you're listening to the head-to-head people podcast find us on facebook email us at Welcome everybody to the Head to Head Pinball Podcast. This is episode 28 and my name's Martin and with me... It's Ryan C. Ryan C. sounding particularly Australian today. Yeah, just bimberangs, roon-up sacks. I'm all about that stuff. No, no, no. We've got an awesome episode for you guys and girls today. We're going to be talking to Eric Meenier, who is the youngest designer currently. working at Jersey Jack Pinball, who just designed Pirates of the Caribbean. We'll be talking about the Alice Cooper Nightmare Castle teaser, the Kingpin remake, Scott Danesi's soundtrack. We will be having some fun with Steve Bruce, with all the news that came out, and talking about this week in Pinball. So, what are we heading to first, Marty? Well, I think we should probably go straight to the interview. It's what everybody's come for, isn't it? For sure. Let's get straight to it. I've been wanting to interview Eric for a while, and he was a very hard person to get into contact with as soon as he released the pinball machine because there was such a buzz around Chicago Expo and he was being interviewed left, right and center, and I didn't want to have an interview that was just a repeat of the three other interviews that were available at the time. So we waited a little bit longer and we got him on so he can talk about changes that were going on between Expo and now and dive a bit deeper into the software. Yeah, and it's got to be said, it was a really, well, I thought it was a really good interview. He was really easy to talk to. You can tell he's obviously very passionate about what he does. And you listen to the interview and you'll agree. However, one thing must be said, though, and that is that we were kind of doing this interview on the fly. So I was on holiday, so I was doing it on my mobile. I think Eric was on his mobile and Ryan was having problems with his microphone. So the audio quality is not that great. We've cleaned it up as best we can, but I hope you enjoy it as much as you can anyway. It's a great interview. Let's get to it. Here we go. So today we have a very special guest joining us all the way from Illinois in the US. It's one of the newest designers to hit the scene. it's Eric Muniz from JJP. How are you going, Eric? I'm doing quite well, thank you, guys. So what time is it there? It is 2pm on Friday. Okay. And it's pretty cold in Chicago? Actually, it's actually really nice outside. It's in the 50s. Fahrenheit. Which is, you know, t-shirt Carl Weathers for me. Yeah, it's more than compared to the recent Carl Weathers you've been getting. So, So I wanted to get you on the show, just talk about your journey into the position you're in now at Jersey Jack, and want to dive a bit deeper into parts of the Caribbean and talk about what the heart of the changes have been since that initial showing at the Chicago Expo. And a little bit about the software as well. So start us off, just give everyone a background. because some people may not have listened to some of your previous interviews. You used to be involved with Kimball and CoinOff at a very young age in your parents' business. Is that right? Correct, yeah. So my father started a route operation when I was around three years old. And when I was about seven years old, I started helping. I never had a babysitter as a kid so I was helping them like collect coins and fix simple repairs and things like that we had over 100 arcades in the Wisconsin Dells area which is coined the water park capital of the world so a whole bunch of arcades and stuff in there when I was about 12 years old I started working full time for my parents I was still in school, obviously, but every weekend after school and all summer long was working for them and fixing games, repairing, like, soldering boards and doing, like, you know, fixing all the stuff that my parents couldn't figure out. Yeah, I got away pretty easy then because I had a similar upbringing, not on a large scale like your parents' business, but when I tagged along with my dad, it was just counting coins and that's it. I was never responsible for fixing machines or soldering anything. Did you have a hand crank coin counter or did you have an electronic coin counter? like literally chucking all the two and one dollar coins on a table getting a a bank thing and I got so fast at doing doing it I would count like a thousand dollars within you know a couple of minutes it was just in bags of fifty for the size and yeah no hand machines it wasn't a big enough operation to pop up there as a time house as well so but also was it was it something that you enjoyed being part of the family business or was it just something that you just got into because the family were doing it? Definitely both. I didn't really have a choice. My parents were running a business and they owned it and they needed someone they can trust to help work it. Not a lot of people in the world you can find that can carry a bucket with $10,000 in cash and it never crossed their mind to put some in their pocket. Yeah. I mean, I ask because, you know, I would have rather my father being into pinball rather than timber. So I had to count timber. You guys had to count thousands of dollars worth of coins. I know what I would have preferred. So how did that, did that continue throughout your whole kind of teenage years? or did the coin-up industry as part of your lifetime go away and then come back at a later age? Definitely the latter. So when I graduated high school, I said I was done with coin-up. I don't want any part of it. I'd worked many 18-hour days over summers with my family, and it was not the life I wanted to live. So I went to school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for a degree in electrical engineering. And then I followed that immediately with a master's degree in mechanical engineering, focusing on robotics. And my intention was to get into medical prosthesis, thought-controlled robotic limbs and things like that. Then in 2011, I was still, you know, obviously spending time with my family and things that we all mutually enjoy. we went to a pinball show. We went to the Midwest Gaming Classic. And there, Jack announced his intention to make this game, this new pinball, and bring pinball back and make it great and all these other things that Jack says. He knows how to sell his game, that's for sure. He very much convinced me that he said he was looking for the right people to make this all happen. My My dad and brother had signed on as a distributor for Jersey Jack. And my dad is a very shrewd businessman. He never loses money. He never fails at a business. And for him to take Jack's word, I knew it was going to be a good thing. So I went up to the room we had, and I printed off my resume. Now, at this point, I was finishing my undergraduate and just about to go into my graduate. it. And I printed off my resume and handed it to Jack and said, you know, I'm interested. What can we do? And he got back to me a couple months later and said, we really need someone for a tech position, like a lab tech. I'm like, well, that's not really for me, but whatever. It could be fun. So while I was doing my graduate degree, I drove down to Illinois three days a week and worked in their lab, and the first project I had was actually, like, hey, put together this Wizard of Oz game. Here's a room full of parts. Let's go. Okay. You're going to work it out. Yeah. I'm like, okay, can I get some engineering drawings? That'll really help. They're like, yeah, we don't have those. This is before Butch Peel's couple hundred page manual, right? Yes, well before Butch's manual. So I had a sample game and I had a room full of parts and that was, you know, trial by fire at Jersey Jack Pinball. That's awesome, man. And we'll talk a little bit more about your time with JTP in a sec, but just to backtrack a bit, let me just talk about you as a pinball player slash collector. Do you see yourself as like a decent pinball player? Are you more of a collector or a tournament player? I would consider myself a tournament player if I had the time to play in tournaments. So I'm a relatively new father. I have a toddler. I have a 12-week-old at home. So not a lot of time to get out and play in tournaments, you know? I do have a decent collection. as well. I'm a relatively good player. I've won a couple tournaments up in Wisconsin. But I don't play in enough tournaments to consider myself a good tournament player. What machines do you have in your collection? Oh, okay. Let's see. Well, at my office I have a Wizard of Oz, a Hobbit, a Dialed In, and a Pirates. So that's kind of nice I consider this part of my collection I also have Three of my other personal games here I have a Tron And a Simpsons Pinball Party And I actually Last weekend I picked up a Safecracker I like that It is 100% perfect Never been played on route It came out of the Williams Cafeteria When they closed down pinball or when this game was done running, I'm not quite sure, but it was a Williams employee that I bought it from. I'm guessing that he invited Pat Lola? No, Pat has three of his own. Different Williams employee. He invited me over. I'm pretty good at repairing pinball machines and he was in need of some repair. He turned on the game at Christmas and the slingshot rubber snapped. He invited me over and I went through and replaced all the rubbers on his game and he asked if he knew anyone who'd want to buy it. I'm like, I'll buy it. I'm looking at it right now actually because I brought it to my office. Mid-condition, home use only, safe cracker. I've never seen a prettier cabinet or a prettier play field on a safe cracker. It's pretty amazing. So would you say that the machines that you've got are some of your favorite machines or what would you say, looking back, would be some of your favorite machines? Hold on, I didn't get to the games in my house yet. At my house I have a Twilight Zone, I have Prototype No. 7 Banzai Run, I have Stern Star Trek, Black Knight 2000, Whitewater, and Lord of the Rings. You're into most of the modern stuff probably over the Solid State and the ENs, besides I think Black Knight was the only one there. Do you, are you attracted more to the deeper rule sets, or is it you know, one game? Yeah, it's definitely the deeper rule sets. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love Solid State games. I haven't really been on the search for them, but I've been playing them more in tournaments and stuff and like them more and more. So I saw like a blackout for sale that I was considering purchasing, you know, just to change it up a little bit. But the first game that I ever really got into was Lord of the Rings. I remember coming home from high school, and my dad had bought three of them brand new in box. We were going to put them out on the route the next day. and he told me to go set them up and play them and make sure they work before I bring them out to the location. And I didn't come back inside the house. They had to come find me at 2 in the morning because I was still playing Lord of the Rings in our shop. So that was the game that got me into it. Yep, and that was the first game I bought. I bought it when I was a senior in college in my one-bedroom apartment that I shared with my girlfriend, now my wife. So the question is then, have you been to Valinor? I have. Oh, okay. I have been to Valinor, but not on my machine. I did it on my brother's machine. He set up easier, right? That's why? He struggled through the game? Yeah, probably. It was Christmas Eve. I was at his house. I spent the night. I decided I'm going to play one more game, and that was at like 1045 or so. and at midnight I start screaming, and he comes running out. He's like, where's the fire? What's going on? I'm like, I found a little orange dust in his shirt. He's like, that's great. Merry Christmas. Go to bed. You can film it, nothing. That's awesome. So you mentioned that you live in Chicago, and the Jersey Jack factory is in New Jersey, right? Right. So how does that work on your daily operations? Are you designing stuff from your house or do you drive in there every day? Well, New Jersey is a 15-hour drive from Chicago. Okay. Do you ever do that? Right. So our engineering office is in Chicago. Everyone that designs games or works on the engineering side is here. So myself, all the programmers, all the mechanical engineers, our in-house artists, the materials people, they're all here in Chicago. This is where the games get designed. And then manufacturing is done in New Jersey. So we all work here, come into the office here every day, which is only like a well that's Chicago which has some of the worst traffic in the world so it's like a 25 minute drive in the morning for me but like an hour and a half drive back home to go 14 miles Is it hard to you know are there any hurdles that you have to overcome by not being there in the factory while you're designing a game? Oh surely I mean there's If we were in one location, things would be a lot easier, but we have some pretty good communication devices set up in our facilities so that we can talk to each other at the drop of a hat. Really easy to see what the people on the line are seeing and help them out and sort it out. Sure. And, Eric, before we come into the nitty-gritty and juicy stuff, I have to ask, when you visited the Egypt Jack, Patrick Lars, Jack did a little Facebook live video. And as a fellow team member myself, I have to ask. Oh, here we go. You've got some big triceps, okay? You've got the biggest triceps in pinball. So please let me know what your workout is because I'm a hard gainer. I'm struggling at the gym. So what do I need to do to get up to Eric Meunier level of triceps? Weighted dips. That'll do it. Yeah, 45. Yeah. And strap it to your waist and do dips. Okay. How many sets and how many reps? What am I building up to here? I generally do three sets of eight. Okay, and 45 pounds. Wow, all right. I've got to build up to that. It's going to take a while. Hilarious. It is really funny because when that video came out, right, and we're all fawning over the fact that, you know, they're pirates of the Caribbean, all Ryan could think about was triceps and, man, how do I get triceps and triceps? You could keep... Another thing I probably house is I lift up my play field on a daily basis, you know, do that on a daily basis. So that goes a long way. It's a heavy play field, man. So that's not a tricep. That's like a bicep. So you might be doing it backwards, right? face away from the pinball and lift up the plate. There you go. Yeah. Yep. Oh, you guys. Anyway. You got that out of the way. So I'm going to ask all the inquiring ones out there, okay? No, well, you in particular. So then sort of when you start getting into sort of pinball design, had you thought along the years that you would want to build a pinball machine or was it just something that just progressed after starting work with the Jersey Jack? Getting into it, I don't think it was my end goal. You know, I had a passion for electronics and robotics, and that was what I knew and what I understood. And going through the games and seeing, you know, we had to do... Everyone had an input at the end of Hobbit when we were cleaning stuff up on there, and it was interesting to be able to make a decision that gets seen by the whole pinball world. It's like no one really sees what I do. Well, everyone gets blinded by what I do in the electronics world, but actually affecting shots was really an interesting concept and a really interesting design or a really interesting idea. and I talked to Jack about it after Joe Balcer parted ways with the company and we were wondering if we needed, you know, how to get another designer in because we knew we had Pat locked in for game number three and should we go and see if we can find some of these other guys that have been doing pinball for longer than I've been alive. And I said, well, why don't we give someone new a chance, some new ideas and, you know, a fresh look at playfields. And it was discussed in the company and decided, hey, that's a great idea. Let's do it. So did you actually have to bid your case versus other people