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Lawlor – Pinball's Rollercoaster Tycoon

Silverball Chronicles·podcast_episode·2h 19m·analyzed·Dec 27, 2020
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.033

TL;DR

Silver Ball Chronicles profiles Pat Lawlor's early Stern era, examining Monopoly as a conservative but well-designed return to pinball.

Summary

Silver Ball Chronicles episode featuring David Dennis and Ron Hallett discussing Pat Lawlor's career, focusing on his work at Stern Pinball and Jersey Jack Pinball. The episode covers Lawlor's early life, transition into pinball design, and his first game at Stern: Monopoly (2001). The hosts praise Monopoly as a solid game with interesting mechanics while acknowledging Lawlor's design philosophy of playing it safe after returning to the industry.

Key Claims

  • Pat Lawlor's first game at Stern was Monopoly, released in September 2001, selling 3,640 units

    high confidence · David Dennis states specific release date and sales figures with design/mechanical credits

  • Monopoly was a Platinum Edition special run limited to only 40 units, each representing a different square on the Monopoly board

    high confidence · David Dennis describes the special edition with chrome trimmings, signed by Lawlor/Yowsey/Stern, sold through pinballsales.com by Jersey Jack

  • Pat Lawlor met Larry DeMar at Brunswick Systems and pitched the idea for a vertical playfield pinball machine, which became Banzai Run

    high confidence · David Dennis recounts Lawlor's direct quote about meeting DeMar and proposing the concept

  • Lawlor spent a significant fortune on an Apple II computer in 1978 to learn programming

    medium confidence · David Dennis notes Lawlor used an Apple II during a three-month gap and spent thousands of dollars, comparing to his father's IBM purchase at $3,000

  • Williams shut down their pinball division after the Pinball 2000 era, leading Lawlor to become a contractor

    high confidence · David Dennis states this as context for Lawlor forming Pat Lawler Designs (PLD)

  • Pat Lawlor's father was a runner-up in the Prince Edward Island Provincial Monopoly Tournament in 1982

    high confidence · David Dennis provides personal anecdote about his own father

  • Monopoly pinball playfield design was similar to Addams Family, with Lawlor 'playing it safe' upon his return to the industry

    high confidence · David Dennis and Ron Hallett discuss design similarities including ramps, side ramps, and jackpot shot placement

Notable Quotes

  • “I told him, hey, I have an idea for a pinball machine with a vertical play field in the back glass. And he basically said, let's go build this.”

    Pat Lawlor (recounted by David Dennis) @ mid-episode — Describes Lawlor's pitch to Larry DeMar that led to Banzai Run, illustrating his creative confidence and connection-building

  • “They wanted to know if I'd be interested in working on pinball. They decided they could get their hands on the Monopoly license... I thought it would be really cool. We struck a deal to go off and do that.”

    Pat Lawlor (recounted by David Dennis) @ mid-episode — Explains how Monopoly became Lawlor's first Stern project after Williams division closure

  • “Programmers were one thing, but they wanted creative people. Everyone else was looking for programmers. They wanted to make things that were sellable and fun to make money.”

    Pat Lawlor (recounted by David Dennis) @ early-mid episode — Illustrates Bally's strategic shift toward creative game design in early video game era

  • “Money was thrown around the video game industry. It was so big and massive that there was more money around than you can imagine. Then it went to nothing. Overnight, it was all gone.”

    Pat Lawlor (recounted by David Dennis) @ mid-episode — Describes the 1983 video game market collapse that shaped Lawlor's early career

  • “People think you're a crook. My employees were demanding, too. I'd go to the bar with my coworkers and play pinball while others had drinks and a good time.”

    Pat Lawlor (recounted by David Dennis) @ early-episode — Reveals Lawlor's personality and why he left auto shop management for technology careers

  • “I get daily calls from headhunters at other firms. One day I said, don't call me unless you can get me a job in video games. The guy grumbled and hung up. He called back after a while and said I had an interview at a Bally affiliate.”

    Pat Lawlor (recounted by David Dennis) @ mid-episode — Shows Lawlor's directiveness and focus on video game industry despite working elsewhere

Entities

Pat LawlorpersonDavid DennispersonRon HallettpersonLarry DeMarpersonGary SternpersonJersey Jack PinballcompanyStern PinballcompanyWilliams Electronicscompany

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: September 2001 was poor timing for Monopoly pinball launch due to 9/11 terrorist attacks, though not explicitly stated as impact factor

    medium · David Dennis notes September 2001 release date and comments 'which is a really rough time to launch anything because of the whole 9-11 thing'

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Podcast listener feedback indicates David Dennis has become increasingly negative and contrarian about games over time, detracting from Silver Ball Chronicles' earlier fresh perspective

    high · Comment from 'Mr. D' states: 'David has gotten more and more negative and contrarian about the games... Ron is on defense half the time.' Dennis acknowledges criticism and commits to being more positive

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Pat Lawlor deliberately chose to design Monopoly conservatively after returning to pinball, using proven Addams Family layout principles (ramps, side ramps, jackpot placement) as a safe re-entry strategy

    high · David Dennis explicitly states 'He played it safe' and notes strong design similarities to Addams Family; Lawlor had been absent from pinball industry for several years

  • ?

    event_signal: Jersey Jack Pinball Podcast featured special episode reuniting Pat Lawlor with his original college Flipper Cowboy machine

    medium · David Dennis references Jersey Jack podcast episode featuring Lawlor reunion with the exact machine from his kitchen; recommends listeners jump to that episode for full story

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Stern Pinball deliberately pursued Monopoly license (succeeding where they failed with earlier license attempt) as strategic licensing play to attract Lawlor back to industry

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.425

0:00
This podcast is sponsored by Talkspace. Last year, I went through many different life changes. I needed to take a pause and examine how I was feeling in the inside to better show up for the ones who need me to be my best version of myself. When you're navigating life's changes, Talkspace can help. Talkspace is the number one rated online therapy, bringing you professional support from licensed therapists and psychiatry providers that you can access anytime, anywhere. Living a busy life, navigating a long-distance relationship, becoming a first-step father, Talkspace made all of those journeys possible. I could speak with my therapist in the office. I could speak with my therapist in the comfort of my home. I was never alone. Talkspace works with most major insurers, and most insured members have a $0 copay. No insurance, no problem. Now get $80 off your first month with promo code SPACE80 when you go to Talkspace.com. Match with a licensed therapist today at Talkspace.com. Save $80 with code SPACE80 at Talkspace.com. Ready to buy a car, a home, or just want to take control of your money? Your FICO score matters, and 90% of top lenders use it to make decisions. Check your FICO score for free today without hurting your credit score. Visit MyFICO.com slash free or download the MyFICO app today. MyFICO gives you the score lenders use most, plus credit reports and real-time alerts to help keep you on top of your credit. Visit myfico.com slash free and take the mystery out of your FICO score.
1:35
The Pimple Network is online. Launching Silver Ball Chronicles. Ow! I just flipped my chair. You keep injuring yourself. I just wanted to boost my chair up, but I tilted it forward, and I hit my crotch. Oh. All right. That sounds like a major injury there, Peter. Better get a light down again. Sorry.
2:22
Hello, everyone. I'm the man with two first names, David Dennis, and this is Silver Ball Chronicles. With me every month is Ron Hallett. I didn't give you a nickname this month. No, that's good. Very good, very good. I apologize, everybody. I have a bit of a cold this month. Uh-oh. COVID. Yes. I actually, my doctor did suggest I get a COVID test, so I did the old up-the-nose test. And although uncomfortable, it was not quite as horrible as you might think. So a little bit of a PSA here. If you think you got the COVID, get yourself tested. Sort of like how on the Final Round podcast, they always tell you you should get your prostate checked. We're telling you to be on the COVID thing. So, anyway, what's up in pinball? Led Zeppelin's coming out. Yeah!
Bally
company
Monopolygame
Banzai Rungame
Addams Familygame
Silver Ball Chroniclespodcast
Slam Tilt Podcastpodcast
Ken Cromwellperson
Paul Dessaultperson
Kurt Andersonperson
John Yauseyperson
Chris Granerperson
Brunswick Systemscompany
High Speedgame

medium · David Dennis quotes Lawlor stating 'They wanted to know if I'd be interested in working on pinball. They decided they could get their hands on the Monopoly license... I thought it would be really cool'

  • ?

    community_signal: Pat Lawlor is characterized as introverted academic with detailed, methodical communication style; often appears uncomfortable discussing himself publicly; business-focused rather than community-oriented

    high · David Dennis states Lawlor has 'long, lumbering, and detailed way of explaining himself'; is 'a bit of an introvert'; 'seems a bit uncomfortable at times when it comes to talking about himself'; 'doesn't shy away from sharing his true thoughts'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Pat Lawlor transitioned from employee to independent contractor (Pat Lawler Designs/PLD) after Williams Electronics shut down pinball division, eventually recruited by Gary Stern for Monopoly license

    high · David Dennis traces Lawlor's career: Williams closure → contractor phase → Stern recruitment; explicitly states 'Pat Lawler Designs. PLD.'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Monopoly Platinum Edition employed scarcity-based differentiation strategy with only 40 units produced, each representing unique Monopoly board square, with Boardwalk edition as sub-premium tier

    high · David Dennis documents 40-unit production limit, chrome trimmings, artist signatures, numbered squares, and certificate of authenticity; sold through Jersey Jack's pinballsales.com

  • ?

    technology_signal: Monopoly's early Stern White Star mini-DMD scrolling display was functional but flawed, requiring players to trap up and wait for slow-scrolling text messages

    high · David Dennis describes the mechanic as annoying: 'it takes forever to scroll. So you basically will trap up and watch if you're not a good user.' Notes it was 'quite smart at the time' but had usability issues

