Sometimes we're funny, sometimes we suck. This program contains three potty mouth. Because we like to swear. Hey! The following is an ad-hoc radio production. Welcome to the super awesome The Pinball Show! With your hosts, Christopher Franchi and Dr. Pin, Kristen Lein! Hey everybody, this is one of your hosts, Christopher Franchi, and we've got a doozy for you today. Our first double reveal with Spooky Pinball, revealing Halloween and Ultraman. as well as artist Jason Jason Edmiston. So stick around as Dr. Pinn and myself find out all about these two amazing new games from Spooky. I met this six-year-old child with this blank, pale, emotionless face and the blackest eyes, the devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him and then another seven trying to keep him locked up Because I realized that what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply evil. What's the boogie, man? As a matter of fact, it was. Following up their most successful game launch ever with Rick and Morty's, Spooky Pinball is doing it again with their new game. On this episode, we're sitting down with Charlie Emery and his son Corwin Emery, also known as Bug, to catch up on how the heck they've been doing and take a deep dive into all things Halloween, including a special guest, the artist on Halloween, Jason Jason Edmiston. If you're listening to this show, you almost certainly know who these two gentlemen are, but let's do a quick recap just in case. Charlie Emery is the grand poobah of Spooky Pinball, building a pinball company from the ground up in Benton, Wisconsin. Spooky's first game came out in 2014 with America's Most Haunted, and now seven years and seven games later, Spooky has only gotten bigger and better with his guidance. Bug shares the love of all things spooky with his dad and ran both the Spooky Pinball podcast and another horror-focused podcast with him for many years. He's also been along for the entire Spooky Pinball ride and has seen the evolution of the company from the start. So, Charlie, this is your third time on the show, and you've reclaimed your title of the most frequent guest on the Super Awesome Pinball Show. And Gomez, I think, tried briefly to take your title, but you're back. But, Bug, this is the first time we've had you on, so I'm excited to learn more about your time at Spooky and your involvement with this game in particular. But first off, do we address you as Bug or Corwin? Whichever feels most comfortable. I don't mind either. Can I just call you Junior? Junior works too. I don't care. I don't have many names I love it So Bug we haven't had you on our show before Can you tell us like how have your responsibilities evolved From the beginning of Spooky Pinball To where you are now directly involved in this major release Well so in the beginning I mean I was really a young kid When we first started this off To the point where even as a young kid I remember dad coming out to the living room saying Bug I think we're going to do it I think I'm going to break off And I'm going to do my own pinball company And I was like 10 and I was like Dad that sounds like a terrible idea but absolutely go for it. And, you know, for a lot of the ride there, I was just kind of some moral support behind that. He's like, should we do Rob Zombie? And I was just the dumbass kid that he could get yes from most of the time. So I was like, heck yeah, man, do Rob Zombie. That's awesome. Should we do Alice Cooper? Dude, I love Alice Cooper. You should totally do Alice Cooper. So most of my role was supporting him behind the lines like that and helping out with the podcast when he got too busy to do it anymore. And I worked, you know, part-time here and there at the shop throughout school and high school where I could and a lot of times through the summer but it wasn't until I graduated high school in 2020 that I stepped into the line full-time and became a part of final inspection and then part of game development and Halloween so that's a lot of where my role is now we ended the podcast what was that like six seven months ago now probably a lot of know what day it is I don't know what day it is either I mean we ended the podcast about six seven months ago so we could just focus on making the best damn possible game we could for everybody and that's been a lot more where my focus is now is making sure the line is rolling and helping develop games. Yeah, you've been surrounded by tip balls all your life and you've learned the ropes for years now. But like you said, you just graduated high school and the company's really been taking off while you were in high school. Are you at Spooky full-time now? And if so, do you realize that that's one of the coolest jobs you could ever have coming out of school? Yeah, I'm full-time and a half at this point. Full-time would imply 40 hours a week. This kid's in there probably 70 to 80. I'm great with the rest of them. I dropped many hobbies and made designing and working on pinball pretty much everything about my life at this point, to the point where I moved to a different house in Benton just to be close to it. I didn't run away to college for four years or eight years if you're from Animal House. No, he graduated high school a week before he graduated high school. I had a pretty clear-cut image of wanting to get into pinball by the time I got to my senior year, So I attended nighttime classes at tech school so that I could just get right into work as soon as I got out. Because being honest, I hated school a lot. As did I. When you've got a pinball company at home, basically, I get it. I'm sure your attention was diverted a little bit to the awesomeness happening in your household. A lot, yeah. I mean, it's weird because you'd go to Texas during the weekend for a TPF, and there's just all this crazy, amazing things happening around you. And you get back, and it's like, nobody in Benton cares. at high school. So it was like, man, I really dig this cool pinball thing that's going on and not so much this high school football bullcrap. I totally get that. Here's my favorite high school story. I got him in trouble because we got him a behind-the-scenes tour of NASA. Yeah. I had to sit like three baseball games because we went to NASA, and I was like, all right, let's go. They're like, rule, rule, he's going to be suspended for three games because he missed practice. And I'm like, but he got a behind-the-scenes tour of NASA. Tell me what he was going to learn here. I saw that Facebook post, and you guys hung out with the Mythbusters there too, right? I mean, this was a pretty epic... Not intentionally. It was purely accident. We were walking through this area, and our tour guide was like, oh, this is this, this is that. That's Adam Savage from Mythbusters. I wonder what he's doing here. So we were like, can we say hi? Because I grew up loving that guy. He's a big pinball fan, isn't he? Yeah, he is into pinball. What have you done on other games before this? Have you had a hand in any way in any of the previous games? A bit. So many people probably resent me for the song choice in Alice Cooper because I left out Schools Out, but I heard it. Yeah. Whoops. For the most part, I just worked on the line assembling stuff. I didn't really have too much say or pull on what goes in the games because, I mean, I always quote Rick and Morty, I was just a dumbass bug at the time. Right. I totally get that. Did you help your dad with the Godzilla homebrew? Yes. Yes, I do remember helping him quite a bit with that. I mean, he did all the real work. I just said what monsters I wanted to see where and what call-outs would be cool. And, like, we just watched all the movies together, you know, picked out, oh, that shot's beautiful, that would look great by the ramp, that call-out is hilarious, that's perfect for multiball. But he really did all, like, the dirty real work at that time. Well, you were, like, seven. I was, like, seven. Spooky Pinball's next game was rumored and talked about forever. You know, ever since Rick and Morty came out, everybody wants to know what's coming next. So what is your company's strategy regarding themes? Do you guys look at your release schedule and say, okay, we've done Rick and Morty, which was kind of a lighthearted, funny game. Now let's go back to our roots and do something scary. Do you try to alternate, or is it just whatever is fun at the time? No, we just look at our DVD collection and pick stuff from there. Oh! Nice! Someone get a picture of that collection so we can see what's coming. Yeah, we're in an interesting spot after Rick and Morty, because Rick and Morty was a big success theme-wise. It spoke to a lot of people and it sold a lot of units really fast. But Spooky's always had that thing of kind of doing their own niche, goofy stuff. So it was kind of, how can we pick a commercial item that would be very appealing to a lot of people while still being that boutique, niche, spooky category? And Halloween falls into that very well because, I mean, it's very much so our kind of thing to pick. But it's also probably one of the biggest franchises out there. I mean, we're still making them. Halloween Kills just had its next trailer dropped recently. so it's a little bit of a tricky spot anymore for us because we can't pick just the smallest, most goofy weird things we have to pick things else we think a lot of people will like but also appeals to that spooky crowd exactly, it's a very fine line because we're not dumb we understand that if you need to sell 300 to 500 games you can be a bit more eclectic and pick things that are close to the heart and you're going to enjoy the hell out of making it but we're to the point now where the company is growing and obviously by the time people hear this you know, we're doing 1,250 Halloweens. So that's a lot of games. That's a big step up from us. The most we've ever done is 750 in 18 months, but, you know, we've expanded production. We're adding onto the shop. We're doing all these things. So, yeah, we fully understand that, you know, to sell that many games, you definitely need those A-level licenses like Halloween and still stay true to ourselves. So, you know, that's kind of what this whole game and go around on this turn is all about. it. You know, we want to see that horror community get behind the game. We want to drag some new people into pinball. We're going to take this to some shows that aren't necessarily strictly pinball and, you know, just try to make the most of it. So we love all this stuff. I mean, if you don't enjoy what you do, then it makes it a little harder. You're the most perfect example of a family-owned business when it comes to pinball because, you know, I can't think of another company that's more family than the way you guys operate. So when you're picking your properties, you're picking your licenses, do you gather around the kitchen table or the conference table? Like, is this a family decision or is this more of a company decision when you decide what you want to do? It's both an acceptable answer. Well, yeah, because I would imagine by the way you guys run your kitchen table is your conference table. Sort of. I mean, yeah. We were just eating French toast right before this together at the table, so you're pretty much right on the money. He made a wonderful breakfast this morning. You guys missed out. Yeah, we were invited. I'm looking for an invite on my desk here. I don't see anything. I didn't get that text. Damn it. Before we get too heavily into the game, let's talk a little bit about the reveal for this thing. Because, you know, what is your strategy for the game rollout? It seems like you've kind of managed the perfect tease to keep people talking about all of your games. And you always have a hype train that's kind of like a surgical strike leading up to the game reveal. You've got, you know, these videos where, you know, Charlie's got a Freddy Krueger hat on and Bugs rocking an Evil Dead shirt. And you sent Troll City. Yeah, you've got underplay field picks. You know, how seriously do you plan all of this stuff out? And are you just kind of rolling with it and doing what's fun for you guys at the time? It's like 10% planned, 90% rolling with it, I'd say. There's a little bit of thought into that madness, but that's a good question. Do we plan that out, Dad? You know, it's kind of controlled chaos. That's the best way to describe it. I mean, we have a bit of a game plan going into these things. But, I mean, people start looking for all these subtle hints, and they think, oh, they said stacked and loaded. Is that a clue? Maybe. And if people are going to sit there and type 10 pages on Pinside saying, this means this and this means that, I'm going to feed into it. Yes, it does mean that. That's true. Congratulations. You're smart. Honestly, we don't mean to troll people. We're having fun with it. Yes, you do. It's not true. It will drive you crazy when people are getting upset with you for releasing a horror game. I'm a lifelong horror fan, but why isn't this Evil Dead? Well, maybe next time. Support this game. We love Evil Dead, too. Let's see if we can get there. It's all a natural progression. And when we do the best we can to keep everybody as informed as possible while still keeping our little secrets, I think we've done a pretty good job of kind of masking or disguising what we're doing. So when games come out, you do have that initial rush of joy of, oh my goodness, I can't believe they got Halloween. And it's a short window to get production. you know, production, we try to have everything as ready as possible. And so when we hit those launch circles, like, you know, the video comes out 9am on Monday and sales open Wednesday, and here we go. So, you know, hopefully people enjoy the process. And, you know, it's never a perfect plan of attack, for lack of a better term, but it's, we do the best we can with it. And I mean, our marketing team is, you're talking to them. Yeah. Guys in the shop here and there. And, and, you know, everybody's opinion matters at Spooky. And obviously, we try to include everybody and we just we do the best we can with it for 10 planning you guys are absolutely killing it i mean the amount of hype and the amount of excitement that you guys build up is astronomical compared to a lot of the other companies that are significantly bigger and have big marketing teams so so kudos for that because i do think you get people really pumped up to see what's coming next you know with stern and jjp obviously and i mean we don't mind talking about other companies they're so much bigger than we are it's probably a little easier for them to sell games just because they are so massive and they have everybody's attention but you know for us it's uh we just kind of have fun with it and see where it goes and so far it seems to be working yeah now this is the second time you guys have showed the underside of the play field which is you know feeding into your your height building and whatnot now there's been several people who have tried to flip the wood so to speak and construct what they were seeing from underneath up on top of the play field like i know carrie hardy even did a video about