Hello everybody. We have a distinguished software engineer and that's a first for our show to have a a guy who does software. Sometimes it's hard to understand how his work is manifest in the pinball machines. We're going to explore that. Bill, I guess you have some slides prepared for your explanation of your life, your existence, or whatever you're going to explain today. I thought I would just talk about how I started and some of the stuff that I've done. Because I've seen you on stage with a team. You know, you have these Williams reunions or something like that, and you're up there. And this is your first time going solo, I think? Pretty much, yeah, pretty much. No pressure here? Yeah, no pressure. You know, we don't often get out in the bright lights. It's kind of scary for us. Yeah. But, yeah, yeah. So, let's start on the next slide if you want. But, so, software engineer. I went to college to be a software engineer. I actually ended up with a degree that was half software, half hardware, computer engineering they called it. I got out of school in 1991, that's forever ago now, but, and it was a recession. And I had a really hard time finding a job. Sent out lots of resumes, had lots of interviews, got rejected for almost everything. And including one of the interviews I had was with a guy named Kerry Mendick, who was a midway electrical engineer. So you were in the Chicagoland area already? I was in the Chicagoland area, yep. I grew up in Chicago. And I remember at that interview with Kerry, and I teased him about this this past year at our reunion, that I was looking at his desk and he has a computer that is completely disassembled on his desk. It is just, you know, power supply, motherboard. It's just the whole thing is all across this whole desk. But it's still working. He's got his monitor there. He's typing on his keyboard. But it's just completely. And I'm sitting there looking at it, and I'm thinking, this looks exactly like my desk at home. And it's just kind of one of those things where you go, this is probably where I should be, right? And so about eight weeks later, I signed up with a temporary agency because I couldn't find a job anywhere else. and the first place they stuck me was at Williams and I was working in the factory at Williams so that was 1992 and what were your job duties? so it started off doing kind of odd stuff like I did a little bit of soldering in a line occasionally and assembling stuff but eventually ended up in what was the quality control department they had a big push to try and prove the quality of the games that were being made so quality control was the last person to play the game for it in a box. And so you ended up, you know, testing the game. Sometimes I had to fix things that weren't quite right. You know, Adams family, they were building 160 Adams family games a day. So they had a lot of people, a lot of testers, they had a lot of, you know, quality control people. And so, you know, I'm in this factory and it's, you know, again, this felt like the place I should be, just, you know, the sounds, the smell, the excitement of the games. But when you have 40 games on test at the same time, just the noise that that makes. And if you know Adam's family, when you're playing the game, making a jackpot or a super jackpot, the game just goes crazy, the lights, the sound. Imagine 40 of those all in a row doing the same thing. It was a fun place to be. Is there anything you can say, I found this bug in Adam's family? or this problem? You know, at that point, I wasn't even thinking about software, right? I was focused more on just what was mechanically wrong with the games, right? Okay, all the switches and all that. Switches, the lamps, the solenoids, that's what you did as a tester. But as I'm working in the factory, I did whatever I could to try and meet the people from engineering because they would walk right by and all the people from engineering. And so every time he got a chance, I'd meet somebody. Occasionally, I'd see Steve walk by. Steve was legendary for being the one who always cashed his paycheck on payday. And so the goal was to try and get to the paycheck cashing place before Steve because they'd run out of money when they cashed his check. But, so eventually, I met Chuck Black, who was head of the electrical department at Williams. And I told him, hey, you know, I'd be interested in a position in engineering if one comes available. And probably six months later, he came down and he says, well, I think I've got something available for you. And that was because all of the people that left to go to Capcom. Oh, right. So Capcom was starting it up. So Python, your brother, went to Capcom, Mark Ritchie. Mark Cotabella was an electrical engineer. And Mark Johnson was the cable guy. so I found a spot in the cable department in electrical engineering and that's you know that was my step into the door um says car guy car guy yeah yeah I like I like cars I grew up working on cars um it's still a hobby of mine um I was um Pat Lawler's big car guy too um so I've done a lot car stuff with him. I was his pit crew when he was racing cars. So, yeah. The next slide. I looked up, I finally found the first game I remember ever playing, 1973, it was a Williams Jubilee. It was in a bar, a pizza pub in a town by our house. I remember vividly playing that game. It was kind of my start to pinball. So, all right, the next slide is the Midway Let's see if I'm missing anything here. Yeah, the famous entrance to 3401 North California Avenue. So I think it's interesting just how many games. In that short time, I worked in the factory for just over a year. I think it's interesting just how many games that are, you know, the core of what we consider, you know, the big area for Williams. I mean, Adam Stanley, Getaway, Black Rose, Doctor Who, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Fishtails, Whitewater, and Dracula. Those are all the games that I worked on in the factory testing those games. And that was in like a year and a half period. I mean, all those games, that's how many game teams they had at Williams. That's how many games went through there at that time. It was just amazing looking back on that. Yeah, and for those of you who were here last hour, this is up against Tales from the Crypt and like that. so a lot fewer from the competition they still made a lot of games too compared to what we're doing now we sold a lot more games back then we made a lot more games but again it's interesting for me to look back and see how many really big games came through in that time that I just happened to walk in the door because I worked for an temp agency so in electrical engineering the first game that I did cables for was Star Trek Next Generation. So if you've ever had a game where the cannon harness breaks, you can blame me for that. That was my fault. I used the wrong size wire. I should have used a heavier gauge wire. I didn't know. It was the first game I did. Same thing for Judge Dredd and Popeye. I did cables for those games. and other odd jobs around the electrical engineering department. But I started to meet some of the programmers. I met Dwight. I met Mike Boon. I met, who was he? Well, what about Larry DeMar? I didn't meet him until a little later because he