This week on the JBS show, Gerry Stellenberg and Michael Ocean of Multimorphic drop by to discuss all things P3, including Elemental, a brand new add-on game for any P3 module. Now, here's Jamie Burchill with Gerry Stellenberg and Michael Ocean. Hello and welcome to the JBS show and a special interview edition of the JBS show. I have gentlemen from Multimorphic, Gerry Stellenberg and Michael Ocean. How are you gentlemen? Thank you so much for joining me today. Doing great, Jamie. Thank you for having us. Yeah, thank you for having us. So one of the main purposes of this interview is some very exciting news and a new add-on game for the Multimorphic, all P3 systems called Elemental. And if you haven't seen the trailer, we're going to play it right now. How about that, gentlemen? We'll play the trailer, and then we'll come back and talk about it. If you are listening to the podcast and you're not watching on Spotify or on YouTube, pause it. The link is in the description below, and then come back to us, okay, because I really want you to see what I watched last night, which was an outstanding, really, trailer for the new add-on game for all P3. No matter what game you have and whatever module you have, you can play this game. Right, gentlemen? That's right. Yeah, absolutely. So let's watch Elemental. All right, thank you for coming back on the podcast side, and thank you for watching on the video side. Gentlemen, give me the back story here on Elemental. Sure. Sure. So forever we've wanted to highlight some of the unique factors of the P3 and also show people that this system that some people might buy for a particular game module, that it's a multi-game system. And now with the release of this game, which, by the way, is free for everybody, free for everyone who owns a P3, free download for those who already have a P3, and it will be installed by default on new P3s. This is a game that instantly turns what was a machine with a play field module into a multi-game system the day you unbox it. So it's a cool little game that highlights some of the cool, unique features on the machine, and it gives you a really fun, one-more-time kind of gaming experience. I get that from the P3 all the time, Michael, right? One more game, one more game. talk about that yeah uh we so those of us who develop games uh for for multimorphic uh which includes me as a first party developer but also sometimes when i'm wearing a third party developer hat uh we we strive to make pinball gaming experiences that are just deeply addictive so you you have a good time and you're the right amount of frustrated so that way you feel like you're achieving more but you want to get back in there and see if you can do better um and I think this game captures that it has a couple different modes of play it has a couple different ways to play it so that way everyone in your family or anyone in your friend group can have a way to enjoy it we really did try to capture the fun addictive nature of just one more game so it can be either a shorter experience that you play with friends and you're battling each other in brutal mode to see who can get the most who can get the most scoops in a row or like a longer experience if you're playing solid to sort of transition through the levels or gem collector to then play it a completely different way um it definitely has sort of it has a hint of the flavor of dungeon door defender and that it has the the multiple modes of play um yeah it's cool it's a it's a very different experience um that i think people are going to enjoy on the p3 well we'll talk dungeon door defender later because you know my uh you know my feelings on the ddd i do i appreciate them oh my god that was one of my favorite streams that we did at the wormhole when we just put it over dungeon door defender and four of us just tried to progress and i think you joined the stream that day and i think you did too jerry i think it was just a fun fun day and uh boy i miss our p3 i miss it that's good i mean we don't want you to miss it but we're glad that you enjoyed playing it and that you you want you want to play again yeah it's fun to watch people play the games the first time and discover everything that's there that we put into these games to actually be enjoying them. It can be hard sometimes. You're sort of biting our hands or whatever it is. I don't know what Jerry bites. We're just like, ah, it's right there. I stink of pinball, so I'm sure you were like, come on, virtual, hit this. It's not about that. It's the questions. It's like, oh, I wonder if I could do this. It's like, I can't tell you because you're playing, as opposed to if you're at a show or something and I'm standing over my shoulder. And then, of course, making it harder to play because someone's telling you everything to do while you're just trying to play pinball. But anyway, different topic. So what's cool about this game specifically, though, that it works with every play field. So everyone, if you have a Weird Allen or Final Resistance, Princess Bride, whatever module you have installed, it understands the features on the play field. It knows where the ball's going to come around a loop and plow into the back of a scoop So it will lower the scoop before that happens. It's set up, it's programmed in a way that the game can react to things that happen on the play field and allow you to experience the game uniquely depending on which play field you have installed. It's pretty cool. It's super cool. How long has this been in development? Oh, geez. Actually, we started it about four and a half years ago. Wow. And we came up with the concept. We wanted to leverage the scoops. We wanted to show them doing cool things and having you interact with them. We actually had a demo game on the early prototypes of the P3. It was called Whack-A-Hole. Whack-A-Hole, kind of like Whack-A-Mole, but with the scoops popping up, and you're supposed to shoot the ball into the scoops. This is kind of a new take on that idea, and it's themed in a unique way with the four different elements coming out of the scoops. But we got busy doing other development projects. We came out with Heist and Final Resistance and Weird Al and Princess Bride and now Portal. So we kind of got sidetracked doing some really cool big projects. And we got a moment to revisit this. And originally it was Rory Cernuda doing the graphics. And I wrote some of the early code. And then Michael came on board and turned it into a real game. But, yeah, it's been slotted sort of between main titles. for a while. I think I got pulled onto it two years ago and then chipped away at it a bit and then got shelved while we were working on Portal. But then, which is good because then you think of other things to do and other things to add to the game. And I think it ultimately makes the game better. But yeah, we're glad to finally get this out and let people start enjoying it. Just so that everyone who has a P3 can have a second gameplay experience and sort of understand the thing that you understand, which is that you just install a different set of software and you have this whole other game, you