it did any of those people come close at all i remember seeing one that i think it was probably 70 right like they got quite a few things pretty accurate there was one i saw and this this guy was brilliant i don't know who did it but the cutout there's a big cutout in the underside of the playfield and you can see the upper playfield kind of through that cutout playfields playfields sorry you can see one of the upper playfields through that cutout and this was before anybody knew it was halloween And they, like, Photoshopped in the Halloween movie poster of the night he comes home with the pumpkin knives curled over it. And they said, it's got to be Halloween because the shape of that cutout was the same as the movie poster pumpkin knives on the front. And I was like, man, that was a way better idea. There's some super sleuths out there, man. That's impressive. No, whoever did that was clever. That was a good one. I think they got it a little closer on Rick and Morty than they did on Halloween I think so but they do a pretty decent job and we know that's going to happen and it's kind of fun when we throw that out there just to see how close they get at this point and yeah man I hope we keep doing that because actually it's a good time to watch that yeah I always really enjoy that watch Native people you know okay I'm going to do a mirror image flip and then start building it and let's see what's got to be a post this has got to be a ramp this has got to be so it's fun I totally agree with you. And it is cool now that I've seen the pictures to actually go back and look. And some of them are actually relatively close. I mean, I'm just looking at the one that first popped up. And, wow, they got the upper play field perfectly and some of the ramps. But anyway, let's talk about the license. So Spooky Pinball is known for its love of all things horror-themed. And you've actually had a nice mix of non-horror-related games in there, too, like TNA and Jetsons. And Rick and Morty even got a pizza game in there. But was it nice to get back to horror? I mean, this is your bread and butter. It felt very comfortable, yes. I mean, in my opinion, I think it's most haunted, obviously. It's a spoof of ghost hunting, which was fun. Domino's Jetsons, we're very proud of our associations there, but they were contract games. The games that we have picked, everything has had either a science fiction or horror feel to it. You know, Rob Zombie, Alice Cooper battling all the monsters in the castle, even Total Nuclear with, you know, kind of a post-apocalyptic vibe to it and everything. But yeah, for us, we've had, including Mr. Christopher Franchi, who I had to bite my tongue so hard the last time I was on this podcast telling me, you guys need to do Halloween. And I'm like, if he only knew. But Chris, you weren't the only one, buddy, man. We've had people screaming at us since we started that you really need to embrace a true horror theme. And it felt really good. It did feel natural, just like Bug said. Yeah, the only part, I mean, I'm glad it happened. The only part that didn't happen was I didn't get hired to do the artwork. Oh. Oh. You can do that out with the guy that's waiting in the wings here behind you. Well, if I had to concede to someone, I would be happy to do it with Jason because I've been a fan of his work for a long time, and our careers kind of intermingle. We do a lot of the same stuff and all that. So, yeah, happy to do so in this case. Well, let's bring him in. Yeah, we can bring him in right now if you'd like. There are so many well-known names in the pinball industry that we get really excited when a new talent enters the ring. We're fortunate then to be talking to a gentleman who fellow artist Alex Hardy said, his portfolio swept me off my feet. I seriously wanted to shoot myself in the head with admiration. And who Gene Simmons of KISS called an attractive and talented man. Now he's working on his first pinball art package, and it's one hell of a big license to kick things off with. So please welcome lead artist on Spooky's Halloween Pinball Machine, Jason Jason Edmiston, to the show. Hey. Hey, guys. How are you? All right. There we go. Put a lot to it. Make the room feel more full. Thanks for having me, guys. I appreciate it. I'm really excited about this project. Yeah, thanks for joining us, man. It's good to have you. The first thing that we saw, might as well do this in order of the way Christian and I were exposed to it, and that's the first thing that we saw was the artwork. We had no idea how the game worked. We had no idea what the play field looked like. We just got artwork. And I looked over it, and I'm like, it's just what I expected. And that comment could kind of seem like it's not as complimentary as it should be, but it is because I know the level of your work, and I know the time that you put into it. And when I think of a pinball machine, And I think if you're doing that, I'm like, there's not enough time in the world to give this man the time to do what he needs to do in his time, in the way that he does his artwork, and get it done in the amount of time. And you did, and it stands up for the rest of your work. So, amazing job. Oh, thanks very much. Thank you so much. I was worried about that when I did accept the job because I knew how much artwork was involved. I didn't know how much work was involved, but I did see previous cabinets. And I'm friends with Jeff Zornow, and I saw what he put into the Alice Cooper machine and was blown away. And so I knew that there was a lot of artwork. But what I wanted to do with it was to put my full level of painting ability into a machine and see what was possible with that. So I talked to the guys at Spooky way back, maybe two years ago, and discussed the possibility of doing my full painting style on a cabinet. And they said that they would have enough time for me to do that. And they did, based on from what I've heard, they did have more time than usual for these types of jobs. So I was blessed with that. It still wasn't enough. It still took much longer than I expected. And we're not yet talking about the art on the sides of the cabinet, but I wasn't even able to paint those specifically full size because the machine is so big and my art board is only so big. So they're painted at about maybe 80%, 90%, and it took up my entire art board. Even at a smaller size, they are still huge. Yeah, and the back glass, you can tell is one single image, but the sides are kind of broken up. Did you do those as separate panes and then kind of use Photoshop to assemble them, or is that one? No. Yeah, they're both individual paintings, so one on each side. I designed it in Photoshop. I laid it out using either sketches or photos just to kind of get the composition down. And then I hand-drew it and hand-painted it. And then the play field is a bunch of different paintings because of the different levels. And the slingshots are done separately, too. So all in all, two dozen paintings all together, maybe. And you kind of took an old-school approach sort of with the play field because there's artwork that I'm not familiar with seeing from you usually, which is sort of like a black line outline around things. Right. How did you adjust to that? And was it a conscious choice to kind of go with that old school look, or is it just what worked for you or what? No, it was a conscious choice. So I discussed it with David and the team. I had an older style that I used for screen prints, which you can see in my Dream Warriors poster that I did for Mondo maybe five or six years ago, maybe longer ago, I can't remember. but it's a hard black inked line art and then flat colors in Photoshop. And I thought that that style would work better on the play field because it needs to be a bit poppier because of the way the lights go and you need the high contrast. So rather than fully painted, I thought maybe flat colors with hard outlines would work better. So I said, well, that's also my style. I just haven't done it in a while. So how about we kind of have two different art styles on the machine, but it's by the same artist, so it still has kind of the same hand in it. And I think it goes well together. I think it shows. It doesn't look too drastically different. It gives you that feel of a Kiss pinball machine or the, we also looked at Evil. Yeah, it's perfect. It's perfect because, you know, Halloween came out in 78, you know, so it's almost kind of like a throwback machine. I think it works out perfectly. Yeah, I try to describe my style as classic but reinvented, you know, kind of like make it look like it's always existed but it's fresh at the same time. That's kind of my goal with my art all the time is to make it look like it's always been around. It's a fine line to walk, but I do try that with my stuff. This is your first foray into pinball art, but you've been creating and selling your art for a long time now. Tell us a little bit more about kind of your background as an artist. Well, I had a completely different career in art for the first 10 years of my career. After I got out of art college in Ontario, Canada, I went to OCAD, and I was trained to be a commercial artist. So I did editorial and advertising art for magazines or billboards. I did spot illustrations for the Wall Street Journal and the Village Voice and some Canadian magazines and newspapers and stuff like that. But it wasn't very fulfilling. So I did that for 10 years. It also wasn't very lucrative because although it took a lot of work to break into that industry, traditional print media was kind of slowly dying. So less work out there and it paid less. And I wasn't even interested in the content as much. So I really wanted to get into pop culture content. And this was right at the pop culture resurgence, like before the Big Bang Theory, before Comic-Con was as huge as it is now, before Funko Pops. Like this is maybe 12 years ago. So I could see the tide kind of changing. So I decided to show my portfolio around and I went to America and showed it around different comic conventions and horror conventions and started exhibiting. And I really switched my portfolio. So for the past, say, 12 years, I've been in the pop culture arena doing toy packaging and movie posters, horror magazines that were famous sponsors. I also have a series of gallery shows doing my own pop culture related art. Jason, you basically sound like if I had asked Christopher Franchi that same question, he would have answered it the same way. Like, how are you guys not best friends? Well, I'm aware of his work for sure. This is the first time we've met, but I've seen his work everywhere. But it's funny, this industry is really small. I'm surprised we haven't run into each other before because I'm friends with most people in the industry. We run into each other at shows all the time or we have the same clients. So it's not surprising. Yeah, well, we almost shared a job together in that Italian Batman DVD release. I don't know what happened to that. Oh, I think that's still happening. But I know. That guy, I'm not quite sure what's going on with his company because he keeps promoting stuff and then the stuff hasn't come out yet. So I don't know exactly what's happening. Well, we were, yeah, we kind of stalled in negotiations because he wasn't offering what I felt was a very fair price. And I'm pretty reasonable to a fault sometimes. Yeah, yeah. And I just, yeah, I was not feeling that. And then, like, everything just kind of, like, fell apart. And then COVID hit. And I'm just like, okay, well, we never came, you know, I never signed a contract with him on anything. I don't know, whatever. We're getting too deep. Yeah, that's a common complaint in the industry. you know, that's why I only have maybe three or four regular clients, because you run through a lot of, you know, fly-by-night people or people that you can't really trust. So when you find a company that you can actually really trust, like, say, a Fright Rags or a Roomwork or Horror Hound magazine where the guys that run it, or Spooky, I imagine. I mean, they seem like great guys to me so far. You know, once you find a company that you like to work with, it's gold. So you just stay with them, you know? Right. So on your website, you've got, like, a really cool eclectic mix of pop culture art, And a good percentage of that is based on horror. You're obviously a huge horror fan, and I'd say even so, a good percentage of that is based on Halloween. So this must have been a dream job for you, getting this phone call. It was. I've done a number of Halloween projects in the past, just because I'm a huge fan of the franchise. I did it before I was selling my art. I just did it for fun. And then as soon as I could get connections to licensors and things like that, I jumped at the chance of doing posters, and I have a series of portraits just based on close-ups of pop culture eyes that I call Eyes Without a Face. And obviously, I did a poster, actually a couple posters for Mondo for Halloween, Drew Trankus, and Compass. So I've worked with those guys before already. I love the franchise, and I really wanted to kind of squeeze all the juice out of that property. But I thought there was still more to do with it. So when I got the offer to do this game, if I was given a choice of, you know, your top three properties to do a game for, this has got to be... I don't want to say number one because I'm a huge Kiss fan, so I would love to do a Kiss pinball machine at some point, but Halloween would have to be second for sure just because I'm a freak for Kiss. But as far as properties that are more likely to happen, and definitely in horror, Halloween is the house on the list. It was great to explore some scenes I didn't explore before. You seem like a perfect fit for the Spooky brand. How did you initially get hooked up? You said you reached out to them and said, hey, I'd love to do art for you. I seem to remember it's been so long I apologize and these shows kind of blend into each other because I do so many of them I do about six convention shows a year so I believe it was at Monsterpalooza I guess two years ago I met David possibly and I thought I met somebody else too I apologize it was David David Van Es and myself at Monsterpalooza I think it was 2018 so my memory is half there There you go. I haven't tried it yet. And we just talked about what was possible. We even threw around some other properties as a possibility. And I was like, hey, you know, I'd love to do a machine. It was on my short list of projects that I hadn't yet done. I'm a big video game fan as well. So Pinball is, you know, the sister to that as far as I'm concerned. And it employs a lot more old school art. So that spoke to me as well. But we hadn't yet found a property that really sung. And then they asked me, well, given your druthers, you know, what would you choose for a property? and I said, oh, it's got to be Halloween. So they said, well, that might be possible. Well, I can't turn this down. So it may be below what my normal day rate would be, which ended up being much below my day rate, just because of how long it took. But it was worth doing for me