was, at the time I started, he was actually a contractor for Williams, and he wasn't in the building all the time. So he was in and out. He worked out hours. So I didn't meet him right away. I met Ted right away. Ted was the head of the department. Ted Estes. Yep. But so one day I'm talking to Dwight, and I'm working on the cables for Star Trek. And we were talking about what stuff was going on. And he says, you know, have you ever thought about doing software? Well, my whole life I figured I'd be doing some sort of electrical engineering type work. And he's like, no, you really shouldn't be doing software. And he was right. He was right. I realized quite quickly that that's where the cool stuff was at Williams, was doing software. And so I started, you know, I set up one of the development kits that they used for, we called it an Orkin, because it found bugs. But it was basically a backbox that had all the development stuff so you could load code into it and run code. So I set that up on my desk and then started learning how the software worked at Williams before I was even in the software department. And that's when I started, you know, when I actually met Larry DeMar. I wrote a... Dwight had written a breakout game to play in one of... Is that Star Trek? I think that was in Star Trek, wasn't it? Was Breakout in Star Trek, do you remember? I don't remember. Yeah, but you'd written a Breakout game on the WPC system. There was a poker. Yeah, yeah. It wasn't meant... I've never seen Breakout, although it's rumored to exist, I think. Yeah, it wasn't... I'm checking out on doing it because it was a licensed Atari game. Right, right. Oh, I think I could have beaten that. I think there were some other brick-chipping games before that. Yeah, yeah. So I actually wrote a breakout game on the same system, but instead of using the display, I used the lamps, you know, the lamp matrix. And that was something that Larry saw. It was really interesting because he never thought of doing that. So that's when I met Larry. Yeah. So we did a bunch of games and software. Demolition Man was the first game I worked on with Ted, and he taught me a lot about how the system works. and I was a great teacher in just how to do software in general. I knew what to do, but the style of things was kind of the stuff I learned from him. Okay, let's pause there a moment because yesterday we had Demolition Man under the rig so world champion Eric Stone could show somebody how to exploit the game, what's the right way to play it and so forth. is there anything that you felt really good about in particular the particular coding or oh well i mean it was my i mean first introduction to doing the the display effects doing the graphics work for pinball machine and that was really exciting because you got to work with the artist the dot matrix artist Eugene Geer and scott salmiani scott was amazing he could just come up with stuff so fast. He would outstrip me by days where I'd say, I need this and this and this, and he'd come back, okay, here you go. I'm like, I didn't even start on the first thing I asked for. He was just amazing. It had some really good stuff because it was a movie and there was lots of good clips, like the start of Multiball where you see the helicopter flying in over the mountains and stuff. They translated really well to Orange Dots. Part of that's Scott and part of that's just because of the way the movie was, you know, like the car crash scene where the car is flying into the billboard and stuff. It's, you know, stuff you can do in low-resolution dots. Right. But the one I really remember having fun doing was the one on the multiball starts where I did this really cool lamp effect where it's these little explosions that go off over the play field. And it's just a really cool build-up thing that I thought was really interesting and fun. It's still fun to see that when people play the game. Well, it's here at the show, so you can try it out. Yeah? Yeah. The next one I worked on was Corvette with Tom Euban. And Tom was a new programmer at Williams, but he started about the same time I did. So we got to work on that together. And same thing, I did most of the display work, and he did most of the rules programming. We kind of learned stuff together. And he's still a really good friend of mine. There's a Corvette here also. Yeah, yeah. Dirty Harry was a project that a lot of people worked on because it was not managed very well. So it was one of those where everybody had to jump in and try and get it back on track. Another place where, you know, Larry was helpful in making that happen and also very appreciative of the work I did on it. He made it clear that he saw that I had really contributed to that project and got it back. And then a couple other little projects in the middle, but Congo was the last game I did, the last pinball game I did at Williams. And I was lucky enough to be the lead programmer and worked with Dean Grover, who passed away last year. That was a lot of fun. That was a really long project. Not many people know, but that started as a two-level play field. There was an upper-level play field that was cut out of the same board, and the gorilla that's down below originally was motorized, so it would raise up out of the play field in the center. But it was decided that that design was not any fun, so basically it was wiped away and they started fresh. So it was a very long project. Now you mentioned that you would be doing a lot of display effects and other people doing rules when it comes to driving a mechanism. Is that considered a display effect? Would that be in your realm? No, we would call it a device driver. So you start off with something that's like the claw in Demolition Man. That's a device. We would write a device driver for that, a code that just determines what that thing does, and then you would tell it, go to this position, so that the user of that doesn't have to figure out, do I have to go 25 steps or 35 steps? You write a device driver that does that work for you, and you can tell it at a higher level what you want it to do. and maybe in some cases query where is the arm or whatever or is it broken can you do anything with it that's one of the first questions you ask I guess since we've mentioned Larry so much he's a real pioneer in compensating for broken stuff how was that helpful to you Do you remember anything from those days? Well, I remember when I first started looking at the software at Williams at the time, I was amazed at how much there was. I mean, playing the game, you see the high level of the lights and the sounds and the display. But there was, I would say there's at least ten times more stuff behind the scenes going on that I had no idea was even there. Things that even today I don't think people even know about. The WPC system supported something like 20 different printers that were used by operators to download the audits. Our distributor in Germany, fanatical about keeping track. This is long before USB. Yeah, serial printers. So every printer used a different cable, a different interface, some were parallel, some were serial. But the distributor in Germany was fanatical about keeping track of how much the games earned, how long the ball time was, how much multiball people