have this whole other thing there, which is really unique and really dope. It is the easiest thing to do. As someone who's a gamer and downloading something and putting it on the P3 platform, you guys made it as easy as possible, honestly. Well, for those that don't know, when you power up the P3, it presents to you a carousel of games that you have installed. So it includes the big games, the add-on games, Dungeon Door Defender, Elemental, Barnyard Rocks, Chute and Scoot, all of those are there if you've installed them. And then all the big games too, Lexi Lightspeed, Cosmic Kart Racing, they're all in the carousel. So when you power up, if you're not on location, on location you might choose to have it automatically load a specific software. But in your house, you have it load up to this carousel and you can pick any experience you want. You can play it for a while, then back out and choose a different playing experience. It basically is a computer and it allows you to choose the application you want to run at any given time. yeah it works perfect so congrats on that and i love the carousel it's a very simple uh interface to use it really is third-party development has been a huge part of multimorphic can you talk about that a little more jerry yes so when we came out with this multi-game system and you think about any successful multi-game system uh computers or or phones or console machines, Xboxes and PlayStations and those things. They're all successful because of the breadth of gameplay experiences you have, the game library, so to speak. And usually the creator of the console or the hardware creates their own games. They show you what they can do, but they also open it up to other third parties because with third-party developers, you get a lot of different ideas, you get a lot of different skill levels, You get a lot of different applications or games in this case. And what we've seen even on the P3 in the last few years are things that I would never have thought of, are things that we've never discussed as a team. But somebody comes out with a game like Romania, a game developed for the drained play field, which, by the way, was also developed by a third party. And it's a unique EM style playing experience on an EM setup of a play field. And then you got modern takes on tower defense like Dungeon Door. It's just really cool. it expands the game library and it expands the value proposition of the P3 because you pay the expensive amount for the machine once and you get to enjoy all these games. Yeah, plus, sorry to just jump in, but we get to do, when you're a third-party developer, you get to do things that, aside from the old P-Rock boards and that sort of thing, now on the P3 in a completely different way, you can create gaming experiences that no one else is going to let you create, take a risk on, right? I mean, you think about Birdwatcher by Ian Ian Harrower, which is this, you know, it's this really chill, you know, you're in these different environments depending on what module you have installed, and you're trying to take pictures of birds by capturing them with a ball. And then you have a picture book that you get to keep across because of the profiles that no matter what game module you load, it knows who you are, and you open up your picture book, and you see all the pictures, you know, that's such a cool and strange idea. You know, Dungeon doors tower defense thing which has elements of tower defense and roguelikes or even before it ranger in the ruins nick baldrige's game which has you know real roguelike elements from from video games we have this opportunity to take the best part of modern video gaming right and extract those those elements and then integrate them into pinball which is the best and so you cherry pick the best of video gaming experiences into these pinball experiences and we get to create really bizarre stuff and i mean i say bizarre stuff because i'm thinking of stuff that you'll never see that i tried and didn't work like i have a lot of experiments that did not work i don't want to name them but basically at some point i went through like the entire well i don't want to name that either but i went through an entire catalog of old arcade games and went what would this be like no this is bad what would this be like build up no it's bad um But the good ones make the light of day, and then everyone gets to play them. It's so super rad. Just a few more examples. Grand Slam Rally on the Cannon Lagoon Playfield by Jimmy Lipum is a pitch-and-bat style pinball game implemented on the Cannon Lagoon Playfield, and it's perfectly themed. It fits in beautifully. Hooping It Up by Greg Goldey on the Lexi Lightspeed. Lexi Lightspeed, this high-tech, this sci-fi-themed playfield with a spaceship in it. And Greg implemented a basketball game on it, and it works. It's themed brilliantly. Just super creative people are given an opportunity with this platform to turn their creativity into a playable game. They can choose to share it with others or not. They can develop the game for themselves and play it locally, or they can choose to share it, and then we'll host it on our web store. They set the price. It can be free, like Hooping It Up, or Young Martial Artist by Neil Carlson, which works on the high supply field, or they can choose how much they want to charge for it. And we take a small listing fee, like most app stores do, and they get the rest of the revenue for it. So it's just a cool thing that pinball fans who have development-based minds and ideas, they can turn those ideas into something really cool. Can we switch on to Portal? Can we talk about how Portal's going? How's the development of Portal going? Because I know, Michael, you're also a developer for Portal. So, you know, we've got parts coming in. What's going on with Portal? Portal is still on schedule for production by the end of the summer. Yes, parts are coming in now. They're not all quite here yet, but in the next couple of weeks, the remaining parts will be here. And then we have a validation process. We've got to make sure they were made correctly. We may have to tweak a couple things here when they get here. But so far in the history of Multimorphic, we've pretty much stuck to all of our schedules pretty well. Production late this summer. Shipments should begin mid-September at this point. I feel like we're still on track for that, which is right what we predicted. A lot of people are excited to get their hands on their portal. It's so good. It is so good. Anyone that has gone to a show and waited in that two-hour line or was lucky enough to get an invite like I did, it is so fun. And the shots are completely amazing. How has sales been going for Portal? Sales are always awesome the day of launch or the week of launch, right? We have a great launch. We always do a great trailer. Stephen Silver helps us with the videos, and we put together really cool packages, and we show these amazing games. Throughout the summer, we had really good interest when we were taking it to shows, the show period in the early summer, late, I guess it would be late spring, early summer, and