    • 3:28
    Yeah, I was thinking Led Zeppelin was going to be some sort of a, like they were going to throw us a curveball there, a little bit of a swerve. It looks like that's on its way out, so that's pretty exciting news. Let's see what Steve Ritchie does with his Led Zeppelin. Yeah, and we've also got Deep Root has done their thing. So they've stumbled their way into the party here, and they're taking their orders and doing all that stuff. So that's pretty cool. I'm looking forward to a few years down the road doing our Deep Root episode. Tons of fun. Lots going on in pinball. Optimism is through the roof now, right? We're making our way through winter. Christmas is upon us, and it's all joy and happiness except for, you know, the stuff in the world.
    4:17
    Ron, social media update. do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Do. We've had a lot of interaction over at Facebook.com slash Silverball Chronicles. That's where we spend a lot of time chit-chatting, talking about our upcoming things. And if you'd like to join us, please swing on over there as well. The TWIP Pinball Promoters Database, of course, that's the best place to leave us a review. So if anybody's looking for pinball-oriented podcasts, if you're looking for Twitch streams or YouTube channels, that's usually where you go. We love to get our comments up there because it's a lot easier. Leave us a five-star review. That way other people can find us and enjoy some of our awesome pinball content brought to you by Ron Hallett and myself. Much better than that other podcast that Ron is on. No, no, no, no. Bruce will kill me if he hears me say that. That's right. So we have to make sure that we promote Slam Tilt Podcast at least three times. Ron, your producer and manager and life coach and inspirational individual has said that you now have to at least three times promote Slam Tilt on the podcast. So that's one down. We're going to bring that up at least two more times to make sure we fulfill your contractual obligation here. We have comments. We've got a couple of comments. One of them here I wanted to bring up because it made me sad. This is from Mr. D. The Big D. I love the show and have listened to every episode. My only critique is that for some reason David has gotten more and more negative and contrarian about the games and features as the show has progressed. It's gotten to the point where Ron is on defense half the time. At first, the show was a breath of fresh air amongst the excess of bros give opinions on pinball podcasts, but it's been inching towards that, which is too bad. With a slight course correction, the show could rival TopCast. You're too negative, dude. Surprise, surprise there, Mr. D. I am super positive on this episode. I'm pumped towards this one, which is a lot of people, I think, would not enjoy this topic here this week or this month. But I enjoy this topic, and I am going to be positive on this. Don't you worry, even though everybody would assume that this is a time where you don't want to be positive. One thing that I did notice, Ron, is that people can leave comments in other places, and we haven't been reading those, mostly because I have a hard time finding those. I don't use Apple Podcasts. I don't use any of those other apps. I use Pocket Casts, and you can't really leave reviews on that. So generally I rely on the Twip database to bring in those quotes. But I did find a couple, one of them from Apple Podcasts. I'm not trying to say his name. I'll leave that to you. Yeah, you're going to let me screw up the name so I seem dumb. Sikiti from Apple Podcasts says really enjoyed the Silver Ball Chronicles like the history of the hobby and hearing about designers and artists from years past well thank you Sikiti I'll do the easier one here Minty Fresh from Podbean says another fantastic and engaging podcast nice work yeah thank you so we just wanted to recognize that one thing that we also have t-shirts people are buying t-shirts over at silverballswag.com lots of design choices there's some mugs and stickers we don't actually get a list of the names of those people who are buying those shirts that's a privacy thing i guess and uh you know if you have bought a shirt please let us know on our facebook page because we want to give you a shout out we want to say thank you, even though we're not doing that in person and we're not doing that sort of proactively. It would be awesome if you would reach out. So please, by all means, swing on over to Silver Ball Swag, pick up a shirt and enjoy keeping your nipples warm.
    8:22
    So corrections and comments from the previous episode. That was our Borgie episode. I haven't got any corrections. Have you? I have not. I guess we're awesome. there was not an error to be seen. We're going to send corrections if I wanted to. If you wanted to send corrections in, you can send that into silverballchronicles at gmail.com. So if we screw anything up, there are a lot of sources that I'm pulling from, from a bunch of different places. And, you know, quite frankly, I'm part of the quote-unquote hobbyist media. So being part of that hobbyist media, it means that I actually am not putting as much effort into as most professionals might. and, you know, errors do happen. So please, by all means, if we make a mistake or say something silly or you completely disagree, shoot us an email, silverballchronicles at gmail.com.
    9:13
    All right, anything else you want to add, Ron? I'm ready to get started. This month's topic, a positive topic, Pat Lawler is a pinball statesman, a magnate, or perhaps a tycoon. One thing's for sure, he is a powerful person in the pinball industry. Pat has a deep and controlled thought process, which is often why his designs and mechanical toys are so detailed and dedicated to being exciting. Some people would call Pat Lawler a pinball academic. He's sometimes even called a prickly fella. He has a long, lumbering, and detailed way of explaining himself, and he certainly doesn't shy away from sharing his true thoughts, even if he has to go on a 10-minute journey for everybody to hear those thoughts. Pat began his career at Williams in the late 80s, but we're not here to talk about that today. No, no, no. That's an awesome topic for another day. We're here to talk about Pat's time at Stern, and eventually his company-changing role at Jersey Jack Pinball. This month's topic, Pat Lawler, Pinball's Rollercoaster Tycoon. What a great title. Great title. Why did we call it Pinball's Roller Coaster Tycoon? Because you asked me, and that's what I came up with. Yeah, I couldn't come up with a title, and you just named the first machine that you could think of. Great play field. Great play field. Pat Lawler is a bit of a tycoon in the industry, so I think that that actually fits very well as a title. And, of course, today we're not talking about Peak Lawler. We're not talking about Funhouse and Adam's Family and Twilight Zone. we're sort of talking about on the other side of the roller coaster, the lower part, if you will, but one that I still think is so much fun. So we'll get into that. Well, I guess we should start with where he came from and what his upbringing was and where he was. Even though, you know, this isn't the beginning of his career, I think we should probably start there anyway. We want to make sure that we leave you wanting more. So that's why we're doing, you know, low-end Lawler first. Anywho, he played pinball like everybody else in the industry as a kid on Saturday mornings. His father actually was a delivery driver for various bars in his hometown, and he would be in those bars and he'd play some pinball. He was often building and tinkering with toys and not necessarily playing with them. He'd like to take them apart and put them back together. Now, he bought his first machine in college and he put it in his kitchen. It was a flipper cowboy. Funny story, the Jersey Jack Pinball podcast hosted by Ken Cromwell actually had an entire episode where they reunited Pat Lawler with that exact flipper cowboy. Did you hear that episode? I did not. It's kind of neat where they go through all that. So jump into that Jersey Jack podcast. I'll include that in our show notes. It's a very odd story, the exact machine that was in his kitchen. Pat would move on to post-secondary education at St. Mary's College of Communication and Arts. He went into radio. He was a late-night FM radio DJ playing things like Led Zeppelin. Not great pay for the work, and he lasted about eight months. Pat Lawler would say if the money was good, he probably would have stayed, but it doesn't seem like that that was really the position for him. Do you picture Pat Lawler as a radio DJ? I do not. So I don't know if the money was good enough or not. I just don't think he's the radio DJ type. Like I said, he's a bit of an academic, right? He's kind of lumbering and slow. He doesn't have that Mark Silk up-and-down voice stuff going on, right? Like he's pretty even keel. Maybe he had a DJ voice of some kind. Yeah. Yeah, maybe Pat Lawler is actually like this huge partier, and he's all about classic rock. If anyone can find any clips of him DJing, send a link to them to our mailbag. Please, by all means. I think the industry would be a better place if we could have something like that. I think Pat's a bit of an introvert. So I've listened to podcasts. I've read some articles. I've even watched some videos from expos of years past. And although very personable and very nice, he seems a bit uncomfortable at times when it comes to talking about himself and talking about the industry. You know, would you say that Pat's an introvert? Maybe. I'd say he could come off as somewhat negative at times. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Now, there was a bit of a controversy in 2020 with Pat at Jersey Jack Pinball when they were moving factories from New Jersey to Chicago. I think that that mostly comes down to the fact that, you know, Pat's a business guy. He's business first. He's, you know, he's not everybody's best friend, but he certainly is good at what he does. And some of the critiques are always like, you only see Pat Lawler when he launches a game, and then he's disappeared, or he doesn't sign translights, or I just think he's a bit awkward. I just think he's an awkward dude. Do you agree with that? I've seen him sign translights, so I can't say that. Right. So I think a lot of this critique is a bit silly. You know, I think people should go to a show when those open back up and things like that. Meet Pat. See what he's like. Make your judgment for yourself. After his old DJing gig, he became a shop and service manager at a big auto center where he spent seven years working. At the end, he said he was completely burned out because customer service job just was very demanding and it wasn't for him. So there you go, right? When you're dealing with the public, that's a difficult job sometimes. And if you're more of an introverted personality, that's really, really difficult. Pat says, people think you're a crook. My employees were demanding, too. I'd go to the bar with my coworkers and play pinball while others had drinks and a good time. By 1980, I'd moved on to Space Invaders and Pac-Man. Yeah, so you're going out with your buddies, your coworkers, and you're like, you know what? I don't want to talk to these people. I'm going to go play pinball. Although that probably sounds pretty great to a bunch of us. you know, you can see how that kind of created a bit of a barrier. After he left there, he disappeared for about three months. He doesn't talk about what he did there. And he said that he actually used an Apple II. He played a lot with that during this time. It was his first computer, and he has said he spent a fortune on that computer in 1978, where he learned to program. That's probably thousands of dollars. I remember when my father said that he bought his original IBM, like, 186th, and I think he said that he spent, like, $3,000 on that thing, which is insane. The future. A lot of people would say that they didn't understand why Pat would buy such an expensive computer and learn programming, but I guess if you love to learn, and again, you're a bit of an academic, why not? 1979 and 1980. Now this is when Pat started to move deeper into actually professional programming. He saw an ad in a newspaper for computer programmers, and he took some courses in college, and he interviewed for a job. After he got that job, he lasted a year. Pat says, I get daily calls from headhunters at other firms. One day I said, don't call me unless you can get me a job in video games. The guy grumbled and hung up. He called back after a while and said I had an interview at a Bally affiliate. This is kind of that late 70s, kind of early 80s era. We've spoke about this tons of times across a bunch of different podcasts, but there's like a race for programmers, right? Originally, the programmers in the industry were the engineers themselves, and they're using electromechanical switches, and everything is pretty straightforward. Now we're getting into people that actually have to be professionally trained that are building programming in computer chips. So there's a race for anything programming and programmers. Now the coding is done by creative folks who are creating something as opposed to something that's sort of more purpose-built. Pat says programmers were one thing, but they wanted creative people. Everyone else was looking for programmers. They wanted to make things that were sellable and fun to make money. Bing Bally. Yes. His first project at Bally was a game called Demons and Dragons.
    17:45
    I had to actually look this up. I'm going to include this in the show notes if you want to click on it. It was actually a bit of a rabbit hole to find this. It was not particularly popular. It's basically a 2D game where you have to save a maiden in a castle from some demons. Surprise. They're trying to burn down the castle with the maiden inside, and you're kind of like trying to put out those fires and catch them. This was around the beginning of the great sort of video game collapse. The game itself was kind of shit.
    18:15
    Negative. Nope. I'm sorry. Sorry. The industry moved into survival mode shortly after this, right? This is where all that high-tech shuffle alley stuff started coming in, and they're all trying to kind of find something to move back to. Pat ended up working kind of in those areas, learning a bunch of different tasks. So if you take a look at his education so far, right, he's in sort of sound design and music. He's done computer programming. He's done sort of people management and management roles. So he's not very old. He's in the early 80s. He's got a lot of experience in a bunch of different specialized areas. Somebody like Pat Lawler, I think, is going to bring a lot to the table when it comes to building teams and building machines. What do you think? Strike record speaks for itself. Yeah, yeah. Now, we're not going to talk about when he came in to Williams in the late 80s. and, of course, his smash hits in the 90s, because that would be far too easy for a first episode of Pat Lawler. We're going to talk about his other years.
    19:25
    But around the collapse in 1983, Pat would say money was thrown around the video game industry. It was so big and massive that there was more money around than you can imagine. Then it went to nothing. Overnight, it was all gone. Now that was well before my time in video games and things like that So I don't really know what that time was like But when I look at some of the Atari games at the time It brings a lot of sadness and a couple of tears to my eye So Pat went to work for a company that transferred arcade games And video games into specific cartridges And a year after he was there, that collapsed Then he worked on a bunch of odd tech jobs for a year or so, and he ended up working at a bowling tech company, which you might be familiar with, called Brunswick Systems. That's where he met a fellow named Paul Dessault. How do you American say that? It would probably be Dessault with a T. Dessault, right.
    20:32
    Of course, Paul Dessault would know Larry DeMar. And Larry DeMar was working at Williams, and he was really very much at the time working on some bowling tech because they were getting into those bowling things, which were all the rage. Do you have one of those bowling things? What are those called? You mean shuffle alleys? Yeah. I do not have a shuffle alley. That doesn't really get me going, those things. Are they great? It just seems like that's very much a part of this hobby, and I don't get it. I'd say it's more of a bar thing. Yeah. It's not bowling. It's not shuffle alley. Well, it is a shuffle alley. It's shuffle alley and you hit pins. Well, you slide under the pins. What's the one that's just the discs? What's that called? Just the discs? The old people. The old people do it. The old people do it? Yeah, they got the little stick. I'm far too young to know what you're talking about. They do it on cruise ships. Oh, croquet? No. No? Anyway, if you know what that is, shoot us an email, silverballchronicles at gmail.com, and I'll bring that up on the next episode.
    21:42
    Anyhoo. So Larry DeMar came into Brunswick to take a look at some bowling tech that they were working on. And then Pat recognized his name from high speed because he'd go out for lunch and play high speed. Everyone was playing high speed.
    21:56
    Yeah, it was a big deal at the time. High speed really became this turning point in the industry, which is really interesting because as I'm going through all of this reading and all these podcasts and things like that, high speed comes up like all the time. People all the time are like, oh, my God, I played high speed, and it was like something changed. So it's pretty interesting.
    22:19