got. They wanted to know everything. And so, I mean, nobody knows today, but if you have the printer kit installed in the game and you have one of their printers, you just walk up, plug in the printer, and it dumps all that out automatically. And to me, and then you mentioned the compensation stuff, but the other thing that Larry worked on was the auto-percentaging, which John talked about, the patent for auto-percentaging. Things like replay and extra ball are auto-percentage, would automatically adjust for the particular location how much free play it gives out. The code for that, staggeringly big. You'd think, oh, that sounds really simple. I don know It complicated to make it work right and not overcompensate not give away too much free games as you trying to get the system up to speed Like I said, just the amount of stuff that was in the game behind the scenes to me was staggering. I never would have imagined before walking in the door how much was in those games. How big is the code to, like a flashing light effect where the flashes get closer and closer together? Is that a lot of code or? So if you wanted to, I mean ignoring the code that makes the low level code where you actually have to turn on, somewhere you have to turn on a switch, somewhere you have to turn on a transistor that makes the light come on. And it's a little more complicated because most games have a matrix. So you've got a row and a column you have to turn on to get one light to come in. Ignoring that, if you wanted to have a light that gets going faster, that's probably about six lines of code, right, just to do the blinking part. But then you end up with, you know, all the stuff that says how long do you want it to go, right, how fast do you want it to go at its fastest, right, how fast you want to go to slowest, right? And each increment, either you have to figure out how much to increment or you have a table that says when you're at this, blink this fast, or at the next step, blink this fast. So, yeah, at the slowest level, probably about six to eight lines of code, but probably more like half a page to get the whole thing to do that lamp. Okay, and that half a page is something that the rules guy would then be able to just think in terms of what the user is experiencing. It's a total of 10 seconds of faster and faster. It's this fast at the beginning and this fast at the end. Okay. Well, that gives us some beginning insight into easy versus hard. Yeah. Where are we on your timeline? Yeah, let's finish this up. So after Congo, Congo was the, I think it was the worst-selling game that Williams had done. They built 2,000 or bought parts for 2,000 and sold something like. Yeah, it says 2129 on IPDB. Yeah, well, I think they really sold like 1,500. And they planned on doing all these kit games for Congo, and that was a huge failure. Yeah, I forgot about that. Yeah. Yeah. the kid game thing sounds really good but when you think it through you have to take a good game that's either somehow not earning money anymore or has to be worth less than the game that you're going to put in it and destroy it I'm going to take my no fear and turn that into a Congo and that just doesn't quite make sense that was a big failure So downturn in business for Williams, and they're looking for anything else to make money. So that's when they got into slot machines. And I ended up doing a game called Phantom House, which was kind of like a slot machine but not. It wasn't really gambling. And then they only sold 50 of those. So it didn't sell very well. And then when PIN 2000 and the rest of pinball shut down, I was given the option of working in slot machines or going home. So I worked on slot machines. So does that mean you know a lot about how to get people all excited so they keep pumping money in? I do. I do. We call that random positive reinforcement. there's this whole psychology of how you get people addicted to things we can talk about that in terms of pinball too pinball is by definition random so the random part is already there what's important is giving the reward for things that happen that are good I don't have to put random in pinball you get that anyway, that's Steve's job but I have to give the reward for doing something good in pinball and that's what gets people excited about playing the game again and you get that one little hook that goes wow that was cool I want to do it again I think of combos also where you can do this shot and feel good and you can do that shot and feel good but to do this shot and set right up and do that shot and of course Demolition Man is like the ultimate do ten combos in a row There's a cool sound effect when you get, I think, the seventh or eighth combo, and the lights keep getting bigger and bigger. Yeah, it's the reward that you have to work on in pinball. And then eventually the slot machine thing kind of lost its luster for me, and I went to work for Cisco Systems, not the food company, router company. C-I-S-C-O. Yeah. And did that for about seven years, and I got laid off from there. I was still working with Ted and Tom Uban. They worked at Cisco with me. And then I was hired by Larry DeMeyer again to work for his company, and he was doing slot machines again. So slot machines for, I did that for about another 10 years. Wow. And then back at Jersey Jack in 2019. And who brought you into Jersey Jack? Pat Lawler. Okay. He had taken over engineering at some point. I don't know all the history to how that came about. But I had talked to him, and I said, you know, I'm looking for a job. I'm interested. I had a couple other options, but I was really interested in working in pinball again. And so I talked to him, and a couple of months went by, And he says, I think I finally figured out how to make space in the budget. Yeah. Well, now there's a lot of ex-Williams people there. But which ones were already there when you got in? Well, Keith P. Johnson was the head of the department. And Ted Estes was there in software. All the other software people were never at Williams. They were younger. Williams didn't exist when they were there. There were a few other people in mechanical that had worked at Williams. Not all of them on pinball. Some had worked on slot machines. Peter Dorn worked at Williams, did a lot of the top boxes for slot machine. Hernando Furtado was one of the, he did a lot of work to set up the factory, mechanical engineering work. I remember working with him at the factory. So he was there. He's since retired. Let's see, who else was there when I started? Purchasing people. Ron Summers was in purchasing at Williams, and he was working at Jersey Jack when I started there. So there were quite a few. You're all crammed in this little tiny building. Yeah. So you have a slide for, oh, that was the recruitment there? Yeah, yeah. So Jersey Jack, I started off doing software. We worked on Wonka. And then we were working on GNR. And then COVID hit. And I don't know how people know, but during this time, they had already been planning to move the factory from New Jersey to Chicago. that had started in I think maybe November of 2020 or 2019 2019 and then COVID hit in March of 2020 and we were already moving the factory we couldn't stop that so but but before that there was a like a development team office