because I wanted to see that final product. Yeah, cool. Before you worked with Spooky, were you a pinball fan at all Were you familiar with the game or the style of artwork and whatnot Well I was I played very casually Like I would play at bars or I play you know when they would have a few machines at my local arcade When we had arcades, they became less and less prevalent in my neighborhood in Toronto. But some bars still did have pinball machines, you know, or they would have pinball-related cafes or something like that. But they just weren't so popular in my neighborhood. But whenever I was able to play one, I would play one. The thing that I would focus mainly on, though, was the art. I loved all of the cabinet art, and I loved how the art was integrated into a 3D, a moving kind of 3D application on the play field. I loved that, too, and I loved the little sculptures. Above all, I loved the little sculptures, you know, whether it be a sculpted head or a little character that would pop out, you know, things like that, just dioramas and miniatures and all of that spoke to me from an art aesthetic. The terminology that you may not be aware of, but I'll give it to you as a welcome to the pinball community is it's called all the little toys and stuff it's called a world under glass i like that it's very poetic yeah yeah and that's the same way i was growing up you know i don't i don't know how you felt when you were a kid but like as an artist i grew up as a big kiss fan too and i was like man be so cool to do a kiss album cover but for some reason whenever i saw pinball i loved the art i loved the idea of it but i never thought of myself as doing pinball art. It seemed like one of those jobs you just couldn't get. Like, you had to go to a special school or something. Yeah, yeah. As much as I loved it, I never thought of it as, you know, something I would end up doing. Yeah, I imagine that those jobs were given, like the casino slot machine art jobs, that they were done by a studio. Like, that's all that they do is make slot machines or make pinball machines, and they have a number of artists that do that because they kind of seemed similar, at least in the 80s and 90s. a lot of that art seems kind of of the same vibe. It's better, you know? Yeah, yeah. But since then, I've seen artists like Zorno or Zombie Ed, Jeremy, do art. And they're my contemporaries. They're guys in their 30s, 40s. And they're new art for games like Ninja Turtles and Alice Cooper. And, you know, so a bit of different styles. Some traditional, some digital guys. But I'm like, okay, well, maybe it's branching out. So I thought it was maybe possible more recently, I guess, to answer your question in a long way. So Jason, let's go into Halloween and let's talk about how you went into it. So, I mean, the game is freaking beautiful and you took a lot of iconic scenes from the movie. Talk us through your approach to the game and how you kind of decided on what to put where. Okay, well, if you want to go through them individually, possibly, I can do it real quick. For the Translight, I wanted to do something just generally iconic. And you also have to take into consideration all the time. The very first thing is I take into consideration, which is hard for some artists to do initially, is what's the form? Because you're designing to a specific shape more than anything. You don't want to, you can't say, oh, I want to have a full body picture of a character standing from head to toe when you've got this landscape piece, because they're going to seem very small, and then you have to fill up the sides and everything. So the first thing I thought is, okay, it's kind of like a movie screen. It's more landscape. so I want to do a scene most likely with the houses or the street or something like that because it would fill that space well. And then in order to give it some dimension, some height, and I wanted to put Michael in there because, you know, you've got to have the moneymaker on there. And you can't have him without his knife because that's just how he's always portrayed. So I knew I wanted to have Michael, you know, looming over the house, his house with the knife, kind of like a spirit or like a giant, right? So, I mean, it's been done a million times, but I thought I could do it with a bit of a different look than you've seen on, say, T-shirts or other posters or whatever by playing with the perspective. So I decided to, I'll make the house scene and make the Myers house the most dynamic by making it like a fisheye lens, like a wide angle lens and have everything kind of bow out from the center. It also makes that kind of a smaller house seem a lot bigger because it's center of the attention and everything kind of fades away. it bows away to the sides and it creates this natural triangular composition, which is a very strong artistic composition. It makes Michael look even bigger and more imposing. And then he's kind of mounted behind the house, looming over with the knife, almost stabbing directly at the Strode Realty sign, which was very intentional. If you notice, the tip of that knife, that white hot tip, is in the black window, so it has the most amount of contrast, so it really has some emphasis. The rest is kind of emphasizing that scene. So then you've got the Halloween logo behind him, you know, an old magazine trick to kind of make it look more 3D. And then as a sky, I wanted to have it more of like a sunset sky and seem kind of like a dusky kind of, you know, the night has just begun. This is where all the killings start. And I thought it would be kind of cool to have an orange sunset, but have it made out of the initial opening credits pumpkin. and the glow of the eyes was emphasized to kind of just look a little bit more ominous, and, you know, it adds a little bit more power to that knife arm. That's a long-winded answer, but in case anybody's wondering why that scene, why is it portrayed like that, why I've even had people ask why the rest of the houses, why he bothered putting the rest of the houses. You know, you're right about the knife. I never thought of it because if you take the knife out, like you can just be reaching and going, I'm here to fix your plumbing, you know. Right, right. Yeah, you kind of need the knife. It's like, oh, sorry, it's a scary knife. Also, it may seem unusual to do a kind of a more daytime scene with Halloween, but it is a dusk, and I wanted that orange cast. I basically wanted a very orange image. So if you do it at sunset, everything has this kind of orange cast to it because a lot of the images you see of Halloween, everything is blue. It's very blue, blue, blue. But when you think of Halloween, you think orange. So I wanted to go different. And also, if you see that in a pinball arcade, it's going to stand out. You're going to see black, purple, blue, dark green on every horror-related machine. They all kind of look the same. When you go into a pinball arcade sometimes, everything is just black, black, black. So this one is glowing orange. It's going to draw customers. It's going to look great in your collection. I purposely thought as the collector, what would I want in my house if I was going to have a Halloween cabinet? And I decided to have a very kind of orange cast main image because that's the first image you see. and luckily the art directors at Spooky went along with it. Absolutely. It's weird for me to say this about a horror-themed pin, but it might be one of the prettiest cabinets I've seen on a pinball machine. Oh, thanks so much. Yeah, I mean, you could have very easily gone dark with the Halloween logo on a black cabinet and a Michael Myers mask, but you really created a full-blown art piece on each area. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks so much. Yeah, it's cool to see kind of your thought process on how to decide what to put where, because I know there's so many iconic scenes from that movie, and you've really incorporated them well together and the composition of different scenes, like on the sides of the cabinet, you've taken four or five different scenes from the movie and you've made them all work like one image that just looks like it flows really nicely together. Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, that took a long time. It was described to me once, the posters that just have a lot of floating heads, you know, these movie posters you see a lot where they have a scene and a head and a ship. It just looks like, oh, I took a spaceship sticker and I put it here and I took a head sticker and I put it there and it has no flow. So I decided to make compositions that had more of a float. So they go together. They look like bookends when you look at them side by side, although you'll never see them side by side because they're on opposite sides of the cabinet. But no orange as a main color element in that piece either. So what I was trying to do was get a full, broad color palette that would be bright and poppy, but still be kind of horror-related because there's some unusual choices there. There's like a green and purple. There's like a blue and a fuchsia kind of going across from each other. So when you look at this cabinet, it's full of color, but it's not like a cartoon thing. It's not like you're looking at Ninja Turtles. It still has a lot of dark in it, and it still looks kind of spooky, but it's almost like psychedelic, which actually I think fits with the blacklight posters of the 70s. So that was the kind of goal, to make it look like something that would come out in the 70s, very poppy, very famous monsters of film land. That was a really cool deep dive into your thought process and how you chose what you chose. It was really important to the licensor, Malik Akkad, that the game has, I always call it retro-modern, because, you know, we're selling games in 2021, but he still wanted that 1978 vibe, and I mean, Jason absolutely crushed it. I think especially on the playfield, like you said, you know, to make it look like it was done in 78, but still appeal to a modern audience, and it's phenomenal, Jason, seriously. Oh, I'm really glad you feel that way, because above all, I wanted this machine to look like everything was thought of and it just wasn't kind of rushed out and I really think and that's also why it took longer than than I expected longer than you had to expect that I'm sure too because I tried to finish everything to its full degree not kind of like whiff at the 10 yard line you know what I mean yeah I almost hesitate to ask you this but uh Charlie was there ever a thought in your mind that you would because you're going to a three-tier model now that you might do three art packages for this game no not really and I mean Spooky has always been very adamant about the CE, the LE thing kind of making sure that everybody gets exactly the same gameplay experience from top to bottom. So if you can afford the standard edition, it's not changing the game. I've said it before. I never want to, as an old school pinball guy, I was desperate. I want a medieval madness or whatever the game is. And it's like, well, wait a minute. Do I get the version with the exploding castle or without? I never want to do that to people. So everything we do as far as the Bloodsucker Edition or now that we're introducing a CE, it's little cosmetic things. And yeah, obviously we watch what everybody else is doing too. And you kind of see that market growing where people want something just a little bit special. And we took a little bit of heat for not doing it. And we're trying to find a happy medium there, and I think we've done it. I think our CE price is the lowest in the industry, but you're still getting a whole lot of bang for your buck on this thing. And, yeah, that's kind of my mindset going into this stuff is just give people everything they want, but at the same time don't hurt the game, so to speak. Absolutely. From a cosmetic standpoint, though, do you don't think you would ever do three separate art packages across the different games, or do you feel like that really should be a cohesive thing? Jason, did we tell you that we want the other two art packages? I'm sorry, but I'm having trouble with my earphones. I did not hear that. In the future, I'm not opposed to the idea of doing different art packages. As long as the gameplay doesn't change, I'm very okay with cosmetic differences between units. We've talked to a lot of other artists on the show, Jason, who've said that, you know, they were really surprised at how challenging doing art for a machine was. Was there anything specific that you felt was particularly tricky about doing this job for a pinball machine versus other art that you've done? Yeah, absolutely. Not the cabinet itself. You know, although some of the shapes were a little unusual, side of the Translight, you know, the tall, narrow kind of format of those illustrations, although they do lend themselves to the figures that I illustrated for those. Other than that, the play field was the real challenge because it was almost like I felt like I was designing how the exterior of a car looks and where to put vents and where to put, you know, scoops and how much to bow out the fenders as it's going along the assembly line. So it's already being built and things are already moving and wheelbases are already changing and I'm trying to design what the fenders look like. So it's like, it was really hard for me to design something that was in development because things were moving around, shapes were changing slightly, our art was being added. So that was the most challenging. It wasn't impossible. It was just something I wasn't used to. Usually things are set in stone. This is the format that we need the art designed for. Now go and make it. Things were still being developed as I was drawing. Well, all this being said, Jason, now that you've finished the game, do you think you would take on the pressure of doing another pinball machine art package in the future? Man, that's the question. I got to tell you, it's interesting because this job did take from a bunch of assignments that I need to get to because I have a few regular clients that I have kind of ongoing projects with. So I need to kind of stay on a schedule with those. And I also have a lot of side projects that I like to do, whether they be gallery shows or my own print releases, that sort of thing. So it's hard to fit in a project like this because it takes so much time. It's basically asking me, Even at the end, when it's just rendering, say you could be working on it for a year, it's fine to kind of fit in time here or there to do sketches or get this approved or do this concept. But then when you're down to the wire and you're actually illustrating straight for weeks, that's a big chunk of my schedule that I don't necessarily always have time for because I also do a lot of appearances. As before I said, I do about six conventions a year. So there's a lot of traveling. There's gallery shows. there's existing clients that I have to appease. So there's not always that big chunk of time that I have to put into a project like this. Yeah, I don't want to say anything, but Randy over at Necker called