    So Pat would actually meet Larry DeMar and he'd say, I told him, hey, I have an idea for a pinball machine with a vertical play field in the back glass. And he basically said, let's go build this. Of course, that game would become Banzai Run. I think originally it was Wrecking Ball. Yeah. Spoilers. Oh, yeah, that's for the other. That's for part one. We're doing part two now. Yeah, we're going to go backwards. Going back in time. I saw about that one time. It's a good movie that that was a portion. It was a shitty pin, though. Negative. Positive, Dave. So, of course, now let's jump in the old time machine here with the dog and the kid with the glasses. What's that show? Oh, that's...
    23:02
    Shut up. You? Oh, Mr. Peabody? Yeah, something like that. So if we jump forward in time, Williams would shut down their pinball division after the whole Pinball 2000 thing. Again, we're going to add that one to its old dedicated podcast by itself. Pat would become a contractor within the gaming industry in general. This is where Pat would start something called Pat Lawler Designs.
    23:27
    PLD. Hilled. One day, Gary Stern would call Pat Lawler. Pat says they wanted to know if I'd be interested in working on pinball. They decided they could get their hands on the Monopoly license, and that was a license that Pat wanted that they, I believe, didn't get, i.e. Safecracker. Pat says I thought it would be really cool. We struck a deal to go off and do that. Yeah, so this brings us into Pat Lawler's first game at Stern, Monopoly. This is a licensed board game theme from September of 2001, which is a really rough time to launch anything because of the whole 9-11 thing. It was a Sega Stern White Star board set. Sold 3,640 units. Designed by Pat Lawler. Mechanics by Kurt Anderson. Art by John Yausey. Sound by Chris Graner. And software by, I'm going to have to say this American way, Louis Kouzerias and Greg Dunlop. Should be Louis. Shouldn't be Louis. It should be Louis. This game is great. I think this is a great game. Wow. A game you like. I think this is a great game.
    24:41
    Now, I want to talk about the history of Monopoly. My father, true story, was a runner-up in the Prince Edward Island Provincial Monopoly Tournament in 1982.
    24:58
    Monopoly is a thing in my family. I haven't played it in years because my father used to just crush me at it and I hate this game.
    25:08
    The board game is published now by Hasbro. It was created in 1935 under the Parker Brothers name and of course that was designed on another game or some people say stolen from another game called The Landlord's Game by Lizzie Maggie in 1903. This game was originally designed as a bit of a critique on large monopolies and corporations, and it was a way to demonstrate that the economy which rewards wealth creation was much better than one where monopolists work under a very few constraints. And as many people know, Monopoly has sold millions of copies worldwide, and is one of the 20 worst games ranked against 10,000 others. Huh? Worst? It is apparently one of the worst board games ever created. Judged by who? Judged by a bunch of board game nerds on the internet. I guess so. Yeah. Because it's long and grinding and incredibly adversarial. basically the strategy of the game is to never trade or deal or do anything. People do, but that's not the object. The object is to read the rules and just never do anything but just grind and probably, you know, never have any friends. Wow, what a dark world Monopoly is. I was unaware of this. Yeah, so, yeah, honest to God, if you want to win at Monopoly, Basically, play exactly to the rules, never trade anything to everybody, always bid for everything you land on, and it is just horrible. And that's probably why they say it's one of the 20 worst games of all time. Now, the pinball machine, I think, is actually very, very good. I played it twice, which is probably why I think it's very, very good, because I don't have a whole lot of experience on it, but I think it's a lot of fun. One of my favorite things on this is this really strange spinning mini flipper. Yeah, it just spins around and around. That's all it does. It spins both ways. It's got a two-way motor. No idea what it really does. It's just there to go away. Oh, it's got a saucer there. So knock the ball out of the saucer. Yeah, but then it can knock it kind of back towards you, like really uncontrolled. The ball's wild. Yeah, it's very cool. It's so simple, but yet it's so, I don't know. It's such a great little thing. So cool. People would argue the play field is very similar to Adam's family. And what are some of the similarities there? What are some of the things that you can kind of look at really quickly and say, oh, that's very Adam's family-esque? The ramps, the side ramps, jackpot shot. Instead of the scoop, it has the railroad ramp in the same spot. They're very similar. Yeah, he played it safe. Why would you not copy that? Yeah. He's coming back into the industry. He's been kind of gone for a couple of years. He figured, okay, let's play it a bit safe. And, of course, Monopoly is kind of cool anyway. This is also one of the machines that has those early Stern, White Star, mini DMD scrolling things on the play field. So kind of on the side left, there's a little dot matrix display, and it'll scroll left to right and tell you stuff. But what's kind of annoying about that is it takes forever to scroll. So you basically will trap up and watch if you're not a good user. But it was actually quite smart at the time, if you ask me, right? Where, hey, these games are getting a little more complicated, and just having a little piece of paper on the apron was really difficult.
    28:58
    I mean, when you look at something like The Simpsons, oh my God, thank God it has that screen up there. They had a lot of games that used that screen in that era. the early 2000s. Yeah, they certainly knew what the bomb was on that. You could just throw it in pretty cheap, I would say. You know, on the apron card, it says, note to beginners, shoot the flashing shot and watch the mini-DMD. Yeah, that's pretty straightforward. Yeah, basically, it's like any Steve Ritchie game. Just shoot the flashing light, you'll be fine.
    29:25
    I mean, you can put that on any friggin' pinball machine. The bank, you were talking about some similarities to the Addams Family. Well, the Adams family had that really cool sort of rotating bookshelf. Well, this has a horizontal moving bank, so it's like a bash toy, and you hit it, and it'll horizontally open, which is kind of neat.
    29:47
    I bet you that wasn't an easy mech to actually build. One thing that was very cool and a little bit confusing when I looked this up is the Platinum Edition. Ah, yes. Pat Lawler has to be a nerd because he knows this, like, scarcity, special edition kind of thing. They did it with Adam's Family Gold back in the day. Well, they're doing it with the Platinum Edition of Monopoly. Basically, it's the same game except it has chrome trimmings. It's signed by Pat Lawler, John Yowsey, and Gary Stern. There was a production run of only 40 of these games. you'll notice it is because there's a plaque on it that says Platinum Edition. Is there? I've never, I knew, my podcast mate Bruce actually has a Platinum Edition. There's nothing on it that says Platinum Edition. Oh, there's supposed to be a little plaque under the DMD. There was supposedly like a certificate you got with it that told you what square you were. Each of the 40 is a different square on the board. So if you had Boardwalk, I guess that would be the ultimate addition that you could possibly get. I literally didn't know. The first Monopoly I ever played was a Platinum and had no idea. Oh, there it is. There's the plaque right there.
    31:10
    It was a funny thing. It was sold through pinballsales.com, which, for those who don't know, that was Jersey Jack, Jack Guarneri. He was their largest distributor. Yeah, Jack knew how to sort of do those special little things that he could charge a little bit more for. And in fact, one of those 40 was the Platinum Boardwalk Edition, which itself is sort of a sub-special one.
    31:40
    And if you've got that one, you're a big deal. Friends are very impressed. What's the code like on this? Now, I, of course, have only played it a few times. I enjoyed shooting it. It was kind of fun. It was fairly straightforward. It was a bit unusual. But I couldn't get into the deep codeness of it or things like that. It's very grindy. Yeah. It takes a long time to get a big score. Yeah. It's very much the stern white star gold standard for grinding.
    32:11
    All those games are very weird that it just took forever to get going. And then when it did, it was like, it just didn't stop. It's very weird. great design game, a lot of fun,
    32:23
    kind of unusual. It's a monopoly, right? So it's a cool-ish theme. Would you buy one? I don't like it that much, but I do think it's a good game.
    32:36
    I always enjoyed it. So if you Google pinball and you type in cows and Easter eggs, it'll bring up a whole webpage. In those areas, it'll often tell you about some of the flipper codes and some of the interesting little bits and pieces. There's a bunch of flipper codes for this game. It doesn't tell me what those flipper codes do. It just says for a secret message, which is probably like, hi, mom, or something. But anyway, they're in there. If you really care, you want to do some flipper codes.
    33:06
    Does Slam Tilt have a flipper code on any machines? You mean, do we have anything in a game? Yeah, you guys are friends with Tim Sexton, right? Surely he's put a flipper code in the game for Slam Tilt, right? He is not. We have no flipper codes.
    33:21
    But Tim Sexton has put your initials on the Slam Tilt podcast. No, he did not. He hasn't done that either. He was like one of the biggest guests. Yeah, he hasn't done that. But you know who did? Raymond Davidson did. Well, you're not friends with Raymond Davidson like you are with Tim Sexton. Sure we are. We love Raymond. Yeah, but not like Tim Sexton. How many times has Raymond been on Slam Tilt podcast with you and Bruce? Quite a few times, actually. All right, that's our second mention of Slam Tilt Podcast. Oh, very good, very good. And Tim sexed and bashing for some reason. That's so mean. Well, I've never met Tim, but I'm sure he's okay.
    34:00
    So one thing that's interesting here is, of course, Pat grew up in the industry at Williams, the peak of the peak of pinball, and then sort of saw the downturn of that. A lot of people who worked at Bally Williams in those late 80s, 90s upswing will say that it was like working in a toy factory. It was like the greatest, most exciting thing. You could be creative. You had lots of time. You had lots of budget. That was not necessarily the environment at Stern. Pat Lawler would often talk about the different environments between Stern and Valley Williams in a way that sort of made you feel sad. Now, Pat would say that it was not because one company was better than the other, but because the companies had totally different backgrounds and philosophies. And, of course, we're in totally different eras, right? In the 90s, we're on the upswing, right? You're throwing money at themes and mechs and toys. Until the end of the 90s, but yes. But now we're in 2000, in the 2000s, and, you know, we're basically just trying to hold on and stay alive. So you can't really blame Stern for being in survival mode. Both companies come from planet pinball but we from different tribes and speak different languages Sometimes we foil our arms around to communicate The people who came from Williams and Stern don entirely understand one another I leave it at that What do you think some of the discussions they had that gave them such a hard time What do you think those discussions between sort of like a Pat Lawler, ultimate Williams designer, and a Stern? Yeah.
    35:41
    They went from a Pinball 2000 board set to White Star, which is kind of basically going down. And I know, I think it was harder to program, just from the people who worked on the tech side. It was like going, it was like regressing.
    35:55
    They had those beautiful WPC soundboards, too? That sounded better then. But they didn't have those anymore. Yeah.
    36:02
    And just, Data East, Sega, they were getting all those licenses. They were all about, like, licensing.
    36:13
    They were all about, I mean, it's just, Williams was more creative. Let's put it that way. In my opinion. Again, just my opinion. Now, if we were on Speculation Island. Okay. Do you think a lot of that flailing was like budget conversations and costing? Could have been that. But it's also Williams was like the Cadillac of the industry. Data East Sega was not. And now you're basically working there. I think that has something to do with it. You can always tell the Williams guys, too, because they all call pop bumpers jets.
    36:48
    That's how they give themselves away, and they'll still do it. If you listen to any of them now, they still will call them jets. And if you look, Pat, he brought that in. Well, we'll get into it later, but when he goes to Jersey Jack, what do they call the pop bumpers? They call them jets. Would you say this is like going from playing for the New York Yankees to playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates? Yeah. That's a good analogy. Yeah. I'm really sorry, Pittsburgh, by the way. And I think they had jets before Pat Waller went there. I don't want to get a correction. Dwight Sullivan, of course, one of the, you know, I would say fathers of modern pinball code. He worked at Williams, worked on a lot of the top tier machines at Williams, in fact, with guys like Steve Ritchie and Barry Osler and a bunch of others. Now, he, of course, came over to work at Stern around this time as well. And, of course, they had that fancy pants WPC board set that you were talking about with their fancy pants sound boards and big budgets and loads of time to develop. Now those programmers like Dwight Sullivan, well, you know, they had to kind of hold on because they just didn't have what they had before. Well, Pat would say, Dwight Sullivan is one of my good friends, would say we've all just come from the holodeck on the Star Trek Enterprise-D, and we're now on the bridge of the original series Enterprise.
    38:15
    What's showing Dwight Sullivan, I assume Enterprise-D is next gen. I thought you were a nerd. You should know that. I know it's NCC-1701, the original Enterprise. All this fancy, cool technology and leading edge awesome to sitting on basically red and blue painted cardboard. That's what that tells me.
    38:40
    And you get this noise every now and then. Boo! Just in the background for no reason. That's coming from three episodes of TopCast, which I would say is probably the gold standard when it comes to industry interviews. now that there's some space. So there's 10 years between when this interview was actually done and today. So there's been a lot of really cool changes in the industry, people in and out of the industry. Well, Pat, at this time, he quit in 2008 at Stern, and he sounds so bummed out about his entire time at Stern, which I don't think was actually that bad. He sounded like that during most of his seminars. So I think it's just his way. Right. So I guess that kind of goes back to where I started the podcast, which is sort of like, he kind of has this lumbering kind of laissez-faire, sad demeanor.
    39:34
    You know, you look at like... Not all the time, though, which I'll get into that once we get to it. There's not, there's like this war in the industry. It's like, you're a big Pat Lawler person, or you're a big Steve Ritchie person, and these two shall not touch. because Steve Ritchie's like this rock star and he's like Mr. Energy and he loves hanging out with people and talking about things and making jokes and Pat Lawler's a little more like ho-hum.
    40:02
    I don't think one is better than the other. I am a huge Steve Ritchie fan, but I love Pat Lawler too. I'm like maybe one of these anomalies that doesn't pick a side, and I don't know, maybe it's because I'm Canadian or maybe because I'm new to the industry. I don't know. I'll go with Canadian. So the next game that he dove into was Roller Coaster Tycoon. And this is a licensed video game theme. It's from August of 2002. It's a Sega Stern White Star board set. We don't know how many it sold, so there is no production numbers. Designed, again, by Pat Lawler. Mechanics by John Kursich.
    40:38
    Kertsich. Does that sound right? I thought it was John Crutch. John Crutch? You might not like that spelling. I'm just trying to go by previous interviews with him, who was mechanical engineers usually were. John Yausey on art, Chris Granner on sound. The man, Chris Granner. And on software, again, it's Louis Cossier.
    40:58
    Cossier's? Sounds good to me. Yeah. Corrections can be sent to silverballchronicles at gmail.com. It's like a running joke with me and these names, man. Like, oh, my God. Give me a Francophone name. Give me a French name. No problem. And I'm an Anglophone, but you give me these Ukrainian, Eastern European names, it's like, my God. Yes, comrade. Did you notice this is one of the top-selling PC CD games? So I actually took that from the Roller Coaster Tycoon marketing materials. It says PC-CD game. That's how old this PC CD game was. That's pretty old. This is before Steam. Oh, wait, wait, before Steam. This is when you would go to the store and you'd buy a box. Yep, you had to actually buy the media, yep. We don't even have DVDs yet, it's on a CD. Yeah, and the CDs were a big deal, right? Like, if you had a, you know, this was like the future was this thing.
    41:53