things have been pretty quiet for the last couple of weeks. But now that we're releasing Elemental, getting people into the P3 news cycle again and with Portal production coming, A lot of people wait until the machine ships or the game ships before they buy because they don't want to wait in the queue for six months. That makes sense. But listen, call me a shill for the P3. I don't really care. I not getting paid from you so that not a true moniker for this But I love the P3 platform I been a proponent since we got one at the wormhole years and years ago And I wish you nothing but luck with Portal because it is just a fantastic module and people need to buy it And people like Retro Ralph, I'm talking to you right now, Ralph. Listen, you need to buy one. Put it right next to some of your other machines. You're going to fall in love with this machine. I'm telling you, it really plays that well. and with all the different modules that you can get from Weird Al to Heist to Final Resistance, which is one of my favorites, and Portal, it's a no-brainer. So there's my public service announcement for you, Jerry. Okay. Thank you. Go to what is the website? Multimorphic.com, right? That's right. Multimorphic.com. You can see the whole game library. Choose the module you want with your machine. Buy it with one. Buy it with all of them. Absolutely. It's totally up to you. And there are people that are buying another P3 because they have too many modules and they want to keep them there. And that really is happening. So congratulations on Portal, and I can't wait to see it. Any shows that you're going to come up? Are you going to Expo in Chicago? Are you going to the Houston Arcade? We will absolutely be at Houston. I will be at Houston. Expo, we usually are represented by our distributor, Justin, from Wise Trailer. He usually takes his machines up there. I may fly out there for it this year. I'm not sure. My son's birthday is that weekend, so it's always up in the air if I can take it. I have a huge wedding on Friday, so I'm going like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and leaving Friday. Did you try to convince him to get married in Chicago? He's from Chicago, too, and I was like, that could work. But no, they're getting married in Galveston, which is nice. So there you go. So one quick comment about Portal, that people – we launched that right before TPF, so people in Chicago haven't probably seen it in person yet, so they'll get a chance at Expo. They'll get to see it with all of the new stuff we've been doing, which is really, really cool, right? Michael, Ian, Stephen, Rory, Brad, they've all been super busy adding tons of content. So when the game ships – and this is what we've done with all of our games – When the game ships to the first customer, it will feel very mature. It doesn't always have all the modes. It doesn't always have the final wizard mode. Portal will. And Final Resistance did. Princess Bride did. The last few games we've released, when we've shipped them to customers, they've been mature games, which is a commitment that we make to our customers. Portal is awesome. people have seen less than half of portal yeah oh that's fantastic news i mean seriously chambers are so cool there is one that like i just want to play all the time just all the time um but i won't say which one but people will know have how is the reception for the lower third play field add-ons because I think that was just brilliant. So 99% of orders that came in for Portal included the extension module. Yeah. Two or three people that bought new machines bought it with the standard version. Everybody else, including every order of an add-on play field module, they bought it with the extended part. People have been asking for stuff lower in the playfields on the P3 for a long time. We've always said we could and we would when it made sense for the theme and it fit our schedule and it fit our designer's eye. Portal made sense, and it's got some cool – the kickback feature. I don't know if you noticed when you played it. You hit launch. The P3 doesn't have a traditional shooter lane because, one, I think it's a waste of space on a playfield, but, two, because it's got the ball trough in the back of the playfield. So it just kicks a ball up a tube. But on Portal, you hit the launch button. On the extended module, it comes out of a tube. It feeds a kickback mechanism that's in the same position where a shooter lane would be. And it kicks back up the play field as if you had a plunger lane. It's this really unique feature that gives people a traditional experience, even though they're playing it on this high-tech platform. There's lifting ramps. There's this really cool wall plate, which makes sense thematically. There's a lot of fun stuff on the extension module. And further, the upper playfield module in Portal is the most feature-rich playfield we've developed by itself. If you just play the standard version of Portal, you're getting more features than any other P3 game we've ever developed. It's packed. It really is. When you think about Weird Al and you think about Heist and you think about other packed playfields, right? Right. I mean, heist is packed and then Weird Al is packed and then Portal is even more packed. He's packed. Yeah. Yeah. You're pushing the limits. And that's what, you know, I love about Multimorphic, that you consistently push the limits on what pinball and this LCD screen can do. And it's just fantastic. Talk about the ball tracking system for a minute. Can you explain that to people that maybe are not familiar with your system? Sure. So the lower two-thirds of the P3 play field is not a painted piece of wood. It's a dynamic screen. It's an LCD, over top of which we run a matrix of lights, of infrared lights. So those lights are on top of the playing surface, but underneath all of the things that hang down, like your flippers and bumpers and targets and those things that hang down from above. The extension module and portal has features on it, but they all are suspended from a ceiling piece of clear plastic. So you see right through that plastic, you don't realize it's there, but you see all these physical features. But underneath those is a matrix of infrared light. Now, as the ball rolls through the light, we have sensors that say, hey, this beam turned off, that beam turned off. Or more accurately, these 15 beams turned off at this one instant. Therefore, we know for sure the ball is in this position. And we have some algorithms that do a lot of math and triangulation and all the fancy terms that mean we know where the ball is at all times. And we can have that pinball, just like your finger on an iPad or a touchscreen device. we can have that pinball interacting with the virtual targets. So in some cases, we do traditional things with a virtual detection, like in-lane and out-lane detection is all virtual in the P3. We know when the ball went in the in-lane and went in the out-lane, so we don't have physical switches there. But we also have targets that move on the screen or things you need to roll over to collect or some really cool things. And