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Collecting Pinball Flyers

Pintastic New England·video·57m 4s·analyzed·Jan 11, 2022
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.031

TL;DR

30-year flyer collector Mike Minshew explores pinball industry history through promotional ephemera.

Summary

Mike Minshew, a dedicated pinball flyer collector with 30 years of experience, presents the history and significance of pinball promotional flyers at Pintastic New England. He discusses his collection of over 6,000 unique flyer pieces from 27 countries, the evolution of flyer design and production quality as indicators of manufacturer financial health, and historical details uncovered through his research—including Bally's previously unknown Memphis distribution center. The presentation emphasizes how flyers tell the story of pinball industry development, from Depression-era manufacturing education to modern promotional practices.

Key Claims

  • There have been approximately 700-900 pinball manufacturing companies in history according to Internet Pinball Database

    high confidence · Mike Minshew cites Internet Pinball Database with 836 entries documented

  • Gottlieb has the largest number of game titles (702), with Bally close behind (696)

    high confidence · Mike Minshew references data pulled from Internet Pinball Database, notes caveat that Bally numbers include bingo machines

  • Only three known Humpty Dumpty flyers exist in the world; took 30 years to find one

    medium confidence · Mike Minshew personal collection discovery, claims never verified by others

  • Bally had a major distribution center in Memphis, Tennessee in the 1930s, confirmed by newspaper clippings found by Rob Hawkins

    high confidence · Mike Minshew found two flyers with Memphis address; Rob Hawkins located three newspaper clippings confirming Bally's Memphis Distribution and Operations Center

  • Marilyn Monroe's estate sued over use of her name/likeness on the Marilyn Monroe pinball flyer, leading to a revised version with the name removed but blonde hair remaining

    medium confidence · Mike Minshew describes the flyer variants; claims intermediate version is 'almost unobtainable'

  • Until about 1972, major pinball manufacturers made two versions of every flyer—one with manufacturer info and one blank for distributor customization

    medium confidence · Mike Minshew observes pattern across Gottlieb, Bally, Harry Williams, and United flyers in his collection

  • Gottlieb dominated the market for about 20 years; Bally's transition to flipper machines didn't accelerate until the early 1960s

    medium confidence · Mike Minshew analyzes flyer design quality and production values as proxy for company financial health and market position

  • First time since 1991 that a pinball show has hosted a flyer collecting seminar

    high confidence · Introduction by Pintastic New England moderator

Notable Quotes

  • “I do this for me. This is my own thing.”

    Mike Minshew@ 5:57 — Establishes his collecting motivation as personal passion rather than commercial or social engagement; explains 40-year low-participation approach to the broader community

  • “What you see is that they recognized they had to build an industry, and they had to teach people how to become operators.”

    Mike Minshew@ 14:50 — Key insight into 1930s-40s flyer content as educational documents for industry infrastructure development, distinguishing early pinball from modern promotional materials

  • “These guys were building an industry from scratch. I mean, at one point in the early 30s, there were 300 or 400 manufacturers making these things in their garages.”

    Mike Minshew@ 14:29 — Describes the chaotic, decentralized manufacturing landscape of early pinball era, emphasizing the scale and fragmentation of early industry

  • “Did you know that most pinball machines take in most of their money after dark?”

    Mike Minshew@ 16:44 — Quotes 1939 Bally flyer selling game light add-ons; demonstrates practical operator education embedded in promotional materials

  • “The company really rides on the back of the designers. The guys who design the games, I mean, sales important, marketing, production, all that, but if you don't have a game that appeals to the player, it won't matter.”

    Mike Minshew@ 21:57 — Articulates his core belief about pinball industry dynamics based on 30 years of flyer analysis; emphasizes designer role as primary success factor

  • “You don't want it to pass through your hands and not have taken the opportunity to have pulled a better one out.”

Entities

Mike MinshewpersonPintastic New EnglandeventInternet Pinball DatabaseorganizationGottliebcompanyBallycompanyHarry WilliamscompanyRob Hawkinsperson

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Gottlieb's early exit from gambling machines vs Bally's continued reliance on gambling revenue until early 1960s visible in flyer production quality and game design evolution

    medium · Minshew contrasts flyer quality: Gottlieb oversized/multicolor indicating financial health; Bally thin/cheap paper during gambling-era; transition visible in post-Fireball output

  • ?

    event_signal: First pinball show flyer collecting seminar since 1991; represents growing recognition of ephemera as legitimate collecting category and historical archive

    high · Moderator states 'first time since 1991 at any pinball show that there's been a discussion of the flyers'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Minshew's thesis that flyer production quality and design sophistication directly correlate with game financial success and designer quality

    medium · Systematic comparison of Gottlieb, Bally, Harry Williams flyer quality as proxy for market dominance; pattern analysis across decades

  • ?

    historical_signal: Discovery and validation of Bally's Memphis, Tennessee distribution center through collaborative research; previously unknown to pinball community

    high · Minshew found two flyers with Memphis address; Rob Hawkins located three newspaper clippings confirming existence; represents novel historical documentation

  • ?

    industry_signal: Early pinball manufacturing landscape extremely fragmented: 300-400 manufacturers in early 1930s; eventually consolidated to ~836 total entities across history

    high · Minshew cites 300-400 garage manufacturers in early 1930s; Internet Pinball Database documents 836 entries total; demonstrates industry consolidation over time

Topics

Pinball flyer collecting and historical preservationprimaryPinball industry history and manufacturer evolution (1930s-1970s)primaryFlyer design as indicator of manufacturer financial health and market positionprimaryEarly pinball industry infrastructure and operator education (1930s-40s)primaryGottlieb vs Bally market dominance and transition periodsprimaryRare flyer discoveries and historical research (Humpty Dumpty, Marilyn Monroe, Bally Memphis center)secondaryPinball manufacturing statistics and game title countssecondaryDesigner role as primary success driver in pinball industrysecondary

Sentiment

positive(0.82)— Speaker exhibits deep passion and enthusiasm for flyer collecting; celebrates historical craftsmanship and industry development; respectful tone toward predecessors; minor critical observations about market dynamics (eBay prices, counterfeits) but framed as educational rather than negative