me, and he said, hey, this Jason guy is fucking off, but you want to take these jobs? Well, there you go. I'm sure that happened. No, actually, it hasn't, damn it. If this is the only game you ever end up doing, you crushed it out. So we're really happy that we got you on this project because it was really, really great. And we appreciate it. And we appreciate you coming on the show and giving us, you know, the inside scoop on it. So, you know, if you want to see more of Jason's stuff, definitely check out JasonEdmiston.com. He's got some amazing art for sale there, including some really cool Halloween pieces. Or you can pick up his book, Visceral, the Art of Jason Jason Edmiston, available on Amazon. And obviously you should buy Spooky's new pinball machine so that you can get all of his art at one time in your home. Oh, thank you so much. has done an incredible job. You obviously have to have this art package in your home. I'm just saying, all you Jason Jason Edmiston fans, come on in. We're ready for you. I've heard a bunch of people on socials mentioning that they're going to get one, so I'm hoping that it's not just talk because I'd love to see that in their house. I know I'm getting one. Yes, you are. From a manufacturing standpoint and in Jason's defense, when we hire an artist, and literally every game we've done, I think we've only had one guy that had pinball experience in all the years that we've been doing this stuff, two if you count Ben Heck, I've sent them templates of the play field, the cabinets, the back glass, we've explained the video element side of it, all that kind of stuff, just to fair warn them, you know, and the same thing with like Jeff Zornow and stuff. And I've adequately succeeded in explaining to them the level of work exactly zero times. It was always funny to me, like, you know, because Zornow was getting, he was getting fried towards the end of Alice Cooper and he's like, dude, how much more is there? And I'm like, you're almost there, Jeff. You're almost there. And then at G-Fest, we showed up with an Alice Cooper and, you know, not giant monster related at all with that game, but we put it in his booth and the man looked at it, put his arms around me, hugged me longer than Jeff Zornow had ever hugged me before. And when he pulled back, he had tears in his eyes. And I was like, all right, we're good now. Jeff still loves me. Maybe he just smells like onions. It might have been. It might have been. Oh, that's great. And one thing I gotta say I appreciate, Jason, is that your name being attached to this title in general has brought a lot of people from your community, the horror community in general, over to the pinball side to see things. But what I appreciate even more is that on one of your posts, because I was just stalking your Instagram a bit, was you talking about how names don't always matter. As long as it's good frickin' art, it's good frickin' art. And it's a pleasure knowing that you have good frickin' art and that you have a great name to help bring people over to this game. Thank you so much. I'll always promote good art when I see it, and I'll always promote good relationships when I experience them. And you guys have been, honestly, a pleasure to work with. The only gripe I have on this project is that it just took more out of me than I was prepared for, even though I was prepared ahead of time, if that makes sense. You guys warned me, and I still was not prepared for it, which makes me wonder. People always imagine, oh, I'd love to direct a movie someday or produce a movie. I don't think you would. it sounds like torture Jason if we were completely honest with you you wouldn't have done it that is true so thank you for saving me from myself it was a real pleasure guys thank you very much and the guys at Trincus and Compass they've always been really sweet to me and very cooperative and creative and this isn't just me blowing smoke honestly I don't need the work so there's no reason for me to kiss anybody's ass but man you guys have been Just a pleasure to work with. Thank you, man. It's a feeling mutual, man. We're so thrilled to have you on this game. Well, you guys enjoy the rest of your podcast. All right. So we're going to jump into more details about the game because we have so much to talk about. And there's a lot of cool stuff here. So let's talk about the license. So you get this great license in Halloween and you have to develop a pinball machine around it. How do you decide what content to use from the series? Because there's something like 11 movies and there's so much mythology at this point. Did you guys have to decide what fraction of the movies you were going to use, or did you always know it was going to be the original movie? We knew that it was going to be just the original movie. It's all we were allowed to use, per se. But I would actually say that it being just the original movie probably helped us in an aspect where there's too many movies to try and pull from. It's very easy when you have all the content in the world to have a really messy product at the end because you're just trying to incorporate too many things from too many different places, and it just doesn't end up marrying that well to itself. And having just the one movie, even though there was less content, probably helped us get a more clear image out of the game, I would say. Very much so. Well said, my son. Yeah, I know, that was. So yeah, we knew it was just the one movie when we started incorporating the theme to it, yes. And we were absolutely, I mean, this movie is in the National Film Archives, for crying out loud. It's an absolute classic, and it was great to be able to kind of keep the focus on the origin and all those classic images that absolutely everybody remembers, and it worked out well. Yeah. Well, looking at this game, you know, first of all, it's packed and, like, crazy cool to look at. As soon as I saw the pictures, I'm like, oh, crap. Now how am I going to make room for one of these? And David David Van Es is rumored to have designed it. We actually don't know. So, you know, first of all, can you confirm that? Is that true? So if people have noticed, the design credit is labeled as Taurus Barloff, Which is kind of, which is a little bit of an inside joke, but basically this game is designed by a whole team of people rather than one person completely with creative direction on it. This is really going to cause problems in pinball because they're not used to, oh, it's a Steve Ritchie game, it's a Keith Elwin, it's a game from J.J.P. This one isn't one sole person. This isn't anything like that. There's fingerprints from all of us all over this thing. And to be honest, three guys kind of did the bulk of the heavy lifting, and that's Spooky Luke, Bug, and AJ. And, you know, the rest of us dipped in and out here and there where it made sense and offered our opinions, and things changed here and there. I've got little things in the game that, you know, I wanted to see. And it was phenomenal to me to watch my workers step up, really get involved, kind of make it their own. And, man, they did a killer job. this all pun intended but this game is i mean i'm not that you know okay let's be honest and blunt here gary will tell you the greatest term game is whatever's on the line i don't say that stuff this is the greatest game we've ever made that's awesome you said the same thing on your video so far it's amazing but tell us more about that man i mean since you were one of the three i guess primary people involved what what was that experience like how do you bounce ideas off of each other? How did you go from the assets of the movie to what we're looking at on the playfields? So to give kind of the full story without too much of the full story, the other two guys in the team were starting this design up while I was still in school. So I wasn't really around too much or paying too much attention. When I graduated, they were like, hey, do you want to get in on this? Do you want to be a part of it? And I was like, absolutely, man. So we were designing it back then. We didn't know what we were going to put on it. We were actually kind of just designing it on whatever we thought was cool at the time, which was John Wick to us. Oh, nice. So we were designing kind of our own little thing there, and eventually we got to the discussion of putting the Halloween layout on it, so we started adapting the layout to Halloween a bit more specifically. I think Barlow wants to answer. Is that Barlow? Yeah. It got done really well. They kind of built it up from there and started adding all the Halloween elements to it. Exactly. That's cool. So whose idea was the double play field in the back, right? because, man, that is like a pinball circus in a game. It's so cool. Yeah, so a lot of the time while designing, there was a lot of we don't want to do things that get recycled a lot between designers and layouts that you would just see very often in like the last 10 years. It was a lot of what isn't done a lot today, what is kind of funny but really cool, and let's just not let things stop us from putting what we want in this game. like we never thought we'd have the opportunity to say hey there's three upper playfields in this game which sounds completely ridiculous but there's no reason you can't put three upper playfields in a game so we didn't want to let any kind of norms or what would you say stereotype yeah i'm sure say norms any norms stop us from putting what we wanted in the game no matter how ridiculous that might be that's why in the trailers you see dual this triple that because we're obsessed with being over the top about things because we think over the top is the best way to do everything. And that's what people want in pinball. They want more jammed into a play field and you guys have achieved that with this game. I mean there's so much going on. And right about there we're going to take a quick commercial break and we'll be back with the rest of the story right after this. We'll be right back. This show is sponsored by Cointaker. Distributor of brand new full-size authentic stern pinball, Chicago games, raw thrills, arcade games, and much more. Also a full line of dramatic pinball mods, LED flipper kits, speaker lights, custom laser LED toppers, playfield protectors, Valley Williams Park, pinball apparel, and much more. Get the latest releases and glam out your game room with CoinTaker. Everything at your fingertips at CoinTaker.com. CoinTaker.com. Get your game on. Now, back to our program. Chris and I, before we came on the show, we were kind of looking at these images, and we were trying to count the shots, and there's, I think, ten shots. on just the main playfield, and then that's not even including the other ones. Exactly. We're a big fan. I forget who said it, but they said the standard pinball playfield is seven shots or so, and we wanted to go way past that. We wanted to have more than that on the base playfield, and then we wanted to have other playfields to cram more into. We wanted to give people as much content as possible between the multiple playfields, and that is definitely something we plan to keep doing in the future. We want to keep giving people a lot. The amazing part to me is even with all the upper playfields, and the main play field having as many shots as it does, there isn't a single shot on that thing that I would call tight. You know, people get upset if they're hitting a post and stuff like that. No, it's a clock fest. This thing flows like the Mississippi River, you know, because it's two miles to my right. But it's unbelievable what this group pulled off. These young guys come in and they make this thing, and it's like, what do you think? And all I'm thinking is, holy crap, this is amazing. Like, how the hell did you pull this off? And, you know, it's unreal. Even the upper play field, which is the Strode house, or I guess it's a conglomerate. It's multiple houses, yes. It takes place in different houses, so you kind of got to combine those elements. Right. You can't have all or that many. But they even got that to flow. That figure eight shot affectionately known as Bug, what do you guys call it? We call it the butt pretzel because it just kind of looks like a butt pretzel. I don't know. You rip that right spinner and hold the flipper up and it goes together. It just flows right into the next shot. It's unreal. And to let off on a mini play field, so to speak, is just insane. Mini play field that takes up most of the game. And then add a drop target blocking a ramp and another ramp shot off that thing. It's just ridiculous. To answer your question a little bit more from earlier, though, the team that we go in there with, we literally just go into the office, we close the door behind us, we take this blank board, and everybody has a good idea, but it always seems that there's one idea amongst all of us that just sticks. And there's never been a moment of, I really didn't like that, but the other two guys agreed to it, so I'm going to just kind of roll with it. That's never happened for us. Every single thing that we decided on, everybody mutually agreed on that that would be best for the game. So we found it just worked best to have more cooks in the kitchen in this instance, which a lot of people always say is a bad thing. But for whatever reason, and I have a feeling it's because we're very like-minded individuals when it came to going into this, having multiple ideas get joined together ended up making what we thought could be the best product for the game, or the best outcome for the game, I should say. I never would have predicted that these guys could kind of team up to do this and not have the one chief in charge and have it come out the way it did. I was absolutely stunned and blown away, and like I said, and I'll say it forever, I am so ridiculously proud of what these guys did. It's amazing. That's so cool. I mean, it's three guys that have never really designed a game by themselves before, So I'm sure that that energy and excitement that they're bringing to this game together is just going to be translated to how much fun it is and how cool it is. Because you guys are all super passionate about pinball, obviously. So you're bringing that to the table, and I can't wait to flip this thing. Yeah, and I almost feel bad saying just the three of us because we take everybody's input, no matter who they are. Like any employee in the building, the very few people who might have seen the game before others did, we listened to everybody's input. And if somebody had a good idea, we didn't discard it because we wanted it to be like our layout and it's our thing. No, we just wanted what was best. So anybody who had good ideas, we were listening and we would put it in or at least try it. I was like, you know, hey, this is great, but maybe this would be better. Oh, my God, that's right. And they just took it and they did it. A little bit of backstory. Like these guys, they've been working for Spooky for years, including my son. Obviously, he's been here since before Spooky existed. These guys have worked on the line. They have shot every game over and over again. and