we use those in different ways in all of our games. You have a game like ROCS, R-O-C-S, kind of like asteroids on the video game platforms or a computer, but it's a pinball interacting with moving asteroids on the screen. And the ball rolls over the asteroid, it blows them up, and these asteroids are floating around. So basically, you don't know where you're going to have to aim when the game starts. It could be anywhere. This rock is just floating. You might have to shoot up the other in lane because that's where the rock is. That's where the asteroid is. If you're not doing well. And then there are games like, yeah, go ahead, Michael. If you're not doing well because then you let the asteroid get all the way down there. They start in a fairish place. Sorry, go on. No, sometimes we have static virtual targets like in Lexi Lightspeed. The crates are in specific positions. You roll over them. They blow up. They reveal a prize or an item or not. Different games, we use them in different ways. Portal, we use a number of different virtual interactions in unique thematic ways when you're collecting items or a couple of to-be-seen implementations. But, yeah, the ball tracking on the P3 is unique. No other game out there does it. but also the LCD showing you dynamic graphics, dynamic artwork, thematic instructions, real-time feedback, your status of gameplay right under your ball while you're playing is unique, and it really does make the P3 special. The dynamic scenes that you can get on the P3 from killing a knight to the blood splat is really fantastic. It really is amazing. yeah i mean if you think about it right i mean lots of games in the past have had you know the the eddie style switches right where the ball doesn't even interrupt the physical switch but you know it went through a lane now imagine applying that to your entire play field well now anywhere on the play field could be a switch and then you couple that with a screen and it's we can give you all sorts of reasons to shoot where you're shooting with a completely smooth rollover switch um which you know to i'm sorry i interrupted jerry about rocks but i think part of what makes rocks so awesome is that right you have the the asteroids coming towards you right you have these these uh right not a meteorite because then it would be in nope too nerdy you have these big things coming towards you and you have to hit them before they get too close and when you hit them they split up into smaller ones which now shoot off into different directions and You have to get those. And so you have this justification to have targets anywhere on the screen. And where you shoot in that particular game is totally dictated by what seems like, oh, these are video game rules. Right. But it's up to you as the pinball player. If you hit it fast enough, they would be in different places. And so that's sort of like this. The interesting intersection between having the screen and having the tracking with these different pinball experiences is that you're shooting pinball shots. but why you're shooting them changes and how sort of stressful it is or how rewarding it feels. Or, I mean, we get the chance to make any reason we want for you to for you to shoot these things. That's actually what I think the best part of the P3 screen is, is that we can we can tell you the story of the shot you're shooting. Why am I shooting this shot? Is it because there's a blinking arrow? and the rules designer decided, let's shoot all the ramps for this mode or let's shoot all the loops for this mode. On the P3, we integrate the shots into the story and into the theme and we can show something like a missile. We can draw a missile on the screen and say, you need to blow up the missile so you have a thematic reason to shoot the shot where the missile is sitting. Or differently, we can have the missile like in Final Resistance as an offensive device where it's in your in lane and you shoot a ramp shot, the missile aims itself and fires off in the direction of the ramp and it attempts to attack the invading alien forces. Just the screen gives us the ability to explain why, to give you reason, to give you a sense of need to shoot the shots that you don't get on a traditional play field. That's actually one of my favorite things of Final Resistance is when you load up that shot and the missile angles are from your flipper, and then you make the shot and you see the missile fire and the explosion, because that's what's implied in many games, right, in many pinball experiences where you've got the decorated wood. The implication is you're doing something. I guess it's firing a rocket. I guess it blew up. And if you happen to look up, you see it on the screen. But there are all these small dynamic things in Final Resistance which people don't necessarily even notice. A lot of people will tell you, like, oh, Final Resistance could be just a piece of wood. But in reality, there's so much dynamic stuff going on in that play field because it's a good balance of sort of the traditional, like the normal inserts, the consistent shot paths. You can aim and do all the core pinball stuff that we love. But then also to have that dynamic content is dope. Cool. Screen, cool. Screen, cool. Ball tracking, cool. Yeah. Game's rad. It really is. To put a bow on this, when is Elemental going to be able to be downloaded for all P3s? If you're listening to this podcast, you can download Elemental. It's on the web store, or you can go on to your P3 through System Manager if you're Wi-Fi connected, and it should show up in the available new apps. You can download it, install it, enjoy it right away. It's a smallish app, so the download won't take long. Or you can, of course, go to the website and download it to a USB drive and install it that way, too. But available today. Install. Enjoy. No charge. It's on us. Enjoy another gaming experience on your machine. Wow, that's just fantastic. Congratulations on this. I have some general questions for you, and then we'll wrap it up. I don't want to hold you guys too, too long. Question for you. How have – we hear the word tariffs. We get your tariffs all the time, right? We're getting parts from all over the world. How has that affected your planning? How has that affected your business planning, not knowing the cost of some of these items? Oh, boy. That's a hot topic, Jamie. How do you plan around something that can change dynamically after you plan? You can't. You have to do the best you can do. You have to set up your budgets as best as you can, and you have to use the information you have in front of you to order stuff. But it's hit and hurt us. I'm sure it's hit and hurt every company that's making anything in the country these days. We ordered portal parts before the tariff from some of our Chinese suppliers, before the tariffs on Chinese imports jumped up to 100-plus percent. And so there's this fear, this instantaneous fear that we'll have to pay basically double for all of our parts just to get them in-house. And we already ordered them. We've already paid our suppliers for them, so we can't cancel those. It's a not-fun challenge, and