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.171

0:00
Good afternoon, everybody. I'm a big-time flyer collector, so I guess I'm being a little self-indulgent in scheduling this seminar. First time since 1991 at any pinball show that there's been a discussion of the flyers that have been a mainstay of pinball promotion and continue to be today. When you go out in the vendor hall, you can see flyers at pinballs.com and I think Maine Home Recreation has some flyers out.
0:47
So there are some modern ones in the vendor hall and then also in honor of this presentation that we're about to hear, Steve Engle of Mayfair has switched the sides on his booth so that the flyers are in the most prominent position, and he's got tubs and tubs of the older flyers. And you can put them to use at our autograph session tomorrow about 5 o'clock. But to learn more about how these came to be what they are today and some of the most interesting examples that have ever been made of the flyers. We have someone who is a frequent flyer himself flying up from Texas just for this one hour to talk to us, and then he's heading right back. So thanks very much for coming up, Mike Minshew.
1:42
Thank you. Thanks a lot, everybody. This was, yeah, after doing this for some 30 or so years, you meet a few other people in the hobby who are into this. And it was a good reason to kind of stop. And this is something I've pursued for a long time on my own very quietly, sort of quietly. So I thought I'd put some of the presentation together and kind of explain how people get to this level of obsession. And most of us know something about that being in the hobby and how we got there. So, you know, let me just kind of give you a quick overview. I do have a lot of slides. They're going to go pretty quick. The biggest and most important thing is in red. I brought these packages of 23 flyers made up, and we're going to do trivia questions like every five or seven minutes. Looks like I probably brought enough for everybody in the room to get at least one. So, you know, take one, take one for your friends. It's great. I don't really want to carry them back in the backpack later. But we're going to just kind of walk through how I got to this point in it and then go through a little bit of the history of the flyers because there's more to this. Just like any hobby, as you get into it, you learn more of the details, you meet more of the people, you have more conversations. It doesn't start out that way, but by the end of it, you know more. It's more than you probably want to. And we'll kind of go through that, get down into the newer flyers and do just a little bit of talk about there's a lot of chatter sometimes around counterfeit or fake flyers out there, especially when you see some of the prices. and I'm also going to pull up some latest eBay listings where you'll see that things have just gotten completely out of control. And I know all these guys because most of them got their flyers from me. I don't really sell like that. It's not my thing. But we'll talk about why you're seeing the things you do on eBay because I think that's a piece of the hobby that impacts us all as well. So just to give you a little context and put some meaning to this, when I sat down to put this presentation together a few nights ago, So I started, I had actually been up with Mike Pasek recently and had purchased a 1980s Bali annual report. And in that annual report are these photos that you see right here on the screen. And it reminded me that this is where pinball started for me. My dad used to take me on Saturday morning to our little local mall that had a Bali's Aladdin's Castle. And that day there were two rows in there, pinball and pinball. And if you didn't want to play pinball, you didn't need to go in because there weren't any video games. There were a few electromechanicals or some things like that. But that's all there was. And so I grew up in that era of, you know, if you wanted to get out and do something, you went to the mall and you played pinball. And, of course, as a kid in that era, you didn't have a lot of money. So you got really good really fast, right, because putting your quarter up on the machine or a few meant you could play all day. So, you know, it started probably just like a lot of us, you know, with our friends or with our family and playing. But I found those photos in that annual report from 1980, and it just really resonated with me. So I kind of wanted to show you. And then, of course, things get out of control. And at some point the wife says it's either me or the pinballs, right? How many of you have heard that before? And so the game room got built out, swapped around. You know, things have come and gone. My high speed's gone. Some of my other favorites. But you end up, I find that I kept things that when friends and family came over, I watched what they played. And so what's in the game room now is really a mix of things that they will play. But I got into this and started doing really, really high-end restorations like 30 years ago. Like every nut, bolt, screw, you know, 100, 200 hours in these games. And I can't do that anymore now. It's like a lot of people, you know, it's new in box and you do it through mods and then you go. But I just want to set the stage that like I'm a normal person. before I show you the crazy in a few minutes here. I got into it like everybody else. I've got the games. I love them. I play whenever I can.

  • Mike Minshew has completed over 1,500 trades/deals with collectors around the world over 30 years

    high confidence · Mike Minshew states this figure directly regarding his collecting activities

  • Design and designer quality is the primary driver of manufacturer success or failure, more critical than sales, marketing, or production

    medium confidence · Mike Minshew personal opinion stated during discussion with college graduates; opinion based on analysis of flyer patterns

    • Mike Minshew@ 24:31 — Reflects collecting philosophy of condition optimization and stewardship; explains why serious collectors continuously upgrade inventory

  • “I mean, bottom line is, if you design a game, you know it's going to make a lot of money. You get more money, just like today, you get more money for toys on the play field, and you get more money for a better flyer.”

    Mike Minshew@ 25:22 — Connects flyer production quality to game commercial success; uses it as proxy for manufacturer confidence and financial health

  • “Alvin Gottlieb owned this market for a good 20 years, and the flyers tell the story.”

    Mike Minshew@ 22:18 — Central thesis: flyer analysis as historical record of market dominance; establishes methodology for using ephemera to reconstruct industry evolution

    • Sam Harvey
    person
    Alvin Gottliebperson
    Aladdin's Castlecompany
    Maine Home Recreationcompany
    Mayfaircompany
    Humpty Dumptygame
    Skill Rollgame
    Fireballgame
    Marilyn Monroegame
    Star Actiongame
    Papa Dukegame
    Barnyardgame
    Victory Derbygame
    Victory Specialgame
    Ann Margaretgame
    Daily Racesgame
  • ?

    licensing_signal: Marilyn Monroe estate intellectual property enforcement on pinball flyer artwork (1950s); led to game redesign and flyer variant rarity

    high · Three documented flyer versions show progression: original (name + blonde), middle (blonde only, unobtainable), final (renamed 'Lola')

  • ?

    manufacturing_signal: Industry practice of dual flyer production (manufacturer version + blank distributor version) standard until ~1972 across major manufacturers

    high · Minshew documents pattern across Gottlieb, Bally, Harry Williams, United; provides visual examples of variants

  • $

    market_signal: Observation of inflated eBay pricing for rare flyers; reference to counterfeit/fake flyers entering secondary market

    medium · Minshew mentions 'prices have gotten completely out of control' on eBay; plans to discuss counterfeits; notes he supplies most flyers seen for sale

  • ?