they watched Pinside and they watched, you know, what people like and what they don't like. And when they started this thing, that base layout, literally, I knew nothing of it for six months. They were kind of the Johnny Cash song one piece at a time. They were building it in their basement and not telling me about it and just wanted to see if they could do it. And they wanted to kind of bring it to me and present it to me like, you know, hey, if this is good enough, maybe you can use it one day. And the minute I saw it, it was like, you dudes need to get this into the shop right now and keep going. Just take whatever you need and, you know, work on it, pluck away on it. And they did, and a lot of it on their own time. So if that doesn't tell you what kind of crazy pinball dedicated workers Swoopy Pinball has, I don't know what does. I'm just ridiculously thrilled with how this thing came out. And I'll get emotional and weird sometimes. No, that's all right. I love these guys, man. It's awesome to see what they've made. Well, Jeff from This Week in Pinball just chimed in, and he said he doesn care how many people worked on this game When it comes to Swoopy you only get one trophy you gotta pay for extra We as Barloff on there and I guarantee you this team will be happy What can you guys tell us about the gameplay? I mean, we've seen pictures, but we don't really know what the objectives are and what you're trying to do. Yeah, let's start with, Chris and I were trying to figure this out and we couldn't. Where does the plunge go? It disappears under a knife and then it's like, where does it come out? I don't know. It goes around that orbit. It just comes out of that left side orbit when you first throw it out there. And then there's six stand-up targets, which you can change in between the stand-up targets and the draft targets to change the value for your skill shot. And then how do you get to the upper, upper playfield? Is that the shot that's over the, I guess, the car scene with Michael on top of the car? Basically, the lower playfield, it's the Smith's Grove Sanitarium playfield. It has the fencing around it and the concrete. After you've visited that mode and after you've visited that Hedge Michael mode, the center-most ramp switches open so that you can get to that uppermost playfield, and you battle Michael Myers in the closet as Laurie Strode, basically. But that's not the only time you can get up there. That's just the initial way you get up there. So you just have to start a couple modes, and then it opens up. Otherwise, that center ramp feeds to the left, kind of behind the balcony shot, and down to that left habit trail. So you have two feeds to that left habit trail. So you've got the two tiers of upper playfield. When you're on the middle tier, I guess I should say, can you get it up from that upper playfield? Or is it only from the center ramp? Only from the center ramp there. Okay. Okay. But the uppermost playfield does drain down to that second playfield. So if I'm on the uppermost playfield shooting the butt pretzel loop and I fail and it drains down, it'll fall into that asylum playfield. and then from the asylum playfield, it can fall behind the pumpkin into the subway or back into the shooter lane. Wow. Or you can also shoot it off. There's actually four exits to the asylum playfield because I can also shoot an escape shot to the right and if you mess up, you can shoot it back down the ramp that you came up on. So cool. I'm looking at this playfield and I just noticed now, after Christian and I stared at this thing for like 20 minutes earlier, there are little Michael Myers figures behind the hedge. Please tell me there's targets or something, and those little figures swing out like they do in the movie. That sums it up, yeah. So, after the ball, it's the three hedge scoop shots there. It starts a mode called hedge multiball. It lifts up that in-lane lifter, and it gives you your three balls. And when you shoot the left ramp, a Michael Myers appears from behind the hedge, and that's the jackpot, Michael, that you want to shoot. So it's kind of like a whack-a-mole mode, per se, is that by shooting certain shots, Michael Myers will appear behind the hedge, and then you shoot for that Michael Myers. Like a whack-a-shape. It's a whack-a-shape, perfect. And then there's a... Like in the movie, you know, he was constantly, he was there, and then he wasn't. He's outside the school window while Laurie's daydreaming, and then he isn't. So, yeah, it's designed to be kind of like a bit of hide-and-seek Michael. I love how the wire form travels the ball underneath all the hedges, and then it returns it to the left flipper. You guys are bastards, because I have to have one of these now. Oh, I forgot to tell you, the fee for this podcast is a... Oh, that's right, one game. That's right. Christy, you can come and play with us. Sounds good. Our listeners have to bear with us here because we haven't... By the time this episode releases, we will have seen everything and seen videos and that sort of stuff. But, you know, we're just kind of geeking out over this, you know, because we're just seeing it for the first time now. But why don't we just take an overview of the game? So, Boggart Charlie, how do you progress through the game? and what are the goals of the game? So there is essentially three main modes and six pumpkin modes. So like I said earlier, you have the hedge multiball mode and the Smithscrope Sanitarium mode. Those two modes will get you to house, so you can battle Michael Myers in the closet. Now, aside from those, there is a whole bunch of what we call pumpkin incidental modes, basically, and those are kind of highlights of the kill scenes in the movie. So Michael getting Annie, Michael getting PJ and Bob, each of them have their own modes, so each person has their own death scene mode, basically. And what you want to do is complete, or at least visit, all of the pumpkin modes, and then those other three modes that I mentioned, and that gets you to the Boogeyman Wizard mode, which is a seven-ball lock mode where you lock balls one at a time. It's not a seven-ball multiball yet. You lock the balls one at a time in each lock in the game, and after you've locked all seven, that starts Nike Came Home Wizard mode, which is a seven-ball multiball. Wow. There's seven locks in the game. Seven locks in the game, yes. That's wild. All physical, too, yeah. That is wild. The main lock of the game is the drop-down mech that Spooky Luke came up with, where on the uppermost playfield, you shoot up the ramp on the third level, and it goes across that balcony over to that metal piece over there. And that's essentially in the movie Michael Myers getting shot off the balcony. And as they look over the pier and he's gone, that's when it drops down, and the ball starts, and you're in wizard mode now. Wow. So does that top piece there tilt, or is it just it opens up a diverter or something and lets the balls out. The top piece to the far left over there, the metal piece, it gets pulled down by a lever, basically. There's a magnet with it that holds the ball in place while we play the animations and give you the story, and then poof, it tilts, the ball rolls down into the habitrail, and then everything comes at you. As soon as that drops down, the other six balls are released at the same time. You know, think of the scene in the movie where all of a sudden the bodies start coming out of the closets and everything. That's what you got. Nice. How did you guys handle the call-outs? You know, because you can't get Michael Myers. Because all you get is... We have a Donald Pleasance sound alike, and we hired PJ Souls herself from the movie. Absolutely. So, you know, PJ from Halloween and Carrie and Stripes and, you know, Private Venom. She's been in so much stuff, but we got to work with her, an absolutely wonderful, sweet human being. Yeah, she's awesome. Yeah, she got to do a lot of the speech call-outs in it, too, so we actually did get somebody from the film that was very key to the whole movie, and she was a sweetheart and her only question as we were leaving from the recording session was like, hey guys, this game has a video stream, right? And we're like, yeah, sure does, BJ. Are you going to show my boobs? We're like, did you want us? We weren't going to bring it up. Every time that, you know, she's on the cabinet, she's on the play field, so every time you've got a piece of artwork done with her on it, I would text it to her and she would, she just absolutely that's totally awesome! She's a sweetheart. I've got a suggestion for an updated code. When you drain your fifth ball, you get Tommy Lee Wallace to come in and go how'd you like that, titties? So, did you guys have all of the assets from the movie? You could just pull whatever you wanted from? Uh, yes and no. Not particularly all the assets, no, but um, we were able to pull a very generous amount. Okay, all right. We have the soundtrack. We have movie clips, obviously. We have dialogue and everything from the film. But, you know, they wanted us to kind of present it in a unique way, and that's exactly what I think we're doing. All right. But what I find really exciting is that we do have the John Carpenter original score and also original music from Matt Count D. Montgomery. Bass player in Rob Zombie's band basically wrote additional music that kind of expanded on what John Carpenter did in 1978 for the film just to give it some more variety and make it even more better. More better. So, yeah, this is actually, you know, the second time we've gotten to work with Matt, we've become good friends. And congratulations, Matt, if you're listening on the birth of your new little girl. Oh, congrats. He's phenomenal, and he does a wonderful job. And it took a couple revisions to get Malik to go, you know, that sounds like 1978. But it worked out, and, yeah, I think it's absolutely incredible. That's very cool. But tell me about the display and the animations. I assume David was on those as well? A little bit of both. Actually, he kind of started it, and then Ryan Polisky, the Unite Mutilator from Denver, Colorado, he's doing a lot of the UI stuff for it right now, and it looks pretty good. Don't you think, Bob? Yeah, Polisky is absolutely amazing. Everything he's sent in to me. I gave him a list of the things we would need for different modes, and I knew that this list I was giving him, half of it was super unrealistic to even ask for, and he never complained once, never said, I don't know that I can do it. Nope, he just worked as hard as he could and got me exactly what I asked for, even though it didn't even exist in the movie. I knew I was being completely unfair to him. I just wanted to see if he could do it. And yeah, he got exactly what I asked for. So it was absolutely amazing. He's doing an incredible job and I can't see what more he brings to the table with it because I'm talking to him more than anybody at this point. They wanted a different take kind of on how the pinball display is handled, and Ryan absolutely crushed it. So, I mean, we're thrilled to be working with him. Yeah, absolutely wonderful job. I knew he was. I've seen his videos. I had no idea he was an animator or, you know, would do that stuff. So that's very neat. I'm excited to see that. What was the take that the licensor wanted that kind of was different than the normal display for a pinball machine? Well, in essence, and right now I'm the one kind of dealing with all this, this end of it, is he didn't want necessarily the film just running in a continuous loop. So he was like, you know, the play field, you guys do all what you do, that's your world, but on the display, he kind of wanted us to take a different take on it and make it a little bit more original so that when you're seeing the movie clips, it has a little bit more impact. And to be completely blunt, we kind of butted heads on it for a little while, and after seeing what Ryan has done and it really sunk in with the producer, and he's like, that's what I'm talking about. He was right to do so. It's making a better game, and it's really cool and unique, and I can't wait for everybody to see this. Seems like Malik Akkad should get a credit on the making of this game because he was so involved. Absolutely, yes. Yeah, he is. He's very involved. Yes, he's very passionate. I mean, this is, you talk about a family-run business. Halloween to Malick Akkad, I mean, his dad, Mustafa, was the one that put the original film together and gave Carpenter the tools he needed and everything else. So it's for a family-run business like Spooky Pinball to work with a family-run property like Halloween is absolutely amazing. So, yeah, he cares as much about that film as we do about Pinball. He takes very good care of what he has. Yeah, he does. He has a very clear vision of what he likes to see, and it went a very good direction. For as much credit as John Carpenter gets, it was actually Mustafa's idea for the title and the whole theme about a guy coming after babysitters, which was rare at the time. Nowadays, it's kind of passe, but back then, it hadn't been done, and that was Mustafa's idea, wasn't it? Yeah, I believe that is the case. It was mostly Mustafa's idea, and yeah, Carpenter put it together for him, obviously, but I believe Mustafa was in charge of most of it. That was pretty much just a perfect storm of a really good young director that had a lot of talent and needed an opportunity with, you know, everything that Mustafa did for him. And, you know, they have a lot of respect for each other still to this day, and it's absolutely been incredible to work on. So, I mean, this game of all of the spooky title games or theme games that you've done, this is a horror movie that, you know, has scared a lot of people. And the question that has been on my mind, I know, Charlie, I've asked you this question before in the past, is, is it possible to make a truly scary pinball machine? Do you guys feel like that was a challenge here? Was that even a goal of yours to try and scare the player? We have a few tricks up our sleeves on things we would like to try to scare people in the game. But it's a very interesting route to go. Because, yeah, humor, campiness and humor has always just gone hand in hand with pinball. And we don't want this to be that. Yeah, and Halloween, obviously if you've seen the movie, it's not exactly the funniest movie. It's not like Eddie Murphy's running around as Michael Myers or anything. No, it's pretty serious. He means business. So incorporating that into the game is a very different direction for us because obviously everyone who knows our games, they're pretty goofy and sarcastic. So it was a very different route for us to go with this game. But yeah, we have a few ideas on how to make it actually a scary, intense experience because games like Scared Stiff, which are funny all the way through, every time I've ever gotten to Scared Stiff mode, though, I wasn't laughing. My heart is beating fast, my hands are sweating, and it's a very intense, thrilling experience, and that is something we definitely wanted to duplicate in this game. Because, yeah, I