it's affecting everybody's business. And I have a whole lot of thoughts about it, but suffice it to say it's difficult to own and run a business that requires parts. parts? You know, I run a staffing business. This is I am a shill from my own staffing business. I'll tell you that, guys. And no one is is hiring right now because they don't the economic uncertainty. And it is a real problem that's happening in this world. And so I think, you know, So when content creators or whoever is saying, you know, prices are high, prices are this, prices are that, what they don't understand is the economic uncertainty that's going on right now and trying to budget for all these things is near impossible. Yeah because prices have no choice but to go up to offset some of the costs and then companies aren making as much money They don have the budgets to hire They don have the budgets to put as much time into R Everything's kind of suffering. It's a difficult time for sure. It sure is, but we're supposed to be talking pinball and having fun, so sorry about that. 26 games. Elemental is our 26th game for the P3. There's 26 different gaming experiences for this one machine. It really is unbelievable, the P3. I've been a fan of it for a very long time, and you know that. So thank you for coming to me. A couple more. A couple more. It's not going to be tough. Michael, AI is supposed to make your job a lot easier. Is that possible? Is that happening for you as a coder? I mean, it's fun. It will occasionally autocomplete a line, and I'll have to stare at the line and say, why would you write that? I don't want that. I don't need that. No. So I've turned off a lot of that AI stuff. I read a lot of articles about people get interviewed, and there was a recent study that was published I saw online. I actually read the study, where a bunch of developers were given AI. They were interviewed about how they thought it was going to help them before they started. and so everyone responded sort of mid middling sort of i don't know maybe it'll be better and then while they were doing it people said this is amazing it's increasing our productivity and then after when it was done they said how did it affect your productivity this is great it was amazing and then they actually looked at the productivity and it was all worries and so people feel like it's really helping them but in in practice it's i mean i'm sure in some industries um maybe it can be really helpful maybe you know if you're doing really routine things you know if you need to implement an algorithm that's been implemented 20 times before then you could probably do that but i mean for those of us who've written a lot of code you just find the code that you wrote before or rewrite it because you've written it a bunch of times okay or you have a library that already does it so you don't need to rewrite it that time what's your take on uh gentlemen ai and pinball art what's your take on on that subject that swept the uh the pinball community a couple weeks ago. We don't have to talk about the game itself and the designer itself. I'm just curious, like utilizing AI and pinball art. So we have wonderful relationships with some really impressive, really talented artists who create amazing work. Brad Brad Albright did the artwork for Portal, Matt Andrews for Princess Bride and Weird Al, Jonathan Bergeron for Final Resistance, some amazing, talented artists. I have never seen anything even close to similar come out of an AI engine, and why would we want to? We want to, as a team, work together with human beings that are super creative and super talented. I don't use AI to write my public updates. I don't use it to email people to summarize stuff for me. I don't have a problem with AI in general. It's a tool, and if you can figure out a way to make it help you be more efficient in an ethical and legal way, then that's fantastic, and use it and do it. I don't use it for most of my work. I do use it when I use AI more as a search engine these days than some kind of productivity helper. But artwork, we have no intention of going down the AI route with artwork. We love the hand-drawn, created stuff by these talented folks. I was listening to a recent episode of this very show. Uh-oh. No, I mean, one thing that came up for sure was, you know, are these museum pieces? Are these gallery pieces? Right. It's interesting because for me, when someone tells me they love a game that I worked on, right, you talk about Final Resistance, you talk about Weird Al, you know, it's the combined work of all these people who are very talented, who work very hard on it. And when someone chooses to have it in their home, when someone chooses to play it and spend time with it, in a way, to me, that feels like a very personal sort of thing, like sort of like a gallery. I mean, yes, a lot of people see a piece that hangs in a gallery. A lot of people see a game that's sitting on location. but I don't know. I take that very, I take that very seriously and I, I take it as a, as a real compliment. And I think that someone who does that deserves, you know, whatever the best work is. And if AI is helping someone make their best work, then fine. You know, it's not, it's not what I would, it's, it doesn't work for me, not helping me any. But, you know, I think that there's a real value in my wife is an artist. She makes sculptures. She makes watercolor. She works in watercolor and she works in Joshua Clay sculpture. And there is something very nice about knowing that it was all handmade. But also, if there is something that helps someone's process and it gets a better product in the end, well then, who am I to say that they can't do it um but you know is this one we're supposed to talk about living in a simulation and all of us being ai and doing we very well might be very well might be birds are fake birds are real birds are real birds are real i promise you the birds are real never track that one yeah uh that was a funny one conspiracy theory if you have no idea what we're talking about google birds are real birds aren't real because it's a very funny it's not real it's a the guy it's a move. We don't know. I'm pretty confident that birds are real. But it is a really good, crazy thing that you can go down a little wormhole and it's fun. All right. So here's another question for you, gentlemen. Right. I'm putting you on the hot seat. Why not? Right. You're on my show. Might as well. How do you deal with negativity in the pinball content creation space? We have a very niche little space here, right? But there's a few voices and a few places, we won't name the places, that are loud. And I was telling a content creator, here's the reason I have the question, but here's a quick little backstory. I was talking to a content creator, I'm not going to mention their name. And they were very negative to some friends of mine at another company. And I said, I told them the story of one of the people that worked on this machine came home, and the first on launch day, and the first thing they heard was their partner listening to a live stream of someone crapping all over that particular