or you pretty much put your hand up? Well, I mean, no one else in the company wanted to volunteer. In retrospect, I understand why. It's not a stress-free job, that is for sure. But what made you think in your head that you could actually go from being engineering to actually be more design? That's a big step. It is a big step. I have a pretty creative background as well. Sounds strange coming from an engineer, but I've been in a lot of theater productions in high school, and I've always been, I've always played an instrument. I was in the Wisconsin band in college. So creativity was definitely part of it. And like I said, I consider myself a decent player. I can play pretty well. I know, I understand what's fun in a game, or at least I think I do. And I wanted a chance to be able to bring that to light and show people what I think could be fun in a game. And I made that case. I made the case to Jack and to Joe, who's the CEO now. And they agreed. They said, that's great. So what did you show them? Did you show them rough sketches or rough CAD designs? What was it that actually got them convinced that you knew what you were doing? Really good question. They took my word for it that I could do it. I convinced them by talking and And then after a couple months, I showed them a CAD design, and I think that cemented in the fact that I could make this happen. So did you have a background with your engineering degree and your electronics engineering degree? Did you have experience with doing CAD design, or is it something that you had to take additional courses for or get help from an employee like Pat Lawler who's been doing it for decades? How did that come about? Um, so designing circuit boards, modern circuit boards, you're definitely using a CAD design system. So layering and traces and running things like that and chip design, things like that, definitely using all of that in a CAD design system. When I switched over into using SolidWorks and a 2D drawing platform, it was pretty natural progression. you know layer management is one of the big things that I was working you know made sense in my head it's very ordered very easy to understand very easy to see different layers you know your plastics and your rubbers and your above the playfield metal and below the playfield metal and wood routing and things like that it all made sense I had some solid works experience in my masters program but not a lot so I had to do you know quite a bit of self teaching on there yeah so you've given this opportunity to build your first game in your mind do you have a whole bunch of ideas that you've been thinking about since you were 7 years old saying wouldn't it be cool if they did this that hadn't been fulfilled yet or did you come up with the design after watching the Price of the Caribbean movies and thinking about theme separation and things like that definitely the latter I watched the movies quite a bit, probably for two weeks solid at work. That's all I was doing was watching movies. You know, hard life. Let me tell you. That's not bad, is it? No, it's not bad. And there was some stuff that, you know, I was interested in doing from a gameplay perspective. is, you know, one of my friends had built a prototype game, like a one-of-a-kind, who had the whole play field tilted back and forth. He calls it Tilt-E-Flash. That's a shout-out to my friend Banger Jay. I saw that game and, you know, where the whole play field does it, and that was an inspiration for the upper play field after watching the movies. You know, I didn't intend to, oh, I've got to put a rocking play field in a game. It was more, hey, this could be the black pearl out on the water, and if I design it right, I could have a whole playfield up there that rocks back and forth, and that's something that's never been really done. Now, I know Paths of Adventure on Indie kind of had that, where you're controlling the flippers, but there hasn't been a game where you had real flippers up on a playfield that was rocking, so it was a combination of a lot of ideas. It was fun at Expo because Mark Ritchie was there, and he played my game. And I'm like, yeah, that play field up there that rocks back and forth. There was this game back in the day that some schmuck designed, and, you know, he was cool about it. He's like, yeah, it's a really cool idea and really fun. So it was interesting, you know. These guys that I grew up, like, hero-worshiping their games come and play my game was pretty sweet. so so they just again talking about the layout so we we played it it came out when when jack came out we played it um yeah and one thing that that that we saw even in videos and then when we saw playing it was that it's a wide body but it's it's actually got quite a i don't know it's probably a complex layout but a real flow layout did you did you go into this thinking that you were going to really have those sort of features? Fast flow, innovative layout style, or did it just sort of just naturally progress as you started putting pen to paper, so to speak? The type of game that I like, I think Flowball has its place, right? Steve Ritchie's the master of Flowball. You know, balls always returning to the flippers, always just 1,000 miles an hour. They're fun games. I have a certain Star Trek for a reason, right? I like that style and Black Knight 2000. But pinball, where the ball stops, you're hitting some things, it's showing you a show, you're interacting with toys, you know, that do more than just kick the ball straight back at you, is something that I find interesting as well. So I wanted to have a good mix where if I so chose, I could stop the ball on any shot, which I can on my play field. There's diverters on every shot that can stop the ball and feed it somewhere where it can be held and play the video, but I don't have to. Every shot can also keep moving, except for the scoop, of course. So I wanted it to be designed that, through software, we could play either style of game. That's interesting. I didn't think of that. but one of the most important parts of the Pyrex Academy and Pomor machine is the salthing mat, the spinning mat in the center of the playfields. Did you watch those videos online on YouTube on how the prop was made, you know, using certain materials so it wouldn't expand because of the heat and all that kind of stuff? And did any of that come into your design? and can you just talk about it a bit more in general? Because it's one of the most, I guess, unique Playfield toys people have ever seen, and it has quite a small profile compared to other designs. When I saw, and again, I was watching those movies for a while, and, you know, spinning discs are fun in games, and there hadn't been one for a while, I don't think. I'm trying to remember the most recent game that had a spinning disc. Tron definitely does. X-Men. X-Men? Yeah. I was thinking it hadn't been done in a while but I didn't want to just do your standard spinning disc because I wanted to innovate so I have an awesome mechanical engineer here his name is Dan Molter and I sat down with him and I'm like alright, here's the plan three discs that can be variable speed variable direction stop on a dime they have to be clear so light can go through it and there's going to be artwork and words printed on it, and go. Another space inspection. I gave him. He is absolutely the mastermind behind that mech, how it works, how we use offset gearing to make it function. He does pictures and stuff online that people have seen of the mech from underneath. It's really simple to put together. It's easy to service. It can pop out of the game. It's held into the game and leveled with four wing nuts. So you can just tighten the screws by hand to get it level into your playfield, and those same things can make it come out of the game if you ever need it. For such a, you know, as Ryan was saying, it's sort of under-profiled compared to a lot of the other stuff there. But having played it, it probably is the most important mech in the whole game that affects gameplay. How do you go through sort of balancing what it does to how it affects gameplay? Well, the intention of having it right down by the flippers is to put your ball in peril, right? It does. It does, absolutely. But the reason that I like this more than, say, like the power in atoms, right, you can see that the discs are spinning. You know when they're spinning, you know what the speed is, and you can tell kind of what the ball is going to do. Now, can you react to it fast enough? Eh, maybe. But I feel like even though it's pretty close to the flippers, it's not going to unfairly jeopardize your ball the way that, like, a magnet or the magnet slings in Ghostbusters. Oh, man, those things frustrated me so much. Oh, yeah. You know, when I was playing, I was like, it's not fair. The ball shouldn't do what it's doing right now, an inch away from my flippers. The funny thing is that it, you know, not to bash on Ghostbusters, because we've probably done enough of that, but you power up the Magnus sling kind of like it's a reward to do weird things, but the weird things, you know, it's just extra Magnum play that converts people. Right, right. Oh, yeah, it's brutal. So what material, I mean, is it the same material as a normal play field, or is it an extra gripping kind of element on top of the mat to help grip and throw the ball around? It's a proprietary material we developed. It's not normal play field material. It's grippy. When you feel it, when you take the glass off the game, you can feel it. It's really resistive to wear as well, which is pretty awesome. I've had a test fixture running in the back of my shop, for several weeks nonstop where I've just got three balls rolling around on a spinning disc. You know, and it continues to spin and cycle, and I'm not seeing wear on it. So it's great. It's holding up really well, a lot better than I even anticipated, and I'm really happy about it. And the fact that it's clear, you know, it's all these different variables that build onto itself because I wanted to be able to light up those awards, which is another part of the map that, you know, we haven't really even touched on, all the randomly generated awards where you can, there's over 216, well, there are 216 viable combinations of awards from the three different levels of disk. Yeah, we'll touch on the software side of that in a sec, but just the last question on the map hardware-wise, does it sit exactly flush with the play field, or does it sit a bit up or down? because I noticed that when I was playing, when it's spinning at full speed, it doesn't really affect the ball if you were shooting for the chest, you know, but when it comes down at a slower speed, that's when the ball's getting grabbed. So is the ball just too fast while it's going over, or is it slightly up or down to break the kind of bounce over? It's slightly, and we're talking, like, millimeters or less taller, higher than the play field. And the reasoning for that is if you have it lower than the play field, you're going to chip the wood around area. The fact that the ball doesn't get affected is because, I did put it so close to the flippers, you've got so much power, the ball has inertia going across it, it's not going to be affected if the ball is moving quickly. But if you break a shot, and and it comes slowly back or it gets hit off the top of a slingshot and slowly arcs over, that's when you've got to be on your toes because that's when the ball is going to get grabbed by the material. Yes. And so looking at that, that seems quite complicated. I can only imagine what's underneath it. But just thinking about all the overall elements of the machine, what was the hardest thing that you had to implement and also then test to make sure that it works consistently all the time? Yeah, it's probably the spinning disc. You know, there's, it's not just hardware, right? Things seem, you know, easy when you look at them. You're looking at the game, right? It's like, okay, there's a spinning disc in there. But, you know, no one's ever designed anything like this. So when Keith gets the first run of hardware, he's like, okay, I have to develop a driver for this mechanism. No idea what it should be, so let's start experimenting and, you know, controlling speeds and controlling directions and how quick can I stop it? Do I need to reverse brake? Do I need to do X, Y, Z? So there's still tweaking in progress on that map because, you know, we've noticed some things spinning clockwise versus counterclockwise where there's slightly more current draw. and we figured out that if we do XYZ to it, we can reduce that and make it run smoother and all this other stuff. So it's a complex dance to put together, even though the mech is done very elegantly. Again, Dan Molter knocked this thing out of the park. There's just so many different variables that all go together, hardware and software and gameplay effects that it's – I want to get it perfect before it gets shipped to people's homes, and that's why I actually put it out en route yesterday in Chicago. Yeah, we saw the post on Facebook that it's at 257, the level 257. Yeah. So talking about kind of getting it perfect, how long did you spend in that whitewood phase kind of controlling the layout and position of where everything was before you said, okay, this is ready to go for Chicago? Thanks, Brian. That is a great question. I was going to look up, there's a picture that I took of the first whitewood I cut, and I think it was in January of the year, of last year. Maybe it was slightly earlier than that. Maybe it was November of 2016. and is that the first final Whitewood or is that the first you know it's Whitewood so I'm looking so I've I've taken apart all of my Whitewoods there's no well actually Dave Steele has a Whitewood version of the game but I've got three Whitewoods sitting in front of me three just wood with all the parts stripped off that I've gone through so there are three versions the whitewoods on the game that got it tweaked. So how important is the whitewood phase to you? And I say this because there been another company and a new company that are all sort of talking about skipping the Whitewood phase So like I always thought that it probably one of the most important phases because that is where you are really thinking about the user experience, the player, and how much fun they're going to have shooting the ball around, without having to worry about rules, without having to worry about how it looks, just how it feels. So how important is that to you? For me, it's very important. If companies can get by without doing it, more power to them. But I think playing the game, playing a physical game, seeing where you see your ball, how it looks from a player's perspective is a lot different than how it looks from a vertical playfield drawing or even a 3D SolidWorks model. Having the game in front of you and playing it goes a long way. And would you say that through that whitewood phase, you've altered the feeling of the layout through that phase? Absolutely. Significantly or just, you know, a millimeter here and a millimeter there? Yeah, not significantly, but enough that I altered it for a reason, right? Yeah. You know, the game didn't play as well as it does now because this target was two millimeters to the left or two millimeters to the right or that shot was slightly smaller or whatever the case may be. That curve on the flat rail needed to have a little bit more degree to it. And so all that stuff looks good on paper initially and then you build the way it wouldn't play it and you're like, oh, that could be better. Let's tweak it. Was there any ideas that you sort of scrapped through that phase? um there were some ideas yep but I don't think I can talk about them no that's okay you don't want to use them on another game yeah of course was the um that shot from the upper flipper that can go into that little tiny hole um would that get it bigger and then you kind of reduce it because when you look at it it's almost like it looks like just the side of the ball and I'm still confused how the ball goes in there so reliably. Like, you never kind of break that shot. No, it goes in pretty well. Yeah, and now, like, don't