    Let me bring up some stats here about the best-selling, I'm sorry, top-selling PC-CD game. Roller Coaster Tycoon, of course, is a series of simulation video games based on building and managing amusement parks. Each game in the series challenges players with open-ended amusement park management and development and allowing the players to construct and customize their own unique roller coasters and thrill rides. This sold millions of copies in March of 1999 and started an entire series and sub-genre. And it was, of course, published by Hasbro, who probably got them an in when they did Monopoly. Did you play Roller Coaster Tycoon? The PC game? No. You didn't? I did not. Oh my God, I played this game. And this game was awesome. this is when I was like I want to say like 13, 14 probably early high school, late middle school you could make these crazy roller coasters and then get people into your park and they'd ride them and then they would go and walk throughout your park and just throw up everywhere and then you had to have dudes that would come and clean it or you'd have to have like washrooms really close to the roller coasters so they would throw up what you're saying is that should have been in the game yeah Yeah. Somewhere. Okay. Yeah. Like a barfing station or something? Yeah. Some people would say that the rules in Roller Coaster Tycoon make you want to vomit. Oh. Negative.
    43:28
    But I would say, like, Roller Coaster Tycoon was an amazing game, and it started this whole sort of sub-genre of, you know, it was sort of like SimCity was a big thing before that, and then now you've kind of moved into this other genre. And it's been a lot of fun. But I really, really like Roller Coaster Tycoon, the game. Again, I've only played it a couple of times, but this game makes me smile. I have a lot of fun. Like, you're shooting the ramps and things are whirling around.
    44:02
    It's got great Chris Granner sound package, music, and call-outs. It is a fun, fun game all around. Probably one of Pat's best play fields. Yeah. Yeah, probably the biggest negative of the game, which probably turns a lot of people off, is the troll. The troll. So there's a troll doll kind of what, back left, back center, and you can kind of dunk them in the dunking, like a dunk tank. But you can't. That's the problem. You can't have an annoying character bouncing up and down that you can't at least hit. Right. as well as troll dolls at this time were very much way past, kind of when they were popular. So, I mean, I don't know if they found a bunch of these, like, out back behind, like, a store in a dumpster, and they're like, hey, here's 4,000 of these. We can put them into a game. Another thing that was interesting about this era of Stern was it's like they would go to Target, and they would just buy a toy and stick it in there. Oh, most definitely. Most definitely. We'll run into more of those. as we go along. Other than that, if we leave out the kind of the weird troll thing, I think the play field itself is so much fun. There are so many ramps and so many shots. Pat Lawler loves multiple flippers, and this is an example where those multiple flippers are awesome.
    45:25
    If this was made today, it would be an LE. Oh, my God. Can you imagine the bomb on this thing? Yeah, this would be the ultimate premium package. They'd have to take out one of the ramps for sure. now colored ramps ramps ramps ramps there's ramps everywhere but there's one specific yellow ramp that kind of starts in the back left it comes all the way to the right all the way down and then under around the flippers and off into like a lock on the left i don't even think that's a ramp that's like the buck that's a vertical up kicker you hit it and literally that whole thing is just to look cool when you fire it up it comes all the way around like a roller coaster yeah it's called The Rocket, and in the promotional documentation, it says it's the biggest, baddest ramp ever in a pinball machine. I guess. Now, if this were coded by Dwight Sullivan, you'd never get to use that ramp. Just like the Hyperm.
    46:18
    Wow. Star Wars hate in a Pat Waller episode. Star Wars hate knows no ends, obviously. I'll tell you what. The back glass on this makes me smile. It makes me so happy. I don't know what it is. It reminds me of when I was a kid.
    46:37
    It's one of John Yowsey's probably best. It's goofy. It's fun. It's got a guy. He's like oiling it while he's riding, which I think seems quite dangerous. An elephant? A panda? With sunglasses, no less. Of course. There's two gentlemen in the front. There's one fellow who has these amazing like white hair just kind of just perfect, and his hands are over his face. I think that's supposed to be Gary Stern. What do you think? It could be. It's also got this scrambled eggs thing on the left side. So in the upper play field, you kind of shoot it up to where, like, the orbit shot was, and there's, like, a spinning disc or something there.
    47:21
    And, I mean, I don't know. It's got a cool 360 up-flipping ramp thing, which is pretty cool. It's a pack game. It's got the MIDI DMD in the back also. Ah, there's so much going on. Now, as you said, though, the software. Yeah. At least among the tournament crowd, this game is known for you just start a mode and time it out. You time out every mode.
    47:46
    You don't play any of them. Except I think one of them might be a multiball or something. But it's just known as not being the greatest software package. This is one I'd like to see almost they redo it. Keep the play field, maybe redo the software. Yeah. Albert Agar, who is the host of the Pinball Nerds podcast,
    48:09
    he says that he thinks Roller Coaster Tycoon is Pat's most underrated game. I also think that it's the Pat Lawler game with the most flow. But that's debatable, of course. If the game were to get some sort of Soren code update that would somehow prevent you from simply timing out the modes, it could be one of his best games. There you go.
    48:33
    I see the opinion is shared. At least with a couple of people. Yeah. So, you know, his background, of course, tournament play. My background is mostly just screwing around. Yeah, you can't go by what the tournament players say. Yeah, because it's funny, right? When you all play games, you think about it very differently than most. Well, not me. Not me. I'm not the rules guy. Yeah, you're not the rules guy. I just asked somebody, what am I supposed to do here to score the highest points? Yeah. But I just love ramps. You know? I love it. Go in different places. It's got some great call-outs. So it seems you really like Roller Coaster Tycoon. It's a lot of fun. I don't get it. Mm-hmm. Right? It's one of those early, you know, white stars. Look at this. Four flippers. Yeah. Captive ball, drop target, colored ramps, second dot matrix display. I mean, this thing is ultra-LE version. There's a lot of stuff going on there. Even as annoying as the dummy is, he does move. He moves up and down with the laugh.
    49:37
    It's a lot of fun. If you can see this game, go ahead and play it. I mean, it's not, you know, it's not The Simpsons. It's not Lord of the Rings, but it's a lot of fun, and I bet you you could pick one up for a pretty decent price. Oh, yeah. Now, this brings us to his next game, Ripley's Believe It or Not. And this is right when I got into the hobby. Okay, so this is kind of, this is so, so when you started in the hobby, it was like the dark days of pinball, right? And this was your new inbox that year, right? Dark days? I mean, this was a pinball machine. My dark days are the outbreak where I've only had four Stern machines being released and one of, like, Jersey Jack's greatest games ever. I would say this was, it just seemed like a weird license, I remember. Yeah. Ripley's Believe It or Not? It's like a licensed... What is it? It's like a freak show thing. Well, I just think of the Jack Palance-hosted show when I see this. Yeah. Believe it or not. March 2004 was when this was released. It's, again, a stern white star. We don't know the production. Basically, the same crew as all of the others with John Yossi and Chris Granter.
    50:44
    Ripley's Believe It or Not. Now, this is based on Robert Ripley, who was this fellow. He would do deals in bizarre events and items so strange and unusual that readers of magazines and books would want to read about these. And this was way back in the 20th century. Way back in the 20th century. It was like a newspaper panel, which was like a column, I guess, or a section. And newsreels, I remember seeing newsreels from like the 30s with Robert Ripley himself. Yeah, it would feature these like popular, weird... This man's eyeballs come right out of his skull. The tallest man in the world and the shortest man in the world hanging out at the coffee shop. It was in comic books. It was on TV. It was on radio. It was really this like turn of the century popular, you know, these tribes of Papa New Guinea kind of thing. And he apparently, Robert Ripley, had collections of like 20,000 photographs, 30,000 of these random weird like artifacts, like fertility idols. And basically things that you would see in a tourist trap now is what is a Ripley's or believe it or not. These are like franchise museum things now. This game is amazing because of one thing and one thing alone, and that's a very target. Yeah. Bring it back to very target. Right. Or what Stern calls it. Did the Gottlieb patent expire? Called it the variable push target. Yeah. It's a very target. Although this target, you can push it all the way back and it goes into a hole. Yeah. Yeah, so a very target is like this target. You hit it, and every time you hit it, it kind of clicks back slowly, unless you really give it a good smack, and then it'll go all the way back. And this one head, it kind of would go back and down, and there was a scoop behind it.
    52:45
    Pat Lawler, a little bit like John Borg, modern John Borg, loving the scoops, which is probably one of the downsides to the next couple of games. It also has a cool shrunken head in the back, which is kind of cool. Cool story. So my first Chicago Pinball Expo ever, when we took the Stern Factory tour, they were giving away the shrunken heads.
    53:12
    So that will give you an idea how much it sold. Those shrunken heads, they were quite detailed. It, like, looked like an actual shrunken head. I still have it sitting downstairs right now. They got them from, I don't know, Walmart, wherever they got them from. They were just a store-bought thing. This is probably, what, his best rule set of this era? You know, it's very popular with Keith Elwin, so that must mean yes. Yeah, I think so. I got a friend of mine, and he says he just loves the rules for this game. I've never played it. This is one that I haven't. It has a grid. Yes.
    53:46
    Keith Elwin loves his grids. I mean, it's another pack game. It's got ramps, it's got the extra display. Ramps for days. On the upper left, it's got wire forms, curling a little coily, curly Coily wire forms, always like those. Vertical up-kickers into top flippers.
    54:07
    This game has a couple of really cool Easter eggs. One of them is a call-out. So when you shoot the bozo hole. It's got more than call-outs. Do you mean a call-back? Yes. Isn't that what I meant? No, yeah, call-outs. So basically it says, like, there's a bozo hole, and when it's unlit, you shoot it in, and the guy says, it's not plugged in, man. It's a call-back. It's a callback. Oh, okay. A callback. They're all callouts. If I say, Jackpot, that's a callout. Right. It's not plugged in, man. It's a callout that is a callback. Yeah.
    54:42
    Yeah, I get you. Okay. All right, Mr. Semantics Pants over there. There's another one. So when you tilt, it'll say, skate with the penguins at your own risk in the Ripley Zone, which is quite similar to a tilt quote in Twilight Zone. Yeah, it's got one of those voices. Yes. Skate with the penguins at your own risk in the Ripley Zone. Yes. Which is a callback to Twilight Zone. Very good. You're welcome. And there's a two times bonus that gives you a cow with two heads. And a magnet. It's got a magnet over on the lower left.
    55:16
    When you hit the idle, it screws with the ball. Kind of, just think of, well, we'll get to this later, but think of dialed in, but on the left side. Very similar. Yeah, very cool. Listen, it's a packed play field. There's lots going on. There's like a little upper play field on the top. Absolutely packed, and the art's not terrible. It's got a ton of inserts. Yeah. Like an obscene number of inserts. So they really want you to know what to do by looking at the play field. There's a lot going on. Now, there's a bit of a rinse and repeat design here. Like if you look at that left side with the scoop and the target and the pop bumper, it's a little whirlwind-esque. Whirlwind-y? Windy? I mean, you know, I mean, there's not that much else, though. Pat Lawler, he loves his shot through the pops. He's a big orbit through the pops guy.
    56:09
    So, I mean, yes, once a designer gets into a groove, they tend to kind of do the same things. However, he only has single in lanes in this one, so. Yeah, which is weird. He's always doing that five in lane, out lane thing. But there's like an odd lock on the right side. So over by the plunge area, there's also kind of a lock, which is a little bit similar to the Twilight Zone lock. But, of course, it's a standard body, so it is shorter. So something had to give somewhere, I guess. I mean, what we've seen so far after Monopoly, which was heavily influenced by Adam's family, we see some pretty cool original play fields coming out here that would cost a ridiculous amount to make today. You know, there's a lot of quotes from this sort of era, particularly maybe early Stern, where a lot of people, you know, are very much down on this era. In fact, Josh Ropp from Loser Kid Pinball Podcast said that this era almost killed pinball completely from some of the playfield designs. Although I understand the critique, I disagree a little bit.
    57:20
    But, you know, some of them were pretty lackluster. And I'll tell you, Pat Lawler's were not lackluster. They were doing the best they could. I mean, I don't see how you can consider this like the worst era when later on they would have like Big Buck Hunter and NBA and games like that. Just saying. One thing that's kind of neat that I learned when reading through IPDB was that there was actually a couple of issues importing this game into the U.K. There's this whole, like, game of skill versus a game of chance thing that the industry has always had an issue with. In the U.K., if you were importing games to the U.K., you had to put posts, controllable posts in the game wherever the ball would drain with extra buttons so you could save the ball. They did that, Stern had to do that for a few games. So the left out lane, the right out lane, and the center lane had up posts, and there would be extra buttons on the cabinet, sort of like a MagnaSave button, and you'd push the button and the post would come up to keep it from draining. So it was more of a game of skill versus a game of chance. You push one button, it would be on the left side, you push the other one, it would be on the right side, you push both, it would open the one in the middle. This is similar to Williams' Superstar from 1972. This is a much more complex rule set than the other Pat Lawler games. Isn't that right? Yeah, there's actually a Keith Owen tutorial on this game that's like 30, 40 minutes long and loses me. So, yes, that means it's very deep.
    58:47
    Yeah. I'm trying to remember what the last mode is called. If you're looking for like a Pat Lawler kind of game around this time, if you're looking for something that's reasonably priced, plenty deep, lots of weirdness going on, this is probably your game. This is a very popular game amongst collectors.
    59:05
    There's a lot of collectors that like this game. Jason Fowler, formerly of the Slapsafe Pinball Podcast. Actually, this is one of the games that he searched and sought out for because he really wanted to get a Ripley's, believe it or not. And one of my friends here in town really wants one of these. Atlantis. That's with the final mode. That's the wizard mode. Ah, getting to the last of Atlantis. Now these machines always have a massive amount of wear on that scoop.
    59:36
    They are always a mess around this time. So you're going to have to bondo that, throw a cliffy on. They're going to be rough. Anything else on that one you want to talk about? No, it's Ripley's. It's a good one. It's pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good. Now we're getting into kind of like a weird one. This is Grand Prix slash NASCAR. This is a licensed race car slash NASCAR theme, August of 2005. Again, we're still on the Stern White Star board set. Of course, they have to have the Grand Prix edition for non-U.S. buyers. That's right. Same team all around except Chip Curtis is the different individual here on software. Now, Grand Prix, again, you mentioned a more European-centric game. NASCAR, and I'm going to disappoint a lot of people here, particularly big in North America, basically only big in the United States, and only really, really big sort of, you know, in the southern states. I enjoy NASCAR. I think it's really great. If it was commentated by a British man, I think the world would probably enjoy it more. You insulting some accents there?
    60:52
    You, a Canadian with the weird Canadian accent and spelling stuff wrong? You're going to make fun of us? I don't think so, boy. And to be truthful, they don't all sound like that. Usually the play-by-play guy will have no accent, but then the color guy is some ex-driver who will have a very thick accent. I enjoy all motor sports in general. I think the skill level of NASCAR drivers is outrageous.
    61:18