machine. And I said, how do you think you made them feel? And their response was, well, that's my job. And, like, it's not your job. Your job is to say, okay, you know, I don't know, how do you deal with that negativity? Because I had a back-and-forth conversation with this individual. But how do you guys, as designers and blood, sweat, tears and coders of these machines, how do you deal with the negative press, if you will, from our niche little community? I'm sure we all deal with it differently. We certainly discuss certain feedbacks amongst the team and figure out if the feedback is good or bad, if the criticisms need to be addressed or whatever. But a couple of points. One, we've dedicated our lives to this company. I have. This is literally my entire life besides my family. I come to work every day, early in the morning to late at night. I meet with overseas suppliers. I talk to designers. We have design meetings at night sometimes because some of our developers are nights and weekends helpers. It's literally a 16, 18-hour-a-day job for me. It has been for 13 years now. This is my life. And the product we've all gotten together to create is something we're so proud of. It's so complicated to develop any product for any reason. Michael lives 1,500, 1,700 miles away from me. We have a team of people all over the world who develop these things. So we're not even in the same office where we can walk down the hallway and say, let's do this thing. We all have to schedule time for each other and make it work, and it's not easy. It's not easy to work in a remote environment. It's not easy to make a pinball machine. It's not easy to produce, to manufacture and ship a pinball machine, but we put our lives into it. We put our hearts and souls. We do everything we can to address concerns, to make the product better, while also staying true to our own visions. This is our lives, but it's pinball. And there are thousands of pinball machines because everyone's got a different opinion on what they like and what they don't like. So criticisms, negativity, it kind of comes with the territory. Some people are more tactful in the way they share their feedback and their criticisms, and some people lean into negativity because that's what garners views and feedback. And they get community sometimes out of negativity. Other people get community sometimes out of positivity and progress and creating stuff. I get community and feedback from people in a positive way that drives me, that makes me want to create more because people like it. This is awesome. I want to create more and do more things and take more risks and create more things. negativity is tough but you kind of have to in this business you have to brush it aside and keep going while also pulling out the nuggets of actual real advice or criticism or ideas or suggestions that make sense and can actually be applied into a positive change it's a bummer sometimes when you're at a show and you hear someone quoting a talking point or something when you're standing around and you're just like, well, just play the game, you know, just experience it. Because I think we work so hard to make experiences that people enjoy that when people don't even approach them or try to try to don't try to enjoy them or don't or maybe try to dislike them because they're trying to, you know, meet someone else's popular opinion instead of seeing if there's something in it for them. you know it's a it's a strange bummer because it means that person then doesn't get to enjoy a thing that we've worked really hard to make but then also i don't understand what the benefit is right like why it's it's like when someone sees a movie and they're telling you that you know it was terrible and you shouldn't see it you're like okay well i saw it and i actually kind of liked it and then they go on for another 45 minutes to tell you why your opinion is wrong and you shouldn't enjoy something right like well whatever like if you enjoyed it you enjoyed it you know you don't have to convince me that i was wrong to enjoy this thing um and so it's very validating when you hear like i had uh i don't i don't want to name names but i had a p3 owner come talk to me and hang out with me for a while at the pentastic show recently and he was like also a dungeon door defender fan also final resistance fan also a lot of these games it was like you know game for game in my game room i probably played and enjoyed more games by you specifically and i was like that's a It's a lot to take in. And that is worth a lot. Right. That that really does help you sort of keep going when you hear, you know, casually dismissive or sometimes I mean, you know, comments online. But I don't know, people are people, you know, they're going to say things that they want to say and they're going to try to get views or listens or likes or subscribes. I don't know. So it's nice to see people actually give it a chance and realize they're allowed to create their own opinions and react to it the way they want to and not just listen to other people's opinions. So the negativity hurts and it's there, but it's there. And hopefully people walk in open-minded and try the games, play it, develop their own opinions. All you have to do is if you go to a show and you get a chance to meet any people from Multimorphic and you see the passion on their face, you know that they believe in this product. They believe in this module system, and it is working. And congratulations, guys. Just keep it up. Don't listen to the negativity. Try to have, you know, and just do what you guys are doing, which is kicking ass, taking aims. Thank you, Jamie. Thank you, Jamie. Appreciate it. I know I keep saying last question. This is the last question, Michael. I really promised. Why don't you make a standalone portal instead of a module system? A standalone portal without the screen? Without the ball trough? Well, I think they keep asking, why don't you make a standalone unit? What does that mean? When they keep saying standalone, what do they mean, number one? And what are they asking and what do they want from you? We hear the question a lot because people are so used to the pinball has been unchanged for decades. It's always been a painted piece of wood with a shooter lane and some number of mechanisms bolted to this piece of wood. And we've come with something different. Now, you can experience traditional pinball in the P3. We could make the play field static. We could draw a picture of a traditional play field and never change anything and just blink a couple of lights. We could do that. But one, I don't think any traditional machine could implement portal. We leverage the functionality of the P3 in very unique ways to deliver the ball in here and the ball out here without you having to stage a ball. You don't have to shoot one into that place first to have it ready to be kicked out later. It's already there because our ball trough is there. But we talked earlier about the screen. The screen enables so much storytelling, immersion. We change the scene on the screen. When you go into a test chamber, we put you in that environment. If