    operational_signal: 1930s-40s flyers served as educational documents teaching operator business model, location selection, machine maintenance, and revenue optimization

    high · Minshew describes extensive text content covering industry infrastructure; references 1939 Bally flyer with game light add-on marketing; business plans handwritten on backs

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Minshew argues single designer at each major manufacturer was primary driver of success/failure; production/sales/marketing secondary to game appeal quality

    medium · Opinion stated based on 30-year flyer pattern analysis; used as educational advice to computer science graduates; supported by observable design quality variation

    • 5:40
    Then it became, when there was no more room for games, how am I going to stay involved in this hobby? I'm not the kind of guy who hangs out with the local pinball crowd a lot.
    5:51
    Don't go to a lot of shows. In my 40 years of collecting, this is probably my fifth show that I've been to. I do this for me. This is my own thing. So what happened was, I don't know who it was that actually got me started. I remember maybe something that Sam Harvey had said once or twice about flyers, what's a good flyer and this, and different things that had resonated with me. But I decided that I'd look into this flyers thing, because I had found one for all the games I was going to keep. I had my little owner's manual that had a binder with the flyer and the manuals and the stuff that came in the coin box and all that. But I decided that this could become something interesting to do, and so I could pursue it on my own time in my own way and I could pretty much have all the games. And that's how this got started. And that was about 30 years ago right now.
    6:41
    And over those 30 years, or 25, 30 years now, the collection's grown a little out of control and these are some very, very small photos.
    6:50
    I'll give you the stats on the next page in a second. But it had, after a while, the investment becomes like running a small library because you've got a lot of time and energy and in some cases some funds tied up in that and you want to take care of them. And my goal is at some point to pass this along, to donate it to either one of the pinball museums or somewhere because there's no value in breaking up what's taken 30 years and flyers from something like 27 countries around the world that have come in. I've done over 1,500 deals, trades around the world in the years with people. So it does start to add up. but just a couple of shots here to give you some sense on the first one is about 40% of the cabinets. The one in the middle is a collection that I bought about six or eight months ago. There are people getting out of the hobby. Can you imagine that right now? People are kind of throwing in the towel sometimes, and so I tend to have my name out there, and I pay people for leads, and I certainly try to treat everybody fairly when I buy, and that's where a lot of those eBay flyers end up because I don't keep the common stuff anymore. I don't have room for it. And then there's a couple of boxes there of just the things I keep for trading with other collectors around the world. And I've kind of, you know, at this point in my life, I don't need all that stuff. So when anyone buys from me, I always throw in like 20 or 50 extra flyers. Or if I do a trade, I try to give them a whole lot of extra, you know, I don't need to die with a bunch of paper. If there's another collector, I'd rather have them be happy too at this point. But here's the collection at this point just by the numbers, just to kind of set the stage. It's a little over 6,000 unique pieces. I mean, I don't collect 100 Adams families. I have one. Well, maybe one and one autographed one and one from Germany and one from, you know, like that kind of thing. But 6,000 unique pieces. And what I've settled on is I started with the flyers and then as I got into it and learned a little bit, then, you know, getting access to people who had the original press photos, the promo photos. That's a nice addition. and the level of detail in those sometimes for people who need a shot of something on the play field is wonderful. And then I realized that, you know, we sell pinballs all over the world. They go to a lot of different countries. Therefore, flyers are created in multiple languages. And then something that's not as well known by most people is if you look in those top two photos,
    9:13
    you'll see that up until about 1972, pretty much all the majors, There's Gottlieb, Bally, Williams, United. I'm trying to think of all the ones that are... They made two versions of every flyer. So generally speaking, when the games first came out, you'll see the one that has at the bottom there of the Grand Slam, that's the one that has D. Gottlieb and company and the address printed on there in the place where normally you'd see a distributor's name and address. And then the one above it, that one's probably blank because I try to collect ones that are mint condition. So my goal is to have two of every one of these. Now, not every game was done this way, and it did taper off over time. Godlieb was the most prolific. You can see the Williams went on the right. But as hundreds and hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of flyers have gone through my hands over the years, these are the kinds of things you would see. I mean, it's just like a guy that works at the U.S. Mint, you know, looking at the dollar bills or whatever. You start to see the little details and the changes, and then you realize that in some cases that distributor flyer actually has slightly different artwork than the final production one that went out. That's not super common, but it did happen. Changes were made in production after the prototypes were done and the first run of flyers probably for a trade show or something were made. So these subtleties kind of crept into it and started to give me a reason to expand the collection. Right now my spreadsheet, and I didn't do slide shots of that, but over 30 years I've built a spreadsheet that has about 9,000 lines in it that organizes every manufacturer alphabetically and games alphabetically. I don't do it by year because that's, from a collecting standpoint, that makes it much harder. I know a lot of pinball enthusiasts want to think of it, you know, as this game or these seven games came out that year. But from a collecting standpoint, alphabetical seems to have worked out better. But that spreadsheet now has all of this in it, conditions. I've kind of created a grading system. A lot of the other collectors actually have adopted or I've just given them a copy of my spreadsheet over the years because it helps. But it's continued to grow, and I've tried to keep up with it. I've probably focused a lot more in the last several years on the 30s and 40s flyers as I've met more people, and they're kind of starting to exit the hobby, people who are much more into those games. So before we dive into the flyers and the story and the history, I was just trying to give everybody a little bit of a sense of what I've put into this and why, how I got started, and I'm not that crazy. But what I want to do is let's take a break, and don't yell out the answers to stuff. Just somebody raise your hand, I'll call on you, and we've got plenty of prizes, so I'm going to go straight to the first people in the room. What game? Six games. All right. See? So that envelope, so the prizes here, what I made up is there's 23 different flyers and two little business kind of card things in there of mine that say, hey, if you know anybody selling flyers or wants flyers, please give them my name and information. But yes, I didn't know if a lot of people had ever seen that envelope before, but when these first came out for the eight-page version of that flyer, this is the way they were sent out from the factory. Did I lose the feed? Did I do something? Oh, sorry. All right. Just making sure. And let's see, you know, and since I've got a bunch of these to give out, let's do another trivia question. Who wants to profess they know the answer to this one?
    12:40