mean, Michael Myers, it's not like he can make Elvira call-outs to you while you're playing. Well, before we talk about the different models of the game, let's talk about general improvements in all spooky games that are rolling out with this new release. You've got quieter fans, you've got improved flippers, Molex connectors, easier play field movement, and more. It sounds like you guys are constantly taking notes and improving what one can expect from a spooky pinball machine. Is that a group effort, or does one person really kind of focus on leading that charge? Very much so a group effort. But I would give Spooky Luke a lot of credit for that one. He spends day and night checking pin side, as harmful as that may be to somebody. I'm so sorry. But, no, those improvements were very important to us because along with putting all the things we wanted to see in this game, as the guys who have been building the games on the line with people and teaching non-pinball people, just regular folks who don't particularly even care about the hobby, who just need a job, it's important to us that they can build these games in a feasible manner. Because it's very hard to teach people who don't know anything about pinball how to build pinball machines to a pinball customer's standards. And those standards are always rising, as they should. It makes sense why they do. So it was important to us to pay very close attention to the changes people wanted to see made and improve them and also make this game easier for our guys to build, which both of those things go hand-in-hand together. If it's easier for our guys to build, you will have a better quality game because there's less room for error on our end, and we can keep a better eye on the problems that do get out of the building. Yeah, Spooky Luke actually, our upstairs office has a bathroom in it, and he literally took a piece of paper, slapped it on the outside of the bathroom door, and we just started writing everything down that anybody complains about. Okay, the flipper machines, the flippers that I took too high. Okay, we'll fix that. We got new tooling for that. The power supply fan. These aren't quieter fans. They are completely non... You don't hear them, period. They don't even activate unless the amp level gets high enough for them to kick in, and if that's happening, it's probably in seven-ball, multiball, and you're never going to notice, and then it shuts back off. So there is no fan noise, none. Just everything, every little thing. Molex connectors have been kind of, this is dumb tech crap, but like PanCon, the company that makes them, has kind of pulled back on a lot of that stuff, and so they're just not there, or we have to get different brands, and they don't quite work as well. So, yeah, everything went out. No more IDCs. We just do complete Molex. We bought the big stripping pneumatic everything, so we just put all that stuff right into the housings, and it's done, and it's going to hold up forever, hopefully. and just a lot of little stuff like that that really adds up. And I think we've kind of built our reputation on our playfields and cabinets being just ridiculously good. But we wanted all those little things to kind of come together, including the new Pinnatar board from Parker Dillman, and Ben had some assistance there. It's an all-in-one design. It's a little bit simpler to navigate and a little bit easier. Like if there is a problem, you can troubleshoot it. And just all these little things add up to us getting our quality to where Hopefully we're not just as good as everybody else, but we want our games to be the most reliable in the marketplace too, man. We want those operators happy that are going to run these things 12, 14 hours a day, every day, and get everything that we do to that standard. The collector's market in pinball has really, really grown. We know that. It's a different marketplace. The home guys are very particular, and we want to satisfy them too. Yeah, I mean, kind of in that vein, let's talk about the new strategy that you guys are doing because you have new game tiers now. And instead of a a la carte upgrades, you have three different models to pick from. You get the standard edition, the Bloodsuckers edition, and the collector's edition. I know, Charlie, in the past we've talked about this. You've kind of resisted the three-tier model for a while, but it makes sense to me to standardize things and avoid 750 different games on the line. Is that kind of your new approach going forward with all games? Yes, very much so, yeah. Like you said, the a la carte options were very, very nice, and you could kind of customize your game to your liking. But if you're working with the distributors, which we obviously do, and if you're working with human beings, which we obviously do every day, that can lead to some problems. So basically what we wanted to do was simplify the ordering process. So if you're ordering a Bloodsucker now, very few people that ordered that top-level model before didn't throw everything at it. And we paid attention to this. You know, I want the knocker. I want the shaker. I want the speaker lights. I want all that stuff. So this way, when you order it now, you're getting all that stuff. And did the price go up a little bit? It absolutely did. But if you add up the cost of all those parts that we are injecting into even the mid-level game, you're saving money. So it's actually for those guys, for that customer base that wants everything, it's cheaper for you. So, yeah, we're proud of that. Yeah, that was really a surprise to see that you guys came under what it would have been to throw all of the bells and whistles into a game. That's really awesome. We're trying. We want to be the best value. We want to be the best games. We want to be all that stuff. All the different models vary only in enhancements to things outside of gameplay. Do you feel strongly about making every game play the same way, or do you think you might add on something unique like a special mode or a higher tier addition on a future title? You know, I never considered the mode difference before. Is that something people do? Yeah, yeah. Like Tron had a multiball that was unique only to the LEs and that kind of thing. Interesting. I didn't know that, actually. My personal opinion is new. I want everybody to have the same game. Yeah, I'm very okay with games being decorated differently. I mean, if you paid for a more expensive title, I want to give you a more expensive-looking game. But as far as gameplay value goes, yeah, I would prefer people still have the same shots, the same mechs. Same modes, same everything. All right, well, let's talk about something that Chris and I haven't seen yet, which is the topper that is coming on the collector's edition. You guys may or may not even be divulging what that is yet, but we had to take a shot and see if you could tell us about it. Oh, we'll tell you. It's the most bitchinest, raddest, coolest topper we've done. To explain it to everybody, it's... Familiar with the poster. Yeah, if you're familiar with the poster, it's basically the movie poster with motion. So it's Michael Myers' hand holding that big curved knife, and he's literally stabbing into the top of your game. It's on a loop of him just stabbing it, stabbing it. It says John Carpenter's Halloween in front of it. It's lit up. It's gorgeous. and it's the funniest, coolest, most badass topper we've ever done. If you haven't noticed, you look at that poster and those pumpkin slices are actually reflections coming off the knife. So they're shaped just like the knife. And the knife that we're using in the game is from Trick or Treat Studios and it is the movie poster version of the knife with Michael's hand on it. So yeah, that chunk of knife and hand is stabbing the hell out of the top of your hand. and you get rolling. So is there a slit in the top of the cabinet that allows the blade to go in? Yes. Yeah, it's the full-size blade. It's literally grabbing the cabinet. Yeah. It's not damaging the cabinet. Hopefully no one thinks that we're destroying your game. So if you don't get that model, you're going to be looking at that slit going, damn it, I should have got the good one. Nope. It'll be there just to remind you. Yeah. Now, what's that? This is curiously worded. Additional licensed decorative toy. The additional licensed decorative toy is a big-ass knife on the playfield. Oh, that's cool. In the shooter lane? In the shooter lane? So the pictures we saw on the playfield, was that the collector's edition? Yes. Okay, all right. The knife in the game isn't stabbing anybody, but it's a big decorative knife over the shooter lane. It's really, really cool. And it's pointing away from your hand as you plunge. Yeah. And your plunger is a knife as well. I've lost knives. Yeah, because Ben Heck's like, You've got to have knives everywhere. Do it, do it. He emphasized this very heavily, that if we didn't have too many knives in the game, then we screwed up terribly. Nice. You know, if you could make the lockdown bar and all that area look like a kitchen drawer, and you have a plunger with the knife there. It could have been a consultant, damn it. Well, there's something really freaking special to talk about before we move on, and Spooky Pinball is about to do what I think is a first in pinball. You're taking an awesome pinball machine, and you're releasing two different games with completely different themes based on the one great layout that you've made. So do you guys want to elaborate a little bit on that? Yeah, so as people know now, the second theme that goes out is Ultraman. And as we talked earlier, where we're in this interesting position of we want to pick titles that are cool to us, that we think could sell to the masses, Ultraman is one of those ones where it's like, well, we don't know that we could sell a thousand of these, but it's definitely worth trying. So we're going to incorporate it with our next release. So yeah, you can get an Ultraman layout as opposed to a Halloween. Because some families can't have a murderous serial killer pinball machine in their house. So we'd like to put in a family option, and it's a very fun, family-friendly, exciting, beautiful-looking option in conjunction with Halloween. Nobody thinks that this is an and-also situation. It definitely isn't. We put as much time and effort into Ultraman as we did Halloween. We had Matt Frank doing all the artwork on it, who's another friend from G-Fest, where Buggy has been forever. You know, that's where we met Jeff Zornow. It's where we met Matt Frank, and Matt's done a ton of work for Tsuburaya Productions over the years. And when Alice Cooper came out, he was like, if you ever do a kaiju game, you've got to get me on it. And Matt's an amazing dude, too. He's very nice, very, very talented. Here's a little secret that I don't think anybody really knows yet. The back glass on that game is, in fact, Matt Frank's first time. He's done a lot of comic books for IDW and stuff, but this is his first time on a Marvel comic. So Marvel is literally putting our back glass on the cover of one of their comic books, and we're so happy about it. That is so cool. Yeah, it was a huge honor for Matt, a huge honor for us. He deserves it. He did an incredible job on the artwork. It's bright, it's colorful, it's fun, it's campy. It's everything that Ultraman should be. And we should give people the full title because the full title is very fun. It's Ultraman Kaiju Rumble. I was watching a show all about Ultraman last night just to get prepared for this, and the sequel names to some of these movies are so ridiculously over-the-top funny. Oh, my gosh. We joked about doing that, but we figured we better keep it simple. Ultraman, what is it? It's Ultraman Mega Monster Battle for the Universe Galactic Legends. It's really funny. Looking at these pictures that you sent over of the Ultraman, I can see in the background, we now know what your next theme is, and that's Sea Monkeys. Congratulations on that. So, yeah, this is really cool. The artist that did this, he's got a background in working for Marvel Comics. And, yeah, that's cool. People are going to be able to go to the comic shop and get a special edition comic book with this art on the cover, which I think if you have the pinball machine, you have to get the comic book to go with it. I know I will. Of course. Absolutely. So, I mean, this is such a unique thing that you guys have done because outside of the Family Guy, Shrek, Stern machine, I don't think any games have kind of been repurposed like this and not come out at the same time, released with two completely different themes. So how much of a challenge was it to create two games simultaneously? I'll never do it again. Yeah, no, this is the first kind of last for the company. I will say that. And honestly, you just mentioned it. And the handful of people that knew going into this what we were actually doing were like, you're doing what? And they couldn't quite grasp it. And I was like, Family Guy and Shrek. And you throw that out and they're instantly like, oh, I get it now. One's grown up, one's, you know, everybody can play. And that was the intent the entire time. But we didn't want to put one out without the other. so people had that choice so you didn't feel like, hey, why didn't you tell me in advance I would have bought the other one? I have little kids. Trying to be as fair as possible. Trying to be as fair as always. There's us again being small town Wisconsin and nice and trying to do the best we can in those situations. I love the game, man. It's absolutely incredible. And it just worked. That layout was so damn good. Again, did I mention how proud I am of these kids? It was so damn good. it was just like, you make this the Kaiju Battleground, and you got Gomer on there bashing up the Science Patrol car, and then you go up top to the headquarters, and it's just so much fun, and it works. And then who doesn't want Baltan hopping out from behind those buildings just taunting the show? And if you're not in Ultraman, for the love of God, get out there and find it. This is the classic 1966 show. It's very much in that kind of Batman 66 vein where it's campy and it's colorful and it's fun. And Bob-Man would multiply and split to confuse the Science Patrol, and that's what he's behind all the buildings. And it just works. It's so good. There's, like, Power Rangers and Pokemon and anime in general. You can't go to a store in a mall without running into something Japanese like that. And I particularly, I mean, I'm 55 years old, but I grew up watching Ultraman after school. I can't speak for the entire pinball population, but the whole kaiju thing in general is like super hot right now. So even if you're not particularly familiar or an Ultraman fan, you can still relate to this in that sense. You know, it's just like all the other stuff that comes out of Japan. So it's just, it's like actually very like trendy and hot right now. Absolutely. It's a new Netflix show, right? It's the number one anime show on Netflix right now. And it's kind of a modern take on what this game is. This game is very much the