we did it on a traditional machine, you'd have 20% of the game. You see a painted picture of Reggie or GLaDOS or some cubes or whatever it is you see You see some hallways painted on this piece of wood You won't get the experience. Could we do a single-themed machine? Could we deliver Portal in a P3 that has the screen and has the ball trough? Sure, but it costs the same. It's already there. Being modular is just a bonus for all of our customers. Being able to take Portal out of the machine and put in Princess Bride is literally just a bonus. A P3 with Portal costs the same as most of the other high-end versions of any pinball manufacturer. It costs less than some manufacturers. It costs more than other manufacturers. It's in a really good sweet spot, and you get the bonus of being able to swap games. So why anybody would want to not have that extra functionality for free doesn't make sense to me. It makes no sense to me either. Michael, does it make sense to you? No, I mean, you play Dungeon Door Defender. I can't imagine that on a decorated piece of wood. Where are your attackers? What are the rooms? What's happening, right? I mean, blinking lights. Yeah. So many of the P3 experiences are just able to immerse you. I once had a conversation with someone where I hypothesized the reason that people get more annoyed when they drain a ball on a P3 game is because you're so much more immersed in the story and the experience that you actually feel like you've let a character down or you understand the stakes of draining as opposed to the ball went through the drain on my decorated piece of wood. Right. I mean, we we do you know, we do the same things that that every other pinball manufacturer does. Right. That the soundtrack to Lexi from David Thiel is amazing and so engaging and engrossing. And yet you go from one area to another and the whole play field changes. Like you're you know, your decorated piece of wood is not a decorated piece of wood and it all changes. And that lets you experience those other things. I don't know why I don't. It's one of those things that I just, I never quite understand why people say it. I mean, even Final Resistance, which in many ways was our most traditional game, I remember having lots of conversations with Scott and Bowen about like, okay, so we're not going to add dynamic content here, and it wouldn't be me pushing for it. It would be Scott or Bowen. Well, we should put the missile. We should put the power up. We should show the explosion. We should show these things. And the balance of that game, which I remember people saying, like, oh, maybe that game could have just been on a decorated piece of wood. Why would you want it that way? It's so much more immersive. It's meant for the P3. Oh, and I don't want to spoil things, but when you get really far into the game, you'll know that it's not. It's not. They're cool things. So if people really want an arcade environment or if they really want a game room with individual playing experiences that you can move on to the next one, you're having a party, you want people in all the games, it's no different than having a bunch of traditional machines to having a bunch of P3s, each with different playfield modules installed. Again, the price is comparable across the board. And if you don't want to swap, you don't need to swap. You can just get another base cabinet and put a game in there. last thing for you this is a little goofy i came up with an idea for you guys and i don't know if somebody provides this already if somebody has an etsy shop i was at russell shrewd's house the other day and we're playing a few games and i saw a few of his modules underneath his p3 And I was wondering, for the multi-morphic owners, P3 owners that have multiple modules, do you have like a showing case where you could slip your modules so people can come up and see all the different modules and maybe like a storage shelf? Do you guys provide that? Or is there a third party that does this that would look really cool? There is? So there's a company called AP3 Shop, the letter AP3shop.com, I believe it is. He is a woodworker who created his own idea for a stackable storage case with really pretty drawers that can pull out and you can store a module in them. They have magnetic paint on the front so you can stick your aprons and stuff to them. That's an option. We would love to. We've talked about it for a long time. We know it's something that a lot of customers would really like. But when we choose between developing new games and stopping development for a bit to take our mechanical team off of that and to build cabinets, most people agree with our decision to keep building cool content. I think it's a better move to build the content. This is the last little thing that I was thinking of last night. That's cool. God. But third party, absolutely outsource that. Let somebody else develop that. Right. One thing I do know about P3 owners is that they own multiple modules, right? And how cool would it be to walk up and see all the modules displayed, if you will? When Justin sets up a booth with his – he has two machines. He takes them to shows, and he's got all the modules. So he usually sets up a table in front of them or beside them that he puts the modules on there so people standing in line to play the games or whatever get to see all the modules as they walk up. And it's a great display. people. We had a, I can't remember what game it was. It might have been Heist at Texas Pinball Festival three years ago. We had an extra Heister. Maybe it was a Weird Al play field. I can't remember. But we had a tabletop. We use rotisseries. A traditional pinball rotisserie is really big for the big playfields, but ours, because our playfields are smaller, are much smaller. So we had one on the table and we put a play field in it and people the entire show would walk up and point at all the shots and we'd flip it over and show them what's underneath the P3 play phone. It's really neat to see those things. So displaying them is a great idea. Just displaying them in your home with nice lighting above to see all the cool layouts and features. It's a good idea. But yeah, AP3 Shop does it. We've had a couple of customers post pictures of really impressive, professional-looking cabinets to store their things. And there are a lot of talented people out there. Yeah, the P3 owners discord is filled with folks who are very passionate about the P3 and have shared designs in some cases of dollies or carts or other sort of storage solutions. And then there was one pretty recently. I can't remember who it was. The name escapes me. So I apologize to that person if they're listening. But they had posted this really cool cabinet that had different lighting inset in each of the in each of the areas. So people have definitely, they agree with you for sure that there's an opportunity there. But yeah, it's also fun to make games. Yeah, make the games. We'll outsource this to somebody else. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You don't want me trying to build any piece of wood and anything. I'll write code for you, but you don't want my cabinets. What we have talked about doing is selling a flat-packed shipped version of our rotisseries. So people who want to pull a module out of their machine and stick it on a table or something and show it off, they can stick it on the same exact rotisseries that we've designed and built because they're easy to – they can lock into place, and then you can rotate them around so you can access any part of them to either work on it or show it off. It's a nice thing that we've already designed, so people can just leverage what we have. People who are designing their own modules. It's true. There you go. There you go. People designing their own modules, they need one of those. Gentlemen, thank you so much. I really appreciate you choosing the JBS show to launch Elemental. Again, if you're listening to this or watching this, Elemental is out on your P3. You know this already. Download it. If you are looking to buy a P3 platform or any of the modules, go to multimorphic.com. Is that the easiest way? Yes, by far. Okay, by far. Just go to Multimorphic.com and put your order in today. You won't regret it. I'm telling you, go to the – and then even before, join the Discord channel. Ask questions to them. Jerry might be the one answering your questions about the P3 platform, but that's the best way to get the answers right from them themselves. Is that okay? Yeah, absolutely. We have a whole team of people that are all technologically immersed, and they'll be on Discord. I answer, Nick answers, Michael or Ian or Stephen, there's any number of us might answer on Discord. The other key point for the listeners is that once portal production starts, we'll be working through the portal queue. And that includes months worth of machines we need to ship and months worth of playfields we need to ship. But between now and then, we have inventory on P3s and on our other playfields. So if you want to get your order in right now, we can ship you a P3 within a few days. Once Portal production begins in about a month, then there's a build queue that new orders will sit behind. Okay. Get a Final Resistance. Get a Princess Bride. Get a Heist. They're all fun. Get Weird Al. They're all very, very fun. I've gotten to play all of them, and I enjoy them. Cosmic Heart. Final Resistance could be one of my favorites. I don't know. It's hard to say which one was my favorite, but I do love Final Resistance. As long as it's one I worked on, then I like the answer. There was a thread on Pinside the other day that people were saying they thought that Heist, as an original theme, would have been loved as much as Medieval Madness and Attack from Mars if it were released in the 90s. And that was the biggest compliment I think I've ever read from a P3 review, saying this number one game, number one of all time pinball game for decades, Medieval Madness. And they were comparing Heist to it as an original themed game, which is awesome. It's a great story, a great layout, but it's nice to get that kind of credit. Yeah, I loved Heist. I absolutely loved it. I really did. Again, you know, I'm not a paid spokesman, ladies and gentlemen. I just played the hell out of this machine, and I really, really enjoyed it. Congratulations to you both. Elemental out right now. Go buy yourself a P3 at multimorphic.com. Jerry, as always, what a pleasure. Michael, thank you so much, man. Always a pleasure meeting you. I haven't really met you face-to-face, I don't think, so this is great. I've seen you a lot. Oh, I know. Sorry. No, no, it's awesome. No, it's really nice to actually meet you and talk to you and have you respond instead of usual where I'm talking to your podcast or talking to your streams. You can't hear me. No, I can't. But, again, DDD was a game changer for me. And it really – it was the first really aha moment of the P3 where I went, oh, wow, look what they can do, right? and it was the moment where I had already fallen in love with Heist and I had already fallen in love with Weird Al, but DDD really got me, man. Dungeon Door Defender, congratulations on that. I hope you sold everyone who has a B3 buys DDD. Dungeon Door Defender is, is it, how much is it, Michael? $179, I think, in the store. That was $199? It's absolutely worth $199. It's super inexpensive. Yeah, I mean, compared to toppers or other things, the people who have come up to me at shows, I got a very nice email from Jerry's wife recently who is singing Dungeon Door Defenders praises. She plays it literally every day. She comes into the office in the afternoons to pick me up. She brings our two-year-old who comes in, and he plays every game in the showroom, and Sarah just jumps on to Dungeon Door Defender and plays it nonstop for about 30 minutes before we leave. I still think the last two couple levels are really hard. I gave you some crap about that before. It frustrates me to no entail to know that I can't finish that game. You've got to cash up all your mana, right? So you've got to go into those levels with mana ready to go, probably Earth's Magic when you get there. There's a lot of strategy, right? No, there is. it's a ton of strategy and i've gone through every which way but loose to try to figure it out but uh not a bad move have you tried the artifacts mode have you played did you play artifacts you did play no i've not played oh my gosh it's so crazy every time you play you get different artifacts and then you get the combinations of how the artifacts interact with each other so you can get things like midas's gloves you get anyway there it's good it's good it works on Heist and The Princess Bride. Because both of those have doors. Both of them have doors you're defending. You're able to defend. It was never going to come to a game other than Heist, because Heist was so perfect. And then, you know, it's Princess Bride. There's a literal castle on there. How could you announce it for it? It doesn't make any sense. That's so smart that you can use it for those two different modules, too, because most B3 owners have those modules, you know, and so they get to play Dungeon Door Defender. It's awesome. Yeah. So it's cool. Oh, yeah. Sorry, sorry, sorry. No, do you have anything else? Did I miss anything? 26 games. 26 games for the P3. 26 games. There's nine playfield modules, nine physical playfield modules in 17 add-on games, a bunch of which were developed by third parties, some of which were developed by us. It's – people look at the P3 and they compare it to a single-themed machine from any other manufacturer, but this P3 is now an ecosystem. It's a machine plus a ton of games, and you get to enjoy any or all of them. Well, congrats on continued success, gentlemen. Appreciate you so, so much. Multimorphic.com. This is on the JBS show. You've already listened, so you found me, so click that subscribe. It's not hard. I went from 5,000 to 530 and it hurt feelings. So, you know, do me a favor. Just click subscribe. It's not hard. It's right there. And we'll go from there. Thank you, gentlemen. I appreciate you so, so much. Thank you, Jamie. Have a great day. Thanks. You too. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.