude everything's a multiverse now everything it kind of has little spin-offs and like little separate stories and stuff and you just like that's kind of how it goes in the world of comics so it fits right in and it works well to just be like yeah we can kind of like do this however we want you can kind of base it off of like something like i know with x-men they based it off of days of future past or whatever a real specific little uh thing or avengers they do the Infinity Quest, right? Right. But it's like still kind of tweaked to like fit how they want. It's not 100% like this. It's not the movies Avengers Infinity Quest. Right. Which is a different thing, which would be harder to do. Yeah. So now we get to some of our takeaways here. We talked about some of these soft licenses, but, you know, name recognition is actually, I think, the biggest asset in licensed pinball games. Everything else is just icing on the cake. some of these soft licenses are just original storylines with famous names pasted on top of them i mean is it not yeah it starts feeling that way when you look at them critically that's what i'm saying they tricked us dude we kept being like nobody's making original themes anymore nobody's doing this and you're like stern's been putting out fucking original themed they're not original themes but they're original stories right that's the more important part that holds you back when you're making a game trying to stick to a story when you're making a pinball machine is more difficult yes it's not more difficult it's more limiting i should say it's more limiting there's there's more walls around you there's more hoops that you got to jump through you got to thread a needle in a certain way that you know just it being deadpool is different than it being deadpool with ryan it also is limiting from an economic like looking into the economics of everything it's really limiting being tied to specific deals and having to have manufacturing timelines or production like limits or whatever that's how spooky for example negotiates all their deals so like with like rick and morty or whatever they can make 750 because that's how many they could make and the time they were able they would they had paid to use that license to make games that's how they secured that deal whereas like king kong they can run king kong for the rest of time and never have to pay keep running for the next five ten fucking years they don't care they can put it yeah it could be 15 years from now they can put out a king kong vault when people are like because you know that it's instant classic no one writes instant classic we haven't played it yet but you all know it it's game of the year twippy winner 2026 like it's fucking happening it'll inevitably be widely loved i'm sure i'm gonna love it and they can keep running it forever it's it's beautiful it's like fodder for a line when you have a production line like that and you have a game you can run and you don't have to deal with licensors that's genius dude that's like an amazing amazing asset to pick up that all being said we get some of these amazing games we get these soft licenses you know individual variants and what your feelings are any one of them is obviously going to be different like you could be like well i like this one i don't really like that one this one would have been better with assets or whatever but you got to admit looking at this list of soft licenses there's at least one of these that Stern has made that you've enjoyed. So you know it can be done, whether it's D&D or it's Jurassic Park or it's one of the band pins, Foo Fighters, whatever, one of the Marvel games. This is what I'm going to ask Waterboy. Would it matter to you if they had all the principal main actor licenses doing custom call-outs, video clips from the movie, et cetera? My question for Waterboy in particular is, if Stern makes The Fast and the Furious, what do they have to get to make you happy? Does it need movie clips? Does it need Vin Diesel or does it just need the actual cars? Can the cars be fake? What would it take to make you happy? So I think this is a good question because it's a theme that is near and dear to my heart as a big Vin Diesel fan. Vinny D as you call him. It's a good example though because it speaks to how it really matters on the specific license. I think the most important piece of this is that Stern or whoever's making a game needs to understand what is truly important to that license. So they need someone that's familiar with it enough to know what the fan base really wants to see. I like the Fast and Furious movies, and I'd love to see a fully licensed game based on any of the first three. Past that, I don't really. I watch them. Actually, I don't even know if I've seen the last one. But I've watched most of them, which is a lot of movies. But I've seen the first three, you know, dozens of times each. There's tons of iconic moments in there that I think would work great. I'm one of those little pea brain people that is like, oh, they could do this for the they could do this for the multi ball star and they could do this would be how you start that mode. And this would be that. But as far as like soft licensing, one of those, like if you were cost cutting it, I think I would much rather see licensed cars than licensed actors. because to me what makes Fast and Furious what is important why I'm drawn to that series and what stood out to me over the years is not the I mean the actors are I guess the actors change too the actors did change like my favorite Fast and Furious movie is probably Tokyo Drift which doesn't feature any of the recurring actors other than the cameo from Vin Diesel and so you're like to me the cars are more important and I think a lot of Fast and Furious fans would agree with that the cars are more important than the characters I think the name alone with generic cartoon cars would be like a slap in the face. There's a children's show like that on Netflix. Like there's a Fast and Furious, like cartoon friends shit show. I don't know what it is. I know that there is something like that. And if it was something like that, it would be like, no, this is absolutely like juvenile. I had no way I would ever buy a Fast and Furious game with knockoff cars. And likewise, if they had one where it was generic cars, like what they've done with John Wick, where John Wick in the movies, if you watched any of the John Wick movies, they do have like iconic cars in them. I think there's like a 70 Mustang in the first one or something. He's got muscle cars in all of them that I've seen that I remember. Yep. But the movies aren't about cars. So I'm not offended that the game is about Keanu Reeves. It's not about the cars. That was a smart choice to me. Like if you had to pick one or the other. You've got to have Keanu Reeves. The cars don't matter. No one's watching John Wick for the cars, even though there are cool cars in it. Fast and Furious are watching for the cars. And so it's important to understand that. And yeah, I would much rather see the iconic blue underglow R34 GTR ripping across a bridge in Miami than Paul Walker's face. Like, honestly, if I had to choose between those, if you're going to get generic cars and Paul Walker or an R34 Skyline and no people shown on the screen at all, easy choice for me. Cars all day. And I even put in here, even if that means the Skylines recreated as a fresh 3D animation, even if they didn't get any movie licenses, just having a licensed car is the important part to me about that. That's why I wrote this question, because I thought this is a perfect way to ask you, because I'm like, those movies are huge. It's entirely possible that Stern could at some point be like, yeah, maybe we'll do this. They'd be a company that could do it. It's interesting. It's a good example, too, because Rothrills has made Fast and Furious racing arcade games, and they don't have any of the characters licenses. They just have licensed cars in it. Right. That was the choice they made. And that's if Stern was doing it, I would pray to God that's the way they do it if they can't secure everything. Right. License the cars. Netflix has done it where they just got the name Fast and Furious and nothing else. And it's like a kiddie show. And if you're making a kiddie show, that's fine. But like you can't do that for like a pinball machine that you're trying to sell to adults. I think with Jurassic Park, they knew the name and theme song were enough to make you feel like you were in that universe. if they had landed the rights to Sam Neill, that's the main dude. Dr. Alan Grant. Famous Alan. Us Alans stick together. If they hadn't landed the rights to Sam Neill but not the theme song, would the game be better? Definitely not, in my opinion. Agreed. Like if you started that game and it was just like. But shirtless Jeff Goldblum.