    No. But you're in the ballpark. No. Wrong direction. In the hat. Yes. Does anyone know why? Does anyone care? No, I'm just kidding. Let's talk about why. This is actually, most people have never seen, I believe it is the middle flyer here. And that is what happened to, of course, you know, it's the Maryland Monroe State.
    13:12
    The Maryland Monroe State sued over the use of the name and the blonde hair. And so they had made the first flyer. They tried and just took her name off in the second one, but left the blonde hair on her. That flyer is almost unobtainable. The only one I've ever found in my 30 years of looking was actually a pull from one of the trade magazines, but it was the full flyer. And then the last one, of course, they changed it to Lola. So, again, these are the kind of things that, you know, if you aren't really into this stuff, not that interesting, but if you're into, you know, Williams and pinball, that was actually a pretty big deal at the time with what was going on with that game.
    13:51
    So I want to take a second now and let's go back in time. we'll have trivia like every five or seven minutes to try to keep everybody interested and awake. But one of the things that I've learned and talked to Dave about a lot is most people don't have a really good appreciation for the pre pinballs or the flyers or the history of pinball And I owned a number of the early games and restored them and have enjoyed them and found them actually a lot of fun to play But when I started really getting into the flyers I started reading them. And I started realizing, I mean, that you can't read the text that's over here on the right. But what I wanted to come across is these guys were building an industry from scratch. I mean, at one point in the early 30s, there were 300 or 400 manufacturers making these things in their garages.
    14:40
    And it was probably a pretty hard sell during the Depression to get somebody to put a couple of pennies in a machine. Pennies were pretty hard to come by. And if you start looking at the flyers, what you see is that they recognized they had to build an industry, and they had to teach people how to become operators. So what you'll find in the text of a lot of these is how to identify a location, how to set it up, how to maintain your machines, how to encourage people to come and play. So it was an industry that didn't exist. It didn't exist until this time. I mean, there had been gambling devices and the like, but this was really a change. And so when you look at these early ones, you get a chance to, if you're interested, to me, the amount of effort that went into them, especially if you compare them to modern flyers, where it's really just how much the game weigh, and here's some of the features on the play field, and specs like that. This was real thoughtful. There was real work put into these. Here's another one of my favorite ones. that, again, look at the design, the artwork. And again, I look at this and I go, this is what they were doing during the middle of the Depression. So I give them points for the time, the effort, the writing, and the way they packaged these up. Some of the more... What you see is there is a bit of a difference between the smaller companies like this one, field manufacturing. Most people have never even heard of it, didn't know it existed. And you get over here and you get to some of the Mills games. now. They were coming off the back of more the gambling side of the industry, but much more sophisticated. I mean, when you look and you hold these flyers and you read them, the production value, the writing, the artwork, I mean, you wouldn't know that this wasn't a current period piece. Way back in that, now Mills is, here we're starting to work up into the pre-war and the wartime years. And then here's something that I came across a few years ago that I thought was really interesting.
    16:36
    Not only were they building an industry, but here's another one where they were teaching someone how to become an operator right there on the flyer. Did you know that most pinball machines take in most of their money after dark? In most locations at this point in time, what is this, 1939, not well lighted. So Bally came out with this game light and were selling these as this add-on, call it a mod, whatever you want, in the day. So I just found it interesting that as you keep looking and keep poking, you come across things like this I'd never seen, didn't know existed. And the flyer collecting is, for me at this point, has become kind of educational, bringing me back in time and making me appreciate the work that went into them. And so to kind of wrap up the 30s, 40s period, here's just another sampling of some of the other flyers.
    17:25
    Now, keep that in mind, because now, I don't know if I've killed another five minutes, but we're still going to go into the next trivia question.
    17:33
    So, Bali. In 1933. I always thought Bali was based in Chicago. Well, I stumbled across some flyers. I'll show you a picture of one in a second. But apparently they had major distribution centers in other places in the country. There was one in the south.
    17:56
    Anybody guess the state? I'll help you with the left, right, up, down, narrow it in. But who wants to take a swing at it? Where do you think it might be? A little farther south.
    18:10
    Awfully, awfully close. What's just north of it? Yes, who was that? Tennessee. I found two flyers in the last 30 years that had this valley address in Memphis, Tennessee. Couldn't believe it. I sent pictures of this to everybody I know in the flyer collecting world. I mean, all the, and finally, just here recently, was talking with Rob Hawkins, and he actually took it on as a project to go figure this out. And he found three newspaper clippings where Bally had announced their Memphis Distribution and Operations Center. You know, again, it's a minor point, but I got these flyers, and the first thing I thought was that the printer had just screwed up and was printing for someone else and had left a different address. I mean, you know, I even went on the Internet and looked, and that address was actually in a manufacturing era in that period of time, but I couldn't find anything about it. So this was another just little thing that just popped up, and nobody in the pinball world, I mean, really even knew about it, that Bally was ever there. Okay, one more. This one's super easy, hopefully.
    19:22
    Yes, Dave. Dan Marcus. Yes. All right. Very good. Let me bring you yours. Oh, okay. You've delivered me so many flyers in the past.
    19:35
    Ann Margaret on the Wizard Flyer. I loved that game. I think earlier when I was talking about going to Ballet's Aladdin's Castle as a kid, I remember when they ran their, whatever it was, Pinball Wizards Tournament. I think one year that was the tournament game in the back of the Aladdin's Castle, and I played and played poorly. Not well enough to win. so that's another reason I started restoring games and collecting flyers is I was never a great player really enjoy it but not talented so kind of picking up from here and then moving on this is probably in the pinball flyers and pinball world this is probably considered the holy grail it took me about 30 years to find one the Humpty Dumpty flyer I think to my knowledge there are three known to exist in the world I've not actually seen the other two. I just have people tell me they have them. But the game that kicked it all off, first game of flippers.
    20:31
    And this really starts, I think, more of my primary, where some of my primary interest in the flyers started to pick up, was with this, and I wanted to, again, I'm sharing my thoughts, my opinions. There certainly could be other ones. but as a collector who's looked at all this for decades now, I can really start to have a story. I can tell a story from the flyers, and that story is how each of the companies were doing at the time. And I think I can take it a step farther, and I'm sure I'll irritate some people with this, but I don't know how many people get, what is it, the pinball magazine, the really big one that had the whole, what is it, number three, four, I can't remember, Wayne Nines. I have started to look at the flyers and come to believe that there was, generally speaking, one person, one designer at each of the major manufacturers during their heydays that drove their success or failure.