    I'm also a huge F1 fan, been an F1 fan for years. I actually had my honeymoon at the Montreal Grand Prix. the F1 race in the Isle of Notre Dame in Montreal so I love racing, I love racing cars I would love a Grand Prix I would play a NASCAR now we talked about Ripley is having a playfield that's packed NASCAR has a friggin packed playfield just packed. Really? I think it's more open. He had less room to deal with here because he made a track that goes all the way around the perimeter of the play field to simulate the racetrack. It's like a hyperloop or the supercharger, but done probably, I think, better, to be honest. So the idea is you plunge on the right side. The same thing for Grand Prix or NASCAR. It's exactly the same, just different artwork and sort of different call-outs and animations. But you plunge, and it kind of goes all the way around the top orbit and kind of comes down the left side, and then it goes under the apron, and there's magnets under there, very much like your Hyperloop in Star Wars or the Supercharger, and it will go back around, and the diverter will either stay open or stay closed, and it will go around again, or it'll come popping out of the bottom of the plane. It is so cool. I'm going to put a video of this in the show notes because it's really, I mean, a bit difficult to describe the way it zips around and then sort of shoots up into the play field kind of from the bottom corner. So cool. The test car. Don't forget the test car. Yes. So the test, can you explain this? This is one of the coolest toys. So in the top center, there's a test car that you can hit it with the flipper or if properly adjusted, when you plunge and it goes around the track a couple times, it will come out and hit the test car for you. If you bash the car enough, it will pop up, exposing a scoop, which you hit it into.
    63:35
    And NASCARs are notorious for the scoop. When it comes out of the scoop, it invariably goes right down the middle on a ton of them. Because it's a bit wiggly, right? Yeah, and it's pointed directly at the middle, and it's just gone. I've actually played games where they put like a rubber cushion in the out hole, which is huge, a huge out hole. So if it goes right down the middle, I actually bounce it out so it doesn't drain. It's got some super smooth plastic ramps, and it's got two ramps, one on the left, one on the right. One of my favorite things in the game, which is goofy, is it's got the checkered flag that moves. Yes. Like it waves back and forth. There's like this little flag. It's like on a solenoid or something. Yep, a little flag, and it just moves back and forth. So when your mystery is lit, this little flag will shake. So nowadays, that would just be a blinking light. Not Pat Lawler, man. Pat Lawler is making a freaking flag that moves. Again, the art's not bad. Ton of inserts again. It's a great game. Ton of inserts. Most people will not like this game. Yeah. Yeah, it's not too Photoshop-y yet, right? and John Yowsey is still sort of hand-drawing a lot of it. One thing that I think is really weird is because of that hyperloop or because of the raceway that goes around the hole outside of the pinball machine, they've had to move the out-hole, like, really close to the flippers, and there's this weird hole that you can see, and it's really off-putting. It really just looks horrible. But that's the out-hole, and then it goes under there, and then under the racetrack and then kind of gets spit up underneath the apron. It's really weird. It's got this truck on the back panel, and it's like the truck that your car arrives to the racetrack in. And there's a diverter at the top of the left ramp. So it'll either come up. I almost forgot that. Yeah, the truck goes by, and you can hit the truck. Yeah. So you hit the truck, and then it'll kind of fall back down and go down the left side into the pit. or it'll kind of go to the right and fall over, I think, or it'll go all the way through the truck and then around to the ramp on the right side.
    65:54
    It's like a multi-stage little toy, but it's just like a spinning thing that sort of spins around. Like, there's a lot going on in this game, and it's really, really cool. And if you're a NASCAR fan, and there's millions and millions of NASCAR fans, there'd be no cooler machine to have kind of in your garage than this thing. Or if you're a European, listen to us. Or you're from down under and you're a big Mark Webber fan or something like that, a Grand Prix sitting in your, what do you call them, your car park. They actually had Alan Bestwick, which was the NASCAR television analyst for NBC, to do a lot of the voiceover. And they actually included the recording of Sammy Hagar's I Can't Drive 55, which is a popular tune among NASCAR fans. But it wasn't Sammy Hagar singing it, which was a piece. Yeah. That pissed some people off. Which is funny, because I believe that his version is in Mustang.
    66:52
    It's like, hey, they finally got the race for that one. There's the number two Miller Lite Dodge, driven by Rusty Wallace. And number 29 GM Goodrich Chevrolet, driven by Kevin Harvick, Richard Childress Racing. I do watch, at least through my father, I know who the names are. And the number 21 motocraft Ford driven by Ricky Wood. Now that is an Escar name right there. Of Wood Brothers Racing.
    67:24
    Now in 2007, they actually re-ran this game as the Dale Jr. Oh yeah, the Jr. It's got 600 of them, mate. I'm going to offend a lot of people with this accent. What about me? Yeah, but you're allowed to. You're like an American. I'm trying to remember. The Dale or Hertz that I saw had chrome. I don't know if they came that way or the one I saw was just chromed out. So if you have a NASCAR that's the Dale one, you got the fancy one. Yeah, they were chrome. Yeah, they were. At least that one in the picture. All the ones I saw were always chrome, so I figured it was some kind of super limited edition thing.
    68:02
    Now, I would say the art, much worse than this one. It's horrible. Because it's very Photoshop. It's not very Photoshop. It's Photoshop. It's literally a picture. Yeah, and on the side it's him, and it's like, you know, Dale Earnhardt Jr. is a big deal. If I was a pinball fan and I had a game made for me and I saw this as the art, I'd reject it. Like, that sucks.
    68:22
    Yeah, but what if it was 2007? And you're like, wow, this computer. Good point. Metallica hadn't been made yet, so we're kind of used to this art at this point. So you're right. Yeah, we're a bit spoiled nowadays. We were spoiled in the 80s and kind of the early 90s, and then it just all went to hell real quick.
    68:43
    Now, this is where we get into a real hot topic here. Oh, yeah. Family Guy. This is the cartoon-licensed television theme, August of 2007. It is a Stern Sam, S-A-M, board set. So we've switched generations. Yep. Designed by Pat Lawler, John Kersich, again, in mechanics. John Yowsey and Margaret Hudson on art. David Thiel on sound. The man himself, David Thiel. Software by Lonnie Robb, Keith P. Johnson, and Dwight Sullivan. Do you know what the SAM stands for in the SAM board? Oh, do tell. I don't know. If anyone knows, or if they just put, because usually they spell it S.A.M.
    69:28
    I always thought it just meant Sam Stern, Gary Stern's dad. I mean, that's what it's named after. Now, whether it actually stands for something, please let us know at our email address, sliverballchronicles.com. The Family Guy TV show. This was a big deal. Big, big, big deal when I was in high school and university. I loved, loved Family Guy. Yeah, this was surprising they got this license, too. It was the American animated sitcom by Seth MacFarlane for the Fox Broadcasting Company. It premiered in January of 1999. After the Super Bowl. I remember that. Right after the Super Bowl. It was a big, big, big deal.
    70:08
    The series centers around the Griffins, a family consisting of the parents, Peter and Lois, their children, Meg, Chris and Stewie, and their anthropomorphic pet dog, Brian. The show is set in the fictional city of Quahog. Let me help you there. The show is set in the fictional city of Quahog, Rhode Island. It exhibits much of its surreal and dark humor in the form of metafictional cutaway gags that are often lampoon American culture. So in 2002, the show was canceled because of low ratings, but because of massive DVD and rerun ratings, the show was brought back in 2004. The show has won three Emmys been nominated 12 times and it just been renewed for its 21st 22nd and 23rd seasons Damn Take that The Simpsons The Family Guy theme, as you alluded to a few moments ago, a little bit controversial. I know Pat did not want to do this game. Pat is about being family friendly. He said that in multiple interviews. Pat says, when I see that line being crossed, I don't like it. why not cast a wide net and try to bring in more people? There is a group in pinball that are really hyper-focused on family-friendly pinball. Why is that such a focus, Ron? Because they have it in their homes and they have kids. Ah, so you're telling me that machines with Satan and boobs and swearing and sperm, just not a big thing. Uh, games like Walking Dead. I mean, look at the art on there. I know there's people who wouldn't own it because of that. Yeah, it's the reason I don't have an Iron Maiden. I mean, even – Couldn't get that by my wife. This is – it's not just in pinball. Back in the day, I think it was – I think it was Valley Midway. I think George Gomez has said this. They had Satan's Hollow, which is a video game, which had his joystick on it, the one he designed. And they couldn't sell them in the South. So they already took away some of the – and the game we just talked about, NASCAR, they kind of hurt – I mean, they had the Grand Prix version. But, I mean, you hurt yourself when you don't have either universal themes. you want the widest reaching theme possible. That's why we're seeing Marvel, we're seeing Jurassic Park. I mean, that was turned into Wheel of Fortune. Why are they doing Wheel of Fortune? Because in Europe, Wheel of Fortune is nothing.
    72:23
    I mean, I'm a big Alec Trebek guy. I'm not dealing with that Wheel of Fortune crap. I want that Jeopardy stuff. You start sort of focusing in even tighter on an already niche market, right and i agree something like something like rick and morty yeah i'm sure he's not a fan of that if you think about family guy you know that was pretty racy and it was often compared to the simpsons which in its time its time was quite racy which is now quite tame and then you look now at rick and morty which is way out there yeah and that's almost like the family guy of today like the bar keeps moving and um you know there's something to be said about that like i have a Simpsons in my house, you know, and my kids play it, they think it's all, you know, fun and games and whatever. But if I had a Rick and Morty and there's like aliens exploding and swearing and all that stuff like that's, you know, that's pretty different. Callouts, callouts, callouts, callouts. Oh my God, the callouts on this game are amazing. Amazing. They created one of the best universes ever with some of the best characters ever and all of the callouts are in there. Which luckily most of the cast is done by Seth MacFarlane, so they only had to pay one guy. Yeah. Stewie Pinball, you want to talk about that? Oh, yes I will. Yes I will. Steve Ritchie would say that Black Knight is the best upper playfield ever until Stewie Pinball. Yeah, that's quite the compliment from somebody like Steve Ritchie, who him and Pat Lawler don't really get along. I think it was the best mini playfield of its kind until Monsters. Yeah, I would totally agree, because it's actually Pinball. Because they took the same flipper bats, they basically took the same thing and they added ramps. Well, actually, what am I saying? What am I saying? I'm going to get corrected again. The other, forget Stewie Playfield had ramps. What am I thinking? They added multi-ball. Yeah. You could lock the ball and play multi-ball mini play field. You know, interesting thing about the Stewie mini play field, it's one of the first times I can remember LEDs on a production game. I remember that because they flashed a little differently. because their LEDs are smaller. They had to fit them in there. Yeah, and it's not just mini flippers. They're like little, teeny, tiny... Oh, they're tiny flippers. Tiny flippers. And they're fun to work on, I'll tell you that. The only issue that I have... Now, I've played Shrek, and we'll get into that in a minute, is that when you're up there, it's the same problem you kind of have with Munsters. It's kind of numb.
    74:58
    Like there's no kinetic feedback. It's just sort of like, you just kind of hear like a click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. You can't feel it, which is not a big deal. But at the same time, when you're playing pinball, it kind of feels weird. Are you saying you're not feeling me? Oh, here we go. It's a lot of fun. This game is a lot. I would probably have one of these. I've never shot one. But theme alone, theme, theme, theme, theme is everything. Come on, man. I own one.
    75:25
    Oh, you owned one. Oh, I own one. I'll say it's the last game I can think of that had the ball saver between the flippers, the pop-up post. Oh, yeah. I can't think of one since then that's had that. Pretty simple. Like a really thick one. It's a pretty simple mech, actually. But the thing about the play field, it has this super cool suey mini play field. However, if you actually take that play field off the game and you just look at the play field, it's barren. There's almost nothing on it at all. I would say that's if I had a criticism.
    75:59
    But, I mean, all your call-outs make up for that. Yeah, it's like Keith Johnson has this reputation for, like, if you need to save your pinball machine's layout, you need Keith Johnson on code. Keith Johnson did the wizard modes on this, so like the TV wizard mode, which is super cool. The fact that if you have any game with a second play field, you have to have some kind of mode where that and the main play field are active at the same time. It's just required, in my opinion. The bash toy is also really cool. It's like a beer. Yep. Pawtucket Patriot. With Brian on the top. The only things that aren't really clear to me, did you know that Peter, everyone has a shot. So, you know, Lois is the spinner. They're pretty obvious. Meg is Meg, where her figurine is. Chris is the ramp. Stewie is like the captive ball because he's got his picture right there of him firing his laser. Brian is the can. But what's Peter? What's Peter's shot?
    77:05
    No, the ramp is the – The answer is it's the pop bumper he's standing on. Oh. I own the game, and I didn't know that. That's a good point. Like, you know, shoot Peter. Okay. Where the hell is that? You just shoot the pop-up where that Peter's standing on. That's his shot. And, I mean, this is a weird Pat Lawler. It's only got one ramp.
    77:28
    Yeah, this is, it is a barren play field, except for the, it's got the Stewie Mini play field and not much else on it. Do you think maybe Pat was a bit unhappy with the project and it sort of shows in his design? Or do you think he was just trying something different? No, he was just trying something different. I don't see him as the kind that would just sabotage the thing because he didn't like it. Well, I don't know if he didn't sabotage it, but maybe he just didn't give it a, you know, 100%. You know? Like, he's a very diplomatic guy. He knows how it goes, and it's totally different than anything else he's done. So maybe that was just the problem. Well, Pat also said he heard feedback. He heard feedback like, there's no way I'm going to buy this game because my wife won't let me. Or I can't put it in a kid-friendly location. I'll get killed. So, enter the Shrek re-theme. Pat says theme is everything, which is kind of funny if you think about the future, but theme is everything. And that's why they thought, okay, how do we save this game? Well, let's re-theme it to Shrek, which was a big deal at the time. The movie Shrek and the series that it would create. Another person who was very instrumental in getting the theme changed was a man named Jersey Jack Guarneri. Let the Italian help you. Thank you. He says they released 1,500 units, then only about 900, and Stern began to worry about all the parts they had. That's true. They had a 1,500 unit, I think, in 2007, and then they had a shorter one in the beginning of 2008.
    79:02
    At that point, they had the idea to make Shrek, which was a Jersey Jack idea. Then when we brought the game out there, people really liked the game, and they bought up the 1,500 machines and a few more. I don't know what the final number was. Then they had to buy more stuff for Family Guy. It did pretty well and was well received in the end. Yeah, so what happened was this, it didn't sort of take off really quickly. It was a bit of a slow burn.
    79:26
    And Stern, along with a lot of the distributors, like Jersey Jack, who was a big distributor at the time, started to sort of worry and panic. So then they're like, oh, God, how do we fix this? And they're like, kid-friendly, quick, the theme. So then they picked Shrek. And they just sort of took the exact same play field, changed the arse, changed the dots and the call-outs, and you've got a whole totally different game. And the cool thing is if you owned either game, you could play either game's software. So I have actually paid a Shrek, played one in Halifax, didn't like it. I switched my family guy out with Shrek for a while.
    80:07
    See, I would probably take the Shrek and make it a family guy. Now, Shrek, of course, is the 2001 American computer animated fantasy romantic comedy film, loosely based on the 1990 fairy tale movies and books that were done by William Stegg, Steg, directed by Adam Adamson, which is a very, directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicki Jensen with their directorial debut.
    80:37
    It also stars Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, John Lithgow as some of the voices. Shrek was, like, I loved the original Shrek and, of course, like all animated features, They just have to take something that's really awesome and just beat it to death. Really, really, really enjoyed this because it's like a spoof of fairy tales in general. Shrek itself had a budget of $60 million, and it did a box office of $484 million, which was huge. One of my favorite characters of all time is the Gingerbread Man from the Shrek movies. when they break his legs off and then they tease him about running away and he can't because, oh, just hysterical. And it also made sure that we had the worst freaking song of all time played over and over and over. That's All Star by Smash Mouth. Jeff Powell, who was the sound guy for the game, he says, Another huge nightmare was in nailing down the licensing of Smash Mouth's All-Star for the opening music of the game.