give away your trade secret, because there's other games that have, like, scoops that are bigger, and you get so many rejects. Is it just the angle, or was that bigger, and you kind of kept on reducing it to see how small you can get it? Um, no. It was the size I thought it needed to be in order to make it in there, and it works pretty well. And actually, I think the production game is going to be slightly bigger than what you're going to currently play. So then, talking about the white wood to obviously dead in the art, do you have much input into how the game is going to look as far as the art goes? Absolutely. So our in-house artist, his name is J Zielinski, I think he did a great job on the game. The art looks really good. He's never done pinball before. He's been in gaming. He took a lot of input from me on, you know, who goes where, what goes where, what style we should use, coloring, things like that. Now, I'm not an artist by any means, so he's the one who made it look good. but he just listened to my thoughts and took what an engineer asked for and made it look good. So who's responsible for, say, like the insert placement? Because once the inserts are in there, they almost control, I guess, the rule set, or the rule set has to be, you know, collaborate with those inserts. So that keep, that request that, you know, maybe needs three inserts per shot? Or is it you or the artists? It's all three of us, basically. I'll start with, hey, here's an insert for everything, every target and shot, and what else do we want to do? What's the concept of the game rules? And I'll slap some more inserts in there and we'll figure out. But we can't have too many, otherwise you've got no art, no room for art on the play field. So at one point I had more inserts than I do now, and this game has a lot of inserts. I had quite a few more than I do now, and it got to the point where I was like, okay, I don't have room for anything other than inserts because there's so much space used up by the inserts. So we wound up tweaking some of the rules and stepping it back on the inserts and basically putting one for every character that's in the game and one for all the targets and some other stuff. So definitely collaborative on what inserts are in the game and how they're used. So that was like the Whitewood phase, and then I talked to you briefly before Expo, and it was obviously a mad rush to get everything done. You kept on saying there's so many things to do, so many things to do. We got to know the story about how it was released and the reception there at Chicago. Obviously, you know, that was your first showing, and it was a pretty good showing. People weren't complaining about anything, but as a designer, obviously, you're watching the machine being played by different people. What's it been like taking it from prototype to where it is now? So I've made some hardware changes on different aspects of the game. For example, the chest mechanism slash fork mechanism that's underneath, those have been modified so the ball gets in there easier. A nice shot up the middle will put the ball into the chest. It's a little harder at expo. And then the cannon door on the upper play field has been completely redesigned, so you no longer have to shoot the ball through the door. now the door opens up and it's completely out of your way and you can shoot into it. So it's an open instead of a just unlocked door that you've got to bash through. So now you just need to place the shot on the right angle of the footer, you know, plus control. It's still hard. But I remember being quite hard because you would hit it, but if you don't hit it with enough power, you know, which is quite hard with the thing walking back and forth. So now, as long as the shot is in the right direction, it'll make the shot, right? It's all in there. Correct. But then as far as what's underneath the machine, has there much that gets changed going from prototype to production? There's a lot of refinements done in things like the wiring harness, in things like, you know, all of those games. a lot of those parts were hand built by me hand fabricated by me you know in order to get these things together so I have a nice machine shop in the back where I was, where me personally I was fabricating parts to get them ready for the show and it's nice to see what real company can, like a actual metal fabrication company can do and how clean the parts come out and how good they look and how well they work and things like that So lots of engineering drawings, for example, need to be made and sent out, and lots of cable samples be made and sent to cable harness companies and things like that. So the upper playfield, the rocking upper playfield, when we saw it at Expo and we played the prototype, it was rocking to one side more than the other. So you could track up on one mini clipper, but you couldn't track up on the other one. Has that now been changed so that you can't track up on either the phone, or is that a feature of the game? The playfield has been tweaked. Sorry, the mechanism that rocks the playfield has been tweaked by 60 thousandths of an inch to make this. Yeah, so we really get down into the nitty-gritty details on it, but it should be balanced now. We're going to tweak the software a little bit. I've seen it depends on the speed that the ship is rocking and the intensity that it's rocking where you can trap a ball on one or both flippers or you can't because of how violently the ship is rocking you know so it really depends on how the game is being used at that time and is that rocking in a randomized sort of velocity or is it like a fixed left-right, left-right, left-right? Well, it's not random, but it's not fixed. It changes based on gameplay. Yeah, I can. But at any one time, I think what Marty's trying to say is that, you know, it's based off gameplay, but once you get it up there, I guess unless you're in multiple or something, the gameplay is kind of fixed for that current trip to the upper playfield? I believe so. I believe it's fixed once you get it up there. I think it changes each time you're hitting the ramp. And some other features might change it, but that's definitely... Keith is still tweaking that part of the software to try to make it more fun and more balanced as you're going up. So, talking about Keith, we want to dive a bit further into the rules of just jack games. You know, Keith's games are quite deep, perhaps the deepest in them all. So at Expo, you talked about the percentage of the game being about 20% complete. And obviously, it's hard to kind of gauge how far along it is now. But where would you say you're at at this moment in time? I would say we're approximately 80% to 85% done with core rules. So there's a difference between rules complete and game complete, right? We have most of the rules in the game, but the light shows aren't polished and all the sound effects aren't used and things like that. But the game is, I mean, all of the different chapters are in there. One of the five wizard modes is programmed in there. All of the multiballs are there. Mystery's programmed in. There's not a lot left to actually put in functionality-wise. But, of course, the guys are still going to be tweaking the rules, make scores balanced, adding light shows, adding sound effects, voice call outs, etc. So, I saw someone playing a video and in between his balls it was showing a bunch of things on the screen, like tips. I think it was tips on the current person that he was using. So, have you added additional code to make the game a little bit easier to understand since Chicago? Yes, absolutely So between every ball There is a pro tip On how to play this game And it corresponds with lights flashing On the playfield at the same time Like it'll say Completing pirate lanes It adds an award that you can select With your action button And it'll light up the pirate lanes You know, the inlanes or outlanes Down by the flippers And then it'll light up the stand-up target Near the top of the game That's pirate and casual players might have no idea that they can, what do you mean complete lanes? So pro tips will kind of push people in a direction to help them figure out the game a little more. We've got some tips about what different characters do, how they can be used, etc. I mean, we all know in the pinball world that Keith makes deep, awesome games and casuals might have no idea on where to even begin. So the pro tips go a long way. It's kind of like in video games, right? Yeah, that's exactly the inspiration. It's like we don't really have loading screens. We don't really need loading screens, but this was more of a, hey, let's just give people a little bit of information between balls so they can kind of understand more of the game. So even further to that, you've actually got, I can't remember the name, but, you know, the map that's on the apron that's pointing to, I guess it's probably the most valuable shot or the most logical next shot. How do you... I've always thought that's really interesting because different players are going to have different styles and they're going to be going for different things. How do you sort of work out what really is the best shot for all players? So, again, we've had this discussion many times internally. the compass might point at the whirlpool for example as the most valuable shot but if you're trying to light multiball for movie one for example you're not going to be aiming at that so right now it goes by what the expected value is along with the immediate value return but eventually we're going to be basing it off of the game's actual audits for determining what, like, if a player starts multiball, number three, and they get, you know, 50,000 points on it or 100,000 points on it, and statistically multiball number one is worth 200,000 points, if you've got both of them lit at the same time, the compass will point at movie number one. So this is artificial intelligence, right? This is machine learning. Yeah, basically. This is Skynet going online, basically, right? Right. That's awesome. So let's talk more about rule structure. So you said you have one of the five wizard modes built in. So I'm guessing the wizard modes are based off. Is that the little insert above each movie multiple? Correct. And I've since changed the art on the play field a bit, so that's more understood. I've got a little book in there so people understand that those indicate the wizard modes. Can you talk about what is required as a qualifier for one of those wizard modes? Is it kind of like The Hobbit where you have to do a certain amount of chapters or things in that movie? Yes, that is pretty accurate. So I think people have heard about the 3.25 sextillion mode combinations, chapter combinations, right? Yeah, definitely. Yeah, we know that. So, in order to qualify one of the movie wizard modes, you need to play that movie's multiball and play all five chapters of that movie. So, are you able to start that multiball without playing all the five chapters? You're able to start the multiball, yes. Yes, I can. Multiball qualifications, one for each movie, are all different. Yep. whereas the chapter qualifications are all pretty similar. You shoot one of each chapter shots, which on the play field are designated by the skulls. I didn't know until I started this project, but there's actually a unique skull for each movie, a unique skull and crossbones design. And that's what you see on the play field for movie one, two, three, four, and five. They all have their own unique skull. So there's an insert for each one of those. If you shoot that shot, it qualifies chapters from that movie, and then you shoot into the chapter start area to actually start one of the chapters. And I'm guessing you don't need to finish the chapter to qualify for the wizard mode, but is the wizard mode scoring based off how you went in those chapters? Of course. You can't just time out the chapters and then get into the movie mode, right? Chapters are very valuable in this game. If you guys want to go into the deep end on the rules, there's some really cool stuff about the chapters. Go for it, man. Awesome. So if you shoot a single movie's shot, so, for example, the left orbit is movie one. You shoot that, and then you shoot the chapter start area. All of your mode shots are worth whatever the value shown at the top of the screen was for that movie when you started. So if you go in, there's a little number in the upper left-hand or underneath that movie's cannon port, and you see it across the top of the screen. If it says, like, 1050 or 1075, basically the chapters get – each time you make the shot, it adds a little bit more to your skull value. and then if you shoot that chapter start your shots will be worth that and they'll build each successful shot you make makes the next one worth more makes the next one worth more so that is indicative that you're starting the chapter of your choice you shoot movie one, you shoot it into chapter start, you know you're starting a chapter, or a movie one chapter now if you qualified chapter, or movie one and movie two, and you shoot it into chapter start area, every chapter shot you make will be worth one and a half times the value you had going in, but it's going to randomly select from either movie one or movie two which chapter you're going to play. So it goes from there, if you've qualified all five movies and you shoot it into the chapter start, you're going to have a 3x multiplier on every one of your shots, but you're not going to know which chapter you're going to start. So there's a risk-reward in the scoring and also in your progress toward your wizard mode because obviously you want to have all five of one movie in order to qualify your wizard mode. But you also want to have all five movies qualified in order to get the highest multiplier on your chapter shots. So do those chapters stay multiple? Like, say I like all five movie chapters. I go into my mode. I fail. I get out of the mode. So that chapter shot is lit four more times without me having to do anything? No. You have to qualify the chapter shots you want after each time you've played a chapter. Okay. So if you have all five qualified and you see the chapter start, after you finish that chapter, you have to qualify everything again. Okay. So how do these modes... Are there modes that are worth more than others? all things being equal with all the multipliers and things like that. I think the basis of the modes is collecting characters that appear in that mode, right? So I'm seeing some chapters where some modes where there's three characters lit and you can make three shots and I've seen ones where there's like five or six. So... This is 11, I believe. Wow. Well, with 125 different chapters if eventually you'll learn which ones have more characters and which ones don't. Eventually. Do you know all 125 chapters? No. I've got a spreadsheet. I could study it, you know, but I don't know it intrinsically. I know, I'm starting to get more familiar with them. Like, I know the name and I know if I, so if you shoot movie one chapter qualifier, it'll have a little skull on the left-hand side of your cannon port up at the top and shoot it again, it moves it over by one, and then you can play the second chapter from movie one instead. So if you know that there's, or you know the chapter that you currently have qualified isn't the one you want to play, you can shoot that same movie shot again, and it'll qualify the next one in that movie instead. So because there's so many modes, does each mode, do you think, have its own unique flavor? Like, you know, we took out Lord of the Rings before, you have New Coalition. They're very distinct modes, because there's only a couple of them. You know when you hit Gandalf versus Saruman, you know what sounds are going to play. Right. That's correct. Exactly. So, well, I'm not talking about the shots. I'm talking more about the sound and the presentation. So are there 125 different sound packages for each mode, or are they shared between modes because there's so many? There are shared sounds, but the mode music is based upon which characters are in the chapter as well as which movie it's from. Wow, okay. This seems