    21:34
    And I was actually talking to some upcoming college graduates recently, and some of them are going to go, you know, they're computer science type majors, and one guy who's going to go work has got an offer from a slot machine company. But the point of it was I was making sure that they understood, don't underestimate yourself. If you are that guy, you need to raise your hand and let the company know that the company really rides on the back of the designers. The guys who design the games, I mean, sales important, marketing, production, all that, but if you don't have a game that appeals to the player, it won't matter. And to me, this period in here, you can tell from the flyers, the energy, the color, the writing, the presentation. Gottlieb owned this market for a good 20 years, and the flyers tell the story. Most all of them are oversized.
    22:28
    The graphics, the color, the paper quality. You can tell that from a financial standpoint, they were doing really well.
    22:37
    Now we can... Yes? I just want to connect to a question. How are these flyers distributed? Are these male people? or they put it in bars? Yeah, it was, I mean, you know, this was a manufacturing business.
    22:52
    So the question, I'm sorry, I'll repeat the question. The question is, how did flyers get out into the market? How were they distributed? And, you know, this was, I had the advantage of having lived in Dallas. You know, I grew up with two or three major distributors, you know, for a long, long time. So I was used to that, getting in the car, driving out there. And they would have them in a rack and, you know, staple a business card to it and tell you the price and a lot of them have writing on them. A lot of the older flyers are amazing. You'll see entire business plans written on the back in beautiful handwriting, too. People knew how to write back then. You see the business card stapled to them. But it was. These were, what's the word, ephemera? They were a product not made to last. They were expected to be used for the few months the game was in production and then to be thrown in the trash, and then they were gone. And that's one of the reasons, especially for the older ones, they're so hard to find. And what's really prized is the ones that were not folded or not distributed or stamped or not written on or not hole punched to put in some type of binder that a lot of the operators would keep around with what they paid for the game and sometimes on the back their weekly earnings.
    24:06
    So that drives me and people like me to continue to hunt. I mean, you know those stacks I showed in that photo early on? It must have been like 3,000 flyers there. I will take, every time I buy a collection, I sit down and go through every single flyer and see if there is one in there that is better condition than the one in my collection and swap them out. I mean, at some point you recognize there's a finite number of them, so you don't want it to pass through your hands and not have taken the opportunity to have pulled a better one out. Getting back to the story that the Flyers tell in that period,
    24:42
    Gottlieb made the call to get out of the gambling business very early on. I think at the time of daily races was their last gambling machine. And Bally was not so quick to move away. They had built a huge business on the bingos, the gambling-type devices, and it was probably not until the early 60s. They really started even producing mini pinball machines at all and then started to pick it up. So I put this slide together intentionally just to show that the Bally Flyers tended to be on thin, cheap paper. They were generally one color, and it was representative of the business. I mean, bottom line is, if you design a game, you know it's going to make a lot of money. You get more money, just like today, you get more money for toys on the play field, and you get more money for a better flyer. I mean, it's just basic math. But I put the skill role in the middle here because most people, I know that a lot of pinball guys and families have skill roles. It seems to have been one of the crossover, one of the most common. I own one of them in my collection that I've restored.
    25:46
    Tremendously addictive game to play. But what was important about it was the language on the flyer. Get well quick. They knew, barely knew that their operators weren't making a lot of money. and the gambling devices were starting to become unpopular or illegal and skill roll was a whole line of games. I think they made four or five different versions of it. Skill parade, skill derby.
    26:16
    But then as you get into the early 60s and the mid-60s, you start to see that all of a sudden now, Valley's got a designer. They've got someone, and then they start to pick up and take over and I think when you think about pinball you think about there was the Gottlieb era and then there was the Bally era and from Fireball on which I've owned you really start to see the change and then of course along this point in time Bally as a company which was also interesting to read that annual report you know what they had Aladdin's Castle they had I think Bally Fitness Centers Casino they almost got too big for their pants because they expanded so quickly and they couldn't manage it and then other problems happen. But you do kind of see the Bally era in here of all the great and amazing games. And then I just wanted to contrast that with the Williams games.
    27:07
    And then the Flyers tell the story. The same thing. I mean, Williams was, you know, Steve Kordak. They were good, solid games. They invested fairly well in their Flyers in the period. They were oversized, multicolor, good paper. and then you see that move forward. And the ones I put on the screen, probably here the star action is one that most people probably have never seen.
    27:33
    Pretty uncommon, hard to come by flyer right there. So I just wanted to kind of paint the picture of the 30s. The flyers are really, really lengthy. I mean, if you wanted to sit down and read them all, it's like reading an encyclopedia. No one would probably ever do it. But a lot of information about how to build a pinball business, how to operate, how to get locations and make them happy. The other thing in the 30s, I didn't put pictures in this time, but a lot of them were trying to develop an aura around pinball. So they would have like a nice, well-dressed man and a lady with like martini glasses, you know, very cosmopolitan looking, very upscale. They're trying to move pinball machine into a slightly different perception. And then you go through the 50s and the 60s and you get in the 70s here. And, you know, we kind of all know the changes that they went through. and there were good times and bad times in the business. And as a grouping when you can lay them out and look at them you can see the financial ups and downs right through the flyers Let do some more trivia because I getting bored too This is one that we can have an argument about Where did it happen to my screen? There it goes.
    28:40
    How many pinball manufacturing companies have there been? Have manufacturing companies have existed? A, B, C, or D? We're doing this one like Pawn Stars, starting to make them easy if you guys are getting tired. Yes?
    28:53
    Correct. Very good. What was it, D? It was D, 700 to 900. According to Internet Pinball Database, there's at least 836 entries in that database right now.
    29:13
    Now, this one is the one that we can have a discussion on because there may be more. There can be two good answers here. But what company has the largest number of titles? not units, but different titles?
    29:31
    No. I'm sorry? Yes. Well, okay, so let's take that as an answer and put it on pause. Anybody want to offer what is the one that is right up against it?
    29:46