yeah yeah so that's what you started with yes they so the engineering had always been in the Chicago area, and it was in Bensonville. It was a small 5,000-square-foot office. And all the development works, the mechanical software, were all done in that office. The sound people and artwork were outside. They were contractors that worked outside an office. And so Duncan and I started about the same time at Jersey Jack. Duncan Brown. Duncan Brown and Mark Molitor was another guy that came from Larry's company who's an artist. Tell all these guys we want them to come here for our seminar program in the future. I know. I know. That would be awesome. But – So you built a factory there or you rented one and then you had to move. I got asked by Pat Waller if I would help set up the new factory. At that time, it was kind of still secret. They weren't telling a lot of people they were going to move to Chicago. And so he picked a few people to help him without making a bunch of noise. He asked me to help him with that. And so I researched all the stuff for getting the factory set up, a company to do all the conveyor work, a company to set up the warehouse. We figured out how to lay out the factory into what we remembered as a pinball factory. So I helped him with that all through COVID. It was me and one other guy in this 60,000-square-foot warehouse, and we're putting tape on the floor to figure out how to. And I actually ended up running the production line for a year after that, too. We hired all the supervisors and trained them how to build these games because nobody moved from New Jersey. We had to hire all new people. So I ran the production line for a year, and I finally found somebody who was much better at it than me and hired him, and then I went back to doing software. So that's my story. I threw this picture in just because we have a lot of fans at Jersey Jacks. Okay. Sorry, I couldn't resist. So the first game at JJP with your software involvement is Wonka then? Yep. And they were in the middle of that game when I got there. There was still a lot of work to do, but they had been working on it for a while. So any particularly glamorous work that you got to do for art? Well I think it's glamorous, but I don't know other people do. But I did a lot of the work for the Wonka Vader multiball rule. I wrote some of the rules for that, did most of the display work for it, lamp effects for that. I thought that was a really cool feature where you lock the ball and it stays across games and stuff. the gobstopper. Ted wrote the device driver for the gobstopper to make it open and close, and then I made the rule where you lock the balls in the gobstopper. And then I wrote the pure imagination wizard mode for that game, too. Okay, and then GNR is next on the list. GNR. GNR. So, this was COVID, right? We saw the storm coming, not knowing exactly what it meant. But I clearly remember two days before St. Patrick's Day 2020, we rented a truck and we loaded up all of the prototype games for GNR and took them to everybody's house so we could keep working. Because we didn't know. Did we get shut down for two days or two weeks or six months? We didn't know. So I packed them all up. And so we're all working in our homes on the game and, you know, trying to divide up the work. And we had all these songs. We ended up dividing up all the songs. And each person took like four or five songs to get through all 20 of them. In that game, I wrote the structure for the way the lamp effects for the songs work. So every song has its own lamp effect. I wrote the structure that lets you sync up the lamp effects to the part of the song you're at. Yeah. I believe we've had Eric talk about how proud he is of the musical, being a musician himself and such. Yeah, but that was something I don't think they'd ever done before, where the actions of the lamps are tightly synced to every single beat of the song. And it's literally every single beat. Yeah, like Gottlieb Brock did a cheesy version of that. If you played Gottlieb Brock, you would know what was intended, but doing it Eric's way is... And Eric's dream was the full concert experience when you played the game. And that was only possible because we got all the assets from the band. We got terabytes of concert video. We got the actual studio masters for the songs. And like I said, it was an immense amount of work. And the only reason we were able to get through it is because it was COVID and we had nothing else to do but work on that game. Right. So how does that work in practice as far as your house developing your code and you just upload it somewhere and you get other people's code, like their releases 0.98, 0.99, that kind of release? Well, we can talk a little bit about real programming stuff, but if you're an aspiring new programmer, learn version control. Learn a version control system. I don't care what it is, but it is the only way to keep yourself sane. It gives you the ability to back up and say, well, that didn't work so good. I'm going to go back a couple days and either see what I did wrong or start again and see how I can do it better. Learn a version control system. Git, you know, Git's free. It works great. If you've never heard of it, look it up. But we use a version control system for our entire software development process. and it's cloud based so I check in my changes and all the other people on the team can download those changes just by checking them out and it doesn't so they can back up your stuff if you broke something there's a thing called blame in the system we use where you can literally just tag this is the person who broke everything yes but like you said if something gets broken, you can back up and just undo those changes and figure out why it was broken or just leave that stuff out. Yeah. But, and it does an okay job. Some things are better. It does an okay job of merging changes together. If two people are working on the same piece of code, you have to merge the two together so they work. And sometimes you can automate that. Like if you're working, one person's working the top, one person's working the bottom, you can usually automate merging those together. If they're working the same function. Or if they're adding to a list of options and they're separate options. It's not without its pitfalls because you make a change to, let's say I change how many pages there are in some sort of story, but the guy who's writing the thing that shows those pages on the screen, if he doesn't know about it, then you're probably going to have a bug because you're going to have one page that you can't show somehow or something like that. So, again, working in teams on the same area of code is inherently dangerous, but the tools help a lot. Any other recollections of Guns N' Roses, of successes or compromises? Well, successes, I think one of the biggest successes in that game is the way the music, the studio master recordings, are synced up to the video. The videos are all from their current concert tour, or the current at the time, and the recordings are all from their album releases, which were 15, 20 years ago, before their concert tour. That worked really well for them. And that studio stuff was probably a lot more precisely produced and controlled. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And part of that is, you know, J.P. Duin in the Netherlands doing the, you know, he's working with, I think he worked with his brother to do that, where they're going through and listening to the music and adjusting the cuts for each scene of the concert footage to make it line up. and part of it is the work that I did to make sure that the sound stays in sync with the video that you know if you're if you're 18 seconds into the music track you need to be 18 seconds into the video track and so I'm pretty proud of the way that came out that works really well in that game all right and Toy Story 4 I started working on Toy Story and Joe Katz was the lead programmer It was a really cool thing to work on because it was so broad and the stuff you can include in that world and just getting into it, and that's the time where I got sucked into running the factory. And for a while I was like, oh, I could keep helping Joe on this, and then I could go back and do the factory during the day, and it was too much. So I did a bunch of early stuff on Toy Story, specifically all the carnival games that you play. I set up the framework for that. I wrote the first two games, and then, like I said, I got sucked away and I couldn't do a lot of work on it. So I did come back after, towards the end, and do some more work to help him finish it up. But, yeah, I don't feel like I contributed as much on that game as I could have. But I was doing other stuff. And next. Well, I worked on Godfather. Did some work on that. A lot of the UI display was work I did to lay that out. I wrote some of the rules for that. What's the name of the one? Man, it's not working well. Who has a Godfather? Yeah, no, it's Compound Multiball is the one I wrote. I really like that feature, the horseshoe, that the area came up with that. and difficult to make the – I should have included a picture of that. That's a good one to talk about. But the horseshoe shot where you shoot in and then it catches the ball, but you can hit the target and knock the ball back out, that was really difficult to figure out how to actually keep track of the ball in that case because you could have – you know, you've locked a ball, but then you can make a shot that actually kicks the ball back out, and it's not really locked anymore because you push it back in the play field. It's a very similar problem to what the people from another company were talking about earlier today, the bash locks in the Barry Osler tribute game. Same thing. You need to know that change of state. Yeah. Well, I mean, the hard part is figuring out what you're going to do when that happens. Yeah. Right? You can detect it. You can see, oh, the ball went away. but you've got to decide what you're going to do. Does that mean you have to shoot it back in before you can start multiball? Does it mean maybe it's broken? Right. The ball just went away. What can I do? It's gone. And is it on the play field or is it stuck somewhere else? You don't know. And at the rules level, that's what they were talking about this morning, is one player puts it in and all that. Yeah. You know, how you account for all those different things that could happen. We're a little ahead on my slides here. So if we back up, what is that? We've got the fan slide already. No, well, I'm on this one here. Okay. But, yeah, that compound multiball, that was a cool and interesting rule to write. Plus there's a skill shot way to get into the compound. and so that was fun to write. And then I think we're up to Elton John. I think so. So what are your points of pride, things that you really like that you were able to pull off? Well, I really like that the whole package came together, and I can't say enough about the team that worked on the game. And, you know, Joe Katz is the other programmer that really helped me out with the rules. Joe, again, doesn't do a lot of speaking at seminars and stuff like that. But he really is the core of modern pinball software design at our company, I think. Wow. and very smart, very dedicated to making fun games. He's a really good player too, really good. And where is Keith? Keith is my boss, but he really doesn't tell me how to do my job. It's a creative process, and he'll comment on stuff we do, and he doesn't tell me what to do other than work on this game. And he's busy working on his own game too. He was lead programmer on Godfather, and I'm always going to him asking, what did you want to do here? How do you want this to work? We're another very smart person. So overall package, just amazing, I think. the artwork, the play field layout is amazing fastest game we've ever done at Jersey Jack by far the sound package it's Elton John's music but I'm really proud of the way it sounds in our game and I think it's fun to play but individual things one of the things I was really proud of is the display on the piano it's a neat feature but the part that I thought was interesting was it's 500 lights it's 500 LEDs and it runs off of our lamp system right it is no different than every other LED that's on the play field you know it's driven by the same system if you you know if you tell it to turn on all the lights like we didn't go into Diag and turn on the lights those lights in the piano come on right there They're LED lamps. But one of the things that I wrote was a driver to be able to do all of our display system stuff on that piano. Yeah, I was about to ask. Somebody had to make that package. Right, right. Because we have all these really cool tools for doing stuff on the display where you can, you know, we can do fonts. We can do text on the display. We can show movies. We can show still images. We have all these tools for the big display, and I wrote a driver that does that for these lamps. So it takes this array of lamps that's 57 by 10 and treats it as an actual display, like any other display in our system. So you can make foreground and background effects on it. So there's actually times when you have two different things showing on that little display on the piano. So I was really happy with the way that came out, because it was a big chunk of work that It took me, I don't know, it probably took me close to a month to get it to work. But once it was done, all these other tools that I had in my pocket for doing the regular display work, they all worked on that little thing full of lamps. Yeah, and that display is a key part of the player's first impression when they walk up to the game. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's funny because those LEDs are actually so bright that we had to turn them down. When we first started doing that display, it was literally like, turn it down, I can't see anything else. Right, and when you say turn it down, that's a software thing, right? Yeah. So you're the one turning it down. Yeah, yes, yes. But I was proud of that. But in terms of rules, I really like the way we did the wizard mode, the collecting milestones to get to final tour. Because to me, I really like that theme of, well, if you haven't played the game, so you collect milestones throughout the game to qualify final tour. and there's 10 different milestones in the game and you get them, the easiest one to get is by getting combos so the first milestone you can get from getting a combo but there's harder ones making a super jackpot is another one and you can qualify final tour with 4 milestones it's relatively easy to do but if you can get more milestones the final tour is worth significantly more points significantly more features becoming able to be in that mode I really like that easy to learn, difficult to master theme. Want to give any shout-outs to people you've worked with over the years? Inspiring? It would be a long list. Larry DeMar, great inspirations. Great boss to work for, very creative, very talented person. I've talked about Ted. Ted was a great manager, and I learned a lot from him. Still a good friend of mine. Tom Euban was a very talented programmer before he did anything with games still is today good friend of mine what sound guys you like working with mechanical engineers Chris Granter, John Hay some of the from the old days still talk to them once in a while some of the people at Williams or not Williams, at Jersey Jack have been really good we have a new one, Pierce Pierce Colbert he did the Elton John game he's really good I've never worked with David Thiel he was not in our company but Bacasse was really good on GNR I'm trying to think of some of the other people Eddy Hicks was the mechanical engineer for Congo He's still a good friend of mine. I just saw him in Milwaukee last weekend. He's working for Stern. So really brought Williams into the AutoCAD era. When he started there, people were still drawing on paper, and he really helped to get them up to speed on what you should be doing in AutoCAD. So that's 30 years ago now. Yeah, but I think it's interesting for people who think about boutique pinball companies and it's just so different that at a place like Williams, you've still got Steve Kordek there, and there's a lot of institutional knowledge, as the cliche goes, that is directed toward being better at the old methods. And somebody has to say it's time to go to AutoCAD or SolidWorks. When I started at Williams, they were still drawing on paper or vellum. still had a huge blueprint room where if you wanted to make a change to a drawing you'd have to go down and check out the drawing and you'd make your changes and then you'd get them approved by the head of mechanical engineering and then they'd put it back in the blueprint room and that's not that long ago that was the way everybody worked so I got to see them switch to AutoCAD or the electronic drawing archive Yeah, pretty interesting. All right, let's see. Is there a burning question in the audience? Someone who's been really waiting to ask a question? All right. I have a comment. Oh, comment. Bill's awesome. He, you know, we find bugs. There weren't very many to find, and when he did find them, people were kind of lazy and work around them and stuff. but Bill finds them and fixes them. And, you know, it's kind of like a jack-of-all-trades. He worked in the factory while I started. He was still working and running the factory, okay, at Jersey Jack while I was just starting on Elton John. And so, I mean, I've got to give them a play field. They can't have it immediately, but, you know, we had regular talks about everything that I'm putting on the play field. So I let them know everything I want to do. And it's like, they have things they want to do, too. And so many awesome, I don't know, teamwork connections in this game. And it was really good and easy to work with people who aren't egomaniacs. Not myself, excepted. I'm not. I said out in the hall, if you want to keep going, I've got plenty more real programming stuff we can talk about if you want to keep going. We're getting close to the 5 o'clock hour. Yeah. It's up to you. Well, let's see. Let's take that other question and see what we can do. You were talking about the GNR being the unique step into integrating software and lights and music because of the uniqueness of the masters. How does that compare to the Elton John? Because as you say, when you listen to the Elton John... Okay, so for the recording, the question is, is there something at the level of the technical difficulty that you did for GNR that is an equally difficult thing that you did for Elton John? Well, I mean, this is really easy. I used that same system from GNR in Elton John. So the same system, we made a few changes to it, but they're not in the way the system works. Yeah, but his hands are not just in the beat with the music you're playing. It's clean, too, which is really impressive. Yeah. Again, the answer there is I wrote that system for GNR. I used that same system in Elton John. So you had the masters from Elton John do that down to the note? To the beat, yeah. So it's the same system that we used for GNR, and then I had to write drivers to extend that for, like you said, the hands for Elton John and his head. But it's just an extension of that same system where on this beat or on this many seconds into the song, do this action. And so for the hands, it's literally recorded what action is to do with each hand for each beat of each song. Well, what kind of time interval? Are we talking tens of milliseconds for that or hundreds? Millisecond. Millisecond. Yeah, millisecond. For most of that stuff is enough. I mean, the fire time for those hands are 8 to 10 milliseconds, so you can't do them any faster than that anyway. so you have to give the fire signal 8 to 10 milliseconds ahead of when it's actually going to happen and have that come out when the music is you don't have to be that close for those hands you can't quite perceive that but you have that lag that once you tell it to fire you can't do it again because you won't see it you have to have that time for it to go down and the time for it to come back up So, yeah, about millisecond accuracy is enough for stuff like that. But is that? I literally just copied that system in and used that same thing. It's not the same as the videos, though, right? No, no. That's another interesting thing. So we did that really well-synced video on GNR where the video is synced up to the live concert footage. On Elton, and there's a lot behind this, But the real answer is the licensor asked that we not sync up video to his current concert video. And you can do this experiment at home, but it works really well at GNR where you have, you know, if you've seen GNR in concert, they sound almost like they do on the albums. They really work to keep that same studio sound. Axl is not quite what he was in the 80s. but he tries he really tries but on Elton John if you've ever been to any Elton John fans here been to his concerts he has really changed the way he sings those songs from the 70s and 80s I'm sure part of it is his voice has changed a little bit but I think especially listening to him in concert I think his I think his view of those songs, the meaning of those songs has changed for him over time and he sings them differently and if you try and sync up the studio master songs to his current concert it looks wrong it just does not work and they asked us specifically not to sync up those songs that we licensed with the videos from his concert tour So we do have video of his concerts in the game, and it's featured on the topper quite a bit. But it's not synced up beat for beat with the Studio Master songs. Other questions? Over