like a lot to Perkz. It really is. And so speaking of characters, then, if I could go back to the beginning. So, you know, when you first go up to the machine, put your money, and hit start, the very first thing you've got, and which we think is really cool, is, you know, you have to pick a certain character with its own different perk. Who came up with that concept? and how has it evolved over time? Because I think when we first played the machine, I can't remember, but it might have been about eight different characters. Now there's probably more that are available. Who came up with that? I really don't remember if it was me or Keith or we were just sitting there talking and we both came up with it. I'll give Keith credit because he is the rules master. But I remember explicitly saying, I don't want now again I'm not trying to say anything bad about Stern I own several Stern games I like Stern games some Stern games but I don't want Game of Thrones syndrome where everyone picks House Martell so I specifically said we need to make them all balanced and we also need to enforce that you can't pick the same character as someone else We certainly found that really interesting because when we were playing it normally in a tournament setting you would want to be playing last whereas in this case, everybody was wanting to play first because they actually get to pick the most lucrative mode or one that suits their playstyle Yep So we've got even from the get-go, from the character selection there's so many different strategies that you can employ. I mean, we've got characters that make chapter shots easier, for example, the character Norrington. So you need to make the left ramp for one of your chapter shots. You know, you have to shoot either for Elizabeth or Barbossa, who are both on the left ramp. If you choose the stand-up target to either side of the ramp and you're playing as Norrington, it'll give you credit for the shot. But you'll only get half points for doing so. what's your go-to person at the moment when you're off obviously you have to play different characters because you're you know you've got to have a favorite right I like Norrington a lot because it'll help you get to the wizard mode faster but his point detriment you know kind of kind of hurts so when Myself and Joe Katz and Keith are playing. We're choosing Gibbs, for example, who gives you more Tortuga value. We're choosing Blackbeard, who... And we're trying to theme all the characters, too, through what they experience in the movies. So for Blackbeard, whose goal in movie number four was to live forever, he gets a 10 second ball saver whenever he starts a multiball 10 seconds extra or 10 seconds extra 10 seconds extra I mean it depends on how you set up your game we here play with no ball saver we do it in the office here but with his ability both Keith and I and probably Joe have all been able to string all six multi balls together at the same time and stack them all together. And his ability really makes multiball easier to do and easier to chain together. Whereas Norrington's ability really makes chapters easier to string together. And there's another character, Pintel, who's probably one of my other favorites, I guess, who spots you pirate lanes. So there's a lot of lucrative points to be had in the pirate lanes, a lot of good awards. he starts the ball he starts the game with five of the six lanes lit. Once you've completed that one other lane, next time, next pirate award comes after only two more lanes completed. So it goes five, four, three, two, and stays at two completed automatically. So it really lets you get into the upper levels of the pirate lane awards which do some really cool stuff like extra ball, for example. After you've completed five pirate lanes, extra ball is lit. so you really do have to have more than one favourite because you're really, if you're playing multiple games you hardly have any to choose your favourite yeah you have to have your backup it is super interesting I guess to see the orders of the machine that you're putting on site what people are attracted to if they're just choosing the prettiest lady because they like that picture or if they're choosing the hero Johnny Depp or if they're reading through and developing a strategy based on that, right? Yeah. I mean, there's definitely some characters that appeal more to casual players. At least that's my feel right now, like Cutler Beckett. He's a character who, with one press of the action button, you collect all the gold on screen, whereas with every other character, you have to hit the button once for every piece of gold you see on the screen. So with that character, the detriment is you don't get a gold collection bonus. every other character does get 50 points per piece of gold collected. He just presses the button once. I was unaware that all these perks came with a slight downside. Are they listed on that page, or do you think that's just too much information to play with? I think it's too much information, so we're working on the UI to try to see how to develop that. It does stay in the pro tips. generally what the player's perk is as well as their disadvantage. Okay. And that's all done in an effort to keep the game balanced. You know, we don't want one character to be the powerhouse. So what's the detriments? Because there's that one play that everyone was choosing that you basically, you shoot up the ball into the upper playfield that it can ship and you press the action button and the ball will be added. so all of the conditions that half point on the second ball is active even during multiple or something yep, wow, okay that's great so then when you've been watching people playing the machine either via streams or on location, have there been sort of changes that you've made software wise and rules wise to sort of balance the game? I'm trying to think I know we had watched some streams and we were when we were at Expo we were watching people some of the things that were obvious to us as the designers was the gold concept right? you can use gold and gold splashes across the screen and you hit your button as quick as you can I remember you were watching our stream and we did the Melbourne Silver stream and in chat He kept saying, guys, press the button. There's gold. There's gold. Right. So we're adding more call-outs for that, more light effects for that. Like, for example, because we use full-color RGB general illumination on the Alien Collector Edition, like, all the lights are turning gold and flashing gold. Like, the whole play field general illumination is all turning gold when there's gold on the play field to grab. And Gibbs calls out, collect gold or hit the action button as fast as you can. and things like that. It's a new game, and a lot of the things that you've implemented are new concepts, so I think it's just one of those things where people just have to play the game and then the knowledge gets passed on, you know. Yeah, it's like tribal knowledge that goes on. That's a great thing about our big display in the back, because as the player, you're not necessarily looking at that, but your buddy who's spotting for you, like, oh, there's gold everywhere, hit the button. or you're close to the multiball if you do X, Y, and Z because they can see on the display up there your progress for your multiballs. When we were playing me and money when we used to each other, we used to say, look, okay, well, you be my gold collector. I can't be my gold collector. Please collect my gold gun patents. One of the questions I really want to ask, probably my number one question out of all the questions we've asked in this today, the spinning map. Now, what triggers it to start? Because we played the beta code, and it would start spinning, and you pretty much, the award part of the code wasn't implemented. So one, is that now in there? Can you actually get awarded things on the map? And two, what triggered the map starting, and what triggered the map stopping to collect the awards? So start with the easy stuff. To start the map, there's three targets that you hit from the upper left flipper. they spell out map and to stop the map it's that tiny hole you were talking about from the upper left flipper. You shoot it into there and it stops the map. If it's all three disks are spinning it'll stop the map. As far as the awards right now I overheard yesterday from the programming office talking about implementation of plundering and how that's going to work and so they're actively working on that now. Okay. So it's still not in that prototype that's out there and the latest code revision that's not implemented yet? Correct. Yep. So it stops the math. Is it as soon as... You said you can stop it at a dime. So, you know, bam, it stops. Obviously, it has to line up perfectly, you know, in a straight row of what's being awarded. So is it when, like, an opto or a switch gets hit inside that sub lane? Is that when it stops, or how does that work? That's a good question. So Keith is working on that. The concept is going to be, I would think of it more like a mystery award. At least that's how I'm viewing it right now. Now, if Keith tells me I'm wrong, I'll email you guys after this and correct myself. But I don't want it to just stop instantly, because you might get, you know, light 10x character or something, and that doesn't make sense, or whatever. There's over 500 different combinations, but only 216 of them are viable combinations. So we're going to stop it with weighted averages on what we want to actually show up, right? Like in a multiplayer game, it doesn't make sense to say, plunder opponent's character. Sorry, in a single-player game, it wouldn't make sense to plunder opponent, you know, or whatever. So we'll stop it, you know, like, on the features we want to showcase based on what's happening in the game. So how will the camera be integrated? We're definitely going to do, like, high-score pictures. Sure. And... Pipe lottery. Yeah. Yeah. Scratch your fleas for extra ball. Remove barnacles, that kind of thing. Right. Right now, we're implementing the high score pictures. Anything else we're still in discussions on? It's all a bonus, right? I mean, I think if that was the only feature on Daldin, people would still be happy. I mean, people like the selfie mode, but I think just taking off each of the high scores, if you've got proof that it was you that was playing the game, is more than enough. That's good enough. So you can play on your mobile phone on dialed in, and that kind of integrates with the theme. I'm guessing you still kind of have the technology there. Is that something that you guys have thought about influencing, or is it just let's dialed in and that's it? I've got to toe the line on this one. The answer I can give you is probably. Wait and see. Yes. So you've got that machine out at level 257. So that's still in a prototype stage. So that's not final hardware. or is it still the final test, I guess, at the moment? Right, there's a lot of Expo hardware in there. I've gone through and modified the chest and the fork and the door and the rocking for the playfield and stuff like that. Some of those parts are still handmade, right? I consider myself a pretty good machinist, but I'm not a laser cutter by any means. So it's still prototype hardware, but it's as close to production ready as I have right now. And that's the reason it's out there. I want people to play it and find out what's wrong, because I haven't been able to find stuff wrong with that game, and that's why I've released it from under my wing, if you will. It's chosen well. Is there anything that you can tell us about it that we haven't asked yet, or, you know, you want to sort of give us some exclusive info? Exclusive info. We've already had plenty of stuff. I don't think there's been enough at all. I'm just really looking forward to getting some streams out there of people who know the game and can, like myself and Keith and Joe Katz, like I'm looking forward to getting us to stream some of this game so that people can understand the rules and see how deep this game really is. Yeah. Because there's so much strategy. Technically, we're playing against each other, but we're all playing different games. It all depends on your character and then just how you're trying to progress, like which multiball you're going for, are you trying to stack them or what the deal is. So there's a lot of complexity into the game, and I think people are going to really dig it. Yeah, you can fly down to Australia or the U.S. if you want, and we can do a stream, or just invite the buff-working world guys down, like you did with Daldin. That would probably make more sense, right? Probably. We'll get some people out here, you know, either at level 257 or at our office or what have you. One question, this is unrelated to streams and stuff. I saw a picture at the expo of someone who took a picture of the two spinners on the upper playfield, you know, at a certain angle where you could see a face, like it looked like a ghost. Was that a reflection of someone in the background or is there like an underlay picture on those students of a face, like Salazar or something? That's a mystery, I don't know. No. Yeah, it's a mystery. I mean I didn put a face in there It the ghost of Kit Paul Pass who come to play again Weird. Okay, I'll send you the picture after. Actually, I've got it right here. All right. Once they've got the power of editing, I'm going to send you the picture right now. Whoa. What is that? uh that's a damn good question it is it can't be a reflection because the person's got their like mouth open and they genuinely look like a goat uh I don't know maybe it's someone from Damien Jones' locker okay awesome alright mystery unsolved fantastic alright Eric it was an absolute pleasure to have you on thank you for taking time out of your day to talk with us and yeah I mean maybe we'll have you on again sometime in the future after production has started and we get we get to play the machine more because I'm not sure if you've listened to our podcast but we talk about it for like an hour and a half just how impressed we are with the game because there is so much to talk about as you said it is an absolute jam packed game hardware wise and the software base obviously is pretty big as well. Yeah. Well, thanks for having me, guys. This was a lot of fun. This game has been my life for the last year plus, so it's fun to finally be able to tell people about it. That's what I was saying at Expo. I've been working on this game forever, and it's so great to finally be able to tell. I'm in Pinball League, where I meet up with 32 other pinball heads once a month, and I couldn't talk to them about anything I worked on. And so actually being able to talk to people about it is cool. Well, I just remember when we were first talking about it, and we saw it, we played it, the initial thing that came to mind, and we sort of talked about it in a lot of the questions before, is for your first pinball machine, you absolutely nailed it. And, you know, when people are talking about, well, we need new blood, we need new designers, right here, here's a perfect test case that this is why we need new fresh blood into pinball design. Thank you. That's great to hear. Yeah. Yeah. Scott did a great job with his game as well as another new designer. For sure. You know, my brother has a TNA, and hopefully he'll let me borrow it soon. well good stuff alright mate thanks guys thanks very much thank you bye now so there he is that was Eric yeah I went to the gym today and I tried I tried to I did 10 kilos which is close to 20 pounds and my triceps are burning so I've still got a way to go but he's right dips are 10 times I do 3 tricep exercises None of them are as good as this. I don't know why I wasn't doing that. So thank you, Eric, for that. That's the most important part of it. That was the only take-out I got from that interview with him. From that one-hour deal. Yeah. Seriously, though, we did get some pictures from Eric showing the whitewoods, one kind of populated and one not. And, yes, there is a pretty big difference between what he was, you know, originally designing and what eventuated. and