    Aside from Gottlieb. Actually, no. Yes. and so if you go out and pull the data it's 702 to 696 now the problem here or the argument could be is that the bally's in the internet pinball database they include like the bingos so it's not just flipper games but you do see a large trailing off of the game titles you know during the gambling prohibition and things like victory derby and victory special are different titles but it's just because is the state of Ohio had some, you know, they needed to make the circuitry a little different. So there's a, I think that's a debate on which one. But again, that's a lot of titles. I mean, if you step back from this and think about the design, the package, the manufacturing, the selling, and I didn't even get into the units. But anyway, we'll move forward and get into probably the period that's a bit more fun. So this is what I call the 80s. This was, I was an 80s kid. and to me this was in my lifetime this was the heyday of pinball the machines were beautiful the flyers were amazing Bally was in charge period there's just no argument I mean you look at the kiss flyer and I want let me see if I can make this work I know this probably doesn't come across too well but take a lot of I'm going to come back to this area on this flyer right here when we talk about fakes because this is the most counterfeited flyer on the market, and I'll leave it at that for now. I've got some close-ups later, and I'll show you how to tell the difference. But the Bally games, you know, Bally ruled. I mean, this KISS flyer is absolutely amazing. Can't even imagine the production cost. Those must have cost a couple of bucks apiece, even in quantity. And then you get into things like we did earlier. We did the Space Invaders envelope. Good answer. And can you, I mean, this was not a flyer. This was a magazine. It's eight pages long. comic, art, the back glass just phenomenal, phenomenal games I learned a lot about using a scanner the last couple of weeks too that's also something I tend to try not to do I will pull things for people who own really obscure games I have hundreds of flyers where I probably have the only one in the world and if you own the game I will take the time and make you a scan of it I've done it for museums and other people but that page right there is 30, 35 minutes worth of work to scan and clean and do all that. The Centaur flyer, again, amazing. And if you note, too, these games have a lot more writing on the flyers. They've moved back into that. We're really going to talk about the game, why operators will like it, why players will like it. There's effort and time being put into these. The paper as well, like on this flyer, is special. It has a texture to it to be a little bit like leather. And Williams was right there with them. I mean, they didn't have as many of the hits, but when you think about the games, it was a slightly different approach. But, you know, the whole Black Knight series, and Black Knight may be one of the Flyers groupings that has the most variations. They did it in French and German, and they did one with a pop-up play field in it. And they did, I mean, there's probably 12 different versions of that Flyer.
    33:16
    And I was just over at Mayfair. Steve had brought me a few pieces from a collection he had bought that he knew I needed, and I was flipping through them, and he had them priced, and I was like, wow, $50 for a Black Knight flyer? That's a whole piece that we'll talk on in a little bit, how flyer inflation has taken hold.
    33:36
    So there's the quick walk on, without trying to drag you guys through a whole lot of detail on it, but tell a story that at least maybe makes this make sense and understand why someone could pivot so deeply into this area and want to go so deep. Just to make sure that, you know, I almost forgot this piece of the story. Can we go back to the... In 2005, 2006 and 2007, I had been working at Electronic Data Systems in Dallas, Texas. That was Ross Perot, if you remember him, he ran for president, his company. And we were the title sponsor of a PGA Tour event, the EDS Byron Nelson Championship, and it was to support a local children's charity there in Dallas. And the CEO at the time, I got to know him a little bit, and he thought I had to create a bunch of... At the time, I ran the website, and he was like, Mike, can you guys come up with some way to get us some more press, get us some more interest around the golf tournament?
    34:41
    And I was like, he just asked the wrong guy the wrong question. because pinball wasn't doing real great right now. And I'm like, you just told me I have a blank check to go promote my hobby. So what we did was we dreamed up these pinball machines. You'll see the one on the left there. We called it Mega Golf Ball Frenzy. I rented a U-Haul. I found five or six people around the country with nice home use only, no good gophers, and we designed new back glass, cabinet decals, plastics. We did the flyers. We did the key chains. We did everything, manuals, the whole bit, completely overhauled them and had those at the tournament. One of them was in the players' locker room. Byron Nelson, who's since passed away, the golf pro who the tournament's named after, he autographed it and then like 190 other PGA Tour players did. We auctioned it on eBay for a small fortune and then did some private auctions for our client stuff. So that was year one. And I got to do the whole thing where I went to this big, huge banquet where it was like actually 400 people in a big room and got to do the big check and give it to the charity and all that. It was great. And so while I'm doing that, the CEO is sitting up front and he goes, well, I hope you have something better for next year if you like your job. I mean, he was trying to be funny.
    36:03
    And so then it was, yeah, I do actually. So the next year, if you move to the other flyer here, Ultimate Golf Ball Frenzy, if you guys remember a TV show called American Chopper, and it was on, I think at the time, Discovery Channel. My kids and I had been watching it. It was the fathers and the two sons owned a company in Orangeville, whatever, New York, New York, not California. And they built these amazing motorcycles for charity, and they did one for the space shuttle crash, one for the firefighters, and all these ones. So I had a friend at Discovery, and so two days later we were on a jet up there, and we cut a deal with them to build us, it was going to be the first ever three-chopper build, and they agreed to let us turn them into the newer version of our little squirrel characters, you know, from the previous year, and we built an online pinball, video pinball game to go with it, and did the whole bit, and this time we produced, with the help from Chris Hutchins, we produced 12 of these and went through the same process and sold them with all of it by this time I had gotten everybody's interest so like my PR team at work they had the pictures of the pinballs and choppers up on the big screens in Times Square in New York and in Tokyo I had basically been given a $10 million budget to go do this project and it was great because I got to design flyers I got to design pinball machines and I got to work with the TV show guys and design some choppers and all of it in my mind at least it was like fulfilling a dream, right? I mean, I got to build pinball machines and help promote the hobby. So that was something that when I was going through this, I had built the whole presentation and actually somehow managed to forget that part of it. But I'm pretty proud of that. I think that was, at the time, that was a lot of fun.
    37:50