    81:52
    I recorded an instrumental version of the tune with Dan Peters, a guitarist Chris Granner introduced me two years ago. We also found a singer who was able to piece together for us a reasonable vocal knockoff. Well, Smash Mouth said they would not allow anything but the original recording to go into the game, which of course meant bigger bucks. I have no information as to what Gary paid, but ultimately the original recording starts the game and runs through the first chorus. From that point, it's my instrumental version during the remainder of the general main play. That didn't sound like a lot of fun. So here you go. We're freaking out because we've spent all this time and money with Pat Lawler Designs to get Family Guy, and we're panicking because it doesn't seem to be selling very well. We changed the theme, and now we're running into a whole lot of other costs and a lot of other spending that we have to do with this pinball machine, Shrek.
    82:46
    And that sounds horrible. Maybe that's why they took one of the coils out of the game. Oh, so why don't you explain that? On Family Guy, the Meg shot, if you hit Meg, she bounces up and down. Meg. I like how they made the shot worthless in the game. It's so perfect to the theme. But she bounces up and down. On Shrek, I don't know what character is in the same spot, but they don't do anything. They don't move. The coil isn't there. So that's some money they saved. I'm trying to figure out. There's something else here about Shrek. Well, it's green, and you have the donkey play field instead of the Stewie play field. Yeah, and the donkey, you know. If you're running Shrek software in a family guy, Stewie never faces the right direction because it's coded for donkey. Who's facing in the other direction. Yeah. Yeah, when he moves, it's like he's never in the right position. I think in the end, many more Family Guys were actually sold than Shreks. I don't have those numbers, but I think I heard it. Somebody else mentioned it in a roundabout podcast somewhere, and I didn't write it down, and I'm kicking myself in the butt now that I didn't. But I was looking for the sales numbers, and I can't seem to find them here. I just like that. they're all sound-alikes in the game. Yeah. But they had to be approved by the actual actors. We talked about that a little bit in our previous episode about John Borg, about Mike Myers being sort of difficult to kind of work with or not necessarily wanting to work with the individuals. So they had to do a lot of the lifting directly, lifting of the audio directly from the movies. So that became a thing. And so now we've created this sort of albatross, which is the, you know, family guy Shrek games. And in the end, they sort of don't really, you know, they don't shoot the lights out with sails. Now, in the Williams days, Pat would say that the first question was always about what does the ball do? What do the shots do? And in the Stern era that he found himself, the first question was, what's the theme?
    84:57
    And, of course, Gary was very smart about licensing. He'd been doing it for years. And rebranding a play field into Shrek, I think, was probably a massive risk. Because if you remember something like Jackbot, where Jackbot is the exact same play field as the Pinbot play field, just with a DMD and some updated code, boy, Williams really took it on the chin from people when they said...
    85:23
    Collectors love it. But as Kyle Waller said, our distributors hated us. Don't you dare give us the same play field. Yeah. So they were gambling here with Shrek being the same play field. And it went over okay. Didn't go over bad. But, you know, they didn't rake them over the coals. Do you know who was originally supposed to be Shrek? Who? Chris Farley. No. He actually recorded a good portion of the speech. That's disappointing. Yeah.
    85:56
    More useless information. Yeah, so it was said that, well, I got it here. It said Shrek sold in the hundreds and Family Guy sold about 3,000. So there you go. Yeah, I've seen way more Family Guys than I've ever seen Shrek. But Chip Curtis, the engineer from Pat Waller Design, says, I did the lamp effects and all the low-level code support for Stewie's play field. I also designed the electronics for Stewie's doll and the electronics for the play field. Good or bad, the electronics in the main play field was all mine. LEDs were still hated in pinball. Wow, that's hard to believe. So my philosophy was to stay away from lamp effects used in tungsten lamps. Tungsten lamps? I guess that's just the regular old lamps. Okay, let me try again.
    86:41
    LEDs were still hated in pinball, so my philosophy was to stay away from the lamp effects used in regular lamps and focus on the effects and attributes that LEDs were capable of. Fast.
    86:51
    Fast was what I aimed for. Just make it dazzle. Now, towards the end, corporate took over all the software development for the machine. So you could see that they were concerned about this machine very much from the get-go. And it was bittersweet.
    87:06
    Chip would also say that we weren't happy with the direction that the games were going. So we were grateful to let go of it. But it wasn't the game that we wanted to make. So we were sad to see it go.
    87:17
    So it ended up being a bit of a mess, this game. And I think this is sort of where Pat and Pat Lawler designs, you know, they started to kind of not be all warm and cozy with everybody at Stern, and they started growing apart.
    87:34
    This brings us into the next game. CSI. It's a television show theme. November of 2008. It's a Stern-Sam board set designed by Pat Lawler and John Borg. John Yowsey, Margaret Hudson on art, David Thiel on sound software by Lonnie Ropp, Keith P. Johnson, Lyman Sheets Jr., and Mike Sviet. Wait a minute, Pat Lawler and John Borg? Pat Lawler works alone. What happened here? What happened here, Ron? Well, one thing that happened was CSI, someone on CSI, the producer, the director, one of the main people who ran the show was a pinhead. so that's where it originally got pitched that's how the game came to be and CSI is still a fairly big show kind of now, the different spin-offs of it CSI was a big show its first five or six seasons like huge by the time they made this game several of the cast members have left including I think the main guy what the hell is his name? William Peterson the actor, he had just left before the game came out, but he's on the backless. He's the guy that would take his glasses off all the time? No, that's David Caruso. That's the CSI Miami you're thinking of. So he left as I remember, he left the show, but the game had him on there, so he was still on the show when it was in development. They left him on the backless which is smart because he was the main name. This game is probably best known for its art package. You mean Photoshop art? This is the, like, coming from a guy who has a Tron, this is like the pinnacle of really bad Photoshop stern art. You know, like, this is bad. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. It has one good art element. Did you know it has a custom shooter rod? No. Like from the factory? Yep. It's not like a $200 add-on? the shooter rod it has a thumb print on the end of it oh it's like a police thing so it's so cool now CSI was a big deal but the biggest deal is this amazing skull lock that this game has oh wait before we get into that let's chat a little bit about this art. So John Yowsey was the lead on this art. So he would always work with Pat Lawler. He's worked with Pat Lawler on everything since Earthshaker.
    90:24
    And he's always been a pen and ink airbrush kind of guy. John says, I avoided digital for a long time as much as I could. It was a hostile takeover. I went kicking and screaming, but I ended up embracing it. I was lucky to get into it when I did, when I can kind of transition easily to the new thing. Yeah, it was a big move from physical to digital, Arsh. The good old days. I'm traditionally trained, you know, and I learned to love the paint splatter and the stink, you know, the airbrush overspray. We all had big exhaust fans in our homes, and it was what we were born into. this is obviously when photoshop was really the the quick and easy get it done but photoshop then is not what sort of like photoshop or light room or whatever there is now right this is very much the sort of the beginnings of using digital art and now that we have some perspective of like 10 years and looking back at this thing, it's like, oh my god, it's bad. But what isn't bad on this machine is an amazing toy, which is the Skull Lock. Can you explain some details on that one? I've never played the CSI. Oh, really? Well, you shoot the ramp, and it goes into a skull, and there's an eye socket. Then he lowers down. I'm actually trying to remember it myself. I believe he starts He starts low. Then he raises up, and you get a ball in his eye. Then he lowers again.
    92:01
    Then he'll raise up again, and you get another ball in his eye from two locks. I think he just hit the ramp over and over, if I recall.
    92:08
    It's a cool back. Then it has a centrifuge. Then it comes all the way up, and then it falls down. Yeah. It's so cool.
    92:16
    Now, the thing is, when this game was being made, somewhere in the middle of the production, Pat Waller quits. Oh, he's done. He's done. I don't think I've ever read too much detail about what exactly happened, but he quit and Borg had to come in to finish up the game. He doesn't talk about this in this 2010 podcast, because it's only a couple of years out since he left, right? So it's still maybe a bit fresh. Nor have I heard any interviews later where he's talked about it either. I remember when it was in development, I remember being at Expo in October a month before it came out, and Lawler was there, but he just stopped by to visit and left quickly, and the word was around, like, yeah, he quit, he's not on the game anymore. Yeah, so Pat Lawler Design sort of around this time also more or less dissolves, right? You don't have the formal Pat Lawler Design anymore. The website now, this is 10 years later, 12 years later, doesn't exist anymore. Now it might on paper and tax filings, but it's not Pat Lawler Designs anymore. It's Pat Lawler working for Jersey Jack. Around the time that Williams went under, Pat created Pat Lawler Designs,
    93:30
    and that's where he would do his independent contracting. And he brought in guys like Chip Curtis, who did a lot of the programming and mechanics. He brought on John Yowsey, who did an exclusive contract on all of his designs. So he sort of had created this kind of faux company itself. And in fact, Pat Lawler Designs was in talks with Gene Cunningham after he bought a lot of the Williams assets. We'll get into a whole Gene Cunningham episode some other time. They never did actually come together with Gene Cunningham, and that's when Pat Lawler Designs ended up over at Stern. And we can see that that sort of, you know, it lasted, what, like eight years about? And then it sort of ended, and it ended in a way where nobody who works around it really talks about it. So we'll leave it at that, I guess. Yeah. I've never heard anything from either side. Brings us sort of into the post-Great Recession of 2008 era. And that was a whole mess of a thing. Now, you know, as much as we are a history pinball podcast. That could be a podcast in itself. Yeah. They said the economy collapsed right after Expo 2008. Stern fired everybody.
    94:39
    They did the right sizing. I think it was called at the time. But, I mean, they fired. They just had Borg as their only... Cutting costs like crazy. Yeah, Borg was their only programmer. Lyman Sheets and Lonnie Ropper, their only coders. And they started making games like... Well, they had the games that were in development before this happened that came out, which was first CSI and then 24. They were the last full-featured games for the $4,000 price point or whatever it was. and then they did like NBA, Big Buck Hunter, Iron Man, Avatar. How little could we put into a game? Pretty much, yeah. That's when they get rid of like the service rails underneath the play field and start putting pegs in. Oh, yes, they started that with Iron Man. They're using plastic aprons instead of metal aprons.
    95:32
    Like they are trying to save a dollar wherever they can save a dollar. And, you know, God bless Gary Stern and those guys for doing that because that's a tough call, man, and they're still here because of it. And the world was totally different, man. Everybody was incredibly panicked about manufacturing in general. You know, major companies like Ford and Chevrolet, you know, having major issues with their finances. You know, Chrysler going bankrupt, that kind of stuff, right? So it's a tumultuous time in everything, let alone pinball. it was two years after that where Pat Lawler is doing his the podcast which quite a few of these ancient or older quotes come from and he generally said that pinball now has two paths to either live or die. The first path was to sell the products only to collectors and to sell as many as you can to people who will put them into their basement. So that's it. You sit back and you double down on people like you and I and those probably listening to this podcast that are buying them for their home and you completely forget about everybody else. So they have a different set of needs and wants, right? They're going to want deeper code, they're going to want less stuff to break because you can't really work on them and that kind of stuff.
    96:52
    He said path two, that's where you try to revive pinball as a profit device and One that is designed to take money.
    97:02
    Where pinball is a return on investment device. You buy this device, people put money into it on location, and you make money. So if you're a manufacturer, your main goal is to make sure that those operators make money. Pat says, you need to attract new customers to the game. You need to make machines like they were in the heyday. You need to be willing to take a risk. People want to see something new. We're past the point where you can keep stuffing toys in the game and people will think it's cool In this time, in 2010, what do you think Stern was? Which one of those two?
    97:34
    They were definitely not the home one They were more the operator than the home Yeah, but they were like this really wishy-washy time, right? Like, they kind of didn't have deep code Well, they were trying to survive, and honestly, Stern Until the premiums and the LEs and stuff started coming out They did not really cater to the home buyer at all Yeah, that's for sure. Now, if you look at something like Lord of the Rings or the Simpsons Pinball Party, with their code and all of that crazy stuff, they're very much, you know, that's very much focused at the home market. Like, yes, they did probably decent on location, but long ball times. They play too long. That's one of the reasons they started going simpler and shorter ball times. Right. So you can see Pat's critique here is kind of like, okay, well, either you make a bunch of deep code or you don't. but you can't have an unspired game either. He seems to be going for path two. Yeah. But he joined a company that is clearly on path one. Right, which is kind of where we're kind of leading the crowd here as we go through today's podcast. But it's an interesting thing to say, okay, well, you need to take a risk. Clearly Stern was not taking any risks in 2010, and they probably wouldn't take any risks until maybe 13 or 14. Like ACDC might have been a bit of a risk. With a lot of the toys and stuff they put into that? Nah, it's a pretty safe game. And the theme is perfect. When was the last one that they took a risk on? Really? Took a risk?
    99:03
    Hey, Wheel of Fortune. Yeah, that's risky business. But you can see that they're playing it safe, right? And they have very much been playing it safe since. But you can't just keep stuffing toys in, he says, right? Like, that people think are cool. You've got to have more there. he wants things to be more Bally Williams-esque is what I read from that quote, right? Hence the heyday, yes. Now the complaint around this time is that code was becoming too complex and I remember when I first after a few months into the hobby I found an old documentary which everybody in this industry hates called Special When Lit. In there there's a part where Dwight Sullivan is trying to explain the rules to Pirates of the Caribbean. Code is becoming too complex. People want it to be just like it was in the Bally Williams days, right? We're at a Pandora's box now, right? We're way ahead of that. So there's a lot of time now where people are sitting back that were in the industry and they're trying to say, how do we save it? Because quite frankly, a lot of people said that it would be dead by now. And we're going through another golden era. Pat had a couple of suggestions as to what you can do, like actual specifics as to what you can do to change things. Lots of people basically know how to fix things, but they rarely actually do it. So, for example, I know, well, Pat Lawler would eventually go ahead and do it. So here's a couple of his suggestions. Pat says, you need to make a small video thing in the game, a trap door with a character waving at you that you hit with the ball. I have the wherewithal to do all this innovation, but do I see anyone beating down the path to my door to do it?
    100:41
    That more or less sounds like, hey, I got all these great ideas, and I'm just sitting here and nobody wants them. A trap door with a character waving at you sort of sounds like dialed in, doesn't it? Yeah, it sounds like the QED guy. So, I mean, Gary Stern doing the best that he can with what he has. And, you know, the company in the way it is and manufacturing within, you know, North America, you know, that was difficult, right? It basically took us, you know, 2008 all the way to really, what, 20, 2016, 2018 to really start digging our way out of that.