we'll add them to our website and then Facebook and the show notes and everything, so you should be able to see them if you're following us. And I'm not sure if you've had a proper look at it, Marty, but did you notice that that start mode area used to be a captive ball? I'm not sure if you've got it in front of you. No, I haven't got it in front of me. It was really interesting. When I saw the white wood that's got the ramps on it, it's really interesting how it can look quite bare. I mean, I don't know if that's... I mean, obviously. It hasn't got everything on it. But it's really interesting how artwork and inserts and lighting can really make a machine look more populated. And, I mean, I don't... It also makes it more confusing as well, though, doesn't it? Because when you see the whitewoods, it's like you understand the machine better, right? Yeah. It's just like, okay, I understand the layout in 10 seconds. whereas when you have art, it just like, it almost confuses you, right? Well, it's not just that. Like when you see the art, you're then thinking about all the shots that you need to make whereas when you've got no art and it's just whitewood, it's just this space where the ball can go anywhere. There's no real direction. So I think you're right in that it does complicate it but it does necessarily because you're thinking about all the rules that go with all the different shots and what the lights mean, what the mode shots mean. It's meant to do that, obviously. Yeah. I'd love for people to contact us or, you know, right on Pinside or ZRK, you know, all the differences that you can see between the Whitewood and the final. Just at the top of my head, you've got three drop targets in front of the Chester. You've got the Captive Ball in front of the Mozart. The, I think there's four Pop Pumpers, and I think the final has three, but I might be wrong on that. The Ball Launch launches directly onto the upper playfields, play feels and if it rejects I think it goes down into the pops that's all different now so a lot of um a lot of differences so it's it's interesting to me to see a machine in different stages because yeah well and again I asked the question and it was a loaded question but it was about you know the importance of the whitewood phase and and that's really highlighting it how many changes can be made from that phase to the final product. Yeah, so I was talking about that picture that was populated. The other picture that we're going to show is an unpopulated one with all the inserts, and there's so many inserts on there. And it makes sense what Eric said. If you have too many inserts, it kind of just disrupts the artwork. I can't see how you'd have a nice art package with that many inserts on there. and it looks like the insets in the middle, like next to the flippers, is in the shape of a triton, I think, which is to do with the fifth movie. I'm not sure if it appeared in the other movies, but yeah, interesting changes. And, I mean, the machine still isn't out yet, so he did say that more things were changing, things were moving left and right a little bit. Yeah. And look, the other thing, I know this may sound a little bit silly, but it's, again, talking to Eric, and I hope that other people listening to the interview have the same thing, but I'm now back really excited about this pinball machine again. It's been a couple of months. I'm like, okay, go and do your thing and maybe we'll play it in the future. Now listening to him and hearing some of the detail that's gone into creating this thing, I'm excited all over again. Me too. I can't wait to play it again, knowing a little bit more about the software and where it's leading. Hey, it's pretty cool. We've interviewed Scott Dinesi. We've interviewed Eric Pignier. So that's two out of the three new designers. I'm not sure if we'll be able to get Keith on because he's not as liberal with the interviews, but two out of three is pretty good. Well, Keith, make it happen. Isn't it funny how we review our own interviews after we do the interview? Well, you just never know. I mean, we came with some questions, but, you know, we really sort of just uncovered things as we went through the conversation. And it's when you really listen back like we did just now that you sort of actually do take it all in and understand really what he was saying, as opposed to, you know, trying to concentrate on being an interviewer. You know what I mean? Sure. So this week we got a teaser trailer. That's a thing now in Timberwolves. Yes. for the reveal of Alice Cooper in Nightmare Castle. And did you watch it, Marty? I did watch it. I saw lots of blurred filmography. I saw lots of close-ups. I saw some weird angles. The one thing I'm trying to get from this, as I've said all along, is I want to know how much of a fully-fledged machine this is, where it's fully populated, that it can stand right next to a Stern or a Jersey Jack and say, I'm one of you. Yeah. They've been hyping it up for, you know, maybe a year and a half, saying their third big game, even though it's probably their sixth game or something, their third game designed by Charlie is going to be a lot different. So, yeah, a little zoom in on inserts, but more about kind of the walls and the castle and everything else that's blue in the background. The one bit that wasn't blurred out was the shot of the LCD screen. Yeah. It does look nice and crisp. Yeah. And it looks like they're using the comic book style kind of font and like the arrows and all that kind of stuff, which is quite cool. I like that myself, you know, rather than kind of a more realistic, you know, pictures and trying to create their own city kind of like dialed in. Yeah, sure. And look, I don't know whether you noticed it as well, but, you know, one of the things and it was a bit of criticism that came from America's Most Haunted and also Rob Zombie, was that the play field was quite dark, like the art on it was quite dark, and therefore the play field in itself was quite dark. This, from what I saw, actually looks quite bright and vibrant, so I'm hoping that that's what it actually is. I'm not sure if this has been discussed on Pinside yet or anywhere else, but I just noticed that when they zoomed in on the LCD screen, if you've got the video open, Marty, go to 10 seconds. If you look in the middle between, like, ball one and credits, it actually has, like, a little tiny map of, I'm guessing, where you are. And it was what I think Ben Heck referred to where, like, you're going through, like, a dragon's lair, whatever that video game is, where you can go kind of, like, left or right and battle the zombies. So can you see that now where it says M at the top and then X to the right of it? Let me just have a look now. So in between these big squares, it's kind of like a diamond, there's little tiny squares, so I'm guessing there's like little mini modes you play in between the monsters and you choose to go either left or right either time, which would lead to a different mode, like a sub-mode, and different monsters to battle. So there's one, two, three, four, five monsters that you have to battle to get to the end, I guess. So there you go around in a circle. Okay, yeah, so it's got a little map down the bottom, which has got, yeah, you're left and right. So they sort of look like they're different rooms. And that would make sense, because what we've heard about this is that you're being guided through a castle. So maybe you do have those moments where you choose a different direction. I think I might have mentioned it. I mean, we've been covering Alice Cooper Nightmare Castle in, like, you know, little tiny teasers. Little bits, yeah. From what they say on their podcast at the start of every month, and I guess there'll be one in a couple of days as well where we'll get some more info. So, you know, we're going to see it at Texas More Festival, and I hope they have a decent amount there because there's going to be a lot of people at Texas, and if they only have one or two machines, there's going to be a long, long line to play these things. So I'm not sure how many they can make, but, you know, I'm sure that's it. so I don't think they can just print a couple more. Well, come on, Spooky, we are rooting for you. Talking about another machine that's going to be at Texas, the Kingpin remake, and it's quite funny because they're not saying, you know, hey, we're going to bring Kingpin here. No. Let's see what Circus Maximus is up to. Mystery game. and people are smart enough to figure it out. It was the Texas Pimble Facebook page that posted the picture of Kingpin and people... Well, we already talked about it a week before that they're doing it, but people figured out from the inserts and stuff that it was indeed Capcom's Kingpin. Now, what do you think their intentions are? You know, are they just building one because they can and then seeing the interest maybe? or... Well, you know, again, it's down to the business model. So, okay, look, why would they be doing Kingpin and not producing the Pinball Circus, right? You know, why are they now having to say this? And I think it's probably because, at the end of the day, Pinball Circus is a fun novelty game, but it's not really a great pinball machine. I've played it. It's just really not that great. But what do you think, I mean, if they intend on taking money from people, do you think people are going to have confidence sending money knowing that they started a project and didn't complete it? Well, and I guess that's, you're asking what do I think their intent is at TPF? Well, my prediction is that they will come with whatever they have, whatever they've been able to recreate and gauge interest. I don't think they're going to go expecting people to put money down. I just think they probably want to know, are they on to a winner and then spend the next two years... Well, actually, you know what? That wasn't actually meant to be facetious at all, although, sure, let's take it. But what I mean is to actually go away and learn how to be a manufacturer. Because we need more manufacturers, right? Well, we do. I just noticed that there's an LCD hooked into the machine, and maybe that's just for diagnostics or something, but do you think they've done a Chicago Gaming thing where they've modernised the machine as well? Maybe completed the code and have an LCD instead of the D&D does? Yeah, I mean, I know what you're saying about the fact that it could be just a diagnostic machine. It just so happens to be exactly where the D&D would go. Why wouldn't they have a D-Series instead of a... Anyway, it's just speculation, I guess, but... Yeah, well, I mean, also, we've talked about this. I mean, the Kingpin, the game, I don't know. Maybe you can correct me whether the code was fully complete. I've watched some videos on it, and it seems pretty complete, but, you know, people say that machines are never complete these days, and it might be pretty shallow, kind of like Big Bang Bar in pretty simple. So I'm not sure. Yeah, I'm not sure if people are going to make just, hey, we're going to make 200 or we're going to make as many as we can and it's $8,000 or we're going to make a limited amount and it's $15,000. Hey, if it was $15,000 and it was limited, I think they'd sell it because people are paying $50,000 for a kingpin, one of the original ones. So what's a remake worth? mass producing it kind of destroys all of that kind of... Well, yeah, that's right. So it really just depends. Who knows what they're going to come up with? And, you know, according to some people, making pinball is hard. Some people seem to think otherwise. But, you know, this isn't a big organisation yet, as far as I know. So it'll be interesting to see what they can... what they're actually going to say their schedule is going to be, how many they're going to make, what the price point's going to be, how quickly they'll make them. They have to go from being able to recreate it, which we can see in this photo, to actually becoming a manufacturer. And what I want to know is whether they're actually going to manufacture it themselves or they're going to go into a contract model like Planetary. Planetary did it with what? With Megafor Madness? Yes. Yeah, well, I don't think CERN is interested in doing that anymore. Who knows? Anyway, we'll see in a couple of weeks. That'll be another one where, if there's only one, The lines will be like one hour long, so I will enjoy playing one game on this machine and then forming some kind of opinion based off that one game after waiting an hour, so I'll probably be really pissed off by the time I play it. Maybe you can just play the celeb card and go, hang on, do you know who I am? Do you know who I am? My word of mouth makes or breaks your comp. No. No. I'm nobody. I'm just Ryan C. So, it's got an easy release. Yeah. Oh, God. So, the soundtrack for Total Nuclear Annihilation. Well, first of all, he released the FLAC or the FLAC file. So, that's pretty much the highest quality you're going to get from a download besides a WAV file. So, that's pretty good. And it's now out on Spotify is when I was listening to it. And I have listened to it non-stop. over the last couple of days. I've only listened to a bit, and because it takes, because of the type of music that it is, you know, a little bit more hardcore than I'm used to in the electronic kind of, is it electronic dance music? Is that what you would call it? EDM? EDM. Close-ish? Yeah, well, I think it's in between, so it's in between that whole retro wave and sort of synth pop sort of thing. It's a bit harder, but anyway, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, I love it, but I'm so used to hearing that first track, the main Shooter's Roof song. That's the one I'm used to, so that's the one that I can listen to all day long. But the other ones are so new, and because I haven't played the Bill Moore Machine yet, I think I'll take a little bit longer to like those songs compared to the other ones. Well, so what I take from it is that probably the first five tracks are all progressions of that, let's call it the Shooter Lane soundtrack song, right? Alpha Particles. Alpha Particles. Is it? No, I think... Okay, it's called Alpha Particles. Oh, no, sorry, it's called Total Nucleotide Annihilation. Yep. So then, you know, Alpha Particles is a little bit different. But the first, I don't know, four or five tracks have a similar beat, a similar sound and a similar feel to them. But then when you get to the last couple of tracks, they are quite different. And that's great because they take you in a new direction. And if you think about the machine itself, you still want to be kept in a certain mode or a certain feeling. So you don't want the music to be too radically different when it is such a pronounced feature of the machine. yeah Ron from the Slant Tilt Podcast fresh from telling me that you know I'm too OCD in particular about certain things like the font they use on Aerosmith I'm not sure if you've listened to their latest podcast it's a great one but he said that he doesn't like the well he didn't say he didn't like it but he said the original version of you know the remaster because it's a deep instead of a book or a four-pin set of beats. Well, I think what he was saying was that they've lowered the pitch. That's not quite right. It still is the same pitch, but they've turned the volume down slightly and given a bit of a delay. So instead of it that one bip, the delay, the bip, bip, bip, is more pronounced. You reckon it's the same tone? Yeah, I think it is. Because remastering isn't remixing. So it's not like they went back and added new lines or changed lines. It's basically down to the mix. They pronounce certain lines or they'll change the dynamics of the drum beat, but they won't actually change the sound. So really all they've done is they've just gone back with all the tracks and just sort of tweaked the master. So it does have a more full, rich sound, and as a result, certain other things are pronounced as opposed to that one bit. Cool, man. I could talk for hours. My whole life, I haven't bothered to look up what remastered was, and I just always thought, like, it was a second attempt. Like, ah, yeah, I