    So I want to touch on two quick topics, and then we'll go to some Q&A or wrap up. and I don't really think there's such a thing as a counterfeit flyer. I was kind of just trying to hold your interest earlier. The point is there are flyers that are rare. There are flyers that are overly expensive. But what's happened is, for example, the Kiss flyers and the Fireball flyers were both produced by Gene Cunningham back in the day when these flyers became very, very hard to get and people were asking for them and he was just making really nice copies to do packages of them to sell, give away at shows, things like that. But they weren't labeled as originals. It wasn't intentional. But unfortunately, in years past, people have found some caches of these and put them on eBay. And I know it's probably pretty hard to see, but what I finally figured out the way to tell is right up here in this upper right corner, there is a small tear that was in the original flyer when they scanned it to make the reproductions. And there's no tear. I mean, you feel it. It's smooth paper. That tear is copied into the artwork. So if, in a second I'll show you some, you know, we'll talk about some eBay pricing. But this is a flyer that routinely sells on eBay for north of $200. And the reason why is they're hard to get. They appeal to the KISS collector. And I'll talk a little bit more about what's happened in the flyers market. And then the middle one here is a Cinderella flyer that is actually a really, really old color copy. and the way on that one, it has the early color copiers. They kind of have like a waxy kind of ink if you touch them. And here, it's a little hard to see as well, but if you see a flyer, and of course, I deal with flyers all the time, so to me, it's just second nature, but the first thing I do is I run my hand down the front and the back because if you can't feel the fold lines, they're copied into the image because the old flyers were all folded to the question about how did they go out. The vast 90% of them were folded, it has a stamp put on them or either an envelope or a stamp themselves. And so the fold marks are a physical thing. But when you copy it, it just becomes part of a flat image. And then on the fireball, that was a flower that badly produced on a textured paper, kind of like I was talking about on centaur that felt almost leathery. This was kind of like a Gottlieb texture paper. And the copies were just on plain, smooth paper. Again, it's easy if you handle a lot of these all the time. and you know but this has my point here is i don't really think anyone like the cinderella flyer in 19 was that 40 48 really really hard to find the people who copied these did them like 35 years ago they were collectors they were you know it was back in the day they were flyer collectors and the one guy had one and he made copies and gave them to his friends so they'd at least have something in their binder they wouldn't have a blank page but over the years that settled that's gotten kind of lost and you'll see these things for sale at enormous prices. So I pulled these two just a couple of days ago as examples of what has gotten out of control. I think it's an interesting little story. The Superman flyer, that's like a $20 flyer. The Captain Fantastic is like a $30 flyer in nice condition.
    41:10
    Most of these guys on eBay got a lot of their inventory through me because I'll buy collections and take out the 15 that I want, and then I'll sell the rest to recover as much as I can. And when I talk to them about, you know, like, I sold you these for, like, $3 a piece, you know. What's going on here? And the interesting part is that the market, just like with pinball, has changed.
    41:39
    It used to be there were people like me who were building collections and would buy 10 or 20 flyers at a time, you know, at a moderate price, and that was good. but nowadays what you have is you have people who own the machine.
    41:55
    They're going to buy the flyer, and they don't care how much it costs. And this is tied to other things going on in society, right? I mean, the haves have nots, but you've got people who it just doesn't matter. They got the game. They're going to buy it. And so the dealers have told me, Mike, what we've done here is simply say, I'm selling only 15% as many flyers in volume as I used to. And it's a lot better for me to pack up one flyer than it is at $200 than it is to do 20 flyers at $5 like it used to be. And so it's just a shifting in who has what and a way to manage the market. So I put that out there only because it's something that only someone who's been doing this probably this long and looks at it and knows all this, but it's out of control. and I sure it will self but this is just an example of absolute ridiculousness in my book So that kind of brings us to the end in the Q slide And what I had realized was I had not written, or I had run out of time. Oh, it came out just right. That's great. I was going to have three extra prize packs left over at the end, and it was like 2 a.m., and I was trying to finish this presentation, to tell you the truth, and I was just done with it, putting all this together. So I put this up, and then I was just going to ask the question. For anybody who has not already won one, do I buy flyers?
    43:20
    Correct answer. Winner. Do I trade flyers? Answer. Yes. And what was the last one? Do I sell from those big piles? Someone bet that guy. He's been trying so hard. Okay. Okay, questioners should come up here. And I'm going to start off, Mike, with some of my recollections that I think are pertinent. So you showed the cabinets.
    43:51
    Now, when I was operating in the early 70s, and I could go to the distributors and just scoop up flyers at the Gottlieb Distributorship, which also carried Chicago coin for all the good it did them, They had that cabinet, the 30-drawer steel cabinet, and I could just go in there and pull out. This would be like Jack in the Box, Captain Card, things of that era, early 70s.
    44:24
    The fireball flyers were all gone by the time I started operating. That means Bill Kurtz must have beat you there. Bill Kurtz maybe beat me there.
    44:35
    and the Bally distributorship had a similar thing, but Bally, I don't know if it was the factory, because our Bally distributorship was factory-owned, Bally Northeast Distributing,
    44:50
    they came pre-folded in a tri-fold, and they also came with the Bally Northeast overprint. So we had no shot at a flat mint-conditioned flyer from Bally because they tri-fold. And I think I've seen that most of the distributors of Bally got them trifolded. And Gottlieb was the same way. I had the image up here. We'll go back to this one. Yeah. This one is a good example. I mean, the first one, you have the factory version of the flyer, but then the vast majority of the Gottliebs, that image on the top there, that one for all of their – because Gottlieb especially had names, distributors' names, territories, very rigid. So all of those were pre-printed. So if you figure, if you look at it, based on what I have seen,
    45:39
    I would say that somewhere in the range of, for any given game in that era, 80% of the flyers are pre-folded and pre-printed from the printer, not stamped on like the later ones you might see in Bally Williams. And then about maybe 5% of the flyers, for whatever reason, came through, were provided to other types of outlets, unfolded, unstamped, unprinted, and then only about 10% of the flyers actually had that D. Gottlieb logo. I would say across all those flyers, the ones I'm missing the most of are the ones with the D. Gottlieb imprint on them.
    46:19
    Yeah, our Williams distributor, Seabird North Atlantic Distributing in Randolph, They got them flat with their distributor imprint on them in that Williams texture that anyone who's seen any Williams EM flyers of the late 60s and 70s knows Williams had that texture in that paper. Our Gottlieb distributor got them flat, so it was only the Bally that was an exception in this part of the country. here collect arcade flyers or flyers of any other kind of coin up besides pinball? So I guess we could say, what about Mike Munvee's? Does everybody hate Mike Munvee's for just cutting up those flyers and pasting over the actual distributor names and all that? You see it all. I have stacks of flyers that people have gotten where, in fact, everybody who got a prize pack got one of them. I must have gotten 50 of whatever the bally is in there. I can't remember. They cut the bottom off. So the distributor, before they would give them away or whatever they did at the end, somebody very professionally with a paper cutter cut their name off. And you see that a lot too, especially on the older flyers. For whatever reason,
    47:42