here. What languages are you using? Are you using all low-level, or do you have... What programming languages? This was actually something on my list to talk about. So at Jersey Jack we use Visual Studio C++. It runs on Linux on the actual game, but we do all our development on Windows because the debugging tools are better. But I would not recommend that, right? Use what you have It doesn matter if you want to write in Python if you want to write in assembly language We had to write in assembly language at Williams because the processor was so slow at the time and our memory was so limited, we had to write in assembly language. And we were literally counting the cycles for each routine. We had this little, the 6809 had this little scorecard that shows for every instruction that you did how long it took. And we would be counting cycles because it was that critical that, you know, you didn't overrun your loop and run out of time. But today, you know, we're 1,000 times faster CPU rates. So, you know, use whatever you have. You know, the tools have gotten so much better. The processes are so much faster. you don't have to concentrate on that stuff as much. I like an object-oriented system for some things. It works great for modes. You think of a mode, you can write a base class for what the mode does, and each of the different flavors of the modes is a derived class. But don't focus on what language you use. Focus on writing the rules and figure out how to do them in the language you're using. Let's go up for another one. A follow-up to that. If no one has anything to say, you were talking about your display tools that you meant to do for syncing up the audio. Are there other sort of in-house tools that you've developed or other people have developed that use the process or whatever? Well, there's a lot of... There's a lot of history in the software we use that dates back before I started at Williams. When I started at Williams, they had at least 10 years of development on their system, and it had gone through a couple revisions. But this was what Larry DeMar did when he started at Williams. He contracted to create a new development system for Williams. And the system he created was, I think it's amazing, still is to this day, but very well-developed multiball handling system. keeping track of the balls that are locked the balls that are in the trough keeping track of the balls that are in play very well developed system by the time I got there they had already been through so many issues that they had fixed that that system was very stable, very reliable, very understandable and the system that they use at Jersey Jack is modeled after that system, but not written in assembly. It's all written in C++. And went through its same trials and tribulations and failures long before I got there. So again, that system now is 10 years in, is very reliable, very stable, very well developed. and you can do things like, you know, easily do things like the Wonka Vader lock-up where you have, you know, you can just, you know, locking balls that get lost to another player is an easy thing to do in that system now because it's so well developed and they've been through those problems and know how to do that. I can add to that too that over at Stern Pinball, in the mid-aughts Lyman Sheets started working there and Jim Shelberg and I were able to interview him about what he was doing, it was all low level stuff that the other programmers would use but it was like over a year of people saying what's Lyman doing, we don't see anything from him, well when the new system came out, then it was probably people like you or your equivalent at Stern Pinball would say, this is great. We're so much more flexible. So much is already packaged up for us. But on the other side of that, I'm going to be the one who tries to exploit all of the corner cases for that system. I'm going to find something where, hey, I want to do this. and like one of the things I really like to do in the games that I work on is have somewhere where when you're in multiball to put the balls it drives me crazy you've got six you have four balls in the play field you can't make any shots these balls are all on your way so one of the things I've done in most of the games at Jersey Jack I didn't do it in Elton but Guns N' Roses is a great example where you can lock a ball in the guitar in multiball. And they stay up there for 20 seconds or something like that. And if you can get all of them up there, we give you a jackpot for that. But that's one of the things, it's kind of like a signature thing I like to do. But get a place to put the balls when you're in multiball. Well, they had never done that at Jersey Jack. That was one of the things that was on the list of don't ever lock balls while you're in multiball. But I want to do that. But I was able to figure that out, and now it's easy to do that because the issues that we encountered in trying to make that work have been fixed. And so, well, this is what you have to do if you want to lock balls on a multiball, and it works. And you have to handle all those stupid cases, like if somebody tilts when there's a ball up there or when somebody drains at the same time a new ball is being served, stuff like that. And bad switches, too. I always have to deal with bad switches. Other questions? Well, to tell you a secret, we aren't actually locking the balls. We're just waiting. We're waiting to give them back for a bit. But they're not locked there. They will all come back at some point. Okay, another question here. How much work was involved in the news code update for Guns N' Roses? Guns N' Roses code update. Is it a big update? How recently are we talking? So I've been working on, I've been doing this work. This is because Elton John is, you know, trailing off. So I've been actually doing all that work. I have promised that it would be about, I think I promised it would be about two man months worth of work. So it's going to be twice that. So it is not a significant update, and there's not a bunch of new rules that are going to show up. But I've went back and gone through all of the songs, the scoring for the songs, to get them better balanced with the rest of the game. I've gone through all of the album modes, and tried to make sure, well, first of all, make sure they're fun because those were at the end of the project and they didn't get as much love as they should have. So try to make sure they're all fun. Have you played any of the betas yet that are out? I have, yeah. Okay. Same thing for Slash Solo. Spent quite a bit of time trying to make sure that's fun and the scoring is appropriate. And then I went through a list of things that people had complained about on the game, having the option to not start a song if your ball falls in the scoop. Right? So that's in there right now. You can turn that on. It's off by default, but if you want to enable that, you can. It's in the beta right now. Same thing. I had many people saying that on their game, the ball rolls out of the guitar lock and goes right between the flippers. So you can turn on a ball saver for that now. Again, all by default, but if your game does that... So significant amount of work, but there's not going to be a lot of new features. It's more fixing