kind of want it to sound like this, you know. But I didn't know that it just means that they're different. Yeah, so remastered... So you know when they have, like, you know, bands from the 70s or 80s, and they go, right, we're going to remaster their... What they do is they take the original recording, like all the multi-tracks, and then they mix them down with today's frequencies and with today's technology so they can enhance the sound. We have a broader spectrum of sound available now through headphones, through speakers, through audio equipment. So they then just reproduce that with today's frequency bandwidth, whatever you want to call it. I understand, though, where Ron is coming from because once you get used to a sound from a pinball machine, certain people like myself don't like it to change at all. even if it is better. I haven't played, well, I haven't played TNA at all, but I haven't watched enough streams and drummed that sound in my head enough to be annoyed by the change. I can't believe we're talking about this very much. Yeah, the same thing happens with, you know, with Twilight Zone, when someone showed me the pin sounds for Twilight Zone, I hated it. I was just like, no, this isn't Twilight Zone. Even though this is what it was meant to sound like, it doesn't have the same effect because I'm so used to that sound. and yeah, I hated Doctor Who when I got it because of the sound. Love it. A lot of the rings made my ears bleed because of the poor sound sampling and I love it now. I love the crackly things. So it's fine for me because I haven't played it enough. Yeah, fair enough. You just get used to it. And look, if it comes to us with the remastered soundtrack, we're not going to know the difference. well yeah they're sitting in they just passed customs and I think everything's being paid for so I think they arrive in the warehouse for distribution probably tomorrow or the next day so great time for Prowler to have a break and not be available to these machines so TNA will be here in about a week that is awesome now so speaking of spooky pinball isn't there now a change to somebody in Australia that's become Spooky Pinball Australia? Yeah, there was the Pizza and Pinball, which was a kind of, it was a pizza place where you can play pinball. It is, fair enough. We talked about them closing down a couple of episodes ago, maybe two or three or four months ago. And the guy who ran that, Chris, was the guy who was organising. He was like an distributor, but I don't think he was making any money from it. They, this week, changed their Facebook page to Spooky Pinball Australia and who knows what that means? Well, I know what it means, but I'm not allowed to talk about it. It's not officially out there, but you know what it means. So yeah, stay tuned to what that is going to mean in the coming months. Well, I think that's great. If it is something that is a bit more official, that sort of gives us a great sort of visual to a distributor in Australia for those products. Yeah, and it's still well organised now. I had a look at all the emails that were kind of getting passed around today with my mate and it's very well organised and all the transparency was there, all the invoices were passed around so everyone is paying what it kind of costs to get in. Fantastic. Shall we tackle the big news of the week, Marty? The big... Is it really the big news? Well, it is, I guess. Deep root. Deep root. Our mates. Best friends. Yep. Rob Mueller. How are you, Rob? Just to remind him. I guarantee he did listen to us. He was choosing someone to interview him, and I'm sure he just listened to our segments on Deep Root and was like, no. It's not going to be them. It's not going to be them. They made fun of us way too much. Just a reminder, guys. The word root, just if you're a new listener, the word root in Australia has two meanings. One is like the root of a tree, the origins where it comes from and the other one is sex sex. Fuck. Fuck. There it is. If something breaks this thing is rooted it is fucked. Okay? So that's what it means. So deep root if they ever sell people machines in Australia it's you're buying off a company that's deep fuck maybe they can rebrand themselves in Australia Yeah. We'll try to get that out of the way before we get to the super serious stuff. So this was a follow-up interview. So our good friend Jeff from ThisWeekInPinball.com managed to do a follow-up interview with Robert from Deep Root. And look, I think it's suffice to say the first interview that he did had a lot of people sort of a bit confused, a little bit unsure and it wasn't really what people were expecting and a lot of people were saying to me that it did come across as a bit arrogant. What were your thoughts? I don't know. It's just confusing and, you know, you're almost saying it like, and this clears it all up, but there's kind of a lot of confusing stuff in here as well as to why this is all being done. So maybe we should just kind of like go through the article quickly and talk about our notes on it. I guess that's probably the best way to handle it because when I was reading this and it was late at night, like 11 p.m. at night, and you were reading it, I was just – I just came back from a party, like a 44-year-old party. So I was a bit tanked and it was a bit of an experience reading this thing. Yeah, I was actually already in bed about to go to sleep. You sent me a link and I went, okay. And so half asleep, I was so trying to go to sleep, but I couldn't because I just kept reading and reading and reading. And more and more through it, I was just even more, I don't know, confused. But I just think there's a real disconnect between what I expect a new manufacturer to come out and say and with what's being said. Yeah, so the first part of their news was that they have a new home, and basically they give the address and a Google kind of top-down view of it, and it's a Silicon Valley-esque industrial building, but it's not in Silicon Valley, it's in Texas. So the size of it is 41,000 square metres, and I said, wow, that's, let's say, square feet. They're in America. The size of the CERN factory is 110, So it's about three times smaller than the Stern factory, but still pretty big with room to grow. This is the part that made you say, holy shit, do we have to stop making fun of this whole situation and take it seriously? Because before it was just this new company and J-Pop. Now they've got some new hires, Marty. Oh, my God. And it's a bit of a who's who, really. I mean, take out the mechanical techs and the scenarist, scenarist? What is a scenarist? What's a scenarist? I don't know what that is. You're right, scenarios. They probably do. But you've got now designers. The first designer who is exclusive and in-house, Barry Alsler. Now, does in-house mean he's living there, or does that just mean that he works in the factory opposed to everyone else that works remotely. Well, I don't know what they mean, because the others just say exclusive, and they don't say in-house. So, I don't know. So, exclusive means that they're not, maybe not allowed to work at another company, but while they're working at Deep Root? I would say that's what it means. I'd say... I just don't know. I read when it says Barry Osler exclusive in-house, That means he is exclusive to Deep Root and will not be doing any other designs for other people. Now, good old Baza, as we would say in Australia, Baza, hasn't done something for a while. Well, apparently, this is probably my biggest take from this whole thing. Some of these people that are mentioned are meant to be having upcoming pins. Yeah. Harry Osler is going to be at Texas Pinball Festival, apparently, the rumor is, to show Highway Pinball game number three, which is apparently Queen. Right. So does that mean that he designed it so long ago that it's already done and his work is done? Could be. Maybe he can appear as an employee or a contractor for Highway Pinball, but he can't do any more work for them. Is that what's happening here? Well, you know what? You're probably right. I mean, you can put a design on paper and say, right, here's my machine, but then you don't actually sit there waiting for the machine to be built. You've actually done your job. Has Eric Meunier done his job with all these little changes and things that need to come out? I mean, like, do they actually have a working Queen pinball machine that is error-free, or does their in-house designer now fix all the little things that need to be cleaked in the machine? Well, that's a good question. I mean, who knows, but it depends on how the company operates, whether they want a designer that goes from, you know, ink on paper to full production, or whether they go at some stage, yeah, you know what, you've done enough, we've got that. And they did that with Alien. Remember when the first designer, who was it? Dennis Nordman. Dennis Nordman. They kind of said, yeah, we'll take it from here, thanks for all your work, Dennis. And he's like, okay. Are you sure it went down like that? Are you sure it wasn't Dennis saying, I can see the writing on the wall? Well, yeah. It could have been. Let's put the ball in Dennis' court. So Dennis is actually the second person they announced. Correct. So the other confusing bit is Dennis and Greg Perez did a panel at last year's Texas Pinball Festival with Cassandra Peters, who is Alvara. And someone asked, are you doing another Alvara pinball machine? And which they responded, very awkwardly, yes. So, is that still going ahead, or has that been scrapped, or has it been finished hardware-wise? I saw a post on Pinside saying that it's been delayed or something, and it might never come to fruition. So, it's interesting. I mean, how much money are these people getting paid when they have such great names and high esteem in the pinball designing community to be exclusive? Yeah. This is obviously not a situation where they're saying, you know, kind of like what Andrew Highway did with Aliens, saying, hey, Oreg, I really like your work. Can you please design the art for it, and I'll pay you money after it ships, plus you'll get a free Alien pinball machine. Yeah. These guys aren't going to, you know, agree to that. They're going to get paid up front and be paid a wage. Right. So, now, I ask this question actually not to be facetious. I know it's going to sound like this, But when you think about Barry Osler, Dennis Nordman, Owen, the third one being Jon Norris, right? When was their last great, and I mean great, just knocked it out of the park, machine released? 1993 demolition. Probably Alvarez gets this, even though they didn't sell too many of them, but people, I guess, hold that in high esteem. Jon Norris is the third person I mean I'm not much of a Gottlieb guy but World Challenge fucker I don't hate many people but that's the worst game I've ever played by Aslan Shah absolutely worst game ever so the reason why I'm not saying that as in oh you know what have they done they're shit designers no that's not what I'm saying what I'm saying is that they've been dormant for a while they haven't really had a good knock-it-out-the-park type game, this is probably a really good opportunity for them to actually have a comeback and show that they can actually design something that's fantastic. Yeah. So Dennis Nordman and Barry Oswald, I mean, I like a lot of their designs. Jon Norris, I mean, he was pretty much just at Gutley, right? And I've hardly played any of those games when I have. They've been in horrible condition. So you've never played Books Undone? No. What is that? I've never played a lot of... I've never played Waterworld. I've played Waterworld. I've played Dicker. Yeah, terrible. I actually don't want to have a Biotronica. Yes. Yeah. It's horrible. Yeah, but it's an okay game. Cactus Jacks, you know, Teed Off is alright. Playdown is terrible. World of Tanks is terrible. Surprise, isn't that bad? Rescue 911. The problem with all these big games is that no one ever bothers restoring them and I don't think I've ever played a really nice Gottlieb that plays how I guess it's meant to play. So my opinion on them is always skewed based on that. I know there's a lot of issues with software on these Gottlieb games. The funny thing is the other designer is John Popadook and it's kind of hard to... It's the problem is you can forget that because... I don't know. Why do they need four designers? Oh, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no. No, no, no, Ryan. There's five designers. Ah, okay. Sorry. Robert Mueller is also a designer. Yep. Because... Why not? Absolutely. You know. Pimble is easy. Yeah, Pimble is easy. It's easy. Many things happen. Pimble is easy. Okay, I just want to say this. Before Dennis Nordman does this, right, Scott Danesi, Eric Meunier, or Keith Elwin, you guys are the three new designers. someone needs to copy Demolition Man into a standard body machine. It is one of the greatest layouts ever, except for those two left shots. If you remove those two left shots, that is a standard body machine. And, you know, layouts get copied all the time. You know, some people copy their own layouts, some people copy old layouts and just flip stuff around. Just copy Demolition Man and, you know, add your little bits here and there. Just do it before Dennis O'Connor does it, because he's going to do it at this company, I guarantee it. Because, you know, Demolition Man is a horrible game in many aspects, you know, with the theme and the art and everything, but the layout is absolutely on point. And the jackpot call-out. Yeah, well, it's funny because it's horrible. So, as though... Five to five. Five to five. And also, interesting but not exclusive sound. Yeah, David Thiel. I mean, he does work for pretty much everyone now except Stern. I'm not sure. Well, I guess, you know, I guess it's sound. He can do that remotely. He just needs to be sent, you know. Yeah, he did the sound for Alien without having the machine, like 90% of the sounds. So he doesn't need to be there. He doesn't need to be exclusive. But these are all people that are renowned in the industry, especially David Thiel. So they've got the picture of everyone there. Do we now have to take this seriously? Like, it's not a joke, right? I mean, if you hire all those people, this is, they want to take over, right? They want to be a pinball manufacturer, right? Yeah, well, okay. So what it says is the intent is there. That's great. Okay. it still doesn't mean you're there, right? And yes, you've hired some great people and there's probably also some people in this picture that we don know who they are but they might have years of engineering you know if somebody like eric that we just spoke to is relatively new and he got all this background in you know engineering and robotics that he was trying to get in and he can design it maybe others can as well that that that knowledge just isn't exclusive right yeah and that that's one of the things that i kind of realized i was like hey american pinball did it in a week sorry week about a year from prototype to production in less than a year. It was like March, nine months or so. And then obviously the work they did before then. So what's the stop the company with even more people that have been in the industry doing the same? There's a lot of hurdles obviously, but we did get a bit more of an insight into the five days of DeepRoot. We still don't know what the hell it is but day one is the deep root standard day two is design three immersion four culture five launch event i guess i mean just what a load why this is a confusing thing it's just like that that part of the article was almost enough like hey you guys are hiring a lot of people but then it was like why tease people i guess it's so people like me and you can talk about it but no one's going to get excited about an event that's going to happen a year and a half from now. No. On the stage of Deep Root. I know. And you know what? You're right. Even if they'd stopped the five days of Deep Root, because also even before that on the article, they also talk about resolutions that Deep Root Pinball has come to a resolution slash settlement with Apple Juice, in which both parties were happy with the outcome. So