    they didn't want them to, after the game was done or they were disposing of them, they cut their name off of the flyers. So you've got a lot of flyers out there that have been cut down. Another possibility there is as operators, maybe the operators wanted to show to their locations, here's the pinball games I have so I can do a good rotation for you. But not give away the source. And not give away the source so that the location won't go straight to the distributor. So that would be my theory. Anyone else have questions? Because I've got a ton of stuff to talk to them about.
    48:16
    Okay. Let me make one more point, just because it doesn't come up very often. But the single worst thing that I think can be done to a flyer is take a pair of scissors to it. And I'm always amazed at how many of the oversized flyers have been cut down so that someone could put it in one of those standard 8 1⁄2 by 11 sheet protectors. And I don't think I mentioned it when we were on the slide, but after I got pretty far into this collecting thing over the last 30 years, I actually contract with a company who makes mine for me, and I have 11 different sizes made so that that never becomes a temptation because it's beyond me. But I've seen very, very old, very, very rare flyers, and someone's taken a pair of scissors to it. Yeah, and that's a tough thing with this stationary business, the way it's become with staples taking over.
    49:04
    There are some companies like Joshua Meyer that used to make nice, oversized binding systems, and I think in the art world, can still find some oversized binders. So if, like that Rockmaker's. I gave up and went mass production. I just use a Cardinal legal size binder because they're the legal size paper. And then because the binders in my drawers lay flat, if something sticks out the side, it's not going to, you know, they don't get hurt. But you've got to come up with something that, you know, at some point, you're running a small library here. So you've got to come up with a plan that's financially viable too. Yeah, on the content of the flyers, I think one thing you tune into if you start looking at a lot of flyers, and you can start in by just looking on IPDB at the flyers there,
    49:57
    is sort of the Herb Jones era, and we saw some slides of Bally flyers that just say your profits will go up and don't really explain much other than maybe point out a couple features. And then, yeah, so the novelty, playing up novelty and skill and so forth.
    50:28
    Herb Jones always liked this 23 ways to score. It's like they counted the number of switches on the play field, and that was a selling point. It also felt a lot like the bingo flyers, which I didn't put any of those in here, but Bally was still trying to get out of their gambling days right here. Right, and Bally had certain fonts they used all the time. So this is the Herb Jones era right here.
    50:55
    And all advertising in the coin-op business was pretty simple-minded like that until Atari came along. And we all know about George Opperman and the art, how Atari had a corporate look that just all the other companies and coin ops saw that and said, wow, they're a level up. And companies like Electra Games on the video side out and out blatantly imitated it. So Paul Farris came to Bali, and the people who were here for Paul Farris' talk a few years ago about how he revolutionized that. But on the copywriting side, Carol Cantor at Atari, K-A-N-T-O-R,
    51:44
    she was a real leader, not just for the flyer ad copy, but also in their trade magazine ads and giving a whole new way of writing about,
    51:56
    writing to the operator about how you're going to be better off with the Atari product than some other, which of course turned out not to be true in the pinball case, but they did a good job of really elevating. It's like those 30s flyers. They recognized they were building an industry and they had an opportunity. Yeah, and of course Atari could say, we are the leading edge. No one will ever get ahead of us. That was part of their message all the time. Come on up. We've got to record it all. So yeah, the words as well as the pictures is a big difference over the years and I think Carol Cantor needs to be recognized more for her contributions. I just wondered if any of the companies actually make any interesting ones today and it seems like some of the ones you see they don't put a ton of effort in. They're mostly just pictures of the machines and the eight different versions that they're going to put out, right?
    52:59
    It's a fair question. There was a piece I had worked on with Jonathan for the Texas Pinball Festival. I don't know if it got published because the show's been canceled the last year or so, but yes,
    53:14
    there's not a lot. Unfortunately, what we see now is that I think Jersey Jack has stopped printing. I have not seen a flyer, I don't think yet, for Stern, Godzilla. So they may have. I mean, you know, what's going on with COVID has given people, just like companies shutting down their buildings and selling their real estate, everybody's looking to cut costs. So I don't anticipate that we're ever again. Because I just recently got from a guy in France, I got a stack of flyers, of Stern flyers from their distributor in China. and they had re-Chinese language them and reformatted them, printed them on very nice, very heavy stock. But what you're seeing is more of that. What you're seeing is more distributors are on their own needing something to use, but Stern or companies are providing the artwork in high-res form and then they're allowing them to take it and edit it however they want. I have a feeling that the era of the flyer is probably just about over. Yeah, I was curious. I will argue against it. tiny little like well yeah Timball star Joe Newhart is trying to do it so Joe does a lot of distributor level instead of the factory but it's uh it's one of those things where my argument would be is interestingly it's kind of a point I was trying to make earlier which is if you design a great game you get more money for toys on the play field and you what it looks like looking at history you got more money for a better flyer now I'm not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg. But when you look back at a lot of the more collectible games, most of them have great flyers. Black Knight, Fireball. I mean, you look at these, the two go hand in hand. So my argument to the distributors and to the factories would be people like to pick up something physical at a show and take it home and save it. And then down the road, if you're selling your machines to an operator that says, buy this machine, operate it, make X amount over 24, 30 months, and then sell it for 85% of the value into the pinball collector market, those flyers help drive that pinball collector market. So for a relatively small cost, but yes, you're right that there's probably never going to be anything like what we see and what we went through in the presentation. And I kind of wanted to stay away from that today because I didn't want to be negative. Well, I was curious. So that's why I just kind of didn't get into the current flyers. I didn't see the modern slide, but I knew why because you get the tiny little postcard-style flyers. Some of the last great ones, what, Capcom Pinball Magic with the big fold-out flip-up was really good. There have been a few, but not many. I bet Greg Freris wants to. If he could, he probably would.
    55:58
    All right, last call for questions. Got one. All right, so do you have a favorite flyer? Oh, the answer is probably no. I think what happens is anytime I go into those cabinets and have to, for whatever reason, because someone needs something or wants to see something or needs a scan, all of a sudden it's almost like that flyer becomes, I mean, it sounds funny, but once you kind of live with them, grow up with them, and that's, you know, you got into the hobby because you played pinball with your dad. I can be looking at the older ones or I can be looking at the newer ones. I guess if you force me to give an answer I guess the right answer would be the two that I did for those two games that we built for charity because I got to design it and I got to have last say alright thanks everybody appreciate it thanks for your time and the binder came back that's good too, thank you