the imbalance issues and adding things that people have asked for that would make their game more fun. And hopefully by the end of June, there'll be a real release out everybody can get. Any implications for tournament play on that? That's a good question. Other than the scoring changes, probably not, because the tournament play should already be taking the randomness out between players. Right. So probably not big changes other than the scoring. It may change the path people take, because, you know, like slash solo now is a little more lucrative. You heard it here first. Yeah. And if you're not on the, you know, if you're interested in suggesting ideas, you know, get on the beta channel and let me know. That's what I'm doing right now. All right, last call for questions. Oh, okay. How much work are you putting into it before you ever see anything on a play field? I imagine most of it gets written in there, but the first time it's put all together, what does that look like for you guys? Okay, is this a programmer's point of view you're talking about? So you're finally putting some of your game-specific code on the play field that you've gotten? I mean, this depends a lot on the particular project and a lot on the game designer, too. Steve will give us a play field very early that is almost useless in terms of the final outcome of the game it will have a few of the devices and it will have some of the shots but will look nothing like the final game somewhere I probably have a picture of the first Whitewood for Elton John and it's really it's got the orbits and it's got the side ramp shot on it and then it's got like 40 different inserts on it he's just testing out what the inserts look like and how to make them into shapes that are interesting for the artwork so on other games the first whitewood I saw was almost a complete game Eric is masterful at creating parts with the 3D printer. He will create ramps and mechs and everything on the 3D printer and you can do more in terms of what the rules for the end game will look like on something like that. But in the real world, those things get destroyed very quickly because they're not able to stand up to the ball. So it's different for every game. Yeah. We had another question further back there. This is just more like a general thing. I mean, compared to the other, like, Jersey Jack games, this game feels like it has, like, really strong flippers. I was wondering if there was any sort of, like, thought process behind that. Flippers strengthen Elton John. Well. They're really good. Can I answer a piece of that? Please do. When I first was interviewing for Jersey Jack Pinball, I had to meet our chairman of the board, I guess you'd call him. I said, I want to go there, but Flipper's got to be fixed. And I had nothing to do with fixing them, nothing. But they did fix them. Guns N' Roses benefited from that, I'm pretty sure. Steve's contribution was to say it's got to be fixed, and Steve says it's got to be fixed. It's someone else's fix. It's a basic requirement, and they didn't work as well as they needed to. That's what I think. You want to spin? Well, no, I can tell you the entire story of how we got to Steve's game. But the truth is this is very subjective, because the games from Wizard of Oz up through GNR all use the same electronics. They are unchanged. And there was not a time when I worked at Jersey Jack that we considered the flippers to be broken. The strength of the flippers, and they're totally adjustable, right? You can turn up the power on all the flippers on every game that we've done. the strength of flippers is chosen in the games in all the games including Elton John to be able to make the shots that are in that game and you have to account for the aging of the flipper max all the flippers will weaken as the coil sleeve starts to wear and as the flipper mechanism pivot points start to wear so you plan for some of that so you go a little over and beyond what you think is a good setting for the string. When we got to Toy Story, Pat had this idea for doing this jump like No Good Gophers, right? And we were having problems getting that jump to make a consistent shot. So Pat ended up with a stronger flipper coil than he had ever used before for just the left flipper. And it's the equivalent of the blue flipper coils from Williams, which is the one Steve always uses, right? But it was a new one for Jersey Jack. They had never used a blue flipper coil from Williams. They had used orange and yellow, mostly orange for the bottom flippers. Yellow would be for the upper plate field, stuff like that. So for Toy Story, we made a change to the driver board to make the power to the flipper coils more consistent. Large capacitors, there's larger traces on the board, there's better heat dissipation on that I.O. board, and that was all for Toy Story. And all we did is we made that change, and that became our new I.O. board for all of our games. Toy Story started with that board, and every game, Godfather has that board, Elden has that board. So when Steve came in, Steve already had the benefit of that board and the blue flipper coils which he had already been using at Williams right so that's the combination you see in Elton John right now is the Steve Ritchie flipper coils and the board that was made for Toy Story which is now our standard board so begin what I could see outside before I knew anything about Jersey Jack was basically what everybody was complaining about yeah It's cool that it got fixed. Okay. Another one back. So the mechanism isn't different, it's just the coil? Yeah. Okay. It's the coil and the way it's driven. There's no question there is that difference. But the flipper link is the same, the bell crank is the same. We didn't change any of that stuff. I was just curious because they do feel different than like, Toy Story or Guns and Roses. Uh-huh. They do. But again, we, you know, before Toy Story, we never considered the games to be broken. I mean, I agree. Yeah, I agree they feel different than other games and it's very subjective. But the, I think the settings for those games made it easier to make some of the shots. And if you turn up the power, some of the shots, especially the outside shots, gets much more difficult. Designing to that play field. Same thing we did on Steve's game. We played with the settings for the power on his game to make all the shots the easiest to make within that range. I'm going to take the last question. So you guys have this new young designer from New Robert Englunds. Are you working with him? Honestly, I've been too busy to really work with him. I go out to lunch with him quite often. He was here a minute ago. He was here a minute ago. I waited until he was about to ask us. I have not had the opportunity to work on any of his game yet. I've just honestly been too busy. I was on Elton John, and now I've been working on the Guns N' Roses stuff. I've got to play his games he's working on quite a bit. but not had the opportunity to work with him yet. Okay. Well, you know, we do a show every year. I will reserve judgment for you. Yes. All right. Well, thanks for this extended interview. You're welcome. Thanks for having me. And I hope this will give you more insight to what these software guys do all day. Okay.