he did the coding, is that right, for Magic Girl? Yeah. That's right. And it says a deal is close to being finalised with Zombie Yeti to use his art assets. The confusing thing as well is why do they need to do all this? Like, I don't think John Popadou has that much goodwill attached to his designs after what's happened to warrant a massive payout. Like, there must be something else going on because, you know, American Pinball did it. They gained kind of nothing out of it. you know, Contagio did it and then they, I guess they had the rights so they possibly got bailed out. Maybe there is. Maybe there is just one. There's just one fully functional Magic Girl machine. It's got the code complete. Every mech works. And when people feel it and touch it and play it, things just stir in their nether regions and they go, oh my God, So he just shoots out their arms But maybe there is Maybe they've actually got to play The final game And they go Okay This actually is a masterpiece We've got to produce this Because if we can Everybody will forgive J-Pop Because it is that good Maybe that's the case I apologise to everyone who's listening Who's not interested in any kind of new in box drama As it's now coined because the fact that we're talking about this company who hasn't done anything yet is kind of silly, but it's a podcast and we talk about things that happen in pinball. Shall we head to the little bits from the interview because this is where the real juicy stuff comes in. Well, do you want the real answers or do you want the special answers? I'll have some of the special answers, please. Okay. This is why we're recording one hour later than we should be. Whenever you record, Marty, I'm busy. Whenever you record, Marty, I'm busy. What were you busy doing? I was busy getting my answers for some of these questions. Okay. So, the first question was, in your last interview, some of the pinball community thought you came across as overconfident or arrogant. particularly with your comment about pinball being easy. Do you have any comments regarding the last interview? been overwhelmed with the She's Spread for the Project and seemingly taintly endowed with a renewed passion for pinball and what can be done with the right vision and tink tink tink tink tink if you consider what a pinball company done in a year or two, people have forgotten that pinball doesn't have to be hard, doesn't have to drag on and doesn't have to be limited but by pinball for close-minded echo chamber, echo echo echo chamber, we are here to do what we can to Every newbie, for a long time, fanatic, fanatic, fanatic. The Echo rarely Tournament Outfit, How are we going to pimple the echo chamber? A closed-minded echo chamber. What do you mean? Okay, clearly we're making fun of this, right? But really what I think he's saying is, and if we're really honest, I have spoken to some industry folk who have kind of said that the design process, the manufacture process is still stuck in the old way of doing things. It really is just the way they go about doing it. It's the way that they've always known. So maybe there is a new way of doing it. And what he's saying is that whole closed-minded echo chamber is really everybody saying, no, you can't do it that way, it's got to be done this way. No, you can't do it that way, it's got to be done this way. And it's just this echo. So I kind of get it, but we just haven't seen any evidence that it's actually going to be different. We haven't seen anything. It's just words. I mean, I can go into any industry that's been successfully manufacturing devices for how many years and say, yeah, you guys are doing it wrong. I know a better way to do it. but unless you can actually prove that, then it should just work for now. Yes, exactly. So, anyway. What's the next question, Marty? So, again, he talks about the Zidware customers. Do you still plan to do a webinar? And basically saying that, blah, blah, I reached out to them. Nobody wants our settlement. So, I think they're just waiting for what's going to happen. The American Pinball thing was quite a funny answer because they said that they now have the license for John Papadiuk's Houdini. So at Expo in 2016, he showed a kind of non-working populated playfields, you know, being run by an Arduino or something that just kind of flashes the lights in the track mode. But it wasn't actually a functioning pinball machine. And apparently they have the rights to that. What they're buying, I guess, is the layout. it was almost like a jab at American Pinball saying we might release our version of Houdini which I don't think is a very cool thing to do because they're on the eve of launching and these guys are in town to ruffle feathers as they said they want to cause as much chaos as possible and puff their chests and I'm going to crush you guys That's what they're saying in legal space. So one of the other questions was, how much are you into the pinball hobby for business versus passion for pinball? First, no pinball company that has ever been started has gotten into the hobby solely for the passion, passion, passion. Pinball development and manufacturing is complex and expensive. It has to be run like a business to stay business, business, business, of a business. First, no pinball company that has ever been started has gotten into the hobby solely for the passion, passion, passion. Pinball development and manufacturing is complex and expensive. It has to be run like a business to stay business, business, business of a business. First, no pinball company that has ever been started a job. First, no pinball company that has ever been started a job. First, no pinball company that has ever been started has gotten to the hobby solely because of passion, passion, passion. Pinball development and manufacturing is complex and inexpensive. It has to be run like a business to stay in business, business, business, for the business, business, business. Oh, hilarious. I'm having a lot of fun with this. Business needs to stay in business. It's true what he says, I guess. I think this guy is passionate about pinball. You know, I might not come across as that, but I think he does earn a lot of pinballs, and anyone who spends that much kind of money on pinballs, and if you look at his Pinsight profile, he has asked questions in the past about fixing things, and he's taken swaps there and stuff like that, so he does play his machines. One of the other questions they asked was an interesting one about, you've hired all these people, who have you hired to kind of complete the codes? Who's your programmer? And I'll just read this out properly. No rap battle, you know, auto-tunes on this one. So he said, Turner Logic will be providing most of the software. They designed our financial system. Like everything else with the project, nearly all of the innovations and designs are my own. In the case of Turner Logic, sorry, in the case of software, Turner Logic has put their own spin on it for implementation. So Jeff asks, Does this mean that non-Pimble, a gaming team of people, will be coding the Pimble machines? He said anyone with basic knowledge of structured commands would be able to code the machine. Okay, and then Jeff asked a follow-up question, and he said we'd like to give our programmers and players more control over the code so no one will be able to rationally blame us for incomplete codes. What does that mean? He cannot reveal more. and then Jeff asked, will the games ship the code complete? Is any code truly complete? We would like to make arguments about whether the code is complete or incomplete, irrelevant. Now, Marty, what the hell can that possibly mean? I guess what he's saying is, you know, you should always be able to evolve, but, you know... I think what he's saying is that he's possibly going to open up the software so it's like an open source community effort, So it's never complete or incomplete because people can keep on writing. Anyone who has basic knowledge of structured commands can code the machine. So are they going to release or plan to release these shells of a Piml machine where there's base software in there, like when you hit this, this happens, but you get to code the software around it? Is that what happens? Like you get a package and you're the programmer or the community is the programmer? it's an interesting concept I'm not sure how it will work with a small community like Pimble how does it work with competitions when everyone has a different version of the code I guess these aren't competition Pimble machines if that's what they're doing yeah fair enough there's another interesting thing as I said there's a lot of juicy stuff in this cycle well so the other thing that he also mentioned he said there's going to be no assembly line and asked can you expand on how the machines will be built without an assembly line. And he refers to this concept, you know, quad assembly, which will provide rapid and dynamic on-demand manufacturing abilities that current pinball manufacturers will have a hard time to match. When I read this, I was like, okay, quad assembly, that sounds cool. What's that? I Googled it. No results. Okay, so quad assembly isn't a thing yet. It's something that they've managed to figure out. So why quad assembly? Quad means four, right? Why not hexagon assembly? You and your hexagons. Well, actually, no, it would be hex assembly. It would be... Someone made a good point. I mean, if they have, you know... When pressed on what quad assembly is, he said that we have hundreds of... That was one of the hundreds of trade tickets we have and we're keeping to ourselves. Now, assembly lines, they're used everywhere. You know, to make cars and, you know, I'm pretty sure, like Apple iPhones are probably even manufactured on an assembly line. If they have something better than that, someone made this point on Pinsight, they would probably patent the method or this terminology and they wouldn't be into pinball machines. They would teach how to do things better. Why would they jump in bed with John Popper? Things like, hey, I've discovered this amazing new thing that is possibly worth hundreds of millions of dollars. let's team up with John Poppy to make pinball machines. Yeah. Well, maybe. Maybe it's a low... Because this guy's probably got lots of money. It's probably a low-cost entry into proving the concept. Maybe. Okay. So, I mean... Well, what's the worst thing that happens? If you don't do it, what happens? A couple of pinball... Everyone loses their money. A couple of pinball nerds are going to be upset. So, you know. But, you know, that's if they sort of do the... ask for money up front, which you would hope they wouldn't because there's already been enough money lost. No. They are going to be making pinball machines or attempting to in normal size, you know, the standard Bale and Sky missions. Yep. So, you know, they talked about Bible adventures. So he was talking about how Ben Heck was discussing doing his Bible adventures and they might actually make their own Bible game, Fire and Brimstone. Yeah, it was a funny thing because he was like, we want to expand the community and not just pinball people. But hello, what do you think Stern do? They try to produce anything that was popular before and popular now. Game of Thrones. It's like people are watching on TV. And I don't necessarily think that a Bible game is, you know, people might buy it, but I don't think they're going to introduce more people to pinball. It's not like, you know, the key secret to selling more pinball machines is to just go into, you know, a new theme and all of a sudden, holy crap, I go to church, I'm going to buy this, you know, $5,000, $6,000... Yeah, I know. It's like, it's the argument of, oh, you know, people love their Mustangs, they'll therefore love a pinball machine. No. Did that work? No, it obviously didn't work so well. The thing is, I mean, I'm sure people did. I'm sure they broke through to a couple of collectors and car shows and car dealerships and things like that, but is that better than just servicing the pinball community that are hungry for pinball machines that would rather a pinball machine that is better than Mustang? I don't know. Well, I mean, he said already with this that they've partnered with Kingstone who apparently have some sort of Christian marketing. So there are obviously some ways. So that may actually come around. He's then asked if you're the designer and he said that he has pretty much spearheaded the design. Then they talk about, you know, are you going to have more than one title available at launch? Who said yes, won't say how many. And then the question is, how soon after launch do you plan to start shipping machines? It says, since we are not selling any game we can't ship within two weeks, we anticipate a slow rollout after the five days of Deep Root using inventory manufactured prior to the announcement. Some of these terms that they kind of used, I was like, oh, wow, that sounds really generic, and I tried to Google the term to see if it's like, you know, just for copy and paste, but no, they're all his words. I don't know. I'm probably done talking about something. I'm done. I tell you, I've had about five days of deep root. Oh, my God. They're all going to be at the Texas Timberwolves Festival, but not that they're appearing as fans. So I'm guessing they're all going to have gag orders and not be allowed to talk about all their proprietary stuff that they do, but I'll see if I can talk. Who would I talk to, Marty? I'm going to approach one person out of all the people that are named. I don't think J-Pop's going to be there. I don't think it's too early for that. Should I talk to Norman or Robert? I reckon Norman. And I say that because everyone that's met him said he's a really, really nice guy. He's very quiet. I talked to him at the Chicago Expo and he's very, like, he's not like a... He's fine. He's no Steve Ritchie. you know he's not like a very loud character like a banging drum yeah got it anyway that's Deep Root wish them all the best like we said there's no reason for a company to come and try and save John Papadiuk's kind of you know the mess that he created but they are so I guess that is better right all said and done all jokes aside that is probably better than John Papadiuk just claiming bankruptcy and it all going away right someone's going to try and save it. The number one thing, and they're not asking for money, when they do, don't give anyone money unless there is a working pinball machine that you have tried and you have played in front of you, because, I don't know, I guess in the five days at DeepRoot we'll further understand what this company is all about. But, you know, if they're producing machines that aren't complete and we don't know how people are going to buy them, it doesn't sound... I don't know. We'll see how we go. All right, moving on. Moving on. This Week in Pinball. What have you done this week? What have I done? I've been playing a decent amount of pinball. I'm trying to play Metallica, but it's so frustrating. I've just been playing Demolition Man and absolutely loving it. As I said before, one of the coolest designs in a pinball machine. I'm still confused why no one's copied something similar. I've been trying to play Guardians of the Galaxy, because they're now in the country. So on Friday, I was interested in playing one, and there was one at Pixel Alley. Unfortunately, it was Australia Day, and they were closed, so I couldn't do that. I have someone that I know that is getting an Alley. He said, yeah, I've been really busy. I haven't picked it up yet. I'll get it next week. So I couldn't go and play at his house. I saw on Sunday, yesterday, I was out close to the city. I said, oh, I'm going to go to Pixel Alley. no Peace Lately was closed so I went and did some other things including playing some more with you and then after I finished I was going to go home I said no I want to go to Biotronica because they have a Guardians of the Galaxy so I drove all the way there and it was like 38 degrees at like 10 o'clock at night and they haven't got their heads yet they put it up on their Facebook page but you know Guardians of the Galaxy coming soon and I simply