classic Ultraman. But, yeah, it's kind of a long, convoluted story with Tsuburaya. They should have been what Power Rangers in this country became. But there was a legal battle going off with a rights dispute, and somebody had kind of basically stolen the worldwide distribution rights, and they finally won that court battle just a few years ago so that Tsuburaya, another family company started by Eiji Tsuburaya and passed down to his son, became their own thing again. Like, they have all the content back. They have all the worldwide rights distribution. And at the same licensing expo where we got Rick and Morty, I noticed in the corner of the room they were there. And I was like, super high. I thought they were having these issues. And I went over and I started talking to them, and they told us the story. And as high-zoo fans, we kind of dug into it and found all the content we needed to figure out what had happened. And, yeah, they won the rights back to distribute this in the United States and do everything that they've ever wanted and immediately got a deal with Marvel Comics because they been kind of waiting for this to happen too And I was like we have a chance to get in here on the ground floor with a company that really trying to build this brand and it was something that was obviously Bug and I I mean yeah sure we love Godzilla we love Gamera we love all things giant Japanese monsters but Ultraman is ridiculously iconic and been a big part of our lives forever so and since I was a kid I was just like Chris I'd run home from school every day to watch Ultraman and uh it just held such fond memories and exposing Bug to it as a little guy and then finding out that, you know, it's been going on for 60 years. It's like Doctor Who. It's never gone away. Oh, yeah. And it's just getting bigger and bigger. And when we went to Japan, now you know, that's why we're there. I honestly threw a picture on Facebook at the time of me with Ultraman in Ultraman Town. And they're like, here's a hint. And everybody thought we were doing Meat Loaf. And everybody thought we were doing Meat Loaf. It means a lot. This is absolutely a passion project for Bug and I to do together. and yeah, just thrilled to have this license on this layout and it's so cool. And if you lock all seven balls in this game, you get to meet Ultra 7, which is a big nod to the true Ultraman fans. He was perhaps even the only character that could rival the original Ultraman on the series. So this is big. Now I'm talking about how popular this license is and how popular anime and all that is in general. You say you're only making 500 of these games. Are any of these going to Japan at all? Because I think you'd sell like way more than 500 or just in Japan alone. Well, that's kind of the experiment, really. Because we've never had hundreds of units go to Japan before. So, I mean, I can't think of many titles other than, say, like, Pokemon that would sell to Japan as much as Ultraman. So if we do sell hundreds to Japan, that opens up a whole new bag of worms for us. It's kind of an experiment there. The Silver Ball Planet in Osaka has almost every single game we've ever done. and Yoshiko who buys games for them here in the States reached out to us as soon as they saw Halloween we've got to have one for Silver Ball Planet and we're like Yoshiko that's great we'll get you one but you're going to want to wait until Monday nice they get more than one and I hope it makes a big presence there and Katie and I are really looking forward to maybe going back over there and maybe delivering some games That's so cool. He's like the Superman in Japan, right? I mean, as big as Superman is in the States, he's kind of the equivalent. Dude, this was my eye-opener. We went into a KB Toys in Japan, which still exists. Wow. And we're like, where's all the Kaiju stuff? So we go back and we find the action figures and all this stuff, and Godzilla was basically an end cap, and Ultraman was like two rows. It's so popular over there. There's a section of Tokyo that's affectionately known as Ultraman Town. It's where E.G. Tsuburaya, who also created Godzilla, he broke off in 65, actually, to start his own production company, Tsuburaya Productions. And, I mean, they have embraced Ultraman so hard. It's ridiculous. It's everywhere. It's wonderful. It's just, he's a hero, man. He comes in, and he's the good guy, and he saves the day, and it's all the right things. It's a great message. It's fun. And he beats up giant monsters. what does your guys carry on look like coming back from Japan if you're going to these toy stores let's see it had X-Plus, Godzilla it had all kinds of Ultraman toys it had Led Zeppelin 4 in Japanese on vinyl sorry Charlie the luggage, we took a giant suitcase with us completely empty and came back it was not empty I can't hear sorry Charlie without thinking only the best tasting tuna gets three strikes. There's even a bar in Kawasaki we went to called the Kaiju Saka Bo Bar, which is all Ultraman themed. And Ultraman aren't allowed in there because it's for Kaiju only. So you have to pass it in and they give you monster slippers and you walk around in monster slippers and all the food looks like monsters and has Science Patrol logos on like the bread and everything. It's just ridiculous. That little light on your chest, like once you've had too much to drink, it starts beeping. so is this an entirely new rule set or have you guys um you know roughly translated halloween's rules to ultraman so and this was a big tricky discussion going into it because having two separate code sets for a game at the same launch time was it was a daunting idea so basically the rules do transfer over to ultraman you just swap out okay michael myers is behind the hedge Baltan is behind that building, but it's the same objectives. So if you know how to play a Halloween through and through, you'll know how to play an Ultraman through and through. You'll just be fighting monsters instead of Michael Myers. That's cool. So are the murder scenes the monster battles? Is that how you translated those things? So it's funny you mention that, because we were going through the rules in the game, and I was setting up what I wanted for each mode, and I got halfway through, and I realized, hey, Dad, every mode in this game is just Ultraman fighting a different monster. What else can we do? And we were like, well, it's kind of the whole point of this show. but yeah pretty much every mode in the game is a different monster battle which i think comes up to like 10 plus monsters 12 plus monsters now yeah i'll have to go back we're still adding more modes to the game as well but everything we could possibly want uh every single episode all the video we could want all the original soundtrack we hired a wonderful wonderful japanese american lady to play the part of fuji so she kind of directs the science patrol uh Kyle Yount from the KaijuCast, who's a very long-time podcaster and YouTuber. Very pleasing voice. Very pleasing voice. He's got a hell of an announcer voice and has done some, you know, voice characterizations at GFest and comic book adaptation readings and all this stuff. And we knew he was amazing. And so, yeah, we've got a lot of custom speech. Matt “Count D” Montgomery, again, did this. Ultraman was always known for this kind of jazzy, funky, almost surf rock kind of music. Yeah, and it's so catchy and stuff. and we had him do some more of that, a little bit more orchestral and some surf guitar. So he went across both games. He got to do Halloween and Ultraman. And it's funny because when you see Rob Zombie live, behind him, Ultraman is on the video screen a lot. He's fighting all these strange kaiju and just having a blast. And so we knew that those guys were into it. And Matt's like, oh, my God. It's like his two favorite things put together in one. So he got to do Halloween. He got to do Ultraman. And he was absolutely thrilled and crushed it. Wow, that's some versatility. This is in different soundtracks, for sure. Hey, everyone's crazy for toppers. Let's talk toppers. How does the topper differ from Halloween to this one? Does he have, like, Ultraman, like, throwing a kaju, like, into the backboard? Or, like, you know, how does it... Is it similar in the way it's constructed, or is it completely different? It's a little similar. So this one has, instead of Halloween up front, it says Ultraman. It's lighted as well. It actually has Ultraman behind it. And if you watch the show, he throws this blue disc. It's called the Ultra Slash. The Ultra Slash. And when he throws this, it literally just cuts monsters in half. Right. And I remember that we just said this was a family layout, and it sounds brutal as hell. But he throws it, and he cuts the monsters. And basically, it's him throwing this disc, and it's spinning in the background while it's lit up. Oh, I'll give you lighting on the topper as well. And it's NeoPixels, and you can do some crazy stuff. So it's really unique. All right. You guys have been super generous. We've got a couple more questions if you can hang with us. For sure. We all know that Michael Myers never really dies, and Ultraman has a million sequels, so would you guys ever consider making a follow-up game if they were amazingly well-received and there's the demand out there? Hmm. Never say never. Not in that... I mean, right now, we're honest, we've been working on these two games for, what, two months, 18, or two months? I feel a little bit longer than two months. Two years, two months, something like that. I don't know. We've been working on them a long time, so right now, we just want people to see them, play them, love them for what these guys have done. and get them out there. And, yeah, I mean, never say never. We have quite a few things lined up that are going to follow after this game right now. So after we kind of get through the next tidal wave of things we have coming that we have to prepare for to do all of this again and again, it'll be a conversation down the road I'm sure we'll have. Obviously, there's always stuff in a similar vein and have fun and make scary memes and funny, you know, can't be fun sci-fi and all that kind of stuff. That's what we are. but we'll see. There's always Halloween 3. I love the third one so much. Happy, happy Halloween. And Atkins is around to do voiceovers, to do call-outs. Yeah, that guy's awesome. He is so cool. He's amazing too. Tom would be fun to work with. In every interview I've ever seen him in, he just seems like one cool dude. So you guys are taking orders now. When do you hope to deliver the first game? And when that game is delivered, where's the code going to be? We'll be taking orders at 9 a.m. on July 7th? Yes, Wednesday, July 7th. If you're in the fan club, that's central time. Make sure you have your fan club memberships in place. You get two weeks early access. And Bug is hand-in-hand on the code every single day, so he's going to have a better... And he's also on the line, so those are better questions for him. So right now with code, I'm not... Code's never 100% done. but um pretty much every single mode is in the game at this point with the code you can start the wizard mode good luck finishing it but uh yeah i mean every mode leading up to wizard mode is in the game we're hoping we can finish off wizard mode before anybody gets good so uh that's just in all transparency yeah i mean there's some glitches here and there with the modes but i think we're gonna have it very ready for launch. Probably more ready than we've had previous games. Now you're making 1,700 games, and that's like, you know, 2.25 times more than Rick and Morty, and that took just under 18 months. How long are you planning on getting the rollout for all these games done? Same amount of time that being that you've expanded? 18 months. The one thing that we've never had any faults with so far, I believe, is expanding production to meet those deadlines, And at the end of Rick and Morty, we were doing some serious numbers at the end, more than we'd ever done before. And we don't have to reach too much further than what we were capable of at the end of Rick and Morty to do $1,750 in 18 months. So I feel very confident that we're going to get that done. Yeah, just to clarify, it's $1,250 Halloween, $500 Ultraman across all editions. So if we sell $1,250 standard Halloweens, they're gone. If we sell, you know, 500, 500, and 250 of each edition, the customers dictate how many of those we're going to make. But 1,250 is the hard number. And, yeah, I'd always said in the past that we weren't going to go over 500 games a year. We're going over 500 games a year. We're very going over that. They're, like, all hardworking and ambitious and kind of impressive to watch, and I don't handle production anymore. So I just let them go, and this is what they want to do. And, you know, like Buck said, we've never missed one of those numbers. Even with COVID on Rick and Morty. We actually beat the deadline. We beat the deadline. I think by two or three months, yeah. So I'm feeling very confident that the 1750 is doable in 18 months. And again, that's 1,000 games more than we've ever done. So we understand it's a big undertaking. It's a big step for Spooky. And I'm also a super impatient person, and I just can't wait to already do the next title. 