    101:17
    I would say, oh, economy or pinball? Yeah, just in general, right, to get things kind of feeling more normal-ish when it comes to outside of pinball in general, but sort of the economy as a whole. Like things kind of finally started to feel pretty good until this whole COVID thing. Pat would say that every bump in pinball came from a technological innovation. It was some sort of technical innovation that ended up pushing it a little bit further. He said that the problem isn't ideas. The problem is building those ideas. As production numbers go down, the parts manufacturing costs go up, and this vicious cycle continues to take place. So it gets more expensive to build games as your production goes down, and your production goes down because you're not innovating and putting enough cool things in your game. So it's like this is terrible, terrible. It's like circling the toilet drain. Larry DeMar says there are 99 bad ideas and one good one. It's our job to find the one good one. In his post-Stern years, Pat basically did his home. He had his own home shop outside of Chicago where he'd been for many years. While he was at Stern and even before he was at Stern, he spent a lot of time creating prototyping materials, CNC machines, all of that stuff at home. He worked from home before it was cool, right, Ron? He was ahead of his time. During this time, Pat would really work on a lot of redemption games for kids, which he described as technologically advanced beyond pinball, which is quite funny to think that those redemption games were more advanced than pinball, but I would probably agree with him. John Yowsey would also leave Pat Lawler Designs along with the others, and Pat was asked if he would return to designing, and he said that we need to shake up what these games do first. Then maybe I'll give it another shot. So things got to change a little bit. So basically it says, I don't want to work at Stern. Isn't that what that sounds like?
    103:15
    So whatever happened with that breakup, it was a whole thing. So where does Pat end up next? I don't know. Where does he end up next?
    103:25
    So Pat goes to Jersey Jack Pinball. Yeah. This new Youngstart company. A Youngstart? They're an upstart, too. Upstart, yes, this upstart company. What I read about sort of Jersey Jack's beginnings is they were quite rocky. Is that true?
    103:45
    Yeah, pretty much. We'll do a whole Jersey Jack episode. Yeah, I don't want to give away too much. But they had a difficult time to go, cost overruns, machines maybe being sold too much. Then all of a sudden they were bought out by an angel investor who's very much changed the face of the company now. During the time that Pat came aboard, JJP was trying to finalize the Hobbit machine, and they ended up in financial troubles.
    104:15
    They were acquired by the investor group who now runs the company. They needed these new investors. They wanted to really have an overseer of the head of design, Jersey Jack, the actual Jersey Jack, and the leadership team thought that maybe Pat Lawler would be a good addition to the team. With some of Pat's ideas and thoughts, they started building up a better model shop at a new facility in Chicago. They started to tool things up with a bunch of different machines that could do different designs and different things that they could use. And since that time, they have actually moved 100% of the manufacturing and design and everything, all of it, from Jersey to Chicago. Pat says going from good to great is to build them and fix all the problems. Steve Ritchie used to say all pinball machines look great on a piece of paper. Yeah, so along with the management position at JJP, Pat was also able to design machines. There is a rumor that Pat demanded that he design an original game when he joined JJP He is one of the reasons that he would come aboard. Basically, a rider on his contract, which is not true in any way. And he has been given a lot of flack for his first machine at Jersey Jack, one that I really, really disagree with. Pat's first Jersey Jack pinball machine was dialed in. Pat says, after Jack had done the first JJP games, he called me up and said, Pat, will you do an original game? I told him that was suicide. You shouldn't do an original game in this day and age. People would never buy it. Lucky for me, it turned out I was wrong. In the history of what we do, it's very dangerous to do that. Almost everything in recent times has been a licensed product in one way or another This is an interesting quote for a couple of reasons One of them is that it was Jersey Jack idea to make an original game This is directly from Pat. This was not Pat Lawler's idea. The other thing was that Pat Lawler told Jack that it was probably a very bad idea and nobody will buy something that's not a theme. And then he says, huh, good thing I was wrong. And he wasn't wrong. It did not sell. It is their least selling game I believe And I think probably still their best Hmm Okay so I was told that I could use this Specific quote Dialed in is my favorite Lawler game And that comes from Dennis Creasel From the Eclectic Gamers Podcast And the Pinball Show He also said some other things about Pat Lawler But that was off the record The other Pat Lawler Another story I remember is before he started working at Jersey Jack,
    107:10
    as the renaissance of pinball was picking up steam, he was at a bar somewhere, and they were getting ready to do a tournament, and they had some guy there that was, like, really into Steve Ritchie. He was, like, really excited, and he starts talking to Pat. He has no idea who Pat Waller is. And he's, like, that's Steve Ritchie, man. This game's the shit. Then he asked him, like, have you ever played any pinball? and Pat, you know, back in the day, I played some pinball.
    107:38
    Yeah, I might have done a thing or two. That was almost like it kind of got the juices flowing. I can't remember which show he said that on, but I just remember that particular interview. I really, really like Dialed In. Like, I don't know what it is about, like, I'm very much a theme person, right? Like, I got a Simpsons and a Tron. I'm all about theme, right? You're one for two. That's good. Right? Like, I love, love theme, right? And I don't know if I would ever buy a machine that isn't a theme. But for some reason, it makes me smile so much to see dialed in and to play dialed in. It's just, it's whimsical. It's fun. It's a bit strange. It makes me laugh. It's a great game all around.
    108:29
    And I was there. During the launch. I was there for the original reveal. Yeah. Raymond did say that dialed in is dope, which I think is how the young kids say cool nowadays. It's lit or something. Yes. And that's a direct quote, by the way. Yes. When they unveiled this at the Chicago Pinball Expo, you know, we're talking about, you know, Pat always seems to not be in the greatest of moods. This was polar opposite. This might have been the first time I ever saw him smile. He was 100% invested into this. Now, is this the video that you can see on YouTube that I think I've included in the show notes? There might be, if it's the reveal stream. Yes. That wasn't a stream, but it was the reveal. Yes. He was literally, they had like a stage. They had the games below the stage. I think it was three of them, two or three of them. And he's just standing up on stage just smiling for the whole thing. and if you had any doubts about his influence at Jersey Jack when they unveiled the cabinet, number one it's not a wide body because he's not going to do a wide body doesn't want to do a wide body he's very much on the record about how much he hates that and one of the first things he says is we've done a redesign of the cabinet we've taken the electronics from the body and put them into the back box where they belong like ooh like okay so I think I know who made that decision Shots fired. So, yeah, I think you get to see at least some of his influence at Jersey Jack. That's just like, no, we're putting this stuff in the back box. The only time I've ever played a dialed in is when I'm on vacation. So nobody has one of these in the Atlantic region as far as I know, or there's nobody who will let me in their house or has ever talked to me, which is quite possible. But I have played these on location, and it doesn't matter where I go, I always play this game. I think one of the reasons for that is the ramps and the flow and the kind of interesting things the ball does. Pat, outside of his home, he very much has a shop. He said a few times in some of these videos that we're only as good as the models that we can build. So his shop was very much a throwback to the Bally Williams philosophy where he could experiment and play with a lot of these toys. This machine, the ramps are, you know, the machine's called dialed in, but the ramps are dialed in. The ramps are interesting. The orbits are interesting. Everything feels really good. He had a lot of time and a lot of fun designing this. a lot of the ramp work and play field stuff was done while the engineering team was actually trying to finish up the Hobbit. So he had a lot of lead time to sort of play and experiment because they were still trying to get the other machine. And you worked on this for a year and a half, two years. It is a long time. You can really see that in the tweaking. One of those things is the orbit ramp. So the plunge of the orbit ramp. Now, it's a very unique shot. So it's the right orbit, and it goes up into a ramp that kind of comes through the middle and then back down to the right side. Pat wasn't sure if it would work. Now, you're asking yourself, well, come on, everybody's done a, you know, George Gomez has done a playfield to a ramp thing like a million times. What does he mean? Well, he really wanted to change the way the playfield ramp transition went. Usually it's a wire form that's kind of hammered into the playfield.
    112:02
    Pat Lawler didn't like that design. He didn't think it was, it wasn't smooth enough. It didn't go quick enough.
    112:08
    What is it? Now, I don't know, Ron. What is it? What is that transition like on the play field? What does it look like? I actually don't know. It's in the back of the play field. You'd have to like, you have to really look close in there. Might even have to take some stuff off if you want to really look at what it's doing. You can tell when you, when you plunge that ball or you shoot that orbit, it is incredibly smooth. That it is. Like where it kind of goes halfway up and then comes back down like monster bash. It's not as tight and as quick As the one in Lord of the Rings by George Gomez As well Whatever he did there You can tell it worked And it worked because he had time to develop it You're really into the ramp What about the cell phone I love Dialed In I'm like the craziest person out there People think I'm like insane But he's got mom jeans in the middle of the play field But the cell phone It's great. It's got a cell phone. See, the thing is, it's a bizarre theme, and either you get it or you don't. And if you get it, like, when I played the prototype, I just, I got it. It's like, okay, the phone, all these disasters, goofy characters. I like goofy stuff. Music was killer. David Thiel, a Jersey Jack. The sound is just. The sound is insane. And it was nice to play a non-wide-body Jersey Jack game, to be honest, that shot that good.
    113:35
    I just was never, well, I was never a huge fan of, you know, Wizard of Oz or The Hobbit. But this thing, yeah. When I played it, it's like, I may have to get a Jersey Jack game. Yeah, I feel bad that it gets as much crap as it does, because I think it's a great game. But it is a weird thing. It's totally a weird thing. What's the cell phone? What are the disasters? Are you causing the disasters? Is the phone causing the disasters? Are you the bad guy? What exactly? What's QED? What's this woman in the back? What is she there for? What's going on? There's people driving. They're like, theme is everything, David. The reason it's not a good game is because it's not SimCity or it's not, you know, Guardians of the Galaxy. And I'm like, yes, I know that. But I'm not, like, everybody listening to this is like some weirdo enthusiast in the industry, right? He said it, not me. We're able to look at it differently than somebody who's coming into a random showroom and sees Guardians of the Galaxy or Dialed In. Right? Like, they're going to go Guardians of the Galaxy because they don't know any better. They don't know the ramps are too tight. And the LCD screen sucks. Wow. Sorry, John Borg. Now they see Groot. And like, that's Groot. I know what that is. Right. So I realize that, yes, the theme is better and the theme is everything. But, man, I would buy a dialed in if it wasn't a fortune here in Canada. They're still available. The theater is pretty cool, yeah. I could probably get a CE if I wanted.
    115:05
    The theater originally had a drop target in the middle, and it was taken out. What do you mean costing a JJP, right? Like, they never cost anything. Well, no, according to Pat, he says, you put things in you think will be fun, cool, or exciting, and you might learn they ain't. You also have to think about the kinetics or putting wires on the underside of the playfield. All the costs should be reviewed. So instead they have a hologram in there. Yeah. The drones, those little drones on the right side, every now and then you hit them and they spin. They just go. Yeah. They're from Amazon. So they ordered them from China. They come in from China. JJP sort of like creates a little circuit board and solders them all on.
    115:47
    And they did have problems with those. A lot of them died. Did yours die? Mine still stand. Yeah. So, you know, you give them a call up and they'll replace them. You know, let's talk about the development of this theme, right? Where did this theme come from? Well, Pat, you know, obviously they sit back and they go, what's popular with kids today? Mobile phones, right? Like, I don't necessarily think that that's how the discussion went. But, you know, everybody's got a mobile phone. Your mobile phone runs your frigging house now. Even my Christmas lights get turned on by my mobile phone. Well, they originally called it Killer App. And they didn't think that putting Killer in it was a really good idea for a location play.
    116:33
    And then they thought, okay, well, if the cell phone's in there, maybe, like, the secret government organization lost the phone. and this phone was able to control like a bunch of secret government weather control disaster devices. At the beginning of the project, they actually didn't have an artist because John Yowsey wasn't really available at first. So what they did is they commissioned another artist who just did a bunch of concepts and a lot of those concepts came out of these like 50s robot B-movie kind of style, Which I think would probably have been better. What do you think? I agree. And Betty, if you're wondering, Betty is the woman in the back of the game. Like the diverter. The diverter. She's supposed to be a representation of a giant character that sold things on the side of Route 66. Yeah, so instead of like a robot, they kind of wanted a character from like 50s B-movies that would kind of like push the ball away. She's like one of those like roadside signs. And the QED is an exterminator. He's the exterminator dude. They put a spider on the post and the mech didn't fit. So the spider stayed. They were going to jump up and down like scared stiff. There's a lot of kind of like collaboration going on in this thing, right? It was like a 50s B-movie with like giant spiders and, you know, killer robots and mutant rats and spiders and zombie cats, they would say. and it just didn't make it in in the end, which I think is kind of cool.
    118:12
    One thing that Pat had predicted in that 2010 TopCast interview was putting screens under the glass. Well, this is the first pinball machine that has three screens. So it's got the large LCD monitor in the back glass. It has the phone under the... Above the scoop. Above the scoop, right. It has the phone above the scoop, and it also has the theater to the left. So these are three independently run screens and monitors, all of them being run by the same operating system, all of them running different things at different times. that's seriously difficult. Like, that's a technological feat that I don't think people give enough credit to that machine for. What do you think? Do you think that's easy? Like, come on.
    119:11
    I'm not a programmer. I'm guessing not. It's like just drag and drop, right? Just put it in the file. And don't forget it has a camera.
    119:20
    Yeah. That's a cool bit. It was actually Jersey Jack's idea to put the camera in the game. Jack's got some bad ideas, but, man, he's got some good ideas sometimes, too. They're still using the camera. One of the biggest issues with an original theme is what do you do with the LCD screen? What do you do with animations? And we know, hands down, unquestionable, 100%, Jersey Jack has the best screen animations. Sometimes there's too many of them, and there might be too much going on, but they are the best.
    119:50