thought that means after five days they would have one no they don't have one no So I have still yet to play it. The one in Pixel Alley has apparently got a ball stuck. I'm sure it's fixed by now, but they don't have the keys, so they couldn't change it. I almost give up on playing this film on Steam, but I'm sure I'll be able to play it sometime this week. Well, if you are in Melbourne and you are listening to this podcast on the 30th of January, if you go to Pixel Alley tonight, there will be a comp on, and Guardians of the Galaxy will be there to be played. I should go to that. You should. I can play and win my first one. That's exactly right. You should do that. So easy. It's the second last time, so yeah, it's super easy. Super easy. Don't come, please, mate. And Richard Rose, don't come. Yeah. Everyone else, I think I can, on a good day, I can beat them. Just not you, Jordan, or Richard. Oh, and like, Johnny Crabtree. Yeah. And everybody else. And everyone else. Yeah. I hear you. It was my kid's birthday on the weekend, and we held it at our house, and I invited everyone over, you know, except you, of course. No, everyone came over, and it's funny because people have had pals' kids' birthday parties at our house before, and people are always resistant to play pinball, and I get them to play a couple of games, and they just kind of leave. This time, it's finally been enough time to have played enough pinball kind of when they come over. People were just playing pinball the entire time, and it was great. You know, my wife's mum was just, you know, my mother-in-law was just playing on ACDC the entire game, and she was understanding rules. I was teaching teenagers, kids how to play pinball. Being a pinball ambassador to people who never played pinball is quite fun. I think my game is struggling because of it. I haven't played very good pinball, but it was great to see, like, a four-year-old, like, cradle a ball and then make a shot. Jack Danger is right. It is so much easier teaching someone who's never played pinball before to play pinball than someone like my wife who's played in the past and still double flips. And I can't teach her how to play well. But these four-year-olds and these teenagers, yeah, I made the teenager update her Facebook and Instagram and everything. And I was just like, yeah, tell everyone how cool pinball is. And she's like, ah, I'll post the picture, but I'm not telling them that it's that cool. She knows it's not cool. One last thing. there was a kid who was 10 years old and he got like the high score of the day on Wizard of Oz and it came up and it's like, what's hashtag one mean? And I'm like, no, that's just number one. It's like little kids, whenever they see that sign now, it doesn't mean like number anymore. No, it's hashtag. It's hashtag. What does hashtag one mean? I'm going to stop laughing. Anyway, that was my weekend tomorrow. There you go. So, other than that, I guess we did something together. I did go to your house yesterday to play some Game of Thrones. But that wasn't really the highlight. I mean, it was. It was great because, again, we've gone hard to this machine, so it's good for you to every once in a while play your 50% of the game. Yes. It's a fun game. It really is. And I've said before, this one is in immaculate condition, so... They all are. How many Game of Thrones are in horrible condition? It's an interesting machine, right? No, it rocks. Oh, okay, the ones that are on site that don't... Yeah, oh, I've played some really stinky Game of Thrones, but to be able to play... And a pro in particular, a pro you don't see in home collections. People have the premium or the limited edition, so the pros you only play out on site, you know, have been, you know, worn down a bit, so... But what was interesting, you know, on Wednesday night, I streamed, it was my first stream in a couple of weeks after being in America, just in case I hadn't told you, and so it was interesting to play Star Trek and Game of Thrones, both Steve Ritchie's, both slow games, just both very different. Yeah, software totally dictates how to play both those games, right? Correct. Once programmed by Lonnie and another person jumped in, I think Dwight, to do all the medals and put polish on it. And all the flashbacks. Yeah, Game of Thrones is a Dwight game through and through and I'm getting more confused the more I play. The more I think I understand, it's deeper than that. So it's one of those games where I'll have to get in my house and study the rules and then play. Because I think if I watch all the videos, I know there's some good videos out there, and read a rule sheet, unless I can then go and implement that, yeah, I'm just going to forget it all. And so there was something else that you saw when you came over for the stream. What was that? Before we get to that, I just got a message. officially confirmed six months of free weekly burgers for me and Marcus too. Did you hear about that? There was a – sorry, just going to cut in and destroy your story. There was a company here called Mr. Burger, and they had a competition, which was really cool. They teamed up with Zax, I think it was. And if you get the highest score on a machine on that day, they had, I think, WWE on one location and Star Wars on another location, you win half a year's worth of free burgers. And I considered going, but I didn't, and I knew some of the guys would. And, yep, Daniel won and Marcus won the other one. How good is that? So I think Daniel won on WWE and Marcus won on – so two of the guys that are part of the Melbourne scene, free burgers, their waistline and their diet plans for the new year. That's awesome. Well done, guys. Yes, okay, what was the question, Marty? You also saw something else when you came over to my house for the first time. Yes, the Pinstadium lights. What did you think? Yes, the hype is real. You can bag it as much as you want, but the Pinstadium lights in person are a sight to be seen. It is very freaky when you were turning them on and off at the start, and I was like, oh, yeah, it's not too bad, it's not too bad. But then I played for five minutes, and then you turned it off at one point, and I was like, you know, holy shit, like, is the GI not working? It's very easy to get used to. So beware, if you buy one of these things, you will probably want them on all of your machines. You know, I'm not 100%, you know, I don't think I'd be their customer for anything, you know, other than Wizard of Oz possibly. I'd probably, you know, minimize it to about, you know, 30% or 40% brightness. I don't think I need it that bright. but yes, you were right, Marty. The art is good. And the point I made to you is when you turned it off, all the artwork that's on that machine is gone. You can't see anything. The artwork is gone when I'm playing anyway. Right. To me, it's more about the visibility of the ball and ball tracking. I don't look at the art at all. Someone else that is watching me play, and especially for you that you're a streamer, you want people to see this beautiful art while they're... because they're not playing. but for me as a player, I don't need art. I'll be playing a whitewood and I'll almost have the same effect because I'm not looking at art when I'm playing. Yeah, fair enough. So what else? Well, there was only one other thing really that happened in my week and Ryan, I too have also been on another podcast on my own. Okay, one second. We're not going to talk about how you absolutely demolished me and we tried the heads up challenge on one machine. We can say it quickly. So we were playing Game of Thrones for two hours or so, and the last hour of the stream, we decided to have some set challenges, kind of like pin golf, but timed. And how did it go, Marty? Well, I think at some stage I was beating you seven to one, and then said, right, this final challenge will be worth six points, so if you win, we then tied at seven to then have a tiebreaker, and I ended up beating you again. So it was 13 to 1. You did get Midnight Madness. That's true. At least 1 billion points. Hodor, Hodor, Hodor. That was fun. Yeah. And so the other thing that happened this week for me is that I've also been on another podcast without you, Ryan. Did you know that? I did listen to it today while I was working. And Jeff Gell was not a very nice person, is he? He's a lovely person. He is very nice. So, yes, when I was at Indisc, and I don't even think I told you that I had done this. You did. Oh, had I? You did. You didn't tell me what you said. Or what Jeff said. So, everybody, if you can, go to Pinball Profile with Jeff Teolis. Great show. And he interviewed a number of people that were at Indisc, including myself. So, it was a lot of fun. And we get to bag out Ryan. And so there's always fun in that. Link in the show notes. There is. So shall we head to the mailbag? Let's do it. We've got quite a bit of mail this week. I'm going to make you read it all, mate. Are you? Yes. I'm very hot. Okay. Fair enough. Well, the first one was actually a correction. Now, let's in our defense. In our defense? I tried to correct you. I said, you live in Canada. In my defense, which you then backed up, So therefore we win this together Two things First of all We are on the other side of the world Right? So we are not on the same side of Earth as You know, North America and Canada, right? So that's point one Point two We couldn't give a fuck Like honestly Seriously I don't give a shit Like Do you know Do you know how many times I spoke to people in America And I said I'm from Melbourne And they said where is Melbourne? So don't even So anyway So the email we got, hello Miles Thank you very much for your email Miles Said he wanted to give us a small correction See, he said small correction, no big deal When you were talking about Adam Becker Winning the Ontario playoffs Ontario is in Canada, not the US Well You know, whatever So, but he said you know Canada and the US are combined into one big tournament That is run in Las Vegas one representative from each US state one representative from each Canadian province he said and also he's asked for a nut sack so because I'm reading this out he said he said he'll send the money but do what I do it's a freebie so because he's such a nice guy how many freebies do I give out though? there's got to be a limit there's got to be a limit I gave out five I gave out five so that can be your limit but you know what what I really liked about this was It was a very, very nice, pleasant way of being able to correct us. And I like that. He's really nice. I don't know if you got this message, Marty, but I got quite a nasty message about our mistake. I'll just play it for you. We're not going to mention the name of who this is. We're just going to play the clip. Allow me to give you a little geography lesson, you son of a bitch. Ontario is a province in Canada. Yes, Canada has provincial championships along with the state championships. Yes, Ontario is in California and also Oregon, but Adam Becker didn't win a city championship. He won the provincial championship. You know, Canada is second only to the U.S. as far as number of pinball players. Australia, third. That's right here behind us. So once you put down your boomerangs and kangaroo knapsacks, maybe you'll catch up with all the best. Oh, my God. Who was that? Who was it? I'm not going to mention the name, but I'll give you a hint. It rhymes with Schmeffsmeolus, okay? You won't say who it is. That's a real buzzer. I'll never be able to work out. Who is Schmeffsmeolus? I'll read this next one out. This is a short one. Like, crazy banana. Whoever this crazy piece of fruit is. He emailed in and said, Have you ever listened to an ACDC song? Lucy fits right in with the theme. People need to lighten up. If you're offended, don't buy it. The US has too many new wave Puritans. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I got a lot of messages during the week. I'm not going to, you know, read them all out because those are just personal messages saying like, you know, big deal, if you don't like it, don't care about it. And I kind of mentioned as well, you know, I thought it was an interesting talking point because some people were getting so upset about it. But I kind of am of the same belief, but I am mindful to other people that might say, you know, cool, you don't like it, but it kind of exists in this industry, right? Yeah. So moving on. So we actually, because last week we talked about Houdini because we saw the stream and I actually now want to buy Houdini. I put it out there, but I'm still going to wait to find out what Iron Maiden looks like before I make my final decision. But our second lot of corrections, kind of, came from Josh from American Pinball. Yeah, and I think, yes, we had like four talking points or so on the stream, and he kind of addressed all of them. So one of the things I said was that the person that tells you what to do at the start of the mode does talk a lot, and Josh was nice enough, you know, Josh from American Pinball emailed in and said that Houdini is very chatty, but there are about a dozen settings to control the level of verbosity in the game, which is quite cool. A lot of people do leave the settings on default, but it's cool to know that you can customize that, and that is just the default setting at the moment in whatever code it's in. That game wasn't the second to ship. It shipped about five, and there's a lot more going out now. And we talked about one of those really hard shots, and he kind of, you know, I'm not going to read the whole email, but talked about how the shot isn't that hard and it's a really important shot and the software kind of balances out the risk-reward of that shot with use of kind of hurry-ups and possibly multipliers. Anyway, so, yeah, thanks for emailing in, Josh. Thanks, Josh. It was really good for him to reach out. Again, a very nice way of being able to correct us. Thank you. Thanks, Jeff. I mean, sorry. Sorry. Funny. Sure. And the last email we got today was from Alex Boz, and he's from Oz Retro Gamer. So look up Oz Retro Gamer, all one word, AUS Retro Gamer. It's a really good site that talks about pinball as well as video games. He said Basically said some awesome things about the podcast Thank you Alex, you're amazing But he also sort of had a question for us About maintaining people machines In particular, how do you keep them clean And what wax do you use So I'll ask you Ryan How do you keep your How do you keep your undercarriage clean I actually use mistishing and a lot of people spare by it some people say it has abrasive things inside that aren't good for primal machines but basically I'm kind of spraying it on and then you know wipe it it's just to remove dirt and grime and then wipe it off straight away obviously there's still some kind of like residue left on there but yeah apparently I'm not meant to be doing that well that's again so many people have got all these different varying views on it. For me personally, with a new machine, I use Novus, N-O-V-U-S, Novus One, which is effectively just a plastic cleaner. And because I clean it so regularly, there really is no build-up that I then need to go to Novus to, which is, you know, more of an abrasive. But, you know, if you do want to wax it as well, there are so many products to go with. A lot of people said that the main one is to have a product that's got Canuba wax in it. Somebody also then on a website chimed in and said that they use a synthetic wax, which is fantastic. Oh, man. It's just the main thing is, my advice to give you is start with something that's non-abrasive and work your way up. Don't go straight in with a Novus 3 because you'll just be scratching your stuff that you don't need to. And, you know, I know Alex has got a brand new Attack on Mars remake, so you'd only be using Novus one now for a while. Yeah. Cool. I zoned out because I'm still going to use Mr. Sheen. Or you can just use Mr. Sheen for the lazy people. Just use Mr. Sheen. There's also one last email, which I don't think we're going to get into too much, It was Michi, good mate Michi in Queensland said, congrats on the top three in the Swippies. You know, it'd be interesting to talk about...