18 months is about as long as I can wait before we do another game. Don't start that talk bug. Pinside will do it for you. That's right. so can you ramp up your production numbers now because you've just gotten more efficient or because of your new factory that you guys are going into i would say both of those things i mean we've expanded the factory more and more over the last two years uh we we've just gotten a lot more efficient with the games and like i said earlier we wanted to make sure that halloween and ultraman were easy games to build on the line i mean there's still a lot of challenges to come with that no pinball machine is ever truly easy to just build but we we streamlined this game for production. We wanted to make sure we can get this done in a fair manner. Yeah, in all fairness, when I was designing games, or if Ben Heck or Scott Denisey or whoever we were working with, when we design a game, it's like, oh, we'll figure it out in production. And that's not good. Totally sucks, man. These guys that actually have to do the production. This time, it was production workers actually looking at it like, how do we make this as fun as possible, but also manufacturable so it's it's flawless and and repeatable and all the shots stay the same and the orbits work the same and and the butt pretzel works the same and they did an incredible job i'm i'm impressed as all hell that's so cool so i mean you guys you guys have a limited number of these games uh with with the 1200 halloween 1250 halloween games um but what's kind of unique is you're not differentiating between types so they could all be bloodsuckers all collectors etc and in the pinball industry as you know there are lots of people out there consumed with rarity of higher tier models and both from like a collectability and a resale factor so does that factor in at all in your decision to do this like was that even a thought judging from the resale value on rick and morty right the uh standard edition rick and morty is is the second rarest game we've ever made second only to the green edition of america's most haunted right so you know like i said we want the public to kind of dictate that you know there's a lot of people too okay, you're satisfying that collector's market with a higher end product. There's a lot of people that get pissed off at us when they can't get something. And they, you know, they were a day later, they just missed. So like I said, this is kind of our way of hopefully satisfying that market as well. But let the fans decide, you know, we know we can only make so many. And if there's 2,000 Halloween fans out there looking for a game, you know, we're only doing 1250. So I think the balance is there. We'll find out. Yeah, I mean, you guys have so many people who have signed up for the fan club. Just to get an early crack at this, are there more people in the fan club than you're making games for? That's the dirty secret. There are more people in the fan club now than at any time in Spooky Pinball history. And again, huge thank you to Brian Savage. Brian's a friend of ours that he's retired now, but he headed up a bunch of projects for Hasbro, including the G.I. Joe Collector's Club and the Transformers Collector's Club. and he's like, I'd like to see a bit of that pinball. And he's a good friend of ours, and he's helped Bugs Sister Squirrel, a.k.a. Morgan, who does all the sales and stuff now, and get this all set up over the last few years. Again, we're getting to work with the Bela Lugosi estate and working with Lynn Lugosi-Sparks, Bela's granddaughter, to get you some really cool, I mean, even if you're just joining the fan club to get the cool Bela Lugosi stand-ups and all the little products and the membership cards, we wanted it to have that famous Monsters, you know, Captain Mail Order Company vibe, and we put monster mail order on the boxes, and it's $40. So, I mean, if you're doing it for that reason or if you're doing it to get early access to the games, which obviously is the big, big selling point, it's all just meant to bring people into the family, so to speak, make it feel special, make it feel fun. And we used to always do the thing where if you were a previous Spooky customer, you automatically get first chance at the next game. We can't do that anymore because the previous customers are more than our editions are allowing. So it's kind of a way for people to get in early, get all that stuff, feel like they're part of the company, and just kind of grow it from there. Very cool, man. So with these games that you guys are coming out with, you've got two new licenses that we've never seen in pinball. And a lot of companies out there, not named Stern or Jersey Jack, really struggle with getting into the license game space. But you guys have done remarkably well with that. And there's only two games that you've done, America's Most Haunted and TNA, that didn't have a license associated with it. So how have you, as a small pinball company, gotten these, you know, juggernaut licenses that a lot of people would love to have? Lock the door when you see s*** coming. Is that it, man? I don't know. It just happens. It all kind of started with Rob Zombie. I knew he was a pinball guy. I had reached out to his marketing agent or his manager and said I was interested in the hopes that it would get his attention. And it did. Within 24 hours, he got a hold of me, and he's like, dude, I've always wanted a pinball machine. Please make this happen. And once you get one of those under your belt, it kind of does open the doors a little bit to other things. Like, you know, their marketing agent was shared between Alice and Rob, so she was like, you've done a game for Rob. Alice would love a game, too. And he had been turned down by other companies, and so it gave us an opportunity to get in with him. And it just kind of keeps snowballing, and it's never easy. And that's always a big part of the pin side debate is what theme, what license, what should we be doing? If it was easy as just, hey, here's a check, we want this license, and go, everybody would be doing it. But it really isn't. You have to find properties that are interested, want to work with you. Halloween was definitely one of those. Ultraman, same way. They were extremely excited about this. It's kind of seen as a prestige piece. So if I had a nickel for every band that's come out of the woodwork since we did Rob and Alice, that maybe they're not like a Metallica or an ACDC-level band, that they want games. It's ridiculous. But you kind of got to get in with these people. You've got to understand each other. You've got to be good to them. You've got to work with them. You've got to pay your bills on time. And once you get that flow rolling, they're more open to working with you on bigger projects. Obviously, when we did Rick and Morty, it was an Adult Swim product that transferred into Warner Brothers. kind of midstream while we were doing it because they had bought the whole network, I believe. So again, those relationships just grow internally, and the harder you work at it, the better it does. It's funny that you mention Rob Zombie because we actually have a recording here of when he called you back. I'll put it up for you now. I want a pinball, yeah! Working with Spooky for a pinball game, yeah! Yeah! How did you get that? That's exactly how it went. He knows that leaked off my phone. He's going to be pissed at me. Spooky is established now as a company to respect. And, of course, Christian and I respect you. That's why we're here. And you've gotten bigger with each release, but you still maintain a very family-oriented, small company feel. How hard is it to balance expansion with keeping your company's core values at the forefront? Well, I've found that the more transparency you give people, the more that that idea stays intact. It's weird that being transparent and honest with people the best you possibly can kind of gives you that family feel vibe, but it's absolutely true. I mean, we understand if there's a problem, we need to fix it, and we acknowledge it, and we put that out there. And we also understand there's improvements that need to be made, and we grasp that and we don't shy away from it. We talk about it and we do what we can to fix it and instill buyer confidence, you know, and there's still areas we know we need to improve on. But every day, it's been a slow, steady, maintainable growth. We've never tried to overreach. We've always tried to be upfront and honest with people on how long it'll take to get your games. And, you know, if you're from outside the pinball world, it's a little scary for them maybe. you know pinball guys have kind of gotten used to it but you know we we live within our means and we just grow naturally but honestly after eight and a half years in business and this if you count Ultraman and Halloween as two games we're we're nine games into this and I think all that stuff that we've talked about all these years uh has really come together it's really paid off the quality, the gameplay, the rules, the art, just everything about this project, it takes us to a different level. And again, I'm so crazy proud to be, I'm working for these guys at this point. You know, it's their game. It's their baby. Yeah, it's our licenses together as a family and as a group and stuff that we care about deeply. But to see it all come to this point, I never take this stuff for granted. And I am just insanely proud to be working at Spooky Pinball and helping these guys achieve a goal that they set out to do and make it happen. So you heard it here, people. I'm his boss now. Wow, you've risen in the ranks so quickly, son. No, I mean, there was really a time in the company where just building games between, say, Zombie up to TNA that, and up to Alice Cooper, I should say, we used to know almost everybody that we built a game for. Like, we used to look at the build sheet and see the name and be like, oh, it's this guy, you know. and that was a big part of keeping us really tied into that family feel that you were talking about earlier obviously anymore i don't know every single rick and morty customer no i'm sorry people i just don't know all of you but like you said it's important that we do maintain that family close connected feel to everybody and like we said just being transparent with people admitting our flaws talking about what we can improve on and being as honest with people as we can is probably what i would say is the best way to allow people into that family idea because your family's always honest with you if you ever ask your mom like you know how these pants look you look fat we'll put on something else so we we know that you've been working on another title with with Ben Heck and a few other pinball superstars can you give us any update or any progress with that game no I'll expand on that in Spanish now I'll expand upon that, hell no But you've had some incredible life experiences because of Spooky Pinball and you've gotten to hang out with Alice Cooper and Rob Zombie, etc Where does making this game, or these games I should say, rank on the list? I'll let you know after we see how it sells Makes sense You mean the personal experiences Yeah, it's really tough. So, I mean, because all of those experiences are obviously wonderful and amazing. This was the first experience that I felt I was really tasked with. So I've probably gotten the most reward out of it, I would say. Just in a personal way, being a part of it, working on it, enduring all that there is to endure in the process of a two-year design and build on a game is probably the most rewarding thing, not just in pinball, but I've gotten to experience in my life. You know, and being embraced by the Halloween family, as Malik calls it, and there's a lot of people in that group. It's been absolutely amazing. It's been fun. To kind of be brought into that inner circle is always a good feeling. And getting, I mean, to me the highlight of all of this, everything we've done to date was getting to go to Japan with my son. You know, we're crazy kaiju nerds. And to see everything and where all this stuff is made and to go to Tsuburaya Studios and even getting to, you know, go to Toho Studios and see all these iconic things and Tokyo Tower that's been knocked over by every monster in the history of Japan. There's no way any of that stuff wasn't going to happen without InBall, America's most haunted, leading into Rob Zombie, into, you know, Total Nuclear, into everything we've ever done. It's all been a progression of steps that have led to amazing life experiences. And again, man, to me, just that stuff is great and it's fun. and getting to travel and see these things and meet people and do all this stuff. And I don't mean just famous people. I mean pinball fans and getting to hear people say, I don't care what anybody says. Rob Zombie's my favorite game. Thank you. That makes my heart feel better. And, you know, to finally get to do a game like Halloween where we feel it really is a classic. It's an amazing movie with all this history and sequels that still run, like Bug said. And to be brought into that world is incredible. And to be able to work with Ultraman, just amazing. And, yeah, we know there's going to be some people going, Ultraman, I didn't watch that as a kid. I don't like it. That's fine. There's a lot of people that did. And being able to cater to those people makes me feel good. And it makes us feel good to make these kind of products and be true to ourselves. And going forward, do we know that we're going to need bigger and bigger licenses to kind of keep that momentum rolling? Absolutely. So, you know, you never know where the future is going to go. But for now, we're having a blast, and we appreciate every bit of this. At the end of the day, I appreciate all of it immensely, and I try my absolute hardest to make sure it never goes to my head. That makes sense. At the end of the day, I just want to work really hard and make really cool shit for everybody. The whale jumped just off the beach in Maui, or we're backstage at a Rob Zombie show watching it happen in front of us. How many times have I leaned over to you and said, this isn't normal, kid. don't get this to happen. I like to think I did a decent job of making sure I didn't expect it to be abnormal. I was super shoved cheesecake in your mouth saying, come on, impress me, kid. When I was working for Kiss, I took my daughter to see them when she was about eight and we had front row tickets and we went backstage and all of that sort of stuff. And I told her on the way home, I said, it's only downhill from here. And she goes, what? And I said, when you grow up and you go to concerts, it's never going to be this good. You're not going to get front row. You're not going to go backstage. You're not going to get three things done. You're not going to hold Gene Simmons' hand for 45 minutes while he sits there and talks to everyone else. You know, this is the pinnacle. It goes downhill from here. We are ridiculously honored to be, you know, the reveal podcast for you guys in these games, and we're so excited for Spooky and what they're bringing to pinball. Thank you guys for continuing to push the envelope and prove that you don't have to be the biggest company to bring, you know, exciting new ideas to the hobby. Thank you so much, guys. We appreciate it. Yeah, I appreciate it immensely. It was a really good combo. You two do an amazing job. You keep everything happy and positive and fun, which is what pinball should be. It's a toy, people. Enjoy it. Love it for what it is. And Christopher Franchi, I still don't know how you edit all this together. Agreed. Eight billion hours in the editing room. Yeah. Well, what people who are listening to this don't know is that I've got probably about 12 hours to put this entire episode together because we're recording the day before release. So, you know, in addition to what Christian said, I want to thank you guys for helping us to do this and taking the time. I know you guys have got a million things going on and you're sending us information and images and the stuff we need to put together the show on our end. So we appreciate the time that you gave us in order to do our job for you. So thank you. The best of luck in the release of this game. I know it's going to do awesome. It looks amazing. Everyone that's listening to this already knows that because they've seen it. And we look forward to seeing you guys in your next release. Yeah, absolutely. Can't wait to do this again. I can't wait to survive Wednesday and maybe actually take a day off. You guys definitely deserve it Alright, we'll see you guys later Thank you very much Thank you The original content of this show is copyright 2021 Asshat Radio Productions The sponsors of this show, Cointaker do not necessarily subscribe to the commentary and critical suggestions made by this show If you want to reach us here at the Super Awesome Pinball Show simply email us at superawesomepinball at gmail.com Thank you.