    Now, with The Hobbit, you've got 17 hours of, you know, pretty darn good movies. Now, they're not Lord of the Rings good, but they're still very good. 17 hours? How many movies did they make? They did three movies. But they got the extended versions of them, right? They're all like four hours. Even four hours is 12. Yeah, but then they've got the special leases. Five and a half hours? Oh, my God. That's way too much. They don't have that with Dialed In, right? They've got to make their own stuff. So Dan Moulton's one of the head guys on the Dialed In team. And he was really integral with trying to figure out what the heck to do on this screen. He said we had to come up with some ideas. We thought, how about a 24-hour newscast? They were big, so we went with that. We could have news tickers, real headlines, and funny headlines. Except the Cubs win the World Series. That was wishful thinking. Except they did. I know. So this machine was designed well before the Cubs did the World Series. So dialed in, predicted the Cubs winning the World Series is what you're saying. Exactly. And they probably won the World Series because of Jersey Caps. 100%. Yeah. Another thing that they implemented beyond putting the electronics in the correct place was changing the arch plaques. Can you explain the complexity of the arch plaques? I think so, only because I actually have the game. They gave you options. You could either have pricing cards in it, like an operator, or you could configure it differently, like more of a home collector, so it has the art on it. The funny thing is, guess how I did it? I put the cards in there like it's a routed game. Why would you do that? Just because of what I'm used to. I hate you. And it looks good. Because they've got to line up like all the other ones? No. I'm used to my cards. Okay. Do you read the card before you play it? I should, but I don't. Do you have the dollar amount per play, or is it all, say, three plus? Oh, I have to look at it. It's the cards that came with the game, so. Yeah, it's like a dollar a play or whatever. Now, you mentioned this a little bit. David Thiel on sound. And I'd say one of the biggest losses that Jersey Jack has had has certainly been David Thiel.
    122:01
    I think the sound on Dialed In is probably one of the best sound packages ever. And the only one that's maybe better than that is probably Chris Granner's The Next Generation or Thiel's Tron and probably Jersey Jack's Pirates of the Caribbean. Like, those are some solid sound packages. Deadpool. Deadpool's is amazing as well. Shout out to Jerry Thompson. Love me some Jerry. But David Thiel met Pat Lawler while making video games in 1983.
    122:38
    David had heard Pat was making a game for JJP. I sent an email to Pat to say hi because I recently finished up at Stern. basically a great to see you back. Pat emailed me back and said, do you want to do sound for my game? Well, you don't say no to Pat. Yeah, and I would say that this was an amazing collaboration. During the Lord Lawler dust-up of 2020, it was said that David Thiel, after doing this game, said that he would never work with Pat Lawler again, which turned out to be completely untrue because David Thiel himself said that, like everybody, you have disagreements, when you work on a pinball machine together, but he would undoubtedly work with Pat Lawler again. Yes, he did. He did say that. Anything else you want to talk about dialed in?
    123:28
    It's awesome. It's a great game. So to get a Jersey Jack machine, the problem in Canada, especially with those Stern LE, the Jersey Jack machines, sort of those high-end, kind of above-a-pro price points, is the cost of actually getting them in your house. So you add 30% in the currency, and then we have a harmonized sales tax in most of our provinces where you add an additional 15% sales tax on top of that. So if you wanted like a Jersey Jack, you know, LE,
    124:05
    you're looking at about $11,000 US. And if you can get a use dialed in, you're probably looking at $8,300 U.S. So it's not, you know, particularly cheap or easy to get a Jersey Jack machine, which is a bummer because I would totally own a dialed in. I just have expensive children, and they destroy all of my disposable income.
    124:34
    Now, it was a couple more years before Pat Lawler was heard of again on the Jersey Jack stage with Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
    124:48
    This, of course, is done from the beloved Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory movie. And, of course, that was based on the book by Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But, of course, we're talking about the one with Gene Wilder in it. Not the one with Johnny Depp. We're not even, don't, yeah, no, no, we're not talking about that. Oh, okay. Don't even start. This movie was a commercial failure. It had a budget of $3 million back in 1970, and when it was released in 1971, it had a box office of $4.5 million. It has, however, turned into a massive American musical cult classic. But they made money. How is it a loss? Well, you never want to make a million and a half more than what you spent. Right? You want to make $14 million, not four. Okay. I mean, since then, it's a cult classic. Like, this is one of the movies of my childhood. I love every song in this movie. I love the art style in the movie and how weird it is. I love how Gene Wilder, like, murders children and has funny songs about murdering children. Like, this is Gene Wilder's probably best movie. What do you think?
    126:20
    He was in Blazing Saddles. Oh, yeah, Blazing Saddles. And Young Frankenstein, so. Yeah, that's true. outside of a Mel Brooks film. Oh, okay. There you go. We're going to shorten that up a little bit. All right, all right. I liked Her Crazy. That was pretty good.
    126:39
    Eh, not really. I've read the Roald Dahl book to my daughter, who doesn't even know what's going on, but she loved Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory when I showed her, and she loves everything about this world as much as I do, and it brings me back to being a child. So when the rumor was that Pat Lawler, one of my favorite designers, was working on Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, one of my favorite movies of all time. You pre-ordered. And I also heard that it was done by Jersey Jack, who is, you know, the new Bally Williams, the not-cost-cutting brand. Ooh. The excitement was real.
    127:25
    And then it just kind of went, eh. What do you think? Are you being negative? I'm not being negative. I'm being controlled in my emotions.
    127:38
    It shoots like a dream. Like a dream. It might even shoot better than dialed in. There, I said it. I don't know. It's got the four flippers, man. It's got the pop bumpers on the left side. It shoots great. The art is, they were handicapped by the license. Let's just say that.
    128:04
    I would say a lot of the shortcomings in this game are not the fault of the design team or Jersey Jack. No, they're licensing limitations. But are the licensing limitations, which I think probably got tighter and tighter and tighter as development went. I think that they were given sort of an idea, they went in one direction, then the licensor looked at it, and then they overruled it, and then they had to water it down a little bit. For example, the biggest critique is, where are the songs that we love from the musical that we love?
    128:39
    Well, there's probably an issue there, maybe, with licensing. I don't know what that is. They haven't talked about it. They won't talk about it, because that's not how things work in the industry. You'll find out ten years down the road. but something's going on there with licensing and it's a bit of a bummer.
    128:57
    This is also the first pinball machine by Jersey Jack which had a feature in the limited edition and the high-end collector's edition which was stripped out of the on-location standard edition which is the Wonka Vader ball lock. Which is a change for Jersey Jack. who said very early on they would never strip anything out of a game. Every game would have the same features.
    129:26
    So with Willy Wonka, I believe it was the first one, where they were like, nope, we're going to have an addition on location, we're going to take out a mech so we can make it cheaper. Yeah, they're leaning a little bit more into that sort of Stern-esque differentiating factor. But taking that mech out and simplifying the art, they were actually able to significantly reduce the MSRP of the standard edition, which then they were able to do again in the latest Jersey Jack Game, Guns N' Roses. One thing that is a bit silly about the limited edition is it's limited to 5,000. Yeah. Do you think Jersey Jack has sold 5,000 of any of their machines? No.
    130:14
    The CE, collector's edition, is limited to 500. Do you think they sold all of those? I don't know. Probably not. I do very much like this game. I did play it a couple of times. I've played it a couple of times again when I'm on vacation or had been on vacation. I do enjoy it. It shoots really well. I feel like for this game to shine, I think you have to have it at home. I think you've got to really sit down, really digest it, really play it, and then I think it's going to really come out. because right out of the gate, I don't think it catches you quite like some of the other Jersey Jack games. Do you agree with that? Yeah, it's Willy Wonka. It's sold better than dialed in. Yeah, of course, which is, you know, a bit crazy. Some of the comments that I got here from a few individuals when I asked them their thoughts on Willy Wonka,
    131:07
    Dr. John Cosson would say that Willy Wonka's rules are too confusing to advance the tickets. And he owned the game. and he owned the game. Again, I plead ignorance on rules. It's shot good. I know you hit the gobstopper a bunch of times, the multi-ball starts. Raymond Davidson, number one ranked IFPA pinball player, Raymond Davidson would say, Wonka would be dope, except for the pop bumper situation. Similar to Dialed In, I wish Pat Lawler made a path for the ball to escape to go to the upper flipper. That sounds like a tournament player critique. Not really. He didn't say anything about the rules. I totally agree. I actually very much agree with that. I feel like if it had a way to get into that sort of upper flipper to the left side thing. I also find the spinner placement, although it's kind of cool in Willy Wonka, you know, a bit of a bummer. I love spinners. I love watching spinners. But it's kind of in an odd place behind a ramp, kind of. You can only access it from that upper left flipper. the object is to collect Wonka Bars on the ramps which feeds into your bonus and then Wonka Bars will kind of unlock various modes as you start collecting them. It's a different kind of way than most Jersey Jack games are. Well I know there's a lot of stuff on the display a lot of different statuses that's the one thing we actually didn't talk about with Dialed In it has probably the simplest rule set of any Jersey Jack game by far Yeah. I mean, it does not have the complexity that the other ones do. Maybe that's another reason that I liked it. Initially, I was very much all in on a Willy Wonka. Like, if I were to buy a Jersey Jack, I was like, oh, this is the one. And then I played it, and I did really enjoy it, and I thought it was fun. And the art does not bother me as it does some people. I'm probably a bit forgiving that way, maybe. This sound package was, it really bummed me out. There's a lot, like, It's dinging and chinging, and it sounds like a gambling machine. It's whimsical. It's, I don't know, it's like they're too loud or they're taking over too much. And again, maybe that's just because I haven't had it at home or I haven't had it at a location where it's been close and I've played it and played it and played it. Like, the more I played Star Wars, the more it grew on me. And I feel like this game would be exactly the same. I think the more you kind of figure it out and play around. But I'll tell you, that Gobstopper toy, that Bash toy with the gobble hole subway, that's an awesome toy. I don't think people give that enough credit.
    133:44
    That's some difficult mechanics going on on that thing. So the ball doesn't go flying in all directions. That's a heck of a lot cooler than, you know, the pop-up toy that's on Avengers. Like, come on. The Avengers Subway thing is nowhere as cool as this. And everybody fawns over Keith Elwin's, you know, spinner, raising spinner on Avengers Subway, and they don't fawn over this thing. To be fair, Keith doesn't get the budget that Pat gets. Okay. I'll give you that one. I think Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is actually a pretty great game. It does have some shortcomings. I think it gets maybe a little more grief than it should. It's probably, I think it's either third best-selling game, then fifth best dialed in. Yeah, there's some exciting stuff going on at Jersey Jack, and I'll tell you, this Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was very much a turning point, I would say, in the history of Jersey Jack pinball. Something changed when this machine came out. The investors have control, and they instituted a new policy. That's why there's a standard now. Well, what's next for Pat? So, allegedly, Pat is working on another fantastic theme of my childhood and my children's childhood. Toy Story. Yeah.
    135:11
    Whew. So that brings us to the end of our Pat Lawler Pinball's Roller Coaster Tycoon. He came into Stern. He's at sort of the lower end of his career. It's not really the greatest of games, although I think some of them are a heck of a lot of fun and a lot. Certainly bring a smile to my face. And now he's very much ended back up on that top of that roller coaster, I would say, with a leading role at Jersey Jack Pinball, two amazing games at Jersey Jack, and I would say the sky's the limit at Jersey Jack. Well, Pat says, I grew up drawing games and being a game geek, which ended up serving me well. I spent my life not knowing it, being in pinball. Ron, do you have any closing thoughts on Pat Lawler? Dialed in rules.
    136:00
    A lot of his Stern games are really good. Give him more of a chance. Some of the rule sets might not be the greatest, but the play fields are good. Certainly more original than a lot of other designers of the era. I'll say that. I'll keep my comments to this era. Go out and have some fun. Play some fun Pat Lawler games. He's one of the best designers out there. Play some Roller Coaster Tycoon. Take out the troll. Just remove him from the game. Just burn it in your backyard in effigy. 2020 has been our first year. We're very much at the end of the year here with our podcast. This is our 10th episode.
    136:36
    Wow. I've had a lot of fun so far. 10 episodes. At first, I was very concerned that I wouldn't have enough content to get through the year. But as I continue my research, I find more and more topics that I could research more on, and we could make those independent. So I'm looking forward to 2021. Do you realize 10 shows means 30 hours of recorded content? Holy moly. For those out there, we typically record for, and it's amazing, it always ends up being three hours. Yeah, well, I always time them out to be about 5,000 to 5,500 words in our show. Oh, really? Which ends up to be approximately three hours of me talking on and on. Now, see, on your other podcast, Slam Tilt Podcast, you and Bruce are much, much smoother. You guys know each other. You know how to edit out all of Bruce's Bruce-isms, all of his stumbling. Oh, no, we leave those in. We leave those in. The stuttering, yes, that's removed. That's removed. Yeah, but I'll tell you, your other podcast, Slam Tilt Podcast, that's a good one, too. So if anybody wants to hear more about sort of the news of the day, you want to hear some silly running jokes and what kind of new technologies are there to fix your old crappy sterns, that's the show for you, Slam Tilt Podcast. Wow. All these mentions. Did Bruce threaten you if you didn't mention? No. No? I'm just making sure that everybody knows. And make sure everybody knows about the twippies that are coming up. And everybody out there needs to think, okay, I want to make sure that Ron gets a Twippy this year. Okay, you've been doing this for so many years. The best way to make sure Ron gets a Twippy is voting for Silver Ball Chronicles in the This Week in Pinball yearly awards. So, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for another month. Have a great 2020 Christmas season. And as always, you can send your comments, questions, corrections, and concerns to stillaboldchronicles at gmail.com. We look forward to all the messages, and we read every one. Please subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or your favorite podcast. Did you know Google Play isn't around anymore? It's more like Google Podcasts now.
    138:55
    It's going to make me change my template. I'll let the listeners know, because they might be looking for Google Play, too. I know I had a link for Google Play up, and I noticed it's not really Google Play anymore. But it's still Google.
    139:07
    But make sure you turn on automatic downloads so you don't miss this single episode. Remember to leave us a five-star review. That way more people can find us. Want to support the podcast? Need a new shirt? Swing on over to silverballswag.com and pick up a Silver Ball Chronicles t-shirt.
    139:30
    Thank you. How'd he get a COVID test? Oh, did you do that yet? Well, you get saliva tests weekly. I haven't had the thing up your nose test yet. Yeah, I got the nose. But I have a cold. My doctor's like, oh, you should get a COVID test. I'm like, I have a cold. She's like, yeah, but, you know, you're in your 30s, and most of those people don't get symptoms, and it's, you know, it's like something out of a friggin' Outbreak movie with Cuba Gooding Jr. and Rain Man. Yeah, was it Dustin Hoffman? Wasn't he in the movie Outbreak? I never saw it. Or was that Bill Pullman? Or Bill Paxman.
    140:46
    Just give me a second, see if I can remember it. Remember better! And I look at the sockets, and one of them was different.
    140:55
    Then, you know, it's nine sockets, one of them was different than the other eight. It's like, oh, it's one of those newer sockets.
    141:02
    Did you shake your fist in the air? Yeah, I did. It's so weird. This app shows that my credit score is pretty good, but I couldn't get the car loan. Are you using MyFICO.com? No, it's some other company. You should get a MyFICO account instead. FICO scores are the ones used by 90% of lenders, and other credit scores can vary up to 100 points. That would have been helpful yesterday. Get the scores lenders use. Get the right FICO credit score for your credit goal, including your FICO scores used for mortgages, auto loans, and credit cards. Visit MyFICO.com or download the MyFICO app to get started today.